It’s the week before Halloween people, so that means horror movies on the FAM. All horror from here to the witching hour (or twice, for those counting their Fridays). Today the FAM presents a double feature unabashedly ripped off from TCM’s programming schedule from the past month, comprised of two fine films from the classic Hammer Film Productions: The Devil’s Bride (or The Devil Rides Out in the UK) from 1968 and The Gorgon from 1964, both directed by Terence Fisher and both starring Christopher Lee, along with fellow Hammer superstar Peter Cushing in The Gorgon. Additionally, Devil’s Bride features a screenplay by Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come, among others, as well as a host of well-known Twilight Zone episodes) based on the novel The Devil Rides Out by Devil Dennis Wheatley.

Hammer is perhaps best known for their slightly more graphic takes on famous Universal monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy, as well as interpretations of The Phantom of the Opera, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Robin Hood, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which featured a troupe of actors (most notably Lee and Cushing) and directors perhaps the most famous of whom was Fisher. The studio is also responsible for a great number of films without the benefit of well-known subjects and The Devil’s Bride and The Gorgon are two of the best examples of this.

The Devil’s Bride, for all it’s new-age influenced Satan-worshiping cheese is surprisingly effective, not only for Charles Gray’s turn as the villainous Mocata but for the quiet menace of the entity who he serves. Indeed, the best scenes feature mostly silent specters, such as the demon in the observatory. The Gorgon may be even more of a success, transplanting the traditional Greek myth of the Gorgon to turn-of-the-century Middle Europe and features some absolutely stunning work from cinematographer Michael Reed. And while the titular Gorgon may seem campy by today’s standards, she is incredibly effective in the brief glimpses leading up to her reveal.

Hammer’s horror films are some of the defining examples of the genre and, at the time, were shocking in their depictions of violence and sexuality. By the end of the 60s Hammer’s formula had lost most of its punch however, and the release of low-budget films like The Night of the Living Dead and Hollywood productions like The Wild Bunch made the studio’s offerings look downright tame. Still, the quality of the acting and production combined with an almost perfect level of camp makes these films a nessecity in any horror buff’s education.

Craig Welch’s short, animated, silent film from 1996 is the story of a strange, reclusive man obsessed with the mechanics of winged flight who one night receives a mysterious visitor in his dark and empty abode. Always in Welch’s animation benefits from a distinct, Edward Gorey inspired look which complements the strange and macabre subject matter quite well. Welch’s protagonist, as well as being enamored of wings, is also someone who has created around him a sphere of perfect and utter control. There is no aspect of his existence that has not been meticulously planned, going so far as to force this exacting mastery over other living creatures that make their way into his world. Whether or not his mysterious guest meant him any ill will is left unspoken but regardless she proves to be his undoing. Indeed it may be that she is more cipher than anything — a metaphor for that which he hopes to attain through all his miniature, bio-mechanical tinkering. However you interpret it, it remains a short journey well worth taking.

I’m fascinated by conspiracy theories. The machinations within machinations, the way they simultaneously complicate simple matters and simplifying the most complex world events, they are a monument to human creativity and imagination. It should be no surprise then that conspiracy theories have come up multiple times on the FAM. Indeed, only last week, we examined some breathless speculation on the veracity of claims that man has ever set foot on the lunar surface.

That, however, is tame as far as conspiracies go. The real money is in world domination, in the people pulling the strings. The Freemasons, the Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Lizard Men — this is the nexus of lunatic postulation. Therefore, as a service to those in the audience who are, perhaps, not as well versed in the affairs of the tin-foil hat crowd the FAM presents the History Channel special Secret Societies which functions as a great introduction into the mad, mad world and which features FAM favorite David Icke, making his third Friday appearance. Should this pique your interests, feel free to check out Jon Ronson’s Secret Rulers of the World which delves much deeper into all this weird and wonderful nonsense.

Welcome to a Russian Roulette episode of The Friday Afternoon Movie, brought to you by my lack of functioning brain cells and a YouTube search for “documentary”. Today we present the kind of programming many viewers of FOX TV might remember in and around the time of the X-Files. Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? begs the titular question in the voice of an announcer for a monster truck rally with a smooth chaser of X-Files alum Mitch Pileggi to help lend an air of mystery and intrigue. This is all in the service of one of my favorite, inconsequential conspiracy theories — an elaborate hoax perpetrated by NASA in order to stick it to the Communists. Or not. I’ve never really been sure as to why NASA would go through such lengths to fake such an event; “Communists” is merely a solid go-to for any conspiracy taking place before the fall of the Soviet Union. Either way, it’s 40 minutes of “experts” with backyard bunkers explaining how the American flag could not flutter without an atmosphere and even hints at murder most foul. Enjoy.

