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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FURIOUS (1984)

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DIRECTED BY: Tim Everitt, Tom Sartori

FEATURING: Simon Rhee, Phillip Rhee, Arlene Montano

PLOT: After “Mongol” warriors kill his sister, Simon’s karate master summons him to avenge her death—but all is not as it seems.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: All is literally not as it seems—from its opening credit sequence featuring a black-clad actor’s disembodied hands performing card tricks against a black background, Furious wants to be clever with sleight of hand symbolism, but absurdly unsubtle dialogue then robs the film of any mystery, heavy-handedly spelling out the plot. The result still baffles viewers through what must be the most random appearances of chickens in a movie since Death Laid an Egg.

COMMENTS: Furious seems to have been largely forgotten by mainstream movie culture. Only five people have bothered to write user reviews on IMDB; they either love it for its insane creativity or hate it for its stupidity. Both are valid reactions. Whatever chance Furious had to tap into the ’80s zeitgeist must have been lost forever when the original The Karate Kid was released in the same year. A weird gem kept alive through the devoted efforts of a small cult following, perhaps the time has come for its own resurgence from the astral plane.

Relying on the conventional plotline of a martial artist seeking vengeance for the death of a loved one, Furious manages to be a painfully amateurish effort. Either that, or it’s supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek homage to badly dubbed imported films. If so, the effort falls flat, like a guy falling off a bridge into four inches of water. The many fight scenes feature wooden and uninspired choreography, a cardinal sin in any karate movie. The cheap special effects hardly dazzle, but they occur at such bizarre moments that they still amaze.

In the fifteen minute long dialogue-free introductory sequence, fur-wearing warriors chase Simon’s sister up a mountain and into a “Mongol” cave. A broken tusk guides her way and she discovers a box guarded by a skull. Unfortunately for her, some strange power makes this compass bone spin wildly, and after fighting off all but one of her pursuers, the final warrior kills her and steals the bone. The scene then cuts to Simon lighting candles for her on his family altar. It’s all the backstory we’re going to get.

Shortly thereafter, the “Mongol” warrior arrives at Simon’s house and gives him a card which turns out to be a key to Master Chan’s corporate headquarters/karate dojo. When Simon obeys his summons, Master Chan solemnly tells him he’s “between the hammer and the anvil.” His magician henchman illustrates his predicament with a dove and red and white silk scarves. After a brief test of Simon’s skills, he’s given an amulet and told that if he wants to avenge his sister he must find the man who wears the same symbol.

Outside the building Simon runs into friends who conveniently inform him that the symbol appears in the sign for a restaurant, apparently run by some evil chicken concern. The friends are attacked, and most of them killed, when they try to investigate. Simon later returns to dine and discovers the restaurant specializes in chicken served by masked waiters who perform magic tricks, while shirtless martial artists demonstrate karate with swords and nunchucks.

You’d think seeing the magicians would give Simon pause, especially after the trick they pull on him (and the random chicken wandering around Master Chan’s offices). Just in case this hint didn’t get through, a whispering waterfall warns Simon to “beware” because “traveling in the spiritual void can be dangerous.”

Traveling in the spiritual void can be dangerous. This line repeats multiple times while Simon experiences an agonizing series of flashbacks. Finally, he suspects Master Chan might not be who he seems. The plot proceeds, with the mystic waterfall providing spoilers to the audience along the way.

This consistent balance between what’s wrong and what’s right makes this film so bad it’s weird and so weird it’s good. The directors (a special effects technician and editor) make some very strange choices, but the high degree of WTF-ery proves to be their greatest strength.

The rapid cut editing in the montage sequences adds needed energy when the action starts to flag. A darkly lit office corridor effectively portrays Simon’s descent into the void (where he just happens to overhear his nemesis complaining that Simon is too powerful and must be stopped).

The score begins as typical operatic orchestral stings, but whenever what little suspense builds, synthy electronics pulse underneath. One of many inexplicable scenes reveals the music is coming from a room in Master Chan’s corporate empire where his white jumpsuited lackeys perform in a band. Why does a karate master have a techno band? In this life there are questions without answers, but in Furious all will be revealed (by a pig), so just wait for it. At only 71 minutes of runtime, you won’t have to wait very long.

