What do you get when you cross schizophrenic singer Wesley Willis with an attack Schnauzer with an overflowing toilet with a white-trash pool party with a Jim Varney mask with dinner-roll shenanigans with a portly Boy Scout with a deep hole with a female ventriloquist with egg tricks with a remote-control biplane with a Pride parade with a baby-shower smoke break with a confident squirrel with a Pee-wee Herman doll with gratuitous carrot-eating with golfers in drag with a disembodied deer’s head with a testicle festival with low-calorie horseradish with 50-year-old tits with Howard Frum with a baby who totally sucks at swimming?
You get America’s Runniest Home Videos, a 20-minute mixtape of rapid-fire camcorder found footage from VHS tapes several dozen families will soon regret accidentally donating to Goodwill — all from the fine folks at the finer Strange Tapes zine. —Rod Lott
Many critics have slammed the “fictional” David Bowie biopic Stardust for different reasons, ranging from the lack of any true Bowie music to the fact that lead Johnny Flynn’s accent goes strangely in and out. I understand all that, but working within the confines of the chameleon world of Bowie, it does quite an admirable job of shuffling in and out of reality, the way we believe the fictional alien would have.
It’s a year or so before Bowie will release The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. He’s still in his enchanted folkie period, coming to America for the first time to promote the failing record The Man Who Sold the World, shocking homophobic people with his gender-bending ways while personally dealing with the institutionalization of his brother.
He meets Mercury publicist Rob Oberman (an outstanding Marc Maron), who is eager to work with him, but Bowie is such a bona drag — especially to music reporters — even Oberman grows weary of him. I wonder if, because the film depicts Bowie in a usually unsavory way, that’s one of the reasons that it was so disliked; I am a huge follower of Bowie, but even I recognize that he was something of a jerk much of the time, especially to the media.
Following the duo on a cross-country tour of America — one where he can’t even perform — Bowie manages to piss off everyone, from a local newspaper writer to a supposed bigwig at Rolling Stone. Perfectly capturing the enigmatic brilliance of the games Bowie put these people through, as the film goes on, you feel this is quite fitting for what the man’s public persona was — or at least who we perceived him to be.
What I’ve mostly read though was the sheer displeasure at the absence Bowie songs, instead relying on things like Anthony Newley tunes. Being unauthorized by the family — probably because they want to make their own movie, of course — the film works, while being somewhat off-putting, because besides the actual fans of his music, how many people truly know about Bowie before Ziggy, the defining music and the supposed alien? —Louis Fowler
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a transcendental madman. He’s everything a master of eclecticism who is consistently creating in this world should be, but, as the dollar reigns supreme over us all, sadly can’t be, no matter how hard he tries. That should be obvious given his scant track record of film, placated through other forms of art.
But the mercilessly beautiful tale of Santa Sangre took him from the realm of suspected hippie storyteller to proven grandfather of spiritual interpretation, as the film takes us not only on a journey throughout the life of Fenix, but the life of all of Jodorowsky’s obsessions and damnations, from holy cults and bosomy circus folk to maternal obsessions and the Invisible Man.
Jodorowsky’s sons Adan and Axel are Fenix, young and old, respectively. As a child in the circus, he sees far too much death and sex, and soon, they become intertwined, from his mother obsessively believing in a folkloric saint to his father’s demonic womanizing, all done under an American flag. After another night of bloated cheating, Mom throws acid all over Dad’s penis and, in turn, he slices her arms off.
Having been in an asylum where he is surrounded by mentally handicapped children for most of his life, Fenix sees his mother standing outside his window and escapes — and, in turn, becomes her arms. While I’m sure that’s healthy, it gets worse as Mom can’t stand Fenix thinking about any other women and kills them all, often in the most gorgeously giallo of ways.
A hauntingly challenging film consistently filled with beautiful darkness and feral wonder, I consider this to be Jodorowsky’s apex as a director, taking himself, Fenix and especially the viewer to the ultimate outreaches of religious ecstasy and unholy forgiveness, a combination few directors — if any — could truly present on screen. —Louis Fowler
When people talk trailers, someone inevitably scoffs, “They show all the good parts.” As if that’s a bad thing? It certainly isn’t in the world that exists underneath mainstream motion pictures. From blaxploitation to sexploitation with a whole heap o’ horror in between, Film Trauma’s Only the Good Parts dishes out a feature’s worth of proof — 39 trailers in all, roughly organized in themes that include badass broads, possession pics, killer kids, Italian ick and sacrilegious sinners.
