Island of Terror (1966)

A rather peculiar human corpse is found on an isolated island between England and Ireland (I’m not sure if this is explicitly meant to be Pitcairn): it is boneless and has a jelly-like consistency. The local doctor (Eddie Byrne) has no idea what could be going on – a new infectious disease, perhaps? – so he jaunts off to fetch eminent pathologist Dr Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) who in turn fetches “young” bone specialist Dr David West (Edward Judd as the most boring man alive) who in his turn again will – for reasons of plot contrivance too tedious to get into and so we have a character in the movie who is only there to be in hysterics at all times – fetch useless rich girl Toni Merrill (Carole Gray).

On the island, the doctors quickly find quite a few more dead bodies and soon realize their problem isn’t a new kind of disease but the accidental product of another doctor’s attempt at curing cancer, which somehow resulted in bone-sucking monsters. Nearly indestructible monsters at that, if not for the wonders of that glorious stuff we know as Strontium-90.

Island of Terror is never going to be an important entry in the annals of British SF/horror films, nor one of the important films directed by Terence Fisher, nor any kind of career highpoint for my spiritual house patron, Peter Cushing.
It’s just too leisurely a film, with Fisher only seeming to put the minimum of effort – though the minimum of effort for Fisher is the maximum for many another genre director – into filming a script that itself barely scrapes by. Just look at the way the film isolates the characters on the island and cry bitter tears of It’s In The Script!.

Speaking of the script, apart from being rather silly (which is perfectly okay for this particular genre), it is too often falling back on variations of 50s US monster movie tropes, with a female lead character so useless even said 50s US monster movies would be a bit embarrassed about it, and a romance that’ll send shudders of horror down even the spines of the most hardened of viewers. The script also suffers from making so little out of the somewhat more original or more grim ideas it has. It doesn’t even bother to do anything with the moment where our heroes decide to murder our heroine so she doesn’t have to suffer through being bone-sucked, keeping what could lead off into an actually interesting little scene about a woman’s right to choose her own death (or something like that) a deeply unpleasant paternalistic gesture that probably can still invite a perfectly justified feminist rant.

Fortunately, there’s some enjoyable nonsense in here too, starting with the adorable looking monsters (or “silicates”, as the film calls them) that remind me of a some kind of English dish, only moving and with a single front tentacle, and that make the sort of electronic noises you also could have found in a contemporary  Doctor Who episode. And how many films are there whose grand finales are based on the heroes feeding cows they have poisoned with Strontium-90 to the monsters to then hope the creatures will die before they can bone-suck the rest of the cast?

Peter Cushing’s fine as always, of course, even with the little the film gives him. He milks the scene where he loses his hand for all it is worth and gets a few quips in I very much suspect were improvised on set and not in the script, and is otherwise the sort of presence that will improve every film. His old partner behind the camera Fisher does get around to two or so effective scenes between the parts of the film where he isn’t doing much beyond pointing the camera. Particularly the film’s finale is rather good, while the sting in the tale is not unexpected but fun enough in suggesting an imaginary Toho sequel.

Otherwise, Island of Terror is nothing to write home about, but is enjoyable enough.

Three Films Make A Post: For 500 years the secret lay dormant... Until now!

Ghost Town (1988): There’s a lot about Richard Governor’s only film (as finished by its DP Mac Ahlberg) Ghost Town that should make it an easy recommendation: the charm of its ghost town, how courageously it aims for the dream-like and the ambiguous, and more than one clever idea. But all that gets buried by a film that never actually finishes anything it starts, a plot that meanders all over the place without rhyme or reason, a big bad who never can shut up spouting his horrible, pseudo-creepy monologues and the damn one-liners, and a lot of the wrong kind of tedium.

Spooky, Spooky (1988): Tedium isn’t something happening in this Sammo Hung-directed horror comedy from Hong Kong, on the other hand. If you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect: characters with the emotional life of children, slapstick, martial arts, some mildly icky stuff, Chinese folklore, utter weirdness, a whole load of blue light, and a film philosophically and ethically set against being boring. This one actually starts a bit slow, but once it gets going, Spooky Spooky doesn’t stop anymore until it’s time for the credits to roll. On the way, Hung also somehow manages to include slapstick and martial arts based suspense scenes that are as tight as the ones in more earnest-minded films would be and teaches us the best use for a watermelon.

Creepozoids (1987): But let’s not end this post on too much of a high note. So who better to come to my help there than David DeCoteau, carrying an early epic about some non-entities played by non-entities and Linnea Quigley’s breasts wandering through a warehouse for fifty minutes or so. There’s some business about a virus that makes you allergic to food in the worst possible way, an adorable giant rat, and more tedium than you can expect from three movies of this sort. Why, even the big finale is a long slog. A long slog, that is, until the film’s horrid monster suit births a monster baby. Then, it’s ten minutes of hilarity during which one guy (seriously, using actor and character names would suggest an individuality that’s just not on screen) pretends to get attacked by the monster baby thing by shaking the doll around, repeated as often as necessary to get this thing on sort of feature length.

In short: Hospital Massacre (1981)

aka X-Ray

Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton) is just popping in to the local hospital to get the results of a routine check-up, but soon finds herself kept in for a possible deadly disease the doctors won’t name. Of course, given that this is the kind of hospital that has a random room full of creepy people with respiratory problems, another one loaded with moaning patients bandaged-up mummy style, where the patients of the mental ward seem to be randomly mixed with the rest of the patients and which employs doctors who put the sexual assault into medical examination, this sort of thing is par for the course for the place.

The root cause of Susan’s troubles is a particularly weird slasher killer who goes around killing off doctors and nurses all in service of faking Susan’s tests so she has to stay in the hospital. And here I thought Jason Voorhees and his adventures on a cruise ship and the New York sewers were weird.

Boaz Davidson’s Hospital Massacre is Cannon Film’s attempt to catch a bit of that sweet slasher trend money; the emphasis here is strictly on the word attempt, for this thing is a dire abomination whose divergences from the standard slasher formula are actually so bad, they could grant one an appreciation for the more classic tropes it eschews.

If the synopsis didn’t already suggest it, the whole thing takes place in a parallel universe where nothing makes sense, hospitals operate on the basis of random assumptions, and slashers have even better teleport powers than in more sane (I’d never believe I’d use that word to describe the slasher genre) pastures of the genre. Seriously, our killer here can basically be in two places at the same time.

Now, given my usual tastes, the film’s utter you have to see it to believe it weirdness should make this an easy recommendation for the easily distracted who always wanted to see a movie that needs a creepy medical examination as an excuse to show its Playmate lead actress’s breasts, or features a hospital so puzzling it might have been dreamed up by Thomas Ligotti. Curiously, though, I found myself mostly bored and annoyed by the film’s randomness, Davidson’s shoddy direction, the lack of even basic narrative structure in the script, and an “acting” performance by a female lead who can’t even express the most basic of human emotions. In the world of nude models acting in B-movies, Benton makes Pamela Anderson look like Harvey Keitel.

It’s a film so off, so strange, and just so obviously confused about how a horror film is supposed to work, it should be pushing all of my buttons, but in practice, I never, ever want to suffer through the thing again. Perhaps it is the film’s visible lack of enthusiasm for its own ideas that’s putting me off this much?

Music Monday: Biscuit Edition

Doctor Mordrid (1992)

Extradimensional sorcerer supreme Dr. Mordrid (Jeffrey Combs) is spending his time on Earth awaiting the earth-shaking attack of his arch enemy Kabal (Brian Thompson). I’m not sure that’s the best use of his time, seeing as he himself imprisoned Kabal in a magic space castle and knows very well where the guy is, so he might look out for him there, but what do I know.

Obviously, Kabal does break out of his decrepit space castle prison and starts spending his time stealing silver, diamonds and other elements useful for his plans to free a bunch of demons from said space castle prison and rule Earth with them, like the most overpowered petty criminal you’d care to imagine. Once he finds out, Mordrid probably would do something against Kabal, but before he can, he gets arrested for a sacrificial murder Kabal committed, on proof so non-existent the film doesn’t even bother to make anything up, but mostly because his love interest and neighbour Samantha Hunt (Yvette Nipar) – who works for the police as an advisor – sends her cop friends over to him to ask him for clues in the case. Nope, I have no idea, really.

Eventually, Samantha helps Mordrid break out and there’s a kinda-sorta show down in a museum. The End.

