The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

10:13 am - In short: Mikadroid (1991)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:00 am - In short: The Shackle (2000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:19 am - In short: Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Death-Make (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:04 am - In short: Escape From Coral Cove (1986)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:06 am - In short: La Radice Del Male (2006)

aka The Roots of Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:20 am - In short: Love Bites (2001)

Not to be confused with other rather forgettable films called Love Bites.

The young Parisian Antoine (Guillaume Canet) spends his nights freeloading at any party and club he can talk himself into, and sleeps through the day in the fitness club where he lives.

One night, he pretends to be the friend of a certain absent Jordan (Orazio Massaro) to get into an upper class party. A mysterious older man (Jean-Marie Winling) is very interested in their supposed connection, since he is trying to get a hold of Jordan. Even after hearing that Antoine doesn't even know how that Jordan person looks, the weird stranger still decides to hire the nightlife specialist to find the guy. For one million Franc, Antoine can hardly decline the offer.

But even with the help of his friend Etienne (Gerard Lanvin), who is well-connected in the world of the sleazy and the slimy, Jordan is a very difficult man to find. The things Antoine hears about his target aren't too promising anyway - he seems to be in the business of biting people in the neck. And he's only ever seen by night. My, whatever might his secret be?

Finally, Antoine manages to run into Jordan's sister Violaine (Asia Argento), herself known for sometimes taking a bite out of people. Nonetheless (and not all that surprising seeing that she is played by Asia Argento after all), our hero lands in a hotel room with her, but being drugged up and finding himself scratched and roughed up on the street the next day was probably not exactly what he was after.

Still, he is clearly fascinated by Violaine, and isn't even willing to stop his investigation when it is starting to get rather dangerous.

Love Bites could have been quite a film - a comedy about vampires as part of the Parisian nightlife sounds promising enough, at least.

Unfortunately, neither the film's script nor its director Antoine de Caunes seem to have much of an idea what to do with their basic concept, sidelining the vampire angle completely, instead concentrating on showing us Canet's Antoine not doing much in a lot of bars and clubs. The actual plot could be condensed to about thirty minutes of film.

This is not to say that the rest of the film is completely forgettable, but for every neat (if irrelevant for either mood, plot, character or theme) little joke and amusing absurdity, there are two or three scenes whose use in the film I can find no explanation for.

It would probably be easier if I'd find Antoine as charming as he is supposed to be, but Canet plays him with a combination of smarminess and blandness that is never anything else but punchable.

So the main weight of the acting has to be carried by Asia and Gerard Lanvin. Unfortunately, the former might be as sexy as ever, but isn't allowed to do much else. A small wonder when you keep in mind how seldom she is actually present, because another scene of nothing happening is deemed more interesting. Lanvin for his part is just the friendly character actor giving support.

Still, I found myself mildly entertained by the film - the scenes which work really do it quite well, and I'm always happy to find a comedy that doesn't absolutely annoy me.

Just don't expect more of the film than mild entertainment, and you're good.

10:07 am - In short: Number 13

The Cambridge historian Anderson (Greg Wise) comes to a small country bishop's seat somewhere in Britain to do some research in the church's archive.

He is soon fascinated by newly found accounts from Cromwell's times that put the local bishop at that time in a rather disturbing light. He and a mysterious foreign friend seem to have been the leaders of a witch cult. At least that's what the documents say.

Anderson's interest doesn't please the clergy too much, and they decide to disallow him further explorations of their papers, so as not to stir up things better left untouched.

The now rather exasperated historian has other problems anyway. Every night, he hears strange noises and laughter from the hotel room next to his own, noises that seem inexplicably not to come from his actual neighboring room, but from the absent 13th room of the hotel. If he'd just look a little closer, he'd also realize that his room changes its dimensions after dark.

The strange occurrences surrounding Anderson come to a head when he learns that his hotel once was the house where the bishop and his mysterious friend were reputed to host their black masses.

As far as M.R. James adaptations made for UK TV go, this is one of the weaker ones, not comparable to the much better ones made in the 70s as "Ghost Stories For Christmas".

While there is no single flaw I could put my finger on and call the reason why the short film doesn't work for me at all, there is a timidity about the everything in it James' work doesn't deserve. Number 13's director Pier Wilkie makes some small attempts at modernizing the tale, but transplanting it from Denmark to Britain and putting about thirty seconds of suppressed sexuality in is neither here nor there.

What is also missing here is a an attempt at actually building the mood of the story. The only thing we get is some mediocre sound design, as if putting an echo on a little otherwise unprocessed laughter was the epitome of that craft.

Neither the ironic distance of James nor the very undistanced creepiness of the author's tales comes through here, instead everything is rather harmless and quaint, both things which don't make for a frightening or entertaining ghost story.

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.

09:39 am - In short: Battle Warrior (1996)

aka Mission Hunter 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I certainly did have a good time with it.

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.

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.

09:32 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.

10:17 am - 3 Films Make A Post: A New Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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.

10:17 am - In short: Blowback 2 (1991)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:21 am - In short: Royal Warriors (1986)

aka In the Line of Duty 2 (or 1? My sources contradict each other on that point)

When a group of gangsters hijacks a passenger plane that is transporting a Japanese gangster boss to his new home in a Hong Kong jail, their plan of freeing the boss is thwarted by three law enforcers who are sharing the same flight.

CID Inspector Michelle Yip (Michelle Yeoh, definitely not stupid enough not to have a different first name than her character), the pea-brained sky marshal Michael Wong (Michael Wong, very possibly stupid enough to need to share his name with his character, and the worst actor this side of Keanu Reeves) and Japanese cop Peter Yamamoto (good old Hiroyuki Sanada) take the gangsters out with aplomb and a disturbing lack of surviving perpetrators. Still, the three are the heroes of the day. But their hijackers have a few surviving friends, two old war buddies, who are less than willing to forgive the death of their old friends and start a rather rude campaign of vengeance on the cops.

If I tell you that Yamamoto has a wife and a small child and is just in the process of giving up his police job to have more time for his family, you know what will happen next.

Royal Warriors is a very typical mid-80s Hong Kong action film. This of course means the characters are flat as cardboard cutouts and the plot is as thin as India-paper, but the action is so furious and ruthless that I don't find myself caring about the film's weak script.

Hong Kong films from (one of the Golden Ages of HK cinema) like this had a sense of absolute and wild abandon about them, milking the willingness of (probably mad) actors and stuntmen to do the damndest things (very much like some Thai action productions do today) without a care for anyone's health, good taste or realism. You can just watch your last hopes for the latter go up in flames with the homemade tank Yeoh drives into the finale.

Royal Warriors is also a wonderful showcase for the young Michelle Yeoh (at that time often billed as Michelle Khan), who is throwing herself into her role and the action sequences with the mix of athleticism, charisma, kicks to the face and plain talent that would make her famous. Of course she's just waltzing over her co-stars here, which isn't much of a surprise when it comes to Wong (who just can't act at all), but needs more of an effort with Sanada, who never was a Sonny Chiba to be sure, yet alright enough in his mere mortal way.

There really isn't more to say about this one. It is a movie as far from anything cerebral as possible, yet it is a fine choice if you crave some very Hong Kong adrenaline kicks in an 80s stylee.

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.

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.

09:11 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.