The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

10:56 am - Blood Beach (1980)

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.

10:36 am - In short: Toxic Zombies (1979)

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.

10:24 am - The Devil Master (1977)

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 ClausChristmas 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.

10:36 am - In short: Midnight 2 (1993)

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.

09:33 am - On WTF: Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987)

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.

09:32 am - In short: Midnight (1982)

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.

08:15 am - On WTF: Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

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!

09:54 am - On WTF: Prime Evil (1988)

Being the further adventures of a somewhat young, possibly be-tentacled man in the weird land of the late period pictures of Roberta Findlay, a woman with the gift of shooting very pretty pictures but without any kind of love for the films she does.

What will happen when the young man ventures forth into one of the lady's two Satanist conspiracy pictures of 1988? Find out on WTF-Film!

09:24 am - Seventh Moon (2008)

The American couple Melissa (Amy Smart) and Yul (Tim Chiou) has come to China for their honeymoon. If they had known that they were going to star in a horror film, they probably wouldn't have chosen the ghost month for the whole affair.

One night, out in the middle of nowhere, their tourist guide Ping (Dennis Chan) just leaves the two behind in his car. Supposedly, he has gotten lost and just wants to ask for the way in a nearby village, but he just doesn't return.

After some time, Melissa and Yul follow him, only to find themselves right in the middle of live animals put outside as if for a sacrifice and confronted by voices from behind the village's locked up houses which seem to send someone - or something - in their direction. Being some of the smarter horror film tourists around, the couple decide not to stay and wait until the mysterious someone arrives and make their way back to their car. Surprisingly enough, their vehicle is still alright, well, except for the mass of blood someone has splashed onto it.

The Americans aren't waiting up on Ping, wherever he might be, and just drive away, but they don't get too far. First a naked, pale and hairless figures crosses the road in a rather disturbing fashion and soon thereafter an injured man stumbles onto the road.

A little later, our intrepid tourists and the man manage to crash the car and have to go on the run from more of these pale figures, who really don't seem too friendly.

Seventh Moon is an American film directed by Eduardo Sanchez, one half of the Blair Witch Project director duo. It was completely filmed in Hong Kong with mostly Hong Kong talent behind the camera, and for the first two thirds of the film I truly wasn't sure why anyone would bother to go to Hong Kong just to make nothing more than a very standard vacation horror piece that could have taken place anywhere and anytime. The film's beginning is just dreadfully generic, with all the expected plot beats, all the bitching, screaming and running around I have seen oh so many times before, just filmed with a shakier camera and faster editing and therefore harder to parse than necessary.

Until fifty or so minutes in the film, a sudden shift in its rhythm occurred and a more individual voice came to the foreground. There's a moment when the film suddenly stops, its hectic pace turning into something much slower and a little stranger than what came before, as if Sanchez had just fulfilled his contractually obliged amount of "stuff all horror movies need to have" and was now starting to show us a more personal way to work inside the genre.

Even then, Sanchez still loves his handheld camera and fast editing more than will be dear to some, but now he uses them with much more control. From that point on, the film is not exactly surprising, but it has lost its genericness as if it never had been there, coming to a finale which fits the film and is not trying to do the mandatory schlock horror twist ending. I'd even go as far as to say that the film's ending has some emotional resonance, providing a little awe in front of the unknown.

I just wish the film would have done this a little earlier, or that the actors would have done their Acting with less of a capital, shouty A (although Smart and Chiou are quite good at the end of the film), or that Sanchez would use the shakycam a little less outside of hectic and exciting scenes. All of these things, or just one, and I'd have an easier time recommending Seventh Moon. As it stands, I found the film's last third well worth going through what comes before, but I don't think this will be the case for everyone.

09:05 am - Trick 'r Treat (2008)

Oh look what Warner finally bothers to throw on the market. At least they are getting the season right.

Trick 'r Treat consists of four interconnected stories, all taking place at Halloween in a small American town where the holiday is even more dangerous than in Haddonfield. First, we make the acquaintance of Steven Wilcox (Dylan Baker), school principal and seasonal serial killer with a Halloween tic. When he is not busy killing children and hiding their bodies, he also takes care of his little son.

The second story concerns a group of children visiting a rock quarry that is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of a (small) school bus full of children. What starts out as mean way to make fun of a slightly weird girl soon turns a bit more ugly.

