.
Sunday 28 August 2011
Sunday 14 August 2011
Even More of The Greatest part 1
As before they're not in any particular order.
60. Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)
Some time during the mid sixties Roger Corman gave director Monte Hellman the money to make two western b-movies, to be shot more or less at the same time. The first was The Shooting, a kind of existential take on the traditional western stereotypes whith Jack Nicholson as a black clad, sociopathic gunfighter and Warren Oates as kind of architypal western hero in the style of Ethan Edwards. Infact, Oates characters paternal relationship with a younger protagonist is like a straight up homage to John Wayne in The Searchers. The Shooting has much of the best things of the traditional hollywood western, while at the same time waving farewell to it. The second film to be made was Ride in the Whirlwind. Made with much of the same cast as The Shooting (minus Oates) and from a script knocked together by Jack Nicholson, it nevertheless marks a drastic departure from its predecessor.
The architypes are replaced with beleivable characters. The incredible dialogue which carries most of the film is a sometimes bareley comprehensible stream of authentic 1870s north american slang and inflections. Watching this film you feel as if you're listening in on the old west, perhaps from an early record. Harry Dean Stanton plays a one eyed bandit called Blind Dick, who's gang robs a stagecoach in the opening scene of the film. They are tracked down and killed by a vigillante mob, who then mistake some nearby cowboys, Wes (Jack Nicholson) and Vern (Cameron Mitchell), for outlaws. Wes and Vern are forced to go on the run and even take a family hostage in order to escape their pursuers, essentially becoming what they where accused of being in the first place. Seemingly then, the film is a comment on subjective justice as a kind of physical embodiment of the 'lawlessenes' of the old west. Jack Nicholson, already one of the great actors, can apparently write too. Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting could also be seen as direct predecessors to a later more famous western, The Missouri Breaks, which also stared Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton (alongside Marlon Brando) and had a similar sense of authenticity and approach to dialogue.
59. The Name of the Rose (1986)
Jean-Jacques Annaud adapted this from a book by Umberto Eco, it's basically a murder mystery set in a remote abbey in northern Italy during the middle ages. It's thickly atmospheric, feeling for the most part like a horror film, Annaud seems to have deliberately chosen the ugliest actors to play the various characters, who in turn have been exagerated to the level of gargoyles. Sean Connery and Christian Slater play franciscan monks who have been sent to the abbey as representatives during a theological conference. As certain monks start turning up dead they soon uncover a conspiracy that reveals corruption in the catholic church itself, represented by an inquisitor played by a demonic looking F. Murray Abraham. It's good, late night fun.
58. The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
57. Satyricon (1969)
Federico Fellini's adaptation of the Roman text by Petronius, the story of Satyricon basically follows the exploits of two Roman men who start out as rivals in a love triangle with a young boy and then end up in a series of misadventures that take them on a kind of tour through Roman society. The original text is basically an attempt by a Roman writer to update, or satirise, the kind of Greek heroic myths in which young men are sent on these long journeys of discovery. In Satyricon however the two protagonists are distinctly un-heroic, and their journey is a chaotic series of mishaps brought about by their initial capture into slavery. In alot of ways this is a typical Fellini movie, lots of scary women with painted faces and the narrative progresses in this kind of dreamlike way, but it seems to take his cartoonish stylisation to a new level. It's a beautiful dream.
I think it's also notable among his films as being an adaptation of a well known work of literature rather than his own story. Usually I think of Fellini as a very autobiographical director who wrote most of his more well known films with a kind of confesional quality. This is apparent in what are arguably his three most famous films: 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita and Amacord (which translates as I Remember). The only other story that I'm aware of him adapting would be his 1976 film of Casanova's memoirs. Satyricon has something of the same atmosphere as Casanova, as I've said before it's very visually exagerrated, as if the further back he goes historically, the less 'realistic' he's prepared to be. Perversely, this can also add to the veiwers historical curiosity, a curiosity Fellini reveals himself in a film he made not long after Satyricon, Fellini's Roma.
56. Tokyo Story (1953)
Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story is perhaps one of the greatest human dramas ever made. It's about the generational divide and the certainty of change and eventually death, set against the backdrop of what was apparently a transitional period for Japan in the early fifties. Ozu is well known for his family drama's and his distinctive visual style, the kind of odd low camera angles and tendency for filming actors straight on so that they are almost talking into the camera. The audience experiences the story as if a participant, first hand. Ozu himself is a slightly mysterious character. He seems to have rareley, if ever, given interviews. Ozu comes from the generation of directors who basically taught themselves how to make films from just watching movies, and apparently he spent much of his formative education in the cinema instead of the classroom. He was eventually expelled from the boys school he attended for sending love letters to a fellow student, so its possible he was a homosexual, a huge taboo in the Japan of the twenties. In Early Summer, a film he made a few years before Tokyo Story, the subject of arranged marriages is dealt with with vaguely homoerotic undertones. Like Tokyo Story and another film called Late Spring, Early Summer follows the character of Noriko (played as always by Ozu's muse, Setsuko Hara), a twenty something who is presurised to marry by her family. During the course of the story she is forced to decide whether she even wants to marry anyone. She remains reluctant untill almost the end of the film, and when she does finally choose a man it seems to be mostly because of his friendship and apparent loyalty to her dead brother (the war is never far away). No romantic melodrama here. The scene in which she asks his mother for her consent seems bizarre, as if she's asking his mother to marry her instead of him. The theme of repressed homosexuality is subtle but it's there. Tokyo Story was the last in this 'Noriko Trilogy', and I think the most succesful in achieving a sense of genuine pathos with the character's. In this film Noriko is a war widow who's relationship with her dead husbands parents is much deeper than that of their real children. The drama is understated as ever, but seemingly all the more poignant. The plot of Tokyo Story is episodic, like real life. One of the most distinctive things about Ozu's films is his sense of this kind of simple beauty in the cinematography, particularly in his famous establishing shots, and also his sense of rythm in the editing, it's just really well made, pure filmaking.
