JFL

An extremely bizarre viewing experience that raises a number of questions, for which only disturbing answers are offered. Who came up with the idea and how, or rather what compelled those involved to actually make a porn movie with an obvious copy of the beloved children’s hero E.T.? Why does the film take place in the 19th century (which is depicted by the interior and exterior of a villa from the ’90s)? Who, on the basis of a concept that is perversely brilliant and repulsively perverse, created the costume for the central character, which is both sophisticated, as it allows the actress to participate in all manner of sexual practices, and extremely disgusting (E.T.’s head with large, unmoving eyes and a body that looks like a mouldered diving suit that has been rotting in a landfill for a couple of years)? What’s even worse, however, are the inevitable meta questions about the kind of light that this de facto prequel casts on Spielberg’s original E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Was the filmmaker’s goal to merely make a nonsense porn flick or to commit an act of porn sabotage or even a terrorist attack on the greatest icon in the genre of family movies? _____ The film was released in Spain with completely made-up subtitles (which were the basis of the English subtitles for the pirated release) that do not match the German original at all. There are thus actually two versions of the film, and it’s difficult to say which one is more bizarre. In the German version, the female variation on E.T. is ordered by her father to travel from the planet Uterus to Earth with the task of learning about sex from people so that she can return and use the knowledge that she has acquired to save her own species, whose members are dying out because they have learned to deny physical pleasure and the joy of life through sex. In the course of her subsequent observation of Earthlings engaging in sexual activities, in which she also takes part, E.T. makes absurd, vulgar comments and spouts superficial observations such as speculation about reproducing through the mouth while watching oral sex. The Earthlings, or more specifically the guy in the role of a nobleman, who was the only one in the whole film with written dialogue, speak completely nonsensical bullshit such as “I am disgusted yet honoured that this being from another planet has come to us to learn about human sexual habits.” In the Spanish/English version, the extra-terrestrial or, more precisely, unit Z-9 sets out for Earth only after being warned that humans are evil and have strange customs, which she nevertheless has to try to understand. Accordingly, the following comments on the sex being performed are also completely unimaginative nonsense about strange customs. Similarly, the things that the nobleman says are utterly insipid and obscure what the relationships between the characters are (in the German version, the girl that the alien engages with first is his the nobleman’s daughter).

We’ve had foul-mouthed puppets taking drugs behind the scenes before and even in its most celebrated incarnation, Meet the Feebles by pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson, it wasn’t such a devastating farce that went beyond the concept itself. It’s simply not enough that characters usually associated with children’s productions do the same things that the protagonists of adult films do, because the joke gets old very quickly and then it depends on whether the creators can come up with something else, or rather come up with jokes and situations that work independently of who appears in them or, conversely, take into account the bizarreness of the concept. However, there is none of that here. Just a bunch of puppets blathering idiotically, which isn’t the humor of an original comedy movie, but of moronic TV shows.

Another from-fans-for-fans product made under the auspices of XYZ films, whose founder, Todd Brown, has used his highly influential website focused on “unique” genre films to foster a target audience that enthusiastically eats out of his hand and is unfortunately also another nail in the coffin of genre films. Just as in the case of Killers, here we have a film that turns showy uniqueness and attractive imaginativeness into a formula in and of itself. The idea for a comedic slasher musical set in a summer camp has a lot of potential. However, with the exception of two well-choreographed and nicely staged musical sequences, it offers nothing more than insipid jokes endlessly exploiting a handful of prejudices about the world behind the curtain (a lecherous director to whose will actresses have to submit in order to get a role, closeted and out gays, hatred of metalheads).

Instead of a biting spectacle that blends humour with cannibalism and murder, we get an exhausting, wordy flick with overwrought dialogue, in which every character has at the ready a sharp bon mot, ideally with the scope of a long newspaper report, for every situation. The narrative about a group of characters held captive in a windowless restaurant by a gang of deranged maniacs who want to gradually savour their prisoners physically and gastronomically is given a cruel meta-level when the film, with its changing demeanour through irrational diffusion and exaggeration, sucks the life out of viewers to the point that they can’t even leave the screening room. Another level of this meta-horror movie is the characters’ Orwellian lot in life, as they are deprived of their own will and have to deliver moronic lines and act like idiots at the instigation of a sadistic screenwriter. Gravy comes across like one of the many 1990s clones of Tarantino movies, whose makers also thought that clever monologues and bizarre characters were enough to be successful. Unfortunately, this is further accompanied by the syndrome of shitty post-quality TV, where if you don’t have real quality, you just beat the audience into submission with spectacularly fake sophistication.

The Mo Brothers’ feature-length debut, the cannibal slasher flick Macabre, suffered from having a half-baked screenplay. Conversely, their second film, Killers, is fatally hindered by its overwrought screenplay. Thanks to the ostentatious effort to surprise viewers, not to play according to clichés and to come up with extremely suspenseful sequences, the film becomes tiresome – the attempt not to be formulaic paradoxically becomes a formula. Forcedness and intent emanate from every scene, so viewers do not see the film as either a dramatic narrative that the characters’ stories would draw them into or as an entertaining genre movie. If we say that a film should ideally run like a well-oiled machine, then Killers is a machine that has so many polished and oddly shaped cogs that it stalls and becomes a completely useless artifact instead of a functional unit. At the same time, Killers is an ideal unmasking project for XYZ Films, behind which is the founder of the website Twitch (twitchfilm.net), which in recent years has become an opinion leader in the area of non-mainstream genre cinema. After Todd Brown used the website to build up a sizable group of followers whose tastes were shaped by their preference for particular types of films, he began to serve them films from his own production stable. Though these films have the exact attributes that Twitch contributors and readers prefer, it is becoming increasingly apparent that those attributes do not in any way make them good. It is necessary to add that XYZ Films always figures into the equation as a co-producer or distributor, and it never develops its own projects, but instead takes over projects in the pitching phase (finding investors based on a synopsis or promo video at film fairs). Because of this, the company’s filmography even contains a handful of excellent movies such as The Raid and The Dirties. Whereas these are projects by filmmakers with an entirely clear vision, major talent and the ambition to realise their creative potential in films, The Mo Brothers (and most of the other filmmakers working under the XYZ Films banner) are at best skilful enthusiasts who are unable to breathe any distinctiveness into their movies. [EFM]

Comedy gore and splatter fan service with an appropriately bizarre premise and a handful of effective jokes, but unfortunately also a lot of superficial pandering to the target audience. [EFM]

At first glance, it seemed like an enlightened decision to entrust the directing of the third installment of the Crows franchise, about high-school hooligans, to Toshiaki Toyoda, who wrote and directed the generational cult film Blue Spring, which was also about, among other things, young men competing for the position of leader of a school gang. However, what was merely a framework for symbolist and empathetic storytelling about the anxiety of growing up in Toyoda’s older film, is the be-all and end-all in Crows. Toyoda’s involvement is rather a total denial of his creative style, nothing of which remains here (though the slow-motion shots remain, but instead of being a dramatic storytelling element, they are used only as a flashy formalistic device). Crows Explode tries to make the individual characters a bit more three-dimensional by emphasising their motivations and it even contains some of the same narrative motifs as Blue Spring, but we’ve already seen those in the first film of the franchise, Crows Zero, directed by Takashi Miike (who, after all, had previously made The Way to Fight, a much more complex variation on fight movies). In the end, however, these tendencies comprise a mere empty embellishment of a film in which everything revolves only around brawling. Because of this, the paradoxically most interesting element of this instalment, and of the franchise as a whole, remains the fact that, even though everyone here pretends to be a big rebel, Crows is essentially an absurdly conformist work in which the tough guys are subject to basically the same social pressures to perform, to devote themselves to the “enterprise” and to make the maximum commitment as students at elite schools and employees of major corporations. Another unintentionally ridiculous feature of the live-action films in the Crows franchise is the fact that the tough guys at the upper levels of the hierarchical pyramid of high-school hooligans are played by actors around the age of thirty, so the whole franchise actually glorifies repeaters.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls is essentially composed of a number of often-seen motifs, but their handling and placement in a captivating setting make this film an experience that remains in the viewer’s memory. Here we have a standard story about the conflict of colonial and indigenous cultures combined with a film about young heroes fighting for their freedom. However, the narrative is set in the environment of a Canadian Indian community in the 1970s and thematises the oppression of the original inhabitants at that time by despotic authorities, particularly Christian boarding schools for the re-education of children. As in the brilliant comic book Scalped, with which the film has several things in common, here the reservation is a place where the original culture has been crushed by the ills of consumerism and capitalism together with rampant crime. The main attraction of the film is the vivid depiction of this world, which straddles the line between sober realism and fantastical mythology, and is equally unbound from and tied to its roots. The story itself, about the clash of Christianity, which replaced spiritualism and mystery with a sadistic doctrine, and Indian culture, whose everyday experience is conversely enveloped in mysticism, can on the one hand be seen as an expression of post-colonial iniquity, when formulaic stories are created primarily for an audience made up of the majority society, who can thus express their sympathy with the previously oppressed ethnic group. On the other hand, however, such films can also serve as emancipatory works for the other, minority audience.

On the one hand, this live-action film based on Eiko Kadono’s children’s book of the same name is put at an extreme disadvantage by the enormous shadow cast by Hayao Miyazaki’s phenomenal adaptation of the same book. Thanks to the qualities of the older anime version, it’s impossible to not make comparisons, which immediately reveal the brilliance of Miyazaki and his collaborators. Whereas they focused on the book’s atmosphere and highlighted only a few motifs from it, the live-action adaptation attempts a more literal and more complete transfer of the book’s various peripeteias to the screen. And whereas the animated Kiki comes across as concise and consistent, the live-action version is ultimately rather a series of unrelated episodes. Mainly, however, the live-action version suffers from the typical ills of the Japanese mainstream, which is characterised by irritating affectedness and forcedness (and let’s not forget the requirement for the physical appearance of actresses, thanks to which the jolly baker has the physical form of a slender lady), which again reminds us of the exceptional nature of the films produced by Studio Ghibli with its emphasis on a carefully paced narrative and subtle style.

People always lament the decline of Japanese cinema because, among other things, only adaptations and remakes are being made both in the mainstream and non-studio segments, and then come to the harsh realisation that this practice has its reason and logic. Miss Zombie is one of those rare projects made on the basis of an original screenplay, but it is an absolute disaster in terms of narrative, dramaturgy and stylisation. With respect to the subject matter and the initial  idea, it at least had promising potential. It doesn’t use zombies as a cliché from a run-of-the-mill genre flick, but rather as a metaphor for bullying and the oppression of minorities and individuals who in some way stand out from the majority, and thus also for heartlessness and zero empathy. The titular protagonist is situated in the role of an absolute object that the others deal with based on their own arbitrariness. Unfortunately, the particular presentation of these motifs has the form of a tiresome and desperately didactic art-fart that tries hard to be intense, but instead remains only hysterical and unintentionally ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that Andrew Parkinson used the same concept in a zombie film years ago, but incomparably more impressively and effectively.