by ·Comments Off on Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962, Albert Zugsmith)

Odd human trafficking spy/rescue story, less furious than The Furious but overall better, set in 1900ish San Francisco. Yet another movie where newspaper men have to solve local crimes themselves, sneaking around to find kidnapped brides held in bamboo cages. All the dialogue is philosophical quotes. Costarring every Asian guy they could round up to play Chinese (including the Chinese-Hawaiian Richard Loo, who played Japanese in The Steel Helmet, and the Korean-American Philip Ahn, who’d play a doctor in Shock Corridor), I found nothing wrong with the movie’s politics except when it scared a cockatoo into trying to fly while tied to a perch.

Vincent Price is a rogue element stepping into the middle of a gang war filmed on Western sets, hmm. Nice freakout scene with masks, skulls, funhouse lenses, and zoo animals. In the middle of the rescue operation Price has a couple hours to kill until the girl auction starts, so he stops to smoke some opium. Soon afterwards when he’s accosted by baddies, the drug has given him super-slo-mo powers.

Feels like a Messiah of Evil / Carnival of Souls indie. Zugsmith produced a couple Sirk films and Touch of Evil before cementing his legacy with MST3K-bound pictures about wayward high schoolers. As far as I can tell, the source book by Thomas De Quincey (best known as originator of Suspiria) is an 1810s drug memoir and contains no human trafficking thriller story. The Monthly Film Bulletin review excerpted on wiki is spot on, just add “(complimentary)” to the end of each sentence.

Philip Ahn and Vincent have the same tattoo:

The late Richard Loo faked his death, joins Price for the final fight:

Angelo/Master has a cameo:

by ·Comments Off on Alpha (2025, Julia Ducournau)

After a flashback scene with her drugged-out dad uncle, stoned teenage Alpha gets a tattoo at a drug party, then it won’t stop bleeding. She inevitably will catch the medusa virus going around that’s turning people to stone, but first she’s gonna become unstuck in time and live her past/present life with her troubled uncle.

I liked the range of weird tones in Titane, the dark humor in Raw – this one is all grim all the way, following lives of pure misery, and whenever something almost positive happens it gets interrupted. Didn’t I see another movie recently where the final shot was the poster image? Only Alpha and boyfriend Adrien and uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim of A Prophet) have character names, none for mom Golshifteh Farahani or nurse Ella McCay.

Sometimes the world vibrates and assaults Alpha. Her teacher (a Nocturama lead, above) has a boyfriend with the stone disease. Uncle Amin takes the girl for a dreamed night on the town to Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat,” but even in the dream he has fits, then vanishes. Mom tries to deal with Amin, helping him to live or to die. The boyfriend got the same tattoo (minus the constant bleeding) and didn’t tell anyone. Despite the big fantasy epidemic, the movie is mostly handheld-cam family/teen drama, and feels long.

by ·Comments Off on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025, Almereyda & Stephens)

Altered States: the documentary. Lilly invented the isolation tank, did psychedelic drugs, got naked, and “regressed through generational time.” He survives experiments with dolphins, the US government, hollywood, LSD, and the isolation tanks, only to go insane on ketamine (“hourly injections of ketamine inspire increasingly apocalyptic visions”). Besides Altered States, works based on his studies include Ecco the Dolphin, Day of the Dolphin, Holy Mountain, and probably parts of the Hitchhikers Guide series.

I’d hoped this would be more formally exciting, some kind of Experimenter storytelling with Invention vibes, but it’s more a traditional doc (with archival footage, talking head interviewees, and clips from related works) covering their shared interests in oddball scientists and American un/popular history.

Lilly may have been a wealthy weirdo dolphin torturer whose science wasn’t so scientific, but per Filmmaker:

One of Coincidence Control’s clear takeaways is that universal reverence for dolphins and whales, and how their preservation became a stand-in for caring about the environment as a whole, is a direct and uncomplicatedly laudable part of Lilly’s legacy.

by ·Comments Off on Altered States (1980, Ken Russell)

Pre-Big Chill William Hurt and Post-Close Encounters Bob Balaban are doing isolation chamber tests in 1967, Hurt appreciates the trippy demon visions he experiences in the tank, and shares his thoughts on the matter while his girl Blair Brown is trying to make love to him.

A decade later Blair is leaving socially awkward Hurt while he’s heading to Mexico to try mushrooms (to open ancient physiological pathways in human consciousness), which take him to another place that he can’t remember when he sobers up. So he heads back into the isolation tanks, enlisting angry skeptic Charles Haid (pre-Nightbreed!) to observe.

