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Kogyaru-gui: Oosaka terekura hen (1997)
Japanese Exploitation
British cinema-goers of a certain age will doubtless remember with fond affection the now extinct phenomena of the second feature; a shorter, often low budget 'mini film' that preceded the main event (which in my day usually had Doug McClure fighting some men in rubber suits) and were usually funded by the Children's Film Foundation. One thing that the Japanese film industry seems to have excelled at over the past fifty years or so is the production of such sub feature length, low budget 'fillers', but rather than tales involving a pre-pubescent Keith Chegwin foiling kidnappers, these Japanese shorts have been exercises in enveloping stretching when it comes to the abuse of young Asian females.
The pedigree can be traced back to Koji Wakamatsu's art house shockers 'Violated Angels' (1967) and 'Go Go Second Time Virgin' (1969) through to the infamous 'Angel Guts' and 'Guinea Pig' series of films, to recent efforts like 'Seketsu No Kizuna' and 'Mu Zan E'. Besides scenes of horrendous and graphic violence inflicted upon women, what these films also have in common is a pretension toward intellectualism, probably in an attempt to legitimise the proceedings in a "Hey, but it's art so it's OK" kind of way. And this mentality leads as nicely to 'Eat The Schoolgirl', because pretension is something that this film has, and has in spades.
Directed by Naoyuki Tomomatsu, 'Eat The Schoolgirl' concerns two young adults who eke out a living doing dirty work for a yakuza gang whose main line of work seems to be making genuine rape/snuff films. Both of them share an obsession with sex; one is addicted to telephone sex whilst the other can only get his rocks off over the sight of eviscerated female corpses. Throughout the film, he is visited by a naked female angel (sometimes with wings, sometimes with scars where the wings used to be) who tells him to go out and kill. This he does in graphic style with the added kink of being dressed as a schoolgirl while he does so.
In terms of plot, that's virtually your lot. At least, that's what the whole film boils down to in the final analysis, despite what the filmmakers would have you believe. At barely an hour long, Tomomatsu simply does not allow enough time for any of the 'mysteries' of the plot to unravel. There are hints and flashbacks that suggest our cross dressing killer witnessed something bloody and traumatic as a child (a plot device that's strongly reminiscent of similar in Scavolini's 'Nightmares In A Damaged Brain'), but it's never developed enough to provide any kind of satisfactorily explanation as to what's going on or to give any depth to the film as a whole.
And that's the main problem with 'Eat The Schoolgirl'. Rather than develop the identity and motives of the 'angel' and the killer, or to give the two antiheroes any kind of contextualising backgrounds, he prefers instead to focus on lengthy and extremely unpleasant scenes of women being abused, raped, or given forced enemas by cackling males who delight in filming the attacks on video and clearly regard the women as nothing more than objects.
Although Tomomatsu is best known for 'Stacy' (though 'Eat The Schoolgirl' pre-dates it by around four years), anyone expecting more good natured blood and gore in the humorous and slapstick style of this later film should be on their guard; 'Eat The Schoolgirl' plays straight as a die and is completely devoid of humour or any moments of light relief. The violence is frequent and bloody and the special effects, though nothing particularly 'special', are graphic and gritty and leave nothing to the imagination. The sex/rape scenes, although never hardcore, are as brutal and harrowing as anything in better known shockers like 'I Spit On Your Grave' and are not at all easy to sit through.
But sit through them I did, largely out of interest as to where Tomomatsu was going with the characters and situations, and it so was with some disappointment to find, when the credits rolled, that he wasn't going anywhere with them. Instead, 'Eat The Schoolgirl' plays in style like a jumble of cut up images and ideas that recall a 90's MTV video, a clear example of style over substance with the underlying idea seemingly being that the introduction of some ambiguity and mystery will excuse the images of a naked woman being disembowelled in a shower and her killer masturbating over her writhing body as she tries to hold her intestines in. Subtle? Certainly not, but the feeble attempt to pass off such tacky, exploitative fayre as 'art' leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
Gik dou keung gaan (1998)
