Now Playing ABSOLUTELY FREE on You Tube - European Girls Edition

You Tube is better than ever. They’ve opened up the floodgates with posting full-length films in order to compete with Netflix and other assorted cinema providers, and needless to say, everybody wins. This month I’m going to review a few foreign films with strong female performances I wholeheartedly recommend. Most of these films are already legendary in foreign film circles, so if you’re well-versed in new wave cinema you’ll already know about these great films. These films are all currently available for your entertainment on You Tube.

1. Les Bonnes Femmes (The Good Time Girls): This is one of Claude Chabrol’s earliest efforts (his fourth) and considered by many to be the beginning of his sinister yet understated style. He films must be the quietest murder mysteries I’ve ever seen. They are so unassuming that when a murder eventually occurs it’s genuinely shocking.

Les Bonnes Femmes is the story of four shopgirls who dream aloud of men, money and freedom, not necessarily in that order. Bernadette Lafont heads the cast as a wayward party girl who continuously makes bad choices in men, but that’s the point of the film. The women fantasize about the perfect romance but the men they choose are arrogant control freaks.

The climax of the film is pretty powerful, making you wonder what you just watched to the point of wanting to see the film all over again in a different light. And Lafont towers over all the other girls, no small feat.

2. Les Novices (1970): Bizarre psychedelic romp featuring Brigitte Bardot as a bored nun escaping the order to run wild through the streets of Paris. She’s taken in by a worldly wise prostitute played by Annie Giradot.

The irony is that the prostitute exhibits more compassion and intelligence than the runaway nun, but maybe we shouldn’t read too much into this. It’s supposed to be a sort of Odd Couple-style buddy comedy with French ladies running through the streets of Paris. It’s all good fun, anyway, and BB looks amazing. One of her last good movies, maybe THE last.

3. Sweet Ecstasy (1962): This one has long made the rounds on cheap, low-budget public domain video companies, but the You Tube version is the best with a clean, beautiful letterboxed transfer. This French film is a pretty good juvenile delinquent movie about a bunch of reckless thrill seekers featuring a young, hair hopping Elke Sommer.

Elke’s boyfriend Maddy talks her into flirting with a shy rich nerd named Olivier in the hopes they can mess with him. In between picking on this poor dude there’s tons of le jazz hot, Elke striptease dancing, et al, topped with an amazing final scene where Elke the babe’s bound in bondage aboard a burning boat. Try saying that fast ten times. Two years later Sommer became a huge international star from the Peter Sellers comedy A Shot In The Dark.

4. Il Demonio akaThe Demon (1963): There has never been a film quite like Il Demonio (The Demon). Dalia Lavi gives a performance most performance artists would give their first born for. She plays Purificazione, a misfit from a chaste ultra-Catholic village in the Italian countryside. Unlike the other women she’s unruly and perpetually in a state of ardor, making the religious locals believe she’s possessed by the devil. The sad truth, of course, is that she’s madly in love with the utterly gross Antonio, who thinks she’s trash.

Lavi spits and screams and writhes around like a wild animal in heat, but raises the horror movie bar with her upside-down spider walk (pre-dating Iggy by about ten years!), which has to be seen to be believed. This movie and the Mario Bava classic The Whip And The Body are probably her two best films before she transitioned to spy movie fame (Casino Royale, The Silencers, etc.).

5. L’Enfer (1994): Yeah, everything goes back to Chabrol. This latter day work by the master doesn’t disappoint. It’s the story of Paul, a struggling hotel resort manager played by Francois Cluzet, rapidly burning out to the degree that he sees his wife (Emmanuelle Beart) cheating on him every time he turns his back.

Paul imagines best friends and hotel residents all having a go at his wife, manically fantasizing about her infidelities. He spies on her continuously, stalking her more like a sex-starved stranger than a husband. The pinnacle of his insanity is his jealousy over his wife doting on their four-year-old son. Paul is the jealous husband from Hell!

L’Enfer, aka Inferno is one of the cinema’s great unfinished projects, originally filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) in 1964 and starring Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani. A documentary about the original film is available on You Tube (in Spanish subtitles) and it’s a knockout!

The documentary includes footage from the film as well as test shots which freely experimented with the use of color, lights and sound. Some of these test shots, when used, were highly innovative and reminded me of the films of Kenneth Anger and the Hans Richter film Dreams Money Can Buy (also available on You Tube).

