"After all, we have no right to the jungle. It belongs to the natives, and the animals, not the white man. It was theirs before we came, it should be theirs now."
The Joy of Recycling: THE WHITE GORILLA (1945)
Derek Love vs. the Buzz Killer : TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE; REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

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"If he'd just... belt her one, occasionally." |
And just imagine who Jim would want to bring around to gang meetings if he was in. Considering his new best friend is a super needy rich kid who just killed a whole boxful of puppies the night before, which is the slam dunk hat trick of red flags.
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I used some color screenshots, as I generally don't like colorizing, but in this case it's by a fan on YouTube, and looks pretty good- giving it an extra weird sense of dislocation |
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With those hooded Peter Lorre eyes, Bette Page bangs, Edith Massey teeth, 'Bette Davis whispering into the ear of a sleeping Val Lewton' vibe, and that starchy retro-hipster dress, Dawn Bender is a totally unique presence in movies. It's like a whole new category of 'types' has to be invented to support her her. A whole new kind of 'small town cool' is born. Perhaps it's the queer perspective of the film that she--the only woman with any real skin in the game--is the most unique and thoughtful character, a true lead and not just another endangered love interest / lab assistant. In yet another of his innovative but weird editing choices, Graeff lets all her scenes play out a few seconds longer than an ordinary editor would, letting his camera keep an eye on what she does after the action in the script is completed, how she fills out the gap between the end of the scene and the actual cut. She uses the time by wistfully gazing through windows as if she's Lilian Gish on the lonesome prairie after yet another day with no mail from her far-flung fella in a DW Griffith silent. It's archaic yet ahead of its time. It wouldn't matter if she just shut down emotionally at the end, like a robot; we'd still be with her all the way, enraptured and confused by her weird charisma. (As in so many films by gay auteurs, the women are as handsome as the boys are beautiful.)
The Hairs of Incoherence: AFTER BLUE: Dirty Paradise (2021)
In fact it's so unique it needs its own film movement just to figure out to have a place to belong. In meta echo of the luddite matriarchy of After Blue, Mandico and some peers (like (which includes Yann Gonzalez, whose adorable You and the Night I've written about earlier) have formed Incoherence movement. Some tenets include: shooting only on expired film; keeping all special effects in-camera (rear-projection rather than blue screen, etc.); using found objects for set design; post-syncing all sound but adding no post-production; and avoiding anything resembling a familiar trope or narrative 'act' structure. In the age of the mood-altering gummy, it's the perfect post-dosed park picnic or party pick.
In a mythic story kind of sourced from Androcles & the Lion, or Aladdin, a young bullied gamin named Roxy helps free a wild-eyed, glitter-covered naked woman named Kate Bush who she finds buried up to her neck in the sand. But that's where all familiarity ends. Freeing the wild Kate turns out to be a catastrophically bad idea; she starts blasting everyone in sight. Then, she turns the gun on Roxy; and then, turns on Roxy and soon Kate Bush is riding naked on a horse with a Nordic crown and sword through Roxy's erotic dreams while drenched in gold glitter, while three of Kate's victims haunt her nightmares, tearing Roxy apart in a perfect illustration of Lacanian jouissanc. And now, since she freed the demon, Roxy has to pack up her hairdresser mother and le cheval and set off to the poison mountain to kill.... Kate Bush.
And so begins Roxy's call to adventure, kicking, puling, licking, and sulking all the way while her wide-eyed mom, Zora (Elina Lowensohn) slowly goes mad from hunger and motherhood. So ushers forth a hypnogogic haze of frond-shadowed alien landscapes, blue fire, azure beaches, blue forests, filthy Dickensian outlaw vagrants sniffing around their saddlebags in search of food and/or a new wife; a gaggle of local inhabitants, easily colonized triffid shamblers with crystal cave mouths who can become your dreams (everything is fluid here, not just gender but between animal, vegetable and mineral).
