The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

Music Monday: It Is The Season For Better Or Worse Edition

2009-12-07T08:26:25Z

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,bob dylan

Deadline (2009)

2009-12-06T09:35:53Z

Screenwriter Alice (Brittany Murphy) has lived through some hard times with her ex-boyfriend Dan. During the course of their relationship Dan developed a very unhealthy amount of jealousy and finally tried to drown Alice in the bathtub, killing their unborn child in the process. She survived, but has had a major breakdown, and doesn't remember anymore what exactly happened between her and Dan, only how hard it hit her.

Now, after some time (and presumably a lot of therapy), Alice has decided it's time for her to start working again. Her new girlfriend Rebecca (Tammy Blanchard) doesn't seem all that convinced, though. Be that as it may, Alice is positive that spending a writing week alone in a Victorian mansion somewhere in the boons is just what she needs to find back to her old self again.

Once she arrives at the mansion, it doesn't even take a whole evening until the first strange things begin to happen. It is your typical ghostly stuff - strange voices, wet footsteps, a mysteriously self-filling bathtub, the shadowy figure of a woman, the works.

While she is freaking out more and more, Alice distracts herself with some camcorder tapes the ghosts have lead her to find. On them, she witnesses the deterioration of the marriage of Lucy (Thora Birch) and David (Marc Blucas) Woods. At first, the relationship seems healthy enough, but David's love passes the point of obsession and dangerous jealousy. That, just as it was in Alice's case, a baby is on the way only seems to make the problem worse.

Alice identifies herself more and more with Lucy, until she has trouble telling reality and dream apart, quickly reaching a point of crisis.

Sean McConville's Deadline is a very traditional ghost story, perhaps trying a little too hard to be also an artsy drama. You could argue that the film's ending betrays the ghost story for pure melodrama, although I think it keeps everything admirably open, never exactly defining how much of what we have seen has happened in Alice's head and how much outside of it.

McConville's directorial style is slow, moody and a little conservative. There are no flashcuts, no whooshing noises and no shaky cam to be found anywhere (even the home videos are shown as conventional film scenes), and it is the right way to direct for the story the film is telling. There's the characters and a little plot, and McConville is intelligent enough to not get between the audience and those.

Deadline concentrates much more on Alice's mental state as mirrored in Lucy (or is it the other way round?) than on being all that scary, so people only looking for scares in their horror will probably be quite disappointed by it. Instead of trying to frighten its audience, the film uses its ghosts as amplifiers of Alice's mental state, which doesn't mean that there are no disconcerting scenes to be found at all. The second half of the film has some moments that make good use of the psychological horrors of the tale to unsettle the viewer.

I was pleasantly surprised by the actors. I don't necessarily expect great work from Brittany Murphy, but her performance as the brittle woman getting more and more disturbed is really quite good. Not as surprising, but equally convincing is Thora Birch; even Marc Blucas' typically flat affect fits nicely into his role here.

For some, Deadline will probably be boring - there's no action to speak of, the spooking is very conservative and the film is interested in character and not much else. I for my part think that this is a good direction for a ghost story to go in. There should be space enough for something a little old-fashioned among the gore and the spring-loaded cats that seem to be making up much of the horror genre today.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,drama,sean mcconville,brittany murphy,thora birch,reviews

The Stranger And The Gunfighter (1974)

2009-12-05T08:03:08Z

The thief and expert safe-cracker Dakota (Lee Van Cleef) is trying to steal the fabled riches of the Chinese-immigrant businessman Wang. To his disappointment, Wang's safe only contains four pictures of the backs of Wang's four mistresses. Worse still, the pictures' owner stumbles onto the burglary and falls down dead (I suspect four mistresses weren't such a good idea for a man of his age). Poor, semi-innocent Dakota ends up sentenced to death for murder.

A little later somewhere in China, a warlord presses Wang's nephew, the martial arts expert Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh), into his service to travel to America and get him his uncle's money. The fabled riches weren't actually Wang's own, but belonged to the warlord who used Wang as intermediate to invest money in the US. Now, the rather rude man has gotten impatient and gives Ho Chiang exactly one year to return with his money, or the fighters' father and sister will die.

Once arrived in America, Ho Chiang soon realizes that Dakota didn't steal his uncle's money. It also becomes clear that uncle Wang was quite the fetishist and had the whereabouts of his treasures tattooed onto his mistresses backsides.

Since Ho is a nice guy and thinks himself in need of a traveling companion who knows the lay of the land, he frees Dakota from the gallows and offers him a little money for his help. Dakota agrees to the proposal, very un-Spaghetti-like without showing any sign of ulterior motives.

Together, the two men travel the land to stare at female asses everywhere. It's just too bad that they aren't all that good at secrecy, so they soon have to compete against an insane preacher only known as The Deacon (driving a mean mobile church) to get at the behinds.

As the film's fascination with female backsides (not that it is actually showing any of them) should demonstrate, The Stranger And The Gunfighter is not to be taken seriously. It's a film built - in the glorious Italian tradition - to cash in on the short popularity of Lo Lieh in American grindhouses as a martial arts hero (which of course blissfully ignored the fact that he more often than not played the bad guy in his Hong Kong films) and the absolute willingness Lee Van Cleef's to do any damn thing for a movie (see also Captain Apache), and it succeeds admirably as a silly piece of fluff.

Many among the surprising number of Spaghetti Western/martial arts crossover films aren't too entertaining to watch, but most of these films weren't directed by house favorite Antonio Margheriti, who always had a sure hand when it came to directing silly adventure movies. And at heart, The Stranger And The Gunfighter is a deeply silly adventure movie outfitted with the trappings of a Spaghetti Western and a little Kung Fu more than it belongs to those other two genres.

Watching the film, I found it hard to shake the feeling that everyone involved had a hell of a time - Van Cleef shooting, singing (alas) and drinking and Lo Lieh staring at female bottoms with scientific earnestness and a looking glass and kicking male asses when necessary. I imagine Margheriti giggling with glee behind his camera, as I often do when watching the man's films.

All this is obviously far from that mysterious thing experts call "good taste", but I stopped caring about that a long time ago when I decided that I'm not that bourgeois. While the bottom business and the not completely enlightened interpretation of Chinese culture which isn't as bad as in other films I've seen, mind you) might offend some people, that will mostly be a problem for those looking to be offended.

