SUSPIRIA for Men... ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

Lately when I meditate all that happens is my unconscious/anima rummages through forbidden memory drawers, exposing afresh long-buried shames as far back as ninth grade gym class. I'm all cool about it, of course--"oh thank you ma'am, for saving these precious memories"--and I believe once I accept them she's going to just toss 'em out. But I doubt she will, 'cuz my unconscious is a bitch, yo. Still, nothing like the one pulling Julian (Ryan Gosling) apart in Nicolas Winding Refn's career-sabotaging follow-up to his career-making DRIVE, ONLY GOD FORGIVES.

Yeah, but She doesn't, Blanche!

The tale of an Oedipus complex writ large by white people across the dirty expanses of Bangkok, it's almost more of a Jim Jarmusch-meets-David Lynch in an Argento hotel bar horror film than a standard Asian action-revenge thriller.

Then again, everything is a Jim Jarmusch-meets-David Lynch in an Argento hotel bar horror film for Sweden's dark lord of the Seijun Suzuki-esque macho melt-down post-modernist gangster genre, Nicolas Winding Refn, and GOD is his special love letter to those Angelica film snobs who saw his earlier films DRIVE and VALHALLA RISING and said "very good, Sven, but maybe slow it down a bit. Maybe don't have a protagonist who's such a chatterbox." There has to be one such film snob... somewhere. Maybe it's even me, for I'm keenly aware (since I'm Swedish) that to stand out from the legions of 'corrupt but honorable cop vs. redeemable but doomed Oedipussy' Asian vengeance-athons loitering sullenly along the blighted "Dark Foreign Revenge Thriller" avenues of Netflix, Refn has to import his own brand of ice and snow onto the eternally wet floors of le Bangkok Dangereuse. We Swedes know that Thai swordsman cops can out swing us, so we have to out-stare them and more importantly be willing to die without blinking.

No, please, don't get up

Critics haven't been kind to ONLY GOD FORGIVES, though some have been maybe too kind and maybe they shouldn't be. It practically begs for a beat-down, craves it like William Devane's masochistic ex-POW in ROLLING THUNDER. It promises to not even fight back, just proffer its hands for good severing (or garbage disposal grind). But for a film with such ornate and original visual style it sure is shy about saying anything or making a move, unless it's to judge misogynist ex-pats for slapping frightened little Bangkok sex workers. There's some bizarre sinthom going with hands, and the fear of losing them, as in if I stick my hand into this stripper's inner gates of paradise, will I ever get it back, or just pull out a stump? In a land of bare knuckle boxing and grim black dragon wallpaper, Gosling's hand bravely goes where only Jessica Harper doesn't fear to tread.

From Top: Suspiria / Only God Forgives

And there's this thing with brother Billy who is so mad about Bangkok dads pimping their daughters he kills one, or something, and some weird karaoke-singing cop lets the dad kill Billy, then cuts off the guy's hand right to punish him for that right when Julian (Ryan Gosling, apparently now the Michael Fassbender to Refn's Steve McQueen) is getting his hands tied in a lap dance, and imagining his hand cut off by the same cop. Dude, it's all connected. So the next week (or hour- there's no sense of time on the Bangkok streets) brings in on her sky chariot the brassy Clytemnestra of a devouring Mother with a typically Lady McBeth-ish streak of not thinking her dark deeds through to the end (brilliantly essayed by Kristen Scott Thomas), who has an incestuous love-hate bond with Julian, and who we learn eventually-- if our TV is on loud enough and there's no traffic outside our window to mask their fetid whispers---once ordered her boy to beat his father to death with his bare hands. And he did. You know how hands are...

But all that stuff is minor. It reminds me of my own small short films in a way, because there's no time for a plot so it all has to be delivered on the sly in expository fragments. No one leaves or arrives, they just appear in one of the many dark red-lit Chinese serpent dragon wallpapered rooms like clients at the bordello of the unconscious. When the mom lets down her hair she has a silk dress that both blends and stands out against the wallpaper. It's presumably a rose on the front but looks more like a bullet hole showing the place Julian burst out of (and where we will rather grotesquely return in the final act). She demands to know why her son hasn't killed the guy who killed his brother, when he mentions the dead son killed a sixteen year old girl she snaps "well I'm sure he had his reasons."

This old broad is a real pisser.

