TUSK

Tusk

Directed by: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Drama, 119min

France, 1980

Alejandro Jodorowsky, man of mystery, man of myth, man of magic. The eighty-five year old Chilean born director has but a half dozen movies to his name, but is still considered to be one of the most daring and original visionaries to ever grace the screen with his images and philosophical narratives.

Lost films. Every director seems to have one. Every fan seems to find it. Tusk was (may still be) Alejandro Jodorowsky’s lost movie. The first time I saw it was off a VHS dupe, not too unlike the one I watched this time around, but this one was obviously a few generations closer to the source and actually had English subtitles. The first viewing all those years ago on a dodgy tape from VSoM – hey there was no Internet back then right! – was perhaps not a fair judgment of Jodorowsky's vision. That time around Tusk failed to leave an impression. I probably only watched that tape once. El Topo and/or The Holy Mountain where more to my liking – and obviously Santa Sangre, but Tusk never really went down well with me. Perhaps because back then I wanted it to be wild and surreal like those other films… Re-visiting it today, it’s fair to say that something’s do change and where I may have missed certain traits that I back then would have said where typical Jodorowsky, they are undoubtedly present in Tusk.

On the same day as plantation owner Morrison’s first child is born, the largest elephant of the herd also gives birth to an elephant cub. It’s the start of two destinies, which will intertwine and depend upon each other for the rest of time, shown clearly as Jodorowsky crosscuts the two deliveries. Plantation owner Morrison [Anton Diffring] is severely disappointed it’s not a boy and turns the child over to one of the female villagers to take care of. His butler acts fast, and returns the infant to it’s still in father… who breaks down, cradles the baby and names her Elise. A few years later Elise (now at age five is played by Oriole Henry) is given an elephant of her own, the elephant Tusk with whom Elise shares her birthday.

Two antagonists (or rather sub-antagonists, as the piece deals with several of them and in various combinations) are introduced into the piece, Shakley [Michel Peyrelon] and Greyson [Serge Merlin, who later starred in several films of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet]…in many ways classical Jodorowsky antagonists, farcical, goofy and filled with slapstick and mime articulations, but also dark and disturbing. They are more the surreal kind of characters that otherwise fill Jodorowsky movies, disturbing facetted fiends swinging between sadistic and moronic. They fart, crack jokes about the stench, smoke Camel hairs, drink till they pass out, but at the same time they are ruthless bounty hunters who will stop a nothing, no matter how fiendish it be to achieve their goal.

Back at the ranch, it’s time to break Tusk and put him to work with all the rest of Morrison’s elephants. The scene is strong, violent and provoking leaving Elise terribly distressed. Morrison tries to reason with his daughter, and delivers the non-comforting explanation that, one day she will understand Tusk cannot be a wild animal, but a worker. Elise hides herself in her room and refuses to eat. When the young Elephant cub starts refusing too the bond is apparent.“So he’s going to die!”  The Village Mystic arrives and Elise is given a false promise of Tusk being “freed”, after which she talks to him and he eats. For the time being all is well, Elise and Tusk lead happy lives but we know otherwise...

Time passes; adult Elise [now played by Cyrille Clair] is about to leave home, travel overseas to England and attend school, briefly illustrated through transitional illustrations. With Elise out of the way for a while, enter Mr Richard Cairn [Christopher Mitchum] a complex character who’s both a fiendish elephant hunter, bit also holds the strong love interest position for Elise’s heart.

Elise returns home from her time abroad, but the celebrations soon come to an end when Ram Baba [T. Venketappa] attacks Samadi [B.N.K. Nagaraj] Tusk’s warden. Tusk [now portrayed by Menoara the elephant], ever the faithful one, looses his and goes off on a min rampage. Luckily Elise steps in right on time and calms down the giant elephant merely seconds before Mr Cairn was going to put a bullet through the beast’s brain. This incident ignites a subplot concerning Ram Baba – now degraded to serving in the cow shed and never to work with Mr Morrison’s elephants ever again – as he demands vengeance on Mr Morrison, Samada and Tusk for this loss of face.

