BRING HOME THE MOTHERLODE, BARRY

 

Beyond The Black Rainbow, d. Panos Cosmatos (2010)

In 1983, a young mute woman with uncanny abilities is held prisoner within the sterile and dehumanising Arboria Institute. Her captor is Dr Barry Nile, a sinister, wig wearing pseudo-scientist. He becomes increasingly obsessed with her and, when she escapes, he loses his mind completely during the pursuit.

The first film of a major new talent, this may lack the preposterous imagination and violent energy of Mandy (perhaps my favourite film of the 21st century - so far), but it is an important introduction to the strange new / old world of director / writer Panos Cosmatos: a place where time and space are malleable (Black Rainbow is set in 1983, but it could be 1969 or 2001 or 2120); a place where hallucinogenic drugs are mandatory even though they are not necessary; a place where science fiction and horror and fantasy gleefully collide into each other, and cosmic sparks fly on impact. 

I absolutely love this guy, so much so that I'm not even frustrated by the paucity of his output (just two films and a 56 minute TV episode in 15 years): the quality of his work is so extraordinarily high I'm just waiting to see what he does next.

THREE (MORE) SHOTS

 

A brief (final) press of the Return button for Ghost In The Machine. Yes, that's Karen Allen.

PC GONE MAD

Ghost In The Machine, d. Rachel Talalay (1993) 

Have you ever wondered what might happen if, at the point of his own death, a serial killer was absorbed into a powerful computer network and then continued his murderous career using microwave ovens, hand driers, dish washers and ATM machines? No, me neither, or no yo tampoco, as they say in Spanish. 

The main issue with this film is that it is just so creaky and stilted, with the actors clearly being unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the 'state of the art' (see above) effects they were supposed to be reacting and responding to*. Nowadays, of course, movies use CGI for even mundane things, so actors have got much  better at this sort of pretending. 

Ghost In The Machine cost $12m, made less than half of its budget back and would have been pretty much completely out of date before the credits finished rolling. Oh, well, mas que nada, as they say in Portugese.

* The dialogue is also awful, and the lead kid is annoying.

THE TIME TO DIE

         

Le Temps De Mourir, d. Andre Farwagi (1970)

This is a film all about time, but which, unlike most other films and TV shows, manages to respect it and use it in a responsible, adult manner. Here time is not plastic, mouldable, malleable, flexible, but inexorable, inevitable, inescapable. Time is a bastard, ladies and gentlemen, cross it at your peril.  

A time-warped whodunnit, the film begins with a collision between a horse, a beautiful girl and a metal tree which leads to a reel of futuristic video tape rolling down a hill and into the path of a sleeping man. The man and his colleague watch the film, only to find it is surveilance camera footage of their Boss being shot to death by an unknown, but (crucially) not unseen, assailant.

The Boss, however, is not dead: he is alive, well, and bullet hole free. He rapidly becomes obsessed with finding out what it all means: is it a fake, a prank, a collective hallucination, or a vision of the future? Is it already written, or can it be revised? Will intervention stop it, or hasten it? 

Everything about this film is cool: it reminds me of hip, controlled jazz - no squawking sax or atonal key pounding (I'm not averse to that, by the way, but this film is a masterpiece of restraint) - just a smooth, irresistible, intelligent groove - a head nodder, a finger clicker. It's all beautifully enigmatic, and just about makes sense if you mentally squint really hard.

YOU'RE FADING IN AND OUT III

Julie Christie flits between dimensional barriers in the underrated Memoirs Of A Survivor, a 1981 film based on Doris Lessing's dystopian sci fi novel.

CARD TREK

Star Trek Primrose Confectionery Cards, 1971.

