SUSPIRIA for Men... ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

Lately when I meditate all that happens is my unconscious/anima rummages through forbidden memory drawers, exposing afresh long-buried shames as far back as ninth grade gym class. I'm all cool about it, of course--"oh thank you ma'am, for saving these precious memories"--and I believe once I accept them she's going to just toss 'em out. But I doubt she will, 'cuz my unconscious is a bitch, yo. Still, my unconsicous' scathing anima is nothing like the one pulling Julian (Ryan Gosling) apart in Nicolas Winding Refn's career-sabotaging follow-up to his career-making DRIVE: ONLY GOD FORGIVES.

Yeah, but She doesn't, Blanche!

The tale of an Oedipus complex writ large by white people across the dirty expanses of Bangkok, it's more of a Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch play exquisite corpse with an Argento hotel bar napkin than it is the kind of all-too-standard Asian action-revenge thriller it pretends to be.

Then again, everything is a Jim Jarmusch plays exquisite corpse with David Lynch on an Argento hotel bar napkin for Sweden's dark lord of the Seijun Suzuki-esque macho melt-down post-modernist gangster genre, Nicolas Winding Refn. GOD is his special love letter to those Angelica film snobs who saw VALHALLA RISING and said "very good, Sven, but maybe slow it down a bit. Maybe don't have a protagonist who's such a chatterbox." There has to be one such film snob... somewhere.

Maybe it's even me.

I'm keenly aware (since I'm Swedish) that to stand out from the legions of 'corrupt but honorable cop vs. redeemable but doomed Oedipissant' Asian vengeance-athons loitering sullenly along the neon- drenched "Dark Foreign Revenge Thriller" avenues of Netflix, Refn has to import his own brand of ice and snow onto the eternally wet floors of le Bangkok Dangereuse. We Swedes know that Thai swordsman cops can out-swing us, so we have to out-stare them and, more importantly, be willing to lose a limb without blinking. That's how you get their respect!

No, please, don't get up

Critics haven't been kind to ONLY GOD FORGIVES, though some have been maybe too kind and maybe they shouldn't be. It practically begs for a beat-down, craves it like William Devane's masochistic ex-POW in ROLLING THUNDER (1977). It promises to not even fight back, just proffer its hands for good severing (or garbage disposal grind).

But for a film with such ornate and original visual style it sure is shy about saying anything, or making a single unanalyzed move, unless it's to judge misogynist ex-pats for slapping frightened little Bangkok sex workers. Unlike Devane's more macho amputee masochism, there's some much more bizarrely Oedipal form of apotemnophilia going on here, associated with the fear of the vaginal void. As in: if I stick my hand into the darkness, into some stripper's inner gates of paradise, will I ever get it back, or just pull out a stump?

In a land of bare knuckle boxing and grim black dragon wallpaper, Gosling's hand bravely goes where only Jessica Harper doesn't fear to tread.

From Top: Suspiria / Only God Forgives

And there's this thing with brother Billy who is so mad about a Bangkok dad pimping his daughters he kills one of them to teach him a lesson. Some weird karaoke-singing cop first lets the dad kill Billy for revenge, then cuts off the guy's hand right to punish him for that right. Meanwhile Julian (Ryan Gosling, apparently now the Michael Fassbender to Refn's Steve McQueen) is getting his hands tied in a lap dance, and imagining his hand cut off by the same cop.

Dude, it's all connected.... by ligaments.

So the next week (or hour- there's no sense of time on the Bangkok streets) brings in on her sky chariot the brassy Clytemnestra of a devouring Mother (brilliantly essayed by Kristen Scott Thomas)with a typically Lady McBeth-ish streak of not thinking her dark deeds through to the end. She's clearly the evil instigator who made the boys so nutty and she has an incestuous love-hate bond with Julian, and who we learn eventually-- if our TV is on loud enough and there's no traffic outside our window to mask their fetid whispers---once ordered her boy to beat his father to death with his bare hands. And he did!

You know how hands are...

But all that stuff is minor. One of those exquisite corpse bar napkins could have covered more Freudian territory purely by chance. Though feature length, ONLY GOD reminds me a lot of my own small short films: there's no time for a plot so it all has to be delivered on the sly in expository fragments. No one leaves or arrives; they just appear in one of the many dark red-lit Chinese serpent dragon wallpapered rooms like clients at the bordello of the unconscious. When the mom lets down her long, sexy hair it contrasts dazzlingly with a silk dress that both blends her into and stands out against the hotel wallpaper. It's presumably a rose on the front )above) but looks more like the kind of hole an alien or baby (Julian) would burst out of (and where we will rather grotesquely return in the final act). When mom demands to know why her son hasn't killed the guy who killed his brother, (instead of letting the severed hand be enough of a warning), Julian mentions the dead son killed a sixteen year old girl. "Well, mom snaps. "I'm sure he had his reasons."

This old broad is a real pisser.

The film's been compared to the westerns of Sergio Leone, but in Leone all those long stares were connected to hands hovering over holsters. It was more about the eyes than the hands, and eyes are more apt for movies than hands. There's the adage in RED RIVER where John Wayne tells the kid who will soon be played by Monty Clift that he knew when the other guy was going to draw by "watching his eyes. Remember that." Flash forward a few decades and Clint Eastwood and his confederates no longer look anyhere but eyes. They no longer look at their gun or even aim it, or even blink, just stare. And then WHAM, one or more guys die - the guys who look at hands instead, one presumes. Hitchcock had that line about how the only difference between comedy and suspense at breakfast is that only the audience knows a bomb's under the table in the latter. in Leone, everyone knows everyone else has a bomb under the table, and that gives their every move meaning; they don't take their eyes off each other even as they pour the coffee, with one hand, super..... slowly. Each ready for the bomb in each other's laps. In ONLY GOD FORGIVES, Refn takes the coffee away, the table, and the bombs, and most of the hands too, by the end. If it's not suspense at least it's the first violent masculine deconstruction to feminize the macho staring contest, and dissociate vengeance from the minds of tortured heroes. Now, instead of being about facing death the action movie is about Sleeping Beauty, with Gosling spending the whole movie in a glass case, waiting for God's samurai sword to cleave him free, of both that outer (glass) shell, and the inner (body) too, so the nothing trapped within him can rise rise rise.