In the dark times of Marvel cinema licenses, the option for a Doctor Strange movie did actually land with Charles Band’s Empire for a time. Fortunately, that option expired before Band could actually make the film. Not to be discouraged by little things, Band re-tooled what already existed of pre-production materials into a project called “Dr. Mortalis”, which - with the end of Empire - then again got retooled into the Full Moon production we have here, which may or may not have started out as an all ages project that grew some breasts and mild ickiness.

Given that history, it’s no surprise the resulting film is a wee bit uneven. One would think, though, that all that reshuffling and rewriting might have convinced some of the people involved, let’s say Band who is co-credited as a director together with his father Albert, to include a plot that at least tries to hang together instead of delivering the series of scenes with little actual connection we get here. Now, I’m really not asking much of my movies, but I do prefer a film about battling extradimensional sorcerers to not take a twenty-five minute plus detour into a police station without any need apart from making the film longer. Bonus points would be available for a plot that would hang together a bit more, and a villain who’d be doing something mildly more interesting than stealing stuff.

As it stands, this is the most pedestrian use of its set-up imaginable, with a handful of pleasantly strange (sorry) scenes unable to keep one’s interest awake during all the boring tedious bits.
It’s too bad, too, for Doctor Mordrid does have some things going for it. First and foremost, Jeffrey Combs gives his character with an admirable lack of irony, so much so I’d be okay with having watched this thing just for the sake of seeing a man treat things with dignity and seriousness I wouldn’t have believed you could react to without hamming it up. I bet he’d even have been able to talk about the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth with an impression of absolute sincerity.

The production design has its moments too, particularly when it comes to Mordrid’s space sorcerer age bachelor pad and the space castle prison (the film doesn’t even bother to give that place a snappy name). There’s also a very mild tyrannosaurus versus mammoth skeleton fight in the finale, but there, the fun idea is – as is so much else in the film – buried under a half-hearted execution that spends more time in a police station than on a sorcerous duel.

In short: Campfire Tales (1997)

After a short black and white retelling of the good old tale of The Hook featuring Amy Smart before she was famous, a quartet of youngster (says the old fogey) stumble from the site of a post Iron Maiden concert car crash into some ruins in the woods to await the police. It’s night, and it’s cold, so they soon have a campfire going and begin to tell each other variations of some well-loved urban legends.

First, we follow the misadventures of a honeymooning couple landing in the wrong part of wilderness, then it’s off to a bit of a licking when an early chat room predator makes a house call at a little girl’s home, and in the final story, a motorcycle nomad breaks down close to the home of a decidedly attractive mute young woman, where love and ghosts occur, and somebody loses a head.

Campfire Tales is your classic portmanteau horror movie directed by three directors – Matt Cooper, Martin Kunert and David Semel – with visible love for straightforward yet effective horror tales. Which, obviously, is pretty much the only way to film urban legends, because these are stories that work much better when they are kept short and simple, with what they have to say about contemporary fears exiled to the realm of the – usually pretty darn obvious – subtext.

Because this sort of tale is quite so simple, it doesn’t lend itself to deep characters or attempts at art-housing it up through the addition of frightening things like meaning, philosophy or thought. Consequently, I’m very unironically happy the directors don’t try that sort of thing with their tales, instead aiming directly and unpretentiously for the small creeps and the decent moments of suspense, keeping their ambitions in check to actually do justice to their urban legend theme.

They’re doing a fine job with that too, ending up with a film that does the single, in theory simple but in practice often quite difficult thing of telling truly straightforward horror tales in an effective and atmospheric manner very well indeed.

In fact, Campfire Tales does it so well, I can even – if somewhat grumpily – accept that it uses the same final twist about forty percent of all anthology horror movies use. You know which one I’m talking about, but honestly, it’s okay here.

On ExB: 2012: Curse of the Xtabai (2012)

Original title: 2012: Kurse a di Xtabai

This certainly is the first film from the Central American country of Belize I’m writing up here (or have seen). It does fall into an idiom I’m quite experienced with, though. It does change the formula with a few things all its own, so it’ll come as no big surprise this month’s column over at the floating witch-woman known as Exploder Button is rather happy about this encounter.

Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge (1991)

Welcome to backlot Berlin in 1941. Mild-mannered maker of living puppets Toulon (Guy Rolfe) and his beloved wife Elsa (Sarah Douglas) are putting on anti-fascist puppet plays for the little ones. Note: if your brain already starts to dribble out of your ears now because of historical idiocy, do not continue with the film.

Not surprisingly, this does awaken a degree of interest in the Toulons from Nazi circles, who also quickly cop to Toulon’s puppets actually being alive by virtue of Toulon haven’t mastered the skill of hanging up curtains. Toulon’s puppet science is exactly what one Dr Hess (Ian Abercrombie) needs to perhaps lead his project of creating viable Nazi zombie soldiers to success, so Hess would really rather get Toulon alive; GESTAPO Major Kraus (Richard Lynch) on the other hand – in the film’s most historically accurate element - just wants to kill everyone. During the resulting Dramatic Developments™, Elsa is killed by the Nazis.
Toulon manages to escape and starts on a plan to murder as many of the Nazis with the help of his puppet buddies.

Puppet Master III is a much more entertaining film than it has any right to be, more often than not managing to surmount a cornucopia of flaws by the sheer power of dubious yet awesome ideas. The main strike against it is of course that it is directed by David DeCoteau, a guy who could not and still can not shoot anything decently, like the living return of William Beaudine. There’s the expected aura of vague disinterest surrounding every scene that is certainly not helped by the fact DeCoteau can’t even squeeze in any of his trademark as-much-as-possible nudity of extremely vapid looking young men, which usually are the only times when his films come alive. Not ideal for a purported director of horror films.

As is his wont, DeCoteau does his best to drag down even the most exciting bits of the film through the sheer power of visual blandness, an impossible number of needlessly cramped shots (as if this thing were exclusively filmed on one meter by one meter sets), no clue about atmosphere and so on, and so forth. Just imagine a film made by someone without any visual imagination or much of a sense for drama or fun, and you get the drift.

Additionally, there are also flaws DeCoteau isn’t responsible for: the budget of a Full Moon production of 1991 just isn’t one that could provide for a decent period piece, so everything looks even cheaper and shoddier than a comparable Full Moon film taking place in the then and there would have; the script neglects to truly capitalize on some of its great ideas and tends to add meandering to the direction’s dragging; I’ll grant the thing its historical stupidity for being made by Americans and only aiming for a pulp Nazi thing anyhow.
After this list, I’m rather surprised by how much I did in fact enjoy this thing. But then, what the film’s got going for it is easily understood. For one, it’s the sheer pulpy fun of the killer puppet versus Nazis plot, something whose basic weird energy even DeCoteau’s direction can never completely sabotage – too huge is the power of seeing our favourite killer dolls shooting, slicing, leeching, drilling and so on and so forth Nazis, too ridiculously over the top is Richard Lynch doing the naziest of all Nazis. There’s a delightful sense of the weird and the perverse running through many of the film’s details (which ironically are also the parts of the film I wish the script had done more with, but you take what you can get). This does, after all, feature a scene where our perhaps ever so slightly mad hero uses the life force (soul?) of his dead wife to turn the doll he gave to her to commemorate their love into a leech vomiting (while making sex noises) killer puppet with a much better hairstyle and dress sense than before. That isn’t just Weird but also the kind of potent metaphor for the failings of the human heart you can only do in films as this which are absolutely not beholden to good taste, sense, or sensibility. Toulon’s explanation of the origin of his other dolls as housing the souls of his Nazi-murdered friends fits nicely in there too, and even though the film is too dumb to ever realize how horrible and sad this idea actually is, it’s still there, and for my taste strong enough to make up for many of the film’s failings.

Your mileage may of course vary, but I find myself drawn to the film’s shameless – and at this point in the Full Moon puppet world still blessedly untouched by irony – strangeness, its pulpy nature (even if it is pulp with hugely reduced energy thanks to its director), and perhaps even the all-around tackiness of much of the production.

In short: Open House (1987)

Oh noes! Some crazy killer is slashing his way through the – preferably female – realtors of Los Angeles. But don’t worry, realtors of the world, the worst cop in town (Robert Miano), whose attitude is much further evolved than his competence, is on the case, doing diddly-squat but complain.

Things kinda-sorta start moving when radio psychologist David Kelley (Joseph Bottoms) gets involved in the investigation because one of his regular callers just might be the killer. Plus, Kelley’s girlfriend Lisa (Adrienne Barbeau) is a realtor, and whatever plot there is will get moving some time soon, right?

