RAGs film report 6: Final part, I know you cant be bothered but I have a duty

I’m going to make this as brief as possible because I honestly cant be bothered writing about all this and I need to get onto more important things but I would feel guilty for not passing on the word about some of these films. I’ve edited the first post in this series to be less annoying, long winded with good pictures because those films really do need to be seen by everyone.

This will be the last post in the series for a very long time hopefully, I’ve been trying to stay away from movies but I hope eventually there will be more films in the future that do not stick to the conventional length and structure, which is my biggest beef against movies. I also hope someday the will be dazzling fantastical arthouse surrealist movies with huge budgets, because arthouse should not be synonymous with cheap.

I have a little bit of optimism that there will be some of the films I’ve always wanted to see will come in the future, so all the things I expected of older films might still happen yet, there is a lot of good directors who are past their prime and follow a predictable routine but maybe they will break out of that and do their best work unexpectedly,, but otherwise I’m excited by the idea of a long future of films by Tsukamoto, Lynch, Kim Ki Duk, Greg Araki, Del Toro, Laugier and Sion Sono. I’ve still not investigated guys like Fassbinder, Goddard, Bunuel and loads others because I’m impatient with films that don’t inspire me visually, but I have discovered a few times there are prominent directors right under my nose who I ignored but I end up liking far more than I ever imagined I would. I’ll do that someday when I’m next in the mood for a film binge.


- KIM KI DUK is entirely worth the hype. I’ve saw something like 7 or 8 of his films and have never been let down, certainly one of the most consistently good directors I’ve ever encountered, I’m usually turned off by quiet arthouse social commentary but this guy is never boring. I’m amazed how much shit he gets for his portrayals of women, because they are obviously extremely sensitive and thoughtful to the suffering women. SPRING SUMMER FALL WINTER AND SPRING is incredible as everyone says and TIME would be my second suggestion. I would like to see everything.


- I’m not really big on Yakuza movies but I like MIIKE and I think the best thing about him is how versatile he is and I wish more people knew that he can do any type of film. I also recently saw one of his more typical films: the Masters of Horror episode IMPRINT which you can buy by itself. Some of the acting is a bit off and it often feels weirdly stagey but it has some really great imagery and the extreme torture scenes and abortion imagery somehow look quite lovely at times.

BIRD PEOPLE OF CHINA has a Yakuza in it but it is a really beautiful soft story set in Chinese mountains. I don’t know how to summarise it, but it’s very funny in places, I’ll just say it is beautiful and hope you watch it.
GREAT YOKAI WAR is one of the best family films I have ever seen. Some of the cgi is abysmal and there is a lot of really fake looking make-up but the fascinating enormous variety of charming monsters and epic last half of the film more than make up for it, the grandeur parts at the end of the film make me come close to crying, for some reason sweeping grandeur makes me cry, that’s why I listen to symphonic music.


- I really quite like TARSEM SINGH. I like how he has arty ideals but tries his best to get great production values to boost his vision. THE FALL didn’t have the most interesting narrative but is well worth watching for the epic visuals. THE CELL really surprised me, how could a film with Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn be so dark and weird? It has some really amazing costumes and dream imagery. I look forward to Singh’s upcoming fantastical films which might get wider screenings since the new one has Mickey Rourke.

- To be fair to Vince Vaughn, there was a film called THE LOCUSTS/A SECRET SIN that was also really dark, weird, quite depressing and has an oppressive atmosphere. The director was called John Patrick Kelley, this was his only film and I wish he would do more. I wonder what happened to him? I only saw 20 mintues of this film but it made a strong impression, there has been a lot of reviews commenting on bad acting but I didn’t notice any at the time. Ashley Judd looks like an angel in it.
There was another vaguely similar film with Judd looking amazing again called Passion of Darkly Noon which was pretty good. The films of Philip Ridley came to my attention recently because of the bizarre inexplicable rave reviews of Heartless which was a below average faustian tale of the type I have seen endless times. I really don’t like to kick a small director who others are trying claim is an obscure genius, but Passion of Darkly Noon is very nice but not the gem I was led to believe it was, Reflecting Skin was interesting but spoiled by bad child actors and Heartless was extremely clichéd and had very little to recommend it.


- I really like some of Michael Powell. BLACK NARCISSUS was probably the best argument I’ve ever seen for making epic scale films indoors, really sexy too with some really great gothic horror imagery at the end. Peeping Tom is probably better than Psycho.



- TIDELAND and FISHER KING are the best films GILLIAM ever done.



