Black Gate

I expected my last film of July 16 would be a documentary called Blood & Flesh – The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson. You may not have heard of Adamson. I hadn’t. He was an exploitation filmmaker in the 1960s and 70s, responsible for titles like Satan’s Sadists, The Naughty Stewardesses, and Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, as well as not one but two separate films titled Psycho a Go-Go (Technically, one was Psycho à Go-Go; note accent). Introducing the documentary, Fantasia co-Director Mitch Davis described Adamson as more of a hustler than a filmmaker, then called up director David Gregory to briefly explain the film’s genesis. Gregory said it began as a special feature for a Blu-ray release, but the more he investigated Adamson, the more he realised the material was worth digging into more deeply. Thus, it’s now a feature, covering Adamson’s life, the films he made, and his awful death.

(Before the documentary played, we saw “When Larry Met Stanley,” a six-minute short directed by Katy Jensen and Mike Leans. It features Larry Cohen, an independent B-movie director, recounting directly to the camera an anecdote about the time he met Stanley Kubrick, when Kubrick was just starting out as a director. It’s a cute story, and Cohen, who passed away earlier this year, tells it well.)

Blood & Flesh opens at the end, with Adamson’s murder. It then goes back to work its way back through Adamson’s life. He was the son of a B-movie actress and B-movie director, and got his start in film working with his father. He later teamed with producer Sam Sherman to set up Independent-International Pictures, turning out grindhouse schlock through the 60s and 70s, chasing whatever was in the zeitgeist — biker films like Satan’s Sadists, blaxploitation like Black Samurai, softcore sexploitation like Naughty Stewardesses.

He withdrew from film as the industry changed in the late 70s, emerging briefly to make never-released “documentaries” about alien visitations, which he apparently believed in. Then, in 1995, he went missing. His body was soon found. He had been murdered by his live-in handyman. The case was briefly a media sensation, apparently a case of life imitating art: the director of cheap horror films brutally killed.

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On July 16 I started my day at Fantasia with a book launch. Michael Gingold’s book Ad Astra is coming out this fall, but attendees of his multimedia presentation had the chance to buy it earlier. It’s a follow-up to 2018’s Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares From the 1980s and its sequel to come in September, Ad Nauseam II: Newsprint Nightmares From the 1990s and 2000s. Those books were collections of classic newspaper ads for horror movies, while Ad Astra is subtitled 20 Years of Newspaper Ads for Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films.

Gingold, a former editor-in-chief of Fangoria, said he’d collected ads since he was 12 years old, and the book thus covered films from the original Star Wars through to A Phantom Menace. He showed some of the images included in the book while discussing trends in newspaper ads — and in movies, noting that science fiction began to perform reliably at the box office in these years with Moonraker the most popular James Bond film up to the time of its release in 1979, while in the summer of 1980 The Empire Strikes Back and Friday the 13th were the only real financial successes. Gingold went on to say he had a sympathy for smaller films, such as Mighty Peking Man, a Shaw Brothers movie first released in North America as Goliathon.

He observed that while we debate ‘special editions’ of films today, the idea perhaps began with the 1980 version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Among the ads he showed was the one for Dune packed with expository text; and variant ads for films like Excalibur and Flash Gordon. Some films had seasonal ads, as Superman II did for July 4 or ET for Christmas. On the other hand, other films (like Howard the Duck) had to change their ads in an attempt to rebrand the film. Review ads began to emerge (prompting an ad for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure that mocked the format), as did ads featuring tag lines or actor’s name — a whole sub-genre of ads for Arnold Schwarzenegger movies placed the name “Schwarzenegger” in all-caps at the top of the ad. Gingold also noted that he included in the book some of his favourite quotes from his favourite dyspeptic movie critic Rex Reed; such as, for example, Reed’s line that The NeverEnding Story was “worse than girl scout cookies.”

From the book launch in Concordia’s York Amphitheatre I crossed the street to the De Sève Theatre. There, I watched a program of short films by experimental director Nao Yoshigai. Yoshigai’s a dancer and choreographer as well as filmmaker, and her work has already met with considerable acclaim; her piece “Grand Bouquet” was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Fantasia’s program, Nao Yoshigai x 4: Of Blooming Flowers and Dead Skin gathered four of her shorts together, culminating with “Grand Bouquet.”

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The fourth and last movie I saw on July 16 was the most experimental movie I’d seen at Fantasia, not only this year but possibly in all the time I’ve been going to the festival. Before that feature, though, was a short almost as strange.

“Bavure” was directed and written by Donato Sansone. An animator’s hand mixes paints, makes an image, then remakes it, then remakes that, and so on through an increasingly cosmic story. A woman is made pregnant, a child comes out, and becomes an astronaut, and meets aliens, and on to a bleak climax. ‘Bavure’ means smear, or mistake, and the imagery of an animator remaking a smear of paints into a series of images fits. The animation technique’s a striking and effective way to move from image to image, the story’s cute, and at 5 minutes the film doesn’t outlast its welcome.

Next was the feature. It was called SHe, a movie directed, written, and edited by Zhou Shengwei. A work of stop-motion animation, Zhou made 268 models for the film himself, and took 58,000 photos over the course of 6 years to make it.

The film’s a staggering work of imagination. None of the characters are remotely human. They are, in fact, based on shoes. In a world of strange creatures assembled from everyday objects, entities based off of men’s shoes oppress entities based off of women’s shoes. One of the latter escapes and has a daughter, but the mother has to find a way to get the resources to feed the child. Only by adopting a disguise as a man’s shoe and entering into the dreadful danger of a pseudo-capitalist workplace can the two survive. But strange things happen in the workplace: the lady-shoe does not fit in, but turns out to have abilities the other worker-shoes don’t, attracting the attention of the boss of the shoes — who then draws her into an even stranger behind-the-scenes world where the tables start to turn.

At least that’s how I understand the basic plot. The film has no dialogue (vocal sounds come from Lv Fuyang), and the lack of human features on the characters give the audience some space to find their own meanings for things. The body language of these creatures is I think relatively clear, but it still requires some focus to follow events. Or it did for me; perhaps that’s a function of how I parse images as opposed to words.

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October 29th, 2019, will be a very bad day for secret mad-money stashes, vacation change jars, and even kids’ college funds, but it will be a great (shall I say monstrously great?) day for kaiju lovers everywhere. Why? Because on that day, the prestigious Criterion Collection will release a colossal blu-ray set containing all fifteen Godzilla films from the Showa Era (the Showa Era being the years of Emperor Hirohito’s reign, from 1926 to 1989.) Never before have all of these films been collected together in a uniform edition of the highest technical quality… but now they will be, just in time for rubber-suit monster enthusiasts to have the greatest Halloween film festival ever.

Criterion numbers its releases, and in recent months speculation has been mounting — what would the company choose to follow number 999? (John Sayles’ fine period drama, Matewan.) Would it be a foreign film or an American one? A silent movie or one from the sound era? A polished studio masterpiece or a raw, rebellious indie? My money was on Sam Peckinpah’s apocalyptic western, The Wild Bunch, but on July 25th the suspense ended with Criterion’s announcement that number 1000 would not be a single film at all, but instead would be an unprecedented set. Godzilla: the Showa-Era Films, 1954-1975 promises to be a must-have for all Criterion completists and for every fan of the King of the Monsters.

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