THE SUBSTANCE — CANNES 2024

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If you've seen Alain Robak's hilarious 1990 horror blitz "Baby Blood," then you'll have some inkling for the wonderful gnarly extremes that "The Substance" delivers to its well deserving audience.

Writer/director Coralie Fargeat creates the most satisfying horror satire to come along maybe ever.

David Cronenberg must be falling over himself with jealousy.

Fargeat deftly quotes from films by such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Darren Aronofsky, David Cronenberg, and Brian DePalma.

The Easter eggs just keep on coming. The special effects are amazing.

Taking a cue from Oscar Wilde's "The Picture Of Dorian Gray," Coralie Fargeat crafts a diamond-sharp satire that cuts in all directions at once.

Elisabeth (Demi Moore) is a wealthy L.A. television personality being pushed out of her job by corporate misogynist in-charge (Dennis Quaid).

Science comes calling after Elisabeth miraculously survives a car crash that puts her in the dubious medical hands of a shadow pharma company peddling a black market drug kit. The works give the user the ability to create a younger version of themself that they then trade off living between for seven day increments.

Margaret Qualley blows up the screen as Sue, Elisabeth's cunning younger, more beautiful, incarnation. Force of nature.

Vanity, jealousy, money, and fame make for a toxic Molotov cocktail of bad decisions.

Here is a whole lot of movie with some very poignant ideas about culture.

"The Substance" explodes with wit, heart, soul, and a whole lot of blood and guts.

What fun!

Rated R. 141 mins.

THE NIGHT PORTER — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Director/co-writer Liliana Cavani's mind-bending reflection on the Nazi era is a pure filmic transmogrification of power, war, sex, personal identity, and soul-searching.

Cavani reduces her complex wartime narrative to a dead-end reunion between Max (Dirk Bogard), an ex-SS officer and Nazi warder to his former prisoner Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), the imprisoned non-Jewish daughter to a Leftist activist at a Nazi concentration camp.

A chance encounter at the Vienna hotel where Max is employed as a bellman, derails Lucia's post-war life as the concentration camp-survivor wife to a successful American symphony conductor busy on tour in Vienna.

In Cinema, Vienna is the place where people go to die.

Max and Lucia pick up their leftover BDSM desires from the days of their concentration camp experiences together when he was master to her prisoner/slave.

It is significant to realize that Liliana Cavani launched her filmmaking career with two historical documentaries ("The History of the Third Reich (1962) and "Women of the Resistance" (1965), for Radiotelevisione Italiana.

Clearly, Cavani's deep insights into the mindsets of the Nazi's prisoners, as well as that of their tormentor goons, adds significant anecdotal historic depth to "The Night Porter."

The devil is in the details. Even wallpaper sends a message.

To compare "The Night Porter" to any other World War II film would be folly. Not even Bertolucci's "The Conformist" can compare.

The necessary mental, physical, and emotional escape hatch that Max and Lucia employ serves as a temporary life raft from the anger, repression, and violence that rages around them, and deeply inside their tortured souls.

Fearless performances from Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling give "The Night Porter" its humanity. For a film about the lasting effects of genocide, "The Night Porter" gives essential meaning to the madness with a delicate touch of palpable understanding.

Remembering the very thing that most people want to forget is a promise to oneself and a curse.

We are all damned by history, and all that history leaves out.

Rated R. 118 mins.

REPO MAN — SHOCKTOBER!

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Alex Cox caught lightening in a bottle in 1984 with a snarly little L.A.-set independent movie that became a cult classic thanks to the success of its soundtrack (featuring Iggy Pop).

This kooky time-capsule political satire uses LA's hardcore punk scene for its churning dystopic social milieu that our 18-year-old Otto (Emilio Estevez) traverses while getting sucked into becoming a repo man. 

Reaganomics hangs in the smoggy air like a bad fart.

Harry Dean Stanton plays Bud, Otto's father-figure who schools Otto in the code of the repo man as they scout repos in the less glamorous neighborhoods of LA.

"A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."
"Repo man is always intense."

Such dialogue seems written in stone, especially when the film's theme-carrier, Miller (Tracey Walter) busts out with philosophical gems like, "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are."

 What did he just say?

Now you've got me thinking.

Otto eats generic food at his parents house. His tweet tweet arf arf folks have given their life savings away to a televangelist. So much for college.

Otto's future looks bleak unless he can repo a certain 1964 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu with a $20,000 reward, and a Neutron bomb-related MacGuffin in the trunk, a nice hat-tip to the plot-driver in the 1955 Cold War thriller "Kiss Me Deadly."

Endlessly watchable, "Repo Man" stands up as an inspired artistic expression amid dark social and political repression.

Here's a great excuse to kick it.

Rated R. 92 mins.