The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

Blood Beach (1980)

2009-11-08T09:56:13Z

An elderly woman is eaten by the Los Angeles beach she is walking her dog on. Since there are no eyewitnesses for this somewhat strange occurrence, the police think she must have just gone away somewhere. That is what people of a certain age always do, right?

Her daughter Catherine (Marianna Hill) sees things quite differently and returns to her native LA to find out what happened to her mum. Catherine has help in the form of Harry Caulder (David Huffman), her ex-boyfriend from long way off. The harbor patrol man can't help but find the disappearance of a woman whom he'd talked to just minutes before she vanished into thin air very strange indeed. And if spending some time with Catherine while looking for her mother can help him and Catherine get back together, then that's all the better for him. It doesn't seem to matter much to him (or the film itself) that he is already in a relationship. What a stroke of luck that his girlfriend is soon eaten and very fast forgotten anyway.

Yes, the monster living under the so innocent looking beach continues to strike. A decapitated dog, a mutilated woman and a de-phallused rapist later, even police captain Pearson (John Saxon) can't help but go with the monster theory. There's also a police scientist played by Stefan Gierasch who sprouts some pseudo-science, but he speaks so frigging slowly that I have never been able to puzzle out what he is trying to tell us. Something about mutations, and the thing just having crawled from the sea and probably going to learn to walk in the future, I think.

Now it is only a question of time until the authorities find the creature's dwelling place and everything will be alright again.

For a film about a beach that eats people Blood Beach is surprisingly anaemic. I suppose all the blood went into the title, until the most colourful thing you get to see on screen is Burt Young doing a groan-worthy Harvey Bullock shtick as a certain Sergeant Royko and Saxon getting a single good scene in which he chews out some politicians.

Jeffrey Bloom, the film's writer and director, mostly worked in TV, and if not for a little nakedness, the dog head-munch and the most sedate penis loss in the history of humanity, he could have fooled me into believing this was a TV production too, with all the worst things people usually say about the quality of TV movies this once coming absolutely true.

The thing that truly kills the film is its glacial pacing, with scenes often going on much longer than necessary or good and other scenes, like the supposedly comical one in which the wife of one of the monster's victims describes in excruciating detail how her man was dressed, that should have been cut completely, especially in light of the fact that nothing at all seems to be happening for most of the time. Even worse, when something theoretically exciting is happening, Bloom's direction is so bland and lacking in imagination that even attempted rape and scenes of the beach monster dragging people under and nibbling on them come over as dry and boring as watching someone do her bookkeeping.

It doesn't exactly help that our supposed lead characters a) aren't doing anything interesting b) are about as charismatic as umbrellas and (in the case of Harry) c) are morally deeply unpleasant, but I won't blame the actors for more than trying to keep their performances on the same neutral level as anything else in the film.

It's a shame the movie doesn't even seem to be trying, for Blood Beach could (and should) have been a whole lot of low-brow fun (The Beach That Eats People!) if it had just tried to emulate the classic monster movie formula that people like Roger Corman used in the 50s. That way, we would have seen much more of the ridiculous looking monster - whatever it is supposed to be, and wouldn't have to get through quite this much filler and utter slowness for no climax to speak of.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,john saxon,reviews

In short: Toxic Zombies (1979)

2009-11-07T09:36:53Z

aka Forest of Fear

aka Bloodeaters

Two federal agents searching our old friend, the deep American woods, for dope fields, stumble upon a handful of tents, shoot an unarmed female dope grower and are killed in return by her friends. The disappearance of the agents makes it quite clear to two evil government guys in ~~Ma's basement~~ Washington (one of them John Amplas of Martin, but far from that film's glory) where they have to search for the evils of Weed. Because they are evil government guys, they hire a random drunk pilot to fly over the area and dust the crop with an experimental poison (yeah, I don't know, either).

Turns out that the toxin turns hippies in tool-(even torch-)using semi-zombies with a lust for human flesh. The moaning and groaning lot doesn't need an extra incentive to munch on some camping tourists and a forest service guy (director Charles McCrann), his wife (Beverly Shapiro) and associate, in this, the most populated lonely part of the woods this side of Don't Go In The Woods...Alone. Of course there is also a sub-plot about the evil government guys trying to get rid of any witnesses to their wrong-doings. It's what evil government guys do.

Toxic Zombies is archetypal stumbling-through-the-woods horror, achieving everything this sub-genre promises, which is to say, it shows a copious amount of people stumbling through woods and not much else.

The acting is mostly decent and McCrann's direction shows signs of basic competence, but I am quite sure that a less competent film would be a lot more entertaining than this one turns out to be. As it stands, Toxic Zombies is just dreadfully boring, and not the interesting sort of boring that lets you see God, no, it's the sort of boring that just makes you want to close your eyes and sleep for five minutes or ten. You're not going to miss anything interesting anyway.

To be fair, it's not entirely true that the film doesn't contain anything worth seeing at all. There are one or two quietly disturbing shots of flies on rubbery gore and two short moments of neat hand-held camera work showing nothing at all - but in a creative manner, but those add up to five minutes out of ninety at best.

That's more than enough for me not to feel like I have wasted my time on the film, more sane viewers however should probably try to avoid this one.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,in short,zombies

On WTF: Chaw (2009)

2009-11-06T08:53:54Z

This week on WTF-Film, I turn my gaze in the direction of a contemporary South Korean Jaws-alike called Chaw. It's Jaws with a boar, but done in an Asian comedic style! Read more about the terrible truth on WTF-Film!

Technorati-Tags: south korean movies,jeong-won shin,reviews,comedy,horror,giant monsters

El Robo De Las Momias De Guanajuato (1972)

2009-11-05T08:59:29Z

The evil occultist Count Cagliostro (Tito Novaro, who also directed the film) and the mad scientist Dr. Raymond (I think that's his name) have finally enough of always getting beaten by masked wrestlers, so they decide to team up and combine mad science and the science of witchcraft in their quest for world domination. Disappointingly, they don't think of a fitting teamname for themselves - personally, I would have gone with "The Dynamic Duo - of EVIL".

