by ·Comments Off on The Real Presence (1984, Raoul Ruiz)

Rivettian by his own confession, it’s an AI universe-is-simulation all-is-theater sort of movie. Only an hour long, I intended it as another Ruiz double feature with Life is a Dream, but it was too heady and intense and I had to put on something more straightforward afterwards.

The traitor-foot blind man in my Three Crowns screenshots was the star here, playing an actor who sees himself on video saying things he never said. Timely – Q: “Does this mean we will never get paid for the scenes we filmed where our real presence could be reasonably put to doubt?” – A: “If we paid you, we would have to admit the real existence of possible worlds.” He talks to the programmer (who is creating photorealistic AI on an Apple II), then visits another actor to discuss the situation, then attempts suicide. Then we fall into a vortex of different realities, confusing characters, acting/theater metaphors and layers. “He understands that the dream that was haunting him for years was only a theatrical performance.”

by ·Comments Off on Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders)

Nice thing about the five-hour movie being spread across two discs is it’s an easy way to break it up across two evenings. The down side is my brain played the title U2 song on a loop for the 22 hours between discs. This began Wenders’ U2 era – they also did songs for Faraway, So Close and Beyond the Clouds and The End of Violence, and Bono wrote and produced the awful Million Dollar Hotel, beginning a drought during which WW couldn’t make a decent fiction film until (here’s hoping) 2023.

Sam Neill is our narrator writing a book about what happened after Claire left him. I thought there’d be some play between the real versions of events and the way he writes them, but no, he’s just following the story as we are and typing it up neatly so we don’t get lost. Claire is Solveig Dommartin, star of the two angel movies and Claire Denis’s No Fear, No Die. She takes an abandoned road to avoid a traffic jam and crashes into a couple of thieves with bags full of money, beginning the road movie tradition of accumulating a cast of friendly characters. Next she’ll add tech fugitive William Hurt and original road man Rudiger Vogler as a bounty hunter. In various configurations they travel to Lisbon, Berlin, China, Japan, USA. Across the shabby chaotic cities of nuclear crisis 1999, WW nailed how annoying computer voices and graphics would be in our future.

It’s all very plotty, not a loose hangout piece like the earlier films with Vogler. That’s not a problem, just a different sort of thing, but when they settle down in Australia for part two, it becomes a problem. Hurt (“Trevor”) and Claire gerry their way through the desert clutching the airplane door she’s been handcuffed to, soundtracked by Peter Gabriel. I imagine Rabbit Proof Fence was a reference to this – also imagine that their character names are a shout-out to Stagecoach star Claire Trevor. When they arrive at Hurt’s family tech lab, the brisk travel plot abruptly stops and we get bogged down in the plot of transmitting brainwave images to Hurt’s blind mom Jeanne Moreau. Dad Max von Sydow (my second 1980s von Sydow this month) changes the focus of his project to dream capture, alienating the locals and the viewers. Neill keeps writing as Hurt and Claire lose their sense of waking reality and the movie turns to drug addiction metaphors (she goes through withdrawal when her dream-viewer runs out of battery). The gang starts to fall away and it all peters out, ending with a postscript of Claire taking a zoom call in space. Spotted in the credits: Michael Almereyda, Paulo Branco, Chen Kaige.

The Australia half is almost redeemed by this band:

Chico can dig it:

From the extras: Almereyda tried to write a draft. Wenders very interested in creating and distorting the HD images, a prototype technology at the time, and talks about being a music collector. “That was another reason why the movie had to be so long” – he wrote all his fave musicians asking them to write a futuristic song, thinking most would say no, then ended up with a ton of songs. He wanted an Elvis song he couldn’t have, so “I don’t know how it happened but” David Lynch produced a cover version.

by ·Comments Off on A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971, Lucio Fulci)

Fulci’s twenty-somethingth film is the second-earliest one I’ve heard of. Super stylish with a fun, twisty plot. Great black-void backgrounds and jumpcut editing in the dream sequences. Also it’s so poorly dubbed that even the inspector’s eerie whistling looks lousy – how do you fuck up dubbing whistling?

Our buttoned-up lead is Carol (Florinda Bolkan of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion), obsessed with her hedonistic neighbor (Anita Strindberg of Your Vice Is a Locked Room), who soon turns up murdered. Carol’s husband Frank is having affairs (Jean Sorel, Belle de Jour‘s husband, that seems relevant) and seems suspicious, and his daughter Joan (Ely Galleani of Five Dolls for an August Moon) seems sympathetic. We’ve also got a lead inspector (Losey regular Stanley Baker), his main crony Brandon (Alberto de Mendoza of Horror Express), and Carol’s therapist (George Rigaud of All the Colors of the Dark).

