Femme Fatale (2002)

Femme Fatale is a 2002 erotic thriller (with a very strong neo-noir vibe) written and directed by Brian De Palma. It was a box-office flop at the time although it now has a strong cult following and its reputation has grown considerably. It’s one of my favourite De Palma movies. It’s so very De Palma.

It may simply have mystified and exasperated some people. It takes some wild risks. Whether they pay off or not is something you will have to decide. It depends on your tolerance for thrillers that break the rules.

The most important aspect of this movie is the one that can’t even be hinted at. You do not want to read any spoilers for Femme Fatale. I am not going to offer hints at all. Naturally most online reviewers go ahead and spoil the movie anyway so you may want to avoid them before seeing the movie.

What I will say is that you do need to pay attention when watching this movie. There are things you should be noticing.

It begins with a daring jewel heist during the Cannes Film Festival. The jewels are in the form of a snake brassiere worn by a supermodel. Sexy Laure (Rebecca Romijn) steals the jewels while having sex with the supermodel in the ladies’ room. The heist is a spectacular extended visual set-piece with very little dialogue. When it comes to sheer mastery of technique De Palma has never done anything better. Then we get a chase of sorts, or maybe it’s a stalking, and it’s done as another impressive visual set-piece.

Laure figures she’d be wise to get out of France. Start a new life somewhere. Which she does. That’s going fine until down-at-heel paparazzo Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) snaps her picture. Laure cannot afford to have any photographs of herself. Much too dangerous.

Then the twists start to kick in. Nicolas thinks he’s the knight in shining armour rescuing a damsel in distress. It takes him quite a while to realise that Laure is not a damsel in distress. She’s a psycho bitch. She’s a femme fatale on steroids.

Nicolas is in the spider’s web now. More plot twists follow, before the really big plot twist.

When the so-called New American Cinema burst onto the scene round 1967 it saw itself, like the French Nouvelle Vague, the British New Wave and the New German Cinema, as a revolutionary movement that would sweep away the past and create something totally new. Tradition was something that needed to be scrapped. It was all very adolescent.

Brian De Palma made his first feature film in 1968 but I think it’s clear that that was never his attitude. De Palma saw himself as part of a living tradition of filmmaking. He didn’t want to scrap that tradition. He wanted to be part of it.

Of course his admiration for Hitchcock was part of this. But he didn’t see Hitchcock’s body of work as a resource to be plundered. He had seen Hitchcock’s movies. He understood them. He understood Hitchcock’s methods. He has absorbed them. He then set out to make Brian De Palma movies, making use of the lessons he had learnt from Hitchcock and other masters of the past. Sure, he liked to include Hitchcock homages but they were clever and witty and his movies were always Brian De Palma movies.

He lays his cards on the table right at the start of Femme Fatale. We see a woman watching Double Indemnity on TV. We know that we’re about to see a movie that draws on the filmmaking tradition that produced movies like Double Indemnity.

There’s lots of voyeurism in this movie. With a hero who is a photographer and a photograph as a key plot element that’s to be expected and voyeurism is a theme that De Palma knew how to handle. At times in this movie there are multiple voyeurs. Lots of people are watching Laure.

You want wild crazy camera angles? You got ’em. And lots of very cool overhead shots. You want split screens? You got them too. And naturally split diopter shots. De Palma could get away with things like this. This is a De Palma film so naturally it is very much an exercise in style and it really does have insane amounts of style.

Laure (Rebecca Romijn) is very sexy and very wicked. De Palma doesn’t stint on the eroticism.

Antonio Banderas is very good and very sympathetic, playing a nice guy who is just getting more and more out of his depth.

As for the element I can’t talk about, whether it works or not is up to the viewer to decide. It’s something that has been done before but then De Palma adds some extra twists.

This is one of those movies that is worth rewatching. The second time around you’ll be seeing everything in a radically different way and you’ll be able to appreciate the way De Palma never actually cheats.

Femme Fatale is definitely a neo-noir but it’s a lot more than that. Very highly recommended.

Femme Fatale looks great on Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray extras are, surprisingly, very worthwhile but do not under any circumstances watch the featurettes before you watch the movie. They contain a whole bunch of spoilers.

Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

If you go into Belladonna of Sadness expecting the kind of anime movie you’re accustomed to you’ll be confused and disappointed. This is not even remotely similar to what we now think of as anime. In fact it’s not even a true animated movie. It’s partly animated but relies to a huge extent on still images.

