Tag Archives: Spanish

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TIERRA [EARTH] (1996)

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DIRECTED BY: Julio Medem

FEATURING: Carmelo Gómez, Emma Suárez, Silke, Karra Elejalde, Nancho Novo

PLOT: A man fresh out of a mental hospital takes a job fumigating a scourge of wood lice in the countryside in Spanish wine country, where he finds himself irresistibly drawn to both a comely young wife who is neglected by her farmer husband and a spirited wild child who is being kept as a mistress by that same husband.

Still from Tierra (1996)

COMMENTS: Ángel is cool as a cucumber. At least, Ángel as portrayed by Carmelo Gómez is cool as a cucumber. Looking like Judd Nelson at the moment when he might have been the sexiest member of the Brat Pack, he’s utterly unflappable, rolling into town in his exterminator truck and telling the residents how he will wipe out the wood lice that have been making their wine taste “earthy.” Is earthy bad? You wouldn’t think so to watch Ángel take a taste. On paper, he ought to be the most unsettled man in Spain: mental stability in question, with a trip to a sanitarium that everyone knows about, his life narrated by an alter ego that constantly reminds him of his mortality, reduced to killing bugs in a dusty nowheresville, and deeply attracted to two beautiful but distinctly opposite women, each of whom is being kept by a possessive and violent man. Ángel ought to be up to his ears in anxiety. But there he sits, laid back like the cool philosophy professor, taking things as they come, man. It’s fascinating.

Tierra is notably odd for being a character study about a character with very little character. Ángel keeps finding himself in extreme circumstances: encountering a lightning strike victim, arousing the ire of a full Roma encampment, accidentally (?) shooting a rival during a town-wide hunt for wild boars. In every case he is preternaturally calm, taking in the circumstances with the passive contentment of a saint—which the film suggests he may be, hinting more than once that he has had a life-changing experience. On the other hand, we’re also told that his stint in the mental ward was due to an “overactive imagination.” Whatever Ángel’s truth may be, Gómez plays it close to the vest.

It would be completely reasonable for Ángel to be torn between the two young women he meets in town. Ángela, the fetching young mom with a name that screams out how in sync the two must be, is played by Suárez with an aching need that she hopes the newcomer can fill. Meanwhile, Silke’s sexpot Mari always seems to be bending over a pool table with painted-on jeans and a come-hither stare, but she is just as desperate for the change in circumstances that Ángel could provide. But what exactly Ángel has to offer to either of them, beyond escape from the status quo, is not entirely clear. Medem manufactures some suspense over whether he will end up with the sweet mom or the hot chick, but neither the tension nor the choice is altogether convincing. 

In a review of another Medem film, a critic observed that “there’s the sense that he’s more interested in his ideas than in his people.” That suspicion permeates Tierra. The barrenness of the Spanish landscape captivates, creating an almost apocalyptic feel, and an outsider with a supernatural connection would absolutely fill a narrative void. But Medem’s affection for Ángel is such that his protagonist does nothing but win, which means that even the ideas aren’t all that compelling. Wherever Ángel and his new companion are headed, there is little reason to worry about them. No wonder he’s so cool all the time. He never has to feel the heat.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like Medem’s two most recent films, ‘Tierra’ (Spanish for ‘Earth’) is an intricately structured, densely allusive affair. Its central figure is an itinerant exterminator named Angel (Carmelo Gomez) — a nod in the direction of Luis Bunuel’s ‘The Exterminating Angel,’ you might think, but only in the sense that both films draw water from the same surrealist pond… Despite its affectations, however — thanks mainly to a stunning ocher cinematographic palette, rock-solid acting and a story that’s as robustly sensual as it is otherworldly — ‘Tierra’ keeps its two feet (two of everything, in fact) firmly grounded on this Earth.” – Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post (repertory review)

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Tierra

Tierra
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Capsules

ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR, VOLUME 2

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Severin Films. 13 disc set.

