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Ryan's Babe (2000)
Wut?
I'd never heard of this film but stumbled upon references to it as "worst Canadian film ever made" (worse than "Things"?!?), comparing it to "The Room," etc., so I became curious. And indeed it is comparable to "The Room," in that it is one of those movies where you think "Did whoever who made this lack familiarity with...er, how human beings talk and think and act?" It has a similar sort of bizarre disconnectedness from reality that does not appear intentional, though at times there are indications the film isn't taking itself entirely seriously.
Rather than "The Room's" unknowingly strange take on soap-operatic domestic drama, this is more of a kind of exquisite-corpse narrative, with the college-student protagonist endlessly tumbling through one inexplicable left-field adventure after another, usually involving him getting abducted by strangers. Then he escapes, and unlike any normal person who'd go "Well I guess I should return to my normal life/home now," he shrugs "This place seems OK" and gets a job in an unfamiliar town...until he's abducted again, and escapes again somewhere else. These episodes often encompass a woman who becomes obsessed with him, but whom he must flee after a while. It makes zero sense that at the end he seems to have decided he's ready now to happily accept the love of the lying, obsessed childhood-acquaintance woman who started this chain of nonsensical events in the first place.
All this may sound like some kind of interestingly surreal, dream-like narrative. But for the most part the movie seems to have no idea what it's portraying is at all unrealistic. Some of the performers obviously realize they it is, as they occasionally appear embarrassed or flummoxed at how to play un-playable scenes in which characters go from zero to hysteria within seconds for no reason at all. Often "Ryan's Babe's" story seems propelled by little more than locations that were available, or that the director wanted to visit. (I think the geographical progress here goes from Saskatoon to the Grand Canyon.) There are entirely arbitrary bits like a strip-club sequence--you can imagine someone telling the filmmaker, "Hey, I know a guy who can dance while doing karate moves!," and his saying "That should be in my movie!," because why not.
Oddball as it is, "Ryan's Babe" isn't as entertaining as it sounds--unless you add some sort of drinking game, which would no doubt make it a riot--because the filmmaking has a sort of flavorless TV-level competence in technical terms. And also because it lacks a Tommy Wiseau--it's like "The Room" if Greg Sestero were the lead. This guy is also a perfectly decent, typically handsome actor trying to maintain his dignity in slightly abashed, faintly bemused fashion through a ridiculous script. If "Babe" had a personality at the center as singularly off-key as its writing, it would be a one-of-a-kind trainwreck like...well, you-know-what. But instead it's a very eccentric personal project whose weirdness is muffled just enough by the reasonably-professional presentation to be more fun in theory than it actually is to watch.
Mindbender (1996)
Uri gets Russellfied
If you're looking for a serious treatment of Uri Geller's life and claimed talents (I'm not sure why you would, but...), this will not be what you're seeking. It's best approached as another of Ken Russell's biopics, like his earlier ones of composers and such--a silly, flamboyant, not very fact-adjacent fantasia on the most superficial aspects of a famous person's life.
The early going here at least has some of the enjoyably cartoonish/surreal imagery of something like "Tommy." But then it gets more visually pedestrian, reflecting the lowered budgetary scale. The script feels like a randomly tossed-together series of disconnected episodes, and the limply semi-spoofy tone (with the director's then-spouse camping mercilessly as Terence Stamp's wife) means the film lands just halfway between sending up its subject and being an earnest inquiry into his phenomenon.
Still, it's one of Russell's last relatively professional productions, so worth a look for fans. It's certainly more watchable than some of his subsequent glorified home movies. The ending is amusingly goofy, and Geller himself appears in an audience-participation coda that supposedly helps you repair a broken watch/clock with sheer mind power.
Demonwarp (1988)
When Bad Isn't Good Enough
This is one of those films whose potential camp value is wrecked by its attempting to not take itself all that seriously...the problem being that its sense of humor is even dumber than the other elements. Some nubile youth (several women with implants take their shirts off throughout) rent a cabin, then get attacked by Bigfoot, or something like. As the survivors attempt to flee back to civilization, other characters turn up just to increase the body (and breast) count.
Eventually there are sorta-zombies, sorta-Satanists, maybe space aliens, I dunno. Which, let's face it, sounds great. But all of it is so limply silly and lethargic, it isn't much fun at all. The cast is so obviously underwhelmed by this material, for once George Kennedy doesn't seem the most bored participant. I don't know how many beers it would take to make this movie entertaining, but you'd probably pass out by the time that mark was passed anyway.