There's a great piece comparing the film with Lynch's FIRE WALK WITH ME over on Very Aware, with a Refn interview, wherein he says: the original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God."

Note the austere white Great Wall image behind him, a more logocentric version of Julian's twisted dark red wallpaper, setting off a contrast that's about far more than good vs. evil, or right vs. wrong

Hey, I know about that! That's why I love Moby Dick's Capatin Ahab so much, and all my college poetry was about it, like my classic "The Bug that Would Swat God" - but in my case it was drunken bravado and feeling inspired by Gregory Peck's twisted oratory (see here, shipmates). Here it's less about wanting to fight God and more about doing it just to get your awful mother off your back.

And then there's the "villain," the cop in the white collar doesn't just kill people straight up, he does it with a show of torture, hand slicing offery, etc. And for all his swift brutal gestures, our homicidal momma's boy Julian is not much of a fighter, it turns out. He gets his ass kicked by this little guy. It's embarassing. The mom's confidence, and our own action film expectations, have led us to believe that once he's given the signal, Julian is going to be as lethal as Clint Eastwood in the climax of UNFORGIVEN. He's going to be like Popeye given the 101 proof spinach. But instead he gets beaten down... by a middle-aged balding Thai cop! That's like Sly Stallone losing a fight to Burgess Meredith, and Refn knows we'll feel that way and Julian's losing seems somehow on purpose, to piss off his mom, and us by extension, to subvert our and her expectations in a passive revenge plan he probably isn't even conscious of. We know Ahab is going to lose in his battle with the white whale. That's kind of the whole point, that knowing this, on some deep level of the unconscious, he still goes for it anyway is why we love him.Such crazy fighting spirit is what the East is all about! And inner demon battling, trying to drink you're way sober, etc.

It seems absurd that mom should be so eager for vengeance that she'd go up against a supernatural cop like this but on the other hand, without her around to shake things up, everyone would still be sitting where we left them, motionless, like a flock of ventriloquist dummies after their owners have all gone to bed. Refn's out to do more with his dolly shots than deliver a mere Asian revenge thriller; he's gone way past the 1967 Seijun Suzuki deconstruction of BRANDED TO KILL (above; below) and exposed the hideous mom-hating apron string hacker under the hot skin of Ryan Gosling's new Action Figure persona.

It helps to learn that Refn shot in chronological order and kind of winged it for large stretches, with Ryan Gosling and Kristen Scott Thomas both having lots of input and collaboration in their characters' outcomes, and genius DP Larry Smith (who worked with Refn on BRONSON) seems to have been given free reign with the surreal gels. There's a feeling that comes across when submitting to that kind of spontaneity, Godardesque perhaps, but more open-ended, in the moment, from second to second. The drawback? It seldom builds to any satisfying catharsis or ending. It's like that stare of the Leone gunfighter with his hand over his gun has widened and lasts the entire film, and then no gun is drawn. And there are no hands left to pull a trigger. The first credit at the end is to announce the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is pretty steep company. The man is a God himself, a shaman first class, and tellingly has much armless symbolism and actors. Look ma, no hands, indeed.

from top: Only God Forgives, Santa Sangre

All we know is Julian was pretty twisted before all this revenge got started but he quickly loses it thereafter; watching his stripper girlfriend cry jeweled tears behind the strings of a crystal bird house he hears some laughter at the other end of the club. They could be laughing at anything, they're all deep in a conversation way down there, but Julian has had a vulnerable emotion and now he thinks they're laughing at him. Next thing you know he's smashing a glass in one of their faces and dragging him around by his upper palette. Dude, that's so paranoid!

From top: Buffalo 66, OGF, B66 OGF ,The Fighter, OGF, B66, The Fighter

So paranoid in fact it reminds me of two other movies about bruised masculinity: BUFFALO 66, THE FIGHTER. The great music by Cliff Martinez even becomes Angelo Badalamenti at times (the music from TWIN PEAKS was supposedly what Refn cut the film to), linking it as a kind of sequel to THE FIGHTER if Mickey Ward and his ma set up shop at a fight club down in Thailand, and she left to do various deals, but she still flies in like an avenging angel when son Dicky the crackhead is killed. Meanwhile there's some BUFFALO 66 meets THE WRESTLER nonsense as Julian's favorite crying stripper, who gives the drowsiest lap dances in history, is supposed to wear a dress and meet the foulmouthed Madea of a mom. Interesting too that the dead son is named Billy, and had a huge, enormous cock (according to the mom). If Gallo had played him (and if we saw BROWN BUNNY you know he could), oooh synchro-gorgeousity made flesh.

from top: B66, OGF, OGF, B66

And it's clear Billy and Julian both have some seriously warped misogyny going on with women as a result of their mom and--as in BUFFALO 66's strip club owner--father figures they've killed or are determined to kill in one way or another. The Billy in both films skulks around the periphery of slow motion druggy sex dens, forever denied the presumed pleasures of full psychic abandon. Both have way too many mother issues to permit anything approaching even a feint at that sort of enjoyment. They can only take it out on women who seem weaker and more submissive somehow even than themselves, to vicariously relive their primal scene in an attempt to rewritezzzzzz zzzzz

Zzz- eh? I nodded off.... or did I?

Did I miss anything? No --they're all still just staring.

Perfect.

