tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323582192024-03-05T21:45:22.764-08:00The Delirious CinemaVhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.comBlogger139125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-74452648082302105152019-02-02T14:53:00.001-08:002019-02-02T14:53:50.388-08:00#MonthlyBookChallenge – January, 2019.
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#MonthlyBookChallenge
– January, 2019.</div>
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Well,
this month has been crazy busy! Stephen King's and Richard Chizmar's
utterly charming “Gwendy's Button Box” seems like so long ago...
purchased at an Indigo Boxing-Day Sale, this was the first book of
the month for me. I went on to read, upon recommendation (and to
which I have fully appreciated this recommendation), “The Bullet
Journal Method” – wannabe organizers, get ready to change our
life! And I finally got through – or, rather, I finally gave my
undivided attention to – Philip Kerr's Nazi-noir-thriller “Prague
Fatale”, based around the novels of Agatha Christie, and quite good
fun to read, too. I also finally introduced myself to Thomas Pynchon
after years of curiosity, thanks to a local library sale, with “The
Crying of Lot 49”, a very weird but electric
hippie-underground-caper. I have come to believe that only Pynchon
can make a caper story completely <i>un-</i>caper-like, as he'd
apparently also created the ultimate <i>un-</i>noir noir thriller
“Inherent Vice”. I think I'll track that one down next. I also,
finally (and surprising that I waited this long?) checked out the
writings of the Marquis de Sade, “The Mystified Magistrate” and
“Philosophy in the Bedroom”, the latter book being of several
catalystic influences for the films of Jess Franco. Lastly, I read JB
Priestley's “An Inspector Calls”, a play that was brought to my
attention during these strange times of social shaming, bullying, and
the suicides of young people (please check out Jon Ronson, by the
way, if your interest is piqued); Priestley's play is from 1912, if
memory serves, but is in context now a chilling prediction of the
power social media, and specifically social media shaming, can have
on people. “An Inspector Calls” is still in print today and has
also been adapted into a graphic novel, exemplifying its literary
relevance today, over a hundred years later. </div>
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--V.</div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-44484603994944997792019-01-02T15:43:00.003-08:002019-01-02T15:44:48.648-08:003 Books a Month – December (Holiday Reading)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I'm
seriously impressed that we've been able to continue this
#3booksamonth challenge going since the spring of 2018 – but here
we are, and Happy New Year to everyone! My first book of December
seems so long ago it could've been months ago. It was Peter Straub's
brilliant and deeply insightful serial killer novel “Koko”, and
for those of you who </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">think
</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">you
may know Straub's name, I urge you to think about “The Talisman”,
his famous collaboration with Stephen King. But “Koko” is one of
the best horror novels I've read in a long, long time. It's a very
rich book for the horror genre, but the picture it ultimately paints
is vast as well as deep, weaving the mystery of the killer and those
who attempt to find him or her with or without the help of the
police, with the backdrop of the horrors of the Vietnam war, bot on
and off the battlefield. It's complex and brilliant. Following that,
I took a trip back to Dean Koontz land with his old
horror/sci-fi/suspense novel “Lightning”, which I found at a
Value Village while </span></span></b></div>
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searching for a different book entirely.
“Lightning” is exciting and satisfying, as with most of Koontz'
early genre works, it's entire out-of-reach in terms of identifiable
protagonists, but you do love his good guys, regardless, they're just
so perfectly perfect. Like how fudge is sweeteningly sweet. But,
hell, who doesn't like fudge, right? A novel like “Lightening” is
what happens when a movie like “The Terminator” inspires a
time-travel scenario in another creative writer.
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
third book (of four this month for me, all just barely squeezed in by
New Year's Day) is actually an amazing, inspiring self-help book
titled “You Are a Badass at Making Money”, which was recommended
to me by Nicki, who said, “You're almost there, sweetie, I think
you need to read this”. Whether you think you need to read
something like this or not, it is a good, inspiring read by an
inspired author. I closed the year out with the 1926 short novel
“Dream Story” (aka “Traumnovelle”) by author Arthur
Schnitzler, which was the basis for one of my go-to Christmas films,
</span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Eyes
Wide Shut</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
by Stanley Kubrick. In the closing credits of </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Eyes
Wide Shut </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">it
states that Kubrick's film was “Inspired by” the book... No, it
was wholly based on Schnitzler's material, even using dialogue lifted
directly from the book for the film version. All books this month are
highly recommended (as usual). </span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>--V. </i></span></span></b></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-19715778353411072922018-12-02T14:38:00.000-08:002018-12-02T14:38:06.532-08:003 Books a Month – November (Fall Reading... Still in the Mood for Horror)
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<strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">After
taking the first 10 days off from the Reading Challenge in November,
and following the first regular-sized novel, I was then forced to
move to some shorter novels for fear of not being able to live up to
the 3-book challenge this month. A couple of these shorter ones were
by Stephen Kin / Richard Bachman, and since his new book “Elevation”
clearly states that it is in fact a </span></span></strong><strong><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">novel
</span></i></strong><strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">right
there on the front cover, then I'm going to say this swift little
number totally counts. “Elevation” is a read-it-in-one-sitting
novel, to be sure, it actually turned out to be one of my favourites
by Stephen King, following an outrageous premise with our trusted
author guiding the rather poignant plot through his well-drawn-out
characters. This I read after the so-so “The Longest Night”, an
old direct-to-paperback novel by 80s horror scribe J.N. Williamson.
The book started off well, with a violent shoot-out in an old
bordello, but the the ghost story remained at a simmer despite the
good characters. I was actually really looking forward to this one,
too. So back to King (or Bachman, rather), for the last of the
original Bachman books that I'd never read – “The Running Man”.
I remember I'd tried to ready this book back in 1987 after finding a
paperback copy featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Save-On-Foods –
and promptly lost interest when it was clear withing the first two
chapters that this was going to be </span></span></strong><strong><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">nothing
</span></i></strong><strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">like
the Schwarzenegger actioneer... Actually, I'm glad I waited, I would
not have appreciated the biting dystopian satire as much back then.
(Try reading this thing now in post-9/11 Trump times. Yikes). Still
needing my retro-horror fix (I guess), I came across a copy of Harry
Adam Knight's “Worm”, about the attack of several gigantic worms
– and I was hugely surprised by this one – not just fast-paced
and gory, but really well written, to boot, and the horror circled
around a neo-noir-ish hard boiled world. I found out later that Harry
Adam Knight was actually a pseudonym for a celebrated Australian
author, who'd had a handful of his genre novels turned into films
during his lifetime (he died in 2005). After these four horror novels
(well, maybe “Elevation” wasn't exactly horror), I had the
inspired notion that I could get two more “Preacher” books in –
alas, I got one down. But overall, not too shabby for missing the
first third of the month. I'll be starting December with the next
“Preacher” graphic novel, though. </span></span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>--V.</i> </span></span></strong></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-30315131451651158722018-10-30T15:20:00.001-07:002018-10-30T15:20:45.689-07:003 Books a Month – October (Scary Readings)
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<strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Okay,
quick re-cap although we're five month into this now – lovely wife
and partner Nicole D'Amato created a three-book-a-month challenge.
For October, I may have leaned slightly towards Stephen King. And it
may have been a little infectious. Not only was 1408 one of the
Halloween horror movies watched (re-watched) this month, but Nicki
was compelled to delve into King's “Pet Sematary” over a re-watch
of Mary Lambert's incredible film version. Admittedly, I also had
only read King's “Pet Sematary” novel earlier this year. However,
I feel I made up for that infraction by consuming not only one of my
favourite Bachman Book (and King's least favourite), “Roadwork”.
I had no expectations for this novel and found it King at some of his
most mundanely humane – and I actually mean this in a very good
way. His take on marriage and human relationships are far ahead of
his then-young years (the novel was written in the seventies,
post-'Salem's Lot). </span></span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Adding to this I actually, </span></span></strong><strong><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">finally,
</span></i></strong><strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">read
“The Skin Trade” (aka “Dark Visions”) which includes stories
by Stephen King, Dan Simmons (as I continues the exploration of his
work from last month's “Lovedeath”), and George RR “Game of
Thrones” Martin, <span id="goog_653948631"></span><span id="goog_653948632"></span>in his experimental horror days. The standout of
this book, for me, was an otherwise-unpublished novella by Stephen
King titles </span></span></strong><strong><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Dedication.
</span></i></strong><strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Can't
explain that one here, but should be read, and I was so glad that it
was at least published as part of this literary genre anthology. </span></span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I
also worked in a retrospective of Ray Russell's gothic works,
published by Penguin and curated by filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro,
titled “Haunted Castles”. Ray Russell is fast become one of my
favourite underrated genre writers. (If you can get it, please read
his short novel “A Case against Satan”). </span></span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And lastly, while I was
fully intending to take in yet another Preacher graphic novel, that
intention was thwarted whan I came across a novel by Craig Spector –
one half of the 80s-90s splatterpunk team of Skipp/Spector – in a
thrift shop for a buck. Truthfully, I'd been interested in this book,
“To Bury the Dead”, for quite some time. I'd read one of John
Skipp's solo efforts (post-”Animals”), but I was curious about
Craig Spector's solo work as well. During the reading of “To Bury
the Dead”, I have to admit, I was mostly left with the feeling that
from Spector's point of view, his writing really benefited from his
previous partnership of John Skipp. Skipp's writing is more
pared-down, pulpy, fast and furious. While Craig Spector undoubtedly
maintains a high energy to his writing, it's thickly steeped in
machismo and patriarchal heroism; it's testosterone-fueled to the
point of being a little eyebrow-raising in these times. As fast as I
was burning through the pages of “To Bury the Dead”, I was
constantly and uncomfortably aware of the author's then-ideas of
male-dominated ego-heroism. However, through the last fifty or so
pages, things took a turn towards the existentially philosophical,
turning something that at first appeared bizarrely conservative and
right-wing into a work that explored ideas of, overall, understanding
– which sort of saved this novel for me (and took it in a turn
towards the surprising liberal). If anything, Spector's novel ends up
being an experience in the complexities of Americans' personal
beliefs and politics, and ideals that may have been built in the
blood of America but has also softened in the education of the
people. I'm actually glad I read this novel for the first time in the
currently heated times of America, Americans, and their politics. It
gives a strange light to Spector's work. Conversely, of you might be
interested in his ex-writing-partner's anarchic horror-lit, may I
recommend Skipps's “The Long Last Call”. Next month, I'll be back
on Preacher! </span></span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">--Vince </span></span></strong>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-90210854925860429762018-10-07T15:41:00.000-07:002018-10-07T15:41:09.628-07:00And now, an Unused Article originally written for Absolute Underground...
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="background: transparent;"><span id="goog_1211965276"></span><span id="goog_1211965277"></span>Cabin
Fever (and Streaming the Horror)</span></b></span></span></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">No,
not Cabin Fever the film, cabin fever as in cabin fever – being
locked up indoors for long periods of time without much relief from
the situation. Anyone experiencing the wet cold winters in Canada (or
those who have seen </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">The
Shining </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">a
thousand times) will know what I'm getting at. Many years ago, barely
into my double-digits age, there was a long summer that was just as
wet as any winter Vancouver had ever seen, and I'd spent my days –
quite literally, </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">every
day </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">that
August month, walking back and forth to the local video store and
spending a few dollars on one or two tapes at a time, trekking
through the rain to bring them back to my house where I'd hole up in
the basement den and watch movies like </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Out
of Bounds </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">and
</span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Friday
the 13</span></i></span></span></em><em><sup><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">th</span></i></span></span></sup></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">
Part V. </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">The
downstairs den wasn't really in a basement – not quite. We lived in
one of those architecturally unique Vancouver homes where the foyer
was the only part of the house that was even close to ground-level.
Then you'd have to choose your destination: upstairs, a
storey-and-a-half over the driveway, or downstairs, half-buried into
the ground, where all the windows were half-height and set closer up
to the low ceilings so that you could see over the grass on the front
lawn. Anyway, it was down in that sort-of basement that I'd spent
that wet summer getting an education in exploitation cinema. However,
it isn't 1985 anymore, and you should consider yourself lucky if you
still have an actual operating video rental store near where you
live. </span></span></span></span></em>
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<em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">And
now some really good horror can be found on most of the mainstream
VOD streaming services now – the only problem, I find, is often how
the search algorithms are set up on these platforms (not very
horror-fan-friendly, in my opinion), but we'll get to that soon. For
right now I thought it might be cool to feature some of the horror
gens I've found streaming directly into my own home, especially for
those downpouring days where you really don't want to leave the
house.</span></span></span></span></em></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">Taking
Netflix for a spin, while I have come across a few said gems, this is
actually the streaming platform that I find the most frustration when
it comes to its search options. However, the ones that I have
discovered have been unexpectedly good – the Netflix “Original”
slowburn gothic horror film </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">I
Am the Pretty Things that Lives in the House </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">has
a palpable Stephen King / Shirley Jackson literary-horror feel to its
central ghost story and outlaying flashback scenes, making for a
worthwhile entry in the haunted house canon. Another good haunting
lies in the indie arthouse horror film </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Darling,
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">a
quick Larry Fessenden-produced romp that gives us its ghost story
laced with madness and generous helpings of dark humour. </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">The
Bottom of the World, </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">unavailable
on any physical home media format in North America so there's no
other choice </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">but
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">to
stream it, stars Jenna Malone (from </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Neon
Demon) </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">in
a similarly hallucinatory narrative as she becomes wrapped in a maze
of subconscious and other-worldly realities; it's another quick
arthouse genre film (around 80 minutes) that feels like an inspired
collision between </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Twin
Peaks, Psycho, </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">and
</span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Jacob's
Ladder. Bottom of the World </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">is
actually one of my favourites from Netflix, along with the weirdly
erotic and murdery </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Sun
Choke, </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">which
stars classic genre fave Barbara “Re-Animator” Crampton in what I
think is one of her best screen performances ever. One of the best
straight-hitting horrors on Netflix, though, in terms of sheer
intensity and suspense, is </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Hush,
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">which
takes place all in one night when a deaf and mute woman is terrorized
by a violent and clever home invader. </span></span></span></span></em>
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<em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">The
streaming platform Crave TV is, as you'd probably guessed with the
name, focused on television series – some old, and a lot that are
very new. Here you'll find the Stephen King / JJ Abrams supernatural
horror series </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Castle
Rock, </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">and
while Stephen King did not write any of the series' episodes (it's
based on a world created by King in his horror literature), the first
10-part season is, appropriately, very Stephen King in feel and
atmosphere, as the 10-part story rolls out itself much like a novel.
But it was David Lynch's return to Twin Peaks that really floored me
– this 18-episode limited series from 2017 takes place 25 years
after the last time we were invited to visit the town of Twin Peaks,
and everyone one of those 18 episodes was directed by Lynch himself.
This hallucinatory, genre-bending return to Twin Peaks does boast a
couple of episodes that are outright horror, and horror underlies
most of what's going on in a very emotional level where Lynch brings
us his subconsciously deep view of loss and agony, to an ultimately
haunting conclusion. One professional critic had opted to maintain
that the return to Twin Peaks was some of the best “cinema” of
our time, stating that in this age of digital streaming, the lines
between “television” and “cinema” continue to blur closer
together. </span></span></span></span></em>
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<em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">Continuing
my recent TV-series obsession, Amazon Prime has the first seasons of
</span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Preacher,
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">which
I've been wholly addicted to (based on the graphic novel series by
Garth Ennis). I have a preference to the Amazon VOD platform for two
reasons: </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">1.</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">
Unlike most of the titles available through Netflix, there are tons
of horror and giallo films that date earlier than 2015, and you can
also find a slew of wild independent genre films like the
over-the-top </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Peelers,
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">and
the giallo-inspired </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Glass
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">and</span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">
The Editor</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">.