Carol and Frank:

Some procedures are askew here in London, Italy. The cops allow neighbors to walk right into the murder scene, and the psychiatrist plays the cops tapes of Carol’s private sessions. Carol gets locked up in a clinic while the grown-ups try to straighten things out. The psych thinks Carol did it, has a split personality that places symbolic clues in her dreams. Carol’s dad takes photos of her husband Frank with Hotgirl Deborah (Silvia Monti of the previous year’s hippie murder film Queens of Evil), accuses Frank of the murder and having based the details on Carol’s dream journal to frame her, then finally blame falls on the dad, who kills himself.

Meanwhile some pale hippies (Penny Brown of City of Women, and a guy who looks like Irish Peter Fonda’s Ghost) are chasing people around. Little Joan fancies herself a private investigator and gets herself murdered. Of course the simplest explanation is that Carol did commit the murder, having been sleeping with the neighbor.

Joan and Hippie (who paints using throwing knives):

by ·Comments Off on Collective: Unconscious (2016)

Searching for Josephine Decker I found an unusual anthology – five filmmakers adapting each other’s dreams. The introduction guy recommends watching in a trance state.

Black Soil, Green Grass (Daniel Patrick Carbone, dreamed by Wolkstein)

B/W forest fire tower, a couple wearing big headphones while she sings in (Italian?). They even bathe with ear protection, to not hear destructive sheep-counting announcements coming from the tower – shades of A Quiet Place or Pontypool. Our dude keeps getting distracted by insects, but finally destroys and replaces the man in the tower. Nice tape-dubbing montage in this.

First Day Out (Josephine Decker, dreamed by Baldwin)

A big jump to color, long-take camera roving through a house of dancers, with fun choreographed camera movements and match cuts. Conversation about court trial and jail. Long takes with each dancer in their own style reminds of the heights of Climax.

Beemus, It’ll End in Tears (Lauren Wolkstein, dreamed by Bodomo)

Coach Beemus seems sensitive in one-on-one but yells “enjoy the pain!” in groups. “This is not a drill” – he prevents them from leaving when the fire alarm goes off – “your bodies will protect you.” Maybe accurate to the feeling of the dream, but it’s no fun spending time with a shouting high school gym teacher.

Everybody Dies! (Nuotama Bodomo, dreamed by Decker)

A 4:3 VHS game show hosted by Ripa the Reaper, who seems to be fighting the producers/network. Her line “especially if you are Black” cuts to “Please Stand By” color bars. After killing a bunch of children, Ripa repeatedly fails to do herself in, doomed to star in the next episode.

Swallowed (Lily Baldwin, dreamed by Carbone)

A family goes shopping then back home. When baby feeds, mom has a disassociative mirror/light reverie, with horror-film skin effects. A kebab and corndog party devolves into mute psychosis, then the next day mom has an extreme milk-fueled kitchen freakout.

I already know Decker… Baldwin has danced with David Byrne… Bodomo is from Ghana, made Afronauts and wrote for Random Acts of Flyness… Carbone produced We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (that movie’s director produced this) and Chained for Life… Wolkstein made The Strange Ones (I’ve seen the short version), is working on a Dead Ringers remake (oh no).

by ·Comments Off on Last Night in Soho (2021, Edgar Wright)

I came in expecting Baby Driver Wright, not Hot Fuzz Wright, so wasn’t disappointed. BDW has minor plot issues that become exasperatingly major in the last half hour, but at least three absolutely dazzling scenes per movie – instead of musical car chases, here it’s Thomasin “Leave No Trace” McKenzie dreaming Anya Taylor-Joy’s nightlife fifty years earlier, the two actresses swapping places in reflective surfaces.

At least I liked it better than rogerebert.com did:

Amid colorful, surreal kaleidoscopic reflections, a gaggle of morbid apparitions appear to attack Ellie. These ghosts elicit few frights due to their indistinguishability, and how often Wright deploys them. The ever-shrinking boundaries between Ellie and Sandy might be intriguing if the two were more connected beyond having the same address in different decades.

