JFL

When porn came to cinemas in the 1970s, it faced the challenge of how to entice viewers to watch feature-length films on the big screen. One of the logical ways to do that was to use and enhance existing genres of erotic and sexploitation films. In the case of German production, this meant that porn became the logical culmination of the popular titillating comedies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which comprised lascivious and deliberately subversive variations on the conservative Heimatfilme of the 1950s. This lineage is apparent precisely in the most famous title of the golden era of German porn, Billian’s Sensational Janine. The narrative about the title character’s sexual awakening thoroughly copies the motifs and style of the Heimatfilme, with the exception of the fact that the carefree youth, the wisdom of the traditional authorities and the cohesiveness of the family take a significantly smuttier and more explicit form. Stylistically, the film is akin to the costume-drama and historical Heimatfilme, which delighted in the false idyll of the nineteenth century and depicted the life of the nobility and bourgeoisie of the time (another direction was represented by films celebrating the simple life in the German and Austrian countryside, especially in the Alps, which was caricatured by racy comedies, particularly Three Swedes in Upper Bavaria, and porn variations such as Bienenstich im Liebesnest). Adherence to the acting style of the Heimatfilme and, in particular, the period language serve as the basis for a large part of the humour in Sensational Janine, which remains completely lost in translation. Humour is also a key aspect of the sex scenes, in which much more attention is paid to the exposition and its development into a complete scene (see the brilliant sequences with the photographer and the priest) than to the individual simple exercises. Sensational Janine is surprising in its concept of sex, which goes beyond not only the obsessive performance of today's mainstream porn production, but also the delightful debauchery of the golden era. Sex here is not an expression of desire or lust, but simply fun. It does not matter at all with whom or where the deed is done; the only measure is the amount of pleasure it brings. The film thus stands above the usual gender formulas even though the exposition of a number of the scenes may give the impression that the women are treated merely as objects and commodities. On the contrary, however, the likable female protagonist remains a completely autonomous and headstrong person in every situation, as she is only concerned with whether she will have an orgasm and she is completely indifferent with respect to the circumstances in which she has it. It is also worth mentioning the film’s playful meta-humour, which is apparent in the its opening and closing passages, where scenes originally framed as diegesis suddenly break the fourth wall when the protagonist begins to directly address the audience while enjoying physical pleasures. Though the success of Billian’s first Janine led to a number of sequels, none of them feature the amazingly natural and distinctively down-to-earth Patricia Rhomberg in the title role, nor do they reach the heights of fun, playfulness and sophisticated debauchery of Sensational Janine, which deserves its status as cult classic.

Voyage of the Rock Aliens is a brilliantly campy flick that offers a thick concentrate of 1980s pop culture, including its roots in the trash of the preceding decades. Surprisingly, however, the film wasn’t the unintended result of madness, but was rather created entirely deliberately. According to the screenwriter (yes, this film actually had a screenplay), the intention was to make a film that would replicate the effect experienced by a viewer channel surfing late at night. As such, Voyage’s blend of music videos, teen romance, trashy monster flicks, sci-fi B-movies and horror movies about homicidal maniacs suddenly makes sense.

Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends was conceived and created by renowned animator Craig McCracken, who previously worked on production of the popular series Dexter’s Laboratory and later gained fame for his original work The Powerpuff Girls. Whereas his previous projects were partially based on classic pop-culture motifs, which gained a degree of uniqueness due to their distinctive stylisation and incorporation into the characters of children’s heroes (particularly brilliant and somewhat mad scientists and superheroes), this time McCracken came up with a completely original concept with the assistance of animator Lauren Faust, who was later behind the international phenomenon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Around the psychological phenomenon of imaginary friends, he built a world in which such companions become real. That in turn brought about the creation of countless bizarre, colourful and often surreal characters comprising imaginary friends, each of whom has a completely distinctive appearance and character, although dozens of them appear only very briefly in the series. The most attractive aspect of the series is the personalities of the characters who appear in every episode and turn even everyday activities into burlesque escapades through their interactions. Deep within the series beats a melancholic heart in the form of the motif of friendship that cannot last forever, but memories of that friendship certainly can.

