Halloween 2024: October 11th

Crimes of Passion (1984)

Controversy followed Ken Russell's entire career. His maximalist visions frequently pushed the envelope in terms of content. From Oliver Reed and Alan Bates' nude wrestling match in "Women in Love" to a convent of mad nuns having an orgy with a statue of Christ in "The Devils," his work frequently came under fire from censors. Eventually, his excessive imagination and outrageous antics seemed to reach a point of self-parody. Critics and audience both became less receptive to Russell's work going into the eighties. A big turning point seems to have been 1984's "Crimes of Passion." The erotic thriller was heavily cut by distributor New World Pictures to avoid an X rating, leading to a compromised vision that was critically dismissed and financially unsuccessful. However, time has been kind to "Crimes of Passion." Russell's unrated director's cut is widely available, becoming a video hit back in the day. With the salacious subgenre receiving renewed interest in recent years, "Crimes of Passion" is frequently touted as a unique entry. It almost goes without saying, it's gotten a special features packed boutique Blu-ray release, cementing the film's status as a cult classic.

Joanna Crane is a fashion designer by day but, at night, she dons a platinum blonde wig and assumes the persona of street walking prostitute China Blue. As China, she fulfils deviant sexual fantasies for a number of men, never allowing herself to become emotionally close to any of them. Family man and sometimes detective Bobby Grady, whose marriage is slowly decomposing, is hired to trail Joanna. He discovers her perverse night life and quickly becomes one of her clients. However, the two immediately feel a spark that puts Joanna's ability to distance herself from her work at risk. Also putting her at risk: "Reverend" Shayne, a drug addicted and deranged street preacher with an unhealthy fixation on "curing" China Blue that involves the razor sharp vibrating dildo he carries with him everywhere. It's not long before both men are taking over both of Joanna/China's lives.

As a work of stylish eroticism, "Crimes of Passion" is hard to beat. Much of the film is composed of the various outrageous encounters "China" has with her clientele. One perv gets her in a stirrup chair while having her dress up as a beauty pageant winner. Another is obsessed with rape fantasies. At one point, she's picked up by a yuppy couple who discuss business while fondling her in the back of their limo. Russell depicts all of these encounters with the kind of go-for-broke excess that was his trademark. "Crimes of Passion" exists largely in a neon-lit netherworld of sleazy hotel rooms, shadowy sex, and bizarre fetishes. It is, simultaneously, a gorgeous and grimy film. The somewhat episodic nature of China's work allows Russell to create wildly different set pieces. The film is at its most swirlingly wild when China has an abusive cop handcuffed, stabbed with her stiletto heels, and forces his nightstick into a very intimate place. The frantic editing and wild camera movement of this moment recalls "The Devils'" most unhinged sequences. As self-aware as the film is in its own campy sleaziness, and as aggressive as its style can be, "Crimes of Passion" is also a strangely artistic and tender film at times. Russell frequently cuts between the steamy scenes and prints of famous artwork, making it clear that these moments exist as artistic displays in their own right. China and Bobby's first encounter plays out mostly as shadows cast on the wall, a scene of genuine eroticism. Meanwhile, the hooker being hired to give a dying man one last thrill is a surprisingly emotional scene.

China White's dream-like underworld of neon-drenched sex and nightmarish paraphilias contrast against a brightly lit depiction of suburban mundanity. We never see much of Joanna's day job, though her apartment is lavish. It's also largely white in its walls and decoration, providing a visual contrast against the darkly lit seediness of the night scenes. As for Bobby's life, it's crushingly dull. Annie Potts plays his wife as a frigid, emotionally closed-off woman. Every interaction they have in their white picket fenced home is tense. Bobby's unsavory desires are always threatening to burst into this respectable life, such as the dirty jokes that are told during a family cook-out that climaxes with the husband literally dressing up as an ejaculating prick. A notable scene has Bobby and the missus watching a music video that depicts marriage as a series of cages that ends with the happy couple reduced to skeletons. This life, the roles of husband and wife, father and mother, that they've consigned themselves to aren't making them happy. Not that Joanna is much better off, performing similarly ridiculous roles for her various clients. This is one of the primary theses of the film, that too many people are playing a part to please someone else and not allowing themselves to live their own own wants.

The very first scene in "Crimes of Passion" is Bobby's rowdy buddies telling sexist jokes while at some sort of group therapy, where the married man eventually lies about his life being happy and normal. While Joanna insists that she's always in control during her sessions with her johns, it often feels like she's more at their mercy than she'd like to admit. The cop into pegging spits in her face afterwards, needing to reassert his macho dominance after paying a hooker to degrade him. After they make love, Bobby and "China" have a petty argument not unlike those he has with his wife all the time. Anthony Perkin's street preacher is the ultimate example of someone torn apart by the different roles they've assigned themselves to play. He can't get through a religious sermon, often delivered atop an actual soap box, without beginning to vulgarly rant about the state of the world. He seems to think he can communicate directly with God but is always pulled back down towards his lustful desires. Inevitably, this has resulted in a highly disturbed individual. "Crimes of Passion" most resides in the horror genre when it takes us inside "Reverend" Shayne's head, where his erotic fantasies often overlap with violent delusions. A sequence where a blow-up doll writhes orgasmically while spurting blood surely must be seen to be believed. The film never quite depicts the Reverend going fully over into the realm of a sex worker slaughtering serial killer, though it's implied all throughout. Instead, his desire to serve God and jerk off at peepshows while snorting poppers represents the most extreme divide in the film.

The fact that Ken Russell got an ostensibly respectable actor like Perkins to play such a sleazy, disgusting character is a feat unto itself. Russell goes so far as to have Perkins revive Norman Bates' voyeurism, when the Reverend rents the room next door to China's and watches her hook-ups through a peephole. Perkins – who spends the entire movie in a wide-eyed state of drugged-up sweatiness that is simply spellbinding – excels at the ribald dialogue he's given. That's another unexpected aspect of "Crimes of Passion." It's a hyper-verbal script full of clever conversations, circular sentences, dirty puns, and colorful insults. Perhaps that's what attracted a semi-respectable cast to material this salacious. Kathleen Turner stars as Joanna/China, her smoky voice being put to good use while also projecting a surprising sense of vulnerability. Recognizable performers like Annie Potts and Bruce Davidson fill out the supporting roles, also getting some shockingly well constructed dirty dialogue of their own. The obvious star power of Turner, Perkins, and the supporting cast amusingly stand alongside John Laughlin as Bobby, an actor who embodies being an average joe without any sense of irony about him.

As the film goes full giallo in the last act, I was once again amazed that Ken Russell was allowed to make so many movies for so many years. He drops a musical number into the middle of an attempted torture/interrogation scene and never backs away from that sharpened murder dildo. Some will look at "Crime of Passion's" over-the-top sexual fantasies as an overly self-aware act of campy button-pushing. And perhaps it is. However, the film is also deeper than that, with a sharp screenplay that a lot more than mere exploitation on its mind. A totally convinced cast operating on a similarly bug-nuts level is certainly a big factor in the movie being as entertaining as it is. Ultimately though, it's the tone of sweaty depravity and wild imagination that Russell creates that makes "Crimes of Passion" a hypnotic sex vortex of a motion picture. Hilarious, gorgeous, perverse, and weirdly thoughtful, the film is the kind of destined cult classic that you can hardly believe exists. Or, at least, that is exists with Jessica Rabbit and Norman Bates in the lead roles. In other words, this is exactly the kind of shit I live for. God bless Ken Russell, wherever he is now. [9/10]

Save the Green Planet! (2003)

Jigureul jikyeora!

Earlier this year, it was announced that indie weirdo turned Oscar favorite Yorgos Lanthimos was making a film called "Bugonia," about a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps a corporate exec under the belief that they are an alien. As I read that plot synopsis, I thought to myself "Hey, waitaminute, that's the premise of "Save the Green Planet!"" And indeed it is, Lanthimos' new project being an acknowledged remake of this mostly forgotten South Korean cult oddity from 2003. Not forgotten by obsessive-compulsive nerds like me, of course, who read a review of the film in Fangoria many moons ago and added it to my ever-growing mental list of stuff to watch some day. Since Lanthimos' films usually become hot topics of discussion about the kinds of crowds I travel in, I imagine "Bugonia" will generate lots of conversation whenever it comes out. Meaning I should probably go ahead and watch the original first. This is the not especially interesting reasoning behind me choosing Jang Joon-hwan's hard-to-classify film as my South Korean pick for 2024's Horror Around the World project. 

Kang Man-shik is a high powered CEO of a pharmaceutical company. While in a parking garage, he is abducted by a strange young man named Lee Byeong-gu. Kang awakens tied to a chair in a dank room. Lee and his girlfriend proceed to physically torture Kang in bizarre ways, under the belief that the exec is an alien from the Andromeda star system. Lee believes that aliens are about to destroy the Earth and that Kang is their prince in disguise. Only Lee knows this, convinced he's the sole person who can save the world. The longer the man is subject to Lee's bizarre rantings and treatments, the clearer it becomes that the conspiracy theorist has a personal connection to the man's company. Meanwhile, detectives attempt to locate the missing CEO, uncovering more of Lee's strange story. 

