The ‘Older, Eccentric Statesman’ of Cinema (Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959))

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lKibK3oDtTk/S6uob2PsxII/AAAAAAAAABg/
doUnSx2Dqw4/s1600/plan_9_from_outer_space_poster_01.jpg

Dir. Edward D. Wood Jr.

USA

Film #11 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

The following is the start of the missing reviews for this season being made available on the Videotape Swapshop site. This film’s reputation is very well known, but what did I think of it?

Link to the review - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/12357/plan-9-from-outer-space-1956-director-edward-d-wood-jr/

The ‘Z-Movie Which May Be Smarter Than It Is Said To Be...’ [Robot Monster (1953)]

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_aoZjamlF5VE/S_iwdNVQYYI/AAAAAAAAAYw/
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Dir. Phil Tucker

USA

Film #28 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_s_30zQFJp4g/SCdGyxnticI
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"The trouble with modern day films is that the actors and actresses seem to be showing off rather than acting...don't you think."

- YouTube Comment -

From http://i.imgur.com/jjRn1.jpg

I will argue that American genre cinema is not as unbridled and uninhibited as one wishes it could be. Japan sits on top of both categories as the unchallenged king, able to have deep questions on the human condition alongside two androids melding together into a phallic-headed man. After that every country has vast quantities of these ideals, especially in Europe and Eastern Europe. American cinema has its fair share of imaginary phantasmagoria, but there is also many ‘should-have-beens’, films which could have been more artistically creative, more pulpy, more crazier, despite the great ideas they had to start with. Fifties science fiction is becoming for me a vast area of all these virtues in American cinema even if the films are bad. The obsession with nuclear annihilation and the Cold War, mixed with an innocent sincerity, despite the darker aspects of the era, and the development of technology like 3D, creates a distinct tone to these films where everyone I’ve seen is difficult to forget, even if I am bored by them, because of their moods created from all this. Robot Monster, dubbed one of the worst films of the genre, is a lot more potent in its tone and creation than a great deal of bad films, as has been brought up with other films reviewed in this season, made decades later.

From http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9vatnb3Ti1ra8pzzo1_500.png

When the entire human race, in a quite gruesomely nihilistic fashion, is destroyed, except for eight people, by cosmic death rays by the alien species the Ro-mans, the survivors have to content with the Ro-man charged by his grand leader to eliminate the last survivors. It is impossible to take Robot Monster seriously, but considering how legendary this film is for its titular monster, a man in a gorilla suit with a diver’s helmet for a head, this should vetoed from being a justifiable criticism. A real criticism is that, while this could have worked fully with such a low budget and small cast, a great deal of its sixty or so minutes is of the Ro-man wandering around the countryside and cave hideout. There is a fine line between moments of introspection and just having actors waddling about the shooting location, and just like being too reliant on exposition dialogue, it has undermined a terrible amount of B- and C-level films and quite a few blockbusters too. The sense of the gap in ‘bad’ cinema, the pregnant pauses and long, awkward passages of dialogue and action that catches itself out in comparison to ‘good’ dialogue and acting, which blends into the cinematic world seamlessly, is an obsession for connoisseurs of these sorts of films. There is a concern however that the border between the profoundly languid and comedic, and the utterly tedious, is up for debate. In the case of Robot Monster, for its benefit, it blurs, but other times you wonder why anyone would find any worth in a long drawn out of scene. Perversely this is the same concern that exists in areas of art cinema, the difference between Michelangelo Antonioni and Bela Tarr, in their use of slow, methodical camera takes, to a hack who leaves the camera on not knowing what to do. The difference is the latter isn’t discussing the awkward transitions in Plan 9 From Outer Space (1956) where actors move across screen to the next plot point or their next line.

From http://i851.photobucket.com/albums/ab75/paul_ayche/robotMonster33-03.jpg

Robot Monster is also peculiar – not weird, but peculiar in how goes with the concept of the end of humanity by an extraterrestrial force through a young boy’s mindset. This may spoil this film, or the one I am about to evoke if you’ve seen Robot Monster, but this film has the same narrative structure of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), the only film Dr. Seuss worked on, and one has to wonder, even if the film has glaring flaws, whether the writer of this film’s plot was purposely playing off the story as the sort of thing a younger boy would conjure up. With an opening title with sci-fi comic books and paperbacks in the background on top of each other, and the boy character wandering around in the first scenes with a toy space helmet on, with a toy ray gun pretending to disintegrate his little sister, is this film purposely playing itself off as, without revealing too much, a child’s flight of fancy? Considering the structure of the film, where an older archaeologist he meets becomes his father, his real one dead, and his assistant becomes the love interest for his older sister, and somehow this film that is dismissed as garbage manages to be actually interesting as cheapy sci-fi pulp that was shot in four days in 3D. This is not to defend Robot Monster as a great film, but like a lot of these films, it was an attempt at sincere filmmaking, and in this one, that sincerity shines through. The peculiarities of the film, of what Ro-man looks like and, more oddly, of there being scenes of stop motion dinosaurs or actual lizards fighting on tiny, model jungle opening sets, whether for the film or pre-existing footage, used numerous times including to depict mankind’s end, makes the film stranger. Why dinosaurs and overlarge iguanas? It is better not to ask and go with the surrealness of it. The Ro-man himself falls in love, or has inklings of physical passions for the older sister, and has an existential crisis about his function in life. The sister herself, an independent and technologically gifted genius, is literally tied up by her father and lover who refuse to let her act by herself by meeting the Ro-Man and having a negotiation of their lives with him in favour of a relationship. This sort of thing is far more interesting than what usually counts as entertainment in ‘so-bad-its-good’ films. Boom mikes popping up in the corner onscreen are amusing, but they don’t hold a candle to a creature, made from a gorilla suit and a diver’s helmet, being given a personality and a conflicting crisis about his existence of a drone.

From http://horrornews.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Robot-Monster-photo-5-400x300.jpg

This nature of what Robot Monster is – of what could have been a legitimately great film but is still memorable to see – is far more worth its weight in gold for me after a season of films like this than something ‘so bad’ you laugh at it. It’s a compelling failure rather than an excuse in film making product – like Sunday School Musical (2008) – that is completely worthless. I didn’t find Robot Monster to be the most rewarding of films of this ilk I’ve seen, but playing out as an adolescent’s imagination in cheap location scouting and costuming, it proves to be more than its reputation as a golden turkey suggests even if it’s just to illicit surprise and little else.

From http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/stills/robot_monster_02.jpg

This Week... [1st to 5th of February 2013]

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February 1^st: The Birds and The Bees Disc 1

I do not watch films just for entertainment or messages. As someone who has an interest in history as well, film viewing can also be a dive into the past even for all of cinema’s schlockier aspects. A double set from the British Film Institute collecting together sex education films made in Britain, the first disc, which goes from 1917 with Whatsoever A Man Soweth to 1938, mostly deals with the crisis of venereal disease, particularly the dangers of syphilis when it was still a major contagion. I will admit that if all the films were about this, it would have been a struggle to get through the films even as archival material. Thankfully The Mystery of Marriage (1932), despite dancing around the subject of sex for good taste, is a legitimately charming short film, comparing human relationships to those of animals and plants in witty ways. These earlier films are also fascinating, not just for the social and historical context, but also as movies. They sometimes get too preachy unfortunately even for educational shorts, and they can be viewed as dated in their gender politics in depicting women as willing carriers of STDs, but they are also fully structured, mini-dramas around thirty minutes each with narrative arches and characters. One, A Test For Love (1932), also contrasts the mostly male centric concerns by having the protagonist being a young woman who is infected and feels the social stigma of what that represents. Even in the area of films to teach the public about gonorrhoea, in an area of education (sex and reproduction) which is still embarrassing to some and a controversial topic even in the present day, especially with the lessons taught to children, you get the directors nonetheless playing with various dramatic and directorial flourishes they could come up with as long as they made a short that gave people a lesson. The films feel like meat-and-potatoes melodramas and B-movies than merely documents to pass on information viewing them now; the director of A Test of Love, Vernon Sewell, did become a prominent director and worked with Peter Cushing, so I cannot dismiss this thought.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggQ77JAQuFs-E2UPUKiwImAO9b6HQdzr56W92BOtbiBf1JhgjdqdMmBk51CHK0p4L_zUYurvvKHTgIiEREXEg65Qbp9lgIxi1e_Iw-JyruPyyHTPL9Z-ePiVrj2YT0e1BFcFEeYalue5I/s1600/opening_credits.jpg

