by ·Comments Off on Strangler vs. Strangler (1984, Slobodan Sijan)

The credits roll over a long slow zoom into the back of a conductor’s head – someone has been watching Unfaithfully Yours – and later they’ll steal the Psycho music during a shower murder. It’s a cute mass-murder/mass-media comedy from Serbia, the director’s follow-up to How I Was Systematically Destroyed by Idiots. There are elaborate flashbacks, an opera, a music video, and an intertitled talking cat.

No one will be admitted during the thrilling shower scene:

The police inspector, having a bad day:

Strangler One is Pera, a flower salesman tormented by his mother, who falls into mad amnesiac rages when women insult his flowers. Spiro is an indie rocker who claims to be in touch psychically with the strangler, and writes a hit song about it. Women are just around to be strangled, until DJ Sofia bites off a strangler’s ear during the final struggle.

by ·Comments Off on Body Heat (1981, Lawrence Kasdan)

Lawyer William Hurt meets Kathleen Turner on a hot week in Florida and goes absolutely sex mad, ultimately buying bombs from Pyro Mickey Rourke and murdering Kathleen’s older husband Richard Crenna (of MST3K flick Marooned) so they can be (rich) together, but she vanishes with the money, letting Hurt get busted by his cop friend J.A. Preston (Remo Williams) and prosecutor Ted Danson (the year before getting buried in the sand in Creepshow).

The director’s and Turner’s debut, with Hurt fresh from Altered States, and some good quippy dialogue. Filipe called it genre autopsy. I had high hopes, but this week I’d just seen better craft in The Stunt Man, better dialogue in The Jerk, and more perversion in Turks Fruit.

by ·Comments Off on Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987, Eric Rohmer)

Two girls meet on a country road and spend four chapter-titled episodes together, this might as well have been named Four More Moral Tales. M is a city ethnology student (Jessica Forde of The Blind Owl the same year). R is a country painter (Joëlle Miquel of Lelouch movies). M agrees to stay over another night after a passing truck ruins their experience of The Blue Hour (a moment before dawn when “you can feel nature holding its breath”, the exact opposite side of the day from The Green Ray). So far I’m on R’s side, because she thinks a lot about outside bird sounds.

2. After M stays in the country, she invites R to paint in the city. Tyrannical waiter Philippe Laudenbach (Mon oncle d’Amérique) illustrates how much Europeans hate when you try to pay the tab with large bills.

3. The most tedious episode – M sees a woman shoplifting, attempts to help her evade the police by moving her bag aside, but the criminal runs off leaving M with a bag full of pilfered groceries and an ensuing lecture about it from R, then she in turn lectures a subway scammer (Green Ray star Marie Rivière).

4. R shows off her portfolio to an art dealer (Perceval himself, later evil boss of The Empire), M pretends to be a disinterested visitor who shames the dealer into paying more for a painting.

by ·Comments Off on The Stunt Man (1980, Richard Rush)

Heck of an opening sequence. This silly meta-action movie isn’t gonna top that, I thought, then the opening sequence is followed by an entire heck of a film, to the point that I started wondering if it won oscars. Nominated, but tough luck coming out the same year as Raging Bull and Ordinary People. Director is the toughest race: Redford/Lynch/Scorsese/Polanski/Rush. I haven’t seen Tess, but Rush would feel like a strong contender. This is a good man-on-the-run drama about the making of a bad WWI movie, every shot and camera placement and stunt and Peter O’Toole line reading a bit further out than necessary.

Steve Railsback (star of Lifeforce) is on the run from the cops when he stumbles onto a movie set and maybe accidentally helps kill a stunt driver. Filmmaker Peter O’Toole hires Railsback as the new/old stuntman, claiming to the police that there was no accident, the two guys covering for each other at least until manipulative madman O’Toole gets all the dangerous long takes he needs. The actress caught between these guys is Barbara Hershey (Last Temptation of Christ, Mrs. Yeager in The Right Stuff). It all works out, more or less, Railsback admitting he became a fugitive by attacking a cop with a tub of ice cream, and O’Toole graciously not murdering him during a stunt.

by ·Comments Off on War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981, Piotr Szulkin)

The title and premise sound exciting, but the movie is a sweaty bewigged newscaster (Roman Wilhelmi of Zulawski’s Chopin biopic The Blue Note, with Robert Picardo vibes) being tormented by everyone, including martians, who look like silver-spraypainted oompa loompas in puffy coats. Decaloguists Krystyna Janda and Jerzy Stuhr get a big scene each. The most believable detail is that the biggest music act in the country is called The Instant Glue. Gotta watch the blu extras and learn more about the music. Dedicated to H.G. and Orson Well(e)s, so in addition to finishing Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy I can add this to my ongoing Orson project.

