BFI Southbank, 8.30pm
(This film also screens on Monday May 12 Full details here. )
This is part of the Walerian Borowczyk season at the BFI Southbank.
BFI review:
Films don’t come much more maudit than Borowczyk’s characteristically perverse take on Robert Louis Stevenson. With revisionist interpretations of Frankenstein and Dracula already under his belt (thanks to Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol), Udo Kier plays Dr Jekyll as a wide-eyed innocent, whose research into “transcendental medicine” leads to him bathing in a fluid that transforms him into a ravening beast with an insatiable sexual appetite and the equipment with which to indulge it, leading to a mounting body count among the guests attending the good doctor’s engagement party to Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro).
In an ideal world, this witty, typically fetishistic, wildly imaginative subversion of a stuffily polite literary adaptation would have transformed Borowczyk’s career and reputation. Instead, it was practically buried following a row with his producers, and undeservedly remains one of his most obscure films, lacking even a legitimate DVD release.
Michael Brooke
Here is an extract on YouTube.
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No2: Blue Sunshine (Lieberman, 1978): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm
This is a Cigarette Burns production. You will not be disappointed.
Here is the CB introduction:
So here's one that we've been dying to screen for several years, it seems that the time is right to dust off that print and fill the screen with crazy.
When several old school friends start losing their hair and becoming crazed homicidal maniacs, there must be a connection. But what? Jeff Lieberman throws down a Cronenberg-style mystery thriller, mixing in socio-political elements in a post-war suburban America, politicians with dark pasts, side dealing doctors, and a hero who repeatedly finds himself in rather awkward predicaments. Blue Sunshine is a trip, from the first scene to the climatic final mall-based disco-tastrophe.
Presented in 35mm by Cigarette Burns, and with an introduction from Jon Towlson, author of Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present (McFarland & Co, 2014).
Time Out review:
An intriguing premise: what if a certain species of LSD, a decade later, should begin to have an unexpected effect on its users' chromosomes? All over an American city, isolated individuals inexplicably slaughter their loved ones before going on the rampage. The film has a phenomenal opening, and makes the most of its plot possibilities, but the police's continual arrival at the scene of murder just in time to implicate the investigative hero will put a strain on any audience's credulity. Exploitation of a superior kind, nonetheless.
David Pirie
Here is the trailer.
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