The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

09:53 am - On WTF: Chaw (2009)

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!

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.

05:50 am - In short: Zombie Hunter Rika (2008)

Initially, Japanese schoolgirl Rika (idol Risa Kudo, who is not one of those members of her guild with any acting ability) and her best friend Nami skip school to visit Rika's grandfather and get some important life advice. When they arrive in the small town where the genius surgeon ("Just like Black Jack!", we are informed) and swordmaster lives, they stumble into the beginning of a localized zombie outbreak - "zombies" is how you call camembert-faced people with movement disabilities, right?

The Japanese government is at fault this time. An experimental euthanasia drug to get rid of all those pesky old people has turned out to have some problematic side effects.

Worse for Rika, grandpa is utterly senile and his gold digger wife is trying to poison him to finally be able to spend his riches with her low-life boyfriend. The first larger zombie attack ends with Rika getting bitten. Fortunately, grandpa has still enough brain juice left to amputate his granddaughters bitten arm, well, to hack it off with a sword to be precise, and stitch on a new one.

Rika's new member is the arm of a dead American zombie hunter (don't ask) in a sort of package deal together with his magic sword, which will come in handy.

The local exposition machine, made corporeal by the zombified but intelligent scientist Takahashi (only genuine with his self-built muzzle to stop him from spontaneously eating people), explains that all problems will be solved and all the undead people will become alive again if just someone kills the zombie boss Grorian. So our obligatory motley bunch of survivors (Rika, Gramps, Nami, Takahashi, an otaku, a sushi cook and hippie/drop-out type - a representative cut of Japan's population) proceeds to stumble through the woods in the traditional manner until it is time for the final fight.

Yes, this is definitely one of those films, consciously silly, full of loving but moronic references to Japanese pop culture clichés and only peopled by the worst possible stereotypes. There are bad (but mostly physical, yay) special effects, terrible acting, but also maid zombies, a rubber arm, a zombie who has stolen Godzilla's breath weapon, sword-swinging schoolgirls and zombies.

Zombie Hunter Rika was produced for the DVD market and has the obvious non-budget that comes with the territory, but its director Kenichi Fujiwara tries a bit harder than many others in his part of the business and gives the film a little more drive, sometimes even a sense of silly enthusiasm, although there still are some dull moments. However, if one is inclined to, (and I always am) one can find a lot of love for the less savory parts of pop culture and moronic entertainment in general in the film, which seems to me to be a perfect fit for a film that is definitely situated in the less savory parts of pop culture and generally quite moronic entertainment.

As I said, acting and special effects are bad, yet they are also exceedingly enthusiastically done, and a little enthusiasm goes a long way in the realm of the bad zombie movie, even if it might be misguided.

Compared to something like Onechanbara, this is genius-level entertainment, measured with a slightly more strict standard, it is a fun little film if you don't expect it to be The Machine Girl.

09:43 am - On WTF: Oh! My Zombie Mermaid (2004)

As a self declared wrestling film expert who doesn't actually like wrestling, I send my gaze into the direction of Japan and get rather excited about Oh! My Zombie Mermaid, the best zombie mermaid and wrestling film without a zombified mermaid.

09:42 am - In short: Gakidama (1985)

aka The Tastiest Flesh

aka Demon Within

A newspaper sends a writer and a photographer with a special talent for shooting the really weird stuff into the woods to get a picture of a will-o'-the-wisp reported to appear there. The thing actually does appears, obviously lured in by the tasty treats the two have hung into the trees to attract it. During the photo action, the thing transforms into a worm and stealthily sneaks into the writer's ear.

The next three months of his life, he doesn't do much more than to eat and eat, and then eat some more, until he falls into a comatose sleep from which he - to the shock of his wife - only awakes when a gremlin-esque creature (here called a "ghoul") escapes through his mouth. Fortunately a strange man with a face mask is there to catch the little beast; unfortunately he let's the bugger escape without telling the couple about it.

In the following weeks, the writer will learn that he has now developed an addiction to eating the (cooked) flesh of these ghouls and his wife will have to cope with a classic zuni doll situation which can only end in pregnancy.

"Oh those wacky Japanese etc etc" are words that of course do apply here, as they do all too often where my movie watching politics are concerned. Apart from this - what we call "the obvious" - Gakidama is 54 minutes packed full of weird, blackly comical fun, with some slightly gross moments and more off-kilter ideas than most of us could use up in a two hour film.

That the photography is very nice and the main monster is a charming latex muppet seems somehow beside the point when you're talking about a short film that has the bizarre exuberance of a Kazuo Umezu manga, but there you go: the film's photography is in fact quite excellent and the muppet cute in a very toothy way.