The Happy Hooker (1975)
Plays like a pilot for a TV series
...by which I mean it is incredibly bland given the subject matter. In fact it was the only theatrical feature from a very prolific TV director, and feels like a lethargic endless episode of, say, "Love American Style." I wanted to see it because I figured it couldn't be THAT bad--after all, Lynne Redgrave was a wonderful actor and particularly talented comedienne. But for the most part this isn't even played for comedy, and her Xaviera is just a nice woman with an accent, some funny outfits, and no personality whatsoever. You can't blame Redgrave--the movie has no perspective on its subject, beyond a weird innocuousness, so she seems entirely left to her own devices. And apparently she was only cast a few days before they started filming, so she had no time to prepare for it.
It's a dull enterprise that is neither sexy or funny (let alone dramatic or insightful), and too slick in a televisual way to have a whiff of drive-in sleaze, which it would have actually benefitted from. So it's a film about the decade's most famous sex worker that feels like a PG-rated costume party with a "prostitute" theme that the attendees are too self-conscious even to realize in particularly naughty fashion--this is one of the most CLOTHED movies dominated by women of the decade. I've forgotten which of the other "Happy Hooker" movies I've seen, apart from remembering that they're all bad. But I expected this one to be a little better than the Joey Heatherton and Connie Stevens ones, and while I remember nothing about them, it may actually be the worst of them, just cuz it's so blah.
Spasmo (1974)
A good-looking, bloodless muddle
Lenzi claimed he had to rewrite and otherwise reimagine the film from scratch when he purportedly took it over from Fulci, but it's hard to imagine the original material being MORE of a mess. Character behaviors and plot are immediately senseless, and not in a "dream logic" way, but just haplessly so, with the pseudo-psychoanalytic wrapup feeble as an explanation for the murky events that precede it. The actors, esp. Robert Hoffman, do what they can--which admittedly in Felicity Kendall's case was never very much--but the script is so arbitrary, their emotional expressions are meaningless.
For a giallo, this is a weirdly bloodless affair (purportedly George Romero added murder scenes for the American release, but those aren't evident in the print I saw, which had digitally blurred the occasional partial nudity), with a rush of death scenes as flashbacks crammed in at the very end--to no effect, since we didn't know and don't care that any of these people had died. The film is well-produced in some nice settings, well-shot in widescreen format etc., but its.senselessness results in an uninvolving experience--there is little excitement or suspense here because we never grasp just what is happening or why. Until, of course, the last reel, when "all is explained" in a way just as arbitrary and silly as everything before it.
Mother, May I? (2023)
Answer the damn question already
This is another one of those movies that has nothing seriously wrong with it beyond being a 100-minute movie with about 20 minutes of script, tops. Kyle Gellner is a very good actor who singlehandedly achieves some moments of real interest; Chris Mulkey is always a welcome presence, although wasted in a nondescript role. I wasn't familiar with the female lead, and she's decent enough. But the film makes her "possessed" by the male lead's dead mother (or is she really....???) too fast, too soon, and as written/played that character is a trite Mommy Dearest stereotype of haughty, controlling divahood.
There's no real plot, just a premise, and not enough psychological or directorial complexity to make the central ambiguity (is this a supernatural situation, or is the girlfriend just role-playing as part of her "therapy"?) at all interesting once we've grasped it. This is also one of those movies where you wait and wait, hoping that something will finally "happen"...and then it just ends. Pffft. Your time has been wasted, and that of the cast, though this very thin material is handled competently enough.
But should it have been handled at all? Not without extensive rewrites first. This director needs a screenwriting collaborator next time out. He's not a talented enough stylist to make something substantial out of almost nothing.
Damaged Lives (1933)
Edgar Ulmer, Budgetary Genius
Ulmer's first U. S. film has been classified as an exploitation cheapie a la "Reefer Madness," but despite the sensational subject matter (VD), some brief grisly medical footage, and a supposed budget of about $15,000, it looks like the figurative million bucks. Part of that can be attributed to the director's ability to get the maximum amount of style and production value from minimal resources, as his later career proved over and over. But quite likely those resources weren't quite so minimal after all: In truth "Damaged Lives" was made by Columbia, no doubt making full use of first-rate crew, elaborate sets, et al. From its higher-profile productions. There is nothing cheap about it, and the performers are also a definite cut above what you'd find in an actual tent-show exploitation pic of the era. Although that's how it was released--the studio decided it was too embarrassed to release this drama about a taboo issue under its own name, so it created a fake distribution arm and basically let it play the same kinds of gigs as "Reefer," "Mom and Dad," and other shocking "adults only" titles.
