In The Future There'll Be Plastic Domes On All The Cars: The New Barbarians (1982)

I had to use this instead of a film poster...
From http://www.post-apocalypse.co.uk/aus/NewBarbarians.jpg

Dir. Enzo G. Castellari

With The New Barbarians I realise why Italian genre cinema would sadly fritter away by the late eighties, because as the Hollywood blockbusters travelled around the world, you can see the difference between Star Wars and a film shot entirely in a rock quarry with buggies. Obviously, why would anyone only just like Star Wars when you can enjoy both equally I don't know, but unfortunately back when films like The New Barbarians were being made, the Italian public probably wanted to watch the American imports rather than the cheap rip-offs made by theirs. Yes, these films were being shown in theatres in the English speaking world, which would have been awesome to live through, but this wouldn't last. Unable to keep up with Hollywood, and their virtues ignored by the end, regardless if they were rip-offs in the first place, these entertaining and interesting films would dwindle out by the late eighties, which having seen a few from this period showed how bad it got. The less said about Cruel Jaws (1995) the better.  

But looking back, even if The New Barbarians wouldn't qualify as a great film in Enzo G. Castellari's filmography, its definitely not impoverished as its limited production design suggests. Set in 2019, after a nuclear apocalypse has passed, it means we've missed the worse, thus setting this in a fictitious reality, or that I really need to get a driver's license, learn how to use a laser gun, and arm a car with spikes and rockets for the impending doom befalling us soon. Within this scorched earth, an evil group known as the Templers exist led by One, played by Italian genre mainstay George Eastman; exceptionally tall physically, a giant decked in smart, menacing white uniform, bearded and with an evil smile on his face, the psychopathic leader of a group who desire, after the apocalypse, to eliminate all of mankind in a suicidal drive. The sight of an all-male group with perms, Mohawks and luscious locks, driving armed buggies, and dressed between white clad soldiers and Evel Knievel, would be frightening even before your head came off from the spinning blade extended out from one of their killing vehicles. They're definitely evil because One hates books, particularly ripping the New Jerusalem Bible in half. In their way is Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete), a Mad Max stand-in who seemed to borrow Robert Powell 's hair. Since Mad Max had a souped-up car, Scorpion has a similar looking one too but with a giant chrome skull on the bonnet. It does lose aesthetic points however for whoever in production design thought a giant bubble roof on the top which flows lime green in the dark was a good idea. Fred Williamson is Nadir , the former American football player and star/director of many exploitation films looking a considerable bad ass even if dressed up in sci-fi garb, the circlet not stopping the fact that his body armour was probably designed to be able to fit his machismo. It's strange though to see him soft spoken and without his trademark cigar. With him also to help Scorpion is child actor Giovanni Frezza as a child genius of car mechanics who is deadly with a slingshot; most will recognise him, blond haired and looking like a mischievous cherub, from Lucio Fulci's The House By The Cemetary (1981) as Bob, infamously given a less than desired English dubbing.

From http://monsterhuntermoviereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/NewBarbarians2.jpg

