Hollywood 90028 (1973)

By day, loner cameraman Mark (Christopher Augustine) shoots porn reels – not even proper porn movies – for the low-rent outfit of one Jobal (the impressively named Dick Glass). He’s clearly not happy with this state of affairs and dreams of less morally dubious work. When he’s not dreaming of his traumatic childhood, that is, which has caused some pretty major issues with women.

So by night, mark picks up women in bars, lets them take him home, and strangles them to death. Which doesn’t even seem to make him any happier, adding sad-sack-ism to his deadly misogyny.

Things change when he meets accidental porn actress Michele (Jeanette Dilger). They start on a courtship made less than ideal by the fact the audience knows about Mark’s more typical nightly endeavours, and Michele clearly sometimes catches a vibe from him that suggests more to her than “somewhat difficult guy”. Mark is curiously seriously about their relationship, though. Why, he even stops murdering women, in a somewhat ironic twist on monogamy. Of course, these things can’t last.

Christina Hornisher’s Hollywood 90028, unfortunately her only feature film, has long been underseen and undervalued but thanks to some champions in the film world it is now available in a restoration that look better than it will ever have looked when it hit the grindhouse circuit, and is now presented in environments sympathetic to a film that treats pretty typical early 70s grindhouse-style exploitation material with a low budget arthouse style and rather a lot of feminist subtext.

If you’re of the film school interpretative shape of mind, you’ll find much to think about here concerning the male gaze, the camera as a method of male domination, the problems with the porn industry; if you’re somewhat more bread and butter you might be astonished by Hornisher’s willingness to still treat her male serial killer as a complex human being without ever forgetting/or letting us forget, that he’s also a horrible one.

Obviously, this never tries to be a straightforward serial killer thriller, but there’s a heft and believable violence to the murders that keeps this a horror movie; just one where the violence is equalled by an ability to portray softness as well as paint a picture of a very specific part of Hollywood at a very specific point in time.

Visually, Hornisher often shows her background in experimental film, breaking up moments that feel verité through edits and dissolves that are anything but, very consciously tunnelling under the reality she has at first established so well. There is a slightly disorienting quality to this approach, as if time and place were slightly out of joint, or as if we were subtly pushed into sharing some of the wrongness that lurks in Mark.

Then, there’s that incredible final shot that belongs high up in the pantheon of final shots in (sort of) horror cinema finishing up a film that has been quite a revelation to me in an area of film history I thought I’d pretty thoroughly exhausted by now.

Three Films Make A Post: Family over everything.

Shadow Force (2025): Joe Carnahan always has been a bit of a hit or miss filmmaker for me, though when he hits, he does tend to find the bullseye.

This piece of action cinema, though, does feel like the product of someone who can’t even be bothered to look in the direction of the target. Everything here, from the bland direct to DVD actioner look (this is not actually a direct to whatever movie), the lifeless script without character or style, the blandly generic action choreography to a script that can’t even be bothered to be interesting enough to be called clichéd, and finally the deeply dull performances by a cast that could do so much better, lacks so completely in personality and life, it’s difficult to even call this a movie. Hell, even “content” might be too friendly a description for something this lacking in soul.

Invader (2024): Certainly not lacking in personality is this brutal serial killer movie by Mickey Keating. This time around, the stylistically very varied director goes all out on jittery, nervous energy, often shaking, handheld camera that perfectly puts into picture the sense of looming threat and paranoia its main character (Vero Maynez) suffers as a foreigner in the USA. Particularly this USA, at this point in time. And though this is mostly a highly efficient, condensed, and often quite nasty, horror movie about a woman threatened by a killer, it works all too well as a mirror of how its time and place feels.

The Executioner (1974): One can’t help but hope the Japan of 1974 did feel like this Teruo Ishii action movie starring beloved Sonny Chiba as the youngest descendent of the Koga ninja clan, gone down in the world to steal a bunch of drugs from the Japanese franchise of the Mafia with a former policeman and a sex pest. For its combination of bizarre violence and the violently bizarre is pretty delightful.

Sure, Ishii has directed weirder things – he’s mostly doing Man’s Adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek here – and Chiba has been in weirder and/or better movies, but if I’d start judging their movies, or any movies, on that bar, there’d be a very limited amount of joy to be found in my movie watching world.

As far as the world of silly, violent Toei exploitation movies go, this is doing its job of entertaining me more than just fine.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (1991)

Original title: 女囚さそり 殺人予告

Warning: spoilers for one of the core points of the plot are inevitable!

A young woman (Natsuki Okamoto) is working as a very capable assassin for hire. She’s not exactly a posterchild for feminist self-realization, though, for she is controlled – mentally and sexually – by her handler, who turned a traumatized girl into his own private kill and fuck device.

Her newest mission is rather peculiar: she is to go undercover in a woman’s prison to murder Nami Matsushima, known as Scorpion, a woman whose influence and unbreakable spirit are so large, she has been held in a cave below the prison for years, so she can’t infect the other prisoners with her indomitable spirit. The powers that be of the prison are just that afraid of her.

And no wonder, because as it turns out, for at least half of the prison population has turned Nami into a near mythical figure who will some day get everyone out of the hellhole, and might even threaten the structures of violence and oppression outside.

But there’s something hinky about our assassin’s mission beside the plain weirdness of the situation, a hidden truth, as well as the realization that she, like any other woman, is only a thing to be dropped and destroyed at a man’s convenience.

There have been intermittent attempts to revive the Female Prisoner Scorpion films over the years. I believe this one, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who lived at the wondrous place where exploitation and arthouse met, is the most ambitious attempt of them all.

This early in Toei’s V-Cinema cycle, there appears to have been something of an anything goes approach to the types of films that could be made, if they contained a bit of action and nudity, at least. So making a film that’s a sequel to the first two films of an old 70s exploitation series – the rest of the films can’t have happened in this film’s world – that turns the originals darker by virtue of their heroine having been murdered, her dead body walled in must have sounded like a good idea to someone. While I generally don’t like that kind of set-up – let heroic achievements of earlier movies stand – I can’t help but admire what Ikeda does with the idea here.

This is very much a film about how a religion gets started, how a person’s life becomes mythical, how a poetical truth about someone becomes the only truth actually worth anything. Nami the Scorpion, the film argues rather obviously, is the patron goddess women need to survive what men do to them.

