Para Betina Pengikut Iblis (2023)

aka The Female Followers of the Devil

There’s something going on in a small Indonesian village - I mean apart from all of the patriarchal repression you’d expect. A woman is murdered, her corpse is stolen and – spoiler – becomes the secret ingredient of a tasty curry. Secrets of the past loom, and quite a bit of female revenge is on the horizon.

That revenge is instigated by the Devil (Adipati Dolken) himself. When he’s not giggling like a loon or mewling like a sick kitten, he’s independently feeding information to two different girls – Sumi  (Mawar Eva de Jongh) and Sari (Hanggini) – that makes them very angry indeed, and thus perfectly willing to join into perhaps rather ill-advised pacts. Though said ill-advised pacts do lead to some tasty comeuppance for the kind of evildoer that hides away behind the mask of male respectability, so the Devil is doing something right, at least.

If this does make Rako Prijanto’s Female Followers sound like a tasty example of somewhat deconstructivist feminist horror, perish the thought any of that happened on purpose. Clearly, the filmmakers have not spent a single thought on questions like what it actually means that the only recourse that might allow its female protagonists a way to justice and perhaps freedom is a pact with the actual devil; nor that they only exchange one version of patriarchal servitude with another. They just wanted to show us a dude preening and giggling in one of the funnier devil performances outside of comedies – the noises Dolken makes are absolutely brilliant/hilariously stupid. Female Followers combines that with soap operatics so big, our lead actresses can’t stop eye-rolling, shouting, and contorting for even a single scenes some choice, and also features delightfully tasteless gore.

Obviously, since all horror movies have horrible secrets in the past, Female Followers has those as well, they’re just treated with an impressive degree of stupidity and carelessness and are completely divorced from the way actual people – hell, even fictional people – think or behave.

The script by Prijanto and Anggoro Saronto seems utterly uncaring of the way you’d traditionally construct a narrative. There’s no attempt to reconcile the double protagonists who basically only meet to set up a sequel with the necessities of structures, there’s barely a recognizable act structure – in a way it’s rather an impressive feat in an environment as professional as contemporary Indonesian horror filmmaking is.

So, technically, this isn’t what I’d call a “good” movie, but it is a terribly fun one, full of invention, ill-advised and badly aimed energy, ideas that make little sense, characters that simply aren’t and acting so intensely, badly melodramatic I find it impossible to imagine not being entertained by the whole shebang.

Dangerous Seductress (1992)

After her shit-heel boyfriend tries to rape her, Model Susan (Tonya Offer) flees from Los Angeles to the home of her sister Linda (Kristin Ann) in Indonesia. While Linda’s off on a modelling job in Bali, Susan discovers an old book of spells and rituals some guy who will later turn out to be a shaman apparently randomly gifted Linda for her birthday.

Before you can say “Klaatu barada nikto”, Susan has conjured up The Evil Queen (Amy Weber). Said Queen, who had already been somewhat revived by the blood of some car-crashing robbers, promises Susan eternal life, beauty, and sexual dominance over men if she agrees to puke or otherwise spatter the blood of men she murders at the mirror the Queen appears in.

Susan is more than game, and begins to seduce and murder her way through the Indonesian nightclub scene. In a satisfying development, her evil ex-boyfriend comes to Indonesia to murder and/or fuck her – I don’t believe he sees much of a difference there – and gets a deadly example of Susan’s new, assertive manners.

At this point in his career, H. Tjut Djalil, the director/writer who brought us the glorious Mystics in Bali as well as the not quite as glorious Lady Terminator, was clearly making his movies for the international market. Thus, the Indonesian actors are mostly relegated to minor roles, and the leads are taken by a bunch of spectacularly bad American actors who look like Baywatch rejects.

Which isn’t a problem for a film quite as maniacally insane as this one is, starting with a car chase that produces quite a few flying body parts and going through so many set pieces of tasteless, sleazy beauty, it’s difficult to find words for all the glories included. So, I’ll do as the Marquis de Sade would do, and just list some of it: there’s a woman with skeletal parts who draws the flesh of dead bodies to her to finish her look, who is then held down by grabbing arms underground that won’t let her go on her evil ways this easily; she also has blue glowing nipples I always hoped would fire lightning bolts sometime during the course of the film yet never do; sexy sax and synth music that suddenly turns abstract; a sexy murder chase in a meat packing plant; blood play with fishhooks; a woman cutting her own throat to feed a mirror with blood; a sparkly glowing magic duel; an evil queen played with all the enthusiasm of a kid’s theatre performance; flame thrower candles; so much sleazy teasing with no climaxes but the big bloody death; and so much more.

All of this – and truly much more - is presented with great energy and joy, never stops to think – lest it die of stupidity – and often looks surprisingly good for what it is. I don’t exactly want to cart the old “psychotronic” out to describe this wondrous piece of cinema, but it is, and so I do.

Needless to say, this giant hunk of lingerie, blood and glowy magic made me inordinately happy while watching.

Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch (1985)

aka Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf

Coming to the funeral of his sister Karen, Dee Wallace Stone’s journalist character from the first movie, Texan sheriff Ben (Reb Brown) soon finds himself in curious company. Occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) attempts to convince Ben that his sister had arranged her own on-camera murder to prevent turning into a werewolf for good. Karen’s former colleague Jenny (Annie McEnroe, doing an awkward Jamie Lee Curtis impression) is willing to buy into Stefan’s ideas quickly enough, but Ben needs a bit of convincing.

Fortunately, werewolf attacks are a good argument against scepticism, so soon, everybody’s on board with Stefan’s tales about the mighty werewolf queen Stirba (Sybil Danning) and her plan to turn more werewolves into wolfier werewolves, or something. Anyway, she needs to be stopped right quick. Stefan invites his new allies to accompany him to the small town in Transylvania that’s closest to Stirba’s secret lair in a big ass castle nobody appears to know how to find – not even Stefan’s local allies who must have lived in its neighbourhood for decades.

Needless to say, things turn weird in Transylvania.

Where Joe Dante’s first The Howling is still one of the best werewolf films ever made, Philippe Mora’s sequel is bad in so bizarre and wilful ways, it is also pretty damn fantastic without being good or best in any way, shape or form.

Aesthetically, this attempts to mix 1985 post-punk style, bits and pieces of gothic horror and a backlot Europe that manages to feel like an off-beat dream despite the backlot for once having been in actual Europe - Czechoslovakia to be precise. In practice, this means unholy yet weirdly compelling clashes between the kind of leather outfits favoured in movie BDSM and apocalypses and the cobwebby castles which are Christopher Lee’s natural habitat. A guy wearing an absurd medieval closed helmet and little else guarding said castle with an automatic weapon is the sort of thing you can expect here in every single scene. The film is nearly Italian in this regard.

