Two years after the 1975 debut of Saturday Night Live on NBC, director John Landis got in on the sketch-comedy action with Kentucky Fried Movie. After a string of box office hits, including National Lampoon's Animal House and The Blues Brothers (starring SNL's John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd), he returned to his run-and-gun roots with this unofficial sequel, which reunited him with director Robert K. Weiss, a writer on the 1977 film, along with Peter Horton, Carl Gottlieb, and Joe Dante of Gremlins fame.
Amazon Women on the Moon duplicates the experience of watching late-night TV in the 1980s by combining a B&W Universal-style horror movie, grade Z science-fiction adventure, scare-mongering hygiene film, hokey paranormal program, and ridiculous commercials for useless products.
Arsenio Hall, from another Landis hit, 1988's Coming to America, stars in opening sketch "Mondo Condo," which offers the most extravagant physical comedy, as the victim of a literally killer condominium. Other notable performers include Michelle Pfeiffer, from Landis's 1985 Into the Night, and her then-husband Horton as new parents baffled by Griffin Dunne's sarcastic OB-GYN in "Hospital" and Rosanna Arquette as a single woman with a high-tech system for screening prospective dates, like Steve Guttenberg, in "Two I.D.'s."
The movie parodies include "Son of the Invisible Man" with Ed Begley Jr. as a nude scientist convinced no one can see him (they definitely can), Carrie Fisher as an Iowa innocent who gets a lesson about social diseases from Paul Bartel's Big Apple doctor in "Reckless Youth," and the title entry, "Amazon Women on the Moon," with Lana Clarkson and B-movie queen Sybil Danning as Amazonian lunarians who capture the hearts of three American astronauts, including John Travolta's brother, Joey (tragically, Clarkson's life would come to an end in 2003 at the hands of producer Phil Spector).
One of the running gags, "Murray in Videoland," involves Lou Jacobi as a middle-aged man relaxing on his recliner in undershirt and boxers when he gets sucked into his TV. He ends up on the moon with the astronauts and at a funeral where a gaggle of insult comedians, including Rip Taylor and Henny Youngman, make fun of Belinda Balaski's not-so-dearly departed husband ("Critic's Corner / Roast Your Loved One").
Not all of the commercials work equally well, but standouts include Joe Pantoliano as a spokesman for "Hairlooming" and David Alan Grier as singer Don "No Soul" Simmons whose piano renditions of AM radio hits are exactly as soul-free as advertised ("Blacks Without Soul"). Further notable participants include Henry Silva, Ralph Bellamy, and Howard Hesseman.
Though this Landis-produced project wasn't a critical or box office hit upon original release, it would find new life by way of home video and cable TV exposure, where it felt more at home than in a theater.
This special edition includes a lively commentary track from Busted Guts podcasters Mike McPadden and Kat Ellinger, a fine featurette with Landis and Dante, dailies from Dante's archives, deleted scenes and outtakes, and sketches from Dante and Horton that didn't make the cut for thematic reasons, i.e. they're more amusing in theory than in execution. Overall: recommended.
Amazon Women on the Moon (Special Edition) is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Images from Qwipster, IMDb, and Movie Poster Shop.
Made by an inexperienced Australian filmmaker who had recently left behind a career as a trauma room physician, George Miller's debut, Mad Max, became an action-movie legend that launched a multi-film franchise and forged a superstar out of then-unknown drama student Mel Gibson.
In 1979, even cinematographer Greg Eggby (Warlock, Quigley Down Under) was new to the film business, though you’d never know it from adept camera work rooted in low-to-the-ground shots that put viewers in the driver's seat--or in the path of oncoming traffic. With a shoestring budget, a tight script, and bottomless reserves of resourcefulness, their thoroughly Australian artifact thrilled audiences around the world with minimal dialogue and maximum mayhem, though the original release, unlike Kino Lorber's edition, was unnecessarily dubbed by AIP for American audiences.
As a filmmaker, Miller keeps cliché at bay through his attention to detail even as he hews to revenge-thriller archetype: highway patrolman Max Rockatansky starts with everything and ends with nothing. In a classic Hollywood move, the director introduces him four minutes into the picture by focusing exclusively on his reflective sunglasses and black biker boots.
