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Capsules

CAPSULE: LOVE & CRIME (1969)

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Meiji · Taishô · Shôwa: Ryôki onna hanzai-shi

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Rika Fujie, Yukie Kagawa, Yoshio Kodaira, Teruko Yumi

PLOT: His wife’s suicide inspires a mortician to consider four famous Japanese crimes of passion.

Still from love and crime (1969)

COMMENTS: The fact that Love & Crime begins with a gory autopsy of an attractive nude woman should let you know where it’s coming from. Even more perversely, said autopsy is performed by the decedent’s husband—shouldn’t the morgue have a rule against that?—and he’s not as visibly torn up about it as you might assume. The verdict is suicide, complicated by the fact that another man’s semen was found in the body.

Instead of  a) mourning or b) launching an investigation into his dead wife’s private life, the doctor instead opts to c) travel around Japan and interview people associated with infamous recent crimes of passion, in hopes of gaining insight into his wife’s psychological state (?) These consist of the noirish story of a seductress in a love quadrangle who directly and indirectly murders to gain possession of an inn, the case of Sada Abe (who cut off her lover’s penis and whose story would later form the basis for‘s In the Realm of the Senses), a serial killer rapist, and a woman who becomes a killer after her husband develops leprosy.

These case studies are all told as flashbacks, and each of the flashbacks themselves consistently include at least one more flashback. This confusing structure can make the stories difficult to follow, especially for modern Western viewers who aren’t the least bit familiar with the true crime inspirations. (At least one reviewer didn’t realize the beheaded woman and the leper’s wife were the same story, and it’s not hard to see how the confusion arises.) Adding to the disjointed feel, the third story—that of the postwar rapist—is completely out of tone with the other two. It’s the only one in black and white and the only one where a male killer is the chief subject. And while the previous two stories ranged from naughty to gruesome, this one is brutally unpleasant and unrewarding. Unlike the more story-based segments that came before, it’s essentially a series of repeated rape/killing re-enactments, with the perp using exactly the same m.o. each time. Why was this segment even included in the doctor’s purported search to find the root causes of female crime? In a classic bit of patriarchal logic, our doctor wonders, “Did the evil that lives within all women cry out to him? Is it women’s bodies that drive men to madness? Or rather, is it women themselves that they drive mad?” Huh?

The wraparound story is terrible, a shameless and poorly-though-out pretext for introducing scenes of sex and violence. But Ishii nevertheless proves a talented stylist. The camerawork is superior. Scenes are thoughtfully framed and staged. There are numerous artistic closeups. At trial, Sada Abe recounts her love affair and as she becomes absorbed in her memories, the background spectators fade into shadow and the camera zooms in on her schoolgirl-prim, spotlit face. The score, which utilizes what sounds like footsteps echoing down a hallway and other atmospheric noises as percussive effects, is impressive. These sleazy misogynist melodramas don’t deserve the cinematic style Ishii expends on them. Fortunately, the prolific director would find material worthier of his talents with his next two projects, the adaptation Horrors of Malformed Men and the supernatural samurai film Blind Woman’s Curse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an entertaining mix of sleazy exploitation and arthouse-style direction that, if light on the social commentary you might expect, delivers a solid mix of lurid thrills and strong production values.”–Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop! (Blu-ray)

Love And Crime [Blu-ray]

Love And Crime [Blu-ray]
  • Director Teruo Ishii delivers four dramatized tales of real-life crimes of passion involving women across the ages in this grotesque anthology.
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LIVE FREAKY! DIE FREAKY! (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: John Roecker

FEATURING: Voices of Billie Joe Armstrong, Tim Armstrong, Theo Kogan, Kelly Osbourne, Davey Havok, Asia Argento, John Doe, Jane Wiedlin

PLOT: A denizen of a future, post-apocalyptic landscape discovers an account of a narcissistic cult leader and his murderous spree in Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century. 

