Abby (1974)

Director: William Girdler

Screenplay: G. Cornell Layne

Cast: William Marshall as Bishop Garret Williams, Terry Carter as Reverend Emmett Williams, Austin Stoker as Detective Cass Potter, Carol Speed as Abby Williams, Juanita Moore as Miranda "Momma" Potter, Charles Kissinger as Dr. Hennings, Elliott Moffitt as Russell Lang, Nathan Cook as Tafa Hassan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

We have William Marshall of Blacula (1972) in a lead role here, so we are good from the get-go, an actor who I wished could have had the huger filmography, one to match Christopher Lee's, as they both have the commanding voices, the gravitas and the sense no matter how ridiculous the film around them is, as with Abby here, they stood proudly within them. When I saw a retrospective screening of Blacula, as much as it was the cape that made him alluring, a younger woman in the patrons afterwards admitted to a male friend she found Marshall irresistible, one of those overheard anecdotes that make one glad to go to the cinema. Shame this is a role for him in a film viewed through an old sock depending on the version you can find, as this is a mostly all-black cast reinterpretation of The Exorcist (1973) which was sued off the screens. Warner Brothers may have forgotten to retract the suit, hence why it is difficult to see, alongside actually film prints. It's director William Girdler had no shame in following trends, with his most known film Grizzly (1976) if Jaws was replaced with a bear on land, but in the world of far more blatant Exorcist copies, especially the likes of the Turkish film Şeytan (1974), it feels cruel this idiosyncratic take, shot on barely a budget, was the one that got blocked from released, preserved through bootlegs or theatrical screenings of old prints.

Girdler himself is a distinct figure in American independent cinema, tragically dying in a helicopter accident whilst scouting for locations for a film. He was at only the age of thirty in 1978 when this happened, but he managed from 1972 to 1978 to make nine films. He is a regional filmmaker/producer who shot in various states - Abby shot in Louisville, Kentucky - and alongside how impressive that run is, to image what he could have do when the shot-to-video eighties era came in would have been tantalising in mind to a film like Abby, made in mind to a huge hit undeniably but having its own energetic spin to the material.  

Abby itself, alongside being a riff on the Exorcist, was also riding the wave Blacula was part of when "Blaxploitation" cinema grew in the early seventies, making films about predominantly black casts, and started touching into horror. I credit Girdler, a white filmmaker, just entirely devote himself even if in mind to the market to a mostly all-black cast driven film here, even if you do have to accept that the film might be seen as crass in its premise. I am not the right person to speak of whether the film can be defendable or not, but I could have seen something far more problematic in this premise, rather than what is over-the-top and not subtle in the slightest. Our Father Merrin stand-in, William Marshall, whilst doing humanity work in Nigeria goes on to research a site of Eshu, a trickster deity from the Yoruba religion, originating from south-western Nigeria. This is the one thing really that has not aged well, as you have an actual worshipped God of the past turned into an ancient evil that possesses his daughter-in-law Abby (Carol Speed), a young churchgoing woman with a priest husband who takes on the Regan place but somewhat differently. The deity is turned into a libidinous sex demon, which is broadly painting a figure of ancient worship as you could get and would be frowned on in the modern day, which is ironic because you could have even in a pulp film with this one's tone explored this idea of repressed sexuality and Christian faith much more.

It ultimately becomes an issue in that the film really has less interest in this figure of Eshu than to have the idea of a figure who will cause Abby to fall into being a figure who literally loves someone to death, literally steaming the car up to the point it erupts in smoke and burns up the person she was necking inside. It is more of an issue of you have the calm and saintly Abby contrasted by a demonic figure that is lascivious and has a demonic male voice which is broad in his comments. What really neutralising this, and makes the film more ridiculous than anything, is how absurd this goes. There is some unintentional humour, the demon coming up with memorable one liners, Abby tormenting an old woman to the point of a heart attack by slapping her around, or her offering sexual advice as a marriage advisor by offering to sleep with the husband. What is potentially problematic is crushed in its own alien take on The Exorcist, becoming its own take where there is no knock off Tubular Bells, but funk and monotone drones instead.

It is still, undeniable, with an eye on a huge hit, but this strips out most of the iconic aspects of The Exorcist, such as there being no Father Karras and his crisis of faith. It is as much budgetary reasons clearly we do not get some of the more elaborate scenes recreated, though we get someone floating by the end. It nonetheless is fun to witness, working with the bare essentials to its own quirks, such as the exorcism itself taking place in a nightclub and involves one destroyed disco ball. For a film in the context it was made in too, all the potential issues I have described do not thankfully have anything to them in regards to demeaning its cast, all barring one detective and minor figures an all-black cast, working actors who if you dig into their careers have films and television work which stick out. Our titular lead Carol Speed's career was sadly mostly within the seventies only, with films like The Mack (1973), but it took me by surprise to realise that, playing her mother, is Juanita Moore, famous especially for her key part in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), an incredible film, whilst you have Austin Stoker from Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) too among others.

In terms of whether the film is actually "good" in terms of portrayals of these characters, rather than avoiding problematic stereotypes, one has to be blunt. It is in mind to whether you find Abby's foul mouthed, sex obsessed demon form against the saintly Christian archetype she begins as problematic or just ridiculous. It is, at its heart, openly cashing in on The Exorcist, and with the choice to spin it the way the film did, everything feels ridiculous instead. Everything feels unintentional in its mistakes than deliberately problematic stereotypes. It even attempts to bring in aspects of the Yoruba religion which, whilst not dealt with well, least gives us one good moment, with William Marshall mocking the demon, in a variety of languages between them, for pretending to be the real Eshu, and even moving into using non-Christian African religious rites to perform the exorcism. It is the scene that stands out as distinct even if one also wishes for a film which elaborated on this sequence more than here. If anything, it just makes me appreciate William Marshall more, who actually was not a fan of the film he was making¹, but still committed a powerhouse performance. I wish he was as well known as other cult horror actors as, with one of the better scenes in what is a silly film made on a very low budget in that example, the comparison to Christopher Lee is perfect. He was someone who could have been incredible in so many films if he had the wider length of filmography as the later did. As with the rest of the cast, and Girdler himself as producer-director, I wish this had not been stuck in this lawsuit situation, as alongside the pointlessness of this when most of these films are clearly not like the big hit, which feels like a power game in committing to the lawsuit, Abby within the light of day cannot be taken seriously. It becomes instead a fascinating item from the past with figures involved within it who shine in spite of criticisms of the film itself.

