The Golden Glove

Der Goldene Handshuh | Germany/France | 2019 | Directed by Fatih Akin

Logline: During the mid-70s a German serial killer haunts a local bar and district, picking up destitute older women. 

Akin is probably best known for the intense relationship drama Head-On from 2004. He’s made several features since then, but his latest is bringing him a whole new level of attention. It’s the kind of movie that can only be recommended to those with strong sensibilities. Relentlessly grim and grotesque, it’s so dedicated to the grime and squalor of its central character’s living and mental conditions that it seemingly transcends the trappings that would normally bury a study of such ghastliness. 

The Golden Glove is based loosely on the book of the same name by Jeinz Strunk, which in turn is based on the true crimes of one Friedrich “Fritz” Honka, a lowlife barfly who brutally murdered several women during the 1970s, dismembering their bodies, but storing some of the parts within his cramped attic apartment in the seedy area of Hamburg’s red light district. It is at the local dive, Der Goldene Handshuh, where Fritz spends much of his time, surrounded by other drunks, most of whom have fallen out of the Ugly Tree and hit all the branches on the way down. Fritz is no exception, with his squashed boot of a nose, pockmarked skin, greasy hair, and bung eye, not to mention a pathetic shuffle. He drinks Schnapps like it’s going out of style, and fantasizies about a pretty frauline whose cigarette he lit as she looked the other way. 

Fritz is a rapist and cold-blooded killer. He lures aging drunk women from the bar, back to his upstairs hovel, and after plying them with booze and bratwurst he tries to have sex with them, and then in frustration he bludgeons or strangles, or both. He’s a coward and a monster, yet his bar buddies are none the wiser. But the Greek family who live directly below are subjected to the horrendous smells emanating from Fritz’s lair, and Fritz tells the women he brings home that the rank stench is due to the Greeks’ cooking. It’s only a matter of time. 

To call this movie seedy is being complimentary, to call this movie repugnant is by no means a disservice. It is both, and proud of it. But it is also exceptionally well made. It’s a stark portrait, no foul buts about it, a chipped and cracked mirror held up to the depths of depravity the human condition can sink to, a true reflection of darkness. The handsome looks of young actor Jonas Dassler have been completely removed to portray Honka, and his committed performance is one of the standouts of the year, if you can handle it. But, it’s not just Dassler, the entire cast are uniformly excellent. 

The production design, art direction, and costuming are all bang on; the mid-70s’ back streets of Hamburg have been meticulously recreated, decorated, and retro-fitted. It’s impossible to fault the movie in any department. This is a true crime horror movie dressed as a period piece character study. It’s as sordid, nasty and hideous as Mike Leigh’s Naked, and also just as provocative, fascinating and truthful. 

“Life's a card game. If you want to pIay, you have to take the hand you're dealt.” 

The Golden Glove screens as part of the Fantastic Film Festival Australia, Wednesday, February 26th, 9pm & Monday, March 2nd, 9pm - The Lido, Melbourne, and Friday, February 28th, 9pm – The Ritz, Sydney. For complete program visit fantasticfilmfestival.com.au

Bliss

US | 2019 | Directed by Joe Begos

Logline: A talented painter in the midst of a debilitating creative block finds inspiration through a potent drug, but in turn is exposed to something far more insidious and destructive. 

It’s the age old dilemma, the artist in search of their muse. Usually it’s a trip through darkness to find the light, and in this case, that is most definitely what happens, figuratively and literally. This is a journey through hell, where joy and ecstasy are the most elusive of altered states. This is the plight of young Dezzy (Dora Madison), a free spirit in the City of Angels, who flies too close to the sun, and whose admirers are burned along the way. 

Dezzy is an artist struggling with her latest piece (de resistence), waiting desperately for that surge of creative energy that will enable her to complete the large abstract painting in her Los Angeles studio. Her agent is no longer prepared to tow the line, the gallery owner is tired of waiting, her close friends only facilitate her frustration, while her landlord demands the overdue rent. Something’s got to give. 

Dez resorts to familial recklessness and hits up her dealer for something strong. She’s offered a black devil’s powder known as “Bliss” and immediately finds hallucinogenic exhilaration and astral abandon. Cutting loose at a party with hedonistic girlfriend Courtney (Tru Collins) and lover Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield) she ends up in a torrid threesome with the pair, then blacks out. But this is only the tip of the tenebrous iceberg, and the collateral damage will be extensive. 

This is writer/director Begos’ third feature (he also released an action horror called VFW this year). He co-produced, with his production company, Channel 83 Films, a direct nod to Videodrome, and camera operated - the film was shot on Super-16mm and blown up to 2.39:1, and it’s a fabulous looking movie, rich in blacks and saturated primary colours, stunning work from cinematographer Mike Testin. 

This is easily the best movie Begos has made, as his first two features Almost Human and The Mind’s Eye suffered from overwritten scripts, poor acting, and lacked any real style, apart from wearing their Cronenberg influences like flair. Bliss is one of the most fierce horror movies dealing with bloodlust I’ve seen in many moons. 

It’s a study of desperation and addiction, of the inexorable bind of emotional fragility and creative genius, and is channeled as a phantasmagorical descent into madness, gritty and filthy, drenched and sodden with sweat and blood. It is sexy and uninhibited, yet shackled and depraved. It is a perfect little nightmare for those that seek pure horror cinema of an unbridled, transgressive nature. 

A blistering performance from Dora Madison who utterly owns her character, foul-mouthed and sassy, vulnerable and alone, itching, scratching, tearing, gouging, gulping blood, screaming for life. Indie darling Jeremy Gardner plays her hapless fuck buddy Clive, and watch for George Wendt as Pops, one of the grumpy old men in Dezzy’s social circle. All the support cast are solid, but, apart from Madison, the other real star of the film is the special effects makeup design courtesy of Josh and Sierra Russell, truly outstanding work. 

Bliss is an urban vampire flick reminiscent of the nihilism present in the work of Abel Ferrara and the vivid unfettered expressionism that characterises the look of Gaspar Noe’s movies. The score by Steve Moore is terrific, and the use of sourced metal music adds a thunderous punctuation to certain scenes. What it might lack in plotting, it more than makes up for in an all-embracing, urgent atmosphere, a pulsating, visceral intensity, a brilliantly sustained singular point of view, and a consummate ending. 

I am more than happy, I am in a state of fucking bliss. 

Homewrecker

2019 | Canada | Directed Zach Gayne

Logline: An older woman attempts to befriend a younger woman, only to reveal a troubled mind and an insidious agenda.

There’s nothing like a well-executed cat fight, and in Zach Gayne’s wicked two-hander he provides his actors with one of the best little battlegrounds in quite some time. This is a blackly comic pearler. The emphasis is on the contrasting personalities, a delicate, finely-tuned character study at play, and this is one of those delicious ones that descends into ugly territory indeed, yet still remains a comedy at dark heart. Oh, there’ll be tears before bedtime; tears of laughter, tears of sorrow, and tears of pain. Tear being the operative word. 

We begin our battle of the wills in the gym and the yoga class. Michelle (Alex Essoe) looks 30ish. She is being watched by Linda (Precious Chong), a woman going on 50. Alex has missed her period, but forgot tampons. Thankfully Linda happens to be carrying a spare, even though she’s no longer on the rag. Hmmm. Later at a cafe where Michelle is on her laptop working on an interior decorating job in waltzes Linda, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and immediately ingratiates herself, using coffee as  her spanner in the works. 

Before you can say “boiled rabbit”, Linda has coerced Michelle back to her semi-detached dump to peruse a possible decorating job, “What’s your rate? I’ll pay you double! Triple! Quadruple! Hahah, I’m joking!” Michelle tries to dodge a potent tequila cocktail being thrust in her face, and the liquid therapy is smashed on the kitchen floor. Michelle is mortified, Linda is slightly phased, but already calculating her next move. 

Y’see, Linda just wants to advise Michelle on her future with husband Robert, and the prospect of motherhood. She suspects there is trouble in paradise. She’s aggressively friendly. Michelle just wants to get the hell out Linda’s house. And so begins an hilarious and chaotic game of cat and mouse between the two woman, with the husband as the stinky cheese in the middle. 

A nod to the shenanigans of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a nod to the psycho-drama and thrills of oh-so-many movies, such as Single White Female and Fatal Attraction. Homewrecker is also a disquieting dig at fidelity and loneliness. It sports a cracker of a script, which feels partially improvised. The screenplay is credited to Gayne, Essoe and Chong, and no doubt they must have had a whale of a time throwing lines of barbed dialogue at each other, upping the dramatic ante, throwing caution to the wind. 

It’s a micro-budget feature with a running time that barely clocks in at the required 75-minutes. But it makes for a highly vindictive, very funny hour and a bit. Indeed, the pace is quick, but with some contemplative downtime whilst the two play a board game called “Party Hunks” (an 80s throwback - like all of Linda’s world - designed for the movie), and then back into the combat, with a particularly horrendous denouement you won’t see coming. 

