I caught this despite the serious controversy around it. I knew the director served time for sex with a minor, but I didn't know that when I became a fan of the 1st film. It disturbs me but I trust the director is sorry for what he did and is probably just another artist trying to survive. I will feel terrible if Victor De Silva turns out to be some awful predator still, but I want to see new art so I watched his piece. Its a frigging free watch on cable, I'm not paying the guy. But it is odd that SyFy's politics allowed this. Progressive or just weird?
Anyway, its a decent sleepy watch. Not scary. Not overly entertaining. Not above the quality of a lot of "prestige" TV shows. It reminded me of bad straight-to-video horror sequels in the 1990s. Its the same kinda aesthetic & economic resources. The big difference is low budget technology has evolved and old cinematic tricks haven't aged. De Silva deserves credit for making a film that is well-crafted.
Thats about all I can say about it. I reviewed this film because I want to prove I'm fair. If I loved it I'd say it & if I hated it I would say it. This was super mediocre. The first film was a genuinely creepy minimalist horror film from the bleakness of the 9/11 era. The 2nd film was a campy, pervy softcore teen porno spoofing the sado porn of straight teen horror softcore pornos. Neither is great, but its unique and darkly human.
Pt 3 was hollow, stilted, gratuitous, depressive, uninformative and a little uniform. Its better than much of 2010s' ' horror, but its so dependent on Netflix, Hollywood, old horror classics, some obscure foreign influences & ESPECIALLY The Walking Dead.
This film wasn't as creative or worthwhile (or cinematic) as Cult of Chucky. Stick with that film. JC3 is just kinda gross & creepy and not in the good & honest way. We can pull the plug on this kinda Hollywood surviving.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
The Priest's Wife 1970 / Marriage Italian Style 1964 / Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 1963
Bam! 3 Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni films to review. Thanks, TCM.
I started with Priest's Wife, a very unusual rom-com which starts on a slapstick note and gradually winds down to a somber ultra-realistic reflection of human casualty. Its obvious that Sophia & Marcello were very game to push boundaries with their electric screen chemistry. They give audiences the darker, more obscure sides of male/female relationships. This one explores bureaucracy, fundamentalism, sexual experience, maturity levels & intense personal differences. While it is very mature and even tragic, its somewhat hopeful and vague. The filmmakers were respectful enough to let the viewer decide on the ending they want. Of course, the film is beautifully arranged, decorated and shot too courtesy of director Dino Risi.
Vittorio De Sica directs the screen couple in the next two films and wins a "Foreign Film" Oscar with Marriage. Its an excellent, theatrical piece of work where both actors flex light and dark sides of their souls. Its so much fun to watch them play off each other in various games of roleplay. The plot is fairly elaborate, operatic & testy. This was the 2nd (but earlier) film I've watched of theirs to use domestic abuse as a moment of high emotional bonding or romantic pretext. And very interesting that Scorsese would explore this in his films as well. Italians don't have a monopoly on abuse, but they don't shy from representing it in cinema. Its that touch of neorealism, that brooding and violent rejection of judgmental American artifice, that frees this subculture to address the uglier and steamier sides of human romance. The frankness of this film must have been so radical and yet its so commercial without selling out its Italian roots.
Yesterday is even earlier and even more radical. First, its an anthology rom-com that plays the same actors as very unsavory but human roles. This film studies the class difference of couples and the struggles that brings. Its all the most subtle and realistic of comedy with a very muted and mellow seriousness. One excellent touch is how De Sica personalizes the aesthetic of each short film. Story to story he toys with camerawork in the 3rd, lighting in the 2d and staging in the 1st. There are lots of other subtle distinctions to savor and analyze.
