31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 20: WOLFEN (1981)

When WOLFEN first came out, I was sixteen years old and hungry for any and all horror films that I could encounter, with my appetite for scares of the lupine variety kicked into high gear by the excellence of THE HOWLING. You see, like most fans of the genre, I have a particular flavor of horror and preference of monster that pleases me more than any other, and that would be yarns about werewolves, so when WOLFEN came out I was more than ready for it. Or so I thought.

When a South Bronx urban renewal plan begins demolishing a dodgy neighborhood infested with junkies and other assorted lowlives, a series of brutal and bizarre murders commences, starting with the rich developer behind the development initiative. Also killed are his girlfriend and his huge, Haitian bodyguard, who was a gun-wielding former officer in Haiti's infamous Tonton Macoute paramilitary force (a group of guys you would NOT want to mess with). Investigating NYPD Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is put under direct pressure from his boss, the commissioner, and the mayor to solve the case with expedience, thanks to the murders being (incorrectly) believed to be the work of a terrorist organization called "Gotterdammerung." Noting the deceased bodyguard's prominent ring proclaiming his voodoo affiliation and not buying into the convenient , Dewey's sleuthing takes a decidedly supernatural turn as the murders proliferate and yield inexplicable forensic evidence (or complete lack thereof) from the victims' remains. In no time, Dewey, his coroner buddy Whittington (Gregory Hines), assigned criminal psychologist partner Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora), and weirdo zoologist Ferguson (Tom Noonan) find themselves on the trail of creatures straight out of Native American mysticism — a connection pointed out by Ferguson — a pack of wolf-spirit predators who kill to preserve their hunting territories (and also to take advantage of any weak and easy prey that may wander within their range). The Wolfen have a number of bizarro powers that, among other things, allow them to remain undetected my the eyes of unbelieving mortal men (until it's too late), so even if Dewey could prove their existence and culpability for the killings, who in the modern age would believe his findings? 

Though quite intelligent, mature in approach, and delivered in a way that renders its fantastic elements believable, WOLFEN unfortunately comes as something of a disappointment when sandwiched between the same year's back-to-back lupine onslaught of THE HOWLING and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (all were released in 1981). It's less of a straight-up horror movie than it is a police/detective procedural with a rather dull first hour, but things liven up considerably once we start getting clued in as to exactly what the hell is going on in regard to the supernatural predators. The performances are all good and the story's mostly solid — I could have done without a pointlessly-included sexual encounter between Dewey and Rebecca that comes from out of nowhere and adds absolutely nothing to the plot — so I say it's worth a one-time look for lupine horror completists and those who want to see Edward James Olmos running around butt-nekkid as a militant Native American pretending to be a wolf. Also of note is James Horner's score, which features a few flourishes that would become indelible when revisited some five years later for the score accompanying ALIENS.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 19: MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970/1972)

Remember a few entries ago when I talked about WITCHFINDER GENERAL, a classy movie about foul, manipulative torturers who roamed about ye olde Englishe countryside doling out cruelty, extortion, and rape while taking advantage of the fearful and ignorant and claiming to be doing God's work? Well, bunkies, now's the time to enlighten you on what can happen in the wake of an artful work dealing with highly unpleasant subject matter, namely the crass exploitation of the worthwhile piece's less-than-savory aspects. That's right, I'm talking about WITCHFINDER GENERAL's embarrassing bastard child, the odious MARK OF THE DEVIL.

Released in 1970, this West German shocker was originally entitled HEXEN BIS AUFS BLUT GEQUALT — which my fluent-German-speaking pal Mindless Kirby assures me translates as WITCHES ARE TORTURED TO DEATH — and its threadbare plot wastes the talents of both a young Udo Kier (a very versatile actor whom I've always liked and genuinely feel he's never received the recognition he deserves) and the ever-reliable Herbert Lom in what is essentially an uninvolving excuse for a good number of graphic sequences of innocent young women enduring sadistic torture after being falsely accused of witchcraft. That's really all there is to it and even though it's vile, disgusting, and incredibly sleazy in its presentation, its scabrous "thrills" eventually get old and in no time you'll find yourself looking to down another beer or throw in your ever-within-reach copy of 18 AND NASTY VOL. 10 (which I recommend infinitely more than MARK OF THE DEVIL) and heartily begin shuffling off some knuckle-children. I don't mean to skimp on outlining the details, but there really is no point in doing so with this one, and I only mention it because it's the middle stage in the evolution of its niche in the genre, which paved the way for the ultimate and very classy witch-related torture film that succeed it. But more on that later...

