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.
Island of the Fishmen aka L'isola degli uomini pesce
Well, it’s been a while since I wrote (or watched, for that matter) anything as gloriously silly as Island of the Fishmen. Whilst I have seen it before, it was only once and somewhat over a year ago, so I thought this re-imagining of Dr Moreau’s isalnd was ripe for another watch. And what a (ahem) treat it is!
It opens as you might expect a tense serious monster film to: the sea is still, several injured men look silently at the camera and a gull screeches overhead. Something has gone very wrong here, but we just don’t know what! Maybe this will be, despite the name, a slow-building tense affair, all hinted-at flashes and unsettling curiosities….. OH WAIT, NO! MONSTERS HAVE ARRIVED!
The boat rocks, the men shout and scream, despite clearly being in a studio rather than the ocean they are plunged into the sea! We see flashes of fishy monster hands and eyes… and all this in the first five minutes.
The greatest thing about this film is that, unlike many of its ilk, it never really slows down. All too often, I’ve watched dull films with snappy titles, fun beginnings and then a tedious 45 minute crawl towards a decent finale, the kind of film that makes 90 minutes seem like a very long time indeed. Thankfully, Island… is not one of these. The pace does dip and wobble but the sense of threat and excitement never really leaves. Even within the first half hour or so most of the first characters meet grisly fates (more fishmen!) , presumably-poisonous snakes have threatened the others and native islanders have attacked and captured our heroes. Through all this carnage walks the impressive mustachioed badguy, Rackham (Richard Johnson), sneering and snarling his lines at his captive would-be wife and our shipwrecked hero.
From here on in it just gets sillier. We learn about the rediscovery of Atlantis, the origin of the savage clawed fishmen and the dastardly Rackham’s true plans. It’s chaotically silly stuff that makes little sense to anyone but it romps on through with gleeful abandon. And it is great fun.
I don’t want to give too much of the fabulous plot away but I couldn’t help but mention the volcano shots… Every now and then the camera cuts to some very impressively shot footage of erupting volcanoes - obviously lifted from a nature documentary - which, when contrasted with the unspeakably silly Fishmen costumes, makes them look even more ridiculous than they otherwise would have done.
N.B. This was re-cut and re-released in the US as Screamers. I’m not really sure in what ways that version was different, as I watched the Italian print, but I do know that Roger Corman re-shot the intro to add more gore… The poster for Screamers bears almost no relation to what happens in the Island of the Fishmen!
Banning the Human Centipede II
A day or two ago, the UK’s national organisation of stopping-you-watching-things, the BBFC, announced that they had rejected The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) as a work too depraved to be released in the UK, a film that couldn’t be salvaged by any measure of cuts, a story that would corrupt and damage our all-too-fragile sensibilities.
In one word, this is ridiculous.
To explain why, I’m using this post to write out three of the reasons I believe this. Namely, that 1) this move reveals awkward things about what we do and don’t accept, 2) that the evidence upon which we base the ‘dangers’ of watching bad things is pretty slim and 3) that censorship simply doesn’t work.
What we ban.
The BBFC have always had a major downer on sexualised violence. This might not be such a surprise in itself but it becomes more unusual when you consider that they are considered one of the more lenient bodies in almost all other forms of violence or abuse. Although this has always been the case (see David Pirie’s New Heritage of Horror) it is becoming more and more obvious as other very violent films or very explicitly sexual films are released uncut, whilst any combination of the two tends to fall foul of the censors’ scissors.
David Cox’s Guardian article is spot-on in picking out this detail and makes the following point (quoting the BBFC’s explanation):
The board explain that the original film was OK (if “undoubtedly tasteless and disgusting”) because its centipede was the product of a “revolting medical experiment”, whereas its successor is unacceptable because its own centipede is “the object of the protagonist’s depraved sexual fantasy”
So there we have it. Apparently, the minute someone is enjoying their disgusting creation, rather than simply experimenting, it becomes something which no-one should watch. The inconsistency here is phenomenal: this is, as Cox says “an ideological step”, exposing a curious belief that repulsive violence, sadistic actions and grisly surgical detail are in someway only bad if someone in the film derives some kind of sexual pleasure from them.
And if this is the case, as the BBFC seems to think it is, then there had better be some good evidence to support it, right? Oh…
Why we ban.
