KARAOKE TERROR (2003) - from the author of AUDITION

KARAOKE TERROR
(2003, Japan, Shôwa kayô daizenshû)

I think he got the point...

This darkly humorous satire of suburban Japan grabs the viewer quickly and stays intriguing to the end. A sunnier, small scale Fight Club, with singing. I shouldn't really try to categorise the unique story, but I certainly enjoyed it. Knowing nothing about Karaoke Terror was a good way to go in...


For the first few minutes I thought I was going to get another Linda Linda Linda, as a group of slackers performed some very bad karaoke in matching costumes, wearing bowler hats that seemed to reference A Clockwork Orange.

But the story soon kicks off when one of their group randomly murders a middle-aged woman on the outskirts of Tokyo. It's nasty, but with just a little too much gushing blood to be totally serious.


It turns out that the victim's friends are also fans of karaoke, and not above resorting to bloody vengeance, if they can track him down before the police do.

It was a while before I figured out this was in fact a satire. Problem being I wasn't getting all the humour. The story of the escalating battle between the middle-aged divorcees and the young slackers isn't quite as important as the contrast between the two sides, their attitudes, lifestyles, and just as importantly, their tastes in music.


This is based on a novel by the author Ryo Murikami, no stranger to controversy as he exposes attitudes lurking in the big cities. He also wrote the infamous Audition, which notably excludes any humorous streak.

The story still gripped me, and while I enjoyed the characters and the brilliant cast, I was very aware of repeatedly missing the point of the choices of music and many cultural references.


Each actor in the ensemble cast carves their own very clear characters. The women are just as immoral as the men, while justifying their crimes in different ways. I only knew the intriguing Ryuhei Matsuda from Nightmare Detective, Otakus In Love and Gohatto. A more experienced actor than the rest of the guys' group, he still modestly blended in completely here.

While looking like modern Japan, this presents a gallery of skewed and surreal characters, like Twin Peaks with an agenda.


Karaoke Terror is available on DVD from Synapse Films in the US (see cover art at top). It includes extensive liner notes with a guide to the 60s pop songs featured in the film, a trailer and a good 20 minute 'making of' feature.


This English-subbed trailer includes some major spoilers...

METROPOLIS (1927) - the 2010 restoration

METROPOLIS

(1927, Germany)

Longest ever restoration of this early epic sci-fi.

I was excited to see a near-complete restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which premiered in the UK last week. It was also my first time seeing any version on the big screen. The same way German silent films like The Golem (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) inspired the golden age of US horror in the 1930s, the silent epic Metropolis influenced science-fiction films for decades to come. Blade Runner (1982) is perhaps the most famous vision of the future that drew on Metropolis which, ironically, was also an expensive flop on its first release.


With a humanoid robot passing as human, impossibly high buildings, the underclass of society existing in the lower levels... there weren't many films that Ridley Scott could have looked to that were thematically similar and visually inspirational. I was surprised by a scene in Metropolis where the hero runs through a dark mass of gridlocked cars, an uncanny reminder of the central chase scene in Blade Runner. All that was missing was the rain. The climax of Metropolis also reminded me just how much Tim Burton borrowed for the ending of Batman (1989) – more than just a homage!


The story pivots on Joh Fredersen, the master of a futuristic city, his idealistic son Freder, and a young woman, Maria, dedicated to improving the plight of the hard-working underclass. Fredersen wants to sabotage her revolutionary work and turns to Rotwang, a (really quite mad) scientist. He’s impressively built a humanoid robot. Better still, he can perfectly disguise it as Maria, so that she can mislead the rebel workers. But this complex and sneaky plan could backfire on Federsen’s empire and the city of Metropolis itself...


While the skyscraping city was a projected glimpse of the future inspired by a trip that the director took to Manhattan, the story reads more like children’s fable than sci-fi. Huge crowds of citizens, like the factory workers, surreally act with a ‘hive mind’ even when they're off-duty. This simplistic unity of purpose reminded me of communist Russian cinema of the same era. While the swarms of extras are undeniably impressive, it’s tough to believe all those people would all make the same mistake (like forgetting about their children behind during a disaster).