My main reason for bringing up MARK OF THE DEVIL was due to the lasting impact it had on me when I was about three months away from turning seven years old, just before my family left California and moved to the opposite side of the United States. It was the spring of 1972 and this wee Bunche was accompanying his mother and aunt to a local shopping mall. Once the station wagon had been parked in the outdoor parking lot, we went inside and spent however long shopping and enjoying lunch in the food court, and when we went outside we were greeted with the astonishing sight of nearly every car in the lot having a folded and (thankfully) unused MARK OF THE DEVIL vomit bag tucked snug under one of the vehicle's windshield wipers. 

An example of one of the bags that so sparked my under-seven-year-old admiration.

My mom and aunt were both perplexed but soon sussed out that the bags were basically the kind one received on airplane flights so one could hurl during turbulence, only here they were re-purposed to catch geysers of spew brought on by the myriad horrors that MARK OF THE DEVIL so merrily splashed across the screen like so many buckets of offal during the film's American release's novel publicity blitz. My elders were highly amused by this and when they explained it all to me, I was absolutely delighted at the concept of a film so gross that it actually made people vomit. Unfortunately, my mom removed the MARK OF THE DEVIL vomit bag from beneath the windshield of her station wagon and promptly threw it away, which is a great pity because now those fucking things are collector's items and I would love to have one. (They can be had for cheap and one day I'll get one — or more — but to have the very one from that magical, formative moment in my childhood would be sheer bliss.)

Poster from the original West German release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 18: THRILLER "THE WEIRD TAILOR" (1961)

The 1960-1962 Boris Karloff-hosted NBC anthology television series THRILLER is today largely forgotten by genre fans, presumably thanks to THE TWILIGHT ZONE's five-season episode count and rerun ubiquity, and that's a damned shame because lovers of straight-up horror are missing out on some real gems. Thankfully, the series has been rescued from obscurity on DVD and the curious can now savor it with relative ease. That said, this particular installment is a fun exercise in mounting eeriness that ranks among my favorite hours of televised fright fare and it's written by Robert Bloch, the author of PSYCHO and many, many other shockers of note, so put that in your hookah and smoke it.

Mr. Smith (George Macready),  a wealthy Manhattanite dabbling in the blackest of black magic, seeks to restore the life of his son, a souse who failed to heed his father's warning to not walk through the smoking pentagram that dad has drawn on the floor of his study (drawn there apparently in an attempt to summon and control demons).

Virtually the template for Mercyful Fate's classic metal tune "A Dangerous Meeting."

Desperate for a way to bring his idiot kid back, the amateur hour Crowley seeks advice from a blind seeress/white witch (Iphigenie Castiglioni) but she strongly cautions him against proceeding any further with his unholy scheme. When he will not be persuaded to do otherwise, the seeress reluctantly gives Smith the name of a black magician who may be of assistance, and her lead yields results when the magician — whose day job is that of a used car salesman — sells Smith a rare book of spells for a cool million bucks (which was a hell of a lot of money back in 1961). The book is one of three copies known to still exist and is of such a diabolical nature that all of the previous copies were burned hundreds of years ago...along with their owners. Reduced to being a veritable pauper but assured that the spell he requires is to be found in the antique tome, Smith discovers that the spell in question involves the expert crafting of a suit of clothes, dictated by a very specific set of rules — strict hours in which it must be sewn, no buttons, et cetera — so all he must now do is find a suitable tailor for the task.

That quest brings the immigrant Borgs into the picture, a miserable and mismatched pair if ever there were one. Apparently hailing from "the old country" (which would seem to be Germany), the husband,  Erich (Henry Jones), operates a humble tailor shop somewhere in NYC while physically and emotionally abusing his much-younger wife, Anna (Sondra Kerr). Terminally late on paying his rent and with no business coming in, Erich cruelly vents his frustrations on Anna, leaving the pitiful, abused woman to cry and tell her woes to her only friend in the world, a cracked plaster tailor's dummy named Hans (an uncredited Diki Lerner). 

Anna unloads the litany of her unhappiness to the inanimate Hans, her only friend in the world.

