Overlooked Film weekend at the cabin: Stake Land, Leonard Part 6, Angst, Samurai Cop etc.

Stake Land

We spent a movie weekend at a cabin, me and six friends of mine, watching 14 feature-length films and an assortement of short subjects in a row. Fun was had by all, but I didn't get much sleep and am only now recovering. The films were a really mixed bunch, with some true oddities thrown in. Here's the lowdown.

Jim Mickle: Stake Land: pretty good gritty vampire apocalypse film from the director of Cold in July. ***½

Steven Knight: Hummingbird: tedious noirish film about an Afghanistan veteran (Jason Statham) trying to make wrongs right. Statham can't act serious stuff, but that's not the only problem here. Knight has done better stuff before (writing Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises) and since (directing Locke), but this is just boring. **

Paul Weiland: Leonard Part 6: truly absurd Bill Cosby vehicle that Cosby has tried to keep off the air,.The film has some great moments, but is simply too long, some scenes seem to go on forever. * or ****

Ben Kamras: Life on the Line: shitty home video released in 1995 on VHS and later on DVD, with Finnish people speaking (bad) English. Everything is horribly wrong in this film by the son of a Finnish film mogul and theater owner. The film has some very, very bad fight scenes, the hits miss by a mile. I laughed so hard I thought I was going to die. * or *****

Aurora Productions: S.O.S.: some truly weird moments were had with this: catchy pop songs about Christians being harassed by a mob of soldiers and bar codes being tattooed on people's foreheads in praise of Satan, anti-evolutionist praises and what not. I'd found this on VHS not knowing what to expect, but this was truly something. Possibly shot in Australia. I understand the Family cult behind this has been accused of child abuse and other sex crimes. Some truly disturbing shit on them in the web. Can't really give stars to this.


Michael Bay: Pain & Gain: too long, but still up there with Spring Breakers as one of the essential neo-neonoirs of the 2010s: slick and shallow, full of spectacle, with a heart of pure satire. ***½

Jan Svankmajer: Surviving Life: I've liked Svankmajer's wild and surreal animations, but this didn't satisfy me much, seems like he's not very good with feature films. **

David Ayer: Sabotage: it's no wonder Schwarzenegger's comeback movie didn't make much impact with the audience: all the characters are unpleasant and the story line is botched (possibly because of the producer's interference), but there are still some of Ayer's trademarks: fast and meaningless dialogue and the tension between the bad cops and the worse cops. **½

Gerard Kargl: Angst: intimate and disturbing depiction of a serial killer released from prison and going on a killing spree in an isolated house. Banned in many European countries and possibly in the US as well, but still very intricately shot by Zbigniew Rybczynski and well acted. ****½

Anthony Mann: Strange Impersonation: strong noirish melodrama with an identity switch, suffers from a slack ending. ***

Arim Shervan: Samurai Cop: laughably and entertainingly ridiculous straight-to-video cop flick from the early nineties, shot possibly with a VHS camera. Lots of very bad acting and editing. Still a bit too long. A sequel is being made as I write. * or ****

Efren Pinon: The Killing of Satan: incomprehensible Philippine horror/fantasy film. Might've been a contender, but wasn't, save for some scenes here and there. * (After this we watched a Finnish VHS video from the early eighties in which a Finnish escape artist talks about his faith. I don't know why we bothered.)

Franck Khalfoun: Maniac: intelligent reworking of the dubious slasher classic by William Lustig. The POV technique works well: we almost never see Elijah Wood's face. ***½

Joseph Zito: Invasion USA: inept and stupid Chuck Norris vehicle with a wildly implausible plot to overthrow the US government. Yeah, right. Other guys seemed to love this. *½

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Stanley Kubrick's Fear and Desire (1953) and an assortement of other strange films

Fear and Desire

We had another film festival at the cabin with some friends of mine. (Here and here are posts on the earlier festivals.)

One of the most interesting films we watched was the first feature film by Stanley Kubrick, Fear and Desire (1953) that Kubrick himself had put a ban on, so it hasn't been legally been available for decades. It's recently been released on DVD and is easily available. None of my friends had seen it, so it was all new to all of us.

It's a war film set somewhere in an unknown war, so it's heavily symbolic and abstract to the edge of being almost meaningless. Fear and Desire was written by a playwright, Howard Sackler (who also wrote Kubrick's second film, Killer's Kiss), so it's no wonder it resembles an absurdist play a lot. At times it gets bogged down by hilariously "deep" dialogue and monologue, but the first half-hour is actually quite good. Kubrick - who himself shot and edited the film - edits quirkily, against the rules, using quick flashes of people's faces and pieces of action. Kubrick was at least in the beginning of his career a noir director and there's a strong noir feel also in this little war film. It's an intriguing film, well worth a watch.

