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In The Loop

Monday, March 8th, 2010

companies: BBC Films,
UK Film Council and Aramid
Entertainment Fund
year: 2009
runtime: 106′
country: United Kingdom
director: Armando Iannucci
cast: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander,
Gina McKee, James Gandolfini,
Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky,
Enzo Cilenti, Paul Higgins,
Mimi Kennedy, Alex Macqueen,
Johnny Pemberton, Olivia Poulet,
David Rasche, Joanna Scanlan,
James Smith, Steve Coogan
writers: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell,
Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin
and Tony Roche
cinematography: Jamie Cairney
music: Adam Ilhan
order this film from Amazon.com:
SD DVD | Blu-ray

“Twelve thousand troops . . . but that’s not enough.  That’s the amount that are going to die, and at the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you’ve lost.”

~ Lt. General George Miller

I missed this one when it (briefly) ran in theaters.  It certainly wasn’t a difficult film to miss, seeing as it played on a single screen for a week to two with nothing in the way of local advertising.  The closest I had to a theatrical experience was with regard to the trailer, which played before one of the handful of screenings of The Hurt Locker I attended.  That trailer, a manic flurry of editing backed by Rossinni’s William Tell Overture as re-interpreted by someone in the midst of a cocaine bender, killed with the audience, promising a smart, witty, imminently quotable piece of political satire the likes of which hasn’t been seen in some time.  In The Loop went on to become one of the best-reviewed films of the past year (93 and 83 percentile out of 100 at Rottetomatoes and Metacritic respectively for those who need numbers to chew on), and certainly delivers on all of the trailer’s promises.

In The Loop plays a bit like an episode of NBC’s The West Wing (not surprising given that it’s an off-shoot of the British TV series The Thick of it), only scrubbed clean of any trace of systemic respect and filtered through a ludicrously obscene lens .  There are no appearances by the President, Prime Minister, Secretary of Defense or what have you.  The focus is firmly on the underlings, the mass of supporting players who make things happen through shear determination and hefty doses of luck, good or otherwise.  And if all else fails, there are always plenty of facts to manipulate for the cause.

In fact, the entire narrative for In The Loop is about manipulation, most notably on the person-to-person level.  The plot, such as there is one, concerns the confused cooperation of the United Kingdom and the United States in the build-up to an unspecified conflict in the Middle East and the unlikely Cabinet Minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) propelled into the center of things by his awful media appearances.  Directing him into a host of disparate directions is Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, The Lair of the White Worm), a vulgar enforcer from Downing Street whose job it is to keep bumbling ministers straddling the constantly shifting party line.  Complicating matters on the other side of the pond are anti-war Asst. Sec’y of State Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) and Lt. General George Miller (James Gandolfini) and her enemy, conservative war-mongering Asst. Sec’y of State Linton Barwick (David Rasche).

Simon Foster is as close as the film comes to having a central identifiable character, a well-intentioned Minister turned political pawn (he doesn’t even have control of the blinds in his own office) who stumbles through all manner of positions on the issue of the war before being forced into resignation and, ultimately, fired.  He is frequently equated with meat, room filler for meetings and photo-ops, and is tossed about from agenda to agenda before being fed to the dogs (rather, the press) and returned to his rural constituents, forgotten by the world at large.  Through Foster we are witness to the monstrosity of the modern political machine and its ability to destroy those unlucky enough to become trapped in its quickly-moving parts.

Countering Foster’s political naivety is the seasoned Malcolm Tucker, the Downing Street attack dog tasked with keeping Foster in his place – wherever that might happen to be.  Prone to outlandish threats of physical violence (“Stay detached, or that’s what I’ll do to your retinas!”) and vein-popping fits of rage, Tucker is adept at bullying those he sees as beneath him (everyone, in other words) into whatever corner the situation calls for, but is ultimately as worried about his personal stake in events as everyone else.  Capaldi is exceptional, lending credulity to ludicrous phrases like “ass-spraying mayhem” in ways that I think few actors could.  He is responsible for what is, arguably, the film’s finest moment, when Tucker, alone in the mediation room of the United Nations building, has a moment of silent existential panic.

There’s a lot of seriousness to In The Loop, not the least of which being the subject it tackles (obviously inspired by the build-up to the Iraq War in 2003).  The country the United States and the United Kingdom are joining forces against goes unnamed throughout, re-enforcing one of the important points of the film: The governments don’t want a war against any nation in particular, they just want a war.  There’s no escaping the fact that the decision the film’s mountain of supporting characters are awkwardly racing towards is going to cost real lives (per the quote at the head of this article).

