by ·2 Comments

Interesting movie, pretty good. Funny how I can rent a movie looking for an entertaining horror one night, and it’s not scary or entertaining so it’s crap. Eight years later I can rent the same movie as an auteurist curiosity and it becomes “interesting movie, pretty good”. Was I right before, or am I right now? Fortunately it’s all opinion and nobody cares, so I can change my mind and justify things all I like.

image

Clearly one of Cronie’s body-horror origin stories. Porn star Marilyn Chambers was cast for financial reasons (not political/commentary as often supposed) because producer Ivan “Ghostbustin’-ass” Reitman thought she’d be a bigger funding draw than the unknown Sissy Spacek. Then as shooting was beginning, Spacek’s other movie came out (see shot above). Oopsie.

Chambers capably plays a car accident victim who has a medical procedure (see two quotes below) that somehow lead her to grow a very sexual-looking little bloodsucking rabies-zombie-virus-transmitting armpit-mounted appendage. It’s nuts, but still not nuttier than the ice cream man movie I just watched.

image

Nice looking movie, grimy and low-budget but well composed. When the characters have believable behavior, it always helps a horror movie… of course it’s one of the rarest things in the genre.

Chambers stays with a friend, goes out at night finding people to kill/infect. Is finally caught killing the friend (above) and gives herself up to one of her zombie victims in remorse, ending with the “night of the living dead” reminiscent close, an army cleanup crew tossing her body into a garbage truck.

image

Senses of Cinema’s A. Allinson, in his barely-decipherable Cronenberg piece, says “Coinciding with the AIDS outbreak, Chambers, walking virus, is an apologetic martyr of “very experimental surgery” going wrong”.

image

Film Freak interviews Cronenberg:

FF: “Rabid is home to your first major statement about body-modification–plastic surgery.”
DC: “Yes, and ironically enough what I invented in that movie has recently come to pass in stem cell research. Not that I think of prophecy as my métier, but we invented this neutral tissue that would become whatever tissue it came in contact with and that’s the basis of stem cell research, sort of the universal organic loam–so I have to take a little credit. (laughs) I suppose that there were some intimations even in my earliest work, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, about technology altering the body and there’s some of that in Shivers too. The plague in that film is an artificial one, of course, the result of an experiment gone wrong, and it occurs to me now that it was also meant to replace damaged organs. I hadn’t thought of that in years.”

Reminded me of the Dafoe scene in Existenz:
image

No interesting cast/crew stories besides Cronie and Ivan Reitman. The murdered friend turned to cartoon voice acting, and one of the cops tracking Marilyn co-starred in Shivers.

Watched this the same week we went out to Nightmare Before Christmas. Neither movie is kind to Santa.
image

by ·Comments Off on Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977, Jed Johnson)

I can’t account for how this movie could have nearly a 7/10 rating on IMDB, unless the only people bothering to watch and vote are drug-addled youth who think it makes them hip to pretend to like everything with Andy Warhol’s name on it. Movie is John Waters lite with crap dialogue and acting. Story’s not great, filmmaking is worthless, movie only seems to exist for shock value.

Money-grubbing Carroll Baker runs an electrolysis business and a hitman business out of her home. Her “nephew” Perry King moves in to work on a job for a week, while a detective is shaking her down for protection money and her sister-in-law is whining pathetically about her life, her baby and her missing husband. Bunch of contracts come in for the all-female assassins, kill a baby, a dog, a mechanic. Perry has been misbehaving all week, fnally gets his call to kill an autistic kid but refuses to do it, detective kills Carroll, sis-in-law is still sad, the end.

image

Why make this movie? Warholstars.org gives no clues, just talks about how they financed it, problems with casting, and jealousy behind the scenes. Andy apparently never talked to director Jed after this came out.

Heh, one negative review says “still, it makes you appreciate Paul Morrissey”.

Wikipedia just says the baby-throwing scene is “infamous” and that Julie Christie and George Cukor attended the premiere.

