Torso

Ah, 1970s Italian films. There's really nothing like them. I'm not nearly well versed enough in cinema history to know what it was that fuelled the explosion of fabulous Italian cinema in the late 60s and 70s but I'm glad it happened. From Spaghetti Westerns to supernatural slashers, a number of my favourite films, directors and film scores come from the era.  

More often than not, these films get unfairly dismissed or overlooked.  With large multi-lingual casts speaking whichever language came naturally to them and then being dubbed for release, cheap sets and often clumsy dialogue, a lot of modern film fans sadly mistake these for bad films. They're not.  With the exception of a few well-known greats - like Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone - most of the star-players of Italian cinema seem to be restricted to only cult appreciation. It's a shame because so many of these films are beautifully shot and scored, and ought to be better known.

Torso, today's film, is a giallo flick from Sergio Martino. Like so many of the genre, a number of artsy, rich, female American students meet their end at the hands of a sadistic sexually driven killer (the Italian title translates as The Bodies Presented Traces of Carnal Violence...).  Of course, the aim is to catch the killer but you can never really ignore the obvious glee the film takes in punishing these confident, promiscuous women. Besides the obvious sexism - which these films held in common with most other films of the era - the Italian cinema cycles are so confusingly anti-American. Just as the Spaghetti Western took a classic American good-versus-bad narrative and turned most of the Americans into greedy, cold-blooded murderers, mercenaries and cowards, Giallo films are obsessed with Americans but brutal towards them too.   Here, the Italian art professor registers his surprise that his student, "a product of American technology", could possibly have real feelings for art. He suggests that perhaps her real reason for being in Perugia is to "buy the coliseum".  The irony of these films' resistance to American capitalism being delivered side-by-side with English dubbed dialogue for sale to foreign markets is apparently lost on the film-makers...

Anyway, in Torso we have a bunch of art students being picked of by a killer. It's not really the plot or the mystery that holds the attention here so much as the tension and drama surrounding the murders.  The first death, early in the story, is a masterpiece of suspense. A couple have sped off from class to a deserted spot to have sex in their bright-red mini (it is the 70s...). The camera lurks in the bushes, creeping around the car for a better view, making the viewer just as sleazy a voyeur as the masked man whose viewpoint we are seeing.  Expendable Boyfriend #1 spots the masked man and charges out of the car and into the undergrowth in pursuit.  We're left alone with Flo in the car, the camera still lurching uneasily, as plucked strings warn of what's to come. You know she's going to die. But that's not the point.  Even though it's predictable as can be, with plenty of the those moments where you just want to scream "NO, no, no, stay in the car!", at the hapless soon-to-be-victim, the real art of the seen is in the buildup to the inevitable.  The strings get more insistent. Someone in the orchestra has found a drum and begins gently tapping it. The camera lurches more awkwardly. We see a flash of leather gloves, a movement in the bushes, a peeping figure round the wall. Suddenly it's all crescendo and murder.

Throughout, the score and cinematography are what really drive this film.  Even in moments of calm the camera has a tendency to creep around obstacles in a disarming manner.  As with more famous examples, such as Argento's Proffondo Rosso / Deep Red, a certain amount of the mystery revolves around seeing: mistakes, confusion and half-glimpsed actions lead detectives and characters astray and the viewer becomes a part of the voyeurism that drives the story. The camera shoots from face to face, watching people watching. The score is similarly impressive: silence is used to good effect, and the absence of music is often as tension-building as the music itself. When the music does kick in, little recurring patterns foreshadow moments of violence and build towards violent, noisy bursts. Guido and Marizio de Angelis did a very good job here.

Torso is not the giallo I'd suggest for anyone's first taste of the genre - probably some Argento would be as good a start as any - but it's a decent film. However much the dialogue and plot may be somewhat clumsy, there's a lot of style and tension in it that is all too often missing from modern films.

NO/GLOSS Leeds

The weekend of the 8th & 9th of September saw the launch of Leeds' first DIY and experimental film festival No/Gloss. As a big fan of film festivals with half-an-eye on experimental film this was pretty exciting. I was only able to attend for one of the two days but I had a great time there.

Keeping with the DIY aesthetic, the organisers held it in Wharf Chambers - a co-operatively run Arts-space near(ish) to the Corn Exchange, Leeds. This meant that festival goers could take advantage of the Sam Smiths beer on offer as well as some pretty tasty vegan food. A crowd of film-fans had descended like hungry-wolves on the black-bean paté sandwhiches (would hungry wolves eat black bean paté? Not so sure...) but I can vouch for the herb tofu. Great stuff.

The set-up in place at the main screen saw films being shown in three sessions with short breaks between each batch of films. There was a second screen as well, with a long list of shorts that were on a rolling playlist.  Sadly, this screen got a bit lost amid the bar, food-counter and conversation of the main room so I didn't really see very much that was shown on it. But the glimpses I caught did seem interesting.

