Latest / Outskirts Film Podcast / #019 - Hong Kong Horror: From Black Magic to Spooky Kung Fu

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#019 - Hong Kong Horror: From Black Magic to Spooky Kung Fu · Outskirts Film Podcast

• 0:15
  SPEAKER_04: Hi everyone, welcome to the Outsecurity Film Podcast.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Alonso Aguilar and I'm joined by my fellow co-hosts.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Merc Sofolo.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, this is Christopher.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_04: This week we'll be delving into the world of ghostbusting monks, hopping vampires, and all sorts of problematic type-like magic, which are only some of the wondrous sights present in Hong Kong horror films, which is an amalgamation of genres, traditions, and folklore that has captivated audiences all over the world for its psychotronic delights and exuberant filmmaking ever since the commercial breakthrough in the 1980s, which such classics as Chinese Ghost Story, Mr.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_04: Vampire, Encounters of the Spooky Kind, amongst many others.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_04: However, speaking of just a particular genre or even a sensibility, it's deeply contentious when it comes to Hong Kong horror.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_04: Every era production having its own specific set of nuances, tone, and even mannerisms.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: The world of Hong Kong horror is also like voracious as they come in terms of the source material, taking a lot from classical Time Dynasty poets, folk traditions that go back centuries, even some Western trends in genre, and even goes to the revered text in Chinese tradition as the Evergreen Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Po Sun Ling, source of such classics as the aforementioned Chinese Ghost Story, Painted Skin, A Rouge, and A Touch of Sun.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_04: The genius with Po Sun Ling becomes important to understand the films we will be discussing today, as he was praised and also heavily criticized by Pierce by intersecting two different literary traditions, Weird Account and the Strange Story.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: Weird Account is best described as some sort of like pretty narrative with a strange event or laconic record to some grotesque creature, a hunting movie, like the Asian repositories, like horror stories.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas the strange story are more artistically polished in a way, and are where we see the intersections of the martial arts adepts and the exploits of the magicians involve all sorts of uh amalgamations of Taoism and like a Buddhism and like folklore.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_04: Tales of the supernatural and uncanny have always been highly popular in genre in Chinese cinemas, even going back to the 1920s and the 1930s, which show the first examples of the Wuxia Shenghua films that combine fantasy, dumb cab, and also, as we'll be discussing a lot, uh elaborate martial arts actions.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_04: However, their popularity in mainland China was a bit contentious since they were encouraging superstition, therefore they were kind of like a hindrance to the official stance of the communist revolution.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: Naturally, that opened the door for a new home in the British colonial port of Hong Kong, which embraced these traditions and provided filmmakers with a rich tapestry of events and uh tales to go back to.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_04: It was here that the genre thrived and evolved, uh, finding place with iconic film studios, horror became bold, kinetic, and visually inventive.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_04: So to start off uh our conversation, I wanted to perhaps address uh that difference that we kind of I was kind of alluding to with uh Pusong Ling, which is not really talking about horror directly, but more kind of alluding to spookiness, strangeness, weirdness, like mismatch of tones and everything that goes all over the place basically in these films.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: Having seen five or six of these films now, albeit ones that are kind of scattered from different eras and different filmmakers, I have to say these films are not scary, but also they're not really trying to be scary.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: As a teenage cinephile, when you start watching Hong Kong films, you're just shocked by the kind of things that uh rub shoulders, and that never really goes away.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so coming back to horror films in Hong Kong is another reminder of this, is another reminder that in one scene you can have a very politically incorrect physical comedy.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: In the next scene, you can have someone being tortured to death and having their skin ripped off, and then in the next scene, kind of very elaborate Taoism themed drama set in a temple.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: And these things kind of just generally coexist, generally rub shoulders.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: This is probably the main reason that they're not scary because they don't really try to sustain a mood.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: As you said, they go towards this spookiness.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: I think this word is very useful and is going to be very common in this discussion.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: But it's more about kind of like, oh, isn't that creepy?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Isn't that weird?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: Isn't that a bit scary?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: But that these aren't films that are trying to sustain an atmosphere.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Spookiness comes from change, whereas to be scared you need to first feel the sense of belonging to a certain atmosphere, to feel, then to get scared.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: What I would call a scary is I think belongs to more psychological domain than stylistic and aesthetic domain.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Hong Kong horror, supernatural, hellish uh stories work, I think, more with the style than the psychology.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: How we interpret these stylistic choices as excess is also quite coded from how we learn to watch films, how we how our upbringing in cinema affects our ways of seeing.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a language.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: You speak a language in a certain pace and rhythm.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_04: In Western horror films, at the end of the day, they're largely influenced to some way or the other.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_04: Julio-Christian beliefs, there's like this binary of like evil and it's oppressive and it's haunting, and it's like this like ever-present force that must be destroyed or will destroy you.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas in Hong Kong horror films, we see a combination of like Chinese folklore, Buddhism, Taoism makes it more fluid and also like tonally more out there for us, I guess, in a way.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_04: If you read like some of the strange tales uh from a Chinese studio, like a lot of the stories are just like a lot of what are matter-of-factly in how the supernatural kind of manifests.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_04: The order of nature is not really broken in these stories or in even in these films.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_04: Perception is it is expanded, whereas in like Western cultures usually terrifying comes from this uh unknowingness, like a darker plane of existence that we don't really get into contact with unless it's like a menace.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas in these stories and these films, it's kind of like something that's always there and we kind of like are familiar with, but just kind of like exalts something, and also the fact that these films were made for like decades before they broke out to the West.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_04: So I think that's also like an interesting thing to explore as well.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: There was a moment when uh films being made in the US mostly uh started to arrive on in Hong Kong.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_03: Like all of our favorite filmmakers or production houses or movements, the Shorebird studio in particular immediately moved to rip them off and to take and profit from them and exploit them.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: So it's films like uh Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist arrived at their doorstep and they saw the kind of commercial potential of that, but that waiting in the wings was a very, very rich tradition of a very, very different kind of cinema.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's interesting that this kind of sort of if you want to call it a golden age or this like burst of creativity in Hong Kong horror films was uh somehow stimulated by observing uh commercial commercial success from the outside, but that the response to it wasn't really to rip it off, it was to kind of just understand that uh local Chinese traditions in some way could be reappropriated to kind of achieve that same effect.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, when we watch them, it's not the same effect at all because there's you know, I I haven't seen the Exorcist in a while, but I don't think there's much kung fu in it.