Hearing the rudimentary bleeps and bloops on art-pop freak Kate NV’s (real non-art-pop-freak name Kate Shilonosova) new album Room For The Moon gradually build upon each other is something close to alchemy. Hearing these primitive form intricate, robot-jazz orchestras feels like watching a movie go from black-and-white to Technicolor, a whole world revealed to have been hiding in plain sight, one length of yarn revealed to be a small part of a massive, avant-disco quilt. Room For The Moon is as much a quilt as it is an album, a conglomeration of strange synthesizer noises and foreign languages being interwoven in front of you.

Every song is assembled from the ground up. The silence at the start of opening track “Not Not Not” is cut by a stark loop of beeps, those beeps are interrupted by a low bass strum, that bass gets covered by a chirping Buchla synth that opens up into a drum machine and guitar and horns, all of these elements steadily fall into place like musical Tetris. It’s new wave as a Mondrian painting, all sharp lines and shocking bursts of color that come together in some mysterious abstract harmony beyond my understanding. Even Shilonosova’s vocals, which cut through the instrumentation as the one concrete aspect of the song, only take two minutes to dissolve into pure texture as her voice doubles and triples until the words lose shape altogether.

Shilonosova explains on her Instagram that the album was written at the loneliest point of her life, holed up in her apartment while her body “rebelled on some kind of physical level” from hunching over synthesizers for the last year and a half. Through this futuristic fairy tale pop music, she searches for connections and joy in isolation, and songs like “Ça Commence Par” feel like an introvert’s idea of a tropical dance party. On that song, small bursts of manic laughter bubble up through a mutant disco rhythm as Shilonosova sings in French — one of four languages on the album — channeling Lizzie Mercier Descloux at her most infectious. The chorus — On l’achète pour manger / remarque toi personne ne le mange jamais / ça commence par… un ‘a’ — is, verbatim, just a riddle: You buy it to eat, but notice no one ever eats it; it starts with a ‘P’. The unspoken, hilariously anticlimactic answer to the song’s puzzle? A plate.

The bridging of disparate languages, genres, and cultures is a running motif throughout the album, a blurring of the lines between traditions and sounds. Between tracks and even in the middle of them, Shilonosova shifts seamlessly between English, Russian, French, and Japanese, evoking everything from the swampy grooves of Ze Records to the nonchalant intimacy of Haruomi Hosono’s laidback city pop to French yé-yé chansons. The album’s lead single, “Sayonara,” pushes this to its furthest extent, an exercise in multilingual wordplay fleshed out into a six-minute avant-pop earworm. There are just three words total in the lyrics — yes, no, and goodbye, spoken in Russian and Japanese — but the end result, built up from a skeletal drum machine rhythm and a playful post-punk guitar loop, stands as one of the most addictive and hypnotic songs on the album. It’s a multilingual art-pop bop practically designed for the most classic of all noncommittal concert dance moves, the gentle sway and head-bob, a song to lose yourself in. Think Russian Cate le Bon stripped down to its bare essentials, then make that about 30% funkier and you’ll get the idea.

If Room For The Moon is a symphony of voices emerging from within, then Brooklyn filmmaker Khalik Allah’s 2018 documentary Black Mother is its natural opposite and unlikely companion piece: a symphony of external voices. It’s a travelogue at heart, but reworked as prayer, eulogy, and Greek chorus. Like the tangled sounds and synthetic rhythms of Kate NV’s album, the faces and voices of Jamaica overlap and intertwine like a similar cross-cultural quilt, forming a mosaic of the island country’s past, present, and future from an outsider’s perspective.

In Allah’s trademark style, Black Mother’s audio is untethered from its visuals; the film is organized by metaphorical trimesters of a pregnancy, but within those divisions constructed from dreamy, amorphous portraits of individual Jamaicans speaking in voiceover against disconnected 16mm and digital footage of them wandering the city and countryside. These mini-portraits cover everything from sex work and Kool-Aid to Haile Selassie and life after death. Voices and songs bleed into each other over images of extraordinary joy and beauty, coming off like a sweeping, ecstatic home movie that captures the spirit of an entire country.

There are echoes of Jonas Mekas’ diary films, the anthropological docs of Jean Rouch, and even the transcendentalist spirituality of Terrence Malick films, but Allah’s filmmaking doesn’t quite feel like a direct stylistic descendant of any of those men’s work. In interviews Allah talks about using his camera like a musical instrument, saying he wants to play it like John Coltrane plays saxophone. Like the free jazz Coltrane put out towards the end of his career, Black Mother feels exploratory, like he’s journeying outwards into uncharted territory with every shot, an artistic direction that seems inherently humbling in the way it searches for answers instead of presenting them as known.

It’s also just a film with love and admiration practically baked into the celluloid, one that’s clearly meant to be felt with the heart before the head. Khalik Allah’s grandparents are Jamaican — his grandfather’s funeral is one of the film’s biggest moments of emotional catharsis — and the film’s mission statement seems to be a search for his roots by looking outward to see inward. Through Allah’s eyes, the mundane becomes magical and the routine becomes spiritual, all of it falling into a laidback, poetic rhythm. Every image feels like a little discovery; one man’s impromptu freestyle about smoking weed turns into a moment of transcendent happiness when overlaid with footage of children dancing for the camera. When Allah’s grandmother breaks out into a prayer towards the end of the film and starts chanting, “Hallelujah, hallelujah, amen, amen, and amen, thank you Jesus,” over and over again until it practically becomes a primal scream, the raw power of it is in and of itself a small miracle and makes for one of the most sincerely spiritual passages of any film in recent memory.

