Sugar Hill ('74)!

Valentine: You know it's strange, after you and I split, it took a long time to get over the fact that you took up with Langston.

Diana: Yeah, but you got over it all right.

Valentine: In any case, I never thought I'd be questioning you about his death.

Diana: Murder. First time I met him was right here. He came up to me and he asked my name. It's Diana Hill I said. He said, well from now on you're gonna be called Sugar, Miss Sugar, 'cause you look as sweet as sugar tastes.

Sugar Hill is a blacksploitation Voodoo black magic crime action film from the mid-70s.

Diana 'Sugar' Hill (above) wants to sell her soul to the greatest of Voodoo gods, Baron Samedi (first photo), to avenge her boyfriend, Langston, who was murdered by a honky crime syndicate that wants control of his night club.

Baron: Tell me, why do you want my power?

Sugar: There are some men I want punished.

Baron: Punished?

Sugar: DEAD.

The screenplay was by prolific playwright Tim Kelly, who wrote over three hundred plays before he died at 61. It is the sole directorial credit for Paul Maslansky, producer of over thirty films, including the Police Academy films, Cop and a Half, Raw Meat, Circle of Iron, and Damnation Alley. Star Marki Bey had a short career that began with a role in Hal Ashby's first film The Landlord.

O'Brien: You're not going to do anything crazy, are you?

Sugar: You mean like I did to Tank?

O'Brien: Tha-that was you? I don't believe it.

Sugar: You're about to become a believer.

Slave shackles are used as Jujus (Voodoo charms) to resurrect a zombie murder gang of living dead slaves brought from Guinea to America in the 1840s. Sugar, Baron Samedi, and the living dead slave gang kill off the members of the honky crime syndicate one at a time.

There's a bar fight between Sugar and a blonde lady that begins with a bunch of slaps.

I have described the essential elements of the movie Sugar Hill.

Fear City

I'd have to update my blog to adult content just to talk about Fear City, which "was originally made by 20th Century-Fox, but they decided that it had too much nudity, sex, violence and drug references for them, so they sold it to the independent Aquarius Releasing" (although you have to be careful about believing what you read on IMDb).

Be great to see Fear City in high-def. The image quality is of course superior on my television, but it's still not blu-ray, and I think if there's a place that deserves the high-def blu-ray treatment, it's the interior of a strip club in NYC during the '80s.

This was the Abel Ferrara film that followed Ms. 45. Important early Ferrara collaborators were involved, including cinematographer James Lemmo, editor Anthony Redman, and screenwriter Nicholas St. John. Billy Dee Williams is a cop, Melanie Griffith is a stripper, and Tom Berenger is a bouncer. Berenger's Matt Rossi was a boxer who retired after killing a man in the ring; Fear City is about him conquering that guilt and reigniting the flame inside. His challenge, for the prize of self-redemption, is a serial killer who's targeting strippers from Rossi's own club.

It's a gritty, mean, icy cop film with a kung-fu narrative: there are training sessions, and the film culminates with a physical battle between Rossi and the serial killer (who is unnamed and the actor uncredited). But there's no glory here, no heroes, and no celebration of murder. The killings are nasty, repulsive, and unglamorous, and the killer's killer is confused and haunted.

Cinematically speaking, for me, NYC in the 80s has begun to challenge LA in the 70s, and London in the 60s, as centers of weirdness and awesome cinema. The 80s have great, weird NYC movies like Fear City and Ms. 45, Basket Case, William Lustig's Maniac, Scorsese's After Hours, Michael Schultz's The Last Dragon, Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper, and vibrant, independent, and personal films like Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Variety, Malle's My Dinner With Andre, John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet, and 1980's Gloria, directed and written by John Cassavetes.

NYC has a well-known and rich cinematic history, and edgy, progressive, and talented filmmakers continue to come from the city. I'd like to see more weird ones. Aren't they running together, these days? My impression is that there's a great worldwide panic about the lack of weirdness in our modern lives. I think weirdness is being purchased and then processed by capitalistic logic. It's horrible to witness mass conformity take place. Culturally speaking, in America, corporations and businesses have a stronger impact on trends and lifestyles than politics, humanities, sciences, traditions, or histories (at least this is my impression, based on my extensive field studies, conducted without supervision, and under periodic intoxication). It's not the government, it's the corporations, and examples of corporations are movie studios. They have to behave like corporations, you are what your nature is, but, by the same logic, people should behave like people, not like corporations. Corporations want to be like people, they want you to think they are like you, and that they, too, if no one else, feels the same way. But that's just a lie. So we should continue to allow ourselves to be different, and continue to express our inner selves, and we have to keep changing and moving and exploring ourselves and our world, at least to stay ahead of the corporations.

