homer_b - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Scary Creepy Springfield via Winnipeg at TIFF 2017

There is someone in Homer's house in Winnipeg.

homer_b (2017)
Dir. Milos Mitrovic, Conor Sweeney

Review By Greg Klymkiw

At the best of times, three-quarter-inch videotape on U-Matic playback machines seemed degraded, especially when constantly rotating, whirring drumheads would connect with the tape in pause-mode and render all manner of glitches. Even more problematic was an editing process that required constant duping in order to create desired cuts and resulted in further image degeneration.

At the time, watching community cable programs in the 80s, using already-retro equipment (though not that much worse than the "advancements" made in commercial mainstream video broadcasting at the time), felt positively otherworldly. Seeing said tapes some 30+ years later, especially if they'd been duped to straight VHS and simply captured decades later on a digital format without any remastering results in images that have been dredged from the pits of some analogue septic tank Hell.

It's scary stuff. So too is the astonishingly creepy, disturbing and funny film homer_b by contemporary Winnipeg filmmakers Milos Mitrovic and Conor Sweeney (one of the founders of the visionary Astron-6 collective). Gorgeously recreating the aforementioned look of ancient technology, this is one fine addition to the tradition first coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as "prairie post-modernism".

Feeling and looking like the work of a Matt Groening doppelgänger, or more likely, a Winnipeg community cable Matt Groening wannabe, we're greeted with a series of simple, decrepit opening images: a flash of pre-roll video noise, a screen of piss-pale yellow and a quick, crude fade-up of an ugly title treatment over a faded green star, bold-capped typeface in purple and dark yellow with a shimmering slightly askew shadow drop and then, an inelegant cut to black video noise, followed by an even-more graceless cut to a ruffled, white-tea-dyed curtain and a lone standup microphone in the foreground. Organ music on the soundtrack that makes David Lynch's use of Fats Waller sounding positively chipper, accompanies the chilling fade-up on a live action figure approaching the mic wearing a horrifying Krusty the Clown mask.

Things are not right in Springfield, or rather, uh, Winnipeg. If independent cinema from that midwestern Canadian city is to be believed (and why not?), the likes of Guy Maddin, John Paizs, et al, painted a myriad of cinematic treasures that would lead one to believe that nothing, absolutely nothing, was ever right in Winnipeg. (God knows David Lynch himself was happy to utilize his unacknowledged John [Springtime in Greenland] Paizs influences in his depiction of Lumberton in Blue Velvet.)

As the masked Krusty approaches, his voice queerly distorted in the Lynchian Twin Peaks backward-enunciation-played-forward reverberations, relates a childhood memory that most of us would rather forget, the tale of a boy, a pig and vomit. A masked intruder into this scene, making the testicle-cheeked Lady-in-the-Radiator from Eraserhead seem perfectly normal, manages to perk up the creepy quotient, as if it wasn't high already.

We're then treated to a disturbing "commercial" break segment involving masked Homer and Bart Simpsons in a grubby basement. When the "message" is over, we return to Krusty.

He has a warning.

It is one we must all heed.

Someone is in the house.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

homer_b enjoys its World Premiere at TIFF 2017.

SHE'S ALLERGIC TO CATS - FANTASIA 2016 - Review By Greg Klymkiw: **** 4 Feature Debut

Can a schlub video artist get to home plate with a mega-babe?

She's Allergic To Cats (2016)
Dir. Michael Reich
Starring: Mike Pinkney, Sonja Kinski

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Every so often, I see a film that reminds me of the joy I experienced during those halcyon days when I produced a whack of no-to-low-budget feature films. The accent was always on the love of cinema, innovation and most of all, cool shit that I and my colleagues would be happy to pay money to see ourselves. Given our collective cinematic predilections, our only nod to "marketplace" was knowing there had to be whack-jobs like us "out there".

My personal credo was thus: If you're making a movie for very little money, it better goddamn well be something that puts you and the film itself on a map. Impersonal "calling card" films had only two results: Making something competent enough that you might end up in regular network series television or worse; not being able to overcome the meagre production value and generating a movie that nobody would want.

She's Allergic To Cats made me happier than happy. From the opening frames to the magnificent cut from a hilariously poignant final image to the first of the end title cards, I found the picture endlessly dazzling, deliriously perverse and rapturously romantic. This is exactly the kind of first feature which an original filmmaker should generate. Writer-director Michael Reich boldly announces his presence with a friendly fuck-you attitude, a great sense of humour and a visual style that should make some veteran directors be ashamed of their by the numbers camera jockey moves.

Though there is no official genre called "schlubs who get to successfully seduce babes", She's Allergic To Cats would definitely be leading the charge if such a thing did officially exist - it's kind of like a Woody Allen picture on acid through the lens of wonky, nutty 80s video art.

Are you a schlub? Don't worry. Babes await you.

Mike Pinkney, the actor, plays Mike Pinkney, the lead character - a schlub extraordinaire who works a day job as a dog groomer and in his off hours, makes retro-styled video art and/or endlessly watches the horrendous, compulsively watchable 70s TV movie with John Travolta, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. These viewings include Mike eating sweet, unhealthy breakfast cereals. His home is also disgustingly infested with rats who seem to devour everything - from bananas to condoms. The landlord's only solution is to eventually "look up" a solution on Wikipedia.

Mike's dream is to make a feature film homage to Brian De Palma's Carrie - with CATS!!! His producer thinks it's the stupidest idea he's every heard. Mike is dejected and persistent all at the same time. Amidst the slacker/McJob existence he leads, Mike miraculously hits it off with Cora (Sonja Kinski - Nastassja's daughter, Klaus's granddaughter) a mega-babe who happily agrees to a date.

Here, director Reich deserves to win some manner of official accolade for creating the most depraved "meet-cute" in cinema history. All I will say is that it involves the incompetent clipping of a dog's nails on the quick, causing them to bleed.

The entire love story is mediated through Mike's filmmaking/video-art perspective. The result is a chiaroscuro-like melange of garish "video" colours, cheesy (though gorgeous) dissolves and plenty of sexy video tracking errors.

Though the film's final actions can be seen from a mile away, "surprise" is hardly the point. There's a sad and deeply moving inevitability to where things go. Reich achieves the near-impossible. We laugh with his main character, we laugh at him and finally, we're given a chance to weep for him.

Yes, on many levels, She's Allergic to Cats is a head-film extraordinaire, but it has heart and soul. This is something of a miracle. Then again, this should come as no surprise. Getting the film made must have been a miracle and what Reich's efforts have yielded is nothing less than revelatory.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

She's Allergic To Cats enjoys its World Premiere at FANTASIA 2016

THE GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Retro Romp Rock, Rock, Rocks

Not only was Johnny X shot on FILM,
IT HAS LOBBY CARDS!!!

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012)
Dir. Paul Bunnell
Starring: Will Keenan, Creed Bratton, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Williams,
Reggie Bannister, De Anna Joy Brooks, Les Williams, Kate Maberly, Jed Rowen

Review By Greg Klymkiw

How in the names of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Ed Wood, Jack Arnold, Edward Ulmer and Good God Almighty Himself, does a movie like this slip through the cracks?

