Just to let everybody know that this blog's future postings will be paired down severely.
I'm sick of writing about movies, if this changes, I will start updating again.
I've never really even enjoyed film criticism and have always only really done it for accolades and money, both of which I haven't gotten much of through this. It's a boring, masochistic process that I hate and I get little support from people for it. I feel like it's just regurgitating facts and posting your opinions that nobody cares about on films that nobody has seen. Is that really worth it?
Writing about films makes me stressed out and is like squeezing water out of a rock for me. Making films, on the other, is something I adore and have passion for like nothing else. It's like Tawny Kitaen in a Whitesnake video: I just want to have sex with the filmmaking process 24 hours a day.
So, at least for now, I'm done writing about films. I'm going to write screenplays instead and make movies. I'm finished the new cuts of Little Red Riding Hood and Dream House and starting my own videograper business for local bands soon as well.
I also want to apologize to MST3K's entire fanbase for making that dumb post. It's still not my cup of tea but I recently dug up my old Amazing Colossal Episode Guide and didn't find it all that mean spirited after all. I was very angry and depressed about a myriad of other things and I channeled some of that anger toward a 20 year old comedy show. I'm sorry!
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
A few things.
I'm probably winding down this blog for the time being. No more videos of the week (though a video a day will continue to be posted on Cinematic Damnation's channel for some time) and Ephemeral Film Friday is off for a while (may come back soon though). There will still be updates, just less in number.
Also, as a note, from Monday, March 2nd to Monday, March 9th, there will be no videos posted. I'm putting my desktop computer, which contains all the .avi files I upload to YouTube, in the shop for a while because of viruses. There's a weird, memory-sapping bug on this thing which all the software I have can't clean.
Also, as a note, from Monday, March 2nd to Monday, March 9th, there will be no videos posted. I'm putting my desktop computer, which contains all the .avi files I upload to YouTube, in the shop for a while because of viruses. There's a weird, memory-sapping bug on this thing which all the software I have can't clean.
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Oscars were...
Pretty good this year. They started off boring but ended up less boring than usual by the end.
It was good to see some Japanese filmmakers getting some love.
Heath Ledger deserved that honorary Oscar and it was touching to see his family accept it for him. It was strange that Nolan wasn't nominated, though.
Kate Winslet gave a nice speech. I still need to see The Reader (I loved Revolutionary Road though more than most).
I think Mickey Rourke should have won Best Actor.
I figured Slumdog Millionaire would win. I like the movie. A little too over-sentimental in bits, the cinematography and editing is a little "MTV" but the film's message is a beautiful one.
It was good to see some Japanese filmmakers getting some love.
Heath Ledger deserved that honorary Oscar and it was touching to see his family accept it for him. It was strange that Nolan wasn't nominated, though.
Kate Winslet gave a nice speech. I still need to see The Reader (I loved Revolutionary Road though more than most).
I think Mickey Rourke should have won Best Actor.
I figured Slumdog Millionaire would win. I like the movie. A little too over-sentimental in bits, the cinematography and editing is a little "MTV" but the film's message is a beautiful one.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Evil Dead Trap (1988)
Evil Dead Trap, Japan (Joy Pack/Japan Home Video, 1988), directed by Toshiharu Ikeda
Evil Dead Trap (1988), is a fairly brilliant, thrilling and extremely nasty little Japanese horror flick directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who also directed the somber art film Mermaid Legend (1984) and written by manga artist and soon-to-be-director Takashi Ishii. If there’s one thing that can be said about Evil Dead Trap it’s that the film is a very interesting stylistic work. Though its title brings Sam Raimi’s early work to mind, a viewing of it is far more likely to give one flashbacks of the works of many Italian horror legends, particularly Dario Argento (Suspiria, Tenebre) as well as the likes of Lucio Fulci (Zombie, The Beyond) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, House on the Edge of the Park). It’s got the stylistic flair and striking visuals of an Argento thriller, the wince-inducing viciously brutal violence and gore of Fulci at his finest and the vile rape and nastiness of a Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi exploiter. To top it off, it also throws a lot of elements from American horror films like Halloween, Alien and Friday the 13th as well as the films of David Cronenberg into the mix. What results is a highly suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that truly never lets up! It’s a very cruel, mean-spirited and nihilistic film, but that hardly detracts from its charm. Nami (Miyuki Ono) is a late night variety TV show host. One day she receives a video in the mail. The tape turns out to be a vicious and nasty snuff film. Nami, against everyone’s advice, decides to take a group of her friends to investigate the location in which in the snuff video was shot: a former American military base. However, someone or something starts murdering her friends in various grotesque ways. Later, she is saved by a man (Yuji Homna) who turns to have a bit of a dark family history. The man is actually the host to something truly evil, a creature beyond his control known as Hideki.
Evil Dead Trap is one of those wonderful films that gets you from frame one. The opening scene, of someone sitting a weird room, watching a recorded tape of Nami as someone else, apparently a child, tells him what to do, sets the film up perfectly. Then at the five minute mark, we see one of the nastiest simulated snuff films ever shot, in my opinion even nastier than the disturbing but pointless, badly shot and ritualistic Guinea Pig films, in which a girl is mutilated and her eyeball is cut Un Chien Andalou-style. It’s certainly the nastiest, most wince-inducing example of eyeball violence since Fulci’s Zombie. Later, the nastiness continues. A young woman gets skewered by metal rods and then a girl gets raped in a scene that rivals anything Deodato ever shot in terms of viewer discomfort and later gets strangled with a noose like in Suspiria. After that, there’s an absolutely vicious sequence in which a girl is tied to a wall with her face painted white and killed with a motion detonated crossbow. Ikeda’s direction of all of this is quite crisp and stylish, he keeps the first 45 minutes of the film running at a breakneck pace and the film is well shot by veteran cinematographer Masaki Tamura. It’s been said that Ikeda doesn’t actually like gory films, but this simply couldn’t be possible given the amount of horror references present in the film. Evil Dead Trap’s (often very blue) lighting heavily invokes Argento. The film’s score as well, by Tomohiko Kira, even sounds an awful lot like it was composed by Simonetti, Pignatelli and Morante of the Italian rock group Goblin, who did the music for many an Argento film and numerous others.
My complaint with Evil Dead Trap is that, while its pacing for its first act is steller, it kind of loses steam once Nami's friends are all dead and the film's subject becomes the mysterious man and Hideki. There's nothing wrong with its pacing, but next to the absolutely ferocious first 45 minutes it seems rather humdrum and doesn't really pick up again until the last 20 minutes. What’s interesting about Evil Dead Trap is that it doesn’t actually feel very “Japanese” at all. Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend had a very Japanese sensibility to it, but for Evil Dead Trap he creates something which feels extremely Western. If you were to keep the film exactly the same but simply change its actors to Caucasians and its setting to the West, it would be completely indistinguishable from any Western horror film. The film not only borrows heavily from Italian horror, it also pilfers Hollywood’s then fairly recent horror blockbusters as well. The whole conservative and deeply sexist American “promiscuous young women die first” plot device popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th is utilized early on in Evil Dead Trap. The film’s misogynistic rape and murder scenes are also nicely offset by a strong female protagonist in the form of Nami, played nicely by Miyuki Ono. The character is very reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley of Alien fame in her actions and actress Miyuki Ono even bares just a passing resemblance to Weaver.
