Reading Material

Sinemania!: A Satirical Exposé of the Lives of the Most Outlandish Movie Directors: Welles, Hitchcock, Tarantino, and More!

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sinemaniaA few images from Canadian cartoonist Sophie Cossette’s delightfully naughty Sinemania!: A Satirical Exposé of the Lives of the Most Outlandish Movie Directors threaten to stick with me for a while:
• Quentin Tarantino’s monstrous Franken-forehead;
• Bela Lugosi tweaking, jutted tongue and all;
• Erich von Stroheim as a spider, writing “I’m fucked,”
• and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s furry testicles.

Yes, furry.

See, in her comic-book collection of biographical sketches of Hollywood directors, she takes on everyone and spares no one. Unless you’re one of her subjects, that’s a good thing.

sinemania1A talented satirist but a more talented illustrator, Cossette spends a few pages to send up each target, including such auteurs as Roman Polanski, Sam Peckinpah, Woody Allen, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Werner Herzog. Fritz Lang’s sexual peccadilloes result in him being portrayed as a vampire (“And I can only reach orgasm with the taste of blood in my mouth!”), while the career of Tim Burton is encapsulated into a board game (“You feel the alienation of suburbia so go hang yourself!”).

Only in her imaginary tête-à-tit with Russ Meyer does Cossette go too far, calling the dead man an “Alzheimer’s retard.” It’s a low blow made lower because most of her lines read far wittier. I laughed a great deal through Sinemania! and, when I didn’t, thoroughly enjoyed the experience with a smile. The lone exception is “Love at First Bark,” an extended piece that pits Marlene Dietrich against Madonna, to no earned payoff.

But the rest? I’m crying out for sequels, plural. In structure, ECW Press’ trade paperback reminded me of DC Comics’ late, lamented The Big Book of series the company released through its Paradox Press imprint, but in execution, it should be viewed as a hard-R issue of Mad magazine or a cartoon version of Kenneth Anger’s underground classic Hollywood Babylon. Either way, the cynical film buff in you wins. —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

Primitive Love (1964)

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primitiveloveWTFThanks to director Luigi Scattini (Witchcraft ’70), it’s mondo movie time, sex kitten-style, as Jayne Mansfield (The Girl Can’t Help It) shimmies into Italy and serves up a projector’s worth of animal sacrifices and nude natives in her Capri Hilton hotel room. Fresh from conducting a study on man’s base emotion of lust around the world, “Dr. Jayne” has loads of documentary footage she can’t wait to unspool for her anthropology-professor audience of one (Carlo Kechler, The Ghost).

Among the footage captured by Jayne during her travels to the likes of China, Indonesia and the Philippines:
• a pig being slaughtered, screaming included;
• cockfighting roosters, complete with leg knives;
• an African beauty performing a topless hoochie-choochie dance, which “tends to excite the poor drummer, who is obliged to go on pounding his bongos”;
• a cheating wife being pelted with eggs; and
• another woman tested for adultery by a “supernatural python.” No worries, ladies — it only sinks its fangs into the whorish ones.

primitivelove1As Jayne and the professor review the footage, two superhorny bellhops (Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, the very poor man’s Martin & Lewis) peek through the vent and keyhole and go through their crazy pratfall antics. Because she obliviously encourages it by appearing before them in various states of undress, from a baby-blue bath towel to tight black undies, they fantasize about Jayne as a belly dancer and a Hawaiian hula girl (while one of the guys dons — shudder — a leopard-print Speedo). Back in real life, to prove her point that men are essentially animals, she strips for the guys while the prof secretly watches from the closet. The more annoying of the two hotel ‘hops runs around like a orangutan by the time Ms. Mansfield has unhooked her bra, but like I can really talk. I do, however, claim to be more refined than the professor, since he transforms into a snarling werewolf.

With Primitive Love, the harmless sex comedy finally had merged with the noxious mondo genre. By the time of the picture, Mansfield’s career downshifted into his final, tragic phase, but the girl still looked fabulously hot, cellulite and all. More of the sex bomb would help quicken the pace of this goofy mash-up of a movie, not to mention my heart. One pretty much has to love her in order to even tolerate this. —Rod Lott

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Sex

Brutalization (1973)

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brutalizationAlso known under the baffling title of Because of the Cats, Brutalization is an obscure sickie in which five young men pull Hanes Control Top panythose over their heads and rape a woman while making her husband watch — you know, just for kicks! They may have gotten their rocks off, but the viewer should not expect the same.