The screenplay (by director Armando Iannucci, with Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Ian Martin and Tony Roche, the crew behind The Thick of It) blends comedy seamlessly with a manic pacing and the serious elements of the narrative.  The jokes are non-stop from the start, the sense of humor bleakly sardonic throughout.  Every other line is a jab at something or someone and I found myself, for perhaps the first time ever, watching an English-language film with subtitles enabled just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything (a big thanks to MPI Home Video for including them on their DVD).  In The Loop is, in a word, vicious, an outright condemnation of a system that sends young men to die for little more than the personal political gain of those at the top.  It’s also uproariously funny, and I haven’t laughed so much during a film in a long, long time.

Iannucci’s direction is a bit too television for my taste, and all-handheld HD camera work is starting to lose some of its effective immediacy after all the other feature films (particularly in the horror genre) and television series (The Office, et al) that have utilized the technique.  His sense of pacing is spot-on, however, and In The Loop roars forward at full-tilt from the first frames.  Exceptional casting rules the day, the long list of performers taking the swift-footed screenwriting in the appropriate stride.  Capaldi and Paul Haggins reprise their enforcer roles from the television series, while Mimi Kennedy and David Rasche make for memorable dueling Assistant Secretaries of State.  Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) makes an important bit appearance as a constituent disgruntled about a collapsing wall, and Tom Hollander brings pathos to the dim-witted and quickly fading political star Simon Foster.

MPI Home Video released In The Loop to both DVD and Blu-ray on the 12th of January, and I highly recommend that those who, like myself, missed it in its limited theatrical run take the opportunity to catch up to it now.  Both do the job of capturing the HD-cam photography, the Blu-ray being noticeably clearer and sharper if not much else.  Extras are limited – a trailer, a tv spot, a nice collection of deleted scenes (28 minutes worth), and an extremely short (3 minutes, 17 seconds) look behind-the-scenes – but the film itself is more than enough to make the discs worthwhile and the price is certainly right (under $20 retail for the Blu-ray and considerably less for the SD DVD).  Both English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available for the feature, the former of which I found very useful in preparing for this review.

This is a wonderful piece of acid political satire with surprising depth lurking beneath all the cock jokes (and believe me, there are a lot of them).  I’ll stop short of calling it brilliant for my own petty reasons, but don’t let that dissuade you.  In The Loop comes very highly recommended.

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SD DVD | Blu-ray

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Ganjasaurus Rex

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

companies: Prehistoric Productions
and Reel People Media
year: 1987
runtime: 88′
country: United States
director: Ursi Reynolds
cast: Paul Bassis, Dave Fresh,
Rosie Jones, Howard Phun,
Rich Abernathy, John Ivar,
Andy Barnett, Alex,
Stephen Brown, Diana Hahn
writers: Paul Bassis, Dan Gilweit,
Rosie Jones, Rick Cooper, Al Ceraulo,
Andy Barnett, Alex, Stephen Brown,
Jon Akselsen and Diana Hahn
videographer: Russel Dobson
music: Step One Studios, David Penalosa,
Rob Sadler, Andy Barnett, Mark John,
Rod Deal, Larry “Lazer” Murphy, Tree Spirit,
Tyce, Mike, Sean, Rich, Dan and Paul Bassis
special effects: marty Smitty
order the OOP Rhino Video
release from Amazon.com

Plot: A prehistoric monster terrorizes the California coast and the marijuana growers there, who have developed a new strain of cannabis the grows to be as large as a redwood tree.

Aside from an extensive selection of Sandy Frank-imported Japanese science fiction features and an Ed Wood Jr. skin flick, Rhino Video’s 1988 release of Ganjasaurus Rex is the only other VHS I clearly remember dwelling on Blockbuster’s paltry “Other” shelf.  Even to my young eyes it looked just too . . . well . . . bad . . . to be worth bothering with, so I never did.  Not, at least, until now.

The story, such as there is one, follows a handful of pot farmers looking to make it big with a new sequoia-sized strain of cannabis and the subsequent (farcical) attempts by the DEA to suppress their efforts.  Intruding upon things is the gargantuan Tyrannosaurus Herbivorous Ganjasaurus Rex, a misunderstood beast from the sea who seeks only to munch peacefully on the towering marijuana plants that dominated its prehistoric environment.  Compulsory scenes of monster mayhem ensue, with Ganjasaurus Rex sending the local California populace fleeing and the DEA rushing to an expert on the beast (one Professor Sprog) for help.