I've fallen in love with the Italian genre movies of the seventies and early to mid-eighties. Before the seventies is a large wealth of potential gems, while for the criticisms I've made, my love for this area of cinema means I'll still be hopeful for late eighties and nineties work even despite the lessening quality from a lot I've seen. There is truly great craftsmanship and art in the best. But those which are more pulpy or less than perfect are irresistible to me still. Talented individuals of Italian art cinema worked on these films too, and their creation developed a unique tone and presentation to them that even makes a ridiculous film like this stand out. Strong colours. Post dubbed soundtracks. American stars. Lurid content. Memorable scores, with Claudio Simonetti of Goblin going mad with a synthesizer here. The New Barbarians is low budget schlock but I delight in the idea of these actors playing dress up in quarries. There would be a child-like innocence to this were it not for the gore and adult content. That with its few resources its had to try and weave a limited story from what's there, as Scorpion is pursued by the Templers, is more interesting and entertaining, with its grasps of high budget cinema, barely reaching the budget ceiling, and accidental absurdisms that add great layers to it. It helps to that the film cinematographically is still exceptional despite the nuclear apocalypse being camper vans and buggies decked out like Robot Wars/Battlebots contestants. The quarries, when space is shown, are brightly textured and expansive, and there is never a flabby camera shot or edit despite the narrative side being flimsy. Castellari stands out in Italian genre cinema, impressive considering the great directors within it from the era. He shows great love for all the films of his I've seen, regardless of them being b-movies, caring for the immensely invigorating action scenes but also capable of making films that go beyond this. Thus Street Law (1974) is a vigilante film that becomes a lyrical ode to the complications of taking justice into your own hands, while Keoma (1976) is a sombre, oneiric send off for the spaghetti western. The New Barbarians is slight as a story - cars driving around in circles at each other, conventional on-foot action - but its saved as much by the gifts of his and the crew he worked with as it is the infectious behind it. The quarries are allowed to feel expansive at times despite the limited locations and the touch of the film in editing and look are far removed from lacksidasical but solid. And that its ended up as it is anyway is much of a joy. From the Templers' costumes to a sex scene in a tent made of bubble plastic, the absurd decoration of lower budget films stand out positively for me because, contrary to what would be perceived as taking away the magic of cinema, knowing it can be made from stuff from your home but has become an object of a fantasy world is even more magical, as befitting a medium that started with trick films. For example, realising a communication van is covered in tinfoil isn't a failing, but instead that it is both this and a new thing in a future world, a strangeness that's rich. It's only when mere laziness exists where problems arise. The plot eventually becomes mere construct for this notion to play out, which doesn't dampen the textual pleasure from it. To grin. Admire the action, which is still there in spades. To look on in surprise, at the least expected way a villain 'tortures' a hero, both male, in a regular genre narrative, one that, were not for a single line of dialogue to have added an un-PC side to it, would have uprooted archetypes of masculinity and turned it upside down completely.

If you like your silly, post apocalypse cinema with a plot hanging on a thread bare, this one is worth seeing. Scorpion is a stock characters, but Williamson is simply cool and Eastman looks like he's lording it up as the bad guy, the only regret in the characters being that the women are just there to look pretty, when really this cinema should always make an excuse for a tough female as equal to the hero even if she's stereotypical. You'll find amusement in the laser sounds and the amount of exploding dummies is something, especially as Castellari likes using slow motion quite a bit. Seeing stunt men do their best front flips from explosions and cars flipping over is inherently fun when its shot as considered as here. I cannot dismiss its cheap look in terms of what is onscreen because how it's shot is still good, if you notice, and I cannot help but simple enjoy cars driving around each other in mock combat with bubble roofs on them. In seriousness again, even schlock can have the gift of enthusiastic craft to them, instantly as much cinema as a great film because, cobbled together, the obvious faults nonetheless add to the fantasy played onscreen.  If you admit the farce of this being a nuclear wasteland set in a rock quarry with a few cars lying baout, like the creators probably did before going on professionally regardless and doing your best, you don't worry about this and find virtue in this less-is-more style. The regret that films like this became of disinterest back when they were being made is that, yes, you should be able to enjoy your Star Wars films and these equally, one from the best money can buy in Hollywood, but the other being an enjoyment from what they were able to do with limited resources.

From http://monsterhuntermoviereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/NewBarbarians1.jpg

An Introduction For Angel's Egg (1985)

From http://guriguriblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/untitled-1.jpg

Dir. Mamoru Oshii

[Note = This was originally an introduction for a project I'm part of on the forums for MUBI, which is why its tone may be a bit different. I hope you all can get something of interest from it though.]

