Format: DVD

Release date: 25 September 2007

Distributor: Other Cinema

Director: various artists

USA

95 mins

The healthy bleed between horror, the avant-garde and the cultural demi-monde can comfortably be dated back to at least the Grand Guignol of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris and, in cinema, as Jack Sargeant points out in the DVD booklet of Experiments in Terror 2, to Buí±uel and Dali’s Un chien andalou (1928).

This is perfectly natural. The underground and the avant-garde revel in forms and notions seen as threatening to mainstream society – a threat most effectively neutralised by adopting it, at which point the cycle begins again, only louder, nastier and occasionally smarter. So Romero’s Night of the Living Dead becomes Michael Jackson’s Thriller, becomes Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, ad nauseam.

I’d suggest that hardcore horror audiences are likely to be more tolerant of alternative and experimental cinema: certainly it was that shared sense of the absurd, the uncanny and the other (and enlightened Scala cinema programming) that drew this youthful horror film fiend to the more celebrated cinematic avant-gardists. And let’s face it, one person’s performance art – whether it’s naked beatniks splashing about in a Hermann Nitsch extravaganza or Joseph Beuys confronting a baffled wolf – is just another day on set at American International Pictures or Troma.

But back to the DVD. With Experiments in Terror 2, curator Noel Lawrence has put together a largely satisfying sick bag. The two vintage pieces – JX Williams’ Psych-Burn (1968) and Lloyd M. Williams’ (no relation as far as I can tell) Opus 5 (1961) – are real standouts. The former a distillation of the Corman/AIP flavour of psychedelic horror, all swirling patterns and blood-soaked go-go girls set to a disjointed psych-rock soundtrack, the latter a hypnotic, multi-layered cine-fugue of archetypal night horrors and the fears of the damned, all apparently suffered by a hooch-drinking country-dweller.

Of the younger blood, Angel Nieves’ The Fear (2001) toys successfully with 70s horror tropes surrounding the home and family, managing to be surprising, scary and playful, while you could spend some time unpicking film references in the interior decor alone. Damon Packard’s dreamy, suggestive Early ’70s Horror Trailer (1999) pursues female archetypes from 70s horror flicks – the witch, the victim, the dreamer, the killer – through the Ballardian architecture of Cronenberg’s early work. Bill Morrison’s ‘re-vision’ of 1926 silent The Mesmerist is, well, mesmerising, redeploying the decomposition effects used so stunningly in 2002’s Decasia to equally beautiful effect, nicely complimented by a moody Bill Frisell soundtrack. Found footage is put to genuinely uncanny use in Wago Kreider’s Between 2 Deaths (2006), which superimposes scenes from a familiar-looking 50s thriller over what appears to be the film’s actual locations, shot more recently on DV. The effect is quite unusual, not unlike an extended sensation of déjí­Â  vu. Elsewhere we get skeleton sex in Amor Peligrosa (Michelle Silva, 2002), Maya Deren-esque choreography and stop motion in Childree and Rollason’s She Sank on Shallow Bank (2006) and Goth music video action in Usama Alshaibi’s Hold My Scissors (2004).

Perhaps some of the films come across as a little too knowing for my tastes, but then so does the majority of what passes for ‘horror’ cinema these days. Overall this is a very worthwhile collection, though I still think I’ll stick to the real thing, thanks!

Mark Pilkington

Read the interview with Other Cinema co-founder Noel Lawrence.

Format: DVD

Release date: 21 January 2008

Distributor: Eureka Video

Director: FW Murnau

Screenplay: Carl Mayer

Alternative title: The Last Laugh

Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Georg John

Germany 1924

90 mins

Der Letzte Mann is less celebrated than FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or Sunrise (1928), and its imaginative scope is certainly narrower. But it is perhaps the director’s most perfect example of purely visual narrative. It is famous for the absence of intertitles: Murnau simply shows us what is happening, even what is being said, rather than telling us in words.

The film is driven by an unstoppable performance by Emil Jannings as the proud old doorman at the prestigious Atlantic Hotel. Each turn in the story remoulds his body, each small humiliation etches itself in his face. The contrast between his proud erect gait as doorman and his cringing, hobbling posture when his fortunes change is the essence of the film. Though Jannings was, amazingly, only 40 at the time, he evokes vividly the trials of age – we feel in ourselves, as we watch, the old man’s aching back, shortness of breath, bleariness of eye, stunned incomprehension of a world leaving him behind.

