The Iron Rose (1973), Blu-Ray review

The Iron Rose (La rose de fer) is a 1973 film by Jean Rollin. I’ve seen it before but having recently purchased it on Blu-Ray proves a fine excuse for a revisit.

This is both an untypical and a typical Jean Rollin film. Rollin’s name is indelibly linked with erotic horror films but the eroticism is very muted in The Iron Rose and there are absolutely none of the ingredients one associates with horror films. No blood, no gore, no killings, no vampires, no zombies, no monsters, no ghosts. Most people would hardly call this a horror movie.

There’s also little of the overt surrealism that one associates with Rollin. This is a very low-key film and while there’s certainly plenty of strangeness here it’s a very subtle sort of strangeness.

On the other hand this movie is still pure Jean Rollin. The tone, the mood, the visual approach, the very soul of the film is Rollinism to an extreme degree. On the rare occasions in this part of his career that Rollin departed from the erotic horror genre (in movies such as this and the underrated The Escapees) he still managed to make movies that are clearly cut from the same cloth as his vampire movies.

And there are plenty of Rollin trademarks here - there’s that beach which he loved so much and which features in so many of his movies. There’s a clown. And you expect clocks and time to feature in a Rollin movie and in this one a wrist-watch plays a vital rôle and time is certainly crucial.

Rollin intended this to be a minimalist sort of movie. There are very very brief appearance by other characters but for almost the entire running time there are just two characters, The Man and The Woman. And to an overwhelming degree the film is focused on The Woman. This clearly meant expecting a lot from the young actress playing that character, Françoise Pascal, but she delivers the goods. It’s a stunning performance and very finely judged - she knows just how far to push things. After being cast in the film Françoise Pascal did a lot of research on the subject of madness and she manages the girl’s growing detachment from the world of the real and the living quite convincingly.

The plot is also incredibly simple. The Man meets The Woman at a wedding. They arrange to meet the following day. Now if you’ve just met a girl and you’re attracted to her you naturally want to pick a romantic spot for your first date and he has just the place in mind - the local cemetery. And what girl could fail to be put in an amorous mood by the idea of making love in a crypt? Of course when you’re making love you tend to lose track of time and when they emerge from the crypt night has fallen. And finding their way back to the entrance gate to the cemetery proves to be quite a challenge. They are soon hopelessly lost.

The man reacts as you might expect. He gets frustrated and angry and takes it out on the girl. The girl reacts very differently. And that’s when the strangeness starts to kick in.

The guy is hopelessly out of his depth. Perhaps he was out of his depth the moment he met this girl. When your idea of a technique for picking up girls is to recite poems about death to them you might want to stop to ask yourself whether the kind of girl on whom this technique works is really the kind of girl you want as a girlfriend. And if she gets really turned on by the idea of making love in an open grave filled with skeletons you really might want to think twice about her as a serious relationship prospect.

The movie was shot almost entirely on location, and at night, in the cemetery at Amiens. It’s an amazing location, beautiful in a strange macabre way. It’s a perfect setting for a girl who falls in love with death. There’s some brief nudity. The sex scenes are not even remotely graphic, in fact they’re PG stuff. There is eroticism here though. It’s a very unhealthy eroticism but it’s all-pervasive. There’s also love, and the search for eternal love, but the love is pretty unhealthy as well.

As to whether the girl is mad or not she’s certainly mad by most people’s standards but perhaps she has been given a glimpse into truths that most of us cannot deal with (and which she arguably cannot deal with either). Perhaps madness and truth are one and the same thing. Of course there’s always the possibility that she has become possessed by the spirits of the dead although there are no overt hints of the supernatural.

The Redemption Blu-Ray is a huge improvement on their early DVD release. The transfer is anamorphic and the images look suitably mysterious and gothic but not quite threatening. Almost seductive. There are a few extras including a lengthy interview with Françoise Pascal (whose enthusiasm for this movie knows no bounds) and a fine essay on Rollin by Tim Lucas.

The Iron Rose is a poetic and metaphysical musing on life and death and the boundaries between the two. As a horror film it’s not particularly scary (unless like me you’re terrified of being lost at night) but it does deal with the nature of fear, and the seductive and erotic nature of fear and death. It was his most personal film up to that time (it was his fifth feature) and he ignored commercial considerations completely, which unfortunately cost the film dearly at the box office. It’s also one of Rollin’s masterpieces. Very highly recommended.