The film's been compared to the westerns of Sergio Leone, but in Leone all those long stares were connected to hands hovering over holsters. Clint Eastwood and his confederates didn't look at their gun or even aim it, or even blink, just stared then WHAM, one or more guys died. Hitchcock had that line about how the only difference between comedy and suspense at breakfast is that only we know a bomb's under the table in the latter, but in Leone everyone knows everyone else has a bomb under the table, and that gives their every move meaning; they don't take their eyes off each other even as they pour the coffee, with one hand, super..... slowly. For GOD, Refn takes the coffee away, the table, the eyes, even. If it's not suspense at least it's the first violent masculine deconstruction to feminize the macho staring contest, and dissociate vengeance from the minds of tortured heroes. Now instead of being about facing death it's about Sleeping Beauty, with Gosling spending the whole movie in a glass case, waiting for God's samurai sword to cleave him free of both that outer shell, and the inner too, so the nothing trapped within him can rise rise rise.

There's a great piece comparing the film with Lynch's FIRE WALK WITH ME over on Very Aware, with a Refn interview, wherein he says: the original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God."

Note the austere white Great Wall image behind him, a more logocentric version of Julian's twisted dark red wallpaper, setting off a contrast that's about far more than good vs. evil, or right vs. wrong

Hey, I know about that! That's why I love Ahab so much, and all my college poetry was about it, like my classic "The Bug that Would Swat God" - but in my case it was drunken bravado and feeling inspired by Gregory Peck's twisted oratory (see here, shipmates). Here it's less about wanting to fight God and more about doing it just to get your awful mother off your back.

And then there's the "villain," the cop in the white collar doesn't just kill people without a show of torture, hand slicing offery, etc. And for all his swift brutal gestures Julian is not much of a fighter. The mom, and our own action film expectations, lead us to believe that once he's given the signal, Julian is going to be as lethal as Clint Eastwood in the climax of UNFORGIVEN. He's going to be like Popeye given the 101 proof spinach. But instead he gets beaten down... by a middle-aged balding Thai cop! That's like Sly Stallone losing a fight to Burgess Meredith, and Refn knows we'll feel that way and Julian's losing seems somehow on purpose, to piss off his mom, and us by extension, to subvert our expectations. Of course Ahab is going to lose in his battle with the white whale. That's kind of the whole point. The only time we can control our destiny is when we deliberately pick a fight with something we know will destroy us.

It seems absurd that mom should be so eager for vengeance that she'd go up against a supernatural cop like this, but without her around to shake things up everyone would still be sitting where we left them, motionless, like a flock of ventriloquist dummies after their owners have all gone to bed. Refn's out to do more with his dolly than deliver a mere Asian revenge thriller; he's gone way past a Seijun Suzuki deconstruction like BRANDED TO KILL and exposed the hideous mom-hating apron string hacker inner child of Ryan Gosling's new Action Figure persona.

It helps to learn that Refn shot in chronological order and kind of winged it for large stretches, with Ryan Gosling and Thomas both having lots of input and collaboration in their characters outcomes, and genius DP Larry Smith (who worked with Refn on BRONSON) had a hand in things, too. There's a feeling that comes across when submitting to that kind of spontaneity, Godardesque perhaps, but more open-ended, in the moment, from second to second, but the drawback is it seldom builds to any satisfying catharsis or ending. It's like that stare of the Leone gunfighter with his hand over his gun has widened and lasts the entire film, and then no gun is drawn. And there are no hands left to pull a trigger. The first credit at the end is to announce the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is pretty steep company. The man is a God himself, a shaman first class, and tellingly has much armless and/or handless characters, especially in Santa Sangre.

from top: Only God Forgives, Santa Sangre

All we know is Julian was pretty twisted before all this revenge got started but he quickly loses it thereafter, while watching his stripper cry jeweled tears behind the strings of a crystal bird house corner he hears some laughter at the other end of the club. They could be laughing at anything but Julian thinks they're laughing at him. Next thing you know he's smashing a glass in one of their faces and dragging him around by his upper palette. Dude, that's paranoid!

From top: Only God Forgives,The Fighter, Only God Forgives, Buffalo 66, The Fighter

So paranoid in fact it reminds me of two other movies about bruised masculinity: BUFFALO 66, THE FIGHTER, and Refn's best movie so far, VALHALLA RISING (very similar ending).  Gosling's cobra stillness isn't as strange as it was in DRIVE, since everyone else is on the same slow down drug (that stuff they sell in DREDD, maybe), since everyone suffers from it, a Sergio Leone-like slow-mo Xanax meltdown ensues. The great music by Cliff Martinez even becomes Angelo Badalamenti at times (the music from TWIN PEAKS was supposedly what Refn cut the film to), linking it as a kind of sequel to THE FIGHTER if Mickey Ward and his ma set up shop at a fight club down in Thailand, and she left to do various deals, but she still flies in like an avenging angel when son Dicky the crackhead is killed. Meanwhile there's some BUFFALO 66 meets THE WRESTLER nonsense as Julian's favorite crying stripper, who gives the drowsiest lap dances in history, is supposed to wear a dress and meet the foulmouthed Madea of a mom. Interesting too that the dead son is named Billy, and had a huge, enormous cock (according to the mom) as we all know Vince Gallo does (see THE BROWN BUNNY, but feel free to FF).

