Heartland of Darkness: A “Lost” Film Finally Sees the Light of Day

It's not “Satanic Panic,” if its real. They say “the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” If so, popularizing the term “Satanic Panic” was a big part of that effort. A sleepy Ohio town like Copperton is the perfect place for one of his stealth attacks. In this case, it was incredibly stealth. Although teased to fans, this low-budget horror movie had remained unseen and unreleased in any form since its completion in 1992. Thirty year’s later, our long, slow descent into Armageddon will finally be reversed when Eric Swelstad’s Heartland of Darkness (a.k.a. Blood Church) releases on BluRay.

After his wife’s untimely demise, big city journalist Paul Henson moved to Copperton with his daughter Christine. He acquired the local newspaper—maybe it’s the one Burgess Meredith’s demonic Mr. Smith worked at as a type-setter in the “Printer’s Devil” Twilight Zone episode. At least he won’t have any trouble recruiting, because Shannon Cornell, a former New York City reporter walks in looking for a job on his first day in the office.

On the other hand, the local cops are lazy as heck. They keep dismissing obvious ritualistic murders as drug-related disputes. Copperton’s priest is also weird. The so-called “Reverend” Donovan sounds like he gave the Scriptures a Nietzschean re-write, while also ominously emphasizing obedience to the community and his church. Obviously, he has perverted the church to serve his dark lord. Apparently, the Hensons and Cornell are the only ones Donavan hasn’t corrupted, but he certainly intends to, with the help of his temptress, Julia Francine. She is the one played by Linnea Quigley, who brought a bit of cult-movie star-power to Heartland, in retrospect.

Shirkers: The Iconic Indie That Never Was

This is probably the most celebrated “lost” film after Jodorowsky’s Dune, at least if you live in Singapore. Many local cineastes were expecting Shirkers to jump-start the nation’s indie film scene, even though it was produced by a small group of teenagers and their 30-something film-making teacher, Georges Cardona. Things did not pan out as they hoped when Cardona disappeared with all their footage. Twenty-five years later, Sandi Tan was reunited with the original 16mm footage, sans audio. We will probably never be able to see the film as Tan and her friends intended, but she subsequently repurposed the once missing video into Shirkers (trailer here), one of the most poignant documentaries of the year, which premieres this Friday on Netflix and also opens theatrically in New York.

The earnest nineteen-year-old Tan wore her early 1990s indie influences on her sleeve: Jarmusch, Tarantino, etc. She would be the first to admit her quirky and increasingly surreal serial killer road-trip movie was highly derivative of her heroes’ work. However, it was undeniably a Singaporean production. That alone made it special at the time. Looking back on the 1992 footage, it also would have been and sort of still is a time capsule document of a more traditional Singapore that no longer exists.

Somehow, Tan’s friends Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique allowed themselves to get caught up in her enthusiasm. Cardona served as director, while they filled just about every other role, including Tan playing the evil Amelie-like protagonist, “S,” which Ng and Siddique concede was probably a mistake in retrospect. Nevertheless, Tan and Ng willing sunk their personal savings into the production to cover a sudden financing gap. Naturally, they were all devastated when Cardona disappeared with their film, but it also forged an unusual bond between them.

Alas, Cardona is no longer with us (in the land of the living). In fact, his death was the catalyst for the partial rediscovery of Shirkers. Nevertheless, the film manages to partly explain what the heck was the deal with Cardona (but not entirely). Yet, despite the significant role he plays, the film is not about him. It is about Tan and Siddique and Ng. It is about Singapore at a time when you could still find old school colonial-era buildings and mom-and-pop establishments. It is about youthful idealism and an enduring love of cinema. Most of all it is about the special relationship shared by three friends who can truly drive each other to distraction.

As a documentary, Shirkers has mystery and cultural history elements, but it is also a long-deferred coming of age story. Tan digs pretty deeply into Cardona’s murky past, but she is even less sparing when examining her own life. She keeps peeling back the onion, producing a third act chocked full of epiphanies. Ultimately, it is shockingly poignant to fully understand how much the unfinished has meant to her, Ng and Siddique—and maybe even Cardona.

Tan and her co-editors, Lucas Celler and Kimberley Hassett also deserve credit for the terrific way the shaped the film’s narrative and incorporated eerily tantalizingly silent clips from the 1992 Shirkers. This is a deeply moving film that somehow also manages to be rejuvenating and restorative. Watching it will make you believe in redemptive third acts. Very highly recommended, Shirkers opens this Friday (10/26) in New York, at the Metrograph, simultaneous with its release on Netflix.

Frank Capra at Film Forum: The Donovan Affair

Although everyone recognizes Frank Capra was spoofing old dark house mysteries in Arsenic and Old Lace, few understood he was also spoofing himself. That is because his very first 100% talky was a murder mystery set in an atmospheric manor, but almost nobody has seen it since its 1929 premiere. Perversely, there is decent print preserved in the Library of Congress, but none of its sixteen inch Vitaphone soundtrack discs survive. On the other hand, we have the sound for its trailer, but not the film.

As part of his efforts to mount comprehensive Capra retrospectives, Film Forum repertory programmer Bruce Goldstein has reconstructed the dialogue to produce special “live read” presentations of Capra’s The Donovan Affair. Twenty-some years in development, Goldstein and company’s stagings were a highlight of last year’s TCM Film Festival and the current Frank Capra film series soon to conclude at Film Forum.

