Friday 15 March 2024

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

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

Monday 11 March 2024

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

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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.

Sunday 3 March 2024

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005/2007)



Director: Tsutomu Mizushima

Screenplay: Tsutomu Mizushima

Based on a light novel by Masaki Okayu

(Voice) Cast: Reiko Takagi as Sakura Kusakabe; Saeko Chiba as Dokuro-chan; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Rie Kugimiya as Sabato-chan; Akeno Watanabe as Zakuro-chan; Atsushi Imaruoka as Umezawa; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Daisuke Kirii as Seargent/Zamuza; Fumitoshi Miyajima as Nishida; Reiko Takagi as Minami-san

 

"It can't be helped that the class representative has been turned into a monkey, so Dokuro-chan may sit next to Sakura-kun."

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, to use its full name, could be seen as a true stereotype of anime. A young teen male has a guiding angel, a cute girl, protecting over him, with wacky sex comedy hijinks ensuring. Even if a parody of these tropes, it might prove an eyebrow rising take on them for an outsider to the medium, so this title does come with a caveat that it is an acquired taste. However, considering immediately into the first episode she kills her charge with her giant spiked club the first moment she is introduced, caught getting changed in his room, only to resurrect him as she will do at least two more times that same episode, we are dealing with something more openly twisted in its humour than other anime parodies or sex comedies. It really works as a parody for people who have actually seen anime tropes it is parodying, but as much of my interest in this straight-to-video production, whilst slight in length is seeing it take the stereotypical love-hate romantic relationship found in many stories, not just animated, and take it seriously whilst with its macabre sense of humour, as if there could have been a version of this with a regular of romantic comedies, Jennifer Aniston, could constantly bash her love interest's brains out everywhere only to oops, resurrect and apologise for this over and over. 

The story of this production, and this theme of love even if the female lead will kill the lead, is also as much to do with its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, who I fully believe has always approached his career as an animation director with a macabre sense of humour, which is more implicit as he is the screenwriter for this two series straight-to-video production too rather than just their director, adding a greater connection potentially to the material. Mizushima has fascinated me for a while. Arguably, as much of this may be for the wrong reasons, as his stints in horror after Dokuro-Chan have been divisive to say the least. This is where the question of what is intentional or not gets confusing, but also compelling, as there is a title like Another (2010), a supernatural mystery series, which violently contrasts its serious tone with over-the-top deaths that you could call comedic, such as the first being an unfortunate encounter with an umbrella and a staircase. The Lost Village (2016) really comes in as the production which raises this concern. With its main composition by the acclaimed screenwriter Mari Okada, a huge figure in anime, let alone a significant and prolific female screenwriter in the industry, who has even directed a theatrical work named Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018), it was a very divisive television series, one which many would argue was terrible, but has been argued to have been a satire of the genre which took people by surprise. Between a character who has forever stayed with me and could have been a character here in Dokuro-Chan, Lovepon, a young woman even a tragic back story whose obsession with execution becomes delightfully absurd, and material that even for horror would be balked at, like a giant monstrous silicon breast implant, it emphasised the really unpredictable nature of the director Mizushima.

Because of how many tangents there are in his career, I have always been wary of dismissive some of these projects even if they were failures. Even for the work of his that is more wholesome, like the Girls und Panzer franchise1, Tsutomu Mizushima has also had a streak of misanthropy found in his career, especially in the comedies from his earlier productions in the straight-to-video format. These are the points, including how gory he could get with his horror work to a hyper-exaggerated form, which raised this question of deliberateness for me as an anime fan. An obscure set of shorts less than thirty minutes long for online viewing, Plastic Neesan (2011), is an absurdist comedy about a group of model making schoolgirls which never got to model making, and was instead about characters who could be really spiteful or just weird. There was also Magical Witch Punie-chan (2006-7), which envisioned a magical girl if she was the evil despot heir of a magical kingdom, an inspired and dark premise which went as far as a comedy as having her cute animal mascot as an indentured slave constantly trying to murder her. The infamous one of this trio is Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan itself, as whilst the USA also got Magical Witch Punie-chan, Dokuro-Chan was the one which gained a wider attention when it was released in the United States by Media Blasters back in the day, a straight-to-video work which is brazen with its tone despite juxtaposing it against its fluffy presentation.

