Sunless (1983)

a/k/a Sans Soleil

This is a travelogue, a collage of imagery from all over everywhere, nominally about filmmaker Chris Marker's visits to Japan, Iceland, the Cape Verde Islands, San Francisco, and his inner mind. Marker also wrote and directed La Jetée, the French short that inspired 12 Monkeys, and his inner mind is a busy place.

The film's narrator is never named, and she says she's reading from letters from someone else. Actually she's actress Alexandra Stewart (Day for Night), reading text written by Marker, who was male, a switch which adds to the subtle surreality.

The narration is more memorable than the visuals, and it's mostly stream-of-consciousness philosophical ramblings, heady stuff about time and place, memory, politics, history, joy and tragedy, and whatever else comes up.

Seeing working class people in Guinea-Bissau (to spell it, I had to look it up), Marker/Stewart waxes eloquent about the country's history, and just when you think it's profound, they add, "Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window."

You'll either hate this movie or love it, and I'm on Team Love It, but I can also see the Hate It perspective. If you want a linear story, you definitely don't want Sunless, but if you're open to an intelligent, wide-ranging meditation, this is it.

It's like a report that space anthropologists might file on humanity.

And it reminds me, I need to watch La Jetée.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Cisco Pike (1971)

Gene Hackman is a narc pushing pot, which comes prepackaged in red bricks. While wrapped, the bricks look more like the cocaine you see in movies, but then again, I've never seen marijuana packaged in bulk.

Kris Kristofferson makes his acting debut, playing a folk singer/songwriter, which isn't much of a stretch, but he's also a drug dealer, and Hackman the narc wants his help distributing the demon weed. Karen Black is Kristofferson's girlfriend, who wants him to sing songs but not sling dope.

Hackman's role and performance seem cribbed together from other Hackman movies, but Kristofferson can act, and the movie flutters to life when Harry Dean Stanton is on screen playing a heroin addict. Viva, Andy Warhol's muse, comes off spacey but amusing.

I liked everything about the movie, actually, except Hackman and the story, both of which seem about as deep as a dime.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Demonwarp (1988)

"Be careful, Ted, there are testicle-eating monsters out there."

Actually, there aren't. That line is only an unfunny wisecracks, but a movie about testicle-eating monsters might be more interesting than Demonwarp. It's a remarkably bad and boring monster-from-space movie starring George Kennedy and a bunch of rowdy, doomed teenagers gone partying in Uncle Clem's cabin.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Dust Devil (1992)

a/k/a Demonica

To me, a Dust Devil is a mini vacuum cleaner, but in this movie a dust devil is a dead man in a cowboy hat, wandering the earth and killing people to harvest their fingers.

Hitchhiking, the dust devil is picked up by Wendy, a suicidal woman who's just left her husband because he beats her. Wendy and the dust devil spark a little and boink a lot, but after she finds some of his spare fingers and decides she wants to keep hers on her hands, it's a love than cannot be.

It's a beautiful film to look at, filmed and set in Nambia and visually dominated by orange hues of the desert. The music and sound are classy, too, and the script shows intelligence, and the dust devil and his backstory go a long ways, and the end of the story isn't what I'd expected. Clearly, great effort went into Dust Devil, and parts of it are outstanding.

"There's a storm coming. I think it's going to rain."

It was released in America in a butchered cut titled Demonica, which was disowned by writer-director Richard Stanley. The version I saw was Stanley's cut and title. He also made Hardware, which, like this, seemed highbrow in concept and execution. I didn't care for Hardware, and this is better than that.

At its heart, though, this is supposed to be a horror movie, and it simply isn't scary. It moves kinda slowly, and never really engaged me.

Marianne Sägebrecht (from Bagdad Cafe) has a small role, and it's nice seeing her again.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Was a Shoplifter (1950)

Hard to believe from the silly title, but this is a serious noir piece about detectives trying to stop department store shoplifters. Their main tactic is entrapment, and with clumsy, cruel police work they're able to make it dangerous to a defenseless kleptomaniac's life.

This is a drama that will hold your attention, so long as you never think critically about anything that happens, or ponder whether anyone should give a hoot about someone pocketing a $9 necklace from a giant shop with many millions of dollars in inventory.

So it defies expectations, and works.

Tony Curtis co-stars, Rock Hudson has an early moment on screen, and the department store scenes are nostalgic.

Vercict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Terminal Man (1974)

Michael Crichton was my favorite writer of thrillers when I was young. Some were good — The Andromeda Strain, Coma — and some were so-so — Congo, Timeline — but they all had some thrills. Hence the term 'thriller'. This movie is based on a Crichton novel I've never read, and it lacks any thrills at all.

George Segal is having seizures where he Hulks out and becomes violent, and he has a fear of newfangled microcomputers taking over the world. The doctors decide to perform surgery on him, and the surgery itself takes about a third of the movie, or feels like it does. Not being a medical student, watching a surgery doesn't provide much entertainment.

The story finally starts cooking toward the end, but by then — arf arf — the movie's a certified dog. When things do start happening it's Segal stabbing Jill Clayburgh in slow-motion. Not being a psychopath, slow-motion stabbing doesn't provide much entertainment, either.

After that, I'm not sure whether I clicked the movie off or simply fell asleep, but somehow I'll struggle through the remainder of my days not knowing what happens to The Terminal Man.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978)

Robert Morley stars as a gluttonous gourmet who's the editor of a gourmet magazine, and wants to eat his way through a smorgasbord of the finest gourmet dishes prepared by the world's greatest gourmet chefs.

"I am what I am precisely because I've eaten my way to the top. I'm a work of art, created by the finest chefs in the world. Every fold is a brush stroke! Every crease a sonnet! Every chin a concerto! In short, doctor darling, in my present form, I'm a masterpiece!"

The chefs keep dying, though. The murders are unnecessarily gruesome, but the film is a lightweight parody of murder mysteries.

George Segal camps it up as a fast-food billionaire looking for a superstar chef to endorse his shitty food, and also pursuing Jacqueline Bisset, who plays another master chef and maybe the next to be killed.

It's all very frantic, most of the characters are asses, everyone is always hollering, and it's stuffed with snappy dialogue nobody could come up with in the moment.

Having said all that, though, it was filmed all across Europe and looks great, and it's funny enough to recommend.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

I take care in selecting only films which seem likely to either be good or enjoyably bad, but after that everything is thrown into the hopper, to be pulled out and viewed at random. For today's selection, random was unkind. Sunless is quite good, but most of these movies I could've and should've skipped.

The next batch is better:

A Hitch in Time (1978)
Freddy Got Fingered (2001)
Imitation of Life (1934)
_Imitation of Lif_e (1959)
Long Weekend (1977)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
2/26/2023

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you're missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:

Alter
Cineverse
Criterion
CultCinema Classics
DocsVille
Dust
Fandor
Films for Action
Hoopla
IHaveNoTV
IndieFlix
Internet Archive
Kanopy
KinoCult
Kino Lorber
Korean Classic Film
Christopher R Mihm
Mosfilm
Mubi
National Film Board of Canada
New Yorker Screening Room
Damon Packard
Mark Pirro
PizzaFlix
PopcornFlix
Public Domain Movies
RareFilmm
Scarecrow Video
Shudder
ThoughtMaybe
Timeless Classic Movies
VoleFlix
WatchDocumentaries
or your local library.
Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.
— — —

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Reviews are spoiler-free. Click any image to enlarge. [Arguments & recommendations are welcome,](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Comments for Mostly Words) but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.