During a thunderstorm in 1970s’ rural America, a fallen pylon sends millions of volts into wet mud. Thousands of particularly gruesome fanged and multi-legged worms are charged with a desire to devour human flesh, coming out at night to attack the inhabitants of smalltown Fly Creek in Georgia. Not suprisingly, the electric storm coincides with the arrival of Mick (Don Scardino), who has come from New York to woo local belle Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy). Mick epitomises all tourists, associated with pollution and the nasty stuff they leave in the water, and causes frowns all around when he asks for his fancy ‘egg cream’ in the local caf. The two lovers, who did not factor in an attack of killer invertebrates during their romantic break, are the focus for Jeff Lieberman’s film. When people start to die in the town Mark and Geri set out to find out why, but are Mark’s quick-witted city ways a match for the wired worms?
Jeff Lieberman’s debut Squirm (1976) is well aware of its ludicrous premise, although as ‘ecological parable’ the film may have resonance for audiences in light of a new wave of climate-change horror. The release of the film certainly coincides with a turn to authenticity in current genre cinema. I’m thinking of recent homage films that show a reverence for celluloid over data, physical special effects and everything analogue, for example, Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) and Berberian Sound Studio (2012). The revenge of nature, or at least the physical, is now staged in the modes of production and materials used to make films.
One of the gems on Arrow’s Blu-ray release is the inclusion of the Q&A with Lieberman and Scardino from New York’s Anthology Archives (2012). Their stories about the pre-CGI production are as much a part of revisiting the film now as watching it. Highlights include how make-up artist Rick Baker produced some ground-breaking prosthetics for the shoot, as well as how the all-star wriggling cast of 250,000 worms were rounded up and made to wiggle on cue – animal lovers turn away at this point to avoid authenticity overload. Lieberman also reveals how sets and reverse printing were used in some scenes to create a particular creepy effect. Squirm is put together with visual eccentricities throughout, and part of this is the creation of some eerie, off-kilter shots.
My favourite is a story about the resurfacing of a sound effect that originally featured in Carrie, also made in 1976. When Lieberman was searching for a sound for the worms’ hideous screeching, Squirm sound editor Dan Sable, who had just been working on Carrie, played him a chilling recording of the scream of a pig being slaughtered (it’s enough here just to mention pig’s blood and prom dance). Lieberman thought this was the ideal sound for his rabid swarm, and ultimately it features heavily in the film. It’s interesting to hear that iconic sound effects enjoy this kind of covert resurrection.The resurfacing of the real is what gives the film its uncanny draw, and is as enjoyable now in its HiDef regalia as it was in its grindhouse, scratched up, celluloid form.
Cast: Mario Adorf, Marquard Bohm, Anthony Dawson, Mascha Elm Rabben, Sigurd Fitzek, Betty Segal
West Germany 1970
85 mins
A young man named Kid, in a dusty two-piece suit and with a bullet wound in his arm, walks across an astoundingly stark and shimmering desert carrying a metal suitcase and a machine gun. After collapsing from exhaustion, his body is eventually discovered by Mr. Dump who opens the suitcase to find a vinyl 45-inch single and a pile of stolen money. His initial plan is to take the money and run, until Kid gains consciousness and forces Mr. Dump at gunpoint to take him with him and remove the bullet from his arm.
Mr. Dump reluctantly drives them back to his refuge, a desolate and squalid mining town whose only other occupants are Mr. Dump’s deranged and psychotic wife and their mute, feral daughter. Refusing to remove the bullet from Kid’s arm, a power struggle between the two men ensues as Mr. Dump desperately tries to exploit the situation for his own means. That is until the mysterious Mr. Sunshine arrives to split the cash and settle old scores. As night turns into day, the situation increasingly escalates towards unhinged paranoia and extreme violence, with any chance of hope obscured by blood, dust and the intrusion of bleak reality.
Although Roland Klick’s Deadlock (1970) may have taken its cue from Spaghetti Westerns and classic American crime movies, it’s also fair to say – like the best cult movies of the 1970s – that it takes place within a universe of its own making. Much like Kaneto Shindō’s Onibaba (1964), its small cast of tormented and tormenting characters never leave the confines of their isolated location, with very little indication of an outside world. It’s almost as if a group of classic archetypes have broken free from their own movies and found themselves lost within the last film at the edge of the earth.
