In short: Killer Bees (2005)

aka Killing Bee

Original title: Satsujinbachi - kira bi

A gaggle of Japanese Girl Scouts and their lone male chaperone are happily going camping quite a few hours away from civilization, as if not one of them had ever seen a horror movie.

At first, it's all long, painful scenes of teenage squeeing and insufferably cutesy humour, but after some hours, the first of the kids is attacked by a mysterious insect (there will be some discussions if the killer animals are in fact bees or rather hornets - I'm saying they're bad CGI), and suffers from anaphylactic shock. Being a brilliant man of action, the chaperone is convinced the most intelligent action to take now will be loading the ill girl on his back while one other girl leads the way with a flashlight, and just leaving the rest of the teenagers alone with Mother Nature.

Naturally, the girls staying behind make the acquaintance of some friends of the grumpy digital insect that bit their friend, too. It doesn't look good for the future of the Girl Scout tradition in Japan.

If this short plot description makes you think this direct to DVD killer animal concoction sounds rather bland, you are right on the money. It's one of those films that consist of a lot of teenagers screaming and (if the audience is lucky) dying, a bit of crying and a whole lot of wandering through (at least quite pretty) woods and not much else.

It's a bit of a shame, really, because the handful killer bee attack scenes are hilarious. Who knew that Japanese bees are sneaky like ninjas, often lone wolves like Solid Snake, have their own stalker cam, and know exactly which parts of a teenage body to attack for maximum deadliness? They also are active by day and by night and just love flying into fire.

Alas, we don't get to spend as much time with these true heroes of the film as I would have wished. Director Norihisa Yoshimura does seem to prefer crying teenagers to exciting CGI animals, which just possibly might be the wrong direction to take when the core of your film's cast consists of inexperienced actresses around the age of fifteen.

Friends of unconvincingly acted yet enthusiastic death scenes can look forward to a few moments of fun, as well as to a new reason not to scream when attacked by killer bees, but if one hopes for anything a bit more exciting (or just a bit more), one will be sorely disappointed by this particular killer insect movie.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,horror,norihisa yoshimura

Evil Clutch (1988)

aka Horror Queen

Original title: Il Bosco

After gifting their audience with one of those much-loved holiday slide shows (complete with mandatory boring off-screen mumbling and terrible jokes) during the credits, the young lovers Cindy (Coralina Cataldi-Cassoni) and Tony (Diego Ribon) decide to make a camping trip into the Alps. And good riddance, the audience says.

After picking up a woman named Arva (Elena Cantarone), who claims to have been attacked by someone in the vicinity and inconclusively looking around for the attacker for a bit, they come to a quiet little village. Arva runs off, but our hero couple is unfazed by anything that might be strange about the woman's demeanour. They make the acquaintance of a writer (going by the credits he's called Algernoon; played by Luciano Crovato) who speaks through an electronic box. Writer guy tells the couple an utterly delightful story about them becoming possessed by demons and killing each other. Later on, he'll demonstrate the dangers of the area by brandishing a fishing rod. In fact, Algernoon is trying to warn our heroes off from staying in the area, but instead of just saying something like "whoever goes into the woods gets massacred by the local witch, who just happens to be my daughter", he's going the classic vague rambling route. Not surprisingly, Algernon is creeping Tony and Cindy out so much they don't want to have anything more to do with him.

Of course the two young people decide the best way to get away from their new-found "friend" is to go camping in the woods. There they meet Arva again. The woman invites the couple to stay overnight in an empty house she knows about, and their experiences with Algernoon notwithstanding, they agree.

Little do our heroes know that Arva is a witch who likes to play with a bucket o' demonising goo she stores in the house and castrates men with the giant claw (alas, not as big as a battleship) that grows out of her vagina. Sure, Algernoon could have told them, but then the film would have ended early.

As the title Evil Clutch already hints at, this is another Italian attempt at squeezing a few bucks out of pale imitations of other films.  Given how late the film comes in the history of Italian rip-off film culture, with all the lack of talent behind and before the camera and lack of funds a film being made at this point in time implies, it will come as no surprise that Evil Clutch does not manage to stitch an entertaining monster out of the parts it hacked off of other films. It's especially unfortunate because the first two Evil Dead films this wants so desperately to remind us of were themselves made on shoestring budgets, yet still managed to be excellent movies. One might think Evil Clutch's director Andreas Marfoni could have tried to learn something from Sam Raimi's films, but the Italian prefers to just copy parts of the setting and use lots and lots of low-hanging steadicam shots that implicate the drunken frat boy brother of the American films' force of evil.

Too much of Evil Clutch is spent on moments of refined boredom that are punctuated by ropey gore and pus effects which never manage to be all that interesting. From time to time, these effects are at least funny, but I couldn't shake the impression Marfoni didn't know which of them were worth spending time on and which ones just boring busywork for the effects people. So excellent (yesyes, and tasteless) ideas like the vagina claw or the cuckoo clock with the wee little blood-spitting head instead of a cuckoo inside are drowned out by uninventive mutilations and much brownish decomposition of body parts you'd need someone with the imagination and fearlessness from being ridiculous of Lucio Fulci behind the camera to make interesting.

I probably hardly need to mention that the script (also by Marfoni) only contains enough plot for twenty minutes, or that not much of it makes any sense. These wouldn't be insurmountable problems, if Evil Clutch just weren't so dull for most of the time.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,andreas marfoni,reviews

In short: Cobra Mission (1986)

Four Vietnam veterans (Christopher Connelly, John Steiner, Manfred Lehmann and Oliver Tobias) have enough of being disrespected by random drunks and/or their families. What would lead to a drunken bender, a bar fight or a divorce for most people soon finds the quartet being convinced by their former commanding officer (played by the cameoing Enzo G. Castellari, who'd probably have made a more exciting film had he directed this one) to return to Vietnam and rescue some of those legendary US prisoners of war the Italian film industry cares deeply about.

After further cameos by Luciano Pigozzi/Alan Collins, and Donald Pleasence as a mad, commie-eating Catholic priest, our guys are armed to the teeth and on their way through the jungle.

Surprisingly enough, they even manage to find and free a handful of prisoners, but finding and freeing and actually rescuing them turn out to be quite different things, because The Man turns out to be totally evil, you know.

I have often read that Fabrizio De Angelis' Cobra Mission is supposed to be one of the better Italian rambosploitation (or is it explodinghutsploitation?) movies, but I can't say I agree with that assessment. Sure, the lead actors have have held their creased visages into cameras pretending to be real macho men in a few hundred of these films and are kind of good at their job. Yes, the cameos and small parts for people like Pleasence, Pigozzi, Gordon Mitchell, or Ethan Wayne are nearly as nice a thing to have on screen as having good old friends as dinner guests. And of course there are exploding huts and Filipinos pretending to be Vietnamese dying in various ridiculous poses aplenty.

But unfortunately, Cobra Mission falls into one of the saddest traps a vietnamsploitation film can fall into: it's neither mad and viscerally exciting enough to delight as a cheap piece of crap, nor good enough at being earnest and po-faced to work even vaguely as the message movie it likes to pretend it is between the shouting and the shooting. The film's message movie parts are also of the unpleasantly jingoistic "bring our boys back home (even if we Italians don't have any boys there)" variant, with a mild helping of racism, which does not help to endear them or Cobra Mission to me.