55. Hardware (1990)
Richard Stanley's horror sci-fi debut, Hardware is a cult oddity, crafted from elements of eighties's classics like The Terminator, Alien, Blade Runner and Mad Max. As an amalgamation of these films, it seems to represent a kind of quintessential eighties sci-fi action movie, with an added influence of the european horror films of Bava and Argento. In the comentary of the Optimum dvd release Stanley even admits to the film being "..a rip off of Terminator and Alien", it seems as if this was Richard Stanley trying to appease movie producers as much as the immagined audience. It was never more than a cult hit, this may be dew to the emphasis on dialogue and character development and lack of action in the first half. Hardware has some of the slow burning elements of a John Carpenter movie like The Thing or Assault on Precinct 13. Like Rio Bravo for the MTV generation. When it reaches its climactic second half the violence is concentrated and brutal, the film kind of explodes. Some of the eye gouging and various other things were cut out on it's initial release, and there are some other sequences that have stayed with me since I saw it when I was 11. The plot is looseley adapted from a story in the comic weekly 2000 A.D., about a homicidal skull faced robot called The Mark 13 that goes on the rampage through a post apocalyptic urban slum of the future. The use of eighties rock songs like P.I.L.'s The Order of Death and Iggy Pop's Cold Metal seem fitting and are well placed. More music by bands like Gwar and Ministry add to the film's gothic industrial aesthetic. Also of interest are the cameos: Fields of the Nephilim singer Carl McCoy plays an enigmatic "zone tripper", Lemmy from Motorhead appears as a taxi driver and Iggy Pop's voice is heard as a radio personality called Angry Bob. Bob's rants at the beginning and end of the film serve a narrative purpose, establishing first of all the context of the story, and finally the outcome in a kind of verbal epilogue, giving the feeling of a medieval play. It's certainly as violent and existential as any work of Shakespeare.
54. Immoral Tales (1974)
Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales is one of the most famous erotic films of the seventies, but it has a dreamy quality and sense of the surreal that sets it apart from films like The Story of O and Emmanuelle. Immoral Tales is made of four segments, which regress cronologically, starting on a French beach in the present day and ending in fifteenth century Rome. The film is obviously about sex as sin. All the characters missbehave by the standards of their time, and seem to get worse as we go on, as if we are regressing also in a moral sense. Borowczyk's film seems to imply that morality itself is relative. The earlier scenes are atmospheric, closer to todays reality and more subdued. The later stories are presented rather more dramatically. The Countess Bathory segment is perhaps the most interesting and memorable, filled with surreal images. Paloma Picasso's performance as Elizabeth Bathory is detached and somewhat menacing. The Borgia family in the final segment are presented as the ultimate symbol of corruption, their incestuous relationships are a subversion of the family, in the Catholic Church in which the family is an important symbol of the relationship between man and God. It seems as if the more repressed the time and place the characters are from, the more corrupt they infact become, and sex and sensuality are represented as all the more enjoyable for being 'wrong'. The characters are not judged or punished by Borowczyk, they are shown objectively, as if specimens in a zoo.
53. Death in Venice (1971)
Luchino Visconti's masterpiece is an adaptation of the famous novel by Thomas Mann. The story concerns a 19th century Viennese composer Gustave Aschenbach, apparently based on Gustav Mahler, who travels to Venice after suffering from health problems brought about by a series of personal and artistic failures. Upon arrival he becomes secretly obssessed with a young Polish tourist called Tadzio. Eventually he tries to leave Venice, which appears to be in the grip of a cholera epidemic, only to return straight away after a minor problem concerning his luggage. It seems as if he is glad to return. He begins to openly follow the boy, to the extent that Tadzio's family notice him. Tadzio reminds him of his own past, seeming to embody everyone he has ever loved, including his dead daughter. It's incredibly poignant and sad. Visconti creates a sense of profound isolation around his central character, a solitary figure who hardly speaks to anyone. Aschenbach is a man at the end of his life, alone in a foreign country and trapped by his past. The dialogue is minimal, much of the film is carried by Dirk Bogarde's incredible performance as Aschenbach, and the music of Mahler resounds through the opening and closing scenes of the film, it seems like a wordless opera.
52. Tenebrae (1982)
Tenebrae is Dario Argento's last great giallo, it's also probably my favourite film of this much underrated genre. It's an incredibly violent film, almost all the characters are eventually killed, but as always the deaths are beautifully elaborate, his style is indesputable and very Italian. I particularly love the fact that in one scene a young girl is chased into the path of her killer by an over enthusiastic doberman, a cruel twist of fate typical of Argento's films. His characters often die in the most unlucky ways. Daria Nicolodi, the mother of Argento's daughter Asia, was often the brunt of these sadistic ironies: in Terror at the Opera she's not only shot in the head but through the eye. In Phenomena she's mauled by a razor weilding chimpanzee. In the climax of his early giallo, Cat o' Nine Tails, the murderer receives their comupence by falling down a lift shaft (after being shot) and on the way down burns their hands trying to hold on to the lift cable. He seems to like making his characters suffer, beyond what is required. Argento's violence is literally excessive.
51. 3 Women (1977)
By far Robert Altman's most disturbing and strangest film, 3 Women is a schizophrenic nightmare. Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) share an appartment and work together at a health spa. They are both archetypes. Modern girl Millie is outgoing, sexually confident and shallow. Pinky is a country girl, shy and childlike. The appartment complex they live in is owned by an older woman, Willie (Janice Rule) a pregnant artist who paints horrific murals, depicting ferral, ape like creatures. The two younger women are also sporadically bothered by Willie's over sexed husband, Edgar. The three central characters are so exagerrated, Duvall and Spacek are clownlike.
Millie, Pinky and Willie all seem to exist apart from their surroundings and are treated with indifference and sometimes hostility. By the end of the film the three women have swapped roles to the extent that it suggests that they are merely facets of the same woman. In this sense it's similar to Bergman's Persona. This idea is more blatantly suggested in the ending which is horrific and mysterious.
60. Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)
Some time during the mid sixties Roger Corman gave director Monte Hellman the money to make two western b-movies, to be shot more or less at the same time. The first was The Shooting, a kind of existential take on the traditional western stereotypes whith Jack Nicholson as a black clad, sociopathic gunfighter and Warren Oates as kind of architypal western hero in the style of Ethan Edwards. Infact, Oates characters paternal relationship with a younger protagonist is like a straight up homage to John Wayne in The Searchers. The Shooting has much of the best things of the traditional hollywood western, while at the same time waving farewell to it. The second film to be made was Ride in the Whirlwind. Made with much of the same cast as The Shooting (minus Oates) and from a script knocked together by Jack Nicholson, it nevertheless marks a drastic departure from its predecessor.