First up on their agenda is mining an element "stronger" than Uranium that can only be found in a deserted silver mine. Unfortunately, mining radioactive ores isn't all that healthy and the scientist's hired midget help would probably just run off. What are two evil men to do? The obvious, of course, which is to say, use an Egyptian rite to revive some of the famous and much beloved mummies of Guanajuato and let them do the work!

They would probably even get away with this blatant case of mummy exploitation, if not for a shoeshine boy (Julio Cesar Agrasanchez, most definitely related to the producers) witnessing the mummy robbery. While the authorities don't believe a single word he tells them about walking mummies, his grown-up shoeshining hobo friend knows an expert in the mummy sciences - the most fashionable of all wrestlers, Mil Mascaras.

Mil seems to have left Blue Demon and the shadow of El Santo behind after the indignities he was subjected to during the first Momias de Guanajuato film, and is now hanging out with El Rayo de Jalisco (really bad at fighting midgets) and Blue Angel (not a lot better at fighting midgets). Apart from the lucha business, the three also seem to have some sort of fitness studio exclusively for women wearing exceedingly short skirts.

Three luchadores and their army of aerobic groupies should be enough to solve the mummy and evil mastermind problem for good.

El Robo De Las Momias De Guanajuato won't go down in the annals of lucha cinema as one of the most exciting examples of the genre. On the other hand, it is an Agrasanchez production, and compared to other products of this most slapdash of all Mexican cult movie production companies, this isn't too bad a film.

First and foremost, Superzan is nowhere to be seen, and while neither Blue Angel nor El Rayo are of much interest, or really doing anything, they certainly aren't lifesucking voids like he is (Darkseid take note). Mil Mascaras, for his part, is Mil Mascaras. In other words, the most perfect luchador ever to wear the most eyegouging fashion outside of Bollywood with utmost confidence.

I also approve of the interesting life the wrestlers seem to lead, with their short-skirted what-ever-they-may-bes always just one blink away from oiling their manly chests. It's the 70s, oh yes.

Tito Novaro is solid all around. His acting is a little too professional and not scenery-chewing enough for my tastes in this context, but he's not too bad. He also gets to ride around in a weird little coach that is lead around by an animated skeleton with a scythe. I don't know what that's all about, yet I can't help but approve (again!) and put a coach just like it on my Christmas wishlist.

As a director, Novaro doesn't do much, but that seems to be quite fitting in a film where nobody seems to be doing all that much, and when he/she/it is doing something, they are doing it quite slowly. So slowly even that there is no need for typical Agrasanchez filler in the form of badly integrated musical numbers recycled from other movies or bad comedy in the film. I'm not completely sure why, but I think that's a win.

What entertainment value the film has rests on the shoulders of the natural awesomeness of Mil Mascaras, the typically disarming matter-of-factness in which the silly plot is presented (none of Blue Demon's mummy skepticism here) and the weird little details that naturally happen in any film concerning luchadores, mad scientists, mad occultists, mummies, groupies and midgets.

As a fan of lucha cinema, that's more than enough for me, your mileage however, dear reader, may very well vary. In any case, we all can learn something from the film: mummies make for very slow miners and making them invincible with the help of your newly built reactor can lead to explosive problems.

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,lucha,reviews,horror,mil mascaras,blue angel,el rayo de jalisco,tito novaro

The Devil Master (1977)

2009-11-04T09:24:01Z

aka The Demon Lover

An aging Iron Maiden fan named Laval Blessing (Christmas Robbins, only lacking the facial hair to be truly deserving of his first name) lives in a tower he likes to call a castle deep in the woods. Laval has his own little coven of Satanist friends coming over for regular meetings and very much hopes they'll some day call him master.

When he proposes a nice little orgy to end everyone's virginity, and the channeling of everyone's awesome power through the trigger of his "gun", his people rebel, supposedly out of fear that he actually means "virgin sacrifice" when he says defloration and anger about his dominant personality, although I suspect the truth of the matter is that they have just realized Laval has a tent in his bedroom and that when he says "gun", he means his penis.

Be that as it may, as soon as his theoretical minions leave him, never to return, a naked woman teleports in to let herself be used in a magickal ceremony. ~~Santa Claus~~Christmas manages to summon a guy in a gorilla costume with a horned mask with red, glowing eyes who screeches something about killing.

Soon, the traitorous coven members are indeed being killed, some by being filmed with a very shaky camera and doing some enthusiastic shaking themselves, some by murdering each other, others by letting the gorilla goat throttle them.

An irascible cop named after artist Frank Frazetta (Tom Hutton)- although he's called Tom - shouts at people and gets angry, Laval trains his karate, Laval gets into a bar brawl, women have a whipped cream fight (so that's what women do when no pillows are around?), random stuff happens, someone has a quarrel shot into his crotch. Finally, everybody dies, The END.

If I can believe the IMDB and the evidence of my eyes, then The Devil Master is an early work by the impressive and wonderful Donald G. Jackson, filmed half a decade before the man became obsessed with frog people and the future of rollerskating after the apocalypse (see films like Hell Comes to Frog Town, Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors).

It already shows the same mix of high enthusiasm and comical incompetence that makes his other films so endearing. The Devil Master is possibly even more fun than his later films, for where those are usually marred by having moments of competence or sudden appearances of actors who are only frighteningly amateurish instead of total amateurs, this is the pure, undiluted stuff of Roger Ebert's nightmares.

Nothing here is well done, fits, or makes sense, there's not a single moment in which the film works like normal films do. It is truly gloriously inept, full of badly framed sequences, odd editing, noodly music, mumbled dialogue, beautiful randomness and awesomely cramped sets.

What the movie never is, is boring. Nothing of what's going on might make any sense to you or me or look like a real movie to the film critic down the block, but there is always something going on to keep the rightminded viewer interested, sudden glances into a place and time where all the nonsense contained here would suddenly start to make sense and where Christmas would be a star, bouts of laughter brought about by the magic that happens when regular people suddenly make their own movies.

And to think that Jackson somehow managed to make a career out of it! Ours surely must be a better world than we might think. Special cinematic artifacts like this are proof for everyone who cares to see.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,donald g. jackson,reviews

In short: Battle Warrior (1996)

2009-11-03T08:39:04Z

aka Mission Hunter 2

A Thai archeologist/explorer has crossed the border to (what I suppose is) Laos to find an ancient artifact known as the Golden Stone hidden away somewhere in the jungle. He is captured by the local warlord General Jang who is biding his time smuggling heroin and doing various other dastardly deeds until he has gathered enough funds to establish a reign of terror in the whole of South-East Asia.

