Black Gate

After the box-office success of RKO’s The Spanish Main (1945) and Sinbad the Sailor (1947), in 1948 Warner Bros. re-released The Adventures of Robin Hood to theaters, where it did almost as well as its first time ‘round in 1938. The rest of Hollywood took notice, and soon every studio had two or three historical adventures in the development pipeline. The postwar swashbuckler boom was on!

Walt Disney wasn’t about to be left behind. With a pile of money parked in European banks, he decided to open a British studio to make his first live-action films, using The Adventures of Robin Hood as the template: historical adventures with broad appeal based on familiar stories from public domain sources (because why pay royalties?). And he hit a home run the first time at bat with Treasure Island.

Treasure Island

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA/UK, 1950
Director: Byron Haskin
Source: Disney DVD

Walt Disney liked to adapt well-known classic tales, so when he decided to make his first live-action feature, it’s not surprising that he chose Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with its child protagonist and adventures in exotic locales. What is surprising is how hard-edged and gritty it is, considering Disney’s later (well-earned) reputation for peddling bland conformist mediocrity. This 1950 film is as tense and dynamic as its pre-Hays Code 1934 predecessor, and just as closely adapted from the novel, though exact choices of scenes and dialogue vary between the two. Moreover, the Disney version is in vibrant full color.

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Mickey Reece is a musician turned underground filmmaker with over two dozen features to his credit. In 2019 he came out with Climate of the Hunter, which he directed and wrote with John Selvidge. It streamed on-demand at this year’s Fantasia Festival, and it’s billed as a cross between old-fashioned movie melodramas in the style of Douglas Sirk — what is sometimes called a “woman’s film” — and 70s vampire movies. That’s an intriguing blend of genres. But I didn’t think the result did justice to either.

Climate of the Hunter starts with the glimpse of a psychiatric case file dated 1977, after which we see the subject of the file: Alma (Ginger Gilmartin), a sculptor in late middle age. She and her lawyer sister Elizabeth (Mary Buss), both single, are waiting for their childhood friend Wesley (Ben Hall) to join them at the cottage where Alma’s now living. Wesley turns out to be a well-travelled Goethe-quoting man of the world, and over the course of several dinners together a romantic tension develops among the three of them, which grows worse as first Wesley’s son (Sheridan McMichael) and then Elizabeth’s daughter (Danielle Evon Ploeger) arrive. Alma, meanwhile, has begun to harbour dark suspicions about Wesley — who she comes to believe is one of the undead.

This is a solid enough structure, but the execution doesn’t work. There’s a lack of tension to both the development of the romance and the mystery of Wesley’s nature. The tone is one of uncommitted irony, flatness without humour. It’s not just that there’s no sense of building horror, there’s no involvement in the characters.

That’s partly because those characters seem to belong in different movies. Elizabeth and to an extent Wesley have the earnestness of melodrama, but the disaffected Alma has no particular narrative chemistry with either. She spends much of her time smoking pot with her rustic neighbour (Jacob Snovel), who rejoices in the name BJ Beavers and acts like it. That sounds like a jarring tonal clash with a story about a creature of the night, and so it is. The actors individually give fine performances, but collectively don’t mesh. The tone is inconsistent, each one nailing a slightly different register of irony.

The plot’s simple enough, but nevertheless manages to be unlikely. Alma’s family worries about her mental health because she chooses to live in a fairly large cottage in the woods instead of a condo in the city. Elizabeth’s daughter throws herself at Wesley for reasons that, to be polite, remain unclear. The question of Wesley’s nature is apparently resolved, then the movie proceeds as if it weren’t.

Visually, the movie’s interesting. Although clearly shot on a relatively low budget, 1970s-vintage lenses on the camera produce a distinctive period look; a certain cruciform twinkle to glints of light recalls a past era. The aspect ratio’s 4:3, further making it feel like a TV soap opera. And there’s a nice use of deep dark shadows, sometimes obscuring even the actors’ faces. Add to that a few interesting formal touches — for example, the way a voice-over names every part of a meal as it’s served, while the dish is photographed at its most luscious. There are ideas here, and some craftsmanship. But it doesn’t come out to much.

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Nobuhiko Obayashi, the director best known for the surreal 1977 horror film House (Hausu, ハウス), died on April 10 this year. His final film is Labyrinth of Cinema (海辺の映画館 キネマの玉手箱), which he wrote as well as directed. Just as visually extravagant as House, it grapples with weightier themes — specifically, the nature of cinema and of war, and how film can be used to protest war. It’s therefore also a rumination on history, specifically the history of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how that history was depicted in the movies of its time. And Labyrinth gets at these things through the frame of a fantasy story about movie spectators unstuck in time and narrative. Obayashi swung for the fences with this film, a three-hour long experience that feels like a career summation, a director reflecting on his life and craft and art.

It begins in an almost essayistic manner, with the musings of a narrator named Fanta G (Yukihiro Takahashi), floating among memory fragments in a time machine that eventually brings him to the present day and the seaside city of Onomichi (Obayashi’s home). The last cinema in town will be closing at dawn, but before that happens an audience will take in one last picture show. And then some of members of that audience are caught up on the images onscreen — three young men chasing a mysterious teen named Noriko (Rei Yoshida).

The film ranges across the years roughly from 1868 to 1945, talking about Japan’s history, how it played out in film, and how Japanese film itself developed. The decline of samurai and the rise of mass mechanised warfare is seen through a peculiar lens, the garrulous Fanta explaining everything necessary as the film goes along. The characters from the audience take on different roles, playing out different stories across different genres and forms. If the frame concept of the Onomichi movie house is self-consciously surreal, the scenarios that incorporate the audience members grow more serious as the film goes on.

The movie begins with a blitz of images and ideas, introducing concepts at a furious pace to the point that ten minutes in I almost stopped taking notes. Not only do we get Fanta G’s time travelling, and then the cinema, and then an assortment of characters, but we’re told that the film will be referring to the writings of poet Chuya Nakahara (1907-1937), and soon get dance numbers and black-and-white scenes and title cards and even passages like silent film. And a visual approach seemingly based on collage, compositing together images like an odd kind of cartoon. Thankfully, it slows down, and in fact continues to slow as the film goes along. But not before a range of genres appears onscreen — musicals and yakuza films and samurai movies — somehow all coexisting.

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Day 5 of Fantasia began for me by watching Simon Barrett give bad career advice. Barrett’s the writer of horror movies such as The Guest and You’re Next, and he took questions from an online audience for what turned out to be more than two hours in a self-effacing discussion about how the modern movie industry works (or fails to), and how aspiring filmmakers can prepare themselves for entering that world. It was a funny, detailed, and generous discussion, which you can find here.

After that I watched my first feature film of the day, Detention (Fanxiao, 返校), a movie from Taiwan directed by John Hsu (his first feature, in fact) from a script Hsu wrote with Fu Kai-Ling and Chien Shih-Keng. It’s based on a game from Red Candle Games, conceived by Yao Shun-Ting, which has apparently become a cultural phenomenon in Taiwan. There’s already been a novelisation of the game; the movie version of the story was released in Taiwan late last year, and became a box office smash.

It’s set in 1962, during the decades-long period of martial law in Taiwan known as the White Terror. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, wake up in their school. They don’t remember falling asleep, the school looks different and eerier, and they’re apparently alone except for demonic versions of their teachers and creatures that might be ghosts or demons. A flood hems them in the school grounds. They have to survive and figure out what’s happened to them, and this set-up suggests the story’s video-game roots.

But the development of this concept’s surprisingly powerful. We start with the perspective of the young woman, Fang (Gingle Wang), but soon learn that the young man, Wei (Chin-Hua Tseng), was involved with a secret book club, copying and reading the work of forbidden authors like Rabindranath Tagore. As the two explore the school and deal with the horrors therein, we learn more about the book club and the two faculty members guiding it, Chang (Fu Meng-Po) and Yin (Cecilia Choi). The dangers that come with being part of the club are made clear, and we see the punishments handed out to people merely suspected of possessing literature deemed subversive. (So, yes, the first rule of book club is nobody talks about book club. And for good reason.)

But we also get an early flash of imagery suggesting Wei has or will meet with a rough fate. In fact the movie plays with chronology a lot, and very effectively. As we learn about what’s brought the two youths into the darkened school, we see past events from multiple angles, with different levels of knowledge, and the film does an excellent job of letting us know just enough at just the right time. Nor do the flashbacks slow the story down overmuch. In fact one particularly extensive flashback struck me as perfectly placed — taking us away from the nightmare environment long enough, and at the right place, that it keeps the horror from becoming normalised: we return for the climax, and the place is still disconcerting.

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