The architypes are replaced with beleivable characters. The incredible dialogue which carries most of the film is a sometimes bareley comprehensible stream of authentic 1870s north american slang and inflections. Watching this film you feel as if you're listening in on the old west, perhaps from an early record. Harry Dean Stanton plays a one eyed bandit called Blind Dick, who's gang robs a stagecoach in the opening scene of the film. They are tracked down and killed by a vigillante mob, who then mistake some nearby cowboys, Wes (Jack Nicholson) and Vern (Cameron Mitchell), for outlaws. Wes and Vern are forced to go on the run and even take a family hostage in order to escape their pursuers, essentially becoming what they where accused of being in the first place. Seemingly then, the film is a comment on subjective justice as a kind of physical embodiment of the 'lawlessenes' of the old west. Jack Nicholson, already one of the great actors, can apparently write too. Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting could also be seen as direct predecessors to a later more famous western, The Missouri Breaks, which also stared Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton (alongside Marlon Brando) and had a similar sense of authenticity and approach to dialogue.
59. The Name of the Rose (1986)
Jean-Jacques Annaud adapted this from a book by Umberto Eco, it's basically a murder mystery set in a remote abbey in northern Italy during the middle ages. It's thickly atmospheric, feeling for the most part like a horror film, Annaud seems to have deliberately chosen the ugliest actors to play the various characters, who in turn have been exagerated to the level of gargoyles. Sean Connery and Christian Slater play franciscan monks who have been sent to the abbey as representatives during a theological conference. As certain monks start turning up dead they soon uncover a conspiracy that reveals corruption in the catholic church itself, represented by an inquisitor played by a demonic looking F. Murray Abraham. It's good, late night fun.
58. The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
57. Satyricon (1969)
Federico Fellini's adaptation of the Roman text by Petronius, the story of Satyricon basically follows the exploits of two Roman men who start out as rivals in a love triangle with a young boy and then end up in a series of misadventures that take them on a kind of tour through Roman society. The original text is basically an attempt by a Roman writer to update, or satirise, the kind of Greek heroic myths in which young men are sent on these long journeys of discovery. In Satyricon however the two protagonists are distinctly un-heroic, and their journey is a chaotic series of mishaps brought about by their initial capture into slavery. In alot of ways this is a typical Fellini movie, lots of scary women with painted faces and the narrative progresses in this kind of dreamlike way, but it seems to take his cartoonish stylisation to a new level. It's a beautiful dream.
I think it's also notable among his films as being an adaptation of a well known work of literature rather than his own story. Usually I think of Fellini as a very autobiographical director who wrote most of his more well known films with a kind of confesional quality. This is apparent in what are arguably his three most famous films: 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita and Amacord (which translates as I Remember). The only other story that I'm aware of him adapting would be his 1976 film of Casanova's memoirs. Satyricon has something of the same atmosphere as Casanova, as I've said before it's very visually exagerrated, as if the further back he goes historically, the less 'realistic' he's prepared to be. Perversely, this can also add to the veiwers historical curiosity, a curiosity Fellini reveals himself in a film he made not long after Satyricon, Fellini's Roma.
56. Tokyo Story (1953)
Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story is perhaps one of the greatest human dramas ever made. It's about the generational divide and the certainty of change and eventually death, set against the backdrop of what was apparently a transitional period for Japan in the early fifties. Ozu is well known for his family drama's and his distinctive visual style, the kind of odd low camera angles and tendency for filming actors straight on so that they are almost talking into the camera. The audience experiences the story as if a participant, first hand. Ozu himself is a slightly mysterious character. He seems to have rareley, if ever, given interviews. Ozu comes from the generation of directors who basically taught themselves how to make films from just watching movies, and apparently he spent much of his formative education in the cinema instead of the classroom. He was eventually expelled from the boys school he attended for sending love letters to a fellow student, so its possible he was a homosexual, a huge taboo in the Japan of the twenties. In Early Summer, a film he made a few years before Tokyo Story, the subject of arranged marriages is dealt with with vaguely homoerotic undertones. Like Tokyo Story and another film called Late Spring, Early Summer follows the character of Noriko (played as always by Ozu's muse, Setsuko Hara), a twenty something who is presurised to marry by her family. During the course of the story she is forced to decide whether she even wants to marry anyone. She remains reluctant untill almost the end of the film, and when she does finally choose a man it seems to be mostly because of his friendship and apparent loyalty to her dead brother (the war is never far away). No romantic melodrama here. The scene in which she asks his mother for her consent seems bizarre, as if she's asking his mother to marry her instead of him. The theme of repressed homosexuality is subtle but it's there. Tokyo Story was the last in this 'Noriko Trilogy', and I think the most succesful in achieving a sense of genuine pathos with the character's. In this film Noriko is a war widow who's relationship with her dead husbands parents is much deeper than that of their real children. The drama is understated as ever, but seemingly all the more poignant. The plot of Tokyo Story is episodic, like real life. One of the most distinctive things about Ozu's films is his sense of this kind of simple beauty in the cinematography, particularly in his famous establishing shots, and also his sense of rythm in the editing, it's just really well made, pure filmaking.
55. Hardware (1990)
Richard Stanley's horror sci-fi debut, Hardware is a cult oddity, crafted from elements of eighties's classics like The Terminator, Alien, Blade Runner and Mad Max. As an amalgamation of these films, it seems to represent a kind of quintessential eighties sci-fi action movie, with an added influence of the european horror films of Bava and Argento. In the comentary of the Optimum dvd release Stanley even admits to the film being "..a rip off of Terminator and Alien", it seems as if this was Richard Stanley trying to appease movie producers as much as the immagined audience. It was never more than a cult hit, this may be dew to the emphasis on dialogue and character development and lack of action in the first half. Hardware has some of the slow burning elements of a John Carpenter movie like The Thing or Assault on Precinct 13. Like Rio Bravo for the MTV generation. When it reaches its climactic second half the violence is concentrated and brutal, the film kind of explodes. Some of the eye gouging and various other things were cut out on it's initial release, and there are some other sequences that have stayed with me since I saw it when I was 11. The plot is looseley adapted from a story in the comic weekly 2000 A.D., about a homicidal skull faced robot called The Mark 13 that goes on the rampage through a post apocalyptic urban slum of the future. The use of eighties rock songs like P.I.L.'s The Order of Death and Iggy Pop's Cold Metal seem fitting and are well placed. More music by bands like Gwar and Ministry add to the film's gothic industrial aesthetic. Also of interest are the cameos: Fields of the Nephilim singer Carl McCoy plays an enigmatic "zone tripper", Lemmy from Motorhead appears as a taxi driver and Iggy Pop's voice is heard as a radio personality called Angry Bob. Bob's rants at the beginning and end of the film serve a narrative purpose, establishing first of all the context of the story, and finally the outcome in a kind of verbal epilogue, giving the feeling of a medieval play. It's certainly as violent and existential as any work of Shakespeare.
