While looking up a suitable image for last night’s post on disco by Simon Frith, I came across a film called Disco Fever, a disco-exploitation oddity from the same year as the article, 1978.
As a fan of both disco music and cult cinema I was surprised to never have heard of this, and now I’m wondering if any of our readers have seen it? In case your memory needs jogging, it stars Casey Kasem and some dude called Fabian, and a lot of the action seems to revolve around a discotheque which is onboard a jumbo jet. Here’s the original trailer for further investigation (this film may just be so bad it’s good, or it may just be so bad):
“Tromba Fredda” (“Cold Trumpet”) is a 1963 short surrealist film directed by Italian film maker Enzo Nasso.
Chet Baker silently wanders through an Antonioniesque landscape in a Felliniesque state of wonderment as his improvised trumpet solos alternate between earnestly offering the obvious and mocking the artiness of the whole affair.
The films of Jean Rollin are a feast of perverse and exotic imagery shot in the soft-focus style of a David Hamilton photo essay and paced as languidly as a Terence Malick film…but with sudden eruptions of grand quignol gore worthy of Herschell Gordon Lewis and lots of beautiful and bloody nude bodies
Rollin’s fractured fairy-tales are inhabited by lustful vampires who often seem more alive than the aspic gelée flesh of the women they’re feeding upon. Using mostly amateur actors that float in and out of the frame like zombies pierced by tranquilizer darts, Rollin opts for something ghostly, chilly and ethereal, often with little regard for narrative tension. The heat comes in the splatter of blood and cum. It’s as though sex is the primary sign of life among Rollin’s cast of the living dead, the almost dead, and the barely living.
The Shiver of the Vampires, Requiem for a Vampire, The Demoniacs, Fascination, The Night of the Hunted, Lips of Blood, and The Living Dead Girl fetishize blood, sex, dungeons, coffins and diaphanous nightgowns with the obsessiveness of a blood sucker foraging through the dumpster behind a blood bank.
Here’s a fun documentary about the fabulous Mr. Rollin. Be warned: this is definitely NSFW, although it was made for British TV.
With a budget of nearly 2 million kronor, Häxan (The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever. Written and directed by Benjamin Christensen this classic horror film from 1922 was partly inspired by Christensen’s reading of Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th century guide to witch-finding. Christensen presents his film as a faux documentary, examining the hysteria around witchcraft, the occult and demonic possession.
The film splits into 4 sections, each with its own theme. The first examines demons and ideas of Hell; the second is series of stories about witchcraft and the use of magic - Christensen makes an appearance as Satan; the third part is set in the Middle Ages and follows a woman accused of witchcraft, who under torture admits to charges of witchcraft; the fourth floats the idea witchcraft and demonology are a treatable form of mental illness.
It’s a more than interesting film, one for a winter’s night - especially if you can stand to read all the caption cards (an edited version was released in 1965 with commentary from William Burroughs, which is easier on the eye) - and is famed for its incredible and powerful dramatic sequences of demons, witches, occult practices and Satan.
Greg Burney created this visual timeline graphic of Christopher Nolan’s psychological thriller Memento. Unfortunately, you can’t see or read caca with the above image. To actually view this sucker properly, click here.
Flying Lotus and Harry Smith, two great tastes that taste great together!
Tomorrow night, our friends at Cinefamily present this inspired avant garde pairing:
Reprising an unforgettable show commissioned for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, L.A.’s own Flying Lotus joins Animation Breakdown for a unique screening of animator/folk music archivist/string figure enthusiast/culture hound extraordinaire Harry Smith’s 66-minute animated collage film Heaven and Earth Magic. The marriage of Smith’s ‘50s folk art mindset and Flying Lotus’ genre-defying 21st century sound may seem at odds, but they are both equally brilliant alchemical cut-and-paste samplers of world culture—and as kindred as spirits can get. Heaven and Earth Magic is a testament to the ability of animators to act as magicians, breathing life into even the most static, eyeworn 19th-century imagery—and as Flying Lotus contributes audio from disparate yet familiar sources (drum machine, turntable, laptop, synthesizer), two giants of sampling unite across time, and Smith’s playful experiments are imbued with a new, positively cosmic energy. This is one-of-a-kind live pairing you are not likely to see again!
