- 04:01 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 06:37 New on the free album train: Del the Funky Homosapien. .. tinyurl.com/ojs3jj
- 11:13 Oh, you just have to love Mr. Gaiman. "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch". bit.ly/xOFlE
- 11:59 RT @neilhimself Retweet this if you disagree w Twitter's decision to hide replies to ppl you don't follow. #fixreplies
- 17:33 New blog post: Road Killers (1998?): Serial criminal and biker Thomas Pain (Jonathan Haynes) is gu.. tinyurl.com/qe4qll
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Road Killers (1998?)
Serial criminal and biker Thomas Pain (Jonathan Haynes) is gunned down by a cop after a successful and peaceful, if armed, robbery and dies. Fortunately or unfortunately (it depends rather heavily on the strength of your wish for this film to end early), two overacting, bug-eyed "scientists" (deserved quotation marks are in the actual movie, charmingly) have found an olde booke of magick and its little bonus content, the Potion To Raise The Dead. The lab-coated duo somehow manage to acquire Pain's corpse to take their research to the next level after illegal animal experimentation.
Mister Pain revives rather too well, kills the two cackling madmen and makes off with book and potion. He hasn't changed a bit since he was alive, so he gets his old biker troupe together to do the things people who tattoo their names on their fists are wont to do.
They start out (their plan for world domination? their summer vacation?) by grabbing themselves a nice shack in the woods near the small Southern town of Plain Dealing, killing the owner while they are at it. Stage two of Pain's master plan consists of terrorizing Plain Dealing.
Too bad there's neither time nor budget for a lot of terrorizing, so Pain and his troupe barely have time to kill the sheriff (who never heard the one about avoiding to let the badguy with the gun get behind you) and abduct another man and sacrifice him to Satan while everyone swills the magic potion before a quickly built vigilante force of local yokels under the lead of a not-Ash named Matt (Carl Weatherly) shows them the true meaning of Southern hospitality (perfectly incorporated in Matt's helpful advice to "shoot first, ask questions later").
Too bad there's still half a movie to go. So, things being as magically and undead as they are, the bikers are dying quite easily, yet the poor mudered murdering dears return from the dead a few surprisingly decomposition-free weeks later to take vengeance.
Will the excitement never cease!?
Road Killers, directed by a certain Derek E. Welch, is quite a peculiar little movie. Too backyard-produced to even have an IMDB page, possibly meant as a comedy, not funny in the way it is supposed to be yet very funny indeed, without any make-up effects for its undead and featuring undead people who may be called zombies by the supposed good people of Plain Dealing, but who always only act, move and look like your usual hobby actor playing a biker, the film is full of the kind of little wonders of stupidity that make humanity such a loveable mess.
More than once while watching this, I had to ask myself questions like: "Is the dry, inflectionless drawl of our hero supposed too sound so flat? Is it so flat to make it funnier? Is it written so flat as not to overtax Weatherly's dubious acting abilities? Why do I even think about this thing so hard? Oh, look, a decapitation!".
The quality of its direction is about what one would expect. There's one or two Evil Dead inspired shots, much camera on groundlevel or crotchlevel business, no attempts to place any of this in any reality I know of, no comical timing to speak of etc etc.
Which does not mean that this isn't entertaining or funny. It is actually both, just not in the way it was meant to be entertaining or funny. Road Killers is one of the very exciting cases of a horror comedy where the true hilarity of the proceedings is based on every joke falling flat, becoming a very different kind of joke (and funny!) through its own ineptness. Truly,this must be the kind of paradox some Greek philosopher-mathematician would approve of, hopefully forgetting all about turtles in the process!
Daily Twitter Terror
- 06:37 New on the free album train: Del the Funky Homosapien. I approve. delthefunkyhomosapien.bandcamp.com/
- 06:40 Comics: still a danger for national security. bit.ly/16LRsr
- 07:50 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 06:56 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 05:50 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/qvqd5r
- 11:56 Just learned through Edmund McMillen in a comment thread on TIGsource that people who don't make games aren't allowed to criticize games
- 11:57 It's always too bad when people whose works you respect turn out to be assclowns.
