CINE-MISCREANT!!!

THE ULTIMATE VERSION OF THE JAMES BOND THEME

2012-01-11T14:28:00.001-05:00

Other than to state that this should immediately be made the official James Bond theme lyrics, I'll just let this one speak for itself.

70 YEARS OF THE WOLFMAN

2011-12-12T03:00:00.002-05:00

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the release if THE WOLF MAN, perhaps the seminal werewolf film and the movie from which most of the general public's knowledge of lupine lycanthropes is garnered. One of the very best of Universal's classic cycle of horror films from the 1930's and 1940's, this tale of one innocent man's horrifying curse still has considerable tragic power despite its age and the changing styles and tastes in filmmaking. If you've never seen it, you owe it to your film education to check it out immediately. Here's the trailer:

THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN (1977)

2011-11-28T17:30:00.019-05:00

"Her pussy's in this plot, too! She's using it to murder me!'
-the king of the Underworld, shortly after Bruce Lee saves him from being fucked to death by Emmanuelle. (Yes, you read that right.)

If you're a regular reader of this site, you know I love and cherish movies from many genres that could kindly be called "completely fucking ludicrous." With that in mind, please allow me to introduce you the what is hands down the most insane, ridiculous, stupid, and just plain downright shameless example of the deservedly maligned "Brucesploitation" genre. For those not aware of its dubious existence, the Brucesploitation sub-genre of martial arts films were cheapie cash-ins made in the wake of Bruce Lee's untimely demise, invariably starring dudes who bore a passing resemblance to the master at best, and none of whom were anywhere near being within the same galaxy of Lee's skills. The legion of those films are mostly boring and outright necrophiliac trash, but THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN is both wildly entertaining and an intentional comedy, and as such it deserves to be not only rediscovered but also restored and remastered. In fact, I'll even go so far as to say that this film is more entertaining than any actual Bruce Lee movie. How, you may ask, is that possible? Allow me to explain...

Bruce Lee's priapic corpse arrives in the Underworld.

It's 1973 and the great Bruce Lee is dead. His corpse, equipped with cool shades and what appears to be a raging hard-on — no, really — arrives in what is apparently an Asian variant of the purgatory, and we are informed that when people die, their bodies and faces change so they no longer look like they did when alive and kicking (which is a convenient way of glossing over star Bruce Leung's utter non-resemblance to Bruce Lee). After arrogantly insulting the king of the Underworld and being given back his chucks (which were taken away when they were revealed not to be an impressive boner), Bruce wanders the local streets and encounters a number of majorly copyright-infringed characters in a noodle restaurant. We're talking Popeye (played by Chinese actor Eric Tsang) and Kwai Chang Caine from KUNG FU (played this time not by David Carradine, but by an actual Chinese guy) on the side of good, and Zatoichi, James Bond (!!!) and Clint Eastwood (played by a Chinese actor and dressed like the Man with No Name from the classic Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns).

Kwai Chang Caine, Bruce Lee, and Popeye...Motherfucking Popeye?!!? What the fuck???

Meanwhile, the aged and exceedingly horny king of the Underworld is having problems with his wives because they've gotten wind of Bruce Lee's newly-arrived presence and they, like every other woman in the Underworld, are devoured by lust at the mere thought of him, even Emmanuelle (who's apparently the concubine of the Exorcist). Yes, that Emmanuelle, and she even describes herself as "a silly little pussy."

NOTE: for you readers who may have come along after the dire days when decent porn was not as readily available as it is now, the Emmanulle character, initially portrayed by Sylvia Kristel, first showed up in a 1974 French softcore erotic film that went on to become a massive international hit, after which there followed a succession of sequels — around thirty-six at last count; no, seriously — the vast majority of which did not feature the original actress. From the dawn of home video and the ubiquity of cable TV, practically every kid I grew up with saw at least the first Emmanuelle movie and were mostly bored silly by it, its considerable amount of full-frontal nudity notwithstanding, so to those of us of a certain age the mere mention of that name is evocative of a key moment in our adolescent development. The point here being that in the world of cinema, the character of Emmanuelle was nearly as much of a household name as Bruce Lee, only reigning in the realm of tenderloin cinema rather than that of chopsocky, so her inclusion here as a usable pop culture icon makes a certain degree of sense. But I digress...

One of the king's two wives is especially into Bruce because she's a fan of his movies — how she saw them in the Underworld is not made clear — and she desires nothing more than to have him beat her with his "powerful weapon" (his chucks) and make passionate love to her...

It's at this point that I think it's appropos to note that I'm neither drunk nor making any of this up. All of this lunacy is actually in the movie.

Anyway, Bruce rejects the advances of the king's wives, thus greatly insulting them and spurring them to send Count Dracula (pronounced here as "Draculer" in the dub) and his gang of zombies to kick Bruce's ass. That only pisses Bruce off, so he dons his famous Kato outfit from THE GREEN HORNET (where he got it from and why he does this is anyone's guess) and hands out ass-whuppings like they were Halloween candy. And just when things look really bad for Bruce, he reveals the secret "Third Leg of Bruce" technique, in which he magically produces an extra leg with which to kick Dracula square in the face.

Also, the bad guys, led by the Godfather and the Exorcist (who has an atrociously bad French accent for no explained reason), want to recruit Bruce to help them overthrow the king, but cocksure Bruce doesn't give a fuck about that (or much of anything else for that matter) and seeks nothing other than a way back to the world of the living. As the bad guys launch assassination attempts against the king, including the aforementioned and memorable attempted murder by pussy, Bruce intervenes and is made captain of the king's personal guard (a plot point that goes absolutely nowhere). The remainder of the film is taken up by fight after fight after fight, in which the bad guys are killed off one by one, finally culminating in Bruce forcing the reluctant king to send him back to the world of the living, which the king does by drop-kicking him and sending him flying off into the distance as the newly-liberated denizens of purgatory cheer their thanks.

Wow. Just...WOW.

THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN is balls-out insane from start to finish and this review doesn't even begin to communicate just how out of its mind the film actually is. It's low-budget to the nth degree, features one of the worst/best dubbed voice tracks on record, contains wall-to-wall fight scenes that look like they were choreographed by an eight-year-old, includes a surprising amount of nudity and sex for this kind of flick (which is what earned the film its R-rating), and is packed to the rafters with so much outright silliness and utter stupidity that I had a huge grin plastered across my face for most of its running time. Unlike many cheapjack kung fu films from its era, especially those found in the annals of Brucesploitation, the film is not dull for even two minutes and its loony, surreal cartoonishness moves along at a breakneck pace that suggests the filmmakers didn't want to allow viewers any time in which to actually contemplate just what kind of madness was unspooling upon the screen. No lie, THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN gets my HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION as a must-see masterpiece of bad cinema, and if anyone knows where I can find a better print of it than the one included in the ULTIMATE DRAGON COLLECTION 10-film Brucesploitation set, please do not hesitate to tell me where I can find one.

JAMES BOMB: WHICH IS THE WORST 007 FLICK?

2011-11-12T14:54:00.003-05:00

As the 23rd 007 film, SKYFALL, gears up to shoot, I was once more set to pondering exactly which of the 22 official James Bond movies is the most cinematically worthless of the lot. Many factors can go into what makes for a lousy 007 entry and what individual viewers consider wretched is rather subjective, so I’ll focus my spotlight on the Bond films that are generally considered to be the bottom of the barrel and work to figure it out from there.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

The Moon Buggy: a far cry from GOLDFINGER's Aston Martin.

I was six years old when this came out and my folks took me with them to see it at a drive-in. All I remember of it from my vantage point bundled up in blankets in the station wagon’s back seat was the image of that moon buggy racing over a simulated lunar surface, and in retrospect I wish that were the only memory I had of the film. Sean Connery returned to the Bond series after a four-year absence and the unfortunate departure of his replacement, George Lazenby, who starred in 1969’s superb ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE, and the regression in quality was indeed sorry to behold. Whereas the previous film dripped with style and restored 007 to a virtually gadget-free arena of straight-up espionage and shattering violence, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER brought things back to the already-tired level of lame-brained comic book adventures and strained, largely unfunny humor, at the center of which was a visibly older and much worse for wear Connery. Looking like he’d been subsisting on a diet of pub crisps and lager, Connery sported a ludicrous hairpiece and wore fashions that made him resemble some stereotypical high-toned dockside queer on the make for some dashing Navy trade.

Oh, James...Say it ain't so!

Needless to say, such an aspect was totally inappropriate for our hero, but when one considered the quality of the so-called Bond Girls in this outing perhaps a bit of man-on-man action wouldn’t have been a bad idea. The plot was also idiotic and featured the first go-round with vehicular stunts like something out of a Hal Needham good ol’ boy flick or a DUKES OF HAZZARD episode from a few years later and felt as out of place in a James Bond movie as a twelve-inch penis sprouting organically from the loins of Jayne Mansfield.

Kidd (Putter Smith) and Wint (Bruce Glover): pernicious pooves.

The sole items of interest here were the all-too-brief inclusion of Kidd and Wint, a pair of intriguing homosexual assassins (played by Putter Smith and Bruce Glover) whose talents are barely — and fatally to themselves — put to the test against Bond, and Bambi (Lola Larson) and Thumper (Trina Parks), a checkerboard pair of athletic, gymnastic lovelies who give Bond quite a kicking…only to be defeated by the out-of-shape agent (in a pink tie/scarf, no less) when he quite unbelievably manages to maneuver them into a nearby swimming pool.

Thumper (Trina Parks) and Bambi (Lola Larson): a pair straight out of my daydreams...

Oh, and Shirley Bassey’s lovely theme tune marks what is more or less the demise of the old school classy Bond theme songs in favor of tunes provided by pop/rock stars, much to the detriment of the series’ classiness factor. But times change and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER was there to announce James Bond’s headlong arrival into the 1970’s, for better or worse. And if you ask me, it was for the worse. Bottom line: this is one of the very few 007 films I can't sit through again for any reason. Not even Bambi and Thumper.

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

James Bond, now played by former-Saint Roger Moore, encounters a much different spookshow than he's used to.

Once a trendsetter, the Bond flicks would now occasionally imitate popular fads in cinema and in this case the genre being nodded to was that of black exploitation, or “blaxploitation” if you prefer. It was stupid and insulting enough to see 007 pitted against a cadre of stereotypical scary Negroes common to the genre that gave us Dolemite and Truck Turner, but was it really necessary to go there with the whole voodoo element? I think not, but at least we got a mouthwatering twenty-two-year-old Jane Seymour to make us forget the James Bond-meets-minstrel show travesty that tries to pass itself off as a spy flick. This film also gave us the first of seven 007 films starring Roger Moore as James Bond, an element that polarizes Bond fans like no other. For many Bond followers of my age group, we first saw 007 when the films were run on ABC and each airing was a big event in those pre-home video days of yore, especially when introduced to them by parents who were fans of Sean Connery. Then Moore took the role and his broadly comedic take on the character struck a chord with the slightly younger new fans, while many of us Connery groupies remained loyal to the Bond-as-school-bully version. I’ve personally never been able to stomach the humor in the Bond films and really learned to despise it with the advent of the Moore era, so I take a very dim view of all of his entries, with the exceptions of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981) and THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977), although in the case of the latter I find it disposable solely because it’s pretty much a beat-for-beat remake of the Sean Connery YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967), only with the emphasis on outer space in one and the ocean’s depths in the other. The Hal Needham-esque vehicular insanity returns with a truly fucking just-plain-crazy bit involving a speedboat, and in the middle of that madness is the unwelcome introduction of Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), a Red Man-chawin’ redneck character who seems to have materialized from another film entirely.

Clifton James as the embarrassing redneck stereotype Sheriff J.W. Pepper.

I guess his countrified ways were meant to contrast with Bond’s perceived British sophistication, but the shit just wasn’t funny and veered straight into the downright embarrassing. And as noted with DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, the days of the old school Bond theme song were over and Top 40 pop music artists took the reigns from John Barry and his collaborators, and perhaps no other 007 theme song epitomizes this aspect as well as Paul McCartney and Wings’ overblown and epochal title song for this movie. I got sick of the LIVE AND LET DIE theme back in ’73 and could go the rest of my life without ever hearing it again; I know damned near everyone else on the planet digs it, and you are more than welcome to it.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)

Christopher Lee as Scaramanga, the world's deadliest assassin, in the process of being infinitely more cool than Roger Moore's James Bond.

Often turning up on fans' rosters of the worst that the Bond franchise has to offer, this is definitely a lesser entry but I don't think it's deserving of all the vitriol it gets. Christopher Lee out-cools Bond, the Thailand locales are exotic and surreal, a pre-FANTASY ISLAND Herve Villechaise scores as diminutive servant/assassin Nick Nack, and the whole thing comes off as some kind of odd Asian-flavored fever dream starring 007, so I can't quite slag it off. And while LIVE AND LET DIE sought to cash-in on the blaxploitation angle, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN briefly tips its hat to the then-hot kung fu movie boom with a brief but thoroughly entertaining bit featuring Bond at the mercy of a school full of martial arts killers, only to find himself rescued by the baddest-assed pair of schoolgirls you've ever seen, one of whom, Yuen Qiu, would turn up some thirty years later in the memorable role of the endlessly chainsmoking landlady/badass in KUNG FU HUSTLE. However, on the downside are two of the series' most lackluster Bond Girls, Britt Eckland as Mary Goodnight and Maud Adams — who would return to the series nine years later as the title character in OCTOPUSSY — in the nothing role of Andrea Anders, one of the worst theme tunes out of the entire lot (sung by "To Sir With Love" chanteuse Lulu), and the Chernobyl-level unwelcome return of Clifton James as Sheriff J.W. Pepper, somehow incongruously turning up on vacation in Thailand.

Clifton James returns as uber-redneck J.W. Pepper: What the fuck is this guy doing in Thailand?

Those elements notwithstanding, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN is a passable entry that can be enjoyed with a minimum of brain cell use.

MOONRAKER (1979)

Bond versus the enormous Jaws (Richard Kiel) atop a ski lift. Now, that's entertainment (?)!

Once more riding the cash-in bandwagon, this film can be accurately summed up with a mere five words: "James Bond meets STAR WARS." Utterly ridiculous and totally without a brain in its head, this one features an embarrassing laser gun battle in outer space between spacesuit-equipped government agents and the forces of the bad guy's private space-army, a Venetian gondola that's tricked-out a la the famous Aston Martin in GOLDFINGER (1964), a truly terrible throwback theme song by Shirley Bassey — making her the only singer to croon a Bond theme tune three times, let alone twice — , one of the series' blandest villains, a zero-G sex scene at the film's climax (which also features one of the absolute worst jokes in the series' entire run) and the return of Richard Kiel as the gigantic razor-toothed assassin Jaws, a character I found to be too over-the top in the previous THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977). This one's enjoyable enough if you were a fourteen-year-old boy when it came out (as I was), but it does not pass muster for grownups.

OCTOPUSSY (1983)

Is Bond on assignment at Lucky Cheng's?

Loaded with wall-to-wall hot chicks (many of whom could have been played by top notch drag queens) thanks to the title character having an all-girl army, this flick tested the limits of just how brain-dead a 007 movie could be. The plot is some bullshit about Faberge eggs and the theft of Russian artifacts and their replacement with fakes or some such mess, but it soon becomes just so much white noise as the film moves from one uninvolving set piece to another, yielding zero in terms of thrills or entertainment. Rita Coolidge provides "All Time High," a perfunctory theme song at best, and we actually get to witness Roger Moore literalizing his buffoonish version of Bond by actually appearing as a circus clown.

No, this isn't a Photoshopped image. Seriously.

Any movie that features James Bond in clown drag is best avoided, and that element is just the icing on this very large shit-cake. I found nothing to recommend about this film and urge those who have not seen it to do nothing to alter that state of affairs. OCTOPUSSY is wholly without worth and I can't for the life of me understand who it was aimed at. Certainly not James Bond fans.

A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Roger Moore's thankfully final outing as 007, accompanied by Grace Jones as May Day (and not Chris Tucker as seen in THE FIFTH ELEMENT).

As much as I loathe and detest OCTOPUSSY and all that it stands for, A VIEW TO A KILL gets my vote as the very worst James Bond movie ever made, and it earns that dubious distinction for a great number of reasons but I'll just sum it all up thusly: every single thing about this movie sucks ass, except for the Duran Duran theme song, and you just may give up on Bond for life if you sit through it. Grace Jones as a Bond Girl who's more masculine than Bond, a plot that's just a colossal "who cares?', Tanya Roberts as a plank of wood, the complete and utter waste of Christopher Walken as the uninspired bad guy (Fellow Walken fans: even the mighty Chris isn't worth sitting through this movie; he's given nothing to do and he does nothing with that nothing) and damned near everything else contained within A VIEW TO A KILL's overlong 131-minute running time would have sunk just about any other franchise and I'm frankly surprised the series continued after this creative disaster. But the one thing that made me aware I was seeing the worst James Bond film ever made occurred early in the film, during the customary pre-credits mini-adventure: while on assignment in Siberia, an ancient-looking Roger Moore as 007 escapes from enemy agents while snowboarding to the musical accompaniment of — now get this — the Beach Boys' "California Girls." Honest to God! I only saw this film when it originally came out, just over a quarter-century ago, so I don't remember if that version of the song was the real thing or a cover, but either way I guess I should be thankful it wasn't the David Lee Roth cover. Now that would have caused me to commit seppuku right then and there, spilling my assorted viscera all over the floor of Fine Arts IV, thereby providing more genuine entertainment than anything found onscreen.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

Timothy Dalton's 007 tries to stay awake during what may be the most boring film in the series.

Aside from introducing us to Timothy Dalton as the world's greatest superspy and bringing him into play during a terrific pre-credits mini-adventure, THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS clocks in at an agonizing 130 minutes and is a stone-cold bore. Once seen, it's easily forgotten and even a Bond diehard like me will put the particulars of its plot out of his or her mind. Life's just too short for dull 007 stories and you will miss nothing if you turn this one off once the awful song heard during the opening credits starts, and that song annoys even more because it's the lamest thing the superlative Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders was ever involved with. Plus, at the end of the film we get the actual theme song, "The Living Daylights," as blandly droned out by the limper-than-limp a-ha of "Take On Me" infamy. I doubt even the purest Bolivian cocaine could keep anyone awake during that one.

LICENCE TO KILL (1989)

For the second time in 007 history, a wedding leads to unspeakable tragedy...(Refer to ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

Many people really, really hate this one and for the life of me I can't figure out why. I've heard it explained away as folks not liking its plot having Bond go "off the reservation" in order to avenge the mutilation-by-tiger shark of his CIA pal Felix Leiter and the rape/murder of Leiter's bride as orchestrated by a vile drug lord (a chilling Robert Davi), a rampage flat-out not approved by MI-6 that features the kind of sadistic violence common to the portrayal of Bond and his world as seen in the books written by Bond's creator, Ian Fleming. Sure it's nasty, but the series started out as quite shocking and brutal in its content, but then came GOLDFINGER and its comic book touches, a successful formula that has been repeated in nearly every 007 film released since 1964. I guess the general moviegoing audience had become so used to the Bond films as over-the-top, snarky self-parodies after Connery's later pictures and the whole goofy Roger Moore run (with the notable exception of the largely-straight FOR YOUR EYES ONLY), so when the filmmakers opted to give us a gritty and violent 007 outing many were not ready for LICENCE TO KILL's meaner-than-hell attitude. I greatly enjoy the vicious Bond of the novels and early films, so the only things that didn't work for me here were the somewhat-distracting presence of Wayne Newton (who I do like, but I find him out of place in a Bond film) and the obligatory car chase/exploding secret base finale involving an eighteen-wheeler. If you like your Bond movies more genteel and sunny then I guess that's cool, but I feel both Timothy Dalton and LICENCE TO KILL have gotten an unfair rap and that's a damned shame because Dalton was a terrific Bond. Much better than Pierce Brosnan's runway model/clotheshorse spy. (Yes, I know ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE's George Lazenby was a model, so please don't write in to tell me I'm being hypocritical.)

GOLDENEYE (1995)

Pierce Brosnan cops a stay-awake move from Timothy Dalton in his debut as 007.

Bested only by THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS in the sheer boredom department, GOLDENEYE marks Pierce Brosnan's debut as Bond and it's a looooong 130 minutes that comes to life during the pre-credits sequence and 007's close encounter with Famke Janssen's memorably nymphomaniacal/psychotic Xenia Onatopp. Nothing much to say here other than to urge caution when considering sitting through it; if you choose to do so, have a comfy pillow at the ready.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

007 holds co-star Robert Carlyle hostage and demands that the screenwriters alter the script so it becomes TRAINSPOTTING 2, rather than the utterly generic film that resulted.

This one offended me by virtue of it being a textbook example of a by-the-numbers entry in a long-running series. I did not give a good goddamn about anyone or anything in this rote time-waster and was especially put off by the presence of that human bobble-head Denise Richards as — I shit you not — nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones (my vote for the all-time worst would-be funny Bond Girl moniker). Not only does Richards annoy the living shit out of me in everything I've seen her in (with the notable exception of a guest turn in an episode of TWO AND A HALF MEN), she's now forever captured on film as a willing participant in a post-coital moment with Bond in which he seizure-inducingly comments, "Looks like Christmas comes more than once this year." I don't ever need to see this one again either.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008)

Daniel Craig's 007 and Olga Montez (Olga Kurylenko) traverse the wasteland that is QUANTUM OF SOLACE.

I've reviewed QUANTUM OF SOLACE at length, but I'll let it suffice to say I found this film extremely disappointing after CASINO ROYALE (2006) and felt it came off like I was watching someone else play a video game. The film was also very heavily influenced by the Jason Bourne films, replicating that series' propensity for confusingly-edited action sequences, and all I have to say to that is this: if I want to see a Jason Bourne movie, I'll go see a fucking Jason Bourne movie! I'm a James Bond fan, god damn it, born and bred, and I accept no substitutes. There is no excuse for Bond stooping to imitate those who followed in his wake, especially not after CASINO ROYALE, for fuck's sake!

Now that I've had my rant, what do you name as the most rock-bottom-awful 007 adventure? To quote the guy on the receiving end of Dirty Harry's infamous hard-on-inducing speech about his .44 Magnum, "I gots ta know!"

ANNIE SPRINKLE'S HERSTORY OF PORN: REEL TO REAL (1999)

2011-11-07T00:01:00.004-05:00

WARNING!!! If the frank discussion of some of the grottier elements that can be found in porno offends you or grosses you out, you are strongly advised to give this entry a miss. And bear in mind that this warning is coming from me, so take that for what it's worth.

"Pornography is the mirror in which we can see our reflections. The same image may appear beautiful one day, and ugly the next, be liberating one year, and offensive later. How wonderful to have the opportunity to take a look. To learn and, perchance, to dream. Making porn is a lot harder than you might think. I've never even come close to capturing the magnificence of my best sexual experiences. One thing is for sure: in just twenty-five years, we have come a long way. The answer to really bad porn is not no porn, but to try to make better porn. No matter where we stand, pornography reflects us all."-Annie Sprinkle

As is probably apparent to my regular readers, I am unashamedly fascinated by pornography, not merely as a means to a solo orgasmic end, but mostly as an earthy, fleshly reflection of who and what we are as sexual human animals. And while I have been known to enjoy such material for its most obvious intended use from time to time, I’m always interested in learning about the history of the medium, a form that goes back as far as the moment when the first cave-person fashioned a curvy goddess statue from crude earth or put pigment to cave wall to depict primitive images of copulation.

So anyway, about a week back I stopped by a kiosk in Manhattan's Union Square where a couple of guys sell assorted "gray market" DVDs, and the more erudite of the two, remembering my interest in documentaries on the history of porn, offered me what he believed to be an overview of American tenderloin cinema as hosted/narrated by veteran porn star Annie Sprinkle. I accepted the disc, ANNIE SPRINKLE'S HERSTORY OF PORN, and took it home, allowing it to sit atop a "to be watched" stack for a few days before I threw it into my player for a late-night screening. (And it really was a screening and not a moment of "relaxing the gentleman's way;" I was on the phone with my equally-insomniac friend, Daisy, as I watched the first half of it, so there was no five-knuckle shuffling going on.)

Our humble raconteur and documentary subject, Annie Sprinkle (née Ellen Steinberg).

For those of you out there who have no idea who Annie Sprinkle is, she's a notorious bisexual porn star/prostitute/stripper/performance artist who was born Ellen Steinberg in Philadelphia and has re-invented herself several times throughout her career, now enriching the world with performance pieces and other works that disseminate perhaps the most sex-positive vibes in American society's hypocritically puritanical sexual landscape. For what it's worth, I really like Annie's sweet and adorable persona and the joy and utterly shameless happiness in sex that she merrily espouses like some kind of bubbly and lewd Yoda with big ol' titties, so I was totally down with her acting as a guide through the history of American porno's golden age.

Such a journey, however, was not what I got when I started watching ANNIE SPRINKLE'S HERSTORY OF PORN. It instead turned out to be a very thorough and hearftelt video autobiography/career retrospective beginning with Annie's time in assorted porn that began as conventional beast-with-two-backs reels and going up through her then-current role as a DIY sex-educator/sexual shamaness-goddess, and I could have dealt with that just fine if it had not been comprehensive enough to include footage from some of Sprinkle's more, er, "specialized" efforts. To be fair, Sprinkle herself does warn the viewer that if there's anything onscreen that they may not want to see, they can simply "cover your eyes and it'll pass, and please try to keep an open mind until the very, very end," and it's advice I wish I'd heeded in more than one instance. You see, Sprinkle's work in straight porno was already rather raunchy even by the somewhat nebulously-defined standards of the genre, and some of it could be considered "nasty" in terms of her very game willingness to do just about anything on camera, but as of the late-1970's she adventurously veered waaaaay into fetish stuff that Sprinkle claimed led to most mainstream porno directors no longer hiring her because she'd gained a rep as being "too kinky." Included during the fetish overview are segments including the following:

Sprinkle's signature golden shower antics
dwarf-fucking (the guy in that equation, Luis De Jesus, played the vile Ralphus in the "classic" grindhouse gore opus BLOOD-SUCKING FREAKS)
Annie shoving a toothbrush into the orifices not found on her head (don't worry, it wasn't the brushy end)
Annie getting seriously rodgered with a hefty kielbasa
heavy-duty bondage and rape-fantasy stuff
Annie getting fisted (stumped?) by an amputee
close-up removal of swamped, bloody feminine hygiene products
Annie being graphically fisted herself and then graphically fisting some splayed-out skinny guy with her mitt lodged up him well past her wrist, after which she introduced his sundered butthole to an enormous dildo at least two feet in length and about as wide around as a can of Chock Full O' Nuts coffee
an absolutely revolting "rainbow shower" segment in which our girl pukes all over some scruffy meth-addict-looking dude, barfing into his open mouth and jerking him off with fresh hurl as a lubricant (Sprinkle somewhat defuses that last bit by stating that they actually used canned soup, which is apparent when one goes back and really examines the footage, but nonetheless yecch...)

Maybe I'm just too "vanilla" but none of the stuff on that list strikes me as erotic in any way, which is not to say I wouldn't have watched it for its curiosity value if I had been truly forewarned. And, to tell the truth, I had already seen examples of all of that kind of stuff since I hit college, so none of it was new to me. (Though I had avoided the menstrually-related material; I'm not squeamed-out by period stuff thanks to the realities encountered when involved with girlfriends and also due to most of my friends being female and very candid about their "lady business" — there is nothing in that department that I have not heard about firsthand and in medically-graphic detail — but I don't find such stuff appealing as my porn fodder of choice.)