 

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1) Abby (1974): A Unique Blaxploitation Horror or Nothing More Than an Exorcist Rip-Off?, written by Neil Gray for Horror Obsessive and published 29th September 2022.

Macabre (1980)

Director: Lamberto Bava

Screenplay: Pupi Avati, Roberto Gandus, Lamberto Bava and Antonio Avati

Cast: Bernice Stegers as Jane Baker, Stanko Molnar as Robert Duval, Veronica Zinny as Lucy Baker, Roberto Posse as Fred Kellerman, Ferdinando Orlandi as Mr. Wells, Fernando Pannullo as Leslie Baker, Elisa Kadigia Bove as Mrs. Duval

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Set in the USA, specifically New Orleans with Southern accents in the dub, Macabre was the debut film for Lamberto Bava, son of the legendary Mario Bava, and it is less a horror film in conventions but a really twisted horror melodrama. The set up is a film in itself but sets up a more morbid narrative: a wife named Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) is having an adulterous affair behind her husband's back with a man named Fred (Roberto Posse), creating suspicion in the eldest daughter Lucy (Veronica Zinny) to the point the later, in an act of psychosis, drowns her younger brother in the bathtub out of revenge for the betrayal. The drive back, panicked by the horror of losing her own son, leads Jane and Fred to crash the car, Fred losing his head in the collision with a wall.

A year later, the parents have divorced, and Jane has had mental health therapy, but this perverse melodrama with sultry jazz on the score by Ubaldo Continiello will see the repercussions of this incident for Mrs. Baker. Another figure of importance is Robert (Stanko Molnar), a blind instrument repair man who, in the prologue when his mother was still alive, let a room in the top floor for Jane and Fred for their affair, letting her take the room again by herself separated from her husband. Slow paced, I mentioned this was less a horror film in the traditional sense, and in a gruesome turn in the plot, befits its name a macabre drama in presentation. Late seventies chic of over textured and saturated coloured wallpaper and decor overwhelm the main setting, Robert's home, be it the marble wall bathroom with pure white sink to yellowish gold on everything from clothes to wall decor. Because of this, there is a sick lavishness to a sick story of love as Jane has not forgotten Fred, and someone comes to her room at night as Robert is still able to hear from the floor below.

Robert is our sympathetic figure, sweet and attractive with bold blue eyes, but they are unable to see a thing, Robert not playing a bad stereotype either of a blind man, caught blissfully unaware of Mrs. Baker ritualizing her beloved Fred, with even a portable shrine to him carried with her when she takes the room to stay in. Robert will learn the horrible truth, and even before then he is stuck knowing she pleasures herself at night seemingly on the top floor whilst he pangs in unrequited love. The story is made more complicated by Lucy herself, playing another obsessive in wanting her parents to reunite even if it means tormenting her own mother, like Lucy adding a photo of the late younger brother for her mother to find in her rented room. Wanting said parents back, in the same way Jane wants Fred back, makes up the key theme of the film, of two generations of people clinging to their past in unhealthy, destructive ways, making the film compelling as the equivalent of a radio drama extended into a ninety minute film. As I get older, this is the tone I prefer for a lot of horror, unless they can be great or fun exceptions, much more interesting to see this type of story you could tell in a thirty minute tale with audio only have its form expanded into this intriguing movie.

It admittedly has a plot twist you would have not gotten away with on an old radio show like Beyond Midnight or Inner Sanctum Mysteries. The twisted aspect is what Mrs. Baker keeps in the top of the refrigerator in the room, [Huge Spoiler] which turns out to be an act of necrophilia with Fred's head where the frozen peas should be stored. It is gross but the idea of a love so strong it turns into this obsession to even preserve what remains of him, as a talisman even if involving their actual remains, is compelling. More so as the story is actually based on a real story of a woman who kept her lover's head in a refrigerator too, Bava given a newspaper clipping of the incident by Pupi Avati, the filmmaker who also co-writer with his brother Antonio Avati¹. [Spoilers End] Even if the twist will be obvious if you have sussed up on your plot tropes, and have a sick imagination, the story is macabre literally for this sickly obsession with love in a lurid depiction.

It is helped by the lead Bernice Stegers, a British actress who was spotted through Federico Fellini's City of Women (1980)¹, made around the same time, giving a committed role as a woman lost in her own insanity. Her career is in small roles between film and television, but she would also reappear in Xtro (1982), a film which somehow managed to outdo this Italian film in terms of bizarre imagery. The perversity of the story is enough even with an even more absurd and supernatural end scene for an added jolt, because of its growing tension of everything starts to collapse. Even mother and daughter will be at war with each other in a gristly conclusion. Lamberto Bava's films after, to be honest, are not subtle in the slightest, his most iconic Demons (1985) as over-the-top as you can get, and whilst Macabre fits the director's career in the final act, when everything goes to Hell, the slow burn nature of this particular tale stands out with great reward.

 

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1) Taken from Macabre and the Golden Age of Italian Exploitation (2009), directed by Elijah Drenner.

The Voice of the Moon (1990)

Director: Federico Fellini

Screenplay: Federico Fellini

Based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics' Poem) by Ermanno Cavazzoni

Cast: Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, Paolo Villaggio as Gonnella, Nadia Ottaviani as Aldina, Marisa Tomasi as Marisa, Angelo Orlando as Nestore, Susy Blady as Susy

An Abstract Candidate

 

It seems my whole life is just this night.

Federico Fellini's last film, premiered outside the Cannes Film Festival competition in 1990, was tragically dismissed. It never got distribution in the UK until Arrow Video made it their task to release it in the late 2010s finally.

It begins introducing us to Roberto Benigni's Ivo Salvini, released from a mental hospital, starting from one night going on a journey through vignettes. Whilst it begins with a sense of humour, Ivo accidentally wandering into a nephew letting people pay to see his aunt undress, The Voice of the Moon feel streaked in melancholia of a different time. Based freely on a novel by Ermanno Cavazzoni, where Cavazzoni was taking his influence from the writings of real mental health patients, this film comes with the knowledge Benigni's character is a Holy Fool, with a fixation on wells which may pose a danger to him as others watch over him in fear of this, and with all the voices in his head. All we see is entirely subjective from his perspective. He is an outsider who will be ignored, and whilst his journey is brimming in life and vivescent, he is cast off in society alongside others. The first person he encounters demonstrates this: a musician living in a graveyard who found a man randomly eating everything in his kitchen, following by more appearing in his room when he rehearsed forbidden cords.

