Past Misdeeds: Beyond Darkness (1990)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Particularly innocently faithful priest Peter (Gene LeBrock) and his family – wife Annie (Barbara Bingham) and little kids Martin (Troll 2’s Michael Stephenson) and Carole (Theresa F. Walker) move into the wrong house, or really, are maneuvered into moving into that place by his mentor, one Reverend Jonathan (Stephen Brown), I think. Please keep in mind this movie was written by Claudio Fragasso, so half of the logical connections have to be provided by the viewer or the film would go from “makes no goddamn sense at all” to the noise a brain makes when it dribbles out of a helpless cult film blogger’s ears.

Anyhow, it’s really not a good place for a family to stay, for the house is haunted by a bunch of women in black shrouds – of course once burned for witchcraft they may or may not have committed – who like to tear holes in the fabric of reality, produce dry ice fog of astonishing density, and kidnap children for sport. These charming dead persons are lead by a dead child murderess (Mary Coulson, I believe) who not just murdered her little victims but ate their souls to be able to bring them down to her favourite demon’s part of wherever he dwells.

It was an encounter with that lovely woman right before she was executed on the electric chair that broke down the faith of Peter’s old seminary friend – who unlike Peter became a Catholic priest – George (David Brandon ably assisted by buckets full of sweat). Ever since, George has sort of dropped out of the priesthood, has sort of become an alcoholic, is looking for knowledge Man Was Not Meant to Know. and may or may not be possessed by the demon the murderess prayed to, depending on the mood of Fragasso when he wrote any given scene. In any case, when the shrouded ladies get rude, it’s George who helps Peter in various ways, until the whole thing fake-climaxes in a hilarious exorcism and other assorted nonsense.

As we all know, when Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso ended their partnership, Mattei took with him whatever actual sense there was between the two (and given Mattei’s later output, that statement is rather frightening), while Fragasso went on to transfer full control to his Id and gave us Troll 2. Shot in the same year as that epochal achievement, and featuring the same non-acting child actor in Michael Stephenson, Beyond Darkness will probably always be “the normal one” in comparison, seeing as it features a vaguely understandable plot, contains only half a dozen or so scenes that might traumatise the unprepared by their sheer fucking weirdness, and even tells a – if completely unrelatable and absurdly structured – story about faith lost and found and glowing holes in the wall that lead to another dimension belonging to demons none of the three priests in the film calls Hell.

Of course, compared with Troll 2, most films are “the normal one”, and you can’t really say Fragasso didn’t apply most of his powers of coming up with sheer bizarre bullshit dressed up in improbable dialogue while setting his camera at an angle when shooting Beyond Darkness. This is after all still a film that has its perhaps sometimes possessed doubting priest suddenly popping up at his old mentor’s church to sweat profusely and jam a bit on the organ while both men babble nonsense about demons a theology doctorate wouldn’t help one understand, a film where there’s a scene shot via flying knife cam, and whose kidnap, rescue and possession plot is told in the most convoluted way possible. But hey, I’m pretty sure the good guys win thanks to mentor guy shouting at a demon really loudly while staying home in his church until a Satanic bible burns and mentor guy himself dies from a heart attack (see, you can hear Fragasso think, my film’s just like The Exorcist); which is pretty good, because without that, Peter and Annie would have sacrificed their own son to the demons – and only Peter has the excuse of being possessed at the time.

This kind of nonsense is obviously only the tip of the iceberg of nonsense and non-sequiturs Beyond Darkness barfs into our eyes, ears and brains. I might be mixing my metaphors a little here but this is only appropriate when talking about a Fragasso film. In fact, it’s more or less the same approach Beyond Darkness is applying to storytelling. Visually, Fragasso is all about all kinds of crooked camera angles that are probably meant to be stylish and creepy but most of the time seem tacky and weird, incredible amounts of dry ice fog, glowing holes in walls (with dry ice fog coming through them, obviously), dry ice fog,  close-ups of eyes, dry ice fog, and more dry ice fog. Well, that and sweat, because all of the actors seem permanently drenched in a way that might – like a few other elements here – suggest some sort of misguided homage to Lucio Fulci, with David Brandon so caught up in the hot sweating action it’s a wonder nobody drowned in his fluids.