This, including its source material, a light novel series, is clearly a parody of a couple of works. Ah My Goddess, originally started as a 1988-2014 manga by Kōsuke Fujishima, was about a young man who accidentally summons a titular goddess to his world as a new roommate; famously, as nodded to in a joke here, is Rumiko Takahashi‘s Urusei Yatsura, a legendary manga (including its animated adaptations) where a young teen male finds himself with a female alien named Lum living with him on Earth. Dokuro-Chan herself is an angel from the future with a halo and a giant spiked kanabō club called Excalibolg,  which she can use to both resurrect the dead unscathed as well as splatter a torso into chunks with one swing. The tone of the straight-to-video series, and why it may raise an eyebrow from anime fans as much as non-anime viewers, is that the initial set-up is legitimately twisted despite most of the story in these episodic episodes being more a sex comedy in the traditional sense from anime. In context to the fan base, even some of the lewder jokes are normal, but the cutesy tone occasionally gives way to jokes which with hindsight are quite transgressive, softened yet paradoxically heightened by the tone.

Dokuro-Chan was originally assigned to the past to bump off the male lead, the young teenager Sakura Kusakabe, as he was foretold to accidentally defy God by giving people immortality despite being the typical horny male lead, one whose hormones make it impossible to get past a girl he takes interest in without embarrassment. Where the joke might be more shocking nowadays, casually used as part of the humour, is that for the price of immortality, it meant finding immortality by accident by permanently stunting women from growing biologically from twelve years old. With very casual jokes of people calling Sakura a paedophile much to his horror, it never gets any further in terms of transgression, but is causally brought up to torment him quite a few times and emphasises that, whilst portrayed as a light hearted comedy, this is for the first "season", not conventional in episode number or length, it taps occasionally on bleaker humour whether it has all aged well or not multiple times. This is the kind of joke that occasionally appears within this, which means I would not recommend this series for most. It also falls back into a type of sex comedy which is common in Japanese animation, including a potential issue for anyone outside anime fandom that many sex comedies involve teen leads in general, as here, that will also not be for everyone either. A lot of this in this case, as per the genre's tropes, is usually the gag of embarrassment and the male lead being tormented for a mistaken comment or being in the wrong place of mind (or actual location) at the wrong time, and ending up being called a pervert, which is not for everyone even for anime fans. That idea of male sexual neurosis, whether intentional or not, is found in a lot of anime, and befits this story with hindsight. The difference here is that this has an outlier tone which affects this too, that a lot of it is very light and fluffy sex comedy, with the bright colours and tone of early 2000s anime, but contrasted by the twists of dark humour. The most prominent is that, even if played for light hearted chuckles in tone, we will be seeing a lot of Sakura’s intestines and guts being split over and over, lovingly animated in his repeated dismemberment by Dokuro.

The tone is perfectly set up in the opening credits song, redone with newer lyrics for the second set of episodes released in 2007, a charming ditty from Dokuro's perspective where even if she will maim, disembowel and mutilate her crush, it is out of pure love, infectious and completely setting up the cutesy misanthropic tone. Dokuro-Chan does not play safe with its humour when it wants to, its eight fifteen minute episodes for the first series placing itself in regular slapstick with added gory violence, and deeply weird one-off gags which are strange with clear knowledge that is the intended result. Dokuro decides, rather than kill him as assigned, that she will try to change Sakura whilst becoming smitten with him, but that this pretext is more that he is stuck with an impulsive id of an angel who likes him but also indulges her pure obsessions whether beneficial for him or not. Sakura will die a lot at her hands and the Excalibolg despite the initial promise to protect and change him, usually because of her reactions to his lewdness (or accidentally seeing her undressed), or even trying to get a mosquito off him at one point with the club. It is to the point permanent psychological trauma is likely from the many deaths and resurrections he has had.  The lack of consequence, or anyone else reacting badly to this even among his classmates, who at times do witness this carnage, is part of the joke, even if eventually there is the current that he is crushing on her despite being attracted more to other classmates.

The resulting work for the first "series", eight fifteen minute episodes compiled into four full ones, is to be honest one you would not show a person if they are new to anime unless you knew their sense of humour or taste in the perverse was strong. A lot of it inherently would baffle or even make someone uncomfortable, particularly many of the sex gag are about near nudity or perceived sexual innuendo with its teen cast, despite never showing anything actually explicit unlike some sex comedies have. It is the kind of work, out of context, which supports all the clichés that give anime a bad name, and one has to remember that Reiko Takagi, who voices Sakura, is actually an adult voice actress who however manages to make Sakura sound like he is actually voiced by a young teen boy, one who will be battered and smashed into chunks of meat repeatedly by Dokuro. Within context however, the really misanthropic humour actually softens the discomfort and a lot of it feels like it is playing up to clichés only to twist the knife into them. Dokuro is the lovable heroine if you can get into her headspace. Alongside the cliché of the female lead beating up the male lead for a perceived (even accidental) slight of perverseness being taken to an extreme, she is very much an anti-heroine, someone who can destroy for the sake of it, as much as lovable in her earnestness for Sakura and her growing crush for him.

