The Miscreants of Taliwood @ Sheffield Doc/Fest

Terrifying is not an adjective you can readily apply to most documentaries, at least not beyond the subject matter at hand. Sure, plenty take horrifying travesties of justice as their core focus, and consequently make for a ‘tough watch’. The Miscreants of Taliwood goes one further in effectively making a documentary horror film. Anything can happen, and consequently does. The Doc/Fest catalogue somewhat glibly ends its synopsis reflecting that Miscreants is “at times difficult to watch.” The film goes far beyond that, occasionally to the point of forcing more sensitive viewers out of the screening I saw. Personally I had the good fortune to almost look away, to second guess my line of acceptability. Miscreants definitely crossed that line.

The setup is that of Australian artist/filmmaker George Gittoes, living in Pakistan, off in pursuit of the indigenous Pashto film industry. Micro-budget films that come somewhere between Rambo, Bollywood and Jackass, with political commentary and guaranteed midgets in every film. The heartland of this industry in Peshawar, close to the borders of Afghanistan, is closer still to political rule of the Taliban. As has been well documented, the Taliban hate all ‘frivolous’ creation that isn’t in the name of god, and consequently don’t look too favourably on camp action films with scantily-clad women. Film producers, and dvd vendors are both under persistent attack, kidnapping and threatening individuals, blowing up the stalls of those who sell the films. Still the industry keeps on turning, the producers on the run, the stars living an uneasy existence in an unacknowledged but ever present public eye.

The terror beyond the subject matter itself comes in the merry abandon Gittoes holds towards the telling of this story, his scant disregard for maintaining a register the audience can be comfortable with. Observational footage is inter-cut with overt and covert dramatic/satirical recreations, Gittoes role as observer pushed right to the forefront of the film by maintaining an assistant camera man at all times, consciously filming the filming of the indigenous film industry. When the outsider chooses to personally get involved with the industry, stumping up $4000 (US) and taking a key supporting role, his position as observer, documentary filmmaker, Pashto star and producer gets mixed up into a frankly dizzying mix.

There’s the palpable tension of watching Gittoes drive into the Taliban heartland to interview a prominent Mullah on censorship, an anxiety of the Gittoes becoming just another kidnapped Westerner, executed for the world to behold online. Not that this is played deathly straight, as on either end of the segment are some pretty hilarious clips of Gittoes practically falling over himself in the role of local action superstar.

The central question at the heart of the film seems to be what kind of film star is Gittoes destined to become: that of the AK-wielding Pashto action hero, the dead subject of a gruesome Taliban execution tape, or even just as a unabashed, exploitative and unreliable gonzo documentary maker?

The broad laughs of a Western audience at the high camp shenanigans of the Pashto film industry are all fine and well, but Miscreants’ brilliance comes in the genuinely horrific last chapter of the film, where this very laughter is turned to political ends. Taliwood is as daft as a brush, but it’s one of the region’s few areas of self expression. The Taliban are doing their utmost to terrorise this industry out of existence, and in its place only an industry of propaganda can exist. But just like Pashto action films, the execution propaganda films are pushing towards even more hyperbolic levels of audience engagement. Gittoes goes the distance in showing this horrifying absurdity by throwing an execution film up there. He shows some of it, he partially censors some of it. I couldn’t tell you how much as I’m no big fan of snuff films myself, and chose to close my eyes for the climax. Others didn’t, a few even took this as a cue to make a swift departure from the cinema.

I hated Gittoes for going where he did, for showing the unshowable, while still sort-of-but-insufficiently censoring it at the same time. I couldn’t quite believe the festival would let people see the film without a sliver of warning.

But then the film makes its points, about the indoctrination of the young, about the escalation of terror on both sides of the conflict, about the sheer absurdity of the Taliban’s hypocrisy. Wham-Bam-chew-on-that pal.

Perhaps it’s a bit cheap to knock your audience down, and then effectively lecture them while they’re still on the mat. But it works, the conflict is fucking terrifying and to do it with even an iota of justice you can’t shy away from things. Which is perhaps the ultimate cliché, but never was a stronger case made for it, and all the power to a documentary for going where mainstream news couldn’t go in a million years. A disconcerting experience through and through, and unlikely to be on More4 or BBC Storyville anytime soon.

Video Nasty #6: Blood Bath

OR: Reazione a catena / A Bay of Blood / A Mansão da Morte / Antefatto – Ecologia del delitto / Bahía de sangre / Banho de Sangue / Bloodbath / Bloodbath Bay of Death / Blutrausch des Teufels / Carnage / Chain Reaction / Chimidoro no irie / Den blodige bugt / E così imparano a fare i cattivi / Ecology of a Crime International / Im Blutrausch des Satans / Kanli körfez / Kravgi tromou /  La baie sanglante / O Sexo na Sua Forma Mais Violenta / O krikos ton eglimaton /  Sfagi sto akrogiali tis idonis / The Antecedent / The Last House on the Left, Part II / To spiti me ta alysidota eglimata / Twitch of the Death Nerve as it was also know. (Inofficially this film reigns supreme as The Nasty with the most alternative titles. A sure sign of the detachment of the creator from the final product, if ever one were needed.)

