El Aguila Descalza, aka The Barefoot Eagle (Mexico, 1971)

Though Christa Linder is forcefully stripped to her skivvies at one point, El Aguila Descalza is still somewhat less lowbrow than most Mexican genre parodies of its day. Whether that presages its director’s subsequent arthouse cred is a guess best left to the tea leaves.

El Aguila Descalza was the directorial debut of Alfonso Arau, who, under the mononym “Arau” also played dual lead roles in the film. If his name is familiar to you, that is probably because, some two decades later, Arau directed Like Water For Chocolate, the movie that muscled out the competition to become that year's one foreign film embraced by mainstream America in 1992 (you could say it was the Roma of its day.)

In the film, Arau portrays Ponchito, a hapless man-child who still lives with his mom and works by day as a product tester at a pogo stick factory. An avid comic book reader, Ponchito indulges his superhero fantasies by night, roaming the city in the guise of the The Barefoot Eagle, a masked crimefighter. Though whether the Eagle’s intention is to fight evil or promote it is initially unclear, as, in an early scene, he breaks into the house of his boss, Don Carlos Martinez (Jose Galvez), only to spy on his beautiful daughter Sirene (Linder) as she sleeps. However, when an American mobster named Englepass (also played by Arau) kidnaps Don Carlos and Sirene, Ponchito takes it upon himself to rescue them.

While most superhero films traffic in fantasies of transformation, El Aguila Descalza injects into that fantasy the nagging realization that, if one were to attempt becoming a costumed hero in real life, he or she would make an absolute fool of himself. Ponchito’s costume consists of what looks like a dime store pirate costume topped by a backwards baseball cap with eyeholes cut in it. Though this is a result as much of Ponchito’s dire economic circumstances as it is of his haplessness, as the film pulls no punches in depicting the grime and squalor of the lives of Mexico’s working poor.

This aspect of the movie lends an aspect of pathos to Ponchito’s slapstick humiliations that you wouldn’t see in a film starring the likes of Eleazar “Chelelo” Garcia, Jose Angel “Ferrusquilla” Espinosa, or any of the other Mexican comedians whose names require a quotation bracketed diminutive. Which is not to say that the film doesn’t draw upon Mexico’s tradition of broad, MAD Magazine-style screen comedy, although it at the same time hints at the arch pop cultural savvy of the hip, adult oriented comedies that were starting to proliferate worldwide in the late 60s.

This tendency accounts for the film's few winking references to the lucha genre, which was, at the time, on the upward end of a decline in favor with Mexican audiences. Englepass’ henchmen are a team of burly masked luchadores, anonymous bullies whose threat to the malnourished Ponchito not only cements his status as an underdog, but also makes it that much more comedic when they are humiliated by him. Santo appears both as the subject of a comic book Ponchito is reading and in a wedding scene where the ring-bearer is a small boy in a child-sized version of the Enmascarado de Plata’s iconic mask.

It could be said that Aguila Descalza employs something of a comic book motif. Among other examples, Chona, Ponchito’s would-be girlfriend (Ofelia Medina), is seen reading a Kaliman comic and another of Ponchito’s friends has a Batman poster on his wall. Comic book racks are prominently displayed in a couple of the bustling establishing shots. All of this could be meant to underscore the cruel irony of the powerless seeking refuge in fantasies of super power, or perhaps Alfonzo Arau just really liked comic books.

But, of course--and perhaps predictably—Ponchito is not powerless. With Don Carlos and Sirene locked away, Englepass puts his whip wielding goons in charge of Don Carlos's factory and imprisons the workers families in cages. Ponchito's appeals to the authorities fall on deaf ears and he and Chona are thrown into an insane asylum right out of Marat Sade. They of course affect a clever escape and crash Englepass' forced wedding to Sirene with an army of lunatics.This adds an extra air of mania to that classic 1960s comedy climax in which every member of the cast takes part in a madcap brawl rife with trippy sight gags as, all the while, psychedelic rock plays on the soundtrack. Take that, respectable society!

While I have to credit Aguila Descalza for being a hair more progressive and socially conscious than films like Cazadores de Espias and Agente 00 Sexy, I have to shamefacedly admit to sometimes wishing that it was as fun as those films were. But with the vaguely hippie-ish tone of some of its comedy comes the awareness of all of those things that, in the dark days of the late 60s/early 70s, the hippie culture rose up in opposition to: war, corruption, and repression. That the film brings to its subject an unexpected amount of empathy and compassion makes it worthy of a compensatory admiration, while at the same time giving it an ineffable charm.

