mark boomer redmond

Le cinque giornate (aka The Five Days, 1973)

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three star

And now for something completely different.

Following the conclusion of his “Animal Trilogy,” Dario Argento declared that his time as a giallo director had come to an end. From a modern perspective, this seems as preposterous as Alfred Hitchcock declaring he would begin focusing solely on period romantic comedies in the wake of the success of Psycho, John Malkovich leaving the world of acting to become a puppeteer, or schlockmeister Eli Roth making a family movie about, like, child spies or something. Historically, however, this kind of move is not without precedent; David Cronenberg, for instance, ditched a lifetime career of making body horror flicks to focus on prestige pictures (with mixed success), and many actors have made the leap from on-camera to behind-the-camera work. This change didn’t work out so well for Argento, however, who went back to his wheelhouse for his fifth picture.

Argento’s three previous pictures were domestic successes with great international interest; his fourth film, the first non-giallo, was his first commercial failure. For his fourth film, he chose to make a period piece comedy set during the first Italian War for Independence, with obvious influences from spaghetti westerns like Once Upon a Time in the West, which Argento had worked on before embarking on his own directorial career. I mentioned in my review of Four Flies on Grey Velvet that in his earlier efforts, like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Argento shot duplicate footage of newspapers and notes with the text in English to prepare for international release. Le cinque giornate (The Five Days), on the other hand, was created without any apparent interest in release outside of Italy, as it focuses on a relatively unknown (outside of Argento’s home country) minor historical event: a five day seige during the late 1840s in which the citizenry of Milan drove Austrian soldiers out of the city. As a concept, there’s a lot of potential there. In execution, however… not so much.

The film follows Cainazzo (Adriano Celentano, who is best well known in Italy as a musical performer), an incarcerated petty thief who is freed when revolutionaries blow a hole in the wall of the prison. He escapes and begins searching for his former partner, Zampino (Glauco Onorato), to collect on his half of the score that landed him in jail. He discovers other former compatriots taking advantage of the democratic revolution to plunder the homes of rich and poor alike; they tell him that Zampino has become an important figure in the revolt and is now known by the name “Liberty.” He is identified as a criminal in the street, and he attempts to take refuge in a bakery, but it is destroyed by the inept baker Romolo (Enzo Cerusico), a naive Roman city “boy” (Cerusico was 37 at the time) who mishandles the oven. Together, the two make their way across the city and through a series of interactions and adventures, encountering scenarios both humorous and depressing.

I have long theorized that international comedies are less successful than intercultural dramatic films or literature because drama is much more universal than comedy, which is more culturally determined. Drama is wrung from things that we all share or with which we can empathize, even if the cultural specifics are different. A Korean film about struggling for parental approval, a German film about grappling with the death of a spouse, a Brazilian film about growing up and losing one’s innocence–all of these have themes that transcend national and cultural boundaries, even if the idiosyncrasies and specifics are unfamiliar. But an anime about bakers that features puns that work in the original Japanese but not in translation, or an Australian feature that requires historical knowledge about class differences in Sydney? Not as accessible for someone outside of that culture and its accompanying situated knowledge. For that reason, I’m willing to cut Days some slack, even though it was a mostly forgettable film. It’s crime isn’t being bad, per se; it’s being boring.

The comedy featured here is a little broad for my taste. The first scene in the film features Cainazzo striking a rat which has gotten too close and flinging it away, where it lands in the mouth of another prisoner, who is asleep. Later, Cainazzo and Romolo assist a woman (Luisa De Santis) in giving birth, and the vignette kicks into high gear as the duo’s actions are shot in fast motion and accompanied by accelerated ragtime music. Later still, the duo is enlisted in the creation of a barricade under the guidance of the disconnected and airheaded Contessa (Marilu Tolo), and Romolo accidentally seduces the widow of a hanged traitor (Carla Tato), as she is aroused by his recitation of different types of bread.

And then Romolo is murdered by a firing squad, for accidentally killing an aristocrat while saving a young woman from being raped.

The film is a series of vignettes that are ostensibly comedic (Romolo is forever mispronouncing Cainazzo’s name–hahaha), but are at other times remarkably insightful or emotionally devastating. While squatting in what they assume to be an abandoned mansion for an evening, Cainazzo and Romolo are greeted by grotesque parodies of aristocratic indulgence who nonetheless are right in their declaration that the so-called “People’s Revolution” will do nothing to uplift the downtrodden or poor. A scene ends with a young child shrieking in anguish over the body of his mother, a collateral victim of Austrian violence. What I would normally describe as tonal inconsistency actually seems to be a deliberate attempt to induce emotional whiplash to illustrate extreme nihilism. Nowhere is this more clear than when Cainazzo, after nearly five days of near-misses, is finally reunited with Zampino, only to learn that the people’s hero, the icon of liberty, is actually working with the hated Austrians and is both a traitor and a war profiteer. At the end of the film, Cainazzo delivers his final line, “You’ve all been tricked!” to a waiting crowd of energetic Milanians, flush with patriotic fervor, and he’s right: the Austrians may have retreated, but the revolution is a lie.