If you know Open House’s director Jag Mundhra at all, you probably know him as a purveyor of mildly up-market softcore smut (though he has some films in his filmography that aren’t), and even if I hadn’t known that before, watching this awkward attempt at mixing slasher and thriller tropes to mind-numbing effect would have suggested it. For this is very much a particularly lame softcore movie where many a scene is comparable to the pre-sex scenes of lame softcore with somewhat attractive, deeply untalented actors working their way up to a sex scene that then doesn’t arrive but is replaced by a bit of the old slasher violence. It kinda makes one miss breasts, particularly since the slashing and the stalking might be somewhat mean-spirited but are most definitely pretty damn boring. Turns out you need somewhat different talents for filming sex than for staging a thriller. My working theory is that Mundhra was initially planning to make a sex romp about realtors but had to change tacks half way through the production and just shoved half of a slasher script he found in a trashcan in.

Being a series of generally terrible scenes that end with the wrong kind of pay-off isn’t quite enough for Open House’s particular brand of dullness though. So, Mundhra fills the spaces between the sexless sex scenes with random scenes of Shapiro metaphorically scratching his ass (scenes of cops doing nothing while the audience has to watch being a special favourite of shitty horror films, as we all well know), various business about the Bottoms/Barbeau romance that is neither of import nor interesting to watch, a dire red herring plotline about Lisa’s evil low class (because of course this thing also has a nice line in being classist) competitor, and a lot of the usual stuff films include to avoid getting to their plot when they don’t have enough of it to fill a ninety minute slot. Some of this stuff may or may not be meant to be comical, but given the quality of the writing and the hackjob of the direction (what’s a transition?), it’s rather difficult to tell these things apart in this particular case.

It’s just as riveting as it sounds – not at all. While he’s at it, Mundhra also manages to get bad performances out of perfectly decent thespians like Barbeau and Bottoms, leaving this writer feeling rather shell-shocked by a film that combines all the issues of bad softcore and bad horror films without including any of their upsides; it’s not even bad in a way I could find myself amused by.

Slow West (2015)

Young Scottish upper-class guy Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) makes his way westward through an Old West in its final stages. So there are still natives being massacred, and outlaws roaming, but the end of the old ways, and what we might for better or worse call the dawn of US civilization, is in sight. Jay’s looking for Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius), the woman he loves (even though it becomes pretty clear rather quickly she doesn’t love him that way), who has fled to America with her father after they accidentally killed Jay’s uncle in what was more a comedy of errors than murder.

Fortunately for Jay, whose mixture of mildness of manner, naivety and optimistic kindness is not fit for survival in the place and time he’s wandering through (one is a bit surprised he survived even Scotland until now), he encounters outlaw Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender). For a bit of money, Silas promises to lead Jay to Rose safely. Unfortunately, the outlaw isn’t quite honest with Jay, for he knows about a bounty placed on the heads of Rose and her father all the remaining outlaws and bounty hunters of the area (the difference is fluid) are itching to cash in. So, perhaps, he’s just using Jay to find Rose. That, however, along with the question of Rose actually wanting or needing to be found or rescued by Jay, is something that’ll only come up after a slow trail through the surreal cruelty and cruel surreality of the West and the people dwelling there.

I am generally very, very suspicious of artists with talent and a career in one type of art moving onto a completely different one, so I did go into former Beta Band member John Maclean’s first full feature film with an undignified degree of scepticism for someone whose main wish when approaching movies is to actually enjoy them. As always when I use this kind of intro in a write-up, I was wrong, wrong, oh so very wrong, and can happily report that Maclean is quite the director. In fact, Slow West just might be the best surreal – or at least non-naturalistic - European art house Western I’ve seen in a long time, moving from one strange yet meaningful encounter to the next with unhurried grace and style, as well as with a methodical approach to letting even its strangest moments carry meaning for its characters and its world.

The film’s West, as in many a European Western, is a state of mind, and a place you really don’t want to get your head into (nor the other way round), turning promises of freedom and new beginnings into lies carried by the rule of cruelty, a place without any protection from the grim humour of the universe or the meanest parts of the human spirit. Well, actually, it’s very much like I imagine Los Angeles to be now, which is only fitting, given that city’s location. But I digress. On the other hand, I don’t believe this is meant to be any kind of deconstructive Western, or indeed a film very much interested in talking about the genre in which it is situated in a meta way; it’s more taking an approach where you use what you need and find interesting and useful about a time and place and genre, and discard the rest without a second thought.

Unlike many Western of the past (the small yet powerful bunch of contemporary films of the genre pool made in the last few years is quite different there), Slow West does take pains to paint its West as a place not populated exclusively by white men, so, even though our nominal heroes are indeed pretty white and male, there’s more than room for everyone else too, with Native Americans, people who are clearly the immigrants all Americans were, and so forth, and so on, shown in all the places popular culture has so often denied them. There’s nothing showy about this approach here: Maclean doesn’t seem out to prove a point, but only does what is natural and true. And really, it’s also a nice opportunity to have three Congolese gentlemen sing a love song (as universal as death, Jay knows), which feels more surreal than it actually is thanks to one’s expectations of what the West was. Ironically, it’s also probably an absolutely realistic scene, which might tell us something about how we decide what is real and what not.

Maclean does something similar with the relationship of Rose and Jay, not actually telling a a story of a guy saving a girl yet also not just going on a rant about how evil and paternalistic this would. The film’s criticism is more polite, more compassionate, and also quite a bit sadder than that.

So, yeah, it’s quite the film.

Music Monday: RIP DB Edition

In short: The Editor (2014)

In the last few years, filmmakers have tended to make their love for the giallo more explicit, some aiming for your typical homages (take your pick), some using the visual style and some of the themes as jumping off points for art house mediations on everything or nothing (like Amer), others to critique the genre and think it further (see Berberian Sound Studio).

Astron-6’s Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy parody the genre through over-immersion in all of its tropes and signifiers while also adding a bit of the most loopy side of the Italian horror movie. The immersion technique used is so diligent, the film was shot without sound and – like the Italian movies it relates to – dubbed in the studio with sentence structures and line deliveries that are ever so slightly (or not so slightly) off, even to the owner of a German ear not unaccustomed to writing weird sentences like that himself. Every single scene here is staged, blocked, and lit right out of the (non-existing) giallo filmmaking handbook but moreso, the cast is getting the appropriate acting style (and fake facial hair) oh so right, unless they are Udo Kier, who does this sort of thing naturally anyway.

The resulting film is often very funny, clearly (just look at the number of quotes and nods towards the original films and how well they are done) highly knowledgeable of the genre it parodies by turning its many absurdist elements even more absurd and pointing out some of its obvious subtexts; and because it is just as weird and as weirdly intense as the genre it’s working on/off, it also manages to be just as dream-like and fascinating as the best of its Italian forebears. Because of this, The Editor doesn’t work so much like a normal parody of the giallo but as a film aiming to be the Ultra-Giallo (kaiju filmmakers, please phone me) while staying conscious of the absurdity of this endeavour.

Needless to say, I loved the film all the way through to the appropriately bizarre twist ending. All fears this might be based on smug superiority over the genre its working with I might have had turned out to be completely unfounded, for this is a labour of love as much as it is a parody. Or at least it very much feels like that.

In short: The Shrine (2010)

Warning: despite being short, this is going to be full of spoilers, beginning right at the next sentence.

So, just imagine you were part of a small village in OntarioPoland full of CanadiansPoles who are protecting a cursed place that causes possession in anyone entering it? Would you build something, anything around it? Like, for example, a fence with no entry signs? Would you perhaps guard the place? Oh don’t be silly, how ever would you get around to being part of a plot twist that (surprise!) reveals the murderous (probably) inbred country folk to be murdering (probably) inbred country folk out to protect the world against DEMONS! Yup, that’s the twist here, and it’s about as well thought out as you’d expect, which is to say, not at all.

Add to that the usual crap about English language people visiting the horrors of a foreign country where everyone is primitive (and, as I have been told by people who know, speaks Polish with a heavy accent) and dresses medieval peasant-y, the absolutely pointless contortions the film goes through so that nobody knows where its main characters are even though there’d be no difference in the plot if people knew it (because the whole main plot takes place during the course of a day or so anyhow), and how much the main characters act like totally clueless horror movie characters (the sort of behaviour that only gets worse from a – plot-mandated or otherwise the writers would have had to think - point where we start out with them expecting to get around in the Polish countryside just with their English and their perfect American teeth), and you see me losing my patience with The Shrine rather quickly.

