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Sunday, March 17, 2024

Medium (1985)

... aka: Ling yu an jian (Supernatural Cases)
... aka: Mediet
... aka: Медиум
... aka: Mysteria replica di un omicidio (Mystery - Replica of a Crime)
... aka: Un misterio llamado Aleksander Orwicz (A Mystery Called Aleksander Orwicz)

Directed by:
Jacek Koprowicz

Setting: 1933, Nazi-occupied Poland. Greta Wagner (Ewa Dałkowska), the powerful psychic sister of veteran parapsychologist / occultist Ernst (Jerzy Nowak), tunes into strange visions that are actually the current activities of another unknown medium. The medium is using his or her powers to control four different people, entrancing them and leading them all somewhere to do different tasks. Andrzej Gaszewski (Jerzy Zelnik) travels from Warsaw to the autonomous city-state Sopot / Gdańsk via train and has no idea how he even got there, but vows not to leave until he finds out. Schoolteacher Luiza Skubiejska (Grażyna Szapołowska) walks right out on her students mid-class, goes to a museum, steals a turn-of-the-century dress and then ends up in a park with no clue how she got there or why she has the dress. She then immediately returns the garment to the museum. Since this hasn't been the first time this has ever happened, she's on the radar of the police and could potentially lose her job. Likewise, out-of-town banker Georg Netz (Jerzy Stuhr) keeps waking up in a strange house, despite the fact he's simultaneously paying for a hotel room in town. He has no idea how he got there, why he's there or why he's been writing gloomy lovelorn poetry while entranced.








Superintendent Selin (Władysław Kowalski) is not only in charge of investigating the above weirdness but also happens to be directly involved. Every night after work, he mysteriously ends up on a beach, where he gets drunk and goes to sleep. When morning comes he doesn't remember the evening before and then turns up at the office every day unbathed, unshaven and reeking of alcohol. His young assistant Krank (Michał Bajor) is something of a sadist who worships Hitler ("it's logical to side with the stronger," he claims) and is conspiring against Selin behind his back. He secretly goes to their higher-ups to report the superintendent's bizarre behavior but they refuse to fire him for it. At least for now.

The strange home that appears to be the centerpiece of the action belongs to a Polish man named Aleksander Orwicz, who suffers from diabetes and is later found in a diabetic coma. While in his hypnotized state, Georg had been showing up there to give him shots of insulin and claims there was another guy present at the time... a guy who looks suspiciously like Selin.








Everything links back to a love triangle (square?) gone wrong that occurred in the same house 36 years earlier. In the late 1890s, extremely rich forty-something banker Stefan Orwicz married beautiful 22-year-old Zofia. He built her a luxurious Italian-style home and the two soon welcomed a son named Aleksander. Things then took a turn for the worst when Stefan went blind due to his diabetes. A live-in doctor named Malicki moved into the home to care for him full time. Soon after, he and Zofia began an affair. That arrangement would soon came to a bloody end when Wiktor Arlt, Stefan's hunchbacked secretary and personal assistant, went crazy and murdered all three of them with an axe. See, he too was in love with Zofia, and would often write her poems about how grueling his unrequited love for her was. After the murders, Wiktor committed suicide, and history may very well repeat itself in the present day unless our heroes can stop it.








This is often cited as one of the best Polish genre offerings from this time, which very well may be true. That's not an endorsement of its quality so much as it is the simple fact that not many horror films were produced in Poland in the 80s and two of those were THE SHE-WOLF (1983) and I LIKE BATS (1986). Some of their other genre films from this time sound promising so this may even end up on the lower half of the scale for me by the time I see the rest. Nevertheless, being slightly better than the two middling films mentioned above doesn't mean Medium is inspiring or noteworthy itself. It's not. Things open well and the intrigue is maintained until about the midway point. That, combined with the competent directing, acting and production values, keep everything watchable even after it starts becoming something of a mess. The true undoing of the film is that it's never able to make its myriad plot threads work together harmoniously.

Slow and talky most of the time, this attempts to dress up its average mystery plot with various needless complications. The script makes room for psychic powers, doppelgangers, leech treatments, telekinesis, spontaneous combustion, human lives linked to sea turtles (?), immortality, physical regression to childhood, horoscopes that combine astrology and math (birth dates and times) to predict the exact time and day of death and a solar eclipse that's somehow needed to bring the bad guy's plot together. Why? You got me! There are a LOT of ideas crammed in here; too many, and this doesn't do an adequate job explaining most of them. The overcast cinematography, funeral pacing, lack of personable characters and humor and Nazi era setting also gave me bad flashbacks to Luca Guadagnino's tedious SUSPIRIA remake from a few years back.








Stripped down to its bones, what this really is is a rehash of the mediocre Aussie film PATRICK (1978), which was a big hit in much of Europe a few years earlier. Both involve a coma patient who's fully conscious inside their unresponsive body and using their telekinetic abilities to strike out against others. There a number of other similarities between it and this one, only this opts to gum up the works with numerous ill-explained supernatural detours.