It's all cobbled together from disparate elements most friends of genre films will recognize without my help, yet its Frankensteinian construction has a beauty all of its own. Just don't ask for explanations or a logic that isn't emotional and (at least partly) thematic. You won't get any, because the film has already jumped to the next idea, without looking back. And why shouldn't it?

09:17 am - On WTF: Mirageman (2007)

Who says you need Hollywood money to make a good superhero movie? Not I.

Learn what I do say about the Chilean film Mirageman in my review on WTF-Film.

10:17 am - In short: The Dark Power (1985)

John "Foureagles" Cody (Robert Bushyhead) has been guarding the place called Totem Hill for a long time. The Native American is convinced that the hill is the resting place of a group of evil Toltecs that somehow made their way far north into the US and that said evil Toltecs still like to rise and do what evil Toltecs do if not held bound by his rituals.

Too bad that the man dies before he can make his testament and give his hill to a group of "mystics" we'll never get to see. So instead, his son David (Tony Shaw) inherits the place and does the obvious, namely rent his father's old place out as a dorm for female college students.

Soon, a quartet of comedy zombie Toltecs rises and raises quite a stink. What a stroke of luck that the typical modern sorority girl knows how to treat a zombie and that Cody's old friend, the local forest ranger Girard (whipwielding hero of many a poverty row western Lash LaRue), still knows how to wield his magic whip. When he's not flirting with a reporter who could be his great granddaughter.

Oh my. The Dark Power is once again one of those films that would lead most sane people to questions like "What is this? Why am I watching this? Am I insane?". Fortunately, I have never been one with much of a hold on sanity, so I just look at a film like this and sigh wistfully.

So nothing except boring college student shenanigans happens for most of the film? There's more bad acting than in any soap opera you'd care to mention? Lash LaRue is by far the best actor? The jokes in this horror comedy aren't funny at all? Sexy Grandpa LaRue makes you uncomfortable? As does action hero smack talking Lash? I can take it!

I can even feel kind of amused by it, especially when out of the mire of nonsense that make up this thing suddenly enticing shapes arise (and I don't mean the badly done zombies, or the naked sorority girls) and try to form some sort of anti-racist message. Not that they succeed, but the effort really is endearing, as is the obvious love the film has for LaRue (even if some people might call it misguided).

To be honest, nothing about The Dark Power works as it's supposed to do, yet its constant efforts at being funny, or an ode to Lash, or just plain competent are as sweet as can be.

11:07 am - In short: Neko Ramen Taisho (2008)

aka Pussy Soup

The cat (puppet) Jeff III has had a hard life until now. Brought up by his cruel father, Jeff II, to become a popular cat idol just like dad (and presumably Jeff I), poor Jeff hasn't the necessary cuteness that it takes to get through life in showbiz.

Jobless and rejected by his father after a very bad performance in a commercial, the cat decides to get a decent job. But all his promising career choices go to waste. Work as a sushi chef turns out to be impossible for someone addicted to fish, while nobody wants to be operated on by a surgeon who is also a cat. After his taxi driving job doesn't pay off either - surprisingly, passengers don't appreciate it when you try to run over rats - the desperate Jeff wants to drown himself to end his ordeal, but is saved by a gruff yet kindly ramen cook.

The master teaches Jeff the art of ramen cooking, and soon our hero has a small but fine noodle bar on the outskirts of Tokyo. All could be well, if not for his rather evil father who is trying to lay Jeff's life to waste by opening a new, flashy ramen place nearly next door.

That's the sort of problem only a TV cook off can solve.

Yeah, Minoru Kawasaki is at it again, making another comedy in the spirit of his Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala, just with even more dubious looking dolls.

It is in fact so much in the spirit of those earlier films that one could be tempted to decry a certain lack of originality in the new film. But then one would be the kind of person who complains that a film about a ramen cooking cat isn't novel enough, or, as we here call 'em, a twat.

The viewer's enjoyment of the whole affair probably depends on her ability to find the type of parody that nearly emulates its sources funny. If you like the clichés of Japanese pop culture targeted here at least a little, you'll probably have some decent fun, if not, you are way outside of the film's target range and will probably just stare at the screen in befuddlement.

If, on the other hand, you're like me and have read and enjoyed one bread baking or cooking manga or the other, Neko Ramen Taisho comes recommended. Unless you don't like ramen.

10:33 am - In short: The Occupant (1984)

aka The Tenant

Canadian Chinese grad student Angie (Sally Yeh) comes to Hong Kong to study Chinese superstitions. Her budget for her trip isn't much to speak of, and so she's quite happy that she's able to get a ridiculously cheap furnished apartment instead of an overpriced hotel room.

