Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: Dementia; A Warning to the Curious; The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, American)
Format: Various sources, various players.

Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are going to be at least vaguely aware of the existence of Bruno VeSota (or Bruno Ve Sota, as he is sometimes credited). Buttery fat dude VeSota appeared in five MST experiments, most notably to me personally as the chubby club owning foil of Daddy-O. He did one or two notable films, though, perhaps none more bizarre than Dementia from 1955, a film that, at 56 minutes, straddles the border of short and feature-length. What is most noteworthy about this film is the fact that there is no real dialogue included.

Dementia is very clearly an experimental film, if the lack of dialogue didn’t already indicate that. To put it bluntly, this film is an exploration of a descent into madness, a sort of fever dream following the experiences of an unreliable narrator and a bizarre and terrifying evening she spends in and around a seedy hotel, reliving her abusive past, and perhaps committing crimes in the present.

Our Asylum, in the Middle of Our Street

Film: A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ichipēji)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

This blog takes me to some weird places. A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ichipēji in the original Japanese) is one that would interest me in general, but a little reading would make me think twice about watching. This is a rare early Japanese silent. Apparently, for audiences in Japan, this would have been screened with someone who acted as a narrator, essentially telling the story that was playing out on screen. As such, the film has no intertitles. Just as important, the film was thought missing for more than four decades, and when it was rediscovered, a third of it was missing. So what we have is two-thirds of a show with no actual explanation of what is happening.

But, it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, and I’ve certainly watched longer films that were less coherent. So in I dove, head-first. I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the plot summary on Wikipedia. Again, there are no intertitles and no dialogue. It’s also very clearly an experimental film, so even if there were some intertitles, it’s not going to be the most coherent film around.

Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: The Call of Cthulhu; Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968); Outer Space
Format: Internet video on laptop.

People who read horror either love H.P. Lovecraft’s work or they hate it. I don’t know that there’s a lot of middle ground. One of the problems with Lovecraft’s writing is that, like Ray Bradbury’s writing, it doesn’t always translate well to film. In Bradbury’s case, it’s dialogue—no one actually speaks like Bradbury characters do. With Lovecraft, it’s the fact that his creepy crawlies and monsters defy description. This hasn’t prevented people from trying to film Lovecraft stories, but most of them don’t live up to the promise. The creature at the end of the original Hellboy is probably the closest we’ve seen to a true Lovecraftian horror on film. His story “The Call of Cthulhu” was thought to be unfilmable, but about 20 years ago, a group of independent filmmakers created The Call of Cthulhu as a traditional silent film…and it works.

Like a lot of Lovecraft (and Poe before him), the story is told in flashback, by a narrator who is relating his story to someone, trying to explain exactly what happened. In this case, a man (Matt Foyer) inherits the work of his great-uncle, who was obsessed with a religious cult called the Cthulhu Cult. The nephew pours through the work and becomes similarly obsessed himself. The fact that everyone who encounters or deals with the cult in some way seems to end up dead does not dissuade him. Encounters with the cult itself eventually leads the man to searching for the source of the cult, which leads him to the fabled city of R’lyeh, where great Cthulhu lies sleeping.

Hellscape

Film: Mad God
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime at the office.

What follows might well be the shortest full-length review I have ever written or will ever write. That’s not because there are specific problems with Mad God, but because there isn’t a great deal to write about it. This is an experimental film in every way that word can be used to describe a film. It’s also one of the closest things I’ve ever seen to a pure hellscape. This is the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch come to life through a lens of terrible technology, an animated horror of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. This is the same sort of birth/death/rebirth series of images as in a film like mother! with the added psychedelia of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the end (even including the obelisks).

For this blog, though, the problem is that there is no real narrative structure here. I’ve said that before about other films, usually meaning it to suggest that there isn’t a lot of plot—something like Train to Busan has a plot that fits on a matchbook with room to spare. But Mad God has literally no narrative structure. There is a series of events, of visions, and of places that the film visits, but they connect in the same way that skits in Monty Python shows did, one blending into the next, and us as the audience following something else for a time before we move on once again.

