Ekstremno...bizarno...a NIJE iz Japana

[Milosh]

Rec je o Kanadskom filmu 'Subconscious Cruelty', koga je reditelj Karim Hussain uradio sa, kako sam kaze, namerom da  maksimalno zgadi i isprovocira publiku, sto mu je sudeci po diskusijama koje se vode na internetu, i to prevashodno medju horor fanovima, vise nego uspelo. I dok se ljudi raspravljaju da li Hussaina treba zatvoriti, poslati u ludnicu ili slaviti kao novog Watersa, Deodata ili Lyncha, stoji cinjenica da vecina njih film nije ni pogledala jer isti jos uvek nema distributera, a osim prikazivanja po nekim festivalima, film je jedino otkupljen za prikazivanje u, vec pogadjate, dragom nam Japanu.

Sto se tice onih koji su film pogledali, misljenja su  za sada podeljena, ali je interesantno napomenuti da reditelj koji se poziva na Lyncha i Cronenberga za sada prolazi slicno nesrecnom Deodatu, o cemu i govori sledeca prica o 'maloj nezgodi' sa Kanadskim vlastima:




When local director Karim Hussain returned from a business trip to the U.S. last
March, the last thing he was expecting was trouble from Canada customs officials for videos of his feature directorial debut. The film in question was home-grown--how could officials confiscate foreign material that wasn't even foreign?

But Hussain, who also works as a programmer for the local Fant-Asia film fest, found out the hard way that once material is taken out of the country, when re-entering it's automatically considered foreign. Videotapes of trailers for and a rough cut of his raunchy feature Subconscious Cruelty were confiscated by Customs officials, and Hussain still hasn't learned of the videotapes' ultimate fate.

The trouble for Hussain began March 5. He and other Fant-Asia representatives were returning from a business trip to Los Angeles and New York, when their bus was routinely stopped at the Canadian border. "The customs people hate fucking bus people. If you're on a bus, you're a bad fucking person as far as they're concerned. It was also at a time when there was some new tension in the Gulf, and I was the only one who looked even remotely Middle Eastern. Then they saw that my name was Hussain and they didn't like that much.

"They started going through all my stuff and eventually found the copy of my press kit. There's photos of a messed-up Christ in there and photos of people whose orifices are being penetrated, so they were extremely upset by that. They found the trailers and went back to some room to watch them and then came back white as fucking ghosts."

Customs officials, whom Hussain describes as "impressionable white trash," then arrested Hussain on suspicion of harbouring obscene materials. "I told them that it was a Canadian film, that the negative was in Canada and that we'd even applied to the Canadian government for money. They said that even if your film has been brought out of the country for even five minutes, it's a foreign product. So if you're going into Canada, they consider you a big, bad, stinkin'-ass evil American coming in with your own product."

Then Hussain says he was placed in a cell that made him particularly anxious. "They put me in the cell where they do the penetration exams. It's not just bend down, we'll shove a finger up a your ass, as you'd think it might be. They actually have furniture built for this very situation. It's this weird sort of Ikea-like bench with two different levels. I had been on the bus all day and I had a very special surprise to give them if they insisted on doing it. Luckily they didn't."

Hussain was let go, but his tapes were taken. Luckily, the videos were just copies and nothing crucial was lost, but Hussain says he'd still like the videos returned to him, on principle.

For Hussain, the confiscation is the latest in a long line of problems in writing and directing Subconscious Cruelty. An episodic, surreal film in the same vein as David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Luis Buñuel, Cruelty is full of excessive scenes of gore and twisted sexual situations (local artist C.J. Goldman, who also worked on the currently-playing Species 2, created many of the horrifying effects). Hussain says he and producer Mitch Davis (who is also a Fant-Asia programmer) have endured theft of film stock and crew mutinies, among many other roadblocks, in the four years since they launched the project. "It's also been a tough shoot because we've been asking people to do things they never would have dreamed of doing normally in their lives. Some actors had to be coated in blood for over 14 hours straight. There were sequences where Christ was being raped with a tree. These scenes are a bit rough on the actors. You have to draw the actors into a certain Mansonesque cult for a certain amount of time.