Still from Live freaky, die freaky! (2006)

COMMENTS: A line of defense of bad comedians is to complain when they get called on the carpet for telling offensive jokes that punch down. “Don’t be so offended,” they love to say. So it’s not an auspicious start for Live Freaky! Die Freaky! to kick off with a title card that warns us, “Rated X, not for the easily offended.” It’s a litmus test. If you’re in any way put off by what follows, you have no one to blame but your own uncool bleeding heart. Because giving offense is very much the order of the day.

Make no mistake, writer-director Roecker wants so very badly to shock you with his profane irreverence. Live Freaky! is a bouillabaisse of slanderous characterizations, insulting stereotypes, cheeky musical numbers, and puppet gore. It’s a parade of sub-“Davey and Goliath” animations naughtily saying the dirtiest things they can think of, and then winding up covered in blood. Everyone fails every possible variation of the Bechdel test because everyone endlessly boasts about their depraved sex practices (and one character indulges himself even after death). The meet-cute between the film’s lunatic messiah and one of his aspiring acolytes is a lengthy scene of explicit stop-motion doll sex while singing a jaunty music hall tune. It’s the creation of someone who saw Team America and concluded that the way to make that film’s notorious sex scene funnier would be to just do more of it. 

I suppose Live Freaky! is a bold example of not really caring about anything at all. From the moment we see a live-action post-apocalypse vagrant unearth an old copy of Healter Skelter (sic), we’re launched into a looking-glass version of the Charles Manson story where the inexplicably charismatic miscreant may be bad, but at least he’s a man of the people. His victims are portrayed as even worse: drug-addled, sex-obsessed, vulgar and dismissive of anyone who isn’t rich or famous like they are. Oh, wait. I’m sorry. Did I say Charles Manson? Of course I meant Charles Hanson. Absolutely nothing to do with that other fellow. In fact, you can tell that the filmmakers have done their due diligence removing any trace of the Manson family’s rampage,  because while the names may all seem familiar, they’ve cleverly replaced every first initial with an H. Yep, this story is about Sharon Hate and her friends Hay and Habigail. Totally different. You can’t possibly sue them. It’s all 3-D chess with these guys.  

The movie openly embraces a punk aesthetic, which is presumably why the voice cast is comprised of several major figures from the punk rock scene, led by Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong essaying Charlie through what feels like a Redd Foxx impression. He’s joined by Tim Armstrong (no relation) from Rancid, John Doe of X, plus friends from Good Charlotte, AFI, Blink-182, Tiger Army, White Zombie, Lunachicks, and the Transplants. (Also Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s, which is just depressing.) And then they hand this collection of punk all-stars a series of lame songs without an ounce of punk in them. And aside from their punk bonafides, the other thing cast all have in common is that none of them can act. Every line is delivered as if it was the only take of a script received five minutes before recording. The closest thing we have to a professional actor, Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Kelly, plays her grotesquely vain socialite with the same snooty, over-enunciated whine throughout. The best analogy for the cast I can think of is a bunch of friends who come over to help you move. Everyone’s there to lend a hand, but they’re really just there for the pizza.

This kind of thing is tolerable in a show like, say, South Park because the creators are such committed libertarians. Yes, they’re bomb-throwers, but their targets are usually the high and mighty, the terminally humorless, and blinkered illogicians. There’s a brief glimmer of satire in Live Freaky! in a 20-second scene where the prosecuting attorney bemoans the degeneracy of Charlie and his crew, and then celebrates all the money he’s going to make off the book he’s writing about the case. But that’s it. Who is the movie really out to take down? Hollywood, maybe, although not any Hollywood that bears relation to life as lived by actual human beings. The rich? They’re not so much worse than the murderous, dumpster-diving poor. No, there’s no real target here, except the audience. Basically, the filmmakers are just hoping someone will take offense. They want the glory of having ruined someone else’s day. Well, mission accomplished.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This 2003 [sic] film is a weird concept, done in a weird way and done with a weird sensibility.  Nothing about this feels normal… To quote a great man, ‘This movie sucks!'”– Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

(This movie was nominated for review by Sam, who called it “Pretty terrible, but incredibly weird!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Live Freaky Die Freaky

Live Freaky Die Freaky
  • Factory sealed DVD
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: John Patrick Shanley

FEATURING: , , ,

PLOT: A terminally-ill sales executive quits his dreary job and agrees to jump into a volcano.

