Tag Archives: 1992

Capsules

CAPSULE: WICKED CITY (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Tai Kit Mak (AKA Mak Tai Kit, Peter Mak)

FEATURING: Jacky Cheung, , Michelle Reis, , Roy Cheung

PLOT: Members of a secret government agency in Hong Kong charged with destroying shapeshifting “monsters” investigate a new killer street drug nicknamed “Happiness.”

Still from Wicked City (1992)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There is some admirable craziness here, but the combination of needlessly arty Dutch angles, poor pacing, and uneven special effects doom City‘s List aspirations. (A less murky print than current thrift-shop-VHS quality transfer would have helped).

COMMENTS: Wicked City is shot in an unreal neon-noir style, with hazy pale-blue lighting with accents of red and green, and the camera constantly tilted to one side to suggest an off-center universe. It’s an affectation that quickly becomes annoying, since we need no encouragement to view a world in which characters say lines like “as you know, my mother was a monster”—and mean it literally—-as fantasy. There are some amazingly clipped scenes: one minute, two agents are sitting in a busy go-go bar. One says, “I think there are monsters here” and in the very next shot the entire human clientele lies dead. Such rushed exposition adds a dreamlike quality to the proceedings. Although the plot, which involves mixed loyalties, betrayals, and a human-monster-monster love triangle, is too silly and obvious to be gripping, there are some wacky action set pieces. A courtesan turns into a spider lady, cutlery flies through the air of its own accord, agents lock hands to create an anti-monster magnetic field, our heroes employ Schwarzeneggeresuqe quips against a killer clock (“how time flies!”), and the climactic battle takes place on the wings of a jet liner in flight. Best of all is the scene where one of the monsters has sex with a pinball machine—not on a pinball machine, with a pinball machine. Overall, Wicked City‘s effects are cheap, and the tone is B-movie operatic. Still, it’s probably as much fun as Hollywood’s Men in Black, and significantly weirder.

Wicked City is an adaptation of a Japanese novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi (who also wrote the source material for Vampire Hunter D). It was more famously adapted in Japan as an anime in 1987. Hong Kong New Wave baron produced this live-action version. Because the film bears many of his hallmarks (fast-paced, effects and stunt-heavy fantasy), some speculate that he may have had an uncredited hands-on role in the direction (as is often suspected of films the prolific Hark produced).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The action/fantasy scenes lack the kinesis and wildness that come in the work of other contemporaries of this era such as Ching Siu-Tung and the film’s producer Tsui Hark.”–Richard Scheib, “Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review”

(This movie was nominated for review by “Dani,” who said “. I found it on VHS in a thrift store and it blew my mind.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: PORCO ROSSO (1992)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of , Kimberly Williams-Paisley, , Susan Egan (English dub)

PLOT: A bounty-hunting pig-man (a victim of an unexplained curse) flies his seaplane through the Adriatic between World Wars, battling air pirates and a hotshot American rival.

Still from Porco Rosso (1992)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although it has its strange, and its sublime, moments, I would rate this as flying pig oddity as relatively minor Miyazaki—which, of course, means it’s still well worth seeking out.

COMMENTS: Porco Rosso is set in a precise, but unreal, historical place and time: the Italian Adriatic, in between the great wars. But its pig-man hero isn’t the only fantastic element here. In this alternate history, the Adriatic sea is its own far-flung multi-island kingdom with its own political intrigues, a realm where seaplane pilots are legendary demigods, like the mythologized gunfighters of Westerns. The local hot spot is a floating hotel only accessible by watercraft, with a valet to parks seaplanes. There are Italian fascists and references to WWI, but this universe evolves out of old movies rather than history: it’s a mixture of Casablanca and romantic aviation movies like Wings or Hell’s Angels, a world where you expect to see the Red Baron and Mata Hari sharing a drink in the corner of a flyboy saloon.

Although with its Humphrey Bogart-esque antihero Porco Rosso often seems more adult-oriented than Miyazaki’s usual fare, at other times the drawing style and caricatures are more indebted to Saturday morning cartoons than his later work. Observe the big-mouthed, howling anime schoolkids, and the cartoonish, kid-like antics of the pirate buffoons, who are drawn as goggles and pillars of teeth surrounded by bristles. Despite the flying duels and machine guns, the danger level here is minimal: no one dies onscreen, and the abducted schoolgirls treat their capture by pirates as a fantastic adventure, hanging out in the gun turret with their captors and screaming “whee!” as they dive off the stranded plane into a giant life preserver. The mixed tones are odd, but Miyazaki makes them harmonize well.

