CRYSTAL FAIRY AND THE MAGICAL CACTUS

 

The official UK DVD of Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus (© Sebastián Silva/Content Media/Dirorir0/Fabula/IFC Films – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 22 July 2022, my DVD movie watch was a decidedly 'out there' (but what had initially promised to be an at least ostensibly intriguing) Chilean road movie memorably entitled Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus (I told you it was 'out there'!).

Directed and written by Chilean director/actor/writer/painter/musician Sebastián Silva (who also plays minor character Lobo), and released in 2014 by IFB Films, Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus is (allegedly!) a comedy, all about a young Chile-visiting American named Jamie (played by Michael Cera, visually recalling a young Gene Wilder) and his fervent desire to track down a specimen of the famous San Pedro cactus Echinopsis pachanoi, a tall columnar species from which he can then extract the hallucinogenic substance mescaline and experience its well-documented psychotropic effects.

These are said to take the imbiber to a higher plane of consciousness and open, as Aldous Huxley famously entitled his autobiography, the doors of perception (and from which in turn Jim Morrison's 60s rock group The Doors took their name).

Anyway, Jamie is accompanied on his trek by three Chilean brothers – Champa, Lei, and Pilo (see later for the actors' names) – who, to varying degrees, wish to experience some mescaline moments too. Also joining them, after having been rashly invited to do so by Jamie during a drug-addled party the night before their trek begins, is a New Age-besotted young woman (played by Gaby Hoffmann) who calls herself Crystal Fairy and soon drives the four guys to distraction with her bizarre beliefs and behaviour.

Equally frustrating is that specimens of the required cactus are spotted growing in several locals' gardens during their search, but none of the owners will sell to Jamie and company even a small portion of one. So finally, in desperation, Jamie resorts to a spot of covert misappropriation (ok, theft!) in order to achieve their goal. Victorious at last, they travel on with their much-prized, purloined cactus portion until they reach a lonely desert beach, where they plan to make not only camp but also some long-awaited mescaline-infused magic brew.

Assuming that we would be entering classic Carlos Castaneda territory but expressed visually rather than verbally, I was now looking forward to all manner of colourful animated on-screen portrayals of their psychedelic hallucinations – an eye-blistering fusion of styles forgathered from the likes of Fantasia, Yellow Submarine, Allegro Non Troppo, and Fritz the Cat would have worked very well indeed here, I feel.

But no, nothing at all – just a few moans from Jamie about his voice sounding strange, and feeling hot'n'dizzy. End of. What a swizz, not to mention a major lost opportunity to bring some much-needed, long-remembered flamboyance and flair to this very middling muddy movie!

Instead, under the influence of their drugged concoction the five travelling companions in a very low-key manner simply begin to open up to one another, accepting their differences and putting them aside in favour of a modicum of friendship. And that's it – roll the credits! Had the movie actually built up to any kind of climax beforehand, I'd say that its ending was by comparison a definite anti-climax, but it didn't, so I shan't. Despite being referred to as "hilarious" in some reviews and accounts that I have read, laughs were few and far between as far as I was concerned, and tended to be of the embarrassing, cringe-worthy type rather than the genuinely funny kind. Each to their own, no doubt.

Turning to the characters themselves: I do have a lot of time for New Age ideology, but Crystal Fairy proved just as exasperating to me as she did to her companions (apparently she was actually based upon a real person, known to the director, which is a scary thought!). True, once her mind is loosened (even more than it already was!) by the effects of mescaline, she reveals a tragic, traumatic past that may explain her extreme eccentricities, but this revelation occurs far too late in the movie to ameliorate or cancel from the viewer's memory all of her earlier inanities. Equally, Jamie came across as a thoroughly unpleasant, priggish obsessive, boorish and bad-mannered in the extreme, whom I found impossible to like or even empathize with.

As for the trio of brothers: for the most part they exhibited zero screen charisma, and shared neither fraternal camaraderie nor even much in the way of physical appearance. Yet, ironically, the actors playing them are brothers in real life – Juan Andrés Silva as Champa, José Miguel Silva as Lei, and Agustin Silva as Pilo (not sure if they're related to the director, another Silva). One brother was tall, dark and handsome, one was tall and handsome, and one was tall – that's all.

