5.22pm
I should now be enjoying the end of Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love, Juvenile A over at Ambrosio cinema (about 15 minutes' walk from the main festival centre, where I'm writing these notes) - but I'm not, because the Miike was delayed 20 minutes meaning I had to choose between that and another Japanese picture, horror-movie The Curse (which sounds promisingly like a far-eastern variation on The Wicker Man), starting at 6pm at the Massimo cinema (very close by). I'm keener to see the Miike, but will get other chances at other festivals, whereas this might perhaps be my only chance to see The Curse.
Unfortunate that I had to make such a choice, but these things happen at festivals. Torino does seem a bit prone to hitches and glitches: this morning's sold-out screening of Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly started in silence, ran for a couple of minutes before the projectionist heard the whistling coming from the assembled public and the picture was hastily yanked off screen. It started again soon after, thankfully. I must have seen it at least three or four times on television over the years, but never before on the big screen. And I have to say that, while it's a pretty good thriller - which veers audaciously entertainingly towards sci-fi in the final reel - it wasn't quite the classic I'd remembered and had been expecting.
Picture is a tough private-eye story about Los Angeles divorce-case specialist ("bedroom dick") Mike Hammer, a slug-happy goon played with impressively brutal ferocity by a swaggering, top-heavy, suitably goonish Ralph Meeker. Meeker's performance is probably the best thing about the picture, but the script has numerous dead spots around the middle and the whole thing feels much longer than its 103 minutes. The famously apocalyptic ending still packs quite a punch, however, and Aldrich inserts all manner of oddballs and eccentrics along the way as Hammer blunderbusses his way through various seedy LA locales. Of the six Aldriches I've seen here so far, I'd slot Kiss Me Deadly in just behind yesterday's opener, Attack.
Worst of the half-dozen is the one I caught after Kiss Me Deadly today, namely Hollywood melodrama The Big Knife which stars the late Jack Palance (died Thursday) as big-time movie-star Charlie Castle. The opening titles unfold over an extended shot of a tormented Castle with his head in his hands, which proceeds to messily fragment: a pretty prosaic way to tell us what we're going to witness over the course of the next couple of hours is the story of one man's crackup. Castle's marriage (to Ida Lupino's Marion) is hanging by a thread; he's fed up with his career, and is stuck at a painful crossroads with his long-time producer (Rod Steiger) hounding him to sign a lucrative but restrictive seven-year contract. The travails of the Bel Air wealthy aren't a natural subject for audience sympathy at any time - as somebody remarks, Castle's existential crisis is sparked by a piece of paper that'll give him financial security for most of the next decade: there are many worse fates.
Palance turns in a convincing portrait of a haunted, fundamentally weak individual who's not very much like the tough-guy characters he (and Palace) are famous for portraying on the screen. But the picture, adapted from Clifford Odets' play, has a deadeningly talky, stagey feel, and is hamstrung by some wildly verbose slabs of dialogue (Castle is described more than once as "the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope") which sound even more windy and cumbersome fifty years on. Steiger's hammy turn might have fitted better if the whole thing had been milked for its camp value, but The Big Knife takes itself ever so seriously from gloomy opening to melodramatic finale. A rather taxing, wearing way to spend two hours on a sunny Torino afternoon...
Monday 13th, 12.39pm
Turns out I cocked up a bit by opting for The Curse over Miike's Big Bang Love (which, perhaps infected by memories of Brothers of the Head, I keep calling Bang Bang Love). The Mess would be a more suitable title for KOJI Shiraishi's unwieldy slice of semi-jokey J-horror which bemused the audience at the sold-out 6pm screening in Greenwich Village's screen 3 - or at least, those of whom who didn't walk out before the end of the first reel.
Problem was strictly technical: screen 3 at the GV has the tiniest of "rakes" (rake = slope of floor, enabling all viewers to see screen rather than the heads of the patrons in front of them), meaning the Italian subtitles - projected onto an oblong area beneath the image - were pretty much illegible for everyone sitting more than a row or two back.
Those who exited early didn't really miss all that much: picture mainly consists of a feature-length documentary taped by TV supernatural-investigator Kobayashi before his mysterious disappearance a couple of years back. Result is a series of shortish episodes, some played for laughs (spoofs of garish Japanese "variety" programmes), most aiming (with variable accuracy) for a chillier effect.
Investigation begins with reports of ghostly children's voices being heard in an apartment; evidence points to a frosty, aggressive neighbour who promptly moves on, leaving a trail of death in her wake. 'Case' turns out to pivot on a psychically-gifted young girl, kidnapped for the purposes of a mysterious, age-old 'demon ritual' which was last performed in a rural village since obliterated to make way for a dammed lake.
Director Koji achieves some moments of unsettling spookiness here and there (most of them featuring those innocuous creatures, pigeons) and the climactic 'reveal' features a suitably nasty and nightmarish image. But his approach is stymied by the lack of focus and structure in his screenplay: Kobayashi's documentary dots us around from place to place and person to person, and we quickly losing track of who's alive, who's dead, and how it's all supposed to fit together.
It also doesn't help that he's rather blatant about his "borrowings": an extended sequence late on (in which a ruined shrine is located in an eerie forest) is ripped off from The Blair Witch Project, with much hand-held footage as the cameraman runs through the woods; the ominous score often sounds, meanwhile, like a nearly note-perfect copy of Ennio Morricone's distinctive themes from John Carpenter's Nigel Kneale homage, Prince of Darkness.
