POMO

Before seeing Year of the Devil, I had no idea who Jarek Nohavica was. I was slightly confused after the end of the film but, at the same time, I found that a certain fluid mysteriousness and magic of personality had been created around Nohavica. And still today, I can’t wait to get the opportunity someday to interview him, for example. Whatever he may actually be, I will never be able to see him again separate from the feelings that this fine film evoked in me with regard to him.

The most crystalline, pure, almost virginally transparent and hare-brained Lucio Fulci movie. But I mean that in a good way. Zombie 2 is the most endearing horror bullshit and the first Euro-trash flick that I really fell in love with. The exotic tropical island setting, the seductive sexual undertone, the dumb dialogue, the mordant gore repulsiveness, the cheesy synth “midi music” by Fabio Frizzi and some really over-the-top zombie masks. The underwater fight between a zombie and a shark is incredible!

The Hunted is a B-movie with kung-fu elements that is in no way original or interesting. Well, except for the massacre of passengers on a moving train. You just don’t see anything like that!

A Victorian house that is one of the seven gates to hell and a pretty blonde New Yorker who wants to live in it after it has stood empty for a long time. In various interviews, Lucio Fulci himself says that this is an impressionistic film and the plot is secondary. However, the movie also has plot fundamentals and is only (richly) adorned with surrealistic interludes. Its greatest asset is its atmosphere and, for Fulci, a surprisingly elegant stylishness, which is achieved with great cinematography and dark music (with the exception of the appalling central motif). The latex effects are mostly deplorable. However, the film’s biggest drawback is the disastrous script, which is full of holes that cannot be explained away even by Fulci’s alibi about the film’s impressionistic nature. And the lumbering climax in the hospital could also have been brisker and more suspenseful.

My Brother Tom is a very emotional and nicely made low-budget indie film about the relationship of two outsiders (a boy and a girl) who escape from their painful real world into “their own” forest and indulge in liberatingly crazy behaviour. Their strong bond of friendship never transitions into a sexual relationship. This is a very humane and open yet extremely sad and depressing drama that – like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark – will tear you apart emotionally. Shot with a digital, authentically shaky camera.

A hardcore underground experiment. The main subject: The search for oneself and the means of salvation from crushing loneliness. The main role in the film is played by the association of sex with death and the fetishistic obsession with “dead matter” in the form of human and animal entrails. The psychedelic wandering between reality, dreams and visions is underscored by cheap-sounding but surprisingly effective and compelling music – it’s literally beautiful in the romantic passages (piano). The violence in the film is not gratuitous, as it fulfils the role of symbolism expressing the state of the main character’s mental processes. The film is hindered by the cringeworthy acting in its reality-based (non-dream) storyline, which devalues its presentation as a work of art. In any case, it is a strongly emotional, morally deviant film requiring a significant degree of detachment and free-thinking tolerance. If you look at it through such a lens, you will be superbly entertained by the absurd splatter slapstick and you will be moved by the beautiful love scenes with the skeletal, half-decayed corpse. As I was expecting cheap, gratuitous repulsiveness, I was pleasantly surprised by Nekromantik.

An amateurish, very naturalistic and coarse film about a brutal rape and the subsequent bloody revenge taken in response. No music, no characterization of the characters, no inhibitions in depicting violence. Great sexual openness. Also absolutely zero atmosphere or poetics, terrible dialogue and some of the worst acting I have ever seen. Rating it on it’s filmmaking merits, calling it “garbage” would be giving it too much praise. However, rating it from the perspective of how it affected me, I’m giving it one star. This is a film that you have to watch alone, in the company of only your own intimacy and your television screen. Only then will you give free rein to your voyeurism, your deeply hidden natural cruelty and your longing for violence, subconsciously justifying it to yourself with the word justice.

Even as a simple but effective action movie (see Broken Arrow), Windtalkers would be too slow and ponderous by today’s standards. However, it doesn’t want to be a simple action movie, so it mixes Native American spiritualism and humanism into the firefights and explosions. And it does so to such an extent that the result tastes like a rotten apple. That Native spiritualism is actually quite unbelievable and is in contrast with the gratuitous nature of the heroic action scenes (slow-motion shots of Nicolas Cage after his successful one-man-show action scenes). The gratuitous action scenes also conflict with the whole humanistic level of the film, which is diminished by the depiction of the Japanese as a race worthy of damnation. In short, it is neither proper action in the style of Black Hawk Down nor “something more” in the style of Saving Private Ryan. Someone here either didn’t know what they wanted to make or they just fucked up.

Play It to the Bone is a would-be psychological road movie about two complex-ridden boxers travelling across America on their way to a big fight. Along the way, they attempt to resolve each other’s long-hidden personal problems. Due to their inability to communicate openly, they fail to do so and end up “solving” everything in the ring, with boxing gloves on. This is a terrible film with terrible characters that only a bored social worker could care about.

Daylight is damned failure with lapses in logic and a lack of originality, but it’s pleasantly surprising in the end. It was pleasing that Sylvester Stallone didn’t play just another action hero in it, but a likable flesh-and-blood rescuer. It was also pleasing to see that the whole film is not just another action flick, but a decently built-up thriller about overcoming obstacles in finding the way out of hell. And in technical terms, it’s excellent (the bombastic explosion at the beginning!). In short, it’s a small, unassuming but satisfying disaster movie that offered more than I had expected from it.