Where East is East (1929) was the last of the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaborations, it was the last of Browning’s silent films, and it contained many themes from their previous efforts together.

The heavily scarred, large-feline-monikered Tiger Haynes (Chaney) is an animal trapper who has an uncomfortably playful relationship with his daughter Toya (the bubbly Lupe Velez).   Their relationship alters between games of feline patty cake and overt protection.  Daddy and Toya’s relationship gets thrown its first monkey wrench when Toya acquires a new boyfriend, Bobby (Lloyd Hughes).

Acting like a jealous lover, Tiger refuses to warm up to Bobby, until Bobby assists Tiger in saving Toya from a real tiger. Now Bobby is a real swell and welcome to the pride. While delivering tigers on a cruise to the East, Tiger and Bobby run into Tiger’s ex-wife and Toya’s mother, Mme. de Sylva (Estelle Taylor, the real-life one time wife of Jack Dempsey).  For Bobby, Sylva is the embodiment of oriental fantasy.  She is a true tigress with a jealous, soothsayer-like female servant (hints of a lesbian relationship). Sylva spews her man-baiting poison on the intoxicated Bobby, in order to exact sexual revenge on Tiger and parental revenge on their daughter,Toya. This is a reversal of West of Zanzibar (1928), in which Chaney was the parent exacting parental revenge on a whelp. The incestuous relationship hinted between Tiger and Toya (on Tiger’s part, twice unrequited) is paralleled in Bobby and Sylva.

Sylva enters Toya’s world and repressed, invisible secrets threaten the illusory fabric of Tiger’s world.   Of course, some animals devour their young, and Sylva, one step removed, attempts to incestuously devour Toya.  Unfortunately for Sylva, behind a fragile cage she has a nemesis in a gorilla holding a grudge for secret, past abuses.  It is the savage animal kingdom that will exact revenge.  Chaney, impotently declawed, scowls and threatens Sylva from the sidelines until he unleashes the beast, which will end in paternal sacrifice for the daughter he cannot possess (shades of West again).

Where East is East hands the film to Taylor, who, reportedly, managed her off-screen relations with men in a fashion similar to Sylva.  Luckily, Taylor is up to the part, as is Velez, who conveys innocence, diverse emotions, and energetic sexual charm. Chaney is excellent as usual, in the secondary, castrated role.

One off-screen note of interest: “Mexican Spitfire” Velez and Taylor became quite close after working together in this film. Velez, pregnant and abandoned, spent her last hours on earth with Taylor, before departing her mortal coil with the aid of Seconal. Somehow, in the Browning universe, that is an apt, dark underside to the narrative.

Needless to say, Where East is East does not subscribe to any sort of orthodox realism. It is representative of the blue collar surrealism that both Browning and Chaney espoused and can be best enjoyed with a heaping plate of elephant ears and cotton candy, along with a well-worn copy of “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

Unfortunately,  The Road to Mandalay exists only in fragmented and disintegrated state, a mere 36 minutes of its original seven reels.  In this passionately pretentious film, which is not related to the Kipling poem, Chaney plays “dead-eyed” Singapore Joe (Chaney achieved the eye effect with egg white) who runs a Singapore brothel.  Joe’s business associates are the black spiders of the Seven Seas:  the Admiral Herrington (Owen Moore) and English Charlie Wing (Kamiyama Sojin), the best knife-thrower in the Orient.  Joe’s relationship with his partners is tense and, often, threatening.

Apparently, Joe’s wife is long dead.  The two had a daughter, Rosemary (Lois Moran), who Joe left at a convent in Mandalay, under the care of his brother, Fr. James (Henry Walthall).  Joe, a repulsive sight, occasionally emerges from his sordid, underworld activities to visit Rosemary, who works in a bazaar.  Joe plans to clean up his act within two years, once he has enough money  to undergo plastic surgery and retire.  Joe wants to be a reborn man, so he can reunite with his daughter and rescue her from the confines of poverty. Rosemary, however, unaware that Joe is her father (a frequent Browning theme), is repulsed by dead eyed Joe, understandably mistaking his friendliness for sexual predation.  Fr. James  warns  Joe that waiting two years is too long.  Joe’s insistence for patience only makes Fr. James skeptical that Joe can actually achieve or sustain the redemption necessary to give Rosemary a good life.

One day the Admiral walks into Rosemary’s Bazaar and discovers love at first sight when meeting Rosemary.  Falling in love with his partner’s daughter inspires the Admiral to instantaneously see the light and put his past behind him.  It is the Admiral, rather than Joe, who undergoes conversion.  After spying Rosemary preparing for her impending wedding, Joe discovers the truth.  He succumbs to an unsettling rivalry for his daughter and is furiously determined to put a stop to the union.  Joe  goes to Fr. James, insisting that the Admiral, like himself, is too defiled, too corrupt.  The priest tires to assure Joe that the Admiral’s about face is genuine; he’s been converted by love.  In a rage, Joe attempts to strangle his brother.  A reel or so is missing here and next we find out that, somehow, Joe has shanghaied the wedding, kidnapped the Admiral, and is bound for the seven seas.

Searching for her missing lover, Rosemary arrives at Joe’s brothel, but she is lured upstairs by Charlie Wing.  Joe arrives in time to stop Charlie from having his way with Rosemary, but the Admiral also arrives and a knife fight ensues, during which Rosemary stabs her father.  Mortally wounded, Joe blocks Wing’s way and urges the Admiral to take Rosemary away to the seraphic life.  Fr. James arrives in time to give Joe the last rites.

The Road to Mandalay is depraved, pop-Freudian,  silent melodrama at its ripest.  Fortunately, both Browning and Chaney approach this hodgepodge of silliness in dead earnest.  Chaney is simultaneously cocky, parental, disturbingly coarse, and leering, projecting pathos and machismo.  His Oedipal wailing, when his daughter tells Joe that she hates the mysterious father who has abandoned her, is classic.  Browning, as was typical, idiosyncratically mixes melodramatic hi-jinks with exotic locales and strong actors.  Unfortunately, The Road to Mandalay is in such dissipated state that it makes for burdensome, strained viewing.  The only known print is a 16 mm abridged version, which was discovered in France in the 1980s.  Even in its abridged state, The Road to Mandalay is intoxicating, outrageous  silent cinema melodrama, badly in need of restoration.

West of Zanzibar (1928) is also missing footage, but, unlike The Road to Mandalay, it is in much more viewable state.  Enough of the film remains intact so as not to appear too fragmentary.  Originally tilted Kongo, West of Zanzibar is the most flagrant, delightfully vile of the Browning/Chaney Oedipal absurdities.