For my tastes, the film is much too good-natured and light to deserve anything but laughter, and much too fast-paced and silly not to be entertaining.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,comedy,martial arts,lo lieh,lee van cleef,antonio margheriti,reviews,adventure

On WTF: A Coffin For The Sheriff (1965)

2009-12-04T08:44:34Z

Sometimes, you just want a Spaghetti Western that's satisfied with just being a Spaghetti Western. At times like that, films like this one are indispensable. My review on WTF-Film will tell you why.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,anthony steffen,mario caiano,reviews,other places

In short: The Final Destination (2009)

2009-12-03T08:41:16Z

A group of movie young people - Hero Guy, Hero Guy's Girlfriend, Asshole and Asshole's Girlfriend - goes to the car races. (I miss our old friends Practical Joker and Slut here, but what can you do?)

Death, being the nice being that it is, wants to spare us time with these non-entities and arranges for a crash that should leave a nice part of the racing audience dead. Alas, Hero Guy has a vision of the impending moment of joy, and leads his friends (and some future cannon fodder in form of our old friends Black Security Dude, Redneck Racist, Joe the Mechanic and Soccer Mom) to safety.

Of course, this being a Final Destination film and all, our friend Death now attempts to get rid of the lot of them in freak accidents taking place in exactly the order they should have died initially. Unfortunately, Hero Guy has unclear visions of everyone's future demise and tries to break the chain of killings to save the life of himself and his friends.

While I take the first Final Destination to be as fun as teen-oriented horror gets, its sequels have been steadily getting worse. This one is the fourth film in the franchise (and it is a franchise aka money-making machine only now, not a series of films telling a story) and has about the level of quality even the Friday the 13th films only sank to with their eighth film, Jason Takes Manhattan.

In other words, it is utter shite made by people who don't care about making anything watchable.

The acting in here is as bad as it gets in a non-backyard film. The "actors" (and I use the word loosely) are visibly struggling with their lines and/or are declining to emote at all.

Of course, as bad as the dialogue is, it would be hard for even a decent or better actor to make something out of it.

And just don't get me started on the absence of a plot or a dramatic arch or really, anything that resembles actually screenwriting.

I can't even go and praise the film's creative death scenes, because Death seems to have worn out his brains in the first three films and has become an utter bore, leaving any sense of humor and suspense(you know, the things which made the deaths in the first film so much fun) behind. Everything is just there to give the film a reason to show off its only selling point: 3D effects I couldn't care less about. It might come as a surprise to the makers of this thing, but eyes and pointy objects jumping at the camera do not a movie make. In fact, they don't even make for a carnival ride.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,in short,utter shite

Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot! (1967)

2009-12-02T09:20:11Z

A guy nobody ever calls Django (Tomas Milian), takes part in the attack on a gold transport. Afterwards, his partners realize that not-Django and his Mexican friends aren't part of their beloved Aryan Brotherhood and so decide to keep all the gold in their own evil white hands.

Turns out that it wasn't a good idea to sloppily shoot their old partners and let them rot in a self-made grave in the desert, because not-Django claws himself out of the grave to be rescued by two very Italian looking Indians. These Indians are really nice guys. If The Artist Never Known As Django tells them what awaits after death, they'll be his obedient servants. To prove their enthusiasm, they have already made him bullets from the gold that really shouldn't be lying around there, seeing that not giving him and his friends any gold was the point of killing them.

While our hero recuperates, the bandits arrive in a nameless desert town I like to call Bucket O'Doom, while the Indians call it just The Unhappy Place.

Too bad the bandits didn't have these subtle hints to guide them, and so fall victim to the gold-greedy lynchmob that makes up the population of Bucket O'Doom.

When TANKAD arrives, he just barely has the opportunity to kill the bandit leader quite dead. For no reason I could fathom, and despite the obvious bloodthirsty madness of everyone around him, he decides to stay in town for a while afterwards.

Very soon, the place's various factions kill and betray each other to get the gold. Somehow, everyone still finds time to kidnap and torture Mister Passive, who really seems quite thankful for the attention.

Wow, did you know that people are mean and greedy? If not, If You Live, Shoot will tell you as often as anyone could wish for. It's just too bad that freeform misanthropy is the only thing of interest the film has going for it. While director Giulio Questi (perhaps best known for his brilliantly titled bizarre giallo Death Laid An Egg) has a certain sense for arresting images, I'm less than enamored of what he decides to use it on. There's really just this much you can do with basic misanthropy until it becomes not deep and profound as the film takes itself to be, but monotonous and a little ridiculous. I already understood that people ain't no good after the first thirty minutes of film, giving me 90 minutes more of the stuff is mostly just numbing and more than a little boring.

It's interesting to compare this to Sergio Corbucci's also incredibly dark and pessimistic The Great Silence, a film that works much better than Questi's thanks to Corbucci's interest in people as actual people and not just as robots that commit the atrocities we see to make a point about the director's philosophy. Which of course doesn't make the things happening in The Great Silence that much more pleasant, but the film is as interested in the (social and psychological) reasons for cruelty as in the cruelty itself, something that would go right over Questi's head, it seems.

If You Kill, Shoot mostly wallows in its own unpleasantness and earnestness, never realizing that it has long passed the point where it will be able to affect its audience emotionally.

It really doesn't help that Milian's character is a complete cipher without a past or much humanity himself - he's just there to be a stand-in for the film's viewer's, never more than superficially trying to influence anything that happens.

Even as a shock picture the film falls rather flat for me. At no point does Questi bother to show his characters as actual people with thoughts, hopes and idiosyncrasies, making it impossible to get any emotional reaction for their bloody demises from me. They are just very flat pictures on celluloid, after all, never meant for anything else than dying with a lot of red paint thrown over them, never giving me a reason to care about them (they aren't even archetypes, much less people, after all).