Once the arrive, Roxy finds plenty of distractions: trees to climb, holes to hide in, nightmares to scream to, and an enchanted grotto with phallic little monsters to kiss. Zora runs into a very cool and sexually slithering expat artist ("The second avant-garde") Sternberg (Vimala Pons) who lives 'next door' with her dog and android-male lover/muse Olgar 2 (Michaël Erpelding) and loves to drink and shoot everything in sight with her designer gu. If Kate is a new high of wildness in the wild woman archetype, Sternberg is a new quintessential aesthete, a libertine, alcoholic, rich, decadent, and ultimately both supportive and unhinged. She kind of steals the picture, even though everyone else more than holds their own. I love her. And Kate. Roxy is a whiner; Zora is a wide-eyed sad sack, but the other ladies, beaux sauvages for the revisionist fairy tale ages.
It's all very colorful and helped immensely by the electronic score by Pierre Desprats: an eerie electronic/ambient mix of Morricpme western grandeur, spiked with well-timed deep pitch shifts dropping the bottom of almost Vangelis' Bladerunner-style cathedral Hell elegance (helligance?), like we're plunging way way down over Deckard's rainy 10th floor parapet. It's in French with English subtitles, but don't worry about having to read while your pupils are still micro-dilated, tu monolinguiste analphabète américain lâche fils de pute! Words can't hurt you if you pretend not to read them. Listen instead to the musicality of the le langage de l'amor; don't even look at the subtitles until first trying to decode the words and be grateful. French art movies never work in English dubs. The pretentiously unpretentious poeticism of lines like "you like my hat? It is an extension of my thoughts" or "I'm just a woman... as inoffensive as the wind" might wake you from the hypno-erotique spell in a fit of cringy twitching. But in French, with English subtitles, c'est adorable. Even the occasional overdone nod to contemporary chic, like giving all the guns names of designers (Guccis and Chanels instead of Lugers and Colts) is forgivable as its exotified by the musicality of the language.
RETURN OF THE (REALLY) WILD WOMAN
Above all, forget about that stacked broad in Heavy Metal, and remember Kate Bush! Kate gives Anita Pallenberg's horned dictator in Barbarella, Beatrice Dalle (in everything) and all of the Baader Meinhof Complex a sound trundling. Hairy-armed, heavily clawed, jagged of teeth, this wild sandy blonde runs rampant through the mist and the wild fantasies of our young Roxy; gleefully shooting down anyone she pleases, disguising herself and harnessing the local 'Indians' to ride. Assertive and carnally violent as Tura Satana. wilder than Marsha Quist in The Howling, there's no woman capable of undoing After Blue's snippy power structure as singlehandedly as she.
On the masculine spectrum of wild man Jungian archetype is a vivid neighbor to the sage/senex'who represents the wild man energy absorbed into the hero/soul and thus acquiring the best of both worlds - outside of the social sphere but able to step in and out of it easily. For my CinemArchetype series I found plenty of both to choose from, so tried to pick as wide an array as I could. For female characters I could only find a handful wild (Un-absorbed) examples, hence the categories were merged 'The Wild/Wise Woman." Even within fairy tales that have female protagonists, the wild element is usually a male for girl's myths, i.e. the animus (think Edward in Twilight, Hannibal Lecter, or the Big Bad Wolf/Woodsman), so bringing in a voraciously homicidal wild woman archetype/shadow into a girl's story (where the female villain is usually a devouring mother/stepmother - a gatekeeper of a social sphere out of balance, rigged by hypocrisy and patriarchal fear, or 'the Red Queen' - an evil narcissit rather than a true outsider of 'Iron Jane' style magnitude.) is truly revolutionary; Kate is agressive enough to shatter any old Grimm's fairy tale paradigm. You can almost hear Jung wake up and start clawing footnotes on his coffin lid, excited to contextualize her within the pantheon, and maybe use her in an paper trying to update his theories to the #mefirst movement. There's only like three or four women in her archetypal class in all of cinema, which is so outrageous it should make any Frenchwoman reading grab her scissors and cut Willem DaFoe's genitals off instead of her own in Antichrist. We need more! But Zulawski is dead (one of the other best examples is in Szvamanka (aka She-Shaman). Figures both Kate and Zulawski are Polish. Polish women be like French woman on angel (mountain) dust/
Reviews across the US (where sex is too esteemed in theory to be anything but degrading in practice) have been mixed. Mainstream film critics can't help but follow certain patterns and key signatures to denote quality and 'appeal.' They see too many films a week, and need to turn in reviews too fast, to really get deep into some weird morass of pre-Oedipal confusion like After Blue. How can you even judge it after one viewing? You don't even know what's going on. I've seen four times and I don't know either! Can you, as a critic, think a film can funny without slapstick, artsy without depth, erotic without titillation, stylish without campiness? Are the effects meant intentionally to be artificial? Are we supposed to find it Brechtian, Godardesque (if intentional) or Woodian (if not)?