It is, however, a relationship has its difficulties, whenever she will eventually even say very random and illogically things, and is suggested to have tortured a teacher to start a club entirely devoted to the sport of watching woodwork glue dry. In the wrong frame of mind, these characters including Sakura may put you off, but the clichés they are as characters meant to be add to the dark humour. Such as the fact, when his class is informed he will eventually cause the entire female gender to be stuck at the age of twelve, they do not defend him in the slightest, and were already going to beat him up or ostracise him beforehand. The sole exception is Shizuki, whose crush on him is countered by his to her, undercut by Dokuro blundering through, and their own chemistry as the leads who clearly have fondness for each other, playing to the cliché of a love triangle with actual seriousness. This does emphasis, at the end of the day, this was always going to play in the source as a conventional teen romantic comedy, but that the set-up is deeply surreal. Then there is another angel (with horns) called Sabato, who with an electric cattle prod powerful enough to kill a sperm whale is there to murder Sakura but you feel sorry for, as the joke is how to torment her over and over, forced to live in the streets, and under a bridge cold and miserable, to the point the end credits song is from her perspective as she is miserable and cold.

All these characters exhibit the tropes of their archetypes - Sakura is the typical "potato-kun" generic male lead, a term I am using from online slag as many male protagonists have a passiveness with a sense of being stand-ins for viewers, to the point they have the danger of being blander than a raw potato, contrasted by fighting against his puberty badly as a teenager whilst trying to be a good person. Dokuro is mostly depicted as a bright, light voiced ditz who happens to have a giant spiked club. The clichés of some anime and manga, the sex comedy, is contrasted by the hyper violence or the perverseness of some of the gags, even cruder ones like the fact that, in this series' dogma, if you remove an angel's halo (as razor sharp as a sword) it causes one to have continuous and life draining diarrhoea. For all its crassness, there are moments which are deliciously peculiar. Surreal anime comedy is distinct from surreal comedy in other mediums and other animation from other countries, and a production will win me over if it manages to use its visual style, the writing and/or pure strange ideas to least get a memorable highlight or two. No series, in one episode, is just dumb when it inexplicably references Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, only with the protagonist Gregor Samsa waking up to discover, in a surreal dreamscape of a bedroom, he has grown a bug in terms of morning wood with the sexual anxiety metaphor apt for Kafka, as well as be a good joke when half of these sex comedies in anime, as alluded too, do end up being the existential nightmares of teen males when they reach and pass puberty.

There is, even for a work which clearly does not have a high budget, also moments of real experimentation too. The class rep, in the first episode when Dokuro is introduced to class as a student, is turned into a monkey, with a real stock image of a howler monkey used for his head in jerky stop motion. It is a joke paid off in further episodes on when she turns someone into a dog, or when the second series, just four more additional episodes, there is now a giraffe and a few others in their class from incidents we do not see. Little oddball flourishes, such as cutting to two wild bears looking nervously briefly watching at the carnage of Dokuro playing on Sakura in a river (with sweat drops signifiers for this), show even if the humour is crude and playing to vulgarity at times, it does so with a wink. Even those cruder jokes are helped by one of the huge advantages animation has, that you can exaggerate to an extreme, make even your female characters, no matter how cute and colourful, distort and even look corpse-like when the halos are unfortunately removed, including the strength of the voice performances from the cast.

This explains so much about its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, even if all his productions are animation made by staffs of various collaborators. Working in comedy greatly, he likes broad and heightened extremes. When this applies to horror, even a goreless work like The Lost Village, the exaggeration is there and a dichotomy can arise in what was intentional or not with any work I will see of his in what was a success, what was not, and what was deliberately done as a joke or deliberately cutting the legs under expectations. Certainly as well, he does eventually lean further to absurd comedy through the first season, something to bear in mind even if still with the twisted logic of the original premise. The one crux for this production thought is that, for better and for worse, whilst this does have an ending in the first season, it really does not conclude the story. How you would conclude this premise I have no idea, and it would be compelling to know how the source material did so. Two years later, a sequel of four episodes (leading up to an hour's length) was created. It is, in honesty, bonus material. Set after the first series, with new characters fully introduced like Zakuro, Dokuro's nine year old sister who is yet in voice and appearance like an older sibling remotely not of that age, it is more a series of one-off scenarios with the cast even next to the first season, which was a set of one-off stories itself like Sakura being invited to the cinema by Shizuki on a date. Like the original, it is bright and cheerful in a good way in terms of appearance, but there is also clearly a sense of the series moving more to its sex comedy, lightly humoured tone than the first series, jettisoning most of the more twisted jokes entirely.

