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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THRILLER – A CRUEL PICTURE (1973)

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AKA They Call Her One Eye; Hooker’s Revenge; The Swedish Vice-Girl

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DIRECTED BY: Bo Arne Vibenius (as Alex Fridolinski)

FEATURING: Christina Lindberg, Heinz Hopf, Solveig Andersson

PLOT: A young woman rendered mute as the result of a traumatic sexual assault as a child is kidnapped, forcibly addicted to heroin, and made into a prostitute; after further assaults and indignities, she sets about getting revenge.

COMMENTS: We’re 40 minutes in to Thriller – A Cruel Picture before we finally see our heroine claim some power of her own. Up to this point, it has been a deeply disturbing watch, a rendering of  an accumulated and escalating litany of abuses endured by Frigga (sometimes called Madeleine, and always played by Christina Lindberg with the coolest, most emotionally detached demeanor imaginable). We’ve seen Frigga violated as a child, and deprived of her voice as a result of the trauma. We’ve listened to busybody locals talking trash about her. We’ve watched her get kidnapped, beaten, injected with drugs, and chased through the countryside. We’ve seen a parade of monsters treat her as their mindless personal toys. We’ve learned of her parents’ suicides. And we’ve seen the blood-soaked remnants of the closest thing Frigga might have to a friend. It’s a bleak existence, but we take some comfort in knowing that she’s going to be dishing out some serious payback. It feels like classic exploitation territory, a trailblazer for later tales of rape and revenge like Last House on the Left and Ms. 45. So when she steps off the bus and reveals herself in a kicky little red dress with matching leather eyepatch, it’s the first moment that affords some level of hope. She looks ready to deal out some vengeance. Here we go.

But Thriller doesn’t really work that way. The story beats are there, but the rhythm is all off. In the hands of director and co-writer Vibenius (who previously worked as an AD for Ingmar Bergman), everything is very slow, very deliberate, very thorough. We’re trained to expect a certain cake-and-eat-it-too element to these movies; the female lead endures horrific abuse for our entertainment, but with the reassurance that she’ll turn the tables in a big way, providing a cathartic release and making us feel better about all that pain and misery. Thriller never lets go of that early discomfort. That moment with the red dress is actually the start of an act-long training sequence that will run for roughly 25 minutes. Yes, she learns karate and marksmanship, acquires guns and a car, picks up all the tools and she will need to take down those who have wronged her, but this is not a song-driven montage; we get it in toto. We see every moment of the karate lesson, with the instructor demonstrating falls and then Frigga repeating them. We see how she squirrels money away for her eventual escape, but we’re not spared any of the humiliation and degradation heaped upon her by her johns in order to get that precious cash. And when it comes time to saw off the end of a shotgun, we witness every single stroke of the hacksaw. There comes a point when it stops being a story, passes documentary, and becomes Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THRILLER – A CRUEL PICTURE (1973) →

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CAPSULE: ANATOMY OF HELL (2004)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi, voice of Catherine Breillat

PLOT: A woman pays a gay man to observe her intimate moments for four nights.

Still from Anatomy of Hell (2004)

COMMENTS: Sartre said Hell is other people. Catherine Breillat says Hell is other people’s bodies; or, more specifically, other genders’ bodies; or, when you get right down to it, women’s bodies.

A Woman goes to a gay disco and slits her wrists in the bathroom. She’s rescued by a gay Man, who takes her to a clinic to be stitched up. The Woman proposes to pay him to “watch her when she’s unwatchable.” He goes to her house for four nights, pours himself a few fingers of Jack Daniels to help him make it through the night, and they talk while she lies naked and exposed. “They fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality,” he muses. “The veils [men] adorn us with anticipate our shrouds,” the Woman proclaims. (The conversation is not intended to be naturalistic; it’s a staged Platonic dialogue with a poetic overlay). While never verbally expressing anything but disgust for the Woman, the Man is drawn to experiment intimately with her body (including scenes involving garden tools, and worse). Then the arrangement ends. He is moved, and, in what may be a fantasy sequence, commits an act of brutality. That’s it; it’s partially successful conversion therapy.

Siffredi, a pornographic actor best known for his recurring “Buttman” character, turns out to be a surprisingly capable actor—although his moods are restricted to disgust and melancholy, both simmering. Casar is beautiful as she lounges around naked, but her role could be played by almost any beautiful nude actress. Although she shows more range than Siffredi, as any actress might, she has trouble putting across dialogue like “in intercourse, the act isn’t what matters, but its meaning.” Casar’s body double is anatomically correct. Breillat herself dubs the thoughts for both parties.  And that’s it for the acting—which is a problem, in what’s basically a character-driven two-hander (explicit though it is, it’s so anti-erotic that could never make the grade as a one-hander).