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, in that sense, I think that localized narratives become important to this production process throughout the main production period in the 50s, late 6050s and like early 60s.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_04: You already see like uh adaptations of like the Pusun Ling, you already see like some touchstone classics like A Ride from Hell, There's the Enchanting Ghost, which we didn't see for the pot.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_04: Just like looking at them kind of more like classically aligned, it doesn't really like the idea we have of like Hong Kong horror we'll be discussing today, very much so like Show Brothers finding a way to mix a little bit of like that Western influence.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_04: And to me, one of the uh first examples of that on of the films that I watch was um Black Magic, which is a 1975 like uh Show Brothers production.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_04: From the early Show Brothers films I've seen from that period, it kind of has this B-movie gritty feel, but then the elements of black magic in this one come more to like a crime story, also uh, which I think is an important disclaimer to do, uh, there will be a lot of very problematic depictions of Thailand we'll be discussing, and this is the first one of them.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: So it's so it's not just Vulci and the Italians who are going to uh go into that part of the world to exploit the people there.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_04: It's also the also the show brothers because essentially they turn like Thailand at this like realm of like black magic and evil spirits, and in this one, it's just like a magician that uh is kind of charging people for like love spells, and then uh this naturally uh makes like a whole like descending to hell of someone that becomes too attached to uh in terms of like the use of black magic.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_04: Oiku was kind of alluding uh earlier to a certain structuring plot, which I think this is one of the first uh example I saw of that.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_04: You have like this kind of setup that is quote unquote in real life for a little bit, and then the film kind of like breaks down the middle and just like have these kind of psychotonic images and this like sensory barrage that goes towards uh the climax of the film.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_04: I would say like in this like uh Show Brothers film, it's still like very much so like uh restrained in a way, despite having Lolie, it doesn't really have like that many like ornate martial arts sequences.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_04: Uh it feels very more like still like urban, and I think also like the contemporary setting kind of allows itself to be felt a little bit more distinct.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, since we started talking about black magic films like as a theme, that can also be a point of comparison between the depictions of religion as a template and horror films.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: There is some space and elasticity in how forces that beyond though that go beyond uh human reach are depicted in these films because they're quite within the human realm.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: So you can just like play with them in a very inventive way that you cannot do the that with like very Christianity, maybe.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think that's a great point actually in this like uh tradition and this cosmovision, uh which again each film has different versions of that, but essentially they kind of share a little bit of the way of incorporating folklore as a horror element, like the Taoist element and a Buddhist element present like a way of combating like black magic, not only with belief and with like purity, but with white magic.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_04: So there's like an active like confrontation, which is like leads to action, like uh there's like forces that kind of like uh collide in equal realms of power.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_04: So in that sense, I think it's a little bit natural that these films will be a little bit more like action-packed, crying for help to for Jesus Christ.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's like, oh no, we I can just like fight like the evil like uh ghoul with like the power of like Kung Fu.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_04: Although you don't really start seeing that until a little bit like later on, and in these films, at least until uh I guess like early 80s, um even like Hex, which is uh by the same filmmaker, which we will start then discuss like Boxer's Omen, is like more so like a traditional like horror film.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_04: If you look at it, it's like a a story of a vengeful ghost of uh like a uh chambermaid helps like the neglected wife, and then like they drown their hostman, and then the ghost comes back and there's like a kind of like haunted house, I guess like more uh Taoist way, but still kind of feels like in a more like con- restrained horror film.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: Years and years ago, I saw a film called The Oily Maniac, which is also by Ho Menghua.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's an interesting one for thinking about the ways that these films actually often combine some real ugly undercurrents with the goofiness.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it's very easy to you know characterize these films as just kind of like these goofy visions, kung fu against ghosts, uh things like that.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: From the start, basically, I think they were willing and even eager to really dig into very kind of yeah, ugly and painful topics for lack of a better word.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we can also go to from from this point to anti-sex aspect of these films.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_04: I think you didn't watch, which was uh Bewitched, also by the same filmmaker of uh The Box to Zomin.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's like another kind of possession film.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and that film has like an end title, I think uh I told you about in the chat, which says like uh after the final climax happens and all the ghouls are defeated, and like the white magic wins over.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_04: Like basically, like the morale of the story is like uh you shouldn't deal on the black artists and you shouldn't uh engage with casual sex.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_04: Which I guess like this like moralistic element of this story also goes back to structural literature, which they were like kind of moral tales.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: I don't want to spoil the ending.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, can can I spoil the ending of Encounters of the Spooky Kind?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: This is Samo Hung's 1980 Ghosts Meets Kung Fu Meets Comedy, meets Samo Hung.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's interesting to me that, you know, at least from my non-Cantonese speaking perspective, the film is relatively sexless.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: Although there is this plot line that he gets framed for his wife's murder, but then it turns out that she wasn't murdered, she was actually just sleeping with uh his boss.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_03: The final kind of gag, quote unquote, of the film is that he accidentally kills this boss, and when all the everything has come to an end, his wife comes running out of the boss's house to see what happened.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: She sees that the guy is dead, and she kind of pretends that she was kidnapped, and uh Samo sees through it.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's played for last, but he kind of like kicks her to death and calls her a slut, and that's the ending of the film.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of her end is ending, especially to just come out of out of nowhere.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_04: How do you feel about the counters with Putin?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_04: Because this was in in a lot of ways, kind of like the big breakthrough of the genre, in a way, quote unquote, to like a Western audience in particular.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_04: The element that was perhaps put forward the most at a starting point was like Kung Fu against like ghosts.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_04: In a way, that actually is there, and also like the Samo Hung essence of that uh in the authority that he is.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_04: When I was reading about that film and then what the film actually is, I felt like also a little bit of like misrepresentation being one of the main like entry points of gateway films for a lot of people into this realm of the spooky kind.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's an interesting one because I think it's the only film that I saw more or less that is this kind of autourist object.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, the boxes omen is is definitely the work of a distinctive filmmaker.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, a lot of these films are, but they're a little more kind of possessed with different kinds of energies.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um and often it pulls the films in different directions, whereas this one I think is quite, you know, quite recognizably Samo, and think of it in the way that he's kind of using these ideas of like possession, ghosts, corpses to just find new ways to stage fight scenes.