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The Neon Demon (2016) / The Witch (2015)

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Okay so by some twist of fate we ended up watching a couple of movies from the past year and for new movies they were pretty good??? e-GAD!

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The Neon Demon (2016) – Nicolas Winding Refn

This movie is by the guy who made Drive, which I think we were both meh about, and some shit we haven’t seen.  Yeah I literally remember 2 scenes from Drive – the elevator scene where he beats people up, and the ending stripclub scene where he beats people up. I just remember a feeling indistinguishable from staring at the movie poster for two hours.

This movie is about “fashion” “models”. A teenager named Jesse (Elle Fanning) shows up in L.A. to become an image, and we start with an art photoshoot where she’s done up as a murdered Barbie doll on a couch, which sets the persistently-artificial-and-disorienting tone solidly. Our other main character, Ruby (Jena Malone), is a makeup artist (both in the fashion industry and in a funeral parlor, doing the unsung work of making your dead aunt look like someone you’d want to remember) who helps our modelette (spell check? Why aren’t you calling my shit?  It’s an official hashtag on twitter, it checks out.) get the fake blood off, then invites her to a party. There we meet two other models and we pretty much have our whole permanent cast of characters (the male characters often make a big impression, but they kind of come into the movie, do their bit, and leave. Or rather are left.) Of these two models, one is the product of extensive plastic surgery such that she has been nicknamed the Bionic Woman, and the other is British. (pretty sure that was an Australian accent, so technically right) (bro do you even Australia? (You might be right.))

The thrust of the movie is that Jesse has this effortless “it” quality, innocent and un-worked-on but able to embody the kind of beauty the (male) photographers are looking for and that the other two models can’t have no matter how they modify themselves. Ruby, who initially doesn’t seem concerned with her own looks but only in creating beauty in others . . . am I describing The Picture of Dorian Gray? Is this movie Dorian Gray?
Give me a second.
…
OK, in thinking through the rest of the plot, this isn’t literally an Oscar Wilde adaptation but the resemblance is unmistakable, in terms of setup and core conflicts and shit. Carry on.

But so anyway Ruby is a lesbian and infatuated with Jesse and thinks she can “have” her / her beauty in that kind of way. But as Jesse comes to understand that everyone wants to be/fuck her, and accepts her own Godhead, the mortals take exception.

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But look, this movie isn’t about the plot, or thematic tensions, or possibly being Dorian Gray. It’s about bizarre, stilted dialogue and strange visual situations, set in a world of fucking neon spotlights like the Schumacherized Gotham City in Batman Forever. It’s kind of heavy handed but also gorgeously done; there’s a shot where Jesse and the Bionic Woman are sitting in front of makeup mirrors and it’s somehow lit and posed so that BW’s garish clown makeup only really shows up in her reflection and looks almost natural outside of the mirror. This shot in particular had me going “fucking hell is that cool.”

Also great is that the movie, visually and narratively, goes everywhere you want it to go if you’re a sick little piece of shit like us. Word. It gets top marks in pumas, jaguars, surrealism, corpse tits, eyeballs, etc. All the major categories of movie success.

I cannot help but compare this to the best of Jess Franco – or rather what I find right and good and awesome about his terrible exploitation movies. It is filmed with a surrealist’s eyeball,  and has all the earmarks of a man (director, photographer, rapist, or what have you) who wants to see pretty women in pretty dresses get balls deep in blood, cannibalism and ritual sacrifice. In other words – fashion?
Some reviews seem to shit on the movie for being, in the reviewers’ eyes, too purely an allegory of the fashion industry and its abuses – but that seems shallower than the movie. The fashion industry is a convenient setting for Refn to look at our obsessive, involuntary drive towards beauty – both what is consuming and self-destructive, and what is completely necessary.

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The VVitch (2015) – Robert Eggers

The VVitch is about a goat.

It starts with a family (father, mother, eldest daughter, Caleb, twins, baby) of Puritans in 17th century New England getting exiled from their community for unclear reasons, and setting up shop in an isolated farm next to a dark wood. Being out in the wilderness and away from the community is Very Bad for Puritans, and makes you vulnerable to all the evils of nature and the Devil (which you are already biospiritually inclined towards). They lose a baby to the Witch who lives in the wood (there is no ambiguity that there is a Witch there) and begin turning on one another. The livestock has mixed allegiances: the horse and dog are good, the twins are probably evil, and the billy goat, Black Philip, is I guess literally the Devil (ho-hum).

The aesthetics of the movie are a collage of history and fable stitched into a campfire story you’ve heard parts of since you were a child.  Robert Eggers seems to have a passion for the history and folklore of witchcraft that gives this eerie tale ancient roots and girth that few other ‘horror’ movies dare to glance at sideways from the next urinal.

Most modern horror movies I’ve seen, even a period piece horror movie, do not give a shit about their characters, their antagonist or their period any more than an actor can care about his green screen<3, because it is nothing but a peg to hang your hat on, a means to an end. We need a protagonist (it helps if he’s a skeptic like our audience who doesn’t believe in any of the stuff he’s about to see), some red shirts to die along the way, and some spurned spirit or Chaotic Evil-aligned child to creep people out.  Have the skeptic skeptically skept through the jump scares like a Disney ride until you either kill the spirit or the protagonist. This movie does something harder and better.

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A quote from Eggers tells us that he wanted this movie to be ‘a Puritan’s nightmare’. In order to accomplish this, he had to know what Puritans feared, believed and cared about, and communicate that to a modern audience without making the characters Little House on the Prairie clones ranting illogically about God and the Devil.
This is one of the first movies I’ve seen in forever that lets characters’ religion be important to them and shape their worldview and reactions, without it being either for the sake of mockery or to make a ultra-blunt point about the evils of Christianity.
Take for example the conversation between the pious man and his son about whether or not the infant child they lost is going to hell or not, which is painful, believable and in no ways dismissive of the very characters it’s trying to get you to understand and know.

The last twenty minutes or so get a little lost (like a baby) (ohhhh… 🙁 ), unfortunately, in a way that probably comes of having a shit ton of source material that you’re really excited to use, but knowing you’re only guaranteed one opportunity to make a movie out of it. Basically it can’t pick which horror story it wants to be – the story of the Witch in the woods terrorizing them, the story of which-one’s-a-witch, the story of them all turning one by one to the Devil, the story of… the goat being Satan? Particularly bothersome for me is that you can’t have the goat be the Tempter in disguise but also ram someone to death. These are different stories, that both have their place, but can’t coexist in the catastrophe of the same movie. In one, the goat is the Devil, insidious and disguised among you; in the other it’s a brute beast, part of the cruelty and harshness of the unredeemed world of nature. Both fine Puritan horror stories but I don’t think you can have it both ways. For me this jives well with “what is ‘Goat’?” – a goat has those same shark-like eyes that say the same thing whether they are eating grass or about to gore you to death.  It’s not that it all has to be super neat and tidy and not have any extra horrific side details – the best things in movies sometimes are the parts that aren’t “necessary.” The extra creepy detail that doesn’t need to be there in terms of the main premise is like a gift from the writer/director. But in the last half-act of this movie, it just can’t settle on what that main premise is.

