The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Vlad (Catalin Paraschiv) returns home to a small village in Romania after trying to make a life for himself in Italy. Almost immediately after he returns, Vlad discovers that a popular local shopkeeper has died under mysterious circumstances and no one bothered with an autopsy. Vlad takes it upon himself to find out what happened and who is responsible for the murder, and before too long realizes that the most likely suspect is Constantin (Constantin Barbulescu), the only rich man in town, who may have killed the old man for his land.

  Of course, what Vlad does not know is what happened to Constantin and his wife in the film’s pre-credits opening sequence: the townspeople, tired of living under Constantin’s thumb, held an impromptu trial and murdered Constantin and his wife. When Vlad goes to interview Constantin about his motives, he notices that Constantin maybe acts a bit odd and that his wife is constantly devouring anything she can get her hands on, but otherwise they seem like regular weird rich people. It takes quite a bit of investigating before Vlad realizes there may be something supernatural happening to his small village.

  Strigoi plays out like a rambling supernatural takeoff of a typical mystery, with reluctant protagonist Vlad filling in for the standard detective hero. Vlad unravels just what is happening to the town and learns the truth about the Strigoi and, for the most part, takes it all in stride. There are some very funny twists and character bits that surprise, and the film’s tone is never too dark, even when occasionally indulging in a little gruesome violence.

  Perhaps filmmaker Jackson’s one major misstep in Strigoi is having the entire cast speak English, when it is obvious that for much of the cast it is not their primary language. Still, the accents are not impenetrable and most of the cast gets in at least one good laugh. This perceived language barrier may have been one of the reasons it took the film so long to get official distribution in the U.S., but thankfully Breaking Glass Pictures and Vicious Circle Films were willing to take a chance on it. Strigoi: The Undead is a refreshing new tweak on the vampire film formula that is well worth seeking out.

  Strippers vs. Werewolves (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 27 September 2012

  The immortal rivalry between strippers and werewolves finally comes to the screen in the astonishingly unimaginatively titled Strippers vs. Werewolves. Or something like that. Despite its similarly utilitarian title, this film has no relation to Charles Band’s recent production Zombies vs. Strippers, or Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!: Zombies vs. Strippers, or even Zombie Strippers, may God have mercy on us all. The fact that Strippers vs. Werewolves is a British production immediately raises expectations high above those zombie/stripper-related productions, and it delivers a considerably higher level of production value than any previous “Strippers vs. Supernatural Monsters” films in recent memory.

  After a very brief pre-credits sequence establishes the fact that a Basildon strip club called Silvadollaz was blown up in 1984, the action moves to the present day, where stripper Justice (Adele Silva) has a VIP room run-in with an exceptionally hairy client named Mickey (Martin Kemp). Justice accidentally kills him with an antique silver pen, but luckily club manager Jeanette (Sarah Douglas) has encountered this kind of trouble before and calmly enlists bouncer Franklyn (Nick Nevern) to dispose of the body as quickly as possible. Franklyn is not experienced in dealing with this type of situation and does a fairly poor job of body disposal, which leads to the body’s discovery by Mickey’s wolf pack, led by brutal alpha Ferris (Billy Murray). Jeanette tries to keep a lid on the situation while Ferris and his pack seek out Mickey’s killer.

  Meanwhile Franklyn attempts a tentative romance with Dani (Ali Bastian), Justice convinces her fiancée she works at an animal hospital, and dancer Raven (Barbara Nedeljakova) tries to make a go of a relationship with a bumbling vampire hunter whose knowledge of the occult may come in handy. For their part, the werewolves mostly just hang out and behave badly, sort of like organized criminals with a lot more time on their hands and very little pressing business. Ferris is keen to find Mickey’s murderer, but it seems more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. High-strung Carlos (Marc Baylis) is just looking for an excuse to cause mayhem, and dim-bulb juggernaut Barker (Joe Egan) is just happy to be eating people for whatever reason. The two groups finally meet when Ferris learns Micky was killed in the club run by Jeanette, who also ran Silvadollaz during its unfortunate accident in 1984.