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: So kind of like the big conceit of a lot of fight scenes in this film is that they are using kind of voodoo possession, you know, have characters essentially fight each other in a supernatural way, and in this great conclusion, which is really amazing, you have these two kind of shaman-like characters sitting atop these kind of like tennis court umpire stands and just using this black magic to get Samo and this other guy to fight each other in crazy ways.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: But this this is one of the first films that I certainly, as someone who is interested in Hong Kong cinema, I always kind of knew this as one of the key entry points for that genre, you know.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_04: I think like some of these filmmakers start like getting into the rhythm of being like, okay, this is kind of the bane of Hong Kong film I do, uh particularly Shi Hung Kuei, the filmmaker about Boxers Omen, which again we've talked about Bewitched.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_04: I also watched Hex, which he was kind of starting to have a reputation.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_04: Uh he has a film called uh Corpse Mania as well, which I didn't manage to watch, but Ang Ghost Eyes is well liked as an early example.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_04: But I guess also like the nature of the industry of like how much production was going on, like some of these mics were like going from film to film, just like for example Song Shung, just looking at human lanterns, a film like Avenging Eagle, and a film like Big Pat Seizes, they look like three different two different totally different filmmakers.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: In that sense, Encounters of Spooky Kind, it's it's one of those films that I can imagine people discovering, you know, 20 or 30 years ago on VHS or some horrible planets can DVD, but and that being this kind of um sort of a wacky choice, you know, like oh look, this is the Samo Hung film where he fights ghosts, and then that can be your entry point into uh into Hong Kong horror, such.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, that film is very wacky, but it's all it's of a piece, you know, it's all kind of the same thing, you know.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: When when when it's Samo in the village, when it's Voodoo Battle at the end, or whatever it may be, tonally it's all of a piece, and that's also kind of what makes it in some way this autoist object.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: When you actually see these films in context, it's actually one of the films that has the most kind of level-headed view of all these things.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas when you compare it to the other films, it's often the case that the funny scenes are like very goofy, very, very slapstick, maybe a little too much for my sensibilities.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: And then the horror horror scenes are really ugly.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: So you just have these like two extremes together, even Human Lanterns is a movie that you know, for the first 10 minutes you think it's uh this very specific kind of movie and movie, and then in the next scene you have some woman being horribly tortured to death, and it's like terrible display of sexual violence.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: And that's exactly you know, you even for someone who's kind of looking for sort of freaky movies or weird movies, that can still be quite shocking.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: The the the level of abrupt transition between tones.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: I also feel that the autorist tone that you refer comes from the self-awareness, how the film itself uses the humor, and also it's its references to the genre itself.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what people would probably find as naive as oh, look at these, like look at this film where people fight ghosts by make by doing Kung Fu is actually uh self-aware thing to to by referencing a genre.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: Over this, you know, let's say the ten years before Encounters of the Spooky Kind, there there were these kind of transformations in the way the films in Hong Kong were made, because of course it goes without saying that it was a very, very prolific industry, so things were made very quickly, you know, looking for new creative ideas and just had this kind of inspiration to profit from an already existing tradition and combine it with something else that he'd been doing.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what made this this mix that was already, as you said, at this moment was already pretty, you know, self-conscious, was already kind of um, you know, referencing things that the audience would have been aware of in a self-conscious manner, even as it was kind of forging this new ground in some way.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_04: Uh about this template quote uncle of like the Kung Fu horror film or Kung Fu spooky film, the violence and like the degree to which like the horror starts in the film, perhaps or like it is part of the construction.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_04: Like a wish of film, essentially like the fantasy version of the relevant like the version.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: I was surprised to the extent that this film went into very dark places.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: If you were to cut out all the human lands in the scenes, it's kind of like you know, a bit of palace intrigue, rivalry between two kind of boneheaded warriors, lots of fight scenes, very good ones actually, like very, very well uh choreographed.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's this kind of engine, plot engine in the middle of the film.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's this kind of shaman-like crazy guy who is essentially tricking these two boneheads to go to war against each other, and also is making lanterns out of human skin.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know, watching it, I was like, oh no, this is really going there in a way that these other films aren't.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you see a lot of blood and a lot of gore, you see skin being ripped off, um, you see this kind of device that he uses to rip the skin off, which is covered in blood and bones and guts and viscera.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: Literally, if you were to just take scissors to the negative and just cut those scenes out, the rest of the film would look just like a wheel show.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_04: But I think there's something to that in because in human landing is the kind of horror that you were saying is in a way very like what could potentially happen in real life.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_04: Because to me, also like uh I don't know a film that to me like most horrific part of it is actually like the central like plot uh conceit that then gets you to the crazy stuff, which is seeing of a ghost, which is like that when that's uh the the wife of the taxi driver is kind of like uh raped and killed by uh hooligans and that then leads into like the uh sorcerer uh element of the film, which goes into like once again using hex and white magic.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: To excite revenge of these people in a very violent way.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_04: This one does feel to me more like in the 70s style to like a rear and blicker film.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: That element of like rape revenge kind of presented a different tone and then goes into like that horrible stuff that we kind of like saying that some of these films as they progress to towards the 80s don't really delve with Seating of a Ghost starts in such a like a lounge way that you would expect something like a like a ra rape and revenge thriller that you would have some references or points that you can like r relate to, but it goes to to such a to a direction so outrageous that at the end I was like I I cannot take this film anymore.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think the common point in these films are the last 10 minutes of these films are unbearable to watch.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: The thing is it's about sensory overload.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like for instance, I can remember the details of the magic that he makes in the early sequences when he decides to like collaborate with this sorcerer.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: But then it just it's just a blur because I can't remember exactly what's happening in the in a given frame.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's just too much of ooze, blood, regurgitated, whatever, too much.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's it's like a blur.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think well, I think that describes a lot of these films because as they become more popular, also like towards like the meeting that it is, like the budget for practical effects and more like gooey stuff, and more like creatures and more like aposthetics become more and more part of the films.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_04: Except I think also like uh Boxer's Omen is one of the great examples of that.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's an elegance and consistency in Boxer's Omen.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: The three sorcerers to take revenge for their masters, they build this woman by stitching a corpse.