Villagers that are having a folk horror village fete (probably to give Lee Wickerman flashbacks), a little person zombie attack that echoes Don’t Look Now, and a truly off-putting werewolf orgy to the jolly sounds of the film’s new wave theme song are only part of the film’s attractions. For the sleazebags among us, there’s also an incredibly ridiculous werewolf threesome between Danning, Marsha A Hunt’s character and whoever plays the guy trying to imitate wolf sex noises with them that’ll haunt your dreams (and not in a pleasant way), suggestions that Lee is the ten thousand year old brother of the equally ancient Stirba and the two once had a bit of an incestuous thing going on between them, and general horniness whenever nobody gets killed.

Our heroes are absolute idiots without any concept of strategy or any sense of self-preservation, jollily walking into traps like the giant idiots they are. Fortunately, Stirba’s not much better at her job either. I’m not sure what Stefan did with his life before becoming an occult investigator, or what his qualifications for the role are, apart from his knowledge about the movie’s curious werewolf subspecies that can only be killed by titanium instead of silver. But then, I’m not sure why our werewolf matriarch mostly spends her time having sex, shooting lasers and casting spells instead of doing anything werewolf-y, nor why there’s quite as much staking of werewolves going on here. Yes, titanium stakes, of course. Those are even more phallic, probably.

I am unsure if Mora is in on any of this being as funny, absurd and weird as it plays out, but then, that’s a not an uncommon reaction to Mora’s films for me. On the one hand, if he’s in on the joke, he keeps the straightest directorial face possible, on the other hand, how could anyone not be? The only point in the movie where I’m sure someone involved in the production is consciously taking the piss is in the ending credits, when Danning’s “iconic” moment of ripping her top off is repeated seventeen (of course people, including me, have counted it) times, intercut with outtakes from the movie one can only read as reaction shots to Danning’s breasts. Christopher Lee seems to approve of them.

The rest of the movie, I have no idea. What I do know is that Howling II is the perfect portrayal of the dream life of some male 80s teenager who also happens to be a fan of pulp writing.

Suffer Little Children (1983)

Based on a true story, apparently! That sounds completely plausible.

To wit:A mute little girl with a “please take care of me” note in her hand appears on the doorstep of a small orphanage in what I assume to be a city in the UK. She seems quiet and pleasant enough, but in truth, she’s possessed by SATAN (caps contractually obligated). After turning two other girls into her servants in a zombie picnic dream, she bides her time with minor bouts of terror and violence.

Mostly, we watch people do very little of interest, while most of the dialogue is completely drowned out by a repetitive score that does pop up some metal riffs whenever the action becomes properly SATANic.

Until, eventually, finally, the boredom culminates in a twenty minute freak-out of kids in an attic bowing before our satanic child queen making jazz hands, scenes of kids with knives (apparently a decades-old British nightmare, though they do miss hoodies) piling onto grown-ups and each other until blood spurts, bizarre yet excellently cheap editing effects and an appearance of the Lord Jesus himself (note to SATAN: don’t crucify pop stars), who points his (holy, one supposes) finger at possessed kids while cheap laser pew-pew noises play. It’s pretty fantastic.

Apparently, the smaller British arm of SOV horror, here exemplified in the efforts of Alan Briggs, Meg Shanks and their kid and teen acting school pupils, felt a need to demonstrate to their American colleagues in horror how to properly do that very shot on video horror thing of two interminable acts of nothing followed by one incredibly bonkers and entertaining climax. Consequently, apart from the zombie picnic and an unfortunate death or two, Suffer’s first two acts are a pain to get through, with dull people shot dully in dull locations talking for hours through dialogue you mostly can’t even hear (what you do manage to hear suggests you’re better off that way anyhow). It’s truly excruciating, even though the viewer does get to gawk at some top early 80s UK fashion.

Of course, all that dullness does turn the eventual freak-out of cheap, hilarious violence and utter mind-blowing strangeness not just highly entertaining but also somewhat shocking. Not because some of these kids are rather painfully good screamers – they are - but because at this point in proceedings, nobody could have expected these particular filmmakers to get their acts together enough to create scenes this loud, peculiar, bloody and fun.

Which only goes to show that all those Hollywood movie who taught us to never give up hope did know what they were talking about. I’ll never doubt again (lest Jesus shoot me with his finger guns).

In short: I, the Jury (1982)

Sleazy private dick – I choose the latter word for a reason – Mike Hammer (Armand Assante) has to take a break from sleeping with the wives of clients he’s supposed to spy on because their husbands fear they’re cheating on them, and his bizarre full-body relationship with his secretary Velda (Laurene Landon). An old Vietnam buddy of his is murdered, and nobody, not even his favourite cop Detective Chambers (Paul Sorvino) seems too bothered with doing anything about it.

Hammer’s investigation soon points him towards the sex clinic of Dr Charlotte Bennett (Barbara Carrera), and the product (Judson Scott) of a government conspiracy meant to build mind-controlled killers. Though I’m not quite sure why you wouldn’t just grab an actual serial killer if you want a serial killer, instead of laboriously creating a facsimile of one. In any case, once Hammer understands who his enemies are, he’s going to murder the heck out of them.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the hard-boiled novels of raving right-wing fantasist Mickey Spillane and his murderous, misogynist prick of a hero Mike Hammer, so don’t ask me how this measures up as an adaptation. It does take considerable liberties with the plot of the novel it is based on, but then, you wouldn’t expect a Larry Cohen script to go for evil commies and Italians and whoever else Spillane didn’t like that week.

Initially, Cohen was apparently meant to direct this as well, but was replaced by bland TV hand Richard T. Heffron. That poor man then had to make sense of a Cohen script the guy wrote for himself to direct, clearly leaving much room for improvisation nobody involved in the Heffron version really knew what to do with.

This leads to a movie with a particularly weird tone: sleazy and grimy, but in a way completely divorced from any sense of reality. It’s not an ironic approach to being exploitative so much as a strange fever dream idea of what exploitation might be, with some of the more absurd bits of sex and violence you’ll see in a movie featuring actual actors. Often, it is difficult to parse if certain elements of the film are meant to be terrible jokes or supposed to be taken seriously, which increases the highly peculiar vibe of the whole affair.

Most of the actors seem perfectly baffled as well. But then, what would you think about Hammer’s fish tank obsession in Assante’s position that sees him talking with a client while holding a dead fish in one hand in the very first scene? The big sex clinic orgy that would put off even the most easily aroused? Whatever is supposed to go on in the climax? Only Barbara Carrera seems unruffled, but then, she’s just doing her usual femme fatale bit; if the femme fatale – and the sex scenes – are a bit weirder than usual clearly doesn’t matter to her. Whereas this viewer rather enjoyed stumbling from one improbable scene to the next.