Hot and steamy mini-documentary action on today’s FAM in the form of The Return of A Clockwork Orange, Film4’s look at the controversial film 30 years after director Stanley Kubrick banned the film’s showing in the UK. I’m going to assume that if you have any interest in this you are familiar with both the film and the book it was based on, so I’ll not go over them here.

Even with a working knowledge of Clockwork Orange it is difficult, I think, for modern audiences to understand why a film like this would cause such an uproar, saturated as we are with films that go way beyond Kubrick’s film in terms of graphic depictions of violence, both physical and sexual. The Return of A Clockwork Orange does an excellent job, then, of painting a picture of the political and social climate of England in the early 70s, giving a much clearer for the context for the furor over this film. Released in the same year that saw Ken Russell’s beautiful, bloody The Devils and Sam Peckinpah’s shocking Straw Dogs it was the crescendo in an increasingly heated debate on whether films should be allowed to portray such extreme behavior — a debate that continues today mostly concerning those video games the kids seem to love so much.

The end result is a short but well-informed look at a war between a nation and one of film’s greatest visionaries.

Addendum: Apologies for the inferior quality of this video. This version features much clearer visuals but the audio gets completely out of sync by the second part.

In memory of Satoshi Kon, The FAM presents Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (1995), specifically the first episode of three entitled Metallic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto and written by the late Mr. Kon. Metallic Rose tells the story of a space-faring salvage team who respond to a distress signal (in the form of a recording of Puccinni’s opera Madame Butterfly) emanating from a giant space station in a particularly dangerous area of the galaxy known as Area RZ-3005 or Sargasso. The ship’s two engineers, Heintz and Miguel, are deployed to investigate. Inside they find an opulent, rococo interior and a woman claiming to be an opera singer named Eva Friedal.

The true nature of Eva is something I won’t spoil, but it is safe to say that she is not exactly who she appears to be. Magnetic Rose then, in sci-fi shorthand, is a mash-up of the used, dingy, space-trucker aesthetics of Alien and the psychological mindfuckery of Solaris; and it succeeds admirably. And while it was based on a story by Otomo, it contains many of the themes that would define Kon’s work: the interest in the protagonist’s mental state and subjective reality. Two years later he would go on to write and direct his first feature film, Perfect Blue, and a brilliant career; but the seeds were sown here in the span of 40 minutes. If only that career could have lasted a little longer.

A ride through the dusty landscape of Australia’s Outback as the FAM presents 2005’s brutal Western The Proposition; directed by John Hillcoat, written by Coil Beat heartthrob Nick Cave, and starring Guy Pierce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, and John Hurt to name a few.

The world of Hillcoat’s Australia, circa 1880, is a harsh, desolate, and unforgiving wasteland; an Abadon devoid of compassion or solace. It is this land that Ray Winstone’s Captain Stanley, having moved there with his proper, English wife Martha, attempts to tame. His immediate aim is to hunt down the Burns gang, who are wanted for the rape and murder of the Hopkins family. Having captured two of the brothers, Mikey and Charlie (Guy Pierce), he makes Charlie an offer: he and his brother will be released and excused of all crimes if Charlie kills his brother Arthur (Danny Huston), an eloquent psychopath so vicious that he is known to the Aboriginal inhabitants as “The Dog Man”.

Cave is an accomplished writer and The Proposition calls to mind many of the same themes as his first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, a book I’ve read twice and still not decided whether I actually enjoyed. As with his novel, The Proposition comes close to merely becoming gruesome pornography of the soul. Cave constructs stories devoid of the concept of innocence — in the end all are guilty and shall be punished.

Still, the images of sun-baked emptiness and blood red skies evoke enough strange beauty to transcend, if only momentarily, the unyielding parade of violence. Winstone plays Stanley as a land-locked Ahab whose intentions, while principled, are not exactly pure in contrast to Arthur, a man with no illusions as to his place in world. The penultimate scene, taking place during an absurd staging of a traditional English Christmas dinner, is superb in its tension making for a dénouement in which no one wins.

It would, perhaps, be easy to dismiss The Proposition as a simple tale of violence begetting violence and indeed that might be a true assessment; but it is so raw in its telling, so unapologetic in its delivery that in the end such an observation is moot. It’s a film that refuses the viewer any consolation and expects no quarter in return. You may either watch or, like the Stanley’s Aboriginal servant Tobey — removing his shoes and abandoning them in the meticulously cultivated garden — you may quietly take your leave.

Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane. It’s…Superman!

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Thus goes, perhaps, the most famous of all superhero tag-lines. Running from 1941 to 1943, seventeen episodes of Superman were released by Paramount Pictures. The series is commonly referred to as the Fleischer Superman cartoons though this is a bit of a misnomer as only the first nine episodes were done by the studio of brothers Max and Dave. The last eight were done by Famous Studios, after Paramount took over Fleischer Studios and ousted its founders, and would see an increased focus of WWII-era propaganda and feature some uncomfortable racial depictions.

