Good Shit - Incredibly Strange Films
Good Shit - Incredibly Strange Films
What it is, see, is that every year there's a festival in Auckland (and later in Wellington). Thesedays it calls itself the Incredible Film Festival (trying to be a but more up-market), but it used to be the Incredibly Strange Film Festival, (ISFF) - a far more appropriate title. Collected here is a journal of all the films I've seen at various year's fests in recent years, taken from addict.net and my own site. Enjoy...
Wet Hot American Summer - Not porn (see The Beast). Actually, a bloody funny comedy, taking the piss out of every 80s Summer Camp film ever made. It stars Janeane Garofolo, David Hyde-Pierce, Paul Rudd, and Johnny Bluejeans from Viva Variety, and manages to include every single summer camp cliche ever. Ever. You've got the nerdy guy in love with the hot chick who's going out with an arsehole who cheats on her with a slutty chick; the virgin who's desperate to get laid; a camp baseball team; a camp talent show where the weird kid gets to shine; even a Friday the 13th spoof of sorts.
Highlights: the trip into town that ends in a heroin binge, D&D geek saving the day with his D20, the Cure girl, and the guy from SVU humping a fridge.
Tattoo - billed as a German version of Seven from the director of Anatomie, this pretty much lived up to the comparison and pedigree. Starting with a naked woman stumbling down a city street at night with half her back missing, then getting hit by a bus, the film then changed from shocks to subdued menace, as we get introduced to the seedy world of black market tattoo trading. And then there were a few more shocks, too. An amazingly filmed movie - the director seems to have a thing for reflective surfaces, and some of the shots are just gorgeous.
The ending borrows perhaps a bit too heavily from Seven -- bodies in boxes, last-minute revelations of who the bad guy really is, but bugger me it was worth seeing. Actually, it was worth it just for the shot of a teenage skinhead getting "hasse" tattooed on his bicep.
Suicide Club - Japanese madness (the best kind of madness). Starts with fifty schoolgirls linking hands and jumping in front of a subway train and pretty much goes from there. For no really good reason, people start killing themselves all over town (at one point we get a charming montage of people killing themselves on the street, at home, in groups, as the finale of a standup comedy act, which includes the most wince-inducing "person cutting up vegetables and going a bit too far" scene ever). The police try to investigate, they get mysterious tip-off phonecalls, someone spots a website where the deaths are counted up before they happen... it's all just a bit weird and fruity, and, well, Japanese.
The film was only really hampered by the fact that at the end you still have no fucking idea what the hell was going on, or who was behind it all. (Was it the spooky children and their pal, the gimp with the wood plane? Was it the insidious teen pop group? Was it the Eddie Izzard-looking glam-rocker?) Small price to pay for getting to see dozens of teenagers kill themselves, I guess.
Battle Royale - Possibly some sort of rumination on the gender gap and lack of understanding between adults and teenagers or some shit - this is basically just an excuse to have schoolgirls with submachineguns shooting each other full of holes. And a brilliant vehicle for the understated charms of Beat Takeshi.
The plot is that at some point in the near future, Japanese students have become such an unruly bunch of little shits that the government passes a law allowing the authorities to round them up and kill them. Sort of. What happens is that a class gets nominated to go on Battle Royale -- they're drugged and taken to an abandoned island, where they're given weapons and told that only the last one alive gets to leave the island. All of this is then monitored via their explodey neck collars and broadcast all over the country for people's amusement.
A lot of the film is made up of various set-pieces along the lines of "could you kill your best friend?" or "could you kill the girl you have a crush on?" and so on, but it does follow a few characters in more detail, including the young couple who are the nominal heroes of the piece, the two mysterious "exchange students" who were added to the show, and Evil Popular Chick With a Scythe (my personal fave).
I had a bit of trouble deciding whether I was supposed to be taking it as a black comedy, or an actual drama, but eventually decided on comedy, if only because of the characters' habit of dropping dead only when it was dramatic for them to do so (as opposed to directly after they've been riddled with bullets). Best bits: the Battle Royale training video, delivered by super-perky Japanese chick; Beat Takeshi's final phonecall...
