Mini-Review: Terminator Woman (1993)

From http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-t/terminator_woman_poster_01.jpg

Dir. Michel Qissi

USA

Unfortunately most films made are a waste of time, and when they have covers that suggest something rewarding, that fact stings more. I don’t even know why it’s Terminator Woman, except to cash in on James Cameron’s films, as science fiction or heavy metal lyric connotations the title has are nonexistent in this martial arts thriller. Sent over to Africa to transport a witness against the international villain Alex Gatelee (Michel Qissi), LA police partners Julie (Karen Sheperd) and Jay (Jerry Trimble) find themselves under fire. Both martial artists, Julie is kidnapped and attempts to escape while Jay, with the assistance of a boy called Charlie (Siphiwe Mlangeni) goes to get her back from Gatelee, a hidden plunder of gold bars in the centre of the web alongside the witness.

The film has two good virtues. Set in Africa, the environment in look and palette adds a unique difference to an otherwise conventional martial arts film from the United States. Karen Sheperd also stands out; while the fights are slower and less creative than their Asian counterparts, she does well as a prescience onscreen. Aside from that Terminator Woman is merely mediocre and forgettable. It pretty much goes to its expected conclusion without any real surprise to it, and Jerry Trimble, with a dated hairstyle, really does not stand out as a lead. That the cover and title is trying to sell Sheperd, the giant chunk of the narrative he takes up as the lead, without any sense of him commanding it whatsoever, makes him more incongruous. Even an abrupt, but amusing, sequence with dirt bikes cannot make Terminator Woman worth its ninety one minutes. 

African policemen are armed with crossbows to stop crime. I've only noticed this now, but its completely obvious in this screencap.
(From http://img.youtube.com/vi/EiW3xRGLIjk/hqdefault.jpg)

Videotape Swapshop Review: Street Fighter (1994)

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Dir. Steven E. de Souza

Japan-USA

The final review for the March-ial Arts Month for Videotape Swapshop, and in contrast to Mortal Kombat (1995), this is the review of the nineties adaptation of its arcade machine rival with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Street Fighter won, but the reasons why are in the review.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13327/street-fighter-%E2%80%93-1994-director-steven-e-de-souza/

From http://i836.photobucket.com/albums/zz289/05k21a0551/12-03-2011/StreetFighter1994720p-3.jpg

Must Know The Meaning of Plus (Alphaville (1965))

From http://stagevu.com/img/thumbnail/owexfdyavficbig.jpg

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

France-Italy

From http://adamcr007.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/alphaville-1965-12-g.jpg

Jean-Luc Godard was once the most overrated director for me. Unlike the drastic change of mind, for the positive, I had for the films of Luis Buñuel, which has effectively changed my viewpoints of cinema completely in the last year or so, the change of mind for Godard has been slow and gradual while still as important. Even when I hated Godard for the most part, I still watched as many films as I could of his as a completists and a fan of cinema trying to figure out his acclaim was to cinema viewers, going as far as viewing Week End (1967), a film I despised once, six times even if the first four viewings were painful. As I saw the virtues in his work, I realised, with my growing maturity, how complex, brilliantly made and legitimately intelligent his work was. I even prefer his post-Week End work which has been dismissed as pretentious but is that of a veteran at the top of his craft, even when making a minute long short which has the soundtrack from a tennis match spliced into it. Amongst all the Godard films and shorts I still need to see, countless in number, I need to rewatch many films that I had dismissed before, especially the pre-Week End works that made his name.

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Using the pre-existing character Lenny Caution (Eddie Constantine), Alphaville is a science fiction film in which Caution, posing as a reporter, enter the titular city to bring back a professor to the Lands Without, only to see that the city is run by Alpha 60, a sentient computer who has removed “illogical” behaviour, human emotions such as love, sadness and joy, from the populous under the belief of the greater good. Upfront, Alphaville is drastically different from conventional sci-fi dystopia films with similar premises made now, even to later Godard films with precise, directorial styles to them. Alphaville was partly improvised and even the parts that may have been carefully planned out feel the same way to, low budget and stark in tone even with a rich plot to it, drastically pushing itself away from what would be expected from it. Using Paris itself at the time as the setting for the dystopia, most of the film’s science fiction is unshown ideas, background details and comments that have to be imagined in the viewer’s head. The gritty, darkly lit locations works effectively for the premise, but the concepts must be added to the film by imagination; terms like “The Lands Without”, cities like “Tokyorama” or “Cinerama museums” must be conjured up by the viewer rather than presented to you already visually. Then there is the core idea of how Alpha 60’s logic destroys the humanity in people, presented through Anna Karina as Natacha von Braun, beautiful but a cold vessel from a metropolis where crying is punishable by death and where the question “Why?” is replaced with “because”. Caution becomes enamoured by her and does what he can to break down the behaviour she has been givem. Very much a genre film rather than Godard’s more essay-like works, it expresses its story background and ideas through the mood of a noir film with a trench coat wearing hero, a femme fatale and questions left unknown.

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It does show though, quite early on in his career, where Godard would go, not alien from the old master who made Film socialisme (2010) decades later with manipulation of words, visuals and sound throughout it. Sadly the version I viewed of Alphaville did not subtitle a part of it that I would have immensely taken a lot from – a series of diagrams that manipulate images and words that Alpha 60 monologues over in his omnipresent, deep, electronically aided voice – but the breaking down of standard conventions of narrative and structure Godard is famous for is here and allows him, like in his other work, to place idea after idea within pockets and gaps within the main film. Alphaville works as a sci-fi story immensely, but cannot be viewed in terms of a conventional film, missing the point to how it alters its narrative trappings subtly and abstractly. What could be viewed as logic or plot gaps, like for me in the first viewing of this film years ago, turn out to be gaps Godard put in there on purpose so the viewer would start thinking about how and why they watch the film. Of course, Godard is clearly passionate for the pulpy storytelling and the aesthetics of “coolness”, Constantine’s grizzled looks sitting well in a world of blackened streets, guns and smoking, but what prevents it from being a dated European arthouse film from the Sixties is that Godard takes advantage of the dormant science fiction writer inside him to his advantage in probing views of humanity and what society means. Logic by itself creates a dictatorship where art is lost, perceived to be for the better by higher-ups, and language is watered down as words are banned from the dictionary. Even the cinema, in a brief anecdote, Godard’s obsession, becomes a place where illogical people are put into and killed on mass through electric shocks. The film is a melding of real ideas of politics, pulp storytelling, grim social commentary and science fiction as a vessel for “what-if” scenarios. By its end, Alphaville emphasises how this tangential mass of pieces in his work, once a great flaw for me, is in fact his greatest virtue as a director.

