Just published by FAB Press, Cinema Sewer Volume 2 presents a compendium of material from back issues of Vancouver-based Robin Bougie’s journal of the same name, along with some new hitherto unpublished pieces.
For those not familiar with Cinema Sewer, it’s basically Bougie’s idiosyncratic, personal magazine about porn, horror and general trash cinema, with a distinctive approach to design and layout based on the use of hand-lettering and original line illustrations, often of a pornographic nature.
It’s confrontational, not for the easily offended and a frank insight into its author’s more or less uncensored id, perhaps not as extreme in its transgressions as unapologetic serial killer enthusiast Peter Sotos’s infamous zine Pure but still inherently far enough out there as to separate that one per cent from the other ninety-nine.
Rather, Sotos probably separated that 0.01 per cent, of which neither Bougie, I or (hopefully) you are part of, from the 0.99, insofar as an issue of Pure landed him in court on child pornography charges; like the film Maladolescenza, Pure is a text it’s useful to be aware of, but one which must be approached with extreme caution – or, better, avoided.
Anyway, if you’re part of that 0.99 per cent, with similar interests to Bougie and an awareness of how difficult it can be to acknowledge them in a wider context, no matter what reasoned arguments you may make, it’s essential reading, being well-researched and containing plenty of material that’s hard to come by elsewhere.
How many other publications, for instance, would have excerpts from Marc “Mr 10½” Stevens autobiography or reprints of his fan-club information, or a review of an extreme S&M video from Germany, Kit Kat Experiment?
Moreover, in relation to the latter, how many would then go on to feature an extended dialogue between the author and one of his readers in which they attempt to work through their positions on such material?
Or, even if your tastes veer more towards trash than porn cinema, or more towards contemporary and vanilla porn than 70s/80s roughie fan Bougie, it’s still a worthwhile purchase as an indication of support and gratitude that publications like Cinema Sewer still exist...
Friday, 12 June 2009
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Vampires of Dartmoor - Dracula's Music Cabinet
One of the most interesting recent phenomena in the film soundtrack scene is the imaginary score, of music for films that do not exist or as alternative soundtracks for those that do. Much like everything, the results are of variable quality: For every The Giallo’s Flame, that successfully channels the spirit of Fabio Frizzi’s mellotron, there are two or three unimaginative, lazy, fake 70s porn soundtracks that think some fuzzed-out, waka-chuka guitar is all that’s required.
Given this hit and miss aspect, when I heard about the upcoming re-issue of this late 1960s album I was intrigued, but also wanted to know more. A quick search and a rip of the original, long out of print, vinyl was on my mp3 player, via Mutant Sounds.
And what a treat Dracula's Music Cabinet is. It's sufficiently like the work of Peter Thomas. Heinz Funk and Gert Wilden to function as the alternate score to many a krimi or post-Expressionist Mabuse / mad scientist entry, with bizarre studio effects, weird vocals and self-explanatory titles like Der Henker von Blackmoore and Die Folterkammer des Dr. Sex [or Fu Manchu], whilst also being just that bit different.
The re-issue is available from Moviegrooves.
Given this hit and miss aspect, when I heard about the upcoming re-issue of this late 1960s album I was intrigued, but also wanted to know more. A quick search and a rip of the original, long out of print, vinyl was on my mp3 player, via Mutant Sounds.
And what a treat Dracula's Music Cabinet is. It's sufficiently like the work of Peter Thomas. Heinz Funk and Gert Wilden to function as the alternate score to many a krimi or post-Expressionist Mabuse / mad scientist entry, with bizarre studio effects, weird vocals and self-explanatory titles like Der Henker von Blackmoore and Die Folterkammer des Dr. Sex [or Fu Manchu], whilst also being just that bit different.
The re-issue is available from Moviegrooves.
Palermo Milano solo andata / Palermo-Milan One Way
As the old adage goes “every cloud has a silver lining”
In the case of the Italian filone cinema the lining was perhaps that its general decline sometimes afforded those who were still able to make films the opportunity to work with the kind of talent that likely would otherwise have been unavailable to them.
