Staying Vertical (February 23rd and 24th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[STAYING VERTICAL screens Thursday February 23rd at 6:45 pm and Friday February 24th at 9:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Well, I certainly haven't seen a movie like STAYING VERTICAL before. Described by many reviews as some sort of comedy, I didn't laugh much, but was consistently perplexed.

With its utterly deadpan tone, you don't realize right away that this film takes place in a reality that is at least slightly skewed. Instead you find yourself trying to follow what seems a relatively straightforward plot about a screenwriter named Leo (Damien Bonnard) suffering from writer's block.

Leo takes a drive into the French countryside to clear his head and find inspiration. He also finds both men and women there to stimulate his libido. He wants to make it with a young man named Yano (Basile Meilleurat), but his advances are rebuffed. Instead he hooks up with a female shepherd named Marie (India Hair), and eventually has a child with her.

Lips of Blood (October 30th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[LIPS OF BLOOD screens Friday October 30th at 10:10 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

French director Jean Rollin is best known for making plotless erotic vampire movies that offer up great visual moments and plenty of atmosphere, but not much in the way of story.  LIPS OF BLOOD is a rare exception in that there is a coherent plot in here somewhere.  Frederic (Jean-Loup Philippe) has little memory of his childhood.  All he can recall is something about staying the night at a castle with a pretty red haired girl (Annie Briand), a memory Frederic’s mother (Nathalie Perrey) has convinced him is only a dream.  But when Frederic sees an advertisement that uses the castle as its backdrop, he embarks on a dangerous quest to learn the truth about his past. 

This being a Jean Rollin film, it should come as no surprise that Frederic’s quest involves sexy female vampires in various states of undress, striking imagery like a coffin used as a boat, and an underlying theme of the youth/counter culture (represented by the vampires) being persecuted by the ignorant forces of authority.  The thematic and visual elements still rule the day, but with a more traditional narrative structure than most of Rollin’s films this is a more accessible movie than works like THE NUDE VAMPIRE or REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE.  As such, it makes a good entry point for those unfamiliar with Rollin’s work, as well as being a high point in the director’s career.  3 out of 4 stars.

Fascination (October 30th at the Cleveland CInematheque)

[FASCINATION screens Friday October 30th at 8:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Like LIPS OF BLOOD and LIVING DEAD GIRL, this is one of the more coherent films from French director Jean Rollin.  Mark (Jean-Marie Lemaire), a thief, takes refuge from his former partners in a mansion.  The building is inhabited by two women who claim to be the servants.  In reality they are part of a cult of blood drinkers.  One of the women, Eva (Brigitte Lahaie), plans to turn Mark into the main course for her and her friends.  However Elisabeth (Franca Mai) takes a liking to Mark and wants to save him. 

Plot isn’t usually Rollin’s main focus, but the story in FASCINATION is actually pretty interesting and boasts a nice twist at the end.  Rollin’s trademark visual style is still apparent, but it’s somewhat toned down compared to his earlier works.  There’s also a little more sexual content, a necessary concession to the trends of the time, though not the full-on hardcore material that some of Rollin’s later films would include. It’s not exactly horror, and not exactly erotica, and not exactly an art film, but a little bit of all of the above. 3 out of 4 stars.

31 Days of Halloween 2015: The Oregonian (available on various streaming and VOD platforms)

[31 Days of Halloween 2015: THE OREGONIAN is available on Fandor, Amazon instant video, Hulu, and possibly other streaming/VOD options.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

A young woman (Lindsay Pulsipher) finds herself covered in blood in a car with bodies around her and no memory of who she is or what happened in THE OREGONIAN. In the middle of nowhere, she sets off looking for help and for answers and instead finds herself caught in a nightmare of strange characters and stranger situations. Of course for the audience, the answer as to what’s really going on is fairly obvious almost from the get-go, so we’re really just watching our protagonist put the pieces together. Whether that’s worth watching largely depends on your tolerance for surrealistic set pieces in a film that feels like a talented but rough around the edges David Lynch fan remaking CARNIVAL OF SOULS.

In all honesty, it’s debatable whether this truly qualifies as a horror film, but I found it in the horror section on Fandor, it’s rife with gory and/or horrific imagery, and since I watched the whole thing and only have so much time in the month, it’s getting included in my 31 Days of Halloween marathon for this year. And let’s face it, aside from the hardiest of arthouse aficionados, horror fans are pretty much the only ones willing to watch a movie in which characters nonchalantly pee blood and vomit up black goo while laughing, to name just two of the gruesome sights on display.

The Last Movie (July 25th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE LAST MOVIE screens Saturday July 25th at 9:20 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I had read a bit about THE LAST MOVIE while growing up, all of it negative. Various critics made out that actor-director Dennis Hopper's followup to his trendsetting hit EASY RIDER was a great example of a sophomore disaster, as a drugged-out "artiste" of cinema, spoiled rotten and riding high on the success of the earlier picture (plus various hallucinogens and pharmaceuticals), was given free reign to do as he pleased, and turned in an unwatchable, pretentious hippie-influenced mess.

(Making him, oh, how radically different from any other filmmaker over the past 40 years? Just asking)

THE LAST MOVIE even had an entry in Michael Medved's anonymously co-authored book of film-depreciation The 50 Worst Films Ever Made (And How They Got That Way), one of my favorite volumes of bilious film lore in the 1970s, even though, once VHS was invented and I actually started SEEING some of the 50 worst films ever made, I discovered that many of them weren't all that bad after all.

Then, one day in the late 1990s, the last time I had any expendable finances or hope the future, I conducted a mass-purchase of cassettes on behalf of my friends at the late, great B-Ware Video and Books in Lakewood. In the cache I actually found a VHS release of THE LAST MOVIE on the obscure United Video of America label. 

Inland Empire (July 11th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[INLAND EMPIRE screens Saturday July 11th at 8:05 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

INLAND EMPIRE is to cult-hero director David Lynch what KILL BILL was to cult-hero director Quentin Tarentino. No expense or indulgence spared, no reins, no guardrails, and everything that makes this idiosyncratic filmmaker the...thing that he is, an unadulterated Lynch-a-thon. Never mind his "mainstream" success in Twin Peaks or even the bizarre trivia that George Lucas wanted Lynch for RETURN OF THE JEDI; this feature is the fellow back to  his roots in grainy, grotesque and troubling avant-garde/experimental cinema, shooting in international locations without a completed script, having at his disposal a megabucks cast and winding up with a three-hour running time. 

It was also more or less self-distributed by Lynch city by city, during its non-studio 2006 release. In Cleveland INLAND EMPIRE was booked for an unprecedented seven-day run at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Director John Ewing told me at the time that fans  were coming in from as far as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati just to see it.