Three Films Make A Post: THE END WAS NEAR. THEY KICKED ITS ASS.

Mindwarp (1992): I know I shouldn’t expect anything beyond fan service in form of KNB gore that often feels shoe-horned in for no good reason, horror fan favs Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm, and some moments that aim for taboo breaking but fall flat because they’re as pointless as a reality show from a Fangoria production. However, there’s just no excuse for this particular piece of crap to include all these things and be boring, surely. The script’s just terrible – and I mean terrible for the standards of a low budget post-apocalypse movie with added gore – moving at a snail’s pace and containing little that’s surprising or as freaky as the film pretends it to be. Director Steve Barnett does his work with all the panache and style of a full garbage can, Campbell and Scrimm get paid, and I had myself a nice little nap.

The Light at the Edge of the World (1971): Where Barnett's film is just crap, Kevin Billington’s very free adaptation of a Jules Verne novel is something of an intriguing mess. Sometimes, it’s a psychologically tense cat and mouse game between Kirk Douglas and Yul Brunner that makes excellent use of the (Catalonian?) piece of rock it has been shot on; sometimes, it’s a decent adventure movie; at other times again, it shows the same ruthless, pessimist spirit I love about early 70s horror. A few scenes later, it’s suddenly a meandering mess that just doesn’t seem to know what point it is trying to make about people in general or its characters, just pushing stuff in front of its audience without discernible rhyme or reason. The good parts do make this one very much worth watching, though.

Shame the Devil (2013): If you always dreamed of watching a British movie partially “inspired” by the Saw films with a bit more of the standard serial killer thriller thrown in, this one’s clearly your fault. I have to say, though, this thing does give me a new appreciation for the Saws, for while the entries in that particular franchise are as implausible as all get out, pretty tacky and directed with all the wrong fashionable direction tics, they do at least hang together as actual movies and do their best to make their implausibilities work in the context of their narratives. Shame the Devil, on the other hand, has some of the worst writing I’ve ever encountered, with dialogue that’s at once stilted and unnatural, dumb and lacking in flow, everyone talking at each other in non sequiturs. The plot is obvious, badly paced, full of ill used clichés and just plain disinteresting. The writing is so bad and hangs together so little, I can’t bring myself to actually criticize the actors for the way they stumble through their scenes, for it’s pretty damn clear that there’s nothing to work with in the script. Paul Tanter’s direction sure as hell doesn’t provide anything for them to hang their performances on. It’s just a dreadful mess of a movie, as far from being entertainingly bad as it is from being competent filmmaking.

Three Films Make A Grump: Spewed from intergalactic space to clutch the planet earth in its...TERROR TENTACLES!

Legendary Panty Mask (1991): Surprisingly mild Go Nagai adaptation about a panty mask wearing, mock-Injun-bikini garbed heroine lacklusterly fighting the evil nuns dominating an all-female town and protecting a cross-dressing boy. Sounds fun enough, but lacks the commitment to sleaze (the film does not even contain the slightest nudity) and/or insanity I have come to expect from this kind of thing. There are a few moments of delight to be had in the film's dreadful musical numbers (especially the renditions of "classics" like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Ten Little Indians" in perfect Jenglish), but the whole affair is just too timid to be truly interesting.

 

The Ultimate Warrior (1975): Director Robert Clouse's rampant mediocrity strikes again and manages to make a post-apocalyptic movie about a frequently topless Yul Brunner protecting a group of relatively sane and peaceful people in the ruins of New York against their nasty neighbours until Max von Sydow convinces him to crawl through the Underground kind of boring. The script is fittingly cynical and doesn't shy away from dead babies and humanity showing its worst side, but Clouse is never able to sell it right.

If this was an Italian movie, it would probably be saved through insanity and incomprehensibility, alas, Clouse is too classy (read "boring") for anything fun like that.

 

The Wolfman (2010): This film is as divided in its personality as its titular character is. Visually, there's a lot to like here, especially when the film concentrates on building mood through the glorious artificiality of its production design. It is much less successful - and more than just slightly ridiculous - when it goes for scenes of gory monster rampage.

The script is quite a mess. Themes of classical gothic horror, some clever modernisation, much more stupid "modernisation" and a lot of even more stupid Freudian psycho-nonsense (good old father complexes) are randomly thrown together with any old stuff that must have come to mind while writing the film, seemingly without any thought for what it all is supposed to be about. What business, for example, has Inspector Abberline (the man who hunted Jack the Ripper) in this film? Why overload what is at its heart a very simple story with so much baggage that doesn't have any pay-off, neither textually nor subtextually?

The film's permanent shifts in tone, its unfocused and disconnected jumping from scene to scene are the final nails in its coffin. Well, unless Anthony Hopkins' usual "I am so sinister" performance has that dubious honour.

I liked this a lot better when it was Ang Lee's Hulk.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,japanese movies,horror,post-apocalypse,comedy,exploitation,yul brunner,emily blunt,in short