A married couple purchases an abandoned house in the countryside. Soon they witness strange apparitions and events. Their son and moreover their prepubescent daughter are haunted by a poltergeist.
Tag: 1970s
——UPGRADED——
Portrait of Italian tycoon, Enrico Mattei, who headed a state-combined industrial concern for natural resources from the early post-war years and who died under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash at Milan airport in 1962.
Theresa is a successful teacher of deaf children during the day but after a short unhappy affair starts to spend her nights cruising bars. Her craving first for sex but later also for drugs leads into increasingly demeaning and dangerous situations at odds with her daytime commitment to her children.
After a sojourn in Mexico, undergrad Gnossos Pappadopoulis comes back to his college where, at the close of the 1950s, he partakes in the staples of the burgeoning counterculture movement: drugs, casual sex and radical politics. After Gnossos thumbs his nose at everything from the campus fraternities to the ideas espoused by his professors, he decides to leave school and head for Cuba with a friend. There, he once again struggles with the excesses of his hippie lifestyle.
SHADOW OF ANGELS is the film adaptation of R.W. Fassbinder’s last and most controversial play, “Garbage, the City, and Death,” which was banned in Germany. The story concerns Lily, a prostitute too beautiful to have clients and the real estate speculator she befriends. Lily is paid to listen to her customers’ despairing monologues about politics, power, corruption, and guilt. SHADOW OF ANGELS is quintessential Fassbinder, a fable about victims and victimizers and not so nascent neo-Nazi sympathies in post-war Germany.
When a scientist at a research lab is passed over for a promotion, he creates a clone of himself to attempt to seduce the wife of the man who got the job.
Hotshot film student Tony Hall wins a prize for his short film and sets out to break into Hollywood. When financing for his documentary does not come through, Hall hits the streets alone to film, searching out moments of genuine humanity and truth. However, Hall’s definition of truth is slippery, and he sometimes manufactures incidents in front of the camera to obtain results. Eventually, his personal life starts to suffer, as well as his burgeoning professional career.
In spite of looking a mess (as though it had been subjected to some sort of butchery), this remains a weirdie of the first order: a perverse religious allegory in the form of a Western. The Kid is a vicious psychopath given to laughing a lot, an actor manqué (anyone who doesn’t like his ‘performance’ is shot) who leads a gang of looters and rapists, and is incestuous with his father to boot. The town’s resident Mater Dolorosa, madam of the brothel, hires her lover Marcado (meaning scarred: ‘We all have scars, and the ones inside never heal’), a tight-lipped killer in the Eastwood mould, to kill the Kid, who is of course her son.