31 DAYS OF HORROR 2013-Day 23: CARRIE (2013)

In the current age of needless remakes, it was inevitable that Hollywood would return to the horror well that is Stephen King’s CARRIE (which was already done back in 2002 as a made-for-TV move and possible series pilot, but the less said of that the better) and as remakes go, the 2013 iteration is not bad at all. That said, it doesn’t hold the same primal gravitas and miserable power that Brian DePalma’s 1976 classic version possesses, and that’s partly due to the original’s plot particulars having crossed over into the shared pop cultural consciousness, so it’s pretty much impossible to approach this story without already knowing exactly what it’s about and where it’s going sight unseen. It’s also a story that requires no embellishment in order to make it relatable to a contemporary audience of the twenty-teens. The true power and indelibly resonant aspect of the heart-wrenching tragedy of Carrie White lies in it being one of the handful of classic horror stories that explores a specifically female part of the human experience — a young girl’s traumatic first experience with her menstrual cycle, coupled with the crueler-than-cruel actions of some of her peers, plus the abuses she suffers at the hands of her mentally ill religious fanatic of a mother — and the honesty with which it builds to its apocalyptic climax simultaneously touches and deeply saddens its audience. No amount of flashy special effects and Karo syrup blood can augment what is already very strong meat, so why bother trying to one-up perfection?

I’ve previously written at length on the original CARRIE, so all I really need to say about the plot of the 2013 version is that it tells basically the same story, only with a couple of bits thrown in that were of minor importance in the novel and a couple of changes in the fates of some of the characters. Carrie’s still a shy, tormented outcast (well-played by Chloe Grace Moretz) who was not informed of the facts about female adolescence and suffers her first period in her high school’s girls’ locker room, much to the sadistic amusement of a gaggle of her "mean girl" peers — one of the all-time most abusive and humiliating sequences in all of fiction, now made worse with the addition of cell phone video and internet sharing — and that incident unleashes her latent telekinetic powers, which are displayed to full apocalyptic effect during the narrative’s famous senior prom climax, so if you’ve seen the 1976 version, the same can pretty much be said for the new one.

The major draw this time around is Moretz as Carrie, and I’m glad to say that she delivers the tortured girl’s timidity and loneliness in spades. When word of this remake first got out and her name was attached to the project, I balked because Moretz is simply far too pretty for the role. (The same can be said of Sissy Spacek in the original, but she was also kind of weirdly spooky-looking, an aspect that Moretz does not exude.) But Moretz overcomes the possible stumbling block of her appealing features with a performance that brings the character’s emotional frailty and isolation to the fore, with her eyes perpetually downcast, save for when she makes direct eye contact, at which point she’s like a terrified deer caught in the headlights. Julianne Moore is also quite good as Carrie’s batshit-insane religious fanatic mom, playing the role in a distinctly de-glammed manner that belies her considerable ginger beauty.

One element that works in the film’s favor is that all of the high school-aged characters look the right age, as opposed to the original, where the youngest of the high school kids looked to be somewhere in their early-to-mid-twenties. That helps sell the mishegoss on a level believable of hormonally driven teens, but not half as plausible when enacted by people like the 1976 version’s William Katt. (Nancy Allen and John Travolta were exceptions by virtue of both being outstanding, utterly hateful bad guys.) The current version’s Chris Hargensen works quite well as played by Portia Doubleday, largely because she looks the character’s age, and is therefore totally believable as a spoiled, sadistic cunt of the worst order, which only makes us long to witness her fate on the receiving end of Carrie’s vengeful wrath.

And while we’re on the subject of Carrie’s powers and completely understandable wrath, the way her telekinetic abilities are depicted in the new film seems to be influenced by the wave of popular superhero movies of the past fifteen years or so. This time around, Carrie puts in a bit of practice with her power once she’s aware of it, and when she finally reaches her breaking point at the prom, her control of her TK is nothing short of masterful. It’s very impressive, but that level of Jean Grey-style mastery detracts from the from-the-gut primal anger witnessed in both the source novel and DePalma’s classic version. It’s akin to a kung fu movie in which a novice has just begun to understand and be able to implement some serious martial techniques, and then suddenly engages in combat with the acumen of a master. In short, it was cool to look at but that instinct-driven punch was gone in favor of Yoda-esque hand gestures and concentration.

