Dream or Nightmare logic: a lazy way for European directors to just go nuts with non sequiturs and not have to worry about storyline coherence or is it a daring approach to dissociative Freudian void delving based on the symbolist and surrealist movements of the early 20th century?
a: Yes
b: magenta.
c: hollyhocks
d. Mrs. Claypool
e. I'll fucking cut you, man.
2. European art cinema can be very boring and opaque if you're careful. But if you're not--if you're, say, dosed or delirious or bored into falling into a trance, then its abstraction makes perfect 'sense.' Falling half-asleep while watching Rollin or Jess Franco's earlier work, for example, is a truly psychedelic experience, and very hard to avoid. Would you agree?
a. seven
b. no
3. There are five easy ways to understand Italian drive-in dream logic, all based on the Carnival of Souls principle:
a. DEATH: The protagonist is already dead and/or stuck in an endless reincarnation loop stuck in the amber of hell/heaven time.
b. AMNESIA: They have amnesia but don't even know it - they try to hide it, the way you don't want to admit you don't remember someone who comes up and knows your name. The result of lots of drinking in the swinging 60s-70s.
c. DREAM: Dreaming while awake, caught in a web of true myth, where waking consciousness and unconsciousness have lined up perfectly, like two overhead transparencies.
d. ACID: They're tripping their faces off (LSD was the party drug du jour).
e) INSANITY - They're remembering or recounting from a psych ward.
f) All of the above, for in a way they are all the same.
Which of these 42 ways is the real one?
a. It doesn't matter, man.
b. Remember that in Europe the language barriers are more immediate and the past is older, than in America. In Europe, a 70s B-movie can take place in a real castle, or a condemned art nouveau mansion cheaper than building a single Hollywood set, so a modern French model in a turn-of-the-century vampire gown running loose amidst the Gothic spires is not only cheap to film, it has so much post-modern frisson it creates a truly 'all times all the time' dream logic loop all into itself. And if the lips don't match the voices, even if there are subtitles, that's okay - a poetic monologue voice over (using words wrote long enough ago the poet falls into the public domain) wraps it all up with a patina that just screeches with elegant subtlety.
a. It doesn't matter, man.
b. Remember that in Europe the language barriers are more immediate and the past is older, than in America. In Europe, a 70s B-movie can take place in a real castle, or a condemned art nouveau mansion cheaper than building a single Hollywood set, so a modern French model in a turn-of-the-century vampire gown running loose amidst the Gothic spires is not only cheap to film, it has so much post-modern frisson it creates a truly 'all times all the time' dream logic loop all into itself. And if the lips don't match the voices, even if there are subtitles, that's okay - a poetic monologue voice over (using words wrote long enough ago the poet falls into the public domain) wraps it all up with a patina that just screeches with elegant subtlety.
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| Beyond the Black Rainbow (top: The Strange Colour of your Body's Tears; Berberian Sound Studio) |
For this festival we're talking of a return to the art of those pre-slasher death-poetic times, for eccentric visionaries in Europe--Franco, Rollin, Fulci, Argento-- knew they could go nuts with their zoom lenses and post-modern refraction, with their anti-fascist subtexts and surreal castle-running as long as they delivered lashings of sex and ultra-violence their profit-minded producers demanded. Even Antonioni had to stuff orgies into Red Desert, La Notte, Blow-up and Zabriskie Point; Bardot had to have a nude scene in Les Mepris to justify the expenses of color and Cinemascope...
It was a different time, before the derelict fringe theaters at the edge of America closed. And kids watched tapes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead until they were numb to all but Hostel, Devil's Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek. Compared to that madness, the razor slash black glove murders of what Mondo Macabro calls 'Eurosleaze' seem almost quaint.
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| You and the Night |
And so we come to this post-modern age we live in, the last pre-pornographic gasp of mainstream cinema when returning to forgotten old styles and genres is not only fun and rewarding (hence It Follows and Duke of Burgundy, the two best films of the year, though neither seems to be from even this decade) it's easier than it was even back then when the films were released. Many of these old films were washed out pan and scanned blurs but now glow restored by loving labels. And so new films spring up paying homage to the post-modern psychedelic wellspring of experimentalism created by early Argento, late Antonioni, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Brian de Palma, Michel Soavi and of course.... the music of Ennio Morricone, Goblin, and Bruno Nicolai.
