Tag Archives: Suicide

Apocryphally Weird

39*. UZUMAKI [SPIRAL] (2000)

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“Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.” – Robert Smithson, creator of Spiral Jetty

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Hinako Saeki, Eun-Kyung Shin, Keiko Takahashi,

PLOT: High schooler Kirie notices a growing and dangerous fascination with spirals throughout her small town, beginning with her friend Shuichi’s father, who develops a compulsive need to own and consume objects with the pattern. The affliction spreads to her classmates, who take on whorled physical characteristics and even transform into snails. With increasing numbers of cases and deaths, Kirie and Shuichi decide if they should–or even can–escape. 

Still from Uzumaki (2000)

BACKGROUND: 

  • Uzumaki was adapted from a manga by , who makes a cameo of sorts on a “Wanted” poster in the sandal-wearing policeman’s office.
  • Production on Uzumaki began before Ito had finished writing the series (possibly at the studio’s insistence, so that it could coincide with the release of another Ito adaptation, Tomie: Rebirth). As a result, the manga and film have significantly different resolutions.
  • A four-episode animated TV adaptation was announced in 2020; it is still in production after many delays.
  • Director Higuchinsky took his name in tribute to his birthplace of Ukraine. This was his first feature, up to this point having worked primarily in music video.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It’s not the most shocking sight, nor does it draw upon the many examples of body horror that define the spiral epidemic. But the appearance of an enormous spiral-shaped storm in the sky, which begins to coil downward and reach out to the town like the accusatory finger of God, is when Uzumaki lays all its cards on the table. The spiral is everything, can reach everywhere, and will affect everyone.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Mr. Saito’s eyes; Kyoko’s crazy curls

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Uzumaki lacks a proper monster, any kind of terrifying villain. The bad guy here is a curling pattern. It’s to the film’s credit that it not only pulls off this unlikely trick but adorns it with truly unsettling examples of its malign influence. The fact that there are no sorcerers or alien invaders to blame only makes the events of Uzumaki more unnerving. This outwardly harmless force has no clear point of origin, no cause to be addressed, which only makes its effect on the populace more disturbing.

Original trailer for Uzumaki

COMMENTS: In order to appreciate the strangeness of Uzumaki, it’s Continue reading 39*. UZUMAKI [SPIRAL] (2000) →

Channel 366

CHANNEL 366: WONDER EGG PRIORITY (2021)

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DIRECTED BY: Shin Wakabayashi, Yūta Yamazaki, Yūki Yonemori, Yūichirō Komuro, Shinichirō Ushijima, Yūsuke Yamamoto, Maiko Kobayashi, Eita Higashikubo, Mitsuru Hagi

FEATURING: Voices of Kanata Aikawa, Tomori Kusunoki,  Shuka Saitō, Hinaki Yano, Yūya Uchida,  Hiroki Takahashi; Mikaela Krantz,  Dawn M. Bennett, Anairis Quiñones, Michelle Rojas, Brendan Blaber, Ian Sinclair (English dub)

PLOT: Four teenage girls buy eggs from mannequins in hopes of bringing suicides back to life.

Still from Wonder egg priority (2021)

COMMENTS: Episode 1 (“The Domain of Children”) is a promising start. We meet Ai Ohto, a hikikomori heroine with heterochromia, already inside of a dream. Following a brief orientation in Ai’s waking reality (a hermit existence with only her mother and a visiting teacher to relieve the self-imposed loneliness), we go into the following night’s dream, which brings schoolgirls with blurred faces, a talking toilet paper roll, grinning eyeless balls called “see-no-evils” (who will be recurring adversaries), a flashback inside the dream, a crying statue, and a resurrected firefly who offers Ai an egg that contains, he claims, the thing she really wants—a friend. It ends with the firefly revealed to be, in reality, a crash-test-dummy mannequin in a tuxedo who hangs out, along with a more casual mannequin wearing his baseball cap backwards, in a garden where the two sell teenage girls Wonder Eggs out of a vending machine. Each egg leads into a dream where the buyer must save a former female suicide from a metaphorical monster; succeed in enough of these missions, it’s hinted, and Ai will get her dead friend back.

Thrown into this scenario, the introduction is charmingly disorienting, although enough clues are supplied that, by episode 2, the outlines of the plot are comprehensible (aside from the overriding issue of how and why this oddly conceived suicide egg economy exists in the first place.) The series then falls into a “monster of the week” groove; in the second episode, Ai fights a demonic coach to save a gymnast worked into suicide, and in each of the next four installments a new Wonder Egg devotee comes on board, until we have a girl gang of four dream warriors. Each of the characters has a distinctive design and a nice character hook: Neiru is an pretty but emotionally-stunted girl genius, Rika is a peppy and mischievous former junior idol, and Momoe is an androgynous outcast. The missions the girls go on allow the creators to address an array of topics of interest to the target audience: bullying, unrealistic expectations, self-acceptance, molestation, gender identification, obsessive fandom, and, most prominently, suicide. In between battles, the girls bond, and a couple of subplots—Ai’s teacher and his relationships to much of the female cast, hints of Neiru’s backstory—start developing. A few new elements are also added, Continue reading CHANNEL 366: WONDER EGG PRIORITY (2021) →

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CAPSULE: MOON MANOR (2022)

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Moon Manor is currently available for VOD rental.

