David: Don’t you ever get tired of waving the flag?

Charlie: My fucking flag, is not White!

The Vietnam War is no stranger to Canadian film making headspace as a source of latent, and not so latent, horror and drama. In Bob Clark’s excellent Zombie soap opera, Deathdream, a returning vet starts to decompose and develops a taste for human blood, much to the despair of his loving family. Michael Maclear’s Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War remains one of the most comprehensive documentary studies of the conflict and Denis Hroux’s 1976 Maple Syrup porno Born for Hell goes so far as to have its Richard Speck inspired Vietnam Veteran, rape and murder student nurses.

Burt Kennedy‘s Wolf Lake (AKA  Honor Guard), it should be pointed out early on, is not a Canadian addition to this gambit. In fact, the film was shot in Mexico by an American director best known for his work in the Western sphere. But this small fact seems beside the point. This is an unnerving addition to an apparent concern with Post-Vietnam psychosis in what we might call the faux Canux-pic. That is to say: that by defining itself within the style and tone of the Canadian  B movie,  and by explicitly positioning itself geographically in the Candian milieu, Wolf Lake becomes a picture that handles the political and socio-cultural position of Canada during the period and which casts (in the Wolf Lake edit, at least) a very critical, “All American” response to it.

Inverting the nightmare of the backwoods sub set earlier established in Boorman’s Deliverance, whilst toying with rural Home Invasion elements that the Canadian Tax shelter films obsessed over for a brief, though illustrious period, Wolf Lake sees a vacationing group of Americans, including Rod Steiger as Charlie, land at an idyllic lakeside camp in “Gods Country”, Canada. They are met by David (David Huffman) and his partner Linda (Robin Mattson) and it quickly becomes apparent that David is a deserter – a fact that sets Steiger off into dreadful action.

Wolf Lake pits two “old” US soldiers from very different wars against each other in an extremely remote environment. Ex-Sergeant Charlie comments that there are no rousing songs for Vietnam or Korea veterans. Ex-Airborne David senses the threat but stubbornly refuses to give way. Despite several exchanges, Charlie cannot reconcile the fact that David has eschewed his duty, crucially because his own son Danny has come home from Vietnam in a body bag. Although this theme underpins the narrative, Wolf Lake is undermined by the exploitative and problematic rape of Linda at the hands of  the men and the film subsequently inspects the awkward revenge elements at play thereafter.

Kennedy underlines his film’s interest in the inversions of genre conventions by playing with it’s structure. The tense exposition is elongated, the terrible act shoe horned into the final third. Wolf Lake might be taken as a lop sided affair, but frequent bursts of flash forwards to scenes of  violence  pepper the first 60 minutes,  and give the film a closed circuit feel. Starting at the films end, Wolf Lake is surprisingly circular – there is no escape or redemption, it is crushingly infinite. If Wolf Lake has a problem, maybe it is its overwhelmingly grim disposition. Two versions of the film exist – Honour Guard sees Rod Steiger win out and removes the flash forwards.  But even in the Wolf Lake edit – in which the protagonist appears to pull through, there is no happy ending.  Charlie is right when he observes at the beginning  that he “just might start a war”, and in this one there are no winners. As we leave Wolf Lake, the rousing pomp and circumstance of a military band plays us out and puts the lid on this intriguing and very cynical little thriller.

]]> http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/5362/wolf-lake-1978-director-burt-kennedy/feed/ 0 http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/5730/sunday-scans-022/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sunday-scans-022 http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/5730/sunday-scans-022/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 13:23:17 +0000 VTSS http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/?p=5730 La Nuit Des Traquees (1980) – Film Office ‘Collectorror’ Jean Rollin Collection / 1996

Following the commercial car wreck that was The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Sam Peckinpah found himself, once again, firmly on the back foot with his eternal nemesis, The Studio. What Warner Brothers  had regarded as poor time and cash management, had led to the film-maker being forced to perform something of a morose U-Turn. With a hint of tail-between-the-legs, he scuttled off to England to begin work on  his next project, an adaption of Gordon Williams‘ The Siege at Trencher’s Farm, a story gifted to him by producer and supporter Dan Melnick.

