Flaming Creatures

Flaming Creatures

1963

Director: Jack Smith

Starring: Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Mario Montez

What… the… fuck.  I mean really.  What the hell is this movie.

From what I can tell, this brief but all too painful film is divided essentially into four acts.  In the first one, people obsessively put on lipstick while a narrator talks about lipstick.  And then penises.  In the second act, a woman (Sheila Bick) is… raped, I guess, and there’s an orgy and an earthquake.  And then penises.  In the third act, a different woman – well, drag queen (Markman) – rises from a coffin and blunders around feeling various penises.  And in the fourth act, aforementioned drag queen dances by spinning around in a circle while a different drag queen (Montez) does a tango.  No penises at the end, actually.

Sound awful?  Yeah, it is.  The film has virtually no lines; all the spoken dialogue is in the first eight minutes or so, and all of it is voiceover.  And has nothing to do with the images we see on the screen, save for the fetishistic sequence where everyone puts on obscene amounts of lipstick.  After that point, director Smith completely throws out the idea of any sort of conversation and we just get images. 

 

Now, I am not the type of movie fan who absolutely needs a solid narrative all the time – Koyaanisqatsi is proof that a compelling movie can be made without anything resembling a storyline – but I usually require that the images I’m seeing in place of plot must be something special.  And in Flaming Creatures, the images are of such poor quality that the whole experience bellyflops faster than you can say “pornography.”  Apparently, Smith purposely used out-of-date filmstock.  To make a “statement.”  So not only do we have bizarre acts being shown that are not tied together in any way whatsoever, you are now straining to make out what is actually going on (even though none of it really matters) because the film itself is decomposing.

There’s a joke in there somewhere about this movie being so bad that the actual filmstock tried to destroy itself, I know there is…

  

What staggers me most is that when I read the entry for Flaming Creatures in 1001 Movies, it positively waxed rhapsodic about the “beautiful” “gauzy” images, how the film is essentially a feast for the eyes… wait, WHAT?  Flaming Creatures isn’t so much “beautiful” as it is “barely coherent,” and I mean that in the visual sense, not even the narrative sense.  We blur in and out, get too much white and then too much black in the shots, and the whole thing just feels messy, as if Smith set up the camera and then left the room and one of his drunken friends took over while everyone was passed out.  Not once while watching this did I consider it “beautiful.”  Clunky, awkward, ridiculous, and amateurish, yes; beautiful, no.

I have never had to vet the screen images to ensure they are SFW more than I have for this film.

And oh, the nudity.

I mean honestly, when does art become porn, and vice versa?  Because when you see someone wearing a ridiculous amount of lipstick wanking off in a room filled with comatose bodies while someone else is jiggling a very large boob straight to the camera, you really start to think to yourself that you’ve crossed that line. 

Nothing like a film filled with penii sporting semis.

And in the final act of the film, the bit with the drag queen Spanish dancer and the only section of the film that was NOT removed from youtube due to explicit content violations, the actors dance by simply twirling in place.  Really.  It’s ten goddamn minutes of watching people spin.  From different angles, sure, but spinning.  All I could think of was The Simpsons Halloween episode where Kang and Kodos take over the bodies of Bob Dole and Bill Clinton and say, “always twirling, twirling, TWIRLING!”  

This right here = more compelling than Flaming Creatures

I don’t know.  I mean honestly, I just don’t know.  I’m incredibly generous towards the “Must See” handle our precious tome claims.  Hell, even with films that I don’t personally like (cough – Titanic – cough) I usually understand why, for one reason or another, they are considered “Must See.”  But I swear to fuck, there is absolutely no reason to see Flaming Creatures before you die.  Absolutely none.

Arbitrary Rating: 1/10.  And we have a winner!  Lowest rated film ever!

Blonde Cobra

 

Blonde Cobra

1963

Director: Ken Jacobs

Starring: Jack Smith

So I realized that I had been posting lately about many films that I really enjoyed.  My average ratings have been rather high.  While I certainly fully and freely enjoy film and make no apologies for liking many movies, I also did not want to give anyone the impression that I automatically like every movie I see. 

I am remedying my glut of positive reviews by writing about Blonde Cobra, aka one of the most inane pieces of shit I think I’ve ever seen.

The film has no plot.  Instead, we simply have footage of performer Jack Smith acting in various ways.  The film “treats” us to two of Smith’s main types of performances.  Either he’s traipsing around his New York City apartment in garish costumes and mugging for the camera, or the screen is black and Smith is telling rambling barely coherent stories. 

Yup, that’s this “movie.”

