Mini-Review: Voodoo Passion aka. Der Ruf der blonden Göttin (1977)

From http://imageshack.us/a/img802/1332/l9x3.jpg

Dir. Jesus Franco

Voodoo Passion is straight-up softcore. There is a story of such, but the main and consistent part of the film is the nudity of its female actresses and sex. It feels like a Franco film, a slow and deliberate pace, dream-like, but its streamlined back to the obsession with the female form more so than Female Vampire (1973). Your ability to like this film depends on your liking of mood in Franco's work. A newly wedded wife of a government official moves to Haiti, only to feel that her sense of reality is dissipating as she believes she's murdered people. As this happens, the sensuality of the local music, and the draw of both her husband's platinum blonde haired, and horny, sister and their maid servant, is becoming too much to handle.

What could come off as a "voodoo is bad" film, under the belief that she's being manipulated and with voodoo dolls laying around the house, actually turns out to be immensely different. Baring in mind it feels less like French softcore than the older film, but more Euro softcore, with said sister whose continually nude and lusting over her brother's wife, it's very much a reimagining of Franco's own Nightmares Come at Night (1970). There's shades of Female Vampire too in at least one moment. Far from feeling like Franco tritely repeating himself, it's actually cool that he was riffing on his own work repeatedly in different tones and styles. It helped that he never made the same type repeatedly each time - which may have made this sort of thing too much when he had the expansive filmography he had - and the interconnectivity of it all, that characters are doomed to be repeating the follies of previous Franco characters, is engaging as an idea in taking his whole filmography as one giant film. It comes off as befitting a musician whose main obsession, jazz, could be as much about repeating sequences from previous work and taking it into new improvisions. The thin plot for Voodoo Passion is enough for Franco to push his female protagonist through a series of scenarios where erotic and bloody incidents take place out of her hands. It also becomes apparent, even if depicting its setting as exotic, that Franco is on the side of the Haitians just because he leaps on the opportunity to use the environment's musical rhythms in his film's score instantly, mixing it with jazz as the film progresses. A lot of the film is people being taken away by the beats of the music, equal opportunity nudity by the bucket load, the entire film more of a musical piece than a narrative. Long stretches, when it's not the softcore sex, is lengthy moments of dance, of characters wandering rooms and outside, the entire eighty minutes or so a vast lengthy atmospheric piece.

Its definitely a weaker Franco piece. It does feel long trying to exist only on its nudity and music, not even a basic plot. Nightmares Come at Night (1970), which it takes its inspiration from, was drawing on an abstract air and slightly more complicated narrative. Admittedly the films which repeat tropes from his previous work, that I've seen so far, have felt weaker, though I don't dismiss those films at all, just that in this case, Voodoo Passion is definitely the weakest of the two. It mainly rests on its erotic material and it has to be viewed through that mainly. Is it sexy? Titillating? I confess to being attracted to every woman onscreen, and to Franco's credit the women (and men) are of many shapes and sizes, and that his actresses, even if lusted over, at least had a distinctness and charisma to them that made them more human than vacant. For a man who could get very scuzzy, the film is actually a lot more held back too despite the wall-to-wall nudity. Its solid visual appearance probably  explains this - this is not The Devil Hunter (1980) which does feel scuzzy - and for simple titillation this film is far and above most softcore of now, which is legitimately worse than something like this in quality in so many ways. Whether you can appreciate this film for that or not is entirely of a subjective opinion in this case rather than with other Jess Franco films.

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Frog Dreaming: Decoder (1984)

From http://theendofbeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/DecoderPosterNU.jpg

Dir. Muscha

Decoder avoids what happens to a lot of films based on the subcultures of their time, becoming badly dated, by taking the aesthetics so far it is completely in its own world. It is of the eighties and yet completely its own reality. The colours push out any sense of the real world. Blood reds. Blues. Greys. Sickening woodland greens. Scored with industrial music, this is a filmic manifesto for alternative culture, made in a collective independently with director Muscha. Amalgamating together beat culture, with a William S. Burroughs cameo, industrial music, punk aesthetic, anarchist politics and full out surrealism involving frogs. It still evokes a world of the Berlin Wall, European architecture and even the gothic together with computer technology and industry. It's what Claude Chabrol's Dr. M (1990) should have been, a multi-cultural melting pot of Europe, politics and dystopia, the past and the future melded together into one film.