There's a good reason for her new place's low prize, though - it is haunted. What begins harmless enough with a little table moving and ghostly singing rises to threats of ghostly possession. The ghost of singer Lisa Law (Mak Git-Man) seems obsessed with repeating the murder suicide that cost her life through Angie.

Fortunately two creepy stalker guys - the cop Valentino (Chow Yun-Fat) and the "funny" used car dealer Hansome Wong (Raymond Wong) - have fallen in love with Angie and are willing to help her out with her problem. Valentino even has an ex-cop friend (Lo Lieh) turned priest who can do a little exorcising.

The Occupant is an early work in the long and complicated career of director Ronny Yu. It's more a comedy than a horror film, but it doesn't succeed all that well as either horror or comedy.

The comedy bits are less inane and slapsticky than typical for Hong Kong comedies, so they should be easier to stomach for someone with as little tolerance for these things as I have, but what is on screen often just isn't all that funny. I mean, making fun of Raymond Wong's character can only get us that far.

The horror part of the film on the other hand isn't very exciting either. The usual child-friendly ghosting is present, but fails to excite or interest much.

Still, watching it isn't all that painful an experience. There's nothing really bad about the film, the problem is that there isn't anything really good about it either, leading to a film that's just somehow there to while away 90 minutes without making much of an impression.

08:35 am - Detective Story (2007)

Private detective Raita Kazama (Kazuya Nakayama) is a typical representative of his profession. He's a slob, a wearer of highly dubious fashion (or "vintage clothing", as he likes to call it) and obviously poor as can be, even though he somehow manages to have two employees in his agency.

One evening, when he insinuates himself into the alcohol reserves of his new neighbour, his perversely straight-laced namesake and IT expert Raita Takashima (Kurodo Maki), a distraught woman seeks his help. Unfortunately, Kazama's too drunk and lazy to be of any use and asks her to see him the next day at his office.

She'll never arrive there, though, because she is murdered on her way home from Kazama's. The killer absconds with her liver to do who knows what with it.

Kazama is hit hard by the poor woman's death and decides to find her killer. That's easier said than done when your talents as a detective mostly consist of the ability to wear an absurd wig and when even your ex-colleagues in the police force call you the worst detective ever.

Nonetheless, someone feels threatened enough by our intrepid hero to deposit Kazama's fountain pen close to the next murder victim. That's enough for the police to make Kazama their main suspect, but not enough for the detective to give up on the case, even if it means dodging cops and trying to rope information out of a serial killer whose nemesis he somehow managed to become.

Soon, all trails lead to the eccentric artist Aoyama.

I doubt that Detective Story is a film that could convince someone not already enamored with director Takashi Miike's body of work to fall in love with it. That does not mean that it is not a film worth watching. It's just a difficult film to comprehend and I have a hard time imagining what someone not familiar with Miike's style would make of it.

The film seems to be a re-imagining and sympathetic parody of a late 70s TV show I know nothing at all about (and the Internet won't tell me), so I bet that some of its jokes were going right over my head. But - the film mainly being a comedy of sorts and all - there's quite a bit of humor in it that I did get. Tonally, said humor jumps merrily and with the kind of abandon one is used to from Miike between really unfunny slapstick, that dead-pan Japanese humor which is so dead-pan that you're often not sure if it is in fact humor or just plain weirdness and the sort of left-field stuff one has come to expect from Miike. Because only having his way with one old TV show alone would probably bore our directorial maestro shitless, we also get little routines that play with the mystery genre in general and a truly strange variation on Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter (but with more maggot farming).

Just making a comedy would of course also be way too boring, and so the humor rubs against some gore, some maggots and a tale about the negative influence of Rudolf Steiner's theosophy on a too impressionable mind in a way that I would probably find infuriating if it wasn't exactly what I expected of Miike. This is not one of the films where disparate elements are carefully entwined until they make a beautiful tapestry, instead, they are cut up and cut open with a certain amount of glee and a strange intensity and stitched together in new ways to become a sometimes shambling, sometimes hopping monstrosity with its own kind of beauty.

And while that is more than fine with me, I don't find Detective Story to be one of Miike's strongest efforts. The comedy is sometimes a little too pedestrian, the acting a little too unrefined in the wrong way to make the film completely satisfying and some of Miike's carefully amateurish jump cut tricks just don't seem to lead anywhere all that interesting. Still, I'll take a not completely satisfying film by Miike over films by directors who are always playing it safe any time.

09:44 am - In short: Don't Go In The Woods...Alone! (1981)

A quartet of city-based campers makes their merry, bitching way through the American backwoods woods. Little do they know that they have stumbled onto the hunting grounds of an overworked, pelt-wearing wildman serial killer I like to call Stinky (Tom Drury).

And it'll take quite some time until they notice, because Stinky's work in this area is really never done, what with dozens of utterly bizarre people hiking through his woods at the same time.

