Sonntag, 22. Juli 2012

take7: 25.7.12

NIPPON!!!

start 20h15, 1974, 100min. english subs

  

Review from Weird Wild Realm
Himiko (1974) is a name for Yametsu-hime (Princess Yametsu) known in China as Pimiho. She was a Japanese ruler about 238 C.E., according to ancient Chinese records. She quelled barbarian uprisings in Yame (north of Kyushu), & was variously described as queen, oracle, warrior, & priestess. Upon her death, one-hundred of her thousand female servants buried themselves (alive) with her. Her thirteen year old daughter, Iyo-hime, ruled after mother's death in 247. The Chinese, Korean, & Japanese folk tradition about women's position in those ancient times suggest most strongly a matriarchal system was in place, which today's Japanese school children take for granted as a fact.


  If you can't tell by looking at the screens, you'll know the second that you hear the awesome, and weird, music that makes up the soundtrack. A dreamy film full of images that burn themselves into your mind, it takes the traditional Japanese folk tale and turns it into a Felliniesque, surreal odyssey of the absurd. Great stuff.






ca.22h10, 1972, 90min, english subs
 Matsu, known to the prisoners as Scorpian, is locked away in the bowels of the prison as revenge for disrupting the smooth operation of the prison and for her disfiguring attack on the warden. Granted a one day reprieve due to the visit of a dignitary, she takes advantage and attacks the warden again. This leads to more brutal punishment and humiliation. But the punishment gives her an oppurtunity to escape along with six other female prisoners. Their surreal flight from prison pits the convicts against the guards, the warden and each other.

 One of the favorite movies of Quentin Tarantino and Roberto Rodriguez.  It's a wonderfully psychotic vision, I often sat there thinking "Where the heck is the camera? How did they get that angle?". The opening shots of Matsu and the warden in her cell were simply incredible. Throughout the film there are surreal interruptions of the narrative in a "Theatrical" style where the location turns into an obvious backdrop and the lighting becomes more intrusive. These scenes usually highlight what's happening behind the eyes of the silent Matsu.
 This movie is one of the high points for me of Japanese commercial cinema - gloriously over the top, sexy, outrageous, cinematically stylish and daring and still deeply satirical and intelligent. They just don't make 'em like this anymore. Was the above review useful to you?


Montag, 16. Juli 2012



take6: 18.7.12 

Doors open 19h45-22h and 24h-0h10 bringyourownfooddrinksifulikeuntererheuberg21greendoor

MEXICO!!!

20h15, Mexico 1968, english subtitles

 
"Fando & Lis" is Alejandro Jodorowsky's first full length feature film. Like the 1930 film "L Age D Or", the 1967 premier at the Acapulco film festival in Mexico led to riots. The images shocked many viewers and Jodorowsky had to flee for his life. The film's story concerns Fando and his crippled girlfriend Lis. Fando is very cruel, but sometimes sympathetic. He pushes Lis around in a cart through many strange and surreal scenarios. We also witness flashbacks of Lis as a child loosing her innocents to the corruption of adults. Fando has flashbacks of his father and the soldiers which took his dad away from him. For the two main characters, it's a bizarre world gone mad. Fando & Lis are on a journey to the miraculous city of Tar. Lis is convinced she'll be healed of her physical disorder and able to walk again. This film is based on a short play by Fernado Arrabal. and at time feels like a follow up to the later filmed "Viva la Muerte". Although shot in B&W viewers are treated to many bizarre images including; a burning piano, body painting, drag queens, mud people and other assorted strangeness. "Fando & Lis" holds its place in the hall of fame of weird films. You must see it to believe it.
 



ca. 22h15, Mexico 1978, english subs.

In the 1800s, young orphan Justine (Susana Kamini) arrives at a repressive convent where Alucarda (Tina Romero) has spent her life since infancy. They become fast friends and, while frolicking in the woods, encounter a sinister gypsy (Claudio Brook) who warns them about a nearby cemetery, the devil's stomping ground. After unleashing a malevolent power inside one of the tombs, Alucarda proves to be the most susceptible upon returning to the convent. The gypsy then magically reappears and initiates the girls into the ways of the horned one, courtesy of a blood rite and a sylvan orgy. Potentially bisexual Sister Angelica (Tina French) realizes something's amiss and decides to stage an exorcism, though the ceremony of tying the girls naked to crosses proves to have disastrous results. The local physician, Dr. Oszek (also Brook), finds himself unable to explain away the bizarre deeds occurring within the convent walls, which escalate when Justine seems to be killed... or does she?

