Exploito All’Italiana: Delirium: The Photos of Gioia (Lamberto Bava, 1987)

As a lover of the irrational in cinema, it saddens me to report that one of the most delirious things about this late period giallo opus from Lamberto Bava is probably its name. First off, this ‘Delirium’ should definitely not to be confused with Renato Polselli’s more comprehensively delirious 1972 ‘Delirium’, nor indeed the 1979 American horror film of the same name. And, if you’re thinking, hang on, pictures of what? Well, ‘Gioia’ is the Italian version of ‘Gloria’, which is the name of the central character in the English dub under review here, so, there you go; it’s not just a poster typo that stuck, although quite why the title wasn’t anglicised to match the dub heard in English territories is anyone’s guess. (1)

So, having got that out of the way, let’s crack on and see what kind of enjoyment we can wring from the younger Bava’s attempt to sew up elements of Argento, De Palma and indeed his father’s own ‘Blood & Black Lace’ (1964) into a kind of crudely assembled Ultimate Giallo, telling the can’t-miss tale of Gloria, the excruciatingly rich and tasteless publisher of a soft porn/fashion magazine named ‘Pussycat’, and of a vengeful killer stalking and murdering the models in her employ.

As you might well have anticipated, ‘Delirium’ is first and foremost a veritable riot of out-of-control ‘80s kitsch. The film’s visuals immediately recall the slick, hyper-real fantasias of Argento and Michele Soavi’s ‘80s films, whilst the fetishised, Helmut Newton-esque fashion / photography milieu that provides much of the local colour seems like a direct homage to ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars’ (1978), executed here with a level of garish, exploitative tackiness that makes Irwin Kirshner’s film look like a model of taste and restraint in comparison.

This aesthetic is carried over wholesale into the movie’s shamelessly prurient stylised murder sequences, and, needless to say, the wardrobe and hair-styling throughout must be seen to be believed, whilst the displays of conspicuous consumption highlighted in the production design are such that the characters may as well be lounging around on furniture made of gold doubloons.

Another thing viewers will soon note is that lead actress Serena Grandi has unsettlingly large breasts. Not the cool, Russ Meyer / Tura Satana kind of large breasts, but the kind that look out of proportion with the rest of her body and tend to make you worry about the terrible back pain she must be suffering.

Realising it is his solemn duty to exploit these assets appropriately, Lamberto does so not just via a ludicrous climax that sees Gloria going one-on-one with the killer whilst wearing Victoria’s Secrets-style lingerie, and also through the means of a sub-plot in which she reignites her love affair with a jobbing actor, aptly played by the ubiquitous George Eastman. In a delightful touch, Eastman is introduced whilst in costume for some kind of barbarian movie his character is appearing in. [I’ll put money on the fact that this actually WAS his costume from Ruggero Deodato’s ‘The Barbarians’, released the same year].

Grandi and Eastman’s passionate-in-inverted-commas jacuzzi love scene is… quite the thing, proving beyond doubt that wherever the younger Bava’s talents lay, it was certainly not in the arena of eroticism.

During ‘Delirium’, I wasn’t overly troubled by the notion that Grandi might be a gifted actress, but, in fairness, IMDB reveals that she has over fifty credits in theatrically released Italian pictures across four decades, so she must be doing something right. Perhaps it was just the combination of a distinctly iffy English dub and general tone of OTT melodrama that torpedoed her here, who knows.

Happily though, Grandi is flanked by a battalion of familiar faces in the supporting cast, including Daria Nicolodi (brilliant as ever, making comical “shifty eyes” faces behind the backs of the cops as they question her about the murders), David Brandon (whom you’ll recall as the outrageously camp English theatre director in Soavi’s ‘Stage Fright’ (1987), here expanding his range to include an outrageously camp English photographer), and ‘60s starlet Capucine, who puts in a great turn as Gloria’s embittered former mentor/rival magazine publisher (red herring much?), retaining about as much dignity as is humanly possible in a movie like this.

In order to differentiate his product from the legions of other “beautiful fashion models get butchered” titles competing for our attention across the decades, Lamberto’s principal gimmick in ‘Delirium’ involves shooting the murder scenes as heavily-tinted subjective sequences giving us the POV of the murderer. Nothing out of the ordinary there, I’ll grant you, BUT it seems that this killer’s ill-defined paranoid schizo tendencies cause him/her to see his/her photogenic victims as rubber-faced monsters of one kind or another, thus instigating ‘Delirium’s sole claim toward delirium.

The first time this happens – with fluorescent gel lighting flashing crazily as a model we just saw leaving a late night soiree in Gloria’s villa suddenly walks on-screen with a giant prosthetic eyeball head, shortly before she is impaled by a pitchfork – is genuinely pretty crazy; an authentic WTF highlight that momentarily justifies the movie’s title.

This is only topped by the second – even more distasteful - murder sequence, in which the killer visualises his showering victim with a compound-eyed aphid head. Overpowering her, s/he subsequently slathers his/her victim in what appears to be honey, before unleashing… a shoebox full of bees! (It was the shoebox that cracked me up.) Presumably an attempt to capitalise on ‘Phenomena’s (far superior) insect effects a few years earlier, this is all utterly inexplicable, and just as grotesquely daft as it sounds. (2)

As if all that weren’t enough to keep us busy, we’ve also got a peculiar sub-plot involving a wheelchair-bound teenager who spends his time spying on the kinky goings-on around Gloria’s pool and making obscene phone calls to her, but hey, it’s ok, he’s a good kid really. Beginning as an obligatory Hitchcock nod, developments here take a pretty weird diversion in the second half of the film, when it is revealed that wheelchair boy’s incapacity is a self-inflicted psychological condition resulting from the guilt he feels for the car crash that killed his fiancée. For a few moments there, ‘Delirium’ seems as if it’s about to turn into some ‘General Hospital’ tearjerker, and… I have no idea why any of this ended up in the movie to be honest, but hey – at least it’s unexpected.

Also worthy of note, we have another reliably banging, synth-drum heavy score from Simon Boswell, and a wonderful ‘Pieces’-esque moment in which a cop investigating the first murder presents his superior officer with a blood-free pitchfork, announcing “I found this in the tool shed” before the latter stares quizzically at him for a few seconds, then orders him to “get it to the lab, for testing!” (Ah, small pleasures).

Now, by this point, you’re probably thinking that ‘Delirium: The Photos of Gioia’ is shaping up to be one of the greatest Euro-trash horror films of the 1980s. How can it not be? Well, I don’t have any easy answer for you, but let’s put it this way: one of the great unsolved mysteries of European genre cinema must be: given the lengths it clearly goes to to please the kind of people who’d want to watch a film like this in the first place, how come ‘Delirium’ is basically just not that much fun to watch?

It’s a puzzler alright, but for Exhibit A I’ll put the following proposition to you. Given that Lamberto Bava’s ‘greatest hits’ as a director (the two ‘Demons’ films) provide a veritable blueprint for dispensing with exposition entirely and making horror movies that go off like rockets, it is ironic that, whenever he ventured into thriller/giallo territory, his films tended to suffer from serious pacing issues.

Essentially I think, whilst Lamberto can handle the action/exploitation stuff like a pro, he has no feel for either building tension or developing believable character interactions, and when doing so becomes necessary, he is apt to flounder.

Furthermore, for a film named ‘Delirium’, plotting here is disappointingly mundane. The nature of the killer’s monster delusions is never really expanded upon (indeed, this whole device is dropped in the movie’s second half), and things culminate with the kind of crushingly inconsequential “oh, it was… that guy” type resolution that has long been the hallmark of inferior gialli.

With no real surprises or innovations, the film’s 95 minute run time feels pretty gruelling, with toe-curlingly awkward, repetitious dialogue, highly variable performances and ill-motivated corridor wandering eventually reducing it to a painful crawl to the finish line, in spite of the myriad bells and whistles I’ve outlined above.

And for Exhibit B meanwhile… again, I’m not entirely sure how to put this, but there is a certain lack of charm to ‘Delirium’ that makes me reluctant to give it the same breaks I’ve accorded many of the other films I’ve reviewed in this Exploito All’Italiana strand.

By 1987, I suppose things were getting pretty far down the line towards po-mo self-awareness and the kind of “so-bad-it’s-good” mentality that led many cult filmmakers to creative penury during the dark days of the ‘90s. In this respect, the scenes of monster-headed weirdness in ‘Delirium’ feel contrived – knowingly silly - where, just a few years earlier, more genuinely unhinged filmmakers like Lenzi or Polselli would likely have thrown them in entirely in earnest.

It feels as if Bava was sufficiently canny to know exactly what he was doing with the various cultural reference points and commercial necessities spliced into this picture, but was not smart enough to really justify them or put them to any interesting use. Instead, the film veers toward a cynical, camp sensibility that never feels entirely satisfactory, light years away from the simple, derivative charm of pictures like Sergio Martino’s ‘Hands of Steel’ (1986) or Bava’s own Blastfighter (1984). It’s a fine line perhaps, but Clever-Stupid can make for a good time - Stupid-Clever not so much.

Just a few months ago, we were looking at a Lamberto Bava film – Graveyard Disturbance – that crashed and burned as a result of its total failure to fulfil audience expectations of a horror movie. It is curious therefore to reflect on the way that ‘Delirium’ ostensibly delivers in spades on everything an inebriated Euro-cult fan could possibly wish for, yet still somehow comes up empty-handed. What can I say - It’s a funny old game, isn’t it?

It’s not that ‘Delirium’ isn’t worth watching at some point if this kind of thing floats yr boat. On the contrary, it’s loaded with stuff to make you grin and chuckle and gasp, right on cue. But, just as in the world of empty ‘80s narcissism that the film purports to critique in some vague, five-degrees-removed type fashion, those grins, chuckles and gasps will feel hollow and fleeting, where once they ran deep and rich.

(1) For the record, IMDB currently lists upward of twenty feature films with the name ‘Delirium’ – mostly indie horror efforts released during the 21st century, although there’s also a Spanish ‘Delirium’ from 1983, a 1997 Filipino one, and most intriguingly, a 1965 Iranian horror movie that also shares the name. Now that I’d like to see!

(2) We need to acknowledge at this point that ‘Delirium’ is about as shamelessly misogynistic as these things get, but c’mon. If you’ve made it past the poster art and plot synopsis, you should be prepared for that. You might as well criticise a bulldog for drooling. Should you wish to mount a defence of the film on these grounds, I suppose you could point to both Nicolodi and Capucine as strong/interesting female characters who are never overtly sexualised, and perhaps even make a tenuous claim that the film’s camp sensibility pushes its leering depictions of eroticised violence into a guilt-free queer/po-mo context. But, I’m not going to make these arguments – in fact I’m going to drop the issue right there. ‘Delirium’ is gloriously indefensible rubbish, and I’m happy to enjoy it as such.

Sweater off / Dead: A ‘Bloody Moon’ Fashion Show.

Stylistically speaking, I think it could well be said that Jess Franco never really DID the 1980s. Sure, he made a lot of films in the 1980s, but in purely aesthetic terms, he never really seems to embraced the bold new era as much as we might have hoped.

Visually, much of his output during the ‘80s seems to resemble a nostalgic hangover for the jet-setting Mediterranean excesses of his ‘70s work, and more often than not, ventures toward more contemporary stylings were characterised less by directorial vision than by a sense of sad, budget-necessitated randomness that inevitably veered towards the less tolerable end of the decade’s cultural legacy (Princess Di haircuts, spandex shorts, slap bass, etc).

Perhaps due to the contribution of some outside costume/design staff and a (slightly) higher budget than usual though, ‘Bloody Moon’ stands out as a glorious exception – a film in which the man who brought us the visual delights of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ and ‘The Girl From Rio’ can truly be seen to be adapting his sartorial passions to the era of leg-warmers, ill-fitting cowboy boots and above all, SWEATERS. (Or “jumpers” as we call them in this part of the world, but in keeping with the trans-atlantic nomenclature of the movie in question, we’ll go with “sweaters”.)

The results, needless to say, are frequently a thing of beauty. So, to further elucidate this point whilst also hopefully providing a few moments of light-weight net-pleasure to all you bored wage slaves out there patiently awaiting my next 4,000 word opus on some sleazy, forgotten horror film, here are six of the best fashion moments from this unique motion picture.

6.