In the abstract, this all sounds like an enjoyable, even thought-provoking film. In practice, however, it’s a bore. Objectively, the film falls just short of two hours, but the pacing is so poor and the cinematography so blasé that, subjectively, you feel that you’ve actually been staring at the screen for an interminable five days. Outside of sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I don’t think I’ve ever checked my watch so frequently in my life. Argento’s penchant for dynamic camera work is completely missing in this laborious picaresque; the film feels like a cheap and straightforward product for consumption, like something that was assembled and packaged on the made-for-television production line. There are elements that work, but overall, this is a film that is formless and unappealing, and you can’t chalk that up entirely to cultural dissonance; even Italian audiences and critics savaged the film, and Argento went straight back to work on giallo films afterwards, beginning production of what many consider to be his masterpiece, Profondo rosso. Only one DVD pressing of the film was ever released, in Europe, so tracking down this movie isn’t easy (I was lucky enough to find a VHS copy at Austin’s premiere rental outlet, Vulcan Video). I say: don’t bother.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

4 mosche di veluto grigio (aka Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971)

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see no evil

onestar

No matter how you slice it–no pun intended–4 mosche di veluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) is a weird, sloppy mess, even for a Dario Argento film. The final part of Argento’s so-called animal trilogy, Flies was released just ten months after The Cat o’ Nine Tails, and the movie follows a horribly unlikable protagonist who is being stalked and harassed by a killer in a mask. Oh, also, the protagonist is a killer. Well, not really. I should explain, and I will try. Be warned: this review is chock full of spoilers, but it will save you the trouble of sitting through this stinker.

As the film opens, a drummer in a standard early seventies rock band, Roberto (Michael Brandon), realizes that he is being followed by a cloaked man. After practice, he follows the man to an abandoned opera house, where an altercation ensues and Robert stabs the man with his own knife. Roberto is then photographed standing over the man’s body with the knife. The following day, he receives the stabbed man’s identification in the mail. Then he and his bandmates have a party! Roberto goes to change a record, and finds a photograph taken during the previous night’s incident between two albums. He remains completely unaffected, either by the fact that he killed someone or that he’s getting the I Know What You Did Last NIGHT treatment. He finally tells his wife, Nina (Mimsy Farmer), what happened after he is nearly strangled in their living room in the middle of the night; she is understandably disturbed, but he mansplains her down. Do you like the main character yet?

Roberto’s maid (Maria Fabbri) places a phone call that reveals she knows who the blackmailer is and wants a piece of the action. She waits to rendezvous with them in a park, but gets locked in and killed after dark. It is then revealed that the man Roberto “killed” is still alive, and he and the blackmailer/killer conspired to make Roberto appear to be a murderer, for no initially apparent reason, although there is an eventual explanation. Is it ever explained how he and the killer know each other, or why he would be amenable to such a thing? Nope! After the maid is found dead, Nina tells Roberto she’s leaving town, like a sensible person would after multiple break-ins and a murder, but Roberto is mildly interested in seeing what happens next. I say “mildly interested,” because, compared to the level of intensity and interest displayed by Sam Dalmas in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Carlo Giordani in the aforementioned Cat, he seems to be completely apathetic to the danger to his own life, and only invested in saving his life insofar as hiring a preening, effeminate private eye, who takes the case mostly because he finds Roberto cute.

The private eye, Arrosio (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is one of the film’s saving graces, and a film that followed him solving the crime would have been a much more interesting endeavor than what does end up on screen. Before he is killed in a subway restroom, Arrosio tracks down information about a former mental patient who was considered by the staff to have been a “maniac” but was “completely cured.” At this point in the film, the killer, or the killer’s sex, becomes pretty obvious; the killer’s whispering voice does little to disguise the fact that she is a woman, and the way that the head psychiatrist at the asylum insistently refers to “the patient” in order to avoid using gendered pronouns is stilted and obvious. I guessed this twist so early in the film that I initially assumed it was the maid, before she ended up dead before the end of Act I. You might guess that the killer is Dalia (Francine Racette), Nina’s cousin, especially after she seems to hear the killer’s madness mantra–a man’s voice saying things like “I wanted a boy, not a weakling!” and “I never want to see you cry!” It’s also worth noting that fewer than sixty seconds pass between Nina’s goodbye and Roberto’s seduction of Dalia. What a class act!

Alas, Dalia is herself killed. The police want to run a ridiculous forensic test: using a laser projected through Dalia’s eye to render an image of the last thing she saw before she died. You may remember such a test from Fringe, or even failed Will Smith vehicle Wild, Wild West. It’s completely absurd, and the science is even more dubious than Cat’s XYY gene nonsense, but it’s also the clue that breaks the case and the explanation of the title: Dalia saw four flies in a line. That night, Roberto waits in the dark with a loaded gun and almost shoots Nina when she comes home. As Roberto begs her to leave, he realizes that her giant ugly necklace has a fly in the medallion, and that Dalia’s last vision was of the necklace rocking back and forth. Nina then gives a rant-filled monologue about how her stepfather wanted a son and tried to raise her as one, but put her in an asylum when his beatings failed to turn her into a boy (shocker); by the time she was released, he was already dead, so she sought out someone like him upon whom she could heap all her vengeance, and Roberto fit the bill. She is scared away, jumps in Roberto’s car, and speeds into the back of a large truck, dying instantaneously. End credits.

This is a bad movie. The most compelling imagery in the film occurs in Roberto’s recurring nightmare about being beheaded in a public square, apparently based upon a story he overhears at a party. So much of the plot is frontloaded with absurdity that by the time an explanation is given, you can hardly bring yourself to care. The tone of the film is inconsistent not only with Argento’s other works but within itself as well. There are times when it seems Argento was going for mild comedy, such as the recurring joke about one of Roberto’s neighbors consistently receiving a different neighbor’s misdelivered pornography, or the pranks and jokes of the two recurring homeless men with whom Roberto is friends (for some reason). Intentionally comedic or not, it doesn’t work. That Nina is the killer is apparent from pretty early on, and her motivation is telegraphed with far too many voiceovers and rotating shots of a padded room. Although the mask Nina wears is delightfully creepy, I wish Argento would have saved it for use in a better film. There are some editing choices that seem to be trying to be avantgarde (notably, people disappear from where they were standing in a park, again “for some reason”), but ultimately have no in-story justification. The only thing really novel about Flies is that a female victim, the maid, dies offscreen for once.

