MOVIE REVIEW: FOES (1977)

Written, Directed, and Special Effects Designed by John Coats

. . .

“I’m going to the other side of the island.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

UFOs. Flying saucers. People see ‘em. People wonder what they are, and why they’re so mysterious, always flitting about, teasing us, never quite letting us see the goods. All the photographs and video footage are indistinct, blurry anticlimaxes-if not total damn hoaxes. Some people write books about ‘em trying to explain what they are, how they came to be-and they end up making some wildass claims about the saucers and their presumed occupants. Abductions. Anal probes. Harvesting human sperm and eggs to mix ‘em with extraterrestrial sperm and eggs to cook up some alien-human hybrid omelets. Perverse conspiracies involving government/x-tro collaboration. This is stuff people claim is true! Not a shred of actual evidence, and yet people concoct entire cosmologies around a whole array of interstellar creatures. You have people writing extravagantly paranoid science fiction sagas but they’re published as non-fiction. Some marketing genius must’ve realized right quick that these alien abduction stories moved more units if you sold them as “shocking true stories.” What a fuckin’ racket, right?

As a kid, I used to believe all this stuff was true. Like, y’know, when I was K thru Fifth Grade, elementary school. I spent hours and hours watching TV shows that presented themselves as nonfiction narrative recreations of horrifying alien invasion scenarios of the most gruesomely intimate kind: people kidnapped out of their beds by strange entities that could walk through walls; alien mind control powers that could corrupt your perceptions by implanting screen memories; women forcibly impregnated with alien fetuses and nonconsensual medical exams that could be described as a system of organized high-tech rape-and when I asked my parents about this stuff they just kind of shrugged it off, didn’t seem to have much to say about it one way or another. I started to think that my parents were in denial because they couldn’t acknowledge their powerlessness before these alien masterminds. Of course, I grew out of all this by the time I hit middle school. Around that time I got into serial killers, gangsters, and world-ending diseases, so all that UFO stuff seemed less urgent. The X-Files came along and kinda gave the game away with its overstuffed mega-conspiracy style of plots which made all the paranormal/crackpot stuff seem like plug’n’play narrative gimmicks similar to assembling a tabletop role playing adventure from a Monster Manual. Mulder and Scully would encounter one reality shattering horror after another-and Scully still wouldn’t get it. The true conspiracy seemed to be a plot by Chris Carter to make Mulder look right all the time at Scully’s expense. By the time I got to the end of high school I was pretty much an atheist. 

Which brings me to the 1977 movie Foes, a film that benefits greatly from not trying to over-explain itself. Foes is about a flying saucer that harasses a quartet of people on a small island that’s home to a lighthouse. We get some exposition laden scenes of clueless military officials whose equipment is all being malfunctioned by an energy field projected by the flying saucer. The occupants of the saucer zap the humans with strange energy beams that pick them up off the ground and/or cause them to catch fire. You ever burn ants with the sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass? Well, now we’re the ants. Eventually, we see creepy lights come out of the saucer that may or may not be living beings. Much of the running time is taken up by nondescript humans overcome with a nameless sense of dread to be in the presence of the opaque and ominous saucer. Nothing is explained. We’re never told who or what the saucer and its accompanying lights are supposed to be, nor are we reassured that the government has any secret answers. You watch what happens, and then you have to make up your own mind.

Foes didn’t scare me here in this year of 2026, but I found it utterly fascinating to watch. It doesn’t back down from being creepy and mysterious. Sure, the special effects are obviously special effects, but they’re also precise and evocative. Foes is absolutely committed to preserving the mysterious and the inexplicable without any trace of romance or sentiment. Something from beyond takes an interest in us, and we may have to accept the fact that it will always be incomprehensible to us. 

Of course . . . we may also be beyond the understanding of the saucer beings . . .

You ever got the ants' side of the story before you burned ‘em on a whim?

Probably not . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: CHARISMA (1999)

Written and Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cinematography by Junichiro Hayashi

Edited by Junichi Kikuchi

Music by Gary Ashiya

Starring

Koji Yakusho as Yabuike

Hiroyuki Ikeuchi as Kiriyama

Jun Fubuki as Jinbo

Yoriko Douguchi as Chizuru

Ren Osugi as Nakasone

Akira Otaka as Tsuboi

Yutaka Matsushige as Nekojima

. . .