Whilst Peckinpah was no stranger to conflict with the purse string pulling and “art-less” studio system – and indeed to conflict within the process of film-making itself, the sour taste of perceived defeat following Hogue would colour the tone of what would arguably become his most contentious film – Straw Dogs.

Straw Dogs prefigures the Backwoods/Thriller/Revenge film,  and ostensibly follows the same contours of the Home Invasion genre. All elements previously toyed with in Ride the High Country, for sure, but handled here in a notable explicitness. Taken this way, the film provides a useful insight into the increasingly embittered mindset of its troubled craftsman.

Peckinpah made a living out of referring to and inverting his own cinematic ideas. His films all inextricably link themselves to each other through a dense network of recurring thematic concerns. Straw Dogs, as a follow up to The Ballad of Cable Hogue is no exception and there are a number of acute and somewhat alarming parallels between the two films to  pick at.

The  idea of the milieu as the antagonist, rendered in The Ballad of Cable Hogue as the “New World” of automated machinery, is turned upside down in Straw Dogs. Here it is the “Old World” that poses the savage threat. In a small (but narratively purposeful) role, T.P McKenna as The Major, is as much an intrusion to the Cornish landscape as Dustin Hoffman‘s academic David Sumner. Both characters seem to underline the import of “the outsider” to a well established set of  local “rules”. Neither are welcome and it is no co-incidence that David and Amy’s farmhouse rests on the geographical fringe of the community, as Cable Springs had done in Peckinpah’s preceding film. The frequent nod to alienation in Peckinpah’s remit (evidenced in Coburn’s Steiner in Cross of Iron, McQueen’s Junior Bonner, Oates’ Bennie in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, for instance) advances Hogue’s isolation in the desert to David’s stranding in the wilds of a hunting party. Of course, David’s estrangement is in fact a decoy for the film’s most infamous scene – the complex rape of Susan George.

Again, the relationship between Man (read Peckinpah) and his Woman comes under the celluloid microscope and uncovers  Straw Dogs‘ richest mine for interpretation. David does not own Amy, though not in the same way that Jason Robards had nobly distanced himself from Stella Stevens. Both films busy themselves with pathos inherent to relationships between man and woman. Both are decidely self inflictive, but Straw Dogs is starved of any sense of redemption.

It is of note that during the production of Straw Dogs, Peckinpah found himself embroiled in at least two intense relationships and of further note that one of these was with a woman of striking similarity to his female lead. The well documented issues between George and the director ahead of the shooting of the rape scenes only lends additional weight to the autobiographical nature in Peckinpah’s treatment of woman on film.

Whilst Hogue had proffered a sweet, comedic bias to romance, there is a self destructive urge inherent in the relationship between David and Amy that leads to its complete and utter breakdown. The warning signs to this are pointed at almost immediately in the film. The pair joust over a chess board in bed and whilst we presume they go on to  make love, we can never be sure. In fact in the scene that immediately follows, the pair are both caught up  in a distressing argument. They mock each other’s foibles in secret (Amy deliberately ruins David’s algebraic formulas, David harasses Amy’s cat) and they become increasingly distanced from each other, both physically and intellectually as the terrible tale is told. David doesn’t “own” his wife for reasons that defy the cheery altruism of Hogue and better reflect Peckinpah’s own assertion at this time that his work was more important than his relationships – ergo, the women in his life did not own him.