There is no clear answer, unless the viewer is either micro- or macro-dosing. I might be confused and annoyed too if I was a critic on the clock on some cold screening room; but if you can visit it in 20 minute spurts, with long breaks in between, it's amazing; I've watched it, three times over 12 different viewings. Never in one sitting, unless showing it to friends in an 'altered' state.
As Mandico demonstrated in Les Garçons Sauvage, only after you clear out all the stale genre tropes, getting down to the nitty gritty, can eros chew its way out of the softcore bower, to burst forth flashing the R-rated fangs of some Fassbinder cocaine withdrawal nightmare and the gaudy peacock strut of an Almodovar or Jarman fashion show/Pride float.
What a gift we have in the nouveau Incoherence. And in Mandico, a new luminary of dangerous Parisian surrealist transgression fit to slide in next to De Sade, Huysmanns, Batailles, Genet, Corbiere, Baudelaire, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. There's surely a reason American literary icons like Terry Southern, Hemingway, and Henry Miller all had to go to Paris before they could unleash the full gorgeous obscenity of their human howls, for America's rock-tossing scene-censoring petit-bourgeoisie only admire their own depravity once the French show them how.
Get over it, America! it's just hair.
Telly on the Plane / Telly on the Mountain / Telly on the Train: LISA AND THE DEVIL, HORROR EXPRESS, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE




HORROR EXPRESSOriginal title: Pánico en el Transiberiano
This Spanish-British horror union of Horror Express (1972) is really the best of everything--the best pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (as posh scientists), Alberto de Mendoza as a superstitious priest playing the Rasputin to a bemused young countess (Silvia Tortosa) and her older inventor husband), and the best 'frozen ape man/alien defrosts aboard the Orient Express' film ever. The Chariots of the Gods-savvy script zips along most pleasingly and in addition to the countess there are several strong female characters, including Miss Jones ((Alice Reinheart) the droll older assistant to Cushing who wryly sizes up the other women and delivers acidic bon mots: a sultry corporate spy (Helga Liné) and a lady passenger, friend for the countess (Faith Clift)
Famous Monsters of Mexico I: EL VAMPIRO (1957), THE VAMPIRE'S COFFIN (1958)



Famous Monsters of Mexico II: CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN, BLACK PIT OF DR. M

Take back one kadam due to the overuse of Gustavo César Carrión bombastic score (that big timapanii roll and thunderous Da-da DA!! (Zarathustra-esque timapani roll). Da...da-DA! (Zarathustra-esque timapani roll) is great the first 20 times, but after that....) Another kadam taken due to a bland daylight pastorale scenes of Masali walking to a nearby church with Patricia, and her budding love for the age-appropriate new intern (the old triangle..), But soon enough all of them, and everyone else, are swallowed up by that screaming, dark, hushed mood, expressionistic lighting and ultimately satisfying, frenzied climax --you can almost visualize it as a final splash page panel in an old EC comic, the other doctors saying "gasp!' and 'choke!' as the full measure of ironic horror is unveiled. Best of all is that high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, which wraps it all up in so many inky shadows and twisty fecund corridors, It's so clear that Mendez and Herrera have seen and loved the early Freund-shot Universal horrors as well as the Tourneur-Lewtons, honoring them in their devotion to thick Halloween-ready atmos. And remember: "science and art are equal!"
