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CAPSULE: WINDS OF CHANGE (1979)

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AKA Metamorphoses

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DIRECTED BY: Takashi Masunaga

FEATURING:

PLOT: Five tales loosely based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

Still from Winds of Change (1977)

COMMENTS: Masunaga’s debut is a decent, if somewhat clumsy, attempt at a collaboration with Hollywood’s studios. Even if it plays it by the book—this is a children’s film, after all—it remains a hidden gem, making it of some interest for those loving obscure and long-forgotten cartoons.

This anthology, loosely based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” starts with Peter Ustinov’s pompous voice-over. Ustinov is the only voice in the film—none of the characters speak for themselves. This admittedly cheapens the experience a bit, but in the end it doesn’t prove too distracting. The stories take place in the heaven of Greco-Roman mythology, with a young boy playing a different role in each tale. It may seem unnecessary to have the same character as a different protagonist each time, but works for younger viewers by creating a point of familiarity.

The stories are familiar to older viewers. We have the doomed love affair between Orpheus and Euridice, the campaign of Perseus against Medusa, and the tragedy of Phaethon. Light psychedelia accompanies everything—we are in the seventies, after all —with some segments even recalling “Alice in Wonderland.” With its lush environments full of cute animals as well as eerie secrets, the art style will appeal to fans of Disney’s animated classics. Fantasia (1940) is a point of reference, even if Winds of Change remains mild in comparison. We can’t really talk about dream logic or surreal imagery here; instead, we have a magical realist visual feast with a rich soundtrack on top. Anachronistic pop ballads, classical tunes, and a hint of Africa complement the visuals, creating a sense of phantasmagoria.

Let it be noted that the alternate edit titled Metamorphoses from 1977, with songs by Joan Baez and Mick Jagger, is unavailable.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In Winds of Change, every little detail is explained to death, and Ustinov provides silly character voices for moments with implied synchronized dialogue. To get a sense of the weird tone this creates, consider the moment when a young adventurer stumbles upon the goddess Diana, then ogles her shapely naked backside while she bathes in a waterfall with help from flittering faeries. Upon discovering her unwanted visitor, Diana turns toward the camera and scowls while Ustinov says, ‘Hell hath no fury like a goddess being peeked at!’ And that’s one of the more coherent moments.”–Peter Hanson, Every 70s Movie

Winds of Change - Five Ancient Greek

Winds of Change – Five Ancient Greek Myths (Animated)

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    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996)

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    aka The Slit

    Weirdest! 

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    DIRECTED BY: Christoph Schlingensief

    FEATURING: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johnny Pfeifer, Jones Muguse, Thomas Chibwe

    PLOT: The wife of a gay German UN commander stationed in Africa gives birth to a child who is declared the new messiah; when an accident causes the boy to be horribly injured and endangers the UN mission, an escalating battle for power arises between the power-hungry commander, a religious leader who has declared war on the Vatican, and a chieftain who is attempting to actualize his dream to ride a ramshackle rocket into the White House to kill the American president.

    Still from United Trash [AKA The Slit] (1996)

    WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Movies can be weird, they can be strange, they can be bizarre, but it’s rare to come across a movie that is actually insane. Under the trappings of satire on a global scale, United Trash offers a critique of international affairs forged in the crucible of late 20th century daytime talk shows. There is not a single character in the film who isn’t as awful as they can be, nor a situation that is not plussed to become the most grotesque version of itself. So many fluids are spattered across the screen, everyone is subject to abject humiliation, and not a single institution fails to be undermined. Rarely has a film’s contempt for its subjects been so blatant and so complete, nor has a commitment to the most base appeals for a laugh been pursued so vigorously.

    COMMENTS: In a career cut appallingly short by cancer, Christoph Schlingensief racked up a remarkable number of achievements, including staging a Wagner opera at the Bayreuth Festival, making plans to build a performing arts center in Burkina Faso, and curating a retrospective of his art that was staged posthumously at the Vienna Biennale. In cinema, he created a trilogy of films exploring the trauma caused by both the rise of Hitler and the process of German reunification. (The last of those, Terror 2000, also sits in our Reader Queue.) And in the middle of all this, he directed a film in which Udo Kier paints himself in blackface, dons a skirt made of bananas, and dances like a monkey in front of an audience of Africans while stroking the center banana aggressively. It’s an extraordinary career.

    United Trash features one of the most game casts I have ever seen. There’s not an ounce of shame among the lot of them. They got the note that subtlety would be punishable by death, and they responded by going furiously over the top. Keir leads the way with his relentless prissiness, matched by a frequently naked Natividad raving maniacally about her lack of sexual satisfaction. They are surrounded by actors working just as hard to win the title of Least Restrained Performance, including a Hitler-mustachioed doctor/rocket scientist, an amoral, sexually ravenous, Vatican-hating priest, and Keir’s absurdly bewigged, unexpectedly jacked, child-molesting Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996) →

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: HARVEST (2024)

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    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: , , Arinzé Kene, Frank Dillane,  Rosy McEwen, Thalissa Teixeira, Neil Leiper

    PLOT: Life in a Scottish farming village changes dramatically with the arrival of a new lord.

