Avenue Kurtodrome

As you may have noticed, it’s Valentine’s Day today. In case you were aware but think the whole day is far too mushy, don’t worry: here’s my suggestion for an Alternative Valentine’s Day Film Festival.

1. KISSED
(R: Lynne Stopkewich, CAN, 1996)

Kissed is a romantic movie, be it with a twist: while Sandra Larson (Molly Parker) loves boys, she prefers them when dead. Which is why it’s pretty handy she works in a mortuary. A beautiful film on love (if you can look past the necrophilia, but that’s just a detail). When I saw this film in Antwerp at a late night screening, I was the only one in the theatre. A shame as this was one of the most impressive films of the nineties. For Kissed is as beautiful as it’s morbid. Fine performances by Parker (accidently, this movie is how I discovered her) and Peter Outerbridge make this, Lynne Stopkewich’s debut, so outstanding. Not to be missed.

2. BLUE VELVET
(R: David Lynch, USA, 1986)

The movie starts in a idyllic place, but the camera moves to a grass field and shows an ear, neatly cut off and (if I remember correctly) with some ants walking over it… David Lynch has always had a peculiar relationship with love and romance. Remember Eraserhead, the boy who didn’t have a grandmother and decided to grow one himself in Lynch’s short The Grandmother or the truckload of fetishes on display in Twin Peaks.
The scene where Isabella Rosselini is forced by Dennis Hopper while Kyle MacLachlan is forced to watch everything in the closet may give you an alternative idea for things to do on your Valentine’s night. Violent and perverse, not the sort of movie most people would classify as ‘romantic’. But we do.

3. LA MORTE VIVANTE a.k.a. THE LIVING DEAD GIRL
(R: Jean Rollin, FR, 1982)

A leak of radioactive gas is the reason a girl comes back to life. The only problem is that now she’s a zombie, she can only survive on fresh human blood. No problem, her lesbian lover will take care of that… It’s Feb 14 and we were talking about love and can it get more romantic than killing people or give your own blood so that your lover can survive? I didn’t think so.
La Morte Vivante, being a Rollin movie, focuses luridly on nudity (you might argue whether Rollin had a fetish for nude women or if his budget was so tiny there just wasn’t any money for clothes) and the blood is way too read to be even slightly convincible (mind you, Rollin’s Zombie Lake featured people with green paint on their face and forced us to believe they were zombies… so we really shouldn’t complain too much about redness here), but all that doesn’t matter. On a romantic scale, this third film of our festival will get the highest points. On a quality scale, not. Then again, if you watch all three movies in a row, it’s already way passed bedtime when you’re watching La Morte Vivante and that’s exactly when you should watch this sort of movie.

A Giant Animal movie with a difference: Tarantula

Why is it different?

Tarantula isn’t the first giant monster to rent a room in the Kurtodrome Vault, but it’s special for a lot of reasons. We’ve talked about the 50s sci-fi genre before and how many of those films contained giant monsters and usually sucked. Tarantula is, take or leave a few poorer scenes, a pretty good film directed by Jack Arnold, director of other sci-fi classics such as Creature of the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Tarantula has often been likened to Them!, the giant ant movie made only one year earlier, but Jack Arnold denies Them! was an influence. And not just because here we have one spider doesn’t exactly equal several giant ants.
Most sci-fi movies from the fifties had giant animals as a result of nuclear tests. In many movies the killer creatures were nothing more but an allegory: if you bear in mind that these movies were made in the McCarthy era, it’s not difficult to see who the evil animals (or aliens) attacking good honest Americans were supposed to depict. Yes, kids, if we can get those Martians off our soil, we can sure handle the evil commies.
Tarantula’s tarantula isn’t gigantic because of a nuclear test going haywire, nor is the spider a KGB spy. The person we’ll have to blame for this monster, is a professor who wanted to make sure your children’s children would have something to eat. After all, the more people will walk on this planet, the less food there’ll be per person or something along those lines.
The solution is simple: make sure the animals grow in size. Now the professor’s experiments were paying off as you can see from this spycam footage:

Now I can understand why he wanted to create bigger rabbits, but why the heck a giant tarantula? You can just guess what this means: it means that the professor’s assistant who tried some of the professor’s potion will be angry because on human the stuff only has one effect (the face deforms) and he’ll pick a fight with the professor. In this fight the safety glass of the tarantula’s cage will break and the beast will escape, killing lots of people and animals.
What do you mean: you couldn’t guess that? Oh well, that’s what happens and then only one thing needs to be done: the tarantula must be destroyed.

