Kennelco Film Diary

(1974) dir. Luigi Batzella
viewed: 08/18/08

Talk about suffering for art.  Or maybe suffering because of it.

Nude for Satan was meant to be a nice pairing for a double feature with Vampyros lesbos (1971).  I hope that you can imagine the theme of the pairing from the titles alone.  However, I didn’t manage to watch them both in one night, and it’s just as well.

Nude for Satan is definitely one of the worst films that I have seen in ages.  From the camera work, the special effects, the half-assed narrative to the downright dullness, it’s really not worth the effort. 

The story follows a doctor who discovers a beautiful woman in a car crash on a desolate country road.  He goes up to a mansion on a hill to seek help and finds (literally) behind door number 1: a cackling man lying on the ground with something like a rod through his neck, then behind door number 2: a sex scene (which he shudders at more quickly than the creepy dead guy.)  And yet, he keeps looking.  Like maybe the telephone is behind door number 3?

There is this whole duality thing, with doppelgangers of the man and the woman.  And there is the devil,…I guess.  The devil likes orgies.  And then there is this very bizarre, quite humorous really, scene in a big spider web with the phoniest-looking spider ever made.  I actually thought to myself that Ed Wood, Jr. might have enjoyed this film.

There is one other scene, the only cool effect, I thought, where the woman, confronted by the satan guy suddenly flashes naked like he has just undressed her with his eyes.  In the film in which the camera effects are as amateurish as you can possibly imagine, this was the one trick that worked.  You gotta take it for what you can.

In the end, it seems that the whole narrative is somewhat of a bizarre dream, brought on by the car crash, which, though one of the most cliche narrative devices around, somehow surprised me here.  Maybe just because I wasn’t expecting it.  This film does make Vampyros lesbos look like Citizen Kane (1941).

(1971) dir. Jesus Franco
viewed: 08/16/08

You know, it’s funny, but I’d never seen a Jesus Franco film before.  He’s one of these living legends of cult/horror/exploitation/weirdness.  Still kickin’.  My interest in this film (yeah, I know the title suggests a lot), stemmed from my childhood, from a book I had on zombie films, featuring stills and movie posters.  The titilating title stayed with me and finally, the time had come.

Vampyros lesbos is exploitation.  The unbelievably beautiful Susann Korda is the female victim/inheritor of Dracula’s legend.  The film is a mod and odd take on the traditional Bram Stoker tale, playing the characters with sexual obsession, love, repression, and pop psychology.

It’s both arty and trashy, which is probably what appeals about Franco’s work.  It’s only arty enough, really, to recognize its artiness.  It’s only trashy enough to stoke some tantalizing images of lesbian vampire love and lots of comfortable nudity in the days before plastic surgery.

While it doesn’t quite reach the sublime pleasures of Doris Wishman’s Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), it does reckon of other European horror films from the period of exploration and exploitation, Daughters of Darkness (1971) also comes to mind.  It’s not horrid, no.  It’s strange, semi-pretentious, mucho-camp art trash. 

Is that not a form of beauty somewhere?

And it has this crazy-ass groovin’ soundtrack.  Weirdness.

(1954) dir. Jacques Becker
viewed: 08/14/08

“Hands off the loot.”  That’s what Touchez pas au grisbi roughly translates to.  It’s French noir, an interesting contrast to American noir or even American filmmaking in general in some ways.  It’s one of several notable French noir or crime films that I’ve been meaning to see.

The story, about a suave but world-weary aging criminal who has made his last big haul and is ready to get out of the game, isn’t something all that unusual in a sense, but the film’s focus on the fluctuating morality and integrity of Max, played by Jean Gabin, is where the focus is.  The girls still flock to him even in his middle age, in part due to his suave character, perhaps in part to his flush pocketbook, and while he admires their charms (breasts are squeezed and complimented explicitly in ways Hollywood wouldn’t have allowed), he’s ultimately a bit of a loner, but also a dedicated friend to his pal Riton, who he has to pull out of trouble.

