Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball

source: Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball

First of all this is about a 6.5 I gave a 10 because obviously some people arent to bright. This was worth the watch. I was hesitant at first to watch it but it was a slow 4 days off and I thought what the hell. I enjoyed this flick. I dont know that I will watch it a second time but I certainly didnt feel my time was wasted either. Give it a watch.

Tedg summed this film brilliantly. Objections feel as if some viewers didn't really 'get it", were expecting something else and certainly aren't readers of Fay Weldon (Life and Loves of a she devil) I'm not faulting your take but golly gosh do you know the director?

I don't think I need to go through the characters individually, you must have read it by now in the other reviews. The only reason I am writing this review is because no movie has ever disappointed me so much and that's why I can never forget this one. The trailer is mysterious and quite mystifying. Initially it comes on as some dark story with twists and secrets all throughout, but the expectation is soon kicked aside by a plot set up by an old witch who is trying tricks for her daughter to get pregnant with a boy, but chooses to practice voodoo on her new neighbor to get her pregnant instead so that in time she can steal the baby boy. But then, the neighbor miscarries but apparently doesn't after which she falls victim to another voodoo trick and ends up sleeping with the old witch's son in law, she gets pregnant again but the baby is not a result of the voodoo trick, instead the leftover of her first pregnancy. One fine day, the witch dies unable to yield a grandson. Following which enters an old man supplying silence and absurdity to the script and does little to excite the viewers. Then the neighbors have a spat when invited to a gala lunch, after which blood runs on the pregnant mama's legs followed by the birth of a child...story ends with the proud parents leaving with the baby. That was the story, isn't? I know that's a difficult question and it is easy to lose your way in the wilderness created by the entire crew of the film. However, the dark tones and the artistic background are quite impressive, moreover it suits the vagueness this movie intents to imply. There are too many useless scenes in the movie starting from: used condom handling, mushrooms everywhere and the occasional triple "ekx". You may like it if walking into the wilderness towards nothing is your type of movie, although escorted by dark tones and earthy feels.

Despite having read praise for his work over the years,I have somehow only seen director Nicolas Roeg's work as a camera operator on the fun British Horror Doctor Bloods Coffin.Getting told by a family friend that he had recently picked up,what is currently Roeg's feature film,I felt that it would be a good time to read Roeg's final piece. The plot: Redeveloping a house which had been burnt down 5 years ago, architect Liffey becomes pregnant,after having sex with her boyfriend on a stone-which legend has it,is a shrine to Odin.Being called away on urgent work-related issues,Liffey is left to sort out the redevelopment of the house on her own.Since the death of her young son in the house fire 5 years ago,Molly has been desperate for one of her 3 daughters to have a son,so that a male entity can be in the family.With Molly's daughter Mabs being married to a strapping young man called Tucker,Molly decides to start performing black magik,in the hope that the child Liffey is carrying will turn out to not be hers. View on the film: Based on his mums own novel,the screenplay by Dan Weldon attempts to offer an intriguing mix of Kitchen Sink-grit with Supernatural Horror chills.Whilst the Irish village gives the title a suitable icy backdrop,Weldon is never able to make the mixture fully gel,due to Molly's witchcraft on Liffey lacking any sense of menace,which leads to the Horror elements falling (unintentionally?) into a heap of burnt- out Comedy splinters.Along with the dopey Horror elements,Weldon also fails to give the movie its much needed bite,by appearing to be unsteady over handling the Kitchen Sink dynamics,with none of the largely female cast being given a character with even the slightest hint of depth,that causes Liffey's struggle to be mashed up with Molly's boo-hiss witching. Whilst his early directing credits are infamous for sex scenes which crept extremely close to being "real" director Nicolas Roeg destroys any sense of sensuality in the sex scenes,by wrapping each of them up in a badly-designed New Age tapestry,and also shooting close-ups on the sex scenes in Digital,which despite being designed to shock,just come off as rather desperate.Keeping up with the plodding sex scenes,Roeg drags the film across a vast 120 minute running time,which ends up burning out at the half-way point,when Roeg appears to not know any route to expand on the characters relationships,which leads to this being an extremely disappointing puff piece.

