YOU CAN (NOT) REDO

A review requested by Chris D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I seem to have done this slightly out of order, non? So you'll have to forgive me if I simply borrow what I said the last time I visited the most famous, infamous, and contentious of Japanese anime franchises:

"It is not enough to begin at the beginning. We have to go before the beginning, to 1995, when the 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion started to air on Japanese television. Telling the story of how skyscraper-sized humanoid biological robots called "Evas", piloted by emotionally damaged teenagers, fought off the onslaught of huge trans-dimension or extra-terrestrial or Christ knows what kind of creatures called "Angels", the show was an enormous hit. It was also a costly show, and one that took a turn near the end from subtly exploring emotional trauma to openly depicting creator Anno Hideaki's battle with depression. For these reasons, the last two episodes ended up in a place infinitely different than anyone might reasonably have expected it to end based on at least the first half of the show's run. And there were riots, literal actual riots with outraged fans defacing the building that housed Gainax, the studio which produced the series. Two years later, Anno responded to his baffled and enraged fanbase by remaking the last two episodes as the theatrical feature The End of Evangelion, and in the process doing basically nothing to actually provide them with more clarity or closure."

And now that we're all gathered together to take a closer look at The End of Evangelion, released in 1997, about sixteen months after the enormously controversial final two episodes of the series aired. Those episodes, "Do You Love Me?" and "Take Care of Yourself", were the result of an animation team that had basically run out of resources by the end of the series' 26 episodes. Which meant that the resolution vast story of emotionally broken young people serving as the human weapons in the battle between a corrupt, monstrous paramilitary conspiracy and the unknowably inhuman beings of ancient spirituality made flesh, both trying to bring about the end of the world in different ways and for different reasons, had be done using impossibly limited animation and abstraction. In practice, this meant that the last two episodes of the series are wholly subjective, taking place entirely in the mind of Ikari Shinji (Ogata Megumi) during the events of the Human Instrumentality Project, which are thus described only implicitly and second-hand while the main plot is an inside-out attempt to explore the nature of Shinji's self-hatred and depression, and his conscious desire to isolate himself from humanity.

I am now speaking entirely for myself: I really loved those last two episodes. They bend and break the medium of episodic television in astounding ways, and depict Shinji's mental state from an artistic angle that I can't compare to anything else. But I get why they infuriated such a huge percentage of the Evangelion fanbase, and why Anno took the first opportunity he had to return to his original conception for the last two episodes, approximately doubling them in length to serve as the two halves of The End of Evangelion, "Love is Destructive" and "ONE MORE FINAL: I Need You" (which are presented as two discrete 45-minute segments, each with their own ending credits and all).

The starting point of the film - which absolutely refuses to function on any level whatsoever if you don't know the 24 episodes preceding it in relatively close detail - is Shinji's abyssal sense of loss after being forced to kill Kaworu, a boy of apparently his own age who turned out to be the Final Angel. Kaworu was the first individual Shinji had met over the course of the series who befriended him without judgment, requiring anything of him, or layering that friendship in with a measure of abuse and hatred. So when we show up, Shinji is almost totally incapable of functioning. Specifically, he's standing at the bedside of Asuka (Miyamura Yuko), the girl he has a crush on despite her unbridled arrogance, who has been in a coma ever since her own recent encounter with an Angel gutted her mind. Begging for her to absolve him of the lives he has been responsible for ending, he masturbates over her body after accidentally dislodging her gown to reveal her breasts. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!

The first two-thirds of The End of Evangelion proceed to be exactly the promised resolution to the story that Gainax marketed it as being. The events surrounding the Final Angel has precipitated a final break between NERV (the organisation that runs the Evas against the Angels, and has been positioned by its leader, Shinji's father Gendo (Tachiki Fumihiko), for his own cryptic ends) and SEELE (the international organisation that thought it wan NERV), the latter sending the Japanese Defense Force to kill all the people inside NERV headquarters, good and wicked alike. In this battle, Asuka and Misato (Mitsuishi Kotono), who has served as Shinji's cheerleader and big sister, both die, and Gendo attempts to trigger the end of all things - the Third Impact - by merging Rei (Hayashibara Megumi), a clone of his dead wife, with the preserved corpse of Lilith, the Second Angel, and the progenitor of all humans and Angels.

So even by the end of that little recap, the opaque spiritual mythology that was at no point the strong suit of Neon Genesis Evangelion starts to get a little out-of-hand, and any pretense this has to being the clear-cut "let's just explain things" version of the story that the fans who'd rebelled against the given finale of the show were hoping for disappears completely. It's also the point where The End of Evangelion starts to get really terrific: the second half is very much like the last episode of the show, in that it's mostly a subjective record of what Shinji thinks and feels as he becomes the only human consciousness in existence to not merge with the rest of humankind during the Third Impact. Only where the show could only explore this psychological abstraction using the most desperate cost-cutting measures possible, the movie gets to play with a budget of some considerable scale - not like the sort of money Disney got to play around with in the '90s, not even tremendously expensive by contemporaneous anime standards, but certainly enough to realise Anno's difficult ambitions at a level that even the most complex moments in the series couldn't begin to dream about.

All of the parts of The End of Evangelion that are the best are those which are most subjective, save one: the final, doomed battle between Asuka and the synthetic Evas operated by SEELE is a beautiful marriage of Bach with animated action, a pageant-like sequence that's somewhat conventional but wonderfully evocative. But everything else that's most striking, and not simply an exercise in mecha anime done on an enormous scale, is when the film enters a character's mind and skews the medium around what it finds there. This starts reasonably early: there's a montage that depicts Asuka's realisation that she wants to survive and fight, and it's something of a learn-by-doing experience for the audience to understand how the fragmented, symbolic elements of the film are going to work. It's a mere warm-up for the last 30 minutes or so, in which Shinji's mind becomes, once again, the staging ground for the climax of Evangelion. The sequence in which he witnesses the ascendance of Lilith is stunning enough, nightmarish imagery presented in a reasonably coherent fashion, but the best material is all crammed to the end, when the editing speeds up at a breakneck pace - at one point, the entire series is synopsised in a series of flash cuts last at most a frame or two, presented for - and where the aesthetic switches into computer animation, pencil tests, still drawings, only ever for a second or two. Towards the end, the sound starts to fragment alongside the imagery, and what we've left with is less of a movie than a visual game of word associations; it's like the animated version of the Beatles song "A Day in the Life", and it's altogether some of the most fearless material in Japanese animation.

What I have basically sketched out, then, is the argument that The End of Evangelion gets really exciting at exactly the moment it becomes most slippery and impossible to parse without a notebook in one hand, the entirety of the series including the two "superceded" episodes in the other, and a collection of Jewish mysticism in the third. The accurate implication would be that the first part of the movie isn't quite so exciting. It's solid. The animation is at least a half-step above anything in the show's waning period (when the budget started running out), and the voice acting is rich with the naturalism of people who knew their characters inside and out and didn't have to overwork lines to find the emotion in them. There are individual shots that are absolute killers: Asuka's EVA-02 lying a helpless silhouette, at the bottom of the frame, pinned from every angle, the close-up on Misato's face as she bleeds out, anything involving Lilith-Rei. And at its very worst, the film is still an awfully good sci-fi anime, which is by no stretch my favorite category of animation, Japanese or otherwise, but I can still see it being good when it's staring me in the face. Even so, the film is best when it transcends genre, when it becomes a representation of anger, depression, embarrassment, and fear that rips apart animation from the guts and reassembles it according to a brand new set of rules. Too much of it strikes me as too "normal" for it to be a particular landmark in the history of the genre, but at its best moments, it is absolutely essential.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - BECAUSE OF THE HORRIBLE THINGS HE DOES

Herschell Gordon Lewis has long been known as the Godfather of Gore. In recent years, that nickname was used as the title of a documentary; Lewis has embraced it himself, adopting the name on his official website. In fact, the website goes one further: Lewis is, in his own words "the Godfather of Direct Marketing and Gore". Which is is one of the weirdest dual careers in the annals of Western Culture, but sure enough, alongside his invention of the modern splatter picture with Blood Feast in 1963, Lewis has decades of experience teaching companies how to use more effective active language in selling their product and inveigling customers. This sounds insane, but as I ponder it, it makes perfect sense: it's just two different forms of calculated hucksterism.

With that in mind, it's really not much of a surprise that Lewis jumped ship from the filmmaking game in the early '70s. It was a game he'd already played: as the relaxation of sexual standards led to the collapse of the market for "nudie cuties" in the early '60s, Lewis simply switched from titillating his audience through peek-a-boo nudity to doing the same through extreme violence. With the end of the production code and the explosion of low-budget gore pictures at the end of the same decade, it was no longer possible for Lewis to stand out in a newly-crowded field, so instead he simply closed up shop (only to return to the game in the 2000s, when he'd graduated to the status of living legend and inspiration to a host of grind house aficionados). After all, when there was only one Lewis, he didn't need to be good at all to be the best at it. And he exploited that reality to the hilt: his films are some of the most dismal pits of ineptitude you could ever hope to scrounge up.

We turn at this juncture to one of the director's final horror movies, made during the short window when he was able to really crank up the gory effects thanks to the loosening of moral strictures: 1970's The Wizard of Gore, which would have been an even better nickname. My sweet Lord, what a movie it is, too. There's not a genuinely good film in the director's canon (Two Thousand Maniacs! comes sneakily close, though), but this isn't the mere crappiness of no-budget regional filmmaking with a cast of the finest nonprofessionals who could be convinced to volunteer. This is rank incoherence, even worse than Lewis's notorious hatchet job cobbling the delirious Monster a-Go Go out of the incomplete footage of an unfinished production. And a more incoherent movie than Monster a-Go Go is one of those things that I pretty much assumed simply couldn't exist.

