TALES OF THE UNCANNY

Featuring: Kier-La Janisse, David Gregory, Eli Roth, Joe Dante, Mark Hartley, Mick Garris, Ernest Dickerson, Joko Anwar, Ramsey Campbell, David DeCoteau, Kim Newman, Jovanka Vuckovic, Luigi Cozzi, Tom Savini, Jenn Wexler, Larry Fessenden, Richard Stanley, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Brian Yuzna, Gary Sherman, Rebekah McKendry and Peter Strickland.

Director: David Gregory.

AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE: Screening with NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR 35th Anniversary presentation at Monster Fest from 1:30pm on Sunday, 6th December, Cinema Nova, Carlton, Melbourne.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Anthology films, those critically under-valued providers of thrills and chills for generations of genre fans, are afforded an appropriately passionate, often giddily infectious reappraisal in Tales of the Uncanny. Severin Films’ boss David Gregory, working with renowned horror academic Kier-La Janisse, have corralled over 60 exponents of cinema’s darkest artistry to recount and respect the greatest short-form film narratives in movie history. Refreshingly, the doco compiles two Best of... lists - for whole films and individual segments -in a gesture that will help new fans seek out the finest of the genre.  

While even the best of anthology films suffer from the inevitable saggy segment (a common trait acknowledged by the filmmakers and their interviewees), no such dip in tone or quality infects Gregory’s buoyant love letter. Tales of the Uncanny tracks the portmanteau format from its origins in Germanic puppet theatre and the collected works of Poe and Lovecraft in publications such as Grahams and Weird Tales magazines through the very earliest days of filmmaking. 

Anthologies played a key role in early European cinema, such as the German masterpieces Eerie Tales (Dir: Richard Oswald, 1919) and Waxwork (Dirs: Leo Birinsky and Paul Leni, 1924) and the great British work Dead of Night (1945), featuring director Alberto Cavalcanti’s classic segment ‘The Ventriliquist’s Dummy’ (with Michael Redgrave; pictured, below). Anthologies soon found favour within Hollywood’s star-driven studio system; director Julien Duvivier’s 1943 pic Flesh and Fantasy boasted the dream cast of Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G Robinson and Charles Boyer.

The obsessively-minded cavalcade of contributors - amongst them, filmmakers (Eli Roth, Joko Anwar, Brian Yuzna, Larry Fessenden, Jenn Wexler, Mattie Do); authors and academics (Kim Newman, Amanda Reyes, Maitland McDonagh); genre giants (Tom Savini, Roger Corman, Luigi Cozzi, Joe Dante, Greg Nicotero, David Del Valle); and, Antipodean talent (Mark Hartley, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Mark Savage) - recount seminal moments in the anthology classics of their formative film years. The coverage is exhaustive, but extra attention is paid to such landmark movies as Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963); Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964); and, Histoires extraordinaires (1968; aka Spirits of the Dead), featuring segments by Louis Malle, Roger Vadim and Frederico Fellini.

Even at a relatively lean 103 minutes, Gregory and Janisse are able to fully profile U.K. outfit Amicus Productions, kings of Britain’s golden age of anthology films (Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, 1965; Torture Garden, 1967; The House That Dripped Blood, 1970; Tales from the Crypt, 1972 (pictured, top; with Joan Collins); From Beyond the Grave, 1974); highlight small-screen anthology horror, from the groundbreaking work of Dan Curtis (Trilogy of Terror, 1975; Dead of Night, 1977) to the resurgent anthology TV-series boom of the ‘80s (Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt, Freddy’s Nightmares); and, the classics of the modern era, both adored (Creepshow, 1982; Twilight Zone The Movie, 1984; V/H/S, 2012) and ignored (Cat’s Eye, 1985; From a Whisper to a Scream, 1987; Southbound, 2015).

Tales of the Uncanny has done its job if the viewer comes away with a list of films to re/watch, and it certainly achieves that. It also succeeds in painting the portmanteau genre as a form of film storytelling that needs to be more seriously addressed by both mainstream audiences and film historians. At their very best, anthology films offer the most unique of movie-going experiences and, with credit to David Gregory and Kier-La Janisse, ought now be examined more respectfully.    

