Reflections in a Golden Eye

In the Hollywood Southern Gothic classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Paul Newman’s character Brick Pollitt expresses his undying love for his deceased friend Skipper over the brazen erotic yearnings of his feisty wife Maggie "the Cat" played by Elizabeth Taylor. Almost ten years later, Marlon Brando, as sexually repressed homophile and military man Maj. Weldon Penderton, would also chose a young man over would-be-Queen Elizabeth in John Huston’s underrated film Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967); a plentifully peculiar and perverse Southern Gothic work set in a military training camp during the homo-hating 1940s based on the Carson McCullers novel of the same name. As hinted at by its curious title, Reflections in a Golden Eye is an aesthetically magnetic work that shimmers a golden tone (or a “golden haze” as Huston described it) throughout, but protagonist Weldon Penderton has his gaze on a young recruit's brown-eye; whether he wants to admit it to himself or not. Major Penderton’s wife Leonora (Taylor) is a luscious and loose woman who gets her kicks by mocking her husband’s pathetic passivity and sexual impotence by forthrightly flaunting her hypnotic naked body and having a steamy love affair with his married friend Lt. Col. Morris Langdon (Brian Keith). Needless to say, Major Penderton is an internally conflicted fellow who wears the sort of fixed stoic mask of deceit that only a seasoned military man of the 1940s could have pulled off. Of course, when the Major sees Pvt. Williams (played by then-newcomer Robert Forster), his unspeakable love interest, riding a white horse while au naturel, he begins to lose his cold-cock cool, thus eventually culminating into a calamitous climax that reminds the viewer why AIDS-ridden S&M leather bars exist. Unfortunately for Mr. Penderton, Williams – who is not exactly the most mentally stable young man – has a fetish for sneaking into Leonora’s bedroom and ritualistically inhaling the pussycat pheromones from her panties and lingerie.

Before Brando obtained the lead role in Reflections in a Golden Eye, Elizabeth Taylor's good friend Montgomery Clift was cast to play Maj. Weldon Penderton, but instead died of a much anticipated heart attack before a single frame of film was shot. Lee Marvin was also considered for the role, yet he turned it down, probably because he was too hard-featured and unrepentantly manly, but one can only speculate. Brando – who although masculine in his own right but also a pugnacious pretty boy – was indubitably the right man for the job as further testified by a statement he made in 1976, “Homosexuality is so much in fashion it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. I have never paid much attention to what people think about me.” Of course, his character in Reflections in a Golden Eye certainly cares about what people think about him, so much so that he rather stay with a woman that unceasingly repels him than become a full-fledgling patriotic member of the pink army brotherhood. In terms of theme, aesthetics, and overall atmosphere, Reflections in a Golden Eye is essentially the total antipodean to the ultra-campy comedy The Gay Deceivers (1969); a silly fag romp were two straight friends pretend to be queer lovers so they can avoid being drafted into the military. After initially watching Reflections in a Golden Eye for the first time, it was quite apparent to me as to why the film failed at the box office. On top of featuring diacritic homoerotic themes set in the sort of period and place that most individuals would regard as a man-molding testosterone factory of inborn anti-fagdom, Reflections in a Golden Eye alienated many mainstream viewers due to its puissant gold tint, so much so that the film was subsequently re-released in a normal color format (thankfully, the "golden haze" was later reinstated when the film was released on dvd) so as to appease the typically mundane tastes of unadventurous mainstream filmgoers. Ultimately, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a tragic tale were not a single quandary is resolved, let alone properly addressed, but I guess one cannot expect much optimism from a film where a man unabashedly commits serial adultery against his sick suicidal wife (who cut off her own nipples after having a miscarriage during childbirth) with the spoiled, over-sexed spouse of one of his best friends. Despite its many poignant moments of human despondency, duplicity, and contretemps, Reflections in a Golden Eye has a few instances of (seemingly unintentional) comic relief in the form of an effete Filipino houseboy who has a queer eye for the golden eye as exhibited by his drawing of gold peacock whose ogle acts as a reflection of the world, hence the title of the film.

 Reflections in a Golden Eye is very possibly the greatest example of a semi-subconscious bizarre love triangle and one of John Huston’s most artistically ambitious and uncompromising efforts, as it is a work that was destined to be a commercial failure due to its terribly taboo themes and iridescent gold imagery. The fact that Mr. Huston made such an audience-antagonistic and emotionally-draining work with an all-star cast featuring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor only adds to the case for the filmmaker’s artistic integrity. At the very worst, Reflections in a Golden Eye is work that eclipses its Southern Gothic predecessors A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and The Fugitive Kind (1959) in terms of ever seething starkness, domestic social dysfunction, and psycho-sexual derangement. Out of all the characters featured in Reflections in a Golden Eye, it is hard to designate which one is the most mentally unsound and abhorrent, but somewhat queerly, Brando’s character Weldon Penderton eventually seems to be keenly cognizant of his affliction by the end of the film, even if he blows something other than his load as a result of it. Aside from being a latent homosexual, I think many male viewers, especially older ones, can identify with Penderton’s plight and impasse with life. On reflection, it is not the honor and prestige that comes with being a decorated officer that the Major nostalgically ponders on, but his youthful days of impassioned brotherhood as a new recruit. In a sense, Penderton’s sexual longings for the stark-naked peeping tom on the horse seem to be a rather perverse way for him to recapture the sprightliness of his long lost salad days.  Although expressive in tone and sometimes even phantasmagorical in imagery, Reflections in a Golden Eye is in consummation a very realistic portrayal about self-imposed (and sometimes subconscious) prisons and the self-annihilating misery that such preternatural constructs sow. Next to Sidney Lumet’s Equus (1977), you won’t find a more penetrating and historic film about hysterical homos and horses than Reflections in a Golden Eye.