The Beast - Porn. No really, just pretentious Euro-porn. And a bit of horse porn. Well alright, there's more than just porn; this seems to be some sort of morality play on the beast inside all of us, filthy lusting animals that we are -- I scrub and scrub but the dirt won't come off! IT WON'T COME OFF!! Anyway.
The plot sees a young lass and her aunt driving out to a mansion in the French countryside so she can marry the man of the manor, with whom she has been corresponding. We soon learn about the stories that an evil beast prowls the forest every year around this time, and hints that at some point in the distant past, the then lady of the manor had some sort of dallyance with the hairy brute. Young lass proceeds to go upstairs for a nap and starts having masturbatory fantasies about said dallyance. For quite some time.
It all ends up as a Benny Hill episode, with naked women running around the mansion, and even a proper "oh - hello Vicar" moment (well, Cardinal -- close enough). The closing moral is that we must work to control our beastly instincts. Oh, and women are all whores.
Chances are you'll have a hard time finding this one if you want to see it, but don't worry -- most of the good bits are here.
Wisconsin Death Trip - Hard to describe. This is a historical documentary that relates a number of weird events that occurred in and around a small Wisconsin town a hundred-odd years ago. It's all in black and white (apart from the few bits showing you the present day town), and features reconstructions of the events as narrated from newspaper articles of the time. Witness murders and suicides, interrments and incarceration, bad times and worse times, and the destructive rampages of Mary Sweeny, the coked-up Wisconsin Window Smasher.
From this distance (both spatial and temporal), it's all a bit of a laugh, although if you stop and think about it for a bit, it really is a bit spooky to contemplate what life would have been like for the poor saps whose lives (or more commonly, deaths) are summed up in a few minutes worth of voiceover. Weird.
Story of Ricki - I don't often get to use the phrase "graphic and imaginative violence" and mean it, but this film features a fuckload of graphic and imaginative violence. A live action manga of sorts, it's the story of a tough young man, trained in deadly martial arts techniques, who gets sent to a privatised prison and has to deal with the gangs and corruption inside. By punching holes in them, snapping their limbs off and grinding them into mincemeat.
The violence in this film is a sight to behold. Witness Ricki punch guys so hard their eyes pop out! Watch as his enemies stuff his mouth full of razorblades, tape it shut, and then slap him around until the blades are all sticking out through his cheeks! See Ricki not be noticeably perturbed at the ridiculous amount of damage he sustains!
This film has been in the festival a couple of times before. I missed it the first time around, but when it was shown a couple of years later as a replacement for one they had to drop, I rushed along. Only problem was no-one I knew could make it at that time, and the rest of the audience didn't really get it - more "what the crap?!" than "hee hee - punched his head right off!" This time though, everyone got it. We giggled at Ricki's habit of producing bulky items (e.g. toy trains, flutes) out of his conspicuously not-lumpy-a-second-ago shirt. We guffawed at the ultra-violence. The phrase "best movie ever" was used more than once by more than one person. No-one could understand why the warden keeps mints in his glass eye, though.
Ah well. For a better taste of what this film is like, go read a more detailed review at badmovies.org.
Dark Side of the Rainbow - You've heard the story, right? How if you play Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz with the sound down, the former acts as a scarily appropriate soundtrack for the latter. There's a number of sites devoted to it, like this one. Well, this year they put it to the test, and I went along to see what the fuss was about.
It blew my tiny little mind.
Well, not really - no drugs, you see. Still, there are a couple of quite freaky coincidences (or ARE they?) - the music changes exactly as scenes change, and usually seems to suit the mood of what's happening in the film. People have been picky to the point of grasping at straws over the various supposed synchronicities between the lyrics and what's happening in the film, but most of them are pretty tenuous (except for right at the end, where Dorothy clicks her heels and returns to Kansas just as the lyrics get to "Home, home again" - freaky deaky).
Things I learnt from this: Dark Side of the Moon is a scary album. The Wizard of Oz is a fucking scary movie when you turn the sound off. The two together make for an interesting experience, if nothing else. On acid, I firmly expect one's head would explode.
Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation - A good line in strange, perverse and bloody funny short cartoons. Not as good as last year's selections, I felt, but good all the same. The best thing about this year's was Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected, which, unfortunately was also the best thing about last year's collection, too (OK, maybe on a par with Monkey vs. Robot). For those of you who haven't downloaded it already (from, for example Instant Cool), they also show Ah L'Amour this year. No Billy's Balloon, Genre or Lily and Jim, though.
Continuing the theme of "would have been the best bit if I hadn't seen it before", you've got the video by Spumco of Tenacious D's song "Fuck Her Gently". Where Spumco is notable for being the animation company of Ren & Stimpy creator John K, Tenacious D are a musical comedy duo consisting of Jack Black (Shallow Hal, High Fidelity) and some other guy. You can download Fuck Her Gently as a Flash animation, if you want.
The good side to there being things in this year's Spike & Mike's that I'd already seen is that it boosted my feelings of becoming a more eclectic, experienced and interesting individual. Or possibly just an obscure cartoon wanker.
Rated X - Remember how I said the most common reason why people do things is because they can? Well the second most common reason people do things is because that's what they/everyone has always done. Case in point: this film, a documentary on the San Fernando Valley porn industry, features lengthy theorising on the ubiquity of the money shot in modern porn films. It's a male fantasy, it's a male revenge fantasy, it shows the man as all-powerful, etc etc. My theory is that the reason all sex scenes in pornos end with the money shot is that all sex scenes in pornos end with the money shot. I assume it started because people wanted sex scenes to end with obvious proof of an orgasm, and it's a hell of a lot easier to show a male one than a female one. And from then on it became the done thing - tradition, if you will.
But enough pontificating - this is an independent film about people who make films about people fucking. And like all such films (Sex: The Annabel Chong Story before it, Wadd: The John Holmes Story before that), it's a fascinating look at an industry populated by a variety of people, ranging from perfectly nice to scum of the Earth; from relatively well-adjusted to obviously damaged, but all disturbingly normal you sit down and talk to them.
Bits of it are hilarious (the director gets roped into filming a porno himself), bits of it are worrying (abuse statistics, blatant racism, HIV denial) and bits of it are sickening (dodgy, dodgy casting agents), but it's still one I wouldn't want to have missed.
Happiness of the Katakuris - Fucked-up strange the way only the Japanese can do it. A black comedy musical, this film tells the story of a family setting up a guesthouse in the idyllic Japanese countryside, only to have their first few customers dying in circumstances of varying degrees of dubiosity. (Real word? You be the judge). In order to avoid bad publicity, they bury the bodies and try to get on with things, but a roving conman, a murderer on the run, and finally geological upheavals conspire against them.
And then there's the dance numbers. Surreal in their placement throughout the film if nothing else, they're what really gives the film its fucked-up feel (that, and the clay animation). Finding the body of a suicidal guest prompts a brief interpretive jazz routine (or something), and the "relocating bodies when it turns out the land they're buried on is going to be dug up" scene comes with a nice bit of song and dance on the part of both the family and the recently disinterred corpses. Stirling.
That does say "clay animation" above there, by the way - the opening titles are set to a particularly strange animation (which has almost no bearing on the rest of the film), and a couple of the harder-to-shoot-in-real-life scenes are replaced with claymation sequences. Just because.
All in all, a delightfully warped experience, even if it drags a bit towards the end.
Vampire Hunter D - A movie that lives up to its hype - this is indeed the best horror sci-fi western vampire anime film I've ever seen. Not overly burdened with character development and existential musing (as are some of its ilk), this is a fast paced, imaginative and ludicrously pretty romp about a half-vampire bounty hunter chasing across a post-apocalyptic Earth after a vampire who's kidnapped the favourite daughter of a small town (or HAS he? Etc). Great action scenes, amazing animation, and the voice of Mike McShane of Who's Line is it Anyway / that Robin Hood flick with Kevin Costner fame make it a must see for the anime aficionado.
A little bit low on penis imagery and rape innuendo to make a truly authentic manga experience, but you can't have everything.
