This film & its unbound character is no scream, rising up against whatever. No 'lone man against the world'. As the film states, he was already "mad" before the war, & the afterwards - as Japanese society rebuilt itself amidst the greedy, meddling hands of the many who felt they deserved something - made no difference other than to give him more space to explode.
In Stephen King's Cujo, King sets the scene of a community of pressurisation. Of normal structures & routines,…
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Graveyard of Honor 1975
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The Ghastly Ones 1968
I hesitate to say that any actor here gives a bad performance, or in most Milligan films. They fit perfectly into Milligan's maelstroms. He is at his finest when all his mediocre-to-bad elements are each humming in perfect unity within each section (acting, camera, post, etc) & they are then hurled twirling into the air to become something so much more than good or bad.
If you like one of Milligan's characters on first impression, the actor & the writer/cinematographer/director will have…
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Organ Trail 2023
Organ Trail feels like it's trying to capture the impact of 70s grindhouse westerns, the off-kilter exploiters that rode high on intense landscapes and deviance. This gets the butchering right, but the potent brew of 70s low-budget camp with nihilistic frontier apocalypticism eludes the filmmakers. Very, very few modern films have lassoed that particular vibe. Ravenous did. But Organ Trail plays like it was written stranger and then pulled straight when the filmmakers realised they hadn't caught that thread and…
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King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis 1970
The swastikas drawn on a white convertible by the owners, driving by with sunglasses on and cool as cucumbers.
The burning car with the words "End Slums" written on it.
The housewife who comes out of her house to set the sprinkler on the edge of her property, spraying water over the pavement as the march tries to walk by, hounded by cops.
Martin Luther King Jnr's face as a gunshot-like sound rings out, his mouth clearly so dry, his…
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Transformations 1972
In going through an article on Vermont folk horror from Arrow Video's excellent American Horror Project Vol.2, in relation to DARK AUGUST, I was reading up on a spate of experimental witchy films from early 70s Vermont in Steven R. Bissette's informative essay. Through it I discovered this "experimental" short.
Made in 1972, it was screened independently throughout the region being one of a handful of "essentially secret films," writes Bissette in the Arrow booklet, "self-distributed by the filmmakers themselves…
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Surviving Edged Weapons 1988
A jewelled crown of paracinema, a prize that was never meant for mere mortals, Surviving Edged Weapons comes to us from a golden age of violence & silliness. It was a police training video, created for a professional elite to educate & enlighten. How a man jiggling at the speed of danger, hips flexing & thrusting, was meant to train a police officer in the ways of self defense remains a mystery. There are many mysteries surrounding this film, such as who the…