Strange Films.

ETRANGE FILM FESTIVAL 2019.

Conveniently in the month before Pordenone, they do L’Etrange Film Festival

at Le Forum des images in the Les Halles development in Paris, an event dedicated to everything weird in movies. It’s a concept that could go anywhere, heir to the seventies when fans of exploitation cinema were ticked off that their favorites were excluded from the respectable (subsidised) festivals and went into business for themselves.

The organisers are calling this their Twenty Fifth outing but I remember the Paris Fantasy festivals fifty years back in the great days of Paul Naschy and Ishiro Honda who would be hard pressed to relate to some of the latest offerings. That was the first place I saw Picnic at Hanging Rock and here it was back again, one of the extensive Australian entries spread among the guest programmers retrospective and new releases, along with Barbarosa, Walkabout, Ghosts of the Civil Dead, Justin Kurzel’s Tue History of the Kelly Gang and Kiah Roache Turner’s Nekrotronic.

The only one I caught was Serge Ou’s  Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks stitched together by a collection of Australian State Film Corporations, another Oz compilation of the (mainly) Asian Exploitation films - think Not Quite Hollywood or The Search for Weng Weng.

This one runs to four thousand plus edits put together in five months, kicking off with the sixties martial arts adventures of Chen pei pei & Jimmy Wang Yu. There’s no mention of pre Shaw Brothers activity. They describe a massive demand following the U.S. distribution of Chang Che’s 5 Fingers of Death revoiced in one all night, beer fueled session. A clip shows how slap dash the matching was. When Bruce Lee dipped out to David Carradine for the Kung Fu series, he went back in disgust to Hong Kong where Run Run Shaw passed him over, missing the cycle’s greatest phenomenon. The film samples the Bruce Lee imitators and the mash ups represented by Game of Death and films carved out of his child star movies & funeral actuality, along with offering an interview with his niece.

The martial arts films connected with minorities producing blaxploitation where it got mixed in with hip hop music & break dancing. Jackie Chan, Liu Chia liang and Kung Fu comedies get a nod. Video and grind house stars Richard Norton, Cynthia Rothrock, Dan The Dragon Wilson, Ron Van Clief comment.  Brian Trenchard Smith is in there and Sammo Hung is represented by The Man from Hong Kong (!) Jane Fonda’s exercise videos are good for a laugh,  Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, Ong Bak & U-Tube stars lead to African child champions whose skills inspire resistance to a wave of kidnappers. 

This later material is largely unfamiliar and the old Hong Kong clips come nostalgia laden. The film is thrown together from what the makers could get but it might have been a lot worse.

The main festival program was a bizare collection of programmer favourites including King Kong,  Robert Patinson in the Canadian The Lighthouse, Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC, David Gregory’s Blood & Flesh, his life of Al Adamson, along with Adamson’s 1969 Satan’s Sadists, Cornel Wilde’s superior 1965 The Naked Prey, William Wyler's The Collector, Vera Chytilova’s Sedmikrasky / The Daisies, a Meyer Deren program, Bunuel’s El Angel exterminador, Gerard Potterton ’s 1981 Heavy Metal, Jackie Chan’s Police Story, Kevin Brownlow’s 1964 It Happened Here and a couple of Alexander Jodorowskis. Try and draw a straight line through that lot.

I concentrated on the new and unfamiliar titles which proved a smart move - a jolting reminder of what present day cinema has become. A few of these had already made it to Australia. Among those, Zhang Yimou’s stylish Ying / Shadow benefited from the big screen and the design, with black and white settings and constant rain, is extraordinary. The battle when it finally arrives - the blade umbrellas against bows and spears - is the best thing in the director’s work since the attack on the calligraphy school in Hero but all the Florentine court intrigue that takes up the body of the film is just tedious.  

Zhang Yimou's Ying

 

 

 

 

 Also already seen, Penny Lane’s Hail Satan is a passably surprising account of a Satanist movement whose branches are popping up round the globe, focused on the outfit taking a stand against US Religious Right groups like Westboro Baptist Church’s anti-LGBTQIA demonstrations. The cult registers quite sympathetically marching under Black & White Stars & Stripes flags and complaining when they can’t get tax breaks because they are considered a protest movement rather than a religion.  The line between show business and faith is suitably blurred. “Atheists are dull. They have no iconography.”