Though Ono was a professional actress (having appeared in Toho’s Sayonara Jupiter a few years prior), some of the other actresses, most notably Hitomi Kobayashi, were “AV idols”, the sanitized Japanese term for “porno star”. Interestingly enough, Kobayashi is the one actress who does a fully naked sex scene, perhaps a joking little nod to her far better known roles. The film is at times rather clichéd and can sometimes feel like little more than a collection of slasher movie conventions, but Evil Dead Trap is so mean spirited in its nasty violence that it really rises above that. Best of all, the film features a fairy amazing and unexpected plot twist involving a demonic unborn fetus that must be seen to be believed. As some have said, it feels very Cronenbergian and even brings a few Hong Kong horror films to mind such as Devil Fetus and The Rape After. The gore and special effects by FX, gore and creature master Shinichi Wakasa (essentially the Japanese equivalent to Tom Savini) are excellent, particularly the puppetry and manipulation of the fetal hellbeast.
Evil Dead Trap was popular enough to be followed by not one, but two sequels, both of which were more or less in name only with no connection to the events of the original film. The first sequel, Evil Dead Trap 2 (1991) is directed by Izo Hashimoto, a very strange character in his own right, primarily a screenwriter who branched out into direction for a while. He’s the only filmmaker and writer in Japan who’s worked in the genres of horror, anime, exploitation and Hong Kong cinema all at the same time. He’s written things as varied as the seminal anime masterwork Akira, the Hong Kong co-productions Kujako-O (1988) and Shamo (2005) and the sleazy Sukeban Deka (1987) while at the same time directing such films as the very strange Guinea Pig series clone Lucky Star Diamond (1989). Sadly Evil Dead Trap 2 has little of the power of its predecessor and as usual for much of Hashimoto’s body of work, is just a little too weird for its own good. Then there came Evil Dead Trap 3: Broken Love Killer (1993), a film that was likely given the Evil Dead Trap name just to make a few more yen. Broken Love Killer was another collaboration between director Toshiharu Ikeda and screenwriter Takashi Ishii and features another character named Nami (Ishii tries to work a protagonist named Nami into every film he writes or directs) tracking a serial killer across Japan.
Evil Dead Trap (1988), is a fairly brilliant, thrilling and extremely nasty little Japanese horror flick directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who also directed the somber art film Mermaid Legend (1984) and written by manga artist and soon-to-be-director Takashi Ishii. If there’s one thing that can be said about Evil Dead Trap it’s that the film is a very interesting stylistic work. Though its title brings Sam Raimi’s early work to mind, a viewing of it is far more likely to give one flashbacks of the works of many Italian horror legends, particularly Dario Argento (Suspiria, Tenebre) as well as the likes of Lucio Fulci (Zombie, The Beyond) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, House on the Edge of the Park). It’s got the stylistic flair and striking visuals of an Argento thriller, the wince-inducing viciously brutal violence and gore of Fulci at his finest and the vile rape and nastiness of a Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi exploiter. To top it off, it also throws a lot of elements from American horror films like Halloween, Alien and Friday the 13th as well as the films of David Cronenberg into the mix. What results is a highly suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that truly never lets up! It’s a very cruel, mean-spirited and nihilistic film, but that hardly detracts from its charm. Nami (Miyuki Ono) is a late night variety TV show host. One day she receives a video in the mail. The tape turns out to be a vicious and nasty snuff film. Nami, against everyone’s advice, decides to take a group of her friends to investigate the location in which in the snuff video was shot: a former American military base. However, someone or something starts murdering her friends in various grotesque ways. Later, she is saved by a man (Yuji Homna) who turns to have a bit of a dark family history. The man is actually the host to something truly evil, a creature beyond his control known as Hideki.
Evil Dead Trap is one of those wonderful films that gets you from frame one. The opening scene, of someone sitting a weird room, watching a recorded tape of Nami as someone else, apparently a child, tells him what to do, sets the film up perfectly. Then at the five minute mark, we see one of the nastiest simulated snuff films ever shot, in my opinion even nastier than the disturbing but pointless, badly shot and ritualistic Guinea Pig films, in which a girl is mutilated and her eyeball is cut Un Chien Andalou-style. It’s certainly the nastiest, most wince-inducing example of eyeball violence since Fulci’s Zombie. Later, the nastiness continues. A young woman gets skewered by metal rods and then a girl gets raped in a scene that rivals anything Deodato ever shot in terms of viewer discomfort and later gets strangled with a noose like in Suspiria. After that, there’s an absolutely vicious sequence in which a girl is tied to a wall with her face painted white and killed with a motion detonated crossbow. Ikeda’s direction of all of this is quite crisp and stylish, he keeps the first 45 minutes of the film running at a breakneck pace and the film is well shot by veteran cinematographer Masaki Tamura. It’s been said that Ikeda doesn’t actually like gory films, but this simply couldn’t be possible given the amount of horror references present in the film. Evil Dead Trap’s (often very blue) lighting heavily invokes Argento. The film’s score as well, by Tomohiko Kira, even sounds an awful lot like it was composed by Simonetti, Pignatelli and Morante of the Italian rock group Goblin, who did the music for many an Argento film and numerous others.
My complaint with Evil Dead Trap is that, while its pacing for its first act is steller, it kind of loses steam once Nami's friends are all dead and the film's subject becomes the mysterious man and Hideki. There's nothing wrong with its pacing, but next to the absolutely ferocious first 45 minutes it seems rather humdrum and doesn't really pick up again until the last 20 minutes. What’s interesting about Evil Dead Trap is that it doesn’t actually feel very “Japanese” at all. Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend had a very Japanese sensibility to it, but for Evil Dead Trap he creates something which feels extremely Western. If you were to keep the film exactly the same but simply change its actors to Caucasians and its setting to the West, it would be completely indistinguishable from any Western horror film. The film not only borrows heavily from Italian horror, it also pilfers Hollywood’s then fairly recent horror blockbusters as well. The whole conservative and deeply sexist American “promiscuous young women die first” plot device popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th is utilized early on in Evil Dead Trap. The film’s misogynistic rape and murder scenes are also nicely offset by a strong female protagonist in the form of Nami, played nicely by Miyuki Ono. The character is very reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley of Alien fame in her actions and actress Miyuki Ono even bares just a passing resemblance to Weaver.
