For all you punkety rockety girls out there, and those who love them: this is your new favourite film, you just don’t know it yet. With We Are the Best! (which is based on his wife Coco’s graphic novel), Lukas Moodysson returns to the inclusive humanism of his earlier work (Show Me Love, Together), rather than his pass-the-razor-blades phase (Lilya 4-Ever, A Hole in My Heart) or his what-the-bloody-hell-is-this phase (Container). It’s a simple tale: two 13-year-old girls, Bobo and Klara, are outcasts at school, mainly because it’s a bad place and time to be ferociously dedicated to punk rock: Stockholm in the early 1980s. Partly out of spite, they get the metal band Iron Fist thrown out of the practice room at their local youth centre on the pretext that they have a band, and having booked the room, they decide that they might as well start a band for real. Undaunted by their lack of talent, but aware that they ought to have somebody on side who knows what they’re doing, they recruit Hedwig, a Christian and another outcast, on guitar, and the film follows their trials and tribulations as they attempt to get it together for their first gig.
There is very little conflict here (an unfortunate haircut incident, a falling out over a punk boy), just a lot of brilliantly observed business about families and schools and pop culture and all that other stuff you have to negotiate when you’re 13. The girls are adorable, fearless and bulletproof, wide eyed and vulnerable, with their own cool punk chic (it involves a lot of scarves) and Moodysson perfectly captures that age when you can be obsessing over nuclear annihilation one minute and having a food fight the next. There is a great sense of time and place, and fun to be had about the difficulties of being a rebel when everybody’s so tolerant and accommodating (Swedish punk songs of the period seem pushed to find stuff to complain about). We Are the Best! finds time for everybody – youth club workers, parents, and hell, even Iron Fist are people rather than characters. There may not be a great deal to the film other than a little slice of time, but it’s bloody delightful – a warm, spiky hug.
Cast: Richard Davalos, Brian Donlevy, Ellen Burstyn, Sid Haig
USA 1969
92 mins
After the cult obscurity of Spider Baby (1968), and the even weirder art-house porno trip film Mondo Keyhole (1966), director Jack Hill’s career was sufficiently vegetative to make a drag racing movie offer from Roger Corman look good, and Hill hated drag racing. But inspired by the theme of a man who wins the race but loses his soul, he set out to make an art movie in exploitation guise (again), and succeeded admirably.
The plot is simple: moody racer Dick Davalos succeeds through sheer ruthlessness, wrecking or discarding everyone around him. This morality tale unfolds against the background of figure 8 racing, a stock car race with a lethal intersection in the track. Hill filmed the collisions and, even more scarily, the near-misses, for six weekends and then staged action with his leads to blend in with the most exciting footage, capturing a weird subculture of American sport.
As an action movie, Pit Stop is imperfect, or at any rate highly individual: the dodgem-car violence is abstracted into a series of smashes, interspersed with intense close-ups of drivers. There’s no way to follow who is where, except when a face rotates upside down and we cut to a car rolling belly-up. This is montage as percussion, anticipating the New Incoherence of Michael Bay or Paul Greengrass, in which the violence is not in front of the camera, it is produced by the camera and Moviola bashing fenders.
Hill keeps the energy up between collisions with zestful performances from his rogue’s gallery of cheap players. Davalos was a second-string method guy best known for having played James Dean’s brother. He invests totally in his unsympathetic role, astonishing with his callousness rather than trying to steal our respect. From Spider Baby, Hill borrows two of his beautiful freaks. Her eyes sparkling with a pixilated innocence, Beverley Washburn chews gum nonstop with her huge, smushy lips wriggling all over her face. When she grins, her mouth threatens to separate the top of her head from her body altogether, like a South Park Canadian – for an instant, the cranium seems to dangle upwards on a thread of gristle like a helium balloon on a string.
Sid Haig essays the role of Hawk Sidney, Davalos’s arch-rival and ‘the dingiest driver’ of them all. It’s a role for which the eccentric player is well equipped. Another huge grinner, his crescent moonful of mouth seeming to extend beyond the edges of his face as if he had back teeth made of vacuum, Haig has a vast, long visage made of wet clay, with jagged pores and pockmarks apparently put in with an awl. His lanky body proves unexpectedly adept at quasi-obscene dancing, and surprising subtleties of performance writhe out between his bouts of furious grimacing. He is an original.