And reason number </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">2,
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">the
search-links are similar to what we're used to seeing on Amazon's
shopping website, so if you see a title that looks interesting, it's
easy to open up a whole line of selections that other “Customers
Who Watched This Also Watched”, and thereby accessing hundreds of
titles that may have gone unrepresented in the initial homepage
categories. Through this somewhat intuitive browsing mode, I found a
couple of inspired independent horror films – from 2012, a German
take on the cannibal subgenre titled (very appropriately) </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Cannibal
Diner, </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">which
admittedly</span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">does
not have a high rating on the imdb, but I personally found it to be
fast-paced and very enjoyable with an engaging (and nearly
all-female) cast of characters, and it relies so heavily on the
genre's tropes that it's almost impossible not to find it bloody
charming. Not a lot of violence until near the end, which I didn't
mind, and what there was was fairly gory – the story is basically a
young woman who finds herself lost in the woods runs afoul of a </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Texas
Chainsaw-</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">type
of family in an abandoned chemical factory. </span></span></span></span></em>
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<em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">I
feel compelled to mention that Amazon Prime is one of the only places
you'll find Spike Lee's gorgeous and thoughtful vampire remake of the
70s cult film </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Ganja
and Hess – </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">Lee's
version re-titled </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Da
Sweet Blood of Jesus. </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">Also
on Amazon's streaming service we'll find another Larry Fessenden
indie film (actually, we'll find a lot of things, from the films of
Umberto Lenzi and Lucio Fulci to the crazy flicks of Charles Band's
Full Moon) – called </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Silver
Bullets, </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">and
despite what Amazon will tell you, </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Silver
Bullets </span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">was
</span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">not
</span></i></span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">produced
in 1970; rather it's a modern low-budget erotic and existential movie
from 2011 that eventually turns into a horror movie, after folding
dream- and nightmare-fantasies over its own neo-realism and into the
fantastic cinema of, well, werewolf films. </span></span></span></span></em>
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<em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">A
lot of the independent horror films featured on these streaming
services came from film festivals like SXSW, and now without the
video stores of yesteryear to bring them in front of genre audiences,
a lot of them are leaping directly from the festival circuit to
Video-On-Demand platforms. And while it's probably abundantly clear
that a large chunk of these personal horror selections lean towards
the kaleidoscopic, I have found something hugely engaging and even
inspiring with each of them, whether they're 75 minutes or 18 hours
long. Follow this list and you'll certainly be in for a mindbending
end to your winter months.</span></span></span></span></em></div>
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</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">-Vince
D'Amato</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">https://darksidereleasing.com</span></i></span></span></u></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(Cannibal Diner)</i></span></span></span><u><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"></span><i><span style="background: transparent;"></span></i></span></span></u></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNuqy45SHjGmbcj_T_HcCfiLUxkZcFYfFoLtz0J75ljFfoosXiS8Z2A8b8qaiYp_iTRj_CIvWuGYabIZkguErG7OEFsFaUmTOSzV_6kbVvBw78PVCW6p_vEZj1VnDbcUhQxkECXA/s1600/86_cannibal-diner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="780" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNuqy45SHjGmbcj_T_HcCfiLUxkZcFYfFoLtz0J75ljFfoosXiS8Z2A8b8qaiYp_iTRj_CIvWuGYabIZkguErG7OEFsFaUmTOSzV_6kbVvBw78PVCW6p_vEZj1VnDbcUhQxkECXA/s320/86_cannibal-diner.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrksn1uBhW9C2B-DEm9riHs1lNhSU1yViZMY_pVr3tvdE1dJZ71YaCvIJvVfhuLqG7vs4VCsGaOZimsi_CwdazwDQwoWo1cUSQy6tm8KIIL-QTGfR2YSqSNO3c30QbnHits36gMQ/s1600/86_Cannibal_Diner_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="314" data-original-width="550" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrksn1uBhW9C2B-DEm9riHs1lNhSU1yViZMY_pVr3tvdE1dJZ71YaCvIJvVfhuLqG7vs4VCsGaOZimsi_CwdazwDQwoWo1cUSQy6tm8KIIL-QTGfR2YSqSNO3c30QbnHits36gMQ/s320/86_Cannibal_Diner_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(Da Sweet Blood of Jesus)</i></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgByeTnGaxO5FbbtuzM3s_xSjj4sluSFhv0eXOAqwbE6Vda9PIjUZYO8zsLFwhy9E6i90VjRtcrPi3wfFTjvmFiHeEWlg_IMn9dhqhSRIzB5snKYJhsWIm3cq8sa5R99yftrua2hQ/s1600/86_Da-Sweet-Blood-of-Jesus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="1059" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgByeTnGaxO5FbbtuzM3s_xSjj4sluSFhv0eXOAqwbE6Vda9PIjUZYO8zsLFwhy9E6i90VjRtcrPi3wfFTjvmFiHeEWlg_IMn9dhqhSRIzB5snKYJhsWIm3cq8sa5R99yftrua2hQ/s320/86_Da-Sweet-Blood-of-Jesus.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(Darling)</i></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLYphKzWatTTU6x_qN5HkBMUsdP5VaiawDOcgmBo0A9_qS8yCA4nW3owl4mZKg1N0XW-9BzUDLkqHz-dcIk7r_aXJ7t6qozpjE5HxudxrY4EZ1q2xOGHHxGc-cyrSltgCu5M6agw/s1600/86_Darling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLYphKzWatTTU6x_qN5HkBMUsdP5VaiawDOcgmBo0A9_qS8yCA4nW3owl4mZKg1N0XW-9BzUDLkqHz-dcIk7r_aXJ7t6qozpjE5HxudxrY4EZ1q2xOGHHxGc-cyrSltgCu5M6agw/s320/86_Darling.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(Hush)</i></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAeXZ7cwkWYd7dxD4m307YAsUNvgMiBSa782cYExNHsCbJyFaSEB6bM74IppbxoobBr_DB8RrJQeLrP-xss7zIL4rHTaIoQBNQ2YyVWMYk8kk5nVZqVhZWcVw0Fn6kwucgtgm5Yg/s1600/86_hush-sxsw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAeXZ7cwkWYd7dxD4m307YAsUNvgMiBSa782cYExNHsCbJyFaSEB6bM74IppbxoobBr_DB8RrJQeLrP-xss7zIL4rHTaIoQBNQ2YyVWMYk8kk5nVZqVhZWcVw0Fn6kwucgtgm5Yg/s320/86_hush-sxsw.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the Walls)</i></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRgSdvRXot630Xko0WIrqwVGnSOT2UEBhw2WypVDps8Evppw62Meoex6fafy8Vinl9h5FFVisPO-oAaEsUx9K0wUK5gv2UmdyI0OeG8n5BZ3eQ1Cnx4d9VaVcd7AZ4i_vJLEn_A/s1600/86_Iamtheprettythingthatlivesinthehouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="343" data-original-width="656" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRgSdvRXot630Xko0WIrqwVGnSOT2UEBhw2WypVDps8Evppw62Meoex6fafy8Vinl9h5FFVisPO-oAaEsUx9K0wUK5gv2UmdyI0OeG8n5BZ3eQ1Cnx4d9VaVcd7AZ4i_vJLEn_A/s320/86_Iamtheprettythingthatlivesinthehouse.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(Silver Bullets)</i></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaaVsmsYj4RCz5vt16UG8eB7Jdi-vKaDcSIl-EwXozHtB92HARZOo1kOeY3xosHUKDB1Em3M65eqWpoq0rwNqPbjizr86MKZMb7dDPDhfCT_0ZipAylhss9eAqQ9fKjzA4MwbN7A/s1600/86_SilverBullets1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaaVsmsYj4RCz5vt16UG8eB7Jdi-vKaDcSIl-EwXozHtB92HARZOo1kOeY3xosHUKDB1Em3M65eqWpoq0rwNqPbjizr86MKZMb7dDPDhfCT_0ZipAylhss9eAqQ9fKjzA4MwbN7A/s320/86_SilverBullets1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(Sun Choke)</i></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKXbVF8RR3t0VlvhJH7HQseQ7bhQMce8w9oqbA7JKjztXfzSk5hR6F8G1cxtBsQzv3YuY_8sErDn3Bq7fjKYjEzzZQ96DiCGrKKcPt0vWBj4CBVBF069C3YFUPhbaqNM5DXh2ykA/s1600/86_SunChoke.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="670" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKXbVF8RR3t0VlvhJH7HQseQ7bhQMce8w9oqbA7JKjztXfzSk5hR6F8G1cxtBsQzv3YuY_8sErDn3Bq7fjKYjEzzZQ96DiCGrKKcPt0vWBj4CBVBF069C3YFUPhbaqNM5DXh2ykA/s320/86_SunChoke.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>(Twin Peaks -- Revisited)</i></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq9vOsljMatG6UX3lDg4b4P7l3xsmXX8MuVaqpU6fzDDah0DknbtjTCEKnYDDKFUuzmIhtVRLlc0KE2NCY_2CP0sBLz8B940I76qpoZL2KuxYSB9yp9CdTQsv11pFJDvIcwKrQxw/s1600/86_Twin_Peaks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="710" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq9vOsljMatG6UX3lDg4b4P7l3xsmXX8MuVaqpU6fzDDah0DknbtjTCEKnYDDKFUuzmIhtVRLlc0KE2NCY_2CP0sBLz8B940I76qpoZL2KuxYSB9yp9CdTQsv11pFJDvIcwKrQxw/s320/86_Twin_Peaks.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;"><br /></span></i></span></span></u></span></span></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-52288637796953864402018-10-02T15:32:00.001-07:002018-10-02T15:32:25.565-07:003 Books a Month – September (The Last of the Summer Readings)<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3zXxNhaul7i09I8ckKM6kBRgNvii_kzZh14IHqoSwFXkGLwhbCY-mam5UWFALmfoCv9FhvnVYVUl-dQMKbgWjxOXKBKAddy3Wj28ZxavFt1pXiMwufM9D21T8SyMR2zbF1cOVBg/s1600/Sept_Straub.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="287" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3zXxNhaul7i09I8ckKM6kBRgNvii_kzZh14IHqoSwFXkGLwhbCY-mam5UWFALmfoCv9FhvnVYVUl-dQMKbgWjxOXKBKAddy3Wj28ZxavFt1pXiMwufM9D21T8SyMR2zbF1cOVBg/s200/Sept_Straub.jpg" width="127" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Alright,
we're officially into fall and the Halloween season! Of course that
didn't quite stop be from getting my horror on with September's book
challenge (still ongoing between Nicole D'Amato and myself – and
any friends that care to partake as sort of a self-challenge).
Strangely, my first book book of the month was only the second novel
I've ever read by the brilliant Peter Straub. Well, possibly the
first novel, as the previous book I'd read had actually been his
short story collection </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Houses
Without Doors, </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
I'd read that way back in the 90s after having finished the
Straub/King collaboration </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Talisman. </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Anyway,
I'd been in a used bookstore in Santa Monica when I accidentally came
across a bent-up recent publication of Peter Straub's 70s thriller </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">If
You Could See Me Now. </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Reading
this murder-mystery for the first time, with its dangerous smalltown
redneck flavour and supernatural creep-factor, it struck me just how
influential this novel might have been to the works of upcoming
horror authors and filmmakers – and I say </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">might
have been, </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">because
in truth I'm not sure what the critical or commercial response to
this book was when it was first published in the 70s, but I wouldn't
be surprised to find out that it actually had a direct influence on
other genre works. Moving from </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">If
You Could See Me Now </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">to
a weirdly similarly-toned </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Wasp </span></i></b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKPzG1wzPu9oHnppt8iLjRY5aGWGZ8VPEsruXsps1T0omrtz_yZyNockrVhizkbn9E5HP6UjkpTLHH4H1jnO2V_dUt0afFTSw8T4XMOSKS0vwghHJVprAX6hJ1sgI4guf0S0Sxtg/s1600/Sept_thewaspfactory.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="316" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKPzG1wzPu9oHnppt8iLjRY5aGWGZ8VPEsruXsps1T0omrtz_yZyNockrVhizkbn9E5HP6UjkpTLHH4H1jnO2V_dUt0afFTSw8T4XMOSKS0vwghHJVprAX6hJ1sgI4guf0S0Sxtg/s200/Sept_thewaspfactory.jpg" width="126" /></a></i></b></div>
<b><i>Factory </i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">by
Iain Banks, the prose in the latter novel was far more contemporary
(and should I even use the word “clever”? – I suppose that
would be subjective) yet both novels retained the same tense,
engagingly creepy, and mysterious gothic atmosphere that continually
signaled that there was so much more going on beneath the surface of
these novels' main plots. Following these two novels, I finally read
a book that I had purchased back in the 1990s (around the same time
as I'd purchased Straub's </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Houses
Without Doors</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
it would be extremely safe to assume), Dan Simmons' </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">LoveDeath
– LoveDeath </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">is
a collection of novellas dealing with the often horrifying and always
tantalizing themes of love, sex, death, and violent bloodshed. Some
of the works in this book are existentially haunting, other parts are
terrorizing, and of course, there are some decent doses of humour,
because really, what's sex and death without a little bit of nervous
laughter? Everything in Simmons' book is extremely readable, although
</span></span></b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLDMOUu89itCUlGJ_xjEEzXpfrXLz2GVKSwvERyCF77ICVuNxrLkJQNCc2eXrjBbPNWQ_WWPZcLd0QVd7uBmulA9K2Q8hWHcPAYtmGRdJbti1EPsa3VdTjQVBUBlD-r8sArXZ0SA/s1600/Sept_Lovedeath.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="437" data-original-width="300" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLDMOUu89itCUlGJ_xjEEzXpfrXLz2GVKSwvERyCF77ICVuNxrLkJQNCc2eXrjBbPNWQ_WWPZcLd0QVd7uBmulA9K2Q8hWHcPAYtmGRdJbti1EPsa3VdTjQVBUBlD-r8sArXZ0SA/s200/Sept_Lovedeath.jpg" width="136" /></a></span></span></b></div>
<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Simmons' prose is such that it quite literally demands and
simultaneously commands the reader's attention. Not concentration,
just </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">attention,
</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
thereby the reading of </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">LoveDeath
</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">felt
more intense to me than the other horror literature I'd consumed this
month – and of course, all of these books were so very appropriate
in leading into the fall/Halloween season. Finishing my three books a
couple of days before the monthly deadline, I once again went back to
</span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Preacher
</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(as
season three is still not available on Prime! Come on, Amazon!!) and
I've now gone all linear – last month, I'd read the fourth book in
the originally-compiled 9-book series (the series has since been
re-compiled and re-published in a slightly different order and
context over six books), and now I've firmly placed myself in the
proper order, having devoured </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Preacher
Vol. 1 – Gone to Texas, </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">which
collected the first seven comics in the long-running series.
Hopefully, I'll have </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Vol.
2 </span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
my hands by the end of October. </span></span></b><br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>--V. </i></span></span></b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY2eqX8uGHRI42dKWHK_S4AGV1xwHh4T_ZN5Mvs3A8_U4MD4X8clwZqKPqCfJvKCrTyCgSgO5mD6tgSfZeb-hYd8dU9f15WYk01NcX4Yp2O0u5K9nogLdVdKkWAlo5CRZ4OIH11w/s1600/Sept_Preacher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1038" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY2eqX8uGHRI42dKWHK_S4AGV1xwHh4T_ZN5Mvs3A8_U4MD4X8clwZqKPqCfJvKCrTyCgSgO5mD6tgSfZeb-hYd8dU9f15WYk01NcX4Yp2O0u5K9nogLdVdKkWAlo5CRZ4OIH11w/s200/Sept_Preacher.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></b>
</div>
Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-77230015062981190562018-09-16T12:42:00.000-07:002018-09-16T12:42:05.632-07:00Issue #69 - The Absolute Underground Papers<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #69 - originally published April, 2016)</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6VwpWp82uHx7L-jX1ZXaCqB8O_S4PMNnoX7qhXp8v7lga6Pcv5KHSb_NZipkgJg08YvvUPYc4gFQ2l9dcLhGiHHHOBsxxfjmI-DTCpvY7ZckZdQO7QkbYmlTDUw6u-3lS6VEE0w/s1600/ShockemDeadBlu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="342" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6VwpWp82uHx7L-jX1ZXaCqB8O_S4PMNnoX7qhXp8v7lga6Pcv5KHSb_NZipkgJg08YvvUPYc4gFQ2l9dcLhGiHHHOBsxxfjmI-DTCpvY7ZckZdQO7QkbYmlTDUw6u-3lS6VEE0w/s200/ShockemDeadBlu.jpg" width="158" /></a></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">It
was the summer of 1994 that I walked into the little corner store –
an independent retailer – at Richards & Pender Street in
Vancouver. It was primarily music, a used and collectible record
store; the proprietor also had a lot of CDs – but in the far back
corner of the store, as far away from the summer sun streaming in
through the large glass windows as physically possible, was a small
wooden thrift-store bookshelf that held, in no discernible order
whatsoever, used VHS tapes of all genres. Interestingly, there were
no mainstream Hollywood movies there on that shelf. There were a
couple of 80s horror films that starred a very young Bill Paxton, and
a weird-looking horror-thriller that starred Sting and was directed
by celebrated filmmaker Robert Altman with I title I have never again
come across since that day (and can no longer remember what it was).
