Variety (1983)

A young white woman sitting in a ticket booth for a porno theatre. The key image to Variety (1983) that I had in my head before watching it. New York city in its grimy, sleazy prime. “The old New York” is an idea that has been mythologised into nostalgia, often calcified (HBO’s The Deuce, for example). Going back to independent movies from this era function like documentaries – from The Driller Killer to Smithereens – and seeing NYC for what it is, the crummy looking apartments and working class in the meat packing districts, balancing out the punk scene and bohemian vibes. Bette Gordon’s film, Variety, exists at a cultural flashpoint with writer Kathy Acker contributing the screenplay, John Lurie making the score, and future indie film figures like Tom DiCillo and Christine Vachon involved in the production. Early roles for beloved character actors like Will Patton, Luis Guzman, and Mark Boone Junior. Even discovering in the closing credits that monologuist Spalding Gray was the voice of an obscene answering phone machine. A production budget combined from West German TV, Channel 4 UK and the New York State Council.

What struck me about Variety was that even if it is in the same milieu of something like Taxi Driver, it offers a counterpoint to the macho catholic mix of desire and repression when it comes to the sex industry. There’s something more ambivalent and ambiguous here. A transplant from the midwest, Christine (Sandy McLeod), hoping to be a writer but who needs money to get by. Her bartender friend Nan (photographer Nan Goldin) knows of a job, working the ticket booth in the porno theatre, Variety. There, Christine is accompanied by the upbeat theatre barker Jose (Guzman, so great), and finds herself killing time in the lobby on her breaks. While there is an aspect where Christine is affected by the adult movies and the furtive male customers walking in to watch, her desires are displaced into intrigue around a regular customer, Louie (Richard M. Davidson, almost has an Art Garfunkel vibe), a middle-aged man who dresses in a suit and speaks with a business-like reserve. As Christine’s reporter boyfriend Mark (Patton) talks mostly about his own investigative journalism, Christine begins to compulsively tell erotic stories, and in her off-hours, she secretly follows Louie on his business deals.

Despite the grimy atmosphere, there’s a playful quality to how director Bette Gordon uses montage, such as in a sequence cataloguing the porno theatre marquees, or editing together scenes of men shaking hands. There are creepy customers and the occasional seedy come-ons, but often the men stand silently and withdraw when Christine takes a smoke break in the theatre lobby, or wanders through an adult book shop. Variety connects to feminist debates around pornography and sexuality from the time, and on release was controversial in some circles, looking back at writing from Gordon around its release. McLeod is very good in the lead role, articulating a growing confidence as well as a loss of self, finding herself drawn into mysteries and role-playing. A neo-noir vibe permeates this slice-of-life character study of both an individual and a place, and the ambiguity around Christine’s descent into this world is liberating or totalising.

Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.

First Name: Carmen (1984)

Jean-Luc Godard in the 1980s is terrain I’ve always wanted to investigate. The French auteur coming back to narrative movies after the 1970s, retaining his experimentation and politics, and constantly assessed by reference to his fertile 1960s heyday aka “the fun stuff.” First Name: Carmen (1984) was the first from this 80s period that I watched and Godard references the 60s era himself, reviving a “lovers on the run” genre plot, deconstructing romance and crime much like his breakout movie, Breathless. He even throws himself in there as “Jean Godard”, a filmmaker who can’t get financing, resides in a care facility for the mentally unwell, and carries on as a cigar-smoking creep. The meta nature of Godard’s cynicism towards himself helps to balance his own wider cynicism towards everything else.

During First Name: Carmen, I kept feeling like there was something out of reach, wondering what this all means and to “get” what is going on. Upon reflection, that feels like a fool’s errand and in Godard’s closing dedication “in memoriam: small movies,” maybe it’s enough for a movie to be this unfocused as long as it moves and its under 90 minutes. The images are beautiful, the movie is never boring. It’s funny, horny and strange, and it feels free in its restlessness. A string quartet is filmed playing Beethoven. Nighttime shots of Parisian trains moving across a cityscape are scored to the squawk of seagulls. Lapping waves of a beach are constantly threaded through as visual tracks.

Carmen (Maruschka Detmers) is part of a quasi-revolutionary gang determined to kidnap and ransom a wealthy industrialist. Carmen’s own plan is to ask her filmmaker uncle (Godard as himself) to direct a documentary about the industrialist at a hotel as a cover for the kidnapping. This plan is itself a ruse to the film, which is more about Carmen and her lover Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffe), a guard who she meets during a bank heist. Initially shooting at each in the middle of this madcap, darkly slapstick sequence where customers are accidentally gunned down in the crossfire, the couple find themselves rolling around on the floor, and suddenly deciding to go on the run. Pushing and pulling at each other, often after disrobing, their shallow union is gifted presence by the actors’ physicality and their movements. There’s a particular close-up when they embrace by a hotel window, backed by soft light, and a romantic portrait is captured. Like, this is movie star romance. Did I anticipate the use of Tom Waits’ sweeping, sentimental ‘Ruby’s Arms’ in one sequence? No, I did not.

Poetic: pretentious. Romantic: sleazy. Empty: profound. Somewhere in between is Godard’s First Name: Carmen. Available on Mubi (US). Recommended.