Simon’s final showdowns against the magician and Master Chan must be seen to be believed. All those lingering close-ups of elderly ladies happily eating chicken in the restaurant while watching karate suddenly make wonderful and terrible sense, and yet in the end, Furious still makes no sense at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that continuity and reason go out the window with Furious is an understatement. . .Its nonsensical and ridiculous plot, terrible acting and badly-scripted fight scenes are ripe for riffing. The entertainment value on that alone makes it a recommendation. Anyone looking for anything else will be sorely let down and outright confused at what they’re watching.”–Mike Wilson, Bloody Disgusting

Furious [Visual Vengeance Collector's Edition] [Blu-ray]

Furious [Visual Vengeance Collector's Edition] [Blu-ray]
  • The cult martial arts classic, first time ever on Blu-ray. Mystic aliens from the astral plane fight Kung Fu warriors for control of the universe!
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CAPSULE: INFLATABLE SEX DOLL OF THE WASTELANDS (1967)

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Kôya no datchi waifu; AKA Dutch Wife in the Desert

DIRECTED BY: Atsushi Yamatoya

FEATURING: Yûichi Minato, Shôhei Yamamoto, Masayoshi Nogami, Noriko Tatsumi, Mari Nagisa, Miki Watari

PLOT: A shady real estate agent hires a hitman haunted by the killing of his girlfriend to take out the gang responsible for the kidnapping and torture of his mistress.

COMMNETS: Every day at three o’clock in the afternoon a woman screams and the phone rings. It rings while off the hook, it rings when disconnected, it rings even half-buried in the sand of a desert wasteland. Shô always knows when three o’clock strikes because Rie tells him so. At three o’clock five years ago Shô murdered Rie—when she tried to call him and no one answered the phone.

Real estate agent Naka wants to hire a hitman, so Shô waits for three o’clock in a sunblasted middle-of-nowhere. The client needs to know the assassin of his choice can hit his target in three shots or less. Rie screams as Naka leads Shô to a lone evergreen tree, the only one around for miles, because the blood of “snitches” waters it. Shô chops it down in thirteen shots.

After this display of marksmanship, Naka takes Shô back to his city office. He shows the hitman a disturbing film reel of black-hooded goons recording their sexual abuse of Sae, the woman Naka wants Shô to rescue. Naka himself can be glimpsed in the background, tied to a chair and blindfolded, forced to listen while his girlfriend screams. Shô complains about the poor quality of the entertainment. He can’t see anything in a picture so grainy. Naka admits the film might be wearing out. He must have watched it a hundred times by now.

Shô agrees to take the case. He returns to his hotel room to find a naked woman waiting in his bed. He smells more than cheap perfume and forces her into a bathtub. Mina serenades him with a song overflowing with double entendres. Of course she’s part of the trap, she admits it, but Shô’s not like other gangsters. She wants to help him. He clutches his gun while succumbing to her advances, aiming at the door, ready to fire whenever his enemy enters the room.

Wastelands contains all the classic tropes of film noir—an emotionally compromised detective, a slightly seedy and suspect client, a femme fatale—and then some. Fans of may notice eerie similarities to Branded to Kill, also released in 1967 (they make a perfect double feature). Director Atsushi Yamatoya was one of the Guru Hachiro writers responsible for Branded‘s script. Callbacks ricochet like a volley of gunshots across both story arcs: three o’clock, rings (expensive in Branded, cheap in Wastelands), insects, an antagonist named Kô, hitmen obsessed with their reputations, a (maybe snuff) film within the film.

Both movies share a similar sense of fatalistic black humor and a dynamic visual style. The cinematography always goes for the unusual. Odd camera angles enhance ambiguities of space and perspective, adding to the disorientation. A scene with a character walking up a flight of stairs rotates so “down” becomes left with “up” heading to the right. When a henchman gets shot and slumps over a bar counter the camera tilts with him. The rest of the scene remains skewed as though we’re now viewing the film through the lifeless eyes of a corpse.

Plentiful shoot-outs punctuate the action and every actor who gets shot milks his death scene for all it’s worth. By contrast, the female characters lie around motionless and silent. Whether drugged or sleeping, or worse, it’s hard to tell. Aside from Mina, who radiates a voluptuous vitality (repeatedly rejected as untrustworthy), the others, both living and dead, become indistinguishable.

The final confrontation between Shô and the target of his revenge occurs as a protracted contest recalling Branded‘s Hanada and No. 1. After some creative trash talk (“I can see your heart” – “What color is it?” – “Sickly green” – “You’re colorblind”), they vow that by 3:30 pm tomorrow one of them will die.