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is a low budget marvel crammed with style galore, loads of laughs, gorgeous black and white cinematography (by Francisco Bulgarelli, using the very last rolls of 35mm Kodak Plus-X 5231 film ever sold), imaginative costume/production design, a humdinger of a score (by Ego Plum), idiotically entertaining musical numbers, cheesily delightful SFX, a diverse range of (mostly) straight-up performances (and a few judiciously-utilized over-the-top ones), big beautiful cars, testicle cheeks, babes, hunks and a genuinely loving appreciation for those bygone days when cinema haunted the highways and byways of rural drive-inn theatres and grind houses across North America.

Oh, and the movie is overflowing with babes.

Really, now? What in the Good God Damn Hell is wrong with the world? This is a movie that deserves to be screened in every last, living independent rep/art cinema (and maybe even a few mainstream ones). Yes, it's available on DVD and VOD, but it's a movie that's been lovingly crafted to be enjoyed on big screens with throngs of in-the-flesh appreciative fans. Any indie rep-art houses and/or genre film festivals that did NOT play this film deserve to prostrate themselves before a Minotaur wearing an anaconda-sized strap-on dildo adorned with ribs of rusty Gillette razor blades to deliver a prostate massage of white hot holy terror. (It's not too late for any of the said programmers of said venues to seek redemption, mind you.)

Not since the Lady in the Radiator in David Lynch's Eraserhead have there been testicle cheeks as delicious as these on display in The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

Yes, the movie has a plot. Not that the picture needs it, but thankfully it's there and works as a decent enough wooden coat hanger for writer-director Paul Bunnell to drape lots of cool shit from.

In a nutshell, the handsome, black-leather-jacketed alien heartthrob Johnny X (Will Keenan) and his merry band of juvenile delinquents have been exiled by their elderly, unhip leaders to the dull purgatory that is the planet Earth. Worse yet, they're stranded in a lonely desert town with a diner that serves up delicious, shakes, grease and inspires musical numbers.

This is of little concern to Johnny. Earth is where he wants to be. At least, for now.

HOT BABES. HOT HUNKS. HOT CARS.

Johnny has two goals. He's searching for the powerful interplanetary alien invention called the "Resurrection Suit" - a device so powerful that it could alter all existence, like, everywhere, Daddy-O! Johnny is convinced he'll find his quarry on Earth, and when he does - watch out!

Secondly, he's got a goal not tied into interplanetary domination. You see, Johnny is not a juvenile delinquent for nothing - he's been raised as an alien bastard child. However, his birth father is none other than the rocking-est dude on Earth, the hip musical sensation Mickey O'Flynn (Creed Bratton) - a reunion with Dad is going to set a lot straight in our naughty lad's life. There is, however, a secondary problem to all this - Mickey is a has-been and, uh, he's dead. Well, not dead-dead, but in enough of a state of decomposition that a father-son reunion, a triumphant comeback concert and maybe, just maybe, a "Resurrection Suit" will come in mighty handy.

Add to this mix: a sexy femme fatale (De Anna Joy Brooks) with her own, shall we say, desires, a scum bucket music promoter (Reggie Bannister), a Tor Johnson/Lobo lookalike (Jed Rowen) ineptly wreaking havoc and one of the most gruellingly soppy and perversely sexy love stories on celluloid, twixt a Jim Nabors look-alike (Les Williams) and a sweet Annette-Funicello-crossed-with-Donna-Reed honey-bunch (Kate Maberly).

THE NATURAL ORDER: Juvie Delinquent & Femme Fatale
THE NATURAL ORDER: Dead crooners make comebacks

Of course, what science fiction musical would be complete without magnificent extended cameos from "Swan" himself, the ageless, timeless crooner-songwriter Paul (Phantom of the Paradise) Williams and, ever-so deliciously, the late, great Kevin (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) McCarthy?

Sure, this is a low budget effort and it occasionally bears a few ragged edges. Not all the laughs work and the mostly terrific musical numbers sometimes go on a tad too long. However, what really helps The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is the fact that, writer-director Bunnell doesn't go out of his way to create an intentional cult film. Yes, the homages are there, but so much of the picture plays itself straight that it feels like a labour of love by someone who knows and loves movies from a bygone era.

Oh, and have I mentioned yet that the movie has babes?

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is available on an extras-packed DVD and VOD on Amazon. That said, DEMAND your local indie art house and/or local genre film festival play this film on a BIG, BIG SCREEN. You'll be happy you saw it there first and THEN you can watch it over and over again on the home entertainment format of your choice.

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Take a bath w/ Guy Maddin @TIFF2015 A Film Corner *****TIFF 2015 TOP-PICK*****

Marv (Louis Negin) teaches you how to take a bath in THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

LOUIS NEGIN is MARV

The Forbidden Room (2015)
Dir. Guy Maddin
Co-Dir. Evan Johnson
Scr. Maddin, Johnson, Robert Kotyk
Addl. Writ. John Ashbery, Kim Morgan
Edit. John Gurdebeke
Prod.Design Galen Johnson
Cinematog. Stephanie Anne Weber Biron and Ben Kasulke
Prod. Co. PHI Films, The National Film Board of Canada, Buffalo Gal
Starring: Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Céline Bonnier, Karine Vanasse, Caroline Dhavernas, Paul Ahmarani, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Maria de Medeiros, Charlotte Rampling, Géraldine Chaplin, Marie Brassard, Sophie Desmarais, Ariane Labed, Amira Casar, Luce Vigo, Gregory Hlady, Romano Orzari, Lewis Furey, Angela La Muse Senyshyn, Kimmi Melnychuk, Kim Morgan, Darcy Fehr, Jean-François Stévenin, Judith Baribeau, Graham Ashmore

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to take a bath with Guy Maddin in his closet of tantalizing shame, his forbidden room. God knows I have partaken on occasions too multitudinous to enumerate. So please, allow me to assure you, bathing with Maddin is a most gratifying and sensual treat for the mind, body and most of all, your very soul.

So then, my dear ones, do yourself a favour and hop into the stew with the Crown Prince of Prairie Post-Modernist Cinema and revel in the myriad of pleasures that motion pictures can offer: the fleshly, the ectoplasmic, the magically incorporeal, the visually and aurally celestial and, most assuredly, the cerebral complexities of all human existence in this world and the next, as filtered through the mind (within an enormous head of magma) of the great Icelandic Satyr who worships - nay, attends to all the needs of that Bacchus who rules over us all, the most holy and resplendent gift that IS the great silver-embossed photoplay, the magic bestowed upon our world by the immortal Brothers Lumière.

The Forbidden Room is 130 glorious minutes you'll want to experience over and over and over again. If, God Forbid, you find you're unable to experience it more than once, or worse, if you're compelled to not see it at all, you either don't care about cinema and/or have no taste and/or hold the unenviable dishonour of exhibiting little more than bone matter twixt thine wax-filled ears and behind eyes of cement.

I, for one, must confess to having seen the film five times now. My fifth helping occurred precisely at the scheduled time of the first public screening in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival, which I was sadly unable to attend.