This was a big exposure to me. I'm very familiar with low rent grindhouse from Italy and I'm growing a huge appreciation for Italian arthouse, but hadn't found the big budget middlebrow productions like these rom-com's or what Sophia Loren was surprised to learn are called romantic "drama-edies". These films were meant to rival Hollywood's sanitized cheesecake films starring Doris Day & Lana Turner. They are not rip-off's but reactions, reversals and rejections. The spirit of Italian cinematists was more jaded and unwilling to repress or reproach from pressing psychological, emotional and sexual issues in home life. And we must thank them for it. These films played with the medium in less restrained or commercialized ways. They established a technical style highly influenced by theater and photography of Italian nature, fashion and still life. You can feel the exuberance the filmmakers had in just putting these films out into the global market while representing & speaking to their country primarily.
The films have aged nicely and they were beautiful to begin with. This is important & influential stuff and you revel in the fact that it still plays as relevant, immediate and sensual as it was then.
I started with Priest's Wife, a very unusual rom-com which starts on a slapstick note and gradually winds down to a somber ultra-realistic reflection of human casualty. Its obvious that Sophia & Marcello were very game to push boundaries with their electric screen chemistry. They give audiences the darker, more obscure sides of male/female relationships. This one explores bureaucracy, fundamentalism, sexual experience, maturity levels & intense personal differences. While it is very mature and even tragic, its somewhat hopeful and vague. The filmmakers were respectful enough to let the viewer decide on the ending they want. Of course, the film is beautifully arranged, decorated and shot too courtesy of director Dino Risi.
Vittorio De Sica directs the screen couple in the next two films and wins a "Foreign Film" Oscar with Marriage. Its an excellent, theatrical piece of work where both actors flex light and dark sides of their souls. Its so much fun to watch them play off each other in various games of roleplay. The plot is fairly elaborate, operatic & testy. This was the 2nd (but earlier) film I've watched of theirs to use domestic abuse as a moment of high emotional bonding or romantic pretext. And very interesting that Scorsese would explore this in his films as well. Italians don't have a monopoly on abuse, but they don't shy from representing it in cinema. Its that touch of neorealism, that brooding and violent rejection of judgmental American artifice, that frees this subculture to address the uglier and steamier sides of human romance. The frankness of this film must have been so radical and yet its so commercial without selling out its Italian roots.
Yesterday is even earlier and even more radical. First, its an anthology rom-com that plays the same actors as very unsavory but human roles. This film studies the class difference of couples and the struggles that brings. Its all the most subtle and realistic of comedy with a very muted and mellow seriousness. One excellent touch is how De Sica personalizes the aesthetic of each short film. Story to story he toys with camerawork in the 3rd, lighting in the 2d and staging in the 1st. There are lots of other subtle distinctions to savor and analyze.
This was a big exposure to me. I'm very familiar with low rent grindhouse from Italy and I'm growing a huge appreciation for Italian arthouse, but hadn't found the big budget middlebrow productions like these rom-com's or what Sophia Loren was surprised to learn are called romantic "drama-edies". These films were meant to rival Hollywood's sanitized cheesecake films starring Doris Day & Lana Turner. They are not rip-off's but reactions, reversals and rejections. The spirit of Italian cinematists was more jaded and unwilling to repress or reproach from pressing psychological, emotional and sexual issues in home life. And we must thank them for it. These films played with the medium in less restrained or commercialized ways. They established a technical style highly influenced by theater and photography of Italian nature, fashion and still life. You can feel the exuberance the filmmakers had in just putting these films out into the global market while representing & speaking to their country primarily.
The films have aged nicely and they were beautiful to begin with. This is important & influential stuff and you revel in the fact that it still plays as relevant, immediate and sensual as it was then.
Cult of Chucky 2017
The Child's Play franchise will go down as the best of the 80s slasher franchises that dominated pop culture once. Chucky has outlived & outclassed the likes of Freddy, Jason, Pinhead & the others. Only Leatherface stands next to Chucky as both had new films this year, but Child's Play has retained most of its first predecessor's charm, intelligence & horror credibility by keeping the voice of its creator. No, the Child's Play producers have gone a step further and given the auteurist credit solely to the writer by letting him direct. And Don Mancini has evolved into a formidable & singular talent. He's already one of the supreme directors of low budget horror IMO.