Three Films Make A Post: The Business Of Killing Just Got Personal

After Blue aka After Blue (Paradis sale) (2021): At times, Bertrand Mandico’s pretty bizarre women-only weird science fiction epic is one of those films that just too desperately want to be a future cult item, putting so much effort into being out there it becomes more than a little exhausting and off-putting, suggesting a pose of eccentricity more than genuine one.

At other times, this is the weird, candy-coloured, gender-fluid and ever so lovingly messed-up freeform science fiction epic of my dreams. It is certainly of beautiful artificiality throughout, and not a film that should ever bore anyone.

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992): Why you'd dig up the old franchise eight years after the first movie only to then come up with this abomination is beyond me. As it stands CotC II: TFS could as well have been called "Generic 90s horror movie". The film takes all the cool and interesting elements of the first movie and throws them away to then become something encapsulating all that was bad about 90s horror. So you have the bad yet boring acting, creepy kids who aren't creepy at all, a teenage love story that makes you want to bleach your brain, boring protagonists, a boring series of supernatural deaths which are neither as funny nor as clever as they seem to think they are, and a plot delivered with so little panache you can't help but start thinking about plot holes and continuity errors between this and the first film. On the positive side, that way lies at least madness instead of the boredom David Price's film offers without it.

The Devil’s Mask (1946): I didn’t find this second movie after the I Love A Mystery radio show quite as entertaining as the first one, which I wrote up ages ago. Sure, Henry Levin’s direction is pacy, often moody, and surprisingly elegant, but the film’s mystery isn’t as crazy and convoluted as that in the first film, leading to the always tiresome situation where the audience has long figured out what’s going on and why, yet the supposedly crack detectives still stumble around in the dark, following the wrong suspect. It’s also a bit problematic that the film’s favourite wrong suspect is one based on classist resentment that probably was easier to buy for a 1946 audience, and that our heroes’ reaction to him makes them look like authoritarian asshats instead of intrepid adventurers.

Still, thanks to Levin’s efforts, there’s more than a modicum of fun to be had here; it’s just a bit of a disappointment after the very pleasant weirdness of the first film.

The Glove (1979)

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short: Winterbeast (1992)

Life near an apparently much-used mountain lodge gets a bit dangerous when possessed totem poles, zombie-things, and the little sibling of the Giant Claw begin murdering tourists and locals, thanks to a Native American curse. Or demons. Or something. Fortunately, Sergeant Bill Whitman (Tim R. Morgan) and Forest Ranger Stillman (Mike Magri) are on the case and/or having a lot of nice little chats full of non-sequiturs, doing their best to fight the Winterbeast. Which of the monsters is this mysterious titular entity, I’m not quite sure. Probably the pseudo-giant with the demon rubber mask?

Winterbeast, directed by Christopher Thies, really is quite the thing. A regional Massachusetts-made artefact shot piecemeal over the course of several years during the 80s, it takes place in one of our neighbouring dimensions, where all rooms are about toilet-sized and there exist no filmic techniques to suggest anything about where anyone or anything acts or stands or runs in relation to anything or anyone else. Unless, of course, it’s an interior shot, where people are usually shoved so close together in the frame, one tends to expect they’re just about to start kissing. Which they don’t: instead, there’s a lot of very peculiar dialogue, sometimes in synch with lip movements, sometimes not, that manages to go into a lot of things in excruciating detail, without ever quite reaching what we humans describe as “sense”.

This, however isn’t the slow and boring kind of weird, no budget films: while the film’s first half mostly consists out of these awkward dialogue scenes, they are strangely interesting, always weird enough to suggest there might be something interesting or mind-blowing discussed, and curiously detailed – very much as if all of this indeed made some kind of sense in the minds of the filmmakers. And that’s before things really start to come together in the second half, when the sporadic effects sequences from the first turn into a barrage of cheap and cheerful stop motion monsters of indeterminate size that have the ability to wreak havoc without ever visibly touching anyone or anything. Obviously, Giant Claw jr. is my favourite among them, even though it’s not as big as a battleship, and rather as big as a chicken coop (or perhaps two chicken coops). There’s also an absolutely adorable chestburster rip-off that would probably turn Charles Band green with envy. Hats off to a final action sequence that’s so awkwardly edited, the relations between time and space are clearly going completely out of whack after an hour or so of the strain the film has already put on our continuum.

But wait, there’s more! Winterbeast also features what may very well be the greatest operatic mad scene in cinema, involving a cheerful ditty, a (otherwise very shouty) man wearing a clown mask and a dangerous jacket doing a long and awkward dance, a plastic Halloween pumpkin and a desiccated chestburster victim in an armchair. Also, spontaneous combustion.

If that’s not enough to tickle anyone’s fancy, the spirit of Halloween has truly left this world.

Spectre (1977)

(This is based on the film’s longer UK cut with a bit of nudity and more sleaze that never made it to NBC at the time, for obvious reasons)

Former top criminologist turned occult detective William Sebastian (Robert Culp) calls his estranged former friend and associate, alcoholic sleazebag and medical doctor “Ham” Hamilton (Gig Young) for help in his newest case. He really needs a doctor, too, for somebody is regularly using magic to pierce his heart, leaving him not in ideal fighting shape. Ham doesn’t really believe in anything occult, and the men’s parting of ways some time ago might have had something to do with their difference in opinion. Ham is beginning to change his mind when Sebastian’s witch assistant Lilith (Majel Barrett) gives him a draught that causes an instant aversion to alcohol, and even more so when an oversexed succubus version of Sebastian’s client, one Anitra Cyon (Ann Bell) appears and tries to seduce our hero into what looks a lot like an erection based heart attack to me, or as much as a TV movie from 1977 can suggest that. But don’t worry, hitting her with the right page in an occult tome does get rid of her nicely.

After that business is through, we finally learn what the real Anitry Cyon wants from Sebastian and Ham: find out if she’s assuming right and her decadent brother Geoffrey (James Villiers) has indeed been possessed by EVIL, and when necessary, kill him. So off to Great Britain our heroes jet, piloted by Anitra’s other brother Mitri (John Hurt) who may or may not already be under a malevolent influence himself. There are further attempts on our heroes’ lives and virtue (such as it is), of course, action archaeology happens, and exposition tells of the time when druids and Christian priests teamed up to imprison Asmodeus.

This pretty incredible artefact directed by Clive Donner is another of the many attempts of Gene Roddenberry to make a successful non-Star Trek TV show, this time around with British money. I’m not surprised Spectre never made it to series, because it is absolutely bonkers. What we have here is a mix of a Dennis Wheatley style occult thriller minus Wheatley’s actual ideas about occultism (though fortunately also minus his unpleasant politics) with the toned down “sexy” fantasies of a middle-aged guy with very peculiar interests who never left the swinger party mindset behind, paired with the sort of random crap you put in your movie not because it is a good idea to use it, but because you think it is absolutely awesome.

