47: Address Unknown (1944, William Cameron Menzies)

Owned version: The 2019 Blu-ray release by Mill Creek Entertainment in partnership with Kit Parker Films, as included in the Noir Archive 9-Film Collection, Vol. 1: 1944-1954 set.

Acquired: From Amazon on May 3rd, 2019.

Seen before?: Never even heard of before this - a true blind-buy.

"Looks like a storm's coming."

I had no clue what this was about when I put it on, but it didn't take long to figure out. Ten minutes into the film, art dealer Martin Schulz has returned to his native Germany and is unpacking his belongings. His four cherubic blonde children cavort in the gated front yard, and we see them framed through the bars as a mysterious black-clad man man with a dog glares at them. As he stands, dark clouds begins to gather behind him; noticing this, the Schulz family invites him in.

As metaphors go, it's a pretty blatant one. But there are times for subtlety and times for immediacy, and Address Unknown is nothing if not a ferocious and immediate work crafted especially for and in response to tumultuous times, a bombastic work that confirms the above metaphor not five minutes later when Martin's partner asks in a letter, "Who is this Adolph Hitler who seems to be rising to power in Europe?" Martin's partner, left behind to run their studio in San Francisco, is named Max Eisenstein. The rising action in the film is Martin's indoctrination into Nazism, given a government post and comfort in exchange for his complicity (edging on approval) regarding the Jewish people - even those he once counted as friends, colleagues and family. His letters to Max become more curt, more official and couched in language parroted from the words spoken by his higher-ups and social betters (represented in the person of the Baron von Friesche, the man at his gate at the outset). Max is assured by Martin's son Heinrich, who has stayed in the US to help Max, that Martin is merely writing in a fashion that will appease the German censors, but soon, communication dries up entirely. This rising action, this gradual overwhelming corruption of an ordinary citizen, culminates in an act of violence, and Martin's refusal to offer a gesture of benevolence to prevent even this ends up being his downfall.

It's strange on its surface to see this included in a noir anthology - the plot certainly doesn't play out like a typical noir story, especially its second half, which more or less boils down to a series of aggressions manifested as telegrams. Formally, though, there's no way it could be associated with anything but - Menzies goes heavy on the looming shadows and light/dark dichotomy that plays into a strong majority of noir entries. Even in the earliest scenes, when things are still light and cheerful, he still lights a scene in the Schulz's bedroom so that the shadows of the iron grating outside are cast within, marking the homestead as a prison even before it's a proper home.

The second half of the film pays this off - as Martin begins to receive a sudden influx of letters from Max, all containing inscrutable instructions about the buying and selling of paintings clearly intended as some manner of code (the first missive in this series contains the line "YOU AND I WILL UNDERSTAND"), the home begins to feel as ominous as the country containing it. The barred gate becomes more prominent, a metal edifice meaning to keep in as well as out, and the mere presence of the postman becomes an existential threat; witness in particular the sequence of shots that stars with a wide shot of an empty room in which Martin hovers nervously in the background, then cuts to a shot of him foregrounded while the postman can be seen arriving in the background through a large picture window, a strong wind blowing the leaves in the courtyard away as though they were Martin's capricious good fortune. Isolated from the action, at the whims of forces above and beyond him, caught between a code he can't break and a governmental machine that assumes he can... he's a spectre in his own life, framed and shot like he already doesn't matter. The black-and-white checkered tile that serves as his flooring implies a chess match in which he is but a pawn, which is a clever touch; that the climax sees him locked out of his own home is another. This is sharp stuff.

He never did matter, of course - he was never more than a functionary. His actions only mattered inasmuch as they were extensions of the desires of the State, a State that demonizes a section of the populace to the point where it demands censoring of the Sermon on the Mount. (Again, a clever move - conflating an attack on Judaism with an attack on Christianity.) This attempt inspires an exasperated cry of, "Can that little man do this?" and while the immediate target is the censor, the larger import is evident: can these little men, these tyrannical and terrified little men, do this? And the answer: only if other little, terrified men do nothing to stop it. A bloody handprint on the doorframe of Martin's home signifies his irreversible transition into one of these little men - but where blood on the door was a sign of salvation for the Israelites, here it presages the sickness of Nazi Germany suddenly refusing to pass over Martin's house as a punishment for that whom he did not protect. The final, last-minute twist of the knife is a jaw-dropper of an affirmation: You never know who your inaction is going to hurt - or what response that will inspire.

46: Alien Agenda: Under the Skin (1997, Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Tom Vollman/Ron Ford/Michael Legge)

Owned version: Same 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment that its sister anthology Endangered Species was on.

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

I took less than half a page of notes for Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. By contrast, I nearly filled a whole page for Endangered Species, a film which I reviewed by basically saying, "This all kinda sucks except for the Tim Ritter segment, which has SO MANY GOOFY THINGS IN IT, YOU GUYS." One of my notes reads, "theme song is some Toad the Wet Sprocket-sounding stuff with the refrain, 'Close your eyes and remember the good times / We'll all be dead soon.'" Another reads simply, "mmm, brain salad."