My overall verdict on Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus? I'm aware that some film fans absolutely adore this movie, and that its director even won an award for it – but for me, that's 99 minutes of my life and 50p of my money (the price I paid for this movie's DVD) that I'll never get back! Where's Don Juan when you need him, that's what I say!!

Having said that, however, you may think differently, so if you'd care to take a brief trip by proxy with Crystal Fairy and co, please click here to view an official trailer for this magical(?) mescaline tour.

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

Publicity poster for Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus (© Sebastián Silva/Content Media/Dirorir0/Fabula/IFC Films – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

SHADOW HOURS

 

The official UK DVD of Shadow Hours (© Isaac H. Eaton/5150 Productions/Newmark Films Inc/Seven Arts Productions – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 28 July 2022, I watched one of the most startling but intriguing independently-made mystery/thriller movies that I have ever seen – Shadow Hours. It had been recommended to me by a friend who'd made me curious about it by warning me to expect the unexpected. So I watched it – and he wasn't wrong! In order to review this decidedly strange yet addictive movie adequately, I need to discuss its entire plot, so – SPOILER ALERT – if you don't want to know its secrets, most especially its very enigmatic ending scenes, read no further! In addition, despite trawling through numerous movie sites after viewing this film, I was unable to discover any that contained a detailed account of its full plot, so here's mine, which may therefore be of interest and use to future Shadow Hours viewers and potential viewers.

Directed, produced, and written by Isaac H. Eaton, and released in 2000 by Newmark Films Inc, Shadow Hours takes its title from that dark (in every sense here!) section of each circadian cycle that its story passes through. Michael Holloway (played by Charlie Sheen lookalike Balthazar Getty) is a young, married, recently-recovered drug/booze addict unhappily trapped in a dreary dead-end job – working alone on the cash till during the graveyard shift in a backstreet Los Angeles gas (petrol) station in order to earn enough money to keep himself, his pregnant wife Chloe (Rebecca Gayheart), and their future child out of the poverty net…just. Every night he is confronted by the crazies and destitutes that lurk in the sleazy slums and alleyways nearby, and he even had a knife held to his throat on one occasion when a pair of junkies attempted unsuccessfully to rob his till, his life saved only by the fortuitous arrival of a cop in his patrol car wanting to fill it up.

Needless to say, therefore, Michael is nothing if not startled when one evening a sleek black Porsche drives onto the forecourt, out of which steps a tall mysterious stranger (Peter 'RoboCop' Weller), dressed in a black suit that clearly cost thousands. The stranger introduces himself as Stuart Chappell, claims to be a writer, and, following a few preliminary asides, enquires whether Michael would like to be his personal research assistant! The basic idea is that Stuart will take Michael to various places and monitor his reactions, which he can incorporate into his forthcoming book. Yeah, right! Stuart then drives off, leaving his business card with Michael for him to renew contact if he decides to accept this puzzling yet tantalizing proposal.

Seeing the chance to earn some serious, much-needed money for doing what appears to be so little in return, it's not long before Michael throws his innate caution to the wind, yields to temptation, and duly accepts, phoning up Stuart, who tells him to meet him that same evening at a swish hotel across town. When Michael arrives, Stuart takes one look at him and drives him off to an elite bespoke men's tailors that just so happens to be open and available for business in the middle of the night! There, Michael is measured up and fitted up with a stylish, highly expensive suit, courtesy of Stuart, before they surge off in Stuart's pantheresque Porsche, cruising through the shadows of LA's seedier, seamier nightlife realms to their (very) varied down-town destinations.

At first, the places that they visit are more titillating than terrifying – strip clubs, pole-dancing bars – but when this scenario is repeated on several subsequent nights, the destinations become grimier, grimmer, dimmer, and ever more depraved. Secret fight clubs where bare-fisted pugilists pummel one another into bloody, battered, insensible heaps while jeering punters bet upon who will win, or survive. Incense-fragranced opium dens where nubile young women lasciviously attend to their drugged-up, spaced-out clientele. S&M torture clubs where whips, thongs, and bondage abound, people are suspended horizontally in the air by chains hooked into their flesh, and one man even has skin-piercing pulling hooks anchored in his face (more about him later). And on their final visit, a deadly Russian roulette set-up hidden deep within a closed warehouse, where punters take turns to fire a revolver at their own heads while the others bet upon whether or not they will survive. After witnessing two such games that takes place while they are there (mercifully, both contestants do survive), Stuart takes the revolver, hands it to Michael, and orders him to fire it at his (Stuart's) head – but Michael refuses, pointing the revolver at a wall instead before pulling the trigger, which duly shoots out a bullet into the wall. Scared witless at how close he'd come to committing an actual murder, Michael denounces Stuart and everyone else there as sick before fleeing away into the night.

