In a final act of defeat or defiance, a man builds a sinister contraption. This darkly humorous low-budget short film satirises the typical male pursuits of physical toil and precision craftsmanship. The Contraption is directed by James Dearden who would go on to write Fatal Attraction (1987) and stars The Rocky Horror Picture Show‘s Richard O’Brien.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Ammonites were a kind of snail-like precursor to today’s mollusks, common in the seas of the Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago. They are among the most commonly found fossils, so they must have been extremely plentiful. In this meditative and largely unstructured first feature, a young geologist is traveling by train to visit his sister in the countryside after having received a disturbing and mysterious letter from her. As he travels, he remembers his childhood fixation with rocks, nurtured by his mother, and his very strong affection for his sister.
O Sangue (Blood), tells the story of seventeen-year-old Vincente and his ten-year-old brother, Nino, who must face the departure of their abusive father and its aftermath. With the aid of Vicente’s girlfriend, Clara, the trio attempts to pick up the pieces of their fractured family life while confronting an unwelcomed uncle and mobsters who try to collect debt that their father left behind.
A “cyclo” is a bicycle-drawn taxi similar to a rickshaw, and, in this story, the nickname of an 18-year-old boy trying to scrape together a living in the desperate poverty of Ho Chi Mihn City. Cyclo lives with his grandfather and two sisters, and drives his taxi for a bitter woman who devotes most of her time to her mentally unstable son. When the pedal-cab is stolen, Cyclo is forced into a life of crime to repay the debt and falls in with a group of petty thugs led by a self-styled poet. What Cyclo doesn’t know at first is that the poet is also a pimp, and he’s been using his romantic wiles to lure Cyclo’s older sister into a career as a prostitute.
Mamá Cora is about 80 years old and she has three sons and a daughter. Mamá lives with one of them, unfortunately, the one who is in the worst economic position. One day, all the members of the family have a reunion to celebrate an anniversary. In the middle of the whole thing, an awkward question appears out of nowhere: Who’s going to be Mamá Cora’s heir? Who is going to take care of her during her last days in this world?. The answer is not easy and it doesn’t take too long for the members of this bizarre family to start a terrible and yet hilarious fight. However, in the middle of the whole thing, they’re interrupted by some disturbing breaking news.
The Wars focuses on rebellious Robert Ross, who battles against the uptight, upper-crust Rosedale society he was born into; when war is declared in 1914, he enlists in the Canadian army to escape from personal tragedy. Though it recreates the horrors of WWI trench warfare with harrowing realism, the film is more interested in how war replicates, and even amplifies, the class divisions of the homefront; in one of many telling details, Robert is the only man in his unit with a handgun because he is the only man wealthy enough to afford one.
Set in the backyard of a blue-collar South Philadelphia neighborhood early in the summer of 1973, the comedy-drama focuses on the 21st birthday celebration of Harvard student Francis Geminiani. In attendance are his divorced blue collar father Fran and Fran’s widowed girlfriend Lucille, next-door neighbor Bunny Weinberger and her overweight son Herschel, and Francis’ classmates, the wealthy WASP Hastings siblings; Judith (who seeks romance with Francis) and Randy (the object of Francis’ unexpressed affection), who have arrived unexpectedly, much to their friend’s dismay. All are dysfunctional to varying degrees, and the interactions among them provide the play with its comic and dramatic moments.
The story opens in 1911 at Dr. Seward’s sanitarium. A sensual and charismatic vampire known as Count Dracula has already slain several girls on the English countryside. Abraham Van Helsing, with the help of Dr. Cedric Seward, Lord Gordon Godalming, Jonathan Harker, Freudian psychologist Helga Van Zandt and the reluctant Renfield try to stop Count Dracula from making the lovely Wilhelmina his next willing victim.