And it's clear Billy and Julian both have some seriously warped misogyny going on with women as a result of the mom and as in BUFFALO 66, the tableaux like setups inside the strip club run by the former member of the Buffalo Bills, which is like a beautiful Lynchian circle of hell where no one seems to move, anchored by a grotesque shirtless fat guy with a bow tie on, swilling booze and flanked by slow-mo bouncing strippers. The Billy in both films skulks around the periphery of these slow motion druggy sex dens, forever denied the presumed pleasures of full psychic abandon. Both have way too many mother issues to permit anything approaching even a feint at that sort of enjoyment. They can only abduct, kill, and be cruel to, women who seem weaker and more submissive somehow, to vicariously relive their primal scene in an attempt to rewritezzzzzz --eh? I nodded off.... or did I? Did I miss anything? No --they're all still just staring. Perfect.

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Gialli Ressegne II: SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE, SEVEN NOTES IN BLACK, FIVE DOLLS OF AN AUGUST MOON, SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS, CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS

SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE
1973 - ***1/2
This international-Italian/French co-production stars yeh-yeh girl Jane Birkin as a plucky ingenue possibly going mad in a mansion full of eccentrics, like Paulette Goddard in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY if the Bob Hope part was played by a brooding Byronic pretty boy. With photography lush enough that at times Birkin's luminous hair has the beauty of Sissy Spacek's in BADLANDS, this film  bumps up three stars now that it's not a panned, scanned, washed-out mess. The only remaining flaw is a truly ridiculous gorilla suit, which is anyway a nice souvenir from the age of the old dark house mystery, which someone in this film loved.

One of the stand-out elements here are the clothes, which 'nod' to an assumed setting of 1930's England, but just nod, keeping the high fashion edge rather than getting bogged down in stuffy details like bowler hats and woolen overcoats. For her mourning wear (above) Birkin is given a beautiful black fur collar and her nightgown's sexy without being tacky (Von Sternberg would have approved). The whole production, aside from lingering close-ups of rats eating the face of victim #1, is very tasteful. The music is the orchestral suspense-generating variety rather than the moody giallo electric guitars of the time, but that's not worth a demerit. Indeed, the only demerit is maybe dubbing Serge Gainsbourg (he's the detective) with a fake Scotch burr, and not letting Jane B. do her own voice in English (She was English, after all, despite singing in French for hubby Serge). I kept thinking, hey! She's Charlotte Gainsbourg's mom! and imagining Charlotte even being conceived during this shoot, though that's maybe a stretch. Still it would fit with Charlotte's career choices, and thus this would be a great double bill with ANTICHRIST! Meee-yow!

SEVEN NOTES IN BLACK
(AKA THE PSYCHIC)
1977 - ***1/2
Lucio Fulci may be a lot of things, but boring ain't one. Sure, he's a fan of cheap-ass gore, nightmare logic, and jarringly placed schlock pop ballads, but THE PSYCHIC proves he can deliver an elaborate mystery and all the giallo elements: there's some Poe motifs, and the very 70s trend for ESP and telekinesis made so swinging by the popularity of CARRIE and THE EXORCIST. The music will rattle the lamps off your table and the ending is incredibly tense. Great use of a musical pocket watch as a gimmick, ala the sing-song la-la-la tape in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. You'll scream! You'll cry! You'll think Jennifer O'Neill is a goddess. Her facility with mental powers made her ideal to appear in Cronenberg's SCANNERS four years later.

FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON
1970 - **
Movies like this early Bava effort live and die by the score and the sleazy organ at work here makes you remember the old Shadow radio show, not in a good way... Who knows what Ennio might have done with a few electric guitars instead? The plot's a typical Ten little Indians thing (the number sliced in half) and occasionally the score gets much too jaunty as the bodies are stored in the freezer next to the freshly killed pheasants. Since the house is all modern and stark white there's little opportunity for Bava's deep red and purple gel color schemes. Luckily the women are hot, the clothes are foxy, and there's lines like "death makes you feel dirty." and "houseboys come and go but there's always the bottle." There sure is...

There's also the cast, led in spots by Edwige Fenech, looking more than ever like some strange kid sister to Tura Satana, and Ira Von Furstenberg (Diana's ex sister-in-law). If you're in the mood to fall asleep on the couch go for it. I'll stick with KILL BABY KILL! Still, this film has a fan in a woman who's opinion I trust over my own, Tenebrous Kate:

These jet-setting millionaires may be a generally oily and unlikable lot, but don't think for a minute that this means they're not incredibly well dressed.  The costumes are drool-worthy, from Edwige's scanty white petal bikini to the slim-cut hep-cat trousers favored by the gents of the cast.  Spangles, gauze, colorful lacey undergarments, and pop art fabrics abound.  The house where much of the action goes down is the seaside equivalent of the Frank-Lloyd-Wright-esque mansion at the end of "North  by Northwest," with its cliff-side perch and vast expanses of window.  Everything is circa-1970-sumptuous, right down to the rotating round bed and the ritzy glassware.  And yes, in case you were wondering--these folks ARE drinking J&B. (more here)

 Yep, can there be any doubt that J&B is the official scotch of the genre gialli?

SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS
1971 - **1/2
An ornate title with objectifying noun; Jean Sorel as a soft butch version of Franco Nero; the drab atmosphere of communist Prague; a sinister classical music club and elaborate conspiracies worthy of David Icke, it all adds up to a potentially interesting Eastern European giallo knock-off. Aside from a great last ten minutes, however, GLASS DOLLS puts the drag in draggy. Even Ennio Morricone's score lists at half-mast, limiting itself to some screechy panic attack drones, somewhere between Bernard Herrmann and an orchestra tuning up. I had the soundtrack on a Morricone CD long before seeing the film and used to love to listen while walking through Prospect Park at night with just a dog, a frisbee, and a Discman --every shadow on the stone bridge walls like death incarnate.

But dude, where are the hot clothes? The hot girls? Barbara Bach's sexy lame' dress is left behind in the first ten minutes and there's seldom any swankiness after that. Only Ingrid Thulin (WILD STRAWBERRES) as a sex-hungry fellow journalist gets any color, and then only via headscarves that only make her look older than she already is.

Expertly summarizing the film's distinct old vs. young generational conflict as analogous to Eastern Europe politics is James from Behind the Couch:

The film also serves as a sly allegory addressing the destructive nature of totalitarian governments, like the one in power in Czechoslovakia at the time. The weird socially elitist members of the cult represent overpowering authoritarian systems in which the higher classes literally suck the life out of younger generations, those less well off and anyone else who opposes them. The older generation is depicted as inherently sinister in this film. The disdain and suspicion of the elderly middle class is exhibited clearly in the scene in which Gregory sneaks into the goldsmiths building and into a room full of elderly people in evening dress listening to a classical concert. They sit motionless and look uncannily like the undead ghouls in Carnival of Souls. 

That sounds creepy all right, but is it any fun? Without the pop art colors it's just dispiriting, man! There's not enough J&B in the world...

CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS
1971 - ***
When it comes to soundtracks, Bruno Nicolai is no Ennio Morricone, but he's literally awfully close (he conducted Ennio's early Argento scores), so what is the deal with the trite muzak in IRIS? Oh well. Star Edwige Fenech compensates as the heroine escaping a bad group marriage and moving into a high rise apartment with some models already in the midst of being knocked-off. Everyone's a suspect, including Fenech (or it all could be her imagination). The killer is the official giallo type: androgynous in black stocking mask, raincoat, fedora and gloves. In this instance, alas, the gloves are a sickly looking yellow rubber variety. A real turn-off!

I'm not giving anything away by mentioning the main culprit is Fenech's mysterioso architect boyfriend, or wait, is it her jealous ex-husband, the one who drew her into the Wildflower Group sex club from which the title 'perhaps' gets his name? An hour after watching you won't be able to remember who any of these people are, but is that really so bad?

The real stars of IRIS are the elevator and stairways of the old-school high rise where many a murder and moment of tension doth occur. Could this film have been seen by Brian De Palma? What's that? You don't care? You can't leave me, Carmen! I'm bound to you, do you hear? Body and soul. Yes, shit dubbed dialogue abounds but some parts are pretty kinky-creepy and Fenech is great as always, her soul battling her corrupt body like a one-man show reflecting Catholicism's whole trip wrapped up in a voluptuous wiggle.

