Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Jason goes to Holehead--Day 4

A couple more movies last Monday night.

First up was a retro...um...classic? LADY TERMINATOR (1989)  is an Indonesian sexploitation flick based on (what I assume) is a traditional story of the Queen of the South Sea. Oh yeah, apparently it's a real myth. Anyway, it was adapted into an 80s titty flick with a title and a few other touches that try to capitalize on the success of TERMINATOR. In the opening, the Queen is mating and killing a man, and bemoans how no man can satisfy her. Then a handsome white hero pulls the snake out of her vag, turns it into a knife, and somehow that destroys her power. But instead of becoming his wife, she disappears into the sea and swears she'll get her revenge on his great-granddaughter. So, flash forward to the 80s and an anthropology student  ("I'm not a woman, I'm an anthropologist!") who is studying the legend gets trapped undersea, that snake swims up her, and she becomes the new South Sea Queen. And she runs all over town seducing and killing men. Oh, and that great-granddaughter--she's an up-and-coming rock star. Then things get all murder and explode-y. The end. And the worst part, the anthropologist never finished her thesis!

And the second film of the night was REVERIES OF A SOLITARY WALKER (aka FANTASTICHERIE DI UN PASSEGGIATORE SOLITARIO) was an Italian oddity of mixed-media fantasy. Taking the title from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished novel, it tells three parallel stories. On is Rousseau himself, struggling to finish his work while drinking a ton of absinthe and haunted by a demon in a box. The next is Theo, a student working on his thesis (theme of the night--the unfinished thesis!) on unfinished novels. He finds Rousseau's unfinished book, tracks it back to an occult shop, where the owner warns him against it because it drove the original owner of the shop (his father) mad. And the third is a Claymation story of a boy and an old man walking in the woods. It jumps around in tone and style a lot, and gets a little confusing. But director Paolo Gaudio shows a strong visual flair (he has worked as an animator for some time, this is his first feature) and if he can structure a story better, we can be seeing some great things from him for quite a while.

Total Running Time: 166 minutes
My Total Minutes: 409,645

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