No worries, folks: Inspector van der Valk (Bryan Marshall, BMX Bandits) is on the case! The police inspector embarks on an investigation, yet punishing the “well-bred” boys ain’t easy because they come from fine family stock. Ranging in age from their late teens to early 20s, they’re tennis-playing sons of rich men who actually work … and who make a fuss when an authority figure dares suggest their offspring are anything but sterling gods of the community.

brutalization1While fronted in promotional materials, Sylvia Kristel, Emmanuelle herself, is hardly the star, just as Brutalization is hardly a rape-revenge thriller, either. Fons Rademakers, an Oscar winner for his penultimate film, 1986’s The Assault, has a little more on his mind than S-E-X as he explores the social pecking order of the Netherlands (or anywhere, for that matter), but the movie is a procedural, and a deadly dull one.

It’s also a tough watch just for presentation of the subject matter alone, so give Fons some respect for not comprising or dumbing down the material. Truth in titling — or retitling, as the case may be — is strong with this one. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Bad Milo! (2013)

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badmiloGranted, there aren’t that many movies in existence concerned with a monster born from a man’s anal tract, yet it’s finally nice to see one without Jeremy Piven. Rimshot! But seriously, folks …

Independently funded because of course it is, the dark comedy Bad Milo! casts Ken Marino (TV’s Childrens Hospital) as Duncan, a tightly wound company man with some serious intestinal issues. While the official medical diagnosis is polyps — “a trooper in your pooper,” says the doc — the real issue is that his intestines play home to a squatty creature with big, cute eyes that belie a carnivorous killer instinct.

badmilo1Whenever Duncan gets stressed-out, which is often, out of his butt plops the beast, nicknamed Milo. While Duncan remains unconscious from the sheer exhaustion and pain of passing a toddler-sized critter, Milo turns one of Duncan’s co-workers into a bloody, poopy pulp. Authorities blame a rabid raccoon, which our protagonist is keen to go along with, because hey, who’s going to believe a story about an anus demon?

Director/co-writer Jacob Vaughan hopes we will, and Marino and company do their straight-faced damnedest to sell it. Because they take the silly story seriously, the admittedly erratic Bad Milo! works a sliver more often than not. Playing against type as Duncan’s dowdy wife, Gillian Jacobs (TV’s Community) is right in step with Marino (who deserves some kind of awards commendation for total commitment to his initial shitting-Milo scene), but the show is stolen by comedian Kumail Nanjiani (Hell Baby) in his small role as the too-young lover of Duncan’s oversexed mother (Mary Kay Place, The Big Chill).

Toilet humor isn’t for everyone, yet oddly, Bad Milo! seems cleaner than its raunchy, R-rated brothers, likely because the jokes are delivered as black as bile. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Company of Wolves (1984)

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companywolvesOnly Neil Jordan’s second feature, 1984’s The Company of Wolves can be viewed as Gothic testing ground for his eventual epic blockbuster in Interview with the Vampire one decade later. For all its here-and-there hiccups, however, I find Wolves to be the far superior film.

Visually sumptuous and rich in detail, Wolves is a remarkable adaptation of Angela Carter’s dark fiction, written with Jordan by Carter herself. Almost all of it takes place within the feverish, fairy-tale dreamworld of young, blossoming Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson, 1987’s Snow White). In a sequence that’s one of the screen’s best-ever representation of nightmares, her older sister dies; to let her parents properly mourn, Rosaleen goes to stay with her grandmother (Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate), who shares some seriously macabre bedtime stories. Like Alice plummeting down Wonderland’s rabbit hole, the picture keeps drilling into deeper levels as Granny’s tales are depicted.

companywolves1In one story, a newlywed man (Stephen Rea, The Crying Game) skips consummation in order to answer the call of nature, only to reappear years later. In another, a spiteful witch (Dawn Archibald, Caravaggio) turns a wedding reception turned into a circus of Canis lupus proportions. Eventually, Rosaleen and Granny take part in a twisted update of Little Red Riding Hood.

Horror fantasy at its classiest, The Company of Wolves uses its once-upon-a-time canvas to explore budding sexuality, just as the Brothers Grimm did in their original, unexpurgated tales. The film’s purposeful artificiality, created by production designer Anton Furst (an Oscar winner for 1989’s Batman) is seductive in its own right, drawing the viewer into a surreal existence of the filmmakers’ imagining. The werewolf transformations are superb in their grotesque nature, and when Rosaleen’s real and unreal worlds collide at the end, the effect is chilling. The material works so well, it’s a shame more of Carter’s works weren’t brought to life, especially by Jordan. —Rod Lott

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