ThanksKilling

2009 (USA) // Jordan Downey // March 30, 2010 // Netflix Instant

​There’s something to be said for a slasher picture so ineptly made and thoroughly cracked in its sensibilities that it resembles one of those public access fever-dreams on Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!. I just don’t know what that something is. I suppose it’s a given that a direct-to-video “film” that looks like it was made for about $5,000 and features a sentient, demonic turkey would be odious and mind-shatteringly stupid. I just didn’t expect it to be dribbled with such batshit-crazy weirdness. ThanksKilling feels like the brainchild of a thirteen-year-old delinquent with a hard-on for glue-sniffing and girl-murder fantasies, or, in its best (worst?) moments, like a live-action, R-rated Bugs Bunny cartoon. I could point to one character’s gossamer reverie about his slain best friend (complete with skipping, hand-holding, ice cream-sharing, and swing-pushing), or the killer turkey’s scheme to impersonate a victim by wearing his face (a successful scheme, I might add). However, the scene that takes the pumpkin pie, as it were, is a short sequence where the Groucho-bespectacled turkey and the dressed-as-a-turkey sheriff amicably share a cup of coffee. The sheer dada WTF?-factor of it almost makes it worth the brain cells and hour of my life that I lost forever.

Antichrist

2009 // Denmark // Lars von Trier // March 19, 2010 Format: Netflix Instant

For me, Lars von Trier's films, whatever their merits, have never begged for a second viewing. Therefore, I suppose it's an achievement of some kind that Antichrist yowled out for another look. My first foray into the film's ghastly spectacle of physical and emotional cruelty left me eroded and shaken, but on a second visit the film seems softer, its lurid edginess and uncanny chills less impactful. The excellent sound design is, if anything, more striking, but the emotional scorching of that first viewing simply cannot be replicated. That said, the virtues of the film's entire approach--forcefully sociological, mythically literate, and yet strangely aloof--seem even plainer to me now. What makes Antichrist audacious isn't its shocking content, but von Trier's determination to make a horror film that neither coyly conceals its psychological subject matter nor concerns itself with funhouse entertainments. Which means that it barely qualifies as a horror film at all, despite the fact that it traffics in the genre's customary currency of dread and revulsion. Whether von Trier has a "woman problem" or not, Antichrist strikes me as the most provocative and challenging film about gender in years. Charlotte Gainsbourg might have won at Cannes, but it's Willem Dafoe's arrogant and smoothly monstrous He that stands out as the film's most memorable and disquieting creation. That notorious fox is strictly a runner-up.

Wonderful Town

2007 // Thailand // Aditya Assarat // February 23, 2010 // DVD - Kino (2009)

Revisiting this superb Thai romantic tragedy for the first time since I caught it at SLIFF in 2008, I was struck by how closely it hews to the rhythms and style of an American indie film. There's something about the relaxed but deliberate pace, the delicate soundtrack with the odd foray into pop sentiment, and the aura of small town menace that pushes into the film's final sequences that lend it the tone of a Sundance feature (in the best possible way). Yet it also possesses the unperturbed gaze and absorption with places—their sights, sounds, and, above all, textures—that have emerged as hallmarks of contemporary East Asian film. Unlike many cinephiles, the appeal of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's obscurantist works eludes me, so it's refreshing to see director Assarat (in his feature film debut, no less) offer an alternative entry point into Thai cinema. I appreciate the shattering third act U-turn in the narrative, and the themes of calamity and recovery that it underlines, but the primary joy I take from the film is how exquisitely it conveys its romantic elements. When was the last time a film-maker so closely followed the process by which two lonely adults fall fitfully, hopelessly in love? Assarat's achievement rests on an uncluttered, engaging portrayal of how unexpected and irresistible the heart's beckonings can be.

Black Mama, White Mama

1973 // USA - Philippines // Eddie Romero // February 19, 2010 // DVD - MGM (2001)

The hallmarks of a sexy, scuzzy Women-in-Prison feature—including a gratuitous shower scene complete with frolicking, and hard-assed lesbian guards in ridiculously short shorts—are pretty much dispensed with in the first fifteen minutes of Black Mama, White Mama. What remains is an exploitation The Defiant Ones, as Pam Grier and Margaret Makov (the former a working girl, the latter a freedom fighter of some sort) scurry from one ludicrous set piece to another. This is a straight-up Z-movie guilty pleasure, just the sort thing one can imagine a teenage Quentin Tarantino devouring. It's a shame director Romero was so enamored with tedious gunfights, as it gives him less time to indulge in the loathsome weirdness that is the film's real appeal. The torch-bearer of BMWM's oddities is undoubtedly genre fixture Sig Haig, as a creepy, strangely high-spirited bounty hunter in a Jim Croce 'stache, whose choice of wardrobe and automobile are best described as "Roy Rogers on LSD." That's him above. Just take a moment to savor that shirt. Truth be told, I spent the better part of this film trying to puzzle out where the hell it's supposed to take place. The vague "island" setting seems, at different times, to be somewhere in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Vietnam. Between the Spanish-speaking Asian gangsters and the stray police uniform patch, I eventually tumbled to the fact that we are, indeed, in the Philippines. Such is the way of cheap, sleazy films bound for grindhouses the world over.

Black Caesar

1973 // USA // Larry Cohen // February 19, 2010 // DVD - MGM (2001)

Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from Black Caesar is this: Do Not Fuck With Fred Williamson. Not only can the man take a bullet in the gut and keep on coming for your traitorous ass, he will, as the above screenshot demonstrates, beat you within an inch of your life with a shoe-shine kit. I had been aware of ex-football star Williamson primarily from Italian dreck like Warrior of the Lost World and his campy performance in From Dusk Till Dawn. Little did I know that he had a significant career as a blaxploitation leading man, a career that this film kicked off. Intriguingly, many of Black Caesar's elements crop up in Scarface, and especially in Goodfellas (including that aforementioned shine-box, which a corrupt cop uses to humiliate Williamson before it is turned on him as a weapon). Do you think that De Palma or Scorsese would ever cop to cribbing slightly from the fellow who directed Q, It's Alive, and The Stuff? And by the by, that James Brown soundtrack? Pure gold.

Vanishing Point

1971 // USA - UK // Richard C. Sarafian // January 31, 2009 // Netflix Instant

Vanishing Point definitely plays like a work from another era, in the worst and best sense. The "Can't Drive 55" spirit that the film seizes upon—which it shares with the much zanier The Cannonball Run—unfortunately dates the film as an artifact from an era when a national speed limit was a hot political button. That said, what's most appealing about Vanishing Point is how eagerly and even joyously it strives to present a generous, oddball-ridden slice of early 1970s America. The on-location shooting lends it a documentary look and texture, but the characters are so deliberately out-there, it never feels remotely like realism. I mean, c'mon: the naked biker girl; the faith healers; the blind, black DJ in a shitheel desert town; the old rattlesnake catcher who turns up out of nowhere? Delicious stuff, if you can stand it. And for all the hurtling cars, this strangely-placed, slow-motion shot of a basket of snakes flying through the air is what most caught my eye.