Eggers still does an incredible job, though, of focusing most of the movie on the core Puritan fear – of being damned, of being lost to God’s love. The characters (even the weirdly un-shitty child actors) all speak in perfect 17th century dialect, and it isn’t just window dressing. They really act and think and fear like people from another time and culture, and there’s a horrible joy in stepping into their terrifying little world.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

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In this 1957 Hammer Films production, Peter Cushing is Frankenstein, although first some other dude is him as a 15-year-old hiring a new tutor named Paul (Robert Urquhart), and then he ages 20 years into Peter Cushing between scenes while the tutor stays the same. Together they do some science and reanimate a pretty damn cute dead dog.

Then Frankenstein decides he wants to make a new life from corpses (duh) and his Paul tutor does some qualms about it. Victor’s cousin Elizabeth (Hazel Court) shows up expecting to live with him, and Paul worries about what this means for his pederastic science-topia. Elizabeth spends a while in a nice cleavage/dress (it’s about half and half.) Otherwise, her acting is terrible.

Elizabeth

Pretty soon, a monster! (Christopher Lee in his first major role.) By pretty soon we mean 50 minutes into an 80 minute film.

The monster doesn’t talk (kind of a waste of Christopher Lee, obviously) but has some good pathetic movements, although he’s more inherently violent than the one from the book (who begins simply scared, and rapidly becomes quite intelligent and even well-spoken.  Ain’t no Paradise Lost quoting in this shit)

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Cute makeup though.

Hammer goes all-in on reshaping the plot completely to center on the relationship between Victor and Paul, a character they added (I guess he’s sort of like Henry Clerval, but not really.  At times he felt like a Watson, making me want to look up who was Watson when Cushing played Holmes.) It’s a completely different story for a host of reasons, the main one being that this Frankenstein has no genuine relationships and can’t lose people he cares about to the monster, because he’s pretty much a sociopath. They make a movie where Frankenstein is the real monster and his creation is just a bit pathetic–which, at least, they don’t throw in your face in some stupidly heavy-handed way. Still, at the end, not much of a story is accomplished.

The movie is about a conflict between these guys, not the monster.

The movie is about these pricks, not the monster.

I always just wonder why someone can’t just make a movie of Frankenstein. Dracula is long and unfilmable?!?, hyper-aware of its being a text, and cobbled together from journals, letters, and telegrams. The beginning is heavily dramatized and then the pace changes completely as the action shifts to England, so any film has to, at very least, condense drastically. Frankenstein just isn’t like that. It’s a shorter book, mostly narrated straightforwardly, with a simple (enough) human story to tell. Why not tell it in a movie?  It’d be nice.  I do like the strange cultural phenomenon of everything everyone knows about Frankenstein being from Boris Karloff’s depiction and maybe some Young Frankenstein thrown in, none of the iconic images we associate with Frankenstein are actually in the book.  And that’s a fun concept to have floating around in the whatever.  I still want to see this book’s story done sometime in more than just my mind’s eye. Me too.

This shadowy cartoon guillotine slowly lifts up before the end credits roll over it. At the end, it doesn't drop down! Fail, movie.

This shadowy cartoon guillotine slowly lifts up before the end credits roll over it. At the end, it doesn’t drop down! Fail, movie.

Cat People (1982)

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Cat People Title

This film, written by Alan Ormsby and directed by Paul Schrader, is a loose “remake” of Cat People (1942), which we reviewed a few weeks ago. Hopefully future “Recycled” posts (reviews of a movie and its remake) will come closer together.

Let’s start with how this movie ends:

Shot of panther’s face. Freezeframe. Commence Bowie. At appropriate point in song, unfreeze the freezeframe. Panther roars. Freezeframe again. Roll credits.

This Crazy Ivan-esque maneuver has only been pulled off by the most daring and desperate of movie pilots. A tip of the hat to director Paul Schrader is already in order.

Ok back to how it starts.

Panther Silhouette

Credits roll over orange sands blowing across half-buried skulls. Among the desert sands of Mars Africa probably? warriors take a young woman and tie her to tree on a hill. That night a black panther approaches and rears up in front of her, but the next morning she is alive. We morph from her face into the whiter, present-day face of another young woman, Irena (Natassia Kinski) mmm. She is arriving in New Orleans from an unknown place, an envoy to our world from a better, braless one. Her creepy brother (Malcolm McDowell) stalks her through the airport and only introduces himself when she is about to make a call on a pay phone. They’ve never met as adults.

Irena and Paul have a weird relationship even before the police find the half-eaten hooker corpses in his basement. Their parents, who died when they were young, were circus people, and the siblings remember how to juggle while chanting unsettling rhymes. Paul’s also a religious fanatic involved with what looks like the circus church of latter-day clown jesus (see below).

Gah!

Gah!

More importantly, the pair are the last remnants of an ancient race of cat people, who turn into panthers when they fuck and back into humans when they kill. This has grim consequences for any non-cat people they might spend the night with. Paul knows all this (hence the hooker corpses) but Irena, as a virgin, has a voyage of self-discovery ahead of her. Both actors pull off some nice moments of cat-like movement and behavior in the movie.

Cat Pose

Paul gets stuck in a hotel room as a panther after a hooker gets away from his attempted mauling, and people from the zoo come and put him in captivity. These are our other main characters, Oliver (John Heard) and Alice (Annette O’Toole). They’re good at their jobs, but the captive Paul-panther seems constantly pissed off and scary as hell.  Firstly, the hooker attack scene is fucking amazing, scary as hell.  Secondly this entirely real panther is terrifying; it’s fearfully magical to see a giant cat bounce around a room like a pinball of furious death and furry muscle. Seriously. Did he who made the Lamb make thee, motherfucker?

Such beautiful eyes

Such beautiful eyes

Irena and Oliver end up meeting and falling for each other–even though early on she responds to an offer of aspirin with “Nah, I don’t believe in medicine,” <3 which you think a self-respecting zoologist would find a turn-off. He gets her a job in the zoo gift shop, and from there a relatively tepid love triangle starts up between Irena, Oliver, and Alice. Unlike the Alice in the 1942 Cat People, this Alice doesn’t stand for anything much; she’s a competent woman who’s had a presumably average amount of sex, but isn’t unusually liberated except compared to Irena. If the love triangle means anything, it’s just Oliver’s choice between the alluring danger of Irena and the safer Alice (it’s a conflict within a man, not between two women with different approaches to life). Mercifully, we’re spared this conflict becoming the center of the movie.

The movie’s real core is the myth of the cat people, which comes to the forefront in two magnificent lines:

Paul bursts into Irena’s room through the window, approaches her bed, kneels and says:

“Save me. Only you can stop this killing. You have to make love with me, as brother and sister.”

"We can live together as mates, just as our parents did."

“We can live together as mates, just as our parents did.”

