Gobsmacking Cinema: 3 DEV ADAM (1973)

I'm not long back from my trip to the London Film Festival and I'm about to head out to Dublin for the next week for their Horrorthon festival (it is Halloween after all). So, no time to write up these festivals I've been at recently but just to keep things ticking over here's another entry in my neverending quest to expose all the normal people I know to somewhat less than normal cinema...

Have you ever heard of the Mexican hero Santo? If not, he was the masked star of a string of Mexican wrestling movies in the 60s and 70s. Yes, there really was such a genre of movie, and I guess it inspired the recent Jack Black film NACHO LIBRE. Which I won't be seeing, by the way. It looks awful. But I digress.

I've watched a few Mexican wrestling movies (a couple of Santo films and the excellently-titled NEUTRON VS THE DEATH ROBOTS) and enjoyed them a lot (usually they involve a hero fighting some outlandish criminals such as mad scientists or aliens and winning by carrying out some great wrestling moves), but I didn't think for one moment that they would possibly be popular enough for someone to actually rip them off.

And yet Santo does make what I assume is a totally unauthorised appearance in the mad Turkish film 3 DEV ADAM (translated as 3 MIGHTY MEN or something like that). But that's not the worst of it. The film also rips off music from other films - I recognised snippets from the scores to SHAFT, something else that I think was by Ennio Morricone but I couldn't remember which film, and what I thought might have been DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.

And yet that still isn't the cheekiest aspect of it all. Check this out for a concept.

Santo and his best mate Captain America - yes, that's right, the Marvel superhero, here played by a dark-haired Turk in what can only be described as a slight departure from his comic book image - are sent on a mission to fight an evil supervillain who is flooding the economy with fake currency, torturing and killing people and also laughing in a really maniacal way.

Oh, did I mention that the villain happens to be called the Spider, and bears a not insignificant similarity to a certain wall-crawling Marvel superhero? Imagine Spider-man was a really nasty guy with an evil laugh, his costume was more homemade looking (and slightly green) and he liked torturing people in really amusing ways... and you have an idea what the villain in question looks like. Also, he has long hair which pokes out from the eye holes in his mask, giving the impression of having huge, comical eyebrows.

This shameless blend of stolen material all comes together in a no-budget kaleidoscope of badly dubbed dialogue, poorly-choreographed and unconvincing fight scenes and other such eye-popping crapness as a scene in which a man is tortured by having a big tube held up to his face with a couple of rats entering from the other side.

There are some scenes that transcend the crapness to become something truly special however. The finale in particular has Captain America seeing off several men who all wear the aforementioned cheapo Spider-man costume, only for a new one to pop up, laughing menacingly, every time one is felled. This might be annoying in a more serious film, but here it becomes side-splittingly hilarious, and sets up the rather bizarre closing scene of the film.

Turkish cinema of the 70s and 80s is a wacky world of rip-offs and weirdness and this is a great place to start off. After all, in which other movie could you see both Santo fighting a bunch of Karate experts AND Spider-man strangling a woman in the shower? Unless Sam Raimi has been doing an awful lot of drugs on the set of SPIDER-MAN 3, I suspect 3 DEV ADAM is probably the only candidate.

The Freakpit Festival Frenzy

I had intended another bunch of films to be featured here again tonight but alas I never quite got round to it and now I really need to go to bed as I'm up early tomorrow morning... to go to another film festival.

At least that means I'm building up plenty of films to actually write about though - once I eventually put aside the time to do it. You see, since my last blog entry I've attended Document, the International Human Rights Film Festival, in Glasgow and tomorrow I'm making a brief trip to the London Film Festival.

After that, like next week sometime, I should be able to write something. Except that a couple of days after I get back I'll be away to Dublin for another festival. Then Cardiff a couple of weeks later. Then Brighton. Then London again. And I might squeeze one more in there somewhere in November too, despite not having any holidays left to use.

So you can't say I don't travel far and wide to bring you lots of exciting film-related chat. Well, actually, you can say that, since much of what I write isn't exciting and furthermore the main reason I do it is because I'm a sad pathetic freak with nothing better to do, rather than because I feel the need to bring the film festivals of the nation to your door.