So anyway, that explains why this is a very glossy film for a supposed Poverty Row enterprise. Ulmer is terrifically assured already as a filmmaker, and if the script is not exactly sophisticated, he nonetheless manages a significant feat in getting pretty good performances from actors despite the feeble lines they have to deliver. Short as it is, though, the movie starts to plod when it gets to the horrible-consequences-of-sin part, with the last few scenes' really dragging pacewise. As nicely done as it all is, there still isn't enough depth or weight to ballast the eventual gloom, and of course it's more than a mite simplistic that the lesson learned is basically "Fool around...and you'll end up a suicide!"
So, worth seeing as a very precocious early feature for a notable director, though very much constrained in the end by the rather dully earnest treatment of a "shocking" theme--this is a much better-crafted movie than most you might compare it to from the period, but at the same time that means it lacks some of those genuine cheapies' giddy unintentional comedy.
Roma contro Roma (1964)
Colorful silliness
This is no "Hercules in the Haunted World," and it has no actual zombies (there's a sort of ghost army, plus some people who are hypnotized)--nor, perhaps more surprisingly, any musclemen--but it is definitely above the peplum average for incorporating some fantasy elements in a colorful way. The bad guys worship their bad god on a set that looks like it's left over from "Cobra Woman," and there are some simple, tacky but fun superimposition effects towards the end.
It's not a truly memorable film or even a particularly coherent (let alone original) fantasy, but if you've sat through enough Italian sword-n-sandal epics, you know how cheap and boring many of them can be. So this one definitely gets points for trying harder, and providing some sort of cheesily psychedelic effects along with the usual battle scenes and palace intrigue.
Die Frau meiner Träume (1944)
The hills are alive with the sound of denial
This was sort of a last hurrah for big-budget Nazi cinema, as unsurprisingly the failing war effort was draining resources for such frivolities. But it makes a big effort to provide a booster shot of escapism to audiences who were no doubt in desperate need of it by then. This is basically a German equivalent to a Betty Grable movie--a gaudy color extravaganza with a silly romantic comedy plot and some pretty lavish production numbers, plus of course excuses for the star to run around half-dressed. (Though that's still more dressed than Grable would have been.) Of course, the Hollywood version would be brassy, while this is more kitschy, with an operetta-ish rather than Broadway feel. (The popular female star Marika Romm indeed performed in many stage operettas after the war.)
The plot, involving a runaway stage star taken in by two mountain-tunnel engineers who become rivals for her love, is nothing special, with no great chemistry between the competent leads and routine comedy relief from supporting actors. What is worth looking at are the big numbers, which are well-sung and produced. But they're not really INTERESTING, in terms of ideas or choreography or anything else. It's weird to see some "novelty" bits incorporating "exotic" foreign music and costume motifs, given the Nazis' extreme notions of racial/cultural superiority. (For the same reason, it's also a little strange that none of the leading characters are blond.)
Anyway, this is a curio fascinating in historical terms, but no great find as entertainment--for all the high production polish on display, the material is innocuous and its execution lacks much personality. I'm sure it did take Germans' minds off the war for a couple hours. But it can't hold a candle to the better Hollywood screen musicals of the same era.
Get Mean (1975)
Eccentric ideas, mediocre execution
This curious very late spaghetti western really goes out on a conceptual limb, sending Tony Anthony's rascally Wild West "Stranger" across the Atlantic with a Spanish princess. In Europe he somehow gets mixed up with both Elizabethan-era Spaniards and Viking-style "barbarians," while another character seems to parody Shakespeare's Richard III.
It's goofy stuff that has been compared to "Army of Darkness," and does bear a superficial resemblance in its goofy quasi-historical incongruities. But while the movie does have a sense of humor, it's pretty crude--rather than absurdist, which would much better suit this out-there concept. It's also particularly hard now to take the simpering old-school screaming-queen stereotype played by the star's brother.
Anthony's sort of proto-Lebowski wiseacre carries things to an extent, and the film has an impressive scale at times, particularly since the Euro western genre was way past its commercial peak in 1975. But the direction by a mostly undistinguished toiler in Italian B movies (he did make a handful of decent giallos, straight-faced spaghettis and other genre entries) doesn't rise to the occasion, and beyond its premise nor does the script. This is one of those enterprises that sounds so deliciously nutty it can hardly go wrong...until you actually watch it, and realize it's not nearly as much fun as it sounded.
