The Snow Woman (1968)

The Snow Woman is a 1968 Japanese gothic horror movie.

The first thing to note is that in Japanese (and Chinese) folklore the supernatural is treated in a way quite different from western folklore. Ghosts are not necessarily malevolent. And ghosts are corporeal. They can have sex. They can fall in love. Getting involved with ghosts can be dangerous, but not always. The boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds is not clear-cut. There are supernatural entities that are vaguely similar to the old western idea of the land of faerie - these entities are not evil as such but they’re dangerous because although they can look human their motivations are entirely alien. Witches are not quite the same as westerns ideas of witches.

And of course there’s no Satan as such, and not quite the same obsession with evil. There’s obviously no trace of the Christian concept of sin. Evil exists, but it’s viewed in a slightly different way.

The supernatural world can be tricky to deal with. It has to be approached with caution.

The setting is presumably some time during the Tokugawa Shogunate. It is certainly some time in the past. The Snow Woman begins with two men caught in a snowstorm in a forest. Shigetomo is a master sculptor. Yosaku (Akira Ishihama) is his pupil. Yosaku lives with Shigetomo and his wife. They are more or less his adoptive parents.

The two men are looking for a particular tree, a very special tree. From this tree Shigetomo will sculpt a statue of a goddess for a temple.

They encounter the Snow Woman. She is a supernatural creature although it might be an oversimplification to describe her as a witch. Yosaku survives the encounter. The Snow Woman thinks he’s so handsome that she cannot bear to harm him.

Shortly afterwards a very pretty young woman turns up at Shigetomo’s house. Her name is Yuki. It’s quickly obvious that Yosaku and Yuki are falling in love.

They get married and have a son.

On their wedding night Yosaku notices one odd thing about her. She is very cold. Not cold emotionally or sexually. She is a very loving wife. It’s just that her skin is strangely cold.

Of course we, the audience, know Yuki’s secret. She is, in some sense at least, the Snow Woman. She is not human. Or perhaps she is both a supernatural being and a human woman. During that encounter in the snowstorm she fell hopelessly in love with Yosaku. But she made a bargain with him, and part of the bargain was that he would remember nothing about that night.

Yosaku has been given the commission for that goddess statue that Shigetomo was supposed to carve. The commission has also been given to a rival sculptor. This is due to the machinations of the wicked Lord Jito. The sight of Yuki has awakened Lord Jito’s lusts. He will stop at nothing in order to have her. To achieve this he intends to destroy Yosaku.

Yuki must find a way to save herself and also her husband and herself.

The Snow Woman is a yōkai. These supernatural creatures can be malevolent, they can be benevolent or they can be neutral. Sometimes they’re merely mischievous. Sometimes they’re deadly. The Snow Woman in this movie is also somewhat vampiric.

The Snow Woman in the film does not just take on the physical form of a woman. She develops a woman’s emotions. We assume that in some way this is due to the power of love.

By 1968 filmmakers in Japan (and indeed in all countries) had developed astonishing skills in cinematography, lighting, makeup and practical effects. Skills which are now mostly lost. To do a remake of this movie today you would have to use CGI and it simply would not look as good.

Everything looks unreal, otherworldly and mysterious which is of course exactly right.

The Japanese were particularly good with makeup effects and the makeup work here is superb - it conveys an other-worldly feel without being in the least crude.

This movie was based one of Lafcadio Hearn’s retellings of Japanese ghost stories. If you haven’t read Lafcadio Hearn do so immediately. You will thank me. Start with Kwaidan.

This is a horror story, of sorts, although quite different from western horror films. Don’t expect non-stop thrills and gore. This is also a supernatural love story. Very highly recommended.

This film is included in the Radiance Film Japanese gothic horror Blu-Ray set. The transfer is immaculate.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

You’re making a Frankenstein movie in 1971 but you want to add something different, to make your film look less like a rip-off of Hammer’s Frankenstein movies. So what do you do? You give Baron Frankenstein a beautiful sexy daughter who is also a mad scientist. And you make her the focus of the story. That’s the basis for Lady Frankenstein.

Of course you’ll need the right actress. How about Rosalba Neri? She’s sexy, glamorous, classy, she can act and she has the ability to be equally convincing as a heroine or a villainess. She turned out to be an inspired choice.

Joseph Cotten gets top billing but he actually has only a supporting role. This is totally a star vehicle for Rosalba Neri. She has to carry the film. And she does so with ease.