Right, time for bed. If you feel the need to finish this in some kind of dramatic way, I guess a quick burst of The Clash's "London Calling" will do the trick. I'm not a good singer though, and this isn't being broadcast in any form of audio, so you'll just need to use your imagination.

See you next week. If I get round to it.

A bunch of recent films with no connection

I've really been letting this slip of late, haven't I? Right, just for the sake of posting something, here's a brief round-up of the recent cinema releases I've seen. You know the story, it's another of those random posts where I write a little bit about a bunch of unrelated films and then you get to the end expecting a witty punchline that connects them all, only to be disappointed when you discover that actually there really is no direction to this at all.

I saw the Brit-based post-apocalyptic thriller CHILDREN OF MEN when I was in Dublin. If you're not familiar, it's set in the near future when the human race has not given birth for more than 18 years. Clive Owen is the man charged with rescuing a pregnant young African girl and taking her to a possibly mythical scientific project off the coast of England. It's had great reviews but I've been unable to fathom out why.

Granted, there are one or two examples of shining technical accomplishment (people will righly point to a bombing early on in the film or more likely a siege by the military on a block of flats towards the end), but the history of film is littered with movies that managed spectacle without any worth and there's little to set this apart from the rest.

While the acting is not the best, the cast do what they can with some really awful writing. That said, God knows what made Michael Caine want to do this film but it's the most embarrassing role I've ever seen him in.

The story is full of cliches - the child as humanity's last hope and the mythical destination where everything will be fine are both mainstays of the post-apocalyptic genre that were tired long before this film appeared. On top of that, there are moments of sheer stupidity (Owen's actions during Caine's final scene) that just had me rolling my eyes in disbelief. As for the idea of portraying a future Britain that was a lot like today only worse, V FOR VENDETTA did it better earlier in the year.

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE on the other hand is brilliant. This tells the story of an eccentric family taking their little girl on a road trip across the US to enter her in one of those disturbing child beauty pageants that only the Americans seem to manage.

The cast are perfect - Greg Kinnear, one of the most underrated actors working today, is the father who is obsessed with being a winner despite clearly being one of the biggest losers for much of the film; Toni Colette is the caring mother and the closest thing to normal in the family; Paul Dano is the adolescent son who has taken a vow of silence until he can join the air force; Abigail Breslin is the titular girl who not only manages to not be the typically annoying child actor but instead steals most of the scenes she's in. They're joined by the coke-snorting, filthy-minded grandad Alan Arkin and a subdued Steve Carrell as a gay, suicidal genius. Bet he's not been offered many parts like that.

All the cast shine but they're given plenty of ammunition with a script that is by turns touching and hilarious. It's perhaps the latest in a long line of these quirky comedies in which most of the humour stems from the fact that the characters are a bit weird (see NAPOLEON DYNAMITE or anything directed by Wes Anderson) but it's also one of the best.

I also checked out the concert movie NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD, featuring the legendary Canadian rocker recorded over a couple of nights before he went in for his recent surgery. It's unusual among concert movies in only having the briefest of interviews at the outset before focussing solely on the performance for the rest of the movie (even excluding the audience from appearing anywhere in the film).

If you don't like Neil Young's music, it'll be chore. If you do like it, then this film is a testament to his immense talent and you're sure to love it.

Finally, I checked out Brian DePalma's THE BLACK DAHLIA, a noir-flavoured thriller based on a combination of a James Elroy fictional work and a real-life murder in the early days of Hollywood.

Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart are the cops investigating the case, Scarlett Johannsen is the wife of the latter and Hilary Swank is the woman with a dark secret connected to the murder victim.

Hartnett and Eckhart struggle to make a lot of the dialogue convincing (it's the sort of stuff that worked when Fred MacMurray or Edmund O'Brien said it in the 40s, but not now) and Swank's accent seems to fluctuate between a generic English accent and something along the lines of Katherine Hepburn. Johannsen's great though, as always. And I've probably spelled her name wrongly, as always.

DePalma certainly delivers on the suspense (and peppers the film with moments of truly gruesome violence, including a Fulci-style scene with a water fountain that saw most people in the cinema gasp) but unfortunately there are so many twists that by the end you're given hardly any time for one event to sink in before another two come along to confuse you further.

