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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Abel Ferrara

FEATURING: Harvey Keitel, Frankie Thorn, Zoe Lund, Paul Hipp

PLOT: A dirty cop indulges his many addictions as he pursues the culprits behind a horrible sexual assault on a nun.Still from Bad Lieutenant (1992)

COMMENTS: Central characters who are bad—flouting conventions, horrifying the prim and proper, indulging the id—are the stuff of Hollywood cliché. Between all the bad moms and bad teachers and bad Santas, these comical antiheroes can feel played out. But Abel Ferrara would never be lumped in with conventional showbiz trends, and his Bad Protagonist can in no way be misconstrued as a good-natured rebel thumbing his the nose at society. If anything, it’s the “Lieutenant” that’s superfluous in this title: our hero is a bad detective, a bad dad, a bad colleague, a bad gambler, a bad Catholic, a bad john. He drinks (sometimes upon waking up), he smokes crack, he shoots heroin, and he steals cocaine and sells it to drug dealers, keeping a little for himself to snort off any handy surface (including pictures of his daughter’s first communion). He robs criminals. He cajoles his colleagues into giving them their money and turns around and makes terrible bets with it. He cavorts with prostitutes, extorts teenagers for humiliating sexual favors… hell, when he shows up to a double homicide, he takes a lingering look at the victims’ breasts. And this is long before we witness him hurling vulgar invective at Jesus Christ. Ya get it, folks? The guy is just spectacularly bad.

Lost in the wonder of Nicolas Cage’s out-there turn in the quasi-sequel Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (and a third film supposedly in the works set in Tokyo and to be directed by Takashi Miike) is the fact that the original was a deliberate shocker in its own time. Ferrara pulls no punches, dramatizing every despicable moment in exacting detail as part of what my colleague Gregory J. Smalley called “an overwrought, magnificent Christian parable that sought to demonstrate God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by presenting a character that audiences couldn’t forgive.” Bad Lieutenant is a Book of Job for its audience, dragging viewers through the muck and the mire and daring them to re-evaluate their notions of sacred and profane.

One should always be hesitant in using the word “brave” to describe an acting performance; it is just acting, after all. But Keitel’s work here is undeniably go-for-broke, and sometimes it borders on comedy to see just how horrible he’s willing to appear. He never stops talking, only yielding when a woman injects him with smack. He’s hostile to nearly everyone he encounters (including one of his kids portrayed by his real-life daughter). Contemporary critics made much of a full-frontal nude scene, a traditional line-in-the-sand for mainstream cinema, but Keitel is arguably even more naked in his fully clothed, emotionally raw confrontation with Christ, letting all his feigned confidence and gruff bravado drop in a desperate cri de coeur. The film’s Act 3 twist, in which he makes a series of questionable choices in an attempt to find redemption, only makes sense because Keitel has laid the groundwork for a character for whom no decision is unthinkable.

Bad Lieutenant is outrageous in the extraordinary awfulness of its title character, but not especially weird. Keitel’s troubles are entirely of his own making, and his desperate attempts to keep his head above water while insisting on tying more and more weights to his ankles have become more common in recent years, most notably in the frantic machinations of the Safdie brothers. Bad Lieutenant would make an excellent companion piece to the Apocryphally enshrined God Told Me To; both films force their central detectives to confront the nature of the Almighty and their unstable faith in the face of events in the living world, although their journeys are nearly polar opposites.

There’s an entertaining piece of subtext in the way Keitel’s fortunes mirror the championship baseball series that soundtracks the film. We learn from the outset that a comeback by the hapless New York Mets from a 3-0 deficit in a playoff showdown with the rival Los Angeles Dodgers would require nothing short of a miracle. (It’s a feat that would actually be pulled off for the first and only time 12 years later, by the 2004 Boston Red Sox.) Naturally, Keitel has stopped believing in miracles and so forsakes his hometown team, continuing to put his money and his life behind the ascendant Dodgers and slugger Darryl Strawberry, a prodigious talent who himself was infamously brought down by drugs. Of course, Keitel is in so deep to his bad bets that when things go south, he swivels on a dime from attaboy-cheering to racial epithets, punctuated by a gunshot to the car radio. Yes, he’s a bad, bad man, but it’s not his badness that brings him down. It’s his failure to heed the advice of another Met: “Ya gotta believe.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an illuminating, excoriating descent into the cesspool of sin, self-loathing and defilement. This is not an easy film to watch… This bizarre ecclesiastical dimension is what makes “Bad Lieutenant” more than a shallow wallow in the muck. Ferrara does make his moral points, and though one feels dirtied in the process, there is an accompanying feeling of purification as well.” – Hal Hinson, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

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

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

  • A degenerate cop who snorts coke, bets on playoffs and drinks himself into stupors starts to pull himself out of the abyss when he investi- gates the rape of a nun who refuses to press charges.