Hot Target (1985)

Hot Target is a 1985 erotic thriller from New Zealand (despite several American cast members it actually appears to be an Anglo-New Zealand production).

Christine Webber (Simone Griffeth) is an American woman married to hard-driving wealthy business tycoon Clive Webber (Bryan Marshall). The marriage is not exactly a happy one. Clive cares about making money and destroying business rivals and that’s about all he cares for.

Taking her dogs for a walk in the park Christine meets an American named Greg Standford (Steve Marachuk). He’s pretty obviously coming on to her.

As the days pass they keep meeting in the park and he gets more insistent. He discovers who she is and her telephone number and he discovers where she lives. Maybe the alarm bells should have been ringing for her but she’s very bored and so of course they begin having an affair.

The alarm bells really should start ringing when she finds out that he’s a thief but the sex is so good and she just can’t help herself. I guess it’s the sexy bad boy rebel thing.

If she was thinking clearly she might have figured out that if Greg is a thief that might explain why he’s so interested in getting to know a rich man’s wife. Because Greg intends to rob Clive Webber.

There are several things that make this brilliant scheme of Greg’s a bad idea. If you’re a thief then mixing business with pleasure is risky. Greg might be a skilful thief but he’s arrogant and reckless. Christine might be a willing bed partner but she’s not very discreet. There’s also the fact that Clive is not completely stupid. And then there’s Ben. Ben is Clive’s personal assistant. Christine describes him as Clive’s loyal Doberman and that’s what he is. Ben doesn’t approve of Christine to start with and he’s the sort of guy who’s going to notice if his boss’s wife is behaving as if she’s having an affair.

So pretty obviously this is likely to end badly for all concerned.

The acting is OK. Simone Griffeth and Steve Marachuk do have some chemistry. Marachuk is reasonably convincing as a sexy bad boy. Simone Griffeth is adequate as an actress although one suspects that her casting had more to do with her willingness to take her clothes off, which she does very frequently. Bryan Marshall is fine as the cold controlling Clive Webber.

This is one of only two feature films directed by Dennis C. Lewiston He does a competent if uninspired job. He also wrote the screenplay, which is best described also as competent if not terribly inspired. I imagine he was aiming for something like Body Heat.

It’s not hard to predict where the story is going although there are some twists at the end.

The New Zealand locations help.

You really need to think of this as the 80s equivalent of a B-movie. It was picked up by Crown International and it’s the sort of movies destined for the drive-in market or the straight-to-video market back in those days. If you accept all that and if you accept that it’s not going to be Body Heat then it’s a perfectly acceptable second-tier slightly neo noirish erotic thriller.

What this movie mostly has going for it is that Simone Griffeth gets naked a lot and there are plenty of steamy sex scenes.

This movie pops up in a few budget DVD sets including the Mill Creek Drive-In Cult Classics 32 Movie Collection. The transfer is unfortunately fullframe. Image quality is acceptable. I believe there’s a better release from Scorpion Releasing but I’m not sure that I personally would bother hunting it down. If you buy the Drive-In Cult Classics collection (and you should buy it) then it’s worth giving this one a spin. It’s moderately entertaining.

The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973)

The Corruption of Chris Miller is a 1973 Spanish giallo directed by Juan Antonio Bardem. It opens, fittingly, with a kind of prologue murder. We assume the woman is murdered by her lover whom she’s about to discard. We don’t see the murderer’s face.

Then we go to the main action which takes place in the rather palatial home of Ruth Miller (Jean Seberg), somewhere in the Spanish countryside. She lives with a young woman, her step-daughter Chris (Marisol). We soon find out that Chris is mad. She’s been under psychiatric care and she’s still very unstable.

Ruth doesn’t like men. She thinks they’re beasts. She does like women. We get the impression that she likes women as something other than just friends. Maybe she even likes Chris that way.

Then hitchhiker Barney Webster turns up while Chris is out riding. Barney thinks of himself as a bit of a stud. Ruth decides that maybe men can have their uses after all, at least in the bedroom. She makes it clear to him that she expects him to be gone before Chris gets home. But of course that doesn’t happen.