Alex Essoe and Precious Chong deliver terrific performances, seriously good. Chong has the craze-eye down pat, and Essoe provides the perfect counterpoint; centred, but slightly anxious wife becoming increasingly wary. As Chong becomes more and more agitated, Essoe is pushed toward hysteria. The escalation is a mischievous joy to watch. 

Essoe has become one of my favourite indie actors, and Homewrecker sneaks its way into my year’s favourite movies. 

Werewolf

Wilkolak | 2018 | Poland/Netherlands/Germany | Directed by Adrian Panek

Logline: A group of young and older children are liberated from a Nazi concentration camp, but find themselves trapped in an abandoned mansion besieged by vicious dogs. 

The horror of war is nothing to sneeze at, and in writer/director Panek’s portrait of ravaged innocence and ruined humanity the Holocaust is merely the backdrop to another animals-with-bloodlust terror, in this case, ravenous dogs. From the appalling behaviour of humans to the appalling behaviour instilled in man’s best friend, Werewolf is a hybrid horror-thriller-drama about trust and betrayal, survival of the fittest. 

It is the end of WWII, and in the concentration camp known as Gross Rosen a group of eight children, aged from around five to late teens, are liberated and seek shelter with an adult, Jadwiga (Danuta Stenka), in a derelict, abandoned mansion within a nearby forest. They are starving and have little to no food. Quickly they resort to desperate measures. The two eldest, Hanka (Sonia Mietielica) and “Kraut” (Nicolas Przygoda), do their best to facilitate and supervise whatever they can get their hands on, like a single can of dogwood and a bunch of potatoes. Some of the children are so young, they were born into captivity and have never used cutlery before. 

Wladek (Kamil Polnisiak) is the wild card. He’s obviously more traumatised than the others, from all the horrors he’s witnessed. He feels threatened by Kraut, especially as he is fond of Hanka, and knows she is out of reach. He contemplates dangerous, murderous action. But there is more immediate deadly danger; as a pack of freed SS guard dogs have sniffed their way to the property, and the smell of human is making them salivate. Now the kids have to really keep their wits about them, as the dogs attempt to infiltrate the house. 

Werewolf is a gripping and powerful film, beautifully shot by Dominik Danilczyk and expertly cut by Jaroslaw Kaminski. The use of tension and suspense is handled with great skill, and the geography of the wilderness location is both majestic and claustrophobic. The performances are all excellent, especially Mietielica, she’s one to watch, but also Polnisiak, both exhibit a mature understanding of subtlety and nuances it’s so often all in the eyes. Also of note is Werner Daehn as an SS officer from the camp who is holed up in a bunker not far from the mansion. 

I’m reminded of two other war-related films set in the countryside, the first, Lore, directed by Australian Cate Shortland, with focus on the plight of a young woman dealing with the immediate horrors and terrorisation in WWII Germany, and the other, Burnt by the Sun, directed by a Russian, Nikita Mikhalkov, with focus on the plight of a revolution hero who is suspected of being a spy. In both of these the directors capture moments of exquisite, ethereal beauty amidst the horror. One such moment in Werewolf has Hanka alone, finding a forgotten suitcase full of a woman’s finery, including a pretty red dress, which she adorns, and applies lipstick, admiring her sensuous reflection, then slumbers peacefully on the balcony chaise-lounge in the soft afternoon sunlight. 

Werewolf (the title references the planned Nazi “werwolf” resistance force to operate in Allied-occupied Germany) plays with a very familiar scenario, the hapless trapped by marauding beasts, but gives it a much more humanistic edge, and an altogether more vulnerable one. The term out of the frying pan and into the fire comes to mind, but whose snap will do the most damage, the trained killer dogs, the psychologically damaged young boy, or something else? 

One of the year’s best.

Ginger Snaps

Canada | 2000 | Directed by John Fawcett

Logline: The close bond of two sisters, obsessed with the macabre, is tested to its limits when one of them is bitten by a werewolf. 

Sometimes being a girl can be such a bitch … a howling, snarling, hair-bristling bitch. It helps when you have a sister who’ll do anything to make those teething problems a little less painful for you. Ginger Snaps is up in the small pantheon of great werewolf flicks, one of my faves. Why lycanthropy isn’t as popular as vampirism in the horror community is a mystery as looming as a supermoon. I’m thinking the fetid-breathed undead have that whole immortality angle. But I digress …  

The Fitzgerald sisters (Ginger, nearly 16 and Brigitte, 15) are a little unusual as neither have begun menstruating yet. Their mother (Mimi Rogers) isn’t too concerned; it will come in good time, whilst ather just looks and acts confused, utterly ineffectual. The sisters are ridiculed at school, which only aggravates their general misanthropy (hello, lycanthropy!). They are inseparable and spend much of their free time staging and photographing their own highly elaborate death and suicide scenes for a school class project. 

No one seems to understand them, and that bitch Trina Sinclair (Danielle Hampton) with her damn dog, she’s gonna get hers one day! Just you wait! But fate plays a monster card when the two girls are attacked near the woods by a huge beast, and Ginger is savagely mauled. They escape only to discover back at home that Ginger’s wounds are healing at an alarming rate.

Karen Walton’s tidy screenplay plays with the notion of lycanthropy being a physical metaphor for adolescence and, more precisely, female puberty. It’s not so much the full moon to watch out for, but that 28 day cycle, the “curse”, as Ginger affectionately calls it when she and her sister notice she’s got blood on her thigh, and it ain’t from the mangled dog in the park they just found. PMT is going to play havoc with Ginger’s sensibilities. “I thought I had a craving for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces!” 

Director John Fawcett has elicited two superb performances from the two leads; Emily Perkins as “Bee” (Brigitte) and Katharine Isabelle as Ginger. Curious to note Perkins was four years older than Isabelle, and is wearing a full wig. Rogers is wryly funny as the vague, but earnest mum, Pamela, while Kris Lemche as green thumb weed dude Sam is solid. Handy that he knows a little about the properties of monskhood (aka wolfsbane), and with his illicit drug knowledge, can prepare the crushed petals into a administrable potion. 

Karen Walton’s screenplay holds up really well, nearly twenty years down the track, with terrific dialogue, mostly the exchanges between the sisters (eg with the early stages of lycanthropy surging and looking for a suitable box of tampons Brigitte asks Ginger “Are you sure they’re just cramps?”, Ginger, doubled-over in pain sarcastically replies, “Just so you know, the words ‘just’ and ‘cramps’ do not go together.”). Also, it must be said, the word “fuck” is used as great punctuation throughout the movie.  

While the special effects are uneven, some decent, others less so, the mise-en-scene and editing keeps everything firmly in check, and Isabelle is so charismatic and commanding in the central role, one forgets the movie’s production limitations. Ginger Snaps is a kind of twisted date flick; it pokes smart, witty fun at our adolescent woes; bullies and sexual frustration, while keeping the horror edge sharp and glistening in the fat moonlight. It’s hip without being self-conscious, and that’s a delicate balance to hold.  

But why is it so many werewolf flicks are part comedy? Another mystery to me.

Dogs Don't Wear Pants

Finland/Latvia | 2019 | Directed by J.-P. Valkeapää

Logline: A father, emotionally barren following the death of his wife, finds his dangerous new sexual predilection fueled by his involvement with a dominatrix.

Juha (Pekka Strang) has a young daughter. She is sobbing uncontrollably in his room as he slumbers. His dream fractures as he realises what is happening. His wife is drowning in the adjacent lake. He dives into the dark depths, but he is too late. The coldness embraces his heart, engulfs his love, and smothers his dreams. And now, years later, with his daugher Elli (Ilona Huhta), a teenager, he hasn’t been able to move on from the tragedy, instead he has formed a fixation with asphyxiation, a dangerous form of self-medication tied to his lonely sexual desire. 

When Elli goes to get her tongue pierced Juha accompanies her, but he is shooed away by the piercer whilst the deed is being done. Downstairs in a dimly lit room he discovers a gimp in front of a wall mirror. It’s a professional dungeon, and the in-house dominatrix, Mona (Krista Kosonen), reprimands his curiosity in brutal fashion. Juha leaves with a sweet taste in his mouth. 

In one of the most original movies in recent years, Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, is a singular portrait of loneliness and joy intertwined in a most complex way. It is an elusive romance that operates like an even more elusive thriller. But it doesn’t reward like a thriller, and it barely rewards as a romance, but it’s one of the best dramas of the year. Imagine David Lynch and Atom Egoyan made a movie together. 

The title refers to the “bad dog” role played by the submissive in BDSM activity. Juha laps it up (excuse the pun), whilst Mona, a professional, finds her own sensibilities being tested. She is searching for something too, and Juha’s combined resilience and frailty is pushing buttons she didn’t know she had. She’s used to playing tough, but Juha wants it tougher. Will there be any kind of emotional rescue? 