During their prior visits to these soul-destroying dens of human despair and dissolution, Stuart had actively encouraged Michael to drink and drug himself into oblivion, despite knowing that he had only lately kicked his habits, and not surprisingly Michael wife Chloe is horrified to see him slipping back into his former debauched lifestyle. However, the increasing revulsion and horror that he experienced during his successive nocturnal forays into the sleazy, ever-more-sinister underbelly of LA, culminating in his mind-blowing (albeit not literally!) terror at the Russian roulette games, ultimately shakes Michael's befuddled brain awake to the stark, all too real danger that he is in, of slipping off the precipice of sobriety and sanity into the abyss of iniquity and insanity from which there would be no escape.

So Michael quits his job, accepts an open invitation for him and Chloe to stay with a recently moved-away friend at his new rural home far from the bright lights but bad vibes of LA, and off they go, leaving behind the big city and Stuart…or do they?

I've deliberately missed out the all-important climactic scene and a linked subplot in this movie, because they require some careful consideration aside from the principal plot, so here goes.

Running parallel with the movie's major storyline outlined above is a secondary one, in which a serial killer is on the prowl in Michael's neighbourhood. Several women have been slaughtered, but all are readily identifiable as the work of the same killer by virtue of a particularly grisly trademark. After he has killed each victim, he has twisted her head around in a 180° semi-circle, the strength needed to do so indicating that the murderer is more likely to be male than female, but otherwise the cops have no clue as to identity. Because the gas station where Michael works is situated right in the centre of the killer's zone of operation, and because Michael works there at night and may therefore have seen some unsavoury-looking character in the vicinity (as in more unsavoury than the usual ones lurking around here during the witching hours!), the chief investigating officer, Detective Steve Andrianson (Peter Greene, playing a goodie for a change), pays Michael a number of visits to see if he can offer any insights, but Michael hasn't seen or heard anything suspicious.

During one journey in Stuart's Porsche, however, Michael sees a business card in it with the name and photo of a woman on it. A few days later, the same woman is the mystery killer's latest victim. Convinced that Stuart is said killer, especially after having witnessed him half-kill a man with his bare hands in one of the fight clubs that they had visited, and still shocked from his harrowing Russian roulette experience, Michael contacts Det. Andrianson and tell him what he knows. With his agreement, Andrianson bugs Michael's phone at the gas station, then tells him to phone Stuart and ask him to come over in the hope that Stuart may say something to incriminate himself during the conversation. He doesn't, but he does agree to come over, whereupon Michael vehemently accuses him of being the killer, covertly listened into by Andrianson and a fellow cop sitting inconspicuously inside a car nearby, with a host of police cars and motorcycles on stand-by just out of sight.

As the argument between Michael and Stuart becomes ever more heated, Michael's eccentric boss Roland Montague (Brad Dourif) arrives, as do some potential customers, and abruptly Stuart pulls out a gun and starts shooting. Out leap Andrianson and the other cop, and in drives the flotilla of back-up police vehicles, with Stuart somehow managing to elude a hail of bullets – until…

The longer I viewed this movie, watching Stuart lure and tempt Michael further and further into the dark decadence that he had previously fought so valiantly to escape from, the more another movie that I had viewed only quite recently came to mind – the 1997 Keanu Reeves/Al Pacino supernatural thriller Devil's Advocate. Is this the path that Shadow Hours was taking too, with Stuart a demonic entity seeking to ensnare the young, relatively naïve Michael? And yet I'd read a few reviews of it in which the reviewers had stated that although they had initially assumed it to have a supernatural premise, after watching it they realized that it hadn't. Excuse me??