- 13:46 New blog post: Wendigo (1978): Not to be confused with Larry Fessenden's Wendigo, but honestly, on.. tinyurl.com/q5xg7a
- 18:16 Wonderful: Yesasia's website calling El Santo "Alfredo E. Santo" & Blue Demon "Alfredo Blue Demon".
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Wendigo (1978)
Not to be confused with Larry Fessenden's Wendigo, but honestly, one couldn't.
A small party of people - photographer Eric, used car salesman/hunter Frank, Frank's girlfriend whose name I have already forgotten (and I'm most certainly not going to start the film up again to check, or - in fact - ever) go for an enjoyable time (a weekend? a week? a year?) in the (Canadian?) wilderness.
Their "Franco-Canadian" guide Defago and his Native Canadian assistant Billy are supposed to lead Eric and Frank to a moose (yes, exactly one), so that Eric can make a photo (yes, also exactly one) and sell it to a Big City magazine (look, I didn't write the script, so don't come complaining to me) and Frank can shoot it dead.
Of nearly equal interest to the city boys as the secretive and well hidden star of the animal kingdom, is the island with the old Indian graveyard which is situated in the area. It is possibly complete with hidden treasure (umm, jewelry made of bone?) and its own guardian spirit with a completely pointless backstory Defago will inform us in extensive, flashbacky detail about.
Too bad that the helicopter that brought the party into the wilderness crashes, leaving them and Mike-the-pilot stranded. Not that anyone seems even a bit concerned, don't worry, so everyone just goes about their business.
While I can promise you that nothing much will happen, the guardian spirit will still find a reason to get pissed off at the strangers. I think Frank's tendency to ramble on and on and on is to blame.
Oh boy, this is supposed to be an adaptation of Algernon Blackwood's classic story of the same title, but - apart from the character names - it very much isn't.
What the film instead is, is an especially dire example of the elusive creature we know as the late 70s local filmmaking/microbudget epic.
Even for one of those, Wendigo is exceptionally adept at boring its viewers to tears. The film's problem isn't that there's not much of import happening in it, its problem is that the not-happening does not happen in an interesting way.
Don't get me wrong, the 75 minutes of your life this steals won't be a total loss - for one, the film is very pleasant to have running in the background while one takes a nap, most probably thanks to the extensive amounts of completely inappropriate library music. Also commendable are some painful moments of something that is probably supposed to be sexual innuendo, an "Indian ritual" with following G-rated animal magnetism sex and lots and lots and lots of scenes of people talking, people walking and (for a change) people canoeing, all directed by a blindfolded man held at gunpoint by Canadian Mounties and their deaf wolves.
It is also quite a showcase for the different types of bad acting. There's Defago's "French cook or serial killer" accent, reminding me of nothing so much as of a certain skunk, combined with quite a few fine moments of eye-bugging; Mike's and Frank's complete lack of voice inflections or facial expressions, both men always droning on and on and on like underpaid telemarketing zombies; girlfriend's amusing interpretation of sexiness, which is what she's going for whenever she's not hysterical; and last but most certainly not least Eric's overacted star moose-photographer, as annoying as humanly possible for someone who isn't a mime.
It is in fact quite a shame that this ensemble isn't allowed to do a little more. Confronted with four or five scenes of plot, they'd probably be responsible for hours and hours of laughter.
As it stands, Wendigo isn't much of a film, even for someone with my somewhat lowered expectations, yet I know very well that the type of person who stumbles upon a film as obscure as this will watch it anyway, so it seems rather pointless to warn anyone away.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 06:56 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 05:50 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 09:09 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/pbb6sf
- 11:38 I probably repeat myself, but - about the new Bill Callahan album: that shit is beautiful.
- 12:17 "We need a real actor for this role!" - Obvious choice: The Rock.bit.ly/WXLAj
- 12:42 New blog post: Music Monday: Nearly Necrophiliac Edition: Technorati-Tags: music monday,music,smog tinyurl.com/oaqs44
Monday, May 11, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
- 05:50 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 09:09 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:53 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/p3o3kl
- 18:20 New blog post: Lovecraft's Dagon, as machinima: made with Lionhead's The Movies. via Grim Reviews .. tinyurl.com/p3m8jj
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
- 09:09 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:53 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 07:57 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/pt886k
- 09:54 I'm sure the film's going to be no good, but "I Ate His Face" is a brilliant title.