There are eighteen different places in that film, if you look at it, where he [David Sumner]could have stopped the whole thing. He didn’t, he let it go on… As so often in life, we let things happen to us because we want it to…

I’ve had to lecture twice now, really, about the film to psychiatrists… They say “How did you find out about this?” Well, I got married a few times…

Straw Dogs is unsurprisingly a film caught up in the journey of its Male character.  In much the same way as the once, “yellow” Cable Hogue had hardened up to become a “man in a man’s world”, the restrained David is forced to dispense with his cerebral approach to life when his house is attacked following the sheltering of simpleton David Warner. In happier times, Peckinpah had elected to only have Hogue flirt with the setting of traps  - the snake pit.  Here, in the wind ravaged coastal environment of Lands End, the trap –  specifically the barbaric Bear Trap, is given a full  and bloody road service…

Those who had expected another burst of violence a la The Wild Bunch with its follow up in 1970 had been made to wait for Sam Peckinpah’s vicious, and somewhat provoked, cynicism to ferment. Like David, the director had been pushed into a corner. Depressingly, The Ballad of Cable Hogue had been deemed not good enough. With Straw Dogs, he had finally given them what they wanted.

Half-based on a series of stories in the adults-only comic-magazine Heavy Metal written by Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Dead & Buried, Return of the Living Dead) and Berni Wrightson (Jenifer) and half-comprised of new material by screenwriters Dan Goldberg and Len Blum, the collected works of short animated stories are separate tales drawn by different animators but thinly connected by a glowing green space-ball with a life and ego of its own. The green space-ball in question was brought home by an astronaut as a gift for his daughter. When he opens the case to give it to her, he’s vapourized, and the glowing ball proceeds to tell the freaked-out girl his tales of woe and triumph over the next hour-and-a-half. With the exception of the final, and longest story, about an out-of-universe moral defender who planet-hops half-naked on a flying bird and decapitates men with her sword, all of the preceding tales don’t generally follow the rule that your story should really have a beginning-middle-end. Nearly all of them (again, with exception to the last one), end in the middle, but a good majority of them are entertaining enough to carry it off regardless. Especially the noir-ish first story, about a NYC cabbie in the future who picks up the wrong fare in the form of a hot dame who seems to be in distress – and the second-to-last tale, where an intergalactic ship filled with partying aliens and robots accidentally suck up a large-breasted secretary on their latest rendezvous to Earth.

Disappointingly, it’s a couple of the Wrightson and O’Bannon stories that seem to heed the most interest and potential only to be cut off mid-sentence, cinematically speaking. The Wrightson one in particular, about the intergalactic trial of a smug and immoral bastard, ends only with a lame predictable joke, but the O’Bannon story about a paratrooper dropped in the jungle only to find a mass graveyard of down war planes is stopped before it even gets started, and this might have been the biggest crime of the entire film.

Overall, Heavy Metal as a whole, is pretty entertaining, and does have its own spot in pop culture, especially with the MTV generation, or for those of use who appreciated the more recent South Park satire on the film. And of course, as per the title, the entire soundtrack is permeated with classic hard rock and early heavy metal songs, from the likes of Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, Sammy Hagar, Journey, Nazareth, Blue Oyster Cult, Stevie Nicks, Don Felder and tons more. But what the title suggests to me are those memories I have of standing at the 7-11 magazine rack and seeing Heavy Metal on the top shelf, able to see the luridly drawn and inciting covers and knowing that m,y 10-year-old self would not be allowed to purchase that magazine at the front counter. I would be denied, age-restricted, relegated to Mad Magazine or the current issue of Marvel’s G.I. Joe comic. Now that I’m old enough to enjoy whatever the hell I want, I can honestly say that the printed magazine, while not all that mind-blowing, was still slightly better than its feature-filmed sister. But the movie is entertaining enough for the curious, or for those appreciative of a handful of animated dirty jokes. And hey, who doesn’t like naked cartoon boobies, right?