Chaney plays Phroso.  Phroso is married to Anna  (Jacqueline Gadsden) and together they work in a Limehouse music hall as a magic act (in the early scenes as the magician, the protean Chaney gives a remarkable, Chaplin-like performance).  Behind Phroso’s back, Anna is carrying on an affair with Crane (Lionel Barrymore).  When Phroso and Crane inevitably fight over Anna, Phroso falls from a great height, forever crippling himself.  After a short time has passed, Phroso is told that his wife has returned to town, with a baby, and is in the local church.  The dead-legged Phroso zips down to the church via scooter and crawls into the tabernacle, only to find his wife, with crying babe in arms, collapsed in death, at the feet of a Madonna and child statue.  Phroso looks at the baby girl, then at the Madonna, and vows revenge on Crane and the infant.

Twenty years later, Phroso re-emerges as “Dead Legs”: a witch doctor and trader, lording over a swamp in Africa, utilizing his cheap parlor tricks to keep the local cannibals in submission.  Dead Legs is under the care of the derelict, alcoholic Doc (Warner Baxter) and an assortment of unsavory characters.  Using the natives, Dead Legs steals ivory from his nemesis, Crane.  It’s all part of a twenty year grand scheme for ultimate revenge.

Dead Legs summons Maisie (the beautiful, tragic, and short-lived Mary Nolan).  Maisie is the now grown infant, whom Phroso believes to be the child of Anna and Crane. During the past twenty years, Maisie was placed, by Phroso,  in the surroundings of a seedy bar in Zanzibar. Naturally, Maisie has become a tragic and loose alcoholic. In the original script, Maisie was placed in a brothel and  raised as a  debauched prostitute who contracts syphilis.  However, producer Irving Thalberg predictably insisted this be softened somewhat in the film, which only lowers the film’s sleaze level from ten to about a nine and a half.

Dead Legs instructs the tribesmen to inform Crane that it is he, their master, who has been stealing the ivory.  Of course, this kind of grimy silent era melodrama insists on throwing a monkey wrench or two into the scheme, complications Browning delivers in spades.  Doc falls in love with Maisie and finds himself at odds with Dead Legs torturous treatment of the girl, who has recently sworn to kick the bottle.  Nolan excels in the scene in which her paralyzed father descends from his wheel chair, slithering towards her.  She is simultaneously petrified and optimistic, but Dead Legs drives her back to the brink of brandied insanity.  Enter Crane, who sadistically reveals to Dead Legs the terrible secret that Maisie is Phroso’s daughter, not Crane’s.

It’s cornball, grotesque spectacle that Chaney and Browning treat as austere entertainment.  Crane is shot and killed by the natives.  It is tribal custom to burn alive a female relative of a dead male.  The natives had previously been told that Maisie was the daughter of Crane and they demand that the sacrificial custom be carried out.  Dead Legs must now make amends for his terrible mistake and hopes he has one last parlor trick up his sleeve to save his daughter and Doc.

As Dead Legs, Chaney delivers an amazing, masochistic, emotionally high-octane, and downright creepy performance.  He writhes his way through most of the film, contorting his body with gleeful abandon.  Chaney was a master of pantomime expression, learned from years of communicating with his deaf-mute parents.  Chaney communicated best with those who shared his penchant for what others consider macabre.  His wife had previously been married to a legless man and his preeminent director, Tod Browning, ran way from home to join the carnival, supposedly having had at least one affair with a freak.  In many of his films, Browning depicted men paralyzed from the waist down, and later, in Freaks (1932), utilized actual legless freaks.

Together, Browning and Chaney  acted out of the darkest recesses of their psyche in the silent era’s most manic productions, and they did it with authentic devotion.

DIRECTED BY: Zeb Haradon

FEATURING: Zeb Haradon, Robin Ballard

PLOT:  A woman carrying groceries is trapped in an elevator with a socially inept graduate student.  Oddly, no one answers when they push the call button, and no one comes for days and weeks on end; even more oddly, her grocery bag is refilled each morning.  As the weeks stretch into months, the mismatched pair—an adult virgin obsessed with anal sex and a reformed slut turned Jesus freak—form a sick symbiotic bond, until the girl undergoes a weird metamorphosis.

BACKGROUND:

• Per director Haradon, the budget for the film was between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars.
• According to a statement on the official website the main influences on the story were Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the films of Luis Buñuel (particularly That Obscure Object of Desire and The Exterminating Angel), and Eraserhead.
  
• Although the mouse-stomping scene was faked, the end of the film shows a joke disclaimer that proclaims, “No animals were harmed in the making of this film except for lobsters and mice.”  Haradon received angry mails from animal rights advocates who believed that a mouse was actually killed onscreen.
• Hardon’s followup film was the documentary Waiting for NESARA (2005), about a bizarre UFO cult composed of ex-Mormons.
• The 2008 Romanian film Elevator features a similar dramatic scenario of a young man and woman trapped together in a cargo elevator, but without any surrealistic elements.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Lana, after she inexplicably transforms into a metal/human hybrid.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  By mixing Sartre’s “No Exit” with an ultra-minimalist riff on

Original trailer for Elevator Movie (WARNING: trailer contains profanity and sexual situations)

Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, garnished with large dollops of fantastical sexual depravity and a pinch of body horror, writer/director/star Zeb Haradon created one of the weirder underground movies of recent years. The absurdist script is exemplary, and the simplicity of the one-set scenario means that the movie’s technical deficiencies don’t stick out, and could even add to the oddness.

COMMENTS: I have to start this review of with a confession/apology: when I first reviewed Elevator Movie over a year ago, I gave it a mere three out of five stars and made an indefensible call not to certify it  for inclusion on the List of the 366 best weird movies ever made.  If the truth be told, I wanted to post about the movie that night and was simply too tired at the time to write a full length review, but the excuse I made for overlooking it was as follows: “Unfortunately, in a demanding two character piece that requires top-notch, nuanced dramatic performances to succeed, Haradon’s acting talent isn’t up to the level of his imagination and screenwriting ability.  The resulting film looks like an A- film school final project: it tantalizingly promises more than it’s capable of delivering.”

No doubt, the key blemish on Elevator Movie is the acting.  With one location, two actors, and a heavy reliance on dialogue, the movie feels like a play.  But, as I said originally, although Robin Ballard is passable in the easier role of Lana, Haradon is almost unforgivably subdued as Jim.  Jim is passive, so some of the wimpiness of the characterization is intentional, but when he needs to project a menacing, seething passion subdued under a calm exterior, he can’t pull it off.  Therefore, at times the inherent dramatic conflict tails off into a bland “OK, OK”, just as Jim’s voice does when Lana once again rejects his advances.  There are two many “ums” and pauses in his delivery, which sound less like Jim’s natural speech patterns and more like untutored acting.  And there’s a moment, after Ballard tells Haradon a story about when her uncle saw a vision of Jesus in his feces that his delivery blows what should have been a perfect (if obvious) punchline.

I still stand behind those criticisms; with the right acting talent, Elevator Movie could have been an absolute classic rather than just a fascinating oddity.  But time has proven me wrong in underestimating Elevator Movie; this thing gets into your subconscious and festers there, and its weird incidents linger in the memory long after more technically polished movies have faded away completely.  And sometimes, like lovers, flawed movies become all the more lovable for their flaws, which make them unique.

