Tag Archives: Black Comedy

Apocryphally Weird

3*. SINGAPORE SLING (1990)

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Singapore sling: O anthropos pou agapise ena ptoma

AKA Singapore Sling: The Man Who Loved a Corpse

“You know the feeling of something half remembered,
Of something that never happened, yet you recall it well;
You know the feeling of recognizing someone
That you’ve never met as far as you could tell…”–Johnny Mercer, “Laura”

Recommended (with caution)

DIRECTED BY: Nikos Nikolaidis

FEATURING: Meredyth Herold, Panos Thanassoulis,

PLOT: A detective is searching for a missing girl, Laura, a supposed murder victim with whom he was in love and who he believes is still alive. Suffering from an unexplained bullet wound, he follows the trail to a villa where a psychotic “Daughter” and an equally insane “Mother” live in a sick relationship, hiring servants whom they later kill. When the enfeebled detective stumbles to their door, the two women capture him, dub him “Singapore Sling” after a cocktail recipe they find in his pocket, and use him in their sadomasochistic sex games.

Still from Singapore Sling (1990)

BACKGROUND:

  • Much of the plot references ‘s classic thriller/film noir, Laura, including prominent use of the famous theme song.
  • Director Nikos Nikolaidis is well-known in Greece and is sometimes considered the godfather of the “Greek Weird Wave” films (best known in the work of ). Singapore Sling is his only work that is widely available outside of Greece.
  • Singapore Sling was one of the top three vote getters in 366 Weird Movies first Apocryphally Weird movie poll, making it one of the most popular weird movies left off the 366 Weird Movies canon.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Warning: there are a lot of images in Singapore Sling which you would probably like to forget, but will be unable to. Among the least objectionable (believe it or not) is Daughter’s memory (?) of losing her virginity to “Father”: he appears as a bandage-swathed mummy.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Earrings on organs; mummy incest

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Imagine a cross between Laura and Salo, as directed by a young dabbling in pornography, and you’ll have some idea of what you’re in for—but it’s slightly weirder than that.


Short clip from Singapore Sling (1990) (in Greek)

COMMENTS: Singapore Sling blatantly references Otto Preminger’s Continue reading 3*. SINGAPORE SLING (1990) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: WHY DON’T YOU JUST DIE! (2018)

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Papa, Sdokhni

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DIRECTED BY: Kirill Sokolov

FEATURING: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Vitaliy Khaev, Evgeniya Kregzhde, Michael Gor, Elena Shevchenko

PLOT: Matvey intends on doing in Olya’s father with a hammer, but complications—and Matvey’s uncanny indisposition to dying from his wounds—derail his straightforward plan.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: At a certain point I figured this was merely an extreme case of Guy Ritchie violence and mayhem. By the third act, though, I discovered that the movie still had a bloody mile to go.

COMMENTS: To paraphrase one of my peers who attended the screening, this movie has “Chekhov’s shotgun, Chekhov’s hammer, Chekhov’s power drill, Chekhov’s handgun…” I managed to slip in, “also Chekhov’s ceiling light.” Considering the crowd, I’m not sure if you’d not be surprised to hear it also had the most consistent laughs of any Fantasia “comedy” so far. Perhaps all of us are just terrible people, but I lay the blame squarely on directing neophyte Kirill Sokolov (who also wrote the film) for creating such a side-splitting violence chamber play.

During his brief introduction, Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) seems like a regular fellow, albeit a regular fellow furtively hiding a hammer behind his back as he rings an apartment doorbell. He intones “One, two, three, evil can’t touch me” as he buzzes and is greeted by Andrey (Vitaliy Khaev), an intimidating, hefty man in his fifties, who reluctantly invites him in. Andrey’s wife Tasha (Elena Shevchenko) offers the boy something to drink. When Matvey and Andrey sit down, so begins a very awkward conversation after Matvey’s hammer slips out of his pants and clammers to the ground. “Is that your hammer?” “Yes. A friend wanted to borrow it.” And soon a room-busting melee between the father and Matvey ensues.

This battle of violence and wills continues throughout the run-time of the movie, interrupted on only three occasions by vignettes that explain the pertinent back stories. All very “Guy Ritchie,” as I mention above, but much like Come To Daddy, there is a point at which the whole affair careens over an edge and becomes ludicrous. No more hemming-and-hawing in the theater seat for me, but a quick flash of realization that this movie had just entered the world of crazy-go-nuts. Within its tiny setting (I’d say over 80% of the action takes place in a three room apartment), nearly everything becomes saturated with someone’s blood as TVs bludgeon, shotguns blast, drill bits spin, and kitchen knives cleave.