2^nd February – GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995)

Catching up with more James Bond films within the last four months, I’m finding that I’m not enjoying them as I wish I should. The only ones that have grabbed me, You Only Live Twice (1967) and Diamonds Are Forever (1971), do so because the former goes as far as it can with its Sixties aesthetics mixed with Japanophile chique, and the later because it is so ridiculous that any patriotic feelings are squashed by Mr. Kidd and Mr. Whit’s presence. It may also be because, as the only two Sean Connery Bond films I’ve seen in this recent re-evaluation, that so far nobody does it better than the first person and films in the series. After a long absence from the failure of Licence To Kill (1989), and made in the prime decade of mainstream cultural weirdness, GoldenEye sadly doesn’t become a grand return for the character or a crackpot piece of pulp, but something stuck in-between without really succeeding in either. It’s a two hour film that doesn’t have enough to justify that length but somehow is that long. Pierce Brosnan does make a great Bond, and it has its moments, including Alan Cummings stealing all the scenes he’s in, but the film’s transitions and plot turns feel arbitrary rather than pulling you into them. Considering its incredibly surreal, and stunning, opening credits sequence based on the fall of the Soviet Union, and a major scene taking place in a graveyard for Soviet monuments, it never however strengthens this peculiar tone or tackles real life history with enough pulpy thought to it that it deserves, especially since the series was born in the age of the Cold War. When a new, female, M played by Judi Dench calls Bond a ‘misogynistic dinosaur’, it should be a sign of a film that drags its hero’s ideology over broken glass or pushes the more lurid nature of the character to the lengths like the Sixties Bond films did. Instead however Bond is blasé about all this and just continues with sleeping with women and killing as he has done every time before without the smirk or edge that should have been there after those words were uttered.

From http://www.ukdvdsonline.com/UserFiles/productImages/bfivd915.jpg

3^rd February – The Birds and The Bees Disc 2

Disc 2 of this set is more divisive. The later films – 1940 to 1973 – go from short form dramas to purely educational shorts for the most part, which takes away from their interest aside from the sociological aspects to them. There are some that stand out – the animation Six Little Jungle Boys (1945) and an American made film directed by the editor of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) – and the social aspects of the films themselves are still fascinating. Despite the growing frankness in the topics, you can argue the films become more puritanical in tone, and in the case of Don’t Be Like Brenda (1973), a mirror film to A Test of Love  about a young women also victimised by stigmatism that is far and away more sexist and patronising in tone than the sympathetic earlier short. There was also a fine line with sex education that was broken, shown breaking with the inclusion of the controversial film Growing Up (1971). Made by Dr Martin Cole, its depictions of real male and female masturbation caused an outrage, the booklet with the DVD set containing some of the most obscene and violent complain letters Cole got. Growing Up would probably never be acceptable to view in a classroom this era either, with the usual diagrams used in these films replaced by actual people, including children, being the stand-ins, which was extremely uncomfortable viewing for me as someone raised in this decade’s view on sexual morality. It is worth thinking of this film though compared to the education on the subject most of us got; my own was honest and detailed, taught in primary school and later taught in secondary school, but the approach Dr Cole used of real acts of sexual practice being depicted is probably too far even now for some and, to my hazy memory, never was used in the films my classes were shown. If these shorts, put together in an exceptional set from the BFI, are to be learnt from, it is the knowledge of how the taboos and views on sex and sexuality in the United Kingdom have changed, and have not, and how they are inherently my country’s views on them.

From http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7z8o5DWvO1rnni91o1_500.jpg

4^th February – A Deadly Invention (Karel Zeman, 1958)

The two dimensional world of stop motion, papercraft and animation are combined with live action in this incredible visual achievement. Based on the work of Jules Vern, of pirates and their desire to use a professor’s new technology as a destructive super weapon, the world depicted is made from the use of extensively fabricated sets and props, to create the sort of thing I am showing below, the only way to fully show what A Deadly Invention looks like...

From http://24.media.tumblr.com/cfa58bb98b82593842fc08e65a07374d/tumblr_mgirn2Z0R71qgfhxdo1_500.gif

If there is a potential flaw with this film, it’s the same that has effective many films which combine live action with animated artistry, even Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) to some extent, in that the actors themselves and their plot is not as fascinating as the world around them and do not fully become one with it. The film is still a marvel to see as an animation fan, flying boats, underwater divers fighting a giant octopus, animated birds against real people, and countless other sights that sparkle. When the film gets comfortable with its tone, from a great scene onwards where one sees how people get their news and sports coverage from a giant “movie” projector, A Deadly Invention becomes great entertainment as well as a fest for the eyes.

From http://www.moviehoppingisnotacrime.com/_/rsrc/1349988730674/night-ten-cannibal-apocalypse/caradice.png?height=225&width=400

5^th February – Cannibal Apocalypse (Antonio Margheriti, 1980)

Link to a review here - Cannibal Apocalypse Mini-Review

The ‘Unfairly Abandoned Film’ of Cinema [Showgirls (1995)]

From http://d.ratingmovies.com/servlet/Main/CoverDisplay/Showgirls_(1995).jpg?film_rn=996

Dir. Paul Verhoeven

France-USA

Film #27 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Gdt6SgFdNNw/TFni7shemRI/
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It is amazing that Paul Verhoeven exists. There have been European directors, known for art films, which get put at the helm of Hollywood blockbusters. Verhoeven is something else. That he went from this box office bomb to the large scale 1997 adaptation of Starship Troopers – which has its cake and eats it majestically by both revealing in the nudity and gore, but with enough morality to make itself a satirical masterpiece that decimates the fascist tendencies of science fiction – is incredible. A director as intelligent as Verhoeven, and as subversive as he is still, would not walk into a film like Showgirls blindly. Following a down-and-out girl Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) as she travels to Las Vegas with star struck aspirations in her eyes, the film is a fairytale. It is comparable to classic Hollywood melodrama, with its sweeping camera curves and brightly coloured and decorated environments, following a wide eyed young girl – Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Alice and her Wonderland – but one inside an NC-17 film with graphic nudity, continuous swearing, back stabbings and obscene neon lights. It’s Oz on a terrible cocaine daze, and where the monkeys don’t have wings but run amok around the dressing room and leave faeces over the stage.

From http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i33/shannymaldonado/STILLS/AWP10SH.jpg

And wide eyed young girl is appropriate for Nomi. Berkley has been lambasted for her role, but it slowly dawned on me, once I got use to her abrasive personality and the twisted quirks of Joe Eszterhas’ script, that she is a little girl in the body of a beautiful but far-from-innocent woman. She is tough, but at times cradling or holding a symbolic teddy bear missing an eye, she’s also childish, pointlessly obstinate even to people trying to help her and consumes junk food like a five year old. She will have to learn a lot, or even less, committing questionable behaviour before she becomes Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon), giant mouth and teeth, sequined and moulded eyes and face, and Texas drawl hiding someone who has fought mercilessly, sadistically, for her top spot in Vegas. And that turns out to be Showgirls’ ignored virtue in that it’s a slap in the face, contained in a glamorous mirror, of this sort of place and of this kind of film narrative, full of betrayals that are petty rather than dramatic, slime horn males whoring out their female clients, while a strip club is at least honest and thoughtful about allowing their male client to see the women’s naked bodies, and insidious behaviour. Only Nomi’s friend Molly (Gina Ravera), a seamstress for the major Vegas theatre production Nomi becomes part of, is completely virtuous and free of sin, only to get thrown in the garbage in a horrifying way. Eszterhas’ script by itself is too lurid and ridiculous to be completely serious, but I have to wonder if Eszterhas himself or Verhoeven when he got the script realised that it worked in depicting a Las Vegas that is so wrong and bizarre as it is seen in the film and added to it. Three years later the adaption of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (1998) was released, but despite having only read Hunter S. Thompson’s original book way back in college years ago, the film feels too arch and kooky to work now when I rewatched it. Showgirls shows this place far more potently, more decadent and depraved, with only my memories of Thompson’s original prose as a more damning piece of this city of gold shown in the film.