Barney doesn’t leave. He shares Ruth’s bed but he’s obviously pretty interested in Chris as well. The stage is clearly set for some emotional and sexual games.

Of course if you’re going to play such games it helps if you know the rules. It helps even more if you know who is making the rules. It’s particularly important if it’s the sort of game that has a designated victim and you don’t know you’ve been assigned to that rôle.

The answers to those questions are not at all clear. There are hints that could point to any one of the three being the designated victim. There are also hints that none of the three is entirely psychologically stable.

There’s Chris’s obsession with her father, and with rain. There’s Ruth’s obsession with locks. There’s Barney’s obsession with money and women but even more especially Barney’s obsession with Barney.

Much of the running time is taken up by the sexual game-playing. When the violence really erupts it does so in a fairly spectacular way.

Jean Seberg is terrific in this film. It’s a wonderfully ambiguous performance. In fact all three of the key performances are nicely and effectively ambiguous and the inter-relationships between the three characters are skilfully played out. All three characters have both sympathetic and unsympathetic moments. Perhaps the viewer won’t like any of them but we do want to figure out what motivates them. Actually we do, to some extent, know some of their motivations but we know just enough to make us even more uncertain how they’re going to react to those motivations.

This seems to have been Juan Antonio Bardem’s only foray into the giallo genre. He seems to have dabbled in most genres. He does a pretty assured job here. The pacing is perhaps a bit leisurely in the middle stages but that’s clearly a deliberate choice. He gives us some memorable visual moments. There’s that bizarre Charlie Chaplin-esque (yes really) opening murder, the truy operatic blood-drenched finale. And there are some oddly poignant moments.

Santiago Moncada’s screenplay is pleasingly twisted.

Vinegar Syndrome have done a fine job with this release. We get the movie on both DVD and Blu-Ray. There’s a tiny amount of print damage in the opening credits sequence but once the film gets going the Blu-Ray transfer is impeccable.

The language options present the sort of quandary that so many European genre films of this era present. Particularly with Italian films (and I assume it applies to many Spanish films as well) there’s often no original soundtrack as such - even the “original” language versions were post-dubbed. Vinegar Syndrome claim that the English language version is the original but they offer us the choice of the Spanish version as well. I watched the English language version and it’s quite satisfactory with none of the cringe-inducing qualities one sometimes encounters in English dubbed versions of European films.

They have also included an hour-long documentary on director Juan Antonio Bardem, a brief documentary on the tragic life and very up-and-down career of Jean Seberg plus they’ve given us the alternative ending of the Spanish version. Which raises other intriguing questions. In the case of most European genre films of this era there were different cuts for different markets and it’s often impossible to say which of them is the definitive cut. So you can choose the ending you prefer. I suspect most people will prefer the alternate ending. This is actually a movie that doesn’t end when you expect it to - it throws in some extra twists (how many depends on which ending you prefer).

The Corruption of Chris Miller has plenty of subtly creepy atmosphere. It has a clever literate script, three fascinatingly odd and complex central characters, psycho-sexual weirdness, fine acting and (for those who enjoy such things) plenty of blood. If Bardem was trying to prove he could do this sort of thing with as much style as the Italians then he succeeded. It really is a top-notch giallo. Highly recommended.

Permissive (1970)

Permissive, released in 1970, is a kind of British sexploitation movie and it’s interesting for the way it differs from American sexploitation movies of the same period. The fact that it tries to come off as a warning against the hideous fate that awaits anyone who indulges in what was at that called the “permissive society” is not surprising. That had been a standard defensive technique in exploitation movies for decades, a way of (hopefully) deflecting attacks and censorship by purporting to be taking the side of traditional morality. The interesting thing about Permissive is that it takes those dreary British kitchen sink dramas of the early 60s (which are enough to destroy one’s will to live) and adds nudity, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. But the soul-destroying desolation, despair and pessimism of the kitchen sink dramas is still there.

This is combined with lots of foreshadowing of the terrible fates awaiting some of the characters, a clever technique to make sure we get depressed right from the start and stay depressed.

Permissive’s original working title was the much more appropriate Suzy Superscrew but sadly that was never going to get past the British censors.

