JFL

Free Guy is Tron: Legacy strained through the sieve of Idiocracy, but instead of satarising bullshit, it gives the illusion of freedom with an ingratiating corporate smile. Free Guy shows the absurd degradation of the ideals of cyberpunk into a mediocre tale for a generation weaned on social-media myths about the exclusivity and brilliance of every individual. The film’s messianic romance, financed by the mega-corporation Disney, which is something that William Gibson never dreamed of, performs a diversion manoeuvre in the form of a cartoonish villain, while shoving prefabricated illusions, bought-off YouTube stars and its own bling down the throats of its adolescent target audience. It is also starting to be sad how Ryan Reynolds is becoming a slave to his doggedly constructed image as a bad-boy nerd as he begins to embody the cliché of 40-somethings playing young men chasing after would-be broad-minded women in their twenties.

It is said that some films age like fine wine, but it is actually more appropriate to say that we appreciate them more or differently as we ourselves age. Donnie Darko is the ultimate eruptive debut and a distillation of everything that its creator had done before. Mainly, however, Kelly succeeded in presenting a multi-layered depiction of growing up through the use of sci-fi motifs and a mysterious narrative. When you’re the same age as the protagonists, you may – like the protagonists themselves – concern yourself the most with finding an unambiguous answer for the meaning, causality and internal logic of the narrative. Paradoxically, with the passing of years, you begin to appreciate the fact that the purpose of all of the fantastical motifs and WTF elements is to enable the film to deal with and expressly depict the broadest possible range of thoughts and emotions churning in the adolescent body. The title character thus attempts to find answers to the existential questions of fate, free will and predestination, he wants to destroy and create, to live and die, he is angry at everything, everyone and himself, but he wants to be loved, or at least to get laid. Kelly created a sophisticated labyrinth full of misleading alleyways that, however, help to further examine the various sides of the protagonist, who, like all teenagers, is the centre of his own world. And that offers viewers several levels of pleasure and engagement, whether as metaphor, story, construct, mystery, projection screen or mirror. Donnie Darko is thus to adolescence what Fight Club is to masculinity.

Mark Pirro is fearless and he easily gets by with two jokes, which he stretches out over the entire film. I don’t want to judge him unfairly, as the first third of the film relatively briskly milks the basic premise of a morbid television show and intersperses it with a handful of embarrassingly literal jokes. But the rest of the film just idly focuses on the storyline with the murderer and his mother, who accidentally gets drawn into the game. Today, Deathrow Gameshow serves primarily as an expressive reminder of everything that could find success on the video market in the 1980s thanks to the adolescent audience that made up the main target group of similarly insipid direct-to-video trash and were satisfied with the mere unfulfilled, toothless promise of grittier entertainment than weekend television broadcasts offered.

This amateurish paraphrase of Re-Animator jumps schizophrenically between attempts at unsettling visions and splatstick humour, while part of its charm remains the amusing fact that the filmmakers, despite their apparent verve, don’t entirely succeed in providing either. In the director's cut, with it likably and exceptionally reasonable 62-minute runtime, Soultangler takes the form of a relatively brisk home-grown farce with an absurd premise, appropriately amateurish style and a boisterous variety amusingly handcrafted gore effects. But just the thought of the original 90-minute version is borderline terrifying.

Flesh Eating Mothers has a great premise and decent gore effects and costumes, but it unfortunately suffers from hopeless execution and tired direction, which essentially cut the film off at the knees. The fine idea of how and why mothers become cannibals could have been expanded on considerably more, which is also true of most of the other motifs, which remain half-baked. But the filmmakers rather wanted to focus on how a group of thirtysomething women playing teenagers wander dully through the night and haphazardly run off to somewhere.

Wakefield Poole is known primarily as an icon of the 1970s gay film underground, in parallel with the porn chic phenomenon. His queer films Boys in the Sand and Bijou, which are considered milestones of hardcore queer cinema, show his creative ambition. However, that ambition was fully manifested in his heartfelt project Bible!. The film was a hit with viewers in its time because, thanks to the director’s fame and the casting of the stellar Georgina Spelvin, they expected a hardcore spectacle, but instead got an uncompromisingly distinctive avant-garde project that, furthermore, was completely devoid of explicit scenes. Poole rather appropriately refers to the film as his parallel to Disney’s Fantasia, as it also presents an ambitious creative retelling of oft-told stories and, instead of dialogue, employs suggestive and imaginative scenes underscored with classical music. In three (or four, if we count the epilogue) segments, Poole presents his interpretations of stories from the Bible with bold female characters. Whereas they acted passively in the original version, or rather the version imposed by patriarchal dogma, Poole depicts them as active characters. The creative ambitions are manifested mainly in his distinctive stylisation, which draws from film history while admiring contemporary experimental cinema (especially Kenneth Anger). The delicately aesthetic story of Adam and Eve is thus followed by the narrative of Bathsheba, who seduces David here, rendered as an early slapstick grotesque (in which Georgina Spelvin again displays her magnificent acting talent). The most aesthetically captivating third segment deals with Delilah and Samson, and features a scene combining the aesthetics of both the European avant-garde and modern experimental theatre. The film then culminates with a short ending, in which the Virgin Mary, fleeing from an angel, brings a flowing conclusion not only to Poole's visually impressive, albeit formalistically self-regarding work, but also to his idea of the Bible and its boisterous women. Pool’s Bible! is first and foremost a work of its time, which favoured distinctive creative geniuses, who could thus create their experiments without regard for mainstream norms and, paradoxically, their own audiences.

