Though the film’s title and story loosely resemble that of Abel Ferrara‘s 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, according to Herzog, it is neither a sequel nor a remake; its only commonality is a corrupt policeman as the central character. Nonetheless, the director of the original Bad Lieutenant film, Abel Ferrara, expressed dismay that the Herzog film was being made. Both Bad Lieutenant films were produced by Edward R. Pressman. (wiki)
Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, a bullet hellroguelite video game based on the film, was developed by Mega Cat Studios, published by Skybound Games and released on April 12, 2023, for Microsoft Windows. (steam)
Zeros and Ones is a 2021 American-Italian thriller film written and directed by Abel Ferrara. It stars Ethan Hawke, Cristina Chiriac, Phil Neilson, Valerio Mastandrea, Dounia Sichov, Korlan Madi, Mahmut Sifa Erkaya and Anna Ferrara. (wiki)
I decided to repost my thread with first thoughts on Abel Ferra’s remarkable last production. Altough hard to encapsulate and probably not a success with the critics – Ferrara’s late foray into current world affairs is one of the most visionary & contemporary things out there. It’s impossible for me to sum up but it as if he took wll our daily digital supper, all the aberran and yet so real and hard to encapsulate -apocalyptic moods and made them into a movie. My tw were posted as sort of personal notes freshly after watching it online and reading just Steven Shaviro’s blog review (he’s a big Ferrara fan). I stumbled on Ferrara almost by chance, wachted Bad Lieutenant with my father as an adolescent. We were both blasted apart. There was nothing to compare it with. Will never forget his academic vampire movie (The Addiction) – a total and welcome radical reworking of old horror tropes.
Watched Abel Ferarras ZEROS and Ones (2021). Incredibile piece of work – almost an anti war, conspiracy & spy genre movie. It's like nothing I've seen coming out of COVID era. Filmed almost entirely at night in Covid Rome.https://t.co/Ze5nXWyCmD
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Everything else seems passé or cliché in comparison, completly missing the pulse of the times. Vatican explodes (implodes?). Feeds of video streams & online blackmail material is ubiquitous. A complot without a plot. Explanations are superfluous.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Ethan Hawke (as an ex- soldier merc? with an anarchist twin brother) stumbles trough the looking glass. Pawn gone rogue, muddled & completly dissociative, praying in mosques & churches. Higher forms of corruption (like friend @IonD sez), utterly impervious & black boxed.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
The slick & vacuous corporate ruthlessness of Ferrara's New Rose Hotel (1998) gave way to ceaseless military industrial machinations, gagging orders deceptions & smoke screens. Water boarding & hand sanitizers are part of the very same world. [Julian Assange gets extradited :(].
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
It has been going on since 1000 years, but no one seems to know precisely what, apart from mullahs & anti imperialist homeless suicide bombers. Almost everyone seems to act against their own best interests. "Jesus was a soldier but nobody knows on who's side."~voicever
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
In the wake of Pentagon's new approved aberrant military budget – A. Ferrara's ZEROS and Ones – lets the whole preemptive, self actualizing illogic of War on Terror infuse every corner of life. Stripped of its makeshift ideological facade – collusion & complicity widen the maze.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Ethan Hawke's character pandemic rules seem both strict & lax at the same time. Everything is mediated technologically: the torture, honey traps, backroom deals, confessions under truth drugs. Feverish self immolation & enlightenment ideals both gush out during interrogation.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
(Zeros and Ones made me think of Sadie Plant's 1997 groundbreaking cyber feminist clasic) Ferrara acknowledges this digital (video) ubiquity and near instantaneity of special ops, transmissions, being one step ahead. Computer screens get shot. Warnings spoken through video call.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Night lit monuments of Rome filmed as with a phone camera. Documentary style long shots of lonely streets get mashed with closeups & grainy, almost night vision camera or even (?) CNN bombarded skies over Baghdad, zoom blackmail, pixelated explosions by unknown terror bombings.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
Remarkable movie by a director in his 70s. Not going to find any narrative – if that's what youre looking for. Even Ethan Hawke's (as himself) prologue & epilogue framing, maintains contradictions + unnerving incompatibility – a key duplicity you might say almost intact.
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 12, 2021
One of my favorite lines from Ferrara's Zeros and Ones – (beside many others "no worries they're negative") Ethan Hawke's brother ranting under truth serum: "Your strippers are Marxist!"