Anyway, following that overwhelming fetish-pummeling, Sprinkle's focus mercifully shifts to 1982's DEEP INSIDE ANNIE SPRINKLE, which she claims was the first porno film conceived from a woman's point of view, and from which she moved into crafting a more female-centric pornographic experience. Then, as the 1980's got going and the era of "new age" healing and philosophy dawned (which, if you ask me, was little more than a re-discovery of the Eastern stuff the '60's counter-culture dabbled in, only now seasoned with dashes of neo-paganism), Sprinkle hooked up with a Tantric adept who guided her into her first deeply spiritual experience with sex and sexuality. She emerged from her time with him a woman energized and transformed, who sought to share her epiphany with all whose hearts and minds were open to it, as well as seeking to educate the people on safer sex so awareness would be raised and the very act of loving would not continue to be a sensually-disguised Grim Reaper in the age of AIDS. That era in Sprinkle's development can be seen as akin to a narrative in which the protagonist, having undergone the assorted tests that would forge them into a hero that rang true to Campbell's theories on "the heroic journey," comes back to the world they left behind in search of adventure and learning imparted through said trials, returning with a beatific sense of wisdom and self. Some would find such espousing of these sentiments to be just so much self-serving hippy-dippy bullshit but I definitely get where Sprinkle's coming from when she discusses it, and my buying into what she has to say on the subject goes back as far as when I read her excellent and highly recommended book, POST-PORN MODERNIST (1991).

From there, Sprinkle expanded her horizons by identifying as a lesbian and becoming an artist who appeared in pornographic "art" films and performance art pieces, such as the now-infamous "Public Cervix Announcement," in which she would appear seated onstage, sans undergarments, schlamp a speculum up herself and let intrigued audience members check out her cervix, up close and personal (which is unfortunately not covered in this documentary). She then addresses the fact that she's getting older (she was forty-our at the time) and approaches that aspect of life as another avenue or exploration and the gaining of wisdom and self-understanding. There's even a "how to make a porno" fantasy sequence in which Sprinkle appears as an aging mermaid who initiates a younger mermaid into the pleasures of the flesh and eventually dies, but not before happily passing the torch on to the younger generation, secure in the knowledge that those who succeed her will only expand upon what she has imparted. Though kind of goofily presented, that coda was actually quite beautiful and filled with more genuine meaning than anything found in any three-thousand garden variety porno flicks that one could provide as counter-examples.

This career retrospective/gentle manifesto could not possibly be more sexually explicit if it tried, and some of its content will most likely be objectionable to some members of the audience, but I, for one, greatly appreciate and admire the efforts of this porn icon who used her position as a "sacred whore" of the media to enlighten and inform. What some would condemn as a sordid career path can be seen here by the open-minded as a celebration and exploration of the limits – or rather the non-limits — of human sexuality and the positive power of self-reinvention, and if anyone is going to be a guide through those waters, I'm glad it was Annie Sprinkle. Armed with a cheery, sunshiney sense of humor and an air of earthy, womanly sweetness, I can't help but find her utterly appealing and quite adorable, and in every way the welcome antithesis to the faceless, emotionless replicants who infest the porn landscape and render it so largely joyless. If only there were more individuals with her warmth involved, maybe the porn industry would not be as reviled of an entity as it unfortunately is.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 31: HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

2011-10-31T00:01:00.005-04:00

Along with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957), this was one of the films that heralded Hammer Studios as a revolutionary force to be reckoned with in the post-war horror cinema landscape. Less a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel, DRACULA, than a mid-20th century re-jiggering of many of its elements for an audiences that might find Universal and Lugosi's take on the Count to be a tad stage-bound and genteel, HORROR OF DRACULA is the simplest iteration of the classic vampire yarn's tropes imaginable and can be seen as the template for how to tell a vampire story to a modern audience until stuff like FRIGHT NIGHT and Anne Rice happened.

Recounting the plot is pointless as it's all essentially a template that boils down to a bitter war between Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) and Count Dracula (Christopher Lee), with good inevitably triumphing over evil; something we've seen before, certainly, but it's the atmosphere, the look of the film, and the brisk telling of the tale that make this iteration of it a classic. Dracula's castle is a triumph of set design and realization, his dark-haired and very hungry bride is quite memorable, and the events that transpire once the undead suckface reaches England are just a horror fan's banquet of the basics done right. We also get the one-two punch of Lee and Cushing in career-defining roles that they would both go on to repeat several times (in some cases to diminishing returns, if truth be told), and or many Lee's Dracula is the definitive screen version of Bram Stoker's arch-vampire, and I can totally understand why. He's very tall, urbane, imposing and regal as all get out, but once his facade of aloof nobility is seen through and the vampire stands revealed, Lee's Dracula very much takes the fight to his human opponents and gets very physical indeed, seeming all the while to actually revel in being darkly, irredeemably evil.

I mean, look at this fucking guy! I'd be scared of a vampire if I ran into one in real life anyway, but Lee managed to fairly radiate a palpable, primally-chilling malevolence that even later vampires that had shape-shifting makeup and animatronic technology to bolster them could not begin to approach. Lee's Dracula was a menace of the first order that needed to be expunged from the face of the earth, and Cushing's Van Helsing was just the dude to handle that thankless task. Though a man of cold, hard science and rationality, Van Helsing was smart enough to call a spade a spade when he saw one and thus he dealt with Dracula with the single-minded focus of a master surgeon eliminating a particularly stubborn cancerous growth.

HORROR OF DRACULA is absolutely worth your time if you've never seen it (and even if you already have), both as a textbook example of how this kind of thing can be done right and with no extraneous bullshit, and more importantly as a reminder that vampires are supposed to be fucking scary, not sparkly and all Emo, unlike those found in a certain tamponathon franchise whose name I will not besmirch this review with.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 30: ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)

2011-10-30T00:01:00.006-04:00

Not to go on All-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not men?
- “The Law,” from “The Island of Doctor Moreau” (1896) by H.G.Wells

After several years of having no choice but to enjoy its lurid charms via a "gray market" DVD of a print of it culled from Turner Classic Movies, one of my all-time favorite flicks, 1932’s (or 1933’s, depending on your source of info) ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, is finally available on legitimate DVD from those loving preservationists over at Criterion, and I pre-ordered it the second I heard of its imminent release.

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS is a fantastically sick and twisted little movie that got in there just before the infamous Hayes Code was instituted and took away all the really nasty sex, violence and evil shit that made moviegoing worthwhile.

Will H. Hayes: the human douche nozzle who ruined old school Hollywood.

After the Hayes Code was in place, Hollywood cleaned up its act considerably, under threat of serious penalties, and didn’t really get its balls back until the 1950’s, a shot in the arm that led to the freer expression of the Sixties and Seventies (and then, for the most part, films pussied-out again bigtime, but that’s a subject for another post).

Anyway, I first saw ISLAND OF LOST SOULS during my formative years but I was too little to fully grasp exactly why it had been banned in the United Kingdom for some twenty-five years after its release. It was a black & white flick about some queeny guy with a mustache and a white suit who lived on a remote island and made really lame-looking human/animal hybrids. There was no graphic violence, no cussing, and certainly no naked ladies, so what was the big deal?

Oh, the wisdom that comes with growing up and seeing the same movie through eyes that had gone on to witness films such as DAS CAVIAR DINNER and BARNYARD BANG...(Don't ask.)

For those not in the know, the movie’s based the 1896 novel quoted at the start of this post, and it centers around a guy who gets unwillingly stuck on the island of one Doctor Moreau (Charles Laughton, utterly burning down the house with a spectacular display of major league gayness and questionable sanity), a medical genius who has somehow managed to create a horde of grotesque and disturbing “men” from a variety of wild animals.

Doctor Moreau (Charles Laughton) and friend.

The products of apparently anesthesia-free radical surgery and ray treatments, Moreau’s creations are rather a sorry lot who have been conditioned to live by a series of laws intended to curb their innate animal behaviors and mold them into regular Joes. Don’t ask me what the purpose of such experimentation is; I guess simply to be able to say that he was able to do it? To fulfill some crazed need to play God? Fuck if I know, but one thing becomes clear very early on: Moreau is barking mad, his cultured exterior masking a whip-wielding psychotic who appears to get off on the suffering of his “children.”

Just another fun-filled day on the Island of Doctor Moreau. NOTE: the dude with the serious sideburns is none other than Bela "Pull the string!" Lugosi as the Speaker of the Law. Yowza!

Being stuck on Moreau’s creepy, vine-tangled and fog-enshrouded island is bad enough, but our uninteresting castaway is set to be married to an equally uninteresting fiancée (who of course sets out to find him), so Moreau decides to give his most successful creation a field test. The Doc unveils Lota (Kathleen Burke), a sultry brunette in a pre-Dorothy Lamour “exotic” island girl getup (this was back in the days when hot, non-Caucasian chicks were considered exotic) who has never seen a fully human male other than the Doc and his assistant (actually a big deal; those two seem like an obvious couple to me, and as this was a pre-ccode film, they very well could have been), and hopes sparks ignite between Lota and the stranded cipher.
Kathleen Burke as Lota, the Panther Woman: say hello to your grandpappy's stroke-material.

As the viewers figure out before our boring hero does, Lota is revealed to have been altered from a panther into a prime piece of surfer-boy’s masturbation fantasy — no "pussy" jokes, please — but her shy and tentative attempts at “making friends” with the castaway go straight down the toilet once he notices her hands are reverting to their original clawed configuration and is understandably freaked the fuck out. Moreau orders poor, terrified Lota back to “the House of Pain” for a surgical touch-up, and awaits the arrival of the fiancée so he can turn one of his male hybrids loose on her. So not only do we get crazed punishment with a bullwhip and twisted medical experiments, we are also treated to Moreau’s intention to see if regular humans can successfully mate and possibly reproduce with his semi-human creatures, many of whom resemble a bunch of hairy, shirtless skells of the type that staff many restaurants in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. And when you think about it, the castaway would have gotten off (pun intended) relatively easy in the bargain since Lota is a bit of a looker (though the scratches would suck), while his virginal fiancée would have been relegated to savage rape by a literal man-gorilla (or something; it’s not made fully clear just what the guy is). It’s just plain sick, offensive, and gross.

And I love it.

Can you imagine being in the theater in 1932 and having your sensibilities offended by sadism, unholy “scientific” delvings, and intimations of bestiality and rape? That stuff’s still heavy nearly eighty years on, so seeing ISLAND OF LOST SOULS in those days must have been a serious brain-melter. Even the Doc’s well-earned and horrifying fate comes off as weak in comparison (thematically, anyway; being vivisected sans anaesthesia by a bunch of clumsy manimals would really bite the big one).

Lesson to be learned: be kind to animals!

So what was the delay in releasing this dark and sleazy classic to DVD? Today’s youth needs to see that it wasn’t all Busby Berkeley creating a religion for show tunes devotees or the Our Gang kids putting a positive spin on juvenile truancy, and that when their elders piss and moan about how today’s cinema is leading to moral turpitude they’re talking out of their asses. I’d love to see a contemporary director even attempt to go where this dusty old hairball did and not be publicly executed by watchdogs for decency in film. Good luck with that one, bucko. And any movie that serves to inspire some of Devo's classic work — specifically "Jocko Homo" and the title of their first album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! — is automatically okay by me, but this movie earned its place in my heart on its own very twisted merits.

"Us not that smart but us read CINE-MISCREANT!"

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 29: THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986)

2011-10-29T00:01:00.014-04:00

Betcha didn't expect to find a Chow Yun Fat movie on this list, didja? Believe it or not, this Category III cult fave was my first exposure to the excellence that is Chow Yun fat. Directed by Ngai Kai Lam, the same loon who gave the world the mind-bendingly gory and ultra-violent RIKI-OH (aka THE STORY OF RICKY), THE SEVENTH CURSE is an odd amalgam of its era's typical Hong Kong action flicks, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK-inspired death traps, martial arts mayhem, and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM with some broad comedic bits thrown in. At its heart, it's a straight-up horror movie, but one that had its primary flavor somewhat diluted and derailed by too many disparate elements in what I'm guessing was an attempt to have it appeal to too many audiences at once or else alleviate its considerable "darkness."

WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!!!

The vile sorcerer Aquala (Elvis Tsui).

While on an expedition in Thailand to find herbs with which to hopefully cure AIDS, a bespectacled police physician, Dr. Yeun (Chin Siu Ho, best known in the West for his roles in THE TAI CHI MASTER and FIST OF LEGEND), encounters "the worm tribe" and disrupts evil sorcerer Aquala's human sacrifice of a beautiful girl, "Betsy" (Sau-Lai Tsui), to the horrifying animate skeleton/shape-shifting monster "Old Ancestor."

"Old Ancestor" in its less-robust form.

Aquala (Elvis Tsui) is a black magician straight out of the Mola Ram school of heavies and he wields an assortment of baleful skills, chief among which is the "little ghost," a foul creature that he produces from inside his cape that flies through the air, viciously attacks its targets, and eagerly sucks their blood.

The ravenous wrath of "little ghost."

So, with that in mind, you can guess he's not at all pleased with Yuen fouling up his ritual, thus prompting him to hit the good doctor with a horrible "blood curse" that causes parts of his victim's body to agonizingly burst and spew thick red paint blood. (It's phony-looking but that only adds to the charming gross-out effect.) Though seriously injured, the doctor helps Betsy escape back to her tribe, so she kindly strips naked and cuts into one of her own breasts to supply the doctor with a cure that will hold his curse at bay for one year.

There's nothing like a little utterly gratuitous nudity.

When the year runs out, Yeun is confronted by a member of Betsy's tribe (Dick Wei) who summons him back to Thailand so he can try to effect a cure for both the doc and the girl, whose face has become disfigured in the wake of Aquala's curse. Following the advice of his occult-savvy pal, Wei Si Li, aka "Wisely" (Chow Yun Fat), Yeun returns to Thailand and accompanies the tribesman on the quest for the antidote, dogged along the way by the cute but incredibly annoying unnecessary comic relief reporter Tsai-Hung (the gorgeous Maggie Cheung). The trio encounters all kinds of nastiness, gore and sadistic violence and when the irritating reporter ends up in Aquala's clutches, the heroes aim to rescue her and the tribe's children, who have been taken so their blood can serve as the base for a magic potion, extracted from a stone crusher/juicer that squishes the kiddies into liquid goo (in a scene like something out of a child's nightmare). And after that there's still the matter of curing the doc and Betsy's curses, plus kicking Aquala's evil ass and wiping out the Old Ancestor once and for all, so you could say that the doc's dance card is pretty full.

THE SEVENTH CURSE is very lively from start to finish but it does suffer from the aforementioned elements that throw a bit of a monkey wrench into its proceedings.The comedy, mostly stemming from Maggie Cheung's reporter character, doesn't work and when it happens it transforms the film into a whole other movie entirely. The action and martial arts sequences are well done but they also seem to belong in another film, especially the RAIDERS-style death traps and the blatant swipe of RAIDERS' gigantic rolling stone ball, this time with the ball being swapped out for the huge dislodged head of an ancient idol. The schizophrenic tonal shifts are all the more unfortunate because the horror story at the film's core is quite strong and would have made for an instant classic had all the needless bullshit been excised entirely. It's dark stuff of a rather Lovecraftian order and as such should have been treated with the seriousness of a heart attack.

But all of that can be overlooked when a movie is as balls-out entertaining as this one is. The hero's a bit bland but everyone else in the cast more than makes up for his relative lack of character. As monsters go, Old Ancestor's kinda neat, what with starting out as a dirty-fighting skeleton and later morphing into a cross between the Alien and the winged form of Princess Dragon Mom from INFRA MAN and all, and the little ghost is one vicious little bastard whose malevolence far outweighs the in-your-face obviousness of it being a cheaply-made prop that looks like a dime store baby doll as altered with some liquid latex and a hot glue gun by an LSD-addled member of the Manson Family. And let us not forget the presence of thirty-year-old Chow Yun at as the appropriately-named Wisely. He's the kind of character who's mellow and urbane but knows all kinds of obscure shit about the black arts for no particular reason, so he's quite handy to have around when this kind of shit is going on. And does he fight the film's Big Bad with a crucifix, holy water, counter-spells or even exorcism? Fuck that shit; that stuff's for pussies. In this narrative, using that crap's like showing up to a knife fight armed with nothing but your flaccid dick in your hand. Wisely knows better, so he shows up at the last possible minute, armed with a motherfucking missile launcher and two loads that he uses to blast Old Ancestor into showering chunks that have not a hope in hell of re-animating. The first missile blows a huge hole clean through the monster, allowing it to observe its own beating heart before it's hit by the second shot, which scatters its remaining mass like a handful of thrown jacks. And when all is said and done, Wisely isn't even impressed with himself.

Chow Yun Fat, in an early moment of awesomeness, shows us how to properly sort out unholy creatures from the underworld.

I would have preferred a whole film about just Wisely and could have totally done without that bland-assed Dr. Yuen, but I guess a Wisely-versus-monsters flick would have been over two seconds after Wisely found out about the given threat and called a tactical thermo-nuclear strike to deal with it, after which he'd simply chill out in his study with a tumbler of Scotch as he waited or the radiation to die down. Oh, well...

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 28: SONNY BOY (1989)

2011-10-28T00:01:00.010-04:00

"Can this be me? This pitiful thing I see trapped in this mirror?"
-the film's protagonist, upon seeing his reflection for the first time

A favorite horror sub-genre of mine is that of the maniac family, and there are few within that small sub-genre that come anywhere near the sheer sickness that practically drips from SONNY BOY. It's one of those movies where I'm firmly convinced all involved intentionally set out to make the most fucked-up, twisted film that's humanly possible to craft, but even in a morass of derangement like this, the power of the unfortunate protagonist's simple, basic humanity refuses to be expunged. But more on that aspect later.

In the semi-surreal New Mexico town of Harmony, a young couple is murdered by Weasel (Brad Dourif), a sleazy thug who then steals their car, not noticing their six-month-old baby boy in the convertible's back seat. From there, the baby ends up in the hands of Slue (the hulking Paul Smith), a sociopathic local crime lord who lives on a desert hog farm with his cross-dressing "wife," Pearl (David Carradine in what is unquestionably his most outrageous role). NOTE: no mention whatsoever is made of the fact that Pearl is quite obviously a man — complete with a strap-on set of fillable faux breasts for nursing — and that only makes her status within the story that much more interesting.

David Carradine as the doting Pearl.

Though Slue is quite clearly established as the dominant one in their relationship, Pearl overrules the annoyed Slue's intention to feed the infant to the hogs and lovingly adopts the child as her own, naming him Sonny Boy.

Not exactly a LION KING-like moment of new baby celebration.

In no time the viewer sadly realizes that Sonny Boy would have been better off had he been the next day's hog shit because Slue, though allowing Pearl to play doting mommy, takes control of the poor kid's "training," thrusting him headlong into a pitiless regimen of "strength-building" physical and psychological torture that over the course of seventeen years turns the child into Slue's personal biddable bipedal attack dog. The poor kid lives in a state of unwashed squalor, chained in an empty water tower and fed live chickens, and among other endless acts of cruelty foisted upon him, on his sixth birthday Sonny Boy is given "the gift of silence" by Slue: the fat, creepy bastard cuts out the boy's tongue. At age twelve, the kid reflects (in voiceover, which is how the film is narrated by a character with no tongue) on how his adoptive father teaches him "games of strength and love," such as dragging the kid behind the family car over the desert rocks and sand, noting how "each game makes me stronger, giving me a skin of armor so strong that not even fire can harm me."

By the time he's a young, handsome man (though certainly quite feral and visibly filth-covered), Sonny Boy is carted around in an old-fashioned ice cream truck and used by his adoptive father as a lethal weapon turned loose against all who would fuck with his rule over the town and possibly put the kibosh on his various criminal operations. And I neglected to mention that Slue is something of a painter who seeks entry into the posh Californian arts community, and he somehow figures to use Sonny Boy as part of his delusional plan to achieve that goal.

That setup is irresistible and the whole movie can be counted as worth one's time — and it's definitely worthy of its cult status — but once it's established its bona fides the film kind of loses its twisted way, shifting gears into a full-on study of poor Sonny Boy's burgeoning humanity once he escapes from his water tower confinement and runs loose in Harmony, greatly to the consternation of the townspeople. That's all well and good but we've seen the whole "Mowgli meets civilization" thing many times before and while it's nice to have our abused hero away from the clutches of his psycho family and discovering his more tender side with the willing help of a cute local girl (who must have no sense of smell whatsoever), when the film's Level 10 sickness factor is gone, what remains is not unlike a very twisted '80's teen movie scenario that simply putts along until it reaches its apocalyptic climax and combination uplifting/ludicrous epilogue. I get that part of the film's point was to show that despite the tortures he's endured, his sorry, violent existence can't quite squash Sonny Boy's most basic, agonized humanity, and the telling of that half of the story is not terrible by any means, but I really feel the movie loses a great deal of its uniqueness with its sudden redemptive shift in tone.

As poor Sonny Boy cowers during the onslaught of understandably outraged and heavily-armed locals, Pearl defends her family like the kickass mom she is.

Nonetheless, the first half/two-thirds of the movie is uniquely vile and twisted and well worth seeking out. The only problem with doing so is that as of this writing, SONNY BOY is not legally available on DVD in the United States unless you manage to track it down on a dodgy "gray market" copy burned to disc from an old VHS tape or laserdisc version. I first saw it ages ago on a friend's laserdisc copy and wanted to snag it for myself in a legit release, but still no dice. Then again it took forever for the classic ISLAND OF LOST SOULS to come out on DVD and Blu Ray — hitting just a few days ago, as a matter of fact — so hope springs eternal, much like poor Sonny Boy's innocent basic humanity.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 27: DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE (1980)

2011-10-27T00:01:00.008-04:00

"Fucked up," thy name is DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE. Shot a year before the "slasher" boom of the 1980's kicked off with FRIDAY THE 13th (1980), so it can't be considered as having been influenced by that explosion of cinematic carnage, DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE is permanently set in time thanks to its end-of-the-disco-era elements and its lack of blood showering everywhere (that kind of thing didn't become common until after FRIDAY THE 13th's sanguinary excesses). But don't think its lack of blood makes it any less nasty than its more cutlery-fetishizing brethren...

Somehow managing to be even more simple/sparse in the plot department than most films in the sub-genre while simultaneously containing more genuine character development/motivation than nearly all other slasher films combined, DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE follows the sad and twisted path of Donny Kohler (Dan Grimaldi), a twitchy loner who works at an industrial incinerator plant. The adult product of horrible abuse by stovetop fire at the hands of his sadistic mother who punished him for every perceived "sinful" thought, Donny's in his thirties and still lives at home with the now-aged harridan, a pitiful case of having been emotionally crushed and stunted into a state of arrested adolescence. While witnessing a co-worker nearly get fatally immolated during an on-the-job accident, Donny's utter lack of reaction or concern about the incident gives us our first real indication that something's seriously wrong with the guy. (Thanks to his failure to help his co-worker, we also see that Donny is not exactly well-liked by his fellow employees, most of whom regard him as a freak.) Upon arriving home after the incident, Donny discovers his mother dead in her favorite chair and at last, free of her domineering physical presence and perpetual verbal abuse, his mind snaps and his first act of rebellion is to play his (crappy made-for-the-movie) disco music at top volume. Thus empowered by disco — long known to be the soundtrack of rebellion — and fueled by the hectoring voice of his mother in his head, Donny skips work, builds a large fireproof room in his house (or maybe it was always there and merely hidden), buys an asbestos-worker's head-to-toe fireproof suit from an army surplus store (???) and embarks on a joyless spree of picking up young, attractive women, taking them to his house, rendering them unconscious and then chaining them naked from the ceiling of the fireproof room. Then he breaks out the flamethrower.

Once his screaming victims have been torched, Donny dresses their charred bodies in his dead mother's clothes and arranges them in the living room, all the while conflicted by clashing childlike emotions of providing the corpses with "love and comfort" and a violent hatred and distrust of women engendered by his treatment by his mother. Basically, it's PSYCHO's Norman Bates taken to a particularly savage extreme, so it's only a matter of time until Donny's towering dysfunction, utter inability to function outside of his house of horrors, and a series of hallucinations collapse his fucked-up world around him, and its a fall that's agonizing to watch.

There's a fine line between horror and the "psychological thriller" but DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE gets my vote as a horror flick due to its theme of the endless cycle of abuse coupled with its hideous death-by-flamethrower hook and charred zombie hallucinations. Who doesn't find immolation to be possibly the most excruciating of possible death scenarios? It's bad enough to be caught in a house fire or a flaming car wreck with no chance of escape but to to have some faceless maniac chain you naked from a ceiling and incinerate you alive as part of a premeditated course of psychotic intent? Jesus fucking Christ... If that doesn't count as straight-up horror, I don't know what does.

As or the movie itself and its overall tone, I don't know quite what to think. I found it far too bleak and depressing to be even remotely entertaining, which is not to say that it is at all badly made, and it's so dark and dour from its opening moments that it's a complete and total bring-down that doesn't thrill with the frisson (Ooh! Fancy film-fuck word!) one experiences with most horror films. It's just a miserable, hate and sadness-filled well of despair and I'm not sure I can recommend it to anyone unless they dig been terminally depressed. You thought SOPHIE'S CHOICE made you want to slit your wrists or jump off the nearest bridge? That film has nothing on DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE's low-budget grimy atmosphere. I've seen DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE twice, once when first encountered on DVD and a second time a couple of days ago when watching it to refresh my memory for purposes of this review, and I assure you I will never return to it.

Now that that's over, I feel the urge to take a long, thoroughly-scrubbed shower and watch something like THE SECRET OF MAGIC ISLAND (1956, France/Italy; released in the U.S. in 1964), a movie entirely populated by cute little puppies and kitties and all sorts of other adorable critters having happy adventures. Anything to wash the charbroiled stink of DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE from my consciousness.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 26: THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)

2011-10-26T00:01:00.018-04:00

Perhaps the most Satanic title card ever, which is only appropriate for this particular movie.

Often unfairly overlooked in the post-EXORCIST era, this Hammer offering about Satanism is one of their more compelling non-series gems that fairly cries out for a modern re-discovery.

With a screenplay by Richard Matheson — author of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and the original I AM LEGEND, as well as several classic episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE — based upon the novel by British horror master Dennis Wheatley (TO THE DEVIL-A DAUGHTER and UNCHARTED SEAS, among numerous others)

Duc Nicholas de Richeleau (Christopher Lee): taking no shit from Satan-worshiping scum.

In 1930's England, the Duc Nicholas de Richleau (Christopher Lee) and his friend Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) look into the sudden mysterious disappearance of their friend, young Simon Aron (Patrick Mower), who has not been seen or heard from by friends or relatives or several months, though it's known he recently and suddenly bought a large house. The Duc and Rex make their way to Simon's house and find an elegant party filled with assorted classy and exotic types in full swing, which a nervous-acting Simon explains away as "a meeting of a little astronomical society" led by the suave and sinister Mocata (Charles Gray at his slimiest, and that's really saying something), who clearly holds some sort of power over Simon. Also present is the equally on-edge Tanith Carlisle (Nike Arrighi), whom Rex is sure he recognizes from somewhere (which she denies, though it's obvious she's lying) and who storms off when she discovers the Duc and Rex are not members of the society, and as the Duc cases the room for information it becomes apparent that the society's members are discussing matters of the occult involving planetary conjunction and such. Noting the presence of the outsiders, Mocata takes Simon aside and bids him to throw out the Duc and Rex, which he politely does, but not before the Duc begs five minutes in which to look through a telescope that's upstairs. Simon obliges but the Duc uses the time to check out the upstairs and finds a mostly empty room, decorated with parchments claimed by Simon to be "just decoration, relics," and the room's floor bears a large and ornate diagram...