It’s too bad though, for the film’s pre-possession supernatural phenomena in form of an unnaturally unmoving fog and a moving, bleeding statue are rather creepy, and the basic idea of having people do terrible things in an attempt to push back the darkness would lend itself to a much more thoughtful and deeper approach instead of this one’s bad comic book stylings. As it stands, this is a technically competent film let down by a script that doesn’t seem to know what to do with its more interesting elements and puts its money on a lot of generic horror film gestures I’ve seen dozens of times in better films. So, the usual.

Past Misdeeds: Mirageman (2007)

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

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

When he and his brother were young, Maco's (Marko Zaror) parents were killed in a robbery. Maco now works as the bouncer of a slightly classier strip club, but his parents' deaths hasn't left him with much of a life - he's honing his martial arts skills alone in his nearly empty cellar hole of an apartment and is obsessed with physical fitness, and that's all he has in life. He certainly has neither friends nor lovers.
Maco is still less hurt than his brother who lives in a mental institution, traumatized and depressed and unable to even leave his room.

One night on his way to work, Maco witnesses a robbery. He kicks the perpetrators' asses, donning the mask he takes from one of them for no reason he himself could explain, rescues their victims and flees. One of the victims (Maria Elena Swett) is a TV reporter and on the next evening news, Maco finds himself styled as a masked vigilante hero.

His brother sees the news too, and the newly made hero seems to help him to get in contact with reality again. With a motivator this strong, Maco really doesn't have much of a choice. He buys himself a reasonably silly outfit and tries to become the masked vigilante his brother dreams of.

At first, his exploits aren't always dignified, but everything goes reasonably well. Things change for him with rising popularity, though, and soon he has to cope with the dark side of the vigilante business - a media circus that wants to use him and eat him up, criminal enemies who are more dangerous than your typical street thug and the simple fact that Maco himself is not made of steel nor a millionaire playboy.

Mirageman demonstrates admirably that you don't need Hollywood blockbuster money to create a good superhero movie. Director/writer Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and his star and martial arts and stunt expert Marko Zaror (who before made Kiltro, "the first South-American martial arts movie", if I can believe what I read) take the whole masked vigilante thing down a to the street level and into something more akin to reality as we know it and ask the question how and why a physically normal man in modern Chile would go about being a hero of a sort. It's probably as close to realism as you would want a film like it to be.

The film's low budget aesthetic helps a lot to build this mood. Espinoza uses a lot of handheld camera (not to be misinterpreted as "shaky-cam"), while at least some of the film is obviously shot guerrilla style on the streets, giving everything a gritty sheen which reminds every reviewer writing about the film - me included -  of 70s cinema, as does the third generation funky soundtrack. The colours are unfortunately very much of the yellow, blue and grey 2000s, but I'm willing to let this slide as one of the compromises people making movies without much money have to make to be able to produce something at all.

The first half of the film plays at least in parts for laughs, but it never overplays the humour in the way your typical spoof would do it. The film's humour instead arises mostly from thinking the difficulties of things like costume changes in real life through and looking at them in a clever and dry sort of way without any need to fall back on meanness or slapstick.

But Espinoza is also able to handle the darker and more tragic parts of his film well, shifting its mood from lightness to grimness in a fitting replica of the history of superhero comics. If one goes into the film only expecting sweetness and light and broken bones, one would probably be shocked by the big final battle.
There are also some very fine fights on display which Espinoza decides to show instead of hiding everything in them away by way of fast cutting and stupid camera effects. It does of course help that Zaror is an actual martial artist who is able to perform authentically enough looking fights without problems. To my surprise, Zaror shows himself also to be quite a decent actor, able to sell the psychological scars of his character well enough.

Of course there are flaws - the film's pacing is a little jagged and not every element and character is as clearly or logically developed as our hero and his brother. I found the deus ex machina character who helps Maco a few times especially clumsily inserted.

Still, its healthy mixture of believability and playfulness, comedy and tragedy is what makes Mirageman so satisfying. It's the great little superhero movie that could, even though too few people know about it.

Three Films Make A Post: For fourteen thousand years... It waited.

Manborg (2011): If you want to understand the kind of movie this Astron-6 production is, you need to imagine the fabulous video store in the sky, where all the most bizarre elements from the cheapest post-apocalypse, martial arts, action, videogame and probably Godfrey Ho  movies have somehow been genetically merged, turning into the mighty MANBORG, a culmination of the art form that could not have come to pass until the 2010s because people crazy enough to make it on the monthly budget of a not particularly rich family of three do not fall from trees. All more concrete description would make this sound like a Troma film, but unlike Troma, Astron-6 cares, their jokes are actually funny, and their films not just pretend they’re fever-dream crazy, they actually are. They’re also not feeling like parodies to me so much as the ultimate love letters to things utterly ridiculous and therefore awesome.

Wrecker: Staying in Canada, but entering a much less rarefied space, Micheal Bafaro’s film is an ill-advised backdoor remake of Steven Spielberg’s Duel that really can’t survive the comparison with the original movie. And because Spielberg’s film was a TV movie shot on a tiny budget and on a very tight schedule, you can’t even excuse this one’s failings with it being a low budget film. It’s just that Bafaro is no young Spielberg. Not many directors are, of course, but then not many directors are inviting the direct comparison this openly.

The only interesting change here is replacing Dennis Weaver’s character with two young women (Anna Hutchison and Andrea Whitburn), but since their interactions are not exactly riveting, and this also eats into the feeling of isolation for the films’ respective heroes, this looks more like a film desperately trying to do at least something differently and failing. The rest of the affair is easily described as “Duel but bad”.

Lighthouse (1999): Our final film of the day leads us to the UK, and while it is not the catastrophe that Wrecker is, Simon Hunter’s film isn’t exactly exciting. Sure, there’s a lot more talent visible on screen than in the Canadian film, but in the end, this is the ultra-generic tale of various people in an isolated place being murdered by your usual near supernatural psycho. Having read that description and the title, you’ll know exactly what you’re in for, with only a handful of over-constructed suspense scenes to distract you from the fact that there’s little reason to watch a film quite this lacking in personality. If you’re a collector of slightly more famous actors in early(ish) roles in (sort of) slasher movies, this one gives you James Purefoy as “the good, potentially innocent criminal”. Other excitement is pretty much absent.

The Hallow (2015)

aka The Woods (because there just aren’t enough films called like that)

Warning: spoilers are sometimes inevitable

Biologist (or maybe botanist, or conservationist?) Adam Hitchens (Joseph Mawle), his wife Clare (Bojana Novakovic) and their baby son Finn have moved into an old house in the woods somewhere in Ireland to evaluate which parts of the local forest are ripe for milling. The locals, particularly the family’s nearest neighbour Doyle (Gary Lydon), aren’t too happy with that, though not for ecological reasons but because they fear the revenge of the “Hallow”, the faerie population supposedly dwelling (and being unpleasant) in the area.

None of the grown-up Hitchens’ gives much about the vague superstitious murmuring around them, of course, which, given their improbability and vagueness does not come as much of a surprise.

Alas, even though they are interpreting things through a distorted lens, the villagers aren’t wrong; things are very much stalking the woods, and they are acting according to the traditional legends, if not for the reasons those legends would give. Given the child-stealing tendencies of the Good Folk that’s not good news for a family with a baby.

The first seventy minutes or so of Corin Hardy’s The Hallow are quite a wonderful achievement. The film cleverly updates classic faerie lore with a bit of body horror, providing a somewhat scientific explanation for it while still keeping most of the lore applicable and true. So, the non-scientific legends aren’t so much superstitions here as the result of people observing actual (horrifying) phenomena they can’t quite explain correctly because they lack the proper frame work for it, while on the other hand the scientific side discards these observations with their and because of their wrong explanations. This approach can’t help but remind one of Nigel Kneale, though Hardy doesn’t think things quite as far as Kneale would have.

Hardy presents this not in a dry and distant approach but as a tight creature feature with all the eye-mutilating ickiness you’ll hope for in a film that explains faeries via a fungal infection that leaves much room for body horror. Hardy makes good use of these body horror elements too, yet never falls into the trap of only banking on physically unpleasant transformations as the be all and end all of his film. Hardy’s a much too controlled director for that, instead using many a classic creature feature strategy to creep out his audience. There’s an intensity and a focus to the direction that looks very special to my eyes, the sort of directing approach that isn’t afraid of just cutting out the uneventful middle of the style of film he’s working in, going from the set-up directly to a series of climaxes without the film seeming to miss anything important.