Claudio Fragasso's Naples-Milan One Way is a case in point, with the writer-director getting the opportunity to work with actors Giancarlo Giannini and Stefania Sandrelli – actors who, twenty years before, were more likely to be found working with Wertmuller and Bertolucci respectively – alongside internationally recognised composer Pino Donaggio.
But while the film certainly benefits from their respective contributions, the real surprise is Fragasso's own direction. Not only does he handle the various action set pieces extremely well while sustaining a high level of tension throughout, but he also allows for the characters and the story to develop.
Admittedly the last is derivative, with Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta and Umberto Lenzi's From Corleone to Brooklyn coming to mind in the modern and classical eras of the poliziotto respectively.
But it's also a story that was still relevant at the time and, if Gomorrah is anything to go by, today: the extent to which the tentacles of organized crime have reached through the establishment and the often thankless task of those who challenge this power.
More importantly, Fragasso also navigates his own path between such models, providing more genre thrills than Tognazzi’s film whilst avoiding the more unrealistic aspects of Lenzi and Merli’s work. (Another notable difference between the two periods is that Fragasso’s film features policewomen as part of the team, with their gender going unremarked and their abilities unquestioned by their peers, in sharp contrast to the masculine, woman-as-victim world of the 1970s poliziotto film.)
The altogether more vulnerable Giannini plays a mob accountant, Turi Leofonte, known as “the computer” for his ability with numbers and capacity for memorising everything. He's been named by an informer as someone who knows all the secrets and will divulge them if given the right prompting.
Before word gets out, a hand-picked police squad is hastily assembled, with leave cancelled. Their job is to take Leofonte into custody and transport him to safety. It should be a more or less routine task, but the mission is compromised from the start.
Narrowly escaping an ambush – albeit at the cost of the lives of some of the police escort and Turi’s family alike – the survivors are forced to continue to Milan alone, not knowing whom they can trust.
Drama is added by the well-defined internal conflicts within the group. Understandably paranoid, Turi worries his escort has been selected precisely because of their youth and relative lack of experience, while they in turn are frustrated by his general attitude. In the middle is Turi’s rebellious and naïve teenage daughter, Chiara, who starts to develop a mutual friendship with the youngest of the policemen.
Fragasso recently made a sequel, charting the return voyage from Milan to Naples, which features Merli's son, Maurizio Mattei Merli…
In the case of the Italian filone cinema the lining was perhaps that its general decline sometimes afforded those who were still able to make films the opportunity to work with the kind of talent that likely would otherwise have been unavailable to them.
Claudio Fragasso's Naples-Milan One Way is a case in point, with the writer-director getting the opportunity to work with actors Giancarlo Giannini and Stefania Sandrelli – actors who, twenty years before, were more likely to be found working with Wertmuller and Bertolucci respectively – alongside internationally recognised composer Pino Donaggio.
But while the film certainly benefits from their respective contributions, the real surprise is Fragasso's own direction. Not only does he handle the various action set pieces extremely well while sustaining a high level of tension throughout, but he also allows for the characters and the story to develop.
Admittedly the last is derivative, with Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta and Umberto Lenzi's From Corleone to Brooklyn coming to mind in the modern and classical eras of the poliziotto respectively.
But it's also a story that was still relevant at the time and, if Gomorrah is anything to go by, today: the extent to which the tentacles of organized crime have reached through the establishment and the often thankless task of those who challenge this power.
More importantly, Fragasso also navigates his own path between such models, providing more genre thrills than Tognazzi’s film whilst avoiding the more unrealistic aspects of Lenzi and Merli’s work. (Another notable difference between the two periods is that Fragasso’s film features policewomen as part of the team, with their gender going unremarked and their abilities unquestioned by their peers, in sharp contrast to the masculine, woman-as-victim world of the 1970s poliziotto film.)
The altogether more vulnerable Giannini plays a mob accountant, Turi Leofonte, known as “the computer” for his ability with numbers and capacity for memorising everything. He's been named by an informer as someone who knows all the secrets and will divulge them if given the right prompting.
Before word gets out, a hand-picked police squad is hastily assembled, with leave cancelled. Their job is to take Leofonte into custody and transport him to safety. It should be a more or less routine task, but the mission is compromised from the start.