I mention this as a way to say, what the hell is there to say about this movie other than this is barely a movie? If it isn't as bad as the last time I saw Lindenmuth and Vollman team up (Addicted to Murder: Blood Lust), it's not for lack of trying. Vollman's piece is a half-assed crime thriller that burns its first ten minutes on a stubbly, sunglasses-wearing alien supersoldier pursuing, catching and ultimately de-limbing some putz who was late on his gambling debt. This has no bearing on anything - the supersoldier gets pushed to the periphery after this and the newly one-armed schmo disappears entirely - as Vollman instead reveals that his main plot is actually about some other guy, a low-level functionary in a crime family and how he gets caught between the cops, his higher-ups and a new syndicate that is, y'know, aliens in disguise. I cannot fathom the paucity of imagination it takes to be told to write a featurette about an alien invasion and your big idea is, "What if I tried to remake King of New York but in thirty minutes?" If you don't want to make an alien-invasion film, don't sign up for the alien-invasion anthology, chief.

Lindemnuth's, meanwhile, starts with the abduction of a biologist and then turns into... something. There's aliens in disguise and doubles and a chupacabra? As often happens with his films, it feels like Lindenmuth had an idea and didn't develop it very well. Or, maybe it's a case of him having a few ideas - this segment plays in halts and hiccups, like it might actually be several scraps of unfinished shorts precariously pasted together into an inexplicable shape. The sole highlight in this section is a series of abductee interviews, similar to the interviews that opened Endangered Species, but where Ford's broad caricatures (glimpsed briefly here as well, somewhere within the crazy-quilt second half) serve only to grate, these interviews play surprisingly well. The actors declaiming the dialogue are credible, and the way the stories slowly develop is satisfying. These bits were directed by Legge, an under-the radar mainstay of cheapo cinema with a corny yet ingratiatingly morbid sense of humor, and the modest, off-kilter sensibilities these stories display (one involving a man with one arm, another involving an alien with a yen for fast food) make them a refreshing oasis in a desert of inspiration. It doesn't provide the relief that Tim Ritter's segment of Endangered Species does, but we take whatever we can get around here.

45: Alien Agenda: Endangered Species (1998, Ron Ford/Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Gabriel Campisi/Tim Ritter)

Owned version: The 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment featuring both this and 1997's Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. (There's a third film, 1996's Alien Agenda: Out of the Darkness that for whatever reason has been abandoned as VHS-exclusive.)

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Once on October 3rd, 2016 from a VHS I'd picked up previously. (My response was this Letterboxd capsule.) Never from this disc.

Upon a second look, this dismissiveness of that capsule seems, for the most part, appropriate. Ford's contribution, a series of interviews with various folks about the possibility of alien abductions, is negligible, mostly an excuse to open the film with some light shtick (e.g. the skeptical buffoon who pronounces "marijuana" like Mr. Mackey). Lindenmuth's first segment builds a deep conspiracy centered around two warring factions of aliens (the Shape Shifters, who want to coexist with humanity, and the Greys, who want to destroy humanity) and yet somehow comes out the other end as a banal relationship drama, with newscaster Debbie Rochon convinced her boyfriend Joe Zaso is cheating on her. (Zaso is, of course, actually an alien, which should be obvious just by looking at the dude. A unique look, that one.) Campisi's film is an endless series of scenes where its protagonist runs, drives or walks places, occasionally eluding two lumpy guys in black suits, though it does end with some pretty nifty stop-motion animation - essentially a pair of pint-sized ED-209s, but with laser guns that look like dicks. (It also looks significantly cheaper than the rest of the film, having been shot in 1992.) And Lindenmuth pops in to give us a closing segment that doubles, triples and quadruples down on the conspiracy angle to the point where no sense can be made out of the remains (though it has one great joke about the origin of the Greys). So, yeah, all in all, minimum effort. I was right.

........except for the part where I was completely wrong about Ritter's segment. Accrding to the closing credits, it's titled "Ransom," but fuck that - this is Florida Man: The Movie. See doughy Man of Action (and FL zero-budget legend) Joel Wynkoop shank a masked man holding a bazooka! See Wynkoop wander around the abandoned ruins of South Florida (played by some really shabby, run-down part of South Florida, so props to the location manager there) and have morose flashbacks to happier days! See the grafitti that screams WANNA PLAY TRUTH OR DARE? See the cannibal children chowing down on their own dad! See the bit that leads to the actual credit "SPECIAL APPEARANCE by: NATASHA the snake!" (The exclamation point is part of the credit, natch.) See Wynkoop almost drink worms! See the masked man return for a kung-fu battle! See Wynkoop get abducted by a Man in Black who fondles a silver mannequin, eats mystery meat from the neck of a severed head and threatens Wynkoop with the Meltdown Chamber! See the Man in Black tell Wynkoop, "I could have plucked your eyeballs out," right before chomping down on an eyeball! See Wynkoop sneer and snarl and kickbox and just generally do his thing! See the incredible bit where he's attacked by an alligator!

