I Pass For Human

I Pass For Human (2004)
Written and Directed by Chris D.
Starring Eleanor Whitledge, Joshua Cox, Eva Scott, Jennifer Ciesar, Mary Woronov, Bryan Small

Includes the short film Le Ciel de Sang (1972)

Sometimes a film catches your eye because the person responsible is a cultural mainstay. Chris D. has been a major creative force operating under the radar as a staff writer and label worker for Slash Magazine and Records in the late 70’s, frontman for the Flesh Eaters and Divine Horsemen through the 80’s and as a film essayist and worker at Los Angeles’ American Cinematheque through the 90’s and beyond. His style has always been submerged in the violent grittiness of American pulp and the twisted shadows of foreign horror films; I Pass For Human certainly strives to bring these worlds together in a coherent package.

It becomes immediately apparent that to make it through feature you’re going to have to care enough about Chris D. to watch. The person who loaned this to me (after I saw it had been released and suggested he check it out) told me that when it started he immediately knew to just turn the commentary on and let it rip, but I felt obliged to watch the movie unadulterated the first time through. So I swallowed the shaky hand-held cheap digital video and poor sound and watched.

This is the seedier side of Hollywood crawling with wannabes and has beens struggling to keep their hand in the pot as they disintegrate. Jane (Eleanor Whitledge) is a helpless nervous wreck who has tired of watching her boyfriend Dax (Bryan Small) slip further into heroin addiction. Lucky for her she doesn’t have to wait long before he overdoses, and Jane finds herself lost and alone with only Dax’s circle of crumbling junkies to turn to for support, including his half-sister Mila (Jennifer Ciesar) who politely clears out all of Dax’s remaining dope after his passing.

Mila may not be the nicest or most giving person in the world but she does have the presence of mind to leave a line of smack on the mirror and promises to arrange a meeting between Jane and a friend who recently lost his girlfriend to an overdose. On her own sadness prevails and Jane experiments with her first desperate taste of heroin and with her first bad drug experience. She discovers a room in the basement she had never noticed before and catches a man painting a portrait, but when she tries to speak with him he explodes from his seat and she hits the ground, losing consciousness. The man is gone, she’s running back to her apartment, and the only thing that seems wrong is the blood smeared across the back of her neck.

When she comes to the next morning there’s a strange man standing above her bed. How the fuck did he get in here? The door was open, the TV blasting, which doesn’t mesh well with Jane’s memory but when he introduces himself as Rick (Joshua Cox), Mila’s friend, she shrugs off the unexplained and they go out for coffee to talk about their dearly departed. While Jane seems to have spent years watching Dex succumb to the rocknroll lifestyle Rick’s story is a rapid ride into mania. He met his girlfriend Azami (Eva Scott) at a party and they shoot off like bottle rockets. The sex is great but her habit of unexplained disappearances start to grate until Rick follows her on the rounds one day, watching Azami cop downtown before taking the junk to a hillside house. Through the window he watches as Azami shoots up an older man in a stripped and decaying home, but his confrontation later that evening only reveals his weak will. It’s her ex-husband, and she can do what she wants. And eventually Rick begins to do what she wants, sharing her habit, up to the very night she dies while they’re visiting her parents.

The depressing conversation and Jean’s own weakness soon leads to her asking for a little smack, and Rick becomes the first person to shoot her up. It hits hard and she staggers out of the house hallucinating that Dax is leading her into a crackpark, then hallucinating that hands are reaching up from the ground to grab her. Trying to get home Rick and Mila find her on their way to score at the neighborhood drug bar and Jean finds herself along for the ride, shaking her head but unable to bring herself to leave. Somewhere between the sudden loneliness and the numbing of the heroin she’s rapidly following her boyfriend’s footsteps.

Jean’s only confidant outside of this circle of losers is Dax’s former rehab councilor, Dr. Larraz (Mary Woronov), who tries her best to keep Jane from developing an addiction. The doctor, a former addict herself, reacts to Jane’s tales of hallucinations and the fact that, towards the end, Dax was beginning to see ghosts of the recently departed junkies he called friends. She had developed a theory long ago that dead addicts feed off the living ones, clinging to a half-life between the living and the dead where habituals spend so much of their time.

But there’s no room in a rehab center and Jane’s mother is traveling Europe while her sister’s locked in a mental ward. She keeps hanging out with Mila and Rick despite complaining constantly that she needs to get away from them. She keeps getting high and she’s starting to see more dead people, ghosts she never knew alive. But the worst thing is Mila and Rick see them too, and they seem resigned to the fact that their lives are no longer their own.

 

To Sir With Love

To Sir With Love (2006) Directed by Dae-wung Lim
Released in America as Bloody Reunion
Starring Seong-won Jang, Dong-kyu Lee, Ji-hyeon Lee, Hyo-jun Park, Yeong-hie Seo, Hyeon-soo Yeo, Seol-ah Yu, Mi-hee Oh

It would be a magnificent feat to successfully combine social critique, psychological tension and gory violence into a tidy package. Although To Sir With Love attempts this balancing act with confidence the movie ultimately takes a pretty nasty spill. Regardless of its ultimate failure there’s something intriguing about aspects of To Sir With Love which make it engrossing enough to watch without being driven to kick the screen or talk to the cat, but I can’t say it’s worth any special effort.

The jarring opening sequence of a young teacher enduring the difficult birth of a deformed child and subsequent suicide of her husband grinds to a halt amidst a shocking display of carnage. Police are investigating a basement full of tortured corpses and attempting to question one of two traumatized survivors. From her former instructor’s bedside a young woman begins to relate the previous day’s events.

A group of old classmates have traveled from parts unknown to visit their teacher who is slowly dying in her seaside home. This is the first time many have seen one another since they were children and there’s an obvious nervousness about the proceedings; the collection of students is varied, two have married, one has become a glamour queen, one looks like have a drug problem and likes leather jackets, one is found hitchhiking, one has been driven by circumstances to live with the teacher and one has suddenly reappeared after a mysterious absence. No one had expected to find their teacher in such an advanced state of decay, wheel-chair bound and unable to care for herself, but the sheepishness at never having kept in touch is soon found to be tempered by some deep-rooted resentment.

Dark thoughts are dampening the bright sunny day and each shares a common target. Things were not so fun back in grade school and everyone is haunted by some humiliation. Miss Park was not a kind woman, overseeing class with a hard-knock philosophy and a penchant for calling kids out in front of their peers. As the students quietly share their memories along one another rage slowly builds, but no one seems prepared to take issue with a dying woman. That, to me, is a sign of maturity and patience. Realistically only the most sociopathic person could start ripping on an old woman coughing to death, and Dae-wung Lim understands how to use this natural conflict to now only pace the movie but to show without needing detail the complexities of the characters.

After the cake has been cut and the sun sunk below the horizon a day of hard drinking drags the cat out of the bag. Everyone is embarrassed but the outburst proves a cathartic moment, and sleep is hard-coming for those ruminating on their unspoken anger. Perfect time to knock the students off, one by one and blame it on the ghost of Miss Park’s deformed child.

 

Oira Sukeban

Oira Sukeban (2006)
Written and directed by Noburu Iguchi
based on the manga by Go Nagai
Also known as Sukeban Boy

This is an amazing movie. This is as mind-blowingly good as it gets. Somehow a whirlwind of disparate influences syphon through a digital video camera and lands on its feet, teeth bared, ready to can-can kick your ass into submission. It should be impossible to watch: a horror of bad writing, cheesy costumes and production values normally found in camcorder theater; the actors read lines and then trail off, converse in choppy exchanges and set themselves for shots; the music is recycled from a third rate funk soundtrack filtered through the heartless interpretation of a session band and a Pro-Tools studio.

But it ties together, commands your attention and then slaps you in the face. You’re laughing hysterically and your hand wants to cover your eyes before the next ludicrously profane act but there’s no way you’ll miss what’s coming. There’s rampant nudity, extreme violence and an ever present sense that a line will be crossed which will forever change the viewer’s ability to act like an upstanding member of society. The real world will forever be a boring place with muted colors, distant sounds and an utter lack of the absurd. You’ll feel lonely, wondering where the gangs of schoolgirls have gotten to and why no one laughs anymore.

Sukeban (Asami, recently in The Machine Girl) has been cursed with a pretty face which leads to his daily torment by classmates and random beggars on the street. His only defense is to become a violent sociopath which leads to his expulsion from every school in town and his disappointed single father/biker to confront his son (in the bathtub) and send him off to an all-girl’s school. Suffering the humiliation of dressing like a girl Sukeban struggles to hide his roguish ways and avoid detection but is immediately challenged (by a thrown knife or two) and forced to protect himself. Another student and fellow outsider, Mochiko (Emiru Momose), reveals to him that the school is overrun with gangs and they become best friends with severe sexual undertones. Their first date? Visiting the new school club which teaches girls to be more feminine through humiliation.

Humiliation? Yes, girls strip naked while crying how ashamed of their bodies they are as their classmates taunt them. Mochiko is coerced to strip to her underwear but Sukeban, being a boy (although one played by a girl), knows he cannot do as is expected of him. This leads to a stand-off with the club leader Kanko (Saori Matsunaka) while Mochiko’s clothes are torn apart by half-naked girls wearing football padding and helmets. A fight ensues, and respect is earned. Suddenly Mochiko finds she isn’t the only girl with a crush on Sukeban and there’s something about her quiet consideration and tendency towards rumination that promises this competition will be for keeps.

After an orgiastic tea-party Kanko is tricked into being ambushed by a member of the Naked Gang who wears a bizarre head-dress and little else. Extreme violence follows and Sukeban is blamed, a marked man in a school-girl’s outfit. More gangs appear (one of which incorporates ancient Japanese mythology and nipple clamps made from clothespins), Sukeban’s father re-emerges with his own cross-dressing gang, blood flies, skin shows and then weirdly Japanese mutations (designed by Yoshihiro Nishimura who’s made a name for himself with Tokyo Gore Police) burst from people’s bodies and start shooting everyone. Add a little incest and some strange hormonal injections and we’ve got the homo-erotic credits sequence set to bouncing low-grade J-Pop.