Hill also drafted in Hollywood legend Brian Donlevy, or as I call him, Quatermass McGinty, for his last role. Aged, in trouble with the taxman, and at times visibly struggling to get his lines out, Donlevy seems to be either drunk much of the time or else very tired, which is possible since all his scenes were concentrated into three days of shooting. It could have been a sorry swan song, but as with Lon Chaney Jnr’s memorable turn in Spider Baby, the broken-down old relic is afforded respect as a broken-down old relic. The movie doesn’t try to pretend he’s young, a star, or particularly appealing. He’s just happy to be working, and just about able to pull it off. Donlevy was always best as a loud-mouthed jerk, strapped into a corset, teetering on elevator shoes and wrapped in a hairpiece. The corset seems to be gone, and the expanded waistband relaxes him. He’s playing the embodiment of capitalist evil, but we kind of like having him around. We just hope he doesn’t keel over in mid-take.
These pictures are where talent on the way down brushes shoulders with that on the way up, and Donlevy shares screen time with Ellen McRae, a TV actress with a couple movies to her credit, soon to find fame under a new name, Ellen Burstyn. She’s alert, pert and winning: only in a couple of shots does she seem uncertain what to do, when the script has her stand around while the men try to impress each other, and Hill evidently hasn’t had time to either supply her with motivation or frame her out. But when she’s properly on, you can tell she’s the one in this cast who’s going places: the other actors are great, but too bizarre for mainstream success.
Arrow’s disc captures the source material’s sometimes shaky, sometimes graceful cinematography: the blackness of night appears alternately crushed and milky, or pulses between the two in a single shot; there are occasional scratches and variable grain. But the white desert sands, the imperfect skin textures and the flaring lights are sensually beautiful.
Pit Stop has the modest virtues you’d want from a Corman production: pace and aggression. It also has a point, which most racing movies don’t bother with: it takes a political view, and demonstrates the dangerous allure of winning, without getting preachy or po-faced. It makes its points by showing you rottenness and letting you vicariously enjoy it and then retract from it as if from a rattlesnake. Its impact is testimony to Hill’s smart approach, one too few exploitation filmmakers (or filmmakers generally), have taken: ask the question, ‘how can this junkyard thing become the best version of itself possible?’
David Cairns
Watch an interview with Jack Hill on the new restoration of Pit Stop:
Cast: Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, Arifin Putra, Julie Estelle
Indonesia, USA 2014
150 mins
Virginie Sélavy and Sean Hogan share their views on the eagerly awaited sequel to The Raid – the 2012 Indonesian action stunner, written and directed by Welsh-born Gareth Evans.
TAKE 1
The Raid took everybody by surprise in 2012: a lean and mean, hyper-kinetic, brutal Indonesian martial arts film shot by a Welshman, this unlikely proposition giddily renewed the genre and showed tired Asia and stale Hollywood how it was done. The Raid 2 ups the ante still, not just in relation to the first film, but to action film generally. A prodigious amount of energy has gone into devising super-dynamic, brilliantly inventive fight scenes, choreographed to exhilarating perfection and expertly filmed, with Gareth Evans able to handle elegant wide angles and tightly confined spaces with the same dexterity. The film is one seriously jaw-dropping, breath-taking, gasp-inducing set-piece after another: the toilet cubicle melee, the mud brawl, the car chase to top all car chases, the savage kitchen fight where anything goes, with side distractions courtesy of hired assassins Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man (the latter recalling the enigmatic assailant in Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent). The violence is not only superbly imaginative but full of humorous touches too: Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man in particular have assassination scenes that are as funny as they are vicious, involving claw hammers and a baseball as weapons respectively.
This second helping of 100% freshly squeezed action is, however, slightly adulterated by its narrative ambitions. Where the plot of The Raid was threadbare and fiercely functional, its follow-up attempts to develop a grand crime saga with colourful rival gangs fighting over control of the city, a deadly father-son conflict, and a taciturn hero caught in a hopeless situation (Iko Uwais reprising his role and taking up where the first film left off). Melancholy assassin Prakoso adds to the misguided and tepid efforts at tugging at the audience’s heartstrings, his fate underlined by a particularly distracting use of Handel’s ‘Saraband’. (He is played by Yayan Ruhian, who was terrific as Mad Dog in the previous film, but whose talents are sadly not best used here.)
These, however, are minor gripes, simply because the action is what truly matters here – and what action! Admittedly the radical economy of The Raid had a ruthless perfection that is missing here, but this is not a film that you choose to watch for its story. Despite its flaws, it is impossible not to enjoy this new furious assault on the senses. The whole 150 minutes are a full-on riot of orgiastic violence and preposterous fun: you will be grinning all the way home. Virginie Sélavy
TAKE 2
Proof that you can have entirely too much of a good thing, Gareth Evans’s The Raid 2 stands as a curious artefact of what happens when indie filmmaking meets the modern franchise mentality. For whilst feted by grassroots genre audiences as a gritty, no-holds-barred alternative to Hollywood CGI action pablum, The Raid 2 actually bears all the hallmarks of any committee-made studio sequel you’d care to mention: the wearying insistence that bigger equals better; a paper-thin how-can-the-same-shit-happen-to-the-same-guy-twice narrative (along with the obligatory insistence that this is now going to be a trilogy and was always intended as one, honest); and a general unwillingness to realise when one has outstayed one’s welcome.