Kneale might have approved of the way Koji fills us in on the backstory - various ancient scrolls are consulted and deciphered in out-of-the-way libraries - but the story-development features none of the piercing anthropological ingenuity that was the hallmark of the recently-deceased Manx magus. Though seemingly made with at least one eye on the international market, The Curse - which overstays its welcome with an unnecessarily complicated and increasingly absurd final act - seems most unlikely to attract the success and Stateside remake visited upon the film which should really have borne its English-language title, namely SHIMIZU Takashi's The Grudge.
The evening picked up after dinner, with a double-bill from the US pay-TV series Masters of Horror, introduced in person by the directors Dario Argento (whose Suspiria is in my all-time top three) and John Landis. Though initially daunted and dispirited by the enormous queues outside the Massimo cinema for the 10.15pm screening (which had materialised while I'd been down the street having a much-needed dinner) me and a fellow British-resident critic somehow managed to fluke and finagle our way past security and thus were able to witness the crowd's wild adulation for Argento (who has made his last half-dozen films in the city, and is shooting here at the moment) and, to only a slightly lesser degree, the ever-genial Landis.
The pair appeared at the front of the auditorium before the screening and seemed to be having as good a time at the audience: when he was seated, Argento was surrounded by adoring fans taking photos with cameras and mobile phones, and generally treating him like he was the Pope and Torino was his Vatican.
When his film Pelts began his "directed by" title-card was met with vigorous applause, repeated after each of the picture's numerous gross-out moments: at such points I'd turn in my seat to check out Argento's reaction and he was clearly delighted to be among such an appreciative and vocal crowd. The (55-minute) film itself is an enjoyably grisly bit of grand guignol, featuring Meat Loaf (billed under his nom d'ecran of Meat Loaf Aday) as a crude, sex-obsessed furrier who gets his hands on some remarkable raccoon pelts - which turn out to have supernatural properties, inspiring all those who come into contact with them into acts of stomach-churning homicide and self-harm.
Gleefully nasty and suitably scuzzy, Pelts features a recognisably Argento-ish synth-heavy score from his longtime collaborator Claudio Simonetti and, while not a patch on his 'golden years' stuff (nor last year's Masters of Horror segment by Joe Dante, the delirious political satire Homecoming), it delivered more than enough to keep the gore-hungry crowd fully sated, with an especially amusing (and weird) 'explanatory' backstory delivered by a toothless, English-sounding crone.
Meat Loaf isn't anybody's idea of a Brando (or a Depardieu), but his casting was particularly apposite here: a gruesome bit of self-surgery later on enables us to see several "slices" of this particular Loaf, while his character's fixation on anal sex can be read as a sly allusion to the one of the more popular readings of his mega-hit "I Would Do Anything For Love... (But I Won't Do That.)"
The rolling of Pelts' end credits featured more frenzied applause and whooping, Dario leaping gamely to his feet to milk the good-will in tongue-in-cheek theatrical fashion. There was a distinct 'follow that' vibe in the air, and - perhaps inevitably - Landis's Family (a much less gory, more political/satirical/psychological exercise) didn't quite reap the same thunderous response.
It stars George Wendt as Harold, a mild-mannered suburbia-dwelling bachelor with a dark secret (revealed to the audience in the first few minutes): a schizophrenic psychopath, he has made his own 'family' via homicidal methods which include an acid bath tucked away in his cellar. When a friendly young couple moves into the house opposite, it isn't long before Harold is planning to replace his 'wife' with a newer model...
True to the short-story tradition (of which these TV works are an indirect descendant), Family culminates with a very neat, ironic-reversal twist which does manage to catch the audience pretty much off-guard. But in the end, despite aiming rather higher than Argento's down-and-dirty schlock-fest, Landis's 'segment' ends up more uneven and thematically troubling.
The teleplay is by Brent Hanley, who also wrote Bill Paxton's remarkable feature Frailty (2002), a much more successful attempt to make us see from a monstrous, distorted perspective. Though privy to Harold's "conversations" with his skeletal famly, we never really feel as though we're totally inside Harold's delusions - and Wendt is occasionally guilty of playing him as too sinister a heavy.
The political 'subtexts' are likewise delivered jokily unsubtle style, as with the oft-repeated gag of George listening to rousing Christian-devotional anthems when he's down in his cellar pouring the acid over the corpse of his latest victim. Horror often does feature much humour - but here Landis doesn't quite get the balance right, with the result that the more serious aspects of Hanley's story (specifically the fate of the young couple's deceased child) end up feeling somewhat incongruous. And though in theory a satire on reactionary 'family-values' politics (one of the first things we see in Harold's home is a framed picture of a smiling Dick Cheney) - in the tradition of eighties picture like The Stepfather and Parents - the film's conclusion does feel uncomfortably like an endorsement of revenge-inspired, eye-for-an-eye vigilante justice.
Ghoulishly morbid rather than especially creepy, tense or scary, Family is a reasonably watchable diversion for an hour but wasn't done many favours by being projected on such a big screen. It should perhaps have been scheduled before its accompanying picture Pelts - but then again Dario (who made an early exit) does have another movie to shoot...
Neil Young
12th/13th November, 2006
Kiss Me Deadly : [7/10] : US 1955 : Robert ALDRICH : 103m (timed) : seen at Greenwich Village cinema
The Big Knife : [4/10] : US 1955 : Robert ALDRICH :103m (timed) : Greenwich Village
The Curse : [5/10] : Noroi : Japan 2006 : KOJI Shiraishi : 110m (timed) : Greenwich Village
Masters of Horror 2 - Pelts : [TV 6/10] : USA 2006 : Dario ARGENTO : 56m (timed) : Massimo
Masters of Horror 2 - Family : [TV 5/10] : USA 2006 : John LANDIS : 55m (timed) : Massimo
Jigsaw Lounge 2006 Torino Film Festival coverage : index page
official site...
disregard all below this line - we got a glitch
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