I'll write a separate post to review some of the films over the next couple of days, so for now I'll content myself with saying that the films were varied and interesting.  The speed which the schedule see-sawed between funny and depressing did seem a little awkward - finished watching a gritty investigation on homelessness in Manchester? Here's something funny! - but perhaps that served to emphasise the sheer variety. I'll put a couple of my favourites at the end.

All in all, NO/GLOSS was a triumph (from the point of view of a punter, at least). And I sincerely hope we'll see future instalments of this welcome addition to Leeds' busy cultural calendar.

Some of the best shorts:

Probably my absolute favourite. Bottle by Kirsten Lepore. One of those films that reminds you what fabulous things you can do with a little patience and a whole lot of imagination. A lovely film.




Post Fracas by Xander Robbin is a completely bonkers look at the feelings experienced by a family after being humiliated on a TV-gameshow. A lot of fun

POST FRACAS from Xander Robin on Vimeo.

Surface ii by Sam Spreckley is a beautiful abstract piece. Mesmerising.

Surface ii from sam spreckley on Vimeo.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

In my last post on a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, I admitted that the James Bond project was moving along somewhat slowly.  Inwardly, I promised myself that I'd speed it up a bit, crack through a few more films and get on with it.  But then I looked at the next film on the list: On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Oh dear.

OHMSS is a film I'd only seen once. It has a reputation as a low-point of the Bond series: people can argue forever about who their favourite Bond is but none of them ever say George Lazenby. Ever.   More than that, it's one of the very few Bond films that, after watching it, I never felt the need to return to again. But that was years ago. Surely my memory was deceiving me? Surely it wasn't that bad?

It was.

Well... maybe not entirely as bad as I remembered. Just mostly as bad.  There are a few decent moments and sequences in it but, for the most part, this is a pretty dull film. First off, it's slow. Bond films usually move along at a fairly brisk pace - conversation, fight, conversation, fight, etc. etc - but OHMSS just crawls along. Although the plot itself is no better or worse than most other Bond films - Blofeld + world domination + mind control - it just takes forever to actually get exciting.  When it does pick up, the film's actually not bad. The final, say, 20 minutes are pretty pacey. We have a bobsled-run chase/fight, some decent explosions and good gunfights. It's just such a shame it took so long to get there!

There's basically two ways of looking at OHMSS: if you treat it as a Bond film, it's a disappointment. The tone's all wrong, Lazenby isn't a great Bond and Telly Savalas is a rubbish Blofeld. On the other hand, if treated as a generic spy/action flick it's pretty decent. The [spoilers!] grim ending is so very out of place amongst Bond films: usually marooned in the sea/jungle/desert cosying up to a beautiful woman, Lazenby's Bond is left biting back tears, sat next to his dead wife. It's not a bad ending - but it's not Bond.

Still, OHMSS was slightly-less-bad than I had expected, which is pretty much all I was hoping for. Hello and goodbye Mr Lazenby. Next time it's back to Connery...

[REC]3 Génesis

I arrived at this film with high hopes. The first [REC] is a film I absolutely love. Studying Spanish and being mad-keen on zombie films, it seemed almost too good to be true that one of the twenty-first century's best zombie films was filmed by two Spanish directors in an appartment block in Barcelona. It's a powerful, scary zombie film (that staircase death!) that managed to breath new life into both the zombie and the found-footage genres. Impressive stuff.

The second in the series was by no means as good but it was still streets ahead of most of the competition. Balaguero and Plaza played around with the restrictions of the found-footage film, spiced up the zombies with a bit more religion (not to everyone's taste) and spent their obviously increased budget on quantities of guns and gore. More impressive stuff.

Coming to the third instalment, then, my hopes were high. Almost worryingly high.  I'm pretty sure that at some point Balaguero and Plaza had said they intended to stop after the second but, given its commercial success, rights-holders Filmmax said they'd continue with other directors in that case (I might have imagined this. But I think it happened). Whatever the details of the scenario, B+P did sign up to do more [REC] films but planned two more, of which they would direct one each, rather than co-directing as before. [REC]3 is Plaza's segment. It takes place, as far as I can tell, at roughly the same time as the first film. What seemed like an isolated outbreak clearly wasn't...

It opens in the now-familiar shaky-camera style. We're at the wedding of Koldo and Clara. As the family and friends move on to the reception, however, it emerges that the Uncle's dog-bite may be infected. Badly. Coughing blood and staggering, there are no prizes for guessing what happens next. It is, essentially, all fairly predictable. We're ushered into a secure location (country house), introduced to the characters/victims (wedding guests) and then a zombie is thrown into the mix and all hell breaks loose.