- GREGG ARAKI is one of my top 5 directors, a thing I like about his films is that the beautiful teen characters who are often a bit obnoxious and stupid are the type of people I kind of wish I had as friends sometimes, especially in my mid to late teens, I really longed for that type of company and wondered if those groups of friends ever really existed and I still wonder about it, it seems like a distant fantasy world to me.
It’s incredible how polarising his films are, even a lot of his fans hate some of his films, but I’ve never understood that, I really like them all. DOOM GENERATION and MYSTERIOUS SKIN are his key films and although they can be pretty miserable, it still looks like a sort of odd desirable fantasy lifestyle to me.
One of the most important things is that Araki’s films introduced me to the world of dreampop/ethereal/shoegazing music, at the end of Doom Generation hearing Slowdive was one of the most important moments of my life, just like the day I leafed through the pages of a book showing Ditko’s Creeper and an EC comic cover, it was like a siren calling to me from billions of miles away showing me worlds I never knew existed but where I knew I needed to be. You’ll never forget the ending of that film.
Kaboom is his new film and it should be out soon.


- I had mentioned in the first post that LOVE EXPOSURE is one of the best films ever made, and later I saw a few other SION SONO films, one was a decent horror comedy called Exte but far better was NORIKOS DINNER TABLE, which had a similarly long length and structure to Love Exposure but with more serious drama, it is sort of a sequel to Suicide Circle but it stands alone just fine and feels nothing like the first part. It was really impressive.


- THE SHOUT is a bizarre 70s film about a man who can shout fatally loud, it has really great acting and it stands among the best weird films ever made in that era. John Hurt is in it.
BLACK MOON is another crazy 70s film but far more surreal with a talking horse and an old lady who likes to be breast fed. I had to buy a Louis Malle boxed set for it but I wasn’t interested in any of his other films.

- Crazy Lips is not a great film but it has a newsreader in a leotard playing with a dildo and a girl being forced by her family to have sex with the hanged corpse of her father that still has an erection while a criminal sodomises her.

- I watched a lot of old classic Japanese horror films like Horrors of Malformed Men, Jigoku and I don’t think many of them lived up to their reputations. I quite liked the Shindo films Onibaba and Kuroneko, of which the latter I think is really the better even though I loved the grass landscape of the former. Hausu/House was fascinating at points and I thought it would be a favourite but something was missing. KWAIDAN was probably the best of that era I saw, which is quite long and it has some fascinating vaguely humorous yet eerie singing, some great visuals too. I’ve still yet to see Blind Beast/Moju and Ghost of Yotsuya.

Even though they are not great films I feel compelled to write about the Japanese Dracula trilogy because there is so little talk of it on the internet somehow, you can buy them in a boxed set. They are blatant attempts to be like Hammer movies and seeing a Japanese attempt at this is what makes them attractive, I’ll talk about them in the order they came out...
Legacy of Dracula is the closest to a traditional Japanese ghost story, with a very Japanese ghostly vampire girl with golden eyes, it is okay but there is no Dracula even in it, I have a feeling they really wanted to stick closer to something Japanese but maybe a lack of success made them go more western in the next two.

LAKE OF DRACULA is one of the most beautiful and intriguing film titles I have ever heard of and the name is what made me want to see it for years because the idea of a lake being the home of Dracula really got my imagination going. Sadly Dracula actually lives in a house nearby a lake, but this is by far the best of the trilogy. Dracula has golden eyes, he looks fantastic, shouts and growls more than any Dracula I’ve ever seen. Visually pleasing, as good as one of the better Hammer films, but I don’t rate Hammer that highly.

Evil of Dracula is longer, more violent and has more nudity, but it is somehow really boring and by far the worst of the three. None of the vampires have golden eyes and the settings are less atmospheric. There is one visually striking scene in the film when a vampire girl cuts the face of a sleeping girl off and wears it convincingly as her new face while a crow sits beside them watching, this is the only thing worth watching it for and it is only brief and sticks out almost as if a better director taken over for those 2 minutes, but the whole trilogy is by the same director.



-There were two MARIO BAVA box sets but be wary of the second one, it has more films but the quality of the films is far lower. After seeing and loving BLACK SUNDAY, BLACK SABBATH and KILL BABY KILL(a really shit western title for a gothic horror) I was really let down by most of his other films, but those three I liked are a far better option than the Hammer horrors and gothic Corman films. It is really worth listening to commentaries and reading about Bava because some of his filmmaking techniques are jaw dropping when you find out how he did some scenes.