The Rutting Season: Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones

The new DVD set of Boardwalk Empire provides a chance for the HBO-less (like me) to finally see if Steve Buscemi can really pull off being a mob kingpin mayor (PS - he can't). Didn't anyone try and direct him? He looks and acts like a hermit crab bewildered at the loss of his shell. The real Nucky was presumably tough. Look at his shark eye stare (in pic below/left). There's only one or two actors in the whole series who seem genuinely menacing, who could ever convincingly threaten (naturally they're the unknowns): Stephen Graham, a terrifying but adorable Al Capone; Vincent Piazza, a poison breeze as Lucky Luciano; Michael Stuhlbarg, growing larger with every inhale as Arnold Rothstein ("ever since Rothstein 'cough' fixed the world series...'cough'")

the 'real' Nucky

 But the 'main' protagonists are a bore. Somewhere one of the show's creators felt there needed to be some moral lip service, so Nucky helps A poor widow and attends temperance meetings; dirty rat layabout Michael Pitt occasionally goes home to make idle promises to his wife and kids; obsessive fed Michael Shannon's bug-eyed mask of a face clamps down in self-righteous lock around his anti-booze assignment; self-appointed narc Kelly Macdonald (the Irish widow / temperance league member / all-around 'saint') flinches at every loud noise (she could use a freaking drink) and sleeps angelically with her two children instead of carnally with her lout husband, in such a icky faux-Fordian blarney way as we're forced to wonder what seedy motive is behind it all: is it male jealousy over the perfect bond between infant and mother or is she sanctifying herself in religiously sentimental poses to put the husband off his night's rutting?

And then, on the other side, the premature baby Buscemi, underloved, raised in an incubator, seeing in Macdonald a kind of moral mother he never had. So while Goodfellas was about brotherhood and Godfather was about becoming the Dark Father,  Boardwalk Empire is about being an infant all over again, i.e. gettin' boozed up at the teat whorehouse then feeling bad about it when mom drags you to church the next day. And that's all. 

Ah Margaret, and of course her husband beats her, for all saintly mothers are beaten by their drunk Irish laborer husbands in these sagas--so that Nucky can be saintly by thrashing him (via remote control) near to death-- and a whore gets cut up because Michael Pitt is sleeping with her (so his cocky idiocy is paid for by female suffering, as usual) and we're forced to behold concave Buscemi wheezing his way through doggy-style sex with La Huerta like he's Red Hot Ryder in 1944'a "Buckaroo Bugs." There are endless elaborate adult-themed strip shows in old theaters with far too little cigar smoke and talk of whores even when whores are not present. Just women. Who deserve more respect. Just for surviving and putting up with all these lout's infantile asses.

This is the kind of show HBO specializes in, giant violent grown male toddlers rutting via smash cuts that preclude all foreplay, delivering sudden tableaux of rough sex and domestic violence in attractive period settings, all but daring us not to wince in embarrassment as women are all either naked floppy-breasted prostitutes or floppy hat-wearing saints. Sure maybe that's how it was, in the post-code movies anyway, but these people's lives have lots of incidents they can pick from--why not go the Mad Men season one route and really get into the nuts and bolts of the business side of bootlegging? There is some of that, but none of it feels researched or lived-in, when you unwind the fancy ribbons, the non-sex incidents have no purpose other than to build up to brutal misogynist violence or more mutually demeaning rear guard rutting (which amounts to the same thing). An equal opportunity offender, if we meet a black bootlegger and see his operation, we can be sure it's only so he can be killed or tortured, his whiskey still burned down, in the next scene, in racially-motivated violence. Why else? Black characters exist for only this purpose in period HBO shows, Anything more complex would be too complicated.... But more complicated for whom, HBO? 'Adults?' They can't really say "adults only" for shows like this, now can they? Only "Parental discretion is advised" - and as HBO illustrates, they are nowhere near the same.

Marty Scorsese directs the first episode like he's still trying to capture that old Goodfella's momentum, but as usual of late he's mired in sumptuous period detail (what happens when you let your art director and cinematographer have too much input) and his insecure streak manifests in not one but TWO suspense-deadening multiple violent scene crosscut climaxes, the sort that were new and weird in the first two Godfather films, but have grown awfully trite since in the intervening dead horse kicking decade/s. Even if Scorsese scores these murders and gunfights to a vaudeville comedy routine replete with drum rolls or a tacky 20s novelty song instead of 60s rock, it's still old and overdone and doesn't work, just like it hasn't worked even for Coppola since he drew from the hell three times too many for Cotton Club.
 

Now, I only watched five episodes so far, but how much is enough?  I stopped because I hated freaking Margaret Schroder's smug decision to rat out the St. Patrick's green beer keg stash to the feds in E5. I subscribe to the Over the Edge credo that a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid, and so she should have been the one who should have got cut up, not that sweet-ass Pitt-lover. And then there's the Buscemi miscasting. He can be mildly impressive, but when he has to deliver lines like "I could have you killed!" he sounds like even he doesn't believe it.

In other HBO News, confirming my dark fears, Game of Thrones is just like Boardwalk Empire and Rome before it, existing in the murky realm where all the violent sexual ravishings that have occurred off-camera in every costume period movie made prior to 1970 finally explode from under their shaggy peat moss burial kilts and into their rutting medium shots. The go-to position in all these HBO series is doggy style, for maximum doggy-style shock-erotic value. On this dark channel, the strong survive and the strong don't woo --they bend their bride over and let fly while all their friends are still drooling in the corners like the no-good brothers in Ride the High Country). God knows how these women ever managed to become lubricated. And as Leonard Maltin notes of Watchmen: "deliberately extreme violence and sexuality seems pointless in this stylized but overly long comic book saga." That could surely apply to every show HBO ever made.

I know, I know: the missionary position is not friendly to the voyeur as the sexual displays occur sandwiched between two wall-like backs but the doggy style is very public and bawdy, and very much about power and submission: the man triumphantly ruts away from a kneeling position, both hands free so he can wave to the cheering throngs or sign important documents using her back as a writing surface; the woman, facing forward, all but paraded in chains down the streets of Carthage, head bowed in submission, the way sleazy HBO and misogynistic jack-o-napes like Scorsese and George R. Martin like it.

