Tag Archives: Surrealism

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CALAMARI UNION (1985) / THE CALAMARI WRESTLER (2004)

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The odds that, out of the near-500 films still in our reader queue, two of them would utilize the very same chewy appetizer in their titles seem awfully remote. Yet here we are, cinematically celebrating this savory treat from Helsinki to Tokyo. So let’s see just what calamari means to these filmmakers, and whether they’d have been better off invoking jalapeño poppers.

CALAMARI UNION (1985)

DIRECTED BY: Aki Kaurismäki

FEATURING: Timo Eränkö, Kari Heiskanen, Asmo Hurula, Sakke Järvenpää, Markku Toikka

PLOT: A collection of petty criminals band together to escape the Kallio district for the greener pastures of Eira; their journey to a new neighborhood, however, will be perilous and filled with obstacles.

COMMENTS: The classic World War II caper The Great Escape is about the daring breakout of more than 80 prisoners from a Nazi prison camp. The plan requires extraordinary levels of cleverness, craftiness, and chutzpah. Even then, the odds are against them, and (spoiler alert for 80-year-old history) only three men eventually get away.

Calamari Union is The Great Escape for idiots. A collection of 14 low-level criminals all named Frank (plus an additional traveler who speaks exclusively in English that he seems to have picked up from watching movies) join forces to escape certain doom in a bad Helsinki neighborhood. Are the cops closing in? Is some crime boss about to bring the hammer down on them? No, they just don’t fit in. Too many hills, with kids and dogs running around willy-nilly. No good can come of all that. They all agree: “A sick branch must seek a healthier tree.” They must escape to the paradise of Eira.

Trouble is, they’re all comically bad at looking out for their own best interests. Upon hijacking a subway to take them to the city center, the train driver shoots one of the Franks, an event met with only casual interest from the rest of the troupe. They all independently gravitate to the same café, despite having been warned that it’s every man for himself. They chase girls, make mildly extravagant purchases, pick fights, anything to delay actually reaching their destination. Getting to the promised land would seem to be the most urgent goal, but no one is in any particular hurry to get anywhere. Even when blessed with useful skills, such as convincing a driver to hand over their vehicle with no debate, they don’t put their talents to any particular use. That, of course, is Calamari Union’s particular breed of surrealism: no one does anything logical. It’s amusing, but as aimless as the petty crooks themselves.

Many of the actors are Finnish rock musicians, which might explain the moment when the Franks all show up for a musical interlude in Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CALAMARI UNION (1985) / THE CALAMARI WRESTLER (2004) →

Apocryphally Weird

59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972)

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Requiem pour un vampire, AKA Vierges et Vampires, Caged Virgins

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“[M]ore than thirty years later, Requiem remains one of my favorite films. In my view, it’s a real naïve film, written naively without thought, almost automatic writing, without prior idea and above all without reflection. It’s nothing else but a simple stream of ideas out of an unconstituted imagination. It’s a real ‘B’ movie with all that that involves. No intellectual reflection, no intentional symbolism. Nothing but this free and disordered imagery which I care so much about.” —, “The Making of Requiem for a Vampire” (2005)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: , Mareille Dargent, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle

PLOT: Two teenage delinquents disguised as clowns escape unknown pursuers in a car; their getaway driver is gunned down in the chase. After escaping they remove their harlequin makeup and make their way across the countryside. They are eventually bitten by bats and wind up trapped in the medieval castle lair of a dying vampire and his minions.

BACKGROUND:

  • Rollin’s script for his fourth film, written in two days in a stream of consciousness, evolved out of two scenes: the car chase through the countryside and the piano concert in the cemetery.
  • The first half of the film is nearly silent. Inspired by the pioneering adventure serials of Louis Feuillade, Rollin chose to emphasize the action sequences by keeping them mostly dialogue-free.
  • The art direction was inspired by surrealist painters Clovis Trouille and Paul Delvaux.
  • The dungeon scenes were filmed in the twelfth century Château de la Roche-Guyon, after the crew was evicted from their first choice of castle when the owner caught sight of the film’s nudity. Edmée, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld never saw the script; she agreed to rent her chateau for filming under the impression the story was, in Rollin’s words, “a sort of fairytale.”
  • The dungeon torture scene is ten minutes long, the minimum length of sleaze sales agent Lionel Wallman required in order to sell the film on the international grindhouse circuit. Wallman also donated the getaway car that gets shot to pieces and set on fire.
  • Interpol briefly investigated the film’s production after local gendarmes discovered the shot-up car with Belgian plates in a secluded patch of forest and assumed it belonged to foreign drug traffickers.
  • The cemetery scenes were filmed in a burial ground for medieval plague victims in Crèvecoeur-en-Auge, a small village in Normandy, believed by locals to be cursed.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many fantastic scenes in Requiem haunt the mind (the vampire Erika playing the organ in a chapel to an audience of skeleton monks, the crimson torture chamber, the master vampire’s coffin in a green-glowing crypt), but the two main characters dressed as stock clowns stand out whenever they appear, whether in a golden field, a collapsing barn, or a cemetery at dusk.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Clown car getaway; vagina bat

