My Favorite Movies

Yugoslaslavian-born director Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie was the succes de scandal at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival (much like Cronenberg's Crash was in 1996). It provoked much outrage at Cannes, and at its US premiere in New York in October 1975, it was met with even more vociferous attacks. Even after four minutes were cut it was declared "a social disease" by Time magazine. Vincent Canby called it "elitist", grudgingly admitting it was a courageous body of work but over his head. Two scenes in particular proved troublesome for viewers and critics (and still do) - a protracted sequence featuring extreme performance artist Otto Muehl's troupe; and a scene where a lead character, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal), seduces a group of underaged boys.
Makavejev intercuts two discontinuous narratives throughout Sweet Movie: one concerns an unnamed Canadian woman (Carol Laure) who wins a contest to find the virginal beauty possessing the world's most perfectly formed hymen. The contest is televised by the Crazy Daisy Show, whose host introduces the proceedings (and, appropriately, the film) as "a window into reality... a breath of cold air from another world". Miss Canada's prize for becoming 'Miss World 1984' is marriage to the world's wealthiest bachelor, Aristotlese Aplanalp AKA "Mr. Kapital" (John Vernon). After a traumatic honeymoon in which she's ritually swabbed head to toe with rubbing alcohol and then urinated on by the groom's gold-plated member before he deflowers her (though it's left unclear as to whether he actually does), Miss World is then passed on by Martha Aplanalpe, Kapital's mother (Jane Mallet), to musclebound genius Jeremiah (Roy Callendar). Jeremiah ships her off inside a suitcase to Paris, where she trysts with preening mariachi-singing superstar El Macho (Sami Frey), after a music video shoot at the Eiffel Tower. Complications arise from the coupling that require medical attention, however, and after El Macho is on his way, Miss World eventually makes her way to The Milky Way Commune (portrayed by a real-life radical therapy/ performance art group led by arch-provocateur Muehl; Marpessa Dawn and Anna Prucnal, in her second role in the film, also play Commune members), where the group's taboo-shattering brand of therapy seemingly hurls her into a complete fugue state.
The film's second narrative strand involves Captain Anna Planeta (Prucnal, in the more prominent of her two roles), a revolutionary Communist prostitute who travels the world in a ship, the Survival - its bow bearing a stolid likeness of Karl Marx, and its hold filled with candy and corpses. She picks up a Russian sailor, Luv Bakunin (Pierre Clemeti) and his pet mouse. Luv has seemingly wandered through time on his bicycle from decades earlier - he is apparently the last survivor of Eisenstien's Battleship Potemkin. Luv and Anna begin a passionate affair, bound by their revolutionary fervor. But Anna's ship is full of secrets unknown to Bakunin. With the promise of sweets and sex, Anna soon lures four young boys to their deaths and later slays Luv in a vat of sugar.
Intercut with the two stories is footage from a Nazi documentary depicting the examination of hundreds of Polish corpses. At the film's close, Makavejev brilliantly juxtaposes this footage with the fates of his two heroines, conveying a chilling vision of Communist revolution as it succumbs to the decay and perverse hope of late capitalism.
Makavejev had directed WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), a part-fictional, part-documentary film linking the life and ideals of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich with Makavejev's own take on the Communist Revolution, just before Sweet Movie. Sweet Movie is almost WR through a mirror darkly, taking Makavejev's communist/ capitalist dialectic to its terminus, using Reichian motifs (though not as explicitly as in the prior film) to illustrate his concerns. But Makavejev cloaks his deeper meanings and transgressive intent in surrealistic parody. Sweet Movie is a tour de force of lunacy, maintaining its outrageous frisson from start to finish, and provokes and entertains on multiple levels. Simply put, it may be disturbing at times, but it's never boring.
The Otto Muehl sequence proved to be the most controversial aspect of the film. It contains the film's most graphic shots, and while no doubt a test for weaker stomachs, this portion of the film is the most extreme expression of Makavejev's Reichian ideals. Through body play, infantile regression, and demystification of all bodily fluids and functions, The Milky Way Commune purges itself of guilt and repression and, unlike our tortured heroines, finds redemptive power in the Body Politic. Muehl's antics in Sweet Movie pale before his real-life escapades, captured in an intense series of underground art films that, after many years, remain very difficult to see. Muehl's materialaktionen movement set the standard for extreme performance art, and his films are as artistically accomplished as they are deeply unsettling. His work was the perfect over-the-top actualization of Reichian tenets to attract Makavejev. Carol Laure's traumatic reaction to Muehl's commune was the culmination of her growing disgust with the film, and she dropped out of the movie before all of her scenes could be shot. Originally, hers was to be the sole lead character, and Miss World's ordeals were to transform her into a radical revolutionary. Laure's departure necessitated Makavejev creating the parallel Anna Planeta storyline. As it stands, the picture is all the stronger and more distinctive due to this unplanned dualism: if Anna Planeta is a twisted take on WR's "ideal" communist Milena, then Miss World embodies the excesses of late capitalism.
Makavejev assembled a terrific cast for Sweet Movie: Prucnal (Fellini's City of Women); Frey (Godard's Band of Outsiders); Clementi (Bunuel's Belle de Jour); Dawn (Camus' Black Orpheus); Vernon (Boorman's Point Blank); and loveable Leonide the mouse, who Makavejev bills above Vernon! And lastly, from a film so critically reviled, Carol Laure, who truly gives it her all in Sweet Movie, went on to star in Bertrand Blier's Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1978.
I would contend that Sweet Movie is among the most misunderstood films ever made, but need great art always be understood? Certainly not. There is, however, a method to Makavejev's madness, as surely as there's madness in his method. I would highly recommend Sweet Movie to anyone who wants to see a film that's truly unique and original - there simply is nothing else like it. And you can't say that about many films. But brace yourself - it's a breath of cold air from another world.

