TOP 10: JAVIER AGUIRRE MOVIES AND SHORTS
This week we got the bad news on the passing on Spanish icon director Javier Aguirre. He was behind many of our craziest, pulp and pop movies but also, not so known, he was a great experimental filmmaker who invented Anticine avant guard, where the audiovisual possibilities of the cinema are explored with special focus on the abstraction. He commented many times how he had to say yes to some tacky projects in order to get enough money to shoot the movies he really wanted to make and the ones he was prouder of. With his avant/garde-experimental short films he was awarded in film festivals like: Venice, San Sebastián, Valladolid, Bordighera, Strasbourg, Bilbao and many more.
Here we have a top 10 of our favourite Aguirre’s works including Anticine.
Let us know if you agree and which is your top 10.
10 .La Guerra de los Niños (1980)
Musical movie with the boyband Parchís- a music group of extreme popularity in Spain in the 80s. A school closes due to heavy debt which brings the children into action by doing naughty deeds so as to persuade the real estate agency to reopen the school, and since this didn’t work, they kidnap the school’s owner in order to be heard.
9. Los chicos con las chicas
Another music film, in this case the main band was Los Bravos, another famous Spanish band from the 60s.
8. Las locuras de Parchís
Same band same musical, almost.
7. El asesino está entre los 13
A widow invites a number of guests to stay at her mansion. She reveals that she knows that one of the group killed her husband. Soon they too are being murdered one by one.
6. El gran amor del Conde Drácula
After their carriage breaks down and their driver is killed in a freak accident, a group of young women are forced to spend the night in a strange and isolated former sanatorium, which has just been purchased by the secretive Dr. Marlow (Paul Naschy). Unbeknownst to the visitors, Dr. Marlow is actually Count Dracula, and stalking the sanatorium are his recently turned vampire slaves. Soon the guests begin to be attacked by the ravenous bloodsuckers, while Dracula sets his sights on the beautiful virgin Karen, deciding to offer her his hand in marriage…
5. El jorobado de la Morgue
Gotho (Paul Naschy), a moronic hunchback employed in a hospital morgue, is deeply in love with Ilse (María Elena Arpón), but it’s an ill-fated relationship. Ilsa is terminally ill with tuberculosis and dies shortly after. Out of his mind for the loss, Gotho steals her corpse, killing the medical students who are going to dissect it, and hides her in an underground crypt. Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbés), a mad biologist, promises Gotho that he will revive Ilsa, but Gotho will have to provide him with dead – and live – bodies for his terrible experiments.
4. El astronauta
Several Spanish friends with no knowledge about space science decide to send one of them to the moon with almost no money and much effort.One of his funniest.
3. España Insólita
More Info: http://www.javieraguirre-anticine.com/espanainsolita-ingles.html
2. Zero/ Infinito
More Info http://www.javieraguirre-anticine.com/ceroinfinito-ingles.html
1. Variaciones 1/113
More Info: http://www.javieraguirre-anticine.com/variaciones-ingles.html
__________________________________________________________
Elena Anele is the woman in charge of SPANISHFEAR.COM, Horror Rises from Spain / El podcast surge de la tumba and Un Fan de Paul Naschy . A literature and cinema researcher, finishing her postgraduate studies with a thesis about the mystic filmmaker José Val del Omar. She has published in different media and books as Fangoria or Hidden Horror. She has also been in charge of several translations including Javier Trujillo’s complete works, La Mano Film Fest, The Man who Saw Frankenstein Cry and many more.