From time to time, the jingoism and the racism is unexpectedly interrupted by sudden moments of relativism that show (some of) our heroes' enemies as actual human beings with actual human motivations, moments in which the film also seems on the cusp of developing a consciousness of said heroes being utter jerks. If the film had developed these elements further, Cobra Mission could have become something quite special, but the film's admittance of complexity never goes all the way, and so the next piece of right wing whining is never far away, while the action is never good (or silly) enough to make up for it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,action,war,christopher connelly,manfred lehmann,john steiner,oliver tobias,fabrizio de angelis,in short

Music Monday: From My Album Of The Year Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music monday,music,allo darlin

Tahkhana (1986)

aka The Dungeon

The evil sorcerous son of a Thakur uses the opportunity of his father's death to make a play for the family treasure that is secreted away in a nearby dungeon and can only be found with the help of a map pendant that has been broken in two pieces - at least I think that's part of his plan. He'd also very much like to revive the evil godhood (made of clay and blood, we are informed) he is worshipping through the blood sacrifice of innocents.To keep things simple, he kills his brother and kidnaps the man's daughters to sacrifice them right in the treasure dungeon. Unfortunately for our evil sorcerer, his brother's best friend Mansingh and his men arrive just in the nick of time to ruin his plans and rescue at least one of the children, Aarti (soon to grow up to be Aarti Gupta). Sapna (growing up to be Sheetal), the other sister, is lost in the jungle somewhere together with half of the pendant. Mansingh decides that it's appropriate to entomb his sorcerous enemy in the dungeon alive together with his godhood and take Aarti in as an adoptive daughter.

Twenty years later, Aarti knows nothing of her tragic family history or her lost sister. She's in love with Mansingh's son Vijay (played by some bland guy parts of the internet - I blame the IMDB as the source of this and more errors - insist is Puneet Issar, but who definitely isn't). But the happy cavorting of the young lovers has to come to an end. Mansingh is lying on his deathbed, and before he dies, the old man tells the story of Aarti's inheritance to her, Vijay and his nephews Anand (who definitely is played by Puneet Issar) and Shakaal (Imtiaz Khan), asking them to find Sapna and help Aarti take possession of her birthright. Mansingh also hands Aarti the other half of the treasure map. The question now is just how to find Sapna.

The answer to that question is less pleasant than the usual Bollywood story of lost siblings would suggest. By chance, Sapna stumbles into the hotel Shakaal owns looking for work. Shakaal (and who would have thought that of a character in a Bollywood movie named Shakaal and played by Imtiaz Khan!?) is a proper sleazebag, and so offers Sapna a job as a dancer, but appears soon enough at her doorstep to take what he probably sees as the proper reward for his help.

Sapna isn't the kind of girl willing to prostitute herself though. During Shakaal's following attempt at raping her, Sapna is killed. It is only then that her killer sees her pendant and realizes whom he has murdered; not that he's sorry about anything he's done, mind you. Shakaal takes the pendant for himself and makes a copy to hand to his family once a proper opportunity arises, which will be soon.

Once the untrustworthy treasure map is in their hands, Aarti, Vijay and co decide to move into the Singh family's old mansion near the treasure-holding dungeon. Unfortunately, they're taking Shakaal with them, too.

But the bad guy's attempts at gaining the treasure (and trying to rape every woman he lays his eyes on) won't be the worst of our heroes' problems. The old evil sorcerer has revived his Godhood through his own death, and the unpleasant monster is now wandering the dungeon, killing whomever he can lay his claws on.

Fortunately, the local country strongman and all around swell guy He-ManHeera (Hemant Birje) is around to help put villains and monsters in their place. Or rather pillar-ly looking stone "stakes" into their hearts.

Outward appearances and a longwinded plot synopsis notwithstanding, Tahkhana is one of the less complicated films from the Indian sub-continent I've seen. Unlike many other of the horror movies made by the Ramsay Brothers, Tahkhana doesn't rejoice in the complex net of plots and subplots that make up your typical masala film. At times, the film seems consciously constructed not to be like a masala, what with it killing one of the long lost sisters off very early on. That's just not how a lost sibling plot is done in India.

I wouldn't call the film's plotting tight or lean, exactly, but it is a very simple story told in a comparatively linear way, which also explains the film's rather short (for commercial Indian cinema) running time of less than two hours. Given these time constraints, it's no wonder that there's not much room for comedic relief (although what is there is still painful enough, thankyouverymuch) or minor plots which aren't closely interleaved with the main plot. There's even only room for two musical numbers, both of which are musically forgettable and mildly sleazy - just as you'd expect of the Ramsays.

What there is room for is a number of quite entertaining action and horror set pieces, the former obviously dominated by Hemant Birje and Puneet Issar, who both also seem just too happy to show off as much chest and ass as they can get away with. The Ramsays' films are nothing if not generous with both beefcake and cheesecake; a quality I've always found highly admirable. Apart from that, Birje also is an expert in screen strongman fighting and would have played Hercules more than once if he'd gone to Italy. He's even throwing a few pillars.

The horror scenes aren't quite as great as they are in other Ramsay films. The Hammer worship filtered through an Indian style isn't as convincing as I'm used from the brothers' output, the lighting isn't as freakish, and the film's monster just isn't one of the brothers' best. The big lumbering guy is physically impressive enough, even though his combination of monk's robe, dark oatmeal face and shaggy gorilla costume is more silly than frightening, but he's just a grunting monster without any dimensions of spiritual or human evil, which seems to be a step back for a Ramsay movie.

Given the nature of Tahkhana's Big Bad, the whole film feels more like an adventure movie with an added monster than the sort of silly yet loveable and enthusiastic scream fest I by now expect of a Ramsay film. That's not to say Tahkhana is a bad film; it is entertaining enough. I just don't think it shows the Ramsay Brothers at their best.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: indian movies,bollywood,horror,adventure,reviews,hemant birje,aarti gupta,puneet issar,imtiaz khan,shyam ramsay,tulsi ramsay,ramsay brothers

Three Films Make A Post: It Will Scare You To Pieces!

Red: Werewolf Hunter (2010): Syfy Channel original movies are one of the banes of human existence. Somehow, these films always manage to take a perfectly good b-movie idea (in this case: Little Red Riding Hood's descendants are a clan of werewolf hunters) and make a disappointingly bland movie out of them. If it's not the miserably bad CGI and just plain uninventive monster design, it's scripts that go through the motions of being an exciting ride instead of actually providing one, and direction so devoid of personality or style you couldn't get away with in most TV shows anymore, that kill films of this type. Or - as in Red - all those things at once.

Most of the actors on screen seem as bored by the film as I was. The only exceptions are Felicia Day and Stephen McHattie - both are game, but find no-one who wants to play.

Twice Dead (1988): Ostensibly a horror film about a haunted house, Twice Dead really wants to be a film about two annoying teenagers fighting a gang of late 80s Hollywood "punks". Director Dragin doesn't even seem to be trying to make the "punks" or the ghosts even the least bit menacing, creating a film that feels tired and pointless. The mandatory 80s cheese is not ripe enough to make up for Twice Dead's lack of anything else.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010): It would probably have needed a better world or a lot of bad compromises to let Edgar Wright's intensely nerdy and geeky and clever comic adaptation become the blockbuster Universal seems to have wanted it to be.

On the other hand, what do I care about Universal's bottom line when the film as it is is just about perfect, beginning with its pixelated Universal logo? That logo is just the beginning of the movie's show of just the right amount (which is to say a lot) of love for the formative pop-cultural influences of many people my age or a few years younger.

But beside this love, Wright's film also has a clear look for the things that just might be wrong with its pop-cultural loves and consequently its characters, and so never steps into the trap of using its cleverness only for the sake of being clever. The hyperactive excitement bolsters a (at its core old-fashioned) story about growing out of being a jerk. Just like it was in the comics.

In any case, the film's fidelity to its sources also explains why a certain type of elderly movie critic just didn't get Scott Pilgrim, and also explains to me why so little of what these guys have to say about movies interests me anymore; they are just so goddamn old that their little souls have shrivelled to the point of having no ability to recognize joy when they encounter it in a movie anymore.

Looks like I'll have to change my "I generally dislike comedy" shtick, too, or I'll at least have to amend it with "unlike Edgar Wright's got something to do with it".

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,comedy,in short,felicia day,stephen mchattie,michael cera,mary elizabeth winstead,edgar wright

On WTF: Wardat (1981)

What's better than Eurospy movies? Obviously Bollyspy movies with Mithun Chakraborty.

