Demon Pond: An Aquatic, Electrifying, Gender-Bending Folk Horror Fantasy from 1970s Japan

DEMON POND / Yasha Ga-Ike / 夜叉ヶ池

(Masahiro Shinoda, Japan, 1979, 124 minutes) 

Demon Pond is the kind of film that could get by strictly on aesthetic terms. 

 

It's such a feast for the eyes and ears, it almost wouldn't matter if there wasn't much story or if the story didn't make much sense. 

On the contrary, it makes perfect sense, not least since Pale Flower director Masahiro Shinoda treats the text like a poem. There are certain concepts and phrases that are repeated so often they become incantations of a kind, and not in an irritating way, but in a rhythmic, hypnotic way, specifically "demon pond," "dragon god," and the necessity of ringing a bell to keep the god complacent and the pond under control. 

I wouldn't have expected an adaptation of a 1913 Kabuki play to prove so coherent—particularly to those, like myself, who don't know much about Japanese folklore or Kabuki theater--let alone to have much in common with an American neo-noir from 1974 or a British sci-fi film from 1976, but the 1970s, throughout the industrialized world, were marked by high unemployment, rising food and energy costs, and battles over natural resources, particularly oil and steel. It's not completely surprising that cinema across the globe would reflect these concerns, however obliquely. 

Granted, when Izumi Kyōka wrote his original play, the economy was booming, though Japan was also meddling in the affairs of other Asian nations, and he had problems of his own involving poor health and a leaky rental home. Tsutomu Tamura and Haruhiko Mimura adapted his play for the 1979 film, while Keishi Nagatsuka adapted it for a live version filmed by Takashi Miike for a 2005 video release.

Demon Pond revolves around a community's compulsion to control their region's water source by any means necessary, directly linking it with Roman Polanski's Chinatown, in which John Huston's amoral business tycoon will do literally anything to control the flow of water into Los Angeles, and Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of the 1963 Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie's parched alien will travel as many lightyears as possible to slake his thirst. 

In a larger sense, it's a timeless concern since the human body is made up of 50-60% water. When our supply of the stuff evaporates, crops die, livestock die, and we die. That's the state in which Demon Pond begins. 

Our entry into this prewar world is bespectacled teacher and botanist Gakuen (Kurosawa favorite Tsutomu Yamazaki), who travels by train and by foot to Shikami, a remote, mountain village in the former Echizen Province to get a look at its storied Demon Pond. It's a legitimate impetus for his journey, except he also intends to track down Akira (matinee-idol handsome Gô Katô), a colleague who went missing three years before, possibly intentionally, and to convince him to return to modern society.

 

Once Gakuen arrives, it's as if he's entered a reverse Shangri-La, the mythical paradise from James Hilton's 1933 novel, which would inspire major motion pictures both very good and very bad. It's at this point that a clash begins between the modern and the rational and the ancient and the superstitious. 

I don't mean to burden this thoroughly Eastern tale with too many Western references, but in a sense, Gakuen is a sort of Captain Bligh to Akira's Fletcher Christian--Akira, in other words, has gone native--though they're both basically good guys with different belief systems, and they'll join forces when the village turns against them, but more on that later.

Gakuen has to find his friend first, which doesn't happen right away, and Shinoda hasn't even revealed his ulterior motive yet. The teacher explores the village, which appears to be abandoned, before he notices any people, none of whom are especially welcoming; the ongoing drought has put everyone in a foul mood. Gakuen is also thirsty after his long journey, and after wandering through a mist-enshrouded forest, he happens upon a bucolic spring—not the Demon Pond—in a clearing overlooking the village. 

 

There's a cozy cottage on one side and a belfry on the other, but he's mostly struck by the slim back of a woman in a pastel kimono and traditional nihongami hairstyle, leaning over the water, possibly gazing at her reflection.

 

Without turning around, she senses his presence and begins to speak. She has a sweet, halting voice, but there's something otherworldly about it; she doesn't sound male, but she doesn't sound completely female either. 

 

When she finally turns to face Gakuen, he gives a start, either due to her alabaster beauty or to the intensity of her gaze, possibly both. Like Akira before him, he's instantly enchanted by Yuri (Kabuki legend Tamasaburô Bandô), a dreamy, ethereal figure the villagers view with some suspicion. 

The moment I saw her face, it occurred to me that Bandô might be a man. I wasn't sure, and I watched the entire film without making any attempt to confirm my suspicion. Gender aside, it's paramount that the character works, and she does, marvelously. In Kabuki theater, much as in Elizabethan times, female parts are played by men. Yamazaki and Katô were veteran movie and television actors who knew how to perform for the camera, and they're both very good, whereas Bandô was a celebrated onnagata making his screen debut, and he definitely holds his own. 

 

In case you're wondering how the performance was received in the States, Janet Maslin, for one, was impressed. As she wrote in 1982, upon the film's New York premiere, "Mr. Bando, known simply as Tamasaburo in Japan, is a female impersonator of astonishing subtlety. As Yuri, the village woman, he is delicate and demure, speaking in a soft, feminine voice that is perhaps the most convincing part of his impersonation," adding that "he painstakingly imitates the manner of a woman and does it so unobtrusively that the audience may have to remind itself that this is no actress."

If Yuri didn't look completely female to me, this plays to the film's strengths, because the character's androgynous affect adds to her mystique. Is she human...or something else? Is she good...or bad? 

 

Like Margo (below) in Frank Capra's 1937 version of Lost Horizon, will she age rapidly and die instantly if she leaves Shikami? After all, Shinoda suggests she's rooted to the land in a way the other villagers aren't. 

 

At first, Gakuen seeks simply to rest and replenish before continuing on to the Demon Pond, but he's intrigued by Yuri, who is opaque in her responses, revealing almost nothing about herself. 

 

She means to be polite and hospitable, but it's clear that she would also like him to leave. It was unclear to me at this juncture whether Gakuen represented a threat to her livelihood or whether she represented a threat to his, but once he realizes he's being watched, the teacher uses delaying tactics to uncover what she's hiding, which leads him to her husband, a white-haired gentleman who rings the bell three times a day to keep the village from flooding. 