Later, in a vision set among the orange sands of Africa Mars, he says this:

“Long ago our ancestors sacrificed their children to the leopards. The souls of the children grew inside the leopards until the leopards became human. We were gods then. We are an incestuous race. We can only mate with our own.”

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Everything else is icing on this, the meat and potatoes of this superb cat cake. Meat + Potatoes + Icing = Cake.

The myth and certain aspects of the movie’s feel remind me of American Gods. Like: the gods (cat people) were created by people’s worship of them, and now live a weird posthumous existence in America, divorced from the civilization that made them. It’s enough to make me wonder if Neil Gaiman watched this movie.

We won’t go into interpretations the way we did for Cat People (1942), because this movie is in a different mode: less about metaphor, more about beautiful fucked up myth. (Roger Ebert wrote about it: “This is the stuff of audacious myth, combining the perverse, the glorious, and the ridiculous. The movies were invented to tell such stories.” This was one of the first things I read that made me realize Ebert knew what was up and numbered among the sages.)  yeah, this movie was the first thing I ever agreed with Ebert on except Nicolas Cage, and I have since come to admire his views on many films.

I will say that the idea of ‘myth’ for me applies to 40’s Cat People more than this one.  One is witches and curses, and the other is ‘you’re a magic cat species!’ I’m talking about myth-making–this movie creates/contains a myth that speaks to fucked up little corners of our brains, rather than presenting things that stand for other things.

But we will talk about the strange relationship it has with Cat People (1942).

It’s a remake in only the broadest vaguest sense – both are about a woman who turns into a panther. There’s a zoo and some sorta love triangley stuff.  When it comes to meaning, tone, characters, plot, it’s an entirely different film. The first film’s basic idea was a springboard for Alan Ormsby and Paul Schrader that led to a completely different narrative and visual world.

But in a few places, they do lift scenes or moments from the original (the most iconic ones, that one might hope to see redone in a “remake”)– the mysterious cat-like woman who greets Irena as “my sister” in another language (only, in this one, it’s Spanish, a language irrelevant to the story), the bus halting in front of Alice with a sound blended with a panther roar, and the pool sequence.

"Remember that scene from that other movie? Let's do that, but topless."

“Remember that scene from that other movie? Let’s do that, but topless.”

Not a single one of these scenes fits in this movie, and in fact none have any effect on surrounding scenes and could all be cut without disrupting the plot at all.

This leads us to propose what we will call the Cat People Principle (CPP): In a loose adaptation or inspired work, any portions brought in wholesale from the original will be the least fitting and (in context) worst parts of the new work.
I could also call this the Wicker Man Principle.

When a filmmaker wants to or has to pick a completely different focus/story than his source material but is required to pay homage to it.  Things taken from the source material will feel as transplanted as they are, and things new will feel as alien as they are to lovers of the source material. Right, lovers of the source material are often expecting a close adaptation no matter what, so the new material will always be the bad part from a certain fanboyish perspective.

"This is the best panther autopsy I've ever seen in a movie."

“This is the best panther autopsy scene I’ve ever seen in a movie.”

The converse is called the Lord of the Rings Principle (LotRP): In a close or “faithful” adaptation, although it’s probably necessary to delete and rearrange things, any portions purely added by the adapters will probably be the least fitting and worst parts of the new work.
LIKE FUCKING GAME OF THRONES.  FUCK THOSE GUYS. Yeah it could as easily be the GoTP.

When a filmmaker goes to great lengths to preserve his perceived focus/story of the source material, but whilst dealing with the edits and cuts and woes of adaptation through some hubris decides he is equal and sly enough to insert his own content and that it will flow seamlessly in the waters of another man’s jelly.  He is wrong.  He is so fucking dead wrong.  His meddlings are the sorest of thumbs and stick out tall and throbbing.

In both cases, the logic is actually the same. Someone has a coherent idea worked out or attempting to be worked out, with its own self-unfolding logic. For the close adaptation, this is the original; for the loose adaptation, it’s the new separate idea inspired by the original. Then pockets of someone else’s idea are inserted, and while they might be good in another context, they don’t fit into the scheme of the original (in the close adaptation) or the new work (in the loose adaptation.)

There can be a murky middle between the two (because that’s how dichotomies work), when you can’t decide if something is a loose adaptation or a close one–sometimes creating the feeling of two movies stitched awkwardly together. There’s also another category to muddy the waters (I’d say it’s more of a factor than a category), which is the Factory Movie–aka, some source material (previous movie, book, comics, toys) is combined with purely generic elements, so it’s not a close adaptation, but the new skeleton the meat is being hung on is not a new, original vision, but just a set of conventions.

What makes Cat People the Younger so great is that, except these few blatantly inserted scenes, it goes so balls-out in the direction of a “loose” remake, a new original film that happens to be inspired by a previous one. Take out the few moments copy-pasted from the Val Lewton movie, and you’ve just got Ormsby and Schrader’s wild-ass vision of sex and death and PANTHER TREE.

PANTHER. TREE.

PANTHER. TREE.

Grapes of Death / Les Raisins de la Mort (1978)

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We caught this absurdly-titled zombie(ish) film by Jean Rollin in its last days of streamability on Amazon Prime, which is purging its service of everything good and pure (e.g. trashy French vampire movies) at the end of June. It’s not in my top 5 Jean movies, but I enjoyed it.

Some workers return through dead-looking grape fields coughing through their gas masks. Their villainously scarved-and-piped tractormaster assures them that new better gas masks are coming, and encourages them to relax.

Meanwhile alone on a train, a young brunette and her blonde friend are heading on holiday. A strange man boards the otherwise empty train, and sits by the brunette while her friend is away in the bathroom. He has a rapidly growing lesion on his face which soon becomes so gruesome that she runs away, and he chases her. She finds her friend dead in the bathroom, pulls the emergency brake and runs from the train. He seems disappointed, like his “murder her friend and chase her” pick-up strategy has failed one too many times.

What passes for a safe haven, in a Jean movie.

What passes for a safe haven, in a Jean movie.

She seeks refuge first in a mausoleum or something (locked), then in a creepy farmhouse. The creepy farmhouse inhabitants, a father (lesion on hand) and daughter, let her stay, but insist that their phone and car both don’t work. When our purple-bloused heroine goes upstairs, she finds a woman’s body, and the daughter tells her that her father has gone insane. They hatch an escape plan but the father murders the daughter after revealing that she too has the disease, then pursues the heroine as she gets in the car. He begs her to run him over and she does.

From then on she runs into more zombies and survivors (though this is a blurrier line than usual) and more grim episodes play out. The most mysterious person she encounters is a beautiful blonde woman who has no marks anywhere on her body (she proves it) but is still in league with the zombies.

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For me, the infected villagers were a lot scarier than normal zombies because they could still talk, reason, and have human reactions to things, all while becoming disfigured and compelled to kill. Oh. They’re more like real people losing their minds / acting under a compulsion, which is more frightening than the old animated-corpse cannon-fodder approach.