Wardat is quite a recommended example of its particular sub-genre, but if you want to know exactly how much insanity it contains, and how it applies it, you'll be better off reading my write-up on WTF-Film. I promise there will be rejoicing.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: indian movies,bollywood,spies,adventure,mithun chakraborty,kajal kiran,iftekhar,shakti kapoor,jagdeep,ravikant nagaich,reviews,other places

In short: Damned By Dawn (2009)

Claire (Renee Willner) and her boyfriend Paul (Danny Alder) are visiting Claire's family way out in the middle of nowhere. Claire is concerned about the health of her grandmother (Dawn Klingberg), and mystified by a package containing an urn the old lady sent her. She's also very conscious that this might be the time to say goodbye to the old lady. The very first night in the family home is disturbed when peculiar screams coming from outside wake up everyone. While the menfolk are going out to look who or what is causing the ruckus, the women of the family stay in the house alone, and are soon visited by the cause of the noise: it's the family banshee (Bridget Neval) coming to see grandma off!

After a game of peek-a-boo, Claire gets so frightened by the appearance of the supernatural creature that she pushes the poor dear off a balcony. The banshee is highly displeased and awakens a handful of undead whose bodies just happen to be buried right by the house. These dead people have no sense of humour at all, and start killing off the family members one after the other. Possibly even worse is the fact that these dead come back too and proceed to make the survivors' night even more miserable.

The Australian Damned By Dawn is another case of a movie that is just not bad enough to annoy or to delight, yet also not good enough to be all that satisfying. First time writer/director Brett Anstey's film suffers from some of the typical flaws low budget movies have to fight with. The special effects are just plain bad. Worse, they even manage to combine two very different types of badness - simply atrocious sub-SciFi-Channel-level CGI for the more ghostly dead and the make-up of The Crow for the Evil Dead style talkative freshly dead; I think the combination of the two makes the effects feel even worse than they would if Anstey had gone with only one type of crap effects work.

The writing shows a complete inability to build up tension properly. Anstey's already running off to the directly horrific when he should still be easing his viewers into the situation and acquainting them with his characters; consequently, I never found any reason to care about the situation or the characters, even though the acting is better than could be expected. It sure doesn't help Damned by Dawn's case that "pushing a banshee off a balcony" is one of the silliest reasons for an infestation of the undead I've ever encountered in a film not made in Italy.

Damned by Dawn isn't a complete waste of time, though. The last act sees the movie find its feet a little, and while it is still not impressive, it coheres a bit better and even contains some scenes that are perfectly serviceable. For one, there's a stupidly fun gross-out moment in the Italian style concerning a dead guy, puking, bugs and guts that won't win any friends of tastefulness in horror over, but is well worth a smile. For two, Claire's final girl moments are working well enough they could be called mildly exciting, if not for the much too close look the film provides of its The Crow undead at this point.

Sure, that's not much, but it's still more than a lot of films I could name manage to achieve, and so I at least don't actively regret watching Damned By Dawn (and yes, of course I wrote "Dead by Dawn" repeatedly).

 

Technorati-Markierungen: australian movies,horror,in short,brett anstey,renee willner

Shaapit (2010)

The young lovers Kaaya (Shweta Agarwal) and Aman (Aditya Narayan) are spontaneously eloping. Their ride back home is rudely interrupted by an accident caused by a ghost standing in the road.

Nobody is hurt, but when Kaaya's parents arrive at the hospital and see their daughter's engagement ring, they aren't happy at all. Their problem is not the secrecy of the elopement, though. It's just that they have until now avoided to inform their daughter  of…the family curse. About three-hundred years ago, the family's noble ancestors got into a bit of trouble. One of them, the brother of the Maharajah Rajnisingh, drove a woman soon to be married to someone else into suicide through his unwanted advances. The poor girl's father was a powerful magician, and so cursed the present and all coming generations of the Maharajah's family. Never shall one of their daughters marry and live. (In truth, the back story is more complicated than that and also includes an evil woman whose fault everything is, black-clad assassins and a musical number with fire-swallowers, but the characters will learn about it only much later.)

After having explained this, Kaaya's parents force the young lovers to part. Just living together instead of marrying seems to be an idea so alien to everyone concerned it's not even mentioned; I think it would have spared everyone a lot of trouble. After some intense sulking, Aman makes the solemn vow to find a way to break the curse, so that Kaaya and he can be together.

As luck will have it, Aman's best friend Shubh (Shubh Joshi) thinks he knows someone who can help - the parapsychologist Professor Pashupathi (Rahul Dev). While Pashupathi swallows Aman's bizarre story without blinking he is not willing to help the young man out, because he thinks that Aman's just having a fit of romantic self-aggrandizement he'll get over soon enough.

Aman is dead serious about the whole undying love business, though, and decides to prove his commitment to the Professor by stealing a haunted book from a library. Surprisingly enough, he manages this feat, if only by laying waste to the whole poor library (that barbarian). Obviously, nobody in this movie cares about things like the sanctity of libraries, so the Professor is now quite convinced of Aman's will and ability to see things through and agrees to help him. Pashupathi thinks that the only way to break the curse lying on Kaaya is to lay the ghost to rest who seems to be its focus and weapon. It's just like in a Supernatural episode, just with less classic rock and no shotguns loaded with rock salt. Remember when there were still ghosts in Supernatural? But I digress.

At first Aman, Shubh and the Professor are trying to keep Kaaya completely out of the loop of their investigations (for her own safety, etc, blah blah), but after Aman does something very stupid, they have to take her with them. Don't worry, potential reader afraid of women doing anything worthwhile in movies, Kaaya will soon enough land in a coma where she will spend the rest of the movie.

Anyway, their investigation leads the intrepid quartet (and later trio) first into a burnt-out cinema to get guidance from random ghosts and a tennis ball (a plan that is so stupid it works perfectly), then into an old prison, and then into the palace of Rajnisingh himself, until they will finally have enough information to know what to do about the ghost and the curse.

Genre movie specialist Vikram Bhatt's Shaapit (which seems to translate into "The Cursed") is a bit of a problematic one. It's a film front-loaded with flaws, but it's also a film that can be a whole lot of fun when watched with tolerance for these flaws and an appreciation for its sillier and more imaginative aspects.

First and foremost among Shaapit's flaws is its lead Aditya Narayan, who seems to come from a background as a playback singer rather than that of an actor. Now, the history of cinema is full of singers who turn out to be much better actors than anyone would have expected; unfortunately, it is just as full of singers who couldn't act their way out of their own toilet. Narayan certainly belongs to the latter class. He's pretty, in a fifteen year old (and yes, I know he's twenty-three) boygroup member sort of way, but he has neither the charisma nor the acting ability to be the character the audience has to spend most of its time with. In fact, he only has one facial expression, a rather puzzled look somewhere between "where am I?" and "what's my line?", and really nothing to recommend him as an actor.

One the plus side everyone with less screen time is perfectly serviceable.

Which is much more than one can say for the film's (mostly CGI) special effects. Those are perfectly dreadful, lacking physicality as well as any - in my book more important - sense for the design of frightening or at least threatening monsters. I suspect the ghosts wouldn't even be frightening enough for the next Scooby Doo live action movie.

There's also some terrible green screen work on display, but the film's combination of bad green screen and detailed-yet-fake sets is actually one of its good points. In contrast to the ghost(s), these things ooze charm and a sense of excitement; that they aren't "good" on a technical level seems beside the point, especially when talking about a commercial Hindi film.

So, what's good about Shaapit? Well, it really depends on what you are looking for in a film. As a horror film - that is a film out to scare, frighten, disturb or disquiet - Shaapit is a complete loss. As long as Bhatt pretends that his film is a horror film in that sense of the word - so for about its first forty minutes - it's not very good at all. The only "horror"s on display are the usual rote shocks on the level of a carnival's haunted house. If you're afraid of a film basically shouting "boo!" every few minutes, you'll be pretty afraid, though. Even the situations that should be traumatic for characters and audience don't feel that way. Bhatt also doesn't try to explore the pretty dreadful emotional situation Aman and Kaaya find themselves in any way you'd connect with "horror". Instead, he goes for a very Indian feeling version of melodrama, which would probably work just as well as the more "horror" way to go about it if there was only someone with a personality in the male lead.