Despite his own elephant escaping and rampaging the countryside, Ram Baba teams up with Shakley and Greyson and hatches a plan to steal Tusk! As she sit’s meditating at a water filled temple, Elise senses Tusk’s kidnapping and runs to him only to be confronted by Ram Baba’s mad elephant…Guess who comes to her rescue –TUSK – cue, elephant fight complete with bloody tearing, gory tusks and dead antagonist elephant! A magnificently wonderful Jodorowsky moment!

In the emotional state after her close call with death, Elise understands that Tusk want’s to be free and pronounces him such. He runs off! But his freedom is short lived as the Eccentric Maharaja’s [Sukumar Anhana] wife wants an ivory necklace made from the tusks of the great warrior elephant, and also requests to drink his blood and steal his power…

The hunt is announced, … Elise is disgusted, but she still takes part in it – and damn does the amazing cinematography by Jean-Jacques Flori, demand a proper release now, as there’s some great stuff here, some stunning shots, as an impressive amount of elephants participate in the climactic hunt. Ram Baba and cohorts have come up with a new plan and that is to snatch Tusk from the massive hunt, as they now realize his value and can use it to make a deal with the maharaja.

Ram Baba with his partners in crime, Shackley and Greyson, plan to snatch Tusk during the hunt, as they know of his value! But the two somewhat comedic characters show their dark side as they lure Samedi up a mountain cliff only to toss him over the edge to his death and then double cross Ram Baba as they sniper shoot him from the mountainside!

Mr Cairn’s get’s to show off his hunting skills as Tusk is snared, held in a giant cage, and the Maharajah’s fiendish wife gets her cup of Tusk blood and Elise is devastated! But no cage is strong enough to hold the mighty Tusk, and after a short struggle, he breaks free and goes on a rampage!

Walls are smashed, busses are tossed over, and Tusk even pushes a train backwards as he makes his stand. The kind of thing that makes us all root for the beast and cheer him on… and cheer him on is what we do for the last twenty minutes of the movie, where Tusk settles scores, rights wrongs and makes the world a better place! Phew… Tusk is very much a Jodorowsky experience, without any doubt in mind!

Based on Poo Lorn L’Elephant by Reginald Campbell and adapted by Nicholas Niciphor, who also served as one of the many co-directors on Deathsport together with Allan Arkush and Roger Corman. The original source material could be interpreted as some kind of critique towards the colonization of India, with elephants and the characters as metaphors for empire and occupied country, although that’s not really the way  I see Jodorowsky using the material. Here it’s put into work as a classical Jodorowsky narrative.

Sandwiched in between The Holy Mountain 1979 and Santa Sangre 1989, Tusk is, as the opening titles declare, “a panic fable” and even though it may not be quite as wild and surreal as some of his work, it is without any doubt a very typical Jodorowsky movie. His common themes of revenge, justice, dark comedy and absurd violence, are all here. Many times a serious scene will end in a laugh, or a comedic scene will end in something serious. Violence will lead to tenderness and tenderness will lead to violence. The classic Jodorowsky magik and surrealism is found too, such as the Indian mystic who can transform himself into a chicken!

Tusk sports a fantastic soundtrack, groovy sitar, fuzz tone guitars, and way weird synthesizer pop, yet another reason why Tusk needs to see a proper release.  Why not a soundtrack re-mastering and re-issue while your'e at it?

There’s a reason why they certain movies become “lost”. At times its due to director negligence. As for Tusk, the movie has slipped into the void after fact that Jodorowsky himself disowned the film due to the politics of meddling producers. When will they ever learn?  In any which way, Tusk certainly is a Jodorowsky movie, and I’d love to see an official release of it. Seriously, not even the bootleg versions one can find have even a decent image, hence the lack of screenshots in this piece. This is one “lost movie” that needs to be rediscovered and presented in a proper release, because at the end of the day there can never be enough Jodorowsky movies out there.

Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasure

Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasure

Original title: A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres

Directed by: Marcelo Motta - (co directed, unaccredited, by José Mojica Marins)

Brazil, 1976

Horror/Surrealism, 81min

After a way to long, but superbly surrealistic, what-the-fucking-fuck opening, crosscutting seductively dancing women dressed in equivoque nightgowns, rhythmic beat club Congo-drumming and screaming shots of naked witches, apes and old wrinkly cronies – all the cheapest possible joke shop masks – this metaphorical stand off between Good and Evil where Coffin Joe stands, resurrected form the dead, yet again! (All of which can be seen in glorious colour below!)

