The New Avengers

Purdey Hair

The New Avengers
ITV 1976-77
Two series
26 episodes
Studio Canal Blu Ray Box 

When I was around four or five years old, in the very early 1970s, I used to watch repeats of The Avengers on TV and I remember liking it a lot. I saw the Honor Blackman episodes (indeed, I must have seen many of the episodes I suspect are now no longer with us from the first season), the Diana Rigg episodes and the Linda Thorson episodes... and I believe some of my earliest name fictional character recognitions were Kathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King*… along with other usual suspects like Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Doctor Who and Scott Tracy.

And of course there was the solid rock of a character in every episode, the male lead in pretty much every incarnation of The Avengers... John Steed, with his bowler hat and umbrella. Played, as always, by the great Patrick Macnee.

So it was with no small amount of excitement when the 8 year old version of myself received the news that a brand new series of The Avengers, entitled rather practically as The New Avengers, would be on my TV screen soon.

It was on fairly late on a Saturday or Sunday evening, if I’m recalling correctly… and we sat down to watch the first episode, The Eagles Nest, about a group of modern nazis who has been keeping Hitler’s body on ice all these years, until medical science was able to resuscitate him. And I have to say, it was pretty good stuff. We all loved it as a family and it even had Peter Cushing in the episode, as the scientist the new nazis kidnapped to get the job done right.

Now, not long after the show had started, my mother and I were run over by two cars which hit each other before mounting the pavement, out of control, and clobbering us. Since my jaw bone from my ‘against all odds’ still attached head couldn’t be wired back in the normal way, I had to take a few years off school to allow it to heal itself. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess but the problem was, I was stuck in hospital for the first week or two and the nurses on the children’s ward wouldn’t let me stay up with the television on to watch The New Avengers. Which I was very concerned about at the time. Although I did have the special souvenir magazine put out by TV Times to comfort me at some point, which was pretty thick and covered a lot of the show (and predecessors)… an issue which I’m pleased to say I still have to this day.

So, alas, I didn’t see a fair few of the episodes on its original run, which makes me happy to be finally catching up with them again after all these years, in a new Blu Ray set put out by Studio Canal, which looks good but is way too expensive for what is, after all, just 26 episodes.

And I watched these all recently with my mum and it’s still great. Patrick Macnee was still charming as Steed and his two new, supporting Avengers, Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit and Joanna Lumley as the amazing Purdey (shortly before she would amaze us all again by taking on one of the title roles in Sapphire And Steel), are brilliant.

Some of the episodes… and this is no surprise since the show was using the same writers and producers of the bulk of the original incarnation… are able to capture the surreal and fun spirit of the originals and, others are a bit more humdrum but, even so, the chemistry between the three leads and the dialogue writing for them, was absolutely brilliant and I was a little surprised that these whimsical ‘to and fros’ between the characters still hold up today.

For instance, when Purdey pulls her bra off to give to Mike to use as a slingshot to get them out of a jam, he says “Why didn’t you burn it with all the other ladies?” To which she replies, “I didn’t need to. I already knew I was liberated.”

There were guest directors as well, such as Robert Feust, who you may remember directed The Final Programme (reviewed by me here). And, of course, many actors and actresses who would suddenly turn up for an episode (because who wouldn’t want to be in The Avengers) such as Jenny Runacre, Jon Finch, Ronald Lacey, Deep Roy and even the great Caroline Munro.

They even have a bit of a reunion, with Ian Hendry returning for an episode, although not as the co-starring lead character he played alongside Macnee in the early years of the show. Not to mention an episode where the two bad guys are played by Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins, who would bring exactly the same chemistry they had here to the producer’s next TV show, The Professionals.

Not only that, the set includes the last four episodes, shot and produced in Canada, proudly proclaiming before the pre-credits sequence that it’s The New Avengers in Canada, before going onto the usual action sequence which would then freeze at the crucial part... followed by the wonderful animated credits sequence that came in from about halfway through the first season… and then going back to the freeze frame and concluding the opening scene. As was the format of all the episodes.

And of course, all the music, including the wonderful new opening title music which cunningly utilises his old baseline from the original show in a new way, is by the original show composer Laurie Johnson, who came on in the early days of the show after original composer Johnny Dankworth left. The show is filled with good music including a few sly nods to Johnson’s mentor, composer Bernard Herrmann.

And with episodes dedicated to such antagonists as killer birds, a giant rat in the sewers and a homicidal building… it’s just a fun packed snapshot of what late 1970s TV could be. The New Avengers makes for a nice, if prohibitively expensive slice of TV heaven that audiences of a certain age should surely enjoy and a worthy successor to the original show. Go on, give it a go.

*I’m not forgetting Avenger girls Ingrid Hafner as Carol Wilson and Julie Stevens as Venus Smith... but that’s for another review (coming to a blog near you, sometime late 2026 or early 2027).

Now You See Me, Now You Don't

Augmented Unreality

Now You See Me, 
Now You Don't
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
USA/United Arab Emirates/
Canada/Hungary 2025 
Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some light spoilers.

Okay, so this third installment in the wonderful Now You See Me franchise feels a bit like a too little, too late kind of scenario, to be perfectly honest. And I can straight away say that I can understand why it’s not as well loved as the other two movies... frankly, it is the worst written of the three. But at least it finally has the title Now You See Me, Now You Don't... which is what we all wanted as the title for the second film.

But, that being said, the director manages to keep the ball rolling through most of the presentation and it never once gets dull. Clichéd and disappointing in places perhaps... but never dull.