Fortunately, Shaapit soon changes its track and transforms into something sitting between an actually supernatural Scooby Doo episode and an Indiana Jones knock-off, an investigative adventure movie with ghosts and Undying Love melodrama lurking in the background. And suddenly, many of the film's problem aren't all that bad anymore - the ghost that never was all that frightening now becomes more of a physical obstacle; there's room for a big flashback scene with a bit of swordfighting and the film's only musical number that has dancing (and is any good).

The film also allows itself to get silly, with a scene of time-travel based on the traditions of the Inga (no, I don't know either), which seem to be holding one's breath while submerged in a bath tub, a little séance - complete with digital headshaking, obviously, and a grand finale that is dominated by an extensive game of catch the urn. And while Bhatt doesn't manage much trying to be frightening, he turns out to be quite good at silliness and excitement, and while that's not what Shaapit initially promised, it's a lot of fun.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: indian movies,bollywood,horror,adventure,reviews,vikram bhatt,aditya narayan,shweta agarwal,rahul dev

In short: Zeiram (1991)

Intergalactic bounty hunter Iria (Yuko Moriyama) and her partner, the computer Bob (Masakazu Handa), come to Earth to capture a dangerous creature named Zeiram (Mizuho Yoshida) who has escaped from some sort of imprisonment. Don't ask me, the film doesn't tell anything more.

To not endanger any primitives, the bounty hunters plan to fight their prey inside of a dimensional bubble that looks like an exact copy of the Japanese town Zeiram will appear in, just without any inhabitants. Unfortunately, things don't work out completely as Iria and Bob had planned, and two bumbling electricians (Kunihiro Ida and Yukijiro Hotaru) cross over into the alternate dimension with them. Still, after some fighting, Iria manages to capture Zeiram.

Alas, various mishaps - and the fact that Zeiram is quite a bit more resilient to her ways of freezing him than Iria had expected - soon find the space monster up and running again and Iria stranded on our side of the dimensional barrier. Will the supposed audience identification characters survive until she'll be able to return?

Zeiram is one of the directorial live action works of Keita Amemiya whose work as a character and monster designer (especially in the tokusatsu realm) make him beloved by millions. At least I imagine him surrounded by a host of admiring young women and men like the character designer version of the young Rolling Stones. As usual with Amemiya's films, Zeiram's small number of locations and actors hints at a budget probably lower than most people's electricity bill, but most other typical problem fields of films just scraping by don't apply here.

The acting - a classical breaking point in low budget films featuring men in rubber costumes (even Japanese ones) - turns out to be perfectly decent for a plot and characters as slight as what the film needs. Nobody will win any acting awards for her performances here, but Moriyama knows how to handle herself in the action sequences, Ida is as bland and annoying as a white wall, and Hotaru just annoying, so everything's just as it should be.

One could certainly complain about the slightness of Zeiram's script. It is, however, the exactly right sort of slight for what the film is going for - being a decently paced, fun piece of fluff about people fighting a guy in a rubber monster suit (that later goes all stop-motion on our asses) and its rubber-monster-suited friends. And it really succeeds at that, mostly by avoiding all the ballast attempts at doing deeper meaning and character would be in a film that only really ever wants to show off some cool monsters and a pretty woman fighting them.

Another reason why Zeiram is as fun as it is to watch is Amemiya's very charming monster design, crossing a bit of classical slimy monster with the silhouette of a wandering chambara film swordsman and a wee little No mask head on a tentacle to excellent effect. There's also a slight family resemblance with the Predator in Zeiram's face. Amemiya also mixes things up a bit later on by cribbing from the Terminator, which provides a nice change and can therefore only be a good thing.

I know, it's only a film about a girl in a re-worked stormtrooper costume and two bumbling idiots fighting monsters, but I like it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,sf,in short,keita amemiya,yuko moriyama

Music Monday: I Blame New Vegas Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music monday,music,marty robbins

In short: The Stranger Returns (1967)

aka A Man, A Horse, A Gun

Original title: Un uomo, un cavallo, una pistola

The Stranger (Tony Anthony) rides into another spot of bother. This time around, he's trying to steal a coach full of gold that a group of bandits captained by a sadist known as En Plein (Dan Vadis) has set their own eyes on.

As always, the Stranger has a plan to steal the stolen gold that might look good in his mind but quickly collapses under the stress of reality, leading to his capture and torture. Of course, our dubious hero escapes and the usual hither and yon around the gold ensues; until it all ends in a grand finale in which the Stranger picks off his enemies one by one but loses his ultimate prize.

Unlike the first Stranger movie I talked about yesterday, this second adventure of Tony Anthony's weird-faced wearer of blankets is already half on the way to the bizarre comedy stylings of the later entries in the series. Some of the film's humour is even funny.

Unfortunately, the silly parts collide with the usual Spaghetti Western scenes of sadism that are part of the film to prove the bad guys are even worse than the anti-hero in rather unpleasant ways, leaving behind an aftertaste of unnecessary and ill-considered mean-spiritedness. That this mean-spiritedness is especially directed at women might be par for the course for the Spaghetti Western genre, but shoe-horning scenes of female suffering between comedic scenes really pushes the film towards outright misogyny.

As it is, The Stranger Returns is not light-hearted enough to exclude the nasty parts, and not interested enough in the unpleasant depths of humanity to make effective use of its lighter moments as a good contrast. It just hangs somewhere in the middle.

Luigi Vanzi's direction is less interesting than his work on the first film. It's all very routine, watchable Spaghetti Western by numbers, without even a single scene as tense or spirited as the nearly dialogue-less middle part of the first film.

The Stranger Returns certainly is an alright Spaghetti Western (aka "I've seen worse"), but its transitional position just before the Stranger series becomes really silly and imaginative makes it a less successful film than I'd hoped for.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,tony anthony,in short,spaghetti western,luigi vanzi,dan vadis

A Stranger in Town (1967)

aka A Dollar Between The Death

Original title: Un Dollaro Tra I Denti

A nameless stranger (Tony Anthony) rides into a small, very dusty town in Mexico. The gunman arrives just in time to witness the bandit leader Aguilar (Frank Wolff) and his men slaughter a group of soldiers. The bandit has gotten wind that the army troop he's just gotten rid of has been ordered into town to accept a princely sum in gold the USA are borrowing to the bedraggled Mexican government.

Now Aguilar and his men only have to put on the uniforms of the dead and can accept the money in their stead. And if need be, the nice new Gatling gun the bandits just scored as a bonus to their new clothes will certainly come in handy.

The Stranger - who has changed from Clint Eastwood's old musty poncho into a cavalry uniform - makes himself known now. After a bit of threatening staring and other forms of blustering, the nameless one manages to convince Aguilar that he's the ideal man to help the bandit get the gold from their US counterparts without a fight. He knows the officer of the cavalry unit guarding it, after all (which is a lie) and so will be able to vouch for Aguilar's authenticity to him. Aguilar agrees. If need be, he can still attack the Americans. The plan works out well, surprisingly enough. The North Americans know that something's not right, but are in no position to fight, and so the gold lands in the hands of the bandits and their new friend.

The problems begin afterwards, when the Stranger decides that he'll be wanting half of the gold for his services. Aguilar disapproves and counter-offers one gold coin, a little roughing up and potential death. The Stranger doesn't like that offer too well, and just barely manages to escape with his life and the gold.

This starts the expected cat and mouse game between our hero and the bandits, with the gold changing owners a few times and the Stranger getting tortured for a time, until the decisive shootout leaves only one man standing.

