The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

directed by Peter Weir
Australia
92 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I consider this movie a favorite, but I had an absolute beast of a time actually finding somewhere to see it, which is dismaying. This deserves a better DVD release.

There's controversy over whether or not this is a horror film, and I'm in the camp that says it is, because even though it's bright and sunny and doesn't resemble what we think of as traditional horror, there's still something so dreadful about it. The simple fact of a town running a scheme to intentionally make people crash their cars so they can harvest them for parts is pretty awful, but in another director's hands it could be simply something of a mystery where we all clearly see bad people being given what-for at the end. Peter Weir makes it into this hysterical, screeching car wreck of a film that makes us look directly at it; it doesn't let us veil the weight of what's going on with detachment. That the film doesn't emphasize its main character much aside from setting him up as basically bait to show how corrupt the townspeople are makes it feel even more like we're forced into the middle of things.

A car crash is such a direct, concentrated form of violence that few directors give the presence it should have on film. Shinya Tsukamoto is one who uses car crashes and other mechanical disasters in a very similar way to Peter Weir in this film: they're always big, loud !DISASTER! events that take up the whole screen, shove our faces into it, can't look away, etc. The Cars That Ate Paris couldn't be made today because cars just don't look like this anymore. Cars in this and in other carsploitation films of the 70s and 80s are basically rolling art pieces with an engine in them. Virtually the opposite is true today: we buy cars for the outside, it has to have a sleek, glossy, pleasingly colored shell for us to feel attracted to it. And aside from people we think of as Car Guys, none of us seems terribly interested in customizing their car, certainly not to the length of making it into something artful. Even the Car Guys just want it to look "more" car. The people who glue stuff to their cars or paint weird things on them are branded outsiders and get pictures taken of them in public.

In my first review I mentioned that there's some overt racism here and there in this film: at the costume ball scene towards the end, multiple people are dressed as racist caricatures like "early Chinaman", "early Aboriginal", etc. The mayor also has a small, highly exaggerated statue of an Aboriginal woman in his front yard, and it's made a point of insult that this statue gets destroyed by the youths in their souped-up cars. I didn't catch it the first time around but I think there is a statement in there- the mayor gets mad when he can no longer "own" images of things that make him feel secure in his position as a white mayor of a white town on land that white people claimed for themselves. I do wish this was touched upon more as it could have added more dimension to the film. Maybe the criticism of racism is one element that could be done better if this was remade today.

Angel's Egg (1985)

directed by Mamoru Oshii
Japan
71 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I'd been deliberately avoiding re-watching this because I always have trouble reviewing animated films, and if anything deserves a good and eloquent review, it's this. How do I review something when there's no performances, no camerawork, and no practical effects to critique? It's like talking at length about a painting, something other people may be able to do but which I always fail to find enough words for.

Angel's Egg is just overwhelmingly, devastatingly beautiful, but more than that it's something else that makes putting the label "beautiful" on it feel like a gross oversimplification. I don't know how I missed the Christian imagery the first time around- I was aware at that time of how often anime uses Christian imagery as an aesthetic with no significant meaning behind it, so maybe I just brushed it off- but this film has such an inherently spiritual, inherently religious sense of weight to it that it can't be separated from that imagery. There is also, I feel, a sense that whatever happens has to happen, that it has always been happening, that it always will happen. When the Christ-figure cracks open the egg, although it may devastate the girl serving as the egg's protector and ultimately doom her, I felt, watching that, like it had to be done. The depth and range of emotion portrayed in this film- guilt, inevitability, loss, memory, grief, to cover only a select few- is beyond anything I've seen from animated film, ever.

The world Angel's Egg is set in is a fascinating and palpably oppressive one. It feels like wherever this is, whether it's a far-future version of Earth or some other planet further along in its destruction than ours, it's a world where the idea of itself has overridden the physical reality of it. The world's inhabitants built such impossibly complex structures and technology and intertwined their lives into them so deeply that when those structures and technology began to break down, so did the biological inhabitants, leaving this twisted, half-empty shell of a place whose residents operate on a thread of memory. It seemed like some of them simply ran along a track, like the men who chased after the gigantic shadowy fish repeatedly, even though they could never catch them, and some of them had more autonomy- like the young girl protecting the egg. But even the girl was doing something she couldn't explain in collecting the jugs of water to place them inside the temple among millions of others, spurred on by memory.

