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99 and 44/100% Dead! (1974)
Sociological Gangster satire for the pop-art age.
Robert Dillon's script was considered by producer Joe Wizan to be a black comedy along the lines of Dillon's earlier one for "Prime Cut" (1972: d. Michael Ritchie). Director Frankenheimer, on returning to the USA after much time in France, was faced with a situation wherein years of bad reviews of his films were taking their toll. He accepted this project, and wanted Robert Mitchum for the main role, but the producers wanted Richard Harris, fresh from the hit film "A Man Called Horse".
Critically however, the released film was felt to be a total fiasco, many reviewers holding that it represented the director's career at rock bottom. The film's dark, bleak humour and use of caricature were considered testimony to a certain sadism on Frankenheimer's part, and evidence of his growing contempt. In later years, even the great director plays down this most unusual gangster satire.
It concerns a hitman trapped between rival gangs, and takes place in a vaguely futuristic city, which seems spatially to constantly re-define itself. It is filmed obliquely, so one is never on sure footing as to how to react. What is most interesting about this peculiarity, are the number of bizarre, surrealistic pop-culture set-pieces in a world of futile violence and rampant egos. Only despair and nihilism at the absurdity of it all enables the characters to hold on to whatever shreds of honour they can maintain although they all succumb to personal pride at the expense of everything else.
Frankenheimer directs with a stylistic over-kill at times which sits uneasily with a certain lethargic quality, although it probably guarantees the film a cult audience in the future. Perhaps the film is best seen as a failed, but intriguing attempt to reconcile the director's frequent recourse to stylization with genre-based social satire. Still, the film seems uncertain of its aims, and tends to flounder in its often considerable visual panache. The remarkable opening sequence however, is amongst the oddest ever put to film, and typifies the film's sense of comic despair. A curio.
Chato's Land (1972)
Cynical British Western attacks US Patriarchy.
After virtually inaugurating the British Western with 1970's "Lawman", director Michael Winner returned to the quintessential American genre in 1971, for this film, again scripted by Gerald Wilson. Wilson would be the scripter for many of the director's 1970s films. For "Chato's Land", they managed to attract star Charles Bronson, in the decade of his peak popularity. Winner and Bronson would work together many times over the next 15 years, most notably perhaps for "Death Wish".
The intention of this Western was to debunk the genre's notion of the validity of the social compact upon which social order is founded: ie. Patriarchy. Winner showed law and justice as emerging out of pettiness and boredom instead of any greater good. Thus, the traditional cowboy hero, and lawman, was a mere sadistic thug, with Indian Bronson being Winner's noble savage, using what Winner suggests is an innate violence to protect himself and his property. In that respect, one can see the influence of Sam Peckinpah.
Winner depicts Patriarchal codes as revealing only the base, bestial nature of man. And he does so with a gleeful relish that borders on sensationalism. Thus, the scaled to essentials plot of a Posse chasing down a renegade Indian, is a vehicle for the bitter condemnation of the American heritage. The brutality of both sides makes the film an intriguing companion piece of sorts to Robert Aldrich's much praised Vietnam allegory "Ulzana's Raid" which was released about the same time. However, it is unlikely that Winner will ever be accorded the same status as Aldrich.
To Winner, cinema is inherently sensationalist, and he lingers on every unpleasant detail with lurid and distorted angles. Justice is a concept here equated, much as in Aldrich's film, with a sport, a hunt and kind of boy's night out with the guns. But, further than that, Winner suggests that justice is ironically based on the need to counter or indulge man's inherently brutal nature, prone to sadism and revenge. It is an amoral and cynical film wherein Winner takes the themes of his previous Western, about a man obsessed with the law to the point where he becomes a danger, and shuffles them in favour of the outlaw. Jack Palance's vile lawman in "Chato's Land" is the end result of Burt Lancaster's character in "Lawman". Justice is personalized and twisted into violent expression.
This film, like most Michael Winner films, has very little critical reputation behind it, but has a stark, raw quality that borders on the exploitational. What is perhaps disturbing is the humour with which violence, especially sexual violence, is treated by Winner,who seeks to make the audience participate in such violation, but not for moral aims: just for kicks.
Incubus (1981)
Disturbing view of repulsive heterosexuality.
John Hough's horror films are a mixed bunch, but this one is far more interesting than its horrendous critical reception would suggest. It is ostensibly a detective story of a small town policeman (John Cassavetes) investigating a series of unusually vicious rape homicides. Hough uses the structure to raise some provocative questions about penetration as violation. Sex and violence as one, forged and bonded in repression, resentment, sadism and envy.
The film is riddled with hints of the incestuous desire the protagonist has for his daughter. Hough thus plays with audience identification, seeking to implicate the viewer in a repulsive sexuality which, in a graphic morgue-table scene of a naked female cadaver, extends to incorporate necrophilia. The otherwise conventional plot is spiced up by a contemplation of p.o.v. as moderating aberrant sexuality. No wonder that critics and audiences found the film overly offensive and distasteful. Undeterred, Hough would treat similar themes in his equally maligned "American Gothic".
Graphic, contemplative and unrelenting in its bleakly oppressive visual style, this is a disturbing film experience: one of the more confrontational of taboo-breakers dealing with the always problematic theme of sexual homicide.
Intriguingly enough, the film has some elements in common with Wes Craven's "Deadly Blessing" released around the same time, and dealing with sex crime, isolated communities, deceptive innocence, female independence and role expectations, and the other-worldly demon, the Incubus.
Race for the Yankee Zephyr (1981)
Lively, refreshing adventure forced under by Spielberg.
On the one hand, it is possible to view this film only as an attempt to make a star out of Ken Wahl, whose "The Soldier" had some box-office success. However, the film is infinitely more intresting if taken as an action-adventure in the mold that Spielberg would adopt for "Raiders of the Lost Ark", a film which when released around the same time, served to bury "Race" for all but the dilligent. Certainly the film is similar in certain respects, and may be seen as the first of the imitators, its plot and characters anticipating Robert Zemeckis' hit adventure, "Romancing the Stone". But it is individual enough to warrant some attention.
It was a US/Australia/New Zealand co-production, made by English actor/director David Hemmings on marvellous New Zealand locations. The story focuses on two helicopter pilots and hunters who search for the wreckage of an American plane reported missing during World War II, and carrying a large amount of gold and money. Naturally as the villains appear (led by dapper George Peppard), the film becomes a chase scenario in an agreeably old-fashioned mode, populated by eccentrics.
Donald Pleasance effortlessly steals his scenes, with a characterization resembling that in John Sturges' western epic comedy, "The Hallelujah Trail" some fifteen years earlier. And tpical of the movie's allusive nature, the music score by Brian May ("Mad Max") pays tribute to the theme from John Sturges' "The Great Escape", in which Pleasance also starred.
With sundrenched visuals, and a Europeanized use of open-frame compositions, this adventure is used by Hemmings to explore the lengths to which people are prepared to go to to justify their self-image and self-indulgence. It is less about obsession than about pride. Spielberg would also examine this theme in his later films, as would Hemmings, but to vastly different results.
In many respects, it is a minor film, and unlikely to come under any retrospective scrutiny. But for what it sets out to be, it is lean, charming and entertaining in a way that many film's strive for, but rarely achieve. A curiosity, for completists.
Golden Needles (1974)
Strange martial arts/fantasy/detective concoction.
Director Robert Clouse's career has been overshadowed by 1973's "Enter the Dragon" which was in part, an attempt to incorporate elements of Chinese and Hong Kong cinema into the American formula. Some two decades before John Woo et.al made the leap to Hollywood, producer Raymond Chow (head of Golden Harvest) teamed with Clouse many times in the 1970s, repeatedly spiking cross-cultural martial arts and detective actioners. "Golden Needles" was another such attempt to fuse American and Hong Kong action film conventions: this film being a comedic, actionful, fantasy version of the classic "Maltese Falcon". Joe Don Baker starred as an American in Hong Kong, who for a favour and a price, attempts to track down a priceless idol. This idol is one of the strangest McGuffins in the movies: it is pierced by needles in a specific pattern, and if the acupuncture is performed on a man, in the same pattern as marked on the idol, renewed sexual vigour results. Thus, it is sought after by all manner of older men (including Burgess Meredith in one of his funniest roles). Whilst meant as entertainment, the film succeeds also as one of the strangest treatments of the theme of drug addiction so prevalent in 70s American film, and even Clouse's other work (especially "The Amsterdam Kill"). Boistered by an excellent, comical, music score by Lalo Schifrin, featuring piercing sounds to mimic the acupuncture motif, the film is an immensely enjoyable generic hybrid, free from pretension, and a shining example of B-movie pleasures. Self-consciously, and never heavy-handedly, Clouse uses the genre conventions to frame a study of the US cultural appropriation of foreign practices (the Asian connection being the supplier of heroin ironically enough). Progressively weirder and with a protagonist whose easy-going sense of adventure becomes ever more sobering as he proceeds, this film is a true oddity, and all the better for it. Clouse's handling serves as a neat reminder of the time when he was still an innovator in B-movies, instead of the mere imitator he had become by the beginning of the 1980s.
Blood Diner (1987)
Subversive Necrophile Comedy
Of director Jackie Kong's four films to date, this is by far the best. Intended as a tribute to the so-called father of gore, Hershell Gordon Lewis, and initially planned as a sequel to his classic splatter film "Blood Feast", Kong's effort emerges as a gruesome and rather nihilistic black comedy. What is most noteworthy about the film however is the degree to which Kong's style both stresses the infantilism of the genre's fascination with human viscera, and suggests the necrophilic lusts which are thus inherent in the depiction of the dismemberment of women. No-one could call this film politically correct, and Kong's approach often borders on the jokily inept, approaching a rather unfortunate level of camp. Nonetheless, few films embrace the theme as whole-heartedly as here, and Kong sustains the tone well enough to make her point. Whether that point is worth making, well... That the film is ostensibly a comedy makes those moments in it that work a disturbingly subversive near-celebration and eroticism of homicidal mania. Ultimately, Kong's direction is not up to the subtext, but the effort is commendable, and marks "Blood Diner" an unusually provocative look at the most disreputable of film genres, if not as self-reflexive as one would think. While in no way as extreme as the films of Jorg Buttgereit ("Nekromantik"), or as charmless as Joseph Zito's similarly necro-influenced "Friday the 13th Final Chapter", its low budget energy births a bleak comedy which holds human nature as vile, sadistic, petty and childish. There are no sympathetic characters, and ultimately no escape from the film's darker implications. To call the film ambitious is only partly accurate as there is very little in Kong's filmography to suggest such a coherent approach as here. The film is rather, a peculiarity, well worth a look, for those intrigued by how such aberrant practices can be eroticized.