KWIF: Sisu: Road to Revenge (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Lady Kent was down with the same cold that took me out last week, so weirdly I watched more movies this week than when I was down and out last week. It's all international cinema cinema week: Finland! "Persia"! Australia! Italy!

This Week:
Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025, d.  Jalmari Helander - crave)
Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989, d. Luigi Cozzi - tubi)
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975, d. Peter Weir - xumo)
Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out - 1973, d. Duccio Tessari - tubi)

---

The first Sisu was a cartoon orgy of violence, but underneath it beat the heart of Finnish pride, fortitude and resilience. If there was a message to Sisu it was to tell the world that Finns are tough motherfuckers.  

But Sisu also set itself in a time and place that it didn't really explain. If you're Finnish or familiar with it's history (particularly during World War II) there was no explanation needed. I on the other had had to do some digging. It was a complicated situation with Finland already engaged in conflict with Russia when other battles in Europe started. Sisu took place at the end of World War II, with the Germans set to return home, but attempting to take as much with them as they could before they left, including the gold grizzled veteran Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) had just found.

I don't fully understand the timelines, but Road to Revenge, takes place shortly after the end of World War II, so I assume not long after the first film, just enough time for Korpi to heal. A treaty with Russia saw the ceding of much of Karelia (on the southeastern side of the country) to the Russians, with its citizens of the area being forced to leave within ten days. Korpi's home, which he built himself, remains in the ceded terrain. He crosses the new Russian border with a massive, massive truck, where he deconstructs the home and loads the truck on his own.

His border crossing, however, raises awareness that Koschei ("The Immortal") is in the country. Korpi had infamously killed 300 Russians himself in a rageful tear following the murder of his wife an children. A KGB Officer (Richard Brake) frees the man responsible for killing Korpi's family -- the war criminal Yeagor Dragunov (Stephen Lang) -- from his prison and gives him the resources to, quote "destroy the legend you created and you will go back home a rich man".

And so Korpi and his massive truck and big pile of wood have to travel the 120 kilometers from where his home once stood back to the border...chased by trucks, motorcycles, and airplanes. It's a scaled-down Fury Road but director Jalmari Helander continues to prove he's got the action goods. A lot of wild craziness happens along the way, beyond logic but gleefully entertaining.

The last act takes place on a train, and gets Koschei back into physical action, with some fun setpieces like traversing through the two sleeping quarters without awakening the soldiers (or taking care of them should they stir). The final duel between Korpi and Dragunov is maybe too slow and unrefined to be truely Wick-ian, but it's only one small moment in this 89-minute deluge of violence and survival.

Tommila doesn't speak a word the entire film, and this lack of dialogue really strips the film down to the barest of actions and emotions. Where Brake or Lang might have more to say, there's still likely no more than two or three pages of dialogue, max in the entire film. Whereas the first Sisu felt like a nuveau western, this one feels almost more like a samurai film...but with guns and vehicles and whatnot...but the same attitudes apply.

Helander's next film will see the director's first American production, being brought aboard to helm the John Rambo prequel starring Noah Centineo in the title role. I have no idea what the story might possibly be like, but I'm excited to see what Helander can do with big hollywood franchise budget.

---

One of the final releases of legendary 80's B-movie studio Cannon Film, Sinbad of the Seven Seas stars famous muscleman and former Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno as the storied Persian hero, Sinbad the Sailor. Yes, that's right, Italian-American Lou Ferrigno plays Sinbad. Seems a natural fit to me [/sarcasm].

The story is set largely in Basra, which the filmmakers seem to know as much about as I do, which is to say, nothing at all. All the characters here are played by white and/or Italian actors, nary a middle-eastern among them. If this seems like it could be offensive, it would be, if anyone, anyone at all were trying to convincingly portray this as an authentic tale. As it stands, it's one of the least egregious of its cinematic sins, afterall, Sinbad has been portrayed by white actors many times in the past (and will again...RIP Patrick Muldoon).

But Sinbad of the Seven Seas lies to its audience from the moment the film starts. Before its title card, a chunky block of text mentions how famed author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote an additional adventure for Sinbad titled "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" and that this is an adaptation of that story. It is not. Not in the slightest.

As legend on this film goes, writer-director Luigi Cozzi (who had directed Ferrigno in two Hercules films for Cannon in the mid-1980s) had written the screenplay for Sinbad and the Seven Seas, but was (for unclear reasons) dismissed from the project and it was handed to Enzo G. Castellari. Castellari would proceed to make substantial changes to the script and then proceed to produce an unreleaseable three-hour film. The film sat on the shelf for years before Cozzi was hired back to make some sense of it, to salvage something out of the whole production.

And so, the film's story does not begin with Sinbad and crew on his boat, or in the city of Basra, or in Baghdad or anywhere fantastical, it starts in a bedroom, with a child (Cozzi's daughter) being read a story by her mother, played by Daria Nicolodi.  Nicolodi will proceed to narrato over a large portion of the film. The touchpoint might seem to be The Princess Bride for this framing sequence, but really, it's just a way of trimming down 3 hours of garbage footage into a barely, if you squint, serviceable 93 minute series of adventures.

The wicked vizier Jaffar (portrayed by English white guy John Steiner, it's a variation on Aladdin's Jafar both of which hearken back to The Thief of Baghdad films rather than One Thousand and One Nights) is fixated on the Caliph's daughter, Princess Alina [Alessandra Martines, a French-Italian white lady]. She is involved with Sinbad's ship-mate Prince Ali, but he's been away adventuring. The vizier steals the town's sacred gems of power, keeping one for himself and dispersing the rest across the seas. He then hypnotizes the Caliph into doing his bidding, including telling Alina to marry Jaffar. She refuses and thus is strapped to a fantastical chamber designed to (verrrry slooooowly) sap her of her will. She will marry him some day). When Hercules...I mean Sinbad and crew arrive in Basra, they beat up some bad guys, get captured, break free and then set out on a quest to find the four gems of power (but not before Sinbad escapes from a pit of cobras by *checks notes* making friends with the cobras and then tying them together to form a rope for him to climb out of.  You know how you make friends with wild creatures [totally normal] and then twist their bodies together, with their consent of course [nothing unusual, at all] and then climb them [all checks out, do it all the time].

The majority of the adventures of Sinbad and his crew (consisting of handsome Prince Ali [white guy], Cheropolis "the bald cook" [another white guy], Poochie the dwarf [not a rapping dog, but a white guy], Viking [played by an Italian actor, not a Scandanavian] and the Chinese mercenary Cantu [played by a Japanese-Italian actor]) are narrated over with the action or conversation or both happening silently under the narration from Nicolodi (yes, we see the characters have an exchange and our narrator explains what they are saying], all the while accompanied by the of shoddiest of synth scores.  

In the first stop, he fights a rock monster that shoots lasers from its head. Sinbad must use feats of his notorious Sinbad strength to defeat it and retrieve the gem from its head. In the second, Sinbad and most of the crew (except Bald Cook and Poochie) head to the isle of the amazons where their notorious beauty finds them immediately under their sway (except Prince Ali who seems to be psychically connected to Princess Alina for some reason). If not for Bald Cook and Poochie coming to the rescue with an magical anti-hypnosis potion...I don't know what would have happened, actually. The Amazon queen Farida was played by the stunning actress Melonee Rodgers, a Black, possibly American actress (there's not much available detail on her and seeing as she had no speaking lines left in the film - which doesn't really matter since all lines were dubbed anyway by different actors, except Steiner and one or two others) and all the Amazons were black, which I thought was fantastic...except when Queen Farida has her gem of power taken from her and she turns into an old lady...well, it's just some old Italian lady in blackface. Yeah. Woof.

During the adventures, we constantly check back in with Jaffar, and how progress is going on sapping Princess Alina of her will. The movie makes it seem like Sinbad's voyages are only taking him the better part of an afternoon in total and not days or weeks of sailing the seas. He tries to interfere from afar, but seems to only be able to do anything sometimes for some reason and most of the time looks like a sweaty guy whose going to lose his kneecaps if the team he's watching doesn't lose the match. He's also joined, bafflingly, by the witch Soukra (played by American bodybuilder Teagan, the only other actor not to be dubbed, it seems) for seemingly no reason. Jaffar sort of acts like she's the one who will break his kneecaps if his bet doesn't pay off.

The third adventures finds Jafar sending a gust of wind to send Sinbad's ship ashore (but why send them to the very island that contains the gem they're looking for Jaffar? The guy is an idiot). There they face, ghosts or something...? I dunno, I fell asleep for a bit. 

When I woke up Sinbad was having a conversation with Kira (another white lady), daughter of Nadir the wizard who speaks in gibberish. They landed on the Isle of the Dead in a balloon. They are jumped by a gang of ghouls, and while Kira puts up a good fight, which Hercules, I mean Sinbad immediately falls in love with her over, she gets kidnapped along with her father. Sinbad mounts his rescue but must face the Lord of Darkness, who is like a pot-bellied Swamp Thing who shoots lasers from his hands. Hercules uses his own gems of powers to shoot lasers and destroy the big gooey plant then head home with Kira and her goof-talkin' father in tow.