No, really, check this shit out, I can't do it justice:

What else is there to say? Amid the self-seriousness and poorly-mapped conspiracy nonsense, Ritter's overblown macho silliness is so, so welcome. The rest of the film can shrivel and blow away - "Ransom" justifies the myriad other sins this thing has. Sometimes, all you need is a little fun.

44: Alien 2: On Earth (1980, Ciro Ippolito [as "Sam Cromwell"])

Owned version: The 2011 DVD released by Midnight Legacy as their fledgling - and ultimately only - entry into the market. They had big plans, and the subsequent collapse of the label is quite the lesson in hubris and marketing. (Lesson 1: Maybe don't start your label with a bottom-tier obscurity even genre heads aren't crazy about.)

Acquired: April 29th, 2012, from a vendor stationed outside the theater as I was headed into Exhumed Films's eX-Fest, a yearly 12-hour marathon of exploitation films. This was the first and only time I've been able to attend, so it's nice to have this disc as a souvenier.

Seen before?: Once from this disc, on March 4th, 2017 - was at the time researching knockoffs of Alien and Aliens in preparation for an article I never got around to writing.

The title offers a ripoff. The subtitle promises the mythical sequel the franchise proper promised multiple times but never quite got around to making. The film itself... is all of the above and more. Alien 2: On Earth follows a group of young Italians (one of whom has telepathic powers) as they go spelunking in San Diego following a strange incident involving a returning spacecraft and some missing astronauts. Once they leave topside roughly half an hour in, they're on earth but might as well not be for all the available natural light, and this isn't lost on Ippolito. His main directorial trick is to have the intrepid climbers shine their helmets directly into the camera, which is obvious but remarkably effective and surprising in its versatility - he gets looming shadows and lens flares (there's a great one where he frames it so the lens flare stretches directly across the protagonist's eyes as she's trying to telepathically locate a missing member of the party), but he also pushes further, exploiting the enveloping darkness to send them into deep space without leaving the terra firma. Seriously, check these shot of the party about to descend, which looks for all the world like an extreme close-up of a constellation:

Or this subsequent one during the descent:

There's a conscious artistry here that belies the film's status as a low-budget ripoff - this is a film made by people who genuinely wanted to make the best film they could with the materials they had. In the world of Italian genre knockoffs, a world where people like Bruno Mattei and Andrea Bianchi can thrive, that's a refreshing thing to find.

It isn't just tricks of the light, either. The cutting is often functional but can be bluntly effective when the time calls for it, like a cut from an exploding alien rock to the flash of a Polaroid camera, or a quick shock-cut away from a little girl on a beach whose face has been turned into hamburger. (How she's crying with no face-holes left is a mystery, but the shot is kicked away fast enough that we're not left much space to think about that.) And while the cramped setting doesn't allow for much in the way of virtuoso camerawork, there's still the occasional stylistic flourish that catches attention, like the slow tracking shot starting from a rope at a man's feet that goes down the length of a prone woman's body, ending at her head, at which point her face promptly explodes and ejects something slimy.

As the creature emerges, it has one of the lady's eyeballs balanced on its head - a goofy, gross touch that puts this entirely in line with others of its ilk. Past the unique setting and the effective use of it, Ippolito's main stock in trade is enthusiastic, lumpy splatter; while the majority of the shock scenes are confined to the back half of the film, once they arrive, they're pleasingly gnarly. Heads explode, dangling bodies are emptied out, things burst from various fleshy hiding places, people are munched... it's a good time in that peculiar tempura-paint way at which Italian gore films are so skilled. The contrast between the beasts here and the one in its inspiration is interesting - where Giger's monster is sleek perfection, the low-rent cousins we get here are all blood and sinews, moist rubber mounds of tentacles and unidentifiable chunky flesh. If anything, they somewhat resemble a gluey mass of crimson, wavering stalactites, and whether that's a knowing tip of the cap to the setting, a nod towards their origins within mysterious glowing space rocks, both, or neither, it works in its way.

Alien 2 also reveals itself as a product comfortably nestled in a very specific genre/country movement when we get to the end. The missing-astronaut drama, after running as background noise for most of the first act and vanishing completely when they go into the caves, finally dovetails itself into the main story. Ippolito sets the stage tonally within the first thirty minutes - there's a concentration in finding the unsettling in the mundane, in the still darkness of a garage or the too-noisy clatter of a busy bowling alley - and that pays off once the survivors of the underworld fracas finally re-emerge into the light. For all its idiocy and dorkiness (Great Moments in Dialogue: "Where'd I find it? I found it where people find things!"), this carries with it a horror of oblivion and the inevitability of same, something it shares with Zombie and Nightmare City and Inferno and other such fully-limbic contemporaneous works. Once certain wheels have been set in motion, you can only ignore it for so long before it comes for you too.