The box art for this one pretty much sums it up – cheap is the operative word.  Low-fi and low-tech, the project seems to be the confused brainchild of a few stoner musicians looking to sound off against the Reagan-era War on Drugs in the doofiest way possible, by having a pissed-off prehistoric monster rise up in reaction to Federal drug raids.  Some archival footage from a 1985 raid on a California pot grower is even used to beef up the creature’s first appearance.  The dinosaur menace (implicitly linked with Godzilla, which makes for a copyright joke at the end of things) is primarily accomplished through stop motion, at least in the argumentative sense of the term.  Mostly it looks like what it is: either a toy being jerked around in front of a blue screen or a larger head mock-up with a light bulb inside of it.  Impressive it certainly isn’t, though it is amusing from time to time.


Surprisingly enough, the writing here (credited to no fewer than ten people, including much of the cast) isn’t all that bad, and some is even funny as intended.  It’s obvious where the sympathies of the creators lie.  The DEA, local law enforcement, and anti-pot community activists (operating under the banner of “Operation C.A.M.P” . . . har har har) are presented as little more than buffoons, their dialogue full of Freudian slips (confusing “propaganda” and “press packets”, for instance).  The good-guys are peaceful and well-intentioned hippies with names like Cloud and Moss, who spend their days watching T.V., eating lentils, and being generally unproductive members of society.  The scientists are goofy, especially Professor Sprog, though we know they’re good too – they drink all-natural carrot juice while their DEA agent guest opts for Folger’s Crystals and Sweet ‘n Low.

There is some seriousness afoot when DEA agents descend on Moss and his girlfriend’s pad, confiscating their gargantuan potted pets (named Zelda and Wilma) at gunpoint.  Any comment on the use of extreme force is quickly lost in the farce, with the DEA agents, their supporters, and a gaggle of press representatives finding themselves quite taken with the smoking remnants of Moss’ pet trees.  The display also attracts one Ganjasaurus Rex, who goes on a brief rampage behind still photos of local buildings before settling down and taking a few tokes off the still smoldering pot-pyre.

Performances are expectedly mixed but, as was the case with the writing, not as bad as one might anticipate.  Much of the on-screen talent were local musicians, and at least they have something in the way of personality on their side.  The less said about the more technical aspects of the production the better.  The videography is mostly flat and static, and the live audio recording is ample for understanding dialogue but not much else.  One big positive is the music, which is quite good throughout.  I’d frankly be more interested in owning a copy of the soundtrack than the film itself.

I can’t bring myself to be too hard on this one, though I honestly don’t have that much to say about it either.  For a no-budget shot-on-video monster comedy it could certainly have been worse, even if some of it did leave me feeling rather sleepy-eyed.  Long OOP, Ganjasaurus Rex currently goes for anywhere between $50 and $1000 at online retailers, which seems excessive at both ends.  If you can find it cheap it may well be worth a watch, though those who skip on it certainly aren’t missing out on much.  Does ambivalence count as a recommendation?


order the OOP Rhino Video
release from Amazon.com

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King Kong vs. Godzilla

Friday, January 29th, 2010

part of the Goin’ Bananas B-movie roundtable:

companies: Universal International
and Toho Company Ltd.
year: 1963
runtime: 91′
countries: United States / Japan
directors: Ishiro Honda
and Thomas Montgomery
cast: Michael Keith, Harry Holcombe,
James Yagi, Tadao Takashima,
Kenji Sahara, Ichiro Arishima,
Yu Fujiki, Jun Tazaki, Akihiko Hirata
writers: Paul Mason
and Bruce Howard
music: Peter Zinner (supervisor)
dvd company: Universal Studios Home Entertainment
release date: November 29, 2005
retail price: $14.98
details: Region 1 / NTSC / Single Layer
feature: progressive / 2.31:1 anamorphic
audio: Dolby Digital English (2.0 Mono)
subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, French
order this film from Amazon.com
single disc | double feature with King Kong Escapes

Plot: A television executive has King Kong imported to Japan while Godzilla is simultaneously unleashed from his imprisonment in an iceberg.  The two march inexorably towards each other, leading to an epic final battle atop Mount Fuji.

Like all the earliest of Toho’s science fiction and fantasy films (Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, Gigantis the Fire Monster, Half Human, Varan the Unbelievable, The H-Man, Gorath, The Human Vapor, and The Last War in particular), King Kong vs. Godzilla was altered considerably for importation into the American market.  In this case co-producer John Beck, working from a treatment by an uncredited and unpaid Willis O’Brien, was given full reign over how Toho’s production would be presented in the States as part of his contract with the company.  The end result is a film almost entirely unique from the Japanese original, and one of the most altered Toho productions outside of Crown International’s treatment of Varan the Unbelievable.