In the unfamiliar material, Japan’s Hatsukoi / First Love showed Takashi Miike in good form even if it does outstay it’s welcome.

We start as we mean to go, with boxer Masataka Kubota working out with ear ‘phones & punching out an opponent - cut to the severed head of the Philippino gangster hurled into the street still grinning. The boxer collapses in the ring when he has the match sewn up, to his manager’s exasperation and he’s told he has a fatal tumor. This makes him indifferent to death.

A deluge of sub-plots follows - girl junkie Sakurako Konishi isn’t cutting it as a whore paying of her dad’s debts. The specter of her old boy friend wearing glasses under a bed sheet haunts her. The Yakusa boss comes out of jail and one of his soldiers plots knocking off a drug haul in association with a crooked cop, taking the girl along. (don’t ask) Knocking off the drug courier sets off the gun in his pocket injuring his attacker. The madam who has been abusing the girl becomes distraught about her fate, bursting into the Yakusa boss’ dignified meeting waving a sword, even giving the gangster driver a blow job while he’s at the wheel like the Ringo Lam Full Contact. Sheet man who only the girl can see, dances to the head phone music in the subway train.

Takashi Miike's First Love

Striking moments abound even if the film can’t keep up the pace. After the night of frantic incoherent activity, we get  a totally momentum killing finale which would be more welcome if we’d worked up more sympathy with the young leads.

Coming from fashion photography and modeling, Alice Waddington offered Spanish made Paradise Hills, an orchidacious take on the body snatcher movie - a mix of Seconds, Pat McGoohan’s The Island series & The Stepford Wives. She herself cites Picnic at Hanging Rock  and Alice in Wonderland.

 At green lipped Emma Roberts fancy dress wedding, guests are choreographed to St. Saens “Carnival of the Animals.” Emma does a runner - time laps and she wakes up in some kind of verdant Escher maze which the white suits describe as Paradise.Turns out she’s in an island boot camp for rich wayward girls where Milla Jovovich presides over their retooling - nice study in fading beauty malice.The design aspect dominates - pink parasols, brass butterflies, greenery, holograms and the glamorous girls become an element.

Jovovich & Roberts Paradise Hills.

 Avoiding the drugged nightcap Emma discovers the underground laboratory where lab coat technicians work with white bandaged subjects.

A welcome shift of loyalties produces a change of outcome. With all this, the subject and the style end as up-market Bertrand Mandico. Maybe decadent is what people are buying this year.

New Zealand promoter Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy is a Canada-New Zealand-Ireland-U.S. co-production shot in New Caledonia with Hollywood leads, an agreeable though hard edged departure from the expected.

Summoned by a father he doesn’t know, Elijah Wood takes the bus to a Vancouver Island forest verge stop and makes his way to the isolated “UFO” timber home to be greeted with incomprehension by a ravaged, bearded Stephen McHattie. There are rumblings in the night. Wood’s one of twenty numbered Gold ‘phones gets knocked into the lake and McHattie drunk comes at him with a meat cleaver only to succumb to a heart attack. 

Turns out there’s a history of criminal conspiracy and Wood has to take down the heavies at a Swinger’s convention with a call girl bondage mistress and a menacing document spike. “He’s got a flaming cross bow and I’ve got nothing.”

The final scene with Martin Donovan actually manages to be quite touching.

Sakamoto's Aragne

 Saku Sakamoto’s Aragne: Sign of Vermillion is a stylish, sinister Japme feature “Animated for the big screen with a production crew of one."

Rin, the whispy student heroine made the mistake of buying off the plan into an apartment development, gleaming in the sales brochure, to find it’s a grubby, diseased high rise slum, its elevators and mail boxes already rusting. Disgust increases when an ambulance carries a body away and she sees a giant larvae emerge from the arm of the dead woman. Girls are found with their heads twisted at right angles - super yuk.