There is a surprisingly violent and exciting confrontation toward the end of the film, which is a stark contrast to these characters’ outer demeanors.  When things get tough, the smooth, well-heeled criminals slap people around and grab their machine guns.  Their ability to become remorseless and capable of violence demonstrates the oppositional hearts in these fellows.

Ultimately Max throws down for his buddy, a friendship that he questions in a “thinking” voice-over.  What does this all signify?  It’s kinda complicated, I suppose.  It’s a humanist portrait for the most part, one that shows some of the futility of life’s actions and leaves with a sensibility.  It’s definitely a good film.  I liked the fact that these guys are tossing slang around like American counterparts in these little French cafes, middle-aged criminals, sipping coffee, with showgirls.  Who knew?

(2007) dir. Tamara Jenkins
viewed: 08/12/08

The Savages is a family dramedy about dealing with a parent with dementia, coping with estrangement, self, and many other things.  Oddly, it reminded me to an extent of a sort of female Noah Baumbach story, a New York middle-class tale of family, in which the characters are talented and intelligent, though plagued by emotional traumas of different kind.  Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) is more of a backward glance, and in some ways, much more funny.  The Savages, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, centers the story around Laura Linney’s character, a 39-year old woman from a broken middle class family who aspires to be a playwright, yet is stymied in her self in her relationships and profession.

Jenkins previously made The Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), which I remember liking quite well.  It was also about a dysfunctional family, and I remember it being pretty funny.  It’s not that The Savages needs to be funny.  How funny is the slow descent of an elderly family member into dementia and death?  Certainly, I think, this is a topic that many can probably relate to or prescribe with fear as to something that may eventually occur to loved ones.

The film is good, though not profoundly good.  Linney is lovely, neurotic to an extent, directionless, and mildly adrift.  As her brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman is typically strong.  As a professor and Brecht scholar, he too is damaged by his childhood, but overall more realistic and successful.

While Jenkins does a lot with showing the environs of the characters (the surreal suburbia of Sun City, AZ or the freezing drabness of Buffalo, NY), there just isn’t a lot more to say.  It’s a good film.  Not extra-special, but good.

(2007) dir. Greg Mclean
viewed: 08/09/08

It’s amazing that there are so many movies out there in the world that something as odd and specific as a horror film genre of giant creatures of the order crocodilia could exist, but I am proposing that it does.  Most recently, there was the film Primeval (2007), about a real life killer crocodile in Africa.  There is the earliest one in the genre that I can think of, Alligator (1980), which had the critter in the sewers of Chicago rather than its native habitat.

Well, the latest in the genre is the less campy and far more earnest film, Rogue, from Australian writer/director Greg Mclean, whose previous film, Wolf Creek (2005) also was a cautionary tale of the beautiful Outback of Australia for tourists and pleasure-seekers.  In Wolf Creek, it was a madman serial killer (also allegedly based on a true story).   In Rogue, it is a massive male rogue crocodile, enormous and angry, who doesn’t like his very isolated territory invaded.

The film does truly have an earnestness.  A lot of Australian films seem to take great pride in the weirdness of the Aussies of the bush, whack-jobs, yet colorful.  Mclean does use quite recognizeable character types in his film: the gorgeous, tomboy tour boat operator, the English family with a crippled, ailing mother, a colorful Irish hippie frump, the bad boys of the swamps…  But the characters are less “stock” than is often the case.  It feels like they were chosen more for a purpose than simply to get eaten up.

Mclean shows great love for the Northern Australia visually depicted in the film.  It’s stunning, and according to comments that they made, some landscape that has literally never been captured in cinema before.  It’s isolated and ancient, like the rogue crocodiles, the living dinosaurs who have not needed to evolve for a long, long time.  There is a small hat tip to the Aboriginal mysticism, noting that part of the river is sacred, marked with native art.  There is an attempt to show the beauty and the age of the largely unbefouled Outback.

And Mclean shows lots of shots of actual crocodiles as well, peppering the narrative with facts and factoids, showing that this story really isn’t meant to be as far-fetched as one might think.  Mclean even relates back to a specific crocodile that in real life attacked many a boat to protect its territory, and he notes that there are crocodiles that have been reported that are even bigger than the digitally animated Rogue of our story.

