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Kinky Japanese sexploitation of the 1960s: ‘The Weird Love Makers’ and ‘Madame O’
02.09.2011
03:44 pm
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The other night I was watching an old VHS compilation of about an hours worth of wild movie trailers from Audubon Films, the New York-based distribution company of stylish, high class erotic filmmaker Radley Metzger (no relation) in the 60s and 70s. Metzger had an especially good eye for well-made softcore erotica and even the Audubon films that he didn’t direct, but merely released, had the same fantastic art direction, groovy soundtracks, lush cinematography and smokin’ hot Eurobabes his own films were known for. It occurred to me that since that VHS had come out in the early 1990s, probably most of the Audubon Films catalog had been released by enterprising DVD companies specializing in “underground” cult movie fare. (Hell, the widely seen Audubon trailers video probably inspired many young fans of mondo cinema to grow up and start these very same companies in order to release the films they themselves wanted to get their hands on so badly).

It’s interesting to note that although Japan most certainly did produce some outlandishly weird and sick films then (and now) Metzger’s company picked up few of them for American audiences. Perhaps US filmgoers, even the most jaded, weren’t ready for films like The Weird Love Makers and Madame O.

The Weird Love Makers is a violence for the sake of violence tale of two thugs and a hooker who get out of jail and then do horrible things to the people who put them in the pokey. It’s unimaginable that this film, made in 1960, could have gotten very far when Audobon Films released it in America in 1963!
 

 
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And then there is Madame O (AKA Zoku akutokui: Joi-hen (or, roughly, “Vicious Female Doctor Part 2”—a sequel to “Vice Doctor – Maternity and Gynecology Department Dairy,” a film now thought lost). A young girl is raped by three boys. She gets pregnant and contracts a venereal disease. She later becomes a respected gynecologist, but has twisted impulses, a homicidal rage towards men and a penchant for violent sex ending in her unconscious victims being given her syphilis via a cotton swab!
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.09.2011
03:44 pm
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Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape
02.09.2011
08:36 am
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In 1984 the British government drew up a list of 72 films which it deemed so reprehensible that they should be banned. Anyone found in possession of a copy, or actively distributing one of the films, could face a prison sentence. This was in the very early days of video, when distribution of movies on VHS was unregulated, and the new medium could be found in almost every small local corner shop. This is the story covered by the fantastic documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape by British horror director Jake West, which was released late last year in the UK.

More than just a look at the films that were banned by the UK Government in 1984, it’s an examination of the political climate of the era, and the moral panic whipped up by national newspapers, busy looking for an easy scapegoat for society’s problems (and probably a bit worried that their own medium was under threat). The most fascinating part, for me, are the interviews with the dubious, so-called “moral leaders” that decided the public couldn’t handle this type of thing in the first place. A quarter of a century later and society has relegated them to a status of mockery, yet they still cling dearly to the notion that they were doing something right and protecting stupid people from themselves, not just furthering their own mealy-mouthed careers. Sociopathic politicians aren’t just a new phenomena, you know.
 

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Interestingly, one of the prime movers in the the banning of these films was a man called Peter Kruger, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Unit. It may be just one huge coincidence, but almost a year later saw the release of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street, and the unleashing of one of the greatest horror characters of all time, Freddy Krueger. Was this Craven’s own F.U. to the British board of censors? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t take a wild leap of the imagination to draw this conclusion - Craven is a smart, politically aware man whose own Last House On The Left ended up on the list of 72 banned films.

The three-disc DVD set, called Video Nasties - the Definitive Guide, comes with the documentary itself, and split over a further two discs a guide to all 72 films on the list (almost half of which were unbanned at the time) with commentary from British horror critics like Kim Newman, Alan Jones and Stephen Thrower. It also comes lovingly packaged in a fake video cassette box with artwork by Graham Humphreys, who created the now iconic British sleeve for The Evil Dead (another banned film on the list). So far only available in the UK, for anyone with a multi-region DVD player the film can be found on Amazon.co.uk and comes highly recommended. This documentary is not just for horror buffs, it is for anyone with an interest in politics, culture, and how liberal ideals can be thwarted by a select, self-interested few.
 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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02.09.2011
08:36 am
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New York City in 1977: A beautiful rock and roll hellhole
02.09.2011
02:14 am
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Blackout.
 
Punk, disco, hip hop, the blackout, Son of Sam, Tony Manero, CBGB, Studio 54, Max’s Kansas City, Show World, Paradise Garage, cocaine, polyester and leather—1977 in New York City was exhilarating, a nightmare, fun, dangerous and never boring. It was the year I arrived in downtown Manhattan with a beautiful woman, no money and a rock and roll band. I hit the streets running and never looked back…unless it was to watch my back.