I've seen contrary information on the film's commercial fate, some indicating it ran into distribution problems, others indicating it made $10 million (which would have been a lot then, and seems highly improbable). I suspect the truth is that it didn't do well, because apparently Anthony had hoped to kick off a whole new series of "Stranger" films. Instead, he never made another--which suggests financiers didn't want to take the risk.
Kyûketsu dokuro-sen (1968)
Sometimes style is enough
This low-budget horror movie very much benefits from the typically excellent craftsmanship expended even on such low-end efforts by major studios in Japan at the time. I can't concur with others that it reminded me at all of "The Fog," apart from liekwise involving ghostly vengeance for death at sea. The script is a bit confused, particularly once we get towards the end, when in addition to the supernatural element it turns out there's a sort of mad-scientist thing going on--making for a narrative agenda rather sillier and more overloaded than this movie can pull off.
Still, that doesn't matter so much, because the atmospherics are very effective in their widescreen B&W handsomeness, despite the fairly cheap FX. (Particularly the kind of tank miniatures more familiar from Godzilla-type films, with "stormy seas" clearly not much more than bathtub splashing in slo-mo.) The performances are decent enough, and while the story isn't terribly scary, there's a nice mood of creeping dread--you can almost feel the ocean air permeating inland, bringing ghosts and violent death with it.
Nattlek (1966)
One definition of Eurotrash
Pauline Kael called this movie a combination of "the worst of Fellini and the worst of Bergman," and glib as that sounds, she's right--it exactly locates the leading pretensions of the era's art cinema flavors, and combines them in a particularly superficial and flashy way that lacks either great director's depth, originality or humor. The rather confused structure interweaves past and present as the grown heir to a country estate brings his fiancee there, where he recalls his difficult childhood being alternately amused, abused and ignored by self-absorbed parents. The latter use their wealth and privilege to be kingpins of a cartoonishly decadent social scene. But the film isn't satire--we're meant to take its grotesques very seriously as some statement about, you know, Society, though they only resemble figures from other movies. At the end we're apparently to understand that the present-day characters have somehow been liberated from the chains of the past, but that catharsis rings hollow, particularly since those characters are just as one-dimensional as the wealthy sinners in the flashbacks.
Zetterling's other directorial movies are said to be good, so maybe this was just her auteurist folly, all too obviously derivative of other auteurs' follies. But the imitative quality robs of it any genuine emotion, or even pleasure in flamboyance, though it's well-shot and edited. There's some nudity, a scene about (though not graphically depicting) masturbation, and other content that must have seemed terribly shocking in 1966. (Indeed, the film's most lasting notoriety came from Shirley Temple Black having quit a festival jury in a highly publicized huff over the inclusion of this "pornography." Little did she know how much more pornographic movies would get, or how soon.) But the problem here is that there's nary a single moment that feels organic--everything is trying so HARD to be "shocking." Which pretty much kills any shock value, at least for me.
Anyway, it's a garish, self-important but empty-headed effort that was never a good movie, but now serves as a vivid time capsule of just how merrily (and self-consciously) taboos were being freshly broken at the time of its making. Somehow the overstaged quasi-orgies and such aren't much fun, even without the equally bogus "But think about the child!!" hand-wringing accompanying them. But if you wanna see a personification of what was then called (among other things) "the New Permissiveness," this is it, in a nutshell. Of COURSE Shirley Temple was appalled. You can practically sense the filmmakers congratulating themselves that she would be.
Isabel (1968)
Slow, dull, obscure
Bujold was married to this director at the time, and they made several films together. She plays a young woman who returns from Montreal to the rural Quebec community she was raised in because her mother is dying--though unfortunately she's already passed away by the time her daughter gets there. She sticks around ostensibly to care for a spinster uncle, though he doesn't really seem in need of care mentally or physically. She meets a handsome young newcomer (Mark Strange), who at first vaguely frightens her, then doesn't. She fends off some grabby-handed locals. She sees ghosts, or perhaps specters from her own troubled past here. None of this really goes anywhere.
The prospect of seeing Bujold in a "Repulsion"-type thriller is appealing, because she's almost always a compelling actor...but this movie can't decide whether it wants to be "Repulsion," "Straw Dogs," a ghost story, or what. We get hints that her character may be mentally unstable. Yet that turns out to be sort of a red herring, as does really every plot element in the very sketchy script. There's a sexual/violent assault towards the end that comes out of nowhere, and is so darkly staged you can't really tell what's going on anyway.