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| The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears |
And atop the crest of the post-modern alienation resurgence lurks 'the Darionioni Nuovo' the New post-Dario Argento-Antonioni wave-- Peter Strickland, Helen Cattet and Bruno Forlanzi, Sebastian Silva, Nicolas Winding Refn, Panos Cosmatos, and the post-Carpenter/Morricone music of Sinoa Caves, M83, Tom Raybould, Cliff Martinez, and Rich Vreeland. It's a new setting sun. the two alienation-cum-Freud dissociation style used together to indicate all that is best about red desert crimson rivers of pain and ecstasy, of post-modern disaffect that uses our expectations of a coherent linear narrative against us with the result being, in the right conditions, the most exalted of transcendental weird epiphanies. These young filmmakers use their audience's presumed familiarity with film history, with fairy tales, with Italian horror, with the 70s and sex, with the French New Wave and Betty Blue, L'Aventura and Easy Rider, as a kind of metaphysical third heat paint brush. The result is what art cinema should always be striving for, an erasure of the line where narrative classical cinema ends and avant-garde experimentalism begins. Madness coheres like a boil atop modern alienation's callouses, and our our own vivid imagination becomes a finger pointing at how innate and irremovable is our compulsion to craft a frame, an order, a meaning, a reason, a psychosocial iconography onto even the most elusive and elliptical of texts. It's only when the symbols are there but we can't connect a single one that we're finally free. So line these up in your list, see them all in order, all at once--obey.... obey... and let go of that tightening noose around your mind called language.
See also:
STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS
Bad Acid 80: Italian Horror Drive-In Dream Logic
1. PASSION
(2012) Dir Brian De Palma
***
De Palma's Italian modernizing of the Hitchcock homage has kicked back in for the 21st century, crafting old school returns to form like Femme Fatale and this loose remake of the French film Love Crimes and cousin of Soderbergh's Side Effects, which as Alan Scherstuhl notes "ground that other girl with the dragon tattoo through something like the same pharmaceutical Hitchcockisms." Not unlike Fatale, Passion met with critical hostility from a knee-jerk press to busy sneering at the unrealistic excess and clueless misogyny to notice the sexy genius at work, picking up where Hitchcock left off in proving suspense can be crafted by using only cinema, with almost no reference to the real, except its intertextual relation to other films. If the film came out in 1973, those same critics would be worshipping it today, since Pauline Kael would be around like a protective lioness for edgy imperfect films so anathema to boring 'white elephant' Oscarbait. But here on Netflix, Passion finds its true home, for the giallo genre of which De Palma was an American cousin (see: Two Hearts Stab as One: De Palma's and Argento's Reptile Dysfunction) was nothing if not savvy about the obsessive alienation caused by the endless proliferation of image, foreseeing the frozen terror of having too many options, of choice now implicating viewers in ways the old three-channel system could not. As an heir to the work Argento cannot continue with (good god he sucks now), De Palma's films work best when situated in the frame of its marquee neighbors. Here the boardroom lesbian betrayals and seductions, the split screen with the ballet, all add up to a curious and sometimes titillating exercise in pure bravura style, but so fucking what? Pretend it's a futuristic thriller coming out in 1978 and that it's not a movie at all, it's a lesbian fantasy Catherine Zeta Jones ishaving while in jail in the unwritten Side Effects sequel. So be like the Zeta one and enjoy. Frickin McAdams is the hottest thing ever, man, and brings so much duplicitous brio to her role she's like her old Mean Girl self grown up for the long con.