Okay, so this is set around ten years since the last show staged by ‘The Four Horsemen’ and there’s an opening sequence where the four are back and performing for a crowd, using their stage act to rob from the criminally gained rich and give to the poor, once more. And here was my first disappointment... it felt a little off to me. And so I was pretty unsurprised by the first twist of the movie, that this was an AI representation of the horsemen being utilised to cash in on them (and seek an entrance) by a new group of three young magicians. 

So returning we have the original four horsemen played by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher... we have the new three played by Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt and the always watchable Justice Smith. We also have Morgan Freeman returning and in a somewhat awful cameo at the end of the picture, Mark Ruffalo (who is sorely missed as a player in this). All coming together to foil the daughter of a nazi empire and her dirty diamonds, played by Rosamund Pike. 

Not to mention my favourite return guest... Lizzy Caplan... as the returning ‘other girl horseman’ Lula!

And it’s... kinda fun but, honestly, tips it’s hat one too many times, so to speak and... I don’t know... I can handle that the magic is somewhat faked in a lot of the scenes and there’s even a clever piece of sleight of hand played on the audience when Ariana Greenblatt escapes her captors due to a simple camera movement... but it’s not enough to make up for the somewhat hum drum story, I thought. 

I do have a couple of criticisms of the movie. Now, Isla Fisher’s character is really happy to see Morgan Freeman’s returning Thaddeus, even though in terms of the story, she has already left The Horseman by the time he turns out not to have been the villain after all (at the end of the second movie). So, yeah, considering the fact that nobody has really been keeping tabs on each other in the group (and despite the reason for them splitting being absolutely lacking in credibility)... she really shouldn’t have ben that happy to see what, to her, should have looked like a returning villain. 

Also, my other problem, is that for four people who are fugitives from the law at the end of the previous two movies... how are they able to hold a job down in every day life (Dave Franco’s character is a cruise ship magician, for example) without being picked up by the FBI or the police? It makes absolutely no sense people!

The one thing the film does, kinda, have going for it is the twist with the revelation of the identity of one of the characters at the end game of the film. This actually surprised me but... also disappointed me because it seemed so contrived and somewhat anticlimactic. It just all felt a little off and... meh. Even the Escher-like chase scene in a chateau seemed somewhat less than it should have been.

So Now You See Me Now You Don’t is not a dull film and I had some fun with it, especially as it’s once again all tied up with one of franchise composer Brian Tyler’s masterful scores (although, c’mon man, we need a proper CD release of the first and third film scores please). But that’s me done with it... the young cast are, mostly, not as irritating as they could be but I would have preferred the film without them in order to have more time with The Horsemen from the first two films. Not great but not terrible either.

Undertone

Pod Fearing People

Undertone
Directed by Ian Tuason
Canada 2026
Vertigo Releasing
UK Cinema Release Print

Finally got to the cinema again (the last six months have been very hard) and about the only movie that could coax me out was one in which I knew the sound design would play a huge part. And, yeah, sound design is everything to Undertone, so I think I made the right call here.

So in terms of actual physical appearances by actors, this is a two hander, all set in one house, with lead actress Nina Kiri as supernatural phenomena debunker/podcaster Eva and Michèle Duquet as her silent, dying in bed mum. All the rest of the cast, including Adam DiMarco as her fellow podcast hoster Justin, are all voices playing out on her headphone receiver.

And, suspending disbelief about how podcasts which are being recorded for future airing can have live callers at random recording times, the film has a pretty claustrophobic atmosphere as Eva and Justin, over a space of a few recording sessions, work their way through listening to a series of ten anonymously emailed sound files concerning a young, ‘expecting’ couple during the night. Starting off with the husband recording these to initially capture his wife talking in her sleep.

That’s as far as I’ll go on the story content other than to make the comment that the initial set up obviously shares some DNA with the fantastic movie Monolith (reviewed here), which I saw play at FrightFest a couple of years ago. And, even more so in the case of Undertone, the action never once leaves the confines of Eva’s mother’s house. Eva leaves once but, yeah, the camera stays behind.

Now, I’m a sucker for these very small cast, single location pieces and, I have to say, this slow builds to being one of the most terrifying I’ve seen in recent years. Perhaps for the wrong reasons by the end of the movie but it’s all down to two things, asides from where the ideas thrown up by the recordings goes.

The first of these two is the wonderful performance by Nina Kiri. Apart from when she’s talking on her side of the podcast, it’s a solid silent performance which relies a lot on the reactive expressions Kiri brings to the table here, both to what she’s listening to but also to what’s going on in the house as she keeps an eye on her dying mother.

But the equal star of the show here is the aforementioned sound design. The films does have a deftly, light handed score on it but it’s the mix of sounds giving audio sensations of both what’s on the recordings and, again, simultaneously in the house... which makes or breaks this thing. And it’s well done here.

So well done in fact that, while I was perhaps disappointed by the obvious style of the conclusion the film has, my heart was still beating fast in my chest due to the absolute unremitting cacophony of the foley track.

So yeah, my final thoughts on Undertone is that it’s a very well performed and mostly well crafted slice of horror which, ultimately doesn’t allow for too many surprises by the end of the film but, makes up for it in sheer energy and artistic determination. Good for a scare and certainly one to partner up with the aforementioned Monolith as a nice ‘mates round for drinks’ double bill or even the third or fourth film in an all nighter (it certainly gets way too loud to sleep through).