 

I’m honestly not sure what was worse: the incredibly grainy, shaky, and poor footage of Smith wearing god-knows-what and smiling slyly for the camera while completely unrelated sound bites play over the scene, or when the camera goes black and we get “treated” to one of Smith’s tangential tales rattled off in his nasal monotone voice.  Actually, I think the former was worse, because at least when Smith was telling one of his completely random stories, I was able to do other things, like check my email for the sixth time during the 33-minute run time or reblog a post or seven on tumblr.  And when Smith starts cackling maniacally in said monologues, I at least laugh, but not because it’s funny; rather, I laugh in the way I’d laugh at a madman if he started laughing at me.  I think if I go along with him, I’ll keep the insane guy placated well enough to distract him from the fact that I am currently calling the cops on his nutso ass.  The nice men with the large butterfly nets will be here momentarily, Jack.

The write up for this in 1001 Movies states that it’s an “alluring portrait of the improvisational talents of a great experimental performer.”  I can empirically understand that films showcasing the abilities of significant personalities deserve a slot on a must-see list, but here’s my big beef with this idea in terms of Blonde Cobra: I have no fucking clue who Jack Smith is.  Why on earth do I want to watch 33 minutes of him in a gypsy headpiece and not much else hiding in his bathtub?  I had never heard the name Jack Smith before I embarked on my journey through 1001 Movies, and while I am sure he is a “very important underground performer,” he means nothing to me.  In fact, now that I’ve gone through the films of the sixties, this is what I know about Jack Smith: he’s on camera in Blonde Cobra, and responsible for the utter dreck that is Flaming Creatures, a film I liked even less than this one.  My opinion of him is not terribly high.

  

I will now be very fair to Blonde Cobra and state that it is most definitely an experimental film, and I am not a fan of experimental film.  I am predisposed to disliking it, and I completely admit to not understanding it.  My opinion of it is thusly colored.  Feel free to consider me a plebeian for not enjoying this film.  I’m okay with that. 

I try very hard to understand why every film granted a berth in 1001 Movies is deserving of its spot, and I think I tend to be very forgiving.  I’m still a bit at a loss as to why Blonde Cobra is considered “must-see.”

So utterly not my cup of tea.

Arbitrary Rating: 2/10.

Shock Corridor

Shock Corridor
1963
Director: Samuel Fuller
Starring: Peter Breck, Constance Towers

Movies like Shock Corridor reinforce in me the notion that giving a picture a second chance is sometimes the best thing in the world. My initial impression of this movie several years ago could be summed up by “halfway decent B picture.” Now I feel as though I have more of a handle on what Samuel Fuller is all about as a writer-director, and seeing Shock Corridor for the second time, I enjoyed it much more.

The slightly hackneyed plot is all about Johnny Barrett (Breck), a reporter willing to do anything it takes to win a Pulitzer Prize. The way he’s planning on getting his hands on it is by coercing his stripper girlfriend Cathy (Towers) into pretending to be his sister, then having her commit him to a mental hospital on the trumped up charges of incestual fetishism. Once there, he can investigate the three mentally disturbed witnesses to a murder at said hospital. Everything goes according to plan, except for the wee little hiccup that Johnny starts to lose his own grasp on reality the more time he spends as a patient.

To me, a Samuel Fuller film means grotesque beauty, great play with high contrast lighting and shadows, uncomfortable situations, and characters who are played to absolute extremes. With that in mind, it makes total sense that Fuller made a movie set in a mental hospital. I can almost feel his giddiness, rubbing his sweaty palms together and giggling at the insanity (pun intended) he’s about to unleash. This attitude just leaps off the screen.

The Great Escape

The Great Escape

1963  

Director: John Sturges  

Starring: Steve McQueen, David Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Garner, James Coburn, Donald Pleasence, and lots and lots of other men.

When you think “Nazi POW film,” you don’t really think of a light-hearted romp. And yet, while I would refrain from calling The Great Escape a comedy, there is a levity to it that is both refreshing and wildly unexpected. That is one of the biggest reasons I love this film.

Sick of dealing with repeated escape attempts at other prisons, the Germans, rather unwisely, round up all the major POW escape artists and put them all in the same camp. Lead by their appointed commander “Big X,” (Attenborough) a grand plan to attempt to move 250 prisoners out of the camp at once begins to form. The film follows the construction of three separate escape tunnels, the escape itself (not really a spoiler, the title of the film gives that away), and the fates of the escaped POWs.

This is a war film unlike so many other war films. For one thing, we know the backstory of almost none of the characters. Steve McQueen’s Hilts mentions that he went to college for chemical engineering (a big woot from the chemistry teacher for that one!) and joined up after that, but that’s about it. We are not subjected to long winded speeches of “Before the war, I blah blah blah, and now that I’m here, I have to escape to get back to blah blah bloobity blah.” These men are not motivated by their desire to return to previous lives, but rather, by the simple need to escape. They cannot and will not accept being penned against their will. As their commander says, they will try to escape because it will tie up German resources fighting them, thus diverting the forces from the Allied Front.