a woman in trouble, pt. 1 - norifumi suzuki's sex and fury & school of the holy beast

Reiko Ike prepares to fuck your fucking shit up in Sex and Fury (1973).

Amber's gonna hate this, but her excellent post on the great Frank Henenlotter's latest got me thinking about...Quentin Tarantino (yeah - sorry, Amber. First the postmodernism, and now this).

Here's why - it's hard to say what the exploitation flick, and it's many manifestations - say like Henenlotter's superweird and somewhat trashy-sexy exploration of desire and satisfaction, or blaxploitation, or chixploitation, or the more niche-y nunsploitation, or it's inbred cousin the rape n' revenge flick, or it's penpal from across the sea, Eurotrash - it's hard to say just what it is now, and a big part of that is the way people come to movies now: for instance, is DVD the rightful heir to the grindhouse theater? Was the exploitation flick the product of a cultural moment, now since evolved, and do we mostly see only more skillfully and artistically deployed variations on those themes? Or are the way exploitation filmmakers used to "emplot" their movies dressed up in layers of budget and big names?

Which brings me back to the Tarantino thing (and I promise, we're just about to get to the subject of this post) - if there's one truly remarkable thing about his pop culture phenom Kill Bill (2003) and the sequel, it's that he managed to introduce multiplex audiences (and reintroduce hepper peeps) to a kind of cinematic character type (albeit with zero calories and only some of the taste) that had only previously stalked second run houses in big cities or rural backwaters back in the day - self-made ladies who used their bodies, brains, and above all the strength of character to scale whatever walls a vulgar, hyperviolent and chauvanist world threw up in their way. Characters like Yumi Takagawa ("Maya") in School of the Holy Beast (1974) or the sparkling Reiko Ike ("Ocho") in Sex and Fury.

Your shit? She'll fuck
it up!


Actually, there are probably two chixploitation archetypes - the first show up onscreen as wily, hip, and rock solid women who'll likely stay that way the rest of the film (think Cleopatra Jones or Foxy Brown), while the other type ends up tested (and usually unclothed at some point) by events, only to emerge at the end of the film stronger, if a little more world-weary (think Coffy).

Ocho and Maya occupy the former category, though they were far from original archetypes even for Japanese moviegoers. But originality isn't exclusive to the exploitation subgenre - lots of times, it's all in the execution. Indeed, director Norifumi Suzuki is as much the star of these two films as his tough-gal leading ladies. The director had already been churning out a slate of voguish girl gang boss (sukeban) flicks and the four-film series Terrifying Girls' High School (1970-72) by the time Reiko Ike (who, because of a Traci Lordsish rumor she let slip, was one of Toei studio's most infamous stars) starred in Sex and Fury, and from a glorious nude sword fight (which is twice as genius if you consider it's shot and edited in a way that wouldn't offend Japanese censors)and an array of stunning visual sequences and set-ups, in a lot of ways the film represents a culmination of Norifumi Suzuki's outrageously arty style. And having Swedish sexpot Christina Lindberg tag a long as a secret agent and object du lust done up as an early anime-style Sweet Lolita doesn't hurt either.

(as they say in teeveeland, "to be continued in part two...")

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it...

So, Mr. A-train assigned me a choice of three films - Thriller! A Cruel Picture, Series 7: The Contenders and Ang Lee's Hulk. I mention Ang Lee and not the other directors for a reason, but I'll get to that. I decided to watch all three and decide which one I wanted to review and decided the best thing is to do them all together in ascending order of interest (and quality).


Let's start with Thriller! A Cruel Picture. This film is cheap and exploitative but it's just not as good or enjoyable as I want from my cheap exploitation. I saw the "rated" cut without the notorious penetrative sex scenes but I don't think they would've added anything to the film but some titillation. It's a fairly standard issue revenge picture, with the trauma our heroine endures quite extreme - rape at a young age rendering her mute, then she's kidnapped, forcibly addicted to drugs, forced into prostitution, and ties with her family are severed without her knowledge. And if any cinematic heft were given to the proceedings I might have thought more of the film, might have cared one way or the other about whether she killed off her tormentors. But over and over the implausibility of the film, the concern for making sure you get to see gunfire, cars racing, and Scandinavian kung fu action without bothering with things like character development all get in the way of simply letting the plot progress. And sordid penetration scenes would only have hindered the telling, if you ask me. Anyway, it never builds a head of steam. "One Eye"'s muteness - not just her inability to speak, but her downright refusal to communicate in any form whatsoever with either characters or audience - puts a barrier between the viewer and the character in a way that the similarly brutal and nasty I Spit On your Grave, for example, does not. A shame, because as exploitative fare, this has all the earmarks of a winner.