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Capsules

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LAKKI… THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

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Gutten som kunne fly; AKA Lakki, Lakki… The Boy Who Grew Wings

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DIRECTED BY: Svend Wam

FEATURING: Anders Borchgrevink, Nina Gunke, Bjørn Skagestad, Jorunn Kjellsby

PLOT: A young man dreams of escape from his grim life; salvation may be coming in the form of the wings that seem to be sprouting from his back.

Still from LAKKI... THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

COMMENTS: Lakki comes by his pitifulness honestly. His father is intensely self-centered and will walk away from a relationship without a moment’s notice. His mother fosters a deep narcissism that expresses itself through wanton promiscuity. They’re both heavy drinkers. The boy’s grandfather was hauled away for insanity, and mom has a friend who comes over to the house and just sits around, day after day. Lakki’s school days are miserable, particularly thanks to his hyperaggressive gym teacher, who of course is now sleeping with his mom. None of these adults seems interested or capable of taking care of a child, and Lakki would happily remove their obligation if he weren’t only 14 years old. Growing wings and flying away is honestly the best idea he can think of.

Those wings are, one supposes, the most fantastical element in Lakki. Whenever he hits a particularly low point, he hustles to a mirror sneak a peek. Notably, we only see them when he does. While the film is cagey about how genuine we should find this, there’s no mystery about their metaphorical heft as a means of escape. But on another level, the characters are so outlandishly extreme and the situations are so cartoonish that the whole thing plays as unrealistic. Even Lakki’s ventures into the dark side of his situation play almost as parody. An attempt to offer himself as a rentboy results in a comically violent encounter in which he beats up the wishy-washy would-be John. Meanwhile, a walk down the path of drugs is met with overwrought hellfire and screaming. Far from being a cautionary tale,  even the most dire situation Lakki faces is laced with heightened ridiculousness. It plays like an ABC Afterschool Special, International Edition.

The dialogue is similarly purple, usually making Lakki feel ever more weighted down by the responsibility that the adults disown. His mother is especially dismissive, over-sharing, then dismissing her son’s frustration. (She’s pretentious, too. In a flashback, she tells Lakki, “We mustn’t shout. The night might punish us.”) In a pair of fascinating scenes, Lakki’s parents treat him not as their child but as the peer they yearn to confide in, right down to sharing their booze, and Lakki laps the attention up with needy urgency. Young Anders Borchgrevnik is in every scene trying hard to embody the emotional torment in Lakki’s soul, but some scenarios defy the talents of even the finest actors, and the multiple moments where the boy buries his face in his arm and sobs feel uncomfortably inauthentic.

Writer/director Wam and producing partner Petter Vennerød earned a reputation in Norwegian cinema for exploring social issues, but this, one of their last collaborations, doesn’t really pull back the curtain on the human condition. (After the initial release flopped, the film was recut and issued under new titles to give it another go.) Lakki’s situation is unique and odd, and his resolve to take on the responsibilities that are repeatedly abdicated to him feels more like a surrender than a culmination. Lakki doesn’t fly, and neither does Lakki. He never could.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Lakki is a complete chaos, and the style suggests that Svend Wam for a moment thought he was David Lynch.” – Fredrik Gunerius Fevang, The Fresh Films

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

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TOYS (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Barry Levinson

FEATURING: Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, Michael Gambon, Robin Wright, LL Cool J, Donald O’Connor

PLOT: Whimsical toymaker Kenneth Zevo leaves his company to his army general brother Leland, bypassing his head-in-the-clouds son Leslie; when Leland shifts the factory’s production to military weapons controlled by children, Leslie goes into battle with his mad uncle to save the company and the world from violence and mayhem.

Still from toys (1992)

COMMENTS: A while back, on the occasion of my review of the big ball of whimsy that is Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, my colleagues here at 366 HQ took to the comment section to observe that I missed the opportunity to pair it up with a review of a similarly fanciful tale of the life-changing power of toys. I don’t regret passing up that moment, because now I can don my Santa hat and give Toys the chance to stand on its own merits. And now that I’ve done that, I have to say that it makes me think more favorably upon Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

Toys was a notorious bomb at the time of its release, an outcome that surely had something to do with the wild disconnect between the movie audiences were promised and the one they got. Toys was pitched courtesy of a very buzzy teaser that featured star Williams alone in a field riffing without restraint with nary a single frame of the actual movie to distract. If you saw this (or if you had popped into the multiplex auditorium next door to hear Williams similarly unleashed in Aladdin), you were primed for a raucous comedy featuring Robin-off-the-chain. The opening minutes of saccharine Christmas imagery, pastoral nostalgia, and a decidedly un-funky carol from Wendy and Lisa must have been a real cold shower.