Tickets $12, Tuesday, February 28th, 8:00pm at Cinefamily
Below, an excerpt from Harry Smith’s “Heaven and Earth Magic.” If you aren’t lucky enough to live in LA (I love saying that) as you’re watching it, maybe listen to Cosmogramma?
It can just take one night to rattle and bone-break one’s entire perspective. It’s an intense if not outright harrowing thought, that your whole life could be upheaved into pure rubble in just a few hours. This is exactly what happens to a subway car full of people in the extremely underrated 1967 film, The Incident. Based on a 1963 DuPont Show of the Week movie, entitled Ride with Terror, The Incident is a cult film that has mysteriously languished, despite having an all star cast, a terrific soundtrack and being taut from the opening frame right down to the end credits.
Despite all of this, it remains unreleased on DVD and Blu Ray, with only a long out of print VHS and Laserdisc release, not to mention the occasional TV airing, to its credit. So why is a film this stellar still semi-obscure? Other than the lack of creative justice that has plagued the arts since the dawn of man, a lot of it could have something to do with the unrelenting grittiness that permeates the screen. This film reeks of the sweaty seediness of a warm New York evening in the late ‘60’s, with our two main anti-heroes, Joe (Tony Musante) and Artie (Martin Sheen), heading towards Times Square after an evening of pool playing and low rent thuggery. The stark black and white cinematography, courtesy of Gerald Hirschfield, who went on to work on Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, gives the film a documentary meets violent pulp novel feel. Everything looks beautiful in the ugliest of ways. In fact, the beauty of The Incident is its complete surrender to the ugliness of the human condition.
All of this is conveyed with our cast of characters, most of whom rank very high on the dysfunctional scale. There’s a working class married couple with child, trying to get to their home in Flushing, with the husband (played by Ed McMahon, in his best role ever, and yes, that includes his turn as a pimp in Slaughter’s Big Rip Off) constantly bitching about money and how he doesn’t want any more kids. Continuing the couple theme, there’s a young pair on a date, with the amorous mook badgering his pretty and hesitant date (a young and unrecognizable Donna Mills) into basically putting out. He’s borderline rapey and she ends up being insecure enough to put up with this horny bastard. (Note to our readers: remember that being alone is always preferable to being in the company of assholes. Always.) There’s another married couple, this time an older, Jewish one, made up of Sam (the legendary Jack Gilford) and Bertha (the equally legendary Thelma Ritter) Beckerman, who are constantly bickering over whether or not their son is a good boy or no-good-nik. Then there’s Harry (Mike Kellin) and Muriel (Jan Sterling) Purvis, a schoolteacher and his status hungry ice queen wife. Our last married couple to board is a young, attractive African American pair, including Joan (Ruby Dee), a peaceful activist and social worker and her boneheaded and overly aggressive husband, Arnold (Brock Peters), who tries to pick a fight with the ticket taker before getting on the subway.
The last pair is two young soldiers, Philip Carmatti (Robert Bannard) and our catalyst hailing from Oklahoma, Felix Teflinger (Beau Bridges). In addition to our pairs and families, there is also a recovering alcoholic trying to get his life back on track, a wino passed out on the subway and a lonely, repressed gay man. All of these people are about to have their lives changed forever when Joe and Artie get on board, making their grand entrance by being as loud and obnoxious as possible.
But what initially seems like two drunken clowns quickly turns sinister, when Joe and Artie start to systematically go to each person and break them down psychologically. They start off messing with the bum, threatening to give him a hot foot, when our recovering alcoholic, Douglas (Gary Merrill) steps in, making himself a target, leaving Joe to retort, “Is he a friend of yours, Mister?” It’s all downhill from there, with the two standouts being the scene where Joe sidles up next to Donna Mills and starts asking her date, ‘Hey Mack, what’s she like in the sack?” The guy, Tony (Victor Arnold), once full of dumb testosterone bravado, is now nervous and shaky, weakly defending her, stating that “she’s a good girl.” Musante, not missing one inch of a beat, eyes him up and down, asking, “If she’s a good girl, what’s she doing with youuuuu?” This culminates with Joe toying with her hair, while she looks frightened and her pussy boyfriend looks away, leading to the line, “Well honey, if you change your mind, look me up. Name’s Joe Ferrone. I’ll know what to do with you. I’LL KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH YOU.” This leaves Artie to respond, all wide eyed and brimming with sarcasm, “Woaaaah Joe!,” resulting with both of them laughing as another relationship is obliterated in the wake.