Opening a short time after the climax of The Raid, the sequel picks up hero cop Rama (Iko Uwais) as he agrees to go undercover in a bid to bring down the criminal power structure of the city. The plan requires him to be declared dead, just another faceless victim of the events of the previous film. So leaving his pregnant wife, off Rama goes to prison for two years in a bid to bolster the underworld cred of his new identity, before coming out and immediately infiltrating his way to the heart of the criminal organisation.
What hurts The Raid 2 is not so much this sort of by-the-numbers plotting – The Raid was similarly slight on story – but its pretensions towards being some sort of The Godfather-with-roundhouse-kicks crime epic. Whereas The Raid understood that its slender narrative was merely the means by which it got from Kickass Setpiece A to Kickass Setpiece B, and thus wasted as little time on it as necessary, the sequel deludes itself into thinking that audiences are keen to learn more about its sprawling cast of cut-out characters, rather than simply wanting to watch them kick seven shades of shit out of each other at the earliest given opportunity.
Thus we have such digressions as the return of Yayan Ruhian (antagonist Mad Dog in the first Raid), this time around playing a contract assassin who unwittingly gets caught up in the creaking gears of the plot. We first witness him taking out a gang of hoods who have absolutely nothing to do with the story, then are forced to sit through an interminable dinner scene with him and his ex-wife (the curse of backstory strikes again), before the film finally remembers what it’s good at and throws him into an epic nightclub brawl. But as the fight nears its tragic climax (complete with Handel on the soundtrack for added pathos), you’re forced to consider that all of this has been in the service of a character who’s nothing more than a plot device, and that no amount of hamfisted scripting can make him anything more than that. It’s at times like these that The Raid 2 resembles a rambling old codger reminiscing in the pub, forever talking in circles and never getting to the payoff.
Nevertheless, whilst the film’s timing of punchlines may be slipshod, it is of course the punches that people have really paid to see. And in this regard The Raid 2 definitely justifies the hype, more than surpassing the action beats of the original. Several moments – a combination car chase/fight, a climactic faceoff in a restaurant kitchen – drew admiring applause from the audience, Evans’s grasp of his craft truly demonstrating just how turgid and lazy most modern action movies are. The choreography and stunt work are stunning, often jaw-dropping (one suspects the reason Hollywood doesn’t make films like this is partly because modern health and safety standards preclude it), and these set pieces are certainly enough to recommend The Raid 2 in and of themselves.
It’s just a shame that the film surrounding them is so flabby and shapeless, really only kicking fully into life in the second half. Gareth Evans may very well be the Second Coming of action films, but even Jesus needed a hand occasionally. And The Raid 2 would certainly have benefited from the input of another writer and editor. If (as seems likely) Evans parlays the success of these films into a US directing career, the fervent wish of his hardcore support seems to be that he might bring some much-needed balls to the complacency of modern corporate Hollywood. Fair enough. But what the Hollywood studio system always stood for was discipline and the art of delegation, and The Raid 2 serves as notice of the fact that there are lessons to be learned there for indie filmmakers too. Sean Hogan
Original title:L’étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps
Cast: Klaus Tange, Jean-Michel Vovk, Sylvia Camarda, Sam Louwyck
Belgium, France, Luxembourg 2013
102 mins
As gorgeous as it is oppressive, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s latest neo-giallo is an ultra-sensuous, hypnotic trip through dark desires and the disturbing, delicious lines between pleasure and pain, madness and sanity, dream and reality. With a title that riffs on the wonderfully convoluted names of the films that inspired it, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears strengthens the potent aesthetic vision of the directing duo’s 2009 feature debut Amer, focusing entirely on pure sensation. In this hallucinatory, obsessive psychosexual dream, every shot is a marvel of composition, every object and texture is fetishized: leather, gloves, boots, jewels, blood, mirrors, blades. Male and female bodies are repeatedly penetrated, skull wounds are shaped like sexual organs, broken mirror shards enter flesh, as sensual ecstasy becomes deadly and lovers turn assailants.
The narrative is even more minimal than in its Italian predecessors – a man is looking for his missing wife – and it serves as the pretext for an intense distillation of the visual and sonic motifs of the giallo. Just as its masters effortlessly found stunning decors in beautiful, decadent Italian architecture, Strange Colour makes great use of the Brussels art nouveau building in which it is set. With its exuberance of organic round shapes, flowery motifs, voluptuous naked women, twisted stairs, stained glass and golden curlicues, the building is like a living organism, the figures on its walls breathing and moaning with the rapture and agony of its inhabitants.