The first series had some weirder jokes, like explicitly referencing North Korea multiple times, and whilst the second series has its moments, including Dokuro trying to get Sakura is eat living chocolate versions of himself for Valentine's Day, there is a clear change in tone even if aspects, like dismembering Sakura at least once per episode, remain.  One of the things which does work in those later episodes favour is that they just emphasis some of the weird jokes from the first season, which feel weird even in context then from cultural differences, and let them be expanded upon. The entirety of the “Sensitive Salaryman” running joke grows thanks to these two series, a one off gag about a TV series (with a film spin-off) starring a man who emotionally and physically cannot live a day without his body riddled in hyper-sensation; I still do not get the joke in its full meaning, and the figure really only crops up in the background as a TV series character who got a film adaptation, but it works as a strange gag. More as it allows as well the multiple times the tie-in “Sensitive Sausage” branded food to be unfortunately in Sakura’s vicinity for ingestion for the second season, a tie-in probably requiring health warnings unless you want to be curled up in the foetal position with your body writhing in hyper-sensitivity, and hear that melancholic moaning that cues up in the score when the salaryman is evoked, which is what ultimately made the joke funny for me. And this feels deeply weird on purpose for any audience regardless of their native language and culture, and is one of the moments where the second series does have highlights to appreciate. For the most part, it feels like bonus material in the truest sense.

The original, even if the sequel still has Sakura being smashed to bits by Dokuro constantly, is in itself enough, especially if there was a sense of losing its misanthropic attitude. It feels too short as a fully fleshed out story, but the most subversive moment where the show there ends is trying for a dramatic conclusion, the cliché of the magical figure being forced to leave for her world which the show plays straight and has had enough time to have built up to. Knowing the premise is based on clichés eventually works in its favour as it is mixing the cute with the lurid and the serious. (More so, in the least expected scene, when the final episode even has a sombre and strangely ill-eased sequence of Sakura without memories of before and feeling he has lost something whilst spending time with Shizuki at a cafe). The entire running gag that this is effectively a male protagonist who is a submissive among more stronger and openly sadistic female figures, with the women in their twisted ways lovable and he the butt of the jokes, is pretty striking too from the first season, a trope that I have found finds itself in these sex comedies even if they still raise concerns for sexualising the female leads and, especially with the "harem" genre, the idea of all these female characters in a variety of romantic shapes all vying for the conventional male lead's affections. A lot of them end up, even if by accident, being about the male being entirely out of his comfort zone to confident figures, and here it is more obvious, so much so that whilst the episodes have grow stronger with hindsight, I do see the danger with the second series, if this had continued, of losing the female cast’s original tones in favour of more submissive fan service figures, which is no way near as entertaining. I see with the second series, when it spends an episode about the cast taking a bath together, that this even if you are a fan of the medium that can get past the sex comedy could have dangerously lost its initial spark if we got more from this narrative.

Whether you could have actually gotten this on to a further longer work, in mind to it likely needing to be censored for the television screenings for even the gore, is merely a guessing game. A title like this however presents, even in its own ballpark, the idea that you can parody the clichés of your genres but still be earnest in them. One joke far less palatable as the show aged, that Dokuro wishes to change Sakura because his older self would have lead half the world's population to being permanently twelve years old, has not helped, but most of this is a timeless joke which has aged well and allows one to still like these characters, the oddball couple who, even if one is not attracted to the other, will realise in the end he loves her as dearly even if he has yet to say "I love you" beyond friends. The reference to romantic comedies early on was a nod to this, as it is a joke as old as a screwball comedy from thirties Hollywood like Bringing Up Baby (1938), without Katharine Hepburn repeatedly bashing Cary Grant in the face with a club, but the exasperated male lead dragged along by the firecracker of a personality still found in many stories across mediums, and gender swapped, into the modern day. The idea of people who work together despite one being as much a frustration to the other is universal, and with Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, the joke comes with a very sick sense of humour too in this case.

Abstract Spectrum: Cute/Dark Humoured/Wacky

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

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1) Girls und Panzer might seem surreal still for outsiders to anime as a franchise about an all-high school female team of World War II tank drivers, in a world where they are kept and used for non-violent public activity, and it is considered a martial arts commonly practiced by women. To an anime fan, this is just Tuesday night viewing, so the bar for surrealism in premises is different.

Saturday 2 March 2024

Games of the Abstract: Captain Commando (1991)



Developer: Capcom

Publisher: Capcom

One to Four Players

Originally for: Arcade

 

Revisiting the beat-em-up genre, Captain Commando from Capcom, starring their literal namesake, is pretty well regarded. Even if it is because the company, whose name actually comes from "Capsule Computers", clearly they and the fans became fond of him to include the titular character in the likes of the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games to the RPG crossover Namco × Capcom (2005). This is all despite him never getting a sequel game, a shame as this is a distinct entry into the beat-em-up genre.

