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.

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!

09:59 am - El Robo De Las Momias De Guanajuato (1972)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

10:15 am - 3 Films Make A Post: In Space

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

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

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

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

09:46 am - The Pit (1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

10:22 am - In short: Invitation Only (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11:07 am - La Cabeza Viviente (1963)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

09:58 am - In short: Rats - Night of Terror (1984)

A post-apocalyptic gypsy punk rocker clan lead by a certain Kurt (Ottaviano Dell'Acqua) comes to a group of deserted houses (or is it supposed to be a city street?). Inside one of the buildings, in an interior that looks pretty much like a cross between an old Spaghetti Western saloon and a SF set too shoddy for Al Brescia, they find a large cache of food, a futuristic looking aquarium, I mean water distiller, and a shabby looking assortment of plants.

There are also a bunch of dead bodies hidden away to make for "shocking" finds, and a whole lot of rats. After a little clean-up, the nomads decide to stay there for a while and enjoy their new vegetable garden.

That was probably not their best idea, for in the first night the rats attack. And oh, these are fiendishly clever rats. Some rat commandos (or is it ninja rats?) sneak up on the group's vehicles and nibble through their wheels, leaving our merry band of heroes without the possibility of escape. Except by walking, of course, but the gang seems to be against just walking away on principle and decide with the sort of logic only the duo of Fragasso and Mattei can provide, after the first of them have been killed by those evil nibblers, to barricade themselves  in the same building where they first met their squeaking enemies. Would you believe that this isn't a very good idea?

Ah, "written by Claudio Fragasso", "directed by Bruno Mattei". Are there words better suited to frighten those familiar with the true depths of horror?

By Mattei/Fragasso standards, Rats isn't all that bad. Sure, the acting is atrocious and the way the characters act makes as little sense as the plot, but it's not as painful as it could be. If you can keep your compassion with the poor rats under control, the film has even some things to recommend it, or rather to point and laugh at.

I did already mention the acting and the plot, but inane dialogue also comes oh so naturally to Fragasso. It is a virtual feast of stupidity that culminates in a very special twist ending stolen from a Twilight Zone script as written by a drunken teenager. Afterwards, said teenager probably went on to write the motorcycle/samurai sword sequence in Demons, so I'm not going to blame him too much.

The most memorable thing about the film are its special effects. Absolute highpoint is probably the "rug o'rats", a plastic or papiermache contraption meant to embody a slow moving mass of rats, yet mostly effective in evoking giggling fits. Other moments of cinematic greatness are the adorable throat jumping rat dolls, an exploding (it's the rats, you know) corpse and lots and lots of footage of rats just going about their business, while our protagonists are panicking and describing the devilish evil of ratdom, without a care about the fact that the rats are just ignoring them. Unless a bunch of the poor animals is just thrown at a character's face - that's what goes under "rat attack" here.

Other moments of Magrasso magic include the wonderful scene in which a handful of rats break a barricaded door down by somehow crawling around in front of it and pushing a hollowed out corpse against it. It's probably rat sorcery.

Rats - Night of Terror truly is one of the great comedies.

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.

10:03 am - In short: Zombie Dead (2008)

An acting-impaired, semi-amnesiac young woman (Ai Kawanaka) wakes up in a deserted hospital. After some hospital-gown clad stumbling around, she meets a hair-impaired guy and steals five minutes of his and our lives looking for clothes, while he just wants to take her somewhere to explain something to her, or so he says.

Turns out there is an incredibly cost-efficient zombie apocalypse going on in there (highest zombie count: three) and some guys in especially ridiculous non-hazmat suits are keeping everyone (yes, all three people) in the hospital quarantined.

More corridor running follows, also more time stealing.

If you have ever suffered under the illusion that all Japanese zombie films are necessarily better than their Western counterparts, this one will cure you quite effectively, for the low, low price of one hour of your life you will never ever get back.

I hope you like pointless boredom, boring pointlessness, rubber-faced zombies who do not know if they are fast or slow zombies, non-acting and pervy "let's shoot her from below" camera angles. But wait, there's even more to make you wish director Kanzo Matsuura had never been born or at least never gotten near his digital camera!

The film also features the longest and most pointless zombie brain bashing scene in movie history. I have heard rumors people have died and returned as one of the living dead just by watching it, although it is certainly possible that the groaning noises just were snores. I, at least, have developed a sudden appreciation for the work of Bruno Mattei.

Dear reader, please don't watch this, unless a psychopath kidnaps you and it is this or slow bodily torture for you. Even then, I'm not sure which of the two choices I'd recommend.

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.