Belladonna of Sadness was released in 1973. It was made by Mushi Production, an important company in the early history of anime. They made many of the best-known 1960s anime TV series, such as Astro Boy. Belladonna of Sadness was the third in Mushi’s Animerama series of adult-oriented anime feature films. All three films were commercial flops and the box-office failure of Belladonna of Sadness pushed the studio into bankruptcy.

It has something of a fairy tale feel, at least superficially. It’s based on Jules Michelet’s 1862 history of witchcraft, La Sorcière.

The setting of the movie is France in the Middle Ages and it reflects Michelet’s virulent anti-Catholic anti-monarchy views. Jean, a simple farmer, and Jeanne are about to be married. The wicked lord deflowers Jeanne (reflecting the popular but entirely false myth that feudal lords had this right). Jeanne responds by calling on Satan, although when he appears Satan tells her that he’s already inside her. Satan is like a cute little floating penis.

With Satan’s help Jeanne prospers but her wealth makes her unpopular with the people and attracts the jealousy of the lord’s wife. Jean becomes a wealthy tax collector and an alcoholic. Jean and Jeanne experience lots of ups and down until finally the movie just devolves into bad acid trip territory.

Finally we get a kind of bizarre nightmare orgy scene which is rather hair-raising.

To me Belladonna of Sadness doesn’t feel the slightest bit Japanese (which might explain why Japanese audiences didn’t bother seeing it). It’s clearly heavily influenced by European art cinema and by all kinds of counter-culture elements such as American underground comics.

This is a psychedelic freak-out movie. It’s not a movie, it’s a happening. Can you dig it?

There is a plot. The plot is not terrible. It’s your basic selling your soul to the Devil and getting mixed up in witchcraft kind of plot.

You can tell that the visual artists involved were real artists because so much of the artwork is incredibly crude and ugly and looks like it was done by a deranged five-year-old. Overall this is a movie that looks hideous. A large part of the problem is that that late 60s arty aesthetic has not worn well. The 60s aesthetic is terrific when it’s done with wit and style in a very “pop” way but when it’s done with serious arty pretensions it can be cringe-inducing.

The frustrating thing is that there are some very good visual moments. It does have to be said however that those moments are very hippie-dippie.

This movie uses a variety of animation techniques and only uses traditional cel-and-ink animation sparingly. It’s all very experimental and avant-garde.

It’s a movie that is quite divisive. Some people think it’s a masterpiece. Some people think it’s an embarrassing train-wreck. I lean more towards the embarrassing train-wreck theory. It is at times an interesting train-wreck. I tend to like movies that are interesting failures but this one really didn’t grab me. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right head space man.

This is a movie that was for many years little seen although despite legends to the contrary it was never a lost movie.

If you want to see this movie through to the end I’d advise getting in a large supply of mind-altering substances. Then you’re really be able to groove to it. Maybe. I can’t really recommend seeing this movie but I’d be reluctant to advise people not to see it. All I can say is that if it sounds like the sort of thing you enjoy then see it but if it sounds like the sort of thing you won’t enjoy then don’t see it. Belladonna of Sadness is just not my cup of tea.

The Discotek Blu-Ray offers a nice transfer with a number of extras. The audio commentary includes a lot of fascinating information about the tumultuous history of Mushi Production and the movie’s troubled production history.

Wild at Heart (1990)

Wild at Heart was David Lynch’s next feature film after Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet was not exactly a conventional Hollywood movie. Wild at Heart is much weirder. Lynch had clearly decided that he wasn’t even going to go through the motions of conforming to conventional ideas about movie-making. He was setting off on his own path and if you wanted to follow him that was up to you.

I rewatched Blue Velvet recently and came to the conclusion that if you think you understand that movie that is proof positive that you don’t understand it. In fact if you’re trying to understand it in any kind of rational logical way then you’ve missed the point entirely. That applies even more strongly to Wild at Heart. That does not imply that these movies don’t mean anything. They mean a great deal, but as soon as you think you’ve pinned down the meanings in a neat tidy way those meanings slip away from you. The meanings can change from one viewing to another. Your idea of what Wild at Heart means might differ radically from mine but we can both be right.

It’s amusing to see people describing Wild at Heart as some kind of homage to film noir.