Ever since director Roeg's career went into irreversible decline in the mid- 1980s, he has intermittently been attempting to recapture shades of his former glory and this is surely another effort in that vein – what with its mystical/architectural themes and emphasis on sex, down to an irrelevant cameo by Donald Sutherland (from his masterpiece DON'T LOOK NOW [1973]). However, the result is only mildly compelling and as muddled as ever; at least, leading lady Kelly Reilly is most appealing – and physically reminiscent of Candy Clark, who had featured in the director's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). Like Julie Christie in DON'T LOOK NOW itself, he has recruited an icon of the Swinging Sixties, Rita Tushingham, to play the misguided 'witch' after the heroine (who is renovating the cottage in which the old lady's son had died in a fire years earlier). Aiding her in the 'cause' is Tushingham's middle-aged but still attractive daughter (Miranda Richardson, delivering the film's outstanding performance) and the latter's own reluctant offspring. Reilly is impregnated by her fiancé (who then summarily departs for New York) but miscarries soon after; realizing she is going to conceive once more some time later, the girl fears the father may be Richardson's younger husband (and so do Tushingham & Co.) – whom Reilly had seduced while drunk at her place! However, it turns out that she had originally conceived twins and one managed to survive the ordeal. Anyway, Tushingham's clan professes to befriend Reilly (while mixing disgusting potions ostensibly to assimilate her pregnancy onto Richardson, though the girl eventually exposes the others' scheme) – including giving a dinner at their house where the titular dish (dubbed "The Devil's Eyeball", actually this film's subtitle in the U.S.) is served; at the end of the day, in spite of Tushingham's death, the situation is happily resolved for the 'witches' as well when Richardson herself finally bears a son. For the record, among the remaining Roeg titles I have yet to catch up with, I own the following: INSIGNIFICANCE (1985), TRACK 29 (1988), SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1989; TV) and COLD HEAVEN (1992)

I think I disagree with every positive thing I see written about this movie. I'm sorry I took a chance on Puffball. The story follows a pretty Irish girl, Liffey, while she oversees the completion of her dream home in a remote Irish village. It is a very woodsy area, and there are plenty of scenes in thick forests and muddy farmyards. So it is a very "earthy" movie, and that is what probably drew me to it. Very early on, however, the movie also injects a mystical tone, as we see that Liffey has neighbors who practice some sort of voodoo witchcraft. The tension builds when it is established that Mabs Tucker wants a baby, but is told she is too old to conceive. She turns to her mother, who believes that Liffey's arrival in the area has upset the natural order of things, and that when Liffey becomes pregnant, it is the baby that was "meant" for Mabs which she is carrying. Throughout this exposition, we are shown close-ups of mushrooms as big as a human head with images of a fetus juxtaposed over it. There seems to be some attempt at symbolism, but when the movie was over, I still hadn't figured out what. I was also surprised to see Mabs serving one of these giant puffballs for dinner, carving it like a roast. One of the problems I had with this movie is that there is enough human drama that I feel like they didn't need the mystical subplot. Liffey gets drunk one night and has relations with Mabs' husband (which was initiated intentionally by Mabs and her mother), and through a series of circumstances, believes she has become pregnant by him. It turns out that when she had gotten pregnant earlier in the movie by her fiancé, she conceived twins, one of which she later miscarried. So the surviving child wasn't a result of the drunken hookup (this is established because the fetus is too far along to have been conceived when that happened). Now doesn't that sound like enough twists to fill one movie? Well, they tried to pack much more in there, and I didn't think it worked out very well. Mabs' daughter eventually tells Liffey that her family is using magic against her, and it is also revealed to her fiancé she cheated. Everything comes to a climax at the moment Liffey goes into labor and needs to get to the hospital immediately for an emergency c-section. Except that Mabs won't help her out of spite, and her husband is busy having a fistfight with the guy she cheated with. Will she make it? I thought the ending was very anticlimactic, and that is a big part of the reason I rated this so low. It also got a bit tiresome seeing Liffey with blood running down her legs three or four times, gripping her stomach in pain. A scene like that if effective when used once. The director ends up looking a bit overindulgent, and the nearly two-hour running time doesn't help much either. In closing, I also want to say that a lot of the praise I see written about this movie seems to be from reviewers who end up sounding very pretentious. So if you like to ascribe meaning to vague, symbolic imagery, or you like to focus on attributes like "the architectural quality of film" (???), you may have lots to enjoy with Puffball.

There were a lot of talented (at one point) people involved in this movie . But more to the point, what was the point? Maybe all those who claim to have read the book (really?) could explain what these magical puffballs are. I didn't see one person mention them and yet they are prominently displayed. Just hocus pocus? Rita Tushingham? Well this was no Taste of Honey. Miranda Richardson? This was no Tom and Viv. Roeg was great at one point, but now, I guess from celestial heights he's a Man who's Fallen to Earth. I will give him one thing... he knows how to execute a violent sex scene, far more about eroticism than love and ejaculation as opposed to ecstasy. Music was challenging at times and other times distracting. Camera work was fine much of the time (particularly with the Odin ring thing) but uneven also. Roeg still has an "eye." But now he needs an assistant for continuity. The plot was nonsensical.

I watched this last night with my wife, and within about 45 minutes it turned into an episode of MST3K. The film was jagged, poorly edited, and had terrible camera work. There are several little minor clip scenes inserted into the film that never get explained, for example. The Lars character comes into the movie with NO explanation, you never even know who he is until 5 minutes after he's in scene. The dialogue is terrible. The conversations are unbelievable, not for their audacity but for the fact that they make no sense! Most of the acting here is terrible. The overall writing is horrid. The Puffball itself never gets tied into the movie - this film seems to assume you've read the book or have a clue what's going on, because it doesn't explain almost any of it.

I sometimes mention films in which architecture plays a role. This fascinates me. I believe that the next generation of cinema will be highly spatial, with context in surroundings becoming more important. Welles' "Othello" used space in ways that both implied dangerous conscious reflection and showed the constraints of the world that drive the tragedy. Greenaway's "Belly" used architecture in more visceral way, merging the urge of forms with the relations among components of a human. This film here goes even further. It is no wonder that it is Roeg's least accessible movie, sometimes considered a failure. I recommend it. Here come some spoilers; I think it best for you to not read this before you have seen it. The character in this case is a house in Ireland, a very specific place on the border between the two religions. This is a place where the pre-Christian notions from Viking magic are still recognized and there is a tradition that the Celtic nuns were witches in this vein. A young woman from London buys the dilapidated house. She is an architect who worked in the firm run by Donald Sutherland's character. Something traumatic happened to the two of them, most likely an affair and she has left to find herself. That involves rebuilding this cottage. We are told that she will keep the outside as it is, but completely re-arrange the insides. Very quickly, the magic of the place conflates this building and its insides with her body, the "insides" being her womb. The cottage had been owned by Rita Tushingham's character where she and husband lived with two daughters and a son. A fire in the building killed the boy. The family moved to the adjacent farm. At the time of the story, we have Rita as an old, somewhat demented witch, living with her son in law and one of her daughters (Miranda Richardson), who in turn has two daughters. The other sister is unmarried and works in the office of the town's obstetrician. The old witch is obsessed with having a son. Nearby is magical stone with a vaginal hole. By touching your beloved through this hole, you make a bargain with Odin. The area is scattered with globular fungi about a foot in diameter, giving the film its name. That is where the story starts, and this is all revealed economically. The cottage is conflated with the young woman. The mother (Rita) and her daughter (Miranda) share a womb and magic is wrought to impregnate the woman architect/house and somehow transmute the male embryo from her to them. Along the way, there is lots of sex, sometimes magical and dreamed which every time ends with internal shots of ejaculation, followed by continuing shots within the shared womb of of the developing souls. This womb in turn is conflated with the puffballs around the place, locally called the devil's eyeball. The plot is defeated by Rita's granddaughter who is newly fertile herself. This all is really complicated in terms of narrative. There are multiple magical forces, shifting identities, a rather amazing role of music and musical magic. Twins and twining galore. It is confusing and intended to be so because it is from the point of view of the woman- building. The film is not there for the story, though. It is there so that Roeg can explore this notion of creation as space, story as birth, actor as magical token. What a trip. I can recommend this to you if you have the ability to give form agency, to see this from the side of the magic. I will warn off any women who are pregnant or soon to be, as it surely will produce nightmares. Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.