China O' Brien 2

China Town Syndrome

China O' Brien 2
aka China O’ Brien II
Directed by Robert Clouse
USA 1990 
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, I have to confess that, after seeing the quite good previous movie in this series (reviewed by me here) and having watched a fair few of Cynthia Rothrock’s great Hong Kong movies in a short period of time before this, I was kinda disappointed in China O’ Brien 2. 

As we know from Cynthia’s interview on the other disc in Eureka’s two disc presentation of these films, this was filmed simultaneously with the previous film and the actors were often hard pressed to work out which film they were shooting at any given time. And in this one it kinda shows, it has to be said. 

The almighty Rothrock as China, now Sheriff of the town she arrived at in the first movie, is joined once again by her ‘deputies’, the charismatic Richard Norton as Matt Conroy and Keith Cooke as Dakota, plus a load of other actors from the earlier film. Now, I’m not sure if the guy writing the plot synopsis has actually seen the film... because it doesn’t bear too much resemblance to what actually happens in the movie... but this one’s about Vietnam vet smuggler Charlie Baskin (played by Harlow Marks) escaping from prison and putting the people who put him there six feet under. Culminating in repossessing the money from the one who turned states evidence against him and who was relocated by the FBI, along with his wife and daughter, to the sleepy town which China and crew are watching over. 

And it really feels as rushed as it evidently was, to be honest... more so than the first movie. For a start, there’s not enough fight scenes to keep the pacing going and there’s even a flashback to a fight scene in the first movie (almost like a bottle neck episode of a TV show). It just feels like a bit of a letdown compared to Rothrock and Norton’s back catalogue. Also, now knowing that the fights were rushed and choreographed on the hoof, explains why there’s one bit where a chair seems to connect with Norton’s face in a scene but there’s no sound of it hitting (though the actor certainly reacts) and then he straightens up and keeps swinging. I suspect it was supposed to miss him and still look like it missed him and, they just went on ahead and kept filming and didn’t bother with a retake or dubbing it to make the actual visual work. But I suspect Norton got hurt on that one. 

And talking about lack of sound, the lip synch in one scene of the FBI relocated daughter tied up in the car takes a full couple of seconds to catch up with her mouth, which starts moving way before. And then, seconds later, one of the bad guys shouts through a car window at her... except no sound comes out of his mouth whatsoever. What’s going on?

The continuity on this one is atrocious too. Lots of things wrong but I have two favourites. Firstly, Rothrock said on the interview it was mostly the same stunt fighters being redressed as different people constantly throughout the movie. Well I would have thought they would have drawn the line at one point because there’s a scene where she’s fighting one of the ‘thugs for hire’ and it’s clearly the same actor who played one of the lead villains in the first film. I mean, c’mon, the sheriff didn’t notice this guy? 

Secondly... and this is my favourite... one distinctive looking guy gets shot to death by one of the sherif’s men with absolutely no room to maneuver on that, we see the spray of machine gun fire popping up as blood all over his chest. And then, not a minute or two after this, here he is up in his original, non-bloody costume and helping out again... even becoming a major player in the final fight sequences of the movie. I mean, what were they thinking?

But, yeah, I do quite like Cynthia Rothrock and she has good chemistry with Norton. It’s a shame the proposed next two parts never came to fruition but it’s still, relatively speaking, an entertaining product. I’d liken it to what Republic Studios might have made if they were still active and making serials in the late 1980s (which was when the China O’Brien movies were shot... they had delayed, straight to VHS rental releases... and were doing good business at the time). So, yeah, I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to finally catch up with China O’ Brien 2 and I hope Eureka and 88 Films continue to release more of Rothrock’s back catalogue.  I’m up for it.

Absurd

Eastman Colour

Absurd
aka The Grim Reaper
aka Rosso Sangue 
Directed by Joe D’Amato
Italy 1981
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers drilling into your noggin.

So after Anthropophagus (reviewed here) was, presumably, relatively successful, albeit being a banned film in the UK for many years due to being on the famous ‘Video Nasties list’, they tried to bandwagon that earlier film, somewhat, the very next year with Rosso Sangue, best known in the UK, where it was also banned for the same reason for many years, as Absurd.

Okay, so despite people often calling this a sideways sequel or follow up to the earlier film, Anthropophagus shares no characters with that first one and, although George Eastman plays the Greek antagonist of the movie, he is not a Greek cannibal. Instead, he’s the accidental creation of a ‘science priest’ played by Edmund Purdom of all people. Purdom has a very fake sounding Greek accent and many other people in this have extraordinary fake sounding Irish accents too, which leads me to believe the film is set in the relatively isolated Irish countryside, even though I did spot a red fire hydrant on the road in one shot (is this a thing in Ireland... really?). 

So Mikos Stenopolis, the character Eastman plays, is a man who just walks around looming at people and killing them... in mostly not so interesting ways... for absolutely no reason. We see him trying to get over a spiky fence and get into a house but he’s injured, with the help of Purdom, who we at first think is the villain of the piece. So do the police because, while the unconscious Eastman, with his insides hanging out (presumably a little nod to the end scene in Anthropophagus) is taken to hospital, Purdom is eventually held as a suspect in whatever funny business is perceived. 

Meanwhile, we have the story of a family going out for the evening to a friend’s house to watch an American football game and leaving their completely ‘bed bound and in traction for a spine injury’ daughter, in her early teens, plus her even younger brother, with a baby sitter. The sitter has instructions not to go home until the other baby sitter, who works at the same hospital where Eastman’s character was admitted, arrives to give the daughter her physiotherapy and carry on babysitting. 