The voices in Black Mother belong to many people but very rarely to Khalik Allah himself, who remains mostly silent behind the camera in order to let his subjects speak for themselves. Their voices, like the ones on Room for the Moon, feel less like separate entities than they do individual parts of a larger chorus, echoing and overlapping and fading in and out to meld with the ambient noise around them. A running visual metaphor in Black Mother is the sight of waves washing up on the shore like the voices of the film wash over each other like water, and Room for the Moonshares that same fluidity: fluidity of voice and language and fluidity of space, one person alone in a room connecting an assortment of alien sounds to make a spacious, joyful whole. Shilonosova’s and Allah’s visions intersect even when their art takes on radically different forms: collages of voices that feel simultaneously intimate and expansive.

Arrow Blu-ray Film Review

A young pregnant woman in San Francisco is going to have the devil’s baby during her strange possession.

When a film opens with the Devil providing a tongue-in-cheek voiceover, set against shots of a dark room filled with candles, certain expectations arise about what lies ahead. Considering the opening’s jokey tone and the Devil’s final line “don’t forget that the stranger in the seat next to you could be me,” one would think we’re in for a throwback to the campy drive-in horror of William Castle. What follows instead couldn’t be further from that brand of quaint nostalgia!

Beyond the Door couldn’t have been made in any decade other than the 1970s, as it inhabits the phrase ‘of its time’. It looks like it was made by a sentient pair of bell-bottoms; over the opening credits alone we are subjected to gratuitous moustaches, big afros, funky bass riffs, a bargain-bin soul theme song, ascots, perms, and (perhaps most revealing) hilariously incongruous dubbing.

Existing somewhere at the intersection of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973), directors Ovidio G. Assonitis and Robert Barrett saw an opportunity to make easy money: borrow liberally from recent horror classics, push the special effects past the point of good taste, and you’ll guarantee a successful horror movie of your own, right? Despite its crude filmmaking and production values, the unlikely answer to that question is ‘yes’ — financially at least! This half-baked rip-off grossed $15M at the box office, approximately 43x its $350,000 budget!

In terms of entertainment value, things get more complicated, but at least nobody can argue Assonitis and Barrett were anything but upfront about their influences! The film follows a San Francisco family — Jessica Barrett (Juliet Mills), her record executive husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia), and their two children Gail and Ken (Barbara Fiorini, David Colin Jr.) — as Jessica’s saddled with an unexpected pregnancy. When the unborn child starts maturing at an unusual rate and Jessica begins to experience psychotic mood swings and auditory hallucinations, it becomes clear the father isn’t Robert… it’s Satan.

As soon as he’s finished ripping off Roman Polanski, the directors quickly move onto William Friedkin’s Catholic horror classic The Exorcist. The entire Barrett family becomes subjected to supernatural phenomena, including heads spinning, pea soup vomit, and Jessica speaking in demonic tongues. Sound familiar?

Despite the wealth of borrowed plot points, stylistically it leans more into being Nicolas Roeg-lite, which is fitting given that the family looks like they’ve just walked off the set of a Don’t Look Now (1973) porn parody. Repetitive rhythmic cuts and slow-motion are used during pivotal scenes to create a sort of free-associative montage effect, but it doesn’t seem to be employed for any real purpose like it was in Roeg’s film.

In one especially bizarre scene, Jessica’s walking down the block trying to suppress demonic voices in her head when the camera suddenly crash-zooms on a banana peel on the ground! This bastardization of stylistic devices makes clear that the name of the game is imitation without context: the film tries on the clothes of all the most interesting and innovative horror films of the last five years or so, hoping the resulting stylistic mishmash will be exciting rather than cluttered. There’s no denying there’s entertainment value to be found in that kind of manic filmmaking, but it certainly doesn’t help differentiate Beyond the Door from the dozens of other exploitation films that took that same approach.

If anything, Beyond the Door aims to one-up the films it’s copying by taking the SFX to ridiculous extremes. Did you like the vibrating and levitating bed in The Exorcist? Try the scene in which the children’s entire playroom violently shakes with the children in it. Thought the hospital scene in Friedkin’s film was frightening? This time around, the possessed victim is hooked up to even more invasive tubes and freaky hospital equipment. Did you enjoy Rosemary’s Baby but wish it had more shots from the perspective of a disembodied eyeball that fell on the carpet? We have those! That same amplified quality extends to the script. When Jessica asks Robert if he knows what her name means, he lists “sweetness, deplorable romanticism, and one hell of a great ass.” This is the level at which you have to meet the movie.

As is often the case with an exploitation film this front-loaded, it stalls about halfway in. For a good 20-minutes we’re forced to go through the possession movie motions — Robert doesn’t know how to treat his wife, he meets a mysterious man who may have the answer, the reason for her possession is investigated, and so on. This dry patch culminates in a real headscratcher of a scene in which Robert’s followed and harassed in the street by three men with flutes and drums, stripped of all diegetic sound except a terrible funk song that repeats “there’s no hope” over and over again. If that sounds like it’s taken out of context, I assure you there’s no context and the scene lasts a full four minutes!

