Out of all the films I've been lucky to view, Singapore Sling (1990-also reviewed) has been the only movie where I looked online afterwards, to find out if the director had a mental breakdown during production. This is due to how off the wall the transgressive black and white Noir Horror (not Giallo!) was. Spotting a Sci-Fi film by the film maker appearing in ICM lists for best films of 1987,I joined the morning patrol.
View on the film:
The second reel in what became the loose "The Shape of the Coming Nightmare" trilogy, writer/director Nikos Nikolaidis plays his love of Neo-Noir which would become off the wall in Singapore Sling (1990),into the apocalypse by masterfully sowing extracts of Raymond Chandler/ Philip K. Dick/ Herman Raucher and Daphne Du Maurier's works into his own dialogue, that gives the Post-Apocalypse landscape Nikolaidis paints,the philosophical doom-laden weight of Film Noir. A future where no one has a number,Nikolaidis pulls the partnership between "Woman" and one of the Morning Patrol guards with a rustic earthiness, reflected in Women expressing herself via inner monologue,and the clipped dialogue of the Morning Patrol guard stabbing the decayed anxiety of stepping into other wasteland areas guarded by fellow Morning Patrol's.
Bringing the extracts read as dialogue into focus, director Nikolaidis & cinematographer Dinos Katsouridis cleverly place flickering images of Film Noir titles playing on TV and at a cinema with no projectionist in sight, which touch on the flickering memory Woman and everyone else has to a present which was not bleeding with the bleakness of Film Noir. Scanning over burnt out buildings and rusted metal in stylish long panning shots,Nikolaidis closely works with composer Giorgos Hatzinasios and sound mixer Thanassis Arvanitis in washing over the viewer a hypnotic, ambient atmosphere, crackling on the sparse sound of running against the drenched backdrop of the Post-Apocalypse,before the sun comes up,and it is time for the morning patrol.
View on the film:
The second reel in what became the loose "The Shape of the Coming Nightmare" trilogy, writer/director Nikos Nikolaidis plays his love of Neo-Noir which would become off the wall in Singapore Sling (1990),into the apocalypse by masterfully sowing extracts of Raymond Chandler/ Philip K. Dick/ Herman Raucher and Daphne Du Maurier's works into his own dialogue, that gives the Post-Apocalypse landscape Nikolaidis paints,the philosophical doom-laden weight of Film Noir. A future where no one has a number,Nikolaidis pulls the partnership between "Woman" and one of the Morning Patrol guards with a rustic earthiness, reflected in Women expressing herself via inner monologue,and the clipped dialogue of the Morning Patrol guard stabbing the decayed anxiety of stepping into other wasteland areas guarded by fellow Morning Patrol's.
Bringing the extracts read as dialogue into focus, director Nikolaidis & cinematographer Dinos Katsouridis cleverly place flickering images of Film Noir titles playing on TV and at a cinema with no projectionist in sight, which touch on the flickering memory Woman and everyone else has to a present which was not bleeding with the bleakness of Film Noir. Scanning over burnt out buildings and rusted metal in stylish long panning shots,Nikolaidis closely works with composer Giorgos Hatzinasios and sound mixer Thanassis Arvanitis in washing over the viewer a hypnotic, ambient atmosphere, crackling on the sparse sound of running against the drenched backdrop of the Post-Apocalypse,before the sun comes up,and it is time for the morning patrol.