Severin Films continues their groundbreaking folk-horror “college course in a box” set with the second semester. Expanding and exploring on themes and offering more selections to discover and debate, this time around it has 24 features representing 18 countries, along with tons of extras. Acknowledging the literary roots of the genre, Vol. 2 also comes with a 250 page book, “A Folk Horror Storybook,” a collection of 12 short stories by noted writers in the genre—Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Cassandra Khaw amongst them—with an introduction by Kier-La Janisse, who returns as producer/curator of the whole shebang. The “expansion of themes” may cause some to feel cheated, as there are only a handful of films that fit the expected parameters of “horror” here. But that objection may be more of a failing of the viewer. There are elements of the frightful in all of the selections, and although perhaps  “uncanny” or “spectral” would be better terms, “horror” makes for a good umbrella.

Still from To Fire You Come At Last (2023)
To Fire You Come At Last

Disc 1 features the UK with a film by writer Sean (“England’s Screaming”) Hogan, To Fire You Come At Last (2023), a knowing homage to BBC shows like “Dead of Night” and “Ghost Stories For Christmas.” Four men carry a coffin to a graveyard along a “corpse road” and encounter dangers: from each other, and from something else. Bonus features include commentary by Hogan and producers, along with an earlier short by Hogan, “We Always Find Ourselves In The Sea,” also with commentary, and a separate featurette on corpse roads.

Paired with To Fire is Psychomania, a 1973 B-movie by Don Sharp involving juvenile delinquent bikers whose leader (Nicky Henson from Witchfinder General) learns the secret of returning from the dead—and promptly does it! He then starts recruiting the other members to follow suit. There’s witchery/devil/frog worship, George Sanders (in his last role), a sappy ballad, and lots of cycle action, making for some fine British cheese. This was a previous Severin release with featurettes about the actors and music, all which have been ported over, along with a new commentary by Hellebore Magazine editor Maria J. Perez Cuervo and a new short documentary on stone circles and standing stones.

Disc 2 focuses on two American features: The Enchanted (1984) with Julius Harris and Larry Miller (acting under the name Will Sennet), directed by Carter Lord, and 1973’s Who Fears The Devil? (AKA The Legend of Hillbilly John), with Hedges Capers and Severn Darden, directed by John Newland. Based on a story by Elizabeth Coatsworth, Continue reading ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR, VOLUME 2 →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates, Shorts

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST (VORMITTAGSSPUK) (1928) / APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ALICIA (1994)

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Recommended (for both)

Repression in a society is often noticed first in the arts. When works are banned or proscribed for subject matter deemed offensive to the state, or when artists and their patrons are threatened if they do not alter their messages so as not to displease the powers that be, an attentive eye can pick up the seeds of repression being planted. One might even notice it in attacks on the programming at the national center for the performing arts. Today, our attention turns to a pair of short films that are in the orbit of repression: one that was its victim and one expressly about it.

The title card that precedes “Ghosts Before Breakfast” points the finger  clearly at its tormentor: “The Nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as degenerate art.” The accusation seems absurd to modern eyes, so it’s instructive to recall, in the march to World War II, just how much the ascendant Fascists despised modern art, especially surreal and abstract works. No doubt that attitude came from the top, considering failed artist Adolf Hitler was a strict devotee of classical styles. Dictatorships are always humorless scolds, though, and the Third Reich was especially obsessed with a devotion to German propriety and order. Director , who literally wrote the book on Dadaism, was always going to run headlong into trouble.

Nothing that ensues in “Ghosts’” 500-second running time would seem to merit the iron jackboot of censorship: a bow tie refuses to stay knotted, body parts detach and spin around, and men disappear behind poles. (That last is a nifty special effect once accomplished by your humble correspondent.) Most notably, a quartet of bowler hats liberate themselves from the tyranny of resting upon men’s heads, choosing instead to fly about the neighborhood in flock formation until tea is finally served. It’s mostly lo-fi camera trickery in the Méliès tradition, not overtly serious at all. (Occasionally, one can see the strings on the hats and even the shadow of the marionette’s pole, and it detracts from the short’s charm not a whit.) Richter is always a playful surrealist (witness the giddy way he skewers the evangelization of capitalism in Dreams That Money Can Buy), and “Ghosts” captures that spirit in its simplest form. It’s light, it’s fun… no wonder the Nazis hated it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Featuring unimaginably brilliant special effects achieved through the use of stop-motion animation as well as live-action tricks, the film chronicles the delightful protests of objects ranging from hats to water hoses. The entire short is structured like a relentless magic trick, inviting the audience to witness a bewildering spectacle where the laws of physics completely break down.” – Swapnil Dhruv Bose, Far Out

