Tag Archives: Allegory

41*. THE SERVANT (1963)

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“The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the servant… being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change around into the real and true independence.”–G.W.F. Hegel, “The Master-Slave Dialectic”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Wendy Craig,

PLOT: Hard-drinking playboy and would-be colonialist Tony hires the solicitous Barret as a manservant, despite the fact that his fiancée takes a dislike to the new employee. Barret convinces Tony to hire his sister as a maid, which sets off a chain of events that eventually leads to the master dismissing both servants. Tony’s drinking intensifies, however, and he invites his servant to return to the house; gradually, the roles of master and servant are reversed.

Still from The Servant (1963)

BACKGROUND:

  • Director Joseph Losey moved to the UK after receiving a summons to appear before Joseph McCarthy’s House  Un-American Activities committee.
  • The screenplay was written by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, who adapted  Robin Maugham’s 1948 novella. It was the first of three collaborations between Losey and Pinter.
  • In 1999, a panel of movie professionals voted The Servant the 22nd best British film of all time.
  • Dirk Bogarde, a closeted gay man, had played a closeted gay man in 1961’s The Victim, one of the first films to deal openly and sympathetically with homosexuality. His agent (with whom the actor was secretly involved) was nervous about Bogarde taking this role, fearing he might acquire a “homosexual image.”
  • When Losey came down with pneumonia during the shoot, Bogarde stepped in to direct for ten days, with Losey providing instructions via telephone from the hospital.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Mirrors, devices which reverse and sometimes warp images, but which also serve to reveal the selves we cannot see. Tony’s townhouse is littered with mirrors on seemingly every wall, and Losey takes advantage of them throughout the film, using mirrors to reflect the underlying truth of a situation. In one shot, Tony and Susan face Barret accusingly. In the convex mirror image, Barret can be seen clearly, standing calmly with a robe and a cigarette, while only the back of Tony’s head is visible, and Susan isn’t there at all. The mirror shows us the relative power and importance of the three characters in the scene more profoundly than the head-on camera shot does.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Upside-down orgy; kissing the servant

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Servant emits the subtlest whiff of dignified strangeness, all emanating from the mysterious Bogarde: an unassuming Trojan horse of malice and perversion without a clear motive or objective other than raw power.

2021 Restoration trailer for The Servant

COMMENTS: Led by a dominating career performance from Dirk Continue reading 41*. THE SERVANT (1963)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE MYSTERIANS (1957)

Chikyû Bôeigun

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DIRECTED BY: Ishirô Honda

FEATURING: Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, Momoko Kôchi, Akihiko Shirata

PLOT: The Mysterians, a technologically superior force from another world, threaten the people of Earth with destruction unless they are granted access to a small plot of land and intermarriage with the planet’s women.

Still from The Mysterians (1957)

COMMENTS: The Japanese monster movie stands today mostly as a magnificent punchline, a peak in the field of cheesy filmmaking. With men in rubber suits wreaking havoc upon cardboard cities and sober-voiced scientists sagely predicting doom while hordes of citizens flee in terror, they can feel appealing nearly seven decades later specifically because of their amateurism. The home-movie caliber special effects, the hilarious destruction of major metropoli, and at least here in the West, the peculiarly emotive and awkwardly translated dialogue are all part of their charm. And as the sequels and copycats have piled on, that has largely become the raison d’etre for the whole genre. That was supremely silly, we say. Give us more.

But was it silly? An interesting side effect of their continued popularity is the rise of dedicated scholarship that examines the very serious origins of some of these stories. Consider the giant among giants: Ishirô Honda’s 1954 classic Gojira, which used a rampaging beast to tell a story of Japan’s psychic fallout from the atomic blasts of World War II, as well as to react to current events in which Japanese sailors were contaminated by exposure to a nuclear test. (Later kaiju, such as Mothra and Gamera, would have similar nuclear-inspired origins.) Yes, it’s a monster movie, but those in the know recognize it for much more.

Someone who absolutely knows the subtext is Ishirô Honda, and he practically triples down on it in The Mysterians, a movie about an occupying force that holds immense power over the occupied, who claims to want little but always seems to take more and more. If you imagine Honda and screenwriter Takeshi Kimura weren’t thinking about the United States, then you’ve been well-distracted by the aliens who look like baggy-suited Power Rangers and the monster who seems to be a blend of Big Bird and a steel-plated baseball umpire. Or you’re an American.

That’s far from the only theme The Mysterians wants to get across. There’s the matter of Ryōichi, the scientist who throws in with the invaders only to realize too late that the purity of science was no match for the corruption of power. He deflects accusations of treason only to regret his folly: “Even science has no value in itself!” he declares in his final message. “It all depends on how it’s used – for good or for evil!” And if science has a lesson to learn, so does the whole world, as a relieved functionary proclaims at the film’s conclusion. “The nations of the world must now stay united, and struggle against unknown forces instead of fighting each other.” Remind me to check on how that’s going.

The messages seem more prominent and more didactic than in Godzilla’s film debut, and that might be because the threat seems a lot less impressive. Even though the stakes have gone from the fate of Tokyo to the fate of the world, the battles themselves feel smaller. After the monster is deployed early in the film, the rest of the Mysterians’ danger is represented by being impervious to attacks, firing lasers, and enacting some of the lamest kidnappings ever filmed. They just don’t deliver shock and awe, no matter their demands or their dominance. That carries over into a painful lack of suspense. With Earth foiled at every turn, you need a really big payoff to buy the home team’s ultimate victory, and you don’t get one. Ultimately, the Earth Defense Force just has to keep working on better weapons until they find one that makes a dent, and that’s exactly what happens. It’s the equivalent of playground banter wherein one kid announces he has a forcefield to protect himself from harm, and the next kid declares that he has an anti-forcefield gun.