The second one and arguably the most harrowing is Joe’s confrontation with Arnold, whom up to that point, has been enjoying the ugly spectacle, almost drooling with the possibility of violence, while his poor wife looks on, horrified. When he engages Joe, saying “I’m with you guys,” the look on Musante’s face can only be described as shark like, with his dark eyes black and pinpoint predatory. You know this is not going to be pretty and indeed when Joe tells him that, “I wouldn’t be friends with you if you were the last man…..you want to know why? Cause I don’t like black.” It only gets worse from there with Arnold being internally ripped into two, especially once Artie starts harassing Joan, with her crying and pleading with her husband that it’s not worth it. The interesting thing is that it never gets directly physical. In fact, up until the very end, Joe and Artie are never overtly violent. Sure, they are not opposed to using their body language and borderline touching (slight shoving, small grabs, etc), but the biggest damage done is more emotional and mental.
The whole dynamic between Joe and Artie is very fascinating, bringing to mind another villainous and predatory pair from fiction, Dracula and Renfield. Musante is sinister and handsome, roaming around in a pair of stylish and wrinkled dress slacks, matching suit jacket and his dress shirt completely unbuttoned throughout the whole movie. Even though his character is one savvy sociopath, he is charismatic to the extent that you can’t take your eyes off of him anytime he is on screen. Artie, played perfectly by a very young Martin Sheen in his feature film debut, is manic eyed and following Joe’s lead like a crazed magnet. He might not be eating flies but he is the sidekick to Joe in every way. They both are looking for sick thrills, with the difference being that Artie, at his core, is goony while Joe is truly dangerous because he is intellectually on the ball. It is telling that when Felix finally gets fed up enough to actually take a stand, resulting with him beating the crap out of Joe, Artie doesn’t know what to do. It’s almost like he is frozen without his master. Of course, that leaves him with a slightly better excuse than the rest of the car, whom all just sit there, slack-jawed and powerless. As Felix slumps down, bleeding as his buddy finally goes over to check on him, there is the tangible disappointment in his eyes. With Felix, it was not necessarily Joe or Artie themselves that changed him for the worse, but the fact that a car full of people were too apathetic and weak to stand up for their fellow human. Losing faith is painful enough but when it is humanity itself that has let you down, there is no full recovery for that. Some scars never totally heal.
The Incident is one of the most perfect and certainly most cynical, bordering on nihilistic movies ever. The film is unwavering in its mirror to society, revealing the many cracks, pockmarks and bruises within the human condition. It also begs the question of not only why isn’t this film better known and out with a spiffy Criterion-type release, but why isn’t Tony Musante a bigger name? Because that man is absolute dynamite.
This informative and mouth-watering video is from the Italian mondo movie America Exposed (aka This Is America 3), which has never been released on video or DVD in the United States. Directed with rare insight and sensitivity by Romano Vanderbes, the movie takes an unvarnished look at the weird habits of Americans and our exotic culture.
Among the many strange rites that exist on our mysterious continent is the age-old tradition among our Black inhabitants of eating dirt. Along with more common place dishes like ham, chicken and potatoes, apparently Black people consider dirt a delicacy that rivals the highly sought after epicurean delight the truffle. But unlike the truffle, dirt is dirt cheap.
This particular clip is from a Japanese bootleg of America Exposed. Imagine the shock among our Asian friends when encountering American’s dirt eating proclivities. Is it no wonder they approach us with awe and suspicion? But are we really so different? After all, both dirt and sushi are eaten raw.
The thing I love most about John Waters is that he always appears unfazed by anything. He’s cool, self-contained and shrugs off all condescension. He’s the kind of role model that should be used in schools to get youngsters (and adults) to like themselves, and be confident in who they are and how they want to live.
Steven Yaeger’s documentary on Waters, Divine Trash, is one of those films that ends up on everyone’s wish list at some point or another, it’s an ‘O, I’d love to see that’ kind-of-a-film, and is as good as you hope. This is especially true if you’re a fan of Mr Waters, and want to see behind the scenes and find out all about his early days as a film-maker, in particular the making of Pink Flamingoes. Director Yaeger more than deserved his Film-Makers’ Trophy for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival for Divine Trash in 1998, as he gets the best out of Waters and knows how to tell a damned good tale. With contributions from Divine, Hal Hartley, Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Waters and of course those fabulous Dreamlanders.