Though Ono was a professional actress (having appeared in Toho’s Sayonara Jupiter a few years prior), some of the other actresses, most notably Hitomi Kobayashi, were “AV idols”, the sanitized Japanese term for “porno star”. Interestingly enough, Kobayashi is the one actress who does a fully naked sex scene, perhaps a joking little nod to her far better known roles. The film is at times rather clichéd and can sometimes feel like little more than a collection of slasher movie conventions, but Evil Dead Trap is so mean spirited in its nasty violence that it really rises above that. Best of all, the film features a fairy amazing and unexpected plot twist involving a demonic unborn fetus that must be seen to be believed. As some have said, it feels very Cronenbergian and even brings a few Hong Kong horror films to mind such as Devil Fetus and The Rape After. The gore and special effects by FX, gore and creature master Shinichi Wakasa (essentially the Japanese equivalent to Tom Savini) are excellent, particularly the puppetry and manipulation of the fetal hellbeast.
Evil Dead Trap was popular enough to be followed by not one, but two sequels, both of which were more or less in name only with no connection to the events of the original film. The first sequel, Evil Dead Trap 2 (1991) is directed by Izo Hashimoto, a very strange character in his own right, primarily a screenwriter who branched out into direction for a while. He’s the only filmmaker and writer in Japan who’s worked in the genres of horror, anime, exploitation and Hong Kong cinema all at the same time. He’s written things as varied as the seminal anime masterwork Akira, the Hong Kong co-productions Kujako-O (1988) and Shamo (2005) and the sleazy Sukeban Deka (1987) while at the same time directing such films as the very strange Guinea Pig series clone Lucky Star Diamond (1989). Sadly Evil Dead Trap 2 has little of the power of its predecessor and as usual for much of Hashimoto’s body of work, is just a little too weird for its own good. Then there came Evil Dead Trap 3: Broken Love Killer (1993), a film that was likely given the Evil Dead Trap name just to make a few more yen. Broken Love Killer was another collaboration between director Toshiharu Ikeda and screenwriter Takashi Ishii and features another character named Nami (Ishii tries to work a protagonist named Nami into every film he writes or directs) tracking a serial killer across Japan.Thursday, February 19, 2009
Videos of the Week(s) (2/19/09)
I was kinda busy and missed the last "Videos of the Week" collection. Therefore, here are two weeks worth of YouTubey goodness.
The Strange Ones is a shot for shot, line for line 70s remake of a Sid Davis production from a decade prior. This film is best described as a pedophile hysteria movie, designed to terrify children into submission. Here we see the film's over the top presentation, which implies that there is a child loving pevert waiting to stick his dick up your butt in every alleyway, park, theater, street side and so forth.
Could being fed films and propaganda like this be the reason that the Baby Boomer generation over pampered their children to the point that some are spoiled brats unable to do anything with their lives?
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972) is a fine example of a wuxia (Chinese swordplay film) produced by Shaw Brothers. It was directed by Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen) who later directed a large handful of incoherently plotted but lushly filmed martial arts flicks based on popular books by Ku Lung such as Killer Clans, The Magic Blade and Clans of Intrigue. This is likely his finest film, a stunning, bloody revenge flick of a girl, Ai Nu (Lily Ho) kidnapped and forced into prostitution by the icy Madame Chun (Betty Pei Tei). It contains some fine swordplay, lots of condom-dispersed Chinese stage blood, a subtle by today's standards but scandalous by 70s Hong Kong's lesbian love subplot and some very striking images. This scene, where a grude-holding young man tries to help Ainu escape, contains one of my favorite shots in any Hong Kong film: a haunting image of a smirking Pei Tei licking blood of her fingers.
Here's a very disturbing bit from Nobuo Nakagawa's 1959 kaidan eiga masterpiece Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Ghost of Yotsuya), a Shintoho production and no doubt one of the best regarded adaptations of Japan's most famous horror fable: Yotsuya Kaidan, which has also been adapted into such films as Illusion of Blood (1966) by Shiro Toyoda and 1994's Crest of Betrayal by Kinji Fukasaku. Whereas Toyoda's film runs three hours and treats the proceedings as a historical drama and Fukasaku's fuses it with the equally famous Chushingura Gaiden from the same time period as well as his typical socio-political elements, Nakagawa's version runs a taut 75 minutes and focuses on pure horror! In terms of atmosphere and scare factor, this is easily the finest depiction of the haunting of cruel, unfaithful samurai Iuemon by the ghost of his horrendously victimized wife Oiwa.
This scene shows Oiwa's death and is one of the most disturbing sequences in Japanese horror cinema, all the more incredible since it was made 50 years ago. The genre maverick Nakagawa, who later did the absolutely phantasmagorical freak show Jigoku (1960) and whose work was quite equivalent to that of Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava and Terence Fisher, sadly has little of the appreciation. Interestingly enough, his use of graphic violence predated H.G. Lewis' for several years and his use of atmospheric cinematography and ingenuitive camera tricks also slightly predated Bava's.
Addio Zio Tom or Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) was Italian mondo maverick duo Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperis next foray into the fertile world of human depravity after the shockingly educational Mondo Cane (1962) and the incredibly controversial Africa Addio (1966). This film, rather than an actual documentary, is a staged recreation of the American slave trade or as famed British author William Makepeace Thackeray would say that "most peculiar institution". For the filming, Jacopetti and Prosperi struck a deal with the notorious despot Papa Doc to lens their little epic in Haiti, which gave them an infinite supply of naked black thespians to play the tortured slaves.
Sometimes its hard to tell what Goodbye Uncle Tom's political purpose really is. Its either the most obscenely racist film ever made and a appalling piece of skinhead masturbation material or is the most militantly anti-white, pro-Black power film ever conceived, the kind of film even Spike Lee wouldn't dare make. Often it goes back and forth between these two sentiments. For example, the film shows a very iconic image of a little white girl, complete with a very Aryan blonde-haired and blue-eyed appearance, pulling a naked black boy, her pet, along her with a chain. Its an image that visually tries to demonstrate the superiority, or at least the dominance, of the white race over the black race. The black slaves in this film are depicted as very unintelligent and almost ape-like at times, mostly too stupid and too complacent to rise up and take on their white oppressors. . At the same time, the film goes to extraordinarily graphic lengths to show the extreme cruelty inflicted on black by white. We see slaves tortured and abused in every way imaginable and raped numerous times.
Here we have the film's flamboyant finale, showing an irate early 70s black man, afro in all, sitting on a beach reading the seminal Confessions of Nat Turner by visionary author William Styron, visualizes himself butchering the whites around him just like Nat did as revenge for their cruel treatment toward his ancestors. With his scene, which will make those with staunch racial nationalist views of both skin colors want to punch their fists through a wall just as hard for different reasons, Jacopetti and Prosperi's true intentions become obvious. They were not trying to calm the then current racial tensions in America by making a politically correct feel good piece of trash, no, they were trying to throw a gigantic Molotov cocktail into the middle of it and split the ground wide open. When making films, they didn't care about political correctness or tastefulness. What they did care about is compelling imagery and food for thought and I for one think that makes them incredibly fascinating men, even if their filmmaking practices were often morally reprehensible.
