If you just stick to the plot, the movie looks unsuspicious: A covert investigator gets caught up in a mobster gang, flies up, escapes through crocodile-infested swamps and gets injured in a dark hotel. There live a young woman, imprisoned by her mother, and the jaded hotel owner. There are no guests; a masked woman kills anyone who comes too close to the property.
The story of the 1965 published "The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds" reads like an early hillbilly horror movie. However, the whole event tilts with its bumpy cut and the awkward performance of the actors right at the start into the strange. The only directing work of the actor Bert Williams undercuts almost all standards of professional filmmaking - and creates with its crude rhythm and the overheated music a completely unrestrained atmosphere.
It is thanks to the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn ("Drive", "The Neon Demon") that this strangeness, lost for a long time, can now be seen legally and without any barriers, including financial ones. The streaming portal byNWR, which he initiated, collects lost film historical obscurities: B and C movies, sexploitation films and lunatics that are difficult to categorize, such as the evangelical educational film terror "The Burnig Hell".
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Nicolas Winding Refn
What could easily have been a bad junk - after all, hardly anyone is interested in such stuff, and the right holders are now mostly dead - turns out to be a thorough tribute to the cranky and forgetful of the cinema.
The effort with which byNWR is designed, undermines the mixture of arrogance and weary continuous irony, with which one usually meets the so-called cinematic trash meanwhile. The site is designed so that the impulse to make fun of these pictures is consistently undermined. And there is a lot to discover.
"Which career?"
The seven films to date have been carefully restored. Curators - The Russ Meyer biographer Jimmy McDonough, the editors of the film magazine "Little White Lies" - suggest wealth of knowledge and secret knowledge. The page-long essays, which supplement every single film and for which one must take a few hours of reading time, in general the work that is spent here for works, shows that byNWR is intended as a convincing act.
Bob Mehrs 60,000 characters of text on the work of the "Cuckoo Birds" director contains something of a concentrate of the work assembled on byNWR. Bert Williams' life is surrounded by an Ed-Wood tragedy. With all passion one insists on being a great director, while the world has simply seen it differently.
His entire fortune Bert Williams invested in "The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds". When the film disappeared after a few screenings from the few cinemas that showed it, he told his family that it was time to move to Los Angeles for a career. Williams' wife asked for - "What career?" - and stayed with the kids where she was. For more than fifty years, Williams beat out as a supporting actor in Hollywood. His appearance in Bryan Singer's "The Usual Suspects" of 1993 was one of his last.
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Dennis Hopper in his first movie
The appeal of the other films is not so immediate. In the Sexploitation-ripper "Hot Thrills and Warm Chills" three girlfriends want to rob a piece of jewelry - so far the action is still understood. Otherwise, there is sexualized narrative chaos: flashbacks point into the void, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the different male figures, one also changes the name abruptly, then again naked women jump through the picture.
Invariably instinctive and vile
"Hot Thrills and Warm Chills" lacks a filtering regulator like all movies on byNWR. The result is a thoroughly libidinally structured cinema, a fantasy that simply does not care about social habits and other claims.
The same applies to "Shanty Tramp". Here, too, there is no authority to maintain any measure that would keep the moral coherence of the whole in view. The film is more consistent in its portrayal of everyday racism and religious double standards in the US of the 1960s than most of what was seen in 1967. All act invariably instinctive and vile - a nihilism that would not have been allowed in the contemporary productions of the big studios.
Other movies on byNWR in turn unfold more subtle stimuli. "Night Tide" is the first starring role of Dennis Hopper. The 1961 twisted castration fear fantasy reminiscent of his high-contrast black and white images as well as his plot to Jacques Tourneurs horror classic "cat man": A young man falls in love with a woman who is suspected of being a monster. The film is the most beautiful currently on the portal; at least if you apply the usual criteria.
All in all, Refns cinephile celebration of the outsider shows where the aesthetic potential of the streaming entity might lie. Not in competition with the cinema, but in curatorially carefully created access to images for which there is no space left or never existed.
This is, of course, a utopian idea under cultural-industrial conditions. at any rate, byNWR points out what is possible and documents a love of the cinema, which is seen by the big players like Netflix only as an obstacle on the way to profit maximization - and not as a good to be preserved.