To put it in a different way, Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot! just lacks soul.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,giulio questi,tomas milian,reviews

In short: Ninjutsu Gozen-jiai (1957)

2009-12-01T08:48:34Z

aka Torawakamaru the Hoga Ninja

Being a magical ninja ain't easy. If you are Ishikawa Goemon (Nakajiro Tomita) of the (in this film) rather evil Iga clan, you might be able to ride clouds, teleport, jump really high, make yourself invisible and cut down trees via telekinesis, but your annoying son Goroichi (Motoharu Ueki) has missed every lesson in Being Evil School and your henchwomen like Sagiri (Hiroko Sakuramachi) are so fragile in their evilness that having one good deed inflicted upon them will turn them into do-gooders themselves.

Not that the rather good ninja of the Hoga clan (also known as the Koga clan) have it easy. First and foremost, there aren't exactly a lot of them left, and their youngest and brightest Torawakamaru (Sentaro Fushimi) might be able to do all those sexy things Goemon can plus turn into a big toad, but he also has the laughter of an especially ill-mannered goat. And, you know, who wants to turn into a big toad?

When the Iga decide to throw their lot in with Tokugawa, the Hoga obviously side with the Tokugawa's main enemy, the Toyotomi. The groups are fighting about the plans for new-fangled castle fortifications the Toyotomi are planning to build and use all the silly tricks a good ninja knows.

But not even the kidnapping of the adorable/annoying little Toyotomi daughter Nene is enough to end the difficulties. In the end, only a ninja duel between Torawakamaru and the Iga boss of bosses Momochi Sandayu (Ryunosuke Tsukitaga) can decide who will build a fortification and who will be (quite literally) cooked.

The short programmer Ninjutsu Gozen-jiai was conjured up in the same spirit of silliness that would later produce the best Japanese film of all times, The Magic Serpent. Obviously made for children, and containing the important moral lessons that evilness is not genetic, and that fire-breathing snakes look much cooler than big frogs, the film's naive charms are large enough to make it an excellent Sunday morning choice of film for people receptive to its charms, namely me.

There is probably not all that much technical merit to the film (although its director Tadashi Sawashima manages to smuggle in a very beautifully shot swordfight in the rain right at the start of the movie), but it runs along nicely, from time to time stopping for the nauseating children and some painful humor.

Fortunately, there is always some new magical ninja silliness waiting around the next corner - not as much of it as in, say, Taiwanese productions of the next two decades, yet enough to satisfy me.

The final duel (in the clouds, with people changing into various ugly animal suits) is especially satisfying and reminds of the best animal themed Halloween party that never happened in historical Japan.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,in short,tadashi sawashima,ninjas,fantasy

Music Monday: One Of These Days Edition

2009-11-30T09:33:50Z

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,neil young,the band,joni mitchell

El Castillo De Las Momias De Guanajuato (1973)

2009-11-29T10:41:20Z

Dr. Tanner (director Tito Novaro), another of the dozens of dastardly mad scientists who plague Mexico, is dying of an incurable illness. The only way to save himself is to acquire a large amount of blood taken from people under duress. But how does a man get at this nectar, when he lives and works in a cellar lab and has only three midgets and one slightly larger skinny guy as henchmen? First, he needs to kidnap another scientist and his son (Alex Agrasanchez again), for no good reason I could make out other than to raise the interest of some luchadores.

Then, he plays his mean magic organ while his henchmidgets sacrifice two cocks in a graveyard to raise a group of undead minions (who really aren't the mummies of Guanajuato, whatever the film's title may promise). Easily controlled with a dog whistle, these walking dead are exactly the help Tanner needs, because they might be so slow even my Grandma could outrun them, but have the useful ability to induce instant loss of consciousness in women. Let the mass kidnappings begin!

The not very dynamic trio of the life-draining void named Superzan, the shirtless wonder Blue Angel, and Tinieblas (the mentally less developed person's Mil Mascaras) had already taken some kind of interest in the disappearance of the Professor, but were too distracted by their new girlfriends Lita (Maria Salome) and Nora (Zulma Faiad) and the need to get beaten up in the ring to do much about it. But when they stumble onto one of the mummy kidnappings (and lose one of the girlfriends to the mummy fainting magic), the ancient enmity between luchador and mummy kicks in, and they really try to find out what is going on.

As always, Agrasanchez Productions don't make it easy for anyone to like their films. As if the cast of two c-list luchadors and the unbearable Superzan wasn't bad enough, half of Castillo is just dreadfully boring and possibly even slower than the two Superzan solo outings. It is of course the fault of scenes upon scenes of filler, padding and padding to pad out the filler. Friends of lucha cinema will of course know that this is one of the Agrasanchez trademarks, but three plot-irrelevant wrestling scenes, one musical number (that was at least filmed in the presence of the wrestlers, which would be kind of a plus if not for the fact that it is also especially painful) and much driving, walking and more driving are still hard to take. It doesn't help that our protagonists are not doing anything important for more than half of the film, and really can't make up for it through charisma. Perhaps potential female viewers will at least like the Blue Angel beefcake?

Confusingly enough, the other half of the film is quite awesome and creative in the thoughtless yet effective way I have learned to love.

There are earnest scenes of wrestlers doing research in musty old tomes (always a favorite) and interviewing priests, the absolutely hilarious grand mummy resurrection scene (complete with the shaking of dead cock into the camera), a score that always drifts off into freeform freak-out mode as if played by a talentless Sonic Youth with acoustic guitars and way too tired to try anything fancy, the patented mummy single file, a very campy torture scene and the unforgettable sight of Superzan biting through a young boy's ties - all things which make my heart rejoice and put a spring into a mummy's steps.

I also couldn't help but wonder about the film's sexual politics. What is up with the three wrestlers apparently sharing two women? Is Blue Angel a secret member of the Village People, as his perpetual state of shirtlessness suggests?

I'd love to say something about Tito Novaro's direction this time around, but except for an unhealthy love for the colour red and some groovy camera movements in the resurrection scene, he's just doing point and shoot here. Well, at least he's not making the shoddiest mummy make-up of the series up to this point too obvious and keeps the things we are supposed to see in frame. I'd love to treat things like this as prerequisite for any film, but I'm not that naive anymore.

So, how do you call a film half brilliant, silly entertainment and half snoozefest (apart from "an Agrasanchez Production")? A typical 70s lucha movie? Probably. In that case, El Castillo De Las Momias De Guanajuato is an archetypal 70s lucha movie.

