If you really love movies, there exists
that magic time, the moments before a film begins as it slowly fades
in, and you have to guess exactly what you're watching. Seeing
something contemporary behind generic multi-conglomerate logos takes
a bit of the fun of it, but there's something powerful about catching
a film from another era that gives no hints, shows no credits, and
ominously utilizes a cinematic vocabulary of which you're unfamiliar.
Not only must you guess the film, but you also have to get your
bearings: someone may die, someone might fall in love, and the music
that plays just might kick your ass. And for those brief moments
before the title comes up, you just don't know how.
This is the feeling one experiences
when they attend Exhumed Films' Ex-Fest, a wholly unique movie
marathon that, for true film junkies, is the cinematic event of the
year. For four straight years, Ex-Fest has been showcasing the
strangest and most obscure of exploitation films' past, original
prints teased with only the faintest of clues, the only guarantee
being that the film would be from an earlier period, usually separate
from the horror genre (the good people at Exhumed also put together
the 24 Hour Horror-Thon each year around Halloween).
This year's fest took us around the
globe, showed us the heart of darkness, the ecstasy of bad behavior
and the exoticism of peculiar deviance. Exhumed's Horror-Thon sells
out each year, but that's not the case for Ex-Fest, which makes no
promises about what you'll see. The recipe allows for mass walkouts
and some disappointed people hoping for a more filtered bout of
exploration. You're not going to see Arnold blow off someone's face
in this festival, but you will see George Kennedy cradle a shotgun
while in a lizard suit, which he did in last year's “Radioactive
Dreams”. And you won't catch Sharon Stone disrobing to seduce her
prey, but you just might see Carol Kane seduce... well, read on to
find out.
The first film was “The Eagle's
Shadow” (aka "Snake In The Eagle's Shadow"), which begins with a good look at the martial arts from its
star, Jacky (sic) Chan. This Yuen Woo-Ping-directed fight film, which
I believe I saw once on Univision during a late night, finds a very
young Chan as a bumbling disciple to a borderline-magic old man, who
must then recruit him in a struggle between warring kung fu clans.
This is very much gang warfare on a micro scale, carried on no less
gangsta than it would be in a film like “Boyz N The Hood”. Of
course, there are the typical Chan-quality Gags And Stunts, but the
one standout moment is a brawl between a kitten and a rattlesnake.
Like Donald Sterling, these films are Of Their Era, which means that
some people on the set willingly broke some rules to get things on
the screen. So if you're seeing something dangerous, chances are it's
at least partly real. There is a real snake and a real cat in these
shots, and while the movie employs some clever editing, there's no
doubt during some moments the production had a real cat face down an
actual snake.
The second picture was Sergio Sollima's
“Face To Face”, a widescreen western epic complete with a badass
Ennio Morricone score. This deceptively complex film teams a
principled teacher from the East Coast with a wily criminal from
Texas in a hostage situation that slowly, gradually morphs into a
criminal collaboration. There's some meat-off-the-bones philosophies
about the principles of violence and the duality of man, but oddly
enough, this just didn't feel scummy enough for Ex-Fest for me. Which
is to say I liked and admired it a great deal, and am extremely
thankful I saw it. But it's hard to look at the gorgeous photography
and brilliant casting of this picture and not think this wasn't
something a bit richer and more intriguing than the average Ex-Fest
entry, albeit still with the usual booze, broads and guns.
The next picture hewed closely, and
somewhat depressingly, to the troubling women-in-prison genre.
“Bamboo House Of Dolls”, from producer Run Run Shaw, was an
exceptionally good-looking film about a Chinese containment camp
during World War II, the Japanese aggressors proceeding to have their
way with the collection of female nurses on the premises, a good
chunk of whom are American. The picture actually has top-flight
production value and the action sequences hover between jagged
handheld and blazing dolly shots, stylistically pumping up a fairly
generic storyline. Again, very Sterling-esque, but when you agree to
Ex-Fest, you consent to seeing the presence of more than a few
voyeuristic rape sequences in the films, and this was no different. I
recently caught Camille Delamarre's “Brick Mansions” and was a
bit taken aback by how this PG-13 actioner may have had the most
leering of any movie in years. But “Bamboo House Of Dolls”
clearly comes from a place before so much pearl-clutching.
