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 Poison (1991, Todd Haynes)

Seven year-old Richie Beacon shot his dad then flew off the balcony, filmed in color news-reportage style, the picture stretched out horizontally.

Nancy Olson interrupts Dr. Graves, who then ingests pure, distilled sex-drive potion and becomes the leper sex killer, in 1950s b/w.

A thief goes to jail for the umpteenth time, meets old acquaintance Bolton. “I still could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”

Rosenbaum:

The most exciting moments in Poison are those that create a momentary confusion about which of Haynes’s three stories one happens to be watching — moments of vertigo during which two or more of the three stories seem to fuse (or, perhaps more to the point, “bleed” together).

by ·Comments Off on Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989, Kazuki Omori)

A very silly movie, rarely ever good, with big sweeping symphonic music that sometimes gets close to ripping off Star Wars. Jeers to Criterion for getting people to take a 1980s Godzilla movie seriously enough that I was tricked into wasting an evening on it.

Army weapon temporarily turns Godz into a Trapper Keeper graphic:

Competing English-speaking forces kill each other to capture Godzilla DNA, then a plant lab gets blown up, then a psychic girl speaks to plants. Botanist creates a plant monster and the next time hitmen come to steal secrets they get Little-Shopped. Plant monster and Godzilla fight.

What? Your IVYSAUR evolved into BIOLLANTE

Some of the human players: Yoshiko Tanaka (right) starred in Imamura’s Black Rain the same year, the plant scientist had starred in Samurai Spy in the 60s, the psychic girl became a Godzilla regular.

Godzilla will return, and return, and return

by ·Comments Off on Hollow Man (2000, Paul Verhoeven)

The effects hold up less well than Starship Troopers but they’re illustrating a cool concept (mammals becoming visible from their veins outward) – and I’m sure they were closer to cutting-edge at the time, but now when lab leader Kevin Bacon invisibles himself and becomes a skeleton I get the song “Money for Nothing” in my head.

Bacon is a science genius but kind of an asshole – his first order of business when becoming invisible is to sexually harass coworkers – so his ex Elisabeth Shue and her square-jawed labmate Josh Brolin are understandably hiding their relationship from him. Not taking the news well that he can’t be re-visibled, Bacon goes out and rapes his neighbor, kills his boss (Bill Devane of Rolling Thunder), then comes back to trap and slaughter his entire team (including Zero Effect‘s Kim Dickens). Hit or miss, still better than the last invisible man movie I watched.

by ·Comments Off on A Cure for Wellness (2016, Gore Verbinski)

Valerian “Val” DeHaan travels to a secluded German manor to work out a contract for his employer – is this based on Dracula? Upon arrival he signs some papers without reading them, then starts mad hallucinating, taking too long to realize what kind of movie he’s in. Gore’s ability to illustrate a creepy horror thing with big striking images makes me wonder if I should rewatch his Ring remake.

I guess Val dreams his mom dies after his limo crashes into a Very Digital Deer. Mia Goth plays the weird girl wandering the grounds, but then, everything is pretty weird. Val finds micro-bugs in the water, later panics when his scuba therapy becomes eel-infested. He sees eels everywhere, then tries to rally the patients to revolution but instead they zombie-attack him and the doctors pump Val full of eels – in the end, this is like The Matrix, but with eels instead of technology. I guess the incestuous mad doctor/baron Jason Isaacs (military guy in The Death of Stalin) is Mia’s dad, and they are 200 years old, kept alive through eels, until Val snaps out of his zomb-eel stupor and foils their plan. Partly based on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which the guys who wrote Shutter Island may have also read. Someone should program a Cure for Wellness / Road to Wellville double feature.

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 Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010, Panos Cosmatos)

Coasts purely on VIBES, which is frankly losing me, everyone croaking their lines glacially, TV-Glowing too hard, all whispering portent, nothing ever happening, until the patient explodes an employee. Reminded me more than once of The Catechism Cataclysm.

The patient is Eva Bourne, and the mad doctor was appropriately in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. He smooshes the face of his wife, or perhaps his mom, who cares. In the end he falls down and busts his head.

by ·Comments Off on Junk Head (2017, Takahide Hori)

I can’t believe another sci-fi stop-motion feature exists with the same plot as Mad God – Phil Tippett must’ve been so steamed when he saw this. Both movies’ worlds are packed with lore and backstory, which they mostly don’t bother us with, as we follow a little guy who descends into lovingly-detailed hellish depths on some doomed mission. This guy’s human body has been mangled so he’s been robocopped into a doll head and roboticized. Early in his trip he’s ripped apart by worms and takes a mission-endangering head knock, then is re-roboticized into a science lab servant, and fails (but with great effort) to complete a quest to retrieve some mushrooms. The little guy kills a monster and rescues one of his mole-man friends – he does not save humanity or return to the surface, but a sequel is due next year.

by ·Comments Off on Young Frankenstein (1974, Mel Brooks)

Wouldn’t you know it, two people associated with different hilarious mid-seventies Frankenstein films died on consecutive days, so we’ve got a double-feature on our hands. It’s Gene and Marty’s movie, but Teri Garr runs away with it. Leachman isn’t around too much, and Madeline Kahn features (hilariously) only in the first few minutes and the last twenty-or-so, becoming happily Franken-brided, which frees Dr. Gene to be with Teri. I was distracted when Gene arrives at the train station and a kid points him to track 29. Is the joke that there’d be so many tracks in Transylvania? Was Dennis Potter watching this on cable while writing the script for the Nic Roeg movie?