As a serious horror film the result is of course pretty terrible, but it’s also ridiculously fun to watch, having given up all restraint that could turn it into a proper movie and replaced it with the mandate to just make as much absurd fun, and quite a bit embarrassing stuff, up as possible. So of course Sir Geoffrey proves his decadence by only employing young, female servants who try way too hard to be sexy; of course his sister dresses like the old maid in a 30s comedy; of course one of the main characters turns out to be Asmodeus and looks a lot like a bluish Klingon when uncovered. Of course there’s a particularly awkwardly staged satanic orgy with dancing bad and half-hearted even by the standards of bad movie satanic orgies (one hopes real-life ones are a bit more enthusiastic, because this really doesn’t cut it as a seduction to evil). There’s an evil sort of ape person costume; things feel evil to the touch; Asmodeus lives by rather complicated rules; Gordon Jackson wears demon make-up; more “how we get rid of demons” nonsense that makes not a lick of sense than one could possibly hope for is expounded upon, and so much more.

The film’s tone wavers between embarrassing – just cringe through the unbelievable scene with Ham and the three maids trying to “seduce” him and ask yourself how many people must have thought this was an idea that needed to be put to film – and utterly hysterical, Culp, Young, Hurt and Villiers hamming it up in each and every way possible. I am usually not much of a fan of Culp and find him rather bland and affectless, but clearly, if he wanted, he could take bites out of scenery so large, Vincent Price must have been jealous; it’s the only correct acting decision to take in this particular movie, too, for playing any of this straight would simply ruin the film by dragging it back to Earth from whichever planet Roddenberry was on at the time.

In short: Run Coyote Run (1987)

A Interpol agent with psychic powers (Renee Harmon) is looking for the killers of her sister. Her investigation – which mostly consists of hanging around various places in California and having psychic flashes to other movies – is in turns hindered by her grumpy old man boss, mob goons (one of whom is also a biker preacher with a hankering for a TV ministry), voices from the off, and others. What others? The film ain’t telling, that’s for sure, and trying to figure it out will turn you into a Lovecraft protagonist.

Anyone approaching this particular case of filmmaking should keep in mind as a safety measure: do not try to understand, just let it flow over you. I did, and I’ve got the headache to prove it.

This is a long lost product of the frightening creative partnership between James “Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!!!” Bryan and Renee “Frozen Scream” Harmon. Clearly, these two bonded on their shared hatred for logic and common sense, and boy does the film show. This is at once a sequel to and a remake of the duo’s Lady Streetfighter (obviously not to be confused with Sister Streetfighter with Etsuko Shihomi) in which Harmon plays the sister of that film’s main character, as well as said main character herself in the multitude of scenes taken from it. Because that’s not enough to turn this into the true sort of patchwork movie this is going for, there are also three or four other movies with Bryan and/or Harmon involvement used as sources for non-flashback parts of the movie. Consequently, there’s a strip joint in the film that is at once situated in the late 70s and the late 80s worlds of highly impoverished sets; Harmon ages and de-ages in rapid succession; a climactic fight scene pretends that dressing up two guys in the new footage similarly to two completely different looking guys from old footage will make it possible to just cut two bad fights together to form one ultra-bad one; the soundtrack contains pearls like a joke synth version of a certain spaghetti western theme, as well as what I can only call an assortment of random stuff.

There’s so much of this high effort low effort nonsense involved in the film, you have to ask yourself if there wasn’t an easier way to make a movie than to cut bits and pieces of new footage and scenes from half a dozen other films together and pretend it’s a narrative (there are even plot twists which make as little sense as anything else in here, of course). Only Doctor Frankenstein can understand.

High Risk (1981)

After buying weapons from a cameo-ing Ernest Borgnine, a quartet of Americans (James Brolin, Bruce Davison, Cleavon Little and Chick Vennera) are flown into Colombia (Mexico) by a couple of ex Vietnam vets much more accustomed to this sort of affair. They plan to steal the ill-gotten gains of a local drug lord (James Coburn). Our protagonists’ main problem is that they are all perfectly unaccustomed to violence, have two brain cells going between all four of them (these are the kind of people who take a yappy family dog on their drug money heist) at the best of times, and may have read the word “planning” once on a toilet wall but were distracted by the drawing of a tit.

Still, after some misadventures and bad decisions our – ahem – heroes actually manage to steal a good five million dollars. Alas, two of them are captured very soon indeed (might have something to do with taking a whole night’s rest while actively hounded by the drug lord’s people; or not setting a watch), while the other two escape with most of the money but wake the interest of some local rebels/bandits/whatever under the demented leadership of one Mariano (Anthony Quinn, as we all know a member of every ethnicity on Earth that isn’t white in the US-sense of the word). Lots of tedious business ensues; Lindsay Wagner pops up.

Stewart Raffill’s High Risk is often listed as an action comedy, and if you’ve only ever read a plot synopsis or two and looked at the film posters, you may very well come to the conclusion that it indeed is one. Having actually gone through the experience of watching the film, I’ve rather come to the impression that the filmmakers were the same kind of bumbling incompetents their character turned out to be. There are a lot of elements in here that could by all rights only belong into a comedy - like the business with the dog, or Coburn having a little bull fight as an aperitif to a torture session. However, these are never presented in a way anyone would confuse with being funny or the film attempting to be funny. At the same time, it’s all just too dumb to be taken seriously by anyone.

And yet, the film presents its stupid ideas in so straight-faced a manner, it’s simply impossible to believe the filmmakers were seeing the joke there at all. Which is actually too bad, for an action comedy about people throwing themselves into the violent life without having the slightest capability or the lack of humanity needed for it bumbling through an action movie plot could be very funny indeed; in fact, given that this is about Americans doing the same in a Central American state, you might even turn this material into a pretty great political satire. None of this happens here, though. Instead, this is a film about a bunch of people who are very bad at what they do fighting against various groups of other people who aren’t terribly great at it either, full of dumb plot developments and underdevelopments, plotted so amateurishly, one might wish oneself back to the slickness of homegrown SOV horror movies.

The actors clearly have no idea what the hell this is supposed to be either: The lead quartet looks bored, Wagner mildly bemused, and Coburn just shrugs and shows his teeth while grimacing (his usual move when not wanting to apply any of his actual considerable talent). Quinn does of course chew the scenery like a madman, because what’s a guy to do when confronted with a project like this one?

Una rata en la oscuridad (1979)

Warning: there will be spoilers, because there are some late movie revelations I simply cannot ignore completely

Sisters Josefina (Ana Luisa Peluffo) and Sonia (Anaís de Melo) have managed to buy a surprisingly spacious and classy house for suspiciously little money. As every viewer of horror movies will expect, the house does turn out to be haunted. At first, Sonia is in the centre of the various strange happenings that seem to emanate from the portrait painting of a somewhat intense looking woman found in the living room. These phenomena seem to travel with a single rat that makes uncommonly loud noises. In part, it’s the usual mix of poltergeist style phenomena and strange noises, but the haunting also slowly begins to influence the sisters’ personalities, turning Sonia first languid than aggressive through the magic of what is apparently pretty mind blowing ghost sex.