The big show-down is ...well, not so big. Hercules/Sinbad rescues Princess Alina and defeats Jaffar, but not before facing a Jaffar-controlled mirror version of himself in a match of strength and cunning. Ali and Alina are married, and so are not-Hercules and Kira, the end, go to sleep kid.

There were little glimmers that maybe the original production, under Castellari, was aiming for high camp, but the structure Cozzi rescues the picture with leaves a lot of the camp off to the side, sneaking in only occasionally. But it's obvious from the footage and dialogue left in why Castellari's first draft of this was considered unreleaseable: it's really really bad. I could never get past the idea of Ferrigno as Sinbad. As witnessed above, my brain kept defaulting to him as Hercules, and it would seem Castelli did too. Sinbad is not a legendary strongman, and yet so much of what Ferrigno does here is "feats of strength".

In the right setting, Sinbad of the Seven Seas might be a so-bad-it's-amazing cult classic, but as a tired adult just looking for a break from having to think about shit, this was just an awful 90 minutes. I had more fun recapping it above than watching it.

---

I was introduced to Picnic at Hanging Rock by a friend who I met on a dating website almost exactly 20 years ago. It was an odd time. We'd both recently gotten out of long term relationships and we were trying to figure out the next phase of our lives. We really clicked, but emotionally we just weren't ready for anything other than friendship. It was a friendship that forged quickly but not strong enough to survive eventual physical distance and other life demands (babies) and, frankly, the friendship-subverting suckhole that was facebook (it gives the illusion of being in contact without being meaningful contact in any way). Strangely, Picnic at Hanging Rock was the shared experience most cemented into my mind of that friendship, watching a VHS copy borrowed from the library on a strange couch in a brightly lit room next to a new friend where we were still trying to figure out our dynamic. 

At that time I went into watching Picnic... with a pre-conceived distaste for Peter Weir, having had a high-school art teacher who was a Weir fan and would play us Dead Poets Society, Green Book and Fearless in class at least once per semester...for inspiration? These were not really inspirational films to a 14-17 year old. They were grown-up films for parents.

At that time I found Picnic... a bit confounding. The film starts by letting you know that the titular picnic would end in some sort of tragedy, just as the film's poster does. "On St. Valentines Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock... some were never to return." It's an ominous, and it implies something sinister, something terrifying, something harrowing perhaps. The implication is there will be, at least, something to raise one's blood pressure in watching this film...and there is not. Not really.

It is a film that stuck with me though, left an impression. It's not just a totem but a representative point for a very specific, transitional moment of my life. My memory of the film is nothing to do with plot or characters, but images and tones.

This rewatch reaffirmed that it is a tranquil, vibes-based movie above all, loaded with melancholy (and the tranquil tones of Zamfir's pan flute) 

The girls are aflutter not for their picnic trip but for a Valentines card someone received. Where most of the kids are privileged, some are sponsored, such as Sara, an orphan who is kept behind from the trip because...well, I'm not exactly sure. We don't spend much time with any of the other girl to really get to know them, but there is focus on Miranda, the pretty and independent-minded blonde, and Edith, the cliched fat girl who whines about physical effort and is seen eating.  There at least doesn't seem to be any bullying, at least not in the traditional sense...not at this point. 

At the picnic site is already a young Englishman, Michael, who is there with his parents (grandparents?), and their driver, Albert, who Michael makes friends with. The presence of the girls is instantly exciting to them, and though Albert makes some crude comments to Michael which he finds distasteful, the girls don't even notice they are there.

Miranda, Edith and two others decide to venture up the rock (more than 500 feet high it is!), and they push themselves up until they can seemingly go no further. But they find a crevasse and venture into it, except Edith, who freaks out. She runs down the hill, the others are gone... as if purposefully taken by the rock. A teacher stays behind as the rest of the girls are sent home, and she disappears as well. End of act one.

The rest of the film covers next few hours, days and weeks that follow. There is a manhunt and an investigation. Both Albert and Michael are looked at and then dismissed. Both young men are troubled by thoughts and dreams of the missing girls, with Michael seemingly haunted by Miranda specifically. Michael takes on a dangerous solo search which he nearly dies from, and when Albert picks up the trail, he finds Irma, near death.

The school is in disarray. The teachers are having breakdowns, some kids leave school altogether, and Sara falls ill. Irma remembers nothing and has no answers. She's harassed by the other girls when she returns to visit. Everything's collapsing because nobody can process the tragedy. It's not being swept under the rug, but it's also not being addressed either.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a horror movie, but it is a haunting picture. It's hard not to be affected by watching others unravel in the wake of tragedy, unable to make sense of it and not having the support knowledge or infrastructure to work through it. With years in between, and some further exploration of the film and story in the meantime, I respect the picture even if I still have a hard time with its storytelling decisions and the routes it does not take.

It took some additional contemplation to realize that this is not a film about the incident, despite the title. It's not about the disappearance, but a story about the school, and the impact the incident has on it and the people within it.  That's a defined choice made by the storytellers (be it original novel author Joan Lindsay, or screenwriter Cliff Green, or director Weir) not to answer questions, not to give a resolution. It may be unsatisfying but it's most definitely intentional.  It's a film that has, in a way, haunted me for 20 years now, and I think that will never go away.

---

I have a watchlist on Letterboxd that I don't consult very often, but any time I do I'm bound to ask the question of "what the hell is that?" to about two-thirds of what's on there. My tastes and interests are mercurial to the point of self-aggravation and self-annoyance. I have to be in the right mood or zone to watch something, so just because I don't feel like watching it now doesn't mean I won't want to watch it later. But also, a lot of what is on my Letterboxd list is obscurities that, well, just won't be cropping up on any of the "mainstream" streamers I most regularly have access to.

But then there's Tubi, always full of surprises. I don't love the streamer, primarily because it's owned by Fox, but also because it has ads (which used to be all Fox News-based ads, but now just seem to be targeted Canadian market ads for dish soap and such), and no standards. You can find a lot of great stuff on Tubi, but in terrible quality streaming speed, bad digital transfers, godawful audio and frequently without closed captioning (a terrible combo for a half-deaf guy like me).

I don't know how the Italian action-thriller Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out) wound up on my Letterboxd list but I'm sure glad it did, and I'm also so happy it was among Tubi's fairly decent selection (if not decent quality) of Italian 70's crime pictures.

This one stars Alain Delon, the handsome French actor who played one of the first notable on-screen hitmen in Le Samourai, back again playing another hitman, but this time also a family man, and he wants out. He's done. No more killing for him. Except the consortium of mobsters he works for aren't willing to let him go and they know there's no talking him out of it.

And so before John Wick, before The Punisher, before Death Wish here we have an anti-hero whose wife and child are killed (accidentally mind you) and the response is basically warfare in the streets, one against one hundred.

Delon is Tony Arzenta, an astute, savvy, steely killer who has been wronged, and there's only one way to make right. He's going to dismantle multiple crime syndicates from the top down. At first Arzenta makes his plans and executes them, although not always with ruthless precision, it's a fight from the jump. The mob bosses aren't just sitting back, they have their own schemes as well, setting Tony up so that he has to improvise his escapes. The police are monitoring the situation, but they're sitting back. They're, in a way, buffering for Tony as they see him doing them a service, cleaning up all these syndicates for them.

Tony's bloodlust takes him from from Milan to Copenhagen, murdering on the street and on trains, wherever the opportunity needs to occur. He's not alone, he's aided by his pal Domenico (Marc Porel) and Sandra (Carla Gravina), as well as an ex-dom now living life as a priest who looks out for Tony's parents. 

The film isn't solely told from Tony's perspective and spends plenty of time with the various mafia dons as they start renegotiating territories as Tony picks them off one by one. But there's always one been one don, Nick Gusto (Richard Conte) who didn't want any of this and had tried numerous times to convince the consortium to push for piece. It's only when he's the last one left does he really have any sway, and it all leads to Tony's invitation to Don Gusto's daughter's wedding, and the tense, anything-can-happen environment.

Nothing about it is as straightforward. Tony seems to have ice in his veins, but family, friendships, these have meaning for him, it's where he's vulnerable and he knows it. The scenes where he brings Sandra to stay with his parents, and the awkward-yet-sweet encounters that occur there. There's no definition to what Tony and Sandra are to each other, except that they're family now.

I loved this movie. I'll be eagle eyed looking out for a physical media release. It deserves some special treatment.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Wrecking Crew

2026, Angel Manuel Soto (Blue Beetle) -- Amazon

I did not enjoy Blue Beetle and all its screaming, and yet I enjoyed this comedy-action movie, even with its screaming & swearing; well, at least for the first two acts. We took a break after the first two acts, because it was my bed time, and came back to a movie that felt it was directed by the man who made Blue Beetle even though I didn't know it was his, until the credits were rolling.

But, what I liked. 

Soto exchanges the Latinx experience for a Hawaiian one, except, of the primary cast, only Jason Momoa has any real Hawaiian heritage, instead having people of New Zealand, Somoa and Fillipino culture, along with some stunt casting of actual Hawaiians as supporting cast. OK, I guess I didn't really like that, but Hollywood wants faces, so at least they took Pacific cultures. Sigh. Anywayz, its a light hearted, action-comedy by way of a murder-mystery with family challenges, and almost followed the format of the grimy detective story, but using suspended cop Jonny Hale (Jason Momoa, Aquaman) and Navy SEAL James (Dave Bautista, Guardians of the Galaxy) investigating the murder of their father Walter, who was a private dick, and a man they both actually loathed.