From http://assets.motherboard.tv/post_images/assets/000/013/077/Screen_Shot_2012-07-11_at_4_18_51_PM_large.png

The movie is languid in its plotting. At first it's as if we'll follow a detective, Jaeger (artist and actor William "Bill" Rice), of a Big Brother law organisation, a weather beaten face of film noir still using computers and CCTV cameras, that can see everything, to his advantage. He is clearly tired of his existence, a ghost drifting along on the streets in his investigations. At a distance from his work colleagues as he says viewing clips of Metropolis (1927), the most famous German dystopia on film, is of use for his assignment. He wanders into the red light district as if for a case but becomes more curious about one of the women who works at a peep show, Christiane, played by Christiane Felscherinow. In a world where surgical footage of female circumcision and autopsy material is shown for a turn-on for patrons, evoking J.D. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), his interest in her is far more than mere sexuality but a strive for something out of place in the wreck of a society. But he is not the main character. Part of the way through we are introduced to him, a sound musician, and boyfriend to Christiane, called F.M. played by FM Einheit of the group Einstürzende Neubauten. He becomes intrigued with a fast-food burger food chain, believing that they use a special type of music to brainwash their patrons, working day and night on what he believes will be a noise that causes physical nauseousness. Spreading it to attack the food chain and every fast food restaurant possible, he hopes to cause a political upheaval, as Jaeger is assigned to track him down and finds that even he is more sympathetic to F.M. then his own employers.

Decoder is about mood. Intense, atmospheric music including compositions made by industrial artists who starred in the film. A world of human decay where arcade games blur with the sound of transport into a mass of violent noise. American war films play on the TVs, and even the people on F.M.'s side exist in a fiery underworld abyss led by Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Girstle as an anarchist keeper of knowledge. The only serenity for any character is for Christiane , literally in a world of frog dreaming, as the review's title suggests, at a point surrounded by the amphibians and books on frog anatomy, dreaming of a red desert wasteland monologue by a mix of the witches' chants from Macbeth and Burrough's work. It is ill advised to view the film as a vast narrative as that is clearly not what it wanted to do. It follows aspects of classic crime stories. The detective becoming enamoured with the subjects he is following and questioning his purpose. The attempt by an everyman to demolish a group that, in one scene in their absurd training of new employees just to work at a burger place, have no qualms in restricting "ugly" workers to the kitchens only and act with a belief that they are a titan of culinary skills, even if it means using noise weaponry when any of the customers get aggressive in their premises. (Although when one potential employee admits he'll be finally able to buy a specific brand of shoes with his wages, far from dismissing it as consumer gullibility, the film briefly steps back and admits that the people behind the counter are ordinary young adults like F.M., just happening to work for businessmen who view them as merely human resources). But the film drifts along as the world is turned upside down, real riot footage used to depict the city going up in flames. It's a grubby, beaten down reality distorted by the bright, bleeding colour saturation or dark shadows. It does feel like a feature length music video, but this is in Decoder's favour, as its visually depicted plot is driven by its musical content. The sounds of crashing metal. Synth. Only Soft Cell's Sleazy City, repeated every time the red light district is shown onscreen, doesn't quite work, but it's more of a personal taste issue for me, out of place against the more ominous, mostly instrumental compositions that even border on jazzy. What really sticks out with the film, as stated, is that it managed to be more faithful to older, even centuries older, influences like the gothic and noir while explicitly being new in its anti-authoritarian, industrial music driven world. It's not accidental that there's feelings of German Expressionism in the film because it itself has clips of Metropolis shown, fittingly squashed on a tiny CCTV screen next to surveillance footage, the metropolis here having pushed itself further into monitoring dissidents. Clearly Muscha and every contributor to this film wasn't aghast to the notion of referencing the past, still subversive and outside conventions, and in tipping their hats to the likes of Burroughs, seen in an electronics shop amongst cables and wires, the upmost respect and realisation that Decoder is as much a continuation of forefathers as well as its own work is alive in what's seen in the film, and is a great deal of the reason it works completely. While its future is of the eighties now, in the past, the mood and atmosphere, the ideas and how everything is depict, become a future in another reality, still potent even if the context of it feels more alien. Its newly gained alien nature replaces what is missing with the sense of intensity and rhythm of music that makes Decoder probably a greater film now it's been severed from its original time and place, allowed to be independent of its original purpose and able to become a subversive, abstract beat film completely in its own self-made context decades later.