Clearly, the weirdest element of Porco Rosso is its hero’s porcine curse, which is never fully explained and is scarcely even wondered at by the movie’s denizens. Perhaps his piggish visage only reflects the way Porco sees himself. Perhaps the curse is the result of a mystical vision he saw after he was the only survivor of a massive dogfight, where he saw dozens of fighter pilots soaring upwards to heaven. Whatever the cause of his condition, symbolically, his bestiality sets Porco apart from ordinary citizens: “laws don’t mean anything to a pig,” he explains. Still, his snout and porky complexion can’t keep this charismatic pig from having two love interests, and there is an ambiguous suggestion at the ending that he may regain his humanity. I doubt Miyazaki was aware of the English-language idiom “when pigs fly,” meaning something so exceedingly rare as to be impossible, when he conceived Porco Rosso. Still, it’s probably safe to say you’ll enjoy this movie when pigs fly.

In 2015, Disney upgraded Porco Rosso to Blu-ray.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“That a pretty great adventure movie can rest comfortably alongside a strange tale of identity and morality that is itself set against the rise of Fascism is proof enough that we’re in the hands of a master storyteller…”–Tim Brayton, Antagony and Ecstasy (DVD)

Canonically Weird (The List)

192. LEOLO (1992)

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“Parce que moi je rêve, je ne le suis pas.” (“Because I dream, I am not.”)–Léolo

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Claude Lauzon

FEATURING: Maxime Collin, Yves Montmarquette, Pierre Bourgault, Ginette Reno, Giuditta Del Vecchio, Julien Guiomar

PLOT: Young Léo Lauzon lives in Montreal with his dysfunctional family; he has an active imagination which he uses to escape from his squalid surroundings. He insists that his name is actually Léolo and that he is Italian, inventing a story that his mother was impregnated by a tomato contaminated with semen. He lusts after a neighbor girl (as does his grandfather) and tags along on salvage operations with his bodybuilding older brother in-between trips to the mental hospital to visit other family members; the entire time a mysterious old man hangs around the edges of the story.

Still from Leolo (1992)
BACKGROUND:

  • This was writer/director Jean-Claude Lauzon’s second feature film. He died in a plane crash in 1995 while working on his third.
  • Lauzon said the film was semi-autobiographical. Leo’s last name is also Lauzon, which he Italianizes to “Lozone” when he decides he is really Léolo.
  • The “Word Tamer” (or possibly “worm tamer”—“dompteur de vers” in the French may be a pun meaning both “worm” and “verse”) is played by Pierre Bourgault, a Quebecois separatist and professor. Lauzon was once a student of Bourgault’s.
  • Named one of “Time” magazines “All-TIME 100 Movies.“

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The “contaminated” tomato, the film’s most deranged comic invention.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Immaculate conception via imported produce, underwater hallucinations, and bizarre sexual practices reign in the world of Léolo’s imagination. He uses these inventions to escape from an almost equally strange, but far less pleasant, reality.


U.S. release trailer for Léolo

COMMENTS: “Because I dream, I am not,” Léolo‘s young protagonist Continue reading 192. LEOLO (1992) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made. Please read the official Certified Weird entry. Comments are closed on this post.

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING:  , , Moira Kelly, Chris Isaak, Keifer Sutherland,

PLOT: This prequel to the events of the cult TV show explores the sordid story behind homecoming queen/secret bad girl Laura Palmer’s last days before her brutal murder.

Still from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: In terms of its chances of making the List, Fire Walk with Me‘s pluses and minuses are the same: the fact that it’s so intimately entwined with the TV series it sprang from. That makes it a good candidate to represent a franchise that has blessed us with some of the most memorably weird moving images of all time. The downsides are that this feature film makes no sense whatsoever to anyone who’s not thoroughly familiar with the minutiae of the “Twin Peaks” universe; further, much of what goes on in its 135 minute running time feels like housecleaning, tying up numerous loose ends from the canceled series.