This review was first published as part of our LFF 2013 coverage.
A baroque film composed of giallo elements that are themselves baroque, Strange Colour constructs a dizzying, infinite cascade of doubles and repetitions, of stories within stories and structures within structures, where everything is mirrored, multiplied and fragmented. While it pays brilliant homage to its models, it is compellingly alluring in itself, and its meticulously crafted world of lush excess, sumptuous sophistication and opulent illusion is deeply seductive.
A rambling title is often a reflection of a rambling narrative; it can indicate either ambition or indecisiveness. There is a reason these long-winded titles proliferated in the late 60s and early 70s – things like William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), Peter Whitehead’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), Anthony Newley’s Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (1969), Ulu Grosbard’s Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me? (1971) and Paul Williams’s Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972), not to mention a slew of Italian giallo films. All of these films have a zig-zagging sense of aimlessness and leisure, a cultural urge to ‘be here now’ that can be alternately transcendent or masturbatory, depending on the film (or the viewer). Underground and commercial cinema alike at this time were quilted with countercultural concerns, sensibilities, techniques and aesthetics – the writing of the Beats, the mobilization of protest movements, the ubiquity of pop stars, the street use of LSD, Timothy Leary’s urge to tune in, turn on, drop out (it’s also telling that many of these film titles come in the form of a question). The mainstream increasingly appropriated the signifiers of the avant-garde in an attempt to woo an exploding youth market (as well as that demographic keen to hang on to their youth for dear life), and in this climate, a title like Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion was likely enough to sell a producer on a project. By the 1970s, when even squares lined up to see Deep Throat in the cinema, it was often hard to tell who was the real deal and who was exploiting the convenience of a double standard. As J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum said in their book Midnight Movies (1983), ‘the counterculture cash-in peaked in 1970’, and the Italian production Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion is one of many films to tap into that zeitgeist.
But for a film whose title references a narcotic trip, it is surprisingly bereft of any real lysergic sensibility; the opening credits (cropped as they were, from a Greek-subtitled ETC bootleg) are among its few moments of visual experimentation, with psychedelic colour splashes, jarring sonic shifts and fish-eyed shots of Eurotrash starlet Ewa Aulin grooving in slow motion to the tone-deaf eponymous theme tune, sung by Ronnie Jones and penned by director John Shadow – a mysterious figure in the cult film pantheon.
Repeated use of oppressive lighting underscores the predatory nature of John, a tenured college professor (Alex Rebar, later to star in The Incredible Melting Man) who feels his school’s reputation is threatened by rampant drug use among its students, namely the delinquent heroin addict Billy (Italian horror staple Carlo De Mejo, almost unrecognizable without his beard). After a fellow teacher leaps to his death, supposedly under the influence of drugs, John enlists the help of nerdy student Henry (Eugene Pomeroy) to lure Billy into isolation at the professor’s Italian villa with a plan to dry him out. John’s young, subservient wife Elizabeth (Ewa Aulin) is not too keen on sharing her vacation with a heroin addict, but the professor reprimands her for being selfish when ‘that boy’s under the grip of a deadly neurosis!’ John relishes his privileged position as the boy’s saviour, to such an extent that he’s willing to subject his impressionable wife to the druggie’s charms; it only has to be merely suggested to her that she try a shot, and she’s immediately a sweaty, shivering addict. So now John and Henry have two addicts on their hands.
Pre-order Spectacular Optical Book One: KID POWER! on Indiegogo! Film writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse and Canuxploitation scholar Paul Corupe, the team behind cult film and pop culture website Spectacular Optical, have launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign to support the label’s inaugural anthology book, KID POWER!, about cool and inspiring kids in English-language cult film and television.
The professor uses every opportunity to torment Billy, and also manipulates Henry, appealing to his loyalty by referring to him as ‘a peer’. But eventually the tables are turned on John as the doped-up Billy mocks his masculinity: ‘Elizabeth, have you ever seen your husband’s penis?’ Under the influence of freshly administered heroin, Elizabeth is liberated, theatrical and aggressive. But while in her stateside breakout film Candy (1968) Aulin’s vacuity was perfectly suited to the part of angelic naïf, here it just seems an embarrassing put-on. The stoic professor’s motto – ‘no emotion!’ – will be tested throughout the film as his experiment veers out of control.
Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion posits itself as a counterculture film, thinking that its parade of non-sequiturs somehow aligns it with the existential kookiness of Bob Rafelson’s Head (1968), the swingin’ free love space-out of Joe Massot’s Wonderwall (1968), the inverted suspense of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Volker Schlöndorff’s A Degree of Murder (1967) as well as various AIP youth-in-revolt and drug films. Unfortunately it succeeds at assimilating none of the qualities that make these films stand out, and instead seems a schizophrenic, somewhat inept cadavre exquis. There is a great sense of temporal dislocation (which is not helped by an unexplored subplot involving some hippies camped out nearby). But as Jonny Redman of cult film site lovelockandload.com has suggested, there is the distinct impression that the film was unfinished.
Aside from its tongue-twisting title, one thing that keeps Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion in the history books is the ongoing mystery about who directed it, and where (and if) it was ever widely released. Although it is credited to John W. Shadow on screen, some have maintained that this is a pseudonym of producer Roberto Loyola, whose eclectic roster also included Sergio Corbucci’s goofy Western Sonny and Jed, Mario Bava’s claustrophobic crime film Rabid Dogs, and the Decamerotic sex comedy Canterbury No 2. The latter (which also stars Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion’s Alex Rebar) is credited to director John Shadow, but it has been argued that the name was a pseudonym for Aristide Massacesi, best known as Joe D’Amato. The name John Shadow resurfaces again as the screenwriter of Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces, also long assumed to be Joe D’Amato.
But a look through the newspapers surrounding Ewa Aulin’s brief fling with fame following the sensational Candy reveals John Shadow to be not only a real person, but married to Aulin from approximately 1968 to 1972. Actor Eugene Pomeroy, one of many young British expats working in Italian cinema at the time, remembers calling the director ‘John’ on set, although he too was confused about whether this John Shadow and producer Roberto Loyola were the same person . Without being able to pinpoint who John Shadow was, it is difficult to discern what may have happened to the film – which appears to have only ever been released on Greek video – and why the narrative’s many tangents are left dangling.
Despite featuring no murder set-pieces, the film nevertheless wound up in the giallo files by association; the giallo tended to be a playpen for all manner of visual and moral excess, and not only was drug abuse one of its staples, but Aulin had appeared in Giulio Questi’s head-scratching 1968 art-giallo Death Laid an Egg (and would later appear in Romolo Guerrieri’s 1971 The Double). Ultimately, the film defies categorization, living on only through its superficial ties to other various sensational subgenres, refusing to follow through on any single element – drugs, music, sexual liberation – that would make its content live up to the countercultural promise of its spectacular title.
Kier-La Janisse
(who adores interminable sentences and whose catalogue boasts a convoluted title of its own: House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012). For more information and to pre-order a special limited edition hardback published in May 2014, visit the Fab press website.
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jesse Eisenberg, Sally Hawkins, Chris O’Dowd
UK 2013
93 mins
Richard Ayoade’s second feature film is a very mannered affair, taking pace in its own transatlantic nocturnal bubble, where the architecture is utilitarian, charmless and shrouded in Lynchian gloom, the jukeboxes play old Japanese pop tunes, and mobile phones are significant by their absence. Based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, it follows Simon (Jesse Eisenberg), an office drone whose life is a series of frustrations. Nobody notices him, his contributions are ignored, his transgressions are seized upon, and he can barely function when attempting to interact with fellow worker, and romantic obsession, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska). So far so depressing, but then one day Simon’s exact double turns up at work, and immediately begins to climb the corporate ladder. This new version is confident and dynamic, a hit with the bosses and a wow with the ladies; he seems to be a better Simon than Simon could hope to be, and slowly begins to edge the original out of his own existence…
The Double eschews any kitchen-sink naturalism (the default setting for many British filmmakers) for a highly stylised, intricately planned and executed aesthetic. There’s more than a hint of Gilliam’s Brazil here, in its office politics and romantic frustration. Each scene is framed, timed and sound designed to create the maximum humiliation for Simon, and there’s a lot of physical comedy here at his expense (automatic doors particularly seem to have it in for him), while his plight is accentuated by staging that leaves him locked out and blocked off from where he wants to be.
This review was first published as part of our LFF 2013 coverage.
Also adding to the ‘movie movie’ experience is the casting, or, what I believe is known in the trade as ‘overcasting’: Ayoade has clearly called in a few favours to fill out his film, and as a result we have most of the actors from his first film Submarine turning up here, as well as a couple of his I.T. Crowd co-stars, and apparently everybody else with a resume he could get hold of. I’m in two minds about the effect of all this on the viewing experience. On one level it’s like another design element (I was reminded of John Waters’s stated ambition to make a film where everybody who appears on screen is a celebrity of some kind, and the sets are deliberately fake). On the other hand, it is undeniably distracting to have familiar face after familiar face pop up in the tiniest roles (Chris Morris! Chris O’Dowd! Paddy Considine! Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis as a janitor, for Christ’s sake!) regardless of the quality of their contribution (loved Tim Key’s turn as a heroically unconcerned care home worker, though). I fear that all this stylisation seals the viewer off from total engagement somewhat, and while it plays on common nightmares, it plays as someone else’s.
