Daisies - Vera Chytilová (1966)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060959/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisies_%28film%29

From IMDB:

The opening of 'Daisies' features a montage of two subjects very familiar to 1966 Eastern Bloc film audiences: work and war, as shots of an industrial machine alternate with views of rubbling city from an airplane bomber's point of view. These are masculine subjects in a very masculine culture. Or they seem to be. The machine features a circular mechanism, and represents repetition, but also productivity, and might be said to represent female principles, whereas the war footage is of pure destruction. The heroines of 'Daisies' embody both these gender-specific realms, and manage to create something new. They are idle, but, like George Costanza, their indolence depends on relentless invention. They are destructive, but out of the destruction they produce something new.

'Daisies' was a product of the Czech New Wave, but seems a million miles away from its most famous contemporaries, the films of Menzel and Forman. These latter, though liberal and anti-totalitarian, were artistically conservative - deliberately humanist works, where 'real', psychologically plausible characters exist in 'real' places, and every narrative progression makes logical sense. If they seem 'timeless' to us now, it is because they didn't truly engage with their own times.

And, of course, they were male. Where they seem closer to the 19th century novel, or classic Hollywood cinema, Chytilova's peers are the great European modernists, Godard, Paradjanov, Makavejev, Rivette, or the plays of Ionesco. Where Forman and Menzel framed their illusions of realism in formal coherence, Chytilova revels in formal instability. These aren't psychologically plausible characters in a cause-and-effect universe. We first meet the two Maries after the opening credits, and their automaton gestures, with accompanying sound effects, continue the movement of the machine.

The plot basically consists of the girls trying to chat up old men who'll feed them, but what they really do is make a nonsense of plot. The recurring motif is the posy of roses worn by Marie II, and thrown by her to further the story - we remember the nursery rhyme 'a ring a ring of rosies, a pocketful of posies, a tishoo, a tishoo, we all fall down'. And everything falls down here, in a game where the rules have splintered and fragmented.

The film mixes monochrome, colour, and unstably tinted scenes. Sequences that begin 'sensibly' are broken down, by slapstick, changes of register, 'impossible' changes of location or physics, or are turned from natural scenes into the robotic movements of a clockwork toy going out of control. This disruption has a theoretical point - in one scene, the girls find their bodies cut up as they find their identities dissolved by conflicting desires, social expectations and representations. In another, they wander around a dream space, wondering why people pay no attention to them, realising that 'logically', they mustn't exist, because Western culture has no place for them.

Just as they parody the notions of work and war (in the climactic food orgy, martial army music soundtracks a cake fight), so these sprites play with and destroy the assumptions of Western humanism, its claims to adequately represent 'reality', especially in a time of such bewildering, radical change, as in the 1960s. They do to cinema what Ionesco did to literature, cut it into shreds.

The whole thing plays like parody Godard, with Marie II as Anna Karina, with meaningful conversations about love accompanied by the girls cutting up sausages and bananas: the butterfly sequence is a wicked lampoon of 'Vivre sa Vie'. Where Godard's heroines remained fixed and stared at, the two Maries laugh, look, escape, see their frame and break it, insist on their body as something more than an object, something they can play with themselves.

Not even the heroines' liberating subversivess is fixed - their mindless appetite is punished as often as their formal iconoclasm is celebrated. But for all its theoretical rigour, 'Daisies' never sacrifices its sense of humour - I first saw it when I was ten, and loved it for its slapstick fun, its narrative unpredictability, its playful soundtrack, and its tireless visual invention. I still love it now.

The Reflecting Skin - Philip Ridley (1990)

DVD - No subtitles. Language: English

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100469/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reflecting_Skin_%28film%29

http://www.geocities.com/nzmermaid2003/reflecting.htm

"The Reflecting Skin" and "The Passion of Darkly Noon," (Director Philip Ridley) Reviews:

From Reflecting SkinThe only two certainties in Philip Ridley's films are death and that viewers will have something gorgeous and deeply affecting, at times disturbing to watch along the way. Panathos always seems just out of frame in "The Reflecting Skin" and "The Passion of Darkly Noon," stalking the characters, along with all their friends and relations with his scythe. "The Reflecting Skin" (1990) is a beautifully shot, high concept American Gothic horror tale about community, family and post war fallout.

Jeremy Cooper and Viggo Mortensen are Seth and Cameron Dove; two sons of deeply miserable parents who run a gas station in the midst of gorgeous fields. Seth (Cooper) gets into malicious mischief both with and without his friends waiting for Cameron (Mortensen) to return from the war on what their mother refers to as "the pretty islands." Lindsay Duncan plays a widow who lives near the Dove family and is often on the receiving end of Seth's mischief. When Seth's young friends begin turning up dead, the town starts looking for vengeance rather than justice and the fallout increases.

Duncan (also seen as Lady Markham in "An Ideal Husband") as Dolphin Blue has a gorgeous voice and a line that serves as the film's thesis statement: "Sometimes terrible things happen quite naturally." She is courageous and fully present for the grief and passion that rip through her character's world. Cameron (Mortensen) is instantly drawn to her and the triangle of the brothers and the mysterious widow share the best scenes in this film. In this town, terms like "radiation sickness" and "serial killers" appear not to have been either learned or shared, so Seth does his best to make sense of the incomprehensible with words like "vampire."

Stills from Reflecting SkinWhile not for the faint of heart, "The Reflecting Skin" is an unforgettable film. "The Passion of Darkly Noon" (1995) is a mind-expanding spell, from the crosscut of Brendan Fraser staggering through the woods with the opening credits, to P.J. Harvey's hauntingly gorgeous voice over the closing credits. The immensely appealing triangle of Darkly (Fraser), Callie (Ashley Judd) and Clay (Viggo Mortensen) explore all aspects of the concept of passion: distraction, desire, consummation, suffering and a few others for which words fail. While the entire ensemble is strong, the story revolves around these three, two of whom have been rescued, at different times from the forest and one of whom goes there periodically to sort things out.

The film also addresses the human tendency to confuse blame, justice and vengeance as well as how someone eaten alive by resentment and ignorant misinterpretations of events can level inestimable damage. The forest in this film is not just a place, but another character and works on both tangible and metaphoric levels. The action covers two weeks of a very hot summer when a young man is discovered unconscious near the forest and brought to Callie and Clay's home. Callie (Ashley Judd) looks after him and learns that he lost his family in a traumatic event, which sounds eerily like the siege of the Koresh compound in Waco, Texas in the early 90's. Darkly (Fraser) develops an obsession with Callie's beauty and sensuality and his strict religious upbringing has not equipped him at all to deal with his feelings for her.