2. KISS OF THE DAMNED
(2014) Dir Xan Cassavetes
Bearded screenwriter Paolo (Milo Ventimiglio) meets alluring but stand-offish Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) but they can only hook up if he becomes a vampire, cuz she gonna bite him. Love finds a way and five Twilight films are condensed to the opening act of a low budget but artsy and vivid retro-esque vamp tale from the daughter of John Cassavetes. With a score by Steven Hufsteter that twangs towards vintage Morricone without overdoing it, and a delicate romantic chemistry between the hauntingly alluring actors who underplay just right, Cassavetes proves herself quite a talent. The beautifully photographed domestic bliss really sinks in for us, so when Djuna's wild child sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida) shows up in need of a place to recover after laying waste to her last party town residence, we recoil in frustration like we're Gene Tierney cockblocked by apple-cheeked cherubs in Leave Her to Heaven. It's not set in the past or anything but Cassavetes is clearly showing love and savvy to Jean Rollin's mythopoetic dream world and it hooks us in with the giddy high of feeling like we've just been welcomed into the in-crowd.
3. BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO
(2012) Dir Peter Strickland
***1/2
While we wait for his wildly acclaimed Duke of Burgundy to come to Blu-ray, the Argento stylistic anti-misogyny, Bergmanesque post-modern meltdowns and Lynchian "no hay banda"-ism of Strickland's memorable debut Berberian Sound Studio add up to a deeply unsettling visually (and most importantly aurally) seductive post-structuralist fantasia wherein a reserved Brit sound mixer (Toby Jones) is hired for some reason to work on a horror film in 70s Rome. We never actually see the film they're working on, which just adds to the unsettling frisson. No visual violence can really match our sickening imagination, aptly mirrored in the sickening dead-inside feeling overtaking Jones as he rattles the chains, crunches heads of lettuce, drenches it all in echo (from the fractions of script and scenes the film seems one part Argento's Suspiria, one part Soavi's The Church, and one part Fulci's City of the Living Dead). Strickland trusts his expert blocking and cagey actors and actresses in and around the studio's tight places, and though the rudeness of some of the macho Italian filmmakers got on my nerves, it's supposed to, indicating the corrupt, decadent fucked-up misogyny of Italy runs thick as blood under the giallo surface, and this is a masterpiece of enigmatic self-reflexive horror, with all the ingredients of an average Italian trash classic reassembled like a collage into a making-of fantasia that puts broader self-reflexive stuff like Shadow of the Vampire or A Blade in the Dark to shame, and approaches the greatness of Irma Vep, StageFright, and The Stunt Man.
4. STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS(2013) Dir. Helen Cattet y Bruno Forlanzi
***1/2
Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, cinema's first and only mixed gender / race / nationality directing couple have been setting my head on fire ever since their 2009 feature debut AMER. I was so blown away by their unique mix of modernist experimental and post-modern 70s Italian horror narrative that I even coined a term to describe them, and a few other filmmakers who have found a creative wellspring in the updating and abstracting and melding of classic Argento, Morricone, and Antonioni, the Darionini Nuovo. Argento may not have made a decent film since the mid 90s, but this pair has taken his blazing primary color iconography and shattered it into a million psychosexual grim Freudian mind-meld slivers. Granted Forlani/ Cattet's unique looping style will no doubt prove alienating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know Suspiria or Bird with Crystal Plumage like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at the gorgeous ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance slashed out before them like a blood bouquet against obsidian skies. But even those of us swooning over the ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance might need a break halfway through. Don't worry, the joy of streaming is you can just stop and pick up later where you left off. Or start over. There's no difference. So go, run away back to your linear narratives como un po'vigliacco. This split-screen of a couple will still be a thousand heres at once.
5. BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
2010 Dir. Panos Cosmatos
***1/2
6. ROOM 237
(2014) Dir Rodney Ascher
****
Now we come to the dividing line between present and past, literally, moving from post-modern giallo to TV movie giallo and bizarro refractability. With Ascher's fascinating documentary we understand the impossibility of a text ever meaning anything, regardless of the author's intention. So freed of all understanding, we enter the realm of madness and all is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious so as we hear these crazy theories about what every little detail means we begin to get scared by this movie all over again, for now we realize the insanity that appears when we lose all contact with the outside world. Artists try to work with it, theorists riff on it, and the writer drowns in it. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective. Good riddance! (more)
7. LISA AND THE DEVIL
(1974) Dir. Mario Bava
Elke Sommer's on holiday but when her tourist bus stops in a quaint Spanish villa she reacts strangely at the sight of an old fresco with a demon that looks like Telly Savalas amongst assorted grisly Middle Age wonders. When she sees the lollipop-sucking cigarette-voiced hipster himself buying a mannequin in an antique store, she's thrown into what the Aborgines call 'dreamtime' and Carlos Castaneda calls 'nonordinary reality' and what Bava might call 'Hell.' Obsessed by a little musical carousel of macabre figures chronicling the endless cycle of life after life, she begins to wake into that special nightmare where you turn around and suddenly your parents and everyone you know is gone and you're all alone and lost in an empty narrow streeted maze. She winds up tangling with the malignant director of Freiburg Dance Academy and Harry Lime's suicidally loyal girlfriend, Alida Vialli who tries to cockblock her Satanic-looking son, Alessio Orano, who has been so.... lonely. Sommer looks just like his dead wife and when he later corpses her by his dead wife's sleeping skeleton it's so creepy on so many levels you just have to laugh. Was that vile phrase 'corpsing' born in this film? Mario, you make Edgar Allan Poe seem like a sober health nut.
Selected Shorts:
KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER
(1975) "The Trevi Collection"(ep.14)
(1975) "The Trevi Collection"(ep.14)
Kolchak on the other hand, I knew and loved. And it was even on early enough I could stay up to watch it. And in this episode we're reminded there's no cheaper yet creepier effect than casting and dressing humans to look like particular mannequins, then interchanging them with the actual mannequin in the background of shots, alternating mannequin and posed human in alternating shots until you go insane. Bava used this trick in Lisa and the Devil albeit more overtly. Like Tourist Trap Kolchak keeps it ambiguous. And this witchy episode is one of everyone's favorites from the era. Right up there with the lizard monster in the tunnels, the headless biker, and the ghostly Native American shaman. Dig man... canceled after one season.
"Danielle"Starring Jennifer Lawrence
Saturday Night Live - Season 38, Episode 11 Time: 43.52-47 - 47:08
The movies this four minute spot parodies are all-too familiar for anyone who remembers pay cable in the 80s. They clearly know their stuff and Lawrence as always is perfectly game to go along, brilliantly capturing the flat but sonorous voice dubbing --clipping sentences together.... tofitthelips as they move... and the crushing banality of it all -- hahaha, look kids I'm a bufoon... it's priceless and worth the finding, for it captures perfectly the icky sensation of watching Europeans try to act like Americans on vacation, and pretend orgy mongering is natural even in the swinging 60s-70s--if you want to stick on this bent - check out Danger 5 if you haven't already. Shaken...and garnished with lemon peel.
8. THE IRON ROSE
"La Rose de Fer" (1972) Dir Jean Rollin
***
The French love their poets the way we love rock stars; for the French the songwriter-producer is famous and often the lover or husband of the chanteuse. This is normal, not something for Entertainment Weekly to passively sneer at. In other words, they love writers as well as performers, and understand that the actors aren't just making this stuff up on the spot. Most of all, though, they love French poets like the Brittany's own Tristan Corbière, one the crowning jewels of the Symbolist 'dead before 30' dozen, with a yen for eternity. I'm not sure which part of Françoise Pascal's final monologue/ voiceover during her nude cross-bearing on Rollin's favorite beach reverie, is from him but I do value that it's hard to tell and that aside from an ominously black train parked in the middle of nowhere and an opening wedding ceremony (at which both characters seem to clearly not belong --as if already ghosts) the film takes place over one trip to the graveyard where a pleasant and banal Rohmer-esque date turns into a nightmare and then a surreal mournful cry for death, for the loving embrace of la mortalité, finalité et l'éternité.  |
A purist might wonder how either this or the last film is truly post-retro, rather than pure terrobut again - this is eternity we're talking about. And anyway, it's short, so you might not even have time to wonder where the hell it's going. Just now he boy and girl are dressed in bold primary colors mainly so we can see them in the fading light. There's no glaring spots or anything making Jean-Jacques Renon's photography all the richer for being so dark without going murky, so much more lyrical and poetic--especially when the sun comes up and all the the conqueror worm's snacktime looms. Poe would dig it, too. It's like more Poe-esque in its obsession with death of love through poetry than a little eyed joe or damned if I know. I chose this over the once-thriving Rollin collection on Netflix (now worn down to just a sprinkling, most of which aren't even set in a distant fairy tale past. Iron Rose is decidedly outside of time and space --a few cars passing and the lovers' modern dress instead of horses aside. Even the wedding could really be from any decade..