Angel's Egg is now an even rare type of creation in the Japanese animation industry. Experimental anime still exists, even in pulpier areas, but with the economic issues taking place globally many industries are playing it safe and drawing back away from areas of bolder creation. Hollywood even went away from the mid-budget hard boiled action and crime films that were part of its bread-and-butter at one point, so how could another Angel's Egg be made in anime now unless it was a suicidal risk? In the eighties, with an economic boom, so many anime works were commissioned even though they were just made to let someone experiment or to try any idea out. Mostly these works were made for the new, and at times higher budgeted, straight-to-video market, with creations like California Crisis: Gun Salvo (1986) and Cosmos Pink Shock (1986) examples of the most obscure of the obscure I've at least seen myself, usually up to a mere forty minutes or so long, one off pieces with no original source material or follow-on, and only available now thanks to Western anime fans who have acquired Japanese VHS tapes and put up digital copies online. Angel's Egg is more significant in this area because it's a completely abstract film that was made to be shown in Japanese cinemas. It didn't do well, understandably despite wishing for a perfect world of the opposite, but it has built up a reputation. A lot of it is to do with two key men who created it. Director Mamoru Oshii, who would go on to make entries for the Patlabor franchise, the two Ghost in The Shell films, Avalon (2001) and The Sky Crawlers (2008), a chequered career in cerebral, acclaimed animation and live action experiments. The other is artist Yashitaka Amano, known most for his illustrations for the Vampire Hunter D  novels and his work for the Final Fantasy videogame series. But the film has gained a lot of status by itself for a lot of good reasons.

From http://johnnywestmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/angels-egg.png

It's an incredibly surreal film. Even on this viewing, things in it do not make rational sense for me, more dreamlike and felt than connected together into a full conventional tale. But there is a clear through line within it. The world depicted is a dying one, desolate, destroyed, with remnants of a war still going on. A young girl wanders through an empty town keeping herself alive and carrying a giant egg, the egg incredibly precious to her that she guards it all the time. (The odd, accidental or purposeful, pregnancy motif when she carries it under her dress is either saying a lot about my own though process, or something to dig into another time with another person). A soldier encounters her, adamant to find out what's in the egg, following her with the possible intent of breaking it just to answer his questions. It's here that a very important piece of information about Oshii has to be taken into account. Oshii has been documented as being a Christian at some point, whether he is still or not unknown, to the point of considering entering a seminary. The drastic change, in the path of his life, that would lead him to instead become a celebrated auteur of anime cannot be ignored when viewing a film like this with its choice of Christian symbolism. Anime is notorious for its vague uses of this type of Christian-Judean religious symbolism, especially since the TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) became a leviathan of a work that brought more people to anime but made a hodgepodge said symbolism haphazardly with its real intellectual meat.  But Oshii's use of any symbolism, quotation or reference, even if you have difficulty with it, has always been done with some clear purpose, even in a film like this that is also clearly abstract.

From http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v178/brngrofdeth/tnt1.png