For a while the atmosphere is intriguing enough, despite the irritating, then-voguish overuse of jump cuts. But after a while it becomes clear the movie can't/won't develop any of its ideas enough to generate suspense, character insight, or any kind of point to the narrative, and that Bujold alone can't carry the whole undercooked enterprise. One always hopes these obscure, often hard-to-find Canadian features will turn out to be gold. But so frequently it's the case--as here--that they are forgotten because they were conceptually muddled and executed without enough boldness of style to compensate. This is just another theoretically interesting misfire that is ultimately rather tedious and unrewarding to watch.
Sumpah orang minyak (1956)
Slick and strange
I saw this Run Run Shaw production on YT, where it was posted as being from 1958--evidently confusing it with a different "Oily Man" film from that year which appears (as far as I can tell) to be lost. They and other films are based on a figure of Malay folklore, although here the "Oily Man" doesn't turn up until the last 15 minutes or so...and you could say it's an irrational appearance, since the hero has been wronged exclusively by men, yet as the "Oily Man" he avenges himself only on women.
Anyway, before it becomes a monster movie (with a great, bizarre ending) in the last lap, this is an odd mixture of other things. It starts out as a sort of "Hunchback of Notre Dame" thing in a remote village, where bullies torment the artistically talented but shunned protagonist because he is misshapen of face and body. When things go from bad to worse, suddenly he is in a studio-soundstage "heaven" of sorts, where he is allowed one wish--to be handsome--and falls in love with a beautiful elf. (At least that's how she's identified in the subtitles.)
This section is goofy and fun, with musical numbers. Unfortunately, he is not allowed to stay there, and his triumphant return to Earth as a good-looking, elegantly dressed man goes wrong when he breaks the one rule he had promised to observe in exchange for his physical transformation. His punishment is to become..."The Oily Man." Though as I said, it doesn't make much sense that in this guise he runs around attacking innocent women, rather than his erstwhile tormenters.
This is a lively, eccentric and polished movie that doesn't fit into any precise genre category, but manages to pull off its sometimes-clashing different elements (sob story, celestial fantasy, horror, musical) with sufficient professionalism that it all provides giddy entertainment value--even if it hardly seems an organic mix. Apparently the central actor was the preeminent Malay screen star of this era, a period that is probably worth investigating further, as I really don't know a thing about it and quite enjoyed this somewhat campy but well-made artifact. In terms of production values, it's on the level of an above-average U. S. major-studio "B" film of the era, albeit with a few scenes featuring large #'s of extras as dancers/villagers. Or a "cast of hunderds," as the opening credits rather awkwardly put it.
New Year's Evil (1980)
Annoying killer, annoying target
This Golan-Globus production is a bit slicker than most non-major-studio slashers of the era, and the polish helps it move along painlessly--except for the onscreen victims of course. Roz Kelly plays an obnoxiously self-absorbed radio celebrity hosting a New Year's Eve "New Wave" bash--we get a lot of generic rock music located somewhere between lesser 70s power pop and 80s lite metal. (The musicians in the presumably fictitious bands playing probably grew their hair out and tried to be "the next Poison" a few years later.) Before her hosting duties begin, she gets a call from an anonymous, vocally distorted man who insists she call him "Eeeeeeeevillllll" and says he's going to kill on the hour each other before midnight, at which point it will be her turn. Trouper that she is--or perhaps just too abrasive to care--our protagonist goes on with the show, while the killer gradually approaches the venue, killing people on the way.
The story is pretty thin, such as it is. There's a late hint of something unsavory going on between the heroine's son and husband (it's unclear whether he's the boy's father), both of whom have cause to hate her guts, but the film doesn't have the nerve to really "go there." It aims mild satire at both the Hollywood and punk scenes, but those caricatures are too familiar to be effective. Roz Kelly was said to be a piece of work offscreen--she acknowledged she was known as "pushy," which is maybe what got her sacked from her most famous role on "Happy Days"--so this role seems tailored to her as a glam, flashy but unsympathetic entertainer who is oblivious to others (even at her own peril) and bosses everybody around. The villain's "scary voice" on phone calls is ridiculous, his dialogue worse, his motivation flimsy, but then you don't go into a movie like this one expecting much psychological depth.
Despite the fair number of deaths, none of them are particularly memorable in deed or staging; the only good idea is a climactic scene in which someone is very unhappy to find themselves dangling from the bottom of an elevator as it rockets up and plunges down the shaft.