54. Immoral Tales (1974)
Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales is one of the most famous erotic films of the seventies, but it has a dreamy quality and sense of the surreal that sets it apart from films like The Story of O and Emmanuelle. Immoral Tales is made of four segments, which regress cronologically, starting on a French beach in the present day and ending in fifteenth century Rome. The film is obviously about sex as sin. All the characters missbehave by the standards of their time, and seem to get worse as we go on, as if we are regressing also in a moral sense. Borowczyk's film seems to imply that morality itself is relative. The earlier scenes are atmospheric, closer to todays reality and more subdued. The later stories are presented rather more dramatically. The Countess Bathory segment is perhaps the most interesting and memorable, filled with surreal images. Paloma Picasso's performance as Elizabeth Bathory is detached and somewhat menacing. The Borgia family in the final segment are presented as the ultimate symbol of corruption, their incestuous relationships are a subversion of the family, in the Catholic Church in which the family is an important symbol of the relationship between man and God. It seems as if the more repressed the time and place the characters are from, the more corrupt they infact become, and sex and sensuality are represented as all the more enjoyable for being 'wrong'. The characters are not judged or punished by Borowczyk, they are shown objectively, as if specimens in a zoo.
53. Death in Venice (1971)
52. Tenebrae (1982)
Tenebrae is Dario Argento's last great giallo, it's also probably my favourite film of this much underrated genre. It's an incredibly violent film, almost all the characters are eventually killed, but as always the deaths are beautifully elaborate, his style is indesputable and very Italian. I particularly love the fact that in one scene a young girl is chased into the path of her killer by an over enthusiastic doberman, a cruel twist of fate typical of Argento's films. His characters often die in the most unlucky ways. Daria Nicolodi, the mother of Argento's daughter Asia, was often the brunt of these sadistic ironies: in Terror at the Opera she's not only shot in the head but through the eye. In Phenomena she's mauled by a razor weilding chimpanzee. In the climax of his early giallo, Cat o' Nine Tails, the murderer receives their comupence by falling down a lift shaft (after being shot) and on the way down burns their hands trying to hold on to the lift cable. He seems to like making his characters suffer, beyond what is required. Argento's violence is literally excessive.
51. 3 Women (1977)
By far Robert Altman's most disturbing and strangest film, 3 Women is a schizophrenic nightmare. Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) share an appartment and work together at a health spa. They are both archetypes. Modern girl Millie is outgoing, sexually confident and shallow. Pinky is a country girl, shy and childlike. The appartment complex they live in is owned by an older woman, Willie (Janice Rule) a pregnant artist who paints horrific murals, depicting ferral, ape like creatures. The two younger women are also sporadically bothered by Willie's over sexed husband, Edgar. The three central characters are so exagerrated, Duvall and Spacek are clownlike. 
Millie, Pinky and Willie all seem to exist apart from their surroundings and are treated with indifference and sometimes hostility. By the end of the film the three women have swapped roles to the extent that it suggests that they are merely facets of the same woman. In this sense it's similar to Bergman's Persona. This idea is more blatantly suggested in the ending which is horrific and mysterious.
Monday 20 June 2011
Top 50
Some more of my favourite films. By this point they're in no particular order.
50. Badlands (1973).
This is Terrence Mallick's debut masterpeice which he made a few years before Days of Heaven. The way he uses voice narrative and music is kind of a revelation, theres no other filmaker like him. Badlands is the supposed true story of a couple of young misfits who went on a murder rampage in the 60's. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are both great.
49. What? (1972)
Roman Polanski's What? is a kind of absurd comedy, similar in tone to his earlier film The Fearless Vampire Killers if you replace the gothic horror aesthetic with a kind of modern day Alice in Wonderland, and add lots of gratuitous nudity. I think it might be his take on the kind of European sex comedies of people like Tinto Brass, only funnier and much more elegantly directed. I'm a fan of Polanski's kind of subtle camera style, I could have just as easily included Frantic or The Ninth Gate in a list of my favourite films, and infact I probably will. Sydne Rome plays a young American tourist called Nancy who is almost raped while hitchhiking through Italy and finds herself seeking refuge in a coastal villa filled with strange characters. Marcello Mastroianni plays Alex (also sometimes referred to as Coco the Mashed Potato) a clap ridden pimp and Polanski appears as a perverted greek scuba diver called Mosquito: "..they call me that because I sting things mith my big stinger". Hugh Griffith plays Noblart, the elderly owner of the villa. After being "defiled" several times by Alex, Nancy falls in love with him only to find him indifferent. Like most of the characters, he seems to repeat the same frases and actions daily as if stuck in limbo. This theme is enhanced when it's suggested that they are infact waiting for the iminent death of Mr Noblart in the hope of inheriting some of his seemingly vast wealth. Sydne Rome is both hilarious and adorable as Nancy, who seems to gradually lose all her clothes during the course of the film and is forced to take this and the many other calamities in her stride. The themes of limbo and claustrophobia are offset by the light humour and the film is incredibly watchable and funny.
48. Kill Baby Kill (1966)
Arguably Mario Bava's greatest film, Kill Baby Kill is a masterpiece of gothic horror. Infact it's one of the best examples of this genre ever, long with other Bava films like The Mask of Satan (a.k.a. Black Sunday), Black Sabbath and The Whip and the Body. It's bursting with atmosphere and the cinematography is beautiful, Bava started as a cinematographer and his films have a trademark, beautiful kind of garish quality: deep black shadows complement primary colours. Shots in deep focus, the texture of objects and walls are vividly represented. Whithout Bava there would be no Dario Argento or Jess Franco and infact there would be no giallo film genre. He also invented the slasher film with Bay of Blood, influencing people like John Carpenter. Copolla's Dracula also has alot of blatant homages to Black Sabbath and The Mask of Satan, although Bava was a director who was under appreciated and remained fairly obscure during his lifetime. Most of his films were made with a tiny budget, he famously once used a wheelbarrow to achieve a tracking shot.
47. Dust Devil (1992).
Dust Devil is a kind of bizarre horror love story from Richard Stanley, the maverick director/writer responsible for Hardware. It revolves around three main characters: ageing police detective Ben Mukarob, housewife Wendy Robinson who is fleeing her abusive husband Mark and a mysterious hitchhiker who is also the enbodiment of a kind of desert spirit that kills people in order to take their souls. Wendy meets the drifter, who's murders are being investigated by Mukarob. Subsequently, Wendy's husband Mark teams up with Mukarob in order to find Wendy and they all come together in a kind of Tarkovskyesque climax. The film is narrated by Mukarob's friend Joe, the owner of a drive-in cinema. I think apart from just being a tripy horror film it's also a bit of an aesthetic homage to the Leone western. In the comentary Stanley admits to have been inspired to write Dust Devil after watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.
