Till, Decision to Leave, Tar, Triangle of Sadness, Halloween Day, Irish Jesus in Fairview and October Horrorfest 2022 on Monday Morning Diary (October 31)

 

 

by Sam Juliano

The completed manuscript of Irish Jesus in Fairview is now in the hands of Rob Bignell, my first-stage editor.  The novel came in at around 160,000 words, which everything considered is rather astounding.  I have taken a break as far as continuing on with the third book, Roses for Saorise, as I do need to be abreast of the editing process of the second book, which also requires the art and the more painstaking second stage editing.  I am targeting late February or early March for the actual publication.  The first book, Paradise Atop the Hudson has now sold over 1,200 copies, which pleases me greatly, especially since that total was amassed over ten months.  The average number of amazon-published books during their entire lifetime is 250 copies.  This second book (Irish Jesus) will be much longer than the first, though at this point I am not sure the number of pages it will turn out to be.  Thanks to everyone for your kind words, support and enthusiasm.  As always, Valerie Clark of Toronto has been offering all kinds of support from day one.

Thanks to those who have submitted ballots for the Top 100 All-Time Greatest film project, which ends on November 9th.  Bill kamberger’s tabulation will be completed a few days afterwards, and it will predate the upcoming Sight & Sound results.

Happy Halloween to all!

“Till,” “Tar,” “Decision to Leave” and “Triangle of Sadness” seen the last two days in area multiplexes.

In an effort to play catch-up after being diverted the past weeks, I employed Friday night and my entire Saturday to see FOUR (4) new releases in the Ridgefield Park and Clifton multiplexes. My 1 to 5 star ratings are as follows: TILL 5.0 of 5.0 ; TAR 4.5 of 5.0 ; DECISION TO LEAVE 4.0 of 5.0 ; TRIANGLE OF SADNESS 3.5 of 5.0. TILL features what I consider to be the premier lead performance by an actress this year by Danielle Deadwyler , who plays the real-life mother of a 14 year-old boy who was tortured, disfigured and murdered in 1955 Mississippi by white racists, who deliberately misinterpreted the Chicago boy’s compliment of a white woman working at a general store, who recalls Mayella Ewell from “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The film’s courtroom scenes are electrifying, and again many of us are reminded why when we hear the state of Mississippi mentioned, our blood boils. The film is beautifully mounted, shot and written, and director Chinonye Chukwu is correct to accentatute the grief-stricken emotions in scenes that will leave you sobbing in your seat. (5.0 of 5.0)

If not for anything else TAR should be commended for its audacious subject of a female classical music conductor, a narcissist -Lydia Tar – who beats to her own drum, stepping on anyone who gets in her way, but she receives the required support from her adopted daughter (Petra). The film features the exploitation wrought by some powerful people in the arts field, and Tar is abusive, though writer-director Todd Field isn’t pointing fingers, he’s just documenting in his fictional account of what is hidden behind the scenes. The film is art house to its core, and I see some Kubrick and Bergman here, both in the psychological interplay and compositional choices. Blanchett delivers a towering performance, which for me is a close second to Deadwyler’s. (4.5 of 5.0)

The Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS, is irresistibly entertaining, almost in a Gilligan’s Island sense, but the satire is sometimes overwrought, and the cynicism suffocating. Like director Ruben Ostlund, “The Square” the film eventually overstays its welcome, and it was a curious choice for top film at Cannes, but I still recommend it for its acidic attack on the wealthy, even factoring in its episodic straucture. (3.5 of 5.0)

The South Korean neo-noir, romantic thriller, DECISION TO LEAVE doesn’t pose anything new or revelatory -a detective falling for dead man’s mysterious wife – heck we even saw a variation on this theme in DEEP END, with Tilda Swinton, but despite the sometimes inaccessible and convoluted plot, director Park Chan-wook’s filmmaking skills result in a film that keeps you riveted, even while you are sometimes lost in truly understanding what is really going on. Tang Wei as Seo-rae is extraordinary as the anchor of a multlayered plot, and location-alluring work. The film does cry out for a second viewing, methinks. (4.0 of 5.0)