Like a fly struggling to escape from a forgotten whiskey glass, time traps people in its vise. Outside a window Shô now sees the desert wasteland surrounding him, the same tree still there standing by its lonesome, as if he never shot it down in the first place. Even Sae and Rie begin to resemble each other. Can Shô save the one if death has already claimed the other?

One possible interpretation of the title implies the entire story takes place in a hellish afterlife where ghosts doomed by their former selves relive their last agonizing moments on earth. A blast of fire burns behind the opening credits. Everyone complains about the heat, but there’s never any air conditioning to cool their tempers. There’s nothing but heat (except for Shô’s lighter, which never works whenever he needs a cigarette). This inferno reduces not only women to puppets. The men jerk each other around by strings, but they’re all tangled together, everyone incapable of escaping their own personal purgatory.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“..an enigmatic and paradoxical title, perhaps capturing something of the film’s hybrid, even contradictory nature… It should come as no surprise that Yamatoya, directing from his own script here, had previously helped write Seijun Suzuki’s similarly surreal and abstract take on hitmen, Branded to Kill…”–Anton  Bitel, Little White Lies (2020 screening)

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CAPSULE: THE GOLDEN FERN (1963)

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Zlaté kapradí

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DIRECTED BY: Jiří Weiss

FEATURING: Vít Olmer, Karla Chadimová, Daniela Smutná

PLOT: When a lazy and amorous shepherd steals a golden fern bough from deep in a malevolent forest, a mysterious young woman appears begging him to return it lest dire consequences befall him.

COMMENTS: If fairy tales have taught us anything, it’s that going into the woods at night can be dangerous. The Golden Fern ominously begins in medias res in a dark and moonlit forest. A handsome young man races through the trees; it seems like he’s running from someone, but then he stumbles upon a grove of ferns and triumphantly picks the largest frond. He’s immediately attacked by a flock of angry birds whose screeching fills the air. He fights them off and manages to escape back to his humble peasant’s hut, where he gloats over his trophy. Was this an admirable act of bravery or simply foolish bravado?

There are no easy answers in Weiss’ film, but when a sudden knock sounds at the door, the latter seems more likely. He opens the door and at first only a shadowy figure appears, barely visible in the distance. “Give it back,” a voice urges him. “Give back the fern.”

Our protagonist, Jura (Olmer), hesitates to comply. He wants to know who would command him. Eventually the speaker reveals themselves, and to his surprised delight, the forbidding figure turns out to be a very pretty blonde (Chadimová). This being a fairy tale, he’s not going to give back the fern unless she kisses him first. She continues to insist he must give it back, but he ignores her warnings, and she relents to his clumsy overtures.

What seems like a poor start to a relationship briefly becomes a romantic idyll. The girl, whom Jura calls “Lysanka” because she has no other name, falls in love with him. In her devotion, she steadfastly protects him from the ambiguous influence of the golden fern, which he, of course, fails to return.

Fern was made at the beginning of the , although Weiss represents an older generation than the young film makers who would make names for themselves as part of the innovative and rebellious movement that yielded the Canonically Weird gems The Cremator,  Daisies, and A Report on the Party and Guests. While not quite as anarchic and freewheeling, Weiss displays the absurdist and irreverent black humor that’s a common denominator among Czech directors. This is a pretty dark fairy tale; however, the only truly weird element is the fern itself (unfortunately glimpsed in action in only one scene). Half plant, half beast, and blossoming with mysterious flowers before sprouting a tentacular vine replete with talon-like thorns, this fern looks like a worthy adversary to a monster from one of ‘s cheapo creature features (and I mean that as a complement). In a suspenseful and creepy scene, Lysanka fights the fern in what becomes a battle of wills. She emerges victorious, the possessor of one of its golden seeds.

The clever mix of basic low-budget effects utilized throughout the film enhance the otherworldly atmosphere, and the black and white cinematography fits the ominous tone. Lysanka never explains where she came from or who exactly she is; her pleas on behalf of the fern make her initially appear as its ally, until it reveals itself to be an opposing force. Jura remains oblivious of the magical powers surrounding him, simply losing himself in Lysanka’s love and beauty.