[Early Sunday morning.
Sat in living room, staring at the TV, eating cereal.
A housemate’s girlfriend comes in, awake long before he is]
“What are you watching?”
“Oh just some half-crappy horror film. Video nasty, banned in the 80′s, and stuff.”
“What’s it about”
“Well, it’s Italian, women run around half naked and get murdered horribly.”
“How so?”
“A bit, well a bit like this”

“Oh right”
“And lots of red. Lots and lots of BRIGHT red.”
“Right”
“This isn’t going to end well.”

“No, oh dear, that’s unfortunate.”
“Well that would spoil anyone’s day, wouldn’t it.”
“Why is it SO red?”
“Possibly because it’s shot on really cheap film stock. Decays very quickly, the colour balance goes a bit crazy. It is pretty colourful, now you mention it.”
“Is there any sort of story to this, or does it just..?”
“An old man and a woman at the beginning, one kills the other, then he dies, something about a will, something about some plans regarding a property development.”
“Oh, hello.”
[A bedroom scene on screen. From the perspective of the murderous voyeur we see the amorous couple get impaled, both at once, with a single spear.]
“Well, that’s symbolic, I suppose.”

Which neatly surmises a horror film which indeed revolves around a land dispute. The more inane the conflict, the more inventive the gore we demand.

In a film offensive enough to spook arch Dracula-himself, Sir Christopher Lee, from the premiere obviously warrants some note, but a sneaking suspicious creeps that maybe he snuck out not for reasons of common decency, but rather out of sheer boredom. The cut, thrust, slash and jab of the film is an incessant butchery of barely established characters for even weaker reasons. The critic might scoff that this is the very core of any ten-penny horror film, but a synopsis does not a film make, and there is scant meat on these very gory bones.

To even a passing viewer, such as the housemate’s other half, the gore is absurd to a point beyond the horrific. It doesn’t even stretch to a level of comedy value, with the result effect being much a kin to seeing someone drop a slice of buttered toast on the floor: ‘Oh dear, what a mess, nevermind…’

A single scene of a gangrened corpse being revealed beneath a similarly green tinged octopus was enough to momentarily put me off the Rice Crispies®, but that was more personal shudder than anything else. Not, should it be clear, that I have anything against cephalopods: some of my best friends are cephalopods. It’s just a bit too ick, in a way the rest of the film just isn’t, and more’s the shame for that.

A demented pull-back-and-reveal ending straight out of left-field is buoyed by an equally demented and deliriously upbeat closing number featuring the budget horror film staple I’m growing to love: the demented bongo solo. A cheery conclusion to a dreary dredge of a film. Save yourself some time and take greater excitement and trepidation out of the film’s quite superb original UK VHS cover, than you would in the sum total of the film.

 [The above cover is by way of the superb Video Cultures project, from Birmingham City University. They don't claim any copyright, they just put it out there. Well done them.]

Finding Four Lions in Sheffield

Discussing Sheffield as an overtly ‘cinematic’ city could easily be mocked as daft, but this town really does feel like it’s brought to you in VistaVision. Close to the total population of Sheffield lives on a hill of some kind, and almost everyone can look out of their window, if not down their street, and see at least part of the city unfolding before them. Having the urban heart on your doorstep and the countryside beyond the end of your garden was a quality Victorian art critic John Ruskin rated in Sheffield, and while the post-war period poured a lot of concrete into the city, you’re still never too far from at least a small patch of green.

Despite this the city hasn’t been overly exploited on film, with only a few notable exceptions. A new British comedy, Four Lions is the latest to make the most of the city, and the politically charged satire has its own twist of being set in the shadow of both Western consumerism and two fallen towers. That those two towers happen to be the Tinsley towers is an irony perhaps not lost on the local audience, but more on that in due course.

The place of the city in film starts with its own filmmakers, The Sheffield Photo Company, who got in early on the action with their rather brilliant Daring Daylight Burglary of 1903. Shot in Banner Cross, and up/down/round/about the Whiteley Woods area, one view of smoggy Sheffield down Carter Knowle Road is an eerie backdrop to the lingering death of a policeman. Early silent films aren’t all just knock-about slapstick, straight actuality, or trick films, and regional filmmakers knew both the impact and the draw of shooting in recognisable locations.

A repeated panorama of smoggy Sheffield is at the heart of the propaganda film New Towns for Old from 1942, which  can be found on the rather brilliant Yorkshire Film Archive Online.  Scripted by Dylan Thomas, Sheffield assumes the role of the fictional Northern city ‘Smokedale’ in a bold treatise on the importance of separating housing from industry, and envisioning a city in the sky, away from the ‘muck and the grime’. The jewel in this massive restructuring would of course be the much feted Park Hill flats, and the allusion towards it in New Towns for Old is proof if any where needed of the optimism of the Sheffield Corporation going into the project.