“things are gonna slide . . . in all directions

won’t be nothing . . . you can measure anymore”

-Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

“The past is a vast open sea on which you have drifted

A spell they call history that now has been lifted”

-Lucy Monostone, “Strange New World”

“Call the twenty-first century

Tell it

Give us a break”

-St. Vincent, “Every Tear Disappears”

“Restore the Rules of the World.”

-ultimatum issued by an armed hostage taker in the movie Charisma (1999)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Charisma is a mystery thriller revolving around a disgraced cop who finds himself in a dark forest where various people are fighting over a strange tree. This is from writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa whose eerie horror thrillers Cure and Pulse have been well-established as cult classics by this point. Charisma falls between these other two movies both chronologically and in terms of its genre fidelity. I wouldn’t call Charisma a horror film, exactly, although it does have some unsettling scenes. Like Cure it stars Koji Yakusho as a police detective in a long coat who wrestles with difficult moral dilemmas. Like Pulse it portrays a world spinning out into chaos. Unlike Cure, the Koji Yakusho character is much less attached to his view of the world. Unlike Pulse there’s no discernible supernatural influence upon events as they unfold. In Cure a sinister man with hypnotic powers corrupts previously normal people triggering a chain reaction of brutal murders. Pulse depicts a world in which the Internet becomes a reality shattering incubator for unhappy ghosts. Charisma portrays a world in which humans approach the world rationally, profits or glory or ideals in mind, and cannot help but destroy everything including themselves, no malicious Mesmerists or World Wide Web spirits necessary. You could say that the people in Charisma hypnotize themselves by projecting their phantom visions onto an otherwise indifferent Nature which acts as a mirror or screen for various human desires.

Charisma begins with a man suffering beneath the weight of his job: an overworked police detective who seems to be living in the basement of a police station. His name’s Yabuike, and we first meet him as he sleeps on a bench in a dim, dungeon-like room. Yabuike’s superior wakes him up to give him a hair-raising assignment.

A gunman has taken an elected official hostage. Yabuike is sent to resolve the crisis. The hostage taker has a simple demand written on a sheet of paper: Restore the Rules of the World. Yabuike walks into the office where the gunman has holed up with his hostage, draws his gun . . . but then he re-holsters it, and walks out of the room. The gunman executes the politician. A half dozen cops blast the gunman. The situation is a disaster. When asked by his superior why he didn’t shoot when he had the chance Yabuike says he thought he should try to save both the criminal and the victim. Yabuike is placed on mandatory leave, essentially scapegoated for the catastrophe.

One might question why, exactly, such a fraught situation was placed upon one man’s shoulders, but maybe it is because Yabuike is a Movie Cop Protagonist who is expected to resolve situations with quick thinking and quick shooting. Like, say, Dirty Harry. But Yabuike doesn’t work like Dirty Harry. Yabuike isn’t a right wing jerk-off fantasy, an exterminator of human vermin. He perceived the gunman and his hostage as the tragic outcomes of a larger systemic failure. Perhaps one could say Yabuike was right to refuse to live up to the expectations of being a Violent Movie Cop Protagonist. And yet his actions got both the perpetrator and victim killed. From this low point of failure, Yabuike decides to leave the city for a vast forest, perhaps never to return, as there are dark implications of suicidal depression driving the disgraced cop. Or maybe this is just how Yabuike likes to spend his vacation time. To his credit, he calls home to check in with his family, which is nice, but this phone call is the first and last communication he has with them in the entire movie. Perhaps Yabuike is in the process of a divorce? Is that why he was sleeping at the police station? Is crime so out of control that a Movie Cop doesn’t have time to go off the clock let alone sleep? We’re never given an answer. We the Audience are left to deduce Yabuike’s detachment from his wife and child-children?-by judging his words and deeds as they happen on screen. Yabuike seems to walk away from his job, his family, and from whatever kind of life he had in the city without too much inner static, as though he had made up his mind some time ago. Yabuike is a man of both ideals-in the civic arena-and surprisingly hard-hearted pragmatism-in the domestic arena. You could look at what happens in Charisma as a playing out of this profound inner conflict between a duty to the larger world and a self-serving personal desire.