It sounds simple enough: Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager) is a stage magician whose showy opening trick is to cut his own head off with a guillotine and re-attach it. This is merely the first of many tricks involving hideously dismembering people for the appreciation of tepidly interested audiences, but it turns out that Montag is secretly a murderous psycho, who actually kills the women he brings onstage, only he hypnotises them to think that they're fine. Once they leave the theater and it wears off, they drop dead. TV chat show hostess Sherry (Judy Cler), who is fascinated by Montag's show and wants to interview him on the air, and her journalist boyfriend Jack (Wayne Ratay) start to investigate the chain of inexplicable violent deaths. Straightforward "killer magician" boilerplate.

Move in even slightly closer than the broadest rendering of the plot, though, and The Wizard of Gore turns into a deranged slurry of aggressive stylistic mistakes strung together by the barest semblance of a plot. Like a pointillist painting, the incidents that make up the film's story appear to be a cohesive whole from a distance, but in the moment-by-moment experience of watching, it all feels like so many globules standing independently of each other and only barely gelling into something that's bound by rules of causality and chronology. At the micro level, The Wizard of Gore is a process of intercut sequences that follow the shape "Montag performs a trick, a woman dies later, Sherry wants to interview him, nobody knows why women are dying", over and over again. This pattern stops for no good reason; one imagines that the film could just as easily have been only 20 minutes long, or gone on for three or four straight hours, without meaningfully altering its impact. It concludes in a twist that makes no sense, and is individually redeemed only by immediately preceding a twist that makes so little sense that it turns into a soothing kind of Dadaist anti-logic, but may be meant to imply that we've been watching the unrealised fantasies of a murderous woman-hater all along. And that is meeting the film so much more than halfway that I'm walking up its driveway carrying a Bundt cake.

Its disastrous narrative is worse than confusing, though: it is unstintingly boring, as well. That's readily seen to by the constant repetition of basically the same three points with no consequences to any of it until suddenly it's all been kicked out from underneath, so that we can be sure that there's no consequences that will ever occur in all of the history of the universe. And yet, if all that was terrible with The Wizard of Gore was the disastrous structure of Allen Kahn's screenplay, I'd only hate it slightly. I might even find it enjoyable - superficially, most of what's bad about The Wizard of Gore is also what's bad about Blood Feast, and that movie is a hoot, in the short patches when it's not a slog.

The truly awful parts of the movie go deeper than mere writing. They go deeper than anything to do with merely poor filmmaking, though that is present in abundance. The acting, as is typical for Lewis, is bargain-basement amateur mugging, like the husband of one victim who doubles over weeping with his head in his hands like a parody commercial for a migraine medication, or the moment than an actress has to conspicuously feel around in her mouth before spitting out the hunk of red goo meant to look like her guts, or some such. Mostly people are hellaciously stiff and uncomfortable-looking. There is, though, one performance that goes off the deep end into some freakish other dimension, and that's Sager. It's not fair to blame him: he was but a young crewmember called up on the spot to fill in when the actor cast in the role walked off, and Lewis couldn't afford even a single day's delay. Being an untrained performer stuck with the film's biggest role and its heftiest lines was the first insurmountable difficulty facing Sager. Having absurdly ineffective makeup applied to his cheeks, forehead, and facial hair in a failed attempt to make him look old was the second. The monologues Kahn dumped in his lap are a third - long reams of zoned-out ranting about how all people care about these days are random acts of florid violence in their pop culture (that the film is self-aware enough to autocritique its genre is astonishing, given the pronounced lack of self-consciousness about anything else), which feel more like a stoned street preacher gone wrong than the menacing villain of a shitty horror picture.

Faced with these awful tasks, Sager called upon all the demons of hammy acting, and let forth with fiendishly potent blast of the most purple, flowery, magnificently mis-emphasised line readings it is possible for mortal minds to imagine. It's beyond my powers of transcription to even slightly imply the odd cadences and extreme shifts in volume that happen every single time Sager opens his mouth. His gestures match the grandiosity of his recitals, pointing dramatically like a bad stock player from Restoration comedy and suggesting that the Tin Man got stuck in the rain again. It is simply impossible to look away from the film even momentarily when he's onscreen; the impossibility that anybody might have let this go on for more than a few seconds, let alone filmed it, let alone cut it into the final edit of a notionally professional motion picture, demands every ounce of attention. It is horrible and painful, but it is captivating. (Bless her for trying, Cler attempts to go head-to-head with him in the final scene, but this kind of madness cant be taught, it has to be innate).

Even that, however, isn't the point where The Wizard of Gore runs screaming into the void. It's the way it has been staged - if, indeed, "staged" is the right word. That implies planning and intention, and I don't want either of those things to have been true. There's plenty of run-of-the-mill embarrassingly bad filmmaking: cutaways to a humiliatingly threadbare and barely interested audience for Montag's reedy show, flubbed lines left in of economic necessity, glaring establishing shots that couldn't be more obvious product placement for long-dead northeast Illinois fast food restaurant chain Chicken Unlimited. Which I insist on mentioning because it's just so goddamn goofy. Chicken Unlimited. Chicken Unlimited! I want there to be a synthpop flourish everytime I say it out loud, which I have of course done every time I've typed it.

But the gore scenes, the part of the film that is quite clearly the only reason that we're here: oh my God, they are impossible. This is what happens, basically, in every one of them: Montag brings up an obviously hypnotised woman from the audience. He blandly performs a violent trick as the audience watches intently. SHOCK CUT TO BLOOD SPLATTERING EVERYWHERE! THE MUSIC SHRIEKS IN ATONAL ELECTRONIC PAIN AS THERE ARE CLOSE-UPS OF SOMEBODY'S HAND MASHING AROUND IN SOME PIG GUTS DYED BRIGHT RED! SAGER ROLLS HIS HEAD AROUND LAUGHING! Cut to the very serious, solemn, bloodless version of the trick. The woman looks beatific. CUT BACK SHE'S SCREAMING! RAGEMUSIC! BLOOD BLOODBLOOD! PIGGUTS OH HO! Montag finishes the trick and everybody blandly applauds.

I have no fucking clue how to parse this. Not even at the level of who is seeing what - the sound editing alone is enough to suggest that the audience has also been hypnotised into not seeing the violence, and the victim is aware and conscious and screaming - but then, why the big deal about showing violence? What is even the point of the tricks, if there's no blood? They'd just be random, stupid bits of nothing happening. Which is certainly not something The Wizard of Gore is unfamiliar with. But then, if the audience is actually seeing the gore, why even bother cutting in the shots of bland, bloodless silence? For that matter, why bother cutting those in regardless? It's interesting almost solely because it's so confusing as to be surreal. I honestly think Lewis might have been trying to make a psychedelic splatter movie, bringing the art house and the grind house together in one package, only he did this without even slightly understanding what makes psychedelia or art films tick. As pure dizzying surrealism, it's only confusing, without being in any way atmospheric or haunting; it's like seeing a Dario Argento film remade by Ed Wood.

Reader, I hated this movie, and its languid, puttering 95 minutes bored me out of my skull. And yet I am inexplicably, even unforgivably compelled to recommend it with all the enthusiasm I can muster. It's terrible in every way - even the disreputable appeal of unflinching gore scenes is undone by the unconvincing cheapness of the effects (dropping some intestines onto a ripped dress does not, by any stretch, evoke the horror of pulling a woman's insides out) - but it is god damn weird. As weird as any movie of any extraction I've encountered in a very long time. That doesn't make the experience of watching it pleasurable, but Jesus Christ, it's memorable.


Body Count: 6, unless it's 7 - the twist makes it tricky to tell exactly who died and when. But I think it's 7. It might also be none at all.

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ROBOT JOCKS

A trio of reviews requested by Bryce Wilson, with thanks for his multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

It is not enough to begin at the beginning. We have to go before the beginning, to 1995, when the 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion started to air on Japanese television. Telling the story of how skyscraper-sized humanoid biological robots called "Evas", piloted by emotionally damaged teenagers, fought off the onslaught of huge trans-dimension or extra-terrestrial or Christ knows what kind of creatures called "Angels", the show was an enormous hit. It was also a costly show, and one that took a turn near the end from subtly exploring emotional trauma to openly depicting creator Anno Hideaki's battle with depression. For these reasons, the last two episodes ended up in a place infinitely different than anyone might reasonably have expected it to end based on at least the first half of the show's run. And there were riots, literal actual riots with outraged fans defacing the building that housed Gainax, the studio which produced the series. Two years later, Anno responded to his baffled and enraged fanbase by remaking the last two episodes as the theatrical feature The End of Evangelion, and in the process doing basically nothing to actually provide them with more clarity or closure.

But all this notwithstanding, the show was immediately entrenched in the hallowed annals of anime as one of the series you absolutely, no possible way around it, had to see if you cared about the medium at all, in Japan or anyplace else that the country's characteristic animation had made inroads. And five years after his second series finale, Anno was able to begin capitalising on the multinational enthusiasm for his signature project by planning an ambitious new retelling of the whole series. Collectively titled Rebuild of Evangelion in English, the initial scheme as I understand it (which was altered) was for three theatrical movies to largely re-tell the series, with a fourth movie expanding into a whole new ending, with all-new big-budget animation that would flesh out the world, the characters, and the tech, with more detailed, lusher visuals. It took another five years for the first of these to come, and eight years later, the fourth film still hasn't been completed, though it has already gone far astray from a simple "remake the show" storytelling mentality, and it's a pretty simple and even necessary thing to regard Rebuild of Evangelion as its own self-contained standalone narrative.