From time to time, between the nonsensical, the inane, and the bizarre, Fragasso also hits on an image that’s honestly creepy, like the shrouded (or really, wearing something that suggests he has seen The Woman in Black and/or photos of Victorian mourning garb) women stretching their hands through walls, doors, etc, again demonstrating that you don’t need to watch a “good” movie to see something shudder-worthy.


So, how much did I love this wondrous abomination of a film? Well, I wouldn’t want to marry it right now, but I’m interested in a long-term relationship full of speeches about demons, tasteless child ghosts, and some good old dimensional rifts in the walls.

Past Misdeeds: Born to Fight (1989)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


TV reporter Maryline Kane (Mary Stavin) walks into a bar in Vietnam to hire war hero Sam Wood (Brent Huff) to relive his escape from a Vietnamese prison camp for the camera. At first, Brent isn't too happy with the idea, but once Maryline has offered him enough money, he decides to take her up on her offer. After a nice little boat trip, Maryline, her two-men camera crew and Sam just happen to witness the execution of an American prisoner escaping from a camp full of prisoners of war. Turns out Maryline knows all about the war prisoner problem in the area, and actually wants Sam's help in rescuing her father, General Weber (John Van Dreelen), from the prison camp, but thought that whole interview business and going to the place unarmed would make Sam more willing to help. Or dead. Or something.

Anyway, given Sam's unarmed and unwilling status, the couple (and you know they'll be one in this sort of movie, because they never agree about anything and hate each other's guts) has to flee first. There's also some stuff about Romano Puppo playing another guy who is supposed to buy the general's way to freedom, but would prefer Kurt (Werner Pochath), the boss of the prison camp who will also turn out to be Sam's arch enemy, to kill the general so they can share the money. Which makes as much sense as Maryline hiring Sam to free her father without telling Sam about it, I guess. Plus, further complications because Sam doesn't like Weber. Let's just say that shooting and exploding huts - many of the latter without a good reason to explode - will result.

After half an hour or so, I just gave up on trying to make sense of the random stuff that makes up Born to Fight's supposed plot. After all, it is a Bruno Mattei film written by Claudio Fragasso, and where these two walk, no sense ever follows. As expected, the movie becomes a much nicer piece of entertainment once one decides to just giggle about its lack of coherence and fling poo at the screen.

Of course, if you're like me and adore the special charms Mattei and Fragasso so often brought to their films, you will be delighted to hear that Born to Fight is an eminently worthy entry into the gentlemen's respective filmographies, full of the desperate idiocy we have come to love. This is, after all, a film whose hero (and I use that term loosely) is first encountered showing off his ability to smoke a cigarillo and snore at the same time, likes to spice his drink with cobra venom and has a catchphrase that fluctuates between "It CAN be done. It can be done." and "It CAN be done. Can do.", or various combinations thereof, even when nobody ever questions the possibility of things being done. I should also add that Wood's catchphrase is - improbably - still better than his other one-liners. But as Werner Pochath's character explains, Sam was "BORN TO FIGHT", to which I might very well add "and not to talk".

This - and my inability to make sense of the plot - should make quite clear that Fragasso was in top form in the twenty minutes it took him to write the script; seldom has a scriptwriter's complete divorce from reality been more adorable.

It looks like Bruno Mattei didn't want to be left out when his friend and partner was having so much fun showing off his talents (or "talents"), and so decided that what Fragasso's script really needed to shine was the extensive application of slow motion to each and every scene. People not familiar with Mattei's genius might think the heavy use of slow motion in an action movie like this to be nothing special, or even stylistically justified and possibly cool. Well, some uses of slow motion are; Mattei however always knows how to use a perfectly normal part of the filmic language like it and twist and turn and overuse it in the most improbable ways until it becomes quite hilarious and grotesque.