-Ty E

Andy Warhol's Bad

Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977) directed by Jed Johnson is indubitably a bad movie. Not bad in the banal or unwatchable sense, but a sincerely mean-spirited work that contains some of the most repellant, deplorable, and eclectically appalling people ever captured on celluloid. Warhol (or at least his hired filmmakers) was no stranger to depicting human depravity and emotional disfigurement, but out of all the films he was involved with, Bad is easily his most callously misanthropic and pessimistic work and one of few X-rated films that is conspicuously anti-erotic in nature, but like most of his previous efforts, such seedy and surly portrayals are executed facetiously with a most biting satire. Indubitably, Paul Morrissey was Warhol’s greatest director, Danny Williams is all but forgotten, and pop-art capitalist himself seemed like nothing more than an uninspired mentally-defective dilettante while in the director’s chair, but Jed Johnson – a man who never directed a film before (nor would after) – assembled what would prove to be the Warhol Factory’s masterpiece. Before directing Bad, Johnson had helped with the editing on Andy Warhol's L'Amour (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974) aka Andy Warhol’s Dracula and even interior decorated a townhouse that he and the Factory dictator would call home. Of course, Bad features a different sort of domestic living than the ever so dainty and urbane homophile sort probably shared by Warhol and Johnson, as one might describe the film as somewhat misogynistic, but it is most certainly a wanton work of exceedingly eremitic extremes and sardonic snipes. Bad centers around a beauty salon owner named Hazel Aiken (played by Carroll Baker of Giant, Baby Doll) who also happens to be a slumlord that supplements her income by pimping out ferocious criminally-inclined white trash girls that rent rooms from her. Hazel also hires these boorish broads to carry out extremely profitable contract “hits” on everything from pet dogs to seemingly retarded school children. As a supremely ballsy bourgeois bitch and bottom-feeding capitalist who virtually enslaves the more debauched members of the fecund proletariat, Hazel even makes Martha Stewart seem like less of a soul-sucking cunt. 

 Hellish Hazel has a variety of dejected human-garbage gals and jaded Jezebels staying with here, including a humble (if mentally-feeble) and aesthetically displeasing daughter-in-law named Mary (and her equally annoying infant child), two wopesses R.C. and P.G., and a duo of bitchy brawling sisters named Marsha and Glenda. On a trial basis, queen harlot Hazel also takes in a wop bohunk named L.T. (Perry King) who acts as a hustling Joe Dallesandro-clone of sorts (apparently, the real Dallesandro declined to be in the film as he was working on pictures in Europe). Although Hazel is an eristic nag that treats most of the girls as emotional punching bags, she seems to hold her most marvelous malice towards L.T., probably due to his flagrant handsomeness and her seemingly sexually-repressed disposition. Undoubtedly, L.T. is a delinquent philistine who does not think twice about stealing and selling odious Hazel’s expensive perfume, but at least he is an unintentionally humorous fellow whose petty criminality and lack of manners acts as a haphazard stand-up comedy routine of sorts. Whatever the true merit of their acting abilities, all the actors featured in Bad certainly get the job done as I indubitably found myself anticipating their much warranted downfalls, but I fond Hazel’s delightful descent – which involves an emotional Negro who does not take kindly to the word "Nigger" – to be the most comical and befitting. Essentially, Bad is one of the finest cinematic documents depicting the innate despitefulness of the fairer sex and the assets of such female viciousness and coldness within a domestic criminal network. The film also highlights the intuitive materialistic nature of the female gender and how such mercenary behavior is all the more evident in our unspiritual post-modern Capitalist world, especially in New York City of all places; the home of Wall Street and the world capital of international bloodsucking capitalism. Ultimately, it is from L.T.’s selfless empathy for a helpless autistic boy that leads to the much deserved demise of she-bitch Hazel’s smutty and intrinsically amoral enterprise. Had Hazel remained the cold gutter baroness that she always was and characteristically resisted the charismatic charm of suave con-man L.T. from the get go, she probably would not have gotten herself into such an unbecoming and easily avoidable situation that would inevitably lead to her demise. 

 For a man who directed a scene of an infant falling to its death from a 12-story building, barefaced animal cruelty, and a toilet overflowing with what seems to be a couple gallons worth of feces, it is almost fitting that Bad director Jed Johnson himself would die tragically in the Trans World Airlines TWA Flight 800 plane explosion of 1996. Not since the brutal murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975, shortly after directing his final and startlingly self-prophetic film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) has a filmmaker’s art so tumultuously and appalling imitated his death. Bad may also be the only film featuring a scenario where a number of filmgoers are burnt alive in a movie theater, so to say the film also pokes fun at the viewer would be a glaring understatement. I find this scene to be awfully farcical when I consider that fact that out of all of Warhol’s films, Bad had the most lavish and celebrity-celebrated film premiere as actors as famous as Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, and Jack Nicholson attended the film’s debut screening in May 1977. In reflection, Bad was not a bad way for Warhol to end his career in filmmaking, particularly when considering that he was the same man behind the all but unwatchable A Clockwork Orange adaptation Vinyl (1965). As Vinyl demonstrated, Warhol may not have understood male violence nor masculinity, but he was certainly savvy about what makes women tick as so candidly, if venomously, portrayed in his completely worthwhile masterpiece Bad; a sordid cinematic spectacle of screwy spite. 

-Ty E

Blue Movie (1978)

I first became conscious of the devalued and often derided Italian auteur Alberto Cavallone (1938-1997) after researching cinematic adaptations of Comte de Lautréamont six cantos poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror). Although dismayed upon learning that Cavallone’s Maldoror (1975) was never ever actually released due to petty monetary reasons (even though the blessed few who have actually seen the film regard it as the filmmaker's celluloid opus magnum), I was at least introduced to the seemingly lunatic libertine filmmaker’s consistently controversial yet cinematically diverse filmography that includes everything from esoteric hardcore pornography (Baby Sitter aka Il nano erotico) to less-than-action-packed-post-colonial-homoerotic-race-mixing-adventure flicks (Afrika) to kaleidoscopic Bataille-esque avant-garde surrealist works (Man, Woman And Beast aka L'uomo la donna e la bestia aka Spell). Recently, I had the extraordinarily effete aristocratic pleasure of watching Cavallone’s Blue Movie (1978); a lurid scatological celluloid phantasm that the filmmaker made during a turning point in his career before gaining the distinction of being one of Italy’s most enigmatic hermetic hardcore pornographers. Borrowing its name from Andy Warhol's amateurish sex flick of the same name (Cavallone would do the same with his later Cocteau-esque surrealist sleaze flick Blow Job), Blue Movie was created in a similar perfunctory fashion as many of the earlier films directed by the famous American homo hack artiste. Apparently assembled on a whim inspired by a bet made by producer Martial Boschero, Blue Movie – a work that foretells the Dogme 95 movement – was made in a lackadaisical Roger Corman-style manner (production lasted a week) on a nonexistent budget with mostly non-actors, yet the film is very possibly Cavallone’s most unscrupulous and discombobulated work. Despite featuring scenes of hardcore pornography (which were subsequently cut at the behest of the Italian Board of Censors), a decidedly incoherent plot, a depraved 'anti-hero' with a fecal fetish, and exceedingly somber themes of staggering hyper-nihilism, Blue Movie would go on to become a box-office hit of sorts in Italy. After watching Blue Movie a couple times, I find it quite unimaginable that such a debauched film featuring naked Italian beauties eating shit would prove to be palatable for public consumption, but I can't say I don't like the idea of such a ruthless eremitic work obtaining semi-mainstream notoriety. In short, Blue Movie proved to be a work that lives up to its underground cult cinema infamy. 