It’s earnestness is admirable.  But I think I was expecting more outlandishness.  The camp value is smaller, but the film is still a fairly intense thriller, one that will certainly have me thinking more than twice before taking a river boat ride up the crocodile-infested waters of Northern Australia.

(1965) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
viewed: 08/06/08

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most significant and challenging directors in cinema.  It’s kind of amazing how many important films he made in the 1960’s.  It’s also amazing how radically he approached the issue of cinema, the issues of cinema.  It’s still striking, even now, how much he challenged and questioned, utilized in his films, which feel like ongoing discourses on life, culture, politics, art, you name it.  It’s a lot to take in.  It’s a lot to have put out.

It’s kind of weird, but looking back over my film diary, since I’ve seen a bunch of Godard films, but it seems that the only one that I’ve watched in recent years is Une femme est une femme (1961).  Maybe I caught another while I wasn’t updating, I don’t know.  His films are a challenge for me, I would think for most people.  It’s not just that they are non-conventional, but rather that they work in direct opposition to convention, they are a critique of convention, in many ways, a meta-critique of everything.

Pierrot le fou was recently re-released via Criterion, a clean print, which played theatrically locally not long ago.  I missed it when it played the Castro.  I noticed it’s coming to the Red Vic in a week or two.

The film has a loose narrative.  Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina (about as beautiful as women are allowed to get) escape their lives down to the French Riviera, romping, hiding from society, ranting about love, writing poetry, jumping around on things.  Their love and frolics become challenged with an strange turn of events regarding a crime caper, a brother who is a gun runner (is he a brother or a lover?), and ultimately everyone gets killed.  Belmondo wraps his head in dynamite and explodes.

There is fun and lightness in the frolicking.  It is not joyless.  But it is also not embracing.  There is a constant striking at the subjectivity, a concentrated self-awareness, a sensibility that the film might actually have not had a script (which I have read was something the Godard has said).  It’s never really about the story, though in many ways it is about the romance or the concept of a cinematic romance.  About the concepts of genre, of art.  Many images of modern and classical art pop to the screen, populate the walls of rooms, books and films are verbally referenced.  It’s an ever-moving romp.

I can’t say that I can totally get my hands around it.  It’s very colorful, in striking contrast to Godard’s earlier black-and-white films.  It reminded me of a later Godard film, Week End (1967), which is much less about love or narrative, much more political and apocalyptic.  These films seem very much of a similar ilk, road movies fraught with disasters and modernism, and post-modernism.

I think I’ve better enjoyed Godard’s work on the big screen.  It takes energy to watch his films, focus, concentration.  His work still seems quite polemic even now, forty years later.  And it’s still challenging.

(1972) dir. Kenjo Misumi
viewed: 08/05/08

Based on a popular and influential manga of its day, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, is the first of a series of films that depict the roamings of a disgraced (through treachery) samurai and his toddler who rides in an old wooden pram as they wander Edo-era Japan, looking for work and revenge on the clan that framed him and murdered his wife.  I’d read the comics, some of them, when they were published in the U.S. in the 1980’s (back in my comic book days), and their imagery has always stayed with me: highly stylized black-and-white scenes of often wordless violence and striking compositions.

I think, in the 1990’s I rented one of the Lone Wolf films, but prior to the internet, information wasn’t as accessible or verifiable (probably still a debateable issue), and I am not even sure what I saw.  It was on a cheap video from Le Video, San Francisco’s onve highly venerable video store that had lots of cult films and foreign films in bootleg forms.

Well, I committed to watching samurai films this year and was attracted back to this series.

It’s stylized to a degree, though nothing like Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom (1966) or Kill! (1968).  Tomisaburo Wakayama, the Lone Wolf, is very good, the archetypical hardcore samurai.  And his son, the cub Daigoro, Akihiro Tomikawa is about the cutest freaking baby ever.

There are lots of blood geysers, spurting that thick bright red stuff.  Heads roll, limbs get lopped, someone even gets chopped at the knees.  And of course, no one comes close to touching the Lone Wolf.  He is honorable even in his descent into the netherworld outside of the duties of his former office as the high executionor for the shogunate.  There is a body count that is quickly lost track of.