From http://static.cinemagia.ro/img/db/movie/00/08/08/showgirls-853426l.jpg

The film is a sordid overload. There is so much female nudity, especially from Berkley who I did grown up seeing in Saved By The Bell (1989-1993), that it batters you senseless and yet, to its advantage, makes every moment of it stand out. The dialogue is legitimately abstract at times, perfectly conveying the melodramatic tone, of a young woman climbing up in fame in all its clichés, while being jaw dropping in where it goes, such as Nomi and Crystal, in the only time they have a friendly banter with each other, discussing eating the same kind of dog food in the past. Having worked with writers who have had absurdist ideas in their scripts, intentional or not, like the news breaks in RoboCop (1987), I can see Verhoeven in his second collaboration with Eszterhas taking advantage of how ridiculous the film gets. And if the film is camp, the Las Vegas shown is horrifying in its gaudiness in the first place, the reptile zoo Hunter S. Thompson envisioned while on mass quantities of drugs even more insane and over congested as a g-string and shrimp cocktail hellhole. Made in the nineties, the many clear layers of the film, even if moments of Showgirls do not work on this first viewing, are clear even if they are within an exploitative tone. It’s a far more fascinating take on the struggles a female performer has to go through – the pain, the leering from men – than Black Swan (2010) by embracing its scuzziness, rather than being above it, and by questioning the whole desire at reaching the goal if it makes you less of a human being. What could be Nomi’s potential love interest (Glenn Plummer) skirts between the one who got away and another victim/predator of the Vegas strip because of his human flaws, while Kyle MacLachlan’s character, perfectly played by him, shows a two faced nature that is fitting for the whole narrative. Yes, the sex scene with him where Berkley flops around like a fish in a pool is silly, but its clear Verhoeven is between a balancing act between intentional silliness for humour and kicking this type of story in the ribs in a damning way.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiddSsljyA_HCfvJsU6uQScjQZYFGo0xe0TlHa9X5s64ceAuIrV8XN4nTO74UYf8t3YZIpP6oM2dCzWGd2EIe394hBJF0d1kzVrHR40FAwxW0d6qgqBiy_-LFlOSLa8Xnc5x-Mi0l-sHw/s1600/Showgirls+1995+Elizabeth+Berkley.JPG

It’s not the sort of film, sadly, that large audiences, and more sadly, film critics like, which dares to not be a safe art cinema drama which repeats everything we know of already, or a merely okay genre film which doesn’t push itself into taking risks, but something which is confrontational, is attempting its hardest in a sincere way to be something brave even if it has unintentionally funny scenes, and more of a taboo for critics, dares to skirt and question the line between being serious and satirical, not in a cynical wink-wink sort of way accepted now, but in a way that relishes the sleaze but cautions people of how terrible it would be to see in real life. It would be viewed as hypocritical, but Verhoeven actually managed to balance out the fine line between this in his American films by making sure the critiques of his own material within the films was poignant and black humoured rather than tedious moralising. Very few Hollywood directors dare this sort of thing now sadly, with maybe a few exceptions like Neveldine/Taylor being the only ones in existence, and sadly not getting the chances to make as many films like Verhoeven let alone high budgeted ones. Probably the shift to more teenage friendly content, probably not helped by Showgirls, waving the flag for the NC-17 rating, bombing as badly as it did, has affected this, but  I would also argue we’ve let the politically correct mentality, mixed with the hipster sense of irony, undermine American cinema, where films with sexual content are not actually sensuous  but passionless, where violence is festishistic or numbingly forced like Michael Haneke fostered on the world with Funny Games (1997), when once before very violent films like RoboCop actually made you cringe with real pain and horror even if you laughed or cheered it on. Feminism in cinema has been changed from being a real drive for women’s voices to be more heard of in films to being an excuse to accuse any film which plays with titillation or real sexuality as sexist, and the desire for peaceful liberalism hides a lot more morally objectionable and sick attitudes to violence in films than what Arnold Schwarzenegger did to villains in Total Recall (1990). Most films now are ‘edgy’ but have no actual courage to offend, divide, scrutinise, dissect  or willingly blur the lines between mere titillation and real intellectual meat, and finally seeing Showgirls after all this time, its disappointing something like this no longer, unless pigs fly, will get released in multiplex theatres if it did back in 1995. I want the people who like this as a legitimately great, or flawed but fascinating, film to crush the individuals that merely view it as empty, crap trash and take control of its cult following from them, the side where champions of vulgar auteurism on sites like MUBI.com and the legendary French director Jacques Rivette can bond over it, despite being on different spectrums of cinema at times, and give something like this the due it deserves or admit that it was a brave attempt that, fittingly, has survived many of the critics of the time who lambasted it.

