Sweet Movie (1974, Dušan Makavejev)

The film consists of two separate narratives. It starts off well with a beauty contest for the vaginas of virgins with a billionaire marrying the winner. He reveals his gold penis and urinates on her while people watch through the window. She is packed in a trunk bound for Paris, where she meets and has intercourse with a Latin singer. The sexual act is interrupted by nuns who frighten the lovers into bulbus glandis. The second story involves a woman sailing a candy-filled boat down a river, with a massive papier-mache head of Karl Marx on the prow and a lover onboard who is from the Battleship Potemkin. She eventually does a seductive striptease for a group of children, then has sex with her paramour in a vat of sugar before stabbing him. A scene at a dinner table where people spit their food at each other, kiss, gargle, vomit and urinate stands as one of the most disgustingly off-putting I have seen. The film also features defecation and footage of remains of the Polish Katyn Massacre victims. For its time it must have been pretty shocking, it’s far more extreme than the terminally dull Flaming Creatures and is clearly influenced by the Vienna Actionists, of which Otto Muehl stars. Not surprisingly it was banned in many countries. It’s been described as a political comedy but I found it neither funny nor could I decipher any point to the proceedings. There are some interesting visuals but it’s far too randomly nonsensical to keep interest after the first 10 minutes.
2/5
DVD Released by Criterion

Torso (1973, Sergio Martino)

Released in Italy with the far better title Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence. A masked, hacksaw wielding killer is preying on female students at an Italian University. With each murder we see a brief flashback to a child’s hand mutilating a doll. The killer molests their breasts after death. Daniela starts to believe she is even more at risk because she recalls seeing someone wearing the same red and black scarf the killer used to strangle one of the victims. She can’t remember who was wearing the scarf but it is only a matter of time before she recalls his face. Her and her friends hole up in an isolated mountain top villa. Unfortunately the killer has followed them. Suspicion is mainly aimed at a boy who has a crush on Daniela. Towards the end the film improves, with Jane (Suzy Kendall) waking to discover all her friends murdered and watching them being dismembered. However, because she had featured so little until this point in the film, I found it hard to care for the character or her plight, though the scene still managed to be the most tense of the movie. Lamely, her survival rests on the intervention of a male hero. The murderer is revealed to be a random character from earlier in the film but we are given the full flash back of a child’s death involving a doll explaining the motive, which was my favourite part of the film. While it seems cliché now, the film came out before most American slasher films like Friday the 13th (though after The Last House on the Left) but while keeping that in mind, the storyline is still bad, the gore is unrealistic, the dubbing is poor and the film is cheesy and mostly ineffective in achieving scares, though it’s still a better film than most giallos. The music by Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis is stereotypical but effective.
Available for the first time uncut in the UK now thanks to Shameless Films but also available uncut in the US thanks to Anchor Bay
2.5/5

Nostalghia (1983, Andrei Tarkovsky)

Yet another self-indulgent Tarkovsky movie where very little happens. Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) has travelled to Italy to research the life of a Russian composer who spent time there before committing suicide on his return to Russia. Gorchakov meets madman Erland who locked his family in the house for seven years for their own safety before someone broke the door down and they escaped. Gorchakov then spends about 10 minuted trying to carry a lit candle across a pool. There is a lot of beauty in the film but minimal story, pseudo-intellectual dialogue (as if every character in the film is a brain dead philosophy student) and the excessively long takes make it one of the most frustratingly dull films ever made. He would have been better off directing music videos for goth bands.
0/5

The Frightened Woman (1969, Piero Schivazappa)

Dagmar Lassander plays Maria, a journalist writing an article on male sterilization and Philippe Leroy plays a cold robot-like sadistic villain who claims to like killing women at the point of climax. He detains her in his apartment and sexually, physically and psychologically abuses her. If Alejandro Jodorowsky or Dario Argento had directed The Collector it would have been something like this. A sadistic film but never even approaching torture-porn, it is more influenced by 60s experimentalism of films like Blow Up than horror and the dialogue is far more intelligent than a typical giallo film, overtly dealing with sexual politics. The most memorable element of the film is undoubtedly the visually arresting distinctly 60’s art deco production design somewhere between A Clockwork Orange and Barbarella. After a tense first hour the film suddenly descends into a cutesy love scene which even includes their car working as a boat and sailing across a lake. This last third of the film is whimsically absurd, with the woman undergoing what can be assumed to be Stockholm syndrome, and while this somewhat ruins the film, it is followed by a strong ending that further surprises. An entirely unique movie.
4/5