I’ve been a fan of these cartoons since watching them on a cheap VHS collection when I was a child. The series is beautifully animated especially when one considers that most animators at Fleischer studios had little figure-drawing knowledge. While much of the series was rotoscoped (a technique that Max Fleischer invented) there was no way it could be used for, say, scenes in which Superman was flying. As such, they had their assistants who did understand figure-drawing go over their roughs to keep Superman looking like Superman. It’s also interesting to note that, not only was the cartoon responsible for the “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” line but also for giving the Man of Steel the ability to fly, previously his ability being limited to spectacular leaps.

Fleischer Studios:
•Superman (or The Mad Scientist)
•The Mechanical Monsters
•Billion Dollar Limited
•The Arctic Giant
•The Bulleteers
•The Magnetic Telescope
•Electric Earthquake
•Volcano
•Terror on the Midway

Famous Studios:
•Japoteurs
•Showdown
•Eleventh Hour
•Destruction, Inc.
•The Mummy Strikes
•Jungle Drums
•The Underground World
•Secret Agent

For those who don’t necessarily wish to wade through all seventeen, the Fleischer episodes are unsurprisingly superior, if only for the fact that their stories are much more interesting. The sci-fi leanings of these, complete with evil scientists, robots, and death rays avoid the sour taste left by buck-toothed Japanese caricatures and African natives. An in-depth look at the series can be found here, if your interested in learning more about it.

Come with us as the FAM takes you on an extraordinary journey. Today’s offering is no doubt familiar to many, and yet bears repeated viewings. Released in Japan in 2001, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi which translates literally to Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away) remains his most popular film. By the time of its release in the US in 2002 nearly a sixth of Japan’s population had seen the film, making it the highest-grossing film in the nation’s history. It would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature becoming the first anime film and, thus far, only foreign language film to win the award.

Spirited Away, then, is the ambassador for Miyazaki’s work in the States. While his other films had seen release here, none did so much for his reputation among the general public than this film; and it’s not hard to see why. Spirited Away is a stunning piece of animation, the culmination of decades of Studio Ghibli’s work. It’s a film that upon each successive viewing reveals new details. The bathhouse scenes in particular are wonders, packed to the brim with background points of interest. For their part, when Disney localized the movie for North America they resisted the urge to fill the cast with big-name actors (something they did previously with Princess Mononoke and since with other Studio Ghibli releases). It makes the English dub much less intrusive to me.

It is easily my favorite of Miyazaki’s films, a man whose oeuvre is rife with amazing offerings. Spirited Away strikes me as the film that he let his imagination run wild while still managing to retain a cohesive narrative. It’s also a film that allows the viewer to enjoy it as merely a story and not necessarily a parable like, say, Princess Mononoke a film that, while beautiful, was bogged down by its environmentalist message. Spirited Away is a surrealist journey in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, its messages and meanings subtly woven into the fabric of the story; there for those who wish to find it, invisible for those who don’t. It’s a truly timeless piece of movie making.

A film for violin nerds on today’s FAM. Tom Slade directs 4, a film that follows four different violinists on four different continents playing one of the world’s most well known compositions, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

4 begins in Spring in Tokyo, with violinist Sayaka Shoji, segueing into Summer in Australia and violinist Niki Vasilakis before moving on to New York in Autumn with Cho-Liang Lin and finally ending in Finland in Winter with Pekka Kuusisto. It’s a quite a journey, though I’ll admit to being partial to Autumn as there really is nothing like New York City in the fall. The show-stopper here, however, is Finland. The scenery on display in this last act is nothing short of stunning.

All of it is accompanied by a beautiful piece of music. Vivaldi was a mainstay for me growing up. My grandmother had studied the violin and graduated from Juilliard before marriage and WWII sidelined those dreams. She had inherited the love of the instrument from an uncle who was a member of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. She had, for a time, tried to pass this love and ability down to me, an endeavor she would abandoned in despair, her oldest grandchild seemingly devoid of any musical talent. Her violin, as it is for many who play I would assume, remains her most prized possession. She has, apparently, stipulated in her will that it must never be sold as doing so will, no doubt, bring down some ancient Hungarian curse upon our family.

The musical aspect, then, was what I found most intriguing about this film for while I love The Four Seasons the musicians here are in possession of a wealth of knowledge that I am completely ignorant of. They make for a fascinating lecture on just what is going on in each movement, what events transpire and what each instrument represents, all facets of the music I was never aware of.

It’s a meditative film, made slightly ominous by each musician noting how the weather seems to be changing. But regardless of such politically charged observations it remains delightfully calming — a soothing musical travelogue. The perfect film for a Friday afternoon.