33: Abduction of an American Playgirl (1975, no director credited)

Owned version: The DVD released by Vinegar Syndrome in 2014 as a kick-off to their Peekarama porno-double-feature line

Acquired: From Vinegar Syndrome this past Black Friday after the trailer caught my interest.

Seen before?: No.

The title and general knowledge of the evolution of the genre around this point foster expectations that this, like its discmate Winter Heat, will be a grimy, soul-killing wallow in rape-fantasy porn. The opening moments, where two downtrodden dudes (mustachioed Fred and his friend Will) looking to score decide on a whim to spirit away Jackie, a fashionable young woman in a tight chartreuse dress they spy walking out of a local grocery, seem ready to fulfill that promise.

That goes out the window almost immediately afterward during the abduction promised in the title, when the playgirl in question gets a good kick to the nuts in on Fred and he staggers around uselessly while Will awkwardly drags the woman into the back of their car. It's that kind of movie, the kind that would be queasy were its male protagonists not hapless dorks with grievous overestimations of their station and permanent "KICK ME" signs pasted on their backs by life and fate. There's nothing at all threatening about these jamooks; Will, the dopier of the two, turns getting the boots off the unconscious woman into an IKEA-level exercise in mechanical frustration,  while Fred gets flustered instantly and leaves the room when their prisoner starts weeping ("What the hell ya cryin' for... cryin' turns me off!"). They can't even get on the same wavelength when trying to stretch this situation out into a harebrained kidnapping scheme - Fred gives instructions to Will about what to say, ignoring his friend's repeated cries that he hasn't a dime to make the call.

So, they're total buffoons. Laying this groundwork, the film then presents its central joke: in avoiding one rape fantasy, it curiously flips inside out into another, one where two stereotypically-cocksure '70s males find themselves at the mercy of their literally insatiable object of their desire. (To put a button on it, Fred gets to yell, "She raped me!" after he's tied to a coffee table by Jackie.) It's essentially the only joke the film has, as it repeats multiple variations on Jackie fixing breakfast for the two and telling them, above their exhausted protests, to be in the bedroom in ten minutes, but it unexpectedly gets a fair amount of mileage out of that joke. (Best variation: the double-team that runs at double speed and is overlayed with a piano-centric silent-movie-style score - call it slapstick-and-tickle.) It is, in fact, when the film wholly uses up its two hapless cockswains that it loses its bearings; not having its central duo to beat into the ground, it then settles for a brief bit of lesbian incest and an indulging of the Virile Black Man stereotype that leads first to a punchline that can be seen from space, then a mild gay-panic joke as a topper. (Though it is interesting and appropriate, in light of the film's constructions of its sexual power games, that the Virile Black Man gets the film's only popshot.)

Part of me wonders if this was always intended as a comedy or if circumstances of production steered it in that direction - the industry was grinding them out like sausages at this point, and there's a certain exhaustion visible in all the semis and softies on display during the fuck scenes. The other part of me is like, who cares, I laughed. The actors playing Fred and Will have a solid dumb-schmuck chemistry, Darby Lloyd Raines is gorgeous and convincingly energetic and I can't help but respect a film that, intentionally or not, turns its male actors' inability to keep it up into genuine text.

32: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)

Owned version: The DVD released by Anchor Bay in 2002, as part of the Herzog/Kinski box set.

Acquired: 2005 presumably, from my then-local Borders.

Seen before?: Twice - once in 1996 (or thereabouts) from a VHS I'd bought used from a Blockbuster, and once from this DVD on March 7th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, and man did I write some dopey garbage back then. I was almost 30 already, you think I'd have learned some shit.)

The camera drifts from on high, through the clouds, until settling within view of a jungle mountain. On the mountain is a long line of tiny people, burdened and trudging like marching ants, fording their way over a thin road of mud and rock. Some are natives, kept in chains and made to bear the various possessions of the others, the conquerors who have enslaved them. Around this procession is naught but trees and mist and muck, dwarfing them and making the polished metal and fine clothing worn by the conquistadors seem foolish and incongruous. Already, it seems, Nature is doing its best to swallow these people whole.

Aguirre, one of the greatest - if not the greatest - work from one of our greatest - if not the greatest - living filmmakers, is a long and difficult journey towards an inevitable destination, as the hubris of Man finds no purchase within the implacable loamy soil of Nature. This is a theme that of course Herzog would return to again and again, but it was never so clear-eyed and pitiless and it was here. Man is represented by the Spanish conquistadors in general, with their absurd dreams of finding a legendary city of gold and complete unawareness of how to deal with the landscape, and Klaus Kinski's Aguirre in particular, a dagger-eyed ice-cold sadist straining at the power hierarchy he sees within his grasp yet never able to reconcile his own implacability with the far more implacable indifference of the country through which he storms. Noblemen become tinpot dictators, priests become inquisitors ("The Church was always on the side of the strong"), and a raft in the middle of the Amazon becomes a besieged island nation before then becoming a sinking sepulchre rapidly being reclaimed by the jungle in the form of mice, butterflies and what seems a thousand chittering monkeys. Aguirre, driven round the bed by his impossible ambition and the endless hostility of the immediate world around him, dreaming of sailing to and conquering Trinidad, stares unsteadily at a monkey he's managed to grasp before tossing it aside and croaking, "Who's with me?" Herzog then cuts to the Sun, beaming bright and dispassionate forever upon him.

So it's a tragedy, one built on vanity and imperiousness. But here's the thing: That cut is also objectively funny, a triumph of context and timing. Which leads into something I never really picked up on before, despite the general tone of most Herzog films - Aguirre is also a comedy, a bleak and mordant one that takes full advantage of the absurdity of the situation to find bitter laughs in a hopeless situation. Indeed, what jokes come are almost entirely rooted in irritation and/or exhaustion - there is, for instance, a great plant-and-payoff gag early on, for instance, involving Christian burial and ceremony that earns a shocked laugh when a frustrated Aguirre disposes of some troublesome unburied corpses by ordering a raft blown up. Later in the film, Aguirre's hand-picked Emperor gorges himself on fresh fruit as his underlings are forced to count grains of corn for sustenance, and the shot of the Emperor tearing through a mango is framed so that behind him, out of focus, we can see one man staring at him, unblinking, unmoving and scowling, as though trying to will his heart to explode right then and there, and the shot (and the actor) hold long enough that passes through ominous and earns a dark chuckle; another amusing bit sees Aguirre standing still and staring off into the distance, looking increasingly pained and annoyed as a native toots away on a pipe right near his ear. Even the famed decapitation sequence, a beautiful and grotesque burst of surrealism, is preceded by a one-liner. The distance between this and Nicolas Cage nattering on about iguanas on a coffee table is not so large after all.

Key to the peculiar effect of this film, both in its tragic and comedic dimensions, is the staggering performance from Kinski. And that was another revelation - because for years I'd remembered the mania, the frothing and crazed ranting. Except... that's not what this performance is at all. Kinski does of course have his moments of outsized lunacy (there's really no other way to deliver a line like, "The Earth I walk upon sees me and quakes!"), but it's a far chillier and more nuanced performance than I'd given it credit for all these years - there's even room for moments of tenderness in it, like the last scene with his daughter Flores, a mournful prelude to his mad soliloquy among the monkeys. Said soliloquy, crucially, is also in fact a fascinating underplay - all but the last line take place inside his head, so the hissing, spiraling insanity we hear bears little resemblance to the confused, staggering wretch on screen. This is crucial because while his madness is manifest early on, it's balanced by a control born of understanding of his place in the hierarchy, so that he comes of as ruthless and determined rather than flamboyantly mad. He stalks and smolders and swaggers, only exploding on occasions where his facade of unflappable megalomania is, by circumstances, flapped pretty fucking hard. My favorite instance of this comes after the wife of an enemy, knowing all too well Kinski's ill intentions towards her husband, exclaims at him, "God will punish you!" Kinski affects a haughty, mile-long stare and a faint grin, as if to say, "Neither you nor God can hurt me, I'm fuckin' Aguirre"... and then he turns and walks directly into a horse, leading to an eruption of arm-flailing and a peeved, "Get out of my way!" Aguirre, the man who thought himself the wrath of God, the man who dreamt of being the god-king over all the New World, is a tragic fool who can't even control a single animal.

Speaking of single animals: There's another scene with Flores, an earlier one where Aguirre finds a small sloth. This is a small and beautiful scene, with a genuinely happy Aguirre regaling his daughter about this little animal's unusual life: "He spends his whole life asleep. He's never really awake." Could that be the unspoken cosmic joke at the heart of it all? Are we all just the fevered dream an ever-slumbering rodent?