The soldier, with bandages on his hands and carrying a staff/weapon shaped like a cross, doubts his existence and the meaning of it. His interpretation of the story of Noah and the Ark, in a key monologue in a film mostly without dialogue, is a very disillusioned one. He even questions whether he actually exists. The girl believes devoutly in her egg being something of importance, maybe even an egg of an actual angel, but he wants to break it open to see if this is true or prove his disillusionment forcibly on another person. There is also a group of fishermen in the town, but their prey are giant shadows of fish, which their spears merely pass through and damage their surroundings. It is missing the point to say the film is about blind faith in a "fictitious" God. Atheism is a religious belief in itself, just one where there is no God and the Holy Book is of natural science with no suggestion of it coexisting with a spiritual entity, and disillusionment with one's beliefs can be encountered in any person like it did for Mamoru Oshii. The soldier is trying to find himself, while at the same time he is just as questionable in letting his nihilism cloud his judgement and bully a young girl. In a destroyed world, one would ask if God actually exists. Even in our own world, November 2013 as I write this, the situation of the world with its centuries of war, religious conflict and disillusionment, and the wider realisation of the atrocities committed globally has made the issue of the existence of a God (or Gods), and the question of the existence of evil, more pertinent. Even whether one truly exists could be up to debate, as the soldier suggests to the girl they are being dreamt by another, such an ironic idea when said by a character hand drawn and made to breath and be alive through another person's hands. Even those who stayed faithful to the belief in a Christian God can suffer as well; a term, "the dark night of the soul", was coined in the sixteenth century to describe a rare sensation where certain Christians felt they were completely alone, that God was completely absent in existence and their beliefs may have been wrong. In the New Testament itself, Jesus Christ, said to be part of God Himself as well as His Son, screamed while on the Cross why he has been forsaken for a brief moment. The crisis Angel's Egg depicts is that of the loss of a surface to even place one's foundations, one's feet, on. Oshii in his career would explore these themes in different areas, asking what makes us human, with the "soul" against technology in the Ghost In The Shell films, and in the plot events of The Sky Crawlers.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hLY9DmXXlH4/S76jjGnwoHI/AAAAAAAABu8/
DQYIuf9ZNao/s1600/vlcsnap-2010-04-09-04h13m34s50.png

The film looks beautiful. Painstakingly animated in ways rarely done now if ever. It looks legitimately ethereal in tone and look through Amano's character designs. It sounds beautiful and mysterious in its score by Yoshihiro Kanno. Its paced slowly, so slowly time seems to abruptly holt at one point with a character just sitting there in the dark. Unfortunately this kind of anime is not being made available. This film is not available commercially in the West, and other inventive works like Belladonna of Sadness (1973) aren't either. As much as anime at its best, in its pulpiest genre based material, can be so brave and creative in its aesthetics and ideas, films like Angel's Egg have been left stranded. The key target audiences of anime are young teenagers who haven't been given an opportunity to grasp slow paced, cerebral work that is not punctuated by Facebook links. Or adult geeks of both genders that, stereotypically but honestly at times, are more interested in alarming sexual fetishes involving fictional school girls or boys, or want to stay in their adolescences permanently, considering what is mostly being made now in anime, not something like this film about the existence of God. An audience needs to be built for Angel's Egg so it can be finally released. It's the strongest piece so far for me in Mamoru Oshii's filmography, and one of the most potent works made in this medium.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSPbsRBytjbbKL2BNIdzsXQX5t3PhgU1FtrNQ6Fj_xWLibRPUW_aNsa2NvAu7qiBPEI6oUjfx2jlfA7tUoHfmNn3L2rlU9CykR1RnuKUwWYvQjNFOLTi0Y3Lo__kHmz5wgqcJQvo8ggPn3/s1600/angel1.jpg

The Hole (1998)

Also Known As -  Dong

Director – Tsai Ming-liang

Taiwan/France

Set in an alternative reality just before the year 2000, the film exists entirely in a Taiwanese apartment complex that has been almost abandoned. An epidemic known as ‘Taiwan Fever’ has struck the outside world, starting off as flu-like symptoms before the infected individuals start acting like cockroaches, afraid of light, crawling across floors and searching for dark and wet places to hide. In the middle of this, in a cast that could be counted on a single hand and a few extra fingers, is a woman (Lin Kun-huei) and the man living above her (Lee Kang-sheng) forced into close proximity when a hole between their apartments if left allowing them to see each other (or as in one unfortunate case, for someone to vomit down the hole onto the other’s property). Their relationship is very hostile at first, but as the film goes on, a connection is slowly made.

To merely say The Hole is merely an art house drama is a disservice to its creativity and uniqueness. Commissioned as part of a series of films interpreting what the then-oncoming Millennium would be like, this could be seen as the least conventional post apocalyptic virus film in existence and the best I’ve seen so far. Refusing to leave their homes to go to government medical tents, the characters live in a strange blurring of ordinary life and dilapidation with no rage-infected monkeys in sight. There was the constant feeling in the back of the my mind that food shortages in the apartments would eventually happen, but instead of starvation, the symbol of this apocalypse is people eating instant noodles all the time. The issue of there being enough clean water to survive on is explicit, yet water is one of the film’s most prominent motifs – it is continually raining, water is prominent in nearly all the scenes, including other types of fluids, and plumbing is responsible for the hole of the title in the first place. The walls are rotting and people’s wallpaper is flaying at the sides, but with the furniture and possessions of before still in their original places, this is less a wasteland than an ordinary environment transformed into an alien landscape.

Landscape is important for this film because its cinematography by the director’s regular cinematographer Liao Pen-jung is a masterclass. Baring in mind that flat environments can be just as striking if used right, this film triumphantly pushes cinema’s ability of showing even the most enclosed place as three dimensional. The human eye sees an environment, be it the person’s living room or a vast plain, in great depth depending on what angle it is seen in. The cinematography here was clearly done to enforce the contradiction of the claustrophobia and the expanse of the apartment complex. It is a place that can be related to by anyone who has been in a city, even down to there being too many fire extinguishers then needed everywhere, but at times it becomes science fiction. To avoid a pointless tangent, it reminds me of one of the reasons why the current 3D trend in films is somewhat pointless for me, because a standard two dimensional film, if the production crew take it into consideration, can show just as much depth in a flat image. I am reminded of one of the art classes which everyone including myself had to take during secondary school where we spent a couple of lessons drawing three dimensional shapes on paper over and over again; one is able to create depth depending on where one places the image in front of the eye, something this film can attest to and results in images which are both incredible, and exceptionally dank and rundown.

The film isn’t just about environments though, as there is a clear emotional core to this film. There is very little dialogue through The Hole, but you can still feel that the two main characters, played perfectly by both actors, are interacting with each other and their surroundings, seen through the emotions on their faces and in their actions, like actual human beings. The silence also allows the world and the idiosyncratic behaviour of everyone within it to be fleshed out, from the constant noise of rain outside to the horded collection of toilet paper the main female character has, and feel real. Themes of isolation, the lack of communication and of connection can be found in The Hole, and is built upon as the film gets to its (bitter) sweet conclusion...and that’s not including the musical numbers. I have only seen two of Tsai Ming-liang’s films, this and The Wayward Cloud (2006) (the later I need to re-evaluate now), and both of them have musical numbers, a clear trademark the director may use in some of his work. In The Hole, the director will cut to another part of the apartment complex where Lin Kun-huei is suddenly wearing elaborate dresses and lip syncing to songs by the Chinese singer Grace Chang. These scenes have nothing to do with the film’s reality, nor are they dream sequences, but they have importance to everything in it. In a very clever move by the director, the songs and their lyrics reflect the emotions the character feels at that particular moment, which not only works in drawing the viewer more into the film, but takes advantage of how the cultural items we have make up as much of what makes us human beings as our thoughts and feelings do in a meaningful way (and Ming-liang clearly adores Grace Chang’s music, judging from the statement of his at the end of the film which brought a smile on my face). The musical numbers by themselves encapsulate why I think this film is a masterpiece; they are imaginative twists of film conventions, but they also have a deep and meaningful core to them, a description which can be applied to The Hole in general.

I have only seen the film once, but I already hold this up as a truly great film. It is, if I’m going to be very cheeky, one of the best science fiction/fantasy films in existence, far better than the likes of Blade Runner (1982) in that it has enough power in its contents as well as the images, as well as being a romance, a drama, a comedy and many other things that is sublimely put together, a film which clearly comes from the time when Y2K fears of the Millennium were growing, but is still relevant in its themes now. Sadly it might be difficult to get hold of now, which is an absolute shame. If you do find it, I absolutely recommend it as a rewarding experience.