Ikeda doubles down on the mytho-religious aspects repeatedly – our protagonist is crucified, and later has a moment of bizarre revelation in which Nami’s dead body gives her the iconic sharpened spoon, literally turning her into an avatar of the Scorpion. All of this Ikeda stages without any irony, but as moments when borders between dream and reality grow thin and the mythical remakes reality in its image. It’s an incredible thing to do in a film that could be a lazy cash-in on a beloved series, but then, the space where the mythical, the real, and the commercial reality of the exploitation movie meet is something of a speciality of Ikeda. His probable masterpiece Mermaid Legend did something very similar some years earlier, perhaps even more successful than he is here.

Death Threat is also simply very satisfying as the kind of exploitation movie where all men, especially men in power, are bastards, but where those men are eventually punished by women who aren’t staying their victims. If that’s not invigorating, I don’t know what is.

Go for Broke (1985)

Original title: V Madonna: daisenso

Every year, a rural Japanese high school is attacked by a delinquent biker gang, who’ll take the student council’s discretionary budget, or else.

Not even having enough money to buy proper baseballs anymore, parts of the student body really have had it with this state of affairs, so the decision is made to hire some bodyguards against the bikers’ next arrival. One of the female students knows a justice-loving female biker named Saeka (Yukari Asami), and Saeka, once convinced of the nobility of her cause, has her own ideas on how to get together a band of young women of violence. Enter an angry wrestler, a stuntwoman, a sukeban, a lover of explosives – you know the drill.

These “Seven Madonnas” (don’t ask me, my name’s not Kurosawa) are not only going to protect the school, but will also need to teach the students some of their violent ways.

It has been a while since I’ve written up this sort of awesome, trend-hopping, cheap 80s pop cinema from Japan around here; it has also been a while since I’ve had quite as much fun with this kind of film as I had with Genji Nakamura’s Go for Broke.

In part, this film’s particular joy comes from the usual virtue of Japanese genre cinemas from the 50s into the 80s, this cinema’s ability to apply high technical and aesthetical standards to even the silliest bit of material. Thus, this teenage Seven Samurai variation with mild exploitation elements is treated with the same earnestness and craftsmanship as would be one’s most heartfelt commentary on the state of the world. Here, this manifests particularly in a  sense of forward momentum that feels as controlled as it is exciting – there’s nothing ramshackle about Go for Broke’s excited energy, no flaw in its presentation of a world where all the tropes of grown-up genre films are simply part of the teenage experience (see also the not at all Japanese Brick, or make a great double feature out of the two movies).

The action set pieces are cheap but staged for maximum effect – there’s a short bit of handheld camera work in the scene when Saeka comes to Maki’s rescue that feels like a perfect encapsulation of Nakamura’s use of whatever technique comes to hand to keep scenes exciting and avoid any visual repetition, even when he’s working with only a couple of locations.

In tone, style, and the complete absence of grown-up and particularly male authority figures – let’s ignore the final minute please and thank you – this often feels as if it were taking place on the same planet as Walter Hill’s 70s and 80s work. One fuelled by more synthesizers in its rock music, admittedly.

To my particular delight, the film also features one of the funnier examples of transatlantic misunderstandings I’ve encountered. Somewhere – in the space between the English language and the Japanese islands – something must have gone ever so slightly wrong, so there is many a scene where characters declaim dramatically “Go for break!” instead of “Go for broke!”; even better, the film’s them song also is called “Go for break!”.

Immaculate (2024)

Warning: I will spoil some elements of the film’s ridiculousness, including its ending, because I’m not going to hide its main selling points.

American novitiate nun Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) is transferred to a pretty swanky looking convent for her final vows. The place is actually a hospice for elderly, dying nuns, many of whom suffer from the mental vagaries of old age as well, but clearly, the Church has decided to see them off in style. However, some of the nuns – elderly and not – act rather weirdly, treating Cecilia either as if she were about to be sainted, or like their mortal enemy. Things become curiouser still when Cecilia becomes pregnant – without ever having had sex in her life.

Her superiors decide rather quickly – and certainly without consulting the Vatican – this to be a case of immaculate conception, and thus, Cecilia is the new Mother of God. But there’s something nasty hiding behind dressing our heroine up like Maria and singing her praises.

I have repeatedly gone on record with my general lack of interest in religious horror, but I do tend to make an exception for its absurd and trashy arm, even more so when the absurdity and trashiness is combined either with the values of classic Italian exploitation or an comparatively high budget to pump into its idiocy. Michael Mohan’s Immaculate manages to have a foot in both camps, thus making me very happy indeed.

Having said that, I also have to warn anyone looking for a serious piece of (religious) horror: this is as absurd and trashy as it can get away with, throwing away concepts like believability and logic with great enthusiasm. Andrew Lobel’s script suggests it knows Catholic doctrine only from the pages of 18th Century anti-Catholic literature (as if the actual church didn’t have flaws enough), and has never met a human being or an actual religious believer – fanatic or not. It’s pretty impressive, in its own way, mostly because it enables the film to come up with its central conceit: a Church conspiracy to mad science up an embryo clone of Jesus Christ (gene material apparently donated by a nail from the True Cross) and implant it in a particularly “fertile” young nun, obviously – this is the Church, after all – without consent. Or, if needed, a series of nuns.

As it happens, this conspiracy also is into torture and murder, and has nuns who hide their faces behind stocking masks directly out of giallo central. In practice, this is exactly as awesome (and tasteless) as it sounds. The film’s plot, such as it is, contains little actual drama, but does provide a series of set pieces for Sweeney to enthusiastically overemote in, mechanical jump scares in exhausting number, surprising amounts of squishy gore in the Italian tradition and a general sense of unhinged enthusiasm for material that’s crude and more than just a bit dumb. Of course, its’s exactly that crudity and stupidity that makes the whole affair as enjoyable as it is, even more so since the film mostly plays things straight, as if this were high religious (anti-religious?) drama.

To make things even better, Mohan packages the glorious nonsense in often strikingly composed shots – with more than a nod to Italian exploitation cinema of old –, and stylish, moody camera work while strolling through some wonderfully designed sets.

It’s a truly wonderful piece of exploitation cinema that had me riveted to the screen throughout. I suspect not exactly in the way the film was meant to be taken, but it’s not as if I were doing something as disrespectful as enjoying myself ironically.