The obligation to get the plot across without words certainly doesn’t cramp Murnau’s style. Practically every scene offers unusual composition and lighting, the most memorable vision being the nightwatchman trudging the murky gloom of the hotel basement, his torch glowing in the centre of his silhouette and then becoming a spotlight for the doorman’s shame. Murnau and his cinematographer Karl Freund frequently turn the visual effects up to 11 – most extraordinarily by means of lens distortions. This might seem a limited and gimmicky technique (so did the wah-wah pedal before Jimi Hendrix); in inspired hands it proves richly expressive. But perhaps the greatest visual pleasures of the film are the moving shots with which the two parts of the film begin, drawing us through the perfectly choreographed world of the bustling hotel. The moving camera was a new technique in cinema then – and it is hard to think anyone has ever used it better.

The bleakness of the film is relieved by an exuberant Chaplinesque comic epilogue. Murnau introduces it with an extraordinary Brechtian distancing technique: an on-screen admission, in the film’s only title card, that he doesn’t believe his story could really end this way. The epilogue (like the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited last year) is so perfectly realised as to steal the show from the main body of the film.

Why is the film called Der Letzte Mann? The doorman is ‘the last man’ for a wealthy stranger, in an encounter which leads to his second turn of fortune. But this reading of the title would make the epilogue the key to the film (as does the standard English version of the title, The Last Laugh). And we can only see the film this way if we ignore the ironic framing of the epilogue. Instead I think we should understand ‘letzte’ as having the connotation of ‘least’ or ‘lowest’, as in the biblical warning ‘the first shall be last’.

A film like this – simple, melodramatic, sentimental, wordless – could not be made today. Watch it and visit a world we have lost.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 February 2008

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Victor Sjí¶strí¶m

Based on: novel by Selma Lagerlí¶f

Original title: Kí¶rkarlen

Cast: Victor Sjí¶strí¶m, Hilda Borgstrí¶m, Tore Svennberg

New score: KTL

Sweden 1921
93 mins

Regret is an awful thing to entertain. Nostalgia at its worst. Self-absorbed and boring, it is not very much fun to witness. Victor Sjí¶strí¶m’s The Phantom Carriage is all about this distasteful human condition; a hot, mad – no, psychopathic – self-obsession. The film’s protagonist makes a rather large mistake, which is simultaneously seen as a defining moment. Sjí¶strí¶m being Swedish, the sheer awfulness comes in buckets so big they’d dwarf a cottage. As heavy with the morals as it is with the supernatural, The Phantom Carriage is extremely reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Here, though, the motivation for the protagonist’s downward spiral is not angst over greed and misanthropy, it is angst over alienation, family dereliction and alcohol abuse and a not fully articulated interest in self-destruction.

Manufactured in Sweden in 1920, The Phantom Carriage is a quaint and harrowing New Year’s Eve fable about fate that reeks of late nineteenth-century Protestantism and temperance. Afflicted with tuberculosis and hell-bent on a very slow suicide, Sjí¶strí¶m’s protagonist David Holm (played by Sjí¶strí¶m himself) is tragedy on two legs, a melancholic kamikaze pickled in alcohol. Pathos abounds but there is no hope, David Holm is beyond redemption. In Swedish, the word Holm means an island. This seems an appropriate surname given the alienation Sjí¶strí¶m’s protagonist endures.

As Holm and his two boozer friends congregate beneath a clock tower at twenty minutes to midnight, one of them begins to recount a frightful yarn: ‘You gentlemen are not afraid of ghosts, I hope…’ The tale, delivered via intertitles, carries on: ‘No ordinary driver holds the reigns… he is in the service of a strict master named Death’. Indeed, one imagines Death would be a pretty miserable employer, but I was a civil servant once so I have my doubts.

