Tag Archives: Culture

Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary Spanish Cinema

#114 – Baroness Lesbos

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(1978, Fr/Sp, 99 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Ewa Rohm, Adrianna Belle, Hans, Peter Allison.

Originally titled The Mother of All Sin this is the one film of Dominique’s she seems incapable of standing behind, despite what even she admits are some moments of beauty studded throughout. “It was taken away from me by the bastard producers,” she told me at a 2010 retrospective in Berlin, “They cut it and take out what they don’t like. They film more things and put them in too. Even they take it’s name. I find it hard to look at still, you know?” As you might expect what was taken out was atmosphere and what was added was sex, but that’s not what upset Dominique: “The actors – Adrianna and Hans and Peter – they all work with me before so they refuse to not work with me. All they have then is Ewa, who I never wanted anyway.” That’s not all they had – they also had another woman in a blonde wig pretending to be Adrianna Belle but who looks so unlike her it completely sinks the back half of the film which is a shame as the first half is as strong as anything she has made with fantastic use made of the sunsets along the Spanish coast. Dominique would be back on solid ground three years later with the crown jewel of the sexploitation half of her career – the beautiful and romantic Falling Blossom.

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Art Film, Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#113 – Bête érotique avec quatre jambes, La (Four Legged Sex Beast)

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(1974, Fr, 88 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Beau Modeste, Jean Fillet, Peter Allison.

A midway film from Dominique, straddling her earlier art house efforts and her later sexploitation work, the amusingly titled Four Legged Sex Beast concerns the porcelain Modeste as the powdered and perfumed Lady Pea who is being transported to the home of the man that she is being married off to by her father when one of the carriage wheels breaks on the rutted country road, stranding them in the dark woods. As night falls first the coach driver is taken screaming into the night and then her father too. It’s only a matter of time before whatever it is that’s out there returns for Pea. Of course the beast wants something more than meat from her too – the last twenty minutes of the film form the notorious extended sex scene that saw the film quietly banned in a lot of places. But what is the nature of the beast? Is it a real life Sasquatch type or is it the physical manifestation of Pea’s suppressed sexuality? Who knows! The only film starring the beautiful Modeste, filmed as she rested on the cusp of fame after the one-two hits Je Suis un Tracteur and Petit Chat de Fourrure stormed the French charts and before the suspicious snorkelling accident that took her life. Her performance is limited to be sure but the camera just can’t take it’s eye off her.

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Drama, Imaginary British Cinema

#112 – Happy New Year, Detrasta Melovian

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(1973, GB, 86 min) Dir Adrian Fisher. Cast Eddie Mitchell, Sandra Gladstone, Tony Cousins.

The tale of young Alan Henry, who passes his time over the Christmas holidays in his boring seaside hometown of Yorrip by inventing saints, complete with illustrations of them being martyred. New Year’s Day he decides is the holy day of Saint Detrasta Melovian who was killed for not renouncing her faith in 1386 by having the top of her head sawn off in Bulgaria. Soon enough he finds himself accompanied by the forcibly trepanned imaginary saint on his walks along the beach where he goes to escape his quarrelling parents. This was Fisher’s first feature film after a tumultuous time with the BBC and the freedom of the big screen is palpable. It’s final image, of Alan back at school looking out of his classroom window at his Detrasta Melovian flying in slow circles over the building with Hovum’s Felestra swelling on the soundtrack, is surely one of the most ecstatic religious images produced in all of British cinema. A gentle and quietly confident debut from a director who would go on to prove himself an understated and underappreciated talent.

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Giallo, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema

#110 – Three Deaths for the Magi

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(1973, It, 93 min original (61 min surviving)) Dir Andrea Tontorre. Cast Marco Bostoni, Angella Min, Franco Francini.