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) December 13, 2021
Brand New Cherry Flavor is an American horrordramastreaming television limited series created by Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, based on the novel of the same name by Todd Grimson.
dark, zany and shape shifting
Probably my favorite series of the last few years and one of the best Netflix experiences of the early 21 century. It might come as no surprise that this is not the usual science fiction pean – nor a radically new expression of our times, but a more modest retro tribute to 1990s body genre cinema. Not many horrors nowadays can provide such an enticing mix of grotesqueries, artificiality, comedy, x-ploitation with such panache!
It also stars what might turn out to be one of the most amazing young actresses of these end-times: Canadian-American Rosa Salazar. Salazar channels both bare knuckles, no frills, to the bitter end attitude with everything that we might regard as going-down-the-drain/doomer/crap-I-did-it-again black hole we find ourselves in.
Plenty of good, recent lists of movies take on the celeb path to destruction-perdition (or monstrous transformation into something else). The nascent, young female horror movie director turns out to be the worst nightmare of its sleazeball, libidinous, profiteering male producers or hapless boyfriends and arrogant actors. Hollywood/LA is since (1950) Sunset Boulevard the festering noir Babylon of cinematography, but also a vice-den full of vengeful aging yet still respledent and haunting superstars. Recent horrors have been turning a lot of these powerful early examples on their head somehow. InStarry Eyes– directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, a young starlet (Alexandra Essoe) gets targeted by the (unsurprisingly demonic) Hollywood elite and suffers the most horrific and non-beatific shapeshifting.
there is no exit only the kitchen sink
Becoming a female star or a female director is almost like a satanist ritual or a serial killer praxis. In I blame society (2020) writer/director Gillian Wallace Horvat, uses furious irony to lacerate an omnipresent and condescending patriarchal ‘bro’ culture, too secure (and dumb) to notice how it is producing its own nemesis. A male world full of obnoxious fantasies that keeps denying female authors/directors all due recognition, respect etc. +authorship. This is not rotten to the core, it is just insufferable and blind. That is why it is swallowing the allergic sandwich, the poisoned hook, or gets butchered or ritually maimed on its own self-congratulating altar. Most of the time you will learn to root for the female director no matter what – since the situation as we know and knew even before MeeToo is pretty dire. Method acting in a male-dominated cinematic world imposes more and more bizarre contortions and transformations that never end well or with a tadah- a happy ending.
the sweltering apartment jungle
Back to Brand New Cherry Flavor – where Lisa N. Nova (Rosa Salazar) – a young horror film director enters a netherworld of sex magick, ruthless body snatching, ancient Amazonian lore, witchcraft infused transformative vendetta with plenty of unsuspected zombie voodoo/hoodoo spells. There are newborn kittens everywhere getting vomited and there is a vine growing from the ceiling of a building and hallucinatory brain worms are harvested from its pollen. All this and more awaits the unsuspecting traveler. The horrific – in Linda William’s 1991 body genre’s critical essay (melodrama, porn, horror) usually gets the ‘gross’ label attached, where blamed bodily excess on-screen somehow lets viewers be affected in the most sensationalistic and visceral ways, making detachment impossible and affects hard to deny or to refuse. One of the repeating patterns is Lisa N. Nova’s both horrific and completely ridiculous vomiting live blind kittens that usually get snatched right away. There is this sensation that everything averted might turn out to be even more horrific. When she tries to rewrite the kitten-birthing pact, her body manages to reroute the process. Processes (magical or not) have a life of their own. Kittens start exiting other parts of her body – this is all happening under the most plausible, bodily exhausting, and sticky embarrassing situations.
the debt of kittens
The movie is both eerie, both dark and colorful (cherry flavored?!) at the same time. There is this boring cliche of horror wearing its awfully drab garment proudly – full of dry red, black blood, dressed in mourning colors and hues. Brand New Cherry Flavor is anything but monochrome. In fact, it is best described as being luxuriant. It luxuriates (plot-wise also) with jungle entanglements plants and animals.
patching and changing skins
Although tarantulas and orchids have a long history in noir movies and horror trash, they did not get joined as a related (imported) ecosystem of horrors. This I find the greatest addition of BNCF to the Sunset Boulevard haunted decaying canon of silent star era mansions. It is the undeniable fact that that there might be a hothouse out there, full of exotics and a spirit world in the basement. A tropical taxonomy of non-typical growth amidst perfect preened lawns and green acres. The whole series and its characters are almost like generating their own tendrils, acting out their darkly vitalistic nature, like infesting, seductive invasive species brought onboard some crates of lingering, unwatched movie copies that got buried under production hell. Suffice to say music is also right on top.
TimeSpace Warps 