Have no fear, Teleport City readers, and thank you for your expressions of concern. Here's the official word on the site's status from the ruthless overlord himself:"Apparently this is Teleport City’s birthday, because my domain just expired. So thank you, people who alerted me. We should be back up and running as soon as the credit card payment gets processed."So, though TC is currently MIA, rest assured that we will be coming back with power, power any day now.
Kaun Sachha Kaun Jhoota was my first Telegu action film, and I stumbled into it quite by accident. What attracted me to it initially was the fact that it gave top billing to both Helen and Laxmi Chayya, although neither turned out to have much screen time. (To be honest, I couldn't even place Laxmi Chayya among the cast, and Helen only popped up for one item number during the final hour.) I was not disappointed by this, however, because what Kaun Sachha Kaun Jhoota is really all about is being a showcase for Telegu action heroine Vijaya Lalitha.
The best way I can think of to describe Vijaya Lalitha is as a cross between the aforementioned Ms. Chayya and Dara Singh. In one scene she goes from go-go dancing with hip-swinging abandon to one of the film's twangy guitar and Farfisa organ-drenched musical numbers to being in a wild bar fight in which she's doing all kinds of acrobatic wrestling moves and crazy backflips. The many, many fights in this movie are totally insane -- more the kind of thing I would expect from the Turkish cinema of this period -- and Vijaya both doles out and receives more punishment than you would ever see a traditional Bollywood heroine do -- and all without mussing her helmet of flaming red hair or any of her many brightly colored Annie Oakley jumpsuits.
The plot of the movie is fairly easy to follow, despite the lack of subtitles; basically a revenged-themed Western with Vijaya gunning for the gang of cattle rustlers who killed her dad and raped her sister. On the other hand, the fact that virtually all of the male actors in the movie sport greasy pompadours and mustaches did make sorting their characters out a bit confusing. The style of acting is OTT to the point of making Saira Banu look like a master of nuance by comparison, and, just in case all the agonized mugging doesn't get the point across, the filmmakers use gimmicks like shining a red spot on Vijaya's face to tell you when she's really, really angry. This is a straight up comic strip movie, pure and simple, as colorful and two dimensional as anything you'd find on the inside of a Bazooka Joe wrapper -- which, if you know me, is a compliment. To top it off, Satyam's song score, which is marked by a couple of super catchy, garage combo style tunes, is a real kicker.
Kaun Sachha Kaun Jhoota is one of those films where just writing about it makes me want to run back and watch it again. It's a crazy good time, and you can bet I'll be seeking out more of Ms. Lalitha's efforts from this point on. She totally kills.
Okay, so 4DK's parade of communist cowboys, Filipino wonder women and Bollywood kaiju movies has left you cold, and I'm left feeling like a man trying to stop a baby crying who's run out of funny faces to make. How about this, babies: A South African children's television series made during the final years of the Apartheid regime that's modeled very closely on the puppet series of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It indeed seems like no country's young sprouts were immune to the hypnotic appeal of freaky-looking marionettes framed within a fiery landscape of exploding miniatures. And thank God for that. After all, it's things like this that, despite our differences, bring us all a little closer, isn't it?
I could find very little written in English about the Afrikaans language series Insterster other than a modest-sized Wikipedia entry and what's written about it on the blog of one Mike Cane. Those sources tell me that Interster came into being as a result of the South African Broadcasting Corporation's inability to acquire broadcast rights to the Anderson's Thunderbirds, prompting them to try their hand at producing a puppet sci-fi series of their own. The result is a very close approximation, coming more than a decade after the Andersons stopped producing their patented Supermarionation series (moving instead into live-action fare like Space: 1999 and UFO) and a couple of years before Gerry Anderson tried to jump back into the game with the underwhelming Terrahawks. The puppets in this case, rather than being stringed marionettes like those used by the Andersons, appear to be internally wired puppets that are operated from underneath, and I was happy to see that they emulate the big-headed, caricatured look of the puppets from Thunderbirds and Stingray, rather than the dead-eyed, ambulatory mannequins seen in later Anderson series like Captain Scarlet.
I would love to say that I saw all kinds of subtextual echoes of South Africa's then-current political situation in Interster, but having thus far only seen two of its half-hour episodes, I'd have to say that that would require a pretty fanciful reading. There is, however, a captive alien prince, who is being held hostage indefinitely by the ostensible good guys -- themselves one side in a simmering interplanetary conflict -- in order to maintain an uneasy, coercive peace. Once freed by his people, this prince leads them in a stealthy, undercover war against his former captors. Could this perhaps be a reflection of the Afrikaners' anxieties about Nelson Mandela and the ANC? Perhaps not, but that aside, it's certainly difficult to ignore the physical resemblance of one of the show's villain puppets to then-prime minister P. W. Botha.