Super rare festive knife-fest from shooting star Andrea Tontorre, the Jean Vigo of the giallo with a mere two films to his name before he died, run over by his own car on the outskirts of Rome when he opened the driver’s door to be sick and fell out. Unlike Vigo his innovations went unheralded by the film mainstream and his features remain out of print – I’ve only seen Three Deaths for the Magi by virtue of attending a private party thrown by octogenarian über-producer Hans Belli, appropriately enough in the catacombs under Paris. The print was old and scratched and the loss of two of its six reels left more gaps in logic than is usual, even in giallo, but despite this Belli’s old eyes were brimming with tears by its end, so moved was he by the sight of so much youthful vigour lost. The basic plot is your basic giallo meat and potatoes – Marco Bostoni witnesses a murder and finds himself of the killers hit list. There are only three days until Christmas and killer’s M.O.? You guessed it – leaving gold, frankincense and myrrh at the crime scenes. Can Marco work out the connection and find the killer? The set prices that remain still stun, bursting with a colour and verve that should be equally credited to Tontorre, similarly doomed cinematographer M. Bris (seafood accident, 1977) and soundtrack artists Imp. Hopefully one day Tontorre’s slim oeuvre makes it out of an old man’s catacomb party and into the world at large…

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Documentary, Imaginary US Cinema

#109 – Alan Messing, Side Two

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(1967, US, 100 min) Dir D.A. Pennebaker. Cast Alan Messing, Tyrone Faith, James ‘Jimmy’ Josephth.

Documentary following one hit country wonder Alan Messing as he records his follow up to Two Roads to Reno, the LSD soaked epic of tunelessness Ecstasy and Enlightenment. Word is that Messing got Pennebaker himself after Don’t Look Back by phoning the man and declaring: “Well you’ve done Dylan and the Kennedy brothers, why not work with a legend for a change?” Certainly from the evidence on display here this doesn’t seem unlikely as Messing isn’t short of ego, bullying all and sundry with his outlandish demands and constantly referring to himself as ‘The Talent’ (and yes, you can hear the capitalisation there when he says it). A fascinating if toe curling record of total hubris which works especially well with it’s follow up, The Ecstasy and Enlightenment of Alan Messing, which was shot thirty years later with an apparently unrepentant Messing, who has been cosmetic surgeried to an unrecognisable degree.

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Art Film, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema

#108 – Death in the West

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(2005, US/GB/Fr, 95min) Dir Larry Clarke, Matthew Barney, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Julian Schnabel Gaspar Noe. Cast Pascal Biscuit, the Baltimore Opera Group, Eddie Izzard, Monica Bellucci, Johnny Depp,  Alain de Monet.

Portmanteau on the theme ‘the decline of Western civilisation’ and like portmanteau since time immemorial the quality is variable in the extreme. Clarke interviews (surprise surprise) attractive young girls and boys about their lives and the future and gains occasional insight and more regular inadvertent humour. Barney organises a marching band that tips a crowd of horned opera singers into a pit with twelve foot pikes, the enjoyment of which will depend on one’s tolerance for Barney’s aesthetic. Julian Schnabel follows Johnny Depp on a Mexican trash heap and that’s about all that happens there. Some are interesting but all fail in their remit with none have anything particularly insightful to say our world as it is now, where it’s going or why, sacrificing the opportunity to engage in content for cheap shocks. Noe, who swings his camera around a gang of violent skinheads as they look for and find Jewish victims in the Paris night before going home for a gay orgy, scores copious points for his technical skill even if these points are immediately taken back for philosophical simplicity.

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Documentary, Imaginary British Cinema

#107 – Engineer Species

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(2006, GB, 88 min) Dir Alice Werkherser. Cast Anthony Beckett.

“If the world had’ve paid attention to us forty, fifty years ago then we wouldn’t be in the fix we are now,” is the opinion of the infamous Anthony Beckett. Once the head of the Anti-Life Brigade prior to its disbanding in 1975 he is recorded here, at the age of 82, as the head of a newer incarnation of the same idea in PopCon, the Population Control lobbying group. “Pollution, global warming, habitat loss, the massive extinctions we’re witnessing, food shortages, greater war and resource scarcity,” runs his argument, “The one thing that’s causing all of this is us, the engineer species of every Earth environment, and the only way that we could stop it is to reduce the stress we’re placing on those environments. That means at the least some form of population control and, at the extreme end, the liquidation of some of the population. It seems foolish to try and face down the world’s problems without acknowledging this.” The centrepiece of the film is his attendance at the World Population Forum where you get a chance to appreciate how much vitriol he and those of like mind are subject to, both from those who oppose his philosophy and those, like the scary Death for Life organisation, who don’t think he goes far enough. A dark and serious film about a man with very deep convictions that is leavened only by clips of Beckett’s own contribution to film, 1974’s unintentionally hilarious Is Your Life Worth Living?

