Black Moon 1975 / The Strange Case if Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne 1981 / Messiah of Evil 1973 / Bloodsucking Freaks 1976 / The Devils 1971

"Black Moon" is a Dadaist dream about a young girl who is fleeing a war between men & women. She seeks solace in a dreary country farm occupied by an old woman who knows everything about her and an incestuous mute brother & sister. The film is full of abstract episodes that are probably clever statements on female sexual maturity a'la Alice in Wonderland, but I didn't recognize them. Overall, the experience is rather grating. Its studiously composed but the film feels pretentious with its abundance of cruelty to animal actors, boring metaphors and faux-educational exploitation of its extremely young actress' sexuality. Its worth a watch because it is so unique and its frequently entertaining, but its no lost gem. My impression of director Louis Malle is a wannabe Godard/Bunuel without much originality or talent.

Walerian Borowczyk is much more impressive with his loose adaptation of a classic horror novel. He brings so much voyeuristic intensity and expressive technique to what has to be a minuscule period piece production. The film is a rare accomplishment in balancing erotic and horror tension so well. This is truly one of the most sensual and glossy films of its period (or any period) but it has a grisly urgency. It walks that fine line between art and exploitation beautifully. Seek this movie out.

Messiah of Evil is a film by the couple who wrote Temple of Doom & Howard the Duck for George Lucas. Its a post-hippie horror "feature" about a young woman in a spooky seaside town of zombies. Its freakishly similar to Franco's Virgin Among the Living Dead but they were released the same year (but, Virgin was shot in '71). Its a decent snapshot of a time and generation but its not effective on scares or mood beyond some stylish lighting and minimalist staging. It feels like an arty cash-in on drive-in films without any respect for its audience. Its determined to show off its own intelligence, but there isn't much. To its credit, the film features production design by Jack Fisk, husband of Sissy Spacek and lifelong friend of David Lynch. There is actually a HUGE impression of Twin Peaks in the setting of this story, so its memorable and important for that.

Bloodsucking Freaks could be the best film Troma ever released, alongside The Toxic Avenger and maybe The Last Horror Film. Like those movies, it is a lurid portrait of NY independent filmmaking from a bygone era of sleaze, art and political dissidence. This is the most extreme of its kind, a satire about white slavery full of cannibalism, torture, murder and brainwashing. A decade ago, this film made me queasy to watch. Now I appreciate the immense intelligence and bravery in pulling off such a disturbing but complex little exploitation. A film like this is looking to make a statement more than a profit.

I finally watched Ken Russell's The Devils. Besides maybe a snippet of Tommy, this is my first film by popular British cult director. Wow. What a brilliant technical director and stylist he is. His camera is so alive and magnetized by every action on the screen. There isn't one lazy performance or dull scene or false moment in this classic story of religious persecution and moral corruption. The story itself is a great and bold attack on Catholicism, but it avoids tempting melodrama or bland tragedy by setting us up with so many laughs and spectacles. Russell's film has a broad irony that had to be a game-changer then. He really reflects the Mod sensibility of his generation and marries it with the most classic but unsuspecting narrative tropes. And its more than just a bunch of clever tricks. It moves you and haunts you.

The Omega Man 1971

I rewatched this seminal One Man Army vs Collectivism movie from Charleton Heston to see if it held up. Heston became an embarrassing gun freak and unapologetic white nationalist as an old senile man, but was once a popular actor who supported civil rights and had clever sociopolitical themes in his somewhat meatheaded action spectacles. He was the Arnold Swarzeneggar of his day. A smart Republican who wanted to do right by America. He's at least better than John Wayne.

Omega Man is superbly directed by Boris Sagal (father of Katey) and written with sly care by two 60s college professors. Based liberally on Matheson's anti-communist vampire epic I Am Legend (which inspired the better, more democratic Night of the Living Dead), this version is maybe the most topical to Trumpism. Heston plays a violent, paranoid psychotic pit against a not-hippie-but-totally-hippie band of mutants who survived WW3 after those dirty commies in Russia and China spread a fatal virus. The film claims they're after his "honky paradise". Our hero is an Ayn Randian pillar of excellence and individualism. The film is conservative but not far rightwing. Heston trashes footage of Woodstock and makes lots of lame White Man's Burden jests, but eventually befriends some kindly hippie kids who he can mold in his image. He literally dies in a ridiculous camp Jesus sacrifice but his sacrifice saves the world. Thats at least a departure from Rand where the hero wouldn't help anyone if it meant selflessness. Omega Man was meant to be some fluffy NeoLiberal "let's all get a long" turn towards traditional capitalistic nationalism and away from poststructuralism and Marxism on hippie campuses.