This "information" is a millionfold inflation based on my projections rooted in specific paranoias and mistrusts. Probably not entirely though, because don't US multiplexes confirm what I'm saying? Fuck me if our theaters aren't boring now, and fuck me if US cinema hasn't lost its imagination. Like more and more things, the rest of the world is, right now, more interesting, more exploratory. We're importing, from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, etc. We're remaking the films we're importing. We're remaking our own films. We're rebooting our franchises. We're sequeling ourselves into cinematic hell, America, we're sequeling ourselves out of relevance.

I'm getting myself really worked up. Take it to the page, you should tell me; you should ask me to take it the page, and write movies, write screenplays, you should tell me to write movies and not whiny diatribes. Seriously will you please call me and say that to me.

Vigilante Force (!)

Vigilante Force begins with some manic fucking hellraising. Within the one minute mark, while the credits are still rolling: guns are fired from the bed of a moving truck, a man is dragged down the length of a bar by another man in a cowboy hat, a high-heeled woman in a bikini dances on a pool table for cash money, a roulette wheel is spun, there is a bar fight which escalates to gun violence - and then all out pandemonium (guys being thrown onto tables and stuff), and for what appears to be completely unrelated reasons (unrelated to the bar fight) a man is thrown out a window in a coffee shop, followed by a police car being set on a fire (with a fucking torch) and shot at until it explodes.

This is followed by an early morning robbery getaway sequence. Three men with guns, and either a woman accomplice, or a female hostage, flee to their car while exchanging bullets with the police. Two officers, and an elderly bystander, are shot.

The town is overrun by criminal behavior.

Residents don't feel safe walking down front street anymore. Harry, the sheriff, can't be everywhere at once. He's losing men. Ben Arnold (Jan-Michael Vincent), a young tractor salesman and local, has a Vietnam vet brother, a "genuine war hero," whom he offers to contact for auxiliary police protection.

Aaron Arnold (Kris Kristofferson) agrees to the arrangement on the condition that he can bring with him four friends, friends he promises are war vets and/or ex-police. They're sworn in and issued guns, badges, and handcuffs.

Vigilante Force was written and directed by George Armitage (Miami Blues), with production design by Jack Fisk. It was produced by Gene Corman and released by United Artists in 1976. Kris Kristofferson plays a softer, but not much softer, Kurt Russell type. He controls the criminal population in order to cheat the town himself, and the movie is about his betrayal of the trust offered to him.

This means a cycle of corruption, violent action, and town drama. It's my opinion that no one in the movie is interesting except Kristofferson as Aaron. But he's pretty interesting. The film first made me lose my shit when Aaron breaks up a cockfight by pistol shooting the roosters dead in front of the crowd of betters. "You're all under arrest" is his line.

The problem is Armitage doesn't make me care about anyone, so who gives a fuck about his outrageous, ridiculous southern anarchy narrative. It's tedious and drags itself through a slow middle half that's only punctured by Aaron shooting two roosters. Except, at the end, the movie take off. TAKES OFF. It's the end of the movie I want to describe, and part of the ending's charm when watching the film is its surprising pay offs, emphasis on surprise, and I don't recommend you read the next section or look at its pictures unless you've seen the movie. BUT I also recommend you do check out the next section, even if you haven't seen the movie, if your position is still that you don't think you should watch this movie, because you totally should.

THE END OF THE MOVIE

Evil Aaron and his evil friends disguise themselves as a marching band and intend to use their small arsenal to rob something I forget what.

Ben has assembled a vigilante group (earlier, around a pick-up truck, he'd been like, "I'm the one that brought you here, and I'm the one that's gonna run you out," to a topless Aaron, who'd been saying stuff like "Now you listen to me I didn't volunteer for this").

Ben tries yelling down some threats. There's a stand off. It's intense. Aaron tests Ben's seriousness.

Ben is very serious.

Hell breaks loose. It's insane. They just don't make pandemonium like they make pandemonium in the US south. Guns are fired, things explode, people are given hell, people take cover.

In one instance ...

a woman with a Molotov cocktail ...

throws the Molotov cocktail ...

at a man ...

whom she hits ...

who presumably dies a horrible, painful, fiery death.

The action heads to the nearby ghost town, where things are settled the only way these things can be settled.

Mystics in Bali!

Old Leák Queen: What is her name, and where does she come from?
Catherine: Catherine Kean from the USA.
Old Leák Queen: Hmm. And where is that?
Mahendra: Very far away.

"Here there is even a western actress playing a key role. In fact, the elusive Ilona Agathe Bastian was not an actress at all, but a German tourist holidaying in Bali. She was spotted by the wife of one of the film's producers and it didn't take much to persuade her to stay on for a few months free holiday." -production notes.