Jamie Uhler’s stupendous Horrorfest 2022 reviews continue here:

“The Terminal Man” (1974)

 

Vice Squad (G. Sherman… 1982) crime thriller/serial killer

Wings Hauser, it should be said, is one of my favorite B-actors, a quasi-ham in the era of Jeffrey Combs who sadly never had anyone near the talent of Stuart Gordon realize his many gifts like Combs got. Thus, all his truly great, unhinged efforts (Art of Dying, Coldfire, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, The Wind, Nightmare at Noon, etc) have collected dust, mostly as VHS only releases, or worse yet, standard def DVD only, lambasted by people in an ever increasing blu-ray high definition or steaming world. Nearly lost to the mainstream world is his great maniacal gifts, a humor of realizing seedy characters in seedier settings on threadbare budgets in a world that most cineastes look down their nose at and never dare go. Only above that slightly is Vice Squad, the one film that has become a staple of midnight screenings over the years and occasionally warranted real praise—Martin Scorsese, for example, supposedly being a massive fan. It’s a good introduction, a great film that without Wings Hauser’s central Ramrod pimp character wouldn’t be a movie at all (his name ‘Ramrod’ is perversely funny; it implies a brutal sex act/device while also being the moniker on his spare wheel hub adorning his immaculate Bronco seen early in the film… you see he’s not a jive urban pimp, put a deranged country-fried honky tonk one). While it’s a quick explanation, categorizing this one is both easy and difficult; it’s a pure adrenaline police procedural thriller, we watch vice cops doing their grimy jobs amidst a long night shift mostly spent busting pimps and harassing (and arresting) their prostitutes and the johns that employ them. But the difficulty streams from its truly magnificent lead, gonzo B-movie hero, Wings Hauser. Wings, as usual, catapults the thriller into something altogether different. Above I place it into a ‘serial killer’ tag, but he’s not stereotypically one, instead he’s just a murderous pimp, the type who goes 0-60 in an instant, a maniac that feels all confrontations need a near (or actual) murder to instantly solve. He speaks purely in threats of violence, and spends the movie driving everyone to tense life and death situations. Sherman wrings it all out beautifully, splitting the bulk of the films propulsion between whore Princess, who doesn’t know Ramrod has escaped the arrest she helped lead via wire tap and is hunting her and our desperate vice cops led by Tom, who do (and thus, race against time before he kills again). It makes it all very nerve racking, a film exhibiting considerable craft and style to pull it all off, and enough truly sadistic violence to properly ground it in the gutter. It’s one of my favorite pieces of Low Art trash, and after this most recent rewatch, finally considered Horror in my eyes. I pity those that have never seen it, but not as much as those that have and don’t consider it one of the 1980’s greatest films.

The Terminal Man (M. Hodges… 1974) sci-fi horror

Having covered Hodges very good, sadly underrated Black Rainbow (1989, its esteem further blurred by web searches disproportionally pushing you towards the Marvel movie of the same name from 2021) last year I decided to shore up a few blindspots in the British directors output. He only did 11 non-TV features (another 11 where on the small screen) and I’d seen all the big ones, a fact that left the whole enterprise the strange, confounding exercise I increasingly saw it as. Mainly, the idea that he essentially does some solid TV work which grants him the opportunity to do his debut theatrical release, Get Carter (1971), a gangster picture that many now call the greatest British crime movie ever made. You’d think with such quality right out of the gate he’d be offered the world from there, but instead does a somewhat middling post-modern genre romp (Pulp) and then Terminal Man—a film I hadn’t yet seen, which bombs and many critics lambast it—before a bunch of stuff beneath his intellectual level (Damien: Omen II [uncredited direction, plus he wrote the script], Flash Gordon) to decades of forgotten TV work. Cropier (1998) and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003) both nearly return him to his rightful place, they’re both pretty good and easily found. In between is the already covered, nearly lost Black Rainbow which I thought magical, furthering my disbelief of how such a great director’s career went so awry. Well, now seeing the one in there that left him without a completed film for more than half a decade the mystery becomes only greater to me.

