Naked Vengeance (1985)

Naked Vengeance is a 1985 erotic thriller and we’re clearly in direct-to-video territory here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of 80s/90s direct-to-video movies are get fun. But then you see the dreaded words “directed by Cirio H. Santiago” in the credits and you know that this is going to be total schlock.

This is one of those movies that reeks of middle-class urbanites’ fear and loathing for working-class and rural Americans. It reflects their firm conviction that once you pass the city limits of a major burg such as L.A. everyone is an inbred low-life redneck thug. In this case it’s done in such a clumsy heavy-handed obvious way that it’s almost comical. But given that the director was a Filipino and the co-writer and producer was Indian maybe it just reflects an intense dislike for Americans.

Carla Harris (Deborah Tranelli) is a former actress married to a rich L.A. businessman. He is killed trying to save a young woman who was being attacked in a parking lot.

Carla flees back to her rural home town to live with her parents. Maybe she’s seeking security but as soon as she arrives it’s obvious that she regards the town and everyone in it with a wealthy city-dweller’s contempt for small-town America, and they hate her for being from the city.

Within a day half the men in the town in the town have tried to rape her.

The sheriff is unsympathetic. He thinks she’s a snooty stuck-up city rich bitch.

Of course the men in the town get together to go to her house (or rather her parents’ house) to teach her a lesson while her parents are away for the weekend and it ends in horror and mayhem.

Carla ends up in a mental hospital in a catatonic state. Or so it appears. But maybe she’s not so catatonic. And maybe she’s out for revenge. Maybe she even has plans for getting her revenge.

Lots of mayhem ensues.

This is in many ways a very bad movie. It’s technically a bit slapdash. Santiago’s direction is fairly uninspired. Don’t expect any visual flourishes. It’s all done by the numbers.

You could drive an 18-wheeler through the plot holes. After the night of mayhem at Carla’s parents’ house we’re expected to believe that the cops could not find a single piece of forensic evidence even after half a dozen guys had run amok. And apparently it never occurred to the cops to have Carla physically examined.

When Carla starts wreaking vengeance her victims take no precautions even though they know that she intends to kill them one by one.

Deborah Tranelli isn’t too bad but apart from her the acting is breathtakingly awful. It doesn’t help that every character is no more than a standard type, with zero depth.

On the other hand the murder scenes as Carla stalks her victims are done reasonably well. Santiago wasn’t much of a director but violent action scenes were something he could do. There’s plenty of carnage and gallons of blood but there’s also some real energy here and even a certain amount of imagination. The speedboat scene and scene at the car repair shop are grisly but rather good.

There’s some nudity and the scene in which Carla is violated by the bad guys would require a whole raft of trigger warnings today. It is a confronting scene but it is necessary. We have to feel that Carla has some justification for her bloody campaign of revenge.

There’s an amusing homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie but I won’t spoil things by saying any more.

Naked Vengeance is sleazy and grimy but sleazy and grimy are not necessarily bad things. It’s a badly made movie with a very very thin script but with enough beer and popcorn you might get some fun out of it.

Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray transfer looks pretty good.

Santiago did manage to make one genuinely entertaining movie, the pleasingly crazed Firecracker (AKA Naked Fist, 1981).

Blind Date (1984)

The first thing to be noted here is that this review concerns the 1984 Nico Mastorakis-directed Blind Date, not the 1987 Blake Edwards movie with the same title.

Mastorakis has made movies in both his native country, Greece, and in the United States. Blind Date was shot in Greece.

Mastorakis was one of those guys who figured out early on that the secret to making money out of modestly-budgeted movies was to get involved in the production side so he set up his own production company. On most of his movies he’s the producer, director and screenwriter.

In Blind Date we are introduced to Jonathon Ratcliff (Joseph Bottoms), a young American now working for an advertising agency in Athens. At the office he meets Claire (Kirstie Alley). They sleep together. Everything seeks to go fine in the bedroom. Jonathon seems like a fairly regular guy with no particular hang-ups.

Except that there was that girl at the photo shoot. He thought he knew her. Or at least he thought she was a girl he knew in the past.

Something terrible happened to that girl in his past. But it wasn’t his fault. That’s what he was told.

And then we see Jonathon with a pair of binoculars, watching people through their windows. He appears to be a Peeping Tom. Which is a bit odd. He has a hot girlfriend. And she apparently has no complaints about his performance in bed. Guys with hot girlfriends and normal sex lives are not usually peepers.