The creatures (and babies) here are mostly based on practical effects (with a bit of digital help), demonstrating ably that this particular art still hasn’t died out, and giving the creatures a physicality and presence CGI (particularly on a budget) can’t always achieve without any visible drawbacks.

Having said all this, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat disappointed by The Hallow’s final climax (the final finale?), because it’s much too conventional for a film that has put this much energy and inventiveness into updating its monsters and changing its expected structure. So, we get a film that ends with the infected main character saving the life of his child because he can desperately cling to his humanity thanks to the power of baby love, followed by the film eschewing a possible and much more horrible final sting for one so been-there-done-that it left me in utter disbelief a film with this much clever stuff going on in it felt the need to go for a horror movie bullshit ending nobody will feel anything about instead of something actually disquieting and tragic that itself suggested so clearly before.

Of course, this does not turn The Hallow into a film not worth watching. For my taste, it however did turn a potential classic into a very good movie that just misses the final kick and falls back on highly competently realized conventionalities it should be too good for.

In short: The Transporter Refueled (2015)

For the standards of Luc Besson’s Europa Corp. this attempt to get back to one of the company’s defining franchises without its defining star is a bit of a middling film, providing the expected amount of car chases, some martial arts set pieces that somewhat suffer from new lead Ed Skrein not being a seasoned (or good) screen fighter and clearly not a dancer either - which usually is the next best thing for fake martial arts in movies - and a bunch of stuff and nonsense.

Said nonsense is just general action movie silliness this time around and not Europa Corp. trademark brain-breakingly offensive stupidity, which should not be a complaint coming from a guy who has so often complained about the EC brand of stupidity in the past, but actually very much feels like one right now. Either it’s Stockholm Syndrome, or I’ve just gotten used to Besson’s very particular view of the world and the natural laws that govern it, but I’m missing the deeply stupid bits here, perhaps because most of Refueled’s silliness feels so pro forma and bland.

The word bland leads us directly to Ed Skrein, a man who I’ve seen act, so I’m pretty sure he can, but who doesn’t bother here. Instead he just shows up, mumbles through his dialogue in the most toneless voice imaginable, stiffly goes through the action sequences even though director Camille Delamarre – not being the terror we know as Olivier Megaton – does his level best to film around his lead actor in an action movie not actually being much cop for action sequences. Now, I’m really not a fan of Jason Statham, but Skrein’s performance at least gives me a new appreciation for Statham’s screen presence and acting abilities. Sure, it’s a pretty one note shtick, but unlike Skrein here, Statham always hits his one note.

Given Ray Stevenson’s presence as Frank’s father, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one not terribly convinced by the film’s actual lead, so at least the film gives us the Europa Corp. mandatory aging English language actor having a bit of fun on camera. Stevenson’s cast in a bit of an atypical role here (he’s still a tough guy, but the charming and mildly cultured sort), and whenever he is on screen, proceedings become that important bit more lively. Why, even Skrein seems to wake up from his slumber a bit when Stevenson’s around to drag him out of his coma.

Thanks to Stevenson, as well as the fact that Europa Corp – whoever is actually directing any given movie there – can by now film solid action sequences in their collective sleep (and you could argue that’s how the action here came to be), The Transporter Refueled still works as an okay little Euro action movie. The genre – and even EC’s back catalogue – is just so full of more worthwhile films I’m not sure why you’d bother with this one unless you’re really, really bored.

Music Monday: Getting Ready Edition

It's the season

to leave this blog for the rest of the year, summon one's favourite god(s) (if any), hug/sacrifice/ignore one's loved ones and be merry.
See you next year frequent and/or imaginary readers, and don't forget to think about the important things:


See you next year!

Island of the Fishmen (1979)

aka Screamers

Original title: L’isola degli uomini pesce

Prison ship physician Lt. Claude de Ross (Claudio Cassinelli) finds himself in the unfortunate situation of being adrift in a skiff on the open sea with a boatful of prisoners he rescued when the ship they were all on went under. Things don’t improve when the gang crashes on a mysterious island, for the local fish person population soon kills off most everyone except for the Lieutenant and two of the prisoners.

At least the island is not completely unpopulated of people (probably) not from Innsmouth: the trio soon encounter Amanda (Barbara Bach) who warns them off and basically tells them to shoo back to sea; curiously, that’s not an offer Claude takes. Instead, the stranded follow Amanda to the nice little mansion where she lives under the thumb of sadist prick Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson), a voodoo priestess maid (Beryl Cunningham), and a handful of “natives”. Edmond clearly has plans for his unexpected guests, though it takes a bit for him to go beyond saying every sentence he speaks with improbable sarcasm (there’s not a single word the dubbing actor says that isn’t surrounded by invisible air quotes of doom).

Let’s just say the man’s plans have something to do with the fish people, the mad scientist (a terribly sick looking Joseph Cotten playing a terribly sick man) he hides in his house and who spends most of his time spying through peepholes, the lost race of Atlantis, and so on, and so forth.

I am a great admirer of Island of the Fishmen’s director Sergio Martino’s giallos. However, his work in other genres wasn’t always as fine, with films whose quality was all over the place. Island is very much all over the place, too. At its core, it’s a somewhat Vernesian adventure movie often pretending to be a horror film that follows the old rules of one damn thing after another plotting, and contains nary a second that makes any damn sense at all. I, at least, did have a hard time understanding what Edmond’s plans were actually supposed to be, why he does what he does, and other completely unimportant questions.

But hey, the film does feature the fish people its title promises rather extensively, as well as the obligatory scenes of our wetly clad (clearly, Martino did his best to get around Bach’s no nudity clause in a Bollywood approved way) heroine having a good time with them. There are completely useless (and mildly offensive, as are all the non-white characters, though you gotta admit the white people here are generally pretty offensive too) voodoo rituals, lots of shouting and running around by everyone, an explosion or two, a mad science villain speech each for Johnson and Cotten, as well as a pretty crazy soundtrack, and an English dub that sounds as if we’re listening to a first run through with especially bad accents (Johnson’s voice can only be heard but not described, unless nasal to the degree of cosmic terror counts, while Cassinelli dubs himself as a Frenchman with a heavy Italian accent). And fish people. In other words, I find it pretty damn difficult to find a bad word to say about the film, even though Martino’s direction is uncommonly bland for the third-most stylish giallo auteur, the plotting is, well, not actually plotting, and there’s not a single sensible idea in the movie.

Well, I’ll just admit it, this is exactly as awesome as it sounds.

Past Misdeeds: Mahakaal (1988/1993)

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

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

The life of thirty year old college teenager Anita (Archana Puran Singh) is starting to get interesting. Right now, she and her equally old student friends (among them the most terrifying monster of them all - "comedian" Johnny Lever) are still cavorting around merrily - that is when her boyfriend Prakash and his best friend Rakesh aren't dishooming the local would-be rapists - but all this is beginning to change when Anita's best friend Seela, and very soon our heroine herself, is starting to have terrible nightmares.

In them, they are hunted by a shadowy, mulletted man with a scarred face and the propensity to laugh menacingly while showing his charming iron-bladed gloves. That would probably be troubling enough for the girls, yet the worst thing is that these dreams are leaving physical traces behind. It's one thing dreaming about getting your nightshirt ripped by claws, but it's quite another when you wake up and actually find it ripped.
Still, the friends are (theoretically) young, their hair freshly sprayed and mulletted, so they decide to drive to the country-side to have a picnic and cavort some more. That works out nicely until they want to drive back home and discover that their car won't move an inch anymore. Fortunately there's a hotel nearby. Unfortunately, it's managed by another Johnny Lever and has no working phones to call home from. How immoral! Well, at least it's dry and warm.

Anita and Prakash do the boring and responsible thing by keeping chaste. Seela and Rakesh however decide to have a real picnic together in one bed. Would you believe that Seela dreams of the nice man with the interesting gloves again? Yeah, I was completely taken by surprise myself. This time, though, he's not just appearing to scare the girl; he kills her, leaving Rakesh - who of course decides to run - as the main suspect of the dastardly deed, no matter that there's no proof whatsoever against him.
Hunting Rakesh is Anita's father, your usual Bollywood patriarchal copper arsehole. Thanks to Rakesh's brilliant idea to make a visit to his school campus in bright daylight, it's a very short manhunt, and the young idiot finds himself in a nice, damp cell.

