The Substance, West German noir and four other cultural preoccupations in September

Has it really been a month since my last missive? What can I say, time got away from me. A lot has been going on and here are the highlights.

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990

My new PM Press book, co-edited with Samm Deighan, Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990, emerged into the world, which is very cool.

Those who pre-ordered it should have received their copies by now. It has also been sighted in bookshops in the US and should be available in shops in the UK sometime in October. As for Australia, well, who knows. When the distributor gets around to bringing them out here, I suppose. If you are in Australia and want one, I have a limited number left from the box I ordered from the publisher. Hit me up.

You can also get it as a physical and ebook from the publisher at this link here, as well as the Great Satan Amazon, and other online retailers.

Samm and I have started doing a run of podcasts about the book, which should be hitting the airwaves soon. I did a piece for CrimeReads, a personal top 10 of the films I watched for Revolution in 35mm, which can read at this link here.

If you really want to do a deep dive, head over to the list I put together on Letterboxd that contains every single film that is mentioned in the book.

The Substance

Because I try and keep my finger on the cultural pulse, I dutifully headed off to see The Substance and I have a few thoughts.

Really, it’s just a B horror movie with an A list cast and budget. It even labels everything with large text, just like a 1950/60s sci-fi B movie did. I want to be clear that I didn’t in any way object to the politics and I can see exactly why it has resonated with so many people. Moore is great in it. Ditto Qualley (who is amazing in everything). And there are heaps of ominous footage of palm trees to give it a Lynchean LA vibe. But its execution was pretty ham fisted and the plot was utterly predictable and like so many films now it went on for a good 20-30 minutes after it should have stopped. 

But the thing that really bugged me was how the political themes were laid on with the subtlety of a cement mixer. I know we live in a world where subtext is now text. This is what audiences expect. Hell, they absolutely demand it. But don’t you ever get sick of films that treat you like a first year student attending a lecture? I certainly do. The Substance was a major offender in this regard. Indeed, it felt like being shouted at continuously for two hours. This is the third much hyped contemporary horror film I have trotted along to recently, along with Late Night with the Devil and Long Legs, and all of them have left me nonplussed. They were all okay, but they were nothing special or particularly original.

Black Gravel (1961)

To honest, I wish I had spent the time watching The Substance catching an old film noir, or perhaps a Jean-Pierre Melville film, or even rewatching the 1961 West German noir, Black Gravel, which I saw earlier this month and am still thinking about. Not an easy film to see but Radiance Films have recently released it as part of their World Noir series. Set on the cusp of the county’s economic boom, the story focuses on a collection of characters in a fictitious town next to a major US air force base. Things are still tough and there are shortages of everything. The locals’ chaff under the economic supremacy of their American occupiers, while at the same time doing their utmost to make money off them by catering to their sexual and other desires or, in the case of the main character, by stealing from the black gravel being used to extend the base’s runway and selling it on the black market. Added to this, there is the existential angst created by what seems to be the imminent of nuclear annihilation. It is just cold and hardscrabble and bleak all around.

Helmet Kautner’s film is a trucker noir. It is also a bad town noir. Hugely controversial on its release due to accusations of antisemitism – said scenes are nothing of the sort but were obviously just too raw for early 1960s audiences. But aside from the violence what is more surprising viewing it now is how much overt sex is in it. My advice to you all is to save the money you were going to spend seeing The Substance and pick up the Radiance Blu of Black Gravel film instead.

Weasels Ripped my Flesh

Those of you who frequented my old site would’ve seen me post on the series of wonderful books done by Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle on the men’s pulp magazines that blossomed on American newsstands in the 1950s and 1960s. What Deis refers to as men’s adventure magazines, these combined brilliant, often over the top illustrations, with hard-hitting fiction and lurid ‘non-fiction’ exposes of various mid-century cultural obsessions. Their first book on the subject, published in 2013, Weasels Ripped my Flesh has recently been re-published via Doyle’s outfit, New Texture.

In addition to now being printed in full colour, the 2024 version uses new, better quality cover and interior art scans than the original edition, and there are more of them, plus additional sidebars not included in the original edition. It comes in both a softcover edition and a deluxe hardcover edition, with a dust jacket. If you want to know more, Deis has penned a piece about the story behind the book on his site, Men’s Pulp Magazines. The book is available on Amazon for American readers. He also sells it via his Ebay shop and directly from his site. The latter only ships to US customers, but shipping is free. 

I really recommend this book as a solid primer on the phenomena of men’s adventure magazines. I even cited in my PhD dissertation on post-war Australian pulp publisher Horwitz Publications. And it is a beautiful physical object, chock full of stunning images.

Boiling Point (1993)

One of the many things that kept me busy over September was completing a commentary track with my friend Liam Jose for the Umbrella Home Entertainment release of James B Harris’s 1993 neo noir, Boiling Point. You might recall I wrote about Harris on my Substack back in July in relation to Cop, his 1988 adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel Blood on the Moon. It was great to do a bit of deeper dive into Harris’s career and influences as part of the commentary. While it is perhaps not Harris’s best film, Boiling Point is nonetheless very solid. It bombed on release, largely due to the mismatch between the marketing, which amped it up into a sort of testosterone fuelled hard boiled Dirty Harry story, and what the film actually was; a deceptively low key LA crime story which features an absolutely cracking cast of American character actors.

James Herbert’s The Rats

It's the 50th anniversary of James Herbert's The Rats. This New English Library paperback nasty was essential gateway horror for many of us. To mark the occasion here's an interview with him I posted on my site back in 2021. It was conducted by writer Johnny Mains & reposted on my site with his permission.

Until next time.