So with all that explanation out of the way, let's turn to the first of the three extant films, called... I lied, more exposition. The first movie exists in three versions, distinguished in English only by a number, and not distinguished in Japanese at all, that I can tell. First was the 98-minute theatrical cut from 2007, Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone. A film of the same length, with some re-timed color and other little tweaks, was released theatrically in Japan and on DVD worldwide as Evangelion 1.01, with the same subtitle. And then a subsequent DVD expanded the running time to 101 minutes, and re-titled the film once more, Evangelion 1.11. For the record, this review is based on 1.01, which I gather is the worst way to have gone about it.

But let's sweep all of that bureaucratic nastiness under the rug, and actually talk about the film, eh? Because when we get right down to it, You Are (Not) Alone is a pretty delightful piece of contemplative science fiction. It begins in the best way possible for something that intends to be heady and, in its private way, "difficult": it simply drops us into a world that looks sick and ruined, with water the color of old blood and bedraggled foliage. And having set up that world in a series of wonderfully bleak establishing shot, it drops into a plot that started shortly before we got there, and really doesn't slow down enough for us to catch up. We can pick up what we need, but it's not till the midway point or so that there's anything like the usual cut-and-dried-exposition. By which point, in theory, we're so taken in by the characters and the unpredictable rhythm of their lives, the actual details of what's going on are at least somewhat beside the point. I gather that this has offended many, including fans of the series who consider it to be unduly rushed (and it sure as hell isn't slow). But the headlong pitch into a crazed world seems exactly right to me, and I find its ragged pace to be electrifying in its own right, different than series but not inherently better or worse - it's clearer and more urgent, but less organic in character-building.

The primary arena of the action is NERV headquarters, a bunker deep below the shiny, metallic, futuristic city of Tokyo-3. NERV is the UN's military response to the Angels, of which the fourth has just made its presence felt, endangering much of the city, but in particular the life of 14-year-old Ikari Shinji (Ogata Megumi), on his way to NERV at the order of his distant, dictatorial father Gendo (Tachiki Fumihiko), leader of NERV. He's found and rescued by Lt. Col. Katsuragi Misato (Mitsuishi Kotono), who immediately latches onto him like a big sister, and helps him find his footing as he trains to be the pilot of one of the Eva-01, though he has to be guilted into it. It's only when seeing a girl his age, Ayanami Rei (Hayashibara Megumi), badly damaged from her own recent battle against the fourth angel in the prototype Eva-00, that he agrees to shoulder the responsibility.

The English subtitle of You Are (Not) Alone - chosen by the filmmakers, so it counts - speaks to its primary, almost overriding focus: this is not at all a movie about giant robots destroying giant inexplicable, almost indescribable things (the four Angels to crop up in the movie all look completely different from each other, and the sixth is defined by its absence of a stable form), which is at best its second-highest priority. Its third is on Christian imagery and overtones of the Biblical Apocalypse, which is transformed into something intriguingly weird as filtered through the perspective of a non-Christian culture (the use of Christianity in anime is something that I find endlessly fascinating, and about which I have absolutely no concrete knowledge). At times the use of Christian elements feels like Anno just pulled terms out of a grab bag without reference to what they mean (which American filmmakers do, like all the damn time, so I can't say that I actually have any problem with it), and so we have things like a command center named Central Dogma (also a term from biology, which doesn't make any more sense) and huge cross-shaped explosions when the Angels die.

The first priority, though, is depression. A crippling, low-down depression that makes it virtually impossible to function. Shinji, as we learn throughout the movie, is almost incapable of feeling anything, and his motivations for his actions are almost exclusively limited to the single desperate hope that his father will offer him a word of praise. Meanwhile, he's so confused and disoriented by the kindness shown to him by Misato, it makes him feel even worse than he did to begin with. The action sequences in the film are as much a symbolic representation of how he comes to a better understanding of the people around him, as they are spectacle. They're still some kind of spectacle, mind you, and frankly very good at it: the battle with the sixth Angel is an unusually impressive example of fluid CGI interacting with traditional animation, and it's as tense a pure action scene as I can think of in animation (which, honestly, isn't a very competitive race), while being tremendously imaginative in its use of the medium to add unpredictability to the villain.

The best thing about You Are (Not) Alone is the way it marries its personalities - sci-fi action and blunt, raw character study (it is, scene-for-scene, far more intense in its study of Shinji's depression than the series was at the equivalent point) - without it feeling at all unnatural for them to exist in the same space. And it does it in a setting that, for all its grim trappings, is genuinely fun: the characters aren't quite as complex as in the show, but they're generally livelier, the music gives a great deal of kinetic energy to even the most sedate moments, and the whole thing is utterly beautiful. The worst I can say about it is that the character animation can tend to be unusually limited, even for anime, but the backgrounds and use of color are so strong that there's never a case when the eye isn't busy anyway.

The sneaky thing about the movie, though, is that it doesn't end. It has a complete arc: Shinji's relationship to the people in his life evolves along a natural, comfortable line, and the final scenes round off the shape of the plot neatly enough that it feels like a structurally sound story. But there are almost nothing but loose ends, and the film adds more of them the closer it gets to the ending. It's easy for a movie to feel internally satisfying when it can kick of all of its most difficult elements to resolve down the road to its sequels, and while You Can (Not) Advance is absolutely promising as the first movie in a series, it signs far too many IOUs to pretend that it's a great stand-alone movie in and of itself.

* * * * *

And wouldn't you know, the second part actually pays off some of those IOUS!

We have another title situation, though this time the English situation is more straightforward. There was a 2009 theatrical cut, Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, running 108 minutes; the only home media releases in any country are of the 112-minute version titled Evangelion 2.22. The original Japanese name for the film, meanwhile, is New Evangelion Movie: Break, and I am told that the Japanese subtitles for the three movies are an overt reference to the structure of a Noh play. I am in no way qualified to talk about such things. But I do know that the word "break" can mean "to split away", and that's exactly what You Can (Not) Advance does: while it starts off copying the original series with only some differences in flavor, by the time it ends, it's telling a completely different story using the same characters and themes.

So that being the case, let's not dwell on it. The second film, like the first, is mostly designed to tell a self-contained story, though while You Are (Not) Alone describes a pretty clear individual arc around Shinji's emotional growth, You Can (Not) Advance borrows most of its emotional resonance from the viewer's awareness of the first movie. Such is the luxury of sequels, of course, but I find it leaves You Can (Not) Advance a bit less satisfying in its own right, since Shinji's development this time around lacks such an elegant shape. The first act, if you will, is assumed, rather than depicted. This is perhaps the reason that the second movie ends up more invested in narrative progression than character development, relative to the first movie and certainly relative to the show, which had the benefit of growing over a period of hours what here needs to be covered in an hour.

What this costs You Can (Not) Advance in psychological subtlety, it earns partially back in intensity. The major new character in this film, German-Japanese Eva pilot Shikinami Asuka Langley (Miyamura Yuko), is a barreling force of antagonistic id, self-centered and arrogant and eager to lash out at the other teens for the unforgivable sin of being imperfect in her presence. She's written as a collection of bold strokes, a blast of energy where Shinji is compressed and Rei completely unknowable, and having her in the mix balances out the film's emotional energy well. Instead of the one-man study of the first movie, we have now a triangulation of three different ways of deal with self-doubt and the fear of loneliness, and the result is more complex and rewarding than You Are (Not) Alone.

That's the idea, anyway. In practice, You Can (Not) Advance is moving so quickly that something has to give, and for the most part, it's the depth of characters' relationships. It's clear that the essentialist feelings Asuka is blasting out constantly are there to distract everybody from what's going on in her head, and we're meant to be sophisticated enough to read her layers even when she's not showing them all at once. The thing is, You Can (Not) Advance is so full of incidents and developments that just about everybody is presented in more or less equally essentialist terms. It's a character sketch, not a character study, and in that respect at least, I absolutely break from the consensus opinion that the sequel is a definite all-around improvement on the first film.

Generally speaking, though, the consensus is spot on. The "break" of the Japanese title can be read as more than just a break from the plot of the original series; in a similar fashion, the movie breaks from focusing on individuals as singular personalities to focusing on individuals as elements in a more cosmic framework. Particularly in the second half, You Can (Not) Advance is more or less gunning to be an opera of sorts, using grandiose sequences and an impressively wide range of musical expressions to express a story on Big Themes expressed with Big Style.

At the most superficial level, this means more and bigger robot fights, and if there's one clear-cut reason to prefer the second film to the first, it's because the action is so vastly more impressive this time around. The ambitious scale of all the fights, both in their choreography and in the fearless way they mix traditional and computer-generated animation, puts even the most dazzling spectacle of the first movie to shame, and this one jumps to another level entirely during its protracted climax, a multi-stage battle involving a mixture of locations, characters, and depictions of fighting technique, veering from pure popcorn movie vivacity to abstract behavior mired in the twists of the series' elliptical mythology and expressed in art that seems to detach themselves from the movie to work as solitary images, like a comic book made entire of splash pages. It's gorgeous even when it's thoroughly baffling, which is more often than not; the other thing that happens besides bigger fights is more esoteric storytelling - if you noted that I haven't done much in the way of plot recapping for this second film, it's because the plot defies synopsis. It goes basically like, "Asuka comes in to upset the delicate emotional detente between the established main characters and strike up antagonistic sexual chemistry with Shinji, after which a long sequence makes deliberately no sense except that it's something to do with deliberately triggering the end of humanity, possibly to save humanity", with most of its conflict and stakes happening in a philosophical plane that's not always easy to parse, particularly since the film kicks so much of it down the line. I'll confess that this isn't not my favorite part of Evangelion, not in the TV series and not in these movies. The film does its best to make the character development and the grand-scale storytelling depend on each other, but it's a little too easy for the focus to drift.