Who will survive? And will the Sheriff who hasn't got a problem with the hundreds of people who must go missing in the area each year finally get a clue?

Don't Go In The Woods is one of those special treats US local independent filmmaking sometimes has to offer. It's an abysmally bad film by many people's standards, but to me (and a surprising number of others, it seems) it is utterly charming in everything it has to offer. Director James Bryan marries so-unfunny-it-is-funny-again humor (hello, wheelchair hiker with "funny" music) with moments of beautiful, cheap absurdity until the wrong-headed viewer doesn't know if he is supposed to feel bored, threatened or disturbed. Especially the last third of the film has some quite effective and disturbing moments. The magic lies in the off-hand way even the most absurd ideas are handled, I think.

Bryan's honestly great, atmospheric nature shots are the film's secret weapons against an ultra-low budget and an illogical (only in the best way) a-kill-a-minute script.

Don't Go In The Woods...Alone! is an absolutely magical piece of cinema if you are willing and able to see its flaws as a window into an alternative reality where local colour, improvisation and a manic insistence on making a film no matter what are the true virtues of a movie.

10:03 am - Bride of Three Films Make A Post

House of Bugs (2005): Part of a series of short movies based on horror manga by the glorious Kazuo Umezu. This one was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (whose tone is usually quite the opposite of Umezu's) and tells the story of a broken marriage that climaxes in a metaphorical or not so metaphorical bug transformation by way of Kafka and Rashomon. It is very much a Kurosawa film with his typical subtle aesthetic and the director's usual themes (alienation, the inability to empathize, broken families etc) and therefore quite excellent.

The Bounty Hunter (1954): The story of an infamous bounty hunter played by Randolph Scott coming to a small town to catch three robbers about whom he knows next to nothing and making the whole town more than a little nervous in the process feels a little slight, even though it has its share of darker flourishes. The plot just works out a little too pat, making this most certainly not the best cooperation between director Andre de Toth and actor Randolph Scott. Not that it would be a bad Western, it's just that de Toth and Scott seem to be coasting on their talents instead of straining them.

Dead & Breakfast (2004): A bunch of dweebs on the way to a wedding strand somewhere in Texas. "Comedy" ensues, until the locals get possessed by demons and zombified, which leads to the sort of gory "comedy" that would very much like to see itself standing in the tradition of early Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi, just with the minor drawback that it is about as funny as Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. At least I have a new example now when trying to explain the phrase "painfully unfunny". Oh, and the people who compare this to Shaun of the Dead will be taken care of soon, a dark and ancient power promised me.

10:09 am - In short: Criminally Insane (1975)

Ah, Ethel (Priscilla Alden)! Put into an asylum because of her violent outbursts, regularly treated with electro shocks and still not healed. And her doctor is giving her back into the care of her grandmother (Jane Lambert) anyway. He'll probably regret it, if only for a very short moment.

He's a great doctor, he is, and so he recommends to Gramma that she should decrease heavily overweight Ethel's calorie intake, which is obviously the right thing to do with someone with the delusion that others want to starve her.

One prevented meal comes to the other and a kitchen knife finds Granny's back. Finally Ethel can eat whenever she wants and how much she wants. Or so she thinks.

In truth, Ethel will have a lot of troublesome people to deal with before she can eat peacefully. There are delivery boys, psychiatrists, sisters who work as prostitutes and evil boyfriends to take care of. Ethel will also have to learn that keeping the dead bodies of one's victims locked away in one's home is a stinky business.

Criminally Insane was made in Oakland by the prolific low-low-budget filmmaker Nick Millard (also known as Nick Phillips). As the others of his films I've seen, it's technically crude (but obviously trying very hard to make the best of its budget), raw and rather fascinating.

What sounds like a mean series of jokes about overweight people is given a sense of humanity and reality by Priscilla Alden's spot-on performance. Alden is as good as any semi-professional actress I've ever seen, mostly working through presence and a line delivery that might have been much too affectless for a different role, but fits perfectly here.

The film mostly plays out as an 70s psycho movie reduced to its bare essentials, brought back to an ugly semi-reality of provincial life with casual racism and violence, but also given some gloriously funny moments that work as added reality checks. The scene in which Ethel finally wants to do something about her corpse problem by burying her victims in the garden, only to be first annoyed by a nosy neighbour peeking over the fence and then completely prevented from realizing her plan by the simple fact that the soil is bad for digging alone is worth the price of admission. Ethel is the perfect antidote to the sexy, suave serial killer of today.