The failure of Rituals to resonate with a large audience is almost entirely due to the incompetence of the distributor Aquarius Releasing, who left it to gather dust for a year, before trying to recoup their investment through a tax loophole.  Its obscurity is further enhanced by a series of half-hearted and pathetic video and DVD releases by fly-by-night companies looking to make a fast back. Fortunately we live in an age in which niche distributors can succeed with a title if they demonstrate an appropriate degree of respect towards the product they are putting out. Nevertheless all these factors have helped to cultivate an enthusiastic cult following which distributor Code Red fully took advantage of with their excellent DVD. For me Rituals is made particularly interesting due to a shrewdly selected ensemble cast, the decision to shoot on location in the evocative and remote wilds of Ontario, choosing to shoot the film entirely in continuity, and a mysterious adversary with a truly chilling and warped motive. The ritual of the films title refers to an annual excursion that five friends embark upon, and as it turns out the ritualised nature of murder. The narrative is propelled forward as much by the resentments and tensions within the group, as it is by their battle to survive. Every member of this adventurous party works within the medical profession, and all of them have their own personal crosses to bear when it comes to professional ethics. One or two individuals are haunted by past decisions, several espouse opposing beliefs, and all of them are sensitive to even the slightest provocation. Although the screenplay doesn’t spend a huge amount of time exploring the differing ideologies at work, it does establish them, and it indicates that this is a group of holidaymakers fragmenting from the inside out.

With the party being flown in to the inhospitable woodlands, the image of the departing aircraft escaping the impenetrable landscape is pure desolation. The shot of the five men dwarfed by an expansive and unchecked natural world creates a sense of deep unquiet and unease; these supremely confident men suddenly look very small, and they are about to get a lot smaller. The disappearance of their boots after the first night is the earliest sign of danger, but it is also a masterstroke from scriptwriter Ian Sutherland. The only one whose boots haven’t been stolen is the leader of the expedition, the one whose idea it was to go back to nature, a man of practicality and macho pretensions. The very individual who seems best equipped to deal with the savage wilderness; the fact his boots remain means he is the only one who can go out into the rugged terrain to seek aid. The only clichéd character is written out after only twenty minutes. But Sutherland is not content with merely eliminating the most useful character; he also sets him up as a red herring, and thus develops another line of intrigue. But with him out of the way the narrative can concentrate fully on the weaknesses, pettiness and prejudices of the remaining four. The second sign is the party awakening to the arresting sight of a decapitated deer head, but the first death comes purely by accident when the foursome unwittingly disturb a ferocious wasps nest….and then there were three!

The cruellest punishment comes when the trio are lured into a nearby river, their crossing hampered somewhat by the fact that a bear trap has been placed in their path! Despite these external threats, and then the dawning realisation that they are being toyed with, and possibly hunted, the film is still propelled by the rage, guilt, resentment, and anger that boils away like lava within the hearts of the three men. Harry (played with grizzled world-weariness by Hal Holbrook) is a veteran of the Korean War, a brain specialist who must live with the vegetative state that many of his patients have been reduced too, and a recovering alcoholic who carries guilt over his father’s death. But importantly Harry realises long before the others what is actually going on in the wilderness. Mitzi (played by the films producer Lawrence Dane) is a whiner, a self centred egotist, who eats away at Harry’s insecurities like an acid, and seethes with resentment because of his reliance on Harry’s survival skills. The third man Martin (Robin Gemmell) is also an alcoholic, and must endure Mitzi’s prejudicial attitude to his homosexuality, which only gets crueller when he breaks his leg in the bear trap and must be stretchered over the harsh and unforgiving environment.

As the unwitting adventurers slowly make their way towards a dam that they believe represents civilisation and safety, misery upon misery is heaped upon them. Harry recognises that the unseen assailant wants to degrade them and to make them despair. Having suffered indignities at war and seen his father fade into debasement he is determined to maintain a dignity that Mitzi is all too eager to abandon. The weight of the stretcher, the baking midday sun, and the unsafe mountainous terrain, all combine to heap exhaustion upon them. Rituals is a very physical film, and the actors fatigue and tiredness is a by-product of continuity shooting. The final twenty minutes shifts tenor and becomes a waking nightmare from which there is no escape. The lone silhouette of their enigmatic tormentor stands like a sentinel, shimmering in the haze of the sun, and watching their every movement. These moments are beyond eerie; the barren and forbidding panorama becomes a post-apocalyptic wasteland with further alienation added when they discover the dam is unmanned. And yet Rituals still has some stunning surprises to reveal. The demise of Mitzi is truly horrifying, and the only moment when his nasal whine is not an irritation, but a terrifyingly real reaction to an abominable death. The war veteran causing the mayhem is the walking embodiment of the group’s repressed ethical guilt, a man who was saved by doctors, only to live life as a grotesquely deformed outsider. It has to be briefly noted that Rituals at times is poorly executed and technically unaccomplished, but British director Peter Carter keeps the narrative moving at a pulse pounding rate. There are few genuinely stand out images in the movie, but Carter ends it with a devastating one, as the morally shattered, and physically exhausted Harry, sits in the middle of a deserted road unable to move forward.