However, it transpires that Purdom’s scientific experimentation has, while admittedly given Eastman superhuman recovery properties, also turned him into the mindless killing machine he has become and he harbours the seeds of evil in his brain. The police think Purdom may be telling the truth after all, when Eastman completely recovers from having his guts hanging out earlier in the day and, after putting a drill through a nurses head, escapes into the countryside to do more killing, as he heads towards the house from earlier, where the babysitter and kiddies await. 

After this it’s all, bandsaw through the head, pick axe through the brain kinds of shenanigans until it’s just the physiotherapist, played by Annie Belle (who you may remember from Lips Of Blood, reviewed here, although it’s evident here that no director other than Jean Rollin could make her look as good as she did in that movie) and the two kids, trying to stay safe in the house with Eastman on the loose and lurking everyone to death. One impressive, simply done but surprisingly good looking effect (essentially from Belle’s performance) is when he forces her head into an oven and slow cooks it, the camera crosscutting with other things and each time it returns, a new level of burn make up is applied to the actress’ head. 

And it’s, like Anthropophagus, a film which involves a fair amount of sneaking about and acting quiet and cautious in big interior spaces... yeah, they’re definitely trying to mine the same vein here. And to be fair, it has a lot going for it. 

Firstly, it’s technically better than Anthropophagus, with some nicely designed camera shots and less reliance on the handheld camera technique... which only crops up when it’s appropriate that it does so. And the actors are all, arguably, pretty good in their roles... fake accents aside. Katya Berger, who plays the mostly bed bound little girl (until the end when she becomes a monster in order to defeat the monster and is landed with that riff) is especially good in this, I thought. Not only that but, the score by Carlo Maria Cordio (which was released by Cinevox before a more expanded version by Beat Records was released on CD) is actually much better than the former film and sounds just like an Italian horror film ought to (which is not that many steps away from what Goblin or Fabio Frizzi might have done with it) and so it works very well here. 

So, good acting, quite good direction and good cinematography, good music... Absurd is so much better made than Anthropophagus. Why, then, did I much prefer the earlier film, which wasn’t really proficient in any of these areas, way more than I did this one? All I can say is the simplicity of the plot of the former movie maybe had more charm to it than this one but, even though Absurd is the more accomplished movie by far, I’m much more likely to rewatch Anthropophagus some day than return to this one, in all honesty. And, other than saying it’s absolutely ridiculous for a policeman to lend a priest, who he thought only a minute before was a villain, a firearm and then tell him they’ll both independently hunt Eastman... well... that’s me about done with this movie, I think. It was an okay time but not a great or even good one and I can’t say I’d recommend this one to anybody, alas. 

In The Navy

Navy Lark Ascending

In The Navy
Directed by Arthur Lubin
USA 1941
Universal Pictures
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Abbott and Costello were so popular already that they released four movies in 1941 alone and this one, In The Navy, was the second of them. This one stars the famous singing star Dick Powell as the main romantic lead (three years before he tried to change his image by playing a pretty good version of Philip Marlow, if memory serves, in Murder My Sweet aka Farewell My Lovely), Claire Dodd as his romantic interest (who played Della Street in the Perry Mason flick The Case Of The Velvet Claws, reviewed here) and, also as a kind of semi-villainous authority figure role, Dick Foran (this film sandwiched between, among others, his two The Mummy sequels The Mummy’s Hand, reviewed here and The Mummy’s Tomb, reviewed here). 

While it’s a case of Bud and Lou being punctuated by the intrusive ‘reporter tries to break the story of the singing sensation who joins the Navy incognito to escape his adoring, female public before falling in love with him’ plot, along with various musical outbursts, most of which didn’t land for me this time, apart from the wonderful Andrews Sisters numbers in the movie, they don’t take a back seat as much... but, I have to say, I didn’t like this one as much as the previous two movies, for sure. Which just shows how much I know because, the general public liked it fine and the picture raked in even more box office bullion than their previous picture Buck Privates (reviewed here). This wasn’t a direct sequel to that movie, with the boys playing different characters but, there was one coming for sure. Actually, they already had the next picture in the can before this but, because the American public wanted more ‘service pictures’, the Navy movie was released first.

And, although I didn’t find it quite as entertaining, there’s still a lot of nice comedy moments in this and some points of interest too. The routines they do, a couple of them aided by Shemp Howard of The Three Stooges again, are mostly okay but they are still quite amusing and there’s one extended sequence involving spitting water at each other where the guys (and everyone else on set) keep cracking up and spilling the water, with all those takes left in. There are some nice dialogue moments too... for instance, when the lead actress stowing away introduces herself to Lou as Dot and when Lou sees someone coming for her, he yells “Dash, Dot! Dash!” Which made me smile. Also, when Lou asks Bud what some men are working on in a photo, Bud replies ‘That’s a hull of a ship!” Lou says, “You’re telling me. But what’s that thing they’re working on!” Or when Lou is reading about what Stern, Bow and Starboard is and Dot asks him where the Port is, he directs her that it’s near the ice box. 

So yeah, there’s some good dialogue and also some nice visual comedy, such as the moment Lou draws a big hook on a blackboard and then hangs his hat on it like it’s a real one. But there’s also some interesting metatextual stuff going on in the movie too, such as the opening credits where Bud and Lou are hoisting flags up with the names and titles on them and they flag up that it’s Buck Privates, before Bud points out that Lou got the wrong flag and they hoist it back up as In The Navy. And another scene where Lou says he’s going to go out and buy loads of Andrews Sisters records and starts singing one of the songs from the previous film... which is almost fine because the Andrews Sisters are kinda playing versions of themselves in this one but... yeah, it’s still kinda hammering lightly at that fourth wall, for sure. 