"Cult" follows the very strong "Curse of Chucky" from 2013 (the same year as TC3D hmm). That film was a pseudo-reboot that returned the film to its Urban Gothic roots as a serious mind-bending supernatural stalker film with a psychotic twist. That film was also built on Mancini's economical crafting of a vintage Hammer Studio-like atmosphere & VERY sharp social awareness and genre postmodernism & it was a much more successful experiment than the misunderstood and less popular Seed of Chucky.
Cult is not as successful as Curse, but there is so much to recommend. The plot is cleverly weaved, witty in its plot twists, surprisingly lyrical for a Chucky film and very hard to classify. Like Antonioni's Blow Up, the films of David Lynch & many European styled films, the main gimmick is perception. This is the most essential but underutilized theme in telling a story on film. Mancini has done his homework and even stretches it a bit. He makes some interesting comments about the nature of truth, reality, sanity, society & morality. The film works like an old school art film, not like a killer doll movie. In fact, there might not be enough Chucky for slasher fans. I think its an okay trade-off.
It fun to let the other characters in the Chucky myth basically drive the entire plot. Chucky becomes a Hitchcockian "McGuffin". He ties these vastly different perspectives together and represents different psychological traumas for them & that works best after 6 movies. These characters being the leads in different chapters all meeting for the first time. Very cool.
I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. It was more neat, bleak and open-ended than the previous endings. Even that is a twist on typical slasher sequel expectations. It leaves us in a new territory thats more abstract and gritty than anything in the other Chucky stories. I'm totally sold on Mancini's direction for the next film as its shaping up to be a very personal epic saga of his own demons & angels.
"Cult" follows the very strong "Curse of Chucky" from 2013 (the same year as TC3D hmm). That film was a pseudo-reboot that returned the film to its Urban Gothic roots as a serious mind-bending supernatural stalker film with a psychotic twist. That film was also built on Mancini's economical crafting of a vintage Hammer Studio-like atmosphere & VERY sharp social awareness and genre postmodernism & it was a much more successful experiment than the misunderstood and less popular Seed of Chucky.
Cult is not as successful as Curse, but there is so much to recommend. The plot is cleverly weaved, witty in its plot twists, surprisingly lyrical for a Chucky film and very hard to classify. Like Antonioni's Blow Up, the films of David Lynch & many European styled films, the main gimmick is perception. This is the most essential but underutilized theme in telling a story on film. Mancini has done his homework and even stretches it a bit. He makes some interesting comments about the nature of truth, reality, sanity, society & morality. The film works like an old school art film, not like a killer doll movie. In fact, there might not be enough Chucky for slasher fans. I think its an okay trade-off.
It fun to let the other characters in the Chucky myth basically drive the entire plot. Chucky becomes a Hitchcockian "McGuffin". He ties these vastly different perspectives together and represents different psychological traumas for them & that works best after 6 movies. These characters being the leads in different chapters all meeting for the first time. Very cool.
I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. It was more neat, bleak and open-ended than the previous endings. Even that is a twist on typical slasher sequel expectations. It leaves us in a new territory thats more abstract and gritty than anything in the other Chucky stories. I'm totally sold on Mancini's direction for the next film as its shaping up to be a very personal epic saga of his own demons & angels.
Monday, November 6, 2017
What is the underlying opinion on race in the Alien franchise? With the Prometheus/Covenant entries Ridley Scott suggests the story has always been a horror deconstruction of white racist eugenicist theories, specifically targeting the intersectionality between Nazism & white Christianity. This is supported in the thematic work of Dan O'Bannon & HR Geiger, Alien's respective screenwriter and key artistic designer.
Prometheus details the absurd idea of a white God complex poisoned by his own black genetics and the authoritarian fascist corporation out to profit from the realization/discovery of the "Master Race". Ridley Scott's horror/scifi franchise is destined to be one of the most frightening, intellectually probing and subtle fictional constructs in popular media. Whats most frightening is how many simply buy it at face value as a story about "mankind finding his roots". Scott is playing on the audience's own deeply ingrained racism/authoritarianism and using it against them, to produce scares and ticket sales. Thats one reason he's one of the best directors ever.