Jose Mojica Marins makes his entrance in his Coffin Joe guise, and he does this for a reason. As customary, he kicks off the movie with some of his trademark philosophical ponderings.

“Live to die or die to live? Is there a correct answer? No! Only doubts! Only deductions. Only the certainty of the emptiness! Loneliness is desperately searching for everything or the nothing in the vastness of the dark. For the answer to this riddle would be the end of the mystery. The end of eternity’s secret, the apogee of happiness, before an accomplished mission because man would be face to face with his biggest conquest, the awakening of the own origin itself.”

Sounds fair right? OK, so his line of thought is not to easy to follow this time around, but you know what, it’s Marins trait, so just listen, take in what you can and who knows, someday you may make a connection or a link or something in what the said may make sense… until then, let’s just roll with it. So far you may be right to presume that this is a Coffin Joe piece, in some ways that’s right, but at the same time, and if you are familiar with his works you will know, that this is the way that most of José Mojica Marins movies start. With some food for thought, an appetizer, a clue to what the theme of the movie will be. Such as his existential ramblings and desire to find a woman fit to birth him a child, as to secure his bloodline, his being, his existence. His mark in time if you want, and definitive traits of the three films that make up the Coffin Joe trilogy: À Mela-noite Levarei Sua Alma (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul) 1964, Esta noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver (This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse) 1967 and the final instalment, Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil) 2008. Other than those films he merely acted as a presenter, a host, a figure of authority for Brazilian genre film in the same way as Alfred Hitchcock presents, perhaps at his finest in the excellent O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Zaixão (Strange World of Coffin Joe) 1968. From here on, as the main narrative starts, Coffin Joe is out of the movie. From here on Marins plays a complete different character, the landlord of the strange hostel of naked pleasure.

From here on we go to a magnificent space model and a series of even more questions, unanswerable questions, before the story kicks in. It’s Friday the 13th, answering an ad in the paper for position as receptionist at a nearby Hostel several people gather with hopes of finding a job. After being hand picked and hypnotized by the Landlord [Marins] the workers are assigned to attending the “Guests” of the Hostel. One by one the guests of the evening drop in. It’s a real rogues gallery and amongst them we find a gambler, an “adulterous” couple, a suicidal man, a seductive con artist, a biker gang with a lust to party, get high, and laid and a bunch of bandits all pack into the hostel and its many rooms, up to the point where the Landlord has to refuse patrons entry to the hostel.

A storm rages outside and finally moral is tested when one of the staff finds a loaded wallet on the floor, but as she stretches out to grab it, it turns into a big terrifying spider. It may be one of the longest build-ups ever, but somewhere around midpoint the biker gang get naked, the adulterous couple start having it off, the gambler makes panic decisions and the bandits start to count their loot!

Well to be honest, the movie really only adds characters to the rooms of the hostel, without any real logic to who the Landlord let’s stay and not. A man who crashes his car get’s out of the wreck and wanders into the lobby. The Landlord rejects him, and despite the man’s stern warning of “Do you not know who I am?” Marins sends him on his way. This tiny of subplots evokes some kind of mini-threat as the man threatens to come back with officials to see to it that the establishment is punished for sending him back out into the rain!

So you have all these patrons going about their business in their respective rooms, shagging, drinking, gambling, wrecking others, and their own, lives… until the clock strikes doom and they are all interrupted, one by one, by the cold hard stare - accompanied by crash edit and screeching audio - of the Landlord, who questions their acts! The suicidal man get’s a second chance after seeing his fate as dead, the con-artist see’s how his ways lead to a deadly triangle, of jealousy and the bandits see how they are shot down in blaze of glory as police gun them down, bikers all have a fatal accident. All of it shown in stylishly surrealism with the most god-awful rendition of Auld Lang Thyme ever warbled out on the soundtrack.

But the real question is… Is the Landlord presenting the guests with foreboding visions of what’s to come, hence giving them the chance to redeem themselves… or is he in fact showing them the terrifying deeds and events that lead them to his little establishment!

