"The Invitation" (2015) d/ Karyn Kusama

Tonight's arthouse study on distrust of strangers and human politeness comes from director Karyn Kusama, the gal who most recently brought you 2009's Jennifer's Body.  Can't recall how I felt about that one and I'm too lethargic from radiation treatments to go back and see, so...chop, chop.  There's been a great deal of positive internet press about this one of late, causing me to set aside whatever disdain I'd already developed towards it due to a weak, unengaging trailer I'd already checked out a while back, and give it a look. Afterall, a shitty trailer does not a dumpster fire movie guarantee.


This snob fest could use David Hess and Johnny Morghen.
Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his new squeeze, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi...say that one five times fast), pull up outside David and Eden's (Michael Huisman, Tammy Blanchard) swanky digs in the Hollywood Hills for a dinner party, after wiping out a coyote with the car on the ride there. Eden is Will's ex-wife, who previously attempted suicide after the accidental death of their young son together. David is a fellow she took to during a grief-support group, having spent two years together away from their friends, some of which in Mexico, where the couple picked up Sadie and Pruitt (Lindsay Burdge, John Carroll Lynch) , two new age oddballs who share their bizarre notions on pain management. Besides experiencing painful flashbacks from their time together while noticing Eden hiding away a sizable bottle of pills and noticing that David has locked all the doors behind the guests. And where the hell is Choi, anyway? He should have been here by now.


If a hipster hides in a high end joint, would anyone bother to find him?
David pops in a promotional video for a group called 'The Invitation' that deals with pain and grief on a spiritual hippie level, as evidenced by footage of the head kook talking a dying woman through her final moments of life. If that hasn't weirded out enough guests, a parlour game of 'I Want' turns into Pruitt's impromptu confession of having accidentally murdered his wife. Will's suspicions are temporarily put to rest when Choi finally does show up, but then there's that pesky laptop, left open to files concerning 'The Invitation'  and their true motives, just waiting for an inquisitive partygoer to stumble across while sneaking about the place. Don't drink that wine! Instead, pass it this way so I can put myself out of my misery. I've seen scarier episodes of Quantum Leap, ferchrissakes.


"Mexican suicide cults are all the rage these days. Join one, reaaaally you should."
In the arthouse world, you'll find two approaches to cinema, more often than not. One is overly excessive, the other is purposely minimalist. Either can make for an effective film, if utilized properly, with heaping doses of self-awareness and artistic flair, but I can't help thinking that tonight's movie might have served itself better had it chosen the former instead of the latter. For a film that many are calling "one of the best horror movies of the year", there really isn't any horror to speak of. The script is smart, the cinematography is excellent, and there's some tension early on, but the plot reveal is obvious a lot sooner than it ought to have been, and the pay off is weak and shockless. Interesting, but rarely engulfing. Worth a look for those aforementioned elements, but ultimately forgettable. You could have had something here. Two wops.


In distress? Or just yawning. I think we know the answer.

"Blue Movie" (1978) d/ Alberto Cavallone

If you needed a shower after watching the enjoyably slimy Giallo a Venezia, you might think about trying to dry ice blast yourself clean after getting through tonight's review, a schizophrenic, misogynistic, fetishistic mess from the man who brought you 1980's Blow Job, that openly revels in it's 'Blue' title, before turning a revolting shade of brown. Italian Playboy Playmates Dirce Funari and Leda Simonetti lend the only recognizable faces to Alberto Cavallone's cast in this exercise in endurance that's full of unenjoyable imagery and begs the eternal question, "Where does the role play end and rape begin?" In this particular case, somewhere just after the opening credits finish rolling...


"What's with-ah alla the fahking-ah cans??!!", ponders Daniela ( Daniella Dugas).
We kick off here with a young woman (Dugas) being raped in the woods by an unknown assailant with a stocking pulled over his face. She manages to escape, flagging down a passing car, as driven by Claudio (Claude Maran), a photographer who hates stupid, expressionless women nearly as much as he likes empty cans, and, to a lesser degree, keeping fresh turds in cigarette packs in his fridge. There's also quite a few baby dolls in tiny jars strewn about the place, as well. While keeping a nightmare-plagued Daniela under lock and key, Claudio alternates between photographing and verbally abusing one of his ultra-submissive models (Funari), running a hot light over her nude body. Random footage of war atrocities accompanies his sadism-flavored photo shoots, while Daniela snoops around his flat, prying open a locked door to reveal a slide projector chock full o' can based photographic art. For her crimes, she's forced to crawl around like a dog a bit, after some disciplinary bitch slaps, of course.