You Can (Not) Advance leaves a lot of raggedness in its pursuit of bigger stakes presented with a grander sense of mystery; there's an entire character, Makinami Mari Illustrious (Sakamoto Maaya), whose presence suggests that she's being put into place for later purposes rather than because the plot actually needs her; she feels throughout rather like she exists outside the narrative commenting on it. And like You Are (Not) Alone, this film doesn't bother resolving itself, and compounds it by ending on a particular note of apocalyptic grandeur that is then directly contradicted by a scene that appears after the end credits. And this strikes me as sloppy storytelling more interested in the broad strokes than the fine details, anyway.

And yet, You Can (Not) Advance did the one thing I absolutely needed it to: it drew from the character development of the first movie and sent the story and characters in new directions that feel entirely organic from what went before, giving Shinji in particular a more daunting set of internal and external obstacles to overcome in the process of proving to himself that he has value, is loved, and is capable of loving. Perched on the vantage point of 2009, it's not too hard to be optimistic that the next film could redeem this one as thoroughly as this redeemed the first, even though the story has expanded so much with so little clarity, that there's quite a lot more to redeem this time.

* * * * *

So much for redemption. The third and so-far final part of the Rebuild of Evangelion series (the concluding fourth part is overdue with no release date in sight), Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, doesn't merely fail to button up the holes left by You Can (Not) Advance, it dances around clapping and laughing about how signally it fails to do so, how little it cares if that's what we might have been interested in, and how many brand new holes it's ripping open. It's quite an aggressive little beast on that front. The first two movies, even when they were incomplete, or confusing, or weighed down with too much murky spiritual philosophy, are still ultimately appealing and enjoyable films on their own right, but You Can (Not) Redo finally goes over the edge to become simply frustrating and tedious and damn near unwatchable in stretches. It's a fans-only proposition, and based on the online conversation around the movie, even a healthy portion of the fanbase wouldn't give it the time of day.

This third film - still officially unavailable in North America, though rumors persist of an extended cut showing up one of these days, for sure this time - has the decency to seem merely mysterious and exciting when it starts, though the second those mysteries start to clear up, tit's easy to wish they hadn't. After almost causing the end of humanity but being stopped just in time by a mysterious figure watching the battles between Angels and Evas from the surface of the moon, Shinji is floating, unconscious, in space, still strapped in EVA-01. He's rescued by Asuka and Mari, but not without incident; their approach triggers a drone attack and the first of the film's grandiose action sequences, and thus comes the first point at which You Can (Not) Redo started losing me. Consistently, the action sequences in these films have been the easiest part to like: conceived with great scope, animated with a beautiful mixture of traditional and computer-generated images, and given operatic heft by Sagisu Shiro's rich score, mixing symphonic chorales that all but beg us to be suitably bowled over by the size and severity of the fighting. Sagisu, at least, is still in top form: You Can (Not) Redo has my favorite score of the three movies, richer than anything in You Are (Not) Alone and not as undermined by thin, frivolous passages in You Can (Not) Advance.

The action, though, is nowhere near the level of its predecessors. Throughout, the filmmakers' goal has evidently been to create individually meaningful shots rather than show smooth, continuous action sequences linked by clarity and easy continuity, but the fighting in the third film is actively difficult to follow, and in this first battle at least, there's no sense of scale. In the few places where it's possible to track whatever the hell is happening, the action is presented from angles that minimise the size of the Evangelion units, and without any physical context to compensate for it. A movie about giant robot fighting machines, in theory, has to do just one thing right, and...

Back to the plot, though. We'll learn soon, though perhaps not soon enough, that 14 years have passed since the end of You Can (Not) Advance, during which time an organisation named WILLE has come into being in opposition to NERV, and Misato herself is one of its leaders. Shinji is treated with a profound lack of trust by his former friends and colleagues when he's not ignored by them outright, and retreats in the empty misery that's his default mode. At a certain point, he's rescued by Rei, and dropped on the surface of Earth, in the ruins of NERV headquarters, and it's here that he meets a young man named Nagisa Kaworu (Ishida Akira) - the same mysterious figure we've seen on the moon in the final moments of the last two movies. And here we get what amounts to an exposition dump, after two and a half movies finally learning more or less exactly what's going on. What's going on is a slurry of pieces from Genesis and Revelation mixed in a blender. Shinji makes some unbelievably stupid decisions and almost brings about the end of all life for the second time, leading the film's second and distinctly more coherent giant action setpiece.

The chief practical effect of all this is to shortchange the development of the characters (the series' best element to this point) in favor of doubling-down on mythology (which I, for one, would call its worst element). And not only is this the least psychologically acute of the films, it actually works at cross-purposes to what has been best in the two movies preceding it: the hard-earned sense of family and comradeship between the insular, cripplingly depressed Shinji and Misato, Asuka, and Rei. You Can (Not) Redo runs so hard from that, it's almost openly contemptuous of the earlier character arcs. And while the conversations between the hollowed-out Shinji and the kindly Kaworu are interesting - and certainly the strongest part of the film, both narratively, and even, though probably coincidentally, visually - that hardly justifies the zeal with which Anno and his colleagues abandon what had been working so well to that point.

It's a shambles at the level of writing, leaving its characters wrecked in the quest to do something needlessly bold with the mythology, and far too eager to leave plot holes hanging everywhere, possibly to set up the eventual fourth movie, and probably just because being mystifying was more fun than being cogent. At least You Can (Not) Redo looks more or less attractive, though I find the character animation to be the least appealing of the films - it's brighter and sharper, but also more cartoony, almost, with bigger, gaudier expressions. Still, the marriage of animation styles hasn't looked better, and some of the effects animation is legitimately as perfectly executed as anything I have ever seen. That being said, it's telling that the most unique and beautiful sequence is one of the most primitive: a depiction of Shinji's feelings as he listens to Kaworu playing piano that uses line drawings and stills with lots of empty space and a reduced color scheme. In the midst of a bright and busy movie, the calm, reductive style of this sequence stands out, and it looks special in a way that all the glossy, ambitious art elsewhere in the film can't, simply by virtue of there being too much of it.

Looking handsome only goes so far, and it's not enough. This is basically the mash-up of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Michael Bay's Transformers that nobody asked for, and which doesn't work much at all. It's visually chaotic and narratively confusing, which is perhaps a marriage of form and content, but not the kind we should be celebrating. The quality of the first two movies is enough to give me some hope that the eventual conclusion is heading someplace interesting, but after the almost uninterrupted joylessness of this one, I can't say that I'm champing at the bit for the fourth part to finally come out.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN A POST-WAR WORLD - DEAD WOMEN TELL NO TALES

Last time around, I alluded in a vague way to the wild and woolly world of Poverty Row, the scuffed-up ugly underbelly of the American filmmaking industry in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. The name refers to an inexhaustible supply of short-lived and occasionally durable B-picture firms that latched onto the most profitable genres that the big studios dabbled in: mostly crime movies, horror, and Westerns, the things you could do on a budget using only available sets in Los Angeles. For our current purposes, the important thing about Poverty Row is that it's where those genres had to hang out when they got too shabby and shameful for the big studios. It was, famously, to this low-rent world that Bela Lugosi found himself banished after Universal ran out of things to do with the charismatic, threatening Hungarian import with a profoundly limited acting range. And as our current layover in post-WWII Poverty Row filmmaking, we have here not just one of Lugosi's many trashy, slightly embarrassing microbudget crapshows, though 1947's Scared to Death, is all of that and more. It also happens to be the only time Lugosi had a starring role in a movie in color, though the phrase "in color" already implied something more in 1947 than the rather shitty results of the Cinecolor process, here billed with no discernible shame as "Natural Color".

And that's not the film's only gimmick, either! As we'll discover almost immediately, Scared to Death is a murder mystery, narrated from the perspective of the dead body, from within the morgue. This was, incidentally, very nearly the exact framing narrative originally intended for Sunset Blvd. three years later, leading me to the hopefully ridiculous notion that Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett not only saw this film but also saw fit to steal from it.

The body telling the story is that of Laura Van Ee (Molly Lamont), pulled onto the slab by two doctors (Stanley Andrews and Stanley Price) for her autopsy. "One hates to perform an autopsy on a beautiful woman" says one of them in a line of dialogue pregnant with the worst implications. But she doesn't seem to mind very much, and to keep herself from being bored, I guess, she starts to tell us her story one that started just a couple of days earlier. It is a story that has only a small number of moving parts, but fuck me if I'm able to follow it. The first scene is enough to establish Scared to Death as dreck on every level, from the stilted dialogue delivered by uncomfortable actors in what seems likely to have been the first take, to the bargain basement production design, to the visceral ugliness of Cinecolor. And yet the first scene is at a level entirely above the movie to follow, which is all that on top of a screenplay, by William Abbott, that I'd be paying an undue compliment if I accused it of "bordering" on incoherence.

