Tag Archives: Serial killer

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CAPSULE: SHE’S JUST A SHADOW (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Adam Sherman

FEATURING: Tao Okamoto, Kihiro, Kentez Asaka, Marcus Johnson

PLOT: The matriarch of a prostitution empire, married to a violent pimp, leads her gang against a rival band of yakuza while a serial killer preys on her girls and one of her lackeys is caught in a love triangle.

Still from She's Just a Shadow (2019)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This super-stylized, candy colored exploitationer with a couple of precognitive hallucination scenes feels like a budget version of Kill Bill insistent on earning an NC-17 rating. It’s well off the beaten path, but still only on the outskirts of the truly weird.

COMMENTS: A movie that opens with a serial killer binding and tying his nude victim to train tracks and then pleasuring himself as the locomotive approaches is a movie that knows the audience it’s after. She’s Just a Shadow gives you all the perverted thrills you could ask for—sushi served off naked hookers, constant coke-sniffing, an infirmary full of shot-up whores —all wrapped up in a slick, arty package with professional lighting, elaborate costuming, and acres of nudes.

Shot mostly in the neon-lit night or carefully controlled interiors, Shadow is a great-looking film, but unfortunately loses points due to acting that is not up to the professionalism of the cinematography. Former Ralph Lauren model Tao Okamoto has had major roles in Hollywood superhero movies I haven’t seen, so I can’t say she’s an amateur, but she could have fooled me with her performance here. Her line deliveries are almost completely drab and inflectionless; the lack of emoting reminds me of nothing more than Madeleine Reynal’s deliberately blank performance in Dr. Caligari. She smokes a lot, so her long drags off her thin black cigarette help explain the frequent pauses in her delivery. Making his acting debut as a flunky whose main duty in the syndicate seems to be drinking and sleeping with a pair of the girls 24/7, J-pop musician Kihiro is a little better, but not quite ready to be a leading man; his role requires him to be strung-out and exhausted most of the time, partly compensating for his lack of passion. With the two leads being so laid back, it’s left to a bodyguard named “Knockout” (Marcus Johnson) to bring the most energy, though only in a small role. Main bad guy Kentez Asaka can act, but not without a distracting accent sported by none of the rest of the cast (some of whom speak the Queen’s English despite playing Japanese gangsters).

The screenplay, too, is not up to the standard set by the visuals. Shadow‘s characters can be insultingly dumb when it advances the plot. The dialogue treads a line between cliched and risible. Trite ideas are rendered in eyebrow-raising prose: “Both Jesus and the garbageman wanted a little more time when they were carrying their loads up their separate hills,” muses one character. Later he gives us the even cringier observation, “Women… no matter how human they seem, they’re not. They’re just shadows. But on the other hand, aren’t we all?” Lines like these give Shadow an extra layer of unintentional (?) camp, something that doesn’t work entirely against the film—and will likely be overlooked, anyway, by those looking for cheap thrills.

Despite its handicaps, Shadow will slay many with its over-the-top grindhouse audacity. Director Adam Sherman has clearly absorbed a and flick or two, and while the acting is bland and the dialogue may elicit some chuckles, the wild and colorful visuals are up to his influences, and he goes all out to give the audience what they crave, with little filter on the stylish sleaze and depravity. If you’re a fan of modern yakuza exploitation flicks, you’ll probably dig this.

She’s Just a Shadow opens in New York City (and possibly elsewhere) this Friday, July 19; it will probably find a more natural home on VOD soon after.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…exploitation bliss; unfiltered and pure and injected straight into your putrid pupils via a dirty needle.”–DanXIII, Horror Fuel (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: FELIDAE (1994)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Schaack

FEATURING: Voices of Ulrich Tukur, Mario Adorf, Wolfgang Hess, Helge Schneider, Mona Seefried, Klaus Maria Brandauer

PLOT: Francis, a housecat who has relocated to a new neighborhood with his human, stumbles into a mystery involving a strange cult, nefarious characters, and a feline serial killer. Still from Felidae (1994)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although a neo-noir/serial killer story where most, if not all, of the main characters are cats might qualify as “weird”—and, I admit, it’s a mighty thin line—the events and behavior involved aren’t surreal. They are just seen from a different perspective than we’re used to, to force us to consider our own behavior.