On release, Anatomy of Hell received a lot of understandable criticism for its overly-simplistic brand of radical gender philosophy. Taken literally, the film argues (explicitly and didactically, despite the poetic trappings) that men are disgusted by women’s bodies and instinctively long to damage them—and that this misogyny is even more pronounced in gay men. That’s not a position I would want to defend in a Ph.D. thesis. But while that literal reading is both ridiculous and offensive, there is another layer to the film that is hopeful. Despite his disgust at The Woman’s body, The Man is eventually seduced by it. And after the job is done, he finds himself changed by the experience: “I experienced total intimacy with her. And I don’t even know her name.” Radical posturing aside, Anatomy of Hell at least partly celebrates the alchemy of shared human bodies: that point when carnal disgust is overcome and physical commingling becomes a spiritual experience. Look past words to the magic of bodies, this wordy picture whispers. Though mercifully short, Anatomy of Hell is a hard watch, composed of dull, pseudo-profound dialogues broken by shock sequences designed to reinforce its putative thesis that female bodies are disgusting. It’s not recommended, but—if you can bypass the untenable literal reading its characters propose—this erotic experiment is more thought-provoking than its detractors suggest.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“But sometimes [Breillat] is just plain goofy, as in ‘Anatomy of Hell,’ which plays like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka, who asked for more Breillat reviews and stated that Anatomy of Hell was “especially worth looking at, because of its rejection of a traditional plot.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: PERIOD PIECE (2006)

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DIRECTED BY: Giuseppe Andrews

FEATURING: Bill Tyree, Giuseppe Andrews

PLOT: Intertwined stories of a number of absurd characters including a French dwarf who has rough sex with a teddy bear and a perpetually naked old man who has sex with an imaginary woman.

Still from period piece (2006)

COMMENTS: “WARNING: This film contains senior citizen nudity and dead pigs.”

Now, geriatric nudity is no big thing (although when the octogenarian attempts to holds pork rinds between his buttcheeks, you may disagree). That dead pig, though… we’ll get to it.

Period Piece is a series of absurdist sketches that rarely rise to the level of jokes, and never to the level of insights. They aren’t planned out, they are just passing spurts from the brain of director Giuseppe Andrews, whose mind is not filled with classical allusions like a or scathing anti-bourgeois fantasies like a , but mostly with dirty words, bodily function imagery, and trailer park culture. The result is arrested development surrealism, like something made by if he were a complete psychopath.

You get segments about two guys who siphon gas to get money to shoot heroin in a car wash. Two other guys mime eating each others’ farts (which they slice with a plastic knife and eat with a fork, in about the closest the film comes to eliciting a chuckle.) Stop-motion tater tots have sex in front of a shrine to Charles Manson. A guy eats raw hamburger. That kind of stuff. It’s shot in camcorder glare, and the editing is deliberately bad, as if a few “good” fifteen second takes were assembled to make a scene. Sometimes the same line repeats with slightly different inflection. It’s unpleasantly disorienting and visually unflattering, so Andrews does achieve the Americana nightmare feel he’s going for. And just so you won’t be fooled into thinking you’re watching something with socially redeeming value, it opens with a bit where a guy wearing a fake mustache and speaking in a Pepe le Pew accent sodomizes a teddy bear with an industrial sized can of calm chowder. (The repeated, graphic molestation of the stuffed sex slave is an ongoing motif.) Also, a lot of people shoot themselves in ineffective mock suicides. It’s as disgusting as it sounds, and much of the time, it’s repetitive and tedious, but it’s capable of holding your interest—against your better judgement.

Although the climactic dead pig is explicitly named “Society,” the main target of the film’s ongoing and pervasive anger has been women and scarcity of sex. The teddy bear who “likes it rough” seems to stand in for woman as sexual objects. In one vignette a man threatens to kill a “whore” for cheating on him. A father and son leaf through the gynecological displays in well-worn stroke mags, and the son dreams of scoring someday. The naked old man delivers obscene, scatological monologues about vaginas. Although Andrews had  a girlfriend at the time, and there is a woman in the cast, the whole project gives off the vibe of something conceived by poor white guys who’ve lost all hope of ever getting laid. Therefore, when Andrews’ attempt to top Pink Flamingos in the grossout department has the naked old man hack at the pig’s head with a hatchet while screaming insults at it, I was put more in mind of incels releasing sexual frustration than outsiders taking revenge against a system that has marginalized them.