Suzy is a blonde who arrives in town to meet up with her friend Fiona. Fiona is a groupie who hangs around with a band called Forever More. She sleeps with all of them but now she’s become obsessed by their scruffy goblin of a bass player/lead vocalist. She has, foolishly, fallen in love with him (God knows why since he’s a self-centred creep).

Fiona introduces Suzy to the world of the groupie.

Suzy takes to this world like a duck to water. Pretty soon she’s not only slept with the various members of the band and their manager but with miscellaneous members of other bands. She’ll sleep with anyone who asks her. They don’t even have to ask her nicely.

Suzy thinks the road manager likes her so she sleeps with him but then he kicks her out. She’s befriended a drifter named Pogo who seems like a bit of an acid casualty but he also seems fairly nice. He’s the only person in the film who could be described as moderately sympathetic even if he is crazy and his departure from the film accelerates Suzy’s descent into depravity.

That kitchen sink drama influence and the associated semi-documentary style ensures that the sex lacks any eroticism. Sex isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s all about suffering and emptiness. OK, being a groupie really was the ultimate dead-end lifestyle for a girl, being passed around like a slab of meat by scrofulous smelly musicians, but the lack of eroticism does tend to make it difficult to understand why girls like Fiona even bothered.

1970 was a particularly grim year for both music and fashion. Things were about to improve. Heavy metal, glam rock, disco and punk were about to arrive on the scene and make things more interesting. But in 1970 popular music was still dominated by turgid hippie rock, fashion was ghastly hippie-influenced horrors and men still sported scraggly long hair and beards. It’s sobering to reflect that even disco music and disco fashion was better than this. The music (from various bands) in this movie could I guess be described as progressive folk-rock and I have to admit a certain bias here since it’s a type of music that I’ve always heartily disliked. If you actually like this sort of music then you’ll love this film.

The main featured band, Forever More, are featured way too much and it’s a challenge to endure their songs. They were a real-life band and there is some justice in the world since their prodigious lack of success would soon lead them to break up. I have to grudgingly admit that Sylvester’s Last Voyage is their one vaguely OK song.

At this point you might be wondering - does this movie have anything at all going for it? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. Director Lindsay Shonteff was clearly trying to make a softcore sex film with some emotional resonance and with some arty touches. He succeeds, up to a point. He does throw in a few interesting cinematic tricks and the constant intercutting between the present and the future does give the movie an interestingly nonlinear narrative. And while the semi-documentary feel adds to the bleakness of an already bleak film it has to be admitted that pessimism and emotional blankness is what the director is aiming for so to that extent it works.

I assume Maggie Stride was cast because she has that waif look and she isn’t especially attractive. Suzy’s popularity with the bands is based more on her willingness to drop her knickers at any time than on her beauty. Stride gives an odd distanced performance which kind of works. The more obviously glamorous Gay Singleton is quite good as Fiona. Look out for the Collinson twins (former Playboy centrefolds and the stars of Hammer’s Twins of Evil) in bit parts.

Lindsay Shonteff had an undistinguished career as a director, making a few sexploitation features, a few spy spoofs and a couple of more serious spy films. In 1967 he did direct The Million Eyes of Sumuru which I quite liked so his career wasn’t a complete washout.

There’s a lot of nudity including quite a bit of frontal female nudity and a lot of sex. It might be deliberately un-erotic but it’s still pretty daring for a 1970 British movie. I guess it was hoped that the lack of eroticism, the touches of artiness and the general tone of bleakness would make the censors more lenient (it didn’t work and the British censors cut the film to ribbons).

The BFI’s uncut release includes the film on both Blu-Ray and DVD accompanied by quite a few extras. The movie looks reasonably good on Blu-Ray. It’s in the correct 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The movie was shot in colour, on a minuscule budget.

Permissive has an extraordinarily grimy, grungy, scuzzy feel to it. You can almost smell the griminess. It’s a relentlessly pessimistic movie but it has one or two interesting elements. It’s recommended if you like sex combined with artiness and misery.

The President’s Analyst (1967)

The President’s Analyst is a delightfully oddball 1967 spy spoof/satirical comedy. And what is it satirising? The answer is, pretty much everything. It’s also a vehicle for the slightly off-kilter talents of star James Coburn.

