What happens when you bring together the leading actress from Audition, the FX artist behind The Machine Girl as a first-time director, the screenwriter of Uzumaki and the action star of Versus as fight choreographer? You have a cinematic supergroup that makes the geysers of blood you’ve come to expect from violent Asian films look like minuscule popping zits. Behold, the 5-minute trailer for the upcoming J-splatter film Tokyo Gore Police:
The trailer starts off kinda slow, but gets better and better as it goes along. Gore and body horror await: exploding heads, sliced-off faces, penises instead of noses, borg-like facial implants and a mermaid-from-hell with a chomping crocodile head instead of legs. There are also some hyper-detailed fetish costumes by the latex designer duo Kariwanz.
One of the mutants looks like she escaped from Kurôzu-cho
The plot: future Tokyo is plagued by bio-mechanical a virus. People who contract the virus turn into “Engineers,” named so for their ability to assemble weapons out of their infected flesh wounds. A special privatized police force (the gore police, also known as “Engineer Hunters”) exists to wipe out these beings, but if they’re wounded by one of the engineers, they quickly join their ranks, horrific implements of death quickly spawning from their own flesh. The protagonist is Ruka, one of the strongest members of the police force. Ruka appears to be the archetypal cute Japanese girl with a sword, but one thing I found interesting about her character is that according to one review, she’s a cutter. There are not many films that I’m aware of in which a main character suffers from self-mutilation, other than the French film Dans ma Pau, or In My Skin (definitely not a ‘feel-good movie’… and since we already got the ball rolling on the horrors of the flesh, here you go)
The main storyline of the film is peppered with faux commercials, reminding me of the faketrailersinGrindhouse. As reviewer Mike Skurko describes it:
We flash back and forth to some extremely demented and hilarious public service announcements as T.V. commercials throughout the film. My personal favorite being three cute school girls singing “Let’s go stylish with wrist cutting!” Just enough “Engrish” charm and realism to make this scene as cute as Hello Kitty while they morbidly introduce a new design that is “rounded for a cleaner cutting edge that school girls love!” Oh, this can’t be beat. More great T.V. ads: “Remote Control Exterminate!!” is a demented Wii that lets the viewer slice and dice a tormented player. Complete with all the spraying blood we’ve come to expect from just about everything with the Tokyo Shock label.
If you’re in New York or San Francisco this weekend, you are among the lucky few who can catch this film’s on-screen North American debut. It will premiere this Saturday at the New York Asian Film Festival. In San Francisco, you’ll be able to see it this Sunday at the Brava Theater as part of the Another Hole In The Head film festival, which looks like a lot of fun. A little bit later on, this film will also be premiering in Montreal.
You’ve probably at least heard of Star Wreck – a parody that launched Energia Productions into the public eye beyond internet stardom. Now from the same creative team comes a new production. If you, refined reader, like Doctor Strangelove and maybe Spaceballs, prepare to dig Iron Sky.
Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity.
From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.
Now it’s 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom.
What’s particularly inspiring about Iron Sky is the way it’s being created. To start, just look at this crew list! In an effort of what director Timo Vuorensola is calling “collaborative filmmaking” the project is semi-automated, gathering large numbers of volunteers and acquiring financing through WreckAMovie.com. Wreck-A-Movie intends to “blend the Internet and the film industry together by unleashing the creative potential of Internet communities, and changing the whole chain of filmmaking”. Yes! This here, peeps, is someone using the Web’s power for good, someone Doing It Right.
The footage in the gorgeous teaser below isn’t from the film, more of a taste of what’s in store. If you like what you see you can help bring this film to life by joining the production, buying War Bonds or submitting your resumé, here.
In the bleak, bleak future, gas prices have become so insane that no one can afford to drive. Crusading inventor Archie Andrews, a vegan schoolteacher, labors tirelessly to change all this by building a car engine that will run on plentiful, clean wheatgrass. But one night he makes a discovery — wheatgrass won’t power an engine, but human blood will. He gets seduced by a girl named Denise who loves cars. The government gets involved — and everything just goes to hell from there.