Carrie’s explosive meltdown after the infamous prom night anointing with a bucket of pig’s blood is indeed spectacular, but it’s also marred by the aforementioned Yoda-style flourishes, along with Carrie levitating herself so that she looks like a spectre covered in the red goop one uses to make candy apples. In the previous tellings of the story, Carrie’s fury was such that not even the gym teacher who came to her aid throughout the story survived her rampage, but the new version allows Ms. Desjardin (Judy Greer) to live to tell the tale. I’m of a divided mind on that one; no, Desjardin did not deserve to be bulldozed by the bludgeon of Carrie’s TK retribution, but her death served to point up just how broken and out of control Carrie was when she finally snapped, so Desjardin being spared further dilutes the narrative’s vitriol.

Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde), the repentant girl who convinces her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom, turns up pregnant at the end and finds Carrie after the devastation of the school, cradling her now-dead loony mom in her arms. Carrie senses Sue’s pregnancy and informs her previously unaware classmate that she’s carrying a girl. Carrie spares Sue’s life, telekinetically booting her from the house as she collapses it on top of herself and her dead mom, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why the pregnancy angle was included. It was only after the credits rolled that I considered it might be a way of setting up a possible sequel, with Carrie maybe having somehow transferred her spirit and power into Sue’s gestating daughter. It’s a stretch, but I’ve seen far more ludicrous springboards from which sequels have been generated.

The bottom line on the 2013 CARRIE is that while it’s not a bad movie by any means, it’s done in by its very superfluousness, and it reads as exactly what I expected from a remake of this particular story, namely CARRIE for the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL generation. It’s worth a look when it hits cable or Netflix, but I say why go with a lesser imitation when the superb original can still be had with ease?

(Oh, and they wisely didn't copy DePalma's famous shock ending, which the first FRIDAY THE 13th already ripped off anyway.)

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2013-Day 22: SHARK ATTACK 3: MEGALODON (2002)

Before I do my usual intro/back info bit, I'll cut right to the chase: SHARK ATTACK 3: MEGALODON is an unmitigated piece of shit, but what a glorious turd it is. I went into this one having stumbled across a clip from it on YouTube, and if ever there was a clip that sold me on a movie, it was this one:

Wasn't that exactly what one wants to see in a shark movie?

I'm a lifelong lover of sharks (especially Great White sharks), creatures whose forms are about as perfectly suited to what they do as is possible for any living being, those activities including swimming, eating, and making little sharks (to paraphrase Hooper). You enter into their territory and you may end up a case of "today, a robust scuba diver; tomorrow, shark shit," and there's no malice intended; you just happened to be within reach and of a size to fit into the shark's gaping, razor-toothed maw, and dem's da breaks. Consequently, these ravenous fish have held humans in a state of simultaneous fear and respectful awe, making for ideal MacGuffins in any number of true-life nautical accounts and fictional concoctions, the most famous of which is undoubtedly JAWS (1975), the classic film made from Peter Benchley's bestselling and rather unremarkable novel.

Once JAWS lucratively tapped into the audience's primal fear of the implacable force that lurks beneath the waves, it was a given that there would be a swift succession of sequels and crappy knockoffs, each likely to earn back their makers at least some cash, provided there was lots of onscreen carnage involving screaming idiots who were to fucking stupid to get out of the water. Most of these films brought in the flesh-and-bone-rending violence and gore to audiences with a sub-R rating, meaning lots of shrieking, crimson-clouded water, and the occasional bonus of a rubber leg or head slowly sinking to the ocean floor, but this was all driven home quite effectively through sound effects and editing, along with our innate identification with the characters — read generic "shark fodder" — getting sloppily devoured. But no matter the level of gore, the shark attack genre keeps occasionally resurfacing some thirty-three years after JAW set the standard, but its progeny have mostly chosen to ignore anything resembling quality filmmaking and have turned the shark into a straight-up sea monster out to eat people while acting as some sort of deep sea understudy to the Grim Reaper. Which (finally) brings me to SHARK ATTACK 3: MEGALODON, in which the shark is not just a monster, but a balls-out, "Holy motherfucking shit, that thing is big" giant monster. Not IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA huge, mind you, but big enough to count.

IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955): the biggest goddamned tentacled wiggly ever to terrorize San Francisco.