 Blue Movie follows cunning Claudio, a serious newspaper photographer turned mechanic (while moonlighting as a shutterbug pornographer) who derives venereal and aesthetic pleasure from humiliating graceful statuesque women. While talking to a prospective sex-slave, Claudio matter-of-factly states to the lovely little lady, “Your beauty is absurd and I can’t stand beauty. I love to see fear on people’s faces. Degradation. Its then that they become human.” Indeed, throughout Blue Movie, Claudio proves his propensity towards ‘humanizing’ women through a variety of fetishistic dehumanizing methods that only a completely unhinged sadomasochist with an uncontrollable urge could execute so keenly and unwaveringly. After being nearly turbulently raped by a malicious masked man in the woods, a young beauteous named Silvia is picked up randomly by Claudio as he cruises down a desolate road in his beloved automobile. Little does stunned Silvia know that her personal nightmare is going to be compounded by a manipulative man who finds alleviation in footage of genocide and delights in taking photographs of girls drenched in toxic dung. As a man of exquisite refined taste, Claudio incessantly plays the musical compositions of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach as his own personal soundtrack (which acts as the score for the film). Like many patrons of the arts, Claudio is a committed cinephile of sorts who luxuriates in watching forgotten silent vaudeville comedies and slow-motion stock-footage of Vietnamese Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burning himself to death. Not content with just using Silvia as his own personal Devil’s plaything, Claudio recruits an alluring model and an attractive homeless gal as disposable accessories for his scantly furnished scat-house. While the later two are mostly pleased with Claudio's omnipresent charm and confident courteousness, Silvia – who seems to be suffering from delusions brought upon by post-traumatic stress – cannot shake-off visions of encroaching faceless rapists and milky blood filling up the bathtub. Luckily, Silvia has a gay black male companion (who carries around a skull in a bag) who is looking out for her interests, but he essentially proves to be no more useful than the Negro elder from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Speaking of Kubrick, Cavallone must have been a fan of A Clockwork Orange (1971) as Blue Movie also features an amorous spasmodic montage coupled with Teutonic classical music; the main difference being that while droog dictator Alex can more than aptly sexually service a tenacious twosome a number of times during a single sexual session, Claudio cannot even get off from a mere passive hand-job, hence the source of his preternatural proclivities. That being said, one can only guess how much of Alberto Cavallone’s own personality was channeled into the character of Claudio, as Blue Movie is undoubtedly an utterly frustrated expression of Weltschmerz and irremediable impotence. Forget fellow Italian filmmaker Romano Scavolini’s 1981 slasher flick, Blue Movie is a truly unflinching and wholly unequivocal expression of Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. 

 The relative commercial success of Blue Movie turned out to be just as big of surprise to Cavallone as the film itself is to most uninitiated viewers as expressed by the filmmaker introspective quote, "I was bewildered by the box office results. Blue Movie was meant to piss off the raincoat crowd, it was such an antagonist film…" Indubitably, one of the film’s greatest attributes is its abiding carnal cruelty and deep-rooted misanthropy and misogyny. Although the world positively suffers due to the lack of materialization of Cavallone’s unreleased masterpiece Maldoror (which has essentially vanished without a trace), Blue Movie makes for a germane celluloid panorama of Comte de Lautréamont’s clamorous influence on the venturesome Italian auteur, as it is a work that features a quasi-Satanic steady stream-of-consciousness (non) narrative and hypnagogic sexual deviance; two glaring traits that helped earn the tragic pseudo-Count posthumous immortality. Despite its grody dreamlike imagery and disconcerting schizophrenic editing, Blue Movie, not unlike Roger Watkins’ more or less tamer work Last House on Dead End Street (1977), often has the begrimed aura of a genuine vintage snuff/found footage, but incongruous with authentic stock-footage, one never really knows whether the scenarios played out in the film are real or imaginary, let alone discerning which character’s mind/reality we are peering into. Outstandingly, Blue Movie is often humorous (and seemingly intentionally so), in spite of the film’s loony licentiousness, but then again, such a fundamentally anti-human work would probably be rather intolerable without a little tenebrous comic relief. Like many of Cavallone’s earlier films, Blue Movie features Marxist political commentary about consumerism, but I won’t bore you with specifics as it ultimately, in my opinion, detracts from the film, but I will say it is more subtlety executed than anything that George A. Romero has ever done.  It should be noted that virtually from the get-go of Blue Movie, it is more than apparent that all the women featured in the film are absolute material objects for cagey Claudio to defile, hence the appearance of various symbolic toy dolls and figurines that somehow mysteriously change position as time passes on.  It is only when semi-psychotic Silvia forgets her foreordained subservient role that Claudio's Section 8 microcosm comes tumbling down.  In the end, cursed Claudio finally achieves the climacteric consolation that he failed to acquire from normal sexual intercourse.  If you're keen on watching films that rape your senses and berate your moral compass, make yourself some cold chocolate milk and cuddle with a love one to an intimate screening of Blue Movie; an original romantic comedy for less inhibited and more ambitious lovers.

-Ty E

The Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy

After radically reinventing the vampire film with Nadja (1994), auteur Michael Almereyda subsequently attempted to do the same thing with the mummy movie via The Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy (1998) aka Trance with almost equally favorable results. Further declaring his unwavering assiduity towards deconstructing a classic horror subgenre and rebuilding it with new and often improved ingredients (while disposing of others), The Eternal features a mummy that also happens to be an ancient shape-shifting druid witch. Instead of being the typical pimped-out and gold-chain-sporting materialistic mummified Egyptian royal, the mummy of The Eternal is a “bog-women”; a freshly preserved corpse unearthed from the sphagnum bogs of Northern Europa. Of course, like most monster movies, the mummy of The Eternal is not the protagonist, but a hostile sphinxlike force with cryptic intentions and a mostly ferocious disposition comparable to the mummified succubus beauty of Curtis Harrington's worthwhile Thelema-esque TV-movie The Cat Creature (1973). Instead, an Irish-born American woman named Nora (played by Alison Elliott) acts as the film's lead protagonist/semi-anti-hero. After falling down the stairs (in an admittedly hilarious and hairbrained manner) during a belligerent night of drinking with her equally unstable co-alcoholic husband Jim (Jared Harris), the terrible twosome decides that it will be in their best interest if they (with their nerdy young son Jim Jr.) move to Ireland; the great land of exceedingly poor and destitute drunkards. Of course, it turns out to be a catastrophic mistake on their part, but not for the typical blackout-drunk-in-the-gutter reasons. Upon reaching Ireland, Nora decides that the family should visit her grandmother’s secluded Gothic mansion. Little does Nora know that her crank professor Uncle Bill (played by a very Brooklyn-accented Christopher Walken) has the mummified remains of a distant ancestor stored in the basement of the maniac mansion and he is quite adamant about re-animating the charming little corpse. Upon her reawakening, the menacing mummy-witch takes an instant liking to Nora, so much so that she attempts to steal her body, soul, and identity. Naturally, such sinister supernatural happenings prove to be indomitably stressful for Alison, a woman that is already suffering from acute alcohol withdraw and eerie head-injury-related hallucinations. Needless to say, I doubt The Eternal is a work that one would want to screen at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for motivational/inspirational purposes, but it does seem to capture the miserable soul-disintegrating metaphysics of alcoholism.  To add to the Celtic pagan allure that is The Eternal, the film is narrated by a Delphian little Irish girl that seems to hold a seemingly unfathomable degree of hermetic knowledge.