I did, however, attempt to replicate the joy of said event, in an outdoor soft tub, located at the northernmost tip of the penetratingly puissant peninsula dividing the moist Great Lake of Huron and its clitoral Georgian Bay, surrounded by the glories of the natural world, the horses, ponies, donkeys, dogs, squirrels, beavers, hibernating bears, coyotes, wolves and chickens, puffing fine tobacco purchased from my Aboriginal Brothers on their cheap-smoke-shoppe and hunting lands down the road, with jets of hot water massaging my rolls of flesh and every so often, just now and then, mind you, the hand not gripping a stick of sacred, smouldering, oh-so natural leaves of First-Nations bliss, would plunge greedily into the bubbly water, seeking netherworlds of sheer exultation to grip, to manipulate, to squeeze and tug with abandon until finally, emitting an ejection, an eruption (if you will) of jubilant gratification, a cascade, a geyser, a blast of liquid force in honour of the grandiose cinematic pulchritude before me.

By a waterfall, bath-time with Guy Maddin is calling yoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

As a matter of fact - pure and simple - I do not even wish to imagine how many more times I shall partake of this scintillatingly sudsy broth that celebrates the incalculable joys of life, shame, regret, sorrow, love, death and cinema, all those things which render our otherwise pathetic existence with meaning. Even one helping of The Forbidden Room can drain a feller (or lassie) more powerfully than several months of Sundays infused with gymnastics of resplendent amore. Yes, a drain in more ways than one:

Lo! This motion picture is most assuredly one drain we all must want to be slurped down, down, down into. Please, dear ones.

Let me try to explain why.

MAESTRO UDO KIER:
DEEPLY OBSESSIVE
WORSHIPPER
of DELICIOUS
DERRIERES

The Forbidden Room opens with an astounding credit sequence which stutters and sputters by like fragments of decaying film on nitrate stock (not unlike that of Peter Delpeut's 1991 found-footage documentary Lyrical Nitrate, unleashed upon North American audiences by Zeitgeist Films, who also gave us Maddin's Archangel and Careful as well as the similarly stylish work of the Brothers Quay). The imaginative way of placing gorgeous period title cards announcing key creative elements is an equally brilliant way to dispense with the ludicrous number of producers and the decidedly non-period acknowledgments to gouvernement du Canada et gouvernement du Manitoba agencies like Telefilm Canada and Manitoba Film and Sound, etc. (At least the National Film Board of Canada makes sense given the significance of Holy Father John Grierson's efforts during that historical period detailed in Pierre Berton's book "Hollywood's Canada".)

Once these are all dispensed with, the film opens proper with the John 6:12 passage:

When they were filled,
he said unto his disciples,
Gather up the fragments that remain,
that nothing be lost.

It's a powerful passage, to be sure, but its resonance, its weighty thematic substance and, in fact, the very Raison d'être for The Forbidden Room is clutched almost parsimoniously by John's recapitulation of Our Lord's words.

Though the film is comprised of several different stories, they represent fragments of cinema from days long-gone-by which, through the ravages of time and the lack of care ascribed to film preservation during the first half-decade-plus of its history saw so many pieces of time go missing without a trace, or indeed, pieces of time that never even existed, but should have. Maddin, not unlike Georges Melies is a magician of sorts. His film conjures up fragments of films lost, stolen or suppressed, brilliantly re-imagined (or rather, just plain imagined) by Maddin and his co-director Evan Johnson and the pair's co-writer Robert Kotyk. They have been gathered up, these fragments, these very ghosts of cinema, "so that nothing shall be lost".

The Forbidden Room is a structural marvel. Kudos to Maddin and team for creating it so solidly from what must have been reams of magnificent footage written, prepped, shot and cut during the over-four-years it took to make this grand epic that honours both cinema and the lives of ghosts. In fact, the movie astonishingly adheres to (an albeit slightly skewed) three-act structure in terms of story and tone. The first third establishes its series of problems and obstacles right off the bat. The middle act slides into a journey in which said obstacles must be encountered and hurtled over or deviated into delicious nap times of dreams and reveries which provide even more obstacles to be hurtled over or deviated into, well, nap time for sure, but in this middle section one will find some of the most heart-achingly beautiful and tear-squirtingly moving emotions and images. And then, there is the third act - more on this later, but suffice to say it's an insanely eye-popping affair.

Tonally, then, the first third is jaunty, fun and occasionally sinister.The middle act is supremely elegiac with dapples of madness, humour and absurdity.

The third act is a hurricane.

Many tales are interwoven throughout and our first story (the writing of which is additionally supplied by John Ashbery) is a garishly coloured industrial documentary featuring a flamboyantly bath-robed Marv (Louis Negin), our host on the journey to the joys inherent in taking a proper bath. Marv recounts the history of bathing, then narrates all the proper steps needed to take a bath. Twixt Marv's peacockish descriptions and asides, we're delighted with images of pretty young ladies (Angela La Muse Senyshyn, Kimmi Melnychuk) bathing each other, then followed by the buff fortitude of a male bather (Graham Ashmore) carefully applying Marv's instructions as he settles into a nice, steamy, frothy tub. The man is especially eager to get to Marv's most important instructions of all:

"Work down to the genitals. Work carefully in ever-widening circles."

The sensual digital manipulations within the steamily sopping froth give way to another tale, another film infused with the serous lifeblood (and yes, danger) of water itself. A submarine carrying dangerous explosives and rapidly depleting oxygen is stuck between a rock and a hard place as the pressures of the sea above will be enough to send the vessel into a massive eruption of its deadly cargo and though the necessary slow journey it undertakes to avoid disaster is the very thing that will guarantee another disaster, the lack of oxygen which could kill every man on board. Luckily, there is some solace taken in the constant serving up of flapjacks, which in spite of their culinary monotony, are found to be full of porous insides which offer added oxygen to extend the men's precious lives.

Roy Dupuis is a dreamy, hunky, handsome woodsman
searching, ever-searching for his lady fair.

When a dreamy, rugged and brave Woodsman (Roy Dupuis) appears in the sub, the narrative becomes even more tied into other films and as the movie progresses, its literary properties seem rooted in a kind of Romantic period use of concentric rings (albeit skewed in ways they never should be).

One story after another, either recounted by characters in one film and represented by another or told as stories within stories or, my favourite, as dreams within dreams, flash by us ever-so compellingly, taking us deeper into a liquid-like miasma, a ripe flatulence of wonder, a churning, roiling sea of volcanic lava - DEEPER, EVER-DEEPER INTO THE VERY CORE OF EXISTENCE AND CINEMA!!!!!

We follow Roy Dupuis's Woodsman into a cave of scarlet-furred-lupine-worshipping barbarians who have kidnapped his lady love. We see his infiltration into this den of murderers, kidnappers and thieves as he successfully proves his worth during several challenges including:

- finger snapping;
- stone weighing;
- offal piling and, my personal favourite;

- BLADDER SLAPPING!!!!!

GERALDINE CHAPLIN
THE MASTER PASSION
Le Dominatrix
des adorateurs derriere

When we meet the Woodsman's lady love, the film takes us into her mad dreamworld wherein she acquires amnesia and we're assailed with glorious images of native dancers, sexy crooners, and a delicious pitstop involving a sexy anal dominatrix, The Master Passion (Geraldine Chaplin) and then, an even more delectable pitstop involving a madman (Udo "Who the fuck else?" Kier) obsessed with bottoms who is then worked upon by an equally mad doctor who performs open brain surgery to slice out viscous portions of cerebellum afflicted with buttock obsession and climaxing with the ultimate fist-fucking as the doctor plunges his whole hand into the buttock-like brain of Udo Kier to attack the deep core, or prostate, if you will of the man's anal intrusions upon his very mind, his very soul.

There's the tale of a kindly bone specialist who operates upon a sexy motorcyclist who has 47 broken bones after a horrific accident in which she swerves to avoid a family of ducks in her path. Of course, the doctor must take special care to lay his hands upon her prodigiously in order to heal her broken breast bones and, in so doing, falls madly in love with her before being seduced and kidnapped by a bevy of sexy skeleton women who are under the control of a skull-headed medical insurance fraudster.

In DreamLand, Crooners Croon of Derriere Worship.

One yarn after another assails us and as they emit their fantastical glories, constantly astounding us as to how they dovetail in and out of each other - a tale of a mill keeper and his gardener, a tale of a train psychiatrist and his screaming patient and seductive ways, a tale of volcano worshippers always on the lookout for living sacrifices, a tale of a forgetful husband (Mathiu Almaric, that great French actor whom one can watch for an eternity) who ends up murdering his loyal manservant (Udo Kier - AGAIN!!!) to cover-up his gift-giving incompetence, a tale of the manservant in death as his moustache hairs dream about taking him for a final visit (or several) to his little boy and blind wife (Maria de Medeiros), a tale of a consular official and his gorgeous fiancé (Sophie Desmarais) and the man's obsession with a cursed bust of Janus which turns him into an evil Mr. Hyde-like defiler-of-women and the tale of . . .

Have I mentioned the vampires yet?

Oops. Sorry. My bad!

They're called ASWANG (pronounced ASS-WANG).

You will not want to take a bath with any of them - except maybe the ultra-sexy Aswangs.

Will the submarine blow up? Will the woodsman be reunited with his lady love? Will she be cured of her amnesia?

Will we be able to count how many times Louis Negin appears, Franklin Pangborn-like, in different roles?

Will we be able to count how many times Udo Kier appears, Eric Blore-like, in different roles?

Will we ever meet the mysteriously missing Captain of the submarine?

Will we meet his MOTHER!!!!!

Will we survive the mad, fever pitch of a climax, that flings us into the most mind-blowing trip of visual splendour since Stanley Kubrick's stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (replete with . . . colliding zeppelins)?

What HAVE I missed?

Have I missed mentioning that the editing of John Gurdebeke and the production design of Galen Johnson are both as inspired and brilliant as Guy Maddin's most-assured hand? Have I missed mentioning that the exquisite lighting and camera work from cinematographers Stephanie Anne Weber Biron and Ben Kasulke provides the eyes to reflect Maddin's soul? Have I missed mentioning how astonishing the work that all of Mr. Maddin's creative collaborators proves to be in this, his greatest achievement?

I hope not.

I, for one, will take yet another bath with Guy Maddin.

We've taken so many together over the past 30+ years.

What's one (or a few) more.

The Film Corner Rating: ***** 5-Stars

The Forbidden Room is enjoying it's Canadian Premiere in the TIFF Wavelengths Program during TIFF 2015. For tix, dates, times and venues, visit the TIFF website HERE. The film is being distributed in Canada and sold internationally by Mongrel Media. In the USA, it's distributed by Kino-Lorber.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Oh, and for fuck's sake, lest someone point a boneheaded accusatory finger, I present to you the full disclosure that Maddin's late father Chas was business manager of the Winnipeg Maroons, and my own father Julian, who will, by virtue of his stubborn, curmudgeonly qualities, live-forever, played goal for the same team. Both fathers accompanied the team to various European bouts as the Maroons were, indeed, Canada's national hockey team during the early-to-mid-sixties. Maddin and I have been friends for over thirty years, we were flat-mates for many years, we have shared many strange adventures together and I produced his first three feature films (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful). I am, however, a true fan of his films. Always have been. I'm perfectly able to assess his work critically and the day I ever hate one of his films (which I have, in fact), I'll goddamn well say so (which I have, in fact, and done so with constructive viciousness).

BANG BANG BABY, THE AMINA PROFILE, VENDETTA - Reviews By Greg Klymkiw - Canucks make cool movies y'all can see this week and I be tellin' you why y'all should see them

3 Canucks Make Cool Movies 2 C now!

BANG BANG BABY

Bang Bang Baby
Dir. Jeffrey St. Jules
Starring: Jane Levy, Justin Chatwin, Peter Stormare, David Reale

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Bang Bang Baby is easily one of the strangest movie musical romantic comedies ever made. Of course, it's Canadian. No surprise here, given that le pays de castor, l'orignal et le sirop d'érable, has already generated filmmakers like John Paizs, Guy Maddin and David Cronenberg.

Set in some perversely accurate 50s-60s studio musical version of rural Canada (basically, anywhere above the 49th that isn't Toronto), this is one lively, imaginatively-directed bonbon of a picture, if you, that is, think of yummy candies as multi-coloured Haribo gummies meeting Monty Python's "Whizzo Quality Assortment" featuring delectable sweet-meat comestibles described by company owner and everyone's favourite sweetie purveyor Mr. Milton (looking not surprisingly like Terry Jones) as "Spring Surprise", in which steel bolts spring out from the chocky to "plunge straight through both cheeks" or "Crunchy Frog, the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope" and, lest we forget the chocky featuring "fresh Cornish Ram's bladder" that's been "emptied, steamed, flavoured with sesame seeds whipped into a fondue and garnished with lark's vomit.

Yes, the bonbon is that tasty.

Indeed Bang Bang Baby, in the parlance of "high concept" (Canuck-style, 'natch), is a kind of cross twixt Mario Lanza-Elvis Preseley-Gidget-Tammy-with-dashes-of-David Byrne's True Stories with a few generous dollops of Orgy of the Blood Parasites (an early title of Cronenberg's Shivers).

Lonely Arms, a magical, mythical town in a Canada we no longer know (but desperately want to) is the sleepy-time Canuck home of high-school senior and car mechanic Steffy (the drop-dead gorgeous Canuckian Kitten-with-a-whip, Jane Levy), who lives with her bitter, alcoholic former musician Dad (Peter Stormare, the man who shoved Steve Buscemi into a wood chipper in Fargo).

Steffy has the voice of an angel (as does actress Levy) and her dream is to enter an American "Ingenue of the Year" Contest. When she's selected as a finalist, Dad fears her virtue will be at stake and he unfairly (but well-meaningly) scuttles her shot at stardom. Our gal resigns herself to a life of provincial Canadian mediocrity, pumping gas for her tender-loving-lying-in-puddles-of-his-own-vomit Dad, grudgingly heading off to a school dance and drunkenly going against her otherwise good judgement and eventually accompanying a creepy rich boy (David Reale, proving again why he's one of Canada's best and funniest character actors) for a late-night drive to his family's forbidding factory on the outskirts of town. A mysterious purple-fogged chemical leak leaves poor Steffy alone on a dark country road.

Out of the mist, appears, the Elvis-like American superstar Bobby Shore (Justin Chatwin) whose car has broken down after missing a turn to Omaha and ending up in Canada. (Our American neighbours are not always too bright.) Not only is she the lad's biggest fan, but she can fix his car.