Like the pair of Colour Correct My Cock compilations, the general selection is noteworthy for overall naughtiness and alternative versions. For example, prepare those loins for the one-two pubic punch of the French trailer for Jess Franco’s Barbed Wire Dolls and the German trailer for Franco’s Love Camp. Those are followed by the Franco-adjacent rump romp Rolls Royce Baby, in which muse Lina Romay is so naked so often, you’ll have (to quote ourselves) “an image of her vagina so thorough and vivid, you could accurately draw it from memory.” Look for Franco’s less dirty-minded but no less nude Demoniac later in the program.
For other name-brand directors, we get Ted V. Mikels’ 10 Violent Women and Al Adamson’s Nurse Sherri, heavy on comparing itself to The Exorcist. A rung — if not an entire ladder — higher on the credibility ladder stands David Cronenberg’s The Brood and Larry Cohen’s creatively effective campaign for It’s Alive and It Lives Again, matched in advertising genius only by whoever wrote the tagline for the X-rated slasher Evil Come, Evil Go: “She’s a Man-Hating, Hymn-Humming Hell Cat!”
Finally, when it comes to the grail of coming attractions — I speak, of course, of obscurities — Only the Good Parts giveth and giveth. I wouldn’t swear on this in the court of law, but I don’t recall even hearing of the likes of The Johnsons, Alley Cat and Beware My Brethren. That goes quadruple for Parts’ greatest piece, She Did It His Way, a 1968 vehicle for seriously stacked stripper Kellie Everts filmed at the Miss Nude Universe Pageant. I’m still not sure what the movie’s about, but it looks life-changing.
All this plus Roger Moore as The Man Who Haunted Himself, the pencil-eraser nipples of Werewolf Woman, a whip-crackin’ Coffin Joe and so much more. And remember, “You’ve not seen all of Marilyn Chambers until you’ve seen Angel of Heat.” —Rod Lott
From Japan’s venerated Daiei studio, Yasuzô Masumura’s Irezumi wastes no time in setup, as young lovers Shinsuke and Otsuya run away from their village to elope against parental wishes. Shinsuke (Akio Hasegawa, Navy Yokosuka Prison) is a lowly apprentice to a pawnbroker; Otsuya (Ayako Wakao, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo ) is that pawnbroker’s daughter, arranged to marry another man. To hide for the night, they stay at an inn run by Shinsuke’s friend Gonji (Fujio Suga, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons).
Happily ever after? Hardly. Gonji hires an assassin to kill Shinsuke and sells Otsuya to the wonderful world of prostitution. Her pimp (Asao Uchida, Samurai Reincarnation) orders a tattooist (Gaku Yamamoto, Zatoichi and the Chess Expert) to chloroform Otsuya and ink her back. He does just that, pouring his literal soul into an elaborate, shoulder-to-shoulder tat of an orb-weaving spider bearing a woman’s fanged head — the Peeing Calvin of the samurai era, I’m sure. When she awakes, he tells her the spider will gorge on the corpses of her lusty clients.
Boy, won’t the memoirs of this geisha be something else!
Although definitely categorizable as a “weird tale,” Irezumi never becomes what you expect it be, so don’t come looking for horror. Even with the obvious influence of Edgar Allan Poe — and, in turn, Edogawa Rampo, whose Blind Beast Masumura would adapt within three years — the stab-happy film stops shy of entering Kwaidan territory, instead taking the guise of melodrama and dipping itself into a vat of the perverse. Fantastical elements are lined up, but never called onto the field; the spider supposedly moves and grows with each kill, but Masumura ladles not even half a teaspoon of the supernatural. At least Hikaru Hayashi’s eerie musical score finally finds a visual match in the chilling penultimate shot.
Regardless of expectations, the vibrantly colored Irezumi is well worth the watch, as picturesque as Wakao is luminous. Her progressive performance provides the magic at which the script continually winks. —Rod Lott
What do you get when you cross schizophrenic singer Wesley Willis with an attack Schnauzer with an overflowing toilet with a white-trash pool party with a Jim Varney mask with dinner-roll shenanigans with a portly Boy Scout with a deep hole with a female ventriloquist with egg tricks with a remote-control biplane with a Pride parade with a baby-shower smoke break with a confident squirrel with a Pee-wee Herman doll with gratuitous carrot-eating with golfers in drag with a disembodied deer’s head with a testicle festival with low-calorie horseradish with 50-year-old tits with Howard Frum with a baby who totally sucks at swimming? 