    Still from Harvest (2024)

    COMMENTS: In a nameless village in an uncertain time—sometime after the arrival of tobacco, but before the Industrial Revolution has reached rural Scotland—Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) eats bark and sticks his tongue into a knothole on an oak tree. You can’t get much more at one with the land than that.

    The village Walter lives in has no name. That changes when a chart-maker comes to map out the area. The natives see cartography as a threat; naming things is the first step to owning them, and the village operates (although somewhat hypocritically) on the principle of communal ownership of the land. Not that these people are noble savages, exactly; they’re as cruel, superstitious, and racist as they are poor. Walter wasn’t born there, but married a native and is now a widower; he is a close confidant of the beneficent landowner Master Kent, also not native born. He is a semi-outsider, caught between worlds, not fully accepted by the villagers but lacking another place to call home. His liminal status turns him into an observer. He befriends the cartographer, but also scolds him for “flattening” the land by mapping it. Walter is also spineless, sensing danger but as unable to stop progress from marching into the literal one-horse town as is the weak-willed Mater Kent. A fire in the Master’s stable foretells evil to come. Then, three outsiders are pilloried—for the crime of being outsiders. Walter is the only one who sympathizes with the trio,  but he is unable to muster the strength or courage to challenge any decision of the powers that be.

    Harvest is beautifully shot (sometimes reminiscent of the “harvest” subgenre of European painting) and impressively scored (one peasant threshing song is synced to the rhythm of swinging scythes). But the storytelling is confusing, the dialogue can be stiff, and the feckless protagonists supply little dramatic momentum as the story limps to its inevitable conclusion. The “hallucinatory” element suggested in Harvest‘s promotional materials is vastly oversold; in truth, the strangeness (mostly coming from the slightly alien behavior of the village’s peasants) never rises beyond the occasionally odd. Nor is the movie, as a few have claimed, folk horror (there’s plenty of folk, including some authentic-sounding bagpipe tunes, but no real horror). With this project, director/co-scripter distances herself from her association with the “Greek Weird Wave,” delivering an on-the-nose exploration of the ruthlessness with which capitalism replaced agrarian societies. Weirdophiles may safely skip this one; arthouse fans with a taste for historical, class-conscious narratives might find it worthwhile.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    ” Smatterings of the earthy, the occult, the hallucinatory and the neo-realist never coalesce into a pacy narrative…”–Carmen Paddock, The Skinny (contemporaneous)

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    FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND (2025)

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    Reflet dans un diamant mort

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    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY: ,

    FEATURING: Yannick Renier, Céline Camara, ,  Koen De Bouw, Thi-Mai Nguyen,

    PLOT: Retired superspy John D. finds his routine of drinking by the seaside interrupted when a lithe body washes ashore, triggering chaotic flashbacks to his days as a secret agent.

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Cattet & Forzani whirl their inspirations in a blender while pushing a cornucopia of sub-genres up to and past the breaking point — including the popular kink, “CMNKWF”. (That’s “Clothed Male, Naked Katana-Wielding Female,” for those not in the loop.)

    COMMENTS: There are two early giveaways that Reflection is going to be an oddity of excess. One is the long list of production companies. This is not uncommon for smaller-budget European films, but Cattet’s and Forzani’s film goes a bit beyond that, suggesting the filmmakers needed to scrape around to find brave investors. The second, foreshadowing the coming bombast, also appears in the credits: a blast of hyper-Bondian murder blasts and stabbings, with diamonds erupting from the colorful silhouettes of the victims, before a pleasure boat sinks down behind a growing blood-water column of text. And, as this is a European spy movie, there’s also the early topless scene, wherein a young woman exposes her breasts while tanning in a hotel’s private beach—exposing the diamond piercings that set off our film’s hero’s chain of memories.

    And what a hero! Old John D. has the weathered good lucks of an erstwhile man of action, and young John D. has all the panache, pluck, and pizzazz that might reasonably (indeed, perhaps unreasonably) distilled into one superspy. The developments are a little hard to follow at the start, with intercuts of Old and Young John’s adventures. By the third act, we’re facing a massive explosion of double-dealings, glorious gadgetry, and face after face torn and otherwise peeled from John’s ultimate adversary, the manifestly deadly femme known only as “Serpentika”.

    Cattet and Forzani exist somewhere above the speed of Ritchie and the grisliness of Tarantino, all while flirting with—and, on occasion, ravishing—the ambiguous meta-cinematic maneuvers of Fellini. With little room to breathe between outlandish capering (at least Old John’s timeline travels at a somewhat staid pace), the combined effect of the various shady machinations is to leave the viewer benumbed with bloody scintillation. Clawing together coherent memories of the chain of events, I can only roughly recall that one of Young John’s charges, an oil mega-baron, was murdered—but not before he kills John’s true love, a dashing young Black woman clad in a high-tech mirror dress, segments of which she leaves behind to allow John to follow her.