Unlike the later adventures of the stranger I have seen, this first movie about the character isn't a whacky to completely insane comedic yet still violent take on the Spaghetti Western, and Tony Anthony isn't mugging like a loon. Instead, the film is closely shaped after the first film of Leone's dollar trilogy and Sergio Corbucci's Django. Anthony's character is a virtual carbon copy of A Fistful of Dollar's Joe, just played by a much less charismatic actor then Eastwood. Anthony's later turn to scenery chewing now makes much more sense to me. It's overcompensation for his excessive woodenness here.

Trying to mould one's film after two excellent models like director Luigi Vanzi does here isn't such a bad thing, at least when it is done with the appropriate style. At first, Vanzi plays it a little too safe, trusting in Wolff's proven abilities at playing a charismatic bad guy, Anthony's sleepy lids and reams of mediocre dialogue to carry his film, while not doing anything beyond routine pointing and shooting  himself, leaving a viewer acquainted with as many Spaghetti Western as I am by now dreading a competent yet unexceptional final hour with the movie.

Then, very suddenly, Vanzi changes his tune. The dialogue dies down nearly completely and is replaced by gazes and small gestures. A film of people talking (and very seldom shooting) at each other turns into one of people looking, and watching and very regularly shooting each other; the camera lingers and glides and waits; actual tension grows. Although the film might still use the basic structures taken from Leone and Corbucci, it now develops a breath and a rhythm of its own. If a film is like a dance - and this one surely is - Vanzi has gone from stumbling over his own feet to an unexpected display of unassuming virtuosity.

A Stranger In Town's plot stays rather thin, of course. There are no surprises, no unexpected or expected political or moral messages waiting for the viewer. There's just violence with an undercurrent of suppressed sexuality, and the threat of more nastiness than the film is actually going to deliver. A Stranger In Town is not a film out to explore any new depths or to find out some hidden truths about the concept of the frontier. Rather, it's a cheaply done cash-in on the Spaghetti Western wave whose director somehow stumbles into making a cheaply done cash-in that at times works so well it can delight and surprise.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,tony anthony,luigi vanzi,frank wolff,reviews

In short: Cazador De Demonios (1983)

aka Demon Hunter

A small town in Mexico. The shaman Tobias (Jose Tablas) is clubbed to death by a farmer believing the old man to be responsible for the stillbirth of his child. He might even be right about that, what with the shaman slaughtering a chicken over the wife's belly during delivery. Be that as it may, death doesn't stick with Tobias, and so he returns as a floating image by day and a murderous nahual/sasquatch/furry/demon/whatever by night. Tobias starts off with killing his murderer, but the dead guy isn't just satisfied with one single killing and so continues a random killing spree throughout the next nights that culminates in the kidnapping of the town doctor's wife Rosa (Roxana Chavez) for procreation usage. Unpleasantly, he's not as romantic as the Creature from the Black Lagoon when going about things.

The town's sheriff (Roberto Montiel), priest (Tito Junco) and doctor (Rafael Sanchez Navarro) will have to join their forces of authority to conquer the creature that is threatening their peaceful (well, if you can call a place where everyone's a violent jerk even without a supernatural threat going around peaceful) town and/or marriage. After the sceptical sheriff has stopped hunting for a bear with human saliva, that is.

Cazador de Demonios is one of those sad little films that could be contenders either in the league of cheap-but-good little films transcending their poor circumstances through tightness or cleverness, or in that of so-bad-they're-fun ones, but doesn't manage to get any further than to be sort of boring, kind of alright.

The film's budget doesn't seem as low as that of other Mexican horror films of its period, so there's a surprising amount of varied outside locations to see, no filler needs to find its way from the library on screen, and the actors are all perfectly competent. Unfortunately, the film's director and writer Gilberto de Anda doesn't know what to do with any of it, and so decides to very slowly set up a bunch of thematic threads (the typical duel between reason and faith, the fact that everyone in town seems rather…well…evil, the shaman demon's need to live out his physical cravings) that never build up to any kind of actual pay-off and instead just seem to hang in the film's air for no good reason whatsoever.

For a film about a murdering and raping creature, Cazador also turns out to be just very unexciting, which just might be caused by the film's complete lack of dramatic tension and the absence of ideas about how to sensibly fill its running time. You could probably cut out twenty minutes and would not lose anything important, except some of that feeling of tedium.

There's some skulking around in the dark, some screaming, some body parts, people wandering around and talking, a torch bearing mob appears at random, and in the end the movie's monster dies in one of the limpest final confrontations I have ever seen.

It's all so joyless and perfunctory I don't even have it in my to make fun of the hairy guy (understandably barely on screen) who is supposed to be the monster.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,horror,in short,gilberto de anda

In short: Santo Contra Los Cazadores De Cabezas (1971)

An enemy of heroic Santo (El Santo) talks the chief of a large tribe of Amazon Indians into declaring a war of vengeance on the White Man (the heads of certain people will probably explode when they realize that the film's white men are all from Mexico). But before the chief can begin his war, he'll first have to sacrifice a very special victim to his gods. The chosen one is Mariana de Grijalva (Nadia Milton), a descendant of the conquistadores who nearly extinguished the Incans a few centuries ago. She's easily kidnapped by an Indian sleeper agent who has been working for her father for a decade now, and slowly, very slowly transported to the place of her sacrifice.

Fortunately for Mariana, her dad's best friend knows the glorious El Santo's secret radio frequency, and so the wrestler, Mariana's dad, her boyfriend and various redshirts and traitors are soon on their own way traipsing through the jungle (technically, it's probably supposed to be the Rain Forest - or not, but obviously, it isn't) to rescue her. Various dangers are to be conquered and a lot of walking ensues.

This is probably the most walking-oriented of all Santo films, keeping very much in the tradition of jungle "adventure" movies throughout the history of insomnia cures by being terminally boring. Director veteran Rene Cardona (senior!) really puts out all the stops when it comes to the walking. It makes up about sixty percent of the movie (boy, do I wish I were exaggerating). Even the traditional scenes of people pointing at library footage of animals are mostly replaced by it.

And because that's not enough walking, Cardona has additionally developed a very clever plan to get even more mileage out of it: the unlucky viewer is treated with scenes of both parties - the bad guys and the good guys - walking separately through the same patches of jungle. So the film goes something like this: first, the bad guys walk and walk and walk, then they exposit about the dangers that will threaten their pursuers. Then there's the walking, walking and walking of Santo's band through the same area, followed by about thirty seconds of Santo conquering the respective danger, and Santo and friends talking for three minutes about said danger. Then it's back to the walking bad guys again and so on, and so forth.

It would all be a bit easier to take if the film would at least spend a little time on the actual action, but Cardona films the scenes of Santo fighting a drugged caiman, a helpless leopard, invisible piranhas, invisible vampire bats, invisible electric eels and Indian ambushes in such a short and blandly perfunctory manner that it's impossible to derive any fun from them. It's as if the director is absolutely convinced that all this walking and talking about action that isn't happening is much more entertaining than anything else he could show us. I can't even excuse it with the usual lack of funds, because really - would Santo punching a group of mooks for five minutes instead of five seconds be that more expensive than Santo walking?

After fifty minutes, the film became so painful I even began to wish for some of the musical numbers and stage fight repeats most lucha movies use to fill up their running time. Hell, even Blue Demon reading from his books about UFOs would have been a delightful diversion from THAT DAMNABLE WALKING.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,el santo,rene cardona,in short,lucha,adventure

Shadow of the Cat (1961)

With the help of the two servants of the house, Walter Venable (Andre Morell) murders his wife Ella (Catherine Lacey) after thirty years of trying to get at her money in vain. It seems marriage impostors in the olden times were much more patient than today. The killers dig a (quite shallow) grave for their victim in the nearby woods, and report her as missing in the conviction that Ella's reputation as being a bit of an eccentric will be enough to not make the police look into her disappearance too closely.

