Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

THE RAPTURE (1991)

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As part of our continuing effort to restore all the posts lost in the Great Server Crash of 2010, we’re reprinting this column from Alfred Eaker’s Fringe Cinema, originally published on Oct. 14, 2010.

Once upon a time there was a breed known as independent filmmakers. Usually with shoestring budgets, the indies, taking no prisoners, discarded business plans, forgot to look at marketing strategies, and the image of a proposed target audience was as abstract and surreal to them as their films often were to audiences. The indies were decidedly reactionary to the Hollywood institution. Maya Deren once said “I make films for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” It was the indies who were progressively harking back to the dawn of cinema, before the rules of filmmaking had been established and canonized.

Stanley Kubrick was the closest Hollywood would get to the indie spirit, but Kubrick, for all his aesthetic brilliance, was, essentially, an academic. Whatever Kubrick’s genre, be it sci-fi, porn, horror, war, swashbuckler, his approach stemmed from a safe classroom distance. Kubrick lacked the fevered intensity and aesthetic struggle of the indies, and subjects such as horror and sex were rendered as studies and, therefore, matters on somewhat safe critical ground for the mainstream.

Newly minted and authorized film critics, such as Roger Ebert, would lavish heaps of praise on Dr. Kubrick, but Ebert was clearly out of his ivory towered ball park when trying to grasp the likes of Larry Cohen‘s God Told Me To or Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which is unfortunate considering Ebert once scripted for Hollywood outsider Russ Meyer.

Still from The Rapture (1991)The 1990s was the last real decade of the independents. Even by then, they were becoming an extinct breed, and in their place were the new breed of timid indie-lites, who merely emulate the Hollywood recipe without having the budget for the high priced, bland ingredients.

In 1991 Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture did what an independent film is supposed to do: took critics by surprise. Some critics Continue reading THE RAPTURE (1991) →

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CAPSULE: DON’T LOOK BACK [NE TE RETOURNE PAS] (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Marina de Van

FEATURING: Sophie Marceau, , Andrea Di Stefano

PLOT: As she struggles to write an autobiographical novel, a writer with childhood amnesia finds that everything she sees—her apartment, her husband’s face, and even her own image in the mirror—is changing into something unfamiliar.

Still from Don't Look Back [Ne te retourne pas] (2009)

 

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The sophomore effort by rising bizarre star Marina de Van arrives as a slight disappointment.  The opening segments are disquieting without being bang-up weird, and by the end the mystery is resolved too completely, leaving nothing to linger in the mind.

COMMENTS:  Don’t Look Back mines the psychological terrain of jamais vu: the strange feeling you get when you enter a room you’ve been in hundreds of times and everything suddenly looks different, or when you look at the face of the person you’ve slept next to for a decade and see a stranger.  Sophie Marceau begins as Jeanne, the woman who finds that her kitchen furniture has been rearranged, the Paris city streets are no longer familiar, and her husband and children are making strange hand gestures when she’s not looking.  Initially she just seems paranoid, but the incidents keep building until finally her entire family has been replaced by different actors whom she doesn’t recognize, and we’re convinced there’s something seriously amiss inside Jeanne’s mind.  The breaking point comes when she looks into the mirror and sees an unfamiliar face staring back at her—on her left side, she still looks like Sophie Marceau, but the right side of the image is the face of Monica Bellucci.  Based on a clue she finds in a photo, Jeanne (now being played by Bellucci rather than Marceau) travels to an Italian village where she finds herself in a situation that’s almost the reverse of Paris: she recognizes the faces she sees as those of her husband, mother, etc., but no one she encounters seems to have a clue as to who she is.   It’s an intriguing premise, and the film is sincere, well-executed, and clever—and it’s also one of those movies where, by the end, you’re puzzled why it’s turned out merely solid rather than exceptional.  Part of the problem is the pace.  The movie starts slow, and keeps piling up weird incidents long after we’ve gotten the point that something’s cracked inside Jeanne and are anxious to get moving towards some answers.  The use of horror movie music cues to inform us that something uncanny is taking place is overdone and gauche, almost to the point of parody.  Containing two episodes of traumatically interrupted intercourse and more than a hint of incest, the movie flirts with ideas of sexual repression and perversion that, in the end, turn out to have nothing to do with Jeanne’s psychology.  And although the movie gets into a nice weird groove in the run up to the finale, where Jeanne now seems to be turning from Bellucci into a third actress at a wild village party, the script explains itself too completely by the end.  Although the solution to the mystery is intellectually satisfying, it doesn’t provide the emotional chills and thrills it should.  Looking back on the “clues” scattered through the earlier parts of the film, you realize that many of them didn’t add up; they were just arbitrary strange occurrences that let you know something was off but didn’t assist you to guess what it was, and so you feel cheated.  That said, the ending is unexpected and should keep you interested enough to keep watching.  The half Marceau/half Bellucci effect is truly novel and uncanny.  And the performances by the two French beauties are superlative: Marceau sets up the character, but it’s remarkable how Bellucci picks her up mannerisms so that you never question that this is the same character inhabiting two different bodies (to a lesser extent, the same compliment can be applied to Andrea Di Stefano and Thierry Neuvic, the two men who play Jeanne’s husband).  The end result is not a disaster, but given everything the movie apparently has going in its favor, it’s underwhelming.