If you've seen JAWS, you already know the basic story: a big-assed shark menaces a beach resort that's kept open by a corrupt official even after the local authorities and a marine biologist urge him to close it,  resulting in a bunch of intrepid worthies setting off to kick its ass while accompanied by a score that's just a note or two shy of outright copyright infringement. That's it really, but this time around it takes place in Mexico, has way more cursing and gratuitous nudity, and there are two sharks, one at a scale comparable to the windup critter in JAWS, and another that's supposedly close to seventy feet in length, both of whom growl. These fish are Megalodons, gargantuan ancestors to the awesome Great White, so by making the monsters in this flick ultra-ginormous the awesomeness factor is increased considerably. Well, in theory anyway, since this production is too cheap to afford much by way of effects, so a good 98% of what we see of the sharks comes from stock Great White footage probably culled from Discovery Channel "Shark Week" outtakes that are slowed down somewhat to convey ponderous size, with the remaining 2% featuring either cheesy puppets or borderline-bogus CGI representations. Fortunately there's a fairly high body count comprised of people we just don't care about, coupled with lots of terrific set pieces that make the most of the sharks' enormity. I mean, what's not to love about a shot like this:

The whole film wallows in being an idiotic, shameless ripoff, and therein lies its charm: it knows exactly what's it's doing, and it simply doesn't give a fuck who notices. The story's a total joke, the performances bite the big one, and you'll sit there smacking your head every five minutes while watching it, but it's an enjoyable time waster that's the cinematic equivalent of a six-piece order of Chicken McNuggets; it ain't necessarily good per se, but it's fun while you're ingesting it.

Oh, and another added bonus is seeing a pre-DOCTOR WHO and TORCHWOOD John Barrowman — Captain Jack Harkness on those shows — as the Roy Scheider stand-in utter one of the greatest from-out-of-nowhere lines in film history. How his co-star, Jenny McShane — who looks not unlike a white version of the mouth-watering Leila Arcieri — , kept a straight face during that scene is beyond my ability to process.

Bottom line: it's crap, but it's more entertaining than any number if big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, so if you're in the mood for something completely ridiculous, TRUST YER BUNCHE!!

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2013-Day 21: HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY (2008)

It’s official: I must now come out of the closet because of my overwhelming desire to give director Guillermo Del Toro some serious lovin’ with hugs and much tongue for giving me exactly what I have needed to see for a long, long time, namely a monster movie designed to please its audience in every way. HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY is Christmas Day for every “monster kid” everywhere, even those of us who left our childhoods behind decades ago.

Now that the origin details are over with — as seen a few years back in the previous Hellboy flick — the story jumps straight into the action as Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his colleagues in the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (or B.P.R.D. for short) contend with monster prince Nuada’s (Luke Goss) efforts to locate the final piece of a crown that will grant him total control over the Golden Army, a massive magical/mechanical fighting force with which he intends to put an end to the human race and claim the Earth for his supernatural brethren. This prince is not just some mustache-twirling baddie, however, and his agenda is motivated by legitimate grievances that give pause to Hellboy, especially after his intentional “outing” of himself and the B.P.R.D. and his subsequent discovery that the humans he protects are scared shitless of him and his colleagues. Thrown into this mix is the prince’s twin sister, Nuala (Anna Walton),

a sweet, pretty monstress who sides with the B.P.R.D. and feels the reciprocated stirrings of romance with sensitive resident Creature-From-the-Black-Lagoon-type Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), alongside a look into what’s up now that Hellboy and pyrokine Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) have stopped dancing around the obvious issue and become lovers. All of this adds up to a fun movie, but what sends it into must-see monster-fan Nirvana is the unashamed and wall-to-wall inclusion of a veritable shitload of monsters and creatures of damned near every shape and size that the imagination could come up with; huge, tiny, winged, tentacled, having a cathedral for a head (I shit you not), they’re all on display, and if you aren’t satisfied with the monster on screen at a given moment, just wait about another minute and there will be at the very least two more to give you something wondrous to behold.

I mean, just look at this! And wait 'til you see him move and speak!

That said, here are a few points of interest:

• You will never look at the Tooth Fairy in the same way again.

• Forest gods are fucking awesome.

• The “human torch” effects for Liz Sherman blow away those found in either of those shitty FANTASTIC FOUR movies.

• The “bad guy” has every right to be pissed off and you kind of want to root for him.