46. The Serpent and The Rainbow (1988)
A largely unnoticed early gem from Elm Street and Scream director Wes Craven, The Serpent and The Rainbow is a really entertaining, fun horror film and also a kind of fascinating look into the world of Haitian voodoo and zombies. The late Zakes Mokae (Ben Mukarob from Dust Devil) gives an extaordinary performance as Mr Paytraud, the villanous witchdoctor and head of the secret police who terrorises Bill Pullman.
45. The Brides of Dracula (1960).
The Brides of Dracula is definateley my favourite Hammer movie, it's directed by the legendary Terence Fisher. He made most of the other good Hammer films including Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Devil Rides Out, Curse of The Werewolf and the Dracula films. This is the only Dracula film made by Hammer without Christopher Lee in the title role (in fact the character of Dracula never appears), although Peter Cushing does turn up as Dr Van Helsing about half way through. I think its one of the few Hammer films to have a genuinely engaging plot and it doesn't rely on the same old Universal monsters. It's a true oddity. David Peel is excellent as Baron Meinster, a suave young vampire who becomes captivated by the new school mistress Marianne, played by the french actress and sex symbol Yvonne Monlaur. Monlaur also starred in another macabre gem of the same year: Circus of Horrors.
44. The Long Goodbye (1973).
Robert Altman's adaptation of the novel by Raymond Chandler. Elliott Gould is amazing as private detective Philip Marlowe, the role made famous by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. It's just a great detective story updated from the early 1950's of the book to Altman's 1970's hollywood. Altman is one of the greatest directors ever, having been responsible for some of the best American movies of the 70's, nameley: M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Theives Like Us and 3 Women. In the early nineties he made The Player, a kind of satire of the hollywood film industry and followed it up with probably his greatest film: Short Cuts, inspired by the short stories of Raymond Carver.
43. Requiem for a Gringo (1968)
Requiem for a Gringo a.k.a. Duel in the Eclipse is a classic spaghetti western by Spanish director Jose Luis Merino. It was also rumoured to be co-directed by another Spanish director, Egenio Martin, the man behind the infamous spaghetti western The Ugly Ones. Regardless, Requiem is one of the most violent and unique spaghetti's from the heyday of this sub-genre, and remains one of the earliest and best examples of non linier storytelling in a comercial film. Ross Logan, a civil war veteran (played by Lang Jeffries), returns home to Mexico from travelling through central and south America. He soon clashes with a band of outlaws, the Carranza gang, after they kill his younger brother. One by one the distinctive characters in the Carranza gang disapear as Logan takes revenge, but not in the usual way. As he reveals in a final confrontation with the gangs leader (Fernando Sancho), he has used his extensive knowledge of astronomy and almost supernatural connection to the elements to trap and kill each one. By no means a typical western hero, Logan is a 'brujo', with his distinctive jaguar skin poncho as the apparent source of his power.
42. The Diabolical Doctor Z (1966)
Highly atmospheric and beautifully shot, this is my favourite film from one of my favourite cult directors, Jess Franco. He is the undisputed king of Euro-sleaze horror-exploitation films and alot of people mistake him for a hack. His films, particularly those from the 70s and onwards, often feature long meandering seaquences, or shots that are completely out of focus. These are both symptomatic of films where a director has only filmed one or two takes per shot (your average hollywood director might film between ten and fifty). The reason for Franco's thriftieness in filming was offcourse to save time and therefore money. It seems he rareley takes more than a week to make a film, from initial idea to final cut, the entire filming taking no more than two or three days. Apparently, during his busiest periods he also often made more than one film at the same time, and infact he claims to have tricked actors into being in more than one film whithout their knowledge. This was possible as Franco would often write each days scenes in his hotel room the night before, giving the actors little knowledge of the overall plot of the film, or films, they would eventually appear in. To date he's directed something like 150 movies. By his own admision a lot of these are trash but his best films, of which The Diabolical Doctor Z is one, are truly incredible.
41. Angel Heart (1987).
Angel Heart is a terrifying gothic noir thriller writen and directed by Alan Parker. It's about a private detective in 1950's New York called Harry Angel (played by Micky Rourke) who is hired by the demonic Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find Johny Favourite, a 30s jazz crooner who has been missing since the end of the war. The whole movie feels incredibly bleak and dark, a bit like a nightmare. As if the characters are already in hell. Lisa Bonnet of The Cosby Show plays Johny's morose/sexy daughter Epiphany who'm Harry meets when the hunt takes him to New Orleans.
40. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)
One of Werner Herzog's early films, I think like the best of his work it's truly original. Herzog claims to have never seen a film until he was in his teens, as bizzarre as this sounds I think it's given him a unique perspective and approach to film making. Aguirre is a perfect example of this. Like many of his films its contemplative, water breaks on the rapids of a river for a full minute. It's the Amazon river and the film, almost a documentary, follows a group of sixteenth century conquistadors on an ill fated mission to find a city of gold. Apparently it's also partially a comment on the Vietnam war. The music by krautrockers Popol Vuh is beautiful, Klaus Kinski gives another memorable performance.
39. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
One of my favourite examples of a Sam Peckinpah film. The opening scene featuring a man breaking the arm of his pregnant daughter sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It's a very dark tale about the power of money over a couple of outcast losers. Bad things happen. The amazing Warren Oates plays Bennie, a pianist in a Mexican bar who is approached by two sinister hitmen, Sappensly and Quill, to track down and kill an old aquantance of his, Alfredo Garcia. They offer him one million dollars in exchange for his head. Like in other Pekinpah classics like Straw Dogs, The Wild Bunch and Cross of Iron, the action/violence is beautifully stylised. Incedentally, in the opening scene of From Dusk Till Dawn, George Clooney's character threatens a shopkeeper by stating that he will "turn this place into the fucking Wild Bunch".
38. The House by The Cemetery (1981).
One of my favourite horror films of all time is Lucio Fulci's The House by The Cemetery. I can't begin to express how scary this film actually is. The funny thing is, it shouldn't be: it has an atrocious English language dub (like alot of Italian movies) and it centres around alot of aesthetic horror cliches (a cemetery and an old house with a haunted cellar). The fact that some sequences still make my hair stant on end is a testiment to the directing of Lucio Fulci. The film is incredibly atmospheric. A New York professor researching suicide takes his wife and their young son Bob to stay at an old mansion in a small town. Offcourse, one hundred years ago Dr Fraudstein lived there with his family, which he murdered in order to use their body parts in his experiments. They were buried in the house (apparently a common practice in the 19th century) and now it is haunted by a mysterious creature living in the basement.
37. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978).
Yes! this is a wonderfully uplifting kung fu movie about triumph over adversity and the importance of perseverance and self discipline. Gordon Liu plays San Te, a young student in medieval China who comes to the Shaolin temple in order to learn their form of advanced kung fu so that he can create a resistance force against the invading northern Han empire. It features what is probably the all time greatest training sequences ever that takes up about half the movie. Liu is a legend.
36. Phenomena (1985).
My favourite Dario Argento film, and probably one of his most bizarre. A teenage Jennifer Connelly stars as a young American girl at a boarding school in Switzerland who finds she is capable of telepathy with insects. She teams up with a wheelchair bound Donald Pleasance to solve the murders that have begun to occur in the area. Highlights include a homicidal chimpanzee, general weirdness from Pleasance and a truly astonishing score that seems to mainly consist of Iron Maiden songs.
35. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Not considered one of Scorsese's best films, nevertheless The Last Temptation of Christ is a favourite of mine and one that I seem to end up watching alot. It's an adaptation of the novel by the Greek writer and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis. While I haven't read the book I think films often benefit from having the structure and concept of a novel behind them. Willem Dafoe's performance as Jesus is quite incredible and Peter Gabriels 80's score still sounds amazing. The minimalistic art direction is also remarkable, the film seems stripped down, spartan. A far cry from the traditional hollywood epic. This seems to suit the subject and recalls another great film based on the life of Jesus: Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.
34. Vertigo (1958)
Vertigo is the most emotionally satisfying of all Hitchcock's movies. I think it was his personal favourite, his magnum opus, and it's my favourite aswell, along with The Birds. James Stewart plays an ex-San Fransico police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson who is forced to retire after an incident on a roof top causes him to suffer from a fear of hights. One day he's approached by an old college friend to act as a private investigator and follow his wife in order to get to the bottom of her strange behaviour. The man believes that she has become obsessed with her dead ancestor Carlotta Valdes, and possibly even possessed by her spirit. It's a truly convincing portrayal of obssession and features one of the greatest unspoken sequences ever, along with one of the greatest musical scores by Bernard Herrmann.
50. Badlands (1973).
This is Terrence Mallick's debut masterpeice which he made a few years before Days of Heaven. The way he uses voice narrative and music is kind of a revelation, theres no other filmaker like him. Badlands is the supposed true story of a couple of young misfits who went on a murder rampage in the 60's. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are both great.
49. What? (1972)
Roman Polanski's What? is a kind of absurd comedy, similar in tone to his earlier film The Fearless Vampire Killers if you replace the gothic horror aesthetic with a kind of modern day Alice in Wonderland, and add lots of gratuitous nudity. I think it might be his take on the kind of European sex comedies of people like Tinto Brass, only funnier and much more elegantly directed. I'm a fan of Polanski's kind of subtle camera style, I could have just as easily included Frantic or The Ninth Gate in a list of my favourite films, and infact I probably will. Sydne Rome plays a young American tourist called Nancy who is almost raped while hitchhiking through Italy and finds herself seeking refuge in a coastal villa filled with strange characters. Marcello Mastroianni plays Alex (also sometimes referred to as Coco the Mashed Potato) a clap ridden pimp and Polanski appears as a perverted greek scuba diver called Mosquito: "..they call me that because I sting things mith my big stinger". Hugh Griffith plays Noblart, the elderly owner of the villa. After being "defiled" several times by Alex, Nancy falls in love with him only to find him indifferent. Like most of the characters, he seems to repeat the same frases and actions daily as if stuck in limbo. This theme is enhanced when it's suggested that they are infact waiting for the iminent death of Mr Noblart in the hope of inheriting some of his seemingly vast wealth. Sydne Rome is both hilarious and adorable as Nancy, who seems to gradually lose all her clothes during the course of the film and is forced to take this and the many other calamities in her stride. The themes of limbo and claustrophobia are offset by the light humour and the film is incredibly watchable and funny.
48. Kill Baby Kill (1966)
Arguably Mario Bava's greatest film, Kill Baby Kill is a masterpiece of gothic horror. Infact it's one of the best examples of this genre ever, long with other Bava films like The Mask of Satan (a.k.a. Black Sunday), Black Sabbath and The Whip and the Body. It's bursting with atmosphere and the cinematography is beautiful, Bava started as a cinematographer and his films have a trademark, beautiful kind of garish quality: deep black shadows complement primary colours. Shots in deep focus, the texture of objects and walls are vividly represented. Whithout Bava there would be no Dario Argento or Jess Franco and infact there would be no giallo film genre. He also invented the slasher film with Bay of Blood, influencing people like John Carpenter. Copolla's Dracula also has alot of blatant homages to Black Sabbath and The Mask of Satan, although Bava was a director who was under appreciated and remained fairly obscure during his lifetime. Most of his films were made with a tiny budget, he famously once used a wheelbarrow to achieve a tracking shot.
47. Dust Devil (1992).
Dust Devil is a kind of bizarre horror love story from Richard Stanley, the maverick director/writer responsible for Hardware. It revolves around three main characters: ageing police detective Ben Mukarob, housewife Wendy Robinson who is fleeing her abusive husband Mark and a mysterious hitchhiker who is also the enbodiment of a kind of desert spirit that kills people in order to take their souls. Wendy meets the drifter, who's murders are being investigated by Mukarob. Subsequently, Wendy's husband Mark teams up with Mukarob in order to find Wendy and they all come together in a kind of Tarkovskyesque climax. The film is narrated by Mukarob's friend Joe, the owner of a drive-in cinema. I think apart from just being a tripy horror film it's also a bit of an aesthetic homage to the Leone western. In the comentary Stanley admits to have been inspired to write Dust Devil after watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.
46. The Serpent and The Rainbow (1988)
A largely unnoticed early gem from Elm Street and Scream director Wes Craven, The Serpent and The Rainbow is a really entertaining, fun horror film and also a kind of fascinating look into the world of Haitian voodoo and zombies. The late Zakes Mokae (Ben Mukarob from Dust Devil) gives an extaordinary performance as Mr Paytraud, the villanous witchdoctor and head of the secret police who terrorises Bill Pullman.