40 Year Old Virgin Japanese Style!
Imagine you went to Tesco for some baked beans, but when you got home you found the tin was packed full of monkey nuts. Or if the box of Corn Flakes you opened for breakfast actually contained not salty lumps of processed maize, but with inch square sheets of paper cut from Croatian travel brochures how would you feel? Irritation coupled with bemusement most probably. Which in a roundabout way brings me nicely to 'Severely Raped', a film that, with such a bald, 'in your face' title, I approached with a certain apprehension and with my finger hovering on the fast forward button in case, as often happens in films of this genre, the on-screen events graphically degenerate into something I'd rather not watch. Well my finger quickly found the controller button, but it was rewind rather than fast forward 'Severely Raped' is one of the few films I had to actually stop half hour in and start watching again with the right 'mindset' because the events unfolding on screen bore absolutely no relation to what I imagined from the title and, I must confess, I didn't know what the hell was going on.
'Severely Raped' seems to concern the adventures of two friends - a forty year old virgin called Fok who's desperate to pop his cherry, and his mate Kam who may or may not be trying to swindle him out of his money. They arrive in Hong Kong looking for ladies and Kam quickly hooks up with Bobo who in turn introduces Fok to her friend Ling. Sure enough, Fok's quest soon comes to an end when they end up in bed together. For a while, all seems fine and dandy between the four of them, with Fok more than willing to splash out his money on his new lady-friend, but trouble looms when Fok and Kam find out that both Bobo and Ling are in fact two prostitutes playing them for suckers and are fleecing them of every dollar they have. Kam discovers the pair of them with their pimp and, after being laughed at for a bit, he slinks away with his tail between his legs to tell his mate the bad news. And that seems to be it.
I say 'seems' because the subtitling makes it very hard to tell what's going on here. Lengthy speeches of on screen dialogue are frequently condensed into three world lines of text that may be easy to read, but bear as much relevance to the source material as the winner of Monty Python's Summarise Proust' competition. But the trouble is of course, 'Severely Raped' was not scripted by Proust (or if it has, it's by Proust's idiot brother in the attic rather than the more famous sibling). It's quite possible that the acres of un/mistranslated dialogue contain the sharpest one-liners and wittiest dialogue this side of Noel Coward, but somehow I doubt it.
One thing that IS certain though is that nobody in this film gets raped or anything like it. Indeed, 'Severely Raped' plays more like a grittier version of an instalment of the 1970's 'Confessions' series of films, but without any humour. Whatsoever. (Thankfully we get no scenes reminiscent of Robin Askwith and his pneumatic arse but there are some softcore scenes that are rather more graphic than necessary when they involve a bald, overweight forty-year-old bloke with a moustache, but I digress).
Indeed, it's difficult to see what the whole 'point' of 'Severely Raped' is - what exactly are the filmmakers trying to say here? The acting and production values on display would shame Ed Wood, and the static direction and solid oak acting make the above-mentioned Confessions films play like Fellini in comparison.
'Severely Raped' is an undistinguished, unremarkable and unmemorable piece of work that fails to engage, interest or satisfy on any level. The overriding impression is that the filmmakers agree with this assessment too and so stuck a controversial title on top of it in a feeble attempt to generate the levels of controversy and interest that calling it 'Forty Year Old Virgin Tries To Pop Cherry' simply wouldn't. (Actually, in that respect, 'Severely Raped' is the antithesis of certain other Eastern cinema gems like 'A Day Without Policemen' or 'There's A Secret In My Soup' which sound like jolly Ealing comedies but in fact contain prolonged sequences of horrendous violence!). Doubtless the punter settling down to enjoy 90 minutes of sadistic rape scenes will be sorely disappointed by all this, but such people deserve all they get to be honest and they'll get no sympathy here.
Sabu (2002)
The Other Side Of Miike
Think of a Takashi Miike film and what immediately springs to mind? Guns, leather coats, hit men, demons, yakuza, violence, torture and blood. Lots and lots of blood. 'Sabu', however, is far removed from the usual fare in Miike's canon. Miike has ventured into gentler waters elsewhere in his oeuvre (think 'Ley Lines', 'Bird People in China'), but 'Sabu' stands apart from these again in that it's a period drama based on a renowned Japanese novel; 'Sabu' is rather more Merchant Ivory than anything in Ichi's warped universe.
