Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
LIFF25: El Sicario, Budrus and I Am Jesus
Ok then! Here come a few more review from the Leeds International Film Festival. I’m currently seeing more films than I can write about, so a review of Fanomonen’s Night of the Dead will have to wait a day or so. For now, here are three documentaries from Monday and Tuesday…
El Sicario
This is certainly not a cheerful one! El Sicario can be summed up pretty quickly as one man in one room talking about the horrible things he has done. In a bit more depth, it is an ex-hitman in a hotel room in Ciudad Juarez, explaining over the course of 80 minutes what his life has contained. With his face masked throughout the film and no props other than a pad of drawing paper and a squeaky black marker, the hitman proceeds to explain the procedures of induction to the Mexican drug cartels and the jobs he had to carry out.
It is, as you can probably imagine, pretty gruelling stuff. He talks us through the day-by-day plan of a typical kidnapping, explains how the narcos (cartels) ensure there is at least one policeman in their pay amongst every group of new police recruits and recounts stories of strangling kidnapped people on the orders of the boss (if you strangle them before cutting them up, they bleed less, he explains).
Whilst this would all have worked equally powerfully (and in less time) if it were a written interview, his stories are compelling (and gruesome) enough to ensure that the time flies by. It’s a grim but fascinating account of a lawless, dangerous life in a dangerous part of the world (Ciudad Juarez is now, apparently, the most violent city on the planet!)
Budrus
Although you might not expect it from merely glancing at the subject matter, Budrus is a much more uplifting film than El Sicario. We’ve moved from Mexico to Palestine and are witnessing the residents of Budrus’ attempts to prevent the Israeli fence from going through their lands, particularly their cemetery. In the face of the Israeli army’s tear-gas and barricades, this is a film about people coming together to protect what they love (and, thankfully, succeeding).
An especially powerful moment comes when a large group of Israeli peace-activists join the Palestinians in their village in opposition to the army. The interviewed army leader’s claim that the destruction of this Palestinian village’s cemetery was necessary for “Israelis to sleep soundly at night” rang somewhat hollow as a line of Israelis stood face-to-face with their own army. Perhaps even more shocking was the grumbled complaint from the army captain that they could no longer “use force” to crush the (nonviolent) opposition because “there were Israeli Jews in the group” - the implication that it was absolutely fine to violently crush peaceful Palestinian opposition remaining unspoken but unmissable…
I Am Jesus
From the serious to the ridiculous: I am Jesus is a wonderfully straight-faced documentary about three different people who fervently, honestly, astonishingly believe themselves to be the second coming of a certain Jesus Christ…
From mental ex-secret-service hippy David Shayler (“I first realised I was Jesus whilst tripping on mushrooms…”) via the bearded, robed Brazilian Inri Christo, to the messianic monk of the Siberian wilderness Vissarion, I have no hesitation at all in labelling these people as deluded, ego-centred freaks. For all that, little of what any of them do could possibly hurt anyone, so they’re probably just best left to it really.
Great fun to watch and worth the ticket for the followers of Inri Christo’s “mystical version” of Eye of the Tiger alone…
Oh my…
LIFF25 - Convento, Battenberg and Architects of Harmonic Rooms
Aaaaand the Leeds International Film Festival has kicked off. The opening gala of Wuthering Heights was not really the thing for me so, skipping over the first day, my festival started on day 2. There were lots of exciting sounding bits and pieces on today, including Human Centipede 2, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, 22nd May and The Beat is the Law - Pulp and the Sheffield music scene. I saw…
Battenberg
This was an incredibly fun animated short, a crazy magpie battling a squirrel armed with a fishknife in a scary guesthouse. With a train that brings battenberg cake. It’s about as cool as that sounds.
Convento
This was a “poetic documentary” about a curious Dutch family who, part-way through a ballet career, moved out and bought a shabby old convent in Portugal. The (now ex-)
ballerina and her two sons live a quiet, happy life in this convent. One of them attaches motors to various animal skulls to make mechanised creepy sculptures whilst the other is er… best friends with his horse.