From http://files.myopera.com/RoughneckCowboy/blog/vlcsnap-141451.png

Mini-Review: Family (2001)

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxMeGVkrfH0kEBrQKX5LK2q11xQ73bF1oUcVJfhLFVZbiWGyZzFByCnUUMPkrGgOq6aVuyY4o7ZQOgTFhbbLc64WQqgNzF8ZIBIWFDfngbJAHQ5HIZcIuIJR7LHdeWRqpBkVWBDcEt2Ml/s1600/family.jpg

Dir. Takashi Miike

Japan

I am a huge fan of Miike, but I realise that from a self proclaimed director-for-hire the massive output and the variety of formats he works in could lead to an erratic filmography. Sat between truly great films like Audition (1999) and Ichi The Killer (2001) is this work, bizarrely split onto two discs as two eighty or so minute films. A manga adaptation about warring yakuza, backstabbing and a budget large enough to afford a tank and a water-ski shootout, Family has the traces of all that makes Miike interesting. Brothers from a family broken into pieces by yakuza in different areas of the crime underground, a viewpoint from minorities in Japan, and a female character who is a Christian. Unfortunately it is an exceptionally dull story. Nothing in the film is inherently original or of interest, worsened by the technical quality. It is filmed on a cheap digital camera, which looks awful; Miike can use digital to his advantage, such as the probing of the image and voyeurism in Visitor Q (2001), but here it makes everything sparse and lacking. Miike also sadly continues the trend of using generic heavy metal music, at pointless loud volumes, over sequences that comes off as noise, surprising when he is very adept in his sound and music track choices.

It is a slug to get through both parts. It also makes the more gruelling sequences, such as a prolonged rape scene starting with molestation with feet, dubious. I will defend Miike over stuff like this, especially since he always, even in lurid genre works, makes such sequences discomforting and prevents the viewer from being able to shrug them off as merely sequences, but Miike needs to have made a good film around such sequences to prevent them from being merely tasteless, the result of which adds depth to them or sticks a metaphorical knife in the viewer’s brain to startle them. Since this is a poor film, barring some experiments with sound and image, such sequences just come off as pointlessly offensive, not helped by the fact that, while Miike is known for improvising or changing his scripts and stories during filmmaking, he is dependent on scripts being good or having something of interest for him to run with like many other directors. Family as a whole has no sense of Miike being fully engaged with it. It was made between some of his best work, showing this is a minor blip in his filmmaking, but unfortunately it is one of those true mistakes in a director’s filmography that discolours it. It is not an interesting failure one can learn to appreciate or actually love, by itself or in context of an auteur, but something so rudimentary you don’t want to own it even if it means a gap in the filmmography of one of your favourite directors.

Videotape Swapshop Review: Out for Justice (1991)

From https://colmseeley.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/out-for-justice-poster1.jpg

Dir. John Flynn

USA

Another review for Videotape Swapshop, and part of the ongoing story of my complicated relationship with Steven Segal.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13089/out-for-justice-%E2%80%93-1991-director-john-flynn/

From http://p3.no/filmpolitiet/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Out-For-Justice-bilde-2.jpg

Videotape Swapshop Review: Norwegian Ninja (2010)

From http://www.wreckamovie.com/system/task_references/0000/1100/
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Dir. Thomas Cappelen Malling

Norway

Another Videotape Swapshop review. The title of the film is more than enough to explain what it is about, but even better, there’s more to it than that would suggest.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13092/norwegian-ninja-%E2%80%93-2010-director-thomas-cappelen-malling/

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cu8vhHUPQcs/USVoziZm8YI/AAAAAAAAAn8/YMgxiVFfwGM/s1600/NorwegianNinja3.jpg

Mini-Review: Casa de mi Padre (2012)

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5bwVgRjwbneUyEiy7Q9-OxjE2aERmodm86V04sSJwHHjSsbRXcxRf43s_jy66Q2lcebd78GCLsMWKfKP-4pQwwlCLthKHD2rFX2KB5PWAC5_SGf9dL7xZTFM9j-eKjX6zyVVuh_J29w/s1600/Casa+de+mi+padre+2012+poster.jpg

Dir. Matt Piedmont

USA

The newest kinds of parody films that tackle cult and niche material are divisive. Unlike Airplane! (1980), they are in danger of only being designed for single viewings only, unable to create memorable worlds to match the jokes; Black Dynamite (2009) fell to pieces on the second viewing for example. I have hope for Norwegian Ninja (2010), and in its favour it has a full story, even in such a short running time, and is tackling real life Norwegian political history which adds layers to it. Casa de mi Padre, based on Mexican melodramas, is in a precarious place for me even if I admire what it attempts to do. I have not seen anything that could have influenced this film, so it came to me as a very unconventional work, one, regardless of what happens on another  viewing, I will applaud for being an American comedy taking an original turn.

When two drug lords – his own brother (Diego Luna) and the local lord Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal) – begin a bloody conflict, pushed forward by a corrupt American FBI agent and Mexican police, the naive rancher Armando Alvarez (Will Farrell) will have to learn what it means to be a man to protect what he loves. Done completely deadpan, it is supposed to be a Mexican film with everyone, including Farrell, speaking in Spanish. What could have been quite insulting to Hispanic viewers, with its intentionally fake model effects and back projection, is far more interesting than a cheap parody. It’s whole premise and concept is what could make it remembered in the future even if it’s flawed in the final results. At only eighty minutes, if suffers from a thin running time which prevents it from taking a sketch and making it into  fully formed, unique creation. Many of these intentional cultish films spend most of the running time setting up the premise and not deepening them, which Casa de mi Padre does suffer from.

This film could survive in the eyes of viewers in that, embracing its cultural influences fully, it is inspired and exhilarating. In eighty minutes it includes some immensely good musical numbers, a throwback to spaghetti western title themes that Quentin Tarantino wishes he had, a willingness to tackle something as serious as the Mexican drug wars in a way that isn’t trivialising, and a legitimate cinematic quality to the material, far from flatly made comedies as we expect now but with a mix of artificial and real sets that is distinct and imaginative. When it does play with the tropes of “bad” filmmaking – awkward delays in dialogue, obviously fake animals, in-film advertising – it comes as peculiarly funny rather than a self conscious attempt at being awful. And that it is playing itself as a serious film, including bloody gunfights and tragedy, while creating an off-balanced tone to the story at first, actually makes it difficult to not be caught up with the narrative arch even when you’re still noticing the subtle and blatant absurdities in the fore and background of scenes. The only hesitation I have with giving the film more praise is its slightness, and whether this will do the same to it as it did to Black Dynamite, making it pointless to watch it after a first viewing, is up to what happens on another viewing. Aside from this it is the kind of unconventional idea you want more comedy films to go along with. 