The numerous references scattered throughout the movie to The Wizard of Oz make it clear that this is a movie with zero pretensions to realism. It’s a fantasy movie. In fact it’s a fairy tale movie. Once upon a time a young man named Sailor (Nicolas Cage) fell in love with a beautiful princess named Lula (Laura Dern). Her evil stepmother tried to keep them apart. The evil stepmother is jealous of Lula’s beauty and goodness. The young man has to fight ogres and monsters to prove his love. The young man and the princess are stalked by the Wicked Witch of the West. But although he doesn’t know it the Good Witch of the North is watching over him.

Only in this case the young man is a two-bit loser serving a stretch for manslaughter. The beautiful princess is a crazy chick obsessed with sex. The evil stepmother is Lula’s mother Marietta (Diane Ladd) who wants to have sex with Sailor. The ogres and monsters are assorted gangsters and hoodlums and psychos. But the Wicked Witch of the West really is stalking them. Lula has seen her. And the Good Witch of the North really is keeping an eye on them.

It is pointless to fret about the fact that the characters in David Lynch movies are not believable. They’re not supposed to be. They’re fairy tale characters. It’s pointless to worry about plot incoherence. This is a fantasy story.

It’s also impossible to judge the acting by normal standards. By any conventional standards all of the acting performances are ludicrously atrocious. But they’re just right for a David Lynch movie.

The characters are not stereotypes, but archetypes. While they can be seen as fairy tale archetypes they are also American pop culture archetypes. Or rather they’re blends of various American pop culture archetypes. Sailor is the Rebel, the Outsider. Sailor is also Elvis, another pop culture archetype. Other characters represent Gangster and Hoodlum archetypes. They’re not real people.

There are lots of totally irrelevant scenes that are there because this is David Lynch and he likes adding lots of weird stuff. But the Wizard of Oz references are not irrelevant. They’re the key to the movie. If you can’t believe in fairy tales you cannot possibly enjoy this movie.

You can see some film noir elements in the movie. It also fits into the “couple on the run” sub-genre. But it’s not handled in anything like a film noir style.

This is not quite a surrealist movie although it certainly includes moments with a surrealist tinge.

There is a very Lynchian blending of extreme violence and sweet romanticism. Which is of course what you get in fairy tales. Plenty of ultra-violence, and then the hero and the heroine live happily ever after. The violence really is very extreme. But in spite of that this is a wildly deliriously romantic movie. This is, in its own way, a feelgood movie. It's insanely romantic.

The core of the movie is the love story and it’s a very simple story. Boy meets girl, bad people try to keep them apart but nothing can destroy their love. The only thing that matters for Sailor is his love for Lula. The only thing that matters for Lula is her love for Sailor. Without their love they would be nothing. But if they have their love they don’t need anything else.

It’s worth noting that the ending is the ending that Lynch always believed the movie needed. He was right.

There were a lot of Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s trying to deal with sex in a grown-up way but the traditional Hollywood approach always has been and always will be that sexual obsession is a terrifying destructive force. I’m finding it hard to think of any Hollywood movie that deals with sexual obsession more positively than Wild at Heart. There’s more to the love between these two people than sex but sex is a very very big part of their love. They want to devour each other’s bodies. The sex scenes are very raw and very intense. But their sexual obsession is portrayed as an entirely positive thing. It’s the wild crazy obsessive sex that makes their love perfect and complete.

Nic Cage is perfect. The fact that Cage, who is obsessed with Elvis, plays a character obsessed with Elvis is another of the movie’s delights. And he gets to sing Love Me Tender to his girl, and yes it is Cage singing. Laura Dern is amazing. At one point she tells us that the world is wild at heart and weird on top. That could describe Laura Dern’s performance. And of course it describes the love between Sailor and Lula. Maybe you have to be wild at heart and weird on top to fully appreciate this movie. If so, count me among the wild at heart. A great movie. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Blue Velvet.

Carrie (1976)

I saw Brian De Palma’s Carrie many years ago and hated it. I saw it again a few years later and still hated it. But here I am watching it again.

There’s no doubt that much of my dislike for the film stems from my intense dislike of Stephen King’s books. The one Stephen King adaptation I truly love is The Shining and that’s because it’s much more Kubrick than King. As far as I’m concerned the less of Stephen King there is in a Stephen King adaptation the better.