The fate of the Park Hill estate is as tortured and convoluted as could possibly be conceived, and has busy bodies bickering on all sides of the divide. It has yet to feature prominently in any films to my knowledge, but is none the less regularly exploited by TV and documentary teams looking for a handy visual shorthand for anything broadly Grim, Northern, Deprived, or all of the above. The BBC documentary English Heritage – Romancing the Stone did a fine job charting the highs and lows facing the current redevelopment, and the absurd ins and outs of the politics of the funding surrounding the project. The team behind the documentary also had a whale of a time shooting the estate from every conceivable angle, often catching it in rather a stunning light. A case for the site’s listing if you ask me, but lord knows the jury’s still out on that one.

A trope which films of the city consistently return to is using an allotment or suburban park as a setting, always unfolding to the backdrop of either the distant city, if not the cities rural fringes. Post-apocalyptic classic Threads had more than a few scenes set in allotments, where anxieties about the escalating diplomatic tensions were punctuated by the roar of passing Harrier jets. Half of The Full Monty seems to be Robert Carlyle sitting on a park bench looking out over the city, brooding with son/colleague/self over the particularly vexing question of whether to strip or not to strip. Last year even served up an admirable short film called Boy, by local lad Joe Morris, where a tortured soul brushes with the mere notion paedophilia after a chance meeting in a Sheffield allotment.

The new comedy Four Lions continues with this same trope, with the tale of four would-be jihadists bumbling together a plot to bring justice to the Western world. The apartment headquarters for this tiny insurgent cell is set in a very real terrace flat in the Sheffield suburb Tinsley, a stones throw from the hulking Meadowhall shopping centre, a fine symbol for excessive Western consumerism were ever one needed. Again the warren of allotments, and the meeting of urban and rural found there acts as a strange, almost liminal space where the group’s inept technician Fessal can field-test the explosives he’s distilled. The key scene for these tests are shot on the fields not far from Bole Hill in Crookes, and these views out into what becomes the Peak District are the very same that Ruskin epitomised in his reflections on living in Sheffield.

There are no major plot spoilers in saying that the film is partly set in London as well, but the irony for the Sheffield audience is spotting that nigh all the filming was still done in Sheffield. The empty side streets of The Moor stand in for London’s back streets, and one particularly heated confrontation takes place in Kebabish on the Wicker in central Sheffield.

Being a massive geek, and proud to live in Sheffield, I’ve cooked up a Google map to illustrate all the locations I could spot. BE WARNED, there are SOME SPOILERS. Just glancing at it won’t give up the game, but there are some plot details written into the pinpoints. Unspoilt viewers who wish to remain so are advised NOT TO CLICK ON THE PINS.

View Larger Map

To conclude, one final irony: When John Harris dragged a camera crew to Sheffield to film the blinkered and condescending documentary Time Shift: The North-South Divide for BBC4, the team needed shots to illustrate just how dilapidated Sheffield was relative to the bounteous South. Poor John couldn’t be bothered to actually explore Sheffield, so he took a cameraman and went for a  drive in his Mini Cooper. A glimpse of Park Hill ticked the usual box, and the one way system seemed to get him back to the Wicker. Flickering, shuttered shops blaze by, John squeezes in a snide remark about the Malcolm X Islamic bookshop on Spital Hill, and then rolls back down to the Wicker. A very short tour of course, but John still manages to chime in with the remark that this is all ‘very Sheffield now’. So Sheffield that it’s the first place filmmakers turn to when they want to film Sheffield to stand in for London.

Thanks for the insight Mr Harris.

Lars von Trier and the North Korean Documentary

Documentaries about North Korea are almost without exception brilliant. The troubled one party state lends itself perfectly to whatever approach of documentary you want to throw at it, if only by virtue of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s closed door policy to 99% of the world’s media. Some docs approach the place with the solemnity of tone expected of a country so adept at suppressing, if not just killing its’ own population. Others fall straight into the stop-point-laugh category of filmmaking, in which the sheer scale of DPRK’s sur-reality turns into a grand joke.

The BBC recently screened the amazing documentary Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club (originally: The Red Chapel) and it stupendously manages to nail both the gravity and the inane hilarity of the matter. It’s amazing, and I’ll explain why in due course. [it’s on iPlayer until 4/4/2010 and you really should give it a look]

My entry into the rabbit-warren of NK docs started with A State of Mind, about two girls training for, and then performing in, the spectacular mass games held in honour of Kim Il Sung’s birthday. To be more accurate my first encounter with the film was on the Music TeleVision, as the music video to Faithless’ I Want More cannibalizes the film’s climatic performance to spectacular effect.

The closing game is strikingly shot, and Sheffield based documentary maker Daniel Gordon has pulled off the feat of capturing the individual cogs in this massive machine of perfectly synchronized children. A documentary of observation more than anything else.