You'd need one of Andre the Giant's mitts to blot out that bush.
He takes in Leda (Simonetti), a pixie-haired waif left homeless-by-volcano(you'd think people'd have insurance for that kinda thing), that he later peep-toms on, as she swaps fluids with a lanky, effeminate African (Joseph Dickson, as "Il Negro"), who'd been searching for Daniela, snarkily slagging himself off to Claudio as a homosexual, before dicking down his new secretary on the sneak. Meanwhile, Claudio has also locked up a compliant Sylvia like a starving animal, allowing her to occasionally sloppily lap coffee cake(? the print I watched was thankfully far from crisp...) crumbs off of his chest while she jerks him off. Next up, he's got one of his models pinching off her daily deuce in what looks like a paint roller tray, or it could be a litter box. Does it matter, at this point? In any case, this movie gets a good deal shittier from here on out, both literally and figuratively. Rather than spelling it all out graphically and hilariously for you here, I'm gonna leave the finale for you to discover on your own, should you be inclined to hunt down such obscure art-sleaze cinema, as I had done before you. Woe is me for my curiosity, but woe of woes is you who now oughta know better.


"Ohhh, take me, Willis! Now, while Arnold's still on the dialysis machine..."
The two reasons I sought out this title in the first place: Funari would also appear in Starcrash and Midnight Blue the following year, before her notoriously lascivious turns in D'Amato's Le notti erotiche dei morte viventi aka/Sexy Nights of the Living Dead(1980) and Porno Holocaust (1981). Simonetti appeared in Bruno Mattei's La vera storia della monaca di Monza aka/The True Story of the Nun of Monza(1980) and Detenute violente aka/Hell Penitentiary with Ajita Wilson in 1984.  I think Doc, a fellow of a milder tolerance for the disgusting, who naturally vacated the room for good when the paint tray came out, may have best put the exclamation on our observations tonight, when he said, afterwards: "I'd rather watch the guy with the eggs." One Wop. For hardcore genre freaks only.


Not the worst thing that gets eaten in this movie. Trust me.

"Antichrist" (2009) d/ Lars von Trier

Danish director Lars von Trier has never been a stranger to controversy, be it some badly misinterpreted attempts at humor at Cannes in 2011, or the frightening and often strikingly beautiful subject matter in front of his poetic lens, as is the case with this, his 2009 effort, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Antichrist masterfully combines von Trier's trademark haunting dreamscape visuals within horrible events, equating to an effective tone of general unease throughout the film. The director proclaimed himself the best in the world at his craft after a screening of tonight's review in Cannes, and proclaimed that everyone was his guest, and not the other way around, after being asked to justify the film's existence. Though I'm in no position to confirm or deny his admirably boastful claims at this point in time,  I will say this: Love or hate his movies, they have a knack for sticking around in your head long after you've walked away from the screen, and if that isn't great film making, I'm not sure what classifies as such.


...Like combining to form a Voltron made of ugly.
We begin with a voyeuristic explicit shower fuck between he(Dafoe) and she(Gainsbourg), with both lust-ravaged fornicators so thoroughly engulfed in each other's fuck that they fail to notice her toddler son climbing out of his crib, unlatching the child gate, and doing a window swan dive into the snowy winter night to his untimely end. Nothing kills a guy's hard on like accidental death, and he, in true therapist fashion, volunteers to see her through her immense, crippling grief, offering his professional analysis along the way, as he's unsure of her current psychoanalyst's merit. A guy'll go the extra mile for dimepiece. When open discussion and prescription drugs prove mostly fruitless in her recovery, he suggests therapy through exposure, where she returns to the cabin where she'd worked on her thesis on the killing of women throughout history the previous summer, a gloomy place called "Eden", to identify and face her innermost fears, head on. On the trip, he encounters a fearless doe with a stillborn fawn hanging out of it's womb. Then he awakens to a hand full of blood-engorged ticks, and watches a fox eat it's own entrails before stating to him, matter-of-factly, that "Chaos reigns." Not a good sign, as Nancy Loomis used to say.