Still from Joe vs. the Volcano (1990)

COMMENTS: What makes a man give up a career as a firefighter—enthusiastic, feeling good all the time, and casually courageous—to become an administrative drone at the worst factory this side of Staten Island? Apparently it’s three-hundred dollars a week. That’s small change for getting your spirit crushed eight hours a day: working under a foul-tempered boss, drinking arsenic coffee, and feeling your brain fry as you soak up the rays of droning fluorescent lights.

And what makes a man throw everything away and opt to willingly toss himself into a volcano?

This second question makes up the bulk of John Patrick Shanley’s directorial debut, Joe Versus the Volcano. (Which, for the longest time, was the famed screenwriters only directorial outing.) Shanley is at his peak picaresque powers, impressively avoiding the “cutesy trap” as he maneuvers his charming leads—and guest actors—through a well-paced, well-plotted, well-shot adventure, toward a seemingly inevitable end. Indeed, there’s so much buoyancy in the cast and tone that the semi-demi-hemi-twist of fate ends up being, in hindsight, the only viable fate for our passive hero.

Odd and awful, Hedaya steals his ten minutes as a supervisor; despite half his lines being over the telephone—and half of those lines being “I didn’t say that!” Comedy stalwart Lloyd Bridges swans in as a rogue fairy godmother, belittling Joe and his apartment before offering the improbable plot hook, just after opening a canister of salted peanuts and emptying them on the coffee table. And thrice-credited Meg Ryan delights as the three women Joe pursues (well, ends up in the vicinity of by mere happenstance…), showing a playful versatility which mirrors the trajectory of Joe’s self awareness.

Joe Versus the Volcano does more than immolate us in a firewall of charm. Joe’s job at “Parascope” (famed both for its rectal probes and impressive petroleum jelly sales) is a Dantean combination of German Expressionism and grime. The jagged pathway to the godawful factory (which mimicks Parascope’s trade logo while bringing to mind Caligarian sets) delivers us, from the start, into the blurry, grit-sheened hell of industrial living. We meet Joe here, and Joe needs must be Hanks. We need to like this loser, who has fallen from grace (or whatever echelon former-firefighters fall from). His performance is a charismatic variation of Ryan O’Neal’s turn as Barry Lyndon. But whereas O’Neal’s Lyndon was mired in a cynically reactive worldview, Hanks’ Joe is capable of awe and appreciation—which is why Shanley’s fluffy romcom works so well, and why we end up heartily rooting for Joe to overcome the looming trial-by-magma.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gradually during the opening scenes of Joe Versus the Volcano, my heart began to quicken, until finally I realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before… Hanks and Ryan … inhabit the logic of this bizarre world and play by its rules. ” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Joe Versus the Volcano [Blu-ray]

Joe Versus the Volcano [Blu-ray]
  • Polish Release, cover may contain Polish text/markings. The disk has English audio.
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE COMING OF SIN (1978)

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La Visita del Vicio;  AKA Vice Makes a Visit

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DIRECTED BY: José Ramon Larraz

FEATURING: Patricia Granada, Lidia Zuazo, Rafael Machado

PLOT: An orphaned girl haunted by prophetic dreams becomes the maid of a wealthy young widow.

Still from the coming of sin (1978)

COMMENTS: If asked by a producer to make a “sexy movie,” not many directors would combine the unsettling atmosphere of Belgian weird fiction with the Tenebrism of the Spanish Baroque, and then mix it all up with an ancient Greek myth about bestiality. José Ramon Larraz does just that. The tale of Pasiphaë provides the surreal imagery; the painting of Diego Velazquez the light and shadows; and the setting, an isolated country manor house, is straight out of Thomas Owen, along with the film’s shockingly violent conclusion.

Trianna (Zuazo) suffers from a recurring nightmare. An orphan without any family, she ends up working for Lorna (Granada), an eccentric and independent widow living alone in the remote countryside. When Lorna asks Trianna about her dream, she says there’s a man on a horse and he frightens her, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. They drop the subject and soon fall into a cozy domesticity which eventually develops into a full-on Sapphic relationship.