De Van’s previous film was In My Skin [Dans Ma Peau] (2002), a shocking and mysterious portrait of a woman’s obsessive self-mutilation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a traumatic and reductive incident from Marceau/Bellucci’s past is to blame—hence the title—which makes the entire film feel like the laborious setup for a dopey Twilight Zone twist.”–Mike D’Angelo, Onion A.V. Club (Cannes screening)

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CAPSULE: BIG MONEY RUSTLAS (2010)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Paul Andresen

FEATURING: Violent J, Shaggy 2 Dope

PLOT: Sugar Wolf, son of slain sheriff Grizzly Wolf, returns to restore law and order to the town of Mudbug, now in the grips of gambling baron Baby Chips.

Still from Big Money Rustlas (2010)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the fact that both hero and villain wear “insane” clown makeup and speak in hip-hop patois, it’s the existence of this movie that’s really strange, not its content.

COMMENTS:  If you assumed there was no way a Western performed by washed-up white rap stars in greasepaint could fail to deliver some sort of camp value, then you’ve seriously underestimated the lack of wit of the bizarre cultural phenomenon known as the Insane Clown Posse. (So you’ll know what you’re getting into, in the DVD commentary, clown Shaggy 2 Dope confesses that, to him, a closeup of a horse’s anus is the funniest feces ever [to paraphrase]). Starting from a script that would have been rejected by Troma studios as too lowbrow, tasteless and juvenile, Big Money Rustlas ambles its way onto the screen with all the charm of a syphilitic cowpoke and all comedy value of Eminem doing a vaudeville routine. Since they’re merely inserting their generic gangsta personae into a generic Western revenge tale, the insane clowns need to stuff the movie full of gags to keep up the interest for ninety minutes; but the jokes overwhelmingly fall flat. The incongruity of two dudes in Stetson hats and evil harlequin makeup speaking dialogue like “give him his f***in’ money you platypus lookin’ motherf***er!” only goes so far. The novelty value fades away after about fifteen or twenty minutes, and Shaggy and Violent’s boastful, grating personalities take over instead. To be fair, there are a few decent jokes in Rustlas: Sugar Wolf’s mother, the town prostitute, also wears clown makeup, and there’s an Indian who sits by the town entrance with a jar of corn liquor and changes the Mudbug population sign every time a villager is killed. There are also isolated weird moments to jerk you awake: a gunfighter who inexplicably shoots laser beams from his eyeballs, and an S&M whipping scene with a mini-dominatrix lashing a clown wearing a baby bonnet. Most of what little entertainment value there is here, however, comes from watching the parade of near-celebrity cameos: besides relatively big roles for cult star Jason Mewes (the “Jay” of “Jay and Silent Bob,”) and retired dwarf porn star Bridgette Powerz, we also catch sight of Todd Bridges, Jimmy Walker, Brigitte Neilsen, wrestler Jimmy Hart, Dustin Diamond, Vanilla Ice, Tom Sizemore (!), and Ron Jeremy (it just wouldn’t be a crappy low budget comedy without a Hedgehog sighting). Most of the cast is made up of rap “stars” unknown outside of the Insane Clown Posse galaxy, guys like Monoxide, Boondox and (I kid you not) Blaze Ya Dead Homie. There is no rap music outside of the opening credits. More surprisingly, in a movie packed with profanity, violence, homophobia, toilet humor, and macho posturing, there is no nudity; this must be because of the Insane Clown Posse’s enormous respect for bitches.