...and the Spiders of Mars

Film: Moonage Daydream
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

As a casual fan of David Bowie, I wasn’t really sure how to approach Moonage Daydream, the approved documentary film on Bowie using a substantial amount of archival footage. It’s nearly impossible to be my age and not know at least something about Bowie, of course. In terms of my musical tastes, Bowie was less important to me early on than the other prog rock acts my brothers listened to when I was very young. It was probably around the Let’s Dance era that I listened to him more in earnest, despite knowing the earlier work through my brothers to some extent.

It's hard to say that Moonage Daydream is a warts-and-all biopic, because it’s not really that sort of movie. It’s a movie that is very much from Bowie’s own point of view. So, while this is going to provide a particular perspective on his life and work, it’s also going to be a perspective that feels honest and important. Much of what makes this interesting is the fact that David Bowie reinvented himself regularly; the same guy who did Ziggy Stardust also did Modern Love and further reinvented himself into a Nine Inch Nails-like band with Tin Machine.

The (Very) Slow Passage of Time

Films: A Ghost Story
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on The New Portable.

Sometimes, this hobby is a frustrating one. I don’t expect to love every movie that I watch, but I’m not always game for a film that is going to more or less be work. A Ghost Story, for much of its 92-minute running time, is work. This is one of those films where nothing happens for a very long time. Sometimes, like with the films of Robert Bresson, that can work for me. Other times, that becomes not unlike sitting through Jeanne Dielmann and I want to pull my own head off. Oddly, A Ghost Story is both.

This is not a plot-heavy film. A musician (Casey Affleck) and his wife (Rooney Mara) live in a house, evidently in or around Dallas. She wants to leave and he doesn’t. One night, something makes a noise on the piano, but they can’t find a cause. Soon after, he is killed in a car accident. His wife identifies the body. When everyone has left, he sits up, still covered in the sheet. That sheet is going to be important, because our spirit is going to spend the rest of the film wearing it much like the old-school depiction of a ghost, a sheet with eye holes cut into it.

Letters to the Editor(s)

Film: Limite
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Dear Mario Peixoto,

It’s my understanding that Limite is your only film. I hope I’m not being too blunt when I tell you that it really looks like this was your only film. I’m not entirely sure what you were attempting in a film where virtually nothing happens for close to two hours. People sail on a boat. They don’t seem to have any particular direction or a goal in mind. They just sail. Oh, and they remember their past. But that’s really it. And that doesn’t explain the extended shots of…a spool of thread and a measuring tape? I’m not really sure. I gather these items are important to one of our characters, but did we really need to look at each one for 10-15 seconds?

I know that experimental films and art films are given a sort of license to do something different. After all, that’s the nature of experimental film. If you didn’t play around with notions of narrative or plot or character, it wouldn’t be much of an experiment. That said, Mr. Peixoto, even an experimental film has to have a point. I had flashbacks of watching Jeanne Dielmann while sitting through your film, and you need to understand that nothing that reminds me of that experience is ever a positive thing.

This Review is NSFW

Film: Tetsuo (Tetsuo, the Iron Man)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

What in the monkey hell did I just watch? I mean, I’ve seen some massively fucked up movies in my lifetime and have even enjoyed some of them, but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything weirder or less understandable than Tetsuo (sometimes called Tetsuo, the Iron Man). Before my comments are filled with, “But what about…?” I know there are weirder films out there than this one, but I haven’t seen them. The only way to describe this is as industrial pornography. That won’t make sense if you haven’t seen it. If you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Let’s see if I can make sense of this. I’m honestly not sure I can, but I’m game to try. We start with a man called the metal fetishist (director Shin’ya Tsukamoto) inserting a huge piece of metal into his leg lengthwise, sort of like a new femur. He passes out (from the pain, id’ guess) and when he wakes up, the wound is infested with maggots. This causes him to run out into the street where he is promptly run over by our unnamed main character (Tomorowo Taguchi).