Attempts to find this film on the internet have been fruitless, as
well, and possibly the VHS cover was using an alternate title; this
happened quite a bit in those days. I still remember Uumberto Lenzi's
</span><i>Nightmare City </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and its
Canadian-release VHS cover from the early 80s – a naked woman
hanging upside-down with her nipple torn off, and the </span><i>alternative
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">title </span><i>“City of the
Walking Dead” </i><span style="font-style: normal;">partially
obscuring said ripped-off nipple</span><i>. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Also
long forgotten was the name of this little corner used-record shop,
the shop itself has been gone for decades now, replacing by an
ever-increasingly dilapidated convenience store that is somehow,
inexplicably, still in operation to this day. I do remember, however,
having a lively conversation with the proprietor when I brought the
used VHS tape of Stuart Gordon's </span><i>Re-Animator </i><span style="font-style: normal;">up
to his counter to purchase. He was a tall, young-ish man with a
sore-looking condition of skin psoriasis all over his otherwise pale
face. I was about to pay $9.95 plus tax for this used </span><i>Re-Animator
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">tape that had be re-packed in a
black Amaray clamshell by some unknown video store long before it
ever wound up at </span><i>this </i><span style="font-style: normal;">guy's
shop, and he proceeded to explain to me why the VHS videotape in my
hands would never become valuable to any collector.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhShjSVoaGsRZEysHpsMD4JXF3LiLM2Sct3E6NMfDYxNln3DtRjImQ_-AAsjy_9uhL10tlvFZrLRgQ1iw8uq2DR43FqHM21znVaRyLBmFXsnIUjdBT0jh7j1bRRfXMsjODnvSHeCA/s1600/cityofthelivingdead1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="945" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhShjSVoaGsRZEysHpsMD4JXF3LiLM2Sct3E6NMfDYxNln3DtRjImQ_-AAsjy_9uhL10tlvFZrLRgQ1iw8uq2DR43FqHM21znVaRyLBmFXsnIUjdBT0jh7j1bRRfXMsjODnvSHeCA/s320/cityofthelivingdead1.jpg" width="201" /></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> “Look
at this,” he said, removing the videotape from inside the clamshell
case and pressing the tiny black release button that allowed the back
of the tape to swing up, exposing the magnetic tape and all of the
thin silver and white reels the tape had to wind around in order to
get from the right side to the left while playing through a VCR. “All
these moving parts. Records don't have moving parts, and that's why
they can become collectible. Something like this, all these parts and
components – it will never become collectible. These tapes won't
ever be worth anything to any collector”. I paid for my </span><i>Re-Animator
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">tape and left. </span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I still have that tape to this day, almost 22 years later.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Funnily,
I was not the only one to hold onto a couple of my old VHS horror
tapes. In fact, I literally </span><i>only</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
held onto a couple of them when the DVD revolution hit. Now, though,
it's astoundingly clear that VHS tapes have indeed become highly
coveted collectors items, some going for hundreds of dollars on eBay
and Amazon, in a time where we've gone even further beyond the
original DVD revolution of the new millennium into HD and 4K Blu-ray
disc media, creating something of a treasure trove for collectors of
all types of media from magnetic standard definition to digital
hi-def picture quality; and often, fans of niche and genre film fare
are the ones benefiting; many genre (horror) titles have survived the
advances in film media technology, and it's not unusual to see titles
that have made it across all the home video formats: Betamax, VHS,
Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray (and I'll include digital streaming in
this sentiment, as well). Of course the biggest impacts were made by
the VHS, DVD and Blu-ray formats specifically, clearly defining the
technological generations in home video history. And with these
defined generations, we see that there are also titles that had
skipped a generation, and it's amusing to me when I happen to come
across a horror or cult film title that had run out its print in the
VHS days only to make a surprise comeback on a hi-def 1080p Blu-ray
disc, while missing out on the entire DVD generation altogether. </span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Most
recently, Slasher//Video (through an output/imprint deal with the
Blu-ray distribution company Olive Films) has begun to release niche
and sought-after horror and slasher videos on Blu-ray while
incorporating the nostalgic aspects of the VHS days. These
Slasher//Video releases were not entirely imagined by design –
often, Slasher//Video (Olive Films) could only track down a Betacam
SP tape master to provide us with the digital transfer to their
Blu-ray discs – Betacam SP is a large videotape master, in standard
definition (or Standard Play, SP), that was the standard delivery
master to broadcast television and often to direct-to-video
distribution in the eighties and nineties. In the case of the
direct-to-video films, while they were nearly all originally shot on
film, they were cut together and mastered only onto standard
definition Betacam SP tapes in that bygone era of film and video
production. The very name of these tapes – </span><i>Standard </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Play
– signified the maximum video quality that the technology had
produced at that time. So now, mixing these distant generations of
video technology, Slasher//Video has given us niche horror and genre
fans a bit of an unusual and offbeat treat – we can see these
wonderfully strange, gory, exciting, and low-budget originally
direct-to-home-video horror movies in their original video/VHS
anesthetic, but on a Blu-ray disc that will never wear down, no
matter how many times the film is played at home. In the VHS days,
god forbid you would fast-forward to your favourite part of the tape
(an explosion of blood, a couple of boobs, a kickass werewolf
transformation and subsequent gory slaughter) more than a couple of
times; the tape would soon develop tracking issues and interruptive
glitches, constantly changing the way you could see your favourite
scenes. Admittedly, this is one of the charming aspects about VHS to
some collectors. But for those who are keen on reliving the nostalgia
of the VHS aesthetics with their 1980s horror obscurities,
Slasher//Video and Olive Films have fallen on something very unique
for horror fans, by delivering that VHS aesthetic on their Blu-ray
and DVD releases. I'm curious to see how Slasher//Video's new
mixed-technology retro-releases will be received by fans down the
road. For me, it gives me the chance to see some of these films that
I missed before the VHS tape went extinct, and I'm personally loving
it. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo2sPxcUddtpSgWyXtMCrBoMH2HpOkzLG7jUeY0IVgbuVSB1Wg_XJ3e4bgYg_iT6Aq8KGg4OgIdcbb98YV20vvCpLnkPI4DU8B4suXP-50QujHkSYXK5FFsT-NC222OHWOxONTew/s1600/Cinco-De-Mayo-BD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1388" data-original-width="982" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo2sPxcUddtpSgWyXtMCrBoMH2HpOkzLG7jUeY0IVgbuVSB1Wg_XJ3e4bgYg_iT6Aq8KGg4OgIdcbb98YV20vvCpLnkPI4DU8B4suXP-50QujHkSYXK5FFsT-NC222OHWOxONTew/s320/Cinco-De-Mayo-BD.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9tzz-ePymxMMpPN-fVAIvuwJL0zFc2iyfuonjizv9uwjZFOdP-c_6pgaRq1SD5jqbVCHjKiHljR5uuJZ2cMquTg4mOWwcmFPXtlX9vMMxQ7bwo6zeiePAvHDouKVBIaLNxruN1Q/s1600/Killer-Workout-BD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1394" data-original-width="985" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9tzz-ePymxMMpPN-fVAIvuwJL0zFc2iyfuonjizv9uwjZFOdP-c_6pgaRq1SD5jqbVCHjKiHljR5uuJZ2cMquTg4mOWwcmFPXtlX9vMMxQ7bwo6zeiePAvHDouKVBIaLNxruN1Q/s320/Killer-Workout-BD.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
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<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>
</div>
Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-76911322001398698222018-09-09T12:47:00.000-07:002018-09-09T12:47:06.609-07:00RE-POST SERIES: Last House on Dead End Street... The Last Enigma<div style="text-align: justify;">
(This "Re-Post Series" is a re-introduction of older writings created for a now-defunct blog from 2011. Still some interesting stuff, though! Beware, some of the old links may or may not still work).</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://creepysixtales.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/last-house-on-dead-end-street-directed-by-an-enigma/affiche-last-house-on-dead-end-street-1477-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-364" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-364" height="200" src="https://creepysixtales.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/affiche-last-house-on-dead-end-street-14771.jpg?w=223" title="affiche-last-house-on-dead-end-street-1477" width="148" /></a>Roger Watkins' 1977 indie arthouse horror film has left behind a seared imprint on my mind since I first borrowed the Barrel release/double DVD from a good friend of mine back in 2004. I think the DVD itself had been released a year or two earlier... Since then, with Barrel's DVD having become woefully long out-of-print, I was able to find a different DVD copy quite easily (and cheaply) in the UK. Watching that film again, I was no less impressed than on the first viewing. There was something so rebellious, so fucking art, so bloody horrific in its low-budgetness... It was actually kind of profound in a way. Having been reminded of this flick in 2009, I began to wonder about the man behind the film. Roger Watkins. So I did what any slave to the kind of immediate self-satisfaction the internet generation has produced would do... I Googled him. And discovered forthwith that he'd died in 2007. Shame. But this was just the beginning of my curiosity, as it quickly piqued higher.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In Barrel's double-DVD there was also a booklet included where Roger Watkins (then going by the name Victor Janos) spoke about how the distribution company had literally - and physically - <i>stolen </i>the film (yes, the actual reels of film and negatives) from him back in '73. The film never appeared again until it's release by the shady distribution company in '77. Victor/Roger never even knew his film had been released (and re-titled) at all.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Also on this DVD is a special feature - the original episode of Joe Frankiln's talk show (originally aired on February 6, 1975) where Watkins speaks intelligently (though you get the sense he's high as a kite) along with his NY film prof about his movie, then titled "The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell". All of this had intrigued me back in 2004, but what I unearthed five years later only added to the mystique of Roger Watkins. I went looking for something, some films perhaps, or <i>anything </i>he'd done since the drug-addled <i>Last House on Dead End Street.</i> Well, here is a sample of what I found... Ultimately raising more questions than solving them, during the course of a day-long internet search that went from mysterious to enigmatically creepy. Judge for yourself.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>From Wikipedia:</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>Last House on Dead End Street</i> is a horror film released in 1977...</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Few knew who actually directed the film, until Roger Watkins, who died in March 2007, posted on Internet message boards three decades after it was made saying he was behind it. The film was made in 1973, but was not released until four years later.</div>
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Watkins said he was high on amphetamines while making the film. He also said only about $800 was spent making the film, while the remaining $3,000 budgeted was used to buy drugs.</div>
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The film was virtually unavailable until Barrel Entertainment released a double-disc DVD in 2002. In the 1970s, its release was limited to grindhouse and drive-in theaters. The [original] version entitled <i>The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell</i> ran some 175 minutes in length - though the only remaining print of it in that form is thought to be stored in a New York film lab.</div>
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<b>Also From Wikipedia:</b></div>
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Roger Michael Watkins was a film director best known for the notorious 1970s movie Last House on Dead End Street He also directed several porn films. He worked with famous porn actors like Jamie Gillis and Vanessa del Rio.</div>
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<b>And from Papermag.com:</b></div>
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"I was greatly distressed to hear of the passing of <b>Roger Watkins</b>, the director of the infamous cult classic <i>Last House On Dead End Street</i> on March 6 in Apalachin, N.Y. I saw that movie on 42nd Street and it really freaked me out at the time. The director’s name listed was “<b>Victor Janos</b>” (which was just a pseudonym for Watkins). Watkins was a director, author, editor and starred in the film as <b>Terry Hawkins</b>, just released from prison after a one year drug bust. Pissed off at the world, he rounds up a few friends and they decide to direct some films aimed at a “specialized” audience of degenerates. Actual snuff films, which they can make money from and get back at society with.</div>
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Watkins shot the movie after getting out of SUNY Oneonto college in 1972. In an interview he said there was $3,000 for the shoot but only $800 was used on the movie. The rest “I think it was to buy drugs,” he said. “I didn’t spend anything on that film.” It’s original title was <i>The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell</i> (a reference from <b>Kurt Vonnegut</b>’s <i>Mother Night</i>). After it was finished it went through many shady distributors and didn’t hit theaters until 1977 as: <i>The Fun House</i> and later: <i>Last House On Dead End Street</i>, tying it into the <i>Last House On The Left</i> popularity. But as a film it still manages to unsettle -- it’s a nihilistic dark little horror masterpiece."</div>
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<b>Some of the feedback from the Papermag obituary went as follows</b>:</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><i>Elizabeth Watkins:</i></b> "I am Roger's oldest daughter and I want to thank you for posting this article and paying tribute to him. I really miss him. He was the smartest guy I've ever met..."</div>
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<b><i>Jo C. Schwarz:</i></b> "Elizabeth, I am an old friend of your dad. I am sadden by the news of his passing. Roger was the smartest man I have ever met myself. His wit and charm will sorely be missed. He often talk about how smart you were as well."</div>
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<b><i>Bob Arturi:</i></b> "Elizabeth I had the pleasure of working with your dad at Bill Kolb Ford in Blauvelt, New York. He was one of the wittiest, smartest people I ever met. I lost contact with him for a while after he left the busines, but found him a little later at another dealership. He then totally left the business to move upstate and I didn't have the opportunity to speak with him before he passed away. I can't say enough good things about him, his sense of humor, our long conversations about his life in the cinema world, and of course his tales of his family. He will always be in my thoughts."</div>
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<b><i>Barry Koch:</i></b> "Elizabeth, Your Dad roomed at my house for a while back in the late 1980s. He was a brilliant, creative, and maddeningly mercurial human being... and remains unforgettable to those who knew him in to any degree. Despite the tempests that seemed to swirl about his restless mind, he always spoke lovingly of "his girls", you and your sister.</div>
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<b><i>pedobear:</i></b> "I loved roger too we hung out together looking for young girls. i will miss you. Pedophilia died with you. R.I.H"</div>
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<b><i>ananymous:</i></b> "Pedobear, It is very important that I speak with you. You hold the key to a very important puzzle. Please, please, please email me at this address. commentsemailatgmail.com. I will make it worth your while."</div>
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<b>You can read the entire string of messages left behind at Papermag's obit <a href="http://www.papermag.com/2007/04/rip_roger_watkins.php">here</a>.</b></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-38787731901230124902018-09-02T13:40:00.000-07:002018-09-02T13:41:13.952-07:003 Books a Month – August (Summer Reading)<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7yZZ4VJ4A8plNEVjcSccJ1HCVNV5mWpmJ6BaisFZMhW0iRQmI3_7a1h_PHce1UNDC344arudMNWKIoRP1-5_jx29YzuCv_ZgWMgVKVK6uhld2ORgY9PaLTksWVZxhUbu56i37yw/s1600/Aug_Book_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="221" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7yZZ4VJ4A8plNEVjcSccJ1HCVNV5mWpmJ6BaisFZMhW0iRQmI3_7a1h_PHce1UNDC344arudMNWKIoRP1-5_jx29YzuCv_ZgWMgVKVK6uhld2ORgY9PaLTksWVZxhUbu56i37yw/s320/Aug_Book_1.jpg" width="207" /></a><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">At
first, I thought I wasn't going to meet the challenge this month!
(For those new to this, my wife Nicki and have currently have a
three-books-a-month challenge taking place – indefinitely. It
started in June). However, I actually passed the goal quite literally
(ha!) in the eleventh hour on the 31</span></span></b><b><sup><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">st</span></span></sup></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– of course, if you were to ask Nicki about it, she;d tell you that
my last book didn't count. More on that later. So, the reason I
almost didn't make the goal this August was actually in part the
fault of the first book I'd read – Joe R. Lansdale's “The
Thicket”. I've always loved Lansdale's work, though he's one of my
favourite authors whose books I seem to only get around to every
couple of years (I've really gotta change that, there are still a few
of his early ones I haven't gotten to yet) – but hands-down, “The
Thicket” is now my favourite Lansdale book. It's a Western-type of
seek-and-revenge tale, with a Southern existential weirdness that
really only Lansdale can do justice to (especially as he practically
invented this style). This one is definitely the pick of the month.
Following this, I absolutely devoured Stephen King's latest, “The
Outsider”. And as much as I loved this book and the insane plot
turns it took following the arrest of a child-killer who may or may
not be innocent, and who was widely adored in his own community, I
have to admit I was slightly annoyed (only slightly, mind you) as I
was getting to the finale of the novel only to realize that there was
a reliance on characters introduced earlier in King's “Mr.
Mercedes” trilogy, which I had/have not read yet. Minor thing,
though, but I'm a little OCD (just ask Nicki) and so I would've liked
to have known that beforehand, and I might've read Mr. Mercedes
first. At any rate, “The Outsider” is still very much recommend.
</span></span></b></div>
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<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLWnO6FvVwvAvLOYOjTydSgINyTAuJPm79SjSgSGLtnhIdA65jHeJQb_7L9Gm7S3iGR2LEZLwTqmitKssEzN2RheZdqpXJB49tX0L5sqMer_xjcPw1CDNzDWI-kTMw97FRwEBiow/s1600/Aug_Book_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="327" data-original-width="220" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLWnO6FvVwvAvLOYOjTydSgINyTAuJPm79SjSgSGLtnhIdA65jHeJQb_7L9Gm7S3iGR2LEZLwTqmitKssEzN2RheZdqpXJB49tX0L5sqMer_xjcPw1CDNzDWI-kTMw97FRwEBiow/s200/Aug_Book_2.jpg" width="134" /></a></b></div>
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<b>Finishing this novel was where the trouble began – I was dying to
go back to something Lansdale-esque. But instead of reading another
book, I launched into the </b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Preacher
</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">television
series on Amazon Prime and binge-watched the first two seasons. (I
would've done three, but the third season wasn't available yet. Which
might've been a good thing). As I ran out of </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Preacher
</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">episodes
to gorge myself on, I remembered that back when I was experimenting
with getting into graphic novels, I had actually purchased a Preacher
book – Volume 4, “Ancient History”. I honestly couldn't tell
you how long I'd held onto that graphic novel for, having purchased
it years ago from Golden Age Comics on Granville Street. I can tell
you that it had been stuffed to the back of the top shelf of the
bedroom closet, and at one in the morning it wasn't going to go over
really well if I woke Nicki up digging through my back-issues of The
Walking Dead and Marvel Zombies to find this fucking thing, so I gave
up after a cursory glance. Instead, I went for a trade paperback that
my friend Vincent Ternida had given us a few days earlier – it was,
in fact, his </span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKfO8rOd1Md1xSWGonUTLNkj9I1ontGHhRqlYzjVGWDbIwVHUekDjC3rvYUaYm33jm-ZKpMAAkQcWiJmkh0TUNQtVL4jOb5Kyz5OBgTFUUdggvhTEBerT_6C-xPGo6gUIPx_AFMg/s1600/Aug_Book_3.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="792" data-original-width="612" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKfO8rOd1Md1xSWGonUTLNkj9I1ontGHhRqlYzjVGWDbIwVHUekDjC3rvYUaYm33jm-ZKpMAAkQcWiJmkh0TUNQtVL4jOb5Kyz5OBgTFUUdggvhTEBerT_6C-xPGo6gUIPx_AFMg/s200/Aug_Book_3.png" width="154" /></a></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
first published novel. “The Seven Muses of Harry
Salcedo” regards the trials and tribulations of singles-dating in
Vancouver, told from Vincent's keen eye on Vancouver living and
getting through a daily grind in what is often a schizophrenic city,
even for people who were born here. His observations on the city are
humorously perfect (the description of his “Java Mausoleum” in
the first chapter instantly reminded me of the time I saw two young
women carrying a new espresso machine to the cashier in the downtown
Best Buy while both of them were carrying Venti Starbucks coffee
beverages); and the description of Harry's dating life are colorfully
painted with his uncannily acute sardonic/loving descriptions of
culture in the city. As I actually managed to finish my friend's
first novel before the <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXtbAR21y94IKtPvI7XOqD7K6-U2zI_a8yBv5k0USOurWXMQQzh5LlVdUGWH-xPD_gqs7dFelW_h4o8gKCNgV2lnZqatBI0-p14z2iz_-zsCTT2-mzjve2foXcFNcwSfp6jrsUPQ/s1600/Aug_Book_4_Preacher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="839" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXtbAR21y94IKtPvI7XOqD7K6-U2zI_a8yBv5k0USOurWXMQQzh5LlVdUGWH-xPD_gqs7dFelW_h4o8gKCNgV2lnZqatBI0-p14z2iz_-zsCTT2-mzjve2foXcFNcwSfp6jrsUPQ/s320/Aug_Book_4_Preacher.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
end of August, I found myself with one day to
spare, so I did dig out the Preacher graphic novel (in the daytime,
as to not find myself in the same predicament as two nights earlier),
and finished it off on the 31</span></span></b><b><sup><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">st</span></span></sup></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
Although Nicki will maintain that “comics don't count” (okay, I
might be paraphrasing there), I disagree when said comic is over 200
pages and boasts a lot of text and the stylized writing of Garth
Ennis. “Ancient History” was mostly filmed in the first two
seasons of </span></span></b><b><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Preacher</span></i></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
but I have to say that it temporarily satisfied my newfound addiction
and gave me a new-found appreciation for the original graphic novels.
