It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE (2007) - Crispin Hellion Glover

crispin glover is an extremely high-functioning insane person. what distinguishes him from those merely skinning dipping in the cross-contaminated gene pools of bleeding hearts and artists and hollywood eccentrics is a conceptual drive stuck deliberately in neutral. this is not to say his projects don't go anywhere; rather, their momentum and direction are neither guided nor overdetermined. concept is both the means and the ends, and the concepts are - in a word - fucked. we love crispin glover because he's the arch wizard of screwball. everything he produces is perfectly consistent within his own conceptual paradigm, and if nothing else, the worlds he creates make sane people really uncomfortable (we are, after all, speaking of the mind that brought us "clowny clown clown"). so where talent does what it can, genius does what it must, and crispin hellion glover is a rare genius indeed.

fortunately for us, madhattery loves company. instead of retreating into the intricacies of his own brains, glover seeks out other screwballs with whom to make movies ... screwballs like steven c stewart. steven c stewart was a man with talent, frustration, and severe cerebral palsy whose rapunzel fetish and deep-seated misogyny came to a head in the original script for it is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. under glover's production, direction, and proceeds from charlie's angels, stewart plays the satanic hero-villain in his own made-for-tv after-school-special pornographic horrorshow.

to say it is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE is difficult to watch misrepresents not only the film, but also notions of both difficulty and watching. wheelchairs, murder, and necrophilia aside, the film challenges the gaze because it forces audiences with even the most indelicate of sensibilities to spend 74 minutes looking at that from which we are socialised to avert our eyes. watching actors engage with and respond normally to someone both physically and verbally inarticulate bothers us. the sexual expression of people with disabilities makes us laugh. and frankly, we don't know what to do with a retarded serial killer with a semi-flaccid penis who flops around atop hot, naked, dead girls. but when he runs over the neck of one with his wheelchair, we know we've got our money's worth.

Hausu (1977) - Nobuhiko Obayashi

like lewis carroll's alice's adventures in wonderland, nobuhiko obayashi's hausu is based on the ludicrous daydreams of an ADD girl-child with too much imagination on her hands. we may be made of sugar, spice, and other nice things, but i've often suspected that our insides run on spiders and coal. and apparently i'm not alone: carroll's exploitation of little liddel seduces readers, filmmakers, and the more lewdly speculative members of the literary community; obayashi's "gorgeous" daughter seduces her virgin girlfriends and feeds them to crazy aunt elizabeth báthory and her hungry house on haunted hill.

although this sounds like the perfect recipe for a japanese horrorfest, the film is also composed - and i quote the subtitles directly - of "chocolate, candy, bread, love, and dreams." a gaggle of schoolgirls on summer vacation travel through painted landscapes via happy train and magic bus to a village populated by singing cobblers and other shopkeepers of the musical theatre variety whose jazz-hands fail to point out the dangers that lurk behind the walls of what appears to be the only house in town. everything turns topsy-turvy once the girls go inside: auntie's a nutter, the house is a death-trap, and blanche the cat shoots green laserbeams out of its eyes.

distributor janus films calls hausu "an episode of scooby doo as directed by dario argento." they're not wrong. while the house tries to gobble up the visitors in an effort to feed the starved libido of its owner - jilted of the joys of her wedding night by WWII - the giggling girls get their shit together and go kung-fu nancy drew on its ass. fortunately, their scooby skillz prove little match for the appetites of auntie unhinged. there is no way to describe the mayhem that ensues.

Mac's decapitated head rises up from a well to bite Fantasy's backside, Sweet strips and leaves behind her suspicious-smelling skivvies in a pile of malevolent mattresses, and skeletons dance to a romantic piano number played by Melody's severed fingers while Gorgeous plays dress-up in her dead mother's wedding clothes. "this is ridiculous!" states the Prof, and we can only nod in fourth-wall agreement as the house devours its inhabitants in increasingly surreal scenarios. the promise of rescue is thwarted when the girls' heartthrob teacher, en route to the house, gets into an argument with a watermelon vendor over which is the superior fruit and dissembles into a pile of that which he defends. this shit is, indeed, bananas. b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

the night goes tits up for the girls after this - a point rather aptly driven home with appropriate visual representation. but naked underdeveloped teens is perhaps the least of obayashi's achievements in 1970s film production. his techniques are actually brilliant. clever cuts, soft-focus slo-mo, animation, and avant garde special effects enable obayashi to visually realise the potential of his plot. inside and out, this house is genius.

Kichiku (1997) - Kazuyoshi Kumakiri

kumakiri was a third-year college student when he set out to make the most violent film in contemporary japanese cinema - a not-unambitious project, given that success would mean producing the most violent film, well, ever. and A+ for effort! kumakiri succeeds magna cum laude. born from a long-established tradition of unrelenting violence in the vein of miike, suzuki, etc, kichiku doesn't so much kick things up a notch as shotgun blast them apart. this is the most fucked-up film i have ever seen.

kichiku is the japanese cannibal holocaust, but perhaps more so. the black-flag characters are about as endearing as the cast of documentary film-makers in CH, and their political project equally admirable. and while i grant that kichiku lacks scenes of actual animal slaughter, there is something deeply nihilistic about this film that CH only irresponsibly gestures towards. it's not just that the cultural narrative to which kichiku belongs is unfamiliar, and thus more upsetting to little white canadian girls (as is the case with most tokyo shock and japanese cult cinema) - there are no fucking rules, dude. so yr left flailing, clawing at yr eyes just waiting for it to be over. but in a good way.

interestingly, kichiku contains the only moment in film my life would be better for having not seen.