Retro Movie: Ms .45

Released in 1981, and I watched this film on its initial released, Ms .45is an exploitation film that is charitably about sexism in society and more accurately an excuse to watch for nearly an hour and a half of a young woman taking revenge with the aid of a semi-automatic pistol. Be warned, spoilers for the entire film abound ahead.

Thana, played by the tragically doomed Zoe Tamerlis, is young woman, mute, who works as a seamstress in the New York City’s garment district. On her way home from work she is attacked and raped in an alley, then when she gets to her apartment, she interrupts a burglar armed with a .45 caliber pistol, who also rapes her. During the assault Thana fights off her attacker and kills him. With her sanity snapped by the violations Thana dismembers her attacker’s corpse and takes his pistol. The rest of the film is following Thana around as she disposes of body parts by leaving them in various trash bins or grinding them into dog food and shooting dead men who attack her, frighten her, or make sexual advances towards her. The film culminated in a costume party thrown by her employer where Thana attends dressed as a nun and after her boss makes a sexual advance, proceeds to shoot every male in at the celebration, though momentarily confused by the man who had cross-dressed as a bride for his costume. The final scenes of Ms .45 has a wildly different context today with mass shootings now ubiquitous compared to 1981 when there were still rather rare.

Ms .45 was written and directed by Abel Ferrara and had I realized eleven years later that he also wrote and directed Bad Lieutenant I would have dissuaded by friend from selected that film as the one we were going to see. The film while attempting to have a thematic point about sexism and the treatment of women in American society lingers on the violence presented following the footsteps of other exploitation movies about crime and revenge that populated theaters of the 1970s and 1980s. Thana’s marksmanship with her pistol is never explained falling into one of Hollywood’s most beloved firearms tropes, precision shooting is easy.

On its release the film received terrible reviews but has become something of a cult favorite and has even had a high definition released of a restored print from the original negative.

Zoe Tamerlis as Thana is really quite good. Bereft of dialog and voice she fully conveys Thana’s inner life with her large and expressive eyes. Sadly, she was devoted to recreational drug use and died from it at the age of 37.

For people who enjoy the trashy sub-genre of rape and revenge films Ms .45may possibly fit your tastes but I was not moved by this movie in 1981 nor in 2020.

 

Share

Your Opinion Will be Meaningless

Trump’s reelection is in trouble. To be sure it is far from assured that Biden will win this contest. If fact, while it can’t be quantified, I think a major factor in Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College loss in 2016 was that so many people assumed that the election was predetermined, certain that Trump simply couldn’t win that, that those who stayed home and did not vote subtracted just enough votes from her to give the Presidency to Trump. That’s a factor I do not think will be repeating.

During the Obama Presidency conservative commentators and friends seemed to harp on an endless list of ‘scandals’ and ‘abuses’ committed by the president and his administration. (I placed them in quotes because it is my opinion many of them were simply ginned up for political purposes but I have no intention of litigating them here.)

Many of those same commenters and friends have been silent on such abuses, fraud, and corruption during the Trump presidency.

Should Biden win the White House I expect that many of those voice will suddenly find corruption and abuses to horrify them. To which I say to them:

“I do not care at all for your opinion on this. It is valueless.”

They will cloak their opinions in phrases such as ‘rule of law’ and ‘abuse of power,’ but their silence during Trump’s years make plain that their interest is not in principal but politics. They have devotion to morality, fairness, or justice but only to whatever club is convenient for them to wield against their political enemies.

 

Share

Weekend Movie: An American Werewolf in London

This past Saturday and friend and I re-watched An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’s 1981 groundbreaking and genre defining monster movie. It had been decades since I last watched the movie but my memory was one of it being an entertaining but flawed film and my experience this weekend confirmed that.

The story concerns David and Jack two Americans on a backpacking trip and their encounter in the north of England with a werewolf that leaves one dead and the other cursed with lycanthropy. There is a tragic romantic sub-plot with a nurse, Alex, played by genre favorite Jenny Agutter and a massive climatic sequence of the werewolf rampaging through central London to complete the movie.

An American Werewolf in London is a film that has left its mark on the horror genre and specifically on how people have dealt with and described werewolves and their transformations ever since. Both this movie and The Howling, released earlier in 1981, presented the first on-screen transformation that were not simply variations of the lap-dissolves used in previous werewolf films all the back to Universal’s The Wolf-Man in 1941. Both Rick Baker who did the special make-up effects in An American Werewolf in London and Rob Bottin for The Howlingprogressed to careers that pushed the boundaries of practical effects until the advent of digital visual effects.

An American Werewolf in London also presented the transformation from human to wolf as something terribly painful and motif that with its overuse has since become a cliché.

With a running time of 97 minutes the movie is by far too brief, and simultaneously feels leisurely in its developing romance and rushed in its head-long drive to get to the next supernatural sequence. This blinding speed short-cuts characters and their development for the sake of plot and exposition and contributes the film’s finale feeling abrupt. I distinctly remember sitting in the theater during its initial run feeling like the it needed to be more, that it was unfinished, as the credit’s scrolled across the screen.

Share

What is the American Dream?

Too often we are told that the American Dream is a house with a white picket fence and the appropriate number of offspring as though the idealized American life had not been conceived before the middle of the twentieth century and that the previous one hundred and seventy odd years contained no national aspiration of individual life.

Liberty, not material possessions, is the core of the American dream. It is unamusingly ironic that a nation with a founding ideal of liberty also at its founding enslaved another people but our national character, just like an individual’s character, is complex and resists simplistic description. We are a nation, a people, raised on the ideal of liberty and far too often and for far too long we have fallen short of our lofty aspirations.

That does not mean we must not try.

Rather the opposite, we must constantly strive to be better. Perfection must never be the enemy of the good, and the evils of history while they cannot be erased nor should they, must never dissuade us from being virtuous today.

Slavery is one of the few things I consider an absolute evil. It is a mark of shame that it is a part of our history but it is there and no pretending that it was somehow caring or considerate can wash away the evil that existed alongside our virtues.

That we ended chattel slavery is a good and should be celebrated even if we continue to stumble towards a better and more just society.

To that end we should celebrate Juneteenth as a holiday. It should be a national one, one that mixes the desire of celebration with the need to reflect on where we still need to go.

 

Share

Why Love Some Bad Movies and Not Others?

Recently I re-watched on HBO, though I own the Blu-ray, 1980’s Xanadu. This film along with Can’t stop the Music is credited with the inspiration that created The Golden Razzie award for bad cinema. Now I can both recognize that Xanadu is in many ways a terrible film, miscast, no character arc, very nearly plotless, but it is also a film that is near and dear to my heart. It is a romantic film centered on dreams and the message that dream don’t die we kill them. And what Xanadu is to me other bad movies are to other people, but it’s the rare bad film that really generates this sort of feeling.

Star Trek: Insurrection is a terrible film that is also essential a romantic film, not in terms of Eros but in rather prioritizing inner emotional life over reason, with a central message but that movie is a tedious bore and its message if examined closely is one that advocate murdering those who do not think as you do.

There lies the answer to the conundrum, it is in the emotional resonance that a bad movie can rise to something special. There are those for whom Star Trek: Insurrection is a beloved film, no doubt due to deep emotional connection to the characters of the cast. (I’m an old fart and more emotionally tied to the original series than and subsequent entry.) So, while Xanadu is mostly a string of expository scenes linking musical numbers it is in my own heart that its emotions truly lie. I love the film not because of what it is but because of who I am.

 

Share

Coded versus Interpreted

I have been watching some documentaries about films and film makers, including some of the better Cinema youtubers. (Really, that makes them sound related to potatoes.) One thing I kind of struggle and rebel against is the idea that something is ‘coded’ into a film when there is no documented evidence of the filmmaker’s intent.

Coded has the clear implication that something was done with intent. In Robocop the Christ imagery, though in my opinion it is highly misplaced, is there by intent. Paul Verhoeven deliberately created that imagery for his own artistic purpose. It is coded. However, I can find no evidence supporting my interpretation that the corporate executives enjoying Robocop food paste that ‘tastes like baby food,’ is a deliberate symbolism that they are children playing with things that have moral implication that they do not understand.

Perhaps the best example of coded versus interpreted comes from John Carpenter’s They Live. From interviews and on-line debates, plus anyone with even a passing knowledge of Carpenter’s political philosophy, it’s clear that the aliens in that film and their objectives are a stand in for Conservatism and particularly Reaganism. Neo-Nazis interpreted the aliens to be coded as Jewish and have embraced the film as something delivery their kind of message.

Another example is Disney’s The Lion King. One interpretation is that the film contains a message about environmentalism and the great circle of life, but it can also be seen as an argument for conservative social Darwinism because the entire system collapses when Scar brings the ‘takers’ in has them live off the ‘makers.’ I do not think that is what the filmmakers intended but I can and has been read in that manner.

There are times when the message is clear, there is no coding in Birth of a Nation, the message is plainly racist and it is meant to be, but I would be wary of seeing intent where there is possibly only interpretation.

 

Share

A Virtual Film Festival

For the past several years one of my favorite things has been the Horrible Imaginings film festival. In 2018 the festival moved the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego to the Frieda Cinema in Orange county, about a 90-minute drive from my home. However, an all-day and deep into the night festival or short and feature length horror films is well worth the drive and so I still attend. Indeed, I have discovered some of my favorite horror film at the festival including Alena a ghost story set in an all-girl Swedish school.

Last year Festival Director Miguel Rodriguez started a new element with Campfire Tales where one evening per quarter the Frieda cinema and Horrible Imaginings would host three or so hours of horror shorts. While the evenings sounded fun and interesting, I couldn’t quite justify driving for three hours and eliminating an evening with my sweetie-wife, for essentially one long films worth of entertainment and so I haven’t attended any of the campfire tales events.

This year COVID-19 changed that. Because in person events were still banned Miguel moved the festival on-line and after paying a very reasonable admission donation, I was able to watch the offerings at this quarter’s Campfire Tales. Better yet I watched them on my schedule, after an evening of board and card games with my sweetie-wife and a couple of friends. From 9 p.m. until nearly midnight a friend and I watched the short horror films and had a truly wonderful time.

I hope, even though it goes against my own interests, that Miguel can soon get back to the in-person screenings he adores and hosts so very ably but I can’t deny how much fun it was to take part in a cycle of ghost, monster, and psychological horror films.

 

Share

Political Bits and Pieces

The title of today’s post in not to disparage the importance of any of the subjects but just because I’m doing quick comments and opinions and several at once rather than diving deep into any of them.

Juneteenth

Under unexpectedly harsh criticism the Trump campaign has moved the date of the return to rally event off June the 19th. Trump himself has said it was moved ‘out of respect,’ but that’s a statement I consider to be yet another lie. Aside from possibly Jared and Ivanka it is my opinion that Trump has never manifested any respect for anyone other than himself. More likely, and this is sheer speculation, Ivanka persuaded him to move the event as though a single bucked of water pumped from this political Titanic could make any difference.

LGBQT Rights

This morning the US Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the 1964 civil right law that forbade discrimination in employment on account of sex protected sexual orientation as well. Well, that’s an unexpected gift for Pride month.

Trump vs. The Ramp

At the commencement ceremony for the graduating class of West Point, the site of the United States most infamous treason, Trump had clearly visible difficulty navigating the shallow ramp prompting more speculation about his physical health. While a president’s physical health is of vital national importance, such as concealing when the President has suffered a stroke while in office, this matter is rather more of a distraction. Trump’s ignorance, pettiness, bigotry, corruption, and tendency to view himself and his office in authoritarian terms are reasons enough to remove him from office.

Defund the Police

Policing in the United States is terrible. It is applied unjustly, frequently with racial bias, and police forces throughout the nation too often have the culture of an occupation force rather than public servants. Much has been made about the police’s non-use of a heavy-handed tactics during protests over pandemic driven lockdowns versus the deployment of batons, riot gear, and tear gas against peaceful protester participating in the Black Lives Matter movement. I do not think it is mere coincidence that police forces have reacted with unjustified force against people directly challenging their authority. We must reinvent policing in the nation.

Share

A Thumb in the Eye

Next Friday Trump returns to the rally circuit but in doing so he’s quite deliberately putting his thumb in the eye of the black community and everyone with even a modicum of decency. The date is June the 19th and that date is a holiday celebrated by many African-Americans as the end of hundreds of years of chattel slavery was enforced by Union, read American, General Gordon Granger in Galveston Texas. Perhaps you can ascribe ignorance of the date to our most ignorant president but his staff and closest advisers, particularly Steven Miller, are too well educated to be blind to the symbolism.

Trump multiplies his insult by holding this rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma the site of a horrendous slaughter of black residents at hand and aerial attacks from whites. A massacre that slaughtered hundreds and left 10,000 homeless with their homes burned and their businesses looted. This ethnic cleansing, it was far beyond a riot, was recently captured in popular media with the opening scenes of HBO’s magnificent series Watchmen. Again, perhaps Trump himself is too uneducated to beware of the history, it would be difficult to under-estimate this man mental abilities, but Miller and the rest will know.

Oklahoma is a solidly red state that in the electoral college is beyond Biden’s reach. Here is no political advantage to hosting a rally in the state.

Trump administration, campaign, and argument is one based on racism and there is no policy or appointment that can justify supporting it.

Share

A Most Challenging Giallo

Giallo is Italian for ‘yellow’ and refers to the bright yellow covers for books that dealt with lurid criminal plots, sort of the Italian answer to pulps but with far less content moderation. As these books were adapted into films the term carried over and Giallo is a sub-genre of Italian cinema dealing with lurid, sexual, and criminal themes.

This week my sweetie-wife and I watched a 1970 Italian/Spanish Giallo ‘In the Folds of the Flesh.’ This was a very challenging movie to view. With a scant running time of a mere 88 minutes In the Folds tries to pack in a number or reveals, reversals, and shocking twists that would be more suitable for a couple of seasons of any daytime soap opera. In short, the story is about Lucille the much younger couple Colin and Falaise dealing with Falaise’s uncontrollable urges to murder any man who is sexually forward with her. Ladled onto this are plot elements of incest, mafia revenge murders, deeply undercover police investigations, and even exploitive flashbacks to Nazi death camps bonus gratuitous nudity.

The camera work seems to have been performed by a spastic chimpanzee with sudden and unmotivated crash zooms, indecipherable close-ups, and rapid circling pans that induce motion sickness. While the editing is reminiscent of a goldfish on acid with unestablished leaps in time and place that are terrible disorienting.

There are quite a few Giallos that I have thoroughly enjoyed since I discovered the genre a few years ago but In the Folds of the Flesh is not one of them and I cannot recommend this movie to anyone who is not currently dosing with hallucinogens.

Share