31: The Agronomist (2003, Jonathan Demme)

Owned version: The 2005 DVD released by New Line Home Entertainment.

Acquired: May 20th, 2017, from used-media store CeX. I got excited when they put one in a mall near me, and I bought a bunch of stuff. Meant to go back from time to time but never could, owing to my work schedule. Now they're out of business in America. Dammit.

Seen before?: No - I've slept on most of Demme's documentary work. Because I am a fool.

Sat on this one too long - didn't mean to take a hiatus, but that's what happened. So instead of a proper review, here's some barely-digested thoughts culled from my notes:

 - If nothing else, this is a fabulous documentary because its subject is endlessly fascinating and Jonathan Demme, ever interested in the lives and thoughts of others, keeps himself inconspicuous and allows the subject to tell his story in the manner he sees fit. Jean Dominique is a firecracker, a passionate advocate for his home country of Haiti who also happens to be a raconteur of rare quality. Because he's interesting, the film is interesting.

 - When speaking on But, I Am Beautiful, the documentary film he helped make that spurred a mini-Haitian New Wave, Dominique proclaims, "The grammar of the film is a political act." This could also be said about Demme's tacit ceding of the floor to Dominique for the duration of The Agronomist - allowing Dominique to lay out the arguments regarding Haiti's history and the political quagmire therein without authorial intrusion is a political act, implying Demme's agreement with Dominique, as well as a deferential one (why try to stake a position when this guy's got it staked pretty well?).

 - In the above light, it's kind of tempting to see this as a flipside to Swimming to Cambodia - both are eccentric and energetic performance pieces (explicitly with the Gray film, implicitly here - the interlude involving Dominique's letters to his daughter that reveal a shy, retiring side he never shows in public suggest that he is, in essence, always performing and the radio microphone/camera allow the remove he needs to enact that performance) about Western exploitation of Third World nations. Swimming is an outsider's perspective on that idea, a man from a protected class reaching certain painful epiphanies about what had to happen for him to be afforded that protection, where this is from the inside, a man from one of those nations explaining the costs incurred. Both also see Demme hanging back and letting the subjects dictate the flow, asserting directorial control sparingly for maximum impact (the spectacular God's-eye-view cut in Swimming, the climactic still shots of blue sky here).

 - The title is apropos in a certain way; while Jean Dominique rose to fame as a radio broadcaster and political activist, his college degree was in agronomy and he did indeed find work in Haiti as one for a short period of time. Identifying him as "the agronomist," after his own self-identification ("I am not a journalist... I became a journalist!"), ties him to the land he fought for in a physical way that his more-famed occupation would not, his root impulse being that to nurture and foster the growth of His Land; furthermore, when Dominique quips that, as a hired gun, he was "an agronomist without land," that brings in the important political distinction between working land and having land, of being exploited versus being the exploiter.

 - When speaking on his youth, Dominique claims his love affair with Haiti stemmed in part from sojourns with his father to "the outside country," i.e. the rural villages where the poor and working classes reside. He fosters his relationship to his home by seeing the whole of the country, setting him in stark contrast to e.g. the Duvaliers, who only see (or pay attention to) the parts/persons they deem to have value. His father developed this love of country in order to instill a sort of nationalistic impulse within his son ("You are not French, you are not British, you are not American... you are Haitian!") - begging the question of what it means to be a nationalist in a territory with a long history of being denied nationhood. Also: interesting, living in a country where nationalism and militarism are joined at the hip, to see a fostering of nationalism meant to counter any impulses towards militarism.

 - Not the film's main thrust, but the role of the US in the Haitian situation is certainly not allowed to pass without comment - the election of Reagan spurring Dominique to proclaim, "Human rights no more!" followed by the discussion of "the phone call option." The complicity there is deep and ugly, and the point gets made without it turning into hectoring.

 - "the sound that you only hear when the record is stuck": boy, that's a hell of a metaphor

30: Agony of Love (1966, William Rotsler)

Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Something Weird as a double feature with another Rotsler feature The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.

Acquired: Probably in December of 2010 from eBay after Something Weird announced that all their Harry Novak-produced titles were going out of print.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - June 8th, 2011.

"Don't you see that the money and the way you get it is not a very satisfactory substitute for love? I think what you want, Barbara, is normal love. Isn't that everything you really need?"

So says a psychiatrist to Barbara (Pat Barrington), a lonesome and disaffected housewife ignored by her business-minded husband and thus summing up the key tension of the film for those too slow or horny to get it. As a way to deal with her spiraling feelings of emptiness, Barbara fills her ample free time by adopting the alias Brandy and doing some light prostitution. Agony of Love has a certain number of plot beats in common with an acknowledged masterpiece of world cinema and indeed often feels like the grimy off-brand version of it, to the point where an alternate title could have easily been Hell de Jour (though it preceded the Bunuel by a year). It even dips into a couple of dream sequences, though Rotsler is hardly working in the puckish, mysterious register of Bunuel - the descent into the fantastic here is as blunt as the psychiatrist's diagnosis, baroque on-the-nose nightmares of sex and money and hostility in which dollar bills are threaded together into chains and horror-movie strings shriek their panic out over the Dutch-angled visuals. (The voiceover repeating the word "Barbara" and then switching it up to "money" is a fun touch.)

This, clearly, is not a subtle film. But then, sexploitation isn't a subtle genre, especially the grimly moralistic roughie (of which this is a fairly mild iteration). Taken in relation to its brethren, Agony of Love is a pretty good time. Rotsler, making his directorial debut, keeps things moving briskly - the sex scenes come at regular intervals but don't run so long as to become tiresome - and he manages to make his ragged inexperience into an asset at certain points, like a ragged pair of zooms at the end into the faces of Barbara and her husband respectively. I also like the depiction of the husband - instead of a typical lout, nebbish or philanderer, he's portrayed as a regular (if awkward and uncomfortable) guy who really loves his wife so thinks he needs to work as hard as he can to get her everything she needs and furthermore would never dream of so much as looking at another woman. It lends an unexpected bit of genuine tragedy to the expected downbeat ending, which is tough to pull off in this oft-callous genre.

Plus, there's the scene with the man billed as "The Eater," which is one of the most delightfully wackadoo things I've seen in one of these films. And Pat Barrington? She has excellent breasts. I'm only human.

29: Age of Consent (1969, Michael Powell)

Owned version: The 2015 "45th Anniversary Series" DVD released by budget-disc kings Mill Creek Entertainment.

Acquired: June 25th, 2017 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

Or, This Deserted Island Wasn't Deserted Enough.

Age of Consent centers around James Mason as a creatively frustrated painter who moves to a tiny island off the coast of Australia in search of solitude; instead, he finds a lively and pulchritudinous teenager played by a debuting Helen Mirren, and a lengthy tete-a-tete begins to develop. As the title implies, Mirren is suggested to be underage (though she seems to have no knowledge of her age, and the one character who repeatedly insists she's too youthful has good reason to keep her believing so); her side of the narrative, then, chiefly involves her own growing sense of autonomy. Indeed, the film uses a series of visual metaphors to suggest that both characters are prisoners in their own lives, from the opening credit sequence revealed to be a fishtank in which a watch is suspended as a form of advertisement to an early shot of Mason in bed with a woman shot through the headboard so as to suggest prison bars to the first meeting between Mason and Mirren - a negotiation on the price of fresh seafood caught by Mirren - arranged so that Mirren is trapped by the front door frame of Mason's beach hovel. So I guess it's ironic that the film ultimately gets imprisoned by the necessary compromises of its screenplay.

Consent, the last theatrical release of the legendary Michael Powell, had the potential to be a rough-hewn gem if it had stuck with the Mason/Mirren dynamic, if it had been possible to pare it down to a two-hander. Mason takes his natural unctuousness and tweaks it enough so that the smarm turns into a wince, the oblivious defense of a man intensely discomfited by the presence of others - he's the kind of guy you can totally see buggering off to some isolated paradise in hopes that the cessation of noise will stoke his waning muse. Mirren, meanwhile, is coded as Nature Girl, the wild animal instinct to Mason's artistic rationality; she's introduced literally emerging from under a dock as though the sea just spat her forth, and her wide-brimmed sunhat stays on even when she dives back into the ocean to escape detection by Mason's dog. (In this light, Mirren's legs and armpits going unshaven is a perfect and necessary touch.) As such, there's a base satisfaction in seeing these two find someone who can give them what they need - Mason gets a model, someone to put a spark of life back into his art, and Mirren gets an adult who will see her and treat her (to a degree) as a fellow adult. Powell's direction is unsurprisingly gorgeous - beyond the nuanced central performances, the editing is crisp and clever (and painful when necessary, e.g. the violent cut when a nude Mirren gets hit across the back with a switch) and the colors pop even on this disc's drab garbage transfer, with sparkling oceanic blues and lush overgrown greens providing contrast to the cool relaxing blacks (for shadowy exteriors) and browns (for interiors). There's even some lovely underwater photography, a fluid accoutrement that takes full advantage of the allowed access to the Great Barrier Reef (even if Mirren's big nude underwater swim is shot, due to necessary adherence to censorial codes, exactly like a nudist-camp movie). The surf-and-sand setting, the beautiful bohemian surroundings with the preponderance of natural color, makes the occasional splash of the artificial that much more impactful; while there's nothing on the level of the berserk use of the red dress in Black Narcissus, the discovery of Mirren's secret money stash - her ticket to a life off the island and thus true freedom! - by her drunken avaricious aunt is given an extra frisson by the pointed contrast of a hot pink handbag tossed on top of moss and rock, screaming the defilement of this secret place to the woods around it.