It's a decent suspense thriller and works well against the convincing recreation of old Hollywood, but I couldn't help thinking it would all have seemed a lot newer if LA CONFIDENTIAL hadn't covered similar ground several years earlier.

That's all for now, but I should be back with more soon. I do after all still have a whole bunch of festivals to cover before the year is out. Hey, I have to use my holidays for something.

Stranger Than Fiction 2006

As you know, I'm rather fond of documentaries. As you may or may not know, I'm also rather fond of Dublin. When I discovered then that the Irish Film Institute was running a documentary film festival (entitled Stranger Than Fiction) it seemed like a decent idea for a wee holiday - so that's where I was at the weekend.

The festival, although only a few days long, struck a healthy balance between short films and feature length contributions, brand new films and those that you may have missed, and a nice blend of international films and Irish works. Despite allowing myself plenty of time to do tourist-type things, I managed to squeeze in a dozen of the films on offer.

Two that I didn't go to see were ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT and LOUDQUIETLOUD: A FILM ABOUT THE PIXIES - but if you've been paying attention you'll know that it's because I'd seen them the month before at the EIFF. And if you didn't know that, now you do and you can go back and read my series of EIFF posts to read what I thought of them.

One film that I saw at the EIFF which I also saw in Dublin was THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED. That's because it was shown here as their Surprise Documentary, so I didn't know what it was in advance. Okay, so it was one I'd already seen but I didn't mind too much as it was one of the better documentaries I saw at Edinburgh this year.

A film that passed me by when it aired at the EIFF but which I saw in Dublin was the notorious DESTRICTED. For those who haven't heard of it, DESTRICTED is a collection of short films by a bunch of respectable indie film-makers including Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noe and Larry Clark, each film debating at what point the P word becomes art. In case you're wondering why I'm being so cagey about it, it's because I know this gets read by people at work, so I don't want them to run foul of their employer's firewalls. But the P word rhymes with born.

Most of the contributions to the movie (the most explicit ever given an 18 certificate by the BBFC) are either just plain filth or else are pretentious, boring twaddle. Noe's contribution is particularly disappointing and isn't helped by an annyoing strobe effect that renders the whole thing even more of an endurance test.

The film is worth watching however (if you can stomach such things) for Clark's reality TV style contribution. In his segment, he interviews a bunch of young men who like to watch adult movies and gives one of them the chance to perform with one of the stars. Needless to say the winner ends up not only looking very nervous but also discovering it ain't all it's cracked up to be. Funny but not for the fainthearted or prudish.

Another effort that isn't for the fainthearted is the entertaining but disturbing OUR BRAND IS CRISIS. This film documents the attempts by a firm of American spin doctors to help a former leader get re-elected to the Bolivian government. Alas it seems that their brand of democracy isn't so easily exportable to every country and the end result is chaos. It's a lively film but some of the scenes of rioting in the streets are likely to disturb.

Equally disturbing is the interesting but overlong WORKING MAN'S DEATH, which showcases five instances of men from across the world toiling in the most horrible of conditions to earn a poor living, whether it be illegal coal mining in the Ukraine or shipwreckers in Pakistan. Enlightening it may be, but it will take a very strong stomach to put up with the relentless footage of life in a Nigerian meat market. Cow and goat lovers, steer well clear.

BLACK GOLD, due to receive a premier at the London Film Festival this month, is an investigation into the multi-billion dollar coffee industry and how the coffee farmers themselves are ripped off despite soaring profits in the consuming countries - so much so that many farmers are turning to growing narcotics instead because it is far more profitable. Sure to make you angry, and guaranteed to make you think next time you pop into Starbucks - I suspect this one will be getting a lot more coverage shortly.

Another uneasy watch is MONKEY LOVE, a documentary commissioned by Channel 4 (so watch out for it on one of their digital channels soon). It concerns the activities of Harry Harlow, an American scientist who, back in the 1950s, began a series of experiments that set out to prove that monkeys can feel love. His results taught the world a great deal about how to raise children but were the benefits outweighed by the increasingly cruel nature of his experiments?

