Michael Wells VS The NYAFF Round Five! Hell’s Ground!

This latter gripe is completely unfair of me. Totally and utterly. I have not seen the feel-good, plucky-underdogs-learn-to-dance-and-save-their-town dramedy “Hula Girls,” winner of last year’s Japanese Academy Award for Best Film, nor do I plan to. I shouldn’t even be saying anything about it, especially since there are plenty of audience ballots yet to be counted. But I have it on good authority that it’s the clear front-runner at this point, and I could barely make it through the trailer without going into insulin shock.

It’s just irresistible to point out that even at a festival whose disregard of mainstream canons of taste is one of its biggest selling points, the highest scores most often go to glossy, fuzzy, middlebrow pictures. (A notable exception being the 2005 Audience Award winner, the exquisitely odd but sweet “The Taste of Tea.") Meanwhile, something like Takashi Miike’s gorgeous and vaguely menacing hallucination, “Big Bang Love – Juvenile A” gets the fest’s lowest scores. This from viewers who probably walk down the streets of Greenwich Village convinced that they’re on the edgiest edge of contemporary culture. Feh.

Have I mentioned that I haven’t seen “Hula Girls”?

It’s probably no worse than Omar Ali Khan’s proudly lowbrow “Hell’s Ground” (Pakistan, 2006), apparently the country’s first flat-out horror movie in many years. Whatever its very modest merits as a movie, it was the center of a glorious, audience-galvanizing evening on Tuesday, my last night at the NYAFF before splitting the city for other duties. On hand were first-time director Khan and his first-time producers, Pete Tombs and Andy Starke (big cheeses at the indispensable video label Mondo Macabro, preservers and disseminators of all sorts of disreputable material from film industries around the world). They not only came with the main feature and lots of behind-the-scenes stories and reflections, but with clips from Khan’s collection of Pakistani pulp and exploitation cinema of past decades.

A more-than-sold-out crowd packed the IFC Center’s main auditorium, overflowing slightly into the aisles. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” the guests of honor asked. Once the clip reel started up, the answer was clearly, “Not a damn thing.” Who’d want to miss hairy, entrail-eating man-beasts? Chubby South Asian chicks in spandex gyrating their hinies in the camera while men leer in the background? A musical number knocked off from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, but with the sorely missed addition of a dancing skeleton? Random inserts of skeletons and other creepy stuff, to make creepy scenes… more creepy? An action hero who bounds around kicking horseback opponents clear off their perches? Not to mention more profligate use of the zoom lens than an entire festival of spaghetti westerns or ‘70s kung fu flicks.

If only “Hell’s Ground” (aka “Zibakhana,” or “Slaughterhouse") had a little more of the crazed imagination of these older films Khan clearly loves so much. But it’s an odds-and-ends assemblage of pieces from the many American splatter flicks he also adores, stitched together with minimum budget and maximum enthusiasm. It would be unremarkable in any western country. Motley crew of youth with a screenwriting class assemblage of one-dimensional, clashing personalities get in a van and sneak off to an unauthorized rock concert, pay insufficient attention to faulty gas gauge, take “shortcut” (quotation marks obligatory) through the forest, meet zombies and guy in a burqa with a huge mace. Pretty standard.

Wait, a guy in a…? “Burqa Man” is the one inspired element in the whole project, a hulk in one of the personality-obliterating coverings worn by ultrapious women in many Muslim countries. One baleful eye glaring through a hole in the white fabric, barreling among the misty trees like an avenging ghost, he generates some genuine chills in a movie that’s otherwise camp and gore.

Khan was quick to disclaim any explicit political intentions underlying this image, explaining it instead as a natural outgrowth of his childhood fear of burqas upon first moving to Pakistan from his native UK as a small boy. “I should refrain from making political statements. I’d like to go back in one piece.”

The tensions and seeming contradictions of making such a piece of work in a society such as Pakistan’s was an underlying theme to the post-screening Q&A with the director. The affable, warm, quick-witted Khan described getting shooting permits that probably wouldn’t have been forthcoming otherwise, by telling authorities he was making a short film on Pakistani folklore and customs. But he also described the enthusiasm of overflow audiences at the preview screenings in three urban areas, the only release the movie has had so far at home. The sense of two countries living side by side is one that Khan tried to impart to the movie itself. He described the “bubble” that people like himself and his protagonists – young, educated, cosmopolitan elites – often live in, one that gets exploded with a bloody pop in “Hell’s Ground.”

Don’t worry, it wasn’t all so deep. Khan emphasized that he simply wanted to make an escapist movie that went beyond the usual Bollywood-derived Pakistani formula of “six songs, two rapes, three chase scenes” and such characters as “the bumbling policeman.” He gleefully described battling cobras, cockroaches and “monitor lizards bigger than my German shepherds” during the monsoon-season shoot. He handed out “Hell’s Ground” coffee mugs decorated by his favorite exponent of the dying art of hand-painted canvas movie posters (several glorious examples, new-made for the film, were on display and being auctioned off to the highest bidder). And he promised a sequel with more zombies.

All in all, it was great example of the festival’s knack for channeling audience energy and communal spirit to make a real “event” out of something potentially just ordinary. It’s also more proof that VCDs from Chinatown or downloaded internet bootlegs will never substitute adequately for watching these movies unfold above you in a huge glowing halo, the mob around you reacting as one roaring entity.

By Michael Wells