The first thing that strikes the viewer about this movie is the overwhelming all-pervasive femaleness. That tone is set right at the start with the infamous shower scene. While some feminist critics got sniffy about the copious quantities of female frontal nudity that abundant unselfconscious casual nudity serves to establish the overwhelming atmosphere of femaleness. This is the world of women. It is a world entirely separate from the world of men. The girls’ locker room is like a pagan temple reserved entirely for priestesses and female acolytes. Or a meeting of a coven of witches, with the witches all sky-clad. The casual relaxed nudity serves to emphasise the exclusion of men from this world.

This world of women has its own rules and its own rituals. It has its own stages of initiation. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is about to experience one of those rites-of-passage.

Carrie’s first period has just started. She is terrified. Her mother had not told her abut such things. Carrie is mercilessly mocked by the other girls. This is a normal female rite-of-passage and the fact that Carrie was not prepared for it marks her as an outsider. Acceptance in this world of women depends on having a proper knowledge of the various rituals. This women’s world is a world of rules and codes of behaviour enforced by other women.

Carrie is ruthlessly persecuted by the school’s Mean Girls. One of the girls, Sue (Amy Irving), who isn’t really a Mean Girl, comes up with a plan. She will persuade her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to take Carrie to the Prom. As it happens Tommy is a major heartthrob. Sue’s motives are, surprisingly, well-intentioned. She and Tommy really are trying to help Carrie to come out of her shell. Their plan would have worked but for the evil machinations of Chief Mean Girl and Uber-Bitch Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) and her sleazy boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta). The Prom ends up not just in disaster but a bloodbath.

Carrie has a gift. Telekinesis. At first her gift is inly moderately destructive but the more upset Carrie becomes the more destructive her power becomes.

There are so many interesting and surprising aspects to this movie. This is entirely a woman-centric movie but it’s not a feminist movie - it has no ideological axe to grind. Carrie’s problems are not caused by the patriarchy. There is no sign of a patriarchy in this movie. Carrie’s problems are caused by the Matriarchy - the world of women in which women enforce the rules on other women. Men play no part whatsoever in this world.

There are only three male characters and only one is significant. That’s Tommy Ross, and he’s a really nice guy. Billy Nolan is a swine. The high school principal is well-meaning but ludicrously out of his depth dealing with Carrie’s very female problems. Tommy Ross represents healthy masculinity. He has so much self-confident masculinity that he has no problems being sensitive and gentle toward women. At no point does Tommy need to do anything to assert his masculinity. It’s just there.

We are half-expecting the plan cooked up by Sue and Tommy to turn out to be a cruel joke on Carrie but it isn’t. Tommy really is trying to help Carrie. She’s at the point in her life when a girl needs to negotiate several rites-of-passage - her first kiss, her first dance, being told by a man for the first time that she’s pretty. Tommy really is trying to guide her gently through these steps. And he has no intention of sleeping with her. He knows she’s not ready for that step. He is not manipulating her. Carrie isn’t stupid. She knows Tommy is not in love with her and that he doesn’t want her to be his regular girlfriend. Tommy knows that Carrie is not stupid. He knows that she knows these things. He is just offering her an evening that will be a beautiful memory for her, and a stage on her way to becoming a grown-up woman.

And it all works. So that when disaster strikes the tragedy takes on an epic quality. Carrie had made it through. Almost.

The relationship between Carrie and her mother is something I have mixed feelings about. The idea of her mother’s fundamentalist Christianity blighting her daughter’s life is trite and heavy-handed and seems out of place in a movie that otherwise avoids the obvious.

It is significant that despite frantic efforts Carrie’s mother Margaret has failed to suppress Carrie’s sexuality and her awareness of her own womanhood. When we see Carrie in the shower in the opening she is experiencing a very innocent sensual enjoyment of her womanness. Carrie is not afraid of the femaleness of her body. She enjoys, in an entirely non-sexual way, caressing her breasts and thighs.

In a later scene her mother expresses her horror of women’s breasts. To Margaret they are symbols of sin. But Carrie is proud of her breasts. She is a woman. Women have breasts. Carrie likes having a woman’s body.

It’s interesting that Carrie is not destroyed by her mother. By the time of the Prom Carrie has already triumphed. She has put on her glamorous prom dress, she has gone to the Prom with the hottest boy in school, she has allowed him to kiss her, she has danced, she has been romanced (in an innocent but enjoyable way), she has learnt to be confident about being a woman, she is ready to enter the grown-up female world. She has won the battle, and the war.