10:17 am - Three Films Make A Post's Daughter

Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002): Takashi Miike in his Wild Director-Man of Japan role. The film merrily hops between ultra-violence, subdued Yakuza drama and weird humor, adds a wonderful scenery-chewing performance by Riki Takeuchi and a near magical bazooka. Somehow Miike gets a rather brilliantly fun film out of it that does not feel even remotely as random as it sounds. Extra bonus points for the ecstasy-inducing use of the Flower Travellin' Band's "Satori" as the rhythmic backbone of many scenes.

Ekusute (2007): Sion Sono directs a strange mix of Japanese horror parody, the grotesque and a story about child abuse with this tale of cursed hair extensions which fuck up the problematic life of a young Japanese woman (Chiaki Kuriyama) and her battered niece even more. Thanks to the director's incredible hand for tonal shifts, inventive grotesqueness and some rather great acting by Kuriyama, Miku Sato as the abused child and the inevitable Ren Osugi at his most exalted as the misogynist hair fetishist from hell, the film avoids every pitfall its ideas could set it up for.

Demonoid - Messenger of Evil (1981): One would think that a Mexican-American co-production of a film about the Devil's hand doing classical crawling hand mischief and possessing people while pining for Samantha Eggar couldn't be anything but great (fun at least). One would be oh so very wrong. Apart from a handful of moments of hand-wrestling hilarity this is just dreadfully boring. It drags, it is charmlessly incompetent, has a stocky mid-70s TV movie soundtrack - what a waste!

09:48 am - Three films make a post

Lord of Illusions (1995): The great lost Clive Barker film (if lost means, "nearly ignored by everyone") merrily mixing Barker's usual pain/pleasure/pointy things in people are awesome shtick with tropes of the hardboiled detective tale. Pleasantly slow-going, sometimes a little silly with its capital-E EVIL, but still a fine film full of honored character actors - and Scott Bakula, but oh well.

Stardust (2007): Matthew Vaughn's Stardust hollywoodizes Neil Gaiman's novel somewhat fiercely, yet as charming, funny Hollywood fantasy romances go, it is still a successful film by virtue of often actually being charming and funny and most definitely a romance. In addition to the expected big set-pieces, Vaughn's direction also shows a pleasant affinity for the importance of smaller gestures.

Home Movie (2008): Another fake found footage horror film. This time around, we are watching the home movie's of a small family living "deep in the woods" with two kids growing steadily creepier. The plot unfortunately hinges on the viewer's ability to ignore the fact that a reverend and a child psychiatrist really should be able to be a little bit more decisive and competent when it comes to diagnosing their children as completely fucked up. Honestly, they don't talk, they don't smile, they don't laugh, they make sandwiches out of their goldfish! I couldn't bring myself to put my brain this deep into hibernation, so the whole film fell flat on its face early and often, never to recover. Adrian Pasdar's highly annoying performance as the even more annoying reverend and dad didn't help much.

10:06 am - Road Killers (1998?)

Serial criminal and biker Thomas Pain (Jonathan Haynes) is gunned down by a cop after a successful and peaceful, if armed, robbery and dies. Fortunately or unfortunately (it depends rather heavily on the strength of your wish for this film to end early), two overacting, bug-eyed "scientists" (deserved quotation marks are in the actual movie, charmingly) have found an olde booke of magick and its little bonus content, the Potion To Raise The Dead. The lab-coated duo somehow manage to acquire Pain's corpse to take their research to the next level after illegal animal experimentation.

Mister Pain revives rather too well, kills the two cackling madmen and makes off with book and potion. He hasn't changed a bit since he was alive, so he gets his old biker troupe together to do the things people who tattoo their names on their fists are wont to do.

They start out (their plan for world domination? their summer vacation?) by grabbing themselves a nice shack in the woods near the small Southern town of Plain Dealing, killing the owner while they are at it. Stage two of Pain's master plan consists of terrorizing Plain Dealing.

Too bad there's neither time nor budget for a lot of terrorizing, so Pain and his troupe barely have time to kill the sheriff (who never heard the one about avoiding to let the bad guy with the gun get behind you) and abduct another man and sacrifice him to Satan while everyone swills the magic potion before a quickly built vigilante force of local yokels under the lead of a not-Ash named Matt (Carl Weatherly) shows them the true meaning of Southern hospitality (perfectly incorporated in Matt's helpful advice to "shoot first, ask questions later").

Too bad there's still half a movie to go. So, things being as magically and undead as they are, the bikers are dying quite easily, yet the poor murdered murdering dears return from the dead a few surprisingly decomposition-free weeks later to take vengeance.

Will the excitement never cease!?

Road Killers, directed by a certain Derek E. Welch, is quite a peculiar little movie. Too backyard-produced to even have an IMDB page, possibly meant as a comedy, not funny in the way it is supposed to be yet very funny indeed, without any make-up effects for its undead and featuring undead people who may be called zombies by the supposed good people of Plain Dealing, but who always only act, move and look like your usual hobby actor playing a biker, the film is full of the kind of little wonders of stupidity that make humanity such a loveable mess.