Secret Ceremony (1968, Joseph Losey)

It’s a wonder that 3 big name stars agreed to be in such a dementedly perverted film. Cenci (Mia Farrow) sees Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) on a bus and due to an uncanny likeness to her deceased mother, adopts her. Leonora is a prostitute in mourning for her dead child and moves into the mansion of the psychologically disturbed child where the two develop a strained mother-daughter relationship with hints of lesbianism until the girls lecherous stepfather shows up. If the ridiculousness of the set-up doesn’t deter you, it’s an enjoyably bitchy, over-the-top camp film, though slightly slow paced. Taylor often borders on her shrieking insanity of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Robert Mitchum is great as Cenci’s paedophile stepfather but my favourite characters were the two evil aunts straight out of a Roald Dahl book. The opulent decadence strikes a resemblance to the director’s earlier film The Servant but this is far less restrained.
3.5/5

A Single Man (2009, Tom Ford)

A completely unimaginative story about a grieving Colin Firth who shares some desperately-trying-to-be-deep dialogue with a twink. Firth is stuck in a perpetual frown in a miserable and boring movie that screams Oscar-bait. It seems more like a classy advert for a fragrance or clothing line than a serious movie. If this had been about a heterosexual man it would have garnered zero interest from anybody.
0/5

The Time of the Wolf (2003, Michael Haneke)

I’m sure Haneke is far too supercilious to ever watch films like Romero’s Dead series or 28 Days Later, and to therefore realize how cliché this depressing, pretentious slow moving film is. The film doesn’t say anything that isn’t clear in any other post apocalypse film, even a Roland Emmerich movie, but insists on being po-faced while leading to an intended but still lazy and dissatisfying lack of resolution. The last scene is the most conceited piece of celluloid since Tarkovsky. The constant blackness is dreary to look at and the performances are the only saving grace but unfortunately there is little character development. While perhaps more realistic than most movies in this genre, it achieves this by excising plot and action or anything else that could be considered entertaining and has been done far better in both Threads and The Day After.
0/5

Caged Heat (1974, Jonathan Demme)

Roger Corman produced the early features of Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha), Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13), Ron Howard (Grand Theft Auto), and James Cameron (Piranha II: The Spawning) and this debut of director Jonathan Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto who would go on to make The Silence of the Lambs among other films. It’s a Women In Prison film involving electro shock-therapy, a doctor who drugs a patient, takes off her clothes, then touches her while taking Polaroids, some ridiculously lame dream sequences, a large amount of naked shower scenes and a catfight on shower floor. While that makes it sound rather exciting, it’s all so sloppily acted and low budget that it’s just a boring mess, though horror icon Barbara Steele is coldly effective as the warden. The directors’ future credits made me curious to see the film but it is a typical b-movie mish-mash of breasts and uninspired hokey action sequences. The film takes a tongue-in-cheek comedic approach to the genre but the comedy is cringe-worthy. Some reviewers seem to think that the script is laced with politics and feminism but in actuality it is a stupid apolitical film and Demme’s dialogue is abysmal. John Cale of the Velvet Underground provides a surprisingly average nondescript soundtrack.
2/5

I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998, Aris Iliopulos)

Based on Ed Wood final script which took him 10 years to write, the film opens as Billy Zane's character is injecting a nurse in the mental ward he is locked up in before stealing her clothes and escaping. He holds up a loan office, killing the manager but escaping with the loot. He comes across a funeral with an odd assortment of mourners and thinks that a coffin would be a good place to hide the money. The coffin lid slams shut, locking his money inside, and throwing him into an open grave, knocking him unconscious. Zane then tracks down the mourners and dispatches them in an attempt to find his money. While Billy Zane’s over acting is understandable for a silent film the childish slapstick humour and dodgy sound effects are annoying. The only things that makes the film vaguely interesting are the eclectic soundtrack spanning from drum and bass to punk and a cast including Ron Perlman, Christina Ricci, Tara Reid, Sandra Bernhard, Karen Black, Tippi Hedren, most of whom however are entirely wasted.