Sunday, November 5, 2017
Venus In Furs 1969 (2nd review)
Writing reviews this year has opened up my appreciation of cinema and I've learned a lot. Much of that credit belongs to Jess Franco, the obscure Spanish surrealist/grindhouse director I covered for the first half of 2017. Studying his work properly introduced me to tons of concepts & artistic grammar that I was only fuzzy about. Postmodernism, Dada, Existentialism. These themes perfectly reflect the dark crises Earth is handling now. I'm a totally different viewer after this harsh year and my outlook has widened tremendously.
I can admit I'm now embarrassed by one of my early reviews. Rewatching "Venus in Furs" last night, the film was a richer, more clear experience and it deserves a new review. But I will not erase my initial, less informed opinion. We should all give things an educated perspective.
https://hollyweedbabylon.blogspot.com/2017/01/venus-in-furs.html
Now Venus is a case like Blade Runner or Night of the Demons where a young ambitious artist made a deeply existential work of art and producers interfered to make it more commercial, thus losing a lot of the intended power. Funny how all 3 of these films revolve around the concept of perception, an essential component of cinema but maybe the least understood or examined.
I wrote off Venus as a clunky, sexy supernatural slasher like Franco's later work because thats what it is on the surface. Even on first viewing I could tell the film was heavily inspired by Vertigo, Carnival of Souls & Dr. Caligari, as its a dream narrative with dream logic and heavy political symbolism. Franco's film is a uniquely Spanish work examining themes of chauvinism/feminism, racism/colorism, sadism, schizophrenia, memory and probably LSD. The sex & supernatural is only a hook for audiences, but the producers re-edited the narrative to highlight these elements at the expense of any meaning. The film can seem convoluted if you aren't keenly aware of the lyrical storytelling that is mostly intact.
One of my favorite writers of the film blog era, Jeremy Richey of "Moon in the Gutter", detailed a connection between Franco's Venus and Lynch's Lost Highway. I originally thought he was off-base but now the similarities are glaring. The way Franco uses surreal photographic techniques and jazz scoring to highlight the dreaminess and artificiality of certain plot points. Franco gives clues and absurdist touches the way Lynch would after him. There's also the shared sensibility in ghostly, unreal femme fatales, unholy affluent boules and a confused, jazz playing spectator to all of the violent insanity who is oblivious to his role in everything. Franco & Lynch both imply that the world's depravity is at the heart of our sick culture, not a byproduct or separate fringe entity. You have to seriously ask if David Lynch, a monolithic American artist of our times, is a fan of this totally ignored cult director.
Its a hard argument for those uninitiated to Franco because Lynch is so quiet about his influences, unlike Franco in his day. Also Lynch fans are a bit dogmatic in praising Lynch's originality and genius. How can that great unique savant be compared to an inconsistent director of lesbian vampire pornos? As I've tried to argue in the past, Franco was a true auteur and genius and I'm sure his infamy is well-known to enormous film fans WITHIN the directing field. Jess Franco's films predicted so much because they were so structuralist and eventually post-structuralist. By "Venus", every shot is a reversal of the expected. Its a totally fresh experience despite its debts to other films. Because Franco, a super movie buff, was combining all of the radical ideas of his contemporaries (Godard, Antonioni, Bunuel, Welles, Fellini) and boiling them down to a level Spanish & American teenagers could even understand. Following these postmodern directors, it could be argued Franco was the original major post-postmodern & remodernist director like De Palma, Tarantino, Rodriguez and so many later.