More than once while watching this, I had to ask myself questions like: "Is the dry, inflectionless drawl of our hero supposed too sound so flat? Is it so flat to make it funnier? Is it written so flat as not to overtax Weatherly's dubious acting abilities? Why do I even think about this thing so hard? Oh, look, a decapitation!".

The quality of its direction is about what one would expect. There's one or two Evil Dead inspired shots, much camera on ground level or crotch level business, no attempts to place any of this in any reality I know of, no comical timing to speak of etc etc.

Which does not mean that this isn't entertaining or funny. It is actually both, just not in the way it was meant to be entertaining or funny. Road Killers is one of the very exciting cases of a horror comedy where the true hilarity of the proceedings is based on every joke falling flat, becoming a very different kind of joke (and funny!) through its own ineptness. Truly,this must be the kind of paradox some Greek philosopher-mathematician would approve of, hopefully forgetting all about turtles in the process!

10:07 pm - Spider Baby (1968)

A terrifyingly square-jawed (and dumb as the piece of rock his chin resembles) man called Peter (Quinn Redeker) tells us a little story about that strange little illness known as Merrye's Disease.

It's quite a fittingly named disease, seeing that only members of the Merrye family seem to suffer from it. At some point in their teenage years, all Merryes start to regress mentally and also develop some unpleasant signs of murderous insanity. In the end, a Merrye even falls back into a pre-human state of existence (that is, starts to resemble Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy).

The last presentable members of the family (I suppose procreation by something other than accident can get a little problematic when you are never mentally adult), Virginia (Jill Banner), Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Ralph (Sid Haig) live in the rather musty old family home, protected and fed by their trusty old family chauffeur Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.).

The old man is also taking care of the less human family members, a small assortment of aunts and uncles hidden away in the cellar.

Alas, Bruno is but a single man - not a very sane man himself, at that -, and when he returns from an excursion into the city, he finds himself confronted with the dead body of the postman (played by our old nemesis Mantan Moreland), who did not survive the charming little game of "spider" that Virginia likes to play so very much.

Even worse than the corpse though is the letter the postman was delivering - some greedy relatives are planning on taking the "children" under their wings and steal all their money. Oh joy, they're coming to visit today.

And what charming people they are. There's Emily (Carol Ohmart), whose love for dancing in front of mirrors while dressed in her undies will prove quite problematic for her future survival, our narrator (and therefore hero of the piece, so hurray for him) Peter - as I said, dumb as a rock, the hitler-mustachioed lawyer Schlocker (Karl Schanzer) and his secretary Ann (Mary Mitchel), the future love of Peter's life, who is of equally dubious intelligence.

Bruno and his charges are bravely trying to put on a sane face, but Emily's insistence on first having dinner at the house and then staying the night combined with Schlocker's unhealthy curiosity lead them down a path, or rather a corridor, that ends like all corridors in old dark houses end - in a room where someone is very enthusiastic about playing "spider".

Spider Baby's director and writer Jack Hill is one of my heroes of low budget filmmaking in the 60s and 70s. The way in which he was always on the look-out for new methods of making his films as sleazy as possible, while at the same time instilling them with a sense of outrageous fun as well as a very healthy dose of satire alone would be enough to make most of his films (The Big Doll House! Coffy! Foxy Brown! Switchblade Sisters! etc.) mandatory watching in my book. But Hill was also a more than competent director, not of the sort that has much use for obvious signs of flashiness, yet exceedingly effective at making well-paced and clever b-films that for once tend to keep the promises their one-sheets make.

Underneath the wonderful and sometimes delirious strangeness of Hill's movies, there was always something else going on, be it that Hill made a quite cynical commentary on the genre of the revenge flick inside of a revenge flick or that he used a cheerleader exploitationer as a declaration of love and hate for women's lib at once.

Spider Baby isn't any different. Here, Hill drags the corpse of the old dark house mystery/horror movies from the 30s and 40s from its grave and takes a good look at what can be done with it in the late 60s. While he's doing that, he might just as well add the sexuality to it the older films were never able (or allowed to) talk about.

And, while he's at it, he makes parts of the sexuality quite uncomfortable by ascribing it to young women with the minds of children, basically poking around in the closet with the sign "Children and sexuality! Don't open!" without running the risk of not being able to sell his film to an audience.

Brilliantly, Hill does this trick while still making a sleazy, well-paced, well filmed, competently acted and very weird black comedy.