When Clay (Mortensen) returns home and Darkly observes their close, loving relationship, unapologetically outside of the sacrament of marriage, the moonlit stroll across the emotional and ideological minefield begins. Fraser's title character is a fascinatingly unsteady balance of trauma, naivete' and repression. Judd's Callie both tenderly and richly evokes the complex dilemma of the once rescued becoming the rescuer. Mortensen, ever the shape shifter, is simply brilliant as Callie's carpenter lover who, at her request, welcomes Darkly into their family and brings him on as an apprentice, without uttering a word of dialogue. The original and remarkable vision Ridley showed in "The Reflecting Skin" is present in "The Passion of Darkly Noon," but it's a deeper, more mature and complex story I enjoyed infinitely more. Also known as "Darkly Noon," there were odd circumstances surrounding the release of this film in the US, which may make it harder to find at the video store. The extra legwork required to see "The Passion of Darkly Noon" is well worth the effort for the performances, story, spectacle and many surprises it affords.

Of Freaks and Men - Aleksei Balabanov (1998)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0156849/

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=3496

From DVD Times:

When I first saw Alexei Balabanov's Of Freaks and Men at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1998, I thought it was touch and go whether a film quite so original, provocative, perverse and calculatedly offensive - not to mention weird in the extreme - would get British distribution at all, not least because the number of Russian films to be granted that honour over the last decade could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. I certainly didn't expect to be reviewing a UK-label DVD of it quite this soon!

Balabanov flings down the gauntlet right from the opening credits, which are superimposed over a series of vaguely sadomasochistic pictures of young Russian women, breasts and buttocks exposed, being chastised by stern babushkas with bundles of birch twigs for unspecified infractions - it looks as though the scene is being set for a return to the kind of arty soft porn pioneered by maverick talents like Walerian Borowczyk (Immoral Tales, The Streetwalker) in the 1970s, and if you watched scenes from Of Freaks and Men taken out of context you'd probably find that impression reinforced.

But the film is rather more complicated than that, not to say ambitious - and raincoated types should be warned that the pornographic elements are largely incidental to the main narrative, which is a late 19th century costume drama (shot for the most part in sepia-tinted monochrome), set in St Petersburg, about bourgeois families being laid low by unscrupulous sleaze merchants who take over the cellars of respectable households and turn them into makeshift studios for photographs and later films of more than mildly disreputable content.

These are created by naïve would-be artist Putilov and overseen by the sinister Johann (to whom Putilov is heavily in debt), and the even more sinister Viktor Ivanovich (played by grinning bald maniac and Balabanov regular Viktor Sokhorukov), who then sells them door to door to the maidservants of respectable families, sowing the seeds of corruption and discord that inevitably leads to scandal, death and ruin.

But Viktor loses interest in the porn side of Johann's business when he spots and becomes obsessed with a pair of Siamese twins, Kolya and Tolya. After seducing their blind guardian, he becomes their manager, turning them into a singing freak show and taking them on tour. But all is not well with the twins: one is an alcoholic while the other has become unhealthily interested in sexual matters as a result of regular exposure not only to Putilov's porn but to the family maid's power games, and Viktor plans for international stardom start to unravel…

If there's a single thread running through the film, it's that of exploitation: wives by husbands, servants by the upper classes, respectable citizens by sleazy pornographers, actual freaks by moral freaks. It's no wonder that Liza, the young woman on whom Johann has developed a fixation - probably the most sympathetic character in the film - spends much of the time staring out of the window at passing steam trains, though when she finally gets away, it's clear that the rest of the world is just as depraved as what she's left behind (or is it that she can't help seeking the depravity out?). And though Putilov eventually achieves fame and even what looks like a substantial schoolgirl groupie following, it's clear that this is on the back of his S&M porn movies rather than anything profound or heartfelt.

This was the first of Balabanov's films that I saw, but now I've caught up with his earlier Happy Days and Brother it's clear that he's getting better and better - there's a berserk confidence in this outré material that means you can't take your eyes off the screen even when the film's at its most inconsequential: some of the most visually compelling moments involve little actual dramatic content, such as a series of stunning, wordless sequences consisting of little more than lengthy journeys around St Petersburg's architecturally glorious tramways and canals, scored to recordings of Mussorgsky and Prokofiev standards.

The film has been deliberately shot and designed to look as though it could have been made at literally any point in the last century, though the fact that it dates from the late 1990s makes it hard not to draw comparisons between its portrait of an exciting new technology (the cinematograph) being misused by smut peddlers and what happened with the introduction of the Internet and, come to that, the DVD format (at the time the film was made, just about the only discs that made genuinely creative use of the multi-angle button were the kind you would probably think twice before showing your wives or servants, something of which Balabanov was doubtless all too aware).

So who on earth has Of Freaks and Men been made for? Well, fans of Borowczyk, Peter Greenaway, Guy Maddin, early David Lynch and Jan Svankmajer's Conspirators of Pleasure will have a field day, as will broadminded devotees of the more fantastical Russian novelists: there's a strong streak of Gogol and Bulgakov running through it as well (not to mention Beckett, Ionesco and Kafka). But Balabanov is very much his own man - few relatively new directors (he made his debut in 1992) have established such a strong personal style quite so quickly, and one that's remarkably consistent whether we're talking about a period drama like this or a contemporary thriller like the equally controversial Brother.

I should in all fairness point out that despite my own high regard for the film (four viewings and counting), it's not going to be welcomed with open arms by everyone. Radical feminists will need some persuading that a film featuring numerous still and moving shots of naked young women being flogged is going to advance their cause in any way, and the Russian film establishment has already condemned it (it caused outrage at its St Petersburg premiere and had extreme difficulty finding a distributor in its native country) - and of my companions in the two cinema trips I made to see it, one utterly loathed it and spent much of the journey home openly questioning my sanity in championing it, though this was happily counterbalanced by my then girlfriend, who absolutely loved it and indeed regularly rang me up for days afterwards to ask me to play a particular Mussorgsky piece over the phone. Like Putilov's creations, it's a film that arouses passions, and that alone is a positive thing in my book.

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

http://imdb.com/title/tt0108069/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Adventures_of_Tom_Thumb

From wikipedia:

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb is a 1993 stop-motion animated film made by bolexbrothers, and funded by the BBC, La Sept, producer Richard Hutchinson and Manga Entertainment, which also distributed the film on video. Though it draws its title character from the fairy tale Tom Thumb, the story and setting is substantially different, depicting Tom as a foetus-like child living in a grim and squalid urban environment.