In short, more watchable than some more poorly-produced slashers of the time, but just OK, with both a protagonist and antagonist that are a little too effectively annoying as personalities.
Ghostkeeper (1981)
A wintry chill
Atmospherics go a long way, if not quite far enough, in this Canadian tax-shelter film that apparently ran out of money mid-production, so they basically had to improvise the remainder of a shootable script without funding. Which does explain how there's more of a premise than a real plot here, with things never quite kicking into high gear in terms of either narrative or action--though there's enough creepiness and death for this to unquestionably qualify as a horror film of sorts.
The three snowmobilers staying at a resort--two obnoxious enough that you can guess they won't likely live to see the final fadeout--go off-trail during heavy snow, ending up at a seemingly abandoned old hunting lodge. But it's not quite abandoned. There's a weird older lady creeping about, and then it turns out some others, more elusive as well as murderous.
The remote winter setting gives the movie a nice visual flavor, and an eerie score is a big help in maintaining some suspense in a progress that otherwise might seem close to rudderless. Despite the sparse writing, the film is well-paced enough to hold interest. But it's more an example of resourceful people making something of very little under difficult circumstances, than it is of those people creating something of real substance. You do have to wonder just how different the movie would have been if the funding hadn't fallen through--was there a more ambitious (or at least better-developed) story in the original script? Maybe we'll never know.
Bloody New Year (1987)
Carnival Oops I Mean Island of Miscellaneous Horrors
This final feature by UK schlockmeister Warren--apparently so unhappy an experience he didn't want to make any more--has an enjoyably daft, anything-goes approach to horror that would be more fun if the film were better made. Six youths visit a fun fair, then run afoul of some nasty carnies. (The highpoint of this is when they manage to shake off from a speeding vehicle the three carnies, each of whom magically falls onto a separate, conveniently located pile of empty cardboard boxes.) Then the youths are suddenly on a boat, which runs aground near an island occupied by an abandoned resort hotel that has apparently been frozen in time since 1960.
Of course, our protagonists are soon prey to terrors and death, but even basic binding fantasy logic is missing. There are ghosts, zombies, monsters, inanimate objects (appliances, a wooden carving, a snooker table, an elevator wall) that "come to life"...even those malevolent carnies return, though god only knows how they got here. It's a little like a low-budget "Shining"--except as arbitrary in its perils as something like "Hausu"--except with little filmmaking style or basic competence to make the nuttiness seem more inspired than just silly.
We've all seen worse, and the sheer randomness of the ideas provides a certain amount of entertainment value. Still, this falls short as both "so bad it's good" and the kind of movie that can actually pull off its deliberate senselessness with panache. It's a medium-hot mess that isn't exactly dull, and has the virtue of not being a formulaic slasher, but is just too sloppily put together to provide more than a few disbelieving yoks.
A Hard Look (2000)
Fun, but insubstantial
I disagree with the other reviewer here--most of his criticisms are valid enough (if more vehement than I felt), but I don't think the film makes Laura Gemser look stupid. She just has an amused, flippant attitude towards her participation in the series--she makes it clear that she didn't care if the films weren't much, she was just happy to be paid to travel to interesting far-flung locations--so her memories aren't terribly specific or extensive. Sylvia Kristel is more articulate, but then this is the role she'll always be known for, and she was taken somewhat seriously as a sexual liberator (rather than just an exploitation movie star) in that capacity at the time.
Some of the other interviewees are indeed trivial--Patrick Bachau gets a lot of screentime despite his only being in one film, and shoehorning Dennis Hopper in is particularly irrelevant. It's also annoying whenever Alex Cox is onscreen, playing a sort of "host" for this superficial overview. He's not as funny as he thinks he is, and god knows he's made enough bad movies that he shouldn't be condescending to anybody else's. Nonetheless, this is OK as an introduction/homage to the Emmanuelle movies, though it's hardly exhaustive and tends to jump around a lot. There are some interesting anecdotes, even if sometimes (as between the recall of Kristal and Just Jaekin) they clash with one another. But hopefully someday someone will make a better documentary on the subject. This one feels like a glorified blu-ray extra.
An Eye for an Eye (1973)
Dull, square handling of outrageous idea
Like the director's prior "The Pink Angels"--an incongruous, campy gay biker movie made at the height of the conventional biker-movie trend--this is a movie with a small cult following because of its outrageous concept, but hard to actually sit through because it's so poorly executed. A children's TV puppet show host who already seems rather creepily infantile (like Peewee Herman minus the humor) becomes aware that some children in his audience and neighborhood are the subject of abuse from their variably drunken, slovenly or just sadistic parents. So he begins stalking and murdering them, as police investigate the trail of crimes.
