Three Nuts in Search of a Dolt

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What makes a mad scientist mad? Is it the realization that his skill set is not sufficient to achieve the medical breakthroughs he envisions or the fact that the medical community is too unenlightened to understand his genius? In the case of Don Panchito aka The Professor (Carlos Riquelme) it’s a little bit of both. His goal is to build a master race of super beings with the help of his two assistants but so far the experiments aren’t working. The Professor has been kidnapping world class athletes and wrestlers and transplanting monkey brains into their bodies (yes, that again) but so far none have survived. Maybe the problem is that he needs a stronger body so his quest continues in Ladron de Cadaveres (English title: The Body Snatcher, 1957), the first Mexican horror/fantasy genre film to combine mad scientists, brain transplants and wrestlers in an audience pleasing formula that would soon inspire a series of movies pitting the popular wrestler El Santo against a variety of supernatural creatures.

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Fate, Coincidence and Missed Opportunities

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Most cinephiles remember the first time they saw a film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. For me it was Ah Fei Jing Juen (English title: Days of Being Wild, 1990), which I rented on VHS from Blast-Off Video in Atlanta, Georgia. The owner, Sam Patton, encouraged me to watch it and it was a revelation, not like his usual recommendations which were more likely to be softcore exploitation films like Doris Wishman’s Deadly Weapons (1974) starring Chesty Morgan and her 73 inch bust or a bizarre obscurity like The Manipulator aka B.J. Lang Presents (1971) with Mickey Rooney at his most demented. What I saw was nothing like what I had seen coming out of the Hong Kong film industry at that time – mostly martial arts action films and kinetic crime thrillers such as John Woo’s The Killer (1989). No, Days of Being Wild is a lush, sensual cinematic poem, a visually innovative tale of unrequited longing, one-sided relationships and melancholy reflections on life as it was in Hong Kong in 1960, the year the movie takes place. 

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A Twist of Dickens

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With the release of Brief Encounter in 1945, David Lean became the preeminent British director of his generation. But the critical and popular success of that bittersweet postwar romance (it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered three Oscar nominations) was overshadowed by an even greater achievement, his film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1946). The latter secured his reputation on an international scale and received five Oscar nominations, winning statuettes for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography. What to do for an encore? Instead of moving in a new direction, Lean surprised everyone by agreeing to do another Charles Dickens adaptation – a film version of Oliver Twist (1948).

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Nazi Zombies, White Slave Traders, Cannibal Cults and More from Eurocine

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Exploitation films in every imaginable genre from the late fifties to the mid-eighties attracted a specific kind of viewer that enabled U.S. companies like American International Pictures (AIP) and Crown International Pictures to become profitable enterprises through drive-in and grindhouse saturation and later the VHS market. By spicing up their low-budget productions with more sex, violence and subject matter Hollywood avoided, these minor players provided a wildly diverse alternative to mainstream commercial cinema but it wasn’t unique to America alone. Europe also got into the act and the French company Eurocine went from obscurity to cult status for some of its more infamous hits like The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), Red Hot Zorro (1972), White Cannibal Queen (1980) and Zombie Lake (1982). A behind-the-scenes look at the company’s history and Marius Lesoeur, the man who made it an international brand, is the focus of Eurocine 33 Champs-Elysees (2013), an entertaining and often amusing French documentary which is named after the company’s address in Paris.

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A Monument to Objectivism

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If you look up the word melodrama in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the description reads “a work (such as a movie or play) characterized by extravagant theatricality.” The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries offers a similar definition: “a story, play, or novel that is full of exciting events and in which the characters and emotions seem too exaggerated to be real.” Some popular examples of this in the movies would have to include The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and The Best of Everything (1959). But they are some films in this category that are so excessive in tone and style that they belong in their own category of extreme melodrama. Among the more glaring examples of this are Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956), The Caretakers (1963), which is set in a psychiatric hospital where Joan Crawford teaches karate, the Tinseltown expose The Oscar (1966), and four films – yes, four! – from director King Vidor: Duel in the Sun (1946), Beyond the Forest (1949) with Bette Davis, Ruby Gentry (1952) starring Jennifer Jones, and my personal favorite, The Fountainhead (1949), which scales dazzling heights in operatic excess.