The setting is supposed to be England but it looks more like the Central Europe of Hammer’s gothic horror movies. In fact the whole visual style of this movie owes quite a lot to Hammer.

Lady Frankenstein adds some sleaze and some hints of sexual perversity. That was very much the trend in European horror at the time and Hammer were moving, a bit tentatively, in that direction. Lady Frankenstein goes a bit further than Hammer would dare to go.

Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his assistant Dr Charles Marshall (Paul Muller) are on the verge of the final successful breakthrough in their attempts to create a living man out of dead tissue.

The problem is that the brain they are using comes from a hanged murderer and this brain has a few malfunctions. They create a man-monster and bring him to life but they can’t control him and Baron Frankenstein pays the price for his error of judgment.

In the 1931 Frankenstein there is of course a famous scene involving the monster, a child and a pond. In Lady Frankenstein this scene is a little different - the monster hurls a naked young woman into a lake, having surprised her having sex on the lakeshore with her young man. This is the monster’s first killing but there will be plenty more.

Baron Frankenstein’s daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) vows to continue her father’s work, which Dr Marshall’s assistance. This is where the movie gets interesting. Tania Frankenstein is not a mere simplistic evil mad scientist. She has a number of simultaneous motivations. Ambition is one motivation but she is also driven by both lust and love. Tania has a woman’s emotional needs and a woman’s physical needs. Dr Marshall can satisfy the former and she is attracted by his mind but his weedy middle-ged body does not set her pulses racing. Maybe Tommy, her servant, can satisfy her sexual needs? He has a strong masculine body. Unfortunately he is a halfwit. Tania needs a man with both an exciting mind and an exciting body. If only the dumb-as-a-rock but hunky Tommy had Dr Marshall’s brain!

It’s always difficult to judge acting performances when they’re dubbed, but Rosalba Neri smoulders when she needs to smoulder and she’s convincingly depraved. Joseph Cotten is very good - he did quite a few exploitation movies in Italy around this time but in this instance at least he is not just phoning it in.

Mel Welles directs. He doesn’t have much of a reputation as a director but here he is at least competent. It’s visually reasonably impressive with a fairly cool mad scientist’s laboratory (which was re-used in several other movies) and manages not to look cheap.

The big problem is the very lame monster. It’s not a fatal flaw because the focus is very much on Tania Frankenstein and her romantic and erotic entanglements that lead her to become a fully-fledged evil mad scientist. But the monster is seriously lame.

Lady Frankenstein doesn’t push things very far on the gore front. There is however a fair bit of nudity and sex. The movie’s selling point was clearly going to be the sexy lady mad scientist.

The movie was shot in Italy and partly financed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. The version released in the States was cut, apparently not so much to remove sex and violence as to get the running time down to the length Corman wanted. With the cut scenes restored the plot makes a lot more sense and the motivations of the characters are a lot clearer.

Lady Frankenstein isn’t one of the gothic horror greats but it offers plenty of enjoyment. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra Volume 1 Blu-Ray boxed set and it gets a lovely transfer. There’s an audio commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman which, as you would expect from those two, is both illuminating and entertaining. And there’s a second audio commentary and other extras as well.

Sex and Fury (1973)

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The Night Porter (1974)

Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter was released in 1974 and ignited a firestorm of controversy. It dealt with forbidden and disturbing topics. It retains its power to shock, but interestingly enough not for quite the same reasons.

It is Vienna in 1957. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is the night porter in a luxury hotel. He had been a concentration camp guard during the war and had done some terrible things. He is on the list of wanted war criminals but he is considered to be too unimportant to make tracking him down worthwhile.

He belongs to an organisation of former SS officers. They protect each other by destroying incriminating evidence and occasionally eliminating witnesses. They conduct mock trials as a way of trying to exorcise their guilt feelings although at the same time that they try to deny those feelings. Max thinks they’re fools. The war was a long time ago. He just wants to live a quiet anonymous life. It’s not that he feels no guilt. He simply doesn’t see anything to be gained by dwelling on the past.

Then he runs into Lucia (Charlotte Rampling). They recognise each other. They knew each other very well during the war. Lucia was a prisoner at one of the camps. Max was a guard.

One thing that should be noted is that Lucia is not Jewish. She was sent to a concentration camp because she was the daughter of a communist and she was considered to be politically suspect. Liliana Cavani was inspired to make this movie after interviewing female camp survivors for a documentary. The women she interviewed had all been sent to the camps for being communists. Cavani clearly wanted her protagonist to be such a woman.