  Like Nadja and the majority of Michael Almereyda’s work, The Eternal features various scenes of fluctuant experimental filmmaking and deathly dry humor that is bound to thoroughly turn-off the majority of everyday filmgoers and mainstream horror fanatics. Unlike Nadja, The Eternal was shot in color and does not feature the peculiar pixilation of the Fisher-Price PXL2000 camera, thus the film is slightly more accessible than Almereyda’s earlier vampire flick, at least in the aesthetic sense. Ultimately, The Eternal is a vastly vague and strikingly spiritual work that is quite in contrast with the all-but-hopeless aristocratic nihilism of Nadja. Admittedly, I know next to nothing about ancient Celtic paganism yet The Eternal seems to more than aptly ascertain and resonate the essence of these arcane spiritual themes in a way that, like the mummy herself (as well as most other characters in the film), transcends the Christian view of good and evil. Admittedly, as long as I can remember, I have always been repulsed by nearabout anything and everything that is regarded as Irish, at least in a modern day context, especially in respect to their cult of victim-hood (the Irish may be the only European diaspora whose history parallels that of nonwhites) and cultural influences in American (from country music to the western film genre), yet Almereyda’s The Eternal brings some much needed culture and class to the eternally unlucky northwestern Celts, as the film echoes the early works of Irish occult poet W. B. Yeats in terms of both potent possessing poetry and esoteric meanderings.  On top of featuring the ethnic stereotype of the Irish as unrepentant alcoholics, The Eternal features the perennial cliché of the absent Irish father.  Aside from American Jim-Beam-loving Jim and nutty Uncle Bill, not a single male elder (be it father or grandfather) is featured in the film.  Unsurprisingly, most of the young male adults featured in The Eternal are (seemingly) symbolically killed off in fairly absurd scenarios by the wicked wench as if the the whole male gender of Ireland was eternally accursed due to one immortal woman's ancient failed love affair and subsequent seething scorn, henceforth lending evidence that the title of the film is an unintentionally humorous and saucy double-entendre of sorts.  Incidentally, an middle-aged Irish-American women (whose entire family was Irish/Irish-American) once told me that Irish men were essentially ignoble drunkards (referring to her own father as such) as depicted in Alan Parker's Angela's Ashes (1999) and it was up to the mother to raise the children and continue the legacy of the family.  The Eternal certainly portrays such a scenario of amaranthine generational family dysfunction where it is altogether up to the matriarch to lead the battle and shield her family's compromised future.  Fundamentally, The Eternal is a fantastically demanding celluloid work where magical and mystical primeval Ireland-before-alcoholism-and-English-persecution meets the innately imbibed and culturally-comatose Ireland of today, except disguised as an ostensibly incoherent B-grade mummy horror movie.

  I cannot think of a single mummy-related film that I have ever fancied to any notable degree, so I guess it is only natural that I would appreciate the intrinsically abstract and acroamatic anti-mummy film essence of The Eternal; a work that brings life to a seemingly postmortem horror subgenre. Leave it to Michael Almereyda to be the person to do it, but, of course, like most of his films, The Eternal is not for everyone, especially those individuals that found themselves especially enthralled by Stephen Sommers’ emotionally and aesthetically barren CGI-corpse The Mummy (1999) starring Brendan Fraser. Like most of Almereyda’s work, The Eternal demands at least more than one viewing, but works best with incessant re-visitings. Not unlike Nadja and Happy Here and Now (2002), The Eternal is an inordinately hip flick with a modern avant-garde soundtrack and intense inaugural imagery that is bound to satisfy most exploratory cinephiles to some noteworthy degree, yet leave most archetypical horror fans flustered and possibly homicidal. Admittedly, many of the actors and actresses featured in The Eternal are less than sexually alluring in appearance and character (unless you have a fetish for drunk girls falling down the stairs), as the film certainly does not feature the sort of kitschy pseudo-eroticism that the cover-art of the American dvd release misleadingly advertises, but then again, when I think of Ireland, I generally think of homely (and often short like a leprechaun) white ladies with hard-as-nails, contra dainty constitutions. Of course, the presence of delightfully dorky Brit Jared Harris does not help this predicament, but despite the film's lack of pulchritudinous lead actors, The Eternal is, in consummation, an elegant work in of itself that can only be understood by fully experiencing it, as a mere inactive superficial glance at the film will not suffice.  One can only hope that Michael Almereyda will give the werewolf and Frankenstein that same thorough and idiosyncratic treatment that he has so vivaciously bequeathed upon Dracula and the mummy, but judging by the commercial and critical failure of The Eternal, it is quite implausible that we will see the emergence of such clamorous horror works.  Regardless of where Almereyda's filmmaking career might lead, we still have The Eternal, the only film where a plastered American beta-male smashes a wine bottle over a equally drunk druid alpha-mummy-witch's head.