It’s a beautifully shot and gently paced documentary but its long, lingering shots are, I thought, a weak point in the end. The three people have so many interesting things to say when they do get to speak that I left thinking it was a shame we heard so little from them. For all that, it is utterly gorgeous and definitely worth a watch.
Architects of Harmonic Rooms & Records
This was a selection of six short films put together by the same people, exploring a handful of different underground artists and their thoughts on their work. So we get the (unbelievably naïve) Josephine Foster singing re-arranged Spanish folk, avant-garde screaming noisesmiths debating the merits of playing naked and punching pianos, and and Costa and Nero, a pair who re-work Greek folk tunes on guitar and bouzouki.
The pick of the bunch though was the much longer, completely mad experimental noise trip through salvaged-from-VHS 70s and 80s Asian horror. We had bass drones accompanying vampire bats, Frankenstein-esque experiments scored with throbbing guitar and a jangling crescendo of other living-dead far Eastern monsters. I just wish they’d given out a list of the films they’d culled their clips from! Great fun!
LIFF25!
Last weekend, the 25th annual Leeds International Film Festival launched its programme, ahead of the festival in November. There’s heaps and heaps of exciting things to look forward to in what is, surely, one of the UK’s premiere film festivals, so I thought I’d do a (very) brief preview here.
The Official Selection is the home of the big names, high-art and gruelling drama but really does host all sorts of things. It’s nice to see the festival score the coup of a whole bunch of UK premier showings of European and World cinema as well as a handful of very exciting retrospectives. Psycho on the big screen is surely one not to be missed and, though I’ve seen them before, Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis are both great and worth a cinema trip. For the more hardy, Bela Tarr’s epic Sátántangó - which is seven and a half hours long! - is screening in the Hyde Park Picture House. Thankfully it comes with two interval breaks!
In the gleefully brutal and bloody Fanomenon strand, meanwhile, there are also a few exciting treats to look forward to. Heading up the classic genre film retrospectives are Alien, Aliens and Invasion of the Body Snatchers but even these treats don’t seem so tasty when compared to the bounties on offer in the new films selection. Monster Brawl, which pitches all the horror favourites against each other, looks too-good-to-miss whilst _Exit Humanity’_s American Civil War zombie apocalypse would surely be the most gloriously insane zombie adventure imaginable, were it not for it being partnered up with Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Hell Driver and Cuba’s very first zombie film, Juan of the Dead. Oh my! That’s three slices of very different but very exciting ZOMBIE ACTION! Hurrah!
Thirdly, and no less excitingly, comes the fabulous news that all Cherry Kino film screenings are FREE (!) this year! Cherry Kino is the semi-independent experimental film strand of the festival and hosts screenings and workshops of ‘wondermental’ films all year round. CK has it’s own web presence in a blog (HERE!) and should bring some reliably curious, strangely beautiful experimentation to the screen. And it’s FREEEEEE!
This is, obviously, a brief and over-excited preview. I didn’t even find space to squeeze in a mention of the exquisitely bonkers-looking Japanese sub-section of the Fanomenon strand (hint: it’ll be weird!), the Cinema Versa documentary strand or the short films strand. And the Official Selection definitely demands some more attention too. More to come soon!
Watching James Bond films. All of them. In order.
So… this week I’ve taken on a new and exciting challenge: I’m going to watch all the James Bond films, ever single one, in the order they were made. Now, I’m not a complete masochist so I’m not going to set any kind of time limit on this: I’m not watching all 22 (twenty two!) back-to-back! I’ll take it nice and slow; I’ll put on the tux, shake my vodka martini and then relax and watch Bond, SPECTRE and all manner of exciting things.
Dr. No (1962 / Terence Young / Sean Connery)
And what better place to start than at the beginning? Dr. No, the film that started it all, is still a decent litle thriller by today’s standards. It’s packed to the brim with awesome and very memorable moments - Ursula Andress emerging from the sea! - and it cracks along at a decent pace, with attempted spider-aided assassination, fist-fights and car-chases. It doesn’t have some of the classic elements we came to associate with later Bond films - gadgetry is decidedly thin here - but it does a lot of what you’d expect from a Bond film and does it well.