Out in the forest, Yabuike finds an abandoned car in which he tries to spend the night. Someone lights the car on fire. Yabuike suffers burn injuries, but survives. Somehow he manages to crawl free of the torched vehicle, and makes his way to a clearing in which stands a withered tree supported by an improvised framework of metal pipes and joints. Later, Yabuike meets someone who claims to have rescued him from the burning car. Even later we are led to suspect that Yabuike’s rescuer may have also started the fire. The whole sequence plays like a shadowy, unsettling dream-and maybe that’s how Yabuike experienced this ordeal. 

Yabuike’s brush with fiery death leads him to convalesce in a set of abandoned buildings where what appears to be a forestry survey team has set up base camp. This team is led by a man named Nakasone who consults with another man named Tsuboi who claims to work for an environmental protection agency. Nakasone asks Yabuike a few questions, but makes it clear that everyone out here in the woods isn’t too concerned with prying into each other’s pasts. Nakasone even refers to the area as being a town, although the buildings are all decrepit, and the survey team seems to be its only population. Yabuike is provided some food, and Tsuboi allows the recently burned policeman to accompany him on a trip into another part of the forest. On this trip Yabuike again encounters the withered tree supported by the kludged together gantry-like structure. Tsuboi informs Yabuike that they shouldn’t go near the tree because it is defended by a strange man who attacks anyone who approaches. Yabuike goes up to the tree. Tsuboi voices concern even while he takes lots of pictures of the tree up close. Tsuboi appears to be emboldened by Yabuike’s presence even as he is obviously nervous about being attacked by the tree’s defender. Even though Yabuike hasn’t outed himself as a cop at this point there’s just something about the way he marches forward into situations that projects authority. I think Yabuike, despite his disillusionment, still clings to his role as an arbiter of law and order. 

Yabuike soon enough encounters Kiriyama, the strange, aggressive young man who guards the tree. Kiriyama wields a sword in defense of the tree which he has named Charisma. Yabuike hangs out with Kiriyama for a while thus putting the cop at odds with the forestry survey team who want to cut down Charisma. Yabuike isn’t sold on Kiriyama’s whacked-out eco-fascist speeches justifying his defense of the tree, but he also suspects the survey team is not what it appears to be, and so the policeman drifts between the camps trying to figure it all out. 

There are also a pair of sisters-Jinbo and Chizuru-who are conducting scientific research on the ecology of the forest. Jinbo believes that Charisma is a toxic invasive species that needs to be destroyed which puts her at odds with Kiriyama and the survey team. Yabuike drifts among these different factions like a more benign version of Toshiro Mifune’s Yojimbo. Mifune’s mercenary creates chaos for profit by manipulating rival gangs into destroying each other. Yabuike sorta just meets people where they’re at, asks questions, accepts food when offered, and gradually climbs out of his depression and despair as he finds new purpose in the heart of a forest of confusion. 

Inevitably, Yabuike must return to the city he abandoned. I don’t want to give it away, but Charisma builds to a helluva final scene. The implications are both disturbing and exhilarating. Yabuike’s quest to understand the “Rules of the World” leads him to face the limits of his power with renewed moral strength. It’s not necessarily the case that Yabuike can save the world, but he is no longer afraid to do what he can. A tough road to walk for sure.

Also, think about how Yabuike learns to use his gun by movie’s end. He’s no Dirty Harry, but he finds his own way to throw a shot . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: LABYRINTH OF DREAMS (1997)

Written and Directed by Gakuryu Ishii

From a novel by Yumeno Kyusaku

Photographed by Norimichi Kasamatsu

Edited by Kan Suzuki

Music by Hiroyuki Onagawa

Production Design by Toshihiro Isomi

Starring

Rena Komine as Tomiko

Tadanobu Asano as Niitaka

. . .

“You must never, ever become a bus conductor.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Boredom in a small town out in the sticks. 

You’ve got to make your own fun.

Even if it’s all in your mind.

Or maybe it all starts in your mind until you find a real life adventure to displace your boredom.

Either way . . .

