Boardinghouse (1982)

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Dir. John Wintergate

I have little in the way of life experience, but in terms of cinema, I can confidently say I've seen things that'll turn your hair grey. It doesn't matter if its art house or grind house. Body fluids. Sex. Gore. Random inclusions of clowns. A man turning into a bed sitting room. Exceptionally low budget films known for having an erratic tone have the aura for me of being exceptionally weird, particularly those shot on video, for the potential of odd circumstances, mismatched editing and rubber mask abuse. So it comes with a surprise that Boardinghouse to be pretty lacking in terms of an off-kilter air to it. I've wanted to see this film for years, since the bemused thoughts of the host of a bonus episode of the Mondo Movie podcast covering it. This is infamous for how strange a film it is. Enticed by the apparent madness its now that I reach this Boardinghouse, renting out a room for the night, and my expectations for what was going to happen were too high or not rewarded. In the tags section to the side of this page, you'll find one called "Cinema of the Abstract". It's used to compile together films that affect the viewer in distinct ways, throwing off one's perceptions of cinematic reality.  The other type of films placed under the tag are those so weird they have the same effect to, intentional or not. Boardinghouse was going to get the tag from what I imagined it to be, but seeing it, it won't now. What the film turns out to be is what happens when you pad a film out with many dialogue scenes with no connection to a plot. When the director plays the main male character who gets to be lusted over and have sex with the female characters. What happens when it's not the erratic editing you can say is why the film jumps tone and scenes as it does. That doesn't mean it's boring, but I'll get to the film as a whole for me as I go along...

In a text crawl and spoken narration that opens the film, on an early eighties computer, the viewer's told of a boarding house cursed with numerous unexplained deaths over the decades up to the then-current 1982. The nephew of the last owner to pass away in its corridors, played by the director Wintergate himself, the craggier faced cousin of Andrew Robinson, inherits the building. Immediately he decides to advertise for beautiful women between eighteen to twenty five to stay there for a rent, and rather than anyone being immensely hesitant to, many do indeed come, including a singer played by Kalassu, wife of the director who gets the most dialogue scenes along with him. The later point isn't a complaint, but this is definitely a film where those two get a lot of screen time. Wintergate's character gets to make love to many women, meditate in his underwear and develop his psychic powers, which he can use to make a bar of soap spin in the air above the bathwater he's in, while she develops her own psychic powers and hopes to succeed with her band. The other women get to muck about and longue by the pool in their bikinis all day. Unfortunately the gristly deaths are about to start again, clearly the work of a mysterious being who has escaped a mental hospital and can kill with psychokinetic powers. They're linked to an evil force in the boarding house, represented by a red haze generated by a computer effect from that decade, and odd and hazardous things start to happen. Hallucinations of having a pig mask for a head and pulling out bloody rat-tampon hybrids from the snout while taking a shower. Strange noises and maybe glowing eyes at the end of corridor. Guns randomly going off and objects harming people. Then people start dying, but only the viewer knows they are. Is one of the women to blame? Is it the gardener, also played by Wintergate as a shambling murmuring old man with all the costume department on, who was a Vietnam War vet and is far from normal? Or is it because of pure evil? Of course the lives of the characters are just as unexpected thanks to abrupt tonal shifts, a would-be suitor with dark intentions arriving to meet his estranged fiancée to a random pie fight breaking out.

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It sounds truly bizarre from this synopsis, but while entertaining, the result feels too much like a desperate improvisation than something that sucked me into a strange dimension into itself like Canada's Things (1989) or an avant garde film that does it on purpose. The first horror film to be shot on video, it's of the lowest budget and barely attached to the plotline stated earlier, neither cohesively or consistently forwarding it, drifting in and out of random tangents. Attempts at humour next to serious horror. A random fight between two female characters at the pool.  Kalassu accidentally throwing yoghurt on herself when trying her psychic powers. The editing, for a film that was originally two and half hours long (!?), is haphazard and furthers the erratic tone by cutting away from plot moments and dialogue abruptly after they're stated. The tonal shift can be drastic, probably at its furthest being the flashback of the suitor raping his fiancée intercut with the women lingering around the pool, leaving a bad taste in the mouth despite the film around it. Around the psychic killer story thread you have the supernatural force in the house, Wintergate sleeping around, random conversations, jokes about a drunk man falling over trying to play golf and many other things. It also includes a gimmick where a specific sound and image, of a leather gloved hand on a psychedelic background, pop up occasionally to warn the viewer of the more prosthetics and fake blood heavy incidents that take place. Far from glorious it does feel disconnected. Moments stand out from what been said. Further points are added for the unexpected prescience of a magician during Kalassu's concert at the climax of the film. But I ended up watching a film which is a lot of dialogue, many scenes of strange circumstances, but never has a consistent, marked heightening of the bizarre.

Preference influences this review too, and I found Boardinghouse to be a mere diversion. I don't really gravitate to films that are held up for questionable acting and random shenanigans. I prefer those under the concept of "bad" filmmaking that end up creating a unique tone to them despite their technical problems, a consistency to their madness should I say. I've seen better examples created from the results of cheaper effects, abrupt editing and the unintentionally bonkers. I've found myself adoring these sorts of films within the last few years, technical incompetency be damned. Hell, Boardinghouse could grow on me. But at this moment its too obvious, and not strange enough to fully join any of the categories of these sort of films I like the most. It's not a film like The Nail Gun Massacre (1985), either, where reality inavertedly stumbled into a cheapie slasher film. Maybe the disappointment is distorting this first viewing too much, but I want to see films that break any perception of how a film should be put together. This just vaguely gets to an ending, and is a lot of poorly spoken dialogue and a few funny moments only.

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