JFL

A decade before Lars von Trier stunned viewers with his supreme Golden Heart trilogy, Annaud showed everyone the emotionally devastating power of the medium of film. But he didn’t go the gimmicky route of the greatest possible purity and immediacy with handheld cameras and minimal post-production, but instead worked with the full arsenal of the means of expression available to him at the time. Thanks to the premise of the story about bears and the ambition to execute it with minimum dialogue and with real animals in the main roles, and thus with maximum space for them in the narrative, his film is, in principle, no less conceptual than von Trier’s ostentatiously provocative experiments. For many of my generation, The Bear was an unforgettable and even seminal experience in the sense of it being our first encounter with precise emotional manipulation that can be hated and admired in equal measure. Annaud masterfully balances sentimentality and rawness, hyperreality and naturalism. In fulfilling his concept, he also proves that a film (almost) doesn’t need any words to drag the audience through a full range of emotions. As in von Trier’s later work, here we already see the merciless nature of the director’s dictate, as he puts his characters in tense situations, in which he lets them wallow for as long as possible in order to totally exhaust the audience without going beyond boundary of the desired effect. Even years later, and even only in segments, The Bear is still just as impressive and, with an educated view, even more captivating. I will dare to watch it again after a number of years, not only because The Bear is one of those films that truly leaves an indelible mark on the viewer’s memory.

This time the pope of poor taste and grandmaster of camp turns his attention to the middle-class idyll, or rather its gaudy Hallmark-style television image. Within John Waters’ filmography, Serial Mom falls into the group of subtly campy titles that are easy to condemn as shallow trash and accept as passably mainstream in equal measure, and therein lies their sophistication and subversiveness. In that respect, nothing surpasses Waters’ crossover success with the musical Hairspray. However, Serial Mom can also be impressive in how it subjugates the mainstream style and format. The tension between the film’s meticulous stylisation and warped premise makes Serial Mom one of John Waters’ most delicate and subversive projects.

With Cannibal Rollerbabes, Kalman Szegvary pays tribute to Ivan Reitman’s Canadian niche classic Cannibal Girls, but he would also like to update it to self-confident high-concept camp, clearly aiming to reach the level of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. However, Rollerbabes doesn’t have enough songs (only three), decent actors or a workable screenplay, so in the end it can only boast an excellent final quarter, for which viewers first have to wade through a sea of drawn-out nothingness with a few crumbs of entertainment from the haphazard sequences in which it’s actually impossible to recognise whether they are authentically or intentionally artless.

In the context of pragmatic productions to line the shelves of video-rental shops, Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies is a product perfectly crafted for its target audience and the associated rating constraints, as it offers would-be erotic steaminess for twelve-year-old boys weaned on secretly leafing through Playboy. It is pleasantly surprising with a relatively generous budget, which was spent not only on assembling a fine ensemble of familiar faces, but also on opulent and meticulous sets. At the same time, however, it can’t conceal its roots with typical shortcomings such as the empty milking of the basic concept and stretching the runtime with dialogue about nothing.

Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari is a psychosexual variation on and sequel to Robert Wiene's expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). This purely conceptual work combines within itself the practices of experimental theatre and the expressive style of silent movies, which conditions not only the actors’ expressions and gestures, but also the work with the mise-en-scene, cinematography and editing. Sayadian doesn’t slavishly copy or imitate the style of silent movies, but rather comes up with its modern equivalent with sound and colour. Though Dr. Caligari works only as an experimental film, it remains consistently fresh and fascinating.

