- 04:08 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 04:13 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:15 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/czqo7u
- 10:51 Cthulhu help us, Argento's "Giallo" sounds more like his take on torture porn than a return to the giallo genre.
- 11:21 This "hinting at a new Thief game" business has my approval.
- 11:42 Semen throwing now illegal in Oregon. Oregonite representatives hilariously unable to say "semen" or "sperm". tinyurl.com/d6qxws
- 15:08 New blog post: In short: The Strangeness (1985): A random assortment of people gathers to survey t.. tinyurl.com/ctkwbd
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
In short: The Strangeness (1985)
A random assortment of people gathers to survey the prospects of re-opening an old gold mine, which was closed off decades ago after a chain of unexplained deaths under the miners got too much even for a mining company.
The group soon finds itself caved in and under attacked by a stop-motion creature I hereby dub "tentacled vagina bear".
The Strangeness is a bland to okay monster movie with slightly better acting than one would expect from a no budget film from the 80s (at least until the actors are afforded to emote). At half its length, this would probably quite entertaining, as it is, it is very very slow and very very uneventful, but not completely without charm. The monster is extremely cute and there are even two or three scenes that are well-made enough to be worth watching.
I have seen much worse.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 04:13 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:15 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 10:36 Hm, there's .. tinyurl.com/cz2zjx
- 10:42 Umm, you know, Amazon, apologies work best when they contain an actual apology and not just an explanation. #amazonfail
- 12:58 New blog post: Gargoyles (1972): It's always nice when a film starts out with a fake history lesso.. tinyurl.com/c246a3
- 18:41 Internet, there's a difference between sexism and misogyny, really. You should learn it.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Gargoyles (1972)
It's always nice when a film starts out with a fake history lesson. Gargoyles informs us that humanity isn't the only intelligent species living on our planet - Satan himself created a species of humanoid horned (sometimes winged) reptiles, who emerge every few hundred years to try and wrestle dominance over the world from humanity. Humanity - notoriously rational as it is - has suppressed the truth about the gargoyles and put them into the realm of legend, the medieval stone gargoyles left as a final warning.
In modern day America (well, it's 1972), Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) and his daughter Diana (Jennifer Salt) are making their way through the southwest of the USA to visit the owner of one these roadside attractions whose existence fills my European heart with intense jealousy.
The man, fittingly known as Uncle Willie (Woody Chambliss), has something to show to the Boleys, something he thinks the Doctor in his function as TV-famous book-writing anthropologist and professional debunker of myths should find very interesting.
Willie has in fact found the motherlode - the intact skeleton of a winged, horned and beaked humanoid creature. Boley is skeptical, but willing to examine the thing more closely. He is also going to listen to the Native American legends the old man has to tell about the skeleton.
Before the old drunk can get very far with his stories, the reason for a certain fearfulness in his demeanor and the strange security measures he takes with confining the skeleton to a locked and barred shack (small echoes of Lovecraft's Whisperer in the Dark here), become clear. Something winged, and worse, clawed, lands on the roof of the shack and shreds right through it.
In the ensuing chaos, poor Willie dies and the shack goes up in flames. Jennifer and Boley escape with the skeleton's skull to the safety of their car .
It is not as safe as they think, though, as the same creature which attacked the shack lands on their car roof and tries to get inside, obviously to get at the skull. They manage to escape, and, for some reason postponing a visit to the police until the next day, check into the nearest motel.
When they finally return to Willie's shack with the Sheriff (William Stevens), whom they of course haven't told anything about flying monsters, the next day, the lawman easily finds a group of dirtbikers (lead by a young Scott Glenn) who are his preferred scapegoats for everything out of order in the area. The bikers themselves aren't helping their case much by looking through the burnt out remains of Willie's place and trying to flee (leading to the mandatory dirtbike chase every film with dirtbikes is obliged to have), so the Sheriff arrests them.
Jennifer is rightfully irritated by her father's obvious unwillingness to protect the long(ish) haired ones from the ire of the cops. One could think that having found a scientific sensation is more important to him than some random people's lifes.
Dispositions like Boley's can of course change when one is confronted with further attacks of the gargoyles and their leader (Bernie Casey), but said changes might come to late to prevent the things that usually happen when a young woman and men in rubber monster suits meet.
Gargoyles is the first piece of TV direction Bill L. Norton did after making the Kris Kristofferson vehicle Cisco Pike, beginning a long career as a network television mercenary. Unlike many made for TV films, this is really quite good (and seems to have at least semi-legendary status among American genre fans), graced with a script that has an interesting premise told in an economical way and made by a director who isn't phoning it in like too many TV people did back then.