The most curious thing, for me, was a whole extended 15 or 20 minute sequence near the end of the movie where Lou accidentally gains control of the ship and sends it on some bizarre military manoeuvres (courtesy of some not too convincing miniatures, it has to be said)... which then suddenly turns out to be part of a dream after he knocks himself out with a sleeping draft. Well, I thought this was a pretty strange choice for the movie, being as it’s right near the end but, reading up on it, it was never originally supposed to be a dream sequence. What happened was, when the Navy saw the crazy movements the ship was making in this big sequence, they immediately withdrew their support for the film... so the studio changed it to being a dream sequence and then they were back ‘on board’ with the film, if you’ll excuse the pun (and why wouldn’t you?). 

And that’s me done on In The Navy, I think. Again, I didn’t like this one as much as the other two but it’s still quite entertaining for the most part and I’m still looking forward to seeing the other 20 plus movies in Shout Factory’s well restored Blu Ray box. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Henry And June

Where Hearts Were 
Entertained In June

Henry & June
Directed by Phillip Kaufman
USA/France 1990
Universal
Blu Ray Zone B

Wow, it says something when I have to import a big American movie on Blu Ray from Italy because there are no UK or US versions of the film made in that format. Hollywoodland needs to catch up with what people want, I think. 

A couple of years after one of his many masterpieces, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Phillip Kaufman co-wrote and directed another movie heavily tinged with the erotic experience, namely Henry & June. I remember going to the cinema to see this one at the time with my best friend. Sadly, neither the cinema or my friend still exist but this movie does bring back some memories of both for me. 

The film was somewhat star studded, for the time, with the titular writer Henry Miller being played by Fred Ward (Remo Williams aka The Destroyer himself, ladies and gentleman) and with his somewhat challenging wife June being played by the rising star Uma Thurman. Then, of course, there’s the central character of the film, who we see everything through the eyes of, the great female erotica writer Anaïs Nin, played by the always compelling Maria de Medeiros. And she is the real star of the show here, as the movie is based on her diaries, published posthumously after the last surviving person who appears in them, her husband Hugo, had died. Hugo here is played by a young Richard E. Grant and, yeah, his fake American accent in this movie does, it has to be said, take some getting used to. And Kevin Spacey looks so young in this one. 

The film takes place in Paris in the early 1930s, starting off with a flashback to 1931 as we find Anaïs coming across a stash of pornographic photos and illustrations she finds after her husband and she have rented an apartment there. The two seconds or less shot of one drawing depicting Japanese tentacle porn is apparently what ensured the film was the first ever to get an NC-17 release in America. Go figure!?!?!

And then, while concentrating on her writing, a struggling Henry Miller, working on his famous book Tropic Of Cancer, walks into her life and she gets sucked into the whirlpool of ‘the decadent artist life’ in Paris at the time... falling in love with both Henry and June while also continuing loving, sexual encounters with her husband. I won’t say much more about the story content because, it’s based on diaries and so in terms of a through line... well there is one but it’s more a series of episodic, impressions of the time. And perhaps better for it.

And when I say it’s impressionistic, I mean just that. As you would expect from a Kaufman film, the director makes best use of his cinematographer Philippe Rousselot to literally paint a picture of the times, often harking back to those famous photographic shots of Paris and its nightlife that you would remember, some of which are one display in the film. The muted colours in certain compositions setting off visual memories in the mind of the watcher (at least it did to me) which often mirror those scenes of the Parisian night life which oft times spark the imagination. Indeed, there’s one scene where it becomes more blatantly channelled, as Anaïs and Henry are hanging around Brassaï (played here by Artus de Penguern) as he takes various shots which, I’m pretty sure, are used in their original form at each flash of the camera. 

The film is deeply erotic but holds back in many scenes of graphic ostentation (apart from standard nudity and the beauty of the female form without too much close up detail) while actually managing to be erotic more in its enthusiasm for the voracious appetites of human sexuality with an emphasis on the positivity of the experience more than anything else. The film starts off almost subconsciously foreshadowing the maelstrom that Anaïs’ life is about to explode into by using the opening bars of The Adoration Of The Earth from Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring and, I guess if you are familiar with the piece (which I wouldn’t have been when I went to see this in 1990) then you might get an idea of the emotional turmoil that the main characters will soon be going through. A piece by Eric Satie is used later, which of course lends it own mood to the way the images are percieved. 

My favourite two scenes of the movie are as follows. One where Henry and Anaïs are in a cinema watching Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (which I guess is a bit of artistic licence because the film was already a couple of years old when this film is set) and Anaïs is vocally defending it against the rowdy audience criticising it for being obscene. 

And the other one is a scene in a brothel where Anaïs and Hugo hire two women to make love to each other so they can watch. It’s a nicely rendered sex scene featuring a cameo role from the great Brigitte Lahaie (again, another actress who I wouldn’t have been familiar with when I first saw this film) and it’s a stand out moment when, half way through, Anaïs tells Brigitte to stop pretending to be a man (in order to properly see how one woman makes love to another). 

So, yeah, Henry & June is a wonderfully performed, well designed movie featuring an exploration and juxtaposition of fleshy textures and warm (and sometimes muted) colours which make for a beautiful and, sometimes, hypnagogic piece of cinematic art. I think it’s a film which has been largely forgotten in the US (and UK) and I think it deserves to be remembered and celebrated with a bells and whistles Blu Ray and UHD release at some point soon. Another triumph for Kaufman and the, probably, liberating poetic sexuality of Anaïs Nin.