Normally the films are interspersed
with vintage trailers, a treasure for anyone who has spent hours on
YouTube checking out their depository of seedy bargain basement junk.
This year, they eliminated the trailers, but they did bring us “The
Best Of Sex And Violence”, a curio of a movie consisting only of
movie trailers. Harkening back to a time where you couldn't just
click a few times to see any trailer you want, this feature presents
the best and nastiest of exploitation trailers, filled with bold
nudity and bracing gore, and introduced by an unlikely host, the
rictus grin of the elderly John Carradine. His introductions,
wide-eyed and completely insincere, usually poked fun at the movies,
as well as his own participation in the entire endeavor, a cheap
paying gig for a former cinematic legend. If you ever wanted to see
the crotchety old Carradine crack deeply-dated jokes about
homosexuality while introducing a trailer for Lucio Fulci's “Zombie”,
this is clearly for you. The unfortunate note is that those who had
been to previous Exhumed events were no stranger to some of the clips
presented, but for awhile stuff like “The Doberman Gang” really
threw the audience for a loop.
Halfway through, Ex-Fest got pretty
aggressively weird with the suspense thriller “The Mafu Cage”.
Transparently based on a stage play, this indescribable oddity finds
Lee Grant and Carol Kane as sisters, housemates and lovers (!) living
off the largesse of their late wildlife-loving father. While Grant
has managed to live a relatively normal life on the outside, she
nonetheless must keep the difficult Kane at home. In an earlier time,
Kane was given a pet she named Mafu, but her reckless behavior led to
Mafu's death. Each subsequent pet she's been given has met the same
grisly fate, all named Mafu. As the film begins, she's onto her
latest Mafu, an orangutan who makes himself overly friendly towards
the lonely Kane by making out with her and groping her repeatedly.
The affection is returned until it is not, and soon Kane's aggression
emerges not only against the pet, but her own sister and her sister's
new boyfriend as well. This is a film with approximately zero scares
or gore moments, blunt and bizarre and absolutely unique. You can
imagine wearing a dashiki to see it open Off-Off-Broadway on opening
night.
The most conventionally exciting film
of the day was “Class Of 1984”, the kids-ain't-alright suspense
thriller from “Commando” director Mark Lester. The new teacher at
Lincoln High is a straight-arrow with something of a short fuse,
something that places him in conflict with the
authentically-dangerous punks who walk the halls. The transgressive
feel of such a film is minimal given that we've been spoiled by
decades of age-appropriate casting (the “teens” in this film are
mostly late twenties) but there's brief gravity brought to the film
by an achingly young and slightly chubby “Michael Fox”, looking
like a borderline ninth grader. Roddy McDowell is the alcoholic
veteran teacher who has grown accustomed to the threats and violence,
and he begins the picture as comic relief before the ferocious and
unexpected violence done to him and the tragic reaction that spurs
the third act. I would very much like to see the sequel, which
apparently takes place in the future and introduces robot educators
into the mix.
Good on the Exhumed folks for procuring
a print of Ralph Bakshi's confrontational “Coonskin”. The most
lambasted of Bakshi's films, this urban animated wonderland traces
the adventures of three black men as they attempt to navigate the
criminal underworld of New York City during a time of what the film
considers phony civil rights and dubious economic realities. Like
most Bakshi films, his has that unique feeling of being immaculately
animated and designed, and haphazardly plotted and indifferently
performed, at once polished and improvisational. Typically, the
audience has just about no idea how to respond to the film. Interesting to see this vision of black culture and attitudes after the thoroughly white "Class Of 1984", where the black students are bullied through transparently racist behavior.
I do wish some out-of-theater issues
didn't prevent me from seeing the final film, the sexploitation
thriller “Eager Beavers”, but twelve hours is a lot of time to
spend at the movies. This one looked seedy and disreputable, but also
polished and relatively newer (possibly 1985?), so I disliked
foregoing a very nice print for the real world. Such is the nature of
Ex-Fest, which very much feels like a portal that swallows you whole
and takes you to another world, one where women are slapped and
yelled at, where men are disgusting, hairy-chested slobs, and where
making love is less common than a sloppy car chase. It's best this
event be once a year: the cinemas no longer have enough personality
to accommodate such an experience beyond that.
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