45. The Brides of Dracula (1960).
The Brides of Dracula is definateley my favourite Hammer movie, it's directed by the legendary Terence Fisher. He made most of the other good Hammer films including Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Devil Rides Out, Curse of The Werewolf and the Dracula films. This is the only Dracula film made by Hammer without Christopher Lee in the title role (in fact the character of Dracula never appears), although Peter Cushing does turn up as Dr Van Helsing about half way through. I think its one of the few Hammer films to have a genuinely engaging plot and it doesn't rely on the same old Universal monsters. It's a true oddity. David Peel is excellent as Baron Meinster, a suave young vampire who becomes captivated by the new school mistress Marianne, played by the french actress and sex symbol Yvonne Monlaur. Monlaur also starred in another macabre gem of the same year: Circus of Horrors.
44. The Long Goodbye (1973).
Robert Altman's adaptation of the novel by Raymond Chandler. Elliott Gould is amazing as private detective Philip Marlowe, the role made famous by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. It's just a great detective story updated from the early 1950's of the book to Altman's 1970's hollywood. Altman is one of the greatest directors ever, having been responsible for some of the best American movies of the 70's, nameley: M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Theives Like Us and 3 Women. In the early nineties he made The Player, a kind of satire of the hollywood film industry and followed it up with probably his greatest film: Short Cuts, inspired by the short stories of Raymond Carver.43. Requiem for a Gringo (1968)
Requiem for a Gringo a.k.a. Duel in the Eclipse is a classic spaghetti western by Spanish director Jose Luis Merino. It was also rumoured to be co-directed by another Spanish director, Egenio Martin, the man behind the infamous spaghetti western The Ugly Ones. Regardless, Requiem is one of the most violent and unique spaghetti's from the heyday of this sub-genre, and remains one of the earliest and best examples of non linier storytelling in a comercial film. Ross Logan, a civil war veteran (played by Lang Jeffries), returns home to Mexico from travelling through central and south America. He soon clashes with a band of outlaws, the Carranza gang, after they kill his younger brother. One by one the distinctive characters in the Carranza gang disapear as Logan takes revenge, but not in the usual way. As he reveals in a final confrontation with the gangs leader (Fernando Sancho), he has used his extensive knowledge of astronomy and almost supernatural connection to the elements to trap and kill each one. By no means a typical western hero, Logan is a 'brujo', with his distinctive jaguar skin poncho as the apparent source of his power.
42. The Diabolical Doctor Z (1966)
Highly atmospheric and beautifully shot, this is my favourite film from one of my favourite cult directors, Jess Franco. He is the undisputed king of Euro-sleaze horror-exploitation films and alot of people mistake him for a hack. His films, particularly those from the 70s and onwards, often feature long meandering seaquences, or shots that are completely out of focus. These are both symptomatic of films where a director has only filmed one or two takes per shot (your average hollywood director might film between ten and fifty). The reason for Franco's thriftieness in filming was offcourse to save time and therefore money. It seems he rareley takes more than a week to make a film, from initial idea to final cut, the entire filming taking no more than two or three days. Apparently, during his busiest periods he also often made more than one film at the same time, and infact he claims to have tricked actors into being in more than one film whithout their knowledge. This was possible as Franco would often write each days scenes in his hotel room the night before, giving the actors little knowledge of the overall plot of the film, or films, they would eventually appear in. To date he's directed something like 150 movies. By his own admision a lot of these are trash but his best films, of which The Diabolical Doctor Z is one, are truly incredible.
41. Angel Heart (1987).
Angel Heart is a terrifying gothic noir thriller writen and directed by Alan Parker. It's about a private detective in 1950's New York called Harry Angel (played by Micky Rourke) who is hired by the demonic Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find Johny Favourite, a 30s jazz crooner who has been missing since the end of the war. The whole movie feels incredibly bleak and dark, a bit like a nightmare. As if the characters are already in hell. Lisa Bonnet of The Cosby Show plays Johny's morose/sexy daughter Epiphany who'm Harry meets when the hunt takes him to New Orleans.40. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)
One of Werner Herzog's early films, I think like the best of his work it's truly original. Herzog claims to have never seen a film until he was in his teens, as bizzarre as this sounds I think it's given him a unique perspective and approach to film making. Aguirre is a perfect example of this. Like many of his films its contemplative, water breaks on the rapids of a river for a full minute. It's the Amazon river and the film, almost a documentary, follows a group of sixteenth century conquistadors on an ill fated mission to find a city of gold. Apparently it's also partially a comment on the Vietnam war. The music by krautrockers Popol Vuh is beautiful, Klaus Kinski gives another memorable performance.
39. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
One of my favourite examples of a Sam Peckinpah film. The opening scene featuring a man breaking the arm of his pregnant daughter sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It's a very dark tale about the power of money over a couple of outcast losers. Bad things happen. The amazing Warren Oates plays Bennie, a pianist in a Mexican bar who is approached by two sinister hitmen, Sappensly and Quill, to track down and kill an old aquantance of his, Alfredo Garcia. They offer him one million dollars in exchange for his head. Like in other Pekinpah classics like Straw Dogs, The Wild Bunch and Cross of Iron, the action/violence is beautifully stylised. Incedentally, in the opening scene of From Dusk Till Dawn, George Clooney's character threatens a shopkeeper by stating that he will "turn this place into the fucking Wild Bunch".38. The House by The Cemetery (1981).
One of my favourite horror films of all time is Lucio Fulci's The House by The Cemetery. I can't begin to express how scary this film actually is. The funny thing is, it shouldn't be: it has an atrocious English language dub (like alot of Italian movies) and it centres around alot of aesthetic horror cliches (a cemetery and an old house with a haunted cellar). The fact that some sequences still make my hair stant on end is a testiment to the directing of Lucio Fulci. The film is incredibly atmospheric. A New York professor researching suicide takes his wife and their young son Bob to stay at an old mansion in a small town. Offcourse, one hundred years ago Dr Fraudstein lived there with his family, which he murdered in order to use their body parts in his experiments. They were buried in the house (apparently a common practice in the 19th century) and now it is haunted by a mysterious creature living in the basement.
37. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978).
Yes! this is a wonderfully uplifting kung fu movie about triumph over adversity and the importance of perseverance and self discipline. Gordon Liu plays San Te, a young student in medieval China who comes to the Shaolin temple in order to learn their form of advanced kung fu so that he can create a resistance force against the invading northern Han empire. It features what is probably the all time greatest training sequences ever that takes up about half the movie. Liu is a legend.