The basic scenario is simplicity itself—Jim and Lana, two polar opposites, are stuck in an elevator together; impossibly, for months on end.  Lana enters the elevator with a grocery bag, and each morning when the couple awakens the supplies are magically replenished.  The problem of elimination isn’t shied away from; fortunately, whatever entity takes care of the shopping while they sleep also empties the coffee can that holds their mingled waste.  The couple have no television and neither brought an Ipod, so for entertainment they only have each other to converse with.  And so, as the weeks pass, they talk, and talk, and talk.

They talk about God, they talk about their personal histories, they talk about what they would do if they were on the outside, but, as their imprisonment drags on, more and more they talk about Jim’s unusual sexual desires.  Jim, a virgin and a socially inept college student studying genetics, is obsessed with the allure of anal sex.  That’s his primary kink, but not his only one.  The longer we stay trapped in the elevator with Jim, the more we come to realize what a sick puppy he truly is.  Early on, on their very first day of captivity, he confesses his dream project to Lana: he wants to genetically engineer a Venus flytrap that’s capable of performing fellatio.

As the days mount, Jim seems to have an inexhaustible store of deviant ideas and fantasies to spring on Lana, and (in the early reels, at least) the oddest thing about her is that she accepts his perversions with nothing more than mild distaste, as if he just passed wind.  The panic that would possess most women if they found themselves trapped in an enclosed space with a madman is missing from her character.  In fact, from the beginning the newly chaste Lana encourages Jim’s mounting sexual frustration by suggesting that they sleep together in the spoon position, and teases him with tales of her promiscuity before she found Jesus, stopping abruptly just as his hopes start to rise.  There’s a powerful strain of misogyny in her portrayal as the ultimate faux-virgin tease, but oddly enough, it doesn’t come across as offensive; probably because the misandric disgust the movie directs at Jim more than counteracts it.  Lana intuitively realizes Jim is too needy to force himself on her—rape wouldn’t appeal to him, since what he longs for a willing approval of his kinks—so she has the upper hand in any sexual jousting.  But, as the days wear on, she also develops a genuine fondness for the only man around.  With no one else to interact with, in the redefined reality of their elevator prison, Jim’s perverse peculiarities lose their ability to shock and become a simple fact of her existence, like the buttons on the wall.

While Lana seems like a perfectly normal woman, or Jim’s imaginary version of a normal woman, she turns out to have a secret of her own.  Jim, with his permanently stained button down shirt and habit of picking his nose in public, begins the picture as one of those standoffish loners you wonder about as you see him shuffling around in public with his head downcast. He gradually reveals that his psychology is more twisted than your worst imaginings.  Lana’s slowly revealed affliction, on the other hand, is entirely physical, taking the form of a bizarre, Tetsuo-like sickness.  It’s almost as if forced exposure to Jim’s sick psychic radiation is mutating her.

Most of the film’s itchy bizarreness comes from the characters and their straight-faced acceptance of the impossible.  With no money for effects, Haradon wisely chose to tackle a project that was completely within his means.  The cardboard box set works in the movie’s favor, removing all distractions and highlighting the characters’ oversized psychologies, which play like grotesque shadows against the elevator’s blank walls.  Weirdness is suggested on the cheap, as when the cross around Lana’s neck inexplicably turns into an air freshener for one scene before reverting back.  Much of the imagery—mainly scatological, but also one scene of brutal animal cruelty—is shocking, but it always feels integral to the sickly atmosphere, never gratuitous.  Sometimes shots are framed poorly, but this seems deliberate, to add to the offness.  The sound is bad—some shots have a background hum that alternates back and forth with a silent scene, and the movement of Lana’s lips don’t always match what she’s saying.  The audio imperfections were probably unintentional, the result of a low budget and technical inexperience, but they could be viewed as happy accidents.  Unless you have a fetish for polish, none of the technical glitches—with the exception of the acting—diminish the effectiveness of the screenplay.

Haradon understands that the basis of drama is conflicting agendas, and, aside from a few missed opportunities to ratchet up the conflict up to stratospheric levels, the script manages to keep up our interest by slowly revealing new facets of the characters and keeping up the tension as Jim and Lana struggle to reconcile their need for intimacy with their utter incompatibility.  Those conflicting agendas are never revealed so dramatically as when the two agree to share their deepest wishes with each other, and scrawl them on pieces of paper for the other to read.  Though the screenplay never reaches the theatrical heights of its literary inspirations, “Waiting for Godot” and “No Exit,” as an x-rated first attempt at a Theater of the Absurd piece, it comes much closer to those luminaries than it probably had any right to.  The simple ending is very nearly perfect; chilling, but, due to the way the movie has altered our view of reality and forced us to reluctantly identify with Jim, also touching, in a bizarre way.  Despite the absurdity of the situation and the gargantuan eccentricities of the characters, if you’re willing to accept this movie’s rules at face value, you may find that it rings with a dangerous psychological truth, and hints at something unspeakably horrifying about male sexuality.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As a champion of ‘Eraserhead’, ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’, ‘Naked Lunch’, and ‘Back Against the Wall’, all fine films that downright bask in their toxicity to the homogenized masses, I found Haradon’s film to be unique and fascinating and a most worthy addition to the midnight movie circuit. Just don’t ask me to spend any longer in Haradon’s mind than I have to in any one sitting. It’s very likely I’d never make it out!”–Daniel Wible, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

“…an inspired piece of weirdness and one of the more original debut films I’ve ever seen.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com

“…the weirdly simple, natural way Jim and Lana deal with their predicament, and relate to each other, provides more than enough sustenance to sate the adventurous movie-goer too long denied a good fix of the strange stuff…  Fans of early David Lynch and other low-budget, absurdist auteurs will be delighted by Elevator Movie, a sick and sincere slice of hopeless existentialism and despair.”–Kurt Dahlke, DVD Talk

OFFICIAL SITE: Elevator Movie Website

IMDB LINK: Elevator Movie (2004)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Zeb Haradon – interview with the director from artinterviews.com

DVD INFO: The weird movie community is lucky to have a flick as obscure as Elevator Movie (buy) available on a duplicated (and thus Netflix eligible) DVD at all; asking for special features would be too much.  The meager extras are trailers for eight other Patherfinder-distributed features (including List entry Gozu) and bios of writer/director/star Zeb Haradon and costar Robin Ballard.

“My mother is dead.  I had a terrible relationship with her.  She had many problems with my father, and she never caressed me.  So I didn’t have a mother who touched me.”–Alejandro Jodorowsky in La Constellation Jodorowsky

DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky

FEATURING: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Adan Jodorowsky, Sabrina Dennison, Guy Stockwell

PLOT:  Fenix, a young carnival boy is understandably traumatized when he sees his knife-thrower father cut off his mother’s arms in a domestic melee.  Years later, he lives an animalistic existence in a mental asylum, until one day he escapes when his armless mother calls to him from outside his cell window.  The two perform a stage act where the son serves as the arms of his mother; she dominates his every move offstage, makes him serve as her arms, and orders him to kill, repeatedly.