In its original form King Kong vs. Godzilla is much less science fiction than comedy, a satire of television marketing.  Producer Beck was none too pleased with the light-hearted sensibilities of the picture and sought, with his version, to present audiences with the more traditional monster romp they were undoubtedly expecting.  His success in this regard was minimal, his efforts to improve things rendering King Kong vs. Godzilla an unintentional comedy rather than an overt one.

Taking a cue from Terry Morse’s financially successful redux of Godzilla: King of the Monsters! a few years earlier, Beck oriented his film around newly-shot sequences featuring news reporters in the United States (Michael Keith, The Worm Eaters) and Japan (James Yagi, of The Outer Limits episode The Hundred Years of the Dragon).  Neither Michael Keith or James Yagi had the star credentials of Raymond Burr, who had appeared as the villainous Lars Thorwald in Hitchcock’s Rear Window just two years before his turn as Steve Martin in Godzilla: King of the Monsters!.  More unfortunately, Beck’s integration of their sequences into the film proper is poor at best.  They play as little more than lengthy info-dumps between the Japanese footage and stop the pacing of the film cold.

Michael Keith plays UN reporter Eric Carter, who communicates with James Yagi’s Omura via stock inserts of the alien satellite from The Mysterians.  Beck must have been working under considerable financial limitation here, as the two sets the reporters occupy have all the depth and realism of a sub-par grade school shoebox diorama.  Each comes complete with a ‘television’, or rather a piecing together of cardboard slabs upon which crumpled monochrome prints of shots from the film are stuck.  It’s sad stuff, indeed, and a far cry from the comparably lavish production values of the rest of the picture.


Harry Holcombe (The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, Empire of the Ants), the most accomplished of the American cast by a wide margin, appears as Dr. Arnold Johnson, who is perhaps the worst paleontologist in screen history.  Using a children’s picture book as a visual aid, Johnson explains to reporter Carter that the recently appeared Godzilla may well be a cross between a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Stegosaurus while comparing his brain to a marble and recommending that electricity might be a viable offensive measure against him (given that he’s a reptile, as though his being anything else would make him any less susceptible to electrocution).  Yes, it is as dreadful as it sounds, though not entirely without its unintentional comic charm.

The English overdubbing of the Japanese footage isn’t nearly so bad as it could have been here, besting Columbia’s for the earlier Battle in Outer Space and a marked improvement over the endless narration found in Half Human or Gigantis the Fire Monster, though Beck’s attempts to play the film straight appear to have been lost in translation.  Television executive Mr. Tako (the wonderful Ichiro Arishima) still comes across as a daft madman and Furue (Yu Fujiki) still plays the bumbling sidekick to Sakurai’s (Tadao Takashima) straight man.  Furue provides one of the most memorable parts of the dubbed version, introducing a minor subplot about his corns and how they ache when monsters are afoot.  The dubbing even improves upon the original Japanese in one respect, making the American submarine crew sound less like the amateur actors they are.

Beck’s King Kong vs. Godzilla runs just 91 minutes, five minutes shy of the original running time, but I’d wager that no more than 75-80% of the original survived the editing process.  Lost is much of the early character development, replaced by Beck’s bricks of exposition.  Perhaps the biggest loss is in the soundtrack department, where Ifukube’s score (one of the very best of his career) is replaced with stock tracks from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Monster that Challenged the World, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, among others.  The stock tracks aren’t bad by any means, but their unconnected bundle of disparate themes can’t compare with the power of Ifukube’s work.


Thankfully, the majority of the monster footage remains intact, less a few shots here and there.  Reviews of the film in America more or less ignored the dramatic inadequacy of the film, focusing on the aptitude of the Japanese effects crew instead.  In this respect Beck’s King Kong vs. Godzilla still makes for an entertaining watch, in spite of its disparaging ineptitude in other areas.

Universal, who released the film domestically as Universal International in 1963, missed a grand opportunity to present a deluxe edition of this film when it chose to bring it to DVD in 2005, but such is the nature of the business.  Those looking for the uncut original will have to rely on Toho’s own expensive home video iterations, as this Universal Studios Home Entertainment DVD caters only to the American release version of the film.