Tomiko works as a bus conductor. She punches tickets. She offers an additional pair of eyes at dangerous crossings-especially train tracks. This is in some vaguely delineated Japanese past-1930s? 1940s?-in which the monotony of existence in a small town is all-consuming. No significant reference is made to the world beyond this town. Tomiko’s job as a bus conductor is explicitly presented as a job for women. Only men are permitted to work as bus drivers. Tomiko narrates her story by way of a series of letters to her best friend. We find out that she had great expectations that this job would be more of an adventure, but, alas, it’s a grind like all other things. It becomes exciting only when Tomiko takes on the role of a civilian detective.

Another bus conductor dies in a suspicious accident. There’s a rumor that she was murdered by a bus driver who manipulated and seduced her into becoming a victim. The implication is that this predator has insinuated himself into the job of bus driver because it allows him proximity to his prey. Whether this is the truth or just a creepy folktale is the mystery at the heart of Labyrinth of Dreams. 

A prime suspect emerges: the sullen yet handsome bus driver Niitaka, whom Tomiko first sees taking a nap right on the train tracks. This sets up a core ambiguity: is Niitaka just a deeply depressed person, or is he a monster? Maybe he is a monster but also feels remorse over his killings which drives him to various antisocial and self-destructive behaviors. Tomiko takes a very black and white perspective on things, casting herself as a dogged seeker of justice right out of a paperback thriller. She’s convinced that Niitaka is the murderer. But the film outside of her constructed narrative allows us to see Niitaka in other ways. Labyrinth of Dreams uses close-ups of Tomiko’s relentlessly suspicious face to remind us that we’re supposed to be on her wavelength even while other shots create a static of uncertainty. Niitaka himself is so emotionally closed-off that we end up projecting whatever pleases us onto him. 

Tomiko finds herself attracted to Niitaka. Niitaka seems to take an interest in her. Tomiko possibly sees their romance as an undercover operation to ferret out the truth, but she also seems to sort of like him. The key scene between these two happens over two glasses of wine. I won’t spoil what exactly occurs but Niitaka challenges Tomiko to play a game of “chicken” involving the two glasses. This is all deeply suspicious . . . but ultimately it's as ambiguous as everything else. The most that can be said for sure is that Niitaka is a deeply troubled person . . . but is he a monster?

Labyrinth of Dreams uses black and white cinematography to evoke harsh feelings of isolation and fear as well as a dreamy romanticism. Everyone that appears in front of the camera is an actual human actor, no deep fakes, no computer generated sidekicks. All of the props, costumes, locations, the bus, the train, the train tracks, the trees, the fog-it’s all there, it all exists, even if it’s all lit, framed, and assembled into a stylish set of sequences that defy easy explanations. Ultimately, Tomiko and Niitaka’s lives are very, very small. They each try to leave their mark upon the world-for good, for evil, maybe just to beat back the oppression of insignificance, maybe they don’t actually know why, maybe they can’t ever know.

Maybe Tomiko’s just inventing a narrative-any narrative, even a ghastly one-to escape a tightly constrained existence in a world that looks down on poor working class women.

Maybe Niitaka’s depression drives him to minimize his own narrative to reduce the surface area of emotional vulnerability.

There is an ending that points to some possibilities, but much is left up to We the Audience to sort through, assemble, discard, and/or frame as significant.

Labyrinth of Dreams asks a lot of its audience, and I respected and admired it for doing so.

MOVIE REVIEW: ZEDER (1983)

Directed by Pupi Avati

Photographed by Franco Delli Colli

Music by Riz Ortolani

Edited by Amedeo Salfa

Written by Pupi Avati, Maurizio Costanzo, and Antonio Avati

Starring

Gabriele Lavia as Stefano (Novelist)

Anne Canovas as Alessandra 

. . .

“Don’t you realize I’m telling you about insane things!”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

There are places known as K-Zones. If you bury the dead in one of them then they will come back to life. A conspiracy involving academics, priests, police, and politicians evolves to conceal the existence of K-Zones since they kinda transform the basic reality of existence. A civilian investigator-a struggling horror novelist-chances upon the secret of K-Zones and tries to unravel their secrets. 