The next night, Anita dreams of Rakesh getting killed in his cell by the mullet man and his new pet snakes, and even her sceptical father looks shaken when he learns that the young man did in fact die that night.
After a few more small revelations, Dad explains who the man with the gloves is. It's a certain Shakaal, a black magician who worshipped some undefined dark gods by sacrificing children to them. Seven years ago, he kidnapped Anita's little sister to do the same to her. Her father wasn't able to save his daughter, so he poked Shakaal in the face with a torch and buried him alive in a chained box in some ruins. Obviously, the dead man has returned to take his vengeance.

If there is one thing you can count on when it comes to the films of the Ramsay Brothers, it is their absolutely shameless will to entertain in the broadest and sleaziest (for Hindi cinema) way possible. These two aren't afraid of anything, not even ripping off one of the two films by Wes Craven that are actually any good - A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Well, there is something the Ramsays were afraid of - putting their Nightmare rip-off into the cinemas when their arch enemy Mohan Bakhri had just before thrown his own version of the tale, Khooni Murdaa, on the market. Just imagine, they could have lost money! So they let the film lie and ripen for a few years and only put it out when the Bollywood horror boom had already run its course, making it their last theatrical feature before they had to flee into the land of cable TV, as far as I've heard while being hunted by villagers carrying torches.

So the fashion and the victims of Johnny Lever's "parodies" (and does Amitabh Bachchan's comeback vehicle Shahenshah truly need to be parodied?) and "satire" are very much part of the late 80s. I have a hard time imagining that this will have helped Mahakaal's financial performance, but hey, what do I know about stuff like that.

What I do know is what I find fun, and Mahakaal definitely is fun.
Sure, if you are easily angered by really brazen theft of plots, ideas, scene set-ups or musical cues, you'll probably have a hard time watching it without beginning to froth at the mouth. I find the Ramsay method here rather charming. The first half of Mahakaal copies the plot progression and characters of its model as closely as possible, but adds a lot of flavour to prepare Craven's recipe for the taste of an Indian audience. So the viewer gets to see a slightly less bloody version of A Nightmare on Elm Street plus everything he, she or it ever loved about the trashier side of Bollywood cinema - musical numbers of dubious quality (well, I actually found the last one with its golden glitter costumes from hell rather undubious, even quite delightful), heroines with an insane propensity to get very very wet, said dishooming of would-be rapists and other assorted rabble, Johnny Lever humour you can blessedly fast forward through because his scenes are not in the least relevant for anything else in the film (although you will then miss out on things like his Michael Jackson imitation, his Amitabh Bachchan in Shahenshah stick - which is actually kinda funny - and the rare Johnny action scene).

Then the last third of the film arrives, and the Ramsays have obviously had enough of following Craven, throw out the dream demon idea completely and turn the film into the monster rumble most of their films I have seen until now end in. Which is an excellent idea when it brings us a re-jigged scene stolen from Dawn of the Dead, an inexplicable, but fun bout of demonic possession and a much better water bed death scene than in the original. The only way to beat that (or bring it to an end) is of course to end the film in a bizarre beat-down that is at once gruesome, silly and absolutely insane and alone worth the price of admission.
Technically, Mahakaal is typical Ramsay Brothers filmmaking - there's not a bit of subtlety to find anywhere, yet the brothers show an exhilarating sense for hysterical in-your-face intensity when it comes to the horror sequences or the action. If it has to do with the use of zoom, manic camera movements, fog, multi-coloured lights, more fog, or bizarre interior architecture (watch out for the temple of evil!), the Ramsays know what they are doing and (or so I suspect) love it.

Memorable acting you won't find here, but at least our heroine, future TV personality Archana Puran Singh, is as game for anything as Polly (Shan) Kuan, be it fighting an invisible man, getting very very wet repeatedly, or just screaming "Nahiiiiiiiin!". Especially her screams are something I won't soon forget.
What more could I ask of a film?

In short: Puppet Master II (1990)

Another group of doomed psychic researchers – though these are government-sponsored parapsychologist – visit the house of Toulon (Steve Welles), maker of living puppets to find out if there’s any truth to the insane gibbering of the last survivor of the first film. Little do they expect that the puppets have revived Toulon, who now roams the house bundled up like the Invisible Man. To keep his puppets alive, the puppet master needs them to collect glands (or whatever, but glands are the traditional thing to collect in such a case) from human brains. He’d rather prefer his puppets to harvest the stuff from outside his home, but the area isn’t exactly populated, and the puppets are not terribly good at keeping brain parts unroasted (which is what happens when you build a flamethrower into one of your dolls and send it out brain-gathering, I suppose, therefore Toulon only has himself to blame), so the researchers are still doomed.

Things become a bit more complicated when Toulon decides the research team’s leader Carolyn (Elizabeth Maclellan) is the reincarnation of his dead wife Elsa. Look, Toulon, bandages don’t make you a mummy!
I don’t think the second of many, many Puppet Master films of Charles Band’s puppet obsessed outfit Full Moon is as fun as the first one, but we are still at a point in time here when Band productions were at least trying to be actually entertaining films in the classic low budget tradition. Consequently, director David Allen (despite being more of an effects guy than a filmmaker in his own right for most of his career) delivers a decent little horror movie that – for my tastes – could use a bit more of the spirited weirdness of the first film (no stuffed poodle here, that’s for sure) but that’s working the few assets it has – a decent cast, puppets – as hard as financially viable.

There are certainly far worse ways to while away ninety minutes than with this variation of various mummy films, but with killer dolls. And because the cruel and uncaring universe had a pretty good day when it caused Puppet Master II to happen, it ends on a final scene so loveably bizarre I can’t help but approve of the whole Puppet Master endeavour up to this point despite my general annoyance with Charles Band as doll movie impresario on account of it.

SyFy vs The Mynd: The Hollow (2015)

Sisters Sarah (Stephanie Hunt), Marley (Sarah Dugdale) and Emma (Alisha Newton) have been having a rather hard time of late. Their parents died in an accident that left the youngest Emma hurt and suffering from some form of PTSD, and now the money their parents have left them has run out from paying for Emma’s hospital bills. Their only choice to escape the loving arms of the foster care system is to move in with their aunt Cora (Deborah Kara Unger).

Cora lives on a somewhat isolated island in what I assume to be the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, this island turns out to be at the centre of the return of a rather nasty supernatural surprise in form of a fiery stick-monster bound to Halloween and storms. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a storm coming up, and it’s the day before Halloween, so when the sisters arrive on the island, Cora is already dead (one suspects Unger isn’t cheap), the island under attack, and the sisters will have to put quite some work into surviving.

It looks as if now that the SyFy Original is a species threatened with extinction, the few films still being made are allowed a greater degree of care – or we’re a really lucky audience and only the crappy SyFy Originals are dying out. Be that as it may, SyFy veteran Sheldon Wilson (in the past responsible for what might be my favourite SyFy movie, Carny) does provides us with a fine example of the SyFy monster movie. Pleasantly, it’s an earnest one too, so nobody’s patience will be tested by unfunny attempts at being funny, and the people who can only enjoy a monster movie ironically can go watch American Horror Story.

But I’m getting rude, and I digress. If you’re acquainted with the SyFy formula, you will have noticed this one surprisingly doesn’t feature any divorced characters getting together again via monster hunting, and indeed no romance plot whatsoever. Instead, Wilson concentrates on the tensions and bonds between the three sisters (the male characters aren’t of any import whatsoever), whose nature is of course revealed via the whole monster business. The characterization isn’t particularly deep but done with a degree of precision that avoids making any of the sisters the bad one who doesn’t deserve to live and realized by the young actresses with surety. The sisters and their relationship feels believable enough to not make me want them get eaten by a stick-monster. Indeed, I found myself actively rooting for them during the course of the film, which isn’t exactly something you can count on in more formulaic horror flicks.

As in most of his other movies, Wilson shows himself to be a capable director of low budget chills too, with many an atmospheric shot of rather picturesque woods (mostly by day, interestingly enough), well-timed monster attacks and an eye for the gruesome detail. It’s a very controlled movie, with little going on in front of the camera that doesn’t have an actual bearing on the movie except for the somewhat pointless sub-plot of Emma’s visions that changes nothing about the plot and tells us nothing about the characters (and was perhaps more important in an earlier draft of the script?). That subplot is fortunately tiny, though, so The Hollow stays the taut and fun SyFy horror movie I enjoyed greatly.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,horror,stephanie hunt,sarah dugdale,alisha newton,deborah kara unger

Music Monday: Not Alright Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,the specials

In short: Black Sheep (2006)

Sheep farmer’s son Henry Oldfield (Nathan Meister) has not chosen the best day to return to the family farm to sell his share of it to his asshole brother Angus (Peter Feeney) in an attempt to find closure and perhaps lose his phobia of sheep (based on a cruel prank his prick brother played on him the day their father died).

