Nine Guests For A Crime (1977)

Original title: Nove ospiti per un delitto

Twenty years ago, a quartet of men with guns first shot a young man for the sin of sleeping with a woman of their family on the beach of their private island, then buried him alive. Might this become the reason for a few killings later on in the movie?

Now, rich patriarch Ubaldo (Arthur Kennedy), his three sons, their respective spouses and their mad aunt Elizabeth (Dana Ghia) go to the very same island for a nice summer holiday.

As this is a group of rich people in a giallo, everybody spends his or her time either bitching at one another, uttering melodramatic monologues, sleeping around with other people's spouses in the same room where one's own spouse sleeps, or just masturbating in an open air shower.

While these fun and games are going on, a mysterious person wearing black leather gloves - as mandated by giallo law - murders the sailors manning the family's yacht and drives it off somewhere. All that arguing and sleeping around is pretty distracting, so the family only realizes the absence of their transportation when family member Carla (Flavia Fabiani) drowns, her body never to be found, and they need to call the police.

And oh, somebody seems to have stolen the spark plugs of the cute red motorboat too.

Of course, Carla isn't the last family member to die. Soon enough, Ubaldo himself is dead of poisoning, and it's time for everybody to give up on the sleeping around and concentrate on calling each other a murderer. And, going by the continuing body count, one of the family members might very well be one.

Nine Guests is another entry in one of my very favourite giallo sub-genres, the Rich-Bastards-Get-Theirs film that's an unholy, sexed-up update of the Dark Old House genre (though the house in this particular case is - ironically - pretty modern and bright) and/or Agatha Christie, just with class politics that would have driven the conservative old writer into conniptions.

This particular sub-genre of the giallo seems to be made to strengthen my own classist prejudices as someone coming from sub-working class circumstances, demonstrating that yes, indeed, all rich people are murderous bastards and deserve to die, and then proceeds to show their deaths in great and lavish detail. This sort of film is to rich people what the slasher is to very old teenagers.

Although playing only to its audience's basest instincts is not something I really approve of in a movie, it's difficult to disagree with the lurid charms of Nine Guests. Directed by Ferdinando Baldi - who is a very hit-or-miss director for me - the film is so obviously having fun with its own trashiness that it's impossible for me to not have fun watching it, too.

There's dubious 70s interior architecture to gawk at, softcore sex of the rubbing kind to laugh at, and decadent evil rich people being hatefully decadent, evil and rich until they are killed off in various bloody and photogenic ways - what more could I ask of a movie?

On the negative side, the first half hour or so is actually a bit too loaded with the softcore sex, going from breast rubbing on a terrace to breast rubbing under the shower to breast rubbing in bed until the sceptical viewer might begin to think this movie experience is a bit lacking in diversity. However, that's only because Baldi needs to load all the mandatory nudity into his movie's first thirty minutes so that he doesn't need to take a break in the melodramatic arguments and the killings for more breast rubbing later on. Thanks to this genius idea as well as some suddenly pretty stylish direction, Nine Guests' final act even develops a solid feeling of suspense.

Sure, the identity of the killer is quite obvious, and the explanation for everything that's going on is more than just a bit silly, but Nine Guests For A Crime is consequent, a bit cynical and so well-clad in its chosen pop trash guise that I'd need to be a much grouchier person than I am to not overlook these minor problems and enjoy it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,ferdinando baldi

In short: Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Snake Girl (2005)

aka The Harlequin Girl (yeah, I don't know either)

Original title: Umezu Kazuo: Kyofu gekijo - Madara no shojo

After a teacher at her school was murdered by a student, the mother of teenager Yumiko (Arisa Nakamura), decides that it would be best to have Yumiko spend the next school holidays with relatives in the country to distract her from what happened.

Alas, when Yumiko arrives, things aren't as good as one would hope. Her uncle and her aunt don't even bother to pick her up at the train station, and once Yumiko has found her way to their home, they are acting distant and would really prefer her to be not there at all. The only ray of light for Yumiko is her cousin Kyoko (Ruriko Narumi), who is all sugary sweetness.

Kyoko explains the behaviour of her parents with a prophecy made by the local shaman about a snake bringing doom when a strange girl will come to town. In combination with quite a lot of snake-based superstition, that's the sort of thing bound to make relatives unfriendly.

Things become even tenser for Yumiko once Kyoko and she go to the shaman's house to find out what's actually up with all that snake business: Kyoko disappears to nowhere, while a snake woman attacks Yumiko. Let's hope her bite is infectious enough to spare us  the twenty minutes of mawkishness that follow.

When Noboru Iguchi, one of my favourite contemporary directors of Japanese weirdness, adapts the work of Kazuo Umezu, one of my favourite not quite as contemporary manga-ka, beautiful and strange things should result (and writer Chiaki Konaka is no slouch either). Instead, this episode of Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theatre is just really damn bad.

The short film's troubles are too numerous to go into them all, or else I'd spend a thousand annoyed words on writing up something that's not even an hour long while foaming at the mouth, so I'll only complain about the two most egregious ones.

Firstly, while I adore Iguchi's work, he's not at all the director to hire when you want anything even vaguely resembling subtlety. Iguchi is to subtlety what Ryuhei Kitamura is to the staging of dialogue scenes, so obviously letting him adapt a manga short that could only be saved from becoming cloyingly mawkish by the most subtle of directorial treatments leads directly to a catastrophic mess of kitsch, bad make-up effects and children saving other children from their hatred through the power of hugs and singing. Now, reading this, you might think - and I wouldn't blame you - that Iguchi's making fun of all the sugary sweetness, but if he does, he's showing it in a way absolutely identical to the thing he's making fun of.

The second factor of horrible badness, and just as bad as Iguchi's performance, is what goes for acting here. I'm perfectly willing to cut kid actors some slack, but what the two (and a half) lead actresses deliver here is the sort of thing I couldn't tolerate in a school play, much less in a supposedly professional (if cheap) film.

But I think I've kicked this particular dead pig enough already, so I'll just stop and go cry bitter tears of disappointment about the wasted opportunity Snake Girl presents.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,kazuo umezu,noboru iguchi,horror

Music Monday: Sons & Daughters Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,sons and daughters

The Devil's Rock (2011)

It's the night before D-Day. New Zealand commandos Ben Grogan (Craig Hall) and Joe Tane (Karlos Drinkwater) are sneaking onto a Channel Isle close to Guernsey to destroy a German artillery emplacement as part of a plan to distract the enemy military from the actual direction the invasion is going to come from. Or that's what the titles tell us.

It's pretty clear right from the start that Joe isn't long for this world. He talks about his girlfriend a lot, which is nearly as bad as the old "only one week until I retire" routine for a horror movie character. Grogan, for his part, doesn't have problems like this anymore, for he has lost his wife in a German air road on London, and has obviously not gotten over her death. He might even be a bit suicidal.

So it only comes as a mild surprise when Grogan decides to take a look at the source of the female screams coming from the bunker next to the guns, instead of just placing his explosives and be gone.

Inside bunker, something horrible must have happened: there are exceedingly dead German soldiers - most of them mutilated - everywhere. Soon enough, Tane meets the only survivor of the German troops, Colonel Meyer (Matthew Sunderland), who is only to happy to shoot him.

The good Colonel also manages to capture Grogan, but is distracted from his following torture efforts by something or someone he has shackled in another room whom he feeds with body parts. That's enough of a distraction for Grogan to turn the tables on his Nazi counterpart, but a little game of cat and mouse between two soldiers is the least of his and Meyer's problems.