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: The boxer eventually wins the battle and the the body decomposes.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you actually see how they sued the initial body.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: So so even on these like outrageous moments, there's a consistency and put prosthetics and practical effects.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: You believe what you see.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just the abstract blur of splatter, blood.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: There there are actual things happening on the screen.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: From what I understand, also at this period in the 1970s at Shaw Brothers, there was also kind of concurrently, or probably not in not coincidentally, a sort of revolution in special effects.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_03: And that also what I alluded to is you know filmmakers also having a little bit more autonomy.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think that was also the case with special effects houses.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: Reminds me actually of Fulci a lot.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, this sense that like a lot of the time you are watching something because you are really bought into it, and in another moment you you just feel like the filmmaker is also kind of just showing off what they're like capable to do.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: And that's something that Fulci did a lot, you know.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like, like, look how terrible this is, like, look how far I can push it, like with the resources I have.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: And that's that's something you feel in this.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: But as Oiko said, like for me, Boxer Zoma, even with all of its craziness, even as far as it pushes things, is surprisingly so sober in some in some sense, you know, which I think also you know speaks a bit to the different kinds of directors that we're talking about here, because you know, even if we aren't talking about auteurs, quote unquote, there is quite a lot of differentiation between these directors.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: The director of Boxes Oman, Quei, I would say, is one of the better known of these filmmakers, and people are starting to appreciate what I think was quite a distinctive body of work.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you see it from the first moments in that film.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the way that it opens in his boxing match is amazing.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_03: It opens in a close-up and it says Hong Kong on the screen.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it almost promises a coherence that like the rest of the film doesn't necessarily try to to follow because it is moving between these like wildly divergent places.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: But you do feel like, oh, I'm in the presence of a filmmaker here, you know, someone someone who wants to be a bit thoughtful about these images.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: As if the filmmaker was saying, like, I'm gonna do crazy shit, but just trust me.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna So that's what I felt like.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was watching a coherently narrative film, even like when it takes crazy detours, when it presents us this second narrative that is embedded in the in the story because there's this uh bewitched priest that is kind of like a soul brother of the boxer's brother, so it's just like they're spiritually connected to each other.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this big chunk of story within the film that tells us how this other priest got bewitched, which is not necessarily related to boxer's storyline.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: It spends a lot of time in there.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't really bothered by like why this film does that, because it just like comes together.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_04: The fact that it perhaps feels more consistent, also is one of the films that's more explicit about this cosmology.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_04: Most of the other films just take it for granted.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas this one, I think it takes a little bit more of time perhaps to position that, like as you were saying, a spiritual bond between these characters.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_04: Kwei I would say that alongside Song Shung and Homen Hua, it's kind of described as kind of like Mastercraftman.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_04: Without like uh setting up to do that, I just watched like three Kwei films in the last week.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_04: Uh talking about Hex and Big Witch earlier.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_04: Boxy Somin is kind of this like final barrage of all the things he was building up to.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_04: To me, like Boxy Somin also creates like a milestone that afterwards become begins like the era of the more like more polished, more ornate, more like big budget films.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_04: We haven't really discussed two of like the major films that people associate with like Hong Kong horror, which are like a Chinese ghost story and seven course.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_04: They kind of leave a little bit of the more like grounded elements of the 1970s, like more literary in in views like Wuxa films and of the like readiness of the films, I would say, is no longer there necessarily.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: How do you see them within the context of the older films you watch?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would say Chinese ghost story is pretty ornate, pretty, pretty lavish, stylish.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: There are also intelligence or practical effects that are put into work.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's also the how to create that also very elegant in its spookiness, because I think when we compare these films, there is a lot of like bright colors that define the their aesthetics, but this film is more, I would say, uh harmonious.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say liquidity in the film, in its in its form.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the fabric that like blows in the wind, the forest, the vi the the fog.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: All these elements I think contribute to that sensation of of volume and texture.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't directed by Troy Hawk, but it was produced in in heavy quotation marks by Troy Hawkes, which means like a lot of his films of that time, it was probably directed by him too.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: And it has that Troy Hawk style and it has all those elements you just said, but I I I guess I was just feeling a bit uh uncharitable to it, you know.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: Like m maybe I wanted to go back to the more kind of gruesome and uncouth uh Hong Kong horror films.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh whereas that one to me is, you know, it's a much more kind of better modulated film, and in that moment of watching it was uh maybe not what I was looking for.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: But it's pretty much a universally beloved film.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's probably the only film on this list of films that we watched that is kind of in the top 100 Chinese films, like really widely beloved.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: I would I would also say that this is also a good entry point for Hong Kong horror, maybe in a different vein, because when you think of the the characterizations and the the narrative structure, it's quite accessible to Western audiences.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's a love story, there's evil forces.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of like the Orpheus theme for Western audiences that's quite accessible in its themes and structures.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_04: I would say that's also as you were saying, very rounded, has a this story that has has this also like some sort of like melancholy within the like the the tone of the film, which I don't really see at the other films being a part of.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I guess this one is also one of those to me, despite being very differently, that has like the veneer of spookiness with the ghosts and everything, but it's essentially another kind of film.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_04: Like I would put that closer to something like uh Sunny Kwan's roosh, which is also another adaptation of uh of Busong Ling.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I would say that that what you were saying about humor, spookiness, the balance between them.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: What you said about Encounters of the Spooky Kind works quite well in this film as well, because the humor is quite interesting too.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: The whole shtick about guards trying to find criminals, and there's also a bunch of side stories about like these guards trying to find the wizard's brother.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: They always end up like bumping into our character and saying, Oh, why are you here?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Are you the criminal?