Jonny and James do not like each other. They are half-brothers and Jonny still resents James for not helping him investigate the murder of his mother when they were teens. Jonny is only back for the funeral, and to annoy James, but he cannot help himself but to start digging into the death, even when warned off by local thugs, and the cops. As Jonny pokes around they add Pika (Jason Batalon, Reginald the Vampire) to the mix, who plays the role of the fat nerdy tech kid. Eventually James is onboard with the investigating, and they even go so far as dressing up as wait staff to infiltrate the local corrupt land developer's party. It does not play well.

Its at this point I realize we are watching an 80s buddy investigator show, like Magnum PI or Simon & Simon except a wee bit more twisted. The half-brothers are constantly arguing, and Jonny's barbs are hilarious, as is his constant Japanese pop-culture references. There are enough one-liners between the two that had me charmed by the characters, especially the supporting cast of the brothers' cousins.

And then it had to go and ruin it with over the top violence. I mean, I know its an action flick, but it starts with the Yakuza attacking the brothers downtown, leading to a number of bystanders dying as the bullets fly. To be fair, the brothers do their best to get people to safety and take out the Bad Guys but... I still hate collateral damage, which is why I hated, utterly HATED the inevitable car chase scene. Its set on a highway, and it grabs the helicopter-vs-car trope and probably ends the lives of at least 50 innocent bystanders in fiery explosions and crashes, adding insult to injury in that the brothers are never held to account for it. We don't even see it make the news! If Yakuza and other corrupt gangsters were slaughtering people in the streets, most movies would at least mention the mobilization of a task force or local anti-terrorist squad. But no, this is just played for bloody, bone crunching, blood spewing, cars-exploding "fun" so the characters could come out of it bloodied & battered. At least we got to see Jonny's ex-GF Valentina (Morena Baccarin, Elevation) do some kick-ass driving.

I have decided to head-canon this movie into a setup for a new Hawaiian-based TV series from Amazon. We've got our Magnum PI reboot and they already had it cross-over with the Hawaii 5-0 reboot, but this new show could come at it from the indigenous experience. We could enjoy the 80s-style re-casting of the main characters but also do some more stunt-casting by having at least one supporting cast member stay in the new show. Maybe Pika.

Ah-Ah-Argento #4: Door Into Darkness

 Door Into Darkness (aka La Porta Sul Buio) was a four episode anthology created and produced by Dario Argento for RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana, nee Radio Audizioni Italiane - the national public broadcasting company of Italy) following his third film, Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Originally airing in 1973, part of the intent of the series was to give friends of Argento some directing exposure, including Luigi Cozzi, one of his early assistants, and Roberto Pariante, an early assistant director. The series was modelled somewhat after Alfred Hitchcock Presents... wherein the director himself would introduce each episode, which Argento does here sporting a shaggy mop and stylish '70's clothes.  It turned Argento into an unlikely, but legitimate star in the country where he would become known as a media personality almost as prominently as a director.

The series originally aired in black and white (since RAI could only broadcast in black and white at the time) but Argento and company was asked to shoot it in colour for the eventual re-airings when they would appear in colour. The crew, however still shot the series optimized for presentation in black and white, so it's bizarre to me that the physical media collection this series is featured on ("Dario Argento's Deep Cuts" from Severin Films) does not have the episodes presented both ways (but from all signs, it seemed a difficult task to find even decent copies of these episodes...the transfers are exceptionally noisy and grainy with frequent haziness or film errors, so it almost feels lucky we even get them like this).

The episodes are:
1. "The Neighbor" (aka "Il vicino di casa") - written and directed by Luigi Cozzi
2. "The Tram" (aka "Il tram") - written and directed by Dario Argento (direction credited to a pseudonym)
3. "The Doll" (aka "La bambola") - written by Marcella Elsberger and Mario Foglietti, directed by Foglietti
4. "Eyewitness" (aka "Testimone oculare") - written by Argento and Cozzi, directed by Argento with Cozzi but credited to Roberto Pariante.

---

For The Neighbor, prior to the story starting, Argento introduces the series as a concept before introducing the episode. He's a gentle, contemplative speaker, unassuming for someone considered a master of the macabre. This staged setting transitions sharply to Argento slamming the hood of a car on the side of the road on a highway where he continues to introduce the episode. He then flags down a car, and a young couple pick him up. He gets into the back seat and we see the resulting conversation from his POV. It's truly and odd sequence, lasting about 90 seconds or so before Argento asks to be dropped off and the car drives off. 

But the charm of the sequence reveals itself when it turns out we will be following this couple as our protagonists for the story. They've just bought a beach-front apartment that they're moving into. The truck is to arrive with all their stuff the next morning. However, their upstairs neighbour has just murdered his wife. They would have been none the wiser if not for the fact that he forgot to shut the tap off to the bathtub and it starts to leak downstairs. He's gone out to fetch a shovel and the couple allow themselves into his apartment to shut off the water only to find the body.

With their car stuck in the sand and neither their electricity nor phone hooked up they're trapped with nowhere to go. Their only hope is the murderous upstairs neighbour will be unaware that they found out about his crime... if only the didn't leave something inside his apartment.

The Neighbor has suitable tension, but it's only got about 30 minutes of story in an over 50 minute episode, so it feels every moment of its padding. Much of the padding is meant for ratcheting up the tension but it's more frustrating than intensifying.

Aldo Reggiani plays the husband, Luca, and has the lightest work to do, while his wife, Stefania, played by the beautiful Laura Belli is our primary POV character, and the one who has to interact with the titular neighbour (Mimmo Palmara) the most. Palmara sports a big 70's moustache and a high head of aged grey hair, and at first seems tired and unassuming, but when he needs to take an unconscious Luca to the beach, we see what a beast of a man Palmara is, throwing Reggiani over his shoulder with relative ease, and moving around with him with no difficulty. The threat level triples after we see this strength.

---

Argento shines with The Tram, a really fun piece of detective/mystery fiction directed with Argento's usual assured hand and only a slightly tamped down version of his traditional flair. Shot on 16mm (as all the episodes were) there are a number of beautiful shots and impeccable use of his environments (the titular tram car as well as the tram depot), neither of which I've seen used anywhere near as well in TV or cinema in the 50+ years since. While Argento (and his cohorts on the other episodes) did not have nearly the time and definitely not the relative budget of his feature films for this production Argento makes a mini-Argento movie that feels as accomplished and as entertaining as anything he's done (Argento cites the lighting being the biggest sacrifice, but he still does well with what he has here).

In The Tram, a body is found under a streetcar seat when the car is being cleaned. The police arrive and investigate, what seems to be an impossible crime. How could someone be murdered AND stowed without anyone seeing it, including both the streetcar driver and ticket taker who were on the vehicles trip from start to finish.

Enzo Cerusico plays the Inspector on the case, Giordani. He has habits and ticks on display as he thinks through his problems, and Cerusico is not only a handsome lead but absolutely charming one as well. Giordani should have spun out into his own series of mysteries, either on TV or film. Having only one adventure with him was definitely not enough.

But part of it is the case, as well. It is a perplexing one, especially if we're to take all the eyewitness testimony (none of which provides any immediate clue to the killer's identity) as fact, then there seems to be only one or two answers that remain. 

The intelligence of the script is that Giordani follows the remaining threads, and it does point to the most obvious answer, through to completion of the accused being convicted but, his please of innocence haunt Giordani. So even though the case is close, justice has been served, Giordani can't shake that he's missed something. So off the books, with his partner Giulia (the beautiful Paola Tedesco), he takes another crack at it, and it leads to an exceptional climax.

The only weakness of this episode is the off-topic, preachy coda that feels like something Argento just wanted to get off his chest (he's not wrong, but it's just such an aside).

---

For the third instalment of Door Into Darkness, Argento brought his friend, journalist Mario Foglietti, whom he collaborated with on Four Flies..., for his first directorial effort.

The story begins with an escape from a mental hospital completely shot from a first-person POV perspective. It's an effective sequence (apparently shot by Cozzi, who stepped in as second unit director when Foglietti fell behind).

From there, it's a confounding and yet kind of compelling puzzle. A police inspector meets with the head professor from the mental hospital. They agree to collaborate on finding the missing patient, whomever they may be, noting that they're a schizophrenic and potentially dangerous.

We follow a handsome, but slightly rumpled man (Robert Hoffmann) around a small town as he checks into a rooming house and looks out upon the street, clearly searching for someone. He finds her (the beautiful Erika Blanc), and follows her, but stops tailing her when she meets up with another man. Later in the evening she is killed in her fashion warehouse.

The inspector and the professor have a follow-up conversation, which only serves to obfuscate rather than illuminate what is actually happening. The man starts following another woman (the beautiful Mara Venier) who looks like the same woman he was following earlier, and he starts messing with her. She seems to let him mess with her. The dynamic is incredibly perplexing and uncomfortable. 

The climax is even more discomforting as the inspector leads a dragnet in the town and the man and second woman play out their psychodrama in hiding. It all comes to a head with the reveal of who these people are.