King Kong vs. Godzilla is in a horrendous state of preservation in its native Japan, and Toho’s recent high definition restoration had to rely, in part, on an awful standard definition video master from the ’90s in order to account for footage in too sad a shape to be transferred.  Universal’s print is in comparatively excellent shape, with much of the footage lost in the Japanese restoration appearing nearly pristine here.  The 2.35:1 progressive and anamorphic widescreen transfer presents the film in its original aspect ratio for the first time on American shores and, save for some damage (dust and scratches), its a beauty.  Beck’s additions to the drama look even cheaper in the original scope, while Eiji Tsuburaya’s effects production shines.  Audio is English only Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic, with optional English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles available.

The single layer disc boasts absolutely nothing in the way of supplemental material, not even a trailer.  Still, the price is low (at least for the double bill with King Kong Escapes) and the quality of transfer high, making it worth the upgrade from the awful pan-and-scan Goodtimes releases that have been kicking around for the past decade plus.  Fans will certainly want to indulge.

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Screwballs

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

postera.k.a. Screw Balls
companies: Maurice Smith Productions,
Millennium, and New World Pictures
year: 1983
runtime: 80′
country: Canada
director: Rafal Zielinski
cast: Peter Keleghan, Kent Deuters,
Linda Speciale, Alan Deveau,
Linda Shayne, Jason Warren,
Jim Coburn, Terrea Smith
writers: Linda Shayne
and Jim Wynorski
cinematographer: Miklos Lente
music: Tim McCauley
dvd company: Severin Films
release date: October 13, 2009
retail price: $34.95
disc details: Region A / Single Layer
feature: 1080p HD
audio: Dolby Digital English [2.0]
subtitles: none
reviewed from a screener
provided by Severin Films LLC.
order this disc from Amazon.com

Plot: A motley gang of high school miscreants go on a quest to reveal the breasts of resident virgin Purity Busch.

I have to admit before delving into this review proper that I’ve never much been friends with the teen sex comedy sub-genre.  I’ve not seen Bob Clark’s Porky’s, any of the multitude of American Pie iterations, or even the seminal John Landis effort Animal House.  Aside from the long-ago experience of seeing Fast Times at Ridgemont High on television one very boring summer day, my experience with the sub-genre is practically nil.  Consider this a view from a complete outsider.

My first impression of Screwballs, and this isn’t meant as an insult in the least, is that it’s a tremendously stupid film.  I would even go so far as to call it epic in terms of its stupidity.  The humor, from character names (Purity Busch, Melvin Jerkovski, Bootsie Goodhead, and so on) on up, is about as obvious as it gets.  Of course none of this is necessarily a bad thing as far as the sub-genre is concerned and in the case of Screwballs, this combination of obviousness and uncompromising idiocy are positive boons.

Cartoonish in the extreme (director Rafal Zielinski reveals in the commentary that the original conception for the film involved thought bubbles and animated transitions), Screwballs is ostensibly a string of increasingly absurd comedy setpieces, the majority of which are based around the revelation of those holy grails of the adolescent male imagination.  That said, Zielinski shows considerable restraint in the nudity department, which will undoubtedly darken the hearts of skin aficianados everywhere (a striptease by Raven DeLaCroix should help cheer things up).  It does allow for some terriffic build up to the ludicrous finale, in which Purity is finally revealed in all her glory.

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While the nudity may be sparse, Screwballs more than makes up for it in its unabashed absurdity.  While set in the America of the early 1960s, the production is an anochronistic mess of 80s raunch and Archy comics-inspired design.  Taft and Adams (T & A, get it?) High School is a place that could never have existed realistically, be it in the past, present, or future.  Classes seem limited to French and biology and the school boasts compulsory freshmen breast exams and a working aircraft maintenance shop!  It’s best not to try and rationalize such things, especially for a film whose reality exists solely to facilitate hard-on jokes and breast shots.

Aside from the cathartic parting moment (undoubtedly the most patriotic nude scene ever to grace a Canadian-made American-produced sex romp), Screwballs boasts a healthy number of comedic highlights.  The title refers to what is arguably the film’s most famous scene, in which an impromptu game of strip bowling (!?) leads to a bit of vulgar bowling ball based slapstick.  Other notable moments include the aforementioned compulsory breast exams, an attempt at mass hypnosis involving a giant weiner strapped to a diving board, and an accidental sexual encounter between a young home invader and Purity’s mother that almost ends in a shotgun slaughter.  Where is Purity in all this?  Screwing a giant Teddy bear, of course!

caseArriving on the heels of Porky’s, Screwballs was evidentally a big money maker for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and a staple of video rental shelves at the height of the VHS boom.  In spite of its popularity as a cult title, the film went long unrepresented in the North American DVD market (there was a loathsome UK release in 2003), creating a niche that exploitation outfit Severin Films appears to have developed quite the itch to fill.  The company has not only seen fit to distribute the film on DVD, but as part of its popular Blu-ray line as well.