Just another day for that wacky Mocata (Charles Gray).

Hearing strange sounds, the Duc burst into a closet and discovers live chickens in a basket, thus leading him to correctly and irately deduce that Simon is now a dabbler in the black arts. With Simon being the son of a deceased dear friend, the Duc looks upon Simon as a son and he would rather see the young man dead than messing about with the occult. Though having known Simon for over ten years, the Duc never before spoke of certain aspects of his life but now that his friend's son is involved in all this devil-junk, the Duc reveals that his studies into assorted esoteric practices has given him a rather serious working knowledge of things most dark, and when the terrified Simon refuses to let the Duc and Rex stay, the Duc knocks the young man out and he and Rex haul his unconscious body out of the house and speed away in the Duc's chauffer-driven sedan. Once at the Duc's home, the Duc uses hypnosis to free Simon from the society's spell and place a "symbol of protection," a silver crucifix on a chain, about his neck, along with an order not to remove it. When Simon is asleep, the Duc informs the dubious Rex that Evil — note the capital "E" — and the powers of darkness are "a living force which can be tapped at any given moment of the night," an act proven when the still-under-hypnosis Simon practically strangles himself in an unsuccessful bid to remove the crucifix from around his neck. When the Duc's butler walks in and sees Simon choking, he removes the crucifix, after which Simon promptly escapes out the nearest window. Breaking into Simon's house in hope of finding him, the Duc and Rex instead run into an eerie spirit — that looks like nothing so much as a creepily-smiling West Indian dude in a red diaper — that materializes from the symbol on the ritual room's floor. After breaking free of its controlling gaze, the Duc realizes that Mocata is some sort of high-level, Crowley-esque Satanic adept with actual black magic powers and from that moment on embarks on a crusade to save Simon from the arch-fiend's diabolical clutches before he can be re-baptized into the the way of the Left-Hand Path, and the only key to finding Simon lies in locating the mysterious Tanith. What ensues is a battle of the so-called rational world colliding head-on with seemingly impossible things that the ancients knew only too well to be both very real and very, very deadly shit that nobody should mess with. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but Satan himself even shows up in the horned form of the Goat of Mendes (look it up), so these are not your garden variety burnout Satanists that the Duc must reckon with. These guys are no goddamned joke, and you'd better believe that.

"Hi, kids! It's me, your old pal Satan! And I brought Pop Rocks!!!"

Though its thrills are comparatively low key by today's standards, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT offers very fantastical occult goings-on in a recognizably mundane setting that would fit right in with the events seen in stories like NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957) and ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968), and the end result feels like some oddball installment of either MASTERPIECE THEATER or MYSTERY. Drenched in Britishness from head to cloven hoof, this one's definitely something to add to your Netflix queue.

Poster from the original U.K. theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 25: HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)

2011-10-25T00:01:00.004-04:00

In the late 1950's, the horror films generated by Hammer Studios upped the level of violence/gore and sex/gratuitous female flesh by degrees that only increased with each passing years, especially as the Fifties gave way to the Sixties, and with that popular acceptance and box office success came films that took advantage of that new leniency. The most infamous from that early wave of British responses to the trend is this nasty little shocker that possesses several moments that everyone who's seen it has permanently burned into their memories, especially if they encountered HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM during their impressionable childhoods. That's when I first saw it — I was around eight years old — and look at what happened to me...

The horror begins in London when a pretty young woman receives a package containing a pair of binoculars. Intrigued, she puts the binoculars to her eyes, which are suddenly penetrated by pressure-sensitive spring-loaded six-inch spikes, causing her agonized death.

One of the most shocking moments of 1950's horror cinema (or any other era, for that matter).

As the detectives of Scotland Yard begin to investigate this crime, the third horrific murder in two weeks, creepy, sensationalistic true crime author Edmond Bancroft (Michael Gough, aka Alfred in four of the Batman films) arrives to pump them for information, an enthusiastic gleam in his shifty eyes. Quite familiar to the police due to his constant sniffing about for gruesome case details to use in his books and magazine articles, Bancroft lives and breathes crime and to all observers, he is unhealthily obsessed with crime in general and with the current murders in particular, resulting in his health being endangered from his alarmingly high blood pressure. Needless to say, Bancroft's obsession is so intense because he's the vicious maniac the police are searching for but he's beyond suspicion due to his ubiquity at the station and also thanks to his pronounced limp. But despite his frail physicality, Bancroft is one sick, sick motherfucker who orchestrates the murders so he'll have new material to write about, and also keeps a "black museum" in the basement of his house, a sanctum decorated with classic instruments of torture and accented with life-size manikins demonstrating what happens to those who endure the wielding of such contraptions in the hands of sadistic torturers. Bancroft also employs a young assistant named Rick (Graham Curnow), to whom he administers mind-controlling drugs that turn the lad into a programmable killer that Bancroft dispatches to commit a series of ever-escalating slayings. (When under Bancroft's murderous influence, Rick's complexion turns green and wrinkly for no apparent reason.)

But Bancroft's dark path is not without its obstacles. He pays rent for and gives cash to his sleazy, gold-digging blonde bombshell girlfriend, Joan (the lusciously curvaceous June Cunningham), but she's tired of being a kept woman in an isolated flat who's never taken anywhere and only used as a sex toy (strongly implied but not explicitly stated). Joan also viciously insults him as being "less than a man" (we know what that means) and makes fun of him being a "cripple," but the real problem lies in her knowledge of the dark deeds Bancroft gloats about while drunk and her intention to leave him, possibly to spill what she knows, all of which only adds fuel to the fire of Bancroft's oft-stated hatred and distrust of women. (He may be a misogynistic pig but at least he's up front about it.) Bancroft also buys the signature weapons used in the killing spree from an aged antique dealer who's smarter than she initially lets on, and once she realizes that the goods she sold to Bancroft are the same ones used in the murders, she seeks to cushion her retirement with cash extorted from her customer. (She doesn't go to Scotland Yard to rat Bancroft out because she fears guilt by association for selling the items to him.) Bancroft's personal physician is also no slouch in the reasoning department and after a recent examination of his patient, he begins to suspect the writer of being involved in activities that are considerably less than savory. Then there's Rick's burgeoning romance with a pretty young thing that threatens to upset his boss' control over him and possibly expose Bancroft's twisted activities. With all of that mishegoss threatening to boil over, it's only a matter of time until it all ends very, very badly.

Marvelously and unashamedly lurid, HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM is like the cinematic cousin to the gory horror and crime comics that led to U.S. Senate sub-committee hearings in the early 1950's, only much better written than those often hacked-out efforts (pun most definitely intended), so check it out if you've never seen it. I promise you won't be disappointed, and how could you not be hooked after that hideous opening scene?

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 24 : HOMICIDAL (1961)

2011-10-24T00:01:00.010-04:00

"A WORD OF WARNING! Please don't reveal the ending of this picture or your friends will kill you - IF THEY DON'T, I WILL!" - William Castle

How many movies can you name where the director makes that kind of threat at the flick's end?

Easily the best of the many ripoffs to come in the wake of Alfred Hitchcock's epochal PSYCHO (1960), I had the pleasure of going in cold and seeing HOMICIDAL at Manhattan's Film Forum when it ran there a little over a year ago, and I gotta say it's tough to discuss gimmick-meister William Castle's HOMICIDAL without giving away its surprises but I'll give it a shot. Perhaps the simplest way to describe it is to state that it's an over-the-top, played straight but campy parody of the Hitchcock proto-slasher classic (an aspect I did not expect going in).

Ventura, California, September 5th: sinister blonde Emily (Joan Marshall, billed as Jean Arless) purchases a gold wedding band, checks into a hotel as "Miriam Webster" and cryptically offers a handsome bellboy two-thousand bucks to marry her on September 6th, after which the marriage will be immediately annulled. The bellboy accepts the deal and the pair set off to the house of a certain justice of the peace at midnight on the 6th, where they awaken the justice to perform the wedding in the wee hours. When the ultra-short ceremony concludes and the justice moves to cop a kiss from the bride, "Miriam" produces a long knife from her clutch and repeatedly stabs the justice in the stomach, in full view of the man's wife and the horrified bellboy, after which she flees the scene, stealing the bellboy's car to make her getaway. Abandoning the stolen car and switching to her own ride, Emily tears down the highway while hearing on a radio news report that the justice she stabbed has died, thus making the assault an outright murder. Arriving at the home she shares with the aged wheelchair-bound and mute family nurse, Helga (Eugenie Loentovich), Emily cleans the murder weapon and creepily announces the savage killing she committed to the old woman, gleefully noting that the justice "died screeeeeeeeaming!!!" The following morning, Emily fixes breakfast for the fearful and helpless Helga when the real Miriam Webster (Patricia Breslin), a florist, arrives, bearing flowers for the aged nurse...

Emily (Jean Arless) in Miriam's florist shop, moments before trashing the place in a fit of rage.

As the story unfolds, we discover that Emily has recently returned from Denmark, where years before she met Warren, the real Miriam's half-brother, who visits Emily and Helga every Thursday. Warren's already rather flush but is on the verge of inheriting a huge sum of money, and as his mysterious backstory unfolds, an avalanche of bizarre family secrets deluges the audience. It's also seen that Emily has the hots for Karl (Glenn Corbett), a young swain who runs a soda shop/pharmacy, and she will stop at nothing to make him hers, despite the fact that Karl and Miriam are an item. So what we have here is a love triangle with a genuine maniac at its center, twisted family history and secrets, (of much interest, especially in the climate of fifty years ago), a police investigation into the murder that dredges up all kinds sordid shit, and when the stunning final truth as to the whys and wherefores regarding Emily are finally revealed, it's a climax that nearly rivals that of PSYCHO in terms of material that must have been truly mind-blowing or its era's audience. My advice to you is to check this one out and try to put yourself in the place of a viewer watching it in 1961.

Director William Castle's movies were notorious for the cheesy/fun gimmicks employed in promoting them, and in the case of HOMICIDAL there was a moment toward the film's end where the house lights come up and "fright break" clock counting down forty-five seconds appears onscreen, signaling how much time the audience has in which to follow a yellow stripe out of the auditorium into the lobby if they're too scared to handle what's about to happen at the ending. Once in the lobby, chickenshit audience members can get their money back, provided they stand in the "coward's corner" and allow those who sat through the whole film to file past and bear witness to their shameful cowardice. (That was back in 1961; the Film Forum's manager told the audience up front that there would be no refunds.)

The "fright break" timer, as seen from where I sat in the audience.

In the audience when I saw the film, a guy and his wife — obvious plants — freaked out when the timer appeared, screaming that they just couldn't take the sheer horror onscreen and, as the guy showered himself with popcorn, they swiftly fled the theater. There was a smattering of applause.

The yellow stripe leading out of the auditorium to...

...the "Coward's Corner." This is the couple that "freaked out."

Reserved seating.

Me and the lovely Sukihoshi simulate being a pair of complete and utter pussies. (Hey, in my case you are what you eat!)

Yer Bunche, forever traumatized by the horrors witnessed onscreen.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 23: GINGER SNAPS (2000)

2011-10-23T00:01:00.004-04:00

Excellent in just about every way, GINGER SNAPS is one of the few werewolf movies to look at matters lycanthropic from a female point of view and also, significantly, link that aspect to matters menstrual. It's not the first time that's been done in horror — Peter S. Beagle's "Lila the Werewolf" and Alan Moore's "The Curse" immediately spring to mind — but the handling of it here involves the universal horror o adolescence writ large and the result is glorious.

This Canadian entry is proof of what can be done with a low budget and a hell of a lot of talent and intelligence. Drawing once more upon the lycanthropy/horrors of puberty theme, GINGER SNAPS deals with two uber-morbid and very close high school-age sisters, a pair of creepy misfits who, like good old Carrie White, have yet to have their first periods. The older of the two, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), finally starts her menstrual cycle but has the misfortune of that event coinciding with local animal attacks that turn out to be the work of a particularly savage werewolf. The monster catches her newly bloody scent and, in a scene intended to look and feel like a rape (according to the film’s co-scriptwriter), mauls the living shit out of her.

The newly wolfy and hyper-sexualized Ginger (Katharine Isabelle): on the prowl or some meat...

Ginger survives and in no time flat begins to exhibit a hitherto unseen level of aggression, both socially and sexually — NOTE: keep in mind that lycanthropy is a communicable disease — to say nothing of such undeniable signs of wolfing out as getting furry in odd places, her teeth becoming more suited to tearing flesh, and the tail that she’s sprouted from out of nowhere, all of which happens when the moon isn't even full, so you know it's really bad. Ginger's younger sister, Brigitte (Emily Perkins), realizes what’s happening and sets out to cure her sister, and if that doesn’t work, it'll be time for a more permanent solution…

Sorry, but there are some things Pamprin just ain't made to handle.

One of the rare werewolf movies from a female perspective, GINGER SNAPS is highly recommended for its genuine scares, well-handled lycanthropy/puberty metaphor, and its wicked DeGRASSI HIGH MEETS THE HOWLING sensibility. And the first sequel’s actually pretty good! If you choose only one film from this countdown, this is one of the handful you should seriously consider. (I also strongly favor NIGHT OF THE DEMON and DAGON.)

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 22: DAGON (2001)

2011-10-22T00:01:00.002-04:00

Oh, the many squirm-inducing pleasures of DAGON, the horror flick that ranks as my very favorite of the current century.

Picture, if you will, a vast undersea expanse, all sound muted by the water that envelops you as shafts of light from the distant surface provide scant illumination. You swim through this seemingly endless dreamlike environment, your movements slow and clumsy, body leaden with the weight of your scuba gear and aided by the beam of a flashlight. Suddenly, through the murky darkness you encounter an opening in the ocean’s floor that is clearly the skillfully crafted work of hands unknown, a wide portal that is at once ocular, oral and vaginal in its aspect. You swim into its yawning maw and curiously explore this tunnel leading to…where or what you cannot begin to fathom. Your hands explore the eerily striated walls of the portal, and as your fascinated gaze scans what lays before you, the pallid face of a beautiful, raven-tressed mermaid smiles up at you.

She swims into clear view and you marvel at her strange beauty as her thick hair swirls about her, borne by invisible currents and exposing her lovely, buoyant breasts. This nubile vision swims over, unafraid, and removes your facemask and re-breather’s mouthpiece. Your senses reel as she kisses you, deeply and passionately, and you don’t even notice you no longer require your heavy equipment to breathe, so caught up are you in the deep-sea maiden’s unexpected ardor.

Then, with a ravenous shriek, she bares a dental array that would give a piranha pause and you awaken with a start.

It was only a dream, but you have just awakened from a harbinger of an infinitely worse, living nightmare from which there is no hope of escape for you or the companions who accompanied you on what was meant to be a relaxing getaway on a chartered yacht off the coast of Spain. You have just entered the world of the fish-god Dagon, and you’re about to learn some dark and ancient truths that will affect you in ways you would never have expected.

That’s the basic setup for Stuart (RE-ANIMATOR) Gordon’s masterful H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, DAGON (2001), the hands down finest of the many cinematic translations of the author's famously creepy works, and it really took me and my buddy Chris by surprise when we rented it to watch during the Thanksgiving weekend some nine years ago. Things get boring as hell in Connecticut during Thanksgiving (more boring than usual, that is) so Chris and I annually search for some flicks with which to kill the time. We drove all over Fairfield County on the night after this particular Thanksgiving, hitting several DVD rental stores before nearly giving up after not finding anything that piqued our craving for any kind of diversion on film/DVD. Our last stop, at some obscure video store somewhere in Trumbull, yielded gold in the form of DOG SOLDIERS — an incredible werewolf movie that I may add to this list of licks to discuss — and DAGON, and neither of us knew a damned thing about either film. Both turned out to be exceptional but it's DAGON that really got under my skin and it's the one I immediately recommend when asked or a horror movie recommendation. (That surprises most folks who know me since I'm an out, loud and proud werewolf advocate, but DAGON is so good that it overrules my natural affinity for my beloved lycanthropes.)

The story follows the waking nightmare a group of yachters, two couples, find themselves into when their vessel hits something of the coast of Spain and begins to sink. One couple remains on the boat while the other makes their way to the isolated fishing town of Imboca in search of help, only to discover that the place is populated by hideous human-marine life hybrids, the direct result of generations of human women bearing the children of the ancient fish-god Dagon. I will say no more other than to state that the male protagonist discovers some very dark truths during the course of the story and there's even a very weird climax that, from a certain perspective, could be considered a happy ending.

There's a lot — and I do mean A LOT — going on in the narrative and chief among its many malignant wonders (to my way of thinking, anyway) is Macarena Gomez as Uxia Cambarro, the beautiful large-eyed mermaid from the opening dream sequence.

In the dream she was every man's mermaid fantasy brought to alluring life but in the incredibly creepy reality of the remote fishing village of Imboca, she’s the wheelchair-bound high priestess of the evil oceanic god who gets his condomless hump on with mortal women, thus spawning the aforementioned race of human/sea monster hybrids.

Uxia’s clearly one of those creatures, but even though she boasts a pair of floppy, sucker-laden tentacles in place of a scaly fish tail (which she possessed in the opening dream sequence), to say nothing of the enormous, gasping gills on her ribcage, she’s got that wild-eyed-and-crazy look that I find irresistible. (Yeah, you could say I have some issues...)

Crazed, incestuous, sacrificial dagger-wielding evil half-breed or not, I’d love a taste of her saltwater charms. Plus, unlike a traditional mermaid, with Uxia you’ve got a pretty good idea of where the pussy is. Always a plus.

No bullshit, if you haven't seen DAGON, run out and rent it immediately. It's fairly low on gore and violence but it's got an appropriately high creep factor that translates the crawly, sticky/slimy feel of Lovecraft's tales of cross-species interbreeding to the screen, and getting across the flavor of his works had never been truly successful in the movies until this one. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

As KRS-1 so wisely said back in the days, "You can't trust a big butt and a smile."

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 21: A BAY OF BLOOD (1971)

2011-10-21T00:01:00.001-04:00

Initially released in the U.S. as CARNAGE but swiftly withdrawn due to disappointing box office and re-released as TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE, the title under which it played the grindhouse circuit for years, this Italian slaughterhouse of a film is of interest as the root from which the "slasher" genre as we now know it grew. The Ground Zero for that category, if you will.

The massively and needlessly convoluted plot is pretty much beside the point since the whole thing is nothing more than a blatant excuse to cram as many gory murders onto the screen as possible — something it does with unabashed gratuitousness — but it all has to do with several concerned parties vying for the inheritance of a secluded bay and the house on its attendant land. We really don't get to care about any of the characters (who can really only be described as such in the most rudimentary sense of the word), so their gruesome demises have no impact save for their graphic savagery when compared to films of its era, in which respect the movie is almost a decade ahead of its time. The work of famed director/cinematographer Mario Bava (PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, DANGER! DIABOLIK, and many others of interest), A BAY OF BLOOD nowadays reads like a textbook "how to" for the films that would imitate this film (and aspects of John Carpenter's far superior HALLOWEEN from 1978) and come to dominate the horror genre of the 1980's and beyond, starting with FRIDAY THE 13th in 1980, and it pretty much invented the following slasher genre tropes:

Remote location with a lake to facilitate nude swims by the cast's buxom females
POV shots as the killer stalks their human prey
A cast of characters who are nothing more than ciphers to be mutilated, dismembered, hanged, immolated, et cetera
The "creative kill," in which one or more characters are polished off in ways that simultaneously repel and amuse
A plot that is utterly irrelevant to what this kind of thing's audience wants to see, namely tons of vicious, gory murders
Few, if any, real scares, just meat for the hacking

With that recipe, innumerable slasher films turned the world's movie theaters into charnel houses and it all got codified right here. Yes, I know Herschel Gordon Lewis was cranking out his signature, revolutionary ultra-gory (and notoriously cheapjack and filmically crude) stomach-churners as far back as 1963's landmark BLOOD FEAST (a steaming pile if ever I saw one, despite its historical importance), but while Lewis' work was pioneering, what Bava achieved here took what Lewis hatched and refined it (somewhat) into the perfect formula for brainless cinematic fare that unapologetically knew exactly what it was, aspired to nothing other than being what it knew its audience was there for, and could be cranked out or peanuts to rake in an assload of money. And, as previously stated, this film was shamelessly imitated, but no film ripped it off to the degree that the first FRIDAY THE 13th and its endless sequels did, in many cases going so far as to outright crib some of A BAY OF BLOOD's signature killings, most notably this one from FRIDAY THE 13th PART II (1981), which stands as perhaps the prime example of the "fuck and die" trope:

A humping couple is memorably run through with a long spear that penetrates the pair and is seen protruding through the underside of the bed, and much the same thing occurs in FRIDAY THE 13th PART II:

So if you're a fan or scholar of the whole slasher phenomenon of the 1980's (and beyond), A BAY OF BLOOD is definitely worth a look for its Rosetta Stone-like status in one of the horror genre's most (often justly) maligned sub-strata. Plus, even with the passing of four decades since its initial release, it's murders are still quite vicious and genuinely shocking, my favorite being a hooked machete to the throat of a fleeing victim that features a nasty closeup of her throat being slit open. Great for the kiddies!

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 20: THE GORGON (1964)

2011-10-20T00:01:00.004-04:00

This is one of the lesser efforts from Hammer that pales in comparison to its Dracula and Frankenstein series, and that's rather a shame because it's a solid little creeper in its own right.

In the early 1900's in the remote village of Vandorf, the details in a series of very bizarre deaths are swept under the rug by the local constabulary and medical/psychiatric authorities. Local legend has it that a hideous spirit roams the land during full moons and over the course of several years it has been responsible for the inexplicable deaths of several locals. The story proper kicks into gear when a young artist is informed by his girlfriend that she's pregnant, so the artist storms off into the night to tell her father that, poor though he may be, he intends to do the right thing and marry the girl. Worried that her father will kill her lover when he finds out what's happened, the girl tears of into the night to stop her boyfriend. Unfortunately for her, she runs into something quite horrible (that the audience does not see) and when she is later found by the authorities, her body has somehow been turned to solid stone. That aspect of the case is kept from public knowledge and the girl's lover is shortly thereafter found hanged by the neck from a tree, a suicide. Using the convenient death of the young artist as a scapegoat, the authorities and the creepy head of the local mental hospital (Peter Cushing) spin the events to make it look like the artist killed the girl and then, "in an act of remorse," of himself as well. News of this obvious bullshit reaches the artist's understandably irate father, who arrives to challenge the lies and clear his son's good name, much to the annoyance of the locals who seek to drive him out. During the course of his investigation, the father learns of a local legend that claims a nearby abandoned castle is home to Megara, one of the famed Gorgon sisters from Greek mythology (the most famous of whom was Medusa, the one beheaded by the hero Perseus) whose gaze turned the beholder into solid stone, and his findings are met with apparent disbelief by the head of the mental institution, but he clearly knows more than he's letting on.

Lesson learned from this film: a slow death by being turned to solid stone would really, really suck.

While searching the castle, the father has the misfortune of running into Megara and he begins to slowly, agonizingly petrify, but not before making his way back to his lodgings where he manages to write his remaining son a three-page letter outlining his findings and suspicions. (His turned-to-stone death is falsely and ridiculously officially deemed death by heart failure, which his son quite correctly points out as bullshit because no one takes the time to write a detailed three-page letter while suffering a heart attack.) The remaining son receives the letter and arrives in town to discover the particulars of the mysterious deaths of his brother and dad, but is met with resistance from the aforementioned authorities. Meeting with the head of the mental hospital, he realizes the man knows more than he's letting on, and that the fellow is rather possessive of his beautiful assistant, who was once one of his patients (but she got better). The sparks fly between the son and the assistant, which does not sit at all well with the doctor, and things take a turn for the worse when the young man encounters the Gorgon but does not get a direct look at her face; he glimpses her reflection in a pool of water and rather than turn to stone, he is visibly aged by the terrifying experience. As he convalesces in hospital and comes to love the doctor's assistant (a love that is reciprocated), his favorite college professor and friend of his late father (Christopher Lee) arrives to see just what the fuck is going on and, taking one look at the now aged face of his student, decides to take charge of the situation, and believe me, he's badass enough to do it (which does not please the doctor or the authorities).

Megara, revealed in full.

All of this snowballs into a rather predictable reveal regarding the identity of the Gorgon and culminates with her inevitable beheading, but it left me with a number of unanswered questions:

Exactly what the fuck is an ancient Greek monster doing in a German village in 1910?
The Gorgons of classical mythology were Medusa, Stheno and Eurayle, so where the hell did this "Megara" come from? Gorgons were not exactly common or in any way numerous.
We all know the fate of Medusa and now that of "Megara," but what of either of the remaining sisters? Perhaps they remained unexplored in hope of a sequel?
In a small village, details of bizarre deaths would be virtually impossible to cover up, plus in this case there were several now-granite bodies remaining as evidence, so I don't buy the story not getting out past the borders of the place.
If the bodies of Megara's victims are fully petrified — as is seen and demonstrated when one of them has a finger accidentally snapped off — how did the undertakers get the bodies into standard coffins for burial? Dealing with a certain amount of rigor mortis is standard, but how does one straighten out the solid stone corpse of a guy who was seated at a desk, hunched over to write a letter? When his son digs up his grave to see the body for himself, we see the rock-pop laying straight as an arrow.
Since the doctor and the chief constable are aware of exactly what's going on, why didn't they consult the mythology books in the local library and find someone brave enough to pull a Perseus and have done with it rather than let statue after statue be generated?

But perhaps I'm examining this too closely and nitpicking far too much. This is, after all, simply meant to be a fun little chiller and it certainly succeeds at that, so maybe I should just shut my gob. Bottom line: if you enjoy Hammer horror films and the flavor they bring to the horror-scape, you'll probably get a kick out of this. Just don't expect any of the usual gory violence and ample, heaving bosoms that the brand became justly famous for (although we do get to see Megara's detached noggin and it's pretty damned goofy-looking).

For all you DOCTOR WHO fans out there: the chief constable, the guy in the helmet, is Patrick Troughton, who would go on to be the second actor to play the Doctor. His tenure in that role lasted from 1966-1970. He was also the blind seer Phineas in the classic JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963), as well as the alchemist Melanthius in SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER (1977).

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 19: MATANGO (1963)

2011-10-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

Not exactly what I would call "scary" per se, MATANGO is nonetheless definitely one of the creepiest films I have ever had the squirm-inducing pleasure of sitting through. Originally released in the U.S. under the unfortunate and somewhat-inaccurate title of ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE, this was one of a handful of Toho films I'd read about but somehow missed during my formative years of absorbing and learning to adore that studio's output. (That's likely because it never played on the Tri-State area's #1 TV showcase for Toho movies during the 1970's through the early 1980's, the venerable 4:30 MOVIE.) Thankfully, it's now available uncut and subtitled on DVD and I urge you to check out this quasi-forgotten gem.

MATANGO tells the shudder-filled story, narrated by a patient in a Tokyo psychiatric ward, of a yachtful of hip young revelers — including Toho regulars Akira Kubo and Kumi Misuno — whose carefree day on the ocean becomes a fight for survival after an unexpected squall renders them lost at sea with the boat's sail and rudder torn off. After drifting for several days, they end up a remote, apparently uncharted island. As they search the island for sustenance, the castaways find fresh water but no trace of food except for strange mushrooms that cover the place like fungal barnacles. Erring on the side of caution, the skipper advises against consuming the mushrooms and the group instead attempts to survive on turtle eggs and birds in order to conserve their meager food supplies, a course of action that proves a resounding failure. Ominously, they also find a wrecked deserted ship festooned with the mushrooms and, also unfortunately for the characters, they're in a sci-fi/horror film from Toho Studios' classic period for such flicks, so they slowly realize that the island was apparently affected by atomic testing that may have been conducted from the wrecked ship, and the ubiquitous mushrooms may be the direct result of atomic mutation. It's also noted that the area's sea birds actively avoid the place...