Ivo is blissful even when thinking of those he knew of who have died, but the world continues around him regardless of his presence, the modern changes to Italy visible in the background as tourists have collected together around the streets in the day, TV aerials are on all the roofs, and washing machines and refrigerators of pure manufactured white are especially everywhere. Against this, the film feels melancholic and eerie, even when Ivo is speaking tenderly of life, realities bleeding into each other especially when it comes to memories of his grandmother, Roberto Benigni playing the role whilst meant to be a child and a young actress is cast as the grandmother.  

The tentative plot is his love for a woman named Aldina (Nadia Ottaviani), as pale with blonde hair as the Moon she will be positioned as later on, trying to return a shoe back to her after an ill advised incident her sister helped with, clutching onto throughout without any true insidious (or unintentionally insidious) aspect to his love for her, almost childlike instead as a crush. The closest thing to another prominent figure, among those displaced like he and seen throughout in reoccurring roles, is a prefect named Gonnella (Paolo Villaggio), shown initially fearing his neighbours will infect him with their old age as an older man himself, made to retire due to his mental health and believe everyone is a spy out to get him, even thinking his own son is a fake pretending to be a son. There is still a light humour, and it is still bawdy, one of the stories is that of the wife whose libido is so strong it lead to an amicable divorce from her husband, who adored the hairdresser's manicurist but could not keep up with someone so passionate the sofa starts steaming up with their embrace and hurdles on literal train lines in one of their many frequent love making rituals. Honestly, where the film was probably dismissed is how gentle it is, following characters and scenarios Ivo encounters without a sense of plot driven melodrama. Considering early in his career Fellini jettisoned plot driven stories for this template which help bring his acclaim, such as with the likes of Amarcord (1973), it does raise the sense Fellini sadly was out of time for cinema in 1990 then the film being flawed in pace or meaning.

The film looks beautiful, Fellini's trademark a baroque maximalism where depicting entire aspects of Italian culture, even its ancient past, were depicted with every detail and every extra having interest to examining them. This was all with a dream logic that explored the "texture" of his worlds whether the internal subconscious of a lead, the environment itself, or both, the gnoccata festival is a good example here. Without the loaded satire of Roma (1972) of the fashion show of priest uniforms covered in neon or riding bicycles on a catwalk, it is still over-the-top in taking the real tradition of a festival based on the food item gnocca, with a crowned gnocca Queen and even mascot costumes of gnocca royalty, done in this case as a loving nod to tradition whilst having a sense of humour.

The film does dangerously get close to Fellini looking at the modern day dismissively whilst lamenting the past, which is righteous when mocking the obsession with fancy new electronic appliances, but with music would veer into closed mindedness of an old man. Thankfully, the sequence when this comes in clearly embraced the spectacle and feels less dismissive, more the lament of everyone charging ahead in the new world without pause for the past from the perspective of those lost from before. That is the discotheque sequence, an awesome scene for Fellini's swansong, of a giant warehouse with towering reflective panelled walls that move on rails, and crowds decked in late eighties fashion. The biggest surprise, which clearly was not a musical licensing issue at all when the film was instead "lost" to lack of interest, is how he managed to get Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel, off the Bad (1987) album, a huge album and one of its singles which also happens to work perfectly for the sequence itself. The scene, where Gonnella laments the music lost in the past, thankfully does not quash the beauty of this moment, actually evoking what David Lynch does in a set piece for Wild at Heart (1990). The irony is not last as, at that Cannes Film Festival where Fellini's film was dismissed it was Lynch, who admired the filmmaker and would even befriend him, who won their most important award the Palme D'Or for that year with Wild At Heart. Both films have scenes juxtaposing wildly alien fans of a different genre of music, in Lynch's a heavy metal concept, suddenly stop and become an audience for an entirely different reality, time stopping for everything as these youths circle around a beautiful slow dance with an older woman who loved Gonnella despite he being so gone in his conspiracy theories, getting to rekindle that love over a classical piece.

And thankfully, Fellini ends his last film, before his 1993 passing, with the satirical touch he streaked his career with, as whilst politics do not necessarily appear in his films, he did prod follies in humanity continually. Two brothers, set up early on wanting to accomplish this, end up literally capturing the Moon herself at one point, and as crowds gather, priests and politicians intermingle on TV, and it is a world changing event of spiritual profoundness. What happens is that this monumental event is to be ruined by bickering, the Moon getting abuse hurled at it for no reason, and a gun being fired spoiling a profound moment. Fellini still loves humanity but gets a humour in humans being distracted by their own pettiness, rather than enjoy the things in life Ivo as many characters before him had throughout the director's other films, a fitting end to a magnificent career.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eerie/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Games of the Abstract: Oyaji Hunter Mahjong (1995)

Developer: Warp Inc.

Publisher: Warp Inc.

One Player

Originally for: 3DO Interactive Multiplayer

Warp and its founder Kenji Eno are unsung indie heroes of nineties video games, but tragically their legacy is marked by little of it being available officially. We can only be thankful D (1995), their most well known game, got ports on everything to the point Night Dive Studios, a retro game preservation developer, re-released the PC port, but Warp are a cult studio in a medium where preservation is still an issue with video game distribution. It neither helps Warp's legacy was backing the cult machines, not the winners, of the fifth and sixth generations of video game consoles. D, a really inspired attempt at an interactive movie that yet had an attitude to puzzles that I feel was more accessible, was a big hit but it was ironically Sony, the winner of the fifth and sixth generation with the Playstation One and Two, which under published copies and annoyed Eno so much he deliberately revealed he would jump to the Sega Saturn at a Sony press even with Enemy Zero (1996)¹, a full motion video sci-fi horror game. There is D2 (1999), sadly on the Sega Dreamcast, Sega's last hardware, and an unsung machine for arcade ports and experimental works. It would also be the last project under the Warp name even if Eno worked afterwards. More obscure is most of the work which helped Warp come to be. Those would be the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console games, which is a very unpreserved console for any game which was not ported from or to the PC.

