Talkin' 'Bout That Outlaw X: Ti West's Body Horror-Cum-'70s Slasher Picture

X 

(Ti West, USA, rated R, 2022, 105 minutes) 

At its most basic level, the slasher film revolves around sex and death. By building his '70s-style horror picture around a pornographic film shoot, Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers) makes the connection between the two more explicit--pun intended--than usual. But wait, there's more! Sex isn't subtext in X: it's text. 

The action takes place in 1979 as a van full of adult film performers and crew members head towards a rental property somewhere outside of Houston, TX. If that sounds like a twist on the set-up behind Tobe Hooper's immortal Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), I can assure you that it is. 

There are few, if any, coincidences in Ti West's eight-feature filmography. If you think you've seen something before, you probably have, but the filmmaker has a knack for making his borrowings feel new. Beyond the van full of youngish people and the sun-blasted landscape, the gang passes a dead cow, en route to their destination, in the wake of its evisceration by truck. Not only is it a harbinger of things to come, but the mess of blood and guts evokes the abbatoir milieu of Tobe Hooper's film. Granted, there are no slaughterhouse workers in X, but the film does have a couple of leathery-faces… 

Wayne (The Ring's Martin Henderson), the porn film producer, had made arrangements with Howard (Stephen Ure), the property owner, before he'd met the guy or seen the place. It was a different time--no cell phones, computers, or internet searches. Had Wayne taken advantage of any of those tools, it's likely he would've made alternative arrangements, because Howard is one weird and creepy dude. He's also very, very old. 

The producer, a relentlessly optimistic type, doesn't let it get him down. He plans to shoot the film in the ranch house attached to the stable, and then split the scene. 

His companions include two couples: leggy blonde performer Bobby-Lynne (a very game, very funny Brittany Snow) and the laidback Jackson (actor and musician Kid Cudi) and junior director RJ (The Americans' Owen Campbell) and boom operator Lorraine (You's Jenna Ortega). Wayne's girlfriend, auburn-haired performer Maxine (Nymphomaniac's Mia Goth), rounds out the troupe. He believes the freckled coke fiend has "the X factor" that separates run-of-the-mill adult film performers from superstars. 

While the gang shoots a scene with Bobby-Lynne and Jackson, Maxine decides to take a dip in the lake. As she floats on the water, an Ophelia in the sun, a hulking alligator eyes her hungrily. It's another harbinger of things to come, but she has no clue. She slips back into her overall cutoffs, but before returning to the ranch house, she stops by Howard's home, beckoned by the ghostly figure at the door. It's his wife, Pearl, an elderly wraith (played by a certain unbilled actor) who looks at Maxine with a mix of curiosity, jealousy and…something else. She shows her faded photos from when she was young and pretty. Her whole life was ahead of her. Now it's not, and there's a sense that Maxine is a very unwelcome reminder. 

The young woman eventually takes her leave. She's rattled, but unharmed. The shoot continues, but it's increasingly clear that the younger people are being watched--and judged--by the older ones. The fire and brimstone televangelist (Simon Prast) constantly ranting from Howard and Pearl's B&W living room TV provides a glimpse into their Old Testament mindset regarding premarital sex (the film's cruel joke is that, though married, they're too decrepit to act on their sexual desires). Once things start to go wrong for Wayne and the gang, they go hilariously, disgustingly wrong.

West, who also wrote the script, co-edited the film with David Kashevaroff, and their cross-cutting creates a destabilizing effect. It's subtle at first before becoming faster and more insidious. The jump scares also prove incredibly effective; some of the best I've witnessed since Jennifer Kent's The Babadook. A haunting, choral-based score from Chelsea Wolfe and The Sacrament's Tyler Bates contributes to the film's dangerously sexy vibe, bolstered by FM staples from Blue Öyster Cult, Robert Palmer, and the like.  

By the end, West has put his own "porno chic" spin on the '70s slasher film, with all the requisite toplessness, but he's also made a horror film in which the scariest thing isn't a rusty nail or even a hungry alligator, but an aged human body. He's hardly the first director to do so, since Tony Scott, M. Night Shyamalan, and numerous others got there before him, but the combination of sex and old age--let alone the combination of sex and death--creates a particularly queasy kind of tension. You could call it ageist, and you wouldn't be completely wrong, but it sure got under my skin.

X opens on Friday, Mar 18. A prequel, Pearl, shot around the same time, is expected later this year. Images from A24, Fangoria, and Indiewire. 