    Or does the evil oil baron murder her? The narrator’s recollections are as murky as his cocktails. But there are roulette wheel orgasms, pentuplicate ninjas, art-and-murder by oil slick, and an unbelievable parade of increasingly dangerous (and art-house-styled) rogues standing between John and his vengeance. After you watch Reflection in a Dead Diamond, you will clamor for these Belgians to craft the next Bond movie. I’m sure the suits in charge of the franchise will gladly sacrifice the 100% clarity for the 100% boost in oomph and style.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “John’s drifting memories are a dizzying kaleidoscope of surreal free associations, lifted from the clichés and conventions – the cartoonish credits, the casino games, the clandestine meetings, the global players, the masked assassins, the absurd gadgets, the sadomasochistic sex and the kickass fights – not so much of a Bond movie (although Testi does resemble an older Sean Connery), as of the endless European ripoffs that appeared in the wake of Bond… a deep dive into the genre’s established imagery and grammar that goes beyond mere postmodern pastiche into something more artful and abstract, even quintessential, and all sexed up with the filmmakers’ characteristic kink.” — Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous)

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: FRECKLED MAX AND THE SPOOKS (1987)

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    Pehavý Max a strašidlá

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    DIRECTED BY: Juraj Jakubisko

    FEATURING: , , Ferdinand Mayne, Gerhardt Karzel, Martin Hrebeň, Barbara De Rossi, Jacques Herlin, Mercedes Sampietro, Flavio Bucci, Milan Lasica, Julius Satinsky

    PLOT: Orphan Max ditches the traveling circus and ends up at a castle just as Victor Frankenstein is preparing to animate his new creation, “Albert”; Count Dracula, water and fire spirits, Igor, the White Lady, and the Wolfman also haunt the premises.

    Still from Freckled Max and the Spooks (1987)

    COMMENTS: At first glance, the clunkily-titled Freckled Max and the Spooks hits all the marks as more-than-decent family entertainment, with a plucky orphan who falls in with a bevy of misfit monsters, leading to wacky adventures. Those of a certain age (OK, 60+) may be reminded of the Saturday morning show “Monster Squad” where the “Love Boat”‘s Fred Grandy solved mysteries with Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman. Young Frankenstein and 1972’s The Girl on a Broomstick are also similar in tone. Freckled Max‘s comedy isn’t quite as broad as those, but there is a fair amount of slapstick, mainly involving Martin Hrebeň’s monster Albert, in a performance that’s sort of a proto-Jason Segel. A slight element of European bawdiness intrudes from time to time, but the characters have an underlying sweetness—as well as a bittersweet sadness, notably in the backstories of Igor and The White Lady. As Count Dracula tells Max, “When someone ends up alone, he turns into a ghost.”

    Freckled Max is stacked with a cast of stellar actors: Lindfors, Constantine, Mayne (who also played a vampire in The Fearless Vampire Killers), and familiar faces from Italian (De Rossi and Bucci) and Czech cinema (Lasica and Satinsky) cinema. If there’s one criticism about the film, it’s that you wish that you could spend more time with the characters. Freckled Max is a drastically reduced theatrical version of a 7-episode Czech miniseries, “Frankenstein’s Aunt” based on a book by Allan Rune Petterson. That it holds up as a satisfying viewing experience even in its truncated version is a testament to the skill of everyone involved.

    Juraj Jakubisko was an acclaimed director (1969’s Birds, Orphans and Fools) who, like most of his contemporaries who remained in the country after the post-Prague Spring crackdown, fell into disfavor. When allowed to make films, their projects skewed towards non-problematic fare: documentaries or family-friendly subjects like fairy tales. Jakubisko did a magical realist miniseries, “The Millennial Bee” (1983, based on a novel by Peter Jaroš), which also got a reduced theatrical version, and the feature The Feather Fairy (1985, based on the Brothers Grimm tale “Mother Hulda” and starring .)

    Restored by the Slovak Film Institute, Freckled Max gets its first ever U.S. Blu-ray release via Deaf Crocodile in limited and standard editions. Extras include a commentary by Samm Deighan and a visual essay “Frankenstein’s Faster” by Ryan Verrill and Dr. Will Dobson. Deighan digs into the differences between the mini-series and movie while Verill and Dobson examine the source material. The disc also includes interviews with director of photography Jan Duris, assistant director Petra Galkova, and director of the Slovak Film Institute Rastislav Steranka; a short (5 minutes) behind the scenes featurette; and “Portrait of a Film Director,” a 45 minute documentary about Jakubisko. The limited edition comes in a slipcase with art by Beth Morris and a booklet with essays by writers Walter Chaw and Stephen Peros.

    The full miniseries got a DVD release in Germany (“Frankenstein’s Tante”), but with no English subtitles. It is not currently on any streaming services. However, the curious, motivated, and bilingual might find a Spanish language version (“La Tia de Frankenstein”) out on the interwebs.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a surreal fantasy film that’s reminiscent of Federico Fellini and Terry Gilliam.”–Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets (Blu-ray)

    Freckled Max And The Spooks [Blu-ray]

    Freckled Max And The Spooks [Blu-ray]
    • Director Juraj Jakubisko's Gothic horror comedy about an orphan who hides out in Frankenstein's castle with a lovable rogues' gallery of monsters
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