One odd thing is that the Lone Wolf shields his son from only two things: a near rape and murder of a woman by some villains and then (while the boy is sleeping), his own sexual encounter with a prostitute (performed nobly to protect her from villians).  But the boy sees all the cutting, chopping, slicing, spurting, beheading, and even in certain circumstances is insinuated in it by the way his father uses him as a ploy.  It’s kind of like the MPAA: all violence and no sex.

The image of this stoic man with his sword contrasted with his bright-eyed charming little boy is striking, probably why it so quickly became iconic.  The film was good, though not top notch.  Maybe I was spoiled with some of my earlier samurai films.  They rushed through production, releasing 6 films in 3 years, 4 in the very first, 1972. 

I’ll probably watch some more of them. 

(1975) dir. L.Q. Jones
viewed: 08/03/08

Sometimes, the apocalypse isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I’ve had for a long while a fascination with the post-apocalyptic science fiction films regarding nuclear war that symbolized a mentality of the Cold War.  Maybe this is due to my growing up in this era and having fed off of a lot of the images and notions associated with the results of WWIII.  By the 1980’s, there were several notable films in this genre, the best being ones that are low-budget and pretty much just out-and-out Cult films.

Well, A Boy and His Dog, which I had seen back in the day on cable, is surprisingly early for this vision.  Adapted from a Harlan Ellison novella, it’s not just post-WWIII, it’s post WWIV.  And most notably, it’s a young Don Johnson playing a free-wheeling young man with two things on his mind: sex and survival.  And in that order.  Lucky for him he has a psychic relationship with a dog, who helps him hunt down women.  It’s funny what’s left after nuclear devastation, huh?

The characters banter, but they are more unlikeable that I think they are meant to be.  The dog, who is erudite and intelligent in contrast to Johnson’s hormonal boy, is a little too snotty.  And Johnson just lacks charm.

The other quite strange scenario besides the semi-The Road Warrior (1981)-like above ground world, is this bizarre underground world in which a total cartoon of Americana is kept alive with creepy pancake-made-up faces, and a group of elders who need fresh genetics to keep them healthy.  It’s social criticism, but so weird that it’s hard to know exactly what to make of it.

The best part of the film is the end when the female love interest of Johnson’s (who is not really a love interest, but a sex object and opportunist) tells Johnson to leave the starving dog and live with her because she loves him.  The boy must choose between his woman and his poor, hungry psychic dog.  And he chooses to kill the girl and feed her to the dog.  Not exactly the most humanist ending, nor the most lacking in misogyny, but it adds a subversiveness that gives the film more character.

It’s kind of a little ahead of its time.  But it’s also pretty lame, I’d have to say.

(1979) dir. Walter Hill
viewed: 08/01/08

Oddly enough, this cult film is one that I’d never seen before.  I’ve become an admirer of director Walter Hill’s early work, namely The Driver (1978) and The Long Riders (1980).  I may have to queue up a couple of his other films that I haven’t seen in ages: Southern Comfort (1981), 48 Hrs. (1982), and Streets of Fire (1984).  I don’t really know what happened to his career, but his choices of material may have been what doomed him after a while.  Who knows?

The Warriors is so bizarre that it could only be a cult film.  A Coney Island street gang, the titular “Warriors”, along with dozens of other street gangs from all over New York City convene to a meeting of unity of street gangs.  When the organizer is shot down by the only really “bad” gang, everyone splits, and the Warriors have a long journey home across 1979 New York.

Okay, that isn’t why it’s so weird.  It’s that all of the gangs are goofily-named and costumed to levels that are more outlandish than one another.  It’s kind of like group Halloween in the Castro.  There are mimes, baseball bat carrying KISS face painted goons, guys who wear all kinds of weirdness to look alike. 

So not only are they goofy dressed, they are also only semi-tough.  It’s a street gang culture that precedes the the modern gang culture, largely lacking guns and nobody taking drugs.

It does offer a fascinating look into the streets of New York of the time.  I’ve become more interested over time with the New York of the 1980’s, seeing it in several films, a much grittier, overwhelmingly strange and dark and seedy.