I was living in the decaying Hotel Earle in the West Village when NYC went black. The power failure of July 13, 1977 knocked the city to its knees. I was sitting on the window sill of my room keeping cool or as cool as one could keep during a sweltering summer night in the city. I was drinking a nice cold beer and listening to the music of the streets when at around 9:30 p.m. everything suddenly went completely dark…and I mean dark, dark as Aleister Crowley’s asshole. It was the strangest fucking thing you could imagine. One moment the city was there, then next it was gone. The only illumination came from automobile headlights lacerating the night like ghostly Ginsu knives. My girlfriend and I clutched hands and felt our way down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. We walked to Bleecker street in spooky darkness. We weren’t alone. The avenues were teeming with the dazed and confused. Not that unusual for the Village, but the confusion was different. Was the world coming to an end?

By midnight the streets were mobbed with people who had figured out that civilization wasn’t ending, it was on vacation. There was a festive vibe in the air. It was like Mardi Gras for the blind. The bars and pubs that stayed open were candlelit and booze was flowing for free. Refrigerators weren’t working and there was no way to keep perishables from spoiling so instead of facing the prospect of throwing food away some joints were feeding people for free. A few cabbies got into the spirit of things and maneuvered their taxis in such a way as to shine their headlights into the cafes providing diners with surreal mood lighting. It was a prison break theme park. And this wild night was bringing out the best in New Yorkers. But it didn’t last. As the blackout continued through the next day and night, things started to change. The novelty of the crisis wore off and it got ugly. What had started out as a party turned into looting and violence. An unexpected payday for the poor and desperate.

The blackout put the whole gamut of what makes New York marvelous and miserable on display: the “I got your back, brother” slamming into the “fuck you!”

These were times when the city was an unseemly beast, a scabrous, moulting fat rat that was exciting to look at but terrifying. Part of the excitement came from the ever present sense that things could go haywire at any minute. I lived intensely in the moment, acutely aware of everything around me, jacked up in a state of heightened consciousness that was both Zen and manic. Being in the here and now of New York City in 1977 wasn’t a hippie thing, it was survival. And when I got inside the safety zone of Max’s or CBGB, among my tribe, I was ready to get fucked up, to get high, to dance and celebrate.

In the city of night, we went to bed at dawn and rose at dusk. We were vampires before vampires became hip. 

NY77: The Coolest Year In Hell is a terrific documentary that captures a pivotal moment in the history of a city and its pop culture. Here’s the whole beautiful mess.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.09.2011
02:14 am
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Cairo, Egypt travelogue from 1938 in ravishing Technicolor
02.07.2011
01:50 am
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Director James A. Fitzpatrick visits Cairo in this 1938 short movie he produced as part of his Traveltalk series for MGM studios.

Cairo, City Of Contrast has no pretense of being anything other than a lighthearted travelogue. Colorful and quaint in its optimism.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.07.2011
01:50 am
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Tura Satana Interview
02.05.2011
08:53 pm
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Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher has already done a fitting tribute to Tura Satana, but I thought I’d share this interview that Tura gave for Kevin Sean Michaels’ 2008 documentary The Wild World Of Ted V. Mikels. Tura starred in Mikel’s The Astro-Zombies and The Doll Squad. In the interview she discusses working with Mikels and Russ Meyer.
 

 
Tura Satana does a striptease in “The Doll Squad” and is interviewed by Sandra Bernhard after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.05.2011
08:53 pm
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Star of iconic 1960s film ‘I Am Curious (Yellow)’ Lena Nyman has died
02.05.2011
02:46 am
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We’ve lost two art film goddesses this week. First Maria Schneider and now Lena Nyman.

Nyman starred in the controversial I Am Curious (Yellow) and it’s sequel I Am Curious (Blue). These were iconic films for anyone growing up in the 1960s. As curious teenagers we all tried to sneak into theaters screening these Swedish soft-core films that combined free love with a radical political viewpoint.

When the film arrived in the United States, it was seized by customs as pornographic material, which, if allowed into the country would lead to more race riots and political assassinations, not to mention another Vietnam War elsewhere in Asia or perhaps Africa.

Following an anti-censorship battle in US courts, I Am Curious (Yellow) was finally allowed to be shown on American screens in 1969. Thanks to all the free publicity provided by various branches of the US government, it became the biggest foreign-language box-office hit ever in the United States, grossing $20.23m (or about $113.3m today). If inflation is taken into account, I Am Curious (Yellow) remains the record holder among non-English-language releases in the US.