There really still isn’t very much clear evidence that watching something nasty in any way makes you nasty.
I should point out, I’m talking about censorship rather than restriction. I have no problem at all with limiting children’s access to films but I think we’re on much more troublesome ground when it comes to adults.
The BBFC state:
It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.
Oh. So this film “poses a real risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers”, does it? Even when we get around the incredibly vague probability of this sentence (risk…likely…potential..) it is quite a bold statement. What kind of harm do they mean? And how is it measured? Even more interestingly, why is it that sexualised violence poses more risk than non-sexualised but equally brutal and graphic violence?
In fact, do they have any evidence to suggest this at all?
It would seem not. Ah well, it hardly matters really because, as anyone with half a brain could tell you…
Censorship doesn’t work.
It’s a curious thing. In a world in which movie and film industries are having remarkable difficulty in forcing their ‘customers’ to actually pay for their ‘product’, how does the BBFC think a ban will effect the viewing figures of The Human Centipede?
It was not submitted for a cinema release, so we can already discount cinema screenings. What the BBFC’s ruling does is to make DVD sales of the film illegal in the UK. Despite this, we can absolutely take it for granted that the moment this film actually hits DVD somewhere in the world, it’ll show up on the internet in high quality, just waiting to be downloaded.
Not only will it be available, however, but it now has a whole heap of free publicity. At the time of writing this, the BBFC’s decision is reported as news on the front pages of several national newspapers’ websites (inc. Guardian, Daily Mail, Independent) and is now something that people have heard of. The classic censor’s argument about protecting the children is also obviously poor: nothing makes a fifteen year old want to see a film so much as being told it’s been banned! And, with the internet, they (and everyone else) will be able to access it easily.
***
So, in short, a disaster. For dubious reasons, the BBFC have inflicted an unenforceable ban which will almost certainly massively increase the number of people who see the film. Gee, that was smart, wasn’t it?
Why You Should Watch The Tunnel
A week and a bit ago, The Tunnel, an indie Australian horror film was released for free online. The creators have taken a daring approach to film distribution, attempting to cover the $135,000 production cost of their film by selling individual frames on their website, releasing a deluxe DVD and organising a couple screenings. A lot has been said already about this side of the project so… let’s ignore it all together and focus on the actual film.
The Tunnel is a pretty damn decent ‘found-footage’ style movie. As such, comparisons to other similarly styled/gimmicky (delete-as-per-your-taste) are absolutely inevitable. Amongst such competition, by my reckoning, The Tunnel mounts a pretty strong defence and, whilst it’s by no means the best around, it certainly holds its own. And kicks Paranormal Activity all over the park (although, in truth, that isn’t exactly hard…)
The unique selling point in this case is the presentation of the story as a documentary, with talking-heads style interviews with several of the lead characters involved in the story. This, as should be immediately obvious, has a fairly massive downside… You. Know. Who. Survives. I’m not giving anything away here at all (I do seriously hope lots of people will watch this) but, given that we expect people to die in horror films (that’s what happens!), the fact that the film makers show us two of the four lead characters talking to the camera from the start leaves the audience to draw some fairly easy conclusions!
Minor documentary-gripe aside, they do succeed in setting up a genuinely intriguing story. With contemporary fears over water-shortages, the New South Wales government have come up with a new plan to use the miles of abandoned train tunnels that run underneath the city for water storage. For various reasons, this leads to our starring group of intrepid (and possibly implausibly stupid…) band of journalists to go exploring in the dark. Sadly, they’ve told no-one they were going (they clearly haven’t seen 127 Hours). And they’re staggeringly under-prepared and under-equipped. Even Theseus took a thread with him when he went into the labyrinth!
Needless to say, all sorts of tragedy, violence and scary noises ensues.
Again, I don’t want to go into too much detail about what actually occurs. The camera wiggles, night-vision comes and goes, screams and cries echo through the tunnels. It’s stylishly and competently put together and puts their sub-Sydney environment to good use. The only criticism I can really level at the film, however, is that with such an interesting background story created for the film, much of the detail and interest gets forgotten about from around halfway through. They’re not the only ones who do it - District 9 forgets entirely about its mockumentary format from about 30 minutes in - but it did leave me wanting a little bit more from the story. I’m not the kind of viewer who likes to be spoon-fed an easy solution, but having interested me in the story, to forget about it was a bit of a let down. Perhaps, like the creators of [REC], they intend to reveal a lot more of the story, the causes, etc. in a future instalment. Perhaps they don’t.
