Mr Intolerance

Night Train Murders

2007-01-25T14:45:00.000+11:00

Fuck, did I laugh at the beginning of this film. Here we have one of the more infamous Italian slasher films of the early 70s, and the opening credits are accompanied by a theme song by Demis Roussos – a man whose voice I thankfully hadn’t heard since the 70s, and who used to perform on stage in a kaftan and knee-high boots.

Doesn’t seem to really set the scene any more than two of the villains of the film beating up on a guy dressed as Santa – kind of like when Krug pops that kid’s balloon with a cigar at the beginning of Last House on the Left – not really an ultimate act of evil…

Turns out that isn’t the only similarity with Last House on the Left – it also shares an identical plot, which in turn was a rip off of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. It is, however, a superior version to Last House…, and I’m not dissing Wes Craven – it’s become all too common in horror circles these days to indulge in Craven-bashing; people seem to forget he gave us Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s just that Craven was a first time writer director with a zero budget, some fourth rate actors and dreadful production values (the film does still pack a wallop in parts, though, but the comedic elements and the Home Alone ending…Christ!), whereas, Aldo Lado was an established director with a budget, production values, and an (admittedly rather spare) Ennio Morricone soundtrack. I can’t comment on the acting in Night Train Murders, as the version I own has burnt in English dubbing, and the voice-acting is pretty dreadful. I hate dubbing – it makes a film seem cheaper and more low budget, to me, and takes away from the effect.

The plot then: two young innocent girls are tortured, raped and killed by some horrible bastards, who then in turn unknowingly seek refuge with one of the girls’ parents. An item belonging to one of the girls is discovered in the possession of the killers and the parents exact a bloody revenge. Pretty simple, and quite effective.

I must interject at this moment: I’m watching the film while I’m writing this, and I had to laugh – two of the villains are walking through the train, trying to find an empty compartment and they happen upon a bunch of respectable-looking German businessmen who are singing the Horst Wessel Lied – one of the villains opens the door to the compartment and gives a Nazi salute complete with a “Heil Hitler!” All of the businessmen instinctively reply in kind – there’s a momentary embarrassed silence before rushing at the two punks.

The violence is pretty tame in terms of blood and guts here (compared to say, The Descent – a recent, what I would call mid-range horror film - it’s nothing), but the sexual nature of it makes it nasty, and the sexual debasement of the two girls makes this a grimy, sordid affair (a horrible moment: while the virginal character is being raped, the rapist calls out in frustration of not being able to penetrate her: “She’s tighter than a frightened asshole”). I did feel quite uncomfortable during parts of this; there’s a cold detachment at work – a guy who’s perving into the compartment while one of the girls is being raped gets spotted by the bad guys and invited in to “join the action”. While he’s fucking one of the girls, one of the villains is cleaning his nails, another is touching up her lipstick, the other looking bored. All under a cold blue light – there is no warmth or humanity here. It sort of reminded me of the Dutch businessman in Hostel – after the invited man leaves the train, we see him talking to his family on the phone. I guess it’s saying that anyone can have the capacity for evil or violence – the female villain is a stronger example of this – she urges the two young punks into more and more depravity during the torture and rape of the girls, and yet is only kind of “drafted” into their circle by the “glamour” of violence and danger.

As the repulsive nature of the crimes escalates, so does the feeling of discomfort, although nothing is shown explicitly. Believe me, implicitly is bad enough – this is not an easy film to watch. Although I do have to say, the vengeance is a bit anti-climactic. One very notable exception: one of the villains is a junkie, and while he’s shooting up and has the needle still in his arm, the father sneaks up behind him and bends his arm, snapping off the needle inside the junkie’s arm and breaking it – despite the lack of blood, it’s one of the most excruciating moments of on-screen violence I’ve ever seen. Fuck you – I don’t like needles. He then gets stabbed in the crotch with a medical drip-stand – poetic justice; any man who saw that would feel it acutely. The other punk gets shot rather routinely (and by a man in a cardigan – how embarrassing!) – the female villain gets no punishment at all – what the fuck’s up with that?

All up, a film that is abjectly depressing to the point of dejection. There’s a lack of respect for human dignity, a willingness to rub your nose in filth, and a sense of despondency that even Demis Roussos’ jaunty theme song can’t lift. Sure, I laughed at the beginning, but I was not laughing at the end.

Ilsa: The Wicked Warden

2007-01-25T14:43:00.000+11:00

I haven’t reviewed any Euro-sleaze for a while, so here’s a Jess Franco sleaze-grinder for you.

This was one of the last in the notorious Ilsa series of films; only the rather mild Ilsa: Tigress of Siberia came afterwards. The basic premise of these films is simple: Ilsa (an enormous-breasted camp commandant) tortures and sexually degrades a whole bunch of nubile, naked young women. Then there’s an uprising and she gets horribly murdered, and the young chickadees flee for the hills.

So, in this particular film, we start off with about five minutes of naked women soaping themselves up in the shower, inter-cut with our starlet Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne), soaping up her enormous chesticles. After about another fifteen minutes of “plot development”, we have Dyanne Thorne (nekkid) putting pins into Lina Romay’s (nekkid) magnificent breasts. It’s a Euro-sleaze fan’s (exceedingly wet) dream. There’s a fair bit of lezzo work in The Wicked Warden. The weird thing to me is that Romay was Franco’s partner at the time – who the fuck wants to put needles into their girlfriend’s tits and wants to have them make out with chicks? Oh well, horses for courses…

What we get down to in this one is a chick gets herself put into Ilsa’s clinic for sexually abnormal women in order to find out what happened to her sister, who was previously imprisoned.

There’s some weapons-grade dubbing - seriously craptacular – and generally rubbish acting, loads of nekkid women (watching wrestling wet women is fun) and sadistic (and generally sexual) violence in the way only Jess Franco can provide (one bit where Ilsa brands Evey’s clit is particularly nasty – I’ve never been so revolted by a curl of smoke). Franco himself turns up as a vaguely heroic, yet ineffectual, character. It’s funny, Franco often casts himself in his own films, but he’s never an efficacious good-guy, always deeply flawed (see Eugenie de Sade, A Virgin Among the Living Dead).

And when Ilsa gets killed at the end, we get this weirdness where she gets eaten alive by the inmates – bunch of naked lesbians chomping on the camp commandant inter-cut with footage of lions eating dead animal flesh. What’s going on there?!

Seriously – I had very little idea of what the hell was going on during this film…

Island of Death

2007-01-25T14:42:00.000+11:00

A little-known genre classic, and a must for fans of extreme horror. Also known as Devils in Mykynos and Island of Perversion (which is the version to buy – I’m reviewing the British Vipco version, which is censored by nearly 5 minutes, although it’s still pretty nasty), this is a pretty horrible piece of work.

Now there’ll be some pretty major spoilers in this review, so you may wish to stop here if you’re planning to watch it and haven’t.

Still with me? Celia and her brother Christopher, who’s posing as her husband spend their time on Mykynos either fucking, or killing people the brother judges to be perverts – homosexuals of either gender, the unfaithful, the French, doesn’t really matter – which is a bit of a surprise when you consider that Christopher fucks a goat before slitting it’s throat as some kind of sacrifice inside the first fifteen minutes of the film.

Not exactly a family feel-good film.

What this horrible piece of work is, is a slasher film with a whole bunch of murder set pieces. There’s little in the way of plot, just showing different ways of killing people – besides slashing and shooting, there’s making people drink paint, crucifixions, hangings from airplanes, drowning in toilets, being harpooned, burning off breasts with a blow torch, being submerged in quicklime – it’s not pretty.

The one question here is: who is really in control: Celia, or her brother?

The film is cold and nasty. By the time you wend your way to the end, you’ll have changed sympathies with different characters and found yourself possibly in a horrible place. Say, for example, when Celia gets raped for the first time, you’re sort of torn between the fact she’s been responsible for pouring lead paint down somebody’s throat and has blown some poor bastard’s head off, and the fact that she’s being raped. By the time she gets raped for the second time, you don’t hesitate in sympathising with her. This does put you in a strange moral situation.

But by the time Christopher’s at the end of his killing spree, buried in a pit of quicklime, you do sort of know where you sit.

It’s an ugly piece of work, but an undeniably strong one. Like I said, a long lost genre classic. This isn’t for everyone, it’s only for serious fans of extreme horror.

Y’know, I feel a bit sorry for the goat.

Faces of Death

2007-01-25T14:40:00.000+11:00

Look, let’s get something straight – this is no classic, it’s a piece of crap. Much of the footage is fake, or at best, highly dubious in terms of its verity. I mean, anyone who gets sucked in by the bit with the monkey in the restaurant must be totally fucked in the head. The “mallets” used by the diners to beat the unfortunate creature to “death” couldn’t be more obviously foam rubber if they had “Made by the Rubber-o company of Rubberonia” stamped on them.

Faces of Death is meant to be a documentary in the mondo-style, narrated by Dr Frances B. Gross (yeah, that’s a believable name). It’s meant to be an exploration of various ways of dying and various other things to do with death. What you get is a bunch of bumptious nonsense in the narration, and a whole lot of cobbled together stock footage and obviously bogus scenes shot by the clueless morons in charge. I’m watching it at the moment – the execution by electric chair scene; if that’s real, I’ll eat my boots.

I can barely be bothered to waste words on this drivel. In my entire, reasonably extensive, collection of horror and exploitation films, I can’t find a film with less artistic merit. And consider that I own all of the Ilsa films and at least half a dozen Nazi-exploitationers. And a bunch of Joe D’Amato films.

This thing sucks arse.

Hard.

Last House on Dead End Street

2007-01-25T14:39:00.000+11:00

This film is some pretty fucked-up shit.

That isn’t a criticism. It’s praise. LHODES is an overlooked classic. Seriously, it’s probably one of the ten best horror films of all time. I also think it’s great that for a super-low budget film of $3000, the writer/director/lead actor spent almost all the budget on crystal meth. I’m watching it right now while I type this – believe me, you can tell.

Originally a three plus hour film called “The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell” (it’s a Vonnegut quote, apparently), LHODES was mercilessly butchered by distributors into about 80 minutes of pretty nasty stuff. Certainly the real cattle slaughter at the beginning of the film is not very nice, but it gets even nastier as the film goes on – leading up to the Guinea Pig-style climax. Yeesh.

It does also have some pretty fucking weird dialogue: “I know what I like; tits like bananas and leather.” Huh?

Basic idea is that Terry Hawkins has just got out of gaol, and he’s pissed off. He wants to make society pay for the time he’s lost, and plans to make it through making snuff films.

Yes, it’s that kind of film.

And so Terry gets a bunch of his buddies on board and they do some bad shit – torturing and murdering, basically, on film. And they do it wearing some weird masks, and doing some crazy shit – the infamous deer-hoof fellatio scene is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen.

This film has a spectacularly grimy feel, and flits in and out of being a horror film and an absurdist rant (there’s one sequence where a woman in black and white minstrel make-up (for League of Gentlemen fans, I couldn’t stop thinking of Papa Lazarou – “You’re my wife now!”) and underwear gets whipped by a retarded hunchback at a party for perverts, while her husband is in the next room watching badly-made porn – y’know, it does make you wonder what the hell got cut out of the film if THAT was what was left in…). It’s actually quite a shame that the only version you can get is amazingly grainy and audio-wise is full and snap, crackle and pop – it doesn’t do this movie justice.

I would have liked to have seen the original, uncut version of the film, if for no other reason then simply to have some explanation of why Terry’s gang wear the masks while they do, as Alex would say, the ultra-violence. The executioner mask particularly, as it looks like something from a Greek tragedy.

But yeah, it’s a slimy, grotty film that makes you feel dirty after you’ve seen it. Go watch it now.

YOU GO NOW!

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead

2007-01-25T14:36:00.000+11:00

This is a pretty dismal affair, even by Joe D’Amato’s standards. I mean, I’ve sat through some total stinkers before, but this bastard takes the cake. What we get here is some unfortunately minimal gore offset with all-too-frequent hard core sex. Now, I’m no prude and I like sex as much as the next person, but when I buy a horror film, I want horror – and no amount of rather uninspired blow-jobs is going to make up for that.

The plot is flimsy to the point of non-existence. Larry (played by lanky George Eastman of Anthropophagus fame) takes businessman John Wilson and his “girlfriend” to an island Wilson has just bought, and it’s inhabited by zombies.

And lots of people have loads of really boring sex.

And some people get chomped on by unfeasibly poorly made-up undead.

And that’s pretty much about it.

Oh, and Laura Gemser turns up for a bit as an unexplained cat-girl/ghost-presence on the island.

And gets nekkid.

How unusual.

Now, I’ve been a vocal campaigner against censorship for many moons, but with this film, I’d actually support the ban, but strictly for aesthetic reasons. It sucks like a Hoover (which is more than I can say for the “ladies” in the film). Every time we get one of the sex scenes, there is REALLY bad 70s style porn music (and you should see the moustache on one of the main actors), the atmosphere is non-existent (despite what you may read otherwise to the contrary), the zombies are rubbish (apparently sticking what appear to be plasticine appliances to peoples’ faces makes them scary fearless undead killing machines), the porn is dreadful (there was one point where I was rolling around on the sofa laughing and kicking my legs in the air like a dying cockroach it was so awful), and the gore ludicrously bad.

Simply put: this film gives the noble art of the zombie film a bad name.

Mind you, I did discover a new way of opening a champagne bottle. Use your imagination, kids. Just think: it’s an X-rated Joe D’Amato film.

There are a range of D’Amato’s films I consider to be pretty good movies – Beyond the Darkness, Anthropophagus, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Emanuelle In America – but this is definitely not one of them. Matter of fact, from the D’Amato films I’m aware of, this is only surpassed by Porno Holocaust in terms of being purely craptastic. Quite honestly, if you’re a fan of extreme cinema like me (and that was why I bought it – it has a certain notoriety), avoid this like a vacation on one of those leper islands. This film was so bad it gave me cancer.

House on the Edge of the Park

2007-01-25T14:33:00.000+11:00

If you’re looking for the uber-squalid, this is the movie for you. From the same director as Cannibal Holocaust comes a movie that has no idea about pulling its punches – seriously, this film positively lacerates its viewers. Consider this: the BBFC cut nearly three times as much run-time from this film as from either Cannibal Holocaust, Island of Death or Anthropophagus. It’s not for blood and gore, it’s for the depressing tone, the uber-misogyny, and the frank depictions of sexual brutality.

Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) and Alex (David Hess) are two sadistic nutcases who gatecrash a party and terrorise, torture, molest and rape the people attending. It sounds grim, but watching it is even grimmer. Home invasion hell, basically.

I think when you get to the end, when Alex is using a straight-razor to carve up blond, virginal Cindy, you’ve probably hit Ruggero Deodato’s ultimate low point as a director. Well, in terms of horribleness, anyway. Then it becomes a rape revenge film, and they’re never pretty.

Is it a good film? I think so. It’s not pretty, and it’s certainly not for everyone, but if you want a nasty piece of work that’s pretty gruelling and doesn’t let up, you’d be damn hard-pressed to find a better example. It’s kind of like if you had a copy of Last House on the Left that didn’t have any of the stupid, slapstick comedy – just the unremitting bleak violence and sadism. The lengths the revenger goes to in order to exact his toll – allowing various friends to be raped, sliced, beaten and otherwise abused – makes sure that no character in this film is sympathetic. Everyone is grimy, tainted and horrible. Except maybe Cindy, although she’s kind of a peripheral character at best, turning up in the last act of the film. We feel sorry for her because she turns up to a party, gets debased in front of a bunch of her friends and has her boobs sliced up with a straight-razor. But there is no depth to the character – she’s simply there to be a victim.

It’s probably worth watching just to see David Hess play the least-likeable screen villain ever (besides maybe John Lucker or the nameless necrophiliac from Aftermath) – but his death-scene is awful; seriously, the facial expression after he gets shot in the groin is laughably poor. But up until that point, I totally bought his performance.

Worth a look, if you like that kind of thing.

High Tension

2007-01-25T14:31:00.000+11:00

STOP!!! If you haven’t seen this film, don’t read this review – I have no desire to ruin the impact of the best stalk-and-slash film of the last twenty years for you. This uber-violent horror/thriller did something that I thought was impossible for a compulsive viewer of horror, exploitation and sleaze – it surprised me.

I’m pretty jaded when it comes to this kind of stuff, but two things really raised an eyebrow in Mr Intolerance’s apartment the first time I watched this film – the totally nuts over-the-top violence, and the ending. I’m currently watching it for the second time, and I’m seeing a lot of visual and verbal clues that make the ending make a bit of sense – but some of it, I must say, can’t really be explained logically. For example, if anyone can explain to me the serial killer’s rather memorable first scene (the rather evil fellatio sequence – I’m not going to spoil it for you), I’d be grateful for the tip – no pun intended. I mean, I understand what’s going on, but I don’t get how it happened, unless it’s meant symbolically.

The story is as goes: Alex and Marie are two university students who go out to Alex’s families’ lonely farmhouse to study without the distractions of city life. A savage murderer is introduced, then the stalk and slash murder-fest begins.

And it is fucking brutal.

Director Alexandre Aja has certainly spared no expense in the gore department. If you’re familiar with his work in the 2006 re-make of The Hills Have Eyes, you’ll know what to expect, and expect plenty of it – remember, this is a French film, not a Hollywood piece of rubbish.

So much blood…

The name of the film is quite appropriate, too. It does build up to at times an almost excruciating level of tension – this film is practically the definition of “edge of the seat” – but it’s the claustrophobia and sense of dread that mark this film out as something special for the horror fan – well, that and the uber-gore. Believe me, a second viewing is just as rewarding as the first, although it does provide a glimpse into a number of logical inconsistencies, which I guess can be attributed to point of view, but some of them are still a bit shaky.

It’s hard to write any more without giving a lot of stuff away, so I’ll leave it there. I think I may have given away too much already. I’ll sum up: good performances, taut editing, good direction, uber-carnage, surprise ending, and it moves along at a fair old clip – you really can’t ask for more in a horror film, except maybe zombies.

But I guess you can’t have everything.

Anyway, I figure any film that features a gorgeous French girl masturbating (implied, not explicit, you perverts – this isn’t a Joe D’Amato film) has got to have something going for it, surely?

Dawn of the Dead

2007-01-25T14:28:00.000+11:00

The original 1978 version, obviously.

Simply put, this is one of the best horror films you will ever see. Sure, the blood looks like melted red crayon (by Tom Savini’s own admission). And sure, the zombies are a bunch of guys in grey pancake make-up. But, like all of George A. Romero’s films, this baby has style, focus, atmosphere, social commentary and vision.

Like all Romero’s Dead films, the basic plot is pretty simple, and eventually becomes a “people trapped in a lonely place” siege film. But it’s the performances, the verve the actors bring to their roles and the clever, sharp script that bring Dawn of the Dead to life.

And, of course, the gore.

Romero is well famous for upping the ante in terms of blood and guts in his zombie flicks, and this film is no exception. It’s by no means the visceral gut-muncher that Day of the Dead was, but I think it’s a tribute to this movie that there are still parts of it where even a seasoned horror campaigner like myself winces and goes “urgh.” (For those of you who’ve seen it: the screwdriver-in-the-ear bit, the exploding head at the start during the SWAT raid in the projects, and when Roger gets his leg chomped, for example). There’s a certain wonderfulness to on-screen special effects that CGI simply can’t equal. Compare any of the three bits I’ve mentioned above (or where the husband takes a big bite out of his wife’s neck) to say for example where Chollo shoots the zombie in the liquor store through the head in Land of the Dead. Better yet, look at where Captain Rhodes gets ripped to pieces in Day of the Dead (memorable last line: as he’s being torn in half by zombies eating his guts: “Choke on ‘em!”) – as a CG effect, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as visceral; I await with interest the 2007 remake.

Back to the point: simple plot analysis of DOTD – zombie apocalypse (we all know it’ll happen some day, people). Four people (Roger and Peter (SWAT soldiers), Fran (a TV news producer) and Flyboy/Steven (a TV news helicopter pilot and father of Fran’s unborn child)) flee the big city and hole up in an in-door shopping mall, which eventually is invaded by an army of bikers.

And that’s your two hours, folks.

And it’s brilliant.

Dawn of the Dead is a movie I watch religiously – at least once a month. I never tire of it. Zombie films are my favourite type of horror film, and to me, DOTD is the best. Zombie Flesh Eaters is a close second, but DOTD is as good as it gets. Many people will tell you that Night of the Living Dead is the grand-daddy of all zombie films, but to me Dawn of the Dead is the undisputed King of the zombie film. It took everything Night… had and took it to the next level (apart from Night..’s unremittingly bleak ending – but then, the original ending of Dawn… had Peter committing suicide and Fran throwing herself headfirst into a helicopter’s blades before being eaten by zombies). I love the fact that everything hangs on such a delicate balance – an example would be where the gang are trying to block off the doors of the mall and everything appears to be going well (Roger: “We got this by the ass!”), when all of a sudden Roger gets chomped on the leg and eventually becomes zombified – it’s the inevitability of it that I really like.

Also, it’s a real ball-tearer when the bikers invade the mall, and all of the gang’s hard work in securing their home falls apart in literally minutes. I do like that sense of futility – it’s the hallmark of any good zombie flick (look at Zombie Flesh Eaters: just as the two main characters think they’ve escaped back to the security of New York from the zombie hell of the Caribbean, they tune in the radio and hear that New York has been overrun with zombies – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory).

Romero’s satire of consumerism is another reason to love this film – it’s not particularly subtle, but it is effective. I did get a good laugh out of the explanation for why the zombies try to get into the mall: “This was an important place in their lives.” It does make rather a fine mockery out of the kind of people who hang around at the mall – we hang out here because we are brainless sheep; another way of saying, “He who dies with the most toys wins”. Romero has always used zombies to attack any kind of class system, and I think that this was his most acerbic attempt.

Dated? Hell, yes. Dodgily acted? In parts, but definitely acted earnestly. There’s no pretence to this film, which is another reason to love it. As a matter of fact, why the hell are you still reading this? Go and watch the damn thing again, or, if you are the kind of sad act that hasn’t seen it, go and buy it. Don’t even bother renting it, just buy it; it’s got Mr Intolerance’s guarantee – if you don’t enjoy this film, you must be retarded.

Evil Aliens

2006-11-29T09:12:00.000+11:00

Yeeee-hah! I was not expecting anything anywhere NEAR as entertaining as what I got when I whacked this disc in the machine. I thought it might be mildly diverting splat-schtick, but I honestly found this to be in the Bad Taste/Evil Dead stakes. Loaded with cinematic knowing nods to genre classics (Evil Dead was an obvious one), and tick ‘em off genre conventions, Evil Aliens is a movie made for horror fans by horror fans. Or more to the point, a movie made by fans of Evil Dead for fans of Evil Dead.

What’s so great about this film? It’s got it all:

1. People, well, an alien, using its own dismembered arm as a club. Body-parts- as-weapons is ALWAYS comedy gold.
2. As an extension of number one: large parts of a cow (those aliens love doing horrible things to cattle, don’t they?) being used as projectile weapons. Genius.
3. An impaling a la Cannibal Holocaust but done to a man – ouch!
4. The ultimate in slap-stick: the banana peel gag, complete with ridiculous slapstick sound effects.
5. Weird flying silver balls a la Phantasm (but admittedly not as cool).
6. Crazy Welsh farmers who spit every time someone mentions the English, and have to be subtitled because they speak in Welsh for the duration. Well, Welsh and “Arrrrrrr.” Which is, quite surprisingly, an effective means of communication.
7. Chainsaw.
8. The lead actress’ chest and the clothes that don’t even come close to covering it.
9. Comedy wanking scene with some extremely unpleasant looking jizz.
10. Holly from Red Dwarf. The real one.
11. The song “I’ve Got A Brand New Combine Harvester” by the Wurzels.
12. A sexy blonde with a shotgun.
13. An unexpected ending for a number of the characters.
14. Alien birth scene. Actually, two of them.
15. More gore than I’ve seen in a VERY long time, comedically done, that is (if it’s serious gore you want, check out these two Alexandre Aja films: Haute Tensione (you may find it as High Tension) or his 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes – yeeesh).
16. Aliens being run over by a combine harvester and exploding into gore to the tune of the song in #11.
17. Comedy re-enactment of the alien abduction at the start of the film. It was very silly and made me giggle.
18. The alien abduction at the start of the film with the most horrible anal probe scene ever – there’s no nice one, admittedly, but when the actor has what appears to me to be a razor covered dildo inserted and then it begins to rotate like a blender – yuk. You can stop clenching now.
19. Aliens being destroyed by exploding cloud of methane produced by an enormous tank full of shit.
20. Gratuitous Watchmen reference.
21. Crop circle hoax that so infuriates the token anorak in the group that he ruins it with the device the TV crew used to make it – he treads the words “Fuck off!” around the circle so that it can’t be used on TV.
22. Comedy dream sequence where the anorak thinks he’s some sort of cross between James Bond and Captain Kirk and has to repopulate the race of the blue triple breasted alien standing in front of him.
23. When it actually happens (well, a variant of it anyway).
24. The end scene with the pregnant alien – absolute comedy gold.

Why are you still reading? Go and buy the fucker! What do you mean, story? Oh, if I must. Sexy TV host Michelle Fox takes her crew off to a remote Welsh island to follow up the story of a farm girl who was inseminated by and is resultantly pregnant to an alien. The TV program itself is an amusing piss-take on those shows where we get to see recreations of alien encounters and other paranormal happenings, with Norman Lovatt (Holly from Red Dwarf – huzzah!) as the sleazy producer. They duly arrive and then the carnage begins. This is not sophisticated stuff – I think that the clue is in the title. With a name like Evil Aliens, this is not going to be Noel Coward. If you were expecting Jim Jarmusch or Wim Wenders after noticing the title, you would have to be a dickhead. I’m not going to string together the above points into a plot – go watch it then get back to me.

You’re welcome.

The Untold Story

2006-10-27T15:33:00.000+10:00

I knew I was going to dig this film when a guy got doused with gas and set fire and there were multiple uses of the word “fuck” within the first two minutes.

This is one of those films that could only come from Hong Kong, combining good straight acting, absurd Jackie Chan-style humour and extreme violence. It’s a weird blend, but it works very well, presenting us with a pretty grim tale told with lashings of uber-black humour.

The really horrible part of this film is that the basis is a true story, which made me feel a bit guilty laughing at parts of it, and left me wondering what the families of the victims made of it. However, actor Anthony Wong did win a Best Actor award for his portrayal of the arch-nutcase villain, so I guess there couldn’t have been too much protest when it came out.

The basic plot of The Untold Story revolves around all-round psycho Wong, who has murdered the owner of the Eight Immortals restaurant so that he can get his greasy mitts on it. As the story unfolds further, we learn that not only did he kill them, but to remove the evidence, he put their flesh through a mincer and used it as filling in his bar-be-que pork buns, a fate which befalls many other characters in this film – basically, anyone who gets in his way.

The scenes of violence as Wong knocks off his victims are pretty damn harsh, brutal, in fact, but are oddly off-set with the comedic utterly inept police, who don’t even appear to be a serious threat to his actions until the last half an hour or so. Damn strange film in that regard. The shift in tone once the heat is on Wong is marked and surprising – there are still a few moments of comedic inanity, but they’re much more sporadic than they were. Back to the violence: my pick for most horrible scene would have to be the rape, vaginal mutilation (via a fistful of chopsticks – a teeth-sucking moment if there ever was one) and ultimate death of one of Wong’s female employees, who he thinks has ratted him out to the cops. There is no laughter here, let me tell you.

I don’t dig the comedy. I can kind of take it in a Jackie Chan flick, but I’m not keen when it’s in a horror flick. In terms of horror comedy, I’ll stomach Shaun of the Dead (surely one of the greatest movies ever), Return of the Living Dead (but none of the sequels), Army of Darkness (I like it), Evil Aliens (wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!), The Story of Riki (I’ve never seen someone actually put their fist through someone else’s head before…), Bloodsucking Freaks (are you trying to tell me it’s not a comedy?!), Bad Taste, Brain Dead, Versus (made by fans of Evil Dead for fans of Evil Dead – yakuza, zombies, yakuza zombies – it has it all!) and Dellamorte Dellamore (pure genius). Much more than that and I’m almost guaranteed to hate it worse than musical theatre (Cannibal! The Musical and Evil Dead the Musical excepted). This is slapstick, and not terribly good slapstick at that. It also mimics the Chan style jokes – the inept police who are utterly clueless, the comical flirting between characters, all the kind of stuff we saw in Armour of God and Police Story many moons before this. The only purpose I guess it serves is to provide light, because believe me, on the occasions we get to see Wong ‘at work’ – you need light. There’s some particularly nasty footage towards the end of the film after Wong’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment – you know, the whole prison justice thing – unpleasant doesn’t begin to come near it, and the absence of the Keystone Kops stupidity makes the whole thing unspeakably grim. You almost feel sympathy for Wong at the inescapability of his plight.