I guess the movie could be called “outrageous” if it wasn’t so boring and lifeless… but coming out soon after Rocky Horror, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Thriller, Shivers, Salo, Taxi Driver, and Morrissey’s monster movies, what’s the point in just aiming for outrageous? This being the same year as Eraserhead, it’s no wonder nobody talks about “Bad” anymore. This was the last movie with Warhol’s name on it (unless Blank Generation counts).

image

This movie is as old as I am. Carroll Baker, one of the only good actors here, played the title role in Baby Doll and a lead role in Giant (both ’56). Lenny Bruce’s daughter was in this. The awful police detective was in Blazing Saddles and Super Fly and died in ’96. Girl who played Mary (sis-in-law) has had good roles in lots of things (Forbidden Zone, Crybaby, Tapeheads, Big Top Pee-Wee, Masked and Anonymous, Fat City), lost her legs in 2000 from a blood disease. Director Jed Johnson died in the TWA Flight 800 explosion in ’96, never directing anything else before or after, and Warhol died in ’87 after hosting two seasons of “Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes” on television.

image

by ·Comments Off on Some Seventies Shorts

Frank Film
image
Barebones story of Frank Mouris’s life narrated on the soundtrack blended with a free-association list of words. Visual is a fast-motion collage of magazine-clipped images. Neat, must’ve taken forever. Won the Oscar, kickstarting a long life of filmmaking obscurity for Frank, poor guy.

Valse Triste
image
Looks like a montage of found footage from rural America in the 1940’s set to sweeping sad music. Sepia-tinted, only 5 minutes long. Took me a visit to IMDB to realize the montage represents the wet dream of the boy who goes to sleep at the beginning of the film, damn. I get it now. Bruce Conner born in Kansas in 1933, so he WAS that boy!

Adam, 5 to 12
image
Begin the rhythmic Estonian vocal music. Trippy animation doesn’t do much, then the clock appears, then a whole pile of grim images of war and death are overlaid on the clock. Adam tries to turn the clock back but it’s frozen at 5 to 12. Finally it moves dramatically to THE END. Director Petar Gligorovski died in 1995.

V. Gligorijevic (via email) on the music: “Its composer, Veljo Tormis, had clash with Soviet authorities which perceived Estonian nationalist overtones in Tormis’s music, from which the Curse to the Iron, the featured background, is considered one of his most recognizable works.”

Reflecting Pool
image
Wow, this is great. Seven minutes of a reflecting pool with some video effects. A man motions to jump in, but is frozen in midair while the pool stays in gentle motion. The man slowly fades out, and most of the rest of the action takes place in the pool’s reflection and through its varying levels of agitation. Probably just a more complicated metaphor for sex than the last film… I don’t pick up on those things easily. Bill Viola is only 56 and still working.

Sweet Light
image
Another by Bill Viola. Close-up: some flies on a windowsill. Camera moves slowly and evenly away and turns toward a man writing at a desk. Camera fast follows a ball of paper he hurls on the floor. Abrupt change to camera spinning around a dinner table candle, then insects leaving vapor trails in the air. There is light involved, and it’s all pretty sweet, so there’s your title.

Pause!
image
A man against a wall making hand gestures, distorting his face and making breathy sounds. Gets violent at times. Probably also a metaphor for sex. My copy was dark and muddy but it’s not like I’ll be scouring rare video stores looking for a better version. Oh, I looked it up and the man is Arnulf Rainer, a surrealist-influenced artist known for “body art and painting under drug influence”. This must be body art. I wouldn’t have named a museum after this guy, but I guess the New York art scene knows better than I do. Directed by Peter Kubelka.

Powers of Ten
image
By famous designers/architects/filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames. “A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero”, made for IBM. A man is laying in a park in Chicago. We zoom out from him to 100 million light years (10^24 m) then zoom into his hand to 0.000001 angstroms (10^-16 m). Both Eames died on August 21, ten years apart. Music by Elmer Bernstein (also dead) of Far From Heaven and Ghostbusters.

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa
image
The Kafka story done with cool mushy black and white perspective-shifting animation (paint on glass?). Samsa might be some sort of spider/beetle. Caroline Leaf works with the National Film Board of Canada.

Elimination Dance
image
Co-written and starring Don McKellar (Last Night). Dir. by Bruce McDonald, who made cult films Roadkill and Hard Core Logo. Couples dance all night while an announcer reads off descriptions (“anyone who has lost a urine sample in the mail”) eliminating them one by one, as the cops slowly close in fearing unrest. A comedy, cute. Not from the seventies, I realize (1998).

A Doonesbury Special
image
Kind of limited animation, but that’s not a cool criticism to make of a well-intentioned independent production like this one. Neat movie, could’ve stood to be another half hour longer. A regular day at the commune with a bunch of flashbacks, “feeling the present as it moves by”. A little sad, some disillusionment about the fallen ideals of the late 60’s, probably a nice companion to the comics (which I haven’t read since Hunter died). Both Hubleys have died, Trudeau cowrote the Tanner movies.