Plus, the HBO modus operandi for delivering these sex scenes is the genuinely ingenious use of 'uncanny Oedipal shock'. Instead of the long, tedious build-up to softcore action set to smooth, slow soulful muzak like we used to get in late night Cinemax, these HBO sex scenes do what I call the "smash cut rut" - where the boy and girl meet casually in some public space along the "Hey, Cheryl. How's things?" variety and then smash cut to anout five seconds before the man comes, from behind, camera forward, so we can see the nonplussed/exploited OR passionate/frustrated look in the eyes of the woman but not have to see the dead-eyed animal emptiness in the man's. The cut is so jarring, so contrary to our expectations, it takes a second or two for our objecting/objectifying defenses/senses have time to activate. The effect is jarring, like accidentally walking in on your parents, or accidentally opening the door on a massive coke-fueled orgy while trying to find your coat to leave a party, or being suddenly sexually groped on a bus stop or book store, where it takes a few seconds to realize even what just happened and for the shame and fury (or playa regret) doesn't have time to come roaring up before it's far too late to do anything about it. 

I don't mean to sound too militant feminist, but this raunchy HBO sudden shock sex stuff poses a problem for me because it is so well acted, so artfully and so skillfully rendered.  What on the page is a lewd fantasy imagined in the privacy of one's mind becomes a traumatizing 'adult' reality. It's not 'real' in a novel. I haven't read either the Game of Thrones's or Girl with a Dragon Tattoos, but I imagine they probably come off much less traumatic and degrading in the privacy of the printed page. The French know these things and as Acidemic's French correspondent Severine Benzimra writes:

Sexual scenes aren't supposed to, on this side of the ocean, attract the audience. They represent a part of the life of the character that it is necessary to represent. They aren't meant to excite. Sexual excitation is linked to imagination, which can't be provided by all-audience movies (meaning not the audience of pornographic/erotic movies). This is an idea on which French people wildly discuss and disagree. Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature.

I feel these kind of things should always be poorly acted, or narrated in an affectless tone by one woman to another in the privacy of a Fårö boudoir. Writ in vivid Blu-ray they are simultaneously indulgent and a reprisal against indulgence. They are where the consumerism's frenzied promise of bling and commodified sex and indentured bitches sippin' Cristal go-- not to die but to see the ugly traumatic exterior of such an ugly, antiquated macho fantasy. From the inside out it's all Playboy hot tub fantasy, from the outside in it's tawdry and mutually demeaning. 

This is why a good moral center is so essential for sports teams. We only have to look at the whole Joe Paterno situation to see how the hierarchy of a team mentality can obliterate the feeling of responsibility to the larger society... that's why I'm glad Eli Manning is such a good boy! He-a-writes-a home-a to-a his-momma! That's why I blame HBO. 

 Some things are better as dreams --this we know, we decadent shaggy artists. We know because we tried it all, every pose, every drug, and even when it led us nowhere but depression and despair we kept doing it, til the wheels fell off. And then, finally, we realized art was the only thing that didn't hurt someone else (or ourselves) and leave us feeling skeevy at the end of the day. Despite our libertine credo, our belief it was only social conditioning that made us feel cheap, feeling shitty about it five years too late is who we are. Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire (and even Mad Men) point to a deep-set oral fixation in our country... we're looking back into past for our lost sexual freedoms, because we sure can't find them in the world of today... and this allows us to forget that we lost them on purpose, and deliberately hid them so we couldn't just go back and find them during our later addict mood swings.

Now if a girl likes these sex/rape scenes in these HBO shows, that's fine, let them be turned on. They're allowed to. But I scoff at the argument that it's not sexist since later the girl gets even or rapes back or learns to control her lusty mate to win a kingdom. And we who haven't read the Throne books or seen more than one episode have a right to our shocked response. I liked this response from Carla DiOrio James on Think Progress:

Rather, holding the subject in a deeply personal space, I worry what good these images can do in the collective subconscious of American males. Since the spike in sexually violent images of our Hollywood culture in the 1980's, date rape has spiked accordingly. This spike has not been proven as dramatically in any other country as it has in the US, where male sexuality has become increasingly linked to hyper-violent images.

In some crappy Jess Franco or Jean Rollin movie, rape and sadistic torture can be titillating mainly because it is so fake-looking. In a 70s sex-horror movie, the whip bounces harmlessly off a girl's back leaving a slight trace of pinkish food coloring that's supposed to be blood. The scenes scan as liberating, even paradoxically joyous, because the trauma isn't 'real', and therefore a sense of play coheres - pain and death burlesqued to ease the anxieties of our age. As the great Joseph A. Ziemba of Bleeding Skull wrote in his review of The Possessed: "Blood and mean-spirited torment become instantly hilarious when the torturer can’t keep his wig on."  But etched so vivid by the expert and well-funded HBO craftsmen and acted by solid professionals giving it their all, the rough trade rutting and demeaning sexual servitude of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones are just sad signs that HBO has finally exhausted the stash of sleazy taboos it looted from its now destitute grindhouse neighbors, and it still / hasn't found / what it's looking for. God knows what it will overdo next. What else is even left, outside of being real, real gentle?

Giallo Reviews II: THE PSYCHIC, 7 DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE, 5 DOLLS OF AN AUGUST MOON, SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS, CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS

SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE

1973  - Dir. Antonio Margheriti
***1/2

This international-Italian/French co-production stars yeh-yeh girl Jane Birkin as a plucky ingenue possibly going mad in a mansion full of eccentrics all vying for possession of the elaborate yet crumbling secret passage-ridden ancestral estate; she's like Paulette Goddard in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY if the Bob Hope part was played by a brooding Byronic pretty boy chief suspect... and he had a pet gorilla; and she came with her mom, but her mom was murdered and then appeared to her as a vampire ghost with a Hamlet-like demand for vengeance. The score's a bit on the dimestore Morrione cop show side, but that's hardly bad thing. The main benefit here is gorgeous photography lush enough that at times Birkin's luminous hair has the beauty of Sissy Spacek's in BADLANDS, this film  bumps up three stars now that it's not a panned, scanned, washed-out mess. The only remaining flaw is a truly ridiculous gorilla suit, which is anyway a nice souvenir from the age of the old dark house mysteries, which Margheriti clearly loves along with the writing of the godfather of the giallo, Edgar Wallace.

One of the stand-out elements here are the clothes, which 'nod' to an assumed setting of 1930's England, but just nod, keeping the high fashion edge rather than getting bogged down in stuffy details like bowler hats and woolen overcoats. For her mourning wear (above) Birkin is given a beautiful black fur collar and her nightgown's sexy without being tacky (Von Sternberg would have approved). The whole production, aside from lingering close-ups of rats eating the face of victim #1, is very tasteful. The music is the orchestral suspense-generating variety rather than the moody giallo electric guitars of the time, but that's not worth a demerit. Indeed, the only demerit is maybe dubbing Serge Gainsbourg (he's the detective) with a fake Scotch burr, and not letting Jane B. do her own voice in English (She was English, after all, despite singing in French for hubby Serge). I kept thinking, hey! She's Charlotte Gainsbourg's mom! and imagining Charlotte even being conceived during this shoot, though that's maybe a stretch. Still it would fit with Charlotte's career choices, and thus this would be a great double bill with ANTICHRIST! Meee-yow!

SEVEN NOTES IN BLACK

(AKA THE PSYCHIC)

1977 - Dir. Lucio Fulci
***1/2

Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci may have a weakness for pointless gross-outs, nightmare logic, and jarringly placed schlock pop ballads, but THE PSYCHIC (AKA 7 NOTES IN BLACK) proves he can also  deliver a relatively tasteful, classically logical, lovingly lensed 'psychic wife searching for her own killer'-style-mystery. Here Poe motifs mingle with an array of time capsule 70s horror film trends, namely ESP - which was super hot after CARRIE - and it's all so well done you'll forget how entrenched it is in its moment. Bixio, Frizzi and Tempera's score will rattle the lamps off your table but only via such a slow build-up from a gentle refrain (the "Seven Notes" of its alternate title) that you're never shocked, only slowly alarmed.  And the ending is incredibly tense, clever, and torturous without being gory. Truly both Hitchcock and Poe would probably nod to each other from across the balcony at a preview screening, while De Palma would stew in jealousy that someone was able to hit all the buttons he did but without all the fancy tricks and misogynistic violence.

Jennifer O'Neill is excellent in the lead, devoted to the truth of her visions with such single-minded resonance you can see why her character has so ably blended into the fathomless wealth of her hood-eyed husband (Gianni "Sartana" Garko). Even if she never even takes off her coat or sweater, let alone disrobes for some obligatory love scene, her eyes still smolder, perfectly holding a vast amount of black eyeliner with nary a droop or smudge; her Brazilian ex-Cover Girl model skin brilliantly matches the rich autumnal color patterns of her fashions --she's an unusual presence in these kinds of films --a mature knock-out and no push-over. First accusing him, but then working to clear her husband of a five year-old murder after she flashes on where the body is buried, she sets about following her instincts and drives with enough keen resolve we never even notice when they begin to give way to uninhibited horror. An extended cat and mouse chase through a rich old art dealer's mansion and an under-construction nearby gallery museum provides most of the suspense: it goes on so long it's still in effect by the climax and end of the film! Add the dusty, unused mansion that Garko seldom uses but ONeill is thinking about refurbishing (she's neither a mother nor employed, though--as she tells the cops--she's a decorator), and you have a movie that breathes a rarefied, rich air without seeming like a social climbing outsider. Every car is gorgeous and when Garko flies he takes his own private plane and she waves goodbye from the landing strip before driving off in her swanky ass roadster. O'Neill doesn't bat an eye over any of it, yet has no problem grabbing a pick axe and hacking through a spot in the wall her vision tells us hides a body, even while alone in a huge spooky mansion.  Evelyn Stewart plays her sister in-law, a strong-willed, very-cool cigarette-smoking Germanic lady who helps her decode the clues; Gabriele Ferzetti (!) is one of the suspects - but he had a beard in the vision! OMG, he shaved it off! And Marc Porel is her 'para-psychologist' doctor and ex-lover, who records her descriptions of her visions for later use and backs her up on her endless investigations. She may be seeing into the future as well as the past --gulp--which is which?

All in all, it's a big hit, artistically, and O'Neill's facility with mental powers made her ideal to appear in Cronenberg's SCANNERS four years later, once again showing an ability to seem very resilient, assertive and self-confident while at the same time deeply affected by the weird and horrific (2). Even the dubbing is good. And as it builds and builds in intensity the score starts to straddle the line between Ennio and Goblin as if the two were really one and the same all along. The photography is nice and dusky, the frame often encompassing the entirety of a room from above, allowing us to soak up the centuries in the ancient plaster like some crystal energy-sucking ghost. All in all, not to be missed.

FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON

1970 - Dir. Mario Bava
**1/2

Movies like this early Bava effort live and die by the score and Pier Umiliani's sleazy, shrill, unmodulated organ-- like some Fellini movie fell off its tracks and smashed into a roller rink DJ booth-- and bursts of inappropriate Latin jazz makes you wonder what Ennio might have done with a few electric guitars instead. Bava meanwhile is indulging 'lazy zoom shot' mode, so we know we're not in Black Sabbath country anymore. Where we are at is a weekend getaway of the jet-set rich and famous, out at a swanky summer pad on a remote island where all the men are jostling for a mcguffin formula for rubber or something, trying to outbid each other and steal each other's wives (or give theirs away). The blonde young scientist (steel-eyed William Berger) doesn't want to sell, but his wife is hot so maybe that can be a wedge? Adolpho Celli is one of the more boisterous swingers, ever trying to Shark Tank a deal together with one or more of these cagey investors. Helena Ronee, Edith Meloni, and Ely Ganalle are some of the dolls, though the real standout doll is Edwige Fenech, though here she has little to do except look languidly oversexed. As friends and enemies and lovers all sashay around and also die quickly (we never see them murdered, only discover the bodies) it's like Bava is trying for La Dolce Vita via Ten little Indians. As the bodies accumulate in the meat freezer, the swingers all wonder to the extent they should care about their own safety. "We're the first one to have deep-frozen houseboy" notes George (Teodoro Corrà), 'coldly'.

The macabre irony is heavy-handed but Bava's clearly having a ball (or faking it well), oscillating between the leering zoom poetry of Jess Franco, the glittery decadence of Fellini, and the frisson of Antonioni. Wandering camera close-ups and pull-focus deep frames make it all easy to watch --the flow of fabric for lounging Fenech's dresses drape around the rectangular parameters of the proscenium arch as she rotates around on her circular bed, waiting for some husband or other to make a move. Outside, people wander the beach and spy on each other behind the rocks; inside, we follow the path of a bunch of silver balls from a fight up the stairs down into a sunken bathtub adorned with another dead beauty.

So many people die so fast you may wonder what bloody well is the point. Since the house is all modern and stark white there's little opportunity for Bava's deep red and purple gel color schemes, but the lighting is still great if you have the Blu-ray or it happens to be on Amazon Prime in HD; the women are all hot, their dresses are pop art at its finest and there are great lines like: "Death makes you feel dirty." and "Houseboys come and go but there's always the bottle." There sure is...

There's also the cast, led in spots by Edwige Fenech and Ira Von Furstenberg (Diana's ex sister-in-law), and let's check in with Tenebrous Kate:

These jet-setting millionaires may be a generally oily and unlikable lot, but don't think for a minute that this means they're not incredibly well dressed.  The costumes are drool-worthy, from Edwige's scanty white petal bikini to the slim-cut hep-cat trousers favored by the gents of the cast.  Spangles, gauze, colorful lacey undergarments, and pop art fabrics abound.  The house where much of the action goes down is the seaside equivalent of the Frank Lloyd-Wright-esque mansion at the end of "North  by Northwest," with its cliff-side perch and vast expanses of window." (more here)

Amen. The trick --as Kate shows in her observant details--to digging this film is to admire the crazy clothes and pop art detail rather than expecting to be riveted by the narrative. Apparently Bava was hired on at the last minute and was refused permission to deviate from the script. Still, ever the pro, he delivers with some great shot composition, so you have to be paying attention to more than the plot to 'get' its brilliance. It may take a few viewings but it's worth the effort, just barely, now that the HD version lets us see around the corners, and count the luxuriant strands of Fenech's hair.

SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS

1971 - Dir. Aldo Lado
**1/2

An ornate title with an objectifying noun (girls as breakable objects) + a high-ranking international journalist (Jean Sorel as a soft butch version of Franco Nero) sulking through communist Prague thinking his press card allows him to push his luck with the repressive authorities + sinister suspects snapping down shades, or lowering their newspapers slowly to peer malevolently as he passes + a dark secret that's like Kafka via David Icke +  one cute girl vanishes almost immediately = Aldo Lado's dreary film, proving gialli need to take place in the more permissive West or are just depressing. Aside from a great last ten minutes, Dolls puts the drag in draggy. With "the oppression of the [Communist] party," in full effect, reporter Sorel is continually under scrutiny for trying to tell the truth, which is that attractive young people should never look too attractive to the cold, dead-eyed middle-aged elite of an Eastern European country, for no good ever comes of it.

Case in point: Sorel wants to smuggle his lady friend (Barbara Bach) out of Prague into West Berlin. "Don't worry about crossing borders, I've already crossed palms" he assures her, thinking himself very witty. But the palms might have ideas of their own and when he shows her off at a party that night-- Bach looking ravishing in a shimmering cocktail dress, her famous long brown hair a perfect silky band offsetting the silvery grey of her dress--the power brokers at the bash start stirring to life like deeply entombed sleeping vampire catching wind of a far off spelunker's period. She's gone by the end of the night, and didn't bring her passport, leaving Sorel with just her purse and her dress on their couch, so where... what?

It's hard to care when the setting is this oppressive. The key to the giallo is it exists in a post-Antonioni Blow-Up world, where the youth rule the scene and beauty is its own tyranny and anyone who cares to don black gloves and wield a razor can become king for a few moments before he dies hideously. Here there's no chance evil will ever lose; the deck is so stacked against Jean it's hard to root for him. Even Ennio Morricone's score lists along at half-mast, limiting itself to some screeches that sound like an orchestra tuning up before playing a program of Bartok as conducted by Bernard Herrmann having a panic attack. Sure, it's still Ennio and it rocks in its draggy way: I had the soundtrack long before seeing the film and used to love to listen to it on my Discman while walking through Prospect Park at night with my dog; every shadow on the stone bridge walls alive with pareidolic menace, the Bartok-by-Herrmann-ish avant garde jangles frying my nerves in the most giddy and pleasurable of ways.

But dude, where are the stylish clothes? The hot girls? Once Bach is gone, only Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin, as a sex-starved fellow journalist, gets any color, and then only via headscarves that only make her look older than she already was at the time. At the party she comes onto Jean pretty intensely and if you're a Bergman fan it's weird to see this crossover, since she's usually such an icy Nordic powerhouse, aloof and imperious (or if horny, openly vampiric, like her Veronica Vogler in Hour of the Wolf). There's also a zombified blonde hanging out with another of Sorel's journalist buds, played by the great Mario Adorf, a much more acclimated guy who notes: "even chickens in the frying pan are called political suicides here."

Narrating from a slab on the morgue ala Scared to Death, the disjointed recollection format is confusing (continuity is anticommunist), but we get many pieces of a bizarre puzzle. Some scenes seem to be missing and the overall hanging heavy bureaucracy and corruption. It's pretty funny that a supposedly keen journalist would go around trying to solve his girl's murder with his conniving ex-lover who desperately wants him back, a kind of L'Aventura in verso but it's hard watching this chump refuse to notice the giant dripping jaws of the bear closing in on him.

Expertly summarizing the film's distinct old vs. young generational conflict as analogous to Eastern European politics is James from Behind the Couch:

The film also serves as a sly allegory addressing the destructive nature of totalitarian governments, like the one in power in Czechoslovakia at the time. The weird socially elitist members of the cult represent overpowering authoritarian systems in which the higher classes literally suck the life out of younger generations, those less well off and anyone else who opposes them. The older generation is depicted as inherently sinister in this film. The disdain and suspicion of the elderly middle class is exhibited clearly in the scene in which Gregory sneaks into the goldsmiths building and into a room full of elderly people in evening dress listening to a classical concert. They sit motionless and look uncannily like the undead ghouls in Carnival of Souls. 