The psychodrama Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed by Robert Aldrich, became not only an acclaimed genre gem revered by cinephiles, but also a popular camp cult flick in the queer community. The fact that this didn’t happen many decades later due to the influence of some postmodern reading, but rather that the film gained this status and perspective immediately upon its release, is confirmed by this medium-length underground remake made only a year later. What Really Happened to Baby Jane? is a drag reimagining of Aldrich’s film in the style of a silent movie, which, instead of a dense psycho atmosphere, highlights the bitchy dynamics between the central characters and actually differs from the beloved original only in minor details (such as the pigeon droppings). After all, it can’t stand on its own without the original, but as an enthusiast appropriation of a particular work, it remains an amazing historical artefact for the history of film fandom and queer culture.

This rollicking predecessor to Andy Sidaris’s movies, as well as the television series Charlie’s Angels, which debuted three years later, offers a strikingly trashy paraphrase of spy movies, as it delightfully overflows with predictable twists, diabolical schemes, stiff action scenes and, mainly, conspicuous cleavage. Mikels made a virtue of the insufficient budget and unabashedly served up comic-book tricks with explosions, which go perfectly with the hopeless anti-choreography of the film’s martial arts passages. The whole thing is fundamentally enhanced by the titular “Doll Squad”, particularly their leader, Francine York, who appears in a different multi-coloured stylish outfit in every sequence. Thanks to her and her colleagues, including the iconic Tura Satana, The Doll Squad fulfils its potential as a deliberately cheap spectacle with playful stylisation and a pin-up aesthetic, which the director occasionally spices up with a dash of unexpectedly ultra-naïve moments.

Without knowing the context, Shot comes across as a run-of-the-mill cop thriller from the 1970s. That was exactly the intention of its creators, who were not seasoned genre craftsmen, but a group of students. Shot was made as a semi-professional project by students from the University of Illinois and, what’s more, with a budget of only $15,000, which the filmmakers earned by holding film screenings in their dormitory. Awareness of the project's regional and student roots is essentially what makes it likable. It is not often that a feature-length project is made in student conditions and, furthermore, conceived as a pureblood genre flick without ostentatiously self-reflective betrayals of the given genre. On the contrary, Shot adheres precisely to the style learned from contemporary thrillers like Dirty Harry and The French Connection. Its student/enthusiast pedigree is manifested only in its typically unconcealed enthusiasm for the equipment that the filmmakers had at hand, which here means an overabundance of shots taken from a helicopter. The filmmakers also genuinely adore the film fashion of the day, or rather the form it is given in cop movies. Thanks to the distinctive hairstyles, moustaches, worn-out civilian clothes and, mainly, the sunglasses worn by the characters regardless of the fact that the whole story takes place in winter, Shot now looks like an entirely serious feature-length version of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video, which I think is a calling card the filmmakers would be very pleased with.

The renown of Godmonster of Indian Flats promises a bizarre spectacle and, indeed, that is what it delivers. In attempting to classify this unhinged amateur neighbourhood work, we can reach for the analogy that it comes across as a mutant clone of Ed Wood and Robert Altman. The latter evokes the former with a patchwork of disparate characters and their storylines, but combines them with both Ed Wood’s intuitively artless style and naively agit-prop ambitions. Though everyone who has seen this film and wants to share their trauma places emphasis on the storyline with the sheep-monster that terrorises the American backwoods, the truth remains that it makes up barely a third of the film and the monster doesn’t fully begin to figure into the narrative until the last quarter. On the contrary, most of the runtime is taken up by the Altman-esque following of a gallery of bizarre characters, most of whom are involved in intrigues revolving around how to force a guy who is buying up land for a big company out of rural Nevada. Both storylines are concurrently about the xenophobia of (not only) American small-town bumpkins, for whom the monster becomes the perfect personification of everything foreign that needs to be controlled and subjugated or destroyed. Thanks to the abundance of authentic dilapidated and desolate settings, chillingly appropriate non-actors and sequences involving authentic country celebrations with their dull pomposity and unsophisticated forms of entertainment, Godmonster of Indian Flats turns out to be a grotesque treatise on the American West, which remains wild, untamed and degenerate. It is necessary to admit that, despite being generally unwatchable and hollow, this “film” remains intensely fascinating thanks to its disjointedness and fundamentally unsettling derangement.