PHANTASM @ 45

Tommy gets lucky and takes his belle de jour to the graveyard for sex one night. When its her turn to penetrate she chooses a long sharp knife into the chest. Not quite the pillow talk he had in mind but he's beyond caring about that. Also, the woman has transformed in the space of a cut into a tall frowning man. When Tommy's brother Jody goes to the funeral with his friend Reggie, they talk about how weird Tommy's apparent suicide was before Jody goes into the bizarre black and white mausoleum where he's slammed on the shoulder by the tall man in the prologue. Younger-still brother Michael, who's been following Jody around, turns up on his trail bike and watches through binoculars as the Tall Man (as the figure came to be known in the franchise) effortlessly lifts a full casket into the back of a hearse. Ok that's all in the first ten minutes and I haven't mentioned the strange creatures who seem to be darting behind headstones or the Dune-like box o' ordeals that Michael is tested with at a local medium business.

This is the world of Phantasm built of strange details that seem left over from last night's whiskey flavoured writing session. It's also one of the most refreshingly original genre-bending films ever made. I said original and just above I also said that one of the details was like something from Dune. Writer/director Don Coscarelli knows you know that (and this is five years before Lynch's feature film made a big thing of it). Jody goes to a watering hole in the town called Dune Cantina. You might find some resemblance between the flying ball and the flying syringes in Dune but the similarity is slight and diverges as soon as the ball meets a head and drains the blood which it spits out a hole in its rear. That's the kind of thing Coscarelli was thinking up when he conceived of this film. He was on a phone call and played around with a Styrofoam cup, pushing through the bottom with a finger and watching as it moved apparently by itself. That's what I mean by original. A lot of what you see on screen here feels invented on the spot, spontaneous, regardless of how screenplays happen.

Apart from the impressive practical effects and atmospheres, the human story of the younger brother's sadness at Jody's intended departure for further adventures is an affecting one. The scene of Michael running after Jody as he rides a bike around the streets feels less literal than figurative, it's how Jody sees it and how Michael feels. And there is a suggestion that the weird happenings in the town that only this family appear to see, rise directly from this melancholy state. When you see what becomes of the brother from the prologue, the sting of the absence is made clear.

That aside, Phantasm is a fresh adventure with plenty of sci-fi ideas and horror scenes and a bad guy who joined the Jasons and Freddies of mainstream horror from the off. The fact that the blending of ambience between the green suburban streets and the stark gothic of the mausoleum feels so smooth is testament to why this film continues to work. This is an unofficial extension of the homely suburban leafiness of Halloween and a precursor of the Spielberg look of the decade to come but while the sex on show is not even mainstream explicit it is too clearly suggested to allow a G rating. This puts Phantasm in that strange margin where adult and young adult blend uneasily. Michael's grin at spying the sight of exposed breasts is knowing (just like Coscarelli's inclusion of it).

The other group I'd put Phantasm into is the margin of early home video and arthouse titles like Evil Dead or Tourist Trap, held together with gaffer tape but holding real originality. These travelled under even the parade of slashers and cheaper sci-fi and emerged decades later for delighted discovery. Phantasm, as aforesaid, found itself a franchise but it is this first think-it-and-throw-it-against-the-wall outing that still packs the punch.

Viewing notes: I watched this on the Well Go region A Blu-Ray which is very fine. If you are tempted to explore, you are currently limited to buying overseas or trying ebay. To my knowledge this film has not been released locally since the days of VHS (which is how I first saw it). 

Review: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Lydia Deetz has grown up to host a successful ghost hunting tv show but is starting to see her old foe appear in crowds like a stalker. Her mother Delia, not quite grown up but older, is a performance artist. Lydia's daughter Astrid is in the polar position that Lydia was with her mother so goth mum and straight daughter, now. The dad from the first one dies in a stop motion plane crash and the family heads back to Winter River where the old house is shrouded in black for the performative memorial. Lydia's modern fragile manager and close companion, sweet talks her into getting married on Halloween. Astrid quietly rides away on a bike and crashes through the fence of the introverted boy in town and they start talks. Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice, now an afterlife bureaucrat, hears tell of his soul sucking ex ressurecting and coming after him. There's a lot of intertwining dependencies that will lead pretty much where you expect.

I wanted to spend some weighty time on that premise to convey how long it feels to sit through it before this film gets into gear, and that's leaving a lot out. The elongated first act plays like the first half hours of episodes one and two of this as a streaming mini series. It's not boring but you get the feeling that you'll be kept waiting. But there are rewards.