It's not at all a bad idea, but "Psychopath" aka "An Eye for an Eye" seems oblivious to how badly its elements match up. The actor who plays "Mr. Rabbey" (the kidshow host) gives one of those bug-eyed, over-the-top performances that at first makes you think "Where's he gonna go with this?!?" Then you realize he's not going anywhere with it--that weird, artificial, simultaneously effeminate and childish affect is all he's got in his bag of tricks. It makes his character silly, rather than frightening, and underlines the absurdity of other, normal-acting figures not discerning that Mr. Rabbey is a mental case from the get-go. The other performances range from shrill caricatures (the bad parents) to routine competence (everyone else).
But given its bad-taste conceit, you'd think "Psychopath" would have some fun with it. Nuh-uh. It's dully earnest, with no flair for suspense or even violence (the latter is generally kept to an on-screen minimum), the utterly middle-of-the-road aesthetic of an early 1970s TV movie, and seemingly no awareness at all that even Mr. Rabbey's TV show comes off as grotesque. (We're told the kids just love him, but that's laughable--Anthony Perkins in "Psycho" would have more juvenile appeal.) You'd think this story could only be played as black comedy, yet the film is as simplistically sincere about saying "child abuse is bad" as a PSA. And that social ill is presented in such crude terms, you can't even accept the sincerity of the message--it's on the level as a warning of "stranger danger" painting that peril as consisting of middle-aged men in trenchcoats skulking behind suburban shrubbery.
As a curio, this might be worth looking at for five minutes, in which span you'll get as much as you're going to get from the whole feature--nothing improves, or surprises, later on. But it's pretty abysmal, and even the elements that are relatively professional (in terms of technical polish and some performances) only serve to blandly take the edge off whatever tension or shock value was intended here.
Panna a netvor (1978)
Pretty, but not much else
I've certainly enjoyed other Eastern European fairy tale/fantasy films, so this came as a little bit of a disappointment. It's got all the lush visual invention of others you might have seen (if on a somewhat reduced production scale), but there's really nothing else going on, not much narrative drive or chemistry between the characters/actors.
It starts out promisingly enough as a more folk-horror-ish take on the familiar tale, but as soon as the vapid heroine is in the "beast's" lair as his willing captive, any imagination outside production design and photography ceases. She's vanilla-sweet, he's sorta scary but trying not to scare her...nothing happens, we just wait an hour for the inevitable transformation to occur. You'd think this would be leavened somewhat by glimpses of the homelife left behind, but that too is unimaginative--the heroine's sisters are just Cinderella's stepsisters, vain and trivial, caricatures too monotonous to be entertaining.
Apart from the film's atypically gloomy look (the "beast's" castle is much more damp and decrepit than usual), it just doesn't bring any fresh perspective, dramatic urgency, or much else to a familiar story told in bare-bones style. The beast's look IS a little odd (in that he's halfway between Cocteau's vision and a "bird man," not unlike the guy in Vadim's stupid "Night Games" a couple years later), but that's not enough to make much difference.
H2S (1969)
Apparently barely-released sci-fi fantasy whatsit
This movie was apparently barely released, then forgotten, and has been basically inaccessible for decades. There were a lot of misfired experiments in its era, but god knows this is hardly among the worst of them-or even the least commercial.
But then, it's also one of those movies that seems almost entirely to have been created for the sake of its set design, rather than the other way around. There's not much to the script, beyond a familiar bare outline (moderately rebellious individual rebels against controlling society), and the point is vague because the satire (or whatever) is so subservient to the visual design. Nonetheless, the visual invention (plus an interesting Ennio Morricone score) is enough to hold your attention. Most of the interiors (and even some exteriors) are almost entirely white-on-white, with an op-art feel amplified by costume and sculpture elements.
You can see why the young male British lead didn't have a major career (he's effortful without being very appealing), Lionel Stander is OK as his chief tormentor, and the only other actor to make an impression is Carol Andre as a somewhat crazy young woman the hero shacks up with (in makeshift igloo) after fleeing the oppressive society, and before returning to it.
There are some moments that anticipate aspects of "THX-1139" and "A Clockwork Orange," although of course without the stronger narrative or guiding directorial visions of either. What does it all mean? Not a lot, I'd guess. But "H2S" is still one fo those films whose indulgence and eccentricity couldn't have happened at any other time, and if you keep your expectations modest, it's a rather enjoyable curio-lively enough not to be just a failed experiment, even if the humor that leavens it isn't necessarily its strongest point. I'm giving it a six, which is a little generous, but a five would seem too stingy.