It’s perhaps worth noting that had Lucia been Jewish the film would have had zero chance of being released. The subject matter was already touchy enough.

Lucia is married to an orchestra conductor. But the wartime relationship between Max and Lucia cannot be left in the past. They rekindle the relationship which is, for various reasons, a very dangerous thing to do. Max’s old wartime comrades may well now decide to hunt down Max and Lucia.

The story in broad outline could have been made into a safe conventional politically acceptable movie but Cavani consistently choose bold options rather than safe options. She presumably had no interest in telling the kind of story that had already been told countless times.

The events during the war are told in brief flashbacks scattered throughout the movie.

The first safe option would have been to make it absolutely explicit that Lucia was forced into her wartime relationship with Max. But Cavani does not do this. Of course Lucia would have been under immense pressure but the matter is left uncertain.

That wartime relationship was complex. Max fell hopelessly in love with Lucia. Lucia’s emotions are left ambiguous but was is made quite explicit is that she was intensely sexually attracted to Max.

When the relationship is revived Max falls in love with Lucia all over again. This time it is obvious that Lucia is in love with him. And her sexual hunger for him is breathtaking.

It is also obvious that Lucia is now a very willing participant indeed. She leaves her husband to move in with Max.

The success of the movie depends to a huge degree on the ability of the two leads to sell this story to us. Dirk Bogarde is perfectly cast. He was superb at playing contradictory and ambiguous characters. The audience has to be able to see Lucia’s attraction to Max as plausible. Bogarde has the good looks, charm and self-confidence to do this. A young woman might well find such a man very very appealing. Bogarde also conveys to us Max’s dark side. He is a sadist. That’s why he excites Lucia so much. That’s something that Lucia likes in a man.

Rampling is superb. She easily convinces us of Lucia’s lust for Max but she keeps Lucia’s emotions just mysterious enough to keep us interested. Could she truly be madly in love with Max or is it just her sexual hunger? These are things that need to remain uncertain as long as possible.

This movie contains of the great cinematic sex scenes. It’s not graphic and it’s not erotic but it’s unbelievably intense.

In my view the wartime events are not in themselves a major focus except insofar as they represent lives lived in darkness. Cavani has said that Max and Lucia are two people trying to escape from the darkness into the light. Of course there is the darkness within them as well. Perhaps love can redeem them. Perhaps even Max can be redeemed by love. The idea of a war criminal being redeemed by love was certainly going tp push people’s buttons in 1974.

Max is a hunted man and he’s a man in love, and he’s a man in love. An audience is always going to be inclined to be at least a little sympathetic to such a character. On the other hand we know some of the things that Max has done. Our feelings about him are going to be a little conflicted, which one assumes was precisely what Cavani was aiming for.

There’s also the the fact that Lucia cannot be considered as a straightforward victim. Perhaps not a victim at all. Perhaps party a victim. Perhaps partly guilty. She knows the things that Max did during the war. Again we’re going to feel conflicted about this character.

1974 was about the time that Stockholm Syndrome was first identified and there is perhaps a touch of that here.

The Night Porter is confronting and provocative but we need confronting and provocative movies. Highly recommended.

King of the Rocket Men (1949 serial)

King of the Rocket Men is a 1949 Republic serial that mixes crime and science fiction. There are those who consider it to be the last great Republic serial.

Super-villain Dr Vulcan is murdering scientists at a company called Science Associates. Professor Millard decides it would be safer for him to feign death. He and Jess King (Tristram Coffin) hope to uncover the identity of Dr Vulcan. They know he has to be one of the key members of Science Associates’ staff.

Professor Millard and King have one ace up their sleeve. It’s Millard’s new invention, a rocket suit. With its aid Jeff King becomes Rocket Man.

Being able to fly though the air is certainly a useful attribute.

There are quite a few gee-whizz inventions. There’s the rocket suit, a kind of death ray machine and Dr Vulcan has a few communications and surveillance gadgets.

The plot however is reasonably solid and isn’t too outlandish, being essentially a tense but straightforward crime thriller. The plot isn’t entirely reliant on the gadgetry. It’s a good formula. Adding too many fantastic elements was a temptation that made some serials seem a bit silly but this one mostly feels grounded in reality.

And in 1949 a rocket suit would have seemed like a plausible near-future scientific advancement.

The cliffhangers are not quite as imaginative as those that William Witney and John English provided in classic serials like Spy Smasher and Daredevils of the Red Circle but they’re still pretty effective.