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A car chase gunfight along a winding country road; a solitary food truck in the middle of nowhere; a motorcycle in an abandoned water tower; a chapel doorway glowing crimson in the dead of night. Requiem for a Vampire transitions from scene to scene with the abrupt illogical shifts of a dream, as the intrepid heroines traverse a deserted landscape freighted with mystery. Mysterious themselves, the girls transform from clowns to teenage outlaws with handguns in their miniskirts. It remains unknown quite how they’ve ended up here, who was chasing them, and even where “here” is.

Trailer for Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

COMMENTS: Disregard for normal narrative conventions (establishing the setting, introducing the characters) give Rollin’s films a Continue reading 59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972) →

Apocryphally Weird

57*. HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978)

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Delírios de um Anormal

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“…there’s this spiritist center in Bahia that summons an Exu, or Zé do Caixão spirit. I’ve been to these places, incognito of course, wearing sunglasses, hiding my nails, the whole deal. And then someone channels Zé do Caixão, claiming it’s me. There’s this narrative that Zé do Caixão was already a spirit and I just summoned him. I pay them homage in this film. I leave it up to the viewers to decide for themselves. Is he real?”– on the commentary track to Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind

DIRECTED BY: José Mojica Marins

FEATURING: José Mojica Marins, Jorge Peres, Magna Miller

PLOT: Psychiatrist Hamilton has terrible nightmares where he believes Coffin Joe is coming to take his wife away to use her to breed his offspring. His concerned colleagues call in José Mojica Marins, the creator of the Coffin Joe character, to convince him that the character is fictional and all in his imagination. The cure works; or does it?

hallucinations of a deranged mind (1978) still

BACKGROUND:

  • Zé do Caixão (Anglicized as “Coffin Joe”) was a character created and portrayed by low-budget Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins. Beginning in the late 60s, Coffin Joe appeared in a trilogy of canonical feature films, also appearing in Marins’ work in dream sequences, host segments, personal appearances, his own line of comic books, and so on. The character is sadistic, but ultimately more amoral than evil; he disdains religion and the supernatural, and quests eternally to find the perfect “superior” woman to breed with so he can sire superhuman progeny. Joe was known for his black top hat and cloak, his monobrow, and, most notably, for his uncut fingernails, which Marins grew to over 9 inches in length. Though nearly unknown outside of Brazil during the height of his popularity, within that country Coffin Joe was a homegrown bogeyman of superstar status, roughly equivalent to Freddy Kruger.
  • Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind was created from repurposed and unused footage from This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, The Strange World of Coffin Joe, The Awakening of the Beast, and others, mixed with newly shot scenes (there is approximately 35 minutes of new footage in the 86-minute movie). Some of the reused scenes had previously been nixed by censors.
  • The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974) used a similar premise of director Marins facing off against his own character.
  • Marins says that the inspiration for this film came from a real life request from a psychiatrist. The doctor’s wife was obsessed with Marins’ Coffin Joe character, and seemed to believe he existed independently. Marins visited the couple and watched one of his films with them on a midnight TV broadcast; during the screening, he reminisced how he suffered from diarrhea and painful corns during the shooting of certain scenes. The spell was broken and the woman no longer believed in Coffin Joe.
  • Editor Nilcemar Leyart estimates that the final film contains more than 4,700 cuts.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many garage-surrealist possibilities here it boggles the mind—the woman-headed spider, the magic-markered buttocks, the human staircase—but ultimately the dominating figure is, appropriately, Coffin Joe himself: the dark, dagger-fingered nightmare undertaker who orchestrates this parade of Boschian delights.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Faces on asses; multi-headed torture blob

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A circus of the damned crawling out of a cinematic scrapheap, Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind is the distilled essence of Coffin Joe at his most irrational and insistent.


Clip from Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind

COMMENTS: A man circles a bikini babe while beating a bongo; after each circuit he stops and a new set of female legs pop into the Continue reading 57*. HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978) →