by ·Comments Off on Dogra Magra (1988, Toshio Matsumoto)

The Funeral Parade of Roses guy two decades later has turned to narrative… but it’s super-meta-psycho-narrative, at least. In the 1920s an institutionalized amnesiac is given conflicting stories by a hairy Dr. Detective and a bald Wacky Doctor, and instead of piecing together the real story, he either goes on a killing spree, or doesn’t.

Which of these doctors would you trust:

Labyrinth of Dreams was based on the same author’s work, and I wondered if the novel was an influence on Shutter Island. The boy went on to be a voice actor, most notably dubbing Leo in Titanic, and the not-bald doctor/detective Hideo Murota is in all the Kinji Fukasaku movies. Unsurprisingly this cinematographer also worked with Terayama.

by ·Comments Off on Flesh + Blood (1985, Paul Verhoeven) +2

Oddball adventure movie post-Conan the Barbarian with modern slang/language, setting up a love triangle for young JJ Leigh between dim warlord Rutger Hauer and rich wannabe-scholar Tom Burlinson (title role in The Time Guardian), both of whom are dicks to her anyway. Sure it’s full of raping and pillaging, and a nun gets conked in the brain, and plague meat is catapulted over the walls, but most of the fun is in guessing Leigh’s intentions as she goes from captor to queen of the gang after they conquer a castle, earning Rutger’s respect by teaching him to eat with a fork, then trying to rescue both of her men during the final showdown.

Rutger vs. Octopus:

Untrustworthy bounty hunter Jack Thompson is in all the big Australian movies I haven’t seen (Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright, Jimmie Blacksmith), Rutger’s ex-pregnant ex-queen Susan Tyrrell specialized in weirdo comedies (Forbidden Zone, Cry-Baby, Big Top Pee-Wee). Brion James pops up a fair amount. Matt Lynch: “an incredibly skeptical story of superstition & tradition giving way to pragmatism & capital. Money, religion, love, sex, class; spoiler alert: power is power, everyone’s full of shit, survival is the only cause.”

Displaced Barbarian Queen Susan:

Brion James fate foretold:

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Starship Troopers (1997)

“Oh Johnny it’s us… it’s home.” All the kids are supposedly South American but no two people can agree how to pronounce “Ibanez.” Holds up, never looks cheap, Verhoeven firing on more cylinders than on the 1985 movie. Neil Bahadur: “One gets the sense that Verhoeven took this god-awful script and flipped it without changing a word.”

Where’d these people end up? Jake “Son of Gary” Busey played murderers in The Frighteners and Contact. Dizzy was a cop in the first four Saw movies. Caspar has only ever appeared in two other movies: Sleepy Hollow and Alita, both of which are due a rewatch, and Denise was in Edmond and Wild Things, which, same. Sgt Clancy “Mr. Krabs” Brown has achieved Vaguely Recognizable status after I’ve seen him in twelve movies. Michael Ironside is so cool that I might actually watch that Bob Odenkirk revenge movie now that I know he’s in it.

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Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Semi-rewatch while assembling furniture, really much better than part two if you’re not looking directly at the screen, despite tediously starting with the final showdown instead of making up a cool secondary pre-credits adventure.

by ·Comments Off on The Green Ray (1986, Eric Rohmer)

Marie Rivière (marriage-plotter of Autumn Tale) gets into a series of awkward social situations, some of them self-caused (she’s a preachy vegetarian), while increasingly feeling that her summer vacation is slipping away.

Won the Venice Golden Lion, same year as The Beekeeper and A Room With a View. I should have realized Green Flash Brewing is named after the same phenomenon. I didn’t love this as much as others seem to, but Jake and Lawrence wrote good justifications for its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)

Watched the miniseries version, which lived up to its high reputation. Kids grow up in wealthy theater household, where everyone’s got their eccentricities and all the husbands are sleeping with the maids. Theater owner dad (Allan Edwall, who bought a theater after appearing in this) has an episode during a rehearsal and dies, then after a year, mom Ewa Fröling marries bishop Jan Malmsjö (Scenes from a Marriage) and moves the kids into his severe, forbidding household.

Family members have been pathetic or horrible, but mostly in an entertaining way, while the new stepdad is horrible in a horrible way. Knowing how Bergman loves mixing religion and punishment, I figured this would be the bulk of the movie and lead to everyone’s ruin, but the kids’ grandmother and her friend Isak (Erland Josephson, Hour of the Wolf baron and Nostalghia madman) plot a successful rescue operation.

L-R: the bishop, uncle Jarl Kulle (guy who loves dueling in Smiles of a Summer Night), uncle Börje Ahlstedt (I Am Curious x2)

“I don’t understand why I always have to see dead people,” says Alexander, ahead of his time. In addition to theater, there are ghosts and dreams and stories and magic in every episode. In the last half hour, instead of simply wrapping up, the movie introduces trans psychic Ismael, giving the sense that the kids’ lives will stay richly weird for a while longer.

by ·Comments Off on That’s Dancing (1985, Jack Haley Jr.)