Dr Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is a psychoanalyst and a very successful one. He receives an offer he can’t refuse (although as it turns out he should have refused it). He is offered the position of analyst to the President.

Now of course if you’re the President’s analyst you’re going to have to be cleared by the intelligence agencies - the CEA (obviously meant to be the CIA) and the FBR (obviously the FBI). When you start dealing with the spooks you’re dealing with a world of paranoia and you can become a little paranoid yourself. Sidney becomes very paranoid indeed. He thinks there are spies everywhere and that they’re out to get him. The joke is, there really are spies everywhere and they really are out to get him. The American intelligence agencies are out to get him. So are the KGB. And the Chinese. And the British. And the intelligence agencies of several African countries. Even the Canadians are out to get him.

Sidney’s problem is that everybody has an analyst, except him. Every psychoanalyst has his own analyst (that was more or less the rule). But because of national security concerns Sidney isn’t allowed to have an analyst. So he has nobody with whom he can discuss his own problems and his ever-growing paranoia.

He can’t talk to his girlfriend Nan (Delaney), because he’s not allowed to sleep with her because of national security concerns (and because he talks in his sleep). He can talk to her on the telephone but the ’phone is probably tapped. His office is bugged. His home is bugged. His car is bugged. If he goes to a restaurant it’s bugged. Everywhere is bugged.

Sidney runs away from the craziness. He wants to just calm down and be among normal people. But everywhere he runs to he finds more craziness. The weird people who look crazy really are crazy, but the normal people who don’t look crazy are crazy as well. And it doesn’t matter where he goes, it will be bugged. And wherever he goes, there are going to be spies after him.

We also discover that spies need to talk their problems through as well. They need analysts to deal with the craziness of the world of espionage.

James Coburn was always at his best playing offbeat characters in offbeat films, especially offbeat comedies (such as the wonderful spy spoof Our Man Flint). As you’d expect he shines in this movie. Sidney Schaefer is a weird hyper-confident hyper-active sort of guy but he’s really just trying to make sense of a world in which nothing makes sense. He doesn’t want to do any harm to anybody. He just wants to be a psychoanalyst and marry his girlfriend Nan.

Writer-director Theodore J. Flicker had an interesting career, enjoying his biggest successes in television. He was probably just too offbeat to become a really big success in Hollywood and even though everyone in Hollywood was trying to make zany movies in 1967 The President’s Analyst was just too strange and unclassifiable for both audiences and most critics.

You might expect a 1967 spy spoof/satirical comedy to appear very dated today but oddly enough this film isn’t dated at all. That’s because it’s satirising everything. It isn’t satirising liberals or conservatives, it’s satirising everyone who has a political agenda. It aims its barbs at normal straight people and at hippies. It’s not sending up the FBI or the KGB, it’s sending up the whole paranoid world of spies.

That might have been its problem in 1967. It doesn’t seem to have any political agenda other than mocking people who are obsessed with political agendas, and it doesn’t aim its barbs at the Americans or the Russians or the Chinese, it aims those barbs at everybody. It’s satirising the whole paranoid mindset.

What this means is that the satire is just as effective (and relevant) today as it was in 1967. We still have politics and we still have spies. We still have craziness.

Paramount’s Region 1 DVD (which is still in print) offers a very good anamorphic transfer.

This is a very clever very funny movie. The satire is merciless but because it’s directed so widely it’s rather good-natured. Everybody is crazy in this movie. It’s one of the more interesting and effective 60s spy spoofs. It’s zany without being merely silly. The revelation at the end, that there’s an organisation more sinister and more terrifying than any spy agency, works perfectly.

There are so many good moments in this film - the spies stalking each other as Sidney canoodles with a hippie girl, the nice-guy KGB agent with both mommy and daddy issues, the hijacked telephone booth, the nice ordinary suburban couple who are deadly killing machines. And there are surprisingly few false notes. The jokes come thick and fast and they’re consistently funny.

This is a very underrated movie. The President’s Analyst is very highly recommended.

The Final Programme (1973)

If you enjoy eccentric cinema then the 1973 British sci-fi film The Final Programme might be just what you’re looking for. If on the other hand you’re expecting a conventional science fiction film then this is most definitely not for you.