BACKGROUND:

• After completing The Holy Mountain in 1973, Jodorowsky planned to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel “Dune,” which fell through.  He did not direct again until 1980′s poorly regarded Tusk, a film over which he had little creative control and which he has since disowned.
• Santa Sangre is supposedly inspired by the story of a real life Mexican serial killer (whose name is variously given as Gregorio Cárdenas or Gojo Cardinas).
• Young Fenix and adult Fenix are played by Adan and Axel, Jodorowsky’s sons.
• The MPAA originally rated Santa Sangre R for “bizarre, graphic violence;” when the NC-17 designation began in 1990, the film was reclassified to the more restictive rating for “extremely explicit violence.”
• Empire Magazine’s combined readers/critics poll voted Santa Sangre the 476th best movie of all time.
• Before making this film Jodorowsky had founded an unofficial school of psychotherapy called “psycho-magic”; one of the basic tenets of the theory is a belief in a “family unconscious.”
• The mother’s given name—”Concha”—is slang for “vagina” in many Latin American countries, including Jodorowsky’s native Chile.
• The movie is an Italian/Mexican co-production, and was co-written and co-produced by Claudio (brother of horror maestro Dario) Argento.
• OBSCURE CONNECTION: Producer Rene Cardona, Jr., himself a prolific B-movie director, was the son of the Rene Cardona who directed El Santo movies and appeared in Brainiac.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The most representative images are any of the moments where Fenix stands behind his mother and acts as her hands, especially when he is wearing his long red plastic nails.  The most affecting sight, however, may be a dying elephant with blood trickling out of his trunk.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  You could argue that Santa Sangre isn’t that weird, but that

Original trailer for Santa Sangre (German)

would only be in comparison to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s previous films.  Although he does deliver Feliniesque carnivals, an elephant funeral, a cult that worships an armless girl, a hermaphrodite wrestler, and graveside hallucinations featuring zombie brides, the obscure auteur actually scales back his mystical obtuseness a tad in this psychedelic slasher movie.  The result is his most popular and accessible film—if anything by Jodorowsky can be considered accessible.

COMMENTS: In a way, Santa Sangre is Jodorowsky lite.  Compared to his hippie-era midnight movies (Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain), this weirded-up Freudian mishmash of Psycho and Hands of Orlac by way of Fellini is less mystical and more psychological, less pretentious and more exploitative, less obscure and more universal.  While exceedingly odd things happen, the narrative is easy to follow and the Oedipal themes easy to grasp.  True to slasher-movie conventions, he spares neither erotic excess nor stage blood, but adds an arthouse sheen of psychological depth and surrealistic wonder, thereby appealing both to exploitation movie fans looking for something a little more weighty and to arthouse fans looking for a defensible guilty pleasure.  That’s not to say Santa Sangre is better or worse than the earlier films, but it does appeal more to the casual fan than do Jodorowsky’s earlier movies.  Some will prefer the more disciplined and narrative approach taken here, while others may miss the anarchy and cosmic scope of the 1970s work.

Although Santa Sangre is much easier to follow and comprehend than Jodorowsky’s previous works, I don’t mean to imply that Jodorowsky strayed too far from his avant-garde roots.  This is, after all, still a movie where a random man in a marketplace tears off his own ear for no apparent reason.  Many themes and symbols from the 1970s films recur in this film made fifteen years later.  Most significantly, the structure and theme of the film is still a quest for understanding.  In El Topo and The Holy Mountain that quest was for cosmic illumination, an understanding of God and ultimate reality; in Santa Sangre, the quest is turned inward, as Fenix grapples to comprehend his own psychological reality as twisted by his peculiar relationship with his mother.  As in El Topo, there is a religious cult with a unique symbology (an all-seeing eye in the pyramid in the Western, the crossed severed arms here).  As in The Holy Mountain, birds in flight are used as an elegant symbol of transcendence.  And the director remains obsessed with human deformity, in unsavory ways.  Although the real-life armless freaks from El Topo have been replaced by an actress playing a woman with no arms, the genetically disadvantaged make an unsettling appearance here in the form of actors with Down’s Syndrome, who sniff cocaine and take a trip to see an obese prostitute. 

Jodorowsky, though a Ukrainian Jew by heritage, Chilean by birth, and French by choice, chooses to make movies in Mexico.  In El Topo and The Holy Mountain he was attracted to the spiritual serenity of the desert, but here the story plays out in an urban setting, and the director transforms the country into a phantasmagorical land trapped in an eternal carnivale. It’s a divided land country sanctity and licentiousness fight an eternal war.  Mystical Mexican Catholicism is paid tribute through Concha’s heretical Santa Sangre cult, which worships a non-canonized saint, an armless rape victim.  The shrine is a small masterpiece of indigenous folk religion, mixing Christian and pagan elements with its pool of blood, gory primitivist frescoes, and walls decorated with cowboy hats and homemade flower garlands, all lit by a mixture of candles and neon.  Outside, prostitutes troll the streets for customers.  The streets are patrolled by circus processions, mariachi bands and rolling advertisements for lucha libre (wrestling) exhibitions.  Outside of the insane asylum Fenix finds himself imprisoned in, the city seems to be little more than a neverending red light district, full of dancing in the streets, drunken soldiers, burlesque houses, and whores, whores, whores.  Jodorowsky even adds some social commentary on the baneful cultural influences of Mexico’s northern neighbor, represented by Guy Stockwell’s knife-throwing Orgo, the dictatorial proprietor of the “Circo del Gringo,” who tattoos a symbol that looks suspiciously like the eagle from the American dollar onto his son’s chest.  There is also commentary on Mexican poverty, when gray-faced villagers living in a pitiful gully gleefully pillage the coffin of a circus elephant for meat.

As if this lunatic, fantastical Mexico of his imagination did not add enough color, Jodorowsky heaps on the carnival ambiance by setting half the movie in a circus.  Our antihero Fenix, a boy magician who’s the product of a union between a knife-thrower and a trapeze artist, grows up with a dwarf as a best friend, a deaf-mute as a love interest, and a chorus of silent clowns providing amusement and solace to carry him over the rough patches in the tough existence of a carny boy.  There’s plenty of circus pomp and spectacle to fill up the background of these early scenes, and a voluptuous head-to-toe tattooed temptress to stir the psycho-sexual pot.  The processional during the elephant funeral, set to a jazzy mariachi dirge, is a parade of pageantry that would have brought a tear to Fellini’s eye. At the very least, he would have appreciated the obscene tears the black-clad clowns squirt as they sadly bid their pachyderm pal farewell.

