BAZOOKA FOR DUMMIES

 

In Italian crime thriller Killer Versus Killers (1985), hard-bitten hired assassin Henry Silva's weapon of choice is a rocket propelled grenade launcher. No hastily substituted mannequin is safe, no matter how nattily dressed.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Edvard 'my whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm' Munch worked on this painting for three years (1932-1935) without ever finishing it. 

It's called Uninvited Guests and in it he makes a fairly unequivocal statement: alcohol has been consumed, the wallpaper is weird, and I have a firearm, so don't come around here ad hoc with your smiley balloon heads and expect your shrift to be anything but short.  

MEANWHILE, IN A COMPOUND SOMEWHERE IN THE USA...

Red State, d. Kevin Smith (2011)

I'll start by saying that there are few film makers I dislike more than Kevin Smith. I don't like his point of view, or his sense of humour. I don't like his face. But I like Red State*, I like it very much, not least because it is absolutely nothing like a Kevin Smith film and his face doesn't appear in it.

The plot centres around a radical church group who picket gay funerals in public and, in private, kidnap homosexuals and other people they don't approve and execute them. When they are visited by the police on another matter, a violent siege begins that only concludes after a government approved massacre and the baleful sound of the seven heavenly trumpets that announce The Rapture.

The film moves quickly and erratically and feels as if it's unfolding live as you watch it, aided and abetted by washed out visuals and unshowy mumbling performances*. It made me think about the off the map parts of America and the churches and clubs and families within those neglected places that are armed to the teeth and waiting for Jesus and, for the first time in a long while, I felt glad to be living in the UK. It won't last.

*  A 'red state' is a Republican Party stronghold.

** Michael Parks is quite amazing as the leader of the cult, but resists numerous opportunities to chew the scenery to instead create a terrifying but nuanced character.   

20th CENTURY ANTHROPOLOGY

#thelandoflostcontent
#survivalofthefittest
#tribalritual
#mortalcombat
#playtime

HIT BY A TRUCK

Truck Turner, d. Jonathan Kaplan (1974)

It looks like murder, but it's actually (sort of) self defence. Isaac Hayes plays bounty hunter and Magnum toting bad ass Truck Turner in the meandering, wish fulfillment fantasy film of the same name. I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, but couldn't that pimp have found a better outfit to wear when trying to kill a man? I can't help but think if he'd have selected his clothes with more care the outcome might have been different.

NEON DREAMS

Benjamin Marra is a hell of a talent, even though most of what he does is pure evil. Night Business is a relentlessly violent and extravagantly sexual cocktail of pulp fiction and porn, a comic strip rendition of the sort of films that Abel Ferrara and Brian De Palma spent much of the 70s and 80s making, although even those distinguished gentlemen would have baulked at having a topless female vigilante motorcyclist as a heroine. All that’s missing is the sound of synths.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE OF THE DAY

From the stupendously good Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki, d. Lam Nai-Choi (1991)

HER AIM IS TRUE

Pam Grier lines up a shot in Sheba, Baby (1975)

OH, KLAUS!

This is not from a film, by the way, it's something that actually happened on a 1980 Lufthansa flight. Probably. It sounds like the sort of thing the crazy bastard would do. 

COFFY CREAMS

Coffy, d. Jack Hill (1973)

There is no-one better at revenge than Pam Grier. She uses her intelligence and charm and prodigious physical gifts to full effect in the pursuit of shooting villains in the head, in the groin, anywhere villains don’t like to be shot, which is pretty much everywhere.

In Coffy, Pam is targeting the sort of low life scum who put her sister in an early grave, the pimps and pushers of the world, mostly men – men who think Coffy is there to be fucked when, in fact, she’s actually there to fuck them. And she gets away with it, too, not exactly unscathed but certainly unpunished, a recurring feature of Blaxploitation, where the official forces of law and order as administered by ‘The Man’ don’t really apply.

WELCOME TO LA

Cleon Peterson is a contemporary artist from Los Angeles who specialises in starkly rendered depictions of epic violence: a mix of graffiti, mythology and fantasy. His semi-naked, shaven headed figures battle constantly amongst themselves, or commit atrocities to others. They remind me of the Brutals in Zardoz, heavily armed savages bred to kill and rape and keep the world a savage and terrifying place.  

Peterson's art stirs in me the memory of when I was a child and would spend hours drawing enormously detailed scenes of dead soldiers, crocodiles, murder, pools of blood, people being thrown into pits full of spikes, that sort of thing. It was probably the peak of my creativity. If I'm honest, I've ploughed rather an arid furrow for the last forty years.

VIOLENCE IS THE KEY

Ballard + Panther + Design = Win.

HER REACTION