It turns out that Toys is a dour film, beginning with a funeral, ending with a war, and delivering a volume’s worth of personality quirks and emotional damage in between. The mere existence of toys is supposed to be a balm of mirth, but even these people who rely upon them seem to derive little joy from them. This is a movie whose idea of showing the jolly, happy world of toymaking is to score it with the warm, sentimental tones of Tori Amos. (When the same song returns to demonstrate the drudgery of toiling under a new regime, the only change is to give it a techno remix.) You want fun? The dying toy magnate has a goofy beanie hat hooked up to a heart monitor. The quirky daughter lives inside an enormous swan that closes like a coffin. The straight-laced nephew converts to the side of light and life only because he discovers that he and his father have been sleeping with the same nurse. I think that delight is supposed to leaven the sadness, but the sadness actually crushes delight under its oppressive weight. No one is having a good time; even the people play-testing fake vomit are obsessive and pedantic, and it’s hard to imagine that the finished product would be much more entertaining, since Zevo’s toys are all throwbacks to the lead wind-up models of Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TOYS (1992) →

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366 UNDERGROUND: THE OTHER DIMENSION (1992)

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L’altra dimensione

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DIRECTED BY: Fabio Salerno

FEATURING: Francesco Rinaldi, Maddalena Vadacca; Luigi Sgroi, Nadia Rebeccato, Piero Belloto; Marco Monzani, Giorgia Chezzi

PLOT: In this horror anthology, a man plots abduction of the woman who’s left him, another plots possession of a woman who’s leaving him, and a third plots incorporation of a woman who’s no longer living.

COMMENTS: Three short films await us, projected in a dingy, dark room. Dust-covered sound equipment, cobwebbed film reels, and a menacing tinge of green fill the narrow screen, as an unseen entity inquires, “How many of you have found yourself the subject of incredible stories?” The Other Dimension spools out like miniature theater event: two shorts preceding a near-feature.

Salerno kicks off with “Delirium”, a fun variant of the “Bluebeard” folktale. Simply constructed, the segment features clever lighting, with the unearthly sparkles of the protagonist’s whiskey and glass capturing the titular condition, and giallo greens exuding organic menace. The film’s frame is put to compelling use as our angular stalker’s and victim’s fates collide. Most troublingly, Salerno manages an abstract, and impressively brief visual metaphor for rape, whose beauty left me quite unnerved. Closing with a shot of three heads by a bottle of Pepsi, Salerno wraps up the action and we are quickly brought to the squabbling exes of “Mortal Instinct.” The title is a bit heavy-handed, but the second short (the weakest of the three) goes by quickly enough. But not before it makes some remarks on machismo by way of Black Magic—with a bodily destruction sequence that may not appear realistic, but somehow manages to be ickily convincing nevertheless.

The main course of The Other Dimension, “Eros e Thanatos (Love & Death)”, shows off Salerno’s talents about as far as his means could allow. Some fifty minutes in length, its story of decayed love rotting into aberrant obsession left me, against considerable odds, wishing for a happy ending to fall upon the quiet protagonist. Judicious montage, narration, and, once again, a keen eye for lighting simultaneously showed how cleverly this was made—and how inexpensively. The lead actor, Marco Monzani, never plays a note wrong, whether he’s awkwardly paying the cabbie to get his ex-girlfriend moving on her way, or taking her by the hand as she emerges from the grave. “Eros e Thanatos” lies somewhere between Angst and After Hours, and its action, though scant, floats by on gusts of a sickly-sweet breeze.

Stumbling into this experience with no information beyond “low budget”, “Italian”, “horror”, and the IMDb filmmaker overview’s sole blurb, “Died 1993 · Milan, Italy (suicide)”, I really didn’t know what to expect from this, but it was certainly not that The Other Dimensions would have such impressive flashes of on-screen poetry. To the best of my knowledge, Fabio Salerno is a name known only to a small subsection of horror buffs. This final offering, completed not long before his death at the age of thirty-one, clearly shows that the world of cinema lost a promising voice far too soon.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[I]t’s a heck of a wild ride if you love scrappy homemade horror.” — Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (Blu-ray)

The Other Dimension and the Films of Fabio Salerno [Blu-ray Set]

The Other Dimension and the Films of Fabio Salerno [Blu-ray Set]
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL WORLD (1992)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Ralph Bakshi

FEATURING: Kim Basinger, Gabriel Byrne, Brad Pitt, voices of Charlie Adler, , Candi Milo

PLOT: Cartoonist Jack Deebs finds himself magically transported to the universe he thinks he has created, the Cool World, where sexpot doodle Holli Would is scheming to transform herself into a humanoid.