- 16:05 New blog post: In short: Forbidden World (1982): aka Mutant Top troubleshooting space soldiering s.. tinyurl.com/qr3zca
- 18:09 Tim Fite gives away his new album. 's good. timfite.com/
Saturday, May 9, 2009
In short: Forbidden World (1982)
aka Mutant
Top troubleshooting space soldiering stud Mike Colby (Jesse Vint) and his trusty battle robot sidekick Sam (Don Olivera) have to postpone their vacation from being awesome ass-kickers when they are sent to a small research facility on a planet very far from Earth.
The lab is kept as isolated as possible to avoid any problems with contaminated research specimens somehow getting out - a reasonable precaution seeing that the scientists of the facility work in the exciting and dangerous field of genetic research to produce a new food source for humanity, a field of inquiry that usually leads to the creation of killer sharks or hideous mutations.
Well, "hideous mutations" are something one should probably expect when one experiments with implanting some very special genetic material into a human womb for no discernible reason. The product of that fun little idea is (surprise!) rather dangerous, but when Colby and Sam arrive on the planet, the creature has built itself a nice little cocoon and is safely isolated in a lab.
It's just too bad that Colby is too occupied with getting into bed with future "let's communicate with the hideous monster that has eaten all of my friends" specialist Dr. Glaser (June Chadwick), and that the rest of the crew consists of utter morons. So, yes, the creature escapes the merry bunch of idiots and horndogs that populate the facility and starts to wreak budget-conscious havoc.
Forbidden World is one of the attempts of Roger Corman's New World Pictures to produce an Alien rip-off, just without much of a budget, little sense and a surprisingly high NBPM (naked breasts per minute) index.
If you can ignore or love the utter stupidity (this script was definitely not written by John Sayles, but, oh, "story by Jim Wynorski", which does explain the amount of naked flesh) of everyone and everything, the silliness of the way the monster was created or will be killed, the blatantly stolen ideas and director Alan Holzman's rather loose idea of what exactly a plot is supposed to be, Forbidden World is rather good fun.
On a technical level, it's well made (he said, ignoring the often visible microphone) - the camera work is fine, the editing is inventive if bizarre (or is it possible that someone in the cutting room found sex really this icky?), the music is godawful synthie blubbering (as I like it) and the sets and monster are filmed in a way that makes the best of very little.
It probably helps if the prospective viewer likes women with transparent high-heeled shoes and/or without clothes, or likes to watch an alien monster thingie die by puking, but I cautiously promise a reasonably fun 70 minutes.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 02:53 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 07:57 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 06:21 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/d5awap
- 15:57 New blog post: In short: Tamami - The Baby's Curse (2008): It's the early 60s. After years, the au.. tinyurl.com/o2ydow
- 18:43 Plants vs Zombies just broke my brain. I am seeing planting designs when I close my eyes.
- 18:46 "Ruby Throat" is a new KatieJane Garside project? Colour me excited!
- 18:50 Keanu Reeves in Doctor Jekyll & Mister Hyde. An actor would probably have been too cheap.
Friday, May 8, 2009
In short: Tamami - The Baby's Curse (2008)
It's the early 60s. After years, the authorities have finally found the parents of now teenaged Yoko (Nako Mizusawa), who had lost their baby daughter during the chaos of World War II.
Yoko's father is very happy to finally be able to take care of his daughter, alas the rest of the girl's new surroundings is not what one would call healthy: the family mansion is situated deep in the woods, surrounded by an electric fence to keep out the aggressive wild dogs of the area, the family's housekeeper has stepped right out of a Gothic romance tale and mum is insane and treats a teddy as her only child while she ignores Yoko. There is also something else living in the house, something with claws and a nasty character that really does not want the young girl there.
Well, this is certainly something. I'm just not sure what.
At least I am sure that Tamami is Battlefield Baseball and Meatball Machine director Yudai Yamaguchi's adaptation of a manga by house favorite Kazuo Umezu, but what exactly Yamaguchi tried to achieve with it, I am less than sure.