DIRECTED BY: Machete Bang Bang, Erin Grana

FEATURING: James ‘Jimmy’ Carrozo, Lou Taylor Pucci, Richard Riehle, Debra Wilson

PLOT: Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, an elderly bohemian decides to end his life, and stages a celebratory “fun-eral” party ending with his suicide.

Still from Moon Manor (2022)

COMMENTS: Moon Manor has a strong point of view, and for better or worse, it sticks to it. It’s structured not as a movie, but as a memorial service. It’s both didactic and celebratory. Jimmy, a former singer and moon real estate salesman, suffers from dementia that’s only getting worse. Deciding to take control of the end of his life, he avails himself of liberal West Coast laws allowing physicians to prescribe lethal doses of barbiturates and invites his friends over to celebrate his last day on earth. Along for the final ride are a death doula who reads from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and a neophyte local journalist covering the eulogy beat who hopes to leverage Jimmy’s death into a feature article. Most of Jimmy’s old friends are dead, but younger folk touched by his mentorship come along to the party to give testimonials, a drag queen supplies entertainment, and Rikki Lake shows up to give some words of encouragement. Jimmy is a swell guy and no one has a bad word to say about him, as is appropriate. We get to know him through flashbacks (Jimmy met the love of his life at an audition for “Hair,” a musical whose revolutionary potential he still staunchly defends). The only pushback to the general sense of how wonderful the whole suicide plan is comes from a pair of evangelical protestors who park outside his house and shout Bible verses through a bullhorn—although these antagonists are quickly overcome and sidelined. (They are basically intolerant, unempathetic strawmen, although one of them does receive some unexpected character development).

The movie has a heavy neo-hippie, New Age vibe, which can come across as a bit naïve but is in keeping with its subject’s spirit. Moon Manor is a feature-length advertisement for a radical species of death with dignity, and, though one-sided, it successfully makes the decision seem rational. But is it weird? Not if you’re the kind of guy who recognizes the pot of San Pedro cactus growing in the corner of the kitchen. There are a few fast-cut montages with colored lights, and there’s a shambling apparition hanging around (Jimmy assumes it’s Death, but it names itself “Intuition). The editing in the hallucination sequences is indie-psychedelic standard, competent but not transcendent. It’s not as weird as you’d expect from a movie co-directed by someone named Machete Bang Bang.

Moon Manor aims at persuasion, and how well you like it will depend on your position on the right to die (and on whether you think opposing viewpoints should at least get a fair hearing). But it’s also a living eulogy for an extraordinary man, which makes the movie harder to criticize or dislike. Jimmy is endearing and authentic, because he is playing a version of himself: many of the details, including his love story and his career as a working musician, are taken from the actor’s real life. Knowing the factual basis of the fictional story makes it easier to accept the film’s argument: this may not really be happening, but you know the actor you’re seeing onscreen wholeheartedly endorses the scenario. Fortunately, there is no indication that the real-life Jimmy has advanced Alzheimer’s, or intends to die soon.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film brilliantly blends humor with melancholy, feeling like a surrealistic biography.”–Jon Mendelson, CBR (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: MAYDAY (2021)

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DIRECTED BY: Karen Cinorre

FEATURING: Grace Van Patten, , Soko, Havana Rose Liu, Juliette Lewis

PLOT: Escaping a horrible day of work at a restaurant, Ana finds herself amongst girl guerrilla fighters in the midst of war.

COMMENTS: Though others may have said it better, few have said it with as much swagger and clarity as Queen: don’t try suicide. This is among the handful of messages littered around the intriguing mess that is Karen Cinorre’s feature debut, Mayday. In fact, every other line of dialogue seems to be some kind of advisement:

  • Getting dizzy? Of course you are: you’ve never seen that far before.
  • You’ve been in a war your whole life, you just didn’t know it.
  • Girls are better off dead, ’cause now we’re free.
  • A lot of girls just slip away. They deserve better.
  • He needs to learn what fear feels like.
  • Wars always get out of hand. Soon everyone will be in on it.

This last line bears dissection, as the gist of it perhaps makes some sense (the spiraling nature of violence), but the execution of the aphorism collapses under scrutiny. This is a difficulty that Mayday battles throughout. But despite nearly buckling under the weight of its own heavy-handedness, Mayday pulls off the sermonizing while remaining generally entertaining.