Next up is Series 7: The Contenders, a film that let me down in a similar way. It's smarter filmmaking by far than Thriller! but no more successful at putting across something more than just what you see on screen. The film opens by giving us a recap of a program we're about to watch in which six contestants have to kill each other on the show. Last one alive wins. No prize is mentioned, except the occasional reference to "The prize? Your life!"; no rationale is mentioned as to why anyone except the suicidal central male character would want to participate. Are the contestants forced to play as punishment? Do they win anything except a return to the show? Some explanation is necessary, but none is forthcoming from the actual text of the film - you're left to make up your own mind about the reasons and the consequences of things. The predominant idea in readings of the film seems to be that this is a critique of society's love affair with reality TV. But there's not any contextualization of the show that might lend itself to that. There's no narration explaining how the show came about, who might be on it, anything like that that might give a clue as to why we're watching it - even commercial breaks would've given a welcome context (think Robocop here and how those commercials helped set the tone of the world they existed in). Instead we just watch the show, without even the benefit of having seen previous series to let us root for Dawn. Director Minahan has the look and feel down, but not the point. If he's really trying to offer a critique, an ironic look at these shows, he'd do better to understand what some people get out of them or why people choose to appear on them. Any season of Survivor offers more intereting human interactions than this film. It's a shame, because he does give the viewer enough to suggest that he could've gone into interesting areas: about mass media, about the right-to-die, about homophobia, even about abortion, all of which are brought up (or at least insinuated) within the film and then dropped cold. This film let me down in a way that Thriller! didn't because I expected nothing of the sort from that film. This one hints that it might be saying something but doesn't take it to a point where you actually get to see what it might be saying. Instead you're left watching a reality show, and not a terribly interesting one at that.

Which brings us to Ang Lee's Hulk, by far the best of the films A-Train asked me to peruse. Is it Lee's finest film? No, not by a long shot, but it's still another exploration of some of the themes that interest him. He's drawn over and over to the tragic love story and this one's no exception. Think of how often he sets up a relationship based on unrequited passion that can never be fully embraced: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, Lust, Caution - it's even a sideline in The Ice Storm with the swinging couples that aren't happy in their own marriages but won't leave them for the other partners they're interested in. Here Eric Bana's Bruce Banner buries his passions deep for fear that they might turn him into the Hulk. Even before he's actually become the Hulk the fear is there preventing him from any passionate display, and this is the fact that Ang Lee keys in on and explores throughout the film. It's almost like he's showing the flipside of what the surrealists called l'amour fou - where they wanted to explore their unbound desires and passions through their art, Lee has made a career of exploring what happens (always tragic) when you refuse to let that passion out. Coupled with this is the generational conflict (or rather, generational disconnect) that's also common to his films. Father and son clash here (quite literally at the end), with Nick Nolte's nice turn as the father claiming to do what he feels is best for his child at the expense of the child's own thoughts, feelings, and development, a claim shown up as purely selfish from early on in the film. Meanwhile there's the parallel story with Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliott drawing out a similar parent-child relationship fraught with mistrust and anger rooted in the past, though it's given a possibly heathly outcome. Lee has explored these idea more fruitfully in other films, but I still enjoy Hulk quite a bit. He uses comic book styled transitions masterfully, he's worked from a palette of appropriately comic-booky colors and design (mise-en-scene if you prefer), taken characters with recognizable issues and conflicts and put them into the larger-than life world of the comic book, the same way he planted similarly believable characters into the fantastic world of flying kung-fu or the romantic melodrama of a pair of cowboys. The only real problem with Hulk, I think, is that where Lee can be sublime, this one's louder, brigher, more in-your-face (though hardly as bombastic as it easily could've been, or as some fans might have wanted it to be). The effect might be off-putting to some, but to me it's just another facet of the continuing saga of Lee's tragic romances.