Near the end, when all the facts are on display and poor Matvey is sitting in a sorry state on the tattered couch (middle finger still flipped up in defiance), Andrey muses aloud to his daughter, “How is this guy still alive?” What, indeed, is this bloodshed for? Part of me suspects it’s allegorical: Matvey, the Russian everyman, enduring and outlasting every abuse from a government system that’s against him. A slightly larger part of me suspects that that would be thinking too much. This red-spewing fountain of black comedy needn’t be approached with any lens, political or otherwise. Just make sure you can stomach ninety straight minutes of top gore .

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:

“Building a crazed Looney Tunes mood with cartoon-bright colors, kinetic camera moves and zippy fast cuts, Sokolov keeps ramping up the savagery to absurdly excessive levels, his protagonists somehow struggling on despite skull-cracking, stomach-bursting injuries. Gore levels are high, but the overall effect is more sicko comedy than torture porn.”–Stephen Dalton, Hollywood Reporter (festival screening)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: COME TO DADDY (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Ant Timpson

FEATURING: Elijah Wood, , Michael Smiley,

PLOT: Norval receives a letter from his long-estranged father, begging him to come to his remote home to reconnect; daddy is not who he seems, but he does have a lot of deadly associates holding long-simmering grudges.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The word “quirky” lurked around the back of my mind throughout the first half, until a plot spasm of strange violence brought the weird levels up to floodgate-breaking point.

COMMENTS: Appropriately for a plot that hinges on a theft, there is a whole lot of stealing in the movie: stealing of scenes (not to mention chewing of scenery). That’s to be expected from a film featuring some of the best characters actors in the business, each one-upping the other as the craziness volcano erupts. The heavy lifting (and grand larceny) is done most by Elijah Wood, who surprised me equally with his capacity to normalize the narrative while drawing attention to himself with perhaps the most nerd/hipster/pratt/ mama’s boy character I have ever seen. (While rocking one of the worst haircuts ever to grace the big screen.)

Wide-eyed, apprehensive Norval (Wood) steps off a bus close to the middle of nowhere, California, and walks on foot while rolling a massive suitcase along with him. When he arrives at “a UFO that crashed in the ’60s”-style cabin, he meets his father (Stephen McHattie), whom he has not seen for three decades. They bond, or try to, but mostly Norval endures of varying degrees of abuse. Norval is a recovering alcoholic who describes himself as a combination DJ, pianist, beat-layer, and event organizer; what his father describes him as I cannot type, but the description is apt. At one point mid-rant, his father’s dander rises so high that he has a fatal heart attack while threatening his boy with a butcher knife. Then what’s actually going on starts coming to light.

Watching it with a packed house on a Friday night, I noticed two related things: the audience was far too eager to laugh at things that probably warranted silence, and Come To Daddy‘s sheer oddness (and intensity) was insidious. Rabid fans of Stephen McHattie burst out laughing at the drop of a pin; I sat quietly wondering what, if anything, was going to make a payoff that warranted my attention. The arrival of Michael Smiley’s character (a kind of a twisted, drunken, deadbeat heir to A Field in England‘s effete and sinister O’Neal) turned out to be the harbinger of the film’s madness, and once this madness set in, it did not relent.

As I mentioned above, it doesn’t feel like a slow build up so much as a massive explosion. I came close to writing this off as a wasted outing, as I had with a previous Fantasia buzz-puffed disappointment, 68 Kill. Rarely have I been happier to have been proven wrong, as the investment of my time and focus handsomely paid off. I was left, though, with the burning question, how in Heaven’s name did they get Elijah “Frodo Baggins” Wood to go through this suffering on-screen? But good for him. I look forward to him embracing the role of character actor—albeit on a quite different pay scale than his confrères.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Come to Daddy’ struggles to maintain its zany energy through the final act, and a concluding hotel room showdown unfolds like a quirky, half-hearted sketch comedy in the shadow of the more alluring weirdness leading up to it. Even so, it’s punctuated by a violent act so cartoonish and bizarre it brings the story back to its strengths… the movie finds its way to a bizarre form of closure that illustrate Timpson’s confidence in this strange genre brew. By the end, it all suddenly clicks.”–Reic Kohn, Indiewire (festival screening)

Apocryphally Weird

1*. THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)

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Katakuri-ke no kôfuku

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, ,

PLOT: The Katakuri clan retires to a remote mountain area to run a bed and breakfast, but the place seems cursed, as every guest who stays there dies. The Katakuris try to cover up the deaths to avoid bad publicity, while frequently bursting into song and dance numbers.