Catherine O'Hara turns on the quirk dependably. Wynona Ryder is believably an older Lydia. Justin Theroux enjoyably overplays his new age balderdash character. Tim Burton's magic shop aesthetic is turned on to gush and when the narrative begins to crank into action the movie feels a lot more like home. But you also start noticing things you probably shouldn't. While the original spent time on earning character empathy, this one does more toward recognition humour and leaves things at that depth. Then you get to Astrid's subplot which would make a better Tim Burton movie that this or most of his output since the '80s. At the centre of that is the increasingly magnetic Jenna Ortega who stands in for the audience's skepticism through her sassy adolescence. As in Wednesday, X (where she really gave charismatic Mia Goth a run for her money), Scream VI or Sabrina Carpenter's Taste video (please watch that) she owns the screen.

Otherwise, this is a rerun with less of the charm that came from the then novelty of Burton's goofy gothic style. There are many self referential moments to highlight the passage of time but there are too few new inventions to allow a claim of something more than nostalgia. This is Beetlejuice in the era of YouTube ghost hunters and experiencing live events through phone screens but the crowding of the canvas between these and the callbacks just make you realise you could have thought all this yourself from one viewing of the trailer. When the big song at the climax happens you think, "wow!" and then you think, "ok". So, Tim, good to see some updates but I heard you the first time.

RHINOCEROS @ 50

John, an aging bon vivant, chastises his younger friend Stanley for surrendering to a bad life that has driven him to drink. He is about to entice Stanley to grasp his own life when a cacophony outside drives everyone in the restaurant to the window to see a rhinoceros charging down the street. Later, at work, the wife of an absent staff member reports that the animals have not escaped from a zoo but that people, like her husband, are transforming into them. As she rides away on her newly pachydermal husband's back, life choices are being reassessed.

Eugene Ionesco's absurdist fable freedom from conformity and resistance to both is presented with big performances and a lot of stagey overreach. This would have rendered it unwatchable but for the casting of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the second of only two pairings on screen. The first was in the deathless Mel Brooks debut The Producers. The relation between their characters in Rhinoceros is immediately reminiscent of that film, with Mostel's John bullying Wilder's Stanley about his life choices. After that opening, though, the dynamic differs when John faces his own transformation and the mood shifts quickly to panic and then pathos. It's worth noting that Mostel was repeating his role from the play's Broadway debut over a decade earlier. But that, while interesting, does not explain the staginess that can drag this film away from compulsion.

It wasn't a standalone production but part of a series of films commissioned by the short lived American Film Theatre project in an attempt to bring the media of film and theatre together by presenting cinematic versions of modern classic plays. I remember this coming to far off Townsville in the mid '70s as a subscription package which was expensive and gave off exclusivist vapours. I thought it sounded stuck up but I also loved the idea of it. Harold Pinter's The Homecoming was one of them and Pinter himself directed Simon Gray's Butley. This was not something I could easily convince my parents to invest in so I let it slide. Later, I saw Butley at Uni and the ABC played most of the titles in late night spots. I was gratified to discover how good they had been. The project was doomed as it tried to reinvent cinema into a more theatre-like deal with the subscriptions and came across as snobbish bullshit. Pity, though.

This is important in considering Rhinoceros as it goes a way toward explaining the staginess of a lot of the action and how most of it is done in sets with little of the freedom of movement that cinema production allows. While it doesn't feel like a filmed stage production the sets, particularly the apartment interiors are exploited for their claustrophobic pokiness. Director Tom O'Horgan came to the gig from his work on Broadway. While he does allow some breakout and is clever in his use of sound to suggest the rhinos on the streets, he does fall back on the kind of blocking that emphasises physical engineering over cinematic setups when bodies have to move together; we're seeing a movie but we're also seeing the cooking while we watch approach of live theatre. I imagine this was intentional but it can lower the tone even of this broadbrush satire.

But then we can easily fall back on the performances. Mostel and Wilder in the leads but also a bright Karen Black with her heyday energy, the character stalwart Joe Silver and the instant comedy figure of Don Calfa as the waiter. But these are the kind of things that while adding to the enjoyment of the film can also date it. I wonder if the final defiance would be done with such anger and futility as it is here. Is Ionesco's proposition about resistance readable in the post-truth realm? Maybe more than ever. Just, don't remake it, watch it, for all its antiquity, the way it is here. It's from when the truth about misdeeds at the top of American society could bring a Nixon down. It's worth the watch for that thought alone.

Rhinoceros is available through Kanopy which you should join now. Free, and through your local public library system(which you should also join now).