Oh, how they would have utterly loathed “Alicia,” Jaume Balagueró’s nightmare musing on the abhorrence of femininity. After our young heroine menstruates during a moment of idle self-pleasure, uniformed thugs haul her away to become a kind of indentured remora to a hideously bloated creature. Alicia’s act of defiance is to have the temerity to reach sexual maturity, at which point she is a commodity for the beasts to consume and discard. Balagueró’s film (a student work that presages his future efforts such as the REC series) exudes a palpable sense of a terrible power that punishes people for who they are.

In less than 8 minutes, there’s no time to be subtle, and Balagueró dials up the unsettling and odd atmosphere well past the initial premise. Alicia herself (played by twins Ana and Elena Lucia) is as white and smooth as a cherub, the very essence of purity before her blood drips onto a book titled “The Drama of Jesus.” Rubber-clad troops force the girl to consume a goopy slime that emits from their masks and drill into her neck in a cascade of oily fluid. When she finally emerges from this dark underworld, she exits through a refrigerator, as if she has only been kept around as food. Meanwhile, the final shot is the ogre framed with the shape of a cross, just in case you’re wondering whom to implicate. The theme of the punishment women endure is explicit, but the concept is dressed up in grotesque imagery that carries the slight story up to another level.

Film is storytelling, and storytelling is speech. Richter may have only intended to tweak the establishment, not rouse the beast; Balagueró was clearly prepared for whatever expressions of offense or disgust might come his way. But both are compatriots in cinema, for storytelling is also bravery, and there’s nothing weird about standing up for their voices.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “…a disturbing and even suffocating atmosphere in which we also glimpse hints of the purest Cronenberg every time the mutilations of the flesh come into play.” – Rubén Collazos, Cinemaldito (translated from Spanish)

(“Ghosts Before Breakfast” was nominated for review by Rafael Moreira; “Alicia” was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)

Capsules

2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART ONE

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Montréal 2025

The Fantasia commercial, about the Fantasia audience, before the Fantasia screening, really spoke to me.

7/16: Fragment

The festival pulled a fast one on me this year, adding a day to the front end. Arriving at the bus depot just after 5 o’clock, I made it first to my hotel, then to the accreditation office around 6:15: just in time to wander into Kim Sung-yoon’s directorial debut. Fragment is a well-acted drama about grief and culpability. A little disjointed at the start (as could well be appropriate, considering the topic and title), it finds its footing as the characters creep toward a reconciliation of sorts with their circumstances. The young leads are all commendable, with a special shout-out to the kid sister. She suffers no nonsense. Fragment is not a film made for me, but nonetheless I must admit it left me touched. (A good touch, that is.)

7/17: The Wailing [El llanto]

Pedro Martín-Calero, you fiend! There is a great deal to enjoy about this story of the supernatural: an evil presence (creepy old dead guy, from what I could glean) has haunted a series of women in a family, moving from mother to daughter when the former succumbs to despair. This is something of two movies in one, when I feel it should have been three. The chronicles of the characters are all well paced, and the scares are real. (The hook here is: this entity can only be seen through video capture, be that the large camcorder of the mother as a youth, or the ubiquitous smartphones of the latest victim.) Sound design is dead on, with the titular wailing emanating from a tower block whose second story room is always up for sale. The mood is set, details established, and then, BAM: it’s over.

I suppose there are greater sins in filmmaking than leaving me all too curious how this occult situation is resolved.

7/18: “Nyaight of the Living Cat”, Episodes 1 – 4

Tomohiro Kamitani and , judging from their specially recorded video introduction for the Fantasia screening, are two chill middle-aged guys with a love for cats. Or at least a love of global apocalypses involving cats. Although, perhaps the feline menace is safely Continue reading 2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART ONE →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FATA MORGANA (1966)

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AKA Left–Handed Fate; Fata/Morgana

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DIRECTED BY: Vincente Aranda

FEATURING: Teresa Gimpera, Marianne Benet, Antonio Ferrandes, Alberto Dalbés

PLOT: When a literature professor predicts an advertising model will be the next victim of a black-gloved serial killer, a secret agent sets out to save her life.