At Stephen King’s urging, producer Dino De Laurentiis took Raimi under his wing, and though he tossed Raimi’s original plan for a farce set in the Middle Ages (which had to wait until the third film in the franchise) and demanded a variation on the original Evil Dead, he in turn gave Raimi a professional production environment, a generous budget for effects and creative freedom. Raimi grabbed onto all of this with tremendous verve and made his first spectacular comic-book movie without a comic book to use as source material. In Raimi’s case, the essence of a comic-book movie is not limited to today’s synonym for superhero escapades, but rather relates to the overall exalted nature of such films, not only in the way of conveying the trash premise with fantasy elements, but primarily in terms of the means of expression, which are distinctive, maximally expressive and thus the most easily readable and attractive to viewers. In addition to the camerawork, editing and practical special effects and stop motion animation, Raimi makes extensive use of his own discovery and visual element by the name of Bruce Campbell. Even in their previous film together, it was impossible to overlook the fact that Campbell, with his prominent chin and surrealistically perfect features, looks like a character from Kája Saudek’s comics. This time, after Campbell had completed an acting course, Raimi constructed whole passages specifically for him and the result is a phenomenal display of acting with wide eyes, raised eyebrows and, mainly, incredible slapstick talent. The etudes with a severed head in hand, particularly with a demonic hand, are a grand symbiosis of all of the above-mentioned production elements, Campbell’s acting skill and willingness to commit himself to any frenetic idea for the needs of the scene, and Raimi’s talent and style. Evil Dead II secured Raimi’s fame and, mainly, established the cult of Campbell.

If you watch it alone, The Evil Dead seems like a depressing horror movie about a descent into madness beyond the boundaries of rational certainties. In the cinema, those levels are still there, but the entertainment value of the whole work stands out more, and that includes the unintentional elements, from the characters and their behaviour to the film’s low-budget roots, which are evident in the out-of-focus shots, among other things. At the same time, however, Raimi’s talent and creative brilliance become fully apparent on the big screen. The Evil Dead is an essential entry among the legends of enthusiastic amateurs who simply got together with some friends, picked up a camera and shot a genre milestone that opened the door to the wide world of professional productions. But the reason that thousands of others set out on the same path but only a few filmmakers actually succeed in graduating to the Hollywood big league consists in the level of talent. It’s not about Raimi picking up a camera, but everything that he does with it and how. With deflected angles and exalted gestures, poses and precise framing, he not only displays his disposition for almost comic-bookish expressive visuality, but also perfectly draws attention away from the limitations of the production environment and fascinates viewers in every respect through intense scenes.

If we judge it only according to the rule that every film is as good as its villain, then The Return of Captain Invincible is absolutely excellent. Among other things, Australia’s musical-comedy answer to the Hollywood wave of superhero movies at the time is impressive thanks to its several wonderfully frantic sequences (such as the fight with a vacuum cleaner) and a handful of outstanding musical numbers. Above all, it boasts a grandiose villain played by Christopher Lee, who also has a marvellous gallery of eccentric sidekicks and a whole suite of glam/punk nymphs. Unfortunately, however, his nemesis in the form of the titular hero is so bland and anti-charismatic that he could be considered one of the most depressing examples of why it is necessary to balance opposites in the principle of yin and yang.

The Masturbating Gunman is a desperately tiresome case of feature-length misery with a misleadingly excellent trailer. Not even its rather fine climax can save it. It is more than obvious that the filmmakers greatly enjoyed having their masked protagonist stand on a cliff as the tide rolls in and walk the streets of their city. But it’s not fun for anyone else.

The Suckling looks great on paper as a low-budget variation on Alien set in a brothel that also operates as an illegal abortion clinic, where an aborted mutated foetus is thrown into the sewer and proceeds to go on a rampage. The film serves up a full range of wild situations, which its creators set in motion from the start. Only after the delightfully over-the-top beginning does the filmmakers’ lack of good sense start to become apparent, as they probably thought that, instead of moronic bullshit, they were shooting a regular horror movie in which it would be necessary to develop the characters and construct their story arcs. The consequence of that is numerous and hopelessly drawn-out dialogue sequences and interactions between characters who are utterly uninteresting. As if that wasn’t enough, the filmmakers indulged in several flashbacks that needlessly stretch the film’s runtime. The Suckling is thus an alternately boring and, in some places, magnificent low-budget film that can be appreciated for its wild premise, excellent first third and fine ending, as well as for the entertainingly unconcealed limitations of its setting in a house with a handful of rooms.