Shots of Anarchy III: The Bluesky Manuever
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shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
Shots of Anarchy III: The Bluesky Manuever
@shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
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Things found out where the grass grows wild. Maintained by @LCosgrove.bsky.social, updated irregularly.
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shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
A nude woman in the distance walks towards the camera, away from a grove of trees and a fence. There is a white wall to her left, and at the edge of this wall can be seen a black smudge - evidence of optical censorship so that we can't see the nude woman's body. The title of The Naked Witch is mostly a misnomer, since roughly five minutes after the title character is resurrected from her grave, she steals a wrap from the hero's girlfriend and spends the rest of the film looking like an upscale Jungle Girl. But, for at least a little bit, there is a witch, and she's running around naked. How to square that circle in 1961? Well, if you're Larry Buchanan, you don't. And then someone obscures the nudity in post by slapping a shadowy bar over the lady's naughty parts. No, really - during the commentary included on the Something Weird disc of this, Buchanan exhibits surprise that the bar is there, then muses, "I wonder who has the original on this... we can probably cut that back in there." Through most of the sequence, this bar is integrated so it looks like it could just be an artifact of the film's dingy, murky day-for-night photography. But it's in this shot that it becomes obvious - the bar is pushed just too far into the frame so that the white wall interacts with it, making it clear that someone somewhere stuck something in front of the image so that we didn't see this naked lady's boobs. I kinda always figured it was Buchanan himself, freestyling a quick fix in his inimitable impoverished way. But now that I know it's not, that it was likely the choice of some local censor or someone on the distribution end trying to head off any problems, that makes it even curiouser. An anarchy so pure that it's out of the hands of its creator? Of course I'll have time for that.
January 20, 2025 at 7:22 PM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from HOTEL INFERNO (2013, Giulio de Santi)
A completely black screen, save for a vague figure in the middle. There appear to be a couple hazy points of light behind him, and the white of the soles of his shoes can be seen. His arm and head are visible, and the lack of light makes him look as though he is wearing a balaclava or luchador mask over his head. HOTEL INFERNO is butt-stupid, an attempt to recreate FPS video game aesthetics in cinematic terms that also exists solely to get absurd amounts of gore on screen. In this first aim, it's at least more successful than HARDCORE HENRY - the CG-enhanced splatter and awkward false-sounding overdubbed dialogue really does make it feel like watching a playthrough of an especially single-minded RESIDENT EVIL mod. In the second aim, less so: the gore gags are plentiful & wet as hell, but the 1st-person camera occasionally sacrifices definition, so that Our Hero is slamming pipes/fists/blades into undifferentiated piles of slimy tissue, and while the CG assists are useful for hiding the cut on a decapitation, they're significantly faker-looking when it comes to explosions or fire. None of that has anything to do with this screenshot. This is from a bit midway through, where the here has found a secret passage to an area that houses the mutants and monsters chasing him through the hotel in which he's trapped. The main villain purrs in VO that, while his minions are gone, there may be one or two that got left behind, so watch your step. He travels through a passage using a flashlight that throws off three dim halos when he hears a whisper behind him. He swivels to just barely catch someone running with purpose behind him. Said person turns out to be a huge bearded empty-eyed freakazoid with a dozen tattoos and a slavering rictus of menace... but for exactly two frames the lack of light and blur of movement make it look for all the world like the hero's about to be attacked by a feral El Santo. I might be the only person to laugh at this, but it's my project.
January 19, 2025 at 1:25 AM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from ANGEL ON FIRE (1995, Phillip Ko)
A woman and a man are in a field - the woman is on the left side of the screen and the man is on the right side. The woman is holding her arm in pain, and the man has a concerned look on his face. In the space between them can be seen a green field, in which a brown cow is obliviously munching grass. Phillip Ko's Angel on Fire is a late entry into the Hong Kong girls-with-guns cycle, and as such it ends like everything in the genre does: with an absolute blowout of action. It starts on the outskirts of an abandoned airplane hangar, and there's a couple shootouts and a couple kickboxing battles involving a short-haired female cop who is decidely not Cynthia Khan. (Cynthia Khan, disappointingly, does almost nothing during this climax.) As the scene develops, it transitions into a series of open fields as everyone rushes in pursuit of the film's MacGuffin (a mysterious relic in a velvet bag). A couple more loud gunfights later and it's boiled down to the male lead, a bumbling Filipino cab driver who also is confusingly excellent at combat, being chased by a villain with a combination assault rifle/grenade launcher. Said villain blows up a series of shanties and shacks in the process of pursuing the cab driver. After all that fire and noise and flying bullets, the cab driver manages to blow up the villain by jamming the barrel of his own gun into the grenade-launcher part. He then gathers himself and sprints over to where Cynthia Khan is lyying, prone and dazed... ...and it's here we see that this violent, explosive conflagration has apparently been taking place not ten feet away from the world's most placid and accepting cows. Just mooing and chewing contentedly while people's bodies erupt into pieces within their eyelines. I don't have a proper finish for this - it just made me laugh thinking about it and I figured I'd share it.
