Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Starcrash

You've seen Plan 9 from Outer Space? You thought it was the worst movie of all time? You ain't seen half of it, there are films that are infinitely worse than Ed Wood's turkey.

The worst part of Plan 9 is that is so slow and boring, mainly just dead people staring at something and walking all too slowly. Where's the action, where's the goofiness? Both are found in large quantities in the Italian space opera Starcrash (1978), directed with hysterical gusto by Luigi Cozzi, using the American-sounding pseudonym Lewis Coates. You want action? Here's action for you. Lots of babes in scantily-clad suits? Check. Uninterested extras parading around? Check. Badly-made spaceships? Check. Red, orange, blue and green planets filling the space? Check. Flat-out weird psychedelic monsters? Check. Stupid one liners? Check. Robot talking with Southern accent? Check. Incomprehensible space battle scenes? Check. Totally goofy last-minute savings by far-out machinery? Check. David Hasselhoff in an early role? Check. Christopher Plummer looking dazed out and giving bad monologues eyes half-closed? Check. Joe Spinell raving about being the emperor of the universe? Check.

This film has got it all. It's entertaining all the way, everything goes ahead with full speed, and the dialogue just keeps giving you shiny examples of humane wit. Most highly recommended.

I don't know if anyone's collecting these posts nowadays, but I thought I'd use the moniker nevertheless. Do check out Todd Mason's blog, he used to collect them earlier.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Minnesota Clay

Minnesota Clay was Sergio Corbucci's second western and the first one released under his Italian name - the earlier one, Massacre at Grand Canyon (1964), was released as Stanley Corbett. Minnesota Clay was actually the first Italian western to be released under the Italian director's real name - even Sergio Leone claimed his true authorship later.

Minnesota Clay has some of the same characteristics as Corbucci's later, cynical Django, but it's not on the same level and it's also a bit clumsy and at times even boring, especially in the first half. The last shootout in which Cameron Mitchell is virtually blind, but still manages to kill six baddies, is however very good. Beware of the copy with the happy ending!

Sorry, managed to do this only on Wednesday! More Overlooked Films here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Django (1966)

This is the original Django film directed by Sergio Corbucci, who's one of the more important Italowestern directors, not in the rank of Sergio Leone or even Sergio Sollima, but follows rather close behind.

I'm not hot on Italian spaghetti westerns, but there's certain grandiose about them I'm slowly getting warm to. I still think Leone is a bit overrated, but there's no danger of thinking Corbucci is overrated. There's no place for him in the cinematic canon, though there are some nice stylistic touches in Django. Some of the picture compositions are striking as well. The noisy renaissance acting is very far away from the stoic Hollywood acting of the westerns, not to mention the outrageous violence. I think at least 150 people die in the film. 

All this said, I found Django mildly entertaining and quite funny at times. None of it makes any sense, but I don't think anyone thought it should. More Overlooked Movies here. 

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Goodbye, Uncle Tom

The mondo documentaries were a fad in the sixties carrying on till the seventies and even the early eighties. The genre was born in the hands of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi in their dubious early film Africa Addio (1966) that was blamed for racism in its depiction of what happens to Africa after the white Europeans leave the continent.

I haven't seen Africa Addio, but I just recently saw another film by the same duo, called Addio Zio Tom AKA Goodbye, Uncle Tom (1971). It's another exploitation documentary, using lots of footage of sex, rape, killing, maiming and torture. It's also a political film, since it's about the rise of Black Power in America in the late sixties and about the slavery of the earlier centuries. All the scenes are acted out, as there are understandably no archive films about the time of slavery. This is by no means as clever as the Cuban The First Charge of Machete.

Goodbye, Uncle Tom is a very shocking film with all its violence and gratuitous sex, including even minors. It's clear that the directors want very much to condemn the exploitation of slave business and the bad treatment of the Africans, but still they use it to depict sex and violence to attract audience. Goodbye, Uncle Tom is a very confusing film: I really didn't know what to think about it. It's also a bit too long, but the main problem is that it never really gives the word to the Africans or the Black Power activists of the sixties (it even at times ridicules the African-Americans of the late sixties, either for the lack of political consciousness or at their funny seriousness), and with this gesture it becomes clear that Jacopetti and Prosperi want to shout at white Americans: "Watch out, the niggers are coming and it's all your fault!"

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.

Edit: Earlier I had used Mondo Case as an example, but I was pointed out that I was actually talking about Africa Addio.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Last Jaws

The Finnish DVD cover says the title for this is The Last Jaws, but the opening credits say it's The Last Shark. Be it as it may, the original Italian title is L'ultimo squalo. I'm sure this film has other names as well. It was banned in the US for being such a blatant rip-off of Spielberg's Jaws.

This epic falls not very neatly somewhere between a schlock horror thriller and a solid turkey. It's not as camp as it should be, nor as shocking as it should be, so it's pretty mediocre. Some very funny moments throughout, as the YouTube link shows (it's with Spanish dubbing). More Overlooked (is this "overlooked"?) Movies at Todd Mason's blog here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Blazing Magnum

This is an outrageous Italian crime flick with an insane plot about a police lieutenant's sister who gets killed in a party and some pretty interesting secrets start to unravel. Directed by veteran Alberto De Martino, this boasts some hilariously ridiculous scenes, such as Stuart Whitman beating up three transvetites. The long car chase in the middle of the film is one of the best and one of the stupidest I've seen - yes, at the same time.

If you enjoy stupid films that aren't bad, this is especially for you.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here. (Seems like they are not up yet, as the Americans are not up yet.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The New York Ripper

I saw this classic nasty last night and I must say I was shocked. Some of the killing scenes are very gruesome, almost to the point of being unwatchable.

But then again Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper (1982) is also a quite well-made thriller or a giallo, as they say in Italy. This one is about a serial killer who's specialized in pretty young women and who talks in a Donald Duck voice, quacking over the phone, yapping to the police. The police are as clueless as can be and get a psychiatric to help profile the killer. Some of the scenes with the cops and the psychiatric are a bit boring, feels almost like there's no real police work being done.

Fulci has a knack for diverting the viewer and also for some great-looking chasing and killing scenes, and he clearly knows what fetishes are all about: some of the scenes before the killings are actually quite erotic and even sexy. Then again, Fulci spoils everything by showing something like a woman's nipple sliced in half. (I think that's the worst scene in the film full of other scenes like it.) Is there some sort of repention going on in here? Fulci feels ashamed for wanting to show beautiful women enjoying sex, jerking off in public, giving fingers to middle-aged men, and then has them slowly and mercilessly butchered? You know, Fulci comes from a deeply Catholic country...

Whatever, this is an interesting and intriguing film, minus the stupid psychoanalytic babble solution in the end. In Finland this was banned from the start, but the print of the film has remained in the archives of the Finnish Film Archive - it was in a beautiful shape.

The original uncut trailer is not safe for work and certainly not for minors:

More Overlooked Films here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Anima Persa

The Finnish Film Archive showed last night a very interesting Italian film that's not very well known: Dino Risi's Anima Persa (1977) that seems like it's not been shown in the English-speaking countries (there's a title for it in the IMDB, but with the caption "undefined", whatever that means). The film falls somewhere between an artsy film and a giallo film with some shock moments, but it's no Mario Bava or Dario Argento. It's no Fellini, either. Dino Risi was a skillful comedy director from the late fourties on and this shows with many funny and humorous moments, even though the pervasive feel in the film is the feel of the thread, the fear and the absurd. The dirty town of Venice is one of the main players in the movie, as is the decayed Renaissance palace these people live in. Vittorio Gassman, the former leading man of the Italian romantic comedies, is simply marvellous as the engineer who keeps his wife - the beautiful Catherine Deneuve - in tight leash. Highly recommended.

Two other films seen recently, from the small screen:

Antoine Fuqua: Training Day: a very interesting, but at times highly implausible take on what cops do when no one sees them. Seems to be the peak of Fuqua's career, though.

Ron Shelton: Dark Blue: an interesting take on the same theme, with a historic view, as can be expected from James Ellroy whose screen story this is based on. (Did Ellroy write a non-fiction piece on Rodney King or was he planning a novel on the subject? Then he must've sold the treatment to the producers.) Suffers greatly from Shelton's slack direction and Terence Blanchard's cliché-ridden film noir soundtrack with howling saxophones.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here.