Set in 2026, which is hilarious unless things are going to go downhill soon, we have the futuristic version of Metro City from the game Final Fight (1989) as our initial setting. An intergalactic villain named Scumocide (or Genocide in the original Japanese version) is head of all the scum and villainy of crime on Earth and the galaxy, with Captain Commando and his team are sick of this, wishing to stop them all. It is as simple a premise as the game mechanics themselves, where you have a basic strike and jump button, some moves depending on the directional commands and a special that drains energy for a huge attack.

We are yet to get to some of the more elaborate games of this genre, which varied the gameplay, like Konami's Bucky O'Hare tie-in, the 1992 arcade game, which is a shooter in a scrolling beat-em-up template, or two of the best of the genre which added move combos and more buttons to use, like Winkysoft's Denjin Makai II: Guardians (1995), or Capcom's own Battle Circuit (1997). However, we can proudly say that, in terms of a fever dream game logic, Captain Commando has personality in spades as so many of these games did. It begins with your closable heroes, where the least interesting of the lot is a ninja, usually the more entertaining choice for most gamers when given the options. Captain Commando himself is pretty memorable himself, including the digitized sound clip of his name, "toyrific" in form but with it clear how he would get constantly brought back into Capcom crossover games. I wish the two others, excluding the ninja who was, were brought back into Capcom crossover games, as Capcom throughout their history had a delirious nature to character designs, even Street Fighter with its iconic characters having a sense of style to them that was really distinct. You have Baby Head immediately standing out here a literal hyper-intelligent baby, with diaper and pacifier, piloting a robot suit that, yes, can pilot already in a robot suit much larger ones you knock enemies out of when they appear. Mack the Knife manages to stand out too, not just for his name explicitly referencing the Bertolt Brecht song, as a pink alien mummy with twin knives that, depending on how you defeat them, are blades which cause enemies to melt into skeletons. The later is one of a few moments of where a premise of a Saturday morning cartoon gets suddenly gruesome, like the fact some enemies, like a kabuki warrior boss of one stage, can disembowel you when you lose a life, torso off below everything from the hips downwards entirely, with some gore and a trace of guts to traumatise any kids playing this back in the arcade.

Between muscular pink haired women with electrified sais, little portly fire breathers, and men in xenomorph alien cosplay, cybernetic suits blatantly riffing as much as possible on the H.R. Giger designs without copyright infringement, make the villains just as diverse. There is something we could be in danger of losing if we are not careful with the type of games more commonly published decades later, which is unlike the triple-A games in the decades after which are carefully put together, this has an improvised dream logic which is compelling. Even for a game set in the future, it seemingly wanders off from a conventional sense of progression soon after the first level. We go from the streets of Metro City fighting knife welding hoodlums to a finale in a spaceship against Scumocide, somehow reaching there by way of an old Japanese temple full of more ninja to a circus that has a secret lab full of horrifying mutant experiments in the basement. This is matched by the gorgeous visual aesthetic, Capcom always at this point on their A-game in terms of their quality.  

Having played quite a few now, this does seem basic next to others I've written of, and an appeal to these games in general is the pleasure of just bashing the attack button at thugs over and over, taking advantage of sidestepping enemies vertically and that the throw is a godsend. There is one tangent chasing a mad scientist on hover boards in a river chase, which is as nineties as you can get, but this is, without this seemingly a cheap description, a "classic" example of this beat-em-up genre. By the later games, and those which were released directly for video game consoles or the resurgence of them in the 2000s and 2010s, we will be getting RPG options pioneered by the likes of Battle Circuit where you can power up your attacks, or multiple attack buttons with combos a greater emphasis. Captain Commando, alongside its cartoonish and vibrant tone, is a game from the old school titles before these examples, which are a pleasure enough in them especially when they have the personality this has.


Tuesday 27 February 2024

Wrong (2012)



Director: Quentin Dupieux

Screenplay: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Jack Plotnick as Dolph Springer, Éric Judor as Victor, Alexis Dziena as Emma, Steve Little as Detective Ronnie, William Fichtner as Master Chang, Regan Burns as Mike

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sir, I took it upon myself to paint your van blue.

