From the Ice Age to Tropicanada

When you live in a city like Montreal, you have to get used to the various weather extremes.  One day you freeze your ass out there and you need a winter coat in June, and the next day you just MELT because it's 3000 degrees.

We live in such an age, I guess.  Yesterday at Piknic we felt like we were going to liquify, and even though I absorbed more vodka than I can honestly remember, I didn't go for a single leak the whole time.  Sweat was the fashionable fluid of the day.  Sweat was flying everywhere.  Sweat was applied on various female body parts by promiscuious amateurs.  Sweat was, shall I say, a way of life.

I got there while David Kristian was unfolding his italo disco madness right after a quite good electro-breaks set by Bliss.  The first thing I did was serve myself a vodka / Guru glass and try to locate people I know in the heat.  When Mini begun her set I was already pretty joyful and let's not mention Jordan Dare's ass-kickin' selection that helped me put an end to it.



The Jacques-Cartier bridge never seemed so steep.  I was struggling with the wind and gravity on my bike.  Yeah, I was drunk.  While some of our friends went to Club Sandwich to grab some grease, we went home with some Ice Cream and turned into flesh eating zombies in our wildest, alcohol-fueled dreams.

T'was kinda hard to get up this morning.

*

I have always appreciated José Larràz, a spanish director who didn't age as well as we would have thought.  The first time I was exposed to his work was at Cinéma du Parc, back in the days when it wasn't quite a "real" theater but rather someone's cozy living room, with a drape passing as a screen, and some computer speakers for sound.  There were rules : at one point during the movie, somebody had to drop an empty beer bottle on the floor so everybody could hear it roll down the room.  Tall anglos with glasses had to sit in front of you and talk loudly while pointing at the screen.  Somebody would cough and you'd lose a whole sentence of what was going on in the movie.



So there I was during a "midnight cult screening" watching VAMPYRES, or rather what the Parc owners tried to pass as a copy of the movie; the print was so old and washed out that I'm still not sure about what I've seen.  There were lots of red spots on the screen, so many that at some point, we felt like blood was raining down on the print.  But this lusty lesbian vampiresses drama left me eager to see more.

And I did, on Saturday : I found my old (and never opened before) VHS copy of SAVAGE LUST (a.k.a. Deadly Manor) and since I'm currently hunting for cheap slashers, I was quite glad to see it still looked good !  I didn't even read the synopsis on the back of the box and I popped the tape in my VCR, and proceeded to watch the magic unfold with Miss Bijoux by my side.



[Note to readers : no, I am not in the process of torturing her to death with crappy eurotrash - she actually loves these kinds of things, or at least she does a pretty good job at pretending !]

So I guess the movie was shot in the early nineties, somewhere in the US, with some very limited acting talent & special effects budget.  This is a classic case of teens on the lose who do all the wrong choices and almost throw themselves on the killer's blade; however, the treatment is something special, almost never seen before.  At least not by me !

Larràz has evacuated any comic relief from the script and all we're left with is darkness.

Not darkness per se; but the lightning of the whole thing is sometimes deficient, and the action unfold in the course of a night; only the introduction and the climax take place during the day.  And all of this is rather creepy.  The characters are not likable, they are not deepened, and we don't really care when they die - but there is still an ever-present tension that never lets go, even in the dumber moments.



That may be due to the visual impressions Larràz creates by putting in place unfamiliar elements in a familiar setting; the house where the teens end up is filled with worrysome hints, and the obsessive way they are shot succeeds in making the viewer feel kind of uneasy.  The final revelation, as poor as it may be, does not erase the overall impression we felt during the rest of the movie, and I'm pretty sure that when SAVAGE LUST played in theaters during its release, it scared the shit out of kids who went to see it.

This viewing also reminded me how scared I could get of random symbols present in movies I watched at the time.  I only saw portions of some movies, or the trailers, and therefore couldn't grasp the ridicule of the whole thing.

And this is how suspension of disbelief works : it hooks you with a strong part that makes you want to give in all the rest.  The problem remains that some of are way too lucid to go in all the way, and you end up with blasé reviews of movies nobody cares about but the three montrealers who still remember who Larràz is.  Which will absolutely not keep me from doing it again in the near future, believe me !