Tag Archives: 1973

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SENSUELA (1973)

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DIRECTED BY: Teuvo Tulio

FEATURING: Marianne Mardi, Ossi Elstelä, Mauritz Åkerman, Ismo Saario

PLOT: A young Sámi woman abandons her life of reindeer herding for the big city when she falls in love with a Nazi pilot/photographer.

Still from Sensuela (1973)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Sensuela is a difficult film to describe. A remake of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio’s own melodrama Cross of Love (1946), which itself was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 short story “The Stationmaster,”  though neither film closely follows the text. In his updated version of a prodigal daughter’s journey, Tulio mashes together the modes of ethnographic documentary, commercial advertising, and softcore porn. All incongruously set to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, the result is ultimately unclassifiable.

COMMENTS: Did you know the Sámi geld reindeer by biting off their testicles? Neither did I, until I watched this movie. I don’t know if this is actually true in the real world, but in the world of Tulio it’s a fact, and one which proves shockingly relevant to Sensuela‘s loosely plotted narrative. Like and other low-budget outsider auteurs, Tulio clearly pursued his own cinematic vision, with relentless disregard for prevailing taste or convention.

Sensuela opens during WWII with three fighter pilots in the midst of battle, but this isn’t war as seen in any other movie. Painted backdrops of snowy mountains provide the landscape and cartoonishly simple sets, barely recognizable, represent the plane cockpits. To the sound of gunfire, two of the pilots collapse on their instrument panels, but the third survives.

Hans parachutes out of his damaged plane into the Arctic landscape below. Laila, a Sámi girl, crossing the tundra in her reindeer sled, discovers him and brings him back to her father’s yurt. While she nurses him back to health, they fall in love, but the war forces Hans to flee Finland once he recovers.

In the first of many confusing transitions, the characters reunite after what must be about twenty years (though neither one has visibly aged). Hans whisks Laila away to Helsinki where he works as a photographer and she becomes his hottest model. The novelty of the relationship wears off when Laila refuses to swing with the ’60s. They break up, but she continues telling her father she and Hans intend to get married.

What seems like a harmless white lie proves to be Laila’s undoing. After many trials and tribulations, she takes a job in a warehouse, falls in love again, and becomes engaged to one of her co-workers. Meanwhile, Laila’s father happens across her nude photographs and sets off for the city in a rage. After roughing up her roommate, he decides to go after Hans. The roommate warns Laila, who manages to reach Hans just before her father’s arrival.

Happy to see Laila again, Hans, surprisingly, agrees to go along with the deception. They’ll tell her father they’re still planning to marry, thinking he’ll leave once they calm his indignation. Instead, dad insists on remaining in the city for the wedding.

Laila and Hans decide to hold a fake marriage ceremony. They almost pull it off—until Laila’s actual fiancé crashes the “wedding” party and all hell breaks loose. In a classic over-the-top Tulio climax, emotions run hard and fast, and love turns to hate in the blink of an eye. Her fiancé renounces Laila, but Hans suffers the brunt of her father’s anger.

Unfortunately, it’s not all sex, drugs, and castration. Sensuela is honestly a train wreck, but it’s difficult to look away, as one can’t help but wonder what randomness will happen next. Stock footage pads the already overlong 104 minute runtime with gratuitous scenes of carnival lights, saunas, and loudly chirping birds. Even more -esque moments appear, with conversations taking place over static close-ups of a coffee table.

Tulio frames sex scenes from such awkward angles they detract from the sensuality implied by the title. Other scenes have such a contrived, stagey feel they can hardly be taken seriously. In a scene of Sámi watching a reindeer race, the crowd jumps and applauds in unison (especially unsettling because they also dress identically). The editing of the fight choreography has a strange, staccato rhythm, like the skips between comic book panels. This would work in an actual comic book adaptation, but in the context of Sensuela, it just adds to the film’s erratic quality.

Some film scholars categorize Sensuela as camp, citing Tulio as a forerunner of , Pedro Almodovar, and even . Others stress the director’s distinct lack of humor and jouissance, which work against his camp aesthetics. Sensuela echoes the grim morality of Tulio’s earlier melodramas, despite the hippy orgies. Laila’s look always retains an out-of-place 1940s glamour. With her buttoned up trench coat, high-heels and red lips, she looks like she wandered onto the wrong set from a film noir. This speaks to the film’s deep weirdness: Sensuela exists in its own world, without any concern for linear time or standard genres.

