Death Rage

Death_RageA Mafioso member is gunned down in a nightclub with some pretty formidable Spencer Davis Group / Doors psychedelia going on. So far so good. A bit of rage, a bit of death = Death Rage. As Homer Simpson says, “I’m a rageaholic, I cannot live without rageahol.” A little rage is good. This rage, not so much.

Flash forward to a Neapolitan racetrack in which a 25-1 long-shot comes through. Unfortunately for the winner (another Mafioso type), he’s gunned down in a hail of lead before he can collect his big payout.

And a competing mob group wants revenge!

So here we are.

Not just in genre movie territory but in Anthony M. Dawson / Antonio Margheriti land, he of the spectacular Yor: Hunter from the Future (please see our podcast) and Andy Warhol’s Dracula/Frankenstein. We’re also in “Poliziotteschi” territory, a subgenre of crime and action films that emerged there in the late 1960s and reached the height of their popularity in the 1970s. It is more popularly known as Euro Crime. (See the excellent doc, Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s, featuring the likes of John Saxon, etc for more on that genre.)

In Death Rage there are fedoras, cigarettes, raincoats, menacing stares, fixed races (a low-level crook is in the business of shooting favorites with an air-gun), sleazy nightclubs, nudity, and great locales. There’s also a nifty chase through the Naples subway. Unfortunately, that’s about it. Pretty stilted stuff.

DEATH_RAGEAnyway, the aggrieved mafia parties enlist the services of Peter Marciani (played by the legendary Yul Brynner, barely exerting any effort being this unnecessarily charismatic — must be nice) who’s left the criminal underworld and living a life of peaceful existence, fishing under the Brooklyn Bridge (!). Perhaps he figures he’s cheated death so much, he’s not worried about courting it by eating whatever comes out of the East River.

They want to get even with one Gennaro Gallo, who’s responsible for the assassinations above.

Leonard Maltin uncharitably said “all this film kills is time,” but there’s a saving grace: lots and lots of Barbara Bouchet (Moneypenny in Casino Royale).

** (out of 5)

eXistenZ

existenz-movieMore people want Allegra Geller dead than even Anita Sarkeesian. eXistenZ is the reality-bending game she developed that is taking the world by storm.

When Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) survives a failed assassination attempt at a focus group test launch of her new game, one with “just enough free will to make it interesting,” she’s shown to safety by a security guard, Ted Pikul (Jude Law).

Do we even have free will, or are we subjects of what Sartre called “the bottomless well of excuses” that is determinism? Philosopher Daniel Dennett says the key to free will is understanding that it’s a biological-level phenomenon. No doubt David Cronenberg would agree.

His conception of gaming is our nervous system directly engaging the game architecture via umbilical bio-ports. Back when David conceived of this film, virtual reality was all the rage and it wasn’t that much of a leap to envision a richly immersive, tactical experience “inside our heads,” rather than interfacing with a screen that would make the real/unreal dynamic that much more difficult to discern.

Now that 2016 is apparently the year virtual reality gaming will take off (according to The Guardian and others), Cronenberg’s conception of gaming has, in a way, been vindicated. Unlike the VHS tapes of Videodrome usurped by all kinds of technology since, this unreal world is going to become even more real indeed.

existenzThis site’s reviewers are not hard-core gamers, that part of the 50% of North American households who own gaming consoles. The ambivalence might arise from the fact that, as artistic as games can be, they’re cutting into the time users are spending watching movies (according to data from the Entertainment Software Association).

It’ll be hard NOT to be enticed into becoming a gamer, with Cronenberg’s vision here coupled with the expanded possibilities of the technology.

In eXistenZ, Jude Law’s character Pikul has a phobia about “being penetrated surgically.” He’s given a bio-port gaming implantation “off the grid,” by an unhinged mechanic played by Willem Dafoe.

And then Pikul’s effectively left the real world behind, playing Geller’s game along with her, fighting for the Reality Underground against the gaming establishment in a virtual world dominated by mutant amphibians and slightly off characters (very accurately depicted; the video game industry meanwhile, is making game characters whose movements are becoming more fluid and indistinguishable from actors).

It’s a terrific idea, a companion piece to A Nightmare on Elm Street: an unreal dreamscape from which there’s seemingly no escape.

And perhaps advances in gaming development will work as a feedback loop for the movie industry and we’ll get a truly immersive horror experience, regardless of the medium. We hope we’re alive to see it, or at the very least, our memories are uploaded to some server permanence.

**** (out of 5)