The movie segues easily from the halcyon carnival days, which grow more and more turbulent until they end in a bloody blast of vengeance, into the movie’s second half, where slasher and horror movie conventions begin to dominate.  The action moves from the carnival and red light district into bare, rocky interiors in the house where Fenix and his mother come to live.  Freed from his asylum and seemingly cured of his madness, the son reluctantly assumes his position behind his mother, thrusting his arms through her sleeves so he can play piano for her or lift her morning coffee to her lips.  He has plenty of hallucinations, as well.  Mom even mocks him: “it’s always roosters or swans.  You never see anything else in your ridiculous hallucinations!”  (Her accusation isn’t entirely accurate: he does also see pale nude bodies, presumably of women he’s slain, rising from their graves to clutch at him).  We watch Fenix murder three women (well, two women and one borderline case) at the direction of Concha, who psychically controls his limbs; the killings are suitably bloody, and sometimes absurd (as when he kills a lucharore).  By the end, the house has transformed into a twisted Expressionistic nightmare, with wooden beams suddenly spouting out of the walls at irrational angles.  It all ends in broadly predictable but satisfying horror movie fashion, with Fenix conquering his internal and external demons, and a host of carny folk from his past life making ghostly farewell cameos.

The actors playing out this bizarre tale are competent, but never upstage Jodorowsky’s tableaux, which is how it should be.  At times, the acting is decidedly non-naturalistic.  Jodorowsky studied pantomime under Marcel Marceau, and although silent comedy skits popped up from time to time in his previous works, never before had nonverbal communication taken center stage as it does here.  An important character is a deaf-mute, who mimes out of necessity.  The tattooed lady’s seductions, and Concha’s anger at her gringo husband’s philandering ways, both play out in dance rather than dialogue, with a band of harlequins providing the score.  Young Fenix’s woos the deaf-mute with a magic trick, and she expresses her appreciation in mime; this quiet, beautiful scene is poetic and universal.  Sante Sangre also underscores the fact that it’s impossible to act as if your arms are being psychically possessed and forced to kill by an unseen force without appearing hopelessly melodramatic.  The saving grace is that any movie in which you are asked to act as if your arms are being psychically possessed and forced to kill by an unseen force is probably a hopeless melodrama at heart.  Too much dialogue and verbal explication could have made Santa Sangre appear ludicrous; instead, the pantomime and storytelling through choreography give the film an abstract, theatrical quality that recalls silent film and lulls our disbelief into suspension.

Santa Sangre was Jodorowsky’s most critically acclaimed film, as well as his most popular and accessible.  Anyone with a passing interest in strange film is likely to be pleasantly astounded and even charmed by its visions.  The only ones who should steer clear are those who have a low tolerance for blood and violence; though informed by arty surrealism, this film is a true modern horror movie (which is a large reason for its crossover appeal).  Santa Sangre is the perfect place to begin exploring the weird world of Jodorwosky, which exists in a cinematic netherworld somewhere between academic surrealism and B-movie madness.   If you like  Santa Sangre but have a nagging feeling that it’s just not weird enough, then make Jodorowsky’s surrealist spaghetti western El Topo your next stop.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…nonsense of a very extravagant, alienating, private sort… A massive clearance sale of leftover psychedelia, ‘Santa Sangre’ is enough to make a movie critic toss his notebook across a screening room.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…watchable and fun in a campy, sub-Fellini sort of way—if only because of its dogged devotion to surrealist excess.”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader

“…after waiting patiently through countless Dead Teenager Movies, I am reminded by Alejandro Jodorowsky that true psychic horror is possible on the screen–horror, poetry, surrealism, psychological pain and wicked humor, all at once.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Great Movies series)

IMDB LINK:  Santa Sangre (1989)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

At the Movies – Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert discuss the film on their television program (verdict: one thumbs up, one thumbs down)

Santa Sangre at The Image Grows – There’s not much Santa Sangre material at this Jodorowsky fansite, but there are a few reviews and images, plus links to other Jodorowsky material

Alejandro Jodorowsky – David Church’s career retrospective of Jodorowsky from Senses of Cinema includes a few paragraphs analyzing Santa Sangre and putting it in the context of the director’s entire canon

DVD INFO: Jodorowsky movies and home video releases have always had a tempestuous relationship.  El Topo and The Holy Mountain were tied up in rights disputes for many years, and could only be seen in bootleg versions.  Santa Sangre did get a wide release on VHS (search for a used copy) and was eventually issued in a very nice 2-DVD special edition licensed for distribution in Singapore (buy), but the run was short and copies are now rarer and more expensive than they should be for a film of this reputation.  More copies seem to be popping up lately; interested parties may want to search Ebay or other resellers for bargains (we secured a copy for about $20).  When you receive the sturdy and attractively packaged set, you’ll get the dubbed movie on disc one (as far as I know the movie is only available dubbed in English, with subtitles for other languages).  Disc 2 contains numerous extras, including “Echek,” an interesting 4-minute, black and white silent film from Jodorowsky’s son Adan (who played young Fenix in the movie); a deleted “Trumpet/Hooker” scene from the film with commentary by Jodorowsky; and a question and answer session from a Santa Sangre screening, with Jodorowsky speaking in broken English.  The jewel of the supplements is the feature length French documentary La constellation Jodorowsky [The Jodorowsky Constellation] (1994), which discusses the man and his art and features interviews and recollections from the director, Marcel Marceau (who taught Jodorowsky mime), surrealist playwright and author Fernando Arrabal, and fan Peter Gabriel, among others.  The only complaint with the otherwise illuminating documentary is that it focuses too much on Jodorowsky’s “psycho-magic” therapy, finishing by taking us through an entire, agonizingly long public psychoanalysis session.

UPDATE 1/27/2011: Severin Films has righted a great wrong by releasing a reverent new 2-disc version of Santa Sangre (buy), complete with 5 hours (!) of bonus material and a new commentary track supplied by Jodorowsky and journalist Alan Jones. We don’t have full details on all the supplemental material at this time. Severin is also offering the same package on Blu-ray (buy).

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Ylenia.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

–Lyrics to “The D’Ampton Worm” from Lair of the White Worm

DIRECTED BY: Ken Russell

FEATURING: Amanda Donohoe, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, Peter Capaldi, Sammi Davis, Stratford Johns

PLOT:  An archeology student visiting the British countryside digs up an elongated skull he assumes belongs to an dinosaur while excavating the site of a buried convent, now an English bed-and-breakfast run by two young sisters.  Lord James D’Ampton is the boyfriend of one of the sisters, and also the descendant of a legendary D’Ampton who reputedly slew a dragon (the “D’Ampton Worm”) that had terrorized the countryside.  After wintering in climes unknown, slinky and regal Lady March returns to her mansion and discovers the skull, after which strange events begin to transpire…


BACKGROUND:

• Russell’s script was very loosely based on Bram (“Dracula”) Stoker’s 1911 novel, although the similarity almost ends with the shared title.
• This was Russell’s second horror film in three years after Gothic (1986).
• Hugh Grant had roles in six films released in 1988, including portrayals of Chopin and Lord Byron.
• This was Amanda Donohoe’s second starring role in a feature film.  She went on to greater fame when she joined the cast of the hit T.V. show “L.A. Law” in 1990.  Catherine Oxenberg, on the other hand, had made a name for herself on the hit T.V. show “Dynasty,” and this was her first feature role in a theatrical release.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: A 30 second hallucination sequence featuring Roman soldiers raping nuns before a cross on which a monstrous worm slithers over a crucified Jesus while a topless blue vampire woman looks on joyfully, waggling her tongue.  The scene is dressed up in lurid colors and performed in front of a deliberately cheesy looking blue-screen inferno.  So over-the-top and parodic that it’s not nearly as offensive as it sounds.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Ken Russell throws a handful of his typically excessive hallucination/dream sequences into what is otherwise a subtle horror parody, creating a minor masterpiece of deliberate camp blooming with ridiculously memorable scenes.