So, what did I think? I liked it. The comedy did grate on me at times, because to me, it spoilt the tension. It could have been so much nastier without the comedy, and more realistic, too. Like I said before – there’s no real sense that these police are ever a serious threat to anyone, let alone a stone-cold psycho like Wong, who, while not the sharpest tool in the shed, does have a kind of low animal cunning. It also seemed kind of disrespectful to the families of the dead, cheapening their families’ suffering. There’s no laugh track to Men Behind the Sun, for example. Still, worth a watch, if only for Anthony Wong’s performance, which is noteworthy. There’s no Hannibal Lecter urbanity to this killer, he’s just a cold, paranoid and opportunistic bastard who explodes into literally murderous rages when provoked.

Which is often.

Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood

2006-10-16T13:26:00.000+10:00

This is pretty grotesque, even by my shockingly low standards.

The plot is straightforward: the writer/director was sent a parcel containing a letter, a film and a series of photographs depicting a brutal slaying. After handing the evidence over to the cops, the writer/director, also manga artist and writer Hideshi Hino, decides to recreate the horrors he saw and read about – this is all explained at the beginning of the film, the text scrolling up the screen. Then the movie proper begins.

A young woman is stalked, as it becomes blatantly obvious, by two people, as she leaves the train station one evening; the stalkers have a video camera and record the event. She’s chased, drugged and taken to an unknown location. She’s injected with some form of pain-negating drug by a man dressed in a samurai helmet and an apron, who then proceeds to dismember, eviscerate and eventually decapitate her, before adding bits of her to his collection of body parts from previous victims.

That’s pretty much the whole story. The film, which cleverly makes the most of being a V-movie (straight to video), clocks in at about an hour, and is basically an example of some pretty nasty special effects at work. There really isn’t much more to it than that. Except for the rather fascinating history that’s built up around it, of course.

If you’re familiar with the Guinea Pig series, you may wish to skip the next couple of paragraphs. I mentioned the clever use of video before. Well, considering the fact that most people in the 80’s in the West would have seen this film as a fourth or fifth generation dub – crackly, grainy, indistinct. In other words, it would have looked like what the media would have us believe a snuff movie is meant to look like. The “plot” certainly equates. Would have been no subtitles either, in those awful pre-DVD days (how did we ever survive?), and the film has no credits, which adds an air of verisimilitude. (NB If you own the Unearthed DVD of Flower of Flesh and Blood, go to the menu, select The Flower of Flesh and Blood. The menu you can see has lips on it. Hit the back button and you’ll see a blood splatter appears. Select that and then sit back to “enjoy” the film in ‘Snuff-vision’ – it cuts out a lot of the expository dialogue and a number of point of view shots as well as the picture having been degraded to look remarkably nasty and snuff-like – it’s an even more disturbing experience than the original, which is a nasty thought). So anyway, apparently (my attorney has warned me to say) a famous Hollywood actor (Ch*rlie She*n) saw a copy of the film, and, thinking he’d witnessed a real live (?) snuff movie, contacted the FBI, who then wasted taxpayers money investigating it. It’s cruel the way they let people like that out by themselves…

Any terminal fuckwit who’s watched that film and thought it was real must have had their brain swapped with dogshit, or been beaten around the head at birth with a pool cue. The blood in some cases looks even less convincing than that bit in the original Dawn of the Dead where Roger sticks the screwdriver through the zombie’s ear. And, and this is the bit I couldn’t believe – there’s a chicken who gets a point of view shot. I don’t think anyone who wants to watch a snuff movie really gives a rat’s ass about what the chicken thinks. And why would somebody who has just killed someone on screen let their own picture be taken, thus placing themselves in a compromising position with the law? People, people, people, come ON! Think! This is just as stupid as the morons who thought the actors in Cannibal Holocaust really died, and then had to be produced in court to prove they were still alive. Plus there’s the fact that there’s never been a single frame of snuff found, ever. I would have thought that the FBI would have had more important things to do, like investigating all that organised crime, and all those guns and drugs going into the country.

That aside, the story keeps going, and in a rather horrible and real direction. In August of 1989, otaku paedophile Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested in Japan for the repulsive mutilation and murder of four young girls. It’s alleged that one of the murders was carried out in a similar fashion to that depicted in Flower of Flesh and Blood, which is a pretty fucking repellent thought, as he owned a copy of the film, amongst 6000 other tapes, most of which were hentai or other violent films.

I feel sorry for the families of the children murdered. That someone would recreate something so fundamentally grotesque is a very sobering thought, but as the killer was unhinged to begin with, I can’t blame the film any more than I could blame Superman for all those kids over the last 70 odd years who’ve broken arms and legs trying to fly from tree branches and garage rooftops. You’ll never convince me that a book or a comic or a film or a song can make you do something like that. Did anyone try to ban The Exorcist after it was revealed that it was Jeffrey Dahmer’s favourite film? They should have, it’s a fucking stupid film. All that De Sade or Nietzsche that Ian Brady used to enjoy? How about The Catcher in the Rye? After all, it was responsible for John Lennon’s death? You can’t have one rule for one work of art and one for another. In Japan it was moved from a film that anyone of any age could rent, to an 18 certificate. Which is where it should be.

I use myself as a case in point. I’ve watched Flower… many times. I haven’t killed anyone. Ditto reading the collected works of De Sade. I studied Mein Kampf as part of my first year Modern History course at University. I’ve read the Satanic Bible. I listen to extreme Power Electronic bands like Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend and Genocide Organ, and extreme Black Metal like Burzum, Mayhem and Emperor. I haven’t killed, raped, otherwise molested, or tortured anyone. I’m not a Nazi. I’m not a Satanist and I don’t burn down churches or desecrate graves. It’s art, that’s all. Some wouldn’t find it entertaining or even engaging. That’s fine, I don’t care – I don’t like romantic comedies or “reality” TV or courtroom dramas or the forty fucking billion crime scene investigation or forensics shows currently clogging up our televisions with shit. I’ve never told anybody what they can or cannot watch – all I ask is to have the same basic right extended to me.

If you can explain to me that why, at the age I am, I can vote a government into power, drive two tons of metal around the streets as a potential death machine, smoke and drink (thus potentially killing myself), join the army and be trained to kill others but not be able to watch a film, regardless of content, I’d like to know. Frankly, I’d be more worried about romantic comedies giving people unreal expectations of love, reality TV like Big Brother role-modelling degrading, cheap and tawdry behaviour and saying its okay, or teen role models telling twelve and thirteen year old girls its okay to wear revealing, sexualising clothing – is Parris Hilton with her home made fuck films and drink driving charge and shallow over-privileged life-style an appropriate role model? Who, in the grand scheme of things, could give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about a film with zero commercial appeal like this? It’s a pretty unrealistic film, to say the least – the fictional drug, to begin with, the samurai outfit (only equalled for absurdity by the guy in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls chasing our heroine around in his crown and cape waving a sword), the huge collection of body parts – apart from that, look at the acting, the script and the special effects; this is not an A-list film any more than Last House on the Left, Last House on Dead End Street (by the way, a film legal in this country with an R 18+ certificate which features a murder almost exactly like that in Flower and with comparable effects) or Beyond the Darkness. How much mayhem have those films caused? Exactly.

Flower of Flesh and Blood is currently refused classification in this country. The reason eludes me. Sure, it’s pretty nasty. So are lots of films. The re-make of Dawn of the Dead has an MA 15+ certificate in this country – look at the amounts of carnage in that. Or Gladiator. Or Braveheart. Or Saving Private Ryan. Or Irreversible (you know, that film with the 12 minute fixed camera anal rape scene)? Because horror films carry the stigma of not being ‘serious’, and low budget films don’t have the amount of money or political clout to force themselves through. The little guy loses again.

And in terms of the censors ever making sense, let’s face it – I live in a country where last year Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Gore Gore Girls got binned by the censors, as well as In A Glass Cage (which the OFLC actually acknowledged the artistic merit of), but I can walk into any video store and buy Ichi The Killer, Laboratory of the Devil, Hostel, Zombie Flesh Eaters or Audition. Go figure.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture

2006-10-16T13:18:00.000+10:00

Well, it certainly lived up to its name.

No rape-revenge story is going to be an easy viewing experience, but this 1974 Swedish contender is up there with I Spit On Your Grave in the extremely nasty end of a pretty grimy genre.

The basic story goes like this: a young girl called Madeleine is sexually assaulted in a park by an insane old man (this quite unpleasant sequence starts the film and establishes a pretty sordid tone which is maintained for the full 104 minutes), the trauma rendering her mute for the rest of her life. She grows up on a farm with her loving parents but is kidnapped by uber-sleazy Tony, who forces her to be both a prostitute and a junkie. When she tries to escape and later attacks her first client, Tony slices her left eye open with a scalpel, forcing her to have to wear an eye-patch for the rest of the film.

Yes, it’s that kind of movie.

Grim? Oh yes. Strap yourself in, it’s a bumpy ride from here. One of Tony’s first acts of horribleness is to type up a letter to Madeleine’s parents, which he has her sign, stating that she never loved them (untrue), that living with them was hell (also untrue), that she never wanted to see them again (gimme a ‘U”, gimme an ‘N’ – aww, you know what I’m saying), and worst of all, that she was living with a wonderful man who was going to take good care of her (that one takes the cake). Her parents are utterly devastated by this, and commit suicide, having first written a letter in response, detailing their emotional response to “Madeleine’s” letter. Now, during all of this palaver, the audience has been subjected to watching Madeleine entertain her customers in extremely explicit (i.e. hardcore) detail. She’s degraded in a number of ways sexually (remember, she was molested as a child – even the most vanilla of straight sex must have been an impossibility for her) and the director really rubs your nose in it.

Having seen her parents’ funeral, and overhearing that the letter was the cause of their death, Madeleine quite methodically plots the deaths of anyone who’s caused her pain and humiliation. She gets weapons training, training in martial arts and then unarmed combat from some soldiers, as well as stunt driving (odd, I thought, until the movie unfolds a little further). During this, she’s still forced to work as a prostitute, and is further degraded.

At this juncture, it’s worth pointing out Christina Lindberg’s quite convincing performance as Madeleine. Angelic, sweet, girl-next-door turns into ruthless killing machine, and done without a word. She literally looks like a totally different person once she goes on her killing spree; she radiates coldness and disgust and an utter lack of remorse – and why should she? As far as lives go, Fate was dealing at her from the bottom of the pack, giving her a hand like a foot, if I can extend the poker metaphor.

It’s interesting to note that the director and writer don’t have her get off the smack – instead, once she’s locked, cocked and ready to rock, she goes off to store up on heroin, as, quite logically, her main source (Tony) isn’t going to be around much longer. She buys a lot of drugs, a pretty cool car and heads off to the army firing range where she had her weapons training. It’s here that I found my patience being a bit tested. I seriously doubt that the Swedish army lock up weapons in a wooden shed with a flimsy padlock which Madeleine has no difficulty in forcing. Matter of fact, from the ease with which she gets in, a five year old with a fucking toothpick could probably have done it. Then there’s also the fact that she has the time to saw off a shotgun (not a traditional weapon for soldiers, given its limited range and accuracy, not to mention this one’s double barrelled and therefore only holds two shells at a time – but I digress), tool up in the car – a nice touch: her ace-in-the-hole is a tiny automatic pistol she duct-tapes to the back of her neck, hidden by her hair. I was also left wondering why, when she had been trained with a rifle – a precision weapon – she chose a shotgun. It’s like being trained in a Formula 1 car and choosing to drive a tank.

Actually, I feel I must mention that now she’s on a murderous rampage, she looks the part. I always felt that Uma Thurman’s yellow jumpsuit in Kill Bill 1 was a little too campy – Madeleine is all in black with a mid calf leather coat and knee high boots, her one eye burning with total fury. If I can get melodramatic for a moment: she looks like the angel of death she is about to become.

Sorry about that. I’ll get my hand off it.

And cue violence. This I was a little disappointed by. I mean, this film has a certain reputation to uphold among fans of extreme cinema, and I thought it was going to be a total bloodbath. Sure, she kills a lot of people, and some of it’s in pretty horrible ways, but there was a surprising lack of blood. In one bit where Madeleine beats the snot out of two police men, one of the unfortunate coppers bleeds more from the mouth than another guy who gets shot in the face at point blank range with a shotgun. Another minor gripe: I may not know much about guns, but I do know that if you unload a twelve gauge in someone’s face at six feet, you’ll probably remove most of his head, or at least turn it into something resembling dog food. My main problem with the violence was two-fold. Here we have a director who is quite willing to show the heroine having unprotected anal sex – complete with cum-shot – but he’s not willing to throw in a bucket of blood or two? I don’t get it. And I’m not expecting Tom Savini/Rick Baker/Stan Winston visual effects – even Herschell Gordon Lewis would do! Look at Blood Feast! Look at 2000 Maniacs! Look at The Gruesome Twosome! (Don’t look at Colour Me Blood Red…) The other problem with the violence is that it is all in VERY slow motion. All of it. This quickly becomes tiresome and leads to the biggest problem this film suffers from – pacing. It’s a very slow moving film – except the chase scenes, which truly rock. Honestly, this is like watching The Wild Bunch at half speed; even Peckinpah didn’t slow things down this much. There’s a quote by one of the BBFC censors about the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and how it possessed “the pornography of violence” – much more appropriate to this film. The camera leers at the scenes of revenge and mayhem.

One interesting aspect to our heroine when she starts with the killing – she doesn’t care who gets in the way, innocent or guilty. Madeleine knocks off quite a few innocent folks in the chase sequence; in a slightly absurd moment, when a truck driver blocks off stolen police car, she tries to encourage him to move the truck – he, rather unwisely, pokes his tongue out at her, she responds by firing her shotgun at him. Rather an extreme reaction, I thought. It makes it rather difficult to sympathise with her, which I thought was curious. I guess it’s the writer and director making some kind of statement like, Revenge Is Bad. If so, it’s a little obvious. And again, if that IS the case, why provoke the character so much? We’re not talking Travis Bickle or the Butcher from I Stand Alone here, this is a sweet young woman who works on a farm and likes cute furry animals. She’s not a looney-toon going quietly nuts in a room. That kind of motivation did seem a little gratuitous.