Gibson's famous blue-eyed visage doesn't materialize for nearly 20 minutes, by which point Max's colleagues have enlisted him to track down Nightrider (Vince Gil), a cackling cop killer joyriding with his girlfriend. The high-speed chase ends in fiery death for the both of them, leading his gang, led by Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Fury Road's Immortan Joe), to plot revenge.
After they set a trap for Max's friend, Goose (Gibson's drama school pal, Steve Bisley), that results in a gory outcome, Max decides he's had enough, but instead of quitting the force, he goes on vacation to clear his head before making a final decision. He and Jessie (Joanne Samuel) load up the car with toddler Sprog and hit the beach, picking up a canine companion on the way.
The gang looms closely behind, and when Max's car experiences engine trouble, they close in like outlaws in an old Western. No shrinking violet, Joanne is a fighter who gives Toecutter a swift kick in the biscuits before speeding away, but the gang eventually dispatches dog, wife, and child, leading Max to pick each one of them off before riding off into a mythical future in which he'll become The Road Warrior.
If Miller would play up the post-apocalyptic qualities of his environs in subsequent installments, the look of the first film owes largely to budgetary considerations, since he could turn oil cloth costumes and ramshackle locations into strengths rather than liabilities. The abundant extras include archival featurettes, commentary from Eggby and art director Jon Dowding, and an interview with the ever-expansive Miller (now working on sequel #4).
Decades after the fact, Mad Max remains a kinetic experience spiked with humor, romance, and real-world stunts that offer the kind of visceral excitement computers can't quite replicate. To quote an original tagline, it's a "movie that runs on adrenaline, high octane, and raw nerves!" Highly recommended.
There had been War Is Hell movies before Yasuzō Masumura's The Red Angel, but presenting the battlefront from a woman's eyes was rare at the time. It's still rare. Granted, the women of Kantemir Balagov's Beanpole served on the Russian Front, but that film focuses on one woman's post-war experience. Like Ayako Wakao's Sakura Nishi, Iya served as a nurse, but unlike Nishi, she entered the field untrained and didn't treat men at the sites where they suffered injuries.
By contrast, 24-year-old Nishi is a well-trained nurse in 1939, stationed at a Tientsin field hospital in Japan-controlled China. She's capable and prepared for what awaits. She's also pretty--a liability. A greater liability: her gender in and of itself. To these men, it only matters that she's young and female.
Though it isn't unusual for a war picture to feature a few bad apples--Platoon and Apocalypse Now come to mind--Masumura, working from screenwriter Ryôzô Kasahara's adaptation of the 1966 novel by Yorichika Arima, takes a more cynical approach, because most every military figure in the film is singularly unpleasant. It's a move that can only have been poorly received in Japan. Irene González-López, a Japanese cinema scholar, confirms my suspicions in her excellent essay for the Arrow Blu-ray, "It did not receive such a positive reception in Japan and still nowadays barely features in Japanese publications on Masumura and Wakao" (even the actress, according to González-López, felt the film was "too much").
If Masumura steers clear of sentimentality, he isn't without sympathy, since he's always on Nishi's side. Though she feels responsible for the bad things that happen to her patients, it's clear that she isn't, but the way her good deeds never go unpunished only reinforces the film's central driving thesis that war corrupts everything it touches.
Though Red Angel feels epic, it clocks in at a tidy 95 minutes. Masumura introduces Nishi with a few quick brushstrokes before plunging her into the action. She was raised by her aunt, because her parents died when she was young, and that's the extent of her biography. If anything, she might feel unformed if portrayed by an actress of lesser skill, but the role represented Wakao's 15th collaboration with the director. She and Masumura would make five more films (she would also work with Yasujirō Ozu and Kon Ichikawa).
I was particularly struck by the contrast between her characters in The Red Angel and Irezumi (both 1966), since the sex slave-turned-courtesan of the latter--a tattoo of a spider covers her back--is more of a femme fatale.
Five minutes after Masumura introduces Nishi, men swoop onto her like vampires. The most vocal, Pvt. Sakamoto (Jôtarô Senba), rapes her while others hold her down or gawk. It's the worst kind of trial by fire, but Nishi is no shrinking violet. She promptly reports the assault, but the head nurse insists there isn't much she can do, except to send Sakamoto back on to the field, and she only takes that measure because Nishi is his third victim.
Though it sounds like she's letting him off easy, the opposite proves true when Sakamoto ends up in Nishi's care after a mortar blow to the abdomen. As she sees it, she can save him or let him die. In truth, survival was never an option, but she feels guilty for reporting the rape that led to the circumstance that made the fatal injury possible.
Nishi will have life-changing encounters with two other men. She meets the next, Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida, Crazed Fruit), when she transfers from the field hospital to a frontline facility. A new kind of hell awaits as she assists in an endless series of amputations. Dr. Okabe explains that they lack the resources, medicine above all, to implement less extreme measures. If an injured arm or a leg risks killing the patient: off it goes.
It becomes clear at this point why Masumura, working with cinematographer Setsuo Kobayashi (Fire on the Plains, The Burmese Harp), chose to shoot in black and white even as Irezumi blooms with color: the screen would otherwise be saturated with crimson. As disturbing as Red Angel may be--and it's plenty disturbing--it really could be worse. Nonetheless, the sound of the bone saw and the sight of a can filled with limbs says it all.
The third man, Pvt. Orihara (Japanese New Wave star Yūsuke Kawazu), is a young soldier who has lost most of both arms. One was lost to an explosive device and the other amputated to stop the spread of gangrene. He's largely healed, except the Japanese army refuses to send him home for propagandistic reasons: if civilians were to see for themselves what happened to him at the front, they would be less likely to support the war: out of sight, out of mind.
He's the only military figure in the film for whom it's possible to feel any sympathy. He's also open about his needs. After Nishi bathes him and helps him to urinate, he asks if she can provide an even more intimate service. It's clear what he means, and Nishi complies. The virginal character at the film's opening has transformed into a sex surrogate, at least for this stranded, forgotten soldier with a fiancée waiting for him back home.
In Nishi’s attempt to build his confidence, and possibly her own, she takes things a step further by booking a room for them at a local hotel. His injuries haven't affected his ability to perform, and she wants to prove to him that he can still please his fiancée, even if there are other things he can't do. They have a pleasant evening, but afterward things take a turn Nishi could not have foreseen. Once again: her good intentions end up backfiring.
Since Nishi has no time to bond with the other nurses, she bonds with Dr. Okabe instead. It's a problematic relationship of a different kind. Dr. Okabe wants to sleep with her, and yet he admits that morphine addiction has rendered him impotent. This is doubly dangerous, because it means he's depleting the supply of a desperately-needed painkiller. When he propositions Nishi, it's mostly because he requires her expertise with the needle. Not feeling she has a choice, she agrees to assist him.
Though there's nothing romantic about the world-weary Dr. Okabe, Nishi falls for him anyway, possibly because her loneliness makes it easy for her to overlook flaws that would loom larger in peacetime. Naturally, this angelic character wants to help him, too, and so she does. In this case, her good intentions don't backfire, but it doesn't matter: war still manages to entirely obliterate her efforts. And that's the pessimistic note on which the film ends.
From start to finish, Red Angel doesn't mess around. There are no flashbacks to better times. Everything takes place in the present. It's also one of the more brutally honest films I've ever seen about the connection between war and misogyny. Just as the Nazis had their joy division (freudenabteilung), Jewish prisoners forced into prostitution, the Japanese army had comfort women (ianfu), Chinese and Korean women forced into prostitution. Towards the end of the film, a cholera outbreak takes the lives of several of these women before spreading throughout the soldiers' ranks.
As David Desser notes in his historically-rich commentary track, rape during wartime, particularly in Japan, went far beyond the experience of the occasional nurse. It was widespread. Only two years before the events depicted in the film, the Japanese army invaded Nanking, slaughtering 200,000 men and raping and mutilating 20,000 women. Though the Rape of Nanking goes unmentioned in Red Angel, Masumura provides a glimpse of the mindset that could lead to such an atrocity.