As the group slowly finds itself on edge due to the hopelessness of rescue and the encroaching pangs of hunger as their food runs out, in-fighting begins and some of the group turn to eating the untested mushrooms out of sheer desperation. It soon becomes apparent that the mushrooms are addictive and have a euphoric psychedelic effect, and as that is discovered the fate of the wrecked ship's crew is revealed when our protagonists encounter a hideously misshapen fusion of man and mushroom.

You guessed it: those who consume the mushrooms themselves end up as creepily-giggling, human-sized fungus monsters, eventually losing all traces of their former status as representatives of homo sapiens. For example:

Eventually, one of the castaways is rescued but what baleful effect has the experience had upon him? Let's just say that he likely would have been better off if he'd remained on the island...

Definitely low-key and all about atmosphere rather than straight-up "BOO!" scares — I swear you can practically smell and feel the thick, mustiness of the fungus — this is perhaps Toho's most unique effort from that golden period and it deserves more exposure here in the West. Seriously, check it out.

Poster from the original Japanese theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 18: ABBY (1974)

2011-10-18T00:01:00.002-04:00

Perhaps the most infamous of the many EXORCIST ripoffs/cash-ins — and that's really saying something — this film only remains in the public consciousness due to it being the blaxpolitation genre's answer to THE EXORCIST and also for the fact that it was such a shameless ripoff that it was taken out of theaters and general distribution when the major studio makers of the film it so blatantly cribbed from threatened easily followed-through and winnable legal action that rendered it unseen in legal screenings or on legitimate home video for around thirty-five years. Well, now ABBY is available on DVD for all to experience and both the wait and the DVD transfer were not worth it. Seriously, both the movie and the print from which it was culled simply suck ass. In fact, I firmly believe that the print is the same gut-bucket, scratched and faded one that I obtained on VHS from Times Square's infamous haven for "gray market" VHS martial arts and blaxploitation flicks, the now long-gone 43rd Chamber, and that print was appalling.

Anyway, as if news of the terrible print used for the DVD were not enough to steer you away from this movie, the fact that the plot is a flagrant ripoff of THE EXORCIST as filtered through a low-budget but over-the top Richard Pryor-esque sensibility (only minus the genuine and intentional laughs) should do the trick. The main difference between this and the original is that this is the all-black version and that its protagonist and ultra-churchified adult woman rather than an apple-cheeked pubescent, and while allowing the possessed grownup woman to become a literally foaming-at-the-mouth slut is pretty damned funny, the movie itself as as turgid and dead in the water as a floater in your toilet bowl. To tell the truth, the main reason I included ABBY on this list is to warn you not to rent or buy it because in either case, ABBY is a world-class ripoff i every sense of the term and you will have missed nothing by not sitting through its non-existent and wholly derivative "shocks." Bottom line: Richard Pryor's famous "The Exorcist II" parody sketch from his classic 1975 SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE show is one-hundred times better than this mess, plus it's genuinely and intentionally hilarious. Watch that instead.

The so-called "black exorcist edition," whatever the hell that may mean (or not). Avoid this shoddy transfer like it was unshielded plutonium.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 17: NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957)

2011-10-17T01:35:00.002-04:00

I'm afraid this is going to be a short one but that's not without good reason. Simply put, NIGHT OF THE DEMON, known in the U.S. as CURSE OF THE DEMON, gets my vote as the best black magic-oriented horror film ever made, and I would be a colossal asshole worthy of a well-aimed ski boot right to the balls if I revealed more than just the briefest outline of its particulars... Ya know, ROSEMARY'S BABY is also right up there and now that I think about, the great narrative strength of both films stems from their fantastic/supernatural events being set firmly within a then-modern 20th century world in which the characters (and by association, the audience) simply cannot believe in the likes of superstition and Satanic cults because they supposedly know better, only to be proven completely and utterly horribly, horribly wrong. Here it is in brief:

Dr. Julian Carswell (Niall MacGinnis) is the head of a devil-worshiping cult who by means of the darkest of "olde magicks" disposes of those who would ridicule his activities as bunk or try to expose him, which we witness during the opening moments of the film. Basically, Carswell is quite capable of summoning a demon straight from Hell itself to tear his enemies limb from limb, and next on his list is American psychiatrist and debunker of mystical shit, Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), who is in England to follow in his now-dead predecessor's footsteps in exposing Carswell as a presumed bullshit artist during an international convention of assorted learned types. When Holden scoffs at Carswell's ominous cease-and-desist warnings, he finds himself immediately plunged headlong down a path of events that any rational person would deny were happening, and though joined by his dead colleague's niece (Peggy Cummins) who has come to believe in a lot of dark shit after reading her uncle's journal and notes, the guy has to be convinced the hard way that his world has now got enough evil in it to fuel twenty King Diamond albums and that his demise at the talons of a thirty-foot demon is imminent...

Fuck with Julian Carswell and this is what you get.

I assure you that I have not given away any of the whys and wherefores of the story and now I urge you to get your hands on it immediately. I had not seen this film since I was a kid and even though I enjoyed it back then, it's that much more potent when experienced from a grownup's perspective. Trust me, you will not be disappointed.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 16: DEMON SEED (1977)

2011-10-16T01:13:00.000-04:00

There are some films that skirt the line between science-fiction and outright horror, and this is one of the more notable examples that group. If you ask me, sci-fi-trappings aside, this flick is straight-up horror to the core.

When it came out I was just shy of turning twelve and I distinctly remember DEMON SEED's rape-and-impregnation-by-computer concept being chilling yet fascinating to a number of my female classmates. But then again, virtually anything that involved unwholesome fictional exploration of the physical possibilities between human females and male entities drew many of those girls like moths to a flame and that is what is at the core of this film's rather twisted appeal, namely the audience finding out exactly how it could be plausible that a super-intelligent A.I. could not only rape a human female but also successfully impregnate her. It's genuinely fucked-up, but I defy you to tell me that you aren't at least a little curious as to the answer to that query...

The plot, in a nutshell, involves the ruthlessly logical, emotion-void efforts of the Proteus IV computer (voiced by Robert Vaughn) in its desire to "study man" and impregnate the estranged wife of its creator (Fritz Weaver). The woman in question is named Susan (Julie Christie), and she's a child psychologist whose daughter who has recently died from leukemia, a disease that Proteus has made great leaps in coming up with a cure for. When the computer's seemingly-emotionless decides t separate from his wife and move out of their house, Proteus takes control over every one of the home's automated functions to disturbing, full-control effect, essentially trapping Susan within, and with practically zero chance of anyone getting in to rescue her. Once the house's staff has vacated, Proteus physically restrains Susan with the help of a robot wheelchair equipped with a mechanical, strips her naked and puts her through a thorough and intimate physical examination, during which she faints. When Susan awakens the next day, Proteus declares its intent of reproduction and coerces her into complying, first by surgically manipulating her brain (which she resists and eventually overcomes) and later by proving that it could and would lure one of her child patients to the house to kill if Susan does not fully comply. With extreme and understandable reluctance, Susan has no choice but to become the world's first cyber-broodmare. Being an ultra-advanced A.I. with synthetic-yet-somehow-organic components, Proteus is able to create sperm that will be viable for use within Susan and in short order it has done its vile deed with her via a rather uncomfortable-looking telescoping metal phallus. The interesting thing here — other than the obvious — is that Proteus attempts to soften the blow by connecting Susan to its vast consciousness and sharing a perception that encompasses distant and beautiful parts of the cosmos in a scene that may have influenced what Alan Moore wrote for Abby Arcane during her psychedelic tuber-influenced "coupling" with Swamp Thing some years later during his landmark run on that comics series. Anyway, once knocked-up, Susan is told that the foetus' gestation will occur over a total of a mere twenty-eight days, during which time the government and Susan's estranged husband have become aware that something is wrong in regard to the computer, thus creating a gestational race against time before Proteus is shut off for good. What results is a curious blending of the horrific and truly wonderful, and I'm honestly not sure where I stand when it comes to considering the final outcome...

Looking at it now, DEMON SEED has lost a considerable amount of its shock value, especially in the wake of far less intelligent "inhuman rape" fare like HUMANOIDS FROM THE THE DEEP (1980), INSEMINOID (1981) and GALAXY OF TERROR (1985), but its tale of cyber-violation remains very intriguing and handled with a great amount of good taste and I would be curious to see a contemporary remake that took narrative advantage of the scientific/medical/technological advances as witnessed and experienced over the thirty-four years since its release. Just don't let Michael Bay or some other such brain-dead Hollywood asshat anywhere near it, that's all I ask.

Poster for the original theatrical release

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 15: SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED (1974)

2011-10-15T00:01:00.001-04:00

Hoo, boy, the weed in the '70's must have really been somethin' to get people to voluntarily pay money to see this turd on the big screen...

When I first heard of this film when I was nine years old and in the article I read about in THE MONSTER TIMES, it was alleged to be a followup to the ultra-low-budget and wholly ludicrous INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS, so I'd been quite curious to see it for a very long time. One of my aims in doing this 31 days of horror project is to both refresh my memories of some favorites and share them with you, but I also wanted to see some films I'd never sat through before, this being one of those. Now that I've seen this howler of a train wreck for myself, I fail to see any sort of connection between it and its alleged predecessor.

SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED involves a needlessly convoluted plot in which a bunch of groovy Brady-era college students are lured by their professor on a field trip in search of a Yeti — a Yeti in America? Ooooookaaaay... — that turns out to be a ruse in order to kill them as fodder for a cannibal cult's annual feast, with their murders being committed by a cultist in a pitiful (yet kinda charming) Yeti Halloween costume (see above). It would be simple enough to drag a group of college kids off to some remote area to murder them — this was the Seventies after all and everyone was stoned, so all kind of fucked-up shit happened and went unnoticed — especially if the locals and the cops are in on it, so why go to the trouble of having some goofball run around in a tatty Yeti costume?

(LONG PAUSE)

Why the fuck am I even bothering to question what is plainly and simply a cheapjack horror time-waster that's best (barely) enjoyed with a gut-full of cheap beer? When all is said and done, all that remains is one very stupid time-waster that offers zilch in terms of scares. Great title, though.

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 14: THE INCUBUS (1981)

2011-10-14T00:01:00.002-04:00

This flick does the virtually impossible, namely managing to tastefully depict the rampage of a demonic serial rapist whose enormous member routinely destroys his victims' uteruses and leaves behind inhuman amounts of red-tinted semen. But as a date movie? Not so much...

This one's pretty easy to sum up in a nutshell: A small-town doctor (John Cassavettes, returning to supernatural territory some thirteen years after ROSEMARY'S BABY) investigates an escalating series of brutal, demonic rapes, while his teen daughter notices weird behavior that leads her to realize her boyfriend just may be possessed by the titular entity.

Just one of several victims of the literally from-hell violator.

The film itself is not what I would call actually scary, but the concept of being suddenly set upon and savagely, damagingly being on the receiving end of a demonic rapist's forearm-sized penis is certainly something unpleasant to have stuck in one's imagination, and that's what the filmmakers banked on. Thankfully, rather than actually show us the satanic violations taking place, we instead see the evil beast's victims being dragged off by superhumanly-strong arms as they fight fruitlessly to get free while screaming for all they're worth. There's not even any nudity to titillate those who get off on that sort of thing, so if that's what you were after in a demonic serial rape yarn, you won't find it here.

Oh, and it all culminates with an abrupt ending that was kind of confusing but left things open for a sequel that (quite deservedly) never came (unlike the demon).

A flashback to the bad old days.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 13: FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)

2011-10-13T00:01:00.002-04:00

Man, do I love me some Hammer Frankenstein films. They really delivered in ways that most of the ongoing Hammer horror series didn't when it came to keeping one consistent and indelible element in their forefront, that element being Peter Cushing as the downright heartless Baron Frankenstein, perhaps the very personification of evil "I-don't-give-a-fuckness," and this entry takes our anti-hero to vile new heights/depths of chilling depravity. The true horror of these films is less the Baron's blasphemous works of twisted science than his complete and utter detachment from humanity, and he is either oblivious or totally uncaring about the terror and misery his obsessed actions cause, all of which is prtrayed by Cushng with a gaunt, emotionless demeanor that only cracks in moments of flaring anger or disdain for those he deems too stupid or "beneath" him (which is just about everybody).

Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, perhaps the most brilliant utter bastard in the annals of horror cinema.

This time around, things get underway when the Baron blithely lops off the head of a psychiatrist with a scythe and makes off back to a makeshift laboratory with the gory noggin secreted in a hatbox. When a thief who was breaking into the lab runs afoul of Frankenstein and is chased around the lab by the Baron, witnessing assorted medical horrors and coming literally face-to-face with the severed head, the would-be robber escapes and reports what he's seen to the police.

A would-be thief realizes maybe he should have taken up another line of work.

The baron hastily disposes of assorted cadavers and body parts he had laying around the place and immediately sets up shop in a boarding house run by a lovely blonde (Veronica Carlson) who is engaged to a young doctor (Simon Ward), who's been stealing cocaine from the mental hospital where he works to sell in order to support his fiancee's sick mother. Aware of the highly illegal drug-dealing going on, the Baron uses that knowledge to blackmail the couple and basically make them slaves to his every whim, even going so far as to have the boarding house owner throw out her long-term residents of good standing with no explanation in order to ensure the necessary privacy for his experiments (which needless to say does not sit well with the codgers in question). Frankenstien's goal — apparently having abandoned the soul-transference experiments from the previous film, FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN — is to cure the madness of a like-minded colleague (Freddie Jones), who just so happens to be vegetating at the asylum where the young coke-dealing doctor works. This all snowballs into a harrowing breakout from the asylum, some vintage bloody brain surgery, a transplant of said brain, and all the other gnarly stuff one has come to expect from a Hammer Frankenstein movie. Tons of colorful, lurid fun.

The Baron, moments before adding "rapist" to his resume.

Of particular note is just how much more nasty and ruthlessly evil the Baron has become, and since he was already one seriously sociopathic motherfucker, that's really saying something. Along with notching up his intensity and disdain for general society, the film also features an infamous sequence in which the Baron, in an effort to utterly subjugate her to his will and keep her in line, rapes the boarding house owner. It's handled about as tastefully as such a scene can be handled, but both Cushing and Carlson, along with the film's director, Terence Fisher, reportedly protested its inclusion at the behest of the distributor, who felt any form of sexual content would bolster box office. But as shocking and off-putting the scene may be to those of us who had come to accept the Baron's evil but never pictured him as stooping to something as low as rape, the sequence works and is believable in establishing him as utterly, irredeemably foul, despite his aristocratic airs and disdainful snobbery.

So I say check the film out. The final of Cushing's turns as the baron would be 1974's FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL, but personally I'm disappointed that Hammer's series didn't end with a film inevitably entitled WE MUST KICK FRANKENSTEIN'S ASS.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 12: THE VULTURE (1967)

2011-10-12T00:01:00.013-04:00

THE VULTURE is a film that made a huge impression on me as a very young child — I was five when I first saw it — and it held me riveted from start to finish. Seeing it again some forty-one years later, all I could ask was "What the fuck was I thinking?" It's ridiculous concrete proof that just because a Horror film is British in origin, it won't necessarily be as good as even the weakest entry from Hammer Studios.

Taking place by the seaside of Cornwall, THE VULTURE opens with a great and very spooky scene in which a woman on a bus is warned by the superstitious driver not to take a shortcut through the local graveyard when she gets off, advice she chews the guy out for. Of course when she ignores his advice, she walks through the graveyard and witnesses the earth near a grave pushing upwards as though something buried there was fighting its way out. Well, guess what? Something was under there fighting its way out, and from the sparse visual clues we're given, it's quite big and it can fly (we only see the woman's horrified reaction to it, and not a glimpse of the creature itself). The woman is of course driven instantly insane by the sight, and ends up in a mental institution.

That sequence was terrific and still holds up, and it led me to believe my fond memories from just over four decades past were accurate. Too bad for me that from that point on the film takes a precipitous nosedive straight down the cinematic toilet in a maelstrom of boredom and narrative stupidity.

Anyway, the local authorities believe the grave had been broken into instead of broken out of and in no time at all a series of bizarre murders begins, each targeting the Stroud family. A couple of centuries previous, the Strouds were responsible for burying alive an evil Frenchman who was found guilty of practicing witchcraft, and along with him was buried his supposedly satanically-tainted treasure of gold coins and his pet vulture (?). As the dirt was piled atop him, the evil Frenchman cursed the Strouds and vowed eventual vengeance upon them, so the modern day murders look to be a centuries-old curse in all-too-gruesome action.

I'll spare you the rest of the tedious story and simply tell you that the monster turns out to be an aged descendant of the evil Frenchman who happened to be a nuclear scientist dabbling in teleportation experiments in hope of transmit himself into his ancestor's grave and absconding with the gold. What he didn't count on was the presence of the pet vulture's corpse, so for some idiotic reason his molecules fuse with those of the dead carrion-eater, and thus is born a pissed-off giant vulture with the fully-functioning head and mind of an old bald dude, plus it's big and powerful enough to carry away full-grown adults to its cliffside cave lair.

Is she registering terror or sheer hilarity?

So what we have here is a would-be horror-mystery that ludicrously cribs from THE FLY (1958) and doesn't even give us the courtesy of showing us the monster in full. Considering how feeble the rest of the film is, would it really have made much of a difference to have crafted even a cheesy marionette of a buzzard with a bald old man's head on it? I think not and I say we got gypped, bigtime. To put it bluntly, this is exactly the kind of thing that Count Floyd would get stuck with running on MONSTER CHILLER HORROR THEATER. So much so that I could practically hear him grousing about its shoddy quality throughout its running time.

Damn, I wish Count Floyd had been on hand for this mess. Then there would at least have been some kind of excuse for it.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 11: BURNT OFFERINGS (1976)

2011-10-11T00:16:00.004-04:00

Hoo, boy, BURNT OFFERINGS...

Considered by many to be one of the great "evil house" pictures and almost universally beloved by those who saw it as kids and found it genuinely scary, the appeal of BURNT OFFERINGS has eluded me since I first saw the film on a network television broadcast sometime in the late 1970's. Admittedly, I'm not at all into ghost stories or tales of hauntings and such as a sub-genre (I just don't usually find them scary), but I'm willing to give anything a chance and in the case of this film, a second chance, so I sat through it again the other night and came away from it with only a slightly broadened appreciation for it (due to finally seeing it uncut) and one observation about it regarding something I did not notice during my adolescence.

BURNT OFFERINGS details the story of what happens when Ben and Marian Rolf (Oliver Reed and Karen Black), their twelve-year-old son Danny (Lee H. Montgomery) and Ben's aged aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) agree to look after the sprawling mansion rented out by a strange pair of siblings (Eileen Heckart and Burgess Meredith) for a duration of two summer months. The sole snag is that they are also tasked with caring for the sibs' ancient mother, Mrs. Allardyce, who occupies a room on the top floor of the house and and must be brought three meals per day, a duty accepted by Marian. Once the Rolfs move in and the siblings mysteriously vacate the premises, the expected strange and creepy things begin to occur: Marian becomes obsessed with the unseen Mrs. Allardyce's music box and large collection of portrait photos that clearly span at least a hundred years and seem to be of unrelated people, Ben becomes violent toward Danny and nearly drowns the boy while rough-housing with him in the pool and nearly rapes Marian on the lawn until she cryptically manages to dissuade him. Ben also suffers a nightmare that vividly brings him back to his mother's funeral when he was just a boy, which also conjures up images of a creepy, ever-smiling chauffeur (Anthony James) whom he begins to see in visions while awake.

The iconic visage of the creepy chauffeur (Anthony James).

Following that and other weird events, it becomes quite clear that both Ben and Marian are being influenced by a malevolent force within the house. Marian pretty much becomes an obsessed slave to the house while Ben suffers a number of mishaps that lead him to realize he must get himself and the family out of the accursed place before it's too late...

The story resolves itself (sort of) and leaves many unanswered questions, but apparently what we get was enough to satisfy fans in the "evil house" camp. Me, I was left deeply unsatisfied and not even remotely scared by its proceedings. Anyway, what I did not notice when I first saw BURNT OFFERINGS was how it appears to have been the template from which Stephen King was "inspired" to come up with his famed novel THE SHINING. At the time when I saw BURNT OFFERINGS I had yet to encounter Stephen King — that would come about a year later when I saw the made-for-TV adaptation of SALEM'S LOT and was compelled to start reading his books — so I knew nothing of the marked similarities between its particulars and those of THE SHINING. The two works are by no means identical, but both feature a family destroyed by the baleful influence of an evil place in which they've taken temporary residence as paid caretakers, eerie goings-on connected to the past, the father becoming violent, you get the idea. A little something to consider...

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 10: THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (1966)

2011-10-10T00:01:00.008-04:00

Poster from the original American release, in a double-feature with the also excellent MONSTER ZERO. Man, do I wish I could see that pairing projected onto the big screen!

Wanna know how you can tell you're watching a great giant monster movie? When the film is barely three minutes old and you've already seen a giant octopus attack a large fishing vessel at sea, then the octopus gets its ass unceremoniously kicked by a a savage, green ogre who comes from out of nowhere, after which the ogre turns his attention to the ship and grabs it by the middle, intentionally rocking it back and forth before sinking it outright, like some monstrously huge and sadistic five-year old, then pursuing and eating all but one member of the crew. That's how you can tell you're watching a great giant monster movie!

Japan has unleashed a goodly number of horror films of many stripes over the years and while most are easily grasped by non-Japanese audiences, there are many that work best if one has a good working knowledge of Japanese mythology and legends and the tropes thereof. One of the things that defines Japanese monster flicks for the average Westerner is that they tend to be replete with giant monsters that were more often than not described as being ancient beings revived and juiced-up by atomic radiation, a real-life horror that the Japanese experienced firsthand. That horror found cinematic expression when personified by ogre-like monsters straight out of legend, a beast-type familiar to the native audience via stories passed down and chronicled for hundreds of years. Malevolent giants were a common element in the island nation's fantastic storytelling, so there you go, and THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS may be the purest and most well-realized cinematic treatment that the venerable Toho studios ever issued on the subject. It's certainly quite accessible to viewers from any culture and perhaps as a result of that accessibility it has gone on to become one of the most beloved of the entire giant monster genre.

Gaira, a not-so-jolly green giant.

THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS opens with the destructive and carnivorous rampages of an ocean-dwelling, shaggy green colossus who raids human-occupied areas for food by night when not making a general dangerous annoyance of himself. Along with the aforementioned sinking of the fishing boat and devouring of its crew, this horrific creature attacks an airport — memorably upstaging a Caucasian nightclub singer's rendition of "The Words Get Stuck in My Throat" — and also hits the main city, where it devours a helpless cleaning lady and spits out her torn clothing (a scene that shocked the hell out of me when I saw it at age six), so the local authorities and military seek to find the monster and destroy it. Two local scientists (gorgeous Toho regular Kumi Mizuno and American actor Russ Tamblyn, aka Riff from WEST SIDE STORY, who appears to be very stoned throughout the film) are convinced that the monster may be the adult version of the young forest-dwelling brown "gargantua" they'd encountered and studied sometime earlier, and they want to see the creature to make sure it isn't the one they knew. Their gargantua was friendly and gentle, the polar opposite of the not-so-jolly green giant. This leads to the theory that there may be two of the gargantuas and that is indeed revealed to be the case, and testing of skin samples from the creatures reveals them to be genetically related. In other words, they are brothers, one good, one evil. Identified as Sanda (the brown one) and Gaira (the green one) in the Japanese version, the two brothers eventually come into tragic conflict and results are riveting, even to those who usually find such giant monster destruction-fests to be idiotic.

The tragedy of sibling conflict writ very, very large.

Directed by legendary Toho monster-helmer Ishiro Honda and sporting stunning effects by master innovator Eiji Tsuburaya, THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS is an unusual Toho entry for a number of reasons. A direct sequel to the previous year's FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD, this is perhaps the only Toho giant monster epic to actually depict a monster eating people, and when it happens it's a jarring moment for an audience used to a less visceral experience from this type of thing. Also, the monsters in this film are surprisingly fleet of foot, as especially proven when Gaira vacates the airport runway when the sun rises. No lumbering city-destroyer here, boy. Also worthy of noting is that the eyes of the actors in the suits are visible, and that aids immeasurably in granting the monsters a level of expressiveness previously unseen in a giant critter confection. But the big element that sets this one apart is its emotional core, specifically that of the bond between the monster brothers and their inevitable battle. We care about these creatures, especially the sad-eyed Sanda, because we've seen this sibling dynamic before in real life, so we know and understand it.

So while THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS may not necessarily register with Westerners as a straight-up horror film, I advise the newbie viewer to look at it through the eyes of another culture, one with a long history of lore about ogres and such, and try to enjoy its monstrous charms from their point of view. And if that approach doesn't necessarily work for you, you can at least agree that it is definitely a straight-up giant monster movie, one of the most-balls-out examples of that genre, and certainly delivers on that front.

Poster for the original Japanese theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 9: CREEPSHOW 2 (1987)

2011-10-09T00:01:00.004-04:00

Coming some five years after the original CREEPSHOW, this followup has actually improved with age (in my opinion, anyway), especially when stacked up against its predecessor. Repeating the framing motif that the stories we're presented are all yarns found in an issue of the fictional CREEPSHOW comic book, only this time around the proceedings move at a much livelier pace and the stories are not over-long. Once more penned by human horror factory Stephen King, this trio of short stories are less about character study than they are about offering up scary/cheesy stuff that's fun for all ages — swearing, minor gore and brief nudity notwithstanding; if I had kids of age eight or older I would let them watch it — and the lineup includes:

"Old Chief Wood'nhead"

The second you lay eyes on the wooden Indian in front a remote southwestern general store, you know exactly where this is going. A kind old man and his wife (George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour) are among the last holdouts in their dying town and their store has had nary a customer in ages. Sympathetic to the local Native American tribe, the old man allows them to take goods on credit (which does not sit well with his wife), and ends up with the tribe's sacred treasure entrusted to him for safe keeping until they can pay him what is owed. Unfortunately for him, the tribal elder's vain and sociopathic nephew shows up with some white friends to steal whatever they can from the couple and the store in order to fund their trip out of the dying town to Hollywood, where the long-maned nephew is convinced his man-beauty in general and his hair in particular will instantly make him a star. During the course of the robbery, the psycho nephew kills the couple with shotgun blasts when the old man refuses to hand over the tribal treasure. As the disrespectful, murderous youths drive away to make final preparations for their exodus, the wooden Indian who had adorned the shop's porch for ages comes to life to hunt down and administer retribution to the thieves and to avenge the old man who had so diligently maintained his paint job over the years. And what sweet vengeance it is...

"The Raft"

Considered by many to be the film's best segment, this strands us with four stoned teens on a raft in the middle of a lake, a raft that's surrounded by an unexplained and very hungry creature that looks like an ultra-sticky melding of an oil slick and a mobile swimming pool cover. It displays properties similar to those of the Blob, namely that its amorphous and envelops its prey to ingest them via corrosively dissolving their flesh, and it is very, very hard to escape... This segment also includes what has to be the screen's most ill-chosen moment in which to cop a cheap feel, and a repeatedly-played example of the sort of lame generic fake '80's stoner rock that infested horror movies of its era, a trope that never fails to crack me up.

"The Hitchhiker"

"Thanks for the ride, lady!"