The story follows the tiny Tom Thumb as he is abducted from his loving parents and taken to an experimental laboratory, and his subsequent escape. He discovers a community of similarly-sized people living in a swamp, who help him on his journey to return to his parents. The film is largely dialogue-free, limited mostly to grunts and other non-verbal vocalizations.

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb was made using a combination of stop-motion animation and pixilation (live actors posed and shot frame-by-frame), often with live actors and puppets sharing the frame. It was originally commissioned as a 10 minute short for BBC2's Christmas programming, but was rejected for being too dark for the festive season. The short version nevertheless garnered critical acclaim through showings at animation festivals, and a feature-length version was commissioned by the BBC a year later.

The Atrocity Exhibition - Jonathan Weiss (2000)

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0197256/

http://www.filmfreaks.nl/reel23/en/frameset01.html

Review from Slamdance.com (http://www.slamdance.com/SD99/festival/atrocity_exhibition.html)

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION is a faithful adaptation of the 1970 novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard (author of EMPIRE OF THE SUN and CRASH). Jonathan Weiss' filmed adaptation concerns a doctor in a mental research institution who goes insane at the spectacle of the horrors of the end of the twentieth century, especially those communicated through modern media and broadcasting. The film makes extensive use of rare archival footage acquired from such varied sources as the Nuclear Defense Agency, the Car Crash Analysis Library, and the Zapruder Estate. Weiss incorporates this footage into the narrative, weaving fact and fiction to create a unique film experience. Ballard, whose other works were crafted into films by Steven Spielberg and David Cronenberg, writes of Weiss' film: "What a superb adaptation it is - it takes the logic of the book and translates it almost seamlessly into a very different medium...a ceaseless flow of atmospheric locations."

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man

http://greylodge.org/gpc/?p=871


It’s probably impossible to make the perfect documentary about Leonard Cohen, a poet, songwriter and performer about whom most people — of a certain age and temperament, at least — have ardent feelings. There was a time when every worthy record collection (and I mean record collection) included a copy of Cohen’s 1967 debut, “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” whose cover featured a sepia portrait of the man himself: This somber visage — gazing straight into the camera, straight at us — might have come directly from the Old West, except most people in the Old West never looked this impeccably groomed and elegant. There has never been anything scruffy, literally or figuratively, about Cohen. The pinpoint-precise imagery of his poetry is part of what makes it so alive. And his voice has developed a glorious depth and texture over the years, like the patina on an antique watch chain. Yesterday and today, Leonard Cohen is the picture of class — but it’s class with feeling.Lian Lunson’s “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man” is partly an interview documentary and partly a record of a Cohen tribute performance, organized by the ever-inventive producer Hal Willner, at the Sydney Opera House in 2005. The result is something of a jumble: The performers here include Nick Cave, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, and the silvery-voiced Antony, and although some of the performances are lovely (the Handsome Family and Linda Thompson’s somber and graceful version of “1000 Kisses Deep,” for example), the problem is that once Lunson starts talking to Cohen, we only want more of him — and we can’t get enough. We peer through the thicket of sequences in which the likes of Bono, Cave and Rufus Wainwright sing Cohen’s praises, but all we want is for Cohen to reemerge. We even suffer through a particularly painful butchering of “Hallelujah” — surely one of the most beautiful songs in the English language — at the hands of Rufus Wainwright (who does better with other material here) and two backup singers, Joan Wasser and Rufus’ sister, Martha Wainwright, whose phrasing is so incomprehensible that I sometimes wondered if she even knew what song she was singing.

Even so, there’s never any doubt that “I’m Your Man” has been made with love, and even when it’s not quite measuring up to your hopes, you feel warmed by its affection. Rufus Wainwright offers a particularly sweet account of meeting Cohen for the first time: Cohen was in his underwear, chewing up little bits of sausage and feeding them to an injured bird he’d rescued; then he went off to get dressed, reemerging in a perfectly tailored Armani suit. (Cohen’s father was an engineer who ended up in the clothing trade, which helps explain Cohen’s knack for sharp dressing.)

The performers interviewed here speak so glowingly of Cohen’s songs that they nearly trip themselves up: His work is so personal for each of them that articulating its significance is a struggle, and anyone who’s ever tried to sum up Cohen’s spectacular gifts can relate. Bono, in particular, is effusive to the point of parody. And yet by the time, at the end of the picture, he takes the stage with the rest of U2 to accompany Cohen on “Tower of Song” (in a cabaret performance filmed at the Slipper Room, in New York), even this most poised of rock stars can’t help betraying some boyish excitement. Even when you’re one of the biggest rock stars in the world, getting to sing with Leonard Cohen is a huge deal.

Seul contre tous/ I stand alone - Gaspar Noe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seul_contre_tous

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157016/

From Wikipedia:

Seul contre tous (English title: I Stand Alone or In The Bowels Of France - I Stand Alone) is a 1998 French film, written and directed by Gaspar Noé, and starring Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, Frankye Pain, and Martine Audrain.

The Butcher narrates his backstory through voice-over and a montage of still photographs. Orphaned at a young age, he opened a butcher shop and fathered a mentally-deficient daughter from a woman who later left him for another man. He raised his daughter, fighting his lust for her, until the day of her first period, when he stabbed a man he thought had raped her. He went to jail, losing his job and his daughter, who became near-catatonic. After being released, he took up with a woman who owned a tavern and she became pregnant. She sold her business and moved to northern France with him under the promise of opening a butcher shop. It is 1980.
The Butcher hates his life with his ovebearing, overweight mistress. She backs out of her promise to open a butcher shop, forcing him to take a night watchman job at a nursing home. Along with a nurse, he witnesses an elderly patient die, and he ruminates on the pointlessness of life. He fails to capitalize on the nurse's vulnerability, but his mistress accuses him of having an affair nontheless. He snaps and punches his mistress's belly several times, killing their unborn child, then steals a pistol and flees.

The Butcher determines to feel no guilt and return to Paris. He rents the same flophouse room where he conceived his daughter and begins looking up his old friends, but they are all too decrepit and poor to help him. The Butcher's interior monologues focus on his hatred of the rich and their exploitation of the lower class. He looks for butcher jobs, but the French economy is bad and there are no jobs in any related field. After being turned away at a slaughterhouse that once did business with his shop, the Butcher decides to kill the manager. He plots the murder at a local tavern, but gets ejected from the bar at gunpoint after squabbling with the owner's son. The Butcher finds that he has only three bullets in his gun, and plans out which of his new enemies he will use them on.