It’s interesting to note that Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a film that would help make “Swedish” a byword for sexploitation, was released in the same year. No such trend occurred in Finland. Sensuela would be Tulio’s last movie; after it bombed, the director retired into seclusion, rarely granting interviews about his life or forty-year career. Finnish cineastes continued to value realism and restraint, and Tulio’s films were always, very consciously, the exact opposite.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…best described as a psychedelic, Alice in Wonderland-like journey that has ample amounts of Brechtian melodrama. – Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets [Blu-ry]

3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross

3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross Of Love + Restless Blood

  • A trio of surreal melodramas from Finnish director Teuvo Tulio including CROSS OF LOVE, RESTLESS BLOOD and the notorious SENSUELA

List Price : 37.79 $

Offer: 33.46 $

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CAN DIALECTICS BREAK BRICKS? (1973)

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La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?

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DIRECTED BY: René Viénet

FEATURING: Hung- Liu Chan, Ingrid Yin-Yin Hu, Jason Piao Pai

PLOT: Alienated proletarians, trained in kung fu, fight against their bureaucratic oppressors.

Poster for "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" (1973)

COMMENTS: What if a typical kung fu flick was transformed through voiceover into a subversive and radical wanna-be manifesto? Such an anarchic romp could only come from France. But let’s take things from the beginning.

Some definitions should be clarified. Dialectics is a product of the Situationist movement, a group of anti-capitalist artists and thinkers, known cinematically mostly through Guy Debord’s documentaries. Like a lot of spoofs—What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966) and In Search of the Ultra-Sex (2016) come to mind—this movie takes preexisting material and subverts its meaning through clever use of voiceovers.  The Situationists call the exact technique used here “détournement”, and it could be better defined as a reappropriation in a new and ideologically subversive setting. It is a recontextualization of images so that new meanings, radically different than previous, are produced: a practice commonly used in  postmodernist art of the later half of the twentieth century until our own time.

With the theoretical background of this movie specified, what is it really about? The plot revolves around a commune of proletarian martial artists defending themselves against alienation and their evil overlords. These overlords are not simply your typical evil Western capitalists, but we can trace references to the Soviet Union’s nomenklatura as well. They in fact represent of every possible state, even of those that hypocritically claim to defend the rights of the proletariat.

A main character emerges from the crowd, a typical hero who becomes the focus of the narrative, a man who sets his noble ideals against the bad guys. What is atypical of the genre , though, is that while the choreography of fighting plays out, our characters indulge in deep conversations about class struggle, the abolition of masters, and Wilhem Reich‘s writing, among other subjects. Through voice-over an “essential”  bibliography is mentioned, too, which one of the most unexpected and weirdest elements of the movie.

Don’t worry, though. This is not a heavy movie. Sexual jokes and self-aware irony prove its unwillingness to take itself too seriously. In fact, Dialectics isn’t much more than a funny gimmick. It surely has an appeal for fans of cult cinema, but it is not essential viewing for anyone interested in the Situationist movement. On the other hand, if you enjoy this kind of absurd humor—and the eccentric idea of a martial arts show about the class struggle—and would like to view something similar, albeit in a contemporary setting, try to find the French TV show “Machine” (2024) created by Thomas Bidegain and Fred Grivois.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“An obnoxious and hilarious stunt from 1973…”–Eve Tushnet, Patheos (streaming)

(This movie was suggested for review by Comrade Faustroll, who said “The filmmakers strike the right balance of meaning what they’re saying enough to be really weird, but joking enough to keep it interesting.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THRILLER – A CRUEL PICTURE (1973)

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AKA They Call Her One Eye; Hooker’s Revenge; The Swedish Vice-Girl

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DIRECTED BY: Bo Arne Vibenius (as Alex Fridolinski)

FEATURING: Christina Lindberg, Heinz Hopf, Solveig Andersson

PLOT: A young woman rendered mute as the result of a traumatic sexual assault as a child is kidnapped, forcibly addicted to heroin, and made into a prostitute; after further assaults and indignities, she sets about getting revenge.

COMMENTS: We’re 40 minutes in to Thriller – A Cruel Picture before we finally see our heroine claim some power of her own. Up to this point, it has been a deeply disturbing watch, a rendering of  an accumulated and escalating litany of abuses endured by Frigga (sometimes called Madeleine, and always played by Christina Lindberg with the coolest, most emotionally detached demeanor imaginable). We’ve seen Frigga violated as a child, and deprived of her voice as a result of the trauma. We’ve listened to busybody locals talking trash about her. We’ve watched her get kidnapped, beaten, injected with drugs, and chased through the countryside. We’ve seen a parade of monsters treat her as their mindless personal toys. We’ve learned of her parents’ suicides. And we’ve seen the blood-soaked remnants of the closest thing Frigga might have to a friend. It’s a bleak existence, but we take some comfort in knowing that she’s going to be dishing out some serious payback. It feels like classic exploitation territory, a trailblazer for later tales of rape and revenge like Last House on the Left and Ms. 45. So when she steps off the bus and reveals herself in a kicky little red dress with matching leather eyepatch, it’s the first moment that affords some level of hope. She looks ready to deal out some vengeance. Here we go.

