Thebes

Thebes

Hi. I’m Kalle Räisänen and other than seeing my name underlined, I also like film. Fittingly enough, this site — called Thebes because that was the next name on my Big List of Egyptian Place Names to Use as Sub-Domain Names — collects my film (and other media) reviews.

Reviews

The kind of stuff you’ll mostly see me review is Euro-sleaze with delusions of artistry — e.g. Jess Franco and Jean Rollin — and, really, whatever else I happen to want to write about. Strangely, for a site that was supposed to be dedicated to exploitation film, I also review quite a lot of video games and TV shows.

There’s no set word-length for reviews, but I aim for between 500 and 750 words. Sometimes I have more than that to say about a film, sometimes less.

Ratings

I rate films on a five-star scale. Ratings should be taken with several grains of salt; I try to make them express some kind of balance between my enjoyment of a film and my opinion of its merits as cinema, but the former criterion will, naturally, take precedence. Which is why you’ll sometimes see something which is technically and cinematically inept — e.g. Jess Franco’s Downtown — get three stars. I keep debating with myself whether to get rid of the star-ratings. No matter how well I try to define the score-levels, there’s always a lot of ambiguity — two stars can be a very good or a very bad grade depending on the film. At the same time, I find that ambiguity quite interesting, which is why the ratings stay. But, as I said, several grains of salt.

I can almost promise that you’ll never see this rating given. This is a masterpiece, an apex in the history of film-making — one of the best films ever made. Because I’m an optimist, I don’t think I’ve seen the best films I’ll ever see yet, so I refrain from giving five stars so that the rating will mean something when I do see the best film ever made.

This is the rating you’re likely to see given to my favourite films. This is a film that I’d recommend without hesitation, and which I will rewatch several times.

A good film. It has flaws which prevents me from giving it a higher score, but I enjoyed watching it.

An OK film. I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either. Two-star films tend to be a bit boring, because they’re not so bad they’re good but neither are they so good they’re good. Might be enjoyable if you’re a fan of the genre or of one or a few of the film’s elements.

A bad film. This is a film you’ll only enjoy if you have a perverse fetish for bad films.

This is pure dreck, gone long past so-bad-it’s-horrible and into so-bad-you-want-to-gouge-your-eyes-out. I’m a pessimist, so I don’t believe I’ve seen the worst films ever made, yet. Which is why you won’t see this rating on this site.

Coleman Francis

Throughout my reviews, you’ll often see me mention Coleman Francis, whom I’d like to consider the patron saint of Thebes. Francis was an actor who in the sixties directed three of the strangest films ever: The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), The Skydivers (1963), and Night Train to Mundo Fine (a.k.a. Red Zone Cuba) (1966). The films are strange not because they’re bad, there’s nothing strange about bad films, but because of the way they’re bad: they seem to intentionally alienate the viewer and subvert the conventions of cinema. Most film-makers are metteurs en scène, Francis was an auteur; where most film-makers are anxiously mediocre, Coleman Francis dared to be different. He wasn’t a good director, by any means, but he was unrelentingly original; every film he made was unmistakably a Coleman Francis movie. He exemplifies what I’m looking for in a film: it doesn’t have to be good if it’s idiosyncratic.

Contact

You can reach me at revkalle@gmail.com.