Considered by some to be a hard-to-find gem, I cannot in good conscience suggest that you spend your time trying to track down this movie or view it. The 2009 DVD released by MYA Communications restores the two minutes of Nina’s speech that were cut from previous U.S. releases, but I can’t recommend it, either. Although viewers have the option of viewing the film in English or Italian, there are no subtitles on the disc at all, save for the parts of Nina’s speech which were never dubbed into English due to being cut (the restored footage is in the original Italian). Unlike some of Argento’s other films, in which insert shots of printed text were shot in additional languages for easier international release, all onscreen text is in Italian as well, and there aren’t even translations of these in subtitle form either; as a result, the taunting notes that the killer leaves for Roberto are completely meaningless if you, like me, are unfamiliar with Argento’s native tongue.

Overall, I can only suggest skipping this film. If you are a completist like I am, you’ll probably find yourself watching this as part of the Argento oeuvre at some point. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

l gatto a nove code (aka The Cat o’ Nine Tails, 1971)

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three star

Speaking of l gatto a nove code (The Cat o’ Nine Tails) in the book Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Argento himself referred to his sophomore follow-up to 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as one of the his least favorites from his canon. Released just 51 weeks after Plumage, The Cat o’ Nine Tails is a weaker effort, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it is more grounded and follows a more linear narrative than Argento’s previous film. Where Plumage was impressive in that it already exhibited so many of Argento’s stylistic eccentricities, Cat almost seems like an earlier work, with mostly monochrome environments and a drab color scheme; whereas Plumage was populated by bizarre characters and situations (I still can’t get over the hermit painter who raised cats for food), Cat is much more straightforward.

The film follows Franco “Cookie” Arnò (Karl Malden), a blind retired reporter and caretaker of his young niece, Lori (Cinzia De Carolis). One night, he overhears a man in a car discussing blackmail; the next morning he learns that a nearby genetics research facility, the Terzi Institute, was broken into, but there is no evidence that anything was stolen. Still later, Lori tells Arnò that she recognizes the man from the car, Dr. Calabresi, as the victim of an apparent rail station accident, as this makes the front page. Arnò reaches out to Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus), a journalist whom he previously met when Giordani was investigating the Terzi break-in, and discusses his suspicions: Calabresi was involved with the break-in, and he was killed in order to prevent his blackmail from coming to light. The photographer who captured the supposed accident is also murdered, garrotted and then slashed, as is Calabresi’s fiancee once she uncovers evidence that names the killer. Giordani strikes up a sexual relationship with the adopted daughter of the Terzi Institute’s founder, and Arnò sends Lori away as attempts to kill the two journalists mount.

Cat trades Plumage’s psychological reason for the killer’s murder for a physiological one, as the killer is hypothesized (and ultimately revealed) to have a genetic mutation of the chromosomes, possessing XYY genes. The belief that this mutation leads to a predisposition toward violence has long since been disproven; it cropped up in the trial of Richard Speck (who was later found to have standard XY genes anyway), and still floats into the public consciousness from time to time, even featuring in an episode of Law & Order, long after everyone should have known better. This would seem to discredit the film’s premise, but modern sentiments can allow us to read the text as the killer learning of their condition and committing violent acts not because of their predisposition towards violence, but because knowledge of their genetic make-up allows them to act out in ways they could not before, essentially giving the murderer a reason to act on their desires, rather than an impetus for said desires. Still, it does date the movie in a way that other Argento films are not.

The performances here are stronger than in Plumage, but that does not always a great film make. Karl Malden is a stand-out, which should come as no surprise considering that his resume boasts On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Patton; his performance as Arnò encourages sympathy but not pity, and it’s impossible not to enjoy his screen presence. Catherine Spaak is underutilized as Terzi’s daughter, and it’s unclear if her coldness on screen is a result of a lack of talent for the craft or a deliberate stylistic choice. Even my brief synopsis above mentions her only in passing, as her contribution to the mystery is an obvious red herring; she could be removed from the film altogether, and this change would have virtually no effect on the outcome. Franciscus, for his part is well cast, and his range is greater than Plumage’s Tony Mustante, making Giordani a more compelling figure than Dalmas was; compare the scene in which Dalmas fends off the advances of an aging antique dealer in Plumage with the subtlety on display when Franciscus’s Giordani pursues a potential lead to a gay social gathering. He is clearly discomfited, but only on the personal level, not in the abstract, which is not only a mark in the actor’s favor but the director’s, as it demonstrates a positive departure from the way that homosexuals and other “deviants” were portrayed in Plumage.

Also telling is the way in which the murders are committed. As I wrote in my Plumage review, there has been no small amount of scholarship devoted to the sexual overtones of the slasher genre, with predominantly female victims and phallic murder weapons; here, however, the murders are committed with the specific goal of hiding information, and the victims are men as often as (or perhaps more than) they are women, and the woman who is killed onscreen dies in the same manner as the men: fully clothed, with her dignity, via strangulation (although her murder is, admittedly, more brutal and drawn out than those of Dr. Calabresi or the photographer). There are no scenes in which a woman becomes hysterical when trapped by the killer, or in which there is a component of lasciviousness. In fact, Lori, despite being a child, plays a very important role in noticing and gathering information that Arnò cannot because of his lack of sight. I honestly would have preferred to see more of this, as the older man/young woman mystery-solving duo is one of the elements that I love so much about my personal favorite Argento film, Phenomena, which we will be getting to eventually. Although Lori ends up becoming a hostage, this is less because of her sex and more because of her age, and it’s a bit of a surprise how much more progressive this film is than Plumage, especially since less than a year passed between the two movies’ premieres.