Other films with snappy mini-reviews and starrings:

The ass of the Machine Gun Woman

Ernesto Díaz Espinoza: Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman (Chile 2012): sounded great, but proved amateurish and boring. *½

Lucio Fulci: Beyond (Italy 1981): confusing and dead-serious zombie flick. **

Willard Huyck: Howard the Duck (USA 1986): absolute bore-fest, with people (and the duck) just shouting, running and jumping all the time. *

Kaarlo Kortelainen: Makkarakalakeittoa, sano Tympee Huttunen/Sausage fish soup, said the Grumpy Huttunen (Finland 1988): one of the worst films ever, only video-released calamity shot somewhere at a deserted cabin and in near-by woods. Very hilarious. * or *****

Veikko Itkonen: Mullin mallin/Topsy-turvy (Finland 1961): nonsensical and incoherent musical comedy made near the end of the Finnish studio system. Probably one of these: * or ****

Adam McKay: Anchorman (USA 2004): I'd never seen anything by Will Ferrell, but even though this was mildly funny, I don't feel an urgent need to watch more of his films. **

Robert Culp: Hickey & Boggs (USA 1972): pretty hard to follow without subtitles, but still great early seventies' crime flick, without any of the genre trappings. ****

Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel: Leviathan (USA 2012): experimental documentary of a fishing ship somewhere in the Atlantic, quite hypnotic at times, but don't go looking for a content. ***½

Tobe Hooper: Lifeforce (USA 1985): interesting movie about space vampires, but even though the main monster is one of the most beautiful women in the history of cinema, suffers from too much length and uninteresting lead actors. **½

Andrzej Zulawski: The Third Part of the Night (Poland 1971): very interesting allegory on Communist Poland, with lots of grotesque and surrealistic imagery thrown in. ***½

Fred Cavaye: Point Blank (France 2010): capable and snappy thriller. ***

Kinji Fukasaku: Message from Space (Japan 1978): a hapless Star Wars clone should've been more hilarious than it really was. **

Albert Band: Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (USA 1978): I didn't watch this myself, but from what I gathered is either * or *****

Ismo Sajakorpi: Merkitty/Branded (Finland 1984): early Finnish horror TV movie, not bad, but somewhat dated. ***

Steve Carver: Lone Wolf McQuade (USA 1983): hilariously serious Chuck Norris vehicle, quite entertaining if you're willing to forget it's very stupid and clichéd. **½

More Overlooked Movies coming in at a blog near you!

The history of French animation

I was at the Tampere Short Film Festival last weekend, the festival I've attended to for the last 20 years, with some (one or two) one-year pauses. This year I was particularly interested in the three-show series consisting of old French animated films, ranging from Émile Reynaud's cartoons from the 1870's to films made just after WWII. There were many films I hadn't previously seen, even though some of the films were familiar to me.

The earliest examples were pretty crude, as you can imagine, but there's also a sense of invention and real magic, especially in the two films by Émile Cohl, his first, Phantasmagorie, from 1908, and a later one, called Les Locataires d´à côté from 1909. The latter one is a good example of early Surrealism that still flourished in commercial cinema during that time.

The second screening of the series was the best. There were the best-known examples of French art animation, like Berthold Bartosch's Expressionistic L'Idée (1932) and Alexandre Alexeïeff's Night on a Bald Mountain (1933). The most striking example - and one I had never seen - was La Joie de vivre (1937) by two British artists, Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin. It's timeless, could've been made in the sixties or seventies - or even now, with some alterations. It's made in a free-flowing, fluent and fast style, with only outline drawings. I can find only one link with an extract from the film, and the quality is poor, but it's here nevertheless.

The third screening consisted of films made in the fourties, during the war and just after it. The most interesting of these was Jean Painlevé's clay animation, Bluebeard. It was a wild experience, utterly unrealistic, in weird colours, with crude and grotesque humour reminiscent of Rabelais and his Gargantua and Pantagruel, with heads being chopped and all. Painlevé has seen a renaissance in later years, with a DVD collection of his short films having been released; he was a Surrealist, but also a scientist, who used his fellow Surrealists' ideas in his scientific films, the best-known of which is probably Le Vampire from 1945, a horror documentary about a blood-sucking bat.

Also Paul Grimault's two films in the screening were very good, reminding one of the best American cartoons of the era, with only more artistic ideas thrown in - for example L'épouvantail/The Scarecrow from 1943 in which the devoid landscape is an echo from Surrealist paintings.

One of the most interesting and most boring films in the screening was André-Édouard Marty's Callisto from 1943. The ancient tale of Greek antiquity was told in art deco style, with a very slow pace, in artistically high standard, but also with boring rigidity. It was said that Marty made this in order to show how the French should be making animations in the new Europe (we have to remember that the Nazis were on the winning side in 1942 and 1943 when this was made). I made a quick association to Finland and thought that this is how Finnish animators could've worked had there been any animation industry in the country in the 1940's. (I had especially sculpturer Wäinö Aaltonen in mind - he never made any cartoons, that's for sure, but I think the Founding Fathers of Finland might've called for him, if there had been a need.)

Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie:



Grimault's L'épouvantail: