Tag Archives: Artsploitation

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: DJANGO KILL… IF YOU LIVE, SHOOT! (1967)

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Django Kill has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made. Please read the official Certified Weird entry and make any comments there. Comments are closed on this post.

Se Sei Vivo Spara

DIRECTED BY: Giulio Questi

FEATURING: Tomas Milian

PLOT: A bandit is betrayed and left for dead by his comrades, then rides into a strange and corrupt town looking for vengeance and the stolen gold.

Still from Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! (1967)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: An ambiguously dead antihero who shoots golden bullets fights Mr. Sorrow and his gang of gay fascist cowboys. How could we not at least consider it for a spot as one of the weirdest movies of all time?

COMMENTS: Django Kill (which has nothing to do with Django—American distributors tacked on the name of Franco Nero’s popular cowboy in hopes of selling more tickets) is one of the first movies to recognize the hallucinogenic properties of the overripe oater. Flirting with surrealism while laying on the stage blood in ludicrous quantities, Giulio Questi’s bizarre 1967 western must have set off light bulbs inside Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s skull. The plot, involving a protagonist who is rescued from death by Indian spirit guides, also appears to have at least subliminally inspired Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Dead Man. Although most of the shocking content—a man being scalped, an (offscreen) homosexual gang rape, and quick-flash subliminal editing techniques designed to induce seizure in epileptics—seems dated or tame today, in 1967 Django Kill was a real sizzler. Italian authorities banned the movie until certain (now-restored) scenes, such as a gang of townspeople’s flesh-ripping treasure hunt for golden bullets suspected to be lodged inside a fresh corpse, were excised. Even though Kill‘s violence no longer carries the same visceral impact it did in the late 60s, it’s still a lot of bloody fun; at times, it’s like watching running loose on a Sergio Leone set. One of the surprising things about Django Kill is that, despite all of the bizarre touches Questi adds, it’s accessible enough to work as a satisfying exploitation western, albeit with a supernatural tinge to it. With his hazel eyes gleaming above his scrub-brush cheeks, Cuban-born Thomas Milian makes for an attractive, ethnically ambiguous antihero (he’s supposed to be a half-breed) who needs to do little more than act cool and aloof to make his presence felt onscreen. The admittedly meandering plot hits all the genre highlights: shootouts, stolen gold, cruel villains, hangings, saloon fistfights, God-forsaken desert landscapes, betrayal, revenge, and closeups of grizzled macho faces aplenty. The strangeness comes in small doses, giving the weirdophiles in the audience secret thrills without alienating the drive-in/grindhouse patrons. Other than the gold bullets, the first fifteen minutes are played almost totally straight. When a gang of desperadoes roll into a nameless town, things start to take on a strange tinge: naked children stand calmly watching their progress through the dusty main street, while other kids are being used as footstools. Figures are briefly glimpsed in windows and there seems to be something unspeakably depraved happening behind every door. As we progress through the movie these quirks multiply, from the villain improbably named “Mr. Sorrow” and his gang of black-clad “muchachos” to a mock-crucifixion scene featuring vampire bats to an alcoholic parrot. The subtext appears to be that Milian, known only as the Stranger, is dead and is wandering through a bandito’s vision of Hell; or, perhaps the Stranger is a Christ figure, redeeming the debauched town through his suffering. The answer is probably both, and neither, of the above; Questi keeps the existential implications of the tale as wide open as the dome over a Montana prairie. To modern eyes Django Kill isn’t the weirdest of the acid Westerns, but it was a pioneer among crazed cowboy pics, and its mixture of unabashed exploitation, arty surrealism and psychedelic editing makes it a cult item par excellence.

Giulio Questi had a short but extremely curious feature film between 1967 and 1972 before being exiled to TV movies. Starting with Django Kill, he made three films in three different b-movie genres—a Spaghetti Western, a giallo (Death Laid an Egg), and a horror film (Arcana)—each co-written with his editor, Franco Arcalli, and each informed by the aesthetics of surrealism. This is the most widely seen of the trio, but it’s far from the weirdest. Blue Underground put out a Django Kill Blu-ray in 2012, while Questi’s other films remain yet unreleased in Region 1.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…determinedly weird… [a] savage and surreal smorgasbord for cult-film aficionados.”–Bud Wilkins, Slant Magazine (Blu-ray)

(This movie was nominated for review by The Awful Dr. Orloff, who called it “the most insanely violent spaghetti western of them all.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DEMONIACS (1974)

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Les démoniaques; AKA Curse of the Living Dead

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: John Rico, Joëlle Coeur, Lieva Lone, Patricia Hermenier

PLOT: A crew of “wreckers” rape and apparently kill two female shipwreck survivors, but the two girls seek revenge with the help of the evil spirits who live in nearby ruins.