Cat isn’t a bad film; it has a great cast, a good mystery, and some great moments. Unfortunately, although this is a film not lacking for substance, its blasé cinematography is nothing new, and it lacks the stylishness that sets Argento apart from the herd (and the ending is so abrupt you’ll wonder if you missed something). Although I recommend the film for fellow Argento fanatics, and horror/slasher fans in general, home video releases of the film are generally abysmal. It seems that not a single VHS release escaped being trimmed, for censorship (of violence and homosexual themes) or to fit the length of tape in a videocassette, as was the case with JTC’s release. Despite advertising itself as being “fully restored,” Diamond Entertainment’s DVD release actually contained the same cut as earlier mangled VHS releases. Anchor Bay’s DVD of the film, which was what I watched, at least contains the full film; ironically, for a film with a disabled hero, there is no release of this film that would work for deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers. Fans like me, who prefer to watch Argento’s films in Italian with English subtitles, are unable to do so–the only subtitles are translations of onscreen text. Blue Underground recently released a Blu-ray of the film, but I don’t know if this oversight has been corrected. Still, if you have the time, opportunity, and a copy of the film in its entirety, it’s worth a watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

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threehalfstar

campstamp

When I was a kid, I looked forward every week to the articles on TV Guide’s website from the Televisionary and FlickChick (better known as critic Maitland McDonagh). These proto-blogs were where perplexed readers who had reached the outer limits of their personal research could ask what this film or that TV show was that featured that thing–you know that thing–and finally get an answer after years of trying to recall. “What was that movie with the kid living in the walls?” Bad Ronald. “What was that series with the girl whose dad was an alien and she talked to him through a crystal?” Out of this World. “What was that movie that was like Blair Witch Project but, like, from the 70s?” The Legend of Boggy Creek.

I was lucky enough to take in a viewing of this 1972 oddity at the Alamo Drafthouse last night, projected from the last known extant 35mm copy, loaned to the theatre by its owner, a certain director you may have heard of named Quentin Tarantino. Boggy Creek is a curious entry into the canon of 1970s horror flicks. Like Blair Witch, which was made nearly 30 years later, the film is shot largely as a documentary, featuring interviews with individuals who encountered what became known as the Fouke Monster, a three-toed, vaguely sasquatchian cryptozoological beast that supposedly roamed (or perhaps still roams) Fouke, Arkansas and the surrounding waterways. The film was made by a relatively amateur director, Charles B. Pierce, who had made a series of commercials for Texarkana-based trucking firm Ledwell & Son Enterprises before borrowing $160,000 from the company to produce Boggy Creek. Surprisingly, the film became the 11th highest grossing film of 1972, netting $20 million(!) dollars. More people saw Boggy Creek in theatres than Hitchcock’s penultimate outing Frenzy, or Peter O’Toole’s Man of La Mancha, or the film adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five. In fact, were it not for the surprise mainstream popularity of Behind the Green Door–a movie that is literally pornography–Boggy Creek would have cracked the top ten, not a bad legacy for an independently produced flick about one town’s personal Bigfoot.

Boggy Creek is not an excellent movie, but it is obviously a labor of love and was made by someone with an untrained but doubtlessly cinematic eye. There are lovingly framed shots of a child fleeing across a field from the howling in the night, accompanied by voice-over from the film’s narrator: “I was seven years old the first time I heard him scream; it scared me then, and it scares me now.” The omnipresent narration of the film, some of it framed as the recollections of an adult who lived in Fouke as a child and some of it having a more documentarian distance, is one of the odder elements, but it contributes to the feeling that this is not a work of fiction–and many of the people interviewed in the film would argue that it is not, recalling individual interactions and inexplicable events. Some of these interactions are recreated on screen, and although the Fouke Monster, a furry creature with hair hanging down in its face, looks silly to the modern eye, it nonetheless is effectively discomfiting, and by the end of the film feels like a real creature that you might see dart across a dark highway while driving at night, or be caught washing its feet in a stream by a wandering hunter.

The last third of the film is taken up with an extended reenactment of the monster’s two-night assault on a multi-family household. This is the most captivating section, and it feels like it was spliced in from a very different film, although it would likely not work as well as it does without the backstory provided by the more Direct Cinema elements of the first two-thirds. There are certain parts of this segment that are somewhat repetitive, but there are some legitimate scares and shocks in it, so it works. There are other sections of the film that can charitably be described as “padding,” but these also yield something memorable. Pierce wrote and performed two songs for the film; one, which is either titled (or should be titled) “The Ballad of Travis Crabtree,” plays over a montage of said teenager (who was also the film’s key grip) checking traps and engaging in standard rural lifestyle activities. The second is a lovingly crafted ballad about what it must be like to be the only monster in the world, and whether that life would be terrible lonely or not. It’s an undeniably silly excursion that’s treated with complete sincerity, which is the best way to describe the film overall. It’s a slow burn, but it finds its fun in both camp and otherwise, and is a great testament to how one person can create a career out of finding one narrative and following it through to its end.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970)

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fourhalfstar

The trailer for L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, better known in the U.S. as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, explicitly references Alfred Hitchcock, who supposedly said that Dario Argento, “That Italian fellow,” was beginning to make him nervous. Plumage was the first film directed by Argento, who was already relatively well known as a screenwriter, and the reference to the Master of Suspense in the film’s advertising is well placed, as the traces of Hitchcock’s influence are all over this film like fingerprints at a murder scene; this is not a criticism, per se, but it is nonetheless true. Specifically, I found myself thinking of Psycho from the film’s first onscreen murder, which featured no flesh to blade contact and instead focused on slashing motions and splashes of blood. The connection to that most well known of Hitchcock’s works moved from subtext to text at the film’s conclusion, which featured a voice-over from a mental health professional explaining the psychological motivations of the killer, just as the 1960 film had used an expert to explicate Norman Bates’s madness.