• Abe Sapien comes into his own as a character in this one and he’s simply impossible not to love.

• Drunken male bonding = funny. Drunken male bonding between monsters that also involves Barry Manilow = genius.

• The inclusion of Teutonic ghost-in-a-containment suit Johann Krauss was great (Johann’s one of my favorite characters in the comics), but the unexpected coup is that the voice acting of Seth McFarlane in the role steals every scene the character is in. Yes, I’m talking about the same Seth McFarlane who voices Peter, Stewie, and Brian on the increasingly derivative and irritating FAMILY GUY, and he sounds completely unlike any of the work he does on that show. McFarlane even gets to utter an instant classic of a line: “You can suck my ectoplasmic schvanstucker!”

• The romance angle works to good effect and in no way detracts from all the cool monster stuff.

• This film offers yet more proof that some seriously weird shit goes on at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge every day.

• The film’s art direction is simply stunning, and Del Toro’s well-publicized affection for old school effects like those of Ray Harryhausen is plainly evident in every frame. The use of makeup effects and animatronic critters outweighs the CGI imagery, and the CGI seamlessly blends with the physical effects rather than overwhelming the movie’s “reality” as the majority of CGI tends to do in countless other sci-fi/fantasy/horror/superhero flicks.

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY sets out from frame one to be a crowd-pleaser, especially if that crowd happens to be composed of monster-freaks like me, so if you are of a like mind, see this one as soon as possible. It's monster kid's delight.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2013-Day 20: THE WIZARD OF GORE (2006)

Just by existing this remake of splatter/gross-out pioneer Herschel Gordon Lewis' 1970 homicidal stage magician opus is light years ahead of its predecessor in every aspect of filmmaking, but it's still no great shakes.

Once I heard someone had unleashed a remake of Lewis' "classic," I was intrigued to see what could be done with a modern take on Lewis's concept of a crazed Doug Henning type who horribly mutilates beautiful women during his act and reveals them to be apparently unharmed when all is said and done, only to have them turn up dead a day or two later suffering from the very wounds that were supposedly stage illusions. Considering how shitty contemporary horror offerings are in general and the remakes in particular, I suppose I should have expected what I got, namely a would-be shocker by way of murky MTV-style visuals and a gore/violence quotient that was surprisingly restrained for an unrated movie. This version gives us a douchey trust-fund kid who fancies himself a journalist who chronicles the seamy underbelly of L.A. (translation: "slumming"), frequenting strip joints and the like, much to the dismay of his girlfriend. One night the two of them attend a sleazy adult amusement boardwalk, replete with all manner of nekkid chicks engaged in just about everything you could get away with in public without getting busted, and wander into a performance by Montag the Magnificent (Crispin Glover, playing it far more normal than one would expect, which is kind of a bummer). The show features the aforementioned onstage torture, mutilation and dismemberment, and if you're a seasoned gorehound the proceedings will barely register if you've seen anything as "hard" as the original DAWN OF THE DEAD or worse. Fascinated by what he's witnessed, the so-called journalist returns night after night and soon ends up spiraling down a psychedelic mindfuck trail to mind-controlled madness as the bodies of Montag's victims start to pile up. To which I say a big "who gives a shit?" I was bored about a half hour in, and I only stuck with it to the end in order to see if anything of real interest happened, and I can assure you nothing did.

Bottom line: Unless you have absolutely nothing to do, I would advise giving this a miss and renting something far better, like the unrated versions of THE MIST and THE RUINS. Although, to be fair, THE WIZARD OF GORE remake is better than Rob Zombie's abortion of a HALLOWEEN redo, but that's not saying very much.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2013-Day 19: 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-dwon 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 2013-Day 18: HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980)

Poster from the original theatrical release.

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. Cutting out 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.

One of the more extreme moments from the "nature runs amok" sub-genre.

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. 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!

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 victim’s 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. (If you ask me, the concept of that monstrosity entering the world via standard vaginal birth would have been a million times more horrific, especially from a thematic point of that delivery being a wholly-innatural nightmare.)

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.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2013-Day 17: FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD (1965)

The Japanese iteration of the Frankenstein monster (Koji Furuhata), a misunderstood leviathan if ever there was one.

I love me some giant monster flicks, and nobody made them better or crazier than Toho Studios during their heyday. The critters that infested their world came in all manner of metropolis-demolishing forms: giant jellyfish (from outer space, no less, in DAGORA THE SPACE MONSTER), giant psychedelic mushrooms (ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE), giant spiders and mantises (SON OF GODZILLA), giant walruses (GORATH), giant cuttlefish (YOG, MONSTER FROM SPACE), giant shrimp (GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER), giant moths (MOTHRA), giant birds (RODAN), giant gorillas (KING KONG ESCAPES), and even a giant cockroach (GODZILLA VS, MEGALON). So once they'd pretty much exhausted the animal and vegetable kingdoms, what else was left except a giant Frankenstein in a Tarzan outfit? In the completely out of its mind (even for Toho) FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD, you get just that.

According to the story, in the waning days of WWII the Nazis remove the living heart of the Frankenstein Monster from a lab where it's kept in a tank and move it for safekeeping to Hiroshima. Well, not meaning to sound glib about it, we all know how that turned out, and the heart was lost and forgotten. Jump ahead to the present — 1965 — and we find out that there's a fucked-up-looking boy running around the countryside, eating small animals and leaving behind their remains. He's eventually captured and turned over to an American doctor (Nick Adams) who's in the Land of the Rising Sun to minister to victims of the radiation at Hiroshima with his foxy colleague (the toothsome Kumi Mizuno). They soon discover that the kid's not just fucked-up-looking, he's also Caucasian! The details on his exact origins are a little fuzzy: he's either a starving kid who found the case containing Frankenstein's heart and ate the beating organ, or he's a whole new being that grew from Frankenstein's immortal heart, only given a bit of help in the growth department from all that radiation. He's also found to possess fantastic healing abilities that allow him to survive devastating physical damage, even regrowing severed limbs. (I dig the idea of him having grown from the heart, so I'll go with that one.)

After befriending the hot doctor chick, the now-adult Frankenstein (Koji Furuhata) escapes into the woods and grows by a couple of hundred feet, also fashioning himself a happenin' Tarzan-style over-the-shoulder number out of miscellaneous animal skins to cover his nekkidness. (And thank God for that; I don't think I could have handled the sight of Frankenstein's gigantic nuts flopping around all over the goddamned place.)

Of course the army is called in to take Frankie out when cattle and people start vanishing down the gullet of a giant, unseen, burrowing critter that they naturally assume to be the big guy, despite him never having dug a hole in his life. It instead turns out to be Baragon, one of the silliest-looking of the Toho monsters, and that's really saying something. It's basically a giant puppy-dog with big, floppy ears, sharp teeth, and a horn that lights up for no apparent reason.

The uber-goofy Baragon (not to be confused with Barugon from the painfully boring GAMERA VS. BARUGON).

Soon enough, Frankie and Baragon are duking it and destroying more raw acreage than a legion of clear-cutters, the whole thing wrapping up with Frankie kicking Baragon's rubbery ass only to be swallowed forever when the earth opens up, also for no apparent reason.

It's all great, stoopid fun and one of the extras on the DVD is perhaps my favorite deleted scene of all time: After Frankenstein kills Baragon, he roars in triumph and suddenly stops dead. A look of utter confusion appears on his face and he practically says "What the fuck?!!?" as a monstrous octopus sidles out of the forest and engages him in single combat.

This is the kind of thing that you'll only see in a Toho movie.

Yes, a fucking giant land-based octopus shows up and the two wrestle their way into the ocean. THE END.

I first heard of this loony epic when I was about six years old and the kid from up the street showed me the feature article on it in the late, lamented THE MONSTER TIMES. His description of the film was quite exciting, albeit erroneous; he told me that the Frankenstein not only destroyed every army on the planet in gory ways that involved their pants getting ripped off and killed about thirty other monsters, but at the end of the film he began to hit the ground with his fist making a "konk" noise, thereby "konk"-ering the world. Ya gotta love it when kids recount movies. Their fabrications are often far better than the actual film, but when I finally saw FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD about two or three years later on New York City's THE 4:30 MOVIE (of course as a part of the beloved "Monster Week" cycles) I was far from disappointed. I love this movie, and it should also be noted that it's the seed from which one of the all-time classic giant monster movies sprouted, namely the superlative THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (1966), but that's a discussion for a bit later...

The movie poster from the original Japanese release.