Jang would really like to know where the Golden Stone is hidden, but even after a year of torture, the scientist isn't telling, causing much blustering and evil laughter in the hairless general, a man obviously compensating for his hair loss by being very evil indeed.

But a photo of her father's plight and knowledge of his location have found its way into the hands of the explorer's daughter Vicky. She hires the friendly mercenary Captain Pratuang (possibly played by Chatchai Ruksilp) and his men to attack Jang's base and get her father back. Also part of the rescue mission will be a British journalist named Smith who wants to save one of his colleagues from Jang. Like all British journalists, he is a hulking colossus of a bodybuilder with an awesome moustache and much love for snarling while shooting automatic weapons. Add to this the group's native guide and awesome martial artist Arsu (Internet, please tell me what this actor's name is) and you have quite a merry little band.

Everyone's expertise will be needed, too, because before our heroes can even get to their actual enemy they will have to cope with the unfriendly tribe of the Black Goblins (obviously, people without much clothes wearing badly applied blackface and "tribal" make-up) and Jang's secret weapon - the Forest Immortals.

We'll only get to see one member of the latter group, but since this member is Panna Rittikrai repeating his Spirited Warrior martial arts zombie bit, that shouldn't be a problem.

Mission Hunter 2 is marketed in the West like your typical piece of Jaasploitation, which means that it is presented here as a film starring Tony Jaa, although it was produced before the actor's sudden (and deserved) fame and so Jaa is in fact only playing henchman number one in it. If you can get over this and don't expect Ong Bak 0, you get a typical jungle action flick containing all the usual ingredients, from the racially offensive tribe to people jumping away from exploding huts.

There's no dramatic need for much of anything that happens in the movie, its pacing is in fact rather slow. It would probably be more coherent without the silly-but-fun zombie bit, yet it is a perfectly watchable example of its type.

If you go into it looking for a basic and cheap piece of jungle action, you will probably have your fun, at least with its little bonus features like the very obviously stolen and highly melodramatic (often for no good reason) musical score, the very tasteless scene where Jang threatens the explorer with the mass rape of his daughter while his men are already lining up for it in single file (the difference to comparable movies from Hong Kong or Italy would be that no rape is happening after the explorer caves in) and some rather good jumping and fighting by the guy who plays Arsu.

I certainly did have a good time with it.

Technorati-Tags: thai movies,in short,action,adventure,tony jaa,panna rittikrai

Music Monday: June Brides Edition

2009-11-02T08:49:41Z

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,june brides

XX: Beautiful Weapon (1993)

2009-11-01T09:38:51Z

A young, nameless and blind woman (Masumi Miyazaki), spends her life hidden away in a small villa on the outskirts of a large Japanese city, far enough outside to never be disturbed by anyone or anything. From time to time, a man sends her someone whom she lures into her completely darkened bedroom and shoots in the moment of orgasm.

She is working as an assassin for a big-shot political fixer to keep all his dirty deeds under the carpet. Not surprisingly she is slowly losing her grip on sanity. Leading a life with her only human contact being a father figure who likes to rub his face on her legs and men who don't leave her bedroom alive, she is already on the best way into alcoholism and a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown. When she's not killing she is crying, clutching a glass in one hand and a doll in the other.

What she doesn't know is that her increasingly erratic behaviour makes her boss (who turns out to be a little more than just that) doubt her further usefulness.

Things get complicated when a bar pianist/killer who used to work for her boss ,too, gets it in his head to find out why he hasn't gotten any jobs anymore of late. Supposedly, his drinking and loose mouth are at fault, but he doesn't believe it.

He is able to follow father figure to the woman's place and witnesses her during an assassination and its aftermath. The next night, father figure comes to the killer's bar and tells him that he finally has a new job for him - he is supposed to kill our heroine, but he has to sleep with her first. The killer pianist (take that, Jerry Lee Lewis) knows this to be a trap, yet he still goes to her place, already quietly infatuated.

This entry into the XX series of Japanese Girls with Guns films is a little different from the other parts of the series I have encountered until now in that it really isn't a Girls with Guns film at all. It might contain a girl with a gun, but no action to speak of, and fits more under the genre umbrella of thriller melodrama.

This is not the sort of film I would have expected from a director like Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu, who is best known for the Guts of A Virgin films and the atrocious The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay and therefore not exactly someone I'd connect with concepts like subtlety or the extremely deliberate (people without patience will of course say "boring") pace Beautiful Weapon has.

There isn't a lot happening in the film, but I am a sucker for any attempt to drag the mood of film noir into the neon-coloured 90s. I am also a sucker for films about people who have somehow lost their connection to the world completely and are violently, often tragically, jolted into connecting with it again, which turns out to be what Beautiful Weapon is all about on a thematic level (and which also is an unexpectedly big theme in most of the other XX movies).

On the visual side, Komizu keeps everything as cool and muted as the emotional life of his characters necessitates while doing his best to keep up a certain amount of tension. But it is a film about dead ends and not about sexy shoot-outs, and as such not tense in the way a John Woo film would be.

From time to time, Komizu inserts a dry visual joke viewers not used to this part of Japanese humor will possibly miss completely.

The film has quite a few neat little directorial ideas, just small things like not using any music in the love scene between the two killers, which still go a long way to keep the less than original plot interesting.

Most important for the success of the film is Masumi Miyazaki. The actress is not just putting much more effort into the role than many of her colleagues would, she is putting said effort into the right places. It's one thing to do the cool erotic bit of the role right, but it is quite another one to be believable as a woman both coolly erotic and standing on the threshold of an absolute breakdown.