Turns out that Meyer has done what half of all movie Nazis do, and has summoned a succubus from hell to become the Nazi's secret war-winning weapon, without taking into account how enthusiastic demons can get when it comes to their work. The gal from below likes to take on the form of her potential victims' loved ones, so she's going to spend most of the film as Grogan's dead wife Helena (Gina Varela), trying to seduce him into letting her loose.

Eventually, Grogan might have to team up with Meyer to send not-Helena back to hell. But is a convinced Nazi really a better partner than a demon?

Often, when special effects people turn to the director's chair, they tend to put a pretty heavy emphasis on the effects side of their movies - that's after all the stuff they know most about - and don't really show all that much interest in the acting or writing side of things.

Not so in the case of WETA Workshop's Paul Campion (whose fine short film Eel Girl made the rounds some time ago). While Campion's The Devil's Rock has his share of fine make-up effects, and delightfully gruesome looking dead bodies, it is not a film about these effects. In fact, it's not difficult to imagine the movie made under slightly different circumstances and just not containing any effects at all, instead trusting in the solid acting and the equally solid script to convey everything there is to say to its audience. I don't exactly think the effects are superfluous - and I sure as hell wouldn't want to miss the charming head-munching scene late in the movie - I just have the impression that Campion uses them to embellish a straightforward yet effective little story, and not the other way around.

"Straightforward yet effective" does not necessarily mean "original", of course, and all the elements Campion's film is made of are well-used in decades of comic, pulp and movie storytelling (the film itself nods at least in the direction of the Indiana Jones movies, and house favourite Hellboy), some might even say overused. I'm always a bit sceptical when a film goes into a place that has been so often visited as occult Nazi shenanigans, but watching The Devil's Rock, I found myself mostly delighted by the fact that even the hoariest chestnut can still be quite exciting when presented with enough conviction and an eye for the telling detail (even the German used is - for once in an English language film - mostly correct, even though the "Germans" are all clearly no native speakers of the language and have accents as horrible as mine when I'm speaking English).

There's a pleasant sense of (certainly also budget-friendly) minimalism about the film. It features one bunker, three main characters, lots of dead bodies, and the occurrences of a single night, and Campion isn't trying to give his film an "epic dimension" or something in this ruinous vein. The Devil's Rock is a product of classical low budget filmmaking methods of the good sort, where solid technical expertise (in acting, camerawork, editing, and so on) is used to make a film that knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: new zealand movies,reviews,horror,paul campion,craig hall,matthew sunderland,gina varela

Three Films Make A Post: Beyond the black mouth of the cursed cave lurk the unfleshed...

YellowBrickRoad (2010): This turned out to be a real exercise in frustration for me. Thematically and conceptually, this could and should be a major milestone in indie horror that goes for the truly weird instead of the usual generic stuff. In practice, the potential effect is ruined by directorial decisions that seem wrong-headed and self-sabotaging, bland photography, and acting that can go from decent to horrible in the span of a single scene (I dare you to watch the first character death without laughing).

Priest (2011): Speaking of exercises in frustration, Scott Stewart's manhwa-based Priest is even worse than YellowBrickRoad, because, given that Stewart does actually have a bit of experience in his job, and a budget high enough to finance an indie director's entire filmography at his disposal, there's just no excuse for how crap this turned out to be. You'd think there's not much that could be done to keep a vampire SF western from being at least a bit diverting, but Stewart and scriptwriter Cory Goodman know how to ruin a perfectly fine set-up: just ignore everything that might be entertaining or interesting to watch and only go for full-on bad action movie clichés and total lack of drama or believable human emotion in every single second. There's bathos and mumbling about faith and stuff, sure, but this is one of those films that believes that it's enough to go through the motions of the same tired old crap to produce an emotional reaction in one's audience.

The action scenes are boringly staged, the film's look designed to show as little of what looks like it might be rather inventive steam-punky production design as possible, and nobody ever turns on the fucking lights. Colour desaturation (the world, it turns out, is mildly brown) and disinterested acting (not even Karl Urban seems to make an effort) are obviously a given. So it's pretty much like Stewart's execrable Legion all over again.

Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938): This is the third and last of the three films about the British pulp detective where the character was played by actor George Curzon, and the only of the three I've seen. It's a British programmer by numbers - light on substance, with a bit too much "comic" relief but entertaining enough for what it is. There's also Tod Slaughter doing his usual sleazy mugging.

Only real point of interest is how bad a hero this incarnation of Blake is: he's the kind of guy who blubbers out confidential information in public, nearly burns evidence, bumbles and stumbles mindlessly into danger only to be saved by chance or a competent woman (Greta Gynt) he still goes on to patronize, and leaves the final hunt for the film's criminal mastermind to the police because he prefers to have dinner with his lady friend. Frankly, he's more than just a bit embarrassing. Was the literary Sexton Blake as bad? Is this conscious deconstruction? I certainly don't know.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,scott stewart,karl urban,george curzon,greta gynt,tod slaughter,horror,mystery,pulp,in short

On WTF: Asesinos de Otros Mundos (1971)

What's better than a movie featuring El Santo? A movie featuring El Santo, two evil masterminds, and one or more very adorable monsters made of…but you'll see.

Asesinos de Otros Mundos has all that, and so much more. Read me definitely not containing my excitement in my write-up on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,reviews,ruben galindo,el santo,juan gallardo,sasha montenegro,carlos agosti,lucha,horror,sf,other places

In short: Aquarius (1987)

aka StageFright

Original title: Deliria

Freshly escaped insane killer Irving Wallace (Clain Parker) secretly hitches a ride on the back seat of dancer Alicia's (Barbara Cupisti) car to the soundstage where the final rehearsals for a very 80s low-rent musical about a serial killer the woman dances in are taking place.

Irv doesn't hesitate, and kills the musical's costume designer in the appropriately gruesome manner. Alicia finds the body, and the police is called. The cops don't find the killer around the soundstage, so they take their leave again, only posting two deaf and stupid colleagues in front of the building in case, well, I don't know in case of what.

The musical's director Peter (David Brandon) sees a golden opportunity here, spontaneously renames the killer of his piece into Irving Wallace and locks his play's core cast in with him, letting the dancer who's going to die next hide away the key, so he can, well, I don't know what the key business is supposed to be about. Oh right, because the killer's in the building too, and we wouldn't have much of a movie when everybody could just leave when Irving begins to slaughter further dancers.

Aquarius is the first of a handful of pretty swell horror movies actor, assistant director (among others for Argento's Tenebre and Phenomena), and all-around Italian movie person Michele Soavi directed between 1987 and 1994.

The film is a perfect example for my pet theory that in Italian horror of the country's prime periods, dumb writing and horrendously convoluted and illogical scripting was not the slightest impediment to a film turning out pretty exciting. It's all a question of presenting the stupid as if it were as quotidian as a visit to the loo. You might think it's lazy writing, but when it works, this technique gives a movie all the aspects of a particularly bizarre dream.

Of course, just having a script of doubtful taste and logic (but with some great ideas on how to set up murder scenes) is not all that's needed to make a proper Italian horror movie of dream-like aspect. There's also the small but important point of having a director who's able to take all the ingredients in the script and make them sing with style. Fortunately, Soavi shows himself to be very great at being stylish. He takes half of the stuff he probably learned while working with Dario Argento, some Hitchcock-style suspense, the gory pay-offs of post-Friday-the-13th slasher movies, and applies some of the lessons he learned about the importance of what happens in the visual background of a scene from John Carpenter's original Halloween to it, and fastly makes you forget how dumb the whole script is. When Aquarius doesn't feel like a dream, all floating camera movements and nightmare edits, it's tight and exciting.