Zeder lays it all out for the audience pretty directly, and then lets us observe its protagonist sink deeper into danger. The horror novelist isn’t hapless. He’s actually quick to realize people are lying as part of a vast cover-up. A would-be whistleblower fails to appear at a secret meeting. Everybody he talks to is obviously choosing their words a little too carefully. Most people, if confronted with the situations in Zeder, would simply go home, but the horror novelist cannot resist becoming a Full Protagonist just like he’s been trying to write in one of his rejected manuscripts. It felt to me like his failure as a pulp author had metaphysically displaced his mundane reality with a genre reality. Artistic frustration might be the truly eldritch power at work in the deepest background of this low key saga.

Zeder is a horror mystery centering on a fantastic premise that’s set exclusively in concrete, real world locations, which are all photographed with an unnerving clarity. The look isn’t nearly as shadowy as one might assume. It ends up being about how a t-shirt and jeans Everyman navigates mundane spaces that have been infused with otherworldly dread. It’s light on the blood and gore. Zeder leans into dialogues of interrogation and atmospheric traversals. By accident it resonates more with point and click adventure games than contemporary horror movie trends. The soundtrack emphasizes a tightly looped motif of tension and danger much like a video game soundtrack. It also vibes with trendy Terminally Online aesthetics: Urbex, Dead Mall shit, Liminality-I wouldn’t be surprised if a YouTube or Nebula grifter has done a video essay on Zeder. 

Zeder is an engaging film experience if one doesn’t get too caught up in the plausibility of the K-Zone idea, which is not overtly explained in detail-nor should it be. Zeder works best as a chronicle of a t-shirt and jeans guy’s odyssey into the unknown despite the best efforts of creepy, aggressive gatekeepers-the church, the cops, the academy, the state-to keep him puttering about upon the surface of things. It might not even be a conspiracy about policing the borderline between the worlds of Life and Death so much as it is about enforcing the border between being a Protagonist of a grandiose narrative and just settling for being a nobody in the great crowd of nobodies.

MOVIE REVIEW: WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (1956)

Directed by Fritz Lang

Written by Casey Robinson

From the novel The Bloody Spur by Charles Einstein

Cinematography by Ernest Lazlo

Edited by Gene Fowler, Jr.

Music by Herschel Burke Gilbert

Starring

Dana Andrews

Ida Lupino

Vincent Price

Rhonda Fleming

George Sanders

Howard Duff

Thomas Mitchell

Review by William D. Tucker.

While the City Sleeps opens with a creepy sequence in which a serial killer gains access to a woman’s apartment. We see the perpetrator full-on. This is not a whodunit. He’s a delivery man for a corner grocery in New York City. His job gives him access to people’s homes. He’s killed before, he’ll kill again. He preys on women, exclusively. We get a first person murder sequence of the woman we just met. We’re seemingly set up for a character portrait of a twisted psychopath and the hunt for him that will no doubt ensue. We get those things, more or less, but they end up being told from the perspective of the employees of a media empire who compete with each other to transform atrocity into profitable front page headlines. It’s this perspective that makes While the City Sleeps modestly intriguing.

Because it’s not a mystery. We know who the perpetrator is from the jump. This puts the emphasis on how and why questions as opposed to inquiries into who. It engages with the how a little more substantially than the why.

It’s not much of a character study of psychopathy. We quickly come to understand that the killer targets women. Sure, there’s some pop psychology prattle offered up to explain his works, but in 2024 misogyny is widely understood to be a motive force all on its own. 1956 was, I guess, a simpler time, but this movie more or less presents a predator who would make sense yesterday or today. He’s a creep. He’s dangerous. He’s also kind of a bore.

It’s not much of a police procedural. The cops are on the case, but we basically interact with them from the journalists’ side of things. So no super detective stuff. No reassuring Law and Order routines. What is interesting is how While the City Sleeps depicts the porous flow of intel from cop to reporter. Everything hinges on insider contacts. There’s an unofficial yet normalized understanding that the public desires both the reassurance that the police are on the case and the lurid come-on of true crime infotainment on a daily schedule plus extra editions when something dramatic breaks. The cops and the reporters have worked out the give and take. Some journalists get favored access, some don’t.

