1971-1980

Nicola (Lou Castel) bears the psychological scars of unbearable guilt. As a boy, he was given the job of looking after his mentally unstable mother and protecting her from herself. One day, he and his sister went instead into a large closet and enacted a childishly intensive “I dare you” bonding ritual, marking one another with the blade of their father’s sword cane. While he was occupied in this manner, the boy’s mother hung herself and died. Now an adult, he still has an unhealthily strong fixation on his sister. This is so obvious that a girlfriend of his sister’s, with whom he has an affair, breaks it off, complaining that she is not interested in being a stand-in for the sister.Read More »

Quote:
Sado is a third base man in a high school baseball team. He has a friend, Shinbunbu, who is an editor for the school newspaper. As a plan to make money, the two one day decide to become pimp and prostitute. However, after killing a gangster in a conflict, Sado gets caught and ends up in juvenile delinquent hell.

The movie was targeted for a high school audience with what would have been an outrageous adventure for a high school student for that time in Japan. Such occurrence is no longer novel in Japan today where high school girls become their own pimps, but back in 1978 the theme of the movie was quite shocking and sensational.Read More »

Jason Sanders, Pacific Film Archive
Frantisek Vlacil’s Shadows of a Hot Summer shared the Grand Prize at Karlovy Vary in 1978, and drew comparisons to Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs for its tense tale of a gentle man pushed to violence in defence of family and home. Mixing potboiler plot with Vlačil’s trademark poetry, the film is set in the summer of 1947, when remnants of enemy forces still roamed the Czech countryside. A Moravian farmer and his family are taken hostage by a group composed of different soldiers, who fought on the German side during the war. Czechoslovakia is on the verge of accepting Communism; the fighters are desperate to get to the Austrian frontier. The farmer initially yields to his captors’ demands, but as the ordeal stretches from days into weeks, he realizes that he will have to take matters into his own hands. Some interpreted the film as a subversive parable of the Warsaw Pact’s 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. “One of the key films of Czechoslovakia’s otherwise sterile post-Prague Spring era … Fitting a nuanced psychology more attuned to Kieslowski into a narrative more worthy of Stallone, Shadows is one of the rediscoveries of the year”.Read More »

Synopsis:
A beautiful young ballet dancer is accepted into a prestigious and exclusive dance academy. Overjoyed at the opportunity to further her career and repair her relationship with her boyfriend, she soon discovers that the academy has a much, much darker side to it–and she may not be able to escape it.
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Ralphbakshi.com wrote:
Ralph Bakshi’s follow-up to Fritz the Cat is a mixture of live action and animation. It is a downbeat look at the urban life of a young New Yorker, depressed by the sights and sounds around him, who finds refuge at a drawing board. Along with Fritz ,Coonskin and American Pop , this film stands as a testament to Bakshi’s determined and most welcome effort to create personal animated features aimed at an intelligent, adult audience.Read More »

Quote:
Land of Milk and Honey is an absolute departure from Étaix’s narrative cinema. The 1971 documentary was made in the wake of the political and social upheaval that rocked France in May of 1968. The footage that the filmmaker gathered after these events took him the next couple of years to assemble, a plight jokingly referred to in the movie’s opening skit. It’s one of only two times that Étaix appears in front of the camera, and it’s a bit misleading as an intro. The entirely staged segment shows Étaix in discussion with himself, buried in a self-replicating pile of celluloid. We won’t see the star again until the very end of the film, when he amusingly asks his random interview subjects if they’ve ever heard of Pierre Étaix. Many haven’t, and the ones that do definitely have an opinion about what Étaix considers humor. The movie closes with Étaix taking a bow, having just performed a song and dance number in disguise. He exits the stage, and effectively exits cinema.Read More »

VOL666 wrote:
WIFE TO BE SACRIFICED is another in a long line of sleazy Nikkatsu roman-porn features – and this is another of the better ones. Somewhat reminiscent of the (also excellent) 1969 film BLIND BEAST – WIFE TO BE SACRIFICED explores subjects such as sexual obsession and domination in much the same, albeit much sleazier fashion…

The story revolves around a woman whose husband had disappeared after being arrested for molesting a child. The husband comes back after three years and decides he’s not through with his wife yet. He kidnaps her and puts her through the requisite humiliation and S&M games, including some inventive rope torture, forced pube-shaving, candlestick rape, whipping, toilet humiliation, etc…The wife tries to escape several times but is never successful, and is even raped by two passers-by during one failed escape attempt. Out on an excursion around his property, the husband finds a couple who have attempted suicide, and after raping the female, kidnaps them as well and puts them through some strong “paces” as well – including a forced enema for the young lady. Eventually the psycho’s wife finds that she’s begun to enjoy the twisted “games” as her will has now been broken and re-molded by her whackadoo husband…
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An artist slowly goes insane while struggling to pay his bills, work on his paintings, and care for his two female roommates, which leads him taking to the streets of New York after dark and randomly killing derelicts with a power drill.Read More »

After 25 years of married life, Julien and Clemence Bouin have ended up hating each other. Living in a dilapidated house soon to be demolished, their lives are filled with bitterness and regret for the happy past both have lost. When Julien adopts a stray cat and smothers it with affection, Clemence’s suppressed resentment turns to hatred…Read More »