If one must steal, it’s smartest to steal from the best, and Argento’s homages did not end with Hitchcock, as he also lifted the appearance of the killer in Plumage from fellow Italian horror master Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. I mention all this not to imply that Plumage is a retread of other, better films; in fact, Plumage would be an excellent movie at any point in a filmmaker’s career, and the fact that it was Argento’s first feature is, frankly, astounding. There is a lavish attention to detail in composition, color, and framing that is already on display in this freshman effort, and although he would refine this palette over the course of his career (at least until his latter day works, which leave much to be desired), there is a rawness, a viscerality, to those elements here that works in the film’s favor. Plumage is just as much a precursor for and inspiration of the slasher genre as Psycho, precognitions of a style and type that were freshly emerging from the depths of the subconscious and which would be codified a few years later in John Carpenter’s Halloween. And, to a modern audience, Plumage has something that neither of those films has: a surprise ending that hasn’t bled into the mainstream via pop-cultural osmosis, meaning that you, dear reader, are much more likely to find a surprise here.

The film follows handsome American Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante, most recognizable to a modern audience as Nino Schibetta from the first season of Oz) as he prepares to return home from Rome, where a series of young women have been murdered, to New York with his model girlfriend, Giulia (Suzy Kendall). Walking home from collecting his paycheck for a completed project, he passes an art gallery wherein he witnesses a struggle between Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi) and a figure clad in a dark latex jacket and hat. She is stabbed, and Sam is trapped in a glass enclosure when he attempts to help. The police arrive, and suspicion is cast on both Sam and Monica’s husband, gallery owner Alberto (Umberto Raho); Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) initially confiscates Sam’s passport, but eventually realizes that he is innocent when Sam becomes obsessed with finding the killer. Sam’s investigation leads to being stalked, objectified by an aging antiques dealer, attacked by a former boxer with a heroin habit, and fed cat meat by a mad hermit painter, but he eventually finds the truth… in a surprising place.

There are some moments in the film that are distinctly odd or unsettling when compared to modern sentiment, although I must admit I cannot be certain whether this dissonance is the result of cultural differences between nations or eras. Morosini has Sam view a line-up of perverts, whose crimes include such heinous items as contributing to the delinquency of a minor alongside presumably consensual “sins” as sadomasochism and sodomy; it’s a scene which is ultimately pointless, and its inclusion is puzzling. There is undoubtedly a sexual undercurrent to all slasher films that feature, completely or simply in large part, victims of a feminine persuasion; that has been discussed in many essays by more academic minds than mine, but suffice it to say that this is present in this film as well, although the revelations of the film’s final third call into question some of the assumptions that could otherwise be made about the sexual politics of this specific film. In order to preserve the viewing experience, I won’t get into that here, but I will say that the sexual violence of the film is no more intentionally titillating than that of Psycho, and is relatively tame by current standards. More disappointing, in my opinion, is the utter victimization of Giulia when she is trapped in her apartment by the killer; she is utterly helpless, and she does make several stabs (pardon the pun) at defending herself, but her hysteria while doing so reflects the contemporary sexism of the era a lot more clearly than when the killer rips a victim’s undergarments off.

All in all, Plumage is an excellent movie, and well worth tracking down if you get the chance. There are several different versions floating around, but the differences between them are minor and inconsequential; I recommend the two disc release from Blue Underground for its faithfulness to the 35mm print and the wealth of special features. The film has a rapid pace that horror movies of the era are not generally known for, and the kind of attention to cinematic technique that most films in general fail to capture. It’s a classic for a reason.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Sole Survivor (1983)

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threehalfstar

“Before there was Final Destination, there was Sole Survivor,” proudly proclaims Code Red’s 2008 DVD release of 1983 indie horror film Sole Survivor. There are some superficial similarities between the two, notably a plane crash, psychic visions, “accidents” aimed at the survivor of said crash, and a scene with a coroner that helps explain the film’s plot, but the two films are different in execution and concept, and I daresay the older, cheaper, and admittedly somewhat sloppier film is superior. The Final Destination series’ bread-and-butter was constructing tension through shots of elaborate Rube Goldbergian death traps falling into place in order to lead those characters who managed to cheat death into a gruesome end. Directed by Thom Eberhardt, whose inarguably classic film Night of the Comet premiered just one year later, 1983’s Sole Survivor lacks the kind of frenetic energy that characterizes the more modern film and its sequels. Instead, there is a quiet intensity to it, and I was surprised by how haunting some of the imagery was. For instance, in the first sequence of the film, Karla (Caren Larkey) awakes after having a psychic vision of Denise (Anita Skinner) strapped to her airplane seat, placid with shock, surrounded by a rustic field strewn with debris and broken bodies. Later in the film, Denise is trapped in an underground parking garage, and she is first seen only in beautifully composed long shots, before she begins running and quick film splices are made as support beams pass between her and the camera, in a scene reminiscent of the oft-referenced behind-the-columns transformation from The Twilight Zone‘s “The Howling Man.” Eberhadt also edited the film, and cinematographer Russell Carpenter went on to a fairly distinguished career, working as the director of photography for James Cameron in the nineties (notable highlights include being D.P. on both True Lies and Titanic, the latter of which earned him an Oscar). This was the first film for both of them, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from a purely aesthetic standpoint, despite the film’s issues with pacing.