It was based on the first of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels. Considering how popular and how prolific Moorcock was (he was one of the major figures in British science fiction) it may seem surprising that this is the only novel of his that has ever been filmed. If however you’ve ever read one of Moorcock’s books you’ll understand why film-makers avoided them. They’re bursting with mind-numbing ideas, they’re wildly extravagant, they’re convoluted and they’re rather cerebral. Only a very rash or very brilliant director would have contemplated trying to film a Moorcock novel. And Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories are even stranger than the rest of his output.

Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch) looks like a refugee from Carnaby Street in the Swinging 60s but this dandified individual is actually a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. His father, an equally brilliant scientist, has just died (to be given a Viking-style funeral in Lappland). Jerry finds that the glamorous Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre) and three rather dotty scientists are extremely anxious to get hold of a microfilm that Jerry’s father left behind.

Jerry has other priorities. He wants to return to his father’s house, and blow it up. Preferably with his brother Frank inside it. He is most of all anxious to rescue his sister Catherine who is being pumped full of drugs and held incommunicado at the house by Frank. Miss Brunner and her pet scientists are however very insistent. Miss Brunner is happy for Jerry to carry out his plans to revenge himself on Frank but she must have that microfilm. It’s the secret to the Final Programme, a computer project in which she has an intense personal interest.

The purpose of the Final Programme is what today would be described as extreme transhumanism - the creation of an immortal being using two human brains as the raw material. That’s an adequately extravagant premise for a sci-film that The Final Programme adds lots of other weirdness as well. There’s the revenge plot, there’s the slightly unhealthy affection Jerry has for his sister, there’s the bisexual Miss Brunner’s rampant sexual appetites and there’s a WW2 German U-boat and there are scenes that take place in an abandoned Nazi secret laboratory. There are disembodied brains. There’s not just one mad scientist - there are lots of scientists and they’re all mad in different ways.

There are also a lot of elements that the movie makes no attempt to explain. Why do Jerry and his brother have a homicidal hatred for each other? Can Miss Brunner literally consume her sexual partners? What are the motivations of Miss Brunner’s pet scientists? Why is the Cornelius house filled with deadly booby traps? And in exactly what type of future world does this story take place? It seems to be a world in the grip of a long-running nuclear war but this is something that we learn in passing.

There is no point whatsoever in criticising writer-director Robert Fuest for any of these things since they are all obviously deliberate. He has no interest in presenting us with a coherent conventional narrative. He obviously intends to puzzle us. There is also no point in criticising Fuest for emphasising style over substance. This movie is a deliberate exercise in style.

Some of the special effects are a bit iffy but to be fair there was probably no way of avoiding that without a very much larger budget.

The set designs are futurist psychedelia, at times reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. I loved the sets but they are totally outrageous (in fact I loved them because of their outrageousness). The gigantic pinball machine set is particularly impressive.

After making Macbeth for Polanski and Frenzy for Hitchcock Jon Finch was a very hot property indeed in 1973 although his subsequent career failed to live up to its early promise. His performance here is decidedly odd - you start off expecting Jerry Cornelius to be arrogant and supremely self-confident but as the film progresses he seems to be less and less in control and less and less sure of himself. You start to suspect that maybe he hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. I think the performance works simply because it isn’t what you’re led to expect it will be.

Jenny Runacre is rather splendid as Miss Brunner, a woman who could be described as both a sexual and intellectual carnivore.

The supporting cast includes wonderful British character actors like Patrick Magee, Graham Crowden and Hugh Griffith. Everyone in this film gives an excessive performance, which is exactly as it should be.

There are some esoteric intellectual themes being played around with. The creation of the replacement of the super-being is intended to bring the Kali Yuga, the last of the four ages of the Earth in Hinduism. Whether this will result in the end of the world, or a rebirth, or chaos or a golden age is quite another matter. The ending is somewhat cryptic, but a straightforward unambiguous ending what would have been quite out of place in such a film. If you want everything to be made clear at the end you’re watching the wrong movie.

Network’s UK DVD release offers a good anamorphic transfer. They’ve released in on Bl-Ray as well. I believe this movie was also previously released on DVD by Anchor Bay.

The Final Programme is psychedelic pop-art sci-fi with some spy elements and lots of mad scientist stuff with some mysticism thrown in. It’s a wild ride and you may hate it or you may love it. I loved it. Highly recommended.