You see, the film can be divided into three stylistically highly divergent parts: the first one is an obvious homage to the Gothic horror film (I suspect mostly in its Italian incarnation), slightly held back by the less than perfect production design, yet still achieving a certain dream-like quality that's typical of the sub-genre.
Until the film quite suddenly shifts gears with the realization that the film's big bad isn't the expected baby ghost, but in fact a mutant killer baby muppet. This leads into part two, a Fulci-esque piece of gore horror with a dubious grasp on physics and logic, but quite a bit of enthusiastic inventiveness.
The third and final mood and tempo change isn't quite as grating as the first, since the film doesn't change its nature completely anymore, but only increases everything it did before into the crescendo of bug-fuck craziness the Yamaguchi/Umezu connection promised in the first place.
There's really nothing you could imagine happening in a film with such an ill-advisedly adorable looking killer baby muppet that is not somehow pressed into the last thirty minutes of this film. There goes the matrix-style killer baby fu! Here comes the killer baby flea jumping! Ahoy silly suspense scene with added dismemberment! Hello, exploding mansion!
Obviously, Tamami would be a much better film without its grating shifts in tone, and Yamaguchi should really try to make a slow and coherent film one of these days, yet I couldn't help but like this messy little thing in all of its Frankensteinian glory and absurdity. Just try to avoid going in expecting coherence, stop thinking about how much of the film is meant to be taken seriously and you're all set to enjoy the murderous adventures of Miss Piggy's jumping, giggling and killing maniacal flea child.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 07:57 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 06:21 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:22 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/cejwpp
- 10:43 RT @cmpriest Steam-powered vibrator, and other things I won't be using: bit.ly/tT1vD
- 10:54 Random House puts first of their Moorcock Elric re-issues on the net for free, tells no one. tinyurl.com/dyq3b9
- 13:28 New blog post: Fury in Marrakesh (1966): aka Death Pays In Dollars Reader, be warned, I'm going to.. tinyurl.com/dy62pg
- 18:33 You know, sometimes I like to be European bit.ly/vz0g7
- 19:10 Oh, a Flipper (band, not dolphin, I'm afraid) comeback bit.ly/kYTin
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Fury in Marrakesh (1966)
aka Death Pays In Dollars
Reader, be warned, I'm going to spoil the ending of the film somewhat fierce. I have to, trust me.
When a surviving Nazi, his very pulp-German henchwomen and much less German henchmen and his merry band of assorted international criminals finally find the tons of perfect counterfeit money Hitler had made to destabilize the Allied economy, but didn't get around to use anymore, it looks like they're going to be rich.
Too bad that Monique, one henchmen's girlfriend, makes off with a part of the money. One lasered to death henchman later, and the bad guys are chasing Monique through New York, where the woman's tendency to throw the fake money (which is supposed not to be identifiable as fake, yet still is identified as such) has already drawn the interest of the CIA.
All discrete and competent American agents are already in the field somewhere, so the section chief has no choice but to draft agent-in-training Bill Dixon (Stephen Forsyth, later of Hatchet for the Honeymoon fame) for the mission.
Seeing what happens during the rest of the film, they might as well not have bothered sending anyone. Proving his competence, Bill lets Monique be kidnapped by the baddies. He follows them to Marrakesh where a friendly British agent (Gianluigi Crescenzi) does most of the heavy lifting, while Dixon stumbles into traps and ogles women.
Fury in Marrakesh, directed by Luciano Martino (brother of the Sergio), should work excellently as a touchstone for a viewer's disposition towards Eurospy films in the special Italian style.
It has all the typical and necessary elements of its genre in place:
- The suave and highly unlikely protagonist who could as well not have shown up for all the good he does, but who is at least excellent with his fists as well as with the ladies
- Said ladies, all pretty, and either the protagonist's future bedmates (though Dixon isn't all that competent here, either) or evil sexy killing machines or both or...but I'll explain the last "or" later
- A plot that is only a thin excuse for a fun assortment of globe-trotting (New York! Marrakesh! The Swiss Alps!), chases, pulpy fistfights and explosions; a plot which in this case has some especially puzzling moments - why exactly does the disguised main bad guy save our hero's life?