Seemingly, all the thinking that wasn't applied to the script went into the visual presentation, leaving the viewer - as is so often the case in Italian genre cinema - with a film where the style is the substance.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,horror,slasher,michele soavi,david brandon,barbara cupisti

Sweet Karma (2009)

Anna Balint (Patricia Stasiak) the sister of mute Karma (Shera Bechard) thinks the nice gangster-looking people she's doing business with are going to fly her from Russia to a nice cleaning job in Toronto. Instead, she disappears into the rather less nice world of the sex slavery trade.

Karma is more than just angry about her sister's fate, especially once a newspaper article about a girl fitting Anna's description that has been found dead in a park in Toronto more than just half convinces her that Anna is dead. Karma sets herself just one goal: find the people responsible for Anna's fate and kill them.

At first, she is quite successful at her goal. Karma kills the slavers' Russian contact, and makes her way to Canada, where she continues her minor killing spree. The vigilante's life becomes more difficult once Karma's enemies have realized that someone is targeting them and become more careful. There is quite a bit of unpleasantness in our heroine's future, and if not for a helpful undercover cop who must have flunked the lesson in police school where they talk about not enabling serial killings and arresting murderers, she might not be able to see her plans through.

Many of the qualities Andrew Thomas Hunt's revenge flick Sweet Karma possesses can best be described by listing the mistakes it doesn't make. Saying a film succeeds more through avoiding bad decisions than making good ones is the sort of thing bound to make a film sound less interesting than it actually is, but there you have it: Sweet Karma is not dumb, it is straightforwardly plotted, it does not drag its feet for most of its running time, it contains action sequences that are cleverly shot and edited around the abilities of its actors without getting grating, it doesn't wallow in its sleazier moments for sleaziness's sake. It is, in other words, a serious exploitation movie in the classic mold.

Generally, serious exploitation films of this type have become few and far between, because most filmmakers interested in the style are either working the ironic re/de-construction circuit or just don't seem to have the chops or the money to make a straight revenge flick like this. Not that Hunt seems to have had all that impressive a budget, but he's milking comparatively simple camera set-ups and seedy locations for what they can provide if you just let them, namely the sort of (probably only seemingly, but I wouldn't know) authentic mood that makes a film's plot automatically more believable.

The camera work goes into the same, hyper-realist direction. Hunt uses grain and lots of handheld camera to further the believability of the motel parking lot world his film takes place in. Since the film evokes the sense and mood of a particular place and time as nicely as it does, it keeps its audience (well, at least me) more willing to go the places it wants them to go, and to buy the elements of its plot that are less easy to buy, like the particularly helpful undercover cop (admittedly, the film does at least try to explain his helpfulness a little, which is as much as one can ask from this sort of thing), or a plot twist that hinges on people not using modern communication devices like letters or telephones.

Unlike a lot of contemporary low budget films, Sweet Karma also features solid acting throughout. One might speculate that there's a reason Shera Bechard's character is mute beyond a nod in the direction of Thriller: A Cruel Picture, but the actress does quite a convincing job working through facial expression and body language alone, so those speculations might be more based on the bad feeling one gets when one reads an actress is Hugh Hefner's girlfriend of the week. The rest of the actors did equally good jobs at convincing me that yes, these people might in fact be Russian slavers.

When it comes to exploitational values, Sweet Karma is one of the milder examples of films containing rape scenes and shot off penises. It's not that the film is all that squeamish about showing us these things, or getting in a bit of female nudity, but Hunt's direction doesn't feel mean-spirited; the film's sympathy seems to lie squarely with the women, and it would need a very firm belief that showing something in your film is the same as approving of it to put Sweet Karma down as misogynist.

So, it's pretty much a film like half of the non-weird exploitation movies of the 70s.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,revenge,crime,andrew thomas hunt,shera bechard

In short: Baby Blood (1990)

aka The Evil WIthin

Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou) doesn't have it easy. She's trapped in a relationship with an abusive circus owner (for whom she also works), and doesn't seem have much of an idea about how to get away from him besides throwing herself at random idiots, a technique that, not surprisingly, is not very helpful. The way Yanka checks her weight and looks at her belly suggests that she also believes that she's in the early stages of pregnancy from what goes as her "boyfriend".

A strange sort of rescue begins when the circus's newly bought leopard explodes and the primordial worm creature that lived inside of it slithers into Yanka's belly. The creature (soon to be voiced by director Alain Robak under the excellent nom de plum "Roger Placenta") motivates Yanka to just pack her suitcase and leave.

About a month later, our heroine lives in a run-down building in the worst part of a French city (when in doubt, it's Paris), seemingly going a bit feral and having the rather disturbing habit of having little chats with the thing inside of her - and it answers. The situation gets problematic again when circus boyfriend finds Yanka, and the thing convinces her (it's never getting clear how much of it is mind control, how much Yanka being used to just do what she's told, how much the girl losing her mind, and how much love for her "baby") to kill him. It really, really needs Yanka to drink blood to grow big and strong, you see.

Consequently, our friend from the circus isn't the last asshole (though Yanka is not that particular about her victims) who won't survive his contact with Yanka until this very special pregnancy will be through.

Baby Blood is quite a peculiar film. It's part black comedy, part semi-feminist (of the "all men are dicks" school) horror film about the horrors of pregnancy and the difficulties of a woman surviving the dickishness of men, part drily ironic look at the social mores of urban working class France. That's the sort of combination you don't see every day, and at times, director Alain Robak seems to have his difficulties to keep all of his film's disparate ideas and themes completely under control. Counterintuitively, Baby Blood's episodic narrative structure helps the director hold it together rather than hinders him, because it separates elements of the film that would just not work well when they were kept closer together in a tighter plot.

The film feels more like a loose conglomeration of situations Yanka and her "baby" stumble - or rather drift - into than your usual dramatic narrative, with all the pros and cons that approach to narrative entails.

Obviously, this turns Emmanuelle Escourrou's performance into Baby Blood's main engine - her character is, after all, the only one that is developed throughout the whole of the movie, and is on screen in nearly every scene. Escourrou is really the one who needs to sell us on that whole "creature inside my belly" idea for most of the film's running time, for while Alain Robak's vocoder-ed performance is pretty good (and/or funny), a movie needs a face and a body an audience can believe in. Escourrou is very much up to the task to not only sell a pretty outrageous concept, but also to keep Yanka believable as a human being surrounded by Robak's unpleasant shorthand caricatures of the rest of humanity. The actress's mixture of very French sexuality, painful vulnerability, and underplayed madness is a thing to behold, and truly what keeps Bad Blood from only being the expected series of bloody jokes.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,in short,horror,comedy,alain robak,emmanuelle escourrou

Music Monday: Pointless Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,amy lavere

Ero Kowai Kaidan Vol. 2 - Poltergeist (2010)

College student Maiko (Shelley Fujii) is run over by a car while crossing the street, which seems to be the sort of thing that happens when one is more interested in one's cellphone than in one's surroundings. She doesn't seem too badly hurt, but once she is released from hospital, the young woman begins to have the mandatory strange experiences.

The rather nice kick in the head has given Maiko the ability to see the ghosts spooking all around her. After a bit of panicking, our heroine has a little talk with the woman who paints her "past life picture", and is therefore an expert on all things spiritual. The woman's recommendation is for Maiko to just ignore the ghosts and continue living as before, but the spirited young woman decides to ignore such a boring proposition and help the ghosts solve their various problems. Just like on TV.