That said, [REC]3 handles it all pretty well. The country house makes a refreshing change from the apartment block of before, the characters are (mostly) intelligent and likeable and, most crucially of all, the gore is good. Some cruel, splattery deaths are dealt to zombies and humans alike, characters are killed off, heads and limbs are hacked at. It's gleeful, bloody stuff (which is exactly what we want, right?)

It's certainly not as innovative or as well-crafted as the first film, I'll accept that, but I'd say that it gave [REC]2 a pretty close run. [REC]3 is a well-made, straight-faced, zombie-movie. And I enjoyed it a lot.

Suspiria in a Swimming Pool

The Russian synchronised swimmers just did their routine to Goblin's creepy and wonderful score to Dario Argento's Suspiria!



Amazing.
(video via AVClub)

You Only Live Twice

The James Bond project is going slowly. When I decided, back in October, to watch every Bond film in order I didn't expect it to be a marathon of back-to-back viewings (not like Argento week!) but if I'd been asked I'd probably have predicted to be beyond Film #5 after 9 months! As it is, You Only Live Twice marks a milestone of sorts: it's the last film with Sean Connery. Ok, well... it's not. Because he came back after Lazenby. But it's the last film where only one actor had played Bond.

And it's a good one. You Only Live Twice has long been a favourite of mine. It's hard to explain really but, in many ways, it feel like one of the most Bond-like of Bond films.  It just ticks so many of the boxes. James Bond has, in my opinion, never really recovered from the end of the Cold War (Media barons just don't have the same level of villainy...) and YOLT is a good demonstration of Cold War threat: even if it's not actually the Russians who are the bad guys, the danger of M.A.D. looms over the space-race backdrop and spurs Bond into action. Because when the Yanks and the Ruskies are at loggerheads, it obviously falls the Britain to save the day!

In the process, we get some prime Bond action. Q turns up with a tiny fold-up plane in a box (one of the more perfect Bond gadgets that gently mocks his hyper-masculine reputation), the Japanese secret service supply NINJAS (with throwing stars!) and, Bond punches and fights his way through a series of Japanese paper walls. They even manage to create a clever, highly-trained and sympathetic female character and (even more surprisingly) resist giving her a name like 'Pussy Galore'. As Bond in the 60s goes, that's about as close to progressive or feminist as you're going to get!

The plot is reassuringly bonkers: a Spectre spaceship keeps swallowing the US/Russian spaceships and vanishing before anyone can find it. Tasked with stopping it, Bond has to fight a handful of subservient Spectre drones, find the lair and put a stop to Blofeld's sinister spaceship-swallowing plans.  The lair in question, nestled in a Japanese volcano with a metal fake-lake hiding it from view is pretty spectacular and one of the more memorable of Bond Villain lairs (I've always considered the submerged satellite in GoldenEye to be in imitation/homage to this one, really). Add to that a handful of really memorable scenes (poison on a string!) and you have a pretty neat Bond film.

As might be expected, there are a few clumsy moments - the less said about Bond's Asian disguise and the Japanese security-chief's harem of subservient women, the better... - but all in all this is a Bond film that takes some beating. Great stuff.

And it's On Her Majesty's Secret Service next. Now there's something to look forward to...

Melancholia

I've never been a Lars von Trier completist but I've always enjoyed his films - particularly Dogville, The Idiots and Antichrist (Ok, enjoyed might not be the right word), so I'd been looking forward to Melancholia since Cannes last year. My excitement was only further stoked by Peter Bradshaw's astonishingly negative review in the Guardian...

Bradshaw has never made a secret of how much he hates everything von Trier has done, is doing or will do (to the extent that it's pretty much pointless him writing reviews) but this one clearly had him riled!

Once again, Von Trier has written and directed an entire film in his trademark smirk mode: a giggling aria of pretend pain and faux rapture. The script is clunking, and poor Dunst joins Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard in the list of Hollywood females who have sleepwalked trustingly through a Von Trier production. Even the spectacle is thin and supercilious.

Quite apart from the utterly nonsensical description of 'spectacle' as being 'supercilious', Dunst even won best actress for her "sleepwalked" performance! Luckily, Philip French was on hand to provide a second-opinion, half sneering and half simple plot retelling, that - as one commenter pointed out - got several of the significant details entirely wrong.  Thankfully, other reviewers less-desperate to smugly condemn von Trier's Cannes-Nazi-gaffe provided more ...uh... balanced reviews.

Either way, I was keen to see it. Now that I have, I have no idea what to think. I'm pretty sure it's one of the best films I've seen in a very long time but I've still no real idea what it was about. The failure of human relationships? Bipolar disorders? The futility of making plans for the future given that life is essentially fragile? Who knows?

I know that I'm going to be musing over it for some time though. A thoroughly thought-provoking film.