He eventually decides to see his daughter first. After meeting her at her asylum, he takes her back to his room and hesitates, looking at his gun. He has sex with her and then attempts to kill her with a shot to the head, but misses and hits her throat. As she bleeds in agony and the landlord pounds on the door, the Butcher eventually uses his second bullet to finish her off. His mind in chaos, the Butcher collapses and shoots himself in the head. Then the movie returns to the moment of the Butcher's hesitation. He puts the gun away, resolving to be good, and tearfully embraces his daughter. He flashes back to the moment when he spread his old girlfriend's legs on the day of his daughter's conception. Standing at a window, he unzips his daughter's jacket and begins fondling her. His interior monologue asserts that their love is more pure because the world condemns it.

Style

Most of the film's dialogue is the Butcher's interior monologue, spoken in voice-over.
The camera is usually stationary throughout the film, however this trend is sometimes contrasted by sudden, rapid movements of the camera. The sudden movements are always accompanied by a loud sound effect, usually an explosive gunshot. A notable exception is the final crane shot, which moves gently away from the Butcher's window and turns to look down an empty street.

The film frequently cuts to title cards that display a variety of messages throughout the movie. The cards often repeat a notable word spoken by the Butcher, such as "Morality" and "Justice". At the climax of the film, a "Warning" title card counts down 30 seconds under the pretext of giving viewers an opportunity to escape the rest of the film.

Film connections

The film is a sequel to Noé's short film Carné. The Butcher also makes a cameo appearance at the beginning of Irréversible, Noe's follow-up to I Stand Alone. In a drunken monologue, the Butcher reveals that he was arrested for having sex with his daughter.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes - Quay Brothers

Film Info

2005

99 mins

Color and B&W

UK/Germany/France

In English

35mm

Aspect ratio: Cinemascope (2.35:1)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342882/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Piano_Tuner_of_Earthquakes

From Wikipedia:

An 18th-century opera singer is murdered on-stage shortly before her upcoming wedding. Soon after being slain by the nefarious Dr. Emmanuel Droz during a live performance, Malvina van Stille is spirited away to the inventor's remote villa to be reanimated and forced to play the lead in a grim production staged to recreate her abduction. As the time for the performance draws near, piano tuner of earthquakes Felisberto sets out to activate the seven essential automatons who dot the dreaded doctor's landscape and make sure all the essential elements are in place. Once again instilled with life after her brief stay in the afterworld, amnesiac Malvina is soon drawn to the mysterious Felisberto as a result of his uncanny resemblance to her one-time fiancé Adolfo.

Begotten - E. Elias Merhige

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101420/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begotten

Begotten is a 1991 Experimental/horror film, directed and written by E. Elias Merhige.

The film heavily deals with religion and the biblical story of earth creation. But as Merhige revealed[citation needed] during Q&A sessions, its primary inspiration was a near death experience he had when he was 19, after a car crash. The film features no dialogue, but rather uses harsh and uncompromising images of human pain and suffering to tell its tale.

Mehrige also revealed in Q&A sessions that he would like this film to be the first of a trilogy. He is however experiencing difficulties getting proper funding for such uncompromising and uncommercial projects, and it is unknown if/when the two other films will ever be made.

From IMDB Review:

I saw 'Begotten' last night, and I'm of two minds on the film.On one hand, I appreciate it for being the total invert of a Michael Bay film. No dialogue, extremely stylized grainy B&W photography, some of the most genuinely horrific imagery ever set to film, and a very compelling use of sound (which nobody else seems to have really picked up on yet). It's a reflection on a theme, and it dares go where most filmmakers do not not only in terms of images, but of production and concept. It's a movie that most people don't understand, and if you read through these comments you'll find a lot of people whose lack of ability to figure this film out results in them shrieking about 'pretentiousness' with the fervor of a gibbon rattling the bars of its cage at feeding time. It genuinely shocked and disturbed me, and the last time a film managed to do that was a while ago.

On the other, this is a thirty-minute short that sprawls out to over an hour and a half. I understand that there might be artistic merit in using repetition and monolithic pacing as a bludgeon, but in this case it just doesn't help everything hang together. Imagine being approached by a ragged man on the street who grabys you by the shoulders and says something that completely confounds the core of your being... but then, instead of leaving your shattered and gibbering in his wake, he just keeps talking and talking and talking. By the end of the movie, I found myself glancing at my watch now and again.

This is not entertainment, people. This is disentertainment. This is how you deprogram people who just watched "Glitter." If you watch movies to be entertained, this will frustrate, confound, and possibly anger you. You don't approach 'Begotten' like a chocolate cake you want to eat because it tastes good. You approach it like something on the menu you have never heard of before, something you see furtive glances of through the kitchen door, something that's dark and glistens and twitches on its platter; something you order not because it will taste good, but because you just have to know what it's like.

Jan Svankmajer - Conspirators of Pleasure

http://www.moviemartyr.com/1997/conspirators.htm

Jan Svankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure is so original that it is difficult to place in context with regards to other films. It looks like an either an extended version of the bedspring scene in Delicatessan or a very long Björk video. It utilizes the same sort of stop-motion animation seen in the films of the Brothers Quay or Wladyslaw Starewicz (The Tale of the Fox, The Mascot). Its subject matter, which surreally examines sexual repression and fetishism, feels positively Buñuelian. Svankmajer’s work doesn’t often feel derivative, however. His strong ability to tell a story visually (Conspirators requires absolutely no subtitles to watch despite the fact that it’s in Czech) and his nonchalant way of raising issues and lecturing to the audience about their foibles through exaggeration and bawdiness make this film feel like it’s been cast in the style of a newspaper’s political cartoon.

Conspirators follows about a half-dozen people as they elaborately and secretly plan out their fetishistic sex rituals. None of the sex acts are really erotic or plausible enough to make the audience feel the director is singling them out or expecting them to be titillated, but there is, for the audience, a real sense of identification with the alienation these characters’ desires cause. The participants are never shown discussing their needs (which are literally hidden “in the closet”), but there are some knowing glances between characters exchanged suggesting a mutual understanding. Like the hero of Before Night Falls their sexual deviancy is nearly a form of political rebellion, and unifies them in the face of their society’s oppression. The film is also smart enough to suggest sexual desire is malleable and fetishes aren’t as distinctly ours as we might think they are. That it’s able to convey so much about sexuality and perversity with a minimum amount of either nudity or erotic charge is impressive, though one might wish these acts, which are obviously hugely enjoyable for their perpetrators, might be more fun for us. They’re certainly funny and odd, but we’re always looking at them from an outsider’s perspective.