- If you liked the madness of NICOLAS CAGE in Bad Lieutenant and Wild At Heart, you have to see a really great film called VAMPIRES KISS about a yuppie who becomes convinced he is a vampire, it is actually very similar to American Psycho but long before it. I was in disbelief at the way he acts in this, it is hilarious but it does get a bit serious in a surprising way. His performance in Peggy Sue Got Married is also really odd and he makes a far more interesting popular high school prom king than anyone I’ve ever seen.


- The original BLACK CHRISTMAS is one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen, do not be put off because it’s termed a slasher film, it is probably the first one ever made and actually quite scary. Bob Clark also made Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, which is a nice little zombie film he was planning to remake before he died.


- In animation I highly recommend the QUAY BROTHERS films, PAPRIKA and PERFECT BLUE by SATOSHI KON, Tale of the Fox by Starewicz is a really impressive early stop-motion film, most of his films are on youtube because the dvds are rare.

- I recently showed Daughters of Darkness to my brother and he wasn’t impressed by it much and I was amazed how much his impression changed my own after we discussed it, but I still love the scene when Countess Bathory scratches and strokes the chest of a man sitting on a chair as she hangs over him while he describes the tortures she had done hundreds of years ago while his wife screams in disgust, I found it funny and strangely arousing.

- I was really impressed by City of Lost Children, I wish there were more films like that. Anyone else think the videogame Bioshock looks a lot like it?

- I recently bought the 67 episode 14 disc boxed set of Boris Karloff’s Thriller, it was extremely expensive and although it is a high quality show, I regretted it. It was often said to be the best show ever made in the Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and Masters of Horror tradition, always talked of as a horror show and the box leads you to believe it was all horror, but in truth it is a crime and mystery show (not of the gruesome variety) and there is only roughly 10 episodes of proper horror. As I said, the show is good, but it is NOT really a horror show. I was attracted to it because it had adaptations of August Derleth and Robert E Howard classic horror stories, but there was not nearly enough of it to justify buying it.


- Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide is a documentary with interviews from directors, fans, critics, journalists and politicians about the censorship of horror films in the 80s in Britain. The main part of the dvd is the documentary about fabrications, gross exaggeration, spreading of lies, idiocy and incompetence that made it really scary to be a gore film fan at the time. There is an interviews with a person who possibly still believes that real people were actually killed in these mostly very shoddy and unconvincing films, and there is a journalist who did a lot of research and investigations into the cases and I think he forms the backbone of the film because he makes a brilliant damning attack against people who completely taken advantage of the public and will gladly do it again and again.
72 of the outlawed films are reviewed across 2 discs and it is funny how many of the films had nothing in any way extreme about them (police were sometimes mistaking films like Apocalypse Now and Best Little Whorehouse In Texas for horror films) or are completely laughable in every way. Funny how even fans of the genre think that more than half of these films are awful. So if you are a beginner to horror films and expect this to be a guide to a host of harrowing nightmarish films, prepare to have your hopes and dreams crushed like I did in my teens.

- More than most of the 70s-80s horror film directors, I really like TOBE HOOPER and it really saddens me to hear the reputation of his 90s-00s films and the difficulties he has had considering he did TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and SALEMS LOT. But even though they have terrible reputations I recently heard someone highly recommend Night Terrors and that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a huge fan of Spontaneous Combustion. I really want it to work out for him, he recently made an enormous claim about the power of his upcoming films will have and I wonder if he has a right to be so confident.
I think Funhouse is a nice film that has another of his child-like monsters from an outsider family, the main character is really cute I think. Eaten Alive/Death Trap is quite underrated, it feels more like a fifties horror comic than any film I’ve ever seen, even more so than Creepshow. It has a really good visual style that evokes the dingier comics of the era but it does go on too long.
I recently saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and despite enjoying the impressive road killings at the start, I kind of wish I hadn’t saw it because it slightly spoiled the original for me. I was completely aware that Hooper chose an entirely different style for the only sequel he ever directed, that even attracted me that it would be so different, but as it goes on it becomes far too similar to the original. I wish it had more focus and development on the deranged Dennis Hopper, but it just ends up referencing the first film in a way you expect a fan might, and is a bit bloated.

- Buying films because you fancy an actress is really frustrating, I bought a couple of Alison Lohman films and I have to stop myself from making ear-piercing squee noises when I see her and that is just how I feel about SANDRA JULLIEN, an excruciatingly cute French actress who starred in Jean Rollin’s Shiver Of The Vampire, and the erotic comedy films I Am A Nymphomaniac and I Am Frigid... Why? She even recorded several extremely rare albums always naked on the cover. She really deserves to have a lot more fans, she is so sweet and cute. I find those type of porn comedy films to be really boring and it makes sense why those films died out, but those films are the best look at her you will ever get.