From http://boscosgrindhouse.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/casa-de-mi-padre-1-620x.jpg

Terror At The Opera (1987)

From http://annyas.com/screenshots/images/1987/terror-at-the-opera-title-still.jpg

Dir. Dario Argento

Italy

Terror At The Opera like actual music is about the vivid images that a song or piece of music generates for the listener even if they don’t make logical sense. Re-seeing the film, I realise that my coldness to the film originally was because it completely goes against the grain of what one expects with this sort of narrative. Since his beginning as a director, Dario Argento’s films have been curveballs which don’t go in unexpected directions – tangents in Deep Red (1975), the abrupt ending of Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), and Suspiria (1977) as a whole – long before the eighties and his more divisive films. They’re the same identical curveballs of his later, divisive films like The Card Player (2004) and Giallo (2009), with only the material around them up to debate. Even The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), kicking off the giallo genre, has unexpected directions, the kind that would be dismissed as bad screenwriting to some, but are the dreamlike and abstract tones people adore his films, and Italian genre cinema, for. Viewing Opera, without bringing up the music choices, raises attention to an age old question – do we view cinema through the lense of theatre and novels, needing a full narrative, or do visuals and juxtapositions of everything there (visually, audibly, tonally) mean more?

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bHSVCs9rX0A/TMsPhJBuccI/
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An understudy becomes the lead in a major operatic performance, only to be the victim of a killer who forces her to watch them murder people close to her. The film does not follow convention. It is various fragments connected into one sum – horror, voyeurism and pleasure, theatricality and the questioning of the protagonist’s state of mind all together in a loose story. It is intoxicated by its aesthetic and cinematic style, an exceptional creation which contains elaborate camera movements and clever use of what we the viewer can and cannot see. It is not mere aesthetic fetishism however, as it is clear, despite the problems he had making the film, that Argento is making the structure purposeful. It is clear we are not that separate from his supernatural films viewing Opera, within the same tone of Suspiria and Inferno (1980). The best of Italian cinema, including auteurs like Federico Fellini, work on a logic of waking dreams and everything connected to them – bright, deep textures and colours, fetishes, sexuality and power, individuals as representations – and you could view it as a cop-out to defend the apparent plot discrepancies, but when compared to awful abstract films from Italy (like Luigi Cozzi’s Demons 6 – De Profundis (1989) which attempted to be a film in Argento’s cinematic world), this seems more purposeful. If so, what does this mean? As a horror film, it is meant to terrify or unsettle you and that is Opera’s main concern. The displacing of what we expect to happen in a narrative like this knocks us out of our comfort zone. That the protagonist can have a cold attitude to just seeing a person killed may suggest that, actually, we’re being steered through the story by a character that is not in a mentally stable internal atmosphere, which Argento pushes, leaving us stranded. The only stable beings in the film are not even human but the ravens that dominate the theatre environment and influence how the murders are settled.

It is stripping down the typical plot line into a sensory effort. The scenes of tension, especially one in an apartment with a discomforting mistaking of identity, are effective if you give yourself up to the tone of the film, visually stunning beautiful grotesqueness, but it is completely abstract. Suspiria, even Inferno, even thought the latter especially is a fully abstracted work, have supernatural tones to make the curveballs and unexpected pulls back and forth more acceptable. Terror At The Opera plays within the same area within the vein of a obsessive killer plot, something we expect to be more conventional and realistic in a pulpy cinematic standard. That his influences, such as Edgar Allen Poe, were as much about the mental states of the characters and how it effects the environments around them help magnify this fact in Dario Argento’s work, making a drastic rewatching of his filmography, and covering up the gaps in my viewing, a necessary thing to do in the future. Hell, even the use of heavy metal music makes sense when you view the film like this.

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Videotape Swapshop Review: Project S aka. Supercop 2 (1993)

From http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn148/Captain_Video/ProjectS-Jposter.jpg

Dir. Stanley Tong

Hong Kong

Another March-ial Arts entry for Videotape Swapshop. Enjoy.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13201/project-s-%E2%80%93-1993-director-stanley-tong/

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpvYFuuY4tN6W4Cbgak64VGj0N1O_8DhokUwRn9Wj-wNVPeXfLV0xLYfr0tuKEFYo036ykMpEcxyh9VstQo6Z7yBj8-dlLEJV-Ajg7l0El4nFdpAWbpRsZf8vWYln4JrhHNB1hxb32ADCt/s1600/ProjectS%252B1993-8-b.jpg

Beasts and (Savages (2012))

From http://www.cinematoria.com/images/films/savages_2012/wallpapers/savages_2012-en-1-1920x850.jpg

Dir. Oliver Stone

USA

A new review and something more recent. In the last week especially, in just two days of viewing films released last year, I’ve become more enamoured and optimistic about the quality of cinema still in just three films. And, gasp, they were mainstream films like Skyfall (2012)! Even Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is more a mainstream work because it’ll be more available than an obscure documentary about textiles from Uzbekistan or something that actually exists to my knowledge. It shows my concerned issues from before, that dangerously put me close to a snob, will always be about the film culture surrounding the movies instead. That and the large percentage of overrated films and those I should have avoided the moment I felt trepidation that I viewed. I realise that, as this thought grows, that the concept I had before becomes stronger as well. Do I qualify as a contrarian to the eyes of the likes of Rolling Stone magazine and The Guardian newspaper, or are there issues to be brought up of the damning of Oliver Stone’s new film that’s taken place? Before I get into the meat of the review, it becomes clearer that the need for self consciousness in one’s self is required. A film critic is supposed to teach the reader as well as recommend things to them, but as anyone who has gone through education should realise, as I did at university but could be learnt as far back as a child in primary school, it’s that for an education to work the student (the hobbyist, the fan, the scholar etc.) must be taught (and teach themselves) to think for themselves even if it means questioning the Master, to borrow the symbology from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, to get there. To think for oneself allows skills to increase, and knowledge to have a use, while allowing you to separate yourself from herd thinking. Looking at Savages, and thinking about it, one wonders if it’s as much a cheap shot at Taylor Kitsch again (after John Carter [Of Mars] (2012) and Battleship (2012)), and the sense that Oliver Stone is no longer the ‘cool’ director loved in the eyes of popular film fads, that has coloured the apparent negative reviews of the film.