Let's start with the characters. That's enough to give us the shape of it. In life, Laura was the wife of Ward Van Ee (Roland Varno), the son of Dr. Joseph Van Ee (George Zucco), who is currently treating her nervous condition. Dr. Van Ee sort of openly hates his daughter-in-law, and both he and Ward want her to divorce the younger man, which she's perversely disinterested in doing, despite being certain that Dr. Van Ee is trying to drive her insane. This stable household situation is spiced up by the presence of an unduly nosy maid, Lilybeth (Gladys Blake), and an unbelievably dim security guard, Bill Raymond (Nat Pendleton), an ex-cop hoping for a juicy murder to serve as his ticket back to the force, when he's not trying to flirt with Lilybeth. A guest is coming along to imbalance things further: Dr. Van Ee's much hated cousin, Professor Leonide (Lugosi), who for no clear reason has a mute dwarf sidekick, Indigo (Angelo Rossitto). He's got blackmail on his mind, demanding a few days in the Van Ees' guest room in exchange for not telling the horrible things he knows about his cousin's past. Nothing whatsoever comes of this, but Leonide does possibly know something about Laura's own mysterious past, which Ward has apparently tracked back to her time in a European dance duo called Laurette and Rene, and though this information is presented extremely early on, it's not until minutes from the end that anybody goes further in exploring it than noting that "Laura" and "Laurette" are similar names.

Right about this point, Laura receives a package containing a wax head that looks uncannily like her own, which triggers Dr. Van Ee to give up the weak pretense of secrecy around his treatment of his daughter-in-law. But his call is intercepted by a canny reporter, Terry Lee (Douglas Fowley), who brings along his monumentally stupid gal Friday, Jane Cornell (Joyce Compton) to the Van Ee mansion for his investigation. And now that we have all the players lined up, the plot can commence to spinning around in wobbly circles as nobody works very hard to actually solve any of the confusions that crop up, mostly because everybody in the film other than Jane is apparently hiding some kind of gloomy secret or another. It's even more confusing to us than to the characters, since we know as none of them do that somebody is peering in through the mansion's windows, somebody wearing a blue mask. And this would apparently be the green mask that Leonide remembers as part of Laurette and Rene's act, since God bless 'em, the filmmakers built their entire narrative around an object specifically stated to be a color that the Cinecolor process couldn't reproduce.

It's simply not possible to convey how inept the storytelling is in Scared to Death: trying to summarise the story elements necessarily enforces a kind of structure on them that they lack in the original. It's very nearly Dadaist in its virtually complete absence of an actual narrative throughline connecting all of the baffling shit it throws out, in essentially random order. And, too, the conspicuous failure of every element of the filmmaking is so complete that one is tempted to assign some kind of intentionality to it. Horrible, no-budget filmmaking can explain things like the way that in the morgue opening, one of the actors jumps the gun on his cue, and the other keeps soldiering on delivering the lines as they were written, so we have two people talking over each other at different points in a conversation. That's just par for the course in these borderline amateur productions. But the way that seemingly every actor exists in a different kind of movie, from screwball horror to Gothic melodrama, speaks to a disinterest in creating any kind of unity that merely bad filmmaking can't answer. Director Christy Cabanne, almost all the way to the end of one of cinema's most prolific careers, must have had enough experience to know when his cast was spiraling off into a half-dozen different and irreconcilable dead ends, unless he was so repulsed by the total lack of continuity in the script that he didn't bother supplying continuity to the performances or imagery.

There's nothing at all about the film that's acceptable in the least, from its flat staging of characters against a set that never looks meaningfully like anything but a hastily-constructed trio of rooms, and a "forest" made up of some large bushes (the sets are the one point at which Cinecolor, unfortunately, lets us know exactly what reality looked like), to its desperate score by Carl Hoefle, pounding with theremin screams to try and convince us that the plaster-looking blue thing looking in through windows is somehow terrifying. The single thing that's most offensively incompetent is the return, at intervals, to Dead Laura's narration, which is always preceded by a theremin sting that gets prematurely cut off so that she can deliver one (and only one) line, and then always followed by the same sting, while the film dissolves in and out of the morgue so quickly that it's barely in focus in between. It's shoddily executed and serves to do absolutely nothing but guarantee that the film can't possibly manage to work up any momentum, not that it had much of a chance to do that between the lack of a clear plot and the absence of cause-and-effect relationships between any two actions performed by any characters, at any point in the feature.

In the absence of anything remotely good, at least the film can count on Zucco and Lugosi for their grave, vaguely threatening screen presence, though Lugosi in particular lacks an actual character to play - even at the end of the film, I had no real sense whether Leonide had been a villain all along or not (he's also, in color, too ruddy-cheeked and avuncular-looking; if ever an actor needed to have sallow skin and bleached features, it was Lugosi, but here, he looks like Santa wearing a Dracula cape. Yes, he's wearing the goddamn Dracula cape). It's so wildly awful that I can imagine the right combination of friends, mood-altering chemicals, and good spirits turning it into an extraordinarily fun bad movie night experience, though watching it alone and sober, I found myself suffering through pretty much every moment of it, too incredulous and confused to find it tedious, but also too shrill for it to be inadvertently funny. Being long since in the public domain, it's trivially easy to find the 65-minute film on the internet, if you're curious. But don't say I didn't warn you - this isn't just bad filmmaking, it's practically outsider art, made by an unusually incompetent outsider.

Body Count: 1, which is even more boring given that we know from the beginning who it's going to be.

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POINT OF VIEW

A review requested by Nathan Morrow, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

As titles go, Mind Game is perfect: it describes exactly what the movie is and plans to do to its audience (it's also in English and Latin characters, despite the film being overwhelmingly in Japanese). The 2004 animated feature is a psychological portrait that uses metaphysics, memory, and delirious shifts in perception to keep things from ever making perfect sense, and then having allowed itself to start to level off in its second half, it jumps into a finale that intuitively works but God help you if you decide to apply linear logic to it. I've seen the film three times now, and I'm still not completely sure I know how to parse everything that happens, other than being comfortable in declaring that all of it feels right, relative to where the characters are at any given moment. And that is all that the film requires, given that it is far more interesting in portraying a state of mind than telling s story. It can be best compared to another film that also, coincidentally, first appeared in 2004, an ocean away: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also places us inside of a character's memories for lengthy stretches of screen time. The most important difference being that Eternal Sunshine, no matter how much inventive camerawork and editing were thrown its way, is still ultimately bound by what actors are physically capable of doing. Mind Game, being animated, is under no such limitation; and it takes the absolute fullest possible advantage of its medium.

The movie was the feature directorial debut of Yuasa Masaaki, with the animation direction specifically overseen by Morimoto Koji, and it is absolutely the movie that happens when somebody who has been kicking around the industry for a while finally pukes out everything he's absorbed into one frenzied blast of inspiration. If nothing else, Mind Game might well be the most-animated Japanese film of the 2000s, utilising at least three absolutely different aesthetic vocabularies as it goes along, none of which are the big-eyed clear line drawings with bold colors that most of us first think of as anime (though there are a couple of dream sequences where old-school anime is broadly parodied). Even within its individual flavors, which range from photorealistic drawings to sketches that feel like a bored teenager's doodles, the animation in Mind Game to any one sort of thing - its most distinctive trait, visually, is the way that the protagonist's whole body can be warped into extreme shapes and exaggerated facial expressions. It resembles, if it resembles any one thing, the similarly intense caricatures of emotions in Takahata Isao's My Neighbors the Yamadas, on which Yuasa was one of the primary animators.

The film's internal breakage is always linked to the strength and nature of the emotional state entered by its lead character, and I guess we should meet him right about now, huh? Mind Game centers on Nishi (Imada Koji), a young man who could charitably be described as a pathetic loser; his career as an aspiring manga artist hasn't quite exploded yet, and his personal life is a shambles, as we find out in the exact moment of meeting him, as he encounters his childhood crush Myon (Maeda Sayaka) in the subway, as she's on the run from gangsters, if in fact she is. By this point, the film has already begun relaxing the normal rules of continuity and chronology, and the opening scenes don't obviously slot into any gap in the onscreen plot. What really matters, anyway, isn't the presence of gangsters, but Nishi's unbridled response to seeing Myon again: he freaks out and remembers how much he never remotely got over her, and keeps staring at her large chest. He is as perfect an embodiment of a sexually underdeveloped manchild as you could ever hope to come across, and everything that happens, happens because he trails after Myon like a lost dog. That's how he ends up at the restaurant run by her sister, Yan (Takuma Seiko), when the gangsters show up looking for the sisters' father (Sakata Toshio); that's how he ends up being shot dead; that's how he ends up impressing God It/Him/Herself with the furor of his desire to live; that's how ends up leading Myon and Yan into the belly of an unfathomably enormous whale, where they spend the longest individual portion of the film's running time cooling their heels and visiting with a peculiar but mostly friendly old man (Fujii Takashi). It's not a normal movie. Don't need it to be a normal movie.

The thing I love best about Mind Game and thing that annoys me the most about it are inextricably yoked: this is a film entirely about Nishi's perception of the world and of himself. On the downside, this means that the whole thing is a bit tawdrily obsessed with sex and female bodies (this is a distractingly boob-obsessed film), though sometimes the tawdriness goes all the way back 'round to genius, like the technicolor orgy fantasy in which Nishi uses his phallus as a jump rope, as Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2" plays, like some kind of oversexed remake of Fantasia on acid. So even the downside is only kind of a downside, and the upsides are constant, extreme, and enormously gratifying. Mind Game is, directly as a result of its subjectivity, one of the most radical animated projects made in this century in any ultimately representational style. That radicalism does not mean that the film isn't messy as hell, for it certainly can be. Though it's surprising clear throughout why the fluid style is being employed on a moment-by-moment basis (it is, almost without fail, because of Nishi's mood at that moment, moving between lust, fear, anger, or triumph with visual cues to match). And the digressive parentheticals which make up essentially all of the narrative, no matter how surreal they get in terms of what we're seeing and how much loopy comedy it generates, kind of make perfect sense as the literalisation of Nishi's daydreams.

