Category: Videodrome

Rather than become a pillar of blaxploitation, Trouble Man has been abated to a cinematic footnote of the subgenre. But the impeccable soundtrack from Gaye deserves to be held in the same regard as other blaxploitation soundtracks ranging from Edwin Starr to Bobby Womack. It’s not only one of the best soundtracks you don’t hear enough about, but one of the paramount releases of Gaye’s prolific career, emblazoning him as a musical jack of all trades and a master of all of them.

Tokyo Drifter is undoubtedly a pop film, and like the greatest pop songs, its limitations birthed its originality. Despite a muddled script adapted from pop-song lyrics, a meager budget, and a draconian studio system, Suzuki managed to outmaneuver his dire circumstances, producing a film that was even more glossy and fashionable than if he had twice or triple the budget and time. It’s pure spectacle for the sake of spectacle, an idiom of sixties pop culture that – like any great pop chorus – invites you to sing along with it.

In this installment of Videodrome, Stephen Lee Naish examines the sinister and dangerous representation of urban spaces in cinema. From comedies like Adventures of Babysitting to Taxi Driver, The Warriors, and Cosmopolis, he explores how film filters our own sense of danger and makes the city a strange and intriguing place—and a hellscape once night falls.

Blue Sunshine is one of the rare 1970s films you may find filed underneath “Horror” or “Cult” or “Exploitation” that has no nudity, just a few drops of blood, and PG-rated language. It’s an odd feat for a low-budget film based around homicidal maniacs killing people because of unregulated drug use. But Blue Sunshine’s horror doesn’t stem from gore and carnage as much as an undercurrent of paranoid psychosis, a reflection of the time it was released.

However one chooses to interpret the thematic message, part of Tetsuo’s lasting endurance is that it can be enjoyed on a purely visceral level. If you tear away all of the percolating themes, Tetsuo is a pure emulation of the sci-fi and horror content Tsukamoto grew up watching and reading. It’s a love letter to the kaiju films of Toho Studios as well as a continuum of Japanese horror; ironically dubbed “the most metal film ever made

Candy Mountain is in many ways a strange film, but it makes perfect sense in the context of Robert Frank’s life. Perhaps the strangest thing about the movie is that it was made in 1987, and not ten or twenty years earlier.

1975’s Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope defies categorization. It’s not that the film is confused; it simply doesn’t care to fit into a box. Throughout its brisk eighty-six minutes, it weaves in and out of elements of hardboiled thrillers, superhero flicks, espionage conspiracies, paranormal occultism, sleazy soft-core porn, and pulpy noir. It’s a chaotic piece of pop-art, filled with surreal lighting cues, vibrant dutch-angles, and bursts of ultra-violence and sexuality, bursting at the frames with a kind of kitschy, hyper-stylization usually reserved for comic books.

Between 1972 and 1985, Dennis Hopper was persona non grata in mainstream Hollywood circles. As Hopper was unable to score a decent mainstream acting gig in American cinema, he headed to West Germany to appear as a disheveled and burned-out music manager in German director Roland Klick’s White Star (1984).

As a coherent film, White Star might not hang together, but it offers a lucid experience of Hopper’s dangerous, real-life psychological decay, and his own persona bleeding into his character’s wild nature.

In many ways, 1982’s Vigilante is the scrappy kid brother of Death Wish. But its approach is leaner and meaner, rough around the edges and unvarnished. There’s a primal and animalistic undercurrent to Vigilante, grittier and sleazier then the Death Wish franchise or any of its “revengeplotation” contemporaries. The visual aesthetic and thematic philosophy is exploitative and nihilistic; ice in its veins and hate in its heart.

Welcome to Videodrome. A recurring column plumbing the depths of vintage and contemporary cinema – from cult, exploitation, trash and grindhouse to sci-fi, horror, noir, documentary and beyond.

The Holy Mountain is offensive and grotesque in the same breath that it’s beautiful and transcendent, challenging all methods of interpretation and blowing the doors off meta-narratives in its rejection of form. It’s as subversive and tripped-out as any contemporary piece of media, serving as a gateway drug into the hardcore realm of mind-bending world cinema.

The Last Tycoon seems to view the fabled “hero’s journey” of Hollywood storytelling as a pandering lie; a disingenuous roadmap to regurgitate while navigating narratives, as phony to the audience as it is to the real life of the people who make the kinds of films that propagate it. It presents a contrarian disposition to the cinematic tradition of happy endings that works on a meta-level, unapologetically concluding itself in sorrow and confusion.

Considered a monumental flop at the time of its release, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie has since developed a vehement cult following. It’s widely regarded as one of John Cassavetes’ best films and Ben Gazzara’s greatest on-screen performance. Part of the delayed attraction may be that audiences have finally caught up to what Cassavetes was attempting to do. At a time when other American directors such as Coppola and Scorsese were releasing films that would serve as the consummate blueprint for future genre films, Cassavetes was already eradicating pre-conceived narrative standards and deconstructing archetypical characters, searching for the unaffected moments where these histrionic gangsters and gamblers could be vulnerable, flawed, and resolutely human.

Welcome to Videodrome. A recurring column plumbing the depths of vintage and contemporary cinema – from cult, exploitation, trash and grindhouse to sci-fi, horror, noir, documentary and beyond.