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Videotape Swapshop Reviews: The Wicker Man (1973)

From http://voiceofcinema.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/wicker_man_poster_01.jpg

Dir. Robin Hardy

UK

This will be the last of the Videotape Swapshop review links in a while until next month. By then the three months of summer will include links to numerous reviews I am doing for that site. The film here today, back to now, is the original version and one of the best British films ever made. The Nicolas Cage version requires an entirely different set of criteria to write about it, so I will stay with this one at this time.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/14591/the-wicker-man-%E2%80%93-1973-director-robin-hardy/

From http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0s46vvN1q1qaun7do1_1280.jpg

Mutant Disco [They Eat Scum (1979)]

From http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m65j76Bvlx1qzq9v4o1_500.jpg

Dir. Nick Zedd

USA

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/they-eat-scum/w448/they-eat-scum.jpg?1289659829

To someone who does not love or admire They Eat Scum, a barrage of criticisms could be rained down. It looks cheap they would say, amateurish, badly acted, not good in terms of structure, and just tastelessly disgusting. It was clearly made out of Nick Zedd’s own resources yes, and it does quality as amateur cinema, but “amateur” is not an inherently negative word, and viewing this film, I myself have to reassess how I use that word from now on. An amateur creation can be far more interesting than the “professionally” made work. That’s why the term underground art was created for and creations within said term have knocked to the kerb overground creations in terms of quality. It was the creation of a New York based movement known as the Cinema of Transgression, made with what was available at hand and, with Zedd as one of the main individuals of it and a manifesto writer, making intentionally provocative and tasteless films designed to startle and amuse. Truly cheap, awful work is lifeless, lazy rehashing of generic tropes ad nauseum or pretend to be intentionally bad with no charm. They Eat Scum is the opposite to all this, keeping with its punk rock content in terms of mindset rather than being a dull gooffest. When a character, so enamoured with man’s best friend, sucks off their male poodle, people will raise their eyebrows to this differentiation but tastelessness needs creativity and a sense of craftsmanship, at any level, to work. Nothing in this film is half-hearted and contrived, but feels like a gleeful poke in the eyes that works whether you reveal in it or feel like you’ve got poodle spunk in your mouth.

From http://images.undergroundfilmjournal.com/wp-images/timeline/they_eat_scum_zedd.jpg

Episodic, it is centred on the actress Donna Death and starts off with a family – Death as the daughter, who is the lead singer of a famous death rock band who encourages a death cult of cannibals out of her fans, a son with a “very” close relationship to his pet poodle, and a very religious father. From there you go through shady managers, canine prostitution, ritualistic genital mutilation, twin sisters, chaos and digs at disco that, far from being cruel jokes in this newer era, are actually funny and leads to one of the best moments which the quote of the review’s title is from. It’s also, as mentioned, a celebration of punk music, including filmed performances of punk bands in their messy audio glory. I wonder if Zedd saw Jubilee (1978) and was directly inspired by it, Derek Jarman’s anarchic series of vignettes about the growing punk culture at the time and made in a way just as antagonistic and intentionally ramshackle as They Eat Scum is meant to be. It’s the unpredictability that makes They Eat Scum rewarding. Only seventy or so minutes long, it never drags into the mire of tedious plotting. It has no hesitance in its content and has no issue using music, such as the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, that may have not been paid for. It even introduces, unexpectedly, a scene of stop motion animation that was my personal highlight of the film just for the sake of it.

From http://img.rp.vhd.me/4627840_l2.jpg

And it is fun. Shot on Super 8, it is the product of a decade before where a micro budget film automatically brings up the image of something interesting or at least worth seeing (usually) than a cheap zombie/slasher film or CGI sharks. It was intended to shock the viewer or gives some un-PC entertainment to those who got the joke, and its do-it-yourself, take-no-prisoners aesthetic is ultimately rewarding. 