It’s not much of a thriller save for three key sequences-which are efficiently set up and paid off. This mostly ends up as a character drama about the employees of the media empire, and how each one chooses to chase the big scoop. There’s a not entirely convincing gimmick built around the death of the big boss of the media empire. The big boss’s wastrel son takes over and pits the division heads against one another to drive up productivity. This struck me as superfluous: a New York City media operation is already going to hit the ground running to win the scoop on a local serial killer saga. Which is what happens, anyways. The wastrel son element is, well, wasted. 

It’s not much in the visuals department. It’s not terrible. But it is directed by Fritz Lang of Metropolis and M among other masterworks. While the City Sleeps can’t compare to Metropolis in terms of city visuals, nor is its creepy killer near as memorable as Peter Lorre’s depraved predator in M. It’s certainly competent and concrete, nothing too arty or conceptual I guess, but it lacks atmosphere. 

While the City Sleeps works best in how it depicts a media machine responding to an extreme series of crimes. The true fascination here is with how the different employees of a media empire work at cross-purposes even though they’re all part of the same outfit. But this is a modest achievement at best. The story loses momentum a good ten or twelve minutes before the finish. The ending is a betrayal of all that has been established about the cutthroat gamesmanship within the media conglomerate. At the last it tries to sentimentalize what has throughout  been depicted as a hard-boiled zero sum game, thus shitcanning its last bit of credibility. While the City Sleeps is far from the worst thing ever put to film, but it's off-puttingly mediocre for the talents involved.

MOVIE REVIEW: OUT OF THE PAST (1947)

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Screenplay by Geoffrey Homes adapting his novel Build My Gallows High

Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca

Edited by Samuel E. Beetley

Produced by Warren Duff

Starring

Robert Mitchum as Jeff Bailey/Jeff Marcum (Running from the past)

Jane Greer as Kathie (A fatal woman)

Kirk Douglas as Whit (Crime boss)

Dickie Moore as The Kid (Jeff’s employee)

Virginia Huston as Ann (Jeff’s girl in Bridgeport)

Richard Webb as Jim (Has a crush on Ann)

Paul Valentine as Joe (Whit’s henchman)

Steve Brodie as Jack Fisher (Jeff’s partner)

Ken Niles as Leonard Eels (Whit’s lawyer)

. . .

“You see, Jeff, you owe me something. You’ll never be happy until you square yourself.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Out of the Past is another one of these old timey black and white movies that gets classified as “film noir.” It has a morally compromised tough guy protagonist who gets trapped in an escalating series of bad deals and burdensome relationships. This one in particular is defined by its relentlessly clever dialogue which serves as a kind of winding road to guide the audience through its maze of lies and schemes. The dialogue is so clever that it seems to come alive from a primordial soup of greed, delusion, desire, and betrayal so that it could stalk the memory as its own strange beast loosed from the heart of the film. The actors are but vessels compelled to speak the words rapidly, crisply, and with an air of just-tossing-it-off, even as it is obvious that every syllable has been meticulously chosen, sequenced, drilled and executed. I was left with the feeling that these people were trapped on DVD in an endless cycle of frustrated desire-no wonder everything they say is so cynical, and everybody’s just too cool for school.

Out of the Past happens in strictly mundane settings, and doesn’t overtly defy the laws of physics. But it will never be confused for naturalism. It’s all too perfect. No one stutters. No one rants. No one’s attention drifts from boredom or carelessness. It’s classy as hell. Mitchum never stubs his big toe and says,”Motherfucking cocksucker!” But no one’s truly innocent despite the elevated language. Everyone’s angling. Everyone’s paying attention even if it’s only to their most murderous desires. Something unnaturally precise obsessively knits itself together perhaps attempting to displace the messiness of mundane reality into exile beyond the cinematic frame. At times the characters seem tickled by the cleverness of their own words even as they betray, are betrayed, murder, and are murdered. In mundane reality crime is just as often opportunistic, greedy, sloppy, idiotic, and desperate-even when it is premeditated. Fargo captures that messy end of the crime movie spectrum. But classic film noir frequently dresses up avarice in sophisticated modernist romanticism evoking a world where, sure, there’s no Sky Daddy God to lean on, it’s our reality now-courtesy of Nietzsche and Doc Oppenheimer-but all the same there’s a looming hand of fate born of some collective yearning for a discernibly purposeful order to things post-WWII, post-Pearl Harbor, post-Trinity, post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki, post-Holocaust.