Screwballs seems an odd choice to receive the HD treatment, particularly given the conditions of its archiving.  Severin certainly had their work cut out for them, as the best available source for the picture appears to be a 16mm internegative – a sad state of affairs for a domestically released film less than three decades old.

While presented in full AVC encoded 1080p in the original theatrical 1.66:1 aspect ratio, Screwballs is about as far from demo-quality material as you can get.  The image is soft and overly grainy with unimpressive color and contrast, and the unrestored 16mm source presents with a few moments of damage that may be more than today’s HD connisseurs are expecting to see.  But expectations are everything, and this is still the best Screwballs has looked in decades and is probably the best it’s ever going to look again.  Audio is presented in a serviceable Dolby Digital 2.0 English track that presents the source honestly if not much else.  There are no subtitles.

003 004

As with previous Severin Films Blu-rays, supplements are extensive.  The feature is accompanied by a lively commentary track with director Rafal Zielinski, who proves to be an amusing interviewee, and Severin Films gurus David Gregory and Joe Cregan.  This is a great commentary track for the film in question, lively and informative, and one of the few I’ve ever listened to in its entirety.  Next up are a spate of seperate short interviews, with writers Linda Shayne (Bootsie Goodhead in the film) and Jim Wynorski, actor Kent Deuters, SPFX artist Gerald Lukaniuk, conuxploitation scholar (these exist!?) Paul Corpue, and Mr. Skin of the online skin-flick megachurch of the same name.  In case that weren’t enough, Severin also provides an expansive collection of deleted scenes culled from a Spanish VHS release and a theatrical trailer to boot.  As with previous releases, all of the video supplements for Screwballs are presented in high definition.

I imagine that there will be lots of gnashing of teeth online with regards to the video quality on this release, but I honestly have no issues with it.  As I said, it’s all about expectations and the soft 16mm sourced HD image is still noticeably superior to the SD release and an honest representation of the source.  At this point it’s going to be a question of playback capabilities, and with the Screwballs Blu-ray currently going for $14.99 at Amazon (57% off retail!) I honestly can’t see any reason not to purchase it over its SD counterpart.

So Screwballs didn’t make a sex comedy convert of me, but its reputation for absurdity is well earned.  While stupid to an astounding degree, I can’t say that I wasn’t entertained by the proceedings.  Those keen on the genre are encouraged to indulge, while a rent will probably be sufficient for the rest of you.  For fans, the loaded Severin Films Blu-ray comes highly recommended – I only wish more major studios could be bothered to make their catalog releases this appealing.

005

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Chaw

Friday, November 6th, 2009

postercompany: Lotte Entertainment
year: 2009
runtime: 121′
country: South Korea
director: Jeong-won Shin
cast: Eom Tae-woong, Yoon Jae-moon, Jeong Yu-mi, Jang Hang-seon, Josiah D. Lee

Police officer Kim (Eom Tae-woong) suddenly finds himself transferred from Seoul to a precinct in a small farming village. Because Kim is officially willing to work anywhere, he has to grab his pregnant wife and his dement mother and move virtually at once. Is there no police union in South Korea?

Another question is why the village would need another uniform in addition to the half a dozen or so policemen already stationed in a place called “the crimeless village”. That question is never quite answered directly, although the insane lack of competence and intelligence shown by Kim’s new colleagues could be an explanation.

The arrival of at least one level-headed person turns out to be timely, though. A large animal, which will shortly be identified as an absurdly large boar, has begun a series of deadly attacks on just about anyone unlucky enough to cross its path. At first, the rather freaky village heads do the mayor of Amity thing, and try to sweep the whole business under the carpet. A boar attack on a weekend farming event convinces the town fathers that they have to take action. They call in a group of professional hunters lead by media darling Baek (Yoon Je-moon).

A short but exciting hunt later, Baek presents a dead female boar as the mankiller everyone is afraid of, but the local old, wisened hunter Cheon Il-man (Jang Hang-seon) who has lost his granddaughter to the beast doesn’t believe the animal to be the true culprit. Rather, or so he theorizes after a make-shift autopsy of the animal, the animal Baek has killed was just the true killer’s wife.

Cheon Il-man is just all too right. The same night, the true killer boar breaks through the wall of the building where the villagers are celebrating the death of his wife by eating her and wreaks a little havok.

Since most everything else that has happened has followed the Jaws template like nothing since Grizzly, a small group (but hey, it’s not a trio) consisting of Kim, the city police detective Shin (Park Hyeok-kwon) who had been called when nobody was sure if the killings weren’t murders, Baek, Cheon Il-man and the zoologist Soo-ryeon (Jeong Yu-mi), decides to search for the monster’s lair and kill it.

chaw1 chaw2 chaw3
chaw4 chaw5 chaw6

Chaw is a weird one. While all of the film’s plot beats are slavishly copied from Spielberg’s Jaws, I’d never call this South Korean production a true rip-off. The difference does not lie in the difference in animal species or talent and interest of the filmmakers as it is between Jaws and Grizzly, it is a difference in tone. Chaw is not trying to be a thriller or horror movie, it is an absurd comedy that uses the big bad animal template to, well, I’m not completely sure to do what. It is most certainly not one of those boring genre parodies Hollywood likes to crap out like a dying elephant, but why excatly Chaws director Shin Jeong-won uses the template at all instead of just making an absurd comedy about weird people living in a weird little village never was too clear to me while watching it.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, because there is nothing in this world that can’t be improved by the addition of a big freaking monster, be the monster a mutant boar or Margaret Thatcher. Less fortunately, I am not completely satisfied by the way the monster CGI is realized. While the boar wears a satisfyingly evil looking face, he is never looking all that real when he is moving. It comes down to the typical CGI problem of not looking physically massive enough and not moving like a living creature but like an animation.

Director Shin at least seems to have realized that his creature isn’t much above SciFi channel standard and doesn’t show too much of it too often, so that the creature troubles aren’t the kiss of death for the film’s entertainment value it could be.

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More important – and more problematic to some – could be the film’s humor. Even though this is also a monster movie, it is a comedy first, and it is a comedy whose humor is all over the place. It begins with annoying bumbling comic relief cop antics by the village police but then goes on to include just about any other kind of humor you could think of, from some mild things about poop to quite a bit of the black leftfield humor I have become acquainted with through South Korean films like The Host or The Quiet Family. There are moments of the absurd that turn into the humane and the tragic or hint at a darkness lying behind human relationships, yet also so much pure silliness that the latter is robbed of much of its impact. Many of the film’s absurdities are funny, effective and worthwhile nonetheless, the trouble is that the jokes, the human angle and the monster bits never achieve the kind of thematic unity a film like The Host reaches.

Instead we have a technically (apart from CGI troubles that always also come down to taste) highly proficient monster movie that permanently gets waylaid by weird little jokes and asides and your typical Asian movie what-the-hells like Baek’s talking (telepathic?) dog (Earl Wayne Ording – no, really, that’s the dog actor’s name) or the karaoke sequence.

This just doesn’t add up to a completely satisfying movie, but to a film chockfull of fun little moments that is highly entertaining to watch if one likes monster movies and absurd humor and is willing to just follow the film wherever it leads, coherence be damned. In its own way, it beats most other Jaws copies easily, however faint this praise might sound.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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Mahakaal

Friday, August 21st, 2009

a.k.a. THE MONSTER
Prime Films / Cine Film [1988/1993] 132′
country: India
director: Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay
cast: Karan Shah, Archana Puran Singh,
Johnny Lever, Mayur, Reema Lagoo
Order this film from Amazon.com

The life of thirty year old college teenager Anita (Archana Puran Singh) is starting to get interesting. Right now, she and her equally old student friends (among them the most terrifying monster of all – “comedian” Johnny Lever) are still cavorting around merrily – that is when her boyfriend Prakash and his best friend Rakesh aren’t dishooming the local would-be rapists - but all this is beginning to change when Anita’s best friend Seela, and very soon our heroine herself, is starting to have terrible nightmares.

In them, they are hunted by a shadowy, mulletted man with a scarred face and the propensity to laugh menacingly while showing his charming iron-bladed gloves. That would probably be troubling enough for the girls, yet the worst thing is that these dreams are leaving physical traces behind. It’s one thing dreaming about getting your nightshirt ripped by claws, but it’s quite another when you wake up and actually find it ripped.

Still, the friends are (theoretically) young, their hair freshly sprayed and mulletted, so they decide to drive to the country-side to have a picnic and cavort some more. That works out nicely until they want to drive back home and discover that their car won’t move an inch anymore. Fortunately there’s a hotel nearby. Unfortunately, it’s managed by another Johnny Lever and has no working phones to call home from. How immoral! Well, at least it’s dry and warm.