You're left to make up your own mind. The film doesn't go into all the gruesome detail about his more horrific experiments but tells enough that animal rights enthusiasts are sure to be disturbed. Provocative stuff.

CELTIC - THE IRISH CONNECTION is a documentary examining the Irish roots of the famous Glasgow football team. I should say up front that I am not a fan, but thought the subject would be interesting. Unfortunately the most interesting part of the story (Irish immigrants fleeing the great famine were greeted with hostility by Scots, leading to the formation of a charitable football club to aid them) is covered only briefly in the opening part of the film and from then on the film concentrates more on telling us how wonderful Celtic is.

Don't get me wrong, I expected something along those lines - the film is, after all, clearly not aimed at an audience of people like me so much as it is at Celtic fans - but the vision it presents is a little too unbalanced for my liking. Watching this film, you'd think that Celtic have been the innocent victims of anti-Catholic or anti-Irish bigotry ever since they were founded over a hundred years ago, and that they are being unfairly picked on by the rest of the country right up until today, including the media and the Scottish Football Association. While I admit there is still trouble with bigotry in Scotland, it seems wrong to paint it as universal or as being so one-sided, and this gives the film a faintly paranoid tone in places.

Again, I'd have expected this anyway since it is obviously aimed at Celtic fans, but regardless of who the intended audience is, there is no excuse for one of the comments that follows.

When discussing the persecution faced by Celtic's Neil Lennon when he joined the club (over his decision to play for Northern Ireland), it is correctly pointed out that the treatment he received (including death threats) was shocking. I freely admit that the treatment Lennon received was nothing short of disgraceful. However, one of the contributors to the film then states that when the other teams in Scotland play Celtic and their supporters boo Lennon, they are all booing him for the same reason.

This is a ridiculous accusation and no evidence is given to show that this is the case at all. By leaving such a statement in the film, essentially allowing one of the contributors to brand the rest of Scottish football's supporters as bigots, the director has taken the film from beyond a slight Celtic bias and turns it into what must be, in my humble opinion, an extremely irresponsible example of documentary filmmaking.

I did enjoy many of the other Irish films on offer however.
THE GHOSTS OF DUFFY'S CUT tells the story of 57 Irish settlers who moved to America during the great famine to find work and, within six weeks of arriving, were all dead, buried in an unmarked mass grave. Part documentary, part reconstruction, part ghost story, this tale of bigotry and fear finally tells the story of what happened to the men, a fate that was a mystery until very recently. The film was shot and shown in HD too, so it looked very nice indeed.

Enjoyable but not quite as impressive was THE CONNEMARA MONSTER, a film that details the attempts to locate a monster that is reported to lurk in the depths of a lake in Ireland. The film allows the audience to make up its own mind, but ultimately that's the biggest flaw - you come away from the film without really thinking any differently.

The most impressive of all the Irish films that I saw had to be BLOODY SUNDAY: A DERRY DIARY. This film chronicles (or attempts to chronicle) what happened on that day in 1972 when British paratroopers killed 13 unarmed civilians on a civil rights march in Derry, and charts the aftermath of events as well. The film analyses the original event, the controversial investigation that followed and the eyewitness accounts, building up to the new tribunal that was set up, whose results are expected early next year.

Sure to be controversial, the film is more balanced than I expected it to be. While the finger is still firmly pointed at the British soldiers, there still seems to be an element of doubt over one or two of the civilian eye witness stories too. The film ends by saying that more recordings will be made following the results of the tribunal, but the film is powerful enough as it stands.

The other two films I saw both concerned Africa. DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE wanders about a bit but essentially tells of how an experiment in a lake in Tanzania has resulted in a boom for consumers of fish in the developed world but ruined the ecology and lives of those who dwell there.

More impressive is Thierry Michel's documentary CONGO RIVER. The director follows a boat crew as they travel the length of the river, recounting the country's troubled history as they go along. Colonisation, famine, war, religion, politics... everything from tidal disasters to the excesses of Mobutu are covered by Michel, all the time using the river itself as a metaphorical timeline to explore the country's history and showing how the river itself is inextricably linked to the country's development.

I have no idea as yet if the two highlights, CONGO RIVER and BLOODY SUNDAY have been picked up for theatrical releases but if they are, seek them out. You heard it here first!