The high point of Mattei's very special use of slow motion is surely the film's "emotional" finale, when Sam kills Kurt, who was responsible for the death of all of his prison camp buddies years ago. It begins with some hot slow-motion reloading action. Pochath blubbers (in slow motion, oh yes) "Nooooo!". Sam shoots in slow motion, once. Pochath overacts being shot in slow motion and does some excellent slow-motion whimpering. Then - because what could be more heart-wrenching? - Sam shouts the name of one of his dead friends, still in slow motion, sounding like an elk during rutting season (or so I imagine them to sound). Sam shoots again - still shaking muscles and gun in slow motion, then shouts the next name in elk. This is repeated a few more times - yes yes, in slow motion, still - while Sam walks to the still slow-motion-groaning Pochath, until finally, even Mattei must have thought enough is enough, Sam shouts "Aaaaaaaandddddd aaaaalllll thhhhhheeee ooootthhheeeeerrrssss!", and Werner Pochath is finally allowed to overact dying (die overacting?). I have heard rumours of people rupturing one or the other of their inner organs from laughter while watching this scene, and for once, I do believe a rumour.


The great thing about Born to Fight is that this single (and quite singular) scene is only one of many scenes nearly equal in their power of unbelievable stupidity, all coming to the delighted audience live from the brains of two of greatest purveyors of intensely entertaining crap ever to have come out of Italy. It's enough to make one tear up out of pure joy, really.

Past Misdeeds: Robowar (1988)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A merry mercenary group working under the delightful moniker of BAM (as the film explains, this is an acronym for "Bad-ass motherfuckers"), is hired by shady government types to go on The Mission for them. Now you might ask yourself: "What's this mission about?". The film isn't going to tell you. It is in fact withholding this information for its audience's own good, or at least to spare you wasting too many brain cells, as The Mission will turn out to be not what our heroes believe it to be, so there surely is no need to bother your pretty little heads with it.

All members of BAM have manly codenames like Killzone, Blood, or Diddy Bopper, alas they very seldom use them when talking to each other. The only thing that's important about them is that their leader is played by Reb Brown and that the rest of them might just as well be wearing red shirts instead of army fatigues. Reb ain't too happy when he learns that the team is going to be accompanied by a man of the Man who just might be called Asshole or Fuck You (Mel Davison). But what can a Reb do when he's already somewhere in Central America and on The Mission with his guys?

After the BAMsters have played around with some random guerrillas and picked up a gal named Virgin (Catherine Hickland), they finally meet the problem they were brought in to solve without having been told that they are supposed to solve it - a big bad government cyborg who is running amuck. And IMDB tells me it's played by Claudio Fragasso! Kill that monster, people of BAM!

Of course, it won't be that easy for the mercenaries, and in the end, only Virgin's superior chemistry skills and the fact that Robocop was nearly as successful a film as Predator will conquer the big bad.

And lo! It came to pass that Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso watched Predator. And they saw that it was good. So obviously, they needed to make a terrible, yet glorious version of the material all their own. Dear Fragasso is only taking the responsibility for the story this time, whatever that might mean in a film patently without one, while the writing credit goes to Rossella Drudi, who has certainly fine qualifications in her future work on Troll 2, her past work on Hell of the Living Dead and being married to Fragasso. It's quite the script the couple produced, never giving an explanation when one would probably be a good idea, never having an idea of its own when it can manhandle someone else's, and never satisfied stealing from just one source. Why only rip off Predator, when Robocop is also there, rife for the picking? It's what you expect from real masters of their art.

I'd love to go deeply into the principles of Mattei's direction, his meaningful use of the colour green, the way he uses the adventures of the BAMsters as a metaphor for all human struggle, but unfortunately I'd just be making it all up. If you have seen any Mattei film, you know how it looks; if you haven't, words cannot prepare you for the experience, at least not words I feel comfortable using.

I'd also love to tell you about the acting performances, alas, there aren't any. There certainly are people on screen who are speaking some perfectly bizarre dialogue, and they certainly are actors by trade, but that's all I can tell you about them, at least not without using words I don't feel comfortable using when talking about people I have never met and who could probably still kick my ass in a fight.

Furthermore, I'd love to tell you about the action. Let us just say that there's a lot of shooting and punching on screen, often executed by BAMsters standing in a single line, shooting and screaming and avoiding cover like their Civil War ancestors before them, at other times performed while running and screaming wildly. And yes, of course there are exploding huts.