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Art Film, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary Senegalese Cinema

#106 – Coeur, Le (Heart, The)

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(1975, Sen/Fr, 136 min) Dir Mohammad Bamba. Cast Ousmane Faye, Ismaila Faye, Jimi Faye.

The kind of bizarre, hallucinatory travelogue through African history that one would expect from Mohammad Bamba. From the distant horizon on an unnamed plain come three tribesmen, a grandfather, father and son (played by real life grandfather, father and son Ousamane, Ismalia and Jimi) telling each other stories, whether of myth and legend or of their tribe and their life. As they travel they meet people from every era of African history – including Arab traders, the retinue from a mediaeval kingdom, a broken-down jeep of WW2 soldiers, Victorian prospectors and modern-day revolutionaries – but seem unfazed by this, even when they meet an elephant which claims to be a hunter trapped in that form or a star that has fallen to earth. The film ends as it began, the camera watching the three figures dissolve back into the horizon. An eerie trip which treats its fantasy with a straight face, its closest cinematic relative perhaps being the holy pilgrims of Bunuel’s The Milky Way. The blank landscape feels like a void and there is no music throughout save the sounds of the wind and the grass.

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Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema

#104 – Night of One Thousand Bastards, The

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(2011, HK, 100 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Nicolas Cage, Regina Ho, Mo Yun-Fang.

I know he’s had a long and a varied career but still, it’s hard to reconcile the disreputable Jackie Woo of old with the disreputable Jackie Woo who is now deemed worthy of invitation to Cannes but I guess that says a lot about the post-Grindhouse world we live in. His inaugural fest film was Bloody Dolls, an uncharacteristic convent-set revenge flick that spent the guts of it’s runtime following the actresses gazing wistfully out over the mist-shrouded countryside and not, you know, disembowelling someone. He was back to his old form with this, his third film of 2011, and not only that but he snagged Nicolas Cage too! Okay, late-period low-budget in-hock-to-the-tax man Cage but still, it’s something. So Cage is a US government hitman in mainland China, there to kill a party functionary (Yun-Fang, looking tired) holidaying in some backwater town when the titular bastards arrive – a horde of freshly dead zombies hungry for blood. The tables now turned, Cage and Yun-Fang must team up to survive. The luminous Regina Ho plays Yun-Fang’s daughter and Cage’s inappropriately young love interest who spends the whole film under a table screaming. Don’t let the chorus of boos that trailed the film from Cannes fool you – this is a fun bit of trash that doesn’t attain Woo’s manic heights of the past but will keep you going the four months until he makes another.

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Horror, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#103 – Dark Watch, The

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(1996, GB/Ire, 105 min) Dir Fintan O’Driscoll. Cast Bob Hoskins, Stephen Rea, Bronagh Gallagher.

Belfast, 1974. Joe Wilson is the head of the Dark Watch in Northern Ireland – a secret regiment deployed into warzones on behalf of the British army to spread superstitious fear. He’s an older man now, a veteran of service against the Mau Mau in Nigeria and various unspecified deployments in South East Asia. Now he’s using the popularity and the scandal of the recent films like The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and so on to leave evidence of black magic and witchcraft in the bombed out buildings of Belfast and Derry, to instil fear into the population and make them think twice about going out at night. Unfortunately for him this means that Wilson himself is out at night with three decades worth of ghosts in his head. Is this why he’s seeing the devil in the shadows of burned out buildings? Is that why he hears the sound of hooves following him down the empty streets? A fantastically atmospheric chiller with a cracking performance from Hoskins that has the advantage of being filmed on the streets of a Belfast still divided by conflict and marked out O’Driscoll, following the also excellent The Peat Cutters, as a director worth watching. While dismissed by many a critic at the time for the absurdness of it’s premise it has been found, in recent years, to have had a greater basis in fact that might have been supposed.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms