The Fourth Man (1983)

This is going to be spoiler heavy, so if you haven't seen Paul Verhoeven's classic erotic thriller The Fourth Man I recommend you to stop reading now and see the film first, then come back to see what absurd things I have to say about it.

I'm not especially familiar with the earlier stuff of Verhoeven. The oldest movie I've seen directed by him is the excellent and totally insane Flesh+Blood, starring our favourite Rutger Hauer - and the legend says he and Verhoeven never got along good again after that movie, which is a damn pity. I love them both.

The Fourth Man is a masterpiece, there's no question about. It's a wild, European version of what Brian De Palma could have done the days he woke up brilliant, with a big dose Hitchcock and the usual European style of sex and violence and gorgeous cinematography by Jan de Bont - who later became a terrible and shallow director of Hollywood blockbusters. Fuck him. It's a steamy and graphic - both sexually and violently - story about a gay writer (Jeroen Krabbé) who gets spellbound by a blonde goddess (Renée Soutendijk) and starts a sexual and economical relationship with her, more or less to get his hands on her young, hunky lover (Thom Hoffman). But soon he notices that something is odd, something is wrong - she's been married three times and all of her husbands has been killed in macabre accidents. Is it just a coincidence, or is she a murdered - or even a witch?

I love every second of this film, it's so original and intelligent and open-minded. Lots of sex and even a very graphic, almost humoristic, death scene who could have come directly from an Eighties gory horror film. But what struck me the most is the films that the mysterious woman shoots with her Super 8 camera. Films of her three dead husbands, up to their very death, in graphic detail!

There's a lot of this footage to choose from, but what do you think of when you see these three screenshots?

Now, I'm a disturbed person. I often see stuff that's not there. I get bored if I don't do that. But here I see something very interesting, I see three clear references to famous Mondo-sequences. Yeah, well - it's more clear if you see the whole footage - and especially when it ties together in the end, in a true melodramatic, unrealistic Mondo-fashion.

The first two is obviously inspired by 1978's Faces of Death, the infamous fake documentary that was produced for the Japanese market and became very controversial - and a big success, bigger than Star Wars in Japan at the time. 99% of the footage is fake, not so well-done either, but it's pure, traditional exploitation. In that movie we see a girl (I think it's a girl, it's been a couple of years since I saw it the last time) getting killed by a boat propeller, crashing into her and also a skydiver who lands in the middle of a croc pond! What we see in The Fourth Man is one husband, first with shaky handheld amateur camera getting killed when a boat crashes into him and the other husband falling from his death when the parachute won't open. The footage is very similar to that in Faces of Death, and like this footage - or more like a flashback in the end - it suddenly transforms to something more advanced than just amateur footage. There's suddenly several cameras, different angles - stuff that would give away that the Faces of Death-footage was fake - but very few, at the time, dared to think that far. Real deaths is more fun, it seems.

The third one is even more interesting (and I'm not sure it was included in Faces of Death). When I was a kid I saw something on TV that I never forgot: a man stepping out from his car in a safari park and getting eaten by lions. This is footage that was created for Antonio Climati and Mario Morra's 1975 Mondo "Savage Man Savage Beast", and has since then become the truth. People still debate if it's fake or not, but it's fake - it's just too many cameras, too many angles, too many dramaturgical tricks to make it real. It's well-made, but it's just smoke and mirrors - and very similar to the scene in Verhoeven's film. 

Here it is, for those who want to see:

So Verhoeven uses three famous faked scenes from fake documentaries about death and destruction, as inspiration for his own little masterpiece. Is this deliberate or is it just coincidence? Personally I think it could be something he noticed and used, maybe even thinking it was real - like many others at the same time. Faces of Death was a big hit and the lion-sequence is still a famous piece of mythical "found footage". Maybe one of the best of it's kind, because it's still alive and still talked about.

The Fourth Man is a movie about confusing reality with dreams and visions, what is real and what is fake. What is madness? What is murder? Maybe we'll never now. Maybe the deaths in The Fourth Man just is strange coincidences and our hero is getting too absorbed in his storytelling and religious guilt.

Or maybe we're all fooled by the magic of film. 

Amphibious 3D (2010)

I hope Brian Yuzna one day write his memoires, because he's a director/producer who really fought all his life to make genre cinema, and only that. Some stuff was bad and some stuff was really good. After a sejour in Spain together with Fantastic Film Factory he took his bags and went even more far away and ended up in Indonesia, of all places in the world! After producing the anthology movie Takut (2008) he found some Dutch investors and made his most ambitious film in years, Amphibious3D! And... what the hell happen? This was released in 2010 and still not good distribution! I mean, if every crappy SyFy Channel movie gets a blu-ray release, why is this one totally forgotten? Distributors, do your fucking job and give this a fat release!

Michael Paré plays the grumpy Captain Jack Bowman, who works in Indonesia, taking every job he can find to get some money. Marine biologist Skylar Shane (Janna Fassaert) hires him to go out on an expedition to find prehistoric fossils. Out on the sea they bump in to some of Jack's old buddies, a gang of smugglers pretending to be fishermen. They have their base on an old house sitting on top of a wooden platform. But something has awoken in the sea, and Progeny one of the smugglers - a little boy - has supernatural powers and taking revenge on the death of his friend by controlling a huge underwater scorpion! Well, you can guess what happens next...

If you go into this movie expecting an original story with amazing dialogue and characters from a Scorsese movie - then you can turn around and watch something else. But if you want - and appreciate - a good old monster movie this is the movie for you. First of all, I love the setting in Indonesia, deeply connected to local believes and traditions and some beautiful locations. Most of the movie is set on the house/platform-thingie, but the set design is excellent and never takes away the illusion of being stuck somewhere at sea.

The monster is BIG, so it's nothing that hides around in the house killing people. It mostly uses it's tail to impale baddies, or just rip them apart. Or stick it in the head of some ugly mother... or cut and decapitate! Yeah, Amphibious delivers on the gore and blood-front and I for one is very grateful for that. This is not a bloodless SyFy production! I love the mix of practical effects and CG and even if I've seen better animations in cheaper movies, the scorpion looks great and fits the style of the movie.

Compared to Yuzna's two last movies in Spain, Beneath Still Waters and Rottweiler, this is actually a very slick movie. The other two had scripts that desperately tried to be something different, something unique - but failed miserably! It was also obvious that Yuzna didn't put his soul into the stories and the end result was boring like hell. Amphibious 3D is a lot more fun. The simple storyline and few locations gives Yuzna an opportunity to shine with his visual talents and work a little bit more with the actors. I would say this is Yuzna's best movie since 1998's Progeny (and even The Dentist 2 from the same year).

Now I just wish this movie got distribution, everywhere. I would love a blu-ray for example! I'm sure a lot creature feature fans out there would love to give this is a spin more than one time!