Once she starts belting out her show-stopping tunes, it doesn't take Bobby too long to realize that she's quite the catch. Crooning and dancing against a plethora of gorgeously fake old-movie-studio-style backdrops, our made-for-each-other couple look like they're going to find happiness and live happily ever after.

However, I hope you haven't forgotten the aforementioned chemical leak from the factory. If you think this movie is weird, I can assure you, in the words of Al Jolson, "You ain't seen nothing yet!"

Without spoiling the rest of the picture for you, I will only say this: icky parasites begin to grown within the bodies of the citizenry of Lonely Arms.

And they are mutating.

Oops, mutants on the way.

Bang Bang Baby won last year's Best Canadian First Feature Film Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2014). Clearly the Awards Jury were swept away by director St. Jules's cornucopia of imagination. And yes, said mad vision runs gloriously rampant through the picture.

Still, its period and post-modern details only partially work. Many of the film's oddball touches are stunning, but an equal number of them feel forced and even occasionally anachronistic in many of the wrong ways. The usually reliable Stormare feels like he's sleepwalking through his role (looking aimlessly for the punch-clock and pay cheque) and though Chatwin makes for a decent romantic lead, I was a bit thrown off by his look, especially the Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein-like hairdo.

The film's inherent silliness is always a treat, though, and wisely, St. Jules never plunges into the kind of over-the-top that might have been swathed in globs of horrendous whimsy. Besides, leading lady Levy delivers a knock 'em dead performance and the genuinely great song-score has the kind of hum-ability to annoy you in all the right ways - as in, you can't get the bloody tunes out of your noggin, especially the title number.

Oh, and there are mutants. As a Canadian, I accept this.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars

Bang Bang Baby is a Search Engine Films release that plays from August 21 at Toronto's Varsity, Vancouver's Fifth Avenue and Montreal's Forum, with expanded release in other Canadian cities to follow.

*NOTE* In an earlier version of this article, I reported how shocked I was that Bang Bang Baby won the Best Canadian Feature Film prize over Albert Shin's In Her Place. This was a huge error as BBB was the recipient of the Best First Feature Film Prize, which makes total sense. (Shin's film is not a first feature.) I had successfully managed to repress all knowledge of the ever-so-slight Felix and Meira which did win the overall best feature prize. Pardon the brain fart, but I do tend to shuttle some films deep into a dark closet - not because they're bad, but because they're so egregiously unmemorable.

THE AMINA PROFILE

The Amina Profile (2015)
Dir. Sophie Deraspe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Set against the turbulent backdrop of war-and-revolution in contemporary Syria we meet Sandra Bagaria, one hot French-Canadian babe in Montreal and Amina Arraf, one hot Syrian-American babe in Damascus. They meet online. They're young. They're in love. They're lesbians. Okay. That's it. Go see the movie.

READ THE FULL REVIEW of The Amina Profile from Hot Docs 2015 HERE

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

The Amina Profile is a Les Films du 3 mars presentation opening theatrically August 21, 2015 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. For dates, times and fix, visit the cinema's website HERE

VENDETTA

Vendetta (2015)
Dir. Jen and Sylvia Soska
Scr. Justin Shady
Starring: Dean Cain, Paul "The Big Show" Wight, Michael Eklund, Kyra Zagorsky

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Let's get to the meat of the matter in this kick-ass prison picture by everyone's favourite Beautiful and Talented Hungarian-Canadian twins in Beautiful British Columbia - the action and violence. The Soska Sisters (American Mary) do not disappoint in this regard. Their direction goes far beyond just covering the thwacks, whacks, kicks, testicle-twisting and gore in a perfunctory manner, nor do they resort to the usual wham-bam with no sense of spatiality. I was delighted that they placed a fair degree of faith in actors who could clearly fight, some superb stunt choreography/coordination and a few occasional frissons like the makeshift "brass" knuckles Danvers creates and uses with sweet abandon.

As a side note, it is incumbent of me to point out that the one prison movie cliche sadly missing from Vendetta are a few instances of forcible sodomy and blow jobs. Most disappointing. What gives? Even a dull, inexplicably beloved piece of crap like The Shawshank Redemption had a decent anal rape scene.

But, I digress.

READ THE FULL REVIEW of Vendetta HERE

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½

Vendetta is now available on BLU-RAY via Lions Gate.

CRIME WAVE - TIFF 2014 - TIFF CINEMATHEQUE 2K RESTORATION - Review By Greg Klymkiw

PREAMBLE:
THE BITCH-GODDESS "SUCCESS" ELUDES ONE OF THE GREATEST, MOST INFLUENTIAL CULT FILMS OF THE 80s.
THOSE WHO "KNOW", KNOW. THOSE WHO DON'T, WILL.

By Greg Klymkiw

CRIME WAVE is the best cult film you've never seen.

Before you read my review, it might be interesting for you to peruse the following history as to why you might have never seen this masterpiece.

After its triumphant 1985 world premiere at TIFF, a Canadian film distribution company called Norstar Releasing signed the film for world wide sales. The deal came with a $100,000 guarantee which would be payable no later than 18 months after the first date of the film's theatrical release. This was just the impetus director John Paizs needed to redress something that was nagging at him. In spite of the accolades, he didn't like the ending and knowing $100K would eventually be paid, he rewrote, reshot and recut the entire final 20 minutes and fashioned the film into what we all know and love today.

Months, then years, passed by. Norstar Releasing was making money on the film in the home video market via a poorly transferred, retitled VHS American version, as well as substantial pay-TV and free-TV broadcast sales. NO theatrical release was forthcoming. As it turned out, there was no specific clause in the contract which guaranteed ANY theatrical release.

The result?

There was NO LEGAL NEED for Norstar Releasing to pay the $100K to Paizs until a theatrical release would trigger the said payment.

This, in spite of the fact that the company lured the filmmaker with verbal promises of a 400-screen theatrical release, as noted in this archival news clip (the tape quality is a bit grotty, but you'll get the idea) from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

In my then-capacity as Director of Distribution and Marketing for the Winnipeg Film Group, I poured over the deal made long before my tenure there began. I engaged in the aggressive move to visit the Norstar offices in Toronto and examine their books. Sadly, all was on the up and up - save for the scumbag deal its filmmaker signed in good faith. Even if it hadn't, neither Paizs nor the non-profit arts group The Winnipeg Film Group were well-heeled enough to mount expensive forensic audits and/or legal challenges against a company as huge and powerful as Norstar Releasing was at the time.

In the early years of home video,  this was still long before the days of VOD, digital downloads and many of the current platforms industry and audiences are aware of today. As such, if you signed a distribution deal, you automatically assumed there would be a theatrical release. At this point, I aggressively lobbied an independent movie theatre in Winnipeg, where the film was made, to secure a theatrical playdate. Even then, Norstar tried to dissuade the movie theatre from showing the film, but luckily, perseverance won the day and the film was slated for release - in ONE THEATRE.

18 months passed. The trigger to pay had come and gone. Though the money was due, Norstar was still not coughing up. I called the Toronto office of Telefilm Canada, the Federal Government's film financing agency which, at the time had a distribution program that actually funded Canadian distributors to offer guarantees to Canadian films. The head of distribution at Telefilm at the time was Ted East, a film distributor and producer who provided a very sympathetic ear when I explained how a Canadian company fucked over John Paizs. Mr. East poured over his agency's policy and discovered he could put money into Norstar's pocket to pay the filmmaker who was deeply in debt for a film that many loved, but that many more had not seen.