  Strippers vs. Werewolves promises three things in its title that it totally delivers on: there are strippers, there are werewolves, and they fight each other. The final sequence of the film pits the exceptionally well-armed strippers against the vicious werewolves, and an on-screen ticker helpfully keeps track of how many each side has killed. There are numerous such touches throughout the film, including comic book panel interludes and scene transitions and a sequence near the beginning that introduces each of the members of both “teams.” Strippers vs. Werewolves thankfully has a sense of humor about itself, and almost plays as a companion piece to Jake West’s Doghouse, with the gender of the monsters switched. The practical effects are decent, although the werewolves look a little goofy, and at 93 minutes the film could have stood some more time in the editing bay. Regardless, Strippers vs. Werewolves is a decent time-waster that delivers the goods, and is the easy choice if you’re looking for an evening’s light entertainment of strippers fighting monsters of some kind.

  Stuck! (2009)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 12 November 2010

  Over the past few years, there have been a number of films that seek to replicate a very specific type of cinema from the past. Some of these, like Scott Sanders’s Black Dynamite, are simultaneously loving reproductions and parodies of the era they portray. Others, like Anna Biller’s Viva and Ti West’s The House of the Devil, seek to become indistinguishable from the films of the era from which they draw inspiration. Naturally, some of these have been considerably less successful than others, such as R.W. Goodwin’s Alien Trespass, which nailed the 50′s sci-fi rubber monster but not much else. Steve Balderson’s Stuck! seems to be a similar stab at creating a new classic for an old genre– in this case, women in prison films– but the result is something quite different.

  Daisy (Starina Johnson) is a shop girl who lives with her sick mother (September Carter). One day Mama decides to shoot herself, and Daisy tries to stop her. In the ensuing struggle, Mama is shot dead and nosy Next Door Neighbor Lady (Karen Black) thinks she’s seen a murder. Based on the Next Door Neighbor Lady’s testimony, Daisy is sent to prison and sentenced to hang. Once she goes to jail, she meets a crew of tough-broad inmates and a nasty guard, all the while insisting on her innocence. After a miraculous accident puts Daisy face-to-face with death, she becomes a new woman. Meanwhile, Next Door Neighbor Lady becomes more and more uncertain about what she saw, and whether or not Daisy really did mean to kill her mother. Will she do something about it? And would the new Daisy even want to leave prison if she could?

  Stuck! absolutely nails one aspect of its tribute: the dialogue. Nearly every character with a speaking part gets a killer monologue at some point during the film, and even the less dense scenes are packed with hard-boiled lines perfect for chewing for all they’re worth. However, this also leads to one of the film’s biggest missteps: it’s extremely talky, and often feels very much like a stage play. This feeling is compounded by the fact that much of the film’s action takes place on a small three-cell prison set in what appears to be the smallest women’s prison ever built. Still, it’s a treat to see these actresses interact with each other, including a virtually unrecognizable Mink Stole as Esther, the cellblock’s religious loony.

  While Stuck! initially seems like a straightforward tribute to familiar genre films, mimicking their cadences and story beats, the film eventually transforms into something quite different. The overheated dialogue and acting start to take on more serious emotional undercurrents, and suddenly what initially seemed like a comedic tweak on a familiar
guilty pleasure takes a hard left turn into more dramatic territory. It’s a credit to Starina Johnson’s portrayal of Daisy that she carries off this massive shift in tone largely on her own. By the end, it’s hard to recognize Stuck! as the same film you started watching.

  Anyone who wanders into Stuck! looking for low-budget exploitation thrills is likely to be disappointed. This is ultimately Stuck! ‘s greatest strength and biggest shortcoming– if you’re looking for what the DVD cover is advertising, this really isn’t the film for you. If you’re looking for something more substantial that takes you unexpected places, though, you may well want to give Stuck! a chance.

  The Suspicious Death of a Minor (1975)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 6 October 2017

  By 1975, Italian director Sergio Martino had already made a name for himself in the major exploitation film genres in his home country. In addition to Spaghetti Westerns (Arizona Colt Returns) and sex comedies (Giovanna Long-Thigh), Martino had a hit Poliziotteschi (The Violent Professionals) and a number of major gialli under his belt. His first Giallo, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, is one of the best of the legions of those lurid mysteries that followed in the wake of Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is nothing if not one of the best titles in film history. So as an established filmmaker with a solid list of credits, in 1975 Martino decided to try something unexpected: Despite its title, The Suspicious Death of a Minor is sort of a a Giallo/Poliziotteschi with more humor than murder.

  Marisa (Patrizia Castaldi) is being tailed by a mysterious man in mirror shades when she meets Paolo Germi (Claudio Cassinelli) at a cafe. He dances with her while she tries to escape from her hunter, but he catches up with her and slashes her throat in the small apartment where she had shacked up with a boyfriend. The police think it’s a standard robbery gone wrong, but Germi isn’t so sure. He enlists the help of thief Giannino (Adolfo Caruso) to track down information about Marisa, and soon finds himself on the trail of something much bigger than he could have guessed. The murder of Marisa has uncovered a conspiracy that includes murder for hire, kidnapping, human trafficking, and a number of very rich men behind the scenes. Can Germi and Giannino blow the lid off it before the police superintendent (Mel Ferrer) shuts them down or that killer in the cool shades comes for them?

  While its storyline sounds fairly similar to other genre films of the era–the title and some specifics recall the popular “Schoolgirls in Peril” trilogy (What Have You Done to Solange?, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, and Rings of Fear)–Martino’s approach is considerably different. Germi is an able detective but also somewhat ridiculous; the lenses of his glasses are forever getting cracked in an effective running joke. Instead of the standard badass car chases, Germi outruns police in a car that looks like it might collapse at any minute. There’s also a very funny shootout on a rollercoaster that doesn’t feel out of place at all in this near-parody of its contemporaries. There’s still some unpleasant business of murder, of course, but the overall tone of the film is endearingly playful. A soundtrack that veers between Goblin soundalikes and more whimsical songs only adds to the cognitive dissonance, which may sound like a complaint but is actually a refreshing change of pace from the legions of similar Italian films released in the 70s.

  Arrow’s 2K restoration of the film from its original camera negative looks great. It’s certainly an auspicious debut for a film that has never had a legitimate release on home video in the States. A number of Martino’s other films have had fine releases here, but this particular entry into his oeuvre has been elusive for American fans. Martino went on to make a number of Poliziotteschi, Spaghetti Westerns, cannibal movies, and post-apocalyptic action films throughout the 70s and 80s. He worked as a director more or less regularly up through the end of the 1990s, but his work in the 1970s remains his best-known. Arrow’s work in unearthing gems like this one has helped connect some major dots in genre film history, and while its occasionally uneasy balance of comedy and garish violence may not be for everyone, The Suspicious Death of a Minor is highly recommended for any serious fans of Italian cult/exploitation cinema.

  Synecdoche, New York (2008)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 19 October 2008

  Because he’s such a reclusive figure, it’s temping to assign traits of his characters and films to Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman has managed to successfully avoid the press, appearing only once on The Charlie Rose Show in 2004 and otherwise keeping out of the spotlight entirely. So while we have the films he has written, and now one he has directed, we still don’t know all that much about Kaufman himself. And as brilliant as Synecdoche, New York is, we have to hope that Kaufman is nowhere near as miserable as his protagonist.

  Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, incredible as always) is a theatre director whose radical take on Death of a Salesman gains him newfound fame, as well as a MacArthur Genius Grant. Unfortunately for Caden, this comes around the same time he is afflicted with an unknown disease that causes his autonomic functions (pupils dilating and contracting, salivating, tearing, etc.) to stop working. Caden, apparently already a severe hypochondriac, finds himself confronting actual health problems that are considerably stranger than any he might have imagined. This puts a further strain on his marriage to painter Adele Lack (Kaufman regular Catherine Keener), who decides that Caden should not accompany her and their daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein, ridiculously adorable) to Berlin for her next exhibit.