L'arcano incantatore (1996)
A slow but rich exercise in gothic style
This lesser-known Avati wade into the fantastical is nonetheless highly accomplished, even if you handle that the supernatural elements don't really kick in until halfway through, and then not in a terribly flamboyant way. A disgraced young seminary student is dispatched to the remote castle of an aristocratic hermit rumored to be dabbling in occult matters. (And some locals have disappeared, adding fuel to the rumors.) Needless to say, the new helpmate eventually discovers this is true.
It's a slow but genuinely sinister tale that is very well put across by the two lead actors and Avati's great care with the visual presentation--this is hardly an extravagant production, but the modestly scaled period production design, the compositions and camera movement convey much more atmosphere than many a more expensive, FX-laden enterprise. There's probably not enough "payoff" for those who want conventional horror content in terms of kills and gore, but this is an admirably restrained exercise in supernatural creepiness that never goes slack.
Adam 2 (1968)
Striking minimalist adult animation feature
Why isn't this movie better known? It's very much in the Soviet era Eastern European animation tradition of sardonic, macabre, implicitly political satire/allegory, though you'd think its relatively rare feature-length status among such films would have resulted in a larger reputation. It's a plotless (and almost completely wordless) but always engaging series of surreal forced metaphormoses for our everyman hero, whom institutions, industry and nature itself seem compelled to constantly force into new, reductive incarnations--as if any amount of individuality were something to be rigidly stamped out. The animation style is composed primarily of stark, simple graphics, often with a collage element--you might be a bit reminded of Terry Gilliam's such contributions to "Monty Python's Flying Circus," and indeed it seems likely he was influenced by this director's work, though the latter's impact is more deadpan than antic. You can't exactly say "Adam 2" is a "delight," since its message is essentially so depressing--human individuality inexorably squashed by one insidious system after another--yet, well, it sort of is anyway. It's inventive, humorous, and always arresting to look at, turning an economy of means into a bold aesthetic.
De dødes tjern (1958)
Fair supernatural mystery
This was a bit of a disappointment after having heard very intriguing things about it. A group of friends go to a lakeside rural cabin that has "mysterious disappearance"/haunting-type legends attached to it, and where one visitor's brother was last known to be--but he's seemingly disappeared. The setup is fine, but the movie plays a bit like a television omnibus hour from the era (like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or "Suspense") in that its generic, overlit professional craftsmanship doesn't really suit the material--nor does the over-emphasis on character comedy. There's way too much talking, and when all is finally explained, it's a garrulous muddle of the pedantic and the fantastical that is offered in the undifferentiating lecture tones of a science class. This would actually be a better movie if it were less slickly produced--but then, others found it highly "atmospheric," while I thought that was its worst lack, so go figure.
The Punk (1993)
Mildly interesting cultural time capsule
I had been trying to see this rare later movie the director of "Myra Breckinridge" and "Joanna" for decades, with no luck, then as these things happen it suddenly turned up in an obscure corner of the internet.
My amazement and gratitude ultimately outweigh the fact that, well, it's not that good--but hey, it's off the bucket list at last. You can tell the film is trying hard to be something along the lines of "My Beautiful Laundrette," with a similar flippant mix of culture-clash seriocomedy amongst various stratas of London. But particularly compared to that breakout, which deservedly got wide theatrical release (after premiering on TV), this is clearly a TV project that is not particularly well-written, unevenly cast, and rather sloppily directed, though it has its moments.
The leads are appealing enough, but the very loose "updating" of "Romeo & Juliet" is never anything more than a gimmick; the material never seriously addresses that source, it just occasionally remembers to riff off it a bit. As for the "punk" milieu, well, by 1993 that wasn't exactly breaking news, and the best you can say about the treatment here is that it provides some snapshot of a scene at a point when nobody much was paying attention anymore. (Not that the music on tap is particularly "punk," anyhow.) Anyway, this is more in the realm of an amiable goof with a few charming moments than anything of substance or even much style.
I wish Sarne had had more directorial opportunities, but he only partially manages to transcend the budgetary and conceptual limitations here. It's a mildly cute, contrived movie--sorta like a cheaper, pseudo-punkier version of a John Hughes joint like "Pretty in Pink," another quasi-edgy teen romcom--that does not leave much lasting impression.