I won’t spoil the end for you. It’s a good film; in terms of exploitation, it’s top-notch. But it’s very bleak, and there are absolutely no laughs (intentional or otherwise) in it anywhere. It moves through various tones of darkness – there is no light. Mind you, given the subject matter, that’s pretty appropriate. If the rape-revenge genre is your bag, check it out, it won’t disappoint. If you’re squeamish, avoid. If Irreversible was too hard for you to sit through, run a mile from Thriller; it’s been a while since I sat through a film this seedy and remorseless.

The Wizard of Gore

2006-10-16T13:14:00.000+10:00

There’s a great line in Futurama when Fry is defending himself against being accused of hypnotising Leela into loving him. He responds angrily, “Hypnotism is for losers with big eyebrows!”

He must have seen this film.

Seriously, you have to check out the eyebrows on the villain of this ineptly made rubbish. As well as the wonderfully excessive murder set pieces – the spectacle is the ONLY reason to watch this. If you thought some of the infamous Herschell Gordon Lewis’ other films were exercises in amateurish drivel, do I have a film for you! Don’t get me wrong – I thoroughly enjoyed it, but only in a “so bad, it’s good” kinda way. It certainly doesn’t skimp on the gore, let me assure you. I’ll have to go back and have a look at some of the others (Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat springs to mind), but tentatively, this might be the bloodiest Lewis film I’ve seen.

The plot is thoroughly retarded: Montag the Magnificent (oh yes) hypnotises his assistants from the crowd during his magic show, then performs some trick with them which should result in their instant and very gruesome demise – miraculously, they survive, only to die in said gruesome fashion (eg sawn in half with entrails all over the place) when they get home.

WHAT?!

As Bricktop says in Snatch, “In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary, “Come again?”” Now I know Lewis isn’t renowned for his Ken Loach realism or Mike Leigh grittiness, but that’s stretching the old willing suspension of disbelief just a little too far. Oh yes, kids, a hitherto unexplored nadir of stupidity is being mined. This is just too dumb for words. The first time I watched it was over breakfast martinis, so I thought maybe I’d gotten a little “confused”, so I waited a week and watched it again.

Dear God.

I can’t find much to say to recommend this film except that if you and your buddies have got nothing to do on a Friday night, get this turkey, a case of beer and some ribs (now my favourite food for a gore film – an example: I recently bought Last Cannibal World (Italian cannibal films – the only thing better is a zombie flick), ordered ribs and was chowing down on them at the bit where Me Me Lai is being devoured. At that point, covered in red dripping sauce and rending flesh from bone with my teeth and bare hands, I felt a sort of oneness with the cannibals…) and prepare to be highly amused. The actor playing Montag is even more over-the-top than Mal Arnold as Fuad Ramses in Blood Feast. An alternate way of spending said evening would be to watch it with the sound down and do a kind of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 piss-take.

It wouldn’t be difficult. There is much to take the piss from.

Zombie Flesh Eaters

2006-09-18T16:49:00.000+10:00

Fulci is God. In speaking of his early 80’s zombie films (The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, House By The Cemetery, and this one, his masterpiece), it’s really as simple as that. And this film is the reason why that truth is most definitely axiomatic.

Of course, his later movies (Manhattan Baby, A Cat in the Brain) sucked arse hard.

Okay, okay, George Romero is a superior director when considering the zombie canon – in the Zombie Movie Encyclopaedia, the author, Peter Denkle, states that Romero is the Shakespeare of the zombie film, and Night of the Living Dead is his Hamlet (personally, I disagree – I’m going for Dawn of the Dead), if we can extend on that metaphor, then Lucio Fulci is the Marlowe, and Zombie Flesh Eaters is his Doctor Faustus. As in masterpiece. I mean, obviously we’re discussing zombie films here, so we’re judging them in terms of their relative merit, and merit is one thing this film has in spades. From the in media res pre-credit sequence to its grim conclusion, Zombie Flesh Eaters is (with one brief Caribbean interlude with Calypso accompaniment excepted) unremittingly bleak, with the atmosphere becoming stiflingly claustrophobic as the film progresses.

I fucking love zombie films. I guess that’s rapidly becoming obvious. I love the sense of dread, the ‘the whole world’s going to hell and we’re all going to be eaten to death, and then come back as carnivorous rotting corpses’ vibe, the idea that death is imminent and utterly inescapable. Zombies should never be able to run. That, to me, is a golden rule that should never be broken. The idea that a single zombie is a pretty feeble opponent, especially if you’re armed with a gun and are a reasonable shot, BUT should a bunch of them get near you, they’re suddenly absolutely terrifying – this is an idea I like. When it’s done well (say, Land of the Dead), it’s excellent. Mind you, when it’s done badly (Children of the Living Dead), it’s execrably poor.

Anyway, back to Zombie Flesh Eaters. The dread and sense of threat are evoked from the start, and retained for its duration. A gun is directed at the camera, a shot is fired and a head shrouded by a sheet is pulped by the blast, expelling the first of the large volume of gore we see over the next 90 odd minutes. Not the most life-affirming of orientations. A terse order is given (“The boat can leave now. Tell the crew.”) and the screen goes black. The word zombie appears, starkly white and then we get Fabio Frizzi’s rather haunting and eerie synth’n’drum machine score, a trope familiar to fans of late 70’s early 80’s Italian horror cinema, providing an oppressive tone.

When the picture returns we’re in New York City and a derelict boat (the one mentioned in the pre-credit sequence, we can safely assume) is floating into the harbour. It’s a very effective sequence, disquieting and sombre. The tension breaks with the arrival of the first, quite grotesque, zombie – a repulsive appetite on legs. A word must be said here about Fulci’s zombies. They are disgusting. Romero’s zombies begin as shambling fools with pancake on (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead), and develop into something a bit nastier (Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead), but Fulci’s are revolting from the get go (see the films mentioned above); putrescent, decaying and often worm-infested, they practically decompose while you watch.

The boat, we discover, belonged (notice the past tense?) to a Dr Bowles, who had been on the island of Matul – it transpires that it was Bowles we saw get his head blasted by Dr Menard in the opening sequence; he’d died and turned into a zombie.

As you do.

Anyway, to speed things up a bit, enter our heroes, Peter West, intrepid investigative journalist, and Anne Bowles, daughter of the missing man. They zoom off to the Caribbean to try to find Matul, aided by Brian and Susan, a young couple off on a pleasure cruise around the islands on their boat. Meanwhile, on Matul, things are getting grim, with more and more zombies coming back to life. Local medico Dr Menard is trying to get to the bottom of things, but to little avail.

Susan, while indulging in a bit of deep-sea photography, is attacked by a zombie, who, in one of the more bizarre sequences I’ve seen in a zombie film, is in turn attacked by a shark. Yes, you read that correctly. What is kind of amusing is that the zombie’s arm is seen in one shot to not be there before it gets bitten off, and then to still be after it’s been ripped off by Mr Jaws. It’s actually a really well-shot and conceived idea, and certainly original.

By the time we reach the island things are looking mighty bleak for anyone living on Matul. Menard’s had to perform a little more of his…ummm…”social surgery” on some returning zombies, but it’s moving too quickly for him to be able to do anything about it. Unbeknown to him, his wife has been attacked by zombies, and in one of horror cinema’s nastiest moments, her eye is skewered by a 14 inch wooden splinter. By the time we see her again, however, that’s the least of her problems, as she’s been partially eaten by the zombies – the special effects here are exemplary for a movie with such a paltry budget.

Peter has injured his ankle in the flight from the zombies, and while our fearless four are resting, they are attacked by the corpses of Spanish conquistadores. I did notice that they weren’t particularly well buried… (reminiscent of the priest in City of the Living Dead – kind of like they’d laid on the ground and were covered with a thin layer of dirt). Susan gets chomped, but the other three get back to Menard’s hospital, we enjoy that great staple of the zombie film, the siege, and then, everybody else being dead, Peter, Anne and Brian try to escape after having fricasseed many zombies with Molotov cocktails. Susan turns up in zombie form to give Brian the worst hickey of his life before being killed by Peter in turn.

Back on the disabled boat, Brian slowly begins to turn into a zombie. Peter has kept him on the boat despite the danger of doing so, so that he’ll have proof of what happened. What then becomes apparent on the radio as they approach New York City is that a police officer bitten by the zombie on the boat has been a busy little beaver, and that the city is rapidly being over-run by the undead. Not a cool situation for a heroes to be in, and it would appear that taking Brian back to NYC as proof is a little superfluous…

The gore and the grue in this film are undeniably grotesque, and in my opinion focussed on far too much by reviewers. To me, it’s the above mentioned feeling of dread that marks this film as a cut above the rest. So where does the atmosphere come from?
• The carnage. This might look a bit contradictory considering the above statement, but the body count and the violent demise of many of the characters just reinforces the lack of hope for those who remain.
• The soundtrack. It’s a real bummer. Don’t get me wrong, I really like it, but it’s equally as grim as the action we’re seeing.
• The inescapability. It’s even encapsulated by the tag-line: “We Are Going To Eat You” – a rather definite statement. Your fate is sealed.
• The characters palpable fear. Particularly when we reach the hospital, after we’ve seen Mrs Menard’s rather grisly demise at the hands of a pack of ravening zombies; the abject fear of meeting a similar fate is quite strong.
• The finale. Being eaten by loved ones is probably quite horrible, but it pales into insignificance against leaving terror behind only to find worse ahead of you in a place you assumed was safe. I know it’s a horror movie staple (it’s been a gothic staple since Villiers d’Lisle Adam’s short story, “A Torture of Hope”, and probably before), but it’s handed quite effectively here (although the bit with the radio announcer is a little laboured and histrionic).

In terms of film-making, how does it stand up? Well, it’s obviously a genre film, but the direction and editing are quite good, and the tension is built up gradually, but undeniably and with strength. The acting veers from the …errr… “rudimentary” to some quite good performances, especially from Richard Johnson and Ian McCulloch (McCulloch, according to the audio commentary on the DVD, had never seen the film in its entirety until recording the commentary track). And it’s certainly not every film where you get to see a zombie and a shark taking chunks out of each other at the bottom of the sea…

The onset of the outbreak of zombification is never adequately explained to my mind. Yeah, okay, I get the voodoo thing, but that doesn’t wash with Mr Intolerance. Voodoo only works on people who believe in it – so explain the conquistadores suddenly re-animating after a few hundred years. Plus, Fulci’s zombies are directly based on Romero’s, not on the voodoo rites of the Caribbean – where the zombies weren’t chowing down on the living, and the zombies themselves weren’t actually dead. I don’t buy it. It’s the only thing that annoys me about this film, apart from the annoying synth-Calypso music after we leave New York for the Caribbean.

In terms of where this stands in the world of the zombie movie, I put it right towards the top. In some ways it’s a nasty piece of work (need I even mention the 14 inch splinter in the eye? Mrs Menard’s brutalised and half-devoured remains? Yeeesh – ugly stuff), but it’s also to my mind one of the best horror films of its day and despite some dated haircuts and wooden performances (Hello, Tisa Farrow) and clunky dialogue (almost all of it), still retains a strong and undeniable power.

Men Behind the Sun

2006-09-15T09:51:00.000+10:00

Dealing with the experiments and activities of the infamous Unit 731 in Manchuria during WW2, Men Behind the Sun is truly a film of horror.

Made by Hong Kong director TF Mous, Men Benind the Sun is one of the bleakest, blackest, grimmest films ever made. Personally, I don’t find the film to be as exploitative as many of its detractors might suggest, but I would apply that epithet to its excruciatingly poor sequel, the abysmally poor Godfrey Ho directed Laboratory of the Devil. But it is a hideously violent, deeply shocking condemnation of the war crimes inflicted upon the Chinese (among others) by the Japanese Imperial Army.

Based in the puppet province of Manchukuo, Unit 731 was a secret military scientific and medical experimentation facility, masquerading as a water purification plant, focussing on biological warfare – increasing the virulence of strains of typhus, cholera and bubonic plague, for example – and led at various points by Lt General Shiro Ishii. The experiments were performed upon Chinese, Russian and other Allied prisoners of war who, military or not, were referred to euphemistically as ‘maruta’. Material. Dismantled (well…mostly destroyed by the retreating Japanese) at the end of the war, Unit 731 had been a tightly guarded secret, and despite the obvious similarities, never achieved the notoriety accorded in the West to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald or Ravensbruck. According to an interview with the director on the R0 version I’ve got though, the Chinese have never forgotten it, and the Japanese simply aren’t taught about it. It’s still a highly contentious issue, and the director, for making this film, has received death-threats from loonie right-wing extremists.

Out of all the HK Cat 3 films I’ve seen (Hong Kong Category 3 films are the strongest in content in terms of sex and violence – and by the way, the Category was specifically invented for this film to allow it to be shown), this is the most high impact with regard to violence and human suffering – mind you, Black Sun (also directed by Mous and depicting the atrocities inflicted upon the Chinese by the Japanese during the occupation of Nanking) gives it a serious run for its money – any film depicting a woman having a baby being bayoneted out of her stomach by an enemy soldier is saying something pretty bloody serious about the treatment the Chinese received. I’ve mentioned in other entries on this blog that there are certain films that really bum me out, the kind of thing that when they’re finished I tend to sit on my sofa and just stare into the darkness for hours – Cannibal Holocaust, Salo, Schramm, Emanuelle in America, a documentary I watched the other night called The Executioners (no-one needs to see an elephant being electrocuted to death by Thomas Edison so that he could market his version of electricity over Westinghouse’s – that’s a true story, kids), The Grey Zone, Guinea Pig; Devil’s Experiment, Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, All Night Long 2: Atrocity, the aforementioned Black Sun, for example. This film sits alongside those movies. It’s bleak, oppressive and ultimately life-denying. The characters are fundamentally unlikeable, and the images on the screen are grotesque. I would challenge anyone to sit and watch this film and not be affected by it.

The basic story begins towards the end of the war, with a group of Youth Corps troops in the Japanese Imperial Army arriving in Harbin, having no idea what their duties will be. To the best of my mind, I think we’re meant to identify with them, losing our innocence/ignorance at the same time as them – but the fact is, you can’t sympathise with someone who can still spout nationalistic bullshit after they’ve seen a friend of theirs machine-gunned by their own soldiers and charred into a blackened corpse on an electric fence. The truth becomes rapidly apparent to the boys when they arrive at the camp and find themselves under draconian rule, and becoming gradually exposed to even more and more horrific sights as the film progresses.