For today isn’t just the day when Angus is planning to present his new genetically modified super sheep to interested parties but it is also the day when bumbling eco-activists Experience (Danielle Mason) and Grant (Oliver Driver) will accidentally cause the beginning of the sheepocalypse. That’s the sort of thing just bound to happen when one hires a mad scientist (Tandi Wright) to perform illegal genetic experiments on sheep, of course.

Well, at least the ensuing rise of the zombie sheep and zombie sheep people just might help Henry get over his sheep problems.

I don’t know what it is with New Zealand and gory (though in this case not on the early Jackson level of gore) horror comedies, but I’m glad these things always turn out so well. In the case of Jonathan King’s Black Sheep the film’s even funny enough I don’t exactly need to call it something like “the best zombie sheep movie ever made”, though it most certainly is that.

Apart from the film being funny (it’s a comedy thing), it also recommends itself through some adorable sheep people zombies courtesy (as the rest of the effects) of WETA Workshops that would also look good in a future were-sheep film, sheep fart jokes, not very mean-spirited jokes about chakras and other “alternative” nonsense up to the use of acupuncture when you fight sheep people zombies, some nastily-funny gore effects and a script that realizes that sheep jokes will only get you half-way through a film, yet family trouble and trauma treated through the lens of sheep zombie-ism aren’t just comedy gold but also a fine way to have a film that feels serious enough in certain ways not to end up as only a series of sheep jokes.

King is rather good at the sort of half-comedic (these are still and always zombie sheep, after all) suspense and zombie sheep defence scenes George Romero never includes in his films (because he doesn’t know about sheep, I suppose), so that Black Sheep stays as riveting as it is funny throughout.

Technorati-Markierungen: new zealand movies,in short,horror,comedy,jonathan king,nathan meister,peter feeney,danielle mason

In short: Hideous! (1997)

I am generally quite down on Charles Band and Fullmoon Entertainment productions after about 1992 or so (what with them generally sucking badly in the worst possible manner) but this big gloopy ball of weirdness is much more fun than I could have hoped for, starting from an outrageously silly premise and just getting intensely strange, and then stranger.

Unlike most of these films that spend more time winking at their audience while exclaiming how funny they are, this one actually had me amused throughout, thanks to a cast of strange stereotypes with an extra dollop of weirdness, played with the proper kind of overacting by a cast (among them Michael Citriniti, Mel Johnson Jr., and Jacqueline Lovell as the strangest henchwoman imaginable) that actually isn’t phoning it in, even though they are in a film with mutant killer foetuses concerning the misadventures of people in the medical specimen collectors’ underground. A film not containing all that much of said killer foetuses to boot, because special effects ain’t cheap, buddy, but talking it. Fortunately, said talking’s often so funny – as well as off – you might not even miss said foetuses. If all this does sound a bit like a Troma movie, there certainly are more than just a few parallels, but it’s Troma done right, which is to say, actually funny and weirdly subversive in feel instead of just screaming at you that it is.

Hideous! (it truly works hard for that exclamation point) is directed by Charles Band himself with unexpected verve, and just goes from one moment of fun off-the-cuff weirdness to the next. There aren’t many films around who get their mandatory bit of nudity in by having Lovell (the actual brains of her collector’s operation, like every good henchwoman should be) staging a hold-up while being topless and wearing a gorilla mask, which won’t even be the weirdest habit the character will show. And if that sounds like your idea of fun, this one’s for you as much as it is for me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,comedy,charles band,michael citriniti,mel johnson jr.,jacqueline lovell,tracie may

Past Misdeeds: Fiend (1980)

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

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

A strange red energy descends upon a graveyard by night. It seems to have plans with one of the corpses which are so peacefully rotting away. Conveniently, a pair of lovers has decided to spend some time together there, and the freshly revived dead guy (Don Leifert) can have some fun strangling the female part of the duo with red glowing hands. Looks like he is sucking out her life force too - at least he looks much fresher after the rude deed is done.

Some weeks later, we see the former dead guy move into a house in the circle of hell known as the suburbs. Another jump in time forward, and we finally learn a little more about him and what he is up too.
Dead guy now goes under the name of Eric Longfellow, owns a music school and drives his choleric and paranoid neighbour Gary Kender (Richard Nelson and yes, ladies and gentlemen, our hero) bonkers with his proclivity to play the violin until the early evening hours (terrifying, I know).

When he's not fiddling away merrily, Longfellow sits in the cellar of his house, pets his (of course black) cat and swills wine. From time to time, he drives out to kill another woman to replenish his energy levels.
This could probably go on forever if Longfellow wouldn't start to get sloppy. He kills his victims ever closer to his home until he one day strangles a child in the woods just behind his house. The police might not suspect anything, but his categorical statement that he hasn't heard or seen anything out of the ordinary when the child was slain is more than enough to put the aggressive lunatic that is Gary Kender on his case.
Gary is soon convinced that his hated neighbour hides something terrible behind his facade of arrogant politeness.

For once, there are no evil aliens invading Baltimore in a Don Dohler film. We are in fact not in Maryland at all but in Delaware, and the change of scenery does minor wonders for Fiend. It's the peculiar case of a Dohler movie that is actually more good than just stupidly entertaining.

Sure, Dohler still provides all of the flaws that characterize his films in copious amounts, but their impact on the film as a whole is not as bad as I'm used to in his works. As a director, Dohler often had trouble reaching a level above "technically barely adequate", probably thanks to the shoestring way he had to budget his film, but also thanks to a decisive lack of visual imagination. Fiend still isn't a festival of the senses, yet there are enough moments that show a higher amount of style than one is used to from the director. For once, Dohler is out to evoke a mood through his film's visuals instead of just pointing the camera in the direction of his actors. Don't get me wrong, he isn't suddenly transforming into Mario Bava, but in the context of his other works and the way American local independent horror films had to be shot to be shot at all, it's quite an impressive development for Dohler.

The acting is also quite a bit better than in other Dohler films. Of course, there are still enough bad line readings to make viewers unaccustomed to backyard filmmaking flinch. Nelson and Elaine White as his wife however are at least coming over as natural instead of wooden, which is all I ask for in a film like this, really.
Don Leifert's performance as the film's Big Bad is a little more difficult to evaluate. On one hand, he does some truly fearful mugging for the camera, like a chimpanzee trying to imitate Vincent Price (and of course failing), yet on the other hand he hits some notes of real creepiness, sometimes even of evil, when one would least expect it.

Also better than usual in Dohlerland is the script, or at least the plotting. The pacing is very deliberate (meaner people than I might call it slow), yet also lacking the rambling, disconnected quality of Dohler's other films. Calling it tight would probably go too far, but it's pretty solid.

What I found especially interesting about the film was the character of Kender. The viewer is obviously meant to identify with him, but his irascible nature and extremely rude manners and the initial irrationality of his antipathy towards Longfellow made this completely impossible for me. Our hero here is the kind of guy who, living in a totalitarian state, would go around denunciating people with the smugness of one perfectly unable to have empathy with anyone but himself. In this, he is ironically enough just like the monster he is after, both of them perfectly punchable.

Now, I'm not arguing this is something Dohler put into his film on purpose; looking at the politics of his other films I rather think Dohler sees Kender as "good people", and as someone perfectly in his rights when being an insufferable arse. To me, it just seems to be one of the beauties of art, and something that happens especially often in this type of local filmmaking, that aspects and ideas an artist never planned for still find their way into it, making it stranger and quite a bit more interesting than anyone could expect.
Of course, one would be perfectly in one's right to call this pretentious crap and just let oneself get distracted by Fiend's perfectly annoying synthie soundtrack.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,don dohler,horror,reviews

Three Films Make A Post: It's diabolical! It's daring! It stalks, it cuts, it rips!

Debug (2014): Call me conceited, but I always get a bad feeling when a movie is written and directed by somebody who is mostly working as an actor, despite there being clear and rather fantastic exceptions to the rule that actors can’t write and direct for shit unless they bring a ghost writer/director or two. David Hewlitt’s Debug is not going to change my mind on the matter either, for while the film’s technically competent on the direction side, it’s also a text book example of a film that makes the wrong choices for mood, characters and everything else with every single edit.