From http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/30400000/Savages-2012-upcoming-movies-30420931-725-463.jpg

Oliver Stone can be divisive for me. Some of his films I’ve seen are failures, but he made Platoon (1986) which is a great work. Savages is an interesting borderline between his political and sociological dissections, of the process of negotiations and methodical pacing, and the more erratic, and contextually and visually more confrontational works like Natural Born Killers (1994) and U-Turn (1997). The two sides create a perfect bed for the content, easy to dismiss as a generic thriller with a winking tone, but far more of a complicated animal I will praise Stone, co-script writer Shane Salerno, and author of the original novel it is based on Don Winslow for. When they reject the partnership with a Mexican cartel, the incredibly successful duo of pot merchants Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch) find that their shared love of their life O (Blake Lively) has been kidnapped by the group as a ransom and fight fire with fire in return. What could have been a generic, one note story of good and handsome heroes rescuing a damsel in distress from evil Mexican drug dealers is a far more layered, dense work. What I have had to learn as well is that, as much as I champion innovatively made films when I feel they deserve it, I have learnt how exhilarating it is to see well worn tropes, in plot, structure and tone, given freshness and richness through craftsmanship and a distinctiveness as seen in this film. It started with weariness for me at first with Lively’s constant narration over the first few scenes, fearing it would be an incredibly empty, ‘hip’ crime story, but it sinks in early on how no one in this film is clean-cut and morally black-and-white. Many films are like this, but Savages actually enforces this idea fully, staring back at you about this issue sternly as you follow its intentionally lurid, rush of theatrics it is playing out in its hands. Even if Lado (Benicio del Toro) the cartel’s heavy is a monster who assaults his wife and does sadistic things, the fact that early on we see him at a son’s baseball game as a dysfunctional father does not let the viewer get away scot-free from being on equal grounds with all the characters. As Chon keeps telling his friend Ben repeatedly, they will always have to resort to violence eventually and the world ‘changes you’, and Stone emphasises this. The well worn clichés and expected beats, because of the methodical tone of the film, are scrutinised – the corrupt FBI agent (John Travolta) is a family man with a dying wife and some semblance of consciousness still in him, the psychopathic Lado and all the Mexican cartel are human beings with families, and the loss of innocence for Ben and Chon, from the director of Platoon, and their transformation to mirror reflections of the other side is more apparent, as “Savages.” is used by both sides at the other at least once each. Ben’s Buddhist influenced desire to help the world is sincere and praisable, but that his best friend Chon, a former soldier in Afghanistan, has to be an enforcer to collect money from people who didn’t pay up shows that, long before the violence that takes place, he was already exhibiting the crippling flaw of hypocrisy that he doesn’t even recognise in himself.

Then there are the non-conventional aspects of the film. The pan sexuality of Ben and Chon, that O shares them as lovers and that, beneath it all, they love each other just as much, or more so, plays a fascinating (and applaudable) card of knocking over gender and sexual stereotypes from the creators of the film while emphasising the bond of the protagonists and adding to the script’s complexities. That this aspect isn’t made an upfront part of the narrative in a patronising, half-hearted liberal way shows a skill and greater subversiveness from everyone involved including Kitsch and Johnson in the roles. Also significant is that the leader of the Mexican cartel, the lord who presides over the riches with a bloody fist, is a woman, a mother in fact. Playing Elena, Salma Hayek is beautiful, even more so now as an older woman, but that also brilliantly by her in her performance and Stone’s part adds to the character. The expected gender roles of a woman to be followed in a patriarchal society – the doting mother who looks after the home, the paradox of the beautiful, sensual siren hybrided with the faithful widow who never remarries and has flings – are melded with statuses usually assigned to male archetypes. Elena is also the sole home figure (and breadwinner) in a family where most of the men were killed, the businessman, the leader, the boss, the bloodthirsty, the ends-justify-the-means brutalist who, to survive the precipice her group is near, deems it needed to behead opponents with chainsaws through the likes of Lado and has the footage sent to white, pot selling, naive surfer-types to frighten them into becoming business partners for her and her extended family to last. The mother estranged from her daughter emphasises a far deeper use of stock characters by her position within the characterisation. It is fitting, learning of this in university classes, looking back at this film through the knowledge that, at least in Britain before the twentieth century, there were housewives who, far from flimsy submissive creatures, had control of everything in the house (especially finances and what was done inside the home) and likely had far more control of the family than the husband. Elena is the mother who, having taken the cartel over after her husband’s death, proceeds to manage it as carefully and fully as she can, regardless of the carnage and its dwindling future. That this is furthered in making her captive O a quasi-daughter to her more sympathetic and thoughtful to her than her real one is to her shows a compelling dramatic licence that is sadly absent from films which were praised to the heavens, unlike this, but even to my virginal twenty three year old mind, were the creations of cynical hollowism, crass one-dimensional characters and unbearable whinging to the material.

From http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/benicio-del-toro-salma-hayek-savages-2012.png

The only potential issue I had with Savages is its ending which pulls the rug from under the viewer. It is wonderfully abrasive, but my issue with it at first, rather than being angry with it being a cop-out, was that not so long before it a gruesome plot point is introduced between O and Lado, who paws over the captive hostage constantly, that could make the ending queasy in the wrong way, as if ignoring the weight of what was introduced. Preparing for this review however, I reread the Sight & Sound review of the film by Nick Pinkerton that made me interested in the film (October 2012, Volume 22, Issue 10 for those interested), and a point he makes is that her narration is “selectively omniscient, occasionally unreliable” and while I won’t call her a “sybaritic sun-worshipper with a THC-soaked brain” like he did, she is just as compliant in the events that take place. A true victim of unjustified brutality, she nonetheless - emphasised (on purpose?) by Lively’s physical appearance, close to the tween high school girl fetishisation that, while not her fault at all in any way, is becoming a fad with male fantasies and Hollywood cinema – is also a blasé rich girl who, for her clear sincerities, is also ignorant. With a lack of concentration likely caused, as Elena states, from smoking pot since eighth grade, she fails to realise the obvious and tragic coincidence, when Ben and Chon resort to more extreme tactics, and how they mirror her captors’ behaviour. A man as intelligent, talented and skilled as Stone, regardless of his failures, would not put a disturbing plot point into a film and seem to shrug it off afterwards; it becomes obvious that, along with the carpet pull twist ending, that it, along with the violence beforehand, is supposed to leave an unclosed, festering wound in the viewer’s mind to stop them from forgetting the film and remind them of the ideas beneath the gunfire.