There are of course flaws in the plot logic - it is, for example quite difficult to understand why the Boley's don't get the hell out of Dodge at once - but the content and pacing are handled so gracefully and with a surprising amount of complexity (not depth, mind you, more like thematic broadness) that I found myself not caring all that much about boring things like correct motivations or logical behaviour.
I found the film's first half to be especially effective, yet even the opening up to elements that wouldn't have been out of place in Star Trek works surprisingly well, showing some knowledge of and respect for genre conventions as well as a considerable willingness to leave the movie's morals a little more open than one can usually expect from a film like this.
The only real problem some modern viewers might have will lie with the gargoyle rubber suits. Don't get me wrong, they are lovingly designed, even granting the gargoyles individuality through differences in the lay-out of their heads and bodies, but some people won't be able to look at them and see more than (probably cheap) rubber suits, instead of the strange creatures those rubber suits represent. (My short theory about rubber suits: rubber suit monsters aren't supposed to be realistic, they are representational.)
I for one welcome our rubbery overlords.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 02:15 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 10:36 Hm, there's a film called "Cannibal Mercenary".. tinyurl.com/cncxca
- 11:59 New blog post: Music Monday: Inappropriate Nakedness Edition: Technorati-Tags: music monday,music,.. tinyurl.com/cz96yn
- 20:13 A new detective IF game by Jon Ingold. Does look rather good. tinyurl.com/ddsosr
Monday, April 13, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
- 10:36 Hm, there's a film called "Cannibal Mercenary", and I haven't seen it?
- 13:24 Huh, didn't know there is an OGL versions of Spirit of the Century faterpg.com/dl/sotc-srd.html
- 16:01 New blog post: Ils (2006): also known as Them, but honestly, that title belongs to my favorite gia.. tinyurl.com/cb769o
- 16:01 New blog post: In short: Nero Veneziano (1978): A blind teenager called Mark (Renato Cestie) and h.. tinyurl.com/csmf5j
- 18:35 RT @neilhimself @zanzando consider it retweeted. bit.ly/5CNxw is a complete #amazonfail, yes.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
In short: Nero Veneziano (1978)
A blind teenager called Mark (Renato Cestie) and his slightly older sister Christine (Rena Niehaus) are living in Venice with their grandmother. Their parents died some years ago under never really explained, but most certainly dubious circumstances. Granny mostly blames the mother's family, the Winters, for everything and so contact between the only Winters who are left and the children is non-existent.
The family priest (Jose Quaglio) is in contact with the Winters, though, and conveys their wish to take Mark and Christine in as help with their boarding house. Grandma declines, but soon dies during mass in the sort of freak accident one gets into when one regularly psychically abuses one's blind grandson and lets him stumble into the direction of the back of a candle rich environment just to be nasty.
With grandmother dead and more priestly words of advice to just try living with the Winters for a bit, as well as equally priestly elucidations about a healing well that is supposed to cure illnesses like blindness in the direction of Mark, the children are willing to try it out.
Mark, who has already had strange visions in which he sees a black coated man with a cane (Yorgo Voyagis) before, now hardly has a moment without something weird happening to him anymore, be it having earthworms crawling out of the water faucets, more visions of the black coated man or extra special fun with dead people.
It seems like he and Christine have stumbled into the hands of an occult conspiracy with the goal of producing the son of Satan and helping him into experiencing a fast lane version of a "negative image" of the life of Jesus.
Ugo Liberatore's (and what an excellent name that is!) Nero Veneziano is a very weird riff on Rosemary's Baby and The Omen. Some people would call it a rip-off, but the Italian movie is way too peculiar and way too interested in its own (wrong-headed, twisted) ideas, in a way much too Catholic, to be seen as such. Some of these ideas could in fact be the basis for quite a clever and subtle film.
Obviously, Nero Veneziano is not that film. Instead it's a sleazy, strangely paced, dubiously acted completely weird exploitation movie that could only have been produced in Italy. It is quite brilliantly messed up and you really should see it if you are a friend of this sort of thing (I'm still giddy from watching it, myself), yet definitely a film to avoid if you are primarily interested in plot, logic, plot logic, characterization, sense or good taste.
Me, I like me some scenes of decaying Venice, Satanic conspiracies, baby throwing, the mental torture of the blind and other fun things.
Ils (2006)
also known as Them, but honestly, that title belongs to my favorite giant bug movie.
Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen) are a French married couple living and working in Rumania. Clementine teaches French in a school in Bucharest, while Lucas stays at home, living the sexy lifestyle of the blocked writer. Their home is a gigantic mansion that has seen better days and - looking at the few pieces of furniture in it, as well as the fact that this is not a rich couple - obviously went for cheap. It's not a big surprise, really. Whoever would want to live this remote in the woods?