In short order, he finds that it's his old friend in disguise. Akira removes the wig, and tells his story. Unlike most plays, Shinoda uses brief, effective flashbacks throughout the film to fill in the characters' backstories; it's one of the ways he keeps things cinematic--the stunning cinematography from Noritaka Sakamoto and Pale Flower's Masao Kosugi is another. 

Like Gakuen, Akira entered the village as an explorer. En route to the Demon Pond, he met Yatabei (Jun Hamamura), who had been ringing the bell three times a day for 50 years. The bell keeper takes a shine to Akira, tasks him to carry on the tradition, and then dies. Akira feels obligated to honor his commitment, and when he meets and falls in love with Yuri, that's the end of that. He sets down roots, and despite their status as outcasts, puts aside all thoughts of returning to his humdrum life. 

 

The more the men reminisce, the more antsy Yuri becomes. She knows what Gakuen is up to, and doesn't want to lose the love of her life, not least since he's also her protector. When Akira agrees to accompany Gakuen to the Demon Pond, she fears he won't return. Fortunately, he does--but not quickly enough.

Lest that scare you away, rest assured that the villagers don't kill Yuri, but they do put her life in jeopardy. After gathering together to determine what to do about the drought, a fat-cat politician convinces his unworldly, uneducated constituents that a flood is the only solution, but it doesn't occur to them to question exactly what that entails. A flood isn't simply a heavy rain, but they've never experienced one before, and nor are they convinced that daily bell-ringing has kept one at bay--though they're willing to take the risk. Further, if the land surrounding the village isn't without water; they haven't found or sought a way to harness it, relying instead on rainwater wells rather than a modern plumbing system. 

Knowing their plan might fail, they decide to up the ante with a sacrifice. Naturally, only the most beautiful virgin will do. At first they settle on the daughter of Yoju (Hatsuo Yamaya), who Shinoda previously depicted poaching a fish from Yuri's property, but he and his wife insist that the village's young men have been having their way with her. This elicits snickers, not at the idea of a sexually-active young woman, but because they know just how aggressive their sons can be, and what they describe sounds more like rape than consensual sex. Not exactly a charming lot. 

 

Yoju then suggests the beautiful Yuri, which gives everyone pause. She may be married, but because they doubt her humanity, they agree that she's the perfect choice. It isn't stated explicitly, but they seem to think that her relationship with Akira is more spiritual than physical, even as they know she didn't emerge from the ether. Like everyone else, Yuri once had a mother and a father, except both had died before the story begins, and aside from the fact that she doesn't talk, dress, or move like the other village women who eschew her refined ways, she and her husband don't have any children in an era in which that would've been considered unusual, if not suspect. 

More unusually, Yuri spends her time alone talking to a porcelain doll she cradles like an infant. We can interpret all of this as we wish, and the villagers don't remark on any of it, but Shinoda prioritizes showing over telling, and I never felt he was winking at the audience about Bandô's gender. The screenplay doesn't suggest that Yuri could be a man or even a true androgyne, and nor does the actor play her that way; she's a woman, full stop, though just when it seems as if her relationship with Akira exists on a higher or alternate plane, the two share a long, passionate kiss. 

At first I thought the actors might be miming, like Will Smith in Fred Schepisi's John Guare adaptation Six Degrees of Separation--who agreed to play a gay character on screen, but refused to kiss costar Anthony Michael Hall--but as the camera moves from the back to the side and then right up next to the couple, it becomes clear that they're really kissing. 

 

Since Bandô was a Kabuki superstar, I doubt it harmed his reputation, but it may have represented a risk for Katô, though I don't know if it caused any controversy. At least Demon Pond saw release in 1979 rather than, say, 1959. Japanese cinema was hardly tame in the 1970s what with the bold visions of Shinoda's New Wave peers Shōhei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima, even if societal norms weren't progressing quite as rapidly. 

Before the villagers arrive at Yuri's cottage with their torches, much like the witch-hunters of 17th-century Salem, Shinoda introduces the animistic  creatures of the Demon Pond in an elaborate sequence that plays like a cross between Powell and Pressburger's take on Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann and "The Devil in the Dark" episode of Star Trek. 

 

In other words, it splits the difference between the fantastical and the stage-bound, and the glorious score from composer Isao Tomita, a master of Moog and Mellotron, even evokes Jerry Goldsmith's haunting Trek theme when he adds a ghostly choir. At other times, Tomita specifically references Modest Mussorgsky and especially Claude Debussy, much as he had done on his landmark 1974 album, Snowflakes Are Dancing.

 

At first, the artifice disappointed me after all those realistic locations, but I warmed up to it. If Shinoda had constructed the entire film in this lysergic manner, Demon Pond might have developed a cult following like Nobuhiko Obayashi's immortal House from two years before. He's gathered every kind of creature, from anthropomorphic crabs and catfish, slathered them in greasepaint and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters-style costumes and surrounded them with gnarled coral foliage, and yet the ground is clearly a wooden stage coated with black semi-gloss.

The real star of the underwater show, however, is Yuki, the dragon princess--played by Tamasaburô Bandô in glamorous garb, including a glittering gold crown. By ringing the bell three times a day, Akira has been keeping his wife and fellow villagers safe, but unbeknownst to him, he has also been keeping the princess imprisoned. Yuki has a love of her own, but she can't fly away to be with him unless Akira stops ringing the bell. Taken literally, this arrangement confirms Yuri's earthliness, while also suggesting a psychic connection between the two women, since they look alike, their names are similar, and of course, they're played by the same actor. 

I won't say what happens to Gakuen, Akira, or Yuri, only that the ringing stops, unleashing the kind of tsunami that could stop Godzilla in his tracks. This shouldn't come as a spoiler, since the film has been leading up to it for almost two hours, hence the repeated warnings about the bell's magical properties. The bigger question is how it affects everyone, both above and below the water, and whether or not Shinoda was able to pull it off. 

