A blatantly amateurish chunk of no-budget, lo-fi cinematic antimatter, Chris Jolly’s “Curse of the Seven Jackals” emerged from an obscure corner of the movie universe (the Athens, Ga., indie music scene), wowed the 2001 New York Underground Film Festival and its Chicago counterpart, then dropped back into obscurity, leaving a trail of fond memories.
Entrusted with the film’s sole 16-millimeter print, Anthology Film Archives undertook a digital restoration which screens twice nightly for a week. It suffices to say that Jolly’s hourlong feature is no less confounding than it was when it debuted.
“Curse of the Seven Jackals” was made to be exhumed, a process hinted at by its title (Anubis, the Egyptian god of embalming, has a jackal’s head) as well as its premise. Looking to fund a trip to Egypt, the protagonist, Bernard (the rock musician Kevin Barnes), signs on to test an experimental form of synthetic blood. That blood draining was part of the mummification process may explain his self-identification as an Egyptian cadaver — not that “Seven Jackals” is a movie of rational explanations.
Bernard fails at Egypt-oriented phone sex but strikes up a friendship with Helen (the multimedia artist Jill Carnes), the dowdy housekeeper at the charmless suburban motel where he receives his daily dose of fake blood. Bernard is morose and obsessed; Helen is cheerful and tolerant. They bond with a duet of “America the Beautiful,” more cracked than sarcastic, and go on a bingo date at a V.F.W. post with an old military plane parked outside.
A subsequent evening at a local karaoke dive provides the movie’s musical high point. Jolly samples a few seconds from each performance. The unstable image complements a montage of discombobulated numbers that culminate with three teenage girls joining forces to riff on Rick James’s 1981 song “Super Freak.”
Even when new, “Seven Jackals” was something of a relic. Created with outmoded technology, it was partially shot on an old sound-on-film Auricon (the same camera used by Andy Warhol for his first movies), and intertitles are displayed on a TV screen. The images are washed-out black-and-white and the audio track is harsh.
Jolly’s nondescript locations recall the suburban Baltimore of John Waters’s early films. Jim Jarmusch’s infinitely suaver “Stranger Than Paradise” (1984) might have been a model, although in its utter indifference to craft, “Seven Jackals” is the opposite of a calling card. (It did, however, spin off a soundtrack CD.) It’s possible that “Seven Jackals” inspired Harmony Korine’s programmatically retro “Trash Humpers” (2009), though as impoverished as “Trash Humpers” is, “Seven Jackals” makes it looks like “Dune: Part Two.”
A free-form, bang-on-a-can “no jazz” score aside, the most underground thing about Jolly’s film is its use of technical imperfections as a formal device. This desultory attitude echoes that of old-school subterranean filmmaking. (In keeping with its Egyptian motif, “Seven Jackals” suggests an ouroboros in which the snake’s retro head swallows its avant-garde tail.)
Nothing shouts ’60s underground louder than Bernard stumbling around an empty field in toilet-paper mummy wraps calling on fellow gods to “take me from this earth.” Neither “Seven Jackals” nor its antihero ever break character.
Curse of the Seven Jackals
Through Thursday at Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, anthologyfilmarchives.org.
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