La Soufriere
image
“This is the police station. It was totally abandoned. It was a comfort for us not having the law hanging around.” Would’ve probably been one of Werner Herzog’s best-known movies (OR have led to Herzog’s fiery death) if the volcano had exploded as predicted, but since it didn’t, this is an obscurity on a DVD of documentary shorts. “There was something pathetic for us in the shooting of this picture, and therefore it ended a little bit embarrassing. Now it has become a report on an inevitable catastrophe that did not take place.” Herz and crew tromp about an extremely dangerous volcano site in the Caribbean, explore the completely empty towns below, and interview what few stragglers remain. One of the cameramen is from Morristown NJ, also shot Far From Heaven, A Prairie Home Companion, Tokyo-ga, True Stories and The Limey.

Most of these movies are as old as I am.

by ·Comments Off on Dog’s Dialogue (1977, Raoul Ruiz)

Colloque de chiens is the real title, Dog Symposium is the title on the subtitles. The movie is a story told to each other by dogs through a series of stills, La Jetee-like, with quavery synth music and dry narration. The dogs are shot live-action with natural sound.

Dogs on a vacant lot bark at each other over the credits.

image

“The woman you call mum isn’t your mother” Monique turned pale on hearing those words from a school friend. Madame Duvivier tells little Monique that Marie, the woman who often comes by, is the real mother. Marie tells Monique that she doesn’t know who her father is. Monique flees Bordeaux. “From now on, sex and domination shall rule Monique’s life.” Monique is a nurse, has illicit affairs with her male patients. Christmas eve 1966 she dances with rich, 65-year-old Hubert, intends to seduce him for his money. Monique becomes a “cold and dry voiced whore” with “an urge for revenge”.

Dogs bark in apartment windows and balconies.

image

Monique falls for the TV repairman, Henri, who she remembers from her hometown. She starts a new life, opening the Joli Mont cafe, but “in fact she’s buying her own death”. Henri helps her run it. Alice, a friend from home, comes to visit, blackmails Monique to not tell Henri about her sad past, has an affair and falls in love with Henri. When the three are in the park, Monique kills herself and her 3-year-old son Paul-Henri. Dogs.

image

“Henri’s only option is to marry Alice, his wife’s intimate friend, who dominates him. In a way, Alice was buying her own death.” Alice tells about both women’s pasts on their wedding night. Henri has an urge for revenge. He grabs an empty bottle of wine, which turns into a knife on the images, and kills her. Dogs. Henri cuts up Alice’s body and hides the parts all over town, which switches to live-action for a bit, with no dogs but the sound of children singing.

image

Back to stills. Henri goes to Marseilles and falls into some shady dealings with gangsters, is jailed for 5 years. Nurses a sick cellmate with whom he has an affair. The police draw a map of the body parts they’ve found, which form a circle, the Joli Mont cafe at the center. “The universal geometric laws gave him away”. Live action street shots, adults singing.

image

Stills. Mr. Benami tells Henri about sex-change operations in Casablanca, “the perfect disguise”. “Henri Odile has become a charming young lady.” Christmas eve 1974 she’s invited out by a rich, 65-year old man, intends to seduce him for money. Odile becomes a prostitute. Goes back to Montsouris, sees the Joli Mont is for sale, buys and runs it, adopts young Luigi. One evening, 18-year-old Fernand comes to the bar with a bottle of wine / knife / empty glass, kills Odile. Dogs barking. At school, Luigi is pestered by his friends. “Your mother was killed by her lover.” “That’s not true. The woman you call my mother wasn’t my mother.” Credits.

image

This movie is as old as I am. I watched it three times in one weekend… it is fantastic.

The editor and composer both still work with Ruiz (That Day, Klimt, etc), the cinematographer is now with Olivier Assayas, and the actress (!) who played Henri is now a press agent. Everyone involved still alive and well, including Ruiz, who has a euro-art-meets-quentin-tarantino cast of actors lined up for his next film.

by ·Comments Off on Alternative 3 (1977, Christopher Miles)

Hosted by an actual BBC personality, this was a special episode of a (made-up?) show called Science Report that aired on April Fool’s Day. Plays it very straight, a well-made fake documentary. Can’t scare people with it anymore because of the dated 70’s look, but it would be fun to re-stage today, especially with global warming so big in the news.

