Cult status is a double-edged sword. One could argue that unlike critical/audience acclaim, cult status is conferred rather than earned. This would be making some pretty big assumptions about the way art lives in culture, but I think it’s safe to posit that the connection between a film and its cult status is a bit looser than a film and its place on top-N lists.
I still remember the cover of Maniac Cop (1988) taunting me at the video store of my childhood, with its stalking silhouette of errant law-enforcement menace and 18+ rating. The concept is genius in its simplicity — a figure afforded all the powers of policing then using those powers to kill. How would his victims deal with a killer who masquerades as a force for justice? How could they escape someone who could marshal the assistance of the police force? Imagine if that happened IRL!
Once the seed was planted, years of imagination allowed it to grow before I finally got around to seeing the film as an adult. The reality of Maniac Cop had no chance of living up to the maniacal cop that stalked my long ago bedtime thoughts.
It didn’t help that the film is basically Halloween but Jason is a cop. Aside from maybe one scene where the victim assumes the cop is there to help, the central concept is largely inconsequential.
But even if Maniac Cop had taken full advantage of its core idea, could it still escape from the eclipse of its cult status? Or, what is more likely, from the idea of the film — one which exists in minds of the audience, unrelated to what they have/haven’t seen onscreen?
(Hey, Nicholas Winding Refn is reportedly directing a remake, so there’s still an opportunity.)
All the images of Ms .45 (#10) I’d seen showed Zoë Lund brandishing her pistol while dressed as a nun. Therefore my imagined version of the film had her haunting NYC alleyways as a kind of perverted figure of penance, while headlines of The New York Post would scream about the killer nun on the loose.
The film instead only arrives at the image of religious ravaging in its final sequence (which, it must be said, rivals Carrie (1976) for its clock-stopping rapture).
This is probably to the film’s credit, because it provides what the screenwriting books call character arc. However, part of me wanted to see a film that achieved that fever pitch — that it could focus on a young woman dressed as a sexy nun, toting a high-calibre pistol, committing mass murder on the mean streets as a kind of silhouetted symbol. Like Batman, but not as lame.
The films I’m watching this week…
The Addiction
(Abel Ferrara, 1995)
The next in the line for Ferrara’s films, for fans of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), it’s Lily Taylor as a NYU philosophy student turned vampire!
Lily Taylor always seems to get roles where she’s being exploited and crushed. My enduring image of her is in Ransom (1996), fallen with her leg awkwardly snapped backward — Gary Sinise leaving her with only a oh that’s nasty look. I hope we can see her get her own back.
C’était un rendez-vous
(Claude Lelouch, 1976, short)
Favourite car chase? The purists might say Bullitt (1968) or The French Connection (1971). The modernists, Ronin (1998) or The Bourne Identity (2002). Then the revisionists, Drive (2011) or Baby Driver (2017).
What sets this inches-from-the-pavement-POV chase apart from any of those is that here every red light blown through, every one-way street breached, every vehicle or pedestrian or pigeon dodged — all of it’s real. The clichéd garbage truck emerging from an alley ahead? It happens. And it will make your toes curl. The crew had stationed a couple of people with radios around blind corners, but the radios failed. The filmmaker is driving his own car, reaching a top speed of 122km/h. (The director claimed 200kkm/h but some helpful person mapped out the paths against the timing.)
Call it immoral, as many did, but I find this film not only exhilarating but incredibly emotional — it’s a filmmaker risking his life for cinema. It’s both a testament to and metaphor for a total dedication to art, which reaffirms itself with ever squealing turn and bust-out acceleration.
The film’s only soundtrack is the roaring of a Ferrari V12 engine (which is dubbed), so I cautiously suggest adding your own background pairing:
Free to view on Vimeo
Last Days in a Lonely Place
(Phil Solomon, 2007, short)
After Khtobtogone (#10) I took a stroll into the realm of machinima, the vast majority of which is of little artistic merit. But the name Phil Solomon kept coming up — whom I’d only vaguely been aware of through his association with fellow experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage.
It feels inaccurate to call Solomon’s video game filmmaking machinima — both because of the annoying spelling, but also the genre seems largely motivated by controlling video game characters like puppets, i.e. replaying sequences from existing movies or playing out other fantasies.1
Instead, Solomon is more concerned with aesthetic and mood, using the video game as another filmmaking tool, and of his films made this way, Last Days in a Lonely Place is considered the best starting point.
Free to view on YouTube
That which remains in mind…
This piece on Zoë Lund and her writing method for Bad Lieutenant (#9).
The Caretaker’s musical oeuvre is a two-decade homage to The Shining — lose your grip on reality with this Bandcamp deep dive.
The New Yorker updates disaster films to make them more realistic (via Daniel).
A primer on Nokiawave (also via Daniel).
For me, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (#10) didn’t get its hooks into the kind of nihilism of U-Turn (1997) or The Counselor (2013), which maybe makes me a cynic?
This does make me wonder if filmmakers are acting on much more motivation than to puppeteer with human beings.