I don't know what anything in this film means but watching it is such an intimate and awe-inspiring experience that, even though nothing was explained to me and I understood virtually nothing, I also somehow felt like I understood every detail of it on a level I wasn't aware of. One of the themes Angel's Egg lifts from the Bible is a revised story of Noah's Ark in which no doves return and the boat drifts on and on forever, the animals turning to stone and the people eventually forgetting everything about where they came from. Everything in this film eventually turns back to that story and the unreliability of memory: are we the ones forgetting we ever sent out a dove? Are we the ones moving along a path we can't remember setting out on? Are we the ones who will see everything we love turn to stone around us, because we can no longer imagine a future with any hope in it?

Disorder (2009)

directed by Huang Weikai
China
58 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

There's a lot of documentaries and semi-documentaries coming out of China that showcase the country's natural beauty, as well as the unnatural beauty that can sometimes be found in urban centers, if you have the right lens and know where to look. Disorder is not one of them. As its title implies, it's a hodgepodge of several different film reels from several different contributors who taped the general goings-on in Guangzhou, capturing a myriad of problems and brutalities that I'm sure no government authority is too happy about seeing exported from their country.

Disorder doesn't take a viewpoint of "oh, well, life goes on anyway". Life in this film has stalled and is choking to death on concrete and pollution. The message seems to be that other Chinese films where the country is resplendent and full of life exist in the same space as Disorder, but until the problems caused by misuse of governmental powers and oppression of the people are put to a stop, footage like you see in this documentary is just going to keep coming, and it's not going to get any better. This is why independent voices coming out of China are so important to see and hear- like in any country, the truth is ugly when it concerns violence and discrimination, and the reflex of the people in charge is to suppress things like Disorder.

The chaos of urban life in spaces that are packed to the gills with people is enough to make anybody sweat. Towards the end of the movie, there's a scene that extensively shows police taking members of a crowd and beating them without care, stuffing them into the back of a van and hauling them away for doing basically nothing (though even doing something would not be justification for the brutality) save for noticing the cops heavily abusing their authority.

I don't think China is an exceptional place in terms of abuse of power and censorship- essentially any country has these things going on, in different forms, no matter what kind of face they want to put forward, and that's another reason why this documentary is so important, but is unfortunately probably just going to be held up as an example of "OMG look how corrupt China is". This film should remind us that the only reason we're able to see these things is because somebody filmed them. They don't go away when the camera turns off. And they don't always look like this, either.

Long Weekend (2008)

directed by Jamie Blanks
Australia
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I'd known about this for a while but I was wary of it because of how much I liked the original. I figured that nothing could top it, and I suppose I was mostly right, but this is a very solid remake, and if the 1978 version didn't exist, I would probably think this 2008 one was just as good.

Probably the main reason why this was so good is because they kept the original writer. I'm so glad that they didn't tone down the inherent strangeness of this idea at all, because that strangeness is what makes the film. The whole thing is like when you hear menacing music in a video game and look around for an enemy, but there are none. The enemy is all around the main characters, comprised of every organic being they disregard as less than them and every bit of foliage they traipse through without thought. If you know anything about the original film, you should be familiar with its idea of nature-as-person, and the concept of that is no less fascinating in the remake.

You really get the feeling of some power behind everything that happens to the characters- it's constantly ambiguous whether the attacks on them are due to the whole of nature working in concert, or if there's some larger single power behind it all. Is the unseen force in Long Weekend simply capital-N Nature, as in one overarching force that controls every smaller being we call "life", or is each individual bird, wallaby, snake, and dugong acting of their own accord? I was especially glad to see that they kept the dead dugong from the original because it was probably my favorite and the strangest element of the whole thing. The birds and snakes and other small creatures flit in and out of the picture or act unseen, but the dugong serves as a solid representation of nature's anger. As silly-looking as the fake model was in this remake, it's still a powerful symbol sitting there on the screen: its eyes open, unseeing, but still filled with some presence that says "this is what you've done".

I was curious to see how this one would handle the topic of abortion, because that was my only hangup about the original. I still don't think either of these films are deliberately advancing an anti-abortion agenda, but one interpretation of them could be that nature is mad at the woman character for doing something it deems "unnatural", and like I said about the first one, if that's the case, I'd be really disappointed. It's less ambiguous here than in the first that abortion is a point in the story- unsurprisingly, as the difference from 78 to 08 is quite marked- and, fortunately, it looks less like nature is torturing the woman for getting an abortion and more like her husband is torturing her for it. He's a total nightmare throughout the whole film, both to her and to his environment, and yet when she smashes a bird's egg- her only "violent" act- it's instantly as if she's done something worse than anything he did to her. Some obvious symbolism there.