After an effectively unsettling cold open of a bloodied and armed woman riding a bus past closed shops full of mannequins on a Christmas-season evening, we see the same woman sitting in a field surrounded by body parts and airplane debris, in the scene mentioned above. It’s the last chance for actress Karla Davis, an over-the-hill former starlet who was blacklisted because her psychic visions (perceived by producers to simply be delusions brought on by alcohol use) made her too difficult to work with. She awakes after dreaming of Denise’s plane crash and tries to convince her agent to warn her, but he ignores her. Later, Denise is rushed to the hospital for treatment by the dreamy doctor Brian Richardson (Kurt Johnson, who unfortunately died of AIDS-related illness in 1986 at only 33), who is attracted to her but is concerned that she is masking her survivor’s guilt, as she seems to simply feel lucky to survive. After seeing an apparition of a soaked girl and nearly being crushed by a truck with no driver, Denise is taken home by her neighbor, a 19 year old party girl named Kristy (Robin Davidson), whose parents are absent for the course of the film.

Karla has great difficulty completing her work on the coffee commercial that Denise is producing. She is distracted and zoned out, and she tells Denise about her visions. Denise continues to experience inexplicable events, like a man appearing on the road and driving her onto the shoulder, an elevator with a mind of its own that deposits her in an underground garage where she is menaced by a ghoulish troublemaker, and a creepy figure standing in the rain watching from across the street as she and Richard have dinner. It’s very atmospheric and intriguing, and the composition of the images makes the sections of the film in which little happens more intriguing and intense. There’s a sharp turn around the hour mark, however, when it is revealed that the spectres haunting Denise are not the spirits of those who died in the crash, as one expects, but reanimated corpses. It’s never made clear why the supernatural force that Denise theorizes is trying to end her because she survived the crash would go about reanimating corpses to fulfill its goal, or why it targets people other than Denise, but this is not a movie that gets bogged down in those particular details.

Larkey, who financed the film along with her husband, appears in the special features in a ten minute interview alongside Eberhardt, and they discuss the fact that they wanted to produce a low-budget movie and hopefully make a return on their investment; they mention that with their budget, they could have made either a horror or a sexploitation flick, so they took the high road. Unfortunately, the film was financially unsuccessful. The film passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors with a cast mostly made up of women, and there’s some great dialogue to punch up some of the more static moments. (My favorite line comes when Roxie, the ditzy but spiritually curious friend of Kristy says she has seen God; when asked what he looked like, she says he was “Not great, like he wasn’t eating right or something.” That’s one for the ages, honestly.) The film was released on Vestron VHS in 1985, but Code Red’s out-of-print DVD is release from seven years ago is the only release on contemporary media; despite the not-great mono sound mix, I recommend checking it out if you can find a copy, for the imagery if nothing else. Unlike a lot of cheaply made horror movies from that era, this one stands up.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Trainwreck (2015)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

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fourhalfstar

Trainwreck is a weird movie. Culturally, we are no longer standing on the threshold of a new era in which comedy, especially raunchy comedy, is the domain of men—but we haven’t finished crossing into that new world on the other side, either. It’s likely we’ve all heard the story about how Amy Poehler took a definitive stance against subliminal sexism in the SNL writers’ room stating that she was there to be funny, not cute; we all know how Bridesmaids was a huge hit that surprised our dudebro friends who thought that women couldn’t be funny or gross, and how that opened the door for fare like Trainwreck (I personally prefer the widely-reviled The Sweetest Thing for its uninhibited provocativeness, but that’s neither here nor there). Comedy Central, formerly the home of media catering exclusively to douches and douches in training, now features transgressive shows like Key & Peele, Another Period, and Broad City, helmed by and starring women and people of color in the timeslots that used to feature Adam Corolla and Jimmy Kimmel mocking little people and ogling women on trampolines. Sure, Daniel Tosh still finds his home there, but he’s old news now, and I’d be surprised if Tosh.0 exists beyond 2017. And, of course, that’s where Amy Schumer’s series airs.

Inside Amy Schumer, recently having completed its third season, is easily one of the most insightful and thoughtful shows on air. A sketch comedy show featuring interstitial footage from Schumer’s stand-up routines, the show has skewered toxic patriarchy and the roles women are forced to play in society, from a sketch in which various successful women in STEM fields participate in a panel in which none of them can stop apologizing, portraying the way women are trained to be “sorry” about everything, to the now viral sketch parodying Friday Night Lights to address the issue of sexual violence against young women, at once targeting both rape culture and the deification of high school athletics culture, and the intersectionality between these two social problems. My personal favorite is the sketch in which Amy’s character attempts to play the military first-person-shooter that her boyfriend is obsessed with; she selects to play as a woman, and said video game avatar is immediately the victim of sexual assault. When given the opportunity to report the assault, the game’s narrator attempts to talk her out of doing so, asking “Did you know he has a family?” The pixelated assailant is convicted at court martial, but his commanding officer disregards the ruling while Amy’s soldier character is relegated to a lifetime of paperwork in retribution. Amy complains to the boyfriend, who runs off to check the message boards; they say nothing about this situation, so he declares she must have played incorrectly somehow. The sketch takes aim at so many things at once, it’s almost hard to keep track: the pervasiveness of sexual assault against women in the American armed forces, the horrible manner in which these women have their careers destroyed for reporting their assaults, the insular toxic “just us boys” attitude that permeates video game culture (the fact that the assault is a de facto result of playing as a woman, coupled the fact that there is no discussion of this gameplay mechanic online, implies that Amy is the first person to actually choose to play as a woman), and the act of “mansplaining.” Given how much of Schumer’s body of work takes aim at the absurdity and darkness of phallocentric culture and mocking that culture’s paradigms, it’s a surprise that Trainwreck follows such a standard romcom formula, albeit one populated by more colorful characters than is the norm.