Then we find him watching a young couple making out in a car. The guy spots him and chases him. That’s when the accident happens. The bizarre and unlikely accident that leaves him blind. So we have a Peeping Tom who is now blind. I think they call that irony.

And there has been a brutal murder, of a woman.

There are some hints that things may not be as straightforward as they appear. We’re not sure what is really going on with Jonathon. Maybe it’s not simple voyeurism but something to do with his obsession with the woman from his past. We have no idea if Jonathon is actually involved in anything genuinely disturbing or violent. Or if he ever has been. All we have are hints that could point in those directions but we’re aware that perhaps we’re being led up the garden path.

Another murder takes place. We still have no clear indication that this has any connection whatsoever with Jonathon.

What we have here is a setup for an erotic thriller, or perhaps a slasher movie. And then the cyberpunk elements kick in. Jonathon is given bionic vision. It’s like very crude 80s video game graphics. He cannot see any details at all. He cannot identify individual people. But he can now get around. The problem is that he will find himself in dangerous situations where he needs to see details. He needs to be able to identify people’s faces. It’s a nifty thriller plot mechanic.

It’s incredibly interesting that Mastorakis was playing around with cyberpunk concepts in 1984, at a time when cyberpunk was in its infancy. The movie Blade Runner had established the cyberpunk aesthetic but content-wise it was not full-blown cyberpunk. Wililam Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome had been published in 1982 but it was not until 1984 that his novel Neuromancer put cyberpunk on the map. But here we have Mastorakis dealing with at least some of the themes of full-blown cyberpunk in a movie released early in 1984, a movie that was presumably already in production before Mastorakis could have had any opportunity to read Neuromancer.

Mastorakis did something similar a few years later, in his excellent In the Cold of the Night (1990). That movie starts out as an erotic thriller with neo-noir overtones and then veers into cyberpunk territory.

Mastorakis was very good at choosing locations that provided production value without spending much money. He uses Athens rather well. This is not tourist Athens. There are no shots of the Parthenon. This is the Athens of the wealthy middle class but it’s still clear that this is a movie that is not set in LA or London or Rome or any other familiar thriller locations. There’s just that very subtle hint of the exotic.

Joseph Bottoms is an adequate lead. He is ambiguous, which is what was needed. It’s not a demanding role for Kirstie Alley but she is very good.

There’s decent suspense and the action scenes are made interesting by the fact that at times we’re seeing things through Jonathon’s primitive video game graphic vision.

Blind Date is an enjoyable thriller made much more interesting by the proto-cyberpunk touches. Highly recommended.

The Shadow (1994)

The Shadow, released in 1994, was one of several 1990s attempts to kickstart superhero franchises. Other notable attempts were The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy and The Phantom. All these attempts failed which is a pity because they’re pretty good movies.

The Shadow began as a pulp magazine hero was was featured in several movies in the late 1930s.

The 1994 movie wisely adopts for a period setting although it looks more 1940s than 1930s.

The movie gives us a backstory. Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is a very nasty American bandit operating somewhere in central Asia. He ends up as a prisoner in a monastery where he learns to deal with his inner demons. 

He returns to America to become a force for good as a masked crime-fighter.

He has one super-power. He can cloud men’s minds. This gives him virtual invisibility - others are hypnotised into not seeing him.

Now he’s up against Shiwan Khan (John Lone), a descendant of Genghis Khan who has some similar hypnotic powers. Shiwan aims at world conquest. He plans to get hold of an atomic bomb. Such things do not yet exist (we assume the setting is the United States just before the Second World War) but Shiwan knows of a couple of eccentric genius scientists who may be able to invent one.

Lamont Cranston has one possibly useful ally. Margo Lane (Penelope Ann Miller) is the daughter of one of the crazy scientists but she appears to have telepathic powers. Or at least she has the ability to make telepathic contact with Lamont Cranston.

I have a few reservations about this movie but they’re more matters of personal taste than actual criticisms.

Alec Baldwin is seriously lacking in charisma and charm. But given that it was decided to make Lamont Cranston a very dark tortured character constantly battling the darkness within him his casting works reasonably well. He does the tragic brooding ominous thing very well and overall his casting works.