Still from The Demoniacs (1974)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Jean Rollin expands his narrow directorial palette slightly with The Demoniacs, moving away from his usual vampires and stepping out of his musty old castles for the fresh air of the seashore. The film doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the usual Rollin romp, however, and despite the pirate spice the result in a fairly typical film that exhibits all the artsploitation auteur’s usual virtues (visuals and atmosphere) and vices (pacing and continuity).

COMMENTS: The Demoniacs explores a new aesthetic for Jean Rollin, one that I’d dub “beach Gothic”: there are scenes set in a ship cemetery, a battered girl in a nightgown crawling along the shoreline past a congregation of carefully arranged crabs, and a pirate’s tavern decorated with bat wings and death’s heads. The villains of the piece are a quartet of sinister salts called “wreckers” who scheme to lure ships onto the shallow reefs of their island home at night, then salvage the loot that washes up onshore. On the night this tale begins, the crew is rooting through their latest catch when two beautiful young blonde girls in pristine white nightgowns stride out of the sea, looking as if they’re walking on water. True to their corrupt natures, the pirates’ response to this eerie and angelic vision is to rape the two innocent survivors, brutally beat them, and leave them for dead. (The rape scene is overlong, and somehow seems even more unpleasant and perverted because the abuse is so badly choreographed). Whether the girls were killed or not remains ambiguous; later, the Captain sees visions of them in a drunken stupor and is convinced they’ve come back to haunt him, but a villager also spots the girls walking about. That sighting leads the wreckers to track the fugitives to a graveyard of shipwrecks—an amazing location, although the most suspenseful question arising in the chase is whether the busty female brigand’s impractical bodice will be able to contain her heaving bosoms during the ensuing three-way gal slap fight. The girls flee into the “cursed ruins” where even the wreckers fear to follow; there, they are met by an orange-haired female clown (!) who introduces the suddenly mute cuties to a sleeping evil who promises to give them a chance at revenge. This sets up a third act with a resolution that’s bewildering even by Rollin’s nonlinear standards. Along the way we get a psychic brothel proprietress, bloodless pigeon heads, and macabre background details like the cheerful noose that hangs over the Captain’s bed as a decoration. One of the film’s biggest assets is Joëlle Coeur as the wanton female wrecker; she’s one in a long line of remarkably beautiful and uninhibited leading ladies Rollin managed to dig up. She’s tempting, she’s perverse, and she’s hard to take your eyes off of whenever she’s onscreen.

After you’ve seen several of them, Rollin’s 1970s movies start to blur together; they become almost interchangeable, like hazy fragments from an uneasy night of nightmares, so that one’s preference for one over another is based on subtle and almost arbitrary criteria. I consider this one of his better efforts, but newcomers will take a while to adjust to the slow pace (it seems like the Captain even gropes his mistress in slow motion). Rollin’s vampire movies may be a better place to start, since the familiar bloodsucker lore provides the viewer with something of a safety net when logic leaves them hanging.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“For all its dreamlike Rollinesque tendencies ‘Les Demoniaques’ is actually a solid and entertaining (if somewhat lackluster) viewing experience. The premise is handled well and the narrative is welcomingly coherent; Rollin’s direction is pretty much faultless throughout and the cast cackle their way through the script in fine fashion (with as ever much topless shenanigans on show to keep art house fans discreetly aroused)…”–Alan Simpson, SexGoreMutants.com (DVD)

The Demoniacs (US Limited Edition) [4K UHD]

The Demoniacs (US Limited Edition) [4K UHD]
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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE (1968)

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Le viol du vampire

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Bernard Letrou, Solange Pradel, Jacqueline Sieger

PLOT: In Part I a psychoanalyst tries to cure four sisters of their belief that they are centuries-old vampires; in Part II, the Queen of the Vampires revives the cast members who died in Part I so she can conduct medical experiments on curing vampirism.

Still from Rape of the Vampire (1968)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Jean Rollin’s feature debut—which began as a partially improvised 30 minute short in which the main characters died at the end, only to be magically brought back to life for “part II” so the story could be expanded to feature length—is one of the vampire auteurs weirdest works, which is saying something. But, like all Rollin films, it’s a mixture of the awe-inspiring and the godawful. There’s likely only room for one Rollin representative on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies; is Rape it? We’ll need to finish up his entire catalog to be sure.