  As Caden’s personal life is thrown into flux, his sense of time begins to break down as well. The film becomes more and more confusing and disorienting, brilliantly mirroring Caden’s perception. He decides to use his grant to stage a massive project: he rents out a warehouse of enormous, almost Lovecraftian proportions in which to build a complete, working city populated with characters played out by actors from a framework provided by Caden. Most of the characters are based on people in Caden’s life, eventually including Sam Barnathan (Tom Noonan), who plays Caden himself. Sam gets the part by appearing at an audition and confessing that he’s been following Caden around for over twenty years. His appearance and casting creates even more chaos and confusion in the world of the play and in Caden’s real life. There are hints that the world at large is in even worse shape: at one point some years into the project, people begin begging Caden to be let into the warehouse because “It’s bad out here.”

  There’s no question that his is Kaufman’s most ambitious, and most difficult, film. We follow Caden through decades of his life as he suffers loss, grief, abandonment, regret, and all manner of miseries. There is a strong undercurrent of black humor, but more than any of Kaufman’s other films, the sadness at the core of his other works is right there on the surface. It’s often difficult to empathize with Caden, who seems incapable of being happy about anything, or believing good things can happen to him. This somewhat uncomfortably recalls Kaufman’s depiction of himself in Adaptation, played by Nicholas Cage as overweight, unattractive, and cripplingly neurotic. Caden is all these things and more, absolutely and unwaveringly self-centered to the point that many characters disappear from his life entirely and he has no concept of the world outside his project.

  Still, it may be that Kaufman is using Cotard as almost a parody of himself. Caden lets nothing but misery in, and as he becomes more and more unhappy his notes for the cast of his huge play become relentlessly bleak (“You were raped last night,” “Your mother died yesterday,” etc.) and his search for “truth” seems to leave no room for the possibility of happiness. Perhaps Caden is a comment by Kaufman on writers and artists who wallow in their own miseries, convinced that this is the only truth. While the people around him try their best to make him happy, Caden can see only the things that he has lost and the people who have abandoned him. His intermittent relationship with Hazel (Samantha Morton, in a beautiful performance) seems to offer his best chance at happiness or some measure of normalcy, but Caden r
emains emotionally tied to his past failures.

  Synecdoche, New York is an exceptionally sad, often disturbing, and emotionally exhausting film with little relief from humor. It’s beautiful and surreal, and clearly director Spike Jonze had the concept of Kaufman’s world nailed down: visually, Synecdoche, New York is similar to the deceptively plain and “realistic” look of Being John Malkovich. It relies less on the sort of playful surrealism that often marks Kaufman’s work, but still has its share of strangeness (most notably the enormous warehouse and a character who buys and lives in a burning house). While there’s no question that Synecdoche, New York is extremely dark and often heartbreaking, it’s also as exciting as ever to be given a peek into Charlie Kaufman’s mind… or what he perhaps wants us to think is a peek into his mind.

  The Synthetic Man (2013)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 9 June 2013

  The independent horror film scene, perhaps more than independent film in general, often presents the dedicated fan with a peculiar problem. Legions of low-budget horror films are made every year, many of them barely-competent takes on the standard zombie or slasher film, and it’s tough to figure out who’s making movies in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting a deal to make bigger-budget (but still barely competent) films and who’s genuinely making movies out from their own obsession and/or love of cinema. It’s exceptionally rare to find a filmmaker who is obviously making something truly unique. One such filmmaker and film is John R. Hand and his latest film, The Synthetic Man.

  After a creepy (dreamed?) morning visit from a gloved figure with a knife, a seemingly disturbed young woman (April Hand) begins to write a novel in a spiral notebook. She wanders to the library and her attention is grabbed by the title of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Synthetic Men of Mars, from which she borrows the title of her work in progress: The Synthetic Man. In the story, a man named Richard (Jeff Hartley) learns of an ancient alien race that has been watching humanity throughout history. One of these aliens is The Synthetic Man, a humanoid creature who periodically rapes and impregnates human females. As Iris continues work on the book, she becomes increasingly unhinged and Richard’s methods of dealing with the alien threat become more violent.