9. YOU AND THE NIGHT
"Les rencontres d'après minuit" (2013) Dir Yann Gonzalez
You'll either like it or think it's too jejune, or maybe both, but certainly you won't think it's sexy because it's too French for that --rather, its loving. If Radley Metzger and Jean Cocteau collaborated on an off-off Broadway production at some SoHo gallery, this might be it. The French sounding Mme Jannings notes "This is a movie that cannot be seen with the eyes of evasion. It is a movie that needs to be watch it with the eyes of the soul as well as the physical eyes, without prejudgments, and without taboos." Oui, mademoiselle, it may have that pleased-with-itself air that most Americans have bullied out of them by third grade. But it has a warm heart, and if you wish to understand Cocteau, which is to understand France, there you see? It is better at what it's trying to do than Greg Araki (whose White Bird in a Blizzard almost made this list), and better--to my mind anyway--than by Wong Kar Wai, but of his I am no fan. It is a film that explores certain 'lover' stereotypes, "The slut, the star, the stud," etc. coming together for an orgy held in a rich couple's apartment, presided over by a cross-dressing maid, that looks like a more upscale version of a black box theater-meets-retrofuturistic minimalist downtown boutique that with the hip disaffect, pretty people (as with Cocteau, the boys prettier than the girls) and mix of low budget that, with a a great M83 score and a nicely ravaged cameo by the ever-feral Beatrice Dalle as a whip-wielding commissar, adds up to a nice bunch of parts even if they might leave you feeling (as does Iron Rose) there's not quite a whole movie here.
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Ah, but it's not alone anymore, it's part of my curated orgie de fête so'cest bon. And this film is all about that. In America we feel empty after sex so get married anyway or run away call the other person a slut on social media, either guilty or vindictive, it's never sex's problem. In You and the Night they are all very sexual already. To paraphrase Dietrich, it is not an obsession so much as a fact. So overall they skip the sex, so they can go home feeling like they've bonded as a unit spending a magical night --their resemblance to a theater troupe or AA group performing a thing that's a lot of monologues followed by a feeling of warm togetherness that we in the audience may or may not feel part of (keep coming back it works if you work it so work it you're with it) depending on our mood and attention span. But it is not whiplash edited, morose, uncouth, violent, or abusive. It's a safe space, and flights of Cocteau-esque fancy await...
And of course, what there is, sexually, is talk, which the French understand (and Americans do not) is much more seductive than the image of sex. Rather than doing lines off each other's bellies and swilling wine like a pack of HBO original rutters, eacg stereotype confesses, and talks and when there is an 'ahem' discharge its from a female (the slut), and in general no one really has intercourse, they're too busy being poetic, and engaging in group astral travel to beaches and theaters, which is why it's so fascinating, bringing to mind two quotes that have helped me, as an American, understand French sexuality more than anything else: "In Europe, sex is a fact. In America, it is an obsession" (Dietrich) and our own Severine Benzimra: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature." I've found these things to be true in my own amor fou experiences. And I love at least some Cocteau, and at any rate, I like this film's bold red-and-black colors. There's no violence (unless you count a slit throat) but until the arrival of Van Damme and Luc Besson what did French cinema know about violence? What they do know about is surrealism and poetry, and like the tide of poetry that subsumes The Iron Rose both resound and abound.