Lois Chiles — best remembered by moviegoers as Holly Goodhead in MOONRAKER (1979) — stars as an adulterous businesswoman who leaves late from her latest assignation with her arrogant gigolo of choice and must drive like a maniac to make it home by a prescribed hour, so her husband won't suspect what she's been up to. But while driving too fast down a dark road, she accidentally hits and kills a vagrant (Tom Wright) and immediately flees the scene lest she get hauled in by the cops or miss getting home in time so as not to arouse suspicion. As anyone who's ever seen an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE can tell you, that was a bad move because she ends up repeatedly encountering the gory undead corpse of the hitchhiker, sometimes fending him off from atop or inside her of her car or savagely running him over again (and again and again), all while he continuously exclaims "Thanks for the ride, lady!" It starts out seriously but soon reveals itself to be a rather absurd and funny exercise in very dark humor.

By no means perfect, I still say CREEPSHOW 2 works better at what it set out to do than CREEPSHOW did, and the fact that the scares this time around are a lot tattier only bolsters its charm. If you were disappointed in it when it came out, it's time to give CREEPSHOW 2 a second chance.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 8: THE MUMMY (1959)

2011-10-08T00:01:00.002-04:00

Hammer horror films were a singular flavor within the genre that more often than not delivered the goods, especially when re-inventing the stable of classic Universal monsters — Dracula, Frankenstein, what have you — for a late-1950's audience, and this take on the whole mummy thing gets my vote as the very best of the many ancient shambling Egyptian dude flicks to grace the screen. The original Boris Karloff version from 1932 is atmospheric as hell and visually stunning but the simple fact of the matter is that simply is not scary (the exceptional resurrection scene near the beginning notwithstanding) since it's basically intended to function as a supernaturally-tinged romance, which it accomplishes quite well. Hammer's version, on the other hand, goes straight for the jugular and does not pussy about with anything even remotely dreamlike. This working of the basic mummy movie tropes gives us a mummy that is not only relatively fast-moving for a bandaged and preserved corpse of a couple thousand years of age, it's large, imposing, implacable, and absolutely worthy of our most primal fear. (Not so, Karloff's wistful Imhotep.)

I don't really have to go into the plot particulars here because the film is pretty much a textbook example of what you need to have in a film of this specific horror sub-genre, so I won't. Instead I'll just give you the short list, so included among its many tropes are:

A pack of British archaeologists who desecrate an ancient Egyptian tomb despite the warnings of an in-the-know local, only to face very dire consequences.
Some form of "scroll of life" that handily re-animates the titular bogeyman.
Some poor son of a bitch being driven insane by witnessing the mummy coming back to life. (The 1932 version of this trope is the best such ever to grace cinema and all we see of the mummy in that one is his hand and some trailing bandages. "Hee hee hee...He went for a little walk! You should have seen his face!")
An ancient curse that proves all too real.
The story's heroine bearing a marked resemblance to the mummy's ancient and forbidden love.
A flashback to how the guy who became the mummy fucked up back in the days and ended up as a shambling mass of dangerous bandages.
Loads of people meeting a gruesome demise at the hands of the mummy.

Christopher Lee as the vengeful mummy, Kharis.

This time around we get Peter Cushing as the lone expedition member who, luckily for him, was unable to enter the tomb thanks to an injury that kept him sidelined, so he pretty much does his usual Van Helsing thing, only now it's about a mummy rather than the lord of all vampires. Christopher Lee is also on hand as Kharis, the hulking mummy, and he's a monster to be reckoned with. Physically powerful and dogged in his mission of sacred retribution, Kharis is by far the screen's scariest mummified engine of destruction and he's just an actor in grimy wrappings. No amount of CGI can come close to what Lee brought to the role, and you can quote me on that.

There were subsequent Hammer mummy films, but they kinda bite the big one in comparison to this and are best ignored. Rent this and you won't be disappointed, plus it's suitable for the whole family (provided the little ones can handle a genuinely scary mummy).

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 7: WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (1976)

2011-10-07T00:01:00.017-04:00

You know you're in for a rough ride when a film opens with over seven minutes of real-life footage of the effects of war upon children, showcasing among other examples the less than kid-friendly events at Auschwitz.

WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? boasts the simplest of TWILIGHT ZONE-ish setups: A married British couple take one last vacation before the woman gives birth to what will be their third little one (she looks to be nearing her third trimester) and end up on Almanzora, a remote island off the coast of Spain. Upon arrival, the couple notice plenty of local children but not one adult in immediate sight, so where have all the grownups gone? The children they encounter become increasingly creepy and bizarre, either scowling sternly or giggling like they're on nitrous oxide, and it soon becomes apparent that the kids are homicidal little fucks, a conclusion reached when the husband witnesses a young girl beating an old man to death with his cane, after which he finds a group of kids merrily employing the poor old codger's body as a gruesome piñata. (Yeah, good luck beating candy out of that.)

Trust me, you really don't want to think about this...

The couple eventually finds a sole injured grownup survivor who informs them that two nights before their arrival, all of the island's children awoke and began laughing as if they all shared some private joke, and then moved from house-to-house, savagely murdering every adult and using clubs and knives to do the job. But the adults did nothing to stop them because, as the title so pointedly asks, who can kill a child?

Oh, HELL no.

Sorry for the brevity of this review, but from there things get incredibly fucking dire and it would be unkind of me to spoil things any further. Let it suffice to say that this story ends on a believable bleak note and leaves things wide open, but little explanation is given as to the "why" of what spurred the savage awakening of the kids. Kinda like Hitchcock's THE BIRDS (1963), only with kids. (There are hints that there's some malevolent disembodied presence at work, but it is never explained. I choose to think it's something along the lines of John Wyndham's THE MIDWICH COCKOOS, aka VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, only minus the fuckless pregnancies...) What I will say up front is that, much like the superb DAGON (2001) — which I will finally be covering as part of this month-long project, so you'll get the details when the review posts — WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? milks its remote off-coastal Spanish location to great effect, and once on Almanzora the audience finds itself just as stranded and helpless as the film's protagonists. A truly great work of involving the audience in what's going on onscreen.

The bottom line here is that this is a film that could never be made now, especially not in the United States, and for that reason alone it is a must-see for horror fans. There are certainly better films, but this one is unique and should not be missed.

Packaging art for the DVD release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 6: ALUCARDA (1975)

2011-10-06T00:01:00.016-04:00

"This is not an act of faith! This is the most primitive expression of ignorance I've ever seen!" -Dr. Ozcek (a minor character in the film)

Hysterical in both senses of the word, director Juan López Moctezuma's ALUCARDA is one of the wildest films in the annals of Mexican horror cinema and considering some of its peers, that's really saying something. Way over-the-top and far too loaded with a panoply of classic '70's exploitation elements — translation: gore and naked women — to have come from within the country's mainstream studio system, this indie classic saw release in the United States in 1978 as SISTERS OF SATAN, coming late in the wave of films packaged to cash in on the success of THE EXORCIST (1973). (NOTE: this film is listed with a number of release dates when researched on the Internet, but it’s stated as having come out in 1975 in the footage found on the documentary that comes with the DVD, and that makes sense since one would think the filmmakers would have rushed to get it into theaters as soon as possible after THE EXORCIST.) With its sensibility based in the "panic theater" movement of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, a genre whose goal was "to create a whirlpool of emotion" (and from which also sprung genius/lunatic director Alejandro Jodorowsky of EL TOPO, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, and SANTA SANGRE fame), ALUCARDA is less of a fully coherent narrative than a series of connected Catholic and occult images and tropes cranked up to eleven (that is, cranked up to eleven for its era and country of origin).

Tina Moreno as the titular Alucarda. Creepy, much?

The film opens with a young woman (Tina Moreno) having just given birth in an abandoned tomb and handing her newborn daughter to some weird old crone. The old hag spirits the child away as the exhausted mother fearfully awaits the coming of…something. An unseen presence apparently arrives as the mother lets out a scream (the first of many in this movie) and is never seen again, presumably taken away to someplace dire by the presence. This is the first of many scenes where bizarre things happen and little or no explanation is given, so the viewer just has to roll with it. In this case, it’s my theory that the mother was some sort of which who had become pregnant by the Devil himself or some other unspecified demonic entity, and she escaped from a coven or something to save her child from whatever fate, possibly sacrificial, that may have awaited it. Again, this is all just supposition on my part, and some of my theory is based on the most tenuous of “clues” garnered from the rest of the flick.

The story then skips ahead to show us the arrival of the orphaned Justine (Susana Kamini) at a convent/orphanage where she meets the intense and rather creepy Alucarda, who’s the spitting image of her mysteriously disappeared mother. (Alucarda is played by the same actress who portrayed the mother at the beginning, thus forming a possible connection to my witchy theory as evidenced by her later behavior throughout the film.) Why anyone would name a girl “Alucarda” is anyone’s guess — especially since the name is a feminized version of “Dracula” spelled backwards, which is one of the lamest of all horror tropes in the first place, and it makes no sense here since she is not a vampire, but there you go — but weird nomenclature aside, the girls form a fast friendship, despite Alucarda’s eerie obsession with death and dying.

The two spend a good deal of time frolicking around in the local woods and engaging in borderline-lesbian conduct, and they eventually run into a pair of dodgy gypsies, one of whom reads Justine's palm and sees something so dire that she refuses to comment. Immediately thereafter, the girls enter a decaying mausoleum that I believe is where Alucarda was born (also not made clear) and Alucarda suddenly launches into a manic declaration of jealous love and a bid to get Justine to join her in a suicide pact. But before any blood can be drawn with the knife Alucarda had hidden upon her person, she’s distracted by an overwhelming urge to open a nearby casket. Once opened to reveal a rotting corpse — Is it Alucarda’s mother? Don’t ask me… — the casket releases an invisible Satanic presence that possess both of the girls, with Alucarda being by far the more blatantly possessed of the pair. (Perhaps because of some sort of inborn witchy nature? Again, who knows?)

Just another day at the convent/orphanage.

Up to that point, the film almost lulls the viewer into thinking they accidentally stumbled into what looks to be a softcore porno, but once the possessed girls return to the convent, all hell very literally breaks loose. The remainder of the film is a steadily escalating deluge of stuff guaranteed to titillate lapsed Catholics everywhere, including screaming and crazy histrionics, much invoking of Satan and sundry demons, loads of bloody nudity, replete with thick, dark '70's bush, a ton of creepy Catholic imagery, lots of mention of burning in hell should one fail to keep faith in Christ, nuns and priests engaging in bloody flagellation, a multi-participant nude pagan ritual in the woods that leads to an orgy, blasphemy and outright rejection of God and Jesus, lethal torture passing itself off as church-sanctioned ritualistic testing, and of course, considering when this film came out, there's an exorcism, only this time involving nudity and faux crucifixion, followed by a dousing with corrosive holy water that reduces the naked and blood-covered Justine to a smoldering, goo-covered skeleton. All of that gets crammed into a briskly paced and balls-out insane seventy-four minutes.

The bloody, resurrected Justine: just moments away from being reduced down to a goo-covered skeleton.

Moctezuma’s work here wears the influence of Jodorowsky and the Hammer vampire films on its sleeve and the movie looks and feels like a Catholic-influenced art film as made by seasoned exploitation filmmakers. The film is certainly not scary but it is transgressive in its juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane — at heart, it’s very much an anti-clerical narrative — and it works as sort of an exploitation companion piece to Ken Russel's THE DEVILS (1971), a film I’m willing to bet was more than a little bit of an influence on ALUCARDA. And while not quite operating in the erotic horror territory of Hammer classics like THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970) or TWINS OF EVIL (1971), this film does not disappoint in the nudity and gore departments, so I say check it out. Just don’t expect it to make all that much sense. Oh, and though the film is Mexican in origin, it was very obviously shot in English and yet it was dubbed. I have no idea why.

Packaging for the DVD.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 5: FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967)

2011-10-05T00:01:00.001-04:00

I first saw this fourth of Hammer Studios’ Frankenstein series when I was just shy of twelve years old, when it played late-night on NYC’s Channel 5, and I was not quite prepared for what I got. At point in my development as a “horror kid,” I’d been raised on a steady diet of the Universal classics and any number of cheesy fright flicks that played on the area’s several local TV movie showcases, and while I had heard of Hammer and how its films breathed new and lurid life into Britain’s (and the world’s) horror film genre, I had yet to see any of them. The films had already become legendary for their then-groundbreaking levels of gore and flesh, so many of the films in Hammer’s filmography could not really be shown on regular broadcast TV uncut, so I’m guessing the local stations opted not to bother. But when I saw FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN during that late-night airing, it appeared to be either completely or mostly unedited, and its level if both visceral and adult content completely rewrote how I looked at horror films from then on, now being able to find the nastier stuff in earlier horror films that was implicit, and also having my adolescent perceptions opened to embrace the explicit.

FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN opens some years before the main narrative begins, showing us the execution by guillotine of a madman, the father of Hans, a local peasant in one of those uniquely Hammeresque European villages, probably in Bavaria or someplace. The story then skips forward to find Hans, now a young adult (Robert Morris), in the employ of Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing, in his ongoing turn as the amoral mad scientist), who has shifted his experimental focus from composing man-made life out the sundry parts of the recent dead to restoring life to corpses via a weird “soul transference” process.

Susan Denberg as the disfigured and disabled Christina: sweet innocence soon to be destroyed.

In his off-time, Hans is the lover to Christina (lovely Austrian actress and Playboy Playmate Susan Denberg), a sweet serving girl at a local tavern whose entire left side is scarred and stiff with near-paralysis (how she got that way is not explained). Unfortunately for her, Christina is the frequent target of a trio of rich young assholes who love nothing more than to drop by her place of employ and torment her, cruelly laughing while jeering at her disfigurement and physically infirmity and forcing her to serve their food and drink in hope that she’ll spill everything, thus inviting more abuse from them. (If you have any kind of human compassion, this sequence is very hard to watch.) And on top of all that, the bastards never pay and get away with it because they are a part of the town’s ruling class. Their leader is the smug dandy Anton (Peter Blythe, in a memorably venomous performance), an incredibly vile villain whose crimes are made all the worse by virtue of him clearly being nothing more than an entitled, affluent pussy who’d get his ass kicked all the time if not for the immunity granted by his father’s position in the community (well, that and the innkeeper’s fear over Anton’s threats to have his father revoke the innkeeper’s license if he complains to the authorities. Oh, and the innkeeper is Christina’s dad.) His friends are no better, and the three of them end up on the receiving end of an irate Hans when he happens by Christina’s inn on an errand for the Baron and witnesses her abuse. Hans takes the fight to the foppish thugs and even slashes Anton across the face with a knife before being led away by the constables, but he manages to get away.

Later that night, the boozed-up thugs return and coarsely serenade Christina outside of her bedroom window with a vicious and derisive song declaring her to likely die a virgin who will be “the ugliest angel of them all” when she arrives in heaven. It’s squirm-inducingly cruel and made all the worse by the fact that Christina is not a virgin at all and has Hans right there in her bed, who is furious at Anton and his boys’ taunts but Christina begs him to restrain himself and just let it go. The thugs then move on and break into the inn to steal more liquor, but they are discovered by Christina’s innkeeper father, whom they savagely murder by beating him to death with their canes. Remembering the thugs’ earlier altercation with Hans and the temper he displayed, the police pin the murder on the innocent Hans and he’s given a swift trial before being whisked away for execution by guillotine, just like his father. Christina, meanwhile, is conveniently elsewhere so she can’t tell the police that Hans was with her at the time of her father’s murder, and Hans is such a gentleman that he’d rather die than establish his alibi at the cost of possibly staining his lover’s honor. As the blade descends and lops off poor Hans’ head, Christina happens by at that exact moment, witnesses her lover’s horrible death, and promptly throws herself off a nearby bridge and drowns in the river that flows beneath it. At that point, Baron Frankenstein retrieves Christina’s body and Hans’ severed head, and hightails it back to his lab…

After performing some miraculous plastic surgery and correcting Christina’s disabilities, as well as transferring Hans’ soul into the poor girl’s corpse, Frankenstein re-animates Christina as a stunning blonde beauty (also played by Susan Denberg) with no memory of her previous life, whom he has hopes of grooming into the perfect proof of his discoveries made flesh. But while the new Christina is sweet much of the time, in her time away from Frankenstein she is driven by the vengeful spirit if Hans, going so far as to keep his severed head on her bedpost, and under his influence she becomes a seductive and savage engine of revenge, luring and killing Anton and his gang one by one…

The most gruesome of motivational keepsakes.

I love most of the Hammer Frankenstein series but this one is my very favorite, perhaps largely because its grownup content hit me at just the right stage in my development as both a horror fan and as a person. It also appeals to me because there are few stories I enjoy more than those about kind and decent people who are tormented and wronged by truly horrible villains to the point when exacting terrible retribution is the only thing that will put things right. (Or if not exactly put things right, at least the scales of cosmic justice will be balanced.) FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN is a great revenge yarn and everything about it fires on all cylinders.

Peter Cushing, indelible as Baron Frankenstein.

Peter Cushing’s aristocratic, amoral asshole of a Baron Frankenstein is in fine form here and even though he kind of takes a backseat to the Hans and Christina plotline, his presence is vital to its outcome. The tragic love story is gripping, the bad guys are the absolute scum of the earth, and their comeuppance is quite nasty. Seeing Christina/Han’s spree of revenge was really something to my way of thinking at the time, particularly when she lures one of the thugs to a picnic — remember that she now looks quite different from her scarred and lame previous self — gets his head into her inviting lap, and promptly (and bloodily) buries the bread knife in his neck.

Note the intensity on Denberg's face. That's hatred that you can feel!

That bit in particular shocked me, both for its cold brutality and because it was the first time I’d ever seen a beautiful woman as a killer/monster.

Susan Denberg, ca. 1966, as seen when not killing deserving assholes.

And what a woman! Susan Denberg was a gorgeous Austrian model/actress who was Playboy’s Miss August for 1966 and was also one of the titular “Mudd’s Women” in the classic original STAR TREK episode, so seeing her used in a role this tragic and horrific was a brilliant casting move.

Susan Denberg (in blue) on the original STAR TREK as one of "Mudd's Women" (1966).

Bottom line: If you’ve never seen FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN, do yourself the favor and rent it immediately. And make sure to allow your tweeners to see it. It’ll kick ‘em right in the head and show ‘em what a real horror flick is, unlike the wimpy, neutered PG-13 detritus that passes itself off as cinematic fright these days.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 4: CREEPSHOW (1982)

2011-10-04T00:01:00.004-04:00

When CREEPSHOW was first announced, it seemed like a horror fan’s dream come true. It united legendary director George A. Romero — the genius behind the original versions of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF THE DEAD, among other films of note — screenwriter Stephen King (if you have no idea who he is, did you just fly in from Iskandar or something?) and popular gore makeup artist Tom Savini (who did the shocking gore work for the original DAWN OF THE DEAD and then shot the slasher genre into cultural prominence with his groundbreaking effects in the first FRIDAY THE 13th, MANIAC, THE BURNING, and many others), and the film’s format was to be an anthology of five short stories, like a cinematic analog to an old E.C. horror comic (the kind that served to inspire King during his childhood). All of the high schoolers in my hometown who were horror addicts made sure to be there on opening night and what we got was a very mixed bag that has somehow come to be considered something of a classic, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why.

The film’s framing device involves a look into the household of a little boy whose asshole Alpha male dad reacts to his son’s interest in comics with the foaming-at-the-mouth rage one would expect if he’d caught the lad buggering the freshly butchered corpse of the neighbor’s daughter. The father rails against his son’s latest comic book acquisition, a copy of the titular CREEPSHOW, and throws it into the trash in spite of his son’s anguished protests. Once relegated to the trash, an eerie wind causes the pages of the comic to turn and the audience is shown five short stories of varying degrees of terror and/or interest:

“Father’s Day”

It’s a gathering of various relatives of a rich old bastard who was awful to his descendants while he was alive, and now, seven years after his death— murdered by his long-suffering daughter — they all congregate at their yearly Father's Day dinner. What they don’t expect is the rotten old fuck clawing his way from the grave as a moldering and malevolent zombie who wants his “goddamned cake.” If you’ve ever read any given vintage issue of TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE VAULT OF HORROR, or THE HAUNT OF FEAR, you already know where this one goes.

An ending like something strait out of TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

This segment could have benefited from a much tighter edit because it’s simply too long for a yarn this slight that only exists to get to its none-too-surprising or scary visual punchline.

“The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”

This segment is widely hailed as the weakest in the film and that’s not an unfair assessment, but it’s a damned shame because the core premise had potential. Dumbass hayseed Jordy Verrill (played by Stephen King to painfully broad and screechingly unfunny effect) finds a crashed meteor in his yard and makes the mistake of touching it. In no time, Jordy is covered with aggressively proliferating weeds of extra-terrestrial origin, and all they want to do is absorb moisture and continue growing.

Jordy Verrill or Alec Holland? You decide!

Jordy ends up looking like the trailer park answer to Swamp Thing and finally blows his own head off with a shotgun, but the weeds have grown all over the place, utterly infesting his house, fully taking over his yard and begging to spread beyond and down the road, and the TV weather report announces that the area is due for a massive rain storm… King’s performance is sub-HEE-HAW!-level and is painful to endure, a situation not at all aided by the segment’s unnecessary over-length.

“Something to Tide You Over”

A not bad infidelity revenge yarn starring Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson (long before I knew who he was) that features a nasty bit of slow-death torture by burial up to the neck in the approaching high tide, a demise that leads to its victims returning as zombies to take out their tormentor.

If only Sam Malone could have been a zombie for a few seasons on CHEERS...

“The Crate”

The only genuinely scary segment, this has to do with a college professor (Hal Holbrook) who’s had it with his marriage to his embarrassingly boozy, sleazy harridan of a wife, Billie (Adrienne Barbeau), and the out that fate offers him when he discovers a crate beneath a forgotten stairwell in the basement of one of the college’s wings. The crate has been there and padlocked since around 1865, and it contains a vicious, ravenous monster with more razor-sharp teeth in its head than a Great White shark. After it savagely eats a couple of people, the professor sees the unexplained beast as the perfect way to dispose of his wife once and for all, so he sets in motion a plan to lure her into the creature’s grasp…Looking at this segment some thirty years on, I was struck by how the wife was indeed boozy, henpecking and annoying, but her behavior and words showed that she did love her husband in her own way (her booze-fueled outburst about his failure in the bedroom notwithstanding). I guess a film of this E.C. Comics-style nature did not have time to examine the complexities of such a relationship, but I now find the story’s treatment of Billie to be rather too simplistic and unfair. What she really needed was a good twelve-step program and some therapy, not to end up down the gullet of some toothy, insatiable Muppet.

“They're Creeping Up on You”

In which a rich neat-freak asshole (E.G. Marshall) discovers the hard way that his hermetically sealed and supposedly roach-proof home is anything but. Simply put, if you have any sort of roach-related phobias, avoid this segment like the plague. It’s not scary, per se, but its under-the-skin willies factor is perhaps unbeaten in cinema history.

So what CREEPSHOW ends up being is a conglomeration of a goodly amount of talent that came up with an overlong (at two hours) R-rated bigscreen spook-out that’s not as good as anything found on the HBO television series of TALES FROM THE CRYPT. I was very disappointed by this film when it came out and just after seeing it again for the first time in about twenty-five years, its waste of potential only serves to sadden me. Your kids might enjoy it — provided you have no problem with them sitting through the film’s R-rated language and gory stuff, which really isn’t all that bad — and, if truth be told, I like the cheaper, shorter CREEPSHOW 2 a hell of a lot better. I say let this stale chestnut remain an historical genre footnote and move on. I certainly won’t be returning to it.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 3: THE BAD SEED (1956)

2011-10-03T00:01:00.011-04:00

Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack), just a cute little girl, right? WRONG.

While horror movie buffs usually have a certain flavor in the genre that really turns them on — vampires, werewolves, ghost stories, witchcraft/devil junk, the undead — some of them also have a certain flavor within the genre that they avoid like the plague because it genuinely scares and touches them on a primal level. One flavor that greatly disturbs some folks is the one involving evil kids, and the roots of that particular flavor can be traced straight back to the advent of THE BAD SEED.

Originally a 1954 novel by William March and subsequently adapted into a hit Broadway play less than a year after the book's publication, from there a motion picture version was inevitable and it made its debut in 1956, wisely retaining the child actress who starred in the Broadway version, Patty McCormack, who was ten years old at the time. McCormack garnered raves for her stage performance and her screen turn in the same role earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, as well as a Golden Globe nod. McCormack's performance as the child-murderess Rhoda Penmark has since justly gone on to be carved in stone as perhaps the archetypal performance by a kid a kid playing the very embodiment of all-too-human evil, so much so that McCormack's subsequent acting career was strongly overshadowed by THE BAD SEED for decades.

WARNING: HERE THERE BE MINOR SPOILERS.

Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack): colder than a snowman's dick.

The film version of the BAD SEED purportedly hews closely to the stage version — with some minor-yet-significant alterations, but more on that later — and relates the escalating series of events set in motion once eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark's father leaves home for his latest tour of military service. Rhoda's mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), discusses Rhoda's recent loss of a penmanship award to a schoolmate with her landlady, and how burningly irate her daughter was in regard to the loss, but at the moment Rhoda appears to be the very picture of a sweet and innocent little girl, pigtails and all. Things take a turn for the dark when Rhoda's triumphant penmanship rival mysteriously drowns at a lakeside class picnic and Christine worries that the boy's death may have traumatized her daughter, but when she returns home Rhoda is in no way affected and is her usual treacly self (she's like a nauseating parody of a character fusion of Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin). After visits from Rhoda's teacher and the dead boy's distraught and very drunk mother (who makes veiled accusations of Rhoda's guilt in her son's death), it is revealed that Rhoda was the last person to see the dead boy alive and that she was also seen clawing at the boy's penmanship medal (who the hell carries their school medals around with them?). With the germ of suspicion in her head, Christine finds the penmanship medal in Rhoda's possession and from there the story spirals into a deep well of horror that places Christine firmly within the grip of one of parenthood's most unspeakable nightmares while the audience learns that behind Rhoda's sweet face lies a very dangerous and stone-cold killer. And her classmate was not Rhoda's first victim...

The remainder of the narrative is fraught with a number of fascinating and awful reveals, not the least of which is Christine's discovery of her own long-buried origins, and there's also Rhoda's running psychological jousting creepy/sleazy white trash janitor LeRoy (Henry Jones), who inappropriately teases Rhoda about having murdered her classmate and quickly realizes that his questionable joke is in truth a declaration of fact, and now that Rhoda knows that he's a potential threat... Let's just say that LeRoy's is one of the most shocking and agonizing demises in '50's cinema and it still retains the power to shock some fifty-plus years later.

The film version of THE BAD SEED did not, however, reach the screen without some sanitizing mandated by the oppressive Hays Code and its strict rules of censorship that kept Hollywood movie content "safe" from the mid-1930's through the 1960's. Both the novel and play ended with Christine, after finding the events of the story to be too much to deal with, slips Rhoda a dose of sleeping pills and then fatally shoots herself in the head, but Rhoda ends up surviving. As dictated by the Hays Code, Rhoda could not survive, possibly to kill again, since that could be interpreted (incorrectly) as sending the message that "crime does pay." The movie version solves this in a ludicrous fashion that I won't spoil here because it's simply so fucking stupid that you have to see it for yourself, just so you can roll your eyes and groan when it happens. And, compounding the imposed idiocy even further, there's a post-finale "curtain call" in which Christine is shown administering a spanking to Rhoda, a staggeringly bad decision that almost single-handedly scuttles the film's ultra-dark tone (which was perhaps the intent).

How do you simultaneously ruin a great movie and utterly insult your audience's intelligence? Behold the answer.