From http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/iA2DlxbREys/mqdefault.jpg

Cowboy Rock [Zachariah (1971)]

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Dir. George Englund

USA

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/zachariah/w448/zachariah.jpg?1310420090

It was this exact DVD, which is the first image for this review, that enticed me to Zachariah in a second hand DVD store, an odd looking spine in the Z section that lead to a fascinating cover, a brilliant one, and the promise of ‘the first and only Electric Western’ in the back cover blurb. The subversion of the Western, the archetype genre of American cinema, is an obvious concept to do. In American B-cinema itself it was subverted with films such as Johnny Guitar (1954). Many other countries, especially Italy, made their own, and numerous revivals and twists to the genre had been done up to the current decade. It seems obvious that, on the cusp of the Seventies when alternative culture was ripe for film, that something like Zachariah was made, combining rock music with the genre.

From http://img.rp.vhd.me/4536650_l4.jpg

When he acquires a gun, young Zachariah (John Rubinstein) in tow with his friend Matthew (Don Johnson) becomes a gunfighter, first encountering the incompetent but musically talented bandits The Crackers (the band Country Joe & The Fish) before continuing on in a journey of self discovery including notorious gunfighter Joe Cain (Elvin Jones) and dancer Belle Starr (Patricia Quinn). As they continue though, Zachariah and Matthew start to drift apart. With an opening image of a horseback rider travelling through a barren landscape, accompanied by an electric guitar riff, the film starts off swimmingly. A blasphemous juxtaposition to the traditional, John Ford-lead western yes, but with an awkward combination of full drum kits and guitars in a traditional frontier western setting, this is far from a conventional piece within the genre, trying to meld both sides together. It has the look of a traditional Western, closer to the classic American ones of the 1950s than something from the same decade it was made in like El Topo (1970), but with rock music and groupies of the period as well as the attitudes of this era. When Zachariah goes to a border town to Mexico, the film is almost about to hit its stride, its colourful, flat dimensional architecture for the outdoor and interior scenes gingerly toddling towards a Ken Russell film but with less confidence and a lower budget.

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/79Cdwsdwp8I/0.jpg

The film has the materials to be great, Rubinstein and Johnson generally likeable in their roles, while the late drummer for jazz musician John Coltrane Elvin Jones makes a formidable gunfighter who gets a chance to show his impressive skill with a drum kit as well in one scene. There is a great choice of music and musical acts scoring the film that push the film over to a musical as well as a western even if no one suddenly bursts into song mid-dialogue. Only an attempt to combine Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with rock guitars fails, potentially kitsch in its most awful form, but something that could have been impressive if it wasn’t half heartedly attempted when scored over an attempted wagon robbery. The film sadly though feels incredibly convoluted, undermining its potential to be good. It is clear it is supposed to promote the bands and musicians involved – also including The James Gang and The New York Rock Experience – but the film comes to a screeching halt at many points when the musical numbers are played. The story itself goes in unnecessary and completely pointless directions, such as Patricia Quinn’s entire contribution to the film, and the true plotline of the film, of Zachariah and Matthew’s relationship being tested by the chance that one of them will shoot the other dead, is killed by a New Age message introduced in the last act that, while attempted in a subtle way, feels undercooked. Even the potential gay subtext to Zachariah and Matthew’s relationship, which would have been a great flourish for the film, is inadequately dealt with because of the pointless tangents. Sadly it is also another potentially great genre film failed by its director not allowing the locations around the characters to breath and flex on camera; baring some good moments, including those moments when it is about to become a Ken Russell made western, the closed-in use of the camera, fixed on the actors baring an occasionally establishing shot, kills the sense of grandeur an ‘Electric Western’ could have used to its advantage. This is worse when you consider how landscape and its character is one of the most significant aspects of the western genre.