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For Sizzle: AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE (2010)

 

I considered myself a sleaze merchant know-it-all prior to entering AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE, but still had to see it if only for my idol, Kim Morgan's presence (below) as a talking head. Turns out it's pretty cool and I learned new stuff. In addition to the "sinsational" Ms. Morgan there's: "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller (good), John Landis (fun), Jack Hill (Zen), and Joe Dante (tres cool), not to mention people I was sure I'd be annoyed by but turned out to love, like Herschell Gordon Lewis (sage-like), of whom Landis says, "I don't particularly like his films, but I love his posters!" Hey, that's a compliment in exploitation land and you can tell Landis means every word of it. Despite the crushing despair I experienced covering the SW double feature of Lewis' JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT/BLAST-OFF GIRLS (for the now defunct DVD Angle), I must admit Lewis seems like a helluva nice, smart, relaxed guy - and even a squeamish feminist like myself has to doff his hat to the man who made 2,000 MANIACS - in the words of Michael Weldon: "YEE-HAW!".

Producer/director/editor Elijah Drenner keeps it all humming along at a nice clip through the decades, starting around the dawn of cinema and ending with recent tributes like Tarantino and Rodriguez's GRINDHOUSE. There's elements I would have put in (the rise of the VCR and Disneyfication of Times Square) and others I may have left out (THE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT) but you'll never squeeze the whole history into a single film, and Drenner keeps it all from being too flashy or too slow, too normal or too head-spinningly weird --and does not spare the adult content: bare breasts, sexual assault and horrific gore are all here, with many of the most disturbing clips from the most disturbing films: ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS and the works of HG Lewis (pictured below), such as BLOOD FEAST, for example. And the clips all look really, really good. It's very strange that this stuff was once so shocking you could only see it as a legal adult in a sleazy theater at the stroke of midnight, and now it's nostalgia and much less traumatic, and yet - the times are if anything more conservative and morally regressive than ever.

HGL and some of his 2,000 Maniacs

The best praise I could give for something like this is that it reminded me of when I was a kid in the 70s and actually scared of the TV commercials and newspaper ads for a lot of these movies. I could also see a portion of a drive-in screen, far in the distance, from my bedroom window, if I used my kid telescope - I watched THE MANITOU that way! I still haven't seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (from fear of post-rape viewing trauma more than anything else) but if I could be assured the actual DVD transfers of these films looked as good as they cleaned-up clips here, I'd be all over it. Plus, Drenner leavens any unease about the film by showing lots of outtakes: LAST HOUSE seems less foreboding now that I've seen David Hess shooting the breeze with his onscreen victims between shots.

It must have been a difficult choice to leave out the European imports that had a huge effect on grindhouse distribution patterns (I asked Drenner about that: "We had to make a clear line down the middle and decide what to cover and what to leave out.") On the other hand, who needs a complete picture? That's what Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Cinema Guide The Psychotronic Video Guide To Film is for! What we have here in AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE is a nice little summary of 100% American film output, a carny's insider view of Yankee hooplah and pitchman ballyhoo, with art and culture pushed way to the side until it's off the table -- and lands with a lowbrow splat.

There's stuff here I didn't know about, which shocked me. I had no idea the film THE CORPSE GRINDERS was a huge hit for Ted V. Mikels. The grinding of corpses carries no appeal for me, personally, but I always kind of subconsciously associated it with the term grindhouse (or the shredding of old film in a cheap projector, grinding the sprockets). When I learned the name's taken from "Bump and grind" as a mark of when the country's once plentiful burlesque houses were turned into theaters to show films of girls stripping (cheaper that way), you coulda knocked me over with a feather from a rhinestone pastie. Imagine if it was called 'bumphouse' instead? Why just grind, man? 

The whole stripper genre was a bit of a blind spot in my sleaze-education prior to this film but apparently there were an awful (in both senses) lot of them. Ed Wood fans still recovering from trying to stay awake through ORGY OF THE DEAD might be glad to know it's not anyone's fault that they failed. LSD fans who tried and failed to watch more than ten minutes of MANTIS IN LACE can also relax for the same reason. Apparently there was a time when looooong dull stationary camera striptease scenes (as with burlesque queen, Blaze Starr, atop with drum) were considered the height of decadence. Fascinating, yet tame and tedious in our age of readily ubiquitous nudity and XXX-rated websites.
 

I've got minor quibbles with AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE as a whole, of course: we'd be so much better off with more of the witty Kim Morgan, though when she's put on the spot for saying women like to see other women naked ("They do!" she exclaims in reaction to Drenner's apparent offscreen incredulity) it seems a bit of a weird inclusion; if you're going to leave it in the film, don't doubt the woman! She's trying to help Travis Bickle get Cybil Shepherd to go with him to see SOMETIMES SWEET SUSAN (see way below).  I always thought Travis was being rather passive aggressive, the pressure to be charming and get Cybil into bed leading him to this massive act of self-sabotage. But Kim says different. I believe her.