Clip from Lair of the White Worm

COMMENTS:  The one word that immediately comes to mind to describe Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm is “fun.”  It’s not an important movie, or a really scary one, or even a particularly well-crafted technical effort.  But everyone involved seems to be having a great time romping through this neo-Gothic, hyper-eroticized playground.

Amanda Donohoe is the engine that keeps the flick rolling along its kinky, demented path.  She’s sexy, slinky, witty and hammy, in equal parts.  Whether spitting venom on a crucifix, trading double entendres with Hugh Grant over a snifter of brandy in her bathrobe, or sacrificing a virgin to a pagan snake god with an enormous sharp horn strapped to her pelvis, she vamps her way across the screen with an obvious delight in her power to tempt men into perdition.  She’s simultaneously every boy scout’s wettest dream and direst nightmare, just as sexy when she’s showing the top of her stockings while shifting her sports car as when she’s tramping about a cave in blue-green body paint and plastic fangs.

The rest of the cast fades mostly into the background; appropriately enough, because they serve the role of horror movie dupes who take forever to suspect that the bizarre, eternally youthful local lady with the obsession with snakes and the villainously ironic mode of speech might be responsible for all the odd disappearances around town.  Mainstream movies fans may enjoy, or more likely cringe, at seeing Hugh Grant as the effete but effective young lord whose smashing idea it is to put speakers on the roof of his manor and play snake charming music to lure the culprit from her lair.  Catherine Oxenberg is appropriately vapid and pretty, especially in her virginal white underwear with her hands tied above her head dangling before the worm’s pit, although she struggles with a British accent that sounds sometimes country and sometimes posh.  Sammi Davis makes little impression as the tomboyish sister, and Peter Capaldi similarly brings little charisma to his role, although he is given a nice opportunity to charm snake-vampires with his bagpipe (which he apparently can’t play properly without changing into a kilt first).  Stratford Johns as the stereotypical butler gets little screen time, but hams it up beautifully when given the chance, showing barely disguised boredom at doing his master’s bidding until he’s called upon to deliver a plot point with widened eyes and an ominous pause.

The story’s framework follows the standard “creature feature” formula–weird occurrences, investigation, confrontation and triumph over evil, and coda suggesting the peril may rise again–and comes complete with plot holes.  By either ignoring, or accepting at face value, Russell’s flights of delirious fancy, Lair could be enjoyed as a straightforward horror movie.  Strings swell ominously to warn the viewer something mysterious is going on as each plot point is plucked: the discovery of the skull, the tale of the legendary worm, revelations of missing villagers, the reappearance of the mysterious Lady Marsh, and so on.  By the time the finale clicks into place, Hugh Grant is running around bisecting snake-people with his ancestral broadsword and the Scotsman is fighting off vampires with his bagpipe, all while the bound virgin is menaced by the naked pagan priestess and her slithery monster rising slowly from its pit.

Any standard AIP or Hammer horror of yesteryear could take us to the same ridiculous climax, but Russell drives us there not only with phantasmagorical excess, but also with considerable wit.  Certain characters (Donohoe and Stratford) overplay their roles with gleeful campiness, while our young quartet of heroes underplay theirs with the sincere cluelessness necessary to keep the plot moving.  Besides the constant undercurrent of subtle parody, deliberately absurd comic touches abound. When a minor character briefly breaks into a rhapsody on his harmonica, the suddenly hypnotized (and quite annoyed) Lady Marsh involuntarily places her hands above her head and begins dancing to the strains.  Dialogue sparkles with unanticipated wit: the innocent “Do you have children, Lady Marsh?” is answered with the wicked “Only when there are no men around.”

Of course, it’s not the horror, hallucinations and chuckles alone that have won this film its devoted cult following.  The film is about sex, and fear of sex.  Even the title suggests Freudian implications: both the “worm” and its “lair” (a hole on a hillside) suggest genitalia.  The abundant sex is never depicted without an undercurrent of horror, especially the threat of loss of sexual innocence.  The separate courtships of Lord James and Eve and Angus and Mary are innocent and staidly Christian, and never go beyond chaste kissing (which is itself interrupted by ominous music and the appearance of danger). Although James appears more worldly than the others, he doesn’t abuse his lord’s right with the virgin Eve, and his dreams are filled with obvious sexual repression (he’s tied to a chair and forced to watch helplessly as two women fight over him).

Lady Marsh, the embodiment of dangerous pagan sexuality, ostensibly intends to raise her dead, phallus-shaped god to rule the world, but she almost never appears anywhere without threatening to take away another character’s virginity.  Like the common earthworm, she has hermaphroditic qualities, and her trusty horn is never far away should she need to deflower a female.  She even has the power to defile the ultimate symbol of Christian chastity, the celibate nun (in dream sequences, at least).  She’s the ultimate symbol of fearful desire; when her body is revealed nude, the natural sensuality of her skin is troubled by an alien blue pallor.

Although the imagery occasionally veers towards outright pornography, when it does so Russell keeps it so brief that it’s almost subliminal.  The scenes he lingers over are those that are merely titillating.  Still, to avoid alcohol poisoning, it’s strongly advised never to play a drinking game based on taking a sip of beer whenever a phallic symbol appears onscreen.

Of course, weird-freaks will want to tune in for the psycho set-pieces, of which there are four of note.  The first is the elaborate and outrageous crucifixion tableau, where centurion rapists appear before the cross while the worm writhes over Jesus.  A second venom-induced hallucination is briefer, but even more transgressive: impaled nuns in a sea of blood, while a topless Donohoe suggestively licks blood off the tip of a stake. The third is a compressed sequence in which Sammi Davis is menaced by a gaggle of sexy, spike-groined vampire snakes that emerge from Donohoe’s flaming, fanged mouth.  The blue-screen backgrounds in these fantasy sequences are deliberately unreal; note the way that the appropriate shade of makeup if placed around Donohoe’s eyes so that the same crudely animated flames that burn in the background dance across her visage, as well.  If these scenes aren’t enough to satisfy your lust for Russell weirdness, there’s also that delightfully absurd and humorous dream sequence where a bound Hugh Grant watches catfighting stewardesses while his red marker rises to attention.