That sounds creepy all right, but is it any fun? Without the pop art colors, foxy broads in dazzling clothes, and sense of a kinetic capitalist whirligig at work, Morricone's dissonance can only do so much. In Eastern Europe, the murder of free-thinking young people--whether by knives, imprisonment, Satanic cult sacrifice, or just drab industrial Kafkaesque slow soul crushing-- seems almost a mercy.

CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS

1971 - Dir. Giuliano Carnimeo
***

When it comes to soundtracks, Bruno Nicolai is no Ennio Morricone, but he conducted and collaborated on many of Morricone's giallo scores, so sometimes his score of jazzy musak for Bloody Iris veers out of the usual spy film schmaltz and into the breathy sing-song creepy stuff from the earlier Argento films like Bird with Crystal Plumage. Bruno could never imagine these movies ever getting on TV and video was a decade away, so he can be forgiven for thinking we'd forgotten the eerie melody. Compensating for any inequity is the always provocative Edwige Fenech, here as--what else?--a neurotic under-sexed housewife escaping a bad group marriage ("one flower, one body, with many petals") by moving into a Satanic high rise. Her neighbors are models already in the midst of being knocked-off before she gets there, as we learn from some creepy old violinists dishing exposition in the foyer. Everyone's a suspect, including Fenech... or is it all her imagination? My money is on the burn victim recluse, the old lady who won't "give them alcohol" or the hot lesbian offspring of one of the taciturn old eccentrics. The killer is the official giallo type: androgynous in black stocking mask, raincoat, fedora and gloves. In this instance, alas, the gloves are a sickly looking yellow rubber variety. A real turn-off!

I'm not giving anything away by mentioning the main culprit is Fenech's mysterioso architect boyfriend (the ubiquitous tall dark and effeminately handsome George Hilton) but he goes all fugue state panic at the sight of blood--or wait, is it her jealous ex-husband (Ben Carra), the same man who drew her into the Wildflower Group sex club in the first place ("you're an object and you belong to me!")? An hour after watching this film you won't be able to remember a thing about it, but is that really so bad? Some great scenes of urban alienation, like a stabbing out in public that takes forever for anyone to notice as they hustle past to and fro, bespeak some lofty underpinning to the 'you never know who your neighbors are anymore' modernist eeriness. Even the lesbian neighbor (Annabella Incontrera) responds to Sheila's freak out that a neighbor's burn victim son just tried to rape her by admiring her body and saying "you'd tempt anyone" rather than offering sympathy or help calling the cops. A black dancer challenges her nightclub audience of leering men to a judo fight, vowing to be their sex slave if they should subdue her inside of three minutes --the kind of stuff an American director would hopefully never dare put in a film ("your color is already starting to corrupt me" notes the club's pervy owner). A ditzy roommate Marilyn (Paola Quattrini) feigns drowning in the tub for a joke, the day after a girl is killed in it (she gets the best line though "No orgies: I get motion sickness!"). Then there's the mom of the burn victim: "my son never harmed anyone before; he understands what whores you are!" Even Hilton warns her "wait until I try to make it with you and you'll find out what a bastard I am." At least he's honest. But the most offensive bit is the cop's derogatory put-downs of the lesbian neighbor ("try the opposite sex; that's what we're here for!")

As with all early 70s genre cinema set in old or new apartment buildings,  Carnimeo sets the tension in elevators, sub-basements, and auto junkyards, and the power keeps going out. Could this film have been seen by Brian De Palma? What's that? You don't care? You can't leave me, Jennifer! You're bound to us, do you hear? Bound... body and soul!

Yes, cliche'd dubbing abounds but some parts are pretty kinky-creepy and Fenech looks great as always. Her tortured puritanical soul battling her corruptive, voluptuous sprawl of a body in a one-woman wrestling match, she's latent Catholicism's whole trip wrapped up in a languorous cross-bed stretch. And her makeup - alabaster cheeks and perfect delineated black eyelashes over big wide eyes (like limpid pools - gorgeously lit), and clothes--especially a long black cape, and a blue, white and red mini dress that evokes nurses and sailors---are perfect.

NOTES:
2. If you want to read a disturbingly-TMI mini-biography check it out on Imdb.  

For Sizzle: AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE (2010)

 

I considered myself a sleaze merchant know-it-all prior to entering AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE, but still had to see it if only for my idol, Kim Morgan's presence (below) as a talking head. Turns out it's pretty cool and I learned new stuff. In addition to the "sinsational" Ms. Morgan there's: "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller, John "In-Joke" Landis, drive-in guru Jack Hill, and Joe PIRHANA-Dante, not to mention people I was sure I'd be annoyed by but turned out to love, like Herschell Gordon Lewis, of whom Landis says, "I don't particularly like his films, but I love his posters!" Hey, that's a compliment in exploitation land, and you can tell Landis means every word of it. Despite the crushing despair I experienced covering the SW double feature of Lewis' JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT/BLAST-OFF GIRLS (for the now defunct DVD Angle), I must admit Lewis seems like a helluva nice, smart, relaxed guy - and even a squeamish feminist like myself has to doff his hat to the man who made 2,000 MANIACS - in the words of Michael Weldon: "YEE-HAW!".

Producer/director/editor Elijah Drenner keeps it all humming along at a nice clip through the decades, starting around the dawn of cinema and ending with recent tributes like Tarantino and Rodriguez's GRINDHOUSE. There's elements I would have put in (the rise of the VCR and subsequent Disneyfication of Times Square) and others I would have left out (THE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT, though it does make a great metaphor for America's geopolitic) but you'll never squeeze the whole history into a single film, and Drenner keeps it all from being too flashy or too slow, too normal or too head-spinningly weird --and does not spare the adult content: bare breasts, sexual assault and horrific gore are all here, with many of the most disturbing clips from the most disturbing films: ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS and the works of HG Lewis (pictured below), such as BLOOD FEAST, for example. And the clips all look really, really good. It's very strange that this stuff was once so shocking you could only see it as a legal adult in a sleazy theater at the stroke of midnight, and now it's nostalgia, and yet - the times are if anything more conservative and morally regressive than ever. I've even argued the two are linked - we're conservative because we're jaded.