Still from Fata Morgana (1966)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Inspired by quick-change artist extraordinaire Leopoldo Fregoli, Fata/Morgana dons the garb of several genres (fumetti, spy thriller, science fiction, giallo) only to disrobe just as quickly. Set during an unspecified cataclysmic event anticipating ‘s The Falls, the viewing experience mirrors an unsettled narrative reality. The killer’s identity is revealed early on but leads to an entirely unexpected outcome, and a closing scene eerily similar to Blow–Up‘s contentious and equally inconclusive ending (released the same year). Like the main character, the viewer is adrift amidst a world of shifting symbols. The eclectic style, along with the mysterious backdrop, ambiguous characters, and a uniquely bizarre murder weapon combine to create a Pop Art concoction with a seriously unhinged vibe.

COMMENTS: What would you do if you accidentally bumped into a blind man on the street and he said you were going to be murdered today? Poor Gim understandably freaks out. She doesn’t want to die, but she’s decided to stay behind while the rest of her unnamed city’s residents flee en masse. A mysterious catastrophe has occurred in London, and fear of it happening in other cities has rapidly spread around the globe.

Introduced via comic book panels set to an uptempo jazz beat, Fata Morgana aligns itself with the artistic sensibility of European adult comics and the beginnings of the giallo craze (‘s Blood and Black Lace was released two years earlier). The Professor (Ferrandis) prepares to present a lecture on the career of an unidentified serial killer, seen in black and white photographs clad in classic fedora with black trench coat and leather gloves. His victims are all young female models. The Professor’s careful study of horror literature, advertising imagery, and popular films leads to his “premonition” that cologne spokesmodel Gim (Gimpera) will be the killer’s next target.

Gim meets with friends and attends her modeling shoots, trying to retain some semblance of normality. Someone slashes her car tires, so she’s left to walk deserted streets between appointments. Her chance encounters with the city’s remaining inhabitants become increasingly threatening. A gang of silent teenage boys roams the city stealing billboards and appliances to create their own modernist clubhouse. The Professor gives a lecture on how to identify the victims of future crime, then stalks Gim while wearing a series of improbable disguises. Miriam (Benet), a survivor of the London event, spends hours in an “art chamber” staring at sculptures, before wandering the city in an aimless quest to find her lover Jerry (though enigmatic flashbacks suggest he’s already dead). Meanwhile, Agent JJ (Martí) desperately tries to save Gim from the killer while being thwarted by The Professor and everyone else he meets.

All Gim’s friends spout philosophy while trying to process their own impending doom in revealing yet pretentious dialogue:

“When we are awake, we all live in the same world, but when we dream, each lives in his own.”

“A chessboard has no place for dreams. Who wins in chess, loses in life.”

“To be or not to be. To die. To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream,” Gim chants in stream of consciousness while displaying a bottle of cologne. “But I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

“Very good, very good. Repeat just the last sentence,” says the photographer, “but this time smile.”

Like Blow–Up seen from the other side of the camera, the female model grapples with the deceptive nature of photographic images, well aware of advertising’s false promises. In a collapsing world, do luxury goods and status symbols still have meaning? When official loudspeakers announce that people can actually live without “superfluous objects” and all you need to start a new life is a suitcase small enough to carry onto a plane? The anti-consumerism now seems like another random element in a narrative constructed of jumbled ideas, but Fata Morgana‘s themes obviously resonated at the time of its release. Echoes can be seen in films by directors as disparate as , , and Peter Greenaway.

The tone, alternating fatalism and optimism, still feels relevant today. In the end, the professor’s theory proves to be wrong, the London event goes unexplained, but Gim’s valiant struggle to maintain her humanity continues. She keeps walking, leaving the city behind as the camera moves away from her until a green field fills the frame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a wild, disorienting, surreal mash-up of Pop Art, science fiction, thriller, and horror.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters (Blu-ray)

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]
  • First U.S. Blu-ray release for this 1960’s psychedelic Euro-thriller.
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