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,lucha,horror,reviews,tito novaro,superzan,tinieblas,blue angel,zulma faiad

In short: Fu-Rai (2005)

2009-11-28T08:48:54Z

aka White Panic

(This time, I will not be able to avoid spoilers for the film's ending. Be warned!)

Four young people - three men and a woman - awaken naked in an empty white room full of something that looks suspiciously like flour. They all remember that they were assaulted in their respective apartments and kidnapped, but have a hard time imagining why they have been brought to this strange place.

Since this is a Cube-alike, they immediately start to bitch at each other for no good reason at all. From time to time, their discussions are broken by the lights turning blue, gas being pumped into the room and guys in white hazmat suits forcing them to swallow a mysterious fluid.

After some time, at least three of the young people form a reluctant coalition and try to find out why they have been kidnapped and how to get away. Turns out that they all share a feeling of guilt for one parent.

With this pooled information strengthening their resolve, they manage to escape from the room, only to spend the rest of the movie crawling through air-ducts and running through corridors and stairways, all the while evading a handful of exceedingly silly death traps like the Mousetrap of Being Stuck and the Foot-Cutting Wire.

It's no wonder these traps are so silly. They have after all been invented by the same scriptwriter responsible for the film's twist ending, such as it is. You see, our protagonists' feelings of guilt notwithstanding, those feelings aren't the reason they have been kidnapped, rather, they have been chosen because nobody will miss them when they end up as food in the giant microwave oven of an evil corporation trying to solve the problem of overpopulation while making tasty treats.

Fu-Rai is an ultra-cheap imitation of Cube, but one which, unlike the films it copies, is stupid enough to commit to a reason for the things happening to its characters. The cooking angle is of course patently absurd, the earnest and dramatic way the film treats it making the ridiculousness just worse.

This is not the film's only problem. Its production design tries hard to let the cheap and shoddy look minimalist and stylish, but seems to give up after the first twenty minutes or so, and just goes for the usual airduct/corridor/warehouse stuff.

With a running time of 68 minutes, Fu-Rai is also at least half an hour too long, like a classical Twilight Zone episode artificially bloated by flashbacks and people screeching at each other.

While all this does not for a good movie make, I can't help but appreciate that director Shugo Fujii is at least trying to make an earnest and interesting little film, something that puts it automatically above too much of the direct to DVD market in Japan or elsewhere, which is full of films made by people who just don't give a shit about movies or their audience.

With a bit more cleverness, a slightly better sense of pacing and little less (or much more, of course) silliness, this could have been a neat little movie. As it stands, Fu-Rai is just not interesting enough to overlook its flaws. It is also a case where I find myself having a hard time laughing about a film's unintentional humor. It would be a bit like laughing about a one-legged man's troubles with stairs.

Technorati-Tags: in short,japanese movies,sf

On WTF: Hantu Jeruk Purut (2006)

2009-11-27T08:29:43Z

The Indonesian part of the Asian horror boom is often ignored by Western horror fandom, undeservedly so, as not original but fun films like Hantu Jeruk Purut prove. There's long-haired ghost women and headless priests, oh my!

Technorati-Tags: indonesian movies,koya pagayo,horror,reviews,angie virgin

In short: Mikadroid (1991)

2009-11-26T09:13:05Z

To the surprise of no one, Japan was trying to build a cyborg soldier during World War II. Just when the war is lost, the Japanese government decides to close down the project. They needn't have bothered, because the building in which the project is based is destroyed in an air raid. Before that, the lead scientist manages to help two not completely converted soldiers escape, while the real prototype in its full early Iron Man glory is buried under the rubble.

45 years later, a building with a parking garage and an underground disco has been built on the site. One day, Iron Man awakens and kills a few people. Fortunately, his old soldier colleagues haven't aged a bit in the intervening years and are coming to kill him.

A young electrician (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, yes the director) and an office drone (Yoriko Douguchi, who still has a career in Japanese genre film and has also played in a few Kurosawa films) will be very thankful for their help.

Mikadroid sounds more interesting than it actually is. Apart from the intriguing Kiyoshi Kurosawa connection and a handful of neat visual ideas, there's unfortunately not much about the film.

There isn't happening enough for 73 minutes of film, the plot would barely be enough for 45, and while the cyborg soldier's design is nice and truly looks like I'd imagine a cyborg made in pulp '45 would, the two directors (Satoo Haraguchi & Tomoo Haraguchi, the latter mostly a special effects guy with a few films like the dreadful Kibakichi as a director) never manage to do much with him. The film does not manage to build the necessary feeling of menace and is also much too slow to ever build up enough momentum to become exciting.

The script is nothing to write home about either. It never bothers to explain why cyborg soldier is going on a killing spree, leaving what is happening too abstract to have emotional impact. The film's tendency for undeserved pathos does not help its case - there is too much baseless melodrama here, too many moments when we the viewer is told to feel something the film doesn't bother to make her feel.

Still, I am not completely down on Mikadroid. Most of its problems are obviously based on a lack of experience and a lack of funds, and I am willing to live with them to a degree when a film at least tries to be professional.

There are also a few slightly surreal sequences making up for some of the film's flaws. Seeing Kurosawa act alongside Douguchi is quite a neat thing to watch, too.

So while I can't really recommend it, Mikadroid has its intriguing aspects.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,kiyoshi kurosawa,yoriko douguchi,sf,action,in short

Slaughter High (1986)

2009-11-25T08:32:56Z

It's April Fools' Day somewhere in the trenches of the American high school. A group of jocks lead by a certain Skip (Carmine Iannacone - watch out for his dramatic mugging in the second half of the film) and Carol (Caroline Munro, at age 36 wee bit old to be in high school, yet even with her 80s hair still too classy for the film, even though she doesn't seem to be trying very hard) play a series of especially cruel jokes on the local nerd Marty (Simon Scuddamore).

Despite their best efforts, the funny people don't manage to electrocute or drown their victim, but have no fear, Marty himself is stupid enough to take a (of course spiked) joint from some members of the group and will have a terrible disfiguring acid accident which also lands him in a padded cell.

Years later, Carol is an upcoming, coke-snorting actress, but still has time to visit her class reunion. It's a rather strange reunion at that - only the members of her old clique seem to have been invited and the school is more or less deserted.

