Electric Trio Vol. 1
'Love Massacre' (1981), 'The Red Spectacles' (1987), and 'Looking for an Angel' (1999)
Electric Trio is a column where I look at some of cinema history’s countless underseen, underappreciated, and largely forgotten works. The format (or gimmick, if you prefer) is simple: three films, three paragraphs each. Hopefully these posts will, on occasion, move a few of my readers to seek out a film they were previously unfamiliar with. If not, I hope that reading about them proves a worthwhile experience, at least.
Love Massacre (1981)
After making his debut with the 1980 wuxia film The Sword, Hong Kong filmmaker Patrick Tam set his sights on the slasher genre for his 1981 follow-up, Love Massacre. It is very much a nomen est omen situation as Tam prefaces his horror blowout with a romantic psychodrama, marrying lowbrow impulses with highbrow excursions — the characters even visit a museum to stare at abstract pieces, some of which, like the film itself, bear a striking resemblance to the works of Mark Rothko — and Hong Kong cinema with Italian gialli to make for a stunning, haunting mishmash of modes.
Squint your eyes and the film plays like a rather conventional drama at first, introducing a love triangle, a doomed long-distance relationship, and personal tragedy in the form of a sibling’s suicide. But instead of emotional turmoil, Chiu Ching (Chang Kuo-Chu), the brother of the suicide victim and short-term lover of main character Ivy (Brigitte Lin, who would go on to star in 1994’s Chungking Express, directed by Tam mentee Wong Kar-wai), descends into stalker madness and contorts the film into a nasty knife-wielding-maniac tale as he preys upon Ivy and her fellow co-eds.
There are essentially two variants of the film floating around the vasts of cyberspace: one boasts a sickly, washed-out color palette of whites, reds, and blacks, complete with hard-to-read subtitles that often blend into the pale backgrounds. The other has a warmer color scheme, legible subtitles, and is also, notably, uncensored. Some of the gore in the latter cut adds to the deranged tone of the final act in particular but the ghostly aura of the former is what truly pushes the film into the realm of the weird, even without copious amounts of blood splashing across the frame.
The Red Spectacles (1987)
Dystopian fiction by way of Seijun Suzuki, Jean-Luc Godard, and Buster Keaton. You’d be forgiven for not anticipating the puzzling gear shift that occurs after the bloody, heavy-on-the-lead overture but 1987’s The Red Spectacles does indeed rearrange itself into a surreal, philosophical slapstick comedy neo-noir after disguising itself as a rote sci-fi actioner for the first ten minutes. The sepia cinematography that greets the audience after the opening credits underscores this, as does main character Koichi’s (Shigeru Chiba) change in attire from futuristic battle armor, rounded out with red eyes that glow ominously, to a Bogart-cool trench coat.
Director Mamoru Oshii is best known for his anime features, namely Angel’s Egg (1985) and Ghost in the Shell (1995), but five films and a few TV shows into his career as an anime director, he decided to try his hand at live-action filmmaking and blended his affinity for ponderous dialogue and paranoid ambience with irreverent shōnen humor and fevered eclecticism. The film giddily moves between somber conversations, wacky chase scenes, and moments of oppressive urban dread where the characters seem in danger of being swallowed whole by the imposing cityscape.
The result is disorienting and bizarre but also fascinating. Oshii’s nods to the experimentalists of both Japanese and French cinema are most apparent during the off-kilter fight scenes whose unorthodox staging and loopy editing recall Atsushi Yamatoya’s Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1962), Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967), and Godard’s Breathless (1960) in equal measure. (Oshii cribs his Bogart-aping protag from Breathless as well.) The Red Spectacles’ quasi-futuristic setting also looks to Godard’s 1965 sci-fi neo-noir Alphaville but Oshii’s eyes remain firmly trained on the anxieties of the post-apocalypse and perhaps its absurdist streak extends from that more than anything else.
Looking for an Angel (1999)
Akihiro Suzuki’s Looking for an Angel is a melancholy lo-fi trip starring Kōichi Imaizumi who also appeared in a handful of Hisayasu Satō films, 1992’s The Bedroom being the most infamous. (No, I will never pass up a chance to bring up Satō.) Using only a shitty consumer-grade camera and a gorgeous blue tint, Suzuki crafts some exceptionally beautiful and evocative images that outshine anything seen in the endlessly manicured indies we’ve unfortunately grown so accustomed to.
The sparse plot concerns the death of Imaizumi’s Takachi, a gay porn star whose passing prompts his two best friends to travel to his hometown of Kochi to try and come to terms with their loss. Once there, they realize that all the boys they come across appear to be angels. Their sex- and voiceover-laden journey through their deceased friend’s home is accompanied by a moody soundtrack that shifts between dream pop, folk, and ambient, and the ethereal vibe imbues the film’s myriad locations — small-town alleys, cramped bedrooms, dimly lit bathrooms — with a deep, tangible sense of sadness.
Looking for an Angel is a peculiar object, one whose meandering pace and loose narrative are frequently interrupted by home videos of drunken nights out, sexual encounters, and diaristic confessions that offer a glimpse into Takachi’s life leading up to his death. If it wasn’t for its limited availability, its aesthetic sensibilities and themes of queer love and desire would surely have made it a favorite of aesthetic-obsessed Tumblr-dwellers a decade ago. (The low-res visuals are a feature not a bug for esoterica like this.) While Suzuki lifts liberally from Gregg Araki, particularly Araki’s shoegaze-drenched 1997 classic Nowhere, the overall effect here is quieter, less psychedelic, and a lot more low-key, lingering in memory like a wistful dream.