Something Weird - Smoke and Flesh
This will be my next SWV review. It was a double feature with Alice in Acidland and could very well eclipse it in pure trashy value. Again I have only penned (well typed) a little bit on S&F, which I will include below, but this could actually be fun once it is all accumulated together. SWV has a history of this. One film on the double feature gets a bit more pop while the "additional film" is actually better. I would say this about Satan's Children, for instance, as I felt it was actually more entertaining than William Girdler's highly repped Asylum of Satan (which I would actually like to watch again; as the commentary track audio was kind of fun).
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I think some exploitation (SWV?) fans might find “Smoke and Flesh” a bit
pretentious (you could perhaps apply this to many kinds of film direction that
desires to incorporate a visual motif or style, in the editing or photography
phases) in that the director wishes to describe sexual pleasure and lovemaking
in ways that visualize particulars. For instance, you might have a hand gliding
gently across an ear and then rummaging back and forth through waves of hair,
then cut to a shot of a fish’s face in a fish tank (in the room where the
sexual encounter occurs) or under a bed where we see the legs tighten and feet
clutch of a woman as she receives cunnilingus. A hanging light and smoke rising
towards it from within a room after a joint is lit (the way the joint is lit, the shot is quite an alluring bit of glamorizing its use). A camera shot upward to a motorcycle biker as he
drives (which leads to the main title sequence at the beginning), and an establishment shot of Big Ben as it chimes towards the end (reminding us of it being in London). There is a lot of
this, and so I think the approach to shoot images in quick succession, driving
home not just the sexual experience but the surroundings where they occur, could
be considered desperate longing to be respected as an artist, not just some guy
behind a camera shooting smut. Still the subject matter and scattering parts (actors/characters and their activities within an apartment) shot by the director are anything but sophisticated or arty.
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