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Friday's best pop song ever

April 21, 2016, 10:34 pm
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A two year offense

April 22, 2016, 7:13 am
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Wednesday night, Jeff Heyman and I celebrated the end of Pop Offensive's second year on the air by surrounding ourselves with a chorus of angels--that is, if your religion allows for The Shaggs, The Slits, and the Runaways being called "angels" (which it should.) Yes, it was our second All Girl Extravaganza, an eclectic survey of the female spirit as expressed through a wide array of pop genres, and it was awesome. If you missed out on hearing it live, you can now stream the episode in it's entirety from the KGPC's Pop Offensive archives even though you are obviously a complete misogynist. We don't discriminate! We'll even let you read the complete playlist for the episode over at the Pop Offensive Facebook Page. (And while you're there, don't forget to check out all the videos we've posted, including Sophie & Magaly's penguin obsessed Eurovision performance.)
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A Devilish Homicide, aka A Bloodthirsty Killer (South Korea, 1965)

April 23, 2016, 11:15 am
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On paper, A Devilish Homicide (also known as A Bloodthirsty Killer and, in its home country, Salinma) tells what is more or less a boilerplate Asian ghost story. There is the vengeful spirit of a wronged woman—sheathed in white, of course, and with her eerily glaring countenance peeking out from behind a veil of long black hair—who, as the years have taught us to expect, spends the bulk of the movie systematically picking off all of those responsible for her demise. In practice, however, the film is a great example of how an oft-told tale, when told inventively, can take on a vibrant new life.

For the first half of A Devilish Homicide, director Lee Yong-min seems to have dropped us into the middle of a Lynch-ean nightmare, piling on one disturbing visual non sequitur on top of another until, very gradually, a story starts to coalesce. This story, once it comes into view, is an anxious one of a middle class family unit so plagued by both mysterious outside forces and byzantine internal intrigues that it is impossible not to compare it to Kim Ki-Young’s landmark The Housemaid, made five years earlier. As in other rapidly modernizing Asian societies in the 1960s, the state of the traditional family appears to have been an abiding concern for Koreans at the time.


The film begins with well-to-do businessman Lee Shi-mak (Lee Ye-chun) making a late night visit to a deserted gallery, where he finds on the wall a red-tinted portrait of a woman whom he immediately recognizes. Much later, we will learn that this woman is Ae-ja (Do Kum-bong), Shi-mak’s ex-wife, who disappeared ten years earlier—but, for the time being, Yong-min leaves us to piece this together for ourselves.

Shi-mak takes the painting from the wall, only to have the image melt away before his eyes. He then flees the building and hops into a cab. Shi-mak wants to go home, but the disfigured cab driver has ideas of his own, taking his increasingly uneasy passenger out into the countryside. The driver warns Shi-mak that the night is alive with vengeful spirits and, to illustrate that fact, we are shown a dawn-lit forest teeming with white garbed female forms. This haunting image, presaging Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, is one of many in A Devilish Homicide that will stick with you long afterward.


Eventually the driver lets Shi-mak off at another apparently abandoned building, the interior of which, as rendered by Hong Jun-Mun’s noirish cinematography, is a foreboding maze of shadows. There he stumbles into the apartment of an artist, who happens to be in possession of the painting of Ae-ja and insists that Shi-mak take it. Before he can make his exit—or find out what the actual fuck is going on—the clock strikes midnight and the murderous spirit of Ae-jun appears at the artist’s door, dagger in hand. Hiding under the bed, Shi-mak watches fearfully as the ghost overcomes the artist and stabs him in the back. He then escapes from the building, only to be pursued by the cab driver, who now seems to have murder on his mind.

Taking shelter in yet another expressionistic ruin, Shi-mak crashes through the rotting floorboards into the shadowy crawlspace. There he finds the supine body of Ae-jun, unaged since her disappearance, in an apparent state of suspended animation. He takes her to his doctor friend, Park, who clearly recognizes her and is just as startled as Shi-mak to see her. He examines her while all the while exclaiming that it is impossible for her to be alive. Except that she is—although, when Park puts a thermometer to her chest, all he hears is science fiction-y electronic noises.


Now, at this point in A Devilish Homicide, there have been many opportunities for the screen to go all watery and for Shi-mak to sit bolt upright in bed and scream—in the manner all movies seem to think we awaken from bad dreams even though none of us do ever. Even Shi-mak—who is wandering through the abandoned streets of the city in the middle of the night why, exactly?—repeatedly exclaims that he must be having a nightmare. This conviction is bolstered by the languid horror of all that has happened so far, which is more than a little reminiscent of the similarly dream-like Carnival of Souls. Even a devotee of outré cinema such as me, who should have been conditioned by my viewings of other deeply strange Korean movies like Woman after a Killer Butterfly, surrendered to the expectation that all of these improbable events would eventually be ascribed to night terrors. However, this was not to be the case.

