Tag: Transylvania Film Festival

Inferno Rosso: Joe D’Amato on the Road to Excess (Inferno Rosso: Joe D’Amato Sullva Via Dell’eccesso)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

In a strange moment of serendipity, I caught Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) the night before on my hotel television. It’s that weird mixture of boobs and gore that feels like it comes out of the imagination of a fourteen-year-old child, hitting me very definitely than when I was entranced by the movie as a teenager. But some directors never grow up, attracted to both eroticism and gore right until the very end.

It’s serendipitous because Eli Roth is also an executive producer and interview subject in Inferno Rosso: Joe D’Amato on the Road to Excess, a workmanlike documentary about the ultimate cinematic workhorse. Before his death in 1999, Joe D’Amato directed soft-core and hard-core porn, grotesque horror movies, adventure films and historical films; films for Italian cinema, films for foreign distributors and films in America starring big actors. He had his own production company and mentored others as well, making him the “Roger Corman” of Italy. All in all, he was involved in over 200 films, making him one of hardest working directors of all time, a man who made movies as if he was merely breathing.

He’s a fascinating character, his forays into the smartest risk-to-reward genres, telling typically low-budget porn and horror, making him worth of his own deep dive. We are treated to clips from his classic films, including mutilations, sexual violence, body horror, sacrilegious elements and lots and lots of topless ladies. In one of the few stylistic flourishes in the entire documentary, we are treated to rapid-fire montages of naked bodies in all their writhing, sexy glory, showing off just how far D’Amato was willing to push the boat out in the name of entertainment.

Despite all of this titillation, this film is oddly incurious. Only 70 minutes long, it feels made for television rather than the big screen. It’s curious how a director that made so many films wasn’t captured more often in archive footage, making me wonder if the team behind this didn’t do enough research or there simply wasn’t enough to go on. The same goes for the interview subjects, who are incredible knowledgable about distribution details or the technical details of filmmaking, but betray little emotion about the man himself. His daughter tearily tells us about how he was misrepresented as a mere porno director by the press, or how he put the house up as collateral so he could continue making movies, but the camera doesn’t linger, and we move on to more platitudes, reducing the emotional impact of the moment.

He is obviously a complex figure, but the complexity feels flattened by this tribute film, introduced by Nicolas Winding Refn. In one major misstep, we are told an actress tried to sue the crew of one of his films after she felt traumatised on set. This moment is basically treated as a joke by the men who remember it, who say it was all part of the way films were made back then. That might’ve been true, but a more interested documentary would embrace the different aspects of filmmaking back then, instead of just going down memory lane. If you’re just interested in a primer on a legendary filmmaker, then you’re in the right place. But there’s no genuine interrogation here, making for a flat experience. Horror and eroticism can benefit from a childlike perspective, but documentaries need to be far more grown up.

Inferno Rosso: Joe D’Amato on the Road to Excess plays as part of the Larger Than Life section at TIFF, running from 17th-26th June.

Beautiful Beings

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

Step over, Euphoria (Sam Levinson, 2019-). When it comes up to hyper-attenuated and messed-up portrayals of youth, you have a serious contender from Iceland in the form of Beautiful Beings. Telling the story of four kids growing up in a rugged and beaten-down Reykjavik, it’s a dark, mysterious and complex portrayal of young life that is equal parts beautiful and grotesque.

It’s a 90s period piece. The main give away is the sheer amount these 14-year-olds smoke. Given that a pack of cigarettes in Iceland these days is just over £10, there’s no way that they could chain with the absolute glee seen here. Likewise, the country, known for its natural beauty, has never looked quite so depressing and ruinous. Director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson and his team do some great location work here to depict a city that feels like one of the worst places in the world to grow up.

We start with Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason), who comes from a broken home and is a shy reticent boy. His mother is off scoring drugs and drinking with friends, while his abusive step-dad is in jail. To make matters worse, he is terrorised by the cooler kids In the first of many violent scenes to come, he is smacked in the face with a branch. This attracts the attention of Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson), Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) and Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason), who think it’s fun to terrorise Balli and make fun of his injuries. Nonetheless, Addi is revealed to be a far more sensitive soul, eventually reaching out to Balli and becoming his best friend.

Unlike many movies, where bullies are often one-dimensional and uninteresting, this film does a great job of showing the ways that bullies can become friends and friends can become bullies. But while Siggi bullies to fit in and Konni to assert power, Addi seems to do it just because he can. This also makes it easier for him to stop. But in a few strange dream sequences, he starts to sense violence coming around the corner, which finally erupts with incredible force and brutality.

The kids do a great job of navigating an almost-adultless world, free to run around, smoke, experiment with drugs and rib each other over the slightest deviation from the so-called masculine norm. Their lives are captured with handheld camera-work, soft colours and nuanced editing choices, resulting in a poignant portrait of broken youth, the cycle of violence and the difficulty of finding your place in such a terrible world.

Nonetheless, viewers should beware: there are scenes of sexual violence here that are likely to turn some people off. While the more joyful parts of the kids lives go someway counteract the misery-fest, they’re not quite handled with the nuance that such a difficult topic deserves. Despite this, the kindness and the tenderness remains. While adults may have ruined their chances of being better people, kids are often far more malleable. There’s still a chance that they’ll be alright.

Beautiful Beings plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th-26th June.

The Execution (Kazn)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

This is a crime thriller with enough twists to make Agatha Christie proud. An unpredictable, non-linear serial killer drama from Russia, Execution is a bloody, bruise and highly nasty film from debut director Lado Kvataniya. With echoes of Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-Ho, 2003), Old Boy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and David Fincher’s Mindhunter (2017-19) and Zodiac (2007), The Execution a confident and exciting genre picture that doubles up as an allegory of the last, fading days of the Soviet Union.

It’s freely inspired by the true story of Andrei Tchikatilo, who murdered, sexually assaulted and mutilated at least 52 women and children in the 80s 80s. While the USA had experience building psychological profiles of killers from the mid-20th century, this was the first time the Soviet Union had to pursue such a case, leading to much confusion among the politburo.

Nikoloz Tavadze is perfect in the main role as the lead investigator in the case. With a similar gait and frame to Ivan Lapshin in Alexey German’s classic My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985), he occupies a similar world of paranoia and crumbling institutions, with lone men given free rein to be both judge, jury and execution. With intense pressure from above, the police commit unspeakable brutality in order to pursue their cases, showing how the solution can often approximate the same level of the problem. The myth of the Etruscan Execution is invoked, whereby the perpetrator is attached to the body of the victim until both bodies turn black. Of course, we’ll see something to that effect by the end, but its how it gets there that keeps us riveted throughout.

The film starts in 1991, but the killer starts in 1978, the film freely hopping between and playing with time, slowly revealing layer after layer during its luxurious runtime. The non-linear approach is a smart one, as the story is as much about how information is doled out as what we know from the start. And no matter how much you predict what’s going to happen, there’s simply no way to have a clear grip on how brilliantly this film reaches its final conclusion.

Mixing a romantic atmosphere with the utter darkness of man, it often feels more South Korean than Russian, especially in the way that lurid violence is tied to character and its portentous sense of destiny and forward momentum. While it often strains towards the absurd, its excesses seem necessary given the lurid subject matter. All the while, the heads of state seem useless to stop the killer or rein in the reckless behaviour of its officers. Considering torture is still commonplace in Russian prisons, it has an all-too present day resonance.

Considering that it’s from Russia, the chances of it playing in the UK are incredibly slim. Yet one hopes that when the awful invasion is finally over, it will have a chance to be discovered as a solid genre programmer worth pursuing.

The Execution plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th to 26th June.