Morgan!

Also known as Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment. British, a bit dated, the offbeat antics of eccentric artist Morgan Delt make the film reasonably enjoyable. The girl (Lynn Redgrave) he’s trying to win back is just as nutty as him. Each are thoroughly British.

Being British and made in the 60′s, the film utilizes sped-up Benny Hill style comic sequences. Was this every funny? To whom? Another indicator of its era is the number of jokes about Lenin and Trotsky. Do these joke make any sense to modern viewers? Those not interested in politics? So much of today’s comedies, especially those where the actor is allowed run amok and look foolish, avoid all politics. In a way it’s nice to hear jokes linked to something other than bodily excretions.

Demonoid, Messenger of Death

I’ve got to hand it to Alfredo Zacarias the director of Demonoid. This is hands down one weak horror film.

A disembodied hand terrorizes a British woman (Samantha Eggar) until a preacher can quote some scripture and blow torch the thing to death. The terror all starts when she visits her husband at his mining operation in Mexico. The bull-headed hubbie refuses to listen to his superstitious employees and drags his wife deep into the mine. They uncover a demonic temple and a lone hand, encased in its own coffine. Being stupid white folk, unable to heed local warnings, they take the hand from the temple. Late one night, while fucked up on tequila, the husband opens the casket and unleashes the Devil’s hand. Escaping from Mexico, the hand travels to Las Vegas where it tries its luck on the craps tables and comes up sevens everytime. From there, the disembodied appendage moves on to Los Angeles and all sorts of cheesy heck breaks loose.

I say heck because there is no way in hell this film could be considered scary. Disembodied hands just aren’t frightening, especially when they are crawling and leaping from victim to vicitm. All cut-off hands do is provide those watching a film like Demonoid the chance to make corny ‘hand’ jokes. That being the case, Demonoid with its vacant acting, dumb dialogue, and effects that look like they cost as much as a dozen churros, is certainly the funniest of all Mexican disembodied hand films.

Police Beat

Bicycle officer Z, an African born, Muslim, conservative, peddles through seven days full of odd scenarios plucked right from Seattle police reports. His mind lingers more on the whereabouts of his young white girlfriend who is off camping with another male. A movie soaked in a bluish hues, Police Beat eschews the police procedural format for something more poetic.

The rhythm and pace of the film are at times so wondrous that one is able to coast along with Z as he divulges his inner thought in his native tongue of Wolof. Z is adrift in a world of contemplation and chaos, but he cannot connect the two worlds. The seemingly non-sensible crimes that he encounters and his girlfriends inexplicable behavior leave Z bewildered and wanting to return to Africa.

Made in 2005 the Police Beat rings of two distinct feelings. The first is that of a film made after September 11th. Forgoing the angry stereotype that berates Z about the evils of President Bush, Police Beat captures the helpless confusion that surrounds most Americans as they move forward into a less than stable future while longing for a seemingly more innocent time. The second indicator is the use of digital video. A tool not exclusive to the new century, but one wielded in such a casual fashion that it decries a comfort with the pixelated, electronic grain attributed to shooting digitally in low-light situations. At times the filmmakers use this look to their advantage, to create a texture full of activity and tension. Most of the time, sadly, there appears to no attention paid to the image’s quality or worse the style is designed to lend grit and an air of reality to the picture.

Digital video can do better than what is shown in Police Beat. I hate to fault a movie for lack of technical rigor, but Police Beat‘s smart story and sensible use of pacing deserves better. It could also have done without some of the wilder cases taken from local police records. Yes, they may have really happened, but their oddness is more easily dismissed. Weird does not always mean better. This is a lesson that both police dramas and independent film need to remember.

Fuses

Here in academia, where we love to take young minds pickled on Hollywood movies and expose them to work that exhibits just how wildly different ‘experimental’ film can be, Fuses gets played every few semesters to the expected shock.

 

Now it’s on Ubu for all to see, at anytime.

 

Experimental film is one thing, experimenting with hardcore imagery is something else. In my opinion it’s shock and awe. Can you believe she went there? If you ask anyone about this film the first thing they’ll usually reply with “Is that the one she fucks in?” or something to that effect. Take out the fucking and what do you have left? A rather dull, sloppy, optically manipulated landscape film.

Somewhere I have read that Schnemman made this film in response to Brakhages’ more candid work with his partner. I can see this, but I can’t see how Schneeman’s work frees itself from objectification or fetishization.

Reading the Wikipedia article on the film, I loved this gem :

“She received an especially strong reaction regarding the cunnilingus scene of the film.”

 

Strong how? And, by whom? That image, more than other graphic images in the film, is the least obscured. and perhaps the most titillating.

I guess we do not expect to see nudity in a classroom or in a mature film. That term itself being rather goofy. Nudity is something shot in Hollywood and porn is something shot in the San Fernando Valley. It’s also something used again and again in performance art and avant-garde works usually to capture someone’s attention, to stand out.

Schneeman’s done other body related work, pulled scrolls out of her vagina, etc. Perhaps, this is fascinating to someone who has just discovered that with their clothes off men and women are different looking. That’s not my thing. It holds little interest. I’d rather look at the ways we can’t connect and the fucked up things going on in our hearts and heads that prevents us from doing so.

Though, I’m all for a good rut every now and then, too.

Food of the Gods

Bert I. Gordon tries to bring the 50′s sci-fi matinee into the 70′s. Food of the Gods is a loosely adapted H.G. Wells tale of man vs. nature. What Gordon lends to the production are giant rubber insects and rats, lots and lots of rats. It’s all so fake. It’s all so laughable.

Adding to the hilarity is the always over-the-top performance of Marjoe Gortner. What makes this film most memorable is serious tone of Marjoe’s narration that foretells of nature taking its revenge on man. Rarely is narration this dramatic and this expositional. He is either clueless to the level of production synoymous with Bert I. Gordon’s name, he is purposefully hamming it up, or he truly believes in the project or its moral message. It could be a bit of all three.

Wells maybe right to believe that nature has a way of putting man in his place. On the other hand, Food of the Goods only ends up proving that a ballsy, dashing all-American quarterback can kick mother nature’s ass. This is the sort of red-blooded heroism Americans want to see, not some moral compass like An Inconvenient Truth.