The pacing is good, with plenty of action scenes. The fights are well staged. 

The hero and the villain seem evenly matched. Both are intelligent, both have some cool technology, both are determined.

Dr Vulcan isn’t a crazed megalomaniac. He doesn’t seek world domination. He just wants money. He’s a plain old-fashioned gangster.

The special effects are terrific. The flying sequences are exciting and look convincing. They looked convincing in 1949 and they still look surprisingly convincing today. And the flying sequences are imaginative. Clearly a lot of thought was put into coming up with ideas for ways in which the hero could use his rocket suit.

That rocket suit with its full-face helmet looks cool.

The stunt work is good as well.

Budgets for serials were getting tighter by this time but King of the Rocket Men doesn’t suffer too much from this. It’s slick and well-made and looks thoroughly professional. It manages to look more expensive than it was.

The pacing is pretty good and the action scenes are handled well.

You don’t win Oscars for acting in serials but the cast members acquit themselves quite satisfactorily.

This is not far future sci-fi in the Buck Rogers mould. This is more cutting edge super-technology in the present day sci-fi. Actual rocket back packs were developed at the beginning of the 1960s. It’s a crime thriller with futuristic gadgetry.

If you’re a fan of movie serials you’ll want to see this one. King of the Rocket Men is a lot of fun and it’s highly recommended.

This serial is available on DVD as a two-disc set from Cheezy Flicks. The transfer is acceptable.

Lost Highway (1997)

Lost Highway is a 1997 David Lynch film that received a mixed reception at the time.

It certainly establishes a weird disturbing atmosphere right from the start. Everything is normal, and also somehow wrong. We see a house. Everything is as it should be but it’s oddly disturbing.

We meet jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman). He has a very attractive wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). It seems like an ordinary marriage. Then we see them making love. That’s normal but the music on the soundtrack is spectacularly inappropriate. It wouldn’t matter what kind of sex scene this was, whether it was romantic or sleazy or desperate or passionate, this music would be spectacularly inappropriate. Lynch is trying to make us see perfectly ordinary things as weird and unsettling.

They keep getting videotapes in the mail. It seems that somebody has been filming them, inside their own house. This creeps them out, naturally.

Then we see Fred walking into a strange hall of darkness. This is a David Lynch movie. It could be a portal to another reality, or a portal from one dream world to another.

Fred finds himself convicted of murder. He is on Death Row.

The guards get a shock when they check his cell. He has gone. There’s another guy in the call, a guy who should not be there. This guy is a young punk named Pete Dayton, a guy who is pretty harmless. Pete has not done anything. No-one knows how he got into the cell.

So where has Fred gone? Good question. We’re now following Pete’s story.

Pete has a girlfriend, Sheila. They have lots of hot sex.

Pete is mixed up in some ways with an ageing big time gangster, Mr Eddy. Mr Eddy is terrifyingly violent. He could give lessons to Frank Booth. Mr Eddy has a gorgeous young blonde mistress, Alice Wakefield. The sexual sparks are immediately flying between Pete and Alice. They begin a wild sexual affair. If Mr Eddy finds out they’re both dog food.

Shortly thereafter the movie begins to make less sense. It makes less sense every minute.

There’s lots of incredibly brutal violence. I’m not a fan of excessive violence but I’m open-minded about it. If it’s your thing that’s fine. There’s lots of steamy sex. And Lynch does erotic scenes quite well - sexy but a bit edgy.

Lynch indulged in plenty of weirdness in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and those films also challenged the viewer to question the reality of reality. But they had some coherence. They engaged the viewer’s interest. There was a reason to keep watching.

Lost Highway is in some ways a step backwards to the incomprehensible weirdness for its own sake of Eraserhead. If you loved Eraserhead you’ll probably love Lost Highway. If like me you hated Eraserhead then you might consider Lost Highway to be 134 minutes of soul-crushing tedium.

There’s lot of spooky surreal crazy stuff but since there’s nothing happening in the movie that we could possibly care about those moments come across as self-indulgence.

We cannot be sure of the identity of any of the characters. They do not seem to have fixed identities. They have no personalities. We do not know why they do any of the things they do. All of which makes this movie exciting to film school types. When talking about the movie they get to use the words subversive and transgressive a lot and that makes them very happy.

Lynch loves bad acting. Given that his films do not take place in the real world and that his characters are probably not real people that perhaps makes some sense. It obviously makes sense to David Lynch. This time he has excelled himself, assembling a cast of breathtakingly bad actors.