I’m not sure that Penelope Ann Miller has the necessary star power. Margo Lane is more than just the hero’s love interest. She becomes his active ally. This movie needs a really strong female lead, especially with such a taciturn leading man. Compared to Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer, Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Phantom or even Madonna in Dick Tracy she’s a little bland. I can’t help thinking of several other major female stars of the period who might have injected bit more life into the character. Nicole Kidman perhaps. Or Sharon Stone (who had demonstrated in King Solomon’s Mines that she could be a delightful adventure heroine). On the other hand Penelope Ann Miller is pretty, she’s likeable, she looks very good in period costumes and hairstyles and there’s nothing actually wrong about her performance.

At times the visuals are just slightly too reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Batman, but I must admit that The Shadow does the 1940s urban gothic thing very effectively.

Viewers unaware of The Shadow’s long pop culture history were likely to dismiss this movie as a mere Batman rip-off. In fact The Shadow as a character pre-dates Batman by a decade.

The biggest problem with these 90s attempts to launch new franchises was that these movies were horrendously expensive. It was not enough for them to do well at the box office. To justify a franchise they needed to be gigantic hits, which they weren’t.

Australian-born Russell Mulcahy was a solid choice to direct. One of this movie’s great strengths is that it doesn’t suffer from the problems that afflict so many movies of recent decades - bloat and poor pacing. It keeps powering along and there’s always something happening.

The Shadow is heavy on the urban gothic noir vibe but with moments influenced by old Hollywood musicals and even (as Penelope Ann Miller quite correctly points out in her interview) some nice screwball comedy touches. The dynamics of the Lamont Cranston-Margo Lane relationship are structured in a very screwball comedy way.

It’s very special effects-heavy but they are done extremely well. There’s some CGI (CIG was around but still in its infancy) but Mulcahy preferred practical effects and that’s mostly what we get. It really is a great-looking movie.

The Shadow delivers dazzling visuals, thrills and adventure. That’s more than enough to keep me happy. Highly recommended.

Sex and Fury (1973)

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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.

Someone’s Watching Me (1978)

Someone’s Watching Me is an early John Carpenter film (he wrote and directed it). It’s a made-for-TV movie and it’s a suspense thriller.

This is obviously Carpenter doing a riff on Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This is Carpenter’s voyeurism film.

Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) has just arrived in LA to start a job as a live TV director. Using a generous bonus from her previous job she takes a luxury apartment in the swanky Arkham Towers (and yes I’m sure the Lovecraft reference is deliberate). This is an enormous high rise apartment building and it’s very high-tech. It has elaborate security.

But as Leigh finds out she is not safe there at all.

She gets creepy nuisance phone calls. Not threatening or obscene, but subtly creepy. She gets mysterious notes delivered to her. She receives expensive gifts, supposedly from a travel company. She starts to suspect that this guy knows all about her. He knows everything that she does.

The scary part is that he makes no direct threats. She has no idea what he actually wants. He might be a relatively harmless weirdo. He might be very dangerous. There’s no way of knowing.

It takes her a while but eventually she figures out that the guy is watching her from another apartment building. But it’s a high-rise building as well. This guy could be in any one of hundreds of apartments.

The police can’t help because she doesn’t know who the guy is and he has not yet broken any actual laws.

Her new boyfriend Paul (David Birney) is sympathetic but he’s a philosophy professor not an action hero.

Her best friend Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) is very supportive but it’s difficult for any of them to do anything really useful.

Of course everybody who has ever discussed the subject of movies about voyeurism has made the very obvious point that all movies are voyeuristic - we are watching other people’s lives. And of course a film director is not just watching the lives of the characters but also manipulating them. An interesting twist that Carpenter adds here is that Leigh is a television director, so she herself is a kind of voyeur and a kind of manipulator.

Technically this movie is impressive. Carpenter does a more than competent job as director. He understands pacing and he understands the basic techniques of suspense. The suspense scenes work. The basic setup is very promising.

There are however major flaws. There is not a single interesting characters in the movie, and not one of the characters really comes to life. By the end of the movie we do not know a single thing about Leigh. She’s a complete blank. Her apartment looks like a hotel room. It does not look like someone actually lives there. There are no personal touches.

Her friend Sophie is pleasant but she really just functions as a plot device.

Leigh’s boyfriend Paul is a harmless nonentity. We learn nothing about him. There is no erotic or romantic heat between Leigh and Paul. Even after they begin an affair they behave more like casual acquaintances.