They Got Him on the Run: Alien Boy Documents a Too-Short, Long-Remembered Life

I recently rescued this review, which was originally posted at The Stranger. It's from March 11, 2014.

Alien Boy, winner of the best film award at the 2013 Local Sightings Festival, begins with references to Portland bands like Poison Idea and the Wipers, but it isn't a music film. It's a documentary about police brutality and mental illness, since subject James Chasse, also known as Jim Jim, suffered from schizophrenia, a condition that inadvertently contributed to his tragic death. 

According to his parents, Chasse had a normal childhood until junior high, when things started to get weird. But music was a solace. He sang in a band and started a fanzine, The Oregon Organizm, to which notable writers like Joe Carducci (Rock and the Pop Narcotic) contributed. Chasse's girlfriend remembers that he would wear whatever he wanted, including women's clothing, for which he would get beaten up. It didn't deter him, but the demons in his head were another matter, and his behavior became erratic.

When Chasse told Greg Sage of the Wipers that he felt like an alien, the singer turned that admission into the song "Alien Boy" (it's fitting that Kurt Cobain shows up, via archival footage, as it's hard not to hear Nirvana's origins in that adolescent snarl and bass-heavy rhythm), but the Wipers connection ends there. 

Chasse maintained his friendships as best he could, but while his associates were finding their way in the world, he ended up in a mental institution and a series of group homes before eventually reentering society. Independence came with a price. When he neglected to take his meds, he would stop bathing, soil himself, and face rejection from the local establishments in which his parents, James and Linda, would attempt to catch up with him. They appear to have done all they could, but things would only get worse. 

And that's what happened: things went from bad to horrific when an arrest for suspected public urination turned lethal. The cops used excessive force and Chasse, who didn't receive appropriate medical treatment, died in police custody. The Oregonian and The Portland Mercury documented the ways police failed Chasse, including the untruths they told his family (former Mercury news editor Matt Davis appears in the film). It’s all pretty grim. 

In contrast to the officers' testimony during the ensuing court case, photographic evidence and surveillance footage—including disturbing audio—confirm that they acted inappropriately. Chasse may have run from the authorities, but he wasn't combative, he wasn't armed, and he wasn't on drugs. He died in 2006, but the findings of the internal affairs investigation wouldn't be released until 2010, while the family's lawsuit against the police bureau wouldn't be settled until 2011. 

As Linda puts it, "He didn't ever get to live the mainstream life of an average American man." All those avenues—college, a music career, a home of his own, etc.—ended when his illness kicked in. Consequently, there wasn't as much music content in this documentary as the title had led me to believe, but there's value here for viewers interested in the intersection of the police, their training, and the way we treat the mentally ill. At the very least, Chasse's death has helped to inspire change in the city of his birth. 

Alien Boy plays Northwest Film Forum through Mar 13 (no 9pm show on Mon). Breaking Glass plans to release the film on home video later this spring. Images from Oregon Live, Mental Health PDX, and PDX Monthly.

As it turns out, this review is still available on The Stranger website; I thought it had disappeared. Consider this a slightly expanded edition.  

Surrealistic Spies in Switzerland: Jean-Louis Roy's The Unknown Man of Shandigor

THE UNKNOWN MAN OF SHANDIGOR / L'Inconnu de Shandigor 

(Jean-Louis Roy, Switzerland, 1967, 96 mins) 

With this stylish Cold War satire, Swiss filmmaker Jean-Louis Roy crafted his own unique Dr. No-meets-Dr. Strangelove hybrid. Nominated for the Palme d'Or, yet unjustly neglected for decades, the loopy results play more like one of those mod '60s films that inspired Austin Powers--say, The 10th Victim--than a big-budget Bond production. And that is definitely not a complaint.  

Roy, who cowrote the screenplay with Gabriel Arout and Pierre Koralnik (director of the hard-to-find Serge Gainsbourg musical Anna) alternates between French, Russian, and American operatives. He starts by introducing a grumpy, aquiline-nose man in a wheelchair, Professor Von Krantz (The City of Lost Children's Daniel Emilfork, looking a little like Miguel Ferrer), inventor of The Canceler XII3, a contraption that neutralizes atomic weapons. 

Though reporters clamor to interview the Professor, he can't be bothered, snapping at one rather large fellow, "You are a walking blob of sperm!" The widowed scientist shares an under-furnished, modernist villa with his albino assistant, Yvan (Marcel Imhoff), and his beautiful blonde daughter, Sylvaine (Marie-France Boyer, Agnès Varda’s La Bonheur), who attends to his every need. 