Stepping aside from filmed documentaries, Guy Delisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea captures what it’s like actually living and working in the DPRK. Sent on commission to work for two months in a major ‘tweening’ studio in the capital, Quebecois Delisle recounts the culture clashes and the unfailing frustration of talking to citizens seemingly plucked from another planet.

His relationship with his translators (the always-at-your-side state approved guides) are wonderfully telling, and his struggles deciphering opinion from indoctrined propaganda form an interesting crux. Does his guide really believe there are NO disabled citizens? “North Koreans are born strong, intelligent and healthy.” From the way he says it Delisle worries that his guide actually believes the rhetoric.

The book mixes the day to day interactions of the work place with the usual pre set tours that so often form the backbone of documentaries about North Korea. While a filmed documentary would obsess with capturing the scenes as they are passing by, Delisle has the luxury of hindsight when illustrating his own experiences.

Not managing the balance of in-the-moment footage with after-the-event reflection is The Vice Guide to North Korea. Coming from the broadcasting arm of hipster bible éternel, their infiltration of the DPRK is as irreverent as you might expect. While the Gonzo-lite approach works surprisingly well in the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, with North Korea the film strictly follows the increasingly familiar state sanctioned tour route, stopping to point and stare, and then adding a reflective interviews to underscore quite how head-spinning the experience really was.

It’s never really clear if the crew are allowed to film, and while the illicit game of trying to record what you really, really, shouldn’t be is quite a giggle. This naughty schoolboy approach is less effective when speculating on the fact that there my be containment camps just behind that forest, or reflecting that the Nampho dam was probably responsible for the devastating famines of the early 90′s. Oh but they shouldn’t be filming the dam, eek, what larks!

Which is why Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club is all the more amazing, for taking an even MORE irreverent approach to the matter. Danish journalist Mads Brugger takes two Danish Korean comedians (Simon and Jacob) to NK to put on a comedy show. The regime leaps over itself to invite two South Korean orphans back to the North, and one of them has cerebral palsy! A chance for the nation to prove how tolerant they are towards the lesser abled! You couldn’t script a better piece of propaganda.

Both filmmaker Mads and the regime try to play the two comedians as pawns in their elaborate game, which doesn’t really work as both defiantly kick against the pricks on all sides. Not having any Danish translators within the regime, the visitors can pretty much get away saying what the hell they like, and simmering arguments breakout as the tension rises, hectoring Danish flying back and forth as the visitors do their best to not let on that they are furious with each other.

Rehearsals are broken up with the ever familiar tour of North Korea’s proudest sights, but the trio’s running Danish commentary is brilliant, not just for pouring scorn on what they see, but also for laying bare come how crushingly uncomfortable the two comedians are at being shepherded around. Which is not to say they don’t have some fun along the way, constantly pushing the limits of what they can get away with. Before the show they have to pay due respects to the minister for culture, and having been decked out in the tailored work suits of the people, the trio sing the praises of the glorious leader and spit at the foul underhand dealings of the imperialist American dogs. A gift of a pizza shovel is made to the minister, to pass onto the beloved leader ‘as he loves pizza so much’. Short of asking what pizza is, you can tell no one has a clue what they are talking about.

It was almost without surprise that I found out at the end of the film that it was bankrolled by Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production company.The irreverence of the concept has all the hallmarks of the man who takes such pleasure in splitting audiences, and good as the Beeb are for screening the film you can’t imagine any commissioner in their right mind backing this project. A crying shame at that.

Having gone down the same path of laughing in horror at the regime, Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club pushes through the wall hit by the Vice Guide to, and comes through in sheer brilliance of observational satire. The joke is on the DPRK, the tragedy is that they can’t quite grasp irony the in the first place.

The Beyond

A word of advice: never, ever, attempt to eat dinner while watching a Video Nasty.

That may be the most obvious statement in the world, but up until this point I’d quite happily whiled hours away watching Axe or even the autocannibalistic Anthropophagus while having bolognese, or the occasional pie and chips. The Beyond however, has broken new territory in terms of gore, effectively putting me off the film/food combination for the foreseeable future. The revulsion I felt while trying to have cottage pie during the first ten minutes of this film almost put me clean off Video Nasties all together. Faces covered in acid, melting and bubbling away does not good dinner company make.

Aside from the ridiculously stomach-testing gore, Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond stands out from the morass of films on the DPP list (covered so far) as a rock solid horror in its own right. A passable script which harks back to Lovecraft, a spectrum of decent actors who know how to look terrorized when necessary, and a budget bigger than cost of an average car. Throw in some location shooting in Louisiana, and you have a thoroughly shocking film.  Perhaps most satisfyingly of all, it has a cinematographer who knows how to use his camera, creating shots which give the carnage beyond chucking red paint around. After the flat camera work of The Beast in Heat and the sub-art-school student shooting of Axe, The Beyond proves to be a visual feast.