And radicalism is only so much of a justification for itself; Mind Game is a dazzling feat, a cornucopia of new ideas and arresting, shocking visuals, but it can be a little fatiguing, honestly. After a while, and for me it's during the slowest part of the whale interlude, one begins to wish that the movie didn't feel quite so free to race headlong into every rabbit hole that caught Yuasa's eye. The point of the movie, illustrating a hectic mind in a state of near-constant panic, either romantic or existential, explains and earns the barrage of disconnected moments - I used the word "daydream" earlier, and that's exactly the way the film feels and connects its ideas - but it would be possible to accuse it, accurately, of being bound together by no stronger tie than "cool shit goes down in the most unpredictable ways". Frequently, that's enough: the scene between Nishi and God, who transforms in appearance with every movement and cut, is a marvel of animation and sarcastic theology alike, and it would never have showed up in a film that was exercising any kind of discipline or restraint. The same for the closing montage, which wraps up the fates of just about every character of note in quick bursts of visual storytelling that legitimately can't be unpacked without a pause button.

At any rate, you can't separate out the weaknesses from the commanding, singular strength of how well this movie uses the specific capabilities of animation to plow through its protagonist's head. Subjectivity divorced from physical plausibility is a miraculous combination, and it's enough to make Mind Game one of the essential animated features in the last 15 years. In fairness, it might well be the case that this is an animated film mostly for other animators and animation buffs; but as an animation buff in good standing, I don't personally have any problem with that. It just makes it slightly - slightly - hard to be quite as active in recommending it to the world at large as I'd like to.

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TAKE A BIIIIIIITE!!!!!

A review requested by Robert K, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I'm greatly pleased that, when the time inevitably came for me to write about The Apple, it would be in the context of a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. There's a deep connection between this film and my own period of sickness back in 2005. It was at that year's B-Fest in Evanston, IL that I first saw The Apple, where it stood out for especially personal reasons - of course, it pretty obviously stood out for everybody in that auditorium. But I knew that I was going to get a call on that Saturday from my oncologist, telling me whether my cancer had metastasised or not. I was barely able to focus on the parade of bad movies in front of me; only The Apple was so manic and stupefyingly incomprehensible that I was truly distracted from my health worries. As I started receiving chemotherapy the next month, I had a portable DVD player to while away the five-hour days stuck in a room, tethered to machines; the "get well soon" present I request from my parents was a copy of The Apple, and it became the first movie I watched during treatment.* Many years later, I've seen The Apple more times than is decent, and I always hear just the slightest echo of those bleak days, in its clamorous musical numbers. It is and will always be my cancer movie.

It's also so toxic in its badness that I wouldn't be surprised at all to know that watching it causes brain tumors. So that's the other reason it's a good fit for this fundraiser.

The 1980 film takes place in the far-flung world of 1994, where a record label impresario named Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal) plans to use a hybrid pop-disco sound to establish a musical dictatorship over at least North America, if not the whole world. At which point I should confess that a plot recap of The Apple is doomed to failure: it is simply not possible to express using the clumsy, limited matrix of English to communicate how fucked up this movie is. No, not even when the Devil wants to use disco to take over the world in 1994. Oh, right, because I skipped over that bit: Boogalow is symbolically equated with Satan, right up until he turns out to actually be the actual Satan. So let's skip back to the 1994 Worldvision Song Contest, which is like the Eurovision Song Contest only trashier. Here, Boogalow and his lackey Shake (Ray Shell) sit in the show's control room and gleefully cackle with triumph as Boogalow's top act, the duo Pandi (Grace Kennedy) and Dandi (Alan Love) hit record-setting levels on the biometric scanners they're all using to test audience response to the duo's new single, "BIM". Which stands for "Boogalow International Music", and will eventually be, more or less, the name of the future one-world government. Which makes it even more threatening when the singers lead the crowd in the chant "Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way!" As if it wasn't already threatening enough when they start off by reciting that in the world of BIM, "There ain't no good / There ain't no bad / There ain't no happiness / There ain't no tears". And you have to hand it to George S. Clinton, adapting the lyrics from Iris Recht's Hebrew originals (Iris and husband Coby, who composes all the music had originally planned a Hebrew-language stage musical before meeting the film's producers... but we'll get to the producers): it takes some truly, relentlessly appalling songwriting when you can legitimately declare that "There ain't no sad" would have been a much better line than the one they went with.

Pandi and Dandi are followed by Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), a folk duo from Moose Jaw. They immediately launch into a syrupy love ballad that manages to sound even worse than "BIM", but somehow, this tribute to the most essential of human emotions - BIM, we find, has been hellbent on eradicating love songs - gets the audience so worked up that there biometrics go all the way up to 151. Whereas Pandi and Dandi topped out at 150. I mean, they're a whole 1 better!!! Boogalow knows a threat when he sees one, so he immediately invites Alphie and Bibi to BIM headquarters the following day to sign a contract. Alphie is far more untrusting than his partner and girlfriend, and when the contract is presented to him, he has a vision of thunder and storms. It gets even worse when Boogalow and his crew try to force Alphie to sign - from out of nowhere, he suddenly finds himself inside a smoke-filled cavern, with Boogalow suddenly dressed in long black cloak with a tiny gold horn on his left temple, and the rest of BIM's hangers-on dressed (or undressed) as trolls, snakes, zombies, and all number of hell denizens. And an oiled-up Dandi urges Alphie and Bibi, dressed in the chaste fig leaves of Adam and Eve, to taste the BIM apple, and seal their fate. Bibi doesn't see this vision, and signs herself over to Boogalow the Devil, but Alphie flees, and spends the next period of time hiding out and trying to avoid BIM's takeover of all society, identifying the BIM faithful with the metallic triangular stickers all citizens are required to show - the mark of BIM.

You guys, I think The Apple might be a religious allegory.

The film was made by producers Menahem Golan (who also wrote and directed) and Yoram Globus, Israeli cousins and masterminds behind Cannon Films. Now, this was early in Cannon's existence, so it's probably not fair to be as baffled by its place in the company as we must be: for Golan and Globus were the most savagely, mercilessly market-driven filmmakers of the 1980s. And The Apple is not remotely market-driven. It's a disco musical made at the ass end of the disco era whose message is that disco is the literal devil's music; it is a stunningly incoherent spiritual odyssey that ends with God showing up in a gilded Rolls Royce to Rapture up all the hippies who'd been able to hide out from BIM. It's a work of futurism that attempts to show a modestly dystopian world by throwing some banners up around concrete hyper-modern West German buildings and putting fins on cars. It has some of the most shitty original songs in the history of movie musicals. It feels for all the world like a mad auteur's highly personal vision gone wildly far off the rails, not like an attempt by two savvy producers to make a popular disco cash-in. But that's absolutely what it was, the last of 1980's three Hail Mary attempts to keep disco alive long enough for one more hit movie, following Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu. All three tanked and all three are awful, though The Apple is surely the most thoroughly demented and incompetent, and I am quite inclined to suggest that it's by far the most entertaining for those reasons. But not the kind of entertaining that Golan and Globus would have preferred.

No indeed, this is the entertainment that comes of pure unbridled madness. It's easy enough to latch onto the songs, and talk with baffled amazement about the inane lyrics which don't rhyme, don't scan, and don't make even the slightest narrative sense. Like, to name a conspicuous example, the film's most notorious line, "It's a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire", upon which a vampire (Francesca Poston) does indeed pop up and then just stand there, doing the gaping mouth "vampire snarl" face for, like, 15 seconds. It's not worth going through all of the dizzyingly horrible lines - the review is long enough already. Anyway, the deficiencies of the songwriting has nothing on the savage insanity of Golan's staging of the songs, all of them drifting headlong into big group numbers with virtually identical choreography, and inexplicable choices like the one where the bad guys ride on exercise bikes while Boogalow talks about how great it is to be a manipulative creep, right in front of of the woman he's manipulating, or the one with all the clowns and then the people twirling batons with streamers on the ends. Or the number I have fondly referred to, since 2005, as the Quaalude Tango (the actual name is "Made for Me", and it's a romantic ballad song by a date rapist), which in addition to its comatose dancers features the most deadeningly literal editing, crisply bouncing around precisely on the beats of the music and always showing us exactly what the lyrics are referring. Though painful lyrical literalism is pretty much found in every moment of every song. I mean, there's that vampire moment.

But focusing entirely on the songs, however tempting and easy to do, means missing out on much of the joy The Apple has in supply. It could be totally absent any songs at all, and be no meaningfully better, though it would be a hell of a lot shorter, and that could only help. But the godawful production design and erratic acting - Sheybal is the only person who comes even close to giving a functional performance; even Miriam Margolyes, who I generally love, is out-of-control terrible as oy gevalt, the most outrageous kind of Jewish landlady - and dogged commitment to its opportunistically New Agey message of how everybody but the hippies is in the grip of pure evil, and the totally incomprehensible closing moments with the gaudiest deus ex machina on record, all of this would make The Apple a transcendent bad movie experience even without the unclear satire of the "America loves drugs" song "Speed", the unacceptability of a song that tries to set the words "Life is nothing but show business in 1994" to music, or the outlandishly smutty double-entendres in a song whose subtlest couch is that it's title is "Coming".

