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Connections, in both directions
As Enid trudges through the claustrophobic subway tunnels, the film evokes Possession ’s windy subways and the 4:3 aspect schlocky films the censors watch bring to mind films like The Driller Killer and Evil Dead .
When Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Abel Ferrerra’s The Driller Killer are your high-end examples you know deep seediness is afoot.
Censor tells a story set in the trash-horror film world of the 1980s—in Britain, the era of gut-ripping "video nasty": pictures like Cannibal Holocaust, The Driller Killer, and Gestapo's Last Orgy.
Uncut versions of previously banned or butchered-to-death works like I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, The Beyond or The Driller Killer were a button-push away.
One of the first “video nasties” was Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer , others include Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left , Cannibal Holocaust , and I Spit on Your Grave .
Adapted (and softened) from the 1998 Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, Filth combines the sleaze of Bad Lieutenant with the gauche giddiness of Dom Hemingway , eventually metastasizing into a desperate movie about a desperate man.
Filth is bolstered by a gonzo performance from McAvoy, who seems determined to out-Bad Lieutenant the American Bad Lieutenants; like his Yankee counterparts Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage, he even does a scene where he coaxes sexual favors while on duty.
A self-serving Detective Sergeant in the Lothian constabulary, Bruce makes Bad Lieutenant look like a virginal vicar as he shags, snorts and schemes his way around Edinburgh, feeding his out-of-control addictions and monstrous libido.
Close cousins to Filth are In Bruges and Werner Herzog’s re-imagining of Bad Lieutenant, both of which had moral vacuums for main characters and were similarly contented in their carefree depiction of sex, violence and hardcore drug-use.
Think of a more psychedelic version of Bad Lieutenant – one that nearly borders on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and you’ll be in the right cognitive space.
If you watch the trailer for Promising Young Woman , the feature directorial debut of The Crown actress and Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, you’ll probably think you’re about to see a glossy proto-feminist tale of revenge, something akin to a 21st-century Ms .45 or a post-Weinstein Veronica Mars .
I’m thinking, specifically, of Abel Ferrara’s righteously furious Ms .45…
Any vicarious thrill from seeing these films’ antagonists hunted down by avenging angels (typically, but not always, the victims of rape) in work as varied in style and quality as The Last House on the Left (1972), Ms .45…
In making the results of a playoff series a life-and-death matter for an in-too-deep gambler, Uncut Gems owes not a little to 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, a film by another New York moviemaker distinguished by his commitment to capturing the tonality of the city—Abel Ferrara, who turned in a cameo in the Safdies’ 2009 Daddy Longlegs.
So, with a mix of guts and resourcefulness, the film rips a page out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love playbook and leans into certain Sandlerisms—primarily the idea of a loud, abrasive man-child without a behavioral filter—while placing them in a discombobulating new dramatic and artistic context, like Billy Madison remade as Abel Ferrara’s neo-exploitation classic Bad Lieutenant.
If Good Time , which you can view on Amazon Prime, had something of the feel of Dog Day Afternoon , Uncut Gems made me think of Bad Lieutenant, the pugnacious 1992 Abel Ferrara film about a not-nice police officer, memorably played by Harvey Keitel, and his attempts to survive his gambling addiction during a New York Mets playoff run.
And it might be objected that the vampire-junkie parallel has already been done to (un)death, notably in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction .
The film is all the more impressive in that it is consciously put together out of the hoariest clichés - drinking blood, improbably extended life cycles, the connection (à la Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction ) between vampirism and the heroin lifestyle.
And surely Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction had said everything there was to say on the equation of vampirism and the junkie lifestyle?
You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
influenced by Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Characters
In his own way, Phoenix is reminiscent of Harvey Keitel’s anonymous awful cop in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, only instead of pure id, Joe manifests his trauma as a hulking lump of sentient meat, rage channeled into a new hammer he picks up at a random hardware store during his latest quest to recover a Senator’s daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov).
Gotham is a mirror for received notions about urban America, and Joker, with its graffiti and news reports about “super rats” overrunning the sidewalks, evokes the lurid high-water mark of the white flight era, when tall tales of wanton lawlessness rebranded New York as “Fear City” for skittish out-of-towners.
Better to rent Abel Ferrara's criminally underestimated The Funeral for a better treatment of the same themes in the same milieu, but if you do see Road to Perdition--and it's certainly worth watching for its performances and its visuals--see it on the biggest screen you can find.-Walter…
Of all the movies to follow the Bad formula — a collection that includes Bad Grandpa, Bad Teacher, Bad Santa, and that has somehow retroactively enveloped Abel Ferrara’s not-like-the-others 1992 Bad Lieutenant — Bad Moms clearly features the lowest standards for what constitutes misbehavior.
If the initial premise of Byrkit’s high-concept, quantum mechanics-driven narrative is slightly difficult to swallow, that’s only because a comet passing near Earth—and resulting in all sorts of supernatural phenomenon—rings of the deus ex machina that marred even good or great films by master directors, namely von Trier’s Melancholia and Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth .
In Maxxxine, the series moves away from the made-in-New Zealand Texas farmhouse with adjacent alligator lake of the first two pictures into a 1980s Hollywood which is at once scuzzy and vibrant. With perfect needle drops — Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’, Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ — and an array of authentic costumes and hairdos, this inhabits video-rental space with Abel Ferrara’s Fear City, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A. — not to mention a whole lot of non-auteurist exploitation pictures like the teenage-hooker classic Angel trilogy, the cult-of-killers cop flick Cobra and the extraordinary mad-movie-buff film Fade To Black.
It’s a gorgeous film shot by cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (who worked on 1987’s China Girl, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, The Lone Ranger and more).
There’s the zombie comedy, the buddy cop/murder mystery, the Body Snatchers homage, the superhero pastiche, and the heist flick.
For a home invasion movie that warps into some kind of Body Snatchers film, Us has many moving parts and gear shifts in what is being delivered, and yet it never feels like it is taking on too much for its own good.
It’s a home-invasion thriller paired with a more vast and ambitious science fiction conceit — a little Body Snatchers, a little Funny Games.
They are unlike those in the 1956 version of “Body Snatchers,” out to replace the bodies of individualist Americans with those of groupthink Soviets.
Gallo, an angular and unshaven man with a haunted look, has acted for offbeat and experimental directors such as Abel Ferrara (" The Funeral "), Bille August ("House of the Spirits"), Mika Kaurismaki ("L.A. Without a Map"), Emir Kusturica (" Arizona Dream "), Claire Denis ("Nenette and Boni"), Mira Nair (" The Perez Family ") and Kiefer Sutherland ("Truth or Consequences, N.M.").
Gallo was an actor in interesting films like Arizona Dream and Abel Ferrara's The Funeral.
Intense, pale, gaunt with haunting light blue eyes, Gallo has been a vivid presence in a number of films, including Abel Ferrera's "The Funeral," a period gangster picture in which he played Mafioso Christopher Walken's fiery, idealistic younger brother.
Sci-fi fantasies of the Body Snatchers ilk provide the inspiration for director Edgar Wright's latest spoof, after mining zombie horrors in Shaun of the Dead and action thrillers in Hot Fuzz.
Igual que ocurría en películas muy finas para entender la economía actual como Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, 2007) o Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, 2018), Estafadoras de Wall Sreet demuestra ante todo cómo el cuerpo de la mujer es tanto campo de batalla crucial del capitalismo como uno de sus espacios de resistencia más importantes.
In The 5th Wave‘s dark and dangerous world, a mysterious alien race, dubbed the Others, has arrived on Earth, hovering above cities in menacing spaceships and unleashing wave after wave of devastation – an electromagnetic pulse that wipes out all technology, mega-destructive tidal waves, an ultra-lethal strain of bird flu, Body Snatchers-esque infiltration – on the human race, with all the mercy of an exterminator dropping bug bombs.
Merrimen plans to rob the LA branch of the Federal Reserve, and Nick—otherwise beset by classic Bad Lieutenant (a phrase uttered perhaps unironically in this film) vices like drug abuse and alcoholism, etc., as well as a wife (Dawn Olivieri, last seen as “wife” in Bright) who wants to divorce him because he’s a horrible person—wants to stop that theft from happening.
There’s a whisper of Abel Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant in so many scenes you’d think that director’s finger was on the trigger.
Whether gurning through Bad Lieutenant or the simply bad The Wicker Man , he’s a reliably entertaining presence – even if the material frequently plops in what was once called the straight-to-video bin.
If you thought Cage had found his greatest enabler in shoe-?eating iconoclast Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), Cosmatos has done the German director one better: he’s created a film crazier than Cage is, rendering his performance completely in sync with the nightmare world surrounding him.