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then they just move on trying trying to find the criminals in the town.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there's always this running gag in the film, and the court scene also is just like a gag doesn't that doesn't necessarily contribute to the story, but it's still like well blended.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I mean, I love I love I love the film.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: I love the film.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: I was just saying, like it does feel very different from perhaps the other kind of like goo goopy films we're kind of like watching.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_04: On the other side of the spectrum, which I guess is like this the seventh course, feels more so with like the idea of like Hong Kong action film and also like as some sort of like gateway film to a lot of films.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_04: I mean it has Cho Jung Fat fighting like little evils, like uh once again like Thai uh become once again like the subjects.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this this film's Thai racism is like pretty outrageous, I would say.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_03: Of the ones I saw, definitely the most racist.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_03: Oiko, you were saying that Chinese Ghost Story is uh is a good entry point for people.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_03: I actually think that Seven's Curse is like, as Alonso was saying, on the other side of the spectrum, the other possible entry point.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of those exploitation films that feels a little bit like the nerds in the video store went back in time and made that this film would be made.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's ready made for that.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: It was directed by Lumnai Choi, who the really famous Hong Kong director, who actually didn't, I think, make that many films, but most famously made Ricky O, the story of Ricky, which is exactly that.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: I mean it's made for the kind of video store crowd and is very self-conscious.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas the Seventh Curse is also that, but it is also, I think, pulled in different directions by certain very interesting energies.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: On one hand, it's kind of an ultra-coherent film because it's exactly the kind of film that is in like uh that was in video stores and now is marketed to like boutique Blu-ray labels.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's like this kind of like must-see, very fucked up, very weird Hong Kong film.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was also kind of this like police detective film in some ways.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, for the first 10 minutes, I literally thought that it was the wrong file.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_03: I knew it was a film about a guy who gets cursed by a worm tribe in Thailand, and then like the first 10 minutes of the film is like a police drama uh with like an opening shootout in a in a hospital in Hong Kong with like Magi Chang is there, and I was thinking, like, what is this movie?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: Like, where is this going?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_03: And then after you know, 10, maybe 15 minutes, it goes in that direction as a flashback that this the main character starts to feel bad.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: He's like, Oh yeah, well, when I was in Thailand and he goes to Thailand and it turns out that he's been cursed with this um obscure worm-based seven curses when each curse culminates, or whatever you would call it, part of his body explodes with this creepy worm, and on the seventh explosion, which I think is every day or every couple of days, the seventh one will kill him.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: And and before the seventh curse, he has to go back and uh resolve some some mysteries with this tribe.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's a kind of interesting sort of evil twin to the box's omen, because I think the box's omen is really my favorite type of director in some way, like someone who's like auteur-adjacent but not quite an auteur, and is working with kind of exploitative material and is taking it seriously in some way.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you take a step back, it doesn't seem that serious, but if you actually look at the kind of devotion to craft of that film, like you can see a very serious-minded uh directorial presence.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas the seventh curse, which was made just three years later, is dealing with a lot of the same stuff.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's dealing with these curses, it's dealing with goopy body horror, disgusting maggot bodies, this kind of horrible stuff.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: But it's dealing with it in a much more kind of like over-the-top, explosive, even flippant way, kind of self-conscious.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: It already feels like it's passed into that realm where the filmmakers are kind of self-consciously dialoguing with a history of Hong Kong horror.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_04: So, of course, as you were saying, it's also interesting to me as a gateway film, literally commenting on multiple traditions, devil fears in the early 80s.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: There's like the which some people call like don't go to Thailand original films, which kind of stems back to like black magic incentivize.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna make a list of don't go to Thailand.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_04: I mean just just just just this last week I saw like at least four of them, but definitely.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_04: Like Volkswich Solomon is the most respectful of all the films that we've we've we've gonna discuss here, like deal with Thailand, I think.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_04: You have like Lam Nike showing like we were saying at the seventh course, then he does something like The Cat, which also feels very much like a free pre-produced kind of like a cult object.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_04: Not in a bad sense.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_04: I really like that film, but it has like a lot of like prosthetic cat fights, uh alien cat fights.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_04: It feels a little bit more like Tongue Chicken away.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_04: You have that strand a little bit, then you have like someone like King Who that does like a convoluted comeback story that we can perhaps talk in a lot or episode that deals with uh Shoei Hark and like a failed swordsman film.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_04: Then he does his own adaptation of Painted Skin, which is a classic Huson Ling story that was already uh horror film in the 60s.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_04: His version is like a totally different register, laid back, professional, like uh looking, very like literary, almost like 70s film, like Lost in Time.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_04: Very interesting film for like a King Who authorist, but like not really like a horror film per se, just have this like spooky ghost uh vibe occasionally.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_04: And then you have something like uh Untold story that kind of opens like a can of worms for like a different era, takes the previous experience of Hong Kong horror and throws like in like a midgrinder in a way.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_04: When did you feel like okay, we're no longer watching the same kind of films?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now that I like have more context about the structures of these films, I can see that the cat is the cat is like, okay, let's put some science fiction elements instead of kung fu.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's a film that it's that takes itself quite seriously, even in a in the most whimsical way.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: The premise is quite whimsy.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's this princess who's trying to go back to her home planet, and there's this guardian that takes the shape of a cat, and he's like and he is like the superhero of the film because he's fighting evil aliens that try to destroy them.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: The dog and the cat fight is amazing.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a it's a great, it's a feast for the eyes.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: But the untold story, on the other hand, maybe Chris wants to start.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_03: Just blaming me right there.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I started to look in these films or filmmakers that I sort of already had an idea about, um, and also kind of trends of Hong Kong cinema that maybe I haven't explored, but I kind of know exist.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: One of those in my mind was like these really ugly um category three horror movies from the 90s.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: The name associated with those films is Mr.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: Herman Yao.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_03: The untold story and the Ebola syndrome, which unfortunately we didn't have time to watch for this episode, are like in a way the kind of origin story, if you like, of Herman Yao.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then as we started to watch all these other films, I realized, oh, like this is really not the same thing.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_03: As you can hear from our discussion, like everything we've talked about is like spooky, ghosts, haunted uh mansions, uh trips to Thailand, curses, hexes, uh chickens being slaughtered, uh whatever.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's like this almost like adventure films in some sense as well, you know, like this weird blend of genres and like spookiness being the word of the day.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so, like, as we were going on, I realized like ah, this film, the untold story really isn't doesn't fit here because it's a film that was based on this like real series of murders in a dumpling restaurant.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: So it's this kind of like ripped from the headlines exploitation film, very blackhearted and cynical.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: The untold story could have been easily 30 minutes or maybe one hour long, but it's just like through flashbacks, through extended sequences of violence, it's just like stretches and on and on in its uh in its brutality.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Quite inventive on the ways in which one can torture and kill someone through chopsticks, through grinding them in the meat machine, knives and various sizes, shapes.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: The the problem with the film, it's not a problem, maybe, but we know that the who the killer is.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: So from that point, it's just like let's see what inventive ways of murder and violence that you can come up with to shock us.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_03: You can feel this really like dead inside presence of the director just like taking you to the limit and like relishing and pushing you beyond that, and doing it in a way that's like very amoral or even immoral a lot of the time, like just basking in cruelty for cruelty's sake.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I can see why that's off-putting, because it in in the case of the untold story, it it permeates the entire movie, like that's the worldview of the movie.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's like a very, very bleak and ugly film.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_03: Sort of it was a very low-budget film, and it sort of evolved as they were making it.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_03: So there is that Hong Kong element with the police that's kind of interesting because that feels in a way like it's from a different movie, and I think that is how it was conceived, like they were moving more in that direction, but then I guess just the like the violence became the thing that drove that film.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: Halfway through the film, he's captured.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_03: So the film is kind of this diptych.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: So in the first half he's committing crimes freely, and in the second half he's in jail, and it's kind of an interesting structural conceit, if you can call it that, because basically in the first half he does everything possible to make this man as morally reprehensible a human being as ever been depicted on screen.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then through depicting the the cops as so kind of uh venal and stupid and sexist and violent themselves, essentially creates a structure where in the second half of the film he's challenging us very um relentlessly to empathize with this monster in some level, even just on the level of like degradation, which is why this like flashback at the end, which is just like crosses every line that exists in cinema, reminds you that he's the worst person ever again.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_03: So there is some kind of structuring purpose to that, but it's it's like the film is a blunt force instrument.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_03: That that is what it is.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you can't you can't um try to dress it up.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_04: You kind of start you you see a uh change towards more like uh ripple on the headlines, crime, like a serial killer kind of like starts a trend of films like Daughters of Darkness series, like uh even like uh Kaiming, which is another film based on like a police uh report and like abuse and rape, then people like being slaughtered.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_04: You have other titles like uh Rot of Silence, which is like an mortician, again revenge, serial killer, that kind of film.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_04: There's another one called Red to Kill by Billy Tang, which is that's kind of like has some sort of reputation.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_04: That's also like kind of like very, very ugly, very tour, very like awful film that again once again deals with revenge and rape and like serial killers.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_04: So it kind of like starts like a little trend.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_04: There's also like direct to video, I think, help a lot in the sense of like allowing for these like ugly films that really were kind of pitched for the for the sequels.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_04: If you're making films like Untold Story, which I haven't seen, just looking at your reactions to the film, you can't realistically go back and expect like something like even like painted skin to exist in the same same realm, and like that urged to like seek for harder stuff, which like we kind of alluded to in different episodes, like director DVD VHS is kind of like give me the like the most fucked up thing possible and I'll go from there.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_03: We mostly talk about filmmakers on this podcast, but when we talked about trends, usually they they they do come to an end at some point.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas I think this is the one where it kind of became assimilated into just a general kind of grab bag of what Hong Kong filmmakers could draw from.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_03: So like you you see it resurfacing after this, but not in a conscious way as what we've been speaking about now.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: Not not as ostentatious.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_03: Thinking about you know Soi Chang and people like that.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: Then we kind of like delve into like the late 90s and the 2000s, which became I guess I guess kind of like a product in the West of like Asian extreme horror.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_04: Hong Kong filmmakers like Peter Chen and Fu Chen kind of like appear in these compilation films with filmmakers like uh Kim Ji-won and like uh Takashi Mike.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_04: So it's kind of like a very like noticeable change also in terms of like sensibilities and what horror was expected from the region that naturally also kind of created a different template, and it's difficult to think of like a moment where this.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_04: Puson Ling adaptations and this like more hyper-localized production practices as well, like dealing with like popular material that's like very original, would happen again in the same way.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_04: To me, it's very indicative of something that happened, like the first Puson Ling adaptation, like a successful like painter skin in the 60s film.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_04: Then you have like uh adaptations like a Chinese Ghost Story and like Sunny Kwan's rouge, and then you get to like uh unsuccessful like King Who kind of attempt, and then in the 2000s, just like straight to TV kind of like mini-series.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: So clearly, like something changed along the way.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_04: But I think it's also interesting to see that process almost happening in real time, in what's like also like a very focused period of production, like ephemeral, it is at the end of the day.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: An instant cult classic.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: Written by and starring Danny Lee, star of John Woods, the killer, and starring Hardboy's Anthony Wong in the riveting performance that earned him the 1993 Hong Kong Film Award for Best Dr.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: Demented, really and 100% Fred, based unfortunately upon real events.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: So that was the magical world of Hong Kong horror.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: What have you guys been watching besides these treasures?
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was in Adana, my hometown, two weeks ago, and I had an amazing festival experience back there, and it was very emotional.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: I spent a lot of time with my friends, and I also had the chance to introduce film program, guest program, let's say Jostin Saab's films, and I also urged our listeners No, unfortunately no.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, guys.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was the trilogy of Beirut and A Razor the Razor's Edge.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so sorry.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: There I watched seven Turkish films from this year basically.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say the highlight of the films I watched was a documentary called Eight March with Stella.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I was very surprised by this documentary because that was the only documentary I saw from the competition, and it's it's made by Aileen Kurial, who's also a friend.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I the she's quite productive, she's making a lot of short films.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is a film that has a very simple structure.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's um discussion-based documentary with a visionary feminist activist from 1980s in Turkey, and she spends an a day with her.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh Stella, who's also a Jewish uh activist, Marxist, and uh in on on an 8th March.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: And in 8th March, usually the Turkish police blocks everywhere so that to avoid women marching on the streets on the main square and the on the main avenue in Taksim.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: So they they spend the afternoon together talking while there's also a lot of like police sirens are blasting outside and you hear women shouting and chanting.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this great tension between inside and outside.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: So while they talk, they also go near the window and comment on what's happening outside, and you you feel that direct action is calling them, they want to go outside, but they also spend the time um talking about the feminist movements of the 1980s and how this uh Stella evolved from a writer while also participating in uh direct actions, manifestations, but there's also a direct action happening outside, so there's always these moments of obstruction where the narrative or the information that we're supposed to have is impeded, so you don't get what happened next.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: So there's no chronological evolution of feminist movement.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's always um points in which narrative is blocked because something happens outside.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's a siren, there's a there's a rainbow that comes up on the sky, and they're just like, oh, look at the rainbow, the sky is with us.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the it's a very simple and uh like minor film in its structure, but I I it moved me a lot.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: It made me uh think of the documentary form.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the highlight of the whole festival, and I'm so happy that I got to watch that film.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: How about you?
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I think I might like lower the bar.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_04: I saw a film called Dragon Slayer by Matthew Robbins.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_04: There's no segue to be done here, just there's a a dragon that needs to be slayed, Paramount Walt Disney production.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_04: This film was kind of pitched to them as like the possibility of having like a Star Wars series, which was not the case at all, done by Matthew Robbins, which I from what I read, it was kind of bodies with Lucas and Spielberg.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_04: Has a lot of like goofy humor and a lot of like very like um stuck characters in like uh hero's journey kind of thing, but also it was done in the same moment in time where a lot of like uh sword and like sword and sorcery films were being done towards like the slicier end of the spectrum.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_04: This one's more like family friendly, but has a lot of like like I guess like that like metal inclinations, dark fantasy vibes, a lot of like witchcraft being done, like uh sorcery being a central element of that, uh like the dragon, the titro dragon of the film.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_04: It's like an incredible, like practic, like my like a practical effect kind of uh feed of production, and it kind of is introduced in the film in the same way like a Joss uses like the shark in a way.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_04: You start seeing like these like sequences of suggestions of the dragon, and you see like for a family-friendly film, like the plot deals with like a lot of like virgins being sacrificed, it's like a cult, like a dragon cult being built around uh this figure, and a lot of the political intrigue about like the religious uh order created around the dragon.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and then when you finally see the dragon, this incredible like creature design, the dragon slayer is uh this like hellish and like very like gooey, almost like out of like a Dante's Inferno kind of thing.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_04: Like in a visual like Pleasure, I think it's a film that kind of has some like interest, despite me seeing it in the context of like the the one-pound screenings at Prince Charles, which I've mentioned in the past, which is kind of like throwaway films that nobody cares about.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and I want to see this and where you make most of your discoveries, right?
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, where I make most of my discoveries.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_04: But going back to some reputable taste, uh, Chris, what have you been watching?