Put it all together, and it's a completely unadulterated bundle of the worst of cinema all spun up into one ball of madness. It cannot be described, and it can barely be experienced; I assume that this is what a bad acid trip feels like, right down to the chintzy rendition of Hell. With all the sincerity I can muster, this is one of my very favorite bad movies, and not even with the "I kind of think I like it unironically" relationship I have with Xanadu. The Apple is utter, irredeemable trash, and it is a privilege to be part of the same species that could cook up something so totally imaginative and divorced from anything resembling rules, logic, good taste, or basic decency.

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UNSPEAKABLE FILTH

A review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

L'âge d'or, an hour-long 1930 feature, is the second of the two collaborations between France-based Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and it is certainly less jam-packed with iconic "every film buff alive knows this shot" shots than their 1929 short Un chien andalou. But it also better - oh, fuck me. "Better" is a word that has no place in this conversation at all. Buñuel and Dalí were, quite specifically, not looking to do things that would get them praise for being "good". Using "better" is exactly missing the point. L'âge d'or is, let us say, the more complex of the two, and the more thematically probing, which is probably inevitable given that it's four times as long. It is absolutely the more naked political film - Dalí was an iconoclast who just wanted to up-end people's expectations, Buñuel a committed radical who wanted to tear down the Catholic Church and and the right-wing European governments of that period with all the force and rage he could muster. In its combination of rabid left-wing politics and vigorous surrealism, L'âge d'or is the first truly "Buñuelian" film, then, and it is not surprising to learn that the relationship between the two artists had deteriorated to the point that Dalí had virtually nothing to do with the film's production once the screenplay was completed - according to a deliciously tawdry but hard-to-verify legend, Buñuel chased Dalí off the set on the first day with a hammer.

The film has a scenario that starts to reveal itself more and more explicitly as it moves along, but for a healthy span of the beginning, it doesn't seem that way. Instead, L'âge d'or picks up right where Un chien andalou left off, as a series of seemingly disconnected visual gags, though "gag" is in the eye of the beholder. Violent shocks of aggressive absurdity is probably closer to the mark. The first of these is a series of images of scorpions, taken from a nature documentary, stitched together with large blocks of intertitles - the movie is a sound/silent hybrid, but more on that later - which pretty neatly sets up the mood of the film as a series of lashing, defensive attacks by venomous arthropods. Which is about as nice a sentiment as anything Buñuel and Dalí have to spare for the twin targets of their ensuing satiric broadside, the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church.

The nature of that attack is two-fold: first in the accumulation of random startling and blasphemous imagery, second in the details of its story - perhaps surprisingly, given how cozily L'âge d'or fits into even the most proscriptive definition of Surrealism. But for as madcap and what-the-almighty-fuck-is-going-on the film's barrage of visual non sequiturs no doubt is, L'âge d'or actually tells a rather clear, straightforward story: they want to have sex (they are played by Gaston Modot and Lya Lys), and circumstances keep preventing. At first they can't because the city of Rome is founded on the exact muddy patch where they were trysting. Afterwards, they can't because of the censoriousness of Rome's most noteworthy export, Catholic morality. Finally, they can't because of psychological symbolism. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ (Lionel Salem) is raping young girls in a monastery. Only it's possible he's just a man who look as and acts uncannily like Christ. It's also probably not the case that Rome was founded in 1930. But that is when it was foundered, anyway.

So, fair is fair, it gets less clear the closer you look at it, but at the broadest possible respect, the film is first and above all about the importance of openly and honestly engaging with one's libido, and the way that all of Polite Western Upper-Middle Class society is structured to make that engagement specifically impossible. It's a randy film, with seductive blow-jobs delivered to the toes of statues, and the man feverishly imagining that advertisements are depicting abstract, disembodied vaginas, and all that good stuff; and while it presents sex as the stuff of loopy comedy, it also presents it with good-natured humor. The rest of the film, though, is pure, rage-filled mockery of the stifling rules of society, opening with a bleak joke against a quartet of bishops, ending with a nasty attack on Christ as a hero-villain out of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and middling with a stuffy bourgeois party that's pelted by absurdities and anti-social provocations like something from a more sexually-charged Marx brothers movie. For anti-social behavior is presented in L'âge d'or as an aphrodisiac; both in a nod to the erotic nature of the taboo, and a clear implication that everything about this society is worth being anti.

The film is confusing and densely packed, but one thing it's surely not is subtle: there's no way to watch it without being repeatedly hit in the face by the filmmakers' disgust with the puritanical conformist urges that are linked through bizarre staging, crafty editing, and ironic sound cues with cruel exploitation of a working class that the wealthy ignore completely, with sublimated violence, with feces - much like the then eight-year-old Ulysses, another work of art to fearlessly confound social satire with pornographic depictions, L'âge d'or wants us to see and hear and think about shit, the great unifying element of all humanity and animals, that Nice People Never Talk About, and can be made to look ridiculous simply by placing them in its metaphorical proximity.

Is it all a bit puerile? Aye, undoubtedly - the 26-year-old Dalí and 30-year-old Buñuel weren't kids but they were close enough anyway to have the enraged snottiness of youth, and that's the clear animating force underneath L'âge d'or: the young person's snarl of contempt to an older generation that has massively ruined everything, "fuck you for this, and fuck you for that, and just fuck you". By drifting from boldly authoritative documentary footage and narration to cheap visual and audio gags to startling, often upsetting weirdness that seems to come from no place but a chaotic dream, the film connects the real, tangible world (the documentary) to a frolicking hell of random nonsense (the rest), and it does this with the unchecked, self-confident gusto of untried, undisciplined youth. I freely admit that it's largely for this reason that, as easily as I find myself whipped along in the film's frenzies, I can't find it in me to regard it as top-level Buñuel; most of his career later, the director would revisit much of the same ideas (the need for sexual openness, the totalitarian hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, parodic religious iconography) in Viridiana, a film as controlled and clear as L'âge d'or is freewheeling, and directly because of its greater maturity and more precise presentation, it's a far nastier and more piercing satiric assault.

But by no conceivable means does the existence of that later film mean that L'âge d'or is redundant: it has a vitality and insane level of visual creativity that are all the justification it could possibly require. As a document of capricious madness turning the world into a pile of steaming shit and then declaring things a Golden Age, the films' unpredictable shifts in tone and content, and the inexplicable content of its various jokes, could not have been bettered. It was the film that 1930 needed, and decades upon decades later, it still has potency to shock the squares like almost nothing else out of entire generations of the avant-garde.

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SANTA ON THE BEACH

A review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny isn't an inexplicable movie. Hell, I'm about to explicate it here in just a moment. But it's exactly the kind of movie that feels inexplicable, colliding random nonsense in a matrix that we're obliged to call a narrative more out of habit than accuracy. The plot more resembles a transcription of a bad peyote experience than a motion picture, and its execution is at places so determinedly bereft of even the most limited, accidental filmmaking talent that it doesn't seem right to call the resultant object an actual work of cinema.

So with that to whet your appetite, let's go into the thing in proper chronological order, which naturally begins with the world of Florida roadside attractions. Here, we find among many such places an amusement park, Pirates World of Dania, near the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. The place opened in 1967, apparently built largely out of bits and pieces bought on the cheap from other parks that had picked up nicer, newer toys; some rides were salvaged from the wreck of the underperforming 1964-'65 New York World's Fair. It was, naturally enough, themed to piracy, with its signature ride a cruise on a full-scale pirate ship, but among its themed lands was a fairy tale exhibit.

Cursory research - undoubtedly there is such a thing as deep research full of footnotes and recovered historical documents, but there's also such a thing as wasting your goddamn time on a surreally terrible kids' movie - has not revealed to me who made the decision or when, but there came a point when the Pirates World powers that be decided to promote their park with a series of movies. Three of these came out in 1970: the documentary Musical Mutiny, about a concert held at the park, and the fantasies Jack and the Beanstalk and Thumbelina, all directed by Barry Mahon, who spent the '60s cranking out nudie flicks by the handful in the burgeoning Florida exploitation scene; his only film prior to his trilogy for Pirates World that wasn't smut was 1969's The Wonderful Land of Oz. Meanwhile, his Wikipedia page, at the time of this writing, almost exclusively focuses on his World War II record. Barry Mahon is a fascinating and slippery enigma, I mean to say.

Jack and Thumbelina were both aimed squarely at the kiddie matinee marketplace, and I do not know how well they did - cursory research, folks - but by the end of 1971, Pirates World had more to worry about than residuals from the cheap-ass films shot on their properties as a bit of feature-length advertising. For in October of that year, the Walt Disney Company cut the ribbon on Walt Disney World in Orlando, some 200 miles north of Dania, and the nature of Florida tourism was irrevocably changed forever. With the beefiest tourist trap ever devised by man or some dark angel serving as a black hole in the middle of the state, sucking in all the visitors to the state, a rinky-dink little amusement park had virtually no chance of surviving, and Pirates World didn't - its holding company declared bankruptcy in 1973 and the park was gone by the end of 1975. Before that happened, though, the Pirates World folks rolled the dice on one more movie. It visibly bears the scars of a production that had no budget for resources: got a cheap Santa suit and a hideous Easter Bunny costume? Then you have a movie starring Santa and the Easter Ice Cream Bunny, whatever the actual fuck an ice cream bunny is. Not one that gives out ice cream, that's for sure. And in the time-honored tradition of chiseling film producers throughout history, the minds behind Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny figured that you could surely save some money if, instead of building a whole feature from scratch, you take a feature that's already just sitting there and add crap to it. Which is why almost two-thirds of the alleged Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny is composed of the entirety of Mahon's 62-minute Thumbelina, presented so uncut that it even includes its original opening and closing credits, with a little more than a half hour of new movie directed by the shadowy R. Winer, apparently working without benefit of cinematographers, editors, or any other credited crew.