Walter and his cronies haven't counted on various complicating factors, though. First and foremost, Ella's death has not gone without a witness. Her cat Tabitha has seen everything and his highly displeased by losing her favourite food-bearing monkey. The harmless looking cat begins a reign of terror by doing lots of spring-loaded catting and throwing evil glances at the trio. It's also not too good for anyone's peace of mind that Walter might have been able to press his wife into writing a new testament that makes him the sole heir of her fortune, but her original will that gives everything to her favourite niece Beth (Barbara Shelley) is still hidden away somewhere in the house. For some reason, Walter invites Beth into the house as soon as Ella has "disappeared". Despite stealing her inheritance, the old bastard seems to be rather fond of her.

Neither the local police, nor Michael Latimer (Conrad Phillips), the young owner of the local newspaper who was quite friendly with Ella, are convinced by the supposed circumstances of the old lady's disappearance either. Latimer can't prove anything, but that surely isn't going to stop him from snooping around, especially after he and Beth begin to look at each other with the proper romantic lead expressions on their faces.

Soon the cat terror is getting to Walter so much that he's suffering a minor heart attack and decides to send for some of his low-life, untrustworthy relatives to help him find the will and - most importantly - kill the cat. Alas, this is going to escalate the cat terror into outright murder, and also brings further people without scruples but with a desperate need for money into the house.

Shadow of the Cat was produced by "B.H.P. Productions", which was a label Hammer Films used for co-productions in which they provided other firms with studio room and (as in this case) creative talent. In fact, some of the film's sets were earlier seen in one of the Frankenstein films, if in colour and not in black and white; director John Gilling was of course part of Hammer's talent bullpen, as were actors Shelley and Morell.

Mostly, Shadow does play out like a lower budget version of a mainstream Hammer film, with sensibilities a bit more old-fashioned than those shown by productions made under the mother label at the time, but still feeling very Hammer nonetheless.

The old-fashionedness is probably the Shadow's most problematic aspect. The film's script might just as well have been written in 1936 as in 1961, with not much of it hinting at a film with gothic inclinations made after Corman's House of Usher.

However, that doesn't necessarily make Shadow of the Cat a bad film. What it does is make it a film trading in any sort of daring for competence and professionalism and the decided refusal to actually be of its own time. Fortunately for the film and its viewers, the professionalism of everyone involved is large enough to provide for a slightly creaky, yet very entertaining little movie if one is not going in expecting anything original.

Gilling's direction is at least decent; from time to time, his use of shadows hints at the influence of Universal Horror, and it is in these moments the film's balancing act between thriller and outright horror film does pay off.

George Baxt's script does have its problems, obviously. I found it a little difficult to actually buy into the cute little tabby cat at a ruthless mastermind provoking people into their deaths. It's also not necessarily easy to buy into all of the film's villains going into hysterics about the animal. Sure, a guilty conscience could play its part in a case like this, but accepting half a dozen people in mortal fear of a tabby seems a bit more work than my suspension of disbelief should be doing.

On the more positive side, Baxt provides most of the villains (except for the servants, whose exemption from being actual persons is - I suspect - based on the mortal sin of being members of the working class) with at least a second dimension. I quite appreciated the script giving most everyone a motive for their being so greedy as to go to murder (although I would have loved an explanation why Walter waited thirty years to go through with his murder plans). It's also quite nice to see a semi-Gothic movie heroine with a bit of backbone like Shelley's Beth. I wouldn't exactly say she has agency, but at least she's not the fainting kind who is only there to be menaced and kidnapped.

Some of my objections might make the film sound worse than it actually is, I'm afraid. When you're able to pretend it was made in 1936 and not 1961, you'll probably find Shadow of the Cat to be an entertaining little film. At least it was to me.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,horror,thriller,reviews,john gilling,barbara shelley,andre morell,gothic

In short: The Tomb (2009)

Rich Professor of literature Jonathan (Wes Bentley) falls under the spell (and you can take that phrase literally) of the student of metaphysics and sometimes killer (for magickal science!) and stealer of souls Ligeia Romanova (Sofya Skya). A bit of flirting, some absinth and a wee bit of mind-(penis-?)control magic later, Jonathan has ruined his engagement with musical singer Rowena (Kaitlin Doubleday), and marries Ligeia instead.

Then, Ligeia makes him buy back her family home somewhere in Russia so she can continue her experiments in immortality through soul-stealing in peace. Ligeia has a very personal interest in these experiments too, because she is is suffering from a strange illness that should see her dead shortly if she doesn't find a cure against death soon. Except for her illness, Jonathan knows nothing about his wife's plans (which makes me ask myself why she didn't just magick him into writing her a check), and will be quite shocked when he finds out.

And find out he will, because Ligeia's grip on his mind is beginning to slip the more ill she gets.

The Tomb (which was initially - and much more fittingly - titled Ligeia after the Poe story it is based on) must be the goth-est horror film I've seen in a long time. Not surprisingly, as that is too often the mainstream interpretation of the goth way, it suffers from a total lack of self-consciousness and humour, which would be less of a problem if the film's ideas of decadence weren't so darn square. Decadence: it's Russian women who like to dress in black, drinking absinth and going into movie goth clubs, at least if you ask scriptwriter John Shirley, whose ideas of evil have become quite trite since the last novel of his I read. This vibe of harmlessness surrounding the film's concept of evil grates with its determination to take it capital-e EVIL seriously, leading to a terrible case of po-facedness that also finds its way into the at times leaden dialogue.

I can't believe I'm arguing for more (self-)irony in a movie, but the film would need either that or a firmer grip on the emotional abysses it pretends to feature yet actually goes out of its way to avoid; revelling in the dark side of human nature only works when that "dark side" actually feels dark, and not, like here, just like a bourgeois imitation of darkness that lends itself only too well to be giggled at.

From time to time, director Michael Staininger manages to stage an effective scene or two in an old-fashioned Gothic horror mood, but for every good if clichéd scene there are two that seem to be directed by a robot who knows all the right techniques yet doesn't have a clue how to apply them in the right way. Turns out making a Gothic horror movie is hard.

The acting's all over the place: Bentley and Doubleday are just kind of there, while Skya chews the scenery quite admirably. If you like to see male actors who have seen better days look embarrassed, don't miss out on the appearances by Michael Madsen (who randomly starts to ACT!) and Eric Roberts (who is a nice Russian caretaker - no, really).

At least everyone connected with the film seems to be trying, which is more than I'd say about most torture porn films of the last few years. There seems to be at least the potential of Staininger one day making a film that comes together on screen.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,in short,michael staininger,wes bentley,sofya skya,michael madsen,eric roberts

Music Monday: Halloween Leftovers Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music monday,music,misfits

Curse of the Undead (1959)

aka Mark of the West

There's trouble in a small town in the Old West. The youngest daughters of of the town's families are dying from a mysterious illness. The local physician, Doc Carter (John Hoyt), is at a loss to explain what's happening to the girls, but he won't have to suffer from the doubts that come with his lack of explanations long. While out at night, he dies mysteriously with only two little marks on his neck to show as a cause.

Despite the way of Carter's death speaking against it, the doctor's son Timmy (the atrocious Jimmy Murphy) and his daughter Dolores (Kathleen Crowley) are convinced that their neighbour Buffer (Bruce Gordon), the local would-be major bad guy who has been trying various shady methods to steal the family's ranch for some time now, is somehow responsible for their father's death.

Timmy, as stupid as he is badly acted, provokes Buffer into a gunfight and pays for it with his life. Pained by the doubled loss, Dolores decides to throw all her principles in the wind, attract the anger of family friend and suitor, the perversely upright Preacher Dan (Eric Flaming), and hire a gunman to kill Buffer for her. And a gunman very soon appears in front of the Carter Ranch's door. Drake Robey (Michael Pate), as he calls himself, has been hanging around in the shadows of the area for some time, but nobody in town who is still alive knows of that. The gunman is in fact the true killer of Doc Carter, his deed however has nothing whatsoever to do with ranches or water rights. He's only a vampire returning to a place he once called home, and the doctor was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although Robey is a cruel bastard and habitual liar, he's also something of a tragic vampire, not merely a wild animal hiding behind a human mask, and falls for Dolores, which pushes him into a fateful rivalry with the preacher. Preacher Dan soon finds out the truth about the nature and history of his enemy, but knowing it and making others - especially Dolores - believe that truth, or conquering his enemy, are quite different things.