January 11, 2025 at 3:38 PM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN (1977, Kei Law)
An Asian man dressed as Popeye stand in front of a door, his hands out in some manner of fighting gesture. He is making this gesture towards a pair of men in police uniforms, of whom we only see their backs. The first time I saw The Dragon Lives Again was on a multi-gen VHS dub, and very few movies deserve to be seen that way more than this. The entirety of its existence is an ode to bad taste and copyright violation, with a recently deceased Bruce Lee fighting an army of preexisting characters (such as Bruce Lee, Zatoichi and Dracula). I have since seen it under more favorable circumstances - I find it mind-boggling that this has a beautiful bells-and-whistles Blu-ray - and yet even in pristine condition, it never shakes off its janky flea-market-toy-store feel. As evidence: behold! Hong Kong Popeye! Back when I first posted this to the Tumblr, that was the extent of my thinking - this Brucesplotation flick has a dude dressed as Popeye in it, isn't that novel? And... yeah, sure. But I think the true magic in that screenshot is the way he's holding his hands. Hong Kong Popeye looks like he's about to hadouken the shit out of those Hell cops. If the thought of that doesn't make you laugh, I don't know what to say.
January 9, 2025 at 3:07 AM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS (1972, Ferdinando Merighi)
A shot from THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS, wherein a "body" falling off the Eiffel Tower is represented by an animated silhouette. The filmmakers behind The French Sex Murders had a real dilemma: The film begins - and ends! - with a suspect falling off the Eiffel Tower. But authorities wouldn't allow them to throw a dummy off the Eiffel Tower, and they definitely wouldn't allow them to do that to a flesh-and-blood actor. So how to crack that puzzle? Behold the result: an FX process shot where a silhouette appears to have been painted and animated in front of blurry stock footage of the Tower. As goofy as it looks as a still - my guy appears to have had both his hands severed past the wrist - it looks even odder in motion, a budgetary necessity that skirts the edge of the uncanny. And it's as close as the film gets to inspiration, sadly: the film that follows is a decidedly bland and lifeless affair, wasting the talents of both Rosalba Neri and Barbara Bouchet (not to mention Anita Ekberg!) by spending more time following the cops trying to solve the case than the models and sex workers who are being preyed upon. That the lead detective is played, without comment, by a Humphrey Bogart impersonator is worth mention; that the film never comments on it is more proof of its paucity of imagination. All of which got burned up for the opening scene, presumably.
December 9, 2024 at 12:34 AM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from MANSION OF THE DOOMED (1976, Michael Pataki)
A middle-aged white man with a mustache and sunglasses sits on a porch reading a newspaper. He has a mild, contented look on his face. Visible on the back page of the newspaper is a recipe for meat loaf. There's a fern out of focus in the extreme right-hand foreground. This is what I mean when I talk about bits that break through the illusion of the film. Maybe it's just how my brain works. But here we have Richard Baseheart, sitting by a pool in which his daughter and her fiancee are swimming. The filmmakers needed to give him a bit of business to do, so they decided he should be reading a newspaper. Having neither the budget nor any real story-related reason to mock up a lorem-ipsum broadsheet, they grabbed whatever copy of the Los Angeles Times that was within arm's reach. Said portion of the paper has on its back page, visible to the camera, a recipe for meat loaf. There's a headline that reads, "Meat Loaf Out Of The Ordinary." And now that's all I can pay attention to. I want to know about this meat loaf. I want to know what makes it different than other meat loafs. I want to see the full recipe. Maybe I want to try my hand at making it, I dunno. If the back page had had a story about, say, international trade or an advertisement for a local car dealership or a random op-ed, maybe I wouldn't care. But that recipe with that headline and that photograph of a trapezoidal slab of meat? Sorry, I can't pay attention to your movie right now. Tell me about this ground beef!