Stunning work from cinematographer Pietari Peltola, the movie is shrouded in a tenebrous neo-noir atmosphere. The underwater photography alone is beautiful. Superb performances from the two leads, and a terrific soundtrack – incidental score and sourced club music – gives the movie an even sharper edge. 

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is not for everyone – and be warned there is an especially ghastly scene involving a pair of pliers - but for those prepared to take Juha and Mona’s journey, it’s ending will make you smile. Hell, you might even snigger from time to time. Considering the intensity of their professional relationship you can be rest assured their relating in the real world will be hunky dory.

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is screening as part of Australia’s Monster Fest, Saturday, 2nd November, 10pm in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth. Click here for venue details and the full Monster Fest program.  

Joker

US/Canada | 2019 | Directed by Todd Phillips

Logline: A desperate comedian falls prey to his own mental instability and increasing contempt for the society surrounding him leading him to murderous action. 

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) only wants to give joy and laughter to the world. His dear ailing mother, Penny (Frances Conroy) told him he had a purpose and to smile and put on a happy face. But Arthur hasn’t felt genuine happiness his entire life. You see the worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t. Everyone is one day away from madness. 

“I hope my death makes more cents than my life,” writes Arthur in his journal of scrambled thoughts and paranoid delusions. He hopes to make it big as a stand-up comedian, to leave his sad clown act behind. He struggles to put on a happy face. His social worker feels society’s disregard weighing heavily on the man’s skinny frame. There’s only so much pain and rage that the medication can keep at bay. 

Celebrity talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) is Arthur’s inspiration, whilst his weary mother is the petal in his hand, the thorn in his side. Just who exactly is Arthur’s father? He needs to get to the bottom of it all, down to the emotional cul-de-sac, where the Manor behind the huge iron gates looms like a shadow from his future past. 

This is a dark and grim study of psychological fragility and inevitable collapse from a director who began his own career with a study of a similar ilk, Hated, a documentary on GG Allin, the punk rocker who alienated his own audiences with his extreme behaviour. Phillips’ portrait of one man’s descent into his own private hell, and those he drags down with him, is very reminiscent of Scorsese’s masterful portrayals of God’s lonely men in Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy, especially in tone and setting. 

Joker depicts the origins of one of the great comic book villains of all time, and yet also paints a singular picture of a psychopath that could be anyone on the street that passes you. The danger is palpable; the atmosphere is gritty and authentic. Phillips went out of his way to make his movie as realistic as possible, removing it stylistically from the DC Superhero Universe so that it can stand alone, and it stands tall and formidable. 

Joker is an extraordinary film, a powerful and compelling drama, a nightmare movie for the now and here. It is fictional Gotham City, but it is every city in the real world. We’ve all known an Arthur Fleck, or known of, or thereabouts, six degrees of separation, horror at arm’s reach. Superbly filmed, with Phoenix delivering a career performance, Phillips stays close to the character, he’s in almost every scene, we watch him brood and lurk, we watch him fidget and slow dance, oh yes, the dancing. It’s creepy and morbidly mesmerising, like a train wreck in slow motion. 

Joker is confronting and disturbing, yet there’s the darkest kernel of comedy lurking in the bowels, like a kidney stone. “I used to think my life was a tragedy, but now I realise, it’s a comedy,” Arthur states matter-of-factly. His life has become an out of control delusion (the “grandeur” comes at movie’s anarchic end). How much of Arthur’s world is happening inside his cracked mind? Certainly some of it is. We know this much is true because Arthur craves love and intimacy and acceptance. He is an abandoned man. 

Arthur fabricates and hides behind guises, just like Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, just like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. He searches for peace of mind, but there is only deception and manipulation, only ridicule and humiliation. He’ll have to snatch the facts to uncover an ugly truth, and he’ll need to confront his demons in person. 

Arthur dons his red garb, his face paint a diabolical clown, he skips and skirts down steps, twirling to his own tune, and it’s a glam rock song tainted by the awful sociopathic crimes of its singer, in some kind of hideous (un)intentional parallel. 

“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fuckin’ deserve!”

Blow Out, Wolfen, Arthur, Zorro the Gay Blade … these are the movies playing in the cinemas on the streets; serial killers, savage animals, the deluded rich, the vigilante folk hero. 

In a mirrored nod to Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, Arthur Fleck leans against a car window as it traces through the ruined nightlife of Gotham City. 

Somewhere a young boy mourns the death of his parents and another seed is born. 

In Arkham Ayslum a psychiatrist asks what’s funny.  

“You wouldn’t get it,” the patient replies, smirking … snarling.

It’s the killing joke. 

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht | West Germany/France | 1979 | Directed but Werner Herzog

Logline: Logline: A real estate agent is sent to a distant buyer to close the deal, but becomes a pawn in the buyer’s dark agenda to possess the man’s wife. 

When German maverick Werner Herzog took it upon himself to direct a remake of what he felt was one of his country’s most important feature films ever made he delivered a portrait just as richly atmospheric, but burnt with a melancholy that sears itself on the viewer’s soul.

Herzog’s Nosferatu is a re-imagining of F. W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece; an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that doesn’t have to hide behind the guise of changed character names, as the 1922 original did, although curiously Stoker’s novel is again uncredited. Klaus Kinski is Count Dracula, Isabelle Adjani plays Lucy, Bruno Ganz plays Jonathon Harker, Roland Topor plays Renfield, Walter Ladengast plays Dr. Van Helsing, Martje Grohmann plays Mina. Curiously Herzog’s swaps the novel’s roles of Lucy and Mina. 

Herzog wrote, produced and directed, and had two versions of the film shot simultaneously: one in his native German tongue (Phantom of the Night), and one in English to appease 20th Century Fox who were distributing it internationally (Herzog considers the German-language version to be the more culturally authentic).

The narrative floats and drifts like an ornamented funeral barge; dark and macabre, the mise-en-scene blanketed with a shadowy grandeur and desolate beauty; like the white-grey beach that Lucy finds herself wandering along after Harker has gone on his mission to assist the Count in his move from Transylvania to their home town of Wismar. It’s a film lost in time that transcends the ages, haunted and etched. 

The three leads are perfectly cast and inhabit their characters effortlessly; Adjani and Klaus are like a strange reflection, immaculate porcelain skin, eyes wide and dark, and full lips, yet they make for a most powerful dual visage: the juxtaposition of pure innocence, elegance and pulchritude against deep-rooted lust, evil and grotesquerie. All the sound in the movie was dubbed in post-production, which adds a heightened theatricality. Much of the cinematography was shot using available light (adding grain and soft focus), and almost the entire movie was filmed on stunning locations in Europe (Netherlands, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany), with the exception of the mummies in the opening scene, which was shot in Mexico.

This is definitely one of Herzog’s most powerful and evocative films - yet as a horror movie, it is a surprisingly rare creature; intensely languid, devoid of any gore (almost bloodless), nudity, or profanity. A haunting soundtrack, courtesy of Popol Vuh and Florian Fricke, tightens the embrace, for there is something deeply affecting about this particular tale of bloodlust. The theme of supernatural possession mirrors a strangely human experience of loneliness and longing; spectres of sex and death whispering close enough to make the hairs on your back bristle. An overwhelming Gothic presence that creeps under the skin and crawls like a pestilence, yet soft and dreamy, that stirs and yearns and echoes across the mountain steppes. 

Although Herzog uses Stoker’s characters names he follows Murnau’s version of events more closely, but changes the very end significantly, departing from both Murnau’s film and Stoker’s novel. It is a curious direction, and one which bothered me years ago, but viewing again in the movie’s fortieth year, I am most accommodating of its cyclical - immortal - narrative. 

Pour yourself a finger or three of very old special pale, and then open the window to let the cool breeze waft through the moonlit room, allowing the children of the night to slide their phantom arms around your shoulder, pulling you closer until you’re shrouded in the darkness of the undead … The music is sickly sweet.

Valhalla Rising

Denmark/UK | 2009 | Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Logline: A Norse warrior escapes being a fighting slave and joins a group of Crusaders on a grueling quest for the Holy Land. 

Danish maverick, Nicholas Winding Refn, channels the poetic minimalism of Andrei Tarkovsky, the spiritual mysticism of Werner Herzog, and the violent surrealism of David Lynch into a dark and beautiful tale of degradation, emancipation, redemption, and resignation. Valhalla Rising is the journey of One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), a mute Norse warrior, across the rugged landscape of the mind, body, and soul, toward his mortal destiny foreseen. 

It is the Dark Ages, circa 1000 AD, in the misty highlands of Scotland, a terrain of majesty and desolation. One-Eye is a pagan’s slave forced by the chieftain, Barde (Alexander Morten), into fighting to the death for the amusement of his captors. He is very strong and adept and never loses, snapping necks, tearing jugulars, disemboweling his adversaries. By day he is thrust into the mud circle of wrath, by night he is chained inside a wooden cage. A young boy, Are (Maarten Stevenson) feeds him, observing the silent killer with fascination. 