The third story tells of the adventures of Laurie (Anna Paquin), a virginal girl pressed into looking for her first time by her big sister. Whatever could go wrong. On Halloween. In this town. When she is dressed as Little Red Riding Hood?

The fourth and final story finds Steven Wilcox' neighbor Mr Kreeg (Brian Cox) confronted with an unwelcome intruder in form of a child (or is it?) with a potato sack mask on its rather pumpkin-shaped head, and let's just say that it is not a friendly visit.

Michael Dougherty's Trick 'r Treat is a fine example of a seasonal horror film. It does not do much that should come as news to anyone even slightly into horror films, but does it with such verve and style that it becomes something heartwarmingly special, in as much as you can call something inspired by the cruel humor of classic EC comics and episodic horror TV heartwarming.

Dougherty (who wrote the excellent second X-Men movie and the problematic Superman Returns for director Bryan Singer, among other big studio things) does a fine job at getting the spirit of the holiday as well as the colours of autumn into his film. Both does of course happen in an idealized way, but I wouldn't want to watch a film about the dreary reality of Halloween or a shitty, grey looking autumn if I could help it. The film is spending much of its energy on getting the feeling just right, and it shows.

Besides the film's merry and very enjoyable acceptance of, and very slight bending of, genre standbys, I did also enjoy the way the stories are interleaved, with small parts of one story drifting into the next and one episode's killer possibly the next one's victim. Excellently, Dougherty manages this without overdoing it to demonstrate his script's cleverness.

Of course, not all episodes in anthology films are created equal. In this case, the Little Red Riding Hood part is the weak one, and this even though Paquin knows how to wear a Little Red Riding Hood outfit and the episode's story is the one playing with genre conventions the most. The problem is the pacing, I think. It's the only part of the movie that takes a little longer than it should and contains some rather useless would-be titillating filler that could have been left on the cutting room floor without the film (or the audience) losing out on anything. It is enough to throw the film's near perfect rhythm off a little, but not enough to be a real problem.

On the acting side of the film, there is nothing truly memorable, but nothing to complain about either. Trick 'r Treat is not the type of film in need of actors deeply steeped in the Method or other semi-religious acting theories, yet it could well be ruined by actors adding too much camp. Since nobody does that here, I'm satisfied.

The same goes for the technical part. Nothing about the film (except for the photography that could be filed under autumn porn, and that's a compliment) is fancy, but everything is unassumingly accomplished and done with conviction.

Which fits perfectly into my view of the picture, because its beauty for me really lies in its simplicity. The plan was obviously to just make a very good Halloween horror film anthology without too much ironic distance to the material, yet with quite a bit of black humor, just like one would wish more horror anthology movies actually were. And by the Big Pumpkinhead, that's what the film delivers.

09:11 am - In short: Offspring (2009)

A few years ago, a small community in Maine had to solve some trouble with a clan of wandering wild cannibal madmen who had that whole stone age tribe thing going on.

Obviously, the cops missed a few cannibals then. Now, with the hippie cavepeople freshly returned from a Canadian tribe vacation, the murders in the area start again.

The young sheriff talks his predecessor George (Art Hindle) - the man who dealt with the problem the last time - into helping him. He and the locals will truly need it.

As happy as I am for Jack Ketchum to have found people willing to adapt his books for the screen (and that even based on his own scripts), I still would have preferred not to have seen this one.

I think I will just happily ignore the question why you'd adapt the sequel to Ketchum's Off Season before anyone has seen a cinematic version of that book, for Offspring is worse enough without me straining my little brains to understand the complicated world of movie deals.

Ketchum's script for the film doesn't seem to be all that bad, the pace is sprightly, the film is short (thank you for that, Mister Ketchum, honestly) and Ketchum even does some creative things with the the viewers' expectations about which characters will live and who will die.

Unfortunately, even the best script would lose out when confronted with the awesome non-talent of the film's director Andrew van den Houten. Van den Houten is a classical point and shoot type of director, ignorant of fancy concepts like "building a mood" or "using the visual palette to heighten the film's tension". In other words, the film looks much shittier than it needed to look, with some of the least effective nature shots I've seen in a long time and surprisingly crappy lighting.