The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (Denchu Kozo no Boken) is a neat low budget short film from Shinya Tsukamoto. The film has a difficult length, at around 45 minutes, as it's too long to be a conventional short but not long enough to be a feature film, but is nonetheless very rewarding and quite wonderfully bizarre, shot on 8mm and color a year before Shinya Tsukamoto would make his seminal feature length break out hit Tetsuo.
It features a lot of the wonderful kinetic and crazy visual techniques Tsukamoto would employ (albeit to better effect) in Tetsuo. The plot involves a young man with an electric pole sticking out of his back (Senba Naruaki) who is considered a freak by his classmates, save for his kindly female friend Momoko (Shin Kanoka). He then time warps decades into the future, where he helps a grown up Momoko battle a trio of vampires and a genetically engineered mutant woman (Kei Fujiwara) who can blot out the sun so the vampires can reign supreme. For a 45 minute amateur film made on Super 8, this is a fine piece of cinema.
One of the funnier scenes in the 1975, criminally obscure classic Criminally Insane (also known as Crazy Fat Ethel). This film is simultaneously one of the best "bad movies" ever made along side such gems as Robot Monster and H.G. Lewis' and Ed Wood's collective bodies of work. It also, alongside such films as Troma's notable later productions and Peter Jackson's later Dead Alive, is one of the funniest low budget horror comedies ever made. Its subject: morbidly obese mental patient Ethel Janowsky (Priscilla Alden), recently released from the state loony bin to the care of her grandmother. The film follows Ethel's murderous exploits as she kills everybody who stands between her and the thing she loves most: large quantities of hearty food. Directed by former porn director Nick Phillips, despite having rock bottom production values, the film only really is heavily marred by its length: even at its short, barely feature length hour runtime, it still feels overlong, like a 30 minute short film stretched out to twice its needed duration. Still, if your looking for a a night filled with hysterical, belly rupturing laughter, make a date with Crazy Fat Ethel! She truly puts the "laughter" back in "manslaughter".
Here Ethel wants a midnight snack but finds her grandmother has locked up all the food. Her grandmother explains that she will eat normal amounts of food like a normal human being from now on so she can become healthier. Ethel, unfortunately, doesn't take this very well.
Here's a great scene from one of Godzilla director Ishiro Honda's first horror-themed films at Toho, The H-Man (1958). The film is known in Japanese as Bijo to Ekitiningen (Beautiful Woman and Hydrogen Men), a hilariously hyperbolic title that rather falsely advertises the film as being far more exploitative than it is. This is ironic, as usually, particularly in the case of AIP's releases of Toho's films, the US titles always played up the films' exploitation elements (see Matango/Attack of the Mushroom People) whereas the Japanese titles were often more serious.
While in The H-Man there are some pretty girls dressed a little scantily at times, the real focus is a creepy atmosphere and some well done special effects by the always iconoclastic Eiji Tsuburaya, both of which look forward to their aforementioned Matango (1963). The film's mix of yakuza hjinks and genre elements also anticipates Honda's future, and far less serious Dogora, the Space Monster (1964). Here's one of the big highlights of The H-Man, a sequence eerily reminiscent of the infamous Dai-go Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) incident in which a fishing vessel steers way too close to an atomic test causing some horrific repercussions.
Another scene from Mondo Cane co-author Franco E. Prosperi's often unintentionally comedic but always morally repulsive when-animals-attack epic Wild Beasts (1983). Have you ever seen an elephant squash a lady's head with its foot? Now you have!
A special, Valentine's Day themed clip. Here's a spectacularly silly sequence from Kinji Fukasaku's Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983). This is actually Fukasaku's second go at the material, as the director previously used the same basis for his space opera Message From Space (1978). For years only available in washed out public domain prints, Legend of the Eight Samurai is actually quite beautifully filmed and lavishly made and compares well with such Western films of the same type and period as Conan the Barbarian, Krull and Ladyhawke.
Its all the more amazing to see something like this from Kinji Fukasaku, who was simply the most versatile Japanese filmmaker to ever live. His crime dramas like Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) and Graveyard of Honor (1975) are notoriously grim and boast an almost documentary-like grit and realism akin to Western filmmakers such as William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann. Legend of the Eight Samurai, on the other hand, is silly, opulent and very over the top, all the more obvious in this borderline unintentionally hilarious sequence, a scene in which Shinbee (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Shizuhime (Hiroko Yakushimaru) fornicate in a saccharine PG fashion under a bunch of Buddha statues in misty, blue lit atmosphere is punctuated by American vocalist John O'Banion's love theme.
Meet Florrie Fisher: she's a narcissistic, drug addicted beast who sadly plays into "Nasally-voiced New York Jew" stereotype all too well. This is her story, the apparent point of it being "don't do drugs", which she drills into an obviously uncomfortable crowd of high school kids with the charm of a chronic Staph infection, often singling out the black kids as "you Negros", something that would get you instantly ejected from the premises of any respectable high school today.
While watching this footage, you will feel a strange mix of emotions: mainly disgust, fear and amusement. Within a few years Florrie Fisher was back on the streets doing drugs and later died in complete obscurity, as in nobody knows what happened to her. Amy Sidaris later based her character off Fisher in Strangers With Candy.
Here's a nasty bit from T.F. Mou's Lost Souls (1980). Mou was the man later responsible for Men Behind the Sun (1988) but some years before he was causing people to throw up, faint and even get heart attacks in China, he was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable at Shaw Brothers studios in Hong Kong. Mou hated working for the Shaw Brothers because they were pretty much a movie factory that did little in the way of encouraging artistic integrity. For Lost Souls, Mou convinced Run Run Shaw to greenlight this film with no script and pretty much made the film up as he went along. What results is a wildly uneven but definitely worthwhile film that very much foreshadows his later work on Men Behind the Sun and Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995).
Like Men Behind the Sun, Lost Souls takes its plot from reality, in this case the cruel exploitation of mainland China refugees in Hong Kong by HK-based Triads, a frequent headline news-grabber in the tiny island nation in the late 70s-early 80s. Lost Souls is one of those kinds of films that switches gears at any particular moment and if there's one major problem with the film, its that Mou seems like he wasn't sure what kind of film he wanted to make (and the fact that the film was shot without a script probably exacerbated this). At times it seems like hes trying to make an exploitation film as degrading and tasteless as anything Japanese filmmakers such as Teruo Ishii or Yasuharu Hasebe or Europeans like Jess Franco and Ruggero Deodato could come up with. Other times it seems like hes trying to make a serious political piece about the plight of these poor immigrants or even an artsy fartsy film like Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo and the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). This makes the film rather bipolar at times. One thing rampant in this film that definitely foreshadows Mou's later work is the use of extreme, graphic imagery. Throughout the film, we see women tied up like animals to chairs having hot wax dripped on their naked bodies, we see rows upon rows of naked female asses with prices sharpied onto them, we see naked children murdered and we even see homosexual sodomy so graphic it makes Deliverance look like an Ernest film! Some of this is staged in a solemn fashion, some of it is staged in an almost comedic manner and some of it is like a weird mix between both. If theres one major problem with the film, its that Mou seems like he wasnt sure what kind of film he wanted to make (and the fact that the film was shot without a script probably exacerbated this). Still, Lost Souls is a pretty incredible film. It goes as far as any Category III film did in the early 90s yet was made years before the rating (which T.F. Mou actually indirectly helped create with the controversy surrounding Men Behind the Sun) even existed and yet is a studio production from the Shaw era. This sequence is a good example of how far the film goes in its level of depravity.