Narrowly escaping an ambush – albeit at the cost of the lives of some of the police escort and Turi’s family alike – the survivors are forced to continue to Milan alone, not knowing whom they can trust.
Drama is added by the well-defined internal conflicts within the group. Understandably paranoid, Turi worries his escort has been selected precisely because of their youth and relative lack of experience, while they in turn are frustrated by his general attitude. In the middle is Turi’s rebellious and naïve teenage daughter, Chiara, who starts to develop a mutual friendship with the youngest of the policemen.
Fragasso recently made a sequel, charting the return voyage from Milan to Naples, which features Merli's son, Maurizio Mattei Merli…
Monday, 8 June 2009
Ladies of Giallo
Over at Daily Tourniquet, http://www.dailytourniquet.com/?p=130, is the first of an on-going series looking at the Ladies of Giallo with a profile of the talented Rosella Falk of Seven Bloodstained Orchids, Sleepless and more.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Dalle Ardenne all'inferno / The Dirty Heroes
Wow, what a mess!
An intermittently entertaining one, to be sure, but a mess nonetheless.
For this post- Dirty Dozen WWII action / caper crossover can't seem to decide what it wants to be, the tone it wants to take, and generally outlives its welcome somewhat thanks to a resulting lack of focus and a near two-hour running time.
We begin with the escape of two Chicago gangsters, Joe Mortimer (Frederick Stafford) and Randall (Howard Ross) from a Nazi POW camp, aided by one of the guards, Sergeant Rudolph Petrowsky; Petrowsky just happens to also be from the Windy City, having had to leave the US in a hurry and take advantage of his dual nationality sometime before the war.
The three men are intent on steal some diamonds and plans for the V1 and V2 rockets from the Nazis. To accompany these goals they need the assistance of three people.
The first person is local resistance leader, Luc Rollman (Adolfo Celi). He unfortunately expects that the diamonds should be returned to the Dutch people from whom the Nazi's appropriated them...
Students of geography and military history will at this point note that the Ardennes, as referred to the in film's Italian title, is in Belgium rather than Holland; suffice to say that this proves an early indicator of the film's somewhat slapdash approach to such matters.
The second person is Kristina von Keist (Daniela Bianchi). She's the wife of the local Wermacht commander, General von Keist (Curd Jurgens). She's also Jewish, her real name being Hannah Goldschmitt.
Needless to say it would be very bad for her and her husband if recently arrived SS commander General Hassler (Helmuth Schneider) were to find out.
Being intent on pursuing what his army counterpart Keist feels to be a lost cause, Hassler's has brought about an end to the uneasy truce that had existed between Rollman's partisans and Keist's men by a series of punitive SS actions.
The third person - finally we get there - is another of the men's old Chicago crime colleagues, O'Connor (John Ireland) who's now a Colonel in the advancing US army. They need him to create a diversion by launching an attack on the German positions at the right time. The complication here is that O'Connor doesn't really have the authority to make such an attack...
In sum, what we have is an convoluted and co-incidence based story that alternates awkwardly between war as hell and war as caper approaches, with few clichés left unexplored - the good German and the bad Nazi, the Jewish woman passing as 'Aryan' - and some dubious treatments of the partisan struggle and the Holocaust where attempts at pathos tend instead to come off as bathos.
Alberto De Martino's direction is a mixed bag, some effective compositions and set pieces - most notably the underwater sequence in which our (anti-)heroes enter the Nazi compound through the canal system - being offset by a lack of imagination in the battle scenes, some poorly integrated stock footage and, most laughably, a moment when a reconnaissance plane commandeered by O'Connor transforms into a bomber, delivers its payload, and metamorphoses back again.
Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone contribute some suitably stirring martial music.
The leading men acquit themselves well enough in the derring-do stakes - Howard Ross looking as though he'd been working out particularly hard - whilst Bianchi makes for a suitably attractive love interest and sympathy figure.
The cast are nicely rounded out by some of those always welcome Eurocult faces, including, in two rather unimaginative pieces of casting John Bartha as an SS officer and Tom Felleghy as one of his allied counterparts.