HGL and some of his 2,000 Maniacs

The best praise I could give for something like this is that it reminded me of when I was a kid in the 70s and actually scared of the TV commercials and newspaper ads for a lot of these movies. I could also see a portion of a drive-in screen, far in the distance, from my bedroom window, if I used my kid telescope - I watched pieces of THE MANITOU that way! At least I think it was. I still haven't seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (from fear of post-trauma more than anything else) but if I could be assured the actual DVD transfers of these films looked as good as they cleaned-up clips here, I'd be all over it. Plus, Drenner leavens unease by showing lots of outtakes: LAST HOUSE seems less foreboding now that I've seen David Hess shooting the breeze with his onscreen victims between shots.

It must have been a difficult choice to leave out the European imports that had a huge effect on grindhouse distribution patterns (I asked Drenner about that: "We had to make a clear line down the middle and decide what to cover and what to leave out.") On the other hand, who needs a complete picture? That's what Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Cinema Guide The Psychotronic Video Guide To Film is for! What we have here in AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE is a nice little summary of 100% American output, a carny's insider view of Yankee hooplah and pitchman ballyhoo, with art and culture pushed way to the side until it's off the table -- and lands with a lowbrow splat.

There's stuff here I didn't know about, which shocked me. I had no idea the film THE CORPSE GRINDERS was a huge hit for Ted V. Mikels. The grinding of corpses carries no appeal for me, personally, but I always kind of subconsciously associated it with the term grindhouse (or the shredding of old film in a cheap projector, grinding the sprockets). When I learned the name's taken from "Bump and grind" as a mark of when the country's once plentiful burlesque houses were turned into theaters to show films of girls stripping (cheaper that way), you coulda knocked me over with a feather from a rhinestone pastie. Imagine if it was called 'bumphouse' instead? Why just grind, man? 

The whole stripper genre was a bit of a blind spot in my sleaze-education prior to this film but apparently there were an awful (in both senses) lot of them. Ed Wood fans still recovering from trying to stay awake through ORGY OF THE DEAD might be glad to know it's not anyone's fault that they failed. LSD fans who tried and failed to watch more than ten minutes of MANTIS IN LACE can also relax for the same reason. Apparently there was a time when looooong dull stationary camera striptease scenes (as with burlesque queen, Blaze Starr, atop with drum) were considered the height of decadence. Fascinating, yet tame and tedious in our age of readily ubiquitous nudity and XXX-rated websites.
 

I've got minor quibbles with AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE as a whole, of course: we'd be so much better off with more of the witty Kim Morgan, though when she's put on the spot for saying women like to see other women naked ("They do!" she exclaims in reaction to Drenner's apparent offscreen incredulity) it seems a bit of a weird inclusion; if you're going to leave it in the film, don't doubt the woman! She's trying to help Travis Bickle get Cybil Shepherd to go with him to see SOMETIMES SWEET SUSAN (see way below).  I always thought Travis was being rather passive aggressive, the pressure to be charming and get Cybil into bed leading him to this massive act of self-sabotage. But Kim says different. I believe her.

On that note, no review of a movie on a topic like this would be complete without the word misogyny, so there it is. Surprisingly, the most feminist-friendly guy on the show seems to be HG Lewis! There's ample time devoted to his feminist-fave, SHE-DEVILS ON WHEELS, but where's Russ Meyer's FASTER PUSSYCAT, Abel Ferrara's MS. 45, that Hemingway sister joint, LIPSTICK, and the whole rape-revenge cycle? For that matter, where's the Satanic possession and the EXORCIST / ROSEMARY'S BABY knockoffs? Where's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE? ERASERHEAD? Bette Davis' BABY JANE microgenre, and 70s telekinesis? BLACULA? And ballyhoo meister David Friedman's classic quote about how his movies were "all sizzle and no steak," and pornography gave people the steak, so the sizzle was out, and that's how grindhouse essentially died and became pornography?

Not to kvetch of course, just to flaunt my own expansive knowledge and hide my terror. Because not only am I afraid to see LAST HOUSE, I'm afraid to see PASSION OF THE CHRIST (above), which Landis astutely points out is "the last real grindhouse film!"

Speaking of passion, I've got a soft spot for New York accents, so I got a real kick out of sleaze director Don Edmonds alternately justifying, apologizing for, and boasting of, the excesses of his ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS, a film I rented back in 1990 in Seattle (from Scarecrow Video!) and which made me see red, literally, when I closed my eyes during sex for the next three years!  But one must admire the relative care that went into ILSA, vs., say, most other Nazisploitation (called "Nazi Exploitation" here, for some reason) with their use of Lewis' patented nail-the-camera-to-the floor, yell-action-and-sneak-off-for-a-nap style framing. But what about the other period sleaze auteurs that aren't mentioned (unless they were mentioned whilst I was in the bathroom, or mixing drinks, or smoking crack, or rolling johns in the men's room), shouldn't there be a sequel? Eurosleazeonomicon, or something cool like that?

AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE never reaches much of a conclusion beyond confirming that Americans will always make films with both eyes on the ticket window and just a toe brushing up against the edge of art, and thus our baser instincts will always be catered to. It's a comforting but disturbing thought about the value of prurience and the way always getting exactly what you want to see can make you a perverse mess just like the anti-porn crusaders have always harangued it would. But at a brisk under-90 minute running time (it would be a perfect part of any exploitation double feature), AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE moves fast enough there's nary a dull moment. For casual fans you can really get an idea of what avenues you may want to explore. Just be prepared to be shocked, amazed, and... most of all, flabbergasted! Grind yourself deep into your seat as you enjoy a splice-ridden slice of film history, one bedecked with sound, fury, and sizzle. In the words of Pam Grier in COFFY (below) when her cop boyfriend tells her she can't just go around just killing everyone: "Why not?"