Quote: “Eaten Alive” is director Tobe Hooper’s 1977 follow up to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974). While it is still a horror film that takes place in the deep South, it is a much different kind of film, and much like “Texas Chain Saw’s” first sequel, deals with a lot of humor, as well as over-the-top violence.
The story starts with an awkward semi-rape scene involving Buck (played by a young Robert Englund) and a young prostitute. Englund has said that the Japanese version of this opening sequence inserted images of a stunt double’s genitalia, though the American version was more tame.Read More »
Quote: “A filmmaker and academic, Stephane Marti has pursued cinema as a visual art form, divorced from the codes of the dominant narrative cinema, since 1976. He is a passionate and militant advocate of Super-8, a filmmaking tool which he has used for 30 years.
His work has been shown in festivals and international presentations and has elicited numerous articles and interviews. His flamboyant, baroque and sensual style focuses principally on the Body and the Sacred.Read More »
Quote: Two writers and their girlfriends visit the castle of an actor who specializes in playing vampire roles. As the night progresses, they begin to wonder if the man is an actor playing a vampire, or a vampire playing an actor.Read More »
Underground filmmaker Amos Poe (“Blank Generation”) wrote and directed this punk-flavored thriller about a terrorist agent whose mission in New York exposes him to constant danger and a bizarre array of friends and enemies. Eric Mitchell, Patti Astor star, with appearances by The Cramps and Debbie Harry.Read More »
“Living (1971), Zwartjes’ own favourite film is the much praised climax of his series Home Sweet Home, in which he explores the rooms of his new house in The Hague. ‘Living has this weird, indefinable atmosphere’, Zwartjes said in an interview. ‘The strange way people move around and the whining music with it…’ The film is a demonstration of Zwartjes’ virtuoso camera work. He plays the main character and at the same time operates the camera, which is hand-held while he films himself. Zwartjes: ‘I was strong as a horse in those days.’ Two persons, Zwartjes and his wife Trix, move aimlessly through the house. Living was filmed with an extremely wide-angle lens (a 5.7) that suggests a powerful atmosphere of alienation.”Read More »
Lina Wertmüller’s harrowing 1976 film stars Giancarlo Giannini as a petty crook with seven unattractive sisters to support, and it features a picaresque, World War II-era journey through a prison asylum, army service, and a Nazi concentration camp. Wertmüller is more indulgent in highbrow sadomasochism than she is real profundity, but there’s no denying that the film is powerful in its story of subjugation and survival. A climactic scene in which Giannini saves his skin at the camp by seducing its disgusting female commandant is unnervingly honest. Giannini became a ’70s international icon partially on the basis of this work.Read More »
SYNOPSIS With Zerkalo (The Mirror), legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky crafts perhaps his most profound and compelling film. What started off for Tarkovsky as a planned series of interviews with his own mother evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Time shifts and generations merge as a single extraordinary actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays the narrator’s former wife as well as his mother. Tarkovsky’s memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of Tarkovsky’s father reading his own elegiac poetry. The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is captured by Tarkovsky’s camera as if by magic–the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a wheat field–all creating indelible images with deep if mysterious emotional resonance. As the timeline shifts between the narrator’s generation and his mother’s, newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs, and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present, and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panopticon of memory, history, and nature. (Rotten Tomatoes)Read More »
Synopsis: In this third sequel to “Planet of the Apes,” the apes turn the tables on the human Earth population when they lead a revolt against their cruel masters in the distant year of 1990. By doing this it creates the time loop that leads to the first film. “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” is cinematically etched in broad, brash strokes slashing social satire and science fiction suspense with large-scale spectacle.Read More »
Clarke Fountain, allmovie.com wrote: Rather than being just another exploitation documentary, designed to re-use footage from unprofitable porn films, this feature explores the social circumstances which gave rise to the legend of the “snuff” film, and the conditions present (in 1976) in the porn film industry in general. Sex performers and all the others involved in making such films are interviewed about their work and why they do it. The filmmaker, himself well-known for making “soft”-porn films, was so incensed by the snuff-film trend that he made this exposé of the hard-core pornography industry. The Evolution of Snuff includes a forward by Roman Polanski, who was experiencing legal difficulties in the U.S. at the time.Read More »