On that note, no review of a movie on a topic like this would be complete without the word misogyny, so there it is. Surprisingly, the most feminist-friendly guy on the show seems to be HG Lewis! There's ample time devoted to his feminist-fave, SHE-DEVILS ON WHEELS, but where's Russ Meyer's FASTER PUSSYCAT, Abel Ferrara's MS. 45, that Hemingway sister joint, LIPSTICK, and the whole rape-revenge cycle? For that matter, where's the Satanic possession and the EXORCIST / ROSEMARY'S BABY knockoffs? Where's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE? ERASERHEAD? Bette Davis' BABY JANE microgenre, and 70s telekinesis? BLACULA? And ballyhoo meister David Friedman's classic quote about how his movies were "all sizzle and no steak," and pornography gave people the steak, so the sizzle was out, and that's how grindhouse essentially died and became pornography?

Not to kvetch of course, just to flaunt my own expansive knowledge and hide my terror. Because not only am I afraid to see LAST HOUSE, I'm afraid to see PASSION OF THE CHRIST (above), which Landis astutely points out is "the last real grindhouse film!"

Speaking of passion, I've got a soft spot for New York accents, so I got a real kick out of sleaze director Don Edmonds alternately justifying, apologizing for, and boasting of, the excesses of his ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS, a film I rented back in 1990 in Seattle (from Scarecrow Video!) and which made me see red, literally, when I closed my eyes during sex for the next three years!  But one must admire the relative care that went into ILSA, vs., say, most other Nazisploitation (called "Nazi Exploitation" here, for some reason) with their use of Lewis' patented nail-the-camera-to-the floor, yell-action-and-sneak-off-for-a-nap style framing. But what about the other period sleaze auteurs that aren't mentioned (unless they were mentioned whilst I was in the bathroom, or mixing drinks, or smoking crack, or rolling johns in the men's room), shouldn't there be a sequel? Eurosleazeonomicon, or something cool like that?

AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE never reaches much of a conclusion beyond confirming that Americans will always make films with both eyes on the ticket window and just a toe brushing up against the edge of art, and thus our baser instincts will always be catered to. It's a comforting but disturbing thought about the value of prurience and the way always getting exactly what you want to see can make you a perverse mess just like the anti-porn crusaders have always harangued it would. But at a brisk under-90 minute running time (it would be a perfect part of any exploitation double feature), AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE moves fast enough there's nary a dull moment. For casual fans you can really get an idea of what avenues you may want to explore. Just be prepared to be shocked, amazed, and... most of all, flabbergasted! Grind yourself deep into your seat as you enjoy a splice-ridden slice of film history, one bedecked with sound, fury, and sizzle. In the words of Pam Grier in COFFY (below) when her cop boyfriend tells her she can't just go around just killing everyone: "Why not?"

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Misogynist! Genius!

The title is a line from Le Tigre's "What's Yr Take on Cassavettes?" but applies equally well to Dario Argento, and all accusations and adorations are true. On a freezing Saturday I start to write but end up reading endless reviews of giallo dvds I'll probably never see, on sweet sites like the Mondo Digital, the Cinebeats, the Final Girl, the Tenebrous Empire, the Bleeding Skull and my long-time favorite, Eccentric Cinema. I love reading about movies from other people's perspectives, and something about giallos seem to bring out the best in people. I think it's the feeling they have to justify their love of the genre in the wake of "feminist accusations of misogyny." That's not a put-down but an observation of myself in particular. Perhaps discussing Argento DVDs is just the codex some of us use to disguise topics too horrifically ambivalent to deal with directly.
 
I was reading Stuart Willis fine Giallo Collection piece on Sexgoremutants.com and its mentioning the misogyny accusations of Argento's Bird With Crystal Plummage:

The razor-slicing of a female character in a lift is justifiably famous for it's shocking impact, and in recent years the reinstated footage of the killer slicing apart a woman's knickers has become a talking point too. Savage, suggestive and yet another piece of ammunition for the insane brigade who think Argento hates women.

Now, I both agree and disagree that Argento hates women. Any artistic complexity--and Argento's is bottomless--naturally results in oppositional interpretations being always valid. The reason law has to be so exact is to prevent this sort of thing, a bar is set in the shifting sands of human emotion/action, and that is all we have to prevent a full reversion to savagery. Art on the other hand must always remind us that this bar is not really set at all, to remind us not to rely on it too heavily but instead find the bar within, before it closes forever and you're left high and dry. 