The plot isn’t as strong as the striking visuals of men and machines, (men as machines), and the production design of a future city life and science. Some of the shots made me feel that I was being hit in the eye, a powerful overdose of visual imagination - the bizarre garden, the rare close-ups of the robot, the dreamlike mini-epic tale of Babel… are all powerful as still photos, but deserve to be seen brought to life.


Like Blade Runner and 2001 - A Space Odyssey, the visual effects set a high standard for science-fiction for decades. Using extensive large-scale modelwork, matte paintings and huge working sets, many seamlessly combined with models (using the in-camera Schufftan process). I’m also still impressed by the superb make-up work on the living statue of death, besides the iconic ‘robot Maria’. Talking of visual effects, her phenomenal near-nude dance is so powerful a scene, it’s still risqué today. Not for her costume, but the reaction of the panting crowd.


Metropolis premiered in Germany in January 1927. It had cost over a million dollars (back then). But within months, it was released in the US in a much shorter version, with its dialogue and narrative intertitle cards rewritten. This US version remained the worldwide template for decades, with the original German negative presumably destroyed in WW2.


A series of restorations have gradually clawed back footage, minute by minute, up to a running time of two hours for the 2002 restoration, (released on DVD by Kino as the Restored Authorised Edition). This version was in the process of being remastered for a Blu-Ray release, when most of the remaining footage was dramatically re-discovered in Argentina. The film is almost complete now, at 147 minutes out of the original 152.


The retrieved footage fleshes out almost every scene, but particularly clarifies Rotwang’s motives, and restores the part of Federsen’s creepy spy (Fritz Rasp), who strongly reminded me of film critic and Exorcist-fanatic Mark Kermode. Rasp was also the leering baddie who victimised Louise Brooks in Diary of a Lost Girl. He went on to appear in Lang’s more predictive sci-fi Woman in the Moon the same year (1929).

The downside is that this 25 minutes of newly recovered footage is heavily scratched and taken from 16mm film. It carries the missing narrative and reveals what we’ve been missing, but pales in comparison with the startling detail of the renovated 35mm footage. This can now be appreciated in more detail in the cinema and on the forthcoming Blu-Rays.


Misleadingly called ‘The Complete Metropolis’, it’s a miraculous restoration. The new recording of the original orchestral accompaniment helps the film enormously, adding to the energy and pace and sounding remarkably modern.

To me, the action still looks ‘sped up’. Some of the actors’ movements verge on comical, especially when young Feder is running around trying to save the day - at times he resembles The Flash. There are conflicting reports about the original projection and recording speed, but if it were slowed down to show more realistic motion, the running time would of course be even longer.


The new (almost-complete) Metropolis opens across UK cinemas on September 10th. There are also two special screenings with a live orchestra playing the original score at The Roundhouse on October 10th and 11th, details here. The BFI will continue to screen the film in November and December. In November the Blu-Ray lands in the US, then later in the UK.

The new restoration trailer, with a taste of the re-recorded original music is here on YouTube...

Running nearly two and half hours, 'The Complete Metropolis' may challenge the patience of anyone unused to black-and-white, let alone silent cinema. While I’m dedicated to the director’s original vision, I’ll also recommend a possibly more accessible version, the 1984 restoration. It offered colour tinting, an 87 minute duration, a cavalcade of eighties 'soft rock' music (including Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar and Giorgio Moroder), and all the best highlights and visuals. The intertitles were transformed into subtitles and the framerate slowed to 24fps. But good luck trying to find it... last seen on VHS and laserdisc.



Another fan review with some great photos from missing scenes on the Libertas site.

Rare behind the scenes photos on this German site StyleMag....

Some before and after films of restoration of the new footage by Scientific Media.

BARBARELLA (1968) the Ultimate Guide - Part 6: the Posters

I'm no expert on movie posters so I can't say for definite which countries had each poster campaign. But I've tried to show the main types of original poster art, without showing every minor variation in layout. Many of these have since been reproduced as postcards and posters, though many of the originals can be found on eBay and specialist sites.