An intermittently entertaining one, to be sure, but a mess nonetheless.
For this post- Dirty Dozen WWII action / caper crossover can't seem to decide what it wants to be, the tone it wants to take, and generally outlives its welcome somewhat thanks to a resulting lack of focus and a near two-hour running time.
We begin with the escape of two Chicago gangsters, Joe Mortimer (Frederick Stafford) and Randall (Howard Ross) from a Nazi POW camp, aided by one of the guards, Sergeant Rudolph Petrowsky; Petrowsky just happens to also be from the Windy City, having had to leave the US in a hurry and take advantage of his dual nationality sometime before the war.
The three men are intent on steal some diamonds and plans for the V1 and V2 rockets from the Nazis. To accompany these goals they need the assistance of three people.
The first person is local resistance leader, Luc Rollman (Adolfo Celi). He unfortunately expects that the diamonds should be returned to the Dutch people from whom the Nazi's appropriated them...
Students of geography and military history will at this point note that the Ardennes, as referred to the in film's Italian title, is in Belgium rather than Holland; suffice to say that this proves an early indicator of the film's somewhat slapdash approach to such matters.
The second person is Kristina von Keist (Daniela Bianchi). She's the wife of the local Wermacht commander, General von Keist (Curd Jurgens). She's also Jewish, her real name being Hannah Goldschmitt.
Needless to say it would be very bad for her and her husband if recently arrived SS commander General Hassler (Helmuth Schneider) were to find out.
Being intent on pursuing what his army counterpart Keist feels to be a lost cause, Hassler's has brought about an end to the uneasy truce that had existed between Rollman's partisans and Keist's men by a series of punitive SS actions.
The third person - finally we get there - is another of the men's old Chicago crime colleagues, O'Connor (John Ireland) who's now a Colonel in the advancing US army. They need him to create a diversion by launching an attack on the German positions at the right time. The complication here is that O'Connor doesn't really have the authority to make such an attack...
In sum, what we have is an convoluted and co-incidence based story that alternates awkwardly between war as hell and war as caper approaches, with few clichés left unexplored - the good German and the bad Nazi, the Jewish woman passing as 'Aryan' - and some dubious treatments of the partisan struggle and the Holocaust where attempts at pathos tend instead to come off as bathos.
Alberto De Martino's direction is a mixed bag, some effective compositions and set pieces - most notably the underwater sequence in which our (anti-)heroes enter the Nazi compound through the canal system - being offset by a lack of imagination in the battle scenes, some poorly integrated stock footage and, most laughably, a moment when a reconnaissance plane commandeered by O'Connor transforms into a bomber, delivers its payload, and metamorphoses back again.
Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone contribute some suitably stirring martial music.
The leading men acquit themselves well enough in the derring-do stakes - Howard Ross looking as though he'd been working out particularly hard - whilst Bianchi makes for a suitably attractive love interest and sympathy figure.
The cast are nicely rounded out by some of those always welcome Eurocult faces, including, in two rather unimaginative pieces of casting John Bartha as an SS officer and Tom Felleghy as one of his allied counterparts.
A beautiful Bava poster
For The Whip and the Body:
Presently on Ebay, at a reasonable price, but just a little too large sized for me as a quattro foglio / four sheet that's 55 by 78 inches and in two pieces...
Presently on Ebay, at a reasonable price, but just a little too large sized for me as a quattro foglio / four sheet that's 55 by 78 inches and in two pieces...
Thursday, 4 June 2009
Fulci / Bacon #2
Yesterday I was at a seminar on Francis Bacon, which produced another couple of connections to Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin:
Bacon's paintings, with their vivisected / meat forms
Lizard's dogs
Interestingly the lecturer also mentioned Bacon's interest in Bataille - someone whom I've often thought about Fulci's 'obscence' "stories of the eye" in relation to...
Bacon's paintings, with their vivisected / meat forms
Lizard's dogs
Interestingly the lecturer also mentioned Bacon's interest in Bataille - someone whom I've often thought about Fulci's 'obscence' "stories of the eye" in relation to...
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