There’s a bit of hamfisted political dialogue shoved in (aka the best dialogue in the movie), after our heroine meets some uninfected guys with a shotgun and dynamite, who will pass for “the good guys.” The older of the men fought the Nazis in the French Resistance, and the young man briefly chews him out, suggesting that what’s important isn’t fighting the Germans, but fighting fascism, whether it’s German or French, and berating him for feeling comfortable living between a nuclear plant and a weapons plant (not pictured.) There’s definitely a thing going on where the zombie-ism represents people succumbing to a fascistic ideology–maybe a militaristic, corporatist sort of culture bleeding in from America (or wine). But probably not a very deep thing. But still, there’s something evocative about how the movie shows people caught up in–whatever–and turning violent and horrifying while remaining people, compared to how zombies are usually our cultural shorthand for “people that aren’t people anymore, it’s okay to shoot them.” (Our virtuous younger man also gives the older one shit about basically thinking this way about the zombies, and enjoying gunning them down too much.)  (this is cool and probably accurate, but I had given up on the movie and started playing guitar at this point.) (Hey man, whatever fails to float your boat.)

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My main complaint about the movie is that the female characters keep their clothes on too much. That might sound like a puerile complaint, but Jean can be kind of a puerile guy, and often really satisfies that part of us. Sex and nudity usually happen in Jean’s movies for no forced reason, just for their own beautiful sake, and at the drop of a hat. And I think that’s a healthy and joyful thing, compared to a lot of your grosser American horror movies where sex is something very bad, maybe even something that we want to see punished. This movie comes a lot closer to that, in that two of the female characters keep their clothes on until during/after their killing, bringing one of those situations where it feels like the violence is what we’re expected to get off on–not my cup of tea. In other words, the women in this movie are insufficiently sexualized, and I find that problematic.

Crash (1996)

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I…
Me t….
To note first: this is not the Crash that won Best Picture at the 2005 Oscars. This is a 1996 movie by David Cronenberg about wanting to be/fuck a car crash. It’s also much better.

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Breast, meet plane.

We begin, after the very unabridged credits, in a hangar, where a blonde woman (Deborah Kara Unger) is slowly baring her breast and laying it rapturously on a plane, communing with the plane, becoming the plane, until a man enters from behind, but he’s an afterthought to her and to us. We cut to the set of an action movie, where her husband (James Spader) is having sex with another woman in his office. His name is James Ballard, the name of the classic sci-fi author whose novel got Cronenberged into this. (Shouldn’t the character have been named Dave Cronenberg for the movie?)

They meet on a balcony for the post-coital debriefing, and it sounds as if no one has ever come in human history. “Maybe the next one,” she says, twice.
balcony
He gets in a car crash, injuring himself and killing the driver of the other car, but the other driver’s wife (Holly Hunter) survives to become our third out of four main characters. (In my head I kept calling her Dr. Melfi through the entire movie. Makes sense to me.)

Ballard’s wife jerks him off under the hospital covers while describing the car crash to him in immaculate detail. Well–now we know what his fetish is. He is drawn to where they’re keeping the remains of his car, where he runs into Dr. Melfi looking for her husband’s. They end up fucking. (Everyone in this movie ends up fucking.)

Ballard and Dr. Melfi go to a shady back-alley reenactment of the car crash that killed James Dean, hosted by a man named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) who briefly ogled Ballard’s wounds earlier in the hospital. “When I met Vaughan he was a specialist in international computerized traffic systems … I don’t know what he is now,” says Dr. Melfi during his opening monologue. We find out soon enough as Vaughan leads them into his car crash death fetish cult.

vaughan
Said death cult includes a man eagerly working on his Jane Mansfield costume for their next crash reenactment, and a woman with legs in braces like a kind of low-fi cyborg produced through bodily harm. (The prominent wounds on the backs of her legs come to some… interesting use later in the film. Her leg wound… had a clit, right? I didn’t see one. I mean just a kind of overall vaginal outline with a little nub of sorts where one belonged. I know what you meant.)

The rest of the movie has the characters do things like watching crash test tapes while jerking one another off round robin-style, cruising around getting into near-accidents for sexual titillation, and fucking one another in almost every available pairing. This is the light stuff, this is the Prancing Pony stage of this quest to Mount Doom.

Deborah Kara Unger is absolutely fucking fearless she a’ight in this movie, both in what she lets us see and the complex emotional states she’s willing to dive into. The scene of Ballard fucking her from behind (which gets mirrored at the end of the movie by him repeatedly rear-ending her? And then fucking her from behind Shhhhhh) while she questions him insistently in a dirty-talk voice about whether he wants to fuck Vaughan (also mirrored) is beyond what any actress since Lina Romay would willingly do on camera. (Yeah, I like her character, but her dirty-talk voice never shuts off and it’s kinda grating to me.)

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Additional credit should be given to Howard Shore, who provides a lot of tension with his restrained score, which is of the kind they call “brooding.” We kept imagining him saying, “So… what am I scoring today, David?” but he always finds the mood somehow, giving a dark cast to every sex scene and… other sex scene. Like the legless woman says about Vaughan’s photography, “[he] makes everything look like a crime.”
Elias Koteas as Vaughan is so great that we’re angry we don’t know who he is. His lines and facial expressions and gestures are all … taut? Like a creepy calm stretched thin over a nervous, horny, apocalyptic energy. He has the benefit of incredible lines though:

“James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal.”
“It’s not the police, it’s the Department of Transport. It’s a joke. They have no idea who we really are.”
“Did I seem glib? ‘James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal.’ I just couldn’t resist.”
“No, I live in my car. This is my workshop.”
“I use it to test the resilience of my potential partners in psychopathology.”
“This is not a medical tattoo, it’s a prophetic tattoo.”

Crash revisits a lot of thematic shit from Cronenberg’s earlier Videodrome, in that both films prove that sex and death and technology are having some excruciating orgy in David Cronenberg’s brain <3, and he can make a heck of movie out of it. (A throwaway line in this film, “That’s tape player’s fucked!” almost seems like a retrospective summary of Videodrome.)

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I really like this sequence where the convertible’s roof and windows come up around them during foreplay, like the machine is closing around them.

So Vaughan’s religion does turn out, in one scene, to have a theology. We aren’t really capable of understanding it at this time. He describes a car crash as a release of sexual energy or something. Fuck. Here’s what I’m getting: Every wound is an opening. The traumatic or explosive energy of a car crash creates an opportunity for uh…. Some kind of sexual-religious transcendence, the psychosexual equivalent of becoming a cyborg for a moment. Or um… the world of frail humans and soulless machines is broken open and all the boundaries blur and you ejaculate furiously. Orgasm, death, and becoming a machine are all just ways to break out of the quiet desperation* of your shitty little pedestrian self. Coming… becomes becoming?

Ok, so… Valhalla (/orgasm) is reached by dying in a car crash, a la the warriors who have gone before us like James Dean and (honorable mention) JFK, immortal legends of the 1960’s American Graffiti era. That’s all I know.
It is Viking warrior death meets dying in a car crash – kinda the Warboys’ religion in Mad Max Fury Road but… more like Charles Manson meets Fast and Furious.