The couple takes an environment that would keep me in a permanent state of panic with the shrug that suggests people who never have been in any physical danger. Of course, they both don't know of the murder of a woman and her daughter that took place not far from their home the night before that functioned as the film's pre-title teaser as if this was a rather tame episode of The X-Files.
For characters in a horror film, Clementine and Lucas have quite well developed survival instincts, though. So, when Clementine is woken by strange noises from outside the house (or are they inside?) at night, she first wakes up her husband and then goes to look at the source of the noises together with him.
Someone has gotten into Clementine's car and drives away with it, but only after toying a little with Lucas in a style that most definitely does not look like a thing a normal car thief would do and suggests that something more sinister is afoot.
Clementine calls the police, but is, in the least believable moment of the film, put off until the next morning.
A few moments later, the electricity of the house is cut and the couple has to deal with the fact that someone (or is it something?) much worse than a burglar has come for a visit.
Ils is yet another part of the small horror renaissance which has taken place in France in the last few years. Where most other films of the type are quite gory, Ils mostly tries its hand at classic suspense techniques. With the gore, the film unfortunately also seems to have lost an direct interest in politics or philosophy (which, even when both interests aren't going all that deep, are the core difference between these films and your typical American horror movie of the last two decades for me). One can of course still find subtext here - it's just that it doesn't look as if the film's directors were consciously trying to make a point or were reflecting on what their film could be saying.
Instead, we get a very straightforward thriller, well played, stylish-but-not-annoyingly-so directed, with creepy locations which do in fact look like real physical spaces and with some elements of the trope of "terrible things going on just under the surface of modern, normal life" that is especially beloved in my house.
I found the final fifteen minutes especially striking regarding the latter, although I couldn't shake the feeling that the directors wanted the viewer to have a much stronger emotional reaction to the identity of the killers than I had. Who Can Kill A Child for example handled a similar set-up a lot more harrowing. Of course, that film was also quite a bit more ambitious and its director wasn't on his way to make bland Hollywood remakes of solid Asian horror movies as Ils' Moreau and Palud would with their pointless The Eye remake.
All this isn't to say that Ils isn't worth watching. As a well-paced horror thriller it works nicely, it just lacks the little bit more of substance that makes the difference between a very competent and a very good film.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
In short: 7 Saal Baad (1987)
A husband and wife couple (Navin Nishchal & Sharmila Tagore) reopens the Happy Home Hotel which has stood deserted for a few years after a double murder happened there.
The people of the nearby village are convinced the hotel is cursed, and whoever mentions the place is confronted with the combination of broken dishes, mad ravings by the local raving madman and panicked staring most travelers in a horror film encounter on a regular basis.
Nonetheless the hotel soon attracts a slew of young attractive woman/hairy man couples (including one guy who likes to sing the title song of Disco Dancer) as guests whose happy frolicking makes up quite an amount of the film's running time. There's also the guy (Suresh Oberoi) who once saved Mrs. Hotel Owner from being gang raped and went to jail for his efforts and a certain Lisa (Prema Narayan) who spends real-time hours to reach the hotel.
Finally, a killer strikes! Will he, she or it be able to stop the viewer from falling asleep?
Wow, 7 Saal Baad is the first Hindi horror movie I have seen I would call downright boring. It's neither as wrong as Paapi Gudia, nor as enthusiastic and sleazy (and enthusiastically sleazy) as the typical Ramsey Brothers work, nor is it as deranged as Harinam Singh's Shaitani Dracula, leaving it in the sad position of an exploitation film that seems to be ashamed of being one.
Its core problem is simple: there's nothing much of any interest happening, besides the frolicking (including the least exciting bits of full-clothed sleaze one could imagine) and the highest amount of musical numbers I have encountered in a film up to now. I lost count somewhere around song number eight. It's not even that I am one of these heartless bores who don't like picturisations on principle, I just don't like them boring, and "boring" is the mode two thirds of the songs here are in. There are two or three numbers which are quite charming in their absurdity, but the rest is just dreary. Director S.U. Saiyed also tries his hands at a few moments of masala-like melodrama that never really lead anywhere except for the land of yawns.
A very patient viewer will probably find a few other nice moments in the movie, mostly in the insane, nearly Harinam Singh-worthy mixture of bad animal imitations on the soundtrack, stock footage and ugly colour-filters that makes up the film's murder sequences, but (again) there's hardly enough of these in there to keep one awake. In fact, if you have seen the film's first few minutes, you have seen its best part and can probably find something better to do with the rest of your life.
So, what we have here are twenty minutes of movie that will be somewhat amusing for people with lowered expectations (like me) and another hundred minutes of distilled boredom, probably enough to cure most cases of insomnia.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 03:59 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:52 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 04:52 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/dm7vrl
- 09:44 Note to self: never call something "a cracking good read". Makes one look about 150 years old.