Why are trash films so boring? They surely should be sensationalistic, fun and easy. I don’t know how there are so many enthusiasts of this sort of thing. But I would like to think there could again be erotic films that work as both porn and art/entertainment and get on cinemas. I’d like to see an arty director who made films full of angelic pretty boys with massive cocks.

Outside of a few very obscure brief appearances, movies don’t have any of the main “genre” of women I draw, but the next best thing is Christina Ricci in Buffalo 66 and Pecker, in those she is jaw dropping and super-curvy. Also Deborah Caprioglio is really voluptuous in Paprika by Tinto Brass and I couldn’t stop crying when I first seen that because she was a bit too beautiful.
I’m also really fond of Shirley Henderson, who recently appeared in Life During Wartime, which might be her first American film, unfortunately she hardly ever gets lead roles. She’s so small and adorable.




- I don’t know why I group all these horror films together, perhaps they all satisfy me in a similar way.
VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS is a really nice arthouse horror with lovely imagery.



VIY is an odd old Russian film that can be a little dull, but totally makes up for it in the fantastic monster swarmed ending that is nothing like any other film I’ve seen. I think it is being remade.


ALUCARDA is a great Mexican film with some really striking scenes, tender moments and a fascinating, adorable lead character.


LEMORA deserves to be as famous as the biggest cult horror films I think. People who say the visuals are lacking are talking crap, this is one of the most visually strong horror films I’ve ever seen with the exception of an awkard looking fight scene at the end. Everything is exaggerated and the cartoonish acting helps the weird fairytale feel. It really inspires me and I get loads of ideas everytime I see it. I think it is a crying shame the director never made more films.


LETS SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH is also very dear to me. It is nowhere near as intense as the title suggests, it is actually pretty mellow and it has a scene that somehow didn’t scare me the first time I saw it, but gave me nightmares the second time. Great acting, really special.




- Dario Argento: SUSPIRIA, INFERNO and DEEP RED are all wonderful films, and I often heard TERROR AT THE OPERA was his fifth or sixth best film but it really must be up with the three I just listed, I just seen it recently and I’m glad I didn’t decide to avoid it in favour of just imagining how I would like it to be( as I often do, because horror films are crushing disappointments 95% of the time), with the exception of an extremely ill-fitting heavy rock song at the scenes of the murders (Goblin and Emerson were at times abrupt and slightly too much in some of his earlier films, but they were still great) the style is extremely impressive and the camera work is the best I have seen in any of his films.
You should also see Two Evil Eyes, the Romero section isn’t very good, but the Argento half has Harvey Keitel!

- I was really impressed by MARTYRS especially the scary parts in the first half of the film, I’ve rarely been that scared by any film, but the rest of the film is more straightforwardly unpleasant in a violent way, so I think Laugier is a director to keep an eye on. It is said he will do a Hellraiser remake, and that is a rare circumstance where a remake sounds actually worthwhile.

His first film House of Voices gets a really bad reputation for no good reason, perhaps because it isn’t violent like Martyrs. I don’t think it was great or anything but at the very least it is really pretty and somehow the look of the shower rooms made an impression on me. But what is interesting about the film is that it was filmed in two different languages by the same actors! That is the first time I’ve ever heard of that practice. I also heard Laugier got Claudio Simonetti (Goblin) to do a soundtrack but he rejected it, I’d like to hear it and I can imagine it being perhaps too bombastic for the film, maybe I’m underestimating him.


- I’ve recently heard a lot of praise for Paul Verhoeven, especially from Japanese directors like Miike and Sion Sono, often mentioning Showgirls favourably. Tobe Hooper even went as far to say that Showgirls was an ahead of its time masterpiece that will eventually get recognised as such. I haven’t seen it yet, but I think I might just jump on that bandwagon before everyone else does so I can say “I toldya so”.


- Another film I haven’t seen yet is Late Bloomer, the very concept of it has me fascinated. Director Go Shibata says: “When I first met the star of the movie, Sumida-san, one of the first things we talked about was how society has a certain image of handicapped people. The typical film would show a crippled person overcoming great odds. We thought, "wouldn't it be interesting to see a film about a handicapped killer?"’
Go Shibata interview
-Memories of Murder is really good, I’ll finish this post with a really beautiful sad music piece from it. Try not to cry too much...