A fireman taking a dump in the middle of the road, reading a newspaper in front of colleagues, pretty much sets up the tone of Wrong perfectly from the first scene. Its director-writer Quentin Dupieux caught the attention of people in the wider world, as a French musician who became interested in cinema, as a filmmaker with Rubber (2010), his absurdist take on horror, with a fourth wall breaking aspect dealing with the fictional nature of cinema where anything can happen for “no reason”. Wrong premiered at 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and as a French-US co-production, it presents an absurd story befitting its “no reason” obsessed predecessor. Our lead Dolph (Jack Plotnick) wakes up one day and cannot find his dog Paul, starting a series of non-sequiturs as he tries to locate his beloved pet. Even if it has its moments of absurd abruptness from the get-go - the neighbor, on his way out of town forever, gets angry and denies he jogs in the morning, and thinks Dolph’s sleeping robe is filthy and disgusting - there is a progression to Wrong which, in its own logic, befits the tone later Luis Buñuel lent into for his last act of his career. The difference is that, Buñuel subverted religion and bourgeois culture in the likes of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Here, we have to consider the leanings to more deliberately ironic comedy, expressed as one of the characters set up in the story, pizza staff member Emma (Alexis Dziena), is introduced over the phone to Jesus’ Organic Pizza when Dolph, trying to cope with the initial loss of Paul, ends up in a lengthy discussion about a logo of a rabbit on a motorcycle not making sense.

His story is the well worn one of a lonely man who struggles in life. Yes, it is absurd that at his work place it is raining indoors, but the more absurd detail is that he has been fired from the place for three months prior, and still goes to work for some semblance of connection to life. It is a bleak absurd humour to all this, as the world is conspiring against him in a variety of ways. Paul’s disappearance is revealed to be by a company lead by Master Chang (William Fichtner), revealed to be an organization that deliberately kidnaps pets, than returns them after time to create a sharper bond between randomly chosen owners, only for a mishap to cause Paul to become lost even if the driver of the van involved was killed instantly. As tragic for Dolph is the abrupt discovery, as his hired gardener Victor (Éric Judor), that his beloved palm tree has turned into a pine tree for reasons neither can explain. And for what could be seemingly a nihilistic story, as nothing makes sense for Dolph in his plight, what you also get is a work that manages perfectly to get the littlest deadpan joke to work without elaborate effects or a cartoonish pratfall. Even when things are stated they become funny.

The Luis Buñuel comparison is much more befitting, rather than a figure like David Lynch who Dupieux is not a fan of being compared to1. One joke even feels like something a beloved filmmaker of mine, the Chilean legend Raul Ruiz, would be proud of, where a character abruptly dies of a stroke, only to appear again without anyone asking about his passing and seemingly miraculous resurrection. Buñuel is the right choice in himself anyway, as between the pair you see staged dramatic scenes, as this follows Dolph’s journey to locate Paul, being undercut by the surreal invading the scenes. This is not particularly the same as David Lynch at all as many of his most bizarre and unsettling scenes are always set up with something very amiss. Shot in California, with a starkness from being set entirely in the day, conversations in Wrong follow logic only for an absurd touch to come in, plot threads layering into each other. Emma the pizza store employee falls for Dolph over the phone, only to think Victor is him, and vice-versa when they met in the flesh, and the attempts to track down Paul include both the potential to learn telepathic communication with dogs through Master Chang’s writings, and a dog detective so precise to track his missing pets, he has figured out a way to take dog feces and access its memories of when it was inside a canine.  


Honestly the closest thing to a Lynchian moment is when Dolph is offered an adopted dog whilst Paul is being located, only to be offered a small child as if nothing is amiss. Most of this, however, is more ridiculous deliberately, but I would not necessarily say either it is ironic for the sake of wackiness either. Neither would I say it is nihilistic for the sake of it despite having used that term earlier. As a viewer born on the autistic spectrum, there has always been a sense, in adapting to society in general, a greater acute awareness of the aspects seemed to be normal actually making no sense and becoming nonsensical in my day to day. This is something which is felt in how Quentin Dupieux with this film definitely is playing to the idea nothing makes sense for Dolph whatsoever. There is a happy ending to this story, which actually proves the more rewarding choice to have gone with, as this presents us the right mix between the anxious and the intentionally silly, finding a right balance in even having the missing object of love being a dog in the first place, something that he chose rather than a love story between a man and a woman which would have been disturbing with this scenario instead2.

With his wife Joan Le Boru as the production designer, the first with her as a prominent artistic director on her husband's films afterwards, Wrong as a distinct aesthetic, an American movie but with a sense of disconnect. Everything is sunny and picturesque, but contrasted by the back alleys and dog kennel locations which felt out of time. Even in the opening with the neighbor, who for reasons he cannot explains has to leave his home and drive off the end of the world, the scene between him and Dolph is noticeable, over just the road between their houses, in how they are shot with a sense they are so far away the neighbor cannot hear Dolph, and with them shot together the close ups feeling claustrophobic. White is a predominant colour but that is not a pleasant one, more disconcerting as Dolph himself is wandering along without a real grasp of control. Even that aforementioned happy ending is entirely out of his hands, a destiny as dreamt by another in precognition, as throughout too seemingly everyone else can be possessed by an unknown force to remind him to visit Master Chang at a specific time mid-conversation. The subplot with Emma even becomes overtly surrealistic, in the true classical art movement sense of this idea, in how it involves backwards footage being used, a child born on a beach who cannot tell the difference between a broken wine bottle neck and a sea urchin, and aptly for the Luis Buñuel comparison, someone waking up being buried alive in a casket without any context. What this means really is less a concern; surrealism was meant to shock one out of complacency, and as I have mentioned earlier, if there has to be a meaning to all this, just to experience a day in a life of an everyman who struggles to comprehend the world around him is justifiable as a meaning for an entire feature length story.