From http://img11.nnm.ru/c/c/b/5/9/6955bdab97576f866108dbb82c9.jpg

Mini Review: Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)

From http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-c/cannibal_apocalypse_poster_01.jpg

Dir. Antonio Margheriti

Italy-Spain

[Note: The following is a start of a new post type on this blog, capsule reviews for films that need their own reviews separate from the This Week... series, which will return soon, but do not need a longer review. I hope these will be as of interest as every other type of post too.]

I’ve always found the pace in Antonio Margheriti films unbelievably sluggish. About a virus, that causes people to become cannibals, which is unleashed into an urban environment, Cannibal Apocalypse has a potentially great idea. The infected individuals, who first spread the plague, are Vietnam veterans, with John Saxon’s protagonist as the commander who is bitten by one of his infected men during the opening Vietnam scene and must deal with, years later, the likelihood of the disease corrupting him, an interesting take on the after effects of war from within the Italian cannibal subgenre. The Antonio Margheriti films I’ve seen as well always had potential in their production especially since he had a talent for action choreograph. Sadly this film feels like an impersonal film that goes from A to B without any sense of thrill, emotional connection or, excluding a well known gore moment, any visceral punch.

The plot is erratic as well, not becoming a cannibal virus film, or having anything to do with cannibalism for the most part aside some gory afterthoughts, or becoming a film fully from the perspectives of the infected Vietnam vets who are being hunted down. There are many plot holes in the film, but the real issue is how it never goes anywhere truly interesting. It takes a long, needless amount of time to get to the virus breaking out, but it never feels impactful, and after that the characters and plot threads are too threadbare to have any effect. It is extremely dull. The only thing of worth really from this former Video Nasty is one of the most effective gore scenes from Italian cinema which is, sadly, spoilt on the UK DVD cover even if the film is not good. Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who I’ve gotten into as an actor ever since viewing the DVD extras for the Arrow Video release of City of the Living Dead (1980), is also of interest alongside John Saxon, but the annoying thing is, like many Video Nasties, this is just a mediocre and ultimately tedious genre film.

Frpm http://www.horror-extreme.com/images/cannibal-apocalypse/cannibal-apocalypse-3.jpg

The ‘Umpteenth Martial Arts Film For This Season’ [Sword of Bushido (1990)]

From http://savetorrent.ru/uploads/posts/2012-05/1336757387_d5022003a354.jpg

Dir. Adrian Carr

Australia-Hong Kong

Film #26 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVB0JROqXvu2UwY_B9O_y1yj_iscYgkk0d-voR6Z3Bcfnkg95zMXJ6YuWYpO-t0nsfhoJpKg0luA7-kgWJ07YWN-vSLQAKgapOt7T5ediMYGix5EOaTkv7pnxchilT6MpJFpUOIIVfJDTN/s1600/bushido7.jpg

The amount of martial arts films I’ve covered for this season suggests that I may have an obsession, one beyond that I judged in the review Strike of Thunderkick Tiger (1982). I didn’t expect tonight’s review to be Australian though; I wondered if the protagonist Richard Norton was slipping in and out of an Australian accent in the first scene of the movies, and the end credits, yes to my surprise, informed me of this continental co-production. Martial artist/architect/marine/samurai/lothario of the ladies Norton travels to Thailand to locate his grandfather’s body and a legendary sword that, claimed by his grandfather as spoils of combat after the Pacific War ends, he wants to return back to the Japanese government. Starting a relationship with school teacher cum guerrilla fighter Suay (Rochelle Ashana), the two will have to contend with numerous individuals, including the yakuza, trying to claim the sword for themselves.

From http://s019.radikal.ru/i603/1204/6f/c3944b5231a1.jpg

Acquired because of the potential pleasure of a quasi-American Ninja film, from what the DVD cover suggested, the film for three-quarters of its length really does not go in that direction. Neither does it really present something else during that time either. Nothing really interesting happens. Its star Richard Norton is just a typical early nineties action star who doesn’t really project enough charisma needed for a film like this. He seduces a female office worker, in a really tight white office uniform in a graphically vaselined-screened sex scene, then when he goes to Thailand, he’s a almost super being, even defeating a talented Thai kickboxer who gets the green eye over how Norton and Ashana interact, but he’s not able to be more than a cookie cutter, white male action star. It doesn’t help that there is very little for him to work with, to the point it isn’t really a martial arts film.

