Don’t know why I expected anything different, but it turns out that Albino, the pro-Rhosesian made in apartheid South Africa rape revenge thriller where the villain is played by German actor Horst Frank in albino blackface is really racist.

I guess I was hoping for its other qualities as a thriller to make the experience more tolerable, but no such luck I’m afraid.

Rock wrote:

They pronounce it “Al-bean-o” in the movie. Apparently it’s only pronounced “Alb-eye-no” in North America?

South African pronunciation definitely has its own flavor. I personally can't distinguish a South African accent from Aussie or Kiwi, but I've never truly applied myself to parsing them out, either.

One of the funnier things about teaching overseas was all the expats from various English–speaking countries trying to understand each other.

lol I was gonna ask if you'd seen it yet

Yeah, I really liked it, but my reasons are a lot more basic. Perkins knows how to do "deliberate" style in a way that actually creates tension (instead of just being overbearing), and he knows how to use a weird Cage performance without turning him into a meme.
 

He finally did his homework and watched some actual vintage porn though. There's a brief clip of Marilyn Chambers in Insatiable. Now if only he let that roll out to feature length and got rid of everything else, we'd have a good movie.

(Some Longlegs spoiler potential, so this is mostly for Rock)

I don't really get these criticisms of Longlegs as being "overexpository".  My interpretation of this is that they simply weren't satisfied with the exposition, the content rather than the amount of it.  I can think of a few things from the film which remain completely unanswered, mostly involving Longlegs himself.  A typical review would be Bilge Ebiri, who says:

Unfortunately, as with so many horror movies — even some good ones — the film ultimately feels the need to explain itself. The final act becomes weirdly mired in exposition: It dumps a lot of information on us while simultaneously confusing us, partly because Perkins tries to navigate his story’s revelations while still maintaining stylistic control over the picture. The tension between form and content, which so enriched the film initially, starts to become untenable. Our attention starts to drift.

My attention did not start to drift, thanks.  Nor did I find the exposition to be "simultaneously confusing".  Frankly, I don't just disagree, I have no idea what he's talking about.  I have to suspect that the core issue for Elbiri, and other critics who've written similar things, is that they had problems with this information revealed in the third act, but rather than parse these issues chooses to blame the structure of revelation instead.  How can a film "overexplain" while confusing us?  Too much exposition should lead to clarification not confusion.  If you remain confused about something, chances are the film did not explain itself enough.  And I also suspect that had this film chosen to maintain its obscurity through to the end, you would doubtlessly be seeing the converse criticisms of the film being impenetrable and incoherent.  I haven't seen a critic attempt to explain how this third act could have been handled better.  And my suspicion is also that the supernatural element, which is part of the third act revelation, is probably the bugbear that's bothering them.

Also at Vulture is a similar essay, "Longlegs' ending does a little too much explaining".  (Interestingly, the tab title is "Longlegs' Self-Defeating Ending, Explained", which is odd considering how if the film did do too much explaining why it would need any further explanation.)  I think Beatrice Loayza's breakdown of the film's theme, linking the events to repressed Freudian trauma, is pretty spot-on, so I have no idea why any of it is a problem.  Loayza doesn't ever explain why any of this is a problem either, except the implication that because she could figure it out is itself the issue.  She starts by linking the more obvious (superficial) inspirations of Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, "and so on and so forth".  "What’s different about this new chiller by writer-director Oz Perkins is its embrace of the supernatural."  OK.  "Unfortunately, Perkins’s script seems to anticipate its own tangled wackiness and, by the end, all that productively murky build-up is negated by a last act that feels redundant. It’s as though Perkins is tugging at our sleeves, making sure that we got it — and that’s too bad considering that the film’s potent menace (at least up to this point) rides on the inexplicable."

The problem is that I don't find the third act either redundant or less inexplicable.  (Wouldn't it be redundant to maintain the same inexplicitness throughout anyway?)  And as Loayza lays out the final scenes in detail, I don't see where her objections are.  Taken out of the context of the headline, it looks like a pretty positive breakdown of a horror film which has much more psychological layers than it would appear.  I'd be interested in seeing some kind of a comparison for a horror film which handled this subject matter better, but the only films she mentions are those first two.  Did their respective third acts not explain too much?  Again, the crucial difference seems to be the supernatural element, which Loayza at one point describes derogatorially as "merely", as if she sees this as a cop-out.  But I don't see how the supernatural wouldn't remain a factor in a less explicit ending.  It seems the problem is that Perkins bothered to explicate the supernatural at all.

(And although I generally agree with Loayza's "gendered anxiety" take on the film, there's always little details with are irritating, like the point about the female detective being "made to look at the mutilated corpse of a woman".  That's not what happened.  She was asked, and she consented to look at the corpse, and she handled the sight more professionally than her male superior officer.  These gender analyses have this unfortunate tendency to assume a female character's helplessness that happens to be equally disempowering.)
 

Good enough for me.
 

Rock wrote:

Sorry, I’d go into more depth, but I’m getting my ass kicked by a case of possible food poisoning, possible norovirus since the last few days. 🤮🤢🤕😵

Well, bless you, and try to stay hydrated.

Jinnistan wrote:

I don't think an alternate cut will fix what was for me the prevailing problem which is that it's morbidly ugly.  This isn't just an issue of the transfer I watched (the initial DVD run), but with the original production values, poor lighting and generally just an unaesthetic visual palette.  One example that springs to mind is a nude Helen Mirren - definitely a case of "how can you muck this up?" - shot in a moldy dark blue.  I don't know how much of this is the fault of Tinto Brass (I've only seen a couple other of his films) or Bob Guccione's cheapness.  Maybe a combination of the two.

Managed to catch the new cut in theatres. I don't know what magic they worked in the restoration process, but it looked a lot sleeker and less dingy than the original version. I do suspect a lot of this comes with the restoration producer taking a liberal approach to being faithful to Brass and Vidal's intentions. The framing generally seemed tighter than I remembered in the other version. Loses a bit of the sense of decay of the original.

I do think this version is better, in that McDowell's performance seems surer and some of the other characters come into focus as well. But the movie still has the problem of being pretty repetitive. You can only see Caligula order somebody executed in the middle of goofing around so many times before it stops being surprising. And the music in the new version is terrible, totally overbearing for like the first half of the movie.
 

Kidnapped Coed from the same director as Axe is worth a look. It’s more of a ‘70s road movie, tonally closer to something like Badlands than the exploitation movie suggested by the title.

The director did a movie in 2005 called Blood Brothers where he tried to edit the two movies together. Doesn’t really work, but an interesting experiment if you like both movies.

Georges Franju's final film - literally Red Nights, released in America as Shadowman - this feels like an old-school crime thriller in the French tradition (Fantomas and Franju's earlier remake Judex).  A lot of that old-school (or we could just say dated) feel was budget-related, as Franju was forced to use mostly TV sets, and this renders the look of the film as something closer to 1966 than 1974.  The plum-hooded villain looks like a potential Batman rogue, and Gayle Hunnicutt makes a very compelling would-be Catwoman in the film's highlight rooftop sequence.  The film has a lot of these classic continental horror touchstones: Knights Templar lore, Caligari zombies, conveniently inept police.  And the "man of a thousand faces" at the center of it.

7.5/10