10:08 am - One Eyed Monster (2007)

Alien invasions aren't what they used to be. When the boss of a porn film studio (Jeff Denton) gets the bright idea to film his next movie in a cabin in the mountains - naturally without a working telephone line and with a snow front threatening to cut the cabin off from the rest of the world any minute now - it is only a question of time until the first alien appears to do some invading. Among the actors are porn veterans Ron Jeremy and Veronica Hart (playing themselves, with Jeremy cutely credited "Introducing Ron Jeremy"), still teaching the young 'uns a lesson about things-this-stuck-up-European-is-not-going-to-talk-about.

Alas, poor Ron soon is hit by a strange bolt of light coming down from the sky, leading to a rather overenthusiastic performance in his first scene, Veronica only being saved from bleeding to death thanks to the wonders of tampon science and Ron's penis absconding.

No telephone, snowed in, an alien-possessed killer penis on the doorstep - yes, that's what Hollywood dreams are made of. Fortunately the film crew (we better don't talk about the pitiable actors) is as well prepared for these circumstances as humanly possible, what with the lighting, camera, sound guy Jonah (Jason Graham, channeling Duane Jones quite nicely) being a gulf war veteran, make-up artist Laura having a huge crush on Ron Jeremy('s member) and being played by Amber Benson and boom mike operator T.J. (Caleb Mayo) having the kind of technical talent that could make one chief engineer in the Star Fleet, if the Star Fleet was interested in mechanical vaginas.

Further bettering the chances of team porn/Earth is their neighbour, a Vietnam veteran named Mohtz (Charles Napier, himself veteran of just about every kind of movie or TV show ever made or imaginable), who, what a stroke of luck!, has already had some experience with alien killer penii and brings valuable information about the physiological wonder that is the killer penis with him, as well as a distinct smell of alcohol.

Whatever could go wrong when these people are trying to trap and kill the alien menace to humanity?

As far as killer dick movies go, One Eyed Monster is a newly made classic. As I might have mentioned here already, I'm not the greatest fan of comedies, probably to an even lesser degree a fan of horror comedies, but I have to admit I did laugh here more than once, possibly even loudly.

Firstly, this has to do with the quality of the script. Yes, it is as absurd and silly as it sounds, yet it's also coherent and with a very nice sense for the internal reality of the situation. The film has an amazing lack of the sort laziness which is too often mistaken for irony (I'm looking at Scream and everything that it has to answer for, here) in films. It's still full of comically subverted clichés and honestly funny homages to horror classics like Alien or The Thing (Carpenter version), but the movie also knows when to play things straight - or as straight as things in the world of the killer penis get - and never uses "I'm just a comedy" as an excuse for willful dumbness. There's also a fine sense for the clichés one should just ignore, so the film lacks the mandatory crap-talking black guy who always is the second victim or at best allowed to sacrifice himself for the hero, and  instead features that rare thing, a capable person of colour (and how sad is it that this is a fact that still stands out as something special in horror so long after Romero and a few others have shown how to do it?)!

Secondly, the actors do a bang-up job with what they are given. I imagine that it must be rather difficult to play stuff like this. If an actor goes too far over the top, he'll probably end up dragging the film down into the land of mainstream slapstick comedy which films like Scary Movie taught us to hate, if he underplays it he'll look rather colourless next to a damn killer penis. Here, everyone (yes, Jeremy and Hart, too) finds exactly the right level.

Thirdly, director Adam Fields (who also co-wrote the film with his siblings Jordan and Scott) does the classic good low budget movie thing of knowing what can be done on a budget and what can't and then acting accordingly. As a consequence, we see less blood and killer penis than some would probably wish for, yet Fields films so cleverly around the lack of a big effects budget that it's difficult not to find it charming. What is there to see is rather well done, my personal favorite being the highly interesting strangling technique of the killer member (something only Ron Jeremy's penis could be capable of).

What more could you possibly want from a killer penis film?

02:09 pm - The Stranger Gets Mean (1976)

aka Get Mean

The always weirdly grinning and mugging gunman we only know as the Stranger (Tony Anthony) returns. And what a return it is! He is being dragged behind a riderless horse into the dustiest Western ghost town in all of Spain, um, I mean America. There he meets a bunch of people I can only describe as gypsy pirates. They have been waiting for him as the promised hero who shall return their princess Elizabeth (Diana Lorys) back to Spain and help her regain her throne from the invading barbarians. While our dubiously heroic hero is still haggling about the price of his services, a group of black clad cowboys led by a Viking attack. The Stranger disperses these guys pretty fast and it does only take a little line on a map until the he and the princess arrive in Spain. Once there, they witness a bizarre battle between the barbarians (a bunch of people with melee weapons, dressed as Persian, Vikings, traditional Spanish courtiers, or just in the pelts of movie barbarism) and Elizabeth's people (who are white Moors? Spaniards?), wearing either the gypsy pirate style things or movie Moorish clothing circa from the Crusades era, as well as anything else the director thought he could get away with (that is, everything). By all rights, Elizabeth's guys should win, what with them having firearms (and bows) and such, but the barbarians have a secret weapon. It's an early version of a tank in form of a cart carrying four cannons on a turning disk and it makes short work of Elizabeth's army.