This review is getting lengthy and so I am going to end it shortly, but I really do enjoy talking about these two films because they are such solid examples of the eco-horror genre and of an antagonist which is wholly faceless. There's less dread in this, but more concrete anxiety thanks to Jim Caviezel's performance as just a really terrible husband. Maybe in another 30 years we can remake this again, after all the cities are underwater and it's obvious that nature was justified in hating us.

Canaries (2017)

directed by Peter Stray
Wales
84 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

From how much everybody disliked this movie, I was expected it to be seriously inept; like, "we shot this on my broken iPhone and couldn't leave my house because we don't have money for a second location" inept. So imagine my surprise when it turned out looking like any other movie. It has B-roll! It has many actors! People just see an alien they don't like and decide to throw the whole movie in the trash.

So basically this movie is about an alien invasion as experienced by two groups of people: A party in Wales, and a government agency in the States monitoring said party because somehow they intercepted a photo taken at the party three years before it was actually taken. One of the partygoers is secretly an agent for this... agency, so there's the connection between the two. Without the presence of the agency, this would have been a fairly inane party-bro horror film, so I'm thankful that the secret-agent aspect of the plot was there to break up the monotony. I wasn't a fan of the comedic elements because it all felt like it had been done before, and I wasn't a fan all the times it had been done before either, but I guess it would have been much more boring without some humor.

The part that I guess a lot of people can't get over is the way the aliens look. And I kind of agree with everyone there, because the simple fact of having no budget doesn't mean you can't be really creative and have aliens that look good, and yet the aliens in Canaries... don't look good. They're the reason the film is called "Canaries", because they all wear bright yellow raincoats- why? Who knows! They're aliens. They also have bad contact lenses and very, very long, sharp nails sticking out of garden gloves (again, who knows), but otherwise they look like us. Actually, they're clones of us, which I thought was very interesting because bodysnatching is always something I think is fun, but unfortunately they do basically nothing with that plot point. I mean, it's implied that these aliens picked up a guy out of Africa and cloned him, then dumped his body all the way in Wales, but their choice of who to clone or exactly how many people they've cloned is never elaborated upon.

I don't like alien invasion films where the end note is simply "we'll fight and survive because we're human and that's what humans do"- it's hopeful and I admire the optimism, but in a genre film it feels equivalent to just closing the book and saying "And they all lived happily ever after". Canaries has strong characters, though, and that goes a long way for me. As long as a film can manage to have a relatively large cast of characters and keep each of them feeling distinctive- as in, not writing every single one of your girl characters with the same personality because you don't know how to write women- I'm willing to engage with it, no matter how questionable everything else about it might be.

Mad Max 2 (1981)

directed by George Miller
Australia
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

So here's where all the post-apocalyptic madness I felt was absent from the first Mad Max is. This takes the moral apocalypse that was already well underway and rides it even further down the road towards irreversibility. The reason I specify the moral aspect of this apocalypse so much is because personally I don't think a breakdown of basic human decency and the end of society go hand-in-hand. However in Mad Max there seems to be such a widespread banditry/rogue warlord issue that it's clear that a large-scale break in societal mores is at hand.

Some movies are just good. You can write essays on them and parse their goodness in as many words as you like but nothing you write can ever capture the exact experience of sitting there and taking in the film itself. Most of the time the integral quality of what makes a movie Just Good remains outside of my grasp, or is comprised of many different things, but I find that frequently what separates a Good genre movie from a forgettable one is its willingness to just slow down from time to time. Although Mad Max 2 is still an action-packed wallop of a film, it manages to include spots where we're made to focus on one thing for a couple of seconds at a time. Max watching the convoy of Lord Humungus pillage a car from a distance, with his dog; trucks trailing down the road, smoke billowing in the breeze; even a simple conversation can be a valuable moment for us to take a break. Utilizing the downtime is a way that Mad Max 2 has clearly matured from its originator.

I think a lot of the reason why I like this series is because it's such a twist on the typical masculine fantasy of post-apocalyptic self-sufficiency. You can be your own man, tearing down the road at 120mph in a car of your own design and making, but you have to keep from getting your windshield busted open by a dude in chaps wielding a flail. You are not the only person trying to do the whole make-your-own-destiny thing out here, and most other men's destinies don't include you in the picture.