I see now how seminal this film is to Franco's oeuvre, even if it wasn't the career gateway he wanted. It really summarizes his aesthetic well and explains the frustrated vision of his later, cheaper work. Many times he tried to execute the misunderstood mysticism of Venus in different terms. Some more mature (Other Side of the Mirror), some more juvenile (Virgin Among the Living Dead). I think Venus is more successful and watchable. But maybe Franco's best and most original take on this type of film poetry was "Succubus". But Venus is right next to it as Franco's attempt at a Roger Corman-esque drive-in mindblower. And to be honest, its a perfect hybrid of Corman's LSD and Gothic horror films, but better than both.
I can admit I'm now embarrassed by one of my early reviews. Rewatching "Venus in Furs" last night, the film was a richer, more clear experience and it deserves a new review. But I will not erase my initial, less informed opinion. We should all give things an educated perspective.
https://hollyweedbabylon.blogspot.com/2017/01/venus-in-furs.html
Now Venus is a case like Blade Runner or Night of the Demons where a young ambitious artist made a deeply existential work of art and producers interfered to make it more commercial, thus losing a lot of the intended power. Funny how all 3 of these films revolve around the concept of perception, an essential component of cinema but maybe the least understood or examined.
I wrote off Venus as a clunky, sexy supernatural slasher like Franco's later work because thats what it is on the surface. Even on first viewing I could tell the film was heavily inspired by Vertigo, Carnival of Souls & Dr. Caligari, as its a dream narrative with dream logic and heavy political symbolism. Franco's film is a uniquely Spanish work examining themes of chauvinism/feminism, racism/colorism, sadism, schizophrenia, memory and probably LSD. The sex & supernatural is only a hook for audiences, but the producers re-edited the narrative to highlight these elements at the expense of any meaning. The film can seem convoluted if you aren't keenly aware of the lyrical storytelling that is mostly intact.
One of my favorite writers of the film blog era, Jeremy Richey of "Moon in the Gutter", detailed a connection between Franco's Venus and Lynch's Lost Highway. I originally thought he was off-base but now the similarities are glaring. The way Franco uses surreal photographic techniques and jazz scoring to highlight the dreaminess and artificiality of certain plot points. Franco gives clues and absurdist touches the way Lynch would after him. There's also the shared sensibility in ghostly, unreal femme fatales, unholy affluent boules and a confused, jazz playing spectator to all of the violent insanity who is oblivious to his role in everything. Franco & Lynch both imply that the world's depravity is at the heart of our sick culture, not a byproduct or separate fringe entity. You have to seriously ask if David Lynch, a monolithic American artist of our times, is a fan of this totally ignored cult director.
Its a hard argument for those uninitiated to Franco because Lynch is so quiet about his influences, unlike Franco in his day. Also Lynch fans are a bit dogmatic in praising Lynch's originality and genius. How can that great unique savant be compared to an inconsistent director of lesbian vampire pornos? As I've tried to argue in the past, Franco was a true auteur and genius and I'm sure his infamy is well-known to enormous film fans WITHIN the directing field. Jess Franco's films predicted so much because they were so structuralist and eventually post-structuralist. By "Venus", every shot is a reversal of the expected. Its a totally fresh experience despite its debts to other films. Because Franco, a super movie buff, was combining all of the radical ideas of his contemporaries (Godard, Antonioni, Bunuel, Welles, Fellini) and boiling them down to a level Spanish & American teenagers could even understand. Following these postmodern directors, it could be argued Franco was the original major post-postmodern & remodernist director like De Palma, Tarantino, Rodriguez and so many later.
I see now how seminal this film is to Franco's oeuvre, even if it wasn't the career gateway he wanted. It really summarizes his aesthetic well and explains the frustrated vision of his later, cheaper work. Many times he tried to execute the misunderstood mysticism of Venus in different terms. Some more mature (Other Side of the Mirror), some more juvenile (Virgin Among the Living Dead). I think Venus is more successful and watchable. But maybe Franco's best and most original take on this type of film poetry was "Succubus". But Venus is right next to it as Franco's attempt at a Roger Corman-esque drive-in mindblower. And to be honest, its a perfect hybrid of Corman's LSD and Gothic horror films, but better than both.
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