Not
long after celebrated actor Bill Paxton’s untimely death in 2017, a long
thought lost experimental/hardcore art indie film steeped in dystopian science
fiction the actor participated in when he was only 19 resurfaced nearly a year
after the actor’s passing. Further
still, the film’s writer and co-director Tom Huckabee working with previously
shot footage by the film’s first director Kent Smith, went on to create a ‘Revisited’ director’s cut of sorts which
the filmmaker posted online himself from his personal print.
Loosely
based William S. Burroughs’ novella Blade
Runner (a movie), the title of which would later be reused for Ridley Scott’s
1982 film, the film initially started in the early 1970s with director Kent
Smith shooting a lot of footage of Bill Paxton wandering the streets of Wales
intermingling with the townsfolk. Eventually
Tom Huckabee took over production and shooting newer sequences with Paxton
reshaped the film into an explicit avant-garde exercise in science fiction storytelling about a brainwashed young man on a The Manchurian Candidate-like mission to assassinate the Welsh
Minister of Prostitution.
Though
something resembling a plot emerges from the reversal stock black-and-white Techniscope
widescreen photography, mostly this is a longform student film showing a side
of Bill Paxton viewers haven’t had before or since. A bit more graphic on the side of sex and
nudity than the arthouse crowd is expecting and just meandering enough
narratively to be considered exemplar of ‘pure cinema’, Smith and Huckabee’s Taking Tiger Mountain is a truly
interesting and unique bit of microbudget do-it-yourself enigmatic sci-fi. If Nicolas Roeg ever made a black and white
film, it might resemble this.
Word
has it this film was completed using leftover short ends from Bob Fosse’s
biographical drama Lenny, making this
and Eraserhead shining examples of
what you can achieve technically using recycled bits used on someone else’s
work. With a soundscape as strange and
otherworldly as any segment of sound from George Lucas’ THX:1138 and hyperkinetic approach to editing, Tom Huckabee takes
what shouldn’t work and crafts it into something provocative and curious with a
near-silent lone figure as our confused travel guide of sorts through a
near-Orwellian future.
Not
everyone will take to this, as it sits somewhere between too hardcore for the
arthouse crowd and too strange for the erotic cinema crowd. Fans of Paxton also might have some
apprehension towards seeing him in a role that bares all, leaving little to the
imagination and treading a very fine line between art and pornography. That said, Taking Tiger Mountain for the adventurous
cinephile who don’t mind their films being a bit more on the dangerous or
off-kilter side than others will find plenty to enjoy here. It's worth noting the film forged a longstanding working relationship with director Huckabee who served as an executive producer on Paxton's directorial debut Frailty!
--Andrew Kotwicki