This beautiful artwork was used across Europe and America. The artist is Robert McGinnis, whose most famous posters were for several James Bond movies from Sean Connery's era, as well as Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun (thanks to IMP for that info). The long, wide version (at top) was a spectacular 20 feet wide!

One character isn't recognisable from the film (the one in the spacesuit, centre right), so I'm guessing this was produced for advanced publicity. Note that Durand-Durand's ship is the one shown crashing, rather than Barbarella's.

USA, 1968

UK 'quad', 1968

Spain, 1968


Mexican over-sized lobby card, 1968

Japan, 1968.

A couple of Italian variations on the McGinnis artwork.

Italy also has their own style of collage posters, called fotobustas, of which many variations are produced for each film. These are the ones I know of...

As you can see, many of the costumes are the wrong colours and the fleshtones look strange, probably because they're black and white photos that have been coloured in.



RE-RELEASE POSTERS

Czechoslovakia, 1971


Germany, 1973

Cult fantasy artist Boris Vallejo painted this artwork for the 1977 re-release that followed the space madness of Star Wars. Note that Pygar is wingless. This has become familiar as the art on all home video releases - on VHS, laserdisc and DVD. Note also the new, longer title (which never appeared onscreen).

Lastly there's this spectacular art by the Hildebrandt Brothers, famous for a classic early Star Wars poster, for a 1979 re-release. Seems like a lot of re-releases, but I guess it's because there was no home video yet.

A wide selection of Barbarella repro posters here at Movie Poster Shop.

Some fantastic original posters here at Poster Nirvana.

Don't miss out on any previous chapters of The Ultimate Guide to Barbarella:

Part 1: Overview

Part 2: the movie's Cast and Characters

Part 3: Barbarella's many costumes

Part 4: Missing scenes from the movie

Part 5: Set Design

THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1924) - extreme 'horror acting'

THE HANDS OF ORLAC

(1924, Germany/Austria, Orlacs Hände)

But doctor, will I still be able to play the piano?

The name might not be familiar, but many horror films owe a debt to the story and this first adaption of The Hands of Orlac. Besides the better-known remakes, consider The Beast With Five Fingers (1946), the Christopher Lee segment of Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965), Oliver Stone's The Hand (1981), Ash's possession in Evil Dead II (1987) and especially the homage of Body Parts (1991).

Before surgical transplant procedures had been perfected, there was actually a debate over which organ a person's soul might inhabit, and whether personality was also transferable. In the story, concert pianist Orlac loses his hands in a train crash, waking to find that they've been replaced with those of an executed murderer! He can no longer trust his own hands!

Using this logic, the Frankenstein monster would have had multiple traits from each part of his patchwork body, but in those movies, the donor's personality and memory only transferred when the brains were swapped. In The Hands of Orlac, it's the original function of the hands that's conveyed - they still want to kill, hold knives, strangle...


This far-fetched concept is brought to life purely by the actor's performance. Conrad Veidt (a favourite actor of Christopher Lee) has to convince us he's frightened of his own hands. Not an easy task, but the film is a tour de force nearly two hours long, made fascinating by the extreme 'horror acting' of the cast.

For want of a better phrase, 'horror acting' means to me that someone has to convey extremes of fear and madness when confronted by the impossible, the supernatural, or the downright evil. This is exaggerated to match the extreme circumstances. I'm talking about the frenzied state that 'the final girl' has to convey when she's cornered by a killer, or Ash's descent into madness as the whole house conspires against him. Also the kind of performance needed when the killer is finally unmasked, and has to look like they are insane enough to have committed all those mad murders. But there's a fine line between successfully 'hitting these heights' and over-acting. I think it's also possible, Shatner-style, to overact and take the audience with you.

This is a rare and difficult skill. How often in a horror film have you seen someone scream unconvincingly, or not look scared enough? The reason I gave up on the Saw movies was because of Carey Elwes in the first film. At the crux of the story, trying to look insane enough to cut off your own foot required a height that Elwes didn't reach.