Fittingly, after the compelling but ultimate failing of Natural Born Killers, Stone melds its aesthetic with a strong core this time, director of photography Dan Mindel creating retina burning images and composer Adam Peter combining spaghetti western guitar riffs to pulsating electronica, a foundation that proves that great genre and pulp material can convey universal ideas of humanity more thoroughly than serious dramas. With one side ingeniously using their image of themselves from America, of gardeners and immigrants, to their advantage, alongside ruthlessness, against California types with ex-marine tactics and computer hacking, it allows Stone to prod American culture thoroughly. But it also allows him, even for a man like myself who has never held a gun let alone see a person die in front of my eyes, as someone who lived through the Vietnam War, to show that even if violence is necessary at times, it still means that your enemy is a human being who becomes a pile of blood and organs with a pull of a trigger. In hindsight to the first paragraph, it will be films that can do this that can keep me optimistic for current cinema rather than pine in a nostalgia I wasn’t born into. It must however involve questioning the mass consensus through my continuous education, causing one to view film opinion as idiosyncratic forks of personal opinion, as well as fact, and taking advantage of that. Hence, I’m going to have to defend Savages in a lengthier review like this because it brought these thoughts out from me.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rWdVTSEHV5k/UEBWLUJHKKI/AAAAAAAAVVM/fqfT-Bhx6aM/s1600/Taylor-Kitsch-and-Aaron-Johnson-in-Savages-2012-Movie-Image.jpg

Videotape Swapshop Review: Mortal Kombat (1995)

From http://www.dbcovers.com/imagenes/backdrops
/grandes/mortal_kombat_1995//mortal_kombat_1995_1.jpg

Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson

USA

Not much has to be said about this review, the second of mine for the March-ial Arts month on Videotape Swapshop, except that fatalities, as expected from the game, are involved.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13115/mortal-kombat-%E2%80%93-1995-director-paul-ws-anderson/

From http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111107190920/
mk/images/3/3f/Mortal.Kombat.1995.720p.Bluray.X264-DIMENSION.mkv_snapshot_00.27.40_-2010.07.10_03.41.03-.jpg

Mini-Review: Demons 6 – De Profundis (1989) [aka. The Scary Refrigerator Man Film]

From http://bis.cinemaland.net/poster/demons6.jpg

Dir. Luigi Cozzi

Italy

I purposely found this film to view after becoming fond of Starcrash (1978) director Luigi Cozzi, but this film is a reminder that even directors you like, great auteurs or workmen, can fail hideously. This and Zombie 3 (1988) within March for me has shown that any director in the Italian genre industry can fail and that, to my belief, the culture of the late eighties and its popular trends may have been what killed it off after being so illustrious beforehand. Whether Mother of Tears (2007), Dario Argento’s official third film in his Three Mothers Trilogy, looks good in comparison to this unofficial third film is yet to be accounted for until I view it, but Cozzi sadly dropped the bar low enough for the really average directors to make better films than Demons 6. Set in a world where Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) exist within it, a famous director and his scriptwriter decide to use material from the same source Argento’s films came from, planning to make a film about an evil with called Levana if a famous producer is willing to fund the production. The director’s wife, planned to play the witch, is beset by troubling hallucinations however and threats to herself and her young child by Levana.

The film, if it was just this basic plotline, is not good. It has some style, but it seems like the artistry of even the most lurid of Italian cinema was bled out of this baring some bleached out lighting. Thirty minutes in its still going through introductory exposition, as a ninety or less minute feature, and it has none of the atmosphere of the best of Italian horror, believing cheesy hair metal riffs are what jolts the viewer. Only Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986) have made heavy metal work in Italian horror films from what I’ve seen, and those films were not attempting to be atmospheric but balls-out splat fests rather than spine chilling. The other films I’ve seen, baring maybe Phenomena (1985) and its lunatic ending, did not know how to use this music at all, like most films do, and are marred by them. This is also a film where it is supposed to be scary that the female protagonist talks to a repair man fixing her fridge...only for him not to have existed at all and vanishing into thin air. As I have added to the title of this film, Demons 6 attempts to bring refrigerator repairmen to the silver screen as a new terror, and that concept in principle shows all that is wrong with this film in its dull entirety with this perfect centrepiece. It attempts to do the same with model trains too, but while Mario Bava made toys placed in an order unnerving in his last film Shock (1977), Demons 6 feels lazy and lifeless. There is none of the childish imagination of the other Cozzi films I’ve seen, or the blistering colours and production design. And then there’s the whole story of the film. In something like Starcrash the unexpected tangents felt like a celebration of them for the sake of it like in a flash of pulpy storytelling or how a child adds more and more to a story they’re telling as they go along. Demons 6, right from the first images of outer space and a cosmic foetus, for the lack of a politer phrasing, feels like it is pulling plot twists out of its arse in panicked and gibbering desperation. More arbitrary for the annoying ‘Is it all a dream?’ moments, it wobbles between supernatural horror, cultism, science fiction, and even Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, only really shown through images of cats, and feels like an indigestible hodgepodge of bits. By its end, Demons 6: De Profundis, is just a confused, rambling mess, not an abstract and haunting horror film that Italy can make (and Argento did). It’s completely awful and you should be watching Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules (1983) with Lou Ferrigno instead.