Even as a child, Campbell had difficulty recognizing the ledge(regional joke).
Once he discovers her thesis notes hidden away in the attic, he begins to see the entire picture, briefly quelling his suspicions long enough for a surreal nature-quickie among massive tree roots and reaching hands. Her extensive study of misogynistic violence through the ages lead her to the unhinged conclusion that all women are inherently evil (!), while he finds multiple snapshots of her son with his shoes on the wrong feet, explaining the deformity noted in the boy's autopsy report. I dunno, seems like the kinda gal that probably saw her son go out the window, and said nothing, grooving on the evil of the moment, instead. She makes the scene and pulverizes his egg bag with a block of wood, masturbates him until he ejaculates blood, then bolts a grindstone to his leg to prevent his escape. They play hide and seek in a foxhole, and she removes her own clitoris with a large pair of shears, while a fox, crow, and deer look on. She stabs him in the back with the scissors, earning herself hot strangulation death and a viking's funeral just outside the cabin.While making his way out of the forest, subsisting on berries, he is overcome by a vision of a multitude of faceless women climbing a hill, towards him...

 
"Yeah well, I haven't been feeling so hot lately..."
Dafoe and Gainsbourg are both riveting on the screen, and von Trier's lens revels in their mutual unattractive-ish quality, giving us long uncomfortable nude stretches with both, as well as the explicit sex scene that had to be near the bottom of the unwritten list of things I'd secretly hoped I'd never see in a movie. Like, bleeeech, man. Definitely neck-and-neck with Dafoe-in-drag, tongue kissing fat guys in Troy Duffy's Boondock Saints (1999) on the "Things That Cannot be Unseen" chart. Needless to say, like all else I've seen of the director's work dating back to 1994's The Kingdom, I naturally loved it, and if you're in for a disturbingly good time, majestically shot and powerfully acted, then you'll do well to queue this one up for yourselves, with all speed. Four Wops, and very highly recommended, indeed...


The woodland creatures gathered in silent vigil around Snow White while the dwarves scoured the forest floor for her clitoris.

"Bronson" (2008) d/ Nicolas Winding Refn

My introduction to the film work of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn came a few short weeks ago at the suggestion of one of my more cinema-minded affiliates in the form of his 2011 film, Drive, which I enjoyed greatly, but didn't cover here, as it doesn't really fit the qualifying genre conditions to merit an entry. His 2008 effort, on the other hand, documenting the life story of the most violent prisoner in the history of her Majesty's nick, Michael Peterson aka/ "Charlie Bronson", as portrayed by Tom "Bane" Hardy, fits our cult criteria consummately enough, alright. By the time the end credits rolled, I'd noticed both of my hands had naturally balled into fists from all the pugilistic commotion on the screen I'd just bore witness to. Refn masterfully frames each shot of this bare-knuckle, blood-spattered tough guy bonanza with delicate precision, lending arthouse insight into the complexities of the mind of our mustachioed anti-hero, peppered with punches to the face, and plenty of them.


"Straitjacket? Fuck. I got into the strawberry preserves anyway, didn't I."
That Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy) is not a singer or actor, is irrelevant to his desire for greatness, as we first see him in a naked scrap with prison guards. From an early age, Peterson shows a propensity to mix it up with all comers, from schoolmates to teachers, who's he's not opposed to smashing with school desks. He blags some cash from a chip shop he works at, in an attempt to impress one of his female co-workers, who ends up becoming his wife and bearing him a child. When domestic life proves too burdensome for him, he robs a post office, earning a seven year prison sentence for himself in the process. Here, he flourishes, a star to the other inmates, for his unpredictably violent episodes that no prison seems capable of quelling. He's eventually sent to Rampton, a mental hospital where his brutal outbursts are met with heavy sedation, but after a seemingly sympathetic paedo suggests that the two men rape a nine year old girl together sometime, he feigns compliance long enough to nearly strangle the fellow patient to death, earning him a trip to Broadmoor, another mental hospital where he instigates a full-scale riot and is seen atop the establishment's smoldering rooftop flashing his trademark double peace signs on the evening news.


"Ohhhh, my sciatica. Attica! Attica!"
On parole(!) in Luton, he reconnects with an uncle, who gets his feet wet in unlicensed bare-knucle boxing and human-baiting (man vs. vicious dogs, in case you were wondering) and adopts the nickname "Charlie Bronson", before robbing a jeweler to impress another more disinterested young woman this time, earning him a return trip to prison just sixty-nine days after his initial release. Back in the nick, he returns to his greased up, prison guard-throttling, ultra-violent ways and gets his sentence extended. The governor tells Charlie that he can foresee the inmate's death inside if no changes are made, leading him to take up art as a prison hobby, but when his efforts are met with indifference from the officials, he takes it upon himself to kidnap his art teacher, tying him to a post, painting him up like a sculpture complete with an apple in his mouth(!!), before greasing up for the familiar throwdown with the guards once he's had his bit of fun. Finally, we see Bronson, forced to stand bloody and naked in a coffin-shaped cage in solitary, as we're told the inmate hasn't been granted a release date. He seems okay with that...


"If you continue this...you will die here."
The real life Bronson got over the initial reservation he had towards Hardy in the lead role, meeting with him in prison, even shaving off his trademark handlebar for the actor to use on his own face in the film, and eventually calling him "Britain's number one actor" after finally getting to see the film for himself some three years later. Would you argue with this guy?? Me, neither. The critics were similarly fond of this one, which won Best Film at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival, and was also nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance the same year. I'm not sure one director has ever made it to my list of current favorites any faster than Refn. If this sort of thing is your speed, too, you'll do well to hunt down a copy and check it out immediately. Three wops on the rating scale and a recommendation. See it!


"You mind closely examining this deep transverse metacarpal ligament for me, gov?"

"Sweet Movie"(1974)d/Dušan Makavejev

During my adolescent years, I first got wind of this strange and controversial Yugoslavian rarity through one of the VHS bootleggers I used to deal with, and my curiosity was further sparked by later mentions from trusted genre writers in various publications I regularly flipped through.It wasn't until last night, though, when I finally got the opportunity to screen this one for myself, thanks to the folks at Criterion and Doc's all-encompassing current NetFlix queue.If you're not into all the footage of exhumation of the 22,000 estimated mass graves containing Polish nationals executed by Russian troops on the order of Joseph Stalin contained within, there's always plenty of simulated and unsimulated coprophilia, emetophilia, genital fondling, teat-suckling, and implied paedophilia for you to wrap your glassies around, and if there's one thing that enhances a movie experience, it's seeing John "Animal House" Vernon pissing on-camera out of his erect dick, painted gold for effect.Yeah, not really.Anna Prucnal, the blonde actress who's center of the second narrative, which Makavejev was forced to write when lead actress Carol Laure up and quit after having to fondle a guy's bare uncircumsized junk on-screen (the last straw for her, after enduring several unsavory acts her character performs in the script), was banned from re-entering her native Poland for years after authorities deemed the movie both pornographic and anti-communist in nature.C'mon fellas, those are two of my own finest qualities.Though I was mostly unimpressed with the movie, there are some brilliant sequences with rich visual style contained herein that I'd be upset about never getting to experience if I hadn't watched in the first place.So effective, they are, that I'd revisit them separately in the future.Forwards towards, me hearties.

"Why you gotta flash me yer beaver, lady?Can't you see I'm on the shoe?"
First, we're introduced to Miss Canada(Carol Laure), as she wins a Most Virginal contest, as determined by a gynecologist on stage(Miss Yugoslavia is a burly broad who body slams him into the examination chair), winning a lucrative marriage to an eccentric milk tycoon named Mr. Kapital(John Vernon) who introduces her to the joys of matrimony on their wedding night by whipping out his gold-painted hard on and taking a whiz on her while his creepy old mother and a band of hippes garbed like religious leaders serenade the couple from outside.Embarrassed by Dean Wormser's weiner, she relates a desire to split to Kapital's mom who nearly drowns her before leaving her to the black musclehead(Roy Callender) who serves as family bodyguard.He jumps rope naked and stuffs her into a suitcase(!), which ends up on the Eiffel Tower, where a film starring a Latin lothario named El Macho(Sami Frey) is being filmed.She soon falls prey to his animal magnetism and they have sex right there on the landmark, but a group of touring nuns interrupt their coitus and scare them into a state of penis captivus(he gets stuck inside her!!).After being freed from the ahem, liplock, by French painter/writer Roland Topor, she finds herself in a therapy commune of artists led by Otto Muehl, where she breastfeeds from a lactating hippie, and after a particularly gross meal sans utensils, one of the other members experiences a rebirth of sorts, crying like a baby, pissing and shitting while the others pamper him.Finally, we see her writhing naked in a pool of liquid chocolate for a film crew.Clearly, this is not an ad for Godiva chocolates...or is it.

Choleric over her character's on-camera uncut cock-coddling, Carole was compelled to quit.
The second intercut narrative deals with a failed communist revolutionary named Anna Planeta(Anna Prucnal), who captains a massive, gaudy boat full of candy (with an enormous papier-mache Karl Marx head on the prow, mind you) down a river, where she spots a sailor named Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti) pissing in broad daylight on the shore and opts to give him a lift.After they reminisce and joyously sing old commie songs together, she warns him not to fall in love with her, else she'll be forced to kill him.Potemkin ignores her warnings and pleas to leave the ship, and ends up putting the blocks to her in a hanging nest full of sugar, after which she bites his granule-covered skin, drawing blood, and shanks him in the labonza repeatedly, twirling the blade and mixing the sweet substance with his red red kroovy.She warned you, pal.Her next passengers are a group of adolescent boys who she seduces with candy, stripping off her garments and teasing them with her nakedness.In the end, she's apprehended and hauled off by the authorities as police officers lay plastic sacks containing the childrens' lifeless bodies on the shore in front of a crowd of terrified onlookers.Later, when the crowd has dispersed, we see the children rising from the plastic like butterflies from their cocoons, reborn.

Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti)'s pelvis is promptly perforated while plunged in a cistern of sugar.
Say what you will about Sweet Movie, but you could never accuse it of being boring.A little excessive, like locking yourself in the hall closet with a box of candy bars, but those aforementioned sequences make it a worthwhile viewing, both visually stunning and thought provoking(I got a kick out of the vintage stock footage of baby gymnastics.Baby gymnastics, really?), truly a tightrope balance of exploitative elements and museum quality art.Definitely not for everyone, especially not those individuals whose minds are on lockdown from the bizarre, perverse, and the absurd.Laure's choco-nudity is liable to leave you Yugo-slobberin' for more, while Prucnal's scene with the boys will most likely disturb you deeply.Or leave you itchy, one or the other.Both women have gone on to successful singing careers, with Laure continuing to act in French television and films all along.On the scale, it earns two Wops, mainly because I can't see myself ever compelled to watch it again for any reason.After seeing it once, I can't imagine many of you will either.

If they made this outta chocolate, I'd be in a hyperosmolar nonketotic coma by now.

"Possession"(1981)d/Andrzej Zulawski

I've had some pretty dismal relationships in my day in the quest for the perfect blend of fierce loyalty, unquenchable sex-fire, and slight insanity(can't avoid the I word when you're talking women, can you?), but I've got the feeling that even if you combined all of the most rotten relationships I've ever had into one caustic,abusive black nightmare, it'd play like Rock Hudson and Doris Day compared to whatever the hell Polish exile director Andrzej Zulawski went through during the making of tonight's entry.When Vestron released it in America on vhs years ago, they snipped some forty-seven minutes out of the original one hundred twenty-seven minute running time.That's not fucking peanuts.And for an art film from which Zulawski achieved his most widespread international success, permeated with emotional aggression and allegory of a bombastically pulverized marriage and its ghastly byproducts seasoned with horrific gore, coital demons, and a release poster that pre-dates Japanese tentacle porn by a few years, it's safe to say the vast majority of filmgoers walked away from the experience scratching their domes in confusion.If you're looking for a brilliant intellectual dissertation on the film from ol' Wop, you'll have to catch me between lattes in Soho sometime.I just know Big Z captured some truly memorable sequences on film and pulled unbelievable performances out of Adjani and Neill(Adjani especially, she might put you off dating for a while once you've seen her here).Probably not the optimal viewing choice for anybody about to start a new whirlwind romance, but then again, in my twisted mind, it kinda is.

