Extreme Cinema

After being brutally raped, Mikki attempts to commit suicide.A friendly priest talks her out of it and she decides to become a nun. Once inside the convent, she becomes again a victim of sexual abuse. "Wet and Rope" by Koyu Ohara is a truly fantastic piece of sleaze. It's not as beautiful and visually stunning as Norifumi Suzuki's exploitation classic "School of the Holy Beast", but certainly offers everything a nunsploitation fan could want-beautiful and often nude women, a perverse priest, a nunnery full of lesbians and wickedly deviant finale. The acting is pretty good and the main actress Yuki Nokihara has a great body and beautiful eyes.

"2001" is a story of evolution. Sometime in the distant past, someone or something nudged evolution by placing a monolith on Earth (presumably elsewhere throughout the universe as well). Evolution then enabled humankind to reach the moon's surface, where yet another monolith is found, one that signals the monolith placers that humankind has evolved that far. Now a race begins between computers (HAL) and human (Bowman) to reach the monolith placers. The winner will achieve the next step in evolution, whatever that may be.

In the town of Arkham, built over the original site of Salem, a priest commits suicide in a graveyard and opens a portal to hell. This happens just as a seance commences in New York, and the psychic shock waves from the suicide put Mary Woodhouse (Catriona McColl) into a coma. She 'meets cute' with impulsive reporter Peter Bell (Christopher George, perhaps his best performance) when he hears her cries in the graveyard and saves her from being buried alive at the last possible moment. Once they realize that Arkham on All Saint's Day is going to be neck-deep in demons from Hell, they rush there just in time to become part of the fun. Phantoms are turning up everywhere and ordinary people commit atrocious murders. Unexplainable things happen, such as a girl vomiting up her insides while sitting in a car. And finally the zombies themselves come, accompanied by the ghost of the dead priest himself.

A spectacle of magnificent proportions, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad ranks among the greatest documents of sport ever committed to film. Utilizing glorious widescreen cinematography, Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a catalogue of extraordinary observations that range from the expansive to the intimate. The glory, despair, passion, and suffering of Olympic competition are rendered with lyricism and technical mastery, culminating in an inspiring testament to the beauty of the human body and the strength of the human spirit.

Based on a true story, a group of allied escape artist type prisoners of war are all put in an 'escape proof' camp. Their leader decides to try to take out several hundred all at once. The first half of the film is played for comedy as the prisoners mostly outwit their jailers to dig the escape tunnel. The second half is high adventure as they use boats and trains and planes to get out of occupied Europe.

Werner Herzog is an Academy Award-nominated German film director, screenwriter, actor, and opera director. One of the most eccentric figures in the New German Cinema, Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) has been characterized as the “romantic visionary” of the movement as well as its most notorious selfpromoter who possesses an almost legendary need to confront danger in making his films. Through his well documented production difficulties - dragging a ship over a mountain, attempting to film the eruption of a volcano, hypnotizing an entire cast on set and Herzog’s obsession with quasi-mystical images and landscapes, it is not surprising that many consider his “documentaries” to be his best work.

Set in the bleak aftermath and devastation of the World War I, a recently demobbed soldier, Timosh, returns to his hometown Kiev, after having survived a train wreck. His arrival coincides with a national celebration of Ukrainian freedom, but the festivities are not to last as a disenchanted.

Few people have made as big an impact on Korean cinema as Lee Chang Dong in the last ten years. A former novelist and scriptwriter of masterpieces like To the Starry Island, Lee made his debut in 1997 with Green Fish, one of the best Korean gangster films of the last twenty years. Critical acclaim and countless festival invitations were only the beginning of a pluri-decorated career, which continued to shine with his 1999 film Peppermint Candy, putting the spotlight on amazing actors like Moon So Ri and Sol Kyung Gu. Finally, Oasis was not only important for Lee himself, but for Korean cinema as a whole, as Moon So Ri's unforgettable performance in the film brought her a prize at the Venice Film Festival, along with one for director Lee.

Made the year before his death, Jean-Pierre Melville’s final film and his third with Alain Delon after Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge is the director’s most extreme and underrated gangster movie. Parisian police commissioner Coleman (Delon) is not a happy man, but he does what he can to get through each day. Coleman finds solace in his affair with Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), who also happens to be the girlfriend of Coleman’s friend, Simon (Richard Crenna), the head of a gang of daring criminals. As the commissioner’s pursuit of the gang intensifies, so does the rivalry between the two men.