Also of interest are the very unsubtle jabs at Japan's political culture popping up again and again during the movie's course. Those in power, the film seems to say, would even sacrifice their own daughters to keep it, without a care and without ever making their own hands dirty doing it. That's nothing new, yet also not something you get in every film about blind sex assassins.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,kazuo gaira komizu,reviews,masumi miyazaki,thriller,melodrama

My sins, let me show you them

2009-11-01T09:25:29Z

Greed:	Low
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Very High
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Low

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Technorati-Tags: stuff

In short: Midnight 2 (1993)

2009-10-31T09:36:43Z

Abraham Barnes (Matthew Jason Walsh), the youngest member of the Satanist serial killer family we saw in Midnight, has somehow survived the events of the first film. He has changed his personal style from "country bumpkin" to "insanely annoying guy with a video camera" and is using said camera and a bunch of horrible pick-up lines that would get people much more attractive than he is punched in the face to finagle women into his house.

Theoretically, he is on the look-out for the one special woman to bear his children and clean up his act (and kitchen), but in practice he's more about killing the women who don't stand up to his standards (aka every woman). Exciting times lie ahead when he murders the friend of Rebecca (Jo Narcia). She has seen him and his camera and uses her script-derived charm to talk a cop (Chuck Pierce) into helping her investigate Abraham.

If I can believe the Internet, then John (A.) Russo's belated nominal sequel to his Midnight has "been sold both individually and as part of a "Young Filmmaker's Career-Starting Package" along with John A. Russo's book Cheap Thrills, legal forms, and the four volume videotape set "John Russo's Filmmaking Seminar"". It' was probably included as an example of how crappy a film can get, with big red warning signs reading "Don't do it this way!".

While the first Midnight sure had its share of problems, it was at least an honest effort at filmmaking on a budget. This shot on video sequel is just a lazy bunch of nothing, padded out with about ten minutes of footage from the first film. Those ten minutes are the best that's on offer here, really, the rest is sub-porn acting, painfully bad dialogue, cramped sets and the neverending monologizing of the insufferable Walsh. His performance, consisting mostly of mumbling and sounding like a badly behaved child, just screams for a very special award as the worst acted psycho I have ever seen on film or video. I hope he is proud.

Technically, it's all catastrophe all the time - the interiors are somebody's hobby cellar, the camera just points vaguely into the direction of the "actors", not even the synthie soundtrack (which sounds very very familiar) is any good.

Usually, I try (try is the important word here) not to take bad films personally, and this even is the sort of film whose ineptness might be somewhat endearing coming from someone with no prior filmmaking experience, but from an old pro like Russo, Midnight 2 amounts to the director suddenly appearing smirking in your living room and screaming "fuck you!" right into your face.

So, unless you just need to hear what Abe does with his throbbing hot camera, you'll be better off watching a Polonia Brothers movie. Those guys at least don't hate the people watching their films.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,john russo,horror,what have i done to deserve this,in short

On WTF: Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987)

2009-10-30T08:33:27Z

Finally, I meet a film I find truly disturbing. That it was filmed with a camcorder by the guy who made Black Devil Doll is icing on a peculiarly freakish cake. You can (and in this case really, really should) read all about it on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,chester norvell turner,other places

3 Films Make A Post: In Space

2009-10-29T09:15:25Z

Seven Warriors (1989): The all-star cast (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai! Jacky Cheung! Karen Mok! Adam Chang! Max Mok! Wu Ma! Philip Kwok! Lo Lieh!) is the only impressive thing about Terry Tong's version of the Seven Samurai template. I would have expected a Hong Kong variant of the story to replace Kurosawa's humanism and warm intelligence with relentless action and a whole lot of bloodshed, but instead it's replaced by a little sentimentality, a little more unfunny humor and a whole lot of nothing. One could think the plan here was to bore the viewer into submission. Except for the submission part, it worked on me.

Slit-Mouth Woman (2008): Not to be confused with Koji Shiraishi's rather good A Slit-Mouthed Woman (or Carved) from 2007 or the pinku The Slit-Mouthed Woman from 2005. This one shares a DVD with the dreadful Zombie Dead and gives that film a run for its money when it comes to bad acting and boredom. Finally, Japanese direct to DVD films can be just as bad as their American counterparts. Isn't it wonderful?

Roots Search (1986): After a spaceship nearly collides with a research station, the ship's only survivor Buzz and the crew of the station have to cope with an alien that has already murdered all of Buzz's colleagues. The thing likes to use the ole "transforming into the object of someone's greatest guilt" trick, but isn't above a little tentacle use when necessary. But what's that about the creature being a messenger of god?

This OVA isn't exactly a high point of anime film or of SF horror, yet it is solid enough to not make me rue the three quarters of an hour I put into it. I couldn't find anything special about it, even the design of the alien's different forms is anime standard. The attempts at a philosophical deepening of the plot are wasted, though. There just isn't enough time to develop something deeper.

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,japanese movies,action,sf,horror,in short,anime

The Pit (1981)

2009-10-28T08:46:41Z

Young Jamie (Sammy Snyders) is a problem child. While he is highly intelligent (or so the script says, his actions speak a different language), he has not the best people skills and his sexual awakening turns in a direction experts would describe as "creepy". One is tempted to call him "future serial killer Jamie" right from the beginning.

It certainly doesn't help that everyone he meets during the course of the film treats him incredibly badly for no discernible reason at all, even those people who should know better. His only friend is his talking teddy bear Teddy. For reasons the film never bothers to explain we don't just hear Teddy talking with Jamie's voice, but also see it moving when Jamie is not around, so it is not just the projection of unconscious desires it seems to be.

Jamie's parents are planning on going away somewhere for quite some time (yes, I love precision, I really do), so they hire psychology student Sandy O'Reilly (Jeannie Elias, now doing a lot of voice acting) for a combined babysitting/housekeeping stint. Sandy is specialized on "exceptional children", and at first she seems to have some success at getting through to the boy, even though the crush he develops on her isn't all that helpful, and - not surprisingly - rather creepy.

But Jamie has a secret. If you can call something someone is willing to tell anyone who is not trying to punch him in the face a secret. He has found a pit in the woods. In this pit lives a group of shaggy grey-haired monster suits identified as troglodytes. Because they are his friends (that is, aren't actively mean to him), Jamie decides to feed them. Turns out the charming guys only eat raw meat. For some time, the boy feeds them with meat he buys from the local butcher with money he steals from Sandy, but when the girl gets wise to the trick, he needs some other food source. Teddy suggests to just throw all those mean people who plague Jamie into the pit.

One would probably think that a twelve year old boy would have some difficulty with the realization of this plan, but in The Pit's world there are no opticians and therefore a lot of people are just unable to see a freaking large pit directly in front of them before it is too late.

