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.

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.

10:38 am - XX: Beautiful Weapon (1993)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

09:46 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.

10:17 am - Kiltro (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

10:08 am - Khamosh (1985)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

09:24 am - Seventh Moon (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

09:40 am - On WTF: OSS 117 Se Dechaine (1963)

This week, my guest post at WTF-Film concerns an early example of the Eurospy film, interestingly based on a literary character older than James Bond. It's very much "Eurospy - The Early Years". Read more at the obvious place.

09:39 am - Freesia - Icy Tears (2007)

Near future, alternative history Japan is an unpleasant place. While we never learn any historical details, it is quite clear that the country is dominated by militarism and nationalism, waging a perpetual war somewhere in South-East Asia and driven by casual violence.

The cultural difference that interests Freesia, and therefore us, is the establishment of official vengeance killings, savage murder hidden behind the coziness of bureaucratic process - which also seems to take the place of courts and what we understand under the rule of law - and supposedly fair rules.

There are agencies with professional contract killers hunting down the designated victims in a relatively controlled time and place, while their counterparts are allowed to defend their own lives, but can also hire professional bodyguards. If they can't afford one, there's always the option of getting a national bodyguard, but those aren't too successful.

The ex-soldier Kanou (Tetsuji Tamayama) has just started out in one of the agencies. He's a little bit on the traumatized side since he witnessed a military experiment to test a freezing bomb on twenty war orphans. He was one of the soldiers who lead the children to the testing ground, but his conscience brought him too close to the detonation and left him psychically numb and unable to feel physical pain - frozen inside and out.

What Kanou doesn't understand until deep into the movie is that his boss Higuchi (Tsugumi) is the other survivor of the experiment, as damaged inside as he is. Unlike Kanou, Higuchi wants revenge on the people she deems responsible for her and Kanou's state, and if she needs to fake some paperwork for it and doom herself to death by it, so be it.

Taking revenge is not too easy, though, when the people you want to kill are either by now so senile and physically decrepit that there isn't much of a person to take revenge on there anymore or so shaken by guilt that they have the same psychological symptoms as the would-be avenger.

Freesia is director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's live action adaptation of a manga written by Jiro Matsumoto, but it changes many of the manga's concepts and characters deeply. Even deeper is the difference in tone - where Matsumoto's manga is sleazy and bizarre with a large helping of the outrageous, the film concentrates its interest purely on one thematic element, trauma. Even the alternative history is just a backdrop here.

I have half a mind of criticizing Freesia for being too monochrome, however, its muted emotional palette is the point of the whole endeavor. Still, one can't help to feel at least a certain inner numbness oneself when watching a film only featuring characters with muted affects, doing some muted feeling violence in pictures with a muted colour palette.  My mind's other half does of course wish to applaud the movie for really impressing its characters' emotional state on the viewer.

A large part of the film's success in doing this is based on Kumakiri's note perfect direction, characterized by elegance and the courage to be slow and difficult instead of overplaying the plot's inherent melodrama for cheap effect. However, Tamayama, Tsugumi and Hidetoshi Nishijima as their object of vengeance are doing fine work here, too, showing again that underplaying can be a very effective acting method.

I have no doubt that the film could have gone in a very different direction in the hands of a different director. The screenplay isn't exactly subtle, with elements like a freezing bomb leaving people frozen inside and all the usual tropes of vengeance plots. Somehow, Kumakiri treats everything as subtle as possible, although the film's ending still wants us to feel a closure its characters don't truly achieve.

But I never expect a film to be perfect, so I'm perfectly alright with that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07:08 am - On WTF: Blood Delirium (1988)

This week on WTF-Film, I spend far too many words on trying to explain the inexplicable,

09:53 am - The Blood Drinkers (1964)

aka Kulay Dugo Ang Gabi

(I watched the dubbed-by-local-talent, re-cut version of the film made for the American market. Sense and nonsense of the original might be quite a bit different.)

A certain Dr. Marco (Ronald Remy as a proto-Telly Savalas) and his entourage come to a small Filipino country community. As he is wearing a cape and sunglasses and his people consist of the equally cape-wearing assistant Tanya (future Darna Eva Montes), a hunchbacked gentleman and a murderous little person, it is quite obvious these must be vampires.

They have come for a reason - Marco's great love Katrina (Amalia Fuentes with a blond wig) has some not closer defined illness and needs lots of blood and the heart of her lost twin sister Charito (Amalia Fuentes without the wig) to recover.

Their mother, who is now under the vampire's spell, had once given away Charito to a poor family for mysterious reasons that are never spelt out.

Now, most vampires would just abduct Charito and be done with it, but Dr. Marco sets a rather complicated plan in motion, beginning with the murder and vampirization of the young woman's foster-parents. Nothing about the plan does much good of course, and only alerts the local priest and the awesomely hairdo-ed city boy Victor de la Cruz (Eddie Fernandez) to the evil one's plans.

This is a weird one, and I feel quite lacking in context to put the film in its proper place.

The Blood Drinkers has a certain affinity with Mexican horror of the same time with its mixture of gothic horror tropes and aesthetics with a rural pop (look at the fashion) and pulp sensibility, but also adds quite a bit more Catholicism than the Mexican films do, leading to a splendid friction between disparate elements.

The Blood Drinkers was inevitably produced by Cirio H. Santiago and directed by Gerardo de Leon (both of Blood Island fame and infamy, well and dozens of other exploitation films), and both men keep to their either slap-dash or just cost-conscious approaches to their respective fields. Instead of silly little things like complicated camera-setups or framing (although that doesn't work out too bad here), the visual star of the film is the decision to film large parts of it in black and white that was later on tinted, mostly in quite striking red and blue tones. This lends the film a mood of unreality which fits its rather illogical plot-progression and jumpy editing perfectly, lending the air of a dream to flaws that were probably based on mere incompetence or lack of funds.

"Competence" isn't the word that comes to mind when talking about the movie's narrative either. It's not just that it doesn't make much sense, but also that the dramatic emphasis is put on the wrong scenes or on the shoulders of a frankly ridiculous looking rubber bat (supposedly a much beloved element of the American producers), it's also that parts of the narrative are just plain strange. For example, the characters seem to be able to see the tint their scenes are presented in (red of course being the colour of evil here) and comment on it. And why is the scene in there in which Marco and Katrina are shortly healed from their vampirism by a little prayer of the priest, only to be cursed again by the Christian god in a display of what I can only describe as pure asshattedness? I can't help but use the old "dream-logic" explanation again.

Among its other wonders, the film also features some rather surprising hints of SM in the relationship between Marco and Tanya, when we learn that she isn't just kinda sweet on her boss and jealous of his eternal beloved, but that some of the feelings seem to be reciprocated. At least he whips her and then sucks the resulting wounds in a very sexual way.

The only thing I found myself really disapproving about the film was the disappointingly weak ending that more or less consists of the vampire disappearing and the priest explaining that evil is eternal. It's rather shameful for a film promising a final confrontation between a horde of vampires, our young heroes, the police and a Catholic procession, but what can you do?

Now, is it a "good" film? Most probably not. However, it is one of the cases where all flaws of a film come together in such an interesting way that it becomes exactly the sort of dream-like experience I'm after in my movie-watching, while at the same time offering a valuable look at a Filipino horror film from the early 60s.

10:56 am - Killdozer (1974)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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