The film is offensive in many cases. It has some dry and dated views on race relations that weren't all that cute or nice even then. Heston's black female sidekick first appears in a visual joke where she's an "exotic" safari animal/trophy at the end of his hunting gun. The entire film plays like a paranoid white male power fantasy as Heston guns down the evil masses, expounds on the majesty of Western achievement and casts dour blame on all those evil foreigners who caused the apocalypse. I know that this film is one of Alex Jones' favorite films and its no shock. Its written as militaristic Christian propaganda that tries to be more inclusive and learned than its predecessor, but somehow ends up more vulgar and dumb. Like lots of 80s action films, it plays like gun porn for mass shooters on delusional solitary missions from "God".

But I still cherish this film as unironic document of American white male psychosis. There's a great featurette on the DVD that confirms that the at least Heston and Sagal knew they were negatively critiquing the mad patriarchal violence that had just killed JFK and MLK. Thats where this film is important and redeeming. Is this Jesus ending a piece of camp; intentional kitsch to mock Christian values? Its very possible as Sagal, a Jew, directs the film with too much bitter humor and unpleasant commentary to make it a dumb God & guns commercial. Its a study of the Jesus complex, a forerunner to Taxi Driver and Falling Down. It maybe asks wayyyy too much that we relate or worship this American psycho rather than fear it a'la Hitchcock. But in playing safely to the middle American yokels, its compromised effect is still decent. The film is stylish, brutal and even a bit creepy.

This film is not brilliant or even politically correct, but it was once progressive for a very conservative world. Its somehow more impressive than a film like 2017's Logan which has the same meathead republican morals, but Omega Man has the excuse of being old. Its way too gray morally and has a shitty view of utopia and an even shittier view of who the bad guys are, but its good kitsch.  

Lucky the Inscrutable 1967 / She Killed In Ecstasy 1971

Watched 2 more Franco movies and its amazing the growth of this director within a few years.

"Lucky" is a very polished, commercial spy spoof with heavy NeoRealism influences. It builds to a shocking ending that totally changes the context of everything you've watched. Even as a young populist Spanish director, Jess was transgressive and never afraid to lampoon Western ideas, especially the sexist, racist and morally corrupt greed of the US & UK. But he makes sure to deliver a stunning and well-executed product for his producers. Here he works on a Spanish-Italian coproduction so he ups the slapstick, eye candy actors, lavish color and obligatory Romantic elements. The films most understood by Franco's own fans are ones like "Lucky" where he flirts with selling out only to finally transgress or TRANSCEND the restrictive, repressive nature of the subject matter to make a statement of protest. There's a scene where the hero makes love to the Communist female villain (played fabulously by the legendary Rosalba Neri). Franco's following love scene is a bizarre montage of comic book and porno mag images with the faces of Karl Marx and Mao floating through. His anti-hero makes love literally to the idea of Communism within a film thats supposed to sell Nationalism, fascism, white supremacy. There are plenty of 60s James Bond spoofs but how many are well informed Anti-Bond films?

Flash forward a few years and Franco is within a dark, lonely yet liberating transition. His films are becoming much smaller, depressed, sensual and outspoken. "Ecstasy" has the same revenge plot of so many Franco films like Venus in Furs, Other Side of the Mirror and Jack the Ripper (which follow an arc). But Ecstasy's inspiration is a shattered romance, cultural and generational revolution, economic disenfranchisement, scientific liberalism and many other themes that can be tied to his producer's strict "plot" necessities. Its been said that Franco hated plot. Wrong. He simply saw it as tool for artistic expression and, when forced to work within the conservative genres of low budget filmmaking in Europe, he used the Nationalist or Capitalist issued "plot rules" to simply deconstruct themselves and call attention to the futility, materialism and unreality of mass media propaganda.

So again he returns to films about corrupt authorities, spies, detectives, prisons, Nazis, predatory lesbians, criminals, psychopaths and abusers of power to cut them down and exorcise the psyche of the viewer and himself to create films that are closer to reality at least in psychology. He uses the absurd dreamlike phenomenology of fantasy films to unlock the truths that the timid and conservative call frightening or unpleasant. Jess Franco used commercial cinema like a sugarpill to deliver the medicine of existentialist, nihilist and ultimately socialist thoughts of democratic revolution and utopian change. His films are political protest films but they hide their academic meanings in lurid masks that appeal to the sadomasochistic voyeur in a bourgeois culture of slaves labor and exploitation. His films were for the people who don't need entertainment. They needed art, the one thing the powerful don't want them to have.