 

Considering that the new Criterion Collection release comes with an entire featurette about Nobuo Yajima's effects work with miniature sets and optical printing, it's fair to say that he does. Though computer-generated imagery can provide more photo-realistic phenomena, practical or analog effects provide a tactical quality that computers can't quite duplicate. What started as a folk horror fantasy with a psychological thriller vibe shifts into full-on action-adventure-meets-disaster movie mode once all watery hell breaks loose. 

While Demon Pond was in production in Japan, an American actress named Dena Dietrich was starring in a nine-year series of television commercials for Chiffon margarine that are imprinted on the psyche of every viewer glued to the tube in the 1970s, because although we may not have been paying much attention to the product she was shilling--I wasn't, at any rate--her catch phrase became an instant and enduring classic: "It's not nice," she cautioned mock-ominously, "to fool Mother Nature." 

In a manner of speaking, that's exactly what the villagers do. Decades, possibly even hundreds of years before, representatives of the real and spiritual realms had formed a covenant. By messing with a protocol designed to keep things in alignment, they set a demon loose. 

Demon Pond, which is filled with water imagery, uses the substance to symbolize life and death. As long as we have it, we live, but if we lose it, we die, except the film's true subject is love. We can literally live without it, but is that really living? In Masahiro Shinoda's lush, romantic, bigger-than-life take on Izumi Kyōka's text, the answer is a resounding No.

 

Demon Pond, in a 4K restoration overseen by Shinoda and Tamasaburô Bandô, is out now on The Criterion Collection. 

 

Extra features include an enlightening interview with scholar Dudley Andrew on Shinoda's career and an essay on the film from critic Michael Atkinson. 

 

Images from Janus Films (Bandô as Yuki and as Yuri with Gô Katô), the IMDb (Tsutomu Yamazaki and Mexican-American actress Margo Albert), Japononfilm (Yuri with doll), Reactor (William Shatner in "The Devil in the Dark"), and Festival de Cannes (Yuki and the creatures of the pond).

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s 1973 Messiah of Evil: Drive-In Fare with Artistic Flare

MESSIAH OF EVIL 

(Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, USA, 1973, 90 minutes) 

"My father always said that you're about to wake up when you dream that you're dreaming."–Marianna Hill's Arletty 

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's freaky melodrama Messiah of Evil is of its place and yet placeless. The Los Angeles couple made the film in 1971, and set it along the Southern California coast--it was filmed in Malibu, Venice, and Echo Park--except it feels more like the Euro-cult films coming from France, Belgium, and Italy than other American horror films of the '70s.

Huyck and Katz, associates of George Lucas–with whom Huyck went to USC–even named leading lady Marianna Hill "Arletty," a reference to the French star of Marcel Carné’s epic wartime picture Children of Paradise. Plus, it's a name you never hear in the United States–or at least I never have. 

The film opens in grindhouse mode with a bleeding man (director Walter Hill!), scared out of his wits, running down a suburban street late at night. He collapses at a well-appointed home where he sees a preteen at the door who seems sympathetic to his plight. She watches as he falls to the ground and walks toward him. He looks at her expectantly as she leans down, presumably to help him back up on his feet. Instead, she slashes his throat. And the credits commence. We'll never see either character again. 

Huyck and Katz then shift to the hallway of a mental institute, an iconic shot with a blurry, shimmering figure in the distance, who becomes recognizable as an attractive woman as she moves down the hall and toward the light (I've seen versions of this eerie sequence in other horror films since). Her voice-over, which will continue throughout the film, begins at this juncture as she explains that "they did something" to her.

The directors then flash back to whatever the hell brought her to this place. She recounts the story, but it isn't clear who she's talking to, if anyone, and whether or not it really happened; the clues, however, indicate that it did. The man in the prologue, for instance, isn't part of her remembrance.

Arletty then describes the series of strange letters she had been receiving from her artist father, Joseph (Electra Glide in Blue's Royal Dano), who lives in Point Dune, where she grew up (I don't recall mention of a mother). With each letter, he grows more paranoid, so she hits the road to check in on him. Instead of having her read the letters, the directors hand this portion of the voiceover to Dano. It's one of the reasons the film feels like a mid-century melodrama–strip the horror elements away, and it's an extended conversation between a concerned daughter and an imperiled father.

Our heroine hasn't even entered Point Dune before things get weird. The gas station attendant (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's Charles Dierkop), for instance, is more interested in playing with his rifle than assisting customers, but when Arletty arrives, followed by a Black albino in a red pickup (Bennie Robinson, who made one film and became immortal), the attendant helps her first and then him. When the man steps away, the attendant peeks under the tarp in the back to find three red-eyed, white-faced stiffs. After that, he tries to act normally while sending Arletty on her way, but the attendant and another ghoulish guest will soon have a tussle--like Arletty, the driver is also headed to Port Dune. 

Once she arrives at Joseph's house, she finds it locked, so Arletty breaks in, and makes herself at home. Her father is nowhere to be seen, but his floor-to-ceiling paintings cover every wall of the main room, a studio with a bed on a platform suspended from the ceiling. Jack Fisk, soon to become Terrence Malick's trusty production designer, did the honors, while Joan Mocine, Katz's UCLA roommate, provided the paintings, which depict empty malls and men in suits, both recalling and predicting Romero's Night and Dawn zombie films, except Huyck told Mike White of The Projection Booth that he was more inspired by Universal horror (this interview is included with the 2023 Radiance Blu-ray). He and Katz were also fans of Antonioni. 

Nonetheless, after they ran out of money and moved on to American Graffiti, for which they wrote the screenplay, a Chicago distributor would release it under the title Return of the Living Dead to capitalize on the similarities. Romero's production company took legal action, and the title went away. 

At her father’s beach house, a Malibu location that appeared in Michael Curtiz's mother-daughter melodrama Mildred Pierce, Arletty finds a diary with more insane ramblings, but no other clues, so she sets out to meet with a few people who might know where her father has gone. None of them do, but they're all quite entertaining–this is just that kind of film–including a shifty gallery worker (Morgan Fisher), a wild-eyed wino (Elisha Cook, Jr.), and Thom, a folklorist and dandy (cabaret performer Michael Greer from Fortune and Men's Eyes) and his lady loves, Laura, a stylish model (The Big Bird Cage's Anitra Ford) and Toni, a sporty teenager (Maidstone's Joy Bang in the final film of her five-year career). 

If Arletty was more pragmatic, she might meet with a cop, a detective, or even a private eye, except she doesn't, though they'll come calling when the body of a middle-aged man washes up on the shore. Before she even has the chance to make her next move, she wakes up one night to the sounds of an intruder. Instead of Joseph, she finds Thom, Laura, and Toni. At first, it seems as if they might mean to do her harm, but they're just free-lovin' freeloaders looking for a place to crash. They're also looking for adventure. 

One night, Laura heads into town on her own. When the albino trucker offers her a ride, she looks at him and the men in the cargo bed, all staring up at the moon. She shrugs. "Sure," she says, and gets in. The albino proceeds to ask if she likes Wagner (pronounced with a strong "w" and a short "a"), shows her a "beach rat"--a small dark rodent–pops it in his mouth, crunches, and swallows. Just when you're expecting him to chomp on her next, she asks if she can get out. The rat-eater complies and drives away. 

Crisis averted, except it's pitch dark, and she's surrounded by empty houses. 

Laura then spots a man who appears to be beckoning her, so she follows him to a well-lit, all-night supermarket. It appears to be devoid of people, so she walks around, and catches a few quick glimpses of other customers. Finally, she finds a large group (played by former NASA employees) all gathered around the meat section, gobbling up the stuff–until they see her, and give chase. Are they vampires, zombies, or something else? Huyck and Katz don't say, though a flashback, featuring Cisco Pike director Bill Norton, attempts to explain their origins. The creatures have pasty skin and red-rimmed eyes, but it's never clear what they are, other than very bad news for any human being who crosses their path. 

After Laura goes missing, Thom and Toni have their own encounters with the creatures. The other big set piece takes place in a Venice movie theater that Toni appears to have all to herself. The cashier (played by Katz) even turns off the marquee lights advertising 1950s noir Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye after Toni enters, indicating that she won't be selling any more tickets. 

Nonetheless, the pasty people enter the theater one by one, while Toni sits near the front obliviously munching popcorn–she retrieved it from the concession stand herself, since there was no cashier around. I won't say what happens next other than that Demons' Lamberto Bava and Interview with the Vampire's Neil Jordan--possibly even Anguish's Bigas Luna--would appear to have seen this masterful Hitchcockian sequence. 

Toward the end, Arletty does, in a manner of speaking, find out what happened to her father. After that, she does all she can to escape Port Dune, since her companions have been dropping like flies and the town's zombie population seems intent on making her their next meal. 

The film ends with Arletty in the mental institute. Either she made the whole story up, or the ordeal drove her mad. It's also suggested that she inherited her father's propensity for mental illness as much as his artistic nature. 

Though Messiah of Evil was made in 1971, it wouldn't open theatrically until 1974 due to a variety of production and distribution issues. Because Huyck and Katz ran out of money, they weren't even able to film the entire screenplay. Ironically, the duo had only made a horror film because they couldn't get funding for anything else, and they would never work in the genre again, though they would find their place in Hollywood as Oscar-nominated screenwriters and script doctors. Huyck's directorial career, alas, would end with his misbegotten 1986 take on Marvel's Howard the Duck--an accidental horror film of a kind--which I saw upon its original release. If I can imagine watching and enjoying Messiah of Evil a fourth time or more, one go-round with the weird and creepy Howard was more than enough. 

When critics finally got a look at Huyck and Katz's first film, they weren't all that thrilled either, with the exception of Robin Wood, who declared it one of the best of the decade. The qualities that made it unique were initially seen as flaws. 

As Huyck would later declare, "We made an art film," but since it was marketed as drive-in fare, it's unlikely viewers were expecting all the literary, art, and "pretentious film school references," as horror historian Kim Newman puts it in his rapid-fire commentary track with author and musician Stephen Thrower. The narrative ambiguity must have also proved frustrating, though that's among its strengths, and why it rewards multiple viewings along with the eye-popping set pieces and game performances.

Messiah of Evil would eventually find its audience, leading to last year's deluxe Blu-ray edition, which also features a video essay from editor and podcaster Kat Ellinger, a documentary featuring film critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Maitland McDonagh, a printed essay on the film's fine art inspirations from Bill Ackerman of the Supporting Characters podcast, and the 2019 audio interview with Huyck (Katz passed away in 2018). 

Over the years, the film has been compared to John Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire, both from 1971, but the differences are just as striking as the similarities. Rothman's film, for instance, now streaming on the Criterion Channel, takes place in the desert and features an acoustic score, whereas Messiah of Evil takes place by the beach and features an electronic score (Jack Fisk would also provide production design for Rothman's Terminal City). Both conjure up the beauty and terror of bad dreams that just don't want to end. Though some of the modish Messiah outfits are suggestive in the usual 1970s way, Huyck and Katz's film is devoid of nudity, whereas Rothman's film has plenty.

If today's critics see the film as a commentary on free love, consumerism, and/or the anomie of modern life, Huyck and Katz were mostly just trying to launch their career by working in a genre for which they didn't feel any special affinity, though they filled it with references to art they found meaningful--from Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft to Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha--so I wouldn't call it impersonal, and nor am I suggesting that those readings are invalid; I'm just not convinced they were trying to make any sociopolitical statements, with the exception of one: cults are bad. The Manson murders, after all, had taken place two years before.  

That said, I've long had a preference for horror films made by non-horror directors, like industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey's haunting Carnival of Souls, to which Messiah of Evil has also been compared. They're not all good, of course, but the way these filmmakers tend to ignore, flout, or subvert the well-worn rules of horror goes to show how malleable, expansive, and adventurous the genre can be, so here's to Willard Huyk and Gloria Katz for giving their first film everything they had. It shows, it thrills--and it endures.

 "They're waiting for you! And they'll take you one by one and no one will hear you scream. No one will hear you SCREEEAAAM!!!"--Arletty

The 4K restoration of Messiah of Evil is out now on home video through Radiance Films. Images from Elements of Madness (Blu-ray cover art), DVD Beaver (Walter Hill), the IMDb (Charles Dierkop and Joy Bang), Vague Visages (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Anitra Ford), and Final Girl (Marianna Hill)

You Better Run, You Better Take Cover: Bad Trip Australian Psychodrama Wake in Fright

This is a revived version of a 2014 Slog post about Ted Kotcheff's unhinged portrait of masculinity run amok. The original post is still available at The Stranger, but all of the images have disappeared, so it coexists here now.

Film/TV Jul 2, 2014 at 11:55 am 

You Better Run, You Better Take Cover: Bad Trip Australian Psychodrama Wake in Fright 

Kathy Fennessy

After watching John Curran's upcoming docudrama Tracks, in which a woman (Stoker's Mia Wasikowska) travels across the Outback, and David Michôd's recent repossession drama The Rover, in which a man (Animal Kingdom's Guy Pearce) does much the same—though for entirely different reasons—I realized it was time to catch up with 1971's Wake in Fright (The Rover opened two weeks ago; Tracks opens on September 19, 2014).

In Canadian director Ted Kotcheff's grubby psychodrama, an adaptation of Australian author Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel, a man (Zulu's Gary Bond) tries to travel from the Outback into the city, but the Outback just won't let him go (Joseph Losey associate Evan Jones wrote the script).

Bond, a bleached-blond British singer and actor with a young Peter O'Toole thing going on, plays John Grant, a one-room schoolhouse teacher in the tiny town of Tiboonda. Once Christmas break arrives, he hops a train en route to Sydney, stopping off in Bundanyabba, aka "The Yabba," for the night, where a cop (Chips Rafferty in his final film role) buys him beer after beer after beer. This leads John to believe he can make enough money playing two-up to pay off his bond and quit teaching--he would rather work as a journalist. Instead, he wins a hangover and loses his money.

Left: Thompson enjoying the kangaroo hunt

The next day, the heavy drinking continues. John's attempt to get busy with Janette (Kotcheff's then-wife, Sylvia Kay), the daughter of his host, Tim (TV actor Al Thomas), falls apart when a bout of nausea overtakes him. From the oh-well expression on her stoic face, it's clear she's been down this road before. The day after, John wakes up to another hangover, a shirtless Donald Pleasence, and a plateful of ground kangaroo.

After a breakfast of warm beer, he goes hunting with Pleasence's Doc, a self-proclaimed alcoholic, and his roughneck miner pals, Joe (Peter Whittle) and Dick (the great Jack Thompson in his first film role). They drink more beer and proceed to take their aggression out on a court of kangaroos (the film crew tagged along on a real hunt). It's all very psychedelic in a brown acid kind of way—you can practically smell the beer, blood, and body odor wafting off the screen. I really know how to sell 'em, don't I? Well, it's also rather beautiful in its way, especially John Scott's flute-saturated score.

As with British director Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout, also from 1971, the story ends much as it began, except that John can never return to the person he once was. If the two films share visual similarities, the storyline has more in common with John Boorman's infamous 1972 James Dickey adaptation Deliverance, in which Appalachia tests the mettle of four city dwellers (and was also made by an outsider). About Kotcheff's film, which was initially rejected by its home country, Nick Cave has said it's "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence."

Right: As this image attests: Pleasence is very good value

Kotcheff would go on to direct many other movies, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, North Dallas Forty, and First Blood, before becoming a producer on Law & Order: SVU (let us not speak of Weekend at Bernie's). In the intervening years, Australia has come to embrace Wake in Fright, which helped to kick-start the New Wave that launched Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock), Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant), and Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith).

So, it's a good film and an important one, but it's no walk in the park despite a fair number of funny lines, all perfectly delivered. Though other actors, like Dirk Bogarde and Michael York, circled the part, the lesser known Bond, primarily a theater actor, turned out to be the perfect man to play the antihero (even if Cook wrote the character as Australian). Bond's ability to take his schoolteacher from condescension to degradation to uneasy acceptance helps this strong medicine go down easier than it would have otherwise—plus, I'm not sure that York or Bogarde would've been as willing to go full frontal in a sequence cut from the original American prints.

 

Wake in Fright is available for streaming through Netflix and Drafthouse Films. In 2017, some fool attempted to remake it. Images (Gary Bond, Jack Thompson, and Donald Pleasence) from United Artists via the IMDb.

Trans R&B Singer Jackie Shane Shines Again in Painterly Doc Portrait Any Other Way

JACKIE SHANE: ANY OTHER WAY 

(Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, Canada, 2024, 99 minutes) 

"I was born, but never lived."

--Jackie Shane (1940-2019)

A conventional documentary wouldn't have suited R&B performer Jackie Shane. 

A coproduction of Telefilm Canada and the Canadian Film Board, Any Other Way isn't the first film about a musician of whom little performance footage exists, but unlike most, it doesn't rely strictly on still images, but on painterly recreations of her life at home and on the stage. In other words, it's a cross between a traditional documentary and an animated biopic. 

Though Jackie was making music associated with the Deep South in the 1960s, from the likes of Georgia-born Little Richard and Alabama-born Wilson Pickett, she was a visible trans performer at a time when that was anything but the norm in either Canada or the United States.  

When historians look back at the Toronto music scene of that era, it's all about Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Gordon Lightfoot, all of whom deserve the attention, but Jackie was right there in the mix, and yet completely set apart from the rock scene. While all three of these artists continued to ply their trade in the 1970s and beyond, Jackie completely disappeared. 

Co-directors Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, alongside animators Luca Tarantini and Jared Raab, fill in the blanks, while further contextualizing the Numero Group's 2017 collection of her work. I'm pretty sure that's how I first heard about her, and it was love at first listen. 

As it turns out, Jackie had a whole life in the US, since it's where she was born, where she spent most of her life, and where she died. 