Nadja Gerganoff may be no Lina Romay, but she does at least seem to have picked up a sliver of Lina’s sartorial boldness vis-à-vis her decision to go out in public dressed like this.

5.

Believe it or not, this little number is only the third best sweater in ‘Bloody Moon’. At one point in the film, we learn that Angela, played by Olivia Pascal (pictured above) has actually brought an entire wardrobe of sweaters with her to the International Youth-Club Boarding School of Languages. A questionable decision for a summer break spent on the South coast of Spain you might think, but clearly Angela was well aware that competition in the sweater stakes would be heated. Will such forethought lead her to victory? Read on to find out…

4.

The girl on the right. Entire ensemble. Nuff said.

3.

Inevitably, we’re mainly concentrating on the ladies of ‘Bloody Moon’ for this list, but that’s not to say that male cast don’t have their moments too. In particular, I would like to draw your attention to the 2000AD-esque comic book design briefly glimpsed on the back of the scarred-mentalist-brother character’s leather bomber jacket. Nice one, dude.

2.

It was difficult to get a good screengrab of Angela’s majestic Grace Jones sweatshirt, but… hopefully you get the idea.

1.

I’m sorry Angela – you might have thought the Grace Jones play was a pretty unbeatable move, but nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in the world of sweaters compares to the garment being sported here by Jasmin Losensky’s Inga. Total supremacy.

Right, that's more than enough 'Bloody Moon' for now I think. See you all at the Disco Club...

Rollinades: Jeunes Filles Impudiques/Schoolgirl Hitchhikers(1973)

The genesis of “Jeunes Filles Impudiques”, aka “Schoolgirl Hitchhikers”, and of Jean Rollin’s subsequent parallel career as a reluctant director of sex films, can be traced back to discussions that took place during the production of 1971’s “Requiem for a Vampire”, as succinctly recounted in Jeremy Richey’s review of the film:

“Rollin recalled to Peter Blumenstock in Virgins and Vampires and Video Watchdog that producer, "Lionel (Wallmann) obliged me to put some sex scenes in Requiem-during the dungeon sequence. I told him that I wasn't too fond of that kind of thing, and he answered, "But you do that kind of thing very well. If we made an entire film like that, I bet it would be successful. You may not like it, but you know how to do it." Rollin continued with, 'Okay, I'll do it, but I won't invest any of my own money into it.' Well he raised the money, we made the film and he was right." Hence, the first Michel Gentil film was born and shooting commenced right after Requiem wrapped.”

It seems odd to me that Wallmann was apparently impressed by the sex scenes in “Requiem..”, because watching that film today, Rollin’s unhappiness with this material seems clear. Whilst the eroticism of his first three vampire films arose naturally from their surrealistic, counter-culture milieu, the more minimal, haunted tone of “Requiem..” is quite different. My theory is that what Rollin really wanted to explore was the more innocent take on vampirism that he would later return to in 1997’s “Les Deux Orphelines Vampires” and his accompanying series of stories. But, as confirmed by the quote above, he found himself already pigeonholed as ‘the sexy vampire guy’, and erotic content was part of the deal. As such, “Requiem..”s main ‘sexy scenes’ (Marie Castel’s coupling with that dude on the clifftop outside the castle, and the scene with her tied up in the dungeon) play out like pretty routine and half-hearted sequences in what is otherwise an inspired piece of work.



It is an irony typical of Rollin’s troubled career that this diminishing interest in sexual content ended up inadvertently sparking a career in pseudonymous pornography. But however much fans might see his Gentil/Xavier films as an undignified blot on the director’s copybook, and however sad the oft-repeated stories of Rollin setting up shots then fleeing the room in embarrassment for the more hardcore films he was pushed into making may sound, it’s hard to deny that his opening gambit in the genre is an unexpected delight.

Plotted with all the depth and complexity you’d expect of such a production, “Jeunes Filles Impudiques” stars Joelle Couer, who went on to give an extraordinary performance in Rollin’s “Les Demoniaques”, and Gilda Arancio, who didn’t, as our titular hitchhikers and/or impudent filles. Sneaking into a remote house they assume to be abandoned and spending the night (in the same bed, natch), the girls encounter sad-eyed, moustachioed Rollin regular Willy Braque, an incompetent jewel thief who leads them into a series of tangles with mildly sadistic villainess Marie Helene Regne, incorporating copious nudity, tasteful humping, a great deal of light-hearted running around and poorly staged gunfights, the introduction of the world’s laziest hipster private eye and his unconventionally attired secretary, a thoroughly goofy happy ending, and even a cameo from M. Rollin himself!



The film’s sexual content is fairly mild and, appropriate to the director’s pseudonym, refreshingly gentle in its approach, meaning that, with the exception of a rather jarring torture scene, there is little here to offend anyone.. unless you’re offended by the very idea of sex being portrayed on screen.

(Or unless you object on principle to the inherently patriarchal values expressed through heterosexual male-aimed sex films I suppose… in which case, well, sure - I get where you’re coming from, but I like to try to view these things from within the cultural contexts they emerged from etc etc, and as such “Jeunes Filles Impudiques” is about the most good-natured ‘70s sexploitation films you could hope to find, made by a director whose work I enjoy, and featuring less objectionable content than any one of hundreds of more ‘respectable’, mainstream movies I could name, so I’m gonna watch it and review it and feel no shame – ok, thanks, bye.)

In lieu of sleaze, scripting, or any discernable point, the filmmakers thankfully do their best to cram this movie with a wealth of other aesthetic virtues, the nature of which I shall attempt to elucidate below.


First off, if you happen to be a fan of late ‘60s/early ‘70s fabrics and interior décor, let me just say that this film is the shit. Honestly, no lie – some of the floral pattern dresses the actresses wear here are so lovely that I was quite sad when they inevitably took them off, and even the sheets on the beds are plenty groovy. And maybe this is just me, but I also thought the house in which most of the film takes place was just too cool. Far from ‘abandoned’, it looks pretty much like the house I’d like to live in in an ideal world - walled off on its own in the middle of the woods with big, slightly dilapidated old rooms, furnished with a winning combo of baroque cast-offs, homemade hippy/bohemian touches and pleasantly weird art choices. I loved the dusty entrance hall with what look like Phillipe Druillet prints blu-tacked up the staircase, the dark wood and blue tiling in the hallways, and the psychedelic wallpaper in the master bedroom just plain blew my mind!

*

I’m thinking maybe this house actually belonged to someone in Rollin’s circle – it looks pretty genuine and lived in, more-so than the overtly kitsch interiors you tend to see in more generously budgeted ‘70s Eurocult films, and I’d love to get some further info about it. In fact, forget the shagging and the gunfights, I could have happily watched people just wander around this environment silently for 70 minutes.

Making “Jeunes Filles..” even more visually appealing, Rollin and his regular cinematographer Jean-Jacques Renon seem to have had a lot of fun putting the film together, indulging themselves with bright colours, interesting visual textures and some distinctive and memorable images. The back-lit stained glass in the windows of what the baddies refer to as the ‘Chinese house’ is a particularly striking touch, reminiscent of the exaggerated lighting effects used in “Le Frisson de Vampire”, imbuing what is otherwise a pretty plain (by ‘70s Euro-sleaze standards) production with a welcome dose of otherworldly wooziness, leading up to an actually-quite-brilliant shot that sees Regne’s character slowly emerging from the pitch-black woods clad in bright purple, as the red and yellow of the ‘Chinese house’ pulses like a UFO to her left.



It doesn’t get much more ‘Rollin-esque’ than that, and indeed, despite the director’s decision not to put his name on the film, nobody else could have made “Jeunes Filles Impudiques”. From the opening shot of the two girls strolling hand in hand through the forest, to the familiar pattern of dreamy, aimless wandering, the brilliant use of found locations, the expressionistic, silent-era style performances and almost fairy tale-like naivety – Jean is dans le maison, if you will.

Pierre Raph’s original music for the film is real highlight too – Finders Keepers put out a lovely 7” EP of it last year that I did a review of on my other blog, but I’ll repeat myself to the extent of saying that I very much enjoyed the opening/closing theme, featuring low register brass, flute and jaunty jazz percussion that puts one in mind of the most uncharacteristically upbeat spaghetti western ever made, and the cavalcades of prog rock drumming that accompany the ‘action’ scenes are great too. In fact all of Raph’s various licks here are near absurdly catchy, reflecting the inexplicable feel-good atmosphere of the film perfectly.



Another thing I really liked was the introduction of the aforementioned private eye – a sublimey goofball character who had me cracking up on several occasions. After escaping from the baddies, Coeur somehow finds her way to the nearest town (perhaps she HITCHHIKED?), where instead of alerting the police, she runs straight to this dude, who is chilling with his feet up of an afternoon, enjoying his artfully scruffy demeanour and the silent presence of his ‘secretary’;


Good work Joelle!

Later in the movie, after Joelle has been captured again and whisked off to be tortured and possibly killed by the baddies, scruffy-detective-guy proves himself the most lovably lazy crime-buster in film history, insisting that the best course of action is to enjoy a good night’s sleep and a leisurely breakfast, and hope that perhaps the villains might return at some point. Watch in delight as he gracefully slurps from one of those big bowls of chocolate the French seem to like so much, and stirs sugar into his tea, a look of simple, bleary-eyed bliss upon his chops, assuring his anxious companions that it’ll all turn out right in the end. My kinda guy! (Amusingly, the bad guys have only decamped to the ‘Chinese house’, which prior continuity has established as being about 50 yards from the main house.)


And he’s right too, everything turns out splendidly – nobody dies, and our heroines frolic happily off into the middle distance, the temporary inconveniences of sexual assault and moderate nipple torture long forgotten in their endless enthusiasm for life and adventure!

I’m guessing nobody actually paid the detective for his questionable services, but hey, he got some quality snoozing done and had a kick-ass breakfast, so who’s complaining? Back to the office, futuristic secretary-girl, the day’s work awaits!

Above all, “..Impudiques” gives the impression of being that rare thing – a sex film in which everybody seems to be having a good time. With production values even more threadbare than Rollin’s ‘official’ releases, it in some ways has the feel of an enthusiastic student film – all of the cast and crew seem thrilled with idea of making a movie, regardless of the subject matter, and throw in their energy and ideas accordingly, doing whatever they can to create something worth watching.



For all the elaborate praise I’ve bestowed on it above though, it would be wrong to suggest that “..Impudiques” is some kind of lost masterpiece. All else aside, it is still a cheap and cheesy sex flick, probably shot over a couple of weekends with a story they probably made up as they went along. Even if *I* found it uproariously entertaining, that doesn’t necessary mean you will - in fact many more discerning viewers will likely have difficulty making it past Gilda Arancio’s wig, and the English voiceover narration that sounds like it’s been run straight through Google translate.

Within its own humble sphere though, the film is a whole lot more worthwhile than it has any right to be – a testament to the charm and natural talent of Rollin and his collaborators, and a unique time capsule of an era in which it was possible to make an ‘adult’ movie that was humane, funny and genuinely enjoyable. For a thoroughly depressing experience, I recommend watching this as a double-bill with some soul-sucking late night TV ‘erotic thriller’ and weeping bitter tears for the way the human race has gone astray.

Speaking of bitter tears, I’m not usually one to get fussy about print quality etc., but I can’t end this review without a quick word about the new DVD of this movie released by Redemption. The film has been cleaned up nicely as promised, but unfortunately the disc suffers from what I guess must be a botched digital transfer or something. Played on the computer to get some screengrabs, the film was merely a bit fuzzy and pixelated, but on my stand-alone DVD player it was barely watchable, with jerky movements and picture distortion throughout. If this was a bootleg DVD-R or something I wouldn’t mind, but for Redemption to go to all the trouble of remastering an extremely obscure movie then fuck it up like this is incredibly frustrating, and for them to put it on the market as a definitive edition with a price to match is utter bullshit. I don’t know whether this is some kinda ‘first batch’ problem that the forthcoming(?) Region 2 release will sort out, but I don’t fancy laying down the cash to find out. If you’re absolutely desperate to see the movie or you happen across this disc really cheap somewhere, give it a whirl, but otherwise – not recommended.

Kamikaze Girls(Tetsuya Nakashima, 2009)

As regular readers will surely have noted, I don’t tend to bother writing about many new movies, largely due to the fact that I don’t tend to bother watching any. But nonetheless, I’m extremely glad that fate threw a copy of Tetsuya Nakashima’s “Kamikaze Girls” into my path.