Terrible host segments as usual, misguided efforts at diversity, then it settles down into a clip show of dance scenes from classic movies and all is well. Happy to see Bojangles Robinson, whose statue I drive past on the way to the movie theater.

by ·Comments Off on Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986, Piotr Szulkin)

Unflappable prisoner is sent from one horrid planet to another, his mission to plant a flag claiming the new world for humanity. But this place has received “heroes” from space before and has a ritual for dealing with them: they’re given booze and prostitutes, encouraged to commit crimes, then sentenced to sitting on long sharp pole. At his first stop, hero Daniel Olbrychski (great, of The Tin Drum) is attacked by a severed arm and served fingers instead of hotdogs, then his preferred girl has been replaced by an annoying new one, so he plots to find his original girl and exit this shitty planet. Inspirational, I’ll have to check out more by Szulkin. Having just rewatched Crimes of the Future, I appreciate when a sci-fi movie makes do with a minimum of shabby locations. Everyone here has also been in Wajda and Kieslowski movies, particularly the hero’s handler Jerzy Stuhr.

by ·Comments Off on Wolf’s Hole (1987, Vera Chytilová)

I think it’s a commentary on society? Bunch of kids are chosen for a special skiing getaway, which starts out bad (the road’s out and they have to bribe a ski lift operator to get onto the mountain) and gets worse (the lead ski instructor calls himself Father, says he’s a space alien and the kids need to choose one to be sacrificed). But the kids are all dumb assholes (they start a foodfight with their dwindling supplies), and the counselors are terrible (one ends up dead inside a snowman).

The kids discuss what’s going on and what to do about it, while Father (also of Ikarie XB1 and The Devil’s Trap) is always lurking unnoticed in a doorway. When the movie wants to set a mood, the camera stalks the snow surface to stuttering music, and when we’re lucky there’s a sweet shot of reversed time-lapse ice melt. Father says their alien blood is frozen, so the gang-affiliated kid burns down the cabin and they all flee, but the lift is too heavy to hold them all, so they leave their coats behind (and one sacrifices their hearing aid, come on) and escape together, with no dumb kid left behind.

Ten of the eleven kids:

by ·Comments Off on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981, Walerian Borowczyk)

Walerian: I’m making a fancy-dress period-drama based on classic literature.
Serious Actors: sign us up!
Walerian: the plot is fourteen people in a large house get fucked to death by a beast.

Some actors’ dialogue is in sync on the French soundtrack, Patrick Magee’s in sync on the English, and Udo Kier is never in sync, so there’s no correct way to watch this. I chose English, excited to see the Prisoner guy, until I realized that Patricks Magee and McGoohan are different people. Of course Magee is the tormentee-turned-tormentor of A Clockwork Orange, so still pretty cool. Let’s avoid the Waxwork movies this year, we don’t need Patrick Macnee getting mixed up in this.

ARE Magee and McGoohan different people? Does the editor know?

I feel I’ve formed a satisfying triangle this SHOCKtober between Udo Kier starring in this beast-with-killer-penis movie, Udo Kier starring in Flesh for Frankenstein, and all the dick jokes in Young Frankenstein. Dr. Udo Jekyll has a nice transformation scene in the bathtub, but there are no cool makeup effects – Hyde is just a different actor. He stalks his party guests while they panic (General Magee shoots the coachman then dejectedly confesses), belatedly getting around to killing the General and his daughter, then Udo’s girl Fanny (a Walerian regular, unfortunately for her) becomes Hyded as well and kills her mom. I appreciate that Paul Duane enjoys Borow movies – Rosenbaum says diversity of opinion is healthy for the culture – but to me they are stupid and bad.

Fanny Osbourne will have her revenge on Seattle:

Hyde shoots some arrows into the General, his daughter doesn’t seem concerned:

by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (1989, Stephen Hopkins)

They’re done with sequel numbering, but I’m not – it’s part five. A few years ago I watched four and a half of these in a month, but as much as these movies repeat themselves, it’s better to put a year or two between them. Opening titles sex scene with our survivors from part four, hell yeah, but things are amiss – Alice almost gets showered to death, and has a backstory vision of Freddy’s birth story (a nun assaulted by an asylum full of maniacs). Freddy always “dies” convincingly then comes back inexplicably in the next one, and the gimmick here is he can visit Alice while she’s awake through the dreams of her unborn child.

Prince of Darkness this ain’t:

Alice has four friends with diverse interests, ideal for getting murdered in character-appropriate ways in the first half of a 90-minute movie. Generic Saved by the Bell-lookin’ Boyfriend Dan gets beat up by his self-driving car then Tetsuo-the-Iron-Man‘d by a Freddycycle… anorexic model Greta gets force-fed… Mark gets Take On Me-d into his comics… star diver Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter of Popcorn and Miracle Mile) actually lives, releasing the momma nun’s spirit (she’d been sitting long-dead in some abandoned church), then Alice’s baby uses vomit-attack on Freddy, who once again loses/frees the souls of dead high schoolers.

It’s slightly less goofy than the previous one, but no better. Has Freddy always called every woman bitch? Final showdown where Alice rescues her baby from Freddy on Escher-stairs feels like a Labyrinth ripoff. Hopkins had a good 1990s career, including Judgment Night. The writer did House III the same year, and was a member of Sparks. Rosenbaum raved: “zero-degree filmmaking … flaccid editing.”

You can tell a movie has no prestige when its blu-ray extras are just music videos by The Fat Boys and Whodini. The former is from Mondo director Harvey Keith, opens with a very awkward sketch, making me doubt my memories of the Fat Boys’ great acting talent in Disorderlies. The three then run around a very well-dilapidated movie house pursued by Freddy. Good use of movie clips in the song, and Englund gets to rap. The Whodini is a much better song, has twin dancing Freddies on a staircase, and the band wisely doesn’t go inside the horror house, just dances on the porch.