Black Gate

TV Guide featuring Shogun (September 6-12, 1980)

Before 1980, few people in America and Europe knew much about Japan’s samurai era — if anything, they associated its warrior ethos with the hostile mindset that had led the country into its big mistake in World War II. The unarmed combat skills of judo and karate had been popularized during the Sixties, but little was known about the martial arts of the samurai that had preceded them until Shogun, James Clavell’s blockbuster novel and subsequent hit TV miniseries, hit the American and European mainstream.

Suddenly samurai were top-of-mind for mass market consumers, from low-culture exploitation videos (as they were regarded then) like Shogun Assassin to high-culture art-house darlings like Kagemusha, the triumphant return of director Akira Kurosawa to the genre of his breakthrough film Seven Samurai. After 1980, “samurai” was nearly as recognizable a historical concept as “cowboy.”

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Swashbuckler (US, 1976)

Let’s face it, in the spate of historical swashbucklers that followed Richard Lester’s Musketeers films, not everything was a classic like Robin and Marian. There were a few toads in the flower garden, some rotten apples in the barrel, and it’s only fair to warn you about them. However, even a terrible misfire can have its amusing side, as you’ll see in the sterling examples gathered below, three attempts to capture the that old swordplay magic that go astray in entirely different ways.

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When I first saw the schedule for Fantasia 2021, none of the films playing the final night of the festival struck me as something I wanted to review here. I therefore decided I’d pick one of the movies available on-demand throughout Fantasia as my personal closing film. Which then raised the question of which of those movies felt like enough of an event to mark the end of a three-week revel in the weirdness of genre cinema. And the answer to this question was clear at once. My big finish for Fantasia 2021 would be the three-hour-plus documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror.

Right beforehand I watched the short bundled with it. “Saudade” is a 20-minute film from Singapore written and directed by Russell Morton, presenting stories and rituals of the Kristang people, a community of mixed Eurasian ancestry that arose in the area of Malacca four or five hundred years ago. The film, in the Kristang language, is structured around three sequences. The first is a folk dance, the second’s a conversation between a fisherman and his wife about stories and the shrimp that have vanished from the seas, and the third is a meeting with a mythic entity called the Oily Man — a human who sold his soul to the Devil. The film’s very concerned with ghosts and the survival of stories; the title’s a Portuguese word that refers to a kind of melancholic nostalgia for a desired thing that will not come again, and there seems a connection there with the film’s interest in history and culture. The movie’s photographed well, with a colourful shot at the end reminiscent of a dance of death, and it’s evocative, though the connections are elliptical to me. That may be deliberate, as I’m not sure whether the movie’s meant to present the Kristang culture to others, to speak to the Kristang people, or to record some pieces of Kristang culture. Or all of the foregoing. Either way, there’s a tone of longing and distance here that, so far as I can tell, bears out the promise of the title.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is directed by Kier-la Janisse, the founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. Janisse has written several books on horror, and her micropress Spectacular Optical has published several more (including Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin). Woodlands Dark is her first feature, and it has more than 50 interviewees discussing folk horror films from around the world. It’s coming on blu-ray from Severin Films on December 7, available on its own or as part of a 15-disc collection called ‘All the Haunts Be Ours’ which includes 20 of the movies mentioned in the documentary.

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In the waning hours of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival I sat down to watch The Unknown Man of Shandigor (L’inconnu de Shandigor), a 1967 Swiss spy film directed by Jean-Louis Roy, who collaborated on the script with Gabriel Arout and Pierre Koralnik. The film’s got a new 4K restoration by the Cinematheque Suisse; I’d never heard of the movie, but the description was intriguing, a black-and-white mod odyssey through the weirdness of the 1960s, with nods to Dr. Strangelove and Alphaville, and including Serge Gainsbourg as the leader of a group of bald turtleneck-clad assassins. Was this a lost classic, or an eccentric curiosity? Or both?

The plot of the film concerns one Doctor Von Krantz (Daniel Emilfork, who would go on to feature in The City of Lost Children), an admirer of Dracula prone to observations such as: “I don’t like humanity. Or, I do, but in a jar of arsenic.” The good doctor has invented the Canceler (or Annulator), which can nullify a nuclear explosion. As this is the height of the Cold War, his fortified home has now become the target for spies from multiple different nations. American agent Bobby Gun (Howard Vernon) races with the dastardly Russian Shostakovich (Jacques Dufilho) to get their hands on the device — but the key may lie with Von Krantz’s young and idealistic daughter Sylvaine (Marie-France Boyer), who dreams of a man she once knew (Ben Carruthers), a mysterious man in the city of Shandigor.

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I wrote a little while ago about watching three documentary films bundled together at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival, centred around the short feature You Can’t Kill Meme. There was another set of three documentaries at Fantasia this year, and as the festival drew to a close, I sat down to watch them as well. These two shorts and the short feature Dear Hacker were a bit more diverse in subject matter, but shared themes of technology and power.

First was writer-director Aleix Pitarch’s “Orders,” a disturbing animated short based on a true story. The movie re-creates a horrific phone call that was made to a fast-food restaurant by a man claiming to be a police officer, using actors and an edited transcript of the call (I am not sure where the transcript is supposed to have come from, but the events are clearly based on a deeply disturbing reality). Without going into detail, the story’s a dark working-out of something like Stanley Milgram’s experiments about authority and what ordinary people can be ordered to do. As we hear bits of the phone call, and hear things getting worse and worse, we see everyday images of the day’s work at a fast-food restaurant.

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“Aquatic Bird” is an 18-minute short film from Chinese writer-director Zhang Nan. It weaves together the stories of three interrelated characters — a prostitute (Bird), a man who admires her from a distance (Aqua), and one of her regular clients. The first two are brought together by the light of a green laser pointer; there is a lot of surrealism in this film. It looks very nice, and the script’s very taut — but given the weirdness of the film, I wonder if maybe a bit too taut. To the extent I was able to follow it, the structure worked and built to a solid conclusion. But there’s a lot I did not understand, notably the use of a dream scene, and a peculiar egg of surprising plot significance.

Bundled with it was Midnight In A Perfect World, from the Philippines. Directed by Dodo Dayao, who co-wrote the script with Carljoe Javier, the feature takes place in a near-future Manila where infrastructure’s been upgraded to near-utopian levels. But there are strange blackouts that hit parts of the city after midnight, and you must not be caught out in those places at those times. People disappear, leaving behind only wild rumours about what’s happened to them. Luckily there are safehouses, in which one can take shelter. But there are stories about the dangers of those safehouses, too. The movie follows a group of young friends caught in one blackout, and follow them as they take refuge in a safehouse — then find out one of the group didn’t make it inside.

The first thing to say about this movie is that it captures a striking note of cosmic terror, with a strong inflection of the New Weird (there’s an interesting interview where Dayao mentions being influenced by China Miéville). There are science fiction influences here, certainly, but not in the form of clearly-defined technologies operating in an easily knowable world. Dayao’s said that he worked out the reasons beyond all the unreal elements in the story, but chose not to include them in expository lumps at the expense of breaking up the flow of a scene. In part because of that, the film creates a world which we believe is operating according to rules, however alien, but rules which may be beyond understanding. It’s a little like Lovecraft by way of Laird Barron.

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Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙), from Hong Kong, had its Canadian premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s the first film from director Kin Long Chan, who co-wrote the movie with Ryan Ling, and stars Ka Tung Lam (also known as Gordon Lam, a veteran actor and the screenwriter of Time, also at Fantasia 2021) as Kwan, a former member of the British armed forces in Hong Kong. After the British turn Hong Kong over to China, Kwan retires and falls in with organised crime. In 2019, he’s scheming with a turtle smuggler named Pickle (Ying-gor To) to convince his boss Tai (Ben Yuen) to take a deal for black-market turtles — and then a South Asian immigrant thief named Mani (Bipin Karma), who ripped off Tai, stumbles into Kwan’s home desperate for sanctuary. Mani pays well to get a temporary hiding place from Tai’s goons in Kwan’s home. But Tai’s after Mani’s accomplice, his cousin Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan), and then there are those turtles to worry about. Violence escalates throughout the movie, and it’s clear that at any moment the bloodthirsty Tai could turn on Kwan.

A story of crime and brutality, the drama and conflict of Hand Rolled Cigarette emerge not just from character but from the society the characters struggle with and against. Most obviously, Mani faces blunt hostility because of his race. The movie’s sharp enough to show some of that coming from Kwan, our protagonist and the closest thing to a sympathetic figure in the film. Kwan’s past in the military, meanwhile, comes into play in a number of ways — to start with, as an instance of a broken promise, as he and his men were not granted citizenship by the country they served.

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