From her one-sided conversations with the dummy, it's made plain that Anna's torment has gone on for a long time and that she is trapped in a lonely hell on earth, wishing that Hans were a real man who would simply be kind to her. When Smith arrives with a bolt of very "unusual" cloth and his odd directions for the manufacture of the occult suit, Erich jumps at the chance to make a quick $500 for his services (again, this is 1961 money that were talking), and from there is woven a tapestry of greed, threatened spousal abandonment, murder (both successful and attempted), and something that can only be called a dark miracle...

If you've ever seen a horror movie, read a horror novel, or even absorbed the contents of a scary comic book, you can guess from the get-go where this one is going, but it's the buildup that makes it a flesh-crawling gem. I first saw "The Weird Tailor" during a Thanksgiving or Christmas visit (I honestly forget which) to my mother's house some years ago, encountering it while flipping channels late at night, and it hooked me from the opening sequence of the drunken son discovering his father's Satanic shenanigans. The level of detail/art direction put into the study-cum-conjuring chamber and its unholy decoration was enough to convince me that here was an old school horror series that took itself — and its audience — very seriously indeed, so I stuck with it and as a result it stuck with me to this day. The last two minutes of this story, while providing something of a happy ending, are disturbing as hell and would have come off as silly or laughable on just about any other show, but here it results in a very queasy head-on collision of wish fulfillment and sheer, mind-warping fear. It's one of those stories where you all but scream "Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell happens now?!!?" but it simply ends and provides no further denouement, leaving the audience gobsmacked and profoundly creeped-out. (slow, reverent golf clap)

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012: Day 17-HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964)

There are few places on this earth more psychologically fucked-up than the American south, a fact mined for storytelling fodder to great effect by such authors as Kyle Onstott, Tennessee Williams and the odious Lance Horner (whose GOLDEN STUD is one of the truly great plantation-set sleaze novels). After the critical and box office success of the ultra-fucked-up "hag horror" prototype WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE (1962), director Robert Aldrich wisely looked below the Mason-Dixon Line for the setting for his followup "creepy old broad" movie, 1964's HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE, and that creative decision payed off in spades, allowing for a parade of southern Gothic intrigue, family dysfunction, psychological cruelty and outright madness.

In 1927 Louisiana, during a lavish party at the Collins House mansion, Collins family patriarch Big Sam (Victor Buono) dissuades married man John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) from eloping with his daughter, Charlotte. As John breaks off his affair with Charlotte, telling her he "made a mistake," Charlotte runs away in tears, leaving John alone in the mansion's summerhouse. As John sits with eyes closed, pondering how things have fallen apart, a female figure runs into the room and graphically (for 1964, anyway) hacks off John's hand with a cleaver, then rains repeated cleaver blows down upon him, eventually beheading him (not seen on camera). Shortly thereafter, a dazed Charlotte walks into the party, the front of her party finery drenched in blood. As the body is discovered and all the attending guests stare in disbelief, Big Sam escorts his daughter away from the party.

The narrative then shifts to the present day of 1964, and we learn that Charlotte was sent away to England to allow the murder scandal to die down. Though never convicted of John's murder, Charlotte (now played to the hilt by Bette Davis) has become the town's local "crazy, witchy old lady" and lives, seriously unbalanced and just a bit dangerous when she's got a rifle in her hand, in her father's mansion, well-off but alone, save for her white trash servant, Velma (the inimitable Agnes Moorehead). After repeatedly refusing to heed the orders of the Louisiana Highway Commission to vacate her home so a new highway's construction can proceed, Charlotte calls her sole surviving kin, Miriam (Olivia DeHavilland), for aid in preventing the demolition of Hollis House. Once a poor girl who lived with the Hollises, Miriam arrives and assists Charlotte's doctor, Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten), in the care of her unstable cousin. As Drew and Miriam rekindle a relationship that ended when Drew dumped her after John's murder, Velma fears that Charlotte's cousin is after her money, so she arranges for a Lloyd's of London insurance investigator (Cecil Kellaway), to look into matters. As all of this goes on, Charlotte's sanity takes a steady nosedive as she begins seeing and hearing evidence of her dead lover's presence, and it's only a matter of time before the men in the white coats come to take her away for good...

HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE is very engaging and deserving of its considerable fan base, but for my money it could have done with a nip and tuck here and there. It's definitely overlong at two hours and thirteen minutes, and while its leisurely pace is like a mint Julep-induced hothouse dream that allows us to fully get to know the characters, it occasionally feels like it's taking forever to get from one scene to another. It does, however have some nifty scares, most notably the sight of John's mutilated corpse walking into Charlotte's study and baring a hideous and haphazard neck wound — is it real, or is Charlotte completely barking mad? — and both Davis and Moorehead are a lot of fun to watch at work here, especially the way-over-the-top Moorehead. The film's tag line should have been something along the lines of "Trust No One," and by the end of the movie you'll discover just how tragic Charlotte's thirty-seven-year nightmare of guilt, loneliness, dodgy sanity and status as a social pariah really is...

The bottom line on this one is that it comes in at number three in the hag horror pantheon, a ranking determined solely by its over-length. If it had the benefit of a tighter edit, it would have a firm hold on STRAIT-JACKET's rank in the number two slot, but even then it would still fall short of the superb WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? Now if only this had been written by Tennessee Williams...

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 16: HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980)

When I was a wee Bunche I used to wonder exactly what the hell monsters like King Kong and the Creature From the Black Lagoon intended to do with their female captives once they got them back to a mountaintop retreat or an underwater cave. Sure, there was obvious lust or infatuation in play, but it just wasn’t feasible; Kong would have been thwarted by scale alone, and both he and Blacky faced the stumbling block of being species altogether other than human. But exploitation cinema has never been hindered by such considerations as logic, comparative biology, or even common sense, hence the existence of HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, a classic bit of nastiness that unflinchingly depicts the public menace of horny fish-men who graphically rape beach bunnies in the name of a quick box office buck.

Coming out just two months after the slaughterhouse thrills of the original FRIDAY THE 13th, HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP just barely got in under the radar and avoided the willy-nilly trimming foisted upon the majority of horror flicks released not long after in response to the deluge of gory FRIDAY THE 13th cash-ins. Excising or otherwise neutering the gore and violence from films such as THE BURNING, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, and MY BLOODY VALENTINE robs such fare of its very raison d’etre, and if such a fate had befallen HUMANOIDS it would have ended up completely worthless instead of finding itself in the history books as a landmark of onscreen, tasteless misogyny and what you could once get away with under the guise of a horror/exploitation picture.

HUMANOIDS tries to be many things at once — a cautionary tale on tampering with nature, a rumination on racism, a would-be eye-opener on how badly the Native Americans got the shaft — and fails at everything it attempts, save for the infamous fish-rapes that are the key reason anyone saw it at all. Contrary to many reviews you’ll find, it’s quite slow-moving and absolutely uninvolving, populated as it is with total non-characters who exist only to deliver trite dialogue, get maimed by the monsters’ very sharp claws, or end up on the wrong end of a rock-hard, sea-dwelling cock.

Absolutely tasteless but then again, horror is NOT always a genteel storytelling form. I can think of few things that would be more mind-warpingly horrifying than being stripped naked and sexually assaulted by a priapic sea monster, so, completely exploitative though it may be, the concept is certainly valid and brings to mind what H.P. Lovecraft would have done with DAGON or THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH if he'd made grindhouse movies in the late 1970's or early 1980's.

The film plods on and on between the mayhem, and when the incredibly offensive sight of shrieking girls pinned helplessly beneath the thrusting torsos of Charlie the Tuna’s butt-ugly cousins finally happens you’ll probably find yourself relieved that the film has finally come to ultra-sleazy life. And horrifying though it may be in concept, the fish-rape sequences veer straight into the territory of sheer absurdity and become somewhat giggle inducing. I’ve seen this film with a few women I could name, sleaze-fans all, and each one of them burst out in hysterics at the sight of a guy in a scaly latex getup with overlong arms and an exposed brain violating refugees from a BEACH PARTY movie. It’s one thing to read about such goings-on in a story by H.P. Lovecraft, but it’s another thing entirely to see such material enacted on a shoestring budget with camerawork that would have been right at home in a porno entitled SMELLS LIKE FISH Vol. 6.

One of the title critters smiles purty for the camera.

And, no, we don’t get to actually see the monsters’ fish sticks.

There’s not much story to speak of or care about, so all that remains is the nasty stuff, and that’s rather entertaining, especially the all-hell-breaks-loose final ten minutes or so, in which about a dozen of the monsters crash the town fair — conveniently located at the marina — and proceed to mutilate or fuck everyone in sight.