1.5/5

Rubber’s Lover (1996, Shozin Fukui)

A corporation is funding psychic experiments on human guinea pigs who are outfitted in rubber suits, given the drug ether and bombarded with intense sound and ‘Digital Direct Drive’. Though successful in unleashing psychic powers the experiments are graphically fatal for the test subjects. The corporation attempts to shut down the experiments and in desperation two researchers experiment on a third researcher, leading to all kinds of hard to follow chaos. The film is undoubtedly style over substance with no emotional involvement in characters. It’s somewhat like a Japanese cyberpunk version of Eraserhead with parallels in the body horror of David Cronenberg. Shot in Black and White, some of the visuals are pretty decent, including projectile vomiting, blood spray, and an overused rotating eyeball but the low budget is noticeable. It could have made a nice Nine Inch Nails music video circa Happiness in Slavery but it is never as striking as films like Begotten or the films clear influence Tetsuo and as a 90 minute film it gets tiresome rather quickly. The acting is uniformly awful and the amount of screaming in the film gets rather annoying. The industrial noise soundtrack by Tanizaki Tetora is undoubtedly the best thing about the film. The DVD from Unearthed films also includes the pathetic and pointless short film Gerorisuto and some awesome trailers.
2.5/5

Scanners 3- The Takeover (1992, Christian Duguay)

After accidentally killing his friend with his telekinetic power Alex goes to Thailand to meditate with monks. Meanwhile his sister Helena starts taking a new drug to relieve her scanner headaches but it turns her in to a megalomaniac psycho who goes on a killing spree and tries to take over the world with some fellow scanners also on the drug. Alex then returns to America to try and stop her building up to an annoyingly gore free finish. While the film is aware of and plays up to its stupidity and features the largest amount of ridiculous facial expressions in any film ever made, it still didn’t offer enough laughs or ‘so bad its good’ entertainment. I’m normally a fan of strong female characters but found Helena (Liliana Komorowska) both dull and annoying. I was not a fan of the original film but had heard this one had far more head explosions. We also get to witness a psychic pigeon explosion (the highlight of the film), finger detonation and varicose vein pulsing but its no Braindead and most of the gore was uncreative and without visual flair.
1/5

Firecracker (2004, Steve Balderson)

Jak Kendall plays the annoyingly meek Jimmy. Musician Mike Patton in his acting debut plays his brother David who dominates the family and rapes Jimmy. Their mother Eleanor is played like a sinister version of Requiem for a Dreams Ellen Burstyn by Karen Black, who also plays a circus singer Sandra, who was pregnant by David but forced to have a DIY abortion by the circus owner, also played by Patton, who genitally disfigures her. While Black uncannily plays two opposite characters Will Patton succeeds in neither part. I could not decipher a reason for the dual roles. A friendship develops between Sandra and Jimmy and he begs her to let him join the circus as her piano player. David is murdered and Susan Traylor plays the investigating officer. Brooke Baldersons plays a silly mystical character entirely unrelated to the plot and as a serious actress she fails. Visually it aims for David Lynch circa Wild at Heart but the constant shifting from black and white to colour just jarringly reminded me that I was watching a film. It has some of the overacting of Balderson excellent camp trash-fest Pep Squad but rarely aims for humour. While the first half of the film isn’t great, the second lags as we wait for the murder to be revealed and little else happens, though the film has its moments, including a Hitchcockian scene involving a washing line. The soundtrack consists of effective industrial noise and bad low budget over dramatic stereotypical film music. Appearances by The Enigma and Katzen are appreciated but the film is not got a patch on Santa Sangre or Freaks.
2.5/5

Forty Deuce (1982, Paul Morrissey)

The film consists of a 12 year old runaway some rent boys had been pimping dying in their bedroom and them discussing what they are going to do about it. They eventually invite a client over and drug him up in the hope that they can blame it on him. While the locations are grimy, there is nothing explicit in the film. Based on a play by Adam Bowne, to which its dialogue heavy nature must have been better suited, as the film is never ending repetitive talk. Unfortunately it is all rendered incomprehensible due to accents, slang and bad quality sound. While it is most famous for having a pre-fame greasy haired Kevin Bacon playing a junkie drug dealer the only interesting moments come from a female drug dealer’s deranged delivery of her lines and Orson Beans performance as a paedophile trick. It is nice to see 42nd street in New York back when it was a seedy cess pit but the film doesn’t have the comedy of Morrissey’s earlier and vastly superior Trash or Heat and its pace is mind numbingly dull.
1/5
Available from revengeismydestiny.com with foreign subtitles