Russell’s previous works, like the medieval nunnery and religious corruption fable The Devils and the laudanum-inspired Gothic, feature the same obsessive, fantastical and perverse sexual imagery as Lair of the White Worm.  The difference between those previous works and this one is that Russell presented those visions with a largely humorless solemnity, and tried to attach philosophical musings whose profundities didn’t quite measure up to the grandiosity of the visuals.  The result frequently made this director look silly and pretentious in his self-importance, while at the same time his set pieces packed quite the effectively weird wallop.  By tackling pure genre fare, recognizing the inherent absurdity of his vision, and embracing the silliness wholeheartedly, Russell created a self-aware, self-parodic comedy that’s much less guilty than the prior pleasures he offered.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

” Russell loves the bizarre, the gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about ‘The Lair of the White Worm’ is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…a rollicking, terrifying, post-psychedelic headtrip, features a fangy vampiress of unmatched erotic allure.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“There’s permanent duality in the Russell/Stoker universe — Christian and pagan, violent and bucolic, earnest and decadent, real and surreal — and if you have a hard time figuring it all out, don’t worry. So did Russell, who, once again, seems to have overindulged in diabolic steroids.”–Richard Harrington, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm – An extremely detailed unofficial fan site with a plot-hole FAQ,  a synopsis of Stoker’s novel, information on the filming locations, and more.  It also contains a message board for discussing the movie with lots of spam and occasional meaningful discussion.

Bram Stoker’s “Lair of the White Worm” at Literature.org – the complete text of the 1911 source novel online

DVD INFO: The Artisan release now in print (buy) comes with no extras besides the trailer, which is a shame. Devoted fans may want to pay a premium for a copy of the discontinued Pioneer special edition release instead (buy), which contained a Ken Russell commentary and other goodies.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Nico.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

DIRECTED BY: Roman Polanski

FEATURING: Catherine Deneuve

PLOT:  At first glance, manicurist Carole (Catherine Deneuve) seems merely to be painfully shy.  The early portions of the film follow her in her daily routine, and we grow to realize that her mental problems go much deeper: she daydreams, she seems to be barely on speaking terms with the outside world, she is dependent on her sister (who wants to have a life of her own) to care for her, and she is repulsed by men.  When her sister goes on a two week vacation, Carole’s fragile condition deteriorates, and we travel inside of her head and witness her terrifying paranoid delusions firsthand.

BACKGROUND:

• This was director Roman Polanski’s first English language movie, after achieving critical success with the Polish language thriller Nóż w wodzie [Knife in the Water] (1962).  The relatively recent success of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) undoubtedly helped the film’s marketability, as it could be billed as a female variation on the same theme.  But despite dealing with insanity and murder, Polanski’s film turned out nothing like Hitchcock’s classic; whereas Psycho was clearly entertainment first, with horrors meant to thrill like a roller-coaster, Repulsion was relentlessly tense, downbeat and disturbing, strictly arthouse fare.
• Ethereal Star Catherine Denueve (who had been the lover of, and given her first break in films by, roguish director Roger Vadim) was coming off her first major success in the lighthearted 1964 musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg].  Playing a dangerous, asexual, schizophrenic woman in a role that called for little dialogue immediately after her role as the romantic lead in a musical demonstrated her tremendous range and helped establish her as one of the greatest actresses of the late 1960s and 70s.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  There are many enduring images to choose from, including the hare carcass and simple close-ups of Deneuve’s eyeballs, but the iconic image is Carole walking down a narrow corridor, as gray hands reach out from inside the walls to grope at her virginal white nightgown. (The scene is a sinister variation on a similar image from Jean Cocteau’s surrealist classic Le Belle et La Bette [Beauty and the Beast] (1946)).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Although there are several otherwordly, expressionistic dream

Original trailer for Repulsion

sequences in the film, Polanski creates a terribly tense and claustrophobic atmosphere even before the nightmares come with odd camera angles and the strategic use of silence broken by invasive ambient noises.  As Carole floats around her empty apartment, silent, alone, and ghostlike, ordinary objects and sounds take on an otherworldly quality.  The effect is unlike any other.

COMMENTS:  Polanski begins the film with a close-up of a woman’s eyeball, an opening that is reminiscent of the first shot fired in the Surrealist film revolution.  Later on, a straight razor features in the story prominently, strengthening this connection.  And, of course, the famous scene of the hands morphing out of the walls inevitably brings to mind the other iconic Surrealist film image: Cocteau’s candelabras.

But despite the nods to his influences, by nature Polanski isn’t a surrealist, but a Symbolist.  In Repulsion, Polanski weaves images masterfully, but although they may be obscure, they are never incongruous and irrational juxtapositions, like the Surrealists sought.  After opening credits play over the shot of the eye, the next image we see is a close-up of a woman’s cracking facial beauty mask.  Cracks recur throughout Repulsion, and obviously symbolize Carole’s deteriorating mind.  Early on, Carole looks at a developing fissure in the apartment wall and muses, “I must get this crack mended”; much later on, a crack in her bedroom wall breaks open and draws her into a particularly nasty nightmare.  Select symbols, both visual and auditory, reverberate throughout the film in a way that creates a subliminal narrative that, in an important way, is more important to the story than the minimalist plot.  Besides eyes, razors, and cracks, we also catch echoes of the sprouting potatoes and a hare’s corpse, along with the ticking clock, the dripping faucet, the street band with the spoon player (Polanski’s cameo appearance), the doorbell and phone (which sound exactly the same), the tolling bell and the laughter rising from the yard of the nunnery.  That the first shot of the narrative should be a crack appearing on a woman’s face telegraphs Polanski’s story about the crumbling of a woman’s personality.

The imagery and symbolism aren’t the only things that are masterful about Repulsion.  Critics have correctly noted Polanski’s use of sound, which expertly balances silence and atmospheric noise with judicious bursts from the alternately swinging and dissonant jazz score.  The superlative black and white cinematography and can’t be forgotten, either; there are times when a shot of three aging potatoes looks like a grayscale Max Ernst landscape.  The photography often has a way of transforming the ordinary into the strange and unfamiliar, a visual metaphor for the way Carole sees the world.

But the single most important element that makes the film a success is the magically glacial performance of Catherine Deneuve.  She is in the screen almost all the time, and says almost nothing.  In fact, except when she is terrified, she is frequently emotionless, staring off into space in her own dream world, totally blank faced and inscrutable.  And yet, watching her, it seems impossible to believe that other actress could have captured Carole’s insanity and made it seem plausible.  Deneuve must have known and observed a schizophrenic during her youth; she perfectly captures the subtle tics, the chewing on the lip, the spastic scratching (so unselfconscious and unfeminine), the swiping about her face as if swatting away invisible insects.