In Out of the Past, we follow a guy named Jeff Bailey who owns a small town gas station. A callous man in a black fedora and raincoat named Joe seeks out Jeff. Joe and Jeff have a tense conversation which lets Jeff know that he has to go back to work for a crook named Whit. Whit needs Jeff to retrieve his income tax records from an untrustworthy lawyer. 

Before Jeff leaves his small town business to serve Whit he tells his girlfriend Ann the secret of his past life. This precipitates an epic flashback in which we learn why Jeff became a gas station owner: to escape his past as a sleazy dick-for-hire who betrayed both his partner and his client over a fugitive woman. The woman is Kathie, who was the love of Whit’s life. Until she shot him a couple times and robbed his casino bankroll. But Whit survived and hired Jeff to bring her back alive. You would think Whit would just let her go, but apparently he can’t or won’t. Whit’s the kinda guy that makes no distinction between Needs and Wants, I guess.

Jeff finds Kathie in Acapulco. Jeff falls for Kathie. Kathie wants to escape Whit. They escape. Jeff and Kathie make a life in California. But then Jeff’s angry partner-Jack Fisher-in the private eye business shows up asking for a payoff. Jeff and Jack fight for a bit until the trigger happy Kathie blasts the would-be blackmailer into the next world. Jeff says he didn’t want Jack to get killed. Even so, he sets about the grim task of disposing of the corpse. But then he looks back at Kathie . . . and she’s gone. Just like Batman always does to Commissioner Gordon.

Kathie’s in the wind. Jeff starts his life all over as a gas station operator. He hires a young deaf-mute known only as the Kid. He is now an employer of both himself and another employee. Respectable. He falls in love with a nice small town girl named Ann. Cute. And then Whit sends his errand boy Joe to rope Jeff in for a redemption job since the mission to retrieve Kathie went down in flames. And wouldn’t you know it? Kathie’s right there by Whit’s side all over again. People moving in grotesque circles. That damn cynical-cyclical nature of desire. What’s to be done?

Jeff goes back to work for Whit. Things do not go as planned. Jeff’s technically endangered by the circumstances he faces . . . but he coolly marches into doom. I guess he’s been jerked around so much he’s resigned to his fate. Jeff is also-as played by Robert Mitchum-rather imposing. No one he clashes with seems a match for him. Jeff looks like he could easily pummel Whit-played by a delightfully evil Kirk Douglas-into bone porridge. I ended up coming to the conclusion that Jeff had been cycled through this ordeal so many times-on film reels, on VHS, Betamax, DVD, Blu-Ray-that he just can’t fight it anymore. 

As for Kathie, I guess she’s one of these femme fatales you hear about, but I couldn’t really get too mad at her. Most of what she does makes a tough kinda sense-except going back to Whit. Sorry, babe, but you fucked the dog on that one. 

Out of the Past is a cynical-cyclical journey into oblivion. Jeff Marcum tried to get out of the trap of his actions by changing his name to Jeff Bailey. But he just couldn’t let go of his Jeffness. And that Jeffness, it would seem, doomed his ass. I’m sure of it. It’s all about that accursed Jeffness. 

BONUS: Too bad Hollywood could never get its shit together to do a movie of Red Harvest. I think Mitchum in his prime would’ve been perfect as the Continental Op. Alas, it never happened. But we’ll always have Yojimbo . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: EGGSHELLS (1969)

Written/Directed/Photographed by Tobe Hooper

Edited by Robert Elkins and Tobe Hooper

Produced by Hooper, David L. Ford, and Raymond O’Leary

Music by Shiva’s Headband, Jim Schulman, and Spencer Perskin

Starring

Kim Henkel

Pamela Craig

Sharron Danzinger

Ron Barnhart

Allen Danziger

. . .

THE GOVERNMENT IS VIOLENT-NOT US!

-protest slogan on display in the film Eggshells (1969)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Eggshells is a movie where I found myself fascinated by the overall conception of it, but I had a hard time zeroing in on the individual characters. I didn’t catch their names, but their conversations were often lively. Maybe it’s supposed to feel like some people you hung out with over a debauched, drugged-out summer. Not sure. 

