by ·Comments Off on Noroi: The Curse (2005, Kôji Shiraishi)

Found-footage horrors are rarely good – I’m thinking of Willow Creek and The Poughkeepsie Tapes and V/H/S and its sequels (which also suffer from being anthology horrors, which are also rarely good). If nothing else, the found-footage conceit is an excuse for shitty handheld camerawork, and we’ve got that here, and also clips from fake TV programs with insufferable narrators and graphics. Movie is also not nice to birds. Still, pretty good, I’d check out the director’s torture video Grotesque.

Ghost investigator on the trail of a kidnapped girl pieces together a documentary stitching various hauntings he filmed that turn out to be related. Doc guy Kobayashi pulls in haunted actress Marika and foil-hat “super psychic” Hori, and they have a blairwitchy experience at the dammed/damned lake where a village once existed. Apparently the village had a ritual to keep demons at bay, no longer being performed as everyone moved away, now wherever the demon-possessed abortionist from the drowned village goes, her neighbors are driven murderously mad from the sounds of her ghost babies. Our team tracks her down, the doc guy rescues her hostages, but fails to banish the evil, uh oh. Not to be confused with magic pirate revenge movie Noroît. The actors here also appeared in various Rings and Grudges, and two were in Kurosawa’s Retribution.

by ·Comments Off on Netherworld (1992, David Schmoeller)

Zombie conspiracy movie with lots of birds and boobs, from the director of O.G. Puppet Master, this videotape was very popular with some teens I could mention who were stuck at their great aunt’s house. The wannabe-Phantasm flying stone hand never looked extremely cool, and holds up even worse in HD, but the birdies have never looked better. The stone hand facehugs a would-be rapist using its barbwire grapples and maybe transforms the guy into a bird, and we’re off.

These red-crested cardinals and a cockatoo get carted into the background of every room/scene:

Verbose young man Corey arrives at his late dad’s estate and meets the staff, including lawyer Robert Burr (a doctor in Return to Salem’s Lot), Anjanette Comer who runs the place (she starred in The Baby with Arletty from Messiah of Evil), and her hot young horsegirl daughter who is constantly hitting on Corey (naming her “Diane Palmer” was probably supposed to spark some connections I didn’t catch at the time). The horsegirl says to stay away from the feather-eared bird people at the brothel next door, but her mom is one of them. Corey got a note from his late dad saying someone named Dolores can help resurrect him, and guess where Dolores hangs out.

The director appears onscreen, at left, as if to say “don’t take any of this too seriously”:

Corey keeps acting confident as he blunders around, way over his head, risking his ass to save the father he never met. He gets it on with his dad’s girlfriend while guest star Edgar Winter blows a sax solo. Anjanette maybe tries to kill him, but gets blinded by Dolores. The alliances are confusing… and the meaning of the stone hand… lotta good birds though. Zombie Dad gets almost-resurrected, intending to inhabit his son’s body, but Corey fights back at the last minute and dad turns into a zombie muppet eclectus.

by ·Comments Off on Cobra Verde (1987, Werner Herzog)

Intro with a storyteller and a poem sets this up as a fable or legend, then some great storytelling economy as Klaus Kinski going from mourning his dead mother, leaving home, to penniless gold digger, to merciless bandit in a few minutes.

Kinski is hired as slavedriver of a sugarcane plantation. There among macaws and storks, bats and crabs, he knocks up all three of the owner’s daughters so they decide to send him to certain death in the deadly kingdom of Dahomey within Benin. He’s rescued from the insane king by an insane prince, and trains a woman army, but is he happy? He is not.

Werner Herzog’s Black Panther:

Entire movie was worth making for the scene of a goat taking communion:

by ·Comments Off on Underground (1995, Emir Kusturica)

Blackie and his bestie, the thinner-mustached Marko are communists in 1941. The nearby zoo is bombed, panicking Marko’s brother, the stuttering zookeeper Ivan, and nazis overtake the town. Enter Natalija, Blackie’s girl, an actress also beloved by Marko and Nazi Franz. Marko hides Blackie and his fellow revolutionaries in a basement and when the war ends he decides not to tell them, so he keeps Natalija above ground and the undergrounders keep manufacturing weapons for him to sell. When a monkey blows a hole in the wall during Blackie’s son’s wedding they escape, come across the set of the film reenacting Blackie’s war heroism, and he starts killing German actors. Thirty years later as Yugoslavia is violently dissolving, Ivan finds his lost monkey then everybody dies tragically.