This movie is a more expensive remake of/prequel to Insane Clown Posse’s 2000 effort Big Money Hustlas (which told the same basic story in a faux-blaxploitation style). Insane Clown Posse is a rap duo who had some success in the late 1990s. Until this movie, I was unaware that they still had a dedicated cult following (emphasis on “cult”) a decade later. ICP have created a small media empire for their fans, consisting of a stable of all-white rappers on their own “Psychopathic Records” label, an internet radio station, and a pro wrestling venture. Followers call themselves “juggalos,” emulate their hero’s makeup, and have their own private lingo revolving around “clown love.” If this internet petition is to be believed, some of them consider being a juggalo to be a religion. There have been so many violent incidents involving ICP fans (including the stoning of former bisexual reality star turned failed rapper Tila Tequila) that “juggalos” have been defined as a gang in some school districts. The fact that the mediocre music of these two arrested adolescents could inspire such slavish devotion in thousands of susceptible youth, without the band having scored a charting single since 1998, is far weirder than anything Shaggy and Violent could ever put on film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…what the movie is essentially about is how much more awesome the two guys in clown makeup are than anyone else they encounter. That’s the movie’s worldview: women are objects, and anyone not wearing clown makeup should hand over their money and then be killed, presumably for not wearing clown makeup. Or maybe because they’re ‘insane.’ The Rational Clown Posse would never act that way.”–Patrick Bromley, DVD Verdict (DVD)

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CAPSULE: ALL MY FRIENDS ARE FUNERAL SINGERS (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Tim Rutili

FEATURING: Angela Bettis, members of the indie-rock band Califone

PLOT: A fortune teller carries out her psychic reading business in a country house inhabited

Still from All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

by a slew of ghosts.  The spirits do not haunt her, but keep her company; they’re one big family.  When the ghosts see a mysterious light outside, they feel they are being beckoned and rebel against the fortune teller, thinking she has trapped them against their will.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although it is a bit quirky and takes a unique spin on the age-old haunted house tales, it is simply not that weird.  It is an unlikely little gem that unfortunately few will probably see.

COMMENTS:  All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (great title, by the way) is the directorial debut by Tim Rutili, the front-man for the underrated indie-rock outfit Califone.  Being familiar with the band and a fan of their music, this movie sparked my interest.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a good film with an actual story and good acting, not just an extended music video piece displaying the band’s musical talents.  Viewers who are unacquainted by the music of Califone should appreciate this film for what it is…  a decidedly different independent movie with a supernatural approach. This is certainly not your typical horror film.  If anything, it is a hodgepodge of drama, comedy, and a pinch of suspense, all intermingled with the worldly twang of Califone’s score.

The character Zel is nicely played by Angela Bettis, whom some may recognize from another independent horror film: May.  Zel lives in an old isolated country house and makes her living providing fortunes and psychic readings.  What her customers are unaware of is that she is assisted by the actual spirits that live in the house with her.  The ghosts are not frightening or menacing, just regular looking people all wearing pristine white suits or dresses and having normal conversations.  They sit around playing Trivial Pursuit, theorize about the connections between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, talk about sex, or play music (sometimes too loudly for Zel’s liking).  Most fascinating are the snippets of documentary-style interviews with many of the ghosts discussing how they bit the dust.  A ghostly bride exclaims “I hung myself with my ‘something blue.'”  Another prominent spiritual entity is a young mute girl who Continue reading CAPSULE: ALL MY FRIENDS ARE FUNERAL SINGERS (2010) →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Don’t forget to vote in the reader’s choice poll to pick the next two movies to go on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time!  Currently, the leaders are Adaptation (a small surprise over the early leader, Visitor Q) and Svankmejer’s surreal stop-motion Alice (no surprise there; Dead Man is a distant second).

In December, we’ll be focusing on wrapping up our coverage of 2010 in film and DVD.  To that end, you can look for reviews for the indie rock ghost story All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (fans of the band Califone will perk up at this one); the Western rap spoof Big Money Rustlas (fans of the band Insane Clown Posse will perk up at this one); and we’ll also cover Marina de Van‘s psychological thriller Don’t Look Back [Ne te retourne pas] (no band associated with this one, but fans of French beauties Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci will perk up anyway).

Weird search terms used to locate the site were a bit down this past week, but we did get “elizabeth browning was a subpar poet,” (true enough, I guess, but why come here for confirmation?), “i don’t know what you see in her i’m watching nightmare theater,” (which made us feel like we were coming into the middle of a conversation), and “lucky man breastfeeding” (actually a perfectly appropriate search term for the site, but it sounds weird out of context).   Our selection for weirdest search term of the week, however,  is “super spook cartoon of the 366”: super spook cartoons are weird enough by themselves, but why drag us into the query?

Here’s the longish reader-suggested review queue: Songs From The Second Floor; Possession; Wild Zero; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Perfume: The Story of a Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

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