Notions of life and the afterlife are index-linked in early cinematic vocabulary. Sjí¶strí¶m knows this. ‘A tale told in living pictures under the direction of Victor Sjí¶strí¶m’, state the opening credits in Swedish. Is the Phantom Carriage actually Sjí¶strí¶m’s camera? Since its invention, the camera has been associated with the uncanny and this isn’t just down to anthropomorphism and technological ignorance, the camera was and still is an untrustworthy device. It has the ability to make phantasms out of reality, it records the past and can alter it and Sjí¶strí¶m relishes this. The director certainly liked optical effects or at least saw something of the unheimlich in such gimmicks. The Phantom Carriage is a phantom image. A dullish apparition in cobweb grey, a double-exposure. It intrudes as a super-imposition onto the action of the mortal world.

There are two versions of the DVD, one with a Klezmer-esque ‘authentic’ soundtrack which is nothing more than adequate and another with a KTL soundtrack. KTL being Peter Rehberg aka Pita of Mego and Stephen O’Malley from SunnO))), this is a rather nice bit of acoustic ectoplasm that shimmers like a moonlit lake. Tremulous, spectral and rumbling it hams up the spookiness, but this is erroneous since this film is really about sub-zero squalor and decrepitude. It is hard-boiled and grim and the paranormal aspects of it are in some ways the least relevant since they are ultimately a McGuffin. David Holm is already in hell so damnation to purgatory seems a mere formality. His mad rage at himself and the world around him is far more disturbing than the presence of a skeleton with a scythe.

Fear God, love your family and stay off the booze. Those are the three main moral tenets of this film, all of which are usually very confused on a typical British New Year’s Eve. At least they are in my house, quite often at times other than New Year but always joyously so.

Philip Winter

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 December 2007

Distributor: Third Window

Director: Gee-woong Nam

Cast: Dae-tong Kim, So-yun Lee

Orginal title Daehakno-yeseo maechoon-hadaka tomaksalhae danghan yeogosaeng ajik Daehakno-ye Issda

Director: Yukihiko Tsutsumi

Cast: Maho Nonami, Eiko Koike

South Korea 2000

60 mins

Finally! Somebody in this stinkin’ world appreciates my superhuman ability to waste entire weeks of my life watching endless piles of B-Movies with stupid titles and has actually given me an opportunity to post my narrow-minded opinions on an otherwise respectable online magazine. So big up to the Electric Sheep gang for doing so… and on your heads be it.

The premise of Teenage Hooker Became a Killing Machine is essentially a cross between I Spit on Your Grave and Robocop. A street-walking-sailor-suited-schoolgirl is murdered when she becomes pregnant by her teacher, and is brought back to life Bionic Woman-style by some mysterious organisation. Reprogrammed as an emotionless assassin, complete with a fearsome flip-out crotch-cannon, she is unleashed on the city’s underworld, only to have her circuitry damaged (or to be more accurate, one of her robo-boobs memorably blown off) causing her to realise her true identity. Cue bloody and violent revenge upon her killers and so forth.

Sounds like I just described a generic exploitation action thriller, don’t it? I knew you were gonna get the wrong idea! At risk of sounding unsophisticated… I think this is really one of them artsy films in disguise… To get a better idea of the way things go down in the world of Teenage Hooker Became a Killing Machine, I’d like you to fetch a torch and hold it up to one of your eyes, as this will help more accurately emulate the experience.

You see, I had to take an unexpected trippy-trip out of my comfort zone for this film. As an avowed philistine, I was hoping for something kitschy and lowbrow, I mean, it’s got ‘Killing Machine’ in the title for gad’s sake. Instead I was faced with something darkly surreal and full of what I can only assume was symbolism. I’m not really an abstract type guy, and my knowledge of Asian cinema is basically limited to Godzilla so I had to really fish my brains for a decent reference point and I came up with… Tetsuo: The Iron Man! I know that one gets wheeled out a lot but it’s the only other film I can think of that has a similar mix of Lynchy obscurity and animé-informed cyberia. You can tell someone’s out of their depth when they resort to calling stuff ‘Lynchy’ but you know what I mean. It’s a world where people can transform into robots and shoot each other up, but it all happens in grimy hand-held slow motion with ‘experimental’ lighting and an opera soundtrack. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about: rather than go for the obvious ‘scientists turn dead body into android in laboratory’ scene, Teenage Hooker gives us the world’s first ‘creepy old lady turns dead body into android with a Victorian sewing machine’ scene. That kind of thing.