It's a challenging hour of television, and maybe the payoff doesn't reward the effort, but, as I noted I was pretty compelled the entire time trying to figure it out. Cozzi, in his second-unit direction, really seemed to reach for Argento's-style of first-person shooting, which finds some element of visual consistency across the episodes.

---

The final episode, Eyewitness, turned out to be a bit of a mess. From what Cozzi said about what happened behind the scenes, Argento was not pleased with the quality of what Foglietti shot after the first few days of shooting (each episode shot for around 8 days) and he and Cozzi stepped in to take over production, reshooting what they could (Argento's take was that cast and crew were unhapping with Foglietti and asked Argento to take over... in both cases Argento seems hesitant to disparage anyone, and wished that Foglietti retain credit). That the episode is as engrossing as it is proves that the talent of the directors and the series crew.

The plot is an interesting gialli. Roberta (the beautiful Marilù Tolo...there's a lot of beautiful women in Italian cinema and more than a few of them in this series) is driving to her rural home after a day and evening in the city. On the familiar road home, she turns a bend and something jumps out in front of her. She screeches to a halt and sees a woman's body laying in the road. Roberta gets out, certain she hadn't hit anything. She checks the body. It is dead with a wound in the back. There's a rustle in the bushes and a man with a gun emerges. Roberta runs, knowing the local tavern is not far. She makes it without incident. The cops arrive. The chief inspector (Glauco Onorato) questions her, then takes her back to the scene where he explains that he believe she believes she saw something, but there was no body found.

There's one mistake Argento made with the rest of the story. Where we should be following Roberta and her husband as they're, maybe, terrorized by the perpetrator of the crime, or maybe it's all just a series of weird coincidences and Roberta really did "just see something" (the way it's shot largely allows for both possiblities) instead a transitional sequence does show us gloved hand disposing of the dead woman's bloody clothes, thereby eliminating the possibility, at least for the audience, that Roberta might have just been making the whole thing up.

But this "mistake" then does lead to the most surprising part of the story, the inspector, after another incident or four in Roberta's life, which could all be chalked up as random events or even fabrications, he believes her. He intuitively trusts his instincts on her character, and believes her. It's a surprising and wonderful scene when one expects tropes out of stories from this era. 

The climax plays out as it should, and it's satisfying (if the final note a bit weird), but this is a story that really could have been filled out nicely into a full-length movie, really the only one of these stories that has that in it.

---

I enjoyed all of these entries, with The Neighbor thrilling me the least, and The Tram exciting me the most. In all, as much as these were made for TV, they are all put together with cinematic professionalism. Argento had to cut costs, but I don't think he knows how to cut corners when he directs. Even when he's not successful, he's always intentional and it shows in the work. He was on set for most of the productions, so his guiding hand is there over the whole procession even if he wasn't writer or director on everything.

The Hitchcock/Rod Serling-esque episode introductions are an anthology convention, and Argento serves the role well. Unfortunately the clever way in which Argento's introduction was incorporated into the story set-up of The Neighbor did not happen in the remaining episode. It was an exceptionally interesting way to get an episode started. 

The series ran into trouble with the censors even before the first episode aired, and then ran into more trouble after the first episode aired. All the censorship issues displeased Argento that he abstained from producing another series or even working in television again for years. But what we got is an absolute treat.

KWIF: The Housemaid (+1)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. More than a few sick days for ol' Kent this week, and usually that means curling up on the couch and just gorging on a diet of cold & flu Tylenols and, of course, movies. But the pain on my brain from sinus pressure was so debilitating for one of those days that I could barely leave my bed and just could *not* look at a screen. Here's what little I got up to...

This Week:
The Housemaid (2025, d. Paul Feig - Crave)
Universal Language (2024, d. Matthew Rankin - Crave)

---

The Housemaid is not a film meant for me, a nearly 50-year-old man-boy still obsessed with toys, comic books, superheroes and scifi.  Based off the novel by Freida McFadden, it seemed to me to be right in line with all the other chik-lit adaptations in recent years (Where The Crawdads Sing, It Ends With Us etc), which, again, I am not the target audience for. All this is not intended as disparagement...I mean, I spend two months of the year writing about Hallmark movies, which, again, I am not the target audience for. But where I've found an admiration for the cliches and tropes of the Hallmark formulae (and how they are broken), I've never quite grokked the women-in-peril-stories-for-women subgenre. I've never seen Single White Female or Sleeping With The Enemy for example.

I was warned in advance that The Housemaid was trash cinema, but a couple of reviewers had deemed it highest quality of trash cinema and it's hit some early best-of-2026-so-far lists, and, hey I *generally* like Paul Feig's movies, including A Simple Favor (not enough to review it, or watch the sequel, apparently...that link is to Toasty's review) so I thought, I'm trapped in bed with nothing else to do ...why not.

Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives as the Winchester estate on Long Island for an interview to be their new live-in housemaid (and occasional nanny). The place is pristine. Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) greets her, shows her around the house, including the attic bedroom she would stay in, details the job, and both seem to feel pretty good about the exchange. And then we see Millie back in her car, where she lives, taking hobo-baths in gas station washrooms. We eventually learn she is out on parole and she needs a steady job and place to live, or back in the slammer she goes for another five years.

After a couple days, just when she thinks she isn't getting the job, Nina calls and needs her immediately. In the days since, the pristine abode Millie first saw is now a fucking calamity. So disastrous that it seems kind of impossible. Millie gets to work. She has the place restored to near perfection when Nina's husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and her daughter Cece come home. Cece, in a near Damien-from-The-Omen deadpan tells her shoes are not allowed on the furniture. 

The next morning Millie, having slept in a bed for the first time in ages, wakes up late, and rushes downstairs to find Nina in the midst of a complete meltdown. The place is trashed and Nina accuses Millie of tossing out a speech she had written. Andrew steps in and, like he's had to do this many times before, calms Nina down, kisses her passionately and carries her away, but not without looking at Millie apologetically first. It's just the first of Nina's micro- and macro-aggressions towards her, including canceling her Saturday off to run chores, then calling and asking Millie to pick up Cece from dance class, only not telling her where dance class is before hanging up, and when Millie arrives, another mom notes to Millie that Cece is sleeping over at her house and she calls Nina to confirm and disses Millie to. her. face.

Millie doesn't understand why Nina is fucking with her until a peek in her medicine cabinet reveals prescription drugs for treating psychosis. Later she overhears other mothers, at tea, talking about what a saint Andrew is (not to mention so sexy with a million-dollar-smile) for taking Nina and her daughter in, and learns from another nanny about how Nina tried to drown Cece and kill herself with sleeping pills. As Nina continues to harass Millie, Andrew needs to come to Millie's defence more and more... and Millie starts having nighttime fantasies about Andrew.

All of this is just the literal set-up. If it feels like Millie's being set-up, she is. But why. Why is Nina fucking with her so badly? It seems so...intentional, not just erratic thinking of a mentally unstable person. 

And that's the twist of the movie.

Where it seemed so obvious where this movie was going to start - Millie would have an affair with Andrew and Nina would make her life hell for it - the timing was wrong. This is a 131-minute film. From the moment Millie arrived on her first day of work, everything was awry and Nina started fucking with her immediately. A movie would usually build to such events and give us some explanation as to why they were happening. But here, we're left to wonder throughout the prolonged first act, is Millie's criminal past part of it? What about Nina's past?

And then there's Cece, whose need for control and perfection are downright creepy. But then we meet Andrew's mother (Elizabeth Perkins), whose every comment is something disparaging, nothing living up to her standards. The hints are there...is Andrew the problem?

The first act spans the first hour, and then it takes off when Millie and Andrew fuuuck. She's been in prison for 10 years and he's a big, handsome beefcake with a white knight complex...it was bound to happen. Nina finds out, like, immediately, and goes after Millie, but Andrew comes to her defence and tosses Nina out. And soon all the secrets start to unfurl, all the clues come together and the whole thing comes into focus.

Without spoiling too much other than what I've already spoiled, it gets dark, abusive and demented. Then there's a pivot where the abuse is still demented but not so dark. And the finale which ties things up in a nice little bow.

Except the bow is made of horseshit, such that spending more than 30 seconds thinking about not just the ending, (or worse, the franchise set-up) and the whole thing makes less and less sense. It's a trashy story that's barely held together with popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. 

What Feig brings to the trash is a steady hand and a lens for wish fulfillment. There aren't many male directors who understand the feminine gaze like Feig. If this were an 1980's thriller, the sex scenes would be luridly all about Sydney Sweeney's naked body, but Feig knows that what's important to this film's audience is the setting, the mood, the touching, the contact. In the non-sex scenes he lovingly captures the idyllic Winchester house, he get's Millie's POV that even amidst all the hardship she faces from Nina, there's still something she desires about this place. He gets that as much as a naked Brandan Sklenar is of interest to his audience, Sklenar wearing a white tank-top and showing his muscles put to use picking a weeping Amanda Seyfried up off the floor is even sexier. Feig makes a good-looking picture, and makes good-looking people look good in his good-looking picture.