Whatever… this is bold, intelligent filmmaking. Eisenberg does great work as both unter-Simon and über-Simon, suggesting two entirely different characters through body language and gesture, often acting against himself in scenes that must have been a technical nightmare. It gets interestingly dark and painful in places, I already want to see it again, and I await whatever Ayoade does next.
A man chases a woman through some of New York’s least populated streets, occasionally firing a gun at her as she playfully hides and beckons him on. He is stopped by a policeman, but, as he has the correct license, is allowed to proceed, following her into a club, where she seems to have disappeared among the chic clientele. The entertainment arrives, a statuesque blonde in silver metal mask and matching bikini, who gyrates her way through the crowd, pausing to bump and grind and slap various men around the face. She approaches the gunman and proceeds to do the same, thoroughly distracting him from his quest, then suddenly shooting him dead with the twin guns built into her bikini top. She has won The Contest. She is Ursula Andress. Welcome to Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim, produced by Carlo Ponti, based on a short story by the great Robert Sheckley. It’s a variation on the ‘bread and circuses’ strain of SF, in which the future masses are distracted from war or revolution by violent spectacle (think Rollerball, Death Race 2000, The Hunger Games), but it’s a more 60s, hyper-stylised live action cartoon variation, a swingin’ romantic comedy with lives on the line, featuring a bleach-blond Marcello Mastroianni rocking a pair of shades versus Andress in a hot pink batwing number.
From its New York opening, the film moves to Rome where Andress, with media team in tow, has, according to the rules, become the hunter, with Mastroianni computer-selected as her victim. While our Ursula seems to be making the contest pay for her, Marcello is skint after a punitive divorce. She wants to engineer a photogenic demise for him at the Temple of Venus. He wants to survive, preferably unmarried. The rest of the film plays out as a game of cat and mouse in a series of staccato scenes, as the couple dance around, and inevitably fall for each other.
The Shameless disc comes with the usual plethora of groovy trailers, plus a half-hour featurette with Kim Newman and Petri’s wife talking about the film.
At times it resembles a demented Bond movie where the set designers have taken control of the script, at others it is like some futuristic offshoot of La Dolce Vita (it shares the same screenwriters.) Petri frames Rome to look sleek and strange and modernist, with most of the cast draped in black and white against blocks of primary colour. He fills the backgrounds of his scenes with loosely choreographed action: gladiators, musicians, dancers, killers. It’s a knowing piece of pop art cinema. Comic books are referenced frequently, (particularly Lee Falk’s The Phantom), the backdrops are filled with Op art and sculpture, artifice and unreality are consistently foregrounded, the crass commercialism of this modern world is mocked remorselessly, but this modern world still looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
While the backgrounds still fizz and excite, it has to be said that some of the foreground action hasn’t dated either. Some of the media satire is a bit blunt and obvious, the marriage/divorce obsession just seems odd, and often the whole thing just doesn’t feel as sharp or funny as it needs to be. Having said that, it sure as hell isn’t boring, managing to bubble through its moments of dysfunction and disjointedness with pure energy. There’s a pleasant freeform ramshackle vibe, it feels simultaneously over-stylised and under-rehearsed, and the leads seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. Mastroianni is a cartoon of taciturn indifference, but given to wild mood swings of snarling rage and sentimentality. Andress mostly plays a sense of frustrated determination, a would-be seductress/killer foiled by Marcello’s manoeuvres, looking pretty damn fabulous at all times. A shot where she walks out of the sea in imitation of her Honey Rider moment is, of course, engineered into the proceedings. Petri seems to be largely an unknown quantity, even to Euro-sleaze aficionados. I caught his A Quiet Place in the Country a few years back, and remember its star Franco Nero opining at that event that Elio was like Italy’s Kubrick, a master who made comparatively few films, all markedly different, and all great. On the strength of that, and this, I look forward to checking out the rest of the man’s work.
1982 was a pretty good year for American cinema, with Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. , The King of Comedy and First Blood being just a handful of the movies to be released theatrically. One film that home-grown audiences didn’t get to see though was Sam Fuller’s White Dog. Although it screened around Europe, receiving much praise in the process, Fuller’s tale of the attempts to recondition a dog trained to attack black people was shelved by the studio that financed it. This spineless, economically driven, act was precipitated by a well-meaning but utterly wrong-headed protest from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a representative of which raised concerns about the film – specifically that it could inspire racists to train their dogs in such a way and may even be racist itself – without having seen a single frame of it. Fearing that the entirely unjust ‘controversy’ would adversely affect the film’s box office potential, Paramount decided it wasn’t financially viable to release it.