Apart from the obvious candidates from the 70s and 80s, this would make fantastic double feature with the likeminded yet also antithetical The Pope’s Exorcist – one can only dream of a team-up between said exorcist and Sister Cecilia, killer of the Sweet Baby Jesus, in a future Pope’s Exorcistiverse movie.

Special Silencers (1982)

Original title: Serbuan Halilintar

This is based on the original Indonesian cut of the movie.

Criminal mastermind – the subtitles say so, so it must be true – Gundar (Dicky Zulkarnaen) and his evil nephew are attempting to take control of a village in the Indonesian countryside. To achieve this goal, the village mayor as well as the mayor’s brother, a cop en route from the city, need to die. Because nobody here is into regular assassinations, the villains poison their victims with a red pill that makes a mass of roots burst from their bodies.

Mayor and brother are easily despatched thusly, but the cop’s daughter Julia (Eva Arnaz) escapes this fate by chance and through some pretty nifty martial arts skills. Directly before her father dies, Julia also meet-cutes strapping young Hendra (Barry Prima), who quickly puts his considerable fighting prowess into the service of punching villains with and for her.

In most regards, Special Silencers, directed by Arizal, is pretty typical for an Indonesian martial arts movie starring Barry Prima: the fights are vigorous, well choreographed – if typically not on the level of comparable Hongkong films – and decidedly on the bloody side; there’s a romance element that feels somewhat more serious than in many another martial arts film; the villains are truly hissable.

Also there and accounted for is a pretty incredible synth soundtrack (I believe only partially needle-dropped) that helps make even the most normal fight feel a bit weird, and a certain sense of strangeness.

Despite that inspired and inspiring roots-based murder method – so good the film repeats the effect again and again – the strangeness level is a bit low for an Indonesian movie, for while there are some nods to black magic, and a bit of dubious but fun poison animal action, most of the fighting here lacks the bigger gimmicks you’d find in something like a Jaka Sembung film. That’s a complaint in so far as this lack of the more extreme bits of exploitation movie value robs Special Silencers of the chance of becoming  mind-blowing instead of just being a well-made and highly entertaining example of Indonesian martial arts cinema of its era.

Death Force (1978)

aka Vengeance is Mine

aka Fighting Mad

aka The Force

Doug Russell (James Iglehart) and his war buddies Morelli (Carmen Argenziano) and McGee (Leon Isaac Kennedy) are planning on using their return trip from Vietnam via Manila to at least get something out of the war for themselves with a bit of drug smuggling.

Doug, a usually very straight guy, really only wants to do this one time and then get back to his girlfriend Maria (Jayne Kennedy) and their little son. His partners, on the other hand, are in the drug business for the long run. Because they are not just pushers but also assholes (and because McGee has the hots for Maria and has no moral compunctions against anything, ever), they decide to just murder Doug. Knifing him and throwing him into the ocean doesn’t kill our hero, however. Thanks to a twist of fate/the script gods, he washes up wounded on a small island only populated by two Japanese soldiers who have been purposefully stranded here since the end of the war. Unlike your typical Japanese army throwbacks of the movies, these two are very well aware the war is ended, but still continue defending their island against whoever goes there.

Doug, however, they help and want to keep. They are rather old by now, after all, and a young, strong helper like the American would be rather useful. After various cultural misunderstandings – turns out goading guys like these with tales of and Americanised Japan does not lead to joy and happiness and Americans of Colour don’t really hold much with slavery – the officer type of the two Japanese (played by Filipino actors, obviously) takes a bit of a shine to Doug and teaches him a weird B-movie version of the code of the Samurai, as well as some awesome sword fighting techniques.

While this is going on, we regularly pop in with Morelli and McGee, who work their way up the ladder of Los Angeles crime one burned down house and murder at a time. McGee also attempts to put his very special kind of moves on Maria, but she knows a slime ball when she sees one and repeatedly rebuffs him. Because he’s just that kind of guy, he then stealthily torpedoes her career as a singer, to somehow get her into his bed by virtue of economical pressure. Maria still doesn’t bite, and McGee becomes increasingly more of a physical danger to her.

Fortunately, Doug does eventually make his way back home and goes on a bit of vengeance rampage with his newfound sword fighting prowess.

I am as often down on the movies of Filipino low budget maestro Cirio H. Santiago as I am up. His blaxploitation (and Japaneseholdoutsploitation, and so on) epic – nearly two hours long in the complete “director’s” cut I watched – Death Force however is nothing anyone who likes 70s exploitation fare could possibly sneeze at. Sure, the movie’s structure is a bit rough, and its running time perhaps a bit too epic for its own good, yet it is also stuffed full of awesome elements that come together to form a very special kind of crazy. Santiago certainly doesn’t stint on exploitational values for a second: when you’re not watching McGee and Morelli making their violent career, you get scenes of Doug getting taught a highly dubious version of already highly dubious warrior philosophy by an actor (Jo Mari Avellana?) who puts his all into being fake-Japanese in a way that transcends the offensive so effectively, it turns beautiful.

I also found myself pleasantly surprised by the sequences concerning Maria’s suffering that take on an appropriately Catholic quality and allow her to show a strength of character you don’t usually get from The Girl in this kind of affair. That Kennedy’s portrayal of McGee is quite so perfectly vile – even Morelli seems put out by some of his behaviour - does enhance that aspect even more, for standing up to this jerk takes quite a bit of personality. All of this also provides the hope for a reunion between Maria and Doug with a certain degree of emotional heft, so much so I found myself mentally cheering at the sappy family reunion montage Santiago of course is not ashamed to provide. And good for him.

The film’s action starts out competent and relatively straightforward and increases in intensity and general weirdness once Doug hits Los Angeles, cutting his way through the gang of his former friends, Iglehart always making as good an impression in his fight scenes as he does in the rest of the film. Particularly the final battle is a bit of a paradise for the friend of decapitation, as well, so our timeless lack of good taste is well provided for as well.

Finally, there’s a “what the fuck” to end all “what the fuck” endings that left even me speechless for once.

Add all of this up, and Death Force turns out to be one of Santiago’s masterpieces.

The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965)

Government agent Johnson (Bert Williams) is ordered to infiltrate a gang of moonshiners operating in what the Internet tells me are the Everglades, so what we call the Particularly Weird South. He is quickly uncovered by sweaty uncouth men, and has to flee through the swamp by night. There, an encounter with what may or may not be a mad masked woman nearly kills him. Johnson just barely manages to get himself to a lonely. isolated swamp inn – which is no kind of inn at all, if you think about it. The place’s owner, Mrs Pratt (Ann Long?) and her factotum Harold (Chuck Frankle) take care of our hero’s wounds and provide him with a place to rest.

The inn is as Southern Gothic as it gets, however, everyone at the place having emotions as heightened as Mount Everest. Secrets of course do abound, as well. Mrs Pratt keeps her “mad” daughter Lisa (Jackie Scelza) – who rather resembles that other mad lady with the knife though our hero doesn’t appear to notice – chained up in the attic, and let’s not even get into the very special doll collection in the cellar. Johnson does of course fall for Lisa, and plans to eventually escape with her, once he’s figured out what’s going on around him.

Long thought lost, a print of this Southern Gothic/exploitation piece from, with and by Floridian one-time auteur (and rather more regular actor) Bert Williams was discovered a half a decade ago and restored with the help of Nicolas Winding Refn, who clearly has a taste for strange exploitation films, and does put his name and his time up for them.

The film is probably not for anyone not at least a little experienced with local productions and weirdo exploitation, for it shows quite a few of the less palatable hallmarks of this very indie (decades before we used the word) kind of movie. So expect many a scene of actors very consciously not looking at the camera while emoting to their physical limits in ways that are as intense as they are stilted; blocking and framing is often awkward, a nailed-on camera adding torpor to the less than dynamic approach. Unless, of course, an act of violence or gothic strangeness occurs, when the editing suddenly freaks out, loud noises begin to dominate the soundtrack, and short, sharp jolts of striking imagery cut through the visual dullness with heated intensity. There is also an increasing number of moments of moody swampy goodness, that provide the moments when the film isn’t shuffling its feet trying to bore you to tears with quite a bit of actual atmosphere.

These more interesting gasps of excitement occur more often the longer the film goes on, for like many of its siblings, it is frontloaded with some of its most dull scenes. It gets pretty excited (exciting might go too far) for a bit, only to slow down to a dull crawl again until the final act excitedly sketches out the place where the Texas Chainsaw Massacre will meet Southern Gothic. If you’ve seen as many films of this kind as I have over the decades, you’ll probably appreciate the contrast between extreme dullness and the sparks of the low budget visionary – I at least found this rather bracing, lending The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds even more of the quality of a dream, or really, the quality of something of made to show you an approximation of somebody else’s dream.

The Glove (1979)

Sam Kellog (John Saxon), something of a loveable loser, works as a bounty hunter to – barely, if at all – pay the child support he owes his ex-wife for their daughter. While he’s perfectly willing and able to beat you up when he’s trying to catch you, he’s a bit too soft to be a proper money-grubbing bastard, bound to let a target go if their particular true sob-story is too much for his feelings.

Right now, a very large man we’ll soon know as Victor Hale (Rosey Grier), dressed in body armour, is using the titular steel glove to occasionally but heavily beat up a specific group of former and current prison guards. It’s gotten so bad, the local prison guard union has put out a bounty of $20,000 to whoever catches Victor, preferably dead instead of alive. Sam would really rather like that money, but finding and catching Victor is much more difficult than you’d think. Turns out the supposed violent maniac is otherwise a genuinely lovely person with a tragic backstory who is nice to neighbours and kids, and has a surprisingly pleasant singing voice. So it’s not that easy to find anyone willing to sell information on him, even more so when the guy trying to buy is white like Sam.

While marketing and title suggest a bit of fun and brutal exploitation, in reality Ross Hagen’s The Glove is quite a different film that mixes a couple of brutal gloved-based beatings with many a scene of Rosey Grier (in a much better performance than he gave as racist Ray Milland’s second head) being nice to people, and many more scenes of Sam episodically going through his sad sack bounty hunter daily life, letting a nice elderly lady go, learning that gay people can hit you really hard as well, and philosophizing about the evils of a world that’s all about the dollar, while having to hustle for it himself. Also, going through a lot of off-screen monologuing to somehow stitch this thing together.

Which does of course mean that the film mostly doesn’t work as a thriller, crime, or action movie – apart from that couple of genuinely effective beatings – but is more like a road movie that takes place in a single city, with John Saxon encountering various characters and having fun interactions with them that reveal his flaws and virtues as well as, perhaps, some of the flaws of the world he lives in. Thanks to what must have been quite a bit of adlibbing and a cast that for some reason managed to attract everyone from Saxon to Grier to Joanna Cassidy, from Joan Blondell(!) to Aldo Ray the result is rather fun to watch, at least if you’re like me and just like to see interesting characters interact.

The film goes about its business so charmingly, I’m even willing to believe its somewhat anti-capitalist and anti-racist agenda to be genuine, though not thought through or argued well.

Technically, The Glove is all over the place: there’s a lot of standard competent 70s exploitation filmmaking here, but also improbable stuff like an incredible moment where the actors obviously flub not just a line but a whole dialogue interchange, but the camera just rolls on through the grins and the suppressed giggles. It’s pretty shoddy in that regard, but in context of the leisurely rest of the film, this just adds to The Glove’s curiously companionable quality. It’s as if you’re not watching a product or a work of art, but simply a group of people doing stuff while a camera happens to roll.

In short: Blutiger Freitag (1972)

aka Bloody Friday

Freshly broken out of custody by his buddy Luigi (Gianni Macchia) and some other guy we don’t need to care about, rather violent criminal Heinz (Raimund Harmstorf) is planning the big score. Together with Luigi, Luigi’s girlfriend Heidi (Christine Böhm) and another guy responsible for a distraction, Heinz is going to assault a bank, take some hostages and get more money out of selling those hostages back to the police than they could reasonably get from the bank. In his mind – which isn’t exactly a vast space – his plan is completely fool-proof, but obviously, things aren’t going to go that well.

At first, though, things actually seem to be moving upwards when Heidi’s Bundeswehr deserter brother Christian (Amadeus August) somewhat accidentally joins the gang, but general incompetence, bad luck and reverse Stockholm Syndrome are going to make things turn sour rather sooner than later.