The Pit starts out perfectly nice, with decent, very late 70s looking photography, and seems to promise to be one of the weird psychological horror pictures the 70s and early 80s were full of.

The longer the film goes on, though, the more obvious it becomes that its director Lew Lehman just doesn't have the slightest idea what sort of movie he is trying to make. A psychological horror film about a disturbed child? Nope, it's just too stupid for that. A monster movie? No, too shy about the monsters. A Bugs Bunny cartoon? Well, only in the middle when Jamie feeds his friends. A completely random mess full of ideas nobody bothered to think through? Yes, that's more like it!

The plot sputters, starts, rolls on for a moment, only to drift into a completely different direction, without a care for narrative structure or common sense; I'd call it dadaist if I'd think I could get away with it. Up until the middle of the film, you could possibly think all this is going somewhere, but as soon as the sheriff takes control of the plot (such as it is) and Jamie disappears until the wtf ending (only seeing is believing), you realize that you are in the hands of filmmakers who produced their script by rolling the dice on a modified D&D first edition encounter generation table. Which is kinda awesome, now that I think about it.

Equally awesome is Sammy Snyders' acting. I am willing to cut child actors some slack, but Snyders here gives one of the most annoying performances imaginable, mugging like a Hollywood comic trying to act dramatic, with a line delivery like chalk on a blackboard. It's fabulous, but it hurts so bad.

I think I might have already mentioned that sense and The Pit parted ways a very, very long time ago, but let me restate it: holy shit, this could nearly have been made in Italy.

If you read that as the compliment it is meant to be, you should probably spend some time with The Pit. It's a truly perfect piece of silly nonsense from start to finish, additional proof of my theory that two wrongs do in fact make one right.

Technorati-Tags: canadian movies,horror,reviews

In short: Midnight (1982)

2009-10-27T08:32:50Z

aka Backwoods Massacre

Doubting Catholic schoolgirl Nancy (Melanie Verlin) runs away from home after her alcoholic cop stepfather (Lawrence Tierney following the smell of an alcohol providing paycheck, no doubt), tries to rape her.

She falls in with two poor college boys (Charles Jackson & Tom Hall) on their way to Florida. And these guys truly are poor. Their money is just enough for keeping their car in gas, but to acquire food, they are stealing from small grocery stores along the way, a tactic which could bring a mixed-race buddy pair into more trouble than would be appropriate in the middle of Rednecklandia.

Doing this with their under-aged guest and in an area from which the soon to be deceased Reverend Exposition (Bob Johnson) tried to warn them away isn't exactly going to improve their survivability. As it turns out, a hasty retreat from the police only leads the trio into the clutches of a family of backwoods satanists trying to resurrect their mum through female sacrifices.

Nancy's the lucky one of the three, with a nice direct line to a white-bearded lady above (I do understand the concept of prayer right, I hope?) and a drunk stepfather with a guilty conscience on her trail.

John Russo's Pittsburgh based Midnight is a more interesting film than I had suspected. Russo's script tries its hardest to enrich the backwoods slasher genre thematically by giving it a slight social realist bend. It mostly does this by adding a more complex background to the victims than is common and by first placing them in the way of horrifying real world danger and confronting them - unsubtly, it has to be said - with things like casual racism and poverty. Of course (keeping Russo's background as scriptwriter of Night of the Living Dead in mind this should come as no surprise) there's also a healthy distrust of authority figures in there.

Unfortunately, Midnight is not as successful as it is interesting. As a horror film, it lacks in emotional impact. It goes through all the motions of classic backwoods slasher films, but is seldom convincingly nasty or brutal.

The death scene of our two male college kids being executed by two of our backwoods maniacs dressed up as cops is the only true exception to this. The very casual violence committed by cruel people in uniform resonates, but also makes a promise the rest of the film isn't willing or able to deliver on. What follows is mostly genre-standard, just less gory and hampered by Russo's awkward and stiff staging of violence.

Most disappointing is that Russo doesn't integrate the themes he has brought up earlier into the slasher business. As soon as the usual mad killer stuff starts, everything else is forgotten.

But at least it is a film with a few ambitions.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,in short,john russo

Music Monday: Babies Edition

2009-10-26T08:52:55Z

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,pulp

Kiltro (2006)

2009-10-25T09:17:21Z

The young Chilean Zamir (Marko Zaror) is the leader of a rather un-thuggish gang - or are they just a youth club? - known as (the) Kiltro(s).

After he rescued the young "Korean" girl Kim (Caterina Jadresic) from two rapists and got a kiss as reward, he of course fell in love with her. For two years now, he has been dogging each of her steps, punching every man who just so much as looks at her in the face. For some completely unfathomable reason, Kim is unimpressed by this kind and gentle courting and chooses instead to go out with a nice, blocky young gentleman known as The Maniac. It's enough to drive a stalking thug into depression.

All this is going to change when Max Kalba (Miguel Angel De Luca) returns to town and proceeds to kill some of the older men of the community, taking vengeance for past troubles which will be explained in exhaustive flashbacks throughout the film. For us, it will be enough to know that all of Max's victims belong to the martial arts sect of the Zetas and that Kim's father (Man Soo Yoon) is the one among them Max likes the least.

Soon, Zamir has a little run-in with Max when trying to protect Kim who has unfortunately learned nothing at all about fighting from her father. Of course, Zamir is thoroughly beaten, all his friends killed and Kim's father kidnapped (don't worry, Kim herself will be kidnapped soon enough too).

The dwarf Nik Nak (Roberto Avendano), another Zeta, takes care of Zamir and Kim, and sends our hero on the usual training journey so that he can learn how to better kill people and return to give Max a thorough killing to finally get his girl. Yay for feminism!

Kiltro is the first cooperation between writer/producer/director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and his star the actor/martial artist Marko Zaror. Both would very soon go on to make the excellent Mirageman together.

People who like to talk about stuff like that call Kiltro "the first Chilean martial arts film". That may well be true, it's just too bad that Kiltro isn't a good Chilean martial arts film.

Most of the film's problems can easily be explained through the inexperience of everyone involved and the usual lack of funds, but that doesn't make the thing much easier to watch.