There are some genuinely great special effects, such as the dramatic flooding and the melting tanks caused by the Mysterians’ weapons, and the Akira Ifukube score is exciting and propulsive. But overall, The Mysterians just ends up not being that interesting. Honda and the team at Toho had a lot more to say, but this go-around wasn’t a particularly compelling way to say it all. Seems like another reason the monsters had more staying power than the messages.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s solemn and silly, with too many earnest scientific-military discussions, but it pulls out all the stops when unleashing destructive weaponry, melting tanks, bizarre futurist décor, panicking hordes and kicking the baddies off the planet.” – Kim Newman, Empire

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

33*. BRAIN DAMAGE (1988)

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“[It’s in the] contemporary LSD/monster-movie genre. On second thought, I guess there’s no such thing. Let’s just call it a bizarre monster movie.”–Frank Henenlotter, asked to describe the film’s genre in 1988

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Rick Hearst, Jennifer Lowry, Gordon MacDonald, voice of John Zacherle

PLOT: Young New Yorker Brian wakes up one morning to find that a small snake-like creature, “Elmer,” has escaped from his neighbor’s apartment and drilled a hole in the back of his head. Elmer secretes a powerful euphoric hallucinogen, which he injects directly into Brian’s brain; the young man is quickly addicted to the rush. But Elmer also requires human brains to function, and plans on using Brian to harvest them.

Still from Brain Damage (1988)

BACKGROUND:

  • Frank Henenlotter made has debut, Basket Case, in 1981 for $35,000. For seven years he was unable to raise funds to make the kind of follow-up film he wanted, until Cinema Group put up a reported $1.5 million for Brain Damage.
  • John Zacherle (the voice of Elmer/Aylmer) was a noted horror host in Philadelphia and New York City who went by the moniker “the Cool Ghoul.” Henenlotter, a fan who grew up watching Zacherle, convinced him to join the production. Zacherle wasn’t credited because he was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and this was a non-union set.
  • Crew members reportedly walked off the set during the “blow job” scene. This bad taste sequence was also cut from early theatrical and television prints to preserve an “R” rating.
  • The movie was partly inspired by Henenlotter’s experiences with giving up cocaine.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: With all of the crazy hallucinations, brain cam footage, and grossout gore scenes, it’s almost easy to lose sight of the strangest image in this movie: the Aylmer itself, a talking cross between a penis and a turd with cartoon eyes.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Blue juice at the synapse; pulsing meatball brains

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The psychedelic trip sequences, intriguingly urbane penile villain, and a general sensibility of depraved unreality elevate this gore-horror into something stranger than the usual VHS exploitation dreck.


Original trailer for Brain Damage

COMMENTS: As an allegory, Brain Damage couldn’t be more obvious—or apt. Indeed, if drug addiction could talk,it would sound just Continue reading 33*. BRAIN DAMAGE (1988)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ANALOG (2012)

DIRECTED BY: Ebbëto

FEATURING: Fábio Norat, Giovanna Velasco

PLOT: An android tasked with guarding a lone man in hibernation on a deep-space journey takes radical steps to protect his charge, including creating a female companion and acting to protect the pair from sin.

Still from Analog (2012)

COMMENTS: Surely we’ve learned by now that leaving an artificial intelligence in charge of the future of all life on a lengthy space voyage is a risky proposition. The supergenius mainframe might become homicidal. A highly damaged android might implant the embryos of a malevolent race of unstoppable killers. An autopilot might plot to prevent humanity from returning to its ancestral home. There’s a good argument that those pesky AIs can’t be trusted with our safety at all, and Analog provides us with a new reason to be skeptical: the dang thing might try to become God.

Filmmaker Ebbëto (in addition to directing, he also takes credits for screenplay, cinematography, editing, and 2D animation) makes his intentions clear in his own description of the film: “Strange events with biblical analogies begin to occur, disturbing the machine and making it rethink its priorities.” The obviousness is not overstated. Sensing his charge’s loneliness, The Machine extracts a rib for the purposes of crafting a companion creature. Later, he will probe the minds of the pair and discover desires that he cannot sanction, as though they had new knowledge of themselves. What Analog brings to the table is an appalling realism: the cutting, bleeding, and growing attendant with these procedures are made explicit. So, too, is the humans’ punishment for their sinful thoughts. This is Adam and Eve retold as horror.

Analog is a marvelous example of the remarkable potential of DIY filmmaking. Ebbëto creates a number of immersive settings, including the cramped, industrial spaceship. It’s not always completely realistic – the green-screen technology sometimes gives off that DVD-ROM cut-scene vibe – but it’s thoroughly otherworldly and cleverly overcomes its limitations. There’s a lot of mileage to be gotten out of smart cables, rotating tubes, and robot repair.

But what little story there is amounts to a kind of grotesque punchline. The biblical beats hint at critique or satire but are really just the excuse for an outline, and once you’ve admired the bang-for-your-buck ethos, there’s not much more to it. Analog works best as a proof-of-concept for Ebbeto’s filmmaking skills; that’s the more interesting genesis story going on here.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Analog definitely isn’t going to be for everyone. It is slow and obtuse, and while I tend to dig that kind of deliberate, cautious tempo, I’ll admit, the whole thing does feel too long… Analog is still an interesting watch. There is a creepy ambience, and while that blanched out visual style can overwhelm your eyes from time to time, the look is consistent and unique.” – Brent McKnight, Giant Freakin Robot 

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