It doesn’t hurt that the face is classically beautiful, of course; casting an ugly actress in the role would have made the movie unbearably repulsive.  The tension between Deneuve’s exterior beauty and the grotesqueness of the world behind those eyeballs is the contrast that compels our interest.

In the beginning of the movie, we observe Carole entirely from the outside.  We are given no clue why she is detached.  We simply study her as a beautiful curiosity.  We see her the way her co-workers and her would-be beau does: she seems shy, distracted, perhaps even dull and flighty, but at the same time mysterious and vulnerable.  But when her sister leaves on vacation and Carole is left alone in the creaky, haunted apartment, our focus suddenly shifts from looking at Carole to seeing the world through her eyes.  Our first hint that we have entered a new world is when, along with her, we catch a glimpse of a man’s figure in the mirror–a man who couldn’t possibly be there (and in fact isn’t, when she turns to look).  Soon after, we are thrust into her (literal) dreams and nightmares.  And things grow increasingly worse from there, until we the viewers struggle to tell whether what is happening to her is real or imaginary.  We find ourselves traveling with her down that long dark corridor with the grasping hands.

There are a few things to criticize about the film, although none are serious enough to keep Repulsion from earning its five star rating.  Polanski lingers a bit too much over the setup.  Things don’t become really interesting until the sister leaves on vacation at about the 40 minute mark.  This is artistically justifiable, as the perfectly innocent items Polanski introduces in the early reels–the cracks in the wall, the rabbit, the dripping faucet, the foolishly misguided suitor–will recur with a sinister cast once Carole’s break comes.  But the slowness of the opening scenes will unfortunately keep many from actually experiencing the film.

Another frequent criticism is that, true to its name, Repulsion is relentlessly unpleasant.  It creates a tension that is never pleasantly relieved by the triumph over evil; Norman Bates is never defeated, Carole never escapes herself, the audience is never rewarded for allowing their nerves to be grated.  This is true; Repulsion isn’t entertaining.  But what it does, in taking us unflinchingly inside the unpleasant world of madness, it does better than any other movie.  Catharsis would have rung untrue in Repulsion, and blunted its impact.  If there had been a single artistic slip, the film would have sunk from being an unforgettable classic into being just an interesting but disturbing experiment.  We don’t want every film to be like Repulsion, but we can be glad that at least one exists.

The last criticism is my own, and it goes to the heart of the film.  The objection is there in the very title: Repulsion.  Too much is made of the idea that Carole’s illness is related to her fear of men, her sexual repression, and her possible history of childhood sexual abuse.  The audience is beat over the head with this idea, from Carole’s dreams of rape to her obsessive tooth-brushing after her suitor manages to steal a kiss to the fact that she only seems briefly normal when she interacts with either her sister or her lone friend, a female coworker, outside the presence of men.  Many interpret the final shot–a camera pan to a family photograph that lingers on the face and eyes of Carole as a young girl, sporting the same dead-eyed, distant stare as she does as a young woman–as a hint that it is childhood sexual abuse has caused Carole’s repulsion, leading eventually to obsession and madness.  The idea that Carole’s current repulsion towards reality stems from her “repulsion” to a past rapist seems offered as a sop to those who lust for a solution to the puzzle of her madness, as well as an excuse for Polanski to explore the dark side of human sexuality that has always fascinated him (sadly, in real life as well as in art).

Repulsion is, in fact, the most accurate depiction of schizophrenia ever put on film (there wasn’t really much competition in this field, until 1993′s Clean, Shaven).   This is true whether Polanski and Deneuve knew the name of the disease they were recreating or not. It is unfortunate that Polanski chose to suggest a psychosexual solution to the mystery of Carole’s mind, because the idea that sexual dysfunction was the root cause of every psychiatric disease known to man or woman–from frigidity to nymphomania, from fear of heights to schizophrenia–is a now-discredited relic of then-trendy Freudian psychology.  (Many psychiatrists now doubt that there is much link between schizophrenia and childhood sexual abuse).  Sex is central to human existence, but it doesn’t hold quite the monopoly on the unconscious that Freud, and certain 1960s movie directors, believed.

Carole’s repulsion towards men is more interesting as a symptom of her condition then it is as a cause.  Her disorder goes deeper than a mere fear of men.  When she literally barricades herself inside her apartment-inside her own crumbling mind-she is not merely hiding from an outside world where every construction worker on the corner is a potential rapist.  She is hiding away from humanity, from reality, from existence itself.  Schizophrenia–literally, “splitting (or ‘cracking’?) of the mind”–is terrifying because it is a pathology that arises spontaneously, mysteriously, without pat explanation.  Our desire to find a “cause” for it, to understand and master our own fears about our sanity, is a sign of our own mental infirmity.

Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to embrace this psychoanalytic interpretation of the film to praise it.  Polanski has left the root of Carole’s illness ambiguous enough to allow us freedom to ignore his Freudian blunders.  It is possible to see the final image of the dreamy waif merely as evidence that Carole has always been this way: that she was singled out by random lot to live out a brief life of torment.  In the end, the source of Carole’s irrational terrors isn’t crucial to the movie’s impact.  It’s the stark document of what happens in her during those seemingly endless nightmare days and nights, locked away from the world, that sticks with us, and makes us afraid.  The possibility that our own minds may betray us and drag us down to Hell is a far more frightening than any psycho-slasher in a hockey mask ever could be.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s clinical Grand Guignol, and the camera fondles the horrors… Undeniably skillful and effective, all right-excruciatingly tense and frightening. But is it entertaining? You have to be a hard-core horror-movie lover to enjoy this one.” -Pauline Kael (contemporaneous)

“…a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol-as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist’s notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.” -Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (DVD)

“Polanski’s triumph is a weird, tense depolarization of space, a chipping away at psychological walls so that fear and desire become synonymous…” -Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)

IMDB ENTRY: Repulsion

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Trailers from Hell: Micheal Lehmann on ‘Repulsion’ – The director of Heathers and Meet the Applegates gives his thoughts on the Repulsion trailer

DVD INFO (UPDATED 8/1/09):  After years of shamefully subpar editions, Repulsion has finally been rescued by the ever-reliable Criterion Collection and given a 2-disc special release (buy). The set features a new director-approved transfer of the film, commentary by Polanski and Deneuve, two documentary features, trailers, and a booklet of essays. Also available on Blu-ray (buy).

The previous releases of the film are now obsolete, except for bargain hunters who want a single disc release. The original information on past releases is included below for those who still may be interested.

The Anchor Bay release (which appears to be out of print) is the superior version, and contains commentary by both Polanski and Deneuve as well as a featurette on the British horror film.  Barring a used copy of that release, the Latin American import version (which is in English, and plays on US and Canadain Region 1 DVD players) (buy) is the next best bet. Many have complained of poor picture quality (and an unforgiveable pan-and-scan aspect ratio) on the Entertainment Programs release (buy), but sadly it may often be the best and cheapest version available.