It all begins with the acting. Zaror hasn't yet developed anything beyond a slack-faced stare into the camera, which makes it difficult to sympathize with a character who hasn't a lot of personality anyway, and who kills a lot more people in the course of the film than the supposed bad guy does. The other actors are even worse. Jadesic might be pretty, but is cursed with terrible "Asian" make-up and a role purely as an object that is to be rescued or kidnapped. Everyone else is mostly dreadful in one way or the other.

If the fights were numerous and good enough to distract from the acting, all this wouldn't be much of a problem in a martial arts film, but there isn't really all that much fighting going on and what is there is filmed in a mix of shaky cam and bad editing that shows as little as possible of what is going on. Which is somewhat ironic in a film whose best assets should be the martial arts skills of its lead actor.

Then there's the script, a Joseph Campbell inspired mess mostly consisting of scenes you know from other, better realized movies, stitched together without much of an idea about how to make a narrative out of them or how to merge the film's comedic aspirations with the melodramatic plot. Especially annoying are the repeated flashbacks that show the backstory in useless detail and stretch the film's budget and my patience as a viewer to a breaking point without any pay-off. And how could I forget one of the longest and most boring training sequences in martial arts history, cleverly consisting of Zaror's naked behind and lots of would-be philosophical talk, but little physical activity?

Basically, Kiltro shares the enthusiasm about filmmaking and the love for genre film that Mirageman would go on to channel into an extremely fine film, but does everything wrong the later film would do right. There are a few promising moments in here - a handful of cleverly set-up shots, thirty seconds of a fight scene, a few jokes that are actually funny, that sort of thing - but nothing I'd even mention without the knowledge of how good Espinoza and Zaror have shown themselves at learning from their mistakes.

I really can't recommend Kiltro unless you are such a big admirer of Mirageman that you just have to see what Espinoza and Zaror did first. Mirageman however...

Technorati-Tags: chilean movies,action,martial arts,ernesto diaz espinoza,marko zaror,reviews

3 Films Make A Post: A New Beginning

2009-10-24T08:17:39Z

Taste of Killing (1966): Tonino Valerii's Spaghetti Western about a bounty killer (Craig Hill) protecting a load of gold from the bandit (George Martin) who once killed his brother starts out promising enough and looks quite stylish throughout. Alas, it also suffers from a script that permanently brings up enticing details about its characters without ever making much use of them or finding a unified theme. As it stands, the film is a series of Spaghetti standard situations done well enough, but without the intelligence that makes the best part of the genre so interesting and without much that holds the single parts together.

Goemon (2009): Either I am finally getting too old for this shit, or this is the most horrible, candy-colored mess of a CGI fest I have seen in a long time. I found its director's Kazuaki Kiriya's other big CGI mess Casshern with its wish to be every possible film at once much more worthwhile than the critical consensus says it is, but Goemon is nigh unwatchable.

The insanely broad acting with human actors who are less subtle than your typical anime character alone would be enough to kill the film, yet Kiriya insists on adding the insulting dumbness of his self-penned "script" and the already mentioned terrible CGI. I don't know the words fit to describe this vortex of absolute suckitude.

Kakurenbo (2004): A bunch of kids from a future, retro-futurist Japan comes to a ghost "town" (we'd call it a city, I suppose) to play a hidden, secret game of hide and seek - some of them to find out where all the other children who have disappeared before them went, some of them just for kicks.

This digitally animated one-man project by Shuhei Morita is an exceptionally beautiful anime with a visual style that is at once based on traditional Japanese designs and symbols (the fox masks the children wear, the basic designs of the demons who hunt them) and part of an already aged and lost future. It's a truly inspired piece of work, with every scene hinting at the basics of the film's future without ever actually revealing them. I tend to find storytelling techniques like this highly effective, consequently I am quite awed by the film's perfect and personal style and Morita's choice to let the (at times very creepy) mood do the explaining.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,japanese movies,tonino valerii,kazuaki kiriya,shuhei morita,spaghetti western,fantasy,anime,sf,in short

On WTF: Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

2009-10-23T06:15:21Z

See a bad night's sleep and Jack Weis' epochal Mardi Gras Massacre turn into a fantastic time for me and my old buddy Friedrich! Be astonished by the brownest of browns! Thrill at the answer to the question "Are you evil?"! Only in my newest review on WTF-Film!

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

Brought to you by the people who made "Casting Call of Cthulhu" & "Elder Sign&quo

2009-10-22T10:56:50Z

Technorati-Tags: lovecraft,cthulhu

In short: Invitation Only (2009)

2009-10-22T08:22:27Z

Wade (Bryan Chang) works as a chauffeur for unpleasant rich people, while dreaming of a future of fast cars and models.

His luck seems to change when Yang (Jerry Huang), one of his bosses, gives him an invitation to the sort of party a poor guy like Wade would never be allowed to visit. Yang even gives him a change of wardrobe for the evening and money.

It's a special sort of party, it seems, taking place in an abandoned warehouse, with much talk of special gifts for first timers like Wade, a girl named Lin (Ma Guo-Xian) and a few other people.

After the contractually mandated sex scene with guest-starring Japanese AV-idol Maria Ozawa (not playing herself, at least), Wade is granted his greatest wish: a Ferrari. Truly, this is the best party ever.

So it is a little unfortunate that Wade, Lin - who will turn out to be a competent final girl - and the other new party guests will spend the rest of their evening being chased through the warehouse by Mister Yang and his goons, all for the entertainment of the other, evil, rich party guests. Nobody will be surprised that there will also be torture.

Invitation Only, which was as far as I know quite a hit in its native Taiwan, is billed as "Taiwan's first slasher movie", but it is more of a cross between slasher tropes, The Most Dangerous Game and the ever popular torture porn. Although, seeing how much of the film consists of people running around in a warehouse, I have a mind to call it a warehouse horror film.

And for a warehouse-centric piece of cinema, this isn't too bad - the acting is reasonably competent, the filmmaking reasonably well done, the script makes a reasonable amount of sense, the torture scenes are reasonably nasty.

I have seen much worse films and enjoyed them. The sad truth is that I have also seen much better films, films a bit more willing to take their themes a little further than "rich people are like, soooo evil, you know". Now, don't misunderstand me, Invitation Only is quite alright in its way, but I'm reasonably sure that if you watch it, you will soon afterwards have forgotten everything about it. Everything except the fact that it is a perfectly reasonable movie.

Technorati-Tags: taiwanese movies,horror,in short

Khamosh (1985)

2009-10-21T08:08:50Z

A small film team under director Chandran (Sadavish Amrapurkar) has traveled to a supposedly picturesque part of the Indian countryside to film part of a highly exploitative drama. If you ignore the usual squabbles, the project runs as well as can be expected, until actress Soni Razdan (Soni Razdan, playing herself weirdly enough as murder victim) is murdered and found hanging from a tree.

The local police takes it for a suicide, and close the case without any investigation whatsoever, but fortunately (and very suddenly), a nameless C.I.D. inspector (Naseeruddin Shah, with a very agreeable moustache and doing more sunglasses acting than David Caruso) appears and proceeds to sniff around, convinced the actress' death was in fact murder.

He has quite a bit of work to do, because nearly everyone on set had some reason or other to wish Soni ill, except for the very upright heroine Shabana Azmi (as herself) and Soni's fiancee Amol Palekar (also as himself, but with a twist I'd like to see a Hollywood actor repeat). The film's producer Mister Dayal (Ajit Vachani) wanted to have a little casting couch romp with her, and only got a public slap in the face, extra Mrs. Bahal wanted Soni's next role for her daughter Meenu, the producer's brother Kuku (Pankaj Kapoor) is a junkie with a crush on Soni, the waiter Ghulam Hassan (Kamal Chopra) is a freeform creep, the director of photography wanted Soni to be "nicer" to him and the dialogue writer likes to put dead animals into the beds of people who displease him. It's possible that I forgot someone, but you get the gist.

Turns out that the Inspector has quite a secret himself - he isn't a cop at all but Soni's brother playing amateur detective. And an amateur detective or better two, if you include the very helpful Ms. Azmi, is really needed here, even more so when more people start to end up dead.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Khamosh doesn't want to have much to do with the usual stylistic flourishes and techniques of mainstream Hindi cinema, so there's a decided lack of long, florid speeches, delectable singing and dancing or eye-popping colours.

That is not necessarily as bad a thing as you might think if you are going into the film expecting something more mainstream Bollywood. The potential viewer just needs to be able to keep her expectations in check and just go with the more Western style of filmmaking here. (And, as an aside, isn't it interesting that Indian films which are less commercially oriented look more conventional than their more colorful counterparts when seen from a Western perspective?)

Chopra's direction shows a strong influence of gritty semi-realist US and European 70s cinema, with all the dynamic camera work and brown tones this suggests, but he also finds time to add more than one moment of homage to Hitchcock to it, something that's certainly not to the film's detriment.

There's quite a bit of handheld camera work and just a lot more camera movement than I'm used to from pre-90s Hindi cinema, yet Chopra isn't overdoing it or just showing off, instead it looks to me as if he is trying very hard to distract the viewer from the lack of interesting sets or locations. For most of the time, the director is quite successful at this and it was only in the last third of the film that I started to dread the return of that damn rock by the water or of the house of repeated murder.

Chopra's direction is the film's strongest point. While the acting, especially the work of the always committed Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi, is solid throughout, it is also seldom more, thanks to a script that never truly does something interesting with the shedload of elements and characters it contains, as if it was enough to just put a bunch of people in front of the camera without constructing a narrative or a mood to connect them.

I also have my problems with a film that waddles its finger in a highly moralizing way at oh so exploitative filmmaking when it itself exploits every stupid cliche about movie people, politicians and servants it can get a hold of. The word "hypocritical" comes to mind, especially when the moralizing is connected with the overtly serious tone parts of the film affect, when it in truth is just a rather silly murder mystery. Additionally, I was a little disappointed that the film first sets up every possibility for interesting meta-commentary with actors playing themselves, but then doesn't make much use of it, as if the courage and inventiveness Chopra shows visually had been completely absent when he was writing the script.

I would have wished for either more depth or more playfulness here.

Now, this doesn't mean I wasn't entertained by Khamosh, I was just expecting something a little less cliched and a little more clever. As it stands, the film is still an agreeable little murder mystery, just not the sort of film anyone should go out of his or her way to see.

Technorati-Tags: indian movies,reviews,mystery,naseeruddin shah,shabana azmi,vidhu vinod chopra

In short: Blowback 2 (1991)

2009-10-20T08:17:34Z

The yakuza Joe (a comparatively skinny looking Riki Takeuchi) and Baku are on the run, carrying a suitcase full of money.

Their flight has led them to the Philippines, but their driver, a certain Lopez (Keishi Hunt), leads them into a trap.

The guerilla boss Yameneko (Mike Monty, known from more Italian genre movies than should be humanly possible) likes money, and he likes dead gangsters, so poor Baku's film life is cut quite short. Killing Riki is of course a different proposition. Getting riddled by bullets and falling down a cliff leaves the exceedingly manly Joe in pain but very much alive, perfectly able to make his way to Manila on foot until he finally loses consciousness in the bar of Baku's ex-girlfriend Rei (Mie Yoshida).

Just a little later, the pissed-off Yakuza begins to snarl, shoot and punch himself through Manila to take vengeance on his friend's killers, supported by Rie and the bounty hunter Ratts (Shun Sugata, whose hobbies are wearing sunglasses, grunting manly and throwing dynamite sticks) who wants to get at Yameneko too.

Atsushi Muroga's Blowback 2 is a typical early 90s direct to video Riki vehicle bound to the action film standards once brought down from some mountain or other by Charlton Heston himself, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Muroga (who would go on to direct the zombie film Junk and the first two Gun Crazy films - the watchable ones) clearly likes the genre he is working in, and while his film diligently hits all the required manly man cheapo action flick beats, it does so with more verve and style than would be strictly necessary.

I am not about to call the film big art here, or even a masterful little genre flick, but the sort of cheap and fun film that is made without the hatred for its own audience that mars too many of its brethren and with clear knowledge of what it can afford to do and what it can't afford - artistically and financially.

The setting outside of Japan helps the film to a mood which is quite different from the typically claustrophobic and stage-bound Japanese direct to video standard of its time, with scenes full of astonishing things like daylight and mud. Obviously, Muroga uses this copious amount of outside locations for some time filling tourist shots and to stage a large amount of explosions, as it should be.

