JFL

Copper is a typical by-product of the era of quality TV and concept series, i.e. a second-rate production that tries to fool a gullible audience. In terms of concept, we have here an almost paint-by-numbers checklist of how to pretend to be an HBO product: an ensemble cast composed of familiar faces, an established filmmaker as executive producer and the promise of an epic spectacle. But this isn’t HBO, so the production boasts the name of Barry Levinson (who probably makes his living simply by lending his name to the credits of television productions), the most famous star is Franka Potente and the grand concept falls damned far from it apparent inspiration, Gangs of New York. Copper is appealing (and basically entertaining) in how it obviously and superficially tries to impress viewers. It becomes clear in the first ten minutes of the first episode, with its high concentration of clichés and formulas, that Copper does not intend to leave anything to chance: we start with shots of grime and poverty so that viewers can see that nothing is being sugar-coated, then we throw in some modern action with blood spatter, and then we cram in some bedroom scenes and bare asses in order to make it clear how grown-up this series really is. Of course, everything is rendered in the hyper-realistic style of blockbusters (so the filth and boldness are truly artificial) and all of the exteriors are filmed in medium shots or with a view that is in some way obstructed so as to save money on sets. On the other hand, it’s necessary to admit that such series are actually ideal fare for the average television viewer. Thanks to their overwrought yet essentially empty melancholy and bleakness, they offer attractions similar to those found in their much better competition, but they don’t burden viewers with any real complexity. And thanks to their pretentiousness, they give audiences the impression that they are watching something extraordinary.

- the first generation, or the first two season – Skins was peculiarly nominated for a bunch of awards in drama categories, but not comedy. Despite the misleading or, said more precisely, enticing first episode, this is not a teen comedy built around the usual motifs of losing one’s virginity and out-of-control parties. With each subsequent episode, the drama further crystalises as it focuses on relationships and developing the individual characters. The series has a clever dramaturgical concept by which each episode focuses on a different character. Thanks to that, all of the characters outlined in the first episode (the stoner, the virgin, the sex kitten, the confident show-off, the basket case) get their own personality and ambiguity, as well as their own conflicts, feelings and desires. Both in its characters’ natures and in the chosen style, Skins remains entirely faithful to its target audience. Whereas all of the adult characters, i.e. parents and teachers, are portrayed as caricatures in accordance with the way that teenagers see them, the adolescent protagonists are fully developed without any prejudices or pre-determined patterns. In the case of the first generation of the series, this means that the protagonists do not fit into any outsider or rebel subculture; they are in fact the core members of the class who devote their free time mainly to copulating. Parties, smoking weed and popping pills are only the backdrop for the main thing that makes the world of teenagers go round – intensely dramatic relationships, which are the be-all and end-all of the whole series. In addition to that, particularly the second season of the first generation of Skins brilliantly depicts the end of the last year of high school as a bittersweet time permeated with the feeling that comes with the approaching end and fear of the pain arising from conflicts and the collapse of idealistic plans. Skins is a series about young people and for young people that is in every aspect (including style and great music) uniquely faithful to its target group, but it cannot be said that is naïve.

On the one hand, The Boneyard is completely inconsistent trash. On the other hand, its irrational bombast and unbridledness provide tremendous viewing pleasure that’s actually more of the sincere than guilty variety. Though it starts out as a mysterious horror movie with an unexpectedly unconventional female protagonist, we soon encounter demons in child form and occult rituals, and formulaic characters with bizarre features (for example, a pathologist with a long ponytail and rose-tinted glasses) start to pile up. There is even an extremely phantasmagorical rip-off of Aliens, which ultimately results in an absurd variation on classic happy endings. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t know what they actually wanted, so they just threw every possible attraction at viewers, but everything surprisingly somehow fits together and, thanks to the entirely respectable effects, turns out to be a magnificent spectacle. Furthermore, where else will you see the lead roles played by a mannish obese woman and a dandy past his prime with a grey moustache who looks like something out of a seventies television series and plays opposite a purely nineties rookie from an embarrassing buddy comedy. And then there’s the moulting old lady, who is obviously a very good actress, and the poodle... The Boneyard definitely offers things that you will never see anywhere else, at least not in the given combination.