When the subject of her nightmare appears in real life—a nude young man riding a black horse bareback—he terrifies Trianna (and tramples the rose bushes in the process). Trianna greets him with a double-barreled shotgun. “That’s no reason to shoot somebody,” Lorna tells her.

Lorna insists Trianna’s nightmare results from her fear of sex and/or men; she has books that will explain it all to her, but illiteracy saves Trianna from having to read volumes of pop psychology. Instead, she visits the local fortune-teller, who asks why she even bothered to come, since her fate is sealed. Trianna is the devil’s child; and if she and the man on the black horse ever become a couple then someone will die.

After this disturbing revelation, the young man on the horse becomes a regular guest at Lorna’s house; she insists he learn some manners, so he begins wearing pants when he joins the ladies for tea. Eventually Chico (Machado) becomes the lover of both Trianna and Lorna, despite Trianna’s fears. Though Chico wants Trianna, Lorna begins aggressively pursuing him, unbalancing their fragile love triangle.

In between orgies, they visit the local museum, a nightclub where two female dancers perform a tango, and Lorna convinces Trianna and Chico to pose half-naked together for her latest painting. Lorna insists the pair would make a fine couple, even as she continues her clandestine visits to Chico’s shack down by the river. To make her assignations, Lorna passes through towering reeds, a landscape vividly described in Owen’s “The Conquered Beauty and the Troubadour,” wherein gunshots obliterate the post-coital calm of a summer afternoon.

Larraz started his artistic career as a comic book illustrator, and Spain’s then-restrictive censorship laws drove him to other parts of Europe. He turned to directing films after a chance meeting with Josef von Sternberg in Brussels, where Larraz also met Owen, friend of Jean Ray, the author of the novel Malpertuis. The influence of these two men shaped the course of Larraz’s idiosyncratic film career. The Coming of Sin was made in Spain upon his return at the end of the Franco regime.

In interviews, Larraz claims that every one of his films is actually a Thomas Owen story. Larraz wears this inspiration on his sleeve, but anyone who hasn’t read Owen’s work won’t recognize him as Larraz’s muse, and he’s never mentioned in the credits. Owen was a fan of old dark house stories (one of his collections is titled “Les Maisons suspectes”), and Larraz clearly shares this obsession. His first film, 1970’s Whirlpool, takes place in an isolated house outside of London, where the protagonists get up to artsy, sexy, and occasionally murderous menages á trois, as they do in The Coming of Sin.

In Owen’s stories uncanny events fracture mundane life. Old mansions reveal to strangers worlds unto themselves, where the normal rules of everyday existence no longer apply. The Coming of Sin exists in numerous cuts and under a plethora of titles (S&M scenes were excised from some versions, or augmented with hardcore footage in others), but Owen’s themes are the focus in Larraz’s original. When Trianna and Chico intrude upon Lorna’s den of solitude they set in motion the hand of fate.

The films of Larraz (AKA J. R. Larrath) are admittedly something of an acquired taste. Like and , his pacing can be slow, the scenery repetitive, the amateur acting impeded by stilted dialogue. He had the makings of a genuine auteur; his film Symptoms was England’s submission to Cannes in 1974, where it received favorable notice from French audiences. Despite that success, Larraz primarily worked in low budget Eurotrash productions, his wild imagination sacrificed to excessive sex scenes and gore at the behest of producers. But no matter how cheap or sleazy the film, Larraz always retained his artist’s eye, and he speaks in his own voice, a unique downbeat tone with a heart of weird fiction hidden at the core.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

‘…another Larraz offering that is almost weirdly suffused with a near hallucinogenic, dreamlike ambience, despite some of the more shocking aspects of the visuals.”–Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Arrow box set)

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool /
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GANDU (2010)

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AKA The Loser

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DIRECTED BY: Qaushiq Mukherjee

FEATURING: Anubrata Basu, Joyraj Bhattacharjee, Kamalika Banerjee, Silajit Majumder, Rii Sen

PLOT: A young man in the slums of Kolkata ekes out a mindless existence, dreaming of getting out and becoming a famous rapper.