Through visions One-Eye has the ability to see into his own future. This enables him to break from his binds and slaughter the pagan enemies who’ve enslaved him. On his own, with Are following, One-Eye traverses the mountainside and encounters a clutch of Crusaders, Christian Vikings on route to The Holy Land. One-Eye is invited to join their mission, which he does warily. 

Their boat is engulfed by fog and the journeymen become disorientated and confused. Eventually the mist clears and the men find themselves surrounded by the boreal forest, not The Holy Land. They are menaced, and the Christians believe they have entered Hell. One-Eye takes it all in his stride, using the Vikings’ psychological frailty as fuel for his own spiritual progression. They have reached New Found Land, and One-Eye embraces Valhalla. 

Punctuated by chapters, I - Wrath, II - Silent Warrior, III - Men Of God, IV - The Holy Land, V - Hell, and VI - The Sacrifice, Refn, with co-screenwriter Roy Jacobsen, has constructed the narrative with very little dialogue, traveling a powerful visual arc aided by a magnificent and truly evocative score, courtesy of Peterpeter and Peter Kyed, and darkly vivid cinematography, courtesy of Morten Søborg. Refn composes many of shots as tableaux, with One-Eye’s visions saturated in a luminescent red. He inverses some images within the visions creating a sense of displacement; One-Eye’s profile reversed, the rippling ocean upside-down as a fluid sky. 

Certainly the landscape is something to behold; filmed entirely in the formidable terrain of Scotland. Mikkelsen is quietly brilliant in his unspeaking role. All the support cast is solid. The costuming is very impressive, and the extreme violence is executed superbly. I have my reservations over the use of CGI bloodletting, but Refn carries it off okay, and he does use prosthetics in the right place - there’s an excellent hatchet neck wound on one victim. 

The mood and tone is introspective, ponderous in its depth, the characters frequently musing, lost in thought, observing, scheming, then explosions of visceral, brutal violence. I’m reminded of Jim Jarmusch’s mutant Western Dead Man, a similar drifting, existential mood, a movie of moments, of ideas, of feeling, but Valhalla Rising is devoid of Dead Man’s sardonic and bitter sense of humour. 

Infused with elusive, ethereal buoyancy, Valhalla Rising is a jagged gemstone glistening seductively in the abyss, an existential anchor being dragged through the seabed of time and space, it is a movie for acquired tastes, and certainly not for those with little patience. It resonates and rewards, but doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Refn has likened the cinema experience to that of an acid trip (there is even a scene involving the ingestion of a psychotropic drug), and says he was inspired by Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, and by the curious discovery of a cairn of rune stones in Delaware. 

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

US | 2019 | Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Logline: Three days in the lives of an actor struggling to stay relevant and his stunt double buddy as they deal with life’s little ironies. 

WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) has had a pretty good run in front of the camera. The studios have served him well, and they’ll be plenty of re-runs. It’s 1969. The Golden Age of Hollywood is fast becoming a memory, soon it will be part of popular culture, as will a notorious and shocking mass murder up in the Beverly Hills, but we’ll come to that part later. For now, let’s focus on Rick, and his laid back buddy, stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) …

Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), a fat cat producer and fan of Rick’s earlier career suggests he star in a bunch of Italian productions; the usual fare, spaghetti Westerns, spy thrillers. Rick’s none-too-happy about the prospect, but the reality is, his days are numbered as a draw card. He’s been playing villains for awhile now, and he’s struggling to remember his lines due to his heavy drinking. Cliff thinks Italy is a good idea too. Cliff’s been Dalton’s driver and gopher for awhile, and he’s resigned to it. He even climbs onto the roof and fixes Dalton’s wonky television antenna, showing off his abs (not bad for 55). Next door, at 10050 Cielo Drive, is where the movie star Sharon Tate is house-sitting, along with her husband, Roman Polanski. 

Whilst anxious Rick struggles to get through his new television gig, playing another cowboy heavy for director Sam Wanamaker, Cliff is running errands, and picks up plucky hitchhiker Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), who convinces Cliff to drop her at Spahn Movie Ranch, where Cliff happens to know the ageing owner, George (Bruce Dern). When they get there, Cliff insists on paying his respects to the old codger, but a bunch of dirty hippies, apparently sponging off the ranch owner, try to deter him, especially Squeaky (Dakata Fanning). This is the Manson Family.

It’s obvious, for his ninth feature - QT counts both Kill Bill flicks as one - Tarantino has painted a love letter to Tinseltow, but also to many of the screen delights he grew up. This is the Los Angeles he grew up in. He would’ve been six-years-old when the film is set. He’s described the movie as his “magnus opus”. Apparently he intends only to make ten movies as a film director. Famous last words.  

Shooting on 35mm and having his production design team painstakingly recreate the look of 1969 Hollywood without having to use CGI (only once is it obvious he’s used digital compositing, and that’s with Leonardo inserted into real footage from The Great Escape), this is the second movie Tarantino has made using historical figures, but it’s the first that depicts real events. Tarantino then skilfully weaves his fictional characters through the factual narrative and environments, thus creating a revisionist history. This comes to a head in the movie’s denouement, when several members of the Manson Family arrive at the infamous cul-de-sac intent on murdering the occupants at 10050 Cielo Drive, only to have a drunk and furious Rick Dalton, clutching a full blender of margarita, abuse them for being on a private driveway. They retreat, only to return with their revised agenda to now do the devil’s work on Rick, who they see as a prime example of the Hollywood that taught them how to kill. 

But the dirty hippies weren’t prepared for Cliff and his pit-bull Brandy. 

Having heard much hullabaloo about the ending of Hollywood, I entertained the idea that Tarantino was going to go all meta and have his movie end with the camera pulling back to reveal Tarantino himself and his real crew filming Leonardo and Brad and whoever else, playing their roles. A kind of nod to Blazing Saddles. But the ending I got was a surprise, and a pleasant one. It’s over-the-top, yes, and it pushes the more subtle comedic tone into a farcical one, but I’m okay with that. What I like is the whiff of melancholy that permeates the very ending, as Rick sees Cliff into the back of an ambulance, and then chats to Sharon’s BFF Jay Sebring, who has come down the driveway to investigate the commotion. Sharon chimes in on the intercom, and invites Rick up for a drink. The title of the movie comes up on screen, and you find yourself nodding and smiling. It’s a kind of “fairytale” ending, twisted, yes, but it tugs on the heart strings. 

Hollywood is Tarantino’s most relaxed movie since Jackie Brown, and in many ways, it’s his most endearing, most personable, probably his funniest. Pitt and DiCaprio give terrific performances, a natural chemistry, with DiCaprio’s improvised meltdown in his studio trailer an hilarious highlight. The other splendid stand out in a movie with many great scenes is the sequence at Spahn Ranch, which begins with Cliff picking up Pussycat. This has a suspenseful vibe that made me think Tarantino needs to make his tenth movie a 70s-vibed horror movie in the vein of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But I digress … 

It’s a languid, incidental ride through vintage Hollywood, seen through rose-coloured glasses, with all the trimmings and trappings. It’s filled to the brim with Tarantino-isms - vibrant “cool” cast and a soundtrack rammed with pop songs of the era - yet curiously I didn’t find the two-hour-forty-minute movie contrived or self-indulgent as many of his earlier movies*. It ebbs and flows like Pulp Fiction, and it’s the first of his movies since then that I’ve had the immediate desire to watch again. 

If Tarantino does decide to throw in the movie towel, I think Hollywood will age the most gracefully. It’s one to be cherished, especially for X-Gens and cinephiles. 

*Okay, there was one scene that irritated me. The scene with Bruce Lee. I was fine with it until Zoe Bell entered and mouthed off. She cannot act her way out of a paper bag. Ghastly. Her performance and accent scuttled that scene, but thankfully, not the movie!

Braid

US | 2019 | Directed by Mitzi Peirone

Logline: Two young women on the run decide to rob their wealthy psychotic friend who lives in the fantasy world they created as children, but to take the money they have to take part in a perverse and deadly game of make believe.

Petula (Imogen Waterhouse) and Tilda (Susan Hay) lay sprawled on a filthy floor, counting cash, sorting a drug stash, hatching plans. But the long arm of the law has reached their grimy apartment, so it’s time to skedaddle, quick smart. The young women jump a train and do some fancy fingersmith work in order to escape the clutches of those they’ve temporarily evaded, Tilda stealing a purse, and Petula prizing fare in exchange for a bootlick from a dirty conductor. These girls are adept at getting out of trouble, but they’re jumping from the saucepan and into the fire. 

Arriving at a majestic, but intimidating upstate NY property, where their childhood friend Daphne (Madeline Brewer) dwells alone (with her demons), the scallywags have now donned more classy threads, for they know what’s required (but not what lies around the corner). The huge Renaissance mansion was where the young women frolicked as children, and now they return as adults to play once again, and purloin Daphne’s inheritance moolah to pay for their sins. 

