I’m not actually sure what the point of Vortex is. It comes to us from 1967, a black and white movie about a woman and her — husband? boyfriend? partner? — and the partner’s brother, and some other random men. Most of it takes place on a Greek island after the brother has vanished. Some of it takes place the day before they leave London, when the woman has sex with her partner’s brother. None of it takes place in the realm of linear logic and sound reasoning.
There are a lot of pauses. There’s a lot of repetitive action. And periodically there are scenes where you can see the director and the crew. This is clearly not accidental, as there are scenes of the director directing the actors through a scene — multiple times.
Whatever the heck this movie is, it’s not a CMP movie. Maybe there was subtext that I missed. Maybe it just didn’t make any sense. There was an ominous pair of scissors that never were used for anything except atmosphere. Maybe they cut the sense out of the movie?
Let me set the scene for you. This movie is called Neutron and the Black Mask, but neither Neutron (our hero) nor Dr Caronte (our villain) wears a black mask. There is one scene where Neutron wears a black mask (and calls himself The Black Mask), but it’s literally only one scene in the entire film.
The proxy struggle between Neutron and Dr Caronte in this film involves a scientist who invents a bomb so incredibly powerful that it will guarantee peace. You can imagine how well that works out.
The scientist’s evil lab assistant kills him in order to steal the formula. Dr Caronte wants to buy it. Neutron doesn’t want Dr Caronte to have it. The usual policia are their usual marginally-competent-but-not-so-much-as-to-overshadow-the-protagonists selves.
There is also a bit of plot involving the daughter of the lab assistant, who is as noble as her father is treacherous. Coincidentally, she is also quite pretty!
The Neutron movies are fairly interchangeable, and this is, without question, the first one. Apparently the US version removed most of the musical numbers from this movie, and I have to live with that. And so do you. Somehow.
As promised/threatened, here is the Zoom link for the CMP U-CON Caucus 2023:
[link removed as the show is over]
The show starts at 6 PM, which means the earliest we’ll let people in from the Waiting Room is 5:30 PM. If there are technical difficulties of any sort (including sartorial ones), it could open quite a bit closer to 6 than 5.
U-CON is coming! In fact, it starts on Friday. We are continuing our tradition of running a Cine Mal Practice “caucus” show at U-CON. This is where the audience helps us narrow down some of the options (10 clips is probably too many for any given category) and choose between several clips from the same movie.
If you cannot attend U-CON, we will be streaming on Zoom (link to come). We will be testing Google Forms voting for those who do not wish to vote via Zoom (for example, those in the audience).
This all occurs on Saturday, November 18, starting at 6 PM Eastern, and ending when the curtain has been run down on decency and humanity, but probably well before midnight.