At first, things go well: a college friend is healed from his ghost-induced backaches and the killer of a family of three is apprehended with Maiko's help. Alas, things get a bit out of control once our heroine makes contact with a poltergeist who has been hanging around her all the time. The deader shows itself to be prone to sexual assaults and other highly unpleasant activities. After a little research, this behaviour fits perfectly to the ghost's back story, for he turns out to be a mass rapist and murderer who was lynched by angry villagers after a night of carnage. The ghost also happens to be what Maiko's psychic painter friend paints as the girl's earlier incarnation.

Now, it seems as if it were high time for an exorcism, but there are still two twist endings to come.

It might sound a bit strange given the usual cheapness and ugliness of many of his films, but to me, Poltergeist's director Naoyuki Tomomatsu is one of the true auteurs working in the gravitational fields of pinku, violent exploitation and the weird in Japan today.

Though Tomomatsu's films nearly always struggle visibly with the restrictions of their budgets, they also show a director obsessed with pondering his favourite philosophical questions in his movies, questions like the nature of free will and human identity, not caring that he's producing cheap filler material for low-level DVD labels.

Poltergeist clearly isn't one of Tomomatsu's more successful efforts, in part because the director doesn't really manage to unite the erotic (which, in this case, means "containing a bit more nudity than strictly necessary and having a very silly rough ghost sex scene") ghost story the series he's working in wants him to tell with the weird and slightly annoying double twist ending and his own philosophical concerns.

Instead, Tomomatsu has produced a film that jumps from cheap scares, to the shower, to POV-scenes of the heroine holding monologues of skewed philosophy into her cellphone, to squirt-y ghost sex scenes with the random abandon of a rather peculiar dream, until it tries to explain all its weird flaws away by actually explaining everything that happened as the dreams of a woman who has been lying in a coma for three years. Which certainly is something, though neither what Tomomatsu is going for, nor very good exploitation cinema.

The other reason - beside it not being all that much of a movie - why Poltergeist stays interesting but also unsatisfying is the abhorrent quality of the film's actors. There's a frightening awkwardness surrounding every single performance here (even the ghost actors share that trait), with nobody able to even emote the straightest feelings the least bit convincingly, and obviously even less able to cope with Tomomatsu's discussions of the construction of identity and the ghost hunter fame of Thomas Edison.

It's a bit of a shame, really, because I could see myself being a bit more excited about Poltergeist despite its flaws if it had been acted professionally.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,naoyuki tomomatsu,horror,exploitation,shelley fujii,reviews

Three Films Make A Post: From Embryo To Woman in 4 1/2 Weeks

One Million Yen Girl aka One Million Yen And The Nigamushi Woman (2008): Yuki Tanada's indie drama/comedy (you know the type) with the fantastic Yu Aoi is at its best when it's just calmly and with inconspicuous elegance watching its characters and letting the audience sort out for themselves what to think about what they see. That method kept me pretty happy for about ninety minutes of the two hour running time. Then, the director suddenly seems to remember that she actually wants to make a specific, moral point and calmly and inelegantly begins to just tell the audience what that point is and what they are supposed to think and feel about it in the most mawkish way imaginable.

It's not enough to ruin the film for me (especially since there's a well-meant attempt at breaking up the mood of moral pedantry again at the movie's end), but it drags a film that up to that point was silently brilliant into the realm of the merely good.

Gantz (2011): Somehow, director Shinsuke Sato takes a manga and anime that's so testosterone-driven, sexist and gory that I'm pretty sure it's not written by a human being but by a penis, surgically removes about half the sexism, all the nudity, a lot of the gore and two thirds of the dumbness, and turns it into a pretty entertaining, even clever(!) bit of big budget mainstream action/science fiction.

Sato keeps the story's ruthlessness, as well as the elements that can be read as critical of the juvenile power fantasies that are the basis of Gantz's violence, so that one might at times get the impression that he's just about to really mess with the genre he's working in.

It's still a very mainstream affair though, and so the more deconstructive side of the film has too make room for some J-drama inspired melodrama and rather unconvincing character development for much of the film's last act. I didn't mind, though, because the action's pretty awesome and Gantz still is much cleverer than it needs to be, which is more than you can expect from this sort of affair.

The Task (2010): A bunch of clichés takes part in a reality show where they have to do stupid tasks in a haunted prison. As you'd expect, there's more going on in the prison than the TV crew (who, by the way, are so hard up financially they're making a reality show without having security personnel or a paramedic in place) expected, and the ghost of the prison's warden (trademark: does not like to wear shirts though he really, really should) gets stabby. It all ends in the usual dumb double twist ending. Of course.

If you're burning to see a movie where a total absence of originality and interesting ideas meet overly broad acting and vague technical competence, this will be just the thing for you. Not bad enough to deserve at actual derision, The Task is horror cinema so mediocre it's not even exciting enough to bore properly. Watch this, watch nothing, watch anything - it's pretty much all the same.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,american movies,drama,comedy,sf,action,horror,in short,yuki tanada,yu aoi,shinsuke sato

On WTF: Contagion (1987)

If there's one thing I love, it's the Weird in all of its manifold manifestations.

Consequently, stumbling about a film like the Australian Contagion that begins like your typical backwoods slasher movie, but soon turns into something quite a bit more bizarre, is reason for happiness and a long, rambling column on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: australian movies,reviews,other places,horror,comedy,wtf,karl zwicky,john doyle,nicola bartlett,roy barrett

Nautical Guest Post: The Ghost Ship (1943)

Some time ago, the delightful Pauline of Pauline's Pirates & Privateers (the go-to blog for all things sea-faring and piratical), invited me to write a guest post for the upcoming anniversary of her blog.

I took a look at Mark Robson's The Ghost Ship for her, and my write-up is up on Pauline's blog today. Read it, and afterwards stay on Triple P and learn more about everything you need to know about things that aren't cult movies.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,other places,reviews,mark robson,val lewton,russell wade,richard dix,thriller,drama

Sur Le Seuil (2003)

aka Evil Words

Bestselling horror writer Thomas Roy (Patrick Huard) has cut off his own fingers and unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by jumping through a closed window afterwards (pro-tip: first open the window, then hack off your fingers).

He is given into the tender loving care of psychiatrist Dr. Paul Lacasse (Michel Cote) and his very pregnant colleague and friend Dr. Jeanne Marcoux (Catherine Florent). Initially, Roy is Jeanne's patient, but she's too much of a fan to take the lead in his case, so her mentor Paul takes the initiative.

The beginning of Roy's treatment isn't exactly promising. The writer is too withdrawn to even speak anymore, and even a psychiatrist wants his patients to talk from time to time. Fortunately, and strangely, a sleazy reporter named Charles Monette (Jean L'Italien) approaches Lacasse to give the doctor a scrapbook with newspaper articles covering over thirty minor catastrophes and murders he fished out of Roy's trash. Monette doesn't come right out and tell it at first, but he can place Roy as a helper or witness at the scenes of at least five of these accidents and deaths, and speculates that the writer was in fact at each and every one of them, probably for inspiration.

That sort of knowledge is pretty helpful for a psychiatrist, and after Lacasse has realized that all of these accidents and crimes have found their way into Roy's works, he develops the theory that his patient's breakdown is based on his feelings of guilt for using the violent deaths of others as the base of his writing.

Roy's editor and best friend tries to sell the psychiatrist on a somewhat different theory, though. He is convinced that Roy was somehow able to foresee the violent deaths, and wrote about them a short time before they happened. Unlike Jeanne, Lacasse is at first understandably reluctant to accept that theory, but - as it goes - rather strange things are happening around his patient that can hardly be explained otherwise, and once Roy has regained his ability to speak, he tells him the same thing. Various hints lead the psychiatrist to a horrible event surrounding Roy's birth, an event that just might repeat itself now, thirty-six years later.