The premise of a young and successful woman acquiring a haunted hotel in Louisana is pretty workaday in terms of haunted house films. The over-reaching blonde, destined to be terrorised into submission, and eventual victory, blah-di-blah, heard it all before. The Beyond goes one step further by placing the hotel on one of the seven gates to Hell, and consequently hordes of the shuffling dead end up stumbling into disrupt our poor ladies renovation plans. Absurd as it sounds, the premise gives the film a bonafide hellish overtone, mixing unspeakable horrors with the restless damned crawling out of limbo. These are not just corpse-puppets, animated by some obscure Macguffinesque virus, but the product of something larger and far more sinister. It is, quite simply, the tagline of Dawn of the Dead come true: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth”

Following the tremendous success of Zombi II (unofficial sequel to the very same Dawn of the Dead) and City of the Living Dead, Fulci had established his name internationally as a director of top drawer zombie flicks. Wary of being tied to such a narrow niche, Fulci sought to strike out in a new direction of horror with his next film. The first script of The Beyond was initially penned as a straight haunted house film, but under pressure from his zombie-hungry German financers, Fulci was convinced to include zombies to help provide a physical presence of horror. The combination was, and still is, tremendously effective.

The terror of the subjective is explored in full, with the film’s heroine is constanly uncertain of what she is seeing and hearing. An eerie blind young girl and her German Shepherd repeatedly warn Liza away from the hotel, and their warnings might be heeded if they didn’t constantly appear to her in the most dreamlike of sequences. Clinging mist, clipped dialogue and numerous doubletakes lend these sequences a truly uncanny edge. Liza is told that she’s just a figment of her imagination, yet the poor blind girl ends up getting mauled by her own dog. A physical and gruesome end to a weirdly ethereal character.

The gore is really testing, even for the most hardened blood’n'guts fiends. While the sequences leading up to the burst of violence are grippingly shot, the piercing/popping/ripping/bubbling moments in question are unflinching, more often than not in extreme close-up. Is it gratutious? In part yes, but the horror of it all has such an impact that it cannot be dispelled as frivolous. One sequence of a man’s face getting ripped to shreds by massive (dummy) spiders is particularly hard to shake off, and I’m not even that much of an arachnophobe.

The last ten minutes of the film turns into a slightly ridiculous rollercoaster, lurching from the hotel, to an explosive yet straight-laced zombie shoot-out in the hospital, to a bizarre relocation back to the underbelly of the hotel again. Before your head’s had a chance to stop spinning Liza and her last minute knight in shining armour have stumbled into the underworld. Stunned by the unspeakable and unseen ‘things’ they witness, the film ends with them blinded, glaring horrified back at the camera. A brilliant Lovecraftian flourish to end on, and a bleak and satsifying end to a brilliant horror film.

The First Coming of Antichrist

This is it. The eye of the media shit storm; after the cultural digestion from the liberal arts programmes and columns but still before the reviews start raining in the ‘official’ verdict. Lars von Triers‘ Antichrist has been a fair while coming, but the great Dane has got the media machine humming to his tune, a maestro of stoking controversy, a grand master of publicity. To borrow the sacrosanct yet divine language befitting of the film I can say I’ve been blessed to see the film, and there is a lot to digest.

Firstly we need to establish some parameters to von Trier’s game, for those are the rules we have to play by.

Don’t ever take anything he says at face value. The hook he has given himself in the promotion of Antichrist is that he is ‘The Best Film Director in the World’ and countless hacks have taken the bait. Even if they all contextualise the statement and the humour in which it was said, the headline remains the same. Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times tries to put down von Trier by inventing his own word and denigrating that it as ‘pure undergraduatese.’ The fact that Appleyard continues to play this game on von Triers terms is proof if any that Trier’s declarations are anything but naïve.

A few critics have done a good job at calling von Trier out on this sport, and hats go off to the Guardian’s in-house film-hater-extraordinaire Peter Bradshaw for presciently speculating on the publicity value of von Trier announcing his depression over two years ago. That was the first word I heard of Antichrist, and it is wholly unquestionable that this is a film defined by a nigh chronic depression. It is bleak, unrelenting, and it spirals towards a hysterical ending. It remains firmly in the subjective of the female lead, struggling and failing to break out of a cycle of grief. As she is locked in depression so too is the viewer rooted, shackled to their seats throughout.

In its’ premise Antichrist is easily summarised, and its critics are quick to quip about its blunt symbolism. A husband and wife fall into deep mourning after the tragic death of their child. The ‘She’ is briefly hospitalised, physically debilitated by her loss, while the psychoanalyst ‘He’ carries his loss in a ‘typical’ manner. To tackle her ‘atypical’ mourning, the couple retreat to their isolated cabin, Eden, set deep in an overbearing almost monstrous forest. The husband is blindly convinced that he alone can give active and adequate therapeutic guidance to break his wife out of her depression. Despite promising signs early on, it all goes terribly wrong.

