Here Comes the Calvary

An appropriate image for Easter.

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, on Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema, reviewed by me for Electric Sheep. And like a fool, I’d never seen it.

Ladies and Germs

There’s a commercial showing in UK cinemas right now for some kind of anti-armpit treatment. It’s mostly quite bland, but there’s a shot of an inflamed pink CGI surface that’s supposed to illustrate the concept of When Armpits Go Bad, and if you look in the upper right corner (as Fiona and Alex both did, separately pointing it out to me) you can see a caption superimposed that reads “Artistic Dramatisation”.

Over at Electric Sheep Magazine, I look at the Blu-Ray of RABID, which is another artistic dramatisation of an armpit, in this case that of Marilyn Chambers, who has a very dramatic armpit indeed.

When I first became aware of Cronenberg, it was through Scorsese’s praise, and at that time, RABID seemed to be his second film as director. A little later, we became aware that STEREO and CRIMES OF THE FURURE were actual real productions, and could even be seen if you were lucky. We didn’t learn about FAST COMPANY until quite a bit later, because the filmmaker himself wasn’t anxious to talk about it. Now, the IMDb lists RABID as something like his twentieth project, making Cronenberg one of the most retroactively prolific filmmakers I have encountered. If we wait long enough, it seems like he will eventually have made more movies than Raul Ruiz, not by actually making further films, but by the far simpler route of turning out to have made more movies than we previously knew about. I wish I had that ability.

Lady Latterly’s Shover

Marlon Brando gets jiggy repulsively bestial with the fragrant Stephanie Beacham in Michael Winner’s THE NIGHTCOMERS, reviewed by me over at Electric Sheep Magazine. Of course, frame-grabbing moments like this from the big sex montage allows me to present Winner’s World of Erotica in condensed diamond form, his lap dissolves (he edited it too) creating a Janus-faced limb-tangle, a Brando-Beacham telepod mishap, like something out of Brian Yuzna’s SOCIETY.

Look, Stephanie is eating a tiny arm! How adorable.

Arguably Winner was Britain’s greatest underrated experimental filmmaker, devoting fully three decades of his career to exploring the myriad ways of making a film simply fail to work. An inexhaustible field of study for one so resourceful.