-Ty E

The Passion of Darkly Noon

Upon first viewing Philip Ridley’s second feature-length film The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995), I was – at best – mildly entertained, but regrettably disheartened, yet the film never left my mind. I originally watched the work a day after I first saw Ridley’s daring debut feature The Reflecting Skin (1990); a work I instantly regarded as one of my favorite films, so one could say I had exaggerated expectations before watching the director’s second feature. Recently, I took it upon myself to re-watch both The Reflecting Skin and The Passion of Darkly Noon as a double-feature. Like The Reflecting Skin, The Passion of Darkly Noon proved to be a more aesthetically potent and nobly mystifying work upon subsequent viewings. Starring Brendan Fraser, Ashley Judd, and Viggo Mortensen, The Passion of Darkly Noon is a work that boasts an all-star Hollywood cast and a seemingly straightforward plot for a thriller, yet – not unlike The Reflecting Skin – it is a film that unmitigatedly transcends preconceptions one would have for such a seemingly formulaic and straightforward work. Like Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), The Passion of Darkly Noon takes its title from passage 1 Corinthians 13 ("Now we see through a glass, darkly...") of the Bible and deals with the inevitable hopelessness of a degenerative mental disorder in an exotic rural setting. Although set in the Appalachian region of North Carolina, The Passion of Darkly Noon was actually filmed in rural Germany, thus giving the work a mystical quality comparable to that of the elysian silent German Mountains films.  Akin to his previous effort The Reflecting Skin, Philip Ridley's The Passion of Darkly Noon is an audacious adult fairytale that is in good company with films like Garth Maxwell's Jack Be Nimble (1993), Nick Willing's Photographing Fairies (1997), and Jeremy Thomas' All the Little Animals (1999).  Unsurprisingly, director Philip Ridley cited the child folk tales of the Brothers Grimm as a major influence on the storyline and aura of The Passion of Darkly Noon; a work of penetrating imponderabilia that is patently otherworldly from its erratic opening to its curiously hopeful (if equally tragic) ending. Like David Lynch (who Ridley is often compared to), Ridley has described his approach to filmmaking as primarily intuitive and barely intellectual, hence the quasi-spiritual nature of his work. Despite the ethereal constitution of The Passion of Darkly Noon, the film is scarcely sympathetic towards Christianity, especially of the ultra-conservative cultish sort, and, in fact, portrays an overbearing Nazarene upbringing as the nefarious and demonic source of psychosis and corrosive pathology. In part, Ridley hired the two lead actors due to their vintage all-American good looks as he felt that Brendan Fraser resembled Elvis Presley and that Ashley Judd echoed the semblance of Marilyn Monroe.  While watching The Passion of Darkly Noon, it is easy to see why the director made this conscious decision, as like the character of Darkly (Fraser), Mr. Presley was a sexually-puritanical momma's boy and like Ms. Monroe, Callie (Judd) is an unorthodox temptress with a knack for seducing men of various creeds and ages.  Indeed, The Passion of Darkly Noon is a diacritic slice of zestful yet zany imported American pie.  Of course, like all great culinary artists, Ridley has his own secret esoteric recipe.

 Darkly Moon (played by Brendan Fraser) has a couple problems. He is a virgin man-child whose only close friends/family members – his parents – have been gunned down by angry town folk. Running frantically in an attempt to save his hopelessly holy life, Darkly boy somehow ends up in the forests of Appalachia and is nearly run down by a kindly coffin-transporter named Jude (Loren Dean). Seeing that Darkly is blatantly daunted and possibly deranged, Jude brings the large lad to beauteous blonde Callie’s quaint and secluded forest-covered homestead. Upon nursing Darkly back to equilibrium, Callie takes an instant, if enigmatic, liking to the goofy boy and his peculiar brand of innocence. Unfortunately for both Darkly and Callie, the passive commando-for-Christ and his idle penis soon develop an overwhelming love for the tender woman that treated him so graciously. Callie is in love with a prick of a mute named Clay (Viggo Mortensen); a man that does not need words to express his pathological haughtiness and sexual prowess. To deal with his staggering sexual repression, Darkly commits the almighty sin of spilling his seeds in the moonlight, but this proves to an insufficient form of erotic deliverance for a man that has yet to penetrate and respire an actual furry flapper before his dismally weary, sad virginal eyes. Darkly also engages in masochistic behavior, torturing himself via barbwire and even going so far as wearing an undergarment suit of bloodletting wired spikes. It is not until Darkly meets Clay’s eccentric mother Roxy (Grace Zabriskie) randomly in the woods that he begins to consider that Callie may be an ill-boding conspiring witch that holds sinister supernatural sway over him. After seeing a 20-foot-long silver shoe randomly floating down the river, Clay begins to loss what is left of his Christian-lobotomized mind, but it is not until Clay sees bullet-ridden apparitions of his deceased parents that the loony lad must deal with cunning Callie and her dubious (and apparently diabolical) ways. In a fairytale realm, Darkly’s visions might be seemingly genuine, but it is quite apparent in The Passion of Darkly Noon that, from the get go, the poor boy is suffering from a monumental mental disturbance that is steadily disintegrating what is left of his fragile personality. Inevitably, Darkly finally experiences an atavistic transformation, henceforth ‘evolving’ into a quasi-paganized red-body-paint-wearing modern day berserker of sorts who carries a spear and is immune to pain and has nil serious qualms about storming half-naked through a fire and brimstone domain of scorching flames. 

 Auteur Philip Ridley has described his work The Passion of Darkly Noon as, “Marquis de Sade meets Liberace” (minus the homoerotic flamboyancy) but also as a work with its own “fairytale language” and “dream logic.” As a trained painter and all-around multifarious artist, Ridley has also admitted to realizing his films mostly in a visual fashion as opposed to a dialogue-driven manner. As a fan of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), Ridley has noted that The Passion of Darkly Noon is a work where one knows from the beginning that something awe-inspiring will inevitably befall the lead protagonist, thus leading to an impetuous climax that acts as a substitute to an actual sexual orgasm. Somewhat strikingly, Ridley considers The Passion of Darkly Noon a virtual reflective visual/thematic encyclopedia of horror cinema, as he cites everything from the films of Roger Corman to classic slasher flicks like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980) as influences, but I certainly failed to consciously notice any of these (apparently) crucial and seamlessly blended works upon my initial viewing of the film. This may be due to the fact that Ridley intended these references as not pastiche nor parody, but as pseudo-spiritual allusions comparable to those made with traditional Christian iconography, thus, in a sense, The Passion of Darkly Noon is a work of eclectic blasphemy and artistically-refined horror cinema worship. On top of taking a quasi-pagan stance by portraying the eternal power of nature as the height of purity and depicting Christianity as a baneful source of aberrant inorganic abstraction, as well as making somewhat cynical references to the bible itself, The Passion of Darkly Noon begets a religion out of the almost wholly unholy horror genre, replacing Christ with fictional mass murderers Michael Myers/Jason Vorhees and mother Mary/Mary Magdalene with the archetypical seductive scream-queen, except to a more labyrinthine level. Of course, it would be superlatively misleading and disparaging to merely compare The Passion of Darkly Noon to works of traditional horror cinema, as it certainly transcends – both in aesthetic and thematic complexity – the mostly mundane formulas of the often formless genre. Ultimately, The Passion of Darkly Noon has more in common (at least visually) with the work of Ridley’s painter hero Frances Bacon – the subversive Anglo-Irish figurative painter – than any kitsch horror flick created by B-movie producers just to make a quick buck, as the filmmaker is foremost an uncompromising artist and secondly, a horror fan, hence his is lack of notoriety even in the horror world. Ultimately, Philip Ridley’s summed up The Passion of Darkly Noon as a tale of silver (magic, enchantment, innocence, etc) versus red (passion, blood, the darker feelings, etc), which I think is quite an apropos description, but, naturally, one will never discover the erotically-charged essence and marvelous mystique of the film unless they actually take the to watch it and reflect on the delightfulness of Darkly's invigorated lapse with sanity and the virtual forest of hair that lays quite naturally on Ashley Judd's underarm.