Rolf Olsen’s ripped from the headlines style exploitation crime drama is not a terribly typical example of German popular filmmaking of the time – though there are a good handful of films made in this style - at least half seeming to take its inspiration from the crime movies of its Italian production partners. This still being a German film more than an Italian one by its inclinations, it’s not all sleaze, violence – and this is pretty outrageously violent if it wants to be - and exploitative social criticism of the times it was made in. There’s also a dollop of po-faced melodrama and quite a few scenes of that most German movie of things, people debating thrown in the mix. At times the film’s shifts between Serious German Business, ridiculous (and fun) exploitation, and hilariously bad melodrama are so extreme as to give a boy whiplash. Though, in any case, you can’t blame the film for being boring or not trying to entertain its audience any damn way it can.

Still, having said that, I can’t pretend to actually like the film as much as I should like its type of idiosyncratic exploitation. Mostly, I blame Olsen’s direction. From time to time, he manages to create a tight, or a clever, or a somewhat insane set piece, or creates a moment of fine mock realism, but just as often, he stands in the way of its film potentials, dragging out the wrong scenes for too long, putting the emphasis on exactly the wrong moments of a scene. Generally, Olsen’s directing approach feels random more than anything.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,italian movies,in short,crime,exploitation,rolf olsen,raimund harmstorf,christine böhm

Three Films Make A Post: Take The Trip

Stone (1974): This Australian bikie (thanks for that term, Australia) exploitation movie is a weird thing. It starts out as a paranoid acid trip (that is to say, pretty awesome), turns into a nearly anthropological look at its version of bikie culture - with some added fun violence in between, of course – and ends with the sort of 70s downer business that really puts all that talk about honour in the scenes before into a rather brutal perspective.

One-time feature director and occasional actor Sandy Harbutt has quite the eye for going from 70s psychedelia, through the scenes that feel documentary, to the cheap and fun action, dropping some acerbic bits about class, and getting back to the bad trip quality while making things feel natural.

Hell Drivers (1957): There’s also quite a bit of class commentary in Cy Endfield’s curious mix of melodrama, truck action, and noir tropes. Unlike in many a 50s British movie, one can even imagine the director having met working class people before. The film also shows for its time surprising sympathy for its Italian “Gastarbeiter” character (though he is played by the decidedly not Italian Herbert Lom), and generally seems to have a good working idea of how a certain type of working class pride can easily be exploited to destructive ends.

On a less theoretical level, for my tastes, the film comes down a bit too hard on the side of the melodrama, putting the action and the noir elements sometimes too far in the back. The cast is pretty amazing however, not only featuring Lom, Patrick McGoohan, Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins in the leads, but having pop up William Hartnell, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, and even Sean Connery in small before they were famous parts.

The Comeback Trail (2020): George Gallo’s remake of the Harry Hurwitz movie is one of those comedies that sometimes go out of their way to repeat a joke for the slow audience members, likes to mistime perfectly fine punchlines, and often shows surprisingly little talent for staging its jokes as best as it could. Frome time to time, the script’s very funny indeed (particularly if you like your low budget movies), but just as often, it seems to coast on some basic ideas in it being funny without actually bothering with turning them into funny scenes.

That the resulting film is still watchable and entertaining enough (in an undemanding manner) is mostly the responsibility of the actors, well, really mostly Tommy Lee Jones, Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman (a trio frankly much too good for the film), who put quite a bit of effort into classing up the joint. As an addendum for your nightmares, please appreciate how much Emile Hirsch looks like a young, thin, Jack Black in this one.

In short: Whiskey Mountain (1977)

Married couples Bill (Christopher George) and Jamie (Linda Borgeson), and Dan and Diana (Roberta Collins) are going on a treasure hunt for a load of US Civil War era muskets one of the women’s grandfathers has buried somewhere around a place called “Whiskey Mountain”. But hiking gear and dirt bikes won’t be enough when they ignore the curious stuff that begins happening to them. Apparently, if you’re on a hike, and somebody steals your panties, it’s the local marijuana growers trying to warn you off.

Our protagonists are understandably not really getting the hint, so will eventually have to endure rape, death and killing, for the pot growers around a guy named Rudy (John Chandler) play hardball, with optional sadface.

I’m not sure why of all the local exploitation filmmakers available, it’s William Grefé who is getting the comparatively lavish BluRays (though still sourced from pretty damn beat up prints), when there are still actually good films in desperate need of better versions of their films. But then, every film digitized is a film saved from oblivion, so there’s that at least.

Like most of Grefé’s movies I’ve seen, Whiskey Mountain is a workmanlike effort with a couple of scenes that are rather better than that description suggests, but also the director’s usual problems with pacing and tone. The first half of the movie or so drags desperately, the director filling time with dirt biking sequences and pretty decent nature shots while the plot slowly, very slowly, starts rolling, the mysterious threat taking its dear time to actually become threatening. Our character trait-less protagonists (a waste of good acting talent) are really not terribly interesting to spend time with either.

Tonally, things permanently stumble around between 70s grimness, unfunny humour, hicksploitation clichés and moments of actual nastiness – all set to the sounds of the Charlie Daniels Band. The film never settles for long enough on any aspect to make much of an impression.

There are some clever touches buried among the dross, though: Grefé’s decision to portray the inevitable rape sequence in form of polaroids shot by the evil hicks underlaid with their giggling and shouting and some screaming by their victims is actually making that part of the film more uncomfortable to sit through than this sort of thing is anyhow, and certainly makes it pretty impossible to a viewer to side with anyone but the women here (one can imagine the Grefé shouting: “Try to get titillated by that, assholes!”). In less unpleasant moments, I rather enjoyed the completely over the top Old Man (Robert Leslie) our protagonists encounter repeatedly, a guy so crazy, Grefé actually makes a suspense scene out of the question if he’s going to cut our tied up heroes loose or cut their throats.

So there’s that, at least.

In short: Resurrection (1999)

Homicide detective John Prudhomme (Christopher Lambert), once a Cajun working in New Orleans (Cajun accents are like French Canadian ones, right?), has been working in Chicago (mostly portrayed by Toronto) for some time now. His pretty abrasive character caused by the usual dead kid trauma leaves the man rather unloved by his peers. Only his long-suffering partner Hollinsworth (Leland Orser) takes to him. Everybody has to agree, though, that John’s a hell of a detective. So it’s not a big surprise that it’s him and Hollinsworth who’ll take the lead on a particularly nasty series of serial killings, the sort of combination of mutilations and murder that’ll leave even more stable men than our protagonist disturbed.