Sur Le Seuil is a French Canadian cable TV production, and most of its flaws are well within the realm of the typical for these kinds of circumstances. Firstly, Eric Tessier's direction tends a bit to the bland side, and he's not always that great at evoking the required mood for his film through intelligent stylistic choices; I found the lack of imagination in the lighting of the core horror scenes especially disappointing - some better use of shadows and indirect light could have gone a long way to make these parts of the film more tense.

Secondly, the film's script is a bit too talky in places, spending a bit too much time with parts of the characterization that aren't going anywhere. I had - just to take one example - difficulty to understand why Lacasse's status as being in a divorce was supposed to matter. Sure, the film tells us that he's off-balance because of it, but Lacasse never truly acts that way. Diversions from the film's core ideas like this also drag the pacing down a bit, and take time that could have been put to better use to explore other things more, like the idea of an absolute, partly abstract evil - instead of a horned guy named Satan - that lies behind the rather horrible things that happen throughout the movie.

On the more positive side, I was quite surprised by how grim an ending French Canadian cable TV allows the film to have - there's no cheesy rescue of the innocent in the last second. Starting from a pretty silly - yet still fascinating - premise, this is the sort of film perfectly willing to then consequently go through with it, even when it leads in a direction you just don't go on television. I can always respect a film that's consequent, especially when it takes a not very original idea that might have been taken from any occult horror movie of the 70s and really thinks it through.

So, despite its clear and visible flaws, I found myself quite satisfied with Sur Le Seuil. I'm perfectly willing to ignore pacing problems and professionally bland direction in a film that takes itself as seriously as this one does, and while I see many ways in which the film could have been improved, I'm - this time around - okay with a movie that's as inoffensively solid as this one is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,eric tessier,michel cote,patrick huard,catherine florent,horror

In short: The Perfect Crime (1978)

Original title: Indagine su un delitto perfetto

After the head of large, multi-national corporation dies in a toy plane explosion, his potential successors are desperately shuffling to get themselves into a good position for the election for the next company president. The potential candidates are race driver Paul De Revere (Leonard Mann), Sir Arthur Dundee (Joseph Cotten) and Sir Harold Boyd (Adolfo Celi), and they are just all too willing to transform the expected round of metaphorical backstabbing into some actual backstabbing.

First to go is Paul. Somebody sabotages the breaks of his car, causing the guy to collide with a truck, drive off a cliff and burn to difficult to identify parts in his sports car - it's like three deaths for the price of one.

Sir Arthur for his part has a fantastic plan of how to get rid of Sir Harold: Arthur sics his own lover Polly (Gloria Guida) on his rival to poison him during sex. Let's just hope it'll happen fast enough so that no one will kill Arthur by frying his pacemaker with some sort of microwave gun.

Sir Harold has his own problems anyway. His wife Gloria (Janet Agren) is the spouse who actually owns parts of the company, and she has proof for some of his shadier dealings she uses as protection against any murder attempts, so he has to keep her happy. Which is easier said than done with a woman like Gloria who really likes to rub her husband's nose in his helplessness - and in her affairs with various young men, including Paul.

Scotland Yard's Superintendent Hawks (Anthony Steel) - who just happens to be a cousin of Paul's - has quite a job in front of him.

Giuseppe Rosati's The Perfect Crime belongs to the sub-genre of the Italian giallo that has its fun with portraying the oh-so-decadent lives of the rich and mean in a cross of an especially mean-spirited soap opera with an exploitationed-up landhouse mystery in Agatha Christie's style - though it has to be said that the Italians' class politics are much less abhorrent than Christie's ever were.

The Perfect Crime takes up a perfect middle ground in its chosen sub-genre. It's not as unpleasant and misanthropic as some of its brethren and seems more interested in playing up the fun factor. While all the characters are abhorrent in one way or the other, Rosati's film's not wallowing in all the details of their abhorrence as much as it could, so there may be a few scenes of rich people being satisfyingly mean to each other, a bit of nudity by Guida and Algren, but nothing that should shock anyone not writing for Christian movie review sites. Rosati puts a higher emphasis on the mystery content of his movie, and has visible fun with the convoluted construction of his doubly convoluted plot, inventing some perfectly silly murder methods of the type that don't make much sense but are fun to watch especially because they don't make sense.

Of course, it's all a very slight affair, only mildly stylish directed, and most definitely not the sort of film that'll leave one with any new or interesting insights into humanity nor even just the evils of the rich. But - also of course - there's nothing at all wrong with a movie about unpleasant people doing fun yet murderous things to each other for profit being slight, as long as it actually is fun. And fun, The Perfect Crime is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,giallo,giuseppe rosati,gloria guida,joseph cotten,adolfo celi,janet agren

Music Monday: Curtis Edition

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The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

One day, the world's population falls down dead wherever it stands (at least in that corner of the world we get to see in the movie), as if struck by a poisonous gas pumped out by unfriendly aliens.

A small group of survivors - manly man test pilot Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker), the gangster-ish tough guy Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price), his girlfriend Peggy (Virginia Field), alcoholic Edgar Otis (Thorley Walters), his lover Violet Courtland (Vanda Godsell), and later on the young couple of pregnant Lorna (Anna Palk) and her first pouting, then competent husband Mel (David Spenser) - all of whom have for some reason or the other not breathed the air when the end of the world was taking place, find themselves thrown together in a small, pretty English looking village.

As if it weren't already difficult enough for a group this badly mixed to keep together and themselves away from doing some sort of violence to each other, they are from time to time very politely attacked by slow-moving robots who look like cigars that have been pressed into space suits. Unimpressive as the machines' speed is, they at least have the ability to kill people with a mere touch. What's worse is that these robots - or their potential unseen masters - are able to revive the bodies of killed humanity to do their bidding zombie-style.

The survivors' only hope is the fact they are taking part in the sort of movie that can't end in anything other than optimism, and is willing to give them the easiest way out of their predicament you could possibly think of.

When Terence Fisher wasn't making films for Hammer, the director lend his immense talents to other production houses too. In the case of the beautifully titled The Earth Dies Screaming, Fisher was working for the company of Robert Lippert, an American who had moved his B movie production machine from the USA to the UK to save some bucks.

It's pretty obvious that Lippert was really into this not giving his films much of a budget thing, and so The Earth Dies suffers from quite a few problems that could have been avoided in an even only slightly better financed movie. As it stands, the end of the world takes place exclusively in a small British village, and while that's certainly a good idea to emphasise the characters' isolated position and helps explain why there are so few robots and zombies attacking them, there's something a bit too un-apocalyptic about an empty village street with only a few bodies lying around, and something much too polite and convenient about how the apocalypse turns out for the characters. This politeness in the face of the end of the world is quite typical for British apocalypses of the time (and of decades before, too), but for my tastes, it robs The Earth Dies of some of its potential punch, leaving its audience (or at least me) with the appearance of a film nearly ready to push things in horror/SF cinema truly forward.

There are some (obvious) parallels between some of the scenes here surrounding the not-zombies and the basic humanity under siege set-up, and Romero's later classic Night of the Living Dead, but if Romero (who may or may not have seen this film at all) had learned something from the earlier film, then it was to put more energy into the character work, and to stop pretending that everything's always going to be alright, even after the end of the world as we know it. At least the script is clever and consequent enough not to explain its monsters.