- Directorial execution that is nothing if not enthusiastic and fast-paced, the Eurospy movie being one of the few B-movie genres that nearly never falls into the habit of talking anything to death. There are always women to ogle or men to hit!
- The spy gadget scene, silly, fun and usually providing our hero with a shooting cigarette lighter
- The dubious dubbing. Fury is an especially fun film in this regard, since it also exists in a version that dubs the "hero" (I am using the word loosely here) Bob Flemming, thereby incorporating it into a different series of films. What Dixon's/Flemming's initial name is, is anybody's guess.
- Moments of utterly nonsensical "what the fuck!?". I'd like to see another film beat the ending of Fury in that respect, when the pretty female Asian agent (Mitsouko), who has just helped Dixon out (=has done all the actual work) in the thrilling finale, suddenly pulls off her wig and turns out to be the best transvestite agent the CIA could possibly wish for, leaving Dixon with the sort of problem James Bond never had
If all that sounds fun to you (and golly, does it ever sound fun to me!), you'll probably love Fury in Marrakesh as much as any other Eurospy movie you are going to encounter in the future.
If it doesn't, I am sorry to say that, dear reader, there is not much hope for you.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 06:21 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:22 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 03:17 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/d3bgyj
- 11:32 New blog post: In short: Zero Woman: New Zero Woman: Zero Section (2004): Gosh, you gotta love the.. tinyurl.com/c5vbv5
- 12:31 Proof you are watching too many horror films: reading "The Art Box" as "The Axe Box".
- 19:29 Plants vs Zombies!
- 00:57 New blog post: Swineflu zombie song!: Technorati-Tags: music,zombies,the streets tinyurl.com/chcder
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
In short: Zero Woman: New Zero Woman: Zero Section (2004)
Gosh, you gotta love the titles of Japanese SODDTDVD films.
Rei (Maiko Tono) is the amnesiac top agent of the especially secretive Japanese Zero Section. Her top agent status isn't all that impressive anymore when one keeps in mind that she and her boss (who seems to reside inside a metal container - no secretary for you, sir!) also very likely are the only operatives this highly impressive organization possesses.
But woe! Rei's lone wolf ways are in danger when she is assigned young and innocently naive geek girl Sara from the Japanese version of the Center for Disease Control as a partner in her new case. A terrorist group has abducted a government scientist and samples of the highly lethal virus he was working on and are now threatening to let the virus loose on Tokyo, to cleanse the corrupt modern world and build a new and better society.
As if this wouldn't be enough trouble (or even the sort of case on would prioritize), Sara gets it in her head to find out more about her unwilling partner's lost past.
Of course, both plot lines will collide in the end.
Well, the 70s Zero Woman was a lot better (also, you know, played by Miki Sugimoto).
Nonetheless, I have seen much worse films than this. When you are venturing into the abyss that is contemporary Japanese direct to DVD action films without a budget, you have to be happy if you return at all and don't die from the special kind of boredom these films provide.You should also try not to stare into that abyss, of course, or Riki Takeuchi will stare back into you.
Many people don't seem to know it, but the truth about this kind of action film is simple - they usually don't contain much action to speak of (it's just too expensive to shoot), but instead concentrate on so-called drama and character, which mostly manifest through very badly played and not much better written dialogue sequences of often surprising length. The "talk is cheap" rule is in full effect here.
Of course there are exceptions to this. This film is half of one. There is still too much inane dialogue here to make the inexperienced viewer cringe, also a lot of bad acting, but there is a relatively satisfying amount of action here. Some of it is even quite inventive - even though it is shot and cut by someone who had a bad case of the shakes.
Cut twenty minutes, add a little of the sleaze the film promises but then proceeds not to deliver, give your actors a few acting lessons (or more than one take per scene) and you'd have a sprightly little film set in the strange world of cheapest movie Japan - a place without a population, yet full of empty warehouses and ruined buildings.
In this form, it's still a watchable little number, and most certainly the only movie I know in which the terrorist virus plot is only a ruse to manipulate mineral water company stocks (don't ask).
That's something, right?