Now all I have to do is track down the other eight books from the
original saga... </span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">--V. </span></span></b>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-52394645018601004342018-09-02T12:55:00.000-07:002018-09-02T12:55:18.968-07:00RE-POST SERIES: THE SEVERED ARM!<div style="text-align: justify;">
(This "Re-Post Series" is a re-introduction of older writings created
for a now-defunct blog from 2011. Still some interesting stuff, though!
Beware, some of the old links may or may not still work).</div>
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<a href="http://creepysixtales.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/the-severed-arm/t49592ihp9k/" rel="attachment wp-att-406" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-406" height="200" src="https://creepysixtales.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/t49592ihp9k.jpg" title="The Severed Arm" width="142" /></a>So I was at my pal and co-producer Peter Speers’ place yesterday picking up the final video exports of our recent double-feature, when I’m snooping across his bookshelves and I come across a DVD titled “The Severed Arm” from 1973. Now, this DVD wasn’t exactly out in the open. It had been packaged in the cheapest of cheapest slip-covers (actually it was more of a Photoshopped envelope) and had been squeezed in between “Dawn of the Dead” and “Matchstick Men” and I assume completely forgotten about. It was still shrink-wrapped! According to Peter and his girlfriend Jen, neither of them had any clue as to how that DVD had gotten there on their bookshelf. The package promised gory cannibalism and some kick-ass revenge, while on the front of the envelope there was a picture of a hand that likely had no part in the actual film whatsoever with the tagline: “The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing!”. So of course, we watched it.</div>
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Turns out this DVD was distributed by some company called “Dollar DVD”. I assume it had cost a dollar, but there was no price tag on it, even though it was still wrapped. So we throw it into the DVD player, and The Severed Arm starts off in a dimly-lit morgue, where some disguised antagonist saws the arm off of a corpse and then sends it out “Special Delivery” (not kidding – that’s what the package actually said) through the US postal service to our protagonist. From there, it’s pretty much a tedious 85 minutes showing us a complete lack of gore, horror, suspense, competent acting, and for the most part even a heavy lack of exploitation, until we (finally) get to the end, where there’s a lame-ass twist (the killer isn’t who we thought it was, it was somebody you never even knew existed!) coupled with a pretty good revenge twist… if only we got to see it, that is, instead of simply listening to the characters talk about it.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Well, the beer helped, that was for sure. The only fun part was watching it with a couple of friends, and I suppose that’s what these flicks are all about, anyway (although back in ’73 I assume we would’ve been watching it at the drive-in). Still, I wondered who was responsible for this schlock? Some of the credits at the end of the film seemed made-up, but I can’t be certain. Apparently the director also made a movie called “Coed Dorm”. Not much else to go on.</div>
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Till the next one, then…</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
-Vince</div>
Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-85864385926714131042018-08-26T12:35:00.000-07:002018-08-26T12:35:14.013-07:00Vertigo/De Palma - Part VI
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* * * Part VI (The Scream/End Credits)***</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmHCGPldzFE3L3MNi-f7QbrZkiy-ap4AkcNfm1N5UQEFI78ww1QeGzXEkfWMINd8qKSnl9KjjOWtuYV_hlG-3-ADFSx-nP1AydQecvOheNzsspjz3e87p9oTrJmFs4PDdmUYsehA/s1600/femmefatale-1455055020-726x388.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="726" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmHCGPldzFE3L3MNi-f7QbrZkiy-ap4AkcNfm1N5UQEFI78ww1QeGzXEkfWMINd8qKSnl9KjjOWtuYV_hlG-3-ADFSx-nP1AydQecvOheNzsspjz3e87p9oTrJmFs4PDdmUYsehA/s320/femmefatale-1455055020-726x388.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Femme
Fatale was the first real-feeling DePalma film I'd seen in the
cinema. I had actually seen Carlito's Way and Snake Eyes in the
cinema as well, but Femme Fatale was the first DePalma theatrical
experience where I felt I was watching a film that could've been made
during the time of his master trilogy of the early 80s. Femme Fatale
was the extension of Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double that
it seemed Raising Cain had hoped to be in the 90s. Perhaps Raising
Cain would have been more secured in that creative extension had
DePalma been able to figure our how to edit the film in the manner
that he'd originally envisioned. But with Femme Fatale, it was
apparent that he had fully creative reign when it came to his
experimental non-linear storytelling. Femme Fatale would be another
revisiting of Vertigo themes while Raising Cain had served as a
remake of DePalma's own Dressed to Kill, which of course, was a
remake of Hitchcock's Psycho. Perhaps Raising Cain, then, would serve
as a first offering of a post-1980s trilogy in and of itself,
featuring Raising Cain, Femme Fatale, and finally Passion, which
would also deal with the nightmarishly-presented ideas of Rachel
McAdams having her own “double” that was haunting the thoughts
and actions of Noomi Rapace. Indeed, the list of these six films
undoubtedly make up the “key” and an importantly defining portion
of DePalma's catalogue – Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double,
Raising Cain, Femme Fatale, and Passion, which ironically (even if
this was unintended) loops the modern idea of how society receives
its modern media with the studio-television monitors, 16mm projected
film, and newspapers of 1973's Sisters.</div>
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* * *</div>
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With
all of its similarities, it was the final shot of Vertigo that really
grabbed my attention and shook me out of my seat. It was the scream.
</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYMYpRJCVHW1aWJki4jj5lm6RkeXm5vbTAuPJBMmZtUpB7IJEtYd1sq6Jq57mJehD5MX6YCiGZUnKBpnq0tFuSy8B4ijL8ecPyfcRkjZAIPlopc8NkHNRA7mfWS-Y0NqvwaGRXFw/s1600/Carlito%2527s_Way.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="708" height="130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYMYpRJCVHW1aWJki4jj5lm6RkeXm5vbTAuPJBMmZtUpB7IJEtYd1sq6Jq57mJehD5MX6YCiGZUnKBpnq0tFuSy8B4ijL8ecPyfcRkjZAIPlopc8NkHNRA7mfWS-Y0NqvwaGRXFw/s320/Carlito%2527s_Way.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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But
twenty-four years before this, it was a television trailer for
Carlito's Way (1993) that had grabbed my attention in a completely
different fashion; it would be the first Brian DePalma movie I'd have
the opportunity to see in the cinema ever and since discovering his
films on VHS thanks to a handful of video rental stores in North
Vancouver. My brother and I went to see Carlito's Way after it opened
at what at the time was North Vancouver's only multi-screen cinema in
an outdoor retail complex called <i>Park & Tilford</i>. Before
the movie theatre opened there, Park & Tilford was a destination
for families during the Christmas season because of the elaborate
Christmas display of lights and decorations that were weaved through
a monumental garden tunnel-path. And really, this was the only thing
housed at the Park & Tilford location for years until the movie
theatre went up, followed by a huge Canadian grocery store
(Save-On-Foods) and soon afterwards, Blockbuster Video. I even rented
Carlito's Way for a second and third viewing from this Blockbuster
Video on latter occasions. Carlito's Way was really the epitome of
flashback-sequence storytelling as the entire film was essentially
one long flashback sequence.
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The
movie opens up with a shot of Al Pacino (“Carlito” in the film)
being carried away, dying, on a paramedics' stretcher out of the
tunnels of New York's Grand Central Station. The location immediately
recalls the backdrop of important Blow Out scenes, including scenes
leading up to the climax of that film. Even the reason that the two
sets of leading characters from each of those two films are the same:
they're catching a train out of town to hopefully outrun the bad
guys. In the opening shots of Carlito's Way, we have DePalma telling
us that it's the climax of Carlito's Way that is going to play out in
the same locations. We also have him telling us, directly, the
ultimate fate of his own leading character, and then invites us to
find out if he was lying to us or not; taking us through two and a
half hours of Carlito's flashback story. After the opening credits
play out, with Carlito lifted from the train platform and transported
away on an ambulance gurney, we see him a few months previous to this
in a courtroom as his prison sentence has just been revoked due to
illegal wire-tapping by the District Attorney, and so right away, we
get another Blow Out reference, or at the very least another gentle
reminder of that film. Again, hidden wires, microphones, and audio
recordings play a minor but significant role in this film as well.
The circling camera shot around Pacino and his love interest Penelope
Ann Miller midway through the film reminds us of the same shot midway
through Body Double (nineteen years earlier). Much of DePalma's
filmography holds up years and decades after-the-fact, Carlito's Way
in particular seems to get better with age, crawling up on Martin
Scorsese's GoodFellas as best gangster movie. In fact, I believe one
of the best scenes DePalma has ever film is the fight between Pacino
and Miller, which takes place in her apartment – the two
characters, arguing their own moral logic, remain separated by space,
walls, and doorways until the argument reaches its heated moments –
Pacino pushing his way into her bathroom, where Miller is standing,
yet the two of them continue to argue without looking at each other,
their heads are backside-to-backside. Finally breaking this
disconnection that is coming between them, instead of looking
directly at each other, they face each other in the bathroom mirror,
where they are forced to face each other and themselves as slightly
warped, opposite-reflections of themselves, until he finally breaks
the mirror with his fist – cutting his hand. She follows him out of
the apartment, like she would follow him later in her life, and she
lets him go without her, as he would let her go without him at the
end of the film, from the platform of Grand Central Station. Miller
yells after him as Pacino disappears from her apartment: “I'm
through cleaning up your blood!” – And she is through, she won't
have to clean up his blood again, next time, the paramedics are going
to do it for her. Unlike Nancy Allen's
prostitute-with-brains-and-a-heart-of-gold character form Blow Out,
Miller will get away from all the blood and crime that she'd been
trapped in inside the city. Carlito's Way ends with her dancing in
paradise.
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<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Blow
Out ends on a far more cynical note, made palatable only by the
multi-layered irony that DePalma has brilliantly twisted it all into
at the end of the story. Hitchcock himself had set-up a beautifully
ironic twist at the end of his masterpiece Vertigo. At Vertigo's
halfway point, as James Stewart has had to give up his ascent to the
top of the bell tower, the last thing he hears is Novak's scream
before the body falls, seemingly to its death, from the top of that
tower. As the clues build up to a tense and wholly uncomfortable
climax at the end of Vertigo, Stewart realizes that he had heard
Novak's scream before seeing the body fall – only it wasn't her
body. It was all a set-up to place Stewart as the only “witness”
to another woman's “suicide” – all this an elaborate cover-up
for the other woman's murder. As Stewart literally drags Novak back
to the scene of the crime, he overcomes his crippling vertigo and
manages to get them both up to the top of the bell tower, where the
murder victim had been thrown. As they teeter on the edge of the
tower, Novak, riddled with angst and anxiety, gets spooked by
something in the shadows and accidentally falls to her death from the
tower, her scream echoing once again for Stewart, but this time the
scream isn't staged.
</div>
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When
DePalma's Blow Out opens up, we see John Travolta in a private
screening room with the slasher b-movie producer, mixing the sound
effects track for their horror movie. They are in need of a “good
scream”. DePalma uses this detail of Travolta's background for some
humourous scenes throughout the movie – as Travolta runs about the
city trying to solve the apparent murder he's captured on his tape
recorder, he's suddenly brought back into his everyday-world reality
of having to test voice-over actresses in order to record the perfect
scream for his producer. Still, they can't find the right one. The
fact that the creepy villain-hitman of Blow Out (Lithgow) has
ransacked Travolta's sound studio and erased every single recorded
and meticulously catalogued sound-effect tape Travolta has ever
created just puts him further back from ever being able to finish the
work that his dayjob (and only source of money) requires. Throughout
the entire film the circumstances surrounding Travolta's character
only serve to push him further and further into a corner, until the
climax of the film, where Travolta and Allen devise a plan to entrap
the killer by wiring Allen with a hidden microphone – a plan that
backfires fatally for Allen, and Travolta is left stranded and
helpless, unable to help Allen as she screams harshly to her death
through the headphones in Travolta's ears.
</div>
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DePalma
leaves us watching Travolta, in his own personal hell inside the
private screening room with his b-movie producer, having to listen to
Allen's death-screams over and over and over again; the only scream
that he, the sound recordist, would have on tape in order that he
could finally finish his job on the low-budget slasher film in front
of him. That final scream would be the only thing John Travolta would
walk away with by the end of that film, just like Novak's scream
would be the only thing Stewart would walk away with, in spite of all
his obsessions, at the end of his.
</div>
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</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
THE END</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
VERTIGO/DE
PALMA by Vince D'Amato.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Copyright
(c) 2017 by Vince D'Amato, All Rights Reserved. First published as an
E-book, non-fiction, 2018. All photos are stock/promotional photos
from their respective studios: Universal Studios (Vertigo), Warner
Bros. (Femme Fatale), Warner Bros., MGM (Blow Out).</i></span></div>
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</div>
Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-85356625900623615112018-08-12T13:01:00.000-07:002018-08-12T13:01:01.609-07:00Issue #70 - The Absolute Underground Papers<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #70 - originally published June, 2016)</span> </div>
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<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-style: normal;">The
Cinema Fantastique (Sex & Horror)”</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
by
Vince D'Amato</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I
was recently in Netherworld Collectibles in Burnaby, BC, when I
overheard a customer chatting with the proprietor and telling him,
rather loudly so that most of the store could </span><i>accidentally</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
overhear him, that he “doesn't watch new horror movies at all
because most of them seem really cool but they just disappoint”.
Well, to be perfectly honest, this was a sentiment I shared for along
time, until about a year and a half ago... One of the problems with
new horror cinema was the perception that the genre itself was
precipitating over its intended audience – new filmmakers were
either pushing forth pretentious projection of their work that they
considered high-brow, or to use the term some if these filmmakers
were using five years ago, an “upper echelon” of horror cinema.
Which basically meant cool-looking horror flick with no sex or
nudity, which throughout the eighties and nineties had been required
tropes for the genre, along with the blood, guts and scares. These
“upper echelon” films, like </span><i>House of the Devil, The
Innkeepers, Mulberry Street,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and
to half this degree </span><i>Your're Next, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">also
barely delivered on the guts and gore aspect, usually saving such
frivolities to the very end of their respective films (as I said,
</span><i>You're Next </i><span style="font-style: normal;">was
somewhat of an exception, and as added bonus points it had Barbara
Crampton in it!). On the flipside, if a horror fan did want a little
nudity or eroticism included within his genre fare (artistically, of
course), one would be forced to turn to the ridiculous – indie
films like </span><i>Call Girl of Cthulhu </i><span style="font-style: normal;">or
the exploitive (and yet vapid) Hollywood remakes of the
aforementioned 80s horror films.</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">There
was nowhere for us to turn to the seriously good side horror cinema
that wasn't afraid to be sexy as hell as well...</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> In
December last year I wrote my first Absolute Horror article; and the
inspiration for that article had been the recent releases of
independent horror films that had finally started to change the face
of indie horror into something more sophisticated, more energetic,
more suspenseful for audiences (such as myself) who have learned (i.e
taught ourselves) not to rely on the studio PG-13 output for their
morbid frights. We have been ushered into an era, by these new indie
horror filmmakers, of films that may have originally been inspired by
the likes of </span><i>Friday the 13</i><sup><i>th</i></sup><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">or
the films of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Sam Raimi, but films
that nonetheless do not care to wear these influences outright on
their sleeves – instead, these filmmakers are now often twisting
and flipping the influences to such a degree as to design some very
intense, visceral, and even darkly comedic low-budget scares. And
they're pretty clever about it, too. And thanks to the critically and
commercially successful Scarlett Johansson sci-fi horror/thriller
</span><i>Under the Skin </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and the
hugely popular indie horror hit </span><i>It Follows, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">we're
starting to see a little sexiness reappearing in our horror fare –
following these two commercial releases it seems to all be suddenly
okay once again for a horror movie to be sexually aware, instead of
pretending that people don't have it. (Meanwhile, Brain DePalma
remained cemented in the gorgeously sexy slasher/thriller genre with
his latest outing </span><i>Passion</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
most criminally under-screened on this side of the world). But before
we fully get back into sexy, allow me to talk about a very clever
realization of the horror film that I came across about two days
before writing this piece – a little film called </span><i>The Last
Shift</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> which is an hallucinogenic
mindfuck regarding a lone young female police rookie hired to guard a
defunct police station the before it's permanently closed. It gets
off to an edgy start and just gets totally intense from there, as our
protagonist becomes trapped in the tomb-maze of the old station while
running into some quite literal ghosts of the past who are hellbent
on driving her insane. This small-scale horror flick calls up the
intensity of the modern horror classic </span><i>It Follows, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as
does new director Benjamin Moody's </span><i>Last Girl Standing,
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">which had its inspirational
roots in the aforementioned </span><i>Friday the 13</i><sup><i>th</i></sup><i>,
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">but takes the idea of “the
final girl” into dizzyingly outrageous and wholly intense
territory. </span><i>Last Girl Standing </i><span style="font-style: normal;">has
been a festival hit in 2015 and 2016, and will be screening at this
summer's </span><i>Cinemafantastique Fest </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in
Vancouver (July 8-10) along with some other amazing contemporary
horror films that are far more steeped in the sexy, hallucinogenic,
and the psychedelic: from the Burlesque-noir </span><i>Cruel Tale of
the Medicine Man </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and L.A. artist
Anna Biller's erotic 60s throwback </span><i>The Love Witch, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to
the erotic Lovecraft homage </span><i>Harvest Lake </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(which
incidentally is a far cry from </span><i>Call Girl of Cthulhu</i><span style="font-style: normal;">).