COMMENTS: Rape of the Vampire wants to be the Un Chien Andalou of lesbian vampire movies; it can’t quite reach those lofty aspirations, but it does have fun trying. Viewers frequently complain that the story is “incomprehensible,” but that’s not quite the case; the vampiric shenanigans are illogical and confusingly related, but there is a plot line that plays through from beginning to end. It’s the old story about a psychoanalyst who visits a chateau uninvited to convince four sisters they’re not vampires, then falls in love with one of the sisters and gets killed by angry villagers and then is secretly resurrected so he can foil the plan of the Queen of the Vampires to simultaneously cure vampirism and inaugurate a new age of the nosferatu by burying a bride and groom in a coffin during a high school play. Or something like that. Rollin deliberately disorients the viewer, and you can be forgiven for thinking that you must have nodded off and missed some crucial plot point; this is the kind of movie where you’re constantly gazing at the screen and thinking, “who is that guy again? Isn’t he dead?” For example, there is a scene where the psychiatrist tries to convince one of the sisters that she’s no more blind than she is a vampire; Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE (1968) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1973)

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AKA Caged Virgins

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Mireille Dargent

PLOT: Two lesbian killers dressed as clowns flee the law and wind up in the hands of a vampire who needs virgins to perpetuate his race.

Still from Requiem for a Vampire (1973)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: One of the problems with evaluating Jean Rollin’s fantastique vampire films is that none of them really stick out; each film contains a similar non-plot exploring Gothic iconography and exploiting French models’ nude bodies. It’s almost as if Rollin spent his lifetime shooting one long montage of erotic vampire-themed scenes and arbitrarily edited them into individual movies. Requiem for a Vampire starts out as one of the director’s weirder and artier efforts, but just when the movie goes totally porno on you and you think you can write it off, Rollin whips out the vagina bat, and you’re right back where you started.

COMMENTS: Requiem for a Vampire was Jean Rollin’s first (and only) movie to be dubbed into English and theatrically released in the United States, under the sleazy (but somewhat accurate) title Caged Virgins. It’s a lot of fun to imagine confused 1970s horndogs fuming at the drive-in or grindhouse as they watch Requiem‘s first thirty minutes, which are mostly dialogue-free scenes of two fetching girls wandering around the gorgeous French countryside dressed as clowns.

Frustrated sleaze patrons might have assumed they’d been tricked into watching some sort of Bergmanesque existential art film and left in disgust; but if they stuck around for the movie’s second act, they were rewarded with lesbian lovemaking, whippings, a dungeon full of naked women in chains repeatedly groped and violated, and, of course, that unforgettable vagina bat torture. Even more than most Rollin films, Requiem seesaws between sensationalized sexploitation and earnest eeriness, mixing brilliance and shoddiness together until you’re not sure which is which. After our lesbian clowns (it’s important to stress that the anti-heroines in this movie start as lesbian clowns) escape from the law, they wander across a meadow to a tranquil stream. They gaze into the water and suddenly it turns milky white, then blood red. It’s a delightfully strange moment, cleverly edited so that you don’t realize until later that what you’ve seen is the ladies washing off their clown makeup in the creek. That’s Rollin being brilliant, but soon after comes a scene where one of the pair accidentally falling into an open grave that is soon filled in by two gravediggers, who can’t see the girl in the miniskirt and sexy white knee socks lying on top of the coffin despite staring directly at her. She is somehow able to hold her breath as they fill in the grave with six feet of earth, then wait for her companion to dig her out. This is the type of impossible scene that suggests not so much deliberate surrealism (of which there are no other examples in the film) as a sloppy indifference to logical cause and effect.

The two scenes discussed above, plus the long dungeon orgy with its clumsily staged and repetitive rapes, all occur before the title vampire is even properly introduced; once he makes the scene he turns out to be a tragic, passive and defeatist immortal who’s easily outwitted. The guy needs virgins to fulfill his evil plan, and he thinks he’s lucked out when he finds two lesbians who’ve never known the touch of a man; surely there is no simple trick the girls could pull to avoid a fate of eternal damnation, is there? With its cornball vamp plot and acres of abused nude flesh, Caged Virgins had obvious appeal as an exploitation export, but its arthouse pacing, stylistic experimentation and a disregard for logic that offended even drive-in patrons ensured that it would be a flop. Today, it’s a great introduction to Rollin for vintage horror and sleaze freaks, who will find that this film “delivers” more than the auteur’s artier efforts.