Just let these motherfuckers try this shit at Coney Island. They'd be part of the new fish & and chips meal at Nathan's in a heartbeat!

It’s balls-out insane and once the smoke clears and all seems right in the world, the scene shifts to one of the fish-men’s victims about to give birth to a half-fish baby. The mother, now yellow-eyed thanks her trauma (?), howls and screams as her baby does a move straight out of the vastly superior ALIEN (1979) and rips its way straight up through her totally fake and greasy-looking belly, revealing itself to be a cheesy Muppet knockoff slathered with taco sauce.

The miracle of birth...Not!

There’s an interesting story about the making of this film that claims director Barbara Peters was outraged to discover that infamous producer Roger Corman added the graphic rape scenes after the film was completed, totally without her knowledge. That kind of move from Corman wouldn’t surprise me in the least, but I’ve also read that makeup artist Rob Bottin — who also did stunning work in THE HOWLING and John Carpenter’s THE THING — has gone on record stating that he was one of the humping fish-men and his scenes were shot with Peters behind the camera, so it sounds like a classic case of backpedaling to me…

In short, HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP is completely fucking stupid and very dull, but the potent (pun intended) sleaze aspect makes it worth sitting through at least once, especially in a roomful of equally liquored-up and like-minded friends of cinematic crud. TRUST YER BUNCHE and have the Fast Forward button at the ready for when the prurient bits aren’t happening.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-Day 15: THE GIRLS REBEL FORCE OF COMPETITIVE SWIMMERS (2007)

I really should listen to my own advice more often, namely my oft-mentioned caveat that if the poster and title are irresistible, the film itself is likely to be something of a disappointment (a hard-learned lesson proven by about thirty years of Troma Films). You know and I know that nobody — and I do mean nobody — makes gratuitously ultra-violent exploitation movies like the Japanese, and this sleazefest from the Land of the Rising Sun theoretically has everything going for it: shameless sleaziness, teen sexual curiosity (read "lesbianism") of a possibly incestuous variety, a mad scientist who conducts experiments of an insidious and pointless nature, cute Japanese chicks wandering about either clad in swimsuits or topless/nekkid, a ludicrous script, and scads of spewing gore, entrails and dismemberment. So what the fuck went wrong?

The film's star, Sasa Handa. Don't worry about being busted for kiddie porn, because she's actually in her twenties and is among the vanguard of the legion of Japanese "actresses" who've gotten breast implants in order to advance their careers. The work done on her is not bad, but you can still tell her sweater goblins aren't real. (I prefer the real thing anyway, even if they're not exactly a pair of heaving casabas.)

THE PLOT: hot schoolgirl Aki (Sasa Handa, who looks like a Japanified version of my pal Xtina, something obvious in the film and not the above publicity shot) couldn't possibly have chosen a worse day to start at a new school thanks to arriving just as a mad scientist injects most of the student body and faculty with a serum that will allegedly protect them from the "popular" virus that's debilitating the area. Y'see, the serum's real purpose is to turn its victims into homicidal cannibals, so once it's active the gore starts a'spewin', including a juggling math teacher zombie who literally saws off a student's head in front of his understandably stunned class, a bespectacled English teacher who lets loose her inner slut and gets off on cutting off the Principal's toes one by one, and dozens of uniformed schoolgirls committing all manner of atrocities upon one another. During all of this mayhem we discover that there's something in the school's swimming pool's chemiclas that renders the swim team immune to the serum, and Aki is befriended by Sayaka (Yuria Hidaka), a cute and kinda chunky chick who has birthmarks on her breast and neck that mirror those on Aki, leading to the inevitable question: are they long-separated sisters? Taking refuge from the marauding flesh-eaters/sadists, Aki and Sayaka hide out in the school's kitchen where they succumb to some not-bad manual lesbian tomfoolery (made hotter by the possibility of them being twin sisters; ooooh, so forbidden!), after which Aki reveals the details of her shocking past. It turns out that the same mad scientist who dosed the school kidnapped her years earlier and trained her to be a world-class assassin (his motivation for this remains obscure thanks to the somewhat dodgy subtitles), as well as conditioning her to get bitch-in-heat horny whenever she hears a tune he plays on a flute, thereby making her his easily-controlled sex slave.