Also arriving, well, returning, more accurately, is Lt General Shiro Ishii, the original commander of Unit 731, who at one point was transferred for corruption. However, these are dark days for the Empire, and they need their ‘best’ man for the job, and so he’s sent back to take charge of the experiments. In the first shot we get of Ishii, he’s cleaning his fingers with some form of antiseptic, despite the fact that all he’s doing is sitting on a train in a room by him self – firmly establishing him as icy and detached. He looks like a snake in human form. The only time we see this character looking happy is when he’s contributed to some form of human misery – designing the low-heat ceramic artillery shells needed to fire the plague fleas at the enemy, for example. The look of sadistic glee when he gives a practical demonstration of such to his men is unpleasant, to say the least. Worse still is the roar of approval and applause his men give him in return.

The film then proceeds in documentary form, showing the various experiments, with interludes of the boys being put through their military paces in basic training. It is not pleasant viewing. The special effects are disturbingly realistic: the dead bodies the drunken crematory worker hacks up and throws into the furnaces at different points of the film, for example, are very convincing. Ditto the sequence where a man is subjected to depressurisation to the point where he rectally prolapses a few meters of his intestines.

The most truly horrible thing I think I’ve ever seen, however, would have to be the freezing experiments. This moves in gradations of horror. Firstly, it’s night time and more ‘maruta’ are arriving via train. A woman is clutching her child to her, frightened and alone. A Japanese soldier tears the child from her arms and kicks the woman down a ramp towards the cells. He drops the baby into the snow, its cries gradually muffled by the snow he rakes over it with his foot, burying it alive. When it’s pointed out to him that the doctors need to preserve all of the victims, he casually replies that they can still dissect it and “learn from it.” It’s this level of casual indifference to suffering that starts to induce despair in the audience. The mother, unhinged by the loss of her child and pathetically clutching a pillow to her chest in its stead, staring blankly in front of her, is dragged outside and staked out in the snow, her arms stretched out in front of her over icy poles; she is surrounded by a tall semi-circular wall of ice. When the pillow is taken from her and casually tossed onto the ice, she responds as though it’s a real child. Freezing water is repeatedly poured over her arms over a course of hours, forming long icicles from her forearms, smashed off by a bayonet. When she’s brought back into the laboratory, her blackened arms outstretched before her, she’s ordered to plunge them into heated water. What happens next is almost indescribable. The doctor orders her to remove her arms from the tank of water; while she does so, he casually explains to the other doctors and the Youth Corps what will happen. He strips the flesh from her arms like elbow length gloves, no effort required. The woman, practically catatonic to this point, shrieks, staring in abject horror at the bones before her, dangling tatters of skin. The boys try to look away, but are ordered to continue watching by their sadistic sergeant. The doctor goes on to show a quick-freezing experiment where a man’s arms are frozen instantly with liquid nitrogen. The doctor orders him to put his hands on the table. He beats the man’s hands with a stick and the fingers break off like his arms were made of ceramic. I watched this cavalcade of awfulness with increasing levels of depression. The fact that it’s all presented so clinically makes it all the more horrible. If there were a villain foaming rabidly at the mouth and laughing maniacally, you could achieve some distance, but it’s a calm, grey-haired, unassuming and bespectacled man who looks like he could actually be your doctor.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the horrors inflicted upon the hapless victims, but I will tell you that this film has probably the most downbeat ending EVER. The base is dismantled, the records and specimens destroyed, the maruta killed – their planned uprising a dismal failure. On the march to be transported, in torrential downpour, one of the Japanese soldiers’ wife is giving birth – yet none of the doctors who are present – all expert at taking life – can help bring a new one into the world. To call this depressing would be a great understatement. We’re then informed of the eventual outcome for all the concerned parties, and this is the real kicker: in return for the experimental data, and the services of the doctors, the Allied forces didn’t prosecute Unit 731. Apparently the US flew Ishii to the States, basically so that the Russians didn’t get him first and utilise his skills. Many of the doctors from 731 went on to become involved in big chemical industries and hospitals. If you were sinking in quicksand watching this film, that information was the foot on your head pushing you down faster.

My guess for why this film gets such a bad rap would be for two sequences.
1. A real cat gets eaten alive by thousands of starving rats – to my mind, this is Mous saying that a predator can be overcome by a usually docile, yet mistreated mass given the right circumstances. Or in other words, there’s only so much maltreatment the Chinese could take from the Japanese before overthrowing them. It’s a horrible scene, but in the context of this film, it works.
2. A real cadaver is dissected on screen. The body of a young boy of maybe 10 years old is cut open, with parts of it being removed. In the context of the film, it serves only one purpose: to show the inhumanity of the Japanese doctors; the child is carved up for a bet. What is interesting is that, again according to an interview with the director on the DVD, the parents of the real dead child allowed the body to be used in the film because of the truths the film was showing; the importance of bringing greater consciousness of what happened to a wider audience.

My only gripe with my copy of this DVD is the fact that the dubbing is burnt in – crap US voice actors being overly melodramatic, robbing this film of a bit of its wallop, and actually making it seem like an exploitation shocker. It cheapens it. Oh, and the fact that there are only 4 chapters. It makes navigating the disc very difficult indeed.

So, the ultimate verdict? One of the most powerful anti-war films ever made, and certainly one of the most brutal films of any kind ever. I would stand up in any court of law and defend its artistic merit, and justify its integrity as a film, despite its harrowingly graphic content, which frankly needs to be there. I couldn’t say I enjoyed the film, but I did engage with it. If Scream-style horror is your bag, then avoid this. If, like me, you like stronger fare, watch it and expect horribleness. Regardless, it’s a well made and, as I said before, powerful, if oppressively depressing, film.

Nekromantik 2

2006-09-12T14:01:00.000+10:00

Director Jorg Buttgereit’s oft-banned follow up to the equally oft-banned Nekromantik isn’t exactly quite what you’d expect. That first film was the grimy, nasty, squalid tale of Rob and Betty, a couple of necrophiliacs whose relationship disintegrates almost as quickly as the corpse they have threesomes with. When Rob loses his job with Joe’s Streetcleaning Agency (a private company who clean up dead bodies from accident and crime scenes), which allowed him access to bodies and body parts (which liberally adorn his and Betty’s flat) in the first place, Betty leaves him, taking the corpse with her. Rob loses the plot – rips apart the cat he bought Betty as a gift and smears himself with its organs and blood in the bathtub, kills a prostitute and has his way with the body, and ends up killing himself in one of the most memorable end sequences of ANY film I have ever seen. If you haven’t seen it, let me just say – big rubber cock and jizzing ropy jets of blood.

So what’s all that got to do with this movie? Well, we begin Nekromantik 2 with Rob’s death scene and when we arrive graveside, we find that Monika, an aspiring young necrophile who’s read about Rob’s suicide in the paper, has promptly zipped off down the local cemetery to dig him up, as you do. Appropriately enough, Rob’s adventures haven’t ended with his death…

Rob’s corpse is one of the most disturbing things about this film, and also one of the reasons why this film is far superior to the original. It looks horribly real. Green and covered in some sticky translucent goop, the first time Monika fucks this monstrosity is one of the most repugnant things I have ever seen. Particularly when she gets some of the ooze from the corpse in her mouth, and immediately runs off to vomit. You can almost taste it.

Now, this may get me labelled a pervert, but to me, this movie possesses an odd beauty. If you compare this to other films about necrophilia (say Lucker the Necrophagous, Beyond the Darkness and Aftermath), this is the only one where you get a sense of sympathy for the necrophile, and a sense that they’re a real person, and not just a psychotic slavering caricature. For example, if we examine the main characters of the films just mentioned, John Lucker is an abomination, and possibly the least sympathetic character ever committed to celluloid. Frank Wyler in Beyond the Darkness is a whiny bitch exceedingly poorly acted by Kieran Canter, thus negating any possibility for audience sympathy. And as for our corpse-fucking friend from Aftermath… ahh, I don’t think so. I guess that out of the three Frank is meant to be sympathetic, having been ruthlessly manipulated by his barking mad maid, but the performance is not convincing; there’s more to obsession than staring and sweating, as Monika M’s performance shows. This is one of the reasons I prefer this film to the original, although you must admire any film that can generate such a grubby, squalid tone and maintain it throughout its entire run time.

Where Buttgereit’s original is dark, cold and claustrophobic, this film is almost light and spacious. It’s also a lot more credible, with one glaring exception – when Mark, searching for breakfast, discovers the corpse’s penis in the fridge after Monika’s dissected her goopy green lover for disposal, and seems to recognise what it is; you think he’d head for the hills. I mean, in the same situation, I’d be high-tailing it down the hallway shrieking like a bitch: “Help! Help! My girlfriend who likes to photograph me upside down hanging from the ceiling and pretending to be dead is a psychotic penis collector!” Or some variant thereof. Mark merely looks at the (what is by now) frankly revolting object, rather pathetically covered on a plate with kitchen wrap, with a vaguely quizzical expression and then puts it back in the fridge.

That aside, the performances are quite good. Monika is by turns inhumanly icy and genuinely warm; witness the sequence where she’s dressed the corpse and is sitting with its arm around her on the sofa, sunnily smiling for the photo. For a further example of range, the dissection episode: she actually seems sincerely upset, but eventually girds her metaphorical loins and gets down with some hack-sawing fun. And the less said about what she does to Mark, the better… But she’s presented to us as a proper person, not like the selfish, self-indulgent Betty (who puts in a guest appearance at a later point in the graveyard, having had the same idea as Monika – popular bloke this Rob…), or the defeated doormat Rob. Mark himself is presented to us as a likeable dork who really doesn’t deserve the horrible fate that awaits him.

Similarly, the camera-work displays a different side to Buttgereit’s style in the previous Nekromantik – for example the (rather too-long) scene where Mark and Monika spend a day at the petting zoo. There’s actually a sense here that these are two people, not characters, and that they’re people who enjoy each other’s company, even if they are slightly awkward with each other. It’s believable and provides some light to offset the shade that is never completely erased. Even at moments like this, Monika’s expression is sometimes guarded, sometimes openly cold.

Unnerving moment: Monika and a bunch of her friends sitting about staring fixedly at scenes of animal cruelty on screen. They look absolutely rapt; the scary thing is that Monika isn’t alone operating in isolation, there’s half a dozen or so of these women, a potential network of necrophiliacs: and Rob’s head is with them, like some bizarre tabletop ornament. The video that Mark eventually gets to see when he turns up, the women having left, is vile. A seal is killed and skinned in unflinching detail. It is utterly repellent, and Mark’s expression is unwittingly mirrored by our own. Monika’s expression is something more akin to excitement.

Basically Nekromantik 2 comes to you highly recommended. It’s quite nasty, depressing as all hell (well, I found it so), and like I said, unflinching. It never exploits its subject matter (unlike Beyond the Darkness, although that rather obviously was the point of that film), but calmly and firmly, via the banality and domesticity of some of the scenes, angles our attention to it, presenting it in a way that manages to make us understand that for some people, even if it’s only a very few, this is day-to-day life. And that’s a frightening thought.

PS Keep your finger on the fast forward during the irritating interlude in the arthouse movie theatre – nothing destroys atmosphere more quickly than a mock black and white art film, featuring two naked people sitting at a table eating eggs and talking about birds.

Emanuelle In America

2006-09-08T10:58:00.000+10:00

Any movie where a woman is wanking off a horse for real in the twenty-fifth minute does tend to make you curious as where the next seventy-five are taking you.

Let me explain a bit of background for you: in the ‘70s, an arty soft-core director called Just Jaeckin (The Story of O, amongst others) made a film called Emmanuelle (notice the different spelling from that above), where the main characters would nude up, roll around soft-core style, attend lavish parties and generally live the jet-setting high life. A number of these films followed, some starring Sylvia Kristel (the original Emmanuelle), others not. Then the undisputed King of Italian sleaze, Aristide Massaccessi (under his better known pseudonym Joe D’Amato) decided to cash in with the so-called Black Emanuelle movies, starring the exotic and rather sultry Laura Gemser in the title role. The ideas are much the same, basically, but with D’Amato at the helm, you know that exploitation is the name of the game. If you’re unfamiliar with D’Amato’s work, here’s a brief list of some of the fun you can expect, if you decide to further investigate his ouevre:

• Anthropophagus: The Beast features a baby (actually a skinned rabbit, but some people, those who become disoriented by lights, shapes and colours, tried to claim it was real) being torn from its mother’s womb and eaten alive, as well as the eponymous cannibal eating his own entrails until he dies.
• Beyond the Darkness is a nasty piece of work about necrophilia and displays a marked lack of value on human life – every time I hear Cinzia Monreale’s entrails hit the galvanised garbage pail, my stomach does a slow roll (again, those easily startled by direct light tried claiming D’Amato had eviscerated a real corpse in the scene).
• Erotic Nights of the Living Dead was the first time I’d ever seen a movie combine hard-core gore with hard core sex – and it’s 70’s style porn, too, so everybody’s inordinately hairy.

Und so weiter. Basically, if it’s taboo, D’Amato will have a go at it, as he most certainly does with this one. Actually, with the exception of child abuse and Satanism, this film is a veritable checklist of taboo topics. There is no way it could ever get made today. And it’s not just getting hands-on with the horse (his name is Pedro, if you’re interested – I mean this isn’t some kind of anonymous bar-room pick up, this is a serious relationship here, people), either. The mix of violence and hardcore sex would get this little number banned in all kinds of places. The simulated snuff footage alone would be enough to make the censors nervous, and probably ill. Hence, as the DVD cover would suggest: one of the most notorious exploitation films ever.

The thing is, as with the afore-mentioned Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, this combination of sex and violence doesn’t really work in the way you think it will. The sex is depressing, the violence extremely unsettling, the overall tone grim and oppressive. I was totally bummed out by the whole experience, in a way I hadn’t been since I saw Salo or Cannibal Holocaust for the first time. And before we go any further, can I please state for the record that I categorically do not believe in the existence of snuff movies, and certainly not in the way they’re presented here. There’s no evidence ever been found that they exist – not even one frame of one - and the whole thing strikes me simply as an urban legend of the porn industry. I find it a quite fascinating device to power a film (whether it be Videodrome – from reading David Kerekes and David Slater’s excellent Killing For Culture, the bible of death in film, apparently David Cronenberg took direct inspiration for the snuff in Videodrome from Emanuelle in America, Hardcore, Snuff – a movie so stupid that it made me retarded, 8mm, this one, obviously), kind of like the ‘death factory’ in Hostel. It’s creepy because it seems plausible, like, albeit for different reasons, Wolf Creek or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

The plot’s pretty straightforward: Emanuelle is a photo-journalist who’s on the trail of an unfeasibly rich business man, Eric van Daren, who keeps a harem of women (one of whom is played by Lorraine de Selle (Cannibal Ferox, House on the Edge of the Park), a woman who’s topless so often in this film I started to think that her breasts must be afraid of the dark), which our intrepid investigator manages to infiltrate. Soft core straight and lesbian sex scenes – oh, and the… errr… “horse-milking” occur, before Emanuelle escapes the harem hooking up with the Duke of Mount Elba (played by Gemser’s real life partner Gabriele Tinti), and sodding off to Venice to have some more sex. While at a lavish party, which is where the first of the hard-core scenes occur, she learns of a very exclusive club where women can go to live out their sexual fantasies (which, as we see when she goes there, seems to involve women wanting to do the nasty with guys dressed as Zorro and Tarzan).