But they mustn’t forget the house rules: #1 Everyone must play, #2 No outsiders allowed, and #3 Nobody leaves. 

What was once up in the treehouse, with each girl roleplaying “mother”, “daughter” and “doctor”, now resumes in the kitchen, but the ante has been upped, the forfeits more severe. If Tilda and Petula wish to find the safe(ty) they’ll need to do what mother says. It seems the accidental fall that happened all those years ago has been injurious in more ways than one. It also seems that the innocent daydreams of youth have now transmogrified into garish nightmares. Indeed, in this topsy-turvy tenebrous world the fabric of reality is only as firm as one’s loyalty, and that can be twisted and torn as easy as apple pie. 

Delving deep into the realms of fantasy and illusion from narratives gone by, writer/director Mitzi Peirone has fashioned an exquisite-looking study of fractured identities, unreliable memories, and desperate remedies, a danse macabre. Indeed, an oneirdynia of voluptuous abandon and violent repercussion told with a masterful control of the elements, a la 60s and 70s cinema; the paranoia/madness of Repulsion and The Tenant, the deception and duplicity of The Ballad of Tam Lin, the exotic allure and sensuality of Daughters of Darkness, the Gothic textures and unhinged logic of Suspiria and Inferno, the chaos and fetishism of Daisies. It’s a melting pot of cinema magic. 

A mystical veneer that threads with an hallucinogenic edge that screws with mythological symbolism. Weaving like an endless braid. 

For her feature debut Peirone exhibits a vivid talent as director and wields an uncompromising perspective on storytelling, with huge props to Todd Banhazi’s spectacular cinematography - careering through psychedelic colour and raw monochrome, Annie Simeone’s elaborate production design coupled with Lindsay Stephen’s detailed set decoration, and the furious editing by David Gutnik, it’s a truly impressive collaboration. The three leads - Waterhouse, Hay, and Brewer - are sensational, exuding arrogance, sassiness, vulnerability and bewilderment with aplomb, while composer Michael Gatt provides a suitably dramatic score, amidst the effective use of several classical cues.

Stumbling through this kaleidoscopic realm the audience struggles to keep up, the rabbit hole winds deeper and deeper, the threat of violence escalates, the grasp on sanity slips. Just who is manipulating who? What are the truths? What moments are memories? Will the madness and absurdity ever end??

We are only as resilient as our dreams are fragile, only as vulnerable as our desires are real. 

I feel it is inevitable Braid will be my favourite movie of the year, as nothing else I’ve seen is as richly atmospheric, as provocative and elusive, as sexy and dangerous, as frustrating and rewarding, as gorgeous and grotesque in deliciously equal measure, and I doubt anything I see in the next few months will be quite as extraordinary. Peirone has delivered an instant cult classic. Embrace it, or die trying. 

Alice

UK/Australia/France | 2019 | Directed by Josephine Mackerras

Logline: When a married mother discovers her husband’s ruinous addiction to prostitutes she is forced into grappling with her own identity and self-determination. 

Alice (Emilie Piponnier) is happily married with a caring career husband, François (Martin Swabey) and a young son Jules. They live in a Parisian apartment. One morning François says goodbye and vanishes for several days on end. Alice is confounded. Suddenly she is alone with a young child, with credit cards that have been cancelled, and heavy mortgage payments that are threatening to foreclose. Alice is desperate. 

She soon discovers that her husband had been living a duplicitous life, addicted to high end prostitutes, and spending all his money, including all the savings Alice’s father had provided to help secure the apartment. Alice is devastated. But she holds it together. Just. The threat of destitution propels her into digging deeper into her husband’s sordid secret doings. As a result she attends the escort service’s screening and befriends Lisa (Chloé Boreham) who gives her a crash course in tailored sex work. 

Soon enough the initially nervous Alice is earning good money, and has garnered a sense of independence. Her fragility has been conquered, and with it she has embraced a new lease on life. Then François suddenly re-appears, all pathetic and desperate for reconciliation, and her inner strength is challenged. 

This is Aussie director Mackerras’ debut feature, having made several shorts. Although there is nothing Australian about the production, there are universal truths that lie at the heart of this extraordinary character study, penned by Mackerras. It’s easily the most remarkable relationship drama I’ve seen in a long time. It is small, and intimate, yet never once feels constrained or limited in its scope and execution. 

An absolutely brilliant performance from Piponnier who totally owns the movie. But superb work from Boreham, who provides a wonderful sassiness, and perfect contrast to Alice’s rigidity and earnestness. Swabey is also very good, and it’s a difficult role to play. It’s easy to see that Mackerras has a true talent for directing actors. But her mise-en-scene is strong also, as is the score and cinematography. Alice is the kind of narrative that could easily have felt like a play being filmed, but never once suffers from that kind of staged unreality. In fact, there is a real sense of docu-drama to the film.

But Alice isn’t all grim fare, it possesses a lovely natural sense of humour, without the comedy feeling forced. Also - and this isn’t really apparent until the very end - Alice harbours a desire for freedom that she isn’t really aware of until she experiences a degree of it with her new friend Lisa. It’s the kind of freedom one can only experience physically, not just psychologically or spiritually. It becomes a kind of thematic, emotional core.

Alice is a truly wonderful film. An amazing example of a taut screenplay that doesn’t feel over-written, perfectly cast and given excellent direction, with production values that fit like hand in glove. Easily in my top three films of the year, make sure you see it. 

Alice screens as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival, Saturday, September 14th, 2pm, at The Factory, Marrickville. For more details and tickets click here.

Albanian Gangster

2018 | US/Kosovo/Albania | Directed by Matthew A. Brown

Logline: An ex-pat Albanian has done time and is now back on the streets of NYC and immediately becomes entangled in the throes of obsessive revenge, whilst trying to court a local woman. 

Leon (John Rezaj) is fresh out of prison, back into the fold of his Albanian community in The Bronx. He’s nearly fifty and yet feels like a caged animal half his age. Years of pent up frustration are oozing through his pores. Cognac and cocaine provide only temporary relief. But his brotherhood is strong, and there is the presence of Lisa (Ashley C. Williams), who has caught his eye. He wants to impress her, but his social skills leave a lot to be desired. He only really understands the rules of honour and the rituals of vengeance. 

Leon and his buddy Koja (Nik Nucallaj) run into the informant who was responsible for Leon being put away. Immediately Leon is on the attack, but he curbs his anger, knowing there is a time and place for release, and it will come. Instead he bides his time, fuelling his rage, a pistol under his tank top, his eyes watering with contempt. Soon the thunder will crack. 

Brown’s debut feature, Julia, was a dark and intense tale of revenge, and Albanian Gangster is similar territory, but an altogether different kind of beast, especially in its style. Whereas Julia had a shadowy lushness that gave it a distinct Euro vibe, even though it was also set in New York, with Albanian Gangster Brown has allowed the grimy Eastside locations to really sing. Combined with a mostly non-professional cast, the movie has a strong sense of realism. 

I’m reminded of Nicolas Winding Refn’s debut film, Pusher, which in turn was inspired by Scorsese’s Mean Streets. There’s the heat-seeking camerawork, the naturalistic performances, and Brown’s cinema verité technique. Indeed there’s a classic Scorsese-esque tension that binds the movie. The use of implicit violence, as opposed to explicit, though that’s not to say the movie isn’t brutal, when it hits, it hits hard. 

As a rule the most memorable gangster movies aren’t the ones peppered with over-the-top action and savagery, but the ones that use the threat of violence as momentum, a kind of invisible propulsion, keeping the audience on edge, and Brown uses this ploy beautifully. It’s what lifts the movie from being an ordinary and predictable gangster movie into something that feels authentic, that resonates, as if you’re watching a gripping documentary, rather than a crime drama. 

Rezaj delivers a startlingly performance, essentially playing a fictionalised version of his true self. There’s even scenes with the two lead male characters talking directly to camera as if being interviewed. But there is strong work from the entire cast, especially Nucculaj, another new blood and one to watch out for, and Williams is terrific too, her centred, wary role a perfect counterpoint to the seething volatility of Leon. 

Only his second feature, but Brown has the command of a seasoned filmmaker. Like Julia, Albanian Gangster is another powerful hybrid; part brooding character study, part slow-burn, pared-back thriller, and it rewards through its dramatic intensity, its ugly truthfulness; that gangland honour is steeped in brutal vengeance, always and forever. 

Albanian Gangster screens as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival, Saturday, September 14th, 6pm, at The Factory, Marrickville, with an introduction by yours truly. For more details and tickets click here. 

Too Old To Die Young

US | 2019 | Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Logline: As an L.A. police officer becomes embroiled in a turf war between the Mexican cartel and local gangsters, his own, already compromised moral compass becomes increasingly twisted. 