Sometimes, I Hate this Pastime

Film: Zu Fruh, Zu Spat (Too Early, Too Late/Trop Tot, Trop Tard)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

I dread films like Zu Fruh, Zu Spat (Trop Tot, Trop Tard in most places, Too Early, Too Late in English). I knew it was going to be a rough ride, and while I’ve certainly watched films that have been more difficult or that have tried my patience more significantly, there’s a level of annoyance at a film like this that I find difficult to express adequately.

See, here’s the thing. My habit in reviewing a film is to open up two browser tabs as reference points. One page I keep open is the IMDB page for a given film. This is used mainly for reference with the names of actors and their roles in the film. The other is the film’s Wikipedia entry (yes, I know I tell my students not to use Wiki pages, but they’re fine for quick reference, and I’m doing no real research). I use the Wikipedia page to keep myself honest with the order things happened. It’s a plot touchstone, ensuring that I more or less get the plot summary correct. This film has no Wikipedia page. Think about that for a second. Some of the most obscure crap ever made has a page on that site, but Zu Fruh, Zu Spat does not.

Day Off

Film: Slacker
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Films like Richard Linklater’s Slacker pose me something of a problem in terms of the typical criticism that I write up. I’ve said before that I tend to be most interested in ideas of narrative and structure. The questions I’m most interested in when it comes to film. Put another way, I like “why” and “how” questions—why does the story work the way it does, how does everything hang together. The meaning of the film is ultimately a “what” question. There’s nothing wrong with this sort of question and there’s a shit-ton of criticism out there that tackles this question and does it better than I can. It’s just not always a question that interests me.

With Slacker, though, there is no story, or at least not one in the traditional sense. This film is typically called “plotless,” which it is. What makes it interesting is that it is not without a story or an idea to drive it forward. There is an idea at the heart of Slacker that makes it work. Rather than driving this idea with a traditional narrative that follows a set of characters from point A to point B, it follows a meandering path through characters all headed in the same lack of direction.

Toppling Dominoes

Film: Russkiy Kovcheg (Russian Ark)
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I very much feel like I should have a lot to say about Russkiy Kovcheg (Russian Ark), and I very much feel like I don’t have a lot to say about it. That’s the problem with demanding longer reviews from myself—when I get into a position like writing up a film like this, I struggle for something to say. At its most pure essence, Russkiy Kovcheg is a 99-minute experiment and little more. We walk through an art gallery and encounter various periods of Russian history preserved, as it were, like the art itself.

Russkiy Kovcheg is notable not for its plot (it has none) but for its astonishing technical achievement. The entire film consists of a single take, one long, uninterrupted shot. This wouldn’t be notable if it were nothing more than a static camera, but the camera here is almost never still. As the narrator and audience point of view (voiced by director Alexander Sokurov) wanders through this living museum, he speaks with another ghost out of time known as either the Stranger or the European (Sergei Dreiden). At times, the Stranger interacts with the people they see; at other times, the two wanderers appear to be unobserved observers.

Tune In, Turn On, Czech Out

Film: Sedmikrasky (Daisies); Ostre Sledovan Vlaky (Closely Watched Trains)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

Where do I begin with this one? Put in its most basic terms, Sedmikrasky (Daisies) asks what it would be like if there were two Bugs Bunnies and they were Czech women. Of course, the film is deeper than that, but on the surface, it feels like a modernized Buster Keaton film. It’s 72 minutes of insanity and randomness, food, chaos, unfulfilled sexuality, destruction, and girl power. I’m not going to go anywhere near a plot summary, because there’s no plot here to summarize. There are a bunch of actions that all point in a direction (sort of), but a summary beyond the most cursory is impossible.

Our two consistent characters are both named Marie. While completely different in appearance, they are otherwise completely interchangeable. They aren’t two facets of the same person, but two incarnations of the same personality. One Marie is blonde and generally wears a crown of flowers (Ivana Karbanova). The other is brunette and sports pigtails (Jitka Cerhova). And what do the two incarnations of this personality do? They eat. They are constantly eating, drinking, smoking, or more accurately, they are constantly consuming everything they can. A large section of the film is devoted to their convincing men to buy them endless amounts of food before putting the guys on a train and out of their lives, the men unsatisfied.