This one uses imaginative design and a feeling for the grotesque to hold its own with big budget animations.The film’s emphasis on decay and morbidity evokes a more sinister Roland Topor, coming with the much same shock that  first viewing Suspiria provided in back 1986.

Avez vous vu Carolyn Harper?

Chicago film maker Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin got off to a flying start when she threw lapel badges reading “Cunty Sluts” into the audience and announced she wanted to introduce feminism into the area of Hitchcock & David Lynch. The gore in her films is menstrual blood (“very hard to wash out”) She added “In the Trump area, art & culture will save us.” I joined the applause. The video Alice Wadington sent of  blowing a kiss to the camera was totally eclipsed.

In Knives & Skin, Mid West Middle River High School Band girl Raven Whitley is parked with the school jock, scratching a light up  “C” on his brow (?). When she determines not to come across, he throws her out of the car to die in the woods, a bit of a stretch but it introduces the River’s Edge model the director is working too.

Whiteley’s mother Marika Engelhardt starts a search. Her day job is leading the school choir with a Prom Dress over her work clothes, setting up a number of the film’s best elements - a song  joined by characters including the dead girl, a choir session where the girls’ asides are put up as sub-titles over the music or Engelhardt being comforted by the female quartet (two black and one wearing a hijab) who re-assure her by breaking out in a choral version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

Throw in the black sheriff whose wife is having a false pregnancy. The jock’s sister, Grace Smith has a line in taking cash for her mum’s used underwear from the town’s prominent men, including her school’s principal. When Olwyn demands his team jacket back from one conquest, he finds she has stitched “Andy Kitzmiller treats girls like shit” into it. Even he gets some sympathy, visiting Whitley’s memorial to put her lost glasses on a deposited teddy
bear.

The ending has the kids on the play ground shout at the black student on the roof not to jump but he calms them, explaining that he goes up there to see the highway. “I want to know that there is a way out of this place.” It all makes Middle River an effective addition to the awful American movie small towns like the ones in the Edward G. Robinson Dark Hazard, Helmut Kautner’s The Wild and the Innocent / The Wonderful Years, The Deer Hunter and the rest.

Reeder’s attempt to jam so much into the piece makes it incoherent at times but hers is a strong voice waiting to be heard.

... and for those who have seen everything they added the second screening in ninety years of the 1921 silent La galerie des monstres directed by Jaque Catelain the leading man of Marcel L’Herbier's dreadful L’Inhumaine. Turns out Catelain’s an even worse director than he was an actor.

Doubling as star, Catelain plays one of the tribe of gypsies who sleep in the snow outside the Castilian walled town. He & local girl Lois Moran (with Al Jolson in Mammy) in her first role, decide to pair up and they go to see her grandfather who instead of protecting them shows them to the door. 

Galerie des Monsters : Catelain

 Later (how much later?) they are raising a baby in the Buffalo Traveling Circus arriving in Toledo. Jean Murat the Lion tamer has eyes for Moran and a chubby tootsie in spangles moves on Catelain. Montage of acts - a tumbler, cowboys, clowns, musicians and a fakey menagerie with a rigged human torso, a bearded lady who is obviously a bloke & the skinny girl as a mermaid - a shadowy anticipation of Freaks. The owner lusts after Moran and, when spurned, while she dances in a cage (so so montage) he lets the lion in. Catelain is made to do his act while they are waiting for the doctor. The locals in flat hats go wild for this - implausibly. Hard to see how Catelain-Riquets' sub-Harlequin dance has made him the star of the company.

The circus performers turn on boss Buffalo and the leads and their baby get to drive their caravan back to her village (!) Flossie the spangles girl and the cowboy lion tamer who stole a kiss from from injured Moran are considered to have redeemed themselves.

La galerie des monstres had only curiosity value, even with it’s excellent Lobster Films restoration in a square format. The company's Serge Bromberg did a nice piano accompaniment at the Forum des Images show.

That’s just a dip into their eighty plus programs. I should have got to more of those and cut for instance a draggy Cinémathèque season of French forties movies but there’s no way any one viewer can do that much material justice - that’s one Paris event doing more Cinémathèque than any Australian center can muster in a year - superior too, even with the clunkers.

Elijah Wood in Come to Daddy