The film opens with scenes describing the childhood friendship of the eponymous Sabu (Satoshi Tsumabuki), Eiji (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and Nobuko (Kazue Fukiishi) in rural seventeenth century Japan. Sabu and Eiji are orphans who are set to work for a master making paper screens. Though firm friends, their paths diverge dramatically when a bolt of gold cloth is one day reported as stolen from the workshop. Eiji is accused of the theft and, although he violently protests his innocence, he is sent away to an island prison camp as punishment.
At the camp, Eiji becomes sullen and withdrawn, refusing to speak to his fellow inmates and shunning offers of friendship, making himself very unpopular in the process. Sabu, on the other hand, devotes a major part of his life in attempting to keep their friendship alive. He visits Eiji on the island, even after Eiji makes it plain he wants nothing to do with him. The extent of Sabu's friendship and almost obsession devotion to Eiji dominate most of the film's running time and is fully realised at the finale, when Sabu tries to protect Eiji from his own worst enemy himself. In so doing, Eiji himself comes to appreciate facets of his character he wasn't previously akin too, and though both Sabu and Eiji are revealed to be flawed personalities (Eiji and his self pity, Sabu and his obsession with his friend that sees his own life slide off the rails), they come to understand both themselves and each other a little better by the time the credits roll.
It's this ongoing concepts of flawed characters unable to find an inner peace that provides the engine that drives 'Sabu' along, but it's an engine that is built for a leisurely cruise, not a speedway, and the movie unfolds at a sedate pace for virtually the whole length of it's two hour running time. Although opening with a trademark unnerving/surreal shot (in this case of a hanged woman), Miike never lets the film run away with itself, preferring to let the emotions of the characters drive the plot. Indeed, 'Sabu' unfolds at the laborious pace of a nineteenth century novel, with the pace of the story telling more in keeping with Dickens or Mann than the kinetic pace fans of the director are more accustom too.
Toward the middle of the film, there are scenes in the prison camp where a new prisoner arrives and starts throwing his weight around, taunting Eiji and spoiling for a fight. At this point I half expected the Miike of old to raise his head and for the protagonists to start wearing each other's blood, but to his credit, the mayhem and violence never appear. For all his restraint though, these scenes are jarring and feel shoehorned in as a kind of sop to those yearning for some violent action. They spoil the flow of the movie, serve no real purpose save introduce a subplot that never really develops and it would be no great loss if they were taken out.
At times though, the whole of the plot is outshone by Miike's direction. Each shot is framed to perfection with the care and attention of a master painter, be it a haunting image of the hanging woman, a riot on a beach at night or the marvellous circularity of the opening and closing shots of a bridge spanning water. Such meticulous attention to detail almost gives 'Sabu' a picture book quality a story told in static frames rather than motion. This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that 'Sabu' was made specifically for Japanese television, not the big screen where these images would truly shine.
'Sabu' is not a film for anyone looking for a quick fix of sex and violence. What it IS however is a good illustration that the art of film-making has not yet been completely buried under an avalanche of CGI and predictability. 'Sabu' is by no means without it's flaws (the lead characters, for example, although well played, are largely unsympathetic and verge on the annoying in their cloying self pity), and there is nothing on show here to suggest that it was made on anything but the smallest of budgets. Yet the attention to detail and obvious love of the craft of film-making that has gone into every scene shine through, making 'Sabu' an immensely rewarding experience for those with the patience to follow it through to the end.
Straightheads (2007)
Straight ( to DVD) Heads
Well where to start here? Straightheads presents me with a bit of a dilemma. Had this film come out of Italy in, say, 1975, been directed by Ruggero Deodatto and starred David Hess, then I'd be lapping it up faster than Labrador drinks water on a summer's day. Because whilst Tarantino and Rodriguez are busy elsewhere with their homage to grindhouse cinema, Dan Reed has produced a rape/revenge grindhouse picture of his very own in England, and on seemingly the same budget as it would have taken Rodriguez to turn Rose McGowan's leg into a machine gun. Because if you want to play grindhouse bingo, then let me call out the 'numbers':
1. Rich, high flying career woman meets a bit of rough from the wrong side of the tracks in an implausible manner and, equally implausibly, gets the hots for him. Check.