Wrong was a pleasure to witness, in mind that the earlier films like Wrong only really starting to be released in the USA when the interest in Quentin Dupieux started to exist. Thankfully over time that has started to change, but Wrong is still obscurer as a result of this. In mind that Rubber could have been a one-off, and no one would take interest in him if he suddenly showed none of the originality he had, thankfully Dupieux would become an auteur for the 2010s off the back of titles like this.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Surrealist

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

 

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

2) Writer-Director Quentin Dupieux Talks WRONG, Balancing Comedy and Anxiety, Links Between Random Elements, WRONG COPS, and More, written by Christina Radish for Collider, and published March 29th 2013.

Thursday 15 February 2024

Games of the Abstract: Jumping Flash! 2 (1996)

 


Developer: Exact (with MuuMuu)

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

One Player

Originally for: Sony Playstation One

 

Proceeding on from the first 1995 Jumping Flash, the second game does not attempt to break its established template. Instead, as before, a figure is stealing huge chunks off a planet, and playing as a robotic combat rabbit named Robbit, you have to go liberate each one. Things are different here as our original villain, Baron Aloha, is now the victim of this from a Galactus stand-in named Captain Kabuki; Galactus, the planet eating entity of the Marvel comic books, becomes here a very flamboyantly dressed figure here who collects land masses in giant glass jars for his own personal collection. To be honest, Kabuki does not get a lot to stick out; it neither helps when (for example) for the US release of the game, alongside giving Robbit inexplicably a gruff American accent like a cigar chomping grizzled war veteran, he is voiced as fakely camp with a tendency for bad puns. It is telling for Aloha, the victim initially on an asteroid, gets more to do. This is both with the most cut scenes alongside one of his minions, than that for the extra mode, he gets Kabuki to be a minion to end the Robbit. Plot is less an issue here than returning to this franchise, where developer Exact wanted to improve on the graphical prowess of the original game, using the sequel in terms of pushing the original Playstation hardware.

For those who this may be their first knowledge of this franchise, Sony for the Playstation had Jumping Flash before Nintendo's Super Mario 64 (1996) existed, and innovated the solid fundamentals of the 3D platformer. Jumping Flash 2 comes just before Super Mario 64 was released the same year, and before Sony would replace the Robbit with another platforming franchise that would take the crown for their mascot in this field, Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot coming also in 1996. Jumping Flash was inspired in getting around the issues of the new polygonal era of having the original 1995 game being a first person one, which Jumping Flash 2 follows with. Like the original game, if it isn't why fix it, where instead there is a sense of the aesthetic and general appearance of the sequel expanding on issues like draw distance and the general look of these worlds you hop in the air within. Robbit is played through his robo screen, wandering levels but with the more practical method to traverse everything being to use his jumping abilities, the first a hop and the other two. In the ingenious move of the series, the second and third jump leads to your screen looking down at where you land, allowing you to have precise jumping where you know where you will land, and can take huge risks on tiny little fragments of platforms floating over oblivion. The sequel's platforming fundamentals are still solid, so the quality of the game play is still as good as the first game.


As a sequel, this in modern parlance would be downloadable bonus levels, even following the exact template of six worlds, three levels each, and worlds two and four having one interior level each negotiating mazes. You do not need to find the four "EXIT" carrots as the prequel game, but four of Aloha's minions instead before going to the exit platform. Unlike the first game, with the worlds based on the tropes of platform games like a lava world and Egyptian themed ones, this is set around tropical and urban environments, set around Dr Aloha's secret resort planet base. This leads to this being a very unconventional aesthetic with one level being based on a Japanese hot spa, another being a constructions site etc. I had to take a while but it adds a cool touch, and especially with the harder versions in the Extra Mode, they become outstanding at points as much because of the graphical push the sequel has to improve its visuals. The carnival world of the first game returns and is changed into one of the best levels of this franchise as Stage 5-2, a circus level with cannons to be fired from, a minion to collect on a trapeze high wire swing, and running over a giant moving pack of cards. The aesthetic of these games is kept to their delightful best in its playful eccentricities as alongside enemies who are more obstacles in levels, like kiwi birds gliding on parachutes and anthropomorphic burgers. The music by late Takeo Miratsu is still vibrant here as for the first game too.