This is an extraordinarily lifeless sexless movie. Maybe Carpenter wanted to avoid making an exploitation movie but the problem is that as a result the stalker’s motivation remains inexplicable. There is not the slightest indication that he has even the mildest sexual interest in her. So what is his motivation? OK, he wants to control her, but why? His notes to her are polite but impersonal. Maybe he hates women, but we get no indications that this is so. Maybe he has a romantic obsession with her, but we also get no indications that this might be the case. Maybe he feels powerless? Maybe, but we’re offered no evidence.

The idea that the stalker wants to stalk Leigh from a safe distance and is afraid to get close to her is a good one. Unfortunately it isn’t developed.

The vagueness of his motivation somehow makes the threat less scary.

It’s difficult to judge the acting since the characters are so underwritten.

I’m a huge admirer of Carpenter’s work but I’m inclined to think that realistic thrillers about real people were definitely not his forte. It’s easy to see why he moved rapidly away from this type of movie.

Someone’s Watching Me is well-crafted and reasonably entertaining but there’s something missing. Carpenter completists will want to seek it out and it is interesting as a movie made before Carpenter really found his voice, but it is very much lesser Carpenter.

The Scream Factory Blu-Ray offers both 1.33:1 and widescreen aspect ratios. Both look terrific. 1.33:1 is how it was originally broadcast.

Léon: The Professional (1994)

Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional came out in 1994 and while it’s not a sequel to his La Femme Nikita it is a kind of spinoff and the two films have lots of thematic affinities.

Both movies deal with professional killers, and with people for whom killing is a vocation rather a job. Besson took that same central idea and came up with two different stories which complement each other. La Femme Nikita deals with a young woman, Nikita, who is a vicious killer and is recruited by the French Government as an assassin. She is totally emotionally disconnected in every way. Léon: The Professional deals with a middle-aged man, Léon, a hitman who is also totally emotionally disconnected in every way.

Léon is a very successful hitman. He refers to himself as a cleaner. He has made a lot of money but lives in a grotty apartment. 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) lives in the same building. Her home life is miserable. Her father is a dope dealer. Her entire family is wiped out by DEA agents led by an agent named Stansfield (Gary Oldman). Even by the standards of murderous corrupt cops Stansfield is a nasty piece of work. His fellow DEA officers are brutal thugs.

The DEA officers had intended to murder the whole family but Léon saves Mathilda.

Now he doesn’t know what to do with her. He knows nothing about kids. He doesn’t want a kid. He is a loner. And Mathilda knows what he does for a living. He should kill her. It would be safer. But he can’t. He’s an ethical hitman. He only kills people who are criminals anyway and he never kills women or children.

So he’s stuck with her.

Mathilda wants to learn to be a cleaner. She thinks it would be a cool way to make a living. And she wants revenge against her family’s killers. She’d like Léon to kill them but if he won’t she’s prepared to do the job herself. She just needs Léon to teach her to be an efficient killer. Léon begins her training. She learns quickly.

An emotional bond develops between these two troubled loners.

And eventually there will be a showdown with Stansfield, which is likely to end in a bloodbath (and it does).

This is in a sense a coming-of-age movie but not in a sexual sense. Mathilda’s childhood came to an abrupt blood-soaked end and she was hurled into the grown-up world. Not the regular grown-up world but a grown-up world of outsiders and crime and corrupt cops. It’s a lot for a 12-year-old to cope with but she doesn’t have much choice.

It’s also in a way a coming-of-age story for Léon, who is emotionally stunted and now has to deal with the fact that he is now responsible for a kid. As Mathilda tells him, he saved her life so now he’s responsible for her. Their emotional connection is dealt with in a very sensitive and touching way.

The original cut ran for 135 minutes. After negative responses at previews in the U.S. it was cut by 25 minutes. The theatrical release was the cut version. Besson prefers to call the longer version the Extended Version rather than the Director’s Cut.

The Extended Version would have been too much for mainstream American audiences to cope with, partly because it clearly shows Mathilda as an accessory to a series of murders and partly because it explores the relationship between Léon and Mathilda in greater depth.