The implication seems to be that we’re all harboring shames about our sexuality is a little problematic. Obviously, the film means this in a Buñuelian sense, which would suggest that without religion and manners we’d all be engaging in a nonstop orgy, but even that seems too neatly conceptualized. The fact of the matter is that humans tend to process sexual desires differently, and Conspirators wants us to think that we’re not at all different simply because we all have sexual desires. Some of us opt to act on impulse, while others don’t, so the film probably would have been better if it had examined what differentiated those who do and don’t act. The end of the movie, which hints that it might go in that direction, is fascinating, but it merely introduces the concept, and drops it. Still, it’s a must-see, if only because of the wealth of imagination and the technical bravado. The film’s handmade look fits the material, since it’s about desires too personal to be mass-produced. Conspirators of Pleasure manages to stave off the repetitiousness that its specificity might have caused by keeping its running time under 90 minutes. Thankfully, the film’s more edifying moments are surrounded by a thoroughly enjoyable shell of quirky insanity.

Cannibal holocaust(1980)
director:Ruggero Deodato
writer:Gianfranco Clerici
Also Known As:Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (USA) (complete title)
Country:Italy / Colombia
Language:English / Spanish
Color:Color (Eastmancolor)
Subtitles:English(only for the Spanish parts)
IMDB link: www.imdb.com/title/tt0078935/

plot outline(imdb):
Cannibal Holocaust was, first and foremost, a disgusting movie with more violence than I have ever seen. Despite this, it is also one of my favorite movies. It gives a feeling of Blair Witch done right, even though there are some very obviously contrived scenes in which nobody is holding the camera, but despite some small cosmetic problems this is the best horror movie I have ever seen.

Unlike most "shock" films, such as the Guinea Pig movies, Cannibal Holocaust has a very well written plot and a definite progression. The focus is still on making the audience ill, but we don't even see any violence until fairly late in the movie, so the emphasis on plot is much stronger. The story told is a deep one, showing the lengths at which people will go for some goal, the example given being fame and fortune. The theme is reflected in parallel story lines through the second half of the movie, as Alan and his crew go to more and more desperate lengths for fame, and the professor struggles against a big media company to suppress the release of their footage. Even in a "meta" sense, we see the theme appear once again in the lengths the director of Cannibal Holocaust itself went, going so far as to kill and butcher four animals on camera.

Northfork - Polish Brothers - 2003

Directed by
Michael Polish

Writing credits (WGA)
Mark Polish (written by) &
Michael Polish (written by)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322659/

Two completely opposing opinions from IMDB.

A pretentious crock
1/10

The frustrating thing about a movie like this, with a true potential for greatness, is that it almost enjoys being heavy-handed. We speak of allegory, of metaphor...but the truth is, there's no getting around the fact that there is absolutely no plot or real character.

At a certain point, we most know who the people are...even if we never understand where they are going. The sheer pretentiousness wore me down every time I tried to grasp a truth in this film.

Call it beautiful, great and awesome...I just call it "cheating." All style and no substance. Sure, it's a matter of taste...but I would never take a confusing modernist pastiche of symbols and splashes over the spiritual clarity of Jean Cocteau or Renoir. But if it works for you, I'm all for it. Art is a personal thing, I guess.

Death Dirge
10/10

It is a rare and fine spectacle, an allegory of death and transfiguration that is neither preachy nor mawkish. A work of mature and courageous insight, Northfork avoids arthouse distinction by refusing to belong to a kind. Unlike the most memorable and accomplished film to impose an obvious comparison, Wim Wenders' 1987 Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), it sustains an ambivalence in a narrative spectrum spanning from the mundane to the supernatural. This story of earthly and celestial eminent domains in the American West withholds the fairytale literalness that marked its German predecessor in the ad hoc genre of angels shedding their wings with obsequious sentimentalism. Its celestial transcendence, be it inspired by doleful faith or impelled by a fever dream, never parts ways with crud and rot. This firm grounding redounds to great credit for writers and directors Mark and Michael Polish.

Black Lizard (Kuro Tokage - Japan, 1968)

Directed by
Kinji Fukasaku

Writing credits
Rampo Edogawa (novel)
Yukio Mishima (stage adaptation)

http://www.sarudama.com/movies/blacklizard.shtml

Genre: Extravagant High Camp

"... Like the primordial dreams of Lizards."

Japan's number one detective must match wits, winks and breathless philosophy with the notorious Black Lizard, the sultry, diabolical drag queen intent on stealing the humongous Star of Egypt while adding to her collection of human stuffed dolls!

Taking place in what can only be described as the psychadelically bizarre parallel universe to Austin Powers', brimming with go-go dancers adorned solely with dayglo bodypaint and consisting of underground lairs filled with flourescent murals and Audrey Beardsley paintings, this utterly unique 60's-style spy thriller reaches comic book proportions. By night the mild-mannered cabaret singer Midorikawa, played by Akihiro Miwa, Japan's most famous female impersonator, turns into the infamous Black Lizard, perpetrator of various grand diabolical schemes. Her latest plan involves kidnapping the beautiful Sanae, daughter of Shobei Iwase, businessman extraordinaire and owner of the incredibly valuable Star of Egypt (which whenever looked upon flashes yellow, blue and red, while emitting climactic symphonic music!), in order to orchestrate a swap of daughter for diamond. Hot on Black Lizard's tail (in more ways than one) is Akechi, who, we are informed numerous times, is "Japan's Number One Detective(!)". When they are not undressing each other mentally while philosophizing hot and heavy on the ironies of crime and punishment, our two main characters are locked in a battle of the mind as each attempts to anticipate the strategy of the other. Though Akechi has a small group of cops (each looking like an asian Dragnet Joe Friday-san), Black Lizard has at her command a far more interesting army consisting of acrobatic dwarves, hunchbacks, yakuza bruisers, love slaves, and a motorcycle gang whose bikes spew colored smoke in ways which would make the Power Rangers weep with envy!

Stealing the Star of Egypt would seem bad enough, but we soon learn that Black Lizard also collects other beautiful objects; beautiful human objects, which she kills, embalms and poses in a macabre museum of "Eternal Beauty". Sanae suddenly seems destined to take her place among the exhibits as an unwilling object of perverse adoration unless Akechi can find the hideout and rescue her before the taxidermy lessons begin! But wait! Has the Master Detective Akechi already infiltrated the hideout disguised as an amazingly convincing hunchback?? WHO KNOWS!!??