This sorry story, recounted in the enlightening 50-page booklet that accompanies the new dual format Masters of Cinema release, highlights a number of contextual issues that add extra layers of interest to a film that has lost none of its power or relevance in the 30-odd years since it was made. Chief among these is the fact that artistic representations of issues pertaining to race/racism/racial equality have always, unsurprisingly, been a highly emotive area. Hollywood has often been uncomfortable, misguided or plain backward in its dealings with race, reflecting American society’s own turbulent relationship to both its slavery-stained history and its culturally diverse population drawn from all corners of the world.
At the time, Fuller’s film fell foul of either unfortunate or wilful ignorance. Considering White Dog’s subject matter – the attempts to counter the sometimes fatal effects of ignorance – it’s impossible to miss the irony of the treatment of what is, in actuality, an intelligent, passionate and pointed rejection of racism. The bone-headed disservice done to White Dog also says a lot about the, then, standing of its director, at least in terms of mainstream attention and the Hollywood elite. This was a filmmaker, remember, who was a decorated veteran of World War II, and one who, as a matter of course, included strong minority characters and tackled issues of equality and racism in his films throughout his career. Equal parts philosopher, hustler, humanist and maverick, Fuller was, and to a degree still is, regarded as something of an outsider within Hollywood, despite influencing the likes of Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Spielberg and Tarantino. This is more of a damning testament to Tinsel Town not quite knowing how to handle either the man and his no BS attitude, or the head-on, provocative nature of his films rather than pointing to any detrimental aspect of Fuller or his movies. This welcome Masters of Cinema entry does point to the fact that in some circles Fuller is rightly regarded as worthy of serious critical attention and respect, as well as foregrounding just how important it is to have companies such as Eureka, Criterion, Second Run and Arrow Videos, to name but a handful, releasing special editions of films that enrich our understanding of their directors and the eras and genres in which they worked.
White Dog itself is a simple story, dealing with a literal black and white issue. Inspired by a Life Magazine article and subsequent book written by Romain Gary, and co-written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson, the film works on many levels: it is a psychological thriller, an action flick, a human drama and a crime movie. If the premise of the film sounds sensational (in the wrong way), its realisation is resolutely not so. Ennio Morricone’s plaintive score complements a narrative that, while containing several violent set-pieces, is more concerned with philosophical inquiry than it is with explosive entertainment. The film’s two main locations – the Noah’s Ark centre where animals are trained to appear in TV shows and movies, and the Hollywood Hills where it is situated – sees the Dream Factory become an ideological battleground. The locations are also pointed reminders of the dangers of blindly consuming entertainment, and of mass conditioning to accept the status quo, both subjects which Fuller was always keenly aware of.
With the dog a canvas upon which the worst of humanity has been forced, the post-attack shots of its blood-stained white coat providing stark visual symbolism, a hearts-and-minds battle is played out between man and beast. Having taken on the seemingly impossible task of un-training the dog, animal wrangler Keys, played by African-American actor Paul Winfield, becomes locked in an emotionally and physically draining stand-off with the ‘four-legged time bomb‘. Kristy McNichol’s bit part actress Julie, who, after running over the dog, takes it in as her own, and Burl Ives’s Carruthers, the owner of Noah’s Ark, are also put through the wringer as Keys and the dog play out their very private but universally relevant duel. Fear, hate, aggression and violence – their existence within the individual and society – are confrontationally challenged, as are the notions of how to combat these destructive forces. The later revelation as to the identity of the owner of the white dog, the person responsible for its racial conditioning, is provocatively chilling, raising an unsettling mirror to certain sections of American society.
Featuring numerous, expertly shot suspense and action set-pieces, including an attack on a black actress by the dog that De Palma would have been proud of, White Dog also suggests the idea that reconditioning, even from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, is itself a form of psychological violence, as the film’s downbeat conclusion attests to. Comparisons to the aftermath of the use of the Ludovico technique in A Clockwork Orange are readily apparent, as the Pavlov-like conditioning implemented in both films has dire consequences.
On a wider plane than the specific story White Dog tells, the role the state, church and family plays in the upbringing of each new generation is of clear concern to Fuller, his method of addressing these issues being characteristically forthright and presented with knife-sharp clarity. The frequent use of low camera angles and POV shots, giving the audience a ‘dog’s eye’ view of proceedings, cannily places the viewer as both victim and perpetrator, making us intimate with subject matter from which some may still wish to turn their eyes and ears away.