I am not on the Sidney Sweeney train. She's not a bad actor, but she's not a tremendously versatile one either. I've never been wowed. Sure, she has curves (paging Dr. Wenowdis) but her dead eyes counteract the allure.  Maybe in time she will develop from it-girl to prestige performer like a certain K-Stew I really used to dislike and now have tremendous respect for. That Sweeney is taking ownership of her films, nailing those executive producer credits, and no doubt having full control over how much of herself she wants to show and how she wants to show it does relay that she has some idea of what she's doing, at least on a business end. 

Seyfried is quite good here, but only as good as the script will allow her to be. It's within her ability to put Nina into performance mode, and relay to the audience that that is what she is doing, but it would betray the twist of the story for her to do so, and so she's stuck playing Nina as, basically, two different characters. The Nina of the first half who we have to hate, and the Nina of the second half who we need to sympathize with.

The Housemaid is not a bad time, if it's your sort of thing, but it's not really my thing and I was left just kind of annoyed with it.

---

When I think of filmmaking and Winnipeg, I think of Guy Maddin, the surrealist Canadian filmmaker obsessed with the silent era and with a penchant for stories that revolve around a fictionalized version of himself (I also think of Hallmark movies, but that's besides the point here). It's an impossibility that Winnipeg-born director Matthew Rankin wasn't influenced by Maddin's films, as there are touchstones too hard to ignore in Universal Language, Rankin's second full-length feature.

I am by no means a Maddin expert, so comparing this work against Maddin's filmography is a bit beyond my grasp, but just to point out that Universal Language does feature a character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) who is returning to his hometown of Winnipeg to visit his mother. The story, toying with ideas of identity, community, and reality, also presents itself in a non-linear narrative, and the world in which it takes place is not unfamiliar, but is definitely an alternate reality to our own. Rankin does not share Maddin's fixation with early cinema, he does, like Maddin, have a fascination with branding and advertising and the way in which products penetrate our lives. 

The Winnipeg and Canada of Universal Language finds Persian and French as the national languages (no English words are spoken or seen). The Riel is the currency of this version of Canada (with Louis Riel's image stamped upon it), and the Quebecois of the film seem to have real difficult understanding the landscape of Canada outside their own borders... sovereignty is still a fixation.

The patient pacing of Rankin's film is immediate from the first frame, a frame which holds for over three full minutes. It is of the exterior of a school. The entrance in the middle left of frame, the window into as classroom in the upper right. The bricks and windows and eaves create width across the frame and make for their own frames. The class, as viewed through the window, is fully chaotic, unruly. A man carries his luggage in a hurried gait across the frame, up the stairs, into the entrance in the middle left, appearing again as a he enters a doorway visible through the window in the upper right. He scolds his class mercilessly. He's not a fan of their behaviour. And as he berates them, a child enters the lower left of the frame, up the stairs and into the entrance before it cuts to the interior.

Rankin uses this minimalist technique throughout the film, a static shot, precisely framed, often using brick or cement architecture to create depth and space within the scene. The camera doesn't move, instead it becomes all about the movement within the camera. It's spectacular to watch, to marvel at the precision of the movement and the eye that understands what to keep in and what to leave out of the shot. 

The story, as it were, not only finds Matthew returning to Winnipeg to visit his mother, but two young sisters, Negin and Nazgol, who discover a 500 Riel note frozen in ice on the sidewalk and seek a means to retrieve it, as well as Massoud (Pirouz Nemati, also the film's co-screenwriter alongside Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi) who leads a dubious tourist group through mundane highlights of the city.

There are sub-plots (well, "plots" might be a bit much) about turkeys of the wild and pageant-winning variety, Kleenex bingo, and birthday cakes, and in the end everything is connected, which is the whole point. As Massoud says to Matthew, "Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River and together they flow into Lake Winnipeg, we are all connected, agha". The beauty of the film, beyond the visual aesthetics, is the discovery of the connectedness. The details of this alternate reality are so unique that they stand out, so once the pieces start coming together, it's easy to see how they all fit, but it's possible a second viewing would unveil even more.

I wondered what the purpose of the character being named after the director (and played by the director) was, as it's hard to know when something plays with the surreal in this way what of this film is personal. Has Rankin found himself deeply ingrained in the Iranian-Canadian community, and this is his message to his country and the world of how warm and kind the community is, or is this simply an absurdist conceit that he really committed to? I have not delved into the works of Jafar Panahi yet, but my understanding of the Iranian filmmaker is he often works blurring the lines between what's real and personal and what is fiction. So as much as Rankin is tapping into Winnipeg's most notable filmmaker, he's also reaching outward to much broader cinematic influences (he also cites Iranian cinema legends Abbas Kiastroiami and Sohrab Shahid-Saless as influences as well as other Winnipeg directors John Paizs and John Paskievich, among others. I am, of course, unfamiliar with any of these).

The climax of the film finds Matthew finally reaching his mother, only to learn a stranger has been taking care of her in the years since he's been away. There's an unspoken element, that there was distance between Matthew and his parents, and that in that distance someone else has filled the gap. Though not presented as "big drama" in the moment, there is something nakedly raw and emotional about this idea, that we can find ourselves more connected to strangers than our own family, and also in that disconnect we can lose ourselves.  

It seems 2026 is the year I invest more of my time in Canadian film. I really need to see Rankin's debut The Twentieth Century, and I need to do a filmography walk through of Maddin as well. 

---

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Omni Loop

2024, Bernardo Britto (Jacqueline Argentine) -- download

I had every intention and expectation of doing this write-up as a Loopty Loo post, as the movie is, as the title suggests, about loops. But in watching, it is less about looping than it is about time travel, and it is less about time travel, as it is about living a life. And yet it does begin with the trope -- "Careful, " Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker, Weeds) says to the elderly lady about to sit on a bench at the rest home where Zoya's mother stays, just before a bird leaves a big plop of poo. "How did you know?" And you know what her answer is -- that she has lived this before, many times before. She's in a loop.

How did she get into the loop? When Zoya was 12 years old, she found a bottle of pills in a field. That bottle had her name on it. When she takes a pill, it sends her back five days. The pill bottle never empties. But now, decades later, it has had its consequences. Zoya has a black hole growing in her chest. These are her last five days, which she is living over and over. She wakes up in the hospital, she gets the news from her distraught but supportive family, and then they live, with her, for the next five days, until she has a nose bleed while blowing out candles on her 55th birthday cake, goes into the bathroom and takes the pill.

So, in some ways, its most definitely not a time loop movie. She isn't stuck, she doesn't have to find her way out. The way out is either living onward, or death. And yet we get to play with the tropes a wee bit. Zoya decides she doesn't want to die with regrets, nor just keep looping these same sad five days. And as fate would have it, she bumps into a young woman named Paula (Ayo Edebiri, The Bear) who is carrying a book on quantum mechanics that Zoya wrote. You see, Zoya is not just a woman going through time, but also a woman who spent a good part of her life studying time. That is, until she decided she would settle on living a life with a husband and child, and gave it all up. But bumping into Paula, literally, she finds a new path during those five days, and recruits Paula into unraveling the mystery of the pills, and their time travel abilities.

Except that's not what the movie is about, either. This movie is about the life Zoya chose over unraveling the mysteries of the universe. You see, Zoya has built a life on being brilliant, but is she? She admits she did so well on university tests because she knew the answers; time looping allows for that, quite easily. A professor accuses her of being lazy and unfocused and entitled. That's because she comes to knowledge by way of the answers, not the hard study, at first, I imagine. But eventually, given enough five day loops, she learned enough to write text books on the topic. But it seems she tired of that, and gave it up to become a mother and a wife. But now, in her final five days, she wonders if she regrets it.

This is a weird movie in a weird universe. When she is diagnosed, there is no, "How the fuck do you exist with a black hole growing in your chest?!?!?" The world isn't panicking, its not going to suck in everything in our solar system. It will just kill Zoya and doctors, despite saying they have never encountered it before, are calm. "Take her home, make her comfortable," they say. There is also a dying "last one-horned rhino in the world" and a plastic box containing The Nanoscopic Man, a man who was the subject of an experiment and is now shrinking, forever -- he is already molecular. His box is stored away in an aging, forgotten, professor's drawer. 

Zoya and Paul do end up spending many many MANY loops trying to figure out the power of the pills, but to no avail. The movie just breezes right past the challenges Zoya must be presented with in having to bring Paula up to speed on every previous iteration's experiments. Zoya hopes to break the five day timeframe, perhaps to go back far enough to choose a different life, but the more and more she loops, away from her family, focused only on the work with Paula, the more she comes to value the family time more than the expected benefits to cracking the code. Finally, she sees what she really wanted most out of life, and she had it.

Complete spoilers hereafter.

Zoya has always blown out those candles, seen the drops of the beginning nose bleed, but never opened the birthday presents her family have brought. Until that last "day", when she presents all her studies on time, and on the pills, to another new iteration of Paula, telling her to "proceed" with the work without her, for she knows Paula has her own very personal reasons to go back further than five days. And Zoya she goes home, opens the present, sees that she is going to be a grandmother, and they will name the little girl Zoya. She finally sees she has had a completely full life, and her regrets were silly. And the black hole sucks her in with a pop, and she's gone. No more loops, no more Zoya.

This is why I watch movies. Stories that make me think, touch on emotions, touch on ideas, leave me thinking long afterward. In some ways this was why this blog was created; to record those thoughts, and find rebuttal and/or furtherance. 