The premise is that scientists discover global warming has passed the tipping point and the planet is doomed. The space race is a ploy, and subsequent moon landings after the first few were faked on a studio lot. Really the shuttles are delivering parts for a new ship that will be launched from orbit to send some hot scientists and a representative group of people from different specialties to live on Mars, where they have recently discovered life, to begin a new society. All of this has been hidden from the Earth public to avoid panic. The BBC has carefully uncovered hints of the truth over the last six months but hasn’t learned everything. The movie ends with questions, and a challenge to the people involved in this secret project to explain themselves on-air.

This movie is as old as I am. Cool spacey music by Brian Eno. Some of the same crew later worked on Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, including producer John Rosenberg, who died of cancer in ’91.

by ·Comments Off on Mostly Animated Shorts

Watched some of the earliest shorts I downloaded, over a year ago, and had never seen before.

The World of Stainboy (2000, Tim Burton)
Stainboy is a hero of sorts whose only power is creating stains. He takes on a giant darth bowling ball, a poisonous chemical hazard, a power-sucking robot, a girl with a hypnotic stare, and a match-prostitute, then in the final episode he flashes back to birth and the orphanage (where “boy with nails in his eyes” has a cameo). Pretty okay little show, short with funny bits.

image

Breakfast (1976, Michael Snow)
Decided not to watch it because the quality is too low. Don’t know how I’m going to see the Michael Snow films, but not like this.

Vibroboy (1994, Jan Kounen)
Loud, cartoonish, full of threatened sexual violence, feels like taking a beating or watching the Shelly and Leo home scenes from Twin Peaks for a half hour. Explorers spirit away ancient statue from Mexico, it’s entrusted to transvestite Francesca, who comes home to his trailer park to find his pet murdered and his neighbors Leon and Brigitte fighting. Leon is a violent shit, and threatens both “women”, ends up shooting F. (not fatally), breaking the statue, retrieving the metal dildo within and turning into Vibroboy, who just goes on beating the two girls but with the dildo now. Stylishly shot, but why film such a piece of shit story? Real disappointing because Kounen is someone I’d decided I was interested in before seeing any of his movies, so now I don’t know what to do about Dobermann and Blueberry. (Update: a Kounen fan advises to check out the uneven Blueberry and the doc on psychedelics and skip Dobermann)

image

Escargot de Venus (1975, Walerian Borowczyk)
Camera pans over color drawings of half-snail-half-women having sex with each other and themselves and various snaily men, while renfest flute music plays. Halfway in, a woman starts narrating in French, didn’t catch most of it except some of the dirty words. We actually see her flipping through the drawings, closes with her feeding a snail to an iguana. Nice, sexy images, liked it better than his DOM short. Internet says the woman is Bona Tibertelli De Pisis, and the drawings are hers.

image

L’Amour monstre de tous les temps (1977, Walerian Borowczyk)
Close-up on a painter at work, nicely edited with music by Richard Wagner. Final painting involved a beast and human nudity, so right up Walerian’s alley. A good one. Can’t find who the bearded painter was.

image

Lapis (1966, James Whitney)
finely detailed geometric images (points of light?) falling inwards and outwards to and from the center into infinity. Sound (indian music) didn’t play right on my copy, but when it did, it adds to the trance effect. Would be pretty awesome to see this in a theater. Apparently used motion-control camera (“analogue computer equipment”) and the circular shape is a mandala, “a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual meditation aid”. Director’s brother designed the motion-control for the title sequence of Vertigo!

image

Recreation (1956, Robert Breer)
extremely rapidly edited shots of objects on plain backgrounds, a little animation, some guy talking in French, FIN.

image

A Man And His Dog Out For Air (1957, Robert Breer)
flowing line drawing animation forming many abstract shapes but nothing quite recognizable until right before the end, when they form a man and his dog out for air. Neat.

image

by ·Comments Off on Killer of Sheep (1977, Charles Burnett)

Wowwww, wonderful movie, lives up to its reputation after I’d had lowered expectations from Several Friends and My Brother’s Wedding. This little masterpiece falls right between those two somehow.

Simply but artistically shot, just follows a guy who works part-time at a slaughterhouse and wants to fix his car and live comfortably with his wife. Things don’t work out that well. Movie not centered on him really, follows some neighbor kids, some friends of his and others nearby. A mostly realistic little neighborhood drama. Don’t know what to say, don’t know what made it so affecting, but that’s why I ain’t no film critic here.

The part where the car engine falls off the back of our hero’s truck had more suspense-and-release than anything in Spider-man 3.