It’s difficult to see why anyone would object to the Extended Version. There is absolutely no sex and no nudity and not the slightest suggestion of a sexual relationship between Léon and Mathilda. It is obvious that Mathilda has developed a major crush on Léon. She does some very serious flirting. Léon makes it very clear that nothing is going to happen between them.

The problem of course is that in the U.S. there always has been and always will a knee-jerk reaction to any movie that deals with human relationships in a grown-up complex way. Besson was undoubtedly wise to agree to the savage cuts for the U.S. theatrical release. The original cut is subtle and nuanced but the subtlety and the nuance would not have been appreciated by mainstream American critics.

I think the Extended Version is clearly the superior version.

Jean Reno is excellent. Léon is a killer but he really does have ethical standards, which is more than can be said for the law-enforcement officers in this tale. Léon is a tragic figure, a basically decent guy who has never been able to come to terms with life.

Natalie Portman is superb.

As for Gary Oldman, his clownish absurd performance almost sinks the movie (as he almost sank Besson's The Fifth Element).

There are some memorable action scenes.

Léon: The Professional is a great movie with a definite neo-noir vibe. Very highly recommended and a fine companion piece to La Femme Nikita.

La Femme Nikita (1990)

La Femme Nikita (the original French title is simply Nikita) is a 1990 spy thriller written and directed by Luc Besson but there’s a whole lot more going on in this movie.

Nikita (Anne Parillaud) runs with a street gang. They’re violent murderous thugs. Nikita is vicious and she’s a mess. After a robbery goes wrong she’s facing a life sentence for murder. Then she gets a second chance. She’s a dangerous psychotic but she’s good at killing people and she kills with hesitation or remorse. The government can always use people like that. She is given the chance to work for a government intelligence agency as an assassin.

She isn’t really given a choice.

The idea is far from original. It’s the basis for the greatest TV spy series of all time, Callan. Callan is the world’s worst soldier but he’s very good at killing. He is recruited as an assassin for the British Government. Like Nikita he accepts because he has no other options.

A great movie does not have to be based on an original idea. The best stories are very rarely original. The trick to making a great movie (and La Femme Nikita is a great movie) is to take an old idea and tell it well and give it some fresh twists. That’s what Besson does here.

Bob (Tchéky Karyo) has the job of training Nikita. It’s a challenge. Nikita does not like being told what to do. She has plenty of potential. She’s a natural killer. Eventually she is ready for a mission.

The movie follows her on several missions. This is a movie that can be approached as an action thriller and on that level it’s very good indeed. It has plenty of adrenalin-rush action scenes. It has plenty of suspense.

This is also however the story of a woman. A complicated woman. She becomes more complicated. While she’s learning to be an agent she is also learning to be a woman. She is learning to enjoy being a woman.

She is also learning that she wants things that other women want. She falls in love. Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is a seriously nice guy. They would like to get married.

The problem is whether Nikita can have a normal life with a normal relationship with a man while also earning her living killing people. It’s not just the practical difficulties of keeping her two lives separate. She also has to deal with the fact that she kills people she has never met, people she has nothing against, simply because the government orders her to to do so. The government has turned her into a killing machine but human beings are not machines.

There are very obvious echoes of A Clockwork Orange. The government dealing with people who are seen as social problems by re-engineering their personalities.

And there is the same moral ambiguity. We come to feel sympathy for Alex in A Clockwork Orange but he is a vicious thug. Does that mean he no longer has the right to be himself? Does that give the government the right to change his personality? We come to feel sympathy for Nikita, but she was a vicious killer.

At the start of the movie Nikita is a 19-year-old juvenile delinquent who kills by instinct. She is not much more than a wild animal. It’s doubtful that she has ever given a second’s thought to this. Now she is a woman. She has grown up. But is murdering people for the government more moral than just murdering by instinct? Perhaps it is worse. Nikita has become a killer who is capable of thinking about what she does.

I like the fact that she is not a perfect killing machine. She cannot function that way. As a killing machine she develops malfunctions. At one point when things go wrong on a mission she just curls up in a corner sobbing. She has not only developed feelings, she has come to value her own life. She is now capable of experiencing fear, and panic.

Anne Parillaud is extraordinary. She manages, quite subtly, to get across to us that Nikita is not a whole new person. She now dresses exquisitely but she is not really a super-confident sophisticated woman of the world. This is just a mask that she wears. She is not really an ice-cold professional killer. This is just another mask that she wears. The messed-up juvenile delinquent is still there underneath. And the frightened confused little girl that she once was is still there underneath as well. So we’re seeing an actress playing a woman who is herself like an actress playing a part.

