Sixteen Tongues

On the weekends, all I wanna do is kick back, a brew in hand, maybe some smoking material, and pop in a sick, twisted, mindless movie into my DVD player. Makes the time pass pretty quick and puts a huge smile on my face.

But I have to tell you, in recent years, there's been a dry spell when it comes to cult films. I don't know why, but every little dingbat wannabe with a video camera tries to (re-)shoot their favorite, big budget movie. This gets tired very quickly, let me tell you.

But I gotta say that I recently came across this movie a couple of months ago. It's from the same guy that made "Shatterdead" which I loved back in the day. Only this time he's doing sci-fi and, boy, is it nasty! It was a perfect weekend movie. It's got hot, naked Asian girls, gory makeup, and guns. Oh, did I forget to say it's got hot Asian chicks! It's totally perverted.

I haven't seen something like it in a long time. At least someone's still out there making cult movies.

Sixteen Tongues is a sci-fi thriller set in a dystopian and highly sexualised future. It's written and directed by sometimes film-maker Scooter MacRae, best known for his feature debut 'Shatter Dead' which won him the Best Independent Film award at the Fantafestival in 1995.

The plot concerns two female lovers living in a motel room in the near future. Ginny is an assassin, genetically engineered and implanted with two clitoris's (clitori?) on her eyelids to curb her psychotic impulses, while her girlfriend Alik is a hacker who's searching for the scientist who created Ginny and for the man who killed her brother... So far so cyberpunk, but things get even more brutal when a rogue cop moves into a room down the hall. Adrian is a violent and ruthless man, although considering that he's had sixteen tongues grafted onto him after a near fatal explosion one can see why. Said tongues are sending multiple taste sensations to his brain and it's driving him insane. After a chance meeting by the ice machine Adrian and Ginny form a sort of bond over their respective abnormalities and things progress from there. Over it's 80 minutes the film slowly builds-up tension and ends with a deadly confrontation in the corridors of the Saphio Motel.

The 3.2/10 rating on IMDb.com speaks volumes about the films reception into the mainstream, but there's plenty of fantastic ideas and creative imagery for those who wish to look closer and who aren't put off by micro-budget cinema. Sixteen Tongues is set entirely within the Saphio with no exterior shots whatsoever, no doubt to save money as well as create a look and an atmosphere. The halls are decorated entirely with pornography and the televisions play it on a loop, using your credit card is the only way to shut them off, or indeed to get water, ice, light, etc. The hotel is populated by an appropriately creepy cast of S&M freaks and bums that the main players interact with but ultimately disregard. In short it's a realised world these characters inhabit.

While I'd like very much to praise the vision of the film-maker and to highly recommend this film to anyone interested in apocalyptic film, I really can't. The execution of the film, the sound, the acting, the effects are all lacking. The lighting is bad, actors lines are often mumbled and there's an overall sense of a low budget hampering what could have been a very well done little thriller. The pornography, while an interesting idea and a good visual technique, seems forced and as a lot of other reviews say, you feel more than a little dirty after watching it. The saving grace is probably Ginny, a sympathetic character played surprisingly well by Jane Chase.

However... If you've seen MacRae's previous work and can see past the films technical flaws then you might discover Sixteen Tongues to be real gem, unusual, unsettling, violent and something quite different.

Sometime in the future two people are hiding in an S&M motel: Adrian Torque (Crawford James) should now be dead. He is a renegade cop whose skin was reconstructed out of the sixteen tongues of fellow officers who died next to him in a terrible explosion. He is not a Frankenstein only on the outside, but he is also slowly driven mad by a never-ending stream of tastes. Adrian is not your average cop. The opening scene shows him interrogating a prisoner, then he forces him to perform graphic fellatio on him before blasting his brains against the wall.

Ginny Chin-Chin (Jane Chase) is a female assassin who has a clitoris implanted on her eyebrows; every blink triggers her incontrollable impulses. She stays in a room with her hacker girlfriend (Alice Liu). Their lives are about to collide with Adrian Torque.