A complete lack of guilty consciences and utter stupidity are the reasons why our group of victims still decides to have a party, but what do you know! Someone in a high school jacket wearing a fool's mask and hat is slaughtering them one by one in creative ways, and there's no way out of the school anymore. Will Carol be the world's first mean-spirited, coke-snorting Final Girl? Or will our friend Skippy rise to the occasion? More importantly, do you want them to?

Slaughter High came late in the first slasher movie cycle, but I can't say it had learned any important lessons from its million of predecessors, or rather, not one of the three(!) directors deemed it necessary to do any directing as we usually know it. Why this shoddy, derivative mess needed three directors at all is anybody's guess. I'm just going to blame the cocaine. Or perhaps someone somewhere thought that the combined efforts of three talentless hacks would somehow reach the level of the work of one barely mediocre craftsman. Turns out they don't.

While it, like all slashers whose only ambitions lie in being loose collections of murders, isn't in any way scary or exciting (please put words like "mood" right out of your vocabulary when it comes to films like it), the film at least succeeds as a cheesy collection of silly bits and stupid pieces. There are many joyful (or painful) moments you can only get in a shoddy production from the tail end of the slasher boom like this, be it the outrageous hideousness of the killer's victims or some of the sillier kills. At least the sex-electrocution (while talking dirty) has to be seen to be believed.

There is also the ending to mention, or rather the way in which it effortlessly manages to go from killing off the (theoretical) Final Girl to a stupid Twilight Zone pastiche to a "it was all a dream" cop out to a supposed shock ending in the space of five minutes. It's awe-inspiring in its insipid and annoying way.

Apart from Caroline Munro as the only professional actor on screen, the producers also managed to rope Harry Manfredini in to do the music. In revenge, he composed them a bizarre mix of his usual synthie stuff, some idiosyncratic strings, cock rock and an annoying "humorous" jingle theme thing I will probably never get out of my head again.

So, if you are looking for quality in your movies, you should probably make a wide berth around Slaughter High. If your mind is instead set on witnessing more of the special brand of cheese that only grew (much like especially big-haired fungus) in the 80s, you will feel right at home with it.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,slasher,caroline munro,reviews

In short: The Shackle (2000)

2009-11-24T09:00:02Z

Screenwriter Yuchool spends most of his time writing lurid screenplays his producer doesn't want to touch because they are supposed to be too artsy. Not that he needs the job - the death of his parents some time ago has left him with quite a bit of money.

The rather disturbed man seems to have spent a part of it on his hobby room in the basement. There, he has space for alone time with his beloved mannequins and the women he first kidnaps, shackles and then rapes and kills every Sunday.

On weeknights, he plays the voyeur, watching his neighbour Sulchee and her husband making love. Sulchee is an important part of the creep's fantasy life in her role as is only great and secret love.

While Sulchee is friendly but obviously not at all interested in him as a lover in real life, her visiting sister Dalchee is (like some other women he completely ignores) just all over him. That's unfortunate for her and leads her to an early death when she says the wrong things about her sister to him.

After that killing, it won't take long until the psychopath feels the need to finally get close to his "beloved".

Myeong-hwa Jo's Saseul tries very hard to follow in the footsteps of the less pleasant parts of the Japanese pinku genre or some of the roman porn films of Yasuharu Hasebe, but somehow gets stuck at an awkward place just a bit too far from being truly disturbing and too close to being complicit with its protagonist.

There might be a very unpleasant streak of identification with the deranged main character running through the film, but at the same time this streak never gets strong enough to make one squirm while watching it.

This may sound like a good thing, but I don't think it really is. Trying to get the viewer to identify with the psycho, to feel queasy about sharing the position of the voyeur with him while being disgusted by his violence would be the trick that's needed here to get this jaded exploitation fan to feel more about the film than a combination of slight exasperation and boredom. Intellectually, I should have felt bad about sharing Yunchool's experiences, but instead just co-ogled the naked women, watched his mugging and felt slightly embarrassed.

There's something lacking in this film (and it's not the lack of empathy) I find difficult to put into words, I must admit. I suspect The Shackle just needed a few more scenes which tried to achieve some sort of twisted poetry, or violence that felt either more real or more artificial, something, anything to drag it out of the mire of slightly artsy, slightly unpleasant sexploitation into the weird, the wild or the dangerous.

I'm looking for a something committed to a little more than just breasts and chains in my exploitation. Alas The Shackle never really dared to deliver more.

Technorati-Tags: south korean movies,exploitation,in short

Music Monday: At Least You Can Buy His Albums In Germany Edition

2009-11-23T09:07:54Z

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,johnny dowd

Dead Girl Walking (2004)

2009-11-22T09:30:52Z

Japanese schoolgirl Yuri (Ayaka Maeda) one day finds her heart stopping and the world around her turning from colour to black and white. The doctor her family calls pronounces her dead, yet she's still thinking, talking and walking around like everybody else.

At first, her family just finds her state rather inconvenient, but as soon as Yuri starts to rot and stink (as dead people do), they decide to stop the nuisance by burning her. That's what you do with dead people after all. The scene turns accidentally bloody.

Yuri flees from home to walk around forlornly, from time to time shedding body parts and thinking if formaldehyde wouldn't be of use in her state.

While she wanders around, she meets and is rejected by her former classmates, has to flee a rude gardener and is shortly displayed in a surreal circus.

Dead Girl Walking is a short film based on a manga by the obsessive horror mangaka and director Hideshi Hino, who also delivers a very hokey introduction. It's part of a series of such films, all of them shot on digital video for very little money. As always, I'm not entirely sure if these films were done for the video market or TV; it doesn't matter much anyway.

This episode was directed by my secret Japanese horror director crush Koji Shiraishi (who directed the good Ju-Rei, the excellent Noroi & A Slit-Mouthed Woman aka Carved, the less excellent Grotesque and a bunch of other films I really want to see on subtitled DVDs right now) and is as good as this crushee had hoped for.

It might feel more like a metaphorical little art film using horror tropes than a pure horror film, but since its basic metaphor describes the horrors of growing up, it still ends up being quite horrifying if one is responsive to these special horrors.