H. Tjut Djalil is a new hero of mine. This, Mystics in Bali, is the second film of his I've seen, following Lady Terminator. He is a director of keen imagination and sharp cinematic wit. Roughly a year ago I didn't even know Eastern black magic horror films existed. Which is appropriate: here I was in the house of film, and black magic was being practiced in the back yard. Of course! The ones that I've seen, including a recent theatrical screening of Boxer's Omen, are among the craziest, most enjoyable movies I've ever seen. They lack the tiresome earnestness and rectitude of Christian horror films, and their potential for engaging supernatural phenomenon is greater.

"I'm surprised that a pretty girl like you would be interested in learning black magic."
- the first line of Mystics in Bali

H. Tjut Djalil is a genre surrealist. Neutral, monotonic voice dubs and plastic-faced actors engender a strange impassiveness as the protagonists journey to learn the intricacies of Leak Bali, a black magic which could be the church of Lynch. The roots of its power seem to be joyless high-pitched laughter. The laughter is one aspect of black magic taught by the face-shifting Old Leák Queen, who takes on Catherine as an apprentice. Of the things the Old Leák Queen teaches Catherine, the most important is drinking newborn blood by way of disembodied, floating head.

Blood has a restorative power for the Leaks, and infant blood is best. Like other exploitation movies, kicks are to be had, intentional and not. Some of the dialogue exits in this movie are extraordinary. When Catherine vomits green goo and live mice, Mahendra blames the prior evening's meal! Absurd on the one hand, but true on the other: does Mahendra know of the prior evening's metamorphosis, the transformation of Catherine from human to pig (Leaks can do this[!])?

Mahendra starts Catherine down the dark path of black magic. She asks him to; she's learned about African Voodooism already, and now wants introduction to Leak Bali, the strongest black magic in the world. It ends badly, unfortunately for Catherine and Mahendra, but fortunately for the audience, and really Mahendra is a great guy who cared about Catherine and meant best.

Basket Case (1982)

"But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES."

- from Frank O'Hara's Why I Am Not a Painter, because this could be Why I Am Not a Critic, as it's only tangentially a discussion of Basket Case:

It's difficult for me to imagine a mainstream one-thousand theater rerelease of Basket Case, mainly because it's never enjoyed such mammoth distribution. The film, even in its time of production, was self-consciously executed from the margins. Made by a certain type of movie fan, it's dedicated to Herschell Gordon Lewis, for a reciprocating audience familiar with its rote of camp and humor infused gore and horror, it has fared better than some of its contemporaries that didn't make it to dvd and don't enjoy reputations. The lifespans of this film type are entirely dependent upon fans of the movies, as the film is released by an independent distributor, Something Weird, and has only a sliver of cultural relevance. If not for its esoteric demand it could easily become lost, and, more terrifying to me, people could easily question the relevance of its disappearance. While films by Orson Welles are still underseen and underreleased, who cares about Basket Case? I care about both, and think everyone else should too.

The question of its perpetuation is for me a matter of social self-censorship, a matter of the merits of Basket Case versus the reality of Basket Case. Films like this are now rarely ever made, supplanted mostly by films of ironic self-consciousness, and far better produced films, and distribution for independent films is ever diminishing. Within Basket Case, for example, shot in New York City, 1982, the protagonist strolls by a kung-fu theater playing a triple feature next to a grindhouse with its own set of features. In John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Ben Gazzara takes his dancer girlfriends to a kung-fu theater and has to ask the girls to leave because they're still sitting after three movies! Three kung-fu movies! This culture, even in its time marginal, has mostly disappeared. Its lingering presence can be relished in revival screenings, in youth populated revival screenings, wherein the majority excitedly see the movie for a first time or attend for an "experience," and especially in random encounters with aging film fans. Nothing reminds me of the shared, universal condition of human suffering and longing so much as encountering a genuine fan of a movie after a revival screening, someone seeing it for the second time since its initial theatrical release, even better if it's a non-cinephile, and only loves the particular movie and had to see it again. For me, the more esoteric the film, the deeper the connection, because I often have meaningful conversations about popular films, but rarely have the chance for passionate conversation about the obscure, and treasure when I do. The conversation can be of a delicate, personal nature, the kind prone to evaporate with time.

Films from the margins often show or appeal to the marginalized. For example, their actors are often less talented, less perfectly beautiful, or never became well-known enough for their looks and talent to receive popular validation. Sometimes they are unappealing, sometimes despicable, sometimes outrageous. In this way outsider independent films can depict overlooked characters in a society, people not usually on screens, screens more and more reserved for manufactured, big-budgeted entertainment. So in time an outsider film can come to be defined by what it does show, the particular forms of personality and character it exhibits.