KUSO

Stars: Iesha Coston, Zack Fox, The Buttress, Shane Carpenter, Oumi Zumi, Mali Matsuda, Tim Heidecker, Hannibal Buress, Donnell Rawlings, Anders Holm, Regan Farquhar, David Firth and George Clinton.
Writers: Steven Ellison, David Firth and Zack Fox.
Director: ‘Steve’, aka Flying Lotus.

CONTENT WARNING: Some details in the review may offend.

Reviewed at The Factory Theatre as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival; Closing Night selection, Sunday September 17, 2017.

Rating: 2.5/5

When John Waters asked Divine to eat a fresh dog poo in Pink Flamingos (1972), or Pier Paolo Pasolini tortured the innocents in Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), it was cinema that confronted its own power to influence and defied standards of decency within society. They were frames of an altered reality, a dangerous and challenging new use of the art form. The most important (frankly, only) consideration that arises after watching Kuso is, ‘Can cinema still perform that function?’

The debut feature from musician and hip-hop artist Steve Ellison, a.k.a. ‘Steve’, a.k.a. Flying Lotus, features a scabby, pustule-covered young man having sex with the mouth of a cancerous talking boil that has grown on the neck of his equally putrid girlfriend. The sequence comes after 90-odd minutes of raucous bad taste; penises are pierced, faeces are smeared, eyeballs are consumed then regurgitated, all set to a soundscape of screeching incoherence. Kuso is an anthology film, the segmented narrative able to afford Ellison greater opportunity to explore his scatological, menstrual and anal fixations.

Of course, that all sounds pretty ‘shocking’, as was certainly his intention above all else. There is very little indication this film has any greater ambition than to disgust and disturb the audience that will seek this out when search engines turn up…oh, let’s go with ‘Giant Anus Cockroach,’ or ‘Laser Ray Abortion’. It is all set in a post-earthquake L.A., where the freshly scabby population has turned moronic (turned?) and transdimensional portals exist that allow hairy creatures with TV monitor faces to live amongst us. Maybe Ellison is working some satirical angle, commenting on the nature of modern living or the destruction of society by the media or something like that, but it seems unlikely.

But is it possible for cinema that sets out to shock to achieve the genuinely shocking anymore? Kuso is certainly distasteful, but can make-up and prop department versions of shit, piss, cum and blood really disturb when those who seek those diversions can surf all night to their heart’s content. Society’s standard bearers for ‘goodness’ will feel compelled to rise in defiance of ‘art’ like Kuso, whether that be the current generation of trigger-happy PC-enriched snowflakes or the ageing ultra-conservative baby boomers that initially embraced then abandoned counterculture principles. But is the content worthy of their fight? Might they just be wagging fingers at a naughty little boy who drew the movie equivalent of a pee-pee on the wall with his new box of digital crayons?

The film’s debut at Sundance was met with walkouts, although subsequent reports indicate this was less about paying customers being rattled by the content and more about industry types realising there was little more to Ellison’s film than bluster and bravado.

In all fairness, there is a little bit more. The various narrative strands are bookended by some wildly imaginative montage animation, as if Terry Gilliam had helped Charles Manson with his film school assignment, and one truly beautiful CGI-rendered sequence features frozen chickens being launched by an immense spacecraft over Los Angeles (pictured, above). In 'Smear', the best of the anthology segments, a diarrheic mutant schoolboy connects with a giant sphincter in the woods as a sort of surrogate father, affording Ellison a modicum of sentimentality to fill his frame with some warm composition. There is no denying that some passages achieve the truly nightmarish, though that accomplishment brings further disconnect from character engagement, an element desperately lacking in most of the film.

Loud, objectionable, occasionally funny but mostly trying, the visual experimentation and adherence to all things ugly quickly grows tiresome. By the time Ellison unveils the ‘neck boil sex’ moment, Kuso has devolved into a filmic manifestation of a high school boys’ diary, filled with gross, puerile wanderings of the mind that might shock the kid’s mom, but just bring raised eyebrows from everyone else.