I'm just really into this as a vision of the grim future because it feels so realistic. The absurd outfits everybody wears look cobbled-together and goofy because they were, in real life. Nothing is polished or perfect-looking and it fits in with the whole idea of reckless gritty individualism. And the use of vehicles as battle fleets was just so unique and interesting to me- this is something we don't really explore when we talk about the future, mostly for good reason as it is assumed gas will be prohibitively scarce post-breakdown. But the image of a convoy of warriors in various classes of vehicle, from oil tanker all the way down to individual heavies on motorcycles, is such a creative and striking look at a possible vision of the future. The first one wasn't bad, but this one rules.

Mad Max (1979)

directed by George Miller
Australia
91 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

This is my first-ever viewing of these films and the decision to watch them was very spur-of-the-moment. I'm going to post a review for Mad Max 2 right after this as a companion piece.

I was surprised that this wasn't as post-apocalyptic as I was expecting, because I thought that was kind of the whole point of the series. I guess it gets worse as it goes on (which is a really great idea, to have the world slowly worsen over the course of several films), and the whole thing does have the feel and look of a planet full of people giving up hope, but it doesn't scream "the world ended already". If there's any apocalypse going on in Mad Max, it's definitely a moral apocalypse first and foremost. You can tell this especially by the role of the police, because they've stopped attempting to look anything like people trained to serve and protect and are now just the guys with guns who race after criminals and kill them. This is a world where people value their own lives so little that they've stopped being able to value anybody else's life either.

There's a violence to this film that's really raw and is only enhanced by the lack of budget. Mad Max is neither slick nor thoroughly humanistic, two things that typically create immersion, but instead commands our attention through the use of a devil-may-care attitude towards life and limb displayed in numerous nasty car crashes and explosions. I don't think the car worship in this one is quite to the same level as I understand it is in the later installments, but you can tell that cars have become a kind of status symbol, which would make sense in a society halfway to total breakdown in a place like Australia: no car, no way to get out of the sucking maw of the desert.

I wasn't a big fan of how everything essentially turns into one extended car-vs.-motorbike chase for the final quarter or so, but even that sequence is full of the self-determined excitement that pervades the whole film. Although the scope of it isn't quite as developed as it seems to eventually be (again, I have not seen any of the later films), it's clearly the start of some impressive world-building. Could have used a couple more distinctive characters though, as there is basically only Max, a bad guy, and an endless supply of similar-looking unhinged cronies.

The Enchanted Grove (1980)

directed by Gheorghe Naghi
Romania
75 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

Half of why I wanted to watch this was because the only review on Letterboxd is by a German who seems to be very unhappy with the film. I was curious about what could make a children's fantasy film so abrasive to an adult. I kind of see where that person was coming from now, because it's really not great. It's not awful, but it's got problems.

I was surprised by how dark this is for a children's movie, not only in terms of plot, but also because it has a dreariness that comes from the poor production value. Let's cover the plot first- the basic theme of it is nothing too out of the ordinary; a little girl is taken in by cruel stepparents after her birth mother dies, and she runs away from home to go have adventures in a magical forest. Where it gets darker than that is when it's explicitly mentioned that the stepmother beats her, and we actually see the stepmother's maid slap the little girl. That was a big surprise. I'm sure it wasn't unplanned, and maybe they even dubbed in the slap sound effect and all the real-life actress was doing was tapping her on the cheek. But watching this very young girl just take a full-on slap to the face was really jarring.

The second layer of what makes this film feel weird and a little uncomfortable is that the sets look really bad. Prior to the little girl falling asleep in the wood, it's all fine and enjoyable, because it's purely a kid wandering through totally natural scenery guided by her imagination. That's nice, I'm sure we can all relate to romping in the woods and pretending to talk to the forest as children. After she falls asleep, though. she finds herself in the court of some kind of forest fairy princess along with anthropomorphic badgers, bears, bees, ants, and other such things, and the costumes gave me the willies. The whole thing has the air of something made for about $20 and I couldn't stop thinking about those itchy, heavy costumes rotting away in a Romanian basement somewhere.

I would much rather have seen a cute nature walk accompanied by maybe some painted backdrops and a fun talking dog, but instead we get a more-than-vaguely creepy costumed nightmare with a sad backstory. I think adults making movies for children sometimes get caught up in thinking that children will like anything whimsical and silly, but in reality kids have an eye for aesthetics and they can tell when something is of poorer quality than what adults get to watch.

Anthropophagus (1980)

directed by Joe D'Amato
Italy
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I tried to watch this the day before, but I was so exhausted that I couldn't keep my eyes open during it. It's rare for me to revisit films after I've quit them, but something about Anthropophagus made me want to experience the whole thing. I'm glad I did because... boy.

I realized while watching this that a whole lot of Italian horror takes place on boats, or involves boats somehow. Little cruddy tourist-y boats, not big sailing-ships. This is interesting because a boat on the open ocean is a fairly simple and obvious symbol of liminality for a horror movie to use: being in-between one tract of land and the next inherently puts you in a kind of limbo, and the instability of no dry land beneath your feet makes it feel like you're more vulnerable. But the thing about boats and giallo is that the characters are typically not getting attacked on the boats- they take the boat from one place to another, or something happens on the boat and then they get off the boat and something worse happens. It's like being on a boat is some kind of indicator of trouble or rite of passage after which the characters enter unknowingly into a more dangerous domain.

Tourism is also a recurring theme in giallo. In the particular case of Anthropophagus I really enjoyed this because it was actually filmed in Greece and it looks beautiful. Seriously, all the camerapeople had to do was point their camera outside and bam, instant cinematography. The characters are always roving around in a group down those narrow steps and streets Greece has, against the sea-washed white walls, down beaches and little brick roads. It's all perfect. Tourism necessarily puts one in a liminal space as well, however like the boats it doesn't feel like it's used deliberately in this way in Anthropophagus.

I'm really fond of George Eastman's vaguely charismatic, titular man-eater because he resembles the titular fiend from Don Dohler's "Fiend", and as I mentioned in that review, I feel horror has a lack of villains who are specifically fiends instead of ghouls, zombies, ghosts, or anything else. Anthropophagus is a fiend for sure. And there's something just incredibly evocative about his death scene, where he stares right into one of the living humans' eyes as he slowly brings a handful of his own guts to his mouth with this "DO YOU SEE?" expression that betrays something more animate inside that lurching, shambling, undead thing. I have a lot of feelings about this movie.

Absurd (1981)

directed by Joe D'Amato
Italy
96 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

I'm choosing to call this one by its alternate title of "Absurd" because I fundamentally disagree with it being billed as "Monster Hunter" when the only monster hunter in it is MIA for 75% of the runtime. This is also hailed as an Anthropophagus sequel and a 6th "Zombie" film, but to be fair, I think any Italian horror movie produced between like 1975 and 1990 was a Zombie sequel.

I wanted to watch this because the plot sounds like something out of a dream. "A man has been driven insane by church-sanctioned scientific experimentation which also causes him to be nearly impossible to kill. He is pursued to America by a priest where he embarks upon a killing spree while the priest tries to hunt him down and kill him." Like, that leaves so many questions. Why did the church sanction these things, and what was the nature of the experiments exactly? How in the world did he get to America from Greece (??) while in a permanent state of violent psychosis? Why does a priest specifically have to go get him? This is the kind of Swiss cheese plot that can only be enjoyable when you're not trying to get anything good out of it. It's one of those movies that's just so singularly itself, that doesn't look or feel like anything else, that there's something special about it.

This was also a video nasty, and those films hold a weird intrigue to me, because as a horror fan who sees a ton of gore all the time it's hard for me to contextualize the decision to ban these films. I mean, to a very young child, any type of bizarre imagery can stick in their mind and upset them, and I totally agree with keeping even unrealistic gore away from them. But a lot of people wanted to ban films like this completely, not just for children but for everybody, which to me is pretty ridiculous. It's not that films like this have any kind of message that deserves to be out in the world un-censored, I just think the censorship of video gore is an interesting, small-scale example of a few people in positions of power deciding what is and isn't "right" based on their own personal opinion of morality and then trying to impose those opinions onto the public at large.

I don't think anybody would censor Absurd/Monster Hunter today. It is just so goofy. And the thing about it is that the violent scenes are stretched out to such a length that they go way past being emotionally affective in any way and into being super boring. Seeing someone force a girl's head into an oven is a traumatic image. Seeing him mash it around in there, banging her head on the walls, her face caked in awful burn makeup while somehow her hair doesn't even char in the slightest, while guitars wail in the background, is ridiculous. Everything about Absurd that could be brutal is instead exaggerated until it's almost comedic. Even the set design is silly. None of it is believable as a random small town in America. The filmmakers seem to believe football is shorthand for American culture as a whole. "Absurd" is maybe the best title for this cheeseball.