Jean-Hugues Anglade is extremely well. Bob is a swine who manipulates Nikita but he is perhaps not entirely a machine either. He may feel some emotional attachment to Nikita. We’re not quite sure. Perhaps he is not sure either. A spy’s life is based on lies and deception. Sometimes they can no longer separate the lies from the reality and can no longer distinguish between the masks they wear and the person underneath.

Luc Besson was associated with the so-called “Cinéma du look” movement. Any accusation that Besson favours style over substance can be dismissed in the case of La Femme Nikita. It has plenty of style and plenty of substance. It’s a superior thriller but it’s also a complex look at the life of a complex woman. Very highly recommended.

Perfect Blue (1997)

Perfect Blue is a 1997 Japanese anime psycho-sexual thriller directed by Satoshi Kon.

This is the story of Mima. Mina is a pop idol, a member of a J-pop girl group called CHAM. They are moderately popular but have never quite made the big time. Mima feels she’s going nowhere and decides to make a major career change, quitting CHAM to try to establish herself as a serious actress. We’re already getting a glimpse of one of the movie’s major themes, as Mima has decided to abandon one artificial role in order to take on another role that is equally artificial.

She lands a role in a TV crime drama called Double Bind. It’s an amazingly lurid series focusing on a cop and a psychiatrist investigating sex murders. We see lots of clips of Double Bind and I’m inclined to doubt whether such a sleazy series could ever in reality have been screened on television in Japan (or anywhere else) in the 90s. But that’s not a flaw in the script for Perfect Blue since this is not a movie about reality.

Mima’s acting career progresses slowly but she does start to make a bit of a name for herself. She is a minor celebrity (just as she was a minor celebrity as a singer in CHAM). She supplements her income by doing nude modelling.

Her character in Double Bind undergoes a personality crisis after being raped. Mima’s own personality seems to be unravelling at the same time. She keeps seeing herself, but is it her?

Then people associated with the Double Bind TV series start getting murdered.

Mima has already acquired an internet stalker who posts things about her on the net. His website is called Mima’s Room. She is concerned that he seems to know an awful lot about her. It crosses her mind that he may in fact be watching Mima’s real room, in her apartment.

The lines between reality and fantasy become more and more blurred, for both Mima and the viewer of Perfect Blue. There are multiple levels of reality - the real world, the artificial reality of the entertainment world, the world of the Double Bind TV series, the world of celebrity culture, the internet and the world of Mima’s fantasies or dreams or illusions. Assuming that they’re her fantasies and not somebody else’s. And Mima doesn’t seem to know if any of these worlds corresponds to objective reality. The viewer isn’t sure either.

Mima is so accustomed to playing a part (firstly as the cute squeaky-clean pop idol and later as the sexy actress with a reputation for doing sleaze) that it’s possible that she’s forgotten how to play herself. It’s even possible that she doesn’t really have a self.

But don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t assume that Mima is crazy. This movie is open to various interpretations.

To find out whether Mima finds her way back to any kind of actual reality you’ll have to watch the movie.

It’s interesting that although this movie was made in the very early pre-social media days of the internet it’s extraordinarily prescient about the effects that the internet was about to have on society.

I have seen this movie described as Hitchcockian but apart from the fact that there are hints of voyeurism I don’t see it as being the slightest bit Hitchcockian. There might perhaps be some hints of De Palma.

This is much more of a surrealist film. It’s closer in feel to Jess Franco films like Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden (AKA Succubus, 1968) or Paroxismus (AKA Venus in Furs, 1969) than it is to Hitchcock.

Modern viewers might find the animation style old-fashioned but I think it works, emphasising the unreality and artificiality of everything we’re seeing.

This is certainly an anime for grown-ups. There’s sex and there’s nudity, including frontal nudity. There’s violence.

Perfect Blue is a twisted but somewhat cerebral psycho-sexual thriller about madness, obsession, the nature of reality and the masks people wear and the ways in which the masks can become more real than the people behind them. Highly recommended.

The Shout! Factory steelbook release offers the movie on both Blu-Ray and DVD. The extras include a reasonably interesting interview with Satoshi Kon conducted at the time of the film’s release and a much more interesting lecture delivered by him a decade later to film students. Unfortunately Satoshi Kon’s extremely promising career was cut short by his premature death in 2010.

Black Boots, Leather Whip (1983)

Black Boots, Leather Whip (Botas negras, látigo de cuero) is one of the many movies Jess Franco made featuring private eye Al Pereira.

Al (Antonio Mayans) is about to leave town in a hurry. He owes a lot of money to some guys and they’re not guys who are very understanding about such things. Just as he’s about to leave Lina (Lina Romay) shows up and offers him a really simple job. All he has to do is go to the auto junkyard and retrieve her purse from the boot of a wrecked Dodge. For that he’ll get five thousand dollars.

It seems simple but two guys with guns turn up at the wrong moment. The two guys end up dead.

Al doesn’t look like a tough guy but obviously he is. We find out later that he’s an ex-cop with an unsavoury criminal record.

Lina manages to persuade Al that she didn’t set him up. She pays him his money and then since she has half an hour to kill she suggests they have sex. Which they do.

They decide to see each other again. Lina does a kinky nightclub act in the Whip of Leather, a club owned by her husband.

It’s not an ideal marriage since her husband Daniel isn’t interested in girls.

Daniel is part of a criminal gang involved in the usual rackets such as prostitution and drugs. If anything were to happen to any member of the gang that person’s share would be divided among the survivors. If Daniel were to be the last survivor Lina would be his heiress. If something were then to happen to Daniel Lina would get everything. Lina thinks this would be a good thing. If Al agrees to kill all the members of the gang he and Lina can go away together, with all that money.

That’s the plot and the first thing that will occur to Franco fans is that it’s a very straightforward conventional plot for a Franco movie. There is none of the dreamlike quality or the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality that you get in his best movies. This movie is almost aggressively grounded in reality.

It’s also a movie that has obvious affinities with film noir. The plot is pure film noir. Stylistically Franco is going for a neo-noir vibe - it’s a film noir story but he makes no attempt to capture the classic film noir visual style. This is film noir with an 80s visual sensibility.

This is not actually all that startling. Franco made a couple of good noirish crime films early in his career - Rififi in the City (1963) and Death Whistles the Blues (1964). They’re not only very competent exercises in film noir, they also have a very Franco-esque jazz-fuelled vibe.

It’s very odd to come across a Franco movie that doesn’t feature strange and interesting locations but Black Boots, Leather Whip is rather dull in this respect. Which may have been deliberate - it’s likely that he was aiming for a very stark very gritty look. The kind of weird fanciful bizarre architecture that Franco loved would have been a distraction. The movie was shot in Malaga but Franco is aiming for a mean hostile urban feel. He does pull off one very nifty noirish scene in a corridor - it’s simply done but very noir.

The problem is that although Franco understood film noir he wasn’t especially adept at suspense or action. There are scenes that needed a more effective building of suspense. The action scenes are competent but not exactly inspired. And the pacing is on the slow side.

What it does have is an interesting protagonist. We learn what we need to know about Al Pereira right at the start. He’s capable of brutal casual violence. He’s entirely immoral. He’s impulse-driven, particularly in regard to sex. Antonio Mayans’ performance is impressive.

Franco tells us what we need to know about Lina just as economically. She is scheming and ruthless. She is totally pragmatic when it comes to sex. She wants to be rich. She has one weapon she can use and that weapon is sex but in her hands it’s a very potent weapon. She is the femme fatale and Lina Romay does a fine job although perhaps her character needed just a bit more of a backstory.

While Franco was clearly going for film noir in commercial terms this movie (had it been made for a company that actually bothered to promote it) would have been marketed as an erotic thriller and there is a huge amount of sex. Franco does however manage to ensure that the sex scenes do advance the plot and do add to our knowledge of the characters’ motivations.

This was made during Franco’s period with Golden Films. They gave him total creative control but unfortunately when it came to distribution they were totally incompetent. Franco got to make the movies he wanted to make the way he wanted to make them but very few people got to see them.

I’m not sure this movie is a total success but it is an interesting neo-noir with an extraordinarily nihilistic flavour and it’s fun seeing Lina Romay do the femme fatale thing. This is a Franco obscurity, but an intriguing one. Recommended.

Severin have released Black Boots, Leather Whip on both Blu-Ray and DVD in a nice-looking transfer with some worthwhile extras.