COMMENTS: “What I was watching wasn’t exactly a scene out of ‘The Aristocats’.”

Coming after feline members of a cult electrocute themselves in spiritual thrall, that line’s a definite understatement—and a cheekily self-aware one at that. Although the animation style is reminiscent of Don Bluth’s films, Felidae‘s approach to the material is more closely modeled on the adaptations of the Richard Adams novels Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. Perhaps not that surprising, since this story is also based on a literary allegory: in this instance, a book by Akif Pirinçci.

Felidae is a very good pastiche of film noir detective tropes: the dogged investigator, his reluctant friend/sidekick, moronic thugs, the ‘Good Girl’ who becomes a victim and the driving force for the investigator to pursue the case to the end, the ‘Bad Girl’ who appears to be a distraction but ends up being an integral piece of the puzzle, colorful characters adding flavor, and a nemesis who thoroughly pays off on the buildup. It also deals in the dark subject matter of noir: the violence and cruelty of life, religion and how it ends up being a tool of control, grisly farce, and sex… lots of sex. Placing those events in the world of cats, domesticated and feral, just strengthens the critique of human society, and adds another subject to the mixture: animal testing and its cruelty.

When it comes to quality animation intended for an adult audience, you have to look overseas and be prepared to do some digging.  Aside from Japanese anime, a piece in this genre won’t get much exposure to a North American audience except at a few film festivals, if it’s lucky. Felidae would’ve been a tough sell in America; in addition to a serial killer mystery with eugenics being the main key, there’s lots of violence, a sex scene, a couple of standout nightmare set pieces, and graphic depictions of animal experimentation—all with the look of a nice animated film with cats.

Felidae never got a release in North America. Although an English dub was prepared, it was only released in Australia, with the voice cast not credited (the IMDB list for the English voices is highly suspect). There was a R2 DVD release which had both the German and English language tracks, plus extras like a commentary and a “Behind the Scenes” featurette (in German only), but that is now OOP and going for high prices on the secondary market. YouTube searches turn up copies in German with English subs, or the English dubbed version. It would be great if Felidae gets rediscovered and issued on home video like Watership Down and The Plague Dogs were recently.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an imaginative, disturbing and ex-tremely adult thriller… Francis’ violent nightmares provide the most outrageously surreal images since the golden age of Bakshi.”–Stephen Puchalski, Shock Cinema (DVD)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Felidae was scored by Anne Dudley (Art of Noise) and featured a theme song co-written & sung by George O’ Dowd (AKA Boy George), which did get an OST release.

There are eight books in the Felidae series, though only three of the books have been translated to English. The author, Akif Pirinçci, has recently been mired in controversy, which led to both his German & American publishers cancelling his contracts and no longer selling his books. Still from Felidae (1994)

Felidae (4k UHD + Blu-ray)

Felidae (4k UHD + Blu-ray)
  • The long sought-after German animated mystery about a series of unexplained murders among a group of domestic cats
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Capsules

CAPSULE: SCHRAMM (1993)

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Schramm: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer

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FEATURING: Florian Koerner von Gustorf,

PLOT: Life ebbs from the body of Lothar Schramm after a fatal fall from a ladder. Memories of murders, self-loathing, hallucinations, and his love for his next door neighbor blink on and off the screen. What starts with the death of a murderer becomes a portrait of a grisly, nuanced soul.

Still from Schramm: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer (1993)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As with his previous film, Der Todesking, Buttgereit somehow manages to ride the crest between gore and philosophy, making Schramm considerably more meditative than would be expected. Its (now) familiar “mind of a serial killer” theorizing does result in the occasional shock, but it certainly isn’t the weirdest thing you could see before breakfast.

COMMENTS: There is something to be said for efficient film-making. So often it seems the case that a director wants his or her film to go on for as long as it takes to say everything about its subject. Sprawling movies abound; some peter out, some take forever to find their target, and the worst neither gain momentum nor really tell much of a story. Such a curse is not suffered by Jörg Buttgereit, the affable German behind the underground horror hits Nekromantik (1 and 2), Der Todesking, and, the last feature of his early career, Schramm. In a tight sixty-five minutes, Buttergereit explores the final thoughts and days of the titular serial killer.