"There was this one story where we were filming six people naked in the mud. They're actually fucking the ground, screwing the trees and everything. It was extremely cold outside, and people were getting a bit dodgy about taking their clothes off and covering themselves in mud. Eventually I screamed at them that anything I asked them to do I'd be willing to do myself. So me and my assistant director threw our clothes off and we began attacking the ground, screaming like madmen for an hour. It was pitch black and after feeling the grass rubbing against our balls and eating the dirt, we suddenly realized we had no idea where our clothes were. We eventually had to go back to the production house completely naked. We couldn't find any clothes so we had to make do with some rags and I didn't have any shoes, so I had to wrap paper towels around my feet. After the sun rose we found our clothes, which were covered in frost."

Hussain says making the movie strange is the whole point. "Films that look you in the eye, that spray diarrhea in the eye, and the diarrhea is full of intelligence and beauty. Not just maggots and pestilence--you can learn from maggots and pestilence too, though.

"We want riots in the cinema. We want people to be screaming and wanting to kill the filmmakers after. There are so few ballsy films out there."





A koliko je cela stvar zaista ekstremna neka posvedoci i izjava jednog od gledalaca koji je film pogledao i ukratko ga prepricao tj. naveo neke od upecatljivijih scena:



...It has things like a woman shredding a guy's penis while he masturbates and she eats the pieces she rips off, all shown in detail. There is a scene where Jesus is raped over and over and then pissed on. There is a baby being brutally sliced to pieces during birth, again shown in detail. People have sex with trees, rocks, mud, and anything else outside. There is a lot more but I have not found out what it all is yet. And apparently none of this stuff fits together, it is just different stories being told. There is never any real story to it, it is suppose to be considered as art not a film...



Sto se tice kritike, neki su vec dali svoj sud. Evo i prilicno pozitivne kritike od Fangorie:




In an era when commercialism has sadistically mutilated the American horror movie genre, two Canadian auteurs have produced a conceptual anthology film far more disturbing than anything that has graced U.S. silver screens in the past 20 years. With SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY, their debut feature, producer Mitch Davis and writer/director/editor Karim Hussain have crafted a pure piece of art that works simultaneously as a beautifully nasty horror flick and a thematically literate examination of the darkest existential concepts imaginable.

And, in a refreshing move on the filmmakers' part, SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY has absolutely no commercial potential in the American film market. That's right! They made this to scare the hell out of us and teach us about our own nature, instead of pleasing some studio. Even the film's gross trailer cleared out my living room faster than a neutron bomb, leaving me to watch the picture sans company. Oh well. It was their loss.

SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY, ostensibly an anthology, runs with a concept vague enough so as not to become cumbersome. The four short nightmares, as seen through Hussain's wickedly visionary lens, each deal with the struggle between the logical left and the whimsical right sides of the brain. With titles such as "Ovarian Eyeball," "Human Larvae," "Rebirth" and "Right Brain/Martyrdom," there's no contrived TALES FROM THE CRYPT-style familiarity here. Instead, Hussain gives us Burroughsian obsessions as seen through the eyes of Buñuel, with the set direction of Argento and the moral outlook of Jörg Buttgereit. Some would make obvious comparisons to Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, but as a director, Hussain stays closer to the path of true surrealism than either of those fine directors. This film springs from the same muse that inspired ANDALUSIAN DOG and E. Elias Merhige's BEGOTTEN.

"Ovarian Eyeball," more of a sketch than a full story, sets the tone well, with a most unusual Cesarean section performed on a nude woman, using fingernails in lieu of a scalpel. The composition of each shot is immediately striking, with staggeringly realistic gore FX (by SPECIES 2's C.J. Goldman). From this brief and plotless prologue, SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY defines its uncompromising tone and commands attention in spite of itself.

"Human Larvae" carries the birth theme a step forward in terms of grotesqueness when a deranged young man (essayed with effectively lackadaisical conviction by Ivaylo Founev) becomes morbidly infatuated with his sexually uninhibited sister's pregnancy. Touching upon themes of incest, fetishism, jealousy and menstrual repulsion, "Larvae" maintains a uniformly taut eeriness before exploding into a climactic symphony of cruelty so shocking as to jolt even the most jaded purveyors of cinematic psychotica.

"Rebirth," perhaps the most beautiful segment, loosens the umbilical noose just long enough to give new meaning to the phrase "nature lover." "Rebirth" also allows Teruhiko Suzuki's hypnotic musical score to work its magic as it punctuates scenes of naked, mud-caked humans engaging in a blood orgy with their natural habitat. Amazingly, Hussain pulls off this sequence stunningly, skimming the edges of pretentiousness without ever allowing the picture to fall in too deep.