That doesn't mean Fisher's movie is bad. Though I would have wished for a bit more complexity in the film's characters, the cast gives solid performances throughout, keeping the stock character types they are working with pleasantly two-dimensional. The script - while missing out on taking that decisive step towards honesty - has its moments whenever it's called on to set up one of the film's few, yet effective scenes of suspense and terror. The film's monsters - both the silly but effective robots and the completely effective white-eyed zombies - are fine in concept and execution, though I suspect some may find it difficult to overlook the robots' glittery stiffness and won't be able to just go with it and enjoy the conceptual creepiness of their design.

Fisher was of course one hell of a director, even when he had to cope with budgets and shooting times that must have made his circumstances at Hammer look absolutely luxurious. Although his classic horror movies at the bigger studio were shot in colour, Fisher had years of experience in black and white work (including some British noirs and thrillers for Hammer), and had no problem going back to black and white for this one. This experience working in black and white helps the director create some wonderfully creepy effects through the use of stark shadows and the play of light that work especially well with the not-zombie attacks.

In the end, Lippert probably got more bang for his buck from his director than he wanted or could appreciate.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,sf,horror,terence fisher,willard parker,virginia field,dennis price

In short: The Neighbor Zombie (2009)

An HIV vaccine developed in India has a the unfortunate side effect of creating a zombie virus. Victims slowly or rapidly - depending on their emotional state - develop a rather animal-esque disposition and a hunger for human flesh.

The virus makes its way to South Korea, where the government soon enough declares martial law and orders the military to shoot the infected on sight. The film follows the development of the situation from the first infection to the discovery of a vaccine and the aftermath of the catastrophe in six episodes directed by four different directors (all of whom also have two or three other roles to play in the production, which hints at this not being a very well-funded film) that plotwise reach from the tale of a geek who is infected by something living in his walls (like two of the film's other parts directed by Oh Young-doo), to the tale of a woman (Lim Jeong-seon) slowly feeding parts of her own body to her zombiefied mother (as directed by Hong Young-geun) because she still is her mother - zombie or not, to some Resident Evil crap (as directed by Ryoo Hoon), to the tale of a man who can't come to grips with the things he did when he was a zombie and additionally has to cope with a girl who wants to kill him and a mad robber with a hate-on for people who weren't zombies (directed by Jang Youn-jung).

Tonally, most of the film is positioned at the place where melodrama, Korean black humour and quite a few clever ideas about the emotional impact of a zombie apocalypse on people meet. For most of the episodes, this works out better than one would expect - the directors are quite good at letting their film's tonal fluctuations look organic and believable; most importantly, they know when to stop joking.

And though not all the film's ideas about zombies are original, they're definitely on the more intelligent side of the zombie movie spectrum, showing more interest in what this sort of catastrophe would do with people than in zombie action clichés. I did especially appreciate the fact that there's a time after the catastrophe in the movie, an idea basically unexplored in the zombie film canon. The only exception to this rule of interest in people is Ryoo Hoon's episode, which plays out like a bad Resident Evil fan film (yup, it's worse than the actual Resident Evil movies), with mediocre martial arts, people who inject themselves with a zombie drug and some awkward stuff about a government conspiracy. Needless to say, this part of the film sticks out like a sore thumb, and needlessly drags the film down into what's most annoying about the zombie-film sub-genre.

Fortunately, the rest of the film is good enough for me to just ignore this faux pas and praise the film as a whole as a demonstration of independent filmmaking spirit, where having not much of a budget is a thing to work around, and not something carted out as an excuse to not even try to make a decent movie.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: south korean movies,in short,horror,comedy,zombies,oh young-doo,hong young-geun,ryoo hoon,jang youn-jung,lim jeong-seon

On WTF: Krysar (1986)

aka The Pied Piper of Hamlin

It's a sad fact about the state of affairs on this blog and my guest stints on WTF-Film that I've never mentioned a Czechoslovakian puppet animation film even in passing before.

Fortunately, Jiri Barta's Krysar changes that state of affairs by virtue of being too creepy to pass by. It also affords me an opportunity to go on a little rant about allegories.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: czechoslovakian movies,animation,fantasy,horror,jiri barta,reviews,other places

Three Films Make A Post: TODAY- The Pond! TOMORROW - The World!

Los Marcados (1971): A Ranchero that is heavily influenced by styles and theme of the Spaghetti Western, so expect lots of close-ups of the faces of ugly and sweaty people, more implied and more than implied nastiness than you can shake a stick at and peculiar uses for the camera's zoom objective. Plus some fascinating weirdness, latent homophobia, and heavy, melodramatic sighing into the camera.

Alas, the film's narrative style is so confused and unclear that it's pretty impossible to understand why people are sighing into the camera, and how they relate to the other people in the film. I'm somewhat impressed that director Alberto Mariscal makes what is basically a simple revenge plot this difficult to understand, I just wish he'd put the energy he uses for that attempt into quickening the improbably slow pace of a story in which not much is happening anyway. I suspect if a viewer can get into the film's groove, she might find something psychedelically relevant here. I couldn't.

Space Battleship Yamato (2010): It'll come as a surprise to nobody that, provided with a large budget and a horribly cliché-ridden script based on a much-loved yet horrible old anime show, the Japanese film industry will crap out the same sort of nonsense most high budget US movies try to torture their audiences with. So expect a bit of pew-pew, much bathos, a tear-jerking soundtrack, and a script that barely bothers to cohere because it prefers to spend most of his time to regurgitate ye olde clichés of military porn. Though it's pretty obvious that someone in charge of the production has seen at least a few episodes of Ronald Moore's Battlestar Galactica, it's just as obvious that said someone wasn't willing or able to actually apply any of the lessons he could have learned there to the movie at hand.

I could cope with the film's complete lack of ambition and applied intelligence better if the film were at least somewhat charming, but where other stupid movies might carry a sense of wonder or some visual imagination around, Yamato only has the vacuum of space.

Winter's Bone (2010): Thanks to Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, I don't have to end this on a bitter note, because what could have been a particularly arrogant and cynical piece of Oscar-baiting poverty porn is anything but. Granik does not look down on her characters, and she doesn't judge them or the world they live in in a simple way.

Most of the film's strengths lie in Granik's ability to give her story a quiet and unassuming intensity built out of the acting's unhurried subtlety and a visual style that finds beauty and clarity in compositions that seem much more spontaneous and natural than they actually are; there's an art in achieving an emotional effect by underplaying how much work you've put into achieving it, and Granik seems quite an expert at it. That her film is a perfect counterpoint to the self-important "I am big, deep art" gestures and kitsch-philosophical depth of stuff like The Fountain and Tree of Life does make Granik's approach to filmmaking like a holiday in a land where artists from time to time look away from their mirrors, too.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,japanese movies,american movies,western,sf,drama,alberto mariscal,debra granik,jennifer lawrence,john hawkes,in short

Spirit of Wonder: Miss China's Ring (1992)

Outside of a small coastal town in an England that seems to be stuck in an eternal, rather peaceful and un-classist version of late the late Victorian or early Edwardian era, a young Chinese woman everybody only calls Miss China is running an inn, being nice to the local children, and kicking asses with her superior kung fu when necessary, like a deviant Michael Ripper. China could be satisfied with this somewhat boring life, if not for her boarders, the mad scientist Professor Breckenridge and his assistant and junior inventor Jim.

Because science ain't cheap, and Breckenridge spends all his money on his inventions, the scientist is behind on his rent all the time, providing China with ample opportunity to kick his door in. Which seems financially counterproductive to me, but what do I know?

Jim's a slightly different case - China and he have one of those slowly developing romances going on that mostly consist of the possible lovers looking at each other longingly and not explicitly speaking up, a state of affairs that is somewhat ironic when one half of the potential couple is as decidedly lacking in shyness and reserve as China is when not concerned with her love life.