From http://s54.radikal.ru/i145/1204/0c/db54f7b98206.jpg

The only time this film vaguely gets interesting, not redeemably so but not a waste of time, is when the yakuza get involved in the last quarter. I have no qualms with writing spoilers because this film is only worth viewing through clips. In the sole moment where a ninja, promised on the DVD cover, appears they commit one of the most embarrassing moments in ninjutsu history. While taunting the hero, after he’s had his head kicked in and is fleeing, a ninja is distracted to the point that he is hit by a bus and squashed. The entire populous of ninja cinema would want to separate themselves from the clan who has this unfortunate member, one who was taught the skills of ninja assassination but not basic road safety. The film itself becomes more relieving and interesting, not just with the climactic battle suitable for a martial arts film, but a car chase where Norton pursues the villains in a go-kart, the dinkyness of him sitting in it against the car he is chasing somewhat amusing, especially as he is the typical rugged, muscular action film lead. It cannot save the whole film. Those three quarters before this is unbearable. And even in the ending there are problems. It shows incompetence in the director, when you could have your actors speak in their first language to help their acting, you force them to perform in English, out of fear of subtitles, even more so when one of your actors Toshishiro Obata, to be blunt, is incomprehensible in what he is saying. This is dubious on the director’s part, and when Obata is your main villains, the yakuza boss, it’s also idiotic. The film as a whole is an immense mess, an erratic narrative that really is a chore to sit through until that incompetent ninja onwards appears. The surge of YouTube compilation clips was designed for films like this that have not enough quality to sit through the whole of. A sad thing to say, but where it not for those moments of pleasure, this would have been a completely arbitrary viewing experience. 

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCwtXAQ1J-YXr-b9hGqIrnGMOwTYS82_17wWJJb34tX5nLSp1Jd4xTIK9V7R24jBJNDNT2xWKXwd_fm0K2bUzZT4-tTALrW2UsDIox8Xf3pvFoRkxug61WgemqTDjSvyn9mSNB_fNQDJU/s1600/bushido+3.jpg

The ‘Worst’ of Cinema [Dominator (2003)]

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_BcbuH_teL2Q/S8tIv8bKRFI/
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Dir. Tony Luke

United Kingdom

Film #25 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

 

There’s no point attempting to explain this film, the first all-CGI animated movie to be made in Britain. Just watch this extended clip...

Everything that I needed to explain about this Dominator is in that clip. Everything. I was masochistic to view it all the way through the first time, and I was masochistic enough to see it again years later just for this review. It’s catharsis for one of the worst films I’ve seen. It’s sad to say this because I should adore the ridiculously cheap looking animation, and get a goofy laugh from its heavy metal stereotypes. I feel guilt because, researching what little is available about the film, its director had just hastily recovered from lung cancer when he was working on it. But I cannot hide the pain I felt.

When the three daughters of Dr. Payne (Doug Bradley) play the contents of one of his occult books, The Lost Cord, they bring into the world the Dark Lord of Sonic Hell Dominator (Dani Filth from the band Cradle of Filth) but also leave open the gate to Hell for the individuals after him for a key, one which if returned to their leader Lord Desercater (sic) (Doug Bradley again) will help him take over the known cosmos as well as Hell. It is supposed to be as ridiculous as possible. With its rudimentary look, it is impossible to take it seriously beyond every cliché of heavy metal iconography put together in a work that is clearly influenced by the tone of Japanese anime. This is of importance as, surprisingly, the original source, a comic strip in Metal Hammer magazine, was readapted into a quite popular comic in Japan, one of the few cases where a Western creator, and probably the only case involving a British artist, created work for a solely Japanese market as actual manga. My problem with the film is not its look, or animation, as I should have fallen in love with this. It’s the story and ideas themselves behind them.