*“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city marriage/hangar you go into the desperate country death cult, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats Cronenbergs and cripples. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements fucking of mankind. Still better than Fight Club though.”
-“Henry” “David” “Thoreau”

Clifford (1996)

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Clifford

“It’s bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it’s based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe. The movie is so odd, it’s almost worth seeing just because we’ll never see anything like it again. I hope.” – Roger Ebert

I sent my co-conspirator these words of Ebert wisdom knowing they would make the movie irresistible to him, and inspire him to track it down. I knew not what I did, and I beg forgiveness of the movie saints.   He gave to me the apple and I ate of it.

It begins with an inscrutable framing device involving a Catholic school in the future, before revealing itself to be a vehicle for the antics of Martin Short, portraying a mischievous, unsettling child wreaking havoc through the world of uncomprehending adults, mostly his uncle (Charles Grodin) and his fiance (Mary Steenburgen). These are actors who can certainly do a standard PG comedy as easily as anything, and yet their performances have a persistent stilted strangeness here.

Martin Short

“If Clifford is not a real little boy, then what is he? The movie doesn’t know and neither does the audience, and for much of the running time we sit there staring stupefied at the screen, trying to figure out what the hell we’re supposed to be thinking.” – Roger Ebert.

It’s essentially a ‘90s family comedy, superficially like any other, but pervaded by an evil, alien presence attempting constantly to claw through its surface. I cannot bring myself to describe it further, directly, but I will attempt to outline the malignant vision it has bestowed on us.

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Not from the movie, just how we felt about it.

Cliffordesque.

This is the word we now hold in our troubled hearts. We keepers of the word cannot tell you what it means, and for God’s sake don’t ask us to show you. It is to Lynchian roughly as Lynchian is to everything else.

The Cliffordesque cannot be considered bad. The Cliffordesque inhabits a world to which no aesthetic values familiar to us can apply. It is almost like the persistent strangeness of Nic Cage’s performance in Vampire’s Kiss (1988); but Vampire’s Kiss combines recognizable genres and in so doing becomes the pinnacle of each of them; Clifford has an unnerving family resemblance to a single genre.

It’s a nightmarish quality, like walking into your kitchen and having the unassailable feeling that all its contents have been quietly replaced with exact replicas of those things—that’s how Clifford relates to the ’90s family comedy that it almost seems to be. It takes you to a place where genre itself is obliterated, where you doubt the existence of film, and then of reality. After an hour and a half in its world, the movie makes you want to hug someone, or have a real human conversation, to make sure both you and the world before your eyes are actually real and here to stay.

It is a sitcom theme song played on a saxophone made from a human thigh bone. It is a toddler’s birthday party thrown for an 80 year old man. It is a teddy bear with watering human eyes, staring at you unblinking from the corner of a room that will never, truly, be yours again.

This we have witnessed in this Year of Our Lord 2016, and this is our review.

Grodin

“I underestimated the Evil One. Well, Clifford, what shall we do? Whatever shall we do now?”

Cat People (1942)

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This movie from 1942 was remade–sort of–in 1982, as a wildly different animal. We’ll be reviewing that one soon, but for now, here’s our take on the original, with three two interpretations.

Cat People (1942)

Prod. Val Lewton. Dir. Jacques Tourneur.

Cat People the elder is a polished, well-made movie from a time that appreciated the simple craft of film-making. It tells a deceptively simple story about four people and one panther, and the bit characters that drift in are characterized really deftly. It begins with a quote:

“Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.” The Anatomy of Atavism– Dr. Louis Judd
This opening quote is so awesome, the only disappointment was realizing, when he shows up in the movie later, that Dr. Louis Judd is not a real person and I can’t track down this book and read it.

The movie proper starts with a Meet Cute outside a panther cage at the zoo, where Irena (Simone Simon) is drawing the panther and failing to throw her crumpled firstfruits into the garbage can. Her future man, Oliver (Kent Smith) (but let’s call him America), corrects her LITTERING SIN and points to the sign that says “Let no one say, and say it to your shame, / That all was beauty here, until you came.”
The fact that we would just write “NO LITTERING” now, or pictographs to that effect, shows an actual non-imagined decline in us as a culture.  Greatest Generation IN-DEED.

Adorbs

Adorbs

America carries Irena’s… stool? (an artist’s stool for painting panthers) back to her apartment and gets himself invited up for tea. He stays till dark, when they can hear the lions roaring from the zoo; apparently Irena can hear them many nights, but she doesn’t mind because “to me it’s the way the sound of the sea is to others: natural, and soothing.” He asks about the statue she has of a mounted man with a cat impaled on his sword, which she says is King John of Serbia, who cleared the evildoers and witches from her village, though stories about them remain. He gets her a cat as a present, as one does when someone tells you that cats symbolize evil and witchcraft in their culture. Two scenes later they’re married.

"You're so normal, you're even in love with me, Oliver Reed, a good plain Americano." - actual line

“You’re so normal, you’re even in love with me, Oliver Reed, a good plain Americano.” – actual line

Once married, we find out that she believes that something evil in her will come out if she becomes physically intimate (the movie adorably 1940ses around what it’s really talking about) and America is willing to wait seemingly forever (forever turns out to be about a month of no sex) for her to get through this fear.

He gets her hooked up with a psychiatrist (Dr. Louis Judd, of opening quote fame) but she only sees him once. Dr. Judd is a true doctor, who says things like “Sometimes there is a psychic need to unleash evil into the world,” and generally seems to be from the 1890s instead of the 1940s, talking like Lord Henry Wotton and carrying a sword-stick.

Meanwhile she becomes jealous of America’s closeness with Alice the New Woman, his coworker. She stalks Alice in pantheress form through two of the coolest sequences of the movie (!!!!): one where Alice thinks (correctly) that she’s being followed down the street, the other when she goes for a swim in her building’s indoor pool at night, and Irena follows her down. The first scene ends with an amazing sound effect, where they make a bus coming to a stop sound like a panther roaring, my single favorite touch in the movie. The pool scene is ominous and they have fun with shadow and the weird, echoey acoustics of the pool. (GOD THIS IS SCARY – it really gets that childhood fear of a panther being in your swimming pool.)

Pantherpool

Irena keeps revisiting the panther cage at the zoo, and passes up an opportunity to take the key from the absent-minded janitor. Dr. Judd pops up to psychologize her:
“You resist temptation admirably.”
“Temptation?”
“The, uh, key.”
“Why would I want it?”
“For many reasons. There is in some cases a psychic need to unleash evil into the world, [pretty much why we started this blog, really] and all of us carry within us a desire for death. You fear the panther, yet you’re drawn to him, again and again. Couldn’t you turn to him as an instrument of death?”
. . .
😀
“I don’t think you can help me. You’re very wise, you know a great deal, yet when you speak of the soul you mean the mind. And it is not my mind that is troubled.” [<- she never lied to us, you see? (See Interpretation II)] <3

Irena

Later, our noble doctor decides to enact his own “desire for death” by kissing Irena, provoking her to maul the shit out of him, though in the process he leaves his broken-off sword blade in her. She runs to the zoo and lets out the panther, falling dead as he leaps past her. to be instantly struck by a car.  When America and Alice get to the scene, they find her dead in panther form, and America utters the movie’s final line, “She never lied to us.”