COMMENTS: Early on in Fire Walk with Me a woman in a red fright wig walks in front of three FBI agents, makes funny faces and hand gestures, spins around, and leaves without saying a word. Typical Lynchian randomness, right? Not so fast; one of the agents later explains to the other that every article of clothing the woman wore, every gesture she made, held a secret meaning. After his superior decodes the entire piece of performance art for him, the junior G-man mentions that the lady was also wearing a blue rose. The more experienced agent compliments his powers of observation, but informs him “I can’t tell you about that.”

In a meta-symbolic sense, this sequence explains what the viewer can expect from Lynch’s film: many seemingly abstruse images will have a coded meaning in the story, but something will still remain hidden that the director can’t tell you about. Whether he will refuse to explain it, or whether he doesn’t know himself, is left ambiguous. Fire Walk with Me proves muddled in more than it’s symbolism; it’s also more than a bit of a mess in structure and purpose. It’s set in Twin Peaks’ familiar universe, but the tone is far darker and weirder than the TV show. The project is also constantly pulled in two different directions due to its conflicting desires to tell a compelling story about a doomed high school girl, a story that’s capable of standing on its own, and its obligation to please fans of the canceled TV show by tying up loose ends, however insignificant they might be. And although there is a touching story at the film’s core and beautiful imagery scattered throughout, I’m afraid that the production errs too much on the side of providing “Twin Peaks” fanservice, with multiple dream sequences each trying to outweird the previous, scenes that serve no other purpose but to address passing inconsistencies from the TV series, and the shoehorning in of beloved characters who logically should play no part in Laura’s story.

The overlong and unwanted 30 minute prologue, with two new FBI Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

113. CAREFUL (1992)

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“The pandemonium of everyone, everywhere suddenly declaring all at once ‘and I too was molested by my father, or my mother; I too have recovered memories which have basically obliterated my chances of any kind of comfortable adult sexuality’—it seemed at that moment almost unthinkable to slant a movie—even going back into the German romantic past when incest was almost a common theme—to slant it comically and yet still somehow catch the feverish horror of incest in the net… It was only when the idea of the Alpine world, where extreme caution was required for all behavior, where there was a kind of silencer on everyone’s libido and behavior, when that was factored in, then I could see the green light in Guy’s eyes. Once he had the world ‘careful’ it was there all at once.”–George Toles describing genesis of Careful in the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight

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DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: , Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale

PLOT: Villagers of the Alpine town of Tolzbad believe that avalanches will bury them if they are not meticulously careful to keep their voices low and their movements measured.  The film follows the adventures of a family of a widowed mother and her three sons: Johann, who is engaged to be married; Grigorss, who is training to be a butler; and Franz, a mute who never leaves his chair in the attic. Presaged by the appearance of the blind ghost of the father, the family’s repressed emotions eventually erupt into suicide, duels, and even the dreaded avalanche.

Still from Careful (1992)

BACKGROUND:

  • This was Guy Maddin’s third film, and his first fully in color (Archangel featured a few tinted scenes). The chromatic process used in the film mimics the so-called “two-strip” Technicolor which was used before 1932.
  • The setting of Careful was inspired by “mountain movies,” a 1920s subgenre popular in the German national cinema, although Maddin admits in the DVD commentary that he had not actually seen any mountain movies when he made the film.
  • Long-time Maddin screenwriting collaborator George Toles appears in Careful as a corpse in drag.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: I am tempted by the vision of the mountain mineworkers—women stripped down to their underwear, wielding pickaxes while wearing candle-bearing diapers on their heads—but the film’s most significant image is Johann gazing manically at his mother sleeping under her goat’s-head headboard while spreading the limbs of his massive garden shears.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If movies themselves could dream, their dreams would look like Guy Maddin movies: sludgy jumbles of styles, moods, and melodramatic preoccupations, composed of fragmented images made up from bits of misplaced, distressed celluloid. Like Maddin’s other movies, Careful keeps us at two removes from reality: it displaces us once by its narrative dislogic, and then a second time by its archaic stylization. In Careful the technique is particularly appropriate, since the subject matter—repressed incestuous desire—demands to be buried under layers of mystery.


Original trailer for Careful

COMMENTS: Careful begins with what amounts to a pre-Code Public Service Announcement, Continue reading 113. CAREFUL (1992) →