Cinematographers and sound engineers discuss the making of the film and the various difficulties the film suffered – budget shortages, the leading man falling ill, dropping out and Clouzot’s own failing health. Truly a great documentary about a film that would have raised the stakes of the cinema and revived Mr. Clouzot’s career.

So, that’s it for now. Five and a half films from Europe, all showcasing some of the strongest female performances I’ve ever seen and most of them date over fifty years ago. Catch all these films when you can. They’re absolutely free and available on You Tube.

Tokyo Gore Police (Japan, 2008)

If the Chinese dazzled us with creepy psychic horror films like The Ring and The Eye, then Japan responded with insane, erotic fetish, over-the-top gore with humor to spare movies. The most sensational output comes from a genius make-up and special effects artist, Yoshihiro Nishimura. Nishimura references Salvador Dali as one of his biggest influences in the way he depicts distorted body parts in surreal settings. His sci-fi/horror classic, “Tokyo Gore Police” has enough erotica and surrealism to make Dali beam with pride. It serves up outrage the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the college revival house theater days of Jodorowsky, Makavejev, and crazy Fernando Arrabal.

Tokyo Gore Police is the story of Ruka (Eihi Shiina), a police officer for the Tokyo Police Corporation, a now-privatized police force who excels as an Engineer Hunter. Engineers are serial killers who have the ability to make their severed body parts morph into deadly weapons, whether it’s a chainsaw or a sawed-off shotgun, all courtesy of a mysterious stranger dressed in black named The Keyman (Itsuji Itao). It’s up to Ruka to find The Keyman and stop him from his evil task. Unfortunately, Ruka is a flawed person herself, a cutter who inherited her bad habit from her mother to punish herself from not preventing the murder of her father.

Just like Jodorowsky, though, the plot is almost secondary to the Garden of Surreal & Erotic Outrage breaking up the plot from time to time. In between action scenes you’ll be treated to:
1. Blood showering out of a severed limb like a wedding reception fountain.
2. Chainsaws flying straight into a man’s mouth and ripping open his head.
3. Commercials hawking cool cutters for teenage schoolgirls with cute colors and promising it makes “blood taste better”!
4. Punk kids on the subway chuffing down live earthworms and night crawlers. Yum!
5. Amputee leather slaves walking on prosthetic legs made of samurai swords.
6. The Keyman’s severed upper head grows two gun barrels that shoot out bloody ginsu knives.

Ruka’s colleague, Officer Barabara-Man (Jiji Bu), decides to let off steam by going to a kinky S&M club that specializes in back room sex with mutant girls, like a Snail Girl and a Girl with Crocodile Jaws Snapping Between Her Legs. Whoa! He picks Door Number 2 and gets the girl with the croc jaws who bites off his dick, which naturally provokes another Wedding Fountain of Blood. He gets the Engineer Key and needless to say, his empty crotch morphs into humongous red cock cannon! He takes his Gigantor cock cannon and goes berserk at police headquarters, firing deadly cannonballs at his fellow officers.

Ruka finally corners the Keyman in his crummy apartment, and instead of killing her confesses that he’s the son of the Police-sanctioned hit of her father, executed at an anti-police privatization rally. His father also killed by the now-privatized Police Corporation, he devoted his life as a genetic scientist by injecting himself with the DNA of psychotic killers like Ed Gein and Charles Manson, all bottled up and labeled in his laboratory. That’s right, another Mad Scientist movie! To Ruka’s horror she’s trapped by him with an Engineer key installed in her against her will.

In the meantime the Tokyo Police Corporation has gone completely batshit crazy and begin arbitrarily torturing and murdering citizens en masse, so Ruka hits the streets with her newly acquired Engineer mutation, one crocodile arm which rips the face off a policeman’s head. Now that Ruka knows who the fascist madman behind her father’s murder is she has a final showdown with him using her best samurai sword skills and that badass crocodile arm.

Tokyo Gore Police ends with the Tokyo Police Corporation no longer privatized, with the slogan in big screaming letters: MORE GORE COMING SOON! Love it or hate it, Tokyo Gore Police is punk as fuck and makes no apologies about itself. It’s easily the only movie that can kick any video game’s ass with a cock cannon around the block!