Finally, I'd love to tell you about the film's awe-inspiring effects, how the cyborg dude is dressed in an Ultraman Halloween costume someone has painted black and makes the same chittering noises a toy robot I once owned makes, but I don't think I'm fit to do it justice.

I'm afraid I can only leave you with questions about Robowar where I should be giving answers, but that is part of the nature of the films of Mattei and Fragasso. I am full of questions about their works myself, starting with the natural - if very unspecific - ones, like "who gave these people money to make movies?" and "can I meet him?".

There are, however, more pertinent questions to ask about Robowar. Why did the script only have five pages? Where did the promised appearance of Alan Collins/Luciano Pigozzi disappear to? Did the authorities of the Philippines (where the film was shot) know whom they let into their country and what terrible consequences their lenience would have for the sanity of mankind? Why is it that Reb Brown screams whenever he shoots his gun? How does the Cyborg manage to hit anyone with his pew-pew laser gun when his point of view shots show clearly that he sees the world as a random conglomerate of orange pixels? What exactly was the government's idea in sending the mercenaries there? Did I really need to see Reb Brown in a belly top?

So many questions, yet so little answers. And that, my friends, is the point of the works of Mattei and Fragasso. They help us understand the importance of asking questions we never even knew we had, and show us that answers about the world that permitted the insane duo to make more than one movie can only be found in the tears of laughter rolling down our cheeks while we are watching them.

On ExB: Beyond Darkness (1990)

You thought Claudio Fragasso only made one film worth watching (I’m talking about Troll 2, so you know where this will lead, imaginary reader) after he broke up with Bruno Mattei? Think again! For Beyond Darkness is the ghost and exorcism movie nobody else could have made, a Thing That Should Not Be yet which is utterly delightful.

You can – and should – learn more if you only follow this handy link to my column over at Exploder Button, a place drowning in the sweat of alcoholic priests.

On WTF: Born To Fight (1989)

Original title: Nato per combattere

Brent Huff: born to fight!

Bruno Mattei: born to direct!

Claudio Fragasso: born to write!

You: born to read my write-up on WTF-Film!

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,action,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso,brent huff,mary stavin,werner pochath,reviews,wtf,other places

Shocking Dark (1990)

aka Terminator 2

aka Alienators

Gather 'round me, children, for I have a tale to tell! Once upon a time it came to pass that an Italian movie producer realized that he was in the position to legally name one of his films Terminator 2, and bring it into the cinemas way before the (less entertaining) James Cameron film of the same title would hit - at least if he could find someone to make the film right now, in the space of approximately two days of shooting and with no budget except for what petty cash the producer had lying around. Fortunately for the history of the cinematic art - though not the sanity of mankind - our mysterious producer knew just the right candidates for the job, the dynamic duo of Bruno Mattei ("director") and Claudio Fragasso ("writer"), two men completely without professional standards or shame.

But what the producer could not have imagined about the two was that their lack of standards and shame hid a very peculiar sense of humour (or, if you believe some scholars, a very particular kind of insanity). So, while they agreed to make the producer's dream of a cheap Terminator rip-off come true, Bruno and Claudio then proceeded to film a rip-off of that other excellent James Cameron movie, Aliens. Claudio, full of love and respect for Cameron's work, even took it upon himself to quote whole bits of dialogue from his hero's film, although usually in places where they made neither structural nor plain sense.

Yet despite the shared genius of Bruno and Claudio, their work was still plagued with problems. Surely, they could not afford more than one monster costume while still providing for their own meagre livings on the budget the producer had provided them with! But how, oh how, could a whole squad of professional soldiers be conquered by one pitiable rubber suit monster? Claudio, always cleverer than his peers, went back into his chamber with the script, and turned the squad of soldiers into !MegaForce!; now, even a single rubber suit looked like more than enough of a threat for his film's heroes, their shoulder pads and motorcycle helmets.

But when the producer arrived at Claudio's and Bruno's home the next morning to read their script, he was very angry about what Claudio had written. "There is no Terminator in my Terminator movie! What, oh what have you done!?" he shouted. Claudio and Bruno looked at each other, giggled, and explained they would turn their film's most wooden actor into an android by directing him to babble in the most monotonous voice and never to change his facial expression. "It will be just like Schwarzenegger!" Bruno added. The producer, recognizing sheer genius when he saw it, was mightily pleased by this and allowed Bruno and Claudio to begin shooting their masterpiece.