Yet even under this conditions, the film Offspring could still have the planned effect to shock and emotionally stun the viewer with the 70s horror bluntness that fits Ketchum's books usually so nicely, as long as the cannibals are impressive and the violence nasty. Alas, the cannibals, in all their caveman hippie glory, with their tittering like crazed parrots, their snarling and bug-eye making are just one thing: ridiculous and therefore never for a moment believable as an actual threat to anyone not to speak of their believability as humans. Ah, the glories of bad acting.

Ridiculous is also a fitting word for the violence. I'm not sure how van den Houten does it, but the theoretically shocking acts of violence and gore the film features are never the tiniest bit shocking, lacking the weight of reality needed to make them effective. Of course, it does not help much that these acts are committed by the clown brigade.

The film just had me giggling throughout.

So, if you are an enthusiast of unintentional humor in horror, this one's definitely for you. I have to admit I would have preferred something a little less dumb and a little more like Ketchum's books deserve.

09:28 am - 3 Films Make A Post: The Final Chapter

Drag Me To Hell (2009): Sam Raimi's return BOO! to the comedic horror genre has its moments, BOO! predictably either when the film is getting surreal or when it BOO! nearly becomes a social satire about BOO! class. Alas, too much of the film consists of SOMEONE SCREAMING "BOO" INTO YOUR FACE VERY LOUDLY, which I found annoying more often than not. Also not very amusing is the bleedingly obvious final twist, I can only explain through a) rampant stupidity on Raimi's side or b) Raimi thinking his audience consists only of mouthbreathing idiots.

Of course, horror films in carnival ride mode are far from my favorite part of the genre, so my barely serviceable movie might be someone else's new favorite one.

XX: Beautiful Beast (1995): This first of the XX movies is of less interest than some of its successors, despite being directed by Toshiharu Ikeda of Evil Dead Trap fame. The story of Ran (Kaori Shimamura), known as the Black Orchid, a professional killer taking vengeance for the murder of her sister and falling for an ex-yakuza barkeep who is of course connected to the men she is trying to kill, just doesn't have much to keep one's interest. It's nice to look at, but so generically bland in every other aspect that I had a difficult time staying awake while watching it.

Giallo (2009): As one of the chosen few (of possibly very dubious taste) who did, well, like Argento's Mother of Tears quite unironically, I was looking forward to this one. I shouldn't have. Giallo is so boring, cliched, repetitive and just plain stupid that I wouldn't even call it an unconscious self-parody of Argento. Self-parodists just misuse their stylistic vocabulary; Argento seems to have lost his completely and replaced it with psycho thriller 101 stuff even more generic than the film's title.

It's worse than The Card Player.

10:29 am - The Man Without A Body (1957)

Self-made millionaire Karl Brussard (George Coulouris and his thick accent) is in a bit of a bind. His physician has diagnosed him with an inoperable brain tumor, which puts the immortality he so obviously craves quite out of reach.

Brussard's only hope is Dr. Merritt (Robert Hutton and his single facial expression), a specialist in weird medicine. He and Brussard come to a capital conclusion to Brussard's problem: the man just needs a new brain! Merritt has been quite successful in keeping bodyless body parts alive, you see, and since there's no difference between that and stitching a new head onto Brussard's body, the millionaire only needs to deliver a fine new head to replace his over-used old one. It won't surely make any difference that the brain in the head has nothing whatsoever to do with Brussard.

Merritt also explains that human cells don't deteriorate when a dead body is not buried but laid to rest in a crypt. This information and an educational visit to Madame Tussaud's make it obvious to Brussard - he needs to steal the brain of Nostradamus, the highest developed intellect of his time!

Grave robbery is cheap and easy, and soon Merritt is busy bringing old Nostradamus' (Michael Golden and his ratty beard) head to life again. Brussard's hopes have to take some heavy hits, though.

When Merritt learns whose head he is supposed to transplant, he seems to prefer his nice and friendly conversations with the disembodied head to the work Brussard wants done.

The head itself is also quite uncooperative and doesn't want to let itself being talked into becoming Brussard. Yes, that's the way mind transplantation works - you need to talk a head into adopting your personality.

Then there's also some would-be noirish business with Merritt's assistant Lew (Sheldon Lawrence and his single facial expression) falling in love with Brussard's trophy girlfriend Odette (Nadja Regin and her complete lack of acting competence) and a murder plan.

