And now for something a little out of the ordinary...

Singapore Sling....wow, I don't know quite what to say about this gem of a movie.

Once in a great while a film will impress me through it's pure innovation and creativity. This doesn't happen too often with most Horror/Exploitation films, because they tend to rely on standard conventions and clichés...I don't need to tell you what they are, any Horror movie watcher worth his or her salt already knows. I think it's especially egregious in slasher films.

Singapore Sling, though...this is a highly original film. Shot in beautiful black and white, it tells the story of a detective (who also happens to be a mute and an alcoholic) searching for a woman named Laura who's case he had been involved in. She disappeared from his life, and in the course of his travels he gets shot (this event is never really explained in the film, one of my few complaints) in the middle of a huge storm.

His story is intercut with the actions of two women, a mother and daughter duo, who are...how shall we say..."different". When they aren't having sex with each other or the mummified patriarch of the family, they're killing and burying their servants ("with aromatic flowers"). One of the most fascinating elements of Singapore Sling, in my opinion, is how often it breaks the so-called "4th Wall". The female characters address the audience regularly about their devious plans. To tell you the truth, I'm not exactly sure if I liked this or not; it certainly was unique, in any case.

Anyway, the man crawls wounded to the house where the two incestious lesbians live. That's when the movie takes a dramatic turn for the seriously deranged. The lesbians (who also happen to have a sadomasochistic streak, as it turns out) tie "Singapore Sling" (the name they give him) up, and proceed to do weird things with him, mostly involving electroshock and various bodily fluids. They also eat dinner with him (the dinner scenes in the film are probably the most spectacularly disgusting and bizarre dinner scenes I've ever seen) and have threesomes with him and other sick shit. There is also a particularly memorable scene involving a kiwi. I will say

no more!

On the negative side: the movie wears out its welcome a little bit near the end. It's almost two hours long; I definitely would have made it shorter. The print that they used for the DVD has burnt-in English subtitles for the parts that are in Greek, which are fuzzy, hard to read, and inaccurate. Synapse remedied this by placing their own subtitles over the old ones which are accurate and easy to read, as well as interpret the few lines of French in the film; however, their subtitles are encaptioned in big grey boxes that cover up a good deal of the picture, which is even more annoying than the original subtitles. There are no extras on the DVD to speak of. With this one, the feature presentation is petty much whatcha get.

Besides that, though, Singapore Sling is a pretty great film, combining exploitation, film noir, gore, a bit of Horror...you basically get the whole 9 with this one. Another thing that's great about it that I forgot to mention was the acting, especially by the mother and daughter in the film (as Singapore Sling himself never gets much chance to act). It's quite good.

All in all, I give Singapore Sling a solid 8 out of 10.

I'm a dishonest bastard.

I said I'd post something over my spring break, and I didn't. What a dishonest wanker I am....may God have mercy on my soul.

Anyway, since I can't think of anything else to talk about at the moment, I might as well talk about the book I'm currently reading, which is "Strike!" by Jeremy Brecher. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know the basics of labor history in the United States; it's written in clear language, and concerns very engaging, interesting subject matter (for me, at least).

I've always known that labor struggle had turned bloody more than once in the United States, but I never quite appreciated the extent of some of the conflicts; the struggle in Colorado and the Great Upheaval general strike of 1877 almost degenerated into straight up class warfare. Workers in 1877 in Pennsylvania were setting railroad yards on fire and firing at soldiers sent into break the strike. Supposedly, according to the soldier's testimony, police officers were also firing at them as they retreated! Talk about solidarity. It also reminded me of the dishonest tactics that business used by weilding the government as its henchman, such as in the Pullman Strike. The Attorney General of the United States at that time was openly alligned with one of the railroads that was losing money because of the strike, which was eventually broken with soldiers. The book also discusses some of the ideological motivations that many of the workers held.

It brings to mind just how much unions have lost their way. They used to have far reaching, democratic goals; now they just appear to be another cog in a gigantic, state crony capitalist machine, which is built on beauracracy and screwing the average worker. And it pains me dearly to say that, as I've been part of strikes and labor struggles myself. Rightly conceived, I think that organized labor could form a protective barrier against some of the more negative effects of capitalism, and more importantly it would emerge organically, as opposed to regulations pushed by the state.

Anyway, check it out, if you can; it's interesting.

Wow.

I haven't posted on this blog in a while!

I recently got back from vacation, but I've been paying attention to the news. How couldn't I?! It's so awful, yet at the same time, endlessly fascinating. Watching the election coverage has been like watching a horrific car crash in slow motion: so horrible you want to turn away, but you can't pry your eyes away.

So, anyway, I might post sometime in the near future about our glorious up-and-coming leaders and their illustrious plans for Change (yes, it's capitalized, like all imaginary deities). Or, I might write a movie review or a analysis of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", which I slogged through recently. Who knows.