Their casting director was desperate. "Where, oh where will we find actors who will work for food?" he cried. "Nothing easier than that!" Bruno and Claudio answered, and proceeded to lure a group of American tourists onto their "set" - for this is what the artists called the darkened factory and the service tunnel where they made movie magic happen - with promises of cameras made of gold. Before the Americans could realize they had been lied to, Bruno and Claudio dragged them in front of their camera for "a screen test", letting their new-found partners read Claudio's script aloud. Afterwards, the wily Italians sent the tourists home, telling them they'd call them once filming would start. In truth, they knew that they had already filmed all the performances they would ever need.

And so, having found a solution for each of their problems, Bruno and Claudio brought their film into the cinemas, where it was loved and adored by the masses. Even James Cameron was so moved by the boys' love for his work that he decided not to sue them. And because there are no costs to cover when one's film hasn't cost anything to produce in the first place, the producer, Bruno, and Claudio became very rich from their work's earnings. And they all lived happily ever after.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso,sf,action,reviews,house's fairy tale hour

I Watched Troll 2 (1990), And Here's What I Learned

• There are Little People, and then there are Little People of the Night.
• Laura Gemser became a costume designer to take revenge for her work with Joe D'Amato. Her anger is a terrible thing to behold.
• Never trust a mad-looking girl with pencilled-on freckles.
• Half plant, half man, full nutrition.
• Grandpa Seth is just an invention of Claudio Fragasso's subconscious.
• Teenagers and goblins are basically the same thing.
• Friends are the cause of virginity.
• There's no family trouble that can't be repressed by loudly singing "Row Your Boat", and ten years of therapy later on.
• Grandfatherly ghosts are so badly paid they have to moonlight as hobos.
• All farmers are going to bed before sundown.
• Some people will eat the green goo but not the boyish urine.
• You can't piss on hospitality.
• Spears work differently on planet Claudio.
• "My ancestors came from Stonehenge" is a potential way to introduce oneself.
• Even ghosts can have a bad sense of direction.
• Coffee is the devil's drink. Goblins prefer milk.
• "Nilbog" is "goblin" spelled backwards. Dr. Acula approves of this message.
• The vegetarian cannibal religion is more complex than anyone could have suspected.
• There are no beautiful liberated girls in the middle of nowhere.
• Turns out time and space also work differently on planet Claudio.
• Say what you will about dead people, but they are handy with an axe. And a Molotov. And lightning. And a fist. Come to think of it, there are good reasons to be afraid of ghosts.
• There are things that can be done with a corncob Playboy didn't prepare a guy for.
• One should not think about the cholesterol when driving off goblins with the magic power of fast food.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,wtf,in short,claudio fragasso

Monster Dog (1984)

Original title: Leviatan

Rock star Vince Raven (a two-hundred years old looking Alice Cooper), his girlfriend Sandra (Victoria Vera) and a van load of fodder are on their way to Raven's old family mansion to shoot a new video for one of the singer's songs there, the last one being "shit". Not surprisingly, given that this is a film directed by Claudio Fragasso, the audience has the fortune to see that clip two times during the course of the movie. It is indeed shit.

Anyway, Raven's return home after an absence of more than twenty years comes at a somewhat inopportune time. People in the area have been attacked by a pack of roaming wild dogs that act surprisingly intelligent, and are accordingly nervous. Even before the singer and his gang have arrived at the house, they have already encountered a police roadblock (which is what the inhabitants of planet Fragasso consider to be an ideal defence against dogs, animals known to always travel by road), have run over a dog, and have met an older guy in bloodied clothes muttering the mandatory "you are all going to die, but I'm not giving out any useful details" warnings. Raven and Sandra also see a creature that does not look like a dog as we know it at all, but like a werewolf.

When the meat finally arrive at the house, the fun really begins. The caretaker is missing, the mandatory psychic among the group has a bad feeling and later an extensive nightmare about Raven being a werewolf and killing everyone - how could things get any worse?