It’s worth breaking the narrative here for a bit. So you’ve recovered from the horse episode and you’re back in a relatively normal, if a bit extravagant, scene. Then there’s a close up explicit blow job going on in front of you, as the party turns into an orgy, with lots of graphic sucking and fucking going on. It all seems slightly unreal, as your brain has to get itself around the fact that you’re not watching porno, it’s a feature film. And believe me, this sex is about as un-erotic as sex can get. If the function of porn is to arouse, then this is the opposite of porn.

Our fearless heroine heads off to the sex resort, and takes loads of happy snaps of various kinds of nastification going on, using her hidden camera (very hidden at one point… use your imagination, kids: to prevent it being confiscated after she’s found out by the resort staff, into which body cavity do you think she’d insert it?). It’s in this sequence where we get our first brief glimpse of the simulated snuff. And it’s horrible. You’re probably a bit curious; a group of men in military uniforms raping and torturing a woman. It’s grainy, silent and has the ring of truth about it. In a later sequence, we see a woman’s breast being burnt off, a meathook being violently inserted into a vagina, various beatings, burnings, rapings, slashing, a massive hollow dildo being stuck down a woman’s throat, to have boiling oil sluiced down it – you get the picture, and possibly wish you didn’t. And it looks disturbingly real. The special effects are remarkably good – the deliberate damage to the video stock adding to the verisimilitude. Apparently, according to the interview with D’Amato on the special features, the woman who gets the titty-skin flambé actually sued the producers and director because she claimed that she was disturbed by just how real it looked, after having watched the film. I’ll be honest, I think she was opportunistically screwing them for every cent she could.

So, after escaping the resort by drugging and seducing the lesbian proprietor, Emanuelle, via an ex-cop who warns her off investigating this mysterious footage, follows the next link in the chain to a man known only as The Senator (the Colonel in some versions). She promptly gets him in the cot and tells him she wants to watch dirty movies, and likes them strong. He responds by getting out a ludicrous black and white short to do with transsexuals. She’s not impressed and lets him know it, and so out comes the snuff. Laura Gemser is not one of the world’s great actors, but the very real disgust on her face, particularly the first time she sees the snuff footage, gives this a tangible sense of horror. And this is a woman who in the opening sequence of the film disarms a religious psycho who’s holding her at gunpoint and telling her how disgusting she is for using sexy images in her photography by giving him head. So she’s made of strong stuff, is what I’m trying to say.

While I remember: perverts take note – Laura Gemser doesn’t actually perform any hardcore scenes herself, so put the tissues down, fellas, you don’t get to see her “technique.”

The Senator drugs Emanuelle with LSD and takes her, via light airplane, to where the films are made, and more horribleness occurs. Emanuelle finally decides that things have gotten to be too much, even for her, and the movie grinds to a halt, with her wondering whether or not it’s time to quit this whole journalism lark, once and for all. She’s obviously a slow learner, as she was back larger than life not too long after in another D’Amato sleazegrinder, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (cashing in two-fold this time: the Emanuelle cash-in AND the Italian cannibal craze of the late 70s, early 80s). He’s nothing if not opportunistic.

Anyway (this review is becoming a fucking epic), I guess the question now is: did I enjoy it? Hard to answer. I was engaged by it, certainly. I probably could have done without the hard-core inserts, or if they had to be in there, then they could have been edited MUCH more effectively – they’re over-long, the camera is poorly positioned, the editing is utterly abysmal. And the acting…ohhh the acting… Apparently Laura Gemser used to laugh uncontrollably during the filming of movies she did with D’Amato. I don’t find this difficult to believe at all. Truth be told, I don’t mind D’Amato’s films. He always tries to establish an atmosphere and, given his somewhat limited budgets, usually succeeds. His use of exploitative sex and violence doesn’t bother me, except where it gets in the way of the plot moving at more than a snail’s pace – his films are generally slow moving – but when they’re poorly directed with the kind of mise-en-scene a five year old could better, then it’s time to reach for the editing scissors. One thing I really loved in this movie was Emanuelle’s drinks cabinet coffee table shaped like a pack of Marlboro reds. So seventies it hurt – it actually opened like a pack of cigarettes so that you could pull out the booze!

An interesting note: apparently there are a wide range of versions available, some with or without the horse scene, some with no hardcore but all the violence, some with all the sex but none of the violence, some with neither hardcore or snuff (believe it or not there’s actually a version that can be shown on TV), and some that excises all of the snuff footage, which then begs the question: what the hell would be the point of the last third of the film, in this case? This is the kind of movie you watch for the exploitation, not the acting or the dialogue – take away the spectacle and this would be a drab and rather pointless experience indeed. I guess that if you’re into extreme cinema, or Italian sleaze is your bag, go check it out. If you’re even a bit on the squeamish side – avoid. If you’re on the adventurous side with your movies and don’t mind strong material – bear in mind what I’ve said above in terms of content. Make your own mind up. Can’t say you weren’t warned. Like I said, the snuff footage is quite disconcerting.

If you do feel the urge to watch it, the US Blue Underground DVD is the way to go for English speakers, there’s an Italian DVD available which apparently has some extras the BU one doesn’t, but they’re not subtitled.

SS Experiment Love Camp

2006-09-04T17:49:00.000+10:00

When you’re working with a title like that, you know it’s not going to be Citizen Kane…

In Italy in the 70s, bad taste ruled supreme. Squalid ultra-violent misogynist Giallo (The New York Ripper, Profondo Rosso, House on the Edge of the Park), gore-laden cannibal nasties (Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, Eaten Alive), zombie gut-muchers (Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Holocaust, Zombie Creeping Flesh), and then, scraping the very bottom of the barrel, Nazi exploitation films. Once Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter came out, the floodgates opened, and some shockingly poor quality films followed. This is one of them. If you’re familiar with the genre, this film is so execrably poor, it makes Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS look like Star Wars by comparison – in terms of special effects, acting, direction, costuming, everything.

I started wondering if maybe I’d somehow offended the director in a past life – because he certainly extracting some serious vengeance upon me. There were only two sequences where I could feel some kind of entertainment, and that was unintentional, I’m sure. More of these later…

The plot is farcically poor – some load of old bollocks about uterus and ovary transplants in a WW2 concentration/medical experimentation camp, in order to maintain the purity of the race, blah, blah, blah. And lots of women get nekkid and have loads of soft-core sex with “the six best soldiers in the German army”. The doctor, who we are introduced to as Dr Steiner (he ends up as having been living under an assumed name after having faked his own death some years previously) is anti-these experiments due to the high mortality rate of the patients.

Anyway, the camp commandant has a secret agenda of his own. Because he’s been sterilised while on the Russian front (various bits bitten off by a peasant girl he raped), he needs someone else’s testicles to make himself a man again. Enter Helmut, our square-jawed hero. After we’re informed by one of the doctors that he’s “a real stud” (which doesn’t strike me as proper medico-speak), he and the other soldiers start participating in the sexperiments (intentional, by the way). Helmut, the romantic goon, has fallen head-over-heels for Mireille, one of the patient/prisoners. As he’s about to mount her, he voices some concerns on what they have to do, but, trouper that she is, and also having already fallen for him, whispers to him seductively, “Do what you gotta do, kraut soldier.”

Wine actually shot out of my nose at that point.

Anyway, more rumpy-pumpy, the obligatory (for this kind of film) lesbian scene, a sort of orgy-cum-rape scene in the camp brothel, and some truly terrible special effects later, including a boiling and a freezing torture so pathetically poorly staged as to render it utterly embarrassing (particularly when you compare it to the ones in Men Behind the Sun, the truly horrifying story of Japanese Unit 731), Helmut gets the chop in a sequence I’d care to forget, and the commandant gets his balls.

Helmut tries to get off with Mireille, but things aren’t working too well downstairs, and he takes this performance problem quite hard, or maybe it’s that Mireille doesn’t… Crap jokes aside, his reaction is amazingly over the top, and the less said about the denouement the better, apart from what is possibly the greatest line ever delivered in a motion picture. Helmut confronts the commandant and in something between a snarl and a roar says: “How have you been enjoying my balls!?”

I must say, thought I was going to choke.

The average human being wouldn’t enjoy this film. I’m not the average human being, but I didn’t either. In terms of sleaze, it’s right up high on the list, but in terms of talent of any kind or intelligent scripting, it’s waaaaayy down the bottom. I gotta admit, in terms of atrocity films, I can stomach the Ilsa movies, Hostel, Black Sun, Men Behind the Sun, Salo, the Guinea Pig films, what I’ve seen of Red Room, the All Night Long films, und so weiter, but I would defend any of those films as having some creative merit, or at least try to say something. This is complete crap that is so ineptly filmed it makes Herschell Gordon Lewis look like Stanley Kubrick. The camera just leers at the victims suffering and there’s nothing going on, morally speaking. Even if you look at some of the other Nazi exploitationers, you can see flashes of talent or at least intent to make something that is more than a T&A trashfest – or at the very least there’s a sense of payback, where the victims get to wreak some well-deserved vengeance on their captors/tormentors; of course you may see the whole thing as morally reprehensible and a repugnant exercise in profiting from the misery of others.

Best avoided.

Blood Feast

2006-08-31T15:50:00.000+10:00

Or, how to invent the splatter flick, by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Blood Feast is a fine example of enjoyable Z-grade tat. The acting is truly appalling and utterly lacking in any credibility, the direction almost painfully inept, lighting and sound likewise, and Lewis seems to be operating under the assumption that any holes in the plot can be disguised through the subtle application of yet another bucket of blood.

But, it works. It’s campy, it’s grotesquely and gloriously over the top, and it never makes the Ed Wood Jr mistake of taking itself too seriously. This is the kind of thing you watch with your buddies, a case of beer and your salty snacks of choice. It’s most definitely a Guilty Pleasure, and out of Lewis’ ‘Blood Trilogy’, probably the one you’ll end up watching the most times – Colour Me Blood Red isn’t in the hunt – a deeply dull film – and while Two Thousand Maniacs is a superior film in many ways with some memorable set pieces (the arm amputation is more than adequately horrible, and the woman being rolled down the hill in the nail-studded barrel, which I’m sure I read before in de Sade’s “Juliette”, is etched into my brain with acid), it tries just a little too hard and lasts just a little too long; one of the rare instances of Lewis overstaying his welcome (unlike The Gruesome Twosome, where the runtime had be padded out by a truly bizarre conversation between two foam wig-blocking heads – which has to be seen to be believed; at least Lewis has the decency to sound embarrassed by it on the DVD audio commentary).

Blood Feast wins on pure entertainment alone (and the fact that it’s also the inspiration for and title of my favourite Misfits song). My Unintentional-laughs-o-meter went off the scale. In a true Plan 9 From Outer Space/Robot Monster/Astro-Zombies moment, Egyptian caterer turned psychotic-butcher-of-comely-young-lasses, Fuad Rameses, is fleeing from the police, but is hampered by a strange ailment whereby his limp transfers from one leg to the other. Every time actor Mal Arnold opens his mouth, he puts in a … errr… “bravura” performance as Rameses, which couldn’t be more laughably exaggerated if he tried (staring eyes, panto-like melodramatic delivery – every stage-villain cliché in the book – honestly, you fully expect him to twirl a moustache and snarl, “Curses, foiled again,” after tying a woman to the tracks…). Honestly, he makes some of Vincent Price’s more outré performances look like Ken Loach realism. Fuck, he makes Rita Hayworth look restrained… Another fave moment: the infamous tongue removal scene, where Rameses…errr…removes a victim’s tongue, bloodily and nastily. But it’s a sheep’s tongue, and the sheer size of the thing makes the whole episode seem ludicrous.

The plot? Simple, really. Fuad Rameses is an exotic caterer with an atrociously unbelievable Egyptian accent that reminded me of something from a 1930s Universal mummy film. In catering for a young woman’s 21st, he informs the mother of his decision to prepare a traditional Egyptian feast, but neglects to tell anyone that it’s the infamous blood feast of Ishtar – a gruesome rite involving hacking up lots of attractive nubile women, and whacking sundry bits of them into the cuisine. That’s pretty much it – cue the stalk-and-slash machine.

So, in 1963, Lewis created the modern gore film; this movie is totally unprecedented in that department – we owe him a big debt for that – and changed the course of the modern horror film. This is also one of the first of the modern stalk-and-slash films, predating all the big horror franchises by more than 10 years: Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Inside every Jason Vorhees, every Michael Myers, every Freddy Krueger – there’s a dodgy Egyptian caterer with a gammy leg.

Just don’t ask which one.

Inseminoid

2006-08-30T16:37:00.000+10:00

I haven’t pissed scorn and bile all over anything for a while – so, time to review the utterly craptacular Inseminoid. Part of Umbrella Entertainment’s otherwise praiseworthy “Bloody Best of British” series of DVDs (Blood on Satan’s Claw, Tower of Evil and Horror Hospital are some of the hidden gems also on offer), this film lunges lemming-like over the divide between so-bad-it’s-good to land squarely in the realm of just plain shoddy film-making.

I stupidly watched the DVD extras before I watched the feature (this is my standard operating procedure if I know nothing about the film bar the blurb on the back cover), and from the way the cast and crew were bigging it up, I thought I was going to be presented with a reasonably slick, if B-grade, high tension, low budget sci-fi horror flick a la Alien. However, at one point in this exercise in drabness and mindless tedium I found myself reading a book, having totally disengaged from the viewing experience. Not a good sign.

The plot? A bunch of scientists are on a far off planet in some underground facility, doing research into the society that dwelt there before. That’s pretty much it. Some bad stuff happens: some guys go loopy from playing with strange crystals, a female crewmember is inseminated by an alien, and the crew get picked off one by one, in true horror movie style. I’ll leave the ending for you to find out, should you feel moved to do so. Frankly, I wouldn’t bother.