From http://wtf-film.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/De-Profundis-Black-Cat6.jpg

Blast Forth Into the Corona of an Indigo Sun [Starcrash (1978)]

From http://www.catman.ca/Images/s%20pics/starcrash1979.jpg

Dir. Luigi Cozzi

Italy-USA

From http://cinemapsycho.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/starcrash-1979-rare-oop-b4b9e.jpg?w=300&h=205

On a biased surface view, Starcrash would be dismissed as a terrible Star Wars rip-off. There is a drastic difference however between films that are pure cashgrabs and those, like Starcrash, with more to them. Mere cashgrabs pretty much consist of only exposition dialogue, people sat around chairs or standing saying said dialogue, rudimentary designed monsters and sets; effectively the ready meal mindset to low budget genre filmmaking. Starcrash belongs to the category of this sort of cinema where the director, or whoever is involved in its production, being more experimenting and braver in their work as long as it can be sold on the back of films like Star Wars or Mad Max still. The colours for these films are noticeably brighter and richer, the monsters and vessels of all kinds more chunkier but more unconventional, the dialogue liable to turn exposition into odd pulp poetry with completely made-up names, and the casting of roles liable to lead to fascinating juxtapositions and great scenery chewing. Watching Starcrash, and seeing his films Hercules (1983) and The Adventures of Hercules (1985) with Lou Ferrigno beforehand, it’s clear that the director Luigi Cozzi was obsessed with sci-fi, comic books, Ray Harryhausen films, mythology, prog rock albums and prog rock album covers amongst other things. Rather than the limited palette that the worst of this kind of movie making wallows in, Cozzi’s Starcrash feels like the creation of someone with a wider scope of ideas and influences to draw upon, and a desire to entertain the viewer as much as possible, that is more exhilarating. That it was made on a much lower budget to the Star Wars films made it more distinct, instead of ruining it, and a cult hit.

From http://www.intergalactico.com/images/starcrash_p.jpg

Traversing the ocean of atmosphere-less outer space, criminal pilots Stella Star (Caroline Munro) and psychic Akten (former child preacher turned B-movie star Marjoe Gortner) find themselves avoiding intergalactic prison labour when the Emperor of the galaxy (Christopher Plummer) sends them and two space police officers, including the southern robot Elle, to locate the doomsday weapon of Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell), leader of the opposing side of an intergalactic war. Aspects of the film remind of Star Wars, but aside from a lightsabre and a text crawl borrowed from the prop cupboard, Starcrash is its own creation that, despite its minimal plot and breakneck pace, is distinct and imaginative. With names and planet titles chosen, almost stream of consciously, that sound less like rudimentary gibberish but public domain abstract wording, the film manages to touch into a spark in certain pop culture that is hyper imaginative. The dexterity of animation, the fantastical tone of rock music that scrapes past cheesiness into something sublime, the pop art of comic book pages, the creative pulpiness of material usually looked down upon but more often than not more memorable and rich than better praised work. Starcrash is a creation of its time but you don’t get the following in most “rip-off” cinema – glowing blue star ships and purple moons, the atmosphere of an ice planet spinning as quickly above in a superimposition like an image wheel, a giant robotic female Amazon, or Amazon women riding horses that, painted completely red and wearing Chinese dragon masks on their heads, look like peculiar unworldly steeds done in a proto Michel Gondry style. Starcrash has the virtues I wish all pulp, unless it was breaking certain rules on purpose, had and with a great deal of cinema too – colour and colourfulness, depth of visual look, a drawing from real mythology, and if it’s a sci-fi or fantasy work, depictions of worlds and images that are truly alien even on a shoestring budget. Cozzi does all this and even, with co-writing duties with Nat Wachsberger, makes the expository and deus ex machina filled script intentionally so in tone, celebrating the absurdist joy of characters being able to call upon the ability to stop time and having to deal with cosmic cavemen. That it is spoken by actors like Spinell or David Hasselhoff adds to this, their distinct looks and their persona baggage, from Munro’s spirited sexuality to Plummer’s serious nobleness, filling out the thin thread of plot into a full weave even if most of them were dubbed by other people.

From http://www.cinesploitation.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/starcrash4.jpg

Starcrash is not a strained, over-serious film like most blockbusters with the same sort of thin plots are. Even if you can see the joins between the model effects and the actors, within the context of an aesthetic this brightly coloured and designed, it enhances rather than detracts from the tone of the film, more an explosion of colour and look than trying to be a serious, complicated epic like the Star Wars franchise from the same sort of story writing. 

From http://stillsofthenight.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/starcrash-1979-dvdrip-xvid-phreniac-avi_005213480.jpg?w=840

Videotape Swapshop: Ninja In The Dragon’s Den (1982)

From http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m81vc4RDx51qavxpso1_1280.jpg

Dir. Corey Yuen

Hong Kong

The following is the start of the March-ial Arts month on the site Videotape Swapshop. I absolutely recommend viewing the reviews by my co-writers as they touch upon some eclectic choices and even manage to slip Danny Dyer of all people into the season. How Dyer would survive in this film, with ninjas, stilt fighting and the use of ladders that would impress B&Q, I can’t tell, but the debut of Corey Yuen is still worth its weight in gold.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13166/ninja-in-the-dragon%E2%80%99s-den-%E2%80%93-1982-director-corey-yuen/

From http://cdn-3.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/clp/101946-6561-clp-720.jpg

Month In Review: February 2013

From http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/8862/redline2009bdrip720pita.jpg

Starting off the first of these almost-diary-like posts, February was admittedly erratic. I’ve (until my recent plans) always had a hodgepodge sense of going to a variety of genres/directors/countries depending on my whims for that week, meaning that there are few marathons to catch up with filmographies and series of films that are interconnected. Probably the exception for this month was re-evaluating the short films of the Quay Brothers on mass which proved to be refreshing with their unique aesthetics. Pretty much the rest of the month can be viewed through the following....

Best Film of the Month

1. Redline (Takeshi Koike, 2009/Japan) – 10/10 [Rewatch]

2. La Dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960/France-Italy) – 10/10

3. Fellini’s Roma (Federico Fellini, 1972/France-Italy) – 10/10 [Rewatch]

4. In Absentia (Stephen Quay and Timothy Quay, 2000/UK) – 10/10 [Rewatch]

5. Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994/USA) – 10/10 [Rewatch]

6. Street of Crocodiles (Stephen Quay and Timothy Quay, 1986/UK) – 10/10 [Rewatch]

7. Roujin Z aka. Rôjin Z (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 1991/Japan) – 9/10

8. Beyond The Door II aka. Shock (Mario Bava, 1977/Italy) – 9/10

9. Fear X (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2003/Brazil-Canada-Denmark-UK) – 9/10

10. The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay and Keith Griffiths, 1984/UK) – 9/10 [Rewatch]

My brain says I should have La Dolce vita at the top of the list, but the heart has to keep banging the drum for the anime film Redline. Fellini’s two films in the top ten however are legitimate masterpieces, La Dolce vita still a relevant film in this era in its ideas while being sumptuous in look alongside Roma. Very much a month of great rewatches, including some that proved to be superior than I originally intended them to be, but there were quite a few great first watches as well. Animation in particular, with mention to the underrated Roujin Z and its even more relevant message on the treatment of the elderly, stood out for the month as well.