Unfortunately Sixteen Tongues falters on the technical side. This movie would have benefited enormously from a more elaborate (not expensive) "mise en scene," simply because of its claustrophobic nature and stylized ideas. After all, this is a film set in the future. I'm not saying that it needed a bigger budget. Sometimes stunning cinematography can disguise a low budget. After an impressive opening credit sequence the visuals lose strength. The lighting is poor, or let's better say non-inexistent, for a big part of the film. The lampshades in the rooms are just not enough to keep the image clear of video noise. Maybe it is the ultimate realistic lighting, but it just doesn't looks good. However, the flickering blue light from the TV in Adrian's room is adequate and atmospheric.

The camera-work is uneven. Sometimes it is imprecise in its framing and sloppy in its movements. I like darkness and/or hand-held shots, but only when it is purposefully intended for a specific reason, with some kind of stylization behind it, to achieve a determinate goal.

The sound mix needs some equalization; mostly the voice-overs are sometimes hard to hear. But the music is pretty effective, adding greatly to the dark cyber-punk atmosphere. The opening and end credits tracks are both pretty good.

The actors all look like they are supposed to. Adrian is tall, tough looking. Virginia is cold and sensual at the same time. Although there are some weak moments, the acting is passable for the most part.

On the other hand, the sets evoke the seedy atmosphere of the location very effectively. The hallways are filled with porn photos. There is some of A Clockwork Orange's resonance in an ice machine shaped as two buttocks, the ice spurting from between them into the glass, and a doll with her legs spread over Adrian's TV. The S&M costumes, special effects, make up, gunshots are pretty well done for microcinema standards. The intricate animated sequences depicting web surfing deserves special mention. The live action scenes should have had this level of elaboration.

The pacing of the film suffers from some well-written, but sometimes extended voice overs. They serve the purpose of providing the background stories for the characters as well as some interesting concepts, but less is more. I would have rather have the film find a low budget, yet effective way of "showing me" rather than "telling me" some of its ideas.

But at the end, the power of this film lies in its ideas, original plot, and characters. If you are able to put the technical flaws aside, it succeeds tremendously in creating a uniquely grotesque world invaded by porn and genetically-altered people. In this world you have to swipe your credit card to be able to shut off the never-ending porn ads on your TV, or to use tap water or to take a shower.

There is a tasty amorality permeating all of the characters. If you think the protagonists are deviant, wait till you meet some of the guests from this motel. Despite what I said about the visuals, there are many memorable images. One comes to mind now: A penis ejaculating blood on a female chest. It left me wondering how life outside the motel in that world would be like.

One feels the script was written without any kind of self-censorship. Scooter McCrae doesn't seem very concerned about being assimilated by Hollywood, as it should be. In that sense, Sixteen Tongues takes full advantage of being a microcinema movie. It is not afraid to shock or disturb you with it's graphic sexuality, violence, and bold ideas.

Although I'm always careful to avoid others' opinions before I see a film and make up my mind about it, I often look at what others have to say after I've reached a conclusion. I'm regularly flabbergasted by opinions on films such as Sixteen Tongues--which I thought was horrible--because they are often somewhat favorable. It especially confounds me in light of the consistently negative reviews received by films such as, say, Boogeyman (2005) or Gothika (2003), which I don't think are masterpieces, but they're well made. If reviewers are using anything even remotely resembling my criteria for film criticism, I have a difficult time understanding anyone thinking that a film like Sixteen Tongues is great while they also think that films like Boogeyman or Gothika are horrible.

My current theory is that people are championing certain cultural facts. They're celebrating the simple existence of independent films made on extremely low budgets, which are marketed as being somewhat "underground", and in which filmmakers are trying to do something different artistically while they deal with at least some controversial subject matter. An attendant anti-"Hollywood", anti-commercial, anti-big budget attitude tends to go hand in hand with the above.

From my point of view, I'm critiquing the films only. I'm not critiquing any cultural facts, and I'm not giving any extra points or alternatively subtracting points for cultural situations that I'm in favor of or against, respectively. I think films should be viewed as if they exist in cultural vacuums. A movie is good or not only for what appears on your screen and comes out of your speakers. No other facts have a bearing on whether a film is good or not. Regardless of whether crap was produced for only ten dollars or ten million dollars, it's still crap. And Sixteen Tongues is crap.

There are some potentially interesting things about the premise, on the "forest" level. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future. The characters live in a run-down hotel/apartment building. They have to pay for water with their credit cards. They also have to pay to shut off the television, which otherwise continually plays porno commercials similar to those for 900 numbers that run at the beginning of porno VHS tapes. The government is now building robots, including prostitution robots, combat robots and so on. For some strange reason, an ability to surf the Internet is a rare skill in the film, so a character possessing the ability is depended on and looked up to. Most of these facts have to be pieced together by the viewer over the course of the film, and they all read 100 times more interesting than they play in the film.

More pragmatically, Sixteen Tongues centers on three unattractive characters in two spartan settings. Although there is almost constant nudity, and there are a couple violent scenes, the vast majority of screen time is taken up with incessant talking and relatively inactive shots of these three characters while they provide narration. The story just isn't that interesting or well developed. The talking and narration are both very pretentious. And if they don't lean towards gobbledy-gook, they lean towards blandness.

The male character, Adrian Torque (Crawford James), was killed during the last war and then brought back to life. He required skin grafts, and for some reason that either wasn't stated or was too garbled to understand (the sound mix is pretty bad, and characters tend to mumble and can't enunciate very well) the skin grafts were done with 16 tongues. From what I could tell, they were supposed to be human tongues, but they're sizeable enough and have characteristics more like giant lizard tongues. Maybe dinosaurs exist in the film's world. Supposedly the tongue grafts still work like tongues, as Torque says he can taste things through them. The idea is ridiculous and in a better film could have been campy and funny (it's too absurd to work seriously, which is the attempt here). It seems to just be an excuse for an easy way to use the title "Sixteen Tongues".

The other two characters are Asian women who, despite being naked most of the time, are made to look as unattractive as possible. Ginny Chin-Chin's (Jane Chase) head has been shaven, which doesn't suit her, if it would suit any woman, and Alik Silens (Alice Liu) is made to look dorky--like those token male dweebs in teen comedies. It might seem like complaining about the women's attractiveness is trivial, but as the majority of the film is these two women rambling on and on in a hotel room with crappy production design and crappier cinematography, nudity is about the only possible attractor. Plus, Ginny, at least, is supposed to be sexy. Usually there's nothing I like more than seeing naked Asian women, but in this case, not really.

For some, the attraction here is probably the "daring" subject matter. The nudity in the film is full frontal. There is simulated oral sex (on a male) and simulated hand manipulation (again on a male). The television keeps showing a crappily-filmed-but-graphic porno commercial, and the walls are papered with crappily-designed-(and too often repeated)-but-graphic porno advertisements. I'm a big fan of putting taboo-breaking material like this in films, but here, it doesn't work. It seems like director Scooter McCrae included it just because it's usually taboo. That's not sufficient to make a good film.

I can't really think of a scene that wasn't poorly shot, poorly lit, poorly blocked and poorly set. I can't think of any aspect of the script that I liked. I can't think of any scene that even slightly drew me into the film. I can't think of any aspect of the performances I liked. I didn't get any aesthetic or philosophic value from the film. I've only given an extra point because the premise has a smidgen of potential and the film is somewhat coherent.

"Sixteen Tongues" is not a film that is easily digestible, in fact, it makes it obvious during the movie's first established shot. The plot is simple and yet the message forces the viewer to "read between the lines" of thismicro-budget, cyber-sexual thriller. What the director (Scooter McCrae,"Shatter Dead") does is create startling and quite thought provokingdialog to engage the viewer in what the film's budget lacks visually.

It is a dark and disturbing look at a future many of us want to avoid. The truth resides literally between the lines. For one to really understand and experience "Sixteen Tongues" as a great cinematic experience, one must look beyond the images and at what the screenwriter (McCrae) is trying to say. What many of today's audiences tend to forget is that movies are not always supposed to be handed over to you by "a lazy Hollywood" with happy endings and saccharine story lines. A good film like "Tongues', forces you to think and at times it does provoke uncomfortable reactions.

"Sixteen Tongues" is about, a universe propelled by a sexuality so demanding humanity is forced to literally pay for it. "Tongues" bold expression is a UPC symbol planted underneath our skin. Do not watch it as another "fly-by-night-run-of-the-mill" S.O.V. flick; experience it and think about its memorandum. I enjoyed the film enormously and would highly recommend McCrae's (as well as his first, "Shatter Dead) second effort, it is unique, and frankly, it is a film that pushes the boundaries of modern realism while keeping a sharp distance from mainstream flair.