-Ty E

Don't Deliver Us from Evil

The mysteriously perverse Comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Uruguayan-born French poet Isidore-Lucien Ducasse) and his sole novel Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) had an imperative influence on the anti-bourgeois/anti-Christian sentiments of the already debauched Dadaist/Surrealist artists (including Salvador Dalí, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, etc) of the early 20th century, but one can only wonder what kind of affect the quasi-satanic long prose poem would have on two increasingly subversive Catholic convent girls. In the exquisite once-lost French film Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971) aka Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal directed by Joël Séria, such a succulently sardonic and sacrilegious scenario is played out for the pleasure of the viewer in a most cunningly cruel yet charmingly carnal fashion. Like Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994), Don't Deliver Us from Evil is loosely based on the 1954 little lesbians Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand, but, more than anything, the film is a potent therapeutic expression of actor-turned-director Joël Séria’s personal disdain for the sexually-repressed authoritarian nature of Catholic Church. As an angry Catholic schoolboy, Séria, like the two anti-heroesses of his directorial debut Don't Deliver Us from Evil, found much solace in the devilishly decadent poetry of Lautréamont and Charles Baudelaire. Of course, probably thinking that no one would want to watch two heretical frog-boys hop around for 100+ minutes, Séria opted for casting two exceedingly cute girls to play the lead roles than teenage boy characters modeled more after his own particular and less eventful misspent youth. Séria made the wise decision, as the two lead cutesy gals of Don't Deliver Us from Evil – Anne (played by Jeanne Goupil) and Lore (played by Catherine Wagener) – are quite the barely-legal eye candy. Anne, a Mediterranean-like girl with black hair and dark eyes, is the master in the relationship and little Lore, a blonde Nordic girl, is her loyal and obliging girl slave. After becoming disillusioned with the hypocritical mores of the Catholic Church and seeing two nuns involved in Lesbian blasphemy, the two girls rightfully decide to make an unofficial pact with Satan and bring havoc upon the cold convent they so thoroughly abhor. 

 The girls of Don't Deliver Us from Evil are truly bloomed flowers of evil. Quite conscious of the appeal of their fresh and curvy virginal flesh, Anne and Lore lure in a variety of older men by flashing their white panties in a terribly tempting way. After nearly getting raped in the process, the two girls reap revenge by doing everything from killing their prospective rapists’ precious pet birds to brutally murdering them in a bloody good fashion. Although much more stunning and alluring than her loyal compatriot, Anne uses the more saintly-looking Lore as the underage object of horny old men’s desire. Director Joël Séria has stated that Don't Deliver Us from Evil is less about a teenage lesbian relationship and more about one girl possessing complete psychological dominance over another. For those filmgoers looking for their quasi-pornographic fantasies of teenage girls to be fulfilled, Don't Deliver Us from Evil is probably the wrong film to see as it may bring about castration-anxiety in certain viewers. Like mute anti-heroess Thana of Abel Ferrara’s exploitation masterpiece Ms. 45 (1981), the lovely little ladies of Don't Deliver Us from Evil have an uncompromising disdain for criminally perverted untermensch and thus act accordingly. Of course, to an extent, Don't Deliver Us from Evil is an erotically-charged work, but the various scenes of sick teenage sensuality are ultimately eclipsed by the film's Satanic anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois themes. In fact, upon its release, Don't Deliver Us from Evil was banned not for its steaming portrayal of enfant terrible eroticism, but due to its glaring anti-Catholic themes, hence the relatively obscure status of the film until somewhat recently. Virtually plot-less in form, Don't Deliver Us from Evil is almost as anarchistic in structure as it is in sentiment. Although director Joël Séria claims that the film is almost wholly inspired by his personal youthful experiences and communal readings of decadent French poetry, he did, unsurprisingly, cite the films of Luis Buñuel as a minor influence. That being said, a dual screening of Don't Deliver Us from Evil with Buñuel’s final work That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) would make for a flawless ungodly double-feature, as both films offer a distinguished and uninhibited exhibition of anti-bourgeois sex and politics, minus the overly preachy intellectual masturbation typical of such works. 

 Although a non-actor before appearing in the film, Joël Séria made the right decision when he decided to cast Jeanne Goupil as the lead in Don't Deliver Us from Evil as she would not only prove to give an iconic (if mostly unseen) performance, but would also go on to be the director’s longtime lover. Despite going on to mainly direct comedies, Joël Séria would make one more wonderfully wicked film with gorgeous Goupil as the lead. In 1976, Séria directed Marie, the Doll aka Marie-poupée, a work that like Don’t Deliver Us from Evil, examines the aberrant nature and inevitable symptoms of bourgeois sexual restraint, including pedophilia. In a sense, Marie, The Doll is a much darker film with an even more tragic ending, but Don’t Deliver Us from Evil certainly holds its own as a magnificent work of singular movie malevolence. If you’re a fretful young lady that wants to put an end to the dubious and undesirable propositions of a certain aggressive dirty old man in your life, recommend that they see Don’t Deliver Us from Evil and let those pathetic perverted fellows know how you really feel. I would never call myself a proponent of feminism, but Don’t Deliver Us from Evil is one of few works that reminds me that women have certain inalienable rights, including the right to kill if necessary. Of course, I would be lying if I did not admit that one of the greatest appeals of Don’t Deliver Us from Evil is Jeanne Goupil and her plentifully profane yet wholly persuading presence. If the Church of Satan ever gets around to updating their Video List, I think it is safe to say that they should make an effort to add Don’t Deliver Us from Evil to it, as it makes Rosemary's Baby (1967) seem like a cautionary Catholic fairytale.