Sean Connery lays down a serious argument for his place as Best Bond Ever with his brilliantly suave performance, whether flirting in the casino or punching SPECTRE agents in the head - leaving the bloodied, dead agent in the car for the valet to deal with! There’s no evil henchman on show (although sometimes that’s a good thing) but Dr. No himself with his EVIL METAL HANDS is charismatically evil, a perfect villain.
The unavoidable criticism of the film, sadly, is that the ending just isn’t very good. After such a decent story and some brilliant scenes, Bond and Dr. No’s fight in what appears to be a climbing frame over the er… yellow-lit toxic bubbling water of death is really pretty lacklustre. Having built him up as a booming-voiced overseer, a metal-clawed monster, a smooth-talking SPECTRE agent, Dr. No’s ignoble exit into the - oh so terrifying! - bubbling water is a complete let down really. Still, at least they make up for it a bit by blowing up the base… We all like a good explosion!
It’s a good film, great fun to watch and, in many respects, just what you want from a James Bond film. But it’s not perfect. Right, on with the list…. From Russia With Love next.
Massacre in Dinosaur Valley
Cannibals!
Cannibals, cannibals, cannibals! A-biting and a-chomping! Snackin’ on Human flesh!
For all that we might weave outrageous fantasies of Vampires and Were-wolves, of Aliens and Ghouls, of the half-dead and the undead and all manner of imaginary beasties, there’s nothing quite as shocking as the atrocities and horrors enacted upon people by… Other People! From the Nazis to Human Centipedes, many of the most threatening films feature the cruelties of humans.
Somewhere within this tradition is the, now somewhat passé, strand of Cannibal films that excited 70s and 80s audiences. Some of these films, mostly Italian, clawed their way to notoriety, even infamy - I’m thinking Cannibal Holocaust… - whilst others drifted along in (mostly deserved) obscurity. Their sad drawback, as the 21st century viewer can’t fail to notice, is that the exciting, blood-curdling thrilling tales of Amazonian savages exacting bloody acts of cruelty upon (mostly buxom and nubile) Europeans tend to extensively racist… The ‘White man’s burden’ in this case is usually some civilizing mission to the Amazon rainforest, where civilizing usually involves (with a degree of historical accuracy) slaughtering the ‘savages’ they encountered.
That said, Massacre in Dinosaur Valley is obviously aware of this racist subcurrent and is careful to balance the acts of Native savagery with a good deal of Caucasian savagery too. It is, of course, sexist from start to finish but… well… it was made in Italy in the 70s…
After a spot of messing around in a Brazilian bar, a plane carrying a professor and his (beautiful) daughter, a young paleontologist, a US army vet and his alcoholic wife and a photographer and his two (beautiful) models crashes in… Dinosaur Valley! We lose a couple of the characters in the plane crash but the rest of the party set out into the jungle in a bid to escape to civilization. The story is, despite being utterly predictable, crass and unimaginative, astonishingly good fun from start to finish. As expected, we lose several of the characters along the way as they fall victim to jungle dangers such as piranhas and quicksand, until our remaining three - the brave young paleontologist, the professor’s daughter and one of the models - find themselves caught up in the natives’ tribal rituals, which involve dinosaur masks, claws and… gratuitous nudity! Hurrah!
Mostly unscathed, our heroes escape downriver and fall into the clutches of some rather unpleasant gem miners, who lock up the man and cart the women off to their bedrooms. Thankfully, predictably, all turns out more or less OK, as the baddies get their come-uppance and the good guy gets the girl as all her feminist leanings melt into nothing in the face of his rugged, heroic masculinity… (Hmmm)
As you should have worked out by now, Massacre In Dinosaur Valley is nothing if not trash but it is supremely enjoyable trash. It’s poorly acted, poorly scripted and never really surprises but it does everything with such unabashed enthusiasm that, for a b-movie fan, it’s very hard to sneer at it. Great fun!