The film opens with a flashback to the young Amy and her sister, Kim, being given a lecture by their father (Colin Quinn) about how monogamy is an unrealistic expectation, complete with an analogy about only being allowed to play with one doll for the rest of one’s life, especially when you occasionally want to play with a stewardess doll or the best friend of your main doll. As an adult, Amy embraces this philosophy, engaging in a series of one-night sexual encounters with various men with the caveat that she never sleeps over and never becomes emotionally attached. She’s also sleeping consistently with Steve (John Cena), who is completely oblivious to the closet that he’s living in, although this “relationship,” such as it is, comes to an end fairly early in the film’s running time when he discovers that Amy is not sleeping with him exclusively. Amy works for men’s magazine S’Nuff, where her boss, Diana (a perfect-as-always Tilda Swinton), assigns her to work on a story about sports doctor Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), and implies that Amy is up for an editor position.

The film’s most emotionally and comedically satisfying scenes, however, center around Amy’s relationship with her family. Amy’s father has recently been admitted to assisted living due to deteriorating health. He’s a Mets-obsessed alcoholic with a heart of copper, and Amy has an amicable spiritual kinship with him, despite the fact that her sister resents him for his outdated bigotry and the way that his infidelity broke up their family when she and Amy were kids. Kim (Brie Larson, always a delightful screen presence) is now married to the incredibly dorky Tom (Mike Birbiglia) and has a young stepson (Evan Brinkman) whose fascination with esoteric miscellany Amy finds annoying. Both male characters are odd in a way that the audience can’t help but find endearing and charming despite the fact that Amy finds them, and the culturally normative lifestyle they represent in spite of their individual eccentricities, off-putting. Kim is genuinely happy with her family unit, soon to include a new baby; she also tries to convince Amy that she, too, will one day find fulfillment in embracing the narrative of domesticity. Amy’s having none of that… at first.

The plot outline of the romcom is nothing new, and there haven’t been many tweaks to the idea since the genre crystallized into a single formula as part of the Meg Ryan oeuvre. Woman is in an unfulfilling or boring relationship; this relationship ends, and Woman dedicates herself to the abstract art of self-understanding or focusing on her career; despite her protestations, Woman’s Friend or Friends manage to put her in a situation where she meets Love Interest; Woman falls for Love Interest, but forced drama and farcical misunderstandings push the two apart; finally, one party makes a grand sweeping gesture to demonstrate their love for the other party, they kiss, fin.

Since watching Trainwreck, a movie that I unabashedly enjoyed and found riotously funny, I’ve spent a great deal of time meditating on the ways that Schumer’s script managed to find something novel and original in that formula and exploring those nooks and crannies to mine for comedy gold—at least in the first hour. Like Greg Kinnear in You’ve Got Mail (and Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle, Liev Schrieber in Kate & Leopold, etc.), Cena’s Steve is a disposable love interest. Unlike his genre forbears, however, he does fulfill Amy in the only way she cares about, and he extricates himself from her life not in order for a new love to bloom, but because he can’t feel secure in their relationship (and because he’s totally, totally gay). He also elaborates on Amy’s apparent flaws, and that’s where my confusion about the film’s thesis lies; Amy likes to drink and smoke pot and have noncommittal sex, and anyone familiar with Schumer’s comedy knows that she views these activities as lacking moral or ethical components. Who cares if someone’s taking puffs off of a one-hitter during a pretentious indie movie called The Dogwalker, as long as it’s not hurting anyone? Right? But her inability to communicate with Steve because she is stoned does hurt him. And, at the end of the movie, she gives her liquor and drug paraphernalia away in order to take the next step in her life and commit to her love for Aaron, implying that being a pothead really was a character flaw, and not just a characteristic.

I’m not really sure what to make of this. For the last hour of the film, I kept expecting some twist to occur that would further subvert the tropes of the genre the way that the first hour had–maybe Aaron and Amy don’t end up together, or some other variation from the romcom norm. Instead, after Amy meets Aaron and falls into a relationship with him in spite of her misgivings about a heteronormative monogamous lifestyle, the formula plays out fairly standardly. There is something new about the way that the friction between the breeding couple comes not from lies (Amy makes no apologies for or attempts to hide her party-hard lifestyle) or misunderstandings, but from slowly building unspoken resentment of Amy’s choices on Aaron’s part and Amy’s struggles with grief over her father’s death, but this alone isn’t enough to mitigate the predictability of that final scene where Woman and Love Interest declare their love for each other. There’s just something about it that doesn’t feel like it was created by the same Amy Schumer who spent an entire episode of her show appropriating the structure of 12 Angry Men to satirize the way American men are socialized to treat women as sex objects, regardless of the lack of an inherent connection between talent and conformity to a particular beauty ideal.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a funny movie, probably the funniest I’ve seen in theaters in years. The comedy is sometimes broad, sometimes particular, always insightful, and biting; the relationships between Amy and her father and Amy and Kim are emotionally resonant in ways that are superior to most dramas. I just can’t help feeling a little let down because the movie wasn’t as iconoclastic or transgressive as I wanted it to be. It’s not an “anti-romcom,” it’s a romcom that’s smarter, funnier, and more inventive than its predecessors–but it’s a romcom nonetheless. That’s not a negation of the film’s inventiveness, but it is an accurate assessment. Regardless, it’s a delightful movie, and not to be missed.

–Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ant-Man (2015)

/ swampflix / 25 Comments

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fourhalfstar

When I was a kid, I had a deep and abiding fondness for any film or movie property that featured small people finding novel uses for normal-sized implements. I voraciously read The Borrowers and the sequels to it that my local library happened to have, and I have clear memories of the television series The Littles airing in the mornings before kindergarten, although I’m sure it was well into syndication by then. My absolute favorite, however, was always Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, with its theme park-esque magnification of the trials and travails of one’s own backyard (including one particularly nasty scorpion, which I have no doubt instilled a phobia of the arachnid in an entire generation of children, myself included). Ant-Man has many moments that directly reminded me of sequences in Honey. Part of that might be that the Alamo Drafthouses specialize in editing together interesting footage tangentially related to the film being screened, and my nostalgia goggles were primed due to the inclusion of the scene from Honey in which the Szalinski’s daughter first befriends Anty; moreover, Ant-Man takes pleasure in revisiting the magic of the ant’s eye view. Overall, it’s a fun ride.

Comedy staple Paul Rudd stars as Scott Lang, a recently released ex-con who was incarcerated after hacking into a corporation’s computer system in order to refund millions that were acquired through overcharging customers. His primary goal now is to once again become a part of the life of his young daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson; fellow Young Avengers fans know Cassie as the future Stature). In order to do so, Scott has to convince his ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer, reduced here to playing “somebody’s mom/ex-wife” as she so undeservedly often is; see also: Jurassic World) that he’s capable of handling that kind of responsibility. Complicating matters is Paxton (Bobby Canavale), a San Francisco detective and Maggie’s new fiancé. At the core, this is a pretty domestic story. You’ve probably seen that movie before; I know I have. That’s where the super-science comes in.

In 1989, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), creator and original occupant of the Ant-Man suit, walked away from S.H.I.E.L.D. in the hopes of preventing them from weaponizing the technology to create an army of insect-sized soldiers. Now, several years deep into retirement, Pym is back to prevent his unbalanced former protégé (Corey Stoll), who has recreated his technology and foresees its potential use as a weapon both for the military and for suppressing civilian protest and dissent, from auctioning his “Yellowjacket” technology to the highest bidder. While Scott is unable to find gainful employment due to his past conviction, Hank sets a plan in motion to enlist Scott’s burgling skills to infiltrate his old company and destroy the Yellowjacket project before S.H.I.E.L.D.–or HYDRA–can get their hands on it.

There are a lot of pleasant surprises here, but first: the negatives. I still think it’s absurd that we’ve gotten an Ant-Man movie before a Black Widow feature, and it’s telling that the bare-bones recap above doesn’t mention Luis (Michael Peña) or Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), both of whom play ostensibly major roles in the film but who can be excised from a plot summary without losing significant detail. If the final battle between Ant-Man and Yellowjacket seems familiar, that’s probably because it’s incredibly similar to the final battle from the first Iron Man: two men in similarly powered suits fight each other, and the hero defeats the bald, progressively less sane villain using his superior knowledge of the suit’s technology and that technology’s limitations. It’s a bit of a retread of other movies, both within and without the Marvel Universe, right down to the way that Hope eventually falls for Scott—not that I can blame her. I mean, have you ever looked at Paul Rudd’s eyes? He’s a dreamboat.

My initial skepticism about this movie mirrored my early skepticism for Guardians of the Galaxy: “Sure, expand the scope of the franchise–but why this property?” Ant-Man couldn’t possible live up to the standard of a movie that turned schlubby everyman Chris Pratt into a legitimate movie star, but the hype for Rudd’s vehicle doesn’t oversell the inarguably fun, likable, watchable movie that Ant-Man is. As a CGI-heavy flick, it had the potential to look like computer generated garbage (again, see also: Jurassic World), but at no point did the imagery take me out of the moment the way other recent movies have. Although Lilly is underutilized, the groundwork for her larger future involvement in the franchise is laid well (comic book fans will probably guess in what capacity, but I won’t spoil that here), and Peña works well as a character suited both for comic relief and surprising heroism. An extended cameo from the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) seems somewhat tacked on, but does well to remind us that this relatively grounded entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still part of a larger narrative, and Mackie is always a welcome screen presence. Unlike gloating trillionaire Tony Stark, Scott Lang is a much more identifiable, sympathetic, and likable character, which makes for a more interesting and compelling character. And, as cited above, the sequences that feature tiny Scott navigating the normal world, but magnified, are a treasure—Scott flying around on the back of his flying ant steed, Antony, was a particular highlight.

And, I’ll go out on a limb to hang myself here, Ant-Man was a better movie than Age of Ultron was. The second Avengers movie was never going to be able to recreate the magic of the first, because the novelty of seeing heroes team up had, if not “worn off,” at least dulled. AoU suffered from too many characters and a plot that was more interesting in theory than in practice, and the studio-mandated trimming of certain storylines left the film feeling sloppy and unrefined in many places. Ant-Man, on the other hand, makes for a much more satisfying film by grounding itself with realistic and relatable character arcs for most of the main cast and focusing on one major event, the heist, instead of over-inundating the audience with by attempting to create an endless series of “Wow” moments. It’s not the best of the Marvel franchise, but it is the best of 2015, and I’m more excited to see what lies ahead for Ant-Man than I am for other, more popular MCU characters.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond