Enjoy the monologue.

In reee-lated news, a newly-remastered 35mm print of Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (look down!) has just been released. Oh joy! It’s in LA now, and will hopefully make the rounds after that. Here’s a trailer they threw together for the occasion. They put a song by The Knife over the clips, which seems a little hokey, but the clips provide a good look into the amazing madness of this movie.

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/andrzej-zulawskis-possession-brand-new-35mm-print/

Next up! Put on your crazy hats, whatever that means.

Possession (1981)

Trailer:

Oh, what to say about Andrzej Żuławski‘s volatile, manic masterpiece? It’s nearly impossible to describe in a few sentences; it would read like a Charles Manson interview transcription. It’s a baffling, bonkers, brilliant mess of a thing, part-horror, part-thriller, part-melodrama, and mostly-I-don’t-even-know. I did my best to boil it down in a recent issue of Humanize Magazine here:

Issue 13

But there’s really nothing else like it.

Also, about the trailer: this particular one is interesting, because it reflects the hack-job editing Possession was given on its release. First censored outright, distributors then, completely incredulous and totally confounded, chopped the poor thing up, attempting to turn it into a schlocky gore movie. It was then put on Britain’s Video Nasties list, which was a group of movies that were legislated against in the 80s due to their content; the whole thing was pretty much a big, stupid, overblown witch hunt. This particular trailer shows what the US distributors did to the film; here, it looks like a run-of-the-mill exploitation feature or something, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Currently, it’s stupidly unavailable on DVD. However, an amazing Criterion-like Canadian DVD production company called Mondo Vision is supposedly working on a sweet-as-pie edition for either late 2012 or early 2013. They’ve already rescued a few of Żuławski’s films from the abyss (I especially recommend L’important c’est d’aimer and La femme publique!), yet are sadly not-that-patronized. So fingers crossed!

Also, read Humanize Magazine. It’s passionately conceived, beautifully designed, and conveniently covers all of your soon-to-be-favorite things. Like Possession!

Ms. 45 (1981)

Trailer:

Abel Ferrara began his feature film career with a real heck of a howl. The Driller Killer, about a mad, driller-wielding artist, was unceremoniously slopped into the grit-and-grime of urban exploitation theaters in 1979. However, there was something different in Ferrara’s gruesome gore flick; there was a flair of spirituality, smash-contrasting depravity against sacred imagery, using and breaking the conventions of the genre to convey his message. (And actually, the whole gosh-darn thing is in the public domain, I think, and at any rate is up in its entirety on YouTube.)

He would return to this genre-subversion a couple years later with Ms. 45. In it, a mute woman named Thana is attacked by men twice in one day. She kills the second one, and chops his body into pieces, keeping the .45 caliber pistol he had on him. Throughout the film, she kills several men with it. Ostensibly, it’s a female revenge flick, but Ferrara isn’t content with the facile and often contradictory statement that many female revenge films try to make. He continues to throttle up her paranoia, sending her off the deep end, along with a growing density of unsavory characters and situations. But with this comes increasing complexity; eventually, the relationships between these characters become murky. Thana is conflicted, pushed from one extreme to the other: from powerless victim to attacker in-control. As filmmaker Josh Olson said, the film “eradicate[s] sexism”; it expands upon the feminist themes of most female revenge movies, lamenting disparity in gender equality. For even in the hyper-realistic, absurd world of his film, nothing is simple. Ferrara does this all with a master touch; avoiding the pitfalls of the genre with a clear sense of conviction, message, and artistry. To this, writer and critic Kim Newman mentioned in his review of the film, Thana is presented “as a neutral figure whose power over her victims derives from her ability to inspire and then contradict their fantasies of femininity.” Ferrara shows just how complex the subject is, and offers no simple solutions.

Also, Ferrara has a real gift here in the form of lead actress Zoë Tamerlis Lund, whose performance is haunting; she takes us from beginning to end, from extreme to extreme, with a sense of stoicism that gives way to increasing panic. Lund also scripted another Ferrara masterpiece, 1992′s Bad Lieutenant. It too is a brilliant, complex film. Lund died due to extended cocaine use in 1999, but it would have been amazing to see what else she could have produced with such incredible talent.

I didn’t want to do these in any particular order, because I have decision-making issues. So the first one here is:

Zigeunerweisen (1980)

This latter-day entry by Japanese cult-film maniac Seijun Suzuki is vastly different from the frantic, stylized delinquency of his Nikkatsu days. The white-hot energy that marked those earlier works (check out Gate of Flesh and Tokyo Drifter) cooled, in a way, and allowed Suzuki to rove about a little more; gone was the whip-quick narrative and American-gangster coolness, expanding his kabuki-wild style even more. Suzuki erects a hazy, haunted cloud of a film, about a group of intellectuals in various relationships with each other and dealing with bubbling, oozing forces within. It deals with uncertainty in many forms, taking place during the Taishō period in Japan, which saw Western culture engulfing the country, warping its past, present, and future. It is a mysterious, ethereal, and even downright eerie drama; intermittently distorted, like watching someone walk behind a pane of imperfect glass, the form itself intact and then suddenly twisted and obscured, then back again. We’re not sure what actually happened, what is dreamed, and what is misremembered.

I wish I had some stills from this one, but I don’t have the DVD. Suzuki was a one-of-a-kind director, and this film really shows what he was capable of on his own, free from studio constraints. This is also part one of a loose trilogy; the other two are Kagerô-za (Heat-Haze Theatre) (1981) and Yumeji (1991), both of which I haven’t seen, but I’m sure they’re great.

So there it is! One of my favorite films from the wonderful, terrifying, neon 1980s. Onto the next, eventually.

The 80s were a surreal time.

What will our grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren think?

But thank God for them, because I wouldn’t be alive, we would have about 80% less pop-culture stuff to joke about, and we’d be without some great movies. I’m probably (I don’t want to commit to too much and disappoint WordPress, or myself) going to do something of a Top 10 ± 5 Films from the 1980s. These won’t be John Hughes movies or, well, Die Hard (even though Die Hard is great); I’ll try to concentrate on ones a little further off the cultural radar. So without further ado, I’ll get started on this eventually (probably).

Here’s a pretty great list of 100 scary movie moments. It’s at least way better than those Bravo specials and Hallowe’en-time TV countdowns.

retroCRUSH’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments

I was ready to have an obvious choice for this myself, but it surprised me to not have one spring immediately to mind. There was a more of a swarm of moments in my head. So I picked one, and it was good.

Let me tell you about Sleepaway Camp.

Sleepaway Camp. At first, it seems innocuous-enough for a B-grade 80s slasher, engaging but stilted and giddily-goofy; however, it comes with a dangerous stinger of a climax. To this day, I haven’t watched this film with anyone that hasn’t writhed, gasped, and squirmed under its ultimate assault (myself included); for example, I asked my brother to describe the movie in one word, and his response was something like “Ugh…eesh…I’m not…yeah. I don’t know?”. It’s the kind of gonzo terror that makes you giggle for lack of footing. This movie is off its rocker, kind of like if a young, high-energy David Lynch made an ultra low-budget slasher film in the early 80s (I guess? I don’t know.). From the start, it pummels you with dorky summer-camp melodrama (think Twin Peaks?) and goofy, awkward romance; yet, occasionally, the film occasionally veers into bizarre territory with weird flashbacks and murder set-pieces that are mostly typical slasher stuff, yet still feel slightly off-kilter. But then, in concert with the climax, the whole film suddenly, in a numbing flash, changes tone. Thinking back, this new context makes all that innocent, dopey frolicking into something dark, sinister.

Honestly, though, I’m probably making too much of it. I just really love the movie.

I’m not going to post a video of the ending or anything. To get its full power, it needs to be seen in context. So I’d encourage anyone interested to rent it or buy it or borrow it or whatever.

And speaking of David Lynch, if you want to see more plum ghastly-terrifying scenes that you can shake a stick at, watch his movie Inland Empire. It’s the most horrifying movie I’ve ever seen and will likely ever see.

So what movie scene sca(r)red you the most?

I saw this trailer a while ago; I’m looking forward to it (what else could you do with this?). It reminds me of Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch, which is total high-flying lunacy, and really excellent. In some ways, it’s even more out there than the book, but Cronenberg managed to fashion a really engaging narrative out of the mess; something like a cool 1940s crime story but also, you know, through the melted, diffracted logic of a serious diet of hard drugs. I’m mostly completely sure it’s on Netflix Instant. So do that.

Going back to John Dies at the End, I think I’d also like to read the book. I hear it’s really great and also someone told me last week that it was written by the senior editor of Cracked.com. So hey!

Thoughts? What are you looking forward to seeing this year?

Well, I’ve been thinking that I might like to start infrequently and erratically updating this thing again.

So for now, here’s a picture of Vincent Price choking Alfred Hitchcock:

See you soon, maybe?