It’s possibly worth pointing out at this juncture, that Inseminoid, though rubbish, is not the rip-off of Alien that some (other) of its detractors accuse it of being. Sure, it has some similar elements, but in that case you could quite easily deride Ridley Scott’s masterpiece as a rip-off of Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, or Forbidden Planet as plagiarising Shakespeare’s The Tempest (gaze in awe at my mighty pop-culture referencing), without looking at what else the texts bring to the original stories. Incidentally, if it IS a cash-in, rip-off of Alien you’re after (albeit one set on earth), go directly to Luigi Cozzi’s gore-splatterfest Contamination (aka Alien Contamination, and, rather more tellingly, Contamination: Alien on Earth) - highly entertaining, totally nonsensical and more fun than a barrel full of monkeys – get your friends over, get the beers in and wait in anticipation of seeing one of the pissiest-looking monsters in celluloid history. If you thought the what looked like two-men-under-a-quilt blob monster from Angry Red Planet was bad, or you were embarrassed for the man in the gorilla suit wearing the diving helmet and waving a violin bow in Robot Monster, or howled with laughter at Michael Gough’s putty-headed man at the end of Horror Hospital, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Inseminoid, however, gives it a bloody good run for its money.

Now, Alien worked because Giger’s monster design was absolutely fucking terrifying, and because Scott limited what we saw of it. The director of Inseminoid tries to play a similar trick, but it fails dismally because monster design is frankly atrocious. It’s very much in the film’s best interest to keep the monsters under wraps so that the audience can only laugh at the awful dialogue, the terrible acting and the incredibly ineptly choreographed fight scenes. The fight between the two female leads is so poor it defies description – this is a fight between two people who haven’t been in a real fight in their lives, and who, as it is claimed in the interview with the cast and crew, were “wimps” when it came to pain. Thus, two decidedly no-combatant people who don’t want to get hurt or hurt the other person trying to look like they’re having a believable fight? Yeah, right. The result is frankly embarrassing in its awfulness – I’ve seen better acting on public access TV.

Back to titular creature. It’s fucked, to put it as simply as possible. It looks like some kind of retarded crab-headed thing which never really represents a serious threat. The rape scene where one of our heroines is impregnated by the alien (via green slime oozing down a see-through tube) is reasonably effective, I’ll give them that – all madness and camera tricks and lighting and blah, but when you compare it to the scene in Possession where Isabelle Adjani (sigh…) miscarries the baby of herself and the slimy Lovecraftian nasty she’s having the affair with, which has no special effects and is effectively a woman in a subway tunnel screaming and thrashing, it comes off (pardon the pun) very poorly indeed – what’s meant to be harrowing ends up looking like the B-grade melodrama it so truthfully is.

And this should be the most horrible thing we’ve ever scene – not only rape (which, when you watch I Spit On Your Grave or Irreversible, the camera actually transmits some part of the utterly horrific nature of the crime – I can’t speak from experience, but I find the rape scenes in both of these films – particularly Irreversible – almost impossible to watch due to the responses of the victim; they are harrowing excursions into a very dark place indeed), an invasion of self – the most horrible kind of outrage you can perform on another human – but rape by something that isn’t even human. In other reviews I’ve used the term “body horror” (I read it in some essay on Cronenberg), where you end up being repelled by your own body, whether this happens physically (say, a horrible carnivorous thing ripping itself out of your chest as in Alien) or mentally/emotionally (Videodrome), and this is another instance where it worked in Alien, but failed in Inseminoid. The terror of your body being invaded by something unnatural, whether it’s a disease, another being, hideous technology (Infection, The Fly and Tetsuo respectively), and then transforming into something it shouldn’t be, something debased and grotesque – it’s a primal fear. And it isn’t used to its fullest extent here. It holds back, which is the main problem with this film – its reserve. You shouldn’t be able to watch something like that and not be affected, and I was not.

Maybe horror films do desensitise their audiences…

My mental problems aside, this is a deeply flawed production that suffers from the acting, the direction, the script, the ludicrous action scenes (a fight with mini-hedge-trimmers pales into insignificance when played alongside the duelling chainsaws in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), and the awful, awful special effects. Not only the adult monster, but the baby monsters – even more monumentally crap than Belial in Basket Case), and the gore, which was rubbish. There’s a point where one of the crew has to saw her own feet off to survive a lack of oxygen (it actually makes sense when you see it), but it just doesn’t work. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by years of Savini, Baker and Winston? Or all the excessive gore of Italian cannibal, zombie and giallo films?

Verdict? Only if you’re extremely bored, or have recently lost most of your pre-fontal lobe. It’s a total turkey.

What a waste of a good title.

The Big Bird Cage

2006-08-28T13:10:00.000+10:00

Well, it does say horror AND exploitation…

This is just big, dumb women-in-prison exploitation fun. If you’re not up on this genre, there are a number of strands:

• Grim and horrible SS concentration camp nastiness featuring graphic (usually sexual) torture and human degradation (Red Nights of the Gestapo, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy, SS Love Camp, for example)
• Cheesy, camp and cheerful sex comedy/drama/action flicks with lashings of political incorrectness and ridiculous fight scenes (Women In Cages, The Arena, The Big Dollhouse)

This is one of the latter, rather obviously, and linked to the examples above by the main star of each – the wonderfulness that is Pam Grier, a woman (if I may quote from Blackadder) “saucier than a direct hit on Heinz factory.”

I woke up at about 4am Sunday morning, cursing insomnia, and decided that the appropriate course of action was to spend the time wisely by watching nubile female prisoners wearing next to nothing for an hour and a half whilst consuming sundry breakfast margaritas.

Foolproof.

I gotta tell you, I wasn’t expecting as much entertainment as I got. Lemme tell you, the sequence when the always entertaining exploitation mainstay Sid Haig (playing Django the revolutionary – he looks and sounds even less Mexican than I do) has to camp it up to get the attention of two homosexual prison guards had me in hysterics, kicking my legs in the air.

I thought I was going to lay an egg.

Another prime moment: when Blossom (Grier) gets put into the prison about half way through the movie, she instantly tries to assume power. A chesty piece of white trash disses her claim to be Queen Bee, calling her a “nigger.” Blossom retaliates by immediately kicking her arse to the kerb, puts a foot on her throat and snarls a line you’d only ever hear in an exploitation film: “That’s MISS nigger to you!”

The plot is so thin as to be transparent – let’s face facts, the general aim of this flick is to get as many women naked (or as near as damn) as quickly as possible, to load up on crude dialogue almost entirely devoted to matters trousery, if you take my meaning, to have a number of attractive semi-clothed women (some with almost Russ Meyer proportions) roll around in the mud a lot and otherwise jiggle about, and to have a big climactic fight scene which gets our heroines out of the pokey.

It succeeds, admirably, on all levels.

Sure, the acting is not so great, and some of the dialogue really sucks hard, but since when did any self-consciously made exploitation flick ever try to be Chekhov? Like I said, this film achieves everything it set out to do – mission accomplished, as far as I’m concerned.

I’d recommend this to anyone with an interest in exploitation films, or anyone who, like me, revels in the glories of political incorrectness from its Golden Age, the early 70s. I wouldn’t recommend it to any of the PC thugs who try to take our language away from us and castigate the raggedy arse of anyone who dares to voice an opinion that differs from the wrapped-in-cottonwool society we now seem to exist in.

Infection

2006-08-25T08:20:00.000+10:00

Just a quick one today, folks, as the people I work for seem to think that a staff conference day is more important than reviewing horror films…fools.

I had never heard of this surprisingly nasty and effective J-horror flick before a friend of mine (Hi Nick!) told me of it a few months back, and the name promptly faded out of my head immediately – probably something to do with being drunk. Anyhoo, the same friend recently burnt me a copy and I whacked it on last night.

The plot is pretty simple. An overworked, understaffed hospital on the brink of closure can’t take in any more patients. One patient is accidentally killed due to “mis-dosage” (as they call it in the film), and the doctors attempt a cover-up. Now, while this is going on, a patient suffering a mysterious disease that liquefies your inner organs turns up and then the film REALLY gets cranking.

I’m not suggesting for a second that this is classic horror, or an unrecognised gem, but it’s an efficient and, at times, genuinely unsettling piece of work that manages to avoid many of the clichés of J-horror – people walking funny, people with long straight hair obscuring their faces, haunted household appliances, etc.

Possibly the hardest to watch sequence in the film is where one of the nurses has been infected with the disease and, believing that she can sanitise medical items used on its initial victim, plunges both hands into a hazmat bin. Her hands come out clutching sundry medical effluvia, with the ends of a number of hypodermic needles sticking out of them. She then proceeds to place the items in the sterilising machine – holding them under the literally boiling water. The special effects in this sequence are quite good, and had me wincing at what I was watching.

The movie loses its way a little bit when the disease gets explained in detail – this is right at the end; I won’t spoil it for you. But otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It flits in between various movie genres and doesn’t spell everything out for you like a Hollywood film – I honestly hope Infection is spared the indignity of a crass American re-make – there’re elements of ghost stories, straight horror films, disease apocalypse films and thrillers, all topped up towards the end with lashings of gore. Green gore admittedly, but what’s a horror film without at least some leaking bodily fluids…

So, the verdict? Worth a watch, and would probably stand up to repeated viewings. The acting is quite good, the ideas remarkably original, I thought, and the whole package a highly enjoyable B-grade exercise in horror. The soundtrack in particular is quite creepy – weird dissonant howling noises, silences accentuated with lots of echoes (there’s one scene where one of the doctors is searching for the first victim of the disease in a long dark corridor and his footsteps sound like gunshots); this was one aspect of the film that really immediately impressed me. One question I do have to ask, though, is why do so many Japanese horror films have dreadful pop songs play over the credits? It’s particularly annoying when the songs themselves are completely at odds with the atmosphere the film has created, which is totally the case here (another notable example of crapulence in this department is that abysmal song which plays over the credits in Kairo, and the less said about the woefully shit re-written cover of I Only Want To Be With You at various points of Shadow of the Wraith, the better). Infection is a claustrophobic, tense film with lots of grit – why end it with a jaunty bit of J-Pop? Oh well, it’s a minor quibble, I suppose.

Audition

2006-08-22T08:15:00.000+10:00

If you held a gun to my head and told me I had to tell you my favourite horror film, this is one that’d be up there for consideration (before you ask, the others would include, but not be limited to, Dawn of the Dead (the original, obviously), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (again, the original), Suspiria, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Cannibal Holocaust, Ju-On and Kairo). That’s not to say it’d win, but it sure makes for serious competition with the others.

Okay, the obvious question is “why”? For me, a horror film relies on atmosphere and being able to unsettle its audience through manipulation of that atmosphere. Buckets of blood are not enough (although, as we all know, excessive carnage is tremendous fun all the same). Kairo is one of the most unsettling movies around, and there’s very little (practically no) blood on display. You can disgust an audience with excessive gore pretty easily (Bloodfeast 2, anyone?), but to really scare them? That’s the mark of a quality director.

Takashi Miike is a quality director. I’m not saying he’s flawless – Fudoh suffered from pacing and moments that seemed strangely static; a movie that went on too long considering its premise. Similarly, Visitor Q infuriated by simply being weird for weird’s sake. Entertaining, sure, but ultimately unsatisfying. But Audition squarely hits the mark. If you’re familiar with Miike’s work, you’re probably thinking that this particular little black duck is going to be a hyperkinetic jump-cut edited yakuza film with over the top gore and loads of blood, a la Ichi the Killer or the Dead or Alive series. And you’d be wrong.

That’s not to say that this film has no moments of horribleness – it has them in spades – but the way they’re delivered is what puts this one up the top of my list. For the first hour of this film, you’d think you were watching a romance, at the audition of the title, a romantic-comedy, but there’s one point of this film where the narrative tone changes from heart-warming to gut-churning, and it’s that shift into the bleak and the terrifying that renders this film one of the best horror movies of the last 15 years.

The story, briefly, and there will be spoilers at the end, is about a businessman named Aoyama whose wife dies young. He raises his son by himself, but after many years alone decides that he’d like to remarry. His rather unscrupulous pal and film producer Yoshikawa suggests that they hold an audition, so that Aoyama can see a number of women who meet his specifications. As you can tell, not really one for the women’s-libbers…

Enter Asami, a shy, practically ethereal young woman who had to give up on her great love of ballet, and bears the scars of this failure to live out her dream (in more ways than one…). Aoyama is entranced, and they go out on a number of dates. He eventually tells the whopping great lie that the financing of the film fell through and so it might now never get made. Yoshikawa, however, isn’t so sure about Asami, and does a bit of research into her past, and things aren’t adding up. Asami and Aoyama go away for a weekend – but when Aoyama wakes up the next morning, Asami isn’t there.

This is where the tone shifts. We’ve had, to this point, brief shots showing Asami in a much different context – sitting, head-bowed, in her flat, with a large sack in her living room, which rolls over rather disturbingly when the phone rings. So Miike is signposting a change in how we view the character. We know things will get ugly, and they sure do. The pace of the film picks up sharply here – Aoyama gets quite distraught and tries to locate his new love, who he was on the verge of proposing to. He goes to where Asami claimed to work, to find that the bar has been closed since a horrific mutilation and murder occurred there. Doesn’t take too many guesses to work out who was responsible… His trip to see Asami’s rather disturbing crippled ex-dance teacher is memorably nasty, although not as much as Asami’s later trip there with the razor-wire saw…

Aoyama can’t locate her, and at home one evening, while enjoying a glass of scotch (I’m more of a tequila man, myself) passes out, having been drugged by Asami. The next 15 to 20 minutes are an endurance test for the audience. We get a trip into Aoyama’s drug-addled mind as he flashes in between different sections of the story and then in one particularly nasty sequence in Asami’s apartment, we find out what’s in the sack we saw before…her last boyfriend, sans most of his fingers and toes as well as his tongue and an ear. Asami promptly vomits into a dish, which the ex then slurps up with relish (Guess what, pop-pickers? I’ve read on imdb.com that the dog bowl of vomit is ACTUALLY the vomit of actress Eihi Shiina, who played Asami – the website further claims that Miike has said that she was a method actress and wanted to do this). The dance teacher is offed quite memorably with the aforementioned razor wire saw, and then we’re back in Aoyama’s house for the climax.