Klick uses the sparse surroundings of Israel’s Negev desert to great effect, creating a crumbling portrait of arid decay and brutal, unforgiving desperation. His inventive framing and overtly stylistic compositions give the film a dreamlike quality – with the occasional moment of controlled psychedelic surrealism – without bubbling over into nonsensical self-indulgence. Add to this the superb film score by Krautrock legends Can and you’ve got yourself an incredibly unique and unforgettable piece of German cinema. In fact, the way in which Klick lets the Can track ‘Tango Whiskey Man’ slowly imbed itself into the narrative (it’s the single hidden in the suitcase with the money) is one of the clever touches that gives the film a certain charm.
Despite Klick’s ambitious experimentalism, he never gets sidetracked and thankfully refuses to neglect certain genre expectations, with a plot and place that’s as firm and gritty as the landscape on which it takes place. A thrilling, entertaining and distinctive example of B-movie pragmatism delivered with artistic scope.
Cast: Heather Page, Bill Douglas, Joanna David, Nickolas Grace
UK 1984
50 mins
It’s 1984, and somewhere in England there is a rain-lashed, crumbling house called Albion where the Britains live. Marion (Heather Page) and Alex (Bill Douglas) are a pair of siblings whose already fractious relationship is clearly tested further by the power cuts, leakages and broken windows inflicted on their inherited property. They are visited by the Paradises, Angela (Joanna David) and Richard (Nickolas Grace); he’s an utterly appalling yuppie type given to cracking AIDS gags, she’s a bit of a doormat enduring his hot-and-cold running abuse. Richard and the ineffectual, leftish Alex take an instant dislike to each other and so follows an excruciating drunken evening of unbridled hostility and resentment, with Marion taking the opportunity to aim various digs at her brother (‘he’s not a writer, he’s a translator… writers have style’), also revealing that he once tried to strangle her in his sleep. After an uncomfortable meal at a restaurant, the quartet return to Albion where relations deteriorate further. They all go to bed. And then things get nasty…
Saxon Logan’s Sleepwalker (1984) is genuinely odd, and remains so after repeat viewings. A 50-minute-long state of the nation, four-hander play whose genes have been spliced with a stylised giallo slasher. It’s full of overt symbology, the characters are clearly archetypes, the performances are exaggerated, and given this, one might expect Sleepwalker to hit its viewers over the head with a well telegraphed message, but it’s a bit slippier than that. The doomy synth chords and Bava/Argento gel shots (and blimey, there’s a lot of blue here) suggest one type of cinema; the intricate emotional dynamics, political wrangling and oneiric imagery suggest another. The result is disquieting and elusive. A card at the end of the credits reads ‘this film is dedicated to imperfect cinema’, which seems accurate. There’s something not quite right about Sleepwalker, which, as I write this, makes me want to see it again
The BFI disc of Saxon Logan’s film is part of its Flipside line, a treasure trove of vintage British weirdness. It comes with a lengthy, and ultimately moving, interview with the director, plus the two short films he made before Sleepwalker, which are witty and visually inventive, and suggest, once again, that Britain tends to squander and ignore its singular talents. Logan had the good fortune to work as Lindsay Anderson’s assistant on O Lucky Man!, and the bad luck to emerge as a filmmaker just as the UK industry entered one of its most barren and moribund phases. He recounts in the interview a painful screening of Sleepwalker for Rank distribution executives, in which his film, which had been received with enthusiasm and a Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, was met with disapproving bafflement. He moved into documentaries. And it looks like we missed out on some idiosyncratic cinema.
Also on the disc is Rodney Giesler’s The Insomniac, a delightful 45-minute curiosity from 1971, wherein an everyday working stiff (Morris Perry) achieves a kind of freedom in a sunlit, nocturnal dreamworld, including some X-certificate loving with Carry On starlet Valerie Van Ost, before reality rears its ugly head. Great stuff.
Despite his status as one of Japan’s most talented and consistently interesting directors, a great many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films have yet to see an English-language release. Most of the neglected titles come from before the release of Cure, the 1997 psycho-thriller that made the director a key figure on the international film scene. Like many of his contemporaries, the young Kurosawa started out directing erotic films for Nikkatsu’s well-established ‘Roman Porno’ (romantic pornography) line, before branching out into other areas, including an effects-driven haunted house movie (Sweet Home, 1989), a superior slasher movie (The Guard from the Underground, 1992) and a number of made-for-TV horror films, comedies and yakuza thrillers.
Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider were both filmed in 1997, shortly after Cure was completed. Although not sequels in the traditional sense, the two films are linked by central concepts and casting, with both films starring Shō Aikawa, at the time a major star of the V-cinema or direct-to-video scene. Many of Kurosawa’s early films, including Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider, were V-cinema movies, and he credits his time working in the field with providing valuable experience and affording an opportunity to experiment with a variety of different film genres. Serpent’s Path is one of these experiments; following its completion Kurosawa reworked the script, shifted the focus of the piece and turned it into Eyes of the Spider.
Written by Ring scriptwriter Hiroshi Takahashi, Serpent’s Path begins with two men – Nijima, a schoolteacher (Shō Aikawa) and Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa), an ex-yakuza – kidnapping a third (former comedian Yūrei Yanagi) and chaining him to a wall in an abandoned factory. Miyashita explains the reason for the kidnapping: he believes their hostage is responsible for the abduction and murder of his 8-year-old daughter. Naturally the man protests his innocence, but his protestations are ignored. After being forced to eat off the floor and denied the use of toilet facilities, the hostage eventually says that he knows who really murdered Miyashita’s daughter.
Watch the trailer for Serpent’s Path:
In Eyes of the Spider Shō Aikawa stars as another man called Nijima, although a different character this time. The film starts with him murdering the man who killed his daughter. From this point, Nijima’s life begins to unravel, as his marriage collapses and he ends up working for the yakuza. Throughout all this, the man seems to be almost sleepwalking, as if killing his daughter’s murderer has left him with nothing to live for.
Watch the trailer for Eyes of the Spider:
Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider were both shot in Kurosawa’s typically understated style, using long takes and a minimum of camera movements. Neither of these films are traditional revenge thrillers, and Kurosawa’s purpose here is to explore the differing effects that achieving vengeance can have upon an individual. There are some last minute revelations, but these are not Hollywood-style twists, merely factors designed to shed new light on the events that have taken place. Kurosawa’s interest here is not in complex plots but in characters, something that has been a trademark of many of his films. Devotees of the director’s work will find these two films an interesting insight into Kurosawa’s early career, another glimpse into the background of a unique filmmaker. Those unfamiliar with Kurosawa’s films are probably better off starting with either Cure or the terrifying Pulse (2001), before investigating Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider, although there is still plenty to enjoy here.
Kin-dza-dza! is one of the strangest artefacts in all of Soviet cinema. It’s a science fiction satire in which Vladmir and Gedevan, a gruff Russian construction worker and a Georgian student, find themselves accidentally transported to Pluke, a barren desert-world with a barbaric, bureaucratic society. Gradually realising that they are not in a ‘capitalist country’, the two men begin a long and farcical voyage home that more closely resembles the theatre of the absurd than it does any preconceived notion of cinematic science fiction. The men befriend two locals, Bi and Wef, and are soon busking their way across Pluke and becoming ensnared in various misadventures that stem from the planet’s bizarre and unbendable social rules, and its two-tier social structure of ruling Chatlanians and subservient Patsaks.
There are many things to note about Kin-dza-dza!: the satire that struck a chord with a Soviet audience experiencing the first flourishes of glasnost but that can seem impenetrable to a contemporary audience; the ‘used future’ mise-en-scene that anticipates the subversive combinations of salvagepunk, with items that look like ships and ferris wheels half-submerged in the arid desert; the buried Christian themes; the melancholy-comic dirge that constitutes the film’s score.
But one of the most noteworthy things is the film’s creative use of language: the bizarre Plukanian tongue, which rivals A Clockwork Orange’s ‘nadsat’ as a futuristic dialect, despite mostly consisting of the word ‘koo’. The near identical ‘kyoo’ is a swear word, and there are a few other specific terms, such as ‘pepelats’ for spaceship, ‘etsilop’ for police, ‘etsikh’ for prison, and ‘Gravitsapa’, which they spend much of the film trying to obtain so that they can get back home.