Shi-mak leaves Ae-jun with Dr. Park and returns home to his family, an idyllic unit consisting of his wife, his mother and his three children. Ae-jun, who has murdered Park immediately upon waking up, is not far behind, and soon the family's bonds are tested by a series of horrific encounters. First, Shi-mak’s mom walks into the forest to pray at a Buddhist shrine and is attacked by Ae-jun, who growls and hisses like a cat. We see her getting pushed into the river and swallowed by the current, and she is missing long enough to be feared dead. Grandma nonetheless returns, albeit with a few add-ons. In one particularly hard to un-see scene, she finds her two youngest grandchildren asleep in their shared bed and starts compulsively licking their faces.


In another harrowing sequence, Ae-jun reaches in through a bedroom window and snatches Shi-mak’s teenage daughter up onto the roof of the house. Her mother desperately tries to reach the roof, but the rickety ladder she is using starts to buck and sway dangerously in the wind. All the while, her daughter’s screams of terror and agony pierce the soundtrack. Meanwhile, grandma (in a toweringly creepy performance by a Korean actress whom I sadly cannot identify) continues to behave in an increasingly sinister manner. Suspicious, Shi-mak spies on her and witnesses her grooming herself in the mirror, licking her hand and then pulling it back across her hair. Looking back at her from the mirror is the reflection of a cat. Shi-mak barges in on her and a struggle ensues. His mother dies, leaving in her place a dead cat wearing a tiny robe.

When Shi-mak, in a fit of rage, destroys the portrait of Ae-jun, he finds hidden within it the artist’s diary. In it, the artist describes the murder plot that lead to poor Ae-jun’s demise. Suffice it to say that it’s a scheme that’s every bit as absurd as it is vicious. He also describes aspects of Ae-jun’s sad and lonely death that he could not possibly have known about. Soon thereafter, a mysterious young woman appears at Shi-mak’s home and offers to become the family’s maid. She gives Shi-mak a third eye taken from one of the Buddhist shrine’s idols for protection. This he will repeatedly throw at Ae-jun like a mystical superball in their final confrontation.


A Devilish Homicide is a strange film, but strange only in the best way possible--while being at the same time relentlessly, oppressively creepy. It is also a film that could prove instructive to the current generation of commercial filmmakers, some of whom think that making a genre film is simply a matter of faithfully rolling out a catalog of established tropes and familiar plot points. This practice results in boring and unimaginative genre films that make people like me sad. As an alternative, what A Devilish Homicide demonstrates is that every story, no matter how hackneyed, offers a myriad of potential drop pins from which it can be told—and, depending how far those pins venture from a conventional perspective, told interestingly. In fact, the earlier reference to David Lynch is appropriate here, as so many of his movies, like A Devilish Homicide, contain within them conventional genre films that have been fractured almost beyond recognition.

In the case of A Devilish Homicide, we eventually find that, despite him being positioned as the protagonist, the story is not that of Shi-mak at all. Shi-mak was neither an actor in the plot against Ae-jun nor privy to it, which means that the story of A Devilish Homicide is really that of Ae-jun, an innocent who suffered tragically at the hands of her conniving loved ones and ended up a spirit walking the earth in search of vengeance. If the movie had been made in Indonesia, Ae-jun would be the central character--and portrayed by Suzzanna.



Instead, Lee Yong-min drops us into the middle of a businessman’s nightmare and lets us struggle out of that toward the film’s true heart. Although it’s forcing of a male perspective might merely be the result of patriarchal imperative, its central tale, like that of most Suzanna films, is one of man’s inhumanity to women.
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Friday's best pop song ever

April 28, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Friday's best pop song ever

May 6, 2016, 6:51 am
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Friday's best pop song ever

May 12, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Podcast of Fire's Taiwan Noir Episode #22: Dragon Inn

May 13, 2016, 4:27 pm
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With this latest edition of Taiwan Noir, I use host Kenny B. as a kind of father confessor--a sympathetic ear to pay witness as I struggle with my feelings about King Hu's Dragon Inn, which is arguably a canonical work of martial arts cinema. I think it makes for one of our better episodes, but you can judge that for yourself. Download or stream the episode here.
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Friday's best pop song ever

May 19, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Friday's best pop song ever

May 26, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Friday's best pop song ever

June 2, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Three Supermen at the Olympic Games (Turkey, 1984)

June 5, 2016, 7:12 pm
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Three Supermen at the Olympic Games looks like what happens when the universe itself rises up in defiance at the existence of yet another entry in the Three Supermen series. One cannot so much review it as draw a chalk outline around it, so does it resemble a sloppy corpse left behind by a disorganized killer. Of course, many of its deficits can be understood when you consider that it was one of the few Turkish entries in the Three Supermen series, which seem to exist only to make the Italian Three Supermen films look like Avengers movies by comparison.