If his film isn't as hallucinogenic as, say, Elem Klimov's Come and See, it ranks among the most uncompromising antiwar films. Though it isn't feminist as we currently define the term, the entire project condemns misogyny, an egregious phenomenon in 20th-century Japan that war would only serve to reinforce. Though it doesn't destroy Nishi after one soul-crushing encounter after another, it's also clear: she's one of the lucky ones.
The Red Angel is out now on Prime Video and Blu-ray from Arrow Video. It includes an introduction from Tony Rayns and a video essay from Jonathan Rosenbaum on Masumura's career. The gist: he did his best work, like this film, with Ayako Wakao and in B&W CinemaScope (or "DaieiScope"). His favorite, which I haven't yet seen, is 1961's A Wife Confesses. Images from Asia Shock, DVD Beaver, Barnaby Page, and Wednesday Dreams.
THE SYSTEM (KL Studio Classics, 1964, UK, 93 minutes)
Oliver Reed shines in The System, released as The Girl-Getters in the US, as a ladies' man at a crossroads in his life.
Years before the roles that would come to define him, like Father Grandier in Ken Russell's The Devils, the intense, blue-eyed actor played souvenir photographer Steve "Tinker" Taylor in Michael Winner's 1964 character study.
At first, the 23-year-old seems to have it all. He lives in a seaside resort town where he has his pick of the ladies in town for the summer. He has a job, an apartment, and a group of like-minded friends. Granted, the job doesn't pay much, the apartment is a low-ceiling affair, and the friends are a rowdy lot, but it's a sweet life for a man of minimal ambition (David Hemmings, who plays one of those friends, would go on to portray one of cinema's most iconic photographers in Antoniono's Blow-Up).
Tinker spends his days wandering the beaches of Dover, flirting, snapping pictures, and getting in fisticuffs with rival photographers. Afterward, he asks his subjects for their addresses, and if they're pretty, he shares them with his pals. Once his camera shop boss (The Hill's Harry Andrews) develops the pictures, subjects can pay to claim their copies.
Winner focuses on a climactic summer in which Tinker tangles with an unhappily married woman (Ann Lynn), a busy model (Susan Merrow), and a party girl (Barbara Ferris) desperate to marry and settle down.
Once he realizes he's fallen for Nicola, the model, the tables turn as he questions the smallness of his life, but a humiliating afternoon with her upper-crust associates drives home his limited range of options. While out on a date, Nicola asks him, "What happens to these places in the winter? Do they close down?” Then, she adds, "What happens to you in the winter?" "I close down, too, don't I," he quips.
The System is a very British film that compares favorably to the work of Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger in which the wealthy characters hold all of the cards, but it also bears the continental imprint of Federico Fellini, particularly in future filmmaker Nicolas Roeg's atmospheric cinematography and a rueful, nostalgic tone that recalls I Vitelloni (Roeg was six years away from his co-directorial debut, Performance, with Donald Cammell).
In his fast-paced commentary, Australian film historian Stephen Vagg notes that Reed and Winner would make four films together, including 1967's I'll Never Forget What's'isname, while the filmmaker would find even greater commercial success in the United States for which he directed six blunt-impact movies with Charles Bronson, including 1974's Death Wish.
The extra features also include an insightful interview with Susan Merrow, who describes the alcohol-sodden shoot as rambunctious (she would end up dating Hemmings for four years). As for Reed, The System helped him to graduate to A-list pictures from low-budget horror features, and he's terrific here as a conflicted character who can be funny and romantic, but also sarcastic, cruel, and possibly even dangerous. Highly recommended.
"It's been a rollercoaster ride, but I wouldn't change a thing."--Poly Styrene to The Guardian in 2011
Made with Chinese-British filmmaker Paul Sng (Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain), Celeste Bell's documentary about Poly Styrene, née Marianne Elliot-Said, isn't a standard cradle-to-grave portrait, but rather a daughter's journey into her mother's past in order to make sense of their relationship.
That makes it more intimate and less objective than most music documentaries; an approach that can prove a blessing or a curse depending on the director. The most obvious pitfall: first-person films can end up saying more about their non-famous makers than their famous subjects. For my money, Aiyana Elliott's uncompromising 2000 film about her father, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, gets the balance right more often than not.
In Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, Bell narrates and appears on screen, so she starts by centering herself, but Poly's voice is part of the mix, since Oscar-nominated Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga (Loving, Passing) voices her poems and diary entries, perfectly capturing Poly's soft, high voice.
As Bell sifts through artifacts, in addition to the 2019 biography she co-authored, the film proceeds through Poly's humble beginnings (Slits biographer Zoë Howe contributed as writer to both book and film).
Born in Brixton in 1957, Poly and her sister, Hazel Emmons, grew up in a council estate, the "half caste" results of a union between a single white mother and an absentee Somali father. Though often insensitively asked, "Where are you from?," Bell insists, "She was a Londoner born and bred."
More voices continue to come into play, making for a richer, less solipsistic work. Speakers include Lora Logic and Paul Dean (X-Ray Spex, Essential Logic), musician and filmmaker Don Letts (Big Audio Dynamite), Gina Birch and Ana Da Silva (the Raincoats), Rhoda Dakar (the Special AKA, the Bodysnatchers), Pauline Black (the Selecter), Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, Julie Ruin), musician and professor Vivien Goldman (the Flying Lizards), punk poet John Cooper Clarke (snapping gum in archival footage), fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and chat show host Jonathan Ross.
Poly's embrace of punk provided a sense of community missing from her youth. In the words of a want ad she had placed in Melody Maker, she hoped to assemble a band of "young punx who want to stick it together." X-Ray Spex provided her with an outlet to sing about her concerns, like consumerism, and wear whatever she wanted, including outfits she made and sold herself. "I actually started to sing because of her, to be perfectly honest," admits Neneh Cherry, also of mixed-race heritage, who would go on to join the Slits and Rip Rig + Panic before embarking on a solo career.
Like Kathryn Ferguson's recent Sinéad O'Connor documentary, Nothing Compares, I Am a Cliché avoids talking heads. Speakers comment from the perspective of today, but only archival images appear on screen. When filmmakers cycle through the same photographs and video clips repeatedly, tedium can result, but Bell and Sng have assembled enough material to keep things moving (I contributed to their well-run Indiegogo campaign, and wear my Poly-in-a-combat-helmet t-shirt often).
After signing to EMI, X-Ray Spex released their sole album with the original lineup, 1978's electrifying Germ-Free Adolescents, made TV appearances, and went on tour, even playing a residency at New York's CBGB that Thurston Moore remembers with fondness--he felt "anointed" when Poly handed him the mic to shout along with "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" In 1991's indispensable punk diary England's Dreaming, Jon Savage describes Poly as "a striking woman with a surprisingly loud, gutsy laugh."
If New York was beneficial to the band's nascent career, it was terrible for Poly's mental health, and she was increasingly uncomfortable with the attention and pressure that accompanied fame. She started to have visions and ended up sectioned several times. What she saw as a spiritual awakening, friends and loved ones saw differently. Both things can be true. To add insult to injury, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, rather than bipolar disorder, and accordingly mistreated.
The yearning to breathe free led her to pull the plug on X-Ray Spex in 1979 when she was 21.
Poly's husband, Adrian, and daughter, Celeste, would arrive in the years afterward as she continued to make music, but with increasingly less support from record labels and music press alike. Oddly and disappointingly, there's no mention of her 1981 solo debut Translucence, 1986 EP God's and Goddesses, or even X-Ray Spex's 1995 return with Conscious Consumer.
Then Poly found Hare Krishna, which took priority over family and career (Lora Logic, née Susan Whitby, would join her at Hertfordshire's George Harrison-donated Bhaktivedanta Manor).
Spiritual practice, however, wasn't a replacement for proper psychiatric care, and Celeste ended up living with her grandmother after a protracted court case. "Creative people don't always make the best parents," she says about her distracted, unpredictable mother. "And she certainly neglected my needs at times."
The documentary then skips ahead to Poly's 2011 comeback album on which she collaborated with Viv Albertine (the Slits), Youth (Killing Joke), and her reconciled daughter. Musically, she hadn't missed a step. As Albertine says in her illuminating 2014 memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., "I'm glad she got her drive back and made her album, Generation Indigo, before she died... She was a real doer."
After years of extreme ups and downs, Poly had been in a good place. And then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was discovered too late, because she had, once again, been misdiagnosed and mistreated when she sought help, a notoriously common occurrence for women of color.
