by ·Comments Off on The Ambulance (1990, Larry Cohen)

Having a difficult movie month here. Seijun Suzuki and The Cannibals were the best movies I’ve watched lately, but this one was the smartest decision. How do you follow up those, plus some major docs, a Jerry Lewis, the Arbuckles, the end of the Szulkin apocalypse series, and my big Cinema Scope roundup? With some brilliant late Cohen nonsense, of course.

Gang:

Janine Turner (Northern Exposure, Cliffhanger) collapses while large-faced Eric Roberts is harassing her. But Eric is no casual harasser, he’s a true stalker, devoted to figuring out why this girl (whose last name he doesn’t know) seems to have disappeared from the medical system after being taken away in a weird ambulance. He goes to a real hospital where he enlists his reporter roommate Red Buttons, and involves police officers James Earl Jones and Megan Gallagher, before uncovering a clonus-horror conspiracy of secret medical experiments and pilfered body parts.

Eric and Red:

Vint:

Coincidence? Cop Richard Bright was in Panic at Needle Park with Alan Vint, and in this movie they go searching for the ambulance drivers with only a uniform that says VINT as a clue. The story is nonsense and Roberts is a nut, but it plays well. Terribly choreographed fight scene between the ambulance drivers and a street gang. Eric was some years after Star 80 and Runaway Train, not long before he started appearing in 10+ movies per year. Eric plays a Marvel Comics artist under Stan Lee, in Stan’s first non-doc appearance – his second being Mallrats. Megan was in a Costas Mandylor movie, oh no. The evil doctor who ends up kidnapping Red Buttons as well as Janine had previously brought on the AI-pocalypse in Colossus: The Forbin Project. Most important is the incredible James Earl Jones performance, hammy but dignified, a must-see.

Dignity, even in death:

Uh-oh, ambulance:

by ·Comments Off on Yumeji (1991, Seijun Suzuki)

Our guy is a notorious artist of sexy paintings (pop star Kenji Sawada has made good movie choices, playing leads in Hiruko the Goblin, Mishima, and Happiness of the Katakuris). His pretty young beloved is sick at home with her parents, wants to elope but not right now, so Yumeji enjoys a heavy romp with a prostitute, picks up another artist’s model, and becomes obsessed with a widow(?) and her bizarre story, until her husband (the crazy guy from Zigeunerweisen, even crazier) arrives and chases everyone around.

The Women of Yumeji: Covering her mouth tuberculosively is Hikono, who starred in Strange Circus. Center standing is model Oyo from a hitman movie called Pornostar and center seated/smiling is Mrs. Wakiya, who later starred in similar sounding Two Portraits of Miyagino (artist/prostitute love triangle, disappearance, kabuki-style sets). These two seem to have swapped personalities for this portrait, but I haven’t misidentified them unless they also swapped kimonos. I’ll dishonorably join the rest of the web in not being able to identify the others, but far left is the prostitute he’s with at the beginning.

I’m (re)watching these out of order, Yumeji coming a decade after Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za – the cinema world loves a trilogy. Extremely loosely based on true events, the movie also plays fast and loose with dream/reality, life/death. Despite the apparent genre of “period artist biography,” it’s unpredictable and bizarre, with something crazy in nearly every shot.

Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:

While Kagero-za ends with an unexpected and unnerving glimpse into some kind of afterlife, Yumeji begins a little more reassuringly, with events that soon get explicitly figured as a dream — even if the protagonist dreams of a duel in which he gets shot in the head. After all, the yume from Yumeji also means “dream,” as the renowned real-life painter Yumeji Takehisa muses toward the end of the film, which fictionalizes a period in his life from around 1918 … As in Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za, the film closes with the prospect of Yumeji’s transportation across a body of water to a dimension of death or dream, this time ferried there by “the devil” Onimatsu.

by ·Comments Off on When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast)

The champ, George Foreman, vs. the kid, Muhammad Ali, in Zaire
And other politics involved in the affair
Including rare footage leading up to the event
Plus, interviews with VIPs, remembering the effects
…
We heard about that legendary clashing of the titans
But could never have contextualized the metrics or environment
Until, 90 minutes of history
And images and music, I was riveted, infinity

Listened/half-watched while assembling furniture after turning on Henry Fonda For President and realizing it had subtitles. Good movie.

by ·Comments Off on Dust Devil (1992, Richard Stanley)

Hardware was silly fun, Color Out of Space a real cool time, this movie is the Richard Stanley tiebreaker, and… I can dig it. We got just-okay storytelling, but baller filmmaking – South African post-Twin Peaks cult-killer stuff, with at least three cool birds.

Shelter me from the power of the finger:

Chelsea (one of Deborah Unger’s girls in Lynch’s Hotel Room) is on the run, and connects with roaming psycho Robert John Burke (between Hal Hartley movies). Everything this guy does, he does ominously. Her husband (of Space Mutiny: MST3K season 8) is after Chelsea and cops Joe and Ben (both of Cry Freedom) are after RJB. Eventually everyone will die except Chelsea, but she takes on the serial-psycho spirit and becomes the new RJB. The DP supposedly shot Highlander III: The Sorcerer in 1994, but that must be an AI hallucination – there were only two Highlander movies.

by ·Comments Off on Jennifer Reeves shorts

Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992)

Rapid-fire cut-ups of film and TV and sound clips, slowed down and distorted and strobed, about misogyny and other fun topics.

–
Monsters in the Closet (1993)

Stories of queer youth: sex, crimes, and sex crimes. Sound and visual are again subject to speed tampering and flickering.

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The Girl’s Nervy (1995)

Single-frame flickers of beautiful colors covered in fractured-web patterns. Towards the middle a circular field in the frame makes me think nervy = optical nerve, then in the last segment we’re outside among flowers and the patterns look like veins in a plant leaf. Three 1930’s songs, the first of which sounds reversed.

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We Are Going Home (1998)

More reverse audio, images that look embossed, or posterized, whatever that photoshop filter was called. Double(?) exposures turn people into phantoms or twins, pull them apart from the background, the color flitting from pink to blue like a 3D movie in collapse. People walk slowly, someone is buried, breasts and toes get sucked on.

by ·Comments Off on Live Flesh (1997, Pedro Almodóvar)

After a shooting during a Buñuel movie, aggrieved pizza guy Liberto Rabal goes to jail while his mom Penelope Cruz is dying of cancer and his crackhead girlfriend Francesca Neri marries the cop Javier Bardem who the pizza guy put in a wheelchair. This all makes the pizza guy crazed for revenge, so he plans to ruin everyone’s lives (also everyone has sex with everyone else).

Crackhead, Pizza Guy:

Josh Lewis:

If for nothing else this should be on your radar for the excellent early Javier Bardem performance as the sexy Madrid cop turned paralympic basketball star who spends most of the movie in various Tasmanian Devil t-shirts while he goes voyeur-detective mode on this guy he suspects is Cape Fear-ing him and his wife, and instead unraveling all kinds of secret affairs, domestic abuse and sexual obsessions that the characters eventually start pointing guns at each other over.

by ·Comments Off on The Longest Nite (1998, Patrick Yau)

Tony Leung is a bad cop in Macau whose specialty is smashing people’s hands to pulp, and Sean “Mad Detective” Lau is a tough guy working for one of the two gangs under uberboss Mr. Lung. Better than the same year’s A Hero Never Dies, this is nonstop gangster double-crosses. It ends where all 90s action movies must end: in an exploding box warehouse that doubles as a Wellesian mirror trap, as the killers become each other. They both die unceremoniously, as Mr. Lung arranges to erase both gangs and take the territory for himself, only his undercover man Lam Suet surviving. The girl is PTU star Maggie Shiu, Mr. Lung is from God of Gamblers, and loose cannon Mark was in Peking Opera Blues.

Bad cops:

Bad ass:

Mark with crazy lighting:

by ·Comments Off on Castle Freak (1995, Stuart Gordon)

How did Gordon get mixed up with Full Moon Entertainment? Guess I shouldn’t act like he was in a position to choose his own studio, between Fortress and Space Truckers – at least this one’s a Lovecraft story. Probably the only time the editor of Puppet Master 2 worked with the cinematographer of Dillinger Is Dead.

Jeffrey Combs inherited a spooky castle, always a bad sign, arrives to claim it with his wife who hates him (Barbara Crampton in a thankless role) and blind daughter, and without their son who he recently killed in a drunken car crash. And inside the castle lives the titular freak, who recently murdered its keeper/tormentor, and now chews off its thumb to escape the cuffs and go exploring (finger-trauma handcuff escapes are becoming a theme this month).

Combs brings home a local hotgirl – she wanders into the castle and gets freaked (it chews her boobs off). Combs is arrested because people are going missing, and you’d think it would help his case that the freak kills two more cops while their suspect is in custody, but Combs still has to conk a cop on the noggin and escape to save his imperiled family and battle the freak to their deaths on a rainy roof.