Outside of its home country, this was given a theatrical and VHS release (on the Penta Video label) in Italy under the title Mysteria replica di un omicidio ("Mystery: Replica of a Crime"), but that appears to be it as far as 80s international distribution was concerned . A West German co-production, it may have also played in some other European cinemas, or on TV, as well. It's now pretty easy to find with English subtitles and is on Youtube, Daily Motion and other websites free to view, and was even available on Netflix for a spell, though I don't know if it's still there or not. Studio Filmowe Tor / Studio Blu offer region free Blu-ray and DVD versions with English subs.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Kybernetická babicka (1962)

... aka: Cyber Grandma
... aka: Cybernetic Grandmother, The
... aka: Die Oma vom anderen Stern (The Grandma from the Other World)

Directed by:
Jiří Trnka

They can speak like us. They can say all the right words and do all the right things. They can teach us everything we need to know. They probably make fewer mistakes. And they can claim to feel things and care about us and nurture us and pacify us and put on an impressive almost-human-like show of compassion and emotion. But can they actually fully replace us? This eerie sci-fi tale, which is as timely as ever despite being made over sixty years ago, theorizes that they indeed cannot. "They," in this case, being robots, cyborgs, androids, cyber-whatevers; machinery and computers programmed to replace human beings by duplicating what humans typically do in their day-to-day lives but also mimicking the assumed correct things humans should say. Despite being less prone to error, age, illness and the complexities of the human psyche, there isn't and likely will never be a suitable artificial replacement for family and friends of the human variety, says Trnka. After marveling at technology, taking advantage of it and playing with all of the cool new toys in a futuristic world, sometimes all you really need is a hug from your grandma.

At a small cottage, a grandmother and her beloved young granddaughter receive a message from the girl's absent mother delivered by a drone-like device. There's a lot to gouge about the coldness of technological advancement from this one brief message alone. The girl isn't referred to by name, even by her own mother. Instead, she's "the kid" and is given her new identification number, ACH028. And then there's the fact the mother automatically assumes the little girl must be bored staying with her old-fashioned and tech illiterate grandmother in her simple country cottage. After all, she prefers her quiet, simple life and doesn't even bother with all of the dazzling gadgets available to this advanced society. However, little does the mother know, her daughter is already perfectly content with her red ball and the affection she receives from her loving granny. Nonetheless, the message orders the girl be delivered to her new home.








The trip there is a journey through a graveyard of advancements past. A paved roadway is no longer used because cars are no longer used, TV sets, airplanes, weaponry and other commonly used things of the previous generations sit around covered in cobwebs. Once they arrive at their destination, the sad, scared girl is given her number, says goodbye to her grandma and is then whisked away to her new home, which may be somewhere in space for all we know. Just like any other product, she finds herself on a conveyor belt and is then placed in an egg-shaped glass pod that entertains her with machine-generated music as lights and other pods travel around a complex system where seemingly meaningless numbers, letters and symbols constantly flash. It's all impressive, yet cold, confusing, impersonal and sterile.

Finally arriving at her destination, the girl discovers her new home cavernous, quiet and deserted. Both of her astronaut parents are away; mom on some "geological expedition" and dad back on the moon. Left in their place to babysit is a robot (voiced by Otýlie Benísková) who's been programmed to behave just like a grandmother; even physically designed for that purpose to resemble a comforting chair with angel-like doily wings. "She" insists there's no reason to be scared, assures the girl it loves her, wants the girl to call it grandma and is equipped with all kinds of annoying old school phrases like like "A healthy mind is a healthy body!" and "Cleanliness is next to godliness!" When it comes time to scold ("Leaning out the window is strictly forbidden!"; "Sit straight!") it does so in the same artificially chipper tone. It coaxes her into a bathroom where robot arms do all of the cleaning for her and then sits her down for a bedtime story that involves murder and dismemberment. Needless to say, the girl is distrustful and horrified, but her story ends on a hopeful and heartwarming note.








This is another gem from influential Czech animator Trnka that I probably should have watched a lot sooner since I'd previously loved his allegorical short THE HAND (1965). His trademark combination of stop motion animation and puppetry is put to visually striking effect here, with unique, brilliant designs for this futuristic world, as well as an important message delivered in a concise and affecting way. Even more impressively, this is able to relay its exact intentions to the audience with surprisingly little dialogue, instead focusing on the visuals and sound design, with Jan Novák's varied score, alternately whimsical and disquieting / horrific, ably supporting the scenario.









Since we've already moved into an age where people are not only somewhat disconnected from nature and the outside world, but also somewhat disconnected from other human beings, what this has to say is even more relevant now than it was back in 1962. While the flesh-and-blood grandma may be slower and more feeble, she has the advantage of interpersonal wisdom and nuance gained through lived experience. Her genuine affection for her granddaughter is not something a computer can exactly or believably duplicate, just as the granddaughter is intuitively more receptive to love coming from an organic place that feels earned and authentic as opposed to a manufactured one.

★★1/2
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