The film begins with an airman parachuting from a plane’s open hatch. The story begins with Ana (Grace Van Patten) waking up abruptly in her car. She is awoken by her friend and coworker Dmitri: they are grunts-in-arms at a fairly hellish venue, catering a wedding beset with freakish electrical episodes. Inside, the maitre d’ brushes past Ana, chiding her, “Clean yourself up! I have to look at that face.” The bride-to-be abruptly grabs her, and the two crash into the ladies’ room for a bridal meltdown. When Ana is then tasked with a trip to the basement to futz with the fuse box, things become increasingly jumpy. Flipping the main switch, she ascends the stairs to an empty kitchen and climbs into an oven only to emerge on some seaside rocks.

What follows is a girl-vs-boy fantasy adventure whose tone speedily careens toward a clunky patrio-normative finale. Marsha leads a partisan trio that somehow knew when and where to collect Ana upon her arrival. “Gert” is weapons-obsessed, “Bea” is the playful adventurer, and the now-complete gang of four hide out in a beached submarine. They spend their days frolicking and sending out distress signals, siren-style, to lure would-be rescuers (all men) into deadly storms.

Cinorre has chosen a compelling and (unfortunately still) topical premise to explore, but the experience is undercut with every Marsha-n diatribe. I am fully on board with criticizing male chauvinism, but have qualms about getting into bed with misandry. Mayday‘s ultimate acknowledgement of all genders’ capacity for ill-behavior, though welcome, isn’t enough when the plot clings to the “but you have a man who wants you” motivation for Ana to decide to carry on. Like Queen, Cinorre can swagger; unlike Queen, her message drowns in ambiguity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“From ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and beyond, the references are there in abundance, but Cinorre trusts in their familiarity so much that she ditches notions like logical world-building (yes, there needs to be some coherent and consistent logic even in fantasy), throwing the audience inside a barely-realized novel reality. If you don’t ask too many questions and just go with the flow, you might have a decent time in this dimension.”–Tomris Laffly, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: DEAD DICKS (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Chris Bavota, Lee Paula Springer

FEATURING: Jillian Harris, Heston Horwin, Matt Keyes

PLOT: Mentally ill and suicidal, Richard tries to off himself but is repeatedly reborn though an orifice that’s growing on his wall, leaving his apartment cluttered with corpses of his previous selves.

Still from Dead Dicks (2019)

COMMENTS: Richie and his sister Becca debate about the exact anatomical correspondence of the orifice that has suddenly appeared on his bedroom wall. He calls it a vagina; she replies “it looks more like an asshole to me.” He sees at as a possibility of rebirth, while she sees it as just the same shit over and over? (For the record, it’s obviously shaped like a vulva; trust me, I’ve seen one before.)

Whatever the hole in the wall is, it’s driving the plot. Well, not really. The real conflict in Dead Dicks is not the eternal struggle between death and rebirth, but the more down to earth sibling drama between Richie, a mentally ill artist who annoys his only neighbor by forgetting to turn down the music after midnight, and Becca, who’s always nurturing her brother instead of pursuing her own dreams to become a nurse. As a career enabler, cleaning up her brother’s many spare corpses comes naturally to her.

Sometimes, the bare sets, unimaginative staging, and uneven sound levels—especially in the few shots occurring outside Ritchie’s apartment—smack you in the face with the fact that Dead Dicks a low-budget affair.  But the main place where the budgetary limitations become intrusive is in the long middle act, where cheap conversation takes the place of more expensive action. It seems most of the available money went into a one big effect, a brief but nightmarish gore scene that does dazzle.

The acting is spotty, with Matt Keyes coming across the best (although there is little nuance required of his perpetually annoyed neighbor). Jillian Harris has a hard time of it; her character is often written so as to under-react to the insane events, and to comply with Ritchie’s odd requests too quickly. I’m not sure exactly how an actress should play a character asked, by her brother, to hack up her brother’s body; but there were many times where I expected Becca to object or freak out in a much higher register than she does. There are some attempts at black comedy—sis is more shocked by her brother’s full-frontal nudity than by the fact that he’s just come back from the dead—but on the whole the script eschews yuks in favor of a dramatic tone.

But, warts and all, Dead Dicks is worth a watch to those who find the premise or the mental illness theme compelling. It lags in the middle with a bit too much dialogue, but it starts the third act with two twists that come in quick succession, and ends on a strong note. The ultimate resolution is unexpected, and morally troubling—some may complain, but this is horror after all, and I’m glad they took this brave step rather than a more conventional feel-good ending. Dead Dicks is an ambitious and largely successful feature, though one that might have been scaled back to be an impressive short.

Plus, the body count is much higher than the total number of characters in the film, which is quite a trick to pull off.

The Artsploitation DVD/Blu-ray contains commentary from the two directors and video diaries of the production. These extras are valuable to anyone considering making their own movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Dead Dicks tackles taboos, blending trippy horror, irreverent humor, and shocking tenderness to create a film that’s both darkly challenging and wildly entertaining.”–Kirist Puchbo, Pajiba (festival screening)