The Lair Of The White Worm (1988)

Ever since I read about a scout’s unfortunate end – his own ‘end’ separated in a bathtub by the fangs of Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) – in a copy of Empire magazine as a wee slip of lad (I think as part of a weird section on unfortunate ends to male genitalia in the movies), I’d always been curious about The Lair Of The White Worm (1988). Directed by Ken Russell (The Devils) as part of a three-picture deal with Vestron Pictures and adapted from a Bram Stoker novel, this is ostensibly a gothic horror tale about a pagan snake-worshipping cult, surviving in the shape of the immortal Lady Marsh who lives in a countryside mansion. Everything kicks off due to a visiting archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) unearthing a snake skull from the grounds of a bed and breakfast inn run by two sisters (Sammi Davis and Catherine Oxenberg). One of the sisters is dating Lord James d’Ampton (Hugh Grant), a foppish gent who actually has family lineage with the knights who dispatched an ancient ‘worm’ that hid in the Stonerich Cavern, a cave on top of a mountain. Ancient worm, snake cult, lady with fangs – is this all connected? All of it is rendered as bawdy camp by director-writer Russell; even though it looks like he’s shooting on a budget of a countryside UK TV drama, he splashes everything with suggestive one-liners, sacrilegious dream sequences, and flaunted sexuality with all of the saxophone-scored costume changes and nude writhing of Donohoe as Lady Marsh. Seriously, Donohoe is indominitable as the stylish, sinister villain, and the movie had the great luck of having two great leads in baby faced Capaldi and Grant early in their careers. I knew this film was about snakes but was not prepared for all of the knowing allusions and references, right from a close-up of a hose on the ground, resembling a scaly creature in its yellow colour and texture, and complemented with a slithering sound effect. Completely ridiculous, but well aware and knowing, somewhere between Hammer Horror and Coppola’s Dracula in terms of horniness, shot with an undercurrent of screwball comedy. All I could do is shake my head and think, Ken Russell, you maniac. Streamed on Criterion Channel but available to rent/purchase on iTunes. Recommended.

The Iron Rose (1973)

The Iron Rose (1973; La Rose de Fer) is the third film I’ve seen from French director Jean Rollin, and along with Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco, their names represent a quintessential arty Euro-horror milieu. Rollin is known for low-budget genre flicks, usually concerning vampires, where there’s nudity and blood, and actors wandering around castles and shorelines. While offering some exploitation thrills with the sex and violence (and are often marred by dodgy moments), the films I’ve seen of Rollin’s are also marked by a dreamy atmosphere, usually generated by long takes and a static pace; even though his films never clock past 90 minutes, and are usually under that, they always lull me into a narcoleptic state. Some would argue that’s a flaw, but for me, and many of his fans, that’s part of the experience. That these films feel like a waking dream, accentuated by the locations and misty weather, and the potential for blood, poetic reverie and off-kilter theatrics. There’s something innately compelling about watching figures emerge slowly out of a foggy mist. The Iron Rose is apparently a rarity in Rollin’s work in that it doesn’t involve vampires. The plot is quite simple: a man (Hugues Quester) meets a woman (Francoise Pascal) at a wedding. They agree on a date. Wandering a deserted train track, they look for a more quiet location for their picnic and the man suggests visiting a graveyard. A morbid site for a date, and they pay the price for wanting to make it in a crypt, becoming lost and delirious as night comes and they cannot seem to find their way out amidst the graves. Yet there’s a deeper pull to the unfolding fear and panic, as the young lovers become tense and argumentative, and the woman becomes possessed with the dead and the beyond. There’s symbolism and portent, particularly in the title object of an iron rose, and Pascal is fantastic in conveying their character’s fateful transformation. The use of primary colours in the costuming – the man’s red sweater, the woman’s yellow top – stand out within the darkened landscapes, the gravestones and (purportedly real) bones. Self-financed, a strange passion project for Rollin that was not a critical or commercial success, but has now become a cult object within his overall output of erotic horror films. Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.

Videodrome (1983)

VHS tape might be an antiquated medium but writer-director David Cronenberg’s sick idea to fuse it with flesh ensures Videodrome (1983) has a long shelf-life as a body-horror sci-fi cult classic. Even if the technology featured is dated, from VCRs to cathode tube TVs to cable satellite dishes, the cold eroticism and sick intrigue of this movie complicates any techno-fear with techno-arousal; the medium is the message and the message is horny and depraved. Rick Baker’s grotesquely spectacular special effects, which emphasises the tactile and gooey means that everything has a distinct physicality as VHS tapes are inserted into stomachs and heads are swallowed up by TV screens in two of the film’s most iconic images. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself responding more and more to Cronenberg’s aesthetic and mood. In the past, there was always a slight remove, a chilly distance that he was renowned for as an auteur, ideas over heart, intellect over emotion. Yet as the world gets more and more grim, Cronenberg’s work remains prescient even if we’re in a world of streaming platforms and social media. James Woods is perfectly sleazy and intense as Max Renn, programmer for Channel 83, a Canadian TV station that is controversial for broadcasting violent, sexual content. His demand for “harder” stuff comes true with the mysterious Videodrome, a pirate feed that broadcasts anonymous dungeon torture. As Max starts to become addicted to it, along with his sadomasochistic lover, Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry, perfectly cast), he goes down the wormhole of secret wars between underground parties over the use of advanced technology that causes disturbing mental and physical effects. Much like Scanners, I love that these Cronenberg joints start from a chilly, boring sense of place and eventually unveil strange conspiracies and ghoulish ruptures, an eventual apocalyptic breakdown of body and mind. They also feel like the entry-point into a larger, speculative netherworld; Having just watched Scanners II and III, I wish there were similar direct-to-video over-the-top sequels that expanded the battle between Spectical Optical Corporation and the New Flesh acolytes. Foreboding score by Howard Shore that almost works as sound design at certain points. Available to rent on iTunes. Long live the new flesh. Recommended.