So, yeah, contrary to my expectations, Teenage Hooker Became a Killing Machine is a little more in the arthouse than the grindhouse, and I’d recommend it to anyone who fancies spending an hour feeling shocked and confused. I’d buy it just for the title, it’s a real shelf-brightener.

Doc Horror

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 December 2007

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Alex de la Iglesia

Writers: Jorge Guerricaechevarrí­Â­a, Alex de la Iglesia

Original title 800 balas

Cast: Sancho Gracia, Carmen Maura, Luis Castro

Spain 2002

124 mins

Images of spinning tumbleweeds and drunken bar-room brawls set the scene for 800 Bullets, the latest offering from cult director Alex de la Iglesia, which finally sees a DVD release. Taking its cue from every Western you’ve ever seen, de la Iglesia presents us with the washed-up former stuntman Julií¡n Torralba, an eccentric who is desperately trying to keep his spirit alive by performing action shows on a crumbling Wild West film set in Spain, the very location of his prior glory. In his own words Torralba’s stunts captured the respect of the Western icon himself, Clint Eastwood, but the best he and his team can hope for now is a cluster of Japanese tourists that will secure the next month’s living expenses. He is also still coming to terms with the death of his son, who was killed on set in a stunt gone wrong, and the subsequent estrangement from his daughter-in-law and young grandson Carlos. When the young boy stumbles across relics that point to his grandfather’s legacy, he immediately becomes infatuated with the idea of escaping his seemingly idyllic life, and takes it upon himself to sign up to his class’ skiing trip, only to deviate from the group and set off on his own quest for adventure in search of Julií¡n.

De la Iglesia’s homage/satire/parody works best when taking risks. The funniest scene sees the young Carlos, having been initiated into his grandfather’s clan of Western-themed misfits, finding himself alone with a bra-less prostitute. In keeping with the liberal values of Julií¡n’s regime, she proceeds to give him a masterclass on breast fondling (‘no, not like you’re ringing a doorbell!’), only for the young boy to be phoned mid-session by his mother, eager to know how the skiing trip is going. In scenes like this you’re not sure whether to laugh or be worried about the social services bursting onto the set, but the film is all the better for it.

Unfortunately the script, written by de la Iglesia with Jorge Guerricaechevarrí­Â­a, is wildly inconsistent and at times veers towards the sentimental. Where 800 Bullets is centred on family values and reflects heavily upon the relationship between generations, it seems like an easy option to tie up strands of narrative with predictable feel-good schmaltz, especially as the strengths of the film lie in injecting the clichés of old Westerns with de la Iglesia’s trademark quirkiness. Adding to this is the fact that 800 Bullets looks and feels like a kid’s film. The cinematography is clean and bursting with colour, the dialogue (when not peppered with profanity) is frank, and much of the soundtrack could have been written by John Williams on a lazy day. While on the surface this sounds like an interesting idea, as much of the film is seen through the eyes of Carlos, it comes across less as a stylistic choice and more as an attempt to reach the crossover mainstream audience enjoyed by de la Iglesia’s Hispanic contemporaries Robert Rodriguez and Guillermo del Toro. This sadly compromises the more daring aspects of the film.

While excessive and over the top in parts, 800 Bullets comes across as more Shanghai Noon than El Topo. Despite intriguing ideas that could have been built upon, the film is just too safe in its journey to have any real merit and comes across as a generic Western spoof rather than the witty homage it could have been. Let’s hope that de la Iglesia’s first English-language offering The Oxford Murders can restore faith in his undeniable talent.

James Merchant

Format:DVD

Release date: 5 November 2007

Distributor: EMI

Director: Dean DeBlois

Iceland 2007

97 mins

Somebody once told me a story about an English TV director who spent six months working on a series of Wife Swap in the US. He came home and met up with some friends who were just setting off on a European tour in their punk band. He decided to go along and try and film the tour. For three weeks he tried to force his friends into aggravating situations for his film until eventually his conflict-generating strategies got the better of him and he ended up in an alpine sanatorium. In the calming atmosphere of his lightly padded chalet, he could finally acknowledge the bitter truth; he should have been filming himself all along.