It is not her mother who destroys her, but a teenaged girl. Mean Girls are more formidable enemies than mothers. Carrie’s mother is not the villainess here. The villainess is Mean Girl Chris Hargenson. Nothing is more terrifying than a teenaged girl setting out to destroy another teenaged girl.

I liked Carrie much much more this time. There’s so much to admire in De Palma’s technique. I love the way everything is shot in a way that emphasises that we have entered a world of femaleness. I love the way this movie so often defies out expectations.

I liked Sissy Spacek and I liked Amy Irving as Sue. Nancy Allen is deliciously evil as Chris. I still don’t like Piper Laurie’s caricature of a performance.

This is still not my favourite De Palma movie but it is a remarkable movie that is much much more than the trashy gorefest it seems to be on the surface. Highly recommended.

Carrie is one of the handful of movies that explore the nightmare world of teenaged girls. The other truly great movie of this type, although it approaches the subject very differently, is of course Heathers (1989).

The Werewolf and the Yeti (1975)

The Werewolf and the Yeti (La maldición de la bestia) is a 1975 Spanish horror film directed by Miguel Iglesias and starring Paul Naschy and it’s one of the long series of films in which he appeared playing the tragic tortured werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky. This movie was also released in English-speaking markets as The Curse of the Beast, Hall of the Mountain King and Night of the Howling Beast. Naschy as usual wrote the screenplay.

Waldemar Daninsky is now an anthropologist and he’s part of an expedition, led by Professor Lacombe (Josep Castillo Escalona), to the Himalayas to find the Yeti, the fabled Abominable Snowman. You have to admit that’s a setup that is very promising.

All the passes have been closed by bad weather. All except one. There is a man who knows of a pass open all the year round. The guy is unfortunately not entirely sane. He is haunted by nightmares of the Demons of the Blue Moon. They scare him more than the Yeti. He is however persuaded to act as guide.

The expedition sets off, with half a dozen or so men and two young women plus the guide and a team of sherpas. You’ll be amused to hear that one of the expedition members is named Larry Talbot.

Daninsky and the guide decide to scout out the pass on their own. They are soon lost and Daninsky finds himself alone.

That’s when he finds the cave. There’s some kind of shrine. And two gorgeous babes. The girls are very friendly. Daninsky has a most enjoyable roll in the hay with the girls but then things get weird and scary.

At this point it becomes obvious that the entire Daninsky backstory from the previous films has been scrapped. This is in fact a radical reboot of the franchise, with a brand-new origin story for Waldemar Daninsky the werewolf. It all starts for him in that cave, with those two scary chicks. Scary chicks with sharp teeth.

The expedition is attacked by bandits. There’s an evil warlord named Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni) to whom the bandits seem to be answerable.

More scarily there’s Wandesa (Silvia Solar). She is beautiful, sadistic evil and lustful. She has a dungeon full of babes and her plans for these girls are decidedly unpleasant.

Sekkar Khan is suffering from some horrible disease. Wandesa is trying to cure him. He thinks Professor Lacombe might be able to cure him. That enrages Wandesa. Her power rests on Sekkar Khan’s belief that she is his only hope.

Daninsky is now a werewolf. Professor Lacombe and the two girl members of the expedition are in Sekkar Khan’s hands. Then Daninsky falls into the hands of the arch-villain as well. Of course it isn’t particularly easy to hold a werewolf captive. Despite the wholly new origin story this is still recognisably Waldemar Daninsky - a brave honourable man cursed by a terrible affliction.

The bad news is that this is not really a yeti movie, although a yeti does put it a brief appearance. This is a werewolf movie. The good news is that it’s a very cool werewolf movie.

It also incorporates hints of other genres - women-in-prison movies, lost civilisation stores and mad scientist movies.

There’s plenty of mayhem and a fair bit of nudity. Exploitation movie fans will not be disappointed by this movie.

Naschy’s script is very good. There’s lots going on in this film. There’s that sense of tragedy about Daninsky, there are thrills and chills. And there’s a love story.

There’s a fine arch-villain and a memorable sexy sinister cruel villainess.

It was obviously made on a very modest budget but it looks quite impressive. The transformation scenes are amazingly well done.

The Werewolf and the Yeti is an interesting werewolf movie with some offbeat touches but enough conventional werewolf stuff to keep werewolf fans happy. Later in his career he made another excellent unconventional werewolf movie, The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983).

An under-appreciated Naschy movie. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Shout! Factor’s Paul Naschy Collection II Blu-Ray set. The transfer is in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The transfer looks very nice.

Blue Velvet (1986)

I didn’t like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet the first time I saw it. That was a long time ago, I’m now more accustomed to his work and I’m now much more open to unconventional filmmaking. Also, the first time you watch a movie you focus on the story. When you watch it again you focus on how the story is told. And on the style.

So I figured it was time to give Blue Velvet another shot.

I can now see so many things to admire in this movie. I’m still not entirely sure about it, but that’s the way David Lynch’s movies are. If you think you understand one of his movies that’s a sure sign that you don’t understand it.

I do love that opening sequence. It tells us what we need to know. We have left the real world. We are now in David Lynch’s world. And it does this cleverly and subtly. Everything about the town of Lumberton is wrong. Just slightly wrong, but still wrong. This is like reality, but shifted off-kilter. At first you think Lynch is aiming at satire but that is not his agenda. He’s pulling the ground from underneath us. From now on we cannot assume that anything we see is to be taken at face value.

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is a normal high school kid. Like everything else in Lumberton he’s so normal as to be disturbingly abnormal.

He finds an ear. A human ear. In a field. He takes it to the cops, to Detective Williams (George Dickerson). Jeffrey figures he’s stumbled upon a murder.

He meets a sweet girl, Sandy (Laura Dern). She’s so sweet as to be pathological. She’s the daughter of Detective Williams. She has overheard something that suggests that this case has something to do with a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey and Sandy decide to play amateur detective.

The fact that this clue was something Sandy overheard is significant. Jeffrey is playing detective but he’s like someone trying to make sense of a play but he’s only seen a brief brief scenes, and who then ends up becoming part of the play. But he doesn’t know what the play is about, he doesn’t know if it’s a comedy or a tragedy or a romance or a murder mystery. And he doesn’t know if he has walked in in the middle of the first act or the middle of the third act. He doesn’t know if the other characters are heroes or villains.

The audience of course is in the same boat. We don’t know at first what kind of movie this. When we get to the end, we still don’t know. But we’ve had a wild ride.

There’s a definite interest in voyeurism here, but to an even greater extent than in other notable movies about voyeurism this is voyeurism in which everything seen or heard may be totally misinterpreted. To gather evidence he breaks into Dorothy’s apartment and hides in a wardrobe. Sandy is perhaps not quite as innocent as Jeffrey. She wonders if Jeffrey just wants to spy on Dorothy in hopes of seeing her naked. It’s possible that Jeffrey isn’t quite sure of his own motives. We have to suspect that Sandy might be right.

Jeffrey really isn’t prepared for what he sees. He witnesses a sadomasochistic sexual encounter between Dorothy and a very very scary man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey is naïve, good-natured and not too bright and he’s sure he knows what’s going on. Jeffrey thinks Frank is an evil man and Dorothy is being brutalised and abused. He just can’t figure out why Dorothy seems to enjoy it.

Jeffrey is both right and wrong. Frank is a monster. But Dorothy does get off on playing the submissive role in sadomasochistic sex. Jeffrey will discover that when he later has sex with Dorothy. She wants Jeffrey to hurt her. He does hurt her. Now Jeffrey is really disturbed. Jeffrey isn’t equipped to deal with any of this.

The twist is that Dorothy seems to get aroused by the sex but she’s not an entirely willing partner. Maybe Dorothy doesn’t understand her own motivations. Maybe people in general don’t understand their own motivations.

What is really going on in this movie is open to debate. It does seem like Jeffrey has found himself in a different realty, or a different non-reality. It’s as if he’s left Lumberton and now he’s in Frank Booth’s world. But the opening sequence has alerted us to the fact that we, the audience, are already in a different realty, or a different non-reality - the hyper-real shifted reality world of Lumberton. There would seem to be several layers of non-reality happening. It is of course also possible that each of the major characters inhabits his or her own world. Even after he has slept with her Jeffrey cannot comprehend Dorothy’s world. Perhaps he simply cannot enter her world.

Initially I had serious reservations about Dennis Hopper’s performance which veers perilously close to self-parody. This is however a movie you have to think about. If you see Frank as not really a human villain but a monster out of a nightmare (or even a fairy-tale monster) his performance makes more sense. And some of the other bizarre performances start to make sense. Characters in a dream behave according to dream logic.

In fact this movie makes more sense when you stop trying to make sense of it. Surrealism doesn’t obey the conventional rules of storytelling or of characterisation.