A film both fascinating and hugely entertaining, “Kamikaze Girls” has given me a rare insight into the nature of teenage sub-cultural identity in modern Japan. It has bombarded my senses with avalanches of incongruous cinematic imagery and cultural detritus the likes of which I have never before seen. It has introduced me to characters who exist in a world utterly removed from my own, but whose travails can’t help but remind me poignantly of my own formative years. It has touched my heart with its hymn to the virtues of friendship, non-conformity and self-definition, and has helped me both reflect on and strengthen my own philosophy of life.

And furthermore, it has succeeded in communicating all this exclusively via the medium of pretty Japanese girls flying through the air, riding motorbikes, turning into cartoon characters, singing awesome punk-pop songs and fighting with baseball bats, in a frantic, colour-saturated explosion of continuous excitement.

Verily, it is a GOOD FILM.


Young Momoko, played by Kyoko Fukada, is heavily in thrall to the ‘Lolita’ subculture, a phenomenon I daresay Nabokov never saw coming wherein Japanese girls model themselves upon an antiquated extreme of femininity, wearing incredibly elaborate, hand-stitched dresses along with bonnets, parasols and the like, generally making an effort to appear as sweet and dainty and beautified as they possibly can as they stomp around the streets of Tokyo.

Not that Momoko often gets the chance to stomp around the streets of Tokyo, stuck as she is in a featureless rural backwater, where her outlandish mode of dress and long journeys to stock up on threads at her favourite Tokyo boutique are treated with outright disbelief by the crude locals (haven’t you heard, they tell her, the supermarket has everything, and cheap).


As is common when imaginative kids discover fashion and culture in isolation, Momoko has managed to invest her chosen sub-culture with a weight of meaning that extends way beyond anything its instigators are likely to have intended, daydreaming about the excesses of the French Rococo period and fervently wishing she’d been born in 18th century Versailles. Taking the hedonism of France’s pre-revolutionary aristocrats as her inspiration, Momoko has in fact developed her own personal belief system, prioritising the relentless pursuit of personal pleasure above all things, and rejecting human relationships and earthly loyalties entirely – a belief that proves particularly useful when it comes to acquiring the necessary cash to fund her clothes habit.


It is through one of these scams (selling her deadbeat ex-Yakuza dad’s stash of counterfeit Versace gear online) that Momoko meets Ichiko (Anna Tsuchiya). Ichiko is something called a ‘Yanki’. Like some kind of post-modern Japanese mods, the Yankis, it seems, are violent girl biker gangs who ride outlandish-looking modified motorscooters and wear an odd mixture of baggy brand-name clothing and long, militaristic ‘Kamikaze coats’ embroidered with significant messages and symbols.


It occurred to me whilst watching that obviously naming your film “Kamikaze Girls” must carry a lot more resonance for a Japanese audience than for those of us in the rest of the world, and it is presumably from these Yanki coats that the title is derived. Whether they’re modelled after coats worn by WWII Kamikaze pilots, reclaimed in the manner of Western punks and bikers taking on Nazi paraphernalia for secondary level shock value (as seen on the coat of one of the 'bad' biker gangs above), or something else entirely, I’ve no idea, but I loved the way that “Kamikaze Girls” keeps throwing in fascinating details like this, showing us these previously undreamt of bits of DIY pop culture in full flight, without ever making a detailed knowledge of them a prerequisite to enjoyment of the movie.


Despite clearly identifying herself as a ‘tough chick’ (by tried & tested means of frequently spitting, headbutting, threatening and bragging), Ichiko still goes gaga over Momoko’s stash of fake Versace, and covets her grandmother’s ‘80s Honda scooter – certainly behaviour that will have any devotee of Western mod/biker subcultures scratching their heads, but such, we assume, is the way of the Yanki, a few decades and thousands of miles removed from all that junk.


And despite her tough talk of gang loyalty and comradeship, it soon becomes clear that Ichiko is just as much of an idiosyncratic loner as Momoko, apparently also stuck in the middle of the same square, rural dead-zone, and seemingly with plenty of time on her hands, despite her gang member duties. So you probably see where this is going – in spite of their obviously antagonistic cultural identities and bafflement at the other’s lifestyle choices, the unlikely friendship ™ between Momoko and Ichiko is very much the heart of this film, an opposites-attract pairing that might have seemed pretty hackneyed were it not for Tsuchiya and Fukada’s blindingly likeable, lightning-in-a-bottle performances, as played out against the film’s myriad of other delights and distractions.


To relate the assorted scrapes that Momoko and Ichigo get into together once their awkward allegiance blossoms would obviously be surplus to the plot synopsisin’ requirements of this review, but suffice to say, there is little more director Nakashima could have done to render the proceedings any more *fun*, determined as he is to reflect Momoko’s hedonistic philosophy in the appearance of the film itself, transforming this simple(?) tale of mismatched friendship into a hyper-kinetic avalanche of visual data that would make for a hugely pleasurable experience, even if one were to blank out the storyline altogether.

Every colour in “Kamikaze Girls” is as bright as it could possibly be, every action or image is as strong and stylised and rich in detail as filmic technology allows, even as the maniac-child editing piles up information about as fast as the human mind can process, an endless whirligig of tricks and gimmicks, flashbacks, fantasy sequences and films-within-films. If there is a complaint to be made that the film’s narrative drive becomes somewhat lackadaisical at times, the constant visual stimulus renders that observation akin to complaining that somebody who keeps giving you free cakes and beer isn’t doing so in an orderly and consistent enough fashion.

By way of example, here is but a sample of the audio-visual delights that zoomed by in my DVD-Player window as I watched the movie again to get some screen-grabs:





Doubtless comparisons will be made to post-MTV music vids, video games, anime and the like, but more than anything “Kamikaze Girls” reminded me of the ADD-afflicted insanity of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s “Hausu” (1977 – recently reissued on DVD, fans of A-grade lunacy take note). Both films exhibit a determination to throw every visual trick in their arsenal at the audience at every possible opportunity, to the extent that normality effectively collapses into a hyperreal blitzkrieg of fun n’ games – the only difference being that the strong, real-world characters and convincing performances of Nakashima’s movie keep things nicely grounded, whereas Obayashi spirals off down the rabbit-hole never to return. And if some of the devices utilised in “Kamikaze Girls” may thus seem a little too familiar and cutesy when taken in isolation (y’know, cartoon-ish family history montages and stuff), it’s hard to object too stringently – the “heart-warming indie-comedy” alarm bells will barely have time to start ringing before the next batch of dazzling, hallucinatory antics turns up to keep us entertained.