That drunken aunt, though, is indicative of the crippling problem with Age of Consent - namely that there's other people in it. Every time Powell has to drag in another character, the film loses its bearings; it's a delicate back-and-forth into which a goddamn Carry On film keeps poking its snout. There's the aunt, an unintelligible screech machine. There's the young man who runs the ferry between the island and the mainland, a lean himbo whose big scene is one where he unsuccessfully attempts to force himself on Mirren. (This scene, truth be told, isn't a complete botch - it's mostly about the young man's awkward nervousness, which is both an interesting way to defuse any potential ugliness and an interesting way to play with a completely different vague sort of ugliness.)  There's Mason's neighbor, a female chicken farmer whose sole character trait is that she really, really badly wants some dick. And there's Mason's friend/agent, a licentious mainlander who spends the majority of his screen time talking about banging beautiful women and steals a wad of cash from Mason so that the plot will have somewhere to go in its last half-hour. The last two get dovetailed in quick plot thread about the two of them meeting for dinner, culminating in a baffling and tasteless joke where the agent declares he's been raped. If it happens to Mirren, it's uncool, but when it happens to this jerkwad it's a larf. Yeah, sure, whatever.

If the script dumbs itself down to allow for these broad Komedy interludes, resulting in corny groaners like the agent seeing Mirren and declaring, "I've got a bird of me own," immediately leading to a cut where the chicken-farming neighbor is carving up a roasted bird, it ultimately self-destructs by trying to reconcile the incompatible relationship between the two. Here, then, is where its capitulation to a certain form of crowd-pleasing formula goes past tiresome into fatal - the more I think about the end, the more sour it seems. As Consent digs into the relationship between Mirren and Mason, it comes to an impasse - Mirren clearly has feelings for Mason, feelings which are not being reciprocated. He sees her as an adult, which is gratifying and fulfilling for her, but she comes to realize he only sees her this way because he sees her as a subject - just because he recognizes her womanhood doesn't mean he recognizes her autonomy, and in a scene like the one where Mason is struggling to paint a posing Mirren only to shake his head and mutter, "It's the dress. Take it off." without so much as looking at her... well, that evocative downcast glance by the newly-nude Mirren speaks volumes. She's merely traded one jailer for another and she knows it. So why then, given that this is about her struggle towards autonomy, does it end the way it does? I have to assume this is a function of needing to adhere to the source material - a novel by an artist renowned for his work with the nude female form - but there's still something desperate in the way it manufactures a facsimile of a happy ending, with Mason at the last minute understanding the emotional attachment Mirren has developed for him and deciding - whether out of emotional epiphany or panic at losing his muse, the film isn't clear - sure, fuck it, I do love you too. I try not to be the kind of person who reviews the film they wish they'd seen rather than the one they did, but picking at a perceived flaw necessarily assumes there's a version of this material that would have pleased me; therefore, I submit a stronger film would have Mason left abashed and alone as a chuffed Mirren swims back into the sea that birthed her. But Powell ain't Rohmer, and this ain't La Collectionneuse. So her nascent autonomy gets betrayed in favor of her being revealed as an eleventh-hour Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She was right when she tearfully said, "You only want me for the pictures," and it's to the film's ultimate detriment that it realizes this and frantically tries to wave it away anyway. A pantheon director deserves to go out on better than such a flat note.

28: After the Thin Man (1938, W.S. Van Dyke)

Owned version: The 2012 Warner Brothers DVD release as part of the Complete Thin Man set. (Aside: Holy shit, did I get lucky with this purchase - apparently it went out of print shortly after I bought it and now it's available for stupid prices on the secondhand market.)

Acquired: June 16th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

While it's often given to sequels to check in with its characters a short time after the events of the preceding film, it's less common to see a continuation that picks up exactly where the story left off. This, then, makes After the Thin Man an unusual specimen inasmuch as it gives its leads only the space of a cross-country train ride before drop-kicking them back into the same kind of drama they resolved at the end of The Thin Man (apparently, the After in the title is literal). What follows is basically the first film but twenty minutes longer, as Nick and Nora drink and quip their way through a convoluted murder plot involving several sleazeball mugs of Nick's acquaintance and a few members of Nora's well-to-do extended family. It is, on the basest level, the laziest kind of sequel, one that simply serves up the same dish as before but bigger. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And in this case, there's nothing wrong with that. What's enjoyable about After the Thin Man is how, indeed, it offers up a lot of the same pleasures that marked its predecessor - especially the Nick-and-Nora relationship, one of the great teams in cinema. William Powell's effortless, high-toned charm folds nicely into the sozzled nonchalance of Nick Charles, his disarming bemusement serving as armor against the lowlifes and thugs he used to deal with on the regular (though he's not above the occasional show of force, e.g. "Give me that phone.") Meanwhile, Myrna Loy exudes a relaxed confidence endemic to Nora's life of privilege but balances it with a quick cutting wit - she's a firecracker in the guise of a throw pillow. (Check her weighing a knife in her hand as she says to Nick, "I wouldn't kill you...") Most importantly, there's not just a genuine electricity between the two but also an ease, a comfort that makes them completely believable as a loving and functional couple. Which is more than an accent - it's the point.

It's a canny move to involve Nora's family. The first film built a fantasy life, a carnival of boozy excess at its holiday-celebration apex, and cast that against the gritty milieu of Nick's former gumshoe life. This initially manages a similar effect by putting the avatars of Nick's former life on one side and the representatives of his and Nora's current life on the other; when Nora, after having spent a large part of their California disembarking mobbed by reporters and petty crooks familiar to Nick, tosses off, "You wouldn't know them, darling. They're respectable," in regards to a couple in her social circle... well, that's a pretty clear demarcation of the line between the two worlds, and indeed many of the early laughs come at the distaste Nora's aunt Katherine and Nick (or, from Katherine's mouth, 'Nick-o-lahs') feel for each other. ("What are you muttering to yourself?" "I'm getting all the bad words out of my system.") Where the first maintains the fantasy by holding the division, though, After complicates its high-low divide by letting the spheres bleed together and ricochet off one another. This makes explicit some ideas about class that the first was content to leave implicit (consider that the solution to the murder hinges on a wealthy person failing to recognize a member of the help), but it also works as a metaphor for how to make a relationship work. You can't keep everything separate - you gotta mix the worlds, blend two unique perspectives into a new and engaging whole.

Doing so often means admitting certain ways in which you would be incomplete without your partner. After the Thin Man has an amusing undercurrent in that vein - if the first was about Nora spurring Nick back into the world he left behind, this is about Nick's realization of his occasional failings as a detective and how he's better off with Nora in his life - without Nora, Nick wouldn't have the solution, wouldn't recognize the verbal slip made at the climax. He keeps, amusingly, finding ways to send her out of harm's way and keep her out of the line of fire, but at the end he needs her there. And he's so wrapped up in the mystery at hand he doesn't notice that she's not drinking like she used to. Which leads to a last-minute revelation about another way couples can blend their interests.

(Another note of interest/source of amusement - neither Nick nor Nora sees the parallel plotline involving Asta... which delightfully mirrors the dynamic in the central relationship that led to the plot-driving murder. It's important to try and grasp all the resources you have at hand, even the ones you might take for granted.)

27: After Midnight (2005, Phil Herman/Laura Giglio/Tiffany Warren/Isabelle Stephen/Steven A. Grainger)

Owned version: A DVD-R produced by Phil Herman (I assume) - a two-pack with its sister feature Around Midnight. The (handcut, Xeroxed) sleeve bears a copyright of 2005, so I'll go with that as the production year.

Acquired: 2016, likely May, from Herman himself via eBay.

Seen before?: No.