Soviet science fiction had always been an arena for voicing social critique and ridicule, and could be cloaked in futuristic and fantastical trappings. Danelia and his co-writer Revaz Gabriadze (the founder of Tbilisi’s puppet theatre) took advantage of the far-fetched scenario by foregrounding Georgian-ness against the wider expanse of Russia proper. Georgian, which shares neither an alphabet nor a common root with the Russian language, is the first language of both writers, and some of the language used in the film comes from their native tongue. ‘Etsikh’ is from the Georgian word ‘tsikhe’ for fortress, while the film’s title, named for the galaxy that Pluke is found in, comes from ‘kindza’, the Georgian word for coriander. Most humorously, they capitalised on the non-Russian word ‘katsap’, used to describe Russians in other Soviet republics. The scriptwriters reversed the word, and also reversed the social order so that the Russians find themselves on the lower social strata.
The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari used ‘minor literature’ to describe work done from the point of view of a minority in the ‘major’ language of the coloniser. Kin-dza-dza! transposes elements of minor literature to cinema. The script reflects the frustrations of having a language imposed from above, most of it sounding like an unfamiliar, monotonous noise, but it also demonstrates the strangeness, potential and richness of language; French, Georgian (ideal for creative obscenities), German and English are all heard in the film along with Russian.
The puppet-like gestures that the lowly patsaks have to perform when confronted with their superiors back up this linguistic satire, where gesture becomes a grotesque parody in which power relations are laid bare. This is also true for the busking, done from inside cages, with Vladimir sawing the violin back and forth in a threadbare parody of musicianship.
Near the film’s conclusion, the desert is exchanged for a verdant paradise as Vladimir and Gedevan touch down on the planet Alpha, where they meet patrician overlords in white robes. Perhaps intended to represent the Soviet elite, the Alpha race don’t prove to be the key to redemption or restoration for Vladimir and Gedevan, despite their advanced society and utopian veneer. The film constantly raises questions, but answers few of them. The rules on these other planets simply ‘are’, and if they are not followed, then one risks ending up trapped in a box or transformed into a cactus.
Kin-dza-dza! is still adored in Russia and former Soviet republics, but is little known in the Anglophone world. Some of its humour and reference points may appear to be Soviet specific. But as we move towards an increasingly confusing and complex society, Danelia’s film is likely to become increasingly relevant, and perhaps the glossy new animated version (which was released in Russia in April 2013) will bring this salvagepunk prototype to wider acclaim.
Cast: Roberts Blossom, Cosette Lee, Leslie Carlson
USA 1974
84 mins
Deep within America’s rural Midwest the dutiful and devoted Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom) looks after his elderly, overbearing and bed-ridden mother (Cosette Lee) in a secluded farmhouse. Fanatically religious and slightly insane, Ezra’s mother believes that the wages of sin are gonorrhoea, syphilis and death, and has instilled in Ezra a hatred for all women. Following her own death, Ezra sinks into deep despair, and as loneliness pushes him further towards madness, he decides to dig up her body and carry on as if nothing has changed.
In an attempt to restore his mother to her former self, Ezra begins to study taxidermy in the hope of creating a new skin for his deceased parent. At first he experiments with animal skins, and then resorts to stitching together the flesh scraped from recently deceased corpses. But when the results are less than perfect, Ezra’s morbid pursuit becomes homicidal when he decides that he needs younger, fresher material to work with.
Released the same year as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Alan Ormsby and Jeff Gillen’s cult horror Deranged also took its inspiration from the horrific exploits of legendary serial killer Ed Gein. Although not as well known and revered as Tobe Hooper’s seminal slasher, Deranged certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as its contemporary. It has also been noted that Deranged is far more faithful to the life of Ed Gein and his dreadful crimes.
Unforgettably foreboding and with a deep sense of the macabre, it’s also surprisingly well paced and directed. Much like Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (1968), it’s a master class in pragmatic B-movie aesthetics and how to be as effective as possible within the constraints of an extremely limited budget, crew, cast and locations. The minimal sets, small clutch of characters, and the device of an omnipresent journalist who randomly appears to narrate the story and fill in the gaps add to the surreal atmosphere, rather than hindering the film. There are also some incredibly garish and grimy interiors that give the film that authentically 70s feel of opaque gloom.