Tennessee natives Vonnie Crawford-Moore and Andrenee Majors-Douglas, a niece and a cousin, didn't find out--until she bequeathed them her modest estate--that she had lived in the same area for 40 years. All of a sudden, the two women found themselves in possession of a museum's-worth of stage apparel, costume jewelry, faded photographs, reel-to-reel tapes, and other remnants of a life about which they hadn't known a thing. Because they didn't even know she existed. Significantly, they also found a hand-written autobiography with the perfectly pulpy title Let "God" Be My Judge.

In the film, trans performers Sandra Caldwell and Makayla Walker read passages from the unpublished manuscript, sometimes as themselves, sometimes as rotoscoped versions of Jackie in her various elements. Had she not written down her story, the directorial duo would have to recreate it by sifting through the clues, but she made sure she would get to reconstruct it herself--the late Anita Pallenberg did much the same, since Catching Fire, Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill's 2024 documentary about the model and actress, also relies on a manuscript left behind after her passing. 

The Any Other Way filmmakers, who knew about Jackie before Vonnie and Andrenee, also recorded their conversations with their subject during her final year, but always over the phone, and never in person. She had become a recluse. A combination of voices, including Jackie and her admiring heirs, describes her background. She inherited a love of singing from the grandmother who raised her, and pursued it from youth as a member of the church choir. From early on, she was also drawn to all things feminine. 

In young adulthood, her music career took off just as she was becoming more feminine in her affect. 

She revealed an affinity for the drums, purchased a kit, and plunged into the blues and soul scene, backing up stars, like Joe Tex, when they came through town. She was earning her keep, having fun, and relishing her independence. She even befriended Little Richard with whom she would hang out while he was living in Nashville. 

It was Tex who encouraged Jackie to leave the Jim Crow South for greener climes, so she literally joined the circus in the form of a carnival, which traveled to Canada, and with which she fell in love, starting with Cornwall where she decamped, and then Montreal, where she set down roots as a singer, still not yet fully trans, but more feminine-looking than ever before. 

Abundant photos track every stage of Jackie's transition, from lipstick and penciled eyebrows to more elaborate makeup combined with men's suits. I mean no disrespect, but her brows were pretty crazy, though I wouldn't say it was a specifically trans thing. Sophia Loren and Giulietta Masina also had swooping eyebrows at the time--at least she was in excellent company. 

By the time Jackie made her way to Toronto, she looked more like a woman with a preference for suits, like Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, than a man who liked to wear makeup, like Little Richard or Liberace. Nonetheless, she preferred to use male pronouns, though she refused to take off her makeup or to play for segregated audiences, even if it meant missing out on star-making opportunities, like The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand. She was making the rules up as she went along, which may not play well with some viewers, but nowadays there are more resources for young trans people.

If Jackie was packing Toronto's Saphire club and even drawing fans from across the border, the city's big pop station, CHUM, ignored her music, including signature 1963 single "Any Other Way." They just weren't interested in Black artists, but Jackie's fans forced their hand, and they eventually relented, sending the song to #2 on the local singles chart.

With the release of the Red Hot Organization's 46-track compilation Transa on November 22 of this year, it's possible the song will hit the airwaves again--or for the very first time, depending on your station of choice. 

As Jim Farber noted in a New York Times preview from earlier this month, "Another historic reference point comes from a cover of the song 'Any Other Way,' which became an improbable Canadian hit in the '60s for the soul singer and early trans performer Jackie Shane. The Americana singer and banjo player Allison Russell recorded Shane's song for the project several months ago at Mexican Summer studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in a stripped-down version, joined by the harpist Ahya Simone.” (The Canadian-born Russell, who identifies as queer, is cisgender, while the Detroit-based Simone is trans.) 

In 1971, Jackie returned to the States with her common-law husband Dan--a strikingly handsome man--changed her name, and settled in Pasadena where she lived fully as a woman. No more suits, no more male pronouns. She traded a public career for a private life, but it wasn't built to last. 

At this point, I was reminded of Lili Elbe, the real-life trans artist who inspired The Danish Girl, a fundamentally dishonest 2015 film that warps the circumstances that led to her death. Suffice to say her life was more fulfilling than the dismal one Tom Hooper depicts, except it wasn't enough. Just as Jackie longed to be a suburban housewife, Lili longed to have a baby. Neither woman got her wish--but at least Jackie's dream didn't kill her.

In the late-1970s, she returned to Nashville to take care of her ailing mother and stepfather. She also reclaimed the name Jackie Shane. After her parents passed, she went into seclusion. She maintained contact with a few friends, but it was mostly just her and her little black cat, and since cats only live so long—I lost my 19-year-old Lola in January—there are times she may have been completely alone. 

The filmmakers make space for Sandra Caldwell and Makayla Walker to share their thoughts about Jackie's journey, and also about their own lives. Caldwell, who is especially forthcoming, found a way to reconcile her personal and professional selves, but Jackie chose one over the other. Sad as it may seem now, it's possible she made the best choice, because she may not have been able to hold on to her career if she had fully transitioned in the public eye, but we lost all the music she might have made. 

Fortunately, we didn't lose the music she did make. Just as Light in the Attic brought the work of Betty Davis, another trailblazer-turned-recluse, to a new audience, the Numero Group did the same when they tracked Jackie down and arranged to package her life's work in a box set filled with singles, live tracks, and an 80-page biography. After the set received a Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album, she started to make plans that fate did not allow her to bring to fruition, but she was thrilled to speak with the press about her music and to receive messages of praise from fans old and new.

So, it's a sort of happy ending. Some artists, like Nick Drake and Arthur Russell, don't get their flowers until long after they're gone, but Jackie lived long enough to get hers. Other than the fact that I was never certain how she made a living once her music career had come to an end--a problem with too many documentaries about long-forgotten or newly-rediscovered artists--Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee did right by their subject. 