1,758 FEET UNDERGROUND

Chosen Survivors, d. Sutton Roley (1974)

Briskly ticking pretty much every box on my mental clipboard, Chosen Survivors is a 1970s US sci fi drama set in a sealed military bunker which quickly becomes a horror and disaster movie. The titular survivors arrive drugged and disoriented by army helicopter, and are herded into the shelter by soldiers just a few minutes ahead of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse. The race and gender balanced group are from all walks of life, and are people prominent in their own fields selected to be preserved for posterity, i.e. it’s going to be their job to repopulate America (they’re all a bit too old for this, by the way, surely what you’d really want is a few teenagers?).    

The trouble with this deep shelter set in an ancient cave system, however, is that the hole is already populated – with millions of vampire bats – who are both pissed off at the intrusion and delighted that their larder has been filled. What follows is messy, as (poorly) optically imposed bats feed on middle aged character actors, some of whom fight back and some of whom just flap and flip around until the bats empty them. It’s good fun. To observe as fictional entertainment, I mean, I can’t imagine the reality of it would be anything other than nippy and unpleasant.

Here’s a spoiler: the best thing? It’s not even a real nuclear war, it’s just a drill. Oh, the irony!  

THE VOID OF A WORLD SURREAL

Teeny Deane, here's some rock an roll, Bubbu, hope you like em if you don't you're a cretin!! Ratfink*.

Chrome is not so much a band as an unexplained phenomenon. I don’t know how they wrote these songs, how they performed them, or how they recorded them. They seem to follow the classic film screenwriting edict of ‘come in late, leave early’, so many of their songs are like blurred Polaroids: bits and pieces in motion, indistinct edges, colours smeared and inchoate. The overall result is as exhilarating as it is disorienting. Their music chops and changes like a radio being tuned, ending abruptly, fading out or changing tack mid-song, layered to overload with scuzzy riffs, wild noodling and wayward analogue electronics. Sometimes they layer in screams, chuckles or maniacal laughter, ear-splitting buzzes and sudden bursts of static or dialogue taped off the telly. Their subject matter is from the pages of Philip K. Dick: mass surveillance, sinister media, doppelgangers, terrorism, paranoia, time out of joint. The drums always sound as if they are in a different room to the tape recorder.

My favourite Chrome album is their third, Half Machine Lip Moves, perhaps the most perfectly Chrome-like of their peak output between 1977 and 1982 (they’re still going now, albeit in a revised form, having lost a founder member along the way). It’s a record that sounds like a mix tape – it jumps around in time and space, in time zones and space spaces, a hundred sonic ideas hastily jotted down then crossed through, an album with both a laser sharp focus and attention deficit disorder. Arrows point to new directions, new sounds emerge. Everything sounds live and improvised, then laden with overdubs, echo and lots and lots of compression, slightly chaotic, but often hypnotic and adorned with sinuous guitar lines and squelches. It’s beautifully composed cacophony, sheets of sound, metallic clangs and clatters, heavily treated vocals that hiss about alienation, duplication, death and a ‘cold clammy bombing that will shit on your town’. If the Red Army Faction had made a record, it might sound like this, reeking of high explosive and petrol.

They’re probably my favourite band, and they are becoming more relevant as the world becomes more splintered and confusing. I strongly recommend them to you if you want to listen to something that will beat the hell out of your ears and head whilst making your heart and legs compulsively pump up and down.     

*Indented inscription on the cover of my secondhand copy of the album.

TEST TUBE PLANET

200,000 years in, we're still trying to find an origin story that makes sense. This isn't it.

OPTICAL ART

 

As a child, all Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru wanted was a pair of glasses, but his strict Dad forbade him from wearing them. Now he rootles through the rubbish tips of Nairobi, looking for chunks of metal and strips of wire he can use to sculpt unique spectacles that wouldn't look out of place on the incredible Sun Ra, the thinking and feeling person's Elton John.

I've been wearing glasses since I was nine, as of today, a mere forty years. I've clearly been doing it wrong.

SCI FI OF OLD TIMES

A RÉGI IDÖK SCI-FIJE is a 1982 Hungarian television tribute to the golden age of Science Fiction, soundtracked by music from the Human League and Kraftwerk amongst others. It gets quite trippy, but that's outer space for you.