Rags film report 5: Supernatural Martial Arts

After quite a lot of years of never really going out of my way to see martial arts films, I was lured in by the supernatural horror films made in the genre, which are some of the craziest films ever made, I even found a fascinating book called Spooky Encounters by Daniel O’ Brien all about this niche, while it taught me a lot about Hong Kong( particularly informing me of how alarmingly politically incorrect their films can be, a lot of racism, sexism and hatred for the Japanese in the earlier days), I sadly found out that I had already seen most of the best kung fu horror films and it was mostly downhill from there. I also learned that there is a Buddhist swastika with no relation to the Nazi sign. How do you wear a Buddhist swastika without creating trouble?

I started with the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy, which I think is consistently great with no clear better film of them all, the first probably is the best, but it doesn’t have Jacky Cheung, who is in the second and third, he’s probably the most instantly likable actor I’ve ever seen, he just makes me smile whenever he is on screen and he has a really great scene in the second film when he is frozen by magic and trying to warn Leslie Cheung of a monster behind him.
The third film is harder to find for reasons unknown to me, I had to buy a Chinese dvd version of it, a friend told me it is not considered part of the canon, but it has almost all the cast and crew of the previous films except for Leslie Cheung, but they had the even more famous Tony Leung Chiu-Wai ((there are 3 Tony Leungs in Hong Kong cinema, sometimes even acting together in the same film)) filling in for him.
The whole series of films has really beautiful and occasionally dazzling visual spectacles including a bad guy that enlarges his tongue to kill people with and shoots flying heads from his body, people flying on swords and great stop-motion zombies. At least see the first one.

Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain is my favourite of this type of film, there is just so much happening in it and fights go on for a pleasingly long time and loads of cool bizarre stuff happens in it and it can be hard to keep up with, which is the way I like it, rather than the modern style of slowing everything down and making it look boring. It was remade by the same director in a modern style and I’ve never wanted to see it, it probably never had anyone chasing after a laughing fish in it. Here is the trailer for the original...


Buddhas Palm is a similar film, with a bad guy that can enlarge his foot to giant sizes and a funny traveller who shouts his own name whenever he enters or leaves a scene. I once made the mistake of buying a modern tv remake instead of this original Shaw Brothers film...


For hopping corpse/vampire movies, people usually go for Mr Vampire, but Spooky Encounters is a superior film. Like a lot of people I first known Sammo Hung from the underwhelming tv show Martial Law, but when you see him in his hong kong films, especially the ones he directed himself, you will see why people love him so much. Spooky Encounters has the most fantastic hopping vampire I have ever seen, with a really fascinating fighting style you never see in the other hopping vampire movies, it also has the funniest movie ending I’ve ever seen.
Spooky Encounters 2 has a lot of good things in it and it is visually more pleasing, but it was lacking something. There is a great scene near the start when 2 hopping vampires attack Sammo and his girlfriend and they all end up hanging on a chandelier and all 4 biting each others necks. I really love Lam Ching Ying, since he is so stern and straight all the time, it is hilarious in this film when he does this exaggerated walk swaying his hips side to side. Lam Ching Ying could seem straight/normal to the point of boring, but he makes a strong impression on people, myself included, I really don’t know what it is about him that makes him so likable.


Heroic Trio is not that great, but it is worth seeing the trailer. If you like Maggie Cheung a lot you should see it, she looks incredible in it.


Iceman Cometh is sort of supernatural, but more of a time travel film, with the wonderful and handsome Yuen Biao as an ancient royal guard trying to understand the modern world, which is the source of all the comedy. It is usually not that funny when films have people from different eras misunderstanding the modern world, but this film is really hilarious.

A great deal of the 80s/90s supernatural Wuxia films usually based on Pu Songling stories are either directed or produced by Tsui Hark. Often when he is listed as producer he is still basically the director. If you really want loads of this supernatural wuxia stuff, just go look at his directing and producing credits lists. His newer films went into that glossy slow motion style I don’t really like.
I recently found out that along with America making movie quality tv dramas, Hong Kong has been doing this too with epic wuxia dramas, which look astonishingly picturesque and have so much more grandeur than I ever imagined could be on a tv show. They have not been made available to us yet, so I don’t know how good they are.

For straightforward martial arts, I think Knockabout is my favourite film, it is another Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao film. Really funny with lots of great complex fighting.


In Jackie Chan films I think Snake In The Eagles Shadow and Drunken Master 2 are the best ((although there is a lot I haven’t seen)), the original Drunken Master is made a bit redundant because the second film has more immensely complex fight scenes and Snake In The Eagles Shadow is almost the same film as Drunken Master 1 minus the drunken fighting but with same cast and crew with everything done better, most of all the story.