Anita and Prakash do the boring and responsible thing by keeping chaste. Seela and Rakesh however decide to have a real picnic together in one bed. Would you believe that Seela dreams of the nice man with the interesting gloves again? Yeah, I was completely taken by surprise myself. This time, though, he’s not just appearing to scare the girl; he kills her, leaving Rakesh – who of course decides to run – as the main suspect of the dastardly deed, no matter that there’s no proof whatsoever against him.

Hunting Rakesh is Anita’s father, your usual Bollywood patriarchal copper arsehole. Thanks to Rakesh’s brilliant idea to make a visit to his school campus in bright daylight, it’s a very short manhunt, and the young idiot finds himself in a nice, damp cell.

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The next night, Anita dreams of Rakesh getting killed in his cell by the mullet man and his new pet snakes, and even her skeptical father looks shaken when he learns that the young man did in fact die that night.

After a few more small revelations, Dad explains who the man with the gloves is. It’s a certain Shakaal, a black magician who worshipped some undefined dark gods by sacrificing children to them. Seven years ago, he kidnapped Anita’s little sister to do the same to her. Her father wasn’t able to save his daughter, so he poked Shakaal in the face with a torch and buried him alive in a chained box in some ruins. Obviously, the dead man has returned to take his vengeance.

If there is one thing you can count on when it comes to the films of the Ramsay Brothers, it is their absolutely shameless will to entertain in the broadest and sleaziest (for Hindi cinema) way possible. These two aren’t afraid of anything, not even ripping off one of the two films by Wes Craven that are actually any good – A NIghtmare On Elm Street.

Well, there is something the Ramsays were afraid of – putting their Nightmare rip-off into the cinemas when their arch enemy Mohan Bakhri had just before thrown his own version of the tale, Khooni Murdaa, on the market. Just imagine, they could have lost money! So they let the film lie and ripen for a few years and only put it out when the Bollywood horror boom had already run its course, making it their last theatrical feature before they had to flee into the land of cable TV, as far as I’ve heard while being hunted by villagers carrying torches.

So the fashion and the victims of Johnny Lever’s “parodies” (and does Amitabh Bachchan’s comeback vehicle Shahenshah truly need to be parodied?) and “satire” are very much part of the late 80s. I have a hard time imagining that this will have helped Mahakaal’s financial performance, but hey, what do I know about stuff like that.

What I do know is what I find fun, and Mahakaal definitely is fun.

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Sure, if you are easily angered by really brazen theft of plots, ideas, scene set-ups or musical cues, you’ll probably have a hard time watching it without beginning to froth at the mouth. I find the Ramsay method here rather charming. The first half of Mahakaal copies the plot progression and characters of its model as closely as possible, but adds a lot of flavor to prepare Craven’s recipe for the taste of an Indian audience. So the viewer gets to see a slightly less bloody version of A Nightmare on Elm Street plus everything he, she or it ever loved about the trashier side of Bollywood cinema – musical numbers of dubious quality (well, I actually found the last one with its golden glitter costumes from hell rather undubious, even quite delightful), heroines with an insane propensity to get very very wet, said dishooming of would-be rapists and other assorted rabble, Johnny Lever humor you can blessedly fast forward through because his scenes are not in the least relevant for anything else in the film (although you will then miss out on things like his Michael Jackson imitation, his Amitabh Bachchan in Shahenshah stick – which is actually kinda funny – and the rare Johnny action scene).

Then the last third of the film arrives, and the Ramsays have obviously had enough of following Craven, throw out the dream demon idea completely and turn the film into the monster rumble most of their films I have seen until now end in. Which is an excellent idea when it brings us a re-jigged scene stolen from Dawn of the Dead, an inexplicable, but fun bout of demonic possession and a much better water bed death scene than in the original. The only way to beat that (or bring it to an end) is of course to end the film in a bizarre beat-down that is at once gruesome, silly and absolutely insane and alone worth the price of admission.

Technically, Mahakaal is typical Ramsay Brothers filmmaking – there’s not a bit of subtlety to find anywhere, yet the brothers show an exhilarating sense for hysterical in-your-face intensity when it comes to the horror sequences or the action. If it has to do with the use of zoom, manic camera movements, fog, multi-coloured lights, more fog, or bizarre interior architecture (watch out for the temple of evil!), the Ramsays know what they are doing and (or so I suspect) love it.

Memorable acting you won’t find here, but at least our heroine, future TV personality Archana Puran Singh, is as game for anything as Polly (Shan) Kuan, be it fighting an invisible man, getting very very wet repeatedly, or just screaming “Nahiiiiiiiin!”. Especially her screams are something I won’t soon forgot.

What more could I ask from a film?

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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