Shaun Anderson is the author of The Celluloid Highway, and has long held an interest in the more esoteric and offbeat avenues of cinematic history. This interest led him to a Masters Degree in Film Studies and a career trying to get Nunsploitation and Nazisploitation on the academic agenda instead of Jean-Luc Godard.

Oceanlab 2 sits on the bottom of the Muir Seamount in the Atlantic Ocean.  Finishing out their work rotation, the divers prepare to go back topside for some rest and relaxation.  But after only two divers have resurfaced (Ernest Borgnine’s Mack and Donnelly Rhodes’s Cousins), an earthquake hits, sending the lab and the three workers left in it into an abyss (ahem).  When regular dive searches prove fruitless, the members of the R.V. Triton Deep Sea Exploration team have all but given up hope.  Suddenly, from out of the fog comes salvation in the form of the Neptune mini-sub.  Piloted by retired American Naval Commander, Adrian Blake (the late Ben Gazzara), Mack, Cousins, and eventually Dr. Leah Jansen (Yvette Mimieux), descend after Oceanlab on “An Undersea Odyssey” that will uncover more than just the fate of the missing crew.

Taking its cues from the films of Irwin Allen, The Neptune Factor follows the same route as disaster films before and after it.  You have a seemingly random act of nature which propels our characters into action on a daring rescue mission.  The Swarm had a nomadic pack of killer bees.  When Time Ran Out had an island volcano.  These films are also as known for their all-star casts as for their high concept plots.  This film, not being quite on the same budgetary level as an Allen production, doesn’t try to squeeze in quite so many “name” actors.  Walter Pidgeon (essaying the role of Dr. Samuel Andrews) is the only other highly recognizable thespian herein, but he does little more than wander about and fret.  As these films often need, there is the addition of a ticking clock in order to add tension.  Hence, the Oceanlab only has about seven days worth of oxygen.  There’s also the final touch of never giving our heroes a clean break.  Every time they think they’ve accomplished something, the situation grows worse.  And worse.  And worse. With a clearcut goal and timeframe in place and the level of difficulty progressing, the movie should all but write itself.  It does, and the problem is (much like me) it is very longwinded.

The underwater setting accomplishes two goals in a cinematic sense.  First, it gives the scenes set under the sea (but not in the water) a sense of claustrophobia.  The sets are small out of necessity, and Petrie’s habit of shooting from low angles inside them only accentuates this sensation.  Second, the underwater photography is truly gorgeous, and as Jacques Cousteau knew years before, the world down there can truly be a wondrous one.  As alien and enchanting as the ocean depths are, though, there are more scenes in the film that use this footage as travelogue-style padding than in any sort of narrative sense.  It’s beautiful but dull.  This extends to the scenes inside the Neptune.  There’s no sense of urgency, and the characters tool around as if they were moving through water without a vehicle.  That is to say, slowly.