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It's from the mid-80s so all the fashion shoots are full of horrifying spandex and tacky post-no wave punk-lite make-up, but Tom Skerritt brings his usual low key ensemble brilliance to his every scene, making us realize it's him, not Sigourney Weaver, who really sets the tone for the first Alien, which explains why that kind of chill cigarette naturalism is lacking in all subsequent sequels. Don't expect widescreen, or a consistent tone, for like all TV movies it's completely aware of its job having to start over after every commercial break, since people were liable to be talking and going to the bathroom and forget what they were watching, or suddenly flip over from some competing option (though major network TV was on the decline thanks to the rise of cable, there were still hordes of people who had the old antenna.
That's what the age of cable and Tivo has dne to us, there's no longer a need for that - we grow progressively more merged into the image. But hey, it's the kind of meta-retro perfection this curated Netflix program needs, a breezy stopping point between two gruelingly abstract post-giallo masterworks from the past few years set in the 70s to the actual 70s. The only way it could be better would be if they kept the VHS streaks. Instead it does one better.
There's the post-modern critique of the destructive aftermath of the male gaze, as an array of lewd pervs of all sorts spread their red herring across the killer's trail. Of course, I'm a fan of any detective named "Dan Stoner" but Sharon Stone as the alpha female is pretty wow and treats it like the creme de la creme, like it's her big chance, which I guess it was. Righteous! Why include it as post-modern giallo? 1) The 'jiggle factor' is delivered even as it critiques the morality of its delivery system... in true Italian Catholic twist the knife for mother guilty sickening thrills. 2) the victims are all traceable and crimes discoverable via fashion photographs, and TV recordings, and Skerritt's cop regularly tries to use people as bait to flush out the killer but doesn't tell anyone, so they all die. 3) The recent Lifetime Movie A Deadly Adoption, made by the Funny or Die people and starring Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell, proves one can take a whole straight-faced actual drama with no jokes and frame it as a piece of deadpan absurdist art. 4) If you doubt still, you'll change your mind when Stone answers the door with wet hair in a white terrycloth rob to talk to the cop she's into who suspects her but is too turned on to care, ala Basic Instinct almost exactly which was ten years away and was itself a post-modern twister (i..e all the 'real' murders were in Stone's book as was her romance with a Stoner) and it makes a nice infinite loops of reflections with the first movie in the schedule which is a very loose remake of a French film Love Crime; and here this is a very loose prequel to Verhoeven's film; and Verhoeven and De Palma were the last two directors I was covering for Muze before they pulled the plug - coincidence? 5) There are Italians and Italian-Americans, which are the next best thing as far as the 70s (Saturday Night Fever, Fonzie, Rocky, De Palma) was concerned. They were greasers but not yet made thugs.
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And of course, what there is, sexually, is talk, which the French understand (and Americans do not) is much more seductive than the image of sex. Rather than doing lines off each other's bellies and swilling wine like a pack of HBO original rutters, eacg stereotype confesses, and talks and when there is an 'ahem' discharge its from a female (the slut), and in general no one really has intercourse, they're too busy being poetic, and engaging in group astral travel to beaches and theaters, which is why it's so fascinating, bringing to mind two quotes that have helped me, as an American, understand French sexuality more than anything else: "In Europe, sex is a fact. In America, it is an obsession" (Dietrich) and our own Severine Benzimra: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature." I've found these things to be true in my own amor fou experiences. And I love at least some Cocteau, and at any rate, I like this film's bold red-and-black colors. There's no violence (unless you count a slit throat) but until the arrival of Van Damme and Luc Besson what did French cinema know about violence? What they do know about is surrealism and poetry, and like the tide of poetry that subsumes The Iron Rose both resound and abound.