The film is all about the fear of rejection (by family, friends, random strangers), the feeling of being a freak and the loss of the will to live that made being a teenager so much fun for many of us. Shiraishi is using the living dead angle to show the terror of the situation more clearly. Interestingly, he also chose to break the nightmarishness of his material up through the use of black humor (mostly based on the loss of body parts), showing acceptance of the silliness that lies buried under his film's view of teenage life and the general drama of its premise.

This laughter is not necessarily a liberating one - it is much too knowing for that. Still, it is laughter, and without it the film's final, weird moment of hope would just seem campy. With the laughter in mind, I'm just about willing to accept it.

Stylistically, the film mixes obvious influences of early David Lynch (the terrifying, nightmarish black and white absurdity of Eraserhead), Carnival of Souls and expressionist silent movies, just with even less money to spend. The silent movie influence is especially strong thanks to the soundtrack's synthesizer version of "typical" silent movie music (I'll spare you a digression on why "typical" silent movie music isn't in fact typical for silent movies but for modern interpretation of them) and the title cards that show us Yuri's thoughts, not to speak of some very fine uses of shadow and weirdly angled sets.

Some viewers may find the bluntness of Shiraishi's use of all these elements and the obviousness of his symbols somewhat off-putting, but I don't have this kind of qualms. A symbol that is so cryptic that nobody not reading the artist's mind can understand it does of course have its own charms and uses; Shiraishi seems more interested in communicating what he means than in making communication impossible (very un-Lynch of him, I know), or in making the difficulty of communication the theme of his film.

My tastes run - as they so often do - in both directions at once, so I'm satisfied, as long as a film does what it is trying to do well. Dead Girl Walking does do it well.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,horror,koji shiraishi,reviews,art house

In short: Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Death-Make (2005)

2009-11-21T09:19:07Z

The operator of a website specialized in the paranormal makes some kind of deal with a local cable TV show and carts a bunch of "sensitives" into the empty warehouse where every second cheap horror flick takes place, ahem, I mean where a group of young girls supposedly disappeared years ago.

The group builds four walls out of white sheets and does nothing of interest, until mildly strange things start to happen. Soon, the intrepid explorers into the paranormal find themselves in another dimension or some such, not hunted by the expected ghost, but by a shitty looking crabmantisspider.

Death-Make (whatever that is supposed to mean) is one part of a series of short films either made for Japanese TV or the direct to DVD market, based on manga by the loveable eccentric Kazuo Umezu aka Umezz. Unfortunately, this one has not been helmed by a real director (for example Kiyoshi Kurosawa) like some of the other episodes, but is directed by the series' main special effects guy Taichi Ito, who is really bad as his job.

The monster looks so terrible that I would find it difficult not to take it as a personal affront, if not for the fact that the rest of the effects is just as bad. Therefore, logic suggest a case of incompetence and not of malevolence.

Of course, I would gladly be willing to just ignore the crappiness of the effects if the plot, the acting or the direction would be any good. Alas, it isn't so.

I'm not going to come down too hard on the actors, though. There is only so much someone can do when given nothing at all to work with. As it happens, "nothing to work with" is exactly how I would describe Death-Make's script. There's no rhyme, no reason, no characterization and not even enough plot for the 50 minutes of my life this thing has stolen from me. Worse, every potentially neat idea (all two of them!) is destroyed by Ito's direction.

I would not be surprised if the man had learned (or rather not learned) his trade making videoclips, what with his love for nonsensical jump-cuts, useless black and white footage, puzzling rewinds and digital filters only a blind man would find appropriate. Ito's direction is just astonishingly bad, at once completely without an ability to build mood and filled with the sort of self-important "look at mah wicked stylez!" stunt directing you can only get away with when you know exactly what you are doing. Ito surely doesn't.

While this may sound less than encouraging, I suspect that the outright stupidity of the script, the inept effects and Ito's interesting ideas about film direction could make for something well worth pointing and laughing at in an intoxicated state.

Too bad that I was astonishingly sober while watching the "film", as always.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,horror,kazuo umezu,in short

On WTF: Project: Metalbeast (1995)

2009-11-20T12:24:31Z

In which a mid-90s cheapo turns out to be quite an entertaining throwback to the era of classic suitmation films.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,other places,horror,reviews

Ratman (1988)

2009-11-19T09:33:19Z

What will those mad scientists think of next? Well, this film's mad scientist is all for winning the Nobel price (seems to be quite easy these days anyhow) by creating a hybrid between rat and monkey.

One day Mousey (Nelson de la Rosa) - as the mad scientist calls his creation - escapes from his cage and starts to teleport around the tropical island he was born on, killing young women and the occasional man left and right without anyone caring or noticing or trying to find out how he can cover incredible distances on two very short legs in no time at all.

Some time later the American Terry (Janet Agren) arrives on the island to identify the dead body of her sister Marlis (Eva Grimaldi). In front of the airport, she meets the mystery writer Fred Williams (David Warbeck) who will at once become inseparable from her and tag along everywhere, even to the morgue. There, Terry learns that the local police isn't good for much. The dead body she is supposed to look at isn't her sister at all! It turns out that Marlis is on a photo shoot with the photographer Mark (Werner Pochath) somewhere in the jungle and just hasn't returned by now.

This doesn't hinder the cops from showing Terry another dead body a little later, for no reason I could comprehend.

While Terry and Fred are looking at corpses and trotting through town with no particular ambition for doing anything worth watching, Marylin and her photographer friend delight us with a weird photo shoot scene before they find more dead bodies and witness another murder. They flee to the home of the mad scientist. Will this turn out to be A Very Bad Idea?

When you take a look at "the world's smallest actor" Nelson de la Rosa in his Ratman (and no, I don't know what makes a rat/monkey hybrid a ratman) get-up, you might very well think to yourself that this is going to be a rather creepy piece of cinema. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. While Nelson really looks the part, the film never bothers to make much use of that fact.

In truth, there's just not much happening at all - there are some murders, some cheesy photo shoot scenes and our "heroes" traipsing around finding some corpses, then flying back home, and that's it for excitement.

I have to admit I was hoping for something a little better from the last film Giuliano Carnimeo directed. Carnimeo isn't one of the big Italian genre names, but he has some fine, entertaining movies like Exterminators of the Year 3000 or The Case of the Bloody Iris in his filmography, so I had certain expectations of, not exactly quality, but entertainment value.

