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Reviews
Begotten (1989)
A Disappointment
The first 3 or 4 minutes of Begotten were very promising; the graininess of the film, the obscurity of the scene in front of me, the silence, all made me feel like I was peering in on something forbidden, mysterious. I'd been told nothing of the film before I saw it except that it was "disturbing," and I thought initially that was just what I was going to get.
But after a while (and it wasn't a very long while, either) I just stopped caring. It stopped being worth the effort to struggle to discern the action going on in front of me, to piece the story of even the point of the non-story together, and sitting back and letting the imagery unfold in front of me, sort of accepting it passively for its own beauty didn't seem to work, either.
Some of the shots are beautiful, I'll admit it. And some of them are, for lack of a better word, disturbing. But I spent more of my time wondering "was this shot on film or on video, or both?" or "is that a continuous recording of crickets chirping, or is it a loop?" than "who are they, and why are they doing this?"
Because honestly I didn't care who they were, or why anything that happened on screen happened. I didn't feel any great need to. Half the time I was watching something purely abstract and non-representational, and the other half, what felt like old stock footage that someone had pieced together because they thought it looked neat, even though they had no context for what it was being shown. And it dragged on and on and on, going nowhere except where it had already been, so joy of joys, you get to see a variation on a scene that's already been beaten into the ground a couple times already, and then you get to see it again.
Mercifully, the film did eventually end, with what felt like it was supposed to be a "see, there's the point of all this" series of images, but in order to reveal the point, there needs to be a question posed in the first place, and that wasn't there. Everything just happened sort of matter-of-factly, without any emotional investment to it whatsoever, hoping it would get by on its grossness. Which it didn't. The grossness was deflated by how impossible it was to see what was going on anyway. It wasn't like peering through murk to find something you weren't sure you wanted to see. It was staring straight at the murk itself while it deluded itself that it wasn't something you couldn't bear to see.
Blood Freak (1972)
this film left me permanently damaged
I've seen this one 7 times now, and I don't know if I'll ever recover. I'm still in a state of shock over it now. Really raw for a Christian movie, really preachy for a horror movie, and for heaven's sake, our hero TURNS INTO A GIANT TURKEY!!! An awful lot of the dialogue is muffled to the point of unintelligibility, which only makes it better. Figuring out just what the heck is going on is a big part of the enjoyment on this movie. The two lab assistants should earn some sort of award as the best characters ever to appear on film - I'll leave it a that. Every single scene is flawed in one way or another. Even the one good corpse, which for a few second looks like an honest to goodness dead body, is ruined when you see the cameraman or somebody's shadow move across the floor. My life was an empty shell before viewing this film. It has become a part of me, something I will carry to my grave. Never before, and likely never again will I see such failure blazoned boldly across my television screen. A GIANT, BLOOD-SUCKING TURKEY!!!!!!
Werewolves on Wheels (1971)
the best motorcycle movie EVER!!
This film is a masterpiece! Thrill to hairy, disgusting guys riding enormous motorcycles with no hands! Cringe in horror as they beat the living daylights out of some guy at a gas station. Wonder just what the heck is going on as hordes of barefoot monks descend from the hills to offer bread and wine. Keep your notebook handy, because a step-by-step lesson in dark spirit-summoning is there waiting for you (hint: freshly cut Hazelwood). Ponder the homoerotic subtext. See the worst Tarot card reading in all history. There's even a charming softshoe routine for the kids. There's a couple of decent corpses in this movie, too. and the soundtrack is hot, hot HOT!!! I liked the ending.
Ran (1985)
Long, but really, really good.
I knew there was probably going to be an awful lot of talking when I started watching this movie, and I was right, and not all of it is all that exciting, but it's all there for a reason, and it's all worth it by the end. Never sure whether to like or hate anyone, want to feel sorry for Lord Hidetora but never quite can, but eventually do, because he's a human being. Both battle scenes are breathtaking, in completely different ways. The first was so sorrowful and awful and the second just unfathomable, just not possible, there there in front of you, and in the end, both are equally pointless, needless, horrible in their destruction, yet sorrowfully just. It's amazing that a film that runs for 160 minutes and is only happy for the first five can have the bottom fall out of it so heart-wrenchingly at the end. That after so much time wandering through such an unhappy world can take what little hope, what little joy, may be left, and snatch it away so breathlessly and finally. To be a part of this world so long and to be left so empty is just an astonishing thing to me. I recommend making it a two-night event, and having something dutiful to do with your hands while you watch, especially the second night. I drilled holes in pieces of pipe, which will one day be a xylophone, with a hand-drill. Knitting would also have been good.
Keep My Grave Open (1977)
Boring but beautiful movie. A project film
As a whole this movie was totally lame. Not scary, not funny, not unexpectedly heart-warming, not gross, not incomprehensible. You don't even really have any sympathy for the director as someone trying and failing. But it looks really, really good. It would make a decent silent, with the right score & titles. It's all washed out and almost-there most of the time, and I thought that was really nice. So I have a soft-spot for it in that regard. I wouldn't get rid of my copy. There's something there inside it, there are people there somewhere. Something ought to be done with it.
The Corpse Grinders (1971)
not the BEST film ever, but...
Nothing I could ever say will change your mind about how you feel about watching a movie about dead bodies being made into cat food, so do what you have to do, but I myself was a little disappointed. The Corpse Grinder itself, as a piece of machinery, is great, and it's not every day that I hate every character as fervently as I hate this bunch (factory staff excluded), and some of the corpses look pretty good, but it never quite reaches Failed Vision status, for all that. I feel like there was a pretty decent idea in there in the beginning, where the world was more normal and the human corpse cat food more shocking, but somewhere during filming, the movie degenerated into one about a completely dreary and bleak and awful world, with the added bonus that everyone's cats go feral after eating human corpses. I have to admit though, it's a pretty godawful side these folks all live on.
He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
Inventor triumphs over humiliation by reliving it nightly
I'm not sure about this film. Possibly a work of flawed genius, and possibly one of the first Trash Movies ever. A must-see, either way. If you take nothing more home than the scenes of the clown laughing at a globe or the size of neon sign at the circus where HE grows famous, you've already enriched your life beyond description. The titles say that HE has won by learning to laugh at his misfortune, and by making others laugh at his feigned misfortune, that somehow by knowing that people are so stupid and vile as to laugh at a man getting slapped he has risen above all his past defeats, but at the same time, it's so totally clear that he has never put it behind him, and I don't know if it's pathetic or not when he tries to give his final monologue on the importance of love, and lets himself be slapped to death in the middle of a circus ring before he can finish, because I can never quite let myself feel that HE is pathetic enough himself, I can't quite decide how much of a heart HE has left, and I don't know how to weep for it once it's been buried. It's hard to struggle with that and pay attention to everything beautiful in this movie, and there's a lot. I would like to have seen it with a better soundtrack, because the copy I saw had generic silent-movie-sounding music dubbed over the top of it. Music that paid attention to what was happening, and helped try to speak it would probably have left me with a clearer impression of what the idea was, but c'est la vie. This film is worth a 10 for its inability to fit in with anything I've ever seen, and especially coming from Sjostrom. See it just to keep a copy of it circulating. This one would be a pity to lose.