Halloween II is in many ways what musician-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie’s first reboot of the slasher franchise should have been (although it didn't fare as well at the box office this weekend, winding up No. 3). It furthers Zombie’s attempt to get into the head of serial killer Michael Meyers, a thoughtful reversal of how John Carpenter’s original film treated Michael as a mythical boogeyman that’s only partially made of flesh and blood.

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Next Sunday, April 19, the Museum of the Moving Image presents a free screening of writer/director Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope (1969) at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, in Manhattan.

If you can imagine this, Swope’s playfully inflammatory humor is what Chappelle’s Show might’ve been if it were more angry and bonkers. Downey’s satire is a mean and surreal little gem that sends up everyone vaguely claiming to be “hip,” “down” or “with it.” While Chappelle never played favorites in his routines, his skits aren’t nearly as out there as the kind Swope’s “Truth and Soul, Inc.” advertising firm crank out. Don’t get me wrong, Chappelle’s Show was smart and funny in a zanily perplexing way, but not like Swope, a film that that casually features a pot-smoking midget bureaucrat having a threesome with a fashion photographer that wanders into his bedroom. Clearly, “bonkers” was an understatement.

Swope’s titular protagonist, played by first-time actor Arnold Johnson, is the king of cons. He rises to power after the CEO of his ad agency drops dead mid-rant and his fellow executives almost unanimously vote him in as none of them consider him to be a serious threat. Swope then kicks them all out, proclaiming that he’ll put the company back-on-track by telling only the truth. He declares that they will not promote cigarettes or war toys, demands cash up-front and no feedback from prospective companies save for their products’ name and function and replaces the board of directors with a cabal of yes men, yo-yos, morons and hilariously weird racial stereotypes all rolled into one—one such nut declares that, since they’ve dumped telephones for more direct forms of communication, the ideal way to pass on news is the drum. Shortly thereafter, Swope tells an underling to sell window cleaner as a soft drink “in the ghetto,” a decision made just after “Truth and Soul” begins raking in laundry bags full of cash.

Swope makes for such a great parodic figure because he’s completely morally bankrupt, a perfect scapegoat figure for our hard economic times. While Johnson is totally convincing spouting Swope’s fiery rhetoric, he’s also deadpan enough to not even flick a cigar ash as he walks away with 8 million dollars and some change. The commercials he releases get praised as being utterly original for their daring vision and originality, making it funny that one of those ads features a “soul”ful chick dancing in a mist-enshrouded alley just before she proclaims, “You can’t eat an air conditioner.” Swope’s a great target, one whose world is as churlishly corrupt as he is and every bit as screwy. Make sure to get to Astoria in good time because recession cinema doesn’t get much better.

Visit Museum of Moving Image here.

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Ironically, while the sound on my DVD of writer/director J.T Petty’s The Burrowers (2008), appropriately spiked every time something goes boom or someone yelps, the same could not be said about anything in the film. Petty’s horror-western isn’t nearly as audacious as it should be and never rises above nor sinks past the level of mediocrity that makes you want to either like it or leave it. Petty’s cast, script and direction aren’t that bad, but they’re not that good either, which, for a film about a search party’s fight against a group of giant subterranean worms, is the biggest disappointment of all.

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Pink Eiga Films has done it again, putting me in an awkward position because they make me want to say—despite all my hesitations—that their weird line-up of softcore Japanese erotica is probably the most intriguing cult finds of the year. With their latest double-header—A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn (2003) and Sexy Battle Girls (1986)—they show why these 60-minute skin flicks have developed a cult that can and will defend them as serious artsploitation.

The simultaneous release of A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn and Sexy Battle Girls creates an unlikely collision of tastes and sentiments, especially considering that the only thing they have in common—a bunch of sex scenes involving yelping women and weird fetishes—is the least interesting part of either film. On the one hand, we have a semi-serious drama about an old farmer that confuses his daughter-in-law for his cow Bessie and on the other, an action-comedy about a schoolgirl that has trained her vag’ to be a deadly weapon for the sake of avenging her father.

When thinking about what a typical “pink” film might be, Sexy Battle Girls is undoubtedly the first thing to come to mind. Filled with bizarre, kinky humor—prime examples include a dildo yo-yo and ink pens that are wielded like throwing stars—Sexy Battle Girls is a campfest filled with dated music, cheesy hairdos and lots of misappropriated grrl power. The sex scenes are dull and repetitive for the most part, save for the scene where the lesbian nerd gets friendly with her nemesis’ dildo yo-yo. Then again, anyone expecting to seriously get off by watching a film called Sexy Battle Girls is neck-deep in a certain Egyptian river.  

Sexy Battle Girls’ campy humor is problematically quarantined from its sex scenes for the most part, making the aforementioned yoyo encounter the exception that proves the rule. As far as onscreen coitus goes, they’re fairly vanilla and take up a big chunk of the film’s blissfully brief runtime, making it likely that anyone looking for hyper-pop thrills will end up stabbing their fast-forward button repeatedly. Sexy Battle Girls isn’t nearly as out-there as S&M Hunter (1986), a recent Pink Eiga release that successfully merges its humor and sexuality, making it shark bait for the youtube set.

The truly adventurous cult filmgoer will find heaven in A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn. As a sentimental melodrama about a senile farmer that refuses to sell his farm for fear of becoming useless, it dishes out all the quirk of S&M Hunter with a dollop of sentimentality to boot. As a softcore weepy where an old man fucks his daughter-in-law to get over his pain and free her from her obligation to him, it hits home in unexpected ways (ie: by film’s end, you will believe a man can milk his daughter-in-law).

Writer/director Daisuke Goto’s script is mostly sober but is smart enough to create its own kind of humor—did we just see that cow keel over from its POV? Compared to Sexy Battle Girls, its like what Aki Kaurismaki is to the Farrelly brothers. Being both sad and silly, however, is what makes it the strongest film Pink Eiga has released thus far and a shoe-in for one of the more perplexingly enjoyable one’s I’ll see this year.



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It’s to writer/director Sean Ellis’ great credit that The Broken (2008), his visually flashy but structurally understated follow-up to Cashback (2006), that it makes so much out of a film that doesn’t have a single memorable line of dialogue. The dialogue is purely functional and hence negligible, leaving the bulk of the plot’s build-up up to cinematographer Angus Hudson’s luridly glossy visuals.

Tension builds and builds and even when its released, it’s with the greatest care as to how much we see and not how much we’re told. Even the film’s flabbiest images, even its off-putting Psycho reference, are drawn taut by the fact that nobody is being vigorously interrogated as to their meaning. They’re just over there in the viewer’s periphery and then gone until the next confrontation, which never comes soon enough. Do yourself a favor and find a copy of this film.

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The irony of advertising Chocolate (2008) as a “Prachya Pinkaew film” is that Pinkaew’s more famous martial arts films are successes almost in spite of him. Like Ong Bak (2003) and Tom yum goong (2005), Chocolate is only a moderate success because of star Tony Jaa’s charisma and the dynamic action scenes he stars in and co-choreographs. Chocolate’s romantic overplot is generic and tiresome—an autistic girl (Yanin Vismitananda) that can kick serious ass collects money to pay for her mother’s expensive medical bills—its representation of autistic kids is laughable and slightly, though clearly unintentionally, offensive (look out for the completely random and made-to-be-youtubed autistic child fight scene) but when the film lets star Vismitananda cut loose, it’s a spazzy blast.

Vitmitananda’s moves are a funky fusion of the muay thai kick-boxing style Jaa uses, Hong Kong martial arts and break-dancing. Though a little unpolished at times, she definitely has what it takes to be a big name and hopefully will get the publicity that she deserves.

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Like the 3-D and the stop-motion technology it employs, writer/director Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is something old that’s not particularly new or ground-breaking anymore—but is still very satisfying. It’s a fairy tale—y’know, the original kind, the kind meant for kids?—that forgoes the pretense of making its familiar format topically new simply for its own sake. Any deeper meaning to the film, like the lurking question of what exactly a parent owes to their children, is left fundamentally obscured by a blissful scarcity of deeper detail. Everything is left on the level of superficial storytelling that needs no justification save that it’s nice to be told a good yarn every now and then.

As modest as its achievements are, Coraline deserves commendation for its mostly brisk pacing and economic parceling out of information. Selick, no slouch even on his worst day (see: Monkeybone—or better yet, don’t), hits the ground running and gives us just enough detail to keep the world of our titular heroine (the alternately grating and versatile Dakota Fanning) deeply inviting.

After being welcomed to her new country home by a mangy black cat, a Russian gymnast who trains jumping mice, two former burlesque stars that read tea leaves and a creepy but well-meaning young stalker, Coraline realizes she needs a little comfort from her family. She finds it on the other side of a tiny door that leads to an alternate universe where her family wants nothing but to see her smile. From there, her bright fantasy world, as we all by now should expect, becomes very Grimm very quick.

And yet, the fact that we know to expect certain characters will suffer and triumph at certain points is unimportant. Selick has made the best kind of pastiche, the kind of piecemeal story whose sole agenda is to tell what is by now a thrice-told tale very well. In Coraline’s first two-thirds, he gives us just enough to get hooked but never so much as to overstay his welcome. That’s one of Selick’s greatest assets: as a gifted animator and visual storyteller, his engrossingly detailed sets always wind up becoming his films’ most captivating characters.

For most of the film, Selick does everything right: the plot is dense with vibrant detail, fast-paced and most importantly, not the in the least bit condescending to its audience’s maturity or intelligence. It’s not for kids or adults but rather anyone interested in a fable that’s a story first and a fable second. Unlike the latter, whose purpose is to enforce an allegorical Meaning, Coraline eschews self-serving moralizing though there is a good moral to be taken away from its story of a girl in search of her dream family—selfishness in a parent-child relationship is a two-way street.

That breezy but intelligent level of storytelling craft is undoubtedly why the film’s third act is such a letdown. Though this is more than likely Gaiman’s fault just as much as it is Selick’s, the story’s preceding plot points are so neatly focused and effective in their rhythm that its meandering and frankly uninspired ending provides a very unwelcome surprise. Thankfully that perfunctory denouement doesn’t blemish the rest of the film, which is something of a small miracle and a long overdue return to prominence for Selick, who deserves Pixar-scale praise even if his latest doesn’t reinvent the wheel.



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Just by looking at its title, most American audiences should know what they’re getting into when they check out a film released by fledgling film distributor Pink Eiga. Names like S&M Hunter, Semen Demon or Whore Hospital are what most would expect from pink films, or Japanese softcore porn. They’re quirky-sounding, fetishistic and really bizarre—unless, of course, you enjoy watching a guy in a derby hat and an eyepatch lasso girls using his “spider technique.” If you do, that weirdness is so endearing that to call it strange is no longer a putdown but rather earnest praise. And yet, it’s unlikely that anyone outside of cult devotees will actually care about these fun and freaky cultural curios.

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Özer Kiziltan’s Takva: A Man’s Fear of God (2006) would be a predictable and poorly executed theological complication on a stock plot had it continued beyond its heavy-handed ending. It relies on a fairly simple connect-the-dots plot: Muaharrem, (Erkan Can) a pious Muslim, is asked to become the debt collector for an Islamic community in Turkey. As a result, he has nightmarish wet dreams—one involving a clown and a butcher and another involving mannequins—and reluctantly becomes corrupt.

The one kink screenwriter Onder Cakar puts in that formula is that where Muaharrem might try to take charge of his life, he collapses into a bathetic heap. Can’s moving performance and a few scenes that revolve around Muaharrem’s religious beliefs make Takva a little less dull but not by much.

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Like any documentary, Nimrod Erez’s 2012: Science or Superstition is only as interesting as its subject and talking heads. Half the battle for the film was won by its choice of topic—separating and tying together myths and facts regarding the veracity of claims that the world will end on December 21, 2012—and experts. The film’s presentation however leaves a lot to be desired. At no point does Erez really put the screws to the film’s more obtuse experts, leaving the connection between their research and the mythology/anthropology they’re explicating largely nebulous. A variety of opinions appears to supersede their clarity, ignoring the most basic truism of “quality over quantity.”

Some of these more frustrating specialists provide an excellent counterpoint to the more clear and even-handed authorities, like the skeptical but open-minded Dr. Anthony Aveni. Most of them however are just there to cover all the bases and as such aren’t particularly compelling or credible. For example, Dr. Alberto Villoldo’s take on expanding one’s consciousness through hallucinogens, erudite as it may be, seems the point. Hitting all the bases is one thing but straying so far away from the central question of just how worried should people be regarding the world’s imminent demise is a little silly.

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