The interesting thing about Lost Highway is that as it gets weirder it gets less disturbing. Things disturb us when they threaten our belief in a stable ordered world of reality. But when the movie abandons even the slightest connection to reality we cease to be disturbed because we no longer care.

There is a way of interpreting this movie that makes perfect sense but the trouble is that it can make you cease to care about anything that happens. Of course there are other possible interpretations that avoid that pitfall but to me they’re not as convincing as the simple interpretation.

This is a much bleaker much more nihilistic film than either Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart. Watching it is a gruelling experience. I personally prefer Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart because they don’t take the easy option of embracing despair and nihilism.

I can see plenty of things to admire in Lost Highway but I have to say I did not really enjoy it. It just didn’t grab me. But it’s one of Lynch’s key films and most Lynch fans like it much more than I did and for those reasons it’s recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Wild at Heart (1990) and Blue Velvet (1986) which I personally consider to be Lynch’s two masterpieces.

The Other Side of the Mirror (1973)

The Other Side of the Mirror (Al otro lado del espejo) is an odd Jess Franco movie. What’s odd about it is the lack of weird crazy elements. It’s very low-key and very restrained. This is one of those cases when it’s almost impossible not to use the very clichéd term slowburn. This one burns very slowly indeed.

It starts out giving the appearance of being a straightforward domestic melodrama. Not a psycho-sexual melodrama, but just a very ordinary story about a young woman dealing with rather ordinary problems. Even when something fairly startling happens there’s nothing bizarre about it.

Ana (Emma Cohen) lives on the island of Madeira with her father, a very respectable archaeologist (played by Howard Vernon). He’s a widower. Ana is his only child. They seem quite close, but not in a weird way. When Ana announces that she is getting married her father seems a bit upset but that’s normal and understandable. It will obviously be rather lonely living in a big house alone after his daughter moves out.

The first very subtle sign of oddness is her father’s reaction to her impending marriage. He hangs himself. It’s a shocking to do but there’s nothing inherently bizarre about it. A man in his position might well feel that without his daughter his life will be empty and meaningless. He has built his life around her. Which may not be healthy if taken to excess but again it’s the sort of thing that does happen.

We have already had indications that even before Ana’s marriage announcement her father was bored by life. Boredom is a key theme that runs throughout this movie.

Ana leaves Madeira, moves to a big city and builds a new life as a jazz singer. There’s a burgeoning love affair between Ana and jazz musician Bill (Robert Woods). Ana seems to be reluctant to let things move too quickly.

Everything about this movie is very subtle. We just get tiny clues that something might be amiss. Ana has dreams. We assume they’re just dreams. Things that happen in her dreams happen in real life. Whether her dreams predict the future or whether something stranger is going on remains ambiguous.

She begins another love affair, with theatrical producer Miguel (Ramiro Oliveros).

She ends up back on Madeira. She hangs out with a circle of idle rich people.

Carla (Françoise Brion) and Pipo (Philippe Lemaire) have an open marriage. Maybe it’s becoming a bit too open for Carla’s liking. Maybe the middle-aged Pipo is a bit too interested in Ana. This little circle also includes Tina (Alice Arno).

Several murders occur. This is starting to feel like a giallo. There’s certainly an atmosphere of decadence.

There are however hints that there is something else happening. Perhaps Ana is psychologically haunted by her past. Or perhaps she is being literally haunted. Perhaps her father is reaching out for her from the grave. At the end we find out if there is really a supernatural element at work.

What’s really interesting is the very low level of erotic content and the almost total absence of any kind of sexual perversity. There is no indication of any incestuous relationship between Ana and her father. There is not even any indication of incestuous desires on the part of either father or daughter.

At this point we need to address the question of the multiple versions of this movie. The Other Side of the Mirror was a Franco-Spanish co-production. There were three different versions released - The Spanish, French and Italian versions. What’s really fascinating is that the French version was an entirely different cut with a lot of extra material, with one of the main characters eliminated and an additional main character (played by Lina Romay) added, although utilising about three-quarters of the original Spanish film. This French version, Le miroir obscène, was apparently so different that it was in effect a totally different movie dealing with totally different themes. But the extra material was apparently all shot by Franco.

And apparently the Italian release is yet another rather different cut.