Sex Is Crazy

Cahiers Du Sex

Sex is crazy
Aka El sexo está loco
Directed by Jess Franco
Spain 1981
Severin Films USA Blu Ray 

So once again I find myself, as many of Severin Films’ target audience might proclaim… ‘in the land of Franco’. Jess Franco, to be a little more precise.

Now as some of my readers may remember, I do find Franco a bit hit and miss. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s not he’s… churning out something much less than great and, while the latter verdict could be said for this particular movie, Sex Is Crazy, it also lives up to the caveat that, whether a Franco film is good or bad, it’s still always at least interesting… and this is certainly that.

This particular Classificada S film, it has to be said, since it was made in 1981, seems to be a bit of a throwback to earlier days. Just not to the earlier days of this particular director. Perhaps a more polite way of saying this is that it’s perhaps an experimental homage… and more on that a little later down the page.

The film stars Franco’s wife and muse Lina Romay who, like pretty much every other actor and actress in the film, appears in a state of undress for the majority of the running time. We start off with her having been abducted by naked, badly silver grease painted aliens… a bunch of whom (the male ones) subject her to alien impregnation. That is, they put their extra terrestrial penises inside her, within three seconds her stomach pumps up and within nine seconds she’s delivered a new baby. So maybe ten babies in and the whole thing is revealed as an elabourate stage show.

However, we then get into the behind the scenes drama where a conspiratorial plot seems to be about to come to fruition, before that is itself revealed as a movie being made. Which, then, like Russian nesting dolls, is also revealed as a movie being made, possibly and yeah… social norms are broken, such as two men and two women all marrying each other as a foursome, some direct fourth wall breaking and various other metatextual ploys, so to speak.

This makes for some bad simulated sex scenes (although it has to be said Romay herself is quite watchable and seductive in these moments… such as when it’s just her, the camera and her water bottle) and, a lot of it (not all) is fairly dull and pedestrian.

There don’t seem to be any specially built or dressed sets in the film… all internal and external locations but, of course, in the scenes where he’s not getting distracted by his zoom lens, Franco shoots these very well and there are some nice shots of exterior architectural detail captured in his lens.

However, the whole film felt, to me, like an homage to the early films of the French Nouvelle Vague movement… especially those films directed by Godard. A scene where a taxi driver is following a car and a later car scene felt like something you might find in À Bout De Souffle and, in addition, there are a lot of those typical distancing devices set up. I talked about the constant reveal structure earlier but we also have stuff like the narrator shouting out the constant, naked appearances of the producer’s girlfriend and also the use of music, which may stop or start suddenly, or sometimes just change style, within the middle of a scene, deliberately calling attention to itself in yet another attempt to disrupt the viewer from immersion into the film. It’s like the director was watching stuff like Godard’s Le Mépris and began taking notes for later use.

Unfortunately, for 1981, this feels like a very late homage to a style of cinema which had already played out a decade before this one… making it seem like a home movie where the actors… although most of the many male members on show are not actually erect, even in the simulated sex scenes… are having a better time making this stuff than any future audience might have. It reminded me a little, in spirit, of Jim Jarmusch’s movie The Dead Don’t Die (reviewed here), which employed similar tactics and also seemed to be doing this stuff way too late for any of the so called punchlines to fall anything but flat.

And that’s me about done, I think, on Jess Franco’s Sex Is Crazy. Not anywhere up there on my list of favourite Francos but, if you are into stuff like Shining Sex (reviewed here) you might be able to get something out of this one. It’s not a disaster but… yeah, it’s equally not great.

The Punishment

 

True Britt

The Punishment
aka La punition
France/Italy 1973 
Directed by Pierre-Alain Jolivet
Lira Films
Mondo Macabro Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Some big spoilers.

Before going into The Punishment, a podcast had said that it’s very strong and brutal stuff in terms of its S&M content so, I was a little trepidatious at first. However, while the mental brutality of the film is at least paying a little lip service to the edginess which could be found in some of the scenarios, I’d have to conclude the film is pretty tame and not, in any way, a study of sexuality which has anything to say, or even understands, the mental state of those who embrace elements of the BDSM scene (as it is called today) in their own persona. And, of course, like most scenarios crafted around this strand of sexuality... even the most positive ones... it generally looks at the content with a bias of non-consensuality. 

So what we have in The Punishment is a film which is more about a manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome than anything else. 

The film stars Karin Schubert as Britt, a woman who comes from a small village and is taken under the wing by a ‘couple’ (Amidou as Raymond  and Claudie Lange as François) who work for a wealthy man who will pimp her out as a prostitute in his sex club. The film starts off with Britt and Raymond fleeing one of his wild parties after the owner has been murdered there. They go on the run and the story is told mostly in flashbacks, cross cutting between the experiences of Britt under control of this rich man and Britt and Raymond on the run from one of his killers (although, it turns out, neither of them committed the murder themselves).

So after Britt ‘behaves badly’ when a client rapes her at a party, she is imprisoned in a kind of hotel brothel in Lyon, where she is locked in a room which is pretty much a dungeon room, to be the submissive for a series of clients who want to indulge their sadistic tendencies with her. Next door to her is another woman who seems to be in a much worse condition (she can hear her screams coming through the wall)... and by the end, Raymond feels sorry for her and frees both girls... but not before she has almost developed a taste for her treatment at the hands of the customers.