Yes, you guessed it right, as so much of José Mojica Marins world; Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasure is all about symbolism and deeper meaning, the fantastic approach to the subject matters taken by Marins. The hostel is as you probably already figured out a metaphor for purgatory. Hardly surprising and a recurrent theme in all the Coffin Joe movies, the vision of what is to come! The visions we see here, are all renditions of what lead the characters to end up in purgatory, or the strange hostel of naked pleasure – because almost everyone there gets naked at one point other. But it’s not all gloom and doom, one patron, Miriam, is saved as the light comes and summons her out of the hostel.  As she steps towards the psychedelic lights, her name vanishes off the Landlords book of souls as she walks out the door accompanied by a really off kilter rendition of Handel’s Hallelujah.  

Finally, the last string to tie it all together, is pulled. The man from the car accident returns to the scene of the crime along with armed police. They exit the vehicle and the man stares confused off screen. “But it was here… I swear it was here…” he blurts as the coppers laugh at his confusion and explain that the old cemetery has always been there.  The landlord fades in as he walks the cemetery and up to the front porch of the hostel. The Vacancy sign appears and we understand that all’s set for the next batch of guests, although the Landlord has one last shocker up his sleeve for us…        

The movie moves at a slow pace, and just like the opening segment, almost every scene goes on for just a tad to long… but it’s Mojica Marins, and for that reason alone it never really gets tedious, as you never know where he’s going to take the next twist of the plot. Because even though it is a terribly thin plot, there is one and it does lead forth. Marins doesn’t get up to much mischief either, he’s just checking people in and shocking the life out of them with his stunning insights… so I can certainly see how people may see this as a rather bland José Mojica Marins movie, but at the same time, there is so much great stuff going on here. Much of the film is classic Marins, with reptiles, insects, fab lighting possibly taping into a Mario Bava-ish prime colours approach, the uncannily “to close close-ups” of Marins unibrowed eyes, super imposed images and a great, great mix of eroticism, horror and surrealism.

Co-writer Rubens F. Luchetti had previously worked with Marins and would again on a few occasions along the road, all of them collaborations with the common denominator that they where something of celluloid quilting’s of fragments held together by the wraparound stories that bookended the movies.

The soundtrack to Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasure sounds like woozy discarded Residents filler, but delightfully catchy and brooding! Marin’s regular cinematographer Giorgio Attilli comes up with some spectacular in-camera effects, blood rain, fire on screen, and that great lighting. There’s spiffy and effective editing! Audio that crashes into the soundtrack like a train wreck, all to that effect as this is most certainly what Mojicas and editor Nilcemar Leyert where after. The edits where intended to shock the audience, and keep them on their feet, which is exactly what they do. Nudity, freaky lighting, insects and reptiles, and open-heart surgery shots and a skull that cries blood in guilt are just some of the sights that José Mojica Marins serves up in this low budget, but at times, highly impressive piece of suggestive surreal horror!

As far as I'm concerned, either you get behind José Mojica Marins visions and support it full-hearted, or you stick to watching ludicrous mainstream generic bullshit and never dare walk the alternative side of genre cinema again. 

VIVA JOSÉ MOJICA MARINS!

Livide

Livide

Directed by: 
Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury

France, 2011

Horror/Drama/Fantasy, 88min

  

It may have been the best thing that ever happened to genre when french duo, famous for the tense and violent, À l'intérieur (Inside) 2007, Bustillo & Maury walked away from that proposed Hellraiser remake, saving them from the abyss of franchise (or reboot) hell. It could also be when they had the balls to ditch the Irish location, with planned English Dialogue version of Livide and simply rode tough through the storm of bureaucracy and cooperate bullshit to make their movie in their own vision. Because at the end of the day, Livide, is a stunningly emotional piece of cinema that taps right into old school gothic, eighties horror, that jaw breaking new wave of French nihilism, and classic European surreal fantasy.

Lucie Klavel [Chloé Coulloud], a young woman with plans to start working as a day nurse, spends her first day at her new job under the guidance of the more experienced Wilson [Catherine Jacob]. After visiting a gallery of patients, she manages to make contact with the one patient that Wilson can’t. The last patient of the day is a comatose woman, Mrs. Jessel [Marie-Claude Pietragalla], who Wilson claims has a treasure hidden away in her large mansion. Later that night, incidentally Halloween night, Lucie tells her hardworking fisherman, but longing for something else, boyfriend William [Félix Moati] of the day and the secret treasure supposedly hidden away in Jessel’s mansion. Together with his brother Ben [Jérémy Kapone], the trio set off to the mansion intent on finding the treasure and getting new start in life. What they find definitely change’s their lives forever.