At least we can all learn something from Brussard's final problem and mistake: don't ever take stock market advice from a disembodied head whose brain you want to steal.

Let's start with the bad news about Billy Wilder's less competent brother W. Lee Wilder's and Charles Saunder's The Man Without A Body. The film's production values are terribly low, two directors aren't better than one, the script is as far from science as the creationist I hide and torture in my cellar and none of the actors is able or willing to act at all.

That's the sort of bad news one expects from brain and head movies, of course. I am glad to report that apart from the whole movie being an utter catastrophe, it's quite a fun time.

Everything about it is so utterly bonkers and so completely divorced from the way cause and effect work in the world most people I know have to exist in that watching it is like a nice holiday in the brain of a shoddy bad movie writer. A shoddy bad movie writer who isn't even competent enough to hit all the required genre buttons no less - poor Merritt isn't even a real mad scientist - he lacks any sense of drama, the noir sub-plot is quite pointless, and the final monster "rampage" (in a brain/head movie, oh yes!) had me in tears of laughter for its utter lack of a credible monster and its unwillingness to be more exciting than a Sunday stroll.

The Man Without A Body truly is an absolute mess of a movie, but it is so silly and incompetently made that it's hard not to love it at least a little.

09:29 am - 3 Films Make A Post: The Marsupials

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009): Fox continues to crap all over one of my favorite parts of pop culture. On the bright side, while Brett Ratner's unbelievably bad and disrespectful (of the first two movies, of the comics, his audience and possibly humanity at large) third X-Men film nearly had me in tears of pain, at least half of this masterpiece of unintentional humor produces tears of laughter. The other half unfortunately is the pure teeth-gnashing annoyance that results when you let robots who have been fed a diet of all the wrong action film clichés and are now eagerly ticking the action film ticky boxes one by one write your film, instead of actual human beings.

I Sell The Dead (2007): This comedy about the misadventures of the two body snatchers played by Larry Fessenden and Dominic "I was in Lord of the Rings and Lost" Monaghan who specialize in graverobbing the undead started out a mite slow, but soon won me over through a difficult to achieve mix of playfulness, genre homages and humor I for once did find funny. It also works as a love letter to all poor proletarian bastards who ever had to pay their rent through work done for madmen and mad scientists, making this some kind of low class horror fan feelgood movie, as if one of those British social realist filmmakers had suddenly developed a sense of humor and met a member of the working class he's always going on about.

The only thing I didn't like about it was Ron Perlman's oirish accent, if mostly for reminding me of the dreadful Mutant Chronicles.

The Hills Run Red (2009): The basic premise of an obsessed film student and entourage trying to track down a copy or at least the production traces of the single, infamous and lost horror film of a disappeared filmmaker and landing in a backwoods horror movie has the possibility to make for an intriguing, even intelligent film. Too bad that director Dave Parker just trots out one bad horror movie cliché after the other without ever doing anything interesting with any of them. Instead, we get groan-worthy characterization, mostly dreadful acting and the sort of script that bases its view of the world and psychology exclusively on other movies that themselves didn't have much of a clue about anything to begin with. Adding some Scream-like laziness hidden under the veil of "irony" just means adding insult to injury.

10:56 am - Killdozer (1974)

An oil company sends a crack construction crew (I always wanted to use that phrase) to an island somewhere far away from civilization. The men are supposed to build a base camp for some never defined project. The lowly workers don't much like their rather cold and aloof foreman Kelly (Clint Walker, whose schwarzeneggerian inability to emote becomes a minor plot point), but that is not going to be their core problem for too long.

One of their bulldozers - and the largest and prettiest at that - hits a strange meteorite while digging.

A cheap blue energy effect roasts the youngest of the men (future TV darling Robert Urich) and floats into the dozer. No one actually understands what has happened or why, which seems reason enough to blame Kelly who just shrugs and plans the next day's work. Kelly has seen something, but isn't willing to accept it.

Soon, the dozer starts to act up, as if it had a will of its own and not a lot of love for the meatbags around it. First, it goes for the crew's only radio, then it slowly begins to hunt the men down and kill them.

Tensions between its designated victims run as high as ABC and the mediocre acting abilities allow. Fortunately, our heroes might be chumps, but they know who their true enemy is (a big yellow taxi, um, dozer) and that it is only proper to challenge him/it/whatever to a duel between alien-possessed and human-driven construction vehicle.

