films, page 25 of 31

I distinctly remember seeing this film in the old East Grinstead cinema, probably as the B-movie to some more major film. The trouble is, it was released in 1973, which would have made me about 2 years old at the time, so perhaps it was a re-release I saw, or it just took a while to reach these shores from France, where it was originally released as La Planète sauvage.

The reason it stuck in my memory was that I wasn’t feeling too well at the time, having something of a stomach upset, and I had to leave the cinema when there was scene of two alien Draags sucking little particles of food from a big yellow cloud, which made me feel queasy! Since then, every so often I’ve wondered just what was that film with that scene in? (Also what was the B-movie which had no dialogue, just a long battle between two medieval knights, one all in black?) And then along came the answer, released on DVD.

Fantastic Planet is a French animation created by director René Laloux and French/Polish artist/writer Roland Topor (whose novel, The Tenant, has just been re-released with an intro by a favourite author of mine, Thomas Ligotti — funny how these things connect). It’s fantasy/SF with an obvious sixties psychedelic feel, not to mention an unintentional hint of Monty Python, as, at the start, we see a woman running in fear through a sparse forest before being toyed with and captured by an enormous blue hand. The blue hand proves to be that of a Draag, the native giant race of this planet, who imported human beings (called Oms — hommes in French, geddit?) as pets, only to find them escaping into the wild and breeding like rabbits. As a result, every three years there has to be a de-omming by a series of nightmare devices, like the sticky spheres in the pic below.

The first half of the film follows a young Om as he grows up pet to a female Graak child, being dressed up in ridiculous clothes and subjected to various unintentional cruelties, till he escapes, taking with him one of the Draags’ automatic learning devices. He is found by a group of wild humans who use the learning device in their battle for freedom, culminating in a rocket journey to the “Savage Planet” which orbits the Draags’ home planet, and which the Draags visit regularly via meditation.

Along the way, there’s some pretty trippy visuals, including a scene of four Draags entering a meditative state where first their clothes change colours, then their bodies transmute into abstract shapes. The Draags’ planet is full of animate vegetation and creatures that prey on the Oms, lapping them up with sticky tongues like the ants they are, giving the setting a real Bosch-like feeling. The soundtrack (playable in isolation on the DVD) is rather typical of the era, aiming to transport you to another planet with its ethereal, oohy vocals and heavily chorused organs, but regularly dumping you firmly in the sixties when it brings in a funky wah-wah guitar or (worst of all) a rather clichéd sax solo for the moment when one of the Om females does a strip-tease as part of the wild humans’ religious rites.

Interesting to see it again after all this time, though.

Haven’t been to the cinema for a while, so I gave into the urge and went to see The Prestige, mainly because it’s based on a book by Christopher Priest, a writer I’ve always thought I’d like but haven’t got round to reading yet. (His The Glamour is on my to-read shelf.)

I’d heard a bit of criticism about the film of The Prestige — about David Bowie’s accent in his role as Nikola Tesla (or Nikolas, according to the IMDB), and about the twist at the end — so was prepared not to be bowled over, but actually I think this is an excellent film.

David Bowie’s accent aside — I wouldn’t say it’s as execrable as Mark Kermode seems to think it is — I think the main thing to bear in mind if you’re tempted to go and see this film (and I’d recommend it) is that you shouldn’t think of it as a twist-at-the-end tale. The thing that sets it apart from a film like, say, M Night Shyamalan’s Signs, which was nothing but a twist-at-the-end story, meaning that when the twist occurred you (or at least I) felt you’d just been mildly distracted for the last hour and half but nothing more, The Prestige‘s end of the film revelations add a whole new layer of emotional meaning to what went before. Obviously I’m not going to say what happens at the end, but even if you guess it before it happens (as I, slowly, did), it only adds to what is, anyway, an incredible tale about obsession, rivalry, and the destructive dedication to one’s art above all things.

Haze is a short (40 minute) horror film from Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, who also perpetrated that most harrowing of Asian horrors, Tetsuo (1989) about a man whose flesh sprouts metallic tentacles.

Haze has a similarly nightmarish quality. A man wakes up to find himself incarcerated in a subterranean concrete maze in almost complete darkness. The maze he works his way through is made up of a series of tortuous (and torturous) crawlspaces, which force him to contort himself claustrophobically, often at danger of injury. In one sequence, for instance, he has to shuffle sideways through an extremely narrow corridor. Barbed wire has been laid where his heels would naturally fall, so he has to do his shuffling on tiptoes. And, as if this weren’t enough, a thick metal pipe runs along the corridor, and the only way he can fit into the space is by opening his mouth as wide as possible and grinding his teeth along the pipe as he moves.

This last detail seems a bit forced, as surely all he’d have to do is turn his head? But the best way to watch a film like Haze is discard logic and accept it, just as you’re forced to accept one of your own nightmares till you wake up. At various points the man catches glimpses, through small apertures, of a room where people are being chopped up. He finally meets a woman who’s also trying to get out and the two are forced to make their way down a corridor almost fully submerged in water and floating body parts.

As a brief nightmare, the film works, but is let down by its attempt at an ending. The man speculates on why he’s in this horrific situation, wondering if he’s being punished after some terrible war, or if a millionaire has constructed this underground dungeon for his own perverse amusement. This speculation just serves to get the viewer expecting some sort of satisfying explanation, but in the end (if I’m interpreting the very brief & tacked-on ending right) it turns out to be a sort of pain-induced semi-conscious dream as the man struggles his way back to consciousness having been injured. So it was all “just a dream”, which is hardly satisfying. But I think the best way to enjoy (if enjoy is the right word) a film like this is to forget the ending and just accept it for the Pit & Pendulum-style nightmare that it is.