Unsurprisingly I suppose, the Western film to which “Kamikaze Girls” perhaps bears the closest comparison is Terry Zwigoff’s adaptation of “Ghost World”. But whereas the Clowes/Zwigoff story ultimately explores the way in which its characters’ self-created identities and cultural aspirations are routinely frustrated by the limitations of plebeian reality, the characters in “Kamikaze Girls” exist in a more privileged (post-internet, post-iphone) world in which the drawbacks of the outside world are scarcely even a CONSIDERATION.

Momoko and Ichako’s cultural identities rule their entire existence, with both offering direct veneration to their Lolita and Yanki gods (fashion moguls and legendary gang leaders respectively) throughout the film – an idea that is made more explicit when the film’s ritualistic bike gang showdown takes place in the shadow of a giant, beatific Buddha, both the statue and the girls’ ‘Kamikaze Coats’ reminding us of the presence of an older, pre-cultural overload Japanese history still peeking through the cracks.


When the Lolita and the Yanki first meet, there is a lot more at stake than just some goofy “jock meets nerd” encounter between different participants in the same system of social exchange. Here, their respective worlds, walled off by technology and isolation, are incompatible on a level John Hughes never imagined. Their mutual incomprehension is such that on their first encounter each seems to be making contact with an alien race – they can barely even figure out how to talk to each other, or undertake a commercial transaction, making their inevitable allegiance and Breakfast Club-like exchange of values even more of a fragile and unpredictable thing.


For all of this concentration on isolation and obsession though, “Kamikaze Girls” still manages to reach far happier conclusions than “Ghost World” did, with Nakashima’s film broadly coming out in FAVOUR of the importance of defining ones own world against the squares and grown-ups who would seek to undermine it, of the joys offered by fantasy, individualism and pre-emptive myth-making, and of…. well I forget what else, but everybody’s happy, and this totally kick-ass pop-punk song plays over the end credits, so we can all leave punching the air and feeling better about our own social clumsiness and teenage fashion mistakes.

Naturally tales of teenage outsiders fighting to defend their place in the world always go down well in this neck of the woods, be it in ‘Out Of The Blue’, ‘Billy Liar’ or ‘Spider Baby’, so thematically-speaking, “Kamikaze Girls” had me from the word go. But even taking such bias into account, I can’t remember the last time I saw a modern, teen-orientated film that was anything like as insightful, beautiful and berserkly enjoyable as this one. Heart = Warmed. Result!

Liquid Sky (Slava Tsukerman, 1982)

I have seen some pretty strange films in my time, and many of the strangest are to be found upon that consistently fertile faultline where exploitation/trash meets arthouse. Such inherently unstable territory provides the natural home of many of my favourite filmmakers, and, let’s face it, pretty much EVERY film I watch these days tends to fall into one or the other of those categories, so the meeting of the two is inevitably going to be a wellspring of unending strangeness, and a concept we’ll be exploring a lot on this blog.

Take ‘Arrebato’ for instance; that was pretty strange. And ‘Wax, or The Discovery Of Television Amongst The Bees’ – that was WAY stranger. I’m sure that after their recent official re-release, none of us need reminding how unbearably strange ‘El Topo’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’ are. Benjamin Christensen’s ‘Haxan’ isn’t gonna be getting any more normal any time soon. I seem to have sat through enough brain-melting claptrap from Poland and Japan to precipitate some kind of weirdness ragnarock, should the two film industries ever collide. And so on. On a purely objective level, ‘Liquid Sky’ can’t really compete in the strangeness stakes – it puts in a good effort, but in terms of sheer quantity of ‘?!?!!?’ moments, it’s outclassed. After all, it bloodmindedly persists in making a certain amount of sense. It features fine camerawork and performances, it won some awards. Its themes and imagery are, if not exactly conventional, at least coherent.

Nonetheless though, ‘Liquid Sky’ is still the first film in a long time that’s caused me to pause the DVD for a few minutes, catch my breath, and reflect that, ok, I have NO IDEA where this movie is coming from. After all, most of the films I’ve mentioned above are extremely SELF-CONSCIOUS in their weirdness, revelling in their position as carnivals of overwhelming cinematic lunacy. ‘Liquid Sky’, on the other hand, gives the impression of becoming inexplicably strange simply by virtue of the fact that it is the work of people who, culturally speaking, would normally lack both the means and inclination to make a commercially released feature film, especially a sci-fi/genre film, deciding that they’re going to make one anyway, and deciding that it will reflect the issues and aesthetics that are relevant to them, rather than drawing examples from established filmic language.

I mean, can you think of another example of a whacked out sci-fi movie made by a cast and crew largely drawn from early ‘80s New York queer/feminist art/fashion circles? Can you even imagine what one would look like? – if not, you’ve evidently not seen ‘Liquid Sky’, cos that’s exactly what we’ve got here. By turns, ‘Liquid Sky’ also manages to transform itself into a fairly grim sex film, a goofy black comedy, a celebration of early ‘80s club/drug culture, an examination of the schizoid nature of socially-enforced gender/identity creation and a psychedelic showcase of fluorescent op art visuals, as director Slava Tsukerman crams together a whole host of elements that have never been seen together on the silver screen before or since, creating a true one-off.



I’m aware that at least some of you will have already seen ‘Liquid Sky’. After all, it’s something of a perennial underground classic, a lynchpin of the ‘80s ‘midnight movie’ circuit, no doubt required viewing on any number of feminist cinema modules etc. – but this is the first time I’ve managed to see it (god bless my multi-region DVD player and Amazon Marketplace), so I’ll write this review from the POV of a neophyte if that’s ok with everybody.

When summarised on paper, the basic premise of ‘Liquid Sky’ is as simple as it is ludicrous: an incorporeal alien entity encased within a flying saucer the size of a dustbin lid has come to earth, with the intention of absorbing energy from the opiates released in the brains of humans who are high on heroin, killing them in the process. Having arrived and been around the block a few times, the alien has discovered that the energy that can be harvested from an orgasm is EVEN BETTER, and has parked on the top floor of an apartment block opposite the Empire State Building, focussing it’s attention primarily on Margaret (Anne Carlisle), an aspiring actress and new wave scenester whose life comprises an ugly nexus of bad sex and bad drugs.


We don’t learn this at first though – which is just as well, as if we did we might have assumed we were watching some gross-out Troma sex comedy or something. No, what will first grab you about this film is it’s incredibly stylised depiction of an ‘80s New York club scene that may or may not have actually existed at some point, a scene in which androgynous models with garish, homemade outfits, chopped asymmetrical hair and fluorescent face paint get down under neon strip lights to oppressive, minimal synth music. A no holds barred ‘80s overload, straight from that brief period when the signifiers that have come to stand for “the ‘80s” were still somewhat frightening and new. “We may look ridiculous to you now,” the film seems to yell, “but this is THE FUTURE!”

And, in a way, they were right. Go to New York or London today and you’ll still be able to find androgynous types with garish, homemade outfits, chopped asymmetrical hair getting down to minimal, oppressive electro music, more of them than ever before probably. In fact, when the film introduces us to Adrian, Margaret’s flatmate/lover, she’s in ‘the club’ (actually Manhattan’s famed Danceteria), performing her song “Me And My Rhythm Box”, a shouty, confrontational Suicide-esque number that she begins by sampling her own heartbeat, seeming to prefigure the style of everyone from Peaches to Crystal Castles to No Bra, whilst some of the outfits on display, for all their 80s kitsch, could have been pulled straight from the trash-glamour/global psyche aesthetics of Glass Candy or Gang Gang Dance. It’s, uh.. pretty awesome, actually.



Recently though, I’ve been thinking a lot about how little the signifiers of “NEW-ness” have changed over the years (specifically in terms of music scenes), and how “the future” seems to have atrophied as we’ve stumbled into what some regard as a post-modern/post-historical era. The purveyors of ‘electroclash’ a few years back at least seemed to be incorporating an element of conscious, tongue in cheek retro-futurism into their work, but increasingly that seems to have been dropped, as bottom-feeding media sources like the NME insist that stripped down electro-punk is new, new, new, and the androgynous types with garish, homemade outfits and chopped, asymmetrical hair hanging around colleges and galleries in 2008 STILL seem to be shouting, if a bit more quietly, “we may look ridiculous to you now, but this is THE FUTURE”, despite their working to a blueprint of “the future” that’s as well-worn as a bluesy roots-rocker’s blueprint of “the past”.

So anyway, that’s what I found myself thinking about as I poured another glass of wine and tried to get my head around ‘Liquid Sky’ of a Sunday evening. Visually, the film is a dense maze of quick cuts, awkward angles, stark, expressionistic imagery and bright, high contrast colour & darkness that often render it difficult to sit through for anyone not totally committed to the film’s stylistic agenda, and make even the simplest plot points seem difficult to follow.

Gnarly hair & fashion aside, ‘Liquid Sky’s main visual selling point is the incredible psychedelic visuals, which are utilised extensively, some might some excessively, throughout to represent the alien consciousness, the explosions of sex/drug inspired opiates within the human characters’ heads and, y’know, just because they look really cool. To connoisseurs of such stuff, it’s pretty extraordinary – perhaps the foremost pre-digital example of a narrative film managing to take the techniques of the ‘60s lightshow and the abstract underground films of Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs et al that flourished in New York during the same period, and to refashion them for the more consciously futurist, vaguely cyberpunk-y style of the early ‘80s, as the light rigs at the disco and the neon tubing and eerie ceremonial facemask that comprise the décor in Margaret and Adrian’s apartment melt via the use of fluorescent dye, extreme high contrast photography, heat sensitive imaging and god knows what else into an expressionistic alien landscape.

‘Liquid Sky’s soundtrack is equally jarring and distinctive, with most of the original music, quite fantastically, being “realised” by the director, along with Brenda Hutchinson and Clive Smith, using an early Fairlight CMI synthesizer at something called the Public Access Synthesizer Workshop in New York. Some pieces by Carl Orff and Marin Marais were reworked, but most of the score is original, and then some. The film’s main theme – I think it’s the bit based on Orff – initially just sounds plain wrong, a thunderous triptych of clamouring, dissonant slabs of tone that instantly put your teeth on edge, but, like the film as a whole, it begins to make glorious sense upon further exposure, becoming hypnotic, comforting and deeply involving, as the fuzz of ancient lower register analogue brutality hisses through your TV speakers. Combined with fragments of frenetic, post-punk/disco racket for the club scenes and the minimal electro-punk of Adrian’s song, and, needless to say, the soundtrack to ‘Liquid Sky’ is just as much of a cult touchstone as the film itself. In fact, both the sound and the visuals here are remarkable in the extent to which they push the ambitions and uncompromising, eerie menace of analogue technology to rarely seen perfection, making us curse the dawn of computerisation that swept away such unhinged invention in subsequent years.

‘Liquid Sky’s opening sections focus largely on establishing the parameters of Margaret’s world, and on exploring the toxic cycle she seems to be locked into, wherein she seems to get humiliated and abused by every man she encounters, hiding what we assume to be her deeply traumatised emotional core by obsessively restating that they can’t hurt her, she’s different from them, she just wants drugs, she couldn’t give a fuck, etc, etc.

Adrian, who’s supposedly her partner, doesn’t do a great deal to help matters. Although Paula F Sheppard puts in a very charismatic performance in the role (she seems like she’d be a real cool person IRL, even though her character is completely horrible, if you know what I mean), her character is portrayed as being completely amoral, a self-centred drug dealer who is unnecessarily nasty to everyone, all the time. Since she’s ostensibly our heroine’s best friend, we keep waiting for her to drop her nastiness mask (which seems kinda unconvincing anyway) and say something affectionate or reassuring, but she never does.



To confuse matters further, Anne Carlisle also takes on a second role as Billy, a male model who seems to exhibit many of the same characteristics – emotionless, monotone delivery, solipsism, drug habit etc. – that Margaret does, only he is, I’m assuming, supposed to be big and tough and macho where she is brittle and victimised. Either way, the two characters are so similar it’s hard to really fathom at first that Billy is supposed to be an independent character, rather than simply an evil twin/avatar/projection of Margaret’s imagining. The two play a lot of scenes together, with all the shot/reverse shot and body double action you’d expect, and depending on what Carlisle and Tsukerman’s intentions were in creating the dual role, the whole gimmick either falls flat or works far too well, as Margaret’s identity and gender (the two things she spends the whole film trying to disguise, subvert or destroy) are crushed to dust by Billy’s antagonistic presence. The moment during the film’s nightmarish final photoshoot where Anne Carlisle is effectively forced to give herself head is unbearably disturbing for all manner of reasons, perhaps competing with ‘Reanimator’ to claim the mantle of the definitive psychotronic cinema oral sex event of the 1980s.


For all that though, things don’t start to get what the likes of me might term PROPERLY weird until an eccentric German scientist (played by Otto Von Wernherr) turns up, on the trail of the pint-sized UFO that’s parked on the roof of Margaret and Adrian’s apartment. The scientist is so utterly, utterly out of place within the world of the film, Von Wernheer’s performance so wooden and awkward, that his very presence is totally hilarious, completely shattering ‘Liquid Sky’s carefully-wrought fashionista aesthetic at a stroke as he lumbers about like a down at heel, suburban Klaus Kinski in brown trousers and a sports jacket, earnestly espousing his theories about opiate-hungry extraterrestrials preying on “punk and hard rock music subcultures”, and his determination to stop them at all costs.

So our scientist friend – perhaps displaying what seems to have been a prevalent belief amongst ‘80s filmmakers that foreigners and other such ‘fish out of water’ characters forget all forms of universal social etiquette and just start acting bonkers when they visit New York – proceeds to the apartment directly opposite Margaret & Adrian’s (presumably in the Empire State Building), knocks on the door, and, in faltering English, informs the woman who answers that he is an unconventional scientist tracking the movements of UFOs, and could he come in please and set up his telescope to spy on the people in the apartment opposite – it’s VERY URGENT, you understand? And, luckily for Otto, he seems to have stumbled upon one in a million, as the lady not only invites him in, but orders a Chinese takeout for two, cracks open the wine, and immediately begins trying to seduce him. A series of farcical comic scenes follow, wherein the scientist valiantly ignores his host’s increasingly cringe-worthy stream of double entendres whilst she in turn displays a remarkable lack of interest in the bizarre orgy of extraterrestrial sex and murder that seems to be unfolding across the street. She even does a big *tt – MEN!* pout/sigh when he finally decides he’s got to rush over there and try to save Margaret’s life before it’s too late.

In fact, there seems to be a sort of running joke (or at least, I think it’s a joke… running COMMENTARY perhaps?) going on throughout ‘Liquid Sky’ about cynical, self-centred New Yorkers and their alienation from conventional social responsibility, and indeed reality. Every character in the film, with the exception of poor old Otto, seems entirely unconcerned about all the dead bodies, UFOs and alien laser craziness popping up all over the place. As long as they can still get their fix or get their rocks off, who gives a fuck, right? If guys keep dying with mysterious silver spikes through their head, or disappearing into thin air, well so what, more room for me and I never liked ‘em anyway.



It is through this increasingly exaggerated attitude of detached unpleasantness that the film begins to turn the tables on the underground scene it began by celebrating, fostering a slow realisation in the viewer that these people, for all their apparent flamboyance and creativity, are really, genuinely not nice, that their way of life as inhuman as the thrill-seeking, lonesome alien confined in it’s tin box. As Margaret begins to embrace the influence of the alien over her mind/body during the film’s finale, she seems to emerge from her fog of defiance and confusion, she realises that she’s been playing victim to these characters and their screwed up priorities all along, and instead begins to take on a self-immolating role as their destroyer (“I kill with my cunt”). In perhaps the film’s most effective moment, she throws a question at all the assorted lackeys present at the final photo shoot, demanding to know where they’re from. Each participant is framed by the camera portrait style as they say, “I’m from Cleveland”, “I’m from Lexington, Kentucky”, “I’m from Fresno”, and so on, as the true face of this highly stylised, implacable demimonde is revealed: screwed up Midwest kids, bullied small town queers, self-styled martyrs for art, damaged egos and outcasts who’ve all come together under the neon lights of Manhattan to…. well, to do WHAT exactly, the film seems to challenge them; to further their own narcissistic ends? To humiliate and fuck each other over? To get screwed up on drugs, turn tricks and die a wretched tragic loser as everyone else laughs at them? To take cash from corporate magazines for shallow, faux-shocking fashion spreads? Certainly not to support or communicate with each other, or to create any meaningful art or new ways of life, the film’s unspoken critique seems to imply.

For all the sci-fi craziness, this is a suitably grim and earth-bound conclusion, brutally prefiguring the political and artistic cynicism of the decade ‘Liquid Sky’s aesthetic helped to usher in.

There’s an absolutely brilliant moment during the cataclysmic photoshoot / sex n’ death session that comprises the film’s final half hour when one of the unnamed photographic assistants turns around, and declares in a clearly enunciated upper-crust accent, “there’s something strange going on here, and I don’t like it! I’m going to leave!”

Biggest laugh in the whole movie, and to be honest, I think he’s restating the conclusion that 90% of the film going public will have reached within the film’s first ten minutes. But, for the other 10% of us, ‘Liquid Sky’ ladies and gentlemen: truly, a film like no other, one whose ideas and imagery will be rattling around your brain in ever more disturbing permutations for months.



POST-SCRIPT:

It’s not often you manage to learn something new from the info. box next to a Youtube video, but, for inclusion in the ‘credit where it’s due department’, several of the videos I’ve posted above are accompanied by the following message:

“The producer of the film [Slava Tsukerman] took full credit for everything they really did not do anything but put up the money. He and his wife ( who got the credit for the costumes) needed green cards and that was the way for them to get them.
Anne Carlisle ( wrote the entire script ) and Julia Morton were responsible for almost everything. It was Julia that brought in marcel and nanxy from cinandre, who did the hair and make up.”

Naturally I can’t comment re: the statement’s accuracy either way, but thought I’d throw it in for good measure.