Joint Security Area - A political thriller from Korea, first up. This film centres on the border between North and South (almost literally), and concerns an incident where a soldier crossed/was kidnapped from North to South and killed while escaping from/assassinated some soldiers on The Other Side. It's the job of a Swiss/Korean inspector from the Neutral Nations Security Commission to find out what really went on.
Let's get one thing straight: this was a bloody good film, with a very anti-war "everyone's the same as everyone else" message in the end. But that's not very funny, so instead I'll tell you about my cousin Jamie. Jamie's teaching English in Korea at the moment, and has visited the set used in this movie to stand in for the real border crossing between North and South Korea. He got one of his mates to tape him running across the border while his friends yelled "don't do it Jamie, you'll never make it!!" etc. That wacky bastard. He got drafted into another film as an extra, you know - some sci-fi thriller set in a future where Japan has taken over Korea or something. One to look for in festivals to come, perhaps.
The Experiment - Or, to give it its German title, Das Experiment. Those Germans, eh? This one was based on a book which was based on the famous experiment conducted by Stanford University a few decades ago, where they got a bunch of subjects to be prisoners and another bunch to be guards and sat back to see how they would act when given defined roles. It had to be called off after less than a week, once the guards got too sadistic and started beating up on the prisoners when they thought the scientists running the experiment weren't watching.
The film follows the events of the real experiment fairly closely, but then goes a bit further, having the guards basically take over the experiment, imprison the scientists and generally go psycho. It's told from the perspective of an ex-journalist who plans to sell the story of his participation for some big money (which is apparently what one of the actual subjects did). To make for a more interesting write-up he becomes the troublemaker of the group (there's always one), which only serves to make things worse with the guards. A genuinely tense psychological thriller, with a nice edge-of-the seat ending. If you see it around at a video library, rent it (since last year's Anatomie came out here, I figure this one has a chance, too).
In case you're interested in the original experiment, there's bunch of info to be found on this site. Fascinating reading, if you have some time to spare.
Rather embarrassing, this - turns out the 2001 ISFF ocurred during the gap between me stopping writing at addict.net and starting up this place again. So I have no reviews. Arse. I'll see if I can find an old program, and at least supply a few from memory of the ones I saw...
God of Cookery - I can honestly say I haven't laughed that hard in ages (and people who know me will tell you it takes a fair bit to make me laugh hard. Or at all.) The only actual HK film I've seen in this year's Fest, and it's a comedy, not an action (no Jackie Chan, Jet Li or Chow Yun Fat at all!). It's all about this superstar chef (the "God of Cookery"), played by Stephen Chow (who I'd previously seen in The Sixty Million Dollar Man on Triangle TV - bloody good, that one), who's a bit of an arrogant prick . Anyway, he gets betrayed by his own people and loses his title, forcing him to make his way to the top all over again, culminating in a spectacular display of martial arts cooking. Indeed.
Apart from the basic premise, what makes this film so fucking funny is the special brand of slapstick that only HK comedies can provide - gratuitously violent slapstick! See Stephen Chow whack a flying badguy out of the air with a folding chair and pummel the crap out of him on the ground! See the mysterious 18 Brass Monks repeatedly pound Stephen Chow, then drag him off by his ankles leaving a comically wide trail of blood! See people getting smacked in the face with rubbish bins! And so on!
No really, it's incredibly funny, and typically surreal, largely due to the humorously badly translated subtitles ("Is he a fairy from heaven, or satin from hell?"). And that was it's last showing, so you've all missed your chance. Which makes this more of a gloat than a review - nyah nyah, I saw it and you didn't!
The Eternal Evil of Asia - Seems the Chinese have a thing about the rest of Asia. "Korea and Thailand are full of evil wizards!" and so on, but what the hell, it makes for an interesting enough film.
Plot? Bunch of guys get chased by evil wizard (who has lustful designs on one of the guy's girlfriend) because, it turns out, they met him on a trip to Thailand and accidentally killed his sister (a love potion was involved - it's... complicated). So they get knocked off in imaginative ways one by one, until it's down to the girlfriend to save the last guy. You get the idea.