Breckenridge's newest invention is particularly spectacular. He has - or so he says - invented a way to travel to the moon. That's the sort of thing that should keep a man in rent money for a long time, one would think, but convincing people the professor has a direct line to the moon turns out to be surprisingly difficult even when he writes a happy birthday wish for a certain Chinese innkeeper on the moon's surface in large letters. At least, this particular invention enables Jim to show he's the kind of guy willing to give his beloved the moon. If she kicks it hard enough, that is.

Miss China's Ring is one of two OVAs based on the rather obscure - as far as my sources tell me, both in the mythical West and in Japan - manga series Spirit of Wonder by Kenji Tsuruta. It's one of those OVAs whose existence is a bit of a mystery: its source is after all not particularly successful, and its tone and style don't fit particularly well into any clichés about what real otaku like. The anime also doesn't fit very well into the bodies of work of its director Mitsuru Hongo (whose Outlaw Star is a perfectly fine time) or its screenwriter Michiru Shimada, both men who have spent most of their working lives producing mildly to quite successful anime of the "popular yet not exactly conceptually riveting" variety that just scream work for hire. It's not that Miss China's Ring is an incredible artistic statement, but it's something a bit different in filmographies that generally tend to the blandly commercial.

Visually, Miss China's Ring is nothing spectacular. It's dominated by muted pastel colours and character design that's not too generic - I suspect we have the manga source to thank for that - without anything in its designs that would be stunning, or spectacular. Which, come to think of it, seems to be the right way to go about this particular anime. This is, after all, not a story of high drama and ultra-violence (even Miss China's fights are on the quotidian side), but rather a soft steampunk tale that charms its viewers by treating the utterly fantastical and whimsical with the same smiling interest it shows for its characters emotional lives. That is, of course, a time-honoured way to treat the fantastical, yet not one that's used in the movies all that often, not even in anime. When I look at how well Miss China's Ring succeeds with this technique, I'm bound to say unfortunately.

How well exactly does Miss China's Ring succeed? I had a bright, dopey smile on my face for its whole final act, and if that's not recommendation enough for you, I can't by of any further help.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,anime,sf,steampunk,mitsuru hongo,michiru shimada,reviews

Spasms (1983)

Seven years ago, millionaire Jason Kincaid (Oliver Reed) and his brother mounted an expedition into the wilds (or something) of Micronesia to try and get behind the truth of a local legend about the door to hell opening there every seven years to let out a giant snake. The expedition cost the brother his life and left Kincaid with a telepathic connection to and an obsession with a possibly demonic, loud yet stealthy snake of quite variable size.

Now, seven years later, Kincaid has hired some poor idiots to catch his arch enemy and transport it to his mansion in the USA. Kincaid hopes having the thing in close proximity will somehow make it easier to sever the telepathic bond between him and the hellish animal (though the film also insinuates that this particularly dubious idea might actually be caused by the snake's malevolent telepathic influence). To help sever the unpleasant bond, Kincaid hires psychiatrist and ESP researcher Dr. Tom Brasilian (Peter Fonda, who is all relaxed, man).

Alas, evil never sleeps. A snake worshipping cult of satanists thinks Kincaid's snake is the devil himself, and has therefore hired the shady Crowley (Al Waxman) to steal it before it can even get into the millionaire's and Brasilian's hands. This being the sort of film that it is, it will come as no surprise to anyone that Crowley's attempt to steal Plissken the snake (combined with an attempt of Kincaid's niece to kill it that is only in the movie to make things superficially more complicated) only sets the animal/demon/whatever free so that it can finally begin its murder spree.

Will Kincaid and Brasilian be able to stop it before it eats itself through the whole population of a university town?

If this rather confused sounding plot synopsis (and believe me, I left out much that is superfluous and obviously only in the movie to bring it to feature length) has left you in any doubt, let me just state the obvious here first: even in the area of the animals running amok film, where my expectations of quality are especially low, Spasms is a horrible film any way you look at it. William Fruet's direction is at once bland and roughly jumpy, reminding me quite a bit of the worst parts of Mexican lucha cinema of the late 70s, where elderly directors working on material they don't care about with no budget to speak of were pushed into service by producers who frankly didn't care much either. The most obvious difference is the absence of masked wrestlers (Peter Fonda being not a very good Santo) and filler.

Instead of horrible night club scenes, Fruet (also at least co-responsible for the script) prefers to add as many ridiculous and cheesy flourishes right out of the 70s (quite an idea for a film made in 1983) as he can find, producing a film that adds the devil to a giant snake to devil worshippers to virally induced telepathy to Peter Fonda's funding difficulties until there's no room to develop any single element in the movie properly and everything turns into an incoherent mishmash of this, that, and Peter Fonda "charming" leading lady Kerrie Keane.

What I can't say about Spasms however is that it's boring. There's always way too much ridiculous nonsense going on for that problem ever to manifest. The horrible special effects alone, featuring a snake that very much looks like a toy somebody has painted over to look more threatening, should be enough to keep the easily entertained (like me) happy.

While every single element of the film is badly executed, the sheer mass of crap (which, Peter Fonda explains "charmingly", is an unladylike thing to say - in this movie's world, that's the sort of thing you say to a woman to get kissed, by the way) the film throws monkey-like at its audience is nearly automatically entertaining. After all, if you don't like blue snake-o-vision, you'll probably like the very polite satanist ritual, or Al Waxman nearly exploding from snake poison, or the totally subtle gratuitous (as if it ever were) nudity.

Plus, Oliver Reed does some perfectly, inappropriately intense scenery-chewing of the type only the truly great actors know to produce. If that's not enough for you, though, you'd best keep away from Spasms.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,horror,peter fonda,oliver reed,kerrie keane,al waxman

Music Monday: Monk Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,thelonious monk

No posts for a few days (again)

because even ancient evils get sick from time to time, it seems.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: me me me,maintenance

Three Films Make A Post: Many Motion Pictures Promise You Terror But This One Is Truly Frightening!

Proie aka Prey (2010): The male members of a family owning a rural chemical plant are trying to hunt down an overly aggressive boar, but eventually have to defend themselves against a whole pack of mutant killer boars. Of course, they are responsible for the boars' existence and of course tensions in the small group make their survival exceedingly more difficult than the boars alone could. Man is after all - and please repeat after me - the greatest monster of them all.

While I couldn't shake the feeling to have seen Antoine Blossier's film more than once before, I also felt decently entertained by it. This is, after all, a well-paced, well-acted, and well-shot film that manages to make good use of the old "you're mostly just hearing the monsters" trick. The only thing it truly lacks is an identity of its own.

 

Kishin Houkou Demonbane (2006): On paper, a mecha/fight anime sprinkled with terms taken from Lovecraft and Western magic(k)al traditions where the Al Azif is a Magical Girl sounds like a surefire win of the bizarre and silly to me. Alas, the copious use of Lovecraftian names is basically all this twelve-episode show has to offer. The rest is dire fanservice, horrible animation, characters more generic than the word "generic", and fight scenes as lazily animated as the producers could get away with. It's as if all the show's creative energy had flown into the use of Lovecraftian words, so that nothing was left for minor things like decent plotting, pacing, or even just a basic interest in entertaining one's audience beyond showing the panties of the Necronomicon to it. Which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write. Oh well.

 

Insidious (2010): As much as I sympathize with Saw director James Wan's and Saw writer Leigh Whannell's attempt at making a more subtle piece of ghost-oriented horror, I can hardly call the result of that attempt a successful film, for if there's one thing the pair seems to be unable to do, it's being subtle. Neither the attempts at building psychological tension nor the theoretically creepy scenes work, mostly because there's never any proper build-up to them, and even if there were, in the end, Insidious prefers to PLAY VERY LOUD MUSIC AND SHOUT at its audience instead of actually going through with that subtlety thing. If you think a guy suddenly jumping at you shouting "BOO!" is the height of horror, you'll have a heck of a time, though.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,japanese tv,horror,mecha,james wan,antoine blossier,in short

Music Monday: Rodeo Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,magnetic fields

Devil's Woman (1996)

In an attempt to escape a life of being brutalized by directors for no gain in fame, actress May (Cammy Choi) makes a (not exactly voluntary) pact with a mysterious black magician. Before she's allowed to become successful, though, the sorcerer magics a spider under her skin and uses her as his private magical assassin, first making her sex a doctor to death by dehydration through sperm loss, then having her kill a nurse with an evil kitty. It all has something to do with our magician's wish to find a proper body to reincarnate his wife in, or something of that sort. I think. These murders - and others the audience doesn't get to see - do come to the attention of the police.

Investigator in charge is "Baldhead" Lam Kwok-kong (inevitably for the hairless in Hong Kong, played by Elvis Tsui), who has his own troubles to begin with, for ever since a dead foetus spattered on him during a hostage situation that ended badly, Lam has visions of death that'll later come true. These visions will not be much of a help for our hero when the mysterious sorcerer decides to hinder the police by enchanting Lam with a permanent erection and thoughts of rape. Fortunately, Lam's partner Cheung Si-man (Ivy Leung) and her magically adept Granny (Helena Law) - coming complete with child ghost companions - are there to help him out.

So yes, as the random assortment and sheer amount of never dramatically developed stuff I just mentioned (and the amount of stuff I didn't mention - I've left out the part of the plot concerning a female police physician explaining Elvis's visions with his lack of a girlfriend "to lighten his pressure", just as an example) might hint at, this is very much your typical CATIII black magic movie, just with less puking of maggots and worms (only a spider was harmed during the production of this film, it seems), and less sex, nudity and rape than you'd expect. Don't worry, director Norman (or Otto) Chan Hok-Yan isn't mad enough to include no nudity at all in his sleazy horror movie, but he does show a certain degree of restraint in this respect - at least for a CATIII film. I also have to add that the film's definition of rape seems to include consensual sexual activity too - I honestly don't know what to make of that.

Anyhow, what Devil's Woman lacks in maggots and breasts, it tries to make up for in the expected confusing, shoddy plotting - clearly made up as the production went along - that not only pulls its focus randomly from one character to the next (I imagine depending on who of the cast members was available on a given day), but also keeps some important developments off-screen and prefers to have characters explain them to each other and the audience.

On the other hand, Chan uses the parts of the running time he frees up this way not only to tell a lot of dick and sperm jokes, and show Elvis Tsui making frightening "I have an erection" grimaces, but is also quite fond of filling them with the sort of insane shit one hopes for from this kind of movie: so there's a killer cat (doubled by a puppet when it comes to dying, surprisingly enough given the well-known Hong Kong disregard for animal rights) conquered by a microwave oven, a door to hell opening up in Elvis Tsuis's bed (that part might be realism and not insane shit, though), Elvis fighting his erection through the power of prayer (when Elvis Tsui prays, not only erections flee, but the light turns red, too, I've now learned), Elvis gaining the power to fight evil because his virginal partner gives him parts of her blood to drink, and so on, and so on.

Devil's Woman is not - I'm sure everyone still reading is now gasping with surprise - what you'd call a good movie, hell, some people wouldn't even call it a movie at all, but I found it difficult not to succumb to its threadbare charms, the film's tendency to just make up one disconnected piece of craziness after the other without a care for dramatic arcs, or filmic rhythms, or sense, or anything other of all that fancy film school stuff. It's even easier to fall for the film's dubious virtues because it feels quite good-natured, as if nobody involved hates all of humanity and wants it to die right this second, in what just might be a first for a CATIII film. Which might be a weird thing to say about a film where a dead foetus lands on the protagonist, but there you have it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,horror,wtf,norman chan hok-yan,elvis tsui,cammy choi,ivy leung

In short: Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theatre: Present (2005)

Original title: Umezu Kazuo: Kyofu gekijo - Purezento

It's Christmas all over Japan, and a merry band of friends decide to top off their Christmas celebrations with a stay in a particularly Christmas-themed hotel. Virginal and pure-hearted Yuko (Mai Takahashi) uses the opportunity to fall into bed with her love interest Ryosuke (Takamasa Suga), even though the hotel gives her horrifying flashbacks to a childhood nightmare. As the word "horror" in the title should make abundantly clear, this "having sex" stuff can't be tolerated, so once the couple's finished, a big fat gaijin Santa Claus (Randall Himes) appears. He's got spiky things with Christmas ornaments and he knows how to use them!

Those of his victims Santa doesn't dispatch at once, he drags into his torture cellar, where he also feeds brains to his reindeer. How will Yuko escape him, now that she'll never be able to be a proper final girl anymore? Will Ryosuke's tendency to vomit a lot help her?

But wait, there's more: turns out Yuko never was all that virginal and pure-hearted at all, and a smoker to boot, and just pretended to be one to drag Ryosuke into her bed! How fiendish! Then it turns out it was all a dream! Then it turns out the dream was a dream too! Then it turns out the dream inside the dream was a dream too! Or was it?

Far be it from me to give anyone reading this the impression that I'm intellectually inconsistent (though I am), but it's better to be intellectually inconsistent than to be intellectually dishonest, so I have to admit that my usual hatred for "it was all a dream" twist endings just didn't make an appearance while I was watching Present. Turns out you just need to make your dream-related twist endings so ridiculously complicated and bizarre that they themselves feel like a dream, and I'm neither going to be annoyed by them nor complain about them. In fact, the proper ridiculousness of Present's ending fits in so cosily with everything that came before it that I even have to admit that this might have been the only correct way to end this particular movie.

What did come before the ending was pretty much the intersection of the styles of the short film's two father's, loveable weirdo and mangaka genius Kazuo Umezu - on one of whose manga shorts this is based - and director of gorily bizarre movies Yudai Yamaguchi. Umezu's obsession with childhood fears and Yamaguchi's love for ridiculous (and sometimes awesome) rubbery gore fit together well, and both have a thing for the slightly hysterical and the bizarre, so this is a case where the sensibilities of a mangaka and a director truly are one - at least in the limits of this particular short film, where Umezu's more political and social interests don't really apply, and where Yamaguchi's love for the whacky cancels out the potentially annoying moral lesson of the story.

Present's short running time helps to keep Yamaguchi's less savoury tendencies (tendencies that only appeared in Yamaguchi's films after Meatball Machine) in check, so there's neither too little actual content to fill out the running time, nor the overwhelming feeling of having an overexcited thirteen year old shouting into one's ear for ninety minutes. This time, Yamaguchi's gets the balance between the crazy and the normal just right.

For my - admittedly peculiar - tastes, Presents pretty much has everything I could hope for in a low budget direct to DVD short: very Japanese gore, bizarre humour, merry eroticizing of Western culture, and a mood of violent dream-like strangeness.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,yudai yamaguchi,kazuo umezu,mai takahashi,horror

On WTF: Prikosnoveniye (1992)

aka (The) Contact

One of the true delights of this movie reviewing lark is that from time to time, you will stumble upon wonderful little films like this Russian pearl of philosophical low budget horror with a fairy tale influence you'd never have encountered otherwise.

As always, my write-up on WTF-Film will tell you more.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: russian movies,horror,reviews,other places,aleksandr zuyev,maryana poltevy,albert s. mkrtchyan