Jack Donovan is a gambler, adventurer, and all around cad. If you didn’t want to kill him, you probably didn’t know him very well. His next dinner date will be his last. He has been invited to the birthday party of Capt. Peter Rankin, who hates his guts, because he knows Donovan has been blackmailing his trophy wife Lydia (but he has not used any of the proceeds to pay off his gambling debts). Donovan also has eyes for her step-daughter, which rankles her tightly wound fiancé. To make matters worse, Donovan happens to be available now that he seduced and subsequently abandoned the Rankin’s maid.

Yes, Donovan only has himself to blame, especially when he has the lights turned out to show off his glowing cat’s eye ring, in a scene that only works in a synch-sound picture. When the lights come on again, we see someone has availed themselves of the opportunity to dispatch the heel. Soon the blustering Inspector Killian and his oafish right-hand man Carney are on the scene, but they do not inspire much confidence, especially when their attempt to recreate the murder works a little too well.

Yes, if we could hear them, Jack Holt and Fred Kelsey are probably putting the “ick” in shtick as Killian and Carney, but Capra seems to be having great fun playing with sound. Complicating matters for Goldstein and crew, Capra experiments with conversations conducted between people in different rooms, often outside the camera’s field of vision. Plus there are plenty of those chaos-generating blackouts. It is quite the tricky shoot, featuring a good deal of skulking outside the house and the exchanging of loaded glances.

Eschewing the MST3K aesthetic, the live read cast plays it scrupulously straight within the film’s dramatic context. Of course, they still convey the larger than life nature of their characters, maintaining an appropriately madcap energy level. For many viewers, Boardwalk Empire’s Allen Lewis Rickman and The Practice’s Michael Badalucco will be the most recognizable fuming and bickering away as Killian and Carney, respectively. However, for discerning patrons, James Karen is the man, having appeared in The Return of the Living Dead, Poltergeist, Samuel Beckett’s Film, and the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Yes, wow. Naturally, he brings the voice of authority to Capt. Rankin.

From time to time, lost films are rediscovered, but this is more like a resurrection. Donovan must have been somewhat successful, since Capra’s career continued on an upward trajectory following its release. It is clearly a product of its time, but it is frankly scandalous that Columbia could misplace both the sound and the script (forcing Goldstein and his cast to supplement an incomplete dialogue transcript found in the files of the defunct New York State Board of Film Censors with studious lip-reading sessions). This Frank Capra we are talking about. Films like It’s a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington are not just movies, they are pillars of American culture.

The effort was definitely worth it. Despite the nostalgic creakiness of the film, it leads to a greater appreciation of the breadth and depth of Capra’s career and his early mastery of sound. It is also just a lot of fun to watch the dark and stormy bedlam. This is something you cannot see every day, so if Goldstein and the Donovan players ever mount a live-read near you, jump at the chance to see it. The Donovan Affair definitely added something special to Film Forum’s Capra retro, but they have yet another special to come. Following the Wednesday night (10/22) screening of You Can’t Take It With You, Rickman will moderate a Q&A with Anne Kaufman and Chris Hart, the daughter and son of playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

NYFF ’11: You Are Not I

A substance called kif represented a potentially unusual challenge for film restorers. It is a mixture of pot and tobacco that American expatriate novelist Paul Bowles smoked an awful lot of. Yet providentially, a copy of Sara Driver’s presumed lost short film You Are Not I (trailer here) safely resided in his stuffy, kif-infused Tangier flat for years. Driver’s newly restored adaptation of Bowles’ short story of the same title screens this Thursday as a Masterworks selection of the 49th New York Film Festival.

Ethel is mentally unsound. Institutionalized by her family, she literally walks away from her sanitarium amid the confusion of a tragic accident (originally a train derailment in the Bowles story, but down-graded to a highway pile-up due to Driver’s budget constraints). Mistaking her catatonia for shock, two rescue workers drive the eerie woman back to her family home, which agitates her sister no end. As delusional thoughts race through Ethel’s mind, YANI takes a weird turn at the expense of objective notions of reality.

Frankly, the circumstances surrounding YANI are more intriguing than the film itself. Considered irretrievably lost after Driver’s negatives and prints were destroyed in a warehouse fire, a courtesy print sent to Bowles was unearthed amongst his long undisturbed effects in 2008. Indeed, the image of a film canister hiding with the Beat relics of the author’s exotic chambers gives YANI a greater mystique than is probably warranted.

Driver became something of a phantom herself after the release of her 1993 ghost movie, When Pigs Fly. However, her co-writer and cinematographer Jim Jarmusch became one the biggest, if not the only, pseudo-mainstream crossover success of the so-called No Wave East Village-based filmmaking scene. Yet, YANI is not a truly representative film of the movement, because it is never obscene and provides a readily identifiable narrative thread, regardless of the cosmic twist.

The cast, including Luc Sante as one of the relief workers, definitely come across as an unprofessional lower Manhattan ensemble. However, Driver handles the tricky conclusion quite deftly, suggesting it is really real, despite the hallucinatory vibe. It definitely reaches an unsettling place, even if the early scenes keep viewers at arm’s length.

Given its fascinating history, cineastes will certainly welcome the opportunity to finally see YANI. Though quite accessible by the standards of experimental filmmaking, it will still bewilder the less adventurous. Interesting but perhaps not a “masterwork” per se, YANI screens this Thursday (10/6) at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the 2011 New York Film Festival.