A long way from those K. Gordon Murray Mexican horrors for the kiddies, Alucarda is one of the more striking and shocking south of the border gothic fests from the golden age of cinematic sleaze. Replete with nuns, devil worship, blood baths, and sadistic religious fanaticism, this is one drive-in jewel ripe for rediscovery.



 Moctezuma, a collaborator with Jodorowsky (who claims Moctezuma stole money from him to make his films!) and one of the creators of the infamous Panic Theatre, has created a minor masterpiece with ALUCARDA. Those who associated Mexihorror with Santo monster pics are in for a rude awakening with this baby. But the film is still just as wild as those films and then some! As Michael Weldon points out in his review for the film in Psychotronic, you'd be hard-pressed to find a horror film with more screaming. There are bloodier horror flicks and of course those with more nudity, but ALUCARDA is so jam-packed with both that even the most jaded fan will be rubbing his eyes in disbelief! Satanic rituals, coffins filled with blood, sadomasochistic flagellation amongst priests and nuns, nasty decapitations, and a fiery finale complete with Satanic scripture and multiple instances of spontaneous combustion that must have influenced DePalma's CARRIE, this flick is simply never boring! Some viewers have found fault with the script not deciding who the villains are, the church or the girls, but this adds a schizophrenic element to an already delirious viewing experience!


ca. 24h10 secret movie 1:

SECRET SUMMER SEX DREAM


Dienstag, 10. Juli 2012

take 5: 11.6.12

Kino Anders repeats its programm:
MAN?!? WOMAN?!? from take 3 (movie infos scroll under)
20h30 Calmos
22h15 Sexmission


Montag, 2. Juli 2012

take4: 4.7.12

20h: Panelstory aneb Jak se rodi sidliste, Czechoslovakia 1979, english subs

Movie from the late 70ties about the miserable life in giant livingquarters.  One of Vera Chytilová ("Daisies", "Fruit of Paradise") more recognized later movies.

 Subtitled " The Genesis of a Community, " the neglected 1979 masterpiece Prefab Story (a/k/a Panel Story; May 24 at 3:50 p.m.) is set at a complex of huge apartment blocks in Prague. Amid the continual renovation that has transformed the space between the buildings into a chaos of dirt and rubble, numerous characters wander in and out of the plot, badgering one another, eating, drinking, making love. In the absence of official authority (an ineffectual policeman is more at sea here than anyone else), the inhabitants of the complex make their own order. Minding other people’s business is both the original sin of this world and its possible salvation. In one scene, a pregnant woman berates two workmen for questioning her presence in a flat into which she has moved on her own initiative. While another woman goes into labor, an old man diverts medical help to an old woman who has retreated, seemingly permanently, behind the dirty window of her balcony. The camera is restless, erratic; the defiance of " professional " filmmaking standards is total; the pleasures of the film are infinite.
 That this interest in destructive behaviour in relation to morality is not specific to Panelstory emerged when, in an earlier part of the discussion, she described the formal film language of Sedmikrásky (which she denied was avant-garde) in these terms:
Not just in the dramaturgical sense but in the philosophical and existential sense, we wanted to have real characters, real people, acting like puppets. We wanted the viewer to really grasp the meaning of the film. And that meaning was a protest against destruction. The destruction, in any sense of the term, in our lives. Destruction is going on in our lives and especially in our relationships. So, we wanted to use film language to show this.

Considering the estate (in its planning stage) as a socialist paradise, the film can be seen to link in with other Chytilová films that allude to the Garden of Eden: Ovoce stromů rajských jíme (Fruit of Paradise, 1969), Hra o jablko (The Apple Game, 1976) and Vyhnání z ráje (Expulsion from Paradise, 2001). The latter is particularly close in spirit to Panelstory, depicting an act of misguided creation (shooting a film) that leads to a moral abomination.

 

 

 ab 22h: Poland 1987,ca120min., english subs

 A political allegory wrapped in the guise of a gory horror film, Andrzej Zulawski's The Devil did not escape the wrath of communist censorship. The film was banned in Poland for 15 years, before getting a sporadic release in 1987.

Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski), a young 18th century nobleman, rots in prison for conspiring against the king. A mysterious stranger frees him, but in exchange he demands a list of Jakub's fellow conspirators. Jakub follows the stranger on a journey across a nightmarish, snowbound countryside where they witness countless acts of brutal violence. Affected by the overall chaos and moral corruption, the young nobleman descends into madness.