But the funnier side of genre cinema is also celebrated in b-movie
maverick Ron Bonk's </span><i>She Kills,</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
and</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Canadian Ryan
LaPlante's </span><i>Holy Hell</i><span style="font-style: normal;">;</span><i>
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>Hell Town</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– which is an astoundingly witty homage to Lynch's </span><i>Twin
Peaks</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Alongside
these films is the more intense </span><i>Last Girl Standing </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and
the neo-giallo </span><i>The Red Man, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">but
sexy does tend to reign supreme in this lineup, as it does with the
collection of short films selected for the film fest also range from
the off-the-wall bloodfest </span><i>El Gigante (from Luchagore
productions) </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to the very sexy
</span><i>First Love </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and
</span><i>Mistress C. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">The sexy
and the funny (the </span><i>bloody </i><span style="font-style: normal;">funny)
collide in the French short </span><i>Bitch, Popcorn & Blood.
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">Indeed, the international
collection of very sexy nightmares that populate this year's
</span><i><a href="https://cinemafantastique.org/" target="_blank"><b>Cinemafantastique Fest</b></a> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">are
the films you're not apt to see at other film festivals on the west
coast. With any luck, most of the films here will find some sort of
distribution, but we're living in a funny time now when it comes to
cinema culture. Hard media really is dying and has been niche for
some time now. It opens up the opportunity for theatrical exhibition
for films like these, but cinema has been crawling along towards a
slow death, too, despite there being more film festivals in the world
than any other time in history. Our venues are disappearing, and film
festivals have dared to go digital, like the media itself. Despite
this, there are die-hard cinema fans (like myself) who actively
participate in the lumbering medium, who love to discover obscure on
under-distributed gems. With horror filmmakers no longer settling for
the easy low-budget go-tos of the zombie or vampire sub-genres, it is
inspiring to see that so many independent genre films released over
the last fifteen months have supplied us with some real, visceral
thrills. So here's to filmmakers keeping the sexy, the erotic, the
nudie-cutie, the fun, and the intense, in our serious – and darkly
funny – horror cinema. Cheers! </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">(</span><i><a href="https://cinemafantastique.org/" target="_blank">Cinemafantastique</a>
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">runs July 8-10, 2016 at the
Norm Theatre at UBC)</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-42440412756645903312018-08-05T13:21:00.000-07:002018-08-05T13:21:00.157-07:003 Books a Month – July (Summer Reading)
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<strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">Happily
continuing the three-books-a-month challenge, and getting halfway
through some fantastic summer reading, I actually tried to be a
little more ambitious than the three book-minimum and hit the
four-book mark (proud as I was to have been able to do this last
month) – alas, this was not meant to be – apparently, I was a
hell of a lot busier in July than I was in June. Thinking back on
this, I'm going to say this was true – at one point I found myself
in over my head with a graphic design project while on a plane
heading to a horror film festival – the very plane I was supposed
to have been reading that elusive fourth book of the month. I decided
at that point it would be alright to save the book for the flight
back, the same flight in which the novel (Ian Banks' “The Wasp
Factory”, if you're interested) wound up in the elastic-strapped
back pouch of the seat in front of me while I watched </span></strong><strong><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Daddy's
Home 2 </span></i></strong><strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">all
the way back to Vancouver; and despite even having a couple of hours
to kill at LAX, most of that time was eaten up chatting with a couple
from Philadelphia who had a ten-hour layover coming back back from a
cruise. It was a nice chat, though. So, the three books I had managed
to finish before that last week in July were my requisite three for
the three-book challenge. The first book, “Cosmopolis” by Don
DeLillo, was a fanatical and sexualized ride through the poetry of
finances, global economic breakdown, and revenge. It was also a novel
I had thoroughly wished that I had read a few years ago, before
filming </span></span></strong><strong><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Odissea
della Morte. </span></i></strong><strong><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
next one, a recommendation from last month's challenge, was Shirley
Jackson's “We Have Always Lived in this Castle”, which turned out
to be laced with unyielding philosophical insights into the good and
the bad of human nature, and what, sardonically, might really be the
actions behind what makes us “good”. This novel ended up being
one of the best pieces of literature that I've read in a very long
time. I had to return that one to the local library, but I'll be on
the lookout for it now to purchase. The last of these three books was
a Roberto Bolano book I'd found totally by fluke at the same library
(and at the same time) I was returning the Shirley Jackson novel to –
my eye caught it on the way out, and I picked it up before leaving
the library; it was a Bolano book I'd never heard of before, “Una
novelita Lumpen” – but reading it reminded me of how much I loved
Bolano's “The Skating Rink” and “The Woes of the True
Policeman”. “Una Novelita Lumpen” is a very quick read, and
almost as good as “The Skating Rink”. It's bright and engaging
and mysterious as it delves into the slightly enigmatic psyche of a
young woman who, as a novice to sex and crime, ends up wildly
involved in both. </span></span></strong></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-51273091741370580622018-07-15T12:29:00.000-07:002018-07-15T12:29:20.993-07:00Vertigo/DePalma - Part V
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* * * Part V</div>
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As a
cinephile, I have made it my business to collect as many films that I
find intriguing, interesting, exciting, and engaging as I could find
– the harder to find, the better the challenge. Such was the case
with many of Dario Argento's films during my collecting in the 1990s,
his films were continually hard (or nearly impossible) to come by
until the advent of DVD around the turn of the millennium. Strangely,
though, I was never compelled to collect DePalma's movies on VHS, in
spite of my adoration for his work. Mostly, I would just rent and
re-rent the VHS copies of Carrie, Blow Out, Body Double, Dressed to
Kill, Carlito's Way, with only a couple of exceptions, which
pertained only to his earlier films – Obsession was one of the VHS
videotapes I was lucky to have come by on a shopping excursion to
Bellingham, Washington; I'd found a copy of this movie in a VHS
retail chain called Suncoast Motion Pictures. Obsession was one of
DePalma's titles that I'd never been able to find up until that
point, and so after making the purchase it would be the fist time I'd
experience that thriller, which starred Genvieve Bujold, Cliff
Robertson, and John Lithgow – with Bujold playing a dual-role as
doubles. Obsession is DePalma's actually first stab at remaking
Vertigo, with the first Bujold character having met her death in a
firey car chasing following a botched kidnapping-for-ransom. Cliff
Robertson's character then meets Bujold's younger double, fifteen
years later, in an unlikely scenario in Florence, Italy. But this is
once place DePalma shines as a storyteller – not only in making us
believe in these unlikely coincidences, but in his ability to make us
want to believe in them. There is actually something genuinely and
inherently (and strangely, even innocently) romantic about DePalma's
storytelling.
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The
other VHS tape I'd purchased was Sisters, thanks to that videostore
owner who let me buy it right off of the rental shelf of his store.
The third and last VHS tape I ever acquired of DePalma's catalogue
was The Fury, and this videotape had been given to my by one of my
sisters as a Christmas present one year in the late 90s.
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* * *</div>
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The
Fury (1978) marks a very intriguing spot in DePalma's overall
catalogue, due to its cinematic content and its context within his
filmography – it's a horror-thriller based on a popular horror
novel of that time, and incorporates many of the virtuoso camera
flourishes that would become the stylistic hallmark of his following
films of the 80s. The Fury is essentially the bridge between
DePalma's early horror adaptations (Carrie, from the Stephen King
novel, and Phantom of the Paradise, a wild twist on “Phantom of the
Opera”) and his trip of erotic-thriller masterpieces of the early
80s. The Fury expertly weaves and experiments further on the stylish
cinematography and non-linear storytelling of his early thrillers
Sisters and Obsession with the visceral energy and immediacy
(paradoxically executed through long fluid shots and slow-motion
camerawork) of his horror films, Carrie and The Phantom of the
Paradox (the latter being more of a horror-thriller-musical in the
style of, but superior to in this writer's opinion, The Rocky Horror
Picture Show). This would all culminate in DePalma's unofficial
Psycho remake, Dressed to Kill in 1980, the film that would really
put DePalma on the map.</div>
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Although
DePalma had toyed with placing media and media technology in his
stories before the 1980s, with the television monitors and newspaper
writers is Sisters and the series of slide-photographs that help to
open the film Obsession, it wouldn't be until after Dressed to Kill
that he would really start experimenting with ideas of incorporating
all sorts of media and technology in his films. Of course, Blow Out
featuring jon Travolta s our sound technician and hero was really the
striking point for this, his subsequent Vertigo remake – Body
Double – intriguingly toyed with the then-new videotape media that
was just making its presence known in mainstream society, both in the
consumer realm as well as the production realm. Following Wasson's
first investigative moves through the Hollywood video rental store,
he then manages to get himself hired onto an actual porn production
in order to be able to meet with Melanie Griffith, the body double of
the film's murder victim. DePalma takes us through the entire
porn-scene production in one amazingly fluid set-piece that was: A)
Aped by Quentin Tarantino for his celebrated Inglourious Basterds
sequence that opens the fifth chapter of that film; and: B) Set to a
pulse-pounding rock soundtrack that would serve as DePalma's foray
into “rock video” territory, something that was in fashion within
the Hollywood studios of that time. DePalma knew that he was
basically shooting a rock video in service of this behind-the-scenes
porn-movie sequence, making the entire scene a double-meta affair: A
porn movie shot from behind-the-scenes as a rock video inside a movie
that is about Hollywood b-movie and porn-movie actors, based on
another movie from twenty-five years previous. Sound complex? It's
not, because another one of Brian DePalma's brilliant talents is the
ability to keep all of these overlapping meta-themes subtly riding
the undercurrent of his actual story, about sex, voyeurism, and
murder, without allowing these subtextual themes and secret
criticisms of voyeuristic media to get in the way of his expertly
stylized proceedings. Using a single word, DePalma basically has a
firm grasp on his own cinematic style.
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After
DePalma would continue his stylistic approach to incorporating media
tech into his films, with Raising Cain, Mission Impossible, Snake
Eyes, and Femme Fatale, he would eventually twist the whole aspect of
all of these films' opening sequences in his latest film Passion
(2012), which would open up on a shot of the two lead heroines, both
of whom are focused in on the screen of a MacBook laptop. For once,
DePalma's camera is not showing us the images on the screen, instead,
we're make to patiently sit while watching the two women (Rachel
McAdams and Noomi Rapace) as they watch their shared computer screen
(also sitting). We see only their faces and bodies and the back of
the computer – they're the ones watching, and we don't know what
they're watching, and it is never revealed, marking a first for a
DePalma film. Soon, however, DePalma allows us to discover that
McAdams and Rapace work for a mega-conglomerate media corporation in
Europe. And sooner than later, iPhones, YouTube, security cameras,
laptop cameras, and commercial media all quickly slither their way,
extremely prominently, into DePalma's new take on the story of sexual
and corporate power-plays, murder, and double-crosses and
backstabbing while still managing to interweave the very importance
of dream and nightmare sequences into his personal storytelling. If
Passion is to be DePalma's last film, then he certainly went out at
his peak, which is astounding unto itself considering his first
notable step into the heavy-hitting cinema-auteur arena was Sisters,
almost forty years before Passion was released. Sadly, Passion only
received a limited theatrical release in North America, another
signal of the changing media technology and the way popular media is
delivered (and demanded) in society in 2012. The very way that
iPhones/uploading/video-streaming marked the shift in Rapace's
character's corporate power-position in Passion would wind up being
the very reason that DePalma's brilliant thriller would receive very
little attention in the cinemas and on hard-copy media distribution.
It may have fared better with a VOD streaming release; but of course,
watching a DePalma film on a Smart Phone is no way to watch a DePalma
film at all...
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<i>(To
be continued...)</i></div>
Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-9487069609523531782018-07-09T12:13:00.001-07:002018-07-09T12:13:19.050-07:003 Books a Month...<div style="text-align: justify;">
So, my lovely wife and business partner (<a href="https://darksidereleasing.com/" target="_blank">Darkside Releasing</a>, <a href="https://cinemafantastique.org/" target="_blank">Cinemafantastique</a>) Nicole (or Nicki, as she's called at home) proposed a literary challenge to me: reading three books per month, <i>within </i>the calendar months (so books started before the 1st don't count, nor do books finished after the 30th/31st). Tough! But doable, right? Stephen King claims to be a "slow reader" and yet he gets through around 80 books every year. 3 books per month is only 36 books a year. Easy peasy, Right? We tried to rope some of our other literate friends into joining this challenge with us, but even the booklovers that these friends our, our challenge was bet with immediate self-doubt. But then again, that is sort of the point of a challenge -- if it was <i>easy</i>, it wouldn't exactly be a challenge, then, would it?</div>
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I did make it through the first month, with 4 books, no less, and am on my way towards the July finish line. Here's what I got through (and thoroughly enjoyed, I should add, for all four of these titles), for the month of JUNE...</div>
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<br />Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-49108551825589907642018-06-07T15:59:00.001-07:002018-06-07T15:59:50.117-07:00The Mysteries of Donald Westlake's “Memory”<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHZjjBsb6uxqQxAN8FhCMwFESdnxqWc4-0wybqtV4slOk4UePG20f4xBsRNx_BNWxYol6isJlpSAeAT6vkBaDTOrHvURbpa77TNEcJp6P2sYkB4jsEyLXiByhrmIYJSyxWPlEv2Q/s1600/412collbt9L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="311" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHZjjBsb6uxqQxAN8FhCMwFESdnxqWc4-0wybqtV4slOk4UePG20f4xBsRNx_BNWxYol6isJlpSAeAT6vkBaDTOrHvURbpa77TNEcJp6P2sYkB4jsEyLXiByhrmIYJSyxWPlEv2Q/s200/412collbt9L.jpg" width="124" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Donald E.
Westlake might be best known as the author and creator of the
hard-boiled Parker character that features in several literary and
cinemaitc fictional outings. But a few years ago, a smaller publisher
called Hard Case Crime published one of the author's missing, or .
“never before published” works, entitled “Memory”.</span></span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Written
in the 1950s, the plot concerns an up-and-coming stage actor who
suddenly loses his functions for all faculties and facilitation of
proper memory because of an attack by an angry husband, whose wife
the actor had been having an affair with. The betrayed husband hits
the actor over the head with a wooden chair, and the novel opens up
in the hospital as the actor is awakening from this attack, only to
find that he has lost every facet of his previously-working memory.
He's lost his short-term memory, his long-term memory, and his
ability to retain any memory past the near-present, unless he
develops a fairly strict pattern of absolute repetition in his
existence. This pattern has to be constantly supported with
self-written notes and reminders through the underneath of the new
daily routine. Donald Westlake then takes us on a
four-hundred-plus-page journey through his lead character's
existential nightmare; which for me, raised some skin-prickling
philosophical questions, as well as a very big brain-nagging culture
question...</span></span></div>
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<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
cultural question might not be what one might consider to be expected
– in that my own question is actually relegated to something else
that has popped up regarding Westlake's themes of memory loss, and to
a great contribution to pop culture at that – through Christopher
Nolan's breakout film, </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Memento.
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">My
question on this, where in Nolan's film his lead character suffers
with the very same existential nightmare as that of Westlake's
creation, is sort of a two-parter: Did Nolan somehow have the
opportunity the claimed “never before published” manuscript, and
was then able in incorporate many of these philosophical ideas of
memory and existence into his own screenplay for </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Memento
– or – </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">are
these questions just existentially inherent in any of us (like
Christopher Nolan and/or Donald Westlake) for us to delve into if the
notion ever occurs to us to ask?</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">My
second question as to the mystery of Westlake's book, then, concerns
the philosophy itself: Does existence actually really matter if we
have no memory to use to incorporate, and in a sense, categorize (and
even internalize), our own existence? With huge credit given toward
Donald Westlake, he actually attempts to (and depending on your
personal opinions, he does) answer these nearly mind-boggling
questions. These are questions that stretch our imaginations, to be
sure, as well as our own anxieties and nightmares about what it is to
be a human being. The nearly heart-wrenching (yet surprisingly subtle
and deeply meaningful) ending to Westlake's novel </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Memory
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">might
give most people answers to these philosophical questions, whether
they wanted them or not – because the conclusion depends on if
living in the present is exciting or horrifying, in your personal
perspectives, which is what makes the entire novel, from page one,
utterly riveting.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>(The film, Memento...)</i></span></span></div>
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<br />Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-14779462393233679642018-06-03T15:42:00.000-07:002018-06-03T15:42:18.450-07:00MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
light of the next “Absolute Horror” column being published in the
upcoming summer issue of Absolute Underground, where I chat for a
while about one of my favourite authors Stephen King, I thought it
might been fun to revisit this piece I wrote about his film, </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Maximum
Overdrive</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
nearly</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">seven
years ago, which I'd always had fond memories of writing up for the
UK website Videotape Swap Shop – which itself is now long since
defunct. </span></span></span>
</div>
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</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The article was not as awesome
nor as insightful as I'd remembered it to be. It's still a little
fun, though. And I still hold a lot of gratitude for that now-gone
website, VTSS, which was always quite supportive of my articles.
(Huge thanks to Michael & Hannah)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>MAXIMUM
OVERDRIVE</b></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>by
Vince D'Amato</i></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>(Originally
published December 18, 2011)</i></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><br />Car
movies, and especially their more-specific crossover cousin the
car/road flicks, are something of specifically American cinema
culture, having epitomized its heyday throughout the seventies.
Coincidentally, this was also the decade Stephen King had his first
novel published. And here's a man who has gleefully mixed America's
obsession with the automobile as class status and bullet-fast horror
and suspense throughout his career – with the likes of </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Christine,
From a Buick 8, Riding the Bullet</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
and </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Dolan's
Cadillac</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
just to name a few. When he made his movie deal in the mid-eighties
with movie mogul-producer Dino De Laurentiis, It's really no wonder
that King figured highways, trucks, and bloody horror would make for
a killer directorial debut, and hand-picked his own short story,
“Trucks”, as the key concept for his first (and subsequently
only) self-directed adaptation of his own literary works.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAQ0AcE5Cyqb9pwRSOzfdNp-FE8UHgsUq0TjozDStxLGmDFGfXDX7831ougOzgWD2Klu-hgjnpqQRBUA172S16L5TB86L6GU8q7oj4b36xbcHXOmo_bQ27aXXbC4hFN4jGjR6m1A/s1600/maxresdefault2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="1600" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAQ0AcE5Cyqb9pwRSOzfdNp-FE8UHgsUq0TjozDStxLGmDFGfXDX7831ougOzgWD2Klu-hgjnpqQRBUA172S16L5TB86L6GU8q7oj4b36xbcHXOmo_bQ27aXXbC4hFN4jGjR6m1A/s320/maxresdefault2.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
concept of King's original short story, which appears in the short
story collection </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">“Night
Shift”, </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">concerns
a bunch of trucks that suddenly possess homicidal tendencies. In the
film version, this happens after the earth is caught in the tail of a
passing comet, trapping a bunch of truckers, diner staff, and a bible
salesman inside the Dixie Boy Truck Stop Diner, with King here doing
his best (or taking the piss?) while he tries to </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">explain
</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">why
the trucks went mental in the first place, something left out of the
original short story, and something that is usually left out of his
best works. King works incredibly confidently on the </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">what
is happening </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">level,
but in </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Maximum
Overdrive</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
the </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">why
it's happening </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">is
almost gleefully far-fetched, even for a movie where machines
suddenly get brains and start killing any humans they can't trap into
becoming slaves. Speaking of which, how is it that the newlywed
couple were able to keep control of </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">their</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
vehicle through all this...? Anyway...</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />With
a pretty impressive cast including the reliable Pat Hingle (who
easily steals the show), Emilio Estevez, Leon Rippy, Giancarlo
Esposito (in one of his earliest minor roles), Lisa Simpson, and
King's own discovery, Laura Harrington </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">(What's
Eating Gilbert Grape)</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
it's a shame King wasn't able to direct them with the same Americana
satire that shines from the characters of his novels. Instead,
everyone acts how HE acts in his films (see: CREEPSHOW); mainly, by
over-acting to the point where the characters go beyond satire into
Looney Tunes. Weirdly, though, this actually all sits pretty well
with his over-the-top idea of seeing all the machines in the world
suddenly going on a homicidal rampage, and compliments the outrageous
style of the movie itself – and there are some truly funny moments,
too. Meanwhile, all signs of subtlety are thrown out the window with
within the first four seconds of the film, which nicely sets up what
we're all in for as an audience.</span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />And
as if this weren't all legendary enough, King, ever the rock 'n' roll
fan, hired none other than AC/DC to provide the screeching and
hyper-catchy soundtrack. But what I want to know is how producer Dino
De Laurentiis got King the rights to use the Green Goblin's head on
the killer eighteen-wheeler toy delivery truck that's forever known
as the cult mascot of this ridiculous but compulsively watchable
cartoonish thrill ride. Okay, it's no </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Shining</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
or </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Shawshank</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
or</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Mist </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">or
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Pet
Sematary, </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">but
King's cinematic creation has an ingrained warped sense of humor, and
the satire does come shining through when the paper-thin walls of the
mundaneness and routine of The American Way (circa 1986) come
crashing down. Reading too much into this? Nah. It's awesome in its
own unique way, it's a film I've watched a dozen times. It's like
comfort food. Not really good for you, but damn it, there's just
something so satisfying about it anyway. Then again, maybe it's just
the exploding toilet paper truck, as if King is yelling at us from
behind the camera: </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Heads
up, you're in for a steaming pile of shit, and we're loving it!</span></i></span></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-23931269193397308642018-05-27T16:02:00.000-07:002018-05-27T16:02:13.745-07:00Vertigo/DePalma - IV<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; page-break-before: always;">
Part IV</div>
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<br /></div>
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...Another
notable cinematographic trait from Vertigo [that DePalma utilized in
his own films] was Novak's flashback whilst sitting alone in her
bedroom. Here, the camera has framed the actress perfectly as she
proceeds to write a note detailing her involvement in what we thought
was her double's suicide up until now – where she admits, via her
own voice-over and visualized for us (the audience) through a lengthy
flashback of the bell tower scene, revealing visual information that
we had not been privy to when the scene had originally played out
earlier, that the “suicide” had been in fact a cover for
murderous goings-ons. The mis-en-scene in the hotel room during the
flashback brings to mind the excitingly framed flashback sequence
from DePalma's The Fury when Amy Irving pauses halfway up an interior
stairway and receives a psychic vision of her missing brother.
DePalma shows us this vision as a split-screen as Irving remains
frozen on the steps for us to witness her reacting to the vision –
and while DePalma had played with dual-screen storytelling before in
Sisters and The Phantom of the Paradise, he had never displayed it in
this tricky and clever manner before – instead of the standard
dividing line between the two scenes playing simultaneously, in The
Fury, literally half of the backdrop surrounding Irving dissolves
away into the vision she's having as the camera turns around her.
Here, DePalma has displayed his most brilliant take on the
dual-screen technique. The whole flashback trope also teeters over
experimental territory, and although DePalma was no stranger to this
form on non-linear storytelling, he wouldn't fully experiment with it
until his later films, Raising Cain, wherein his seemingly
overlapping flashbacks and dream sequences were viewed as too
experimental for its time (1991) and DePalma succumbed to the
pressure to re-cut his film into its current “theatrical release”
version. Since that time, Raising Cain has been recut into a pseudo-
“director's” cut where the scenes of real time, flashback, and
dream fantasy have been restructured back into a form more closely
resembling DePalma's original idea for Raising Cain. (This latter
version is now available on a newer home video release). The epitome
of DePalma's use of flashbacks had to have been his sophisticated,
intricate, and suspenseful reveal of how and why Ethan Hunt's (Tom
Cruise's) team of spies had been set-up and killed in the big-budget
blockbuster Mission Impossible. This flashback sequence of DePalma's
is particularly fantastic because as the sequence plays out as Tom
Cruise's inner thoughts, mixing memory with gap-filling logic and
circumstantial accusations, John Voight is sitting across from him
simultaneously relaying a series of lies and his own false
accusations, speaking while the flashback is occurring. The killing
of the Mission Impossible team also happened in the first half hour
of this exciting action film, literally and cinematically amping up
the heroes-dying-halfway-through idea that had so intrigued Hitchcock
in Vertigo and Psycho.
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The
ultimate experiment in non-linear storytelling for DePalma would
happen a few years after Raising Cain and Mission Impossible. It
would be the next decade, in fact, in 2002, when DePalma utilized a
hugely extravagant flash-forward for the entire second act and
continuing halfway through the third act of Femme Fatale, without
even letting the audience in on it until the last few minutes of the
film. At this point in his career, DePalma knew exactly how
experimental he was being, he held no allusions that the climax of
Femme Fatale might alienate his theatrical audiences. He was looking
forward to the reaction that his film would get when it was released
into cinemas.
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<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
DePalma's
inspired fascination with both cinema and media serves to set up
nearly every one of his key films in their opening frames. Sisters
opens up with a shot on a broadcast television monitor. This was in
1973, and when DePalma returned to this idea of opening his films
with televised monitors two decades later, he'd be nearly relentless
with this idea. Raising Cain opens with a shot of a video baby
monitor in a parents' bedroom. Mission Impossible with a shot of a
live-camera monitor, monitored by a group of spies. DePalma had an
obvious field day playing with interweaving video technology where a
group of spies is pitted against two other groups of spies in the
midst of double-crosses and doubleback twists – this is the very
epitome of voyeurism quite literally blown out of proportion. In
Snake Eyes, DePalma opens the camera shot on a series of new footage
monitors until the camera reveals the live footage in actuality,
without cutting. From this, the camera continues to weave expertly
without any noticeable visual cuts for nearly the next twenty
minutes, emulating Hitchcock's Rope once again as the camera follows
a rowdy and rambunctious police detective played by Nicholas Cage and
setting up the entire first act of the film, introducing all of the
film's key ensemble players. Snake Eyes is DePalma's version of Rope
on high-octane steroids. Instead of containing the fluid action to
the interior of an apartment, DePalma's single-setting is an entire
Las Vegas casino and hotel, his cameras gliding across casino
monitors, down hallways, around a boxing ring auditorium and across
the ceiling overlooking the insides of a row of hotel suites, all
elaborately decorated in individual colour schemes. It's no wonder
DePalma needed to hire Nicholas Cage for the role, at that time he
might've been the only Hollywood actor up to the challenge of
out-scene-ing the scenery. As for DePalma's key thriller trilogy of
the 1980s, none of them started out with television monitors,
instead, Dressed to Kill begins with an outright dream-fantasy
seemingly disconnected to the rest of the film's reality, while Blow
Out and Body Double both begin with the making of a b-moive, and both
of those movies retain the making of the b-movies as their underlying
sub-plots (both to be twisted in irony by the ends of those films).
It is finally Femme Fatale (2002) that culminated and somewhat
epitomizes DePalma's cinematic and media fetishes together – the
opening shot, post-90s-DePalma, is of a television (going all the way
back to Sisters), but this time the television is not displaying
anything that is happening within the reality of the film, as the
opening shots of monitors had done in every single past instance
DePalma had utilized this technique – this time, the television is
playing, appropriately, a scene form the classic Hollywood film noir
Double Indemnity. Watching this film on television, we see as the
camera fulls back, is a nude Rebecca Romijn, lying across a hotel
bed. This is preamble to a diamond heist that is about to occur
during a celebratory night at the Cannes Film Festival. This move
fixes DePalma's own cinema with his passion for media and cinema, and
these themes continue on through Femme Fatale as our other leading
character, Antonio Banders, is introduced as a media photographer.
Television, cinema, photography, and mass-marketing advertising all
crossover each other with DePalma's trademarks: sex and crime. And
like Vertigo, Rebecca Romijn takes over for an uncanny doppelganger
(also played by Romijn) when the weaker double commits suicide. Not
as much of a remake of Vertigo as Body Double is, DePalma's Femme
Fatale regardless freely uses and twists around Hitchcock's
plotpoints regarding the heroine and her double. The diamond-heisting
Romijn, the stronger, more sexually outward and confident one, even
gets involved with the dead double's love interest, just as Novak had
done with Stewart in Vertigo. DePalma's Femme Fatale actually plays
out like Vertigo from the heroine's point of veiw as opposed to the
male point of view, up until the third act where DePalma's
experimental intentions are finally revealed, pulling the rug out
from under the audience.
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<div align="RIGHT" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>(To
be continued...)</i></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-28578146984185539282018-05-20T16:12:00.000-07:002018-05-20T16:12:08.833-07:00Issue #68 - The Absolute Underground Papers(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #68 - originally published February, 2016)<br />
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<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Cult Epics, Barrel, and German Arthouse Horror</b></div>
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<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih1zd5ZnlbeIR4e0Wg18133HPePUwUSWguwSpmcwhENhMaUr6wi0QI3ycvkNr1tfrrOtVuXDQL005q93bYZ0wIYmYz2fMMlerU9UM9oOf1Wum3ZUHtCjI5tRBaCLgvLGaQNp6Uig/s1600/AngstArt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1324" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih1zd5ZnlbeIR4e0Wg18133HPePUwUSWguwSpmcwhENhMaUr6wi0QI3ycvkNr1tfrrOtVuXDQL005q93bYZ0wIYmYz2fMMlerU9UM9oOf1Wum3ZUHtCjI5tRBaCLgvLGaQNp6Uig/s320/AngstArt.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Over
the last few months, the independent retrospective genre label Cult
Epics has released some of Germany's best and unflinching horror
films onto Blu-ray – starting with Jorg Buttgereit's </span><i>NekRomantik,
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">the limited-numbered Blu-ray
disc also included the impossible-to-find-in-English short film </span><i>Hot
Love, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">which if you can believe
it, is actually more twisted than the necrophelic shenanigans of the
director's first feature film. For a while in the early 2000s, one
could purchase a European </span><i>Hot Love </i><span style="font-style: normal;">DVD
from the online retailer XploitedCinema.com, which is sadly long out
of business. This online retailer was the first place I was able to
find a reasonably priced DVD copy of Jess Franco's </span><i>Exorcism
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">(the one released by Synapse
Films) and they had for sale many great out-of-print or unavailable
(on this side of the water) genre films on DVD and VHS. Around this
time, there was another distribution company called Barrel
Entertainment. In the early 2000s Barrel was shaping up to become </span><i>the
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">niche of niche genre DVD
distributors; releasing some brilliant cult oddities into the new and
exciting retail market of DVD. Indeed, they were the first
distributor to bring Jorg Buttgereit's films to North American
audiences via home video – </span><i>NekRomantic, NekRomantik 2,
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>Schramm </i><span style="font-style: normal;">all
received glorious special edition DVD releases, as well as some
stellar, nearly forgotten, independent films like Roger Watkins'
bloody experimental 1970s horror </span><i>Last House on Dead End
Street </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and Leif Jonker's
slightly awkward but exciting 16mm vampire gore-a-thon </span><i>Darkness.
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">In 2005, Barrel Entertainment
announced that they were about to release a hugely anticipated first
North American release of Gerald Kargl's German serial killer
masterpiece </span><i>Angst </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as a
special edition DVD... And then suddenly (or gradually, depending on
your point of view), the release became bogged down in constant
delays. Nobody really knew what was happening over at Barrel
Entertainment, as a small independent DVD distributor it was not
uncommon for their DVD releases to experience some minor delays when
it came to their projected release dates, as packed as they were with
new special features and fantastic film transfers, but in the case of
the ultimately doomed </span><i>Angst </i><span style="font-style: normal;">release,
these delays stretched out to nearly two years before Barrel's antsy
fans were starting to give up hope of ever seeing this German
arthouse horror film released in Canada and the U.S. And sadly, it
had been right to give up on the continual waiting – the release
never happened. What none of us fans knew was that Barrel
Entertainment was going through some strenuous financial hardship,
mostly due to director Roger Watkins' suing them over a spat he had
with their special features on the </span><i>Last House on Dead End
Street </i><span style="font-style: normal;">double-DVD release.
Ironic, seeing as the whole reason Roger Watkins' film had been
available for years on VHS and had developed a cult following without
his knowledge was because the original distribution company had quite
literally stolen the film from him. Now here was a legitimate
distribution company finally putting due care and attention into a
new release and special edition DVD of Watkins' film, and he ends up
getting in a snit and suing </span><i>them. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">This
lawsuit was sadly the nail in the coffin for Barrel Entertainment, a
company far too small to deal with any costly lawsuit. But as
half-cocked as this lawsuit may have been, it was nevertheless truly
sad and unfortunate to learn of director Roger Watkins' passing in
relative obscurity in 2007 – something that left a bit of enigma in
its wake*. As for Barrel Entertainment, their last release was in
2006, and they were not only working on </span><i>Angst </i><span style="font-style: normal;">at
that time, but also the first-ever North American release of Jorg
Buttgereit's masterpiece </span><i>Der Todesking. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Barrel
Entertainment official folded in 2007, the same year as Roger
Watkins' death.</span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">During
the exciting dawn of genre DVD distribution, Cult Epics had also been
releasing cult and then-obscure international films onto special
edition DVDs, most notably the double-disc version of Abel Ferrara's
</span><i>Driller Killer </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and the
triple-disc release of Walerian Worowczyk's </span><i>The Beast (La
Bete). </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Nowadays, with Barrel
Entertainment nearly a decade gone (gone three years longer than
they'd been in business for), Cult Epics has managed to finally pick
up where Barrel had to leave off. After presenting </span><i>NekRomantic
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>Hot Love </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in
a newly-restored high definition transfer, Cult Epics has moved ahead
to give us his gender-flipped follow-up </span><i>NekRomantic 2 </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and
his aforementioned masterpiece </span><i>Der Todesking </i><span style="font-style: normal;">on
a Blu-ray that also included the feature-length Buttgereit
documentary </span><i>Corpse Fucking Art</i><span style="font-style: normal;">;</span><i>
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">and most recently, a hi-def (and
English-subtitled) version of Gerald Kargl's </span><i>Angst. </i>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I,
like most people in North America, got to experience </span><i>Angst
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">for the first time thanks to
Cult Epics' commercial Blu-ray release. To say this film is stunning
would be an astounding understatement. It brought to mind another
largely unheard-of German arthouse horror film released earlier in
2015 by Mondo Macabro; the fanatic killer thriller </span><i>The Fan.
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">Both of these highly stylish
German horror films were produced in the early-to-mid 80s, and both
are amazingly groundbreaking in their depth and explorations as
psychological horror cinema. Both of these Blu-rays (as well as the
Blu-rays of Jorg Buttgereit) are currently widely available to
purchase online in North America, and I would highly recommend a
purchase or two in support of these amazing independent distribution
companies who are passionate enough to bring these cult films to
North American audiences – because who knows how long this might
last in our volatile, and dying, environment of home video
distribution. </span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
SIDEBAR: THE ROGER WATKINS ENIGMA.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Roger
Watkins' 1977 indie arthouse horror film has left behind a seared
imprint on my mind since I first borrowed the Barrel DVD from a good
friend of mine back in 2004. I think the DVD itself had been released
a year or two earlier. In 2009, with Barrel's DVD woefully long
out-of-print, I was able to find a different DVD copy quite easily
(and cheaply) in the UK through a different distribution company.
Watching that film for the second time, I was no less impressed than
on the first viewing. There was something so rebellious, so fucking
art, so bloody horrific in its low-budget drug-addled production
values... It was actually kind of profound in a way. It was then that
I began to wonder about the man behind the film – Roger Watkins. So
I did what any slave to the immediacy of the internet would do... I
Googled him; and discovered forthwith that he'd died in 2007. But
this was just the beginning of my curiosity; it quickly piqued higher
when I stumbled upon a comment thread following an obituary published
online by </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>p</b></span><strong><b>apermag.com</b></strong><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">
(the comment section has since been deleted and disabled as of 2011)
– here reprinted verbatim:</span></strong></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /><br />
</div>
<ul>
<li><div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%;">
<em>Elizabeth
Watkins:</em> "I am Roger's oldest daughter and I want to thank
you for posting this article and paying tribute to him. I really
miss him. He was the smartest guy I've ever met..."</div>
</li>
<li><div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em>Jo C.
Schwarz:</em> "Elizabeth, I am an old friend of your dad. I am
sadden by the news of his passing. Roger was the smartest man I have
ever met myself. His wit and charm will sorely be missed. He often
talk about how smart you were as well."</div>
</li>
<li><div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em>Bob Arturi:</em>
"Elizabeth I had the pleasure of working with your dad at Bill
Kolb Ford in Blauvelt, New York. He was one of the wittiest,
smartest people I ever met. I lost contact with him for a while
after he left the business, but found him a little later at another
dealership. He then totally left the business to move upstate and I
didn't have the opportunity to speak with him before he passed away.
I can't say enough good things about him, his sense of humor, our
long conversations about his life in the cinema world, and of course
his tales of his family. He will always be in my thoughts."</div>
</li>
<li><div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em>Barry Koch:</em>
"Elizabeth, Your Dad roomed at my house for a while back in the
late 1980s. He was a brilliant, creative, and maddeningly mercurial
human being... and remains unforgettable to those who knew him in to
any degree. Despite the tempests that seemed to swirl about his
restless mind, he always spoke lovingly of "his girls",
you and your sister.</div>
</li>
<li><div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em>pedobear:</em>
"I loved roger too we hung out together looking for young
girls. i will miss you. Pedophilia died with you. R.I.H"</div>
</li>
<li><div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em>anonymous:</em>
"Pedobear, It is very important that I speak with you. You hold
the key to a very important puzzle. Please, please, please email me
at this address. <i>[Email withheld]</i> I will make it worth your
while."</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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</li>
</ul>
Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-85815779104042517172018-05-13T15:47:00.000-07:002018-05-13T15:47:02.789-07:00Vertigo/DePalma - III<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; page-break-before: always;">
Part III</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Media
itself has played very integral roles in DePalma's most successful
thrillers. Without exception in every one of DePlama's key films
media has been organically integrated into the themes and plots of
these thrillers. Of course, DePalma's use of media in these movies
are a technological and societal development of voyeurism, something
that Hitchcock also utilized to highly effective extents in Vertigo,
Psycho, and of course, Rear Window. With Hitchcock's films, it was
telescopes, windows and peepholes. DePalma turns a technological
twist to all of this, as with the opening to his film Sisters, where
he simultaneously engages his fiction characters and the audience
themselves in an act of voyeurism through a filmed television screen
which is broadcasting a clip of a new reality-game show that has its
own basis in voyeurism – Margot Kidder is pretending to be a blind
woman who has accidentally walked into the men's changing room at a
gym, and proceeds to undress in front of one of the male clients. The
idea of the fictitious game show is “What would he do?”, to which
the studio audience and contestants (inside the film) have to take a
guess in order to win the game show prize. And while this is all
happening, DePalma is also slyly critiquing the whole idea of
television media as just another, albeit accepted and even
celebrated, form of voyeurism. An extension of Hitchcock's
peephole-voyeurism that all of television-watching society condemns –
and so DePalma is pointing out our, his film's audience's (and
accepted society's), own hypocrisy when it comes to where the line is
drawn with our sometimes vampiric voyeuristic tendencies. Media as a
plot device then comes around again, this time in the forms of
cameras and photography, in Dressed to Kill, where the young hero
played by Keith Gordon sets up a hidden automatic time-lapse camera
outside of his mother's psychiatrist's office so that he might
capture evidence incriminating the psychiatrist in his mother's
(Angie Dickinson's) murder. Camera and photography come around again
in Femme Fatale, where a crucial photograph taken of a
woman-in-hiding throws her fairy-tale world into turmoil when the
photograph becomes a printed-media advertising sensation and is
plastered all over Europe. In Blow Out, photography is present in the
deepening complexity of the plot, but this film is more about the
media utilized in the making of b-movies, specifically, recorded
sound. In Blow Out it is John Travolta's sound recording that is, in
effect, the first witness to a conspiratorial murder, but when
Travolta teams up with the good-hearted prostitute Nancy Allen to
utilize sound recordings and hidden microphones to solve the murder
and capture the villain (John Lithgow), things go spinning out of
control and Trovolta winds up completely lost and adrift in his
personal world of sound, which throughout the film has become his own
personal circle of hell. A precursor to Body Double, DePalma's Blow
Out also perversely toys around with the heroine's “doubles”, as
villain John Lithgow, needing to be rid of Allen's character as she
was also a witness to the key murder in this story, decides to create
an alibi for her impending murder by first murdering several other
prostitutes who bear an uncanny likeness to Nancy Allen's character.
This way, Allen's character's murder would look like a random one in
a line of serial killings that had been plaguing the city. Here,
then, we also begin to get a mix of slasher-film aesthetics in a film
where Travolta is first seen sound-editing a b-movie slasher film;
and also DePalma's increasingly flirtatious tango with the
misogynistic controversy, something that celebrated writer Harlan
Ellison had some very opinionated things to say about within the
introduction of a paperback re-print of his book “Shatterday” in
1981.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Voyeurism
went from the telescope and directly to the then-cutting-edge media
technology of the videotape industry in Body Double. While windows
still remained a key element through witch our characters' voyeurism
could be accomplished in Body Double, Vertigo, and obviously Rear
Window, it was the mass acceptance of videotape technology that gave
a welcome twist to Body Double; when hero Craig Wasson peruses the
video rental shelves in the Hollywood videostore, launching his
amateur investigation into the murder of Deborah Shelton, it's a
curiously electrifying scene as we're waiting to see what could
possibly come of this. When he finds the VHS videotape featuring the
porn star (played by Melanie Griffith) who's erotic-dance routine
eerily echoed the murder victim's window-dance, he's able to find,
through the production credits, a thin track to follow in possibly
finding Melanie Griffith's character, and hence, the possible key to
solving a murder. Wasson not only finds Griffith and the key to
solving the puzzle, but also manages to find far more danger than he
was prepared for. At the end of Body Double, DePalma returns us to
the scene of the b-movie production, with film cameras rolling and
body doubles put into place for the leading b-movie actress, and this
all intentionally circles back to the opening erotic-fantasy sequence
in Dressed to Kill (1980) comically triggering memories of Angie
Dickinson's shower scene and the practical use of her body double –
and so then DePalma has created a mini meta-world of circling media
and voyeurism by cleverly utilizing b-movie production, camera,
sound, VHS tapes, slasher films, and body-doubles throughout his key
thriller trilogy. In all of this, DePalma's inherent good-humour
about films and filmmaking are completely in evidence by the time
Body Double's end credits begin to roll up over the body double's
funny shower scene.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Media
also rears its head, again integral to the plots, in DePalma's later
films, both of the throwback thriller with which he's gained his fame
from, as well as his Hollywood studio summer blockbuster. In Raising
Cain, the leading married couple (John Lithgow and Lolita Davidovich)
have set up video baby-monitors which become both a storytelling and
a camerawork element of that film; and in Mission Impossible, the
whole plotpoint regarding media files stored on a hard-disc
eventually becomes one of the biggest, most elaborately
sought-after-and-captured MacGuffins in spy-movie history, once again
providing a grinning example of DePalma's sly, cinematic humour.
Funnily, both of these DePalma films also relied heavily on flashback
storytelling, something that he'd avoided in his key thriller trilogy
(Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double) – a slight exception being
Travolta's character back-story in Blow Out – but that flashback
did not have any bearing on the exposition of the solving of the
mystery in the movie, unlike Raising Cain, Mission Impossible, and
unlike Hitchcock's Vertigo, wherein each of these films the cinematic
flashbacks actually explained the entire mystery.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sisters
(1973) actually cleverly weaved the cinematic flashback trope with
DePalma's interest in media technology by providing a construct for
the movie's flashback sequence through warped memory (echoing
Stewart's dream sequence imagery in Vertigo) and recorded laboratory
research as projected through black-and-white 16mm documentary film
footage. From there, DePalma drew far more specific flashback
inspiration from Hitchcock's Vertigo in both storytelling and
framing mis-en-scene technique, twisting it for his own exhilarating
cinematic means, in his 1978 film The Fury. Following The Fury, from
1980-1984 DePalma dropped the on-screen flashback storytelling trope
in favour of expositional-dialogue as had been used during the
conclusion of Hitchcock's Psycho. Dressed to Kill, in particular, was
more of a remake of Psycho just as Body Double was a remake of
Vertigo. Listening to the summing-up-the-entire-mystery dialogue at
the end of DePalma's Dressed to Kill, we can't help but think of the
conclusion of Psycho, which then causes us to reflect on the whole of
DePalma's film and the fact that each scene is really an updating of
Hitchcock's film within the expanded boundaries of sexualism,
realism, and secret hypocritical voyeurism/coveting of “professional”
people in society of the 1980s.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As a
remake, Body Double also included a circling-camera shot lifted
directly from Vertigo, the shot was also exhilaratingly employed in
Blow Out – circling John Travolta in Blow Out's most celebrated
camera shot as he discovers, tape by tape, that every sound recording
in his sound studio has been systematically erased. The circling
camera shot is used to maximum effectiveness during the beach scene
where Deborah Shelton and Craig Wasson finally interact without
telescopes, windows, or lingerie-store changing rooms between them.
As the unlikely couple kisses, giving into desire, this is a more
lustful and technically updated version of the same take from Vertigo
where James Stewart and Kim Novak finally begin connecting. While
DePalma's take emotionally mixes love, lust, obsession, and anxiety
in Body Double, his take on this same twirling camerawork in Blow Out
strictly served to masterfully induce deepening anxiety. DePalma, if
anything, is a master of camera movements, to the point that when he
was ready to go into production for Femme Fatale (2002) he would
require camera rigs that would need to be invented specifically for
his film. His virtuoso camerawork, mixed with the heightened
sexuality of his content (and context), is what makes his work stand
out and stand apart. He is a technically more proficient filmmaker
than Hitchcock, but without Hitchcock's experiments in
cinematography, from the opening sequence in Psycho to the ongoing
takes in Rope (which also required specialized equipment and
operators at that time) to the inventive camerawork that permeates
nearly every frame of Vertigo, DePalma might not have had such a
critical base from which to launch from.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="RIGHT" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>(To
be continued...)</i></div>
<div align="RIGHT" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-76752453531301474862018-05-06T15:35:00.000-07:002018-05-06T15:35:07.001-07:00Bizarre Gialli – a few out-of-the-box Italian giallo films worth a look<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Initially,
I was arguing with myself whether to even write this retrospective of
a handful of lesser-known <i>gialli </i>or not – but after taking
Arrow's (fairly) recent release of Sergio Martino's <i>The Suspicious
Death of a Minor </i>for a spin, I thought ultimately it might
actually be worthwhile to say at least a few words about the
under-the-radar works present in this lush cinematic genre...
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When
the thought had first hit me to write something about the (slightly?)
more obscure films from the giallo canon, it was months before I'd
even heard of Arrow's release. Years ago, Severin Films had put out a
couple of sleazy, experimental, and somewhat hallucinogenic giallo
films on DVD, <i>In the Folds of the Flesh </i>and <i>The Sister of
Ursula. </i>The latter one Severin had boasted as a sleazy
exploitation giallo, but actually, it's a very entertaining
chamber-style giallo. A “chamber” giallo would be an Itlaian
thriller that takes place mostly in an apartment where the paranoia
within the film's limited amount of characters builds through a
series of sexual encounters, misunderstandings, and double-crosses,
until everything climaxes in bloody murder and abject fear. <i>The
Sister of Ursula </i>dances us through these giallo numbers with the
rough edges of a slightly more low-budget production, which it tries
to cover up with more sex and nudity than your more familiar giallo
stylings. It's actually quite entertaining and the photography
through the abandoned hotel/resort that serves as the backdrop for
this giallo is visually engaging, as is the entire cast as they work
their way through this bodycount/mystery. <i>The Sister of Ursula
</i>also stars Barbara Magnolfi, recognizable from Dario Argento's
<i>Suspiria.</i></div>
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Barbara
Magnofi also appears in Sergio Martino's <i>The Suspicious Death of a
Minor, </i>as one of the titular dead minor's prostitute
acquaintances, and someone who is also wrapped up in the drug and
political conspiracy that pushes lead investigator Claudio Cassinelli
into solving the titular crime. Interestingly, this film looked to me
like a very early one of Sergio Martino's films, mixing all the
expected elements of the giallo genre with the Italian <i>poliziotteschi
</i>genre that became popularized following Don Siegel's <i>Dirty
Harry </i>– to the point where the music score actually varies and
sways from the traditional-sounding giallo soundtrack to the
poliziotteschi one.<i> </i>I discovered, after watching this film,
that this was actually the <i>last </i>of Sergio Martino's six filmed
<i>gialli, </i>and while his previous films <i>The Strange Vice of
Mrs. Whard, All the Colors of the Dark, Your Vice is a Locked Room
and only I have the Key, </i>and <i>Torso </i>might be the crowning
achievements of Martino's career, there is a good spot for his genre
and cinematographic mash-up of Italian sub-genres that is <i>The
Suspicious Death of a Minor. </i>
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Following
<i>The Sister of Ursula, </i>I had watched, as a personal
double-feature, the Severin Films release of <i>In the Folds of the
Flesh</i>, which took me a lengthy amount of time to finally purchase
due to the lukewarm reviews the DVD had received online upon its
initial release. But shame on me for waiting so long, <i>In the Folds
of the Flesh </i>is actually a humourous, sarcastic, sexy,
not-quite-mainstream giallo that stat off with wild, unnecessary,
hallucinogenic hooks that looks like director Sergio Bergonzelli is
trying to give us the Jean-Luc Goddard of giallo cinema – before it
segues into a (also chamber-like scenario) take on Roman Polanski's
<i>Cul-de-Sac, </i>simply elevating this psychosexual romp in
paranoia and conspiracy.
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Once
experiencing these two Severin Films DVDs – <i>The Sister of Ursula
</i>and <i>In the Folds of the Flesh, </i>I found myself energized
and ready for one more off-the-beaten-path giallo. I turned to
Ruggero Deodato, director of <i>Cannibal </i>Holocaust and <i>Cut and
Run</i>,<i> </i>who had made the tip-top of Italian jungle
gut-muncher horror films, yet had not been at all prolific in the
giallo genre. Again hearkening back to Roman Polanski for
inspiration, Deodato's <i>Waves of Lust, </i>put out by Raro Video on
DVD, concerns a pair of lovers who set out to destroy an upper-class
couple whom they not only view as manipulative and opportunistic, but
also believe have something to do with their friend's death and that
the world would be better without, and so a very simple, yet very
engaging, revenge scenario ensues, turning what is billed as an
erotic romp-style drama into total giallo territory, with wonderful
success. <i>Waves of Lust </i>is certainly more exploitive than it is
mysterious, but this detracts from Deodato's film not in the least.
The paranoiac drama between the two couples provides the needed
thrust for the oncoming sexual and violent shenanigans in the film,
which turns out a wonderfully satisfying ending. While this might be
the most obscure of the four films retrospectively viewed here, it's
probably the most solid and memorable of them all. Just like Sergio
Martino, director Ruggero Deodato made films for commercial genre
cinema in Italy in the 19070sand 1980s, and these films are massively
appealing. </div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-31853408468661735212018-05-04T12:15:00.000-07:002018-05-04T12:15:12.072-07:00#FF – Franco Friday (part 2)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Okay,
so I do love the film writings of Roger Ebert. I love his book “Your
Movie Sucks” and some of his film reviews – specifically for Eyes
Wide Shut, Blow-Up, and 2010: The Year We Made Contact, helped me to
understand the multiple sub-levels of cinema and its beautiful
language, and how that language is used to communicate, and at times,
to mess with an audience. But I was, admittedly, slightly dismayed
when I inadvertently came across a review Roger Ebert had written on
Umberto Lenzi's 60s giallo-thriller </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Paranoia,
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
which he describes Lenzi's film as the “second worst film” he'd
seen that year – the film in first place for worst of the year...?