2. Gratuitous shots of said high-flying career woman in various states of nudity. Check.
3. Convoluted and highly unlikely plot development that sets up characters that exist solely to do what they do and who cannot be imagined to have any existence outside the scenes they are in. Check.
4. Unnecessarily graphic rape scene perpetrated by a gang of males with no discernible depth of personality or background other than they are there to rape. Check.
5. Gritty and bloody scenes of murder and revenge to round it all off. Bingo!
Plotwise, Straightheads is pretty basic stuff: Dyer meets Anderson and she invites him to a party at a country pile owned by her boss. On the way home, they upset three locals in a Landover who take their revenge by giving Dyer a good shoeing and gang raping Anderson. The couple then set about getting their revenge. So far, so "Straw Dogs", "Late Night Trains", "House on the Edge of the Park", "I Spit On Your Grave" etc etc. So why didn't I think much of this film? A number of reasons: I suppose first off, having the likes of Gillian Anderson in the cast prima facie lead me to expect better, but it's the complete lack of honesty here than rankles most.
Because whenever anyone sits down to watch Hess and his ilk terrorising women and murdering their menfolk in those period pieces from the 70's, then they always know exactly what they are getting - low budget quickies designed solely to shock and appeal to the lowest common denominator. The baddies terrorise and murder the goodies, the goodies turn the tables on the baddies and kill them back, and everyone goes home satisfied, their desires to see a bit of nasty violence slaked and safe in the knowledge that the world order had been restored.
As writer and director however, Dan Reed clearly believes Straightheads has far more to say on the state of the human psyche than that, and desperately tries to imbibe his film with a philosophical depth that is simply not there. For instance, when Anderson and Dyer are planning revenge on their attackers, they learn that one of the rapists has a fourteen-year-old daughter who is an object of lust for the two men he hangs around with. When Anderson finally meets him face to face, he confesses that he only raped her as a distraction so that his two mates would take their attention away from his daughter!!! The casual and audacious way that Reed drops this little revelation into the plot is simply jaw-dropping, it's almost as if he expects this simple reference to paedophilia to be enough to throw the audience's moral compass into overdrive and make them leave the cinema thinking they've just sat through something of significance. To make sure we 'get it', at this point we are shown a run through of the rape sequence for a second time, ostensibly from the view of the attacker and his concern for his daughter, but Reed ensures that we get plenty more shots of Anderson rough-handled and raped across the bonnet of her car. Gratuitous does not enter into it.
After being told his reasons for raping her, Anderson ties him over a table, rams the business end of a sniper rifle (complete with bulky silencer, just in case anyone wasn't clear on the phallic imagery) up his jacksie but lacks the courage to pull the trigger, telling Dyer (who has no such moral qualms) that 'it's over'. Dyer argues otherwise and their moral dilemma is presented as something that Wittgenstein and Russell may have discussed in their rooms back at Cambridge over tea and cakes. It is almost unwatchable in its ludicrousness.
In fairness, Ms Anderson acts her guts out throughout the film. It's obvious she wants to leave Scully far behind and, bless her, she certainly does that; one wonders what Mulder would have made of his erstwhile partner squatting down to take a leak at the side of the road and then sodomising a man with a gun? Dyer, on the other hand, does what he's done in virtually every film he's made to date - that is, plays a gor blimey guv cockney type chappie with a roguish grin, a cheeky line of patter and a face that most people would never get tired of punching. This is particularly true at the closing scene where, after murdering his assailants in cold blood, Dyer gazes at the camera in, what I'm sure is meant to be, a look of existential anguish that invites us to sympathise at the hand fate has dealt him and the moral quandaries he has had to overcome, but instead is far more reminiscent of Oliver Hardy looking exasperatedly at the camera after Stan has landed him in yet another fine mess. Which incidentally, sums up this film quite nicely.