I cant watch too many of these films all the time, because although it is nice to jump into this world and see so many familiar faces cropping up all the time and getting to know all the actors better,, they can feel really samey and the sense of humor can get really tiresome eventually. Most of the films I mentioned are on Youtube, which somehow gets away with having a large percentage of any martial arts films you would ever want to see. I still have to see the crazier Yuen Woo Ping films like Miracle Fighters and Shaolin Drunkard; older horror kung fu like Seeding Ghost and Attack Of The God Of Joy.

RAGs film report 4: Bad films with good bits

This is going to be brief because I honestly dont remember many bad films worth watching for some aspects, but I bought The Haunting remake because I loved the house in it, the only thing about it arguably better than the original. The film drags horribly long and goes on for another 40mins when you would expect it to end, but that house is so beautifully Baroque/Gothic that I'm glad I bought it. The is a really huge fireplace, a lovely large garden shed and an amazing mirror spinning music/dancing room. Someone could have made a far better film just going around that house for 15mins with a camera.

The other one is Devils Advocate, which I'll admit I've never watched with my full attention from start to finish, but it always given a strong impression of being bad. I hate it when someone gets Al Pacino in a film only to have him shout out lectures as if that will give a film automatic credibility.
The great thing about this film is there is a beautiful vortex sculpture that turns into a portal to hell or something like that, which gradually comes alive with all these stone people and turns to fire and spins perhaps to suck people into hell(cant remember) but it was incredible looking and I cant say I've ever seen anything quite like it. Some of the best usage of CGI I've ever seen. I thought it might all be in one small scene I could link to, but it is spread across several parts in the last third of the movie.
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I havent forgotten I'm an artist, but I've been struggling still, but light has been appearing more often at the end of the tunnel and I'm more excited about the struggle now. It's still gonna take time.

RAG's Film Report part 3: Extreme Hong Kong

Considering how conservative Hong Kong cinema usually is, it's really quite a shock when you find out about some of the extreme movies they have produced, some of the most extreme films ever made, equal to any of the sick movies to come from anywhere. An example of the contrast is when the already married Sammo Hung fell in love with a different woman, he divorced his then-wife out of respect, but because of the divorce, his popularity plummeted despite the steady quality of his new films. It has been said that he could have maintained much better popularity if he had cheated on his wife, and kept the sacred marriage going. Fucking crazy Hong Kong.

Untold Story/Bunman/Human Porkchop, Dr Lamb and Ebola Syndrome all have fearsome reputations, but I wasnt really interested in any of them enough to add them to an overly large list of movies I wanted to get over with within months. But then I heard about Red To Kill. A film with probably the most shocking concept for a movie I'd ever heard. Basically it's about a rapist who goes after a mentally disabled girl, and I wanted to see how someone would approach and execute such a horrible idea in a movie. I have a feeling that this movie could never be made in Hong Kong now, hard to imagine it being made anywhere now.

The film looks like Dario Argento quite a lot, with the dark scenery bathed in red/blue lighting and a bad guy whose face you never quite get to see properly at the beginning. The rape scenes are definitely pornographic, with as much emphasis on the body of the rapist as the bodies of the female victims. You get the feeling they really wanted to show off his body, his fantastic buttocks showcased with a jock-strap. The transormation of the actor playing the rapist is incredible, hard to believe it is the same man, but it is. He at first appears to be a small thin caring sensitive person,, but reveals himself as this large muscular veiny throbbing furious screaming monster just boiling with negative energy. This is a really harsh depressing movie and despite the really questionable exploitative content, I've seen almost exclusively positive responses of the internet reviews I can find, several people said it made them cry. I'd really like to see a roundtable of more politically correct people dissect and argue over it, or atleast ones who arent throwing around the word "misogynist" as if they are trying to strip the word of its meaning. Remember those good old words like "chauvinist" and "dickhead"?

RAGs film report part 2: Shuji Terayama

My summer holiday just finished, but in the first week of it, I finished watching all the movies on my list to keep clear the rest of the holiday for other things, I dont want to watch movies again til the end of the year. I watched 45 movies that week! I did nothing else, usually 6 movies a day. So I'll try to pick up again even though the last post was months ago.

I cant remember quite how I found out about him but Shuji Terayama is a neglected arthouse director whose time will come eventually for revival in interest and reissues, because there is extremely little of his work on dvd or even vhs. The only thing I could get on dvd that interested me was Grass Labyrinth in the erotic anthology film Private Collections and these are screenshots I taken from it, the Grass Labyrinth section is now on Youtube, so is his extremely contoversial film Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which inspired the title of a Stereolab album and is notorious for scenes of young children simulating sex with older women, so be careful if you watch it! It even got some scary imdb users saying they wanted to kill him for making this film, but he is already dead.