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I can follow off this transition between between these two films.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_03: Because I I wanted to speak about NASA.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_03: Lowers the tone in a different way, I guess.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_03: This is Juval Abraham and Rachel Zor's film about Israel's genocide in Gaza.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_03: What I was quite surprised at, in some way seeing NASA, thinking about the film as a formal object became a very interesting exercise for me.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: I really love No Other Land in particular because that film is on some level film of politics and ideas and investigation of this West Bank uh settler terrorism, etc etc.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_03: But it is also a film about houses and about like what houses mean and what it means when a house is destroyed.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_03: So in that film, what was very special to me was that they started from those basic elements and built the formal qualities of the film out of that.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_03: In NASA, it's a film that's based out of conversations with intelligence officials in the Israel Defense Forces talking about the various ways that they annihilated Gaza, specifically buildings in Gaza, using artificial intelligence, for example, to uh murder people, to drop bombs on buildings in a more efficient way.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_03: And what's kind of amazing about that film is the fact that it really is this almost like a formalist object on in some level, without you ever really feeling the hand of the filmmakers wanting it to be that in a self-conscious way.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_03: It got me thinking a lot about like festival cinema and how what annoys me a lot about films that I see now is I often feel like the filmmaker is kind of already kind of predetermined the form of the film before they make it, so you're basically just deciding whether or not it's sort of like successful version of that thing that you already expect it to be.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas with NASA, you know, by starting with this idea, you know, because they are investigative journalists, that this is stuff that's reported elsewhere in writing, they started with this idea of conversations, and from there they're able to stitch together a film that is really a film about building.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: It is this kind of like evil city symphony in some way of Tel Aviv, because you just see this city and these people occupying cities, they're always faceless.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_03: The people speaking are faceless because they are anonymized, and you see these views of the buildings nearby, and you see people lounging around in the living rooms, and also their faces are blocked uh usually by some object or a pillar or whatever.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_03: So you just have like this anonymous city, which is a city of lounging, of sitting, of watching 24-hour news, of conversation, of walking on treadmills and things like that.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_03: And meanwhile, the camera is just showing you all the ways that a city works, all the ways that buildings work, different levels, different floors, windows, doors, different rooms inside the same apartment.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_03: You don't see uh Palestinians through the whole film, except at the ending.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_03: All of what they established throughout the film has a very, very devastating rhyme with what you see at the end of the film, because you you see a very different kind of city, very different kind of urban landscape, very different kinds of buildings as a kind of uh work of cinema.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's a very, very, very special kind of film.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think you will be in the in the minority of people who would comment on the formal choices of the film because I think people will mostly focus on its politics, as you were saying, and especially the choice of not showing the faces will probably be interpreted, analyzed, and criticized from a different perspective.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: I would also want to say what I found very interesting in that film as a film form is how it uses the struct its structure, its filmic structure as a way to build the genocide because you were saying it's about buildings, but it's also about the anatomy of genocide as a as a f system as which involves stages, scope levels.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the building structure also is involved in that way of explaining how they basically decimated Gaza step by step.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think a journalistic investigation, when it's present in that presented in that way in different articles, didn't doesn't give you the sense of layers.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: Something that the film manages to accomplish is to to prove that it's a genocide through its systematic nature of the violence and the crimes that they committed.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the film through its structure explains how the system was built and it's uh and it also manages to explain that it's a historically built system because Gaza, through its very infrastructure, is built by Israel.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like they did the conception of the very city, how the whole the entire communication channels, the infrastructure is Israeli technology.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: The perfect conception of the enemy showing the negative side, the Contre Champ.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: The reverse shot of that is a very intelligent move, but also prone to criticism.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: The evil, the reverse shot of that still holding up.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of reminds me of this rich tradition of documentaries made in East Germany, like for example by uh Walter Hainowski and Gerhard Scheumann.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_03: For example, there's a film The The Laughing Man, which is a conversation with this um ex-Nazi uh mercenary who's doing evil stuff in Africa, and they basically just like pretend to be West German journalists and ply him with booze and he tells them about all the horrible things that he does.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_03: There is some something interesting also, is Juval Abraham himself on screen.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_03: There is a connection with the way that he is presented on screen, the way that you see him sitting, the way that he listens, questions that he asks which aren't, you know, leading or explosive or moralistic.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_03: He's really like searching for facts in a way.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_03: In that sense, he he joins an interesting lineage uh of filmmakers like uh it really reminded me of Jean Oustache, for example, or or like maybe like Robert Kramer as well.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_03: This like presentation of, in this case, one of the directors as a kind of on-screen vehicle for our listening, and the way that like his performance of his listening is also a way to kind of sort of emphasize this point that I just made that you just hear these people saying horrible things about the destruction of Gaza and the genocide of Palestinians.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's flat, it's passive, there's no emotion, there's no I mean this movie has no emotional crescendos, and I was super grateful for that.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_03: I was I think that like at the sobriety of the film is very, very precious.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's no kind of breathy confessions of guilt.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_03: Even when these people are forced into a corner, they basically kind of shrug it off.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_03: That was NASA.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_03: Realize it was I didn't prepare Lonzo that we were gonna speak about NASA, so yeah, I kind of like a not reading the room moving.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, just before we end the episode, I also want to shout out Mr.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_03: Greg Biggerstaff, who by dint of sending now two letters to us, is our official biggest fan.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_03: This letter is not doesn't have a question, it's more of a comment.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_03: But it's very wonderful, very full of sickening praise for us.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_03: And the main highlight is that he sends us a picture of Jean Roland's grave in Père Lachaise in Paris, which he visited and paid tribute to the master.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I see from the picture there is in fact an iron rose on top of Jean Roland's grave, which is beautiful.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so thank you, Greg.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_04: So that was it for this episode of the Outskirts Film Podcast.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_04: If you have any comments, uh be it uh positive or negative ones, you can send them at outskirtsfilmmagazine at gmail.com and follow us on Instagram to see what's happening with the podcast and also with the magazine and outskirtsfilm mag.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_04: You can listen to us on your favorite streaming platform, as in two weeks we'll be engaging with the uncanny realm of uh nightmares of wastecraven.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that's right, folks.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_03: A mainstream filmmaker, also another filmmaker who made a pornographic film, for fuck's sake.