It wasn't nearly as good as Good of Cookery, though, in part because I wasn't sure if it was meant to be a horror or a black comedy or what. Most of the laughs came from the badly translated subtitles (barely a single grammatically correct English sentence in the whole film), but there were bits that seemed to be intended as comic relief. Such as when the main characters are visited by the ghost of their friend, who jumped off a building and landed on a bunch of fluorescent lights in a shop below. His ghost floats around the room asking them if they want a cup of tea, with bits of glass and neon lights sticking out of him, blinking on and off, while humourous "comic relief" music plays in the background. Wasn't actually that funny in and of itself, though.
And then there's the climactic (in several senses of the word) scene where the wizard sends his spirit out to rape the girlfriend by remote control, meaning we get treated to shots of him standing naked in his apartment, thrusting away at midair while off on the other side of town the girlfriend (whose mime skills need a little work) is going down on an invisible penis. Quite.
There's a decent amount of sex and gratuitous nudity - if you saw Chinese Torture Chamber Story last year, you'll have an idea of the tone of this one (it even includes mid-air copulation from a pair of flying wizards, just like in CTCS). Probably not worth bothering with, which is good, because that was the last showing. Ha.
Spriggan - That's more like it - a good bit of manga (alright, anime - bloody pedants). Comparisons with Akira seem to be the obvious thing - big explosions, psychic kids, and the legendary Katsuhiro Otomo (director of Akira) onboard as "Supervisor" - so let's go: not as consistently pretty (sometimes the animation's a bit patchy - other times it's bloody good, though), a lot more kinetic (Akira has it's explosions and motorbike racing, but in Spriggan's action scenes you get a really strong sense of speed and, well, action), comprehensible plot (come on, what happens at the end of Akira? No, really - what? It's almost as bad as 2001), but, despite the fact that it's about threats to the whole planet whereas Akira only blows up a city it just doesn't feel as "big" - there's something of the epic nature of Akira that's missing.
All in all, one of the better manga films I've seen - nice balance between arse-kicking action scenes and clever plot exposition. Gives an interesting view into the Japanese psyche too - they're still hung up on WWII aren't they? Not surprising really - if I'd had two of my cities vapourised I imagine it'd leave an impression on me, too. This film's full of imagery and references to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the obligatory huge explosions at beginning and end (c.f. Akira), cyborg enemies called Little Boy and Fattman, and (and this is the good bit) the yanks are the bad guys!! Lovely to see the Pentagon portrayed as evil scheming bastards out to exert their influence over the world.
So, yes, recommended - if you like Manga you'll like this. It may not have the majesty of Akira or the intelligence (and prettiness) of Ghost in the Shell, but it's still damn good viewing - especially on a big screen.
Vampyres (AKA Daughters of Dracula) - Lesbian vampires - you can't really go wrong can you? Well, yes as it turns out. This was meant to be the ISFF's apology to all the people who went along to Daughters of Darkness last year expecting nudie-vampire lesbo thrills, only to find that it was all a bit pretentious and wanky, and not nearly as, well, blatantly pornographic as had been hoped. (Apparently - I didn't actually get around to seeing it, truth be told). And yes, naked hijinks did abound in this film, but unfortunately man cannot live by hot lesbian action alone (doesn't stop him trying, though). The plot (such as it is) actually made my head hurt a little. The general consensus as the credits rolled seemed to be "what the fuck?!", and it was only a group mental effort afterwards that allowed us to actually work out what the hell had happened.
See, it starts with two naked women getting shot in bed by some guy for no apparent reason. Fair enough. Then we get into the story properly with the same two women hitching lifts with guys, taking them back to their spoooky mansion and sucking 'em dry (ooer missus, etc). Again, fair enough - we know they're vampires, so a few bullet-wounds aren't going to have had much effect. But no - by the end of the film it turns out that that scene was the end of the film, and the rest of it was a flashback, showing why it happened (I think). So they were killed - pretty crap vampires, aren't they? In fact the only concession to actual vampireness made (apart from all the blood drinking, of course) is one shot where we see the mirror in a room is covered up. Oooh...