Mould

OK, so just few days ago I was wowed by the poster for Mould* and decided that I'd almost certainly have to watch it. I must admit I wasn't actually expecting very much: once you've seen a number of 21st century B-movies you tend towards pessimism. Most recent films that aim for the schlocky, low-grade style of classic 70s and 80s films do so in such a self-conscious, post-Planet-Terror, we're-so-very-hip-and-grindhouse way that they're ultimately pretty disappointing. To my surprise, Mould* resisted all that and played it straight-faced and gorey and, as a result, was a whole lot of fun.

[Yes, the film is actually called 'Mold' but the word looks silly without a 'u' in the middle. Sorry America. You might be right about 'color' but oyu're wrong about 'mold']

The plot is about as complex as you'd expect from a low-budget film about mould. A group of basically good but apparently conscience-free scientists (oh scientists, why are you always evil?) have been funded to create a new form of super-evil life-destroying hyper-contagious mould. Y'know, so America can remain a superpower or something. And kill people. It's pretty vague, but let's be honest, who cares? The important point is that this mould is in their lab and it is very, very bad for you.

And it's demonstration day. So as well as 4 scientists (Old scientist, lady scientist, two young scientists who both fancy the pants off lady scientist) we have a coke-snorting congressman, his effeminate aide, a cigar-toting army general and his dumb, macho soldier aide. So now we have cowards, scientists, bullies and a woman. All locked in together in a building with some mould. AND GUESS WHAT!? Despite all the precautions taken, the mould contaminates one of them and, from that point on, the worry of containment and contamination takes over the film.

Budget-wise, of course, this is very efficient. Most of the action takes place in one room, with a few shots set in the neighbouring corridors. This, thankfully, means they were able to save all the rest of their cash to spend on splattering green goo and blood across... well... everything. Mould is one of those that you can imagine was an awful lot of fun to make and the enthusiasm carries across onto the screen. I don't want to spoil the surprise(s) but we have splattering heads, exploding internal organs, facial bleeding. And then later, some guns.

There really isn't very much more to tell: Mould is an awful lot of fun. It does perhaps start a little slowly but the slow-moving first half hour is definitely worth it for the oozing, gooey, mouldy pay-off that follows. This is modern low budget trash made with old-fashioned enthusiasm. Highly recommended.

Available right now at www.moldthemovie.com 

Poster Hunt #12 - Mold

It's been an absolute age since the last Poster Hunt blogpost - there hasn't been one since July 2010! But today I stumbled upon a picture that was just too good not to revive the long-forgotten series. A pedant might well point out that this appears to a cover rather than an actual poster but... pfft! Who listens to pedants anyway?

So here is the beautiful artwork for MOLD! It looks a pretty fabulous film, so I might have to give a watch some time soon.

 

See previous Poster Hunt's here!

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity

Oh they don't make 'em like this anymore. Armed with an invincible title like that, a budget the size of a shoebox and ambitions the size of an alien planet, how could you go wrong? SGFBI is a masterclass in campy sci-fi film that could teach modern snoozefests a thing or two...

Firstly, it's not nearly as sexual as its title would suggest. Nowadays, a film with the words "Slave Girls" in the title would almost certainly be pretty unpleasant. Instead, this fast-paced little flick just throws a couple of prison-escapees into a foreign jungle planet and follows their adventures. There's hardly anything by way of gratuitously sleazy scenes and it's all the better for it. The two women, Daria and Tisa, on a bid for galactic freedom, crash land on a strange and (at first) apparently deserted jungle planet.

Soon enough, they meet the outrageously camp 'Zed', who is master of this private planet and lives in a stone fortress with his two robotic henchmen (I'm not making a word of this up...).  Invited to slip into something more comfortable and join him for dinner (which includes a bizarre son-et-lumiere theremin interlude...) Daria and Tisa meet two other crash-victims who are stuck on Zed's planet. Before long, they realise that the sinister hunting-enthusiast Zed has been taking his unwilling 'guests' out and hunting them in his jungle gardens.

SGFBI clocks in at a tiny 75 mins. In that time we get space travel, intrigue (!), horror (!), theremins (!), robots and jungle. A good third of the film is taken up by Zed's attempt to hunt the three girls through the jungle. The other guest in Zed's personal playground is sadly not so lucky and is crossbowed (is that a verb?) early on.

I need to say a quick word about the robot guards who, apart from being fabulously designed, are apparently also tempted by curvaceous ladies and have a pretty hilarious argument. Read the following in Dalek voices:
Robot 1: The Maaaaaster will not be pleased with your aaabscence!
Robot 2: You displease MEEEE! Aaaand I ignorrrre YOOOOUUU!
R1: I'm going to inform the maaaaaasteeeerrrrr!
R2: Tattle-taaaaaaaaaaalle!

They're awesome, this is awesome, the sets look like they're made of sponge and carboard and Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity is more fun than it surely has any right to be!