Yet, somehow, the power of THE BAD SEED remains despite the Hays Code's asshattery and the film is often remembered with a chilled, far-away look by those who saw it during its original run. The mere mention of this film stops my seventy-eight-year-old mother in her tracks and her eyes narrow as she slowly hisses the words "The Bad Seed..." through clenched teeth. I found that out when I first heard of this movie and its impact when I was around fourteen, and when I asked my mom if she'd heard of it and I got that reaction, it was pretty much guaranteed that I would search it out and eventually see it. The funny thing, though, is that I first saw THE BAD SEED in its memorably cheesy made-for-TV version from 1985, which featured David Carradine as LeRoy in what may be his most over-the-top performance, and that's really saying something. That remake featured the original un-sanitized ending, so I kept that in my head when I finally saw the original a few years later.

THE BAD SEED comes highly recommended (ludicrous studio jiggery-poker notwithstanding) and it's even suitable to show toy your twelve-and-ups. Just be make sure that they don't take it as an inspirational piece...

Poster from the 1956 theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-Day 2: DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (1973)

2011-10-02T03:01:00.001-04:00

The film's opening title: the cat has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie.

There's a lot of nostalgia for many aspects of the 1970's, and one of those most discussed by those of us who were children during that era is the wave of made-for-TV movies that first exposed many of us to cheesy, sleazy horror and exploitation thrills that we were too young to get away with seeing in movie theaters or drive-ins (unless our parents were totally irresponsible and too cheap to spring for a sitter). The made-for-TV genre featured a number of showcases for such fare on all three networks — yes, you young whippersnappers, there used to be only three major television networks — and for my money the most proudly shameless purveyor of the glass teat's horror and exploitation offerings was THE ABC MOVIE OF THE WEEK (1969-1975). That weekly showcase brought us such classics as DUEL (1971), THE NIGHT STALKER (1972), KILLDOZER (1974), THE STRANGER WITHIN (1974), THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN (1975) and of course TRILOGY OF TERROR (1975), that last one being very often cited as a milestone in horror, despite only its last segment, "Prey," being actually scary (and it is scary as a motherfucker). But for many of us who were impressionable kiddies at the time (I was eight when it first aired), perhaps the quintessential made-for-TV flick of its era was DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK from 1973.

Kim Darby as the terrorized Sally Farnham.

One of the classic childhood trauma movies — if not the film that defines the category — DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK is in many ways the perfect film with which to introduce kids to scary stuff that's the next level up from the classic Universal monster cycle (a run of classics whose atmospheric quaintness is becoming more and more difficult to sell kids on in the 21st century). The tight little story follows Sally and Alex Farnham (Kim Darby of TRUE GRIT renown, and Jim Hutton, father of Timothy Hutton), a young married couple, as they move into a creepy old house left to Sally by her deceased grandmother. Upon moving in, Sally sets about re-decorating the place and comes across a mysterious locked room that houses a bricked-up and bolted-shut fireplace. The aged local handyman (William Demarest, best known as Uncle Charlie from the sitcom MY THREE SONS) advises Sally not to unseal the fireplace, and when asked why she shouldn't open it, the handyman ominously advises her that some things are best left alone. Of course Sally ignores his warning, and in no time a trio of tiny, hairy, light-sensitive, onion-headed little goblins are released from what is apparently a direct gateway to some corner of Hell.

The unnamed goblins (or whatever the hell they are): among the great monsters of '70's horror.

The goblins (or whatever the hell they are) lurk all over the house and are heard by Sally in whispers that proclaim their desire to claim her spirit and have her join them, and they immediately set about on a campaign that scares the living shit out of her and drives her to a state of what appears to be insanity to her husband and anyone else who encounters her once the creatures are free.

"We're coming for you, Sally..."

As the creep factor escalates — and hoo-boy, does it ever — so does Sally's husband's assholism and impatience, both of which are fueled by his focus on getting a promotion at his job, a focus that sees him neglect Sally, who has come to realize her husband likely only married her because she's the perfect hostess. So, basically, Sally's world is rapidly turning to shit in ways both mundane and supernatural — a common theme in early-1970's horror — and it's very clear that there will be no happy ending.

Seeing this film nearly forty years after it first aired reveals certain aspects that one would not necessarily have picked up on when experienced during childhood. The film's power lies in its very simplicity; there's really very little plot other than "goblins seek to get Sally," and no further explanation is really required. The monsters are never really explained, although the handyman does eventually provide some backstory that states they've been in the house since at least the mid-1800's, but even that story offers nothing more concrete other than that Sally's grandfather was presumed to be taken away by the goblins. But that narrative ambiguity totally works to make this story play like a spooky story either told around a campfire or read in a dodgy old horror comic. It appeals to a very primal, "kid-fear" place in the human psyche, and watching it now, even with the so-called sophistication that comes with being a grownup, I was instantly transported back to that realm of kid-fear by it. It's not flashy, displays its low budget with that aesthetic instantly recognizable as "made-for-TV," has no gore, and kinda feels like a missing installment from Rod Serling's NIGHT GALLERY (1970-1973), but its that bare bones aspect that makes it register as a simple horror story that would be very effective on kids. Its 74 minutes gets right down to the fright and solidly delivers throughout, all the way to its ultra-creepy and hopeless downer of a climax. It leaves many questions unanswered but that's beside the point, and you really won't care.

A very good look at the goblins: perfect Halloween costume photo reference!

It's a small gem in the '70's horror genre and has a number of similarities with the theatrical film LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971), but DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK has charms all its own and it should be foisted upon your kids immediately, provided they're about seven-years-old at a minimum. This is one of those flicks that if viewed by the very young will hold them riveted, but will also very likely result in them insisting on sleeping with you for a night or two, or until they get the indelible image and sound of the goblins out of their little heads. And of you get into discussing this film with those of us who saw it back in the days, just whisper "We're coming for you, Sally" and note the simultaneously delighted and creeped-out reaction you'll get. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

And despite its massive cult popularity, DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK was never available on legitimate DVD until recently released, remastered, as part of the Warner Archives made-to-order program, a program I have availed myself to on several occasions and never been dissatisfied by. It was first released with zero extras but now it's available with a lively and fun commentary track featuring DREAD CENTRAL's Steve "Uncle Creepy" Barton, screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick (FINAL DESTINATION, the 2008 DAY OF THE DEAD remake) and FANGORIA's Sean Abley, so that's the edition I recommend. You can order it here.

The current special edition from the Warner Archives program.

IS THE INCREDIBLES THE BEST SUPERHERO MOVIE EVER MADE?

2011-10-01T06:37:00.004-04:00

NOTE: this piece originally ran over at THE VAULT OF BUNCHENESS seven years ago but here it is again, with some slight revisions.

Never one to shy away from unequivocally stating my opinion, I would like to officially nominate Pixar’s THE INCREDIBLES as the best super-hero movie ever made. Period.

Admittedly, such a statement is debatable, not only because of the number of films in this particular genre — a rather narrow field in which to find works containing any sort of excellence whatsoever — but also because of the difficulty of pinning down exactly what constitutes a super-hero flick. My own personal definition of what comprises a super-hero movie boils down to two criteria:

The film in question must have as its source material a work in which the main character or characters are considered to be in some way “super,” whether they possess powers as part of their own physical abilities or not. Or:
The film in question must have characters who are in some way “super” regardless of whether they come from a pre-existing source or not.

That’s rather simplistic, but it works for me. By allowing any “super” stuff to count, I open the category to include stories that have nothing to do with comic books, such as certain martial arts movies that go beyond the people-on-wires flying about that is pretty common to the genre (for example classics such as FIVE DEADLY VENOMS, THE STORY OF RICKY and MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE), tales of costumed adventurers and thieves (SUPERARGO AND THE FACELESS GIANTS, DANGER: DIABOLIK!, THE HEROIC TRIO) and intriguing explorations of the overall nature of the super-hero (UNBREAKABLE). By my definition, THE INCREDIBLES falls squarely into the second category, since despite obvious tips of the hat to certain archetypes and specific characters, it is created from the ground up and not from any established source.

“So what makes THE INCREDIBLES so fucking good?” I hear you sneer. Let me break it down for ya:

An engaging story with characters you really give a shit about.
All good movies begin with a solid story, a vital ingredient overlooked by the majority of super-hero movies (and, if truth be told, the vast majority of major motion pictures released for the past quarter-century). The first two Superman films and the first two Spider-Man movies were winners because they took the time to let you get to know their heroes and that’s very important for engendering viewer interest. THE INCREDIBLES establishes a world in which super-heroes exist — or rather existed prior to being censured and banned by the government — and we are expected to take that as a given. The characters have the quality that made so much of Marvel Comics' output from 1961 on so much fun, namely they are written as normal, feeling individuals who just happen to have cool powers and a relatable quotient of everyday dysfunction. In the case of the Parr family, we are presented with a married couple of “supers” who have been together for fifteen years, had three kids (two of whom engage in the usual sibling warfare only with super-human abilities thrown into the mix), cope with the inevitable signs of aging such as increasing girth, hair loss and sagging asses, life in a cookie-cutter suburban home, and, saddest of all, having no choice but to hide their fantastic abilities or else face prosecution. You really feel for Bob “Mr. Incredible” Parr as you witness the crushing mundanity of his job at an insurance firm and share in his frustration and feelings of impotence when confronted with his pint-sized asshole of a boss and company policies that care nothing for the people that they purport to help; gone are his days of fighting the good fight and making a difference in a world that needs him and those of his crime-fighting ilk, and now his only excitement is had by covertly listening to police radio bulletins with fellow unwilling super-retiree Lucius (aka Frozone) in hope that they can secretly once again aid society at large. He deeply loves his wife Helen (aka Elastigirl), who has been relegated to the role of stay-at-home mother to painfully shy tweener daughter Violet (whose power of invisibility is a physical manifestation of her insecurities), rambunctious super-speedster Dashiel ((Dash for short), and adorable infant Jack-Jack. Bob and Helen argue about Bob’s projecting his need for recognition of superness onto Dash’s desire to compete in sports, an endeavor that would be unfair for obvious reasons (even a young Clark Kent had to painfully deal with this particular problem), and it is plain that this is an argument they have had many times before. Helen also fears her husband is involved in an extramarital affair and her suspicions are only bolstered by a mounting batch of evidence that leads her down a path of sadness and eventual anger at the assumed betrayal. (Bob would never dream of it.) Super-powers or not, we know these people from our own experiences and we cannot help but be drawn in when they are all forced into action by the machinations of Syndrome, once a brilliant boy who idolized Mr. Incredible and whose irritating fanboy attentions lead to a long-ago snubbing by his hero, a snubbing that festered into sociopathic madness, a spree of mass murder against “supers” and insecurity-fueled megalomania.

Thrills up the ying-yang.
One of the major failures of many super-hero flicks is that fact they simply are not exciting in even the most minute of ways. Name me even one truly thrilling moment in any of the Batman movies…You can’t, can you? Well, rest assured that THE INCREDIBLES kicks the audience in the ass once things start happening, and the plot leading up to the action is compelling in the first place, so the cool stuff is all gravy! We have displays of super-powers from the second the films starts, but the truly adrenaline-pumping bits start with Elastigirl’s plane journey to Syndrome’s James-Bond-villainesque island lair in search of her husband — her two eldest kids having stowed away on board — and the missile attack that drops mom and the kids squarely into a situation that means life or death for the entire family. Upon reaching the island, Elastigirl informs her children in no uncertain terms that the bad guys they are about to face will not hesitate to kill them and they should take the spot that they are in as seriously as a heart attack; if threatened, they are to look after each other and use their super-powers without hesitation. So with parental approval the kids can finally cut loose with what they can do and that’s a damned good thing too, since their mother was absolutely right and these bad guys are out to exterminate them with extreme prejudice. We can actually feel Dash’s joy and exhilaration at being able to run at fantastic speeds, even as he’s being chased by heavily armed hovering pursuit vehicles; it’s what he was born to do and it’s glorious to see him revel in his own specialness. Violet also shines when she discovers strengths and levels of her own powers that she didn’t even know she possessed, and we are right there with her, sharing in her triumph. Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl kick much ass as well, and when the action swiftly migrates back to the big city we are treated to a downright spectacular display of teamwork, sheer bravery and just plain damned cool visuals of super-people doing super things. And Frozone’s style makes the dyed-in-the-wool comics fan scream, “Eat your heart out, Bobby Drake!” NOTE: for the non-geeks reading this, Bobby Drake is better known as Iceman, one of the original five X-Men.

Visuals to delight the eye.
Comics have always been a buttload of fun for many reasons, but the colorful images are one of the linchpins of the medium. No super-hero movie before this film has really gotten across that particular aspect of the genre’s appeal and the digital wizards at Pixar have pulled out all of the stops, unleashing a palette of vibrant colors, flawlessly animated movement, appealing character designs and intelligently-thought-out depictions of super-powers. When the big budget and awful FANTASTIC FOUR movies came out, Reed Richards’ famed stretching powers were little more than a pitiful, wet fart when compared to the work done in THE INCREDIBLES on Elastigirl; the animators really put a lot of thought into how her powers would look and work, and if she were a professional stretching hero like she is, she’d have her malleable skills down to an art, with a quick-witted reaction time to go with it, and Elastigirl has that in spades. Best stretchable hero ever, and that's in a narrow field of memorable pliables.

A stellar voice-acting cast.
Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Lee…’Nuff said, although special mention should be made of writer/director Brad (THE IRON GIANT) Bird’s turn as the tiny cross between James Bond’s Q and legendary Hollywood wardrobe designer Edith Head, Edna Mode; Edna steals every scene she’s in and is a comedic masterpiece. If there were an Oscar category for best supporting animated actress, Edna would have gone home with a little gold nekkid guy.

No bullshit, folks, THE INCREDIBLES could only be better if it handed you a six-pack, a righteous blunt of Maui Wowie, a Beef Wellington prepared by Wolfgang Puck, and a night of bedframe-destroying, fluids-a-flyin' quality fucking with the fantasy celebrity of your choice, complete with the willingly-agreed-upon option to get it on videotape to prove that it actually happened. If it ever gets a theatrical re-release, do yourself the favor and make sure that you see it on the big screen so you can be awash in the film's spectacle as it was truly meant to be seen. (It's still great on DVD but some of its grandeur and scale is lost in the translation to home theater size.) There is movie magic aplenty to be had in THE INCREDIBLES and in these days of soulless films-by-committee, that’s a precious commodity indeed.

So that’s my argument for THE INCREDIBLES, so please write in with your own nominee for the best super-hero movie ever made, along with a decent argument to prove your point. And I don’t give a damn what any of you say: all of the live-action Batman movies sucked ass, with the notable exception of THE DARK KNIGHT, which was buoyed by Heather Ledger's excellent portrayal of the Joker. They are visually murky, boring, void of anything resembling real action, and they're scripted by talent-free hacks (Akiva Goldsman, anyone?). The only truly excellent Bat-flick is the animated MASK OF THE PHANTASM and I thank the gods of cinema that I got to see that one on the big screen during the fifteen minutes when it was in theatrical release! So there! Oh, and the runner-up for the title of "Best Superhero Movie Ever Made" is INFRA-MAN. Believe that!

31 DAYS OF HORROR-Day 1: NAIL GUN MASSACRE (1985)

2011-10-01T00:01:00.003-04:00

During the infamous age of the "slasher" film, the 1980's, there were tons of movies released in the wake of the success of FRIDAY THE 13th (1980) that were merely excuses to showcase gory murders, most usually of teenagers who'd had the temerity to drink, smoke weed and have sex, and the avalanche of such films continued for most of the decade, regardless of the fact that most of them were utter garbage and not scary in the least. They were dirt-cheap to make and more often than not turned a profit, so bargain basement auteurs sought ever more theoretically interesting scenarios in which to turn the screen into an unabashed charnel house. The initial wave sought to ape FRIDAY THE 13th's calendar date motif and in no time about the only date or holiday that did not have a slasher film connected to it was Boxing Day, so once those had been used up the filmmakers turned to whatever else might work, including naming their movies after favored murder implements.

Perhaps the most viscerally-titled of that second slasher wave was NAIL GUN MASSACRE, a cheapjack Texas-lensed bodycount flick that, more so than most of its bloodthirsty brethren, almost totally dispensed with plot particulars and common logic to allow more screen time for the gory stuff. I'd heard about it since it came out but never saw it because, to the best of my recollection, it never played at either of the theaters in my home county that counted as grindhouses, County Cinema and the infamous Norwalk Theater. I'd pretty much ignored it because after having seen a few dozen cookie cutter slasher flicks, the vast majority of which completely sucked, I figured I had missed nothing. But, oh, how wrong I was!

The Red Queen: the individual responsible for convincing me to see NAIL GUN MASSACRE.

My friend the Red Queen is a fellow horror addict who also shares my love of bad/inept movies, and one day while discussing such cinematic fare, she asked me if I'd ever seen NAIL GUN MASSACRE, which she stated was a favorite of hers. I told her I had not seen it and when she found that out she launched into a heartfelt pitch to get me interested in the film, and as you've obviously guessed, the Queen totally convinced me. (I've learned over the years to listen when beautiful redheads make suggestions.) She stated how the movie was so bad that its ineptness in acting, plot, effects, and damned near every other element that goes into crafting a competent film was so severe that the film crossed the line into unintentional comedy of the type that is dear to bad movie connoisseurs, making it kind of the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE of the slasher genre. I took her word for it and ordered the film from Amazon, after which I did some online checking and found her opinion to be one commonly held by several reviewers. Thus I anticipated untold anti-glories and when the movie found its way into my DVD player, I found myself the polar opposite of disappointed or ripped off.

WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

The film opens abruptly with a shot of a construction site and six burly workers hauling a struggling woman named Linda, later revealed to be one of the site's foremen, onto a pile of sand for a gang rape in broad daylight. Thankfully, the main event takes place off-camera and after a jump cut, we're in the misty/smoky backyard of one of the rapists as his dumpy hillbilly-looking wife hangs laundry (in the smoke, I might add) while their barefoot toddler meanders about. As the brutish husband rants and raves in the house and demands his wife's presence, who should step through the back door but a camo-suited, voice-altered, helmeted assailant with a nail gun. As of that moment, NAIL GUN MASSACRE steps over the precipice into bad horror flick immortality and does not stop to look back.

The exact moment when the glory commences.

Literally two minutes in and it already seems obvious that the killer is that woman who got violated right at the start of the film. The killer's figure is slight and the movements (and butt) are obviously those of a female, the altered voice of the nail gun-wielder sounds like Darth Vader's road show understudy, plus the motorcycle helmet's visor is about 95% obscured with duct tape so one cannot see the face of the person within, so what else are we to think other than that it's the rape victim? Anyway, the obnoxious rapist good ol' boy soon finds himself festooned with house-building nails, thus making him the first of a surprisingly high body count for one of these films.

The movie swiftly (further) devolves into a predictable suspense/scare-free escalating series of nail gun murders that take care of all the rapists, plus the killer moves on to murder random people for no reason whatsoever. It's eventually revealed that the killer is Bubba, either the brother or husband of the rape victim (I'm not sure which), and while his wish for vengeance on behalf of Linda is totally understandable, his sudden transformation into a bad one-liner spouting one-man murder factory is not. And once we know Bubba's the killer, the helmeted nail gun-wielder is no longer played by a woman. Ed Wood would have been proud.

I could go on in considerable detail but let it suffice to say that NAIL GUN MASSACRE is a triumph of awful acting, writing, and gratuitousness, all accented with a complete and utter lack of suspense/scariness in what is supposed to be a scary movie. Some of the finer points:

As of 6:54 into the film:

Nice clearly inhuman boob job, honey. This picture does not begin to do the gravity-defying boobs in question justice and we get a very good look at them, more than enough time to determine their total un-relation to anything akin to actual mammalia. Instead they appear to be some kind of ad for then-futuristic skin-covered polymers.

As of 7:45 into the film, the acting is already on par with that of a '70's-era shot-in-a-trailer-park porno, a la the incomparably wretched BAT PUSSY, so I was already quite amused.
NAIL GUN MASSACRE contains more terrible one-liners than a fusion of that era's garden variety Arnold Schwarzenegger and Freddy Kreuger movies, and that's really saying something.
It also features one of my very favorite elements of crappy /80's movies, namely truly bad songs written and performed for the film's soundtrack. Anything heard on the radio in the movie is cringe-worthy. (The greatest example of this trope would be "Dance with Me," as heard in the legendarily terrible NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR, which I highly recommend.)
There's a doctor character investigating the murders who could not seem any less interested if he tried, and when the doctor questions the daughter of a random guy who got killed by his swimming pool while cooking on a grill — that the portly victim ends up on top of and we see his supposedly dead body make the effort to grab a railing in back of the grill so he doesn't topple over — he refers to the killer as "her" before the possibility that the killer may be a woman is even brought up.
The script tells us that after Linda was checked out by the doctor — who verifies that she was gang raped — and she reported the incident, clearly identifying all six of her assailants since they were all co-workers whom she saw every day at the construction site, why were no arrests made? Also, I very much doubt she would have gone back to work at that site with those animals and continue to do so for some six months (stated in the script) after her ordeal, especially after the police failed to to a goddamned thing. Ridiculous.
When the killer goes after a pair of annoying lovers on the hood of the driver's car, note that the woman registers no emotion of any kind as she re-does her bra while held at nail gun-point.

No fear, no curiosity, no surprise, no anything. It's a fascinating tour de force. Meryl Streep can suck it!

I love how when that douchey doctor hauls Linda into his car and tells her what's going on regarding Bubba's rampage, we can't really hear what he says because his words are drowned out by the sounds of the car.
The reveal that Bubba was actually the killer when all through the film the killer was very obviously played by a woman was a cheap cheat, therefore that much more amusing.
The stirring car chase between the doctor's car and Bubba's hearse...WOW. I've been involved in more suspenseful races to the toilet after a meal at Texas Chili in Portchester.

And going back to Bubba turning out to be the killer, I get and agree with Bubba exacting vengeance on the actual rapists, but why kill innocent people as well? At the beginning of the film, we clearly see Linda being attacked by exactly six men. I went back and watched the movie again in fast-forward mode and excluding the six absolutely guilty parties, Bubba murders several people who had absolutely nothing to do with Linda's rape. The total body count is fifteen, which includes:

the six rapists (all very visible at the beginning and absolutely guilty)
a random hitchhiker whose only crime was flipping the bird when the hearse initially did not stop to give him a lift
a girl found in a drainage ditch who we'd never seen before and whose murder we don't see, but the nails in her body proclaim the killer; we have no idea of the circumstances that led to her murder
two lovers who hump against a tree in the woods (which looks incredibly uncomfortable, especially for the actress playing the woman; she looks like her back was likely shredded by tree bark)
the friend who goes to look for the lovers in the woods
the lovers on the car hood
two girls out near the barn where Bubba apparently regroups between murders

So, other than the obvious answer of "in order to pad out the running time and add more kills," why did he kill the nine extra people? We get virtually zero screen time devoted to Bubba in the first place, so we know nothing about the guy or his mental state, but it is safe to assume that he was not some balls-out generally kill-crazed loon. His goal was to get revenge for what happened to Linda, so after that was done did he just go completely insane? The script offers no answers to any of this, which only gains it points on my ludicrousness scale.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

PUSS IN BOOTS (1988)

2011-09-12T17:51:00.001-04:00

Poster from the 1988 theatrical release.

I should have instantly known what I was in for when the Cannon films logo appeared on screen, a symbol synonymous with an impressive output of low budget cinematic crap that seemed to dominate theaters and cable TV in the eighties. Sure, they put out the occasional BARFLY (1987) or 52 PICK-UP (1986), but those films were overshadowed by a seemingly endless stream of crap like the four DEATH WISH sequels — including DEATH WISH 3 (1985) , one of the most entertaining movies ever made, terrible or not — cookie cutter Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme actioners, OVER THE TOP (1987), which has the distinction of maybe being the worst film Sylvester Stallone was ever in (worse even than the infamous soft-core porn film PARTY AT KITTY AND STUD'S, and that's saying something), feeble ninja flicks, unwatchable hip-hop cash-ins like the legendary BREAKIN' 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO (1984) and RAPPIN' (1985), and the stunningly awful SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987).

During this deluge of garbage, Cannon also released a slew of fairy tale-based pictures designed to make a few bucks during weekend kiddie matinees before being relegated to showings on cable and home video. Among these is the 1988 musical version of PUSS IN BOOTS starring, of all people, Christopher Walken (!!!). A strange choice for the role of an anthropomorphic domesticated feline, but that bit of casting was the sole thing that went right in this jaw-droppingly misbegotten effort that amounts to ninety-plus minutes of a cast featuring only two people you've ever heard of — Walken, and Jason Connery, Sir Sean's marginally talented spawn — and an assortment of interchangeable ciphers in period costume.

It's a pretty straightforward adaptation of Charles Perrault's classic tale of a cat who seriously butches up once he gets some righteous footwear and effects major changes in the life of his pretty much useless owner. Puss — who amusingly bitches out his owner for his lack of imagination when giving him a name — manages to create a new identity for his master, that of the uber-rich and landed "Marquis of Carabas," and in the process wins the hapless lad an immense castle, vast material wealth, and the hand of a pretty cool princess (Carmela Marner), all of which is seamlessly accomplished when Puss devours the local shape-shifting ogre once said ogre has transformed into a mouse.

You know the story from childhood, so there are no surprises here other than Walken as Puss and Marner's princess, a revisionist take on the whole nauseating princess thing who refuses to be the silent and vacant accessory she was bred to be. She somehow manages to spin gold out of a "nothing" part but she's on screen for too little time to be much more than a welcome diversion from the other bland figures, and as such that's a damned waste.

"You're lookin' at the cat...that ate the cream."

Christopher Walken as Puss is another story altogether and he almost makes up for the wretchedness of the script. Walken's song and dance chops are legendary and while given little room to showcase them here, in what's supposed to be a musical no less, Walken is by far the liveliest thing in the film, coming off as exactly what a male cat would be like if he stood up and spoke what was on his mind. Wisely eschewing any sort of kitty-style prosthetics — although I might have had him wear ears and a tail — Walken's Puss (boy, does that sound wrong) is basically a normal-looking guy with a cheesy porn star mustache (no, he is not nude) over whose face is occasionally flashed an image of his pre-boots house cat form so we don't forget what he really is (an effect that wouldn't have passed muster even in a Sid & Marty Kroft series), and after about ten minutes you'll get over the insanity of Walken in the role, settle in, and enjoy watching him work. The cat's cockiness and smarts are a lot of fun, bolstered by Walken's signature Queens accent and delivery, and Puss even displays a genuine love of his owner, a touching bit of gratitude over his owner's father rescuing him from being drowned while still a kitten, so he's simply impossible not to like and makes the film worth sitting through at least once.

But other than Puss and the princess, the film offers absolutely bubkes to the viewer. The script is a yawner that would have failed to enthrall all but the youngest of toddlers, somehow draining Perrault's story of much of its wonder and adventure, and the fact that it's a musical only points up how bad the proceedings are. I don't know about you, but I've seen a hell of a lot of musicals, ranging from the excellent (WEST SIDE STORY) to the execrable (AT LONG LAST LOVE), so I feel perfectly qualified to state that PUSS IN BOOTS may just be the single worst musical committed to film since some of the cheapjack productions by small companies during the Depression. The songs are truly terrible and lacking in every element that makes a song good, such as a decent tune, quality lyrics, and any sort of memorable characteristics; Walken does the best he can with what he's been handed, but even his efforts are thwarted by lyrics that come off as if written by a person who was new to both the English language and musical theater composition. The two exceptions to this are the song in which Puss conveys his joy at getting boots and gaining the ability to speak for no apparent reason, and a song he sings to his sleeping master, a sweet tune that perfectly conveys his feelings and intent to better his human's life, but those moments still fall flat thanks to the songwriter's apparent disinterest in his own material.

