JFL

Corman's feature-length screensaver earned its status as a cult movie largely due not only to its subject matter, but primarily its context. It was here that Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper met each other and, during their joint preparation in the style of Stanislavski, they laid the groundwork for their truly cult project, Easy Rider. Producer Roger Corman, who also handled directing duties, put forth a study group with LSD, so Nicholson’s screenplay for this film about nothing fit right in with his obsession with Edgar Allan Poe. The Trip combines within itself Corman’s undeniable craftsmanship, his feel for the commercially exploitable phenomena of the day, and his ability to exploit enthusiastic young talents with the illusion that they were making their own film.

As a monster movie, Attack of the Giant Leaches is utterly hopeless and as completely useless as anything else. The titular giant leeches appear on the screen for a total of five minutes and the rest of the film consists of insipid soap-operatic quarrels among Southern hillbillies and scenes of swamps accompanied by dialogue about something fishy happening in those swamps.

An excellent premise squandered on a mediocre, unimaginative would-be drama, or film school according to Roger Corman in practice. When the master of trash became aware of incentives in Puerto Rico, he immediately churned out three films at once with the same cast and crew. Of this trio, which also includes Creature from the Haunted Sea and Battle of Blood Island, The Last Woman on Earth is the most economical project, as it gets by with three characters and zero extra costs (among other things, it was filmed in the bungalow rented as housing for the crew). The premise, in which an unscrupulous gambler, his wife and his lawyer go scuba diving and, when they emerge, find that oxygen has disappeared from the air, killing everyone but them, first offers a handful of phenomenally absurd scenes and twists, but then settles into an average and predictable would-be drama about infidelity and trust among the last people in the world. The screenwriter, who would later pen Chinatown and The Firm, tries in vain to breathe some life into this dime-store flick with some stimulating ideas, but Corman doesn’t let that distract him from the goal of shooting a bit of consumer-grade drive-in bullshit for little money.

As consumer-grade dreck for drive-ins, where watching movies was one of the lowest priorities on the list of possible entertainments, The Wasp Woman is ideal. It has an attractive concept that it puts on an appropriately alluring poster, which typically has nothing at all in common with the content of the film. However, watching this exercise in futility is rather a form of punishment. The premise, emerging from the then current topic of the positive effects of cosmetics made from bee products, establishes the collaboration of a mad scientist and the head of a cosmetics company who, like any woman who does not consider a career at home in the kitchen, will be punished for her greed by being turned into a monster as the consequence of using wasp-based cosmetic products. In practice, however, the metamorphosis promised by the poster doesn’t happen, and it is necessary to wait until the last ten minutes for the banal, blathering scenes to stop and for the lady in the insect mask to finally appear.

Ray Milland replaced Vincent Price in Corman’s third film based on a Poe story because the film was originally made outside of the traditional connection with American International Pictures, to which Price was contractually bound. Nevertheless, we otherwise have all of the usual ingredients and formulas here, such as a stranger who is a persona non grata in a gloomy mansion, paintings of disturbing, expressive images and a morbid fascination with death. This time, the motif of being buried alive is expanded to the central theme and around it is built the usual story of ugly family relations, the curse of the past and terribly grotesque punishment from the grave. In comparison with other Poe-based pictures, the film gets its distinctiveness from studio exteriors of swamps with a tonne of manmade fog and, primarily, through a superb etude on the theme of a recipe book of excellent morbid ideas. The passage in which the hero boasts of his private tomb with a hundred and one possibilities of escape in the event of being buried alive offers one of the most bizarre images of unhinged DIY and cottage keeping.

Mammon is a graphic display of post-quality TV (aka quantity TV) in all its naked glory. The original ambition of the golden age of modern television, consisting in the desire to offer narratives on non-standard topics that draw viewers to the screen with their characters, stories and conflicts, has been transformed into the false art of chaining viewers to the screen and not allowing them to leave. The tools used to do this are fabricated twists, arefined form and the formal elements of film, which make it possible to turn shit into a masterpiece. Mammon would very much like to be another contribution to the lineage of serious Scandinavian crime shows with an overlapping social aspect, but unlike the works that it imitates, it has only a half-baked premise, artificial characters with an exaggerated past, a naïve belief in journalistic ethics and, above all else, a pile of absurd twists, the better of which can be chalked up to screenwriting laziness, whereas the worse ones reside in the realm of camp.

Veteran does not deserve attention for its cinematic qualities, entertaining spectacle or the director’s typically brilliant physical action choreography, though in these respects it is a very solid genre mix. Much more noteworthy is the fact that, contrary to expectations, this solid yet not especially exceptional film became the third most-watched movie of all time in Korea. In this respect, the film has a perfect exploitation-style narrative, which for most of the runtime only builds up the outrage toward the demonised, degenerate parvenu and then allows that outrage to be vented in a gladiatorial manner. Paradoxically, however, the narrative concurrently serves as a means of justifying police brutality or even straight-up glorifying it as a necessary way to make the bastards who remain beyond the reach of the law at least partially pay the price for their actions.

Porn to Be Free is a rather turgid documentary that ostentatiously shows how open its creators are and is not afraid to show pornographic scenes, though it fails to make a reasonable statement because of that. The theme of porn as a tool of politics and subversive provocation against the establishment, like film itself,primarily exhibits turgidness. The filmmakers gathered a number of prominent people from the industry, ideologues, activists and porn actors, but in the interviews, unfortunately, they do not lead them to the essence of the matter or challenge them, but rather only agree with them, even though a counter-view obviously offers itself. Most of the documentary is peculiarly focused on Cicciolina, but it doesn’t let her speak for herself until the very end and, furthermore, only in a completely unconstructive manner. It’s impossible to shake the impression that the most interesting of the interviews remained on the cutting-room floor. If not, the interviews were a waste of time and opportunity.

I Am a Hero is the wet dream of every overaged otaku. What more could you want from life, when you’re a self-absorbed, bitter loser and the fact that your thirtieth birth was celebrated long ago indicates that your life is as good as it’s going to get and that, compared to your original dreams, the recognition, fame and higher salary that you crave are never coming? In that case, the global apocalypse is notthe end of the world, but a welcome restart, where all of your annoying acquaintances and co-workers are the first to bite the dust, and your previously eccentric and misunderstood hobby leads to good. In order for the illusion to be perfect, there must also be a trophy in the form of a schoolgirl who is concurrently an object of desire, a fragile beauty in need of protection and a super-lethal weapon all in one. Whereas post-apocalyptic fiction previously served to update mythical narratives and outdated genre categories such as westerns, in I Am a Hero it becomes a means of venting the bitterness of supposedly superior nerds and their frustrationwith everyday reality, which is in sharp contrast to the fantasy stories that they lap up. The fact that some foreign commentators on Japanese cinema consider this exercise in futility to be one of the better films of last year only goes to show the miserable place in which the previously renowned film production now finds itself.

Just like Police Story 2013 directed by Ding, Saving Mr. Wu is a bloated would-be high-concept work and a futile wait for the promised sharp thriller. Hopelessly waving the camera obscures the fact that there actually isn’t any dynamism or tension, but rather only a formulaic bit of bullshit that serves for the melodramatic glorification of Chinese cops as superhuman crime fighters sacrificing themselves for the good of others.