The first half hour of Curse of the Undead is not very promising. Too many of the actors - worst of the worst being the guy playing Timmy and Bruce "Buffer" Gordon - are just not very good. The film tries its damndest to be as generic a Western as possible, neither showing any of the sophistication typical of one half of the better US Western movies of the 50s, nor of the heated intensity lying just below the surface of the other half. Like the machinations of Buffer, the early parts of the movie are just too bland and by the book to excite.

That state of affairs changes once the film introduces Robey, puts Buffer on the plot-enabling backburner and concentrates on the surprisingly complex relationship between Dolores, Dan and him. The interest in the nature of good and evil many 50s Western show appears here too, and what better character to explore that in than in a vampire? This is not to say that the film goes the full-on tragic vampire route with Robey. There's a certain amount of sympathy for him, but the film also shows the vampire as a conniving bastard who uses the tragic part of his fate (and a fate he is not at completely innocent of to boot) as an excuse to indulge in his own worst impulses (or as much as US 50s cinema allows - I'm quite surprised they got away with the child murders or the very obvious sexual aspects of his desire for Dolores). Michael Pate, whom I mostly know from heavy roles in other Westerns, projects just the right cross of physical presence (his Robey is a supremely physical vampire), sadness and unpleasant self-righteousness. Played this way, and supported by a variation of vampire lore that is low on the supernatural, Curse's vampire is supremely human, which seems like a nice change from the teen idol as well as the wild animal vampire modes that are en vogue right now. Though I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with those modes per se - creatures like the vampire need to change to stay relevant to different times and audiences.

Unfortunately, Robey's counterpart in Preacher Dan is much less interesting. Dan is upright and good in that inhuman, flawless amount that tends to make me as a viewer slightly nauseous, so it's quite difficult to see this self-righteous ass as the hero and speaker of eternal moral the film sets him up to be. Although he's emotionally perfect and always right, he's also quite crap as a vampire hunter. It sure doesn't help his case that I find his theological arguments abhorrent - according to his sort of religion, Robey deserved to become an immortal killer for committing suicide, notwithstanding the fact he committed that "sin" to make up for the actual evil act of murdering his own brother in cold blood. And let's just not even begin to talk about the fact that there would be a few young girls alive and happy in Dan's town if his rather thoughtless godhood hadn't turned Robey into a vampire. Your mileage with this sort of theology may of course vary.

None of this is Dan's actor Eric Fleming's fault. He's doing his best to keep his stick-in-the-arse character looking like an actual human being and even succeeds partially, which is about as much as could be asked of him.

Crowley does her best with what the script gives her, and really manages to sell her emotional wavering between Robey and Dan excellently. As someone born in the late 70s I would have wished for more agency for her - you know, like having a hand in solving her own problems, at least - but for the time the film was made in, and the state of the genres it belongs to at that time, her role in the film is at least not as bad as it could be.

Edward Dein's direction of his own and Mildred Dein's (sister or wife, I don't know) script is alright. He sure is neither Andre de Toth nor Jacques Tourneur, but he doesn't do anything wrong. In some scenes Dein's play with shadows is even rather impressive.

So, if you can get over a slow beginning, Curse of the Undead is certainly one of the better attempts at crossing the genres of western and horror.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,western,horror,reviews,edward dein,michael pate,eric fleming,kathleen crowley

In short: The Abomination (1986? 1988?)

Somewhere in rural Texas, mechanic Cody (Scott Davis) lives a quiet life with his mother. All could be well, if not for Mom's obsession with the TV show of preacher Brother Fogg (Rex Morton). Somehow, Fogg has the old lady convinced she's dying from a lung tumour. Mum doesn't seem to have bothered with going to a doctor to get a more grounded diagnosis, and now seldom leaves the house.

Surprisingly, Fogg isn't completely wrong about the woman's state. One evening, while Cody's out driving around with his girlfriend, Mom pukes up a tumour-esque lump of flesh, which she proceeds to throw in the garbage. I have to say, most tumours I have heard of don't pulsate like a beating heart and even fewer do what this particular specimen does when Cody is home, namely creeping into the man's mouth while he's sleeping the sleep of the innocent.

Soon, it turns out that the tumour is the biblical Abomination (which turns all things desolate, as Cody will inform us repeatedly). Abby, as the film unfortunately never calls the thing, puts a mind-control whammy on Cody, who then proceeds to kill various people and feed them to his new master. The Abomination soon grows large enough to move under Cody's bed, later to take over the kitchen cabinets, the toilet and the washing machine.

Obviously, Cody will have to get more food.

I had read rather nice things about Bret McCormick's The Abomination, so I went into this one with expectations of one of the more weird and moody pieces of gore movie making, but I was gravely disappointed by the film's lack of exactly these elements. Sure, the set-up is weird (but is going to be explained away in a very annoying piece of off-screen dialogue of the "it was all the hallucination of a violent maniac" type in the end), and the big monster in the kitchen cabinet effect - as well as everything else we get to see of the film's truly disgusting yet still rubbery looking monster - is extremely neat for a film of this type, but that's about all The Abomination has going for it.

The film's pace, even once Cody has finally begun his killing spree, is just completely wrong. There are too many long stretches of nothing at all happening, and when something is happening, it happens so damn slow that it is difficult to bring oneself to care about it. This particular problem is further aggravated by the fact that McCormick uses certain scenes up to three times. I'm sure if you liked the murder by the graveyard the first time, you'll surely love it after its second repetition during the course of ninety minutes. Right? Well, or you just might get bored out of your mind. Even worse is that all those long dragging moments of slowness and repetition bury the high weirdness factor the film's mad religious underpinnings could provide under a sea of molasses; McCormick seems unwilling or unable to do anything with his madder ideas.

The complete absence of a plot besides "abomination appears, Cody kills people, rinse and repeat the killing for the rest of the movie" makes the whole experience of watching The Abomination quite a chore. A neat looking rubber monster and a bit of gore alone just aren't enough to let the movie resonate with me.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,gore,in short,brent mccormick

On WTF: Ogroff (1983)

If I were in the marketing business, I'd probably try to sell you French amateur auteur N.G. Mount's Ogroff as the first serial killer romantic comedy with zombies and Howard Vernon, but that would be somewhat dishonest of me, seeing that I don't believe the film to be a comedy.

Be that as it may, my write-up on WTF-Film should make clear what I do believe about the film, and why you should do anything in your power to acquire a copy to see it for yourself.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,horror,reviews,zombies,n.g. mount,other places

Three Films Make A Post: A secret hidden by time that will reap its horrible revenge

Night of the Demons (2009): Given that I'm not exactly a fan of the original, I was expecting even less of this remake. That I got. What the remake also gave me was a new appreciation of how clever and effective a film the original is in comparison.

As long as the remake keeps as close to its model as possible, it's watchable as the type of trashy, tasteless movie certain people probably think all horror movies are and that can be halfway fun if you're in the right mood, or twelve. It's very dumb, but not too painful.

Unfortunately, director Adam Gierasch decides to put his own "ideas" into the proceedings after about an hour of tits and blood have passed. From then on out, you can actually feel your brain cells dying one after the other, or can at least come to the conclusion that Gierasch has managed the seemingly impossible - he has made a film that's even dumber than the original Night of the Demons.

 

Altitude (2010): Hint to screenwriters: Don't be like Altitude. If you are writing a movie about a handful of characters in an enclosed environment having to face various dangers that spends much more time on said characters than on said dangers - until it turns out they are all DANGERS OF THE MIND - you're probably better off not making everyone so annoying and clichéd that your audience will want them to die as fast as possible. Oh, and please don't go for idiotic twisty psychological revelations that have no connection to the psychology of actual people nor are much good for your movie's plot, either. And please, just don't get me started on the abysmal yet obvious final plot twist.