So far so good and sleazy, right? Well, right about the middle of the proceedings things slow down to an alarming degree, almost as though another director stepped in and decided the flick needed more exposition rather than unchecked helpings of geysering blood, entrails, and gratuitous nudity. That's a very bad move that renders the remainder of the film a real clock-watcher as the audience sticks around solely to see how it all turns out. Since the film drops the ball in such a huge way, I'll spare you having to sit through this and tell you all of the stuff you need to know, clearly illustrating just how badly the filmmakers fucked over their intended audience:

• When Aki accepts her destiny and decides to take out the mad scientist once and for all, Sayaka gathers about seven surviving swim team members and they arm themselves with whatever's lying around, thus becoming the fighting force of the title. That's all well and good, but with the exception of Sayaka and maybe one other girl all of them are wiped out less than two minutes after they assemble. In other words, there is no awesome swimsuited chicks versus zombie carnage-thon as promised in the film's promotional material and terrific poster imagery.
• When Aki finally confronts the mad scientist, the fight is lackluster almost to the point of disbelief. After the film's thoroughly impressive first half this comes as a total letdown.
• Just when we think the film is over, we find out that Sayaka is actually another of the mad doctor's brainwashed sex slaves, only she's jealous of Aki and got close to her so she could slip her toxic "Genie Narcoctics" by tonguing her in a lezzie kissing fest. As paralysis takes over Aki's body, Sayaka is fatally shot by...the mad scientist? Turns out that the mad scientist is actually a pair of twin brothers who had been taking turns fucking the girls; when one finished, the other hoppped on and continued the ride while the recipient of their foul attentions made loud noises reminiscent of a dog's squeaky toy. This may sound somewhat entertaining in a nasty way, but it's all dull and terribly contrived. (Yes, it looks like I've reached the age where I can find nudity dull, depending on the context. Sad, really.)
• Aki's showdown with the remaining mad scientist twin is pretty uninvolving; he unleashes the flute tune in order to drive her crazy so he can fuck her right there on the school's front lawn, and Aki strips down and splays out, but it takes forever for her to end up on her back. I swear I kept looking at the clock and computing how much longer the feature had to run.

The one saving grace of the film's ending is Aki unexpectedly vanquishing her rapist by blowing him to showering chunks using a laser device that she'd cunningly hidden within her pussy (yes, you read that right). The image of a splayed-out, totally nude girl shooting a STAR WARS-style ray out of her naughty bits made me laugh out loud and almost made up for the boredom and disappointment of the preceding thirty-or-so minutes, but the film's climax proved a huge letdown as Aki cleanses her gore-drenched self in the swimming pool, only to die from the Genie Narcotics. As Aki splutters and coughs while the poison kills her, the camera returns to Sayaka's corpse and shows us a warning on the narcotics bottle's label that warns against using the product in direct sunlight or water, so Aki was double-fucked from the get-go and ends up floating face-down and naked in the pool, like a giant "floater" turd. THE END.

This probably all sounds much better than it actually plays out but I assure you that you'll be disappointed by it should you choose to sit through it, unless you're an eleven-year-old boy who's just hit puberty and have never seen a George Romero movie or a bare tit. TRUST YER BUNCHE and give this brilliantly-titled half-a-hard-on of a movie a miss and check out the vastly superior THE MACHINE GIRL instead.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 14: THE DEVIL'S REJECTS (2005)

“Y’know, Hoss, if I’m not mistaken I think I can still smell your wife’s pussy-stink on my gun. Hope it doesn’t rust the barrel…”

— Otis B. Driftwood

As you may have gathered from that choice piece of dialogue, director Rob Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS is not exactly a family-friendly film. But, come to think of it, it’s not really an anybody-friendly film. 

A direct sequel to the painfully boring and derivative HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES (2003), this film follows the further senseless adventures of evil clown Captain Spaulding (exploitation film veteran Sid Haig) and his murderous brood, basically amounting to a catalog of references to many other films, with the end product coming up like a Tarantino pastiche, complete with QT-style kickass soundtrack, only minus the wit.

There really is no plot to recount, but here it is in a nutshell: A family of murderous psychopaths find themselves on the run from a vengeful sheriff who may be just as crazy as they are, and during the course of their road trip they abuse, debase and kill as many innocent people as sadistically and gorily as possible. That’s really all there is to this slaughterfest, other than a parade of genre icons who mostly serve no narrative purpose; they just show up so us uber-geeks can feel smug when we recognize actors like Debra Van Valkenburgh (THE WARRIORS), Ken Foree (the 1979 DAWN OF THE DEAD), Mary Woronov (DEATH RACE 2000, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, EATING RAOUL), and more, and that’s a lazy cheat since each and every one of them could have added much-needed interest in this cavalcade of pointless cruelty.