Schramm’s chronology is only slowly revealed, beginning, effectively, at the end of the story. Suffering a fall while painting a blood-spattered door frame, Lothar Schramm (Florian Koerner von Gustorf) collapses in the spilt paint, and time slowly rewinds. Our first living encounter with him shows him dispatching two altogether wholesome evangelizers. An impatient woman knocks on the door. Eventually things sift back further and we see what are likely childhood memories, interspersed with the scenes from the days immediately preceding the fall. Schramm’s manner and actions may now seem typical, but in 1992 (the year Schramm was filmed), the precarious mental state of a rather off-kilter man was quite a bit fresher. (As Buttgereit remarks in his charmingly cute introduction, the reason he made this film was he was tired of watching “chain-smoking detectives pursuing the serial killer”, instead of seeing things from the other side.)

As I mentioned, the film is brief. However, it gets everything done that it needs to in the run-time. In what has become almost standard in the genre, Schramm is a generally low-key, pleasant guy who enjoys jogging and chatting with his next-door neighbor (Monika M.), a prostitute who relies on him for company and, later, protection. Stylized flashbacks of murders, a kitchen drawer full of lipstick, and unsettling hallucinations of his own physical deterioration hint at his mental imbalance. (Taking a cat-nap in his taxi, he dreams about a dental appointment for a tooth removal that quickly escalates into an eye removal). While he’s keeping busy with loneliness and killing prostitutes, his neighbor gets herself involved with some rather demanding and unsavory older clients.

There is certainly a fair share of repellent material in Schramm, but anyone familiar Buttgereit’s work should be unsurprised. However, unlike the gross-out tours-de-force of his Nekromantik films, Schramm is more the sibling of his pensive work, Der Todesking. The violent scenes in Schramm are sparingly scattered, and all the more troubling for so being. With this release (and the upcoming über Buttgereit set), the people at Cult Epics have made available a neat little treasure that not only illustrates why this director deserves (a little) greater fame, but also that underground cinema has more to offer the public than just cheap thrills.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…has ‘fans only’ written all over it… Using out-of-date experimental means (repetition and color distortion), Buttgereit tries to put the audience into the killer’s mind, and probably gets as close as a director with limited means can.”–Eric Hansen, Variety (contemporaneous)

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

PEEPING TOM (1960)

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We Westerners hate and resist having our hypocrisy exposed. We get that trait honestly and through tradition, having inherited it from both our Puritan forefathers and Mother England. Both sides of the political and ideological spectrum sow vilification when someone, especially an insider, turns the lens on our own hypocrisy. That is true horror; and when an artist does so in film, purportedly the most accessible of mediums, the backlash can be catastrophic. Case in point: Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Released the same year as Psycho, Peeping Tom, which is not as overtly violent as ‘s classic, nevertheless opened to furiously scathing reviews from American and British critics: “It is the sickest and filthiest film I can remember seeing” (The Spectator). “The only satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. Even then, the stench would remain” (Derek Hill, writing in The Tribune). Audiences reacted with even more hostility, and it took the French to set the record straight a few years later when Peeping Tom was received there to widespread acclaim and enthusiasm.

Peeping Tom committed an unforgivable sin in lensing the hypocritical voyeurism of both filmmakers and film goers (that Powell condemned even himself in the film did not earn him a pardon). Before 1960, Powell’s career was notable, extensive, and esteemed, which included numerous wartime and post-war collaborations with Emeric Pressburger: 1940’s The Thief of Bagdad, 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, Stairway To Heaven, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Hour Of Glory, to 1951’s The Tales Of Hoffman. Backlash to Peeping Tom was cataclysmic, resulting in Powell being permanently blacklisted by both British and American film industries. He was reduced to working (sporadically) for television and producing only three feature films over the next twenty years. That work included a television treatment of Bela Bartok’s opera “BlueBeard’s Castle” in 1963 and 1969’s bitter, semi-autobiographical Age of Consent.

Predictably, the West eventually came around, and Peeping Tom has now been posthumously recognized here with a reappraisal led by , who famously championed it as one of the great achievements for both Powell and for cinema.