And it’s not the most interesting or graphically told story, although the problematic and stunning Karen Schubert does spend most of the film either naked or in fetishistic and revealing costumes. I say problematic because, due to problems with her son who later died on her, she turned to making hardcore pornography in the 1980s to help raise funds for him and, after his death, her mid-90s second attempt at suicide succeeded. But, aside from her tragic arc in real life, she was at the heyday of her career here and she gives a really good, somewhat icy but no less impressive performance as Britt. 

And the film is helped by some wonderful shot compositions which involve lots of verticals in the various rooms and some nice placement of mirrors to focus on people in shots and bring two characters together in an interesting way, so they can both be in different places in a room but you can still see both sides of the conversations in some places. And there is... I almost don’t want to say it because it’s become such a cliché in my reviews but, it’s still the best comparison I can think of... a nice colour palette which is Bavaesque in its execution, where characters are bathed in red, for example... and then pitched against another colour like green in the next shot. 

There are some nice ideas too... such as a pinball machine in an art gallery/amusement arcade/bar having a sculpture of woman’s legs coming up and out of the machine where the flippers are, so a person playing the table gives a simulation of sex with a pair of legs seemingly wrapped around the player. 

It also has some interesting moments of violence which are hard hitting and not connected to the violence perpetrated on Britt in the hotel brothel. Such as a girl pushing a bottle into somebody’s face and, without ruining the ending, a close up of a persons head with a blood squib going off in close up as they are shot... both make for somewhat shock moments in their placement in the movie, not being juxtaposed with the tame version of the sexual violence on show elsewhere in the film. 

Ultimately, I kinda liked the movie in spite of myself and was bowled over by both Schubert and the wonderful mise-en-scène of the piece, which even has one of those opening credits sequences often found in spaghetti westerns and the occasional giallo, where quick scenes from the film are posterised into two colours and put up as a kind of psychedelic accompaniment to the cast and crew typography. 

If I had one big criticism of The Punishment, though, it’s that the trauma inflicted on Britt doesn’t seem enough to make her accepting of the treatment she suffers. One or three isolated incidents do not really represent the slow, psychological degradation we see in her performance... or at least, not credibly, I thought. Slowly and surely would have won that particular race a little more believably, I would have thought.

So yeah, that’s me done with The Punishment, I think. I didn’t like it as much as similar films using this kind of theme such as Femina Ridens (reviewed here) or Scacco Alla Regina (reviewed here) or even The Image (reviewed here) but it was at least nice to see an attempt made to craft a film which was trying to tackle the subject matter in a head on direction, even if I don’t feel it was trying to look at that content in a sympathetic light. Not one I’d recommend to too many people but, again, for cinephiles it’s nice to look at.

Lustmord (Pleasure Kill)

Blood Is The Drug

Lustmord
aka Pleasure Kill
aka Bôkô Honban
Directed by Hisayasu Satô
1987
Vinegar Syndrome
Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Spoilers

Well this is the first film I’ve seen by this director but, as I dwell on it the next day, I find the usually not that helpful IMDB is being even worse than usual. None of the character names are listed and none of the actors, barring one guy who is in just one scene, have a photo. So… yeah, no clue. Sorry.

Now then, Lustmord is what the 1980s pinku (or pinky) film had evolved into, although I suspect a lot of what makes this one totally different to any other ‘pinky violence’ I’ve (so far) seen is the personality and interests of the director, celebrated here with the first volume of a series of Vinegar Syndrome box sets, each showcasing three films.

Now, I’ve always been bemused by Japanese censorship. It seems that absolutely anything unspeakably obscene or shocking such as… I don’t know…  people vomiting on each other or making love inside the entrails of a dissected horse… is fair game… as long as no genitalia are shown. Literally anything goes but… no cocks or vaginas please, seems to be the one sacred commandment.

This film follows that modus operandi and the director puts in the required amount of nudity, simulated sex and simulated rape galore to keep the studio (and the audience for this genre) happy… but infuses it with his own ideas and also goes all out on the sexual mutilation and death.

In this one, a single mother scientist launches a drug trial with three young ladies as volunteers. Unfortunately for all four women in this movie, her teenage son is experimenting with a drug he’s devised to cause the human brain to evolve beyond any form of misery and depression… and he spikes the girls’ drugs with his own formula. Unbeknownst to him (and them), this turns then into lusty nymphomaniacs who want to cut up themselves and others, as they get constantly sexed up.

Now this is a pinku film so his mum has a big masturbation scene using her dead husband’s framed photo before she even takes the drug. Said drug eventually administered by her son who, after raping one of the girls, also rapes his mum in her medical lab and leaves her injected with the stuff. Where she starts doing more of the same ramped up, sexual shenanigans. This is after he’s also taken a dose of the drug for himself.

The film, uses a platform video game called Valis - The Phantom Video Soldier (presumably an homage to Philip K. Dick’s Vast Active Living Intelligence System) as a kind of backdrop to the film, including some of the bright, 8 bit style music to augment the imagery and make a comment on it.

I’m no judge because I’m old and jaded but, I suspect the film’s imagery might be quite strong to some youngsters in the audience if they are not expecting it. Writhing naked bodies covered in blood and a body count killing all but one of the main cast. For example, as the son and the main girl writhe around on the floor, the blood from their various cuts spattered over their naked bodies, the guy mounts her and she slices his throat open, as we watch his arterial spray cover her face and naked body.