While the above is all conjectural, I can tell you with absolute certitude that Interster contains most of the elements that could be found in the Anderson's most successful shows, such as a square-jawed (and, come to think of it, square-headed) puppet hero with a trusty side-kick; a futuristic defense force -- in this case headquartered in a megalopolis-like 21st century Cape Town; all kinds of nifty vehicles and gadgets; lots of neato miniature work, and, of course, plenty of explosions. The only thing sorely missing is the grandiosity that one of Barry Gray's thundering orchestral scores might have bestowed upon the proceedings, as what we're left with is some pretty cheesy synth disco and wan electronic noodlings that give an air of ponderousness to much of the action.
The plots of Interster's brief episodes are, as might be expected, pretty basic, but not without their interesting elements. The war between Earth's Space Force and their alien enemies, the Krokons, is a cold one, waged under the cover of an interplanetary peace treaty, a situation that forces the show protagonists, lead by the aforementioned square-jawed hero Bruks De La Rey, to act with more consideration for the appearance of diplomacy than we see in the battles that play out in typical space operas. I also thought it was a neat twist that the Krokons' secret human collaborator on Earth is one Gorman (the aforementioned Botha ringer), a corrupt weapons magnate who makes money coming and going by supplying armaments and machinery to the Space Force while demanding hefty prices from the Krokons for his services as a spy.
But these hints of complexity aside, what I really enjoyed about Interster are the same things that I've always enjoyed about Thunderbirds and the Andersons' other puppet shows: the unfading and mesmerizing strangeness of the human-like puppets, the cool miniature work, the very apparent dedication to craft on the part of all involved, and the unique, completely closed reality that these all combine to create. That said, the show does feel a bit colder than Thunderbirds, and as a result lacks that series' inherent charm, instead hewing more closely to the somber, militaristic tone of the later Captain Scarlet. Of course, this perception on my part might be colored by my perception of the malignant system that was in place at the time of the show's production. I mean, escapism is one thing, but no mere television show should be entertaining enough to make you forget that. Still, I'm fascinated enough by Insterster to seek out more episodes... at least until that fascination fades in the face of some new, fleeting obsession.
After enduring the harrowing shitstorm of utter wrongness that was Phra Rot-Meri, I felt that I was owed something a little bit more on the low key side from Sompote Saengduenchai's Chaiyo Productions. Well, as someone -- I think it was Rod Serling -- once said, be careful what you wish for, because it might be a really boring unsubtitled movie from Thailand that seems to revolve a lot around pack animals.
Honestly, for most of Pandin Wippayoke's first hour, the drama appears to focus on a much coveted water buffalo. Our young hero, during the opening scene, steals (or, more likely, steals back) said water buffalo from a gang of local toughs, and as a result becomes a target for retribution by the weaselly gang of thieves. When that payback comes, in the form of a vicious beating, it sets up the occasion for the lad -- whom I'll call Buffalo Boy -- to meet cute with our heroine, a comely village belle.
Despite this being a somewhat sleepy rural melodrama, there was no mistaking it as a Chaiyo production, for, within scant minutes of the fadeout of the opening credits, we've seen one character land face first in a huge pile of crap, and another get his face pissed on by a water buffalo. Animals pooing or peeing on peoples' faces is a recurring motif in Chaiyo's films, and I don't know whether that's because this is a common hazard for people in Thailand, or if it simply represents a particular childhood trauma of Sompote's.
Further assuring us of the film's Chaiyo pedigree is the giga-volt culture shock delivered by scenes set in a local snake restaurant, where people -- including young children -- drink the blood and eat the gall bladders of freshly killed reptiles. This practice was apparently depicted in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach, with the result -- judging from the numerous YouTube clips and LiveJournal entries that turned up in my search on the topic -- that a lot of douchebaggy American college guys now make a point of going to Thailand to partake in it.
After the first hour, Pandin Wippayoke (whose title translates to something like "Tragic Kingdom", though I don't think that it was the inspiration for the No Doubt album of the same name) picks up a bit, with the gang of water buffalo thieves killing a bunch of people for reasons that I couldn't make out. Then, at about an hour and a half in, a violent typhoon and tidal wave rocks the village, and we finally get some of the miniature work that Sompote Sands is known for, and which, in this case, is actually pretty good. Still, I had to ask myself, don't the Thai people see enough of this type of thing in reality? Isn't expecting them to pay to see a movie in which the primary draw is a typhoon realized through slightly above-average miniature effects sort of like expecting me to wait in line for an amusement park ride that simulates the experience of being on a stalled BART train?
Anyway, after a bit of Buffalo Boy and his girl being chased through the downpour by the gang of thieves, there's a fight that ends with one of the thieves being struck by lighting and another one being gorily impaled by a falling tree. Chalk one up for Mother Nature. Then the typhoon destroys the Buddhist Temple that stands in the center of the village, after which, apparently, it is built up again. The end.
Obviously the moral of Pandin Wippayoke is that you shouldn't count your water buffalo before a typhoon comes along and totally kills you, at which point it won't matter how many water buffalo you have. Okay, it's not at all obvious that that's the moral, nor is it probably the moral at all. Still, it's possible for us to take a lesson from Pandin Wippayoke without at all understanding it. And that lesson is that not all of Sompote Sands' movies are filled with rampaging giant monsters, children being bloodily killed, and shit and piss jokes. Some of them are just filled with not much of anything at all... and shit and piss jokes, and are quite boring. So perhaps we should feel fortunate for those others.
Absurdly elfin-looking Revolutionary War era British soldiers aren't all that the Turkish fumetti adaptation Korkusuz Kaptan Swing has going for it. Or, on second thought, maybe they are. Oh, there's also a woman with huge knockers. Read my full review at Teleport City.
As writers for Teleport City, neither Keith, David or myself feel obligated to follow one another down whatever cult cinema rabbit holes we individually choose to explore. There's enough of a sense of common ground between us to render that kind of me-too-ism unnecessary. But with Keith's viewing of Shaitani Dracula, I got a palpable sense of a threshold being crossed -- along with the gnawing feeling that, if I wasn't quick to follow, I was doomed to be stuck playing a never-ending game of catch-up. It brought back memories of early adolescence, and those certain kids who, seemingly overnight, had attained the aura of having experienced something that made them somehow profoundly different from the rest. Suddenly the world was divided into those who had seen Shaitani Dracula and those who had not.
There is a nigh immeasurable gulf between the Feroz Khan of the 60s and the Feroz Khan of the 70s. Someday, through close study of his films, I hope to identify the transition point, the missing link between the dewy-eyed faux Shammi of the early years and the hirsute, two-fisted manbeast that we've all come to know and love. Until then, I just plan to enjoy the hell out of movies like Char Dervesh.
The fact that Char Dervesh gives us a fresh-faced FK doing his best Douglas Fairbanks impression in an effects-driven Arabian Nights-style Bollywood fantasy is tantalizing enough. But that's nearly dwarfed in importance by the fact that the film gives us an opportunity to witness the old fashioned visual magic of the Wadia brothers in glorious, retina-searing Eastman Color. And, rather than on a murky VCD, it comes to us on a relatively crisp, English-subbed DVD from Shemaroo with most of its colors still displaying the full bloom of youth.
The film was directed by Homi Wadia, who is also credited as special effects supervisor, with the great Babubhai Mistry handling the art direction (and, I suspect, some of the effects work, as well). Together they bring us a colorful storybook world densely populated with genies, sorcerers, two-headed ogres, invisibility cloaks, underwater kingdoms, and flying just-about-everything (horses, carpets, etc.).
In addition to the above mentioned visual wonders, Char Dervesh also gives us a couple of wonderfully narcotic musical numbers set to the tunes of G.S. Kohli. One of these features Kumari Naaz singing in front of a chorus line of rubinesque women in cat costumes (all bearing a striking resemblance to the lead performer in that Pakistani Cat Woman movie), and breaks away to a fantasy sequence that looks to be inspired by a Les Baxter album cover, in which Kumari is caught in a giant web and threatened by villain B.M Vyas in the form of a grody, giant green spider. The women-in-prison themed number that brings us into the finale also deserves mention (and screencaps!).
The film actually begins on a darkly surreal and somewhat macabre note, with a grim and broken Feroz showing up at a temple with his skin mysteriously blackened. In the back of his carriage is a giant bird cage in which his two conniving brothers are imprisoned, and, in front of that, a throne on which sits a German Shepherd decked out in royal finery. Feroz tells the gathered seekers that this is what his sad life experience has taught him -- that it is this animal, the only creature in his life to show him consistent loyalty, who should be honored as a king, while his own betraying flesh-and-blood deserve to be caged like animals.
But rest assured that this is neither the beginning nor the end of the story, for Feroz then unfurls the tale of how he came to this state, and, despite the downbeat wrap-around, its one leavened with a fair share of humor and whimsy. In fact, the film even exhibits some instances of winking, contemporary humor suitable to a Warner Bros. cartoon, as when Feroz gets saddled with the world's laziest genie, who has a strict one-wish-a-day rule and is quick to remind his master of compulsory union holidays. Unfortunately, Shemaroo tries to get in on this spirit with some subtitles that seem to be putting an attempted colloquial spin on the dialog, with people telling each other to "cut the crap" and calling "bullshit" on one another. (Oh. well. At least it's a nice print.)
Rather than provide any further plot summary of Char Dervesh, I'm just going to recommend that you see it. If you're a fan of the Wadia Brothers' work -- or just of old school fantasy films in general -- there's a lot to embrace here. Plus, what other opportunity are you going to have to see a testosterone-sweating man-slab like Feroz flying around on a winged horsey?
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