If not for allegedly being the first to employ the Nazi SS zombie concept, this trash flick in which a group of people run back and forth on a tropical island would have been forgotten long ago. A telling characteristic of Shock Waves may be the fact that, whereas in Romero and post-Romero zombie movies people usually meet their demise because they can’t set aside their egos and join forces against a common threat, here they die simply because they are klutzes, and also because the screenwriter simply wants them to die, since a good bit of runtime has passed without anyone going toes up. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to admit that the film has a certain distinctive charm and is a lot of fun, albeit unintentionally. The film’s central attraction, namely the unit of underwater undead Totenkorps killers, is put to utterly absurd use when the filmmakers first make viewers wait twenty minutes before they finally appear on the screen and then they have the zombies constantly climbing out of the ocean and then crawl back into it for the next twenty minutes. As soon as the action begins, however, the entertainment goes full-throttle. Space-time ruptures as the SS zombies and their victims disappear under the surface or in the dense undergrowth and emerge somewhere else, logic goes out the window and the mechanically simple killings alternate with bizarre scenes like “Who killed our buddy? How about we ask the pale guys in SS uniforms?” And when the characters happen to come up with a way to kill the monsters, the charm of sincere trashiness is achieved. Though Shock Waves doesn’t provide absolutely wild entertainment, it is a likable and stylishly unadulterated diversion in the genre of zombie flicks.

In its time, Choking Hazard had the hallmark of an event and in the whirlwind of promotion and hype of the first Czech Troma-style trash/zombie flick, it definitely left a significant mark on the history of Czech cinema. But when taking a closer look, especially from the distance of years, during which Marek Dobeš’s cult of personality more or less faded out, we see obvious flaws in the beauty of the highly acclaimed work. While the name Quentin Tarantino was frequently mentioned at the time of Choking Hazard’s release, the Czech deviant from Video Plus actually has nothing in common with the master of self-reflexive genre experiments. On the contrary, it is just the Czech equivalent of hundreds of enthusiasts with video cameras who shoot flashy patchworks of genres in decline. Dobeš’s only strength consists in the fact that he is Czech, which elevates him to the level of something extra in the navel of Europe. At the time of the film’s release, the label “Czech zombie comedy” was, in terms of marketing, a functional (yet empty) promise not only on the domestic market, but also abroad, so the film could boast being released at foreign genre festivals and even on an English DVD from Media Blasters. Nevertheless, it is again true that that is not an exceptional achievement in the world of enthusiast filmmaking. Choking Hazard paradoxically lacks not only a coherent narrative, but also genre attractions, instead of which it only intermittently winks at viewers and tries to pile one overwrought pop-culture reference on top of another, so the result is tiresome blathering with dialogue like desperately rustling paper and reeking of an attempt at verbal acrobatics and would-be sophistication. The ostentatious exaggeration and outsized cleverness lack natural levity and thus reveal one sad aspect of the project. The central concept of zombie hunters suggests that the film is not just an enthusiast’s dream come true, but unfortunately also another contribution to the post-revolution trend of “purely Czech” (i.e. better Czech) variations on western models, such as The Vampire Wedding and Nudity for Sale. But Choking Hazard came along ten years after those films.

Thanks to the proliferation of genre-oriented festivals in the new millennium, a trend has arisen involving films whose main strength consists in imaginatively combining various formulas and genre templates. Though these films and their makers often appear to be innovative and progressive, they are essentially just repeating history. The creators of genre B-movies came up with the same principle in the 1980s, when they threw red meat to the insatiable video market (which at the time was the equivalent of today's genre festivals). Only films that offered the most distinctive and complex plots (as well as attractive packaging) could find success in the deluge of titles in video rental shops. Night of the Creeps is an exemplary product of that time, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that it was made by the trash-oriented company Delphi V Productions, which was contractually bound to TriStar Pictures (now Columbia). The film is an absurd mix of a nerdy college flick and a 1950s horror B-movie. The awkwardness of a love story set on college campuses and revolving around nerds, jocks, fraternities and a dance is mixed with rubber aliens and invasive worms, as well as elements that were fashionable in 1980s horror movies: serial killers and the living dead. Just like contemporary hyper-sophisticated genre flicks, Night of the Creeps openly references the films that inspired it, particularly Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Living Dead. Only it’s less dramaturgically polished and more sincerely trashy.

The first surprising thing about Gargoyles is the fact that it is a product of the Walt Disney studio.  With its dark atmosphere, adult characters that undergo development within the series, extended stories covering several episodes and motifs referring to Shakespeare’s dramas, this animated action series is an entirely unique project in the Disney portfolio. We can see the impetus for its creation in an effort to compete with Warner’s animation division, which had enjoyed massive success with its Batman (1992) television series. Whereas Batman was based on an established character and universe and built on the broad popularity of the masked hero brought to life by Tim Burton, Gargoyles introduced viewers to a completely original world that blended elements of fantasy and sci-fi, and where complexly defined characters with ambiguous motivations stood in the foreground, though Disney’s typical comedic characters were also present to lighten the mood. Even though today Gargoyles, like Batman, cannot conceal its age, which is apparent in the slower pace and the characteristically simpler animation, it still seems modern and current in its progressive themes. A noteworthy aspect of the series is that it gave priority to motifs involving gender and minorities. The central protagonists, a group of gargoyles who, in line with myths, come alive at night and guard their home castle against raiders while the human residents sleep, are profiled from the start as a minority in contrast to the humans, who are mostly afraid of them. Their status as outcasts is further enhanced when enemy soldiers slaughter most of the petrified gargoyles during the day, and a small group of survivors awaken under the influence of a curse centuries later in the New York of the future. The main positive human character is detective Elisa Maza, a strong woman of African- and Native-American descent who plays an active role in the narrative. Though the basic concept is similar to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in Gargoyles (in line with the targeting of the series at a slightly older age group) the characters are more highly developed, the central characters are profiled as adults and, along with their need to conceal themselves, their rootlessness and exclusion from society serve as the basis for the series’ dramatic peripeteias.

Calisthenics in the Wild West or a very entertaining porn flick in cowboy costumes, where every number is enhanced with completely absurd sexual positions.

Kira at Night is a bizarre and unintentionally funny attempt by a leading craftsmen of the American mainstream porn industry to make an art-porn film. Instead of a typical linear narrative based on any of the usual porn plots, the film offers up a would-be mysterious psychological spiral, where the lead actress, Kira Kener, plays herself and, at the same time, is played by the porn star Mercedez in reminiscent passages. Furthermore, the plot is set in the backstage environment of a theatre and the protagonist is dealing with an identity crisis, which is also indicated by the cyclical narrative. Instead of Lynchian porn, however, what actually happens is rather a lot of naïve faking of depth, where the absurdly half-baked narrative serves only as a vague bridge between sexual acts. We can see the film as the result of two competing tendencies in the context of the period productions from Vivid Entertainment, the dominant player in the field of mainstream porn at the time, which had all of the stars under exclusive contracts. Probably in an effort to compete with the other main player on the market, Digital Playground, though mainly in the face of massively expanding internet pornography with entities like Bang Bros. at the fore, Vivid Entertainment came out with a number of films that, in line with trends in internet porn, gave a fake impression of reality (the All About XY series, where XY is the name of one of the stars under contract), as well as a series of projects by which Vivid intended to enhance its reputation through supposed self-reflexiveness and ambition. This also involved the creation of a new image for the company’s leading stars, which was further supported by the fictional projects in which the actors appeared as if they were doing it for themselves. Kira Kener was thus stylised into an ethereally perfect actress elevated above ordinary performers, which is apparent not only from her part in Last Girl Standing, a formulaic, fictional behind-the-scenes look at the porn industry, but primarily from Vivid’s leading titles from 2004 and 2005. Besides Kira at Night, her image as a mysterious beauty was also burnished by the phantasmagorical meta-zoophiliac flick Bad Kitty, in which she plays a magical cat in human form, who seduces her owner, as well as her role in the deliriously misogynistic Les Bitches.

Though it can be assumed that the success of Drive was the impetus for Motorway, the latter is in no way just a typical Hong Kong copy of a successful foreign film, the likes of which were churned out by the dozen in the 1980s and ’90s. The new film produced by Johnnie To and directed by his protégé Pou-Soi Cheang is worthy of attention because it converts the purely American car-movie genre into a form with which Hong Kong viewers are intimately familiar. Though Motorway contains car chases, there is no fetishisation of the cars themselves or their parameters as seen in American movies. On the contrary, the main role is played by the drivers, though they are presented not as people, but as superhuman symbiotes with automobiles. The connection of man and machine is completed by the narrative, which is strikingly reminiscent of fight movies. This time, viewers are also presented with a hot-headed and dashing novice who encounters his nemesis in the form of a perfect driver and begins to perfect his skills under the tutelage of a master, who is later killed by the nemesis and must be avenged by the protagonist. With a straight face, the film presents driving skill as the equivalent of martial arts. As in the case of fighting techniques, mastery in the art of car-fu includes the ability to drive blind, guided only by the noise of one’s surroundings, and to be one with the engine. Though Motorway is literally a singular genre hybrid offering an obscure concept and some imaginative camerawork, it doesn’t have enough viewer attractions to make it memorable.