Young Ivan and flock:

Marko and Nat preparing to take drastic measures:

Inserting Blackie into documentary footage from the era was well-done. I think the internet is saying the movie is pro-genocide, but I don’t follow why. Even if so, this is counterbalanced by the movie’s major macaw presence. Won the top prize at Cannes versus Dead Man, City of Lost Children, Shanghai Triad, Hou, Oliveira, Terence Davies, and a pissed-off Theodoros Angelopoulos. Blackie appeared with a couple of James Bonds and played Santa Claus in the nutty-looking anthology Goodbye 20th Century. Marko was in Ozon’s Criminal Lovers, and Franz was in Ozon’s Frantz. Natalija came to Hollywood and ended up hundredth-billed in Maid in Manhattan, playing a maid, that’s embarrassing.

Old Blackie:

Old Ivan finds Old Marko:

by ·Comments Off on Holy Smoke (1999, Jane Campion)

A good bird movie, with emus and cockatoos and budgies. Kate Winslet falls in with guru Baba and decides to stay in India, so her parents trick her into returning home and hire cult deprogrammer Harvey Keitel. But he lacks his required assistant and fucks up the assignment – the sight of Kate nude leads to a fully degraded Harvey selling out his whole plan. Keitel in the Emil Jannings tradition, a master of playing an apparent tough guy who becomes a blubbering mess. When his would-be assistant does arrive it’s Pam Grier, who I just saw in Ghosts of Mars.

L-R: Kate, Cockatoo

L-R: Robbie (Chopper), Yvonne (Muriel’s Wedding), Tim (Farscape)

Harvey, tough as nails, uncorruptable:

Ah, well, nevertheless…

by ·Comments Off on Eureka (2023, Lisandro Alonso)

Viggo Mortensen is searching for his missing daughter again, this time as a killer in a b/w Western. Presumably this is a prank on those of us who wanted another Jauja, because after a half hour Viggo’s movie is shrunk down to an SD TV movie and ignored like Danny Glover in Bamako, and instead we follow a Native American cop on her rounds, and then… I think her niece gets transported by a CG stork into a dream-recounting ceremony where a young man stabs somebody then tries to escape.

Shot:

Reverse shot:

“Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order” – Jeff Reichert works through the cinema/myth/dream journey on Reverse Shot, and Alonso has no fucks to give in his Cinema Scope interview.

From Bamako to Dead Man:

by ·Comments Off on It Must Be Heaven (2019, Elia Suleiman)

A film about a Palestinian filmmaker leaving home, traveling to meet with producers, who don’t understand his film (“not Palestinian enough”), returning home. Includes a highly relatable bird scene. Don’t know if it meant much of anything but I get positive vibes from Suleiman’s scene composition and onscreen persona, need to watch more of these.

by ·Comments Off on Madame X (1978, Ottinger & Blumenschein)

I guess after luring women onto her pirate ship, X kills them one by one with her artificial hand-knife.

Notes I sent to TB:
– Call chinese orlando, stop.
– “Ottinger” must mean “one-take” in German
– I feel like Bertrand Mandico has watched this movie more than once.
– This fits in nicely with the avant-garde traditions, in that some things (color, music, costumes, visual concept, counterculture vibes) are really good, and others (pacing, sound sync, pacing, mst3k-ass acting, pacing) are unbearable.
– But is the pacing unbearable because we are brainwashed by commercial cinema… would I rather be watching Mission: Impossible 5 because that’s the style of movie the capitalist system taught me to enjoy… I dunno, it’s worth questioning, but when I break free from hollywood pacing I like to break really decisively free (ahem Stray Dogs), while this feels more like a really slow John Waters movie. Fails to cast a spell, and if you only pay half attention it dissipates entirely.
– Feminism, tho. I guess.
– And a macaw if you make it to the end