Still from gandu (2010)

COMMENTS: “Gandu” doesn’t translate literally as “loser.” That’s a polite interpretation for the benefit of weak-hearted English speakers. The most common reading is “asshole.” (The subtitles default to that term, although some onscreen interviewees say even worse.) So the fact that our hero is not only called Gandu but willingly responds to the slur tells us a lot about him. He’s not just bad; he’s happy to make you think he is.

Gandu’s world is one of dreary hopelessness. His mother spends the day in thrall to her boyfriend, the owner of the local internet café where sad people try to reach their loved ones over terrible connections. The young man whiles away the day by stealing from his mother’s beau while the couple is having sex (he literally crawls into the bedroom to lift the cash) and heads out into the streets to find no prospects for employment or romance, placing bets in a numbers racket that is never going to come through and dreaming of becoming a rap star. We get peeks at Gandu’s rap game, and while he throws down some decent verses, the biggest thing he brings to the table is anger.

The story gets some necessary development when Gandu is nearly run down by a rickshaw. While his instinct is to get mad, he changes his tune when he meets the driver, a friendly fellow curiously named Ricksha who idolizes Bruce Lee, to the point of adopting the legendary star’s hairstyle and building a shrine to him. Ricksha isn’t going any further in life than Gandu is, but he’s more satisfied with his lot, and the two make an appealing pair: Gandu sullenly bemoans his fate, and Ricksha encourages his new pal to at least try for his own level of achievement.

Gandu goes on like this for a while, with the two men living life in a loop, while documentary interviews pop in to express the wider world’s general contempt for their sort. However, in the third act, the film takes a big swing, demolishing the fourth wall to make a point about exactly these kinds of stories. Gandu, having been caught stealing and booted out of his home, contemplates ending it all. Ricksha has an alternate plan: get high on the best stuff there is, the drugs of the gods. Clearly, these do the job, because shortly after dosing, Gandu learns that there is a filmmaker named Quashiq Mukherjee (“Q”) who is making a movie about him. Q in fact shows up, camera already filming, and then the dominoes come a-tumbling. Gandu’s lottery tickets finally win, and win big. A record deal quickly falls into place. The hand-scrawled credits that opened the film are replaced with new, slick, professionally designed titles. Most notably, this loser who has been reduced to self-pleasuring while watching porn finds himself in the company of a pink-haired prostitute who takes his virginity, an occasion so momentous that the film switches to color to capture the event in all its unsimulated splendor.

All the while, Q takes shots at the Indian film industry. At the outset, he jettisons the raucous colors, fantastical storylines, and elaborate musical numbers in favor of stark monochrome, brutal realism, and hardcore rap. Then, twisting the knife further, he produces a deus ex machina to give Gandu the obligatory happy ending, but he does so in the most anti-Bollywood way possible: the rap numbers are professionally produced. The romance is pornographic sex. The hero who saves the day is… the director himself. An audience member has the choice of indulging in this absurd grotesque fantasia or accepting the likely possibility that we’re watching Gandu’s last magnificent dream before succumbing to the drugs in his system. Either way, Q refuses to play by the Indian film world’s rules.

Even if you err on the side of the “rap conquers all” interpretation, Gandu is a grim watch. For all of Q’s inventive storytelling, no one in the movie has any real agency or plays an active role in their own lives (as may be true for many of the residents of Kolkata’s slums). For all the rejection of the illusions of the silver screen, the alternative is aimless and hopeless. Gandu is insightful and daring, but in the end, it doesn’t really go anywhere. You can throw magic at him, but the hero never changes. He’s just an asshole.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hte film begins in an almost realist style… until they eventually descend into hard drug abuse, at which point the film takes an extremely surreal, post modern tangent.  A mess from start to finish, [Gandu] nevertheless guarantees a unique ride.” – Daniel Green, Cinevue

(This movie was nominated for review by… um… by Gandu. Hmm. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)      

Gandu

Gandu
  • Factory sealed DVD
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