Daily Twitter Terror
- 02:22 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 03:17 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:23 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/cu9eom
- 11:26 New blog post: X-Cross (2007): Country people are the same (maniacs, killers, cannibals) wherever .. tinyurl.com/dcgdcd
- 11:44 Damn, it's cold
- 14:50 Oh, so Bethesda is absolutely unable to publish DLC for Fallout 3 that doesn't give the buyer trouble,it seems. I know why I don't buy early
- 15:11 What's good when it's cold in May? Reading Cthulhu Mythos fiction of dubious quality!
- 18:19 Peter Hein: best German singer ever? Right now, I think so.
- 18:44 Ah, EA. Yesyesyes, renaming one of your studios to "Visceral Games" iis a brilliant idea. Personally, I'd have gone for "Manly Men Games".
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
X-Cross (2007)
Country people are the same (maniacs, killers, cannibals) wherever you go, it seems. Shiyori (Nao Matsushita), freshly seperated from her cheating bastard boyfriend, lets her best friend Aiko (Ami Suzuki) drag her to a small village and hot spring situated in a remote valley to help her forget about her man-troubles. The village is a very eerie place - difficult to reach, fog-enshrouded, with the horror movie mandatory spotty cell reception, guarded by crucified ragdolls (or is it possible that they are corpses?) and inhabited by some prime examples of the terrors of inbreeding.
When Shiyori comes home to her hotel hut alone after an argument with Aiko, she finds a ringing cellphone hidden away in a cupboard. On the line is a man who claims to be an ethnologist called Mananabe. The phone is supposed to belong to his sister and he is trying to warn her of the terrible danger she is in. The little village, he claims, is home to a rather unpleasant primitive cult that developed out of the tendency of the local lumberjacks to cut off their wives' left legs to prevent them from running away from their loving homes (cheaper than being nice to your wife, I suppose), and soon grew into a real leg mutilation mania, with the male villagers hamstringing themselves and the whole community regularly sacrifing female strangers (by cutting off their legs, naturally) to their God. Mananabe claims that this is still going on today, has probably already happened to his sister, and tries to persuade Shiyori to flee and meet him at one of the tunnels leading out of the valley.
The young woman is of course sceptical, but the horde of screaming villagers wielding sharp farming implements that very soon descends upon her hut gives the stranger's wild story a certain amount of believability.
The leg loving villagers are not the only mad people running through the valley, though, and soon Shiyori has to ask herself whom she will trust - the total stranger on the phone who tells her to trust no one, or her good friend Aiko who obviously isn't telling her all she knows about the situation.
If X-Cross' director Kenta Fukasaku continues in this direction, he'll soon end up making films as brilliant as the one's his father Kinji made. At least, there's a distinct increase in the quality of his films. Fukasaku started his career with the atrocious Battle Royale 2, went on to make the mostly forgettable, but at least slightly better Yo-Yo Girl Cop and now has grown enough artistically to make the actually quite accomplished X-Cross. (I know, I'm leaving out Under the Same Moon here, but how good can a film with Edison Chen be?).
Especially encouraging is the fact that Fukasaku has left the terrible pacing the marred his earlier films behind. X-Cross is mostly an enthusiastically speedy romp, starting to get fast quite early and never slowing down anymore once it has found its speed. Some of the film's tempo is based on the (perhaps slightly gimmicky but still) clever conceit of telling the story of its characters through the things that happen to their cellphones, and not necessarily in chronological order of events at that. Fukasaku turns out to be quite brilliant at playing with the structure of his movie this way, so much so that the expected series of twists and turns the story makes when it races in the direction of the grand finale didn't even begin to annoy me.
Of course, it would be quite difficult to be annoyed by a film that has such a gleeful sense of absurdity as this one. A personal favorite among many charming moments for me is an over the top fight between one of the main characters - armed with a chainsaw - and a woman swinging the biggest big damn pair of scissors this side of the Clock Tower video games, a fight that turns out to be exactly the kind of action sequence a film needs to find a place in my heart beside other proponents of gleeful absurdity like The Machine Girl.
Aesthetically, X-Cross is without a doubt indebted to the b-class of Japanese survival horror games. Besides the Clock Towers, I felt myself heavily reminded of Haunting Ground's character design, coupled with a hint of Forbidden Siren. That's absolutely no bad company to be in and also keeps the film away from the (perfectly fine with me, as you probably know by now) mainstream of Japanese horror movies of the last ten years, providing it with, well, not originality, but a less well-worn field of reference.