Supernatural (1977)
Supernatural - More Info
I too vaguely remembered this from my childhood (even though none of my mates of the same age do) - specifically, images of a man with white eyes laughing creepily and a coffin full of maggots, both of which caused me a few sleepless nights as a 9 year old. I knew it was screened once in 1977 and never again, but all other information (especially in the pre-internet days) was scant to say the least. After a long, long search, I recently tracked down a copy of the complete series and, with the organ music and images of gargoyles on the titles just as I remembered them, I settled down to a nostalgia fuelled extravaganza.
So is this series some lost masterpiece? Sadly no. The few remembered images I mentioned above all come from the last episode 'Dorabella' which is the best of the lot by a country mile and is an offbeat vampire story with a genuinely creepy atmosphere. The rest are rather hit and miss, and at 50 minutes each, some of the extremely flimsy stories stretch well past breaking point. This is especially noticeable in the two part 'Countess Ilona/Werewolf Reunion' which could easily have been done and dusted in 30 minutes flat. At virtually 2 hours, it's almost unbearable.
Although it features a veritable who's who of British TV stars of the 70's (Billie Whitelaw, Ian Hendry, Robert Hardy, Gordon Jackson, Leslie Ann Down et al), production values on the series are noticeably low, with all the action happening in one or two sets per episodes and with the camera virtually fixed in one place. There isn't much in the way of a suspenseful soundtrack, and any sudden close ups or panned shots are invariably accompanied by an over the top blast of organ music. The stilted dialogue is rather wooden and pretentious too; the writer (Robert Muller) seems to have aspirations toward the MR James end of the horror market but sadly, his talent seems to suggest more of a Clive James, but without the wit.
Ultimately, the series is worth sitting through on it's own merits, and these just about drag it above the curiosity/novelty value of watching a long forgotten series, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to sit through them all again.
King Kong (2005)
A Major Disappointment
Totally underwhelming. Jackson's Kong is a very disjointed film that lurches from one thing to another; the compact running time of the original is stretched beyond endurance, making the plot holes that already existed (in what is essentially just a 'Boys Own' Ripping Yarn) even more gaping and in so doing only succeeds in treating the audience as if they are morons. The effects aren't that special, and I found Jackson's portrayal of the natives on Skull Island as little more than orcs a touch offensive. Saying that, there is an absolutely incredible Kong vs. 3 Tyrannosaurus Rex sequence that is jaw dropping, and the finale on the Empire State Building is also exceptionally well done. Apart from the fact that Naomi Watts is standing on the very, very top of the skyscraper in a skimpy dress. In the middle of winter. And there's hardly a breath of wind. Best off getting the DVD and skipping to those scenes, it's not like you don't know the story.
A History of Violence (2005)
A Very Silly Film
Just saw this. What a very silly film indeed. It simply doesn't work on any level whatsoever. As an exploration of the cycle of violence, it never rises above cliché: Stall "We don't hit people to solve problems in this family", Son: "No we just shoot them instead", Stall: "Whack!" Audience: "Yawn".
But as straight out drama, it fails miserably too. One example here(there are plenty more): Stall shoots two men in his diner and he's a national hero. Later, he and his son kill three more on his front lawn and no more is said about it. No media interest, no police investigation, no comeback of any kind except by the gangsters who sent them in the first place. This kind of self contained surreality works in the world of a Blue Velvet, but it simply doesn't work here and Cronenberg really should have made up his mind as to what type of film he wanted to make.
And the violence and sex scenes in themselves are cynical in the extreme. It's as if Croneberg is saying "Hey, look at the bullet wounds, look at the blood, and the naked lady, this is a SERIOUS adult film for SERIOUS adults". But I'm afraid it's not. If Cronenberg has any kind of underlying 'message' that he's trying to put across then I'm afraid its been left behind in the editing suite. This film has as much psychological depth as a puddle in summer and is a major step backwards from a director who has yet to produce anything worthy of his inclusion in the top flight.