Celeste and Sng speed through her final months. Though they don't mention it, she ended up in hospice care that same year, during which time she gave a remarkable interview to Dave Simpson of The Guardian--well worth a click if you missed it at the time.
In the end, there's too much Celeste in this film and not enough Poly. It's the daughter's story to tell, and her perspective has value, but she's a consistent on-screen presence. We're constantly looking at her--she's asking us to see her. And maybe that's the point: by asking to be seen, particularly by those of us interested in her mother, she seems to have found a way to make up for the attention Poly wasn't always able to give.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché opens at the Beacon Cinema on Feb 2 and on VOD on Feb 4. Generation Indigo cover image from Discogs, all others from Poly Doc Ltd, BBC Arena (Poly portrait), Kino Library (Poly on stage with X-Ray Spex), and Falcon Stuart (X-Ray Spex collage).
Here's the pre-obituary I wrote for Amazon's now-defunct blog Armchair Commentary in 2009. I'm happy to say Poitier outlived this piece by 13 years.
Oscar-winning actor and director Sidney Poitier died on January 6, 2022 at the age of 94.
Best known for the movies Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir, with Love, Poitier divided his time between the silver screen, the theater, and the civil rights movement, leaving an enduring body of work and opening doors to other performers of color.
For his part in Lilies of the Fields, Poitier was the first African-American actor to win the Academy Award for best actor in a leading role.
Born in Miami, Florida, Poitier grew up in the Bahamas and learned his trade through a stint with the American Negro Theatre, through which he befriended fellow actors and activists Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. He found another lifelong friend in Richard Widmark with whom he starred in No Way Out and The Bedford Incident.
Other notable works for film and television include Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis, Otto Preminger’sPorgy and Bess with Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis, Jr. (long unavailable on home video), A Patch of Blue, and the made-for-TV movies Separate But Equal as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Mandela and de Klerk, where he played Nelson Mandela opposite Sir Michael Caine's F.W. de Klerk.
Poitier penned two memoirs, 1980's This Life and 2007's New York Times bestseller The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, and one novel, Montaro Caine, and directed nine feature films, including Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again with Bill Cosby, and Stir Crazy with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Released in 1975, Let's Do It Again remains one of the most profitable Black feature films of all time.
Among his many accomplishments, Poitier garnered a Tony nomination for playing Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (he also starred in the 1961 motion picture with Ruby Dee) and, although he chose not to use the honorarium "Sir," a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974. Eighteen years later, the American Film Institute recognized him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Furthermore, John Guare based his play Six Degrees of Separation on a real-life con man claiming to be Poitier's son. Rapper-turned-sitcom star Will Smith began the road to movie stardom when he took on the part in the 1993 feature-film adaptation.
Sidney Poitier is survived by his widow of 46 years, Joanna Shimkus, and six children, including two with his first wife, Juanita Hardy. Youngest daughter, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, follows in her father's substantial footsteps as a television and film actress.
Click here for my obituary for Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison who directed Sidney Poitier in The Heat of the Night.
Images from the Motion Picture Academy (Poitier in 1964), The Library of Congress (Poitier with Dorothy Dandridge in 1959's Porgy and Bess), and the IMDb (poster for the Warner Bros release Let's Do It Again).
On the surface, 1979's Arrebato ("Rapture") is a horror movie about the horror of becoming overly invested in the making of horror movies.
In that sense, it recalls Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor (2021), even as it pre-dates both of those films, one about a British sound mixer unraveling while working on a giallo in Italy and the other about a censor unraveling while working as a government-sponsored editor during Britain's "video nasty" era.
On a deeper level, it's a film about drug addiction in which film is as much of a drug as the drugs consumed while making films, an idea the Spacemen 3 once explored as Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. As the addictions feed off each other, art and life become indivisible.
As it begins, a slinky vampire with long, dark hair strolls out of her glass-topped coffin to skulk about before José (Dwight Yoakam doppelgänger Eusebio Poncela, The Cannibal Man), a Madrid horror director and his editor stop what they're doing to bicker. She isn't real, just a character in José's film, but he doesn't like the way she appears to be looking at the camera. "Meaningless cinema," he sniffs before leaving for the day.
