Black Gate

Collectors (도굴) is a slick heist movie with lots of action, and it comes from South Korea courtesy of director Park Jung-bae and writer Hwang Dong-hyuk. Released last year in Korea, it was a significant hit, sitting at the top of the box office for three weeks and finishing as the 11th biggest Korean film of the year. It’s a crowd-pleaser, to be sure.

It follows Dong-goo (Lee Je-hoon), a thief of antiquities and historical artifacts, who has a glib attitude and a tragic backstory. He begins the movie by swiping a golden buddha statue, which leads him into a yet larger scheme, and an association with a crooked rich man (Song Young-Chang). And this leads him to another scheme; set-pieces proliferate as he gathers allies and prepares for the biggest job of all, stealing an ancient sword from the middle of a major city. We get intricate plans, fight scenes, and twists and turns aplenty.

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King Car (Carro Rei) is a peculiar and beguiling piece of science-fictional magical realism from Brazil’s Renata Pinheiro, who directed and co-wrote with Sérgio Oliveira and Leo Pyrata. The least that can be said is that the film certainly has a distinctive voice. It’s not filled with splashy special effects, but it manages to tell a large-scale story with an inventive structure and a daring approach.

It follows Uno (Luciano Pedro Jr.), the son of a taxi magnate who turns against the supremacy of the car in order to study ecological agriculture. And yet when a new law promises to ban cars more than 15 years old, Uno and his eccentric mechanic uncle Zé (Matheus Nachtergaele) upgrade old cars into a new fleet of sentient automobiles of the future. For Uno has the ability to speak to cars, and to one car in particular. This car, King Car, becomes the prototype of the new fleet despite the misgivings of Uno’s friends. But when things spiral out of control and a disturbing popular movement forms, who else can Uno turn to for help in setting things right?

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Dr. Caligari is a definitely a feature film. We can start there. But let’s be careful; this is not The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the classic German Expressionist movie from 1920. This Dr. Caligari is an American movie from 1989, directed by Stephen Sayadian and co-written by Sayadian with Jerry Stahl (Wikipedia tells me it was briefly known as Dr. Caligari 3000 when it first came out). A new 4K restoration by Acid Pictures is coming to blu-ray, and it played this year’s Fantasia Film Festival first. The film’s usually called an exploitation movie, but it’s unclear to me who or what it’s exploiting, exactly. What it is, in essence, is unclassifiable weirdness from the depths of the 1980s.

There is something that looks like a plot. At an insane asylum run by a woman named Doctor Caligari (Madeleine Reynal), granddaughter of the famous one, inmates are being subjected to a dangerous new procedure. Caligari’s experimenting with ways to extract the nature of one person and inject it into another. Shenanigans follow, mostly revolving around a nymphomaniac (Laura Albert) and a cannibalistic serial killer (John Durbin). Meanwhile, members of the staff are having doubts, and may be ready to revolt against the maniacal Caligari.

This doesn’t really capture the experience of the film, though. It’s a thoroughly artificial, self-aware movie. It’s conscious of the artifice of its story, and pushes that artifice as much as it can visually and narratively. Performances stand out for straight-faced campiness. Dialogue’s quotable in its weirdness: “ECT, my favourite three letters in the alphabet,” one patient declares, and then “Juice me, I’m a shiver boy.” A scarecrow in one sequence declares “There’s much to be learned from a despairing shriek.” Another character declares “I’m not a hysteric, I’m a CPA!” The nymphomaniac patient recalls “My husband had an erection, once. Silly, really.” Early on someone says “My feelings are like filthy prayers I want to scream in your face.” And on and on.

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Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (UK, 1974)

William Hobbs (1939-2018) was the greatest director of European-style stage fencing of his generation. An English actor trained to the stage at the Old Vic, Hobbs was fight director at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company in the Sixties before making is first big splash in films with Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers in 1973. As a fencing choreographer, he was known for his more realistic, rough-and-tumble approach to cinematic fighting, having the actors expend effort to exhaustion, depicting combat as a desperate and fearful endeavor. This was a revelation that overturned the Hollywood standard of elegant and balletic fencing as exemplified by the swordwork of actors like Basil Rathbone, Stewart Granger, and Cornel Wilde. In a William Hobbs fencing match, an actor was as likely to strike a blow with a handy broomstick as with a rapier.

Hobbs’ most influential work was certainly the swordplay he choreographed for Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, after which he was the go-to guy for decades for any British or American production that featured fencing, his credits including Excalibur (1981), Ladyhawke (1985), Rob Roy (1995), all the way through to Game of Thrones (2011). In between he continued to work as a director for stage fencing, mainly for productions of Shakespeare plays — he directed the swordwork in Hamlet over two dozen times, including the 1990 film with Mel Gibson. “I do think, what the hell am I going to do this time to make it different?” Hobbs said in 2008. “A fight has to grow out of the situation of the play. There’s the text, and you’ve got to follow it truthfully and honestly.”

This week, let’s take a look at three of Hobbs’ earliest films as fight director.

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