When that doesn't work out, they just steal their next plan from The Thing From Another World. And that without a scientist.

Killdozer is one of ABC's TV movies of the week, and therefore burdened with a combination of low budget, short shooting time, not much special effects and at best mediocre acting.

To my delight, the people in charge of this production (and, seeing that this is TV, I'm not sure if that means director Jerry London) seem to have taken these problems as a challenge.

If you have no money, it's a an idea Roger Corman would surely approve of to just drive a handful of construction vehicles through a sandy backlot in California, and just film them moving around a little, while your actors are trying to look construction worker-ly. What do you know, it might even work!

The film is based on one of the weaker stories of the great SF short story writer Theodore Sturgeon, who is also listed as co-writer of the script. He and his writing partner Ed MacKillop (with only this single credit on IMDB to his name, therefore smelling of someone using a pseudonym) do a fine enough job of keeping the film's pace a little faster than that of most TV movies, yet probably too slow for the less patient viewer. That's of course not the film's problem, but the viewer's.

If you want to have fun with Killdozer, you'll obviously somehow have to live with (or even like) the very silly basic premise and be able to accept a big yellow dozer representing a malevolent evil from outer space. Of course, someone who can't do that doesn't have too much business watching fantasy and horror films at all, especially in cases like this where the script does its best with the premise by playing everything as straight as possible, trying to ease the viewer into the necessary suspension of disbelief. If you decide to suspend it, the film even gives you lots of perfectly annoying/awesome synthesizer throbbing and thrashing as a bonus.

The characters are a little cliched, but more out of a necessity to work with the film's running time of not even 70 minutes than out of stupidity, and it is a positive surprise how unsympathetic each and every one of them is allowed to be without falling into the "they asked for it" trap of horror movie victims.

It's really a neat little movie. In its small, unassuming way, it applies the techniques of cheap, yet conscientious filmmaking to the TV movie formula of its time and succeeds nicely.

Killdozer will probably be too workmanlike for some, but I have to say that I had quite a bit of fun with it. Honestly, how many films about a possessed bulldozer are there? And how many of them feature an awesome construction vehicle duel?

10:17 am - In short: Night of the Demons (1988)

(Not to be mixed up with all the other movies titled Night of the Demon/s)

Angela (Amelia Kinkade), the only goth in town, invites a bunch of horror movie stereotypes - among them our heroine, the whiny virgin girl to end all whiny virgin girls Judy (Cathy Podewell) and 80s horror strip icon Linnea Quigley - to her Halloween party in the old haunted house at the edge of town.

The house has quite an unpleasant history, what with it having been built on ground the Indian population identified as cursed, and once having been a funeral home whose owners were then one day found dead, their body parts scattered all over the grounds.

It will come as it has to come. The kids will be locked inside the building, Linnea will drop her clothes, and demons will possess a few of the kiddies. There will be screaming and running around. Oh my.

Night of the Demons is cheesy 80s horror distilled to its bare essence - never has the hair been bigger, never the heroine more annoying, seldom the concept of what is supposed to be scary less scary.

The film nearly exclusively consists of pilfered parts of other, mostly better or at least more entertaining films. The main inspirations here were obviously Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies and Lamberto Bava's Demons, but where the former films have Raimi's creative drive and humor, and the latter Italian bugfuck insanity, this one is just coasting on other people's achievements and copying some surface features without ever showing much of a clue about what to do with them. It is a perfect example that it's not enough for a filmmaker to be a genre fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of those who went before; if one doesn't have a single idea of one's own, one won't make a worthwhile movie. That way, only Hatchet and Rob Zombie films lie.

If its models are a feast, Night of the Demons is more like a warmed up microwave hamburger, filling, but forgettable and possibly constipating. In fact, about an hour after watching it, I have already forgotten most of the film. The only memorable parts to me were the inexplicable scene in which one of Quigley's breasts eats her lipstick (that way, unhinged entertainment lies), a pointless sub-plot about a Halloween-hating old man (that way, filler and digression lies) and the strange fact that in this most cliched of all horror films, the black character Rodger (Alvin Alexis) ends up to be the male survivor and sort of hero (that way, the future lies).

That's not enough to make up for all the laziness and cheese, nor for the big hair, but it is at least something.