With hindsight, this console doomed by how expensive it was among other factors, such as a lack fof a mainstream killer app, was innovative and its figurehead Trip Hawkins deserves lionisation for. The founder of Electronic Arts in 1982, he spearheaded an idiosyncratic and bold console, taking a really un-mainstream attitude to a machine at the time where the hardware was not unique, and could have a variety of different versions created by outsourcing to electronics companies, had no censorship which allowed for adult games to be made for it officially, and had no region locking. The cost to develop for the CD based software was a lot less expensive too, which leads into how even next to Microsoft, a huge company who struggled to get the Xbox over twice in Japan, the 3DO managed to have an easier time, just from the exclusives, in that country, and even in South Korea which had exclusive games too. Kenji Eno was an admirer of Hawkins because of these aspects², and it was clear the model, whilst not a successful console, allowed Warp to exist. Knowing one of the variety of games they made for the 3DO, the block puzzle game Trip'd (1995), was clearly named after Trip Hawkins shows the company were grateful for the machine.

Among the obscurest is Oyaji Hutner Mahjong, which comes from Kenji Eno seeing all the erotic mahjong games including for the arcade, where beating female players leads to them taking their clothes off, and being sick of them, thus imagining a game where a male superhero exists to protect women from perverts³. It is a fun premise, and you have to respect someone even if not a serious satire playing with gender stereotypes in this genre. Innately, I do not see anything inherently amiss with the idea of strip mahjong games, but if they are all clearly designed for a heterosexual male audience, with the female players always the ones meant to lose, then you see an accidental issue of objectification this game rightly parodies. It is not perfect itself, and it would have been cool to see a female heroine fight the sex pests, but our lead the Oyaji Hunter does stand out in a funny way. With women even having a way to turn on his own equivalent of the Bat Signal in the sky to call him, be it by Hunter Yo-Yo to the face or the Hunter Beam, the Oyaji Hunter is there to beat up and force wrong-uns to apologise for acting like pigs. Like the man in just women's underwear and a trench coat terrorising a schoolgirl for an underskirt shot with a camera for the first opponent, he will beat these men up and then humiliate them in a game of mahjong.

It is a mahjong game, with it explicit these villains or the Oyaji Hunter himself the first to challenge the other to the game, even the later having to bring out a game board for a last ditch attempt against the big bad of the game, in a giant tall building sized robot, which is funny for a broad slapstick comedy. You still have to play mahjong, specifically Japanese (riichi) mahjong rules, to which this was my first encounter with mahjong in a competitive form than mahjong solitaire. As a result, I cannot attempt an expert opinion, but I will call Oyaji Hunter Mahjong a good example of experimentation in what I would call "ephemeral" video game genres, those which exist throughout video game history but are always doomed to be replaced by new version for new consoles and machines. Mahjong games have always been made for video game consoles, and even the strip adult ones are replaced by new versions, making this a case of one where the personality is its advantage of being remembered. Sadly despite the desire for electronic versions of such games, as is the case for soccer or golf, they can be replaced with ease, making those which are really idiosyncratic or openly distort the rules some of the more memorable even if in bad ways as well as good.

The game itself here is not that radically altered in mind to this. Attempting to explain rules as a new player, the goal is to match tiles in threes (and fours if lucky) by matching images or orders from a variety of different sets like the Sō bamboo tiles.  You can only do this if the tile an opponent discards is the one you need, and you can also win if you have a full hand (or what remains from those you still have) when the next tile you pick up for your round, especially the last one, can complete a set of tiles which all match or connect in a certain way. This raises the innate issue here of random choice, but you can win either by making full sets clearing as many as possible, or if you can manage to have a "fully concealed" hand, a full set of matching/ordered titles only revealed to the opponent when you have won the round instantly.

There is more to this game's rules though, as you both have life bars, the numbered states which are the equivalent of betting with money, yours always at "5000" and jumping into higher numbers over the five opponents for theirs, which have to be knocked down. If you are lucky, each time the opponent sacrifices their life points for a bet, believing they have a perfect hand, and you screw them over, you can still chip at this number, but you are advised to win hands so they cannot, especially as this leads to the one new factor for this game for whoever wins. If they win, you hope to choose the randomly shuffled card that leads to them miss a blow, or the one which only causes the least damage, as they can use a special attack like in a comedy anime story, such as saying a pun so bad it hurts, which can be destructive to your chances of winning. This is more an issue as the score they get for how they win is used for the initial attack damage, something you thankfully have as an advantage if you win. The Oyaji Hunter, if he wins that round, can through a roulette wheel kick, punch or use one of his attacks which have bigger multipliers, 5x for the hunter boomerang, or the Hunter Beam itself, which is a 10x and can decimate enemies in one shot if you won by a big point hand. Or you can miss entirely too and feel like a tool.

This presents an obvious issue with the game whenever you bring random choice. Mahjong has a strategy, but random choice is as much a factor here even with strategy involved, rather than the full ability to win by master planning, or puzzle games where you are previewed what the next item you will receive will look like. This reminds of another curiosity, the type Kenji Eno was satirising, Sega Saturn's Haunted Casino (1996), a bizarre erotic gambling game for that console which however envisioned a full video ghostly mansion to explore. It felt like it was a game in the mould of Myst (1993), if instead of puzzles you played Western style games like poker against cat girl card dealers. It also had the issue that you could be grinding through rounds in games, or that if the A.I. got good hands over and over, you are doomed. Random choice is innately difficult with games, as it is not due to you having made a mistake, and Oyaji Mahjong Hunter is affected by this.

Which is a shame, as it is a compellingly odd project. For a low budget production too, it is still ambitious, as Warp brought in Ichirō Itano as the director of the animated cut scenes, a huge name in Japanese animation. In fact, as an animator, he is legendary, a huge figure for his art form especially for the likes of the Macross series. This is even seen here with his trademark "Itano Circus" where at one point, with the final opponent's giant robot, the individual missiles they fire at the Oyaji Hunter, as they were in the Macross series from robot/fighter plane hybrids, take different (individually drawn) trajectories whilst in the air. As a director, this is probably the most abrupt yet wholesome work for a notorious animation director, Ichirō Itano's work some of the most controversial and nihilistic you can find. His entry in the three Violence Jack  episodes, made between 1986 and 1990, was not readily found uncut and would make some edge lords green; Angel Cop (1989-1994) is notoriously an ultra-violent jingoistic sci-fi action work which, infamously if the English subtitles for the Japanese dub were not censored, sadly fell into actual anti-Semitism for its final plot twists; even a television series Gantz (2004) had befittingly a director suitable for its nihilistic and very violent premise, of resurrected people who died forced to kill aliens in death match-like scenarios, which had to be censored for the gore and sexual content for its television broadcasts. It is quite perverse, in a sick humoured way, he fully committed to this comedic project and created some playful cut scenes in spite of this record of accomplishment for controversial, problematic and not necessarily well regarded anime as a director which violently contrasts his justifiable legacy as a talented animator.