"Right Brain/Martyrdom," the final story, details a night in the placid life and tumultuous mind of an antisocial masturbator. Bringing the right/left brain conflict to the narrative forefront, this segment utilizes shocking sex and violent imagery to illustrate modern man's internal war between logic and creativity. Featured within the story are scathing indictments of supposed religious integrity, the mental shackles of modern society and the depths to which a man will sink in the pursuit of pleasure.




...i jedne drugacije od jednog gledaoca na IMDB-u, koja u skracenoj verziji zvuci otprilike ovako:




"Piece of Crap."




Oni kojima se nije smucilo od cele stvari vec naprotiv zele jos, neka obavezno pogledaju i trejler za ovaj film. Moze se downloadovati samo japanska verzija trejlera koja sadrzi nesto preko minut eksplicitnih scena koje su opisane u gornjem tekstu.

Evo i linka:   http://www.inflictionfilms.com/html/cruelty/Trailers.htm



A da li je Hussain samo obican hack koji hoce da posto poto privuce paznju ili je reditelj koji ima sta da kaze , mozda cemo se i sami uveriti ako film stigne i do nas (...do video kluba Homer pre svega, kada bi neko ovo probao da pusti na Festu, letele bi glave...).  

[taurus-jor]

Ne bi letele glave, o Miloshe. Bar ne ovde, u balkanskoj divljini.

Em smo medju retkim zemaljama sveta gde cenzura ne postoji (Crash je npr. prikazan u ex-SRJ u integralnoj verziji), em smo preziveli stvari koje po uverljivosti nadmasuju bilo kakvu filmsku gadost.

Na FEST-u bi mu dali specijalnu projekciju na koju bi otisli fanovi i snobovi, posle bi - ako bi ga ko otkupio - zavrsio na videu ili u trecoj sali Doma sindikata.

Kako god, voleo bih da vidim na sta to lici.

[Milosh]

To da kod nas nema cenzure je potpuno tacno.  

Medjutim, ja sam prevashodno mislio na neprikazivanje HOROR filmova na Festu, osim ukoliko nije rec o mainstream ostvarenjima (sto prodje kao distributerski film) ili o novim filmovima vec poznatih autora (Avati, Argento, Cronenberg...).

Ja se iskreno nadam da uvrstavanje filma Pulse/Kairo ove godine nije samo puka slucajnost, ali opet...



Inace iskopao sam jos podataka o reditelju Karim Hussain-u. On je vec uradio i svoj drugi, ovoga puta kratkometrazni, film interesantne premise:


City Without Windows - One day, all the windows in the City disappeared... Then the rain started... No matter what people tried, nothing could stop the water. Soon, disease spread, robbing people's abilities to speak; the endless rain killing all other forms of communication with its acidic torrent. This was a time when dialogue became a new challenge. When everything we knew had to be reinvented. This was also a time, in the midst of a chaotic, decaying environment, when a man tried to cope with the loss of his former lover.


...a nedavno je i zavrsio film Ascension :


Ascension - The story concerns the perils facing a trio of women who enter a mysterious tower to find God's murderer; Hussain hopes to have a completed print of the movie this fall for a festival premiere in early 2003. The trailer for this ambitious project will receive its U.S. debut at this month's FANGORIA Weekend of Horrors in Pasadena.

[Milosh]

...a evo ga i DVD: http://www.fangoria.com/ghastly_review.php

[Ghoul]

Ovaj film mi je bio u vrhu WANTED liste već par godina unazad, otkad sam prvi put čuo za njega.
I ja sam se primao na te hvalospeve i na poređenja s mojim omiljenim režiserima, nadajući se da je bar 1/3 toga tačna.

Međutim – bullshit.

Gledao sam ga čim su ga moji minioni skinuli s neta, još negde zimus ili tako nekako – i "Piece of Crap" je najistinitija deonica u svoj toj gomili reči citiranoj gore, uključujući i napaljajući rivju na FANGORIA.COM .

Ima tu lepih prizora, i muzika ima svojih momenata, ali bih u najkraćem film opisao kao 'pretenciozni smor'. Lepo je što postoji, lepo je što se i takve stvari prave, nije ih loše ispratiti, ali upozoravam: samo ako drastično smanjite očekivanja i ne primite se na ono gore možete, možda, da izmuzete malo dubioznog užitka iz filma. Ova ograda, naravno, ne važi za plisskena, warlocka i sl. nekritičke gore-houndove koji će ovo bez ostatka da polapću i da šene za još...