Anything else good?

Yes, the acting is not bad and the special effects deserve some praise: a few scenes aside, the effects are quite believable.

Nearly fifty years later the film is bound to lose some of its credibility, but overall is nothing to be ashamed for. And as the sole non-nuclear giant animal from the fifties it even gets a special place in the vault. Sure, you’ll never have time to see all the masterpieces of the world, but rest assured, there are a lot of worse things to do than renting Tarantula.

PRE-REVIEW INTRODUCTION (a.k.a. rant)
This weekend I got a letter from someone who said she liked my reviews over at the IMDb. I’d considered never posting there again because of their new system where you can vote whether you think a comment is useful or not.
I don’t mind criticism, but that system is so stupid… I’ve already complained about my experience with Ta****ino fans (they didn’t like my mocking their deity, so surfed to my other reviews and clicked the ‘not useful’ button on those because someone who doesn’t like Ta****ino couldn’t write good reviews… they even mailed me to tell me this).
Secondly, apparently the IMDb is visited by lots of people who only think a comment is useful if you share their ideas about the film. (In my opinion - call me foolish - a comment is useful when it says something, whether you agree with the reviewer or not.) Anyway, some teen saying he liked the movie because it’s fun and the actress is so hot got 10 out of 12 people to say the review was useful. My post where I said what I liked and didn’t like about the film was deemed useful by 2 out of 4 people.

So I decided not to post there anymore, until this weekend when I read that mail… surely if someone bothers to read your review and then follows the link to read your other reviews, that means something. I could describe the feeling or post an emoticon that would explain it all, but I’ll leave it to your imagination.
So I posted my most recent review on my website. Over there I’ve created a Vault for 30 movies which either deserve extra attention or which are unfairly given a bad reputation.

I knew that Orca had a bad reputation and I don’t think it’s a bad film. I knew lots of people hated the film, I knew I wrote a good review (it clearly states why I like it) and I posted it last night… within 12 hours it was read and deemed not useful.

So before we go on, let me rewrite the review for any IMDb voters out here:
Orca is a film about a big animal. It also has Charlotte Rampling and Bo Derek in it. They are hotties. I liked the scene where one of them took her clothes off. There was also a plot, but I didn’t notice that. Too busy staring at Charlotte’s titties, huh huh huh.

Anyways…

ORCA, THE REVIEW
(Discerning enthusiasts can read the review over at the Vault to see pictures and other films)

Depending on where you live, Orca is either shown all the time or never it all. The film has an incredibly bad reputation and in fact this does not really come as a surprise: this is a film by Michael Anderson, the director of Logan’s Run (another film with a bad reputation). I’ll try and explain why I think Orca worked for me.

It is very hard (or even impossible) to label Orca (also known as Orca: Killer Whale). What exactly is this film? It’s a drama, a love story, an odyssey, a revenge film and then you haven’t thrown in the scientific bits and its flirting with exploitation. Films that can’t be labelled are often not very good. Compare it to the proverb “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. If you try to flavour your film with ingredients of many genres, you often end up with a dinner that doesn’t taste good at all. But just like there are cooks which are able to mingle the weirdest ingredients and end up with a yummy dish, some directors are talented enough to make a film that goes beyond genre conventions. Anderson is such a director. “Logan’s Run” and “Orca” are both examples of genreless films. Logan’s Run never decides whether it’s a sci-fi adventure story or a love drama. Orca, as I mentioned above, has no clue whatsoever of what sort of a film it is. That is what makes the film so fragile. You’re not supposed to expect anything when watching the film or you might end up bitterly disappointed.

The first images of Orca are extremely beautiful. We see a couple of orcas making out in the middle of the ocean. The sky is beautifully photographed and it gives you a fuzzy feeling. The first human being we see is Charlotte Rampling, diving and trying to avoid a shark. The sight of Charlotte Rampling is virtually always a sign you’re watching a cult movie. In a filmography of over 65 films Rampling has starred in dozens of essential cult films (including the highly controversial The Night Porter). Furthermore, she’s a good actress. Rampling’s character blocks Richard Harris’s attempt to kill the shark. He is a hunter, she is a biologist. Both are intrigued by each other: she would like to know how someone who’s always at sea knows so little about his surroundings, he wants to know more about the orca they’ve seen. Harris ends up catching the female orca and (in one of the most painful scenes of the seventies) it turns out she was pregnant. The male orca is the perfect example of the lover who swears a pitiless revenge.

Though a lot of the scientific mumbojumbo in the film is apparently nonsense that just sounded good, the film’s tagline gives you a good sense of what to expect: “The killer whale is one of the most intelligent creatures in the universe. Incredibly, he is the only animal other than man who kills for revenge. He has one mate, and if she is harmed by man, he will hunt down that person with a relentless, terrible vengeance - across seas, across time, across all obstacles.”

Though Orca is mainly a revenge film and an almost mythical clash between two heavyweights (Harris and the orca), Anderson’s film doesn’t just show orca revenging his wife plus man hunting orca. I fear such a film would end up either boring or a rip-off of Jaws. Some have already dismissed Orca as a rip-off, but those viewers obviously didn’t pick up on everything else in the film. The characters (even the orca) are not one-dimensional and so their personas are explored. That does stand in the way of a revenge tale, but Orca doesn’t care. The film shows how characters cope with being in such a situation and therefore takes time to explore other parts of the characters. If you must, label it as a mythical drama.

The film is also helped by a wonderful soundtrack of Ennio Morricone. Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling are great in their roles and alongside them you have Bo Derek in her debut role (a few years before she’d become a sex symbol with films as 10 and Bolero). Bo Derek turned down the leading role in the King Kong remake, going for a mythical orca rather than a giant ape.

I hope I warmed you up for Orca. When you see it, do not forget this most important advice: do not expect anything. Just sit down and follow the myth. And who knows, you might enjoy it.

Hollow Triumph (also known as The Scar) is a very good film noir that’s often missing from Essential Noir lists, usually only because it’s not very well known. Now whereas we could debate for hours whether this movie deserves a place in those lists or not (or debate on which noirs absolutely need to go in those lists), why don’t we just take a closer look at the film?

The story so far…
Johnny Muller is a criminal, planning to rob a casino with the help of a few friends and two cars. The robbery doesn’t go too well and only the car with Johnny and ‘Marcy’ manages to escape. They hide as it’s all too clear that the casino people will do all to get their money back.
Hiding wasn’t such a bad idea, Johnny finds out: one day the newspaper shows a picture of ‘Marcy’ shot on the streets. No points for guessing who’s behind it. Johnny is looking for a way out and finds one when a man on the streets takes the gangster for Dr. Bartok, a psychiatrist. Johnny pays a visit to the doctor’s office where even Bartok’s secretary mistakes Johnny for her boss, till she observes the one difference that can distinguish the lookalikes: Bartok has a scar on his cheek.
Johnny takes a picture of Bartok and uses all his surgical knowledge to copy the scar on his cheek. Unfortunately, due to a mix-up at the photo lab, the photo’s printed the wrong way round and Johnny finds himself with the scar on the wrong cheek. But who really pays that much attention to people’s faces?

So it’s a film noir then…
Yes, it is. We have the gangster looking for a way out, the femme fatale (the secretary) with no faith left in mankind and we get a hard-boiled vision on life: who really cares about good and bad? Who really observes other people?
Ask yourself the question: would you notice a scar moving to the other side of a person’s face? That person is still there, the scar’s still there and let’s face it: scars can’t move, can they?

Summing up…
Hollow Triumph a.k.a. The Scar is a sadly overlooked noir. While it’s not going to make it to the top 20 of Best Noirs Ever it has essential noir qualities and is quite a good film. It should definitely be part of your Essential Noir Top 100 (possible even Top 50).
The director, Steve Sekely,is best known for directing The Day of the Triffids and doesn’t have too many noir credentials, but all that is made up by the actress in this film: Joan Bennett played in a lot of noirs in the 40s (incl. The Reckless Moment, Secret Beyond The Door and Woman in the Window) and had a career that lasted many decades (her final movie performance was in Dario Argento’s Suspiria). Paul Henreid played in over 50 movies, his best-known performance is probably Victor Laszlo in Casablanca.

Hollow Triumph (a.k.a. The Scar)
(USA, 1948)
Directed by Steve Sekely
With Paul Henreid, Joan Bennett

It is currently out on Region 1 DVD, it is part of the Classic Film Noir box with 9 movies (incl. D.O.A., Detour and The Hitch-Hiker).