He was involved in all sorts of professions, including horse racing commentating and made some highly regarded progressive rock albums that are also hard to find. To be honest, I'm not that interested in the political commentary of his work, but his films have some great imagery, the pictures I taken from Grass Labyrinth only represent a small part of the film. Here is some more nice imagery, much like Suehiro Maruo...

RAGs film report 1: The 5 Best films ever made and 2 other faves

WATERSHIP DOWN
I saw this when I was 4 or something and I think it is partly responsible for the amount of disappointing viewing experiences I have had ever since with all kinds of art. I probably measure so many things by the high standard this set. I assumed that since this was a family film, real horror films would be ten times more terrifying. But this is still one of the scariest films ever made. I love my films emotionally harrowing. It was a real delight to find a few years ago that there was a companion film called Plague Dogs, which only recently became uncut on DVD.

INLAND EMPIRE and DAVID LYNCH
It is my favourite Lynch film and it may be my favourite film of all. I wasn’t as big on Eraserhead as most people are and I ignored Lynch for a long time assuming that he was not for me, so it was a surprise to find out that such a famous guy could make things that felt very close to me. I think Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway are his most powerful works, the warm dreamy style makes me feel incredible and resonates with me more than the black and white stuff. The music and those red curtains feel like my own memories from long ago and I feel it gels with my personal approach to art. After experiencing Inland Empire with all that prolonged wandering in dark corridors and short bursts of terrifying faces, I left intensely pleasured and very sad that someone else had achieved some of the things I had always wanted to achieve myself.
I don’t think it gets enough recognition for how scary it is. I’d like to also mention the start and end credit sequences of Lost Highway when the camera is speeding across the road to what I was amazed to find was David Bowie( since I only had a fairly small fondness for Bowie), I think those sequences with that music is some of the most incredible feelings a movie has ever gave me, makes me feel ELATED!

POSSESSION and ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI

This has the finest hysterical energy I have ever witnessed in a film, not the noisiest movie ever made, but the noise is exhilarating. To me Sam Neil was always just “that Jurassic Park guy” but this gave me a lot of respect for him(not that he was bad in JP, Mouth of Madness or Event Horizon).
I wasn’t expecting more horror from the rest of Zulawski’s work, actually there was a lot more horror than I expected but I was disappointed by all his other films and I gave up getting more (I still haven’t saw Public Woman, Mad Love, Boris Godunov and Blue Note). Szamanka did not live up to reputation and the good music was overplayed to exhaustion, I don’t get why people think Third Part of the Night is one of his better films, The Devil was quite good in places, On the Silver Globe was fascinating at times but I’d rather look at these screenshots than watch the whole film Amazing screens. If you like Sophie Marceau you’ll enjoy his romantic films.
I didn’t think any of the films were bad, they all were interesting and were obviously done by an individualistic director who is pleasingly different from all other arthouse and shock directors, his sense of humor is unique too, but nothing came close to Possession. Tim Lucas raved about L'important c'est d'aimer but that somehow did nothing for me either. But I did think Jacques Dutronc was really good in two Zulawski films, he came across deeply eccentric in a very real way and his eyes are fascinating.
I’m sorry Mr Zulawski, I don’t get your films except for Possession, The Devil and small parts of your other films. Am I a teeny bopper?

TOKYO FIST and SHINYA TSUKAMOTO

Shinya Tsukamoto deserves to be just as big as Miike or any other auteur today. He has a more consistently satisfying body of work than any other director I have ever encountered. Like the way I overlooked David Lynch, I avoided Tetsuo The Iron Man because I assumed such a popular cult classic would not be my thing, and that was another time when I was amazed to find something so amazing that was so widely available and under my nose the whole time.
I watched Tokyo Fist first and I adored it immediately. Remember I was talking about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and the subversive intensity that used to be associated with Japanese imports in the late 80s and early 90s? Tokyo Fist EMBODIES that energy. The film is like a power drink. It has an incredible soundtrack by Chu Ishikawa (who always does music for Tsukamoto), Tsukamoto plays the main character (he acts a lot in his own films and for a lot of other directors including Miike), Kahori Fujii is really great and she has a beauty that that reminds me of a much older Japanese ideal that you don’t see often enough today. You have to see it.