More importantly, I Am Curious (Yellow) set a legal precedent that changed the meaning of the word “obscene,” thus allowing other sexually provocative motion pictures to enter the United States, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron (1971) and Tales of Canterbury (1973), and the aforementioned Last Tango in Paris.”

Lena Nyman starred in over 50 films in her lifetime, including Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. She died after suffering from a longterm illness. She was 66.

Here’s a scene that was cut from the final version of I am Curious (Blue).
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.05.2011
02:46 am
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One of cinema’s great scenes: The final shot of Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’
02.04.2011
04:16 am
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Actor Maria Schneider’s death yesterday brought to mind a film she starred in with Jack Nicholson in 1975: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. Like all of Antonioni’s films, The Passenger uses space, emptiness and architecture to create a sense of spiritual longing in an existential void. The film’s final scene is considered to be one of the great cinematic achievements in the history of the medium—a seamless tracking shot that moves through a gated window enters a courtyard and does a 180 pan and returns to the window from the opposite point of view from which it left, no edits.  It was quite some time after the film was released that the method in which it was done became known to film buffs who had been baffled by Antonioni’s seemingly impossible feat. The definitive description of the seven minute long scene is this Wikipedia entry:

There were a number of reasons why the shot proved so difficult to accomplish and is so studied by film students. The shot needed to be taken in the evening towards dusk to minimize the light difference between interior and exterior. Since the shot was continuous, it was not possible to adjust the lens aperture at the moment when the camera passed from the room to the square. As such, the scene could only be shot between 5:00 and 7:30 in the evening.

Difficulties were further compounded by atmospheric conditions. The weather in Spain was windy and dusty. For the shot to work, the atmosphere needed to be still to ensure that the movement of the camera would be smooth. Antonioni tried to encase the camera in a sphere to lessen the impact of the wind, but then it couldn’t get through the window.

Then there were further technical problems. The camera ran on a ceiling track in the hotel room, and when it emerged outside the window it was picked up by a hook suspended on a giant crane that was nearly thirty metres high. A system of gyroscopes had to be fitted to the camera to mask the change from a smooth track to the less smooth and more mobile crane. The bars on the outside of the window were fitted on hinges. As the camera came up to the bars they were swung away at the same time as the hook of the crane attached itself to the camera as it left the tracks. The whole operation was co-ordinated by Antonioni from a van by means of monitors and microphones to assistants who, in turn, communicated his instructions to the actors and the operators.

In the DVD commentary, Nicholson states that Antonioni constructed the entire hotel entirely so that the final shot could be accomplished.

Here’s the scene. Watch it closely and be prepared to amazed. It was shot by Luciano Tovoli. The clip begins with a little bit of visual “noise” that is not part of the original film.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.04.2011
04:16 am
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John Cassavetes grooving with Greenwich Village beatniks in 1959
02.03.2011
06:34 pm
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John Cassavetes, who died 22 years ago today, was the title character in the short lived TV show Johnny Staccato, which aired for one season in 1959. In the episode “The Poet’s Touch,”  jazz musician and detective Staccato mingles with the beatniks of Greenwich Village and gets propositioned by the stunningly beautiful and bohemian Sylvia Lewis.

Miss Lewis has had a long career as a dancer and actress and is still very much alive. Check out her homepage here.

As Staccato enters a building there’s a sign for The Helen Hayes Equity Group, a sly homage to a theater company where many of Cassavetes acting peers got their training.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.03.2011
06:34 pm
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Auroratone: Therapeutic psychedelia from the 1940s
02.03.2011
03:25 pm
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A collaboration between one Cecil Stokes (1910-1956) and Bing Crosby (natch) sometime in the ‘40s, an Auroratone film was apparently meant to be used in the treatment of mental disorders. As one does. The colors and crystal patterns are indeed quite lovely and Der Bingle and his organ are dreamy (or something).
 

 
More about Auroratone films here
 
With thanks to Devin Sarno

Posted by Brad Laner
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02.03.2011
03:25 pm
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2001: A VHS Obelisk
02.02.2011
03:27 pm
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VHS 2005 Foam
 
Humorous artistic tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s inscrutable cinematic masterpiece created in 2005 by David Herbert. What I’m more interested in is seeing the VCR that can handle this gargantuan tape.
 
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(via Booooooom!)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.02.2011
03:27 pm
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