Finally, there is a toss away scene, one which makes a small comment on Loopty Loo's in that, each time Zoya pops a pill, she disappears, but the time loop continues. It is a reality, a time line, from which she has escaped but it doesn't go away. So in a way they are not loops at all, but a generation of new time lines in their multitude. I love that idea, something new for the sub-genre I love so.

Enter the Lexxicon: Super Nova

aka Lexx: 2.0
aka Tales From a Parallel Universe

1996, d. Ron Oliver - Tubi

There's a brilliant gag in the Father Ted Christmas special ("A Christmassy Ted") where Ted opines to the other inhabitants of the parochial house that he's looking forward to a nice, normal, uneventful Christmas with no big surprises... then the doorbell rings. Ted answers the door to find a bassinet with a swaddled baby stirring. Just as he's about to pick up the baby, a woman appears from out of frame and asks if she has the right address. Turns out no, and off she goes with the baby. The "Three Men and a Baby" plotline is teed up and then quickly snatched away.  It's a great subversion of expectations, especially in how sitcoms often will borrow plot lines from popular films just to fill the schedule and as a cheap shorthand to jokes.

At the start of Lexx's second tv movie/episode, we see a pod containing a single humanoid life form floating in space. It's emanating a message, on repeat, advising of this life-form's mission. His people are dying, their children are dying, and they need help from outside to help save them. He's floating in space in cryosleep hoping to encounter someone, anyone who might receive the message and be able to help him and his people in their most desperate hour. Then, enters the frame the giant dragonfly spaceship,the Lexx. We know this set up from countless Space Journey shows... he is rescued and the next course of adventure for our cast of characters is chosen. Except the message is not heard, and the life pod smashes into the Lexx and explodes leaving nary a scratch and no one inside the ship is even remotely aware of what might have been. For Lexx's second episode, it's the creators yelling at the audience "we are not that".

Instead inside the Lexx, 790 rhymes off love poems about his dear "Zev Zev" while scanning the star charts for Kai's home planet of Brunnis. Zev wants Kai, but he is dead, so he does not want. She hopes his home planet can somehow return him to full life. Stan meanwhile propositions Zev while she's showering (while nudity in TV has become exceptionally normal in a post-Game of Thrones world, in the 90's it was still a bit sensational for any TV to have breasts or butts or whatnots), intoning that she's a love slave and he has needs... but he is resoundingly rebuffed. "Realistically Stan, there's not much to like about you. You're old, unattractive...self-centered, vain, weak-willed, treacherous...." Zev may have been programmed for love, but she still has standards.

Kai is awakened by the insatiable cannibal Giggerata who they rescued last episode. She has designs to eat his cold meat but he gets the best of her. He directs Stan and crew on where to find Brunnis. Landing on the planet they discover the planet is deserted, and Kai directs them to the archive, the reservoir of the planet's knowledge. Only the AI that operates the reserve has been hijacked by Poet Man (Tim Curry), the one left behind when the Brunnen-G all left Brunnis.

Inside Zev, Stan and Kai each are transported into a memory machine that manipulates them based on their memories and desires. Zev sees snippets of her history - her parents abandoning her and the matron of the holocare home guiding her through wifely lesson - before Kai emerges, alive and they perform a romantic duet. Stanley, meanwhile, is tempted by lust, only to find him a prisoner of an impregnation scheme (that mistakenly identifies him as female). Poet Man has turned the archive into a house of torture.

While the crew is on the planet, Giggerata has free reign on the Lexx where she meets the Divine Order (the collection of all the telepathic brains that had once inhabited His Divine Shadow) and, after she attempts to eat one or two of them ("Too salty!") they lure her to their side by promising her the location of the planet of milk-fed boys. She needs Stan to pilot the ship to her new feeding grounds. The storylines thus intersect as the Divine Order advise Giggerata on how to destroy Brunnis and Kai -their greatest threat- in the process.

Once again this Lexx installment feels exceptionally random, as if constructed by free association. While "I Worship His Shadow" was off-beat and took a lot of strange detours, it was still propulsive, and its ability to link the disparate characters it introduced together happens rather organically. "Super Nova", on the other hand, seems a bit lost for purpose. The intent of the episode is the get more into the characters and their motivations, but they're so thin (or non-existant) that it doesn't have enough to really explore. 

It's the problem with Kai being undead, and not having and wants or desires or really any feelings at all...the return trip to Brunnis is at best observational. He has no attachments. It's only Zev's very limited want to find a way to restore life to Kai (something he repeatedly intones is impossible) that moves them to explore the planet. 

All this leads to a largely tedious and repetitive episode with almost no stakes that doesn't demand the 90-minute runtime it has. Giggerata is the episode's highlight throughout, just a delightfully weird, angry, vengeful and hungry character (played by Ellen Dubin). 

While the previous instalment hinted at the idea of cycles of existence, and prophets who can see the past cycles in order to predict the future, there's a short sequence here that touches on it again, although rather than imparting anything new into the operatic elements of the story, it's restricted to the threats immediately at hand. And it doesn't help anything that the episode's climax, what saves our waylaid crew from an otherwise hopeless situation, is a complete deus ex machina.

Where "I Worship His Shadow" was bristling with ideas and energy, "Super Nova" seems largely devoid of them. As far as the creators knew, they had an order for four 90-minute episodes, so it's entirely too early for this kind of filler. 

I was wrong twice with my review of that first installment of Lexx. First I said that Stanley Tweedle will never show any growth in this series, and immediately, in this second episode Stan rejects Giggerata's proposition to turn the Lexx into a love-ship if he abandons Zev and Kai, and instead stands by his friends instead of fulfilling his own needs. But maybe that's all the growth we ever get out of him. Second, I said I was as sucked in as I was 30 years ago. This episode kinda put the 'suck' into 'sucked in'. It has its moments, but they're few and far between.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): American Sweatshop

2025, Uta Briesewitz (TV shows including Stranger Things, The Pitt) -- download

The Internet is full of vile, vitriolic, horrible shit. It always has been. It just seems that more, of late, is being thrown in our face. Part of the reason for that is that the platforms that dominate the Internet now, primarily Social Media, are shying away from proper content moderation. What is "proper" you ask? Valuing humans over dollars, if you ask me.

At the time of writing this, social media is buzzing with the latest example of how horrible people, and in particular, men can be. A porn website exists, upon it was a chat forum where men discussed the topic of drugging and raping their partners. CNN did a story investigating the site and its content. Social Media has gone wild and is more focused on the hyperbole of both sides of the conversation, rather than just addressing exactly how horrible the activity is. The conversation on the actual topic is derailed by hype & outrage because the latter gets clicks, views and impressions. 

Daisy (Lili Reinhart, Riverdale) works at Paladin, a YouTube analog, in the role of content moderation. Its a shit job, but someone has to do it. She's an aimless soul that abandoned becoming a nurse. She works with other similarly aimless souls, some more unhinged than others. Then she sees a video of a woman being nailed to a board. "Fake! Special Effects! Kink!" everyone decries. But Daisy believes it is real and she becomes obsessed with it, and begins to spiral.

I expected this to be a standard thriller, one where she sleuths her way to the truth of the video and its even more horrible than she could conceive. It would end in her confronting the maker, probably in a violent climax. Or a twist. So, it does end with her confronting someone connected to the video, but not in the way I expected.

The movie more so focuses on the effect it has on Daisy, and all of it is negative. Her company wants her to move on. Her friends don't believe it can be real. But she cannot get it out of her head. She tries alcohol & sex to escape, but only finds more anger & violence -- this time, from her. She tries researching the video and its creators, and is sent down a misleading rabbit hole. Nothing is working out, nothing is dismissing it from her mind. Again, another movie would have this as a brief act, and eventually leading to her gearing-up and doing something about it. But we get more a character study and a commentary on the impact not only this "content" has on its victims but also the way our generally apathetic approach to its existence makes us complicit.

That said, I guess I have to lump myself into the complicit because I just see it, frown and turn away, but don't do anything. And I wonder, what is there to do.

Daisy does something. The final bit of the final act does kind of turn things around, ending with Daisy's fourth-wall breaking stare at us, a challenge to follow her path.

Enter the Lexxicon: I Worship His Shadow

aka Lexx: 1.0
aka Lexx: The Dark Zone Stories Part 1

1996, d. Paul Donovan - tubi

I love the Series 1 VHS boxes
that look like sf paperback
novel covers

It's hard to believe that Lexx turns 30 this year. I didn't realize it had hit this anniversary when I was cruising Tubi and saw that the series was available there (I have DVDs of the entire run, I was just being lazy in not retrieving them). It's been at least 20 years since I last watched it. 

I was a big fan of the series, but I always felt a bit ashamed about this fact. If you've ever seen it, you will understand why. If you've never seen it, if you've never even heard of it, well, let me give you a brief description.

Lexx is a series about horny space travelers who have hijacked the most powerful weapon in the galaxy and have absconded with it into the Dark Zone:  an unruly, ugly place of violence and depravity, and possibly some kindness...but unlikely. It's a show that wears its modest budget proudly on its sleeve, revels in being just a bit too gross and a bit too kinky for mainstream acceptance. 