Censorship was still fairly strict in Spain and the Mondo Macabro Blu-Ray offers only the Spanish cut. One might suspect that, given the much looser censorship in France, the French version might develop a theme of father-daughter incest that Franco could not address in the Spanish version. But apparently the French version switches the focus entirely away from the father and onto Ana’s relationship with her sister (in the Spanish version she has no sister).

So my suspicion is that Franco did not see the father-daughter relationship as incestuous at all. The real link between Ana and her father is boredom, and a mutual fear of abandonment. They both feel lonely and disconnected from other people, and adrift.

It’s also possible that this movie is one of Franco’s occasional attempts to do something more mainstream. It got rave reviews from Spanish critics.

Given Franco’s obsessive love for jazz it’s likely that the idea of doing a totally different arrangement of the same basic material to create a kind of improvised variation would have appealed to him immensely.

The Other Side of the Mirror is an oddity in Franco’s filmography but it is an interesting oddity. Recommended.

It’s perhaps worth noting than in 1970 Alain Robbe-Grillet had done more or less the same thing, using mostly the same footage edited in a different way to create two totally different movies, Eden and After (1970) and N. Took the Dice (1971).

Dream Lover (1993)

Dream Lover is a 1993 erotic thriller, made at a time when erotic thrillers and neo-noirs were all the rage. This movie fits into both these categories,

Ray (James Spader) is a successful architect, newly divorced. The whole dating thing is a bit new and bewildering to him. His buddy Norman keeps trying to fix him up with women but they’re all so obviously wrong that they don’t even get to first base with Ray. Then at a party he spills wine all over Lena’s new dress. He has never met Lena (Mädchen Amick) before. The next day, quite by accident, he runs into Lena at the supermarket and they end up having dinner. She’s friendly and at the same time she’s pushing him away. They just have dinner, no more than that.

Ray is certainly not a loser. He’s just a but vulnerable at this moment, and the loneliness is just starting to get to him. He’s not exactly desperate but he really is strangely attracted to this girl and he’s not giving up.

They sleep together and that’s it for Ray. He’s fallen for her big time. He’s that kind of guy, He’s a romantic.

Pretty soon they’re married. It’s like a dream come true. He still gets on well with his first wife but they were never right for each other. It’s not like that with Lena. They’re perfect for each other.

And they have a child and the perfect marriage is still perfect.

It all seems like a very straightforward romance story. Except for the dreams Ray has. Slightly unsettling dreams about a carnival.

And there are little things. Right from the start Lena occasionally reacts in slightly odd ways. She doesn’t like to talk about her childhood. Things are not really happening between them in the bedroom any more. There are clues. Subtle clues. They’re probably nothing. But sometimes husbands do get suspicious about little things.

The problem is that he has no idea what it is that he suspects. And the viewer has no idea either. It might not be such a big deal. It’s just these odd little things that are not quite right.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot for fear of revealing spoilers, other than the fact that at this point the plot really gets moving and the movie changes gears.

Ray is a nice guy. He’s not exactly dumb but he is a romantic. His life has always run smoothly. As far as Ray is concerned the world is a place where everything makes sense. He knows that people are not perfect but he thinks that mostly they’re OK and that their actions makes sense. He has never encountered any problem he couldn’t handle. He’s obviously had a good upbringing, he’s successful, he has money. He’s been sheltered from the seamy unpleasant side of life.

I can’t say very much at all about the acting performances because that would also risk spoilers, other than to say that James Spader and Mädchen Amick are both very impressive.

There are three women who play key roles - Lena, Ray’s first wife Martha (Kathleen York) and Ray’s lawyer Elaine (Bess Armstrong).

This is Nicholas Kazan’s only feature film as director. He also wrote the screenplay and seems to have had a modestly successful career as a screenwriter. His screenplay here is quite ambitious.

Is this a neo-noir? I think it is. It involves a protagonist led along the path to destruction by a character flaw, and the flaw is an interesting one - a willingness to be deceived.

One of the three women turns out to be a definite femme fatale (and an interesting one) so there’s definitely enough here to justify the neo-noir label.

The dream sequences are an interesting touch. They have a very slight David Lynchian feel. They are unsettling. They’re puzzling but they do eventually make a kind of sense.

This is a movie that is often treated rather dismissively on the grounds that the plot involves wild implausibilities. I suspect that most reviewers have failed to consider that those dream sequences might be there for a reason. They might be crucial. They might even be the most important parts of the movie. I’m amazed that anyone could assume that they’ve just been thrown in for no reason at all.

I’m not going to tell you what I think is going on because I’m not certain, and that’s what I like most about this movie. There’s the possibility that it’s not as straightforward as it seems to be.