Still from The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

BACKGROUND:

  • The Happiness of the Katakuris is actually a remake (some say a “very loose” remake) of a Jee-woon Kim’s (non-musical) Korean black comedy The Quiet Family.
  • Miike made Katakuris the same year as Visitor Q, an even blacker comedy which also deals with the theme of a “happy” Japanese family. Katakuris and Q were two of a remarkable eight movies the prolific auteur released in 2001.
  • The Happiness of the Katakuris received the highest number of total votes in 366 Weird Movies first Apocryphally Weird movie poll, making it arguably the most popular weird movie left off the 366 Weird Movies canon.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We’ll have to go with that little claymation yōkai/imp that pops out of a random diner’s soup and falls in love with her heart-shaped uvula—with bizarrely comic results.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Claymation infatuation; reanimated corpse song and dance

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Katakuri clan came about as close to making the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made as possible; we held off honoring them partly because their movie, while weird indeed, was overlong and uneven, and partly because Takashi Miike was already well-represented with three Canonically Weird movies, and it was time to give someone else a shot. The movie’s inclusion on the secondary list of Apocrypha titles was assured, and it’s a highly appropriate choice for the inaugural title in our runners-up category.

Short clip from The Happiness of the Katakuris

COMMENTS: The Happiness of the Katakuris begins with a four-minute scene, which really has nothing to do with the rest of the Continue reading 1*. THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: RONDO (2019) (DVD RELEASE)

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DIRECTED BY: Drew Barnhardt

FEATURING: Luke Sorge, Brenna Otts, Reggie De Morton, Gena Shaw, Steve Van Beckum

PLOT: Paul has been dishonorably discharged from the military and relies on his sister’s hospitality for a couch to crash on; when she recommends a therapist to help him with PTSD and alcohol addiction, he encounters a sordid world where revenge and unhealthy fantasy experiences can be bought for the right price.

Lobby card from Rondo (2018)

COMMENTS: As I gear up for my third trip to the Fantasia Film Festival, I am unfortunately reminded that most of what I’ll be seeing up North won’t be available again for months (and months), if it’s released at all. With that in mind, I look back at my original gob-smacked review and consider whether or not Rondo lives up to the hype I expressed directly after my original “live” experience. In brief: it does.

My earlier review covers most of the bases, but I wanted to expand on how well Barnhardt manages Rondo‘s singular atmosphere. Its edge-of-realistic set-pieces present a grisly and tragic tale that are undercut by a narrator that borders on intrusive. Much to my shame, I hadn’t seen ‘s Barry Lyndon until some months ago, well after I nodded in understanding at Barnhardt’s remarks on it during my interview with him. Like the Kubrick epic, Rondo involves a string of events that, though much more in the vein of “thriller”, have a tone that’s on the unsettling side of banal—until, in both films, an impressively indifferent narrator articulates his views on the action. As I have no doubt that Barnhardt would quickly dispel any suggestion he’s at Kubrick’s level, I’ll merely say that Rondo has the feel of a whomping dubstep echo of Barry Lyndon‘s awkwardly laid-back narrative meanderings.

Without dispersing too much insider knowledge (I spoke with both Barnhardt and Guy Clark, the producer, for close to an hour after the interview proper was finished), I can tell you that Rondo was made for substantially less than its shiny veneer and honed camerawork suggest. Indeed, a large part of its modest budget went to the… expressive use of squibs in a pivotal scene. But like a sculptor given a slim brick of marble, Barnhardt (who also wrote the script, scouted locations, and was heavily involved in the casting of largely unknown actors) manages to chisel a tiny objet d’art: it’s charmingly crafted, bloodily lighthearted, impressively detailed, and the whole thing fits conveniently on your desk (or perhaps your knife-filled kitchen sink).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a tour de force of highly assured genre filmmaking, and the mark of a real talent emerging from cinema’s more perverse, less salubrious end. ‘Ordinary’s not the thing that I want,’ as one character puts it. ‘I want the other thing.’ Rondo delivers just that, very satisfyingly.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (DVD)