The film begins with a vivid documentary portrayal of an anti-war protest and then spins out into a wholly fictional narrative of broke-ass young people navigating lust, love, values, drugs, anxiety about the future, marriage, and the psychic influence of a phantom entity dwelling in the basement of their hippie-dippie party house. Eggshells is wonderfully eccentric and funny, but also a bit impenetrable. I didn’t mind it, though, because it took interesting risks while taking advantage of a range of filmmaking styles and techniques.

In the heart of the city of Austin, Texas vociferous, peaceful protestors march to bring American soldiers home from Vietnam. Cops are ready to suppress, brutalize, and kill with clubs, guns, and gas. But explicit violence is avoided-in fact, we see a protester shake hands with a uniformed police asset. Moreover, the peace marchers come brandishing an array of American flags, which are themselves often transcendentally framed from low angles against blazing sunlight. The heart and soul of America lies with We the People-not the White House, not Congress, not the Senate, not the Pentagon, not the Governor’s Mansion, not the state legislature, not the party bosses, not the Chamber of Commerce, not the Supreme Court, not Madison Avenue, not Hollywood, not Big Business, not the National Guard, not Your Local Sheriff, not the arms manufacturers-it’s us. By the way, this stirring display comes from filmmaker Tobe Hooper, the guy who would go on to bring us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I sort of expected Eggshells to start in a place of hopeful idealism, and then descend into a hell of mutilation-but, nope, that’s not what happens here.

A handful of fictional characters are woven into the documentary footage of civil disobedience. These characters pass through and around the protest event, but they’re somewhat detached from it, even if they are sympathetic to the cause. They seem to be on mundane errands in town. They make their way back to their two story party house, and that’s where we spend most of our time. Just kinda hanging out. Time passes painlessly enough in clouds of reefer smoke. There’s a party. People talk about politics. They get high. They get drunk. They fuck. They discuss feminism. They worry about money. They ruminate on the value conflicts with their parents. They modify the seams of a wedding dress. But there’s no actual dramatic fight between the characters. Everybody basically gets along.

One of these young people wanders into the basement where he falls under the influence of a strange force that presents him with a sword straight out of Legend of Zelda or maybe an Errol Flynn picture. The dude takes up the blade and has a delightfully edited duel with himself. So, I dunno, maybe the conflicts that matter are within hearts and minds; we’re all just dueling with our shadow self, maybe?

At one point, a couple is fucking, and their sex is perhaps turbocharged by the psychic emanations of the basement whatsit unleashing a goofy-but kinda awesome-psychedelic light show. Naked bodies in action unleash cosmic powers that make the Silver Surfer and Captain Marvel look like a couple of pikers.

Another character-a drunk wannabe novelist-takes off his clothes and sets a colorful shaggin’ wagon on fire . . . but I couldn’t tell you if this was drunko shit or the influence of the basement entity or just a pure fantasy riff. I think this confusion is actually the point, but your guess is as good as mine.

If you’re looking for a conventional narrative climax . . . well, you kinda get two. The first is a lovely outdoor wedding where the rabbi’s poetic words seem to evoke a religiously derived kind of psychedelic romanticism of merging souls forged by eternal love beyond human comprehension. Climax #2 involves people under the influence of the basement thing digging up an absurd contraption that, uh, teleports folks to a higher dimension . . . or something? Maybe the basement entity represented some accumulating psychic force representative of people’s collective wish to get beamed off of the violent planet Earth and off to Star Trek somewheres? You take a look, and decide for yourself.

Eggshells mixes fiction, documentary, stop motion animation, and psychedelia to evoke a tumultuous present tantalized by wild promises of a better future. Sure, you could say it’s all hippie dippie nonsense cycling through drug addled brains. But the oh-so-sober Christian warmongers jolly well fucked up the operation in Vietnam, didn’t they? And they had all the intelligence, all the money, all the military toys, all the popular support of the Hard Hats and the Silent Majority and John Wayne his own self. Maybe American existence, as a sum total of all its functions, is just the dialectical output of a war between competing regimes of illusions. At least the hippies and the peaceniks in Austin didn’t napalm any children. So credit where it’s due.