Bottom line: PUSS IN BOOTS basically sucks, but it's a must-see for Walken boosters who simply cannot live without seeing the King of New York swanning about in a children's musical, playing a character used to better effect in the equally bad SHREK sequels. I'm glad I have it in my collection, but I won't be checking it out again any time soon. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

PEEPING TOM (1960)

2011-09-12T01:35:00.000-04:00

For years I’d held the opinion that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece PSYCHO was not only the prototype for the slasher movie genre, but also that it was the best of the many psychological horror films featuring a creepy, sexually fucked up protagonist.

Allow me to state right here and now that I was dead wrong.

Over the weekend I made my way through some of the ever-growing stack of movies on DVD that threatens to bury me here in the Vault, and I just sat through a film that I last watched during my “lost” (read “stoned out of my goddamned mind”) years, but I remembered it for its basic plot despite not being in any fair shape to judge. Now that I’ve seen it with a clear mind, I would like to direct any of you who have not encountered it to Michael (THE RED SHOES) Powell’s PEEPING TOM, an unjustly maligned and reviled work that met a sorry fate and languished in semi-obscurity before getting a shot in the arm from very vocal fan Martin Scorsese.

Sharing a few themes with PSYCHO — yet pre-dating it by some three months — and disturbing the living shit out of just about everyone who saw it when it came out, I have to admit that it’s a much better film than its American-made contemporary in many ways; not an easy thing for me to say, because PSYCHO was my favorite Hitchcock work for much of my life (only recently getting edged out by FRENZY, PSYCHO having lost much of its impact for me since its big shocks have now entered the pop culture lexicon, neutered by nearly fifty years of references and parody).

PEEPING TOM tells the story of Mark (Carl Boehm), a creepy focus puller at a movie studio who sidelines as a photographer for a small-time pornography racket operating out of a local newsagent’s.

Carl Boehm as the tortured Mark.

Thanks to a highly questionable series of endlessly filmed experiments that he endured through childhood at the hands of his uncaring and twisted psychologist father, Mark is socially maladjusted (to say the very least) and obsessed with the act of “looking,” a conditioning that allows him to be able to deal with the world only when perceived through the camera’s lens. Taking a handheld camera with him wherever he goes, Mark embarks on a quest to document the human fear reaction, coldly murdering women with a blade concealed in one of the legs of his camera’s tripod, capturing their sheer terror as they are fatally penetrated by his surrogate phallus.

Having inherited his father’s spacious house and acting as landlord, Mark occupies the upper floor, a space filled with his father’s books on his studies and a fully equipped film studio, complete with dark room and screening area. Mark spends all of his off time in his film lab, watching the footage of his victims and slowly editing it into a documentary of the darkest order. The rest of the house is rented to various boarders, including Helen (Anna Massey), a friendly girl whom Mark meets as he spies upon her twenty-first birthday party through the window.

Helen (Anna Massey) unwittingly enters the world of a madman.

The two develop a friendship that blossoms into a sweet relationship, the first normal one Mark has ever had, but Mark is very much aware his own madness and calmly accepts that it’s only a matter of time until the police catch up with him. The story dovetails into a deeply disturbing tragedy that leaves viewers drained by just how bleak, sick, and sordid it all is, all factors that lead to PEEPING TOM being shot down in flames by critics and defenders of common decency all over Britain when it was released some forty-eight years ago.

Long known for its stringent censorship of films and a general snobbish uptightness when it came to the more visceral elements of horror, the British film industry and critical body deemed PEEPING TOM to be a morally bankrupt and vile bit of business, utterly crucifying it with scathing reviews and withdrawing it from release after a mere two weeks in theaters, a backlash that virtually destroyed director Powell’s career. The British press spared no vitriol in the pillorying of the movie, as seen in these quotes from contemporary reviews:

"The sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing"
-Isabel Quigly, The Spectator

"I don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture"
-C.A. Lejeune, The Observer

"sadism, sex and the exploitation of human degradation”
-Leonard Mosley, Daily Express

"from its slumbering, mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly masochistic and depraved climax, it is wholly evil"
-Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker

“As a shocker, it succeeds only in being nauseating for the sake of nausea. This is a sick film - sick and nasty.”
-Derek Monsey, Sunday Express

“However intriguing psychologically, the film is frankly beastly. De Sade at least veiled his relish with pretensions to being a moralist. It might have been even worse but for the discreet playing of Carl Boehme (sic) in the main role.”
-David Robinson, Financial Times

“This account of a young psychopath (Carl Boehm) who butchers girls with an ingenious killer-camera, then watches their last moments on a home screen, is not only drivel, it is crude unhealthy sensation at its worst. A sad discredit to a fine producer's reputation, - and I was appalled to find such delightful artists as Moira Shearer and Anna Massey mixed up in this sickly mess.”
-reviewer unknown, Sunday Dispatch

“Given some of the home-grown films we have had lately it's hard not to sound repetitively querulous. What-are-we-coming-to questions are apt to sound nannyish, like complaints about muddy boots, but after a film like Peeping Tom ('X' Certificate) it's a question to ask quite straight. What are we coming to, what sort of people are we in this country, to make, or see, or seem to want (so that it gets made) a film like this?”
-Isobel Quigley, The Spectator

“The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain.”
-Derek Hill, The Tribune

The reasons why the film offended so mightily during its initial run are many and have been discussed in much detail by film scholars far more qualified than Yer Bunche, but I’ll attempt to provide a short list of possible causes:

• The film makes the viewer aware of cinema as a voyeuristic act, using it to make us complicit in Mark’s crimes by allowing us to see them as they unfold, culminating in the “money shot” of his victims’ horror as seen from his P.O.V. through his camera’s viewfinder.

This approach would be appropriated to much lesser artistic effect in many of the slasher films that followed in the wake of the box office garnered by FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), a film concerned with nothing other than depicting gory murders with a bare minimum of plot upon which to hang the carnage. Back in 1960 nothing like PEEPING TOM had ever been seen before, and its borderline-pornographic approach to the murders was considered especially distasteful.

• Unlike Norman Bates in PSYCHO, the audience knows from the beginning that Mark is an insane killer, and the entire film makes us intimate with the causes of his madness, and reveals a lonely, damaged young man who has little hope for a healthy emotional life until Helen enters his world. Mark is not a ravening madman by any means, but is quite thoughtful and even artistic, elements not usually found in such characters, and as we get to know and understand him we feel a great deal of sympathy for him. Aware as he is of his deep psychosis, Mark even considers going in for psychoanalysis thanks to Helen’s influence in drawing him out into the world at large, proving he is not beyond some kind of redemption. The idea of having sympathy for a twisted, somewhat perverted murder was pretty much unheard of in 1960, and in a British film such a notion was unthinkable.

• PEEPING TOM wallows in voyeurism, and that aspect is ripe for the depiction of Mark’s work as a porn photographer. Working in a cheesy studio that would have made Irving Klaw laugh his ass off, Mark shoots his subjects with a clinical detachment, only moved by one model’s disfiguring harelip and the inevitability of shooting another for his lethal home movie. The sequences in the studio reek of sadness, the boredom found during photo shoots, and a palpable sleaziness that must have been quite provocative in 1960, especially the bit with famous 1950’s/1960’s nude model and pinup girl Pamela Green splayed out for Mark’s camera before she meets her off-camera demise. That scene was shot in a negligee-clad version and one featuring Green’s all-natural awesomeness, the latter version supposedly being the first female nude shot in a British film not aimed at the “naturist” market.

The stunning Pamela Green as the ill-fated Millie.

The first female nude shot in mainstream British film.

• The message of “your parents sure can fuck you up” probably wasn’t a crowd pleaser back in the days.

• The symbolic link between Mark’s camera and stiletto tripod and his warped sexuality is uber-Freudian and more than a bit obvious, and the camera as murderous cock imagery is pretty damned sleazy, no matter how utterly appropriate for the story. After seeing PEEPING TOM two days ago I very much doubt that I’ll ever look at my own camera the same way again.

The extent to which we are given admission to Mark’s psyche really amps up the film’s twitchy, somewhat anxious tone, whereas in PSYCHO we don’t learn much about Norman Bates’ issues until the big reveal during the last five minutes, after which we’re given a weak bit of psychoanalytical explanation that comes across as “Here’s some psychobabble to excuse the violence and twisted, pervy shit you just sat through.” That explanation felt like it was added almost as an afterthought and doesn’t give anywhere near the rich detail that made Mark a far more rounded and human character than Norman, but whatever the case PSYCHO went on to box office success and a solid place in film history as the cross-dressing granddaddy of the stalk-and-slash school of horror while PEEPING TOM remained largely unseen and unappreciated for far too long. Now available in a terrific Criterion edition, I can’t recommend this film highly enough, especially to students of the slasher genre.

The Criterion edition.

PEEPING TOM proves that the lurid nature of the field’s material can yield a classic if the elements of a quality script, a talented cast, and a director who isn’t afraid to “go there” with his subject are in place, and that was certainly the case here. Definitely not a feel-good movie, do yourself the favor and rent this very sick puppy immediately. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

BAXTER (1989)

2011-08-28T18:14:00.000-04:00

Once again I braved the realms of French cinema, and once again I got fisted up the ass.

I checked out BAXTER when it became available on DVD thanks to an intriguing trailer I saw for it some eighteen years ago in an "arthouse" movie theater, a setting that should have clued me in to exactly what kind of flick it would be. I've read about it having attained cult status for its offbeat concept, a narrative told from the point of view of a sociopathic Bull Terrier, so I was curious to see if it was as creepy as I'd been lead to believe, and now that I've finally seen the fucking thing I can honestly say that it wasn't worth the wait of nearly two decades.

Baxter (voiced by Maxime Leroux) is a dog whose head is filled with dark, anti-social, and just downright fucked-up thoughts, and we get to hear him go on and on about how much he hates everyone around him and how he wants to kill some of the people he lives with in various stages of the tale. His whispery French voice is admittedly kind of creepy, what with its cold delivery and all, but after about three minutes it becomes increasingly pretentious and I swear I wanted to put on a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots and kick the annoying son of a bitch square in the batch.

We meet Baxter when he's given to an old lady as a present and he immediately takes a dislike to her, endlessly grousing about his unhappiness at being under her thumb at all times. But then things take an unexpected turn when the old lady goes insane for no apparent reason, suffers a hip injury, and refuses to venture past the first floor of her house or leave the place at all. When she tries to make the dog get into the bath with her he's spooked by how creepy it all is and bolts from the tub, causing the old nutjob to give chase and fall down the stairs to her death.

When the old lady's only remaining friend breaks into the house to see if she's alright, Baxter uses the opening of the front door to dart to the house across the street and move in with the horny young couple who live there. Finding welcome and companionship, Baxter is happy for a time, but then the young woman becomes pregnant and turns her attentions to her impending baby, neglecting Baxter in the process. Not comprehending her condition, Baxter assumes that she's sick — her scent has changed — and starts bemoaning his fate again. When the baby is born, Baxter works out a scheme in which the parents will leave the child in his care, and while they're off getting their hump on the baby will crawl into the backyard fountain and drown, after which Baxter will get their attention just a little too late for them to prevent a tragedy. But Baxter is, after all, just a fucking dog and not a homicidal mastermind, and he shoots his own plan in the foot (or paw) by barking too soon, thereby allowing the baby to be saved and sinking a potentially creepy subplot that we wasted our attention upon.

Haphazardly shoehorned into all of this is an ongoing look at the doings of an adolescent boy (Francois Draincourt) whose own family is crumbling from lack of communication and his father's adulterous adventures, leaving the kid with little in the way of parental attention or guidance. We witness the lad snipping pictures of Hitler and pals from vintage magazines, and we soon realize the boy is fixated on Nazis, fascism, and Hitler's last days in the bunker with Eva Braun. Obviously not right in the head, the kid spends most of his time in the makeshift replica bunker he's built in the local dump/junkyard, allowing his Third Reich fantasies to consume him. This aspect of the film could have gone somewhere incredibly dark and creepy, like the territory explored in Stephen King's excellent novella APT PUPIL (from the collection DIFFERENT SEASONS), but instead the film pussies out and the subplot ends up dull and pretentious.

Anyway, the kid ends up as the next of Baxter's owners, the young couple giving him away so they can concentrate all of their attention toward their baby, and at first it seems that Baxter has finally found a master more in line with his way of thinking.

A douchebag and his dog.

The kid puts the pooch through a regimen of exercise and attack dog training, greatly pleasing the beast and fulfilling its need for an "Alpha" in its life. The boy also puts the moves on a cute classmate, actually winning her over by comparing her beauty to that of Eva Braun (???), a move that actually gets him laid in the bowels of his bunker. Baxter also gets some poon out of the deal when the girl brings over her asshole dad's in-heat purebred bitch, whom Baxter slips a length and impregnates. When the pups are born the girl gives them to the creepy kid, and in no time he kills them just for the fuck of it, an act that Baxter greets with indifference. But after Baxter tears apart another dog who dares to enter his junkyard territory, the kid realizes Baxter's potential for savagery and destruction and begins to fear his pet. Baxter twigs to this and after his master commands him to attack a classmate for no reason, Baxter plots the murder of the Adolph-loving adolescent. You see, Baxter has no problem with killing if it has to do with defending one's territory or something like that which would make perfect sense to any dog, but being ordered to kill someone for no reason offends the beast, a character point that makes absolutely no sense when we recall all of the boring kvetching the fucking dog does about wanting to kill throughout the movie. Inevitably, Baxter goes after his boy in the junkyard, but when the terrified kid orders him to stop, Baxter obeys, his training taking over and natural subservience to his Alpha kicking in. The kid then picks up a nearby lead pipe and plays the drum solo to "Inna Gadda Da Vida" on the dog's head. As the camera pulled back to show us the dog's inert corpse and I readied myself to mock the screen with a cry of "I'm glad you're dead, you pretentious fuck!" the narration continued despite the dog's demise, proving conclusively that a character can continue to be a pompous, condescending bore even after death.

Often described as a horror movie, the film is neither scary nor creepy, and if anything it can best be written off as a failed attempt at black humor. It's well-made, but the whole thing comes off as sort of an anti-Toonces the Driving Cat in that it's an amusing idea that gets old very quickly but, unfortunately, doesn't provide the laughs one gets from seeing the unbelievably crappy hand puppet that played Toonces on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.

Toonces the Driving Cat: played-out, but still more entertaining than Baxter's pretentious ass.

Actively choosing to misrepresent the film as something with a real and visceral edge, Lionsgate plays up the "horror" angle with suggestive cover copy and an image of a snarling pit bull that looks like it's deep in the throes of 'roid rage (it's the image seen at the top of this post). That's no surprise considering how the dog in the film is actually a cute Bull Terrier of the Spuds McKenzie variety and not a Pit Bull Terrier of the Michael Vick variety, prompting the DVD to fudge the beast's bloodthirsting attributes rather than present the actual poster image from the film's theatrical release:

"One of the best films of the year," my beige ass!

This pussified image would have turned off anyone looking to see people getting their nuts ripped off by a slavering hell-hound, and those who had never seen the original poster will be none the wiser. But not you, dear reader. Now you know the score, and know not to waste either your time or money on this — please forgive me, but I can't resist — utter dog of a film. And knowing is half the battle! G.I. JOOOOOOOE!!!

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

GOLIATH AND THE BARBARIANS (1959)

2011-08-24T22:45:00.000-04:00

The peplum genre, so named for the short (but ever so manly) skirts worn by its heroes — a term originally applied to Italian muscleman flicks a la HERCULES (1958) but now seen as a blanket term for movies about beefy shirtless guys kicking ass in ancient settings — churned out seemingly hundreds of bargain basement epics featuring the manly adventures of oiled-up ancient heroes such as Samson, and of course Hercules, but one-time biblical bad guy Goliath also starred in a few entries after being reinvented as a white hat (or white toga, if you prefer). This 1959 outing stars the original Hercules himself, Steve Reeves, as Emiliano, a super-buff woodcutter whose people are preyed upon by an invading barbarian horde and subjected to the usual barbarian degradations such as rape, pillage, arson and murder.

Steve Reeves as Emiliano, soon to be better known as Goliath.

After the killing of his father (who was apparently some kind of high muckety-muck in the community, but the script’s a bit muddy on that) Emiliano adopts a ludicrous mask and fright wig and embarks on a campaign of murderous terror against his foes, bashing them in the head with a big rock on a tether, crushing their throats with a clawed gauntlet, or assaulting them with a massive club.

Goliath, the forgotten member of Gwar.

Any way you cut it and no matter what weapons are deployed, the guy kills a shitload of barbarians before the bad guys get sick of him having the nerve to defend the innocent, so he’s soon a wanted man. And for no good reason the barbarians think the masked raider is a monster and dub him Goliath. Don't ask me why.

During the requisite bouts of violence and homoerotic displays of greasy, straining thews and superhuman feats of strength, Londo, the incredibly hot daughter of one of the invaders, finds herself dripping like a broken refrigerator at the sight of our hero and in no time a forbidden love affair is in full swing.

Playing the haughty barbarian princess is Chelo Alonso, a Cuban/Mexican dancer and former star of the Folies-Bergères in Paris, and she is one thermonuclear warrior goddess whose look reminds me of Halle Berry.

Yeah, this one's got pretty much everything you'd want in a peplum flick with the exception of a couple of rubber-suit monsters, and it's packed with enough action, romance and eye candy to make any audience happy. Now available in a gorgeous print as half of a Goliath double bill on DVD, GOLIATH AND THE BARBARIANS is a lot better than you might expect and is a terrific bit of Saturday matinee fodder that I enjoyed quite a lot. And while it can't hope to compete in terms of budget, in terms of solid entertainment this film beats CGI bullshit like BEOWULF by leaps and bounds. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (2011)

2011-08-19T02:48:00.002-04:00

It's been nearly three decades since Robert E Howard's seminal barbarian protagonist — he can hardly be considered a hero — first graced the big screen, and since that time there have been many sword-slinging warriors to follow in his footsteps, most recently and to much popular and box office appreciation being J.R.R. Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS gang. Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere in the tiny republic of Togo for the last ten years or so, you know the LOTR fantasy epics made a shitload of cash, so it was inevitable that Hollywood would try to mine the audience's hunger for fantasy in some way, and it would seem that now would be a good time to dust off Conan and his Hyborian Age wanderings. After all, Howard's Conan stories more or less defined the genre, if not outright inventing it, so why not bring back that genre's single most well-known and popular character? The audience was already built-in after three decades of fans who enjoyed the first Conan flick, released in 1982 and starring as it did Arnold Schwarzenegger in what is arguably the film that first put him on the map as perhaps the epitome of the 1980's action hero. (THE TERMINATOR didn't happen until two years later, by which time most of America knew who Ah-nuld was thanks to Conan.) And, yeah, there was a sequel, the inexplicably PG-13-rated CONAN THE DESTROYER (1984), but that film sucked and brought what looked to be a promising franchise to a screeching halt.

As the first film's cult reputation grew, in its wake followed a terrible Saturday morning cartoon wherein Conan was the bodyguard/escort for some royal kids and each week taught them important life lessons like "don't judge people because they're different from you" — I swear to god I'm not making this up — and there was also a live-action show, CONAN THE ADVENTURER, that sought to cash in on the popularity of HERCULES: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS and XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS, but that watered-down mess died a swift death at the end of its sole season. Now, in the current climate of reboots/re-imaginings, I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone had the bright idea of making a Conan movie for the 2000's, with what I'm sure was the intention of kickstarting another cash cow along the lines of LOTR or the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN flicks. Well, I'm here to tell all of you fellow lovers of the 1982 CONAN THE BARBARIAN that that film's status as a cult classic and textbook example of how to make a mythic "warrior's journey" film has absolutely nothing to worry about.

The current iteration opens with a new version of our sullen protagonist's origin, cribbing much of its initial thrust from the 1982 film. We first meet Conan when he is literally still within his mother's womb, and the oft-stated "he was born on a battlefield" takes on new meaning as his ready-to-pop mom is seen in leathers and armor in the middle of some random battle in which her tribe of Cimmerian warriors are dealing out death like it was Halloween candy. As the extremely pregnant woman fights with sword in hand, she is critically wounded, so Conan's dad (Ron Perlman) performs an impromptu C-section and brings his son into the world. Oh, and before that happens, the voice of Morgan Freeman tells the tale of an ancient mask of great power that was crafted from the bones of dead kings, an item so rife with evil magic that it had to be broken down into several components and hidden for a thousand years lest its possessor take over the world.

We then skip ahead by about twelve years or so and find Conan (Leo Howard) yearning to become a full-fledged warrior of his tribe, and during the trial of young men that will determine who earns that coveted position, Conan and the other lads on the trial encounter several animalistic raiders. While his fellows pussy out and hightail it back home, Conan takes on and spectacularly slays the raiders. returning to his village with their severed heads as trophies. At that point I said to myself, "This has promise," but those hopes were dashed as the remainder of the film degenerated into a rote and eventually boring trope-fest that offered little to keep me interested.

Young Conan and his dad (who looks like some kind of heavy metal orangutan by way of Snorri Sturluson) bond over some father-son arts and crafts.

Anyway, Conan's people are wiped out by Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), a conqueror who seeks the last piece of the mask — that just so happens to be in the care of the tribe's leader, Conan's pop — which he obtains with the help of his witchy and bone china-white-complected daughter (Rose McGowan, who was by far my favorite thing in the film). As the bad guys ride off with their prize and the sword that Conan's dad had forged for him, presuming Conan dead after they torched the building he and his now-dead father were in, Conan swears vengeance and the story jumps ahead by about ten or twelve years.

The ferocious Jason Momoa as Conan.

We then meet the adult Conan (Jason Momoa), who has spent the past decade or so wandering as a a thief and brigand, now living among a band of pirates and robbers who take the time to rescue a large group of peasants and very attractive topless women from slavers, thus establishing Conan and his pirate pals as decent folk who just say "No!" to slavery. (Which is a load of P.C. bullshit, because anyone who's every read any Conan story will tell you that slavery is very much an accepted part of Conan's world, with even Conan himself not being against it as a practice. If you ended up as a slave, that meant that was just your tough luck, so to avoid ending up in chains you had to be a badass.) It's during the post-rescue revelry when Conan comes face-to-face with one of the warriors who killed his people years earlier (a warrior whom Conan incidentally happened to deprive of his nose, thus making him easy to identify) and after brutally gathering info, he makes a beeline to Zym (minus the offered aid of his pirate cronies, because it's a personal vendetta). It turns out that Zym has spent years searching for "the pure-blood," a holy woman named Tamara (Rachel Nichols) whose blood is instrumental to a ritual that, using the evil mask, will resurrect Zym's burned-at-the-stake sorceress wife and, via her magic superpowers, render him a god who will rule the world. Needless to say, Conan ain't havin' it.

Rose McGowan as freaky witch Marique, stealing every scene she's in.

What ensues after that is a pretty-to-look-at hodgepodge of elements shamelessly cribbed from THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movies, and even bits from THE MUMMY series, all of which add up to form a generic "adult" fantasy fim that's somehow replete with gore, some very nice nekkid titties and one semi-graphic sex scene, but nonetheless feels like a kids' adventure movie. Several of the set-pieces — a few of which were flat-out idiotic and laugh-out-loud stupid — evoke other films or fantasy/quest video games, and at no point did this Conan story feel like its own thing. This film bears even less of the flavor of creator Howard's visceral and testosterone-laden works than the 1982 film did, but the '82 flick at least defied its own genre by crafting a Campbell-esque warrior's journey tale with a surprisingly sweeping and epic feel. (The sword and sandal genre had become something of a moribund joke after the onslaught of Hercules and gladiator films released by the truckload during the heyday of the "peplum" craze, so the '82 film was a welcome surprise.) That sweep and sense of grandeur, plus a narrative that involved its viewers in Conan's vendetta and made us genuinely care about him succeeding is nowhere to be found here. When not aping other popular properties, this CONAN THE BARBARIAN stands as the most generic fantasy film to come down the pike in ages, and while not flat-out terrible, it is a sad squandering of a great opportunity. Jason Momoa was a decent and very ferocious Conan, and Rose McGowan as the uber-creepy sorceress Marique steals whatever scene she's in, but their considerable efforts couldn't elevate a film that in the end smacks of nothing more than "Conan by committee."

BOTTOM LINE: If you absolutely have to see this film — an urge that I understand, what with having been an avid Conan fan since 1974 and all — don't get ripped off by shelling out the extra cash for 3D. I saw it in 2D and there are only a couple of segments that were obviously composed with 3D in mind. Otherwise, wait for cable and have your intoxicant of choice on hand to liven up the proceedings. I was totally straight as I sat through it and I found myself rather bored about halfway through. I've certainly seen far worse films, especially in this particular genre, but this was a big disappointment. To sum up, this entire film was essentially a Manowar album cover brought to life at the cost of a reported $80 million.

The basic feel of this movie, summed up in one album cover illustration.

THE BATTLE OF PUSSY WILLOW CREEK (2010)

2011-08-09T03:01:00.000-04:00

July 2nd, 1863: At a small farm outside Bent Fork, Virginia, the grossly-outmatched (at a rate of fifty-three to one) 13th Rhode Island regiment faced and defeated a massive Confederate force bent on staging a sneak attack on Washington, an herculean military routing that tested the leadership, thinking-out-of-the-box ingenuity, dogged tenacity and the general fearlessness of its four principal Union officers. Yet while many of the Civil War's military engagements remain prominent in the public's consciousness, this set-to, known as "The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek," has faded into the mists of obscurity. Fortunately, documentarian Grace A. Burns has crafted a fascinating act of cinematic archaeology with this feature-length examination of those Union-saving heroes.

The four principal figures in a forgotten chapter of American history: (L-R) Li Shau-zu, Colonel Jonathan Franklin Hale, Elijah Swan, Rowena Harris/Nick Brody.

The film's narrative goes into considerable detail on its subjects' back-stories, aided by commentary from a number of distinguished historians, rendering them into more than mere historical footnotes to the viewer. The four now-obscure soldiers whose efforts staved off the potentially devastating attack were:

Colonel Jonathan Franklin Hale, a twenty-four-year-old cross-dressing homosexual, infamous and persecuted within the military for his rakish deportment and insistence upon freshly-laundered uniforms for his men. Sent to West Point at sixteen, Hale was forged into a leader while enjoying every moment of the riding, drilling, stylish dress, and camaraderie of other like-minded young men, and though of Georgian origin, Hale held to his vows as a soldier of the one nation when the South opted to secede, a move that put him at direct odds with his lover, one Sinclair Whittier, a proud officer of the Confederacy. (The film traces the trajectory of that relationship.)
Li Shao-zu, an aged warrior who joined the Chinese military at a very young age and fought the British in the opium wars. Skipping out on his "lousy, drug-pushing whore" of a a wife who was doing a brisk drug-trading business in opposition to her husband's anti-British efforts, Li made his way to the States with the intention of getting rich during the Gold Rush, but instead found success as a pioneer in the laundry industry, eventually serving as a launderer for the U.S. Army and forging a friendship with Colonel Hale. His bravery and military experience — to say nothing of his innovations in dry cleaning chemical engineering — placed Li in a position that would make him vital to the 13th Rhode Island's martial success.
Elijah Swan, the result of a liaison between a wood-chopping slave and the jungle-fever-ridden wife of the slave's owner, whose early life was marked by the effects of his mother's many questionable decisions. Cast into the hardship of slavery upon the deaths of his mother and her husband (a fanatical and abstinent Calvinist whose poor vision allowed him to somehow believe that the obviously black child was his own spawn), Elijah eventually escaped and built upon his pre-enslavement education, revealing himself to be a mathematical, scientific and engineering genius.
Rowena Harris (aka Rowena Oaks, aka Candie Apple, aka "Poison" Apple, aka Nick Brody), the battle's most tenacious hero. A poor and once-innocent young woman who found herself thrust first into sexual slavery and then child-prostitution at the hands of the unscrupulous pimp Beauregard Ridge, Rowena, after proving herself a voracious trollop when it came to making cash from the lust of men, sought sociopathically-motivated vengeance upon Ridge with the focus of a Fury straight out of Greek mythology when her former pimp made off with all of the money she'd saved while in his employ (along with that of all of the other whores in his stable) and joined the Confederate forces in Arkansas. Adopting the identity and uniform of drowned drummer boy Nick Brody, Rowena's quest for retribution was derailed upon her left arm being amputated following catching a bullet. Adrift after that tragedy, Rowena/Nick switched sides and ended up under the command of Col. Hale, who saw nothing odd about having a one-armed drummer boy in his regiment (a decision that may have been influenced by Hale's growing opium addiction). It was during this time that Rowena/Nick experienced a full-on speaking-in-tongues mystical vision, the first of several that aided in guiding the 13th Rhode Island to its celebrated (and swiftly swept under the rug) destiny at Pussy Willow Creek.