- 11:30 Worst author license agreement? tinyurl.com/cowvou
- 19:52 Can the Doc Savage movie really be that bad?
Friday, April 10, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
- 02:52 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 04:52 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:51 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/dy6aet
- 07:58 The Lone Star Stories Reader (collection from one of the best SpecFic zines on the net) now a free PDF tinyurl.com/dhnd8v
- 00:25 New blog post: In short (and this time I mean short): Garden of the Dead (1974): A group of formal.. tinyurl.com/cjnn57
Thursday, April 9, 2009
In short (and this time I mean short): Garden of the Dead (1974)
A group of formaldehyde sniffing chain gang prisoners escape, only to die during the flight. For no reason at all, they revive as clown-faced, garden implement wielding zombies with a tendency to say stuff like "Kill the living!" (or something in that sense - I'm not starting this thing up again to check my memory) and attack their place of imprisonment. More formaldehyde-sniffing ensues. Also some bloodless killing.
Oh, look, it's got not budget, no talent and makes no sense! Sounds like a fun time? Unfortunately, this one really isn't. It is just bad in the blandest way possible, without any charm, weirdness, madness or spark of life to speak of.
Avoid (yes, even YOU!).
Daily Twitter Terror
- 04:52 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:51 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 11:18 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/cy5hrb
- 17:41 New blog post: El Latigo contra Satanas (1979): A small Mexican or Guatemalan town way out in the .. tinyurl.com/afn9e2
- 19:05 "The Royal Demon Hunting Squad". Now that sounds like a dream team.
- 21:19 RT @bremxjones @furybug kicks of new group project at howfuckingromantic.wordpress.com illustrating each of Mag Field's 69 love songs
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
El Latigo contra Satanas (1979)
A small Mexican or Guatemalan town way out in the wilderness has more problems than can be fair. If you ask me, living beside a vulcano that is just starting to get active again should be enough trouble for one community. Alas, parallel to the promise of a fiery death, a weird group of halfnaked satanists in spandex trousers holds regular meet-ups in the ruins built on the vulcano. From time to time they ride down into town to attack and burn someone.
An unpleasant mixture of religious fanaticism and plain stupidity runs high, and the less educated part of the town's population has need for a scapegoat - for the vulcanic activity as well as the satanists, which the people take to be demons from hell. Their spokesman, a certain Ramiro (Noe Murayama), finds them a fine scapegoat without problems in the daughter (Yolanda Ochoa, I think) of one of the richer people in town. I'm sure his declaring of her as a witch and the fact that she had refused his love and had escaped his attempts at sexual assault have nothing at all to do with each other. It can't help that she's often acting like a classical oracle either.
Just as the good people of the town are starting to string her up on a tree besides a crossroad, a stranger (Juan Miranda) comes to town. He seems to be your typical snake's oil salesman (if a little bit weirder dressed than most), but when the need arises, he dresses up exactly like Zorro and gives evildoers whatfor with his trusty whip. El Latigo, as he is known when in costume, doesn't take too well to attempts by supersticious nutcakes to murder women, and goes to the rescue.
Rescuing women isn't the real reason El Latigo is in town, though. He is looking for a man (what the realtionship between the two is, is something a certain obtuseness in the movie and my bad Spanish decided to keep as their little secret) who has been murdered by the satanists. Of course, being a masked hero and all, El Latigo isn't going to stand for satanic murders and sacrifices to vulcanos.
Between the evildoers and the supersticious townsfolk he's going to have to whip a lot of people into submission. At least the local priest (Ruben Rojo) turns out to be quite helpful.
As a film about a Zorro variant fighting against a satanic cult, El Latigo contra Satanas wouldn't have needed to do much of interest to find my approval. Director Alfredo B. Crevenna, who has 150 films in his IMDB filmography, seems to have had one of his more ambitious weeks when flying out to Guatemala to film this one, though. Crevenna is keeping the film surprisingly fast-paced, even dynamic.
The action scenes might be a far cry from even a mediocre Shaw Brothers production, but work out quite nicely in the enthusiastic style of old serials, even though someone in postproduction seems to have forgotten to add soundeffects to them. The film even utilizes some classical cliffhanger moments, complete with a certain amount of cheating when it comes to the way it keeps its hero alive.
The true core of the film however are some creatively staged and lighted scenes from the pulpier edge of gothic horror, utilizing a set of moods Mexican popular cinema by 1979 had mostly discarded.
Candles, bava-red and bava-green and various multi-coloured fogs in combination with excellent location shots (if you ignore the unwillingness of the film to stick to one time of day for any given scene) of Guatemalan ruins give the film a unique look I haven't seen much of before.