If we imagine a world without Star Wars, we can imagine a world where cinema was not dying as it is now. If we imagine a world where Alejandro (El Topo) Jodorowsky beat Star Wars to the punch with his planned film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune, we can imagine him laying the groundwork for a new and different kind of film spectacle, rather than the empty state-of-the-art 1980s blockbusters that spawned endless rollercoaster rides masquerading as movies.
Frank Pavich’s feature documentary is as close as we’re ever going to get to seeing what might have been one of the great movies of the late 20th century. A mere five-million-dollars short of becoming a reality, the film was to star Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali and Orson Welles. Seeing this doc is to indulge in the creative excitement that went into every second of preparing this epic motion picture. We experience Jodorowsky’s pride (albeit with a tinge of melancholy) at planting seeds for the future greatness of others from a movie that was never made. The films exists only in a massive frame-by-frame storyboard book with the screenplay and Jodorowsky’s notes – a document used to raise additional financing in Hollywood, but which was instead passed around to one filmmaker after another. Hollywood accepted the genius, but rejected the artist and, sadly, his film.
This review was first published as part of our 2013 LFF coverage.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?
Format: DVD (R1)
Release date: 28 September 2004
Distributor: Guilty Pleasures
Director: Ray Dennis Steckler
Writers: E.M. Kevke, Gene Pollock, Robert Silliphant
Cast: Ray Dennis Steckler, Carolyn Brandt, Brett O’Hara, Atlas King, Sharon Walsh
USA 1964
82 mins
From the director of The Adventures of Rat Phink a Boo Boo (1966), this is another cinematic curio that is as much a document of 1960s underground culture as an achievement in low-budget schlock. The (thin) plot sees the director doubling as lead actor, playing a ne’er-do-well called Jerry who haunts the sideshows and carnival in Long Beach, California. Behind the velvet rope, a clairvoyant keeps mutated punters who have upset her in a cage at the back of her tent, and with Jerry and his friends queuing outside to have their palms read, a clash between the two is about to take place…
A film more famous for its name than its content is never likely to be a classic, but TISCWSLaBMUZ isn’t devoid of memorable moments. As a brusque layabout, Steckler is a surprisingly engaging lead, and Brett O’Hara as the witch-like clairvoyant Madame Estrella – complete with facial warts that move position from scene to scene – is a suitably baroque villain. The movie runs at least 20 minutes too long, with most of the padding comprising scenes of burlesque dancing that occur almost every 15 minutes. This gives a Bollywood-style construction to the proceedings, as if the director felt viewers would rather be watching a TV variety show than a proper film.
However, two members of the crew give the cinematography the quality of a production 10 times the budget: assistant cameraman László Kovács and camera operator Vilmos Zsigmond. Kovács would go on to shoot Five Easy Pieces (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) and Ghostbusters (1984), while Zsigmond improbably has Deliverance (1972), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and The Deer Hunter (1978) on his CV. Needless to say, the film looks terrific, from the night-time shots of the carnival, a futuristic vision of sodium lamps and neon that seems more like Tron (1982) than 1960s California, to atmospheric shots of Jerry as he walks under the Angel Flight funicular railway in Downtown L.A.
The impressive look of the film is both aided and hampered by the editing, which varies between inspired match cuts of headlights and eyes to hamfisted jumps between scenes. As Don Schneider’s only other feature editing credit was on Eegah (1962), featuring many of the same cast and considered one of the worst films ever made, a cynic might suggest the clever edits on screen were more by accident than design.
I imagine more people have experienced TISCWSLaBMUZ on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in 1997, a TV show where comedians Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy among others watch old movies and make jokes about what they’re watching. As this is a film best appreciated for its visuals, this is no bad thing (although MST3K rarely used the best quality prints). It’s a movie made more enjoyable in the company of friends or with one finger on the fast forward button to skip the repetitive dancing scenes and interminable ending where a (look away now if you didn’t see this coming) mutated Jerry runs along the seashore chased by the police. The one scene where the variety acts and the plot intersect, as the mutants invade a stereotyped voodoo performance, is played out too long, wasting the opportunity for such a crossover.
As a scholar of the development of the modern zombie, I watched it with fascination and would love to ask Steckler about the film’s title. When his character first falls under the influence of Madame Estrella he’s a mesmerised, murderous puppet in the style of Doctor Caligari’s Cesare, before her undefined curse makes him, like his predecessors in her cage, some kind of devolved monster. For everyone else, it’s certainly a curate’s egg worth watching for fans of bad movies; actually, with the opportunity of skipping the boring bits, I’d happily give another one of the director’s films a try.
Alex Fitch
Watch the trailer:
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