I havent been able to get a hold of Nightmare Detective 2 and Female, but I have seen everything else and all of them are good films. There are only two or three Tsukamoto films I’m not crazy about, but Tokyo Fist, Tetsuo Iron Man, Vital, Haze, Gemini are all essential. A Snake of June and Bullet Ballet are also highly recommended if you need more.
Vital is nothing like all his other films, it has an extremely soft lovely feel even though it is about a medical student who is dissecting his girlfriend to find secrets about her life and death, it is very romantic.
Haze is a 50 minute claustrophobic nightmare with Kahori Fujii again. Not scary exactly, but still a nightmarishly horrible situation that you will have dreamt about, and it seems like a more logical approach to make a horror film than 99.7% other film attempts I’ve ever seen.
Gemini is an Edogawa Rampo story about an evil twin, but all the delight is in the visuals. The first appearance of one of the beggars is so bizarre and tense because he acts in a scary and unpredictable way and the further scenes of beggars are amazing because their costumes are burning bright with gorgeous color and their dancing is fascinating.


Most of you probably know about the first Tetsuo film, but I will say that the scene where the woman attacks the main guy in the subway is one of the sexiest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie, just seeing her changing from this timid office worker to a wild dripping maniac is really hot. There is a third Tetsuo film coming out this year, it is filmed in America in english but is still essentially a Japanese film, the initial response has been bad, but the second got a bad response too despite having some incredible moments. Everyone wants more of the first film.
I cant wait for more Tsukamoto films across the years, hopefully a lot of decades.

LOVE EXPOSURE and SION SONO
This is currently only in Region2 but do whatever you can to see this movie.

You may think I’m going over the top about this film, perhaps there is something about this time in my life that I reacted to Love Exposure so strongly, but I’m pretty sure anyone who sees it will be impressed.
The previous week I watched Sono’s Strange Circus, which was decent film with some striking rooms, an odd plot about a horrible father making his mother and daughter switch places, but it didn’t come anywhere near close to the power of Love Exposure, which I watched the day after. I’m going to get more of his films, but only 6 or 7 of his films have had a western DVD release.
Sono’s most famous film is Suicide Circle/Club and he seems to love being hated in Japan and he is currently stirring up controversy with his upcoming Black Metal docudrama Lords of Chaos based on the book of the same name, which I think might be an awful idea since the book is supposed to be wrong about a lot of facts and Sono has no real interest in the music scene. Whatever happens, it will probably be a decent movie. Varg has threatened to kill him if Sono makes the film, but Sono likes the danger.

If I picked this film up in the shops I wouldn’t have been interested, as I have an aversion to the type of stylish highschool kids on the cover, but this is a fucking masterpiece. Love Exposure is really hard to summarise, one main thread of the plot is about a son of a priest committing sins to confess to his father because his father wont believe him if he says he has not sinned. Another thread is the son believing he will find the love of his live by taking upskirt photos with his kung-fu pervert technique. It is FOUR HOURS long but it never feels boring for a second because an incredible amount of things happen in the movie, it is not padded or stretched out in the least. It is a really beautiful love story.

I’d like to get to tell Sono what this film meant to me as he seemed somewhat drained and upset after the film finished and everyone regarded it as a probable peak of his career which would be difficult to match again. When it ended I was sad there was not more, even after four hours. I’ve never been so shaken by a movie, for the start of this week I was quite down and wished I could make some exciting change to my life to match the excitement of the lives in that movie even if I would hate to be in their specific situations. I was also a little bewildered by what Sono had achieved and I was creatively envious, because he does things I could probably never do. I don’t really do plot and characters in this way and this is one of the few times when I really cared about such things in a movie. The very feel of watching this is like no other movie. I was immensely inspired and it was one of those times I was so touched that I wanted to spend each second of my life more wisely. I’m still totally astonished by it.
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LISZTOMANIA and KEN RUSSELL

Ken Russell is just as crazy as any other director from any part of the world. Just watch that trailer! Rick Wakeman and Roger Daltrey do a really amazing soundtrack. It may seem just way too silly to start with, but trust me, stick with this film, it is amazing. Incredibly funny.

PINOCCHIO 964 and SHOZIN FUKUI

Fukui could be accused of being a thief of the first Tetsuo film, because his early films are very similar, but he actually worked on Tetsuo. Rubbers Lover is okay, but Pinocchio 964 is really incredible. Easily the craziest film I’ve seen if you mean shouting maniac crazy. It is unique to me in that I have never seen a film before which used lengthy scenes focusing on one thing to create an unbearable tension. There is a part where a girl has a dripping wet face and she stays still for ages without moving, I cant watch it without squirming. The ending is INSANE!
Fukui has came out with several short films in recent years after a long time of nothing, but they are very obscure and I probably wont get my hands on them for years.