The DVD-R I purchased doesn't come with much in the way of special features, unsurprisingly. What is included is a promotional photograph of Debbie D, erstwhile SOV starlet who worked with Herman on Burglar from Hell and Tales for the Midnight Hour. The photograph, stamped February 2001, features her nude and lying on her stomach. Across her butt is a prop storybook bearing the title Tales for the Midnight Hour II. I assume this is an indication that Around Midnight started production under that title; if so, that would make After Midnight the conclusion in an trilogy. Meanwhile, Herman appears to have resurrected the Tales for the Midnight Hour II title for a project currently in post-production, if the IMDb is correct. What does this mean in terms of continuity? Nothing, of course. It's just a bit of trivia I find interesting.

Besides, if you're looking for continuity, you're in the wrong neighborhood. After Midnight can barely be bothered to make its framing device relate to the rest of the film, let alone keeping some manner of continuity between films. Herman isn't exactly the most attentive of filmmakers - there's a cut in the middle of a simple shot of Nancy Feliciano waking up, implying he joined together two identical shots to capture said act, which makes me curious as to how the first shot got screwed up and why he didn't just discard it entirely - so it's to the film's advantage that he mostly holds to writing duties with this project, taking a directorial credit for only the frame. The first story sure could have fooled me in that regard, though - it has all the hallmarks of other Herman films like Jacker and Burglar from Hell. Filmmaking where the incompetence is bone-deep and compounded by an absent tripod, dopey dialogue delivered as snidely as possible ("Just show me what ya came to show me, you wacky bitch" is one of the highlights), an intense focus on the most banal aspects of a given exploitable scenario, a twist easily seen from miles away... that this was in fact directed by its leading lady Laura Giglio appears to have changed nothing. It's a Herman script and a Herman film all the way through, and it was at this point I sighed and settled in for a long 70 minutes.

Turns out I can still be surprised. The third short is a quick gag about a nude model who gets murdered by a photographer except oops, she's a vampire. Its Venn-diagram intersection of strangle fetish porn, vampire erotica and voyeuristic performance give it the whiff of a repurposed custom-porn W.A.V.E. short, but the star/director Isabelle Stephen had previously showed up in a couple things by strangle-fetish kings/anti-erotica weirdos Factory 2000, and while she doesn't port over the hostility or extreme scatology, there's a sneaky level of meta-commentary (starting from the cameraman in the opening bit masturbating and Stephen's subsequent disgust) that serves to cheekily deflate the wank-material nature of the enterprise. The fourth, directed by Steven A. Grainger, is a moody bummer about a depressed woman fighting off suicidal urges; the narrative tries to obscure the fact that she's the sole survivor of a humanity-wiping apocalypse, but that becomes apparent early on from the framing and the carefully-timed fades.

Then, the second story. It's the only one Herman didn't have a major hand in - it is, instead, written and directed by Tiffany Warren. It works with the same devotion to filler and banality as the films surrounding it, but to a perverse degree - the heroine dances at a club, she showers, she watches a movie on the couch, she changes out of her pajamas into her work clothes, she drives to work, so on and so forth. What seems dull becomes weirdly involving once you adjust to its wavelength and realize that Warren is dedicated to mundanity - basically, it shifts from a waste of time to a compelling photonegative of murderdrone. Then the protagonist, a death-obsessed young nurse, gets bitten by an aggrieved patient (played by the director) who turns out to be a vampire. Per the usual plot machinations, the two fall in bed together, and right as this happens, the score abruptly jumps from the percolating synths that had been dominant up to that point into a hard, driving rock song. It's a basic contrast effect, but I'm impressed it's set up and executed as well as it is here - Warren seems to actually understand the point of maintaining a slow, even pace and concentrating on a lack of incident in order to achieve a certain impact at the close of the narrative. It's not Jeanne Dielmann, but at this budget level I'll take what I can get, and it's a disappointment that Warren appears to have made nothing else of note.

26: After Hours (1985, Martin Scorsese)

Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Warner Brothers as part of the Martin Scorsese Collection box set.

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Twice, to my recollection - once on VHS probably around 1997 or 1998 and once on HBO around 2000 or 2001. Never from this disc.

"I'll probably get blamed for that."

The thing about being at the center of a narrative is it makes everything about you, even if it really isn't. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is hiding on a fire escape from an angry mob when he peeps in a window and sees a man shot to death by an angry woman. His reaction is not one of shock but of rueful self-pity, which given the circumstances is semi-understandable - he's already been accused of at least one thing he assuredly did not do, a string of apartment burglaries, which is why there's a mob on his tail. He's having an impossibly bad evening... but the murdered man in the apartment is having a worse one.

That's a fascinating aspect of Paul's trials throughout After Hours, Martin Scorsese's hilarious and unnerving black-comic exercise in ratcheted urban paranoia: the insinuation that much of what he goes through is due to his self-absorption. His skills in reading other people and choosing who to trust are poor and only made worse by stress/exhaustion, as is his unerring ability to choose the wrong response in any situation; by the later stages of the film, he's compounding his troubles by throwing blind panicked trust at an obvious lunatic like Gail, Catherine O'Hara's bizarre and giggly ice-cream-van driver, then whining his way out of a temporary haven provided by a gay man who furtively picks him up as he's seeking refuge in a park. Before that, he'd scotched his evening with flighty raw-nerve Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) by trying to make sexual overtures on her rather than just be the conversationalist she repeatedly says she's looking for that night; further exacerbated the situation by getting snippy and cold towards her even as her emotional state visibly deteriorates; misunderstood a circular conversation with a bouncer and in doing so accidentally agreed to having his head shaved; and allowed his frustrations to boil over at Julie, a lonely, if slightly odd, waitress (Teri Garr, finding all the pathos she can in her short screen time) who was nice enough to take him in out of the rain. Paul may indeed be stuck in SoHo as a sort of purgatorial punishment, but he's had the keys to the gate within his grasp several times and not been able to see it.

Then again, maybe the universe really does just have it out for him. Both these things can be true - Paul is kind of an asshole, yet the misfortunes piled upon him seem out of proportion unless he's been fingered as karma's dumping ground for the night. Despite the connotations of my initial argument, it can only be argued that Paul is the object around which everything in After Hours orbits - especially the camera. As it zooms, drifts, roves and circles with a malevolent energy, the camera never detaches from Paul's proximity, even when he's immobile and encased in plaster. Furthermore, Scorsese throws in a number of sharp little details to signify that this isn't just stacked assholery, many of which I'd never before noticed. When Paul goes to visit Marcy, she's staying with Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a conceptual artist who drafts him into helping with her latest sculpture while he waits for Marcy to return from the pharmacy. The act of doing so gets plaster on his white shirt, so Kiki lends him a black shirt with pinstripes; the swap from white to black, combined with the suggestion of prison stripes, is a clever indication of how the night will proceed. (A similar white/black contrast exists between the phone in Paul's apartment, which he uses to phone Marcy in hopes of a nice evening, and the phone in Kiki's apartment, which he uses to phone the police and report a death.) Later, in Julie's apartment, she attempts to cheer him up by dancing to the Monkees's "Last Train to Clarksville"; Paul breaks down crying just as Mickie Dolenz gets to, "...and I don't know if I'm ever coming home." Even later, he returns to Kiki's apartment in search of a $20 bill he noticed on the surface of her plaster sculpture, and right after he removes it, the flashlights of the nascent anti-burglary posse shine through onto him. The God Paul finds himself bellowing at in a moment of high dudgeon has a sick sense of humor, it seems.

Not as sick as it could have been, though - the original ending was for Paul to be trapped in limbo inside another sculpture, this one built for him by barfly/basement-dwelling resident artist June (Vera Bloom) as a disguise against the angry mob. This haven soon becomes another trap, another cosmic joke on Paul perpetuated on him by a mysterious figure who knows his name without him ever mentioning it to her. His deliverance comes at the hands of the real thieves (played by Cheech and Chong), puckish figures of anarchy who slip through a manhole and into his basement prison - literally descending into the underworld to spirit him away - and in the light of this proposed ending, Cheech's line, "A stereo is a stereo, but art is forever," sounds damned ominous. But instead, he ends up falling out of their van right in front of his office. After Hours opens with Paul training a new hire (Bronson Pinchot!), who responds that the job is, "...temporary anyway. I don't wanna be stuck here doing this for the rest of my life." Paul's response to this unintentional slight is to gaze around at everyone in the office who IS here for good, reflect on his own station and recess into himself for the evening. It closes with Paul back at his desk, having traded one nerve-jangling personal Hell for another, far more anonymous and manageable one; as though to drive that home, the camera at last breaks free of Paul and slides around taking another look at his coworkers. Is that all there is to a bad evening?

