Fantastic Fest 06–Jack Stevenson Presents: Totally Uncensored!/Pan's Labyrinth

JACK STEVENSON PRESENTS: TOTALLY UNCENSORED!

Jack is back in (unfortunately) the last program of his that I got to attend. There was one more about the movie Haxen (a 1922 cult movie about witchcraft), but I decided to go see Pan’s Labyrinth instead. More on that later.

This program was about sex films from Scandinavia. They have always made some pretty nudie-filled films, so there was plenty of material to choose from. Film was pretty much left alone as far as censorship is concerned. You just couldn’t show full on penetration on screen. So from the very beginning of their cinema they were showing topless and nude women doing what Americans at the time thought were horrible things. So horrible, in fact, that when the movies were brought over here they were cut down by about half an hour and turned into morality plays. Their titles were changed to things like Unmarried Mothers and Women In Sin. Over there they were called Unmarried Fathers Wanted and Women Love Sex or something along those lines.

Things stayed pretty innocent until 1967 when a film called Love Thy Neighbor came out. It was the first film to show hardcore sex scenes and get away with it. It was supposed to be an anti-porn film, but it ended up forcing the government to ban all censorship. (YAY!!!) Now it was ok to show penetration on tv! Jack showed a few clips from this movie. Pretty weird stuff. Not the kind of thing you really watch for a lot of fun. It was porn, alright, but not very good porn.

There was also a dream sequence from another film (I forget the name) that involved landscapes made out of naked women and a man’s erect penis shooting up from the ground while naked women danced around it. Very strange stuff.

The most disturbing of the program was the documentary footage of a live sex show. These shows only happened for a couple of years in the early 70s, but they made a huge impression on the Danes. The footage showed an old man nearly get his neck broken by a young naked woman who jumped on his back when he was bent over to pick up her panties. Then they showed the old grannies sitting in the audience. Jack said, “Apparently it’s ok to bring your grandmother to the sex show.”

Then the girls brought a couple of guys from the audience up on stage with them. They got really quick handjobs, but one of them (the older one) couldn’t get hard. The girl actually made fun of him afterwards!

You always think that a live sex show would be kinda cool. Apparently not.

This program wasn’t quite as cohesive as the drug show, but it was still pretty interesting. And there were lots of hot naked chicks in it. Never a bad thing.

PAN’S LABYRINTH

So, a couple of nights ago I saw Tideland, the new Terry Gilliam movie. Now, take my review of that and imagine exactly the opposite of it. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth was everything I wanted out of Tideland.

Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is a little girl who is trapped in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. Her mom (Ariadna Gil) has just married a captain in Franco’s army (Sergi Lopez) and is now pregnant with his child. Unfortunately for both of them, the captain is a huge asshole and really only wants a son to carry on his tradition of violence.

Just about the only friendly person on the camp that they live on (besides Ofelia’s mother) is Mercedes (Maribel Verdu from Y Tu Mama, Tambien). She has an interest in the rebels who live outside of the camp.

One day Ofelia wanders into a labyrinth that’s nearby the camp. It’s been there longer than anyone can remember, but there’s something in there that is going to change her life.

This is where she meets the Faun. (He never says that his name is Pan, but we figure that’s who it is.) He gives her three tasks to finish by the time of the full moon. If she succeeds, she gets to reign as a princess in her “real father’s” world. Can she trust the creature? Or should she run, screaming, into the woods?

Throughout the whole film you’re kind of wondering if she should be trusting this horrible looking creature. He seems to help her out a lot, but he’s also pretty mean to her. But he’s nowhere near as mean as the captain. He threatens her with a gun at least once and makes it pretty clear that she’s nothing to him.

Del Toro is good in English. His American films are a lot of fun. Hellboy and Blade II are definitely good, fun flicks. But when he decides to make a movie in Spanish, he’s fucking amazing. This one and The Devil’s Backbone are a couple of the best horror/fantasy films of the last ten years. And it’s interesting that he’s always putting kids into the horrors of the Spanish Civil War along with supernatural horrors that they are more interested in dealing with. It’s a great way to show what war does to kids without making it such a heavy-handed affair.

The acting was very good across the board with Ivana being one of the best. She’s such a sweet little girl that you can’t imagine all of this fucked up shit happening to her. (I’m starting to type like Guillermo talks. More on that later.)

Pan is a pretty amazing creation. He may be CGI, but he looks real enough. And Doug Jones, who played Abe Sapien in Hellboy, gives him enough life to make you fear him at the same time as trust him. Well, more than you trust the captain, anyway.

There was only one problem with the movie. The second task (the one with the weird Pale Man in the previews) is really strange. Ofelia breaks every rule put in front of her and almost loses everything because of it. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who would do that sort of thing.

Another thing I noticed (not really a problem, just an observation) is that I think Guillermo is obsessed with Rasputin. One of the characters here just will not die.

Before the movie started, Harry Knowles introduced it with a letter than Guillermo wrote to all of us. Normally, Guillermo would be there to introduce the movie, but he had to be at the New York Film Festival before he could be seen anywhere else with the film. So Harry read the letter, but he did it in Guillermo’s voice and with all of the profanity that he would have used. (Apparently, he doesn’t write as dirty as he talks.) Something about sweating off “80 motherfucking pounds of man titty.”

So, in honor of Guillermo, I leave you with this thought:

Go see this motherfucking movie, you cocksuckers. It will bring motherfucking tears to your motherfucking eyes!