Anders Elsrud Hultgreen is a scape artist. His feature debut Dawn (Morgenrøde, 2014) and now its follow-up Devonian Fever Trip (Devonsk Febertokt) offer real desertscapes and rockscapes repurposed as moonscapes and mindscapes, while made to shimmer with alien otherness by all-encompassing soundscapes. His works offer escapism of sorts – that is, the escapism of defamiliarisation…
Escape From New York first published by Little White Lies, as the 70th instalment of my Cinema Psychotronicum column In the mid-1970s, when John Carpenter wrote Escape From New York in response to the Watergate scandal, 1997 was a distant – but not too distant – future in which could be staged all manner of…
Orgies of Edo first published by Little White Lies, as the 69th instalment in my Cinema Psychotronicum column By the time he came to make Orgies of Edo (Zankoku ijô gyakutai monogatari: Genroku onna keizu), writer/director Teruo Ishii had already established himself in multiple genres: boxing (King of the Ring: The World of Glory, 1957),…
Insect (Hmyz) first published by EyeforFilm Entomology has long played a part in Bohemian allegorical art. In Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa famously wakes up to discover that he had been transformed into a monstrous insect, and then must vainly try to renegotiate his place in a household that now proves less…
Suspiria first published by Little White Lies ‘Simulacrum’ is the single word that elderly psychologist Dr Jozef Klemperer (played by one Lutz Ebersdorf, in fact a pseudonym for Tilda Swinton) writes in his case notes as he listens to an unhinged Patricia Hingle (Chloë Grace Moretz) rave in his apartment cum consulting room. In this…
Frankenstein’s Army first published by Grolsch FilmWorks “Everybody’s sick. The Nazis! The Communists! Capitalists! Everyone. The sickness cannot be cured, so it must be cut out.” The speaker is Dr Viktor Frankenstein (Karel Roden), explaining his solo surgical strike against all sides in the Second World War. A German who was interned in the concentration…
Overlord first published by Little White Lies Overlord, the second feature from director Julius Avery (Son of a Gun), begins in the familiar cinematic terrains of the war movie, before deviating to genre’s hinterlands. After rendering the idents for both Paramount and Bad Robot in black and white to signify its period status, the film…
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II first published by VODzilla.co In 1957, Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is a girl out of time. In her first scene, the seventeen-year-old is in a confession booth, telling the increasingly horrified priest that her sins include disobeying her parents, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and enjoying sexual…
Prom Night first published by VODzilla.co In an abandoned building first seen reflected in a broken pane of glass, four young children inside – Kelly, Wendy, Jude and Nick – play a game of hide and seek where, in this out-of-bounds arena of danger and transgression, they repeatedly exclaim, “The killer is coming! The killer…
Candyman first published by Little White Lies, as entry 68 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Graduate student Helen (Virginia Madsen) and her colleague Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) are recording younger undergraduates tell macabre, can’t-really-be-true stories that happened to a friend of a friend, for a study on urban myths. The first such myth that Helen…
In a single, fluid, slightly woozy shot, the camera tracks a blonde woman from behind as she staggers along parallel tracks in a rail tunnel (with trains passing by perilously close) and clambers up onto the crowded platform in incongruous high heels, crouches over and urinates then and there on the floor. This is the…