-Ty E

Nadja

After many years of passively searching, I have finally discovered an experimental postmodern vampire flick that does not compel me to fantasize about breaking the jaws and eye-sockets of bearded hipster fags with pseudo-sophisticated black-rimmed poindexter glasses. Executive produced and presented by David Lynch (who also appears in the film in a cameo role as a morgue receptionist), Nadja (1994) is a work that many falsely believe was ghost-directed by no other than the Eraserhead auteur himself. With its excessive phantasmagorical imagery and sometimes schlocky experimental camera work (pre-dating Inland Empire by over a decade), it is not hard to fathom why one would assume Nadja was directed by tastefully loony Lynch, but for anyone who has seen Michael Almereyda’s previous efforts Twister (1989) and Another Girl Another Planet (1992), it should be plain to see that the underrated American auteur filmmaker’s metaphysical fingerprints are all over this wildly idiosyncratic vampire flick.  Beginning his career in film as a screenwriter, Almereyda wrote a screenplays for the post-apocalyptic Scifi cult flick Cherry 2000 (1987), Wim Wenders' Scifi epic Until the End of the World (1991) and an unreleased David Lynch project before ever having the supreme dictatorial honor of sitting in the director's chair.  Starring the beautiful Romanian Jewess Elina Löwensohn (the sole Hebrewess that I would bequeath such an unbecoming compliment to)  in the starring vamp role and WASP wimp Martin Donovan as a beta-male boxer with female trouble, Nadja also has the situational semblance of a Hal Hartley film, had the Henry Fool (1997) director digested an equal amount of Bram Stoker and George Sylvester Viereck (The House of the Vampire certainly comes to mind) with his readings of Jean-Paul Sartre as a young man. Shot on rich black-and-white neo-noir-ish celluloid for scenes of melodrama and traditional horror, and a children’s toy Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera for segments of inter-species lesbian sex and blotchy bloody murder, Nadja is surely a neo-gothic trip of sorts that offers an onliest sensory overload without the aesthetic advantage of an Argento-esque kaleidoscope of killer colors. Indeed, most people associate blood with the color red, yet the absence-of-color hemoglobin featured in Nadja is more than suitably potent as it takes on a fetishistic ejaculatory quality that acts as the main part and parcel for determining the dichotomous struggle between lust and love, impotency and vitality, and – ultimately – life and death. 

 Admittedly, I had to watch Nadja three or four times before I could soak up the integral plangency of the film’s storyline and various subplots. Like the films of Guy Maddin, Nadja features a weird and wayward thunderstorm of aesthetic and thematic wankery that is indubitably reflective of the filmmaker’s encyclopedic understanding of vampire film history, but unlike most films by the goofy Nordic Canadian director – when one examines the quality and flow of the work as a whole – it is quite apparent that Michael Almereyda is largely successful with his lucid and luscious cinematic love letter to the vampire subgenre. Nadja focuses on a wealthy yet patently dysfunctional bi-species vampire family (the human matriarch of the family died long ago after giving birth to her two mongrel children) from Romania that is currently living a life of cosmopolitan and hedonistic degeneracy abroad in modern day New York City.  As she explains during the beginning of the film, Nadja adores NYC because it offers a vibrant nightlife that is nonexistent in most European metropolitan areas. After Dr. Van Helsing (played by Peter Fonda) kills the patriarch (also played by Fonda) of the already decomposing Dracula family, two fraternal twins squabble over the dubious fate of their family’s mostly infamous legacy. Nadja, being an uncompromising and ferocious femme fatale of the entrancing bloodsucking kind, would like to see the family reinvent itself, but her passive brother Edgar (played by Jared Harris) – who is barely a vampire (he feeds off of exotic shark embryos instead of human blood) and is in love with a mere mortal – rather see the irrevocable extinction of the more-than-human half of his peculiar pedigree. After his girlfriend Lucy (played by Galaxy Craze) is put under the all-consuming spell of undead lesbo Nadja, archetypical beta-male Jim and his notably nimble Uncle Dr. Van Helsing chase the virulent vampiress half-way around the world with the central goal of driving a wooden stake through her exceedingly cold-heart, thus freeing the souls of the she-beast's victims. Naturally, Van Helsing and his cowardly nephew prove to be a pathetic match for cunning creature Nadja’s nefarious supernatural powers, but fortuitously for them, she is a true blue quasi-suicidal Goth girl at heart with an impenetrable desire for tragic transcendence and total rebirth. If you think the average premenstrual female is hopelessly erratic and wholly intolerable, you have yet to see blood-addict Nadja after she has been drained of her vital bodily fluids. 

 I must admit that I never expected to see a vampire film containing songs by Irish alpha-shoegaze group My Bloody Valentine, but Nadja does indeed offers such a delectable and unrestrained diacritic aesthetic mix. A scene of Bela Lugosi from Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) also appears in the film as a nostalgic flashback of young Dracula during his prime. A number of scenes also pay blatant tribute to the ruined Eastern European castles of F.W. Murnau’s vampire masterpiece Nosferatu (1922). These sorts of anachronistic ingredients contribute to a film that, although shamelessly postmodern and ardently artsy, is not the least bit pretentious, but it is surely a work for those individuals that are obscenely vampire-film-literate. Of course, Nadja is not the sort of film I would recommend to people who masturbate to ultra-sleazy softcore lesbian vampire flicks, even if it does feature an intensely pulchritudinous, carpet-munching cold-cunt bloodsucker. Nadja is also ultimately a work that poses sensible questions about life and death in a steadily deteriorating post-industrial and pre-apocalyptic world, but not in the superlatively mundane and emotionally barren my-name-is-Sofia-Coppola-and-my-bourgeois-life-is-unchallenging-and-I-want-to-die sort of way. After all, who would make a more suitable existentialist philosopher than a singularly worldly, ancient aristocratic vampire? Forget manic-depressive Maddin's uneven (yet admittedly ambitious) undead-Chinaman-ballet Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (2002) and instead bask in the beauteous beaming bright white light of Elina Löwensohn's immaculate pale skin in Nadja.  Nadja gets more pussy than pretty boy Edward Cullen, yet only puts forth about 1/100th of the effort to do so, which is beyond a shadow of a doubt the hallmark of a truly hip yet classic strigoi creature.

-Ty E

The Odd One Dies

 

For my money, the strongest work to come out of Milkyway Image, if not Hong Kong cinema as a whole, was the initial burst of nigh-forgotten classics released before the company's break-out hit Running Out of Time in 1999. Among these were a trio of films "directed by Patrick Yau" (Expect of the Unexpected, The Longest Nite, and The Odd One Dies) which have since been proven to be almost solely the work of Milkyway head honchos Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai. And while these fellas have provided us with some very consistent, effortlessly cool cinema over the years, none of it compares to the liberated burst of fuck-all experimentation that sparked it all.

So from what I understand, Patrick Yau was an assistant director to Johnnie To, and To either decided to cut the kid a break and Yau wasn't able to pull his weight, or to direct a few flicks for him to get him on the path to career, or something, but the whole house of cards came tumbling down about the time Expect the Unexpected came out and was nominated for some HK Film awards. At this point, To and Wai owned up to the fact they directed all but about three scenes of the film, and whether any of this has anything to do with these films sliding into obscurity I don't know (more likely than not it's the blink-and-you've missed it accelerated culture of HK than anything else), but if you can hunt down copies of any of these flicks (also Wai Ka-Fai's absurdly inventive Too Many Ways To Be No. 1 and To's heroic bloodshed send-up A Hero Never Dies), you'll be duly rewarded.