Dogme 95

Film: Festen(The Celebration); Idioterne (The Idiots)
Format: DVD from NetFlix (Festen) and video from The Magic Flashdrive (Idioterne), both on laptop.

When Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg created the Dogme 95 idea, the point was to get back the most basic of ideas in filmmaking. Films were to be made quickly, without special effects, without massive budgets, without even much in terms of lighting, makeup, or costuming. The whole point of the movement was to hammer home the point that great and important stories could be told without all of the tricks that the audience has grown used to seeing. In short, Dogme 95 is about the power of storytelling rather than the power of technology. It makes some Dogme films difficult to watch, but it’s a noble idea if nothing else.

Festen (The Celebration) is the first Dogme 95 film ever released. To sum the film up as quickly as possible, a family gathers to celebrate the 60th birthday of the family patriarch and everything goes to hell, hits bedrock, and starts mining. It becomes evident that there is a lot of bad blood right away and a lot of baggage that will be unpacked as the film progresses.

Moves Like Jagger

Film: Performance; Gimme Shelter
Format: DVDs from NetFlix on laptop.

Performance is not one film, but two. That these two films have the same characters and that one ends specifically when the other begins is of little importance. That the two films eventually meet and merge at the end, though, is of very great significance, and it’s equally significant that the two experiences placed under this single name are packaged as a single entity.

Let me explain. At the beginning, Performance is a fairly standard British crime drama. We’re introduced to Chas (James Fox), who works for a man named Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon). Chas is a foot soldier whose main job is intimidation. We get the sense that Chas is in it for both the money and the violence. The trouble starts when Harry decides to take over a bookie joint owned by a man named Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine). He expressly forbids Chas from being involved in the takeover because Chas and Joey have a rocky history.

Exodus

Film: Deseret
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Of all the rare films that exist on The List, none is more rare than Deseret. There were a number of films that, as I started looking around, I had trouble finding, but none were more frustrating than this odd little film from James Benning. To my knowledge, this film has not only never gotten a DVD release, it’s never been put on videotape. There is a mythical copy of the film on 16-milimeter film somewhere in California, one that requires a massive deposit to rent, which doesn’t include the cost of the projector itself. I am, thus, massively grateful to Chip Lary at Tips from Chip for forwarding me this electronic copy.

Deseret is an odd film, one that is difficult to parse. On its surface, it’s a simple film—little more than a series of landscapes and a voiceover narration that seems to have little or nothing specific to do with the words being spoken. As it turns out, the words being spoken are excerpted passages from nearly 100 news stories printed in the New York Times over a span of just shy of 150 years. Each story is pieced down into a few sentences. Benning presents us with a static camera, switching shots for each sentence, and giving us a long pause on a shot between stories. Each of the stories is introduced with the individual story’s initial date of publication.

Alpha to Omega

Film: The Tree of Life
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on Sue’s Mother’s Day present.

I won’t for a moment pretend that I fully understand everything that Terrence Malick was trying to do with The Tree of Life. The film I am most immediately put in mind of, though, is 2001: A Space Odyssey, although I also found moments where I thought of Koyaanisqatsi on a galactic scale. There is a great deal of power and beauty to the images that Malick gives us. This is a view of life in all aspects, from the very beginnings of the universe and the formation of our world to the individual lives of a handful of people. Much of this film looks like a nature documentary. Most puzzling to me is the fact that The Tree of Life is deeply philosophical, but I cannot determine if it is suggesting that the source of life is a deity or if there is no ultimate purpose to the universe and that life (all life) is its own reward. What’s more, I think it can be interpreted either way accurately. Religious or not, this film is all about the spirituality of existence.

This film is more or less about events in the life of Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn). As the film opens, we learn of the death of his younger brother. We flash forward to the present, and Jack is apologizing to his father (Brad Pitt) about something he said regarding his brother’s death. Jack is adrift in his life, apparently successful, but suddenly unfocused. He begins to think about his childhood (where he is played by Hunter McCracken, the real star of this film) and his relationship with his parents. His father is domineering and dominating while his mother (Jessica Chastain) is more open and loving.

