by ·Comments Off on This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967, José Mojica Marins)

Coffin Joe is still a real asshole to everyone he meets – an atheist and completely insufferable about it. In the last movie, after killing a bunch of people, he ended up blind, insane, and dead. This one simply opens among a mad montage of grave-clawing hands and squigglevision credits with [townspeople] “he’s still alive!” [doctor] “he’ll see again!” [judge] “exonerated for murder!”, and then we get on with it.

The townspeople gather to shout about their women who’ve gone missing, figuring the culprit must be Coffin Joe, then Joe comes out to yell at them, saying what, because I’m different?! I’m just as guilty as each of you, and I vow to go out and find this kidnapper! Then he goes straight home to his room full of kidnapped women and gives them another speech about how superior he is – belligerent speeches are his love language. Then he covers the women in giant spiders while they sleep.

Note the parrot behind Henchman Bruno:

Based on his actions, this does not appear to be a true statement:

It’s a little funny to cast yourself ranting about your superior mind, taking on an entire town full of the dumbest people alive. He shows interest in the colonel’s daughter, and when her brother tries to pay him off, Joe takes the money and crushes the brother’s head, framing some bald guy for the crime. His entire scheme involves setting traps for the women until he finds the most superior among them, then impregnating her to begin a new master race, so women are dying every few scenes, including, finally, his would-be bride, precipitating Joe’s downfall.

The backrooms:

Joe has a prolonged hell-nightmare in color, then goes into town and gets captured by his enemies, but they are extremely dumb and slow. He wanders into a storm daring God to strike him down, and when God does, Joe says ahh that proves nothing. A surviving girl from the snake incident (I believe that was after the spiders) rats on him, so a torch mob chases Joe into a skeleton swamp. Supposedly he accepts religion in the moments before drowning in the swamp, but he’s filmed from behind, we don’t see his mouth moving, so I don’t buy it. Coffin Joe would return in Embodiment of Evil… forty years later.

by ·Comments Off on Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff)

A couple gets axe-murdered in the opening seconds, orphaning their two fully grown frizz-haired daughters who are pretending to be cavorting schoolgirls. Once they’ve grown into their actual ages they get exploited by the patriarchy, as far as I can understand – Kirsanoff is more of an editing nerd than a clear storyteller. The cad who has taken advantage of one (or both) of them gets his head smashed in by some third woman and her mustache-man, in a mirror to the open. I played the music on the disc, nice and sinister.

Orphan road:

Destitute new mother contemplating a watery grave:

Death to the cad:

by ·Comments Off on 9 to 5 (1980, Colin Higgins)

We visited my aunt Dolly the week Dolly Parton died and somehow it never came up. A week earlier I saw the Lily Tomlin Snow White fantasy sequence from this movie at a Hard Light pre-show and didn’t recognize it at all from having seen snippets of this on TV through the 1980s, back when everybody knew who Dabney Coleman was. Sterling Hayden doesn’t show up until the very end, after they’ve kidnapped their boss and improved the company without him. Dolly somehow got three Globe nominations for one movie, was beaten by Sissy Spacek (fair), Nastassja Kinski (??), and the song “Fame” (booo).

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 22: Birth, Death, and Homosexuality

The End of Sexual Taboos: Homosexuality and Other Variants
“Sexual permissiveness – certainly destructive of established mores – has been an aspect of the ideology of the avant-garde from its inception. For this movement is forever at war with society and its values.” He calls necrophilia “one of the unconquered areas of liberated cinema.”

–
The Bloodthirsty Fairy (1968, Roland Lethem)

Delivery men unleash the title character, who goes out and beats a man to death, strangles a nun, blinds a boy. She’s collecting severed penises in jars, and they’ve got a metaphorical way of showing her chop a guy’s dick off, which unfortunately involved killing a chicken. I’m not wowed by the church organ soundtrack, and why the nazi credits? Vogel just says “The swastika that opened the film changes into Nixon,” while Lightcone points out nazi stuff in his other films.

–
Fragment of Seeking (1946, Curtis Harrington)

Wow, I was not expecting that. Overdressed Guy creeps around to dramatic music, observing all the women and one smiley man in the vicinity, all sharp compositions. He goes inside and takes off the raincoat, hat and glasses, and wanders into a girl’s room and kisses her – and she becomes a skeleton. He goes back outside, the smiley man is unresponsive and all the women are skeletons. Goes in another door and someone inside slowly turns their head towards him – you expect another skeleton but it’s himself, wearing a wig. My first by Harrington, who seems like a Ken Anger-caliber 1940s weirdo (complimentary).

Mouseover to turn your lonely-boy self into your wig self:
image

–
The First Mystery: Birth

It is difficult to believe that until about two decades ago, films of this process were not permitted to be shown publicly. Hollywood provided euphemistic or fraudulent paraphrases of birth, occurring either off-screen (with shots of anxious relatives waiting outside) or confined to the woman’s face, sometimes showing genteel and manageable discomfort; blood or screams were missing, except in the case of “loose women” who had to be made to suffer.

Kirsa Nicholina (1970, Gunvor Nelson)

Somewhere out there is a person in their fifties who I just watched being born. Soundtrack is folk music performed by the father, oh no.