Of all the above-mentioned films, The Odd One Dies is in many ways the strangest of the bunch, a surprisingly tender inversion of the familiar tropes of Wong Kar-wai's mid-nineties work that manages to both stand on it's own as a winning alternate reality romantic comedy for fucked up weirdos and in a lot of ways comments on exactly what WKW's flicks are lacking. As a formative filmgoer, Wong Kar-wai was among the first non-exploitation directors to really grab me. The lyricism of Chungking Express' lonely urbanites and the unbridled cool of Fallen Angels, with Chris Doyle's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink camera ejaculation, spoke directly to a teenager for whom Godard was not yet a four-letter word. As time has dragged on, I can still appreciate Wong's work, but mostly on technical or nostalgic terms. There is a certain shallow center to all of the hip posturing, cool tunes, and picture-perfect casting (I mean, are we really supposed to believe that Leon Lai's existential hitman in Fallen Angels wouldn't drop everything to run away with Michelle Reis? And that she would pine for THAT guy? Look at her! What does she have to be all sad and lonely about? She's the fucking hottest babe of all fucking time) that doesn't quite hit the spot like it once did. Perhaps it has something to do with the aging process? As a teen I wanted my adult life to consist of blurry montages with a catchy pop soundtrack, a revolving cast of angsty babes secretly cleaning my apartment, excellent clothes and perfect hair and endearing monologues to myself about how my bar of soap is sad and shit. The reality of life has proven to be anything but a live-action WKW flick, though. Body fat, bad haircuts galore, some attractive women, granted, but not sadly pining for me, just beating me with umbrellas and bemoaning my fashion blunders. When I try to look off into the distance and smoke a cigarette and smoke gets in my eyes and instead of looking like some existential superhero for the Pitchfork Media set I'm just a smelly-fingered advertisement for quitting, while my interior monologues aren't quirky and metaphor-laden but pathetic and disturbing.

Fortunately, Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai took it upon themselves to make what is essentially a Wong Kar-Wai film for strange schlubs like us. Instead of populating The Odd One Dies with model-types bemoaning their inability to feel emotions or get over one unattainable hottie for another one, The Odd One Dies is the story of two imperfect, inherently flawed individuals who are briefly brought together, and within the rough edges of the story, some truly uplifting and real emotions are mined. Takeshi Kaneshiro (one of the stars of Chungking Express and Fallen Angels) is cast as a wannabe gangster who, wanting to prove himself after a humiliating beating and in need of cash, agrees to kill a Thai man for some actual gangsters in what is obviously a suicide mission. After a card game in which his bad fortunes are temporarily reversed (a great scene showcasing the understated, off-centre black humor of the film), he is flush with cash and decides to contract out the killing to someone else. That someone else happens to be a fresh out-of-jail, thoroughly pitiful Carman Lee, who agrees to the suicide mission either for the money and a chance to escape her past or because she is genuinely suicidal. The antithesis of the runway model WKW heroine, an early scene reminiscent of a similar section of Chungking Express, also featuring Kaneshiro, has him lovingly removing and washing her socks as she sleeps (much as he removes Brigitte Lin's shoes in that film) in a hotel bed opposite his, but undercuts the romance of the situation with the fact he does so because her feet fucking REEK. Furthermore, Lee's character knows REAL tragedy- she wasn't simply rejected by some pin-up pop idol taking a celluloid vacation, but tricked into killing her own cousin as a teenager by a conniving husband who hardly remembers her. As the todd pair share hotel rooms and plan the killing, the only expected element is that they are brought together romantically, though where it goes from there is completely unpredictable.

Further ribbing of Wong's flicks comes when Lee tries to give herself a hip, short haircut a la Faye Wong in Chungking Express and with Kaneshiro's help manages to shore her long locks into a horrifying mullet. When he respectfully acquiesces to a similar mane butchering, we know we are not in quite the same suave universe as Wong's flicks, but one strikingly similar to our own. Kaneshiro does a magnificent job of playing a conflicted, thoroughly confused young slacker, in some ways a reflection of his endearing mute slapstick performance in Fallen Angels (the sole pathos earned in that film comes via his mugging silent comedy, though it is almost robbed by going full-tilt sentimental towards the end), but instead of making the character saccharine sweet to the point of a toothache, in this flick he is merely severely stupid and in over his head, but given to moments of betraying his tough guy posturing with moments of compassion, typically in the form of beating those who dare offend the put-upon Carman Lee. One last mention of Wong Kar-Wai to be made before getting into what really makes this film an unheralded classic - Raymond Wong's synth-tango score is in some ways reminiscent of the similar musical direction of WKW's Days of Being Wild, but the main theme is far more infectious, and the casiotone kitschiness make it all the more shaggy dog endearing.

What really sends The Odd One Dies into another level altogether is how deftly it plays with our expectations. There is a scene where Lee manages to confront her scumbag scam artist husband, and with his snide dismissal, pulls out a gun and shoots him. The emotion rings true, but doesn't seem to fit the altogether more reality-based pull of the script. Then she snaps out of it and we realize it was but a daydream and, as in real life, she is forced to confront the situation without catharsis. One blackly comic recurring gag involved a gangster who, first by Kaneshiro, then Lee, is shorn of his fingers. Both scenes involve his henchman running like madmen looking for ice, while we the audience are blown away by the fact that this movie's idea of side-splitting humor is a dude getting his fingers lopped off. YES! But at a certain point, this character, after catching Kaneshiro and deigning to cut off his hand, looks like he will again be shorn his re-attached digits and the most unexpected thing of all happens. Forgiveness. This scene of redemption all but makes the film, subverting both the expected outcome and the comedic thrust of the finger-loppings by taking it into unexpectedly touching territory (mirroring an earlier scene in which a snobbish hotel clerk reveals himself to be far less one-note than anticipated). As the film nears it's end, things are wrapped up in a similarly low-key and road-less-travelled manner. From the word go, To and Wai (er, Patrick Yau), prove themselves to be sly genre revisionists of the finest caliber. While the recent work of Milkyway is continually inventive, classy, and often, like this film, the ultimate rarity- meta without devolving into film-geek condescension or mere homage - I can't help but wish they could still work in the occasional lower-budgeted, understated piece like The Odd One Dies or Expect the Unexpected. Genre cinema as a whole would benefit from more of this kind of expert capsizing of conventions.

-Jon-Christian