I was also positively surprised by the acting, especially Murayama and Rojo give very rounded performances, working from a script that is willing to give its characters a little more depth than strictly necessary, making their fate that small but important bit more interesting.
All in all, the movie is an impressive and entertaining mixture of Mexian western, pulp-style adventure and gothic horror I wouldn't have thought the director of La Furia De Los Karatecas had in him.
Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,western,adventure,horror,gothic,alfredo b. crevenna,noe murayama,juan miranda,reviews
Daily Twitter Terror
- 02:51 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 11:18 New blog post: Music Monday: Silk & Amphetamine Edi.. tinyurl.com/dksnps
- 10:30 Oh, I'm not the only one who finds reading Lovecraft comforting ursulav.livejournal.com/871394.html
- 10:39 The state of videogame journalism is perfectly embodied in a series of articles called "World's Greatest Videogame toilets".
- 10:39 No, I didn't make that one up.
- 11:22 So, Wizards of the Coast pulls all PDFs of all of their products "because of piracy",making piracy the only way of getting digital versions
- 11:23 of their products? That'll help.
- 14:18 "Variable pricing" is obviously another phrase for "higher pricing" when you are a major label. Not that I'm surprised.
- 15:08 New blog post: In short: Night of Fear (1972): An soon to be archetypal scrawny bearded serial kil.. tinyurl.com/dec6ws
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
In short: Night of Fear (1972)
A soon to be archetypal scrawny bearded serial killer with a hygiene problem (Norman Yemm) uses his shack somewhere in the Australian bush to do what all scrawny bearded people with hygiene problems like to do: chasing a young woman (Carla Hoogeveen) around until he can feed her to his pet rats. You don't want to know what he does with the remains.
Night of Fear was supposed to be the first episode of the first Australian TV horror show, but the network and/or the censor weren't all too keen on something very much in the spirit that would later produce films like (beloved in my household) Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the film was never broadcast until it finally appeared on a DVD together with writer/director Terry Bourke's Inn of the Damned (which I'll probably comment on one of these days).
The film hasn't much depth, but breathes the relentlessness and pessimism typical of 70s backwoods horror. Bourke's direction is extremely assured in its use of oppressive camera angles and suggestive editing. It seems as if the film is permanently on the look-out for ways to evoke a feeling of claustrophobia, mostly to excellent effect. It's quite a beautiful piece of short, sharp, punchy cinema, even transcending its gimmicky "no dialogue" set-up that works nicely during the main part of the movie, but is problematic during its beginning and end.
Night of Fear only really falters when the viewer starts to think too much about what she sees. It just isn't the kind of film that goes is interested in your brains at all, it instead is very much going for your jugular, with all the good and bad things this usually entails.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 11:18 New blog post: Music Monday: Silk & Amphetamine Edition: Technorati-Tags: music monday,music,ameri.. tinyurl.com/ct7xcl
- 11:22 There was a genre in Taiwanese cinema called "healthy realism"? That does sound unpleasant.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
- 03:56 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 03:58 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 03:53 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/dd7ywf
- 15:50 New blog post: The Stranger Gets Mean (1976): aka Get Mean The always weirdly grinning and mugging.. tinyurl.com/dbyvpx
- 20:27 Turn it down a little, okay, bird?Nature!
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The Stranger Gets Mean (1976)
aka Get Mean
The always weirdly grinning and mugging gunman we only know as the Stranger (Tony Anthony) returns. And what a return it is! He is being dragged behind a riderless horse into the dustiest Western ghost town in all of Spain, um, I mean America. There he meets a bunch of people I can only describe as gypsy pirates. They have been waiting for him as the promised hero who shall return their princess Elizabeth (Diana Lorys) back to Spain and help her regain her throne from the invading barbarians. While our dubiously heroic hero is still haggling about the price of his services, a group of black clad cowboys led by a Viking attack. The Stranger disperses these guys pretty fast and it does only take a little line on a map until the he and the princess arrive in Spain. Once there, they witness a bizarre battle between the barbarians (a bunch of people with melee weapons, dressed as Persian, Vikings, traditional Spanish courtiers, or just in the pelts of movie barbarism) and Elizabeth's people (who are white Moors? Spaniards?), wearing either the gypsy pirate style things or movie Moorish clothing circa from the Crusades era, as well as anything else the director thought he could get away with (that is, everything). By all rights, Elizabeth's guys should win, what with them having firearms (and bows) and such, but the barbarians have a secret weapon. It's an early version of a tank in form of a cart carrying four cannons on a turning disk and it makes short work of Elizabeth's army.
Well, so much for the good guys. Afterwards, the leaders of the barbarians go for a little chat with the Stranger and Elizabeth. It turns out that Elizabeth's tendency to tell everyone, even the leaders of her enemies, who she is and the Stranger's helpful explanation of her monetary worth can only lead to trouble. So Elizabeth ends up kidnapped while our hero sees the world hanging from his feet while the barbarians are shooting their cannons at him.
This is where the plot (such as it is) starts to get complicated with a nonsensical series of double crosses between the leaders of the barbarians (Diego-who-dresses-like-Genghis-Khan-and-is-dubbed-with-a-near-impenetrable-accent, The Gay Courtier, and Richard III's number one fan) and the Stranger himself, kidnappings, escapes, and a little questing for a hidden treasure.
Among the further indignities that are visited on our hero are:
- invisible ghosts hitting him and possessing him into imitating wolf howls (very badly, at that)
- a black face bomb
- people stuffing an apple into his mouth and trying to roast him on a spit
- the local semi-lesbian warrior women trying to do him sexual harm until they are distracted by each other's awesomeness
and more insane shit than one could possibly list.
For those among us who thought The Stranger's outing in Japan was weird, Get Mean is a true eye opener. Its glaring and completely conscious ignorance of things like logic, characterization, history (if not time itself) and plain human sanity is bound to show everyone what the word "bonkers" really means. It is surprisingly unmysterious how the film came to pass, though (and yes, I am passing wild speculation based on my intimate knowledge of Italian filmmaking by way of watching way too many Italian films as fact here). You see, director Ferdinando Baldi and his star Tony "Mugging Mug" Anthony promised their producers to make a Western only to find that they didn't have any Western costumes except for the single one that was part of Tony's private wardrobe. Buying or making some was completely out of the question after most of the budget had already been invested in drugs during the script writing phase (a wild party in Baldi's house during which no script was written), but what luck! Baldi still had some moth-eaten rags "borrowed" during his stint as director of peplums and historical adventure films stashed away in his cellar! Nothing was more obvious than to just put them all on random actors and improvise something along the lines of Maciste's adventures in China, just with a gunman instead of Maciste and even less of an idea when exactly the damn thing was meant to take place.
Which brought this film into existence, a real prime piece of what the hell filmmaking that for once is as fun as its elements promise. There was most definitely neither a real script nor a plan nor any sane idea involved, but damn, this thing is moving along with nary a minute that is not filled to the brim with stupid, inappropriate and goofy scenes of inexplicable meaning, be it the indignities inflicted upon our hero or just a mass of dubious details (like the silver spheres which seem to observe the beginning and the end of the film, or our hero's love for the taunting of dead enemies or or or).
This just might be the film the Italian movie industry was made to create. Thanks, God!
Daily Twitter Terror
- 03:58 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 03:53 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 04:02 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/c6hp9c
- 09:41 My spring morning dysfunctionality, let me show you it
- 09:50 New blog post: Zombi Holocaust (1980): (also known as Doctor Butcher M.D.) A hospital in New York .. tinyurl.com/dzn8ro
- 20:32 Scored the first of Nightshade Books' Clark Ashton Smith collections for half the usual price.Which means just about cheap enough for me.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Zombi Holocaust (1980)
(also known as Doctor Butcher M.D.)
A hospital in New York is plagued by a series of body part thefts (that's a sentence I always wanted to write). One of the hospital's male nurses (in the film's language a "native from the Moloccos") turns out to be the member of a cannibal cult. And he is not the only cannibal active in New York - the authorities are hiding a series of gruesome murders and icky cooking practices in connection with the cult.
What could be a better way to solve New York's problems than to send a small expedition consisting of Lori, a doctor working at the cannibal plagued hospital who is also an anthropologist (Alexandra Delli Colli) and highly qualified in dropping her clothes, Peter, another anthropologist (Ian McCulloch, zombie expert), some guy named George (Peter O'Neal, excellent at getting his eyes eaten) and journalist Susan (Sherry Buchanan) to the cannibals' island to investigate? Not that the film will ever mention New York again...
The island our "heroes" are bound to visit is called Kito and it is also one of the places the famed doctor Obrero (Donald O'Brien) graces with his medical talents. Obrero seems like the best man to get information and borrow some henchpeople from, but doesn't in fact have much of interest to say (gosh, looking at the American title one could think he has something to hide). At least the quartet can borrow a handful of his men as guides.
As it turns out, guides who would very much have liked to guide them to a different island, but whose plans are disturbed by some problems with the group's boat, leaving them (in one of those grand moments of totally superfluous plot flourishes which make Italian movies of this era so endearing) stranded exactly on the island they were looking for.
Also on the menu of the cannibal cult they were looking for, but that's what they wanted, right? Be that as it may, Kito is not only populated by cannibals - there is also a merry bunch of zombies in need of some guts to munch. Who will eat whom first? Will there be a White Goddess?