Romero's epic of survival in a world overrun by the living dead could be the most ambitious - and successful - attempt at using the horror film genre as powerful and multi-leveled social critique. Our quartet of hapless protaganists sequester themselves in a massive shopping mall, all the consumerist needs of their past lives fulfilled, despite one of them slowly dying from zombie bites, and the two in a relationship (one pregnant) finding it impossible to get along in this manufactured world as much as in their previous lives. It falls to SWAT officer Peter Washington (an Oscar-level turn by Ken Foree, as if Oscars held much cred really), one of the great heroes of horror or action cinema, to keep his cool and keep thinking, even when faced with his friend's zombification, and the zombies ultimately breaching the mall due to a renegade army of looting bikers. Peter almost manages to deal with it all and get out alive with pregnant Fran (Gaylen Ross), but there's a final twist - but one that makes Peter's struggles worthwhile.
If you have yet to see this, see it now!! Much imitated, never equalled, with brilliant performances, a tight (and highly quotable) script that shows Romero thought out every angle of his premise. And the interesting thing is, no one ever learns why the dead walk - it's just happening, and they have to deal with it. I could write on and on about the meanings and subtext at play here, but I leave that to the individual viewer.
For the gorehounds (who no doubt have, uh, devoured this flick numerous times, but just in case), the intestine-ripping, gut-munching splatter is on hand in copious amounts. As with its premise and approach, this movie broke ground to become the benchmark for gore films from here on, largely due to Tom Savini's amazingly realistic makeup effects.
Finally, if you've seen neither version, please, I beg you, eschew the remake of DOTD. Watch the real one first. I don't hate the remake, but it's for the most part imminently forgettable and misses much of the points Romero was making. So much for "re-imaginings".

"When the dead walk, we must stop the killing... or lose the war".

All anyone ever talks about regarding this film are the violent scenes, but there's a lot more going on than that in Flavia the Heretic. Flavia is strongly anchored by the always amazing Florinda Bolkan in the titular role. I've seen her in many films and she has yet to disappoint. Truly an undervalued performer. Here she essays the role of a 16th century cloistered nun whose liberation from Catholic dogma leads her away from her pacifist Jewish admirer and onto the blood-caked role of heretical Muslim warrior. The score by Nicolo Piovani (who, years later won Best Score Oscar for Life is Beautiful, but the Flavia score is far superior). is sublime, and for years, it's been rumoured that Piovani was a pseudonym for Ennio Morricone, but that seems to have been debunked recently. Ironic, as Flavia's score reminds me of Morricone's stellar work on The Great Silence. Both scores have deeply melancholy recurring melodies that underlie the tragic fates of their eponymous outsider protaganists. And, just to address the curious gorehounds - yes, there are very graphic scenes, and the ending above all is indeed truly painful to watch. Very gruesome - and sad, as Florinda plays it. As far as "nunsploitation" goes, this certainly doesn't hit the heights of The Devils or even my beloved Alucarda, but it's still a gem of the genre, and a great movie on its own terms as well.