It's a stereotype of Asian cinema that consistent tones are not all that important. I've already seen an example of that this season in "Mahakaal." "Save the Green Planet!" does a much better job of blending different genre elements into a compelling whole though. The film is, ostensibly, a comedy. Lee's bizarre beliefs and eccentric behaviors are played for quirky laughs. This is most apparent in fantasy sequences that show him kicking a bully around with acrobatic martial arts. Or, my favorite scene in the scene, an extended lesson on the cosmology of his bizarre beliefs that feature serio-comic artwork of aliens abducting dinosaurs and an extended "2001: A Space Odyssey" parody. We are clearly meant to laugh at the guy's bizarre behavior and rants some of the time. "Save the Green Planet!" is fairly gruesome too though. Kang is subjected to having his leg chopped up with an axe, his chest burned with a steam iron, wounds rub with menthol spray, and is threatened with anal rape too. Dead bodies start to pile up as the story progresses. The movie walks a very fine tonal tight rope, never quite crossing over into the realm of gory slapstick but  too brutal to be light-hearted while also remaining extremely wacky in some regards. Somehow, it works though, the elevated mood sold by the often frenetic visuals and editing while everything else about the film's aesthetics suggest a certain degree of grit. The absurdity of Lee's beliefs are played for laughs, despite the severity of some of his actions. 

In fact, Joon-hwan does a good job of balancing the many different modes of the film. The scenes devoted to the detectives on the case have a nice hard-boiled approach to them with the right air of quirkiness to keep them from being dull. When an eccentric detective is digging around Lee's house, a genuine sense of suspense is engineered. A clear understanding of creating tension is on display, as Lee has to redirect the detective's attention away from the obvious evidence of his crime. The comedy is often whimsical, such as the girlfriend's heavily foreshadowed day job as a tight rope walker in a sideshow or the increasingly wacky details of Lee's conspiracy, thoughtfully introduced over the course of the film. As an off-beat sci-fi/horror film, "Save the Green Planet!" is also successfully quirky. The sci-fi aesthetic is patterned after the weird artwork of cult literature, which gives an amusingly off-beat feeling to the various flight of fantasy scenes. Keeping in the tradition of Korean genre cinema, the violence is brutal but stylized. Ranging from a stomped on hand to a body covered in bees, you feel the pain. Which is all the stranger when the implement of violence is, say, a giant robot arm or a steel dildo that ejaculates steam. (I did not anticipate both movies today featuring, weaponized sex toys.) Somehow, all these different elements work together equally well, instead of clashing wildly. 

Perhaps it all ties together so well because the film always takes Lee's story, no matter how unlikely it gets, seriously. Throughout the film, we learn more about the tragic circumstances that brought him to this point. His life has been one full of pain and loss. The elaborate conspiracy theories he's created emerge as a coping mechanism against a chaotic life. This quickly moves from being darkly funny – in how he gets revenge on the bully that's followed him since high school – to deeply sad. When he's using quack medicine to try and save a sick and dying loved one, I couldn't help but think of the people dying of cancer who have been convinced that pomegranate juice will save them. Shin Ha-kyun plays Lee as almost child-like, locked in a permanent adolescence as a result of never recovering from childhood trauma. This points towards an increasingly melancholy ending, that ends a film this strange and violent on a strangely poetic mark. 

Not every element of the film works for me. Lee's girlfriend, Su-ni, being a bigger eccentric than him struck me as an odd decision that the film never quite justifies. You definitely see the twist ending coming, which would've worked a bit better if the film had established more of a sense of ambiguity over what we're seeing. Finally, there's some distractingly bad shakiness in the cinematography sometimes, detracting from a film that otherwise looks good. "Save the Green Planet!" is definitely an example of a movie that pushes its own quirkiness as far as it can go, perhaps to diminishing returns at time. However, a sure handling of its opposing tones and a surprisingly firm grip on the tragedy of the main character makes a film that's probably too comedic to be a horror movie but too horrific to be a comedy work quite well. I'm very interested to see what Yorgos Lanthimos will do with this material. [7/10]

The Hunger: Sanctuary 

A few years back, I watched an episode of "The Hunger" and it sucked. You probably don't remember this, as I've never heard another soul discuss Showtime's attempt to build an on-going anthology out of the vampire cult classic. Surely, a horror program hosted by David Bowie can't be all bad? Let's give "Sanctuary" a shot. Bowie stars as Julian Priest, a once controversial performance artist who has fallen from relevance. He now lives as a recluse in a repurposed prison. One day, a mysterious man named Eddie Foden, on the run from the cops and currently sporting a bullet wound in his shoulder, shows up at Priest's compound. After thinking it over, Priest invites the man in. The two share a connection, linked by a story of sex and death, that will spell doom for them both. 

Within minutes of pressing play on "Sanctuary," I remembered why I dislike "The Hunger" TV show so much. The opening credits are an assault of jagged editing, abrasive noise, pseudo-philosophical profoundery, and artsy-fartsy attempts at edginess. The entire episode carries on in that fashion. Priest's art pieces include a naked woman being crucified, sawing a cow in half before a crowd, and slicing off a piece of his own skin on-camera. Are we to expect that any of that would actually raise an eyebrow in a post-"Piss Christ"/Damien Hirst art world? All of it is filmed in the same obnoxiously in-your-face style of the opening credits. The flashbacks are visually and aurally distorted. All the colors are sickly and washed out. All the locations are harsh and industrial, with unconventional camera angles. Basically, if all the shitty attempts to emulate the "Closer" music video were a late night Skinnemax show, that's what "The Hunger" is. Tony Scott himself directed this episode but it looks a lot more like "Man on Fire" than the original movie. 

As for the story content of "Sanctuary," it isn't much better. The idea of a washed-up artist meeting a younger man who reminds him of himself – connected by the same sleazy agent – isn't bad. The script simply can't let this premise breathe. Instead, it bogs itself down in rambling conversations about art and death that never exactly make sense. In an attempt to catch the viewer off-guard, the story constantly twists in on itself, keeping secrets instead of directly stating who it's characters are and what they want. The episode builds towards a metaphorical twist of some sort that doesn't make much sense at all. We still somehow anticipate it coming. Largely because this episode is so high on its own farts, that it's clearly going to try some rug-pulling final reveal that is attempting to make a wider point about something or other. 

It's garbage that has one thing going for it. Whether David Bowie was a great actor or merely savvy enough to lend his particular image to projects that suited him is debatable. I don't know if he gives a good performance here. I do know that hearing him call someone a cunt is totally worth watching this for. There's also some interesting meta-subtext here. The scene where a twitchy-as-usual Giovanni Ribisi berates Priest as someone who used to be cutting edge but is now irrelevant can't help but feel like Bowie commenting on his own place in pop history circa 1999. The late nineties and early 2000s are full of gems but I don't think it was a time in Bowie's career when he was considered the trend-setting, inflammatory artist he used to be. About the only relevant thing "Sanctuary" says is admitting all vital artists will succumb to this fate someday. At least those that don't self-destruct at a young age. If this is an interesting coincidence or if Bowie was genuinely hoping a show like this might get him out of a rut, I don't know. Considering this around the same time Mr. David Jones was soundtracking video games and starring in shit like "Mr. Rice's Secret," "Gunslinger's Revenge" and, well, this show, it's hard to believe the latter. Maybe I should try an episode from the Terence Stamp hosted first season next? Couldn't be much worse than this... [4/10]

The Addams Family: Cousin Itt and the Vocational Counselor 

This elegantly entitled episode has Morticia still worried about Cousin Itt finding a steady career. After throwing around a number of suggestions – including secret agent, a joke I seem to recall the nineties "Addams Family" cartoon ran with – Gomez and Mortica decide Itt would make a fine marriage counselor. The loving couple pose as his first clients and it goes badly. This prompts the family to call in a vocational expert by the name of Mortimer Phelps. At first baffled by the family's antics, Phelps soon becomes enthusiastic about helping Itt. 

You wouldn't think a walking pile of hair that speaks in gibberish would present many story opportunities but it seems Cousin Itt was popular with the "Addams Family" viewers back in 1965. You can tell not only because the show kept bringing the diminutive fur ball back. They also built a specific, new set for him, for a brief gag. That would be a Felix Sila sized room that Lurch has to crouch around inside of it. It's a good joke, better than the reoccurring one about Itt dreaming of becoming a stewardess. Let's not examine the cousin's gender identity nor the sexist expectations of certain jobs in 1960s America, okay? 

This is really an episode split in two. The first half springboards off the idea of Itt being a marriage counselor and Gomez and Mortica being his guinea pigs. We are so used to seeing these two be nothing but passionately in love with each other that having them roleplaying a bickering couple is actually a solid joke. You can see John Astin and Carolyn Jone's chemistry didn't work for romance alone in the moments of them arguing, which the episode nicely stretches out for a bit. That makes their quick reconciliation more meaningful too, Gomez's constant canoodling of his wife's arm seeming more passionate than usual. 

The rest of the episode plays the titular set-up, of Itt bouncing off Richard Deacon as Phelps. He makes for a good straight man, his reaction to Lurch – whimpering out "Help" before fleeing – being a good example of his skills. Conversations about Rorschach inkblots, word association, and block games cycle in nicely absurd directions. Instead of just going with the expected humor of a normie being weirded out by the Addams, Phelps quickly warms up to Itt. It results in one of the few endings of the show where Gomez seems genuinely annoyed with someone. Overall, this is one of those episodes that truly packs as many jokes into its runtime as possible. [7/10]