As a story, this game has one which is far from perfect, but I was not expecting a profound tale of gender politics here considering the type of game this is set up as, a silly parody. After the first opponent, the dirty mac photographer, you get a man in BDSM gear trying to tie up and drip hot wax on a female biker, one who eventually gets revenge by revealing he accidentally targeted a Queen Dominatrix. The third is a man trying to grope a geisha, forgiven by her when you win, especially when revealed from then on the men are being brainwashed and cannot remember their actions. The fourth is an odd duck, using his bald head as a forfeit attack in its shininess, trying to force cooked meat products down a poor air stewardess' throat while saying bad food puns, getting his comeuppance when she turns out to be a talented chef who decides to however use ultra hot wasabi, part of the goofy cartoon tone. The big bad, the fifth and final opponent, is human Gollum getting revenge for being mocked for his short stature by wrecking havoc with a giant robot. His conclusion may disappoint, as he is forgiven by the women involved despite using a beam himself to briefly remove all their clothes and his comments on their gender's laziness. However, literally looking like a wizened Benjamin Button baby when defeated and humiliated, I again think the project was always a knockabout farce parodying erotic mahjong games, a proper video game satire tackling gender politics left to be created and worth trying one day.

The sense of where this came in Warp production is found in how, by accident, this has a compelling historical footnote for the company. There is little in the way of extra options, but the one you get, set up as an elevator with multiple floors for the options, allows players to try demos of other games from the company and has previews, one being an original tease for D2. D became their most successful game in terms of sales, but sadly, their company found themselves always on the wrong side of history afterwards. This version of D2 sets up what did happen in the Dreamcast game, only with the fact our lead Laura rather than just being the "virtual actor", Kenji Eno pioneering the idea with "Laura", a blonde Western female lead, playing different characters per game, is still playing the same one from the original D in that game's aftermath.

She is on an airplane, and whilst she is not pregnant as this trailer has her, the airplane crash that sets up D2 as it became is established here. D2's trajectory shows the unfortunate history for Warp, with Eno's untimely passing in 2013 happening long after that name did not exist as a developer. D2 was to follow Laura's son, warped into a medieval dungeon setting after the set up on the airplane leading to Laura's death⁴. It was being created for the M2, what was supposed to be the follow up console to the 3DO which never came, despite games being created for it. D2 as we got, which is effectively a re-telling of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) that kept Laura alive and surviving an airplane crash in the Canadian wilderness, tragically found itself on a console which only lasted for three years and led to Sega stepping down from being a hardware powerhouse to just being a software publisher. Oyaji Hunter Mahjong by pure accident presents a tantalising piece of their legacy, and whilst not a perfect game, this game itself is unique as a production, so odd and full of charm you can forgive its game play mechanics, a real testament to the studio even as a lesser title for trying to make interesting work.

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1) Kenji Eno, Japan's Maverick Game Creator, Dead at 42, written by Chris Kohler for WIRED and published January 14th 2015. Archived on March 8th 2017.

2) CoreGamers Interview and Profile of Kenji Eno (Part 2), written for CoreGamers and published August 21st 2008. Archived from the original November 20th 2015.

3) Saving Women by Crushing Perverted Old Men at Mahjong – Oyaji Hunter (3DO), written by Snowyaria and published on their Kusoge Coffeehouse blog on April 15th 2021.

4) D2 [M2 – Cancelled ], written and published for Unseen 64 on April 7th 2008.

À l'aventure (2008)

 

Director: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Cast: Carole Brana as Sandrine, Arnaud Binard as Greg, Étienne Chicot as the Taxi Driver, Jocelyn Quivrin as Fred, Lise Bellynck as Sophie, Nadia Chibani as Mina, Estelle Galarme as Françoise, Frédéric Aspisi as Jérôme

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sadrine (Carole Brana) begins with a friend on a bench where an older man sat near them on the same public furniture starts talking about their complacency as a species to act like sheep, starting her journey in self doubt which in context to how the film goes, could easily become a pretentious smut film. If my choice of words seem scathing, this will be a kinder review of À l'aventure, though viewing it as a flawed production which still is worthy of examining over and over. It is not a condemnation of erotica as a potential for art, or smut as inherently a bad thing, but in mind that this is a film by Jean-Claude Brisseau. The late French filmmaker presents a film which is doomed in nature, a film by an older cis male director making an erotic film with a female lead, which is common in the history of cinema, and made more complicated due to Brisseau's controversial real life history. A filmmaker since the seventies, I watched a film like Noce Blanche (1989) which still has erotic elements, but is a drama which focused on its characters complexities. Many will probably know him from Secret Things (2002), which was promoted in the early 2000s as a sexually explicit thriller and also begins the contentious aspect of his career. In 2005, he was found guilty in French courts for sexually harassing actresses in the auditions for that film, two actresses asked to perform explicit sexual acts during the audition process which included them being filmed, leading to him being fined and a one-year suspended jail sentence¹. This does not help scrutinise his career afterwards, especially when with The Exterminating Angels (2006), Brisseau had the gall if you condemn the man to depict his own criminal event in a speculative dissection of the incident which is sexually explicit as well. À l'aventure presents, however, something which feels drenched in ennui, presented as an erotic film where sensuality is still there, but the initial premise of Sadrine looking for the perfect orgasm, a premise from any softcore erotica, given way as a Trojan horse to existential dread. This review will not defend the man at all, but it fascinates as if the results of that criminal charge bled into this production completely.

It feels too obvious, before even watching the film and digesting it after, to just damn the production, more as even if its director presents a concern, now he marked himself for sins away from the film camera, films still present complicated psychological readings. The challenge for a man to write a woman's voice, and the perils of them doing it in a way which is potentially embarrassing, does however not ignore how intentionally (or unintentionally) write their own psychological state into any character they touch. With Jean-Claude Brisseau, this is even more of an issue, but Sadrine's lack of satisfaction with her boyfriend and routine starts as a set up for so many erotic works, sleeping with the stereotypically handsome male psychoanalysis, but feels like the work of a man drained in what he made. Even if going through the motions of erotic, it feels instead like Sadrine's sense of dissatisfaction is more than arousal, and this is also Brisseau's own, more poignant when his fascination of female sexual desire rightly got him criminated.