But Thriller doesn’t really work that way. The story beats are there, but the rhythm is all off. In the hands of director and co-writer Vibenius (who previously worked as an AD for Ingmar Bergman), everything is very slow, very deliberate, very thorough. We’re trained to expect a certain cake-and-eat-it-too element to these movies; the female lead endures horrific abuse for our entertainment, but with the reassurance that she’ll turn the tables in a big way, providing a cathartic release and making us feel better about all that pain and misery. Thriller never lets go of that early discomfort. That moment with the red dress is actually the start of an act-long training sequence that will run for roughly 25 minutes. Yes, she learns karate and marksmanship, acquires guns and a car, picks up all the tools and she will need to take down those who have wronged her, but this is not a song-driven montage; we get it in toto. We see every moment of the karate lesson, with the instructor demonstrating falls and then Frigga repeating them. We see how she squirrels money away for her eventual escape, but we’re not spared any of the humiliation and degradation heaped upon her by her johns in order to get that precious cash. And when it comes time to saw off the end of a shotgun, we witness every single stroke of the hacksaw. There comes a point when it stops being a story, passes documentary, and becomes Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THRILLER – A CRUEL PICTURE (1973) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ALABAMA’S GHOST (1973)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Peggy Browne, , , Ken Grantham

PLOT: A janitor-turned-magician gets more than he bargains for after signing up with a mysterious impresario, as a conspiracy unfolds around the greatest magic show ever.

Still from Alabama's Ghost (1973)

COMMENTS: When you see a credit for “Go-Go Dancers,” you know you’re in for a good time. Especially when those credits are front-loaded, and an array of oddities is laid out before the movie hits you. Especially especially when there’s a jaunty Dixieland jazz tune dancing through the speakers while the promises unspool (Doctor Caligula? Mama-Bama? Marilyn Midnight?). Alabama’s Ghost segues into a live performance of that opening tune—with an establishing shot of a foreshortened trombone sliding uncannily toward and away from the camera. Yessir, ma’am, there’s jivin’ style to spare in this extravaganza from the inimitable Fredric Hobbs, dealing out countless exciting genres in this slice of wonderment.

Navigating this variety show is the titular Alabama (who, despite what that title implies, is very much alive), leaning back at a bar, high on something (“it’s like a hundred yellow-haired cats, dancing on jade”) but whose mellow is about to harshed by the boss-man. Alabama’s gotta pack up the band’s gear, and stack it nice. After bringing the gear to the basement, he drives his loaded forklift through a false wall, revealing the collected possessions of Carter, a legendary magician who disappeared in Delhi in 1935. So begins the rise of Alabama: King of the Cosmos!

Hobbs pulls out the genre stops like they were going out of style, and so Alabama’s Ghost has something for everyone. Do you like magic? Got it in spades. Questionable ’70s sci-fi science? Let me tell you about the powers—and dangers—of transmitting raw zeta waves (not to mention the atomically adjacent deadly zeta waves). Is music your thing? A Scottish-accented impresario who goes by Otto Max (well illustrated by the steel business card, with his name stamped in the metal) will ensure there’s plenty of grooviness, man. Vampires? Comely Nazi scientists? Doomsday? An elephant?

Frickin’-A. These far-out goodies hop around the plotline like horseflies at a cosmic rodeo. Otto Max, with all his Puritan fop garb swagger, pitches his vision of a giant magic show to Alabama: “Surrealism’s in—surrealism’s where it’s at.” He might as well be pitching this very movie. Fredric Hobbs gave the film world far too few gifts, but his Godmonster/Ghost double-shot is pam-jacked with strange sights to see, peculiar paths to take, and, in the case of his sophomore feature, a vampire so full of ham that the Go-Go Dancers might gorge on pig flesh for weeks.

(As it stands, they gorge on people. Add “cannibalism” to that earlier mix. Peace out.)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Whatever you can say about the movie, it does appear that director Fredric Hobbs had a vision of sorts… Believe me, low-budget horror doesn’t come much stranger than this one.” — David Sindelar, Fantastic Movie Musings

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)

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AKA Dead People; Messiah of Evil: The Second Coming; Return of the Living Dead

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DIRECTED BY: , Gloria Katz

FEATURING: Mariana Hill, Michael Greer, Anitra Ford, Joy Bang, ,

PLOT: Arletty travels to the quaint seaside burg of Point Dune in search of her father: apprehensions grow when she meets the unwelcoming locals, reads her father’s crazed diary entries, and discovers the legend of a mysterious figure who returns to his cannibalistic flock every hundred years.