This is a top notch b&w drama that spirals into some murder-panther shit, but not in a “twist ending” kinda way, rather a “this was meant to be” way.  For what it is I can’t imagine a better version of it.  For every Sherlock Holmes that promised supernatural but then had a ‘logical’ ‘explanation’ for it, this one delivers.

Interpretation I: Panther Lesbians (Alexander)

Here’s the lesbian angle, in brief:

Irena finds that in modern America, there is a certain picture of domestic happiness she’s supposed to achieve. Man & woman. She wants it in that she likes Oliver personally, and because she wants to be happy.

However she feels there is something inside her, something in her nature, that bars her from that domestic happiness, and specifically from the sexual side of it. The other cat woman who greets her as “My sister” recognizes her at her post-wedding dinner and Irena denies her; based on the timing, it’s as if her sisterhood of the traveling panthers is a presence appearing to threaten her marriage, which she shoves aside.

Sister

Let’s notice the actual effects of Irena’s “affliction”, as opposed to what she says about it:

When it comes to Oliver, it prevents her being able to go to bed with him and prevents their domestic happiness, but he never causes her to turn into a panther.

Her panther side actually comes out for Alice, which the movie justifies by having her list of triggers suddenly include jealousy, and requires (it being made in the ‘40s) for Alice to be in love with Oliver. But primarily Alice is the career woman*, the one-of-the-boys woman, etc. Cough lesbian. So it seems like Irena’s much more “excited” by Alice than Oliver, and subtext-wise maybe jealous not of her relationship with her husband, but of her seeming to be self-accepting and sort of “out.”

(Forgive me.) Note also the PHALLIC SYMBOL! PHALLIC SYMBOL! imagery associated with the repression of Irena’s panther side; the statue of a King impaling the cat with a sword, and the drawing of hers we see at the end of the first scene, not of just a panther, but rather a panther being skewered with a sword! (I will remind you that for any movie with scenes in a psychiatrist’s office, all the psychosexual shit is on the table.)  Also Dr. Judd, who’s aligned with the repression as the psychiatrist brought in to “cure” her, has a swordstick (it’s a sword and a stick!) which he–sort of–kills her with.  At least, it get stuck in her, and she dies; symbolically it’s more like rape + suicide than a good plain American murder.

Catskewer

It’s a penis!

I could say more about this, the more I write about it the more it makes sense, not as the singular aha! interpretation, but one interpretation that does actually pan out really well.

*although Irena has a career too, but that feels more like the typical you-work-till-you-find-a-husband schtick.

Interpretation II: Pantherstition (Concurrence)

Pantherstition

And so but my (and my) [our] actual main interpretation of the movie is about Old World superstition and religion vs. fancy New World American “scientific” reality, a classic “technology … vs. horse” story. This has less bits of cutesy “evidence” than the lesbian reading, but is still stronger because it doesn’t need them: it corresponds to what’s actually happening on the literal level of the story. Irena really is from the Old World, she really is in the grip of a spiritual superstition. Her stories of witches and curses can’t survive modern life in New York; when she lets the panther out of its cage, it’s immediately flattened by a car. When the pool lights go back on, she’s just a woman and there’s no panther there.

And yet as the movie’s last line says, “She never lied to us”: the movie doesn’t force her to be wrong and slap itself in the face with the dead fish of a rational explanation. The story can’t let her survive modernity but can’t deny her validity either. Specific beliefs may not always stand up to the light, yet still resonate with something true and frightening, that most people would like to push aside and traipse onward in their happy American middle-class lives; perhaps with the reality of the spiritual in some form. Dr. Judd would prefer to say, with deep-repressed psychological urges towards death and darkness, with atavistic ancestral fears of predators and the dark … and he calls himself a psychiatrist.

***

I‘ll just point out quickly that both these interpretations, along with other viable ones we didn’t put in here, have the same basic core: there’s a picture of ideal American life, and something in Irena that excludes her from it. No one around her knows how to respond to the situation, and Irena herself feels confused and trapped–in fact feels that she must be evil and wrong because she doesn’t fit the mould. Whether you view it through the lens of mental illness, queerness, religion, or just immigration/assimilation, the criticism is of the whole ideal and what it leaves out or pushes into the shadows.

And however you read the subtext, it’s a damn entertaining movie.

Meet the Feebles (1989)

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Meet the Feebles

Peter Jackson’s depraved puppet movie, Meet the Feebles, should, by rights, be the most incredible thing ever filmed. Like a kind of post-lapsarian Muppet show, it takes that show’s portrayal of backstage chaos one step further and shows the cast of the Feebles Variety Hour entangled in depravity, perversion, internal vendettas, and organized crime. It sounds magnificent–and we were all the more excited because we’d recently seen Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992), a hysterically beautiful zombie gorefest. Knowing what Peter was capable of in his depraved youth, and knowing the premise, the fact that Meet the Feebles turns out to be a repelling mediocrity was more or less soul-crushingly disappointing.

Just a turd.

Here’s the gist: the Ms. Piggy-style starlet of the show is a huge-breasted hippo puppet, who’s married to the owner of the troupe, a walrus, who’s fucking an alluring cat puppet about 15% of his size, while also engaged in a mob feud with a punk-ish coke-dealing hog with a Scottish accent. His grimy rat friend Trevor is running his porn business behind the scenes, and on the lookout for a new main attraction. The rabbit who hosts the Feebles Variety Hour is rotting grotesquely away from puppet syphilis, while an annoying fly representing the press hounds him. A Kermit-ish amphibian who does the knife-throwing act is going through coke withdrawal due to a dry-up of supply, and lapsing into Vietnam flashbacks. Meanwhile a naïve young hedgehog arrives to join the troupe, full of hope and optimism and almost giving us someone to care about in this movie. See, just reading this gets me excited about seeing it, and then I realize oh yeah… I did 🙁

So close.

So close.

This still might sound like a damned entertaining movie, and it probably could have been. It’s just that all these plots simply aren’t funny or even shocking. There were only four genuinely funny moments in the film:

  1. In the Vietnam flashback, when the Vietnamese soldiers are debating the finer points of socialist statecraft while roasting and eating captives (though the humor of this one moment doesn’t make up for how flat-out racist the Vietnamese puppets are).  yeah, it’s pretty uncomfortable.
  2. The Kermit-style guy finally getting his fix and shooting up in the bathroom, with a comically large syringe for his noodle-like puppet arm
  3. The hippo trying to hang herself, and awkwardly fitting the noose over her giant rectangular head.
  4. The rabbit running excitedly out of his room after learning he doesn’t have puppet syphilis after all, only to get gunned down immediately as the start of the closing killing spree.