Citta Violent/The Violent City

I watched last night an Italian film called Citta Violenta aka The Violent City. It's one of the better Italian crime films from the sixties and seventies, with Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas in the lead. The director is Sergio Sollima, who has been gaining cult status in recent years, also due to his spaghetti westerns (which I haven't seen, I'm sorry to say).

By no means Citta Violent is a perfect film. Some of the dialogue is corny, some of the actions are not very well motivated, some of the actors are poor (especially Bronson's wife, Jill Ireland), and I'm not really sure if I like Bronson. I think this would've been better for someone like Lee Marvin or Barry Nelson. Having said this, I must confess the film has a great style, lots of scenes without dialogue or even music. The climax - shooting in the scenery elevator - is a tour de force. The story line, lifted up from Out of the Past, is a complex one and is truly noir, with everyone dying in the end. Someone said when this came up in Facebook that the film is very Parker-like.

Ennio Morricone's music is great, chilling, with curious guitar sounds. Check it out:

Holocaust 2000

I saw a quite rare Italian horror film last Monday on the Finnish Film Archive's series: Holocaust 2000 by Alberto Di Martino. The Finnish title for this 1973 made was Terrori 2000, which makes the film sound even more cheezy. But cheezy it is not - well, maybe in places. There were some awkward moments, but all in all I found the film quite interesting and well-made.

It's about Kirk Douglas (who's as good as ever, pulsing with masculine energy and even hidden rage) who's planning a huge nuclear reactor in an unnamed Arab country. It seems there are some hidden powers at work here and soon Douglas finds out that he's being used as a pawn - the player of this game is none other than Devil. There are some quite horrific scenes in which the director shows his flair for the absurd - especially the scenes in the madhouse which is like Michel Foucault's bad dream, with glass walls and all. The Finnish censorship had cut away some of the goriest moments, but they'd been restored - the result was that the cut scenes looked different from the usual stock. They were red and pale, which only added to the bizarre feel of the film.

Holocaust 2000 is also more political than the American counterparts it copied so freely (especially The Omen). Douglas is a vehement capitalist who cares only about his investments and mangles the documents so that everything looks safe, even though it's far from that. The ending is a bit abrupt and the narration bogs down for a moment. Uneven, the film is still very interesting and moody.

I was in awe when I noticed that the people in the audience were laughing all the time. (Hey, isn't there enough proof that I really don't understand what's funny?) Maybe they'd been expecting to see a turkey, but as I said, this is not a turkey. I don't know if it's on dvd or has been on vhs, but would recommend it if you came across it and have a taste for this sort of thing.

The Fury of the Vikings

I saw a nice curiosity at the Finnish Film Archive last Monday: the horror classic Mario Bava's The Fury of the Vikings (or The Invaders or Erik the Conqueror, in Finnish, Viikinkien kosto) from 1961. It was the other of the two viking films Bava made in the early sixties.

The film was quite nice, very atmospheric and fabulously shot. Some of the frames were very nicely staged and Bava really knew how to use Cinemascope, with open sea looming at the back. The fight scenes were expertly cut and they hid the low budget astonishingly. The plot should've been better, some of the stuff happening went by all too fast and some of the action wasn't explained enough. The Finnish copy from the sixties was in a bad shape and, especially during the first reel, all the dark objects on the screen seemed to be bursting into flames. I was bugged to see some of the people take a camp approach to the film, even though there weren't any reasons as the film was pretty fluent and well-made (and I'm beginning to get fed up with camp attitude: it's arrogant and obnoxious and so last week).

While it's been pretty obvious to some horror and other genre buffs for many years or even decades now, I've been slowly realizing that the history of cinema is not just a cavalcade of artistic non-genre masterpieces, but it's also, and maybe more essentially so, the history of popular films and popular film-making where there are no deep, hidden messages in the films. I liked this a lot better than some of, say, Fellini's films from the seventies. The magnificent set pieces were there, but there was more dramatic drive in Bava than in Fellini (and in Fellini's films, say Casanova or Satyricon they shout all the time). Well, of course this was mostly eye-candy, but there was also artistic expression blown to full.