Biggest Surprise of the Month

1. Fear X (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2003/Brazil-Canada-Denmark-UK) – 9/10

2. Beyond The Door II aka. Shock (Mario Bava, 1977/Italy) – 9/10

3. The Story of a Three-Day Pass (Melvin Van Peebles, 1968/France) – 8/10

4. Bullhead (Michael R. Roskam, 2011/Belgium-Netherlands) – 8/10

5. Roujin Z aka. Rôjin Z (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 1991/Japan) – 9/10

Pretty much a great month for finding obscurer films from certain directors second hand, only to find that the film you expected to be average to alright to blow you away by their endings. Mario Bava’s Shock was great for this, but Fear X was the biggest surprise.  Nicolas Winding Refn dropped the ball for me with Drive (2011) which felt generic and middling. Fear X, even if it plays too much in David Lynch’s backyard but doesn’t have the grace to wipe the mud off its feet on the doormats, is the sort of films along with Valhalla Rising (2009) I wish he continues with.

Discovery of the Month

1. The Story of a Three-Day Pass (Melvin Van Peebles, 1968/France) – 8/10

2. Roujin Z aka. Rôjin Z (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 1991/Japan) – 9/10

3. Fear X (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2003/Brazil-Canada-Denmark-UK) – 9/10

4. Beyond The Door II aka. Shock (Mario Bava, 1977/Italy) – 9/10

5. Bullhead (Michael R. Roskam, 2011/Belgium-Netherlands) – 8/10

The MUBI Directors Cup that I am a part of, a fun game between film fans which imagines a battle royal for directors while allowing people to see obscure films they would never be able to see, is pretty much to thank for the top choice. Van Peeble’s debut will make viewing more of his films in the future an anticipated event.

Biggest Change of Opinion

1. Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994/USA) – 10/10 [Rewatch]

2. The Short Films of the Quay Brothers

The Quays became more than just “less interesting than Jan Svankmajer” for me but worthwhile directors of stop motion in general. Ed Wood however was a revelation, utterly beautiful visually, but potent as an ode to the difficulties and joys of filmmaking. It doesn’t matter whether Ed Wood Jr. was a great filmmaker or not; it meant more that at least he tried his damn hardest.

Most Divisive Film of the Month

1. Pistol Opera (Seijun Suzuki, 2001/Japan) – 5/10

2. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995/France-USA) – 7/10

3. The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011/USA) – 6/10

4. The Roe’s Room aka. Pokój saren (Lech Majewski, 1997/Poland) – 5/10

Showgirls is the kind of film that understandably would appear on worst-of lists, but it has far too many legitimate virtues to dismiss it, playing in the same ballpark of Starship Troopers (1997) and causing problems for any viewer believing films are surface level only. The Green Hornet as well has to be placed here as, narrative wise, it is a perfectly good film, but making it an adaptation of the famous character was an ill-advised idea when it should have been its own, unique superhero story and avoided trivialising the original character at the same time.  Pistol Opera however has to be top of this list considering my divided review of it earlier in the month, a film that bored me but I cannot forget and find virtues in. It depends on the rewatch one day whether there is any real worth to it beyond this.

The Most Underrated Film

1. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995/France-USA) – 7/10

2. Fear X (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2003/Brazil-Canada-Denmark-UK) – 9/10

3. Dark Horse (Todd Solondz, 2011/USA) – 8/10

4. Cutthroat Island (Renny Harlin, 1995/France-Germany-Italy-USA) – 6/10

5. Roujin Z aka. Rôjin Z (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 1991/Japan) – 9/10

6. Norwegian Ninja aka. Kommandør Treholt & ninjatroppen (Thomas Cappelen Malling, 2010/Norway) – 7/10

As mentioned, Showgirls has a lot more to it of worth than one would believe. Cutthroat Island as well although it suffered from major problems of not being very engaging by its ending. Having seen some truly awful films in my young life already has made me realised that the worst is usually the least well known. The season of bad films I did on the blog the last two months proved this.

The Most Overrated Film

1. Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2012/USA) – 3/10

2. GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995/UK-USA) – 6/10 [Rewatch]

Bond films are varying for me in quality, although the Sean Connery movies may prove to be the great ones for being the first ones of the series when the premise was fresh, and with the Cold War at its prime, having a relevancy to the era. Killer Joe however really has no escape clause to it; I’m starting to realise Friedkin has a terrible habit of pushing the buttons in using provocative content in his work far too much, more of a problem when his work I’ve seen, even Cruising (1980), have the tones of prestige films rather than exploitation cinema. Making a film about broad Southern trailer trash stereotypes with an unnecessary amount of sickening violence and humiliation with a chicken drumstick should not be awarded. It’s just lame, just as bad as the nihilistic “torture porn” aesthetics of many modern horror films and causes my eyes to roll back in my skull and wait for the film to finish so it can leave my DVD player sharply as possible before it leaves a stink in the machine.  Extreme content can work, like in a Takashi Miike film, but the best examples are far too cartoonish to cause one to feel ill and separate the lines between the film revealing in the content and forcing one to question what you are watching. A film like Visitor Q (2001) can get away with being a comedy with immensely sickening content because it undermines and questions the ideas of voyeurism and gender/family roles in ways that stops the viewer from feeling they are above the characters and can look down at them. The same can apply to Showgirls (1995) just from viewing it on the surface.  Killer Joe is just an excuse at laughing at the trailer class of the South and to try to view it like a black comedy and a good film would be like sticking my genitals into an industrial paper shredder.

Biggest Disappointment of the Month

1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958/USA) – 5/10 [Rewatch]

2. Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2012/USA) – 3/10

3. GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995/UK-USA) – 6/10 [Rewatch]

4. Isole Di Fuoco (Vittorio De Seta, 1954/Italy) – 6/10

5. Mortal Kombat (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1995/USA) – 4/10 [Rewatch]

6. Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer, 1992/USA) – 6/10

Rewatching Vertigo was sad as I am unsure whether it is legitimately an overrated film or that the proclamation of it being the greatest film ever made has destroyed its affectiveness. Number 4 to 6 all could have been better, Nitrate Kisses being a mere 60 minute documentary when I was hoping for a work equivalent to a Un chant d’amour (1950) in quality with its subject matters, and the short Isole Di Fuoco having very little effect on me despite its beauty. Even Mortal Kombat could have been something even if part of a very different area of cinema; what could have been as fun as Street Fighter (1994) ends up being a mediocre film with a horrifically put together script.