You can say what you will about Zombi Holocaust, but you can't say it is not trying. You can of course blame it for trying to fasten the progress of entropy by combining the Romero off-ripping Italian zombie movie with the cannibal film (which is arguably just a nastification of the jungle adventure genre) while adding some mad scientist tropes. Personally, I am a little in awe of this film, if probably not for the reasons anyone taking part in the production would have expected.
ZH really does its best to be as nasty as possible - the characters are as unlikable racist bastards as you'll find in Italian genre cinema, there's no gore effect too crude or just plain dumb not to be shown in detail, etc. - but I can't help but get the impression that it's all made with some misguided idea of the film being good fun in mind. It's all presented in so unspectacular a manner, giving the impression of a film being made by people who are trying their best to make a downright evil film, but can only settle on a pulp adventure with added rubbery gore in which they forgot to include the adventure, that I can't help but find this film full of gut munching, eye poking and head-with-boat-motor-crushing kind of endearing and (dare I say it?) rather cute.
I know that everything about the film sounds as if it should be squirm-inducing, censor-baiting (not that the real-world censor wasn't baited), and morally disturbing like, well like a combination of Fulci's Zombie and Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust without the animal torture (and I think in leaving this out the film shows its true colours as coming from a more innocent place)- it just doesn't impress me that way at all.
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- 18:53 New blog post: The Unseeable (2006): Thailand in the 1930s. Pregnant Nualjan (Siraphan Wattanajind.. tinyurl.com/dadgdx
Friday, April 3, 2009
The Unseeable (2006)
Thailand in the 1930s. Pregnant Nualjan (Siraphan Wattanajinda) comes to the country estate of Madame Ranjuan (Suporntip Chuangrangsri), hoping for a charitable place where she can stay for a few weeks and give birth to her child. Nominally, Nualjan is looking for the child's father, who one day went away on business, never to return, though the viewer can't help but be puzzled how she'll be able to find him when she's not actually searching.
Alas, Madame Ranjuan's estate is not the most healthy or sane place for a pregnant young woman to stay in. In spite of the size of the estate, there are nearly no servants to speak of around. Only Ms. Somjit (Tassawan Seneewiongse) - at best the rudest, most class-conscious woman Thailand's - takes care of a lady of the house who never leaves her room anymore on account of a broken heart, while two other welfare cases like Nualjan, Choy and the seemingly mad Grandmother Erb, are the only other people around. The only other living people, that is - there's an overabundance of ghosts around. From shadowy hands grabbing from a shrine, to a lone male lumberjack, to a hanging ghost, to a dead little girl, the place features more ghostly apparitions than the typical episode of Most Haunted.
Things aren't getting any more healthy after Nualjan's child is born. Ranjuan develops something of an obsession with the young woman's child, insisting on seeing and holding it in her room every day. As if this wasn't enough, Nualjan also slowly begins to realize some rather terrible personal truths.
The Unseeable isn't the type of film one would expect from Wisit Satanatieng, the director of Tears of the Black Tiger. It is as much of a stylistic homage to other films as Tears was, but it lacks some of the irony as well as the exuberance of the older film. This has of course a lot to do with the fact that a cross between a melodrama and an old fashioned ghost story doesn't lend itself too well to either of these moods. The film's problem is that there's nothing all that interesting taking the place of these moods, leaving the viewer rather puzzled about what it was meant to achieve.
The first hour of the film or so is fine enough, with some nice old fashioned spook set pieces, a rather minimalist but effective evocation of period detail (ah, the class consciousness is downright painful) and perfectly nice acting.
Afterwards, it all breaks down under the type of flaws I have by now seen to often in promising pieces of Asian horror: there is of course The Twist, not as annoying as it could be here (at least it fits the themes of the movie well), but still at once too obvious and too badly constructed to be satisfying. Then there's the bombardment with supposedly scary scenes in ever increasing frequency, until one can't help but giggle at every new ghost which appears - and there's really a lot of them, as if Satanatieng had thought to himself: "Well, ten ghosts are a lot scarier than one, right?". It also got increasingly more difficult for me to care about the melodrama, for the same reason the scary parts weren't scary anymore. Sometimes too much is simply too much.
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- 19:29 Why was Seabury Quinn Weird Tales' most popular author? And why did I just read one of his stories?
Thursday, April 2, 2009
In short: The Return of Dracula (1958)
How surprising, Dracula himself (Francis Lederer) does not like life behind the Iron Curtain. (Probably state-sponsored) people there trying to stake him could probably be part of the reason for that. Barely escaping a staking, the vampire takes the place of a certain Bellac Gordal, a painter on his way to emigrate to America and live there with distant relatives. Living with a widow (Greta Granstedt), her annoying son Mickey (Jimmy Baird) and family daughter Rachel (Norma Eberhardt) who isn't all that happy with life in small town America and very much wishes her "cousin" to be her savior from dreariness sounds like a fine change of pace for Drac. He's just starting out to have a little fun creating a new group of minions when his old enemy, the communist vampire hunter Meiermann (John Wengraf) comes to town, and if someone would have bothered to write an ending of some real dramatic impact, they would most certainly be bound for a final confrontation.
The Return of Dracula is very atypical for vampire movies of its day in putting the vampire into the contemporary world. For the first half of the movie, it looks as if director Paul Landres is willing to do some rather surprising (for an American film of 1958) things with this setting as well as with some interesting aspects of the film's subtext (the vampire as person who won't conform to society on one side, a priest and a communist agent protecting America on the other), but the last half hour or so forgets mostly about being interesting and sees the film turning into a bog standard vampire story that might as well take place in Victorian England or anywhere else, until the film just stops dead in its tracks.
I'd still recommend the movie for its many moments of striking black and white photography (Landres knew a lot about framing, it seems) and for the interesting beginning. You just shouldn't expect any kind of thematic pay-off or a well constructed ending.
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- 10:50 All that talk of Wendigos can only lead to the watching of Larry Fessenden movies and the reading of Algernon Blackwood.
- 16:21 New blog post: Voodoo Man (1944): The area around Too-Lazy-To-Give-It-A-Name, USA is plagued by a .. tinyurl.com/cvtbc2
- 19:24 Can't decide what's worse: the April Fool's Day "jokes" or the long whining rants against them
- 22:22 Tried to watch The Spirit.Even my power of getting through bad movies has its limits,it seems.Turns out all the critics were right for once
- 22:23 Will read a book now, buy myself a sombrero tomorrow.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Voodoo Man (1944)
The area around Too-Lazy-To-Give-It-A-Name, USA is plagued by a series of disappearances. "Girl motorists" (and their cars) just seem to vanish into thin air, or at least, that's what the comic relief sheriff in his wisdom thinks (if he does think). In truth, Doctor Richard Marlowe (Bela Lugosi) and his merry band of malcontents - among them his Igor, the dedicated zombie wrangler, unfunky drummer and hair fondler Toby (John Carradine, doing his worst until it is oh so right) and gas station owner and voodoo priest Nicholas (George Zucco, often dressed in the most ridiculous voodoo priest get-up you'll ever see) - kidnap the women to solve a typical Lugosi problem. You see (and you just might have heard this one before), Bela's wife has been dead now for 22 years, but her loyal husband is still trying to revive her by transferring other women's wills to live (that's the technical term) to her body. Alas, not just any donor will do for a project like this. He has not been too successful until now, leaving the poor man with cellar full of young female voodoo zombies in white gowns (not even especially flimsy gowns!) to be hair-fondled and told about their prettiness by Toby and not much else to show.
I'm quite sure Bela would be able to triumph over death given enough time (let's say a few centuries), but as things like this go, he has finally kidnapped the wrong woman. Turns out that it's not a good idea to abduct the cousin of the fiancee of a Hollywood hack (Tod Andrews when he was still called Michael Ames, giving an absolutely perfect impression of a wooden doll with rubber arms; just too bad he's supposed to be human), unless one wants to be pestered by the incredible skill of the "romantic lead" (and golly, does this position deserve its quotation marks) of a Poverty Row movie at doing nothing at all and still being called a film's hero and triumphing over evil (by lying unconscious on the floor) in the end.
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who hear about a Monogram picture featuring Lugosi and Zucco and Carradine and jump (not fall) into an ecstatic state of mind quite like being hypnotized by Bela himself and those (poor sods) who just look kinda puzzled and shrug while they're slowly backing away from the person who brought them such glorious news.
I don't know what else I can do for the latter group than to pity them; to the former group I can say that the film is very much like one would expect, which is to say, not a good film at all but still very lovely.
Sure, I'll give skeptics that the plot of the film makes no sense, that the comic relief is as painful as always (though at least lacking in racist stereotypes thanks to the total absence of non-white people - for a voodoo movie from the 40s, that's actually positive), that the young lead characters should be shot on sight, that William Beaudine's direction is as pedestrian as always. But what are these minor questions of quality compared to Bela doing his hypnotic shtick, the gloriously low-key and/or impoverished voodoo rituals (so cheap they couldn't even afford Hollywood voodoo drumming and had to go with John Carradine and Pat McKee performing their own drumming, very badly of course) or the mindbogglingly boring "finale"? Not much, as most people with discerning tastes (a much nicer way to say "I", don't you think?) would agree.
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