In other words, either create characters worth spending the time on for your Twilight Zone revival movie, or just make the flying tentacle monster movie this was marketed as.

 

The Devil's Playground (2010): And the last film in this sad trio of movies I'd in hindsight have preferred to avoid is a British viral non-zombie apocalypse caused by medical tests pursued by a moustache-twirling evil pharma company (great Cthulhu, they even have their own little killer commando!) trying to create a performance-enhancing drug. Don't ask me what performance-enhancing drugs have to do with a non-zombie virus, please. I didn't write the script.

The rest is exactly like at least half a dozen other zombie apocalypse movies from the UK. The only twist the zombie lore gets is that the virus transforms its victims into parcours runners, which turns out to make them more ridiculous than frightening.

The direction by Mark McQueen is competent in a contemporary action movie kind of way, but there's just not anything in here I haven't seen in better movies (which is to say, movies with their own ideas about humanity, or just about what zombies mean).

Dear horror directors, please stop making zombie films if you don't have anything new to add to the sub-genre.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,fantasy,british movies,zombies,in short

Death By Invitation (1971)

Lise (Shelby Leverington) is the reincarnation of a woman killed as a witch way back in ye olden days of randomly applied white face paint and axing women at the stake.

As witches and non-witches alike love to do, Lise's nameless ancestress has sworn revenge on the descendants of the main instigator of her killing, one Peter Vroot (Aaron Phillips). Lise has managed to charm (or whatever, I'm doing exposition the film just doesn't bother with here) herself into the position of the favourite family friend of the 70s version of the Vroots (who are of course all played by the same actors as their old-timey versions), and is now beginning to kill the family members off one by one, probably so that the 70s version of Peter - an intensely unpleasant and self-important businessman with an intelligence only slightly above that of certain houseplants - can suffer a bit more before he comes to his bloody end.

Chances are, anyone reading this will have watched quite a few other movies following more or less the same plot line and has her expectations about how the film will turn out to be set. Death By Invitation has its own and very particular charms, though, which are only in line with expectations of the grandly but cheaply weird.

The film's director Ken Friedman obviously was trying to art house his little low budget horror movie up to the gills, producing exactly the indubitably 70s sort of mixture of the dubiously successful highbrow and the equally dubiously successful lowbrow I take to like a centuries old vampire does to schoolgirls and Southern small town waitresses.

Friedman puts quite a bit of work into avoiding the usual sad point and shoot trappings of this sort of film, so most shots are much better composed than you'd expect. At the same time, every shot is also as peculiar as they come. It's easy to see with how much thought every scene has been put together, yet on the other hand it is nearly impossible for someone not sharing Friedman's brainspace to understand what these thoughts are exactly about, leaving the happy viewer with a feeling of light-headed drifting and vague ideas that the film is somehow about feminism (or not).

Drifting is also what the movie's script (also written by Friedman) does most of the time. The conventional plot gets lost in weird scenes that come out of nowhere and lead anywhere. Lise prepares her first murder victim through a long, absurdly intense acted monologue about "the Southern Tribes", in which "the women were the hunters, the men were domesticated"; a man (actually the male lead, but let's not go there) gets himself "comically" (except that it isn't funny) lost searching for Vroot's office and later has a screaming match with the man trying to be louder than the music that's smattering in the background for no good reason whatsoever; an elderly priest does a particularly bad reading from the Book of Job at a graveside; library music jumps the audience's ears when they least expect it. Some of this is be supposed to be humorous, possibly ironic, but it's impossible to be sure in a film that doesn't include any normality from which the humour can successfully deviate.

The film's feel of inexplicable moodiness is further enhanced by acting performances that fit the bizarre tendencies of everything else on screen perfectly. Shelby Leverington is the only member of the cast who has gone on to something like an acting career (mostly on TV), and she's certainly the most professional person in the cast. I wouldn't call her performance "good" in a conventional sense - that sort of "good" doesn't belong into this movie anyhow - but it sure is intense. For most of the other actors, Death By Invitation is the only IMDB credit. They are therefore ideally qualified to provide the mixture of the awkward and the freakish that the movie needs to survive without just being a boring slog.

Although - truth be told - some viewers might still judge Death By Invitation to be boring and slow. It certainly is if you're on the look-out for straight thrills. If, on the other hand, you're looking for thrills of the more outlandish sort, you're in perfectly good hands with Friedman's film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,reviews,ken friedman,shelby leverington

In short: The Other Hell (1981)

Original title: L'altro Inferno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Music Monday: 'Tis The Season Edition

Technorati-Tags: music monday,music,iron maiden

Blood Link (1982)

Craig Manning (Michael Moriarty) is a successful doctor whose medical research aiming at some sort of diffuse self-realization leads him into self-experimentation with his self-invented mix of acupuncture and electro shock, not exactly to the delight of his girlfriend and colleague Julie Warren (Penelope Milford).

Caused by his SCIENCE!, Craig starts to have strange dreams in which he seems himself murdering women who are all at the tail end of middle age. As if that weren't disturbing enough, Craig's dreams of murder soon turn into day dreams, complete with sleepwalking. The doctor has the strange feeling that he is not just experiencing violent fantasies produced by his own experimental treatment and the depths of his subconscious, but has opened the door to someone else's mind. Craig is quite convinced that the person whose deeds he witnesses is his Siamese twin brother Keith, and that his brother can sometimes see through his eyes too (how that's supposed to work without Keith having undergone Craig's treatment, I surely don't know). Keith, however, is supposed to have died at the age of seventeen in a fire that also killed the brothers' foster father. Still, Craig visits his foster mother Mrs Thomason in the home for the elderly she's now being treated in to ask a few poignant questions about Keith's dead. Turns out that Mrs Thomason was lying about Craig's brother all these years to protect him from police interest.

Now that Craig is sure his brother is alive, he just has to meet him and somehow "save" him from his murderous impulses. A new vision soon shows him that Keith is in Hamburg, so Craig decides to look for him there. This is of course a very bad idea, and before you can say "I toldya", Keith sets a plan in motion that will put the blame for his murders on his innocent brother.

The old tale of the good twin and the evil twin already had survived more variations than anyone should care to count when Alberto De Martino made this thriller, yet it is one of those basic set-ups which - if treated with care - have so much thematic resonance that they are always worth exploring.

It's also the sort of set-up that gives a willing actor an opportunity to really do some Acting. One can do that subtly, showing the on the surface identical twins to be completely different persons through slight gestures and minimal changes in posture and voice, or one can do it like Michael Moriarty does here, by wildly chewing the scenery as if it were the only thing standing between one and starvation. That's not really a criticism of Moriarty's performance here, mind you. Rather, the broadness of his performance fits perfectly to Blood Link's not exactly subtle script that mostly goes into the most obvious directions, but at least goes there with enough conviction and technical to make for an interesting film.

For most of the time, Blood Link is also a relatively logical film, at least if you're willing to buy into the whole good twin/evil twin business and into the telepathy. In an Italian film of this era, that's about as naturalistic and un-dreamlike as it gets. Only in the final twenty minutes, the script gives up on reality as I know it completely, and goes for a sleazy yet fitting finale that's based on Keith's impotence, only to end on a not very well prepared but really disturbing scene where the differences between the brothers have completely disappeared.

The ending would really work better for a film that's more dreamlike than the often rather straightforward Blood Link. This straightforwardness, however, comes with the territory of the film's director Alberto De Martino. De Martino is the kind of guy who is always able to make solid and well-paced films, yet his films seldom prove to be mad enough to be completely to my (admittedly sometimes dubious) tastes. In fact, Blood Link is probably as weird as it gets for De Martino (unless a until now unseen by me film will prove me wrong), and might be a film to watch especially for those viewers who can't cope with more dreamlike Italian films.

Even if you can cope with less normal films, though, there's no reason to avoid this one. It is a perfectly fine thriller with a perfectly hysterical lead performance.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,alberto de martino,michael moriarty,reviews,thriller