November 28, 2024 at 5:12 PM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from THE WITCH'S CURSE (1962, Riccardo Freda)
A low-angle shot of a shirtless muscular man, lit from behind so his chest, arms and face are bathed in shadow to contrast against the blue sky. He has a blank look on his face and is staring into the middle distance. His hair is impeccably styled into a rockabilly pompadour. TFW you descend into Hell to break a witch's curse, fight your way through various trials (including a giant and a herd of demonic cattle) and re-emerge on the surface... and your glorious pompadour has lost not a bit of its fluffy bounce or volume
November 28, 2024 at 4:49 PM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from ALL THE SINS OF SODOM (1968, Joseph W. Sarno)
A dark-haired woman in a dark coat, framed in shadow, eyes downcast, walks away from an open elevator. Behind her, the elevator attendant is pulling an exaggerated pop-eyed leer as he stares at her butt. Off to the left on the wall is an octagonal sign that reads STOP HERE. To the woman's right is a wall-mounted fire extinguisher. Silly faces have and are gonna continue to show up a lot here. The human face can betray fiction in so many ways - one misjudged choice by a featured actor or one attempt at grandstanding by an extra assuming nobody is paying attention and oops, there goes the fourth wall. I find that fascinating. This shot initially looks like the latter, with the elevator attendant taking advantage of what he knew to be his last scene in the film to draw attention to himself by pulling a silly face. That's what I assumed upon watching the film. But reviewing the scene for the screengrab, it turns out my assumption was wrong and it's the former. This is a deliberate acting choice. He's not goofing off - he's leering. I was too distracted by the fact of the expression to follow his eyeline, so I missed the fact that he's totally checking out the ass of the lead actress. What makes this weirder is that this immediately precedes the dramatic breaking point of the film. All the Sins of Sodom is anguished and dramatic in that very Joe Sarno, late-'60s-NYC-sexplo sort of way, and this is the moment before shit goes completely sideways. (The STOP HERE sign on the wall, warning the lead of going any further, is a nice touch.) And as a palate cleanser before that, we get a random mug pulling some Tex Avery shit. It's beautifully disruptive, honestly.
November 28, 2024 at 4:36 PM
shotsofanarchy.bsky.social
from THE SEX KILLER (1965, Barry Mahon)
A middle-aged man in the background, a bartender, stands looking pensive. In the extreme foreground, blurry and out of focus, is a greasy doof pulling a goofy-looking "shocked" face. Perhaps we'd better start at the beginning. This was the first entry from the old Shots of Anarchy Tumblr. I started Shots of Anarchy essentially as a pisstake during the Vulgar Auteurism battles (remember those?). It was me having a "quien es más macho?" moment, looking at the landscape of debate around me and thinking, oh you think you like vulgar, l'Il show you some fuckin' vulgarity. And in thinking of goofy, inexplicable, poorly composed, wholly artless shots with which to prove my bad-movie superiority, one shot floated to the surface of my memory. An otherwise-neglibile film, made by a man whose films in my experience could only be less effortless if he kept the cover on the camera lens, still had one shot that buried itself in my subconscious until the day I needed it, for something that turned out to hold a lot of meaning. What we have here is one of my favorite shots in all of cinema. Its very existence is baffling, and that's why I love it. This is a ruined take, an establishing shot of a bartender fucked up by some yahoo noticing the camera and sticking his whole head into the frame. The film cuts past him and goes to another take of said establishing shot. Which begs: why is it in the film at all? They got what they needed on a later take - why make the berserk decision to leave the shottus interruptus in the final print? I don't know, and Barry Mahon isn't around to ask. But over the last few years, this shot has become a sort of totem for me - a symbol of all things unpredictable, of happy accidents and unintended effects, of reality reaching into the frame of an artifical narrative to assert its existence. Successful art is beautiful, but there's also beauty in failure if you know how to see it, and a rupture of intention can be just as thrilling as an achieving of those intentions if the rupture is curious enough. Or, as Greta Gerwig puts it in FRANCES HA: "I like things that look like mistakes." So. Let's celebrate some mistakes.
November 28, 2024 at 4:24 PM