Anyway, that bit of confusion could've been avoided by a simple "a few weeks earlier" caption, but some of the other stuff... Like the nosy couple camping outside the mansion, who appear to have some sort of significance (especially when the head vampire chick runs into the woman in the woods and says something about "at last I've found you" and traces a funny symbol on her forehead), but then just get killed by the vampires at the end. What's that about?
To sum up: if you want to laugh at appallingly choreographed sex scenes, bad acting and good old-fashioned 70s misogyny; if you want to see a pair of attractive women getting it on; if you're not even remotely concerned with trivialities like plot coherence, go see it. Otherwise, I'd stick to the killer bunny rabbits.
Island of the Damned - A good, old-fashioned horror film, strongly reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead or The Birds, only with children instead of zombies and birds. Nice couple boat out to small Spanish island, only to find it deserted, except for some surly (and quite frankly ugly) looking children. Where are all the adults? Ooooh... And so on. This is a nice, clever, and for the most part subtle film, meaning that most of the shocks are psychological (i.e. a damn sight more effective than gore). This may have been at least in part a result of budget limitations and ropey makeup technology - the few bits of "gore" are pretty laughable - but I'm not questioning it, it works well.
Seeing this film will make you want to run out and slaughter every kid you see, and if that's not a recommendation I don't know what is. A couple of warnings, though: don't expect a happy ending - it's one of those sorts of films, and for the love of God, don't go and see it if you're a pregnant woman. I mean it, don't. Trust me.
Night of the Lepus - Fucking hilarious. Based on the book "Year of the Angry Rabbit", this movie seeks to answer the question "could bunny rabbits ever be portrayed as even remotely scary?" And the answer is, of course, "no". You have to feel sorry for the makers of this film - they try so, so hard to make the giant killer bunnies scary: filming them in slow-motion; close-ups of the not-even-slightly-murderous expressions in their eyes; shots of rabbits with blood on their faces (well, rabbits who appeared to have had their faces shoved in a pot of red paint); shots of "rabid" bunnies; screeching rabbit screams and "roars"; the ever-present deep thumpata thumpata of giant bunny feet - and none of it works. They're fucking bunnies for Christ's sake. A must see, of course, made even better by the presence of DeForrest Kelly and Rory Calhoun (who, true to form, spends a lot of time standing up and walking around).
Interesting fact: In The Matrix, when they go to see the oracle and meet the little "there is no spoon" boy, this film is playing on the TV in the background. Nice spotting, Siobhan.
WADD - The much-talked-about 1998 documentary on porn legend John Holmes. It looks a little bit low-rent, but it makes for genuinely interesting viewing. The story of John Holmes' life is a total cliché come to life - the good old "guy gets famous, lets it all go to his head, fucks up and loses it all" - and it really happened. There's interviews with various people who worked with him (manager, agent, directors, actors, etc.), the odd actual famous person (Larry Flynt, P.T. Anderson - the guy who directed Boogie Nights), journalists and family members, and it all makes for a comprehensive and compelling look at the life of a guy who got famous simply for having a really big dick. At two hours it drags a bit at times, but it's worth the price of admission just to see the interviews with Misty Dawn, his porn-star second wife, and quite possibly the stupidest person on the face of the planet. We're talking disturbingly, fascinatingly dumb - something you'll remember, I guarantee. That goes for the whole thing, too.
And finally, at midnight:
Sinful Dwarf - an actual "exploitation flick". Nasty old landlady and her dwarf son (her sinful dwarf son) abduct women and keep them naked and drugged up on heroin in their attic, renting them out as prostitutes. So I guess that should be "pimping" - whatever. Enter nice young couple who get a room there, have sex while sinful dwarf spies on them, I'm sure you can imagine the rest - gratuitous sex and full frontal nudity, wackiness ensues, etc etc. What really made the show was the fact that one scene had been removed by the Censors, so it was re-enacted live by the organisers for our benefit. Brilliant. Oh, and the eponymous dwarf - boy was he sinful. I tell ya, I've seen some sinful dwarves in my time (not really), but this guy takes the cake. And the final weirdness - it's a US/Danish co-production, where the dialogue is in English and the subtitles are in... Spanish. ??? I can only assume that the organisers originally picked this one up in Spain. Or Mexico - you know how they love their midgets down there...