There’s quite a bit of black comedy which serves to undercut even further any illusions we have that this is the normal everyday world. Of course it’s also possible that Lynch is suggesting that the everyday world which we believe to be ordered and logical and rational is in fact chaotic, illogical and irrational. We are already in a dream world. All of which helps to explain one of the central mysteries, which is Dorothy’s tendency to behave in such odd unexpected ways.

Blue Velvet impressed me much much more this time around. It’s a perplexing provocative but fascinating movie. David Lynch really found his voice with this film. He found the style and the techniques which he would exploit with such success over the next fifteen year. Blue Velvet is like a dry run for Twin Peaks. Very highly recommended.

Savage Beach (1989)

Savage Beach is the fourth of Andy Sidaris’s twelve Triple B (Bullets, Bombs, and Babes) movies. Like the previous two movies in the series it focuses on blonde bombshell DEA agents Donna (Dona Speir) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton).

It was shot mostly on location on Molokai.

Donna and Taryn operate an air cargo business as a cover. They have to fly urgently needed medical supplies to a remote island. They run into a storm and their Cessna is forced down. They’re lucky enough to make a crash landing on a tiny uninhabited possibly uncharted island. They were hundreds of miles off course so it could be quite a wait for a rescue plane.

They have the uneasy feeling that they are not alone on the island. Their suspicion is well-founded. And soon there are lots of people on the island, all of them almost certainly bad guys.

What our two heroines don’t know is that they have stumbled onto something very big and very secret. Something official, but now it’s been complicated by a criminal conspiracy. During the Second World the Japanese military hid a hoard of gold looted from the Philippines on a remote island (yes the same island where the girls’ plane crash-landed). The government of the Philippines wants the gold back. The US Government wants to help them to find the gold but there is at least one criminal gang after that gold as well.

And possibly more than one criminal gang.

Donna and Taryn have no idea what is going on but there are unpleasant men with guns running about the island, they’ve been captured and tied up more than once and shot at and they’re getting quite annoyed about it. One of the bad guys even calls Donna a bimbo. She can handle being tied up and having guns pointed at her but when you call her a bimbo you have crossed a line you should never cross.

This is a pretty good script by Sidaris. It sets up endless opportunities for mayhem and double-crosses. On the island we have our two blonde heroines, there are two gangs of murderous cut-throat bad guys and then there’s the strange old guy who might be a good guy or a bad guy. And there’s the beautiful dark-haired bad girl. We’re not sure which of the gangs she belongs to.

Some of the bad guys might be good guys and some of the guys who claim to be good guys might be bad guys.

Luckily the girls are well-armed. They have an automatic rifle and several pistols and Taryn has a crossbow that fires explosive crossbow bolts. Which of course means we’re going to get some explosions. But then this is an Andy Sidaris movie so you knew there were going to be explosions.

There is also, naturally, some martial arts action because why would you not add some of that to the mix?

It goes without saying that as well as lots of action this movie includes lots and lots of bare breasts (and some brief frontal nudity). How could you possibly add a nude scene to a scene with two girls in the cockpit of a Cessna in flight? Andy Sidaris manages it. He likes those kinds of challenges.

It doesn’t hurt that all of the women are extraordinarily attractive.

What really makes these Andy Sidaris movies so great is that Andy and his wife Arleen (who acted as producer) knew all the tricks of low-budget filmmaking. They knew how to get high production values and a very polished professional look without spending big bucks. They had their operation running like a well-oiled machine. Andy’s Triple B movies look a whole lot more expensive than they were.

For a low-budget movie Savage Beach really is beautifully shot.

They were also pretty good at casting. No-one would suggest that Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton were great actresses but they gave performances that were just perfect for this type of movie. And that applies to most of the cast members. They’re not angling for Oscar nominations but they’re entertaining.

All of the Triple B movies are available in a terrific DVD boxed set from Mill Creek, with excellent transfers. Most have now been released by Mill Creek on Blu-Ray. It’s the Blu-Ray release that is being reviewed here. Both the DVD and Blu-Ray releases include an audio commentary by Andy and Arleen Sidaris and they provide an astonishing amount of fascinating information on the shooting of the movie.

Savage Beach is absolutely top-notch entertainment. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed lots of Andy Sidaris’s earlier movies - Seven (1979), Malibu Express (1985), Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987) and Picasso Trigger (1988). They’re all fun with Hard Ticket to Hawaii being the best.