Just saw Anya’s charismatic pimp Matt Smith as a social worker in His House. Diana “Emma Peel” Rigg is Thomasin’s landlord, aka Anya herself all grown up and murderous. Other swingin’ 60’s actors: Rita Tushingham (The Knack) as Thomasin’s mom and Terence Stamp as a guy who hangs around whom she suspects of being the Old Pimp but is really just a doomed ex-cop. Michael Ajao (Attack the Block) is Thomasin’s over-the-top helpful love interest.

by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 + 4 (1987-1988)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, Chuck Russell)

Kicking off the second Elm Street double-feature, and Videodrome was right, this is the great sequel, a big blockbustery movie, more inventive than it is jokey. Classy intro music until Kristen (Patricia Arquette’s debut) plays a cock-rock song on her boombox. Freddy slashes her wrists to send her to the psych ward where Nancy now works helping people with dream issues. We meet a new group of weirdos and misfits, who will be killed off one by one, their personality quirks weaponized against them.

Kristen’s thing is that she can pull others into her dreams (good sfx on this), which is how Freddy plans to get new victims, something like that. Is there any reason Nancy’s house should be so important in the hauntings, besides visual reference for the viewer? We get some new backstory, as we must, meeting Freddy’s nun mom’s ghost (Nan Martin: a nun named nan) who reports FK was “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” They need to find FK’s bones and bury them in hallowed ground, but the kids don’t know where that is – maybe Heather’s drunk, washed-up dad John Saxon can help, before getting killed by a cool skeleton.

Arquette’s fellow survivors will be mute Joey (Rodney Eastman of I Spit On Your Grave Remake) and combative Kincaid (Atlanta’s own Ken Sagoes of the What’s Happening reboot). Memorable deaths include sleepwalker Bradley Gregg (of some major 80’s movies and also Class of 1999) featuring good stop-motion puppetry, and TV-loving Penelope Sudrow (the Jon Cryer ep of Amazing Stories). We also got punker Jennifer Rubin (Screamers) and wheelchair nerd Ira Heiden (Elvira: Mistress of the Dark) and a slumming Laurence Fishburne as a doctor.

I was getting Hellraiser II vibes from some of this – Arquette can’t help looking like Imogen Boorman, but the mute kid screaming and shattering mirrors, and Freddy pretending to be Nancy’s dad then stabbing the shit out of her all added to the feeling. Nancy gets another doctor (Body Double star Craig Wasson) to believe her crackpot stories about dream murders, the kids imagine themselves as the titular warriors, the bones are buried, and Chuck would go on to direct the pretty good Blob remake.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988, Renny Harlin)

They were “the last” of the Elm Street kids in part 3, so what’s left for this movie, which opens with a shitty pop song, and stars nobody? Part three felt like a real movie, now suddenly all the dialogue feels made-for-cable. Wikipedia says the writer’s strike was to blame for this. Parts 2 and 3 were like alternative sequels, different ways to follow up the original, but this one just feels like a part four, so I’m holding off on the next Nightmare movies before they get too depressing.

Should’ve watched Hairspray instead:

It’s a little funny that the dog who digs up Freddy’s bones (which reanimate using Frank’s Hellraiser re-fleshing effect) is named Jason. Different Actress Kristen is now Tuesday Knight, singer of the opening theme and star of Sex Demon Metropolis: Vampire Madonna and AI-generated werewolf film The Amityville Moon, but we’ve still got the real Kincaid and Joey, for a few minutes at least, before they succumb to junkyard and waterbed.

New Kristen is out of the psych ward and in regular school, starts losing classmates left and right. First goes asthma nerd Sheila, then Kung Fu Rick (of the same year’s Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama – it’s a shame John Saxon didn’t live to meet Rick) and Weightlifter Debbie, who gets Gregor Samsa’d. At some point Kristen herself gets burned alive, and the various powers of all these kids are absorbed by classmate Alice (Lisa Wilcox of Watchers 4) who chases after Freddy with her useless boyfriend Dan. Calling back to the childlike magic of the original movie’s ending, Alice shows FK his own reflection, and his imprisoned souls tear him apart. The movie’s one cool addition is sticking the kids in a time loop, a very dreamlike scenario. Harlin had a big moment in the 90’s, but I haven’t heard of any of the ten films he’s directed since he botched that Exorcist prequel.

by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 / 2 / Remake (1984-2010)

A Nightmare on Elm Street Remake (2010, Samuel Bayer)