Vogel:

As the baby, still half in the mother’s body, begins to emerge, the mother smilingly takes its hand in her own and holds it. This tender gesture would not be possible in a hospital delivery because of drugs and antiseptic precautions. Perhaps, indeed, life should be lived as an open-ended adventure and “security” cast to the winds if we want to become human.

–
The Ultimate Secret: Death

Necrology (1971, Standish Lawder)
I think he’s filmed a crowd of people on a busy down-escalator and reversed the footage, so it looks like a column of people ascending, facing us. What I thought would be a grim work turns out to be a gag film with joke credits.

Vogel, after commentary decrying the lack of contemporary nazi-made concentration camp documentaries, refers to Necrology’s “endless victims… in unbroken, heart-rending succession, to heaven, hell, or oblivion.”

by ·Comments Off on Exit 8 (2025, Genki Kawamura)

Long-take digital cinema about people stuck in an endless videogame maze of subway tunnels. Not since A Quiet Place has a movie spelled out its rules this clearly on signage, and not since Cube has the puzzle been solved by a late-arriving autistic guy (a kid, in this case).

When a body meet a body passing through the tile. I picked the poster behind them as anomaly, but Escher’s first name really was Maurits:

You have to go through the loop correctly (turn back if you see anomaly, proceed if not) eight times in a row. We switch perspectives from Guy 1 to Kid to Guy 2. Each guy has parental anxiety and they keep stopping to get emotional or else the movie would be shorter. I liked the loop concept more than the psychological details. One run is all anomalies, peaking in an Atonement tunnel flood.

by ·Comments Off on Is God Is (2026, Aleshea Harris)

Good production design – I thought about The Black Phone which opens “DENVER 1978” and spends the next 90 minutes painstakingly creating Denver in 1978, while this one feels free to follow its own rules (they drive a 1970s car, use modern music and speech, nobody has cellphones).

Scarred twin sisters (from Kindred and I’m a Virgo) meeting their real mom Vivica A. Fox for the first time in memory, she says your dad ruined our lives. They track him via a mute strongman lawyer who pays people to beat him up (Don King in Ali) and find he’s got a new life with battered hotwife Janelle Monae and perfect twin boys. The girls follow their path and kill everybody. I didn’t think it was necessary for the dad to grab Racine while he’s burning to death, but I guess revenge is gonna have a cost.

by ·Comments Off on The Cremator (1969, Juraj Herz)

Practically a monologue by our lead guy, who becomes more demented and self-obsessed, devolving from a family man to a family-murdering nazi. He’s a recognizable type too, always talking in circles but without anything of his own to say, picking up outside ideas, internalizing and amplifying them. Sure we got grotesque lenses and fast cuts, but the thing that turns this from a series of scenes into one years-spanning monologue is the terrific transitions, where some Rope-like camera move will have him finishing a thought or a sentence in a new location or month than he started it. Herz would go on to even weirder things, like the vampire car movie.

Cremator vs. cat:

Cremator’s innocent son with his goofy smile:

Wax museum:

Unfortunately not a wax museum:

by ·Comments Off on Hokum (2026, Damian McCarthy)

Movie’s lesson is to bring a cutting tool wherever you go, and that despite The Monkey we should continue making Adam Scott horror movies. McCarthy’s Oddity was a slow burn with a delicious ending, he follows it up with a mostly fun movie with a bum ending, oh well.

Adam is an ornery writer staying at a rural hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes and/or finish his dreary conquistador novel and/or commit suicide. When he gets out of the hospital the hotel is closing for the season, the girl who’d rescued him is missing, and everyone suspects Psilocybin Jerry (David Wilmot of every Irish movie, also sinister boss of Little Joe) of kidnapping her but nobody can find Jerry (Adam strolls up to Jerry’s van and there he is).

I got a couple guys named Fergal and Mal mixed up, but obviously if one character is named Mal he’s the killer. Later on Mal has stuffed the girl in a dumbwaiter, shot Jerry with a crossbow and locked Adam in the burning hotel, all of which is complicated by ghosts in the honeymoon suite and witches in the cellar. Not only is the attempted real-world explanation of Adam’s spooky ordeals bad (he was drugged all along), they also try to make us care about the amended ending of his novel.

by ·Comments Off on Rose of Nevada (2025, Mark Jenkin)

Fishing boat time-warp story drifts from mysterious to calculated and back. George MacKay is a young family man who returns from a few days at sea to an alternate timeline where his wife isn’t around, while his loser/loner coworker (Green Room punk singer Callum Turner) returns to the loving family he never had. This is part of some whispery conspiracy set in place by the locals, aware of the ship’s power, replacing their lost son with an unhappy MacKay. It’s all fine story setup, but after Enys Men I’m mostly here for the colors and textures, and they don’t disappoint.

MDFMDF liked it, Sicinski not as much:

Jenkin still uses apparent light spills at the end of scenes to provide both punctuation and transition … one gets an interesting sense from Jenkin’s films, both formally and thematically, that they are deliberate throwbacks to older ways of life. Compare Rose of Nevada to a film like Leviathan (the fishing one), and you immediately notice how rusty and dilapidated this world, how it’s all on the verge of falling apart. Jenkin is a Cornishman, and so he has an understandable commitment to a rural, minoritarian way of life that must militate against its own extinction. Then again, depicting traditional methods as a ghost story, something long dead but haunting the present, seems like an odd way to make the argument.