I’m no stranger to the cinema of brutality, having weathered LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, MOTHER’S DAY, FUNNY GAMES and many others, but all of those films placed us firmly on the side of the victims (none of whom survive in this movie), while THE DEVIL’S REJECTS unsuccessfully and questionably attempts to engender sympathy for the serial killers, a truly vile lot who are themselves in sore need of killing. Captain Spaulding and brood squabble and bicker like every dysfunctional family, but when we have our faces bloodied by their homicidal excesses at every possible opportunity it just isn’t possible to see them as anything other than vicious bogeymen, a clannish evocation of the most unspeakable horrors that lurk among the rest of us, just waiting to lead us to an eviscerated and semen-stained demise in a dank root cellar, after which we are skinned and crafted into ponchos. How the fuck are we supposed to find them, as director Zombie states in the, I shit you not, two-and-a-half-hour making-of documentary, “lovable?” Their crimes are just too unspeakable for us to ignore, and when they gleefully hook up with some long-unseen family members at a ranch-cum-whorehouse I could not share in their celebration; these are not Robin Hood and his Merry Men, these are cold-blooded murderers who laugh in the faces of those whom they brutalize, so all I wanted was to see them get their just desserts.

The list of films referenced here — or ripped off, if you ask me — is long and includes those cited earlier along with THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (to which this and the previous film owe an unpayable debt), FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, and, believe it or not, THELMA AND LOUISE, and the staggering unoriginality gets tiresome about halfway through the picture. However, unlike HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, this entry moves briskly and isn’t boring, and even has a few moments that made the flick worth sitting through:

• An incredibly tasteless-yet-riveting sequence where an innocent family of musicians are held hostage and terrorized by two of the killers, and a bra and panties-clad Priscilla Barnes (late of THREE’S COMPANY, and whose over-50 body puts most women half her age to shame) being squirm-inducingly molested by a gun-wielding scumbag. This bit felt as real as a punch in the guts, and the actors are to be commended for making it so believable. During the making-of documentary, Barnes even jokes to the camera “Today I’m getting a gun shoved up my twat,” her cheery face defusing the squalor of the sequence somewhat and reminding the viewer that it’s all make-believe and modern day Grand Guignol.
• The sheriff’s explosive reaction to a “Hollywood pussy” badmouthing Elvis Presley.
• And my favorite bit in the whole film, namely the dream sequence where Captain Spaulding gets the shit fucked out of him, cowgirl-style, by porn icon Ginger Lynn Allen.

Best known during the ‘80’s and 90’s as tenderloin goddess Ginger Lynn, star of such classics as COCK SUCKING SUMMER, LET’S PLAY BOLOGNA RIDE, FUCK MY FACE, UP THE BUTT, and the immortal GIVE ME HEAD! (all real titles), Allen finds work nowadays all over the place and is welcome in exploitation flicks for her Meg Ryan-gone-ultra-nymphomaniacal look and complete lack of modesty when it comes to onscreen nudity and depictions of unbridled human coupling. In REJECTS she rocks the Captain’s world in a red corset and briefly reveals that she’s stopped shaving her good stuff so she no longer has that ludicrous Barbie-like effect below the waist. Good to see you again, Ginger!

But other than those moments, the film runs out of steam, and only those satisfied with nothing more than gallons of blood and gore will find anything of real worth here. If you must see a film of this ilk, rent one of the films THE DEVIL’S REJECTS yearns to be, especially the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, and bask in a real horror movie, not Rob Zombie’s idea of what one should be. In fact, though it has become revered as a horror movie, in my humble opinion it's nothing more than a glossy throwback to some of the sleazier 1970's-era grindhouse fare.

And that’s another thing: I can’t take any director seriously who calls himself Rob Zombie, former rock star or not. There’s nothing wrong with using his real name, Robert Cummings, rather than the goofiest nom de screen since Screaming Mad George. So he likes zombies, I can get with that. I like werewolves, but you won’t find me changing my name to “Stevie Werewolf,” for fuck’s sake. Although that does have a nice ring to it…