Dan Santelli shares with us his favorite ‘new to him’ watches of 2022! In alphabetical order. Read Part 1 here.

by Dan Santelli, Staff Writer

Parole Violators (dir. Patrick C. Donahue, 1994)

At last, we’ve arrived at psychotronic movie nirvana. Parole Violators is nothing short of a barnstorming Oops! All Jolts DIY symphony of fisticuffs, macho bluster, and broken glass wherein officer-turned-video-cop Miles Long (that is his name!) does battle with a gang of pedophile kidnappers on the outskirts of San Francisco. Barely competent at times and replete with sanity-questioning tin-ear dialogue, but so delightfully relentless that its inability to know when to quit sweeps you away. This film is nonstop energy and insanity served with meat-headed vigor and vaguely libertarian gusto. It moves like a freight train, never makes the mistake of plateauing its quirks and lunacy, and, as a bonus, stars a dude who bears an odd resemblance to Michael Bay. This just shows what magic no-budget filmmakers can conjure when the objective is simply to do all they can to entertain you while pulling off some impressively risky stunts, a few of which play out in long take sans cuts just to prove they’re not fooling around. It’s a tantalizing barrage of bodies in motions, back-breaking fights, shootouts, and mayhem. And it almost doesn't matter that the action itself occasionally skimps on geographical clarity because this is made with so much love and conviction that I couldn't help but be weirdly touched by it. Hell, even the pencil-pushing bureaucrat gets a Hero Moment! Not so-bad-it's-good, just so-good-it's-great. One of the best trash movies I've seen in a long time.

A slightly edited version of Parole Violators is streaming on YouTube at the time of this writing.

Sambizanga (dir. Sarah Maldoror, 1972)

Sarah Maldoror’s second feature deliberately walks the audience up the garden path and leaves them there; it’s a slow-fuse narrative time-bomb that ultimately cuts away before the explosion. This presents itself as a tacitly agitated study of the varieties of resilience and organization amid colonial hostility, juxtaposing a single-minded quest for answers against a forceful portrait of collective instigation; it’s like a narrative network of segments that interlock and isolate, all paralleling each other and profoundly attentive to the suffering on display. In one late scene, the camera observes a group of prisoners regarding the deceased body of Domingos Xavier, reframing and resizing the image to maintain an intimate gaze as it surveys the faces, feelings, and initiatives of care and sensitivity enacted by the imprisoned; formally, it recalls nothing less than the opening credits of Zabriskie Point, the camera acting as empathetic observer and eavesdropper, but with Antonioni's suspicions replaced by Maldoror's furious compassion. Maldoror’s rhythms, however, strike a more forceful, violent stance: consider the drastic cutaways from unresolved action, harsh sound edits that jolt your senses, and framing the turbulent, crashing waves of a river as a double metaphor, suggesting both the populace’s inner turmoil and the acts of revolution that commence as the film cuts to black. Sambizanga ultimately amounts to a persuasive and acutely orchestrated swipe at colonialist oppression that makes you want to stand up and scream. It lingers in the way of a skin burn.

Sambizanga is streaming on Criterion Channel at the time of this writing.

Simone Barbès or Virtue (dir. Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980)

A stripped-down pointedly post-Mulvey glimpse of nocturnal working-class life that really relays that in-the-moment feeling of existential torpor and aimlessness, not to mention the frisson that comes with disappearing into the night. Come for the Rohmerian observation in the “change of the guard” opener, stay for the lesbian cabaret sequence (with Amazonian cosplayers and a rad-as-fuck punk number) and the tangibly wrought sense of urban loneliness that reminded me of Tsai Ming-liang. Practically all of the male characters (some benign, others hostile) are deliberately ineffectual, which only reinforces Treilhou's interrogation of how we watch cinema (and women in cinema). I may need a second viewing to fully appreciate the tempestuousness and melancholy that thrums beneath the surface of Simone’s exchanges. If you’re seeking a vibe, turn your eyes toward this.

Thundercrack! (dir. Curt McDowell, 1975)

A titanic queer monument of prurience and genre riffing, Curt McDowell restages The Old Dark House as a gleefully absurdist haze of collective hysteria, foul-mouthed double entendres, gay and straight hardcore, achingly earnest melodramatics, and some of the most warped pathos this side of Cornell Woolrich…and it clocks in at just shy of three hours. On top of all that, it’s a visually gorgeous film, too, like if Night of the Living Dead’s unrefined chiaroscuro found itself presiding over camp ghouls, interspecies erotica, and a performance of scenery-chewing grandeur by Marion Eaten (her histrionics suggest a Brundlefly-ing of Vivien Leigh and Mink Stole). The all-pervading misanthropy inevitably summons the ghost of Andy Milligan (though McDowell seems to love his freaks more than Milligan), while the film cosmetically plays like a missing link between Jack Smith and Guy Maddin. Deranged beyond belief, and an absolute laugh riot.

