Begotten (1991)

So this is what the director of Shadow of the Vampire did when he was young.

The official story here is this: God kills himself slowly with a razor and gives birth to Mother Earth who impregnates herself with his seed to give birth to a son. Other things happen.

But the truth is: You absolutely do not have to use this interpretation of the film. Like with much of really out there art, its creator's interpretation isn't better than your own.

Shot in high contrast black and white without speech but with a disconcerting soundtrack of noises and darkened ambient, Begotten looks influenced by expressionist silent movies, David Lynch, surrealism and God knows what else, yet it effortlessly creates a disconcerting voice of its own out of its influences.

The experience watching this is a lot like watching the base myth of some kind of ritual one of Lovecraft's pre-human races might have practiced. If it's a ritual of creation or destruction or both isn't quite clear. It is also possible that we are witnessing an apocalypse and the following re-birth of life, told by the way of a nightmare.

It's very much like looking into a place somewhere else where time and space don't follow the same rules as they do here, although there still remain enough parallels to our world to make all that we're watching supremely discomforting.

 

Technorati-Tags: e. elias merhige,experimental,american movies,reviews,the very weird

Satan's Black Wedding (1975)

A young woman (who knows who plays her?) has weird dreams that seem to drive her into cutting up her arms and moaning. While a very hairy mustache-wearer with cheap plastic fangs looks on, she dies of her wounds.

We now learn that she is the sister of a young actor called Mark (Greg Braddock, looking for all the world like someone who mistakenly thinks he looks like Elvis himself). What do you know, the priest on her funeral is the same guy we saw earlier on!

When Mark arrives back at the home of his sister, a cop tells him that her supposed suicide was not a suicide at all, but something much darker and stranger. Her body was found bloodless and missing a finger (how exactly this was ruled a suicide is beyond me, but what do I know of police work?). Next, we are in a dark and dank crypt, where Dakin, the priest, mumbles the usual stuff about Satan to make the sister's first minutes as a vampire as unpleasant as possible. He also informs us (she does know this already, so that's very nice of him) that it is her first duty to kill all her living relatives to "fulfill the satanic covenant" or something like that.

As luck would have it, Mark is just visiting their sick aunt. He is not just concerned about her health, he wants to ask her if she knows where the manuscript of the novel his sister was working could be found. She has it and hands him his very own copy.

He goes back home to read it. Now a very strange phenomenon occurs. We see him at home, reading the manuscript by daylight, intercut with his dear sister slaughtering auntie and her maid (which takes the definition of family quite far, thank you very much) by night. It must be a time paradoxon.

Let's make the rest of the film short: Mark meets his ex-girlfriend, who helped his sister write the book, they leave town to escape being killed, have sex, are being watched by sis. Mark leaves ex-girlfriend alone to do whatever, cop has fun in the crypt, sis vamps ex-girlfriend, ex-girlfriend leads Mark into a trap, vampires hunt Mark, Satan marries vampire-sis and zombie-Mark to produce a child. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Ah, Mid-Seventies inadvertent anti-realism, how I love you! There is not much that is more beautiful than the strange transformation of pure incompetence into a kind of parallel cinema of the slightly demented mind.

Satan's Black Wedding has all the hallmarks of its special sub-genre: The seemingly drugged, completely (e)motionless zombie-like acting; camera set-ups that stay static as much as possible - moving the camera around is awfully costly, after all; the cut and the slightly skewed camera angle as main feature of visual style; a happy ignorance of continuity that sometimes transcends the concept of continuity itself and becomes what I like to call anti-continuity (see also: anti-life equation, the); a script full of the wrong transitions, non-sequiturs and lacking a semblance of logic.

All this and more many-named director Nick Millard achieves absolutely effortlessly. What develops (slowly, oh so very slowly) is a special and precious film, absolutely hypnotic in its own way and of the beauty one can find only in movies and junkyards.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,the very weird,reviews