From 1.bp.blogspot.com/_E2uWeSxRO60/TRtJw4ZEwyI/AAAAAAAALms/g2GvQeta8h4/s1600/zach9.jpg

There is a sense that, sadly, the cover and tagline promised a film that Zachariah is not, although this is probably what producer-director George Englund thought the words ‘Electric Western’ conjured. With a tagline like ‘A head of his time’ however, you are expecting a psychedelic western in what those two words mean. Zachariah could have been good on its own terms regardless of this, but excluding the music, it feels far too mellow for a film which combines two things, rock music and the western, that could be perfect fellows for their hardened, world weary tones and complete lack of compromise.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWfIcHCwYsSSXSBRujjHlr3hmPQ75lgGSY1mX1RxetxIk691tKc7MwMrtHk-zM0Wu8x9NXe-6Alri7BCv1X-84ksQXuXWPgFj_idmDs5aoOif5yelWGbPW2Tzsorg02pakJhYhXmJrt4w/s1600/ZACHARIAH+017.jpg

“See how they fly like Lucy in the Sky, see how they run.” [Magical Mystery Tour (1967)]

From http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width/hash/cc/0e/cc0e0802f6c02210c34bf18c3afccb97.jpg

Dirs. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Bernard Knowles                             

United Kingdom

From http://pavementart.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/magical-mystery-tour.jpg

My knowledge of The Beatles is slight, yet to hear all of their key albums and songs, but even to a layman the drastic change Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was for a band who came to stardom for songs like I Want To Hold Your Hand is obvious. Reviled by many when it was shown on Boxing Day 1967, Magical Mystery Tour would have made it even more obvious what The Beatles’ shift in musical experimentation and psychedelia would lead to. Taking the form of an hour long combination of fictional travelogue, fairy tale narration by Paul McCartney, bizarre sketches, surreal combinations and proto-music videos, the film is a catalogue of vignettes following a tour through alternative England and seaside done in good honest English fun.

As a short television work it is desperately erratic, a jumble of ideas that vaguely resembles a Monty Python sketch or two at times but with a whimsical and naive tone that only has a few bites to it – the vehicle race where its shown vicars are cheats and poor sportsmen, to a striptease performed alongside The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. It is the kind of quaint weirdness the English are well known for if a lot more ramshackle in tone, everything from scenes of The Beatles as wizards with high voices to a predecessor of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) and Mr. Creosote with a restaurant sequence of spaghetti being shovelled onto a dining table (made even odder by half the reoccurring cast being in their underwear only) feeling as it is was heavily improvised and a lark for those involved. That it is as much a celebration of traditional British culture too, from the footage inside the tour bus  to the end sequence set to Your Mother Should Know, matched to this nose tweaking manages to show a contradicting but peculiar aspect common in Britain, turning our culture upside down yet still being reverential to it.

From http://everyrecordtellsastory.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/beatles-in-tuxedos-magical-mystery-tour-inside-ep-7822.jpg?w=500&h=500

It is as much about the music too. It has great soundtrack with iconic songs, and while Magical Mystery Tour is a flawed piece in the career of the band, it does feed into the development of the music video as well. Blue Jay Way is the closest to this, almost coming off as an attempted replication of a Kenneth Anger short in its superimposition and abstract images; it’s not as rigorous as an Anger short, and is far more closer to music videos that bombard the viewer with random but striking images, but it adds a background that must have influenced music videos later on. The music sequence that works the best though, shown on the EP album and all the promotional material for the film, is the only existing performance of I Am The Walrus that, while not as technically complicated, manages to suit the song perfectly. Intentionally written as gibberish by John Lennon, the song’s interpretation is fittingly barking in its strangeness, if not for Lennon and the band in animal costumes, or for the egghead capped men walking onscreen in a white yoke costume together, but for four policemen high above in the corner of the screen, shuffling side-to-side in unison on the same spot, the most subversive image of the whole project and far more effective than anything else in Magical Mystery Tour.

It is a film for fans of The Beatles and the curious only. Even in its short length it will not have the attraction some viewers need to engage with it unless they enjoy the music and silliness of it all. It doesn’t completely work, and the hostile reactions to it from that first screening are completely understandable, but to think a major musical band like The Beatles made this is fascinating. It is certainly as much of a lark for the viewer as it was for those who created it if you are willing to forgive its inherent flaws.

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