BASKIN: Can Evrenol's Turkish horror film (in more ways than one) makes theatrical debut

Your first question -- once you calm down your vomit response and slide back into normalcy as this very ghastly, ghoulish horror/slasher/fantasy frolic ends -- might be, "So who is BASKIN, the person, place, thing or idea for which this new Turkish movie was presumably christened? Tell you one thing: It sure as hell ain't Baskin Robbins. Directed (and co-written along with three other screenwriters) by Can Evrenol, who is shown below, the film begins with that evergreen scene in which a young child, in this case a pretty little boy, hears his parents going at it in the bedroom and of course can't help but wonder what is taking place. Before he can find out, the scene turns into something out of a horror movie.

Cut to a coffee-house/restaurant in which a bunch of Turkish cops are bantering and making with the faggot jokes and generally behaving so very badly that you quickly realize you're not going to care what awful stuff happens to these creeps. It does end up as pretty awful, and yes, you don't care much -- even though one of those cops turns out to be the adult version of that pretty little boy. The first sign that something is amiss takes place in the restroom, as one cop, below, sees a frog and goes a little "off."

Frogs turn out to be a continuing motif here, so of course we think biblical plagues and such. Later other worse things also point a bit toward the Bible or maybe the Quran, or simply something mythic and not very nice. However, if your are someone who wants explanation with his horror, give it up now. You're mostly going to get circularity, hand-held camerawork that makes you think you've seen something scary, little actual "plot," and finally a whole bunch of torture, gore and glop.

Our cop buddies go out on a call, or maybe it's a mission, or anyway something that takes them into the "old dark house." Along the way they meet some odd gypsy types (frog hunters!), a few "service" people, and our pretty boy cop and his older mentor have some flashbacks that explain little but serve to connect the movie enough so that we don't throw up our hands and say "fuck you."

Along the way there is a lot of atmosphere, a little up-chucking now and again and some very interesting special effects, the best of which seems original and has to do with a little man drowning and being rescued by a huge pair of hands. There is also much sleight-of-hand visual stuff that lets our imagination do the work.

What's it all about? Well, sex and death and sex and violence. (Will we ever again see some sex and fun?) Beyond that there is some mumbo-jumbo from a fellow identified in the credits as "Baba/The Father (played by one, Mehmet Cerrahoglu, making a memorable debut). I found myself wondering if maybe the movie might stand for the state of the Turkish nation today? Or could it be some nasty karmic payback for the Armenian genocide? Or could this be the Turkish idea of hell? ("You carry hell with you at all times," that Baba guy intones at one point.)

Your guess, should you see this movie, will be as good as mine. Maybe it's all just a dream. Oh, wait: It's actually real. Or, as one cop tell another, "Not everything has a clear answer."  Baskin does have a certain creepy, all-stops-out craziness. And also a lot of slo-mo that extends the movie well past its sell-by point. Finally it seems as much an endurance test as anything else. The end credits, however, are artful and beautifully rendered.

From IFC Midnight and running a too-long 97 minutes, Baskin opens theatrically tomorrow, Friday, March 25, in New York City at the IFC Center (for midnight showings only). In Los Angeles, look for it at the Arena Cinema come Friday, April 1. For those of you not living on either coast, the movie is also simultaneously being made available via VOD.

Serge Bromberg excavates (and diddles) HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO

What you will see in the new documentary HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO is more of a meditation on jealousy -- and film-making -- than any kind of "real" documentary you'll have viewed in your movie-going career. As famous a non-existent film as Terry Gilliam's never-happened Don Quixote movie (which is said to be not happening yet again!), Clouzot's "Inferno," I would guess, holds a similar place in the annals of French filmmaking.

In 1964, fabled French filmmaker Henri George Clouzot began directing Romy Schneider, then 26, and Serge Reggiani, 42, in his new film L'Enfer (Hell). By the end of three weeks, all enfer had broken loose, worst followed worse, and what existed of this film -- never completed -- was stowed away in a vault, until...   One day, Serge Bromberg (below, right), the co-director (with Ruxandra Medrea, below, left) of this documentary, found himself stuck in an suddenly out-of-service elevator with a woman who turned out to be Clouzot's widow.  Chatting away their time together while the lift was repaired, she told him the story -- a whopping good one -- of the history and making of that never-completed film.

On the spot, it seems, Bromberg decided he must bring that story to the screen. He and Ms Medrea now have, but they have also tried to pull off a number of other things: create a vision of what L'Enfer might have been, while giving us a sense of the character of Clouzot himself and what he was going through at the time (a heavy dose of hell/jealousy all his own).  To this end the two documentarians have diddled considerably with their basic premise, and although the result is only partially successful, so unusual is their film in so many ways that it becomes a fairly fascinating and certainly one-of-a-kind achievement.

Clouzot (shown above with Ms Schneider), always a perfectionist -- of a sort, at least; the French New Wave was critical of his "meticulousness" -- was evidently given an unlimited budget on this film. And while "unlimited" back then was hardly commensurate with even most limited budgets today, this proved enough to become probably the single biggest problem for the production.  The director began to "experiment."  And then experiment again. And then some more.  We see the results, which seem to make up a large portion of the documentary, and we can fully understand why Clouzot became so enrapt with his creations -- most of which use the lusciously pert Ms Schneider as their subject.

He experiments with unusual uses of color,

background,

effects.

And though the "stills" above give you a hint of what was created, they are no match for what the director actually accomplished in terms of "film."  His images are alternately striking, artful, creepy and strange. We also note how lighting can appear to change the same expression, and even discover a very early example of those fast-moving clouds that bore me silly -- decades, I believe, before anyone else used them. Yes, these may be no match for the special effects we see today, but as they are done by a movie master, they deliver the heft and visual appeal of an artist at work.

Schneider looks ravishing, as usual, and since she usually turned in a good performance, we could probably have expected the same from her here. We also get a taste of M. Regianni (Le Doulos), a fine actor not so well known on these shores. The oddest thing the filmmakers have done is to use present-day performers, who fit relatively well into the Schneider/Reggianni mode, and have them act out sections of the "Enfer" script.  Jacques Gamblin (at right, below, The Color of Lies) and Berénice Bejo (at left, below, OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies) do just fine with this, but because the idea is not particularly intrinsic, it ends up seeming more like filler.

We hear from other filmmakers, such as Costa-Gavras, of what was going on during the shoot, and we begin to see, hear and even feel the film -- and Clouzot -- beginning to fall apart.  It's odd and creepy, but if jealousy is indeed to blame, we don't really get close enough to the source of it to begin to understand it.  However, I warrant that we've all suffered from the green-eyed monster at one time or other, so putting ourselves in the place of the filmmaker, we can at least identify a bit. And the sense of sadness and waste only grows stronger as the documentary moves along and we learn what happened to Inferno and its would-be creators.  Even so, and with all the tsuris experienced from within and without, I left this movie with absolute surety of only one thing: The biggest curse any filmmaker can have fall on him is his producer giving him an unlimited budget.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, a Flicker Alley/MK2/Lobster Films release, begins its theatrical run this Friday, July 16, at Manhattan's IFC Center.  You can find further screenings -- dates and cities -- here.