That’s the premise for the Blood Car, a brutal, brilliant and damned laugh-out-loud funny flick from Atlanta director Alex Orr. Working on a shoestring (the special effects budget was $200 and the Blood Car got towed), Orr managed to create the best kind of fringe movie — scathingly satirical, ludicrously bloody and eminently quotable — with an ending that actually manages to shock. [kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=324612271480827511" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
I was fortunate enough to stumble on it while recruiting for Asheville’s film festival last year and it still remains the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long time. It’s out on DVD now and still winding its way through the festival circuit. If you’re fortunate enough to be where it’s playing, absolutely do not miss it — this is one film made to be experienced en masse.
Thanks to the wisdom imparted by this movie, I now believe that, exo-skeletons be damned, tarantulas — deadly tarantulas — in vending machines are the future.
I’m convinced that The Steve Allen Theater is some sort of shadowy government secret, which must the reason we hadn’t heard about the David Cronenberg retrospective they’ve been running for the past few weeks until recently. As a drooling fan of everything from Spider to The Fly, I think this is fantastic and, at $8/ticket, a great deal.
I did a little reconnaissance work and found ample parking, good sound and a pleasant audience, despite lack of a concession stand – bringing own snacks next time. Though the retrospective is now drawing to an end, you still have the chance to watch Existenz on May 24th, which is this Saturday and Spider on May 31st which will be shown with Cronenberg’s latest short film.
Beautiful front & back cover art for the spring program booklet.
Page through the entire thing here.
Located at The Center For Inquiry in Hollywood, the theater has a abundantly promising spring/summer line-up of cartoons, performances, mystery movies including Soylent Green on June 1, and so much more. Go forth, consume, and tell us what you think!
Steve Allen Theater
4773 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 666-4268
I recall enjoying the ADD-inducing tunes of Australian vinyl sampler kings the Avalanches when their first record Since I Left You was released several years ago, but I’d never seen this stupefying video for “Frontier Psychiatrist” before tonight. I’m now having what can only be described as an “it’s comforting to know that no matter what you do in life, it will never be as awesome as this video” moment:
Whatever happened to the Avalanches’ follow-up album? Anyone know? According to their Wiki entry, the last word from the band came in early ’07: “one day when you least expect it you’ll wake up and the sample fairy will have left it under your pillow.”
I am the fly in the ointment. Accept the next dose of disease.
Okay, so we’re a little late to the Green Porno party. But what we lack in punctuality we more than make up for in enthusiasm for these warped short films.
Isabella “Put Your Disease in Me” Rossellini outdoes herself (and actually does herself) in this eight-part series about the sex lives of various insects, arachnids and molluscs. Produced by Sundance expressly for smaller digital screens (computers, cell phones, etc) the whole series is just dirty, filthy, good clean fun. Try to imagine a Children’s Television Workshop-produced interpretation of that transcendently horrible pterodactyl pr0n and you’ll be somewhere in the ballpark. But not really.
As its final scene, featuring the recently departed Charlton “from my cold dead hands” Heston, has become iconic, the rest of Soylent Green is frequently forgotten. That’s a shame, as there’s a damn good dystopian tale in the rest of this oft-referenced 1973 classic too. I, like so many others, had heard about, but never seen, the full movie. Until now.
Observe then, the entire film, loyal readers, for your viewing pleasure. Observe how you’ll know the rich by their bitchin’ ’70s decor and access to hot water. Witness an astonishingly effective combination of whodunit crime tale and dystopian nightmare! See riot cops in football helmets! Thrill to the scarf-wearing sweaty wonder that is Heston in his stilted prime! Wonder how dated-yet-oddly-relevant our own visions of the future may look in 35 years!
There’s a new movie coming out with Eiko Ishioka’s costume design in it! The film is directed by Tarsem, who previously collaborated with Ishioka on The Cell. Events take place in a 1915 hospital, where a bedridden patient befriends a little girl with a broken arm and offers to tell her an adventure story about five men – an Indian adventurer, an African ex-slave, a masked bandit, an Italian bombmaker, and Charles Darwin (what? yes!). The girl is enthralled by the exotic tale, and waits eagerly for every new chapter. But the storyteller, a broken man emotionally and physically, has a dark motive for telling the tale: he wants her to steal something at the hospital in exchange for the story’s conclusion. Here is the trailer:
I did a quick Google search on when the film is coming out: nothing. I did a search for it on IMDB, and learned that it was completed in 2006. Hmm. That’s when I started digging into the YouTube comments. One guy writes that he saw it at a private screening in LA a week ago, and that they asked the audience to critique for the purpose of determining whether it will go on the big screen or on DVD. Another person writes that they have not yet found a distributor. And then there is this comment by Khan Higou:
I spent a year working on post-production of this movie (in Paris); I know every single image of this feature and believe me, it IS beautiful for sure. And you Americans are not lucky about this independent movie (self-produced, directed, even self-distributed, no big studio logo in front of this trailer, did you notice…) ’cause I heard it has been rated R in the US; a way to punish Tarsem everybody thinks here ’cause the movie is not that violent
Further research turned up one review that indicates that the film has not been sold for distribution due to scathing reviews at the Toronto Film Fetival. The reviewer writes that Zoe Bell (Death Proof) was the president of the jury that year. “(She was) seated two seats away from me quite enjoyed at least from what I could get from her reactions to the film while it was being shown.” Maybe she didn’t like it so much after all.
Maybe the ending is a little predictable, but the visuals look stunning! I want to see this – and I want to love it. Thanks to Paul Komoda for the tip.
Update: Obviously I’m not very good with The Google! Looks like it’s finally coming out May 9th. Thanks, Rachel!
Before Val Lewton died of a broken heart (a figurative and then literal one), look he produced a string of nine films for RKO Pictures from 1942 to 1946. None of them cost more than $150, cialis 000 to make. None ran longer than 75 minutes. All of them were saddled with lurid, buy focus group-tested titles like Isle of the Dead, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Ghost Ship. “They may think I’m going to do the usual chiller stuff which’ll make a quick profit, be laughed at, and be forgotten,” he told writer DeWitt Bodeen, “but I’m going to fool them…I’m going to do the kind of suspense movie I like.”1
The kind that I like too. Atmospheric2, stylish, literate—I might squeeze two of his films onto an all-time Top Ten list of horror favorites. So the news that Twisted Pictures (the people responsible for the Saw franchise) is in the process of re-making four of Lewton’s RKO classics—including my favorite, I Walked with a Zombie—makes me nauseated. I’m finally old enough to appreciate why critics bemoaned the oversexed Cat People remake in 1982. That film, at least, had a twenty-year-old Nastassja Kinski going for it. All we have to look forward to now is snuff porn. So, rather than look ahead, I thought I might take a look back—at Lewton’s meteoric career, and at a few scenes from his movies that still haunt me. The past is no vaccine for the future, to be sure, but in the here and now it can act as a topical salve.
Esteemed reader Tanya Vrodova says, “I love cabbage. I will do anything to spread the word about how awesome cabbage is.” To that end, she just introduced me to Chinese multidisciplinary artist Han Bing and his mischievous Walking the Cabbage (2000-2007) series.
Born in 1974 in an poverty-stricken village, Han Bing spent his childhood helping his parents farm the land and was the only student in his class afforded the chance to attend university. There he studied oil painting before moving on to less conventional mediums. His post-university work has focused on creating spontaneous, open-ended discourse that includes members of society who are often excluded or dismissed. He, like many other young Chinese artist, seems compelled to confront the dubious side effects of his nation’s obsession with urbanizing and modernizing at whatever cost.
From Bing’s website:
Walking the Cabbage (2000-2007) series of social intervention performance, video and photography works, Han Bing walks a Chinese cabbage on a leash in public places, inverting an ordinary practice to provoke debate and critical thinking. Walking the Cabbage is a playful twist on a serious subject—the way our everyday practices serve to constitute “normalcy” and our identities are often constituted by the act of claiming objects as our possessions. A quintessentially Chinese symbol of sustenance and comfort for poor Chinese turned upside down, Han Bing’s cabbage on a leash offers a visual interrogation of contemporary social values.