As we witness one man’s bizarre descent into psychopathic madness, the film effortlessly progresses from pitch-black gallows humour to something far more harrowing and nightmarish. Along with the deadpan dialogue, the scenes involving Ezra driving his mother back from the graveyard and a bizarre date with a sex-craved clairvoyant are the most overtly humorous. But it’s Ezra’s rotting dinner guests, his banal, workmanlike attitude towards his actions, and his cold-blooded and predatory hunt for his final victim that linger in the mind long after the credits have rolled.
The previously censored brain-scooping scene (created by the legendary Tom Savini) may be the film’s most notorious aspect, but its most unsettling and effective element has to be Roberts Blossom’s perfectly judged performance as the unhinged Ezra, turning Deranged into one of the few 70s exploitation horror films that actually lives up to its title.
The characters in this little comedy have no real existence. They have been designed and cut out of a sheet of black paper and are made to move on backgrounds lit from below and photographed from above. This brief explanation is not offered as an apology for their lack of life but to make you marvel that they have so much.
– Intertitle from Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Dr. Dolittle (1928)
The German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger may have used simple techniques – manually crafting figures from card using a small pair of hand scissors – but the films compiled on a new British Film Institute DVD commemorating her work are highly sophisticated. The aforementioned preface to her three-part telling of Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle is a necessary reminder that the audience is in fact watching nothing more than inanimate sheets of paper; yet the physical characterisations, especially evident in the Dr. Dolittle shorts, are irresistibly enchanting. Each animal in the doctor’s menagerie has its own defined personality. When Dr. Dolittle’s boat runs into trouble en route to Africa, the jolly, chattering duck is unfazed as he retrieves the doctor’s top hat from the ocean waves, while the chubby, hesitant pig is too scared to jump ship and seeks a piggyback ride to shore. The monkeys that Dr. Dolittle’s band encounter on arriving at their destination are equally characterful. They appear as complex and individual as if Reiniger had employed the very best live-action character actors or placed her camera in a cage at the zoo. In fact, Reiniger was at such pains to get each movement right that she spent hours at the Tiergarten in Berlin, physically imitating the animals’ movements to ensure that the swing of an arm or a flap of a wing rang true.
After painstaking research, the paper cut-outs were manoeuvred by sheets of lead, and it is this manual manipulation that lends the animations their charm and almost truer-than-life vitality. While each sequence is carefully constructed frame-by-frame, there is a hint of unpredictability in the gesture of a silhouette’s hand or the nod of its head, which mirrors the irregularity of life. The potential for error stands in contrast to today’s computer-generated smoothness and, in some respects, viewing Reiniger’s animation after years of steady 3-D releases, the figures appear to possess even more of that marvellous ‘life’ which made Reiniger so proud.
As difficult as it might be to remember that these on-screen figures are mere sheets of paper, it is also hard to appreciate that the DVD’s central masterpiece, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), is the oldest surviving animated feature film. In some ways, it is easy to recognise this work as an early example of filmmaking. There is the evident influence of mechanical magic lantern slides (the camera is still as silhouettes are manually moved across brightly-lit glass plates), and hints of vaudeville theatre, with the sequences of acrobatic physical comedy, as well as the division of the narrative into separate acts. Yet, in other ways, it is extraordinary that the first feature-length animation should display such technical skill and advanced visual storytelling. Unusually for a silent film, Reiniger worked with the film’s composer Wolfgang Zeller from the beginning, and turned the film’s score on rollers while animating her puppets to ensure that the sound and action was perfectly in sync. This emphasis on rhythm demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the artistic possibilities of abstract filmmaking, while there is an inventiveness with painted backdrops that foreshadows the work of Len Lye and Norman McLaren. Indeed, the film was popular in European avant-garde circles.
Although she was an early pioneer in the medium, Reiniger was fully alive to the potential of animation to portray the fantastical and unreal. The recurring motif of flight (the flight of the Sorcerer’s magical horse, the flight of Peri Banu’s winged cloak and the flight of the avenging demons) displays this preference for make-believe and imagination in Reiniger’s work as she weaves together different magical stories from One Thousand and One Nights to create a single coherent narrative. Reiniger was quite clearly a natural storyteller, as evidenced by her 1972 essay printed in the accompanying DVD notes. She does not focus on her technical abilities or role as director, but rather places Prince Achmed as the central hero in the filmmaking process (‘one day he was thrown out of his comfortable existence by a film company which wanted to employ him… for an animated film’). In fact, Reiniger is so skilful at telling complex stories with simple silhouettes and sparse intertitles that I found myself preferring the version of The Adventures of Prince Achmed without the newly recorded English-translation narration. Without the spoken word, the beautiful images can sing even louder.
Fairy tales, Biblical parables and folk tales all feature in Reiniger’s films, and her animations display a preference for strongly moral narratives where the ‘good’ are honoured for their behaviour. While this straightforward morality might seem a little old-fashioned to modern audiences – especially combined with female characters who wait to be saved by dashing heroes and a certain preoccupation with the exotic ‘other’ – Reiniger’s films do not feel like relics from a distant past. The existence of dark forces cleverly counterbalances any sentimental tendencies. In The Star of Bethlehem (1956), Reiniger even ensures that the story of the nativity has a strong sinister aspect with the inclusion of devils rushing to obstruct the Magi in the desert; it was so strong, in fact, that censors cut the sequence when the film was aired on American television, in case it frightened the film’s young audience. Reiniger was also adept at puncturing serious action with moments of well-placed humour. In The Flying Coffer (1921), the tragic tale of the Chinese princess imprisoned in the pagoda is subverted by a moment of slapstick comedy as her two suitors collide with each other while trying to scale the tower. In an early cosmetics commercial, The Secret of the Marquise (1922), Reiniger undermines the beauty of her heroines by revealing the artifice behind appearances. We see a fashionable 18th-century French woman seated at her toilette as her suitor asks, ‘Graceful, beautiful woman, tell me which god gave you such allure?’ The answer brings the audience to earth with a bump: ‘Nivea Soap and Nivea Cream.’
Reiniger may reveal deception in physical beauty in The Secret of the Marquise, but there is no denying the delicate exquisiteness of her own animations. Even with the knowledge that the figures are made from simple pieces of cards and tricks of light, there is a magical splendour to her animations. When Dr. Dolittle premiered at the Alhambra in Berlin, a sequence where the doctor’s ship travels over moonlit water caused spontaneous applause, and I believe the impact of these stunning visuals has not diminished in the slightest since that initial screening. Any fan of film and animation should make sure that they watch these films, not only as they are important works in the history of cinema, but because they provide a rare, luminous beauty, which will transport you right up into the sky with the Sorcerer’s magic horse.
Eleanor McKeown
Watch Lotte Reiniger’s The Secret of the Marquise commercial:
Watch a clip from The Adventures of Prince Achmed:
Cast: Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson, Alan Reed
USA 1957
91 mins
The beautiful thing about The Tarnished Angels, director Douglas Sirk’s adaptation of William Faulker’s novel Pylon, set during the Great Depression, is that the film remarkably encapsulates the human condition in a mere 90 minutes, using only a handful of characters and locations. Desire, love, greed, avarice, sorrow and tragedy are all present, though the film itself is a departure in style from the more overblown melodramas that Sirk is famed for. It’s a remarkable feat – that it also looks gorgeous, with its perfect silvery hues (it was shot in black and white Cinemascope, rather than in colour) and features terrific performances from Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, adds to the film’s appeal.
Roger Shumann (Stack) is a former First World War pilot, now daredevil, who travels from air show to air show to compete for the top prize. His blonde bombshell wife, LaVerne (Malone), fell in love with a poster of Shumann she saw during the war; and in a desperate bid to gain his affection, became a parachute jumper, gliding down to earth in a white floating dress. But to her driven, obsessed and foolish husband, she’s little more than an accessory, even if she is the mother to their small child, Jack, who is already itching for his own seat in a plane. It’s left to Jiggs (Jack Carson), their loyal mechanic, to worship the ground that LaVerne walks on. That is, until Burke Devlin (Hudson) arrives on the scene. The film is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and Devlin, a wise-cracking journalist with a drinking problem, and a thorn in his editor’s side, wants to write a human interest story about the Shumanns – about how a flying ace and all-American hero ends up scraping the barrel, living hand-to-mouth, while risking his life to compete against much younger hot-shots.