The problem isn't in discussing misogyny in relation to Argento, but in understanding the way an artist deals with issues of gender--especially in a country like repressively Catholic Italy, where single women are harassed on the street and mothers are sanctified martyrs, their apron strings like tenacious tentacles that can only be removed with violent razor attacks--and the way critics subsequently respond and the way a wide array of interesting viewpoints can lodge in the drying cement around a film's reputation.  Argento both indulges in and criticizes this approach--a metatextual deconstruction that was the style of his time and place during his formative years (Antonioni, Bertolucci, Fellini) and the ascription of pain receiver is feminine as the female body is considered more vulnerable, a more 'open' source of anxiety, more conventionally able to feel agony due to the ravages of menstruation and childbirth. Woman becomes mom/whore/wife/victim chimera on which conflicted viewers work out unresolved issues of castration, post-weaning depression, and the blood of conquerors like the Moors tossing angrily in their glands. Argento is like Hitchcock getting stabbed through the looking glass eye with a sharp PEEPING TOM poker, making us aware that we're all part killer, part bug-eyed victim and it's this continual self-inflicted violence that both defines us and prevents us from effecting real change. We'd be better off blinding ourselves, like Ray Milland in THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES.

What saves us though is that feminist criticism has effectively brought the idea of misogyny and violence against women into the popular critical consciousness. Now a cheeky lad like Stuart Willis can enjoy Argento's films while engaging in a dialogue with a feminist Other who monitors his arousal responses like a disproving clinician, thus allowing him to transfer and exorcise collective guilt. At the same time this Other provides a kind of anima projection superego which prohibits and therefore enhances certain shades of sadistic enjoyment. Internalizing the feminist backlash against the film's violence in this way may add metatextual goodness to one's viewing pleasure.

Criticism perhaps needs to be over-the-top and make grand sweeping pronouncements, resting assured that whatever critics write won't actually start a revolution, but just plant seeds hither and yon. We can be confident that sooner or later something's bound to actually grow to fruition, but that's not our job - we're the sowers. The seed planting then becomes a reward in itself, the Johnny Appleseedian spread-sewing motion like Tai chi. For embracing change is not the same as trying to change the world, but rather to realize it is always changing and it's our own perceptions which are stuck in the illusory field of time, wherein gravity weighs us down with age and boredom.

No great art actually solves problems or answers questions but instead brings confirmation to doubt, a sense the answer to that question you were obsessed with as a child and have perhaps since forgotten and is still out there, waiting for you to pick up its breadcrumb trail. To firmly believe in two simultaneously contradictory opinions is to free to enjoy your own enslavement, which is all true freedom is, or as Bob Dyaln sang "You gotta serve somebody," and the king is dead. Long Live the King... of death and sex cinema, and his unholy feminist backlash queen!

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Wicker Lieutenant: Port of Call: Summerisle

I am not embarrassed to say it: Neil LaBute's WICKER MAN (2006)  remake finally moved me, we reach. After four years of starting and stopping all through the early scenes with Cage as an overwrought motorcycle cop retrieving a stuffed animal thrown out a speeding car, after four years of vowing to return one day, finally. Look at me, mom! I'm all right!

So now please don't sacrifice me.

It helped me to have seen ANTICHRIST and BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS right before watching it this time. I recommend the three as a triple feature to show that if women ever truly shucker free--all the way and completely--from the patriarchy handcuffs, then as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz once put it: "Say goodbye to your nuts!" And as for Nic Cage, whenever we think our man is totally sucking, it's probably that he's just so far ahead of the curve we can't make out where he's going. Not unlike the character he plays in the BAD, Cage's brave so far beyond reckless that he comes back around to cautious and upwards towards brave again, mach 2.

Perhaps LaBute's remake has acquired such a dismal rep because it was neither a CHILDREN OF THE CORN GONE WILD as its targeted demographic hoped, nor a "noir antihero loses his marbles" art movie, but rather something much more difficult to handle: a damning critique of patriarchy wrapped up in modern sexy teen remake horror trimmings with just enough polish that we believe in its structure as a "Won't somebody please think of the children!" or "Where is my daughter, you animal!" movie, the kind with frantic cop fathers throwing away their rule book and hearing ticking clocks underneath the pulsing synth pads. WICKER even pretends to be such a film until it springs a mighty trap that snaps down tight on the sac of our American values.