We open on Martin Jones (Miles Teller), a sheriff deputy (and later detective), and his partner, in the neon glow of a desolate and ominous City of Angels. These men are bored, and they indulge their power in inappropriate ways. A Latino thug executes the partner in cold blood, and Jones soon enough finds himself neck high in a case of corruption and murder. The deeper he dives into the black waters the colder his world becomes. Not even the soft cosy embrace of his teenage lover can warm the cockles of his icy soul. He is suffering an existential crisis that not even he is aware of. 

Let the cards fall as they may. 

Nicolas Winding Refn and co-creator and co-writer Ed Brubaker have fashioned one of the most gorgeous looking shows to ever grace the small screen. It’s in a league of its own. A sumptuous, slow burn crime thriller that refuses to play by the rules, yet wears its influences like flair adorning a uniform. It’s a series (listed as the first season), but was shot as a marathon-length feature production (a staggering 751 minutes in duration!) One very long, drawn out quest sectioned into ten, mostly feature-length episodes which the creators are calling “volumes” (like chapters in a novel), and delivered with the kind of stylistic indulgence that would make free-to-air prime time programmers weep in despair. 

This is Neo-Noir (yup, in capitals) and takes no prisoners. Well, actually, it does: the audience. We are held hostage from the moment the camera languidly pans across the police officers standing posed by their patrol car, slowly sweeps across the street, past a blitzed-out motel, in the background a night time of demons and infidels coiled in disguise. Refn is all about the tableaux. It feels as if he has been waiting his entire career to make something this delicate and nuanced, as protracted, yet in the moment. Amazon Prime has provided him the perfect platform, and he has embraced the streaming concept like a hug from a bear on opiates. 

To refer to this show as Lynchian would be an understatement. The influences of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive are embedded deep. The lush aesthetics, the religious iconography, the surreal edges. It’s deeply sensual, perversely sexual, then blackly comic, ultraviolent, absurd and unshakeably strange. A labyrinthine realm of sordid darkness seething just below the chrome sheen of the urban world … north of Hollywood, west of Hell. A snake pit of pedophilia, torture and execution, where drugs and money feed greedy mouths. Sister Fate is a harsh and inhumane mistress.

Action speaks louder than words, and dialogue is kept to an absolute minimum, indulging in the kind of pregnant pauses that would arouse the most jaded Beckett enthusiast. Music throbs and sound pulsates throughout. Composer Cliff Martinez is at the top of his game, but Refn curates some choice source music as well, again, very much on the Lynchian tip, especially in one scene late in the season with Jimmy Angel playing live. The superb cinematography is courtesy of a master of light and shade and colour; Darius Khondji, with a couple of episodes shot by the equally talented Diego Garcia. 

On the surface Too Old to Die Young is a study of morality and corruption, with the threat of violence lingering constantly, lashing out to spectacular Scorsese effect. Refn is no stranger to screen violence. Like Tarantino he adores it with a fetishist’s command. Like Tarantino and Scorsese, Refn has always been a dab hand at casting. He keeps Teller in permanent check, has John Hawkes on the back foot, gives Jena Malone one of the best roles of her career, allows Billy Baldwin to snort like a pig and chew the scenery, and introduces us to several striking and charismatic new faces, chiefly, Nell Tiger Free as Jones’ adolescent lover Janey, Augusto Aguilera as Jesus, the Mexican prodigal son, and Cristina Rodlo as Yaritza, quiet and alluring, and, hush hush, High Priestess of Death. 

Refn and Brubaker have named all the episodes/volumes after Tarot cards, and if you are familiar with cartomancy you’ll be able to read into each episode the respective fortune, or misfortune, a complex subtext; “The Devil”, “The Lovers”, “The Hermit”, “The Tower”, “The Fool”, “The High Priestess”, “The Magician”, “The Hanged Man”, “The Empress”, and “The World”. Themes of ritualism, fascism, narcissism, and nihilism all merge, along with rich symbolism, an uneasy eroticism, and even touches of magic realism. 

Too Old to Die Young does not suffer fools gladly, nor does it pander to any kind of easy solution. It culminates in a denouement as rewarding as it is punishing. A circle of pain and suffering, sex and death, of resignation and inevitability. Gratification and frustration in equal measure. To some it will be the ultimate display of pretentiousness, of style over substance, to others a master class in mood, tone, and allegory, of style as substance. 

During the final three episodes (the last two co-written by Refn and Halley Gross) the narrative arcs of its central characters twist and curl, some into a tightened screw, others fraying like ruined rope. Please, for the love of God and the Devil, let Refn and Brubaker make a second season, so that we can continue on the tenebrous journey of the show’s true protagonist/antagonist. A journey so exotic and compelling under it’s mesmerising dream/nightmare shroud, but we were delivered an ending so abrupt - it felt severed. 

“Our identities will be defined by the pain we cause.”

Dead Ringers

Canada | 1988 | Directed by David Cronenberg

Logline: Twin doctors who share everything find themselves falling apart after a complicated woman comes between them. 

The story follows the dual career of twins Beverly and Elliot Mantle (both played with astonishing skill by Jeremy Irons) They are pioneering gynaecologists, and female fertility is their field. Having excelled at a young age, they are now forty and at the top of their game, with their own private clinic, specialists to the wealthy and elite.

The clinic’s latest patient is Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold, also superb), a movie star. Elliot, the cynical ladies man, seduces her, then has Beverly impersonate him, so, as usual, his shy introverted brother can get laid. But this time Beverly falls heavily, and for awhile Claire is none the wiser. As Claire is taking a cocktail of drugs for her infertility and high profile equilibrium, Beverly soon begins his own dependence on prescription pills. The Mantle twins have a dark side, and this shadow soon eclipses everything.

Cronenberg based his screenplay (co-written with Norman Snider) on a 1977 novel, which in turn was inspired by an newspaper article about successful doctors, the Marcus twins, who were discovered dead in their Upper East Side Manhattan apartment which had become a scene of utter degradation. They had died due to withdrawal from barbiturate abuse.

Originally the movie was titled Gemini, which the studio didn’t like, so it was changed to Twins (terrible alternative, but then I’ve never been a fan of Dead Ringers as the substitute either). Cronenberg’s former producer Ivan Reitman then wrangled the title rights for his upcoming Danny DeVito/Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy, so Cronenberg went with the trashy-sounding Dead Ringers. Oh well.

The King of Venereal Horror has always been fascinated by the body and its various states of physical strength and mortal decay. He has also been intrigued by the psychological states of mind that influence the body, both metaphysically and biologically. Dead Ringers is more subtle in his exploration of body horror, but no less powerful. More concerned with the abuse of power and the disintegration of control. It is the subtleties within Dead Ringers that make it so resonant, disturbing, yet quietly, strangely exhilarating. Balancing sensuality with grotesquerie, nightmarish horror with sly eroticism.

It’s a stunning looking film. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky’s hot/cold palate of lush reds and metallic blues juxtaposed amidst the straight formal lines courtesy of Cronenberg’s regular production designer Carol Spier. It’s the director’s most stylised film. Of particular note is the computer-controlled moving-matte photography used to enable Jeremy Irons to seemingly interact with himself on screen. This pre-CGI special effect was the first of its kind. It’s a double whammy performance that should’ve netted Irons a double Oscar nomination!

Howard Shore’s score is a highlight, the brooding strings beautifully capture the inherent sadness and despair. Though the cloud is long and dark, there are some genuinely funny moments; sharp, scabrous dialogue and some unsettling visual gags too. The one weak link is Heidi von Palleske as Elliot’s lover Cary, whose acting is mediocre at best, but it’s a small quibble, as she doesn’t have a lot of screen time. 

This is Cronenberg’s masterpiece, a ferociously intelligent study of ambition, addiction, corruption, loneliness, and despair. Almost Shakespearean in its tragedy, the tale of once clever, successful and sensitive men reduced to insufferable, disturbed children, trying to mend the broken pieces of their careers and lives, but their self-inflicted wounds keep rupturing, and it is their inexorable undoing. Poor Elly, poor Bev. 

Videodrome

Canada | 1983 | Directed by David Cronenberg

Logline: The head of a cable-TV station becomes involved in a mysterious broadcast and finds his reality and future sliding dangerously out of control. 

“The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.”

Max Renn (James Woods) runs a small television station – Channel 83 Civic TV that focuses on exploitation, but he’s constantly on the lookout for new and exciting material, content that’ll heighten the basic viewing experience, arouse viewers in ways much tougher than the mediocrity he’s been solicited in the past, and he’ll be real cheap and sleazy to purloin it. 

When his tech employee Harlan (Peter Dorvsky) decodes a pirate broadcast depicting highly realistic torture and mutilation, known as “Videodrome” Max senses something big. In fact he becomes obsessed with it. This hardcore is a whole new ballgame. He gets hold of his supplier Marsha (Lynne Gorman) to found out who’s responsible. Marsha warns Max that “Videodrome” is real. Meanwhile Max has met and started dating local talk radio celebrity Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry). Nicki, who is openly into S&M, has her interest well and truly piqued when Max introduces her to “Videodrome”.