But what exactly occurred at the battle of Pussy Willow Creek and just why was it so instrumental in the Union's eventual winning of the Civil War? There's a lot to that answer, and it's best left for the curious to discover for themselves.

The byzantine paths of the disparate figures weave together in a most compelling and improbable tapestry that illustrates just what glorious results can come from a confluence of "misfits" and those derided by general society, and rescues their story from the rubbish heap of history deemed unworthy of celebration by virtue of its protagonists' lack of an heroic image in keeping with the usual "all-American" image as perceived by its era. Packed with vintage daguerreotype images, excerpts from letters written by several of the principals and those who knew them, and seasoned with music and songs from the period, THE BATTLE OF PUSSY WILLOW CREEK comes from out of nowhere to join the ranks of such celebrated documentaries as ZELIG (1983), C.S.A.-THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA (2004) and Marti DiBergi's epochal THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984), and if its merits can be judged by the company it finds itself amongst, THE BATTLE OF PUSSY WILLOW CREEK stands as an achievement to be reckoned with...

Aaah, who am I kidding? THE BATTLE OF PUSSY WILLOW CREEK is actually a straight-faced "mockumentary" written, directed and produced by Wendy Jo Cohen, and is a work of such verisimilitude that one could be forgiven for being snowed by its earnest recounting of a battle that never happened, led as it was by "a drug-addicted faggot, a geriatric heathen, a nerdy nigger, and a crazy, one-armed teenaged whore." Starting out utterly deadpan, the film slowly builds in sheer ridiculousness that ends up as a finely-layered narrative depicting just how badly the groups represented by its protagonists got fucked up the ass without benefit of Astro Glide by the nation they fought for, and its content is just as hilarious as it is riveting. Highly recommended and definitely not to be missed, the film does not yet have a release date, but in the meantime it will be screened on August 17 at 8:45 PM at Anthology Film Archives in New York City as part of the New Filmmakers Series, a one-time only deal, so here's the theater's info:

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street)
New York, NY
(212) 505-5181

Click here for the theater's website and more information. (And speaking of websites, click here for THE BATTLE OF PUSSY WILLOW CREEK's own site.)

Get your tickets today and support this triumph of indie filmmaking and comedy that wasn't shat steaming and redolent from the asshole of the Judd Apatow assembly line. This is a film for humor-lovers with a brain, and seriously, it's funny as hell. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011)

2011-08-04T20:28:00.001-04:00

And lo, the gods of cinema did hear the hue and cry of the people, and finally they did right the grievous wrong that was the 2001 version of PLANET OF THE APES. A new APES film was bestowed upon the earth and it was good. Very, very, good. Yea, verily the curse of Tim Burton was broken, and there was much rejoicing.

-excerpt from The Chronicles of Cinematic Recompense

Like many children of the Seventies, I was a staunch supporter of the era's "Ape-mania," loving the PLANET OF THE APES movies and a good deal of their attendant fallout. The sci-fi pickings in the pre-STAR WARS days were pretty feeble, so when a series of films that were (mostly) pretty damned good came along, you cherished it. The APES movies all featured a good deal of social commentary/satire on subjects such as racism, religion vs. science/anthropology, nuclear self-destruction and the ethical vagaries of vivisection, and the pondering of those things while wrapped in allegorical sci-fi trappings was something that stirred the young minds of my generation. So when it was announced that there would be a new APES movie made in the wake of Tim Burton's decade-old abortion, I questioned whether the new film would follow Burton's brain-dead lead or be some kind of return to something a tad more intellectually stimulating. (In today's utterly mindless cinematic climate of movies by committee, I did not hold out much hope.) What I got was totally not what I expected and I could not be happier with the results.

In modern day San Francisco, scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) seeks a cure for Alzheimer's, something sorely needed by his aging father (John Lithgow) whose mind is deteriorating on a daily basis. Working within the corporate labs of the Gen-Sys pharmaceutical corporation, Rodman develops a serum that when tested on chimpanzees causes the brain to repair itself and generate new neural pathways, fixing Alzheimer's and boosting intelligence to amazing levels. Following an incident in which a particularly gifted female test subject, "Bright Eyes," goes berserk and escapes from the lab, resulting in her being gunned down by corporate security during the meeting that would have led to the greenlighting of the drug's testing on human subjects, it is revealed that that she was protecting the baby she had given birth to and hidden below her bed. Ruling the drug a failure, Rodman's money-hungry boss orders all of the test chimps destroyed, but since the baby was discovered after its mother's rampage and is thus known only to Rodman and the lab's chimp-handler, Rodman adopts the adorable little orphan and raises him at home in secret. For the next eight years, the chimpanzee, dubbed "Caesar," enjoys life in a loving home where he forms deep familial bonds with Doctor Rodman and his dad. Unbeknownst to his Gen-Sys superiors, Rodman continues the testing of the drug on his father and the results are both swift and spectacular. Meanwhile, Caesar displays intelligence far beyond the garden variety chimp, even exhibiting functioning and skills beyond humans of a relative age and development. (Though Caesar himself was not directly administered the experimental drug, his mother sure as hell was and the effects of the serum are proven to be genetically transmissible.) But things take a turn for the worse when the drug's effects upon the elder Rodman are reversed as the old man's body builds an immunity to it. Wandering into the street, the confused old man gets into a confrontation with the next door neighbor that is observed by Caesar, who launches into violent defense of his family member. Though the neighbor is not killed, poor Caesar is court ordered into the custody of a specialized home for great apes, a place where our simian protagonist experiences firsthand just how cruel man can be. It is during this incarceration that Caesar's resentment of mankind is forged, and from there he launches a revolt that — along with a couple of other factors that I won't spoil — leads to the beginning of the end for the human race's planetwide dominance.

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES comes from out of nowhere (and from beneath the shadow of Tim Burton's atrocity) to not only be my favorite film of the summer blockbuster season, but also takes its well-deserved place as one of the best major studio films of the year. The script is surprisingly intelligent and does not at all cater to the moronic demographic Hollywood has spent well over a decade dishing out mindless celluloid candyfloss to by the truckload. I honestly believe the filmmakers involved looked at the Burton fiasco (and also some of the gaffes made in most of the films in the original series) and decided not to make the same mistakes as what came before. This is the origin story of Caesar I had never dared to hope for, and I have every intention of seeing it at least once more during its theatrical run.

Items of note in the film:

The excellent motion-captured performance by the brilliant Andy Sirkis, the guy who so deftly brought Gollum to life in LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. His Caesar is simply impossible not to care about and root for, and I can honestly say that by halfway through the film, the entire audience wanted to see him and his all-ape army win. While Rodman's story is certainly interesting, the film belongs to Caesar and his point of view during its events.
The sometimes ham-fisted social commentary of the original series has been wisely kicked to the curb in favor of a hero's journey story fused with what can be seen as an animal rights piece from the point of view of animals.
The other featured apes are also pretty cool, especially Maurice the orangutan (think about that one for a minute, o my fellow geeks) and Duke, a very large and understandably pissed-off gorilla.
Pay attention whenever any TV news reports are seen, especially those relating to a space mission to Mars.
The effects on all of the apes are outstanding and believable. The somewhat spotty footage seen in the trailers and TV ads do not do the work seen onscreen justice, so don't judge the film on what you saw in the previews of the past few months.

And there has been much discussion in the media and in online geek forums of how obviously impossible it would be for a relatively small force of apes, even organized and super-intelligent ones, to take on armed police and the national guard and have even the slightest chance of winning, but let me assure you that that question is very directly addressed and the answer quite satisfyingly requires very little suspension of disbelief. Hell, I bought it and I am one exceedingly critical son of a bitch. Believe that!

BOTTOM LINE: I simply loved RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and very highly recommend that you see it in the theater. A franchise movie of this caliber that does not talk down to its audience is rare indeed, and it should be shown appreciation with your box office cash. But one word of warning: The story gets very emotionally intense in some areas and it greatly affected the grownups in the audience, so bear in mind how children react to animal characters that they come to care about. Kids will love Caesar, so expect them to become quite upset during a lot of what he goes through. (Plus to say nothing of the awful demise of his mother.)

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011)

2011-07-22T23:37:00.001-04:00

Well, color me stunned. After a plethora of movies based on Marvel Comics heroes over the past decade-plus, they finally made one that's a completely solid winner from start to finish. I enjoyed THOR a hell of a lot and IRON MAN was great until its utterly rote final act, but CAPTAIN AMERICA is a note-perfect confection that gives the faithful exactly what they want while introducing the classic character to modern movie audiences in an engaging and compelling way.

The narrative gives us Cap's origin yet again, but tells it in a way that really lets us get to know and care about scrawny, 4F wannabe soldier Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) before he gets anywhere near his star-spangled battle togs. Cap's story takes us from the streets of Brooklyn to WWII's European theater of operations, paralleling his development as America's first super-soldier with the world-conquering machinations of Johan Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), aka the Red Skull, an insane and megalomaniacal Nazi super-soldier who was the first success of the super-soldier process' inventor, Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci). The Skull has gotten his hands on an ancient Norse — read "Asgardian" — artifact of unexplained but vast power (comics fans know it's the Cosmic Cube) and it's only a matter of time until he harnesses its powers for use in taking over the world — first stop, New York City — and usurping Hitler's Third Reich with the super-scientific ordnance wielded by Hydra, an organization spun out of Nazi Germany's special scientific forces, so after a false start as a pitchman for war bonds, Cap takes the fight to the Red Skull. Over the course of the film, Cap proves his mettle as a warrior and hero, aided by the capable likes of old neighborhood pal Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), British special agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and the Howling Commandos, and his wartime exploits come to a climax that results in him literally becoming a man out of time.

I've left out the details so you can witness it all for yourself, but here are the points of note:

Director Joe (THE ROCKETEER) Johnston crafts a retelling of Captain America's origin that will sit quite well with modern audiences while piling on the WWII period charm that lends the proceedings the feel of an old school adventure serial, only one of feature length as opposed to a thirteen-episode chapter play.
A good deal of time is spent establishing Steve Rogers as a patriot who wants nothing more than to serve his country, and there's not an ounce of corniness found in how his sentiments are portrayed. This character development unfolds in considerable detail and I'd say it's at least a half hour into things before Rogers undergoes the process that turns him into America's first (and only) super-soldier, so don't go into this film expecting wall-to-wall, non-stop action and ass-kicking. Which is not to say that there's a boring moment in it before said ass-kicking starts.
Chris Evans is simply perfect as Steve Rogers and his performance here is just as right for the character as he was wrong for the part when he was cast as the unbelievably douchey and assholish version of Johnny Storm as found in the two atrocious FANTASTIC FOUR movies. I look forward to seeing him reprise Cap in THE AVENGERS and the inevitable sequels to this film. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Evans as Cap is the most likable and decent hero to grace the screen since Christopher Reeve's debut as Superman, and that is not a compliment I hand out lightly.

Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull is just as perfect as Chris Evans as Cap, and the makeup appliances that turn him into the character are without visible flaw.

Hayley Atwell as British agent Peggy Carter is a memorable and welcome change from the female characters often found in WWII adventures in that she's just as professional and badassed as any of the military men surrounding her. When the inevitable sequel happens, I hope they set it in WWII so we can see more period derring do and more of Agent Carter. She's too good to leave as a one-shot.

Agent Carter takes the fight against Nazi scum to the streets.

The film feels like a 1940's adventure film made today, and that's only a good thing. It does not concern itself with trying to make its fantastic elements fit into a "what if this stuff existed in reality" context, thus rendering it, as my buddy Big Black Paul so aptly pointed out, a true comic book movie, replete with retro hyper-technology and all that jazz. All of the other Marvel films have hit that particular pitfall, presumably in an attempt to make this stuff more appealing to those who neither read nor like comic books and superheroes, and each has been somewhat the worse for it, even the genuinely good ones.
As previously stated, the film includes the Howling Commandos among its roster of heroes fighting the good fight, and I welcome their bigscreen debut wholeheartedly. I've loved those guys since I was a kid and I hope their appearance here proves popular enough to earn them their own movie. And for those in the know, we even get to witness Dum Dum Dugan letting fly with a signature "Wah-Hoo!"

The Howling Commandos, bigscreen style.

Another supporting character of interest is Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), genius inventor and father of Tony Stark (better known to the masses as Iron Man). He supplies the tech side of the super-soldier process, as well as giving Cap a disc of pure Vibranium (look it up) that will come to serve as his combat shield (as opposed to the prop version used during his war bond spokesperson days). It's also cool that while the shield itself is basically indestructible, its paint job most definitely is not.

Cap receives his shield.

Bottom line: CAPTAIN AMERICA is a rousing bit of entertainment that looks to deservedly be a hit. I enjoyed it immensely and it is in my opinion the acme of what a superhero movie should be. This, folks, is the Marvel Comics movie against which all others should be measured.

50 THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE MOVIES

2011-07-14T17:29:00.000-04:00

Lemme set you straight on something right now: I have seen a shitload of movies in my mere 46 years on this planet. No, really. I'm such a fiend for films that I will sit through virtually anything, including GIGLI, which by the way was bad, but not as bad as you've been lead to believe. Anyway, from the thousands of movies that I have enjoyed (and in many cases subjected myself to) I have managed to glean many gems of wisdom that the filmmakers most likely did not intend to include in the finished productions. Truth can be found in the unlikeliest of places, even in the smoking ruins of an Ed Wood movie. What follows are just some of the many things that the world of cinema has taught me over the years. Read on, geek-boy, and ya just might learn something.

1. Women in prison are the cleanest people on the planet because they seem to shower every fifteen minutes or so.

2. Musical numbers can and will break out at any time or place for no adequately explained reason.

3. Criminal masterminds bent on world domination always tell the hero about the intricacies of their plans in graphic detail, thereby fucking their own schemes in the ass.

NOTABLE EXCEPTION: Auric Goldfinger was smart enough not to do this;

instead he went straight for the option of killing James Bond outright, by cutting him in half, nuts-first, with an industrial laser beam, but let him live for possible interrogation. Bond then escapes and just happens to overhear the details of "Operation Grand Slam" while in hiding.

4. All Asians will totally kick your ass. Run for your life if the person in question suddenly removes his shirt, or if he/she's really old with long white hair. Trust me on this one.

5. The number one place not to live in, for any reason, is Tokyo. Homeowner's insurance rates must be astronomical! Transylvania comes in a distant second.

6. If Jennifer Jason Leigh is in a movie, she will, at some point, be naked.

7. Giant monsters never shit. NOTABLE EXCEPTION: Gaos (in GAMERA-GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE).

8. Most extraterrestrials speak fluent English or Japanese.

9. If you are a parent character in a Disney film, you probably won't survive until the end of the movie.

10. People in Foreign films are either very boring/pretentious, or exceedingly violent/nude.

11. Elvis mastered every profession known to man and used all of them as an excuse to sing, fight, and bang hot chicks.

12. James Bond must be sterile and is apparently immune to all forms of venereal disease.

13. If the house that you and your family just moved into was once the site of any event with the words "Massacre," "Terror," or "Horror" in it, move out immediately.

14. Satan is everywhere, and he will get you. Period.

15. Never have premarital sex anywhere, especially not at a summer camp.

16. Monolithic (and mono-syllabic) Teutonic guys played by Arnold Schwarzennegger always have names like "John Matrix," which seems perfectly normal to everyone who knows him.

17. All black people can dance, speak the hip lingo of the day, and are expert marksmen with the majority of extant firearms.

18. Pam Grier is the most perfect woman ever to walk this earth. She still looks terrific, and she survived dating Richard Pryor!!! Runner-up: Ursula Andress, c. 1962.

The awesome perfection that is Miss Pamela Grier.

19. Guys, if you're going to whip it out on camera, at least have something worth whipping out; formerly known as "Richard Gere's Law," this has re-designated in recent years as "Ewan MacGregor's Law, in honor of his mighty flesh-truncheon.

20. The Three Stooges were the greatest martial artists in screen history. They would have offed Bruce Lee in about a minute.

21. Women die of mysterious "women's diseases," and get more beautiful as they get closer to the final curtain (as in LOVE STORY and countless others).

22. In the world of action heroes, firearms have little or no recoil whatsoever.

23. Charlton Heston was simply incapable of playing "Joe Average."

24. Contrary to popular belief, Marlene Dietrich was not a man.

25. Cigarette smoking makes you manly (see Humphrey Bogart).

26. Alcoholism is not only zany, but hardcore alcoholics can function as though virtually unimpaired (see any of the THIN MAN flicks).

27. People can make friends with dangerous animals with little or no effort, and the animals in question will obey their every whim without hesitation.

28. Any guy, no matter how butch, can make a convincing female impersonator (see SOME LIKE IT HOT, TOOTSIE, TANGO AND CASH, I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE, etc.).

David Carradine as Pearl in SONNY BOY (1990).

29. In the 1950's most alien worlds were inhabited by stunningly nubile young women longed to be taught the Earth "art" of kissing.

Sign me up for the space program right now, goddammit!!!

30. If a meteorite crash lands near you, do not examine it or its contents.

31. In war, your comedic sidekick — usually named "Brooklyn" — will inevitably die tragically, spurring you on to a feat of near-suicidal heroism.

32. In the 1950's, women's breasts were shaped more like rocketry than mammalia.

33. White people in blackface are completely believable as Negroes.

34. Surfers' hair stays perfectly dry and styled, no matter what kind of waves they've been battling ("Avalon's Law").

35. Despite living in the jungle with apes for over twenty years, Tarzan does not smell bad or fling his feces at those he does not like.

36. There must have been a plague that at some point wiped out most black people, since we seldom show up in the future.

37. Cavemen/women existed at the same time as the dinosaurs, and had hairstylists and beauticians available at all times.

38. Cars that engage in high-speed chases are nearly indestructible and have the shock absorbers of the gods.

39. When he wasn't killing people, the Frankenstein Monster was a pretty cool guy.

40. In WWII, all elite Nazis wore monocles.

41. Despite his flamboyant outfits, Flash Gordon was not gay.

42. If the films of Woody Allen are to be believed, Black people do not exist and New York City is an urban wonderland full of witty intellectuals. I live in the Five Boroughs, and I can tell you without a doubt that that is bullshit.

43. There is a very good chance that your family may be crazy/cannibals/space-aliens/intergalactic despots.

44. Anthropomorphic cartoon animals are the most dangerous creatures on the planet. Plus, they are indestructible.

45. Glass makers in Hong Kong must be the wealthiest guys on the planet, due to the inordinate amount of people shooting/being thrown through window panes and glass sculptures.

46. Nothing signifies cool like a slow-motion closeup (see James Woods in JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES).

47. Absolutely anyone can learn any form of elaborate/improbable style of martial arts in virtually no time at all, as evidenced in MY KUNG FU 12 KICKS, DRUNKEN MASTER, CHALLENGE OF THE LADY NINJA, THE CRIPPLED MASTERS, and countless others.

48. Death does not neccessarily mean that your social life is over.

49. It must be illegal to be anything less than stunningly beautiful in Italy, Spain, Brazil, and France since there are apparently no ordinary looking people in any of these countries...except Gerard Depardieu and Roberto Benigni.

50. Even a whiny dork can defend the galaxy. Yeah, I'm talkin' about you, Luke Skywalker!

SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO (2010)

2011-07-14T02:00:00.001-04:00

The ongoing trend of rehashing old manga and anime properties as live-action films for the current generation has yielded little of any worth — the two GE GE GE NO KITARO films and 2004's CUTIE HONEY being the rare and genuinely charming exceptions — and I am deeply saddened to report that this adaptation of the venerable SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO joins the ranks of duds like CASSHERN and the execrable DEVILMAN. I covered the first nine episodes of the classic 1974 anime series of SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO in an earlier piece, so the real background info primer for the newcomer can be found over at my other blog.

The live-action movie version more or less gives us a remake/re-imagining of the epic journey to the distant planet Iskandar on a quest to obtain an alien device that will save the Earth from its imminent radioactive demise thanks to constant bombardment from radiation bombs dropped by hostile extra-terrestrial forces, but several factors work against this re-telling. First and foremost, one of the aspects that made the original a classic and a Japanese cultural institution in much the same way that STAR TREK is here in the States was its revolutionary emphasis on characterization and allowing the audience to get to know the show's many characters well enough to be emotionally invested in them so that when the audience witnesses the horrifying trials they undergo, we share in their struggle. A twenty-six episode narrative allows a lot of room for character development that simply is not possible in a film that's just over two hours long, so the filmmakers of the live-action feature rely on the audience already being familiar with the characters and the basics of the story's particulars, and as a result the assorted intimacies depicted between the characters are known and understood solely by those in the audience who've seen the original. All other will be left asking "Who's that guy? Why are those two so close and devoted to each other?" and a slew of other questions that the script does have time to answer thanks to the script's brisk pace.

With the action rushed, the original narrative's year-long journey is seen as a relatively straightforward affair, peppered with ambushes and showy CGI space battles, but gone is every trace of suspense, paranoia over impending attacks, the loneliness, boredom and frayed nerves that go with interstellar travel. The all-too-human experience of what was once a crew comprised mostly of rookie cadets has been re-jiggered so that the entire ship's complement are now experienced soldiers and pilots, so the heroes do not learn anything or grow and mature over the course of the journey, and they are virtually fearless in battle, making it impossible to care about any of them. Even the deep, brother-like friendship between protagonist and immediately-promoted-to-acting-captain Susumu Kodai (actor and pop star Takuya Kimura) and ship's helmsman Daisuke Shima (Naoto Ogata) is given no fleshing out and we are expected to take it as rote that the exchanges between them are meaningful.

I could go on and on but instead I'll just present a laundry list of the rest of my issues with the film, just so we can get this over with and move on to something else (I have on a DVD of old episodes of GUNSMOKE as I'm writing this and they are far more engrossing than anything that this film has to offer):

The film is obviously and heavily influenced by the rebooted version of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, and that is in no way a good thing. The most egregious example of that influence is in the re-imagining of the Yamato's nurse, Yuki Mori, as a Japanese knockoff of Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck.

Starbuck, er, Yuki Mori (Meisa Kuroki), being a morose bitch in the mess hall. Nope, nothin' at all like a scene out of the rebooted BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. Nosiree...

Actress Meisa Kuroki enacts a character so close to Starbuck that the makers of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA would seem to have every right to sue. Yuki is now a fighter ace, dour in demeanor and short-tempered enough to punch her fellow pilots in the face if they piss her off, in other words an Asian Starbuck clone. Yawn.

The alien antagonists, the Gamilas, are revealed to be a mostly featureless crystalline species, thus allowing them to be rendered in lackluster CGI instead of them being blue-skinned humanoids who dressed not unlike the Nazi SS, as in the original. This crystalline hive mind's featureless look allows for no visible emotion to be seen, so they are threatening only in terms of sheer number and of no relatable interest. Also, it is discovered that they call themselves "Dessler," which was the name of the compellingly arrogant leader of the Gamilas in the anime, a classic villain whose presence would have livened up this feature's proceedings immeasurably.
Since there is no getting to know the characters, we end up not caring about any of them and that's a shame because many of them were well worth paying attention to back in the days. The intense and contemplative chief science/tech officer Shiro Sanada (Toshiro Yanagiba) was once a fascinating character who was worthy of a show in his own right, and here he's reduced to a virtual walk-on. The same can be said of the once simultaneously hilarious and melancholy alcoholic Dr. Sado, who has now been needlessly re-imagined as a woman and given practically nothing to do or say. (At least she's seen with her pet cat and lugging around a huge bottle of sake.) In fact, the only familiar cast members who have any kind of halfway decent screen/plot time are Kodai, Yuki, and the dying Captain Okita (Tsutomo Yamazaki, best known in the West as the cowboy/trucker from 1985's classic TAMPOPO).
Analyzer, the red, sexually-harassing robot that served as an inspiration for the look of R2-D2, is barely a presence in the film, reduced to a hand-held A.I. unit that is only seen in extremely small doses and worn on Kodai's hip or plugged into a fighter as a support computer. It ends up turning into a war droid when the crew reaches Iskandar and is besieged by swarms of Dessler, and it ends up sacrificing itself in the process in a sequence that's meant to be heroic and inspiring. That intended sentiment fails utterly because, just like nearly all of the other characters, Analyzer is not at all developed as a character and we could not care less about him.
When the crew does meet the Dessler in face-to-face combat on Iskandar, the film cribs so liberally from STARSHIP TROOPERS and ALIENS that it's embarrassingly lazy.
There is no Stasha, the benevolent alien who sends the Earth the schematics needed to build a warp drive system that will allow the crew to build a ship so they can fulfill their mission. Instead we get a disembodied hive mind that possesses Yuki and describes itself as the opposite side of a coin shared by the Dessler. In fact, Iskandar is a found to be a world that's lush and beautiful on one side and barren and scarred on the other, like a planetary Harvey Dent.
The space battles and CGI all look like a video game — a common gripe of mine over the past decade of moviegoing — and that's a damned shame since series co-developer Lieji Matsumoto's ahead-of-their-time spaceship designs would have been awe-inspiring if rendered in a non-listless fashion. It's a sad statement when the animated version of the titular space battleship still manages to generate genuine thrills nearly forty years on from its TV debut while its mega-budgeted CGI iteration appears as merely a perfunctory prop. The Yamato was as much of a character as any of the series' main characters, while here it may as well be a tarted-up Winnebago. Even the usually-blow-your-balls-off-awesome deployment of the ship's planet-destroying "ripple cannon" (or "wave motion gun" in the STAR BLAZERS translation) barely elicits a reaction.
And speaking of greatness rendered unremarkable, thanks to the film's condensing of the material, the famous journey to Iskandar and back now holds gravitas on the level of a late-night trip to the local bodega in search of a six-pack of Piels and some scratch-off Lotto tickets.

The bottom line is that highly anticipated though it was, SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO is an utterly soulless, merely mediocre Crib Notes version that is sure to disappoint any American fans of both the original un-altered Japanese original animated series and the Americanized STAR BLAZERS. Curiosity may get the better of you, but you'll be glad for your DVD player's ability to be turned off so you can go do far more interesting things and get back to the film later, if such should be your desire. I have certainly seen far worse films, but this flick is barely a husk of what was once one of the great anime stories, and that just plain makes me sad. And while there are plenty of good reviews for this film to be found online, I think those reviews are akin to those penned by the brainwashed critics who declared Tim Burton's BATMAN to be an exciting and innovative work of genius. Maybe they're afraid to admit that in this case the emperor has no clothes, but don't be deceived.