In his last directorial effort, experimental filmmaker Antony Balch fully expressed his love of trash and low culture, which he had previously vented as the owner of a distribution company and two cinemas with a dramaturgically distinctive programme. Horror Hospital is thus an entertaining intermingling of the style of classic British horror movies with the aesthetics and attitude of swinging London at the time. The formulaic premise of a mad scientist is thus transformed into a whirlwind of exaggerated attractions and caricatured clichés bound together by stoner logic. This is not a parody, but rather an utterly distinctive blend of two seemingly contradictory styles, as foreshadowed a year earlier by Hammer Film Productions’ Dracula A.D. 1972. Whereas that film was based entirely on the contrast of a classic monster and a modern setting, Horror Hospital offers an entertainingly delirious conglomeration of both styles. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the film has the purely anti-establishment premise of a sanatorium where a mad scientist turns intractable young people into absolutely obedient lobotomised zombies, as well as experimentally rendered psychedelic sequences and characters such as the duo of biker henchmen, who come across as a demonic version of Daft Punk, a twisted and unpredictable midget next to whom even the guy from Game of Thrones pales and, of equal importance, the brilliant central villain, who comes across as a clone of Ian McKellen and Bella Lugosi (and is played by the late Alfred the Butler from the 1990s Batman films). As a result, the film as a whole doesn’t seem incoherent, but rather radiates creativity and the impish charm with which it approaches classic horror clichés.

Along with Jesús Franco, Jean Rollin is one of the most overrated directors in the area of trash movies. Some filmmakers are deservedly renowned for their ability to make formulaic sequences more interesting despite limited budgets or, as the case may be, to draw dramatic potential out of a weak story and construct a narrative on it. Conversely, Rollin proves to be a desperate dilettante who completely squanders any potential with his futile directing. This is extremely obvious in The Grapes of Death, which a more capable director could have turned into a devastatingly intense horror movie, but Rollin turns the strong screenplay into a formalistically dismal bit of naïveté. Somewhere inside the film, there is the potential for a unique, gloomy horror movie that would turn the concept of apocalyptic zombie flicks on its head. Whereas such movies set most of the action in interiors, which, as symbols of home, protect the characters against the evil coming from outside, this time the female protagonist walks through a spectral landscape of desolate French mountains with old stone farmhouses and dilapidated homes. The agoraphobic motif is then combined with claustrophobic paranoia in the second half of the film, when it becomes clear that the villages and buildings offer no escape from the infection that is spreading through the countryside. Like Romero’s The Crazies, from which this film is clearly derived, places of civilisation become scenes of the breakdown of civilisational rationality and community when infection robs people of reason. An amusing curiosity is the purely French motif of the spread of infection, which takes place here through infected grapes and the wine made from them, which puts beer drinkers in the role of saviours of the world and exterminators of the infected. Unfortunately, all of the film’s positive aspects and potential are nullified the amateurish treatment and non-dramatically realised sequences, as well as the overall lack of motivation and the half-baked nature of the whole thing.

Olinka Bérová’s second Italian engagement is far from the jadedness, stiffness and chastity of the preceding Lucruzia. This time, curious viewers not only can enjoy more shots featuring the exposed star Jessie, but can also get them served up in a riotously entertaining tale from the age of antiquity. Though Poppea’s Hot Nights is pure B-movie trash, its overall levity makes this exploitative look at the debauchery of ancient times a relatively tolerable spectacle.

Though Lucrezia, the first of Olinka Bérová’s two Italian engagements, promises an exploitative look at the juicy peripeties of the debauched lives of the infamous Borgia family, the result is a tired costume spectacle that is surprising because of its modesty instead of the desired attractions. It could even be said that the famous femme fatale finds herself here in the role of a tragic and distinctly passive tragic heroine and her life story is reshaped as a tale from a romance novel. Faced with these deficiencies, it is no longer possible to cover up the fact that the only reason anyone would watch this film today is the lecherous pleasure of viewing the exposed assets of a popular Czech star. In that respect, however, the film requires a great deal of attention from viewers because, due to the editing and camerawork, the desired nudity comes and goes as quickly as the beating of a hummingbird’s wings.

Made with characteristic haste and second-rate actors under the auspices of Hollywood’s factory of trashy dreams, Cannon Films, Number One with a Bullet is a highly generic variation on the buddy movies of the 1980s, of which 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon are the best examples.

This is indeed a distinctive variation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but the result is not so much due to any creative intention but simply to business calculations. Cannon Films, run by movie enthusiasts and hustlers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, was famous for, among other things, being the first Hollywood company to introduce and boldly operate the system of pre-selling films to foreign distributors, which today is an entirely common practice in film markets. In practice, this means that a distributor does not buy a film based on seeing the finished work, but as early as in the production or pre-production phase, or even based only on the concept or the cast. On the one hand, this system enables producers to have the essential inflow of the funding needed to complete the given project, but the case of Cannon Films and Journey to the Centre of the Earth clearly illustrates the drawbacks of this system. Cannon received money solely on the basis of the title, but by that time, the company already had major financial problems, so it paradoxically could not afford to make the film for which it had already collected the cash, but at the same time it was contractually obligated to deliver a film called Journey to the Centre of the Earth to distributors. With their kitchen-sink approach, however, the masters killed two birds with one stone. They already had the prepared material for the sequel to Albert Pyun’s bizarre Alien from L.A. project involving an underground dystopia, which was a commercial flop. So they simply took the scenes that had already been shot for this completely different film and hired a new director to shoot a handful of extra inexpensive scenes that serve as an introduction to the resulting film, rooting it in the style of a family farce. The result not only has nothing at all in common with Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but it doesn’t even work as a film in its own right. The attempt to combine the completely bizarre world of Pyun’s Alien from L.A. with a family movie had the consequence that the narrative is absolutely incoherent. Some of the characters simply disappear from the narrative without a trace, some passages that were originally intended to be part of a linear plot in the originally intended sequel are used here only as fragments in the characters’ dreams, key plot motifs remain entirely unresolved, and some passages and individual shots have obvious dubbing and were originally intended to be set in a completely different context. We can draw comparisons with avant-garde and editing-based projects, where the establishment of a new context nullifies the original meaning of the scenes and forms a new meaning, but in practice that doesn’t change the fact that Cannon’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a completely incoherent clusterfuck. It is a fascinating relic and a testament to the workings of Cannon Films at the time of its demise, but as a film, it is simply unwatchable.

Hard Target reappears years later in a longer working version (116 minutes), which is considered to be Woo‘s director’s cut. It differs from the theatrically released version mainly in the differently edited and composed action sequences and a handful of Woo‘s trademarks, primarily where his work with pathos is concerned. The most noticeable change is the mirror montages that literally reveal the motivations of Fouchon and Boudreaux, while Henriksen‘s antagonist is introduced while playing the piano in a spacious mansion, which is intercut with documentary footage of wild game being killed by hunters, and Van Damme‘s protagonist receives a shotgun from his uncle in his cottage in the closing part of the film, which is interspersed with shots of people killed by Fouchon; whereas killing is a form of amusement for the bad guy, it is a means of revenge and punishing evil for the hero. Furthermore, the working version contains two sequences of Chance and Natasha coming together, where we learn more about these characters, but there is also a full spectrum of additional shots and brief passages. Conversely, the theatrically released version contains a much longer and more bombastic elimination of the antagonist – in the working version, Van Damme simply kicks Henriksen once from a high jump, launching Henriksen onto a pile of rubbish, and then throws a grenade at his feet, eliciting a look of annoyed resignation from the villain, and finito. ____ From today‘s perspective, Hard Target is an amazing relic due to the fact that they simply don’t make many movies like this anymore; in the new millennium, we are witnesses to the extinction of the mid-budget action-movie category. This is connected with changes in distribution and the gradual restriction of the market for physical media for home use – only big-budget, high-concept spectacles and sophisticated, expensive genre flicks make it to the cinemas today, while the video market is now driven solely by low-budget C-movies and acts of desperation from the likes of Asylum and Tomcat Films. Though it is still possible to find ambitious filmmakers with a distinctive action style in the latter category, they are rarely given the ideal constellation of resources and appropriate actors to show what they can do (see Isaac Florentine and Undisputed III, William Kaufman and Sinners & Saints and John Hyams and Universal Soldier: Regeneration). In its day, Hard Target was one of several generously financed B-movie action projects that enticed viewers with a mid-level star in the lead role and a fresh concept, or rather a variation on a traditional theme. Whereas other contemporary projects in the given category, such as Universal Soldier, Under Siege and Timecop, were based on a strong high-concept premise, Hard Target has a surprisingly straightforwardly trashy screenplay. In this case, no one even looked too hard at the story, because the main attraction was the rising star Van Damme, who presented a new image (though from today‘s perspective, his greasy mullet and raincoat seem rather pathetic, but values were a bit different back in the dark days of the 1990s), and primarily the involvement of the renowned master of action choreography from Hong Kong, which promised a completely unprecedented spectacle (as the film‘s promotional materials repeatedly emphasised at the time). Hard Target is thus a representation of the ideal combination of Woo‘s bloody ballet and an American genre film, where the master was hired specifically for his qualities, but his style had not yet strayed into the realm of bombastic melodramas. Apart from the action passages, the film is interesting as an American B-movie with an unusually bold local atmosphere. The distinctively thematised Louisiana setting, imbued with the motifs of unemployment and poverty, which are further developed to the level of the crisis of the role of men in society and in the context of family, elevate the film above the level of an ordinary, generic action film in the same way that the use of local and historical motifs enhanced Woo's Hong Kong movies.