Fans of Mexican genre movies will probably know Una rata’s director Alfredo Salazar more as a screen writer than as a director. The ten movies he directed are small fry to the more than sixty he wrote from the 50s on. The film at hand does suggest a bit of a pet project, seeing how Salazar does his best to avoid the general shoddiness of late 70s Mexican genre films. However, pet project or not, it has to be said that some of the sleaze is too on the nose to be helpful for the film, and the acting tends to be too broad even for a film as consciously strange as this one gets.

The budget is obviously low, so complicated camera set-ups, extras or simply too many locations and sets are out, yet the film takes palpable care to use what little it has as best as possible. Salazar often manages to create a dream-like and truly strange mood on the cheap with the (I believe at least partially needle-dropped, most definitely genius) synth soundtrack, clever single camera set-ups, and slightly illogical plotting. It’s a film full of decisions like portraying a character’s ghost induced orgasm via a modern dance number in woozy white, the sort of idea that’s a bit absurd, a lot strange, and really rather brilliant. If that sounds a little like an Italian horror movie, I’d be very surprised if Salazar hadn’t been influenced by his colleagues from across the pond, or just inspired to go all out for the dreamlike and the peculiar by some very heavy food.

Also pretty strange are the film’s sexual politics. At first, the whole ghost sex angle does feel a lot like some of the good old (bad) lesbian panic angle. However, the big plot twist - as well as the explanation for why the camera is generally positioned so not to show the face of the sexing ghost, apart from this adding to the peculiar mood of the whole affair - is that the ghost is a transvestite (or a cross dresser), apparently an entity using the house as some sort of honey trap to seduce and murder people. In fact, I’m not even sure our villain is supposed to be a supernatural entity – the ending’s simply to weird to make the kind of sense that’ll lead anyone to logical conclusions about their nature. If this makes Una rata’s sexual politics better or worse, I honestly have no idea. It certainly adds another parallel to Italian horror movie obsessions and makes things more peculiar. What – if anything – Salazar actually means by any of it, I’m not able to parse.

In any case, if you’d like your weird European-style horror to come from Mexico instead for once, and enjoy being confused and mildly weirded out, Una rata en la oscuridad is most probably going to be a fine film for you.

Slugs (1988)

Original title: Slugs, Muerte Viscosa

aka Slugs: The Movie

A lot of people, and I mean a lot of people die curious, icky, violent deaths in a US small town. We the audience know the deaths are caused by a humungous horde of mutated, flesh-eating slugs, but the authorities don’t. Well, heroic health official Mike Brady (Michael Garfield) figures it out relatively quickly, but he walks into a Mayor of Amity/German COVID policy situation where neither said mayor nor the police are going to be any help at all, or worse. Mike does team up with a British slugologist and the head of the city’s sanitation department in a sort of coalition of the people who really keep a place running.

Slugs, based on a novel by trash horror expert Shaun Hutson (that’s where the “The Movie” comes from) was directed by Spanish bizarro movie expert Juan Piquer Simón. His Pieces is often treated as one of those perfect, “it’s so bad, it’s good” movies, but never really did much for me but bore; on the other hand, he is also the director of the transcendentally weird and wonderful Supersonic Man.

The curious thing about Simón, a guy whose projects nearly always sound psychotronic in a way that doesn’t suggest slickness, is that he was clearly a talented director, with a good sense of pacing and editing rhythms and at the very least a solid grasp of the craftsmanship aspects of filmmaking. He just tended to apply his talents to movies with scripts going from the bizarre to the outright crazy, and often on budgets so clearly insufficient, even attempting to make these movies has a whiff of the heroic or Ancient Greek style hubris.

Slugs, curiously enough, is one of the man’s less impoverished films, providing Simón many an opportunity to show off his filmmaking skills. It’s just that he’s demonstrating them on a film about killer slugs full of insane set pieces that make little sense but are also unutterably awesome, presenting a series of gore gags that start out absurd and become increasingly freakish. This is a film that puts a scene of an elderly gardener cutting off his own arm because the slugs have snuck into his gardening gloves and are eating his hand (which somehow ends in an exploding greenhouse, but one has to see that one to believe) relatively early as something of a sign post things are going to become weirder still. And indeed, the film’s not lying, that’s nothing, for it soon reaches the point where a gentleman who accidentally ate a hacked up slug in a salad gets his head melted by the parasitic worms living inside snails. And Slugs is still not going to stop there. Will it be any surprise in this context to mention that the heroic way our heroic health official and co manage to save the day also seems to blow up most of the sets of the town the whole thing has taken place in?

It’s pretty incredible. Simón seldom stops for a breather between the slug attacks or variations on animal attack movie tropes turned absurd by the fact everyone’s trying to deny an infestation of killer slugs (who will bite your finger if you present it) caused by poisonous waste event though people are dying in droves and heads are imploding into wormy mush in restaurants. But then, the town this takes place in seems to be situated in Spain as well as the US, depending on which country any given scene was shot in, so I’m not too surprised everybody’s a bit confused.

The effects are not as unpleasant as they may sound, but go for a kind of wondrously fake gloopiness instead of the naturalistic gross-out, turning this gory killer slug movie into a charmer of a film.

The Sun Above, Death Below (1968)

Original title: Sogeki

Toru (Yuzo Kayama) is your typical movie professional killer: competent, emotionless on the outside, and a natural born loner. He also has performance problems in bed, the act of killing apparently giving him a feeling nothing else can compare to.

This changes somewhat when he encounters professional model Akiko (Ruriko Asaoka). It’s love (or something like it) on first sight, the just as lonely and lonesome Akiko recognizing a kindred spirit in him, and he in her. Even the sex is going to work out between the two, eventually. Akiko’s obsession with catching a huge New Guinean butterfly fits so perfectly with Toru’s own mental bizarrerie, the couple can dream about going to New Guinea so she can catch her super butterfly and he can shoot all kinds of birds dead (seriously).

The film could turn into a very weird romance movie about people who fantasize (well, I say, fantasize, but as the film plays it, this might very well be actually happening) about donning “New Guinean” garb as interpreted by a racist and brownface and going on a drum and dancing session in their hotel room. However, the killer’s newest job of helping some yakuza acquaintances murdering a whole gold smuggling ring soon finds him hunted by the best killer of some probably rather irate Chinese gold smugglers, which is certainly good for his shooting and adrenaline kink, but perhaps not terribly great for anyone’s health.