I liked Dream Lover a lot. Highly recommended.

A Kite (1998)

A Kite is a 1998 anime and its release history is rather interesting. It’s a two-episode OVA (intended for direct-to-video release). Given the subject matter this could never have been screened on television, either in the U.S. or Japan.

Releasing it in the U.S. raised some tricky problems. This is not an adult anime. It is not hentai. It does however contain hardcore sex senes. Yasuomi Umetsu conceived the idea of an anime about a girl assassin and he was also approached to do an X-rated anime. He decided to combine the two ideas. It was made as an X-rated OVA. The American distributors did not want to release it as hentai - there’s not enough sex for that market and it was clearly a very high-quality production that deserved a regular release as a violent action crime thriller. It’s not an adult anime but it is very much an anime aimed at a grown-up audience.

The answer to the U.S. distribution problem was to censor it. It was released and was successful. That censored version was later released in Japan as well. Then it was decided that it should get an uncut release. In fact this new version was not completely uncut. Then a few years later a totally uncut version was released on Blu-Ray.

As a result of all this there are about five different versions of A Kite. The most recent Discotek Blu-Ray includes three versions - the heavily cut version, a fairly uncut version and the totally uncut version.

The version reviewed here is the totally uncut one.

A Kite was clearly influenced to some extent by Luc Besson’s two 90s masterpieces, La Femme Nikita and Leon The Professional.

Sawa is a cute young woman. She’s a hitwoman. She’s deadly and she’s ruthless. She is given assignments by two men, Kanie and Akai. Akai is a cop. They also employ a young male assassin, Oburi.

How Sawa came to be a professional killer is connected to events in her past, and those events explain her complicated relationships to both Kanie and Akai.

Sawa and Oburi are attracted to each other, which is likely to have repercussions.

The emotional attraction between Sawa and Oburi is important in plot terms but the focus is very much on Sawa. Her responses to situations as they develop drive the plot.

A contract on a movie star causes major problems. The hit does not go smoothly.

And Sawa has confirmation of some suspicions about her past.

The violence is frequent, very brutal and very graphic. It’s both the extreme violence and the sex that make this an anime for grown-ups.

If you don’t mind the hardcore sex I recommend the uncut “International” version. The very complex power dynamics played out between Kanie, Akai, Oburi and Sawa are fuelled to a large extent by the sexual relationships Sawa has with both Kanie and Akai. They might not be healthy relationships but they’re very intense and the fact that Sawa may be a willing participant (although her feelings and motivations are very tangled and contradictory and complex) is important. It’s also important to realise that despite these tangled motivations she gets physical pleasure from the sex.

We also need to take account of the fact that Sawa has an agenda. She has a reason for being willing to engage in the sexual encounters. There is something she knows, something she has known in her heart for a long time, and for that reason she has to remain close to Kanie and Akai, and that means agreeing to be used as a sexual plaything.

This makes Sawa a much more interesting character and without the sex scenes her actions would be less comprehensible. Apart from being an action thriller this is an erotic thriller. My impression is that Mr Umetsu decided that if he had to include sexual content he might as well make it a pivotal ingredient in both plot and character terms.

Most reviewers just cannot cope with the idea that explicit sex might serve a purpose, that maybe the sex scenes needed to be raw and confronting and intense to get across to the viewer the extent to which Sawa has been drawn into this world of dangerous unhealthy twisted sex. Those scenes are supposed to be a kick in the guts.

Everything in this OVA was intended to be a kick in the guts. This is not a feelgood story.

A Kite is very disturbing. But in its own way it manages to be quite powerful. The power of a movie does not necessarily come from the plot (which in this case is fairly straightforward). Often the power comes from the atmosphere, the tone and the sheer intensity and shock value of the imagery. That’s where A Kite scores highly. If you’re too timid to watch the uncut version then you’ll be seeing a routine violent action thriller. If you’re prepared to brave the uncut version you’ll be seeing something a lot more disturbing and a lot more hard-hitting.

A Kite is highly recommended, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Dune (1984)

Several attempts have been made to adapt Frank Herbert’s novel Dune to both the big and small screen. David Lynch’s 1984 version remains the most controversial, and the most interesting. Critics hated it and it tanked at the box office.