King Devil says Go for It: DR. SATAN (1966), DR. SATAN VS. BLACK MAGIC (1968)
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everybody's clockin' Rodriguez (top: Interpol /bottom: Satan Inc. |

When one is at their top of their game like our Dr. Satan was before he got nabbed at the end of the last film, well, there's nowhere to go but down, quite literally in his case. When we last saw the doctor he had disappeared, if that makes sense. This is filmed only two years later, but it's in color, with a kind of 'owning' it cheap Batman TV show mise en scene, and our Cordero just doesn't quite look the same, a little bloated and ragged from taking a long nap on a comfy rock in his own wing of hell (or is it just his man cave, quite literally, in his case). Now it's time for King Devil to ask -him for favors. Sleeping on his spacetious slab, he first lazily tries to weasel out of it. Arrozamena, what happened to you, man?
For this mission, Arrozamena magically gets his lair back up on the surface and takes as his zombie slaves a pair of cute women who he finds via a want-ad, then hypnotizing them into his power. Though they seem zombified, they're just as capable as the men if not more so, able to sneak around and spy on the other side with ease, and easily survive knives thrown into their backs. They wear complimentary comic book colors, will make any weird film fan think they may have wandered into a Jess Franco spy movie (it's better) and the nights glow deep blue or olive green over flat shades of light blue (no checkered socks), and everything kind of beams with that flat TV lighting, comic strip framing. It's so chill it almost seems like it could be the pilot to a Dr. Satan TV show and man, what a wonderful world it would be with such a series in it.
Naturally it's not at the level of the first film, suffering from a kind of flat TV budget, but there's a lot to love especially if, like me as a small child watching Speed Racer, you've always rooted for the bad guys, hoping they'd win just this once. Here they do, more or less. Once again we kind of like all the characters on both sides, even if they kill each other a lot; the arch enemies are each loyal to their women, not pervy etc. We root for Satan just because he's the home team but Yei Lin, is cool, nice to his girlfriend crime partner (though she shoots a cop in the back before sitting down to finish her tea) but stern with his henchmen (he blames them when the formula they stole doesn't work). Our doctor would never do that. He's such a good boss even if he programmed normal girls into becoming automaton zombie killers, it's not in a pervy way, and when it's time for the old salt tablet farewell, they seem legitimately sad to be breaking up the team or at least as sad as a zombie can be. "Maybe we will meet again, if King Devil allows it," says Arrozamena. Even when the girls use crosses to subdue the vampire, they hold them inverted, yet it still works. And thus doth evil conquer evil in the name of evil. For some of us weary sinner cineaste's souls, grown so tired of bland heroism and knee-jerk Christian backtracking always bringing everything to a fiery halt just when it's getting good, just so the heteronormative couple can escape to propigate their irritating lack of evil.
I'm also a sucker for when the good guys are just slightly less bad guys, and I hate the years of censorship programming that made movies like these so unique and forbidden for American audiences. It wasn't until 1994, year of Pulp Fiction and Last Seduction, that the old moralistic bad faith resolutions finally blew up, never to be seen again. No more needing to drive off a cliff to atone for thy crimes, Thelma! But with Dr. Satan we learn Mexico was 28 years ahead of us. Viva el' Diablo Rey!
Waxing Gibbous: Luigi Cozzi's BLOOD ON MELIE'S MOON (2016)

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Mr. Cozzi Surmises |
MORE from Acidemic's COZZI Collection:
Hurrah for Luigi Cozzi! HERCULES (1983) & the Mighty Coates Canon! (Sept 7, 2019)
Cozzi Breaks the Cake: THE BLACK CAT (1989) (Feb 9, 2022)
Gettin' Ripped: Luigi Cozz's PAGANINI HORROR (1989) (March 20, 2020)
13 Films for Week X of a Pandemic: CONTAMINATION (1980) (April 5, 2020)
7 Choice Star Wars Nugs: STARCRASH (1978) (Jan 23, 2019)
10 Reasons COZZILL A (1977) (Nov. 6, 2022)