[Non] Guilty Pleasure of the Month

1. Robot Monster (Phil Tucker, 1953/USA) – 6/10

2. Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996/USA) – 6/10 [Rewatch]

While Twister had its virtues, it’s been a one Ro-Man contest this month. Possessing potential depth completely at odds with its cheap, sci-fi look and gorilla suits with diver’s helmets, Robot Monster is a reminder of how peculiar science fiction can get especially on a z-grade budget.

The Para-Bizarre Film/Scene/Work of the Month

1. The Ending (after viewing the whole film) of International Gorillay aka. International Guerillas (Jan Mohammed, 1990/Pakistan) – 6/10

2. The Tone of Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995/France-USA) – 7/10

3. Robot Monster (Phil Tucker, 1953/USA) – 6/10

4. The Aesthetic Look of A Deadly Invention aka. The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (Karel Zeman, 1958/Czechoslovakia) – 7/10

International Gorillay, despite being an attempt to counteract Salman Rushdie, probably becomes as insulting for a Muslim as The Satanic Verses was. Attempting to capitalise on a real case of freedom of speech versus perceived blasphemy for commercial gain, even for a exploitation film, is bound to have a polarizing effect, but the film goes beyond this by its ending to being completely insane, dragging the Islamic god into the unfortunate mess without His permission.

Worst Film of the Month

1. Dominator (Tony Luke, 2003/UK) – 1/10 [Rewatch]

2. Blood Thirsty (Jeff Frey, 1999/USA) – 1/10

3. Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2012/USA) – 3/10

4. Cannibal Apocalypse (Antonio Margheriti, 1980/Italy-Spain) – 3/10

Another disappointingly generic film from Antonio Margheriti and Friedkin’s utterly crass film still have some merit when up against films with no discernible value to them at all. Blood Thirsty became legitimately offensive by its end with its portrait of self harm, but I’m still going to have to give the award to Dominator. I was hoping reviewing it for the blog that its ridiculousness would be charmingly bad on the second viewing, but I instead found out how much of an embarrassment it is for my country’s culture that was thankfully forgotten by everyone else. As a manga and heavy metal fan I feel soiled by the thing and it, along with Blood Thirsty, proves that it is the viewer who gives these films bad reviews like this that are the truly terrible aspect of them, dumb enough to view them when they knew going in it would probably be this awful.

The Steven Seagal Award For Best Worst Scene

1. The Ending Effects of International Gorillay aka. International Guerillas (Jan Mohammed, 1990/Pakistan) – 6/10

2. Ninja meets bus from The Sword of Bushido (Adrian Carr, 1990/Australia-Hong Kong) – 4/10

3. The Go-Kart Chase of The Sword of Bushido (Adrian Carr, 1990/Australia-Hong Kong) – 4/10

Pursuing the bad guys’ car in a go-kart is probably the least expected thing I saw this month in action cinema although I cannot get past the idea that ninja, known for their stealth and agility, could let themselves be caught out by a bus like the one in the same film. The award goes to International Gorillay, with the emphasis that, if one is offended by a writer’s take on your religion, you must rise above it instead of resorting to what the film does to show them up as the ill-religious fool they are. Making an International Gorillay however just allows said writer to dismiss it as rubbish and say how completely opposite from reality it actually is.

The Person(s) of The Month

1. Director Melvin Van Peebles, and actors Nicole Berger and Harry Baird (The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968))

2. Federico Fellini

3. Martin Landau (Ed Wood (1994))

4. Stefan Czapsky (Cinematographer of Ed Wood (1994))

5. Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead (2011))

6. Takeshi Koike (Director of Redline (2009))

7. Stephen and Timothy Quay

8. Jack Birkett (Jubilee (1977))

9. Nicolas Winding Refn (Director of Fear X (2003))

10. Participants of the MUBI Directors Cup 2013 who choose the films like The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968) for the matches

Honourable Mentions - Jost Vacano (Cinematographer for Showgirls (1995)); The Set Designers for Pistol Opera (2001); Tai Bo (Ninja In The Dragon's Den (1982)); Niall MacGinnis (Night of the Demon (1957)); Mario Bava (Director of Shock (1977)); Arne Treholt (Norwegian Ninjas (2010)); Bernabe Pérez and Magdalena Flores (Japón (2002)); Brian Eno, Dean Landon and J. Peter Schwalm (Composers of Fear X (2003)); Gina Gershon (Showgirls (1995)); The Ro-Man (Robot Monster (1953)); Todd Solondz (Director of Dark Horse (2011)); Nasir Adib, Zahoor Ahmed, Sikandar Khanna (and the English translation of the subtitles) (Screenwriters of International Gorilla (1990); Marcel Lévesque (Les Vampires (1915)); Daria Nicolodi (Shock (1977)); Seth Rogen,; Jay Chou and Christoph Waltz (The Green Hornet (2011)); Sterling Hayden (Terror In A Texas Town (1958)); Mary Field (Director of The Mystery of Marriage (1932)); Alan Cumming (GoldenEye (1995)); Marc ‘Lard’ Riley and Mark Radcliffe (Dominator (2003))

Dishonorable Person of the Month

Dani Filth (Dominator (2003))

Dishonorable Mention: Jeff Frey (Director of Blood Thristy (1999)); The Individuals behind the price gouging for the UK DVD release of Roujin Z (1991)

There is no excuse for how expensive Roujin Z, a 80 or so minute film on an extra-less disc, was for me to buy it at my local HMV, Blue Cross sale or not. I have become more and more fond of the store, buying more from them over the two years, but over expensive prices for certain niche DVDs was probably not going to help them during their recent financial issues. Originally I was going to put the director of Dominator on this list, but considering the problems he had including treatment for cancer, I would rather damn the film itself separate from him. The director of Blood Thirsty should be ashamed though.

And out of either of these choices, Dani Filth however has to have the bottom placement for how bad his presence in Dominator was and the potentially sad fact that he thought the whole thing was awesome and added to his view of what heavy metal music is. Cradle of Filth seem a bit off-putting for me to get into as a band even as a general, open-minded music fan willing to try anything, as it comes apparent that the same mentality Dominator may permeate their music, something I dread to have to listen to. I’ll stick with the song Nymphetamine on my iPod for now and not venture anywhere near their discography yet.

85 Works Watched In January

31 Rewatched Works

54 New Works Seen