T2 Trainspotting (2017) / Willard (1971) / The Passenger (1975)

Danny Boyle scored a real winner with T2, the best sequel/spinoff film I've seen this year. It respects the original so much because its a totally natural progression as a story & personal meta-narrative. T2 succeeds because its not someone new giving their version of the old vision. Its the original vision just 20 years more mature and established. So many corporate reboots fail because they decide on a fresh update and re-treading. Boyle makes a great theme out of the past and uses his first entry as a stylistic gimmick, but he (and the material itself) clearly state that they are not suckered by a cheap nostalgia tour. The film is helped tremendously thats its working off a sequel novel, but only loosely.

T2 won't get its props because its one of the rare higher profiled films this year that wasn't for kids, teens or families. This was the only mature 2017 film I've seen that wasn't partly trying to pass itself off as exploitation or a "popcorn film with a message". But the film isn't overly bleak. Its fun, gorgeous, experimental, sincere, thoughtful and a bit abrasive. Its a self-aware mid life crisis for the characters within and outside of it, including our society. Its not interested in returning to the70s, 80s & 90s but analyzing the changes, positive and negative, and celebrating LIFE 20 years later. Its so grateful for its audience and the opportunity to step back into its rare lot in cinema history.

I won't say its better than the original but maybe equal. I didn't want a Trainspotting sequel but this is the film I didn't know I needed. It totally recontextualizes and romanticizes and in some ways eclipses the original. Maybe this is easier to find in European cinema than in American when I think about the charming and welcomed Ab Fab film from a few years back. They are more accustomed to picking up stories again and respecting the virtues of storytelling in commercial filmmaking.

Willard took me by surprise too. I remember the stylish but hollow remake from the 2000s and that both films follow a 1967 novel. I expected a brainless Psycho ripoff with rats eating people. This is much more sophisticated, at least the script is. Its a very introspective study of society's victims and the realistic circumstances that leave them reduced to animal behavior to survive. Willard creates a complex, intelligent metaphor out of its title character. He's a true anti-hero or tragic hero. And the actor Bruce Davison does a lot of good work in the role.

Now the production is not so ambitious but quite memorable. Produced as studios faced a recession, Willard is shot closer to a B&W 1960s thriller TV series like Twilight Zone or Hitchcock Presents. Its very bare bones and muted, but this serves the tone of the film. There isn't much on suspense or action, so we the directing is focused on fleshed out performances and a sense of nerve that creeps up.

But the film is more than a serviceable adaptation of a good story. It surpasses the original text from my understanding in that Willard becomes a catalyst for the zeitgeist of angry youth. It worked well for the political climate then & now. Millennials will relate to the economic and generational abuse this character suffers. He rises into an avenging arm of rebellion, a Marxist. And he suffers a fate that is more poetic and radically leftist than his modest Poe-esque fate in the original tale. He becomes a mirror for the failures of the Love generation and a casualty of class warfare, selling out his own ideals by following the cycle of abuse he set out to destroy. Its heady, very appropriate and shocking for a low budget horror film that could've wasted effort on FX and decor (like the remake and surely the upcoming re-remake).

Jack Nicholson might be the greatest film actor of all-time by body of work. He's made a long list of excellent films because he's worked with some of the best directors of his era: Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Roger Corman, Polanski, Tim Burton, Scorsese and fit all of their esteemed aesthetics. The Passenger unites Jack with influential director Michelangelo Antonioni for a political/existentialist/postmodern/travelogue about identity and freedom. Antonioni loves to create surrogate characters of himself who take on harsh journeys into themselves to either triumph or crumble from their own reflection.

This is the 3rd Antonioni film I've watched and the 3rd in that timeline. Following Il Grido and Blow Up, The Passenger is an even wider and more abstract pilgrimage into the cinematic form. The director is fine playing off established tropes and motifs because he bends them in new ways, like he's revising a world view by performing the same story in vastly different ways. One big distinction is the change in female perspectives in these stories. In this one, Maria Schneider plays a radical youth who acts as a spirit guide or perhaps a siren who leads him to one of two fates. Antonioni might've been a Hitchcock fan because the film builds to an incredibly intense climax loaded with meanings.

"The Passenger" is a sure masterpiece like Blow Up before it, "Willard" is a very tuned in piece of mainstream-meets-counterculture that has aged terrifically & "T2" is a spiritual poem that lives up to the spiritual poem that inspired it. 3 great movies to enjoy forever.