Hiromichi Horikawa’s Sun Above is quite the film. It was clearly influenced by a horde of other movies about professional killers and very consciously presents many a nod to other films from the sub-genre. It harbours a particular affinity towards Branded to Kill, seeing as they both are Japanese movies turning a deep fascination with the psycho-sexual elements of violence into moments of the surreal and the bizarre, not to mention the butterflies.

Horikawa isn’t going as all out all the time as Seijun Suzuki does, tending to play the action scenes straighter, and not adding quite as many peculiar subversions into every single scene, clearly trying to not alienate completely an audience that came to watch movie star Kayama in a straightforward hitman thriller. So about half of the film is a relatively standard, excellently shot and staged crime movie; the other half either includes bizarre elements or gets up to semi-psychedelic freak-outs. That hotel scene that may or may not be a fantasy is the most obvious example, but there’s also a sex scene that uses documentary shots of black people in deeply problematic ways together with extreme close-ups of skin, psychedelic effects, classical European imagery and ends on a little chat about Icarus. Going by the film’s Camus-quoting ending, it’s all in the service of a very particular interpretation of existentialism. However, it is just as easy – and much more entertaining - to read Death Above as a movie about obsessions and kink, mainly for and about a holy trinity of guns, sex and death (where the middle part is only possible in close connection to the other two), with a side-line in butterflies and the dubious objectification of black bodies, overloading all of these elements with an intensity that you can read as subversive, deconstructive, bizarre, or just plain silly.

Me, I’m going with all of the above, raising my eyebrow at some of the philosophy (which may or may not be made worse – or better for that matter - by not always elegantly translated subtitles) and the racial bits, giggling and gasping at Horikawa’s general aesthetic daring, enjoying the weirdness as well as the straightforward excellence of the more conventional parts of the film, while mentally applauding a cast able to inhabit the film’s world as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Past Misdeeds: Una Rata En La Oscuridad (1979)

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.

Two sisters are moving into a rather shabby looking old dark house. Josefina (Ana Luisa Peluffo), the older of the two, has taken the role of replacement mother for her sister Sonia (Anais de Melo), although that doesn't seem to discourage her from practicing a rather problematic kind of sisterly massage women practice. When they are not having pillow fights or pyjama parties.

As is so often the case with old dark houses, strange things begin to happen to the sisters. At first, it's just the appearance of an unnaturally persistent rat (played by an anonymous rat method actor of the highest calibre), or the shadow of a woman (Ricardo Cortes) roaming the house - the simple spooky things. Soon the strange activities begin to increase. The camera and the furniture develop an unpleasant tendency to shake, and the female shadow turns out to belong to a transvestite sneaking through the house. The sneaker being a transvestite (or a cross dresser, the film really isn’t going into details here, or anywhere) seems to be supposed to be something of a twist reserved for the film's ending, but it should be quite obvious to anyone with eyes, so I see no reason not to spoil the "surprise".

A bit later, our transvestite friend begins to grope Sonia in her sleep, which the woman enjoys quite a bit. After their night of sweet sweet copulation, Sonia doesn't want to leave her bed anymore, develops a drinking (in bed, oh no!) habit and tells Josefina that she wants to kill her. Later still, Sonia actually tries her luck at strangling her sister. But don't worry, Josefina will live and she will get some of that sweet sweet groping love too. In fact, Josefina will do her sister one better and dream of doing jazz dance during her big sex scene.

Alas, it all will have to end in tears and more flying furniture.

I don't know much about the state of Mexican horror cinema at the end of the 70s when Una Rata was made, but going by the film's rather impoverished look and the way other Mexican genre movies of the time I’ve seen worked out, it's not much of a stretch to theorize that it was in its death throes. There's an aura of shabbiness surrounding everything I find all too typical of the products of film industries which have seen better days.

Una Rata is one of only a handful of films directed by Alfredo Salazar, brother to Mexican genre film impresario Abel Salazar and writer of just about every horror or lucha movie made in Mexico not written by Fernando Oses, and on one hand, it's not much of a surprise he didn't direct too many films. Salazar's style is just a bit too dry, the pacing of his film just a bit too much on the slow side (even by the rather relaxed standards of Mexican filmmaking of this type), his talent for mood-building just a bit too skewed to the patently weird side of the tracks. On the other hand, Salazar - at least in this film - seems much more interested in making a film bound to entertain its audience than many of his contemporaries, who all too often were making strings of filler instead of movies.

Fortunately, Una Rata is heavily influenced by the wild and weird world of Italian 70s horror in just about every aspect, and I for one can't find fault with the decision to at least make a mind-blowing film when you can't make a "good" one.

The recreation of Italian horror taking place here is a highly successful one and only begins with a soundtrack of perfect mock-Goblin quality, random moments of sleazy lingering on naked female bodies and the over-heated melodramatics of the acting. The core experience of Italian-style horror does of course not lie in in minor things like the soundtrack, a bit of inappropriate nudity, or hysterics, but in a film's insistence of making no sense whatsoever.

Salazar's film is especially successful in this regard. The film doesn't answer even a single question it brings up, gives no explanation for anything that is happening and does not care a lick about character motivations. In short, the sort of viewer who complains about the (imagined) lack of explanations in the finale of Lost would probably go mad from frustration watching this like a Lovecraft character having read his family tree. Who is the transvestite? Why is he doing what he does? Is he an actual transvestite or just a guy dressing up as a woman to disguise himself for some reason? What's up with the portrait of a woman the camera and Sonia's gaze linger so lovingly on? Is the rat causing the telekinetic phenomena? Salazar and the film don't tell, and frankly, I don't think Salazar knows or cares as long as his film causes its viewers to stare in disbelief and befuddlement.


I'm quite sure Una Rata En La Oscuridad's main goal is to trap its viewers in this blessed state of perpetual confusion, and man, does it ever. 

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.

In short: Bloody Chainsaw Girl (2016)

Original title: Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw (血まみれスケバンチェーンソー)

Giko (Rio Uchida) is just your typical delinquent style middle school girl waiting for a girl boss movie to happen. Well, I say typical, but she does tend to bring the chainsaw that’s the symbol of her family’s business with her to school, which I’ve never seen Meiko Kaji do. However, said chainsaw turns out to be a rather useful survival tool, because Giko has somehow – she honestly has no idea how - pissed off the school’s very own teen mad scientist, one Nero Aoi (Mari Yamachi).

Nero, on a bit of a rampage after being bullied for turning a classmate’s cat into a cyborg zombie kitteh, turns many of their school mates – well, everyone who doesn’t simply flee, really – into one type of cyborg zombie mutant or another, many of which seem to develop a bit of a cultish appreciation for their mistress Nero, and are all too happy to try to murder Giko for whatever Nero thinks she has done to her. Ah, teenagers.