ONIBABA @ 60

Marsh reeds, shift in the wind. Somewhere in the whispering mass is a pit too deep to see all the way to the bottom. Soldiers are fighting in the reeds, a pair struggles to escape from the skirmish but the effort is so exhausting they collapse. Just as they seem to revive both are killed by spears. Two women appear and strip the soldiers of their armour and weapons, put the cache aside and drag the bodies to the pit and kick them in. Then they return to their slightly upgraded lean to, stuff rice into their mouths and fall to exhausted sleep. Another day.

This is the world of the story of the Onibaba, an expansion of an ancient Bhuddist cautionary fable about a mother trying to control her daughter by wearing a demonic disguise. Writer/director Kaneto Shindo starts well before that brief story and works to establish the mother and daughter (in law) and their rough subsistence life in the realm of the marsh. 

Into this carefully balanced life, coursing across the river like a crocodile, comes Hachi, heading home from the war he's deserted but without his friend Kichi, son to the older woman and husband to the younger (neither woman is named). He explains the savage chaos of the war and how he and Kichi were both trying to escape but Kichi didn't make it. The older woman judges him but the younger cannot shake Hachi's charm. 

A little wooing later and she's sneaking off at night for the first relief from her strained existence she's known for too long. Her mother in law twigs to this and approaches Hachi, even offering herself in the young woman's place. Hachi has, meanwhile, swapped his opportunistic lust for something more like love and wants to marry the younger (this doesn't play awkwardly on film and wouldn't here if the characters had been graced with names).

A little while later, something comes up and the mother in law comes upon the makings of a deterrent, a demonic mask, which she wears and appears as a terrifying spectre in the marshes, forcing her daughter in law to turn back in horror. This works until it doesn't: she can't take the mask off.

Kaneto Shindo was born and raised in Hiroshima. His military service ironically saved him from suffering the unimaginable hell of the atomic bomb. Not enough irony? Well, this old Hiroshiman died in 2012, making it to a month over a hundred years old. Whether it was a sense of the greatest luck in history or simply a life force energised by his own war experience, Shindo threw himself into the fashioning of fables for cinema, directing forty-eight of his own stories and writing two hundred and thirty-eight films for other directors. With masterpieces of the strange like Human, Ditch, Kuroneko up his sleeve, he easily joins the pantheon of post-occupation Japanese filmmaking. Onibaba is the central gem in his timeline.

Of that generation of  Japanese filmmakers, there is barely an example within a ten year radius that does not mention, however metaphorically, the spectacle and effect of the bombs. In Onibaba this is in Hachi's description of the war in open country and in Kyoto itself, hub of civilisation rendered chaotic and desperate. There is also the spectre of a distant cloud of smoke as though a whole city was on fire. The setting is medieval but the solemnity of the witnesses to this is profound and clearly indicating recent history.

What leads to this moment is the world-building of the endless tall grass in constant motion in the wind and the naturalistic performances and dialogue of the players. These people really seem to live there. Shindo took his crew to the marshes at Chiba where they lived and worked for almost the whole production. Even knowing how difficult this process was and seeing the depiction of the hand-to-mouth inhabitants, I still want to live there.

None of this makes it into the source fable. This was Shindo's solid imagination that gave his public, weary of tradition and authority, a version based on life-affirming sex in place of the piety of the temple of the original. The cool jazz tones of the score that burst into thunderous taiko drumming for the night sequences would have felt like a bow to liberation from the generation of militarism the culture had endured. The nudity and convincing sex scenes work to this end; less titillating than candid. Like a number of films by this Methuselah of the medium, Onibaba is a blend of its times and timelessness and a testament to the need to climb from the pits of history into the kind of light useful for making a living. Few knew that better than Kaneto Shindo.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Criterion's stunning Blu-Ray but that, or the U.K. Eureka edition (also fine). Otherwise, it might be up to finding it second hand, locally. It's one of those essential films from history that are very difficult to get to see.

Review: THE SUBSTANCE

You're in a fairy tale. You get magic a power.  It's yours to keep AS LONG AS YOU DO THIS ONE THING. You've heard the story. You knew it before you could read and it flowed into your ears through your mother's voice. You know that the story only works if you do that one thing. Inj later life it keeps you from walking in front of speeding cars but, who knows, for a chance at opioid bliss or a fortune from the pokies, that one risk might solve your problem. So, when faded Hollywood star Elizabeth Sprinkle gets a chance at a second youth, she jumps at it.