Still from Peeping Tom (1960)Peeping Tom opens with the first person perspective of Mark Lewis (the eerily blank and blonde Austrian Karlheinz Böhm, son of Fascist conductor Karl Böhm) covertly approaching a prostitute with a rolling 16MM camera hidden under his pervert’s trenchcoat. He throws an empty Kodak box into a trash receptacle , follows the courtasan up to a seedy hotel room, and films her undressing. Lewis zooms in for the extreme close-up on her face, twisted and frozen in fear, as he lunges toward her for the kill. Cut to Continue reading PEEPING TOM (1960) →

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ANGST (1983)

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DIRECTED BY: Gerald Kargl

FEATURING: Erwin Leder, Robert Hunger-Bühler, Silvia Rabenreither

PLOT: Immediately after his release from prison for attempted murder, a would-be serial killer fulfills his desires when he happens upon an isolated villa in the German countryside inhabited by a family of three.

Still from Angst (1983)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: By grounding the viewer so thoroughly and painfully within the borderline mundanity of the killer’s violence, Gerald Kargl fuses the horrific with the blasé and leaves us shocked at the permeating numbness. Over the course of a grueling day of murder—with all the blood, strangulation, and heavy lifting which that entails—we are left as enervated as the main character. Nonetheless, he charges forward from setback to bloody setback: menaced by children in yellow rain coats, showing off the contents of his car trunk to patrons of a nearby café, and finally escaping in coattails.

COMMENTS: Imagine yourself trapped in one spot. You cannot move your gaze, and the world wrenches around you as it seems you’re traveling — to a prison, a coffee lounge, a taxi, and finally, a desolate house. While trapped, you hear the plinking of water drops, the rattling of keys, and the soft voice of someone craving your trust and sympathy—someone who talks of little other than lust for murder, destruction, and revenge. Sitting through Angst from beginning to end is a challenge. Though we are only briefly locked in this man’s world, we see nothing but him and his horrible deeds, and hear nothing but his wretched thoughts, from start to finish.

Angst is more unrelenting in its focus than any serial-killer biopic I’ve had the pleasure of watching. Once we meet the film’s antihero (an emaciated, menacing Erwin Leder), the camera virtually never leaves him; those few times when it does, it focuses on nearby people—potential victims—who eyeball the camera suspiciously, or are being visually dissected as the killer contemplates what he may or may not do to them. The director is trying to break into this man’s mind. The killer is allowed a nearly uninterrupted inner monologue, so that he might explain himself to the viewer. There are hovering high-angles and poking low-angles as the camera attempts to capture him in a way that makes sense. Indeed, there are even long stretches with the camera fixed on him as he flees or pursues, never shifting in its view of his face or body as the world gyrates around him. The screen pulses and frames skip, as if the lens is trying to force itself through to enter the psychopath’s heart. It is all to no avail, as this is a man who makes sense only to himself.

Shot on a tiny budget, Angst is the somewhat true-to-life story of the murders committed by Austrian serial killer Werner Kniesek. Gerald Kargl primarily made commercials before writing and directing this movie (his one and only feature length film). The cinematographer, Zbigniew Rybczynski, cut his teeth shooting short films for various Eastern European luminaries (note: the same year he shot Angst, he won an Oscar for Best Short Film for “Tango”; shortly afterwards he began a prolific career in the music video biz). When this pair teamed up with composer Klaus Schulze (of Tangerine Dream fame), their combined efforts culminated in something disturbing, cutting edge, and incredibly commercially unviable. Even today Angst feels unsettlingly fresh, approaching the serial killer genre in a manner that not only refuses to glamorize its subject, but also refuses to feign understanding. In the beginning, we know little of this man’s life and desires, but even after spending an exhausting day with him, we are left with no real comprehension of his motives.

DVD DETAILS: Cult Epics has once again given a crackerjack treatment to their latest release. The movie looks almost new, with a crystal clear image throughout. The soundtrack and score are also given their due, with the low-key effects, muffled screams, and furtive words heard softly, but clearly. There are myriad interviews, trailers, and a commentary track. The real gem herein, however, is the forty-page booklet that not only has a number of interesting essays about the movie, but also images and (for the less fluent in German among us) translations of newspaper clippings about the Kniesek murders. This is a must-buy for any fan of the serial killer genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…disturbing, strangely undervalued and still unflinching shocker… a realistic but oddly heightened experience.”–Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (DVD)