Whether the film itself actually succeeds is subjective, but in this case for this viewer, it is a failure from trying to be a profound about the meaning of life, as it falls into clichés, but becomes far more interesting and more rewarding as the struggle for meaning, and that pervading sense of distance a director-writer who pigeonholed himself into the stereotype of erotic cinema ended up in here. Brisseau has a type, let us be honest, of the slim intellectually beautiful woman who is bisexual in the ideal of certain cis male views, but even the male lead is an erotic ideal for him as a cis male, the ideal erotic man in Greg (Arnaud Binard), handsome and intelligent, embodying the desirable figure for this ideal woman. It is to the point he is named after actor Gregory Peck for a cineaste reference, a figure who believes in confronting conventional morality. The irony is knowing he will be skewered as a false love interest for Sadrine, and that feels on purpose, whilst Brisseau's own stand in is the older male taxi driver, who has no interest in Sadrine physically but like each other as figures wanting to talk about their place in the world. It is an erotic film which however falls back onto Brisseau's static camera takes, from cinematographer Wilfrid Sempé, of talking and Sadrine finding more insight with the aforementioned taxi driver, played by Étienne Chicot, who began her self doubts and shows more interest for her as a fully thinking figure.

It would almost be self parody in some of the scenarios here, as she encounters a submissive mistress to an open minded heterosexual couple, that indulge in cinematic light BDSM, but the idea of a restless middle class who need to escape routine is felt too, following sexual fantasies whether they can help or not. This comes with the issue of gender bias, beautiful women in the conventional idea who are intelligent on a surface level and open to all sexual scenarios as here. It becomes an issue with the figure who made this film who fell into the trap of thinking this ideal would be forced onto women, rather than how much more complex people are, and rightly got a criminal prosecution for this and thus marking all his art work with a stain we need to always point at even if we stay open minded to watching the films still. I would even accept being called a hypocrite for even watching this film or even taking some surface pleasure from it, but it comes with many details that dissect itself, becoming more than the stereotypical film of a bad filmmaker, bad in the true sense for badness as a man and not for something arbitrary as whether the dialogue makes sense, or if the film is well made. Figures, all women, are figuring themselves out existentially, be it from trauma of losing a child, or boredom and stifled sense of their purpose in life, and the mess of this take on the subject is still compelling even from a deeply failed production.

Even if objectifying a figure of desire, if figures speak at all of concerns or pains, even for humour, that can be a writer revealing more of themselves then they may realise. À l'aventure, set in the urban France of so many French films about anxiety and relationship tensions, where tellingly enlightenment comes from fleeing to the countryside, is filtered through divorces, the issue of the ideal marriage of heterosexual couples being hollow, and of how many of these characters here talk of themselves as wives or female figures being bored. The friend meant to say Sadrine's decision to ditch her job and work, drifting along in her sexual journey, is deluding herself ends up running off with an arms dealer in a romance and disappears from the film entirely, an absurd touch in the context but apt for the film. Even if the film ultimately feels like it is grasping at straws sexually and philosophically, that touches on a feeling of conventional reality being unstable from aimlessness that is one of the film's better aspects.

The fantasy the film is set up in is an issue unless you accept the inherent flaw of this particular piece of erotic trying to be serious, instead revealing itself as softcore punching above its weight but with the failed boxing blows still revealing so much more. You cannot work unless you are on the dole, or a true outsider, and there is more to even a naive writer like myself about the notion of a polyamorous relationship that, even for unrepentant and proud smut, you could work with beyond this, whilst this feels tame and falls into the problems of really hollow sexual fantasies shot for cinema that have women as the eroticised figures. But the fantasy still starts as a perfect template because of the fact it collapses, and the fantasy instead exaggerates the fixations that are uncomfortably real. Even when it looks like it is getting into a fantasy scenario that would be considered problematic and requires a lot more concern, even if transgressive to consider, about the place the willing submissive enjoys and controls the scenario as much as the dominant, the film throws the least expected curveball.

That scenario is when Greg is convinced to hypnotise the three female leads by the women themselves, which can make a viewer uncomfortable especially as erotica has the fantasy of mind control and hypnosis, frankly with the issues right to consider about whether it is a healthy scenario to imagine depending on the context. À l'aventure however completely undercuts this. Even if these turns in this type of world cinema I got into from DVD can be the moments which lose viewers as ridiculous, I am always happy when I get what I was not expecting from such films. It is set up that one figure Mina (Nadia Chibani) is susceptible to hypnosis, to the point a coin on her arm when told is hot does leave a real burn, leading into the supernatural crushing this fantasy as she starts to bring up past memories and past lives into what was meant to just be softcore. What was a set up to the sexual fantasy involving all three women turns into a work of figures trying to figure themselves out, accidentally prodding a hole in reality, and Greg making an ill advised attempt to explore this hole that just causes damage. All because he was not prepared to not go into the experiment and went in cluelessly, especially when people start to levitate off the floor in a real miracle.

The philosophical ideas of our repetition and sense of infinite are not original and of depth here, which would become an albatross if a viewer took this film to be a take on existentialism in a really detailed form, but even this abrupt turn in a plot is a surprise, including the one nod to a very contentious subject in French culture when Mima remembers an incident from Algeria in the past, talking of a horrible tragedy she caught the results of when too young to process it. Even the idea, if caught in the issues of Brisseau himself as a compromised artist, of the sexual ecstasy being linked fully to the spiritual is a compelling theory to think of, even if it ends here instead in disaster, those not prepared for the real force beyond their process, and Sadrine realising her ideal erotic man in Greg is not the person she can ever feel fullness as a person from. Ultimately the sex becomes unrewarding, more of a choreographed scenario by the end of this, which is pretty damning for a film that would have been sold on sex, leaving on a beautiful countryside field and discussing how people live in such little time of reality for what has been a millennia plus of the Earth's existence. Eroticism still plays a part in Brisseau's work, but it feels as if it is slowly ebbing away here, burnt by his own controversies of his career but also feeling like it confined him, none of which is a defence of the man in the damndest, but with the sense here the struggle came to the screen in a compelling way.

Abstract Spectrum: Introspective

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

=====

1) French Director Found Guilty Of Sexual Harassment, written for Movie Mail and published December 20th 2005. Archived for the Web Archive on April 26th 2014.