Scenes like that are representative of Beyond the Door’s ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks’ approach to filmmaking. A good third of the movie could have painlessly cut and it would’ve been better for it, but Assonitis and Barratt are so intent on trying everything they never bothered removing what didn’t work. It’s entertaining on a moment-by-moment basis (as there’s no way of knowing what crazy stunt will be pulled next), but when viewed from beginning to end it comes off as exhausting and bloated.

Thankfully, the finale takes things in such a gonzo direction that it’s hard not to have a little bit of fun. We never get a clear explanation of how Jessica became pregnant with the Devil’s offspring, but we do get some of the most OTT effects yet and a laughably absurd plot twist that raises more questions than it answers. Ultimately it’s clear what possessed Jessica; the biggest question the movie brings up is what possessed the filmmaker to share this copyright-infringing curiosity with the world.

USA • ITALY |1974 | 108 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Limited Edition 2-Disc Blu-ray Special Features:

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, access to a physical disc to assess Beyond the Door’ s audio and picture, plus the many special features, wasn’t possible in time for our review. But the contents of this release from Arrow Video are outlined below.

• Limited to 3,000 units.
• Brand new 2K restoration of the extended Uncut English Export Version.
• Exclusive bonus disc containing the alternate US theatrical Version and ‘Italy Possessed’, a brand-new feature-length documentary on Italian exorcism movies!
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Marc Schoenbach.
• Reversible fold-out poster.
• Perfect-bound collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by John Martin and Alessio di Rocco.

Disc One: Uncut English Export Version:

• Brand new 2K restoration of the Uncut English Export Version released as ‘Devil Within Her’ (108 mins).
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation.
• Original uncompressed mono audio.
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
• ‘The Devil and I’. A newly-filmed interview with director-producer Ovidio G. Assonitis.
• ‘Barrett’s Hell’. A newly-filmed interview with cinematographer Roberto D’Ettorre Piazzoli.
• ‘Beyond the Music’. A newly-filmed interview with composer Franco Micalizzi.
• ‘The Devil’s Face’. A newly-filmed interview with camera operator Maurizio Maggi.
• ‘Motel and Devils’. A newly-conducted audio interview with actor Gabriele Lavia.
• Alternate Italian ‘Chi Sei?’ opening titles.
• Alternate ‘Behind the Door’ VHS opening titles.
• Alternate Japanese ‘Diabolica’ opening and ending sequence.
• Trailers, TV and Radio Spots.
• Image Gallery.

Cast & Crew

directors: Ovidio G. Assonitis & Robert Barrett.
writers: Ovidio G. Assonitis, Antonio Troisio & Robert Barrett.
starring: Juliet Mills, Gabriele Lavia, Richard Johnson, Nino Segurini, Elizabeth Turner, Barbara Fiorini, Carla Mancini & David Colin Jr.

Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on April 28, 2020.

¹ This article contains Amazon affiliate links, which earn us a tiny commission to help maintain the site if you use one to make a purchase — at no extra cost to yourself.

Beyond the Door (1974) • Blu-ray [Arrow Video] was originally published in Frame Rated on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Arrow Blu-ray Film Review

Upon arriving in a small town where she’s inherited a rundown mansion, a famous horror hostess battles an evil uncle and townspeople who want her burned at the stake.

Nobody asked for an Elvira road movie through small-town America, but I doubt anyone complained much either. A self-styled horror hostess with the mostest, Cassandra Peterson’s snarky, bouffant-clad altar-ego had been a fixture of US television since the early 1980s; a fast-quipping precursor to Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax . After seven years of riffing on public domain genre films and cracking the frequent boob jokes (a brand of humour she fine-tuned into an art form), it was high time Elvira made the transition to the big screen. The resulting 1988 movie, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, is the halfway point between the pastel Goth of early Tim Burton and Dolly Parton’s Rhinestone (1984), a similarly clumsy but endearing fish-out-of-water film starring America’s other buxom pop-culture legend.

Elvira (Peterson) is hitting the road to make a name for herself in Las Vegas after kicking her handsy TV producer to the curb. The downside: it turns out she’s $50,000 short of what she needs to start her Vegas show. The upside: her great-aunt Morgana has just passed away and left a hefty chunk of her estate to Elvira. With this in mind, Elvira heads to claim the inheritance in the puritanical town of Fallwell, Massachusetts, where her brand of raunchy double-entendres and generous cleavage doesn’t mesh well with the hostile and conservative town council. To make matters worse, Morgana didn’t bequeath Elvira any cash; instead, she’s inherited a seemingly haunted house, a mysterious cookbook, and a toy poodle named Algonquin whom she promptly renames Gonk after giving him a punk rock makeover.

The Vegas mission is put on hold in favour of a half-baked romantic subplot and some typical mid-’80s teen movie antics. Not that it’s all bad; there’s a lot of fun to be had in watching a gaggle of New England boys peeking through windows à la Animal House (1978), rock ‘n roll house redecorating montages, and puritanical adults with names like Chastity Pariah bemoaning Elvira’s famously revealing wardrobe. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to suggest that a good two-thirds of the jokes are about men staring and/or lunging for Elvira’s large chest, and boob-joke exhaustion does eventually set in. But it’s hard not to be at least a little won over by the film’s total lack of seriousness.