Word Salad

Film: Mediterranee
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Frequent readers of this blog will note that I almost never refer to The Book when it comes to a review. The goal of each of these reviews is more or less to coalesce my own feelings and observations about a given film as well as I can. In rare instances, though, I’m so completely nonplussed by a film that I have no other option. Mediterranee is exactly that sort of situation. I watched this thing and I have nothing original to say about it, which is difficult, considering I have a review to write.

Sadly, The Book doesn’t have much to say about it, either. Seriously, essentially it says that this is a film that Godard found influential and that he really liked. Great. So evidently, Mediterranee made it here because someone heard that Godard liked it, and thus it makes it on. This is one of the reasons that I sometimes think that The List needs an enema.

Try it with Peyote

Film: El Topo
Format: DVD from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

I try not to complain too much about the films I watch, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. El Topo is going to be one of those times. Let me put it this way: El Topo broke my DVD player. It was fine a couple of days ago, and now, suddenly, the remote has stopped working (it’s not the battery; I checked) and the play button on the machine itself no longer takes the film off pause. I may use this opportunity to upgrade to a Blu-ray player, as I am apparently the only person in the world without one. And Christmas is coming anyway, so that might top my list. But for now, it means that this will be the last DVD on the big ol’ television for some time.

How in the holy fuckballs do I explain El Topo, though? I have no idea how to piece this damn thing together. It feels like the natural child of a film like Un Chien Andalou, but that one actually made more sense and didn’t have the discourtesy to run for just over two hours. El Topo has the sort of violence that’s expected in a Western, but makes about as much sense as marimba-playing swordfish. For the life of me, I have no idea what the hell I just watched.

November 22, 1963

Film: Report
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I have been avoiding the shortest films on the list for some time. There’s no particular reason for this other than the idea that watching the longest films means I feel like I’m taking care of the largest effort parts of the list first. Still, there’s a time and a place for knocking out the shorties, and with only a small handful of films left under an hour, today seemed like a good day to do it. Also, since a couple of those ultra-short films are difficult to locate, getting them done sooner rather than later seemed like a good idea.

And so we have Report, a film by Bruce Conner about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At a mere 13 minutes, this is hardly a comprehensive look at the events of November 22, 1963 and it’s not intended to be. In fact, I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to be. I’ve seen that there’s some analysis online (searching for rare films brings one to some interesting places), but rather than look there, it’s more interesting to try to parse this out for myself.

Film Within a Film

Film: Zire Darakhatan Zeyton (Through the Olive Trees); 8 ½
Format: Internet video (Olive Trees) and streaming video from NetFlix (8 ½) on laptop.

Just as there are dozens of musicals that are essentially about musicals, there are plenty of films in the world about films, filmmakers, and the filmmaking process. For me, this is a much more interesting topic. I mean, most musicals about musicals are about the necessary pluck and determination needed to put on a show at any cost, and basically indicate that those people who are show people (and who thus smile when they are low) are particularly special and wonderful. Filmmakers might well do this, too, but they don’t seem to do it exclusively. Frequently, films about film are filled not with unashamed promotion of directors as saints, but frequently as people just as confused and lost as anyone else.

Zire Darakhatan Zeyton (Through the Olive Trees) is a film deeply connected to the idea that life and art blend into each other and overlap, often becoming confused, one for the other. I had thought that Kiarostami’s Close-Up was the most convolutedly meta film I had ever seen, but that’s only because I had not yet seen this one. This is the final film in his “Koker” trilogy. The first film, Where is the Friend’s Home?, is a treatise on civic duty and friendship. The second film, Life, and Nothing More concerns Kiarostami searching for the stars of the first film after a massive, destructive earthquake, putting a layer of meta onto the first film. This one is essentially about the filming of the second film, which is about the first film, making a meta parfait of Iranian film goodness.