10. THE CALENDAR GIRL MURDERS
(1984) Dir William A. Graham (TVM)
You'll need something nice and bland after those weird films so here's a different kind of pre-pre-post-giallo, the major network-pr watered down drive-in' lurid hot girls endangered by the viewer's own twisted obsession. Lt. Stoner, (!) played by the great Tom Skerritt, hunts for a serial killer of 'calendar girls' - an approximation of Playboy playmates, mixed up with the fashion world in ways that, like the 70s in general, refuse to become clear. Sharon Stone is one of the models, though she seems to have some other job in an office, and there's all sort of televised events involving swimsuits, fire, aerobics, and track meets. (Lest we forget about Personal Best when connecting this film's DNA across a spectrum of R-rated influences) With a peripheral cast of lurking suspects, a peeping tom, a score that at times conjures Deep Red-era Goblin, an obsessive fan red herring, and Robert Morse (Bert Cooper from Mad Men) as a deranged emcee in terrible blonde toupee. It's a kind of Eyes of Laura Mars see Deep Red and Blow-Up meta-refraction as the format of the TV movie dilutes drive-in sleaze potency to a manageable level, imitating imitators of Hitchcock's R-rated 70s heirs until suspicious eyes find Vertigo references even in the opening credits.
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| Calendar Girl Murders |
That's what the age of cable and Tivo has dne to us, there's no longer a need for that - we grow progressively more merged into the image. But hey, it's the kind of meta-retro perfection this curated Netflix program needs, a breezy stopping point between two gruelingly abstract post-giallo masterworks from the past few years set in the 70s to the actual 70s. The only way it could be better would be if they kept the VHS streaks. Instead it does one better.
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| Basic Instinct |
And here's a real twist, Skerritt's still married with kids, i.e. not showing up late for joint custody hearings! Not that he's not tempted, mightily. Who wouldn't have to let himself be seduced by his son's pin-up crush? It's right on so many levels, until he starts to get jealous! And in true 70s form, cops and killers hug it out at the end; but the great 'wrap-up' scene back at the station where Michael C. Guinn as Stoner's chief magically lifts the entire film right out the path of an approaching Martin Balsam denouement and into a gritty-but-funny 70s cop show Barney Miller meets Fassbinder fade and puts it in a class by itself.
Coda:
Basic Instinct is also on streaming and Sharon Stone tears it up. Douglas is a matter of taste but god bless him for not being afraid to show dat ass as well as the less attractive side of being a cop whose not as adorable and macho as he thinks he is, but is used to bullying women around and getting away with it...(he'd make a fine solstice offering in Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man! - and with that ice pick handy at the end of the film, he still might make it)
Coda:
Basic Instinct is also on streaming and Sharon Stone tears it up. Douglas is a matter of taste but god bless him for not being afraid to show dat ass as well as the less attractive side of being a cop whose not as adorable and macho as he thinks he is, but is used to bullying women around and getting away with it...(he'd make a fine solstice offering in Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man! - and with that ice pick handy at the end of the film, he still might make it)
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Fin NOTES: 1. it's cinema history that Lisa bombed and producer Alfredo Leone tried to recoup his losses by jumping on the Exorcist bandwagon and shooting a few reels of Exorcist ripoff footage with Elke Sommer coming back to play possessed and a priest doubting his faith while they flash back to the events that led up zzz. Re-released as House of Exorcism, Leone recouped his losses! Hurrah. And naysayers hate it, but I can't blame Leone for not wanting to go broke so Bava can make art that won't be appreciated for at least 30 years. Plus, I think Exorcism is hilarious and there's some added footage not used in Bava's film that makes it an interesting addendum... I think. And since it is also on Netflix streaming here so I'd recommend playing them both at the same time (Netflix lets you do that), kind of like playing Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon together, if you get my drift. Here's what you do: put Exorcism on your laptop or phone with the volume low but audible and Lisa on the main screen. Set the laptop/phone down somewhere it's just obtrusive enough, like on the coffee table and let the overlap, duplications, and occasional switches to added footage of Elke being possessed make it all seem like six dimensional reality: Lisa and the Devil is dream poetry, like one long dream some young woman afraid of sex and mannequins might have after an Ugetsu -Wild Strawberries double feature, but stretched to a film length with no 'waking' in the normal sense. But with House on at the same time, Elke occasionally wakes up in an Exorcist 'second level' Inception style dream reality, and then the exorcist himself wakes up and his reality being forced to walk in Father Karras's ungodly shoes... back to that accursed villa. (NOTE: Right as I was finishing this post, House disappeared.... coincidence?) |