The money was finally paid. The debts were erased.

Still, the film languished. Norstar eventually sold all its titles to Alliance Films. When Alliance Films became Alliance-Atlantis, the library simply moved over. When the "Atlantis" portion went the way of the dodo, Alliance Releasing continued to maintain the library.

At one point in the 90s, Fantomas, a very tiny boutique indie home video company in the United States, known for its small, but very cool catalogue of cult items, contacted Paizs directly They wanted to release a super-deluxe DVD version of Crime Wave. They were even offering a decent advance. When Paizs contacted Alliance, he was given the run-around.

The company fucked the dog on the generous Fantomas offer until eventually, they rejected it. Alliance, it seems, was planning to dump huge swaths of its catalogue into a package deal with some dubious entity in the United States. Sadly, the Fantomas deal was not the only offer made to handle Crime Wave over the years to both Norstar and Alliance.

All offers were rejected by the indifferent Canadian conglomerate.

Eventually, Alliance was swallowed up by eOne Entertainment. which is where Crime Wave currently languishes. Thankfully, Steve Gravestock from the Toronto International Film Festival was able to provide funding for an all-new 2K digital restoration of Crime Wave and it is now being premiered at TIFF 2014 in conjunction with the launch of Jonathan Ball's new scholarly book about the film.

This is great news! Still, something was nagging at me. Given the film's reputation, would it still be sitting in the vaults? I sent a note to President of E1 Films Canada, Bryan Gliserman, and asked the following questions:

1. As your company inherited the rights to this film, what are e-One's plans to redress the wrongs perpetrated upon this masterpiece of Canadian Cinema by the previous companies holding the rights?

2. What are your feelings about the recent TIFF-initiated-and-funded 2K restoration?

3. Will there be a proper theatrical platform re-release in Canada?

4. Are there any discussions about a deluxe, extras-packed commemorative Blu-Ray?

He has yet to respond. He's a busy man.

Here's the bottom line:

Companies all over the world have tried to cut a deal with the right-holders prior to eOne, but continually hit brick walls as those Canadian conglomerates sat on it. The irony is that the Canadian taxpayers, via the aforementioned kind and magnanimous gesture on the part of Ted East when he was an official with Telefilm Canada, contributed a whack of dough to pay the filmmaker a guarantee that the original company tried to screw Paizs out of. If this hadn't have happened, Paizs would still be on the hook for finishing funds rightly owed to him.

Bryan Gliserman is a mensch.

I doubt, HE, as the president of a company as powerful as e-One, and the Canadian branch, no less, would ever think about screwing over a masterpiece of Canadian Cinema. He's one of the true pioneers of distribution in Canada and it might be the best thing in the world for this picture that it's found a home with someone like him. He's the real thing. I personally never put faith in any government or corporate entity, but from time to time, INDIVIDUALS within them step up to the plate - like Ted East when he was at Telefilm, programmer/critic Geoff Pevere when he first supported Paizs in the early years of TIFF and Steve Gravestock in TIFF's current era - there have always been human beings who all had faith in this film.

So too, I believe, will Bryan Gliserman. I have faith that he'll do something about the woeful state of affairs that's beleaguered this film for three decades. Crime Wave, with a mensch like Gliserman manning the control panel, will no doubt soar to the heights it deserves.

In the meantime, feel free to read my review. I've never written about Crime Wave before and frankly, I doubt anyone will be able to top Geoff Pevere's brilliant piece (pictured above) that he originally wrote many years ago in Cinema Canada, but for what it's worth, here's my take.

HARK!
Your script doctor wishes to SODOMIZE and MURDER you
and in so doing, he will teach you
the real MEANING of the word,
"TWISTS!"

Crime Wave (1985)
Dir. John Paizs
Starring: Eva Kovacs, John Paizs, Neil Lawrie, Darrell Baran, Jeffrey Owen Madden, Tea Andrea Tanner, Bob Cloutier, Donna Fullingham, Mitch Funk, Angela Heck, Mark Yuill, C. Roscoe Handford

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In 1985, Jay Scott, the late, great Toronto Globe and Mail film critic, renowned and beloved the world over, wrote in his review of Crime Wave after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (then called the Festival of Festivals):

"...if the great Canadian comedy ever gets made, John Paizs might be the one to make it.”

We're one year shy of thirty years later and nobody has yet made the "great Canadian comedy", though writer-director-star John Paizs gave it a damn fine run for the money with his drawer-filling, knee-slapping, near-heart-attack-inducing, Campbell Scott-starring 1999 satire of 1950s science fiction Top of the Food Chain (aka Invasion!, languishing for a time in the Lions' Gate DVD catalogue).

Scott never did review Paizs's 1986 version of Crime Wave. Still, taking mild criticism in Scott's review to heart, Paizs completely rewrote, reshot and recut the entire last half hour of the film. If Jay Scott had been given the chance to review this version, if the film had actually been released, I suspect Scott's line would have been: "John Paizs has made the great Canadian comedy!"

There's no doubt about it.

Some Quiet Men are Nice!
Others are INSANE!

You know, I can't begin to count the number of times I've seen Crime Wave. Has it been 40, 50, 60 times? Have I seen it 100 times?

Even more, perhaps?

Whatever the final tally actually is, and it is way up there, the fact remains that each and every time I see the film, I'm not only howling with laughter as hard as I did when I first saw it, but absolutely floored by how astoundingly brilliant and original it is.

This is a movie that has not dated and will probably never date.

It's a film that has inspired filmmakers all over the world and not only is it the crown jewel in the "prairie post-modernist" crown - coined and bestowed upon it by film critic Geoff Pevere - but it's a film that paved the way for Guy Maddin, Bruce McDonald, Reg Harkema, Lynne Stopkewich, Don McKellar, Astron-6 and virtually any other Canadian filmmaker who went on to blow the world away with their unique, indigenous cinematic visions of a world that could only have been borne upon celluloid from a country as insanely staid and repressed as Canada.

I'll go further and suggest even this: I think it was more than mere "zeitgeist" which bore the fruit that was/is David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Now, not to take anything away from Lynch's mad classic of the dark side lingering under the surface of a sun-dappled small-town America, BUT, if one does a tiny bit of simple math on the following, there's no question Paizs influenced David Lynch:

1. In the mid-80s, a wonderful, but now (sadly) defunct film festival in Edmonton, Alberta screened the "new" re-edited version of Crime Wave in addition to Paizs' unique shorts. This was a festival devoted to indigenous, independent (or indie-flavoured) films which told stories about far-flung places which were as much a character in the films as their human counterparts.

The name of the festival was "Local Heroes", named after the 1983 Bill Forsyth classic Local Hero with Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert. That film embodied everything the festival was about. Most importantly, a special guest of the festival was also in the audience for Paizs's shorts and Crime Wave. The guest was none other than the producer of Local Hero, David Puttnam.

2. From 1986 to 1988, David Puttnam was the CEO of Columbia Pictures. His term was short-lived. In spite of the fact that he was hired to bring his magic touch to the studio, they really weren't keen on what he wanted and did indeed green-light. He had requested and was armed with a clutch of John Paizs' short films and Crime Wave on VHS.