Beyond the participants mentioned above, they also spoke with music historian Michael Gray, gender studies professor Marisa Richmond, singer and dancer James Baley, choreographer Rodney Diverlus, writer Elaine Gaber-Katz, and biographer Rob Bowman. Further, they tapped some notable Canadian talent as producers: Oscar-nominated actor Elliot Page and Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen, the directors behind several fine hard rock documentaries.

In her life, Jackie didn't get everything she wanted, but she lived her truth, and Any Other Way honors a woman of color who refused to let racism, homophobia, and transphobia define or destroy her, even as that same toxic brew led her to leave the wider world behind for an intimate space filled with glittering mementos of that brief, shining moment she was a sexy, sassy, singing star. A Sylvester before Sylvester, a Prince before Prince. A groundbreaker and a path-maker for more new and exciting performers.

Jackie Shane: Any Other Way, which has received theatrical play in Canada, is currently making the festival rounds in the US. I'll update this post once it becomes possible to see in Seattle, whether in-person or online. Images from Image Amplified (Jackie on the bed), Spotify ("Any Other Way" single), Hot Docs (Jackie and Little Richard), Vintage Everyday (Jackie with swooping brows), Ahya Simone Live, and Vogue (Jackie in the suburbs).

Don’t Mess Around with the Cemetery Man

CEMETERY MAN / Delamorte Dellamore 

(Michele Soavi, Italy, 1987, 103 minutes) 

Cemetery Man, Italian filmmaker Michele Soavi's fourth feature film, has it all. 

To be sure, it's a horror film, zombie division. There are zombies, "returners" in the film's parlance, lurching all over this thing, but it's also a comedy and a love story--two love stories, no less. Other zom-coms, like 2013's Warm Bodies and 2014's Life After Beth, have combined the same genres, but Soavi got there decades before, and Cemetery Man, Delamorte Dellamore in its native country, is a model of the horror/comedy/romance form. 

But wait! There's more, because it's also a star vehicle. No disrespect to the film's continental cast, who offer excellent value, but the film, in the best of ways, could be considered The Rupert Everett Show. Forget, or put aside, all of those period pieces, like Mike Newell's 1985 Dance With a Stranger, Everett has to carry this entire film on his back, and he makes it look easy. 

Cemetery Man begins with Everett's Francesco Delamorte in his home at night. He's shirtless, cigarette dangling from the side of his downturned mouth, and looking for all the world like a goddamn movie star. He hears a sound at the door, opens it, comes face to face with an ashen-faced zombie with a fly buzzing around his ear, and shoots him in the noggin. The insouciant way he goes about the task indicates that this happens all the time. It's as funny as it is unexpected–an opening sequence for the ages. 

And it does, indeed, happen all the time. 

Ever since an epidemic ravaged Francesco's mountain village, many newly dead humans come back to life after seven days. Someone has to keep the zombie population under control, and he ended up with the gig. Instead of gratitude, however, the townspeople treat him like a pariah. The way they see it, he's no different than a garbage collector. Fortunately, he doesn't really care. Francisco is perfectly content to fill a role to which he appears to be well suited. 

Nor is he alone, since he he has a trusty assistant, Gnaghi (actor-musician François Hadji-Lazaro of The City of Lost Children and French band Les Garçons Bouchers), who lives in the basement, digs the graves, gobbles food like an overgrown toddler, and spends his free time parked in front of the boob tube. Throughout the film, he makes non-verbal noises, but refrains from any recognizable words, with the possible exception of "gna." 

Not insignificantly, Gnaghi serves as Francesco's negative image, a squat, shaven-headed cross between Moe of the Three Stooges and Buster Bloodvessel of British ska-punk outfit Bad Manners. He may not look like anyone's idea of a romantic hero, but just like his boss, Gnaghi will fall in love with a lovely young local, who will return his ardor in ways you can't possibly imagine--unless you've read the novel. Soavi pulls out all the stops to depict their hilariously grotesque and strangely touching romance.

Writer Gianni Romoli, meanwhile, adapted the screenplay from Tiziano Sclavi's 1991 novel Delamorte Dellamore. 

Though the film has taken hits over the years for the switch to Cemetery Man for English-speaking territories, it's an apt title that doubled as a savvy commercial move. Further, by 1994, Everett had starred in an Oscar-winning short, 1982's A Shocking Accident, and scored a BAFTA nomination for 1984's Another Country, in which he played a role he had originated on stage in 1981. Though Soavi had a track record in Italy for his work in the horror genre, both on his own and with Dario Argento, Everett was seen as an international star who would make the film a hit, except it wasn't. And nor was it the fault of either gentleman, though I do have a few theories… 

First of all, one of the film's biggest strengths, the way it mixes and mingles genres, may have confused critics, audiences, and exhibitors. 

Second, the high-born Everett was a name, but he was best known for literary adaptations drawn from the works of Ian McEwan, Alan Bennett, and numerous others. There's nothing wrong with that–on the contrary–but it may have created a disconnect, with horror fans staying away, because he seemed too refined for the genre, and with Everett fans staying away because the material seemed beneath him. It's neither of those things, and the actor proved he could get his well-manicured hands as dirty as necessary, but I can understand the confusion his casting may have caused.

Then there's the more delicate matter of his sexual orientation. 

It may not have been a factor, but I couldn't say for sure. Though Everett had played a gay character in both versions of Another Country, he didn't come out, in real life, until 1989. Afterward, he says, the job offers went away. 

If anything, Soavi may have gotten a better deal for his services in 1994 than he would have in 1986 when Sclavi modeled the paranormal investigator at the center of his comic series Dylan Dog on Everett's handsomely-tousled appearance in Another Country. Further, Everett may have been drawn to the project more because he needed the money than because he was passionate about the material, though knowing he had inspired a previous Sclavi character may have proved irresistibly appealing.

Not surprisingly, they've been conflated, but Dylan Dog and Francesco Dellamorte are different characters, though they do share similar, baddie-fighting characteristics. Amazingly, the series has continued for nearly 40 years, though Sclavi has been increasingly less involved with the writing. 

In Cemetery Man, Everett plays things unambiguously straight–so straight that it becomes a liability. 

Francesco's commitment to the bit will be put to the test toward the end, in ways both physical and spiritual. If anything, the discontents of hyper-heterosexuality is kind of the point of the film. 

Francesco can slay zombies with the best of them, but he's so emotionally stunted that he can't form anything other than a purely sexual relationship with a woman. Some moviegoers may not have been ready to see this particular actor play that particular part, and yet Everett's ability to project both movie star charisma and an underdeveloped, adolescent sensibility is precisely what makes his performance sing. 

Francesco is so unworldly and poorly educated, in fact, that he has only "read" two books, one he never finished and the phone book in which he crosses out the name of each corpse that ends up in the graveyard.

Everything changes--and not necessarily for the better--when he spots Anna Falchi's very young, very sexy widow in a funeral procession at his place of business, mourning the loss of her much older, very dead husband.

In Romoli's screenplay, she's simply named She. 

Normally, it would irritate me that the men have proper names while the primary female character doesn't, except she represents Francesco's ideal, and he doesn't really see her as a person. Furthermore, Falchi will end up playing two more women in quick succession. Soavi never establishes whether they all really look alike, or whether Francesco simply imagines that they do, because his obsession with this unattainable creature has so thoroughly clouded his vision. 

Since Cemetery Man is filled with surprises, I would rather avoid too many plot specifics, other than to say that Soavi, in his excellent commentary track, demurs that it's pretty episodic. He's not completely wrong, but that's hardly a liability, since it plays like a series of intricately-rendered comic book panels come to life--not least when a zombified motorcyclist bursts through the soil to ride again, an absolutely stunning in-camera effect that would not have made the same impact if created digitally. I went into the film cold, and I love the way it consistently keeps predictability at bay. 

And that includes Falchi. There's no doubt that the model-turned-actress was hired for her looks, but she holds her own with Everett, despite the fact that it was her first leading role. It's quite a remarkable achievement. 

Prior to Cemetery Man, Falchi was best known for a perfume ad shot by Federico Fellini. 

Not a bad calling card for a 22-year-old aspiring actress, but no guarantee that she could credibly play three characters, one of whom will turn into a moldering zombie, and that isn't exactly a spoiler, since it happens surprisingly early on in the proceedings. 

In the interview included with the new release, Falchi says the makeup sessions took as long as seven to eight hours. The release also comes with a making-of documentary, which includes footage of the painstaking process. 

Though the film is filled with plenty of fun zombie jump scares, few things gave me more of a start than Falchi's first appearance on screen wearing sheer, designer-style widow's weeds, because she didn't seem quite real.

Just as the two teenage boys in John Hughes' 1985 horror-comedy Weird Science managed to miraculously create the seemingly perfect woman in the form of Kelly LeBrock–in a decidedly '80s twist on Frankenstein–Falchi's widow looks exactly like the kind of living centerfold a teenage boy or sex-obsessed comic book illustrator would dream up, and that isn't a knock. 

Much as Australian transplant Margot Robbie had to conform to an all-American image of female perfection to play the living doll in Barbie, the Finnish-Italian actress wouldn't have passed muster if she looked too ordinary. With her full lips, almond eyes, ample bosom, and wasp waist, she's like something engineered in a lab, i.e. what most every member of the Kardashian clan wishes they looked like, except it's all apparently real. In the new interview, Falchi admits that she had extensions to make her long, honey-blonde hair look extra-luxurious, but that doesn't count as fakery in my book, just a touch of movie magic.    

Aging comes for anyone who lives long enough, but many va-va-voom female performers don't wear it well. Falchi, who has aged more gracefully than your average blonde bombshell, is a major exception to the rule.

Everett, on the other hand, showed up for his on-camera interview wearing a very unflattering, extra-tall, red knit cap. I have no idea why, especially since it doesn't even look comfortable–it looks itchy. A fully-grown adult has the right to wear whatever he wants, of course, but it's a bizarre choice.  

He also speaks about the film in flattering terms, though Soavi admits that they locked horns. By 1994, Everett had made films in both Italy and Spain, so I don't know if language or cultural differences left him feeling isolated, if the role of an antihero who makes a heel turn was getting to him, or if he expected more coddling on the set, but he appears to have had a fairly miserable time. Then, when the film proved something other than a hit, he claimed that Soavi was the worst director he had ever worked with. Though he doesn't mention it in his interview, Soavi definitely mentions it in his. 

It wouldn't take long, however, for Cemetery Man to become a deserving cult classic. If Everett has warmed to it over the years, it may simply be because time has healed his wounds, or because it's no longer the redheaded stepchild of his CV. If anything, it's one of the glittering jewels in his crown. Unlike Soavi, who appears to have stopped working as a feature-film director in 2018, or Falchi, who appears to have stopped working as a leading lady in 2013, Everett is still plugging away. 

Leading roles may be a thing of the past, but the 65-year-old continues to show up in studio productions, like Ridley Scott's 2023 Napoleon, in which he plays the Duke of Wellington, or Starz's The Serpent Queen, on which he plays Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Everett has also kept busy as a memoirist and novelist, and Simon and Schuster will release his next book, a collection of short stories called The American No, on October 3, 2024.

After Cemetery Man, Everett would avoid horror, notwithstanding a role as a demon in 2019's Muse and a guru in 2022's She Will. It wasn't really his thing, though he's perfect as Francesco Dellamorte. On the other hand, if the film had been a hit, we might have gotten a series of increasingly less heartfelt, less handcrafted sequels--better one great film that stands alone.

Cemetery Man, fully restored from the Cinecittà negative, is available on Blu-ray and 4K HD from Severin Films. Images from StudioCanal and IGN (Rupert Everett), Talk Film Society (Everett and François Hadji-Lazaro), IntoMore.com (Everett and Cary Elwes in Another Country), Hey Kids Comics! (Dylan Dog No. 1 cover by Claudio Villa), the IMDb (Everett admiring Anna Falchi), American Cinematheque (Falchi after zombification), Pinterest (Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science), and X (actor-director Michel Soavi on the set of 1991's The Sect with actor-director Dario Argento).