Another gent with a distinctive visage, actor-musician Serge Gainsbourg, clad in black suit and leather gloves, plays Le Chef des Chauves, the combination spymaster and music director of a band of bald musician spies clad in pseudo-beatnik outfits. In a particularly amusing sequence, one baldie instructs the others on the art of the disguise, except his personas--"a tragedian," "a duchess," etc.--are anything but inconspicuous. 

If The Unknown Man of Shandigor revolves around the futility of war, it's also a treatise on surveillance. Just as the spies, including Howard Vernon's Bobby Gun (great name), a Nazi-turned-American agent, train their sights on the villa, the Professor and Yvan spy on Sylvaine. In other words, they may be on the side of good, but they're not necessarily good people. (For those unfamiliar with the prepossessing Vernon, his amazing filmography includes Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Silence de Mer, Jess Franco's The Awful Dr. Orloff, and Jean-Luc Godard's visually similar Alphaville.) 

While the spies try to figure out how to swipe the Professor’s plans, Sylvaine pines for Manuel, a trench coat-clad figure from her past (played by Ben Carruthers from John Cassavetes' Shadows). Her possessive, controlling father seems glad that he disappeared from her life, but Sylvaine can't let it go. When she attempts to reunite with Manuel, the baldies spirit her away. 

Left alone in an unsecured beach house, Sylvaine makes her escape to the mythical Shandigor (represented by the storybook structures of Antoni Gaudí) to find Manuel. If it wasn't clear by now, the baldies are far more skillful at music-making than spy-craft. As for the increasingly unhinged Professor, he's convinced she'll return, and she will, but not for the reason he thinks, i.e. that she can't live without him. 

Along the way, the various factions attempt to eliminate each other: poisoned gases fill secret chambers, daggers fly across museum spaces, machine guns rat-a-tat at bowlers and chess-players--even "capitalist" rock & roll is wielded as a weapon. Eventually, most of these characters fade from view, and Roy shifts his gaze to a mysterious, amphibious figure with an advantage over all of the others in his attempt to steal the Professor’s plans. 

Roy made The Unknown Man of Shandigor in Geneva and Barcelona, and it's a remarkable-looking film shot by cinematographer Roger Bimpage, who had a fairly brief run (1954-1974). He remains best known, if at all, for his work with the director. I regret that he didn't get or take the chance to work more often. It may be completely coincidental, but I wonder if he wasn’t familiar with Seconds. His use of inky shadows and razor-sharp angles recalls James Wong Howe's disorienting work on John Frankenheimer's 1966 thriller. 

Alphonse Roy's score adds to the appeal, ranging from vibe-saturated passages to guitar reverberations to orchestral maneuvers bolstered by excitable choristers, though the most memorable musical moment arrives with Serge Gainsbourg's pipe organ-drenched performance of "Bye Bye Mister Spy." 

I've never seen a film that combines the more eye-catching elements from the French New Wave and German Expressionism quite like this one--and I haven't even mentioned the ravenous sea creature, the embalming sequence, or the Russian spy's pint-sized sidekick. As Samm Deighan notes in her commentary, the film "is absolutely its own beast--in the best way." 

The Unknown Man of Shandigor is available to stream exclusively via Projectr or see it on the big screen, for one night only, at The Beacon. Better yet, I recommend shelling out for the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray, which includes Deighan’s commentary, an essay from Chris D. of the Flesheaters (a known authority on cult cinema), new interviews, and a vintage made-for-Swiss-TV documentary. Images from Deaf Crocodile and Mubi. 

John Landis's Revival of the Sketch-Comedy Anthology: Amazon Women on the Moon

AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON 

(Kino Lorber, US, 1987, rated R, 85 mins)

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. 

Mad Max: A Movie That Runs on Adrenaline

MAD MAX 

(KL Studio Classics, Australia, 1979, 93 minutes)

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. 

Images from Deep Focus Review, Trailers from Hell, Daily Motion, and Amazon. Mad Max is available on Blu-ray and 4K UHD through Kino Lorber.

War Is Hell for the Dedicated Army Nurse of Yasuzō Masumura’s Devastating Red Angel

THE RED ANGEL / Akai Tenshi 

(Yasuzō Masumura, Japan, 1966, CinemaScope, 95 minutes) 

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.

Oliver Reed, Ladies' Man of The System

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 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 States where 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. 

  Images from Back Row, Kultguy's Keep, and Cult Film Freak.