And as if all this wasn't endearing enough, the film also has quite a bit of fun with the deconstruction of gender and character types, all presented with a certain nonchalance, glee, and a lovely sense of fun.
It's just a wonderfully silly, at times even goofy, B-movie with some real cleverness at its heart.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 03:17 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:23 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:23 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/dkllby
- 11:21 New blog post: Music Monday: Typical Edition: Technorati-Tags: music monday,music,the slits tinyurl.com/dfuom7
Monday, May 4, 2009
Daily Twitter Terror
- 02:23 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 02:23 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 04:19 New blog pos.. tinyurl.com/dfulau
- 11:52 Again, dear UK, 1984 is not a Utopian novel! tinyurl.com/d8vpvr
- 14:29 New blog post: In short: Blood: The Last Vampire (2000): Oh, look, vampires are real (again)! Fort.. tinyurl.com/c33tog
- 18:07 Hm, Space Siege. Why is your download size 3,6 GB if your install is only 2GB? Anti-compression?Also, why do you suck?
- 20:36 New blog post: A song of the living dead: via Nerdcore Technorati-Tags: zombies. music tinyurl.com/ddkn2g
Sunday, May 3, 2009
In short: Blood: The Last Vampire (2000)
Oh, look, vampires are real (again)! Fortunately, this time around, the vampires are of the more bestial sort with no glitter or glamour to speak of (no offense to friends of glittering vampires, of course).
In 1966, a series of vampire related deaths strikes Japan. The deaths all seem to occur around a US army base with the base high school as the center of the rather unpleasant events.
The secret vampire hunting arm of a nameless American secret service has the right agent for the job. The agent's name is Saya, herself a "pure" vampire (no explanation of this, her motivations or anything will be forthcoming, don't worry), who looks like a teenager, wears the necessary (though only for her and no one else at the school) Japanese schoolgirl outfit with a sneer and is more than adept at cutting those vampire mutants into little pieces.
Which she proceeds to do.
Blood is one of the more puzzling specimens of OVA movies. Obviously not too cheap and made by talented people, it is content with being exactly what its plot makes it look like - a short and gory action horror piece with a little winking fan service and some nods in the direction of a potentially interesting backstory without any real interest in things like depth, originality or characterization.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing; if anime of this type has enough verve, energy and style I have no problems with just going with the flow and having a little silly fun. Luckily, verve, energy and style are words which fittingly describe Blood.
Let's just hope I'll be able to say the same about the upcoming live-action remake. We all know by now how much I love remakes.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 02:23 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 04:19 New blog post: Daily Twitter Terror: 09:55 Thing I don'.. tinyurl.com/c6ud6k
- 17:45 Why oh why do half the SF/F/Horror webzines lack an RSS feed? Do they want to be forgotten and ignored?
- 17:49 Tried to get through "Chandni Chowk to China".Unfortunately, my wish to punch Akshay Kumar in his mugging face grew too strong.
- 17:54 Hm, should I head straight for the "My Bloody Valentine" remake to ruin my Saturday completely?
- 17:57 Oh, great, zombie spiders. That's what the world was missing. tinyurl.com/d3f2c6
- 19:51 The swine flu zombie strain attacks bouncewith.me.uk/europe/8027043.htm
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Saturday, May 2, 2009
Casting Call of Cthulhu
A perfect antidote against remake-induced phases of homicidal anger is this wonderful, funny short film:
Technorati-Tags: lovecraft,american movies
In short: My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)
This one's really not worth the effort of writing a plot synopsis or wasting too many words on. Let's just say the plot ignores everything subtle or interesting about the original and replaces it with the usual slasher by numbers fare with an additional coat of utter vapidness.
Seen as a tits and gore transmission utility, the film could be serviceable. Too bad it is painfully stupid and over the top in a most annoying way - so much so that I had my difficulties to make up my mind if the whole thing was just written by a bunch of morons or is also supposed to be a decidedly unfunny spoof of the slasher genre (and still written by a bunch of morons).