That’s because The Terminal Man so bowled me over—it is, with Get Carter and Black Rainbow, the third film of his three complete masterpieces in my eyes, a film so assuredly well made, stylish and thought out that Hodges should’ve spent the 70’s rivaling Kubrick and Roeg for greatest working UK directors. But it didn’t do that, instead it came and went and has been pretty much buried in time, a fact even star George Segal’s recent passing couldn’t correct. Segal’s inclusion is why it was believed to have failed, he was a comedic actor and Terminal Man was his first work outside that. It’s a chilly, calculating picture, the story of a computer scientist Harry (Segal) who, in having blackouts from reoccurring seizures—seizures that lead to him committing violent acts, is arrested. While in custody, to correct the spells, he’s offered and agrees to an experimental procedure known as ‘Stage Three’, an operation where electrodes are implanted in his brain and a small nuclear powering device is put into his shoulder, effectively allowing his brain (and therefor body) to be controlled by a technician nearby operating a computer. But therein lies the problem—he’s a brilliant computer scientist but his violent seizures had build up a conspiratorial nature in his psychosis, a belief that computers were about to rise up and kill all of humanity (plus, you know the procedure has never been done on humans). Now implanted and effectively controlled by a computer, it ratchets up this derangement in his head and coupled with his brain becoming addicted to the computer sensory impulses, brings about blackout seizures every few hours. The film, always as centered on the inner workings of the futuristic experimental lab that devised the operation (a set piece that carries roughly the first half of the film), then becomes a Horrific film as we watch all the doctors and police nonchalantly attempt to (mostly) cover up the fact that the uncontrollable modern day computer Frankenstein they’ve created has easily escaped the Hospital and is on the loose.

Given its sci-fi bent, the film shares sensibilities with a few very good, similar cutting edge genre films of its day. The woefully underseen The Happiness Cage (1972) and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) chief among them. Kubrick was a great admirer of Hodges’ Get Carter, and, as the story goes, was willing to help push positive press after seeing—and loving—the newly released Terminal Man after that. He’d have surely liked the chilling operatic set-piece of the brain implanting procedure, it’s less visceral to his similar idea in the techniques in Clockwork Orange where Alex’s eyes are kept open and pills ingested into his bloodstream. But its lengthy buildup draws out the cavalier nature in exactness and arrogance that the medical community has. To them it’s merely a technological breakthrough to be had, another animal to experiment on and roll the dice. Its outcome produces the reason I place it saddling the Horror and Sci-Fi genres, Hodges’ film blurs the futuristic nature of his setting a lot more than Kubrick does, making it all seem a bit more real, a bit closer to our world in time and place. It’s nearly 50 years old now, its themes becoming rather old hat, a future long since realized and passed by. Kubrick, in his next scary picture, The Shining, respected and paid back Terminal Man’s borrowing of Clockwork Orange with his own; Harry, in a violent seizured state, hunts the one person willing to help him, his psychiatrist Dr. Janet Ross (played with warmth and compassion by Joan Hackett). As she hides, cowering with fear in her shower Harry pounds through the bathroom door, finally breaking through only to fully black out and fall back to pained normalcy. In a whiff Kubrick is given the idea for Jack Torrence to hack away in search of murdering his wife while screaming, “Here’s… Johnny!”. It’s as iconic a scene in all of Horror and it originates in a film thrown on the forgotten bin of cinema history. It’s too bad, it deserves a lot better.