Here's an absolutely kickass sequence from Kinji Fukasaku's Samurai Reincarnation (1981), also known as Makai Tensho (which translates from the Nihongo as Demonic Resurrection). Samurai Reincarnation is Kinji Fukasaku's return to the jidai-geki genre after taking his audiences to a post-germ warfare holocaust world in his megabucks sci-fi epic Virus (1980) which he made for Haruki Kadokawa, the Nippon Jerry Bruckheimer. With this film, Fukasaku pays another visit to the Yagyu clan, everyone's favorite dysfunctional Tokugawa-era martial arts family which he previous explored in his first period piece, The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy (1978). Here, however, working from a lurid novel by Futaro Yamada, Fukasaku crafts a far more bizarre world, throwing in other events and historical figures in the same time period as the Yagyus and the early Tokugawa bakufu as Amakusa Shiro Tokisada and the Christian rebels, Musashi Miyamoto and the Koga and Iga ninja clans. It was with this film that Kinji Fukasaku began to craft a more fantasy-based type of jidai-geki film that actually owed more the Western fantasy epics being produced at the same time than it did to Akira Kurosawa which come full circle in Fukasaku's Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983).
With an all-star cast headlined by such lords of Nippon badass as Sonny Chiba, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ken Ogata and Tetsuro Tamba, the film has several particularly spectacular action sequences courtesy of the always frantically kinetic Fukasaku's direction and karate master Chiba's intensely physical choreography. This is one of them; a beautifully staged and filmed duel on a beach featuring Chiba's Yagyu Jubei and Ogata's Musashi Miyamoto.
Badass as all get out bit from The Deadly Angels (1977), a Shaw Brothers cop/spy flick. If Mighty Peking Man was the zany, Sinoized version of King Kong, Deadly Angels is most certainly the wacky Hong Kong version of Charlie's Angels. The film is directed by hired hack/former cinematographer and Chang Cheh assistant Pao Hsueh-Li and revolves around a gaggle of international female cops lead by Peking Man's Evelyn Kraft and the cute Nancy Yen, who track a vicious diamond smuggling ring.
Despite being one of the biggest box office hits when released in HK and one of the more notable Shaw flicks before Celestial's restorations, Celestial Pictures decided not to bother releasing it, along with a great many other films. While The Deadly Angels is by no means a "good" film, being very sloppily made and disjointed, it is a lot of fun and does pack some always lively action sequences.
The opening sequence of Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, one of the coolest Japanese exploitation films ever made. Directed by maverick Shunya Ito and starring the always stunning Meiko Kaji (later of Lady Snowblood fame) the first three Female Convict Scorpion films feature a strange mixture of sleazy, exploitative violence and degradation with a level of visual beautiful and surreal aesthetic that will please the arthouse crowd. Despite the films' violent content, they are fierce feminist statements in many ways.
Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 is the finest of the films, however, something of a ero-guro Empire Strikes Back to the first film's A New Hope. Most of the film features protagonist Nami, along with a gaggle of other and far nastier female convicts, on the run from the cruel prison warden Goda (Fumio Watanabe). Meiko Kaji's persona shines brightest here: she is an unblinking, tough as a stone female revolutionary who never gives, no matter how much heinous abuse is piled upon her. She is, as the director himself said, the one female voice who dared to stand up and say "no" to patriarchal society. Ito's surrealist direction is also at its finest here and the film has a lot of freak out "wow" moments.
The Strange Ones is a shot for shot, line for line 70s remake of a Sid Davis production from a decade prior. This film is best described as a pedophile hysteria movie, designed to terrify children into submission. Here we see the film's over the top presentation, which implies that there is a child loving pevert waiting to stick his dick up your butt in every alleyway, park, theater, street side and so forth.
Could being fed films and propaganda like this be the reason that the Baby Boomer generation over pampered their children to the point that some are spoiled brats unable to do anything with their lives?
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972) is a fine example of a wuxia (Chinese swordplay film) produced by Shaw Brothers. It was directed by Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen) who later directed a large handful of incoherently plotted but lushly filmed martial arts flicks based on popular books by Ku Lung such as Killer Clans, The Magic Blade and Clans of Intrigue. This is likely his finest film, a stunning, bloody revenge flick of a girl, Ai Nu (Lily Ho) kidnapped and forced into prostitution by the icy Madame Chun (Betty Pei Tei). It contains some fine swordplay, lots of condom-dispersed Chinese stage blood, a subtle by today's standards but scandalous by 70s Hong Kong's lesbian love subplot and some very striking images. This scene, where a grude-holding young man tries to help Ainu escape, contains one of my favorite shots in any Hong Kong film: a haunting image of a smirking Pei Tei licking blood of her fingers.
Here's a very disturbing bit from Nobuo Nakagawa's 1959 kaidan eiga masterpiece Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Ghost of Yotsuya), a Shintoho production and no doubt one of the best regarded adaptations of Japan's most famous horror fable: Yotsuya Kaidan, which has also been adapted into such films as Illusion of Blood (1966) by Shiro Toyoda and 1994's Crest of Betrayal by Kinji Fukasaku. Whereas Toyoda's film runs three hours and treats the proceedings as a historical drama and Fukasaku's fuses it with the equally famous Chushingura Gaiden from the same time period as well as his typical socio-political elements, Nakagawa's version runs a taut 75 minutes and focuses on pure horror! In terms of atmosphere and scare factor, this is easily the finest depiction of the haunting of cruel, unfaithful samurai Iuemon by the ghost of his horrendously victimized wife Oiwa.
This scene shows Oiwa's death and is one of the most disturbing sequences in Japanese horror cinema, all the more incredible since it was made 50 years ago. The genre maverick Nakagawa, who later did the absolutely phantasmagorical freak show Jigoku (1960) and whose work was quite equivalent to that of Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava and Terence Fisher, sadly has little of the appreciation. Interestingly enough, his use of graphic violence predated H.G. Lewis' for several years and his use of atmospheric cinematography and ingenuitive camera tricks also slightly predated Bava's.
Addio Zio Tom or Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) was Italian mondo maverick duo Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperis next foray into the fertile world of human depravity after the shockingly educational Mondo Cane (1962) and the incredibly controversial Africa Addio (1966). This film, rather than an actual documentary, is a staged recreation of the American slave trade or as famed British author William Makepeace Thackeray would say that "most peculiar institution". For the filming, Jacopetti and Prosperi struck a deal with the notorious despot Papa Doc to lens their little epic in Haiti, which gave them an infinite supply of naked black thespians to play the tortured slaves.