Any government building during covid:

by ·Comments Off on The Cannibals (1988, Manoel de Oliveira)

Leonor falls in love with goth Luis Miguel, then is surprised when he acts all goth on their wedding night. The mismatched couple acts all doomed and stoic, allowing her stalker Diogo Doria and the narrator Oliveira Lopes to be pop-eyed loons in the opera’s background.

I had decided that the title must be a metaphor, but for what? Then at the end of the second act, all the lead characters kill themselves, and a new group of men is introduced, who eat Luis Miguel, thinking him part of the bridal party feast after he’d hurled his own limbless torso into the fireplace.

Watching Oliveira films mainly makes one wish to watch more Oliveira films. Looks like good options at the moment are: the earliest stuff through 1964, the latest stuff post-Belle Toujours, and Party – everything else apparently has new restorations that aren’t out on video yet.

by ·Comments Off on Zigeunerweisen (1980, Seijun Suzuki)

Dream-logic stuff happens, shot in a dreamy way by resurgent Suzuki (his big comeback, according to people who didn’t see A Tale of Sorrow). Story of the titular sound recording where the composer’s voice can be heard on the recording is true, the characters sharing this story are a German professor, a guy named Nakasago who is maybe his colleague or maybe a random maniac he met on a beach, and the girl (a geisha in mourning and her various doppelgangers). Between them, the three lead actors have been in all the weird Japanese movies: the prof in Funeral Parade of Roses, the girl in The Human Bullet, and Naka in Farewell to the Ark, Izo, and Nightmare Detective, not to mention the rest of Suzuki’s trilogy.

Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:

A blood-red crab superimposed on a dead woman’s crotch, a bowl of pork fat grotesquely overfilled, a tongue erotically licking an eyeball in close-up, a man buried to the neck below riotously flourishing cherry blossoms — these visual flourishes originate entirely with the filmmaker, rather than the lean and fragmented short stories by the Taisho-era modernist Uchida Hyakken that serve as the film’s source material … Suzuki and screenwriter Tanaka Yozo, who scripted all the films of the trilogy, delight in setting up mysteries that are never resolved: Did Nakasago murder the woman on the beach? Did he seduce Aochi’s wife? Did Aochi himself sleep with Sono, or was she a ghost? And can Nakasago reclaim his daughter from O-Ine, even from beyond the grave?

by ·Comments Off on Blow Out (1981, Brian De Palma)

Haven’t seen this in a while… probably De Palma’s best movie, but I’d probably say that about ten different De Palma movies if I’d rewatched them this week. Sound recordist Travolta works at a movie production house with a framed poster of Squirm, rescues Nancy Allen from a car crash, and gradually uncovers her role in the “accident.” Unfortunately for everyone, killer John Lithgow has gone rogue, starts a side project murdering girls who look like Nancy so her eventual death will be blamed on the serial killer instead of politics. Nancy’s accomplice, blackmail-photographer Dennis Franz, relaxes at home watching De Palma’s Murder a la Mod, while his shadowy co-conspirators erase Travolta’s entire tape library (filmed in an Akerman spin take).

by ·Comments Off on Demons 2 (1986, Lamberto Bava)

Sally dances to Morrissey then goes to her room to watch horror movies alone during her own birthday party, relatable. She finds a TV movie about other young people uncovering demons (some idiot hellraisers a dead demon by bleeding into its open mouth) – but this is not the movie Demons. Then a demon videodromes through the TV, demonogrifies her, and she murders all her party guests then… melts(?), and her cursed acid blood plays hell on the apartment building below. Everyone acts like they’re the character in a TV commercial who needs a miracle product to perform a simple task, and no miracles are here, just the manic unstoppable demons of an Evil Dead movie.

Movie is properly disgusting – a demon child breaks into a woman’s apartment then convulses as an Audrey II-mouthed rubber alien bursts out of his chest and chases the woman around until defeated by a murphy bed. There’s an elevator shaft escape, an ineffectual parking garage showdown, and the hetero couple ends up at a quirky movie theater TV studio (which is maybe supposed to evoke the movie theater of Demons 1 but really only reminded me of Scanners 3). Among the doomed women is Asia Argento. Half the crew followed this with Dario Argento’s Opera and prospered, the other half made Graveyard Disturbance and did not. Speaking of Opera, I wrote “Argento characters never behaving like actual humans makes the movies more phantasmagorical,” and that’s sure true of the dialogue here – but I’ve never been to Italy, and what if the people there are really like this?

Hetero couple triumphant: