Eros + Massacre

I am finally back from finishing my Żuławski book with an episode that is long, long overdue. Cultural historian and cinephile Jessica Shires joined me to gush over our love for Walerian Borowczyk and his radical 1981 gothic horror film, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne. This is meant to serve as something of an introduction to Borowczyk, so we spend some time talking about the development of his career, the importance of surrealism and literary adaptation to his work, and his incredible approach to female characters and women’s sexuality on screen. We love Boro! You can find Jessica here on Instagram — she has impeccable taste and her carefully curated account is highly recommended if you’re an art history fan — and her Projection Booth episodes can be found here, including one we did together on The Story of O.

For the second part of my ongoing series about Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Clara from Angura Research Center was kind enough to return to the show. You might remember her from the episode we did together on Shuji Terayama, but she’s also a huge Kurosawa fan. We had a lot to say about the horror films and thrillers he made at the beginning of the 2000s: Séance (2000), Pulse (2001), Bright Future (2002), Doppelganger (2003), and the short film Matasaburo the Wind Imp (2003). I think you can tell from the episode that we could truly have just kept talking about Kurosawa forever and are both dazzled by him. There are also some shout outs to Seijun Suzuki, Koji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi, and a free Palestine. You can find Clara’s important work as a writer and translator at her Angura Research Center site and YouTube channel! Here’s a direct link to the interview she mentions where Terayama discusses the influence of Surrealist Rene Magritte. And I say this in the very end of the episode, but Kurosawa’s new film, The Samurai and the Prisoner, will be out in select theaters in the US on July 31!

This April was the great Roger Corman’s centennial, so what better time to finally discuss his work on Eros + Massacre. Writer, artist, programmer, and friend of the show Klon Waldrip joined me for an epic conversation about Corman’s 8-film series loosely based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In this episode we discuss: House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), Lovecraft adaptation The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), and a handful of related films. We talk a lot about the overlapping plots and themes in these narratives, the distinctly American use of gothic tropes, Vincent Price, evil redheads, being obsessed with death, Vincent Price with a side of Peter Lorre, sinister doubles, doomed romance, and so much more. Be sure to check out Klon’s new solo podcast, Late List, which you can find on YouTube (with a really cool video component), Apple, or Spotify. The first episode is all about Something Weird Video!

The greatest of all time, Meiko Kaji, recently came to NYC for a retrospective of her work at Japan Society, so naturally I had to celebrate with a podcast episode in her honor. This is a solo outing, where I discuss the Stray Cat Rock series, which Kaji made for Nikkatsu. It launched her to countercultural stardom and was her last major project for the studio before departing for Toei in 1972 where she went on to greater heights with a series of crime and revenge films. I discuss the five film series: Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal (1970), and Stray Cat Rock: Beat ’71 (1971). These are incredibly stylish and often whimsical, though only loosely connected stories of girl gangs, their battles with rival male gangs, racism, the American occupation in Japan, drug use, the Tokyo nightclub scene, and freewheeling hippies. Kaji doesn’t play a recurring character (as in the better known Female Prisoner Scorpion series), but different iterations of a cool, charismatic gang boss and juvenile delinquent with a heart of gold. In the episode, I mention that my live interview with Kaji from March 28 will hopefully be up on Japan Society’s YouTube page soon (but there is a ton of great Japanese cinema content there already). I also mentioned this Meiko Kaji-inspired playlist which you can find here; I made this a few months ago for my Patreon, but it is a public playlist and perfect for spring weather.

I haven’t yet had a chance to talk about New German Cinema on Eros + Massacre, though episodes on Rainer Werner Fassbinder and key figures from his group of collaborators have been high on my list. I could never pick a single favorite director, but Fassbinder is at least in the top five. And Kurt Raab—the actor, set designer, art director, screenwriter, and producer who was among Fassbinder’s most loyal, brilliant, and beleaguered collaborators—is among my favorite Germans to ever exist, so it seemed like a good idea to start with him. Film programmer and projectionist Adrianna Gober is the only person I know who loves Raab as much as I do, and we’ve been planning this episode for… years now. We decided to focus on three of Raab’s films, though we do give a lengthy intro about Fassbinder himself and how he set the creative tone for much of Raab’s career. First up is Tenderness of the Wolves (1973), a bleak serial killer thriller officially directed by Ulli Lommel, but it’s essentially a collaborative effort between Lommel and Raab, made with Fassbinder’s assistance. The center piece of the episode is Fassbinder’s Bolwieser aka The Stationmaster’s Wife (1977), a two-part made for TV series that has primarily been available in a truncated, feature-length version. A kind Discord user tracked down the complete version for us, not knowing we had already recorded, but we HAD TO go back and say more. And we end with a shorter discussion about Barbet Schroeder’s Cheaters (1984), a gambling drama with one of Raab’s wildest character actor roles. If you have trouble locating The Stationamaster’s Wife, you should be able to download it here. You can find Adrianna at the Gap Theater in Wind Gap, PA, which has some truly incredible programming, tons of 35mm screenings, and some of the best programmers working on the East Coast. If you’ve ever heard me wax poetic about Harry Guerro from Exhumed Films, this theater is one of his many labors of love and is an easy drive from the Mahoning Drive In (and is about two hours from both Philadelphia and NYC). I am a bad person and still have not yet been there, but it’s on my list of resolutions for this spring!