With film fest season just around the corner, I thought I’d take a look back at the Incredibly Strange Film Festival in its pre-NZFF days. The plan is to revisit – over two, maybe three parts – several films from the ISFF of old that really left an impression on me. This won’t be a “greatest hits” package – it’ll be futile to reflect on everything that knocked my socks off over the years – and is more of a nostalgic exercise, an excuse to catch up those fondly remembered movies I haven’t seen in nearly 10 years or more.
For those uninitiated in the history of the Incredibly Strange: it hasn’t always been part of the NZFF. Back in the mid-’90s, filmhead/programmer Ant Timpson served up his archive of weird and wonderful movies away from the umbrella of the NZFF. For a solid 6 or 7 years, we were treated to the exploitation/B-movie masterworks of Ed Wood, H.G. Lewis and Russ Meyer, and a frequently mind-bending array of cinema that involved sinful dwarves, bee girls, drunken masters and 4-D witches. In the early 2000’s, a decision to move the festival in a new direction prompted a name change. As the Incredible Film Fest, it began offering the latest, button-pushing, populist genre entertainments from around the globe in its programming: spooky J-horrors, hard-hitting docos, stylish Spanish thrillers. But not long after that, the fest re-embraced its Strange-name origins and found its way into the NZFF in a more compact form, while leaving the psychotronic materials – “the gold” if you will – stored up for the annual 24 Hour Movie Marathon.
Two films have been announced for this year’s IS section so far – Cabin in the Woods and Clown – both on-par with the sort of out-there, jet-black-humoured offerings of recent years. But while the renegade spirit of those films remain the heart of ISFF, it’s also night-and-day compared to say, in 1999, when we were given the chance to witness the likes of Death Game or Revenge of the Zombies unspooling their insanity at the St. James Theatre over two or three sessions. Today it almost feels like a privilege to actually have had those playing on the big screen, given how few and far between those opportunities are now.
I caught Peter Traynor’s 1977 psycho-sexual face-melt Death Game twice in its run, so bowled over was I by its pure unadulterated dementedness. Opening with a ridiculous “true story” title card that doesn’t jibe at all with the tone of what you’re about to see, the film’s a home-invasion bad dream/messed-up cautionary tale of some sort about what happens when you’re an old geezer (Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel) who decides to have a bath-tub threesome with two random hot young girls (Colleen Camp, Sondra Locke) when the wife’s away (attending to your son’s appendicitis!).
The first thing that probably hits you about Death Game is the theme song “Good Old Dad” by The Ron Hicklin Singers, a jaunty, child-like ditty that drills its pesky catchiness into your head during the opening credits and repeats itself maybe 10 more times throughout the movie. Then you’ll notice how laughably dopey and spineless Cassel’s character is, and how persuasively unhinged Camp (The Swinging Cheerleaders, and recently here) and ex-Mrs. Eastwood Locke are as the cackling psycho vixens who proceed to completely destroy his cosy little home.
Traynor will never be accused of being a subtle or skilled filmmaker (this is his only full-length feature directing gig), but the film does succeed in making one feel as squirmy, nauseated and terrified as Cassel does, especially when the intensity of the home invasion switches from flirty cockteasing to a highly maddening judge-jury-executioner-type scenario. There’s also a rather uncalled-for scene where a cat gets lobbed through the window, a dispatch of a grocery boy whose body is dumped in a fish tank-cum-coffee table, and an amazing left-field ending you won’t see coming.
VCI Entertainment put out an eye-sore dog-turd slap-job of a DVD of Death Game in 2004, and it somehow suits the film’s seediness, but I would totally welcome that long, long-awaited release from Grindhouse Releasing, who’ve done bang-up treatments of films like Pieces and Cannibal Holocaust (though not after agonisingly long waits too). Death Game still appears on their site, so hopefully we’ll see something in the vicinity of the next decade?
Allen Baron’s extraordinary 1961 low-budget noir Blast of Silence is the other film I caught twice at ISFF ’99. Made, somewhat fittingly, during the genre’s dying days, this indie oddity is a one-of-a-kind gem I’ve come to value a lot. Allen Baron, who looks like an uncanny cross between George C. Scott and Robert De Niro (and acts that way too), wrote, directed and starred in the film, playing Frankie Bono, a hard-ass Cleveland hitman on a job in New York which would turn out to be his last. It’s a standard crime-noir plot that’s made unique by one particular aspect of the film’s technique: the voice-over narration, which is so relentlessly bitter and cynical it’s practically a character unto itself.
Voiced by the unmistakably gravelly Lionel Stander, lines like “Remembering out of the black silence, you were born in pain” and “If you want a woman, buy one…in the dark, so she won’t remember your face” are absurdly over-the-top, but somewhere along the way the amusement wears off, and you just sit there and allow the misanthropy to kick you in the guts in the best, most cathartic way possible (you can definitely hear a little Travis Bickle in there – Scorsese’s a huge fan).
The film’s melancholy is occasionally, surprisingly overwhelming. Check out the scene where Frankie’s walking down Manhattan on Christmas eve, remembering the coldness of pressing his nose up against the shop windows: it’s one heck of a moment. It has that dreamy, meandering travelogue vibe of threadbare exploitation films, but is also imbued with a sad, almost unbearably lonely kind of beauty that’s hard to explain. And as per noir’s fatalism, the ending is bleak – one of the genre’s bleakest in fact – reinforcing its brutal, unforgiving worldview with a stark visual palette of rain, wind and mud. If you haven’t seen this, Criterion Collection’s DVD is well worth the investment.
Revenge of the Zombies (the nonsensical American re-titling of Black Magic 2) might one of the first ISFF films I saw that seriously made my stomach churn. This 1976 Shaw Brothers barf-bag bonanza, directed by Ho Meng Hua, who’s responsible for great number of wu xia flicks and terrific trash like The Mighty Peking Man and The Oily Maniac, is a pretty good introduction to the sublimely sick world of Hong Kong horror if you’re looking for one (it also anticipates other twisted Shaw pics such as Seeding of a Ghost and The Boxer’s Omen). Lo Lieh (Five Fingers of Death) stars as a sorcerer in a “tropical city” who offers a service to get chicks for guys for a reasonable fee of $5000, but in reality he’s just resurrecting some corpses he has stashed in his dungeon by hammering nails into their heads, a procedure that transforms them into horny, sexy young women who will automatically fall at your feet.
The plot is a bit of a mess, making no sense most of the time, but when the film’s consistently pumping out one icky and sleazy set-piece after another it’s hard to get caught up in specific narrative problems. Things get off to a nasty start when a crocodile devours a skinny-dipping village girl and a shaman guts said croc, and before long we’re trying comprehend the film’s maggoty vision of deformed foetuses, decomposing bodies, leaping zombies, Ti Lung eating eyeballs, Lo drinking breast milk, spitting blood and driving nails through his face, and bad rear-projection cable car fights. The gore effects are terribly cheap, but if you need a case for cheapo effects actually making for more disgusting and repulsive viewing, it’s Revenge of the Zombies.
More strangeness in a fortnight!