That’s it. Knowing why these four moments work shows us why the rest of the movie doesn’t. In the last three, there’s actually something funny about the execution: some sight-gag or clever timing. In the first, there’s an actual contrast that creates absurdity, between the calm intellectual debate and the brutal goings-on.

"I still say that private enterprise is acceptable at a village level, provided it is strictly controlled by the party." -- an actual funny line

“I still say that private enterprise is acceptable at a village level, provided it is strictly controlled by the party.” — an actual funny line

Part of what makes the movie not funny or interesting is just crummy execution. The sound is pretty fucking horribly bad. People like to say that you only notice sound in a movie when it’s done badly, but I think most people don’t notice when it’s done badly either: they just notice that they feel bored, or not drawn into the movie. That’s the kind of bad sound we’re dealing with here, the kind that always feels a little distant and never gets you immersed in the movie’s world. The lighting is also bad; it’s constantly too dark and muddy, either to hide strings and imperfections in the puppets, or to set the grungy atmosphere of the film (and doing it fucking horribly wrong.)

The other problem is that that grungy atmosphere is pervasive. Even in the first scene, where the puppets are doing their happy opening number, the world around them is dark and hazy and shitty-looking, and when the music ends we plow directly into people puppets treating each other like shit. There’s basically no attempt at a bright foreground for the grimy underbelly of puppet show-biz to peep through; they depend on your awareness of the actual Muppet show to set the necessary contrast, but it just doesn’t work. For it to be surprising there has to be some expectation to subvert, but puppets acting shitty in an entire world of puppets acting shitty isn’t surprising.

Here's some puppet nudity, if that is what you came her for.

Here’s some puppet tits, if that’s what you wanted in this reading experience. We really hope its not 🙁

In the end, Meet the Feebles just feels like one of those grimy show-business/crime stories where everyone is shitty to everyone else, and there’s no point to anything. It’s the kind of story that makes you feel a little dirty and unenlightened when it’s made with human actors, and depends on the mere fact that it’s puppets to make it funny, over and over again. Too bad.  It’s just a regular shitty movie with puppets instead of people.  This is the first time I’d criticize a movie for a lack of irony– there’s no advantage taken: whether the actors are people, puppets or animals with CGI mouths, this movie would still suck and make you feel bad.

If you want to see some fucked-up puppets done right (on no higher of a budget) go watch Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared instead.

Female Vampire (1975)

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Female Vampire[Before anything:

Netflix Review excerpt:

“Let’s put it this way: Lina Romay has sex with a bed. Not in a Linda Blair meets the cross kind of way. This woman seduces and ravishes a bed. It … is …incredible.” – 3 out of 5 stars.  28 out of 28 found this review helpful.

Netflix Full Review:

“My first review. GREAT body. Nice close up shots. Firm, perky b r e a s t. Watch it. 1 January 2014” 3 out of 5 stars.  3 out of 4 found this review helpful.

You can read my longer thoughts on this film below, but these two Netflix users pretty much said what matters. (Unfortunately, the movie is no longer on Netflix in the US.)]

Jess Franco’s Female Vampire is, if not one of the great movies, at least one of the great cinematic experiences of all time. We turned to this movie directly after Nightmares Come at Night piqued our interest in Franco, and immediately we recognized the same hand at work: the same motifs (not to say tics), the same incessant zooming, the same disregard for common good taste.

We begin in a misty wood, and towards the camera comes a woman who will change your life: Lina Romay. She is wearing the following articles of clothing: a thin, black cape, hanging down her back; a wide black belt around her hips; and black boots. The costume designer, like a good prose editor, recognized that everything in between was filler, and cut it. Like a Grecian statue, she needs nothing but her defining attributes. As she approaches the camera, Jess pans down her body directly to the dark triangle of her Godhead, then back up. After he’s done panning and zooming all over her, she keeps walking toward the camera until she literally bumps into the lens. No one cuts it out.  eep! 🙂

Whatever a “good movie” is supposed to be, we are not in a world where that matters.

There is no world where being Lina Romay does not matter. Our world is better for having contained her; the world of Female Vampire revolves around her. She was born (in our world) as Rosa Maria Almirall, and took the name of a jazz singer after meeting Jess (who also took many of his pseudonyms from jazz musicians.) At the time of filming this movie, she was only nineteen, and had never taken (taken) the lead in a film before, though she played smaller parts in previous Franco movies like Tendre et perverse Emmanuelle (1973). In this debut, she proves her willingness to do absolutely anything on camera; later in their careers her generosity may have let Jess get away with too much.

After her long march towards the camera, Lina goes on to wordlessly seduce, fellate, and kill a local chicken farmer, before flying away as a bat (not pictured). The next morning, we see her getting dressed—in a special, nobler sense of the word that means “robed in sheer white cloth.” At the same time, our other would-be protagonist, a poet (Jack Taylor) who has come to Madeira (this movie is set on Madeira by the way) in search of some kind of transcendence, is grooming his magnificent ’70s mustache.  (What a Mustache! might actually be his character’s name.)

Just ... just look at it.

Just … just look at it.

A bikini-clad reporter approaches Lina by the hotel pool and they have an interview back up in Lina’s rooms. We learn that she (Lina) is the Countess Irina Karnstein (a descendant, presumably, of the vampire family from Carmilla) and a mute. She answers by gracious, imperious nods and slow shakes of the head as the reportress asks typical reporterly questions like:“Do you think this affliction is a consequence of the curse that has weighed on your family for centuries?” and “Do you feel ill at ease being the descendant of a family of vampires?” When asked how she feels about her ancestors’ bloody deeds, she gives the coyest, subtlest smile you’ve ever seen.

Here is a blurry version of it.

Here is a blurry version of it.

Uncle Jess himself appears as Dr. Roberts, presumably the coroner, meeting with the inspector to discuss the dead chicken man from earlier. In this scene, he utters the following line: “he was bitten… in the middle of an orgasm. The vampire sucked his semen and his life away.” There’s something incredible about this moment. This line sounds like it belongs in a porn parody of a vampire movie, not a serious vampire film. But Jess knows better. He knows sexual subtext is a waste of good text. Leaving sexual content all coy and unspoken (and unshown) makes sex too important. If you hide sex behind your story, your story ends up being only about sex; and if you’re making a story about sex, you might as well admit it and not waste everyone’s time. Sex here isn’t the god in the hidden sanctuary, it’s the public worship going on out front, as awkward as prayer.  (THIS)

People reviewing Franco movies talk about his bad simulated sex scenes, but that phrase seems to miss the point. It implies that Jess cares about simulating sex, which he clearly doesn’t; dicks that flop into view are clearly flaccid, genital areas don’t even remotely line up, actresses moan with pleasure while no one is touching any of their erogenous zones whatsoever. In terms of making it look like there’s really a penis going into a vagina somewhere, we’re way outside the realm of failure and into the realm of not trying to do that. It’s not poorly faked , it’s … emblematic: you’re seeing something that clearly represents two people having sexual intercourse, but just as clearly isn’t (cough*).  When I think of badly simulated sex, I think of the typical Hollywood or TV sex scene, where the whole bottom half of the body is carefully kept out of frame, and sights of even nipples (if allowed) are calculated and dripped out with an eyedropper. Is the premeditated Hollywood sex more artful? Not if exuberance is beauty.  (I for one choose exuberant death!)