Death Weekend (W. Fruet… 1976) psychological thriller/exploitation

If yesterday’s film was “a Canadian version of Deliverance” I’d probably similarly say that today’s is “a Canadian version of Straw Dogs” with an additional caveat that it’s also very much an exploitation picture, a mark showing that it’s taking an already rather aggressive Peckinpah masterpiece and adding an additional dollop of lurid rawness and grime. The Peckinpah is that to a degree, but the inclusion of bookish David, played by Dustin Hoffman in full milksop glory, strikes the film out in new intellectual terrain that makes for cerebral fodder to this day (though, to be fair, Peckinpah’s standing as a major American filmmaker has really wained on generations younger than mine sadly). Straw Dogs really questions manhood, and ponders what makes a man ‘a man’ when the stakes are ratcheted up and preconceived traditional ideas of ‘manhood’ are necessary to bring about safety or prompt a discourse back towards a more civilized one. Death Weekend takes that baton and strips it to the core, presenting an idea of masculinity that all men are more or less dangerous predators with only the way they prey on their victims differentiating them, and women need to be ingenious in combating the next leering turn. It’s as if the central rape sequence in Straw Dogs was outfitting into an entire feature length film, where every activity from a man—both professional or personal—a mere attempt to engage in rough (often unwanted) sex with the opposite sex.

Given it does need to fill 90 minutes, it’s a testament to Death Weekend‘s ingenuity and commentary that it’s able to wring so much from just one of Straw Dog‘s many ideas. It opens with our two leads, oral surgeon Harry and part-time model Diane driving out to his remote, rural Ontario county house for a weekend retreat with friends. Everything is a brag to show off his wealth and affluence, most readily his newly bought pristine Corvette. Diane, a motor enthusiast, asks to take a turn behind the wheel and quickly shows herself to be a much better driver, a helpful addition once a red ’67 Camaro driven by hedonistic and dumb locals begins trying to run them off the road. Two great American muscle cars pitted against each other is a great euphemism for unhinged masculinity, so that when Diane outdrives the goons, Camaro driver Lep intermingles coming sexual assault with motoring via a foreboding quip, “I’m gonna ram a supercharger up her ass”. Once the Camaro finds Harry and Diane at the country house—it’s a weekend retreat we’ve just learned was itself a lie, Harry hand’t invited anyone and was merely looking to score with Diane in the sleaziest way imaginable—we’re in for a pretty scary final hour or so that is ripe with deeper readings and many terrifying moments.

Horror wrought from the perspective of female sexuality is a common enough Horror trope—The Blood Splattered Bride (1972) and Repulsion (1965) most readily—and here it approaches its most primal form. From pumping pistons, Chekhov’s (shot)gun, to two way pervert mirrors, everything is a physical manifestation of the dangerous male gaze. Brenda Vaccaro’s Diane then must be a strong central female lead, and she is, in one of this years most rewarding first time watches. Essential.

Rituals (P. Carter… 1977) psychological thriller/slasher

It’s always quite interesting to read when good genre films have a litany of names, a fact indicating they were released in an era of the drive-in theater or early home-video. Across markets a simple title change could potential sway a watch or link a film to another for a theatrical pairing, one film sheepishly trying to grab a few bucks from another. Rituals has one, also known as The Creeper, which points that the film is potentially a pretty straight-forward early slasher. I didn’t know that, and I think going in with that would’ve robbed the film a bit of its power. Instead, reading ‘Rituals‘ and seeing the film’s opening (at least) first half where it’s couched in an incredibly darker turn pays off. There it’s the tale of five friends reconnecting on a remote Canadian wilderness (Northern Ontario to be exact*) camping trip for its obvious, oft-stated cinema connection, that is to say, “a Canadian version of Deliverance“. The friends are both deeply close to each other will also being incredibly remote—they’re all surgeons who met at medical school but their medical days are long behind them or have been greatly altered in the decades since. Some have stuck to performing medical procedures; ethical lives spent helping people and wishing to cure ailments, while others have gone into the corporate world of cushy jobs and advising new devices or procedures. Soon, their professional disagreements swell—they’re nothing but metaphors to how they’ve changed over time—and once compounded by only one camper of the 5 properly packing, disaster mounts. It seems that there is someone else lurking in these remote woods and it’ll take all their ingenuity to get back to civilization. Problem is, to my point on how this film was sometimes alternatively titled as a(n arty) slasher, they all won’t return safely, and the discussions on their past decisions become highly pointed commentary on male relationships. It’s why I like it titled Rituals, as here is a film using slasher tropes but also very much intellectually stimulating; in the hopes of reconnecting via a very male ritual, they’ve put themselves in unnecessary peril. A real lost treasure that, if you like camping, will never be the same activity again after screening.

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