In its weakest guise this is a film about psychotherapy, and films shot from the therapists couch rarely grasp you by the eyeballs. Onscreen discussions on the value of medicated ignorance or the importance of exposure therapy clunk about in a heavy handed way, railroaded through the film by an increasingly insistent husband/therapist. Yet these doubts fade as the folly of this dominant approach slowly unravels, turning instead to a confrontation of cold rationalism against emotional hysteria. Put bluntly it turns into a straight up clash of the sexes.

This is hardly new territory to von Trier and his critics are all too quick to cite his major post-dogme films and the trail of ‘destroyed’ women he has left in his path. Dragging Nicole Kidman through misery on Dogville, driving Björk to eating her own jumper on Dancer in the Dark. While this rather glib trope of ‘dragging women through hell’ might be obvious in these later films, Antichrist draws its conflict from further back in von Trier’s past, harking back to his widely overlooked TV film adaptation of Euripides’ Medea.

A true archetype for the conflict and contrast of the hysterical wife against the coldly rational and distant husband, Medea casts the imbalance of the sexes at the heart of its conflict, and the tensions between the responsibilities of the mother (Medea) against the liberties of the father (Jason). It ends with Medea rejecting the shackles of her maternal role, killing her sons by Jason, and fantastically disappearing on a golden chariot driven by dragons. While von Trier’s Medea doesn’t end quite so fantastically, it keeps the bloody ending and the inner conflict of a woman uncomfortably vulnerable to a cheating husband she still loves remains as the films definitive dynamic.

This very anxiety carries over into Antichrist, driving a personal tragedy deeper into the realms of metaphysical and symbolic horror. Before the film has even been released across Europe discussions are already raging on the pages of the respectable press whether this film is misogynist or not. To boil it down as such is about as complex as speculating if the coin has landed heads or tails. Is the switch on, or off? Does von Trier hate women, or not? Such headbangingly simplistic debate is about the greatest injustice you can do the film, as it does away with the nuance of the personal and the broader issues that von Trier targets in Antichrist.

Equally the excessive violence at the end of the film does not definitively flick this switch on or off. For the media to be endlessly scratching their heads over it is surely to miss the forest for all the trees? In terms of British exhibition this film is unequivocally a milestone in what can be shown on legitimate screens, and some media debate over the role of the BBFC, and what they think about Antichrist, is natural. Yet when it boils down to the usual claptrap of ‘but is it Art?’ and ‘What DOES it take for a film to get banned these days?’ you can’t but worry for the state of educated discussion of such matters. Yes it is shocking, wince worthy, enough to make any human genuinely uncomfortable. But this is just about underlining the horrors that the characters go through. When Oedipus claws his eyes out it isn’t to anti-titillate the audience, it is (arguably) to drum home the horrors he has just realised, to make physical the dramatic revelation of irony that has been building up throughout. This is the school of tragedy von Trier is dealing with. Physical mutilation: par for the course. Deal with it.

Or is it?

The devilish imp von Trier really cannot be trusted, and for all the interviews with director and cast consistently pointing to the sincerity of this production you can’t but wonder what ire he was hoping to stoke up with all of this. He has widely discussed the two edits he had made, the uncut Protestant version and the cut Catholic version, and with his canny producers’ hat on von Trier must have seen this coming. Undoubtedly, but for all of its most extreme moments Antichrist is none the less a tremendously challenging watch, and all the better for it.

The Beast in Heat

When it comes to brow, the line between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ is a lot thinner than some people would readily admit. A case in point is to be found between arthouse rarity Salo and the grottiest of the video nasties The Beast in Heat. Being principally about the fascist regime in Italy during the Second World War, both gained an edge of notoriety for presenting the darkest corners of sadism, ‘an exploration of the drives which brought about the Holocaust’. To borrow a quote off the DVD cover.

Or to put it another way, they’re both a whips and handcuffs exploration of Max Moseley’s wettest dream. While Salo takes the high ground by citing the grand old Marquis de Sade as its narrative source, Bestia in Callore’s approach to the subject differs only in two areas: its budget and the audience’s expectation. As a late exploitation flick Bestia was churned out at record speed, rehashing material and actors from another WW2 flick made barely days earlier. The little money they did have was frizzled away on Chinese bangers for the few battle scenes which underpin any feeble vestiges of action. In a measure to save their precious money the wardrobe department of Bestia saw fit to reduce the costumes for ‘resistance fighters – female’ to absolutely nothing whenever in the presence of any Nazis. Bare flesh sells and the relative costs of getting some grubby bodies on screen is practically zero. “Quids in!” says mister producer.

In that respect Bestia skirts dangerously close to softcore pornography, and the budget of the torture scenes has you reeling in disgust at the grubbiness of it all. Not as it should be, reeling at the horror of The Horror. The farce of the cheapness comes to its culmination when a roaming camera in the fully operational Nazi torture factory comes across a poor woman strapped to a table with two black guinea pigs on her belly. You can only assume they were the cheaper, more docile alternative to real rats, but the effect it warrants is the comedic highlight which almost saves the film.