Still, Three Supermen at the Olympic Games is shoddy even by the standards of Turkish trash cinema. There is the usual needle-dropped score (mostly John Williams’ themes to Superman: The Motion Picture), but, beyond that, evidence of the film being used as a sort of clearing house for misbegotten footage from other films is plentiful. Actors were apparently asked to recite their dialogue in close-up against a plain green backdrop, presumably to serve as a kind of narrative glue for insertion into the film as needed. I can’t tell whether this was done out of ignorance of the meaning of the term “green screen”, or if there had been some intention to insert backgrounds behind the actors at some point and someone eventually just said ‘fuck it.” Whichever the case, this practice only serves to increase the disjointed feeling of the movie--with these pallid looking shots of the actors reciting their lines at an uncomfortably intimate remove frequently interrupting the already mismatched scenes.


Given all this, summarizing the plot of Three Supermen at the Olympic Games would be difficult under any circumstances – the IMDB threw up its hands with “Three supermen go to Olympics and mayhem ensues”—which means that watching it without English subtitles, as I of course did, makes it as indecipherable as an alien message in a Stanislaw Lem novel. Still, here’s my best shot:

The Three Supermen (Levent Çakir in a canary yellow wig; Yilmaz Koksal as the stuttering, mentally challenged Superman; and Stefano Martinenghi, the son of director Italo Martinenghi) somehow end up in the service of the Greek goddess Hera (Filiz Özten) and fend off an assortment of medieval knights and modern day gangsters before finally rescuing a stolen briefcase from some pirates. The end.


As you might have guessed from the above, Three Supermen at the Olympic Games’ sense of period is pretty fluid, allowing for elements of ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and modern day Turkey to intermingle freely on the screen without any kind of visual transition. Probably the most welcome of these anachronisms is a LOT of recycled footage from the comparatively delightful earlier Supermen film 3 Supermen vs. Mad Girl. Returning for a well deserved encore are the colorfully garbed Mad Girl herself (Mine Sun), her army of minions in satiny green Klansmen’s robes, her boss in his dime store devil mask, and, most welcome of all, that silly cardboard box robot with his unmistakably phallic laser gun. The only problem with this footage is that it’s vibrant, comic book inspired color scheme makes the rest of Three Supermen at the Olympic Games look pretty drab by comparison.

You might think that I’m oversimplifying Three Supermen at the Olympic Games, and you’re probably right. For instance, you Syd Field acolytes out there might ask what the point of all its muddled action is—or, to put a finer point on it, what is exactly at stake in it. Could it be, as the title suggests, the Olympic Games themselves? It’s questionable, since we see only a little of those games at both the films’ beginning and end, and there’s reason to suspect that the stock footage used is not of the Olympics at all.


Also, I have to confess to my synopsis being marred by my inability to account for certain of the film’s repeated bits of business, such as the brief clip of Levent Çakir looking into the camera while “flying” (i.e. either being hoisted on a crane or lying on an elevated plank) over a small boat that pops up with numbing regularity. Especially vexing was the Fu Man-Chu wannabe using a mixing console for a control panel who shows up on a television screen at irregular intervals to spout a mouthful of (presumably) expository dialog. Admittedly, these bits, had I understood them, might have smoothed over some of the films more jarring transitions, and if so, that’s my bad. Or is it? Is it my fault that this movie was not in English? I’ll let you decide.

Three Supermen at the Olympic Games’ director Italo Martinenghi, a producer of the original Supermen films in his native Italy, had brought the series to Turkey in the hope of lowering production costs. Three Supermen at the Olympic Games’ stands as testament to the fact that he was resoundingly successful in achieving that goal. It’s hard to imagine it looking any cheaper. If I could recommend it for any reason, it’s that the footage from Supermen vs. Mad Girl it contains is, in most cases, much crisper than that seen in the version of Mad Girl that’s currently available. All the better to appreciate the mighty Dickbot in the light that he so deserves.