He's in a shitty mood when he gets home to find that Pedro (Will More,Pedro Almodóvar's Dark Habits), a figure from his past, has sent a reel of Super-8 film, a cassette, and a key. On the off-chance you've forgotten you're watching a film from 1979, these items will surely remind you.
José's night proceeds to get worse as his girlfriend, Ana (Cecilia Roth, looking like Dressed to Kill-era Nancy Allen), won't wake up, the bathroom appliances turn against him, and Pedro, a floppy-haired figure in a Withnail and I-like overcoat, materializes in front of him before disappearing again. What's an angry, jittery guy to do but to shoot some smack?
In a flashback, José drives to Segovia with his ex-girlfriend Marta (Marta Fernández Muro, Almodóvar's Law of Desire) to visit her toothy aunt, Carmen (Carmen Giralt). This is where he first meets her cousin, Pedro, who is obsessed with King Solomon's Mines--not the 1950 movie so much as the illustrated comic featuring stars Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger. Once Carmen has gone to bed, José does some blow with Marta and Pedro.
Though José is the central character, Pedro narrates the film by way of the cassette in a hoarse, whispery voice that plays like a manifestation of José's subconscious. Back in the present, José introduces Ana to smack. She's concerned she might become addicted, but he insists that it's all about moderation--proof that he has no idea how addiction works.
Here and elsewhere, Iván Zulueta, a poster designer-turned filmmaker, leaves nothing to the imagination, though the full-frontal nudity and polymorphous sexuality never feels unnecessary or exploitative, not least because his sole directorial credit is largely autobiographical. Fascist dictator Franco had left office just four years prior, and Zulueta and his friend and supporter, Pedro Almodóvar, would lead the charge, by way of La Movida Madrileña, to expand the possibilities of Spanish film.
José's two worlds collide when he brings Ana to meet Pedro. Both want access to Pedro's body, drugs, and film project, leading to a tense atmosphere. If Ana is relatively mature, Pedro is a child with his Silly Putty, Betty Boop doll, and plastic container of Slime (I had the same stuff in junior high--it was nasty). José straddles the line between the two.
Pedro proceeds to project home movies on his bedroom wall consisting of grainy images of Marta's home and its surroundings. Pretty quotidian stuff, though he finds it terribly exciting. In the present, José and Ana watch Pedro's latest film. Compared to the earlier material, it's more personal, sophisticated...and insidious.
Now living in the city after Carmen sold their home, Pedro has become fixated on filmmaking as something that can bring him to rapture. The ultimate drug. He keeps a camera trained on his bed at all times to capture his drug-enhanced sleep, becoming convinced that another person or, more likely, a supernatural force has become involved with this otherwise solitary pursuit. When his friend, Gloria (Helena Fernán-Gómez, voiced by Almodóvar), turns off the camera after he nods off during a visit, he wakes up in a panic, convinced that he can't live without it.
By this point, Zulueta has switched focus to Pedro who grows increasingly pale, red-eyed--vampiric. Throughout, the score ranges from ominous electronic rumblings to tinkly melodies played on (what sounds like) toy instruments, including squeaks, rattle-shakes, and baby lamb bleats.
As José and Pedro continue to unravel, one by compulsively making a film and the other by compulsively watching it, the story threads ultimately entwine in gratifyingly proto-Videodromesque fashion.
Pedro Almodóvar, who would work with Cecilia Roth on 1999's All about My Mother (among other films), has proclaimed Arrebato his favorite horror film, but it goes further than that. In their early days, he truly believed that Zulueta, who would return to his native San Sebastián after the commercial failure of the film, was the superior filmmaker. A more unexpected fan: David Fincher, who references it in Fight Club.
Beyond the fact that they worked and socialized together, I would imagine that Almodóvar's enthusiasm for Arrebato has something to do with the way José and Pedro can't live with or without film. Or drugs. Any more than they can make or consume one without the other. Like a drug, film is the lie that tells the truth, but a human body can only take so much of the pure, uncut stuff. In Zulueta's case, a suddenly stalled film career would not kill him and nor would his longtime heroin addiction (he passed away in 2009), but after giving it everything he had, he had nothing left to give.
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is former president of Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