But you have to take such exploitative fare with a hefty pinch of salt. It truly is a film built from the title down, with more risqué alternative billing like SS Hell Camp, SS Experiment Part 2, and Horrifying Experiments of the S.S. Last Days guaranteed to pull in the idle Dirty Mac Brigade.

Coming up later in the Video Nasties list will be the more controversial SS Experiment Camp which only last year had Tory backbenchers bellyaching about censorship in the House of Commons. The irony of it taking the right honourable Julian Brazier MP a whole 20 months to react to the release of said DVD could be overlooked if not for the damaging impact it had on the BBFC.

The Video Nasties list stands as record to one of the many uncomfortable shifts the BBFC has been forced to make over the years. Yet moves by the same Board in the last ten years has seen the majority of Nasties certified and released in the UK, reflective of an open and some might say more liberal society. This might seem to fly in the face of the opinions voiced by Conservative Christian Fellow Mr Brazier MP and his rather backward looking friends at MediaWatch UK, yet these moves genuinely reflect the more permissive attitudes found in modern British audiences, reflected in a number of extensive and independent surveys conducted regularly by the Board.

Niche material such as the majority of the Nasties list will always pass under the radar of the opportunistic Mediawatchmen, so quite why SS Experiment Camp was singled out we’ll never know. Maybe like the Dirty Mac Brigade the spiritual successors of Mary Whitehouse caught onto the title alone and just went from there. Maybe they found out about it through their regular Nazi-themed S&M magazine? Who knows what these watchmen actually watch in their spare time? Who cares? Hopefully not the Daily Mail or anyone else with a voice that can’t be ignored.

For those hungry for a high camp ‘best-enjoyed-inebriated’ controversy-toting adjective-hyphenated non-horror should look up The Beast In Heat. Those looking for a good film could hardly do worse for ignoring it.

Axe (aka Lisa, Lisa)

Going into this project I was more than aware that I would have to tackle more than a few duffers on the DPP list. Plot holes, ropey make-up, terrible acting; it’s all part and parcel of what’s to be expected on my path through some of cinema’s trashier slums. There is however one technical fault which can never be excused, never be forgiven, and for that I name and shame George Newman Shaw. His unforgivable crime: for utterly failing to record the majority of dialogue in the short but shlocky AXE!

The failure of the film isn’t wholly his fault, as there exists no physical matter know to human science heavy enough to describe just how leaden the plot is. Slow pacing could be tolerated if we were lucky enough to actually hear what the characters were saying. Yet coherent dialogue seems to be a convention, nay a luxury with which AXE casts to the wind. In the process a dull film is magically transformed into an agonizingly infuriating experience.

Three shady men break into an apartment to await the return of a man. ‘Why’ only starts to become apparent once they stick a gun in his face. Not much exposition after that as the hoodlums then take turns kicking the camera about, just to really give us a subjective sense of what its like to get beaten up. Only this assault is beset with a sickening sense of vertigo accompanied by the sound of someone throwing slabs of meat into a table in the background. I know, suspension of disbelief and all that, but old George Newman Shaw really wasn’t weaving the audio magic.

Oh and did I mention the bongos? Being a budget production the soundtrack can only stretch to a demented man on a set of bongos, obfusciating the dialogue as much as humanly possible. Maybe the director was raised in a Beatnick café, and as such relates free-form bongoing (of the beat-poet variety) with sheer and utter terror. Maybe George Newman Shaw shared that terror and as such felt obliged to put them bongos right at the top of the audio mix. Maybe it’s George Newman Shaw on the bongos himself? Who knows? Who cares?

The plot plods on to through an empty convenience store, the thugs indulging in a bit of William Tell rouguery along the way, and finally settles in a scary house in the middle of nowhere. This tired old horror icon is home to a paralyzed old gent in a wheelchair and his shoe-less daughter. And in establishing this location the director takes every care to demonstrably show that every nook of this house is furnished with an axe. Just like the title of the film! Oh my, where could this be-headed?

One of the three stooges turns out to be the archetypal raper. I guess the balding one pulled the short straw when it came to casting. As per convention he of course gets it in the neck. The youngest thug turns unsurprisingly out to be a soft-touch. Uncertain of this questionable path he’s come into, he of course harbours feelings for the shoeless girl. He of naturally gets inexplicably shot by the police. And the third gets hacked to pieces along the way. With an axe of course. The film takes a good 66 minutes to convey all of this, and despite being this short you feel every second being wrenched away.

Buried and forgotten beyond the Video Nasties list, this film is practically impossible to find outside the odd Asda bargain basket. The bongos will linger in the memory, if not in my dreams, but in all other senses this film will be swiftly forgotten.