Like almost everything else, Rollin had an uneven approach to sex scenes. He shoots nude bodies with the eye of an artist, but his attempts to shoehorn nudity into his stories are often laughably awkward. The placement of the sado-orgy in Requiem for a Vampire makes some narrative sense, but a sudden ten minute sex scene (the most explicit in Rollin’s softcore catalog) plopped into the middle of a brooding terror tale that’s been only mildly titillating up to that point is tonally jarring, included at the producer’s insistence. The sex scenes sold the film to the American market but got it totally banned in Britain. Then, it was released in the UK in a cut version (even today, the officially sanctioned British cut of the film is missing six minutes of sex and torture). Brit film fans rightfully complained about the censorship, but ironically, the cut version probably produces a more powerful experience, as the dungeon depravity is hopelessly fake and repetitive and generally detracts from the Gothic atmosphere.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this faintly surreal sex-vampire movie achieved a minor cult reputation thanks to its blend of vampirism and sado-eroticism.”–Time Out Film Guide

Requiem for a Vampire (US Limited Edition Blu-ray)

Requiem for a Vampire (US Limited Edition Blu-ray)
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Canonically Weird (The List)

114. CEMETERY MAN [DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE] (1994)

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“Michele Soari gave me the script. At first I didn’t understand anything, because it was really strange. It’s a horror movie, it’s a sex movie, it was really strange…”–Anna Falchi

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DIRECTED BY: Michele Soavi

FEATURING: Rupert Everett, Anna Falchi, François Hadji-Lazaro

PLOT: Together with his nearly-mute associate Gnaghi, Francesco Dellamorte is a groundskeeper at a cemetery; his most important duty is to blow out the brains of the zombies (“returners”) who rise from their graves after seven days. Weary of his life as a zombie-slaying gravekeeper, Dellamorte is reinvigorated when he falls in love with a beautiful young widow. Things grow stranger when he hears the voice of Death speaking to him, suggesting another approach to his job…

Still from Cemetery Man [Dellamorte Dellamore] (1994)

BACKGROUND:

  • Cemetery Man is adapted from the novel (or possibly graphic novel) “Dellamorte Dellamore” by Tiziano Sclavi, who went on to enormous popular success in Italy with his “Dylan Dog” comic book series about a supernatural investigator with a Groucho sidekick.
  • In Italian “della morte” means “of death” and “dell’amore” means “of love.”
  • Michele Soavi has had an odd directing career. He apprenticed under Italian exploitaion impresario Joe D’Amato, and later worked as a second unit director for both Dario Argento and Terry Gilliam. Given the opportunity to direct his own features, between 1987 and 1991 he produced three solid but relatively conventional horror films (Stagefright, The Church, The Sect), but nothing suggesting he would produce anything as demented as Dellamorte Dellamore. Despite the fact Dellamorte was a domestic and critical success in Italy and eventually became a cult hit around the world, at the peak of his acclaim Soavi retired from both horror and feature film making, choosing to direct movies in multiple genres for Italian television instead.
  • Soavi has talked from time to time of possibly making a sequel. In 2011 fellow Italian director Luigi Cozzi informed Fangoria magazine that Soavi had started on the script and planned to make the film in 2012, but there’s been no further news on the project since that notice.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: An honorable mention must go to the eerily erotic midnight interlude when Everrtt and Falci make love in a Gothic graveyard lit by spermatozoa-shaped glowing will-o’-the-wisps. It would be a crime, however, if the movie’s most indelible moment didn’t involve Cemetery Man‘s two weirdest characters, the mute child-man Gnaghi and his girlfriend, an underage severed head (buried, for some reason, in a bridal veil) whom he keeps in the broken shell of his television set. You won’t forget what happens when she unexpectedly reveals that she can fly…

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s a film criticism fallback cliché to describe an outrageously eccentric movie using the following formula: “it’s [insert name of familiar movie or genre] on acid!” I’m not above recycling useful boilerplate, though: Dellamorte Dellamore is a George Romero movie on acid. The world’s only surrealist arthouse zombie black comedy is too unique (and too poetic) to leave off the List.


Clip from Cemetery Man [Dellamorte Dellamore]

COMMENTS: The typical zombie-movie enthusiast will find Dellamorte Dellamore strange and Continue reading 114. CEMETERY MAN [DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE] (1994) →