The background of this movie is almost as interesting as the film itself. The movie is based on a screenplay by Yukio Mishima of the novel by Edogawa Rampo (Hirai Taro) whose works of mystery and horror were written before the War. The name Edogawa Rampo is derived from a play on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allen Poe ("Edoga Waran Pou") and was used by Taro when writing in this genre. Yukio Mishima modernized Rampo's "Black Lizard", converting it into the psychadelic manifestation which is this movie. Mishima was a prolific author, many of whose books became quite popular in the West and whose life was eccentric enough to result in the disturbing yet compelling movie Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters (1985) by Paul Schrader. Mishima struggled with homosexuality at a time when Japanese society was strictly opposed to openness and increasingly found himself inextricably obsessed with the male body, resulting in meticulous routines of exercise and body-building. This personal obsession emerges clearly in Black Lizard's collection of beautiful examples of human form, in which Mishima himself (!!) appears as an exhibit especially adored (and fondled) by Black Lizard. Mishima was also an adamant Nationalist who headed his own army of 80 "soldiers" dedicated to protecting the Emperor, who by that time had been reduced to a mere figurehead by the post-war constitution imposed by MacArthur and the West. Two years after appearing in Black Lizard, Mishima committed ritual suicide in the traditional manner of seppukku as a demonstration of his opposition to the Westernization and thereby loss of the traditional identity of Japan.

Director Kinji Fukasaku's choice of casting a well-known female impersonator as the lead female role may or may not reflect Mishima's homosexuality or personal emphasis on Japanese tradition. (Fukasaku and Mishima collaborated on this film.) Female impersonation is in fact a traditional art form taken very seriously in the Noh and Bunraku traditions. To this day, male artists play the female roles within Noh and Bunraku plays throughout Japan. Though such impersonation does not imply homosexuality, this traditionally established ambiguity has historically provided an avenue of exploration and expression for the homosexual community. Thus the choice of Akihiro Miwa for the role of Black Lizard may be to some degree influenced by one or both of these aspects of Mishima. Interestingly, the characters without exception view Black Lizard as a female, though everyone in the Japanese audience would have surely recognized Miwa. And while the movie goes to great lengths to orchestrate the other characters' sincere declaration of the beauty and seductiveness of Black Lizard, no one is as thoroughly convinced of her own beauty as Miwa him/herself who at several points in the movie seems ready to break out into an over-the-top rendition of "I Will Survive". As the movie crescendoes with an emotionally swollen tribute to the beautiful of Black Lizard involving 10 minutes of weepy violins and numerous close-up stills of her in various dramatic poses, you will likely sit wide-eyed and open-jawed at the full realization that you just sat through an unabashed psychadelic glam fest! Woo hoo!

Yukoku

Review from Midnight Eye:

http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/yukoku.shtml

Yukoku is an extremely rare and historic piece, not only for proving that Japan's foremost twentieth century author was also in fact a filmmaker, but because the events portrayed in it were an omen for Yukio Mishima's suicide a few years later.

Based on Mishima's own novel of the same name, which was in turn inspired by the true events of 'Ni ni roku' - a failed, patriotically-motivated, attempted coup by a group of officers on February 26, 1936 - Yukoku deals with the ritual suicide of high-ranking naval officer Takeyama. His harakiri is spun out as a long, emotional, romantic ritual in which he is joined (all the way to the bitter and graphically bloody end) by his wife Reiko.

Shot in black and white, silent with long expository intertitles elaborating on the goings-on and detailing the historical background of the story, Mishima (who performed the lead part, wrote, directed and produced) visually references Noh theatre. He was an avid admirer of this traditional style of theatre and wrote a great number of plays in the genre. Set in a single one-room interior, with only a kanji sign reading "shisei" (fidelity) emblazoned on the wall, Yukoku is made up of carefully composed, static wide shots and lingering close-ups (none of which, incidentally, show Mishima's eyes which are always just out of frame or obscured by shadow).

Though his fascination for the story quite clearly stemmed from Mishima's own nationalist spirit (he was famous for his traditionalist views and opposing stance against the westernisation of Japan), the director has managed admirably well in getting across the emotional weight of the story. With its cast of two and minimalist set, the film allows nothing to interfere with the passion between husband and wife as they say their goodbyes to every inch of each other's bodies. As a result Yukoku becomes a powerful tribute to not only the human spirit of determination but also to the human physique (Mishima himself was, as this film proves, an avid body builder).

Yukoku (which roughly translates as 'worry about the state of a nation') is a rare sight indeed. Only intermittently screened abroad, it was banned from exhibition and distribution in Japan by Mishima's widow, who apparently ordered all available prints be destroyed. No doubt this was due to the parallels to Mishima's own suicide in 1970, the circumstances of which were remarkably similar to the events portrayed in the film: the author attempted a coup against the military with several members of his private Tate no Kai (Shield Society) army. When the attempt failed to drum up a following from within the ranks of infanterymen, the disillusioned Mishima (whose real name was Hiraoka Kimitake) took his own life by means of seppuku on the spot.

Foreign prints of Yukoku have survived and it was a version with French intertitles I caught at a festival screening in Paris in early 2001 (on February 26 in fact, the date of the original coup d'état). The making of the film was also featured in dramatized form in Paul Schrader's 1984 biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, with Ken Ogata playing the author.

Yukoku remains Mishima's only film as a director, although he was involved in filmmaking in other capacities, most famously on his collaboration with Kinji Fukasaku on Black Lizard (Kurotokage, 1968) which he wrote, based on his own play which in turn was based on a novel by Edogawa Rampo. Mishima also made a cameo appearance in the film as a human doll, an object of beauty admired by the titular character, a female criminal mastermind (played by famed female impersonator and reputedly Mishima's real-life lover Miwa Akihiro / Akihiro Maruyama).

Incubus

Kia is a succubus, luring to their final perdition men who already have sinful habits and libertine inclinations. She tires of this, it's too easy, and these souls are going to Hell anyway. She wants to match wits and charm with someone who is good. So, against the advice of her sister Amael, Kia seeks out Marc, a man who has already faced death with courage. After a night together, Kia finds that not only is Marc's goodness still intact, but she has been ravaged by love. In anger, she and Amael conjure an incubus to deal with Marc. The incubus starts with Marc's sister, Arndis. Who will win the struggle for souls? from IMDb

Here is a surprisingly gripping and intense horror film complete with succubi, a young William Shatner, and high contrast expressionist photography. It was made by a shoot off crew from the Outer Limits team, directed by Leslie Stevens, and filmed by 3 time Oscar winner Conrad Hall(American Beauty, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Road to Perdition).