And, I have to admit it, I quite enjoyed the movie, mainly because the way it is shot has a kind of visually poetic beauty about it. I mean, the content is like a young Peter Greenaway melded with a young David Cronenberg while the whole thing is shot with the kind of artistry I would normally associate with an Italian giallo.

Two shots especially stood out for me… one including gore and sex and the other not. The earlier of the two shots, shows the main girl in her flat, standing next to her open fridge, the room split into vertical lines to push the composition. The fridge fills the whole right hand side of the screen and a whole load of beautiful, large, red apples fill every level of the fridge. And on the left of the screen is the girl, standing and looking towards camera, eating one of the apples. It’s a fantastic shot.

The other amazing moment is when the mother, in her naked sexual frenzy, is writhing around in her lab. She has tubing wrapped all around her which, as she masturbates, she hooks up to some blood (possibly hers) and we watch as the blood flows up the tubes and all around her body. It’s a beautiful shot, I promise.

But that’s me about done with Lustmord. The last shot of the film, after a twist reveal about two earlier sexual suicides (which if you’re anything like me, you will see coming a mile off) has one of the characters looking though binoculars before spotting the audience (so kind of breaking the fourth wall) and pulling out a knife… so engaging the viewer as the POV. It’s a nice enough ending to what is a very interesting film and so, yeah, something you should maybe take a look at if you are into this particular genre and I’m certainly looking forward to watching the other two movies in this set.

Café Flesh

 

Sexentuate The Positive

Café Flesh
Directed by 
Stephen Sayadian & Mark S. Esposito
USA 1982 
Caribbean Films Distribution/88 Films
Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Well this is a fairly strange movie. 

I first heard of Café Flesh when I met my friend Teresa in the late 1980s. She always used to mention wanting to see it as it semi-regularly played at venues such as the Scala Cinema and the Everyman at Hampstead (back in the days when the Everyman at Hampstead actually programmed good films and was worth going to). It’s something neither of us got around to.

Now, however, it’s out on a shiny new restoration from Mondo Macabro and, I have to say, it was not quite the film I was expecting it to be. 

The premise is that it takes place in a cabaret/cafe after the world has suffered a Third World War. This bizarre apocalypse has had the effect of leaving 90/95% of the population unable to indulge in any sexual activity whatsoever, because as soon as they try they become violently ill. These people, the majority of the surviving population, are known as negatives (or sex negatives). There is a small percentage of the population though, the positives, who have survived with their libidos in tact and are able to indulge in all manner of sexual activity. And, by law, they are legally required to perform in venues such as Café Flesh, to give the negatives something to gawp at... even though the effect on many of the audience members is actually pretty depressing. 

So the film is a series of these cabaret vignettes, involving hard core pornographic scenes, punctuated by scenes of the positives discussing their fate and, also, the heavy and irritating banter of the MC, who is a positive but who has lost his manly equipment in the Third World War. 

And it’s not what I was expecting, for sure. I mean, it has hardcore sex scenes including penetration and erect genitalia splashing the actors seed on various actresses but... I dunno. If anything, this is actually an anti-porn movie. The hard sex scenes, cut into five or six set pieces in the picture, probably total less than 15-20 minutes of the running time. And those scenes are pretty jumpy in and of themselves... cut in a shrewd way, much like the opening fight scene in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here). So it’s more highlights of sex than the full but, often dull, lick, pump and grind you’d expect from a porn movie. 

Not only that, but these sex scenes in particular are dressed up in thematic, burlesque style choreographies and sets which can, at best, be described as highly surreal (often invoking memories for the negatives of their past lives before the apocalypse). So, the first ‘domestic’ number has three adult babies shaking their rattles in their high chairs in time to the music while a ‘housewife’ is sexed up by a man dressed as a giant rat (much is made of his throbbing tale, naturally). Other sequences include an office bound sex scene where a man dressed as a giant pencil penetrates a lady office worker, while her secretary looks on and repeatedly asks “Do you want me to type a memo?” in rhythm to the music...

Which sounds surreal and it sure is, until you compare to the sequence where two men with telephones on thier faces go to work on a lady and a lesbian scene set to a backdrop of barbed wire and the sounds of gunfire and air raid sirens. But perhaps this is to be expected in a movie where the ultimate pinnacle of male handsome is referenced as Jack Lord (I bet he would have been pleased with that) and where a couple of characters are referred to as the ‘Dagwood and Blondie’ of the scenario.

Now, the film looks pretty good with a stylistic flair which suits the premise and, pretty much all of the actors from the world of porn... Paul McGibboney, Michelle Bauer, Marie Sharp, Tantala Ray and so on, are really great (I’m not talking about the sex content here... like most porn actors of the time, they are first and foremost actors). However, the synthesiser music by Mitchell Froomis... uh. It’s both irritating and bizarrely appropriate to the story and, even though I hated it while I was watching it, it’s also kind of haunting and I wish I could get this thing on a proper CD (instead of vinyl or digital download... so not going anywhere near it in those formats, thanks). 

And that’s me pretty much done on the very interesting Café Flesh. A film that is well thought out in concept and certainly makes the viewer think about the milieu and also what this story may well be a metaphor of (and I’m sure people have their own interpretations). My one criticism would be some of the sound design... I’m sorry but that actress wouldn’t possibly be able to make those kind of sounds with the other actor’s male member lodged firmly in her throat like that... it would surely be more muffled. Other than that though... a very interesting watch and I can see how high concept pornography like this must have been an influence on directors such as Michael Ninn, ten or so years later.