After defeating the golden fern, Lysanka sews the golden seed into a seam in Jura’s shirt. When he gets drunk at a tavern and ends up shanghaied into the army, it spells the end of their affair. She begs him to never exchange the shirt for another. He promises he won’t, but it’s Jura’s inability to follow good advice that landed him in this dire situation in the first place.

The setting then shifts to the frontier of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, where the Empress’ forces are at war with the Turkish military. This second half of the film has prompted comparisons to  The Saragossa Manuscript , but Golden Fern never reaches levels of surrealism. After a somewhat minor act of courage (literally capturing a flag from the enemy), the general promotes Jura to officer.

While the upper ranks continue to ridicule him for his slow-witted peasant ways, Jura unwisely begins a flirtation with the general’s gorgeous and aloof daughter (Smutná). First inspired by the possibility that she’ll convince her father to release him from his military service so he can return to Lysanka, she predictably beguiles Jura into attempting a series of increasingly dangerous tasks.

Learning from a fortune teller how to capture the general’s daughter’s heart, Jura risks his life to infiltrate the enemy camp. When he’s caught half-dead and disguised as a Turk after completing his mission, his commanders immediately assume Jura has turned traitor. The general’s daughter coldly abandons to him his fate as the gears of military justice grind into action; laws which seem as cruel and arbitrary as the mysterious rules of the forest. Even in a world of magic ferns and fae spirits, people still kill each other, mock each other, and fall in love—human nature is both triumph and tragedy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Czech writer-director Jiří Weiss’s The Golden Fern is a dark and haunting fairy tale, albeit one that’s grounded in an earthy naturalism. Rather than lean heavily into the surreal, as these films often do, Weiss subtly weaves elements of the magical or miraculous into an otherwise straightforward narrative, thereby cannily introducing aspects of the uncanny.”–Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine (Blu-ray)

The Golden Fern [Blu-ray]

The Golden Fern [Blu-ray]
  • Czech director Jiří Weiss's breathtaking B&W fantasy about a stunning young forest fairy who falls in love with a handsome but selfish shepherd
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Apocryphally Weird

59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972)

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Requiem pour un vampire, AKA Vierges et Vampires, Caged Virgins

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“[M]ore than thirty years later, Requiem remains one of my favorite films. In my view, it’s a real naïve film, written naively without thought, almost automatic writing, without prior idea and above all without reflection. It’s nothing else but a simple stream of ideas out of an unconstituted imagination. It’s a real ‘B’ movie with all that that involves. No intellectual reflection, no intentional symbolism. Nothing but this free and disordered imagery which I care so much about.” —, “The Making of Requiem for a Vampire” (2005)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: , Mareille Dargent, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle

PLOT: Two teenage delinquents disguised as clowns escape unknown pursuers in a car; their getaway driver is gunned down in the chase. After escaping they remove their harlequin makeup and make their way across the countryside. They are eventually bitten by bats and wind up trapped in the medieval castle lair of a dying vampire and his minions.

BACKGROUND:

  • Rollin’s script for his fourth film, written in two days in a stream of consciousness, evolved out of two scenes: the car chase through the countryside and the piano concert in the cemetery.
  • The first half of the film is nearly silent. Inspired by the pioneering adventure serials of Louis Feuillade, Rollin chose to emphasize the action sequences by keeping them mostly dialogue-free.
  • The art direction was inspired by surrealist painters Clovis Trouille and Paul Delvaux.
  • The dungeon scenes were filmed in the twelfth century Château de la Roche-Guyon, after the crew was evicted from their first choice of castle when the owner caught sight of the film’s nudity. Edmée, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld never saw the script; she agreed to rent her chateau for filming under the impression the story was, in Rollin’s words, “a sort of fairytale.”
  • The dungeon torture scene is ten minutes long, the minimum length of sleaze sales agent Lionel Wallman required in order to sell the film on the international grindhouse circuit. Wallman also donated the getaway car that gets shot to pieces and set on fire.
  • Interpol briefly investigated the film’s production after local gendarmes discovered the shot-up car with Belgian plates in a secluded patch of forest and assumed it belonged to foreign drug traffickers.
  • The cemetery scenes were filmed in a burial ground for medieval plague victims in Crèvecoeur-en-Auge, a small village in Normandy, believed by locals to be cursed.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many fantastic scenes in Requiem haunt the mind (the vampire Erika playing the organ in a chapel to an audience of skeleton monks, the crimson torture chamber, the master vampire’s coffin in a green-glowing crypt), but the two main characters dressed as stock clowns stand out whenever they appear, whether in a golden field, a collapsing barn, or a cemetery at dusk.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Clown car getaway; vagina bat

