The long Thanksgiving weekend is a big one for moviegoing—people have time, inclination, and are carrying too much turkey weight to do anything more athletic—which this year will no doubt largely be devoted to newly arrived commercial behemoths Wicked, Gladiator II, Red One, and Moana 2. For grownups in search of something less soaked in Roman Coliseum blood than G-II, there are two of the year’s best movies, A Real Pain and Anora. (The very R-rated latter is not recommended as an outing for visiting Bible Belt relatives, however.)
But if you fall outside those films’ target demographics, pining for something more esoteric, there is still plenty to keep you occupied—indeed, heavily occupied—in coming days. This Fri/29 sees the latest (and purportedly final) edition of revival showcase The French Had A Name For It, returning for a five-day run at the Roxie. And genre festival Another Hole in the Head commences on Sun/1, offering access to much of its program On Demand before in-person screenings at the Balboa and 4 Star Theaters begin next Fri/6.
The French series provides a “Grand Finale” to Don Malcolm’s occasional Roxie residencies over the last several years, which have brought over 150 mostly under-radar vintage titles, many seldom if ever seen in the US previously. Noir was a title French critics and cineastes placed on the hard-boiled American thrillers that flourished after WW2. It is applied more liberally here to Gallic titles spanning a wider period from the 1930s through the 1960s, some falling outside the genre’s usual confines but all with some element of “dark” content or style. The emphasis continues to be on films and talents who were largely dismissed as old-fashioned with the onset of the Nouvelle Vague, burying a “lost continent” of worthy prior celluloid in the rush to embrace modish new trends.
The 18 features this time around are mostly grouped in bills highlighting lesser-known work by a notable director or star. Friday night and Sunday afternoon bring four intriguing vehicles for Erich von Stroheim, the Vienna-born actor-writer-director who spent much of his later career thesping in European films after a reputation for heedless extravagance tanked his short but spectacular Hollywood stint behind the camera. These relative obscurities range from murder mellers (1937’s L’alibi, the next year’s boarding school-set Les disparus de St. Agil) to mad scientist sci-fi (1939’s Le monde Tremblera aka The World Will Shake) and a grim prison-set melodrama (1948’s La danse de mort).
Other stars getting a spotlight are arguably the nation’s two leading luminaries of the eras pre- and post-New Wave, respectively. Jean Gabin, hugely popular for most of nearly half a century in the medium, is seen in three mid-career vehicles Mon/2: Opposite Danielle Darrieux in 1952’s The Truth About Bebe Donge, Madeleine Robinson in Leur dernier nuit aka Their Last Night (1953), and Francoise Arnoul in Henri Verneuil’s Des gens sans importance aka People Of No Importance (1956), probably the strongest of this moody lot.
When the latter came out, Jeanne Moreau was on the brink of leaping from modest prominence to being the preferred muse of Malle, Truffaut, et al. A performer who’d come to personify the sophisticated internationalization of cinema to many, she is seen here in two lesser-remembered but intriguing dramas Sunday evening: 1958’s Le dos au mur aka Back to the Wall from Edouard Molinaro (who’d later turn to the farcical likes of La Cage aux Folles) and Jacques Demy’s 1963 Bay of Angels.
This program’s last chapter in October featured a tribute to Andre Cayatte, a director as yet underappreciated outside France. Sunday afternoon brings two of his features from the 1960s, the enigmatic Le glaive et la balance aka The Sword and the Balance, with Anthony Perkins, Jean-Claude Brialy and Renato Salvatore as suspects in a brutal crime; and three years later, 1965’s amnesiac mystery aka Piege pour Cendrillion aka A Trap for Cinderella.
Contrastingly, one of the most exportably successful directors of the postwar years was Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose mastery of suspense was demonstrated by classics The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955). This series ends with two comparatively overlooked efforts, a visually lush 1949 update of literary staple Manon, in which his sensibility fits uneasily with the source material’s romanticism; and 1960’s La vérité aka The Truth, a courtroom drama that’s one of those films which was meant to prove Brigitte Bardot “could act.” You be the judge—my internal jury thinks the case called for capital punishment.
Saturday the 30th is taken up with a quartet of “hunks.” Le Meurtrier aka Enough Rope (1963) includes series favorite Robert Hossein among several characters embroiled in twisty chicanery derived from Patricia Highsmith’s stinging suspense novel The Blunderer. The 1958 Le piege aka No Escape has Italian import Raf Vallone in a variation on themes from The Postman Always Rings Twice. Handsome Henri Vidal is the man of the hour in La juene folle aka Desperate Decision (1952)—an unlikely project for director Yves Allegret, set in Dublin amidst the Irish Revolution 30 years prior. He’s also central in 1959’s La bete a l’affut aka The Beast at Bay, as a convict who hides out in the home of a policeman’s widow. Sadly, the actor would die of a heart attack that same year, just after turning 40.
Depending on the vagaries of the delay-plagued publishing world, Don Malcolm may or may not have his long-aborning book about this whole era of French cinema ready for sale (and signing) during the Roxie run. Full info on this final French Had A Name For It schedule, Fri/29-Tues/3, can be found here.
France also contributed my favorite horror film of this year, the giddy spider blowout Infested, though in going straight to streaming platform Shudder it attracted little attention. But if you’re already seen Smile 2 and are itching for new genre thrills at a time of the year when they’re largely crowded out of the marketplace, say hello (again) to Another Hole in the Head.
It’s the 21st year for this SF indiefest offshoot, whose virtual elements will be accessible Sun/1 through Christmas Day. Among the tantalizing features available that way only (they won’t be publicly screened) are American Expendables, a documentary about North American Pictures, which cornered the US market in martial arts action flicks during the peak VHS era; “paranormal polyamorous romcom” Dead in Love; found-footage fright Abductee; live action-animation-puppetry whatsit I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food, and Lovecraft adaptation Unspeakable: Beyond the Wall of Sleep.
Also starting this Wed/4 with performances through Sat/21 is a theatrical component to the festival, Evil Dead: Live On Stage! (more info here). Its eight splattery performances at Eclectic Box on Valencia are sure to leave you laughing, and quite possibly in need of a laundromat.
The in-person onscreen part of Hole Head will take Fri/6 through Wed/18 at the Balboa and 4 Star Theaters—content that will generally not be available for streaming. Shorts are plentiful, including in 11 themed programs. There are also a number of revivals, starting with perennial Night of the Living Dead on Fri/6, George A. Romero’s original 1968 zombie classic this time accompanied live by Sleepbomb. Those golden days of watching what you probably shouldn’t have at home while the parents were away can be communally revisited via showings of franchise-starters Leprechaun (on VHS, Sat/7), The Toxic Avenger (uncut on 35mm, also Sat/7) and The Terminator (on 16mm Tues/10).
Fear not, there are lots of new features for those who prefer their horror/sci-fi/cult intake to be served fresh like sushi. Stepping outside those categories is the official closing night selection on the 18th of Jeno Lock and Martin O’Brien III’s Between the Beats, a documentary flashback to the SF Bay Area rave scene of the early 1990s.
Other movies manage to combine an equal musical emphasis with genre narrative content. The indisputable highlight among them is Sander Maran’s Estonian musical comedy slasher saga Chainsaws Are Singing, a frequently hilarious heap of gory silliness much in the vein of Cannibal: The Musical. Tongue is at least partly in-cheek for Christopher Bickel’s Pater Noster and the Mission of Light, wherein the quest to locate a secretive hippie cult that once released psychedelic rock records turns out to be a very, very bad idea.
Not joking at all is Zac Locke’s Decibel, whose aspiring singer-songwriter heroine gets lured to a wealthy producer’s desert compound = where creativity, technology and control make an unholy alliance. Then there’s Dan Noel’s Fleetwood Peaks, an hour-long mashup “visual album” of elements from the cream of two crops: 1970s SoCal soft rock, and David Lynch’s shortlived TV sensation.
In our semi-kinda-not-really-post-COVID era, several new entries unsurprisingly deal with social isolation, whether the cause or result of madness. In Robert Dossa’s The Lonely Ones, a young couple realize that the world has inexplicably disappeared—only an inky blackness remains outside their apartment. Ehrland Hollingsworth’s Dooba Dooba finds a woman’s overnight babysitting gig taking some very disturbing turns. In Stefan MacDonald-Labell’s Head Like a Hole, a desperate man accepts another dubious job in a remote house, doing mind-numbing “research” watching a hole in a basement wall that never changes…until, of course, it does.
Denman Hatch’s Canadian Baleful, Nils Alatalo’s Swedish Voidcaller, and Brian & Laurence Avenet-Bradley’s US The Protos Experiment are all phantasmagorias of hallucinogenic harm, involving diverse people thinly connected by memory loss, alarming violence, and blurred lines between reality and fantasy. The threats are more tangible if likewise contagious in Bari Kang’s Itch!, a polished variation on your basic Night of the Living Dead premise, this time with refugees from a deadly (and un-deadly) plague hiding out in a big-city dollar store rather than a farmhouse. it gets ugly, natch. Still, that entrapment seems preferable to the one in Tyler Mann’s I Voted, where already-quarrelsome staff and citizens at a polling locale during a bitterly divisive election quickly turn on one another once the facility undergoes a temporary lockdown.
In a lighter vein, Mike Hayhurst’s And Through the Portal We Go puts the time-loop concept to clever use as the last three remaining members of a New Age religious cult try to “transcend” like their brethren—only to find themselves stuck in an eternal “be here now.” Broader yoks can be had from Austin Snell’s They Call Her Death, an over-the-top nod to Sixties spaghetti westerns and Seventies female-avenger exploitation epics. Party of Darkness has eight directors making a linked-anthology stab at horror spoofage a la Dude Bro Party Massacre III as some guys swap scary stories while spending the inevitably ill-fated weekend at a cabin in the woods.
For full info on Another Hole in the Head’s schedule, venues, tickets, and streaming options, go here.