Asami, dressed in a cross between a nurse’s uniform and some fetish gear administers to Aoyama a (fictitious) drug which will keep him paralysed, but not inhibit his pain receptors. You know things are going to get worse, and they do. Asami has a nice collection of acupuncture pins, which she decides to stick under Aoyama’s eyes, and in his chest, before bending them this way and that, causing him (and believe me, the viewers) great pain. Then the saw comes out again, and Aoyama’s left foot is removed. Anyone who can watch this scene without flinching is either in a coma, a serial killer or both. As Aoyama’s about to lose foot #2, his son comes home, and narrowly avoids being blinded with mace and drugged by Asami – in their struggle at the head of a staircase, she gets hurled down, to die instantly at the foot of the stairs, which frankly speaking is a bit anti-climactic. Why has she done all of this? Because she wanted him to love her, and her alone.

The fear of loneliness and of being left alone is addressed throughout the text – there’s a memorable sequence where Aoyama and an editor are watching video footage of a moshpit and Aoyama passes the judgement that you’d have to be very lonely to enjoy music like that. The editor states that all of Japan is lonely. Aoyama asks the editor if he’s lonely, to which he gets the response, “You too, huh?” It’s nicely played.

The acting is generally top-notch, really – surprising, considering that this is essentially a genre film. Ryo Ishibashi’s Aoyama is a sympathetic, if somewhat pathetic character, whose desire for a wife is only matched by his utter cluelessness at how to find one. I know it’s difficult to sympathise with a character who objectifies women so much, but he’s a very likeable fella, and really quite harmless. Eihi Shiina as Asami is by turns graceful, elegant, chilling, and then frankly terrifying. The look of bliss on her face as she saws Aoyama’s foot off is horrifying, and there’s something in the way she pursues Aoyama’s son in that final scene that chills me to the bone.

Miike has never shied away from graphic violence, and this film is no different. It’s not the over-the-top cartoonish blood and guts of Ichi the Killer, this is infinitely more disturbing. The tone, from where Aoyama drinks the drugged scotch, becomes chilling, bleak, and very, very nasty – the body-horror of the sequence with his foot being removed is profound, the utter debasement of the man in the bag horrifying in a completely different and utterly repellent way. And the less said about the torture of Asami as a little girl, the better.

After watching this film, I will never go on another date again (not that that was too likely to begin with…). Audition showed me that there are just too many loonies out there.

This is a must-see film.

House of the Dead

2006-08-21T11:15:00.000+10:00

Ta-daa! Now it’s time for the Academy award for the Worst film of all time. And the Oscar goes to…. (insert drum roll here)… House of the Dead! Uwe Boll, come on down!

This film, to be as direct as I possibly can, sucked arse. No, really, I could actually feel my precious, precious arse meats being magically drawn towards the TV while I watched the DVD version. Now, I’ve never been a fan of the kind of film that is based on a video game (say, Resident Evil, the only film in existence where the best performance is by a red dress), nor am I fond of the kind that is specifically made to generate a video game (can you spell Van Helsing, boys and girls?) So I guess that I wasn’t the target demographic. BUT – and it’s a big but (kinda like mine…) – I am an unabashed fan of Jurgen Prochnow’s work. Das Boot is one of the finest war movies ever made, and I really enjoyed The Keep, until David Carradine hove into view near the end and sent the whole bloody thing merrily spinning off to Hell. So, while I had been warned by a friend of mine that Empire Magazine had voted this atrocity as one of the five worst films of all time (and I’m putting it in at Number One with a bullet – preferably aimed right between the director’s eyes), I still got the damn thing out and watched it, due to a misplaced loyalty in the only actor I’d heard of in this appalling waste of space.

I still did this, and I didn’t even like the video game in the first place…

“Hey,” I asked myself, “How bad can it be? It can’t possibly be as bad as Cradle of Fear…can it?” Note the tone of uncertainty that had started creeping into my voice. More of that later…

Now this crap begins with the kind of voiceover that lets us know that pretty much everybody involved in the “story” is going to die, except our fearless narrator, thus eliminating any kind of tension regarding the hero’s destiny. We then get a whole bunch of hackneyed mediocre teen T&A bullshit delivered straight from Satan’s bowels along with the disgracing of a fine actor (including some moronic referencing of Das Boot) the introduction of a smuggling storyline and some other “plot development” and “characterisation” before we arrive on the island on which said House is located. So far, so bad. But I think the first moment when I knew I wanted everyone involved with House of the Dead, their parents, their friends and their pets exterminated with extreme prejudice, and preferably in the most medieval or Inquisition-inspired fashion possible, was when the first of the screen shots from the game appeared in front of me.

“What gives?” I thought, “And just who the hell has hijacked this movie for merchandising purposes? Why are badly animated zombies exploding on the screen for my viewing pleasure before the zombie storyline has even been properly established?”

Well, after about another thirty excruciating minutes into this excursion into mind-numbing vapidity, I started looking back to the halcyon days of inexplicably exploding zombies with wistful nostalgia.

More teen titties, some unconvincing “acting” and a few action scenes at the apparently deserted rave that was the whole reason for the trip to the island in the first place – incidentally, isn’t it funny how in American teen-horror-comedy flicks, it’s always the slutty chick who gets wasted first? See, it’s not just The Exorcist that parades a fear of female sexuality and promiscuity – a very literal toilet joke, introduction of a few secondary characters, some unconvincing zombies, an even more unconvincing fight near the boat the party arrived on, the convenient revelation of Prochnow’s character being a gun smuggler (yawn), and a whole range of other totally bogus bullshit.

I could feel my life force being sapped.

The second moment when I felt like the director should have been branded unclean in the eyes of the Lord and needed a bloody good Old Testament-style smiting with a plague of boils, was the Big Fight Scene at the house.

I’ve always found it really quite amazing how people in these kinds of movies always become instantly and highly proficient with hi-tech weaponry. If I ran out of my front door right this second, grabbed the first bypasser by the lapels and roared into their face, spittle flying out of my mouth in ropy jets, “Quick! The world’s being overrun by moronic Hollywood film directors making crap horror films – take this (insert name of gun here) and prepare to defend yourself!” …Well, let’s just put it this way – could you perform any of the following tasks:
1. locate and deactivate a machine-gun’s safety catch?
2. aim said weapon and fire with more than snowball’s chance in Hell of hitting any part of the side of a barn, let alone a ravenous corpse?
3. fire said weapon at another human being (undead or not), regardless of peril?
4. reload the gun?
5. be sure of not panicking and spraying your compadres with hot lead at over 900 rounds a minute in a frenetic fight in poor visibility, in the dark?
6. und so weiter… I’m sure the point is made and more so…

But the crowning turd in the punchbowl would have to be the way in which this BFS is shot. Think The Matrix, but infinitely more retarded. Lots of cameras spinning around grimly visaged characters, stationary (surely, therefore, making things infinitely easier for yon zombies to pick them off like fleas on a monkey?) in dramatic action poses – you actually wait to see the bullet count and life meter on the screen, too…

Believe it or not, this film actually gets even more retarded as it progresses! After this dumb-ass shoot-out, which ends up with Jurgen being seriously wounded and stoically bearing it to save the morons he’s been shackled to (in the metaphoric sense, obviously) through glorious self-sacrifice, and we get the impossibility of an explosion caused by firing a (non-incendiary) bullet at gunpowder, we get to the cause of the whole shebang, and the inevitable duel between the Unlikely Hero and the Diabolical Genius, with, of course, the equally inevitable “twist in the tail.”

And I watched it with a hangover.

By this stage, I was actually vomiting blood from my arse. Trust me, if you are in any way a fan of horror, of movies, of coherent plot, reasonable acting etc, etc, you will run a mile from House of the Dead. I wasn’t originally going to write about this one, because I sort of felt that from the kind of spleen I knew I was going to vent, people might get curious to see just how bad a movie could be and thence watch it to be entertained by its crapness, a la Robot Monster.

I really can’t stress this enough: don’t. Just don’t.

This film was so bad, it gave me cancer.

The Exorcist

2006-08-21T07:29:00.000+10:00

Oh, for fuck’s sake…

Look, let’s get this straight, right now. This movie is a steaming mound of shit. Funny it may be. Well-marketed, certainly. “The scariest movie of all time”, like the video jacket says? Puh-leeeeze. I’ve coughed up scarier things than this. Hmmm, quite an appropriate simile as it turns out…

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the story, so I shan’t bore you too much with pointless plot recount – and let me tell you, it’s pretty bloody pointless. Satan, you know - a guy so absofuckinglutely powerful he can go toe to toe with God, convince a whole bunch of other guys to fuck up their chances of staying in eternal paradise, harass Jesus, appear on tuna cans and firelighters – yeah, well this cosmic force of supreme evil decides to manifest on earth! As a twelve year old girl!

Head for the hills! Run for your…what? A twelve year old girl? Well, at least I know I’ll be safe – I’ve never had my arse kicked by a twelve year old girl before. I guess Satan either has pretty crappy aim, is going senile, or has gotten so used to losing he’s developed some bizarre-o masochistic taste for it.

This is without a doubt the stupidest premise for a movie I have ever heard. I mean, it sounds like a fucking comedy. Abbot and Costello, anybody? Why the fuck would Satan decide to inhabit the body of a twelve year old girl? Towards the end of the re-mastered version of the film, Father Karras rather sheepishly asks this question to Father Merrin. The response is along the lines of, “To make us despair.”

I thought the scriptwriter was being cleverly ironic.

Credit where it’s due. The opening sequences are pretty good. Evocative, even, of some kind of nameless dread, some kind of ancient evil – the climactic shot of Merrin eye-to-eye with the statue of Pazuzu with the fighting dogs snarling and generally going hell for leather on the soundtrack…pretty good shot, that. I did notice, however, with some interest, that the massive hard-on with which Pazuzu was traditionally carved was not in evidence. No sir-eee, Bob.

My attention for detail is breath-taking, no?

Anyhoo, we’re all set up for some kind of apocalyptic spiritual showdown – a metaphysical Stalingrad, if you will. What we get is more like a metaphysical game of mumblety-peg. Without the intellectual pretensions… I mean, where were the scriptwriters? Out back rolling in their own faeces? Playing in the dirt in the parking lot?

I’m sure you’d probably agree that atmosphere can make a horror film come alive. It’s a shame then to discover that 35 minutes into this fiasco, we lose the atmosphere. All it requires is unbelievable acting, appalling scriptwriting, hysterically funny make-up jobs, crap vocal effects, and of course, that premise. Because logically it would follow that Satan (remember: he is the source of all evil in our world – he is the ultimate in evil – the Elvis of evil, if you will), would ignore potentially possessing…oooh….say…the President of the United States, or the Pope, or sundry members of the Politburo. Hell yes! Why would he bother with such figures? Because the devil always thinks on a small scale, that’s why! “Hmm, that whole hubris-war-against-God thing didn’t really work out as planned…what other mighty evil can I forge? I know! Quick – hie me to the nearest twelve-year old girl!”

Now, this isn’t merely lazy scriptwriting, it’s irresponsible. Let me throw a few words your way, words familiar to the audience of this benighted piece of trash: Holocaust, terrorism, Klan, pogroms, Nazism, Communism, dictatorships, racism, homophobia, increases in rape, the recognition of serial murder, government corruption on a massive scale up to and including the President, increases in teen suicide, televised massacres live from Vietnam. Now: does a potty-mouthed twelve year old girl who hocks a few loogies on a priest and pees on the carpet really equate?

WHO CARES?

If that’s the best Satan can do, I think we by-passed him a few millennia ago. Even if she does defenestrate that irritating film director – and don’t you just wish it’d been Friedkin – well, whoopee-shit. Acts of pure evil in this film: possessing twelve year old girl; making said twelve year old vomit on priests, destroy sundry items of furniture (what do you mean that’s not evil? It was nice furniture), soil one perfectly good crucifix, hurl intensely annoying pseudo-English pseudo-director out of window, give the squirrel-grip to an extremely deserving doctor, teasing an old man into a heart attack; making random appearances in clown make-up or astrally projecting own visage onto the backs of doors (and thence, oddly enough, looking almost exactly like a Venom poster I used to have on the back of my own bedroom door when I was fourteen).

Terrifying.

The real evil in this film? The Catholic Church. Basically what we get here for some hundred and sundry minutes is reaffirmation of the power of the Christian Right, traditional male fear of burgeoning female sexuality (Regan is twelve, remember, and therefore biologically either already or becoming a woman – you don’t think that’s an important part of the film’s “message”? Well then, why else do the perverts who created this nonsense have her repeatedly and bloodily plunge a crucifix into her vagina?), and some facile and quite windy notions about the nature of good and evil which never really come to cases anyway. So on that rock solid and up to date foundation, we get the Catholic Church dragging us back into the Stone Age of tradition. Traditions like: female sexuality is aberrant; the Church will always be triumphant; evil is an external force we have no control over, therefore mankind is inherently good; I think you get the picture. I think that it’s kind of blackly, yet ironically funny that the church attacks this kind of small “e” evil in this film, but the church the scriptwriters are defending here is one that didn’t openly condemn Nazism – you know, like stand up for its principals… So, apparently it’s acceptable to let six million Jews die because we can vaginally mutilate a twelve year old girl with a crucifix. That would appear to be the logic at work here.

What really makes me laugh, though? The fact that the devil and I seem to share a vocabulary (or lack thereof) – I’m sure that I never read “Your mother sucks cocks in hell” in Milton, Marlowe or Goethe… (Interesting point, pop-pickers! One of the script-editors on the film was a priest who’d actually performed ritual state and church sanctioned torture…eerrrr…I mean exorcisms, and this eighty-some year old guy made the Devil curse more! Apparently the original script wasn’t crude enough for Satan! I find the idea of a priest writing some of this shit pretty fucking funny – “Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter!” and “Let Jesus fuck you!” have sounded exponentially funnier since I heard that gem…) And that fucking face that turns up for a bit and then doesn’t – you know, the one that kind of looks like Ronald MacDonald having an existential crisis…What the hell is that all about?

And just who did vandalise the church?

Howdy-do

2006-08-18T15:38:00.000+10:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah - I know what you're thinking: why does the world need yet another opinionated website full of smart-arse horror film reviews written by some prick who feels he's an under-appreciated genius when it comes to this genre?

Beats me.

Closest answer I've got is that I really love horror films, and I look at some reviews out there and I just think that the reviewer is
a) a brainless sycophant
b) being deliberately provocative without really explaining themselves
c) a talentless hack spouting specious holier-than-thou rubbish
and it makes me think I can do it better.

So I'm giving it a shot.