Unlike the usual horror film, and more akin to the films of Bergman, Incubus is very poetic in its storytelling. The stylistic filmmaking relies heavily on symbolic conventions that bolster the struggle between good and evil.

The dialogue is entirely in esperanto which makes Incubus seem like a film from an imaginary european culture. There are imbedded english subtitles with this file. Unfortunately they ride really high on the screen, sometimes blocking important parts of the shot, but this doesn't spoil the experience too much, and is currently the only way to see the film.

From ArtsEditor.com on the mythology of the film:

Incubus is a chilling black and white American film from 1965 that tells a timeless tale of good vs. evil. It features as its star William Shatner. The film has remained somewhat of a footnote for many years, largely because it was taken out of distribution when two of the actors died within a year of the film's release. Fearing a purported curse" on the film, the director ordered all prints withdrawn, and Incubus subsequently remained "lost" for over 30 years. Until now, as they say. Incubus has been "found," restored, and released on home video with English subtitles."

Maniac Nurses

Directed by Léon Paul De Bruyn (1990)
Country: Belgium / USA
Language: English

IMDB: http://imdb.com/title/tt0165870/

From IMDB

Plot Outline:Bizzare, often perverse yarn about nurses in a metropolitan hospital who seduce and then murder male patients.

Review: The value of cheese and tack...,What can you really say? Its a must see for fans of the ridiculous, bizarre and so far fetched its actually really funny. Any film that has a baby born with an elvis tattoo, women running around with shorts so small you can tell their birth signs, brandishing BIG guns and insatiable desires for sex and violence is allright with me. Complete escapism and fantastic cheesy narration make it a tack lovers dream... i am not sure any of the actors worked again but i know if i had made this film i would be proud as it seems to mock the very core of the bad action and prOn films that so often take themselves too seriously. Hats off...lingerie out.

Le Fond de l'air est rouge

Chris Marker
1977

(Le Fond de l'air est rouge) is Marker's magnum opus: a 3-hour overview of the success and failure of the left during the 1960s and 70s. He brilliantly interweaves footage from the Vietnam War, May '68 in Paris, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the Shah of Iran, Regis Debray, Salvador Allende, et alia.

Released in France in 1978, restored and "re-actualized" by Marker fifteen years later (after the fall of the Soviet Union), First Run/Icarus Films is proud to release the film now for the first time in the United States.

Described by Marker as "scenes of the Third World War," the film is divided into two parts, each weaving together two strands:

Part 1: Fragile Hands
1. From Vietnam to Che's death
2. May 1968 and all that.

Part 2: Severed Hands
1. From Spring in Prague to the Common Program of Government in France
2. From Chile to - to what?

Director's Statement

"Scenes of the third World War 1967-1977.

Some think the third World War will be set off by a nuclear missile. For me, that's the way it will end. In the meantime, the figures of an intricate game are developing, a game whose de-coding will give historians of the future - if they are still around - a very hard time. A weird game. Its rules change as the match evolves. To start with, the super powers' rivalry transforms itself not only into a Holy Alliance of the Rich against the Poor, but also into a selective co-elimination of Revolutionary Vanguards, wherever bombs would endanger sources of raw materials. As well as into the manipulation of these vanguards to pursue goals that are not their own. During the last ten years, some groups of forces (often more instinctive than organized) have been trying to play the game themselves - even if they knocked over the pieces. Wherever they tried, they failed. Nevertheless, it's been their being that has the most profoundly transformed politics in our time. This film intends to show some of the steps of this transformation.
- Chris Marker

The Abductors (1972)

The Abductors
Directed by Don Schain (1972)
Genre: Exploitation
Country: USA
Language: English
Subtitles: no
IMDB: http://imdb.com/title/tt0068164/


From IMDB:

Plot Outline: Someone is stealing cheerleaders and other pretty girls and selling them to the highest bidder. Female super sexy spy Ginger is soon employed to investigate the disappearances. She does so by going undercover with a fellow agent and doing whatever is necessary to put an end to the operation and take down the leaders.

Review: Ginger shakes her maracas.

The Abductors: 8 out of 10: Lets face it some bad movies age better than others. From the wonderfully horrible fashion and hair worn by the leads to décor including shag carpets (that they actually shag on) and chintzy coconuts holding push pins. (in the bank presidents office no less) the Abductors is filled with seventies kitsch.

It also has an attitude towards woman so politically incorrect they would burn down the theater today. (Great film to show during a Take Back the Night meeting just make sure you park away from the ensuing riot.) The Abductors is a bit like a feminist raison de ere.

Like any good exploitation film there is a ton of nubile flesh on display. The Ginger films add bondage, rape and generally cruelty that separates it from the cheerleader and nurse pictures that were its competition at the seventies drive-in. In addition the girls are silicone free with tan lines to boot which I admit I find more appealing than the cookie cutter Playboy models of today's exploitation.

Downsides include remarkably incompetent gunfights (the prop guns don't fire on cue) and the state police (who look Canadian for some reason) are out of a thirties gangster movie (Complete with a Tommy gun that smokes like a Cheech and Chong extra.) Strange pacing including a gratuitous drum solo and maraca-shaking scene. (No really Ginger brought her own maracas to the disco) and a lead actress Cheri Caffro who looks like a hooker a few years past her prime complete with pancake make-up (The other lead actress Jennifer Brooks is so hopelessly nubile Caffro looks like her mom.).

Great flick to watch while the significant other is out of the house (preferably safely out of town.) The Ginger films like that other exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave is a viewing pleasure best kept close to the vest.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song! (1971) Melvin Van Peebles

Director: Melvin Van Peebles
Cast: Mario Van Peebles, Khleo Thomas, David Alan Grier
Rated: R
108 minutes
Released on Criterion's Laserdisc Collection

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was a 1971 independent film written, produced, scored, directed by and starring Melvin Van Peebles. It tells the picaresque story of a deprived black man on his flight from the white authority.

The film, funded and distributed outside of the Hollywood system, broke conventions with its visual style, as well as its content. It was a major success, and was credited by Variety with inventing the blaxploitation genre. -Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

Reviewed by Nathan Rabin (Onion AV Club)
May 25th, 2004

The unprecedented commercial success of Melvin Van Peebles' incendiary 1971 independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song supported the then-revolutionary idea that a huge, untapped market awaited uncompromising black films that made no concessions to white audiences. Famously rated X by, as the posters pointed out, "an all-white jury," Sweetback aspired to refute decades of cinematic stereotyping by focusing on a strong, overtly sexual black man who not only takes on "The Man," but survives.