Either way, The Tunnel is a well-made, decently paced and enjoyable film. It’s interesting, genuinely creepy in places and leaves you wanting more (or though not in an entirely positive way). Oh, and did anyone mention that it’s free?
Who cares what I think? Head over to VODO and grab your free copy
or go and buy the DVD.
Cannes ban von Trier...
Oh dear, oh dear, Lars von Trier has certainly upset the Cannes-folk, hasn’t he?
Does anyone really not see how ridiculous this is? Has anyone who does insist that it was a very serious issue actually seen/heard the video? He preceded the comments by pointing out that his next film was a four hour long hardcore porn film starring Kirsten Dunce. With no dialogue.
This man is bored. This man is bored of the dull routine of press conferences and he rambles off on a provocative wander. He clearly has no idea where this ramble is going and laughs at himself throughout. So you don’t like the humour? Fine, I can’t say I’m wild about it either, but the “von Trier is a Nazi” headlines that everyone has been churning out just seem like willful media aggression. Which is pretty pathetic.
But the media are the media, they’re always been smug hypocrites. Luckily, the Cannes organizers are above all that … just as bad. It’d be bad enough that they were dismissing him for what was clearly a joke, given with all the other stuff they’ve put up with, if it weren’t for the smiling face of Emir Kusturica who’s running this year’s Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes. This is the same Kusturica who has very seriously made comments suggesting an extent of support for Milosevic.. Suddenly, Lars jests don’t look so important…
Edit: The Daily Beast have a very interesting post with a response from von Trier.
“It was stupid and the wrong place to be sarcastic,” von Trier admitted. “Of course, I don’t sympathize with Hitler. And, as we all know, the Holocaust was the cruelest and most barbaric crime against humanity of the last century … My only excuse is that if I think a press conference is getting boring I start to perform. […] The reason that I make these Jewish jokes is that, for half my life, I thought I was Jewish. If you’re Jewish, you’re allowed to make Jewish jokes. So it’s hard to break that habit when you find out that you’re not really Jewish. All of my children have Jewish names. I’m sorry that people took it the wrong way. But I know why; I was stupid enough to talk to the world like I talk to my best friends.”
What we have here, as so many times before when the world reacts with shock to particularly callous/offensive remarks is an absolute lack of context. The people at the press conference are familiar with von Trier’s style (there is plenty of laughter or at least nervous tittering through the video) and the people who watch von Trier’s films are familiar with his style. It’s only when remarks given in a closed circle spread (inter)nationally that things start to kick off and the apoplectic rage blinds everyone…
Anyway, if nothing else, this gives me an excuse to stick a couple of awesome Nazi-themed posters from sleazey films in this post. So without further ado, here’s
Deported Women of the SS [rate:4.9] 154 votes
and
Red Nights of the Gestapo [rate:4.7] 104 votes
. Quality, family-friendly entertainment, I’m sure…
Cannes 2011
So Cannes 2011 starts tomorrow, everyone’s favourite round-up of often pretentious, frequently over-serious and yet still usually fantastic film. There’s almost no point getting too excited about any of the films on the actual bill because, months down the line when they actually get a release, the interest usually wears off before I get to actually see them. So I’m taking a fairly laid-back approach to it this year, mostly just reading the occasional review or summary. Or I might read everything I can find. We’ll see…
Neither Empire nor Total Film have much up yet for Cannes besides the month-old line-up announcement. More from them to come soon, I’m sure… The Guardian’s Cannes section has a predictably thorough-but-earnest Peter Bradshaw analysis of the main contenders up, whilst Mark Kermode is not going (he’s not much of a fan).
But what about the films themselves? Well, to be honest, very few of them are really shouting to me. I’ll keep half an eye out for the Lars Von Trier contribution (Melancholia) and Almodóvar’s latest (The Skin I Live In) whilst Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death Of A Samurai certainly has potential (Peter Bradshaw, needless to say, is not interested!).
Half the fun, however, is usually to be found in keeping an eye on the mad as can be films in the marketplace, fighting desperately for distribution deals. There’re almost always a good few horror and other indie gems to look out for there, so I’m sure that’s where my attention will be focused.