Also recommended: THE MACHINE GIRL, almost as demented as Tokyo Gore Police and well worth your time.

Full Time Killer (China, 2001)

Full Time Killer is a brilliant crime film that starts at a kinetic-cum-frenetic pace and maintains its breakneck tempo all through the movie. Directed by Johnnie To and Ka-Fai Wei, it's one of the most exciting suspense films I've seen. Full Time Killer is the story of two hit men, Ono (Takashi Sorimachi), a Japanese: quiet, expedient and efficient like a ninja, while the other, Tok (Andy Lau), a Chinese, is loud, sloppy, and showy in his leather rock star outfits, completing his kills by throwing his arms up in the air like Neil Diamond after a big concert. Needless to say, Tok is a movie buff and loves spectacles. Tok is told over and over again by his boss Ice that Ono is the greatest hit man in the East, far superior to Tok, sending him on a rampage to upstage his Japanese superior. What results is a series of assassination upstaging between the two that recalls Spy Vs. Spy comics at its most devious.

The film opens with Ono performing a hit at a Malaysian train station, almost cock-clocked or I should say, kill-blocked by an old school chum. Ono executes his hit and then, in a fit of pique, shoots down his classmate, alerting Interpol policemen of his crime.

While Ono is out killing people in public places his cleaning girl, Chin (Kelly Lin), moonlights as a clerk in a Japanese video store (in Hong Kong). Tok,a regular at the store asks Chin out for a date in Bill Clinton mask, his tribute to the surfing criminals in "Point Break". His keeps his Clinton mask on when they go out to the movies. She takes a liking to him even though her heart belongs to Ono, thus creating a weird romantic triangle that recalls "Jules & Jim" or "Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid" in a perverse way.

Tok's dance card is pretty busy, teaching Chin how to hit a target from a high-powered rifle and then executing a hit in the middle of downtown Hong Kong (looking a lot like 6th & Flower by the Bonaventure Hotel in LA). Ono takes pictures of the hit from a balcony in the distance and faxes them to Interpol agent Lee (Simon Yam), who's heading the hit man crackdown. It's interesting how many hits occur either in train stations or around vehicles, establishing the effect of death amidst constant motion, like lions in Africa pursuing a herd for a kill.

Ono's hit in Singapore is completely expected by his victim with him realizing that his manager must have sold him out by informing them of his attempt. To make matters worse, Tok is shooting from a balcony nearby at Ono, trying to kill him. This scene recalls countless western films, and in fact creates a cowboy movie shootout vibe all through the picture.

Now that Ono's cover is completely blown his apartment gets busted into while Chin's cleaning up, recalling the way his last cleaning girl was murdered, only this time Ono comes to the rescue. With both the organization and Interpol both nipping at his heels Ono and Chin need to escape from Hong Kong and vanish from everyone.

After watching his entire squad killed by the two hit man in a hail of bullets, Agent Lee suffers a nervous breakdown and leaves the force, drowning in a sea of depression and Chinese beer. He takes a break from drinking to write a book about his Ono and Tok manhunt and how they both got away, but in his words, "There's no book without an ending".

Lee gets a phone call from Chin, giving him the ending he needs for his book. She related the story of her escape with Ono, who finally confesses what he did for a living (or should we say a killing?). She then talks of one night in a bar where Tok joins them at the table, buying them drinks and telling Ono they're going to play a game a called Metal Slug to the death.

Ono accepts and the two have a final showdown in a Chinese fireworks warehouse, giving us a brilliant climax to an already exciting film. Chin gives Lee an ending to his book and then disappears into the night, letting us know that one hit man died and the other lives on, but which one is it? You'll just have to see Full Time Killer to find out.

Everyone in the film gives a perfect performance, Lau terrific as the arrogant showman and Sorimachi just as awesome as the stoic killer. Only Lin's performance is a little wobbly as the girl torn between two killers. You can pretty much tell who she likes more and doesn't really have us fooled. Yam is also excellent as the police chief gone over the edge without resorting to cartoon hysterics. Full Time Killer never feels cartoony and in fact serves up some of the best cowboy gunfights and shoot-em-ups ever filmed.