Well, the next day, the caretaker's corpse is somehow thrown through a window that's rather high up in the mansion's wall, for one. Then, the local group of psychopathic werewolf hunters arrives, planning to kill the singer as a werewolf as they did with his father before him, the fact that the murders were already happening before Raven arrived in town notwithstanding.

And that's only what happens before the dog pack and their supernatural leader attacks.

Say what you will about the movies of Claudio Fragasso (for example that they are shoddy and stupid beyond belief), but don't pretend they are not designed to be as entertaining as possible just by virtue of stuffing as much stuff that was exciting in other movies Fragasso vaguely remembers into a ninety minutes running time. Monster Dog seems out to prove my case here.

Nothing that happens is any good in a traditional view of the art of filmmaking, of course, but what the film lacks in quality, it sure tries to make up for in the sheer quantity of silly crap. Seen from this angle, the film is something of a mother lode of the crazy, even though it does not show Fragasso at his most insane. But when someone's most insane is Troll 2, even his third most insane is pretty mad.

The greatest strength of Monster Dog lies in the absurdity and sheer stupidity of most of its details. And boy, does Fragasso love to put a lot of needless yet stupid details into his movies. There's not only no good reason to, say, have the dead caretaker crash through an upper window that should be quite unreachable from the outside, it's an idea so actively nonsensical I can't help but admire Fragasso for not only having it but putting it on screen without any explanation. We can only assume that the werewolf/monster dog is either really, really good at throwing full grown men or is some sort of spider dog scuttling around house facades like Peter Parker. Excitingly enough, this is only one example among dozens, one of them as awe-inspiringly stupid as the next. Did you, by the way, know that lycanthropy is a heart disease?

If the overabundance of stupid details isn't enough to make a viewer happy, she can further delight in moments of Very Bad Acting, Alice Cooper staring sinisterly right into the camera, Very Bad Special Effects (though Fragasso mostly tries to avoid showing us too much of Monster Dog), and lots of scenes of people acting like utter fools, even for horror movie characters. Yes, sure, let's invite the armed, not the least bit suspicious men in; they say they know Vince after all, while leering suspiciously. Yes, let's leave the screeching, traumatized woman alone with the mutilated corpse. And so on.

It's all enough to make a boy dizzy with admiration for Fragasso's very special art.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spanish movies,claudio fragasso,reviews,horror,alice cooper,victoria vera

In short: The Other Hell (1981)

Original title: L'altro Inferno

Something is not right in a small Italian nunnery. The embalming specialist of the cloister (yes, every religious institution needs one, didn't you know?) has gone corpse-crotch-mutilatingly mad, a papercraft head with blinking red light bulb eyes pops up now and then, and nuns die in violent ways. Vincenza (Franca Stoppi), the mother superior of the place, tries to sell the deaths and the madness as accidents to the church hierarchy, but this isn't child abuse, so the Church sends the experienced Father Inardo (Andrea Aureli) to investigate.

Inardo witnesses more signs of highly unnatural influences in the cloister in form of a possibly possessed nun with stigmata, strange noises and the smell of secrets all around. For some reason, his bosses very suddenly decide to replace Inardo with the younger, much more sceptical of the supernatural Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo).

The young sceptic soon learns that there are even stranger things afoot in the cloister than Inardo has experienced. What has all this to do with the masked nun living in the attic, in a room full of naked dolls hanging from the ceiling? The answer lies - as it always does - in a terrible secret in the cloister's past.

The Other Hell is one of the earliest cooperations between Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso, but it already is the expected mix of insane random stuff (hello camera that films the past!), hilariously bad special effects (hello doll-who-stands-in-for-a-baby and fake dogs!), utter tastelessness (hello groin-stabbing one, two and three!), hysterical acting (hello close-ups of sweaty nun faces and loud screeching!), recycled Goblin tracks (hello, soundtrack of Buoi Omega!) and a preposterously earnest subtext that doesn't survive contact with the rest of the film.

Said subtext is especially interesting this time around, as Mattei and Fragrasso seem to want to say something against the repression of female sexuality - unless they are trying to blame everything bad on female sexuality (the uterus is "the labyrinth that leads to hell", it seems). There's a basis for both interpretations in the film, but our heroic directors/writers are a bit too occupied with ripping off Carrie, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby to give anything but mixed messages about anything.