Ratman completely wastes the excellent duo of Warbeck and Agren and doesn't allow them to do anything of interest besides walking around. It's such a shame.

On the film's plus side are the insane ravings of the mad scientist, the scene where Mousey climbs out of a toilet and the insane ending I am now going to spoil: Mousey hides in the dead Marlis' handbag (not without killing a police clerk without anyone noticing) which is taken by Terry without a look inside or a comment on the weight of the thing, then goes through customs without a problem and causes a freeze frame shot of a plane with screams on the soundtrack. Take that City of the Living Dead's ending!

Now, you could argue that the toilet scene and the movie's ending alone are enough to make it mandatory watching for the friend of cheap Italian crap, and I certainly wouldn't contradict you, yet I still can't help but feel disappointed about the misuse of Warbeck and Agren and the terrible feeling of meh the rest of the film left me with.

Of course, when someone will ask me in a few months what I think about Ratman (this sort of question comes up all the time, doesn't it?), I'll only remember that Agren and Warbeck are in it, the way Nelson looks, the toilet and the freeze frame plane, and call the film completely awesome.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,horror,janet agren,david warbeck,giuliano carnimeo,reviews

Dead Air (2009)

2009-11-18T09:03:46Z

It looks like a typical night in the working life of immensely popular self-righteous audience-hating talk radio man Logan Burnhardt (Bill Moseley). Only he, his on-air sidekick Gil (David Moscow), his producer and ex-wife Lucy (Patricia Tallman), tech guy Burt (Joshua Feinman) and coloured security guard Tanner (Anthony Ray Parker) are in the station when the unthinkable happens (and would you believe that the black guy dies first?).

About a dozen bombs blow up in sports stadiums across the USA. The bombs are just the carriers for the true problem, namely a 28 Days Later-like virus which transforms its victims into rage zombies. While Logan is trying to keep his listeners informed, the usual stuff happens around him.

Oh, and one of the (sigh, yes, evil Muslim) terrorists sneaks into the station to get Logan to first blame the Muslims, then the US government for the attacks, an idea I'd leave out of my zombie virus terrorist attack plans - mostly because it's really stupid and just makes no fucking sense.

So, this is what happens when actor has-been Corbin Bernsen tries his hand at directing (and not for the first time, I might add, so that you can avoid his other films as well) the dumb person's version of Pontypool. Not that Bruce McDonald needs to be afraid of the competition; crap like this lets the original film just shine that much brighter.

The film's problems are manifold, but I - keeping in the spirit of Dead Air's script - am much too lazy to get into all of them.

But let's talk about the script a little, or rather its mindnumbingly stupid politics. It's the sort of film that on one hand wants its evil muslim pulp terrorists to be totally evil yet on the other tries its damndest to keep up a puzzled liberal face of the "why, oh why do these people hate us so much?" variety. And it even gives an answer: they like killing, and all their motives are just excuses. Which brings me back to the word dumb, because, honestly, if it's so hard for a scriptwriter to get into other people's heads, he should probably try to find another job. Ideologically even more puzzling is the "people are mean, you know" monologue at the end which has fuck all to do with the film we saw, in which there never was much room for someone being mean in a meaningful way beside our supposed hero and the evil muslim pulp terrorists. It does, however, fit quite well into my theory that neither Bernsen nor his writer ever bothered to think anything about their film through.

I'm kind of puzzled why the zombies are in the film at all. The thematic work (such as it is) is completely done through blunt and obvious dialogue between Burnhardt and Evil Muslim Guy. The zombies here aren't a metaphor, they're just there because nobody involved in the production had enough talent to write a film "only" about the aftermath of a large-scale terrorist attack or a regular biological agent. Why, without the zombies, you'd need to make use of your characters as characters instead of keeping to the usual cliches.

Yes, I am perfectly aware that you can have well-written characters and zombies as a metaphor and cool gut-munch action in one film, or that you can make an excellent movie with just one of those three elements. Unfortunately, I don't think Bernsen is aware of that. We are in the land of people who think making a genre film is an excuse for being lazy here. People, I might add, who aren't some guys making a film in their backyards with their family and friends doing the acting, but supposed professionals.

The good thing about the momentary flood of zombie films is that it makes it unnecessary for the zombie fan to tolerate films like Dead Air just because their direction reaches vaguely professional levels and they have zombies in them. If you're set on watching something with everyone's favorite monster in it, there's a world of better films to see, and not much reason for anyone to waste his or her time or more words than I just did on this one.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,zombies

In short: Escape From Coral Cove (1986)

2009-11-17T09:04:12Z

A group of young, rich, boring idlers spends some summer days in the beach resort of Coral Cove. They do waterskiing. They dive. They are jealous. They are potential final girls. One of 'em is called Four-Eyes (Louis Kong) and has a little brother.

After hours of painful "excitement" with them, a friendly dead guy (Roy Cheung) starts to kill off the annoying people. Instead of thanking the dead guy or making him president of the yacht club or something, a security guard calls his uncle, a Buddhist exorcist.

Too bad for him that he's a crap exorcist, and doesn't survive the meeting with dead guy. Four-Eyes is better at the job and explodes the evil monster with his little brother's science project. The end.

Even if you keep in mind that the Ocean Shores VCD of Escape From Coral Cove, which seems to be the only way to watch the film, has gotten rid of nearly every bit of blood, there's still no good reason for the film to be this boring. It is in fact so boring that I highly doubt that an uncut version would be more worthy of my time.

Coral Cove's prospective viewers should bring with them a love for long waterskiing and diving sequences and many many scenes of young healthy people presenting their bodies (in bathing suits, oh friends of nakedness) to a leering camera. Which is all nice and well but really not enough to keep one awake for more than ten minutes. Take the hour of the stuff the film provides, and you have a wonderful medicine against insomnia.

I usually try to find at least something positive to say about a film. Coral Cove doesn't make it easy, because there just isn't anything of interest to discover on screen. The direction is just there, the script easy to ignore (that's what the film's writer did, too), the acting is of the "acting" variety, so what is there to praise? Well, Leung Yuen-Jing is kinda cute, but that's not really the film's responsibility.