It's the 'horror acting' that really kept me watching The Hands of Orlac. Filmed back when it was a new artform, the art of appearing very, very scared by the supernatural. Paul Orlac (pity he's not called Hans) and his wife, Yvonne, are happy for a couple of minutes before being dropped into a pit of despair and terror.


Yvonne (Alexandra Sorina) has a similarly extreme emotional rollercoaster ride. First she's awaiting his embrace before he returns from a concert tour, her yearning for the touch of his hands on her body will soon prove problematic. Then she's distraught as she hears that his train has crashed and races to the site not knowing whether he's survived. The torture mounts at the hospital as she waits to hear whether he'll survive, then there's the horror as she learns he'll lose his hands. The actress is limited to playing this last scene in an armchair, but takes distraught to the very limit as if she's climbing the walls.


When Orlac finally regains consciousness, he's relieved to see his new healthy hands unbandaged after the crash, in notably the only daylight exterior scene. For the rest of the film, once he discovers he's inherited the hands of a criminal, the character is trapped in gloomy, cavernous, expressionistic sets. Besides not being able to play the piano, he fears that he can't trust touch his wife with such murderous hands.


Orlac's battle with his hands through the rest of the story is extraordinary to watch. The sheer strain of his performance even showing in the veins on Conrad Veidt's forehead. I'd previously thought Bruce Campbell was the king of 'possessed hand' acting after his Oscar-worthy, kitchen-destroying struggle in Evil Dead II. But Veidt has to keep this level of intensity up for most of the film!

But while Veidt and Sorina's performances are exaggerated, they're still truthful. In silents, performers are allowed to show how they feel inside. Like the most memorable scenes of Lillian Gish in the American silent classics The Wind and Broken Blossoms. The latter has her trapped in a cupboard with a killer trying to break his way inside. For me this works ten times better than Shelley Duvall in the bathroom in The Shining. Gish gets so worked up, she eventually looks like a cornered animal being driven frantic with fear. I should say this acting is heightened rather than exaggerated. It has to be amplified because the actor has to convey everything to us, without the help of dialogue, sound effects or music.


Director Robert Wiene continued using surreal set design of early German supernatural cinema, which he'd helped pioneer in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, also starring Conrad Veidt. The oversized sets, dominated by simple shapes are partly obscured in the murk of the fading prints. But these sets are as unnatural and psychologically wearing as the acting. Not as surreal as in Caligari, but overly imposing and empty, stripped down to the essentials of the script. A music room, a piano. A bedroom, a bed. The patterns on the walls and the frames of the doorways dominate the sets.

The extreme performances look slightly less unusual when we meet the other grotesque characters in this nightmare, Orlac's father and his bizarre butler! I also recognised Fritz Kortner, one of the stars of Pandora's Box, lucky enough to later act opposite Louise Brooks.

The US remake with sound, Mad Love (1935), looks a lot less impressive when you see this first version. This is also for fans of Conrad Veidt, the star of The Cabinet of Caligari (1920), The Student of Prague (1926), The Man Who Laughs (1928), The Spy in Black (1939), The Thief of Baghdad (1940), not to mention Casablanca (1942).


The Kino Video DVD has assembled the best surviving elements of the film, though the picture quality fluctuates throughout. The brightness of each shot flickers a little and there are many scratches. While I'd like it all to look cleaner and a little lighter, these unavoidable artifacts all add to the atmosphere.


Here's a taster, a clip compilation from the Kino DVD transfer, on YouTube...

COMPULSION (1959) - re-enacting the story of Leopold and Loeb

COMPULSION

(1959, USA)

They're loaded, and they wanna have a good time...

This is a taut fictionalisation of a famous murder case from 1924. Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy and intelligent Chicago students, thought they were clever enough to plan a perfect crime, and of superior enough intellect to be above the law. While it lead to 'the trial of the century' at the time, fellow student Meyer Levin later told their story in his 1956 book, Compulsion, which stuck to the facts but changed the names of everyone in the case - I'm not clear why. This early true-crime novel predates Truman Capote's 'ground-breaking' In Cold Blood which has been heralded as the first of its kind.