10:51 am - On WTF: The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964)

I've never been much of a fan of Del Tenney's movies (camp will only get me this far), but while watching his brilliantly titled Gothic proto-Giallo The Curse of the Living Corpse I had to revise my opinion of them and him a little - there are ambitions and good ideas in the film, and I'm going to tell you all about them in my write-up on WTF-Film. Expect a young Roy Scheider and Carnival of Soul's Candace Hilligoss and many a monologue.

09:56 am - Three Films Make A Post: My Sister Is A Werewolf

Rest Stop: Don't Look Back (2008): aka We're not stinking calling it Rest Stop 2.

While I had quite a bit of fun with John Shiban's Rest Stop as a neat, weird and focused if unoriginal little B movie, its sequel is just a retread of the first one with every flaw maximized. It's especially lacking in the sense of strangeness the first film achieved from time to time, and replaces it with a bit more torture. Note to filmmakers: torture without emotional context makes for a boring movie.

The slightly larger cast isn't used too well either and mostly helps to make the film feel bloated and unfocused. And the ending does make no fucking sense whatsoever.

High Plains Invaders (2009): Alien CGI effects that everyone calls "bugs" although they look nothing like bugs attack a Western town. Tragic train robber James Marsters and his small band of survivors fight back.

Typically depressive SciFi Channel stuff, held a mile away from being entertaining in any way or form by the usual: sloppy direction, sloppy editing, sloppy script and sloppy acting (with Marsters and female lead Cindy Sampson as exceptions I'm at least willing to call professional). Of course the effects and the actors never seem to actually interact, of course the film ignores everything it could have learned from the history of B-movies, of course it wastes a fun basic idea. It's so sloppy and just plain lazy that I'd even rather watch the Western episodes of the revived Outer Limits again.

Filial Son (1975): If you have seen your share of Taiwanese wuxia films, you'll more or less know the plot of this one. It's the usual vengeance business, with unagreeably little weirdness and an agreeable interest in its female characters.

The few words about this on the 'net are quite negative, but I found the film to be quite solid. It is true, Mo Man-Hung's direction is neither subtle nor does it ever deviate from genre standards. Fortunately, I happen to like the genre standard.

The film is cheaply but solidly made, with nice enough acting and unexceptional fights, and while I have seen this sort of story told about a million times - and often better - Filial Son is entertaining enough for what it is, unless you expect every film to be a timeless masterpiece.

10:20 am - Nomads (1986)

A disheveled man screaming something in French (Pierce Brosnan and his terrible "French" accent) dies in the ER room of doctor Flax (Lesley-Anne Down). The last few words he whispers to her trigger something in her and she is possessed by him, or at least his memories, and she starts to wander LA in a trance-like state, all the while flashing back to what happened to the man.

It turns out that our man Pierce wasn't the hobo the script says he looked like, but rather a famous anthropologist (as if such a thing were possible) named Jean Charles Pommier. Pommier and his wife Niki (Anna Maria Monticelli) had spent the last ten years on the move, studying everyone from the Inuit to African nomad tribes, and have now decided to semi-retire to a nice university job in Los Angeles to settle down and produce a child.

The house they chose isn't a good place for them, though. On the first day, someone writes a charming little message about sex and death on their garage door, and - worse - another one inside their garage. The same someone has left some rather disturbing newspaper clips about violent crimes in the garage. It seems as if someone was murdered in the new family home.

Pommier quickly jumps on the Mad Max rejects (among them Adam Ant and Mary Woronov) in a black van he regularly sees driving around the house as the culprits. He's instantly obsessed with them, grabs a camera, wanting to do some anthropologizing on them. He follows them through LA and learns that they never seem to sleep and don't do much else than to threaten people, sometimes playfully, sometimes in a more dangerous fashion. The scientist develops the theory that he has stumbled upon a tribe of true urban nomads, not much different from the ones he has studied all of his life.

But some close and puzzling encounters show that he is only half right. These aren't nomads, but the evil spirits all nomads he studied were afraid of, and once having come in contact with them, there is no escape into a saner world for Pommier anymore.

And it seems as if there also isn't much of a chance for a normal existence for his loved ones, or people like Flax whose lives he somehow touched.

Before director John McTiernan went and built the house we know as the American action film of the 80s with films like Predator and Die Hard, he made this deeply flawed, but highly interesting urban horror story.