36. Phenomena (1985).
My favourite Dario Argento film, and probably one of his most bizarre. A teenage Jennifer Connelly stars as a young American girl at a boarding school in Switzerland who finds she is capable of telepathy with insects. She teams up with a wheelchair bound Donald Pleasance to solve the murders that have begun to occur in the area. Highlights include a homicidal chimpanzee, general weirdness from Pleasance and a truly astonishing score that seems to mainly consist of Iron Maiden songs.
35. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Not considered one of Scorsese's best films, nevertheless The Last Temptation of Christ is a favourite of mine and one that I seem to end up watching alot. It's an adaptation of the novel by the Greek writer and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis. While I haven't read the book I think films often benefit from having the structure and concept of a novel behind them. Willem Dafoe's performance as Jesus is quite incredible and Peter Gabriels 80's score still sounds amazing. The minimalistic art direction is also remarkable, the film seems stripped down, spartan. A far cry from the traditional hollywood epic. This seems to suit the subject and recalls another great film based on the life of Jesus: Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.
34. Vertigo (1958)
Vertigo is the most emotionally satisfying of all Hitchcock's movies. I think it was his personal favourite, his magnum opus, and it's my favourite aswell, along with The Birds. James Stewart plays an ex-San Fransico police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson who is forced to retire after an incident on a roof top causes him to suffer from a fear of hights. One day he's approached by an old college friend to act as a private investigator and follow his wife in order to get to the bottom of her strange behaviour. The man believes that she has become obsessed with her dead ancestor Carlotta Valdes, and possibly even possessed by her spirit. It's a truly convincing portrayal of obssession and features one of the greatest unspoken sequences ever, along with one of the greatest musical scores by Bernard Herrmann.Thursday 5 May 2011
Rubber, Somewhere, The Films of Frank Henenlotter
Just watched Rubber, it's a kind of absurdist comedy about a killer tire, written and directed by Quentin Dupieux. The slightly half arsed plot concerns Robert (pronounced 'rubber', clever huh?), a disguarded old tire who inexplicably comes to life and begins a journey of self discovery and murder along an American highway, eventually becoming transfixed by a mysterious young woman. Meanwhile, a group of people watch the story take place through binoculars (as a "film"). I guess that sounds like a Fellini rip off or something, but it's actually quite funny and not too pretentious. Although you can see the influences, the end result is quite original. I thought it was kind of awesome.
Another new film thats probably worth checking out is Somewhere by Sofia Coppola. It's a nice little mood piece/character portrait about a hollywood actor played by Stephen Dorff, and his relationship with his young teenage daughter played by Elle Fanning.
Frank Henenlotter made a series of 'out there' horror c-movies during the 80s, probably the greatest of which is Basket Case. It's about an ex siamese twin who carries around his deformed brother in a basket.
The other good one is Brain Damage. The young protagonist, Brian, discovers theres a parasitic talking worm living in his body. He supplies it with fresh human brains in exchange for endorphines that the worm injects into his own brain.
Another new film thats probably worth checking out is Somewhere by Sofia Coppola. It's a nice little mood piece/character portrait about a hollywood actor played by Stephen Dorff, and his relationship with his young teenage daughter played by Elle Fanning.
Frank Henenlotter made a series of 'out there' horror c-movies during the 80s, probably the greatest of which is Basket Case. It's about an ex siamese twin who carries around his deformed brother in a basket.
The other good one is Brain Damage. The young protagonist, Brian, discovers theres a parasitic talking worm living in his body. He supplies it with fresh human brains in exchange for endorphines that the worm injects into his own brain.
Thursday 7 April 2011
Monday 28 March 2011
Tuesday 22 March 2011
Samuel Fuller, Pete Walker, Death In Venice, Los Olvidados, Bunuel
Recently been kind of re-discovering Samuel Fuller. I was always a big fan of Shock Corridor, Fullers psycho-thriller about an ambitious journalist who infiltrates an asylum by pretending to be mad, but I never realised the amount of other really interesting films he made. His films remain largely unknown, and mostly unavailable in this country, but he's a legend amongst his peers. Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese have both mentioned his films as a major influence. Fullers follow up to Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, is a strange, noirish melodrama about a prostitute who escapes her old life to become a nurse in a small town, only to discover that the handsome town patron whom she has an affair with, seen at the end of this clip, harbours a dark secret.
Also discovered these Pete Walker films, Die Screaming Marianne and Frightmare. Walker seems to have made quite a few decent exploitation movies during the 1970's, I see him as maybe like a British answer to Jess Franco. Like Franco, Pete Walker's films are characterised by camp dialogue, unnecessary nudity, bizarre sadistic characters, pacey and unpretentious plots and cinematography that sort of harkens back to classical hollywood and old gothic horror movies.
Having finally watched Death In Venice, the amazing film by Luchino Visconti, I can safeley say it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen.
Recently I bought Los Olvidados, a film directed by Luis Bunuel, about street kids in Mexico City. Bunuel left Spain to escape fascism, its pretty clear if you watch any films of his, such as Viridiana or Exterminating Angel, that he was quite radically left wing and anti church. Los Olvidados is also famous for this dream sequence.
Un Chien Andalou's eye slicing sequence is probably the most iconic of any of his films.
Exterminating Angel is about a group of South American aristocrats at a dinner party who find themselves suddenly an inexplicably unable to leave their hosts small drawing room. It seems to be about what happens when culture and propriety give way to survival.
Also discovered these Pete Walker films, Die Screaming Marianne and Frightmare. Walker seems to have made quite a few decent exploitation movies during the 1970's, I see him as maybe like a British answer to Jess Franco. Like Franco, Pete Walker's films are characterised by camp dialogue, unnecessary nudity, bizarre sadistic characters, pacey and unpretentious plots and cinematography that sort of harkens back to classical hollywood and old gothic horror movies.
Having finally watched Death In Venice, the amazing film by Luchino Visconti, I can safeley say it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen.
Recently I bought Los Olvidados, a film directed by Luis Bunuel, about street kids in Mexico City. Bunuel left Spain to escape fascism, its pretty clear if you watch any films of his, such as Viridiana or Exterminating Angel, that he was quite radically left wing and anti church. Los Olvidados is also famous for this dream sequence.
Un Chien Andalou's eye slicing sequence is probably the most iconic of any of his films.
Exterminating Angel is about a group of South American aristocrats at a dinner party who find themselves suddenly an inexplicably unable to leave their hosts small drawing room. It seems to be about what happens when culture and propriety give way to survival.
Wednesday 23 February 2011
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