I don’t know what to think of this film really.  It’s okay.  It doesn’t strike a chord with me as it has for others.  Everyone attaches themselves to their own cult films.

(2008) dir. Neil Marshall
viewed: 08/01/08

The end of the world is not what it used to be.

Maybe that has always been the case.  Culture’s concepts of what the end of the world will look like or even what will bring it about, or even the modern version of “post-apocalypse”, the world after the end of the world…it’s changed a lot.

For writer/director Neil Marshall, Doomsday is a pastiche of history, science, sci-fi, and several “classic” or semi-classic post-apocalyptic visions, in particular, The Road Warrior (1981) and Escape From New York (1981).  In fact, there is much of this vision that seems deeply steeped in the 1980’s and curiously so, beyond reason.

It’s a disease film.  A strain of our present time’s most potent and ferocious (and potentially real) fears of human catastrophe is disease.  And, like 28 Days Later… (2002), it hits Britain first.  Of course, it doesn’t turn people into raging, blood-thirsty zombie-like things.  No, it just kills them like Ebola with pus, blood, vomit, and skin lesions like you wouldn’t believe.  And since the outbreak has happened in Glasgow, Scotland, the PM’s in London, harking back to both John Carpenter and Roman leader Hadrian, lock down all of Scotland in a quarrantine, to keep things from spreading.

Flash forward some 30 years or so later and we’ve got the disease breaking out again in the London slums and reports of survivors in Scotland who may carry an antibody or something that can be turned into a vaccine.  So, in swings the heroine, a one-eyed exile of Scotland, pulled from her mother’s arms at the very last minute, who is now an ass-kicker of heights that, well…only women sci-fi fantasy gals seem to kick.  Much like Carpenter’s film, she has to go in and bring out something.

What Marshall does is he turns this concept, this high, high concept, into a bit of a discourse on Scotland.  Glasgow is the inner city from hell.  And everyone that lives there and survives has grown colorful mohawks and listens to 1980’s indie pop.  And they are cannibals.  Heathen.

Our protagonist’s search takes her beyond Thunderdome, so to speak, and via a long tunnel, to yet another post-apocalyptic paradigm: Scotland returns to the middle ages.  And here we have Malcolm McDowell as a one-time scientist, now turned medieval king in a world not entirely unlike one which was more amusingly imagined in Reign of Fire (2002), the only sci-fi, post-apocalypse that seems more outlandish than this one.

See, Scotland, in echoes of history of isolation and enmity and the Black Plague, (right?) has divied itself up into two scenarios: the ancient, forever-lasting castles and history of its ancient depths and also its innercity world, one of 1980’s punks and bondage and The Road Warrior.  Dude.  Every character in Glasgow must have seen this film ad nausea.

But what does it all mean?  Darned if I can tell you.

The movie is so ambitious and ridiculous.  It’s like a script that a 14 year old might have written in the late 1980’s, having watched all these other movies and said, “Dude, but what if it was set in Scotland?”  From a contemporary perspective, its visions are anachronisms.  They don’t make sense.  In fact, the whole story doesn’t make sense given globalism, technology, the internet, satellites…  It’s freaking ridiculous.

Okay, okay.  Like why should I care.  Who of you has even heard of this movie, my miniscule readership?  Well, it comes from Neil Marshall, the only member of the “splat pack”, the current young horror filmmakers who have been randomly grouped together by the media, that I liked anything by.  His previous efforts, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent (2005), indicated something brewing of potential.  I’d been surprised when this film came and went so fast, with so little notice, even though it had gotten some decent reviews at times.

I am surprised no more.  Marshall may continue to make interesting films.  But this one will go down as one of his hammier, campier, silly-ass movies, no matter what else he does.  There is ambition.  There is definitely humor.  But when I look back to both John Carpenter’s film and George Miller’s Mad Max series, you look at genre films that are focused on a critique of culture at the time.  They play off of a zeitgeist and a character that made them unique, made them iconic.  This film doesn’t really have anything interesting to say about the world of today.  It’s a mildly entertaining piece of crap, but it lacks the things to which it pays homage.  It lacks what made them memorable.

But it does have Scotland.