One of the things I miss the most in films is action characters who are over thirty-years-old (or these days, even out of their teens).  The people who took on some of the most deadly threats the world ever faced (the giant ants of Them!, the giant mantis of The Deadly Mantis, the Tobonga of From Hell It Came, and so forth), were (usually) working professionals.  They had real world experience (Note: not experience watching “The Real World”), and this experience had imbued them with the courage and resourcefulness to take on and defeat fantastic enemies.  Would Jaws be as great if Brody, Quint, and Hooper were played by Lautner, Pattinson and Cera?  I would suggest not.  Sadly, this is not what modern moviegoers want in their protagonists.  Ergo, this is not what modern movies give them.  Is it any wonder that many studio films produced now can’t stand the test of time or even distinguish themselves in any significant way from one another?  That’s enough of my soapboxing for right this second.  Back to the review…

If you have seen the poster for this film, you already know that they tease the prospect of giant, monstrous aquatic life that our intrepid heroes do valiant, hand-to-hand combat with a la Kirk Douglas in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.  Alas, this is not the case.  Furthermore, the miniature effects work, which starts out relatively convincing and well-done through the first two –thirds of the film, takes an absolute nosedive in the last third.  Anyone expecting some cool, low-fi monster designs is going to be severely disappointed.  The Brobdingnagian fish are nothing more than regular fish filmed beside a comparatively much less convincing Neptune model.  If you were one of the many viewers let down by the “dinosaurs” in Irwin Allen’s The Lost World, gird your loins for more of the same here (but with less fins glued on the poor animals).  This could even be forgiven (or at least put up with) if the story and action maintained a fast pace, but it doesn’t.  The film (especially in the final act, which should be amping the action up) is so tedious, I was sorely tempted to skip the last forty minutes, because the first one felt like three.  I think a better title for this film (ready for my oh-so-cute summation zinger?) would have been The Boredom Factor.  Get it?  ‘Cause it was so goddamn boring!  AARRRGGGHHH!  Dear reader, you have my sincerest apologies for not remaining more professional about this film in my conclusion, but there’s only so much one can take.  You’ll understand if you ever watch this movie.  Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Uncle must have watched Pete Walker’s House of Whipcord, as he employs a dominatrix-type, Victoria, to tie Dorothy to a bed and whip her until she agrees to sign over the company to Uncle. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have used some questionable tactics in business, but even the guys who brought us the horrors of Windows Vista and the Newton wouldn’t stoop quite so low. The improbably-named Ihor Procak, who plays one of Stratten’s captors, must have thought it was all his birthdays rolled into one. He spends practically all of his screen time raping, beating or similarly abusing the scantily clad blonde sexpot. When he has some time off from the rough horseplay, he sports a white jacket with lapels which practically touch his shoulders. He may be a bastard, but he has got style.

Despite a perfunctory side plot concerning a friendly shop assistant’s quest to track down Stratten, the majority of the 74 minute running time features an uneasy blend of badly realised degradation and all too brief glimpses of lesbian love. The Sapphic scenes are badly done, but are surprisingly tender, but are followed by a good leathering of Stratten’s bare buttocks with a horsewhip. The acting is uniformly atrocious, but Stratten certainly showed promise in this and, especially, Galaxina. She may have been able to throw off the Playmate image and cross over into low-budget respectability.

Ultimately, Autumn Born is neither one thing nor the other. It’s too badly done and explicit to even reach TV movie standards of serious drama, but not dirty enough to be a true exploitation film. There is a fair amount of unconvincing violence and some nudity, but Stratten is mainly seen in her underwear, and there is only the most fleeting glimpse of a full-frontal. Given Stratten’s murder by her ex boyfriend, and her posthumous notoriety, if this film had starred anyone else, it would have been forgotten long ago. There is a certain ‘freak show’ feeling watching it, but there is a genuine laugh to be had at the sight of Uncle drooling at his now-reprogrammed niece. He really can’t take his eyes of her spectacular cleavage, and seems to have serious trouble in delivering his next line. Can’t say I blame him…

Peter Weller is left alone in his New York brownstone (actually located in Montreal) when his family (wife Shannon Tweed and young son) leave town to visit her side of the family for two weeks. During that time, Weller finds that his castle has basically been invaded by a super-sized indestructible rat. He enlists the help of a neighboring handyman, the hugely underrated Canadian character actor Louis Del Grande (Scanners, “Seeing Things”) and as they try to stop the beast, Weller finds that his work as a high-priced banking liaison might be in jeopardy as his attention shifts fully to dealing with the abominable rat.

The entire film involves watching as Weller’s character (Bart) is broken down while things progress towards the worst, and as Bart continues to drown in the madness of the whole thing, we start to doubt that he’ll be able to come back up for air.

Of Unknown Origin is one crazy effing film and it’s nearly unbelievable how well it works, like Jaws for the giant-rat sub-genre (if there even is such a sub-genre. And if there is, Of Unknown Origin just might be the king of it).

I have serious doubts that a film like this could be pulled off as effectively today, surely the rat would be shown with CGI artistry as opposed to classic editing, photography and in-camera work. Unlike Jaws, actually seeing the rat only adds to the creepiness of the movie, and watching Weller spend his lunch hours in the library microfiche room studying the graphic history and habits of various breeds of rats is pretty unnerving. Of course, if you have no aversion to rats then maybe this film wouldn’t work as well on you, but personally, I wouldn’t want to have been in the shoes of this leading character. Like any good successful genre film, it’s also the subtext riding underneath the plot that gives the movie a little something extra. Well, that, and the cinematic use of several fantastic shots that utilize the aesthetics of windows and mirrors like I’ve never seen before. The movie was shot by Canadian cinematographer Rene Verzier, who also shot Cronenberg’s Rabid, Rituals, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Bullies, and funnily, Deadly Eyes, another giant-ass-rats-taking-over horror flick. Okay, so maybe there is a sub-genre.

I haven’t watched too many rat films, but the ones that I have seen (Graveyard Shift, Mulberry Street, or, in the UK, Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street) all tend to take the subject matter seriously, and there is really no humour present in Of Unknown Origin. I guess giant effing rats just aren’t all that hilarious.

In regards to this film, I think a friend of mine said it best when he told me: “This film is better than it has any right to be.” Yes, I think that’s pretty accurate.

“Overnourished, overweight Daddy Warbucks”  mogul, Morgan Hunnicutt convinces Professor Henry (with Morgan’s grandchildren Jane and Herbie in tow) to dig up and defrost an abominable snowman discovered in the ice of Newfoundland. Predictably, said Yeti, an enormous Hugo Stiglitz lookalike Slush Puppie, isn’t best pleased and runs amok when airlifted by helicopter to Toronto for the biggest brand stunt Canada has ever seen – hoisted 10’000 feet, force fed ozone(?) subjected to flash photography and given electro shocks straight to the brain to wake him up will do it, even if the decidedly dodgy disco version of Carmina Burana‘s O Fortuna doesn’t.

Quickly sidestepping the glaring issue that the  nutty Professor has been  wholly irresponsible in taking Hunnicutt’s grandchildren along to dig up a 1000 year old creature (surely there are health and safety restrictions to that kind of carry on?), Yeti: The Giant of the 20th Century allows for a Fay Wray in the shape of Phoenix Grant as  Jane, and a sickly and largely unnecessary sub plot involving Herbie’s selective mutism, yes, Gianfranco Parolini‘s trashy Canux B flick is both an obvious though harmless enough riff on Dino DeLaurentiis’ King Kong and sentimental clap trap of the highest, er lowest grade, order.

It should probably come as no surprise then that this  is essentially an Italian production – one that scurried off to Canada to dine out on the lucrative tax return and one that swaps J&B product placement for a seemingly infinite set of  Canadian flags-in-the-distance shots instead, making Yeti… a great drinking game movie (seriously, take a shot each time someone waves a Canadian flag) and well, little else really. Regardless, it does belabour the fact that despite all the nuances of the Italian exploitation aesthete on hand (recycling ideas, dispensing with thematics, awkward exposition and so on), this is a Canadian picture. Right?

Director Parolini is seemingly obsessed with helicopters (they’re everywhere), the aforementioned O Fortuna work outs are incessant and some very cut price blue screen special effects give Mimmo Crao an opportunity to lurch about in a hairy suit  looking confused, peeved and upset in equal measure. Cinematically, Yeti… is a no show. But then, so what? It’s Canada, it’s 1977 and the film is called: Yeti: The Giant of the 20th Century for crying out loud!

So whilst Yeti: The Giant of the 20th Century does very little for the enhancement of a critical re-evaluation of Canadian cinema and is, of course, a second fiddle rip off of Kong, it is still worth seeing. There’s  a string of odd highlights which include the hardening of the Yeti’s nipples when stroked by Jane, some fine “people running around in panic looking up and pointing to the sky” sequences, a well trained Lassie “death” scene and the breaking of a neck with a pair of toes. All serve to keep things pleasantly strange if not strictly speaking lighthearted.

Yetee…  thank you. But please, go away… this world is not for you… goodbye Yetee…

]]> http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/5514/yeti-the-giant-of-the-20th-century-1977-director-gianfranco-parolini/feed/ 2 http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/5487/what-is-the-canadian-tax-shelter/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-is-the-canadian-tax-shelter http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/5487/what-is-the-canadian-tax-shelter/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:29:06 +0000 Vince http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/?p=5487 The “Tax Shelter Films” sounds like it would be referring to a handful of films, but actually, Tax Shelter Films has become more of a term referring to an entire era in Canadian feature film production… or rather, the initiation of a feature film production boost within Canada. Introduced in 1974, the Tax Shelter Film heyday was really 1978 to 1980, where the majority of the films were produced that actually saw a commercial release worldwide – usually through U.S. Distribution companies. Ah, but here I go again, getting ahead of myself. So, what was the Tax Shelter Film era…?

In 1974 an arm of the Canadian federal government called the CFDC (The Canadian film development something-or-other) launched a tax credit initiative that basically would allow investors in feature-length films to recoup 100% of their investment through tax write-offs, paid for by the Canadian government, if they made Canadian films. The only catches were: 1. that two-thirds of the creative personnel had to be Canadian, 2. the producer had to be Canadian, 3. seventy-five percent of all technical services had to be performed in Canada. As you can see here, the director of the film didn’t necessary have to be Canadian, and so we Canadians got Canadian films that were directed by Brits, Europeans and Americans as well as Canadian directors – Roger Spottiswood (Terror Train), John Hough (Incubus), George P. “Cobra” Cosmatos (Of Unknown Origin) and even Bob Clark, (Deathdream; Black Christmas) whose films were all produced in or with Canada, did not actually become a resident of Canada until around the time of Porky’s.

The death of the Tax Shelter era is spotty – some say it came to a demise around 1982 when the CCA (Capital Cost Allowance) dropped the tax refund to 65%, but in actuality, even that lowered number kept productions rolling right through until 1990, with many low-budget American producers taking advantage because of the then-exploding popularity of VHS rentals. It’s between 1986 and 1990 that we see the films like “Zombie Nightmare” and “Rock & Roll Nightmare”, which was produced as cheap VHS rental fodder. (After 1990 the CCA dropped even further after the CFDC morphed into what is now known as Telefilm Canada, the tax credit now is usually around 25-35% depending on what was spent in Canada, generally money that is spent by American productions, which Hollywood has termed “runaway productions”).

Nevertheless, contemporary critics argue that there is now cultural and influential validity to be found in the Tax Shelter Films, not just for the films themselves, but because of the talent involved when, at the time, they were getting their first breaks in the Canadian film industry. Like many European countries, and very unlike most Hollywood films, Canadian films remained director or artist-driven, not star-driven. Even the Canadian-American films usually hired b-actors when and if they hired Americans in the lead roles. But because the CFDC had no mandate that the film had to be helmed by a Canadian, Canadian films have mostly ended up with an anorexic cultural identity, really, to the continued determent of our cinema culture and our filmmakers.

But still, there is just something about these films that feel or look Canadian, something just not quite American, something waiting to be looked back on and identified – there is a rich cinematic history in there somewhere.