Anthropophagus (1)

Or How To Actually Make Sense of Absurd.

Approaching the DPP list alphabetically I didn’t anticipate that a sequel could possibly precede an original. Yet in the twisted world of video nasties such logic is par for the course, and unfortunately I have managed to see the sequel of Anthropophagus before the principle title. Being in this twisted sphere I thought the logic of such straightforward chronology would be pointless, as horror films with the same title can often have the scarcest narrative connections to each other.

Not so in the case of the Anthropophagi films, as Absurd suddenly makes a whole lot more sense in light of the first film. The blood hungry Greek is bestowed with a reasonable backstory, a raison d’etre to be halting around pestering poor civilians in their own homes. He is, you see, a normal man driven to eating his wife and child after becoming cast adrift at sea.

A normal man! Driven past the edges of sanity! To Cannibalism! The Horror!

Yet he doesn’t actually display many cannibalistic tendencies in the second film, nor does it seek to explain why he is in the States, these plot holes pale in the illuminating fact that the man was driven slowly crazy under a baking sun at sea.

The Greek setting also makes sense in the first film, casting the terror in the light of your typical charter holiday gone wrong. Donkey Punch did a reasonable job in doing that in a contemporary setting last year, so you could argue somewhat generously that Anthropophagus was well ahead of the curve on that one.

The visiting tourists at the center of the film lack any discernable character or motivation, and the inevitable dispatching of each one by one is almost welcome, if only to see the gore effects artists have a crack at something new. The film is also lent an uncanny edge as the gore-bound young folks settle on an island village eerily reminiscent of Meryl Streep’s ramshackle hotel in Mamma Mia! Body bits pop up all over the place, with a clever here, a severed head there, and a rotting corpse yon. None of the effects are particularly impressive, but they do ironically add a splash of colour to an otherwise washed out film.

If the wooden acting and shonky effects aren’t enough to dispel any sense of terror in the film, the wibbly wobbly Synth-lite soundtrack brings it wholly into the bland. John Carpenter can be more than guilty this, but where Halloween just about gets away with it, Anthropophagus is just plain discordant.

The (almost) Last Woman Left finale picks up the film as its sags towards a close, the stalker slumped dead with his own guts in his mouth. The thing to do, I guess, if you want guarantee a sequel. A bit of an extreme measure perhaps, outside any reasoned lines of logic, but functional none the less.

Absurd

Or: Horrible / Anthropophagus 2 / Rosso  Sangue / Zombie 6: Monster Hunter / Psychose Infernale / Terror Sin Limite / The Grim Reaper 2 / Ausgeburt der Hölle as its also know.

Swedish wisdom has it that the fond child has many names, and by that measure there must be hella-lotta-love for the first Video Nasty on the list. Not living up to its suggestively surrealist British title – Absurd, it does live up to other titles such as Rosso Sangue and the truly descriptive Horrible. Cheap & Cheerful could have been another option for the Italian filmmakers, but instead the given title seems to be Anthropophagus 2, vaguely related as it is to Anthropophagus (1). Ironically that’s next on the DDP list, so more on that soon.

Using John Carpenter’s Halloween as its basis, Anthropophagus 2 adds one dash of crusading priest from The Exorcist, a pinch of axe-wielding action from The Shining, and a bearded quasi-invincible Greek maniac from… Greece. It’s never made clear quite what drives this Hellenic psycho, but he seems to relish killing people in particularly gruesome ways. But then again, I guess that’s the point. Yet, you can’t say he –enjoys- killing, as he just seems to be angry and frustrated about the matter. He takes particular care and attention to do things as slowly and tortuously as possible, and his complete lack of visible reaction to these gruesome actions is what probably irked the censors in the first place. Lord knows it irked me.

The horror of the relentless and driven killer is the key to any good slasher film, but the unmasked, Puma sporting, bearded Greek took some time to be established. To all appearances he seems normal, he’s just being chased by a mysterious and quite sinister priest. He debilitates himself in surprisingly unspectacularly fashion on a spike fence, stumbles in dying in a family home, but then regenerates magically on the operating table. The doctors are stunned, the mute Greek rises, and goes on a wrecking campaign against the good medical folk who saved him. Most ungrateful.

While the priest and the police talk in circles about the why’s and the what-for’s the Greed Greek takes to killing some more innocents in brutal fashion. He eventually returns to the family he initially stumbled in on, and terrorizes them, shoving the poor wife’s head in an oven. The bed-ridden, compass-twiddling daughter then breaks free from her restrictive medical gear to launch into the ‘last-woman-left’ role with absolute gusto.

The results speak for themselves in the delightful screengrabs. The motivations behind the killer, and the whole story itself are wholly beyond me. The plot lurches from scene to scene, and while the repetitive scale-racing soundtrack is cheery enough, the film just isn’t Absurd enough to be just plain funny. Fingers crossed syllable heavy Anthropophagus (1) can shed some light and what kept this manic Mediterranean sort going.