Well, so much for the good guys. Afterwards, the leaders of the barbarians go for a little chat with the Stranger and Elizabeth. It turns out that Elizabeth's tendency to tell everyone, even the leaders of her enemies, who she is and the Stranger's helpful explanation of her monetary worth can only lead to trouble. So Elizabeth ends up kidnapped while our hero sees the world hanging from his feet while the barbarians are shooting their cannons at him.

This is where the plot (such as it is) starts to get complicated with a nonsensical series of double crosses between the leaders of the barbarians (Diego-who-dresses-like-Genghis-Khan-and-is-dubbed-with-a-near-impenetrable-accent, The Gay Courtier, and Richard III's number one fan) and the Stranger himself, kidnappings, escapes, and a little questing for a hidden treasure.

Among the further indignities that are visited on our hero are:

• invisible ghosts hitting him and possessing him into imitating wolf howls (very badly, at that)
  
• a black face bomb
  
• people stuffing an apple into his mouth and trying to roast him on a spit
  
• the local semi-lesbian warrior women trying to do him sexual harm until they are distracted by each other's awesomeness

and more insane shit than one could possibly list.

For those among us who thought The Stranger's outing in Japan was weird, Get Mean is a true eye opener. Its glaring and completely conscious ignorance of things like logic, characterization, history (if not time itself) and plain human sanity is bound to show everyone what the word "bonkers" really means. It is surprisingly unmysterious how the film came to pass, though (and yes, I am passing wild speculation based on my intimate knowledge of Italian filmmaking by way of watching way too many Italian films as fact here). You see, director Ferdinando Baldi and his star Tony "Mugging Mug" Anthony promised their producers to make a Western only to find that they didn't have any Western costumes except for the single one that was part of Tony's private wardrobe. Buying or making some was completely out of the question after most of the budget had already been invested in drugs during the script writing phase (a wild party in Baldi's house during which no script was written), but what luck! Baldi still had some moth-eaten rags "borrowed" during his stint as director of peplums and historical adventure films stashed away in his cellar! Nothing was more obvious than to just put them all on random actors and improvise something along the lines of Maciste's adventures in China, just with a gunman instead of Maciste and even less of an idea when exactly the damn thing was meant to take place.

Which brought this film into existence, a real prime piece of what the hell filmmaking that for once is as fun as its elements promise. There was most definitely neither a real script nor a plan nor any sane idea involved, but damn, this thing is moving along with nary a minute that is not filled to the brim with stupid, inappropriate and goofy scenes of inexplicable meaning, be it the indignities inflicted upon our hero or just a mass of dubious details (like the silver spheres which seem to observe the beginning and the end of the film, or our hero's love for the taunting of dead enemies or or or).

This just might be the film the Italian movie industry was made to create. Thanks, God!

01:08 pm - In short: Dead Snow (2009)

And another wonderful sounding vacation spot made less than attractive by the movies.

A group of medicine students goes on vacation in the snowy mountains of Norway. Soon they are visited by the local exposition fairy in the form of a rude weirdo, who tells them all about the history of the dead nazis who supposedly haunt the area. What do you know, the guy is right! There are in fact Nazi zombies (of the fast, tool using variety) around. And what nazi zombie could ever resist the promise of spam tasty medicine students in a cabin?

Dead Snow is a surprisingly entertaining horror comedy from Norway. The beginning is nothing special thanks to overuse of standard tropes like the already mentioned exposition fairy or friends being completely surprised by the phobias of their friends (and really, script writers of the world, people know the phobias of their friends like they know their unhealthy obsession with peas), but once the nazi zombies start to doing their thing the film gets rather fun.

For once, this is a low budget film that knows what it can and what it can't achieve on its budget and that strictly sticks to the things it can achieve: some moody shots of spectacular landscapes, humor that starts out as a rather minor part of the set-up but slowly increases to a crescendo of bloody (and sometimes really mean-spirited) silliness very much in the spirit of young Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi, and some rather clever suspense set-ups.

One could complain (as the usual IMDB people of course already do) about a certain slightness in content and depth, but that amounts to complaining about a car not being an airplane or a technical manual not being good literature. Dead Snow sets out to be a fun ninety minutes for the kind of people who think Jackson's Brain Dead is funny (and by Cthulhu, it is!) and a fun ninety minutes for the kind of people who think Jackson's Brain Dead is funny it does deliver.