The Cameraman's Revenge

Caligula is one of film history’s greatest follies, colossal trash of a truly epic kind, and the further away we get from it in time, the more batshit mad the whole enterprise looks; I don’t suppose it could ever have been made except at that particular time. So much about it is just jaw-dropping, including the fact that Roberto Rossellini, of all people, wrote the very first treatment for it, the fact that seemingly no one knew producer Bob Guccione intended it to be hardcore XXX, and the fact that it was released at all in whichever of its many versions, given the, well, difficulties of its making, the clash of sensibilities at work, and the welter of lawsuits that attended the process. The production was out of control and so was the “finished” product, if such a thing exists when you’re talking about Caligula. But most bizarre is the fact that, you know, it looks incredible. Amidst all the reams of pornography (sorry), you can’t deny that it looks every cent of the $17m or so it apparently cost (this being when $17m was still worth something, of course). Indeed, I only discovered tonight that the film’s art director Danilo Donati was one of Fellini’s regular collaborators, their first film together having been Satyricon, which makes weirdly perfect sense somehow. It may be a fucked-up mess, but what a bizarrely handsome one. I like Caligula far more than I probably should, but then again I don’t think I’ve ever professed to have impeccable taste in films; if I ever did, be assured I was lying. As extravagant as the recent “imperial edition” release is, I don’t think it exactly reveals an unheralded masterpiece as such,  and I’d always hesitate to actually recommend the film (I don’t think the DVD will exactly make converts of the previously unconvinced). Still, I remain somewhat in awe of its very existence, as a relic of a time that—perhaps mercifully—may never quite come again…

I was baffled, while watching Lamond’s ABC of L&S, by the thought of who was actually watching films like that back in the day, and I find myself similarly puzzled by Felicity. For one thing, I can’t work out if Glory Annen’s a poor actress or if she’s just been poorly served by the script and/or dubbing (and if this is true of the rest of the cast), but that’s not all; I’m just puzzled by who was watching this back then. I think I’m just confused by the idea of the theatrical sex film, soft or hard, and the thought that people would actually congregate in large groups to watch them… and Lamond was making his films for drive-ins, so people were congregating not only in groups but in the open air in their cars. I don’t get it. I know home video wasn’t really an option here in 1979, but even so. Anyway—Lamond himself had gone up in the world a bit by the time of his first actual fiction feature (Australia After Dark‘s “satanists” notwithstanding), and in the interests of fairness it must be said it looks really good; Lamond apparently decided to make a film in Hong Kong while on holiday there or something, and the film does a nice job with that setting, the whole thing really does look lovely on the digital disc. Beyond that… um… well, I suppose it’s kind of interesting that a girl from a rural Catholic girls school in 1979 would’ve not only heard of The Story of O but actually had access to it (the Corgi film tie-in paperback)… I’m sorry, I know it’s meant to be fantasy to some extent, but that’s stretching it a bit for me. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve watched it with the sound turned off and just looked at it or something.

I decided it made more sense to cover both films in one review, insofar as it makes sense to talk about them at all, and I opted to watch both films with Antony Ginnane’s commentaries; not something I normally do with films I’ve never seen before, but are these the sort of films where you can’t afford to miss a word of the plot-advancing dialogue? Ginnane’s reminiscences are much more interesting; he’s particularly forthright about what he thinks doesn’t work, and really, considerations of making the films and releasing them are more interesting than the results. Both are composed of ten vignettes, each of which was shot in a single day, so this was fast filmmaking apart from anything else. Plus Ginnane would later become known for making films in this country while trying to make them not look specifically “Australian” to better sell them abroad, so it’s interesting to see him actually going overseas and shooting these films with American X-rated film stars (whose American films couldn’t exactly be shown in Australia at the time), but making them with Australian money and the Australian market in mind… Though as Ginnane notes, the second film was shot with the possibility of adding hardcore inserts (but the latter were never added), which in a way kind of adds to the films’ weird hybrid nationality. But what can you really say about the films themselves? Rene Bond is fucking gorgeous. John Holmes is… fucking terrifying. They look OK for 16mm>35mm blowups. That’s about it. Interesting that, while Richard Franklin apparently tried to downplay his pre-Patrick film work but at least seems to have come to terms with Eskimo Nell, he never quite seems to have done the same with Fantasm; at least on the former film he used his own name rather than a pseudonym. In the making-of piece on the DVD, he only appears in silhouette and only indirectly identifies himself, whereas Colin Eggleston is directly outed from behind his pseudonym on the second film. Even the Senses of Cinema Great Directors piece skips Fantasm entirely. Which is pretty much what I would’ve done myself if they hadn’t been in the Ozploitation collection, and I doubt I’d have missed anything.

So Jean Rollin died. I find that quite sad; I kind of like the idea of him, if you know what I mean, even though I’d never seen any of his films until this evening, he and his films always struck me as at least sounding interesting in theory. Of course I used to think the same thing about Dario Argento until I actually saw his films (thanks for not very much, Maitland McDonagh), and I fear I probably won’t like Rollin either if/when I get better acquainted… Still, at least I knew going in not to treat this (the only Rollin I have at hand, which is on the second Satanic Sickies box; I really should return those to their rightful owner) as altogether representative of his oeuvre, in which I gather it occupies an interesting place by being the only porn film he released under his own name (though not here; the Alpha Blue print has no credits at all). Where Rollin apparently shot X-rated inserts for his horror films, this looks more like he shot horror inserts for a skin flick; Amy gets attacked and nearly killed by a rapist in an attack about as random as the rest of the film, then rescued by the mysterious Gideon, proprietor of a conveniently nearby isolated chateau, then a bunch of other people show up, the plot fails to advance for another half hour or so, Gideon just needs the love of a pure woman or something, a lot of sense is not made. From what I gather, the setting, some of the actors, and the incoherence are typical Rollin fare, the rest not so much, so I can’t really use this to judge him fairly, I suppose… the American release lost about 20-odd minutes from the original which probably didn’t help, and neither does the godawful dubbing (which seems even more disconnected from the visuals than it usually does for some reason). Nice try by Rollin to tell a proper (if hard to discern) story in a porn film, but I suspect I’m better off sampling his straight horrors…

Ted Roter was a Belgian-born actor who’d been in perfectly mainstream and well-known TV shows in the 60s before deciding to move into the burgeoning hardcore field of the 1970s, directing his own starring vehicles under the name “Peter Balakoff” (that’s what you call living the dream, I suppose). As such, one of the more interesting spectacles provided by this film (originally called The Psychiatrist) from the Satanic Sickies collection is that of an actually competent lead performance (female lead Gena Lee’s not bad either); Roter/Balakoff is the psychiatrist of the original title, presiding over his own clinic for lovely young ladies who think they’ve been possessed by Satan. Some strange things have been happening at this place, namely a number of patients committing suicide, wherefore Jean, the Nancy Drew of porn, infiltrates the clinic undercover as a nurse to find out what’s going on. Needless to say, what’s going on is rather more than she probably expected; though the good doctor avers there’s no such thing as the devil or demonic possession, in his spare time he’s presiding over a satanic cult (I’ll bet the Scientologists would love this). This review sums the thing up as “a remarkable, almost unheard of, and nearly indecipherable glob of fuck-art-trash”, and that’s about the best description I can think of; the final explanation of events in the last reel trips things out into a new dimension of what-the-fuck beyond what we’ve already seen. Essentially it’s a straightforward (if extremely B-grade) horror-mystery that happens to have a lot of sex; it could, I think, be profitably remade as a straight horror film now. Roter clearly had some aspirations for his film beyond the conventional hardcore effort (as evinced by the unusually long running time (nearly 100 minutes; I don’t think either of the other features on the same disc runs over an hour), although it’s hard to deny his ambitions were greater than his ability; this was never going to be more than low-level pulp. Nice try, though, I’ll give him that.

Look, I’ve seen Through the Looking Glass, so it’s not like I don’t know about the crossover trend in the 70s between the horror film and the hardcore film or can’t envisage what such a film might be like. And I’d read about this particular film, and the scene with the penises. You know, the disembodied ones with the sparklers. (And yes, I kind of am dreading to think what sort of search requests will come in the direction of this blog now… actually, “come” was probably a poor choice of words in this case.) There are, though, as I think I’ve noted before, certain things that just reading about them doesn’t adequately prepare you for the reality (or if your prefer surreality) of them, and Hardgore provides an example. I saw it as part of Alpha Blue Archives’ Satanic Sickies collection, which I have on loan from someone who, well, let’s just say I wasn’t surprised to find he owned it for some reason. Of course, it comes from the mythical Golden Age,  a time people get excited about because the porn films of that time were actual films with actual plots, as if plot was ever the point… for what it’s worth, the plot here involves a girl confined to a hospital to be treated for nymphomania, where she encounters a Satanic sex cult. And that’s about it in story terms; the rest is incidental detail like lesbianism, pillow fucking, necrophilia… There’s actually one really well-shot (oh GOD/DESS the poor choices of words just keep coming, as it were) sex scene that ends with one actually effective horror scene where our heroine hallucinates a room full of dead girls returning to life, followed by sparkly penis bukkake (KILL ME NOW), but I’m damned if I can work out what else you can really say about a film like this. Other than that if you want to feel profoundly strange watching a film, Hardgore will help. Particularly the last couple of minutes.