Film nostalgia: vampires, breakdance, androids, doll-women, and lusty femicide.

During the summer of '94, I covertly watched B-films served up nightly by ASN at midnight. These films were pretty cheesy and bad by most standards, but transgressive to a 12 year old. Now everyone finds fringe and cult films online, or stumbles upon them, but I must thank ASN (a usually family-friendly channel) for bringing the films that taught me about technology run amok, taboo sexuality, vampire love, and of course, the dance battle:

Amantes (Dir. Vicente Aranda)

Have been haunted by this film since this one viewing. Follows a young man as he abandons his virginal fiance to be sexually educated by his Widowed landlord, with inevitable murderous ending. Innovative uses for a hanky are discovered en route.
Seeing Woody Allen's Match Point a few years ago reminded me of the film, though I had no idea what it was called or who made it. Today I tried many googling techniques, all which yielded nothing, and I finally typed in "spanish film about murder" and found this title halfway down the page. Bingo! Weird.
Levity aside, the final scene of this film has floated back to me many times in the 14 years since I first saw it. The emotional impact of understanding the intersection of sexual violence with domestic violence still resonates. This film was the first to give me that unsettled, morosely creeped-out feeling that comes from mixing death, sexuality, and trust, which I would later experience with films like Olivier Olivier!, A Ma Soeur (Fat Girl), My Summer Of Love, and more recently Red Road.

Full Amantes synopsis.


Beat Street (Dir. Stan Lathan, with Guy Davis, Rae Dawn Chong)

Stars a young Guy Davis (son of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee) in his first and only movie role. I loved the film then, and it has since taken on new meaning, as Frederictonians now know Guy as a guitar-strumming storyteller who used to make frequent visits to Harvest and to Salty Towers to trade notes with Hot Toddy.





Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo(Dir. Sam Firstenberg)

A developer tries to bulldoze a community recreation center. The local breakdancers try to stop it by putting on a dance spectacular. Obviously they succeed, as the coffeegrinder overcomes all obstacles.
I believe in the beat.


The Hunger (Dir. Tony Scott with David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon)

Saw it once and never forgot it.

The Bauhaus over opening titles, the David Bowie, the lesbian love, the loneliness of the undead, the mutating hemoglobin, the Flower Duet, the eighties eye-makeup, the billowing gauzy curtains, the Ankh-necklace dagger, the crumbling flesh... Too much to unpack here, I suggest watching it as soon as possible.
Online.


Making Mr. Right (Dir. Susan Seidelman, with John Malkovich)
Woman falls in love with an android that looks like John Malkovich. Yeah, right.
Most memorable moment is when android Malkovich goes through his human lover's purse and finds her diaphragm. He pings it around wondering what it is, and my young self wondered the same thing.


Weird Science (Dir. John Hughes, with Anthony Michael Hall)

My parents are away for the weekend. Party? No. Initiate woman-making software.
Two nerds design a woman using their geeked-out custom IBM attached to a Barbie, and through the magic of a freak lightening storm, the doll turns into Kelly "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" LeBrock. Anatomically correct or plastic panties? We never find out, because a gang of punk biker aliens break up the party (Time travellers from Tupac's "California" video, who found themselves in the wrong 80s movie. Sorry dudes, Mad Max is in the other studio.)

Cinema's proto-nerd Anthony Michael Hall begins to lose his way after this film, never truly resurfacing until taking on the role he was born to play, pre-humanitarian Ur-geek Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley.