In short: Smile Before Death (1972)

Original title: Il sorriso della iena

Sixteen year old Nancy Thompson's (Jenny Tamburi) mother has died in the sort of "suicide" only the movie police will ever take to be an actual suicide. Not that it matters all that much to Nancy, seeing that she's spent her whole life in various boarding schools and hasn't seen her Mom in years anyhow. Plus, her mother's death has made Nancy very, very rich, although her stepfather Mario (Silvano Tranquilli), who has never even seen Nancy before her mother died, is supposed to take care of her money until she's eighteen.

Nonetheless, Nancy is leaving her boarding school and moving in with the aging gigolo and his long-term lover, fashion photographer Gianna (Rosalba Neri). It becomes clear quite early on in the proceedings that Gianna and Mario are responsible for the death of Nancy's mother, and that they are planning on getting rid of the girl, too, to get at her money.

Nancy's no dummy, though, and, after the first failed assassination attempt on her, starts a very peculiar campaign of self-defence by playing games of seduction and merry mind-fuckery on her would-be killers. Of course, there are further plot twists lying in the future.

Smile Before Death's director Silvio Amadio is one among the astonishing number of Italian back row genre filmmakers who was always working in whatever genre was in fashion at the moment, so his filmography features a peplum or two, a spaghetti western, and a few giallos like Smile. As happens with his type of director more often than not, most of Amadio's films are competent and routine but lack the sparkle or conviction of films made by someone who cares about more in his films than finishing them on time and on budget.

That isn't to say his films are unwatchable, one just needs to keep one's expectations on the appropriate medium height to enjoy them. If you're able to do that with Smile Before Death, you'll probably have some fun with it.

At least, the film contains the mandatory amount of nudity, mostly Jenny Tamburi's nudity. Don't worry, the actress wasn't really sixteen when this was shot, so nobody has to feel like too uncomfortable when the camera lingers and lingers and lingers on her while the film's blasted theme song plays. It's only another day of mild sleaze in the Italian film industry.

When Amadio's camera can tear its gaze away from Tamburi, some mildly thrilling thriller stuff and a load of mightily improbable, yet appropriately cynical twisting and turning happens. From time to time, the film even manages to be blackly funny in its merry disregard for propriety; this never leads into the depths of class, politics and social morals some of the best films of the giallo genre are exploring, but does keep one distracted from further repetitions of the same thirty seconds of music.

I usually do like the technique of playing a jaunty, cheesy lounge pop song while rather decadent or plain unpleasant things happen on screen, but Amadio overuses the little music one Roberto Pregadio composed for his film so much that I'm not even sure if he isn't trying to pull off a Tokyo Drifter-like joke on his producers. Unfortunately, Pregadio's little ditty isn't good enough to be used this intensely and soon (after its tenth use or so about twenty minutes into the movie) becomes so close to sonic torture that it threatens to pull the rest of the film down with it.

Still, if you're nerves are strong, or your ears weak, Smile Before Death is a perfectly decent little movie.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,in short,silvio amadio,jenny tamburi,rosalba neri

My Soul To Take (2010)

Sixteen years ago, a serial killer, imaginatively dubbed "The Ripper", terrorized your usual US small town. In the end, the killer turned out to be a loving family father with one daughter and another child nearly born, but also a lot of voices - one of them rather nasty - in his head. In good old slasher movie tradition, the guy took some killing, too, when the police finally caught up with him, surviving various close range shots, knife cuts, and a self-inflicted ambulance collision until he finally ended up in the local river, never to be seen again.

Now, sixteen years later, the seven children born in the night of the Ripper's death - all of them played by actors age twenty-one or older - are holding an improbable ritual of wrestling a representation of the killer back into the lake on the anniversary night of his death. And no, the film never explains how this tradition got started, and so lets its audience picture the main characters as toddlers wrestling representational evil.

This year, though, teenage meanness chooses our designated hero Bug (Max Thieriot) as the wrestler. Now, Bug's a little on the fragile side and so doesn't do his job before the police comes to break up the whole affair. Obviously, this has the expected consequence of someone dressing up in the Ripper costume going around and slaughtering teenagers. Is it just the return of a killer, or some under-explained crap about wandering souls?

I don't really share the love for Wes Craven a lot of other horror fans seem to carry around in their hearts. Admittedly, I do like his original Nightmare on Elm Street in its role as supernatural slasher movie with a brain quite a bit (as is only fair and proper), but I usually describe Craven's two early exploitation classics as "the one with the Keystone Kops" and "the one with homicidal Lassie", and loathe Scream for its responsibility for a host of movies confusing irony with an excuse for lazy writing. (I don't blame Craven for all the mediocre films in between, though. Nobody only makes important films.) Consequently, I didn't go into My Soul To Take expecting anything better than another teen slasher, probably slickly directed in a boring mainstream manner, with ill-advised "humour" to make the director look more clever. Apart from the visual slickness, that's not at all what the film delivers, though.

Sure, Craven's film is a variation of the old teen slasher formula - although one that seems strangely disinterested in the actual violence, and even dares to let some of the murders happen off-screen - with added doses of black high school comedy only a guy in his early seventies would write, but it's also completely, ambitiously insane in the most unexpected ways.

It's pretty clear Craven had ambitions of making My Soul more than just your run-of-the-mill slasher film, but I honestly don't know what kind of movie the director was trying to make instead. An air of uncertainty hangs over the film, showing itself in the film's moments of utter unpredictability hindered by its moments of complete predictability (try to guess the order of character deaths in this one, and you'll be dead wrong; try to guess the nature and identity of the killer, and you'll be dead right), in the way the characterisation swerves from stupid teen cliché to surprising complexity and back again in the course of a single scene, in the blatant idiocy of the finale (really, shouldn't a film - something that is supremely visual - try to get something visually interesting out of the soul transfer nonsense?), and in jarring tonal shifts a director and writer of Craven's experience can't have included without a purpose. Alas, what that purpose beyond weirdification might be remains completely unclear to me.

In a sense, this does of course turn My Soul to Take into a minor catastrophe, the sort of movie only people with a healthy (or unhealthy, depending on one's perspective) love for the skewed will appreciate. It's not an effective horror movie, it's certainly not a effective comedy, it's just baffling and its existence improbable beyond belief, but it's also a fascinating experience in its strangeness. There aren't many films coming out of the horror mainstream this peculiar, and while I don't think "peculiarity" is what Craven was going for (he seems much too well adjusted for that), I can't help but approve of the fact that peculiarity is what he achieved.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,wes craven

Things I Learned From Watching Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

(Well, it was either this, or a long and annoyed rant about how wrong this and a bunch of other POV horror movies got Blair Witch Project. I chose what's better for my blood pressure.)

• Retcons are alive and well and now living in crappy horror prequels.
• If there's one thing demons like, it's haunting annoying and boring people. See also movie number one. You go, demons!
• The life of a Magical Latina ain't easy.
• That shot of the swimming pool in which nothing happens isn't getting more exciting by permanent repetition.
• Astonishingly enough, the same goes for all those other repeated shots where nothing happens. That's not how suspense works.
• Doors still aren't scary. Well, not Paranormal Activity's doors.
• Automatic pool cleaners are like, totally fascinating. Just ask the demon. Or this movie.
• If a Ouija board was used in the first movie, you gotta have one in the second one too, or else the audience will become confused by the daring differences between the two.
• Ghosts aren't persistent, unlike demons, who are like, evil.
• "Oi! Stepmom! Did your Granny make a pact with a demon for wealth and sold the life of your firstborn son?" is not the sort of question a wholesome American girl will ask her stepmother directly. Or else this film would be a lot more entertaining (and probably shorter, but that's the same in this case) than it is.
• Opening kitchen cupboards is an especially evil and disturbing thing for a demon to do. I'd recommend taking out the  garbage once in a while, too.
• When a demon wants to play fetch, it really wants to play FETCH.
• There are stupid explanations a sequel delivers for what happened in a first movie, and then there's what Paranormal Activity 2 does. You just gotta love it when a sequel makes its predecessor retroactively worse.
• Micah was killed on October 8th, 2006. And I remember being pretty happy about it.
• There's nothing wrong with this movie that couldn't have been fixed by a total re-write and some imagination in the direction. Or just not making it at all, but that would of course be asking too much.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror

Music Monday: How (Not) To Dress Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music monday. music,the decemberists

Sticenik (1973)

A young man (who will later turn out to be) named Michael flees in panic through the countryside, slowly followed by a strange figure wearing a cape. Let's call the latter "The Man" from now on. Ooh, symbolism.

Michael manages to escape to a large building, and right into the arms of a psychiatrist. Looks like the young man has stumbled into a clinic for milder cases of mental illness. The psychiatrist decides to take care of Michael for a time. Though the Man stops his pursuit once his victim has reached the clinic, the psychiatrist still catches a look of the strange pursuer and realizes that something is going on that's not quite right.

Nonetheless, talking with the young man makes it clear to the psychiatrist that his guest is in dire need of more than just physical shelter, and that his clinic is not prepared to help a man like him. But, before the psychiatrist can get Michael someplace else, he will have to win the young man's trust.

Michael's stay isn't quiet, though. There is something about the young man and his fears that disturbs the other patients terribly, as if his nightmares were somehow dripping into theirs, but that's not even the strangest thing about the situation. The Man hasn't give up on his pursuit, it seems, and starts to appear outside the clinic, or even on its roof, willing to use violence against people getting in his way. Later on, the Man accosts the psychiatrist when he is walking down a lonely country road and tries to convince the doctor that he is Michael's guardian, and has every right to get his hands on him, but the obvious strangeness surrounding the Man does seem to make his words rather difficult to believe.

Finally, the psychiatrist makes a decision. It never becomes quite clear if he decides to give Michael to the Man or just to transfer him into a more fitting clinic for his case as he says (who treats supernatural pursuit anyway?). In the end, the nature of the psychiatrist's decision will not be important at all, because Michael makes one all his own.

Yugoslavian (Serbian) director Djordje Kadijevic has quite a few films treating models of the literary fantastic in a very particular way in his filmography. Some of these films, like Sticenik, have fortunately found the interest of fansubbers, who are doing everyone interested in the cinema of the fantastic quite a favour.

Sticenik is based on a short story by Serbian Jewish writer Filip David, and achieves a strange, dream-like, yet precise mood of the inevitable. The film utilizes black and white pictures to reach a point (and a mood) lying somewhere between the type of Gothic achievable on a TV budget in Yugoslavia in 1973 and the clear symbolism of the more daring part of Eastern European arthouse cinema.

I find the work of directors like Kadijevic, whose ideas of what fantasy cinema is for and how it is to be made are very different from those of Western (and inevitably more commercial) directors, as fascinating as it is difficult to write about. Sure, I could give you an interpretative rundown, giving my opinion on what the Man symbolizes and what the rocking chair in the garden is a metaphor for, but this approach to writing about film (or any art at all) isn't for me, because it sells the actual experience of watching a movie short and turns movies into crossword puzzles with one clear solution that I'll tell you about to demonstrate my intelligence, leaving you with little reason to actually watch the damn things on your own other than to disagree with me or praise my awesomeness.

Some things are better experienced than explained, so I'll just leave you with my recommendation for Sticenik as a film that perfectly makes everything that is good and interesting about Eastern European fantastic literature as I know it come alive, and that's well worth seeking out.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: yugoslavian movies,reviews,djordje kadijevic,arthouse,horror

In short: The Last Shark (1981)

aka Great White

aka The Last Jaws

Original title: L'ultimo squalo

Just a few days before a surfing regatta is supposed to be held there, the little US coastal town of Port Harbor is struck by a series of shark attacks. The local experts in such things - author and hobby sharkotologist Peter BenchleyBenton (James Franciscus) and "Scottish" sea bear Ron Hamer (Vic "Yup, it says here I'm from Scotland. This is how Scottish people talk, right?" Morrow) - deem the perpetrator to be an exceptionally large Great White. Their recommendation is to postpone the regatta until the shark problem has been solved. Unfortunately, the town's mayor William Wells (Joshua Sinclair) is trying to get himself elected state governor, and as we all know, that's not a position you can achieve when you are known as level-headed and putting the greater good before your private interests in an emergency, so Wells decides to go through with regatta anyway.

We're not in Amity here (no, honestly, please don't sue us!), though, and while Wells does his best to keep the shark killings out of the news, he still does try to protect the competitors in the regatta by surrounding the area of the competition with a net no normal shark could bite through. Additionally, Wells assigns Benton, Hamer and a bunch of fishermen (surely all experts in animals they don't usually meet) as his anti-shark crack troop.

Not surprisingly, none of Wells' ideas protects anyone, and Port Harbor's beach and the surrounding seas stay an all-you-can-eat buffet. That is, until Sharkie makes the capital mistake of nibbling off the leg of Benton's daughter.

In 1981, much beloved Italian action specialist Enzo G. Castellari must have been in desperate need of some fast money. At least, that's the only explanation I have for the director signing on for a project like this late-coming rip-off of Jaws at a point in his career when he otherwise seemed unable to make a bad film. But bad The Last Shark is, there's no doubt about it. Seldom has Castellari shown himself as indifferent towards making a watchable movie as here. The pacing is sloppy and slow, half of the film's scene are copied as closely from Spielberg's film or from its lamentable sequel as possible without getting sued (which didn't help Last Shark - there was a lawsuit by Universal, and the Italian film's producers lost it), and the other half just doesn't seem to have much of a reason to exist.

Castellari tries to pep things up a bit by adding utterly random slow motion shots and a bit of dynamic editing, but for about the first hour of the film's running time, nothing to get excited about happens. It sure doesn't help the film's excitement level during that phase that the shark is either represented by an adorably bad model or through library footage that doesn't fit what is supposed to be happening on screen at all, and very often doesn't even show a Great White (see the word "white" here, Enzo?).

Fortunately for people who have already wasted an hour of their lives at this point, the film gets sillier going into its final act, and begins to show scenes poor Spielberg would not have dreamt of. The shark munches on a helicopter, the shark kidnaps a bunch of people, the shark gets blown up by an inadvertently mined corpse and happiness returns to my living room. It's not enough to rescue the film, or even in the slightest what one would hope for from Castellari, yet it stills shows the film and its director willing to entertain the audience instead of inflicting pain to it.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,enzo g. castellari,in short,vic morrow,james franciscus,horror

On WTF: Bay Rong (2009)

aka Clash

From time to time, I still get excited about attempts at reviving the Heroic Bloodshed genre. Case in point is the Vietnamese Bay Rong featuring Thanh Van (Veronica) Ngo and Johnny Nguyen being pretty awesome.

As always on a Friday, my write-up on WTF-Film will detail the many reasons to be excited about the movie.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: vietnamese movies,martial arts,action,than van ngo,johnny nguyen,le thanh son,reviews,other places

Three Films Make One Very Sleepy Guy: There's No Waking Up From The SLEEP OF THE DEAD!

Ölümsüzler (1971): This Western is not exactly a shining example of the virtues of Turkish pop cinema. Though there are certainly some things to recommend it - among them Erol Tas, yes Dr. Seytan himself, mugging charmingly as the main bad guy - there's an atypical dragginess to the film's pace, and a painful fascination with scenes of people riding, riding and then riding some more while needle-dropped music you just might know from somewhat more effective Westerns plays that make it difficult to enjoy the film.

 

Red (2010): Action comedy very freely based on the graphic novel by Warren Ellis (who was able to buy his daughter a pony from the money he got out of this, so there's at least that to say for the film) and Cully Hamner. It's all highly paid actors of the good sort, silly action and flat jokes all the time, presented with exactly the type of Hollywood slickness that makes my feet fall asleep. It's quite an inoffensive film in that it is perfectly watchable, but also a terrible waste of talent and theme (what happens to men and women of violence when they get old?), seemingly too cautious or just too damn disinterested to make something out of its budget (you know, an amount several dozen indie films with ambitions could be made from). It's mainstream cinema at its most riskless, and neither as fun nor as funny as it pretends to be.

 

Dead Clowns (2003): Of course, having none of that big time Hollywood money does not necessarily save a film from being a bore. As it turns out, in the wrong hands, even zombie clowns can get frightfully boring. Ölümsüzler might drag through the sheer power of its riding scenes, but that's still better than being like Dead Clowns and dragging through the sheer power of various actors and "actors" holding incredibly tedious monologues until they are killed off by clowns. A plot that might just be enough for a twenty minute short film gets blown up to ninety horrible minutes, contemporary scream queens (= actresses who are probably great people, but haven't been in anything worth watching in their lives) appear and die or do exposition and die, there's no editor in sight, and why am I feeling so sleepy all of a sudden?

 

Technorati-Markierungen: turkish movies,american movies,western,action,comedy,horror,erol tas,bruce willis,john malkovich,in short

Gallants (2010)

Low-level real-estate agent and pathetic loser Cheung (Wong Yau-Nam) has been exiled by (for six weeks without pay) by his company into the outskirts of nowhere to help out with some sort of shady business deal there. It turns out that the guy he is supposed to work with is Mang (Ou-Yang Ching), who was the victim of Cheung's bullying ways when they were kids, but is now the junior boss in a modern and successful (= good for nothing) martial arts school. Now that things have turned around, more than just one initial beating seems to lie in Cheung's future.

A part of the vague business deal are Mang's attempts to acquire the lease to the building of the former martial arts school of Master Law (Teddy Robin Kwan) that is now a tea house belonging to Law's former top students Dragon (Chen Kuan-Tai) and Tiger (Bruce Leung). The two old men have been beaten and battered by life, but are still taking care of the place and their master who has been lying in a coma for thirty years now.

One of Mang's attempts at getting the lease does not get him what he wants, but instead awakens Law from his coma. As these things go, Cheung has sort of stumbled onto the old men's side with vague ideas of learning kung fu from them.

The martial arts master seems somewhat confused, and takes Cheung to be both of his former students. Tiger convinces the young man to play his and his friend's role for Law, while they pretend to be his students. Obviously, this is the beginning of some growing up - for Dragon and Tiger as well as for Cheung.

Derek Kwok's and Clement Cheng's Gallants belongs firmly into the camp of Hong Kong movies of the last few years trying at once to be love letters to classic martial arts movies and to pull the genre that just disappeared with the arrival of the hair brigade in the city back into relevance. Ironically enough, Gallants does its updating (that at times borders on loving deconstruction) by letting great old men of the genre like Chen Kuan-Tai and Bruce Leung take centre stage again. Fortunately, this does not happen in the Hollywood way that would just ignore aging action heroes' ages except for making a joke or two about it, but rather by letting the film be about what it means to be old and cantankerous and not very happy about what one has done with one's life. Cheung's story is basically just there to set the stage for the changes that finally come to Tiger and Dragon. Cheung's growth process has its place in the film, but the show really belongs to the old men, something that the film really drives home once Mang's elders begin to appear.

And once you've seen what Chen Kuan-Tai and Bruce Leung are doing in their fight scenes, or how enthusiastically Teddy Robin plays their somewhat outrageous (this is, after all, a comedy, if one a lot less slapstick heavy than I feared) old master, you don't need any nostalgic connection to their body of work to think that centring the movie around them is the right decision, because these guys don't just have the martial arts abilities to carry a movie, but have also learned to carry themselves with a hard-won dignity that is a joy to watch, even when they are doing something silly.

While all this - as well as the film's very loose structure - is perfectly in keeping with the standards of classic martial arts cinema, there is no confusing Gallants with a mere exercise in nostalgia (like a film like Coweb seems to me) or that terrible word "retro", nor is the film falling down the irony hole. Instead, Kwok and Cheng have taken much of what was great in the martial arts films they probably grew up loving, but given it it a spin that belongs to them and the now. In the end, their film's moral is quite a bit different from what I'm used to from martial arts cinema, with an ending that is interpreting "winning" in a way seldom seen in the genre. Oh yes, Gallants is that frightening thing - a film with a moral, but said moral isn't preached at the audience but actually grows organically; and into a direction martial arts cinema seldom wanders, to boot.

The only thing the film is missing is a strong female martial artist/actor. Jiang Lu-Xia is unfortunately still wasting her talent on making barely watchable crap with Dennis Law (see the limp Bad Blood or the unfocused and incredibly pouty Vampire Warriors), and there don't seem to be any other takers for the female martial arts star position in Hong Kong right now.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,martial arts,comedy,derek kwok,clement cheng,chen kuan-tai,teddy robin kwan,bruce leung,reviews

In short: Terminatrix (1995)

Original title: Mizutani Kei: Insatsu no toriko

In a dystopian future, the new Japanese government, never having heard of contraception, mercilessly controls the population's sex lives to do something against the horrors of overpopulation. But a small band of rebels under the leadership of a certain Hanako resists. The rebels must be quite successful, too, or there would be no reason for the evil government to send a penis-crushing sexbot (Kei Mizutani) into the past to get a hold of Hanako's father's sexual organs before Hanako can be conceived.

The rebels for their part send a girl named Kaoru into the past to protect Hanako's father Kota from the most horrible mutilation of them all. But Kaoru's work is more difficult than anyone could have expected, for Kota is the kind of guy who'd jump any woman even just vaguely willing. As the audience will learn soon enough, he's stretching the word "willingness" to mean "women I've gotten so drunk they just can't defend themselves anymore" when need be, putting my personal sympathies right on the side of the Terminatrix. Not surprisingly, the leech also doesn't believe a single word of what Kaoru tells him about the future and his important role in the destruction of the world through overpopulation. Things may get easier for Kaoru once enough penis-crushed men sharing Kota's name have been found, yet that alone will not get rid of the Terminatrix, who's absolutely not willing to take no for an answer when it comes to the crushing. That's what electrified vibrators are for.

Given the things I've seen coming from exploitation filmmakers around the world, I'm not exactly surprised to see a pinku version of James Cameron's first Terminator movie (aka the good one), I'm only surprised that it took director Mikio Hirota until 1995 to make it, a point in time when even the second Terminator (aka the sappy one in which that Schwarzenegger guy tries to act again, without any success, as always) was already a few years in the past.

Quality-wise, Terminatrix is about what you'd expect when hearing about a Japanese softcore terminator, although not as mad as I had hoped for. Actually, while two (if you squint three) set-pieces of the original movie get an okay sexed-up update (with the vagina-oriented reworking of the self-repair sequence probably the film's highlight), Hirota doesn't seem to put a lot of energy into his film and instead of letting loose with the weird and the kinky coasts on the basic idea of "Terminator, but with sex instead of shooting" without adding much exciting of his own.

The film's also a bit too tame for comfort, with mostly quite unenthusiastic sex scenes that (again) don't do a lot with the robotic castration angle, or the fact that Kei Mizutani's outfit and makeup here should be enough to keep most guys un-penis-squashable (that's the technical term).

I'm usually quite easily amused by stuff like this, but I expect this type of cash-in movie to show a bit of enthusiasm for what it's doing, even if it's only pretend-enthusiasm. Terminatrix unfortunately doesn't do enthusiasm.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,pinku,sf,comedy,kei mizutani

Music Monday: He Probably Is Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music monday,music,the fall

Deathsport (1978)

In the realm of Post-Apocalyptica, a thousand years in the future, the surviving members of humanity have divided into three groups. Firstly, there are the so-called Statemen. Living in domed or force-fielded city states, they use charming skiffy tech and wear the usual mix of togas and silver Lamé, or, when they are evil, uncomfortable looking uniforms. The wasteland between the cities is mostly populated by mutant cannibals with Ping-Pong eyes, you know, the kind of people nobody likes. Lastly, and most terrifying, is the third group, the Range Guides, violent libertarian hippies utilizing swords made from transparent plastic and laser blasters that look just a wee bit like large flashlights who ride the post-nuclear ranges, sprouting mock-philosophical nonsense wherever they go until their victims had rather been eaten by mutants.

Lord Zirpola (David McLean), the leader of one of the city states entertains his populace with the good old Roman method of arena fights to the death. Everyone seems pretty happy with that, but radioactivity is turning Zirpola's brain to mush and so he decides that the fights will be a good way to convince his populace of the superiority of his new secret weapon - motorcycles with built-in (and of course immobile) lasers with a tendency to explode at the slightest provocation. It seems when your brain's radioactive goo, these things look like the ideal weapon to attack other cities. Zirpola plans to demonstrate his dubious understanding of weapon technology and the tactics of urban combat by setting his superbikes into a fight against some of those obnoxious Range Guides (you know, people he isn't actually planning to attack later on), who are known as right ass-kickers. How else could they get away with their Randian hippiedom?

So Lord Zippy sends his favourite henchman Ankar Moor (Richard Lynch), who just happens to be a renegade Range Guide, into the wastelands to catch him some arena fighters.

Among those caught are Kaz Oshay (David Carradine), a guy who just happens to be the son of a legendary fighter Ankar killed (man, the post-apocalyptic world is full of coincidences), and a gal named Deneer (Claudia Jennings), who just happens to be a former Playboy model. Obviously, there will be more idiotic philosophizing, Claudia Jennings's breasts freed from their chains, too many motorcycle stunts, daring escapes and a "climactic" duel between Kaz and Ankar.

Deathsport sure isn't one of my favourite movies from this phase of Roger Corman's New World Pictures. For large parts of its running time, the film suffers from an air of disinterest nearly as strong as like the odour of weed that hangs over David Carradine. Directors Allan Arkush and Nicholas Niciphor weren't among the better of Corman's stable of young, promising talent and would deservedly both go into careers of directing and producing exceptionally boring TV shows. Here, where you'd expect a product of people young and hungry and creative, they delivered an at times draggy, at best vaguely entertaining mix of silly ideas that doesn't dare to really get into that silliness, but instead just aimlessly trundles along.

Worse, the film's script often takes itself painfully serious, bombarding the audience with stiff noble savage Libertarian dialogue from Carradine, Jennings and Lynch whenever there's no motorcycle exploding. It's not much of a surprise that the script does not seem to know the difference between the profound and the ridiculous, and is incapable of smiling about its own foolishness, as is always the way with really bad philosophy.

It's not all Arkush's and Niciphor's fault, though. Deathsport's three cult movie stalwarts in front of the camera all must have had a very bad week when shooting this. I'm used to Carradine being permanently stoned, but in this case, he doesn't even seem to realize there's a camera running. Jennings, and even the usually scenery-chewing Lynch, also just don't seem to be fully there. That's not much of a surprise given Jennings's life when this was shot, yet it's still not pleasant to watch.

Fortunately, it's not all watching near-cataleptic actors mumbling nonsense that isn't even funny. Deathsport does sporadically feature some decent stunts (although exploding motorcycles only go that far for me), and I don't know any other film where one of the big bads dies by being pulled into his own electrified wind chimes by a random naked dancer. The problem is that Corman's production house at this point in time was churning out so many better, or at worst more entertaining, films than Deathsport is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,post-apocalypse,action,reviews,david carradine,claudia jennings,richard lynch

Three Films Make A Post: You Won't Believe Your Eyes Until He Rips Them From Their Sockets!

Abashiri Ikka: The Movie (2009): This ultra-cheap little film based on an old Go Nagai manga picturing the adventures of a family of goofy yet supremely violent criminals puts its heroes into a state-sponsored city of criminals, where they are brainwashed into amnesia and held back from any violence by practical microchips. But a stress test of the chips and a vengeful old enemy soon enough lead our heroes(?) back on their proper ways of carnage. Not that the film has much of a budget for carnage, but director Teruyoshi Ishii does at least keep things moving at a nice pace, and drives most of his cast into pretty adorable scenery-chewing. A further plus is that lead-acting idol Erica Tonooka is quite adept at "I'll kill you" stares and wears the obligatory school uniform nicely. The latter ability does of course come with the idol job, but the former is not as due for the course as one would hope (see for example - or better not - the first Oneechanbara movie). I was pretty entertained by the whole affair, but my standards are probably a bit lower than those of most people.

 

Haunted Changi (2010): Andrew Lau does English language POV horror in Singapore. You know the deal: film crew (with Lau playing a director named Andrew Lau) goes to a creepy, supposedly haunted, place, and more or less terrible things happen to them until only their ambiguous footage remains. Haunted Changi features an excellently creepy haunted place with its hospital and does at least two - possibly even three - things differently than most other films in POV style, but suffers from a very slow and just not very interesting beginning. The final twenty minutes are effective enough if you like this sort of thing (as I do) and even manage to give the ghostly presences a fittingly Asian twist. For me, that's enough to recommend a short, cheap film like this.

 

Skyline (2010): If you want to see a total waste of perfectly excellent bio-technological monster design and really neat CGI effects (so they do exist), then you'll have to see this. The film's script is a potpourri of all clichés from every apocalyptic alien invasion movie you'd care to mention, just minus the (potential) sense of urgency or suspense of the victims it "borrows" from, and with even less of an idea of the way actual human beings react than one has grown used to in its genre. Which is probably for the better, given how indifferent most of the acting here is, except for that of David Zayas, who seems to have decided that all hope is lost for his career anyway, so he might as well try and be as bad as humanly possible; that project is a huge success for him.

Most of the Skyline's script is - frankly - just too stupid and thoughtless to make me want to go into the terrible details. Let's just say that the film hits its lowest point (circa at the centre of the Earth) with an utterly inane ending of the sort even Roland Emmerich would have been ashamed of, and that nothing the film shows ever comes together into a whole, be it emotionally, dramatically or thematically (I wanted to write "intellectually", but that's not a word deserving of this film's company). I guess this is what happens when your movie is written by visual effects people instead of, you know, writers, and one of its executive producers is the abominable Brett Ratner.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,singaporean movies,american movies,comedy,action,horror,sf,teruyoshi ishii,andrew lau,erica tonooka,in short

On WTF: Psychout For Murder (1969)

I don't think the sub-genre of the sardonic Freudian giallo gets enough play in my house, so it was quite a happy coincidence that I stumbled upon Rossano Brazzi's rather obscure entry in this particular sub-genre.

You can learn what I thought about the man's Psychout for Murder aka Salvare La Faccia in my weekly appearance on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,reviews,rossano brazzi,adrienne larussa,other places

In short: Three Crosses Not To Die (1968)

Original title: Tre croci per non morire

Professional bounty hunter Reno (Giovanni Cianfriglia), professional charmer of women Jerry (Craig Hill) and professional Mexican horse thief Paco (Pietro Tordi) all have to look forward to a nice thirty days of jail time for their professions. Fortunately for them, their special talents are needed, and a group of monks and a desperate Mexican father first organize a very soft jailbreak for them, and then hire the men to prove the innocence of the father's son in a murder and a rape committed in another town. Preferably, the three crooks should solve the crime before the innocent will be hanged in seven days.

There's good money in it for the trio too, so they decide to take the offer of employment on the side of what's right and honourable for once.

But someone really doesn't want them to even start their investigation. Even before they arrive in the town where the crime took place, the three dubious heroes already have had to fight off a fake lynch mob and a band of Mexican bandits. Life doesn't get much easier when the three finally arrive in town. The townspeople do not want to have anything to do with the whole affair, and make for especially unhelpful witnesses. Someone behind the scenes - perhaps the man responsible for the murder and the attempts on the trio's lives - has more violent reactions to them snooping around.

Still, after some snooping, the investigators find out that there was a secret witness to the crime, a woman named Dolores. Might she have anything to do with the woman (Evelyn Stewart) living in an abandoned mill Jerry sets his mind on seducing as soon as he sees her?

Sergio Garrone's Three Crosses Not To Die is one of those films that are easiest praised by complimenting aspects of them that sound like they should be normal for any film, but usually aren't. There's an air of professionalism and competence about the movie that all too often just signals boredom and a lack of imagination. In Three Crosses' case that air is more the effect of a director and a script more interested in coherence and telling a simple and linear story cleanly than one is used to from Spaghetti Westerns.

There is, I think, something to be said for this approach, especially in a genre that usually doesn't take it, and instead tends to drift off in all directions. That drifting is something I like films to do too, obviously, but Garrone's peculiar way of being conventional makes for an interesting change, surprising in its lack of surprises.

It does help the film's case that Garrone still delivers much of what is needed in Spaghetti Westerns: people in ridiculous brownface pretending to be Mexican (Evelyn Stewart as a Latina? Really?), lots of close-ups of men making shifty-eyes, shoot-outs with a body count of the "the more, the merrier" sort, and a standard-for-its-genre yet rousing enough musical score. The movie's even well paced.

It's all quite traditional, but also very entertaining, really. The only true surprise the film offers lies in the fact that its script tends to the more American type of characterisation: the film's protagonists are really heroic beyond reason and not much given to the bouts of sadism and asshattery common in the European Western hero. In this respect, I was also a bit disappointed how much the ending pulled its punches - I didn't necessarily expect The Big Silence, but what Garrone does is too much of a cop out for my tastes.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spaghetti western,in short,italian movies,sergio garrone,craig hill,evelyn stewart

Shadow (2009)

Not to be confused with the dozens of other films sharing the title.

Warning: I'm going to spoil the film's ending with righteous wrath. That's what you get from me when you apply this particular plot twist.

US soldier David (Jake Muxworthy) has survived his stint in Iraq and goes on a mountain biking trip in Italy. He turns out to be a bit of a knight in shining armour when he helps another mountain biker, Angeline (Karina Testa), escape the rather rude advances of two redneck type persons (Chris Coppola and Ottaviano Blitch) in a mountain cafe.

Though everyone goes off in different directions, David and Angeline meet up again soon enough, and seem quite taken with each other. Alas, the probable couple eventually meet their redneck acquaintances again too, and those guys are really of the more murderous persuasion, especially after Angeline adds insult to injury by ruining the slaughter of a deer. The bikers manage to escape the unpleasant attentions of their (probably unwashed) enemies for a time, but flee into very peculiar - and supposedly haunted - territory, where fog hangs creepily and compasses don't work anymore. Hardly arrived there, Angeline disappears (and if you think the film's setting up something for later, you can get yourself a cookie, though what it is setting up is probably more stupid than you'd care to imagine). A shadowy shape stalks and knocks out David and his two pursuers one after the other.

When the three men gain consciousness again, they find themselves in the hands and house of the local sadist toad-licking (not an euphemism) Nazi (Nuot Arquint), who is only too happy to have a little fun with his unexpected visitors.

Federico Zampaglione's Shadow begins watchable enough. Although I have probably seen enough backwoods slasher movies to last for a life time, I have no problems with watching another one if it is executed with a basic amount of competence (as Shadow is) and presents its generic series of chases and violence in impressive or moody landscapes (again, as Shadow does). Sure, it would be nice if the film's rednecks had a more interesting motivation for their dastardly deeds than being country people, but I am used to expecting not too much of my movies.

Consequently, I felt somewhat entertained by Zampaglione's film up to the point when it turned from generic backwoods movie into a generic piece of light torture porn, with all the bad metalcore video shots that implies (though, admittedly, without whoosh or shaky cuts). I find it somewhat difficult to be creeped out by a thin, hairless guy who moves with all the menace and speed of a tranquilized Gamera, especially when a film decides to show him getting his drug kicks by licking toads. Toad-Licker's torture preferences and the way they are staged also seem damn lackluster and perfunctory. In truth, there's no way for me to take Toad-Licker even the slightest bit seriously.

Probably even worse is the fact that the film just slows to a crawl once Toady appears, with basically nothing happening that anyone having watched just a handful of horror movies in the last few years hasn't seen before in better movies, only happening slower here.

And then, there's the ending. You see, everything we saw (yes, even the scenes without David) was a dream dreamt by David in a field hospital during an operation. The redneck guys were his brutal and sadistic squad mates, who got him hurt after an argument about their civilian-slaughtering ways, and Angeline is the nurse who saved his life. And Toad-Licker must have been a metaphor - FOR DEATH. But oh noes! David will never ride his mountain bike again, because he has lost both of his legs.

Honestly, I don't even know what to say about that other than: directors, don't use the hoary old "it was all a dream" excuse to explain the illogical crapness of your films! It didn't work when the first Neanderthal storyteller tried to pull it somewhere around the invention of fire, and it sure doesn't work any better now; unless you're as good an artist as Ambrose Bierce, or, you know, are using the dream stuff to make an actual point. But when you're just looking for an excuse for making a film that's wholly made from misunderstood clichés you took from other films that again took these clichés from other movies, you're in no position to try to be clever. I suggest just making a coherent film, or one that is actually weird and dreamlike.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,federico zampaglione,horror,reviews

In short: Kamen Rider ZO (1993)

A guy (Hiroshi Tsuchikado) wakes up in a rather strange looking cave in the mountains. Someone informs him through the telepathic powers of an overly large grasshopper that he has to protect a little boy named Hiroshi from something called a "Neo Life Form".

Once our hero arrives wherever it is Hiroshi lives with his grandpa, a semi-mad scientist, he realizes that the voice in his head was just too right: a few nasty beasties are trying to abduct the boy, obviously not realizing into what a world of painfully whiny child-acting that would transport them. Fortunately for the sanity of monster-kind, our nameless hero can transform into a variation of the always popular Kamen Rider (what a surprise in a Kamen Rider movie!), and will spend the rest of the film enduring said whiny child-acting himself and beating (and, being a Kamen Rider, of course, kicking) the stuffing out of the nasty creatures.

The whole affair turns out to be the fault of Hiroshi's father, whose attempts to create a perfect life form went so pear-shaped that the best idea he had to correct the problem was to transform his lab assistant (our nameless hero) into a cross between grasshopper and human, obviously without the guy's consent.

Little Hiroshi sure is lucky Kamen Riders like children.

This is the first of the two short Kamen Rider features Keita Amemiya signs responsible for - the second one being Kamen Rider J - and it's also the weaker of the two by far.

The creatures and much of the strange bio-technological stuff that makes up that part of the backgrounds for the scenes of creatures mauling each other that doesn't consist of the usual empty factory buildings are as lovely designed and lovingly executed as one can expect from Amemiya, and the monster fights are fun enough if you like this sort of thing (and really, if you don't, no Kamen Rider show or movie will ever make you happy). Alas, the film makes it needlessly difficult to enjoy these elements by giving Hiroshi (and the gnome who plays him) way too much room for that most terrible of all mawkish and syrupy things - terribly executed child-actor melodrama. It sure doesn't help that the script spends so much time on Hiroshi that it either forgets to provide the Rider even with the most basic of motivations or forgets to inform the audience what that motivation might be. It's possible that leaving out the random J-Pop video clip right in the middle of the movie could have provided the time to go into the Rider's psyche for the two seconds of motivation I'm asking for here, but then as now, selling merchandise is much more important than providing a satisfying movie.

Anyway: if you just look at those pretty (and "green child-face in a big petri dish"-type grotesque, once Amemiya gets really going) monsters and the hitting, and go and make yourself some tea once Hiroshi begins to whine, Kamen Rider ZO is still watchable enough, just not as merrily insane or fun as the best examples of its superhero franchise.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,tokusatsu,keita amemiya

Music Monday: Western Swing Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music monday,music,bob wills

Monsters (2010)

So, extraterrestrial life does exist, after all. Six years before the main action of Monsters takes place, a US space probe crashed in Central America, bringing with it a bunch of tentacled creatures that soon enough began to multiply and change the local ecosystem. Generally, these monsters seem only as aggressive as animals are when they feel threatened, but they are so large, and their actions so unpredictable, that the locations they have conquered are declared the "Infected Zone". In a not unexpected reaction to the situation, the USA have built a wall on their Southern border, and are now running regular chemical bombing raids on the Zone whose main effect seems to be to make the creatures there more aggressive.

Mexico for its part has to fight off the creatures' half-yearly migration wave with what little resources it has, obviously with an economy now completely in ruins. The rest of the world - also keeping with its traditions - really doesn't seem to care much about what happens south of the USA.

When the film starts, Mexico is just a few days away from closing its borders completely for the next six months. The photo journalist Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is quite unwillingly pressed into a different service for one of his employers than the ones he's usually paid for. His employer's daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) has been in some sort of accident, and her old man wants Kaulder to escort her out of Mexico as long as getting her out is still possible. Kaulder, who is a bit of a jerk at the best of times, only reluctantly agrees to help the slightly shell-shocked young woman.

After some travels through the countryside during which she and Kaulder get closer to each other, a slightly contrived set of circumstances leads to Samantha missing the last boat out of the country. The only alternative to waiting out the next six months - and who knows if there will still be a country to flee from afterwards - is to take the completely illegal, dangerous route through the jungles of the Zone to the American wall.

A few of the more critical reviews of Gareth Edwards' Monsters I read on the 'net were loudly complaining about the film not being the giant monster bash the reviewers expected nor (oh my gosh!) it being the horror movie they expected. These reviewers are right on both accounts in so far as there's no monster bashing or mashing at all to be found in the movie and that it surely isn't a horror movie, but rather SF/romance film. Personally, I've always been fond of trying to deal with a movie on its own terms instead of reviewing what it isn't, and so can't help but call bullshit on the idea that a film not being what I expected of it means that it is a bad movie.

Monsters is in fact pretty darn great, treating its characters and its SF-nal concepts with an earnestness that shows great respect for the intelligence of its viewers. There is not a single second of the usual (and terrible) talking down to the audience that in too many films manifests itself in long, tiring and usually dumb reams of exposition to be found in its worldbuilding. What my synopsis above takes quite a few sentences to explain about the basic set-up, the film itself does through two sentences in the credits and intelligently placed incidental details that fully trust in the ability of the movie's audience to not only see something, but actually understand it. You know, like I'd hope for in all contemporary SF films (for a great example of how not to do low-exposition SF, see - or rather not - Skyline). This aspect of Monsters, a deft application of the old "show, don't tell" rule if I've ever seen one, reminds me most of that other great, unassuming SF film of the last few years, Moon.

Of course it's not enough to put just any old detail in to make a slightly different world (be it a mining operation on the moon or a near-apocalyptic Central America) believable and make it feel like a real place, it need to be the right details. Monsters is more or less perfect in this respect, starting with the flashes of newscasts we see, continuing through the ubiquitousness of gasmasks and not ending in elements like the short snippet of a (public service) children's cartoon from a world in which monsters are real. These details and the way the characters act towards the world they are living in come together beautifully and make the film's near future perfectly believable, not like an idea made flesh for ninety minutes, but like a real world.

Another reason for Monster's effectiveness is director (and writer, too) Edwards' photography. Edwards' camera work has a semi-documentarian quality about it, the sort of thing that could easily just end up as a mess of shaky cam and random shouting on the soundtrack. But where many other film's making use of this style tend to the hectic, Edwards' film seems more interested in using it to get closer to things and characters, to make them feel more real.

There's a true sense of beauty - possibly even poetry - running through the film's sideways looks at deserted ruins where a few years ago people were living and at the changes an alien ecosystem has brought. Monsters is driven by a visual sense of awe that reminds me of the films of Werner Herzog. Although the film is quite clear about the fact that its monsters are frightening and dangerous, the audience's clearest looks at them are clothed in a sense of wonder towards their beauty and strangeness. On a less obvious level, Edwards suggests that the monsters are made more dangerous by the way humanity interacts with them, without ever landing on the soppy side of the "poor, unloved alien". The film's very low-key love story (that might be more of a story of attraction through loneliness) with its sad, yet underplayed, ending is just as lacking in sentimentality, and just the more convincing for it.

Strangely enough for a film that doesn't have much of a plot, the word that comes to my mind most when I think about Monsters is "richness". It's not the sort of richness that could result from the ideology of "more is more", but something that is grounded in showing just enough of the right things to pull a viewer into a film as if it were a place and not a story.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,gareth edwards,reviews,sf,romance,whitney able,scoot mcnairy

In short: Unhinged (1982)

A trio of young women is on their way to a music festival, when they have a car accident somewhere in the deep dark woods. Fortunately (or is it?) there's a lone house hidden away even further down in those woods, with the two women living there willing enough to help the girls out. Two of the three girls are in a perfectly good state, but the third one will need a few days of rest before she will be able to walk again. So basically, the girls are stranded.

Not that their hosts seem to mind much. The younger of the two women, Marion (J.E. Penner), even seems quite glad to have someone else to talk to for a change, which isn't much of a surprise given that her cohabitant is her mother, an old lady whose long rants about the olden times and the terrible evils of the male gender just stop short of foaming at the mouth.

But - to nobody's surprise but the protagonists' - other things in their inadvertent holiday home are even less well than Mother's mental state. Someone with a love for enthusiastic heavy breathing and watching young ladies undress is sneaking around the house, and that someone might just be a little more dangerous than your usual voyeur.

Unhinged is another one of those films that landed on the UK's original video nasty list for not much reason that is still discernible today. It's far from being all that brutal or immoral (whatever that may mean), and while the style of the very few murders seems influenced by slasher movie tropes, the film mostly tries for a psychological thriller vibe one would think the guardians of all that is good and proper would have approved of.

Visually, the film is dominated by long-ish shots of a quite impressive looking mansion and the surrounding woods. These locations should have made the building of the proper mood of insanity and decay a bit more easy for Unhinged than for local independent productions that had to work with random people's living rooms and someone's backyard. It's a bit of a shame the film's director Don Gronquist wasn't really able to make as much out of these natural advantages than I would have wished for. There's a promise of true creepiness in the places we see, but the proper mood never really sets in, as nice as everything looks and as inexhaustible the synthie score - of the type you'll either love or hate with intense passion - noodles.

Gronquist's directorial style goes for slow and moody, but tends to get dragged off into the territory of the slightly boring. There are only so many evening dinner scenes with Mad Mum a viewer can watch without losing her interest. Another problem with the film's ambitions for subtlety is the acting: the three young actresses are obviously only in here because they were willing to drop their clothes, and drone through their (sometimes - yet not often enough - bizarre) dialogue, looking bored; Penner and Settle on the other hand try to outdo each other in fake upper class stiltedness and only prove that they sure aren't related to Vincent Price.

What Unhinged really has going for it are its final five minutes, containing a pretty nasty little twist ending and an increase in acting intensity that I surely wouldn't have expected at this point in the proceedings. One could argue this sudden transformation from mediocrity to "Holy crap! Horror movies!" is too little, too late, but I'm pretty sure Unhinged's ending will stay with me for a while, and I take what I can get from movies that by all rights shouldn't deliver anything at all.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,in short,don gronquist,janet penner

On WTF: La Dinastia Dracula (1980)

What better way to follow up last week's earnest-minded write-up of an earnest-minded film in my weekly stint on WTF-Film.com than to follow it up with a hysterical Gothic horror film from Mexico that doesn't seem to know what it's doing and frankly doesn't care?

While Alfredo B. Crevenna's film is really kind of terrible, it's also very fun and gives me the chance to post screenshots of rubber bats and a priest in his undies. All this and more you'll be able to find in my write-up of La Dinastia Dracula on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,horror,wtf,reviews,alfredo b. crevenna,fabian aranza,other places,gothic

Three Films Make A Post: Father and Son Related By Blood!!! Everyone's Blood!!

Inception (2010): Somehow, we have managed to arrive in The Future, a strange place where major Hollywood studios throw money at really pretty great directors like Christopher Nolan to make Philip K. Dick adaptations not based on an actual book by the author that still really feel a lot like Dick. It's quite unlike The Past, when major Hollywood studios threw money at directors to make Philip K. Dick adaptations based on actual books by the author that didn't have the slightest idea of what Dick's books were all about (and yes, I do count Blade Runner among the latter, which is a triumph of production design, but not much of an adaptation of the book it purports to be based on, what with it completely ignoring anything but the simplest among the questions the book asks).

I for one greet this bright future, even though I wasn't as confused by the film as many mainstream film critics seem to have been. Is it really that difficult to follow a clearly told, mostly linear story?

Child's Eye (2010): Some travelling young non-entities from Hong Kong find themselves trapped in Thailand during the red shirt protests. Stranded in a cheap, dark hotel, the group is soon confronted with the local female ghost and a dog-faced boy, and the dark secret of the hotel's owner.

The Pang Brothers are a sad case. While all of their films show a pair of directors perfectly able to apply their slick technical chops in interesting and visually arresting ways, most of these films are too conventional at heart to be memorable. This one is really no exception, even though (or because?) it is in 3D. There are a lot of really pretty pictures to gawp at, but not much is going on with them. Characters are uninteresting, the plot is about as fascinating as a slide show about your parents' holiday in Buxtehude, the timely historical background is wasted as a mere impediment to the protagonists running away, and there's no thematic depth or interesting subtext worth half a brain cell. To make matters even worse, the shocks are just not working at all, which leaves the audience with a film that's professionally boring and as vapidly pretty as its lead actors.

G-9 (2006): How little of interest there is about the Pang Brothers' film shows even more when I compare it to this fifteen minute ganime (which is a word that can be used for many types of non-traditional Japanese animation, but in this case means "narrated ink-drawings") by the (somewhat inescapable on this blog these days) Keita Amemiya. It's really a just a small trifle mixing elements of new wave SF with a bit of monster bashing and a sense of melancholy given expression more through the mood of the drawings and the simplicity of (barely) animation style than anything more concrete. Yet even so, it's much more human than anything that can be found in Child's Eye.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,hong kong movies,japanese movies,christopher nolan,leonardo dicaprio,pang brothers,keita amemiya,in short,sf,horror

The Great Horror Family (2004)

Original title: Kaiki Daikazoku

The rather eccentric Imawano family movies into a new suburban home. While the family's dad, being an enthusiast of the paranormal, is rather excited about the fact that something's supposed to be not quite right with the new house, the rest of his family is a bit blasé about it all. And no wonder: though Dad has no talent at actually seeing the things he's so excited about under any circumstances, the rest of the family has inherited the psychic abilities of a long line of female priests and mediums.

While the family is still moving in, Grandpa (Shunji Fujimura) has some frightening experience with the central hub for all of the house's mystery, The Room That Will Not Open, and dies. Obviously, being dead and all, he's now not the best candidate for the family's spiritual protection anymore, so Gramps's ghost moves into the Room and charges his hapless grandson Kiyoshi (Issei Takahashi) with the job. The dead old man is convinced that something important and terrible will happen soon.

In fact, Kiyoshi has his hands full with a series of ghostly appearances, aliens, yokai and other weird occurrences that happen in and around the house in a matter of minutes. Cursed gothic lolitas, men in black, whacky priests and a female ghost (Kyoko Toyama) with a crush on the young man will also make an appearance. Kiyoshi's rather inconcrete mission isn't made any easier by the utter weirdness that is the natural state of the rest of the family (Tomiko Ishii, Shigeru Muroi, Asuka Shibuya). And those are just the little daily troubles the young man will have to survive before he has to cope with the true nature of what is hidden inside The Room That Will Not Open.

The 13-episode TV show The Great Horror Family is what happens when a bunch of directors and writers - among them Takashi Shimizu and Yudai Yamaguchi - with love for and experience in all things horrific decide (well, or are hired) to make a horror comedy.

The early episodes concern mostly relatively traditional Japanese ghosties and ghoulies who all go about their usual business until their problems are solved through practical absurdity. The first episode, for example, sees the beleaguered Kiyoshi turn into a nightly ghost psychiatrist babbling away with the sort of kitchen psychology that could only convince a ghost of anything and inadvertently winning a fan for life (death?) in a female ghost named Asami. Through this, the audience learns early on that ghost are just people, too, only very dead and rather single-minded ones.

The further the show goes along, the more its emphasis wanders from funny interpretations of the more traditional ghosts to the sort of total absurdity and weirdness one expects of Japanese comedy. The show turns to situations that would be outright frightening or disturbing if they weren't played with a wink followed by a deadpan look.

I already liked the beginning of the show quite a bit (it's funny, you know), but the more absurd episodes tend to be even more entertaining. Honestly, what's not to like about a Yakuza movie parody in which Kiyoshi runs away from home and starts to work for a dead Yakuza bartender called Memento Mori, who offers living guests the opportunity to spend time with some charming living corpses, until the man's business is destroyed by zombie hit men? Or the episode in which a ghostly builder decides to renovate the family's home, and the Imawanos find themselves trapped in the bizarre, non-Euclidean labyrinth it turns into? The comedy format acts as a way for the makers of the show to be as playful as possible, and watching these guys being playful is a lot like listening to a group of very good improvising musician on a good evening.

While the show's visuals are solid, yet very TV-looking and therefore are bit bland at times, the excellent cast is what carries the show besides the humour. Everyone's not just cast exceedingly well, but game for everything, willing and able to switch from an ironic emulation of utter dramatic earnestness to bizarre grimacing at a moment's notice.

Even though not every episode's plot is something to write home about, the wild, random asides so typical of what I've learned to identify as Japanese humour make every single one of them worth watching. In this context, I'm even willing to approve of the slight sappiness that comes with the J-Drama territory.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,comedy,horror,reviews,takashi shimizu,yudai yamaguchi,asuka shibuya,issei takahashi,kyoko toyama

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

Music Monday: Sad Timeliness Again Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music monday,music,broadcast

Ultramarines (2010)

Grim future. Only war. Etc. and so on. An Imperial shrine world is sending an automated distress call; all further contact with the full company of space marines stationed there to protect a holy relic is lost.

As this is the Warhammer 40K universe whose military organization is utterly atrocious whenever a plot demands it, there's not much of a military force close-by to answer the distress signal weeks later. Only a rookie squad (with an experienced captain and a war-weary apothecary) of Ultramarines is near enough to be of any assistance. After holding some "WE ARE SPACE MARINES! RWOAR!" speeches, of course.

When the group lands on the planet, they soon enough find traces of a massacre committed by chaos forces. The logical course of action here is obviously for the twelve marines to somehow try and reach the location of the distress beacon, in the hope that twelve marines will survive what just slaughtered a hundred of their brethren. For the Emperor, etc. I'm sure it'll end with a perfectly low body count and without anyone encountering a very stupid plan to corrupt the whole Ultramarines chapter.

When I first heard of Ultramarines, the first official Warhammer 40,0000 movie, I wasn't exactly hopeful about it, especially seeing that it's fully computer-animated, a type of animation that only promises catastrophe when put in the hands of a company like Games Workshop that can be pretty sure fans will lap up everything it puts out regardless of quality. A bit of hope developed with the information that Ultramarines would at least be written by Dan Abnett, whose work-for-hire novels in the franchise often are real highpoints of their special little niche.

And indeed, apart from the hideously contrived set-up, and the rather stupid evil plan (which is to say, the whole of the film's plot) Abnett's script is the best part of the movie. Don't take that as high praise, though. Abnett's writing here is quite unexciting and completely unoriginal, front-loaded with every "For the Emperor!" style phrase the Warhammer universe provides, and contains nothing of the writer's trademark ambiguity. At least it's vaguely competent and constructed with professional knowledge of dramatic beats.

The voice acting is pretty alright, too, although I'm not sure if the movie wouldn't have fared better cast with experienced - yet still cheaper - voice actors instead of people like Terence Stamp, John Hurt and Sean Pertwee, whose acting chops just aren't needed for what's in the script (nothing). Though I have to admit it's pretty funny to hear Hurt say the "grim future" wall of text.

The producers could have used the money saved on the stars and put it into the place where it's desperately needed - the animation. As it stands, Ultramarines' animation is a complete embarrassment, falling far behind even the standards set by the CGI cut-scenes of the first Dawn of War videogame (made in 2004, ages ago in this area). I really hope you like to watch jerkily animated characters with putty faces from the uncanny valley jumping (is there grasshopper DNA in Space Marines, by any chance?) and moonwalking through grey and brown low-detail backgrounds, because that's all Ultramarines' animation department is prepared to deliver. On the design side, the whole affair reeks of cheapskating too - everything that isn't a space marine looks as if it were scrapped together in just about five minutes by a trainee. All in all, the animation doesn't look like an actual finished movie should look, but rather like an early draft for one.

Martyn Pick's direction fits this cheap and/or lazy approach perfectly. There's no sense of visual imagination, nothing that doesn't look like mere performance of a contractual obligation on screen. Of course, given how shoddy the animation itself is, I'm not sure what even the best of directors could have made out of it. This is after all a film so cost-conscious that most of its action sequences take place in the dark or during sandstorms so that there's no need for detailed backgrounds in them. Not that there are many detailed backgrounds outside of the action scenes, either. Well, at least there are lots of shots of bullet casings falling in slow-motion.

And why should there be any actual creative effort put into the movie, as long as there's a big "Warhammer 40,000" on the DVD cover? Surely, fans don't deserve quality.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,animation,warhammer,sf,action,john hurt,sean pertwee,terence stamp,reviews

In short: The Haunted House Project (2010)

Three documentary makers and three members of the local ghost hunter society enter a derelict cookie factory with a very bad reputation. It's supposedly haunted by a vengeful secretary who has been causing accidents and deaths in it for years. Mildly scary things happen, until everything culminates in screaming, running around and six dead people.

Not surprisingly, the film is supposed to consist of the restored footage found on the dead bodies, which is probably preferable to it only being explainable as a Satanist trainee video, like in a certain popular US POV film.

I'm not too sure what has caused the sudden influx of POV horror films from various countries in Asia in the last two or three years. Was it a re-issue of (house favourite) Blair Witch Project? A popular TV show I don't know about? Be it as it may, there these films are, and here I am, so I'm of course going to watch as many of them as I can get a hand on.

Hopefully, not all of these films are as disappointing as South Korean director Lee Cheol-ha's The Haunted House Project (whose original title I can't find out, so I'm just going with the concept that its actual title does not have any relation to Blair Witch).

To begin with the positive, THHP is competently filmed (with not as much camera wobbling as some people's stomachs will fear), solidly acted and mercifully short. Unfortunately, that's really all the positives I can find about it.

As a horror film, THHP fails at the all-important task of being scary or creepy (or even just plain disgusting) in any kind or form. The factory buildings the plot takes place in are surely derelict, but lack the proper (and admittedly extremely subjective) creep factor, and the moments of explicit horror just aren't very interesting. This is one of the films in the POV sub-genre that don't understand the importance of ambiguity, of not showing things, and of hinting at stuff happening that must be much more terrifying than anything that it could show (something that other Project did very well indeed), and instead goes for some obvious shocks.

The film also just takes too much time getting to the (theoretically) scary parts. Instead of using the first half hour or so to build up an interesting mythology for the factory, Lee goes for a background so pedestrian and so obvious that it seems custom made to deflate any sense of mystery or actual fear, as if the director thinks knowing precisely what quotidian sort of haunting is waiting for the characters there will somehow make their experiences more interesting.

Alas, it doesn't.

Technorati-Markierungen: south korean movies,in short,horror

On WTF: Whistle And I'll Come To You (2010)

As frequent readers of these ramblings probably know by now, I like a good ghost story. Consequently, I've always been a fan of the BBC's "Ghost Stories for Christmas" concept, though I'm not as enamoured of every single one of them as others seem to be.

I am quite excited about the newest (and yes, very free) adaptation of M.R. James's "Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You", though.

As always on a Friday, my write-up on WTF-Film.com will go into the details.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british tv,reviews,horror,john hurt,gemma jones,andy deemmony,other places

In short: Kamen Rider J (1994)

Environmentalist photographer Kouji (Yuuta Mochizuki) has come to some unnamed place in the Japanese countryside to document (and presumably identify the reason for) the mass-dying of local animals. He meets an adorable little girl (Yuka Nomura) there, who seems at once quite taken with her new big brother figure.

But all too soon the reason for all those dying animals becomes clear - a bio-mechanical (and quite despicable) life-form known as Fog Mother has come to Earth to repeat with us what she did with the dinosaurs once. The time for her attack has almost come, she just needs to wait a little for her spawn to hatch. Then, it will the all-night Earth buffet can open. Oh, and of course, Fog Mother's children need some wake-up food. That's what adorable little girls are for, right?

So Fog Mother's hench-creatures kidnap the girl and push Kouji down a mountain. It doesn't look good for humanity or the future of adorable little girl-dom. Fortunately, some…people with roots deep underground (I'm not talking figuratively) revive Kouji and turn him into a new version of everyone's favourite insect-themed superhero on a motorbike, Kamen Rider J. And give him an incredibly creepy looking talking grasshopper as a guide.

With the help of his new powers of ecological motorbike riding and kicking monsters in the face, Kouji will have to conquer Fog Mother's trio of favourite monsters, free his little-sister-in-spirit, and do an unexpected Ultraman on Fog Mother's fortress.

This is another entry in my irregular and untitled series of write-ups on the body of work of Japanese creature designer and tokusatsu director Keita Amemiya. This time around, I've stumbled onto one of Amemiya's few contributions to Toei's humungous Kamen Rider mythos in form of a forty-five minute feature film (to be shown as part of a double feature), that were the franchises main outlets in this phase when there weren't any TV shows featuring the Rider. It's the director's last contribution to Kamen Rider as far as I understand.

Amemiya's talent for working with filmic shorthand without losing coherence makes him quite a good fit for this sort of low budget movie special. What there is of characterization is broad but effective enough to motivate the plot (and it's not as if anyone would ask the two human characters what the want anyway), and the plot in its turn is just present enough to make the series of fights and the monster design feel like part of a whole.

Speaking of monster design (very obviously at least in part also done by Amemiya), Kamen Rider J tends as far to the freakish side of tokusatsu monstrosities as possible in what is at its heart a franchise for kids. It's as if H.R. Giger had developed a sudden interest in classic Japanese art and decided to bio-punk that tradition up a bit, with the expected consequences.

As a whole, Kamen Rider J delivers exactly the thrills it promises, and is sure to put a smile on the face of everyone who is even faintly predisposed to like stuff like this.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,japanese movies,tokusatsu,keita amemiya,sf,yuuta mochizuki