3. With the Paizs films floating about the studio, Puttnam green-lit a now obscure feature at Columbia called Zelly and Me. The star was Isabella Rossellini, the eventual female lead of Blue Velvet. Acting in a supporting role was none other than David Lynch himself who was also a mentor to the film's director Tina Rathbone (she eventually directed episodes of Twin Peaks).

4. In the fall of 1988, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, a film which shares a tone, colour scheme, thematic similarities and shots which are slight variations of those appearing in Paizs' films.

Here's yet another time-worn archival CBC video which delivers even more clips from all of Paizs's sun-dappled darkness:



Zeitgeist, indeed.

Borrowing from all his favourite childhood films - sleazy, garish crime pictures, technicolor science fiction and horror epics, weird-ass training/educational films, Roger Corman, Terence Fisher, Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar Brothers, Elia Kazan, Orson Welles, Walt Disney, Frank Tashlin, film noir, Douglas Sirk, John Ford (!!!) and yes, even National Film Board of Canada documentaries - John Paizs made one of the most sought after, coveted and beloved cult movies of the past thirty years.

Taking on the lead role of Steven Penny, Paizs created a character who is hell-bent upon writing the greatest "colour crime movie" of all time. He boards in the attic above a garage owned by a family of psychotically normal Winnipeg suburbanites whose little girl Kim (Eva Kovacs) befriends the reclusive young man.

He has the worst writer's block of all - he can write great beginnings, great endings, but NO middles.

Every morning, she rifles through the garbage where Penny has disposed of his writings and as she reads them, we get to see the gloriously lurid snippets of celluloid from the fevered brain of this young writer. These sequences are scored with gusto, dappled with colours bordering on the fluorescent and narrated with searing Walter Winchell-like stabs of verbal blade thrusts. Via Kim's gentle, non-colour-crime-movie narration, Steven is innocently described by her like all those serial killers who people say after their capture, "Gee whiz, he was a really nice guy."

Indeed, Steven Penny inhabits Kim's words like a glove:

THE TOP!!!!
FEW MEN REACH IT!!!
WILL YOU?

"He was a Quiet Man."

As the film progresses, we see more and more of the film Steven is trying to write, but his creative blockages become dire. He even locks himself up for weeks, his room becoming so foul and fetid that rats are even scurrying upon his immobile depression-infused carcass. Kim must take the bull by the horns and indeed finds salvation in the back of a magazine ad in "Colour Crime Quarterly". It seems that one Dr. Jolly (Neil Lawrie), a script doctor, exists in Sails, Kansas.

He, Kim insists, is what Steven needs. Dr. Jolly himself provides comfort to burgeoning young screenwriters that what they really need are the one important thing he can provide:

TWISTS!!!

Unbeknownst to anyone, Dr. Jolly is a serial killer who lures young screenwriters into his den of depravity to sodomize and murder them. Dr. Jolly's goal is to truly show young men the meaning of the word:

TWISTS!!!

As a filmmaker, Paizs leads us on an even more insane journey than we've been on and the final twenty minutes of the film delivers one of the most brilliant, hallucinogenic and piss-your-pants funny extended montages you'll ever experience. John Paizs then teaches us the meaning of the word:

TWISTS!!!

Twists indeed, You'll see nothing like them in any film. Crime Wave is one of the most dazzlingly original films ever made. If you haven't seen it, you must. If you have seen it, see the picture again.

And again, and again and yet, again.

That's why they call them cult films.

THE FILM CORNER RATING:

***** 5-Stars

Crime Wave, not to be confused with the Coen Brothers/Sam Raimi debacle with the same title from the same year has been lovingly restored in a 2K digital transfer courtesy of Steve Gravestock and the Toronto International Film Festival. You can see it at Tiff 2014, For tickets, date and time, visit the TIFF website by clicking HERE.

A Few Added Notes On CRIME WAVE:
If you are desperate to see it AND want to own what will be a COLLECTOR'S ITEM, feel free to order the VHS tape still available at AMAZON. This is the "new version" of Paizs's film with the title changed to THE BIG CRIMEWAVE. It's a standard one-light transfer to VHS from the original One-Inch tape that was originally broadcast on CBC-TV and TMN way back in the early 90s. If you click this link directly and order it, you'll ALSO be assisting with the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner:

In USA and the rest of the WORLD - BUY The Big Crimewave (aka CRIME WAVE) on VHS - HERE!

Hopefully, if a proper home entertainment deluxe Blu-Ray is ever made, the "original" 1985 Crime Wave will be included on it. I love that version for very different reasons. It's perverse, extremely DARK and most delightfully of all, it features backwoods inbreds bearing the names "Ol' Mum" and "Ethan".

The original version also has a much better shot of the young, hogtied screenwriter in Dr. Jolly's motel room. The scene is meant to be a taste of what's in store for Steven Penny when he meets up with the sodomy-loving script doctor. The actor in the original version, Jon Coutts, one of Paizs's best friends and part of the production team, has such a beautiful, pert ass and baby-flesh skin that many people thought Jolly had a very young, teenage boy hogtied and ready for Hershey-pronging.

Mostly, it was the idiot distributor Norstar (that screwed Paizs over in the first place) that objected the most strenuously to this. The "new" version, alas, replaces the sweet, silky, lithe young NAKED body of Mr. Coutts with only his bare back and a pair of jeans.

I know what I preferred. You? (And if you ever see Paizs' personal 16mm archival print of the film, you WILL see the pert ass cheeks.)

Finally, SHAME on the TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL for not doing a major profile in conjunction with this special TIFF initiative. If only to honour the late Jay Scott, this could have been an amazing opportunity for it to provide the kind of content any important newspaper of record would be pleased to report on.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I produced John Paizs's early short films. I also appear in Crime Wave as a Dog Breeder with the great line of dialogue: "I come a hundred miles to breed this here bitch!" as I mistakenly point to my wife instead of the dog. Enjoy!

DOG BREEDERS:
C. Roscoe Handford
& Greg Klymkiw

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's January 2014 New Music Festival, in collaboration with Spur and the Winnipeg Film Group Cinematheque presented a major series of new musical works and a film retrospective entitled "Forgotten Winnipeg". The 70s and 80s NYC film scene experienced by Jim Jarmusch (presenting his new opera-in-progress on Nikola Tesla in the aforementioned series) is captured beautifully in the documentary Blank City and resembles the very cool explosion in indie underground cinema that I and many colleagues and friends were involved with as it spawned around the same time during those halcyon days in Winnipeg. This period, coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as Prairie Post-Modernism included the works of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Greg Hanec and many others.

Greg Hanec's extraordinary Downtime which has the distinction of being a parallel cinematic universe to Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise is a case in point. Both films were made at the same time in two completely different cities and scenes and both Hanec and Jarmusch premiered their films at the same time at the Berlin Film Festival. One's famous, the other isn't - but now that the "lost" and "found" Downtime has been remastered from original elements to DVD, it can now be purchased directly online.

Order DOWNTIME directly
from the film's new website
by clicking HERE

Perhaps the greatest Canadian independent underground filmmaker of all-time is Winnipeg's John Paizs. It's virtually impossible to secure copies of his astounding work which, frankly, is responsible for influencing the work of Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Bruce McDonald and an endless number of great indie filmmakers the world over. Paizs' great short film Springtime in Greenland is available for purchase in a beautiful remastered edition from a fan website, the inimitable Frank Norman. Norman has Paizs' blessing to provide copies of the film, so feel free to directly make your request to Mr. Norman by clicking HERE.

Visit Frank Norman's CRIME WAVE fan site by clicking HERE

Crime Wave

by John Paizs

& The Editor

by AdamBrooks 

and MatthewKennedy

is the IDEAL

Toronto International

Film Festival (TIFF 2014)

Double Bill.

Too bad nobody thought

of scheduling them

back-to-back

in the same venue.

No matter.

See Crime Wave on

Friday, Sept. 12 @ 9pm

in TIFF Bell Lightbox #4,

then see The Editor

on Saturday, Sept. 13

@ 6:15pm in Scotiabank #4

and PRETEND

you watched them

back to back.

Read my review of

Crime Wave HERE

and my review of

The Editor HERE

and go see BOTH

great films from God,

the Father of Prairie

Post-Modernism

and His only

begotten Sons.

ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Original low-budget Horror-Fantasy Cult Film a real trip.

There are things that happen in WALT DISNEY WORLD
that you don't want to know about, but you MUST!

At WALT DISNEY WORLD,
eating Emu Masquerading as Turkey
offers unexpected opportunities.

Escape From Tomorrow (2013) ****
Dir. Randy Moore
Starring: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Jack Dalton,
Alison Lees-Taylor, Stass Klassen,
Danielle Safady, Annet Mahendru

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Much as I am wont to complain about contemporary movies, I still tend to see a fair number of good and even great pictures. A more rare event is discovering work that's unlike anything I've ever seen, or at the very least is imbued with such originality that I can safely remove my Mr. Grumpy Hat in homage to a picture that restores my faith in cinema.

Randy Moore's debut feature Escape From Tomorrow did just that. Made for well under a million smackers, this is a movie that shocked, awed, tantalized, disturbed and delighted me to no end.

I recently caught up with it on DVD, this being about a year and a half after its world premiere at Sundance. Knowing only about the movie's festival pedigree and that it had something to do with Walt Disney I was afforded my preferred semi-virginal mode of seeing movies. This is just the sort of unfurling that joyously allowed me a most revelatory experience of discovery.

As an extraordinarily creepy and absurdly funny head trip, shot secretly on location at both Disney Parks, it did indeed hold its own with any number of my favourite cult films like El Topo, Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead, Liquid Sky, Mixed Blood, Pi, Primer, God Bless America and American Mary. Indeed the picture certainly works on a purely experiential level. One can just sit back and let it all happen, with or without hallucinogenic stimulants.

On a deeper level, this avant-garde nightmare vision of a trip to Walt Disney World gone seriously wrong is a fascinating and disquieting exploration of the new America, providing a slice of the external and internal life of a consumerism-happy upper middle class family on the brink of crisis and ultimately, plunging free-fall into the chasm of loss and deep despair.

On yet another level altogether, the movie delivers a wrenching portrait of Jim White (Roy Abramsohn) a late-thirty-early-forty-something corporate executive's spiritual death during the last day of a vacation in the famed resort with his wife (Elena Schuber) and kids (Jack Dalton, Alison Lees-Taylor) after getting the unexpected news that he's been fired. Needless to say, this is a shocker and he keeps the news to himself as he and his dependents sally forth into the maw of the wonderful world of Disney.

We already know something is amiss as the family boards the above-ground rail transport from their resort hotel to the park when Jim notices a pair of gorgeous frolicking teenage girls from Paris (Danielle Safady, Annet Mahendru). His gaze is clearly inappropriate and he still has enough of his marbles to try and keep his attraction to the Gallic missies all to his lonesome.

Once at the park, though, the jabbering nubile lassies appear to be everywhere.

After Jim and his family enjoy a few activities together, it's decided to split up for awhile in order to make the most of this final day of the Disney experience. Mother and Daughter go off on their own while Father and Son are left to their own devices - namely, a ludicrously long wait at the Buzz Lightyear ride. Time halts as they move an inch or two towards the seemingly unreachable ride and during this hour, the ladies go on ride after ride while Father and Son eventually get to the head of the line only to be told that Buzz Lightyear is being shut down for the day due to maintenance issues.

Eventually Mom and Dad hook up to switch their spawn for more fun. Though, Jim's experience with his son has proven to be mostly frustrating, it was indeed dappled with more than a few mild forays into surrealism. Now that he's with his daughter, though, his point of view becomes more skewed than ever. The movie begins spiralling into sheer insanity as he encounters a weird, horny single mother (Alison Lees-Taylor) who begins her seduction by noting that the turkey leg he's gobbling is actually an emu leg. Later on, Jim may or may not have had sex with the woman while his daughter and Horny Mama's child sleep in another room. He also discovers that a prostitution ring exists on the premises involving Disney Princess Hostesses servicing Japanese businessmen. Most terrifyingly, Jim's hallucinations result in losing sight of his daughter.

The day seems to never end and if any of this sounds vaguely perverse, you ain't, in the immortal words of BTO, seen nothin' yet. You see, you, along with our protagonist will have not yet met with the mysterious Scientist de la Disney (Stass Klassen) who performs rather unpleasant experiments upon Jim within the Epcot Centre, nor will you experience the horrendous, yet equally magical transformation of the Horny Mama into the wicked witch sharing a poison apple with Daddy dearest's little girl and certainly, amongst an infinitesimal array of surreal twists and turns within a Floridian Disney park merging seamlessly with the Californian park you'll you'll have not been barraged with the truly terrifying rides aplenty, especially the malevolent (YES! MALEVOLENT!) "It's a Small World" ride merging with positively demonic transmogrifications of all that is seemingly good and lest we forget, those damned pesky Tinkerbell-like teenage sexpots from Gay Par-ee.

And then, under a night sky emblazoned by the most staggering display of fireworks, there will be the literally gut-wrenching effects of a feline flu raging throughout Disney's wonderful world, though more likely in Jim's Disney-fied diseased mind, driving Dad to the Holy Disney shrine to privacy, the all-devouring Throne of Uncle Walt, a Holy Disney Porcelain Receptacle waiting for all manner of vile, putrid expulsions of faecal poison and viscous globs needing to be expunged with undue levels of pain and hardship.

And, of course, there are those goddamned hairballs.

Indeed, I defy you to recall a motion picture in recent memory of such swirling audacity and wading neck-deep amidst the outright horror of a world crushed under the weight of that benevolent moustachioed gentleman who grew up on a farm in Marceline, Missouri which sprouted the mind and imagination which eventually captured the fancy and drained the pocketbooks of the whole world, the one, the only, Walter Elias Disney.

Escape from Tomorrow is not unlike gazing directly into the ghastly monochromatic truths revealed by the atrociously repellent, yet interminably revelatory mirror, mirror. You know, the mirror, mirror on the wall.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Escape from Tomorrow is a FilmsWeLike release and available on Blu-Ray and DVD via Amazon and at all fine video retailers. Feel free to purchase the film directly from the links below and thus contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.