It's also less than helpful for having any productive (that is, not containing fantasies of violence against the director, writers and producers) thoughts about this abomination that the combination of mediocre to terrible acting, crap direction, sub-TV show look (what's composition and framing?) and the tedious and badly written melodrama which fills the scenes between the kills drains every possible bit of tension or interest from the proceedings.
Which of course leads me to the same question just about every horror remake in the last couple of years led me to - why the hell am I wasting my time on this shitty little excuse for a film when I could watch the actually worthwhile original?
Daily Twitter Terror
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- 22:20 New blog post: Spider Baby (1968): A terrifyingly square-jawed (and dumb as the piece of rock his .. tinyurl.com/c42r5l
Friday, May 1, 2009
Spider Baby (1968)
A terrifyingly square-jawed (and dumb as the piece of rock his chin resembles) man called Peter (Quinn Redeker) tells us a little story about that strange little illness known as Merrye's Disease.
It's quite a fittingly named disease, seeing that only members of the Merrye family seem to suffer from it. At some point in their teenage years, all Merryes start to regress mentally and also develop some unpleasant signs of murderous insanity. In the end, a Merrye even falls back into a pre-human state of existence (that is, starts to resemble Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy).
The last presentable members of the family (I suppose procreation by something other than accident can get a little problematic when you are never mentally adult), Virginia (Jill Banner), Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Ralph (Sid Haig) live in the rather musty old family home, protected and fed by their trusty old family chauffeur Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.).
The old man is also taking care of the less human family members, a small assortment of aunts and uncles hidden away in the cellar.
Alas, Bruno is but a single man - not a very sane man himself, at that -, and when he returns from an excursion into the city, he finds himself confronted with the dead body of the postman (played by our old nemesis Mantan Moreland), who did not survive the charming little game of "spider" that Virginia likes to play so very much.
Even worse than the corpse though is the letter the postman was delivering - some greedy relatives are planning on taking the "children" under their wings and steal all their money. Oh joy, they're coming to visit today.
And what charming people they are. There's Emily (Carol Ohmart), whose love for dancing in front of mirrors while dressed in her undies will prove quite problematic for her future survival, our narrator (and therefore hero of the piece, so hurray for him) Peter - as I said, dumb as a rock, the hitler-mustachioed lawyer Schlocker (Karl Schanzer) and his secretary Ann (Mary Mitchel), the future love of Peter's life, who is of equally dubious intelligence.
Bruno and his charges are bravely trying to put on a sane face, but Emily's insistence on first having dinner at the house and then staying the night combined with Schlocker's unhealthy curiosity lead them down a path, or rather a corridor, that ends like all corridors in old dark houses end - in a room where someone is very enthusiastic about playing "spider".
Spider Baby's director and writer Jack Hill is one of my heroes of low budget filmmaking in the 60s and 70s. The way in which he was always on the look-out for new methods of making his films as sleazy as possible, while at the same time instilling them with a sense of outrageous fun as well as a very healthy dose of satire alone would be enough to make most of his films (The Big Doll House! Coffy! Foxy Brown! Switchblade Sisters! etc.) mandatory watching in my book. But Hill was also a more than competent director, not of the sort that has much use for obvious signs of flashiness, yet exceedingly effective at making well-paced and clever b-films that for once tend to keep the promises their one-sheets make.
Underneath the wonderful and sometimes delirious strangeness of Hill's movies, there was always something else going on, be it that Hill made a quite cynical commentary on the genre of the revenge flick inside of a revenge flick or that he used a cheerleader exploitationer as a declaration of love and hate for women's lib at once.
Spider Baby isn't any different. Here, Hill drags the corpse of the old dark house mystery/horror movies from the 30s and 40s from its grave and takes a good look at what can be done with it in the late 60s. While he's doing that, he might just as well add the sexuality to it the older films were never able (or allowed to) talk about.
And, while he's at it, he makes parts of the sexuality quite uncomfortable by ascribing it to young women with the minds of children, basically poking around in the closet with the sign "Children and sexuality! Don't open!" without running the risk of not being able to sell his film to an audience.
Brilliantly, Hill does this trick while still making a sleazy, well-paced, well filmed, competently acted and very weird black comedy.
Daily Twitter Terror
- 09:55 Thing I don't get: writer complaining in a video game review that the game follows video game logic.What does he expect?
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