The idyllic air comes to a halt soon enough, however as it becomes clear that, beneath the B-list ’80s comedy wackiness, there lurks plenty of equally of-its-time horror cheesiness. The conservative town leaders and Elvira’s great-uncle Vincent (W. Morgan Sheppard) is gradually revealed to have more sinister intentions than they let on, and Elvira’s cookbook becomes a central object in a supernatural conspiracy brewing beneath the town’s placid façade.

Like Rhinestone, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark isn’t interested in subverting expectations, but in taking pleasure from embracing tropes in a way that’s warm and charming. It’s dictionary definition comfort viewing: a movie that brings nothing new to the table but milks tried-and-true gags and a breezy atmosphere for all they’re worth. Given the rapid-fire pacing of Elvira’s sarcastic cracks, there are plenty of misfires, but it’s hard not to at least be charmed by the relentless efforts to keep you grinning.

It’s a product of the Airplane II (1982) school of comedy: much of its appeal lies in referencing better movies and it’s only occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious, but with gags and double-entendres flying so fast you barely have time to remember the ones that fall flat. Of course, when a joke does land, it’s one for the record books; perhaps the most iconic exchange of the entire film, and the one most representative of its sense of humour, involves Elvira’s love interest Bob (Daniel Greene) accidentally dropping something on her head and asking with concern “how’s your head?” Her perfect response: “well, I haven’t gotten any complaints yet.”

The latter half of Mistress of the Dark leans into its horror elements and this’s clearly where it shines the most, disembodied hands and conjuring spells fitting more comfortably into Elvira’s line of work. As the plot becomes increasing gonzo, the freshness of the movie finally shines through. It’s hard not to giggle at the barrage of flying body parts, soup monsters, and animal transformations usually reserved for films like Evil Dead II (1987). One may wonder if it’s too little too late, but then someone gets a high heel shoe flung at and lodged into their forehead, and suddenly all criticism becomes moot.

With the exception of the final half-hour of campy gore, there’s an element of safeness that permeates most of the film. When you get down to it, the problem lies in the ill-advised decision to take an Elvira feature film in the direction of a quaint fish-out-of-water comedy instead of a more daring and playful approach like Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) did a few years later. A pleasantly familiar movie is better than a boring one, however, and there’s more than enough silly charm to Elvira herself to keep things lively… even when the movie around her feels more derivative than she deserves. Case in point, when the film’s disparate plot threads finally culminate in a Las Vegas showstopper with shirtless male back-up dancers, twirling nipple tassels, and the obligatory ’80s white-person rap. For any other public figure, this would come off as OTT and crass. For Elvira, it’s just another day on the job.

USA | 1988 | 96 MINUTES | COLOUR | 1.85:1 | ENGLISH

Blu-ray Special Edition Features:

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, a physical disc was unable to be provided in time for a review of this Blu-ray many extras, which are listed below.

• Brand new restoration from a 4K scan of the original interpositive.
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation.
• Original Uncompressed Stereo 2.0 audio.
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
• Introduction to the film by director James Signorelli.
• 2017 audio commentary with director James Signorelli, hosted by ‘Fangoria’ Editor Emeritus Tony Timpone.
• 2017 audio commentary with Elvira Webmaster and judge of US TV show ‘The Search for the Next Elvira Patterson Lundquist’.
• Archival audio commentary with actors Cassandra Peterson, Edie McClurg and writer John Paragon.
• ‘Too Macabre — The Making of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark’. A newly-revised 2018 version of this feature-length documentary on the making of the film including interviews with various cast and crew and rare never-before-seen archival material.
• ‘Recipe for Terror: The Creation of the Pot Monster’. A newly-revised 2018 version of this featurette on the concept and design of the pot monster, as well as the other SFX of the movie.
• Original Storyboards.
• Original US Theatrical and Teaser Trailers.
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck.
• FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Patterson Lundquist and a short note on the 2012 audio commentary by Sam Irvin.

Cast & Crew

director: James Signorelli.
writers: Sam Egan, John Paragon & Cassandra Peterson.
starring: Cassandra Peterson, W. Morgan Sheppard, Daniel Greene, Jeff Conaway, Susan Kellerman & Edie McClurg.

Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on April 23, 2020.

¹ This article contains Amazon affiliate links, which earn us a tiny commission to help maintain the site if you use one to make a purchase — at no extra cost to yourself.

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) • Blu-ray [Arrow Video] was originally published in Frame Rated on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are in a pandemic. Western society is collapsing. I haven’t left the apartment in four days. For these reasons and others, I decided to spend six hours today watching every entry in the RoboCop film franchise back-to-back and documenting my experience meticulously. Here are my findings.

8:11AM: Starting RoboCop

8:12AM: I technically watched this movie a week and a half ago so I’m not sure why I’m watching it again.

8:14AM: RoboCop just showed up but he’s currently full cop no robo. Looking forward to seeing if that changes.

8:19AM: This movie is set in a dystopian future in which corrupt corporations run the country and reinforce the police state. Can you imagine!

8:21AM: Okay, now they’re introducing something that’s full robo no cop. Interesting.

8:22AM: One of the board members is pointing a gun at the murderbot to test it. Hope that works out.

8:23AM: He got shot 80+ times by the murderbot.

8:27AM: RoboCop (pre-Robo) is pursuing Red from That ’70s Show in a high-speed chase.

8:35AM: All this terrorism is making me have to pee. Bathroom break.

8:38AM: Back from my pee. Went well. The terrorists just shot RoboCop’s hand off.

8:40AM: The terrorists shot RoboCop 27 more times.

8:41AM: The terrorists shot RoboCop a 29th time.

8:46AM: The corporation seems to have brought him back to life by giving him a robotic body, like some sort of… cybernetic law enforcement agent.

8:51AM: RoboCop (post-robo) is a better driver than me.

8:53AM: RoboCop interrupts a convenience story robbery by picking up the robber and throwing him through a refrigerator.

8:55AM: RoboCop interrupts an attempted rape by shooting the man in the dick then saying, “Madame you have sustained an emotional shock. I will notify a rape crisis center.”

8:56AM:

8:57AM: A man is holding the mayor hostage and negotiating with the cops to give him a car with cruise control if he lets the mayor go. I’m not sure if RoboCop can solve this one.

8:58AM: RoboCop punched him out the window down three stories.

9:08AM: This guy robbing a convenience store looks like someone I knew and didn’t like on Tumblr in 2013.

9:15AM: RoboCop has entered the club.

9:16AM: RoboCop has dragged Leland Palmer out of the club by his hair.

9:17AM: Red from That ’70s Show bursts into a room containing the RoboCop inventor and two women; says, “Bitches leave.”

9:24AM: RoboCop is reading Red from That ’70s Show his Miranda rights and punctuating every line by throwing him through a different pane-glass window.

9:27AM: The villain in this movie is named Dick Jones.

9:31AM: The human cops have revolted against RoboCop. You hate to see it.

9:36AM: This movie doesn’t make sense. The criminal and the CEO are friends? And they’re both above the law? I’m sorry I just don’t buy it.

9:42AM: RoboCop is having a Ghost (1990) moment with another (human) cop, but instead of making pottery together she’s helping him aim and fire a handgun at jars of baby food on a tree stump.

9:46AM: RoboCop has come to the conclusion that arresting criminals is inefficient because the criminal justice system is corrupt. His solution? Shooting them dead without trial.

9:46AM: Starting to question what I previously believed about this movie’s politics as I watch it go from, “the police state is a problem,” to, “vigilante justice is the solution”

9:47AM: The guy who looks like someone I knew from Tumblr fell into a vat of toxic waste and turned into a melty fish man.

9:48AM: The melty fish man just fully got plowed down by a car and literally liquefied on impact.

9:54AM: RoboCop has been crushed by steel beams, but that did not stop him from stabbing Red from That ’70s Show through his neck.

9:58AM: RoboCop, a model for human behavior in a post-coronavirus world, has saved the day by killing a CEO. Cut to black, roll credits, baby.

10:03AM: I’m not wasting any time. I have started RoboCop 2.

10:03AM: This movie is written by Frank Miller, famously the author of the graphic novel 300 and less famously the author of a series of Batman comics in which Batman kills Muslims. He is by all accounts a fascist, which naturally makes him the first choice for a sequel to the movie about powerful corporate fascists running the city.

10:07AM: Tom Noonan, as the villain in this movie, looks greasier on a physical and emotional level than any man in human history has ever looked.

10:09AM: A crustpunk is bottlefeeding a baby next to swastika graffiti. An old homeless woman’s cart full of cans just got hit by a car. A passerby who looks like Rand Paul robs the homeless. He himself gets mugged by two strippers. This is the future liberals want.

10:12AM: Two men rob a gunstore, steal a rocket launcher, and blow up four cars. This isn’t a movie, it’s a comic book.

10:13AM: Oh my god, RoboCop was in one of those cars that just blew up. These criminals are not going to hear the end of this.

10:14AM: RoboCop has 200% more one-liners in this movie but they’ve decreased in quality significantly. He called someone a creep but it just doesn’t feel the same.

10:16AM: RoboCop has come across a stronghold of minorities manufacturing drugs and instantly opened fire. Thank god for our boys in blue.

10:20AM: RoboCop shot a man holding a baby hostage by ricocheting the bullet off an industrial refrigerator.

10:25AM: Pretty sure the mayor’s second-in-command is played by Louis Farrakhan.

10:32AM: The police union (selfish, greedy) is on strike. Because of them, the city is in shambles and rowdy punk children are at arcades instead of school.

10:38AM: Pleased to announce that, due to budget increases, the makers of the RoboCop 2 were able to license bottom-of-the-barrel glam-metal songs for the soundtrack.

10:42AM: This is a really bad movie and I’m dissociating.

10:42AM: Tom Noonan is playing the same character here as he played in Manhunter (1986), but this time he has a humongous nose ring.

10:43AM: They have defeated RoboCop by employing a large magnet.

10:46AM: My girlfriend’s cat just sat on my lap so it’s hard to type but, rest assured, I am unfortunately still watching RoboCop 2.

10:48AM: RoboCop is literally on life-support after having his limbs sawed off by Villains.

10:51AM: The evil drug cult led by Tom Noonan just scalpeled open a dirty cop’s chest. The first movie satirized media violence, this one is just shockingly horny for bloodshed.

10:55AM: RoboCop has not had legs for 12 minutes and has been played ever since by an incredibly disturbing animatronic.

10:58AM: My butt is going numb.

11:00AM: A little league team is robbing an electronics store and filming it on camcorders.

11:01AM: I have just realized the plot conceit of this movie. They replaced RoboCop’s brain with a pacifist, liberal brain. This is not a joke, this is objectively what has just happened in the story.

11:02AM: The movie has a full hour left.

11:03AM:

11:03AM: RoboCop refused to use lethal force on the children, pinko scum that he is, and instead gently scolded them (like a commie).

11:04AM: They’re discussing killing RoboCop to rid him of his soft-on-crime lefty mentality.

11:05AM: RoboCop has instead attempted suicide by electrocution because he can’t stand to live another day as a registered democrat.

11:12AM: I zoned out thinking about how insane this movie is but in the meantime RoboCop was hit by an armored van.

11:12AM: He took it in stride and is now piloting a motorcycle, or as I like to call them, a “hog.”

11:14AM: This is the movie adaptation of this meme.

11:16AM: Tom Noonan has been killed, so they took out his brain and spine and placed it into a robot too.

11:34AM: Chunks of time are just vanishing, like in alien abductions. I do not believe this movie is only 2 hours long because I have been sitting here for eternities.

11:36AM: Robo Tom Noonan has a big LED screen on his chest where a primitive ’90s CGI version of his human face is displayed.

11:37AM: If Robocop wasn’t a liberal coward none of this would be happening.

11:45AM: This is an abomination but also weirdly prescient about Detroit becoming bankrupt and the government manufacturing drugs to fuel the war on drugs.

11:48AM: I’ve been sitting here so long. I think I might be getting bedsores.

11:52AM: I just remembered RoboCop 3 is another 102 minutes long.

11:57AM: RoboCop just removed Robo Tom Noonan’s brain vat and smashed it against the sidewalk, which, unfortunately, I have to admit is pretty sick.

11:58AM: The CEO just said, “It’s over, it’s all over, everything is going to be alright,” which means it’s definitely not over and something’s about to happen.

12:00PM: It’s over and nothing happened. This was directed by the same man who directed The Empire Strikes Back. I’m going to get a granola bar and coffee as an act of self-care.

12:14PM: I’m starting RoboCop 3. It’s rated PG-13 and allegedly a family film.

12:15PM: This looks like an episode of Goosebumps.

12:23PM: The last movie had a 12-year-old drug lord, this movie has a 12-year-old hacker who runs up to the giant robot from the first movie, types into its terminal, “Be loyal as a puppy,” and has it work.

12:25PM: If the first movie was a hybrid between a dumb, loud action movie and a cogent political satire and the second movie was a libertarian comic book come to life, this is a truly horrendous ’90s cartoon. There’s no more irony, no more satire, no more nuance; just lots of car chases, punks with huge red mohawks, and, weirdly enough, a Jeff Garlin cameo.

12:29PM: An evil drug addict who looks like a Mad Max extra just yelled, “Pop a tranq, hypohead, splatterville’s ours!”

12:38PM: This is supremely stupid but I cannot deny that is noticeably better than RoboCop 2.

12:39PM: The evil CEO in this movie who has no character name besides “The CEO”? Rip Torn from Men In Black.

12:43PM: I regret to inform my fans I think I like RoboCop 3 and how obscenely (and knowingly) goofy it is. Maybe it’s just because of the juxtaposition between this and the self-consciously dark and grimy second movie, but the change of tone kinda works?

12:44PM: I have just realized that RoboCop is played by a different actor in this movie. I’d recognize Peter Weller’s mouth anywhere and that is NOT Peter Weller’s mouth!

12:50PM: Nancy Allen, who plays Robocop’s sidekick in all three movies, just called him “Robo” like he was a friendly crime-fighting dog.

12:52PM: Not to be mean to the new RoboCop actor but his mouth is locked in a permanent pout and he looks like a duck.

12:57PM: Do you think this movie was made just to sell RoboCop action figures to nine-year-old boys? Because if so I bet it worked.

1:02PM: Pleased to announce Louis Farrakhan is still in this movie!

1:03PM: If there was an awards show for Japanese men in trenchcoats and sunglasses smoking cigarettes, this would sweep.

1:05PM: If there was an awards show for political dissident hacker children who live underground and wear dirty overalls, this would sweep.

1:07PM: The Japanese man in a trenchcoat and sunglasses just got his jaw dislocated and he seems to be made of putty? Unclear if he is a robot.

1:12PM: Thank god there is more primitive early-90s CGI in this movie.

1:14PM: They literally just hired some guy who looks vaguely like Peter Weller to play RoboCop. This is like Great Value RoboCop.

1:17PM: The Japanese putty/robot man just pulled out a katana.

1:22PM: RoboCop just walked into the “rehab center” offices and blew them up with a flamethrower and explosives. Would elaborate if I could.

1:23PM: A pair of Bad cops are harassing a teen girl and RoboCop just walked up and said, “She said no,” and opened fire on the cops. RoboCop is, number one, an ally, and number two, anti-Blue Lives Matter.

1:26PM: RoboCop just stole a pimp’s hot pink car at gunpoint and is chasing an armored van in it.

1:28PM: His car is on fire and the roof has been blown off but he is not stopping.

1:35PM: RoboCop liberated the Good cops from the police force while a Bad cop yelled, “What are you doing? You’re jeopardizing your retirement benefits!” over dramatic music.

1:40PM: The head cop just deputized every civilian in the city, pumped his shotgun, and said, “It’s time to show how real cops kick ass.”

1:40PM: Becoming suspicious this is Blue Lives Matter propaganda in more palatable packaging.

1:40PM: Okay they have just given up and made the intimidating Japanese man a literal ninja who can do crazy backflips. All bets are off.

1:45PM: RoboCop shot the ninja’s head, which exploded sans blood and shot sparks everywhere, so he may have been both a robot and a ninja?

1:46PM: Good nose-picking joke.

1:46PM: I’m so caffeinated that I’ve deluded myself into thinking I’m having fun.

1:48PM: RoboCop lost a leg and arm in his ninja fight, which seems to be a recurring problem for him throughout this franchise.

1:50PM: RoboCop can… fly?

1:51PM: The robot ninja is… back?

1:51PM: There is an army of robot ninjas.

1:53PM: RoboCop got the robot ninjas to decapitate each other. :•)

1:53PM: The bad guy just informed RoboCop that the robot ninjas were equipped with bombs that go off when they die. :•(

1:54PM: RoboCop put on his jetpack again and burned the bad guy’s legs off and carried his friends to safety. :•)

1:55PM: While the bombs blew up something like an entire city block. :•/

1:57PM: Cut to black. It’s done. I have been watching RoboCop movies since 8am and it is finally over. I am free.

Arrow Blu-ray Film Review

A man lost in the woods is rescued by a trucker, who takes him to a couple’s home, where he becomes sexually obsessed with one of them…

In the early-1990s, English filmmaker Philip Ridley was on the verge of a commercial breakthrough. He’d already written the award-winning screenplay for Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990) and directed a cinematic wrecking-ball of a debut in The Reflecting Skin (1990) — the latter recognised by critics as a cult classic for fans of unconventional horror. With The Passion of Darkly Noon, he was hoping for his big breakthrough; a potential crossover success that didn’t compromise his Gothic, hallucinatory vision. Unfortunately, lightning rarely strikes twice, and Darkly Noon is no Reflecting Skin. It’s a half-baked instance of a director throwing disparate ideas against a wall and seeing what sticks. There’s an appeal to that approach and, taken on a scene-by-scene basis, there’s fun to be had in the often-shocking onslaught of eerie religious imagery and jerkily innovative editing, but Ridley’s unsubtle approach eventually smothers his own ambition.

Setting the tone for the inscrutable film to follow, Darkly Noon opens with a stuttering and disoriented young man (Brendan Fraser) wandering out of the woods and passing out from exhaustion, only to be found by Jude (Loren Dean) and his friend Callie (Ashley Judd). The pair drive the unconscious man — whom we soon learn is a religious zealot named Darkly, as in The Bible passage “through a glass darkly” — back to Callie’s home to rest and wait for Callie’s boyfriend Clay (Viggo Mortensen) to return from a days-long walk in the woods. While they wait patiently for his homecoming, Darkly’s deeply repressed sexual urges start to emerge as he develops feelings for the more liberated Callie. There are shots abound of Darkly gawking at her rubbing ice on her chest, performing housework in skimpy outfits, and going swimming in nothing but a nightgown, just in case it wasn’t clear she’s beautiful and Darkly is, well, passionate.

It’s a familiar story in unconventional packaging: a repressed religious boy meets an attractive free-spirited girl and finds his faith tested by the feelings it inspires. That dynamic is disrupted, however, once Clay finally returns from his five-day jaunt. Darkly slowly begins to resent Cassie and Clay out of both jealousy and religious fury — their being unmarried is an affront to his ideas of family and sin. When he meets another fanatically religious woman in the woods named Roxy (Grace Zabriskie) and she instils in him the belief that Callie’s a sinner and a witch, Darkly rapidly goes off the deep end.

The initial impression is almost of a proto-Donnie Darko (2001) in the way it draws your attention to surreal dream-like images amidst ordinary life. In the film’s most famous moment, Darkly wakes up by a stream in the woods and sees a massive glittery shoe float slowly away downstream. We have no context for this image, but it’s certainly striking and highlights the fact Ridley’s a creator of images rather than a communicator of ideas. Moments like this are more effective outside of context than within it — when we finally get an explanation for this scene in the dying minutes of the film, it actually takes away a little bit of its fairytale wonder. The film’s entire visual style is maybe the easiest thing to recommend about it. Everything is tied together by title cards announcing how long since Darkly arrived at Callie’s home, and the bizarre editing and cinematography grow ever more erratic as things come to a boiling point. Unrelated conversations are intercut with each other, jump cuts abound, and every camera angle seems designed to put us into Darkly’s semi-crazed, frightened headspace. Golden hour lighting bathes just about everything in a yellow glow early on, and as it gradually transitions into vivid blue nighttime towards the third act, it becomes clear that the film’s tone is growing darker as well.

And that’s when things go wrong. There are some jarring scenes early on that foreshadow the film falling apart at the seams — one moment early on, Callie is giving Darkly a gentle pep talk, the next moment gunshots are going off outside, she’s grabbed a rifle off the wall, and is screaming “leave us alone” into the void while firing aimlessly towards an unseen entity in the woods. Still, nothing in the first two-thirds indicates just how quickly Darkly Noon goes from embodying the moodiness of Donnie Darko to the overblown silliness of Southland Tales (2006). At one point, Roxy and Darkly are carrying a dead dog through the forest chanting “Go to heaven! Go to Heaven! Dead dog!” before giving it a Viking funeral in the mysterious floating shoe. Literally moments later, Darkly’s hallucinating his parents sitting at the top of a tree while industrial drums pound in the background so loudly one can barely hear what’s being said. Nothing seems to make sense or check out with the movie that built up to it. It’s like Ridley had too many ideas and didn’t know how to fit them side-by-side comfortably. Whiplash-inducing tonal shifts take place one after another and the acting grows increasingly hysterical, eliminating much of the goodwill built up towards the flawed but engaging first hour.

By the end of the movie, Phillip Ridley has written himself into a corner and everything-the quiet tension, the mystery, the eerie atmosphere-has devolved into silly OTT hysterics and explosions. I’m sure champions of the film see this as a virtue — it escalates from a simmer to a raging boil before you know it, and it’s completely engaging if nothing else. The reality is that Ridley seems to have lost control of the material two-thirds into the script and resorted to (literal) pyrotechnics to distract from its increasing tonal incoherence. The film’s inscrutable final moments are the icing on the cake: deus ex machina strangeness for the sake of strangeness. I suppose some forgotten films were never destined for a re-evaluation.

Blu-ray Special Features:

• New 2K restoration by Arrow Films from the original camera negative, approved by Philip Ridley. Arrow Video’s restoration highlights the most extraordinary aspect of the film: the gorgeous cinematography suffused with golden yellows and ominous blues. It’s a striking look for a film, made all the more effective by the crisp presentation of this print.
• High Definition Blu-ray™ (1080p) presentation.
• Original 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD MA audio.
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
• New audio commentary by writer/director Philip Ridley. Ridley is a humble, eloquent man and I enjoyed hearing his reasoning behind some of the stranger decisions in the film. For instance, he talks about the prominent use of the colours yellow and blue, and how they achieved such a distinctive colour palette for the film’s cinematography. There’s a lot for Ridley to talk about — it’s a deeply strange, unique film — but perhaps the most surprising for me was that Ridley hired Brendan Fraser because of his performance in School Ties (1992). I’d completely forgotten Fraser did anything serious before this movie!
• Isolated score track in lossless stereo, including never-before-heard extended and unused cues, and the two songs from the film.
• ‘Eyes of Fire’, a newly filmed interview with cinematographer John de Borman. John de Borman, who has an illustrious career as a cinematographer, talks about how he came to be a part of this project. He describes this as his first arthouse film, which I found pretty interesting because that was not entirely my impression of it, but I think his cinematography at the very least is incredibly artful and innovative. The camerawork is arguably the film’s strongest suit, so it’s really a pleasure to hear him talk about his rationale behind certain striking shots and why the film looks the way it does.
• ‘Sharp Cuts’, a newly filmed interview with editor Leslie Healey. The other most impressive aspect of the movie is, of course, the editing, and this is also wonderfully insightful. Les Healey worked on (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), which are maybe the highest possible credentials imaginable, and I think his work here is on par with the editing in those films. Healey walks us through a few key sequences, cut-by-cut, and it really feels like a masterclass in film editing. Would be great educational viewing for anyone interested in becoming an editor.
• ‘Forest Songs’, a newly filmed interview with composer Nick Bicât. Nick Bicât composed for both of Ridley’s first two movies and his music really is beautiful. Personally, my favourite part is his talking about the experience of working with indie rock chanteuse PJ Harvey, who wrote an original song for Darkly Noon’s end credits and who happens to be a favourite musician of mine. The interview isn’t quite as engaging as the editing and cinematography featurettes, but I’m sure those interested in film scoring will find a lot to enjoy here.
• ‘Dreaming Darkly’, an archive featurette from 2015 featuring interviews with Ridley, Bicât and star Viggo Mortensen. This archival interview features Ridley, Viggo Mortensen, and Nick Bicât all discussing their experiences working on Darkly Noon. A lot of the information has been covered in the other featurettes, so the really worthwhile stuff here is Mortensen’s segments in which he talks about how he prepped for the role as a mute character. In an effort to get into character most effectively, he didn’t speak a single word during the entire production. Given his towering screen presence in the film, the method acting seems to have paid off pretty nicely!
• Previously unreleased demos of the music score, written and performed by Bicât before filming started.
• Theatrical trailer.
• Image gallery.
• Reversible sleeve featuring new and original artwork.
• FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring a new Philip Ridley career retrospective written by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Philip Ridley.
starring: Brendan Fraser, Ashley Judd, Viggo Mortensen & Loren Dean.

Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on March 20, 2020.

The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995) • Blu-ray [Arrow Video, USA/CAN] was originally published in Frame Rated on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.