If Stuart is not a supernatural entity, then how do we explain not merely that when visiting the fight clubs and other gambling-featuring venues, every bet that he told Michael to put money on proved to be a winning bet, but also that when finally cornered during the police ambush and shot at point-blank range several times by Andrianson, Stuart did not even bleed, let alone die or be severely injured? Instead, seemingly no worse for having been hit by a barrage of bullets, he runs away down an alleyway, followed by Andrianson, who discovers that it is a dead-end, but does not discover Stuart. He has just vanished, without a trace. The only person who is there is one of the local homeless hobos, familiar to Michael, but when Andrianson asks this hobo where Stuart went, he replies that he didn't see anyone, only a shadow flitting by. Finally, in the closing scene, as Michael and Chloe are driving out of LA to join their friend, a young hitchhiker walking along a freeway into LA is picked up by a driver in a sleek black Porsche, and as he gets inside, we see that the driver is of course Stuart, in perfect health and grinning from ear to ear. He even repeats the very same line that he said to Michael when they first met: "I've seen things in this city that make Dante's Inferno read like Winnie The Pooh!"

So who, or what, is Stuart – psycho, sadist, masochist, sociopath, killer, any combination of these, or something much more? There is one last but all-important clue to unveil here, which is hidden in plain sight within the movie.

After Stuart has totally demolished his opponent in the afore-mentioned bare-knuckle challenge at one of the fight clubs, his fists covered in blood while he himself is entirely unmarked and uninjured, Michael confronts him outside, demanding to know who he really is and what he really wants, Michael having belatedly realized that Stuart's story of being a writer and needing him for research purposes is just that, a story. In response, Stuart laughs, and tells Michael that he already knows – he is Michael's guardian angel, and that Michael needs to visit the abyss before he can rise back up and gain salvation. And that is of course exactly what happened – after being exposed by Stuart to the evening-tide evils lurking all around in a big city like LA, Michael saw the light, literally, and chose to flee such inimical influences with his wife, beginning a new life together elsewhere, and where their child when born can grow and be safe.

Moreover, when a perplexed Andrianson walks back out of the alley and asks Michael where Stuart could have gone, Michael enigmatically replies that he knows, that Stuart is still with him.

That line puzzled me for a while, until it dawned on me that it must surely be referring to the terrible memories seared into Michael's brain of the vices and vicissitudes that Stuart had revealed to him on their nightly sojourns – memories that would automatically spring forth if ever Michael became tempted to slip back into his previous misbegotten life of substance abuse. So yes, in that sense Stuart would indeed still be with Michael, always there in proxy to steer him back on track via those horrific memories if he should ever begin to stray. As for Stuart himself, now that he had saved Michael's, he was now focusing upon a new lost soul in need of guidance and redemption, in the form of the hitchhiker. So, not so much Devil's Advocate as Angel's Acolyte?

This is of course entirely my own personal interpretation of Shadow Hours, a singularly cryptic movie that leaves so much unexplained, but it is the only one that I can think of that satisfactorily explains the entire plot. As for the latter's final strand, the killer: a news announcement made near the movie's end, after Stuart's disappearance in the alley, states that a suspect (unidentified in the announcement) who has confessed to all of the murders is now in custody. Consequently, if that suspect is indeed the real killer, this announcement thereby confirms that it's not Stuart, because, as already noted, far from being in custody he is seen in the very last moments of the movie driving along the freeway and stopping to pick up the hitchhiker.

As for the two leading stars: Getty tackles the role of Michael manfully throughout, but he never stands any chance of out-shining or even competing with Weller, who is truly mesmerizing as Stuart and is unquestionably the focus of the entire film, filling to bursting point every single second of time that he spends on screen. He also has the best exposition of what to expect from this movie:

Three categories of people emerge after dark. The majority are the Cinderellas, out for dinner, drinks, a movie, they find Prince or Princess Charming, and they flee at midnight. Then there's the vampire. Pimps, punks, prostitutes, they work the night till the blood or the money's right, and then they leave it for the real lunatics, the certifiable Mr Hydes, the people who cannot sleep at night. Did you know half the world's problems are caused by people who can't sleep at night?

One final but noteworthy snippet: when I watched the brief but unforgettable close-up shots inside an S&M torture club of the man with piercing hooks inserted into his face's skin (as prominently featured in publicity material for this movie, and also included at the end of this present review of mine), I was comforted in my squeamishness by the certain knowledge that these gruesome effects had been created via trick photography and/or CGI. And then, while scanning down the cast list in the end-credits, I discovered to my amazement that this was no trickery. The person playing this character was a celebrated extreme performance artist from LA named Ron Athey (click here to visit his official website), and he actually did this for real! Moreover, during the past 25 years he has staged all manner of exotic, visually extraordinary exhibitions featuring himself and sometimes others too as living, physical works of art (undeniably fascinating, but when it comes to art I think that I'll stick to pencils and a sketchbook, if it's all the same to you!).

Anyway, gifted with a superb central character as well as some scintillating dialogue and a fast-moving pace throughout, Shadow Hours is both a skin-crawlingly twisted, bizarre movie but also an unequivocally gripping, compelling one, unlike any that I've watched before, and if you think that you too may get hooked (sorry!) watching it, be sure to click here to watch an official trailer on YouTube.

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

Publicity photographic still featuring Ron Athey, from Shadow Hours (© Isaac H. Eaton/5150 Productions/Newmark Films Inc/Seven Arts Productions/Ron Athey – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

SOYLENT GREEN

 

Publicity poster for Soylent Green (© Richard Fleischer/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

My movie watch on 6 July 2022 was nothing if not timely, a classic science fiction film from the early 1970s but which is set in the future, in the year 2022, to be precise. How happy I am that its severely dystopian vision of 2022 is very different from present-day reality. For the movie in question was Soylent Green.

Directed by Richard Fleischer, with a Stanley R. Greenberg screenplay based upon sci fi author Harry Harrison's 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! and released by MGM in 1973, Soylent Green is set in a USA (predominantly NYC) where human over-population, pollution, the greenhouse effect, and heedless, needless plundering of natural resources have combined hideously and heinously to turn our once-lush, beautiful planet into an overcrowded hell-hole.

Here only the rich and powerful inhabit plush, luxurious, heavily-guarded homes, with everyone else consigned to poverty and near-starvation in the slums. There, nothing works properly (if at all), voluntary euthanasia is actively encouraged, and food, such that it is, consists of tasteless rationed slabs of processed protein of different colours, created by the all-powerful Soylent Corporation. The most sought-after version, as it tastes better than the rest, is Soylent Green, manufactured from the inexorably diminishing quantities of plankton that still survive in the oceans.

One night, a leading Soylent Corporation board member is brutally murdered in his elite NYC penthouse, and a policeman named Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is assigned to the case, seeking the murderer. Thorn is unofficially assisted by his friend and cohabiter Sol Roth (an unrecognisable Edward G. Robinson in his final movie), who is a brilliant elderly ex-professor. What they discover, however, goes far beyond a murder, exposing the true, horrifying nature of Soylent Green.

It turns out that in reality the plankton needed to produce this food stuff had been entirely consumed some years ago, so Soylent Corporation had secretly turned to a very different source for it – let's just say that recycling is taken to a chilling new level inside the factory walls of this company, one that has a very close working relationship with the nearby euthanasia clinics...

In a particularly tragic, poignant coincidence if true (there is some controversy regarding this), the same evening after filming his final scene for Soylent Green, the scene in which his character Sol undergoes voluntary euthanasia, Edward G. Robinson passed away (an alternative claim is that he passed away 10 days after shooting ended). In any event, knowing that Robinson was terminally ill with bladder cancer, director Fleischer had filmed all of his scenes before any others. Moreover, the tears that Heston as Thorn wept at Sol's death were real, because he knew that Robinson was so ill he would never act again, that this scene was his finale on film.

Soylent Green is a fascinating albeit deeply disturbing movie, offering a truly terrifying glimpse into a grim future bedeviled by pressing issues relating to climate change, overcrowding, environmental destruction, and poverty – not so different after all from the real 2022 that we're living in right now, come to think of it!

If you'd like to pay a mercifully brief visit to this nightmarish alternate 2022, be sure to click here and here to view a couple of stark, official Soylent Green trailers on YouTube.

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.