Turumba (dir. Kidlat Tahimik, 1983)

Like Perfumed Nightmare, Turumba is another of Kidlat Tahimik’s anthropological docufictions on the effects of neocolonialism. In the film, Tahimik weaves a tragicomic study of time-honored traditions and simple ways of living dissipating as a consequence of capitalist intervention, framed by the detached voiceover of Kadu, the daughter of the Turumba’s respected kantore. It’s easy for something like this to get lost in the conceptual and the didactic, as Tahimik veers toward the latter with his dramatization of cultural appropriation’s tendency to devalue what it’s exploiting. However, he counters his own didacticism with quasi-absurdist digressions, namely exploiting the regional incongruities fostered by the colonizer administering capitalism and modernity to the small village, while letting his poetical scrutiny wash over everything; the latter functions like a varnish that becomes more pronounced as the import of customs is gradually eroded. In a movie filled with memorable images, a tilt-up from someone reading a telegram to a lone, forgotten cello sitting on the shelf might be the most haunting. A difficult work at times, but cumulatively very rewarding and thoughtful.

Vengeance is Mine (dir. Michael Roemer, 1984)

The third Michael Roemer feature I’ve seen, and all operate as quasi-ethnographies that critically evaluate their milieu’s impact on the main characters, as well as, in some way, challenge the then-current ideological status quo. Disparate subjects aside, his features are remarkably consistent in their attitudes.

Here, Roemer encroaches on the land of John Updike and churns out an unforgettable arsenic-laced melodrama of suburban jaundice and neuroses — it’s the anti-Ordinary People. Chillingly calm surfaces veil festering resentment buried for years as two Catholic families shatter slowly and painfully amid a torrent of dispute, illness, and ensuing calamity. It’s a film that finds motifs in mothers expressing contempt for their children, aloof fathers, haircutting-as-abuse, and destructive coping mechanisms, while framing religion as the cornerstone of the community. The members of one family are mirrored in the other, two toxic units paralleling each other with almost everyone characterized as incapable of healthy communication and morally compromised at best. Roemer invokes a relaxed, observational camera-style and a soundscape of heightened naturalism, letting the incipient melodrama’s gravitas counter the impassive technique. It’s bookended by long-take close-ups of Brooke Adams’ intoxicated facial expressions communicating the same emotional arc, except the preceding drama inspires us to read it differently the second time around. A film as sensational as it is punishing. I hope Reagan stuck this in his Happy Family pipe and smoked it.

The Wangan Highway (Higashi Yōichi, 1984)

On love in the age of materialism. Another Higashi emotional odyssey concerning self-governing renegades. This transposes Antonioniennui onto 1980s Japan in its portrait of modern romance, consumerist excess, and slow vibes for days. Higashi opens on two mannequins kissing in motorcycle gear against a stylized backdrop, an artificial ideal of romance that he refutes with a font of glacial pacing, glacial emotions, bubble economy malaise, and an introspective gaze. The couple is a strikingly modern one: he’s a gym instructor, she’s an administrator and sometimes sex worker, and their dynamic is one of two individuals leading separate lives as a unit and more or less accepting each other’s chosen path, a realistic union that’s a flesh-and-blood reification of the underlying anti-conformist sentiment that ambiguously climaxes with decisive acts of independence. Intermittently obvious with its musings on consumerist impulses, but the rest is incisive, haunting, and transfixing. This deserves to be major, and it’s a shame it only exists in a spotty VHSrip.

Water and Power (dir. Pat O’Neill, 1989)

Part ontological, part phenomenological, all impactful strokes and expressive textures. A film about landscapes, shadows, ghosts, chaos, industrialization, Manifest Destiny, pivoting, scanning, (de)evolution, nature’s indifference, defamiliarization, dichotomies, visual rhymes, fictional histories/nostalgia, the passing of time, the power of illusion, and the power of the optical printer. What is this? A formal rebuttal to Koyaanisqatsi? A dying man’s reverie? The dream of an empty room, or maybe Los Angeles itself? Whatever it may be, it roused my senses and, as a viewer, made me feel empowered to an inordinate degree. Probing, ethereal, mournful, abstract, tactile, like a moving painting. In the last analysis, a total sensorial bliss-out and my favorite discovery of the year.

Wildwood, NJ (dir. Ruth Leitman, Carol Weaks Cassidy, 1994)

It’s intriguing how this, a documentary short investigating the lives of various blue-collar women living on or around the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, dually operates as A) a covert investigation of women’s issues (body image, gender inequality, restricted agency and autonomy, relational abuse, etc.) and B) a vaguely Les Blank-ish communal portrait that, per A, engenders an odd tension between the romanticizing of locale and the creeping reality that seeps in and gradually erodes that rose-tinted view. I'm sure there's a way to read this now as a rebuke of nostalgia, but, truthfully, it rang to me like an accidental critique of something like Heavy Metal Parking Lot. And despite the collective resilient attitudes, the understated mournfulness is palpable, in that you're watching a group of people with hopes and dreams of getting out but don't possess the means and will likely remain stuck; the sadness of this movie is written all over the resigned face of that woman who blankly says of her mother, “she thought I'd go farther in life.”

Wildwood, NJ is streaming on YouTube at the time of this writing.