INANIMATE CARBON GOD

If there’s one thing I’d never have expected from a Jess Franco film, it’s a Robert Bresson joke. And yet that is essentially how this one begins… fortunately Franco soon remembers this is a film by him, and so even references to classier films and filmmaking (to say nothing of humour; the rest of the film is played fairly straight) go out the window almost immediately; The Diabolical Dr. Z. is nothing if not a Euro-exploitation B film, and a fair example of that sort of thing. This is kind of an early version of She Killed in Ecstasy, in some respects; in that film it’s the wife of the experimenting doctor who takes revenge for his death, and in this one it’s the doctor’s daughter. However, in this case she’s employing her late father’s mind control technology to do so, which is a twist the latter film avoided (Soledad Miranda was enough by herself there); the film struck me as a bit giallo-ish apart from that, though that might be because of Daniel White’s score which sounds awfully similar to some of the music on a DVD compilation of giallo trailers I have… Dr. Z. is also blessed with camerawork by Alejandro Ulloa, alas that he never worked with Franco again cos Ulloa could’ve elevated some of his later works if this is indicative (he would also have films by Lucio Fulci, Sergio Corbucci, Eugenio Martin and Paul Naschy to his credit). It’s not a film about which there’s an awful lot to say, really, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s a Monday night, I don’t need anything heavy, I need an efficient Euro-exploitation B film, and Dr. Z. gave me what I was looking for on that front.

You can click to enlarge these screengrabs I took:

Apparently this beauty has a reputation among HK film lovers for being unusually berserk, and, well, there’s a good reason for that: The Boxer’s Omen IS unusually berserk. I’ve seen some pretty whacked out movies but GODDAMN, few of them have been as fascinatingly mad as this one. Plotwise, it begins in fairly straightforward fashion: a young boxer is crippled in a fight against a cheating Thai boxer, and his gangster brother goes to seek revenge. When he gets to Thailand, though, he gets drafted to help another brother of his (from a past life) who was battling a black magician and killed by the latter in the midst of attaining immortality. Things go a bit odd from there. I have a sort of general rule whereby I’m willing to overlook other issues I may have with a given film if it’s at least interesting to look at, and this is a fine example; The Boxer’s Omen may be weird, incoherent, occasionally disgusting (even the actors look ready to puke in one scene) and blithely unconcerned with whether or not its special effects look realistic or even good (the blood appears to have been left over from Dawn of the Dead, and there are spiders which Lucio Fulci would’ve refused to use in The Beyond for being too fake), but it is nothing if not full of remarkable imagery, especially once it gets to the astonishing and almost dialogue-free final battle in the Nepalese temple. There were multiple times throughout the film where I could only utter the words “what the fuck” at what I was seeing, and I suspect this is a common occurrence among its viewers. Barring a couple of moments of apparent animal cruelty (which I’m obviously not into), this was fantastic; I was genuinely stunned and lost for words after it.

Another first-time viewing, and even I’m kind of surprised by that… I remember all the marketing fuss about it; I dimly recall being in Randwick one day and even there I remember seeing one of those flyers for it pasted on the outside of a shop or something. It was one of the first viral movie hits, and the whole fact-or-fiction thing was a big part of why… obviously it was the latter, the film’s extensive credits were something of a giveaway for anyone who still had any doubts… Anyway, for whatever reason it’s taken me a mere not quite 28 years to finally watch BWP, and, like I said, even I’m surprised at having taken this long. I don’t know why, cos there’s a load of other Reportedly Great Films I’ve never seen, I don’t know why I’m so surprised by this one… but so it is. Maybe all the hype at the time put me off or something. I don’t think I felt anything much while watching it, to be honest, certainly didn’t feel like there was much of a narrative drive; what I did get from it was an interesting sense of naturalism, a fairly impressive sense of authenticity. I could’ve believed that it might be real while watching it, or at the very least that if it were a real situation this is how it would’ve looked and felt. But as a way of actually telling the story? I don’t think it worked for me, and I would’ve probably liked it better as a more conventionally presented narrative. I don’t know. It’s good enough, I suppose, I think I just hoped to be a bit more blown away by it.