Party in Hell (Iran, 1956)

While popular with Iranian audiences, Party in Hell was controversial in its day—perhaps for its combination of traditional religious imagery and broad slapstick comedy. The religious imagery I’m talking about is, of course, its depiction of hell and purgatory. But from which tradition that imagery is derived is open to question. There are indeed many similarities between the Muslim and Christian conceptions of Hell, but when Party in Hell introduces Biblical figures like Adam and Eve into its narrative, it seems to indicate the latter as its primary source. Of course, this question could be easily set to rest if I’d had access to a translated version of Party in Hell, which is why you don’t pay money to read this blog.

It seems that the makers of Party in Hell were as or more familiar with the story of Scrooge as that of the Bible, as that is the story that is here being warmed over for our delectation. Popular stage comedian Reeza Arham Sadr plays Haji Jabbar, a wealthy merchant who is as tyrannical as he is stingy and grasping. In fact, the film does such a good job of establishing Haji as a complete bastard that it is difficult to swallow the comic antics his character falls back upon during its phantasmagorical second half. Haji is shown gleefully evicting a destitute mother and her starving children and then brutally manhandling his daughter Parvin (Roufia) in a rage over her wanting to marry her penniless lover. Parvin then sings a sad song to a caged bird, because, as with so many national cinemas, music was a key part of Iranian popular cinema—or, more accurately, Film Farsi—at the time. Seemingly, it’s only in America that making a lightweight musical romance with major studio backing is seen as taking some kind of tremendous artistic risk (yes, La La Land, feel the stink eye.)

Eventually, Haji becomes gravely ill and takes to his bed, whereupon he is visited by the angel Azrael, who ignores his pleas and whisks him off to purgatory. Party in Hell was considered quite technically advanced in its day, and it’s true that no small amount of modestly budgeted movie magic was expended in realizing its comically surrealistic vision of the underworld. Haji and his conscientious assistant Ahmad (Ezzatollah Vosough), who is also there for some reason, take in the sights as Haji ceaselessly wails and moans pathetically. What they see are monstrous, fog enshrouded idols, dark winged angels, craggy, desolate landscapes, hideous sleeping monsters, and horned demon sentries. Occasionally they will catch a glimpse of hell itself, seeing tormented souls hung by their heels and toiling at a giant stone wheel while pits of white hot lava roil angrily nearby. They even see Hitler, Genghis Khan and Napoleon greedily pawing at a globe that they have been circling predatorily for, one assumes, eternity. Then someone will stumble or hit their head and there will be a slide whistle or “boing-g-g” sound to accompany it, because this is a comedy.

Much of Haji and Ahmad’s tour through limbo has the feel of a twisted travelogue, like a God-fearing, Middle Eastern take on a Mondo movie. At one point, the pair comes upon a group of grass-skirt wearing movie savages, who entertain them with their native dances. At another, they stumble upon a sort of sock hop of the damned, populated by clean cut rock and rollers who shake and shimmy to an American rockabilly record. Haji has, by this point, stopped his obnoxious caterwauling, to the point that he happily participates in the dancing, though at another point he and Ahmad are happy to sit back and ogle the many scantily clad women on hand. You get the message that purgatory is actually pretty fun, until the two of them are presented to a white bearded figure who gives them a few more buzz-killing peeks at hell and its torments before setting them free.

I think that comparing Party in Hell to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol should count as a spoiler alert, so if you are shocked to learn that, upon waking from his dream, Haji is the picture of magnanimity, approving his daughter’s marriage and gifting his fortune to charity, you should probably clean your glasses and start this review over. Of course, Haji then dies, after which he is shown being transported to heaven in an ornate flying palanquin which is born on the shoulders of angels. Given what a shit Haji has been shown to be previously, this seems like a disproportionate reward, to say the least--but by this point it seems that Party in Hell has less interest in harsh moralizing than in just being entertaining. It’s difficult to imagine a film like it being made in the religiously conservative atmosphere of the post revolution years, just as it is to imagine the festival darling that Iranian cinema would become based on this movie’s comparative frivolity. Seemingly, that cinema had to go through a purgatory of its own before it could reach maturity.

The Dwarves Must Be Crazy, aka Krasue Kreung Khon (Thailand, 2016)

I watched The Dwarves Must Be Crazy not so much because I wanted to, but because I thought I should—in that, of all the films at Fantastic Fest, it was, to my mind, exactly the type my readers would expect me to review. Did I mention that it is a Thai supernatural comedy about a village of dwarfs at war with a gang of krasue? Given that, you might ask whether I now question some of the life choices that lead me to that decision. And, yeah, maybe I do a little.

The humor in Dwarves is of the slapstick variety, largely deriving from the innate hilarity of little people and the myriad ways in which they can be projected, catapulted and hurled through space—all to the accompaniment of Scooby Doo style sound effects. I have a friend who, during America’s cultural obsession with William Hung, posited that Hung’s popularity was due to him providing people with an opportunity to laugh at someone who acted like a retarded person without them actually laughing at a retarded person. Could a similar kind of sublimation be at work behind someone's desire to see little people gone airborne? Could it be that little people provide a somewhat less morally repugnant substitute (unless you’re a little person, that is) for some less socially acceptable target we would like to see chucked into the atmosphere… like, perhaps, babies? Hey, I’m just putting it out there.

The rest of The Dwarves Must Be Crazy’s humor centers around butts and the many things that can come out of, and be put into, them and their adjacent orifices: farts, sharts, shits, shit eating, piss, piss drinking, bumming, and implied krasue-on-dwarf analingus. Yes, I just wrote “krasue-on-dwarf analingus.” Strap in, people.

For those of you who have thus far been spared knowledge of what a krasue is, a bit of a recap from my review of Ghost of Guts Eater:

“The Krasue, as it's called in Thailand, is a horror found throughout the folklore of Southeast Asia. In Indonesia it's known as the Leak, in Cambodia as the Ap, and, in the Philippines, as Manananggal… For those unfamiliar, it is an airborne head with its complete digestive tract, intestines included, dangling freely beneath it as it sails menacingly through the night sky.”

I’ll add here that my favorite things about the krasue are (1) that it is so different from any creature in the Western horror canon (save for, perhaps, this one) and (2) that it manages to be at once terrifying and absurd.

Everything I know about krasue I learned from movies, and none of them seem to agree on just how a krasue is created. In many films, like Mystics in Bali and Witch With Flying Head, they are the product of a curse, but in Dwarves they are the result of little people eating weird glowing bugs that they find in the jungle.

Before that can happen, however, we have a wistful prologue in which the bucolic daily rhythms of the little people’s floating village are established. These, of course, involve a lot of the aforementioned farting, sharting, shitting, and pissing. I would say that the arrival of the krasue disturb these peaceful rhythms, except it turns out that they also fart a lot (albeit more strategically than the dwarfs do, as when one of the beasts forces a dwarf who is hiding underwater to reveal himself by farting into his snorkel.)

By the way, I think that adding flatulence to the krasue’s defining characteristics is at least medically sound, given they possess all of the equipment to produce gas without any of the musculature to suppress it. Keep this in mind the next time you share an elevator with one.

The fateful bug-eating occurs when a group of bumbling hunters from the village venture into the neighboring jungle in search of food. Because I did not take notes during the screening, I can only tell you that these hunters all have names like Hi Ho, Mi Mi, and Ho Ho. I know that sounds dismissive, but it’s true. Anyway, once several of them eat the bugs and subsequently lose their heads, the hunters flee back to the village with the Krasue literally nipping at their taut little hineys. Now where the Krasues’ predilection for ass play comes from, I don’t know; in most krasue movies, the monsters are presented as being exclusively female, and nourish themselves by sucking fetuses straight from the wombs of expectant mothers. Here, as most of the Krasue are male, I suppose that butt munching may have been deemed more appropriate, which I resent. I mean, I suppose it’s true that some men would rather dine on shit than eat pussy, but it’s far from a universal.

The terrified hunters arrive home to find their tale dismissed by their fellow villagers. Until, of course, the krasues arrive and start chowing down on them. This is followed by a flock of gryphon-like creatures that prey on both the krasue and the villagers. When the flying men fly off with one of the hunter’s girlfriends, the little guys resolve to head back into the jungle to settle matters once and for all. Along the way they enlist the aid of an old hermit who looks like a compacted version of a grey bearded sifu from a Shaw Brothers movie.

Ironically, The Dwarves Must Be Crazy, despite its trashiness, is a very nice looking film. It appears to have been shot entirely on location in the lush jungles and archipelagos of Thailand, which director Bin Banloerit films to stunning advantage. I mean, I don’t know how much it costs to take a bunch of little people, dress them in loincloths and set them loose in the jungle, but I can truly say that that money—save the laundry budget for all those soiled loincloths--is clearly all on the screen. The krasue effects, which combine CG and practical elements, are also quite good, although it has to be said that bad krasue effects are the best.

Another post-production aspect of Dwarves that deserves mention, although not for any positive reason, is its music, which consist of two alternating cues that wear out their welcome in the time it takes for a dwarf to fall off a log. One is a plucky, Loony Tunes style, “mischief is afoot” theme that plays whenever a gag is being set up. The other is a jaunty reggae theme that plays once the gag has putatively paid off. Neither of these cues proved of much use to the audience at the Drafthouse, who greeted most of the film with stony silence.

Ironically, the scene that drew the biggest laughs was a corny musical montage featuring the film’s two little lovers frolicking amongst the flora. Ironic, because, to me, that scene was The Dwarves Must Be Crazy’s most politically correct moment. To me it said that little people, being equal to anyone else, are as deserving as any non-little person of being the subjects of an embarrassingly saccharine rom-com montage accompanied by a cloying pop song. That’s what freedom is all about, baby.

In the restroom after the movie, I overheard some audience members expressing utter bafflement at what they had just seen. This caused me to ponder just how vast the distance between myself and the rest of humanity has become. You see, you’re going to hear a lot of people talk about how “weird” and “WTF” this film is. But to me, it’s just another movie with a bunch of dwarfs farting and peeing on one another. Next!

A Meeting in Palmyra (Syria/Lebanon, 1965)

When I pledged to diligently seek out more films like Ana Antar, I had no idea that I would find a film almost exactly like it within just a couple of weeks. Like Ana Antar, A Meeting in Palmyra is an action comedy starring the popular Syrian comedy team Doreid & Nihad helmed by Egyptian director Joseph Maalouf.

Doreid & Nihad were so popular in their homeland during their 1960s prime that they are credited with revitalizing Syrian commercial cinema at the time. Demand was such that they were churning out two films a year and, in the process, prompting a dramatic increase in theater attendance throughout the country. Not surprisingly, their films were resolutely commercial in nature, which makes the fact that they were able to continue making them during a time of increasing government control of the Syrian film industry a further testament to their star power.

As in Ana Antar, A Meeting in Palmyra places the duo at the center of criminal caper. Doreid Lahham plays Nabeeh, the personal secretary to Farid, a businessman who has fled the country after being accused of murdering his partner. This partner, it turns out, had sold out their business to a criminal gang led by Mr. Nimr (Yacoub Abu-Ghazaleh). Nabeeh arrives in Beirut to aid Farid’s sister Laila (beloved Syrian star Hala Shawkat) in mounting Farid’s defense. There he is introduced to Laila’s uncle, a lawyer played by Nihad Kalai, who is named, as are Nihad’s characters in most of the Doreid & Nihad films, Hosney.

Throughout their time in Beirut, Nabeeh, Hosney and Laila are relentlessly tailed by agents of Nimr, who is determined to eliminate them before they expose his criminal operation. Fearing for Laila’s safety, Nabeeh—who, I think, is of Bedouin heritage—prevails upon solicitous tribal chieftain Abul Elahab (Sabri Ayyad) to escort her across the Syrian border to his camp in Palmyra, where her brother is also hiding out. Nabeeh and Hosney are then left behind to investigate the crime, facing no small opposition from Nimr and his cronies along the way. One of these cronies, it turns out, is Abul Elahab, who, unknown to them, has plans to kill Laila upon his return to Palmyra.

A Meeting in Palmyra is a very entertaining film. Doreid and Nihad have an appealing chemistry, and making them protagonists in a crime drama serves them well. This insures that they will have to periodically put aside their comic squabbling in order to work together at solving the crime. This, however, is not to denigrate their style of comedy, which is seminal in nature. Watching them run through their shtick will give a warm, fuzzy feeling to anyone familiar with the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Hope and Crosby’s Road pictures. Lahham is especially funny as the small statured hipster/nebbish (I stand by my earlier description of him as a cross between Groucho Marx and 1960s Woody Allen) who is constantly trying to hit on women drastically out of his league by affecting continental airs with varying degrees of success. He also has delusions of becoming a popular singer, and his habit of croaking tunelessly into a portable tape recorder nicely dovetails into a narrative payoff at the film’s conclusion.

The film also evidences the sort of “entertainment at all costs” sensibility that offers us a lot of pleasing distractions along the way. There are a number of songs, including one sung by Syrian actress and singer Yusra Bedouin, as well as a Beatles spoof that sees a be-wigged Lahham join a beat group on stage to shimmy around spastically and shout “yeah yeah yeah” into the microphone. And then, of course, there is the fanciful set design, which colorfully combines the aesthetics of The Flinstones and The Jetsons into a sort of midcentury paleo-modernism. The attendant over-ripened color scheme makes the film overall feel like a Middle Eastern version of one of Frank Tashlin’s live action cartoons.

The finale of A Meeting in Palmyra sees Nabeeh and Hosney put on their hero pants and face off against Nimr’s forces amid Palmyra’s stunning landscape of ancient monuments. Of course, under the present circumstance, these sequences can’t help but have a bitter aftertaste, given that, as of this writing, so many of those monuments have either been systematically destroyed by ISIS or shattered by government airstrikes. The pain of this is made even more acute by the contrast of these events with the Pan-Arab openness of A Meeting in Palmyra—a film that combines Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian talent to create something that can be enjoyed by anyone with a love of movies, whatever their politics or beliefs. In this way the film speaks to a world that, while much less connected than today’s, nonetheless offered some modest potential for harmony among its people, who could commune via their shared desires in the darkness of the global movie house.