Writer/director Coralie Fargeat knows you know this about fables. Expects you to know it as you will be straining with everything you have to tell someone on the screen not to do that one thing. The point is not what happens up there but in how much she can play around with the elements and give us something to think about. Play she does and makes us live through some grimace-inducing squirmy and squelchy body horror until we are compelled to consider what her story is about beyond the template.

Fargeat is happy to be plain with her messaging. Perhaps that should be bold, not happy. The opening sequence shows a raw egg yolk producing another after an injection. Then we get a montage of Elizabeth celebrating her star on the walk of fame (after an intriguing scene of how they are constructed) which progresses through the years with signifiers like autumn leaves, snowfalls, tourists walking over it, murmuring guesses as to who she was, and some slob slipping his mega burger on to it. Cut to Elizabeth now, leading a troupe of tv dancers in her workout show. 

Afterwards, being forced into using the gents, she overhears the tv tycoon screaming into his phone about someone like her, past prime and past prime time. Soon after, he seems on the pop of firing her over lunch (never have prawns been less appetising) but, getting to an awkward bit, he flees the scene and kicks it down the road. Soon after (I'm leaving a lot out) she recovers from an auto crash and, during a creepy examination by a ethereally beautiful young male nurse, she is left with a usb stick upon which is branded The Substance. This leads to the situation you can get from watching the trailer in which her younger self seems to have taken over her gig with the workout show.

As this film does keep to its fairy tale lane, it might seem pointless to avoid spoilers but there are many on screen which I will not detail. The glee of this testing film lies in the articulated anger that Fargeat hurls at cultural standards of beauty that both recoil in disgust at women aging and harshly judge any attempt to reverse the process. The woman who brought us the searing Revenge has learned, like the heroine of that story, how to fashion assault weapons from the pieces of beauty culture. There are many white knuckle suspensions and even more eye popping body horror showcases. Before you cry Cronenberg, they all learn from that experience that each, even the most showy, must take its place in a storyline. The scenes can go longer than they should but nothing you see here does not advance the tale.

On Cronenberg, if you have seen a few of his early ones in order of their release you'll notice the improvement in them when he starts hiring stronger actors. Demi Moore's performance as Elizabeth will be called brave for her permission to be shown old. We do get closeups of porous cheeks, wrinkles and sags but the bravery we see is not in this candour (pushed by make up and prosthetics, btw) but in the acutely observed and expressed sustained rage of her character as she comes to understand the resonance of her decision and how the regime that made it feel necessary remains unmoved in the face of her disaster. It is brave because it is strong. 

Margaret Qualley gets the nepo baby taunt as the daughter of Andie McDowell but I've not known her to appear anything but committed to her roles (even when, in Poor Things, this is reduced to her getting hit in the head by basketballs). She emerges as Sue an apparent clone of the younger Elizabeth, a reset, ditching all the waste and keeping the good stuff. However, Qualley plays her for all the shallowness allowed her by her youth and beauty and a burgeoning rage from Elizabeth's experience to remind us where she's from.

Is Dennis Quaid's disgusting tv boss with his crassness and misogyny, a feminist's stereotype? He's more of a caricatured industry mover, holding nothing of value for longer than it sells, knowing that even his ugliness can be thrown around to herald his power. Quaid is having a ball with him. 

Finally, Fargeat is happy to pay tribute to the influences that led her to this point. These are not nudges and winks (as in the constant barrage of them in Alien Romulus) but marks of tribute. 2001 gets a moment in the climax as do The Elephant Man, Eraserhead and Society, among others. None of these distract even if you do recognise them, the power of the story roaring to its close overwhelms them as cute moments and we're carried along. One thing I found interesting about the score, now I think about it, is how strong the electronics were for almost the whole running time before it changed to an orchestral pallet towards the end. Just another detail on a ride that might make us scream while we're on it but will keep us thinking after the credits.

The Substance is currently on general release.

Review: MAXXXINE

Maxine Minx auditions for a horror movie role to exit the world of pornography. It's 1986 and Hollywood is discovering teenagers and what makes them buy tickets as Richard Ramirez is terrorising the city as The Night Stalker. Maxine gets the horror part about the same time as she proves she can handle herself in the nasty neighbourhoods. A pair of detectives trace connections between new murder victims and Maxine and approach her. They are worried because the new victims seem staged to look like The Night Stalker but differ too much, meaning there's another killer on the block. Maxine rebuffs them and sets about her rebirth as a legit actor. This leads to some enticing invitations from her colleagues but they keep coming back in pieces stuffed into luggage. Maybe she should have taken that cop's card, after all.

This is the third and final of a trilogy that became identified with roles played by Mia Goth in the first one, X. It was Goth who approached writer/director Ti West to flesh the Pearl character out while they were filming X in New Zealand under lockdown conditions. This led to her not only starring in Pearl but getting a co-writing credit for it. After this, it would have felt tidy to do as much for Maxine and maybe say a few things about Hollywood's odd 1980s.

After a bold and engaging opening act the middle progresses toward an expansion of Maxine's world and its relation to the murders and how they relate to her. But then, as the B plot about the murders rises in the mix it starts dragging, feeling complicated rather than intriguing. Then, while the finale is well staged and its significance clear, I was almost checking the time.

West is hit and miss for me. I do not share the admiration that his feature debut House of the Devil gets and while, The Innkeepers had a great premise it was let down by the conventionality of the ending. The Sacrament felt too literal in its treatment of a fictionalised historical event. X put me off with its sleazy phobia of age. Pearl, though, was a marvel, extending far beyond a vanity project for Mia Goth, it explored themes of frustration, isolation and delusion through the force of its star's performance and shaped up with a profound sense of completion. It's why I bothered with Maxxxine.

Goth plays Maxine faintly. It's underacting rather than stiffness and I wonder if that is to contrast with her wide ranging turn as Pearl. Maxine has survived the trauma of X and, while not a shut-in, is showing a hardened mien to a culture defined by its murderers and cinema of murderers. But Goth might be doing this too well as she can come across as flat in scenes where she might afford an emotion of two (as in the scene where she tells her friend she got the part). It does work in scenes of stress where it resembles personal armour. If there'd been more of those ...

While I appreciated seeing Maxine's further adventures, my favourite of the trio remains Pearl and while I'll always give Ti West a chance with a new title, this most recent of his gives me pause. There's an urgent comparison with another 21st century treatment of Hollywood's destruction of its human units but I refuse to name it. I only mention it here as its own complications of plot and character never overwhelm that theme. In Maxxxine The theme is so effectively buried that it must be stated out loud at the crucial exchange of the climax rather than left for the audience to mentally intone.  Maybe he should write with Mia again.

Viewing Notes: Maxxine is probably out of the cinemas now but can be hired through your favourite streamer (Prime has it as a 4K)

Review: IN A VIOLENT NATURE

A structure of some kind, too close to identify. Two young men talk about the massacre that the area is famous for. One of them notices that a pendant has been left on a pole and lifts it as they leave the scene. The pole begins to move. At first it's a slight irregular shake but soon it's swaying until a figure emerges from the deep leafy bed below, climbing out of a damp grave. Seen from behind, the man with clear head injuries walks through the woods without apparent aim. This is Johnny. We are soon to hear his backstory and witness how efficient and creative a killer he is.

This is generically slasher movie stuff with the exception that our focus is almost entirely on the killer. We follow him from kill to kill by night and day, moving through the terrain as the sounds of nature swell and the light falls pleasingly on the woods. We do see a standard campfire scene where the young adults learn Johnny's backstory and they are soon after attacked one by one.

What's different here is the point of view. While it's not literal, we mostly see Johnny from behind as he's trudging through the thicket, not what his eyes would be taking in, it is engaging. The device of following the killer instead of observing the machinery of the social play between the young folk the story boils the generic traits down to danger and process. Attention to process always engages me. David Hemmings darkroom techniques in Blow Up as he closes in on the terrifying detail of his photograph. Alain Delon forging his identification papers in Purple Noon. Matilda Lutz fashioning objects around her into weapons in Revenge. We see Johnny pause to listen and follow the sound to the victims. Our heavily limited acquaintance with them frees us of empathy and the kills are delivered with enough preface to allow a much more efficient context, affording them an incidental emotional punch. Johnny doesn't leap from the shadows, his victims move into focus.

The kills are inventive. The assumption of the mask is tidy. The ending adds a pause and gently steered dread. There is a final girl and she has one of the most compelling last scenes in all slasherdom. It has to do with the uncertainty of what her view might become. We get our answer but it is denied her. It is a moment suggesting the lack of closure that can intensify trauma and it is done in the confines of a 4X3 frame and the sounds of the forest. I cannot predict from this that a new wave of slashers is upon us, nor even that sequels from this one are on the cards, but here in tried old 2024 this movie offers refreshment for the genre fan and that's not something to take lightly.

Viewing notes: There was a very brief cinema life locally for this film but, as a Shudder original production it was posted on that streamer last night (Friday the 13th) which is where it will be hanging around for the foreseeable.