Were I to think of any flaws with the game, I have to be honest in saying that, if the second sequel was to have come not three years later as it did, the shooter mechanics of this game are starting to struggle and would have needed to be revised for the third game. Robbit despite his ability to squash enemies under him also has access to firepower, and whilst there were enemies in the first game you could not quite hit due to their height above you, there is now the issue that he shares with early first person boomer shooter protagonists that he cannot look up. The shooting mechanics in general feel like they just stay the right side of making Jumping Flash 2 still a fun game, but you see the struggles with this by the time, for the Extra Mode, you are trying to attack the final boss, Captain Kabuki, and wish you could pivot the screen up or have more fire power. The irony is not lost that, for a game which managed to succeed in something like 3D platforming, the one gameplay mechanic which was not the biggest concern was struggling for the second game. It did not however undermine a game I sadly never got to in my youth like the original game, but making up for it now, was worth the wait.

Thursday 8 February 2024

Manhattan Baby (1982)

 


Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Elisa Livia Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti

Cast: Christopher Connelly as Professor George Hacker, Laura Lenzi as Emily Hacker, Giovanni Frezza as Tommy Hacker, Brigitta Boccoli as Susie Hacker, Cinzia De Ponti as Jamie Lee, Cosimo Cinieri as Adrian Mercato, Carlo De Mejo as Luke

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Starting in Egypt, a young girl named Susie (Brigitta Boccoli), whilst with her family, is given a talisman by a sinister blind woman, and from here you get one of a few curiosities from Lucio Fulci's career. It is curious to have an Egyptian themed supernatural film appear in his career as, whilst Egyptian iconography would find its way round pop cultural media, in terms of cinema not a lot of films really exist for this trope at some point into the mid-century. Until The Mummy (1999) offered a brief exception, it feels like something never truly in the mainstream of cinema after the early 20th century. An aesthetic usually evoking mummies and pharaohs' curses, unless you are talking about other areas of pop culture like video games to animation where the use of Egyptian iconography feels disconnected from the reality, there is the inherently problematic colonial layers to real Egyptology which may have put people off this. Including the theft of Egypt's ancient history until we had to start giving it all back from the West, this is something which has to be considered alongside the fact that there has never really been many films at all with ancient Egyptian mythology either, just an outsider's perspective. Fulci's film does not even bother with really dealing with the complexities of treating this culture, beginning with Susie's father Professor George Hacker (Christopher Connelly) helping at a dig site. It can be accused of following the demonization of non-Western culture, in how an evil cult within ancient Egyptian history continues its legacy of terror through attacking Susie, but the vague dreamlike nature of this film thankfully neuters this greatly.

There is also the fact that, for most of its length, this is in the same ballpark as Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist from the same year, of a family being terrorised with the children under threat in a New York City apartment complex when Susie brings the talisman home. It is also a work whose obscurity likely comes from the unexpected restraint this has in context of this era of the director's career, not becoming gory except for brief snippets. Barring the brief sight of an Indiana Jones death trap with Fulci violence, the film leaves Egypt to be fully set in New York City, the Egyptian curse only important to allow certain symbolism from the sand to scorpions which Fulci is interesting in depicting. Instead, this is a horror mood piece, one of the more subdued films from this period. Fulci by now was becoming known for his extreme violence in his work, which you can see the contrast to with The New York Ripper (1982) released the same year, one of his most controversial and sleaziest films of his entire career. Instead here, whilst eventually gore comes, there is the built instead seeing that the talisman's aura is also affecting her brother Tommy, Giovanni Frezza a regular (and recognisable) member of Italian genre cinema as that blond child actor, whilst their professor father George spends part of the film blinded by ancient temple lasers.

It gets bloody, but it focuses more on the oneiric tone that films like The Beyond (1980) had entirely. This is still a film where a person is pecked to death by sentient taxidermied birds, but alongside its Egyptian theming, cobras menacing a Manhattan apartment, it feels at a distance from other films of the director's from the time. This thankfully has the woozy mood to compensate for this, with plenty of surreal images transpiring as elevators become possessed and the children's bedroom becomes a portal, spitting the office clown into the Egyptian desert dead on arrival, and ruining the carpet with sand fed by the Nile. Fabio Frizzi really helps with this through the score, adding to this film that does show Fulci's morbid eye for imagery, ending with even subtle images like someone dead partially coming through a bleeding white wall. It definitely feels like a film where, in another's hand, it would have been one of the cheesier films from the Italian genre wave, and it is still a film which could have done with a touch of something else to really grow into something special. Even without this feeling though, it is an idiosyncratic title, one that showed beyond flaws that its director and the production team helped raise it.