Cities well-known for filmmaking often tend to depict shifting populations. Think of the shades of urban character that flourish and vanish through decades of Los Angeles film, and the continuing near-eradication of particular forms of eccentricity that used to be a striking characteristic of New York City's personality. Bright, imaginative, fresh-thinking NYC films still exist for a different type of minority, one that has always blossomed in the film community: the sophisticated, cultured film fan. Recent NYC movies like Momma's Man, Frownland, and Tiny Furniture prosper because their subjects are members of the viewing cadre, and they're great films, but it's hard to imagine Gazzara's dancers sitting through them in succession*!

Diminished and homogeneous genre films, and other forms of esotericism, are partially to blame for the receding scope of independent films. The baby has been thrown out with the bath water. As smaller independent theaters, production companies, and distributors leave the stage, theatrical options narrow, and with them the potential for diverse encounters. Quality levels have risen, in theaters and films, but the curious and unconventional continue to die out^. All film fans have recently heard the repopularized "I'd rather stay home and watch television (!)" The reason for this get-the-fuck-out-of-town comment's revitalization is that television has begun to surprise its audiences, while cinema only flatters.

Cinematic taste has turned the corner while fleeing from Basket Case and films like it, and that's too bad. The progress of narrative variety and the evolution of filmic curiosity shouldn't be slowed to accommodate the safe or familiar. It's not that I want Basket Case to be remade again, the solution Hollywood suggests with their surge of remakes, it's that I see a necessity for an environment of creativity that allows for films like it to be made. In order to sustain the legacy of Basket Case, the outer boundaries of the imagination must continually be sought by filmmakers of all types. While continuing to ask for honesty, I also ask for invention, and gratefully welcome the intrusion of dreams.

* Momma's Man, Frownland, and Tiny Furniture, while not portraying an audience generating minority, due of course portray the statistically marginal, and are made deliberately non-mainstream in order to appeal to a certain group. They don't have well-known actors and they receive limited distribution. Like Basket Case, they sometimes challenge your reasons for watching them with either poor or atypical decisions and processes. The films' specific tones and points of view alienate audiences seeking comfortable inclusion, but reward the curious. I love them, and love that they get shown, but they're not the subject here. They should stay the same and in addition there can be other types of films.

^ If I must mention Internet alternatives well here I have, but it's not really the subject.

Private Parts (+/-).

Private Parts (Blood Relations, the alternate USA title according to IMDb, is a much better title for the film) shares characteristics with the three previously discussed films. Obviously Eating Raoul, as this is another Paul Bartel film, and Peeping Tom, because it's a thriller with themes of obsession, and Shaun of the Dead, owing to the filmic depth of its characters and the unraveling of the narrative. Not Quite Hollywood too, because Private Parts is a personal take on a type of genre.

The film is typical for the period, especially as the name Corman is attached to the production. It's a genre film that faintly exhibits personal traits of the filmmaker, but is geared toward commercial success and exploitative reactions. Following Eating Raoul with Private Parts, traveling in reverse order, illustrates the way filmmaker's interests can break through the surface of a genre narrative without finding full expression. Private Parts is a diluted combination of Bartel's impulses, several previous films (most obviously Blow-Up and Psycho), and genre intrepidity. In Not Quite Hollywood QT talks about the one scene everyone talks about in a good genre film, the scene that's complete 'what the fuck' and 'did they just do that' material. Private Parts has that scene, which Quint of AICN also mentioned in his recent write-up of the film.

I'd like to think that Bartel was inspired by Bava at the time. I know he was around Joe Dante, and I know Dante was into Bava. Regardless, the film plays out like an Italian genre film. There's murder, sexual perversion, mystery, suspense, drama - there are all the qualities that make a film exciting and interesting. This is how it fails: it doesn't wholly commit itself to one idea. It shares qualities with many films but fails to become its own. Development of story and plot is the primary concern, and all peripheral components of filmmaking, including characters, are driven toward a final revelation, or simple audience titillation. Not that Bava had fully realized characters, but he had fully realized films, movies that were cinematically excessive. Bartel totters between character-driven and genre-driven, and wedges these two on his filmmaking inclinations.

It works to the extent that Bartel is an interesting person, a competent filmmaker, and has a bizarre script to draw from. A tapestry of peculiar Los Angeles eccentrics is the direct link between this and Eating Raoul. I love the way Bartel views LA in both films. The problem is in Private Parts the characters, the unusual LA personalities, aren't allowed to steer the film. They're pushed into the background, and to describe them is to simply reduce them to their exploitative and attractive features: a man-loving priest, a sexually oppressed photographer, a time trapped old woman, an alcoholic, an innocent midwestern girl. The tone of Eating Raoul is determined by its characters' mindset. When that happens it makes every shift in the narrative feel like a furthering of character development. That's the difference between a good genre film and a great genre film, generally speaking.

Private Parts is exciting and easy to watch and not a bad film: there is one scene in particular I rewatched about twenty times. But the difference between it and Eating Raoul is significant. Eating Raoul feels like a film made by a man, and Private Parts feel like a movie produced through a system.