It soon becomes frighteningly apparent to Max that “Videodrome” is far more sinister than just addictive viewing. Fantasy and reality collide, dream and nightmare merge, and Max becomes both an activist and pawn as he tries to fight against “Videodrome” and is manipulated by “Videodrome” into terrorism.

Videodrome’s screenplay origins began as Network of Blood, a B-movie title if ever there was one. Writer/director Cronenberg’s first two features; Shivers and Rabid owe much to the exploitation genre, but had an socio-political savvy and philosophical streak coursing through their cinematic veins. He continued similar body and psychological horror themes through his next two movies, The Brood and Scanners, but it was with Videodrome that the social discourse of modern consumerism was most deeply entrenched; it even pre-dates cyber-space and reality television, pushing the sex and violence envelope into the deadly realm of “snuffTV”, where the ante has been inexorably raised. 

Much of the symbolism in Videodrome is vaginal and phallic. In fact most of Cronenberg’s movies from Shivers through to eXistenZ utilise sexual imagery and metaphor. The director is as much concerned with the corruption of the body as he is with biological creation, birth, and metamorphosis. There’s a fusion of pleasure and pain, of sex and death; the gratification and control of one blurring into the fear and submission of the other. A mesmerizing moment has Nicki beckoning to Max through the television, her sensual mouth filling the screen, the monitor tube convexing to engulf Max’s head as he submits himself to her. This is fellatio and cunnilingus entwined and inverted as a powerful visual motif. 

James Woods commands the screen with real intensity, perfectly cast. Debbie Harry’s Nicki slides beside Max exuding a sensuality and vulnerability that perfectly off-sets Renn’s prickly arrogance and unctuous charisma. And then there’s Rick Baker’s outstanding practical effects work, arguably the real star of the show. CGI wouldn’t capture the kind of grungy immediacy that Baker’s special effects does, and there are some truly ingenious set-ups.

Videodrome didn’t fare well upon its initial release, considered too dark and subversive, and its narrative too impenetrable for general consumption. With the original Star Wars trilogy in full flight Joe Average preferred his science fiction with ray-guns and force fields, space ships and robotic villains. The irony is Videodrome features all these elements, only perverted and twisted into provocative, transgressive new shapes and into far more immediate, but outlandish territory. It is a film far more relevant now than it ever was; dark, disturbing, and prophetic, and I strongly doubt the remake, which is currently in development, will be anywhere near as clever, transgressive, or as bleak. 

“… Long live the new flesh!”

Memory: The Origins Of Alien

US | 2019 | Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe

Logline: An analysis of the how Ridley Scott’s science fiction horror movie Alien came about, its surrounding influences, and the relevance of its legacy. 

Tracing the path Alien took from it’s first incarnation, a script treatment entitled Memory, about a planet that detrimentally affects the memories of the astronauts that land on it, through to its final form under Ridley Scott’s direction as Alien, it’s the movie that terrified its potential audience by declaring, “In space no one can hear you scream”. The ultimate monster horror movie, and it remains so today, with only John Carpenter’s The Thing as a serious threat for the top position. 

The origins lie with screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, who grew up in small town Missouri, with no television. But there were lots and lots of bugs. The constant infiltration of insects had a profound affect on the boy’s imagination. That, and comic books. O’Bannon loved the fantastic, and later, around the same time the French magazine Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) was launched in 1975, he wrote a screenplay called They Bite, about an archeological dig on Earth that lets loose a cycle of million-year-old bugs. He was told it would be too expensive to make, so O’Bannon decided to write something on a smaller scale. Another B-movie, but just one monster, and set mostly inside a spacecraft. He called it Star Beast. 

O’Bannon’s early screenplay was influenced by a whole lot of elements, from Lovecraft to Greek mythology, and also several low-budget science fiction horror movies, Planet of the Vampires (1965), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), and one that bears a striking similarity in plot, Queen of Blood (1966). His alien pyramid (an Egyptian-influenced concept that was eventually dropped from the final shooting script) and creature was a kind of synthesis of all cosmic monsters and mythology. 

O’Bannon had been employed to design special effects for Dune, Frank Herbert’s epic science fantasy novel, which was being adapted by Mexican director Alejandro Jodorowsky. Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger had been hired to provide concept art for the movie’s production design. Unfortunately the project never reached principal photography (watch the amazing documentary Jodorowksy’s Dune for that story!). When Ridley Scott was brought on board Alien as director, O’Bannon introduced Scott to Giger’s “Necromonicon” paintings. That was the game changer.

Memory is a superbly constructed portrait of creation within the folds of the cinema realm, the film industry. Cast members Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartright offer their reflections, also included are the late, great editor Terry Rawlings and producer Ivor Powell, art director Roger Christian (who was plucked straight from working as props master on Star Wars), a bunch of scholars and critics discussing the relevance of Francis Bacon’s work, also O’Bannon’s widow reveals a few secrets. 

Without showing too much of the actual movie, yet punctuating with behind the scenes footage, Memory serves up a terrific celebration of this legendary “B-movie”. The dangers of conquest, the futility of humanity, the toils of the blue collar working class, Alien is a prophetic beast. It’s only now, forty years later, that the movie’s scope is truly being appreciated. 

It champions the extraordinary complex sub-textual elements within its seemingly straight forward construct. Indeed, Scott invested a meticulous attention to detail, to authenticity and realism - if there can be such a thing in a phantasmagorical movie - employing an Robert Altman-esque technique; a cluttered, claustrophobic mise-en-scene, with frequently overlapping dialogue. The violence is messy and shocking (the chestburster scene gets a proper dissection), there’s all that heat, sweat, goo, grime, and slime. 

All of these elements contributed to making Alien one of the most important, influential and memorable genre movies of the past fifty years, and Memory champions this with a beautifully edited treatise on the collective dreams of a group of visionaries. But most importantly the tenacity of the late Dan O’Bannon, who died ten years ago. As his wife Diane says, with a tear in her eye, “He moved the world.”

Memory: The Origins Of Alien screens as part of Sydney underground film festival, Saturday September 14th, 2pm at The factory, marrickville. For more info and tix click here.

Dragged Across Concrete

Canada/US | 2018 | directed by S. Craig Zahler

Logline: Following suspension for excessive force two police officers embark on a dangerous mission to extract what they feel they are owed in compensation. 

For his third feature writer/director Zahler is still comfortable as all hell in delivering a movie that continues to push the boundaries of how a genre movie should play out. His debut feature was a Western with a brutal spine of horror, whilst his second was a punishing prison drama that wrestles with the tropes of exploitation. For his latest, he takes the crime thriller and stretches it out until it almost snaps, a whopping two-hours-and-forty-odd minutes, where the action is kept to a minimum, but the journey is compelling as hell. 

Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn) are cop buddies working the streets and back alleys of Bulwark (a fictitious city somewhere in US). Ridgeman is the jaded, embittered veteran, struggling to provide for his disabled wife and bullied teenage daughter. Lurasetti is the younger, cocksure, opportunistic partner. On a drug bust the volatile Ridgeman uses police brutality, and Lurasetti indulges him. They further their bad behaviour by humiliating the suspect’s girlfriend. It’s all caught on tape by a neighbour, and due to a media blow-up, their superior, Calvert (Don Johnson), is forced to suspend them both without pay. 

Almost immediately Ridgeman concocts a plan to use their criminal connections and underworld savvy to make some quick serious cash. Ridgeman sees it as justice for their past services, and now, in limbo, they must make amends, Ridgeman for his family, whilst Lurasetti has a fiancé. Meanwhile a couple of African-American ex-cons, Johns (Tory Kittles) and Biscuit (Michael Jai White) become involved in an elaborate bank heist, for a dangerous, cold-blooded career criminal, Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann). 

The officers, operating rogue, take it upon themselves to pursue the bank robbers, in order to serve both justice, and to fill their pockets. However, the long arm of Murphy’s Law seizes them by the collar. The heist claims extensive collateral damage, and Ridgeman and Lurasetti soon find themselves in the deep, dark end of the criminal pool, with just their wits and wiles, and some solid firepower, at their disposal. 

Let’s call a spade a spade, Zahler makes studies of extreme violence. His realms are governed by men, and women very much play second fiddle. He’s not interested in dramatic licence, intent on capturing a gritty realism, yet there is savage poetry at play. His dialogue is always very particular, existential, almost meta, injecting his movies with a stylised edge, and there’s a buried, oh so tenebrous sense of humour. One is drawn to making a comparison to the movies of Quentin Tarantino, especially with the dialogue and violence, but whereas Tarantino’s movies operate as vivid adult cartoons, Zahler’s movies feel like they’ve been lifted from hardboiled novels, stained with black coffee and straight bourbon. 

Dragged Across Concrete is not just about police brutality, racism and sexism rear their nasty heads. The insidiousness of prejudice, the mechanics of corrupt masculinity and bravado. Ridgeman’s wife says at one point, “I never thought I was a racist until I moved into this neighbourhood,” and there’s an ugly honesty within her sarcasm. This is a world seemingly without hope, and Zahler relishes the darkness before the dawn. But what makes the film so much more interesting than most of the other crime thrillers that attempt similar narratives (although usually in half the time) is Zahler injects a palpable sense of menace and impending doom, right from the beginning, and he sustains that tension, an implicit violence, through the course of the movie, releasing it a few times in sudden, shocking punctuations of explicit violence. 

Bone Tomahawk put Zahler on the map, and it’s a terrific movie, and although Brawl in Cell Block 99 has many fans, I would champion Dragged Across Concrete as his strongest, most impressive movie to date, with Gibson and Vaughn in fine form. It’s definitely not for everyone, it’s a bitter pill, but for those who like their crime flicks uncompromising and hard as fucking nails, Zahler’s muscle flex will be the bittersweet reward. 

Dragged Across Concrete screens as part of the 2019 Revelation - Perth International Film Festival, Monday July 8th, 3.30pm, Saturday July 13th, 8.40pm, & Wednesday July 17th, 8.15pm (Luna).

Love Express. The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk

Poland/Estonia | 2018 | Directed by Kuba Mirkuda

Logline: Documentary tracing the career of the acclaimed Polish animator turned arthouse eroticist. 

“My fantasies are identical to the viewer’s. I only show what everybody dreams about.”

If you’ve not seen a film from this most extraordinary and important artist, Love Express is the perfect entry point. The portrait covers his early avant-garde period in Poland as an animator of short surrealist films (one is reminded of the early short works of David Lynch) and then plunges into his ex-pat career in France where he cultivated his position as one of European cinema’s most interesting agent provocateurs. 

From the short films it begins in earnest with chapter one, “1968”, and the filmmaker’s first live action feature Goto, Island of Love. Throughout the documentary numerous luminaries wax lyrical, including directors Terry Gilliam, Neil Jordan, and Andrzej Wajda, also a very twitchy intellectual Slavoj Zizek, Borowczyk cinematographer Noël Véry, critics Peter Bradshaw and David Thompson, and the much needed female perspective of psychotherapist Cherry Potter, and actress Lisbeth Hummel (who starred in The Beast). 

Borowczyk’s films frequently deal with the journey of love into death, a kind of libertine art that deals with desire and cruelty. In a way the viewer has to submit to his films, and many echo this position. Chapter two, “1974”, is Immoral Tales, described by the director as “a sanctuary of liberty, an island of no restrictions”. An unusual and provocative display of stylised eroticism, featuring Picasso’s adult daughter Paloma as Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the anthology was a critics’ darling, and placed Borowczyk on an enviable pedestal. 

“1975” unleashed The Beast, “a film about the mechanics of dreams”. An outrageously lascivious tale of bestial pursuit, it lead to the carnal artiste being labeled a pornographer, much to his chagrin. In truth the movie is more of a farcical male-skewed fantasy than the transgressive unbridled perversion it skirts with. But I digress. 

Art or porn? Poor Walerian. Stuck in a kind of pit of “reigned freedom”. Determined to continue the artful endeavours he had grown used to controlling, yet hounded by the wolves of commerce, desperate for fabric they could chew on. By the end of the 70s he had become “a confectioner of erotomaniac delicacies” as one newspaper declared. Essentially it was a short-lived era, that period of the 70s when eroticism on the big screen held court. Erotic films managed a curious bilateral existence alongside hardcore adult films, both being exhibited in cinemas, both enjoying healthy audiences of men and women. This was before the advent of the VCR and the subsequent VHS market being chosen (over Betamax) by the porn industry as the perfect private format. And so the delicate art of Walerian Borowczyk slipped away…  But I digress. 

Chapter four, “1976”, in which Emmanuelle herself, Sylvia Kristel, sifts with stud Joe Dallesandro in The Margin (aka The Streetwalker), arguably the two steamiest tickets in town, but the critics weren’t so hot under the collar. Was the erotic film becoming a parody of itself? Oddly, the doco then jumps to “1987” for its final chapter, which is frustrating, as it misses out Borowczyk’s brilliant and tenebrous 1981 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, starring Udo Kier and the sumptuous Marina Pierro. Why the doco chooses not to discuss this integral entry in the director’s oeuvre is a mystery. Instead we focus on the ragged hot mess that is Emmanuelle 5, a movie he barely directed, as he stormed off set only a day or so into shooting (the only part he claims is his work is at the beginning, the film-within-a-film, “Love Express”).

Borowczyk passed away in 2006, after completing one last feature, Love Rites, also released in 1987. He struggled to find financing for any other projects during the 90s. But truth be told, film companies and producers had shown little interest in any of his film projects unless they were sex-themed or erotically charged.  

Despite the glaring omission of his Jekyll and Hyde interpretation, Love Express is essential viewing for anyone who fancies him or herself a cineaste. It quietly champions this most original of smut peddlers, if I may play Devil’s advocate. It reminds us, that in this contemporary climate of neo-conservatism, and the ever-expanding minefield of socio-politics, that freedom of artistic expression is paramount, and the sensual, sexual cinema of Walerian Borowczyk’s kind is rare ambrosia indeed. 

Love Express screens as part of the 2019 Revelation - Perth International Film Festival, Sunday July 7th, 4pm & Saturday July 13th, 8.30pm (Luna).

Come To Daddy

Canada/New Zealand/Ireland/US | 2019 | Directed by Ant Timpson

Logline: A man visits his long-estranged father for a reunion only to discover dark truths and stranger revelations. 

“The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” Words penned by William Shakespeare. “There is no one else like my daddy.” Lyrics sung by Beyoncé Knowles. Both are quotes on the screen at the beginning of Ant Timpson’s debut feature as director, having produced a number of movies that ooze similar cult appeal; Deathgasm, Housebound, The ABCs of Death, Turbo Kid, and The Greasy Strangler. 

Timpson knows a thing or two about genre cinema aesthetics, and screen charisma. He’s been the director and programmer of The Incredibly Strange Film Festival in New Zealand for twenty-five years (fifteen of them as a sidebar within the NZ International Film Festival), so it’s not surprising his first foray in the director’s chair is one that is nestled moist and snug in a cradle of uncompromising ickiness.

But Come To Daddy is more than just a strange tale of a boy and his dad; it’s an emotionally resonant portrait of loneliness and the anxiety of confrontation. It’s the age-old dilemma of trying to reconnect with the past, picking the scabs off old wounds. It’s also about the fear of the unknown. Come To Daddy delicately balances a sense of mystery and menace with the shackles of crime and punishment. It’s a gloriously unctuous stew, as compelling in its poignancy as it is fetid in its detail. 

Norval (Elijah Wood, perfectly cast) is a 35-year-old wannabe Ric Owens’ hipster lost in his own delusions and sporting a ridiculous haircut. He’s responded to a letter from his elusive father, and he arrives at the doorstep, intrigued, but wary. The house is a “UFO from the 60s” perched high on the rocks on the west coast of Canada. Gordon (Stephen McHattie) is an intimidating, booze-addled space cadet, but still quick-witted enough to catch out Norval’s attempt at celebrity name-dropping, and sly enough to prevent Norval from communicating with the outside world. Animosity rears its head, and will continue to thrive like barnacles on a wretched hull. Paranoia will fester. 

Timpson was inspired to helm the feature following his father’s passing, hoping to create the kind of movie they would’ve enjoyed watching together. The death of a parent forces us to face our own vulnerability, fragility, mounting questions without any proper answers, resentment and grief colliding, grasping for some kind of resolution, some kind of closure. 

Timpson fed an idea to Toby Harvard, who had written the screenplay to The Greasy Strangler, and Harvard ran with it. The result is a Wild Mouse rollercoaster of genre elements and dynamics, with Timpson and Harvard exhibiting a genuine love and dark delight of 70s cinema, from the movie’s title card, right through to that perfect ending. 

The central performances – Wood, McHattie, Martin Donovan, and Michael Smiley - are rich with nuance, exuding the kind of studied characterisation that usually comes from a novel adaptation, and seemingly Come to Daddy feels pulled from the pages of an unknown pulpy paperback fished out at a garage sale and savoured like rare and precious booty. But then Come to Daddy is also the kind of movie that could have been presented in “Odorama” with scratch and sniff cards (pungent kelp, spiced rum, and other foul and exotic smells), but I digress … 

It blends silt and bubbles like a potent cocktail. It tickles the funny bone with tangy, absurd moments, then broods menacingly, and suddenly slaps you in the face with surreal violence. It toys with your sensibilities, plays silly buggers with your comfort zone, but deep down, there is a broken heart looking for adhesive, desperate for a stiff whisky and the clutch of a loving hand. It’s an emotional journey indeed, and all the more memorable for it. Come to Daddy is one of my faves of the year.