If I say things like, the atmosphere of Hammer films mixed with the scares of the recent reincarnation of modern horror, the set pieces of Dario Argento, the poetry of Jean Rollin, the surrealism of Jan Svankmeyer and previous violence of Bustillo & Maury, then you should have a pretty good idea of the trip Livide takes it’s audience on. 

           

From here on, spoiler alerts should be announced. I won’t split it wide open, but I will discuss certain moments in the movie, so keep that in mind. I’d prefer you come back after seeing this magnificent flick.

The first fifteen minutes are spent exploring the world and character of Lucie. Lucie is the main character, Lucie is the narrative, Lucie is the movie, establishing her is vital for the magic of Livid. In those first inaugurating minutes, we learn that she’s a sympathetic character through the way she interacts with the patients she and Wilson visit, even communicating with some that Wilson claims to be beyond contact. We later learn of her complicated relationship with her father, a man who only eight months after his wife’s death has chosen to have his new girlfriend move in with him and Lucie. Much to Lucie’s dismay. It’s at this point that we also come to empathize with Lucie, as she talks to the ghost of her dead mother [Beatrice Dalle, in her second film for Bustillo & Maury], and it’s revealed that her mother actually committed suicide. When the “heist” is in motion, Lucie feels regret and tries to halt the mission. She’s also the first to abandon the plan and try to get out of the Jessel mansion. All this gives an insight to Lucie, she’s a good girl – she’s a character with dimension, capable of making wrong and right decisions, doing bad and good, which also makes her more interesting and easier for us to empathize with. Lucie, is simply trying to get by, coping with her mourning, and finding her place in this complex world. A world in which she feels somewhat alienated. But I’ll return to that later on after I set you up for the transformation.

The setting of Halloween night, forebodes the strange events about to come… classic convention tells us that strange things happen on Halloween, serial killers come back to slaughter the few remaining relatives, Goth rock star wannabe’s come back from the grave to avenge murdered love ones, it’s the night of Samhain, and the night of the year when the supernatural and the physical world are the closest and it’s a night when we expect magical things to happen. The borders between the realms become more transparent on Halloween night. I feel that Halloween night is a key to reading Livide, as there’s some strange stuff on the road ahead, which becomes more acceptable with the magic of all hallows eve in mind. 

The film could be split up into three separate parts. The ordinary world, the horror/supernatural world, and the spiritual world. As said earlier, the first act takes time to establish the players. The second is amongst one of the most creepy and atmospherically acts of horror I’ve had the pleasure to watch in a log time. Small quirks and tricks make it an unnerving act that really delivers on the scares, horror and violence. The last act becomes metamorphosis, Halloween where boundaries are transparent and when magical things can happen.

The ordinary world is all about setting up what we need to know about Lucie, as mentioned above, her searching of something new, an alternative to the mournful, lack of respect, world that she lives in. This part works like clockwork. I love Lucie, and later after the transition into the supernatural realm, I want to grab her by the hand and save her from whatever lurks in the Jessel mansion.  The supernatural realm is where ghosts can jump out from the darkness, and in a way they do. Death is all around them. The three friends enter the dark realm of the Jessel’s gothic mansion and pretty soon find themselves confronted by entities of another world. The final act, the supernatural one is where Livide takes a bold step past anything you have ever seen before. This is where it boldly goes into surrealistic territory. Although with an open mind, you will read the movie correctly and will see the poetry of the violence and emotional release that comes through this act. It left me breathless, moved and with tears in my eyes in the same way that Jean Rollin’s La Rose De Fer (Iron Rose) 1973, or La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl) 1982 affects me every time I watch them. 