In my experience it seems that people who loved Frank Herbert’s original novel tend to hate the David Lynch movie, and people who disliked the novel tend to enjoy Lynch’s movie. I personally disliked the novel so I guess it was always likely that I’d enjoy the movie. The novel is a hodge-podge of all the craziest and silliest ideas of the 1960s. Only a madman could turn it into a movie. Luckily David Lynch is indeed a madman.

This is of course High Fantasy, not science fiction. It has antigravity, which is magic. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood are witches. The guild navigators use magic to travel through space. Spice is a magical substance.This far future society is a feudal society. The epic power struggle at the centre of the plot is the kind of power struggle between powerful aristocratic families that is straight out of the Middle Ages. All of the science fiction elements are pure magic.

The futuristic setting is mostly an excuse for the production designers and costume designers to go totally nuts and create a bizarre insane aesthetic. That aesthetic works for me. Maybe Blade Runner is the most visually impressive science fiction movie ever made but in its own deranged way Dune is just as extraordinary. There are hints of ancient Egypt and Minoan Crete but also some Buck Rogers influence. It’s an aesthetic drawn from multiple times and sources but it forms a coherent whole. It’s futuristic and it’s retro.

It’s important to remember that Frank Herbert’s novel was written in 1965. It was heavily influenced by the emerging drug culture, and by the growing interest in the occult, esoteric philosophy, alternative religions and hippie-dippie mysticism. Herbert threw huge amounts of this kind of nonsense into the novel. Lynch at least makes those elements fun.

I don’t think Lynch was particularly interested in finding good actors. He wanted actors with the right vibe. Kyle MacLachlan is not exactly a great actor but playing a young man who doesn’t really understand what is going on is the sort of thing he did well.

Siân Phillips really was a great actress and her specialty was playing dangerous powerful scheming women. As the head Bene Gesserit witch, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, she’s an absolute joy. Sting has only a bit part. He was presumably given this part so that he could be featured on the posters. He certainly wasn’t cast for his acting ability.

The plot involves a power struggle between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, with the Emperor pulling strings in the background and with the Bene Gesserit pursuing their own agenda.

Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) has a Destiny. He is some sort of Chosen One. Again, this is pure High Fantasy stuff.

The key to absolute power is control of the spice, found only on a single planet. House Atreides has wrested control of this planet from House Harkonnen. The Baron Harkonnen wants revenge, and wants control of the spice. The Harkonnen will fight to regain control of the planet. The odds seem to be stacked against House Atreides, they have a traitor in their midst, they suffer disaster. Paul can retrieve the situation only by accessing the powers he has as the chosen one. Accessing those powers may kill him but he has no choice. The power struggle is important but the real story is Paul’s attempt to achieve his Destiny.

The Harkonnen are obvious bad guys. That makes the Atreides the good guys. In theory anyway. It is worth pointing out however that Paul is also seeking absolute power. And he’s pretty ruthless. He’s not just a charismatic leader. He is a kind of messiah, foretold by prophecy. If Paul comes out on top that will be a good thing, as long as you accept that it’s a good thing for one man to have absolute power.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration but without it the movie would have needed lengthy expository dialogue scenes. That would have made it more like a straightforward science fiction movie. On balance the voiceover narration is a better fit for this movie. It also gives us more of a sense of characters driven by Destiny.

Lynch seems to have been attracted by the idea of filming Dune specifically because it’s not science fiction. He was not trying to make a science fiction film. The fact that all the pseudoscience is in practice nothing more than magic didn’t bother him at all.

One thing that distinguishes Dune from the average space opera is that it does not deal with a fictional futuristic culture. It deals with four totally separate fictional futuristic cultures. Each of the four planets involved in the story has its own entirely distinctive culture. Which requires an entirely distinctive aesthetic. And each of these cultures really does feel like a coherent culture.

It’s the visuals that stand out. They’re stunning. The production design and the costumes are extraordinary. And this is pre-CGI so the effects really do look cool.

And this a David Lynch movie. If you’re desperately trying to figure out what it actually means then you’re missing the point. That’s like trying to figure out what a dream means, or what an acid trip means, or what it means when you have a high fever and you’re delirious. You just sit back and experience this movie.

This was a Dino De Laurentiis production and one thing you have to say about Dino is that he was willing to back wild crazy projects. Without him there would have been no Barbarella, no Conan the Barbarian, no Flash Gordon. It’s unlikely that anyone else would have let David Lynch loose on a project like Dune, with a huge budget to play with.

Dune is a wild crazy ride but I enjoyed every minute of it. I love this movie. Very highly recommended. And it looks wonderful on Blu-Ray.