In the beginning of the movie, though, we know none of this. All we get is the in medias res spectacle of a workshop full of North Pole elves busying themselves while waiting for Santa to return from parts unknown. It takes, I'm not exaggerating in the slightest, less than 15 seconds to determine just how impossible Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is going to be. For that gives us enough time to gawk in dismal amazement at R. Winer's complete inability to do, like anything right: by that point, the camera has already visibly wobbled on its tripod, and the cluster of child actors playing the elves have sung enough of their shrill jingle that we can tell how none of them were rehearsed, or possibly even given a full set of lyrics. The most salient aspect of their song, in the early going, is that they're not all singing in time, or the same key, and it's nigh impossible to make out what the hell it is they're trying to communicate. Which is just as well, because as it becomes more audible, we find those lyrics consist of vile passages like:

Tra-la-la-la-la, oh where is Santa Claus?
Tra-la-la-la-la, Santa isn't here
Tra-la-la-la-la, we'll just have to work some more
Tra-la-la-la-la, Santa's never been late before

Complete with the inconsistent rhyme scheme and burst of arrhythmia in the last line, all shouted out to a gratingly tuneless melody. It's like beat poetry as improvised by preteens. Who are, incidentally, credited as "Kids" from Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse, with "Kids" in exactly those scare quotes, and so I start to thinking, if they're not really "kids", then what the fuck are they? Eventually, one of the girl-elves peeks out the front door to see stock footage of caribou, and deduces from this that Santa's reindeer came back to the North Pole before. Where is Santa? Santa's nev'r been late b'fore! The film has not yet celebrated its 60th second at this point, but it has already mounted a compelling argument that it's the worst thing ever made with a motion picture camera.

Santa, anyway, got stuck on a beach in Florida. It's a few days before Christmas, and he was touring the States on his last-minute "Naughty or Nice" check, when something happened to I don't know what. But it left him without reindeer, and his sleigh mired intractably in the sand. Like, centimeters of sand. Since it is clearly impossible for the powers of a demigod to fight such a monstrous fate, Santa uses telepathic powers to summon local suburban children to his aid, and this is depicted with a vibrato post-production effect that makes him sound like the leader of a death cult. Oh, but before that happens, he gets a little song about how lonely, scared, and hot he is. And the outside footage was filmed without synchronised sound, so Jay Clark, in the role of Santa, isn't actually singing, he's just pantomiming. And, seemingly not pantomiming to the actual song, but just assured by R. Winer that he should wave his hands around like he's dancing, or conducting an orchestra of ghosts, and they'd make it work. They didn't make it work. Clark jerks his hands around without being more than incidentally in time with the music, while his or somebody else's voice floats above the film. If the idea was to communicate that Santa is about to drop dead from heat stroke, then mission accomplished.

So the kids - beg pardon, the "kids" arrive to be given their instructions from this terrifying beast with the hollow voice emanating from underneath a fake beard that was not even a little bit up to the demands of south Florida humidity, and looks like Clark was carrying it around in his pocket before gluing it to his face. Those instructions involve rounding up animals to serve as surrogate reindeer, and for something like seven or eight hours we get to watch as Santa demands that the kids try to back the animals up to his sleigh to be hooked up, only to be stymied by the fact that most quadrupeds are not terribly keen on being forced to back up. So it doesn't even get as far as "Ho ho ho! This sheep can't fly!" (yes, sheep, the favored house pet of all suburban Florida children), because we're too busy watching Santa trying to bully animals and saying condescending things to kids while he just stands there like doing nothing at all. Also, the first animal is a gorilla, in a remarkably stupid misjudgment of comic pacing: you do a couple of more or less normal animals first, then you trot out the dude in the gorilla suit, as an absurd twist. But you sure as shit don't lead with the gorilla, because that promises zaniness, and the endless minutes that follow are the closest thing I can imagine to the polar opposite of zany.

Watching all of this unfold are none other than Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, classic boy heroes of Mark Twain's beloved novels. Tom at one point has a raccoon on a raft with him, and boy, I guarantee you've never seen an animal in a movie as monumentally freaked the fuck out as that raccoon is to be on that raft, getting thrown around by some idiot kid. Tom and Huck never interact with the rest of the characters, and eventually sort of drift away; I gather that they are the inspiration for the silent, Christ-like Watcher in Kieślowski's Dekalog.

Eventually, Santa gives up, gathers his clan around him, and decides to cheer them up by telling a story. Or by letting them get a peek at the foot-long patch of sweat blackening the seat of his pants, proudly showcased in a shot that R. Winer actually permitted to be included in his film. I get that films like this are shot fast and without a chance for re-takes, but seriously. If you accidentally get a shot of Santa gushing sweat out of his ass crack, you find way to fix it, even if it means that you don't have time for all 19 inserts of grass during his mopey song from earlier.

But anyway, storytime. And guess what, it's Thumbelina! Which we see in its entirety for the next hour, and I have to say, it's an enormous relief. By any imaginable yardstick, it's terrible, but it has this in its favor: the actors move their mouths and sound comes out in a way that generally matches their lips. And Shay Garner, playing Thumbelina, is a stilted, unnatural performer, but when she's not talking, she's actually in possession of a commanding screen presence. So anyway, Thumbelina takes place in Pirates World, at the Hans Christian Andersen hut, or whatever, where a teen girl (Garner) wanders around looking at dioramas while listening to Andersen's fairy tale being related over loudspeakers by a narrator (Dorothy Brown Green) who turns out to be playing a character in the story. And as she does this, the girl visualises herself as the tiny little human girl who was kidnapped from her home and almost raped by frogs before being almost shamed into marriage to an elderly mole.

Though he wasn't going around trying to burn the very notion of the cinema down to the ground, like R. Winer would two years later, Mahon directs the movie pretty much exactly the way that you'd expect from a pornographer in his second year making children's films. There's an awkward, tableau-like staging everywhere you turn, and the plot beats are all coaxed out with the same dull, unsurprised energy of a woman who accidentally just took a shower while the TV repairman was in her apartment. The sets could not possibly resemble plaster over a wire frame more than they do, except for the mole's tunnel, which looks like an enormous birth canal made out of plastic and the broken dreams of children. The costumes, at least, are a bit fancy, with all kinds of articulating parts, but they're at least a bit nightmare-inducing; the moles have long beak-shaped faces that make them look like a cross between a rat, a raven, and that one dream where the shadow men were chasing you through the cemetery in the forest.

But you know what? It's functional. Ugly, cheap, blandly-staged, and tone-deaf. But functional. The way scenes are cut together indicates some understanding of how we process visual relationships in cinema. This praise cannot be extended to the framing narrative of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, which frequently jams in cutaways to nothing at all, while finding a way to make the physical position of a bunch of kids sitting still in front of an unmoving sleigh difficult to parse. And it always, always calls the most attention to how much Santa's voice has nothing to do with Santa's staring, unmoving face.

After a blissful hour of boring, unattractive kiddie crap, Thumbelina spits its girl back out into the wonderful land of Pirates World, full of fun rides and exciting adventures, and Santa stops narrating whatever the hell he's narrating - I get that it would have taken, like, an extra day to cut out all the parts of Thumbelina that suggest the whole thing takes place in a room full of dioramas in a threadbare theme park, but surely they could have spared one day? - to resign himself to the fate of dying in the hot Florida sun, and he chases all the kids away. There's a long passage in which he talks about removing his coat, and then removes it. But just in time, Santa's very good friend the Ice Cream Bunny shows up, riding his... vintage fire truck... through Pirates World. In something like real time - oh my, the nice, long attention paid to the Ice Cream Bunny's path through a wooded road and to the beach! Now you start caring about continuity, eh R. Winer? There's a shot of Santa just sitting there, waiting like he's just sat there waiting for everything in the whole movie, watching as the Ice Cream Bunny, and his truck full of children, drive in from all the way back on the Z-axis. As a study in the slowness of movement and the gradual development of time, it is the rival of Oleg Yankovsky carrying a lit candle from one of a pool to the other and back in Nostalghia.

Eventually, the Ice Cream Bunny arrives, and it is an eldritch abomination; there's a long shot of a dog jumping and barking at it frantically, and I think we're meant to take it as "oh, the happy dog, it wants to jump up and lick the Ice Cream Bunny!", but anyone who knows dogs will immediately understand it as the natural response of canine fury to something horrifying and wrong that needs to barked all the way back to hell. And it's not just the freaky design of the thing, though its coal-black eyes, the right one of which sags in a sorry approximation of a wink, would cause any dog or man to feel the chill grip of the abyss. Even worse, in a film that has to this point only evinced a rough relationship with the basics of editing, things collapse complete when the Ice Cream Bunny shows up; it's a flurry of dissociated shots hacked together in a rough arrhythmia that resembles a freak-out scene in a psychedelic movie. But Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is no head film. It's a bad enough trip while totally sober. There's nothing in it that makes any kind of linear sense, with its plot - such as it is - lazily meandering forward while the images only occasionally tie into that plot, and all of it frequently erupting in moments of the most repellent attempt to appeal to children with a sweaty, rumpled Santa and a Cthulhic humanoid rabbit.

Anyway, it's on YouTube, so I leave you now to your best judgment.

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