Thursday, May 28, 2009
Murder in a Blue World aka Clockwork Terror
Murder in a Blue World is a strange dystopic Spanish film from the mid seventies. It "borrows" excessively from A Clockwork Orange and emasculates it with a psychosexual slasher film. The US release of the film was even called Clockwork Terror.
Director Eloy de la Iglesia's version of droogies are leather clad biker types who drive around in a dune buggy perpetrating their form of ultraviolence with bull whips. (No I'm not making this up) There is also scenes of electroshock aversion therapy almost directly knocked off from Clockwork Orange. That therapy is overseen by the male lead of the film played by Robert Mitchum's son Chris, in a wooden performance reminiscent of Robert Wagner's acting.
I find a certain charm and allure to an international B movie from the sixties or seventies. American actors (or in Chris Mitchum's case, actors with relations which provide name recognition) for the grindhouse or drive in marquee. Blue World features Sue Lyon as the psycho killer. Lyon, of course, played Lolita in Kubrick's Lolita. At one point her character healthcare worker and seductress slasher Ana Verina is even shown reading Nabokov's novel before she takes out her next victim with a surgical scalpel. According to her imdb bio, Lyon lived in Spain at the time of this film as an expatriate because of pressures she faced in the United States due to her interracial marriage with photographer and football coach Roland Harrison.
Director Eloy de la Iglesia fills his movie with all kinds of elaborate camera movements and angles. It is quite entertaining to see how much of A Clockwork Orange is appropriated as well as other quotes in films of its time. He even endeavors to use classical music in a way similar to Kuburick. This and a surprise ending designed to give the film a higher level of profundity are not by any means enough to elevate it to what it truly is, a psychotronic filler from the seventies.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:53 PM
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