It’s a tight, claustrophobic picture, with much of the action taking place at a carnival, with the pilots racing in the air above the fair ground, flying a circuit that sees them swoop around pylons, inching ever closer to fly the tightest line. The crowd, cheering them on, will play their own role in the tragedy that unravels at the end of the film. But until then, the Mardi Gras parties and carnival atmosphere are the perfect foils for the characters’ inner torments. LaVerne has never had the chance to live her life to the full; instead she’s spent it chasing after a man’s withheld love; beautiful, charismatic, she’s endured a luckless life full of lonely nights.
Devlin, of course, falls for LaVerne, who’s charmed by his attention – although at first, he seems more interested in probing her for personal details about her marriage and life with Shumann for his newspaper story. But by insinuating himself into their lives, Devlin also has the perverse effect of eventually bringing the married couple closer together – but only after a shocking trade that the pilot tries to make with a greedy businessman: a new plane in return for his wife. Despite being portrayed as impossibly heartless, Shumann is eventually given one last shot at redemption – yet it comes at a terrible price.
Brought to life by Irving Glassberg’s expressionistic cinematography, and with an exceptional performance from Rock Hudson, who delivers a terrific epilogue to the sad story of the Shumann, The Tarnished Angels is an intriguing, unmissable slice of Americana.
The legendary New Hollywood director Brian De Palma has had a more erratic filmmaking career than most. Iconic classics (Carrie and Scarface) rub shoulders with legendary disasters (The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Black Dahlia – not coincidentally, two unwieldy adaptations of classic American authors). Impassioned, personal labours of love (Blow Out, Femme Fatale) vie with hire-a-hack studio gigs (The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible). His trajectory is an unpredictable swerve: De Palma has often seemed like an outsider in the fickle world of Hollywood, persecuted first by critics who decried his unoriginality and apparent bad taste, and then by censors balking at his films’ often transgressive content.
Dressed to Kill, newly reissued on Blu-ray for the first time in uncut form, and made at a convenient mid-point in De Palma’s now 50-year career, provides a timely opportunity to evaluate this uncommonly talented auteur. The film has aspects of the passionate, personal side of his directing, as well as his underrated commercial instinct: its box office success marks it as an early populariser of the modern erotic thriller. De Palma was enamoured with Hitchcock; a science whiz as a young man, he fell in love with film at college via Hitchcock, Welles and Godard, and spent his career crafting elaborate cinematic love letters to the three of them (Antonioni was also a favourite). Dressed to Kill is one of his most overt Hitchcock homages: it overflows with lush audience-baiting orchestral music cues, bravura wordless set-pieces, and erotic perversity.
De Palma was more compelled by the voyeuristic strands in Hitchcock’s films than by his studies of wronged-man innocence. So if Obsession cribs from Vertigo, and Blow Out from Rear Window, Dressed to Kill set its sights on Psycho; it lunges knife-in-hand at this overbearing predecessor, extracting the juiciest ideas and discarding the dated fat. Yet as De Palma retrofits and enhances Hitchcock with modernised sexuality and violence, the result only amounts to a blandification; it reduces the master’s fascination with human behaviour and rare empathy into something insincere and unfeeling. We leave Dressed to Kill staggered by De Palma’s technique and craftsmanship, while still unconvinced by the cold void imparted by the button-pushing plot.
Revealing too much of that plot would be cruel. Someone is offing psychiatrist Dr. Robert Elliott’s (Michael Caine) patients; Elliott believes it might be ‘Bobbi’, an unseen and unknown transgender patient, who leaves him threatening, desperate answer-phone messages throughout the course of the film. A well-heeled, bored housewife patient, Kate (Angie Dickinson), and a hooker with a heart of gold, Liz (played by De Palma’s then-belle Nancy Allen) may be in danger. It’s then left up to Liz, and Kate’s teenage computer-boffin son (Keith Gordon) to unlock this taunting mystery.
Uncharacteristically, the film’s highlight sequence is ultimately tangential to the main thrust of the plot. After a meeting with Elliott where, in rather cheesy racy-thriller form, Kate confesses her sexual attraction to him, she then takes a lazy mid-morning detour into a modern art gallery. In a sequence reminiscent of the recent Spanish arthouse film In the City of Sylvia, we follow her as she alights upon a male admirer stalking the gallery for pick-ups. What ensues is a formidably choreographed cat-and-mouse chase of attraction through the white gallery hallways, the glances and reactions of the two conveyed first in split-screen, and then in one breath-catching long take.