Eventually, it’ll turn out the killer is building his own personal Jesus out of stolen body parts, in hopes of achieving the second coming via serial killing. I’m not sure from which part of the bible he’s taken that idea.

Following the success of their first work together in Highlander, both director Russell Mulcahy and his lead Christopher Lambert did have rather complicated careers, often missing the luck more than the ability to catch lightning in a bottle again. In 1999, they re-teamed for this shameless Seven rip-off that rethinks Fincher’s original as an exploitation movie - ickier and bloodier, and with more cop movie clichés. The story was apparently co-written by Lambert, so we know who to blame here.

But seriously, while the moments when the film is trying to ape Seven but with less intelligence and style can become a bit much, this is actually one of the more watchable Seven-alikes. In part, that’s thanks to Mulcahy, who may be quite a few years away from his stylish prime, but still knows how to keep a film flowing very nicely indeed. And while the film is certainly rather stupid, it’s not one that ever pretends to be terribly intelligent; rather it is using its clichés honestly, simply trying to provide an audience with a good time full of mutilated bodies and Lambert staring hauntedly in the distance. Works for me.

From time to time, the film does provide something more: scenes like the discovery of the killer’s nearly finished rotting Jesus are milked for as much gross-out as you can get away with while still keeping an R-rating (there’s a rumoured harder cut, but nobody outside of the filmmakers seems to have seen it), and the climax contains a bit of baby juggling you really got to see to believe. Plus, does Seven have a pretty peculiar cameo of David Cronenberg as the hero’s priest?

Steel and Lace (1991)

Warning: there will be spoilers all over, but that’s okay, the film’s not making terribly much sense anyway!

When, after years of court sessions, the lies of his accomplice cronies help acquit Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris) of the rape of classical pianist Gaily Morton (Clare Wren) he did indeed commit, she kills herself by jumping from the roof of the court building.

Years later, Daniel and co have turned being human garbage into their actual professions, working as developers who still do their own thugging. So nary a teardrop will fall from the audience when these charming gentlemen are killed off – going by the sequence in which they committed perjury in Gaily’s case, no less – by a very interesting woman wearing many different faces, kitted out with useful tools like a giant drill in the middle of her chest. Underneath said faces is that of Gaily, though, for her clearly very talented and equally crazy brother Albert (Bruce Davison) has built a robot based on her, or turned her corpse into a cyborg, or something.

While that’s going on, the film also spends time with former courtroom artist turned fine artist Alison (Stacy Haiduk), who is revisiting some of her old courtroom drawings for a “then and now” project. She also happens to be the ex-girlfriend of the cop trying to solve the murders, one “Clippy” (don’t call him Clippy) Dunn (David Naughton), so she gets absurdly involved.

Ernest D. Farino’s sci-fi horror rape revenge movie is a complete mess, as if someone had taken about three movies with a similar plot but very different protagonists and tones, taken their favourite scenes, stitched them together, and called them a movie.

So expect a seriously played, if weird, scene between Gaily-bot and Albert concerning the nature of guilt, grief and revenge to be followed by a bit of exploitational horror in which a masked (that is, played by a different actress) Gaily first seduces one of her victims to then dispatch him in a ridiculous and gory manner, followed by the misadventures of Alison. That last part of the movie seems mostly made to provide the audience with more exposition than even the dumbest of us could ever need, and bring it to length without straining the budget.

To be fair, Haiduk plays her part in the boring bits of the movie with great intensity, an effort that stays in marked contrast with Naughton, who is looking so bored you’d expect him to drift off and pick his nose any second now.

The serious dramatic bits aren’t working out terribly well, either. Wren’s and Davidson’s performances are – to nobody’s surprise -perfectly fine, but the film never manages to distract from the enormous silliness of the whole cyborg affair, the sleazy way the Gaily-bot is kitted out, and so on, enough to make the melodrama actually work.

So, really, it’s the exploitational horror elements here that are memorable, be it Gaily-bot making a hug extra-special with her giant ass drill, Gaily-bot gender-confusing a guy before she decapitates him by impersonating a very weird and on first look male FBI agent with breasts, Gaily-bot castrating a guy (one assumes with the cutting vagina her totally stable brother must have built into her), and so on. These scenes are all pretty awesome tasteless fun, but they don’t jibe terribly well with the rape revenge motives. In a film with an actual brain in its head and something to say, you just might get away with a victim of rape seducing her victimisers before she kills them, but it feels less than pleasant in a movie that’s mostly about the cheap thrills. In this context, I can’t help but notice that this is a rape revenge movie where the victim doesn’t even get actual agency in her revenge, for she’s literally programmed by her brother to do what she does, and has no choice one way or the other.

A better movie might even have done something with this in combination with the glee Albert seems to feel watching Gaily’s kill footage – this one just lets these elements stand, with little idea what to do with them.

Three Films Make A Post: They Beat Him, Shot Him, Framed Him For Murder-But They Couldn't Stop Him From Busting The BLACK OAK CONSPIRACY

Black Oak Conspiracy (1977): Well, really, it isn’t – as usual – as exciting as the tagline promises. Rather, this is a very middle of the road example of hicksploitation, avoiding the weirdness of the more interesting films in the genre, or politics of any kind. In combination with the pretty low exploitational values the film has in the sex and violence stakes, this gives the whole affair a pretty bland feel, despite a perfectly okay lead in Jesse Vint (playing a guy who calls himself Jingo Johnson, so there’s that, at least), perfectly decent direction by Bob Kelljan, a perfectly decent script, and whatever else you can give that sort of adjective.

It’s just not a terribly exciting film.

Mørke aka Murk (2005): This Danish thriller by Jannik Johansen about a man (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) who begins to believe the widower (Nicolas Bro) of his sister might be a serial marrier and killer of handicapped women with a suicidal past is very much a thriller in the French mould a la Chabrol. So it moves very slowly indeed, taking the utmost interest in drawing a complicated character portrait of its protagonist, but eventually coming up to a suspense finale that’s highly engaging and dramatic exactly because the film has put so much care and thought into the work of creating its central characters. Ambiguities about suicidal ideations, the various forms of guilt in survivors, the bereft, and the terminally sad abound, but the film’s darkness never quite becomes hopeless, suggesting ways out of all kinds of misery without having to stretch into the unbelievable.

The Alien Girl aka Chuzhaya (2010): This Russian crime movie with more than just a small neo-noir influence directed by Anton Bormatov on the other hand does have a pretty nasty streak, avoiding not a tiniest bit of the shittiness of character you’ll probably find in real world gangsters but still making a viewer care at least a little about these clearly doomed fools by also not denying them the softer and more human parts everybody will inevitably have. The film also does a couple of interesting things with Natalya Romanycheva’s femme fatale, giving her more ambiguity as usual while also making her just as doomed as everyone around her, suggesting a world where everyone is corrupt, corrupts others, and so can’t help but end badly, for even the wins you achieve by betrayal are only very temporary.

In short: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959)

A group of drag-racing youth has founded a hot rod club with pretty square sounding rules forbidding all the illegal fun stuff. Which is for the better, though, for the film’s budget doesn’t allow for more than one scene of drag-racing; on the positive side, it’s a girl-on-girl race, which is symptomatic for the way the film really doesn’t seem to have any problem with young women being allowed the same very mild rebellion young guys are.

Eventually, after many a scene of “humour” (more about that shortly), and much dancing to the hot hits exclusively on AIP’s American International Records, a friendly middle-aged journalist, and a middle-aged eccentric (even for this film) lady played by stalwart Dorothy Neumann with a pet parrot and an English accent gift them an old, supposedly haunted house for a club house (we never see any garages there, alas), for they just can’t pay for their normal one anymore. Ghostly shenanigans ensue, as well as more dancing to the hot hits (etc), a semi-climactic off-screen race between our heroine (Jody Fair) and the bad girl from the mandatory bad drag-racing group, and general stuff.

If there’s one thing William (J.) Hole (Jr.)’s Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow doesn’t have, it’s a real plot. Certainly, there are elements here – like the whole new club house business, the fake haunting, the drag-racer rivalry, some romance – that in most other films would accrue to become something of a plot, but this very special film approaches all these elements on the same level as it does comedy skits, the hot hits (etc), a talking parrot of seemingly human intelligence, a weird meta-gag about Paul Blaisdell “explaining” the haunting, a talking robot car (with a mouth), or bizarre would-be hipster speak, which is to say, as stuff to just throw on screen without any particular emphasis on anything. If you’re of that mind set, you might say this makes Dragstrip a film rather true to life, seeing as it too shows a deplorable lack of dramatic finesse and a tendency to random rambling. Why, clearly, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is a bit of an art film just pretending to be an AIP exploitation number trying to sell teenagers an image of themselves fractured through the minds of a bunch of grown-up weirdoes and fools!


If you’re not into a mildly ironic reinterpretation of drag-racing movies that can’t afford drag-racing, you might still enjoy this as an example of exploitation filmmaking that turns weird at a moment’s notice, or perhaps a visit to a past where bad flute playing and a parrot with a hepcat tendency were the height of humour and where all nerds (nerdier than the other drag-racers, even) wore Clark Kent glasses. As someone not easily bored by films that just do bizarre stuff instead of coming to any kind of point, I enjoyed Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow immensely.

In short: The Most Dangerous Game (1978)

Original title: 最も危険な遊戯 (Mottomo kiken na yuugi)

When he’s not working, Shohei Narumi (Yusaku Matsuda) is a drunken louche who loses money and probably teeth gambling and seems to spend more time crawling drunkenly than walking. When hired for a job, he turns into an ice-cold professional assassin and all-round mercenary.

Right now, a gang of crooks is kidnapping executives of various successful Japanese companies. Most of them come back alive once the gangsters have been paid; there are, however, a couple of cases where the abducted are killed. A large company with a fat government defence contract believes the kidnapping and the blackmail are actually only a smokescreen for the murders, and these murders are the way of an enemy company to put them out of business. Narumi is hired to rescue the newest kidnapped; when that doesn’t quite work out but our hero racks up an impressive body count, his new mission is to assassinate the company head responsible for the kidnappings.

Yusaku Matsuda is apparently beloved as a particularly cool example of Japanese 70s machismo. While he’s certainly not boring to watch (though his films, the one at hand a case in point, tend to overdo his sunglasses by night shtick), he’s never been quite on the level of guys like Sonny Chiba or Bunta Sugawara for me. But then, the films he was in weren’t as a group quite as good or as crazy as the best or most memorable works featuring these two gentlemen so that might have been the actual problem.

Be that as it may, this doesn’t mean this, the first film of Toru Murakawa’s “Game” trilogy about Matsuda’s adventures as Shohei Narumi, is not an entertaining film to watch, particularly if you enjoy Japanese 70s exploitation and genre films. While Murakawa isn’t one of the most stylish, nor of the most excessive, nor the most original directors of this sort of Men’s Adventure fare, this still is a late 70s Toei production, so the photography is just the right mix of grime and style, the score tchicka tchicks well, the acting by the usual expected faces is professional in the good sense of the term, the action fun and a bit bloody, and the pacing impeccable, the film hitting all the required beats of the genre like clockwork yet without ever feeling quite as mechanical as I might make it sound.

Not surprisingly if you know Japanese cinema of the era, one of those beats is alas the nearly mandatory scene of our protagonist starting to rape a woman, who quickly begins to enjoy it and from then on falls madly in love with what we must assume is his magical penis (alas, there’s no scene where Narumi trains said organ by hitting it with various appliances, Tomisaburo Wakayama-style). I’ve seen the abominable trope done worse in Japanese cinema of the era, but if that’s the sort of thing that’ll sour you on a film completely, take this as a warning.


Otherwise, The Most Dangerous Game is a typical, fun, violent bit of filmmaking with a great finale that’s certainly not one of the strongest examples of its genre but which is much too enjoyable to ever be called middling.

In short: Guru, the Mad Monk (1970)

Thanks to the generosity of Vinegar Syndrome, now you too can delight in one of Andy Milligan’s movies in beautiful high definition without having to pay a price, or rather, without having to pay a monetary price, for watching a Milligan movie takes its psychological toll on most of us. In fact, a viewer of any given Milligan movie might never be the same afterwards. Just look at your once mild-mannered blogger who is now, just like Milligan himself, quite hateful of everyone (yes, even you!).

Guru concerns the shenanigans medieval priest Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) gets up to in his position as the head of the Church’s island death camp. Bodysnatching, vampirism, torture and a guy in a particularly horrible hunchback costume ensue. Given the film’s Milligan-typical claustrophobically cramped sets, the school play costumes and the sub school play acting, it should be as easy – if boring – to make fun of this as of any film by the director, but as it is always the case with Milligan films and me, Guru is no laughing matter but a film making me decidedly uncomfortable.

The at times absurdly cramped sets and the even more claustrophobia-inducing blocking Milligan prefers take on oppressive hues, with people not so much standing beside one another but crawling into each other’s faces, often times shouting their decidedly angry dialogue at one another with all the enthusiasm their very basic acting talents can manage. Hardly a scene goes by where someone doesn’t do or say something deeply unpleasant while the camera looks on unmoving and most probably unmoved by human empathy, gleeful in its unwillingness to engage beyond The Swirl.

Milligan, his films convince me again and again, hates me, not just in my function as his audience, but also as a member of the human race, and while he can’t hurt me physically (one hopes, for one does not believe in life after death), he sure as hell can hurl his hate for humanity in my face in film form again and again, which he does quite effectively in Guru.

There’s an unbelievably unpleasant, brutal, undertone to the film – as to Milligan’s whole body of work – the sort of feeling that turns what should be nothing more than MST3K-style fodder for cheap laughs into something quite different, a very personal outburst of loathing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,exploitation,andy milligan,neil flanagan

In short: The Clones of Bruce Lee (1980)

In the months and years after Bruce Lee's death, various film industries, with Hong Kong quite in front, did their best to exploit the man's legacy with frightening enthusiasm. There were shady Bruce Lee biopics, Bruce Lee films made from old outtakes, Bruce Lee-themed softcore, but first and foremost, there was a small army of martials artists/actors willing (if anybody even asked them) to be rechristened into Bruce Le, Bruce Lai, Bruce Thai, or Dragon Lee, in the hopes nobody would realize this wasn't the original specimen before they had laid down their money.

By the time the 70s ended, there really wasn't anywhere to go for Brucesploitation movies, or so anybody not working for our old friends at Filmark thought. Somebody there stumbled upon an idea brilliant in its simplicity: why not gather a variety of pseudo-Bruces and let them team up and/or fight against each other? So it happened that Bruce Le, Dragon Lee, Bruce Lai aka Chiang Tao, Bruce Thai and some other guys of the type gathered. Of course, this being a Filmark production, we never get all of this dubious star power all at once, and instead find various combinations of Bruce clones (who actually are clones of Lee in the film) fighting through three very loosely connected episodes, because even when the Filmark guys didn't make one of their Frankenfilms (and I don't think this is one), they did their best to make any given movie feel like one of them.

One would expect the sheer exploitational chutzpa of the endeavour to be enough to turn The Clones of Bruce Lee into a minor classic of WTF filmmaking but once you've gotten over the idea of a Bruce clone team-up (which was good for about ten minutes for me), you realize that mostly, it's a pretty boring affair, directed in typical Filmark style (possibly by Joseph Kong Hung), which is to say, with actual visible direction being completely optional, decidedly monotonous fight choreography, and of course no plot or characterization to speak of. At about the forty-five minute mark, the film turns interesting for a bit, when three Bruces (two of them official clones) go to Thailand to provide us with some of the most bored looking titillation ever committed to film, and fight a pleasantly crazy scientist who has - among some decent ranting and raving - developed a method to paint some of his henchmen slightly golden, umm, turn their flesh to metal, I mean, making them unconquerable until our heroes feed them poisonous vegetation.

Now, even for me, one great horrible idea and ten to fifteen entertaining minutes do not a worthwhile film make, so I'd rather attempt to dissuade people from yawning through this thing. On the other hand, anyone actually inflicting Filmark productions on themselves (you know, like I do) will not listen to advice of this sort anyhow.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,martial arts,exploitation,joseph kong hung,bruce le,dragon lee,chiang tao

In short: The Summoned (1992)

aka The Demon Lover

Jenny Harris (Ashlie Rhey) has a rather difficult time with the men in her life: her husband is an abusive jerk who cheats on her, and her boss is a rude ass. Her new neighbour Rebecca (Gwen Somers) proposes that finding herself a fantasy lover is the way to solve her problems. A little séance later, and Jenny does in fact have her very own dream lover (Sean Morrow). Despite him being a beer-bellied guy with a creepy face, he seems rather irresistible and at first improves Jenny's mood quite a bit.

What our heroine doesn't suspect is that her dream lover is in fact an incubus, and while his tendency to magically rough up her husband a little when he's particularly nasty to her is rather great, he also just loves to go out and murder any women Jenny has negative thoughts towards, be it her husband's lover, or her best friend. It's all enough for a girl to romantically re-orient herself towards the cop husband of the murdered girlfriend of one's husband.

Mike Tristano's The Summoned is just the kind of low grade would-be softcore porn horror crap a doctor would prescribe against insomnia. It's got all the hallmarks of a movie primarily made to show its presumed horny audience a few breasts and a bit of dry-humping, with the plot and the horror parts only there to give the film a slight appearance of being more complex than a Playboy photo spread.

Even with a film made in the pre-Internet era, there's the question who it was made for. I'd rather imagine an audience looking for porn would, you know, rather prefer to watch an actual porn movie. Yet even if you were looking for softcore porn, you'd probably rather watch a film that puts a slight bit of imagination into its sex scenes, which The Summoned clearly doesn't.

If you're lucky, this kind of shot-on-video concoction can still provide some joy by way of weirdness, personality or just plain wrongness. Unfortunately, this isn't The Summoned's forte either. Sure, the plot is dumb, the narrative structure slow and boring, the acting amateurish and full of dubious line deliveries and awkward pauses, the special effects crap, the cameos by Robert Z'Dar and Michelle Bauer short and useless, but nothing here has any actual personality. It's just bad in a bored and boring, characterless way that entices fingers towards the fast-forward button and lulls minds to sleep. You might as well just watch a reality TV show.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,exploitation,ashlie rhey