Many critics incorrectly label LaBute a misogynist, but his remake of WICKER MAN allows him to depict plenty of very powerful, frightening, intelligent women going up against a coarse, ineffectual male cop, and that's far from a misogynist's idea of a good time. Almost my definition, a truly liberated, sexually aggressive, snarling female is one of the most terrifying creatures on earth to a misogynist. And here one can't even trust in God all of a sudden, because God is suddenly not even a "He" and everything gets dark and scary and one's balls shrink and release hormones of queasy dread that hit us like an extra dose of gravity.

Having finally shrunk my balls enough to reach the end of LaBute's film, I see what a fool I was, and what a genius Nic Cage is to be so terrible. That's the main issue that throws people off this film, I think. We're used to the central figure of manly authority being the 'good guy' - but here he's the villain, and he has to go. And yet his Nic Cage-iness is the exact same as it would be if he was going after the Declaration of Independence.

That is his genius.

Without the people of Summers' Isle kowtowing to his manly whims, Nic Cage's "A Child is Missing, damn you!" righteousness is revealed as the macho bullying it really is and always has been.  Cage here is like the sister's boorish boyfriend in REPULSION or the sleazy neighbor in CARNIVAL OF SOULS, only here he's outnumbered, powerless, and roaring like an old pervert crushed to death under the headlights of a Russ Meyer supervixen.

It's a little like Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS (1974) in that sense, and it offers a similar story arc: Dustin Hoffman in that film is a representative of the "civilized world" entering a strange, cut-off remote society and expecting we the viewers to laugh along with him as he jibes the locals. Critics in general were unkind to the movie, many failing to pick up on the idea that Hoffman's outsider was the real villain and calling the film sexist. You can imagine LaBute feeling the same misunderstood confusion over the criticism of WICKER MAN. In a critique of the patriarchy, one must apparently never be ambiguous or stir up unresolved castration anxiety.

Snip snip!

Well, now that there's BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS and ANTICHRIST to explain matters, and so WICKER MAN makes perfect crazy sense: BAD director Herzog is terrified/ambivalent/enthralled by the forces of nature, forces reflected in BAD's flood-faded colors and Post-Katrina New Orleans water lines; LaBute  is terrified/ambivalent/enthrallment towards women, reflected in the patronizing warmth of Ellen Burstyn or the sudden emotional swings of Lee Sobieski; Von Trier just cuts, literally, figuratively and otherwise, right to the chase, right to the chthonic meat of things, where nature and the feminine entwine into one massive castrating green wooded Medusa. Isn't it sad to realize the patriarchy has to repress and belittle the feminine, for the very simple reason that otherwise women will realize it's much better to kill men off once they've served their reproductive purpose, or send them off to work in the fields as castrated slave labor? Hasn't anyone seen CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)? What's the matter with you people? You think this is a joke? A child is missing!

The 1973 original was (perhaps) more bearable for American audiences because of the British accents which made the colloquial strangeness even stranger (not close to home enough to stick in the proverbial craw, as LaBute's version does) and it should be noted that the original was similarly box office-stricken in its own home country of Great Britain (due largely to bad marketing and brutal trimming).

In the Americanized rendition, Nic Cage goes deep Yankee tourist: unconscious of the world around him, condescending, arrogant, even boorish, expecting that wherever he goes people will "get" his outmoded hipster posturing and that all women will bow and scrape before him when he flashes his badge and waves his gun around.  When they don't, his only option is a roundhouse kick to Lee Sobieski's heaving bosom. It still doesn't work.

In the original, the idea was that the victim must be a Christian and a virgin, but in LaBute's remake, Christianity has nothing do with it, except as far as it underwrites the barbaric "normalcy" of the rest of America. The victim need only be unconscious, male, and self-righteous. In the end the movie resonates for the same reason it annoys: we hate that which reminds us of our own unconscious Ugly American-in-a-china-shop deformities. In BAD LIEUTENANT, Cage made us feel the chronic pain of his character and revel in chemical relief and the joy of dancing ever at the edge of sanity. In WICKER MAN, it's not his pain that's alleviated, but the pain of any woman who ever endured an unwarranted and inappropriate "pat-down" or otherwise had to suffer the preachy condescension of an arrogant male official. It's always amusing to see these patriarchal bullies squirm when the shoe is on the other foot, until of course we realize that we the audience are the ones squirming... in embarrassment. Ask not for whom the man burns, he burns for bees... until there's no other foot left.

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Read also Kim Morgan's"The Bitch is Back" on her Sunset Gun, which originally, back in 07, gave me the courage to keep trying to make it through. And remember, just because you wear a bear suit doesn't mean you can punch out pagan women! You need a pope hat do the that. Or to paraphrase Lauren Bacall: Be careful of those double standards, Steve. You're liable to trip over your cross and break your neck!

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