Oh, I know! The scene where the bad guy bleeds water! That is something to praise.

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,horror,in short

Music Monday: Highway Goddess Edition

2009-11-16T08:40:19Z

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,mercury rev

Raigyo (1997)

2009-11-15T09:46:21Z

Noriko (Moe Sakura) absconds from the hospital where she is being treated for her pancreatitis. Dressed in black and carrying a knife and the photo of a child in her handbag, she drifts through the outskirts of a Japanese industrial town, trying to connect to either her husband who is now living with another woman or the lover she betrayed her husband with or both via phone - as in many things, the film isn't forthcoming with clear explanations for what is going on.

At the same time, Yanai, an office worker who takes a day off from work to sleep around while his wife lies in pregnant in hospital, is desperately trying to find one among the astounding number of women prepared for a quick fuck in his little brown notebook actually willing to indulge the sleazy bastard.

When Noriko has been rejected completely and Yanai doesn't find any woman willing to put up with him, a dating hotline connects the two lost souls. They meet up, and after a short bit of sex, Noriko stabs and strangles him to death in the shower of a cheap motel.

The police suspect her of the murder, but aren't able to prove anything. The only witnesses who have seen Noriko and Yanai together are a mentally handicapped girl and a gas station attendant (Takeshi Ito?). The latter would very well be able to identify her, yet chooses not to, so that he can ask her for an explanation how it feels to kill someone, hoping for closure for the traumatic death of a child in his past, or perhaps something else he isn't able to grasp or articulate.

Raigyo's director Takashi Zeze is known for his especially bleak variation of the pinku, and this austere but strangely beautiful drama should be proof enough.

The film is set in the bleakest part of the Japanese province, an industrial area where nature itself seems contaminated by humanity's presence. Long shots of dead fish and sickly green and yellow places abide, putting the characters into a setting that is nearly empty of humans but without any of the calming influences of nature.

Places like these can only be populated by people unable to connect, to their own emotions, to each other, to the world or even the motives for their own actions. Raigyo does the same thing many other of the art-minded pinku films do for Tokyo, namely making its provincial location look like a place where sex and death seem to be the only possible ways for people to connect to each other or themselves. Yet even these things don't seem to bring any peace of mind to Raigyo's characters.

Zeze treats his characters much like parts of the landscape, letting the viewer gaze calmly at them from the outside, but never inviting her into their heads. The way he never provides any direct information about the characters' inner lives might be infuriating to some; I found that it perfectly mirrored the disconnection between the film characters and the world they inhabit.

At the same time, the actors, especially Moe Sakura (and that's a bizarre name in the context of this film if I ever heard one), very ably project the feeling that there is much more to their characters than there appears to be - quite possibly much more than they themselves are conscious of. We as viewers are never given enough knowledge of their inner life to make a completely coherent picture, just as in real life.

All this might sound like an exceptionally depressing experience, and it certainly isn't the sort of film that makes you want to party, or live much longer, but at the same time Zeze finds a weirdly abstract and appropriately numb core of beauty in the bleakness of his film's locations. It is as if through the act of looking at them, the corruption of nature and the disconnectedness of things don't lose their terror, yet somehow gain a quality you can't help but appreciate.

However, if you appreciate this quality too much, you might possibly end up like one of Zeze's characters.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,pinku,drama,takashi zeze,moe sakura

In short: La Radice Del Male (2006)

2009-11-14T09:06:59Z

aka The Roots of Evil

The painter Andrea Spiegelman (Zora Kerova) has lost her memory and half of her face in some mysterious accident.

It is already a year after the accident, but she still hasn't recovered. At least she is finally allowed to leave the clinic where she spent the last year of her life. Her doctor (Lionello Gennero) and husband Valerio (Giancarlo Previati) think it best for her to recover in a country house she inherited from her uncle (Peter Sheperd) who killed himself some time before Andrea's accident.

The painter isn't a happy woman there - her husband isn't exactly the nicest man she could have married (when he is home at all), she has lost all drive to paint and her doctor doesn't want to prescribe her any more morphine.

It seems like a stroke of luck when she finds some notes and tape recordings her uncle left her. In them, the hobby botanist describes his experiments with the psychotropic drugs he produced from the plants he grew in his greenhouse - up to the point when he took his experiments too far and committed suicide, of course.

Andrea, with really nothing better to do and in dire need of chemical improvement, starts to repeat her uncle's experiments. At first, it's all fun and games and pretty pretty colours, but soon Andrea has difficulty telling hallucination from reality. It seems as if rather strange things are happening in the house, as if the servants and her husband have secrets from her, but who can say what of the things Andrea sees is the truth and what an hallucination?

Things reach a violent climax when the disturbed woman tries a plant extract which is supposed to help one regain lost memories.

La Radice Del Male is a very low-key Italian low budget thriller that doesn't contain an ounce of originality.

Nonetheless, I found myself nodding in agreement while watching it. Sure, the plot twists should surprise nobody, and director Silvana Zancolo isn't exactly inspired, but she(?) does a straightforward enough job with the film, just telling her story without trying to impress overtly. I think that sometimes there's something to be said for the work of diligent craftspeople like Zancolo. Watched in the right mood, a simple story told in a simple way like this one can be thoroughly satisfying.

Zora Kerova, whom you might know from a handful of the more extreme Italian genre movies of the 70s and 80s like Cannibal Ferox and Anthropophagus does a fine job in the role of the disturbed heroine. It is refreshing to see an actress who has aged in the graceful way of people who haven't given in to the nightmare of unmovable facial muscles we know as botox and is therefore still able to use her face to emote.

It's also just nice to see a thriller whose main characters are in their Fifties instead of teenagers, living a grown-up life not too often seen on screen.

Still - as I said - this film won't land on anyone's list of timeless classics. It's just a nice, solid little movie deserving of some respect.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,thriller,zora kerova,silvana zancolo,in short

On WTF: Colin (2008)

2009-11-13T09:19:29Z

A much hyped British zombie film, shot on digital for lunch money. Can't be any good, right? Surprisingly,

I found myself falling in love with the film, as my rather long-winded and overexcited piece on WTF-Film shows.

Technorati-Tags: british movies,zombies,horror,marc price,alastair kirton,reviews,other places