Unexpectedly ended up watching the second half of this (and up through the first kill of Freddy’s Dead) on the ceiling of the dentist’s office while getting a filling replaced. Same ol’ thing, Nancy and her bf trying to stay awake, then trying to figure out why this is happening, then pulling Freddy out of the dream world to kill him. Jackie Earle Haley, now a repeat-offense child abuser, has some cool makeup, distinct from the original design, but that’s the only thing here that’s distinct. I didn’t recognize Rooney Mara at all, blaming the poor lighting for that. The bf was Kyle Gallner, just off Jennifer’s Body, who had worked with Craven on Red Eye. The parents are blamed for killing an innocent gardener (the three-pronged garden cultivator as finger-knives, get it?), then Mara discovers FK was not innocent at all, and isn’t killing them as revenge on the parents, but just because he’s a real bad man. The hearing aid scene in Freddy’s Dead holds up well, but the best Freddy movie I’ve seen this year is still Buzzard.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, Wes Craven)

The dentist remake viewing experience combined with the Plaza screening part 3 got me curious whether the original Elm Street series was available cheaply on blu-ray, and yes, very cheaply, so it’s marathon time. My first time seeing any of these in HD, and in at least twenty years. Part one doesn’t look too distinctive, and human behavior wasn’t the writers’ strong suit, but all a horror movie needs to become legendary is a cool concept and good theme song, and we’ve got both of those covered.

First to die is Tina (Amanda Wyss, between Fast Times and Better Off Dead), victim of some memorably anti-gravity claw work. Her pretty-eyed boyfriend Rod (Jsu Garcia would appear in a couple Soderbergh films and Candyman 3) is blamed by the cops, led by Heather’s dad John Saxon. Rod later hangs in his cell, leaving only Heather (also of Shocker and Hellraiser 10) and her bf John Depp (later of Secret Window and Tusk).

“What the hell are dreams anyway?”
“Mysteries… incredible body hocus pocus.”

This is dialogue between two people who WORK at the DREAM INSTITUTE, a Cronenbergian facility where Heather is checked in. She also tried watching The Evil Dead to stay awake. Depp doesn’t make it (both of the movie’s cool kills are in bedrooms, bloody and gravity defying). Heather’s parents are complicit (mom is Ronee Blakley of A Return to Salem’s Lot) and we hear Freddy was “a filthy child murderer who killed at least 20 kids in the neighborhood.” He’s ultimately defeated through some childish magic: Heather turns her back on him and demands her friends back. But:

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, Jack Sholder)

Jesse (Mark Patton of an Altman film) is new in town, a Simple Minds fan who just moved into Nancy’s house. Straight away he’s being followed by Freddy when asleep, and local girl Lisa (Kim Myers with Meryl Streep vibes, of Hellraiser 4) when awake. Nancy was nice enough to leave her diary behind, so the kids learn more about Freddy, who is trying to emerge into the waking world by taking over Jesse’s body – no glove here, the blades grow through his fingers. When this happens, Jesse ends up “inside,” and Lisa braves some seriously unconvincing mutant animals in the power plant where Freddy used to work, and they burn the Freddy off, Jesse emerging safe from within. A decent sequel, from before they’d fixed a formula for these things. Sholder would make The Hidden next (about killers possessing innocent bodies), writer David Chaskin would do I, Madman (about a disfigured killer wearing the skin of his young victims), both carrying on themes from this movie.

The human behavior here is about 10% better than the original Nightmare. I remember the chaotic pool party, not the leather-studded gym teacher. We get real “Parents Just Don’t Understand” vibes from Jesse’s dad Clu Gulager. The kids are lame, but it feels more like they’re meant to be lame. School jock Grady (Robert Rusler of Sometimes They Come Back) has a Zappa poster. Was everything in the 80’s so very 80’s? Sure the music, but the wallpaper and decor and clothes too.

First victim is the family bird, boooo:

by ·Comments Off on Come True (2020, Anthony Scott Burns)

Sarah is afraid of her dreams, which are slow camera moves endlessly forward through dark portals populated by slendermen (rendered in Cinema 4D), like the MST3K movie-sign tunnel as reimagined by the guy who makes the Tool videos. Sarah is Julia Sarah Stone, who has also starred with Evan Rachel Wood, and in a Bruce McDonald movie, and I heard mixed things about this movie but the look (of Sarah, her house, the dreams, the props) is all striking.

Sarah signs up for a sleep study in a concrete lab with period-inspecific equipment where scientists can view low-res images of dreams, and becomes their star pupil until they start to see her slendermen escaping into reality. She watches her own dreams in the form of a Chromatics music video, leads the scientists on a sleepwalking tour through Uncle Boonmee woods, becomes a vampire, then receives the message that This Is All A Dream. I get that the message might be aimed Matrix-like at either the viewer or the character, but haven’t decided if that’s any better.