Let's start off with the film's biggest problem - Pierce Brosnan's typically dreadful performance that culminates in the worst French accent you'll ever hear outside of a comedy, but isn't any good in any other aspect either. Making him the leading man here is a very puzzling decision - he can't act, he can't do the French, and pretty boy anthropologists are even less believable than square-jawed 50s scientists. Personally, I would have gone with a French actor for my French lead character, preferably someone with a little talent, but hey, I just watch this crap. Of course, if you feel the need to see a very naked Pierce Brosnan, you will have the chance here.

The rest of the actors is basically alright, but neither Down nor Monticelli have much to do beyond the usual hysterics.

Another problem are the evil spirits themselves. You know, mock punks aren't too frightening even at the best of times, and the "threatening" stuff these guys are up to isn't anything to write home about.

So, if the main actor just sucks and the baddies aren't frightening, why do I still think that this is one of the lesser known horror films from the 80s more people should see?

For once, it's the script, to my surprise also by McTiernan. While I wouldn't exactly call it subtle, it is still rather on the clever side. The basic concept of nomadic spirits haunting the streets of LA just is a brilliant idea and the sort of thing that might not be all that original when you are a reader of contemporary fantasy novels, but is nearly never done in movies.

It is also a script that respects the intelligence of the viewer to understand its concept, spelling out as little as possible, but keeping its mythology logical, even going so far as to not ruin everything with a smartass ending.

McTiernan's direction also has its moments. Again, it isn't subtle, and some of the "cock rock plays to darkened streets while 80s rejects roam" moments are quite annoying, instead of moody as they are probably meant to be, but after some time, McTiernan falls into a slightly hypnotic rhythm that impressively manages to convey the thinning of the borders between the things that are urban reality and those that are urban fantasy.

In the end, that is more than enough to make up for Brosnan and the film's shocking eightiesness. At least it is for me.

10:06 am - In short: Haunted (1976?/1979?/1982?)

In the 1860s, the Native American sorceress Abanaki (Ann Michelle) is killed for no good reason in the traditional way all frontier communities dealt with their witches, namely by being tied naked to horse and left in the desert. Abanaki of course curses her killers and their descendants.

About a hundred years later, the small Western town where all this happened has turned into a ghost town. Only two young men, their psychosomatically blind and depressed mother (Virginia Mayo) and their uncle (Aldo Ray), who is madly in love with mum, still live there, and Patrick, the older brother, is not planning on staying much longer. Tomorrow, he'll pack up his mum and get her into a sanatorium, and he and his brother aren't going to stay in town after that.

A woman named Jennifer Baines (Ann Michelle) gets stuck in the ghost town. Is she Abanaki reincarnated come to take vengeance? People discuss reincarnation. A pay phone is installed in the graveyard next to the ghost town. People talk melodramatically. Virginia Mayo out-melodramatizes everyone else. Patrick has sex with Jennifer, leading to more melodramatic and kitchen philosophical talk and some fine analysis of gayness. Aldo Ray goes mad! (He has probably heard the film's music). Dark secrets are sort of unveiled. There are pay-phone calls from beyond. Ballads play. Aldo Ray burns.

Haunted is yet another of the mighty peculiar films the great years of American local independent filmmaking have brought us.

I must admit that I have not much of a clue what director/writer Michael A. DeGaetano intended to do here. Is it an homage to classic Hollywood melodrama that accidentally got mixed up with a horror film? A parody? An early example of post-modern filmmaking? An arthouse film about memory that is betrayed by the incompetence of its actors? I certainly don't know, and I am also less than sure that DeGaetano knew what he was doing.

I find Haunted quite a bit more difficult to like than many of its brethren in spirit, in part probably because the classic era of the Hollywood melodrama is not as evocative for me as it seems to be for DeGaetano. On the other hand, however, I find it equally difficult to agree with the handful of reviews of the film which call it things like "a pile of crap". Haunted is just much too careful, confusing and confused to run under the trash label. The film also completely lacks in the hack and slash mundanity that is often used to hide a lack in imagination in horror films.

Still, Haunted is more a mystery than a film, a riddle instead of a coherent narrative - if you want to call it a narrative at all. As such, it's the sort of movie many a viewer will find boring or just plain annoying. With this one, I honestly can't blame anyone not being interested in. I'll probably have to watch it another dozen times or so before I know what I truly make of it.