Sometimes its hard to tell what Goodbye Uncle Tom's political purpose really is. Its either the most obscenely racist film ever made and a appalling piece of skinhead masturbation material or is the most militantly anti-white, pro-Black power film ever conceived, the kind of film even Spike Lee wouldn't dare make. Often it goes back and forth between these two sentiments. For example, the film shows a very iconic image of a little white girl, complete with a very Aryan blonde-haired and blue-eyed appearance, pulling a naked black boy, her pet, along her with a chain. Its an image that visually tries to demonstrate the superiority, or at least the dominance, of the white race over the black race. The black slaves in this film are depicted as very unintelligent and almost ape-like at times, mostly too stupid and too complacent to rise up and take on their white oppressors. . At the same time, the film goes to extraordinarily graphic lengths to show the extreme cruelty inflicted on black by white. We see slaves tortured and abused in every way imaginable and raped numerous times.
Here we have the film's flamboyant finale, showing an irate early 70s black man, afro in all, sitting on a beach reading the seminal Confessions of Nat Turner by visionary author William Styron, visualizes himself butchering the whites around him just like Nat did as revenge for their cruel treatment toward his ancestors. With his scene, which will make those with staunch racial nationalist views of both skin colors want to punch their fists through a wall just as hard for different reasons, Jacopetti and Prosperi's true intentions become obvious. They were not trying to calm the then current racial tensions in America by making a politically correct feel good piece of trash, no, they were trying to throw a gigantic Molotov cocktail into the middle of it and split the ground wide open. When making films, they didn't care about political correctness or tastefulness. What they did care about is compelling imagery and food for thought and I for one think that makes them incredibly fascinating men, even if their filmmaking practices were often morally reprehensible.
The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (Denchu Kozo no Boken) is a neat low budget short film from Shinya Tsukamoto. The film has a difficult length, at around 45 minutes, as it's too long to be a conventional short but not long enough to be a feature film, but is nonetheless very rewarding and quite wonderfully bizarre, shot on 8mm and color a year before Shinya Tsukamoto would make his seminal feature length break out hit Tetsuo.
It features a lot of the wonderful kinetic and crazy visual techniques Tsukamoto would employ (albeit to better effect) in Tetsuo. The plot involves a young man with an electric pole sticking out of his back (Senba Naruaki) who is considered a freak by his classmates, save for his kindly female friend Momoko (Shin Kanoka). He then time warps decades into the future, where he helps a grown up Momoko battle a trio of vampires and a genetically engineered mutant woman (Kei Fujiwara) who can blot out the sun so the vampires can reign supreme. For a 45 minute amateur film made on Super 8, this is a fine piece of cinema.
One of the funnier scenes in the 1975, criminally obscure classic Criminally Insane (also known as Crazy Fat Ethel). This film is simultaneously one of the best "bad movies" ever made along side such gems as Robot Monster and H.G. Lewis' and Ed Wood's collective bodies of work. It also, alongside such films as Troma's notable later productions and Peter Jackson's later Dead Alive, is one of the funniest low budget horror comedies ever made. Its subject: morbidly obese mental patient Ethel Janowsky (Priscilla Alden), recently released from the state loony bin to the care of her grandmother. The film follows Ethel's murderous exploits as she kills everybody who stands between her and the thing she loves most: large quantities of hearty food. Directed by former porn director Nick Phillips, despite having rock bottom production values, the film only really is heavily marred by its length: even at its short, barely feature length hour runtime, it still feels overlong, like a 30 minute short film stretched out to twice its needed duration. Still, if your looking for a a night filled with hysterical, belly rupturing laughter, make a date with Crazy Fat Ethel! She truly puts the "laughter" back in "manslaughter".
Here Ethel wants a midnight snack but finds her grandmother has locked up all the food. Her grandmother explains that she will eat normal amounts of food like a normal human being from now on so she can become healthier. Ethel, unfortunately, doesn't take this very well.
Here's a great scene from one of Godzilla director Ishiro Honda's first horror-themed films at Toho, The H-Man (1958). The film is known in Japanese as Bijo to Ekitiningen (Beautiful Woman and Hydrogen Men), a hilariously hyperbolic title that rather falsely advertises the film as being far more exploitative than it is. This is ironic, as usually, particularly in the case of AIP's releases of Toho's films, the US titles always played up the films' exploitation elements (see Matango/Attack of the Mushroom People) whereas the Japanese titles were often more serious.
While in The H-Man there are some pretty girls dressed a little scantily at times, the real focus is a creepy atmosphere and some well done special effects by the always iconoclastic Eiji Tsuburaya, both of which look forward to their aforementioned Matango (1963). The film's mix of yakuza hjinks and genre elements also anticipates Honda's future, and far less serious Dogora, the Space Monster (1964). Here's one of the big highlights of The H-Man, a sequence eerily reminiscent of the infamous Dai-go Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) incident in which a fishing vessel steers way too close to an atomic test causing some horrific repercussions.
Another scene from Mondo Cane co-author Franco E. Prosperi's often unintentionally comedic but always morally repulsive when-animals-attack epic Wild Beasts (1983). Have you ever seen an elephant squash a lady's head with its foot? Now you have!
A special, Valentine's Day themed clip. Here's a spectacularly silly sequence from Kinji Fukasaku's Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983). This is actually Fukasaku's second go at the material, as the director previously used the same basis for his space opera Message From Space (1978). For years only available in washed out public domain prints, Legend of the Eight Samurai is actually quite beautifully filmed and lavishly made and compares well with such Western films of the same type and period as Conan the Barbarian, Krull and Ladyhawke.
Its all the more amazing to see something like this from Kinji Fukasaku, who was simply the most versatile Japanese filmmaker to ever live. His crime dramas like Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) and Graveyard of Honor (1975) are notoriously grim and boast an almost documentary-like grit and realism akin to Western filmmakers such as William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann. Legend of the Eight Samurai, on the other hand, is silly, opulent and very over the top, all the more obvious in this borderline unintentionally hilarious sequence, a scene in which Shinbee (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Shizuhime (Hiroko Yakushimaru) fornicate in a saccharine PG fashion under a bunch of Buddha statues in misty, blue lit atmosphere is punctuated by American vocalist John O'Banion's love theme.
Meet Florrie Fisher: she's a narcissistic, drug addicted beast who sadly plays into "Nasally-voiced New York Jew" stereotype all too well. This is her story, the apparent point of it being "don't do drugs", which she drills into an obviously uncomfortable crowd of high school kids with the charm of a chronic Staph infection, often singling out the black kids as "you Negros", something that would get you instantly ejected from the premises of any respectable high school today.
While watching this footage, you will feel a strange mix of emotions: mainly disgust, fear and amusement. Within a few years Florrie Fisher was back on the streets doing drugs and later died in complete obscurity, as in nobody knows what happened to her. Amy Sidaris later based her character off Fisher in Strangers With Candy.