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Friday's best pop song ever

June 9, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Wednesday! POP OFFENSIVE RETURNS!

June 12, 2016, 10:19 am
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We came very close to reaching "Peak Pop" with April's gala second anniversary episode of Pop Offensive. In its aftermath, Jeff and I had to take time off to regroup, with Jeff even fleeing the country. Now we are back and bringing you the first Pop Offensive in two months, which will be streaming live from kgpc969.org this Wednesday, June 15th, at 7pm Pacific time. This means that we have had twice the usual amount of time to prepare our playlist for the evening, with predictably phenomenal results. It turns out that, however long we do this, there will always be enough pulse-quickening pop perfection out there for us to consistently turn an otherwise unremarkable two hours of you life into an ass-quaking, era-bridging global dance party. Tune us in on Wednesday and hear for yourself.
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Friday's best pop song ever

June 16, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Tune in, turn on, pop off.

June 16, 2016, 9:52 pm
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How often have you wished that you could relive the night of June 15th, 2016--or, at least, a very specific portion of it? Well, now you can do that last thing only thanks to kgpc969.org, where you can now stream last night's episode of Pop Offensive in its entirety. Not only that, but you can also view a complete playlist for the episode on the Pop Offensive Facebook page. Thrill again to Jeff's evermore baroque theme episode suggestions, Todd's unique pronunciation of Foreign names, and, of course, a lot of really fun and amazing music. It's all at KGPC's Pop Offensive Archives, where you can hear, not just this episode, but every other one of the surprisingly large selection of previous Offensives.
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Friday's best pop song ever

June 23, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Friday's best pop song ever

July 10, 2016, 12:51 pm
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Yes, I know it's Sunday. Hopefully this awesome and underappreciated tune will make up for the delay.
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The Charmer, aka Saher Al Nisa' (Egypt, 1958)

July 11, 2016, 7:26 pm
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That Egypt suffered its own share of post-war anxieties is evidenced in part by the prevalence of film noir within the country’s cinematic output of the 50s and 60s. These films are remarkable not just for their high technical quality, but also for how easily they slot into the genre overall, deep shadows, rain slicked streets and all. As such, they’re worthy of being judged side-by-side with the canonical works of masters like Wilder, Mann and Tournier. Take, for example, The Charmer, which chooses as its subject one of noir’s most generative figures, the shady spiritualist.

From Nightmare Alley to The Amazing Mr. X, the fraudulent fakir has provided for some of noir’s bleakest visions of human nature, given he is a character who cynically exploits people at their most vulnerable. I think it’s a gimme that anyone who is driven to find a supernatural solution to their problems has got to be at a pretty catastrophic low point in their lives. Only a monster would play such a person for a sucker.


Hamza, the character played by Farid Chawki in The Charmer, is just such a monster, although director Fatin Abdel Wahab (Ebn Hamido, The Haunted House) cannot resist giving his exploits a somewhat light-hearted treatment during the film’s first half. The idea of the picaresque con man seems to have an intractable hold on the imaginations of commercial filmmakers, perhaps because they see in him/her a sort of fellow traveler. Wahab, for instance, piggybacks upon Hamza’s prolific use of spooky sideshow gimmicks to swath his moody crime thriller in a haunted atmosphere worthy of Val Lewton. It’s all good fun, but ultimately makes for a stirring transition once The Charmer takes an inexorable turn into darkness.

As the film begins, we find Hamza, a small time crook, on the eve of his release from prison. Another inmate, Kawakby (Tawfik El Deken), has become Hamza’s criminal mentor during his time inside and now asks him for a favor. He will point Hamza toward a treasure ripe for the taking if Hamza promises that, after stealing it, he will use half of the money to pay the tuition of Kawakby’s sister so that she won’t be expelled from school. Hamza agrees, but not necessarily out of a generousness of spirit. Instead, he launches into a diatribe about how much he hates women and about how this job somehow will provide a platform for his revenge against the whole damn lot. Hamza’s misogyny is due, he tells us, to a history of abuse, neglect, and disappointment from the women in his life—in particular his mother, sister, and step-mother. Not surprisingly, that information does nothing to make this exchange any less troubling.


Hamza’s marks are two people who live in the same tenement in Tablia Alley, a rough part of the city. They are Morsi Amin, a drug dealer (Reyad El Kasagby) and Adalat, a matchmaker (Wedad Hamdy). Hamza shows up in the guise of wild-haired holy man Sheikh Maksouf and, using information provided him by Kawakby, makes short work of dazzling the two with his mind reading abilities. A series of supernatural escapades follow, which end with Hamza fleeing town with both Amin and Adalat’s treasure in hand—and each of them blaming the other for the loss. As I mentioned before, most of this is played for laughs, with Hamza making preposterous animal noises (awoooo!) during his conjurations and quite hilariously portraying himself as an ascetic who cannot touch cash.

The Charmer then skips forward in time a bit, where we find a much more high-toned version of Hamza (smart suit, groovy shades) haunting an upscale resort with a female accomplice. His target this time is Rashid Abdel Wahab, a disabled businessman (Mohamed Elwan), and his devoted wife Aziza (Hind Rostom). Hamza introduces himself to Aziza as Sharraf Eddin, a “Spiritual Scientist”, and gradually convinces her that he alone is capable of curing her husband.


Given that he is already planning to rob them, the “treatment” that Hamza then subjects Rashid to can only be seen as needlessly humiliating and cruel—an insult added to injury. Declaring Rashid’s infirmity the result of demonic possession, he proceeds with an “exorcism” that mostly consists of a weird floor show involving dancers in devil costumes and really loud drums. At the same time, opining that it would be helpful to Rashid to be more aroused by his wife, he encourages Aziza to wear ever more revealing outfits. He also sets out to seduce her, with the result that the character played by Hind Rostom gradually goes from being a tremulous innocent to being exactly the kind of back-stabbing gold digger that we’re used to seeing her play. Eventually, she falls so deeply under Hamza’s spell that she says she is willing to kill Rashid to get him out of the way. This, of course, not before Hamza has encouraged her to steal a fortune in jewels from her husband’s safe—such loot being necessary to Hamza purchasing from America the “nuclear device” he needs to complete Rashid’s treatment.


Hamza’s ruse begins to unravel when Kawakby, released from prison, returns home to find that Hamza, contrary to their agreement, has contributed absolutely nothing toward his family’s wellbeing. Incensed, he sets out to track his former friend down—only to blackmail him into giving him a cut of the take when he finds him. Meanwhile, the District Attorney (Hassan Hamed), now hot on Hamza’s tail, has other plans for the two. No amount of legal intervention, however, can prevent poor Aziza from meeting a karmic fate which she perhaps does not so richly deserve.


The Charmer is a rewardingly tight little thriller filled with gorgeous kitsch. The film loses none of its narrative punch for you taking time out to bemusedly savor Sharraf Eddin’s modish office with its smoke billowing whatsit and prominent disco ball, or its talk of nuclear devices from America that cure the lame… or that batcrap crazy dance number, for that matter. More importantly, it is a superb showcase for Egyptian cinema’s legendary tough guy, Farid Chawki. As Chawki is usually presented as more than a bit of a roughneck, it could be said that playing a suave and calculating con man might be a little off his beat—yet he acquits himself terrifically, making Hamza as compelling as he is loathsome. Meanwhile, Hind Rostom, if not playing against type, definitely plays against her normal trajectory, playing a good girl whose heart gradually ices over, rather than the other way around.

Sadly, those sympathetic to Hamza’s brash misogyny might see Aziza’s turn toward treachery as a validation of it. That’s awful, but I like to think, perhaps naively, that those people don’t read 4DK. If they do, I would point out to them that one of the translations of this movie’s Arabic title is “Betrayer of Women”, which indicates to me that no endorsement of Hamza’s behavior is being made on the part of its makers. Yes, it might be nice if they had expressed that sentiment a little more emphatically, but I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that this is the best we can hope for from a film made in the Middle East—or America, even—during the 1950s. In other words, sure, you might not like this film, and with good reason--but, personally, it is simply too good for me to conceive of any reason that it should not be seen.

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Friday's best pop song ever

July 14, 2016, 9:00 pm
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No walls, just Offense

July 22, 2016, 7:22 am
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If you were too busy being either enraptured or appalled by the Republican Convention to listen to Wednesday night's episode of Pop Offensive, I have good news: The episode, along with all the others, is now available for streaming from KGPC's Pop Offensive Archives (and you can also check out the full playlist, which has just been posted on the Pop Offensive Facebook page .) Of course, this episode contains nothing so uniquely thrilling as a human being unironically named Reince Priebus, but it does contain something that is of arguably much greater importance: 50 minutes of joyful escapism and a foot stomping mix of catchy, irresistibly danceable tunes. If you don't find that a welcome alternative to listening to an orange-faced gargoyle bellow litanies of societal ills, I'm afraid it may be too late for you.
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