(*I say it IS poorly faked though, and it’s one of the examples where the natural filmmaking awkwardness -of having a sex scene without showing sex- in the Jess version of filmmaking purely accidentally transcends itself becoming graphic, silly and gratuitous… but as opposed to what? Then you start wondering what you’re used to seeing in ‘this kind of scene’ and it becomes -again, purely accidentally- artistic criticism on censorship and the Hollywood norms you’ve shoved in your face since birth, which are even more silly and downright patronizing when simulating intimacy and/or coitus.  Uncle Jess would never lie to us.)

The movie goes skin-deeper when Dr. Roberts goes to meet a colleague, Dr. Orloff, meant to be the son of the Dr. Orloff from one of Jess’s first directorial efforts, Gritos en la Noche / The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962). The younger Orloff is blind, and a delver into forbidden things: “Oh, I search, and sometimes in the darkness I find the answers that in the light one cannot find.” Roberts asks him about the Countess, whom Orloff has sensed is on the island. “Is she alive?” asks Dr. Roberts, and Dr. Orloff replies to him and to us, “Are you alive?” These two doctors are possibly my favorite part of this movie, and almost any movie.

Two phones, a dagger, and a model ship -- everything a doctor needs on his desk.

Two phones, a dagger, and a model ship — everything a true doctor needs on his desk.

They get better in one of their later scenes, when Orloff tells Roberts more about the occult and the vampiric Countess, and Roberts is compelled to say, “But what you say is more than terrifying. The demons must be killed, and it must be forever.” Dr. Orloff replies, spectacularly: “What for? How are we to know that the pleasure isn’t worth life itself? Why fight against it?”

It is at this point in the viewing that I exclaimed “This man knows! He gets it! He knows!” I meant both Dr. Orloff and Jess, who seems to understand the forces that drag other vampire writers around, uncomprehending as marionettes.

Jack Taylor’s poet knows too. He falls in love with the vampiress not despite, but because of what she is. When he asks her, “Will you take me with you someday, behind the mist?” he wants a relationship with the Countess that is denied him; he can never be her equal partner or live in her world. But he understands that she is worthy of his worship, worth becoming food for.

Linaface

Look. (Sure, I’ll call that a transition.) What is a vampire, and what is its fascination? It is the sexiness of the abstracted idea of evil purged of the dullness of actual, real-life evil. Evil is boring, uncreative, ugly, normal; the imagination, attempting to comprehend its terrors, creates an image that is everything evil isn’t: beautiful, austere, brimming with vital fire. An image for sin’s seductiveness becomes simply a seductive image; a vampire ceases to stand for anything except a vampire. The doctor who thinks he can see is a literalist, and wants to hunt down the beautiful monster because surely it stands for something; the blind doctor Orloff knows better, and is right to answer, “What for?”

Nightmares Come At Night / Les Cauchemars Naissent La Nuit (1972)

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Nightmares Come At Night

This came up on our Netflix recommendations after watching some trashy B-movie lost even to our forgiving history. Its title (it sounds less ridiculous in French, but who wants that?) and cover were irresistible; they promised pure trash. We didn’t expect something so disorientingly beautiful.

This was our entree into the work of Jesús “Jess” Franco, a man of many names and no taste. Estimates of his total output vary, but he himself placed it at over 200 movies, released under the names Jesús Franco, Jess Franco, Jess Frank, Clifford Brown, David Khune, James P. Johnson, and many more, including variants of all the above. Other than a few well-produced studio efforts, they were filmed on tiny and declining budgets, one movie often Frankensteined together from fragments filmed experimentally while working on others. It’s an intimidating, confusing-as-balls filmography, so a good entry point is worth something—and Nightmares was fascinating enough to get us hooked.

After opening credits with more unabashed nudity than a whole 21st-century American movie, plus disorienting zooms and camera effects (on stills, no less,) we encounter a cageful of birds. From there we cut to our sleeping heroine, Anna (Diana Lorys) and zoom into her nightmare. With that we’re straight into the sex and murder (sexmurder, the pros call it) and from then on we’re kept blissfully bewildered.

Our heroine

I woke up like this

When she wakes up, we meet her lover Cynthia (Colette Giacobine), and then Paul the doctor (Jess Franco regular Paul Muller.) The whole middle of the movie is Anna telling Paul the history of her and Cynthia, but because that history jumps in time and includes her own earlier conversations with Paul, it makes the structure of the story seem more convoluted than it is. The long flashback begins with Anna’s past stripping in a nightclub in Zagreb, and the weirdly sterile (but inventive) striptease sequence lasts almost 10 of the movie’s 85 minutes–you do the math and tell us this isn’t art. Diana Lorys seems to have been told to slowly writhe and (occasionally) strip on a table while Jess masturbates and plays with the zoom lens.

Art?

She invents whole new fetishes out of boredom

We see the story through dreams, flashbacks, recountings—we see the actual events through mirrors, cage bars, gauzy veils. We also hear the dialogue through an atrocious English dub that only enhances the movie’s off-putting strangeness. In one scene in the long middle flashback, Anna and Cynthia have their first conversation, but Anna’s narration cuts in over every line as soon as it starts, overwriting the dialogue (even though it was clearly written and recorded) with a synopsis of that dialogue. It undermines our trust in Anna and increases the mystery around Cynthia and her purposes, while reminding us of the artifice of the movie we’re watching—everything Jess likes in his most intellectually ambitious mode, which, unlike with many directors, is arguably his best.

Fairly typical shot

Fairly typical shot

The nudity and sex in this movie has a kind of innocence to it—I mean like Garden-of-Eden innocence. The camera may seem to embody the male gaze, but the characters have never heard of it, and wear exactly as much clothing as seems natural and comfortable in what must be a very warm house. The body-loving camera doesn’t understand about objectification either, but just laps at their skin like an excited puppy.

The form of True Clothing emerges from the matter of cloth

Anna puts this sheet on sari-style, and Jess films the entire process and puts it in the movie, out of apparently pure fascination.

Right from the first, we could tell that this was a director who made exactly the kind of movie he liked, who knew what he was into and would put it on the screen. He likes nude women and sometimes men, he likes birds, he likes mirrors, and he likes incessantly zooming in and out in a way that’s been tactfully described as “improvisational.” Many people don’t like his movies, for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. There are plenty of reasons not to make a Jess Franco movie, and Jess’s defining characteristic is that he doesn’t listen to any of them. He works without moderation, without prudishness, without conscience, without taste or caution, without feminist qualms; sometimes without coherent vision. Without, without, without.

The result is that Jess Franco movies, like B-/cult/trash cinema in general, are an insanely mixed bag of absolute garbage and wonders you’d never otherwise see. I’d give up a fair amount to unsee his worst movies, but I wouldn’t give up his best ones. Nightmares Come at Night is one of them, and it’s one of the best places to start.

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