Cemetery Man (1994, Italian/UK)

Cemetery Man is truly weird, even for an Italian zombie movie. Starring Rupert Everett as the eponymous hero, it takes a little while to really get going, but the second half is grotesquely hilarious and totally surreal. At the outset, Everett’s character (Francesco Dellamorte, or, as he puts it, “St. Francis of Death”) seems resigned to spend the majority of his days and nights drinking, killing the undead, reading the phonebook, and bumming around his small Italian town in the company of Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro), an Igor-like figure who lives and grunts (and eats, and eats, and eats) in the basement of their graveyard shack. All this changes, of course, with a woman. A woman who Dellamorte falls for not once, or twice, but four times, as she simply will not stay dead and buried.

Everett’s dry wit and matinee idol looks are a perfect match for such an over-the-top film, and he’s game for everything that comes his way, and it's a shame to note that, twelve years after the movie's original release, Everett's career seems to have hit a major snag. Now that Cemetery Man is finally available on DVD, horror fans should check it out – even amid the current passion for all things zombie, this movie is one-of-a-kind.

Seconds (1966, USA)

I first saw Seconds in college, while pillaging my roommate’s movie collection (also the way I got my hands on a copy of Pasolini’s Salo, but that’s something for another day). Not ever having been terribly interested in the genre films of the 1950’s and 60’s, didn’t know much about Rock Hudson’s life and career other than the usual gossip about how they ended. Seconds proved to be light-years away from frothy fare like Pillow Talk; a surprisingly avant-garde meditation on the nature of identity.

Seconds emerges directly out of the man’s world of 1950’s American life, when husbands toiled in city offices while wives engineered the suburban home front. As the film begins, our main character, “Wilson,” boards a commuter train home from Manhattan, and a stranger hands him a slip of paper that will change his life – quite literally. What this dour, middle-aged bank manager is offered is a chance for a full life transplant – not merely a fresh start, but a fresh face, body, and identity to go with it. He is surgically transformed into a virile, handsome figure, in the form of Hudson, and given a new life as a painter in a beachside community of Southern California.

Directed by John Frankenheimer, Seconds is stylistically (and thematically) linked to his classic The Manchurian Candidate, but there’s some Polanski here, too – the jarring and innovative cinematography by James Wong Howe recalls Repulsion, in particular. But Seconds investigates very American troubles in its evocation of the anxiety surrounding the myth of the self-made man, and the casting of the iconic Hudson as a character who has everything but true fulfillment was a stroke of genius.

R.I.P. Shohei Imamura

One of my favorite film directors, Shohei Imamura, died of cancer on Tuesday. The New York Times is currently running a brief overview of his life and work.

If you've never seen an Imamura film, I highly recommend The Pornographers and his 1983 remake of The Ballad of Narayama, as well as two more recent films, The Eel and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (both of which star one of my favorite actors, Koji Yakusho). In honor of Imamura and his incredibly weird and wonderful films, I'll pull together some old reviews over the next week or so.

The President's Last Bang (2005, South Korean)

Based on the events of the final day in the life of former South Korean president Park Chung Hee, The President’s Last Bang is a weird, sometimes comical, portrait of what happens when coups, military and otherwise, go horribly wrong.

By most accounts, Park, who utilized seemingly every opportunity in order to remain in office between the military coup that brought him to power in 1960 and the assassination that ended his life in 1979, was a power-hungry bastard, and Last Bang certainly makes this image stick. Park’s last day is spent drinking, humiliating his underlings, and groping the young women delivered to his private compound. However, those characters seeking Park’s overthrow don’t look much better in comparison – Kim Jae-kyu, head of the South Korean CIA and friend turned foe to the president, is shown to be debilitated by a liver disease that has robbed his body of the ability to even perform a bowel movement - but what remains uncertain is whether his body is poisoning his mind, or vice versa.

Structurally, Last Bang moves in fits and starts, and without a primer on South Korean political history of the 20th century, the identities and motivations of some of the central characters are utterly mystifying. Still, the film is quite concise on the subject of power and its ability to corrupt absolutely, and it spares no character in its portrayal of a particularly ugly political hornet’s nest.

Art School Confidential - Link to Guest Snack

Since there are several things I need to drag my butt to the theater to see before I get around to Art School Confidential (like Army of Shadows and Down in the Valley), here's a link to The Artist Extraordinaire's review of the new Terry Zwigoff/Daniel Clowes film, from his excellent art blog, Art or Idiocy?