But before Van Peebles could revolutionize black film and kick-start the blaxploitation boom, he first had to get Sweetback made, an ordeal as dramatic as anything in his cult classic. As the new biopic Baadasssss! shows, Sweetback's origin story is far more compelling than the film itself, which can charitably be described as raw and unpolished, and uncharitably described as misogynistic, self-indulgent, and borderline incompetent.

The making of Van Peebles' movie is memorably brought to the big screen by his writer-director-actor son Mario Van Peebles, who plays his own father, and gifted young child actor Khleo Thomas, who plays the young Mario as a sad-eyed bundle of insecurities. The elder Van Peebles is a role Mario was literally born to play, and he's co-written himself a hell of a part. The Van Peebles are not known for their humility, and the portrait of Melvin that emerges in Baadasssss! is ultimately heroic, but it's also unexpectedly critical and multidimensional.

Baadasssss! colorfully conveys what a major accomplishment Sweetback was, but it also makes apparent that in Melvin's undying passion to bring his vision to life, he was more than willing to bruise egos and hurt feelings, especially those of his long-suffering family. Mario's film presents Melvin as a passionate rebel willing to suffer for his art, but he's also a harsh and demanding father, an unfaithful husband, and a mercurial collaborator. (At one point, when the earnest white kid editing Sweetback dares to quit, a half-crazed Melvin whales on him.)

Baadasssss! has its rough edges: Some of its artier conceits fall flat, as does the faux-documentary talking-head footage, and there are a few too many shots of Mario looking studly atop a motorcycle. But Baadasssss! is a vibrant, funny, fully realized slice of oft-overlooked cultural, show-business, and black history. It's better than the film whose genesis it chronicles, though inherently doomed to be nowhere near as important.

McBain - 1991

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102422/

IMDB Review:


This is a rather nonsensical action drama, with plenty of (entirely unintentional) comedy to go round. To start with, the film itself is called 'McBain.' Anyone who saw that famous Arnold spoof in 'The Simpsons' could be forgiving for looking twice at this title, which essentially features the same cut-and-paste plot, cheesy acting, and incoherent developments that Wolfcastle parodied. It's really nothing great but worth watching for the belly laughs at all the countless errors and overbearing cheesiness!
The 'plot' involves a Vietnam Vet Bobby McBain (Walken)whose friend Santos, a Colombian revolutionary, is killed by the evil dictator on live TV, whose sister comes to McBain to help organize a revolution in that country. For no real reason, other than to alleviate his self-confessed boredom and to avenge his Columbian ex-colleague from Nam, he and his gang of overtly gay middle aged nerds get into a little prop plane and fly off to Colombia to do this.
I started writing a review for this, but deleted it because it ended up totally incoherent. No wonder really, as the madness I was trying to chart is so messed up it's really hard to know where to start. So instead of indignantly providing analogies of McBain's sheer crappiness, I'll just list a few examples from the film which sum it up suitably:
• several people are murdered by people who we have seen die themselves moments earlier
• the special effects, especially some mid-air explosions, look like they were done by a small child with a chemistry set
• at one point, McBain is sitting in the co-pilot seat of a small prop plane. Flying next to them is a jet whose pilot is trying to force them to land. McBain pulls out this stupidly small pistol, and shoots the jet pilot, who crashes, despite the noticeable non-smashing of either windscreen!
• Some rebels attempt to infiltrate the presidential palace using a stretched limo. The driver opens the boot and four men jump out. Four! • Near the end of the film, a government soldier was asking an old man at a café if he has seen Christina, the rebel leader. He beats the man who doesn't tell him anything. This is great because at the next table are a load of American mercenaries in sunglasses, Hawaiian shirts, and fedora hats!
• In a similar vein, during all the battle scenes the good guys can generally just stand around without so much as a bullet touching them, where the bad guys get routinely mowed, and in many cases clearly fail to even notice the machinegun-toting middle aged mercenaries!
• The doctor of the group has to perform emergency surgery on a little girl after a battle. He says she would die without proper facilities, but McBain tells him to go ahead as she would die anyway. After briefly slicing her with a little knife (the girl has had her rib cage severely crushed), she sits there for a second, and smiles! The stupidest survival from mortal wounding since Marie in Biggles: Adventures in Time.
• A tall, Germanic looking drug dealer is really running Colombia. Predictably, he is called Hans.
• A typical example of the nonsense value of the plot: the group doctor declares he is going to stay with the wounded to help them. Then, in the next scene, he is back doing soldiering!
• And another: at the start, the guys are told the Vietnam War is over, and they get into their helicopter to fly home. All of a sudden they see one VC on the ground, and decide to launch a full scale covert assault on a POW camp they hadn't even seen. Yeah, that's exactly what you do right after getting discharged.
• You know a movie is in trouble when even the extras don't look convincing. I blame the director.
Normally I like mercenary movies. They make great viewing and the body count is typically high enough to make up for the lack of plot. Skeleton Coast and Wild Geese were both enjoyable. But McBain, thanks to a total lack of plot development, realistic effects, bearable acting, and tongue in cheek humour, comes across merely as a convoluted, confused mess. In honesty it looked like a load of set pieces had been brought in from a variety of scripts, banged together any which way, and then tagged together with the formulaic 'South American dictator/drug baron revolution' shtick.
Don't get me wrong I sat through it fine, it was never boring, because I was splitting my sides most of the time at the hilariously bad production values and situations. There are some pretty good moments, such as when McBain's gang kidnap a gangster called John Cambotti and dangle him off a skyscraper pretending to be Israeli agents. That part was cool. But the set-up for it, where they killed everyone in a crack house without either taking the money or destroying the drugs, and getting a lecture from the drug chief, was so artificial I just didn't understand why it was put in. Needless to say, mindless killing and slaughter is only entertaining if its well done on a technical level, unlike this ham-fest, where someone is dragged out of a window after a ceiling fan and hundreds of extras overtly mis-time their exaggerated death throes
There is lots of violence but some of it is so poorly done that it actually looks funny, which is not always a good thing. I bought this DVD for £1.49, which in retrospect seems like a bit of a rip-off. I'll hang onto it though, for any occasion in which I want to either play drinking games for number of dead etc, or as a showcase for some truly shoddy film-making.