Here's a nasty bit from T.F. Mou's Lost Souls (1980). Mou was the man later responsible for Men Behind the Sun (1988) but some years before he was causing people to throw up, faint and even get heart attacks in China, he was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable at Shaw Brothers studios in Hong Kong. Mou hated working for the Shaw Brothers because they were pretty much a movie factory that did little in the way of encouraging artistic integrity. For Lost Souls, Mou convinced Run Run Shaw to greenlight this film with no script and pretty much made the film up as he went along. What results is a wildly uneven but definitely worthwhile film that very much foreshadows his later work on Men Behind the Sun and Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995).
Like Men Behind the Sun, Lost Souls takes its plot from reality, in this case the cruel exploitation of mainland China refugees in Hong Kong by HK-based Triads, a frequent headline news-grabber in the tiny island nation in the late 70s-early 80s. Lost Souls is one of those kinds of films that switches gears at any particular moment and if there's one major problem with the film, its that Mou seems like he wasn't sure what kind of film he wanted to make (and the fact that the film was shot without a script probably exacerbated this). At times it seems like hes trying to make an exploitation film as degrading and tasteless as anything Japanese filmmakers such as Teruo Ishii or Yasuharu Hasebe or Europeans like Jess Franco and Ruggero Deodato could come up with. Other times it seems like hes trying to make a serious political piece about the plight of these poor immigrants or even an artsy fartsy film like Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo and the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). This makes the film rather bipolar at times. One thing rampant in this film that definitely foreshadows Mou's later work is the use of extreme, graphic imagery. Throughout the film, we see women tied up like animals to chairs having hot wax dripped on their naked bodies, we see rows upon rows of naked female asses with prices sharpied onto them, we see naked children murdered and we even see homosexual sodomy so graphic it makes Deliverance look like an Ernest film! Some of this is staged in a solemn fashion, some of it is staged in an almost comedic manner and some of it is like a weird mix between both. If theres one major problem with the film, its that Mou seems like he wasnt sure what kind of film he wanted to make (and the fact that the film was shot without a script probably exacerbated this). Still, Lost Souls is a pretty incredible film. It goes as far as any Category III film did in the early 90s yet was made years before the rating (which T.F. Mou actually indirectly helped create with the controversy surrounding Men Behind the Sun) even existed and yet is a studio production from the Shaw era. This sequence is a good example of how far the film goes in its level of depravity.
Here's an absolutely kickass sequence from Kinji Fukasaku's Samurai Reincarnation (1981), also known as Makai Tensho (which translates from the Nihongo as Demonic Resurrection). Samurai Reincarnation is Kinji Fukasaku's return to the jidai-geki genre after taking his audiences to a post-germ warfare holocaust world in his megabucks sci-fi epic Virus (1980) which he made for Haruki Kadokawa, the Nippon Jerry Bruckheimer. With this film, Fukasaku pays another visit to the Yagyu clan, everyone's favorite dysfunctional Tokugawa-era martial arts family which he previous explored in his first period piece, The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy (1978). Here, however, working from a lurid novel by Futaro Yamada, Fukasaku crafts a far more bizarre world, throwing in other events and historical figures in the same time period as the Yagyus and the early Tokugawa bakufu as Amakusa Shiro Tokisada and the Christian rebels, Musashi Miyamoto and the Koga and Iga ninja clans. It was with this film that Kinji Fukasaku began to craft a more fantasy-based type of jidai-geki film that actually owed more the Western fantasy epics being produced at the same time than it did to Akira Kurosawa which come full circle in Fukasaku's Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983).
With an all-star cast headlined by such lords of Nippon badass as Sonny Chiba, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ken Ogata and Tetsuro Tamba, the film has several particularly spectacular action sequences courtesy of the always frantically kinetic Fukasaku's direction and karate master Chiba's intensely physical choreography. This is one of them; a beautifully staged and filmed duel on a beach featuring Chiba's Yagyu Jubei and Ogata's Musashi Miyamoto.
Badass as all get out bit from The Deadly Angels (1977), a Shaw Brothers cop/spy flick. If Mighty Peking Man was the zany, Sinoized version of King Kong, Deadly Angels is most certainly the wacky Hong Kong version of Charlie's Angels. The film is directed by hired hack/former cinematographer and Chang Cheh assistant Pao Hsueh-Li and revolves around a gaggle of international female cops lead by Peking Man's Evelyn Kraft and the cute Nancy Yen, who track a vicious diamond smuggling ring.
Despite being one of the biggest box office hits when released in HK and one of the more notable Shaw flicks before Celestial's restorations, Celestial Pictures decided not to bother releasing it, along with a great many other films. While The Deadly Angels is by no means a "good" film, being very sloppily made and disjointed, it is a lot of fun and does pack some always lively action sequences.
The opening sequence of Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, one of the coolest Japanese exploitation films ever made. Directed by maverick Shunya Ito and starring the always stunning Meiko Kaji (later of Lady Snowblood fame) the first three Female Convict Scorpion films feature a strange mixture of sleazy, exploitative violence and degradation with a level of visual beautiful and surreal aesthetic that will please the arthouse crowd. Despite the films' violent content, they are fierce feminist statements in many ways.
Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 is the finest of the films, however, something of a ero-guro Empire Strikes Back to the first film's A New Hope. Most of the film features protagonist Nami, along with a gaggle of other and far nastier female convicts, on the run from the cruel prison warden Goda (Fumio Watanabe). Meiko Kaji's persona shines brightest here: she is an unblinking, tough as a stone female revolutionary who never gives, no matter how much heinous abuse is piled upon her. She is, as the director himself said, the one female voice who dared to stand up and say "no" to patriarchal society. Ito's surrealist direction is also at its finest here and the film has a lot of freak out "wow" moments.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Cinema and Morality
This is a question that has been wracking my brain for quite some time: does morality and the moral code of society have any true bearing on quality cinema?
For example, Roman Polanski is, by all means, a master of cinematic technique: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist are excellent films all. He also statutorily raped a 13 year old girl. The question here is: do 10 excellent films make Roman Polanski a highly talented, masterful director or does his one rape overshadow all that and automatically make him a rapist? Sam Peckinpah is alleged to have physically abused some women but that doesn't make The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs any less awesome as movies! Should he be primarily known as a domestic abuser or a masterful director? Klaus Kinski was a monstrous person to deal with, but his performances, particularly in Herzog's films, the person whom he clashed with the most, were all brilliant.
One person who really makes me think about this is Roger Ebert. He's reviewed a great many films I loved and it's clear he's very intelligent, loves cinema at its core and knows a great many things about cinematic technique. But he's also given many films that are quite objectively fine works of art poor ratings such as A Clockwork Orange and Blue Velvet because they morally overstepped in his mind. One film I feel heavily this way about is The Exorcist (which Ebert, ironically, loves). By all accounts William Friedkin directed the film in a monstrous way, most of the fear on behalf of the actors was quite genuine and the film uses masterful, documentary-like cinematic technique to make a Christian fantasy world very believable and palatable in a way almost akin to Triumph of the Will and Nazism. Yet I adore the film because it's simply a fine film and a good piece of storytelling.