Chatroom (Great Britain, 2010)

As far as I'm concerned, you haven't been on the Internet until you've been flamed by some asshole(s) on a message board. Adding a completely harmless comment not meant to upset anyone, you find yourself suddenly attacked by a pack of virtual xenophobic dick heads who feel violated by a new voice speaking to them on their precious message board. Well, now there's a movie about an Internet bully called "Chatroom", which was released in England in 2010.

Directed by Hideo Nakata, master of the creepy film, whose past works include "The Ring" and "Dark Water", "Chatroom" continues his creepy pitch quite well. Adapted from a play written by Enda Walsh, Chatroom tells the story of a manic depressive teenager named William (played by Aaron Williams, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Syd Barrett), the son of a successful children's book writer who names her educational book series after William's older brother Ripley. If William's family hated him it would be easy to see why he holds them in such contempt, yet from all signs it appears his family loves him. He's just too messed up to see it clearly.

William starts a chat room of his own called Chelsea Teens, attracting a diverse group of unhappy peers, including Eva (Imogen Poots), Jim (Matthew Beard from "An Education"), Mo (Daniel Kaluuya), and Emily (Hannah Murray playing a more uptight version of Cassie from "Skins"). They meet in an empty room draped in red - representing the tone William tries to set by inciting their hatred. His opening question to them is "What do you hate the most?" William recognizes a victim in Jim when Jim says he hates himself the most.

Nakata makes some subtle color choices in his scenes, depicting William's bedroom in monochromatic tones of gray and only allowing full colors in the virtual house with deep green hallways and vibrant, menacing red meeting rooms. The hallways bear more than a slight resemblance to Stanley Kubrick's hallway in "The Shining" and the chat rooms recall David Lynch, as well.

William gets into everyone's head and goads them into performing negative acts with severe consequences, persuading: 1) Mo to confess his love for his best friend's 11 year old sister to him, getting him beat up and called a pedophile, 2) Emily her family will love her more if she vandalizes their home, 3) Jim to flush his antidepressants down the toilet making him go into violent withdrawals, and; 4) mutilating images of Eva's snotty model friends on the Internet. Since Eva is starving for a boyfriend she's somewhat sold on William's bullying methods. For a while.

Jim finally drums up enough courage to confess the major source of his depression, a traumatic abandonment at the zoo by his father when he was only 7 years old. After confessing the horrible story he realizes it was cathartic but William pounces on him by telling him to hold on to his depression, that feeling better about getting his feelings off his chest wasn't beneficial at all. Boy, does this sound like some asswipe on the Internet or what?

Eva's affections for William are snubbed by his obsession with bullying Jim. William goes for the hard sell regarding Jim's suicide by taking him to a site/room called Dorfli Place, a sort of take-off on emo suicidal attitudes. A video tape of a Japanese girl killing herself on camera is played for Jim with William standing in the background leering likes he's about to cream his shorts!

William blows off Eva so he can concentrate on getting Jim to shoot himself, handing him a gun at the very same zoo Jim was abandoned at. Can Emily, Mo and Eva get to the zoo on time to stop Jim from snuffing it and stopping the dastardly deeds of evil William? Only Skins fans know for sure.

To be perfectly honest, Chatroom isn't a great film but it does have a lot of thoughts about the Internet and how its warped perspectives and self-images in everyone in general, especially teenagers. Yes, there are plot-holes, no, the police won't come to your house if you post bullshit about someone, but the bottom line is that if you like Skins or moody teens in general you'll probably give this movie a big parental hug. And anyway, what could be more satisfying than watching a message board bully finally get the piss-thrashing they truly deserve?

Fermat's Room (Spain, 2007)

"Fermat's Room" is a tense thriller with brains that you'll either love or hate. For every person who's seen it and thinks it's a brilliant suspense film that challenges your imagination there's an equal number of people examining any possible plot holes and inconsistencies so they can feel superior to the spine-tingling tension that fills this amazing film from Spain.

Directed by Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña, Fermat's Room begins with the old House On Haunted Hill premise of four complete strangers invited to spend an evening in a weird little house on a small holm (def. island in the middle of a lake). What the strangers have in common on first sight is a love for mathematics, and in fact are given code names named after famous mathematicians through the ages who all apparently died at the same age of the invited guests.

There's Hilbert (Lluis Homar, excellent), an aging scholar who's harbored feelings of suicide after having been scooped on an important paper he was working on for decades on Goldbach's Conjecture; a young lady named Oliva (Elena Ballesteros), a mathematics expert; Pascal (Santí Millan looking like Anthony Perkins), not a mathematician but an inventor of gadgets like a popcorn popper shaped like a duck; and Galois (Alejo Sauras), the young college prodigy that scooped Hilbert on the Goldbach theory that earned him fame, a cash prize and loads of pretty college girls.

Our four geniuses all hook up in a tiny room in the house that resembles David Lynch's red hell room from "Fire Walk With Me" (with the dancing midget). After a nice, quick meal they find that they can't get out of the room with math questions sent to them through a small PDA - yes, that's right a PDA. Who would have thought that PDA's still had a place in this world? Well, it does in this movie.

The PDA sends questions to them that they must answer within a minute or hydraulic presses installed behind each wall programmed by the PDA will move in a few feet at a time. If they take too long the walls close in more, and if they get the math problem (here called "enigmas") wrong, the walls will close in and crush them to death. The suspense in Fermat's Room is heightened because as the film progresses and the walls close in more the contrast to the cinematography is heightened more and more, the effect being like that of lights turned up higher and higher until everything is simply blinding. This effect in lighting is one of the most imaginative I've seen and definitely enhances the suspense factor.

As enigmas come one after the other walls close in causing furniture to fall over and mirrors shatter and only the correct answer can keep the room from closing in. The only way the four guests can stall the walls from crushing them is by taking all the book cases and lying them down across the room, symbolically showing that their education is the only thing that can keep them from being murdered.

The four guests ask continuously who Fermat is and why did he invite them into a death trap, but as the film continues they all confess to terrible sins they recently committed, the room looking more and more like some blood red confessional booth of sorts. One killed, one stole and one performed unspeakable acts of sex, all impacting at some time one of the guests. But who? Which one is Fermat? Will the other three get out in time before the entire room comes crashing in?

All four actors turn in excellent performances, with Lluis Homar standing out as a scholar who knows everything except how to cope with failure. I enjoyed watching all the math problems being worked out and the logic that went into them, and that's a pretty major feat for someone who never did well with math in school, but that's the real genius to Fermat's Room: while you're being entertained you're learning things and it's awesome.

Other films in this vein include Exam, The Method (directed by Burnt Money director Marcelo Piñeyro!) and Cube.

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White trash TV can show all the lame Heavy Metal Dad shows they want, but the greater truth as usual is served up by punk rockers, and the punk rock documentary "The Other F Word" is no exception. Produced by Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me), the film interviews several punk rock musicians, mostly singers, about living the life of an FTW punk rocker and still living the punk rock life. Some of the dads interviewed are Flea, Fat Mike from NOFX, Art Alexakis, Mark Mothersbaugh, Greg Hetson, and even Tony Hawk.

What the film is really about is the fact that you can wave your freak flag as high as you’d like but ultimately everyone has to grow up. Once babies are born and bills come streaming into the house you’re not Daddy’s Little Monster anymore, YOU’RE Daddy, and it’s somebody else’s turn to be The Little Monster. It’s this change in maturity and responsibility which is really at the heart of the documentary.

The centerpiece in “The Other F Word” is Pennywise lead singer Jim Lindberg who has three daughters, one of which is already of high school age. Because record sales don't earn shit anymore the only way Lindberg can realistically support his family is by touring non-stop all year, which is always deadly for family relations. Lindberg clearly realizes that his family's life is passing him by and it's time to make some real decisions about his life.

The film goes through great pains showing the drama of Lindberg’s deciding whether he should continue touring with Pennywise or stay home and be a good Dad for his family. The film ends with him deciding to leave the band and be a good Dad. End of story. Not. After the film was made Lindberg not only didn’t play the family man, but in fact started a new band of his own and went back on tour, doing exactly everything he complained about doing with Pennywise. And so here we are again with another rock documentary that plays like bad television.

But the whole thing’s pretty lame folks, because two months ago Lindberg rejoined Pennywise, rendering all the drama in the documentary to shit. Maybe I was better off watching the Jack Osbourne-produced “God Bless Ozzy Osbourne” documentary, after all. Ozzy’s still a cooler punk, after all.