Jess Franco's </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Succubus.
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Okay,
also admittedly, I could see where Ebert might have been coming from
at that point in time, and at that place in the cinema culture of
Chicago's movie theatres... Ebert had stated that </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span></i><i>Only
the haunting memory of 'Succubus' prevents me from naming 'Paranoia'
the worst movie of the year... 'Succubus' was a flat-out bomb. It
left you stunned and reeling. There was literally nothing of worth in
it. Even the girl was ugly. The color looked like it had been scraped
off the bottom of an old garbage boat. The acting resembled a
catatonic state. The script (ha!) had the flair of a baggage tag. It
was possibly the worst movie of all time. So no wonder it's in its
fifth week in neighborhood theaters, after rolling up record grosses
in its first run. No matter what the censor board thinks, the Chicago
proletariat knows what it likes.”</i>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I
would think that given some time to reflect back on this review
(impossible now), that the usually intelligent and insightful critic
would cringe at his remarks on the “ugly girl” starring in
Succubus, who happened to be the androgynous and striking beauty
Janine Reynaud </span><i>(Two Undercover Angels; Kiss Me, Monster!).</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
Also, clearly lost on the cinematically critical mind of a young
Roger Ebert in the 1960s was the whole idea and cinematic concepts of
European arthouse genre cinema; which is striking unto itself,
although I'm admittedly reflecting on this with the distance of
decades of swimming and rippling changes in cultural and artistic
representations and acceptances that have come between the now and
the original American release of one of Jess Franco's artistic
masterpieces. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;">#JessFrancoFriday</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk2ca5liI3pdjn5llS1YafdsYx89cubYx6lZ-Qvqax0_T2tcOVCxsklhyGehygF2nlN_Wf7zT0O8TCZWje0T1CaiRyn-K9iB2nVnkzo2QBzpzMlMwv_dXDQ5rY5Z5YBHIYLEKmcQ/s1600/FF_Succubus1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk2ca5liI3pdjn5llS1YafdsYx89cubYx6lZ-Qvqax0_T2tcOVCxsklhyGehygF2nlN_Wf7zT0O8TCZWje0T1CaiRyn-K9iB2nVnkzo2QBzpzMlMwv_dXDQ5rY5Z5YBHIYLEKmcQ/s320/FF_Succubus1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-22000550718803745072018-04-27T15:19:00.001-07:002018-04-27T15:31:21.338-07:00#FF – Franco Friday (part 1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-TXDH7-4CplqgrfYw-htQGwuF-JvnsZdiyDaN7WxxZebvLc6bVgpdoBUBTldkmcNg8GOLyeu9FqkDplnV4sFHaZMBnh_ITta3fcSX2iAz49phVSxoGfJTAHB3zbmhq2kjVU25TQ/s1600/KillerBarbys1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1364" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-TXDH7-4CplqgrfYw-htQGwuF-JvnsZdiyDaN7WxxZebvLc6bVgpdoBUBTldkmcNg8GOLyeu9FqkDplnV4sFHaZMBnh_ITta3fcSX2iAz49phVSxoGfJTAHB3zbmhq2kjVU25TQ/s200/KillerBarbys1.jpg" width="170" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; page-break-before: always;">
In the spirit of
sharing something on #FrancoFriday(s), I'll contribute the minor fact
that while I've been pretty good at keeping up-to-date on
Redemption's / Kino Lorber's Blu-ray releases of this mad genius'
work, I have found myself at a sever lack for time. Sitting in
waiting are two classic Franco films, the re-working of the Countess
Bathory legend as a Rock-Horror opus (featuring the titular band in
starring roles), the Killer Barbys. To me, this was hands-down the
most accessible film in gaining entry into Franco's bizarre world of
nearly indefinable cinema (and for me this was back in the early
2000s), and Killer Barbys still holds a nostalgic place in my heart
to this day, despite its repetitive shots and extended scenes of
nothing-really-happening which are intended to pad out the running
time. At least the shot repetition is set to an energetic pop/rock
soundtrack. The other cool Kino Lorber/Franco release is the
Diabolical Dr. Z, Franco's wildly stylish black-and-white
<i>pre-</i><span style="font-style: normal;">make/predecessor to his
more-adored She Killed in Ecstasy... but this crazy and kitschy
original is without a doubt well worth a look. I'm looking forward to
these two films being my own double-feature Franco retrospective,
which will be happening as soon as I have the chance to carve out
some time in the next week or so. Damn it, what's happened to all of
my time?! #JessFrancoFriday </span></div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-91605268568566986412018-04-15T16:58:00.000-07:002018-04-15T16:58:05.754-07:00“She's So Lovely”...<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqzxel-Ht9Sbu8w0y9OFCALYx428mz3MUFy38t3xUuglAXC7VEVYB0pDxDUxRsNryd3wTyUJ3iOWEHdVDnSf0pGiL05lTyj-XWO7oYn5rKV3HiZ74BzwrIvAbmsuMPobe63T7-ow/s1600/Inception_Marion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1500" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqzxel-Ht9Sbu8w0y9OFCALYx428mz3MUFy38t3xUuglAXC7VEVYB0pDxDUxRsNryd3wTyUJ3iOWEHdVDnSf0pGiL05lTyj-XWO7oYn5rKV3HiZ74BzwrIvAbmsuMPobe63T7-ow/s200/Inception_Marion.jpg" width="200" /></a>Sometimes
a complex and thoughtful film will offer a clue, often as a
throw-away line within a deceptively mundane seen, towards the deep
truths and meaning held within the film author's wholly intended
expression...
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
single most important line in the film <i>Inception, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">a
thoroughly thought-provoking film written and directed by Christopher
Nolan, follows Ellen Page's antagonistic inter-subconscious run-in
with Marion Cotillard, in one such seemingly mundane scene where
Page's character is speaking with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and she asks:</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> “What
was she like in real life?”</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Here,
Gordon-Levitt pauses before answering, </span><i>“She was lovely.”</i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is the exact point where the entire explanation of the film
should come into focus. But before I can explain this, let's take a
look backwards at the situational aspects of these characters:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Marion Cotillard is the dead wife of widower Leonardo DiCaprio.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the longtime friend and business partner of
Leonardo DiCaprio.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Leonardo DiCaprio runs a freelance business, based on his own
research and development of invading interfering in peoples'
subconscious version of their own 'selves'.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When Ellen Page's character asks the question, <i>“What was she
like in real life?”, </i>Cotillard's character would be thus far
setup to appear as a confrontational, somewhat unlikable character.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And at this point, if more exposition is required for you to
understand what's been set up for the film, then it would be better
if you watched the film before proceeding...</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Whist in a training session, Page enters DiCaprio's subconscious
mind, which is where she ran into Cotillard, who is in a twisted way,
acting as a stereotypical jealous ex-wife, is presented as
“defending” DiCaprio's psyche from invasion. Hence the
aforementioned antagonistic inter-subconscious clash. But if we dig
deeper into this allegorical presentation, what is <i>really </i>going
on here? With Cotillard's character having already maliciously
thwarted at least one of DiCaprio's subconscious business endeavours
(and thusly putting the protagonist dream team in actual, physical
peril), can we then take a deeper inspection of this subconscious
relationship between DiCaprio's and Cotillard's characters and
decide, with the information that we're given by Nolan in his own
film, that DiCaprio's character is holding some sort of grudge
against Cotillard's character – or, perhaps, his subconsciously is
more widely seeing her in a negative light? I think the answer to
both halves of this question is YES. And again, herein lies part of
the key to solving the puzzle of <i>Inception... </i>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Throughout <i>Inception, </i>DiCaprio's and Cotillard's children are
involved as a motivational factor – DiCaprio must make it back to
America, from France, so that he can reunite with his children –
children whose faces are never fully realized within DiCaprio's mind,
indicating guilt and regret at being a non-present father, and also
indicating DiCaprio's wishes to redeem himself in this regard. So,
then, who does DiCaprio's character point his subconscious finger at
as being the “bad guy”? His wife and the mother of the children –
Cotillard's seemingly aloof character. And this is where the answers
and true theme of Nolan's film really start to shine out, if, as
audience members, we're willing to dig until we get to this fracted
light.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Like any human being(s), becoming the victims of the mundanity of
life is a psychological danger that resonates. Falling victim to this
is quite severe in the sense that we start to loath our ourselves,
our loved ones, and then perhaps start to blame these loved ones for
our own insecurities, and our own shortcomings. Like being an
absentee father. And like Sidney Poitier said in <i>To Sir, With
Love, </i>“Marriage is no institution for the insecure”. So then,
we start to build a subconscious reality where we can comfortably
shift our blame. The real challenge is to be able to destroy – and
to allow the destruction of – this subconscious world. In Nolan's
vision, DiCaprio's subconscious world is at least rotting and falling
apart, indicating his <i>willingness </i>to accept the idea that he's
merely blaming his own wife for his paternal shortcomings.
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The character played by Ken Watanabe represents (directly), within
his dream-setting, the subconscious-invaded-by-DiCaprio's
consciousness (and this explains the opening shot of DiCaprio waking
up dazed on a beach, or, the initial “awakening” of his
character, both subconsciously and in reality), and he also
represents indirectly<i> </i>the <i>symbolic </i>aspect of DiCaprio's
own character – if he, DiCaprio's character, doesn't save Watanabe
(in essence, <i>himself</i>), then he'll grow old and become lost in
how own blame-and-guilt-soaked subconsciousness. Here, Watanabe is
the insertion of the <i>objective correlative </i>in Nolan's movie.
Or in other words, symbolically speaking, DiCaprio's character <i>is
</i>Watanabe's character. DiCaprio is waking up, mentally, in order
to be able to wake himself from the deep slumber of his own guilt and
inaction.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So then, in the aftermath of this initial “awakening”, we come
back to the proverbial ground-floor of Nolan's cinematic puzzle (and
it is a puzzle, as Nolan left it “up to the audience” whether
DiCaprio's experience was taking place in the real world on in a
subconsciously-manufactured reality...) – Constructed in its
purely subconscious form, DiCaprio's character, dealing with emotions
of guilt, loss, and regret, and avoiding self-realization and the
responsibility and results of his own actions (<i>i.e.</i> the
neglect of his children), he shifts this blame to his wife Cotillard
(whom, in real-reality, is <i>“Lovely”</i>, which is spoken by
Gordon-Levitt's character but is also a true notion buried deep
within the “defence” psyche of DiCaprio's character). Somewhere
outside of the borders of this cinematic tale, DiCaprio's character,
finally realizing that this subconscious subterfuge can't last, even
in the state of dream, he creates an escape scenario (the action of
the film); and following this, he “awakens” on the shores of a
finally ebbing dream-tide; now finding himself physically and
mentally enabled enough to save the Watanabe character – <i>i.e</i>
himself. The final frames of <i>Inception </i>are now just the full
waking of DiCaprio's dream-world, the final images before our eyes
flutter open to the morning light after a night of dream-epiphany, to
an ending that has been hinted throughout Nolan's cinematic vision
through flash-forward repeating shots. And although the focus of the
story (the dream) was placed on the foggy memories of his children,
DiCaprio's ultimate boon, after his own internal redemption (which on
all levels of the story's “reality” is what Nolan's film is all
about), is that he will likely be able to stand with his lovely wife
in his perceived and genuinely desired forgiveness from her.</div>
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~V.</div>
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Vhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13556331576998737577noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358219.post-16978573470287980662018-04-08T19:15:00.000-07:002018-04-08T19:15:01.082-07:00Their Later Films Vol. 5 – Alejandro Jodorowsky.
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<span id="goog_346860260"></span><span id="goog_346860261"></span>Outside of Hollywood's most fanous cinematic releases, it's the
auteurs whose films people really remember seeing for the first time.
Argento, Romero, Bava, Fulci, Franco, Tarantino, Rodriguez, Lynch,
Carpenter, and several others... but perhaps it's the surrealists
that we <i>really </i>remember because, well, the films are fucking
weird – and inspiring, on many levels (intellectually, emotionally,
creatively)... Hands down any cinephile I've ever conversed with
remembers the first David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and
Alejandro Jodorowsky film they ever saw; usually because it changed
their lives. I was a late-comer to the world of Alejandro Jodorowsky,
having discovered him roughly a year-and-a-half before the first film
in his new (intended) trilogy was released, <i>Dance with Reality –
</i>but I'll get back to that film in a moment.
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Funnily, it had all started with 2005's <i>Masters of Horror
</i>television series, created by Mick Garris. The film (episode?)
that would launch Garris' horror anthology series would be <i>Cigarette
Burns, </i>by John Carpenter, in which a sort of film detective
(played by a pre-<i>Walking Dead</i> Norman Reedus, fresh off of
Guillermo Del Toros' <i>Blade II</i>) is hired (by Udo Kier) to track
down a lost film; a movie that caused bloody riots upon its festival
release and sent the enigmatic director into hiding. I don't know why
I thought this at the time, but I felt, somewhere deep in my
cinematic heart, that John Carpenter's <i>Cigarette Burns </i>was
fictionally referring to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Upon seeing
Carpenter's episode, I went out and purchased the then-new Alejandro
Jodorowsky DVD boxset from Anchor Bay. And upon this purchase, I
threw his first film, <i>Fando y Lis, </i>into the DVD player – a
surreal, black-and-white, sexualized travel-epic. But I truly
digress, as this essay is not about the first Jodorowsky film I ever
watched – as I'd said, this is about the first time I actually
<i>discovered </i>Jodorowski, and that wasn't until 2012, when I
witness, for the first time (and from that very boxset), <i>The Holy
Mountain...</i></div>
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<span id="goog_346860266"></span><span id="goog_346860267"></span>Following the life-changing experience of Jodorowsky's <i>The Holy
Mountain</i>, Vancouver's Cinemateque held a retrospective of
Jodorowsky's work, where I went both backwards and forwards in the
filmmaker's stunning career – first, having the pleasure of
experiencing <i>El Topo </i>in the cinema, and then experiencing
Vancouver's first theatrical screening of his 2013 film, <i>Dance of
Reality. </i>This latter film was not like Jodorowsky's previous
<i>Fando y Lis, El Topo, </i>or <i>The Holy Mountain, </i>yet no less
important as those films because <i>Dance of Reality </i>so
thoroughly infused Jodorowsky's own life and perspectives into the
over-the-top and transgressive drama that had been his signature
trademark throughout his career that Jodorowsky actually managed to
recreate himself as a professional artistic filmmaker at the point in
his life when most cinematic auteurs were well on their way downhill
to artistic and commercial failure. He hired his son to play his
father, and gave us a genuine life sentiment in the midst of a
surreal cinematic experience that flirts with exploitation but in far
more comfortable in arthouse, but in the end is a rich visual
exposition of truth and things that we, as human beings, might prefer
to keep buried under a shallow pile of earth.</div>
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<span id="goog_346860269"></span><span id="goog_346860270"></span>There are few filmmakers that can manage to evoke emotional and
intellectual engagement in their films that seem to transcend the
mere opinions of the mainstream (or rather, those who control the
mainstream media content), and Jodorowsky is one of the three – the
other two being Lloyd Kaufman of TROMA Entertainment, the
longest-running independent movie studio... well, <i>ever</i>; whose
latest films <i>Poultrygeist </i>and <i>Return to Return to Nuke 'Em
High aka Vol. 2 </i>epitomize his wildly outrageous and directorial
and creative career with astounding over-the-top satirical and
meaningful anti-conformist showcases contained as exploitation cinema
(although anything of Kaufman's from <i>Tromeo and Juliet </i>forward
is worth delving into if you're game to be exploring in this arena);
and the director of the Mad Max films George Miller, whose latest <i>Mad
Max: Fury Road </i>showed that this stratospheric auteur could not
only deliver a surrealist, artistic, and exploitive film to
international audiences (and with immense praise), but could also
receive industry and commercial accolades in doing so. In one UK film
critic's opinion, <i>Mad Max: Fury Road </i>was the “Movie of the
Century”. I could be close to agreeing with this reactive
sentiment. For all of this appreciation, it might be worth noting
that Jodorowsky, Kaufman, and Miller were all in their seventies
while enjoying these artistic successes; and in the case of all three
of these auteurs' latest movies, each one of them at some point
reminded me of each others' works.</div>
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After <i>Dance of Reality, </i>Jodorowsky had the opportunity,
thanks to crowd-funding platforms, to create the second film in his
late-life trilogy, <i>Endless Poetry, </i>which premiered at
international film festivals in 2016. In this latest film Jodorowsky
leans towards the far-more personal aspects of his life, and so
<i>Endless Poetry </i>is far more autobiographical than even <i>Dance
of Reality</i> – this time, not only does Jodorowsky's son play his
father, but his grandson plays himself. The actress who played his
mother in both films, Pamela Flores, also plays his life-changing
girlfriend in <i>Endless Poetry </i>in a dual-role. Here we also get
emotional closure between the father/son characters, as well as some
closer in regards to what made Jodorowsky make the life choices that
he acted upon, and it brings up some personal regrets, which he
directs his real-life son and grandson to act out in front of the
camera. <i>Endless Poetry </i>could be Alejandro Jodorowsky's most
mainstream-accessible film, but really, without the history of his
films, would it really have the same meaning...? </div>
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~V.</div>
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<i>Fury Road...</i> </div>
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<i>Lloyd Kaufman's brilliant "Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High aka Vol. 2"...</i> </div>
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<i>Endless Poetry...</i> </div>
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