After the book of Compulsion came a hit play and then in 1959 a hit movie, monopolising on the renewed publicity from the release of one of the murderers on parole (after 33 years in prison). The movie is gritty for the time, struggling with teenage sex, rape, and child murder, not to mention the killers' homosexual relationship. Many of the elements that Hitchcock loved to spice up his plots with - he used two (subtly gay) murderers who thought they were above the law in his 1948 film Rope. The image of polite college boy killers may have informed the character of Norman Bates in Psycho.

Remember that in Robert Bloch's book, Norman is overweight and middle-aged, and that the real-life inspiration for the character was Ed Gein, a dishevelled old hermit. The young Anthony Perkins couldn't be further from the source material if he tried. Another thematic link between Compulsion and Psycho is Judd Steiner's (Dean Stockwell) hobby of bird-watching and taxidermy, a perfect match for Norman Bates' favourite past-times.

While not nearly as modern or edgy as the movie of In Cold Blood, Compulsion is still fascinating because it follows the events and twists of the real-life case so closely. While it's set in the 1920s, apart from the car and a scene set in a prohibition speakeasy, it's not aggressively a period film and feels very 1950s, with Dean Stockwell rebelling against his family ties and scorning the teachings of his college professor.


The majority of the film shows the killers at large and the cops trailing far behind, don't let the photos here make you think this is only a courtroom drama. The inevitable trial doesn't dominate the film, though the renaming of all the characters robs the courtroom scenes of their historical power. In that I didn't realise that Orson Welles, as the defence lawyer, was in fact portraying Clarence Darrow, also famously fictionalised in Inherit The Wind. Welles steals every scene once he arrives, though his character is an unlikely figure for sympathy, because he looks too much like his most villainous portrayal, in Touch of Evil, released the previous year. It's a far cry from the image of upstanding legal do-gooders played by Gregory Peck and Spencer Tracy.


Dean Stockwell (above) is always interesting to watch, even as far back as his child roles, like The Boy With Green Hair (1948, a simple but early parable about race relations) and the beautiful 1949 version of The Secret Garden. I also love his later sixties' drop-out roles, especially The Dunwich Horror, and his sublime performance in Blue Velvet (1986). His astonishingly long career continues to fascinate, continuing with his long-running character in the recent Battlestar Galactica remake.


Stockwell's partner-in-crime is played by Bradford Dillman (Bug, Escape from the Planet of the Apes), pictured above on the right. He's a familiar face to me from many seventies' roles, but had no more parts as high profile as this. Of current interest, he was great as the leading man in Roger Corman's original Piranha (1978), which has just had a big budget 3D remake.

Dillman and Stockwell's screen relationship is not only hinted as being homosexual, but sado-masochistic as well. This is inferred in their performances and the direction, plus a few sneaky coded hints in the dialogue. The tortured but unspoken gay undercurrent heightens the drama throughout. A later adaption of the same case, Swoon (1992), was explicit in showing the sexual relationship as well as the boy's murder. But as a film, it's lacking in drama, looking more like a Madonna video, right down to the buff leading men.


Director Richard Fleischer (Soylent Green, Fantastic Voyage, Blind Terror) uses subtly skewed angles to insinuate the power struggle between the two, and their unbalanced morality. We even get Dillman hiding in a closet - subtle! Fleischer landed two more adaptions of real-life murders later in his career - The Boston Strangler (1968) and 10 Rillington Place (1971).


The US DVD (pictured) has a crisp black-and-white transfer, in 2.35 anamorphic widescreen. The only extra is a trailer. I don't find the cover art very inspiring, considering the weighty cast and subject matter. They're even the wrong kind of glasses...

Another Compulsion review here, with screengrabs, at The Sheila Variations.

Cool interview with Bradford Dillman over at Cinema Retro.


A rather sensationalistic trailer, considering the comparatively subtle style of the movie...