The Devil is a lost treasure of Eastern European cinema and a unique addition to the horror genre.

 At the climax of Harold Pinter's vaguely allegorical but wholly chilling play The Birthday Party, the broken hero is being taken away by strangers, no doubt to a bad place. The locals, who have no idea what sort of political act of terror is being committed, stand by helplessly, but one of them rises and says, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" Even though Pinter never makes a specific point of reference as to what deplorable regime is imposing its will, the viewer intuitively understands the message. So it is with Andrzej Zulawski's The Devil. International audiences unfamiliar with Polish politics might not know or care that his horror film was based on actual events from the turbulent 1960s, during which communist authorities provoked a group of Warsaw students into staging anti-censorship protests. This gave the powers that be an easy excuse to crack down on dissidents, leading to mass arrests and, in the process, striking a blow for free speech. Zulawski used this incident as the basis for his film, hiding it in costumes and throwing in a monster, but he doesn't depend on viewer familiarity with a specific incident; instead he paints a world of fear, oppression, and suppressed outrage that could happen anywhere, anytime.

When Zulawski filmed The Devil, he told the Polish authorities he was making a period film set in the 18th-century, when the Prussians were invading Poland and killing everyone wholesale. The film opens during a hysterical prison break where a shell-shocked, brooding young man named Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski) is led away from captivity by a grinning, vaguely satanic man in black (Wojciech Pszoniak). Everyone around them is shrieking in hysteria, frantically trying to escape or wish themselves elsewhere, and moments later soldiers appear blasting everyone in sight with their muskets. Jakub and his strange benefactor take flight across a bleak, war-torn winter landscape with a hostage nun (Malgorzata Braunek), encountering madmen, theatre troupes, and nymphomaniacs along the way. Of course, the authorities watched The Devil, realized exactly what Zulawski was up to, and promptly banned the film for 17 years.

Whether taken as a historical drama or a horror film, The Devil is unabashedly a parable about misappropriated anger against the forces of evil. Jakub is led home by his dark-clad benefactor, only to discover that everything has taken a turn toward the rancid and horrible. His father has committed suicide, his mother has transformed into a prostitute, his sister has been driven insane, and his fiancée has been forced into an arranged marriage with his best friend, who has turned into a political opportunist and turncoat. Leading him through this world turned upside down is the man in black, who continually whispers sarcastic platitudes in the hero's ear and inciting him to acts of extreme violence. Zulawski, whose films reach unparalleled heights of vitriolic insanity, stages elaborate sequences with Jakub either throwing himself into fits of rage or sinking into narcoleptic despair, and the man in black—the true devil of the movie, who even transforms into a literal werewolf at one point—ruthlessly egging him on toward oblivion.

Imagine Network's Howard Beale, pumped up on amphetamines and two tons of cocaine, and wielding a straight razor when he proclaims, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!" That's the height of misappropriated righteous anger Zulawski pitches his film at, and as Jakub slaughters at least a dozen or more people in the final third of the movie, one sees just how far a human being can be pushed or manipulated in the name of duty and honor. It's appropriately repulsive and uncomfortable, and for an American audience a good reminder of how often we revel in the cinematic glory of macho "good guys" killing "bad guys" as the solution to life's complex problems. What's especially sad is that this attitude, reflected in the movies, is all too often the black-and-white solution proposed by the powers that be in, say, Vietnam and Iraq, and one that results in perpetuating even more unaccountable horror. As Charles Mee wrote in his play The Trojan Women 2.0, "Why is it [that] at the end of war the victors can imagine nothing better than to remake the conditions that are the cause of war?"

Zulawski, like Roman Polanski, was born into a world of bombs dropping overhead, and he was one of the few children in his family to survive WWII. No doubt, it's easy for him to re-imagine the contemporary world as a place of shifting allegiances and untrustworthy moral platitudes. As usual for his films, the camera hurtles vertically across rooms and fields and spirals around as the actors pitch their performances at maximum volume. Society for Zulawski is just a thin veneer used to disguise the horrible sadism and unhappiness lurking inside every human heart. The Devil would make for maudlin, depressing viewing if every scene didn't feel like explosions were being set off, sending the inmates of a madhouse free into the streets outside.

Is insanity the only sane response to an insane world? Zulawski's movie says maybe instead one should take time out and reflect before plunging into an even deeper hell.