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A car chase gunfight along a winding country road; a solitary food truck in the middle of nowhere; a motorcycle in an abandoned water tower; a chapel doorway glowing crimson in the dead of night. Requiem for a Vampire transitions from scene to scene with the abrupt illogical shifts of a dream, as the intrepid heroines traverse a deserted landscape freighted with mystery. Mysterious themselves, the girls transform from clowns to teenage outlaws with handguns in their miniskirts. It remains unknown quite how they’ve ended up here, who was chasing them, and even where “here” is.

Trailer for Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

COMMENTS: Disregard for normal narrative conventions (establishing the setting, introducing the characters) give Rollin’s films a Continue reading 59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972) →

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CAPSULE: LES SAIGNANTES (2005)

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AKA The Bloodettes, The Bloodiest

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DIRECTED BY: Jean-Pierre Bekolo

FEATURING: Adéle Ado, , Emile Abossolo

PLOT: When a high-ranking government official dies, Majolie enlists her best friend to segue the disaster into a business opportunity by throwing a trendy W.I.P.: “Wake for an Important Personality.”

COMMENTS: As said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro; and that’s exactly what these plucky heroines do. Set in the neon-drenched perpetual night of Yaounde, Cameroon, twenty years in the future, Bekolo’s genre-hopping Afro-futurist tale depicts a city caught up in the competing influences of power, money, sex, and an ancient elemental force called Mevoungou.

Majolie only discovers her client’s identity when searching his wallet after he suddenly expires from a heart attack during an acrobatic aerialist kink session. To her distress, he’s nearly ninety years old and not just a “granddaddy” but the “SGCC”: Secretary General of the Civil Cabinet. She calls her friend Chouchou to help her out of this mess, then promptly gets drunk.

After killing a bottle of whiskey together, the girls acknowledge the ominous presence of the spirit Mevoungou. Risking the danger of channeling this ambiguous power, they steal the SGCC’s AI driven car to dispose of the official’s body. To further complicate matters, Chouchou’s mother, attended by a bevy of mysterious Bene Gesserit-like priestesses, keeps calling her, arousing the suspicions of an idealistic young cop.

Throughout the course of their night the girls dodge a number of questionable characters, including an insolent cab driver and a nosy neighbor who invites herself along for the ride, along with the mundane inconveniences of a society rife with sexual harassment and government corruption. After bribing a cannibal butcher to chop up the body (he weeps when he tastes SGCC flesh), the girls hit upon the idea of holding a wake—except they need a full corpse to make that happen, and they now only have the head.

Bribing a mortician turns out to be a troublesome task. He’s annoyed at being dragged out his bed in order to supply a body and asks for far too much money. Chouchou doesn’t want to pay him, but Majolie insists the fee will be worth it. In an office decorated with a fish tank full of body parts they continue to haggle over the price. Once they reach a deal, the girls look over the unclaimed bodies to find a good match.

After a narrow escape from the Madame Director of the hospital, the girls dress for the funeral. The Wake for an Important Personality at first goes off without a hitch: a crowd shows up, there’s lots of food and drink, and even the SGCC’s family attends. The only minor disturbance occurs when his wife and daughter tearfully insist the body isn’t his. The girls catch the eye of Minister of State and target him as their new patron. Unfortunately, he too knows how to channel Mevoungou, and they find themselves facing a daunting adversary.

Simple and effective camera techniques (dissolves and double-exposures) conjure a world animated by unseen forces. The futuristic 2025 technology, from camera phones to self-driven cars with English-speaking interfaces, appears disconcertingly accurate (as does the tag line “We were already in 2025, and nothing much had changed”).

Action sequences pay homage to The Matrix, but the derivative fight scenes quickly give way to Majolie and Chouchou’s mesmerizing synchronized dances. In the final showdown they confront their enemy, and in order to preserve their autonomy must also fight off the potentially destructive influence of Mevoungou. Much remains unexplained about this enigmatic entity which kills, and laughs, and dances. It flows through the film like a current of weirdness and, much like in real life, whether the weird brings change for good or ill all depends on how you react to it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as fascinating as it is obscure… Although the production values of this digitally shot film are threadbare, the bizarre visions of writer-director-editor Bekolo are not.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)