Careful (1992)

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Kyle McCulloch as Grigorss, Gosia Dobrowolska as Zenaida, Sarah Neville as Klara, Brent Neale as Johann, Paul Cox as Count Knotkers, Victor Cowie as Herr Trotta, Michael O'Sullivan as The Swan Feeder (Dead Husband of Zenaida), Vince Rimmer as Franz

An Abstract Candidate

 

Guy Maddin with Careful makes a film about a mountain community, a very bleakly humoured take on this setting and context, the Germanic society of Tolzbad a community forced to stay in silence to avoid setting off avalanches. It is a precarious place where it is truly a godsend there are rare valleys nearby whose acoustics silence noises, but one where the problem is significant to the point that flocks of geese are so dangerous they need to be shot out of the sky in the perimeters. The film was also a project whose co-writer George Toles explicitly wanted to tackle incest in Careful¹; the setting allows for a really psychologically twisted work of pent up emotions, contrasted by the lush aesthetic and playfully strange whimsy of this timeless world of the non-existent past. The setting, everyone trapped in this isolated high altitude, has lead to these figures having unlocked memories and desires pent up, including for their own parents or ties to them too tight to the point, suffocating, they will duel their widow mother's suitor to the death.

The tale surrounds the sons of the late Swan Feeder (Michael O'Sullivan), a man who will return as a ghost but stuck with his eyes still blinded, losing one as a babe when his mother pressed him too tightly against a brooch with the pin sticking out, the second warning to any viewer of why you do not stand too close to a cuckoo clock when it hits the hour mark. He will have to watch on, and try to warn anyone he can communicate with, at the two act structure of his lineage's perils, the first following Johann the eldest son (Brent Neale), who wishes to marry Klara (Sarah Neville), but has incestuous dreams about his widowed mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska). Johann begins the first of the two acts as he succumbs to "mountain illness, meant to be the curse to climb the mountains, which is warned as very dangerous and having claimed many, but is blatant symbolism of the isolation of this extremely closed and emotionally rigid community which wrought neurosis and suppressed desires, especially in a world where the danger of raised voices causing avalanches is a constant. Johann's introductory story shows how edgy Careful has remained, spying on his mother bathing upside down in the chimney, and his downfall where he concocts a sleeping draught before he cracks in guilt violently, in the moment he was to commit a true transgression, leading to the younger third son Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) to take over the film.

Whilst played with a sick sense of humour, Careful is entirely about the pull of family, one of the most prominent themes of Guy Maddin's filmography, among the many aspects juxtaposing his really eccentric humour against really uncomfortable themes. A lot in his career have had to do with sexuality of all forms and many taboos, which causes his characters over the years to be thrown in melodramatic maelstroms. Grigorss falls for Klara, and inherits Johann's role as the new butler at Count Knotkers' castle, the head of Tolzbad played by Paul Cox, only to learn the truth of Knotkers and his mother's love for each other which was still burning even when she married the Swan Feeder, explaining as well why the oldest brother Franz (Vince Rimmer), who cannot talk and was forced to live in the attic, was stuck ostracised. The connection to family is a theme Guy Maddin has death with even interpreting his own life, or even in a positive way with actress Isabella Rossellini and her legendary filmmaking father Roberto in My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005); in Careful, be it Count Knotkers having his own deceased mother preserved in a sanitised bedroom, or that Klara has a fixation on her own father, jealous of the closer relationship between him and her sister Glenda as the favourite. Her story even leads to the one scene which may be far more problematic, if unintentionally nowadays, in her going as far as deceive Grigorss with a possible false accusation to kill her father, even if there is a whimsical touch involving using the avalanches to do the job. The irony is that barring the tragic passing of his father at a young age, the short The Dead Father (1985) which began the director's career influenced by this, Maddin's upbringing is sweet and eccentric, even recreating his childhood which showed examples of this in a fantastical form for My Winnipeg (2007), so it might surprise he has twisted tales on family like in Careful.

He definitely likes to probe at neurosis, sexual anxiety and the perverse, which will dabble into anything from the band Sparks providing a musical number in The Forbidden Room (2015) about a man mentally crippled by his interesting in the female posterior, to the purely glorious and fun, making a short Sissy Boy Slap Party (1994) entirely about men wearing very little clothing spanking each other. Guy Maddin's work is not overtly messaged, but the themes are there filtered through obsolete cinematic tropes, least in that his work was seen as throwbacks at this stage or when The Heart of the World (2000), a short inspired by Soviet montage editing, brought more influence in editing and production techniques forward in his work. The fantastical and lyrical is contrasted by the incredibly dark or the purely ridiculous, eccentric behaviour portrayed by characters in these films as much part of their mental tapestries. There is even a whole aspect here in Careful of Johann and Grigorss studying in a butler school, which I cannot help but think of in context to Jakob von Gunten, a 1909 novel written by Swiss novelist Robert Walser which is a very unconventional work, and one we had to wait for animators Stephen and Timothy Quay, in their first theatrical film and with actors, to get an official theatrical adaptation in 1995 with Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life. The connection, even if accidental, is perfect for two works dealing with the unconscious wells of desire.

You could not write a review of a Guy Maddin film without talking of the aesthetic, with the additional fact that with Careful, he was starting to move away from playing tribute to silent cinema aesthetics to others, the look here of old photography hand painted in colour after development, contrasted to the tinted scenes in one colour evoking how silent films used this technique with the colours used depending on the context. Maddin's films are very artificial, even when using old film and TV footage to retell Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as The Green Fog (2017), Careful having a rustic artificiality with ornate homemade set design, feeling of the 18th century in fact but with details like phonographs existing which effect the sense of time and setting being clearly placed. There is even a deliberate crackle in the soundtrack like an old vinyl which emphasis the sense of this entire being a relic, ironic knowing that the themes I have mentioned of Guy Maddin's, whilst over-the-top, are very real in subject, the hyper exaggerated filmic nature of Careful as if influenced by the plots. The safeguard this artificially created world of Tolzbad becomes allows for Maddin to deal with themes in a way to soften their blow, when he does include some incredibly dark content as talked of in this narrative.

This would be followed by a road bump in his career, with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) becoming a maligned work, marking Careful and that film as the last of the first era of his career where the editing and production design were not as explicitly part of the texture of his work as later, more staged dramas in their tone in his first act as a director. I view Twilight... as an underrated film, but one which lead to a period of short films, but nothing in terms of theatrical length work until Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002). The Heart of the World was a jump start to his career, but also emphasised that, to tell these tales about neurosis, their tactile natures as films included using silent film techniques like intertitles more explicitly, using the editing more, and into the 2010s, Maddin embraced another turn into explicit digital post-production. Careful however marks a point, more overt than his previous films, Archangel (1990) and his first film Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), where one of his most distinct features, melodramas about the traps psychologically and sexually which ensnare usually male leads, became really prominent, and alongside being a great film in its own right in a strong filmography, Careful becomes as important for this reason too for the context.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric/Melodramatic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

======

1) Interviewed for Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), a Maddin retrospective documentary from this first era of the Canadian filmmaker's career.