25: Adventures of Zatoichi (1964, Kimiyoshi Yasuda)

Owned version: The box set of the complete Zatoichi series released by Criterion in 2013.

Acquired: July 19th, 2015 from a Barnes & Noble. (Criterion 50% off sale, baby!)

Seen before?: Once, from the old Home Vision Entertainment DVD (as received from Netflix) in 2004. Most likely early May. Never from the Criterion set. This is, in fact, the first time I've cracked the set. Which is exciting for me!

The joy of formula, pt. 3...

You make nine films about one character, you're bound to fall into some patterns. Especially when you're planning to make more. Adventures of Zatoichi, the ninth in what would eventually be a series of twenty-six about the wandering blind masseur/swordsman Zatoichi, slips comfortably into the dominant story beats that comprise most of the Ichi films - Ichi comes to a town under the thumb of oppression (a corrupt magistrate and a local crime boss in cahoots this time), befriends a couple locals including a young woman, outsmarts a rigged dice game in a gambling hall, drinks sake and fights anyone who attempts to make his life miserable. Then the climax has the swordsman cutting down a couple dozen anonymous foot soldiers before tackling a skilled warrior looking to prove his mettle. Every one of these films is telling the same basic story, and the series is far along enough at this point that this entry has a subtle bit of fun with that. The setting is a town that also serves as a mecca of sorts for those wishing, in the words of Ichi, "to worship the first light of the new year." Ichi remembers this place from his childhood and has returned to spend the last bits of the old year trying to find something - a brief sense of peace, maybe. Meanwhile, there's a man who has escaped from prison and returned to this town searching for his sister, and there's a cadre of vendors who have returned to this town as they do every year looking to capitalize on the celebratory occasion, knowing not that the magistrate has imposed stiff new taxes that will strip away their profits. In a series beholden to a cyclical repetition of expected formula, it's amusing to see the screenplay acknowledge that by putting most of the characters into cycles of repetition that don't go as expected.

So Ichi's trip doesn't go as he hopes. Instead of finding peace, he gets embroiled in events that reinforce his sense of isolation. Having gone through the series once before over a decade past, my memories of individual entries are not exactly crystal-clear. But as I found this worth comment back then, I feel it's safe to assume that Adventures of Zatoichi is at least unique to this point in the series in that it deals with Zatoichi's eternal isolation not as a tragedy but as a fact; indeed, part of Ichi's fury in the finale is fueled by his disappointment in coming to what he thought was a safe place and having to do the shit he always has to do. There's a thread where Ichi comes to think a local drunk might be his long-lost father, and when the drunk inevitably lets him down, the great Shintaro Katsu plays it with a rueful smile, as though he knew this moment of potential human connection was too good to be true ("For a moment, I thought I saw my father in you..."). Yasuda further accents Ichi's alienation by keeping him apart from others in group shots - if, say, the women with whom he's sharing a hotel room are in a shot with him, they'll be in the foreground while he'll be off in the background or vice versa. The effect is one of alienation - even as he walks among them, Ichi is marked as not belonging among the rest of the world.

Rather than bending to melancholy, though, Yasuda exploits this alienation in service of Ichi's ferocious fighting skills. We know his skills are superhuman - we've seen the previous films, assumedly - but Adventures of Zatoichi goes further and implies they might be literally inhuman. The great Matt Lynch criticizes this entry for making Ichi too saintly, but I think it's doing something different. The film leans into his apartness to paint him less as a skilled duelist and more as a force of nature whose whirling swordplay is an inevitable consequence of his existence. In other words, he cannot be one of us because he is not one of us. The opening scene has him chuckling in the midst of a fierce windstorm, musing on the dust blowing in his face and caught in a roil of red, oranges and browns (the cut from this bombast to kites in a placid blue sky is great). There are multiple fight sequences in which he erupts out of the pure blackness of shadows like an elemental phenomenon, an extension of the darkness sent to condemn his enemies to a different kind of darkness. And the final fight ends with him admonishing the dead, "You brought this on yourselves," then receding into the distance as snow begins to fall on the blood-soaked field of battle. He comes in with the wind and leaves with the snow, pausing for a moment only to get what he came for: the sun. One implacable fact of nature paying homage to another.

24: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961, Herschell Gordon Lewis [as "Lewis H. Gordon"])

Owned version: A DVD-R manufactured by Something Weird Video.

Acquired: February 22nd, 2008 from Something Weird.

Seen before?: Twice - once on December 31st, 2008 and once on March 4th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, which sums it up pretty well.)

The joy of formula, pt. 2...

Since I don't have much to improve upon or change the previous review linked up there, I'd like to touch on something I find interesting about sex, voyeurism and the nudie-cutie as expressed in this specific iteration. Nudie-cuties, for the unfamiliar, are films in which elaborate excuses are devised for lucky men to play Peeping Tom to a host of unclothed beauties. This is effected via means supernatural (Like Wow!, in which a hobo finds magic X-ray glasses), professional (The "Imp"probable Mr. Wee Gee, featuring the famed photographer applying his trade to something other than headline-chasing) or fantastic (International Smorgasbroad, in which a cook dreams of past meals and the ladies that came with them), but the end result remains naked boobs. It's all variations on a theme, a dozen ways to say the same thing - a series of Playboy joke books scribbled out onto celluloid.

They are among the stupidest films ever made.

The important part, though, is that The Man exists. He's the gatekeeper, the carnival barker shilling carnal promises. This one man has something special about him, something that allows him to frolic in a wondrous world of pleasantly bare female flesh, and for the low low price of one movie ticket you can spend an hour in this paradise of pulchritude. As such, there's generally a leering quality to the films, one leavened by the good-natured fluffy idiocy endemic to the genre but there nonetheless; given that these films often play as feature-length Tex Avery wolf whistles, this is hardly surprising. This is then what's odd about The Adventures of Lucky Pierre - Lewis's chosen tour guide displays a spectacular indifference to the naked ladies around him.

The film is divided into five segments, each of which finds a way to deny the inherent voyeurism. The first segment has Pierre sketching nude models, and the fourth has him photographing nude models who keep disappearing when the shutter snaps; in both, he's too focused on the artistic endeavor to leer. (In the latter, indeed, he's far more excited by the camera than by the subject.) The second segment has him fixing a plumbing problem in a man's house, unaware of the man's wife showering five feet away from him. In the third segment, he stumbles over a pair of nude sunbathers while birdwatching. In each of these, his obliviousness can be excused to his concentration on his job. But it's the last segment that pushes this into fascinating territory. The final bit in Pierre has our chapeau-clad hero attending a drive-in movie theater showing nudie shorts. At last, we have an acknowledgement of desire - Pierre, finally, is One Of Us. But alas! Pierre is so fixated on the films he's there to see that he ignores the fact that the ticket taker and the concession girl are both nude right in front of him. And then a bus parks in front of him for the duration of the film, causing him to miss that too. It's as if Lewis and producer David Friedman decided to punish poor Pierre for not shedding his blinders.

Then, the payoff: As Pierre goes to wander off, he tosses away the dice that have been the film's motif and have, at the end of every segment, landed on ones. The dice this time roll seven. Nude women emerge from the background and Pierre, having finally broken the curse of snake-eyes, opens his eyes, sees them and rejoices. This admonishment to wake up, get off your duff and engage with the world around you is likely unintentional, just an unexpected double entendre bouncing off Lewis's burlesque-broad punchline. But there it is anyway. Call it How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tits.

23: Adventure in Sahara (1938, D. Ross Lederman)

Owned version: The 2009 DVD released by Sony as part of The Samuel Fuller Collection. This set, it should be noted, contains exactly two Samuel Fuller films. This one is included on the strength of his story credit, which as I understand it boiled down to a quick verbal pitch that the studio bought then changed drastically.

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

The joy of formula, pt. 1...

The title promises nothing new and delivers exactly that. There's not a bit about Adventure in Sahara that plays unfamiliar - this is the platonic ideal of the sort of film Abbott and Costello were joshing in ...in the Foreign Legion. There's square-jawed hero Jim Wilson (Paul Kelly), the cartoonishly cruel commandant Captain Savatt (C. Henry Gordon), a supporting crew of mug-faced legionnaires itching for mutiny, a sympathetic higher-up who understands the plight of the soldiers but is bound by duty to maintain order, a love interest for Wilson who literally crash-lands in the middle of the plot, war-mongering tribal Arabs just outside the fort walls and miles of hostile burning sand. A machine could have written this screenplay, lockstep and bound to its chosen path like a soldier on patrol. But I am not a man of refined or elegant tastes, and I'll fall for a chunk of formula every time if it's burnished to the right shine. So it went for Adventure in Sahara - its swiftness and economy, stripped to a fearful leanness reflecting its increasingly-aggrieved legionnaires, won me over even as I recognized that nothing new was under this particular scorching sun.

