Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on February 13th, 2009
A few days ago (and with my advancing age and failing memory, I cannot now recall precisely where), I read a commentator who essentially bemoaned the fact that every single piece of celluloid dreck ever to hit the grindhouse, drive-in, or VHS remainder bin is now being repackaged as a “Cult Classic” on DVD. There is something to this criticism, but I would argue that, in the final analysis, this is no bad thing.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 11th, 2009
Welcome to 1972, when the sexual revolution is simultaneously in full swing, yet also showing signs of exhaustion (all that swinging can wear a body down, don’t you know). Barbi (Anna Biller) is a model housewife who is awakening to the feeling that there is a world outside her four walls. When she and her husband have a falling out, she hooks up with her more extroverted neighbour Sheila (Bridget Brno), who is also in the midst of a marriage crisis, and the two of them seek new love by taking work at an escort agency. What follows is a picaresque series of encounters, with nary a sexploitation angle ignored.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on February 7th, 2009
This past weekend, the Goya Awards were handed out. These are Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars. And during those awards, there was a moment that, for followers of mainstream film, must surely portend the End of Days, but which for fans of psychotronic or paracinema is tantamount to the Raputre itself: the lifetime achievement award was presented to Jess Franco.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 4th, 2009
Hedda and Neal (Lydia Lunch and Don Bajema) are a couple whose relationship needs work. They have retreated to an old plantation house for precisely that reason, but then Hedda invites over her former lover, Jackson (Henry Rollins). The inevitable triangle that occurs is intercut with flashes of other events from the house’s past.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 3rd, 2009
Director Rene Daalder is best known in cult film circles as the man who gave us Massacre at Central High. But now Cult Epics has released a pair of his films (this and Here Is Always Somewhere Else) that seem more in keeping with his real interests. A long and twisting road led to this effort, starting with an abortive collaboration with Russ Meyer and the Sex Pistols, which brought Daalder into the world of punk rock. In that field he met Tomata Du Plenty, vocalist for The Screamers. After funding for their proposed collaboration Mensch collapsed and Du Plenty’s HIV-positive status became apparent, they put together the present film out of a mixture of footage from the abandoned project, plus new elements. The striking result is Du Plenty as the last survivor of nuclear holocaust, holed up in his bunker, declaming/singing poetic rants about the history of the United States, all the while surrounded by a phantasmagoria of bizarre sights. Whether the result is compelling or pretentious (or both) will depend on one’s sympathies with respect to the art scene from which it emerges, but that it is a work that rigorously works out its conceptual and artistic premises all the way to the end cannot be denied.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 3rd, 2009
This is another of Cult Epics’ entries in their new Rene Daalder Collection. His most recent film, it’s a documentary about conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader. The brief body of work he left behind is best known for using gravity as a medium (so, for instance, he did a number of filmed pieces of himself or objects falling). He was lost at sea in1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic in a minuscule boat as part of a piece to called “In Search of the Miraculous.” Daalder’s 68-minute film retraces Ader’s life, but does so in part through the filter of Daalder’s own parallel experiences as an expatriate Dutch artist. The film is very interesting, though I would have like a bit more analysis of Ader’s work, in order to have a better understanding of exactly what it was doing, and Daalder’s speculations about what Ader’s final thoughts might have been are a little too definitive. Still, a strong documentary.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 31st, 2009
If ever there was a release whose title told you everything you need to know, this is it. Yup, the second part of season 5. There you go. Which is in no way a condemnation. Well over four hours of prime silliness is reason enough to pick this up. Unless, of course, you have picked up any of the other recent SpongeBob releases, in which case the curse of double-dipping will likely befall you. Many of these episodes have already been released on the shorter compilation discs. If you held off until now, though, this is a wonderful fix for nautical nonsense junkies.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on January 30th, 2009
Not one to let being late to the party get in the way of verbiage, allow me now to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Though it has, in some quarters, been referred to as the anti-Twilight, but such a designation does no justice at all to a film as complex, witty, moving and gloriously horrific as this one.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 27th, 2009
Here we go with four more cruel experiments inflicted on Joel, Mike, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot on the Satellite of Love. The Mad Monster is a 1942 proverty row epic with George Zucco as a mad scientist giving future Frankenstein Monster Glenn Strange transfusions of wolf blood, with predictable results. Manhunt in Space is a Rocky Jones, Space Ranger adventure – multiple TV episodes pasted together into one dreadful piece of SF idiocy. Soultaker has the unfortunate Joe Estevez, under the orders from Angel of Death Robert Z’Dar, tracking down four teens who are supposed to have died in a car crash. Finally, Final Justice sees Joe Don Baker as a Texas Ranger confronting the mob in Malta. But of course.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 27th, 2009
So there's this group of flight attendants, and we follow their swinging adventures and affairs on and off planes. One, for instance, hopes to be an actress, and hooks up with an advertising executive. And if you care what the plot of “the first 3D sex film” is, you need your head examined. Much of the what goes on is mind-numbingly banal (SEE Wine being poured SEE Drinks being mixed HEAR Dull conversations ), though the acid trip that leads one woman to make out with a lamp in the form of a greco-roman head is something you don't see every day.