The movie works through a lot of small incidents that I could easiest compare to Russian babushka dolls. They all open up to reveal something inside, they area all dependent on each other, and they safely store each other within. There is a delicate set up, early on, a call to adventure if we where to use Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler’s terminology. When Wilson understands that she has an ambitious young helper at her side, she test’s Lucie. Seeing Lucie communicate with the old man Wilson has lost all contact with, Wilson comes to an insight. So when she goes up to the Jessel mansion, she sternly tells Lucié to stay in the car. Being eager and curious Lucie obviously follows her up to the house a few minutes later. Classic gothic territory, Lucie wanders the dark creepy mansion, has a few shock moments, and finds the partially mummified, Mrs. Jessel, who’s kept alive by the machines by her bed side. At the side of the machines stands Wilson who praises Lucie's inquisitiveness and stamina. Here Wilson has tricked Lucie into the realm of Mrs. Jessel and continues to lure her further by telling her of the hidden treasure.  Wilson later returns in the break between act two and three, when the ritual is performed. Wilson is an important part of the movie and as mentioned above, she acts as a key between he various act, worlds and also ties the ritual together.

I can’t really talk about the ritual without spoiling the movie, so I’ll try not to, and perhaps mention it more as a metaphor for the change in life that Lucie wants. Also it see’s Jessel reach out for something she has lost. This is obviously a theme frequently used by Jean Rollin, and also why I can emotionally and intellectually connect this movie to his films. But one person’s desire can be another ones fall, and this dark twist works on several levels, watching the film a second time before sitting down to write this, I can feel that the movie becomes darker in it’s final act than I first thought it did, and despite the gut-wrenching atrocities we take part of, there is some form of poetic justice served.

There’s a lot of hidden symbolism in Livide, and several other reviews chose to compare the movie to Alice in Wonderland. I don’t really see that, as there’s only one clear referent to Alice in Wonderland, and that’s a demented tea party. At the same time, with the grotesqueness of the taxidermy and other oddities that make up the tea party, I choose to read this moment as a loss of childhood instead. A moment caught in time, preserved for all eternity, which when you see the movie will make perfect sense. Livide is riddled with detail and visually it's an amazing movie. I can't wait to lay my hands on a high def version of this film.

Livide contains at least two nods at Dario Argento’s Suspiria 1977. Both are perfect homages, and this is the correct way to do homages, not by naming characters after your favourite directors, but intelligently connecting one movie to another hence creating a bond between them. As soon as I saw the nod, I had an insight that Jessel was much more than the character we’d been shown so far. That moment is a stroke of genius in my opinion.

Baxter’s opening montage set’s not only a tone for the movie, but also recaps the movie in short, as there are several hidden keys in the images shown. The beach – If nothing else a homage to the late Jean Rollin and his long time fixation with returning to the beach of his childhood - but also a foreboding, and a key to understanding the moths of the movie. A moth figures in this opening montage, and although you don’t realize it at this point, the moth is a metaphor for the human soul.

The Second series of Jean Rollin evoking images are the lingering shots of the cemetery, and the image put in focus in the cemetery is Jesus Christ who just like Lazarus returned from the dead… Keep this in mind when you reach the last act, as this is significant. The final shots of the opening montage, right before we are introduced to Lucie, shows “missing” children signs. Apparently a large amount of children have gone missing in the village, and we will know why as the movie climaxes. At the end of the movie these initial images generate a terrifying rush of insight. What we have witnessed was not the first time the nocturnal rituals at the Jessel Mansion have been performed…

If there was one last piece of guidance I could offer to help you read this phenomenal movie, I'd say that you shoyuld think of Jessel and Lucie as polarized opposites. Look at their individual journeys through the movie and the reunification they both long for and you will see, at least one way of how to interpret the film.

With out doubt, a future landmark of European genre cinema, Livide is a daring movie, one of the most surreal and inventive this decade. It challenges its audience to take it’s trip through a visual cabinet of odd curiosities, demanding narrative and may just be the most poetic time you can have being scared! Livide is now one of my favorite contemporary pieces of genre cinema and I'm allready dying to return to it as I write. Luckily it's soon to get it's Scandinavian release from the good people NjutaFilms.

Philosophy of a Knife

Philosophy of a Knife [QuickFix]

Directed by: Andrey Iskanov

Russia/USA, 2008

Drama/ Documentary, 249min

A documentation of war crime atrocities conducted by Japanese Unit 731 during the Second World War. A harrowing brew of archival footage, re-enactments and interviews with Anatoly Protasov, who was a former doctor/ military translator at the trials of the U731 doctors in Khabarovsk, USSR at the end of WWII.

Phew, prepare yourself to be mangled by the steamroller of malevolence, because Philosophy of a Knife is the Ben Hur of extreme cinema!  An epic piece of work, that drains its audience with almost four and a half hours of grotesque but captivating study of the legendary Unit 731.

Crafted through interviews, archive footage and reconstructions, Andrey Iskanov’s joyride of atrocities beats the shit out of any History Chanel documentary ever. This is the ultimate history of Unit 731, the Japanese research facility that conducted chemical and biological experiments on prisoners of war, from the early days, to their exposure and trial after the war. I can’t argue the accuracy of the Protasov interviews, but that old man has an aura of authenticity which definitely set’s up a level of realism which totally sells me the coming scenes of archival footage the often lead up to the brutalities to be re-enacted. What makes this such an overwhelming and powerful trip is the way Iskanov brings his Art-house-surrealistic touch to the realm of tortures and death. Even in the midst of the most grotesque of moments, there’s an aesthetic that propels the onscreen monstrosities deeper into the mind. Rapid edits, loud music, re-enactments cut against real footage and archival material creates juxtaposition from hell, and it becomes a test of endurance.

There’s a decent enough idea behind the movie, as Iskanov claims in his introduction that he wanted to show the events from the Japanese side and the morale dilemma that came with working there. This is obvious through the subplots found in each part of the two part movie, concerning a young nurse [Yukari Fujimoto] and her letters to those at home – who’s voice is performed by Manoush, German actress/singer/writer who also holds an important part in Marc Rohnstock’s Necronos: The Tower of Doom 2010 – and in the second part where a young officer [Tetusro Sakagami] finds himself conflicted between his emotions for a Russian female prisoner [Elena Poboatova] whist in the service of the Emperor, torturing people for a superior purpose.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it’s the sleaze, the gore, the violence of the special effects (or what is shown, I’ll never look at cockroaches in the same way ever again) that one comes to this movie for. Sure the history lesson is tantalizing, but it becomes a competition of comparison to the Men Behind the Sun films from the 80-90's. Iskanov pulls it off with bravura, giving new takes on classic scenes and bringing some even more disturbing stuff with him. Fuck The Human Centipede, this is four hours plus of medical accuracy, and let’s just say that the effects are gag-inducing.

The audioscape of this thing is amazing, there is no sound effect left unused as Iskanov pushes his nightmarish images to a further level with noises and industrial music that could compete with a Merzbow concert.

I guess the thing that attracts audiences the most with Philosophy of a Knife and the Men Behind the Sun movie, is the basic fact that these are all real atrocities which where performed on real people. The Evil that mankind does holds a strong macabre fascination for us all in our daily struggle with the fact that we are all going to die one day. In the safety of our TV couch it’s easy to gloat upon the carnage, but never forget that this is telling you a real story, and the morale debate on doing wrong for a good cause is a fascinating one. I often toy with the idea, what if Unit 371, or even the Nazi WW2 human experiments had come up with a life-altering discovery? How would this affect our otherwise polarized judgement on the matter?

Philosophy of a Knife get’s 6/6, and that’s for the approach to the subject matter and sheer enormity of this movie. Although there are some minor flaws, which in all honesty would be like complaining about the tan marks on the nuns in eighties nunsploitation flicks, or sock marks on nude inmates in WI.P films, the film is still totally worth the full house. Damn, four hours plus of vile grimness, interwoven with an important historic story. This is potent stuff. Just after Iskanov had completed postproduction, and had shipped his cut/footage to US for the DVD release, he was obtained by the FSB - that’s KGB to you and me mate! His computer and materials where seized and he was continuously interrogated on the source and extent of his research. After being held captive in a military base prison cell for five days, Iskanov was released with little of his materials or computers given back. I’d would have written it up as a genius marketing gimmick if I didn’t know that, one of the ballsiest Swedish movie distributors, have been trying to get this movie out for over a year now. More than one hard drive has been seized by officials on the way between Iskanov and the distributor. Or the fact that the box of discs I once sent my mate Alex in Russia, never arrived at his place either! One wonders what they where afraid Iskanov may have found…?

I forbid you to call yourself a fan of extreme cinema until you’ve sat through the full 249 minutes of Philosophy of a Knife.