It's often as simple as finding the right people for the job - Gordon makes for a daunting villain, a hissable martinet for whom this kind of cruelty has become so commonplace that he can whip out a line like, "I shall make legionnaires out of you or crush you in the attempt," and make it sting without ruffling his aplomb, and he's constrasted nicely by Kelly's stiff-backed resolve, a determined man of action whose personal axe to grind off-handledy blooms into full heroism. Lederman's direction is robust and unfussy, burning through a full load of story in under an hour as it does. In the absence of nuance, he goes big when warranted (a desert-march montage makes especially effective use of double exposures) and moment to moment uses simple, direct images of sweating faces and torn photographs blowing away in the wind to get the impact across. There's a snappy pulp flavor to a lot of the dialogue, and I'm a pretty easy touch for that sort of thing. (My favorite: "You've made Agadez an inferno on Earth, and now you're going to boil in it.") Stir all these ingredients into the cauldron and the finished dish is one that, in retrospect, was always going to appeal to my palate. Admittedly, Fuller's original idea for the ending would have likely made a film that would been a better, more powerful and unshakable experience. But a steak-and-potato stew will still stick to the ribs.

22: Addicted to Murder: Blood Lust (2000, Kevin J. Lindenmuth & Tom Vollman)

Owned version: The DVD released in 2002 by Delta Entertainment. I don't foresee any further releases of this movie in its future.

Acquired: November 29, 2014 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

See that title card up there? Here's a dirty little secret - that's from the closing credits, not the opening credits. The opening credits bear this:

And the cover of the DVD smooshes both titles together atop an ugly-ass Photoshop nightmare:

What's the import, why start with all this minutia regarding the actual title to this film? As I see it, an inability to even agree on what to call the infernal thing speaks to a deep discord in terms of the production. I suspect what I have in front of me is a salvage job, and a damned graceless one at that. But what's the nature of the salvage?

Addicted to Murder 3 Bloodlust Vampire Killer starts by picking up where Addicted to Murder had left off, with vampirized serial killer Joel Winter (Mick McCleery, letting a pair of dark sunglasses and a goatee do all the acting work) embracing his newfound calling as a vampire slayer. Then the opening credits roll and Joel is forgotten about for the next twenty-plus minutes; instead, we get more documentary-style framing device nonsense (this time for an ostensible show about vampires) and a series of supernatural domestic squabbles, as Tricia (the neophyte vamp from Tainted Blood) deals with a paramour who demands to be turned and doesn't take kindly to being denied. Joel pops back in just in time for the framing device to resolve in a double twist... at which point the film then jumps to a completely different cast and begins telling a story about a man sent to prison for murder whose cellmate is a vampire. Once that story is over, Joel gets to trot back on screen for a little longer, another random vampire shows up to kill some random lady and then the movie is over.

This isn't the first time Lindenmuth has pulled a fast one like this - his Alien Agenda: Endangered Species uses its status as an omnibus film to justify using at least one unrelated short shot five years before. But at least in that film, he tries to make the piece fit - there's something muttered in the narration that attempts, however unsuccessfully, to provide a way to tie this pre-existing object into the rest of the film built around it and independently of it. Bloodlust Addicted to Murder 3 Vampire Killer doesn't feign such concern - the prison segment was shot by Dead Meat director Tom Vollman, who was blithely unconcerned with whatever the hell kind of world Lindenmuth had been building with the Addicted to Murder series. I can say this because the big, bald menacing crime-kingpin vampire in this segment only goes out at night, sleeps on a mattress stuffed with dirt and at one point hisses, "Holy water, crucifixes, wooden stakes, the whole ball of wax... I don't like any of that fuckin' shit." You know, basic vampire-lore stuff... and absolutely the kind of stuff Lindenmuth had made such a point of flouting. Lindenmuth's vampires wander around in the sun all the time (there's a throwaway line in one of the two previous films about how while they're stronger at night, the sun doesn't bother them), they sleep anywhere and on anything they please and they show no particular aversion to Christian iconography - Tainted Blood even makes a joke out of that when Tricia's friend tries to ward her off with a large plastic cross and she retorts, "Eat of my flesh, drink of my blood... what do you think HE was?" So either Addicted to Bloodlust Killer Vampire Murder 3 is a duology where neither side consulted with the other about the world in which this was taking place, or it's... something else.

Here's my theory: Vollman shot the prison film, intending it to be either a longer stand-alone piece or (more likely, given the tidy narrative arc and Tom's previous involvement with Lindenmuth on Alien Agenda: Under the Skin) a segment in another in-the-works omnibus, something akin to the Creaturealm films where there's no linking device and everyone just makes what they want. But Lindenmuth has about thirty minutes of footage shot in 1998 and intended for another Addicted to Murder film but no film to show for it. Why not? Maybe he couldn't make his idea for the film work without the involvement of Sasha Graham (who only appears in flashback footage), or maybe he just lost interest. At any rate, Vollman's featurette is just what he needs to puff up this orphaned work to saleable length. So in it goes, an abrasive overacted stretch of idiocy stuffed in the middle of a pile of aimless crud like an old, overhard egg inside a stale challah. 3 Killer Vampire Lust Blood Murder to Addicted is one shitty, unfinished film wrapped around another shitty, unfinished film and presented like we won't notice, like the seams aren't snapping and the glue isn't failing to hold. What a terrible way to piss away any remaining promise held by the original work.

21: Addicted to Murder: Tainted Blood (1998, Kevin J. Lindenmuth)

Owned version: The same Navarre DVD from 2002 that I pulled the previous film from.

Acquired: June 11, 2014. Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

Notice that the title card forgoes the 2 in the title of this followup to Lindenmuth's 1995 video. This is less a sequel and more a quasi-prequel/parallel narrative, chiefly concentrating on filling in the backstory of Sasha Graham's vampire Angie and, in doing so, providing context for her curious fixation on sullen serial killer Joel. At least, that's my assumption on the intent. Tainted Blood plays mostly like a supplementary work, a series of scholarly notes and asides meant to illuminate a main text rather than its own thing.

A lot of this can be laid at the feet of the sprawling, halting script. While I get what the base story is - a simple tale of sibling rivalry set among a unique subculture - there's a lot of chaff and noise to cut through to get to that. Either Lindenmuth never quite got a handle on the story he wanted to tell or he was so enamored with the world he'd built, a subcult world burbling under the surface of regular civilization, that he tried to illuminate as many aspects of it as he could given his time and budget. Either way, what's meant to be a generation-spanning epic comes off as diffuse and confused; the time-hopping structure primarily toggles between three plotlines with flashback detours into unexpected areas, including 1950s Ohio and 13th-century France, and as the various threads drift across each other it feels less expansive and more lacking in focus. Tainted Blood desperately needs an anchor, a center from which all the other stuff can bloom, and though Angie is clearly intended as this we don't spend enough time with her for that to take hold. She, like everything else, is given equal weight in the tapestry, popping in and out whenever Lindenmuth needs her to. Ideas are continually introduced then dropped - the jump to France leads nowhere, for instance, and tetchy vampire Jonathan's insistence that newly-vamped Tricia not enter his bedroom is given enough weight that I was surprised when it ended up being just a character curlicue. I feel like there was a significantly longer version of this material that, whether during the script stage or in the editing process, got shaved down past the point of coherence.

I'm not angry, just frustrated. There's enough that Tainted Blood does right that I wish the story wasn't such a mess. Elevating Angie to the ostensible fore was a smart move, if for no other reason than it means more screen time for the spectacular magnetism of Sasha Graham in one of the few lead roles she was allotted in her too-brief career; changing the focus also solves the main issue of the first film in that it sidelines the charisma-free Joel to the point where it's easy to forget he's in this at all. At its best, this is essentially a dry comedy about the mechanics of maintaining a vampire life in a world that would want you destroyed if they knew about you - discussions about what to do with a corpse, a freshly-bitten Tricia shrugging and slapping a Band-Aid on her neck wound, a friend of Tricia listening to her going on about having found her true self and assuming she's in a sex cult, things like that. It's the sort of film where one scene will have two vampires hissing at each other over "unworthy" mortals being turned, and the next scene will be about Tricia trying to explain away biting a blind date she's brought home, and then Scooter McCrae will show up for a scene holding a baby in a Hefty bag asking if anyone wants a snack. Lindenmuth's bemused wit is as in evidence as ever, and he's got a crew of solid performers (especially Graham and the appealing Sarah K. Lippman as Tricia) to sell it. There's a lot of pleasures stacked up in the sidecar, but I just wish someone had taken proper control of the handlebars.

20: Addicted to Murder (1995, Kevin J. Lindenmuth)

Owned version: The 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment that also contains the sequel to this film.

Acquired: June 11th, 2014, from a seller on the Amazon Marketplace.

Seen before?: Twice - once on December 9th, 2014 and once on November 28th, 2016. The latter viewing led to this review.

...and upon third viewing, I feel like the above was sufficient. So, yeah. Definitely read that, because Addicted to Murder is not the sort of thing that reveals endless treasure upon repeated prodding. This revisit has me convinced I pretty much cracked it last time, and now I'm standing here looking at an open safe, pushing the door back and forth to see if maybe I missed a dollar stuck in one of the hinges. I imagine this will happen more than once as I go through the collection and glance off films I've seen and have written about previously (lord, am I not looking forward to a third jaunt through Arang). It's okay. Not everything can be a puzzle box. Some things just are what they plainly are.

Well. Except maybe there's one thing I can use to squeeze a touch more juice out of this pulped blood orange. This time around, the parallels to Deranged struck me as absolutely intentional and resonant in more than just the true-crime-story frame; as such, the frame becomes less a mere homage and more a covert manual on how to read the lead. Both films are about maladjusted men, abused in their youth, whose resultant stunted emotional growth leads them to express their sexual desires in increasingly violent ways after the deaths of their mothers. The abuse visited upon young Joel in Addicted to Murder is sexual in nature, at the hands his mother and a babysitter and a childhood friend. The complicating part is that the childhood friend is Rachel, an older female who also happens to be a vampire with a fetish for being "killed." We and Joel meet her in the opening scene, shot from the POV of an adolescent Joel as he stumbles upon her feeding on a victim in the woods; rather than attack him, she recognizes the recessive, weird Joel as a victim she can mold into her plaything, building off his natural curiosity about death and his already-extant emotional scarring. ("You're a curious little one, aren't you?" is her introduction, which led me to write in my notes, "He's bite-curious.")

Joel's life, then, and the film that contains it becomes a back-and-forth between a series of domineering women-monsters from whom he can't break away and less forceful, friendlier women to whom he can't relate and thus pushes towards bad ends - usually by his psychotic hand, but in at least one case an innocent is slain by one of the monstrous women in his life to get to him. That two of the monstrous-feminine forces in his life are actual monsters is icing and the grand joke of the film. On the one side you have his mother, the babysitter, Rachel the vampire whose repeated demands of violence inextricably joined Joel's sex and death impulses together, and Angie, another vampire who lures him to a bloodsucker's club and tries to harness the pathetic nature of his murderous impulses for her own ends; on the other side, you have a series of hitch-hikers, coworkers, neighbors and random NYC citizens who end up on the wrong side of his frustrated lashings-out, victims of the boiling rage of a beaten-down piece of damaged goods who aims everywhere except the sources of his pain (plus an ex-wife who narrowly escapes such a fate). To break the cycle, Joel has to go back to the source of his pain and find an acceptable outlet for the cruelty and violence bred within him. Which, as a ten-years-later flash-forward reveals at the end, he does. Lindenmuth is mostly a klutz as a filmmaker, and he lets this go on too long, but he's put thought into this.

If only it had a more charismatic lead than Mick McCleery, or at least one who could make the enormous appeal Joel has to women both predatory and otherwise explicable. But no-budget takes what no-budget can get.

19: An Act of Confession (1972, Anthony Spinelli [as "Sybil Kidd"])

Owned version: The 2014 DVD release from Vinegar Syndrome, which has it not only third-billed behind two other Spinelli films (Cry for Cindy and Touch Me) but relegated to a second disc along with the softcore version of Cry for Cindy. This is not by accident.

Acquired: May 23rd of 2015 from Vinegar Syndrome.

Seen before?: No.

What is there to say about a boring porn film? An Act of Confession doesn't have much to it - it's a series of sexual fantasies dreamed up by a novitiate nun, and despite the long fertile history of the naughty-nun genre, this one runs out of ideas roughly twenty minutes in. A case could be made that this is due to genre constraints, inasmuch as this is a straight fuck flick without any of the demonic-flavored aspects that crop up in wilder examples of the genre. But even accounting for that, this pales next to something like School of the Holy Beast - the perversity ended at the concept. Which makes for a dull watch once you realize that all you're getting is concept.

It's not like this is any fun, either. The pace if this is funereal, and any expressions of ecstasy are limited to the grimacing faces of the involved dudes. The nun whose fantasies these are may be a plank of wood for all the life she shows. Really, the attitude here can be summed up by the disclaimer that shows up prior to the title card, which is as follows:

All due respect, Mr. Spinelli, but you ain't no Boccaccio. Though, like a number of tales in The Decameron, this is structured like a dirty joke, building to one heretical (and, in retrospect, inevitable) punchline. The framing of said punchline is actually fairly inspired - the use of gauzy lighting is hilarious - but it's a long road to get there.

(I should also mention that this release, sourced from a 16mm print that is as of now the only known source, is trimmed of all penetration shots. I assume this is why it's been relegated to an extra on the release of two other films - while extra footage of thrusts and flying semen wouldn't really improve the product at hand from a filmic standpoint, the removal of its raison d'etre does mark this as a historical curio at best.)

18: Across 110th Street (1972, Barry Shear)

Owned version: The 2014 Blu-ray released by Kino Lorber under their KL Studio Classics imprint.

Acquired: July 30th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

"You wanna drink?"
"Oh no, I don't drink."
"You will, Pope. You will."

Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), the offering party in this exchange with the named young lieutenant angling for his job, drinks. He drinks for a lot of reasons. In this instance, he needs a drink because it's late and he and Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto) have spent a long day('s journey into night) running through the rattled cage of early-'70s New York City. Matelli drinks because he's been running through this cage for decades, through many long days and nights like this, and the thread is getting to the end of the spool. He's been a fixture in the Harlem precinct for years - you can see it in how he deals with the public, how he wends his way through a crowd of aggrieved residents of the neighborhood and promises them he'll fix whatever has brought them to his station tonight, and how the residents react to him because they know his word is good. But he is now 55 and some of his more aggressive policing methods are rightfully going out of style and the top brass are not-so-subtly suggesting retirement. He drinks because he can feel the city shifting and changing around him, getting angrier and more violent, and maybe he doesn't know where he fits anymore. He drinks because he's getting old and soon there won't be anything else to do but that.

Across 110th Street knows Matelli, like a lot of people, is getting old and being left behind by a society that's working to move past him and what he represents. The tension between the old guard and those trying to burst free from under the thumb of the old guard is what drives much of this sweaty, snarling film. It's a 24-hour period in the life of a neighborhood - and a city, and a country - in the midst of a fierce upheaval. As appropriate for a film about people of a certain age feeling like the world is moving past them, 110th Street races through its day-in-the-life at a helter skelter pace - it's not so much juggling its three major character groups as it is pitching them to the ground and letting them bounce, scoot and ricochet off each other. The opening scene, the inciting incident, starts as a business-as-usual situation, a monetary exchange between the black gangsters who control Harlem and the Mafioso who lord over the entire city, and as such the concentration is on business being done the way it's been done ten thousand times before: dexterous fingers counting bound stacks of cash, hands writing carefully in well-used ledgers, calculators tap-tap-tapping as ambient noise, dialogue limited to grunts and mutters. Then two men in cop uniforms show up and suddenly it's blaxploitation via Sergio Leone - the film rapidly cuts from tense face to tense face, occasionally jumping to a close-up of the barrel of a submachine gun aimed and ready to chew up the room. One wrong move, a suitcase falls; when it hits the ground, the movie explodes like a starter pistol and doesn't stop its mad sprint until the final gunshot.

Shear tends to use his crosscutting effectively like that, concentrating on speed and tension and going for head-knocking effect whenever possible (like the cut from a man screaming as he's knocked down an elevator shaft to another man jolting awake and screaming in junk-sick pain). He shoots handheld and restless, appropriate for a film seemingly wired into the nerves of a screaming city; his framing goes heavy on the closeups and body-crowded medium shots, often pulling in just close enough so that we can count the beads of sweat on the foreheads of the subjects. Yet he's also experienced enough to allow a moment to breathe when needed, as in the scene where Matelli and Pope have to break the news of a man's death to his wife, played by Marlene Warfield; she gets a closeup held just a beat longer than average for this movie, and there's a subtle loosening on her face, a practiced hard exterior slipping away in confusion and shock, that works beautifully as a moment of grieving humanity inside a whirlpool.