Anyone used to the conventions of the modern documentary (Metallica’s Some Kind Of Monster for example, or Holiday Showdown) may find Sigur Rí­Â³s’ film Heima a similarly maddening experience. Sigur Rí­Â³s have every reason to be happy and well-balanced people (for one thing the band has become a massive success without compromising its musical weirdness) but their reluctance to let this slip at all, even though there is a film crew around, comes as a bit of a shock. The film follows them as they play a unique series of free concerts around their home country of Iceland. Part of the way through, a national newspaper publishes an editorial about the events. Are Sigur Rí­Â³s condemned as Satanists and cod smugglers? Do they have to evade arrest in a late-night escape, hidden under the sticky haul of some sympathetic Norwegian death-metallist trawlermen? No, of course not. The newspaper describes the tour as a gift to the country ‘brought forth with unforgettable modesty’ and encourages the population to go along in even greater numbers.

Not only is there no conflict in Heima, but the film actively embraces consensus. Brass bands and village halls, symbols of community, are celebrated in the film. The principle of the tour, playing free gigs in unusual and remote locations, encourages a sympathetic and unusually varied audience (old people, children and pagans), and it’s intriguing to watch how the rejection of commercial imperatives creates the setting for all this harmony. Maybe Heima really is the anti-Some Kind Of Monster, a film where the happiest band member we got to see was the one watching millions of dollars rolling in at an auction of art investments.

The other great virtue of Heima is the footage of Iceland. Not only are the band members and audiences cheerily appealing in a wrapped-up and hearty sort of way but the landscape looks amazing too. Sigur Rí­Â³s’ music has a topographical feel and its sympathy with views of hillsides has made it commonplace on TV shows. In Heima, it gets the perfect accompaniment. Not just hills, but water, rocks and a disused herring factory. The musical sections are all filmed in different locations and the mood of these pieces is varied. Even so, unless you are a fan of Sigur Rí­Â³s’ music or of heart-warming gestures generally, you may find that by the end you are badly missing Metallica’s interminable conflict-management sessions.

Nick Dutfield

Format: DVD

Release date: 19 November 2007

Distributor: Eureka Video

Director: FW Murnau

Screenplay: Robert Flaherty, FW Murnau, Edgar G. Ulmer

Cast: Anne Chevalier, Matahi, Hitu, Bill Bambridge

USA 1931

82 mins

Once Rousseau had taught disenchantment with civilisation, sophisticated Europeans came increasingly to look on ‘primitive’ peoples and their values not just as curiosities but as bearers of deep truth about humanity. Science followed on the heels of sentiment and for a hundred years anthropologists fed lore of the remote into our culture. Chronologically Tabu falls midway between two classic books of the genre, The Golden Bough by JG Frazer and La Pensée sauvage by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and connects the two in its themes of the sacred virgin, ritual prohibition, and profanation. We are no longer able to gaze upon the pre-industrial world as these adventurers did. The questioning of relations between Europe and the post-colonial world made anthropology a self-conscious enterprise by the 1980s; ethnographers shunned the South Seas and stayed closer to home. Enjoying the exotic may still be fun today, but it feels like a shallow activity. And the shrinking of the world has made us more aware of our similarities with people in remote cultures and less likely to see the differences as deep.

So Tabu is a souvenir of another world. It is not the Polynesian islands that are remote now, but the age of old-fashioned amateur anthropology. And yet, while it might be possible to get exercised about objectification and exoticization in the film if one tried, it is hard to see anything demeaning in its portrayal of the Tahitians. We can’t know whether the scenes the non-professional cast enact seemed to them authentic representations of their world, but the energy and grace with which they get stuck in are entirely disarming. For better or worse, the emotions which drive the film are not alien but recognisably those of Western stories of tragic young love. Matahi and Reri (supposedly the characters were simply named after the actors) are touchingly expressive as the lovers under the shadow of taboo.

