|
Event
FANGS
aka ANYAB
Dir. Mohammed Shebl, 1981.
Egypt. 100 min.
In Arabic with English (hard) subs
The Arab Spring and aftermath has yielded an accompanying wave of essential social realist film documents. But where, you ask, are all the Middle Eastern disco vampires now? Those occupied a special part of the early 80s -- namely the exhilarating Egyptian ultra-camp triumph that is FANGS.
The premise -- a young couple attempt to shelter from a storm at a creepy castle only to have their lives changed forever -- may have been lifted straight from THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (along with the dance numbers, professorial framing device, and disembodied lips intro sequence). But however much director Mohammed Shebl may have worn his love of that cult icon on his sleeve, his ambitious and wildly imaginative attempt to transcribe it into contemporary 1981 Egypt makes for something wholly his own. Black magic, singing vampires in spangles, Egyptian pop cameos, awkward climbing Dracula sequence, implausible fog machine deployment, a shockingly banging original electrofunk soundtrack by the film's co-writer (fleshed out with bizarre soundtrack cues lifted directly from American movies of the time), kinetic on-screen animation effects -- it's all here.
In a memorable postmodern tangent the film even turns aside into social commentary to prove the existence of the ordinary "vampires of Egyptian society", wherein Dracula pops up in various mundane roles (price-gouging plumber, opportunistic cab driver, etc) to continue haunting the leads decades into the future. If there's any doubt about what sort of film world we're in, it'll be settled in the first minutes, when our protagonists' relationship is established via an outside-the-window-serenade, with a bunch of random joggers in knee socks and shorts leaping in as back-up dancers. All of which serves, as well, as a strange reminder of the much relaxed social climate that prevailed in Egypt 30 years ago. (In his next film, Shebl would even work in cuts from a Divine video to establish the appropriate vibe at a club scene.)
Mohammed Shebl, an iconoclastic radio personality and filmmaker who died young 20 years ago, was a bit of a glorious outlier in the Egyptian film world. Over the course of four features he fought a one-man war to jump-start the Egyptian horror film industry, which sadly never quite caught on with audiences and critics. But besides his own subsequent films, brimful of love for the likes of EVIL DEAD and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, he did manage to inspire a brief generation of surreal ghost stories and tales of the Egyptian Weird, most sadly untranslated and unseen in the west. His debut FANGS, however, has been translated and provides an ecstatic, essential window into a rarely seen side of Arabic cinema.
Warning: contains one unsimulated chicken sacrifice.
|
|
 |
LocationSPECTACLE THEATER (View)
124 South 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11249
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
|
Contact
|