Still from Messiah of Evil (1973)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: One of this site’s features is the Indelible Image: that one shot or scene that stands out in a movie when all the other strange and disturbing visions have faded from view. Messiah of Evil feels like an attempt to make a feature film composed entirely of Indelible Images. It’s entirely about creating a queasy, unsettling vibe, and that it does, in scene after scene.

COMMENTS: Messiah of Evil springs from the minds of filmmaking duo Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who in 1973 were having quite a year. Their script for American Graffiti catapulted them onto the A-list, while this threatened to pull them right back down. Having sat on the shelf unedited for two years, Messiah was finally bought and hastily released, which makes it all the more impressive that the unsettling vibe Huyck and Katz were going for seeps through.

The opening five minutes is a spectacular smorgasbord of mixed messages. A man (played by future The Warriors auteur Walter Hill) breathlessly runs from something terrible, while a turgid ballad plays on the soundtrack in which the singer speaks to the wind. Then a pretty girl slits the man’s throat, and we’re transported to a mental asylum where an exhausted woman unspools a tremendous mood-dump, warning us that “they’re waiting for you” and saying of a town on the coast that “they used to call it New Bethlehem, but the changed the name to Point Dune after the moon turned blood red.” Then she lets out a bloodcurdling scream, which cues the song to return and plops us back to the woman’s arrival in town just as a gas station attendant wildly fires a pistol into the darkness. If you’re looking for a film with a high WTF-factor, Messiah of Evil is off to a terrific start.

The film works very hard to keep you off-balance throughout. Part of that is the bevy of offbeat choices that occur at every turn. At an art gallery in town, the manager is an old blind woman whose fingers move across Arletty’s face “like a pale spider.” An albino truck driver happily offers to share his light snack of live rats while cranking “Wagner” (pronounced like Lindsay rather than Richard) on the radio. The walls of her father’s house are covered with mirrors and murals that stare at her unceasingly, including one that appears to be a very large Lee Harvey Oswald portrait. There’s nothing in Messiah of Evil so strange that it can’t be made just a little bit stranger.

Even better is when those weird twists end up being directly connected to Huyck and Katz’ story. Following up a lead at a motel, Arletty finds a bizarre trio of wanderers: Thom, a long-haired, nattily-attired fellow who oddly resembles a lithe Stephen Fry, and two disinterested hippie girls, Laura and Toni, with varying attention spans. We meet them listening to an extensive monologue/info dump from a disheveled wino. When the vagrant turns up dead the next day, Thom and his coterie move in with Arletty, because why not?

The girls’ most important contribution to the film is to be the focus of a pair of standout setpieces in which they fall victim to the appetites of Point Dune’s hungry residents. Laura’s decision to skip town seems like an aimless diversion until she ends up at a mostly empty grocery store (it’s a Ralphs, for the benefit of our readers in either California or Night Vale) where a group of patrons make a squishy, slurpy buffet of the raw items at the meat counter, and then make a meal of her. Toni meets her end in a similarly creepy fashion at a movie theater, where the empty auditorium quickly fills up in precisely the same manner that The Birds populates its school playground with avian aggressors. These scenes are the best illustration of the kind of horror Huyck and Katz are interested in: a slow, methodical, and inevitable sense of doom that can’t be debated, understood, or avoided.

The movie works best when it’s not trying to fulfill your expectations for a comprehensible plot. For example, Royal Dano’s dread-laden narratives are head-scratching when you try to mine them for clear explanations, but sharply effective when you focus on the batty circumstances he describes. (It’s extra fun to imagine that Dano is invoking his most famous role, that as the voice of Disneyland’s Abraham Lincoln animatronic.) The less sense things make, the more potent the film’s dark vibe. And that turns out to be fortunate, since there is so much that does not make sense in Messiah of Evil. This quiet little picture packs a lot of mood. It’s best not to come to town looking for more.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The miraculous alchemy isn’t that Messiah of Evil suddenly turns good at any point – the acting, in particular, remains comically atrocious throughout – but that it somehow uses its badness as a tool, rather than a limitation. As the film depicts increasingly weird, threatening, and ultimately violently behavior, the very film itself seems to have become possessed by a spirit of evil.” – Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

(This movie was nominated for review by Pinstripe Hourglass. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)