And that’s before I’ve even come to the atrocious script, a kind of lite version of the lovely but already not exactly intellectually brilliant Event Horizon. The script doesn’t know how or when to exposit effectively, how to build up to its supposed scenes of suspense or fright, and instead just lets things happen without seeming to have any control over its own narrative. The characters are one-dimensional and – despite a decent cast – uninteresting, and the dialogue’s just embarrassing, with no single line that sounds as if an actual human being would speak it, nor one that at least sounds cool. I thought I’d be so easy to please with SF/horror that no film in the small sub-genre could manage to not entertain me at least a little, but this thing’s beyond any hope.

Timebomb (1991): This action film with conspiracy thriller elements by Avi Nesher featuring good old Michael Biehn and Patsy Kensit as the least believable (and impressively stupid) psychiatrist imaginable on the other hand did entertain me quite a bit. The script doesn’t exactly hold up to scrutiny (but then it’s not paced to be scrutinized, really) but Nesher’s a consistent director with a decent eye for keeping things rolling, there’s some entertaining nonsense about brainwashing, and the cast (also including a ranting Richard Jordan, a completely wasted in a non-role Robert Culp, our old friend Billy Blanks and Tracy Scoggins) is getting into it with a degree of enthusiasm.

There are even one or two scenes – the shoot-out in the porn cinema in particular – that are as good as US low budget action gets, and given these scenes aren’t in a film that bored me before them, this is a minor for me.

Eden Lodge (2015): Despite marketing material that makes Andreas Prodromou’s film look like a British version of slasher, torture porn and backwoods cannibal flicks, this is actually much more in the tradition of 70s British thrillers, with some bits and pieces of the more hip genres stitched onto the proceedings (one suspects for better saleability). Unfortunately, it’s not a very gripping entry in any of its genres, with not terribly much happening in it that’s actually very thrilling at all, the psychological suspense never really arriving, and a hesitant air to the proceedings.

The film is pretty to look at though, and, as it so often goes with films that leave me absolutely cold, clearly made by basically competent filmmakers making a basically competent film without anything in it you’ll remember a day later, and not much more you’ll actually be interested by while watching it.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,american movies,british movies,in short,sf,horror,action,david hewlett,avi nesher,michael biehn,patsy kensit,andreas prodromou

Headhunter (1988)

A series of deaths among the local Nigerian community awaken the mild degree of interest deaths among the poor and the black tend to awaken in Miami’s police force. Racist idiot Captain Ted Calvin (Steve Kanaly) sends out what must be his least favourite couple of detectives to solve a series of murders you’d usually build a task force for. The lucky ones are Katherine Hall (Kay Lenz) and her peculiar partner Pete Giullani (Wayne Crawford). Pete’s suffering from marriage trouble: seems as if his wife (June Chadwick) has found her lesbian self after what we can only assume to be a decade or more of horror and is throwing him out on his ass, and if you ask me why that’s going to be important for the course of the film, I surely don’t know. But then, I didn’t write the script.

But, let’s get back to the murders – as the film does from time to time too. These aren’t your run of the mill killings but rather bizarre beheadings after which the head of the victim goes missing. Because they sure as hell wouldn’t find anything out on their own, Nigerian-American shaman/lawyer Samuel Juru (Sam Williams) provides a bit of exposition and informs our heroes they are looking for some sort of demon that drove the Miami Nigerians from Nigeria. Which they of course don’t believe.

But no matter, for the demon finds himself threatened and challenged by the two worst cops in town kinda-sorta being on his case doing nothing of consequence, and starts to haunt them with hallucinations and attacks instead of letting them get on with drinking in bars, walking around town muttering nonsense, and not doing anything that could solve even the case of little Timmy’s vanished ball.

Seriously, I got nothing here. I have no idea what Francis Schaeffer’s film is supposed to be, what it’s supposed to do, or what the people involved think its plot is. About half of the film belongs to the peculiar genre of the mumbling, rambling cop film, consequently spending its time on showing our police heroes (yeah, that’s sarcasm right here) being shlubby, mumbly, and totally ineffective, investing a lot of time into Pete’s personality crisis without it having any pay-off or much connection to the supernatural plot beyond his wife and her lover becoming victims at the end. Mostly, that part of the film takes places in bars, cars, and other places where characters can mumble some nonsense at each other, and honestly, I have no idea why the film showing half of this stuff.

I have even less of an idea about the supernatural plot. There’s a demon, who might have a cult, and might do something or other even worse than beheading people we never learn anything much about, I suppose. He’s mostly an invisible wind for large parts of the film (at least those parts that are indeed concerned with him), and turns into a rubbery suit for the big tiny chainsaw against monster finale, but otherwise, I have no idea what his game is, why he feels threatened by two characters who couldn’t find their own asses, or why I should care.

If all this sounds rather vague and disconnected, welcome to Headhunter, a film that spends most of its time not actually doing anything except for being somewhat peculiar and pointless, and certainly never deigns to attempt stuff like entertaining its audience, telling a story, building up a mood beyond “huh?”, or anything you might connect with, you know, a film, and which, alas, just isn’t weird in an interesting enough way to keep one awake watching it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,south african movies,in short,horror,francis schaeffer,kay lenz,wayne crawford,sam williams

Berserker: The Nordic Curse (1987)

Warning: I’m going to get a bit spoilery here; on the other hand it’s going to be one of the spoiled elements that’ll be the film’s main draw for most potential viewers (you know who you are).

A bunch of the usual young ‘un stereotypes go fishing and hut dwelling in your usual dark woods somewhere in the United States. George “Buck” Flower is playing a guy called Pappy Nyquist; a police man exists (John F. Goff). One of the kids (character and actor names aren’t really needed) – the Intellectual, obviously – reads from a book about the Vikings, because the local area had mostly been settled by Norwegians. From him, we learn a bit about berserkers, specifically a curse that opens up the descendants of berserker bloodlines to possession by berserker ghosts. Oh boy, history can be so exciting.

And wouldn’t you know it? There is indeed someone or something with a bear snout and paws going around killing people in the area. Is it a berserker, or the bear the film shows off from time to time?

In many aspects, Jefferson Richard’s Berserker is your typical middle-80s (the point just before the films became all “funny”) low budget independent slasher movie. There are the paper thin characters embodied by actors with little experience and not much of a future in that career, the oh-so-very-slow first half of the film that spends a lot of time on things like showing the cop and Flower playing chess, or people just goofing around in front of the camera for no reason of narrative, mood, or character.

However, despite these not very enticing elements, Berserker has that peculiar something – call it magic – that made watching it a more pleasant experience than I’d feared. Some of that is caused by some actual filmic achievements, for Richard, particular once the plot gets going, does know how to shoot an (improbably bright by night) wood with all the atmosphere mist, blue light and a primitive (in a good way) soundtrack made out of fake wind noises and random synth warbling can provide, which is an excellent way to make something out of the best production values nature (and cheap electronics) can provide. Done right, and it is done right in this case, watching kids creep through the woods and getting murdered can provide a lot of bang for one’s buck, and doesn’t ever get old to my eyes (particularly since the advent of corridor horror redefined true visual boredom, or horror). What I’m saying, I think, is that the later parts of the film show a bit of a sensibility all its own. Let’s called it individuality. For an example, just look at how creepily it realizes the old tacky chestnut of the sex scene intercut with a murder scene. It’s not exactly tasteful, but it certainly works better at making me uncomfortable than a lot of these scenes do in other movies; most probably because Richard even mirrors the camera angles of the two scenes appropriately, really making the old sex and death story work for him.

There are also some surprises to the script: the way the film takes elements of slasher, nature strikes back horror, and some survivalist thriller bits is actually pretty clever, and leads to some truly unexpected scenes. In particular, it’s the scene where our film’s killer in his partial bear cosplay costume gets to wrestle a bear, a scene that nearly gives Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestling a bear in Day of the Animals a run for its money. And that’s not even the film’s actual climax, because that somewhat later scene aims for a bit of 70s horror feel, with our heroine (more or less) screeching “shoot him! shoot him!” until the rather doubtful looking cop indeed does shoot our killer. In other words, what starts out as a very typical cheapo slasher turns into something unexpected. People get killed if they had sex or not, I’m pretty sure the survivors aren’t virginal, and the way the survival horror elements make their way into the slasher narrative does lead to a handful of minor surprises.

It’s still seat-of-your-pants filmmaking of course (this is a film whose big guest star is Flower, after all), with many a rough edge, and a lot of elements it’d be easy to point at to call Berserker “bad”, but to my eyes, this one’s got heart and personality, and a head of its own, and is therefore good.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,slasher,horror,jefferson richard,george "buck" flower,beth toussaint