Anna(Isabelle Adjani)grinds herself some handburger.
Mark(Sam Neill) resigns from his work for the secret service, to return home with a suitcase full of greenbacks to his wife, Anna(Isabelle Adjani)and young son in Berlin. Almost instantly,he notices his strikingly beautiful mate exuding strange airs; their son Bob being cared for by Margie,who refuses to divulge names or addresses of any guilty male factors involved in the sordid affair.Several increasingly violent and brutal domestic battles ensue,with Anna's erratic behaviour ultimately leads to her matter-of-fact confessions of infidelity dating back a year already, with a flamboyantly self-absorbed middle-aged German named Heinrich(Heinz Bennent),who believes he's attained the highest levels of sexual zen through ballet training, guru mysticism, drug use, and, of course, fashion, all while living with his mother(!), clearly besting the previous record for not leaving the nest held for thirty-eight years by my cousin Phil.The two men have themselves a punch up, with Mark ending up on the wrong end of an embarrassing beating at the hands of the intellectual sissy.Fed up, he breaks camp, leaving his family to sort themselves out on their own, but when enveloping guilt(and a nervous breakdown)brings him home, he finds the situation has degenerated further than he could have imagined, his boy dirty and neglected, his aloof wife often nowhere to be found.

To say Mark and Anna have a rocky marriage is like saying Sharon Tate's crib could have used a Swiffer on Aug 9th,1969.
To further complicate matters,Mark is astounded to discover that Bob's teacher, Helen, is identical in appearance to Anna(perhaps because it's Adjani with different colored hair and contact lenses,but what the hell do I know?),and begins a sex-free relationship of innocence and purity with the doppleganger.On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, things get progressively worse with Anna projecting her harrowing sense of helplessness through blankets, electric knives, and meatgrinders, culminated by a mind-blowing flashback sequence in the Berlin subway station, where she goes apeshit with a bag of groceries, screaming uncontrollably while whipping the bag's contents against a nearby wall, writhing and spasming jerkedly, and oozing blood and fluids from every orifice in her convulsing body.No Midol in those groceries, honey?When she disappears again, and a distraught Heinrich with slighted ego is not her destination, Mark hires a detective to tail her on her new path of self-destruction.A dirty, sparsely-decorated, out of the way love nest holds the terrible truth for all interested parties, leading up to a finale packed full of blood, bodily fluids(and parts), tentacles, fucking, murder, and death.If that hasn't sparked your interest to see this one, you might wanna check your pulse to make sure it hasn't stopped altogether.

After getting six shades of shit kicked outta him by a guy doing this,Mark(Sam Neill) gets his guy card pulled indefinitely.
As of this writing, I've never seen any other Zulawski films, mostly French in origin and directed at the arthouse crowd, but I fully intend on doing so before the smoke clears.His mastery of the medium is blatantly on display in this Cronenbergian effort, using camera angles and movement,and even sound to disorient the audience for his own complex ends.According to the dvd commentary from the director himself,despite the critical praise for her amazing performance,Adjani allegedly attempted suicide after viewing the finished film.Once you've seen the movie(where it doesn't seem like her character is having a breakdown,but the actress herself is doing so) yourselves, you'll realize that's almost a logical conclusion to such a project.The effects work by Carlo "E.T." Rambaldi,who's also been resonsible for such genre work as Profondo Rosso(1975), Una lucertola con la pelle di donna(1971), and the head mechanics behind Alien(1979), among others, are startling and brilliant.This movie, beautiful and depraved, isn't for everybody, and certainly not something for the usual Freddy Krueger fanboy, and as such, I can only award it two wops on the scale, even if my personal feelings about it are much, much stronger.

Isabelle earned herself a French Oscar in 1981 for this performance,barely edging a Japanese lady who fucked an octopus onscreen.