While all the shooting and bleeding to death is going on, there's also time for some well-placed homages to the Spaghetti Western (especially Django and the Dollar trilogy), the exploding huts of the Italian action film post-Rambo and even a bit of John Woo, all presented mostly in the spirit of good fun.

Add to this Riki doing what Riki does best (scowling and mugging), and the friend of a well-placed explosion will have a fun time here.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,action,riki takeuchi,atsushi muroga,in short,mike monty

Short Thoughts On IF Comp 2009 Games V

2009-10-19T12:32:34Z

The Duel That Spanned The Ages: Episode One: The Age Of Machines: Apart from the unwieldy title, this is quite good.

The game is very much like an IF version of a SF corridor shooter (think Doom with world building ambitions). Now, that's not really the sort of experience I look for in my Interactive Fiction, but it is well paced and well done with simple and mostly logical puzzles and enticing hints at an interesting backstory (to be revealed in Episode Two, I suppose?). It's really rather fun in an action movie type of way. I would have wished for a slightly more flavorful implementation of the protagonist's physical state (two broken legs should be painful enough to colour every description of movement, and not just an impediment for jumping, for example), a few random spider attacks less (because shooting the first one already showed that I understood how to get rid of them - further repetition seemed a little boring), and a slightly grander feeling finale, although I approve of the importance of the "smash" command (insert appropriate "puny humans" joke here).

Beta Tester: What I have seen of the writing here is pretty funny, alas it being a puzzle heavy game (or so I suppose) without in-game hints or a walkthrough and me being bad at puzzles means that I got stuck very early on without any possibility to continue.

As an impatient kind of guy, I interpret this as "the author doesn't actually want me to play his game", hand out a low vote, and play something else.

The Believable Adventures of an Invisible Man: Turns out that being invisible isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I was surprised to learn that getting around while being invisible is more difficult than it would be for a visible person - at least if you want to carry something around with you. The puzzles here are a mix of bad adventure game logic and tediousness. The nasty tone of the game's humor and its tendency to make something that should be exciting (I'm invisible, for Cthulhu's sake!) into just another chore to muddle through don't do much to endear it to me either. (Also, "undress" is a command worth implementing if the protagonist is going to drop his or her clothes).

Technorati-Tags: if comp 2009,if,games

Music Monday: Buy His New Album (Yes, I'm That Subtle) Edition

2009-10-19T08:00:01Z

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,grant hart

La Cabeza Viviente (1963)

2009-10-18T09:07:13Z

The Aztec warrior Acatl (Mauricio Garces) must have been quite a guy. Betrayed and killed by a treacherous priest, he gets one of the best burials ever - his head finds its final resting place on an especially nice tablet, the high priest Xiu (Guillermo Cramer) and the priestess of the moon goddess Xochiquetzal (Ana Luisa Peluffo) are buried alive with him to keep him company and an especially enthusiastic curse to keep away those pesky future tomb profaners is spoken, too. And that's still not all! Xochiquetzal gets to wear...THE RING OF DEATH, an eye-shaped, blinking monstrosity that will show exactly who has to be killed when tomb profanation time comes.

And, lo! 1963 a trio of archeologists under Professor Muller (German Robles) enters the tomb and takes everything with them that isn't nailed down, from Acatl's head to Xiu's mummy (which isn't visibly mummified at all, but has his obsidian dagger permanently fixed to its hand) to THE RING OF DEATH.

Nothing of the stuff lands in a museum, instead, Muller keeps it in his home and makes a gift to his daughter Marta (also Ana Luisa Peluffo) of the ring. Even ignoring how problematic this is from a legal perspective, there is also the problem of the curse to take care of. Not even Muller's inspired skepticism will help much when the first of his friends is sacrificed in a classic Aztec rite by the sprightly dead Xiu, with a hypnotized, sleepwalking Marta as a very active participant. Somebody has to carry Acatl's zombie head around on his plate, right?

Will the collective incompetence of Marta's fiancee Roberto (Mauricio Garces) and the police inspector Toledo (Abel Salazar) be enough to save Dr. Muller from his own daughter?

La Cabeza Viviente is a highly entertaining piece of Mexican horror. Its director Chano Urueta (known for more pieces of Mexican pulp cinema than one could mention, some catastrophically bad like The Brainiac, some rather splendid) doesn't delve as deep into Mexican gothic as many of my favorite Mexican horror directors do. Instead this is mostly a pleasant example of pulp storytelling with only the extremely incompetent heroes and the knack for the macabre pointing in a more gothic direction. But that's not much of a problem, since Urueta's direction here is more interested in cheap and friendly thrills than in mood and I'm certainly not one to complain about a film that succeeds at being simple, fast entertainment.

While some people (especially on the IMDB, the site full of people without a clue about cinema writing nonsense about it) might complain about a certain hokeyness of the chills and thrills the film offers, or about its lack of originality, I just can't see these things as much of a problem here. This is supposed to be a fast-paced, old-fashioned monster movie in the pulp spirit of the Hollywood serials, so subtlety doesn't need to apply.

Everybody involved obviously knows this. It shows in Urueta's simple, yet clever direction as well as in the pleasantly melodramatic acting. Especially Peluffo and (of course) Robles know exactly how thick to lay it on, and it truly is a pleasure to watch them really get into the whole silly business as if it were the highest drama. Taking silliness appropriately seriously is one of the great virtues an actor can have.

I wouldn't fulfill my duty as cult film blogger if wouldn't mention the best thing about the film: Garces performance as the disembodied head of Acatl, perfectly encapsulating how just plain wonderful it must be to have an afterlife much like the life of your typical cat. Being carried around on a plate by a pretty woman, taking many nice naps until the time comes to observe a sacrificial ceremony comes, then taking another nap, smiling wistfully, nodding bodilessly - that's what this head's life is all about. I, for one, can't help but wish for this sort of afterlife for myself.

La Cabeza Viviente truly is the best ad for a life as undead head on a plate I have ever seen, leaving the adventures of poor Nostradamus far behind.

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,horror,reviews,chano urueta,german robles,abel salazar,ana luisa peluffo