As a heavy metal fan, I can except and enjoy immensely all the clichés that are usually derided in its imagery – the obsession with Satan, motorbikes, skulls, and ridiculous large shoulder spikes – but I also find most of it embarrassing and unoriginal. Dominator is cringe worthy in how it trivialises heavy metal as much as it does, where character names like Dominator, Decimator, Hellkatt etc. are acceptable even in the context of a goofy animation or for the names of demons. The character designs and the look of the film is aborrant because of the tackiest heavy metal album designs and promotional images it brings up, of skulls on everything and random tentacles and spikes coming from everywhere. The only interesting looking character, in the clip above, that’s not a mess of adolescent metal cover designs or stock character models, is the awfully named Lady Violator, taking the fetish, almost-completely-naked-but-part-machine-in-cock-teasing-places design to ridiculous limits, and with the late Hammer horror icon Ingrid Pitt voicing her, but she was created specifically by another person in the production team.  And that this has such individuals like Doug Bradley, Pitt, and in another role the director Alex Cox staring in it is worse. This will not be said of for extreme metal singer Dani Filth. His main character Dominator is all the worst ideas of how an antihero should be – those repeatedly mentioned spikes everywhere on him, face masked all the time, and no charisma except wanting to shag all of Payne’s daughters, and any other women in the vicinity, at the same time like a horndog – and is made even more embarrassing by Filth’s voicing of him. Using his same raspy growl from his band Cradle of Filth’s music, you cannot take him serious even if its self deprecating as the attempt to sound cool and demonic is so forced. I feel pity for him if it wasn’t for the terrible feeling that, as is the whole problem with the film and large swaths of heavy metal and alternative culture, he is taking himself seriously for something that is childish in an empty way and marketed for anyone who wants to wear designer brand pentagram t-shirts and black hair dye without actually taking in the cultural and pop mythology heavy metal draws from. Two of my favourite metal groups, not taking account of the various sub-genres, are Rammstein and Mastodon. The former is known for their insane pyrotechnics and songs about sex, but have a political edge from their East German heritage mixed with songs drawing from fairy tales and literature, a melancholy to their slower songs, and a wicked sense of humour that goes against every stereotype of German culture. The later have made a concept album about a wolf man going up a mountain and fighting monsters, but not only melded it with a unique personality and an obsession with prog rock, but made it a follow up to a concept album about the novel Moby Dick. Some great songs and bands delve into the clichés of heavy metal, but as far back as Black Sabbath, they distance themselves from the limited, adolescent mindset by their other musical interests that influence their work, their interests in other art forms and their unique quirks.

What makes this even more worse with Dominator is that, as a British work viewed by someone born in the country, a bad British film is truly unbearable and drags into it talented people who should know better. In cinema, the British have been repeated kicked to the curb despite being the birthplace of director like Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, not just from the bias of François Truffaut, and it is quite justifiable at times. We as a country champion laziness and lameness over quality as virtues when such ideas should be burn with fire. I get the feeling that Dominator was made with everyone involved having ‘fun’, words that now are dread inducing for me thanks to this film because it means that a movie like this is made, with a script full of pointless swearing and references only the British viewer could get without any meaning to them, and everyone calls it a day. It is a lack of quality control in favour of ‘enjoying’ oneself that makes this impossible for me to enjoy too. The only thing close to a salvation were the characters Decimator and Extricator (sic again), played by radio personalities Marc ‘Lard’ Riley and Mark Radcliffe, their lame and terrible humour actually amusing, and in a film which turns centuries and decades of mythology, rock music culture and Christian theology into a teenager’s lacking mindset without any sense of thrill or titillation to it all, they’re almost a demonic Greek chorus ripping into the awful film by not participating in the plot at all and being more interested in getting drunk instead.

That I returned to this film under the glib idea of reviewing it for a ‘Worst Of’ series is shameful on my part, but it becomes clear that it should be pulled up from the grave of mass obscurity as a warning of how this film’s mentality plagues pop culture. This lame, bastardisation of Christian mythology and alternative culture is still infecting heavy metal music, and will never create a song as great as Black Sabbath’s N.I.B. or Heaven or Hell, and for every good British film, or comic book, or TV series, or other cultural item except music or literature, which have grand canons of great artists to rest upon, there are too many creations which were made ‘for fun’ and make country look bad to myself and others, a cultural malaise that should have died long before I was born. Dominator is one of the worst films I’ve seen, but it’s also a tragic mirror to how bad British culture can be.

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[From http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/original/uA350tyGx8fp4eN5HFtmNJ1vvFP.jpg]