With exploitation-type films, this dilemma gets much worse. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi's films are, objectively, very well made and powerful affairs, but the majority of them do feature authentic violence and abuse toward animals and sometimes even people. Even if the filmmakers didn't actually stage it themselves like some accused, they still sat by and rolled their cameras as people were executed and animals were butchered. They succeeded as filmmakers, bringing back amazing works of art like Africa Addio, but failed as human beings. Then there's Cannibal Holocaust, a great film, objectively, but its similar animal violence (which Deodato himself lived to regret) makes it hard for many to take. Despite the fact that Deodato clearly shouldn't have harmed those animals, can his film still be called a "good" film? And what of T.F. Mou and his work on Men Behind the Sun? Was his use of actual human cadvaers justified, even if it does lend a horrendous level of authenticity to his film?
This, to me, is truly the biggest dilemma facing all filmmakers and film lovers alike: what is more important, moral integrety or artistic integrity? Should a filmmaker focus only on making the greatest piece of art he can or should he focus on doing the right thing as a human being? Or perhaps should the modern filmmaker try to balance them both?
For example, Roman Polanski is, by all means, a master of cinematic technique: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist are excellent films all. He also statutorily raped a 13 year old girl. The question here is: do 10 excellent films make Roman Polanski a highly talented, masterful director or does his one rape overshadow all that and automatically make him a rapist? Sam Peckinpah is alleged to have physically abused some women but that doesn't make The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs any less awesome as movies! Should he be primarily known as a domestic abuser or a masterful director? Klaus Kinski was a monstrous person to deal with, but his performances, particularly in Herzog's films, the person whom he clashed with the most, were all brilliant.
One person who really makes me think about this is Roger Ebert. He's reviewed a great many films I loved and it's clear he's very intelligent, loves cinema at its core and knows a great many things about cinematic technique. But he's also given many films that are quite objectively fine works of art poor ratings such as A Clockwork Orange and Blue Velvet because they morally overstepped in his mind. One film I feel heavily this way about is The Exorcist (which Ebert, ironically, loves). By all accounts William Friedkin directed the film in a monstrous way, most of the fear on behalf of the actors was quite genuine and the film uses masterful, documentary-like cinematic technique to make a Christian fantasy world very believable and palatable in a way almost akin to Triumph of the Will and Nazism. Yet I adore the film because it's simply a fine film and a good piece of storytelling.
With exploitation-type films, this dilemma gets much worse. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi's films are, objectively, very well made and powerful affairs, but the majority of them do feature authentic violence and abuse toward animals and sometimes even people. Even if the filmmakers didn't actually stage it themselves like some accused, they still sat by and rolled their cameras as people were executed and animals were butchered. They succeeded as filmmakers, bringing back amazing works of art like Africa Addio, but failed as human beings. Then there's Cannibal Holocaust, a great film, objectively, but its similar animal violence (which Deodato himself lived to regret) makes it hard for many to take. Despite the fact that Deodato clearly shouldn't have harmed those animals, can his film still be called a "good" film? And what of T.F. Mou and his work on Men Behind the Sun? Was his use of actual human cadvaers justified, even if it does lend a horrendous level of authenticity to his film?
This, to me, is truly the biggest dilemma facing all filmmakers and film lovers alike: what is more important, moral integrety or artistic integrity? Should a filmmaker focus only on making the greatest piece of art he can or should he focus on doing the right thing as a human being? Or perhaps should the modern filmmaker try to balance them both?
Monday, February 16, 2009
Tokyo Gore Police capsule review
I must say that I found the recent Tokyo Gore Police better than I thought it would be. I think few can disagree that Japanese cinema in the last decade has gotten increasingly boring, bland and tailor made for the careers of TV and pop idols overall. This may sound pathetic, but I was very depressed last year that Japanese cinema was just so boring, a far cry away from the many daring, brilliant films made in the 60s-80s. I was so put off by movies like Sinking of Japan that I didn't even want to watch any other recent Japanese films they now lacked the soul of the classic cinematic art form Nihon film was once. However, then I saw Tokyo Gore Police and my faith has begun to return. I realized, having disdain toward recent Japanese cinema because of Sinking of Japan and Dororo is like hating all American cinema automatically because of Michael Bay and Zach Snyder.Though mainstream Japanese horror is in a rut as the boom started by Ring over a decade ago and brought to America is one dead horse indeed, independent horror films appear to be in somewhat of a rennaisance, look at such gory delights as Meatball Machine, The Machine Girl and now Tokyo Gore Police for more evidence. Tokyo Gore Police is a rather underrated mix of South Park-like political satire with extreme, excessive “splatstick” gore very akin to the legendary Hong Kong production The Story of Ricky and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. Though Tokyo Gore Police is sometimes sloppily lensed on bland digital video, it’s nonetheless a highly funny and perversely fetishistic film that delivers bucket-loads of gore, laughs and arterial spray. I can safely say that Tokyo Gore Police is thoroughly welcome addition to the fabled league of "so excessively gory they're hilarious" films like Dead Alive, H.G. Lewis' mangled body of work and Criminally Insane (aka Crazy Fat Ethel). If you’re a gorehound and its gore you want, Tokyo Gore Police will give you that in literal torrents. In terms of onscreen grue and fake blood usage (in liters here since the Japanese use the Metric system) it rivals Dead Alive. Director Yoshihiro Nishimura exhibits a very similar humor style to Jackson before he started making three hour movies about magic rings and giant gorillas, but of course more Japanese, which means it's way more sexual and can involve teenage girls in school uniforms. The FX are not exactly realistic, but they aren’t meant to be and the film’s gruesome fleshy prosthetics brings Rob Bottin’s work to mind, which is a woefully absent quality in today’s age of CGI work over all else. Tokyo Gore Police utilizes some CG work, but as it should be, it’s used only when normal FX wouldn’t work or to enhance and not replace.
My favorite aspect of Tokyo Gore Police, however, is not the gore but the political satire, which is every bit over the top and very reminiscent of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s brutal, “no-one-is-innocent” humor style. Everything politically unpleasant about the country of Japan is mocked here: from right wing nationalism to enjo-kosei (the polite word for schoolgirl prostitution) to the capriciousness and shallow obsessions of Japanese teenagers to Japan’s relationship with China. Every once in a while the film pauses to show you absolutely hysterical faux commercials, the funniest being a bit where a group of schoolgirls tote trendy knives to self mutilate cute designs into one’s wrists. A Westerner may not get everything, but Tokyo Gore Police’s political satire is every bit as biting and take no prisoners as its gore FX, which is really saying a lot. Tokyo Gore Police is sadly bogged down a bit by a slightly overdrawn out runtime that could have some tightening up and a rather runny, shot on digital video look which is unfortunately very distracting. While the set ups, exposures and shot framings are decent, the film looks to have been shot on high range DV to mid range HD and as a result looks more amateurish simply because of its format than it deserves to. This, in the end, is the main fatal flaw in an otherwise delightful political J-horror splatter comedy which pulls no stops, shows zero restraint and is one hysterical night of chest heaving laughter for those who can laugh at the truly absurd.
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