For all its lurid bombast, Across 110th Street sticks like it does because of its knack for these small moments and its willingness to push its characters in unexpected directions. It's there in the defeated embarassment that takes over Quinn's face when it's revealed he's on the take and beholden to the Harlem kingpin Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), in a crucial moment during the climax where ex-con Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) steals a glance at something behind him and loses what remains of his empathy, in the visible discomfort on the faces of Doc's chief henchmen as they witness unhinged Mafia enforcer Nick D'Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) drop a half-dozen racial slurs while stringing up a black man by his feet. The way the last bit cited there is cut, with three or four significant cutbacks to the two black gangsters looking halfway between offended and sheepish, led me to believe it would lead to an eruption of violence by them against the frothing D'Salvio; that it doesn't play out that way, that they stand by and let D'Salvio do what he will exchanging meaningful glances all the while, implies to me that they understand they don't need to act against this man - that he's already on his way out and his brutality is an extension of his moribundity.

It comes back to that, to the idea of being pushed out. Matelli is being forced out at 55, and D'Salvio is, at the age of 45, stuck doing the dirty work for an institution whose grip is already slipping. "We can't lose Harlem," says a Mafia Don at the outset, but it turns out it's already gone - Doc Johnson has more clout and more smarts than his ostensible Italian overlords and there's nothing a "punk errand boy" who's only where he is because the Don is also his father-in-law can do to stop this shift. He's being left behind just like Matelli, and he's none too happy about it. Power is a hard thing to have to give up, which leads Matelli and D'Salvio both to rage against their obsolescence in their own ways. It's a handy parallel... except it's not just that. Rather than a mirror, Across 110th Street has a triangle, as befitting the three main character groups. The third side is Jim Harris, the brains behind the opening smash-and-grab and a 42-year-old black man with multiple convictions and a crippling dope habit. Where the two aging white guys are acting out of the desperation of losing their perceived place in the food chain, Harris's desperation comes from having found a way out of the food chain in which he's perpetual prey. The opening rip-off was a foolhardy proposition from the get-go, but it's understandable as the act of a man with no recourse left to make something of himself, yet people died when they didn't have to, and that seals it for him. The tragedy of innocents caught in the crossfire, both literal and otherwise, pops up a number of times here (Warfield's scene, significantly, also has in the background a little girl); the tragedy of Harris, then, is his knowledge that, because it went bad and people died, the odds of him truly making it out are scant no matter how hard he fights or how far he runs. (A late-film exchange between him and his co-conspirator Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) sums up the fatalism: "Whatever happens we're gonna end up rich... or dead, man." "There ain't no better way.") Power is a hard thing to have to give up, but it's harder to never have had it in the first place, and either way you will be called to answer for the collateral damage you've left in your heedless wake.

17: The Abyss (1989, James Cameron)

Owned version: The 2000 Fox two-disc DVD release with all the fancy bells and whistles - the height of turn-of-the-century tech. (18 years later and jesus does this ever need a new release that takes advantage of the advances in technology vis-a-vis data storage, image restoration and seamless branching.)

Acquired: Likely in late 2000 or early 2001 from CostCo.

Seen before?: Never for the director's cut. Twice for the theatrical - once on August 10th or 11th of 1989 in a theater, and once from this disc on March 2nd of 2010. (The latter resulted in this awful review.)

Not sure why I was in such an evidently foul mood the last time I saw The Abyss, as judging from that writeup linked above. I assume I just wasn't framing it in the right way mentally - this is a dry run for what Cameron would later accomplish with Titanic, in all ways. It has the spectacle and the complicated setpieces full of gushing water, but it also has the old-school guileless melodrama, here kept grounded by a roughneck reticence. Maybe that's why I didn't go for it the last time - the directness of the blue-collar characters initially seems contrapuntal to the sort of emotional territory Cameron treads. But then, that's a feature and not a bug - the avoidance of swooning emotion in favor of the direct necessity of action is true to the milieu, and it makes the later parts of the film, where the dams burst free, connect with that much more force.

It also maybe helps that I watched Cameron's preferred cut this time around in addition to the theatrical release. The theatrical version, in the name of recouping costs and squeezing in an additional showing per day, runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes, where the director's cut runs an extra half-hour. While the released version has most of the necessary beats and is in general fairly lean for something of that length, it often feels a bit abrupt, as though its concessions to that dominant directness stripped it a touch too close to the bone - the relationship between Hippy and his rat feels more developed than that of the estranged Brigmans. The director's cut restores a lot of small character moments (like a bit where Bud and Lindsey discuss Lindsey's last boyfriend, a "suit" deliberately set apart from the proles underwater) that shore up and deepen the character work in ways that the actors alone are only able to allude towards, and it shows that Cameron once again almost never wastes a frame of space even at epic lengths. But while a lot of the trims are things that only improve the material (I especially mourn the loss of the marvelous shot pulling away from an overwhelmed, fraying Michael Biehn gazing out a portal window and down into the darkness of the trench - the abyss looking into him, indeed), a couple of them do make sense as a way to curtail perceived redundancies. Chief among these is the winnowing down of the scene where the rig crew watches the news regarding the sunken nuclear submarine they've been sent to investigate and the aftermath of its sinking. Where the theatrical sticks mainly to the "facts" of the sub sinking and the Cold-War tensions stoked by it, the DC continues on to detail another ship collision between an American destroyer and a Russian craft that is viewed as retaliatory by the Russians. This was, in the end, an unnecessary flourish/parallel to the Cuban Missile Crisis (especially as Hippy later comes right out and names the situation as a new version of the Kennedy-era historical event), and its removal harms the film not. Yet it did clarify and bring me to something regarding the film, its setting and its placement in late-Cold War history.

In that earlier, crappy review, I broke the film down to "cranky characters in cold, leaky places waiting for something to happen." This time through, it occurs to me that this may be part of the design. If we allow this as a late-breaking piece of Cold War art, drawing inspiration from '50s dramaturgy in more ways than one, the setting begins to seem not just instructive but imperative. Yes, it takes forever for anything to happen down there because the water and attendant pressure turn everything into a waiting game. When the topside crane collapses, all anyone on the rig can do is watch it fall and hope it doesn't cause too much damage to the rig. When characters get into the submersibles and chase other characters or attack them with the loading arms, the objects of the attack can only maneuver so much to minimize the impact. Any impact beyond a glancing blow can cause explosive hull breaches that lead to drownings, crushing, explosions. So. What we have is a number of people, ordinary people, thrust into a pressure-cooker situation by military and government forces who care not about their well-being, who desperately just want to get in and do their job and go home, who see bad things coming miles away and are helpless to avoid  or stop them, who know that any show of force whether deliberate or accidental will have catastrophic results... well, you tell me. Are we on the ocean floor or in the middle of Cold War gamesmanship?

The director's cut more or less insists on that reading, right down to an ending that reveals The Abyss as having been a stealth remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still the whole time, whereas the theatrical merely leaves that there for you to figure out. Without the Cold-War reading, though, this still works, especially in its late stages, as seeing a tragedy occur to a loved one in front of you and being unable to assist. So even in the abbreviated version, there's a lot going on here. Cameron, as always, is an extraordinary visualist and a technical wizard. The early exploration of the sunken nuclear sub is an analog wonder; foregrounded floating debris and diffuse backlighting add an unearthly quality appropriate to a tale of underwater aliens, while the creaks and clicks and hisses and bubbles and random white noise on the soundtrack, underlined by a minimal score, add a fine mixture of awe and apprehension into it. The Abyss often works like an underwater explorer, moving slowly but surely towards its next striking, summatory image - a door exploding off its hinges during a hull breach and creaming a poor rig worker; an imploding submersible releasing one large bubble, floating to the surface like a soul escaping; Lindsey gasping for breath and hugging the sides of Bud's helmet in a magnificent meshing of tenderness and tech. That last image feels like a keystone for Cameron in general, and it makes sense thusly that the film should really kick into gear when Bud has to go down into the abyss the melodrama is allowed to reach full throat. Mastrantonio gets a couple big actorly speechs - the "two candles in the dark" one in particular - and goes for it, wringing the maximum amount of pathos out of this sudden flood of distressed emotion; her need to keep talking is satisfying from a narrative standpoint (the whole film prior to this has been about men trying to downplay or silence her, to the point of Biehn's villain taping her mouth shut) and also as a counterpoint to Harris's inability to communicate in any way other than slow typing on a wrist-mounted keyboard. His clumsy brevity set against the verbal torrents she uses to keep him focused and alive is wrenching, Cameron-style maximalism at its most emotionally brutal. In his hands, underwater works to unleash the waterworks.