Still from Cool World (1992)

COMMENTS: The notion that Ralph Bakshi was ever going to make a four-quadrant, people-pleasing mainstream Hollywood smash seems utterly ludicrous. But damned if people weren’t thinking he would back in 1992. By all accounts, animation’s enfant terrible rode the Who Framed Roger Rabbit wave, selling on the spot his pitch for a horror film in which the half-toon offspring of an absent-father cartoonist seeks revenge. Then, a phalanx of studio executives, producers, and screenwriters set about methodically dismantling that initial pitch, to the point where Bakshi was handed an entirely new script just prior to the start of shooting. Perhaps he can be forgiven for losing some of his enthusiasm for the project.

The result is two different kinds of hybrids: a mix of live-action and animation, and an unholy mashup of a Ralph Bakshi film and the kind of movie that everyone else in Hollywood was looking for. (Supposedly, halfway through filming, Basinger told the director that she wanted to make a movie that could be shown to sick kids in hospitals, betraying a total lack of familiarity with his c.v.) In either case, the mix never really takes. The visual combination is surprisingly terrible, resembling Pete’s Dragon rather than the more recent achievements of Roger Rabbit. The interaction is sloppy, the eyelines are all over the place, and the physical sets are rendered two-dimensionally but without any sense of cartoonishness. As for the tone, it’s as schizophrenic as you might imagine. This may be one of the worst-edited films I’ve ever seen, with scenes covering different plotlines and delivering dramatically contrary emotions intercut and slammed together almost randomly, as though assembled by a hyperactive chihuahua. At any moment that you think you’re watching one storyline, you’ll need to brace yourself for an awkward and illogical transition, with the likelihood that you’ll soon be zipped back to the previous thread without warning. The best thing that can be said for this approach is that it neatly conceals the fact that Cool World is equally as incomprehensible as a linear story.

Part of the challenge is to figure out exactly whose movie it is. Are we watching the tale of an artist who is suddenly confronted by his work? (Practically no time at all is spent on Byrne’s backstory as the ostensible creator of this cartoon universe or on reactions to his predicament, so no.) Or perhaps it’s the artist confronting the unaddressed trauma from the incident that landed him in jail. (The revelation that Byrne was accused of murdering his wife for cheating on him is casually thrown away, left unproven either way, and never addressed again. Probably not that, then.) Okay, forget the artist. Could it really about the poor World War II veteran suffering from both PTSD and the tragic loss of his mother and now finds himself in a world beyond all understanding? (All that is jettisoned approximately two minutes after Pitt is transported to the Cool World, so no again.) Then surely it’s about the Machivellian efforts Holli Would expends in pursuit of her quest to become human. (Honestly, we don’t really know why Holli does anything she does, except that it involves a lot of rotoscoped dancing, so… maybe?) The story is so confused that late in the third act, someone entirely new tries to sneak in, a neighbor about whom we know exactly nothing but who is positioned as a possible love interest and as a foil for Holli, but is then almost comically ignored in the conclusion. Cool World is in the remarkable position of having only irrelevant characters.

The cast flounders amidst this mess. Basinger never seems to know which emotion she’s supposed to play (not entirely her fault), so her sex-kitten allure fails to jibe with her madness for power, a dynamic most evident in the inexplicable scene in which Holli sings a duet with Frank Sinatra, Jr. in which she barely seems to acknowledge the man’s existence. Pitt seems thoroughly embarrassed in every scene he’s in. At least he has an extended introduction to try and make something of himself; Byrne has no character at all, and the film knows it, since he’s barely onscreen for 30 seconds before yanking him into the animated universe, and then isn’t even remotely like himself once he is transformed into his cartoon avatar. Even the voice actors struggle, such as Adler’s choice to play Pitt’s dimwit partner with a voice that suggests Ed Wynn by way of Dom DeLuise.

I honestly can’t say enough bad things about Cool World, but for the purposes of this forum, I must offer this final condemnation: it’s not anywhere near as weird as it wants to be. At its best, Bakshi has littered his animated landscape with an unending supply of throwaway gags and random images, sometimes even overlaying them atop the main action, as if the spirit of Max Fleischer was perpetually trying to break out of the film. These adjunct characters capture Bakshi at his wildest, but those treats are fleeting. The core story is little more than warmed-over rabbit, garnished with sex jokes that don’t even have the guts to be proper smut. Holli Would? You’d best not.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the animation here is really impressive and while a tighter plot and better storytelling definitely would have helped, Cool World winds up being weird enough in its own right to make it worth seeking out for fans of cult cinema or Bakshi’s unique visual style.” – Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop!

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

Cool World - Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

Cool World - Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]
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