Reality (2014)

 

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Screenplay: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Alain Chabat as Jason Tantra, Jonathan Lambert as Bob Marshall, Élodie Bouchez as Alice Tantra, Kyla Kenedy as Reality, Eric Wareheim as Henri, John Glover as Zog, Jon Heder as Dennis, Matt Battaglia as Mike, Susan Diol as Gaby, Bambadjan Bamba as Tony, Patrick Bristow as Klaus, Sandra Nelson as Isabella, Carol Locatell as Lucienne

An Abstract Candidate

 

What are the sticky things in the tummy Daddy?

After films like Rubber (2010) and Wrong (2012), Quentin Dupieux made a more sedately strange film with Reality. This follows a series of figures wandering through scenarios set up by the film, dream logic integral to the premise that everything is interlinking between worlds, between the waking one to films and dreams. Time is non-existent, and logic is less concerning as the rationalisation all weaves into each other, a collective unconsciousness in dreams. When taken with her father to the woods, as he hunts boar, a young girl name Reality (Kyla Kenedy) sees as he guts the animal back home a blue videotape fell out of the corpse’s stomach, wanting to see what is on the tape. The host of a cooking show, where he wears an animal costume and asks guests if they believe in God as much as their chosen desert to make, is having an eczema attack which is not helping the production of the show and no one else can see. One of the cameramen, an older man named Jason (Alain Chabat), has a once in a lifetime deal to make a film with a producer, about televisions trying to conquer the Earth, and only needs to get the perfect groan of agony, good enough to win an Oscar, for the producer to bankroll the project.

Layers of reality are broken, without it leading to a conventional climax to rationalise it all, where an audience is watching the girl’s tale. They are dealing with producing her tale as a film, following an ex-documentary filmmaker named Zog (John Glover) who may be able to record dreams. There is a superintendent at her school, who goes to his psychiatrist, Jason’s wife, about a dream of driving a military car in a woman’s dress, only for Reality herself to be in the dream and later blackmail him over this. Reality herself will watch the cooking show and the videotape bends reality itself further as the film becomes more threaded between each other. There is no explanation of this, and it would be patronising to try to rationalise this either. What you get instead is dream logic of various states of mind and anxieties, a classical surrealistic style, but one you can see influenced by relevant ideas to the director-writer Dupieux. The inherent curiosity of an unmarked videotape, whether a boar can swallow one whole unscathed or not, is a surreal but would fascinate any of us if we encountered it, a little strange moment with curiosity in this phantom object as for the young girl. I can also see Dupieux himself as a filmmaker having had the anxiety Jason has, where he finds himself in a cinema where his premise for a film he worked so hard on is already a produced theatrical release. There are more overtly wacky moments – the producer is a figure who wants non-smokers who visit to try his cigar collection despite hating the smell, and picks off surfers from the nearby beach from his mansion with a sniper rifle – but this is not different from the gags surrealist artists used to pepper into their work on purpose with the subversion to catch viewers off guard, the predecessors to surreal comedy.

Reality is the logical conclusion to Rubber’s thesis of content in films happening for “no reason”, not with a nihilistic suggestion of meaninglessness, but with logic here beyond trivial structure of time, and characters like Jason and the host finding themselves lost in a world spiralling out of their grasp. Reality does not have as much of the wackier touches of the Dupieux beforehand, and feels a more sober production even if entirely a comedy at heart. The one moment which feels less indebted to figures like Luis Buñuel in tone is when we thankfully see Jason’s premise for his film Waves, which could have been a “Rubber 2” (as seen on a cinema marquee as a joke) with TV sets microwaving people until they start bleeding from every orifice to death. In fact scenes like this emphasises that Dupieux, part of this wave of “cult” filmmakers who came into cinema in the late 2000s onwards through film festivals and greater emphasis on the DVD releases being more readily available than theatrical screenings, had an advantage that surrealism found its footing in genre films and independent productions to bend such tropes. He was able to get to the point with Reality where it could touch on premises on psychotronic horror movies about homicidal electronic appliances, and yet also being deliberately more unconventional, basking in mood within it’s playful tone.

Dupieux’s style is clear, another US co-production whose style rejects elaborate camera set ups but allows him to use his locations and style for the intended goal, especially for this premise where realities will bleed into each other to the point bedrooms are to be found in woodlands. A prominent audible choice comes from using the same fragment of Philip Glass’ 1971 minimalist piece Music with Changing Parts, released as a full length album piece which Dupieux deliberately only used a fragment of to cause a sense of being in a loop¹. It is also befitting, knowing Glass’ precise style, or how his opera Einstein on the Beach (1979) consisted of repetitions of stream of consciousness for its lead, Dupieux choose a composer whose trademarks included layering multiple parts and repetition, something befitting for Reality’s examples of repetition and layering of sequences from earlier in the film onto others, before you even get to Jason finding there are multiple Jasons in existence.

There is some post irony here, where characters blatantly state that none of this is making sense, a sign less of compromise but a tongue in cheek humour. That in itself is arguably a mark of how culture has changed, how we have likely had to include this for modern films, but also with an awareness that this type of humour reflects a sense of malaise with life in general as reflected in sarcasm and ironic nods to this makes sense in context to this ennui. The idea of a collective unconsciousness this gets into is admittedly a positive concept, and the character of Zog comes off as an enlightened genius, dismissed for wasting film footage only for his skills and patience as a “fucking genius” to be revealed as he has figured out a way to record dreams and these through lines. The only character left who may still suffer is the host with his eczema, also finding out the eczema doctor he went to, covered entirely on the face with eczema, may be a gatekeeper aware of these realities too, and that this is never resolved may put some viewers off. The lack of conclusion or explanation in itself feels refreshing, ultimately a film deliberately designed as like a dream. All makes sense in the dream, and it is only after waking up, or leaving the film in this case, that one feels pause for thought trying to rationalise the material. For me, that was not a bad thing to experience at all.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

======

1) Quentin Dupieux Explains Why He Doesn’t Like Being Compared to David Lynch, written by Greg Cwik and published for Indiewire on May 4th 2015.