The time when practically every single film of the Japanese bizarro splatter world made it to Western shores are, alas, long over, so whenever a film like Hiroki Yamaguchi’s (of Hellevetor fame) Bloody Chainsaw Girl still does make it here, I do feel a faint tingle of excitement, even though I by now know well that only a few films in this particular genre keep the promises their absurd titles and lurid covers make.

Bloody Chainsaw Girl, to my delight, actually does its job rather well. It’s obviously a pretty low budget affair, but Yamaguchi’s direction keeps things snappy enough you’ll only notice if you really want to. The special effects are cheap but the right kind of cheap, enhancing the charm of the affair by emphasising the absurdity of everything that’s going on onscreen, from the cheerleader with the traditional Japanese thing of shooting rockets from places where rockets should most certainly not be shot from (the film adds an actually pretty funny moment concerning the reloading of this particular device), to the enhanced members of the ninja club (of course this school has a ninja club. Keep up, please!).

It’s all very charming if you’re like me and willing to be charmed by the merry absurdity of proceedings like this. I was also pretty happy that the motivation for the film’s villainess’s hatred for our heroine and the reason for all this carnage does have the pettiness of actual teenage grudges, lacking as much in reason as the less believable parts of the film.

Rio Uchida does the whole snarky teenage delinquent bit rather well (apart from very obviously not being a teenager), making for a surprisingly likeable heroine, whose shrugging, sarcastic, acceptance of every new absurd turn of events did rather endear her to me. Whereas Mari Yamachi’s a decent glowerer and a pretty decent ranter, and what else do you need from the villain of a piece like this?


All of this does obviously add up to a lot of good, clean fun, if you share my loose definition of “clean”, at least.

Past Misdeeds: Alien Warrior (1986)

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.

aka KING OF THE STREETS

Okay, so, here’s a plot, such as it is: in an alien dimension peopled by men with excellent – and better – facial hair live a martial artist-philosopher-messiah-future-cult-leader guy we will come to know and (certainly not) love as Buddy (Brett Clark) and his Dad (Norman Budd). Well, actually, we never get to see anyone apart from Buddy and Dad there, but since Buddy’s supposed to become king, I can only assume he has some people to crush under the boot heels of monarchist oppression. Before Buddy (his Dad actually called him Ragnar until he realized Buddy wouldn’t make a decent Viking, or I might be making this up thanks to the intoxicating powers of Alien Warrior) can take his rightful place, he has to go somewhere to smite (alas, smiting isn’t really part of the film’s dialogue, though it’s ace – as in transcendentally stupid - otherwise) some Great Evil. And what better place for that sort of thing than the rough streets of Los Angeles circa 1985?

Once he’s beamed to LA, Buddy does show himself less shite than we thought and soon saves women from rape – specifically, angelic Lora (Pamela Saunders, I think), a woman not only imbued with the power of making the most absurd facial expressions unimaginable but also the will to bring the beauty of reading to the inner city with what we might call a community centre if it weren’t a warehouse with a random assortment of bookshelves in it. Because Buddy is a bit of a messiah (or cult leader), Lora’s reading warehouse becomes quite the success thanks to our hero’s awesome power of getting in the head of would-be rapists, finding out that their wicked ways started when their mum called them stupid once, and curing them in a way certainly not at all inspired by a certain cult founded by a SF writer who once wrote about how a good way of getting rich would be to found a religion.

Soon, graffiti artists in the place are writing awesome new slogans like “BE TEMPERATE” on walls, Buddy and a helpful homeless alcoholic build a sports car out of scrap metal, and protection money rackets are stopped by slow motion shouting. Somewhere on the way, Buddy makes an enemy, though, in form of frequently pretty much naked pimp and drug dealer Mr. One (Reggie De Morton), owner of an even better car than Buddy’s.

Oh, and he’s – not much of a surprise given his choice of career – totally evil, perhaps even the Great Evil Buddy has come to conquer? Unfortunately, Mr. One is also prepared, and has – in a series of sleazy sexual interludes – gotten a lot of dirt on all three members of LA’s police force, who are now working for him, because who wouldn’t murder so the photos of one’s dalliance with a girl with large breasts won’t fall into the wrong hands?

So, Buddy’s got his job cut out for him, or he would have, if he’d actually be any good at the conquering Great Evil bit or at being a Messiah.

On first encounter with Ed Hunt’s brilliantly bizarre Alien Warrior, the sane viewer will ask herself what exactly she has gotten herself into: perhaps an afterschool special that wants to show us how awesome cult leaders are? The film’s politics and philosophy at least support that theory, what with the rampant naivety the film shows towards the thoughts, actions, and reasons for the actions of human beings, the absurd psycho-babble Buddy sprouts at every opportune moment, bonkers moments like the one where Buddy rubs the hands of a comatose little girl against his beard to successfully revive her, and the whole thing where our expressionless lead with the emotionless voice brainwashes idiots into being good by turning them against their mums (who were right, because these guys truly are idiots). On the other hand, there’s the film’s other half, consisting of about four scenes of attempted rape, some choice gratuitous violence, more nudity than you can throw your facial locks at, and many a scene of Reggie De Morton being a bit vile and/or underdressed.

And did I mention the bad martial arts fights, the slow-motion to end all slow motions (because, where slow-motion in other films slows down actual movement, slow-motion here is mostly used to slow down shots of people not actually moving much) or the moments that concentrate on Mr. One like a very cheap, very late, and very bad blaxploitation movie? It’s a puzzling, and perhaps a little frightening, mix of incongruous elements that gives a film that is already chockfull of utterly bizarre nonsense a kick in the direction of the true classic.
Of course, Alien Warrior does carry all the other virtues of true bizarro filmmaking too. There’s the acting, with De Morton strutting around as if he owns the place (even when he’s wearing only his undies and a submachine gun, and yes, that happens too), Saunders (I hope it’s her, or I’m making fun of the wrong woman and apologize) doing things with her face human faces aren’t meant to do, and Clark giving a frighteningly effective impression of a walking-talking manikin.

Hunt’s direction is static and absurdly in love with his very special concept of slow motion. Scenes are framed in strange and awkward ways and the film’s storytelling is disjointed, jumping from one idea (I’m using the term loosely, of course) to the next without much of a logical connection. In other words, it’s brilliant, and it’s not difficult to imagine this to be a film Buddy himself has made. Which would actually explain the ending too, where Buddy, after having fucked up so completely large parts of the guys whose lives he supposedly improved are now dead, and his nemesis having been shot by one of the few survivors (who’ll spend the rest of his life in jail, probably), and leaving Lora behind with the dubious excuse that time and space are an illusion so they’ll therefore be together forever, returns home, and is congratulated by his father on his awesome skills of conquering Great Evil. Well, at least it sort of fits with Buddy’s philosophy of making peoples’ lives better by having them close their eyes and imagine everything they wish for is coming true and everything’s perfect.