A Canadian/German co-production, Lexx is a lower-budget space-faring action-adventure series that finds the coward Stanley Tweedle become the living key to operating the Lexx, an experimental dragonfly-shaped spaceship that has the ability to destroy entire planets (it's an organic Death Star, in bug form). He is accompanied by Zev whose transition into a love slave whose DNA accidentally got mixed with a cluster lizard, so she's weirdly strong and fierce. And then there's 790, a robot head whose mixed-up programming has him obsessed with Zev. Kai is an undead assassin who is also the last member of his race, fabled to bring about the destruction of His Divine Shadow, the leader of the Divine Order that rules of the League of 20,000 Planets.

"I Worship His Shadow" is effectively the Lexx origin story. It's where it all starts, beginning with Kai and his brethren's last battle against the Divine Order thousands of years earlier, and losing. We get a sense of how the hierarchy of the divine order works when a new His Divine Shadow is chosen. Only this time, the transference of the divine shadow into its new host body still has some of the murderous psychopath impulses remaining and this totalitarian ruler is about to get a lot more nasty.

The host planet of the League of 20,000 Planets is The Cluster, which is underpinned by the a monotonous drudgery of bureaucracy. A heavy debt is usually owed to Terry Gilliam's Brazil any time sci-fi shows the tediousness of ruling bureaucracy. The story of "I Worship His Shadow" largely lives within the bureaucracy, though the larger operatic swoops in starts slapping the bureaucracy around. 

We meet Zev as part of prisoner processing. She is a fat, snaggletoothed, pimply woman who failed to perform her wifely duties (she slugged her juvenile betrothed smack in the face on her wedding day). Her punishment is to be transformed into a love slave and sent to a brothel planet as penance where she's to serve the rest of her days.

Stanley Tweedle is a "class 4" security guard whose surly, selfish, lazy behaviour leads to nearly a thousand demerit and his latest infraction may see him put to death if he doesn't report for corrections, where he hears may lose a limb or some organs.

As the new His Divine Shadow starts to establish his new way of rule, a prisoner, Thodin, leader of the resistance, has sprung free from his confines and wreaking havoc on The Cluster. Zev's love-slave transformation is disrupted when a cluster lizard gets caught in the transformation process, decapitated robot 790 takes some of the love slave programming in a feedback surge, and Stanley's desperate, cowardly last-minute race to corrections is interrupted by Zev and Thodin. (It turns out Thodin knows Stanley and he is deemed an epic traitor to the cause). His Divine Shadow awakens Kai to put a stop to Thodin's insurgent activity, and in the process the key to the Divine Order's latest, greatest weapon, the Lexx, is transferred to Stanley. Kai manages to awaken some long-dead memories and turn on the Divine Order, and they all escape in the Lexx into the rift towards the Dark Zone. Kai, however, only has a limited amount of "protoblood" left to keep him animated (about 10 hours worth they say) so he enters cryosleep and advises Zev and Stan to only awaken him in case of emergency.

By no standard is Lexx "good", but at the same time, it's kind of great. Its digita effects, even for the time, were a bit clumsy, but the special effects as a whole have a cobbled together, kitchen sink approach, with a plucky charm that still remains. The sets are like Geiger by way of Cronenberg, alternatively organic and suggestive, or industrial and grimy, and are meant to make you feel uncomfortable. Even when there's no sex or violence on screen, there's an inference of one or the other in the set design.

The storytelling of Lexx, as witnessed by this first 90-minute movie-length premier (the first season is actually four 90-minute movies, although I first watched them on Canadian television as 8 hour-long episode, with commercials) doesn't like or want a clean narrative. There's a lot of erratic happenstance even in this first episode, and it's already clear that the show's creators (Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff and Jeffrey Hirschfield) delight in the asides and mundanity of this reality they created.

Lexx is a space opera, but one that dwells in the basest of levels. It's like if Star Trek Voyager was about a quartet of weirdos who wanted nothing to do with the Star Trek universe, and yet kept stumbling their way through it. The operatic elements keep finding their way into the characters lives, despite their best efforts to avoid it. The fun the creators have is starting the series off in a realm ruled by an evil overlord (ala Star Wars) and then instead of building up its characters as the freedom fighters who will save the galaxy, they instead turn tail and flee to an even more dismal plane of existence.

Marty Simon's score to Lexx was a particular favourite of mine back in the late 90's. Full of synths and jangly guitars, it feels suitably grimy, while the infusion of real and electronic sounds meshes so well with the show's biotechnology aesthetic. The way Simon's score often pulsates, it accentuates the horny overtones of the production, as if it's the composition for some other-dimentional adult video.

Brian Downey's Stanley Tweedle is a very unlikeable character because, as mentioned multiple times now, he is an utter coward only ever concerned with his own self preservation. Even the pilot episode offers him no hope of redemption down the road (and, from what I can recall, none ever comes, he's a character who stubbornly refuses to learn or grow from the experiences he has).  

Zev is the heart of the show, the one character audiences are meant both sympathize with and lust over. Eva Habermann is a very attractive actress, and the show is keen to remind us as if we couldn't tell. Habermann has a wry glee to her performance in this first movie, and one little tip-off (her "See ya, loverboy" kiss-off to 790) tells me there's some Lori Petti's Tank Girl influence on the character.  There's a bounciness to Habermann's portrayal of Zev in this inaugural episode that emanates positive energy, and makes her the bright center of the Dark Zone.

Michael McManus plays Kai, and his performance was always the one I brushed up against during the original run. The character is literally dead inside, and McManus plays him as such. He has the weirdest facial ticks and physicality which always struck me as too odd and uncool for what was supposed to be the bad-ass killing machine archetype.  With the eyes of a more seasoned viewer I can see that McManus is trying to make Kai interesting and unique, not cool, and I guess as I re-watch I'll see if he succeeded. Also, Kai is designed to be pretty, rather than handsome or scruffy-looking, and that probably made me uncomfortable once upon a time.

Barry Bostwick turns in a cameo appearance as Thodin, the leader of the resistance, running around the sets of The Cluster in a Zardoz-esque loincloth that is so undignified that I don't think I appreciated how much Bostwick must have delighted in wearing such an absurd and revealing costume and being presented as the great and studly hero.

There's a lot of joy to be found in "I Worship His Shadow". It's silly, it's fun, it's sexy and off-putting, alluring and disgusting, and it refuses to play by there rules. I'm as sucked in as I was 30 years ago.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Americana

2023, Tony Tost (feature debut) -- download

I used to reference "cleaning out the cupboards" or similar idioms in reference to finally getting around to writing about movies I had recently seen. But since I now see fewer movies, and generally stub them & write about them quicker, it doesn't apply. BUT maybe it applies to those downloaded movies that I grabbed quickly, but also quickly forgot about for newer, shinier movies. This is one of those. I have many more.

[Soooo many more. I usually start at "latest" and push back, which means I eventually find something and start watching. Today, I reversed the order and I have SO MANY 'unwatched' movies downloaded, I could start my own streaming service.]

Tost is primarily a writer, of shows like Damnation, which he was creator, and Longmire, and showrunner for Poker Face. He writes about "the American experience" which is a rather sweeping comment to make, by anyone. But outsiders (including us) have a view of what "American" means and it often involves cowboys, violence and the downtrodden rising up. Too bad the current viewpoint will only leave them seen as the often violent abusers. America used to be a fictional heroic figure, and I am not sure if its pop culture image will ever recover from what we are going through now, even if that past vision was mostly through rose coloured glasses.

This is the kind of movie I would lumped into a Tarantino-wannabe bucket about twenty years ago. It has a decently large cast, a plot with lots of moving pieces and ends with a great amount of violence. 

It begins with a death. Mandy (Halsey, Sing 2) is escaping her abusive boyfriend Dillon (Eric Dane, The Last Ship). She is forced to leave her "little brother" behind,  who claims to be "the reincarnation of Sitting Bull" come back to save his people. She drives off with a priceless "Indian artifact" in the trunk and Dillon comes out to find the kid with an arrow nocked -- a few fly into the trailer, but the last catches him in the neck. Dillon and I both let out a "huh" before he falls down dead.

Air quote much?

It should be said that the movie, shot widescreen, highlights the vast empty barren landscape of the American Midwest. I would think it was somewhere Texas or Arizona, but it claims to be South Dakota.I guess I am not truly caught up on my geographical Americana, but yeah, peeking at a map confirms South Dakota is definitely "cowboy land".

The next pieces in the puzzle, and its really not a huge puzzle, are Lefty Ledbetter (right handed; Paul Walter Hauser, The Fantastic Four: First Steps) who keeps proposing to women he has been on three dates with, and Penny Jo (Sydney Sweeney, Madame Web), a stuttering waitress with a dream of becoming  a country & western singer. Penny has overheard Dillon, days before his death, plotting with a "antiquities dealer" to steal a Ghost Shirt from its owner. She conspires with the sweet but naive Lefty to steal it from Dillon and sell it herself, so she can fund herself moving to Nashville. Not long after, we see Dillon and Fun Dave (Joe Adler, Damnation) break into the house of a pompous wealthy man, brutally murder everyone at a party and steal the shirt. Dillon immediately kills Fun Dave for having feelings over the murders. And then, not long after that, Mandy steals the Shirt.

Mandy flees back to the relative safety of her family home, with Penny Jo and Lefty following. Mandy's family is a protected compound of backwater hick manosphere types where her father is the patriarch.  She just needs a place to lie low until she figures out how to sell the Shirt. Meanwhile, her little brother Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman, Spirited), who we learn is her son (duh...), has found his way onto the rez and is not endearing himself with the local militant Native American group, considering his whole Sitting Bull schtick. 

And thus begins the convergence on Mandy's father's compound. Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon, Lomgmire) and his militant group, Penny Jo & Lefty, and the original dealer in antiquities who paid Dillon to steal the Shirt. And this is where the "Tarantino" comes in, i.e. lots of violence. Lefty is shot, Mandy is shot, most of Ghost Eye's crew are killed, the male members of Mandy's "family" are killed, and the antiquities dealer is killed, leaving behind the money he was going to pay for the Shirt. The Shirt itself goes to the surviving Ghost Eye, who rejects Cal at the door to the res; he's not having any of this next-level cultural appropriation from a ten year old. The movie ends with Penny Jo driving off into the sunrise, leaving behind the corpse of Lefty, with a bag of money and proving, wow, she can actually sing.

I am not entirely sure of the proper commentary on the American experience, beyond being wrapped up in violence, but it is mostly definitely a very American indie film. Tost is adept at characters and dialogue so all of that rings true and while most in the movie are character actors, the few faces we know (and are on the poster) are doing a proper job. I wonder where Sweeney is going with her career, as she takes on more and more roles that divest her her from a just being a blonde with boobs. Halsey, who I only know as a pop star, does really well in this role, this being her second dramatic piece, outside of voice work. Apparently Paul Walter Hauser is the indie guy of the moment, or so the movie blogs say, and while this role doesn't give him much, there is something there. 

Final note. This is one of Eric Dane's final movies, before passing away from ALS this year, only a year after he announced his diagnosis. He went downhill fast. I knew him mostly for a few thriller TV shows, but he always had a very American Guy presence about him. I don't have the courage to watch his episode of Netflix's Famous Last Words but I can imagine they were powerful words.

Ah-Ah-Argento #3: Four Flies on Grey Velvet

I started my watch/rewatch of Italian suspense/horror maestro Dario Argento in January 2025, and I got all of two films in before I hit a wall. That wall was the wildly unavailable Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Argento's third film. It too disappeared for a long time between its North American theatrical release in the early 70's and when it finally became available on home video in the late 2000s. I ordered a Blu-Ray copy of the film from my local physical media purveyor, never to arrive, and attempts to find it elsewhere from Canadian sites came up empty. Beyond scouring the local used stores in town, I regularly watched a stub entry for the DVD version on a website for a Southern Ontario used music and video retail chain, and after many, many months it finally was available and delivered to me last month. And so now we resume with Ah-Ah-Argento....

(aka "4 mosche di velluto grigio") 1971, d. Dario Argento - dvd

Argento's third film shows the director not yet at the height of his powers, but certainly coming into them. His stylistic flourishes here aren't all consuming but when they're utilized one sits up and takes notice of them, and it starts from the first frame.

Our lead character in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Roberto (Michael Brandon) is in a music store wailing on the drums, and Argento shoots it like a music video, before music videos were a thing. First we're in a series of close-ups of the kit from an overhead shot, which pulls out to reveal Roberto, and it pans around him reveal that he's in a store, and it continues to pan until we're looking out the store window to see a man in a hat and sunglasses looking in and we see Roberto sense the man's glare, before a hard cut to a black screen and left of center a vibrant red heart, heavily pounding. Then a seemingly seamless cut to Roberto in studio, jamming out with his post-hippie psych-rock band, still wailing on those drums (at one point we cut to a shot from the inside of an acoustic guitar, a hand eventually interrupting the shot as it strums). Close up of Roberto is being pestered by a fly, trying not to lose his concentration. We cut to the exterior of the studio, as Roberto walks through the parkette out front. In the distance, the same man with hat and sunglasses. Once more, hard cut to the black screen and pounding heart, before cutting back to Roberto driving his car. In his rear-view mirror he spies, in the car immediately behind him, that same man. Same hard cut. Black screen. Pounding heart. And then back to the studio, Roberto wailing on the drums, but that fly (looks like a mosquito) still buzzes around him, even causing him to lose his timing for a moment, before it lands in the middle of his hi-hat. This whole sequence, the band's wailing psych-rock has been playing, interrupted only by the black-screen/pounding heart, and as the song hits its crescendo, we view Roberto through the top and bottom of the hi-hat, his gaze fixed on the mosquito, until *CRASH*, the song ends, the bug is dead, the slyest of smirks crosses Roberto's face.

The psych-rock tune is just derivative nonsense (not sure if this film's composer, the legendary Ennio Morricone was involved in the creation of that tune, but if he was I would suspect the derivativeness of that nonsense was the point) but it's somehow essential to get across Roberto's profession and juxtapose the jubilant wail of the tune against the anxiety of seemingly being followed. The camera, whether moving or still, is superb, Argento's framing is exciting. The edits are a bit jumpy but effective in adding to Roberto's anxiety. And that pulsating red heart on the black screen, a chef's kiss to the whole process that feels like the influence of Mario Bava.

The plot kicks off immediately following this opening sequence, with Roberto seeing the hat-and-sunglasses man and chasing him down into an abandoned theatre. The man refuses to answer any questions and pulls out a switchblade. He lunges at Roberto, who grabs his wrist and as the man twists he's stabbed in the side and falls off the stairs into the orchestra pit. A noise from above reveals a figure on the balcony, a large mascot-sized cartoon head with a big grin looking down on the scene. A camera in hand, photos continue to be taken. Roberto runs, returns home and is bitter towards his wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer). 

His dreams haunt him, then a phone call harassing him. In the paper the next day, the story of a body dumped in the river, the victim unidentified. The next night someone is in his house. It's dark, the lights won't turn on. He's grabbed from behind, a cord around his throat, and he's told he can be killed at any time, but not now. First he needs to suffer. Then, in the mail, comes the passport of the man he killed. And that night, at the party, someone there slipped one of the photos taken at the murder scene between Roberto's records. He eventually comes clean with Nina, and the maid overhears (Roberto and Nina only seem to call her "the maid", despite the fact that she lives with them...fucking rude man). The maid knows who it was who put the photo there, and she tries to blackmail the harasser, only to get herself killed.

It all sort of escalates from there. Roberto attempts to get help from his outsider friend God (Bud Spencer), and God has his transient friend, The Professor (Oreste Lionello) watch Roberto's house for the next few nights. In my recollection of Argento's films (it's been years since I watched most of his later films and over a year now since I watched his first two) but I don't recall Argento having a lot of humour in his films. But characters like God and especially the Professor bring a lot of unusual energy, taking this outside of the typical Giallo I've experienced. Lionello especially has a incredible knack for physical humour with the  subtle, fluid grace of a Chaplin or Lloyd. Far more broad is the thick-glasses performance of Gildo Di Marco as the postman who Roberto mistakes as his stalker and beats on him. Not all the comedy fits into the production, in fact most of it feels like it's from another picture entirely. It doesn't suit the mood of the piece.

By far the best favourite aspect of the film was the inclusion of Gianni Arrosio (Jean-Pierre Marielle), the private investigator Roberto hires to help find out who is harassing him. Gianni is an effeminate gay, not coded in the slightest. He's right out there. But he's not comic relief. He is witty, but he's not the butt of any jokes. Marielle brings this character to life and he's the most richly drawn character in a production that otherwise feels cast full of one-note, one-dimensional figures. Marielle gets his own slice of the picture, starting with an investigation montage that leads him on full journey through Rome and beyond. I could have watched a whole film, hell, a whole series of Marielle's gay detective... just a remarkably lively performance. Of course he gets murdered, but it's because he's figured out who it is, only they catch on to him first.

Four Flies... is a mystery, but it's kind of a ramshackle one that doesn't fully hold together, especially once the reveal happens. I mean, it doesn't fall apart, but it's not satisfying in the slightest, and is kind of a corny, of-the-era take on mental illess. I don't really expect better of films from that time, but I'm certain even then it wasn't a satisfying reveal. It seems so cliche. This film's climax involves the concept of optography, that the last thing someone sees before their death is captured on their retina like a photograph. It's utter bullshit, and even science of the '70's should have known better, yet it's the turning point of the film. Writers like Kipling, Lovecraft and Verne have had stories with optography as a plot point, and even modern movies and TV shows like Fringe toy with the idea.

Morricone delivers a magnificent theme for the film, a lyrical, haunting string humming over a pulsating heartbeat that feels like it's either going to break into a love song or something terrifying and it never leaves that tension. I can hear hints of what would become the theme to Twin Peaks percolating within its tones. The rest of the soundtrack doesn't have anything so immediate or attention getting, but it's one of Morricone's great compositions that probably isn't cited much (it would be Argento and Morricone's last collaboration for 25 years, due to a falling out).

For Argento viewing Four Flies... seems a transitional movie. The director's first two films were incredibly solid entries in the suspense realm, and this one, with it's cast performing in English (despite still being dubbed) seemed to be a grasp at something that seemed more American in style. I don't think Argento would strain much to operate in that style again. But then again, I've never seen his next film, The Five Days which is the only film of his that truly operates outside his expected genres.