Now on mushrooms in the tank, Hurt witnesses the birth of mankind and bodily regresses to gorilla-state. None of the others (not even lab tech John Larroquette) can deny something crazy is happening here, so Hurt keeps it up, getting arrested for monkeying at the zoo. But he goes in too many times and hellraisers himself into a primordial vortex (even more impressive since Hellraiser hadn’t been invented yet), leading to some major fluid/space/video effects.

Honestly weird movie, surprising that Cronenberg didn’t make this. A small part of the runtime is rapid editing of trippy imagery, larger part is a guy turning into an ape and wreaking havoc, mostly it’s intellectuals talking rapidly at each other. Criterion says Russell was picked after 26 others had passed and the results made everybody mad at him, haha.

by ·Comments Off on Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noé)

Long-take first-person camera to the point of absurdity, with eye blinks. Our guy, swearing to himself he’s not a junkie, smokes some bad drugs. We are Oscar, but it turns out you shouldn’t yell “I have a gun, I’ll shoot” to the police, and then we become Ghost Oscar floating above his body then roaming the city, clipping through walls.

Your first destination as an invisible ghost: the strip club, to watch your sister have sex with some guy in a back room. Sister (Paz de la Huerta, who got naked in The Limits of Control) flashes back to her happy childhood with Bro Oscar until their parents die in a car crash, while Bro remembers meeting Cool Alex who lent him a book of the dead. I guess Oscar’s obsession with his sister, watching psychic steam emanate from sexual encounters, leads to his getting reborn through her?

me, watching this movie:

We’re all watching this because of his Region Centrale camera, right? It bounces back and forth in time but never gets more than a half hour into his post-death, repeats and belabors its points too much, should’ve taken more hits from Je t’aime, je t’aime. Follow-cam with head-piercing sounds, not such fun to watch – Massive Attack’s “Protection” video is both cooler and shorter. At least it’s funny that, in retrospect, by the time Noe made his 3D porno Love, it was the most tame thing he’d done.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Heat (1988, Johnnie To & Andrew Kam)

The earliest To movie I’ve seen by five years, but something seems fishy… is this actually a Tsui Hark movie? Good Cop John is a crack shot but has spinal issues and his hands lock up… Clumsy Lun is incompetent… and Kam has moves. Guy who kills a bunch of people in a hospital meets his doom in an elevator shaft. This was written by Gordon Chan, who’d one-up his gunfight-in-a-hospital scenario in Hard-Boiled. The hand injury plot doesn’t work but it’s a brutal little movie.

Up top is Malaysian Ong and Kam (Hard Boiled‘s Mad Dog), below left is our hero (Waise Lee, Running Out of Time) and his girl Maggie (Betty Mak of the Iron Butterfly trilogy) who will be shot in the head in the next scene after discovering a cocaine conspiracy:

Clumsy Lun scribbling on his girl Joey “White Snake” Wong, two scenes before Lun is rigged with a grenade vest and blown to bits:

by ·Comments Off on Violent Cop (1989, Takeshi Kitano)

V-Cop is introduced beating up a high schooler who attacked a homeless guy, hell yeah. The new chief likes his style but wants not to be disgraced by association, V-Cop doesn’t care, has little respect for the bosses. Turns out cops are supplying the drug dealers, and VC’s baddie-killing investigation technique gets him fired. He’s having a nice day as a civilian when punks kidnap his sister and a hitman stabs him and blows a bystanders’s head off. Final showdown: VC and the hitman blast each other full of holes, he finishes off his sister, the drug trade carries on with barely a hitch. Great theme music, a familiar Satie tune.

I liked the rookie partner’s expression when VC ran over a suspect:

by ·Comments Off on Queer (2024, Luca Guadagnino)

Has its moments. It’s my own fault that I stopped reading Burroughs long ago and let the Cronenberg version take over my imagination. Daniel Craig’s love interest is Drew Starkey of the latest Hellraiser remake. Craig convinces the kid to go on a South America trip to find ayahuasca, but becomes messed up from drug withdrawls along the way.

Mike Leigh muse Lesley Manville protects the ayahuasca – that’s Lisandro Alonso in the background:

Bill Lee’s Space Odyssey finale:

by ·Comments Off on Dredd (2012, Pete Travis)

Is this the first movie I’ve watched in full after previously watching its last ten minutes? It’s not the first time I’d watched the end of a movie and thought “this isn’t bad, I should see the rest of it” – that’d be Waxwork. This one I simply lost track, and ended up half-watching while working on something, looking up whenever someone got killed in super-slow-mo (they’re taking hummingbird-brain drugs). Some good violence, if nothing else. I noted all the important details last time – in the years since, Judge Urban has gotten involved in all the major properties, Psychic Thirlby was in Lousy Carter, Villain Headey did Game of Thrones, and the writer and DP made Trainspotting 2 together.

Zooted Dawg:

Slow-mo final boss plummet: