Red in tooth and claw

Citizen X (Chris Gerolmo, 1995)

Not really fleapit fodder but hey, it's my blog and all that.......

HBO do better TV than films in my opinion, but here is the magnificent, soaring exception. In a decade that, thanks to The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en turned the serial killer into the bad boy pop star, it took Chris Gerolmo's low-key, deliberate and angry Citizen X to remind the viewer that real-life is more shambolic, pathetic and terrifying than any face-eating, head-boxing a-list scenery-chewer can represent.

The film follows the trials of Detective Burakov as he tries and fails to beat the crumbling Soviet system which is preventing him from properly investigating the crimes of a child-murderer (known as Citizen X) in 1980's Ukraine. Burakov is portrayed with heartbreaking frustration by Stephen Rea, and as the constant struggle to improve the quality of his men and equipment, and the constant denials by the local apparachiks that Soviet Ukraine could have anything as decadent as a serial killer, beat him down, he gets closer and closer to collapse.

His saviour is Fetisov (Donald Sutherland, in his best, most noble performance in 20 years), an Army colonel given command of the tiny backwater. In time, Burakov's persistence in the face of overwhelming odds fires up Fetisov and between them, they begin to roll back the smouthering layers of Soviet resistance, getting closer and closer to the man that, by this point has killed scores of children.

The triumph of Citizen X is the fact that it concentrates less on the Killer (in this case Andrei Chikatilo) and more on the emotional devastation that his crimes visit on those tasked with investigating them. Rea and Sutherland are really extraordinarily good. It also portrays the casual depravity of Chikatilo, but doses this with the full measure of his pathetic life and miserable demeanor - no art-deco dungeons for him, just another freezing cold, crumbling railway station next to a nondescript patch of woodland. Here is the banality of evil, and Jeffrey DeMunn, one of America's most underappreciated character actors is mesmeric as the shambling low-ranked party man who's life is a pathetic sham and whom rarely lets his mask slip, but when he does.....

Citizen X deliberately avoids the splashy high-tech gore of the then more trendy (and more expensive) contemporary Hollywood product and instead aims for something much more disturbing, emotional devastation, and it makes for powerful viewing. Even Randy Edelman's downbeat, sombre score fits perfectly with the mundane apocalypse which unfolds in Rostov-on-Don. As a TV movie, it's exemplary. As a film about the banality of evil, it might be the best film of its type since 10 Rillington Place. Yes, it really is that good.

Genre-benders

One of the best thing about exploitation movies is how readily producers and directors are prepared to play with genre convention. Mind-bending genre fusions come with the territory and here are some great examples.......

Kung-fu western
Red Sun (1971 - Director Terence Young)
Not only does Red Sun have a cast to make international production guru's slaver (Alain Delon, Ursula Andress, Chuck Bronson and the great Toshiro Mifune) but the film actually delivers as both a western and as a martial arts film, with grumpy Mifune hacking, slashing and splattering his way through cowboys, saloons, cathouses and dusty town squares like Lone Wolf. It's flawed, certainly but it's great fun.

Sex-horror
Shivers (1975 - Director David Cronenberg)
There are loads of great horror films with a sexual element, but few of them successfully meld both elements and deliver on both scores - the only other one I can think of off-hand is Jose Larraz' Vampyres (1973). Shivers is a brilliant, heady, cerebral horror film with a genuinely powerful sexual charge. Although the whole film is queasy, several sequences stand out - the Octenagarian woman and teenager necking in the lift of starliner towers, the fate of Barbara Steele's character, the final, slippery orgy in the swimming pool of the Starliner Towers. Given that the prime market for horror is teenage boys and here's a film that's guranteed to generate all kinds of emotional 'confusion'!

The Hollywood wallow
Mandingo (1975 - Director Richard Fleischer)
Even excluding the deliberate bad taste efforts of indie auteurs like John Waters and Russ Meyer, there were no shortage of material for this group of Hollywood product wallowing in the gutter, Drum (1976), Mommy Dearest (1981), Redneck County (1975) and Lipstick (1977) are just 70's examples, but Mandingo is the real deal, mixing inept social drama, softcore coupling in soft focus and scenes of barbarity that would never be seen as acceptable today. Slavery is a touchy subject at the best of times, so what made director Fleischer think that the Bull in the China shop approach would work is anyone's guess.

The Action/Martial Arts/Horror movie
Silent Rage (1981 - Director Michael Miller)
A small area for sure, but Silent Rage deserves a mention for the fact that someone tried to mesh these disparate elements together and whilst it's not entirely successful, it's successful enough to be tense when it needs to be and star Chuck Norris and director Michael Miller are canny enough to know how this game works. Silent Rage delivers, and is a great example of how even the most daft genre fusions work if they're made with a bit of moxie.

The Sado-western
Five Bloody Graves (1971 - Director Al Adamson)
There were a few of these films, westerns with deliberately sadistic overtones made in the early 70's - Five Bloody Graves, Cry Blood Apache (1970), Cain's cut-throats (1971) and the biggest budgeted - Michael Winner's Chato's Land (1971). These films are threadbare, cheap and nasty splatter films with western settings. Five Bloody Graves features rape and lashings a plenty and John Carradine as a preacher who carries jars full of severed heads on the stagecoach with him. A short-lived trend, but an eye catching one.

There are others, why not add your own?

Messageboard, and some old favourites passed on DVD

First of all, Billy on Sleazepit has a forum. You can find it at http://www.runboard.com/bthesleazepit

Secondly the BBFC have passed some Fleapit Fodder favourites for UK DVD release in the last few months, including (uncut, for the first time in the UK) Lucio Fulci's The House By The Cemetery, The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, Jesus Franco's The Cannibals and Bloody Moon, Alberto De Martin's The Antichrist and finally John Avildsen's Joe, which is Peter Boyle's finest hour, so you know it's good.

Good to see Handyman released - one of the best British sex-coms of the 70's though God know's who'd pay money for The Cannibals, which is agonising.

Southern Discomfort

Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) - Directed by Gaultieri Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi

If you read the reviews of Jacopetti & Prosperi's Goodbye Uncle Tom (or Adios Zio Tom, in its native Italian) on-line, you'd be forgiven, from the fan-boy slaver, of thinking that this was the ne plus ultra of 70's exploitation, a 2 hour wallow in the excesses of the 19th century slave trade. It is and it isn't. No-one after watching it would deny that this is exploitation at its most base and, in polite circles at least, most unmentionable, but it's both more than that and less. What's really more shocking - the content of this docu-drama or the fact that Hollywood was still making films eulagising the slave-master relationship like The Song of the South in the late 1940's?

Goodbye Uncle Tom follows the successful formula Jacopetti and Prosperi established in their previous 'mondo' documentaries the most famous of which were Mondo Cane (1960) and Africa Addio (1965). The film is really a collection of sequences rather than a coherent narrative. There's no points being raised here (though more on this later) beyond 'Isn't slavery degrading?' and 'Do you want to see?' The movie starts with a sweeping aerial shot from a helicopter of a cotton/sugar cane plantation in the late 19th century American south. Typically for a J&P film, the title sequence is accompanied by a song from regular collaborator Riz Ortolani that is too eye-blindingly sweet to be called saccharine. Following this sequence we then run headlong into a series of sequences with no real discerable narrative which includes a discussion at a dinner table with the plantation owners about how their slaves are sub-human (complete with slave children running around under the table like pet dogs), a slave sale, scenes set within a slave trading ship, a cathouse with black slave prostitutes, capturing and punishing escaped slaves....I'm sure you get the point. The film is full of unabashed full-frontal male and female nudity, a fair bit of (fortunately not especially graphic) violence and obviously a racial charge quite unlike that of any other film I can think of.

Where Goodbye Uncle Tom differs from other films on a similar subject (including exploitation fodder like the so-bad-it's-terrible Mandingo and its pointless sequel Drum) is that it makes no real attempt to place its atrocities in any kind of context. Again, this is a particular Jacopetti and Prosperi trait. For the exploitative way the film is shot, they really do step away from the action and let the viewer decide. This is fine for a film like Africa Addio, which after all is a genuine documentary with multiple valid viewpoints in terms of how it can be interpreted, but it much less successful in Goodbye Uncle Tom because no sane person would ever conceive of a set of circumstance in which slavery could be considered with anything other than contempt and disgust. Nevertheless, because of the lack of a narrative and the way in which Jacopetti and Prosperi let their film's imagery stand on its own merits, Goodbye Uncle Tom is a film that manages to be more offensive than the likes of Drum or racially-charged exploitation flicks like Robert Endleson's Fight for your Life, but much less easy to dismiss, a fact that may have prompted Pauline Kael's infamous railing against the film and the difficulty it has subsequently had finding distribution. If you're simply documenting established and authentic historical activities, when does that documentation become exploitation?

The exploitation movie is the septic tank of cinema art - no-one wants to talk about it, but it serves a vital function. Goodbye Uncle Tom, for all the exploitative elements it contains serves a similarly vital function. Only Exploitation film-makers would have the moxie to take the debasement inherently inter-twined with the slave trade and film it straight. If they'd left it like that, then one could debate the merits of the docu-drama approach to the subject matter and whether the approach justifies the footage. Unfortunately Jacopetti & Prosperi felt it necessary to tack on an ending which is as clumsy as it is uneccessary, and which creates, then muddies the subtext of the film entirely.

This finale tries to place the previous hour and ten minutes of barbarity in a modern context as a contemporary black actor sits on a beach and reads a copy of Thomas Ruffin Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner, leader of a 19th century slave rebellion in which a number of white slave-holders were murdered. This is intercut with a home-invasion sequence in which black men invade a modern white house and attack its occupants. It's difficult to see what Jacopetti and Prosperi were hoping to achieve with this sequence, other than perhaps an utterly cack-handed attempt to link slavery with the rise of the black-power movement in contemporary America. Attempting to contextualise the film in any way is a mistake (for reasons mentioned above, it doesn't need it) but to do it in such a thoroughly ham-fisted way is unforgivable. It's almost as if the two film-makers lost their bottle at the last minute and attempted to 'legitimise' the bulk of the film by trying to tie the historical elements to a modern social 'problem' (as they see it). In doing so, they demonstrate a complete ignorance of 20th century American history and trivialise the civil rights/black power movement to the point of offence.

Even with the ill-conceived finale, Goodbye Uncle Tom is not a film without merit, at least technically. It looks stunning (if you can get hold of anything other than an nth generation bootleg) and has a visual scope far beyond anything in comparable contemporary exploitation film-making. Production design is similarly impressive and Riz Ortolani's score, whilst a shock to those more used to his understated scores for films like Cannibal Holocaust, is a lively proto-disco pipe and drum effort. What disturbs is the fact that the film was shot in Haiti, then in the grip of the foetid Papa Doc Duvalier regime. It doesn't take a vivid imagination to picture Jacopetti and Prosperi's direction being filtered through Duvalier's odious Ton Ton Macoute secret police, machetes in hand, out of shot. Tellingly, no actors are credited during either opening or closing title sequence. Knowing this, and watching the film unfold makes one rather less forgiving of the film-makers, regardless of their intentions.

Goodbye Uncle Tom did play UK Cinemas in the late 1970s though the final reel was excised entirely. Without this sequence, one can only imagine the impact the film must have had. It's not a film for the sensitive and it is flawed in all manner of ways, but it cannot easily be dismissed, not least because, whatever the intent of the film-makers themselves, the sequences they filmed bear at least some relationship to the events they sought to portray. It's far too easy to turn away from the action and blame the film-makers for re-creating it, without blaming ourselves that it exists to be recreated.

Welcome to Fleapit Fodder

A while back I used to run a website called Pre-cert Nirvana that was basically a review site for all manner of trash and tresure from the golden days of home video in the UK. Then I got bored with it and it died a bit of a death. This blog is The Son of Pre-Cert Nirvana and I hope those of you out there interested in all sorts of movie trash, from soft-core Electric Blue videos, to 70's british sex comedies, to mondo documentaries, to ninja films to seriously obscure horror films will feel free to read and contribute.

Hopefully I won't get bored this time!