The film is said to be much more Murnau’s work than producer Robert J. Flaherty’s, but to me it resembles the latter’s Nanook more than the former’s Nosferatu. Distinctively German, perhaps, is the robust enthusiasm for fresh air and nudity: Murnau is not particularly scrupulous about observing the convention that naked breasts should be concealed by a lei or flowing locks. I suppose there must sometimes have been an element of sexual tourism in viewings of this film, but I found it minimally prurient. There seemed to be a certain harmless relish in the depiction of muscular male divers in their trunks, but perhaps that was just me.

The plot is nothing inspired, but it flows easily enough from one bravura set-piece to another. Particularly memorable are: the opening scene of mixed bathing high jinks by a waterfall; the whole village (even a toddler and his pet pig) canoeing out to meet a visiting ship; the East-meets-West scene at the port, where bare feet, working shoes, and high heels mingle on the dance floor, while champagne is drunk (fatefully) from bowls; and the unforgettable night swim with which the film concludes. Floyd Crosby certainly earned his Oscar for cinematography: I’d say this is what makes the film.

Tabu is one of the last great silent films; this kind of innocent romanticism, non-verbal characterisation, and unhurried delight in the visual were perhaps harder to carry off once film narrative shackled itself to dialogue.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 October 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Title Aragami

Director: Ryuhei Kitamura

Cast: Takao Osawa, Masaya Kato

Title 2LDK

Director: Yukihiko Tsutsumi

Cast: Maho Nonami, Eiko Koike

Japan 2003

145 mins

Presented as the latest in Tartan’s Asia Extreme series, The Duel Project sees two established Japanese directors crafting a film each in an enticing filmic experiment. Born out of the short film anthology Jam Films (2002), directors Yukihiro Tsutsumi and Ryuhei Kitamura were challenged by producer Shinya Kawai to create a full feature each, using only one set, as few actors as possible, with only one week of shooting and the same unifying theme – a fight to the death.

The project begins with Kitamura’s Aragami, a period thriller that shows a wounded samurai and a companion enter a Buddhist sanctuary in search of refuge. Passing out on entry, the warrior wakes days later to find his friend missing and himself at the hands of a cryptic combatant who emerges as a near-immortal demonic creature in search of a worthy opponent. Before the samurai has time to comprehend the situation he is drawn into a succession of frenzied bouts with the deadly Aragami of the title, gradually recognising his opponent’s weaknesses as he discovers more about the legend.

Kitamura’s segment boasts a stunning set, which allows for striking use of colour and shadows. The film’s high point sees the warriors duel in total darkness, igniting the screen with brief glimpses of light as their weapons clash. The film also touches upon a slightly sadomasochistic element of the warriors’ relationship, similarly explored in Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer. These elements are weakened, however, by a relatively dull script which allows for little character development, where each ‘level’ of conflict is broken up with uninteresting banter between the two characters. The resulting film, while at times exciting, drags for the most part, and at its very worst feels like watching two people playing Mortal Kombat on a games console.

Tsutsumi’s 2LDK, however, emerges as a peach of a feature. Running at only 68 minutes, the film exemplifies what can be achieved with few resources. It focuses on two modern young female flatmates, both actresses going for the same film role, both sleeping with the same man. As differences and confrontational attitudes escalate, the girls’ frustration manifests itself physically. What begins as writing names on fridge items slowly grows to such extents as electrocution, battery with household objects and attempted chainsaw attacks.

While the film may appear on paper as a version of Uma Thurman and Vivica A. Fox’s domestic bout in Kill Bill stretched out as a feature, 2LDK goes way beyond such comparisons to deliver a perfectly paced thriller that continually surprises with inventive twists and nasty treats. Maho Nonami and Eiko Koike excel as the viscous tenants, crafting strangely believable characters amidst the extreme plotting. The true greatness of the film, however, lies in the hands of Tsutsumi, who expertly builds the tension in a gradual manner before unleashing hell. The single location of the girls’ flat actually heightens the film’s impact, creating a suitably claustrophobic atmosphere while also providing endlessly imaginative set-pieces.

The Duel Project surfaces as a mixed bag. In spite of certain impressive visual elements, Aragami remains a disappointment, which is surprising as Kitamura is the more iconic of the two directors, having made hits such as Versus and Azumi. The price paid for the DVD, however, is well worth it for 2LDK alone, which proves itself to be one of the most decadent delights to come out of Japan in recent years.

James Merchant