The ending of the film disclaims that “no animals were hurt in the making of this film… they were already dead!” This is not strictly true. What about the human animals in the audience who had to watch it?

proudly (?) picked up Period Piece (and some other Andrews movies) for distribution, despite the fact that it’s much darker (and even cheaper) than their usual fare. The DVD features an incongruously cheerful introduction by , a Kaufman interview with Andrews, trailers for other Andrews movies, an obscene misogynist poem written by Andrews and read bumblingly by Tyree, and the entire 70-minute bonus feature Jacuzzi Rooms— which is literally just an unscripted chronicle of four rednecks drinking heavily in a motel room. Fun stuff, for people for whom nothing matters.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Take John Waters at his shock heights, a sizable helping of Harmony Korine’s Gummo, and a completely amateur visual aesthetic you have a vague idea as to what kind of film your in store for… From frame one you are forced into its full tilt bizarro world. You either get on for the ride or reject it completely.”–Infini-Tropolis (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by Tally Isham, who said “Not sure if I recommend seeing it, but it’s zero-budget weirdness.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: MOTHER SCHMUCKERS (2021)

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Fils de plouc

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Mother Schmuckers is currently available for VOD rental.

DIRECTED BY: Harpo Guit, Lenny Guit

FEATURING: Maxi Delmelle, Harpo Guit

PLOT: Issachar and Zabulon must find the family dog or be evicted.

COMMENTS: In keeping with the spirit of the film, this will be my one and only single-paragraph review. Anything beyond that first sentence would be utterly unperceived by the lead characters, two brothers who crash from one chaotic outburst to another without any thought beyond the next maddening moment. Trigger warnings are appropriate, I think, for a film that takes such impressive leeway with animal well-being: violence, sex, cooking, all in the efforts to retrieve the family dog. Mother Schmuckers will leave you addled, as two semi-feral variants of Dumb and Dumber‘s Harry and Lloyd crash around a Belgian city causing havoc whilst thwacking each other. The French title, translating roughly into “slobby sons” or “sons of a slob,” is more apt than the English version’s play on a common phrase. I’ll spare you my rambling list of shockers and let the still above do half of the heavy lifting, and the following remark do the rest: the opening scene has our boys frying up shit for breakfast. Mother Schmuckers has an audience, and although it wasn’t me—and probably isn’t you, either—I will admit that I was never bored, and occasionally laughed aloud despite myself. Beyond that, Guit and Guit are to be commended for somehow securing funding for this manic outing, even if a major backer was an incorporated Belgian tax dodge—er, shelter. Through the wincing and guilt-smirking, this writhing nonsense left me shuddering, “What the schmuck?”

At the time of publication, Mother Schmuckers is in limited theatrical release, with video-on-demand scheduled to arrive on March 15.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Co-writer/co-director duo Harpo and Lenny Guit’s apparent disregard for their viewers’ comfort can sometimes be quite funny, depending on your tolerance for messy, meandering absurdist comedy… Imagine a disorienting European hybrid of Adult Swim’s stoner-friendly cartoons and the proudly crass dorm-room sitcom staple ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.’ Pretty weird, right?”–Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

292. VIVA LA MUERTE [LONG LIVE DEATH] (1971)

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“I have heard this insensible and necrophilous oath, ‘¡Viva la Muerte!’, and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent.”–Miguel de Unamuno

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Madhi Chaouch, Núria Espert, Ivan Henriques

PLOT: Fando is a boy growing up in Spain in the early days of the Franco regime, raised by his mother, about whom he has sexual fantasies. One day he discovers that his mother turned his father in to the authorities because of his “dangerous progressive” political views. In between fantasies, Fando decides to go searching for his father, but his quest is interrupted when he contracts tuberculosis.

Still from Viva la Muerte (1971)

BACKGROUND:

  • Like the father in Viva la Muerte, Arrabal’s own father was imprisoned by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War (one report claims it was for an assassination attempt). After five years he escaped from custody and was never seen again.
  • The title refers to a quote from the Fascist General Millan Astray: “Down with intelligence! Long live death!,” a line barked during a political debate with philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.
  • The movie is an adaptation of Arrabal’s 1959 novel “Baal Babylone” (which does not appear to have been translated out of the original French).
  • The sadomasochistic torture sketches first seen in the opening credits are by Arrabal’s fellow Panic movement member (for more on the Panic movement, see the background information section of I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Fando’s papa, buried in the sand with only his head showing, and a quartet of riders fast approaching.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Incestuous S&M mourning; priest’s tasty balls; slaughterhouse frolic

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A howl of protest at the horrors of the Franco regime, as well as an autobiographical attempt to exorcise some serious mommy issues, Viva la Muerte uses surreal vignettes as a savage expression of personal outrage.


Original trailer for Viva le Muerte

COMMENTS: Fernando Arrabal’s Viva la Muerte is the kind of movie Continue reading 292. VIVA LA MUERTE [LONG LIVE DEATH] (1971) →