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The Double Life of Tokiko

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By day Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) works as a typist in a business firm but after dark she frequents the favorite haunts of gangsters with her yakuza boyfriend in DRAGNET GIRL (1933), directed by Yasujiro Ozu.

Tokiko works as a typist in a business office where Okazki, the owner’s son, is the office manager. He is smitten with his employee and often flirts with her behind closed doors in his private office. Tokiko manages to keep him at bay even though he showers her with gifts and offers her an engagement ring. What Okazki doesn’t know is that Tokiko leads a completely different life after work when she sheds her office worker identity and transforms into a chic underworld player with a gangster boyfriend, Joji. Tokiko not only supports Joji with her day job but also serves as his partner in crime in various money-making schemes. From this brief description you probably wouldn’t suspect that the Japanese crime drama, Hijosen no Onna (English title: Dragnet Girl, 1933), was directed by the celebrated Yasujiro Ozu, but it is an early and surprising entry in his filmography before he became famous for his portraits of Japanese family life in such post-WW2 movies as Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951) and his 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story.

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A Village Memoir

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Some of the world’s most famous directors have made autobiographical features at some point in their careers with their childhood, family life or home town as the central focus. We have seen this in Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022). Some directors even made their film debut with an autobiographical feature such as Francois Truffaut with The 400 Blows (1959) and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan can lay claim to this as well with Kasaba (English title: The Small Town, 1997), which is based on a short story by his sister Emin Ceyland entitled Cornfield. The movie depicts family life in a rural village in Turkey as seen through the eyes of a girl, Asiye, and her younger brother, Ali.  

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The Rotten Are Coming for You!

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For my annual Halloween horror pick, I am highlighting a contemporary film, one that is currently playing in theaters, and not a horror classic from the past. Cuando Acecha la Maldad (U.S. title, When Evil Lurks, 2023) is the sixth feature film for Argentine director Demian Rugna, which includes his 2011 movie Malditos Sean! (U.S. title, Cursed Bastards), co-written and directed with Fabian Forte. This is a movie about demonic possession but it has little in common with the most famous film in that horror subgenre, The Exorcist (1973), with one exception: we never learn how or why the evil entity goes about choosing the victim that launches the ensuring madness. The nightmare starts with a bang – literally – as two farmer brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimi (Demian Salomon) hear gunshots on their neighbor’s property. When they investigate the following day, they discover that a member of their neighbor’s family is a “rotten,” a possessed being, and no one knows how to deal with it. When the brothers ask wealthy landowner Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski) and his pregnant wife for help, they inadvertently set in motion a series of actions that not only release the evil spirit but help it spread like a virus.  

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Class Conscious

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Family holidays can be a joy or an ordeal depending on the family. In British director Joanna Hogg’s second theatrical feature, Archipelago (2010), the Leighton family start their holiday on an upbeat note. Patricia (Kate Fahy) and her daughter Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) have rented their favorite vacation home from past visits on the island of Tresco (which is part of the Isles of Scilly archipelago) as a farewell gathering for Cynthia’s brother Edward (Tom Hiddleston). He is taking a break from his job in the city to do volunteer work in Africa and his mother and sister want to give him a memorable send-off. William, Edward’s father, is on his way to join them and family friend and artist Christopher (Christopher Baker) is staying nearby and will be on hand to mentor Patricia on her painting and sketching endeavors and join them for outings. What could possibly go wrong for such a privileged family in idyllic surroundings?

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Not a Beauty Treatment

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It’s not likely that a Poverty Row horror film like The Face of Marble (1946) will ever end up on anyone’s top ten list – unless the category is guilty pleasures – but that’s what distinguishes a movie like this from a title on the AFI approved list of great American classics. A cult movie rarely conforms to conventional standards of what’s good and what’s bad and that’s why The Face of Marble could be a more entertaining and challenging viewing experience than say, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963). For one thing, you need a scorecard to keep track of the anything-goes-plot which ties together failed scientific experiments, reanimated corpses, a blood-drinking ghost dog that can walk through walls, a voodoo-practicing housekeeper and one woman’s hopeless, unrequited romantic obsession with her husband’s young assistant.

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