Yet it’s a shame that De Palma instills most of his energy into the film’s most conspicuous ‘action’ scenes; as a result, the concluding twist’s lack of psychological credibility exposes this thriller as just another giddy ‘gotcha’ contraption, rather than peering into the heart of its characters with any genuine curiosity or insight.
Cast: James Duval, Ryan Phillippe, Heather Graham, Rachel True, Heather Graham, Jordan Ladd, Debi Mazar, Tracy Lords
USA 1997
78 mins
Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, originally released in 1997, is the last part of his Teen Apocalypse trilogy, after 1993’s Totally Fucked Up and 1995’s the Doom Generation (though I’d argue that 2010’s Kaboom, which carries on along similar lines, makes it a foursome.)
For those unaware of his oeuvre, Mr Araki’s films generally feature beautiful young things, of mixed acting ability but uniformly flawless complexion, doing drugs, and each other, in various combinations, in heavily stylised settings while spouting doomy dialogue with an emphasis on the alienating effects of a crass, overbearing consumer culture. If this, and the in-your-face nihilism of the titles seem to suggest a grim old time at the multiplex, it should be pointed out that his films are actually, y’know, kinda fun.
Nowhere follows formula, but throws a rubber-suit alien into the mix. We’re in shiny Los Angeles, following the lives of various shiny kids one sunny day. Video-camera wielding romantic Dark (James Duvall) wants Mel (Rachel True) to himself, but she’s having fun with Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson), amongst others…and doesn’t want to settle down. Around them circle other cuties: Sarah Lassez, Christina Applegate, Jordan Ladd, Mena Suvari, Heather Graham, Ryan Phillippe and many others, playing characters of varying functionality and sexual persuasion. In lieu of a plot there is the desire of most of the cast to get to a party: all have adventures, some are sweet, some are horrible, some don’t make it. Much sex is had. There is rape, addiction, messy suicide, nipple abuse and alien abduction, before it all goes horribly wrong at the party, then horribly wronger back at Dark’s place. The end.
Nowhere is a giddy, wonky feat of laugh-out-loud audacity, a plate-spinning act that barely holds together over its lean 78 minutes. Characters are called Handjob and Jujyfruit and Dingbat and say things like ‘dogs eating people is cool.’ They are distinguished mainly by hairstyle and interior décor. It zips nimbly from airhead to airhead, sustained by the perkiness of the cast, the audio-visual punch, and a horny, laissez faire attitude. From the opening shower-masturbation fantasy onwards, everything seems drenched in a hormonal fug, most of the cast have trouble keeping their hands off each other for any length of time, and when they do get it on their various scenes are spliced together in artful polysexual feats of editing. Everything is affectless and candy coloured and paper thin. Dark witnesses a reptiloid alien disintegrate three valley girls at a bus stop, but is most annoyed that he failed to catch it on tape. He seems stunned when the same thing happens to his fantasy lover Montgomery (Nathan Bexton) later on that evening, but at no point does he try to tell anybody about all this. It’s like Bret Easton Ellis made over by John Waters – the tone may be numb, addled and apocalyptic, but look! There’s Traci Lords! And Gibby Haynes! And those cool background paintings! And don’t Sonic Youth/ Suede/ the Chemical Brothers sound good in this bit?
The appearances by a money grubbing televangelist (John Ritter) aside (because no post-punk indie movie of the period was ever complete without a sleazy televangelist), it’s remarkable how little Nowhere has dated, given how achingly, trying-too-hard-hip this all was sixteen years ago. Perhaps it’s because it comes sealed in its own weird bubble, where, say, the absence of mobile phones and the internet come across as another stylistic decision, but now it seems box fresh and bright. On the commentary, somebody occasionally asks Gregg about the meaning of this or that shot, but he remains tight-lipped about that stuff, allowing the cast more room to obsess over their poreless skin, their clothes, teeth and hair. This seems entirely appropriate, it’s a film as much about youthful flesh, and surfaces and eyeball kicks as it is about the end of the world.
Mark Stafford
Watch the trailer:
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