Come to think of it, that philosophy is also the only way I can come up with to explain the existence of Alien Warrior, so I can’t even say the film isn’t practicing what it preaches.

Mr. Brooks (2007)

Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a beloved family man, a respected businessman, and also a feared serial killer. He’s not been killing anyone for two years now, thanks to the wonders of the twelve step program (I wonder how that making amends part worked in his case). However, his second personality, one Marshall (William Hurt), representing director Bruce A. Evans’s fear of letting Kevin Costner simply act a man with two very different sides to his personality, does talk him into beginning another murder spree. Alas, some idiot, let’s call him Mr Smith (Dane Cook), has photographed Earl doing the deed through a window and is now blackmailing the serial killer into killing a random person with him, for Mr Smith desperately wants to know how that feels. And that would probably be the plot for an at least half sane movie, but since this thing’s about as deranged as its protagonist, there are various sub- and side plots awaiting your pleasure, apart from the Dexter-style dubious joy of seeing how Earl’s going to get away with it all.

So, we also spend quite a bit of time with the Detective hunting Earl, one Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore); we spend even more time with the divorce troubles her greedy husband – she’s not just a cop, she’s also a rich heiress, you see – gets her into. And then there’s the killer couple who is trying to take vengeance on her. And her breaking all the rules. Earl is going to involve himself in all of this business, because why the hell not?

Because that’s clearly still not enough PLOT for a single movie, meet Earl’s daughter Jane (Danielle Panabaker). Jane has left college for reasons she isn’t willing to explain, and now wants to work for Daddy. Turns out she is pregnant (and we learn that serial killer Earl is against abortion). Then it turns out she has probably murdered someone at school with a hatchet, and Earl has to worry that she has inherited some of his little mental problems, and try to fix her little problem without her noticing.

Also also, Earl might want to commit suicide in the most complicated manner ever devised, or perhaps not. Who knows?

I believe these are more or less all of the sub and side plots Mr. Brooks throws at its audience. If all of this sounds like total nonsense to you, you’ve got the film right. Obviously, it’s trying to milk the automatic respect a lot of people have for actors like Costner playing a bad guy for all it is worth, but it is permanently undercutting this by having so much plot business to take care of, Costner has little time to do any actual character work. That’s certainly not helped by the idiotic decision to give him another half portrayed by a different actor, which turns what should be an internal struggle into lots of expository dialogue, or scenes of the film gloating at how people not Costner can’t see William Hurt!


The funniest thing about the whole affair is that director/co-writer Evans presents all this bullshit with the grand gesture of somebody making a deep and thoughtful film about a terrible human being, wilfully pretending that this is not a cartoon, and that we learn a lot about the human condition here. Of course, if you watch the film as the cartoon about a bedraggled serial killer haunted by the horrors of plotting it actually is, it becomes rather brilliant, with stupid twists and idiotic new sub-plots coming so fast and furious, it’s impossible for me to watch this (or just think about it), and not fall into rather regular fits of the giggles. The film’s educational, too, in so far as we learn that there’s no genre that can’t be made hilarious by the simple application of all the plots ever.

Between Worlds (2018)

Long haul truck driver Joe (Nicolas Cage) is at the end of his rope. Following the death of his wife and kid, he has lost whatever grip he had on life – it clearly wasn’t terribly tight to begin with - and turned into a (probably unwashed) alcoholic who’s bound to even lose his truck soon enough. And, as Joe will explain, a man without a truck isn’t a man. No, seriously.

Anyway, while at a rest stop, Joe saves a woman we will soon enough learn is called Julie (Franka Potente) from being choked to death. His rescue attempt was a bit misguided, though, for Julie wanted to be choked. You see, she can contact the spirit world, but only when she is suffocating. So says the script, and who are we to roll our eyes? And right now, Julie needs all the suffocation she can get, for her daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell) has fallen into a coma following an accident. As you do in this sort of situation, Joe helps Julie by at first driving her to the hospital, and later getting on with some helpful hospital stairway choking. Lo and behold! It helps, and Julie seems to have gotten her daughters spirit back into her body.

She also gets Joe into her pants right quick, and things could be fine – as much as any relationship with a character played by Cage can be fine – with Julie having a new horrible relationship obviously doomed to crash and burn and her daughter being alright again. But as it turns out, Julie didn’t get the spirit of her daughter back into her body, but somehow opened up the body to the ghost that had been hanging around Joe, his dead wife Mary (sometimes played by Lydia Hearst). Of course, Billie manages to convince Joe soon enough she is indeed his wife, and he does what any rational guy played by Cage would do, and starts an affair (including very special sex techniques like reading poetry aloud during sex) with the spirit of his dead wife inhabiting the body of his new girlfriend’s daughter. As you can imagine, nothing can go wrong there.

You may or may not believe it, but that is indeed the plot of writer-director Maria Pulera’s Between Worlds, following a script that somehow must have convinced someone wearing a suit to provide enough of a budget to hire Cage, Potente and Mitchell and have enough money left to shoot a film that looks perfectly professional, if haunted by a tendency to stage everything in the most trashy way possible. The sex scenes alone, with Cage huffing and puffing, and mugging and reading poetry, and the director thinking it a great idea to intercut various sex adventures into one single scene of epic weirdness are a thing to behold; Dutch angles crop up; suspense is based on the big question of Joe being able to get his pants back on quickly enough.

And if all of this sounds to you like a Lifetime movie gone mad(der than typical), that’s what the film suggests to me too, just with a bit more (and perfectly unappetizing, because who the hell wants to see Cage do this?) sleaze, and a script that throws out bizarre and goofy ideas by the dozen. Whereas the modern Lifestyle movie defaults to camp as its tone, though, I never quite understood what tone the film at hand is actually going for. Am I supposed to take any of this seriously? Is the director? The actors apparently don’t know either, with Potente (who doesn’t work great with Cage here) looking as if she’s just barely holding off giggling fits, Cage doing that thing where he’s making perfectly sensible acting decisions for the bizarre material he is given about half of the time, but going all-out Cage-crazy for the other half, and only Mitchell seeming to be able to decide on a tone and keep to it. Is that what the filmmakers wanted? Who knows?


What I do know is that, even though the film obviously is a bizarre mess of curious ideas, dubious execution and Nicolas Cage cageing out, it is also highly entertaining. I might not have cared about the supposed psychological damage of any of the freaks on screen, and never found myself pondering the conundrum of a guy wavering between hot sexy times with the spirit of his wife in the hot young body of the daughter of his girlfriend and said girlfriend, but I sure as hell was always looking forward to the next bit of strangeness Between Worlds came up with. For like its male lead, the film may have a tendency to dubious decisions (some may call them “bad”) but those decisions are always interesting, surprising and genuinely entertaining. Also, in terribly bad taste, but who cares?