It comes as a bit of a surprise what the film doesn't include, though, namely the scenes of female nudity - and whippings, oh wait, let's make that nude whippings - any exploitation film taking place in a cloister is by law required to have. Making a film that's thematically all about sexuality (and the devil) that then doesn't include any on-screen sex seems at once a bit perverse and rather clever; the latter isn't a concept I usually use in connection with these two intrepid purveyors of smut. One could nearly come to the conclusion that Mattei and Fragasso at this early point in their partnership still had artistic ambitions. These ambitions also show in a handful of surprisingly well-staged scenes, whose basic ideas might be cribbed from Bava and Argento, but that still can't help and pull The Other Hell more into the direction of serious dream-like horror than I would have expected from these two.

Don't worry, though, The Other Hell is still as immensely entertaining as most of the films Mattei and Fragasso are responsible for; it's just a bit more like an actual movie and less like, well, whatever Robowar is supposed to be.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,in short,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso,franca stoppi,carlo de mejo

On WTF: Robowar (1988)

I'll just say this: Mattei/Fragasso. Predator. Reb Brown. Things that can never be unseen.

Learn what I'm talking about on WTF-Film.com.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso,action,reb brown,reviews,other places

In short: Rats - Night of Terror (1984)

A post-apocalyptic gypsy punk rocker clan lead by a certain Kurt (Ottaviano Dell'Acqua) comes to a group of deserted houses (or is it supposed to be a city street?). Inside one of the buildings, in an interior that looks pretty much like a cross between an old Spaghetti Western saloon and a SF set too shoddy for Al Brescia, they find a large cache of food, a futuristic looking aquarium, I mean water distiller, and a shabby looking assortment of plants.

There are also a bunch of dead bodies hidden away to make for "shocking" finds, and a whole lot of rats. After a little clean-up, the nomads decide to stay there for a while and enjoy their new vegetable garden.

That was probably not their best idea, for in the first night the rats attack. And oh, these are fiendishly clever rats. Some rat commandos (or is it ninja rats?) sneak up on the group's vehicles and nibble through their wheels, leaving our merry band of heroes without the possibility of escape. Except by walking, of course, but the gang seems to be against just walking away on principle and decide with the sort of logic only the duo of Fragasso and Mattei can provide, after the first of them have been killed by those evil nibblers, to barricade themselves  in the same building where they first met their squeaking enemies. Would you believe that this isn't a very good idea?

Ah, "written by Claudio Fragasso", "directed by Bruno Mattei". Are there words better suited to frighten those familiar with the true depths of horror?

By Mattei/Fragasso standards, Rats isn't all that bad. Sure, the acting is atrocious and the way the characters act makes as little sense as the plot, but it's not as painful as it could be. If you can keep your compassion with the poor rats under control, the film has even some things to recommend it, or rather to point and laugh at.

I did already mention the acting and the plot, but inane dialogue also comes oh so naturally to Fragasso. It is a virtual feast of stupidity that culminates in a very special twist ending stolen from a Twilight Zone script as written by a drunken teenager. Afterwards, said teenager probably went on to write the motorcycle/samurai sword sequence in Demons, so I'm not going to blame him too much.

The most memorable thing about the film are its special effects. Absolute highpoint is probably the "rug o'rats", a plastic or papiermache contraption meant to embody a slow moving mass of rats, yet mostly effective in evoking giggling fits. Other moments of cinematic greatness are the adorable throat jumping rat dolls, an exploding (it's the rats, you know) corpse and lots and lots of footage of rats just going about their business, while our protagonists are panicking and describing the devilish evil of ratdom, without a care about the fact that the rats are just ignoring them. Unless a bunch of the poor animals is just thrown at a character's face - that's what goes under "rat attack" here.

Other moments of Magrasso magic include the wonderful scene in which a handful of rats break a barricaded door down by somehow crawling around in front of it and pushing a hollowed out corpse against it. It's probably rat sorcery.

Rats - Night of Terror truly is one of the great comedies.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,in short,post-apocalypse,horror,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso