Rufus's House of Horrors

Dear God, No! (2011)

2012-02-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

I guess we're stuck with these faux-grindhouse movies for a while- at least until someone figures out the formula for making a real exploitation movie that doesn't verge on homage/parody. I don't really know why it is, but these recent films never quite seem "real" to me. So far, Dear God No! is near the top of the heap- I enjoyed it quite a bit and almost as much as the (often unrecognized) originator of this sub-genre, Jim Van Bebber's The Manson Family. Exactly why I enjoyed it more than something like, say, Machete I couldn't say.

Basically, the film is about a biker gang that follows up the massacre of a bunch of nuns and a rival gang in a strip club with a home invasion that goes horribly wrong. It seems the homeowner is a mad scientist of some sort (former Nazi, of course) and has his horny, demonic wife locked up in the basement, whilst a bloodthirsty bigfoot is stalking the woods outside. One thing you've got to say about these faux-grindhousers: they tend to have great synopses!

One really nice thing about the film is that we can actually call it a film accurately; it was shot on 16 mm, which sure looks a hell of a lot more like a 70s movie than digital video. I also liked the There's also a refreshing lack of CGI and a nice healthy amount of nudity, which was weirdly lacking from the Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature; back in the 70s seemingly everyone did a nude scene in film. There's also a nice lack of winks at the audience and genre in-jokes; god, I couldn't take another homage where the characters have names like "Savini" and "Carpenter"! Finally, there's a sort of gonzo, let's-throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks tone that reminds me much more of old John Waters than Troma, which is a big advantage over Hobo with a Shotgun.

Oddly enough, Dear God, No! also works better because it's meaner than cat dirt. There's something really vicious and anti-social about the film, from its disemboweled nuns to its used tampon alcoholic drinks. The filmmakers want to make us squirm, which undercuts the pleasant nostalgia that usually comes with these flicks. Admittedly, I probably could have done without the extended rape scene or the set piece with the pregnant woman getting her fetus cut out; and, yeah, there is a sort of laziness to how often the "shocks" involve a random woman getting brutalized for no apparent reason.

But, again, there's something refreshing about how mean-spirited the film is. Most of these faux grindhouse flicks come off as polite young men having a few yuks at how "politically incorrect" the old 70s movies were. This one seems like it was actually made by dementoids, and that makes a big difference.

The Delta Force (1986)

2012-02-01T09:14:00.000-08:00

Conservatives who complain about “liberal Hollywood” and it’s “propaganda” tend to forget one big exception: every friggin action movie ever made takes a right wing position. It’s really hard to imagine Rambo fighting polluters or animal poachers or taking on sexism. Generally, the heroes are stymied by liberal politicians and finally get to solve problems the only way that works: blowing shit up.

The Delta Force is Golan-Globus’s contribution to the neoconservative cause from the Israeli point of view. Luckily, this doesn’t mean there are too many didactic speeches in the film. We’re here to see Chuck Norris kick ass and the Chucker doesn’t do big speeches.

Basically, it’s one of those airplane disaster movies from the 70s with 80s militarism. A plane flying from Greece and stocked with B-movie stars like George Kennedy and Shelley Winters gets hijacked by Beirut’s swarthiest terrorists, all of whom look like they came from the central casting for angry Arabs. At the head is scenery-chewer Robert Forster and the jist of their politics is that they really don’t like Jews. This leads to a fairly dramatic bit in which the German stewardess is forced to single out the Jewish passengers and Shelley Winters makes the message of the film clear by screaming that it’s the Holocaust all over again.

Won’t anybody do something to save them? Of course. The Delta Force is sent in to Beirut to get the hostages out. The leader of the squadron is the classic leader-of-the-squadron actor Lee Marvin and the real muscle of the group is the Chucker, who has come out of an early retirement caused by those damned politicians who screw everything up. Luckily, this time, they’re letting the heroes kick some ass and there are some great car chases, gun battles, and shit being blown up real good.

Unfortunately, the Delta Force is somewhat hamstrung by the plot necessities, which lead the first half to be the tense hostage-taking scenes that build up our resentment towards the terrorists. At least half the movie is a trouble-on-a-plane story and, while it’s all good and well, we’re here to see Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin kill people. The last hour, which involves a bunker siege and has some high-tech super motorcyles finally delivers the brainless goods, thank Chuck.

The Bronx Exterminator (1984)

2012-01-31T13:06:00.000-08:00

What the fuck is this movie? The version I saw, The Bronx Exterminator, has totally different voiced-over dialogue and some quite different scenes than The Final Exterminator, as well as an entirely different plot, but damned if it doesn't have all the same actors and only gets credited as The Final Exterminator on imdb. So, who knows what this thing is! Here goes:

Now available in many a cheap DVD for sale at the finest gas stations, Bronx Executioner is yet another of those ridiculous Italian exploitation knock offs that we love so much here. In this case, it’s your basic post-apocalyptic crapola with a large dollop of Terminator on top.

As with so many Italian exploitation flicks of the era, the movie inexplicably starts in New York City where a new rookie cop Tremes is about to head into the wasteland of the Bronx to try and keep the humans and cyborgs from killing each other. His supervisor, played by exploitationer stalwart Woody Strode, explains that the cyborgs were defective models that have been left alive thanks to those damned politicians that screw things up in nearly every action flick. Left alive, the Bronx is now a cyborg reservation and the humans who live there fight the cyborgs regularly. The Bronx also, inexplicably, resembles the Italian countryside.

The head of the androids is Margie, a stock hot chick who wears revealing red leather outfits and says things like: “I only love death. Other people’s death, naturally”. Try putting that on a Hallmark card! There’s a big android dummy named Shark who is in love with her. And the humanoids are led by Dakar, another big dummy who emotes through Shakespearean lines like: “I’m gonna kill Margie. All my people are going to be killed. She’s a murderer. And she just hates us so damn much. Why?” The eternal question.

After a training montage in which Woody Strode basically beats up the kid and acts like a dick, he’s made the new sheriff in town. After this, Strode is out of the movie to bask in the glow of a job well done over probably two days of shooting. Dakar is searching for a girl who may or may not have died in the White Cliffs Massacre, a battle in which a bunch of Italians threw themselves down a hill while pretending to be shot. This gives Dakar some depth, or something, but she’s soon caught by the androids and suffers one of those exploitation flick rapes in which her shirt is ripped open and her tits exposed, but nobody’s pants come off before being shot.

After fighting in an old factory- because the Bronx before the apocalypse was full of factories, our heroes have to storm the android base- which looks exactly like an Italian villa- seriously, did the Italians just not know that the Bronx after the apocalypse would likely not come out looking exactly like southern Italy? Here, Margie hangs out watching the video of the girl getting raped and wanders around naked or in a sheer negligee, so there's a dollop of pointless sleaze to keep us from falling asleep.

Finally, at the end, we see a cyborg get his head knocked off, which is the only time that the cyborg plot makes any difference. In general, there is a shitload of amateur stunt scenes, not a lot of gore, and a tiny bit of sleaze. Probably best viewed drunk.

Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)

2011-11-27T09:49:00.000-08:00

When it comes to the exploitation and grindhouse movies that horror filmmakers are trying to emulate currently, Italy really was the world leader. Sure, there are some amazing exploitation movies from Indonesia and the US and I'm just now discovering Canadian exploitation, but goddamn did the Italians do it sleazier, bloodier, and nudier than anyone else.

Take, for example, Strip Nude for Your Killer, a movie that ups the gore and nudity way over the usual giallo level. The story begins with a botched abortion leaving a pretty young woman dead and the doctor and an accomplice leaving her body in her home to make it look like an accident. This is followed, after the credits, with said doctor getting stabbed to death by a killer in black leather and a motorcycle helmet, and the black riding gloves that no giallo killer would be without.

Next we’re in a luxury hotel where Carlo, the world’s most obnoxious fashion photographer, played by Castel Nuovo, picks up the gorgeous Lucia (Femi Benussi) from the pool by following her around, taking pictures of her ass, and telling her he can get her in Vogue before screwing her in the sauna. Soon this charmer of a man pulls her into the dreamy, soft-lit 70s world of the Milan fashion industry, where everyone seems to be sleeping together or stabbing each other in the back. Also, there’s a killer in a black motorcycle suit stabbing everyone to death. It's not the old home on the farm to be sure.

Much of the film plays as a soap opera. The editor Giselle (Amanda) is a bitchy lesbian who wants Lucia all to herself. Her husband Maurizio is a fat virgin who tries to seduce the models because she won't sleep with him. The lovely Edwige Fenech plays Madga, a photographer who wants to break into modeling and, improbably, has been unsuccessful so far. The model Patricia, , seems to be in her own world. Someone is trying to blackmail Giselle, Carlo is sleeping with Magda in spite of being ridiculously chauvinistic, even for an Italian flick, and again there's that killer. So high drama here.

Strip Nude for Your Killer is both sleazier than the average giallo and a lot more fun than normal. Whenever the plot starts to drag, a character takes her clothes off; whenever you get tired of the female flesh, someone gets killed in gruesome red tempera paint F/X. The mystery isn't that hard to solve and Fenech pretty much saves the film by being more likable than anyone else, and the horror scenes don't induce much fear. But, the film delivers enough skin, sleaze, and splatter to satisfy.

The Burrowers (2008)

2011-11-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

Basically The Searchers with monsters, The Burrowers brings horror to the old West. Set in the Dakotas, 1879, the film begins with a Terrence Mallick style flashback and then an effective sequence in which a frontier family being assailed by something from the outside hides, unsuccessfully, in the root cellar. The next morning, Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary), who has been courting the daughter with plans to marry, arrives to discover his girl missing with half the family gone and the other half halved. So, the prairie folk form a posse to track down the Indians they reckon are doing terrible things to their Christian womenfolk. But, they soon find that what they’re tracking is a lot worse than Indians and most likely tracking them as well.

Setting off with a Confederate army regiment, Fergus befriends a freed slave named Walnut (Sean Patrick Thomas) who he can relate to on some level we’re to understand, as an Irish immigrant. The two break off with William (William Mapother), Dobie (Galen Hutchison), and John Clay (Clancy Brown) after the General tortures an Indian, making this subplot a bit desultory, but adding a sense of the evils that men can do to one another before we get to the evils that monsters do. It all pays off with a sardonic, bitter ending.

The monsters themselves, called “burrowers”, are pretty great. Living underground and coming out at night to feed, they inject their victims with a tranquilizing poison, bury them, and come back to dine on them later. As created by Robert Hall, they look a bit like crabwalking mole people. Horror fans will really appreciate how much of this is done with girls in rubber suits instead of cartoony CGI. These monsters have weight and solidity to them and seem like they could fuck you up.

J.T. Petty has done an excellent job of creating something genre fans haven’t seen before and pulling off a tense third act. The photography by Phil Parmet should be given special notice for making a low budget film look gorgeous, although obviously the New Mexico locations helped. If there’s any weakness in the movie, it’s the dialogue, which veers frequently towards the cliché (“He took everything this country could throw at him”) and seldom sounds historically accurate. That’s the only problem I had with the thing though. Horror fans are recommended to dig this one up. (Get it?! Wow, that's a good one!)

Sexy Nights of the Living Dead (1980)

2011-11-09T09:32:00.000-08:00

It’s probably not a big surprise that Joe D’Amato eventually went into hardcore porn. We all saw it coming and, yes, it's a bit weird to see a movie that combines hardcore fucking with zombies and splatter, but it's not like a bad weird, just a weird weird.

Okay, our story (what there is of it) begins in a psychiatric hospital where a patient played by Italian stalwart George Eastman stares blankly into space, but apparently not so blankly as to discourage a hot young nurse from tearing open her gown and impaling herself on his schlong. This scene is shot soft core, but it’s pretty vigorous and totally irrelevant to the plot. For those of you who were wondering, Eastman doesn't do hardcore in the film. He was in Anthropophagus; he doesn't have to.

Anyway, we flash back to the nutbar Larry’s previous life, taking rich men fishing on his boat and fooling around with their hot young wives. Into the picture strides John Wilson (), a land developer who has come into an island to purchase cheap. Something’s fishy though as the government official who’s signed the lease has a voodoo idol on his desk (cue scary synthesizer music here)! Also, he feels that people are following him and spying on him, so he's a bit uncomfortable.

Not so uncomfortable as to avoid fucking. Shannon was apparently willing to do the porno sex scenes that Eastman was not, and there’s a pointless interlude in which he screws two girls that he met at the hotel, or something. Wilson’s wart encrusted balls were a fairly disgusting non-FX touch. This is intercut with a scene in which a local’s voodoo ritual brings out a hooded zombie who bites out his throat. It possibly says something about me that I found the gore scene more interesting than the sex.

Unfortunately, the hotel sluts won’t come with Wilson to Cat Island, but Wilson hooks up with a hot, spoiled slut played by Dirce Funari, who is more than willing to come along and cocktease Larry, who naturally charters the ship. Trouble is clearly afoot- after screwing another local girl, a zombie tries to climb aboard the ship, so Larry brains it in the head with the anchor before actually checking to make sure it was a zombie. Clearing up any confusion, the zombie gets up and bites the neck of the doctor doing the autopsy.

Things go on like this until they get to the island, which has some sort of supernatural force protecting it. Larry's a capitalist prick who wants to plow over the local cemetery, get the old man and his daughter living there forced out, and put up a Planet Hollywood or some such shit. The daughter is played by Laura Gemser, who also doesn't do hardcore, but gets naked a lot, fools around with the three interlopers, and then disappears regularly. There's also an evil cat wandering around yowling.

And, thank fucking goodness, there are some goddamn zombies in the last reel. The scenes of zombies wandering around the beach in shrouds are right out of Zombi and the suspense is not that suspenseful. I do think it's possible to do a scary horror film with sex in it, but not this one. This one is only really suited for zombie completists or warty ball completists.

Emanuelle on Taboo Island (1976)

2011-11-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

At this point, does it come as any surprise to hear that this movie has nothing to do with the Italian Emanuelle character, but just happens to star Laura Gemser? I suspect if Laura Gemser had appeared in Star Wars, the exploitation distributors would have called it "Emanuelle in Space". The alternative title for this one was "A Beach Called Desire", which is pretty bland, but has the advantage of not being false advertising. After all, this is just a Blue Lagoon rip off, not an Emanuelle rip off.

Okay, here's our story: Daniel (Paolo Giusti) is a member of a heroin addicted biker gang who gets freaked out when he sees his comrade screwing a strung out (maybe dead) girl on the beach and takes off in a motorboat (a motorboat called desire, no doubt), promptly knocking himself out while swerving to miss a large ship and waking up lost at sea after his boat has run out of gas. Luckily, he comes upon a seemingly deserted island with plenty of sun, surf, and food supplies, but sadly no heroin. You can't win 'em all.

When someone screws up Daniel's S.O.S. sign for the small planes that fly overhead regularly, he realizes that the deserted island is not so deserted after all, and soon he discovers a hut with a brother and sister, Juan (Nicola Paguone) and Heydee (Laura Gemser) living there. They’re the children of Antonio (Arthur Kennedy), who escaped from a prison years ago, apparently by swimming like a motherfucker, since he made it to this island. Even though “they say this island is damned, here I found salvation”. Antonio’s kind of a jerk and the brother and sister are having sex, which makes perfect sense, given that she’s played by Laura Gemser and walks around frequently wearing nothing but a loincloth.

Soon, Juan is teaching Daniel how to spearfish and he’s teaching Haydee how to screw someone other than her brother. Understandably, he falls in love with her and she develops feelings for him, but can this dope addict and this brotherfucker find happiness together? Clearly, the island idyll has been disrupted by this outsider who Antonio considers a, “prisoner! Of dope! Money! Cars! Wars! The whole rotten mess!” He’s clearly the king of the kingdom and wants Daniel out of the picture. He’s hoping Daniel will leave with some fishermen who stop by the island regularly in spite of the supposed curse- this plus the planes going overhead regularly suggests that Antonio is really shitty at picking hideouts. Juan, meanwhile, wants to screw Heide, who doesn’t want him now that she has love. And Daniel is turning his life around and screwing Laura Gemser, so he’d really rather stay. Since this is an Italian sexploitation flick, you sort of figure it’s going to end violently- with these movies, you come for the sex and stay for the violence.

Basically, this is an Italian sexploitation rip off of the Blue Lagoon. The direction is workmanlike, but never particularly imaginative. There’s minimal plot and a boring low-speed chase at the end; and Laura Gemser is topless a lot. There’s an attempt at seriousness about the noble savage and the corrupting influence of civilization. But, mainly, it’s about the tits. Since Gemser is naked in a number of movies that are better (sort of), this one’s worth skipping.

Dead Genesis (2010)

2011-10-29T17:38:00.000-07:00

I wonder if George Romero watches very many of the dozens of zombie movies that are coming out these days. It's got to be hard to keep up with all of them- I can't do it- and you know he gets sent plenty of DVDs. At some point, you start to get zombie burnout. It's even less likely that he'll be reading this, but if so, hey George- this one's pretty decent!

Dead Genesis starts after the zombie apocalypse that these movies take for granted we know all about: the dead are rising with no explanation to eat the living and can only be killed by a shot to the brain. They probably could have given some explanation for all of this, but a montage of news reports is meant to suffice, and we pretty much know the drill. Besides, the movie actually begins with a brutal five minute sequence in which a character kills his zombie wife after she eats their son. It's definitely an attention-grabber. One of the old saws of screenplay writing is to capture your audience with an exciting first ten minutes and they seem to have followed that rule.

The actual story is about a documentary filmmaker (Emily Atalo) who's documenting a group of zombie hunters in the field. The group is a sort of renegade militia waging the "War on Dead" for the folks back home. It's a pretty interesting set up because it could be easily transposed to a story of a reporter embedded with a group of marines in Iraq, but the filmmakers don't exactly hit us over the head with the metaphor. Granted, there are plenty of satirical elements, such as an anti-war on the dead group and some pointed lines about the zombie hunters in the field protecting our freedom, but if you choose to view it as a straightforward zombie story, it certainly works that way too. Clearly, they're taking a cue here from Romero, whose best films work both as metaphors or as straightforward genre pics.

The reporter soon finds that the militia, pushed to the breaking point in the field, is able to dish out as much inhumanity as the zombies and her pro-war film turns troubled and ambiguous. S0me characters are revealed to be decent and just; others turn out to be scumbags, and most are in some gray area in the middle. In the end, the film comes closer than most recent horror movies to dealing directly with the current war, which is strange considering that it's been one of the longest in American history. Why aren't more horror filmmakers trying to comment on the war or terrorism, instead of trying to ape the 70s? And this one is very much a movie about America- really satirizing America- in spite of having been filmed by Canadians in Canada.

Problems? Well, it's a microbudget horror movie, which means we get plenty of scenes of characters in the woods behind someone's house in order to conserve resources. Some of the characters are pretty stock: it was guaranteed that the militia would have one tough-as-nails female, one guy who is playing cowboy, and a world-weary introspective guy with the soul of a poet. It's also guaranteed there will be at least one scene where a likable character will be bitten by a zombie and their comrades will have to kill them. And, yes, a few people will definitely get surprised while resting momentarily by zombie attacks. Finally, because it's microbudget, expect that some of the actors will be bad. It comes with the territory. One last beef: the shaky-cam in this movie is stomach-turning. I know that directors feel that using a handheld camera gives the "you are there" effect, but it really doesn't, unless you happen to be there and have Parkinson's. It's probably okay on a television set, but when projected on a big screen it was nauseating.

Serious note to aspiring low budget filmmakers: You can make a functional DIY steadicam for about thirty bucks. Do that. Please.

But, if you like zombie flicks, you'll probably enjoy Dead Genesis. It has some gruesome gore effects and is one of the precious few that effectively uses its supernatural storyline to really explore contemporary real world themes. That and its depth of characterization give the story real resonance after the final credits.

I Saw the Devil (2010)

2011-10-28T18:42:00.001-07:00

After showing up Hollywood action flicks with The Good, the Bad, the Weird, Kim Ji-woon basically showed up Quentin Tarantino by making a frenetic, stylish, over-the-top, and grisly revenge epic that has something Tarantino's last three revenge epics lacked altogether: a sense of moral seriousness. In a lot of ways, a movie like I Saw the Devil shouldn't work as well as it does- it's tone shifts wildly from somber tragedy to cartoonish violence in a way that should alienate us. But it does work, largely because it never loses sight of the underlying sense of loss and sorrow. Its protagonist is a recognizable human falling apart under the weight of his loss. By contrast, Beatrix Kiddo is a pop archetype and already feels dated and hackneyed. This is the real story.

Revenge is, of course, a story as old as the Athenian tragedians. A dish served best cold it might be, but it makes server and eater sick alike. No good deed of vengeance goes unpunished in the Greek tragedies and Ji-woon is as cruel and penetrating as they were in showing how the desire to get revenge for a horrible misdeed can make the victim as horrible as the perpetrator. Ji-woon has called the film an Oriental Western and it reminds me of a Western like the Searchers and just how Greek the Westerns were. So, a Hellenic-Oriental Western!

When her car breaks down, a young woman is abducted, tortured and beheaded by Kyung-chul (Choi min-sik) a middle aged serial killer in a truly horrifying opening sequence. Her fiance Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hyun), who talked with her on the phone right before the killing, is haunted by the killing and takes time off from his position as a federal agent to track down the killer and pay him back for the killing. Planting a GPS tracker on him, Soo-hyun plays a game of hunter and prey, letting him go repeatedly to track him down again and torture him some more.

But, the serial killer has plans of his own and doesn't like being screwed with. Choi min-sik (from Oldboy) plays the killer as a sort of irritated, tired, asshole who thinks he has the right to do as he pleases to others. A scene in which he torments a poor secretary builds a great deal of tension, beginning with the mere sense that he just doesn't care about social niceties.

Gradually, Soo-hyun follows suit, moving farther and farther outside of the law in his attempt to transfer some of his crushing pain to Kyung-chul. He is warned that "revenge is just for movies", but can't seem to change the direction he's headed. When Kyung-chul finally tries to turn himself into the police, Soo-hyun won't let him! An attempted telephone intervention scene in the third act gives the story a surprising gravity. But the action is as frenetic as anything in The Good, the Bad, the Weird- a stabbing scene in a moving car is absolutely eye-popping. It is clear why Kim Ji-woon has become a cult favorite director.

Aside from being a tad long, I can hardly recommend this movie enough. It's shocking, brutal, strangely funny, action-packed, and surprisingly moving. More importantly, it has something that Tarantino's revenge epics lack altogether: it has a perspective.

The Vampire Happening (1971)

2011-10-27T17:22:00.001-07:00

If you remember the sex comedies of the 60s and early 70s, you'll remember that they all hinged on a very basic hypothesis: men are frequently flustered by sexy women with hilarious results. The comedy level increases as we get to more important and stuffy men, so a laborer who is distracted by a passing woman's boobs and drops wet concrete on a coworker's head is funny (provided he's not killed instantly), but a vicar who keeps inserting "breast" and "boobies" into his Sunday sermon because the same busty woman is in the front row is absolutely hysterical. For some reason, breasts tend to be highlighted over all other female body parts in these movies, which is fitting as they're the funniest.

The Vampire Happening operates largely along these lines with a Hollywood starlet arriving in Transylvania to claim an inherited family castle and finding out that her Baroness ancestor is in a coffin in the basement along with lots of torture devices and in pretty good condition considering she's been dead for over a hundred years. Both of them are played by the gorgeous Pia Degermark and the director Freddie Francis takes every possible opportunity to feature her body prominently in the film.

The story becomes a sort of dueling harlot farce. The actress is sexed up and has fun flashing the local priests and seducing everyone in the vicinity with a wang. Meanwhile, her lookalike vampire ancestor is seducing the same men but trying to suck their blood (there is a joke about the one differing because she sucks the men, yes). Then you have an older butler trying to stake the vampire and two slutty Catholic schoolgirls next door trying to get it on with some monks-in-training. In the meantime, priests, vicars, and various others get hilariously distracted by women's breasts. At a certain point, I was reminded of the joke Rick Sullivan used to make in the Gore Gazette about movies having more bared tits than a twenty acre dairy farm.

Freddie Fancis was better known as a cinematographer on films like Glory and Scorsese's Cape Fear, so the film looks beautiful and the castle is an awesome set. Degermark looks beautiful too, of course. The problem is the movie's never actually, you know, funny. Nor is it scary, of course. Unless you find Benny Hill sidesplitting but a bit too highbrow, you might want to skip this one.

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)

2011-10-19T13:47:00.001-07:00

One of Lucio Fulci's most enjoyable movies, Lizard in a Woman's Skin tells the sordid tale of Carol (Florinda Bolkan), a wealthy barrister's daughter and respectable society woman with a disturbing problem: she keeps having wet dreams about screwing the hot bohemian chick (Anita Strindberg) in the flat next door during wildly surrealistic orgies. Admittedly, most of us wouldn't consider that much of a problem, but it becomes more so after Carol makes what her analyst considers a breakthrough by dreaming about killing the neighboring harlot, who then actually turns up dead. Damned Freudian psychology always makes shit worse!

Carol has other problems, including the fact that her husband Frank is screwing his secretary. Then she spots two hippies from her dream walking around London, chases them down, and finds they have no recollection of the killing. The police focus their investigation on her and she gets locked up, but soon there are hippies showing up to snuff her. Is there an evil conspiracy trying to ruin her life? Or is this a story about the psychological damage inflicted upon a woman by sexual repression and upper class hypocrisy? Maybe a little bit of both!

Lizard in a Woman's Skin is sort of Fulci's psychedelic mod mystery flick and two things help him here: the Swinging London setting, which allows for him to slip in his usual surrealistic weirdness, and the mystery plot, which forces him to stick to a coherent narrative. The Ennio Morricone score is great too, of course. I don't know that I'd consider most of Fulci's movies to be giallos, although this one definitely is; and I'm not actually a fan of most of his movies. Granted, City of the Living Dead holds a special place in my heart as the first horror movie my parents let me watch (at age 8! Thanks Mom and Dad!), but Fulci has an irritating tendency to shoot gore scenes with extremely long closeups that start to resemble the boring snatch shots in porn flicks. The problem with filming someone getting killed in slow, long closeups is you start wondering Why the hell are they just sitting there getting killed? Here, the gore is minimal and therefore more effective. There was a scene with some mutilated (fake) dogs that was a bit barf-inducing, but otherwise it's more like a real movie.

Even better, the LSD shenanigans allow Fulci to cram in lots of wacko style and filmmaking bravura. At one point, he pays homage to Francis Bacon's famous portrait of Pope Innocent X. At another, a trip through a crowded train becomes a crowded orgy! The hippie LSD party is a particular highlight. And you also have plenty of female flesh on display. What else could you want? (Maybe a bit less talking and police procedural stuff, but otherwise it's fun.)

The Shrine (2010)

2011-10-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

Carmen (Cindy Sampson) is a journalist whose work is consuming her life and driving away her boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore). To make matters worse, her editor keeps giving her fluff pieces to work on instead of the hot lead she'd rather investigate: a backpacker who went missing in rural Poland. Luckily we saw him get crucified by some weirdo cultists in the opening scenes, so we know he's come to no good. Anyway, Carmen's ambitious and drags Marcus off to Poland to investigate with her and a younger gumshoe (Meghan Heffern), without telling anyone where they're going.

Before long, our cute 20-something Americans (in reality, Canadians with Canada standing in for America and Poland- we're the chameleon of countries!) are traipsing around hickski-ville Poland and having run ins with bizarreski Poles in a small town where the priests are menacing, the hickskis are more menacing, and there's a creepy plume of black smoke billowing in the distance. As they wander to investigate, they discover it's more like a wall of fog enveloping everything- a nice creepy effect. Inside the fog, they come across a big Pazuzu-style demon statue that bleeds motor oil out of its eyes and seems to have a strange power over the girls. Here, things start to pick up.

The Shrine is a solid little horror movie that's more of a "slow burn" than a "wild ride". It's got plenty of nice touches, like leaving the voluminous Polish spoken unsubtitled so we don't know what's going on, or using primarily practical effects, which have more weight and solidity than the digital sort. When it gets gory, it does so with vigor. Shit gets all fucked up.

In general, the movie starts out in Hostel territory (minus the commentary on globalization), passes through Children of the Corn/ Black Sunday land, and spends the third act in Evil Dead-ville with a big stop in Exorcist Town. It's not to say that the thing's unoriginal- there's enough unique touches that you don't feel like you're watching a rip off- but it's a genre film and, as such, is more concerned with hitting its beats than making deeper points about religion, culture clashes, or anything else. It's written at about the level of a comic book. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I just don't understand why we can't get relatively solid genre pictures like this into actual theaters instead of sending them right to DVD? Isn't it more fun to watch them with friends in a theater after a few beers?

Blackula (1972)

2011-10-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, so Blackula (the black Dracula) is not as scary as Dracula, but is probably better than Chackula (the Chinese Dracula) and Spackula (the Spanish Dracula), neither of which actually exist. There was a Blackenstein, however, and a Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, and at some point I'm going to film a Blummy: the Black Mummy. His bandages are black because he doesn't wash them. In the early 70s, enterprising exploitation chiselers decided to cash in on the overwhelming demand in the black community for more rip offs of the classic horror characters, but black. This film was one of those films.

In Blackula, we learn that Dracula (Charles McCauley) was a bit of a racist along with being a vampire. He screws over an African prince Mamuwalde (played by the suave William Marshall) visiting Transylvania to get Europe to abandon the slave trade (which Transylvania had fuck all to do with) and meeting with the Count, who apparently wants to screw his cute African bride (Vonetta McGee). When Mamuwalde balks at this, the Count bites his neck and locks him in a coffin to suffer for eternity without blood.

Jump to the early seventies when a couple of interior decorators buy the coffin for their home and Blackula pops out to suck their blood before heading out into the L.A. streets to bite a sassy taxi driver and fall in love with a hot young girl Tina who looks just like his late bride. By an amazing coincidence, the investigator trying to solve the crimes, Dr. Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala) is Tina's brother, although he's getting no help at all from the Man. Soon, Tina and Blackula are in love, but they can't be together.

Of course, if you remember, pretty much all those old Universal monster movies were about thwarted love- Dracula, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and finally Frankenstein were made horrible by not being able to have a go with their desired mates. Here, it's society that's trying, as usual, to stick it to the black (vampire) man. The race aspect actually gives the society's monster theme an unusual level of resonance. Mamuwalde was a prince in Africa who had everything stripped from him by a white devil, was shipped to America in a boat, and is now hounded and oppressed by the authorities over his understandable rage. Fuck if there's not resonance there.

Blackula is not a particularly gory film- its PG rating is about right. And you might have noticed that it's more than a little illogical. It's more like a kid's movie or something you'd see uncut on TV. But, here at least, the combination of a classic monster and a blacksploitation flick works pretty well.

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

2011-10-02T14:52:00.000-07:00

After I moved to Canada, I learned a whole other way to look at movies: are they openly Canadian or secretly Canadian?

A ton of movies are shot up north, either by American or Canadian production companies, and the difference seems to be between ones like Juno or Meatballs that don't acknowledge their Canadian parentage, and those like The Fly that don't exactly hide it, which stirs the pride of Canadian genre fans. My Bloody Valentine is an example of the latter: on more than one occasion, I've heard it described as the "Canadian slasher movie". Now, having first watched the movie in America, I never noticed that it isn't set in an American town. It always looked that way to me. But, for Canadians, it's obviously set in Canada. Basically, the accent that Americans can't quite place is from the maritime provinces instead of New England, and it actually is meaningful that everyone drinks Moosehead in the film- very meaningful. This is what Canucks see as most characteristically and unmistakably Canadian- the beer!

So, I'm going to take their word for it. My Bloody Valentine is a slasher film set in a working class Canadian town (obviously!) defined by its coal mine. Years ago, there was an explosion in the mines that made one the one surviving miner eat his dead colleagues and go crazy (and one thing is for sure about slashers: they just can't let shit go!), and so he put on the scary miner outfit and started a killing. He killed the foreman who left the mine early for the Valentine's Dance and killed the dude on Valentine's Day and he has a thing against the Valentine's Dance (another thing about slashers- they pick a holiday and really watch their calendars!). Now it's the 1980s present day and they're thinking of holding another Valentine's Dance. Those damned fools!

On top of this, you have a love triangle going on. T.J. left the shit hole town for California (no mention is made that he went to another country. Just saying) to make it big as a professional flautist (just kidding) and now he's back with hat in hand to work in his dad's mine. Lisa, his old girlfriend has since shacked up with his old buddy Axel, and now she can't decide which dick she wants. So the two friends are fighting over her throughout the movie, pussy being scarce in Nova Scotia, and meanwhile the Mayor and Sheriff are trying to handle the series of killings that just keep happening and trying to find out if that crazy miner is still in the mental institution or not.

A lot of people say that My Bloody Valentine is their favorite slasher film and I can see the appeal- you've got a good small town romantic drama set in a working class milieu, a clever psycho on the loose story, and lots of nifty gore effects by Thomas Berman and his crew. The effects, incidentally, were only recently released via Lion's Gate DVD; the original film was hacked to bits by the ever-cowardly Paramount Pictures in order to appease the MPAA. There's also a great folk song about the killer over the end credits. And, frankly, after all the dumb suburban brats getting killed in slasher movies, it's fun to see blue collar kids with blue collar problems for once.

The problem, for me, is that the killer looks cool, but he's yet another faceless psycho for the most part, and the main characters, while not as insipid as the usual slasher victims, aren't that interesting. I don't really care which dick Sarah chooses, although we all know she's going to pick her first love in the end. Ultimately, slasher films are hard for me to get into because they're so formulaic that I know exactly what's going to happen next for 90% of the running time. I'll agree though that My Bloody Valentine is much better than average (unless your average is Halloween). Way to go, Canadians!

Savage Intruder (1970)

2011-10-02T14:46:00.001-07:00

The Savage Intruder starts with a great credit sequence of the decrepit and rotting Hollywood sign panning down to a severed head and hands lying in the dirt below. It's a nice visual commentary on a Hollywood studio system that knows where to bury its bodies. Also, it introduces us to a serial killer who is slashing up older women in the Hollywood Hills, which makes sense because the young ones run away a lot faster in the usual slasher flick. It's a wonder nobody thought of this before. He's played by David Garfield, son of screen legend John Garfield, and we see him follow an old lady home from a bad and cut her up in her bathroom early in the film so there's no mystery about that. The opening scenes, though, are both pretty grim and gruesome, setting up a tone that the movie doesn't really maintain.

Instead, the film shifts into Hollywood Boulevard/Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? mode as the young punk slasher, Vic, turns his attentions to aged former movie star Katherine Parker, played by real life elderly ex-movie star Miriam Hopkins (from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde among others). Her glory days solidly behind her, now she spends her days in a vast and creepy mansion drinking heavily and imagining she's at the gala balls that have since ended. Introducing himself as Laurel N. Hardy, the hippie slasher gets a job as a personal assistant for the old biddy, which we know won't go well.

The movie plays up the arrogance of the 60s generation against the decrepit glamour of 1930s Hollywood. Vic gets under the skin of the house matron played by Gale Sondergaard and into the panties of the Asian maid Greta who he calls "my little fortune cookie". He also shoots up and hallucinates about running down a cool endless day-glo checkerboard hallway to a room where his mother is having a sexual rendezvous with five guys before the child Vic chops her hand off with a hatchet. Mamma was a whore and a lush and now Vic kills older matronly women- Freud would get it. Throwing a spanner in the works, Katherine jumps his bones and falls in love with the young punk. Cue the acid rock!

So psycho Vic's plan is to turn the old bat into a sugar mamma and he's willing to kill anyone who gets in his way. Instead of being a "savage intruder", he's really more of an opportunist with a psycho streak and a genuinely creepy character. Katherine, meanwhile, is a delusional alcoholic in the Gloria Swanson mode. She was always big; it was the killer hippies that got small! Things get sufficiently gory in spots and really weird in others. In one great sequence, Vic takes Katherine to a hippie drug party where she encounters a drug pushing midget, black and gay stereotypes, crazy wallpaper, and the cast of Laugh-In basically. In another, she gets drunk at the late night Christmas parade and bitches to a television reporter about the "queers" on Hollywood Boulevard.

For about the first hour, this contrast between the psychedelic generation and the older lonely booze hound works pretty well. Like The Night God Screamed, the older set's fears about the hippie creeps are totally justified here! The gore effects are surprisingly good, considering it was filmed in 1969. Eventually, though, it starts to run out of steam, right about the point Vic starts holding Katherine hostage. The last half hour really repeats itself. One also the unmistakable feeling of having seen all of this before in some classic movies. Also the last half hour really repeats itself. (Ba-dum-tish!) Anyway, it's still worth a rental if you've ever wanted to see a gorier drug era version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Actually, it's not on DVD, so you'd have to find a place that rents VHS, or rents movies at all anymore. God, now I feel like an old timer!

Jungle Warriors (1984)

2011-10-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Jungle Warriors begins with overhead shots of a jungle, appropriately enough, and a rock song about needing "your heat" that is notable mainly because the singer, Marina Arcangeli, could kill small animals solely with the power of her horrific singing. Soon we're watching a gang of guerrilla rebels blast up a jungle camp at the bidding of drug lord Cesar Santiago (played by Paul Smith, Bluto himself) who tortures a dude, promises to protect his family and then snaps his neck very unconvincingly. As if Smith isn't a great enough villain, he has a femme fatale sister Angel, played by 80s B-movie queen Sybil Danning, who's apparently sharing bodily fluids with him.

Into this domestic drama tromps a bunch of 80s fashion models with big hair heading into the jungles of South America to do a hot photo shoot that looks to be in la mode de Sears. Their annoying manager, meanwhile, tries to pick up South American chicks with 80s pickup lines like, "I got Quaaludes, I got cocaine... any game you can name, any amount you can count." As if this wasn't enough brilliance for three movies, John Vernon shows up as a Chicago mobster looking to do business with Santiago and chew a lot of scenery.

You can see where this is going: the models' little plane is shot down by Santiago's men, they make their way through the jungle for a while, get taken prisoner, and some rapes and tortures ensue at the hands of bisexual femme fatale Angel and a bunch of big guerrillas, including one dude in an E.T. tee shirt! The gang rape scene is also unique for being considerably more exciting than anything that happens in the first hour or so of the movie. Things pick up towards the end, when the models fight their way to freedom and lots of shit gets blowed up real good.

So, this is basically a sexploitation actioner with an all-star cast of overactors. Paul Smith looking pissed! Sybil Danning looking naked! John Vernon laughing hysterically at every occasion! Woody Strode smiling! Dennis Hopper cut out of the movie for drug problems! By comparison, the heroines are colorless. And, weirdly enough, for a movie with such bad acting firepower, the whole thing is sort of boring. The sex and violence come fairly late and it takes forever to get there. You feel like you're in the jungle and getting nowhere fast.

Vampyr (1932)

2011-10-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of the great filmmakers in the history of cinema and his best known film, The Trial of Joan of Arc, is arguably also a horror film about the terrors a society can inflict upon its scourges. It's also remembered for its destabilizing and intense close-ups of faces seemingly lost in space. Renee Maria Falconetti's performance in that silent film is legendary in fact. In Vampyr, his actual horror film, there are less close ups, but one close up in particular, of actress Sybille Schmitz as Léone a young woman enthralled by a vampire and dwindling away in her sick bed, is chill inducing. I often prefer horror movies made by non-horror directors because they bring in influences outside of the genre while quite often going for broke and trying to scare the daylights out of us.

Vampyr was made on the dawn of sound films and shot in three different languages; as a result, Dreyer used very little spoken dialogue and constructed an image-heavy, nearly silent movie. It plays like a very bad dream. Drawing loosely from J. Sheridan Fanu's ghost stories, Vampyr shows us a young man, Allan, who we are told is obsessed with the supernatural, coming to an inn where an old man enters his room on the first night to give him a letter to be opened on the event of his death. Wandering outside, he follows a series of beckoning shadows leading him to an even stranger castle where he spies through a window as the lord of the castle is murdered. Staying for a rest, he discovers that the younger daughter is slipping away to a terminal illness- it turns out she's being drained of her blood by a mysterious figure late at night. When Allan opens the package, it turns out to be a book on vampires.

This, then is a classic 19th century style tale of the eerie and uncanny. It's very effective partly because of how the uncanny events follow dream logic and also because Dreyer has an eye for surreal imagery. His silhouette camera tricks are very clever and quite often he frames things in ways that aren't quite right although it's not immediately apparent where they're wrong. It's a strange and slow-moving movie, even for the era, and might not be immediately accessible for modern viewers. Some viewers complain about falling asleep while watching the movie, which is appropriate because it's already like a dream. It feels as if anything can happen and Dreyer will break any rule of filmmaking. It's also a fascinating film because you can't just watch it and follow along from the start. Instead, you have to learn the logic of the world depicted based on what Dreyer is showing you or not showing you. For that reason, it's still a thrilling movie, both from a technical standpoint and because it's so creepy.

The Headless Eyes (1971)

2011-09-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

If you were a single lady and you woke up with a cat burglar robbing you, what would you do? Grab a spoon from the night stand and scoop out his eyeball, right? Well, that's exactly what happens to Arthur (Bo Brundin, who appeared the next year in Jerry Lewis's lost Holocaust epic The Day the Clown Cried) in the beginning of The Headless Eyes (there's a great band name for you), Kent Bateman's serial killer opus from 1971. The lady in question removes his eyeball, setting him off on an ill-fated obsession with getting people's eyes and saving them in his shit hole apartment that rivals the one in Eraserhead for sheer grubbiness. Some he keeps frozen in blocks of resin in the freezer. He's also an artist.

Arthur is unsuccessful as an artist, but surprisingly successful in killing, bludgeoning to death a married couple that let him into their house because they remembered him fondly from staring insanely at them on the street! The gore is darker and more realistic than the usual poster paint red used in horror movies from the era and the killing scene is fairly disturbing. Cementing the sense that New Yorkers in the 70s were dumb as a brick, Arthur is soon picked up by a hot blonde hooker in a miniskirt moved by the sight of a mumbling manic stranger covered in blood on the sidewalk and does what you'd expect. The new tourism slogan should be "New York: We make killing easy!"

His ex-wife comes back to save him from his self-imposed exile and "from whatever it is that's changed you". She doesn't even ask where his eye went. In response, he rants for quite a long time about the finer points of madness in a scene that perches right on the line between creepy and melodramatic. Much of the movie maintains a squalid, gritty tone helped a lot by the fact that it was clearly made for a few thousand bucks at most. Later, a young artist approaches him and seems to offer, briefly, the hope of a better life- one with less eye-gougings.

There are also some nice touches. Arthur hangs out in the crowd of neighbors being interviewed by a news reporter about the killings. There's a senile old lady who sits on the sidewalk mumbling, "I know who did it!" At one point, Arthur has a hallucination in which he's running around the streets dressed in white. Throughout, there is some fairly effective psychedelic jazz on the soundtrack. It's not a completely artless film, although it has its share of poorly composed, out-of-focus shots and meandering sequences.

The problem is that the story itself meanders way too much. Arthur kills a woman, does some stuff at home, kills another woman, does some other stuff, and so on and so on. What's wrong with Arthur is never really explained, although the police detective's explanation for the killings is great: "God knows. Some kind of pervert, demented, I don't know." The killer talks to himself a lot and offers the explanation, "I... am... twisted!" at one point. That's pretty evident, thanks. He seems to hate women, probably thanks to losing his eye, and kills plenty of them. But the somewhat mellow jazz and focus problems kill any tension and the film drags. Not a lot really happens. It was just weird and disturbing enough to watch once, but that's about it.

Stagefright (1987)

2011-09-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

>Stagefright begins with a great sequence in which a hooker on a city street is strangled in an alleyway, bringing out the neighbours to investigate, before suddenly turning into a stylish dance number lead by a killer in an owl head mask. We’re in the rehearsals for a new musical play and the moody director Peter (David Brandon) is feuding with the money-conscious and actress-ass conscious financer (Piero Vida) and the cute lead actress Alicia (Barbara Cupisti) who is struggling to play a whore. There’s also Brett (let’s give it up for Italian horror stalwart Giovanni Lombardo Radice) the bitchy gay lead, Laurel (Mary Sellers) a slutty young actress, Sybil (Jo Ann Smith) a supporting player dealing with an unexpected pregnancy, and all of the ordinary madness that one deals with in the theatre.

To make matters worse, a notorious maniac escapes from the nearby mental institution and hitches a ride to the theatre from the actresses who’d stopped by for attention to a twisted ankle in a very implausible plot twist. Soon theatre folk start dropping like melodramatic flies and Peter the director, smelling a publicity windfall, starts rewriting the script to parallel the killer on the loose!

Argento protégé Michael Soavi directs this stylish giallo like a backstage soap opera with killings. Giallos were one of the sources for the slasher films of the 80s and they usually play like slasher films with prog rock and adults instead of dumb teens buying the farm. Soavi handles the set pieces with a decent level of panache and the theatrical angle is a cool twist- before long, the real killer is showing up on stage and stabbing an actress to death in full view of the cast and crew! The gore effects are clever and plentiful; in one great bit, an actress is pulled down through a rotten wooden floor and retrieved in half.

The film uses some of the usual dumb slasher tropes- does every social group have at least one prankster who can actually be assumed to be pulling pranks when there’s a killer on the loose? Couldn’t the police have assigned more than two fat and lazy cops to guard a theatre where it’s known a psychopathic killer is prowling? Why do these killers become suddenly much less effective at stalking and killing when they get to the last woman alive? But it also has a fair level of atmosphere and some good tense scenes and enough good gore effects to make up for the usual plot holes.

Shock (1977)

2011-09-12T17:45:00.000-07:00

A haunted house epic with a perverse domestic twist or two, Shock is perhaps middling Mario Bava, but it has some memorable images and maybe even a shock or two.

A couple and their son moves into a house that they probably should have avoided altogether. The wife Dora, played by Argento regular Daria Nicolodi, is understandably uneasy about moving back into the house, where her first husband, a junkie, killed himself, but her new husband Bruno, played by John Steiner also from all sorts of Italian flicks, insists on it- quite the sensitive husband there. (To round out the feeling that we're with the Italian exploitation repertory company, Ivan Rassimov shows up as a doctor.) Making matters worse for Dora, their son Marco is one of those little kids in movies who are easily amused by paranormal happenings in old houses, and he's at that difficult age where they're so susceptible to being possessed by their dead fathers.

What's fairly effective about the movie is that Bava keeps it unclear whether the kid is possessed, the father's ghost is haunting the joint, or they've just got a brat for a son. Marco resents his mother's relationship with Bruno and makes all sorts of difficulty, at one point telling his mother that he has to kill her. He may or may not have sent her flowers, allegedly from her dead husband. At one point, Marco pretends to hump her. Before long, things start moving around the house on their own and Dora is hallucinating rotting hands grabbing her. She starts slipping in her domestic duties, leading Bruno to remind her, "There's nothing worse for a marriage than sending a husband off without his coffee". Nothing? One would think being haunted by a vengeful junkie ghost would cause more problems.

The strength of these haunted house films is their atmosphere. Bava does a good job here with the sound design and striking visuals, such as a scene in which Nicolodi's hair goes every which way as she lies in bed and another in which Marco suddenly becomes the dead husband. Admittedly, as with most of these movies, there's only so many scenes you can take of people wandering around hallways and basements alone. Also, even after the plot reveals its dark secrets and explains why Bruno and Dora moved back into the house it doesn't really make sense. But, there are some good moments of fear and Bava and Nicolodi knew what they were doing by this point, so it all works out.

Red Heat (1985)

2011-09-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

Poor little Linda Blair's acting career only went south after the Exorcist, which in the 80s meant she was appearing in skin mags and exploitation films. In the case of Red Heat, she's made a fairly convincing case that she actually believed she was making a serious dramatic story of one woman's survival in an East German prison under Communism, instead of another women-in-prison flick with all of the requisite soapy shower and steamy lesbian sex scenes. It's convincing because the movie quite often seems like a serious drama and only delivers the exploitation goods intermittently.

Blair plays Christine Carlson, a nice American girl in East Germany to visit her Army boyfriend Mike at the same time that a lady scientist is trying to escape to the West with commie state secrets. Stumbling into the cliched wrong place at the wrong time, Christine gets hauled in with the turncoat scientist and taken to an East German prison where she's forced to confess to crimes she never committed and sentenced to thirty years. For the first half hour of the film, it really does play like a serious cold war drama. At least until Christine wanders into a four girl fuck fest on her first night in the clink.

The head lesbian tough girl, Sofia, is played by Sylvia Kristel, who certainly looks a bit rougher around the edges here compared to her breakout role in the original Emmanuelle. Naturally, Sofia's got a relationship with the super butch prison guard. Indeed, all of the cliches are accounted for: the beaten down old timers who have given up hope, the kindly older woman who befriends our new fish heroine, the bullying dykes, and the girl who is abused so long she gives up hope and kills herself to get away from the bullying dykes. One wonders how more PC viewers respond these days to the fact that the lesbians in these movies are nearly always the malicious villains, or if it gets in the way of their enjoyment of all the tits and pussy eating. One weird thing- everyone in Germany speaks English in this movie.

Then there's all the tortures and beatings. This one gets particularly ugly early on with a nasty violation scene. Admittedly, if you're watching a women-in-prison flick, you sort of have to expect that, at some point, something will be shoved up a vagina by someone. Sofia is a pretty decent bad girl; in an interesting twist, Kristel's character is openly dominating the head guard. Also interesting is the totalitarian East aspect of the story. In one particularly interesting scene, the women are made to watch a propaganda film about how Communism has liberated the working class.

But, if you've seen more than one of these films, you know where the storyline is going: Christine finds her inner strength and becomes an inspiration to those beaten down old timers, while Mike works round the clock to free her. Eventually, the yanks break her out, but there's not as much lesbo commupance as one might expect. In general, Red Heat suffers greatly from taking itself way too seriously to be a fun exploitation flick and being way too poorly made to be a serious prison drama.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)

2011-07-29T16:55:00.003-07:00

Holy fuck! This is the real deal shit- a movie that absolutely pulls no punches. Nine times out of ten when you see a trailer that makes a movie look uncompromising, you finally watch the movie and find it wimps out by about the second act. But The Spook that Sat by the Door is so uncompromising that United Artists actually had it pulled from theatres shortly after its release claiming it was too politically sensitive and it wasn't seen again for about thirty years. Rumor has it the FBI strongly suggested they pull the film, which was doing quite well, from release. For once, I believe the rumors.

I've said before that what's missing from neo-grindhouse movies is the political subtext of the 60s and 70s. Those old movies were made by people who were outside of and often pretty angry at the establishment- they were trying to say something- while fanboys are usually apolitical and uninterested in the world outside of film. This movie is a prime example of what I'm talking about- it became a cult classic largely because it's extremely, even frighteningly radical. You couldn't make a movie like this today, partly because of the production/distribution system, sure; but also because nobody today has the sort of consciousness required to think something like this up. Instead, we get something like Machete that isn't entirely sure what it's about.

One of the brilliant touches of the film is how it plays off of and subverts your expectations. We're introduced to Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook), a token black candidate for the CIA training program who, for at least the first third of the movie seems to be struggling earnestly to make it in a white man's world. There are some very sharp observations here about black assimilation and we find it very easy to wonder if Freeman hasn't deluded himself about the reality of racism in the CIA. He's clearly the token- the spook who's sat by the door to impress newcomers with the 'integration' going on- and the film leads us to believe that he'll struggle to prove himself in the institution. I've read reviews that say it's clear from the start that he's a 'black nationalist' but it wasn't to me.

In the next act, he returns to Chicago after a fruitless tenure in a meaningless government sinecure to help the inner city black community. The initial implication is that he's going to found a community center of some sort, but when he hears some young kids talking about black militancy in a pool hall, he offers to teach them real tactics of guerrilla warfare to use against the white authorities. Then he founds a militant group, the Black Freedom Fighters, and teaches them all of the dirty tricks and paramilitary maneuvers he learned from the CIA! In the third act, they wage war against the National Guard and the police, blow up the Mayor's office, dose a General with LSD, paint him in black face and assassinate him, and the film ends with a black terrorist revolution consuming the inner cities of America! There is no cop out to speak of.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door is clearly a reaction to the deep frustrations of the black community in the early 70s, when the most important black leaders were being killed. At the time, a revolution seemed imminent. Does its message of revolution resonate today? It's hard to say. Does the movie work as more than a political pamphlet? Not entirely. Freeman is more a cipher than a character. Is he angered by his time in the government bureaucracy, or does he begin with dreams of revolution? Is he flawed or heroic? The film doesn't give him many dimensions and, by comparison, gives most of the supporting characters even less. But it's still bracing and somewhat exhilarating to watch. So many action and exploitation movies promise to blow your mind. This one does.

The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

2011-07-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

A reasonable companion piece to Daughters of Darkness (Blue Underground apparently thinks so), The Blood Spattered Bride depicts a newly married couple in which the bride’s anxieties about sex connect well to a ghost who killed her own husband on their wedding night and who’d like our heroine to do the same. The struggle between the sexes reaches a fever pitch in this movie which was based on the same Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu story as Vertigo- there’s a lot more bloodshed in this one, however.

"Husband" (Simón Andreu) and Susan(Maribel Martín )have recently been married and already she’s having hallucinations about being raped (not five minutes into the movie!) when they decide to stay at the old family estate. He hopes this will calm her fears about losing her virginity and they do have sex; but she starts having vivid dreams about a beautiful woman, Cordelia, who wants her to kill her husband before he takes away her freedom. In one such dream, she stabs him repeatedly in the chest and finally in his exposed heart, finally being covered with blood.

It turns out, of course, that there was a beautiful woman who once stayed in the castle and, wouldn’t you know it, stabbed her hubby to death on their wedding night for asking her “to do shameful things”. As she is drawn into a relationship with the ghost, her contempt for her husband grows making it increasingly likely that he’ll have to put her down in the cold, cold ground, and increasingly unlikely that he’ll get any pussy.

Is it really possession by a ghost or is it her deep psychological fear of being sexually possessed by her husband that’s driving her to madness? The movie is great at keeping both possibilities in the air and even bringing in Carmilla in the flesh, found nude under the sand on a nearby beach, to cause more trouble for the unhappy couple. Like Daughters of Darkness, what makes this work so well is that it’s both strongly psychological and very visceral. The body/mind split between the “psychological thriller” and the “horror movie” doesn’t apply here- minds are twisted and bodies are torn apart.

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

2011-07-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

The Europeans really know how to do vampire films, don’t they? America gave us Dracula, of course, but that was basically a European story about Eastern Europe. The best American vampire films, like Near Dark and 30 Days of Night, are basically Westerns with fangs. Lestat, meanwhile, was just dopey, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was Gidget with fangs. The problem is that vampires are supposed to be hundreds of years old and nothing in America feels more than 50 years old.

Conversely, everything in Europe feels hundreds of years old. The exhausted, bloodless, decadent aesthetes depicted so well by Wilde or Huysmans were already basically vampires even if they had no fangs. The vampires in European fiction were symbols of the old Europe feeding off its youth while enervating them in the process. Vampires are the aristocracy that has become useless, taking everything from their social inferiors, contributing nothing, and bound only to their own rules but to no morality. Aristocrats and vampires alike are depicted in nineteenth century European fiction as manipulative, cabalistic, bisexual, and self-interested.

Daughters of Darkness plays off the legends about the original vampire aristocrat: the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who allegedly bathed in the blood of hundreds of female virgins killed for just that purpose. Here, she’s played by Delphine Seyrig as a soothingly evil version of Greta Garbo with a touch of the Duchesse du Guermontes. Sweeping into a beachside hotel in the off-season with her lithe female companion Ilona (Andrea Rau). just in time to seduce the only other people staying there, a pair of newlyweds, Stefan (John Karlen) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet , Seyrig radiates the self-regard of a well-born lady who just expects to be adored.

The newlyweds, meanwhile, have their own problems. Stefan has a dark secret making it hard for him to tell “Mother” about his low-born wife and an emerging taste for sadism. And Valerie is being lured away from her new husband by the Countess in a plot with a very strong lesbian subtext, or just text. Probably the idea of a married woman having her mind controlled by a beautiful, sexually-predatory older woman wouldn’t quite fly in this more PC era, but by making her a vampire we can make blood-drinking interchangeable with all sorts of kinky sex. Well, or just show lots of kinky sex! It would be glib and facile to simply connect this wife-seducing plot to “fears about feminism”- the film is suggesting something deeper and more Freudian: that behind the sentimental marital façade there is a current of male sadism and desire to possess the wife and, conversely, a female hatred for the husband who wants to hurt and possess her. The Countess is successful at slicing the marriage in half because she knows truths about the happy couple that they can’t even admit to themselves. Having been in this experience before- another woman working hard to separate my wife from our marriage- I was sympathetic to its political incorrectness. If lesbians insist that “only a woman knows what feels good to another woman” (which boy do they ever) they can’t be too surprised that their rivalry with heterosexual men makes for interesting drama.

In true Eurofilm style, all of this subtext is out in the open. Before long, she is sleeping over with the Countess in her room, while Stefan is screwing Ilona, before accidentally killing her in the bathroom where she’s burned by the shower. I’d never heard that vampires are burned by “running water” anywhere else- makes you wonder how they stay clean. The three of them hide the body. But will he be able to save his young bride from the clutches of the Countess? I wouldn’t bet on it.

What’s great about these 60s Eurotrash horror movies is they take all of the mystery, atmosphere, and straight out weirdness of the Gothic stories and throw in plenty of blood, mod fashions, and kinky sex. The story unfolds mainly by burrowing deeper into the psychosexuality of the main characters. Compare this to modern horror films in which the heroes are deep as a paper cut and just keep reacting to events like comic book characters; you can’t help but think today’s horror auteurs all need to spend some time reading Freud. Recent horror films are plenty gory, but not sufficiently fucked up.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2011-07-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

Today hailed as a “cult classic”, which is really just a nice way of saying, “a bad movie that’s also sort of weird”, Sleepaway Camp was originally just another Friday the 13th rip off- a movie that honestly doesn’t seem too original itself if you watch it directly after watching Halloween. However, what distinguished Sleepaway Camp from the horde of slasher flicks of the era is that although the movie has all sorts of flubs and problems, it’s just sort of weird, particularly in its bizarre ending and homosexual subtext. I think people remember it for years just because they’re still asking themselves, “What the fuck was that about?”

These movies usually begin with a series of tragic events that happened in the past. In this case, eight years ago some dumbass kids from the local camp were dicking around in a motorboat in the lake when they ran over some kids with thick New Yawk accents. Sample dialogue: “Peetuh stahted it!” “Did not, you lie-uh!” The father is killed and one of the kids dies and whoever survived something like that would probably be a homicidal maniac, right? Probably so.

Anyway, flash forward to eight years later and the survivor, Angela, played by Felicia Rose, is heading off to camp with her cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten), chaperoned by his nutty mother (Desiree Gould) who behaves like Little Edie in Grey Gardens with another couple more screws loose. She’s somehow secured physicals for the two kids without taking them to a doctor and we soon realize that there’s something wrong with Angela. She doesn’t eat, hardly talks, stares a lot into the distance and seems more than a little disturbed. Felicia Rose was a new actress but already played creepy well. She’s pretty much the best part of the film.

When the kids get to camp, Ricky has to protect Angela from the abusive fellow campers, particularly the cuntish Judy (Karen Fields) and the bitchy counselor Meg (Katherine Kamhi). There’s also a weird love subplot in which Angela can’t fool around with the one boy at camp who likes her because she once saw her dad and another dude getting it on. It’s sort of a shitty camp anyway: one of the cooks openly jokes about molesting the pubescent campers, the counselor abuses Angela, Mel (Mike Kellin), the owner, covers up the inevitable killings and beats up Ricky suspecting him. And, naturally, people start getting killed off one by one: the pervert cook gets boiled alive with a huge pot of water, one bully kid gets drowned, another bully gets a hornet’s nest dropped on him while he’s taking a “wicked dump”, and so forth. The effects, by Ed French, are pretty much Savini-level, which helps a lot.

There’s supposed to be a mystery to this, but for the most part, we know who’s doing it the whole time. The one twist is a shock ending that actually is shocking if you haven’t heard about it already. Otherwise, what distinguishes the movie are a bunch of weird touches: the gay dad flashbacks, a skinny dipping scene that amounts to a bunch of naked dudes and clothed girls, that weirdo Aunt, a cop with a painted-on moustache, and the child molesting cook that nobody worries much about. There’s a really weird subtext too- Angela, let’s face it, is basically a closet case. Is the film warning of the dangers of closeting? Because I got the feeling at points it was just warning us about homosexuals. What was the deal with that hallucination anyway?

In the end, it’s weird enough to puzzle over, but not a very good movie; only worth seeing once, and probably not even that many times.

Hitch-hike (1977)

2011-07-21T19:12:00.001-07:00

Holy shit! David Hess actually appeared in a movie that’s enjoyable to watch. After the plodding misogyny of House on the Edge of the Park and the overrated crappiness of Last House on the Left, I was wondering if everyone’s favorite cinematic scumbag rapist ever acted in anything decent. Indeed he did- Autostop rosso Sangue, known in the US as Hitch-hike is good twisted fun. Is it any surprise that he plays a scumbag rapist kidnapper here?
Basically, Hitch-hike is a cat & mouse movie in which three different characters are trying to be the cat. A bickering husband and wife get abducted by a hitchhiker while traveling across the American west (or its Italian equivalent) and each of them vies for power over the other two while weird psychosexual charges are exchanged. It’s a bit like an exploitation flick version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”.

The husband, an alcoholic Italian writer (played to the hilt by Franco Nero, Django himself) with a rich wife, compensates for his feelings of personal failure by abusing his wife mercilessly. The dubbing, by Nero himself, is of the Whatsamattayoo? school of Italian English making his constant attempts to paw or insult her much more amusing than they should be. He’s easily the worst male chauvinist since Gabrielle Tinti in Velluto Nero and makes one wonder how bed gender relations really were in 1970s Italy. Seriously, the guy is a charmer!

The wife (played by Connie Clery of Moonraker), meanwhile, is way out of this schmuck’s league and clearly knows it. One of the major themes of the movie is that she has a sexy body and the camera takes it in as often as possible. Her dissatisfaction with her drunken lout of a husband explains why she picks up the sketchy looking hitchhiker (played by David Hess) to piss him off and why she seems to flirt with the idea of letting him have his way with her once he takes them hostage. Maybe she likes the attention and maybe she just likes hurting hubby.

Hess, meanwhile, plays a psycho bank robber who wants to get away with his money, humiliate the husband and screw the wife, and possibly get the lout to write a book about him and become famous! The writer manipulates his desire for fame, while also humiliating him for having escaped from a loony bin. And the wife seems to hate him, but maybe hates her husband more and maybe likes the sexual attention from this creep.

In a mainstream movie, these tensions would play just beneath the surface with little coming of them. Luckily, this is Italian exploitation so Hess ends up tying up the husband and fucking his eager wife right in front of him before she comes back naked with a shotgun to blow him away! There’s also a crazy truck and camper chase straight out of Duel, rivals from the bank robbery gang who want the money, and an ultra-violent twist ending. The movie works wonderfully at maintaining the tension and paying it off with sex and violence. It’s also a good example of how entertaining it is to watch completely amoral people trying to overpower each other.

Update: Here's the trailer with the great Ennio Morricone score as well as the sex scene with Djano crying. As if it's not hot to watch your wife fuck someone else. What??? Just saying.

Penitentiary 2 (1982)

2011-07-12T13:33:00.001-07:00

The first Penitentiary made enough money that funding came through for a sequel and Jamaa Fanaka is a director who loves to work. Thus we have Penitentiary 2, basically a repeat of the first movie set outside of an actual penitentiary. Leon Isaac Kennedy returns as Martell 'Too Sweet' Gordone, trying to make a new life for himself after having boxed his way out of prison and trying to avoid being pulled into the world of professional boxing. As you might guess, he winds up pulled into the world of professional boxing. His opponent from the first movie, Jessie “the Bull” (Donovan Womack) is his opponent here, and his enemy Half Dead returns, this time having escaped from the law and played by Ernie Hudson of Ghostbusters fame. His old trainer Seldom Seems (Malik Carter) returns as well, although with considerably less pep than in the first film, owing perhaps to Carter’s reputed drug problems.

Much of the continuing storyline is set up via an opening scrawl in the style of Star Wars, an obvious homage that suggests the influence of the Lucas film on Fanaka’s own filmmaking. He seems to be tipping his hat to the huge influence that the Star Wars films had on American cinema in general and this film seems more like a crowd pleaser, with music often signaling the audience’s emotions and the storyline simpler than before, more spelled out through the dialogue. It’s a bit dumbed down, just like the Lucas movies. The impact of the Star Wars trilogy on cinema is apparent, but it’s not exactly been good.

What’s frustrating about Penitentiary 2 is that it begins with a story focusing on the great theme in Jamaa Fanaka’s work: an average black man struggling to have a stable life in adverse conditions, only to abandon it. Too Sweet is struggling with the pain of having lost his parents in a car accident, doing jail time for a crime he didn’t commit, and trying to readjust to the outside world. He has reconciled with his old girlfriend Clarisse (Eugenia Wright) and is working a delivery job to meet the terms of his parole. But this is all derailed by the psychotic Half Dead (Ernie Hudson) who wants revenge on Too Sweet and gets it by raping and killing Clarisse before a long brawl that is only stopped by the police before Too Sweet can kill him- an obvious replay of the brutal fight the two characters had in the first movie, at almost exactly the same point in the story.

Luckily, Fanaka knows it would be absurd to send Too Sweet back to jail for defending his home. Instead, he uses the killing as the catalyst that sends Too Sweet back to the ring. There are two problems with this. First, he has Kennedy announce his intentions to box in a speech that again assumes the audience has to be told everything: “I’m going to box… I’m going to be somebody… I’m going to get respect. I’m going to talk to the kids about the insanity in this world. I’m going to make a difference in this dirty rotten world. I’m going to do it for Clarisse. I’m going to be champion of the world.” We could have probably figured this out without being told. Secondly, the murder of Clarisse doesn’t interfere in the story too much: a few scenes later, Too Sweet and Seldom Seems are picking up cute girls in a disco. It never seems like the rape and murder of his true love has much emotional impact on Too Sweet, which it probably should.

Too Sweet has to prove himself by fighting Jessie the Bull, with the match strangely taking place in the penitentiary. The boxing is shot well and Fanaka is much-improved as a director. As with the first film, there are plenty of colorful characters, from Half Dead's sidekicks Do Dirty and Simple to Too Sweet's new trainer, played by Mr. T in his first screen appearance. There are also great cameos by fighter Archie Moore and the great Rudy Ray Moore. And the conclusion is rousing.

But there's a rushed quality to the film that leaves some logical gaps: Half Dead never ends up fighting Too Sweet in the end and Jessie "the Bull" has almost no screen time outside of the bouts- it gives the impression that the true story hasn't happened. There's also the matter of the quickly forgotten dead Clarisse. At the end, I have mixed feelings about this movie. It's definitely a crowd pleaser and a rousing film. Jamaa Fanaka is a solid commercial director. But I wish someone would give him the money necessary to make a movie that's both exciting and as weird and radical as his earlier films. Otherwise, it's like Half Fanaka, and cinema needs the man giving us all his heart and soul.

Macon County Line (1974)

2011-07-12T13:27:00.001-07:00

There’s something very appealing about the languid pace of these mid 70s drive-in movies. It’s as if nobody is in a particular hurry to get anywhere or do anything. “Free and easy” was how I remember them describing that mood in the 70s, which I barely remember at all. The teens in current movies seem very uptight by contrast- always rushing places and snarking at each other. Did they even have snark back in the 70s? I think part of the reason I watch these old movies is simply because they offer a reassuring picture of a world in which young people bum around and don’t worry terribly much about their ‘careers’ or consumer items. Well, until they get cut up with a chainsaw that is.

Here, we focus on two brothers, Chris & Wayne Dixon , played by real-life brothers Alan & Jessie Vint, who are “catting around” the South on one last fling before one of them enters the Army. It’s 1953 and the film is a bit of a nostalgia piece with great rock and gospel songs a la American Graffiti. The film starts with the brothers having sex with a woman in New Orleans before her husband arrives and chases them away in that classic sexual archetype. There’s also something reassuring about these old saws- we all know how they’re going to end. The laughs come easy.

After dining and dashing from the local diner and picking up a cute hitchhiker Jenny (Cheryl Waters), they run into some car troubles and have to stop in a sleepy little Southern town of the sort where everyone forgets what they were saying in the middle of a sentence and the local lawman seems like his name should be Jethro- in fact, he really seems this way as he’s played by Max Baer Jr., Jethro Clampett himself. Baer stars, produces, and co-wrote the script, and it seems likely that he’s trying to overcome his Jethro image here- his character Deputy Reed, is a hardnosed, racist, closed-minded hick with a badge: in other words, the worst nightmare of the teens that would have seen the movie in a drive-in back in 1974. He’s also a stereotype, of course, and we know that, eventually, he’s going to come after those free’n’easy teens and try to blow a few holes in them.

The catalyst for this is a pair of traveling criminals who invade his home and brutalize and murder his wife in a genuinely disturbing scene midway through. One interesting touch- she’s watching a television report about Senator McCarthy at the time, which might be pure nostalgia, but seems to say, “Hey, America, you’re worried about the Reds? Here’s the real threat to worry about breaking into your house as we speak!”

Meanwhile, Jenny and Chris are having sex in a nearby barn with the car broken down outside of the Sheriff’s house, while he’s driving around with his son (played by a young Leif Garret) teaching the kid to avoid black children! Soon Sheriff Jethro is stalking the kids in the woods turning their idyllic romp into a bloody nightmare. This, of course, happens in the last twenty minutes and the movie takes its sweet time getting down to business. No doubt drive-in audiences of 1974 weren’t terribly concerned about plot mechanics and liked seeing the lawman as the villain. The film ends with inevitable pretensions of really being about the wages of violence and intolerance, which might have been what made the film a smash hit in 1974. Or it was the naked girls and shotgun violence. Either way, it’s still a solidly-constructed time waster.

Exorcism's Daughter (1971)

2011-07-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

The title is misleading: not only is this not an Exorcist rip off, but it was actually made before the Exorcist and only released in the US in 1974 in an attempt to cash in on William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece. Its alternative title, “House of the Insane Women” is more accurate- it is about a nineteenth century Spanish mental asylum for insane women. The staff are worn out and mistreat the patients horribly, beating and insulting them and even pimping out some of the nutzo nymphs to a local bug-eyed pervert who enjoys the occasional loony bin orgy.

Into this dysfunctional family comes a new doctor Alba who is more in the Enlightenment mold and promises the prisoners that “the time of the straightjacket is over”, arousing their hopes to be treated, “like a human being” as they chant in a dreamlike celebration scene. The slow-mo sequence evokes the dream of liberty and its terror as well, justifying the film’s existence. There are other lovely sequences, including a madwoman lying in the rain and a paranoid in a church belfry mistaking a bell for a severed head in a direct echo of Vertigo’s bell-tower sequence. As in most of the Spanish exploitation films of this era, there are plenty of gorgeous stone castles lit by torches.

The story pits the Enlightened Doctor against the local Catholic establishment, who see his methods as being akin to witchcraft. He focuses his efforts on healing Tanya, a childlike paranoid with a dark secret in her past (psst: she’s the daughter of the exorcism subject, hence the title). Naturally, there are conflicts; the old guard bitches, “Everything’s prohibited! Ya can’t hit ‘em, dunk ‘em, nothing!” The townspeople, predictably, are convinced instead that he’s fucking the patients. The local heiress is trying to blackmail him into fucking her. And, what do ya know- he’s falling in love with Tanya! Before long, he’s siding with the lunatics against the sane society outside.

The movie is a solid Spanish shocker in the gothic mode; it reminds one a bit of The Devils. But it’s not quite as shocking as it needs to be and exploitation hounds might be disappointed by its lack of gore and sleaze. As with many of these Spanish gothics, there’s a fair amount of melodrama to wade through. But, its portrayal of the forces of order trying to keep down those who want freedom is fairly rich and it has some great lines, with my favorite being the drunken guard’s, “On my headstone, I want them to write, “He drank of life while they died.”

East End Hustle (1976)

2011-07-10T20:12:00.001-07:00

Young Maryanne (Ann Marie Provenchier) grows up in relative poverty with four siblings, a fatso dad who wears dirty undershirts and smacks the kids at the breakfast table, and, worst of all, a ridiculous Quebecois accent. Sleazy dudes hit on her on sidewalk corners and she works in a textile sweatshop where the boss regularly expects her to screw him. In addition, the bossman decides to rent her out to some pimp friends. The opening scenes of East End Hustle have a suitable aura of sleaze although their languid pacing is a bit off-putting. For some reason, the criminals all speak in a low voice that sounds like they’re on Quaaludes. It’s hard to fear them pimp-slapping young Maryanne when you’re worried that everyone's about to fall asleep!

Luckily for her, and us, she’s saved before doing actual escort work by an avenging hooker angel, Cindy (Andree Pelletier), who is leaving the life behind and who also talks in a thick Quebec accent. “’Ey! Geet in my car ovuh dere!” Ah, the classic days of Cinepix Canuxploitation; back when anyone who wanted a good tax write-off could fund a Canadian exploitation movie and American viewers could try to figure out why the inner city had so many signs in French.

Who knows if it’s a pointed detail that the head pimp, Dan (Miguel Fernandez), sounds like he’s from Brooklyn while the hookers all sound French Canadian. As a pimp, he’s pretty tough and starts bumping off the girls who rebel against him. Weirdly though he talks in a low, steady voice like a librarian. Maybe his boring gelding demeanor sapped the glamour out of hooking for Cindy, who has come to the wisdom: “When your pussy goes for money, something else goes too.” So true. The movie does a decent job of detailing the dynamics of the stable of whores with plenty of nudity, sleaze, and over-the-top dialogue, my personal favorite being a hooker who responds to her dress being torn with, “’Ey yoo! Oh fookin’ shit!!” It might have been more fun if they’d just stuck with that: sort of Car Wash with escorts.
Alas, Cindy becomes a sort of vigilante, pulling a knife on the hoodlums who harassed Maryanne in the opening when they try to pick up the girls and leaving them sans pants in the middle of the street. She’s still in trouble with the mob and Dan the evil pimp tries to send her a message by dispatching his goons to rape her in a public restroom! This starts her on the path to lead a hooker revolution against the evil pimps via an underground railroad of shitty Montreal houses. The mobs take her groggy boyfriend hostage, which doesn’t seem to upset him greatly. But we know this can only end in violence.

The violence does come in the form of some NYC hitmen who slit some throats and send Maryanne down three stories of an open townhouse to her death. The filmmakers clearly know what their audience is looking for with nice gratuitous touches like establishing Cindy’s relationship with her boyfriend via a hot, graphic sex scene. At times, it felt more like a straight sexploitation flick than a revenge epic. The violence is somewhat graphic too, although less so. But there are probably enough sleazy plot points to satisfy a not-too-discriminating exploitation hound. If you’re watching the movie, you’re probably hoping to see boobs, bush, blood, and bad 70s clothes, and it has that in abundance.

The weird thing about the movie, aside from the Inspector Cluseau accents, is the thing with everyone speaking like they’re trying not to wake someone asleep in the next room. Cindy keeps double-crossing the pimps but they don’t seem very angry. They’re looking to kill her, but she doesn’t seem very scared. The soundtrack is full of generic late 70s soft rock, which doesn’t help much. And, as with many of these movies, the characters aren’t well defined beyond what they’re doing; Cindy is the ex-hooker taking on the mob and not much more; Dan is the evil balding pimp; Maryanne is the wimpy young hooker; etc. The languid and subdued tone really goes against the main appeal of these movies: namely, watching a kickass female get revenge on her male oppressors. Cindy is no Pam Grier, that’s for sure. The easy joke here would be that Canadian action heroines are more boring than American ones, but after living here for eight years, my opinion is that Canadians are plenty interesting, although with an English reserve. But it is possible to be a bit too mellow in your vengeance seeking.

House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

2011-06-26T19:00:00.001-07:00

Poor David Hess- it's got be hard for an actor to get typecast as a rapist. That's pretty much what happened to Hess after he appeared in the sleeper hit Last House on the Left. He's a compelling actor and accomplished musician, but for years the only roles Hess could get were variations on his thug character from Last House. This film is an Italian Last House ripoff that even rips of the name, making its lineage even more evident. It's a better made film than Last House, although that's not exactly saying much.

Hess plays Alex (probably a Clockwork Orange reference), a young disco-hopping hooligan whose problems with the opposite sex are pretty clearly established in the opening sequence, in which he drives a young woman he saw in a discoteque earlier off the road and britally rapes and strangles her in a scene that is even more disturbing due to its light disco ballad score. It's also sort of amazing that nobody saw this assault since the film is set in New York City. But, whatever- the very next scene shows Alex working at the garage with his hooligan friend Ricky (played by Giovanni Radice of Cannibals in the Streets, The Beyond, and numerous other Italian exploitation flicks in his first role) and they're looking to hit the late 70s streets and boogie.

Into the garage comes a rich, sophisticated couple with minor car problems who, in a pretty unbelievable twist, invite the two thugs to a little soiree of five rich assholes with the intention of making fun of them. The class dynamnics are pretty sharp in these early scenes, with the beautiful rich girl (played by the gorgeous Annie Belle of Laure) Lisa aroused by Alex but unwilling to have sex with him, and the snotty young men getting Ricky drunk in order to make a fool of him. Soon the little party is getting the dim thug to strip for them and ripping him off in a rigged card game.

Before you know it, though, the tables are turned and Hess is holding the kids hostage with a straight razor. Let's consider that again: he is holding five strangers hostage in their own home with nothing but a straight razor, and for most of the movie nobody gets the idea to just throw a chair at him! He throws one dude in the swimming pool and pisses on him, smashes another's face in on the pool table, rapes Annie Bell (although she eventually gets on top- classy), and finally slices up a young friend who comes to the door on the couch with the razor, and nobody stops him. That last bit, incidentally, is excruciatingly cruel and misogynist: Cindy (Brigitte Petronio) is a virgin, so Hess strips her naked and takes at least a dozen slashes out of her on the couch. It's scenes like this that have given the film a notorious reputation.

Again, though, the framework of the story is so stupid and unbelievable that you start to tune out until the last ten minutes in which there's a twist that is supposed to explain everything, but which is even stupider than the original storyline! So, for about an hour and half The House on the Edge of the Park is drawn out thuggery with serious logical problems. Annie Belle is hot as usual and David Hess is lots of fun to watch, and Ruggero Deodato's direction is fairly competent, but the film will lower your IQ by 20 points.

Foxy Brown (1974)

2011-06-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

One of the things that sets Jack Hill apart from his exploitation bretheren is his ability to both go way over the top with the melodrama and maintain a wry sense of humor. He doesn't make comedies exactly, but he doesn't play the material as seriously as a heart attack either. Above all, his films are entertaining as hell. And this is probably why Foxy Brown has become such a cult classic: it has a playful sense of humor. It also has a strong female character at its center played by the great Pam Grier who is, indeed, "one hell of a woman".

Foxy Brown was originally intended to be a sequel to Coffy, which was a successful film but for some reason the studio opted against making a sequel. Nowadays studios plan to make sequels before the movie comes out and then make a bunch even if nobody saw the original! But this explains why we never know what Foxy Brown's job is: she was supposed to be a nurse. Now her brother (played by the great Antonio Fargas) is a drug using motherfucker, which is more important to the story. Fargas might not be the greatest actor and Grier was not yet the actress she would later become, but they were both already interesting to watch. This is something else I learned about low budget exploitation filmmaking directly from Jack Hill: Your actors don't have to be good if they are really interesting to watch. Sometimes that's even better. A perfect example of this is Robbie Lee in Switchblade Sisters: she's not so much acting as gritting her teeth and yelling, but damned if you can take your eyes off of her.

Pam Grier, meanwhile, was an actress who just needed time to learn her craft, but again had the charisma to carry a film. Here, she's Foxy Brown, a woman whose boyfriend is an undercover narc who has undergone radical plastic surgery to change his face and avoid the drug dealers who want to ice him. The problem is Link, Foxy's brother, who is in trouble with the dealers and looking for a way to rectify that situation. You can imagine what happens, although it's still a pretty shocking betrayal in the film. Link is clearly in the grip of drug addiction and the film is pretty heavily anti-drugs (or at least hard drugs) with the message that drugs are a new means to enslave the black community. It's a pretty heavy message for an exploitation film, but totally legitimate.

Now, Foxy has to get revenge on the white motherfuckers who killed her man. At the top of the heap is Miss Katherine, who runs a brothel among other things. She's played by Kathryn Loder, who definitely embodies the Hill type of villian- again, it's not great acting so much as being able to chew the scenery like it was Juicy Fruit. In order to get her vengeance, Foxy goes undercover as a hooker in the mob's brothel, dive bombs a drug shack with an ultralight plane, gets help from the always great Sid Haig, and there's a lesbian bar fight for no good reason aside from general awesomeness. It's pretty clear why Foxy Brown is such a cult classic- it's just a hell of a lot of fun. It's also, incidentally, a movie about the sort of smart, strong, badass woman that they still don't make many films about.

The Night God Screamed (1971)

2011-06-09T05:22:00.000-07:00

Aside from their clothes, music, and general level of hygiene, there's nothing particularly frightening about hippies. Or, at least, there wasn't until the Manson family did their creepy crawl and justified Establishment paranoia about the love generation. After that, donations to panhandling hippies rose 500% and dreams of an eternal love-in died hard. Not surprisingly, exploitation filmmakers rushed into the void as well. One such exploitation filmmaker, who is sadly overlooked today, was Lee Madden, who turned out this highly entertaining horror rarity about a hippie cult stalking an Establishment matron after killing her preacher husband.

The cult in question is lead by the Mansonesque Billy Joe Harlan, played by Michael Sugich, whose performance is a highlight here. The film begins with Harlan delivering a great sermon at a river about the evils that the Man is trying to bring down on these hippies. "I made them see that using dope was the way to turn on to you!... They don't like us practicing our thing!... They put us down because we ain't one of those establishment churches with one of those fake money-making preachers!" 'Aint it the truth? They never like you practicing your thing.

Unfortunately, there's possibly a traitor in the midst and the robed cult enforcer drags her out for some testifying. After declaring, "God is going to decide if this chick is a Judas!" Sugich "re-baptizes" her, or drowns her if you're some kind of establishment type.

There's great piano music over the opening credits as we watch Fanny Pierce (played by classic studio actress Jeanne Crain) walking through the dirty city streets and hear her thinking, "Everything is ugly and old." Yeah, well, come visit Hamilton sometime! Anyway, she's a preacher's wife in a skid row mission who is depressed about the low quality of bums in the church soup kitchen! Luckily, her hubby (Alex Nicol) has planned a rural revival to drum up the bucks and they're off.

You might guess what happens next: at a rural gas station, the money-grubbing preacher Pierce runs into the gang of hippies who don't like preaching for profit. One of the hippies, in fact, tries to pick up Fanny with the great line, "That man over there your husband?... It make any difference?" Apparently so (she's old-fashioned no doubt) and the preacher stupidly mentions his revival, which the pseudo-Manson family crashes afterwards and nails him to a cross! It's probably the goriest thing in the movie but pretty unforgettable.

In an interesting twist, the maniacal preacher is then tried, convicted, and soon goes to jail, effectively taking him out of the film. There's a nicely creepy scene in which the hippies surround Crain outside of the courthouse chanting "Die... die..." and the second half of the movie is about them stalking her in revenge for putting their cult leader in the hoosegow.

The movie takes a somewhat silly turn in the last act as the judge (Stewart Bradley) lets Crain shack up with his four teenage kids in his big mansion and babysit them while he goes off and does something or other, all the while knowing that cultists are stalking her! The teenagers, who look to be in their early thirties are pissed off about missing their social engagements and basically act like obnoxious shits until some strangers show up and start terrorizing them. There seems to be a real bias towards the older generation in the film: all of the young people are either murderous hippies or really horrible rich kids!

The terrorizing, though, is pretty effective, if not particularly gory. The film goes through most of the house-under-siege tropes fairly well and the cloaked stranger is genuinely creepy. There is a twist ending too that is both completely ridiculous and followed by a nice E.C. Comics twist that puts a cap on the whole business. Admittedly, this is all drive-in shocker stuff and not remotely a serious exploration of the Manson killings. And, perhaps the movie would be on DVD by now if it had much in the way of gore or any nudity to speak of.

Nevertheless, if you're looking for the pleasures of low budget 70s drive-in fare and effective scares, there's plenty to find here.

Penitentiary (1980)

2011-06-08T21:02:00.001-07:00

Much respect to Jamaa Fanaka. This, his third film, shows a continuous progression from his first two, both of which are pretty good. Oh, and again, he made all three feature-length films as student projects at UCLA. Penitentiary was shot with friends and volunteers at a decommissioned California prison as a graduate student film, although you'd swear to God it was a studio project. Man, it's great to discover a cool filmmaker out of the blue! This is why I still watch no-budget exploitation movies- to hear an original voice speaking.

Penitentiary stars Leon Isaac Kennedy as a young wanderer, Martel "Too Sweet" Gordone who gets picked up by a call girl en route to a diner rendevouz (and listening to the love theme from Welcome Home, Brother Charles on her radio!) that ends up going badly. Two bikers at the diner jump them and a fight ensues and, next thing you know, Too Sweet is in in prison, surrounded by several memorable miscreants with their own personality ticks. The filmmaking here is sharp: the characters are unique and even a bit cartoony, while still being believable. The basic story is a bit more generic than Welcome Home, Brother Charles, but it's the touches of color that bring out the characterizations.

Too Sweet is apparently pretty sweet-looking to his rapist cellmate Half Dead (Badja Dolja) who tries to make him his bitch before being beaten to a pulp by Too Sweet in a truly brutal fight scene that achieves a sort of violent kinesthetic beauty. Again, Fanaka scores the scene with avant garde jazz that adds to the intensity. He has said his inspiration here is Spartacus and you can see that in the scene, but it has to stand alone too as one of the best fight scenes in action filmmaking. It's a highlight of the film.

There's also a clear Spartacus parallel in that Too Sweet becomes an inspiration to his fellow prisoners who are "owned" by their larger rapist inmates. The slavery parallel is explicit in a scene in which Too Sweet tells fellow inmate Eugene that no man can own him. As you can imagine, Too Sweet soon becomes a prison boxer competing in matches set up for entertainment and betting by the warden. After this, the movie basically becomes Rocky in jail with Too Sweet overcoming his situation by boxing and through the mentor relationship with his trainer Seldom Seen (a great performance by Floyd Chatman). Chatman gets two of the best speeches in the film, however, wherein he explains his philosophy about being a lifer. I would hold up the first of these scenes to anything in Italian neo-realist cinema for the way they reveal hidden dimensions of a man that society holds to be marginal. These scenes and that initial fight scene are moments in which the movie transcends its exploitation origins.

In the end, there are still the usualy exploitation film problems. The dialogue is good but the acting is not always very good. There is a third act twist that's a bit unbelievable: Too Sweet didn't realize that he was jailed for murder, or the real killer did the deed in front of a diner full of people who didn't mention this fact during the trial? And there are a few boom mics that make their way into scenes.

But you watch these movies for those moments of weird transcendence that you can't get in mainstream films and not because they necessarily hold up as pure cinematic art. It's not suitable for the Criterion Collection, but Penitentiary has moments of true artistry and, to be honest, you can't say the same for any current Hollywood films.

The Collapsed (2011)

2011-06-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

Post-apocalyptic movies tend to focus on bands of unique individuals, usually outsiders who likely had a tough personal philosophy before the collapse of civilization, who are brought together by virtue of literally being the last people on earth, and now have to find ways to work together in spite of this being often a major pain in the ass. Here you can insert Sartre's line about hell being other people and it can be even worse when they're family members. The Collapsed takes a somewhat unique approach by putting a family in a post-apocalyptic survival scenario and dealing with it as a family drama. For the most part, it works pretty well.

There has been talk lately of a revival of "70s style" character-driven horror movies and The Collapsed aspires to fit this mold. It's hard for me to judge since I watch way more horror movies from the 70s than ones from today- probably a good indicator that I sympathise with their tastes. At any rate, this film plays very much as a character study with a family in trouble.

Something has caused society to collapse and we begin the film not knowing what it is. Actually, we end the film not entirely knowing what it was either (my guess is squirrels), but with a pretty gory sense of how it happened. However, this means that we're basically thrust into the middle of the action, with father Scott (John Fantasia), mother Emily (Lisa Moule) and their son Aaron (Steve Vieira) and daughter Rebecca (Anna Ross). As they pass through a city, we get indications that society has collapsed and they're soon trying to get through the woods to some town to see if their son is alive. Something is out there stalking them in the woods in Evil Dead style. We don't know what it is and, after a while, we're pretty sure it's not zombies. Thank god it's not zombies again! Whatever it is though, we soon get a very horrific indication that it's a mean motherfucker of a problem.

The film does a pretty good job of creating a palpable sense of dread and horror and isn't afraid to kill off characters that we've become invested in. It also pulls a nice trick by keeping the evil threat off camera for long enough that we're as bewildered as the characters. When we finally find out (some of) what's going on, I liked that the twist was both plausible and changed how we understood the rest of the story. It was also a fairly solid genre picture made for what was clearly a very low budget. The film is being releasing on DVD next year and the filmmakers have hopes of starting (another fucking) franchise. Mazel tov!

Anyway I have a few problems (like I always do!) with the main one being that that trick of keeping the threat off-screen can only be effective for so long. After about an hour of watching the characters walking around looking scared in the woods and not necessarily playing off anything and it starts to look like kids playing make believe in the backyard. Amazingly, the final twist actually justifies this problem, but it's easy to tune out before we get there. The other problem is that we're increasingly focusing on Dad along the way and Fantasia gives a fairly flat performance. In general, the acting isn't memorable and the dialogue is basically passable: a lot of "It's your turn for lookout" and "we'll sleep here for the night" kind of stuff. Finally, for what's basically a family drama, there sure could have been more in the way of psychological depth. There are some family secrets, but married people know that marriages are usually way more complex than this. At times, it's easy to forget that these people are supposed to be related.

Now that all that's off my chest, I'd still recommend The Collapsed to horror fans. It's not entirely scary but it does have a sense of tension and mounting horror and maintains that mood for most of the film. It's also nice to see filmmakers returning to character-driven pieces and atmosphere. So, I'm fairly sure that, if you're a horror-fan, you'll enjoy this one. If you're not a genre fan... you might not.

Welcome Home, Brother Charles (1975)

2011-05-29T16:06:00.001-07:00

Also known officially as Soul Vengeance and unofficially as "that penis strangulation movie", Welcome Home, Brother Charles is a strange little blaxploitation oddity that's marries via shotgun a social realist story about a black man (played by Marlo Monte, who should have been in more movies) trying to make a life for himself after an unjust prison sentence and a typical exploitation movie revenge scenario in which our hero kills the crooked members of the justice system who sent him away; and on top of all that, he does so by hypnotizing their wives with his enormous penis, which he then uses to strangle them. I'm not kidding.

Jamaa Fanaka is a somewhat unappreciated black filmmaker (is there another kind?) who studied at UCLA where he made three feature films as student projects, an unheard of feat before or since. Of the three, Welcome Home, Brother Charles came first and the third, the prison boxing flick Penitentiary, became the top grossing independent film of 1981. All of his films are focused on the problems of inner city blacks in California in a way that is more socially conscious and even grittier than the average exploitation movie, with more exploitation elements than the average social realist film. Certain scenes in Welcome Home, Brother Charles even echo those in the masterpiece Killer of Sheep, which is not surprising since director Charles Burnett did the camera work on this movie. Like Killer of Sheep, Welcome Home, Brother Charles is an invaluable documentation of Watts and Compton at a time not long after the riots. It's also a record of some truly great, nearly lost soul, jazz, and funk music; the soundtrack is pretty incredible. But how to reconcile all of this with the giant strangling dong?

Okay, let's start from the beginning: the story tells of a small time dope dealer named Charlie who gets busted in the beginning of the film by two undercover cops, one of whom is insanely racist and works over Charles in the back of the cop car, nearly castrating him with a straight razor. During the escape, Charles had hurdled over the cowering cop and humiliated him, but this doesn't really explain why he would attempt castration. We, and he, soon discover the underlying issue: the officer's wife has been cheating on him with a black man, which drives him so crazy that he nearly strangles her! It's hard not to wonder if this bit of information shouldn't have come before the castration scene though. After it just seems ironic instead of important information. Also, the castration never comes up in the trial for reasons that are explained at one point, but not really believable.

The trial scene itself is amusingly sardonic, with the prosecuting attorney delivering a spot on speech about bleeding heart liberals allowing criminals to roam the streets bashing honest people with their "devilish bricks". The incarceration sequence, meanwhile, is effectively nightmarish, with slow pans down an empty prison hallway and black and white photos of Charles in his cell set to avant garde music by the director. Monte does an effective job anchoring the film, although , as the white cop/bomb disposal technician/racist wife choker is not much of an actor.

The storyline also loses a bit of coherence after the incarceration, splitting into three different directions: Charles learning that his friend N.D. (Jake Carter) took the opportunity of his incarceration to hook up with his girlfriend Twyla (Jackie Ziegler) and turn her into a stripper, Charles starting a new relationship with the cute-as-a-button ex-hooker Carmen (Reatha Grey) and attempting some sort of domestic existence, and Charles strangling his enemies with his twelve-foot schlong. Probably the N.D. storyline could have been excised. There are also the usual problems associated with student filmmaking, such as overly long takes, awkward transitions, weak acting, and so forth. Honestly, most of this can be overlooked; but the story leaves some strange questions: why doesn't Charles mention during his trial that the police officer who arrested him nearly castrated him? Didn't the police have to take him to the hospital at some point? Why is the undercover cop also assigned to bomb disposal duty that calls him away at weird times? Why didn't we hear about the girlfriend before Charles went to jail?

And, seriously, what is with that 12-foot cock? How does that make sense in the context of the story? Does it relate to the African demon statuette with a similarly giant dick in the opening credits? Is it a hallucination or real? I have three theories here: the first is that some of this might make more sense in the uncut version of the film. The Xenon DVD, which is about the only way to see the film right now, is at least seven minutes shorter than other prints of the movie and several people who have seen the film during its original release claim it was longer and more shocking. At the very least, there really must have been another scene in which the racist cop was more graphically killed, one of the most disappointing scenes in this version of the film. It's hard to believe that Fanaka would have dispatched the true villian of the film through a few off-camera screams. But a second theory is that the giant killer dick was added after the movie was made to give the thing a more "exploitation" commercial hook. Honestly though, it's hard to imagine a director like Fanaka changing his movie to make it more commercial.

Finally, I think the dick-strangling subplot might all be a very clever play on old white racist myths about blacks. The old story of the black man who dominates white wives with his giant cock originated in slave-owning days and is still fairly popular with white racists and fetishists today. To my mind, Fanaka is saying, "You want that Mandingo bullshit? Well, here you go!" Taken as such, it's actually pretty funny, although most reviews of the movie seem to take a shallower, "black Ed Wood" approach that strikes me as complete nonsense.

Similarly, a white cop trying to castrate a black suspect out of jealousy over black sexual superiority makes little sense on a literal level, but it works as a fairly potent metaphor for a racist justice system that often does seek to constrain or cut off the power of black men- a power that the movie suggests whites really do associate with black dicks. Now, only Freud could say if Fanaka really believes that societal racism can be boiled down to white sexual insecurity, or if racism instead creates sexual insecurity in whites; and I sure as hell can't answer that. But, as a metaphor, it's both outrageous and pretty great.

The sad thing is that much of this confusion would be cleared up by a better DVD release, and yet the movie isn't likely going to generate enough demand for that. It's pretty uneven with some scenes working much better than others: the sequence of Charlie walking about Compton after being freed is a truly wonderful time capsule of the mid 70s black culture; a seduction scene between Charlie and Mrs. Freeman (Tiffany Peters) is laughably awkward. In the end, the movie has too many good aspects to be "bad" and too many clumsy aspects to be really "good", and is just too singular and strange to have any sort of mainstream success. And yet, so what? Art should provoke mixed feelings!

The Rite (2011)

2011-05-27T09:10:00.000-07:00

The story of a young priest who is questioning his faith, but realizes the existence of evil when called to perform an exorcism, The Exorcist- oops, I mean, The Rite, offers viewers a less scary, anodyne version of what they’ve seen before. Hooray for Hollywood!

The center of the story is Lucas Trevant, a priest and full time exorcist living in Rome and played by the great Anthony Hopkins. The selling point of the movie is seeing Hopkins possessed by the Devil, but he’s equally good as a man of faith pulled towards the light of God by an inner conviction. Hopkins could read the telephone book and make it interesting, but most of his dialogue is sharp and engaging; he does, however, call another character “kissy lips” at one point.
The character who is supposed to bring us into the story via identification, however, is much less interesting. Michael, a young seminary student, played by Colin O’Donoghue, has entered the priesthood in order to please his father (the very busy Rutger Hauer), but has second thoughts. Lots of second thoughts. He is the character who doubts the existence of God due to his misguided faith in scientific reason. There’s one of these characters in every exorcism movies it seems and they always learn their lesson. Reason is always treated as wrongheaded in these movies in a way that’s more than a bit reactionary: the characters are saved by faith and destroyed by reason, which are taken as being at odds with one another, and there’s a certain type of evangelical American who has to be the target audience here. However, plenty of religious people are also questioning and curious in the real world.

The real problem with Michael is that he’s a bit too much like us: too lazy to learn any Italian or Latin, which makes the special assignment he’s received, to learn the art of exorcism in the Vatican and perform them in Rome, more than a bit absurd; he’s also sarcastic and hip, horny for a female reporter (Alice Braga); and even though he’s supposed to be questioning his choice to enter the seminary, he doesn’t seem remotely religious or even particularly bright. I kept expecting the character to say something like, “Dude, this possession shit is not sweet!” Really, the character is just not believable.

What’s frustratingly tantalizing about The Rite is that this is Hollywood and they have the bucks, so there are plenty of compelling visuals. A mule with red eyes is particularly effective. I also liked the possessed characters spitting up nine inch crucifixion nails. The cinematography is crisp and clear and visually beautiful, and the sets are great stand-ins for Rome (the film was shot in Hungary and Italy). The one exception is the somewhat goofy sets representing the Vatican lecture halls, which look like CIA headquarters.

But the problem with Hollywood is that they’ve become utterly gutless, which impacts the film in two ways. In the first place, they’ve clearly aimed at getting a PG-13 rating here (a bigger audience!), so the film is basically bloodless and the obligatory shocking language of the demon-possessed is along the lines of “you are disgusting and smell”. Your mother sews socks that smell, indeed.

A bigger problem caused by Hollywood’s gutlessness is that the movie is safely homogeneous and uncreative: it’s pretty close to being The Exorcist, but a less challenging, basically toothless version. The Exorcist is a horror masterpiece, in my opinion, and a genuine work of art. I actually like its sequels, with the exception of Renny Harlan’s prequel; I’m one of the very few who likes The Exorcist II. The problem that the other movies in the exorcism genre have, though, is that they’re rooted in a specific religious rite, and so they tend to follow a rigid formula. The twist here is that, yes, there’s a young girl possessed but also a priest, isn’t much of a twist. When the young priest is shouting, “God compels you!” at the demon, it’s impossible not to think of Jason Miller. And this is what’s so frustrating for many of us about Hollywood at this point: tremendous artistry goes into these movies that are just retreads of what’s come before. And why? Because chicken shit accountants are calling all the shots at the big studios. So a film that repeats The Exorcist can get made, but a film as singular and original as the actual Exorcist? Not a chance.

The Park is Mine (1986)

2011-05-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

A Vietnam vet jumps off a hospital building to his death and his veteran buddy Mitch takes up his plan to take over Central Park with explosives and heavy ammunition. Mitch is played by Tommy Lee Jones, who we last saw in Rolling Thunder, another angry veteran movie that never seems to be available on DVD. In the mid 80s, American cinema developed a renewed interest in Vietnam and its veterans. The Park is Mine came out around the same time as Rambo and Platoon- The Park is Mine was made for cable television- showed up on VHS and has since vanished. It’s out of print on DVD and, thus, popular with bootleggers. Naturally, I was curious.

Mitch is more than a little bit like Travis Bickle in a very similar New York City scumscape to the one depicted in Taxi Driver. He can’t hold down a job, he owes his ex-wife Rachel (Gale Garnett) a fortune, and Rolling Thunder keeps going out of print; so he becomes un uomo d’azione, as the Italians say, wandering around the park in camouflage and face paint and blowing shit up. Soon, he has New York (apparently, the film was shot largely in Toronto though) at a standstill. You probably couldn’t remake the movie today because it would end in five minutes with Homeland Security torturing the main character to death.

Instead, the SWAT team (led by Yaphet Koto) comes in to the park and gets chased out of the park. The Mayor’s office, instead, claims that there’s a team of men holding the park, and admittedly the idea of one man taking over Central Park is a bit farfetched. Sexy reporter Valery (Helen Shaver) sneaks into the Park and makes friends with Mitch, who finally issues a statement explaining where he’s coming from: America has forgotten about its veterans, average men are all-but-invisible, sex is hard to come by and he “just wants to remind people they don’t have to take shit every day”; today, he’d be a blogger (or Sarah Palin’s running mate), but in 1986, he’s blowing shit up. How far we’ve fallen.

Naturally, Mitch becomes an inspiration to average Joes around the city who finally realize they can be someone important, if only they take a few really batshit crazy, suicidal actions. The city sends in commandos.

The Park is Mine is a fairly well-made 80s television drama with a nice central portrayal of urban alienation. I’m always a sucker for watching Tommy Lee Jones act insane and the film does a good job of sustaining a mood. The soundtrack, by Tangerine Dream, has that synth-heavy, slightly inhuman feeling characteristic of John Carpenter’s music (Carpenter was a big Tangerine Dream aficionado). It is a bit lightweight, especially since it’s main message about Vietnam veterans seems to be, “Hey, pay attention to them!” There's also the slight problem of it being completely unbelievable that a veteran could mine Central Park without anyone noticing, or that one man could hold the park against the NYPD. And genre fans should be warned that it has no gore and only very brief semi-nudity- although lots of shit gets blown up. I wouldn't buy a $15 copy from a bootlegger, but it’s worth a five dollar rental, if you can actually find a copy.

Fight for Your Life (1977)

2011-05-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

William Sanderson looks like the sort of devious low-level hoodlum who would be arrested for disturbing the peace or selling stolen packs of cigarettes. In his other genre entry, Savage Weekend, he played a backwoods stalker type; his country creepiness was played for laughs, however, on Newhart where he was Larry with two brothers named Daryl. All kidding aside, he's a very versatile actor. In Fight for Your Life, he plays an escaped convict/hostage taker who is also incredibly racist, and you have to wonder if he doesn’t leave this performance off his resume.

By definition, exploitation films need something to exploit- mostly they reach for sex and violence- that can't be found in mainstream movies. One approach is to exploit some dicey social issue that Hollywood won't touch; about a dozen 60s exploitationers feature a character's back alley abortion, and Sam Fuller was a regular maestro of racial/ social tension melodramas. Fight for your Life pokes at the open sore of racsism in America, so much so that it was the only "video nasty" to be banned in Britain due not to violence but racist dialogue.

Legendary exploitation producer William Mishkin brings us this sleazy little melodrama, directed by Robert A. Endleson, whose only other film was the porn satire The Filthiest Show on Earth. Endleson is apparently not proud of Fight for your Life, although it’s a competently-made movie that moves fairly well. The story is about three escaped convicts- Kane (Sanderson), Chino (Daniel Feraldo), and Ling (Peter Yoshida)- who take a family hostage and torment them before the tables are, inevitably turned. The twist is that the family are middle class blacks and Kane is virulently racist and spends a good third of the movie tormenting the head of the family (played by Robert Judd) by making racist jokes, forcing him to tap-dance and play to old racial stereotypes, and generally attempting to win the Ku Klux Klan image award. Chino, meanwhile, is a somewhat colorless Hispanic, aside from inexplicably insisting on eating with his hands, and Ling is a Chinese psychopath who giggles constantly. They’re sort like a Benetton rainbow of offensiveness.

The Turner family, meanwhile, are the picture of assimilated black domesticity. The patriarch Ted (Robert Judd) is a preacher; his wife (Catherine Peppers) still doesn’t trust whites but daughter Corrie (Yvonne Ross) has a best friend Karen (Bonnie Martin) who’s not only white but dated her now-dead brother Val (Ramon Saunders); Grandma (Lela Small) is a feisty old lady in a wheelchair; son Floyd (Reginald Bythewood) is a feisty kid who wants to be Muhammad Ali when he grows up. None of this would be out of place on a sitcom from the 70s and I kept expecting the little kid to have a sassy catchphrase.

It's been called the "most politically incorrect movie ever made", which is a claim anyone who's seen Birth of a Nation would protest. It's also been called a "racist movie". Is it a racist movie? I don't think it is. Granted, it has more racist dialogue than twenty episodes of All in the Family. But it's pretty clear where the filmmakers' sympathies lie- Kane, the racist character in the film is a wretched creep who seems to be made out of pure oil, while the black family are clearly virtuous folks in distress. I’ve said before that the grindhouse films were very much of their times and that might apply here. Racism is still shocking but an interracial love scene might have still packed a punch in 1977 that it doesn’t now. But, to my mind, a racist movie is one that portrays its minorities as mostrous- in a way that an actual racist would approve of- and there were more than a few of those in the 70s and 80s. Check out the oeuvre of Charles Bronson sometime for a slightly creepy, often hilarious look at how reactionary whites see urban-dwelling minorities. I'm not saying Bronson was a racist, but damn he knew where his bread was buttered.

The problem with Fight for Your Life isn't that it sympathizes with its racist character- more that it plays the race card to get a rise out of the audience, but then doesn't know where it wants to go. Once you get over the shock value, it's sort of a one-note affair and it keeps playing that note for at least half the running time. The bad guys are really bad and the good guys are really good, and very little happens to complicate our understanding of them. The question, as with every movie in the Straw Dogs home invasion/revenge mode is: How much does it take to turn an average man into a killer? Judd’s performance is great, but it’s fairly hard to believe that the family is in mortal danger from Kane who, again, looks like he’d be run in by the cops for loitering. Ling is a bit more frightening and has one of the truly shocking scenes in the film when he beats a child to death with a rock. However, none of the thugs seems truly menacing enough to keep the family hostage.

The payoff, meanwhile, is a bit muted. All three goons get wasted, but it seems unsatisfying. The movie builds up to a climax that doesn’t quite arrive. Terrible as it sounds, we’re expecting the family to torture the three to death, but for the most part, they’re dispatched quickly. Something about the hostage revenge scenario never quite worked for me and I think it’s the combination of the hostage crisis never seeming like a crisis and the revenge never seeming like revenge.

William Lustig has released the movie on DVD and claims to love it, and it does have a fairly solid plot while pushing all sorts of social buttons. With the exception of a maudlin (and hilarious) flashback that lets us know how much Carol misses her dead boyfriend even though she’s a completely minor character, there’s not too much superfluous material here. And aside from the thugs doing everything imaginable to get caught, most of what happens is realistic. But it’s not exactly edgy, which you expect from these dramas. Maybe if you saw it in a multiethnic group of friends whom you didn’t want to offend there might be some anxiety, but otherwise the movie doesn’t supply much in the way of tension.

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

2011-05-13T10:24:00.003-07:00

The first time he uses his titular shotgun, Rutger Hauer’s titular hobo character barks out the line, “I’m going to sleep in your bloody carcass tonight!” right before blasting a pawn shop robber into a bloody carcass. Like much of the dialogue in Hobo with a Shotgun, the line is instantly quotable, a bit silly, and over-the-top. It’s also not remotely the sort of thing an actual hobo with a shotgun might say in real life, but more the sort of thing a vigilante character might say in a movie. Do you know the fake movies that play in the background of real movies when they don’t want to pay for the rights to an existing title? Hobo with a Shotgun is like that- everything in it is self-consciously quoting an exploitation film cliché. If you’re a fan of these movies, you’ll enjoy the knowing winks and nudges, but it’s hard not to feel afterwards like the real movie was taking place somewhere else.

When Jessie Eisener's fake trailer for an unmade film entitled Hobo with a Shotgun played before the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse double feature here in Canada, it fit the faux-grindhouse style like a leather miniskirt, perfectly matching the gritty look and outrageous premises of those 70s grindhouse actioners. It looked like it might really be the trailer for a lost movie. So, when word got out that the trailer would be extended to a full-length movie, as Rodriguez did with Machete, fanboys and girls were fairly excited, especially since Rutger Hauer signed on to play the main character.

Rutger Hauer has been a great character actor since Paul Veerhoven first made him a star in their native Netherlands. He has one of those weathered faces that looks like a sun-cracked field where it’s pleasantly surprising to see an occasional smile bloom forth. Here he plays a homeless man who arrives in a crime-ridden city and, like the main character in many a spaghetti western, is finally resolved to clean up that crime by killing a lot of people. Along the way, he meets Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a hooker with a heart of gold, who adopts him as a sort of father figure. They plan to get out of the town and make a better life for themselves as lawnmowers. Everyone in the town plans to get out and make a better life for themselves. It’s a wonder that nobody mentions how hard life has been there, ever since they closed down the factory.

Opposing him are a crime boss named "The Drake" (played by Brian Downey) and his two sons Ivan (played as a sort of psychotic Tom Cruise by Nick Bateman) and Slick (Gregory Smith), who distribute mounds of cocaine, scream "Whooo!" frequently, and kill a lot of people. There are also roving gangs of punk rockers bullying passersby and a bounty hunter duo in full body armor. This is a movie that leaves no cliche unturned.

Of course, very little here is actually supposed to be original. The film is more an homage to those sleazy 80s action films that came in cheap plastic clamshell video boxes with cover paintings that made them look much more exciting than they actually were. Clearly, the filmmakers wanted to make a movie that would deliver on the promise of its title. And they succeeded marvelously at that; to the point that I can guarantee that many reviews will use the verb "delivers".

The movie also makes a strong case for the worth of somewhat archaic filmmaking techniques. The technicolor cinematography by Karim Hussain is strikingly lush, colorful, and gorgeous. The effects are moist and handled practically, without the cartoony CGI bloodspurts of recent genre films. The film is similar to Machete in that it throws a lot of creative ideas at the screen. Unlike Machete, however, Hobo sticks to one main plotline and keeps any political subtext to a minimum- although it parodies poverty, it has nothing to say about it.

It's also more attentive to detail, while Machete felt a bit rushed and shoddy. Here, you get the feeling that the director is trying to stuff everything he enjoyed about 80s exploitation movies and culture into one movie. There are graffiti-soaked alleys, dark, neon-lit video arcades, bad guys who deserve to be turned into action figures, amoral bikini-clad bimbos, overacting bad guys, horrific violence, and plenty of gruesome Youtube-length set pieces that pay due reverence to badfilm classics. If you take it purely on a fanboy level, it's a mini-masterpiece of genre homage and will, most likely, become a cult classic, since it's a pure sugar rush of a sleaze movie.

Okay, but now let's take it on the cinephile dick level.

It's not really a movie, is it? It's more a series of Youtube-ready set pieces that doesn't quite add up to a whole. And once you get past the artistry of the thing, it has nothing in particular that it wants to say, aside from "Hey, do you remember when they used to do that in 80s movies?" Movies now comment only on other movies or pop detritus, but the exploitation movies that we all remember from that era generally had something to say about the outside world. Take Romero's Dawn of the Dead- there's a hell of a lot more going on there than "Hey, remember in zombie movies when they do this?" The people who made the 70s exploitation movies were bringing in all sorts of concerns and interests. Last House on the Left, for instance, is both a parable about American warfare in Vietnam and a remake of the Ingmar Bergman film The Virgin Spring (itself a 'remake' of a Medieval fable), as well as being a grueling (maybe not very good) exploitation film. What are the chances the fanboys have ever watched a Bergman film? Or have any thoughts whatsoever on the military industrial complex? Or, really, have anything to say at all about real life?

There's a difference between having something interesting to say about your time and context and doing so in a fairly hamfisted, inartistic way- which, to be honest, many of my favorite grindhouse movies do- and having a lot of interesting visual ideas, but without any central idea, and hiding any artistic weaknesses behind a retro aesthetic. "It's not supposed to be a good movie!" is the usual defense of these faux grindhouse flicks.

Fair enough. These movies were never high art. But, just like in any other genre, the truly original exploitation films stand out. Hobo with a Shotgun hasn't got many original bones in its tired old body. It's sort of a parody, although it's only sporadically funny. It works best as an homage, but I think I'd rather watch the geniunely bad movies this new wave of faux-filmmakers are endlessly referencing- at least the 70s crackpots were sincere in their artlessness.

Cannibals in the Streets (1980)

2011-05-13T10:24:00.001-07:00

Cannibals in the Streets was also released as Cannibal Apocalypse and Invasion of the Flesh Hunters, two titles that are a bit generic and don’t really capture what the movie is about. Cannibal Apocalypse was probably meant to confuse people who thought they were going to see either Zombie Apocalypse or Cannibal Holocaust, but a grand total of about ten cannibals in the movie doesn’t really make for much of an apocalypse, and it doesn’t make for much of an invasion either. This is not to say it’s a bad movie. In fact, I think it’s been disserved by its generic titles and has never gotten the love it deserves.

The movie is about a handful of vets who return from Vietnam with some sort of rabies-like virus that drives them to commit acts of cannibalism. John Saxon plays Norman Hopper, a former Army captain who is trying to suppress his own urges to bite people and fit back in to civilized life, something made particularly difficult when the sexy babysitter who keeps flirting with him hikes up her skirt and lets him go down on her. Apparently, he just nibbles her a bit, something she takes as a new kink, but how long can he hold out for? Meanwhile, his lovely wife is being courted by a doctor friend who is in charge of observing the troubled veterans from Hopper's unit, something that would make anyone want to go bite somebody. It’s a bit like the Italian cannibal film version of The Deer Hunter.

Even more troubled is Charlie Bukowski played by Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who has a great “disturbed” look that he put to use in The Gates of Hell (a.k.a City of the Living Dead) as the disturbed town crazy Bob, and Make them Die Slowly, in which he was really more of a cokehead, but did get the top of his skull lopped off with a machete, which is pretty disturbing. Here he has a great sequence in which he goes to see an afternoon showing of a war film- both an ironic commentary on the subject matter and a reference to May Heatherly, who appeared here as an infected nurse and in the film showing, From Hell to Victory. The film does not disturb him, but he is disturbed by the couple making out in the row in front of him.

Seriously, if you’re going to lay back and let your boyfriend suck your tits in a movie theatre, you’ve got to expect some trouble, but Charlie goes a bit too far by biting her neck. The girl screams and an angry mob of bikers dressed like Eurotrash (the movie is set in Georgia, but filmed by Italians) chase him into a thrift store where there’s a tense standoff with the police, only after he gets chased around the store by a motorcyclist and kills him and then kills the security guard who came running for the gunshots, but not for the motorcycle riding around the store. After a tense standoff, the police take him in. I’ve heard some reviewers complain that the story is slow-moving, but in the first forty minutes, we’ve already had a Vietnam battle sequence, pussy-biting, neck biting, a motorcycle chase, and a police standoff. What more do you want?

It does lose a bit of steam in the middle, as the police (led by the great grizzled Captain McCoy played by Wallace Wilkinson) and the hospital try to figure out what’s going on and Saxon tries to hold it together and keep his wife from leaving with that prick doctor. Luckily, before very long, the cannibals under observation, Charlie and Tom Thompson (Tony King of the Buffalo Bills and Shaft), plus a nurse they’ve infected, escape from the hospital with the intention of reliving their Vietnam experiences and actually flying back to Vietnam, where they’ll ostensibly be permitted to bite whoever they want. First, however, they have to duke it out with that motorcycle gang, who’ve apparently been waiting outside the hospital to jump Charlie for killing their comrade, and flee from the cops into the sewers; as the grizzled Captain puts it, “ashes to ashes and shit to shit!”

The movie reminded me of two earlier genre pictures, Deathdream(1974) and Rabid (1977), and the general perception that this it’s a rip off might be another reason that Cannibals in the Streets has lacked appreciation. In some ways, it’s a smaller scale Rabid and somewhat more effective as the domestic setting of the first half has more resonance- Saxon’s character is trying to hold it together even as he knows he, “hasn’t been the same since coming back from Vietnam.” In fact, the movie plays as an effective little parable about the war wounded who could never quite readjust to civilian life with the psychological scars they brought back, and how those mental illnesses consumed their loved ones and finally the larger society. It’s a bit how Romero’s First Blood might have played.

I’ve often said that social commentary plays best in horror movies when it’s couched as a parable, instead of delivered through didactic speeches. Here, the commentary seems fully intentional (the director Antonio Marheriti said as much), and there are lots of nice little touches- for instance, I love a shot in which a character dies in military uniform beneath a toy airplane with the letters U.S.A. hovering above his head. And yet the story can function just as easily as an Italian Romero rip-off, should you choose to take it as such. Either way, Saxon’s performance is much better than average. And, whether you take the film as a biting social commentary on the Vietnam War, or a movie about cannibals running amok, it’s got enough gore, action, sleazy sexuality, and scenery-chewing dialogue to qualify as fully entertaining.

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

2011-05-13T10:23:00.001-07:00

I've still not quite come to terms with Troma Films. Oh, I enjoy the fact that they make gooey, gorey, rabble rousing films of a singular outrageousness. But, usually, the movies are not very good. There's something about the usual Troma movie that reminds me of an unfunny Uncle trying to get you to pull his finger at a family reunion; it's hard to really hate anyone who's trying so hard and harmlessly to be liked, but you can only enjoy their company on a very limited basis. Usually, one Troma movie per year is about enough for me.

All of this explains why it took me so long to actually watch The Toxic Avenger, which is probably Troma's best movie, a compliment akin to "prettiest girl in the leper colony". And it's actually a very entertaining movie. You can see why they spun it off into three sequels, a cartoon series and action figures. I mean, in addition to the fact that Troma is shameless in their attempts to turn a buck. It's a silly little movie because of, and not in spite of, its head-crushing and scenes of kids being run over by cars.

As you likely know, the movie is about a nerdy janitor named Melvin (Mark Torgl) who gets pranked horribly by the beautiful people at the gym where he works and ends up diving into a barrel of toxic waste; fortunately, the toxic chemicals give him super powers instead of cancer and he turns into a hulking, lumpy latex faced mutant (Mitch Cohen) with the strength to easily kill all the bad people in the city of Tromaville, New Jersey. Luckily for him, there are plenty of criminals in the city, including the aforementioned bullies, who also revel in driving over pedestrians, a Mayor (played by Pat Ryan Jr. of Street Trash fame- now it feels a bit wrong laughing at the jokes about his immense weight since it's probably what killed him at age 44) selling out the town to polluting businessmen, plenty of robbers in leotards and face paint (no idea how that was supposed to be intimidating- are they going to commit aerobicide?), and a dude with a beard in drag. Melvin also falls in love with a sexy blind girl (Andree Maranda) and they live together in the dump.

As you can imagine, the movie is shameless in throwing bad jokes at you. Many of these jokes are groaners along the lines of an early visual gag in which an overweight woman does aerobics while eating a submarine sandwich. But, like the Naked Gun movies, there are so many jokes that one of them will eventually work. Admittedly, the majority of the jokes here would have been rejected by the Zucker brothers as too dumb.

So why does the movie work? I think there's just something winning in the film's ability to go over the line in about twenty different directions at once. The makeup effects, by Jennifer Aspinal who also worked wonders on Street Trash, are low budget miracles, the stunt work is pretty impressive, there are some impressive crowd scenes, and plenty of heads get mashed real good. Overall, you have to hand it to Troma- they made a film for an estimated $475,000 that looks like they spent $490,000.

Finally, for a movie about a toxc waste mutant who kills people, it's a surprisingly good natured film that seems to say that even a chronic loser can fall in love and become a hero- he just has to get poisoned by toxic waste. I'm glad that this one was the Troma movie I watched this year.

The Devil's Rain (1975)

2011-05-12T10:57:00.000-07:00

First off, don't be thrown by the PG rating; this is more like a 70s PG, which means your parents can take you to see it at the drive-in and you'll be scarred for life. Some of us are old enough to remember being scared shitless by William Shatner fighting pipe cleaner spiders in Kingdom of the Spiders. They didn't worry so much about kids in those days- they'd lock us in the car while grocery shopping or smoke at the dinner table and think nothing of it. Or, at least, my parents did. (I remember Dad always used to say, "children are to be seen and not fed".) Anyway, nowadays, this one would be R rated easily for the melting people and eyelessness. Not to mention all the Satanic stuff. Back then, before that son-of-a-bitch Reagan got in the White House, they had us worshipping Satan at a young age. It was a different time.

The Devil's Rain is one of a number of 70s Satan movies that followed the Exorcist, most of which involve convoluted story lines that assume some knowledge of theology (which is sort of the study of the ultimate convoluted storyline) and probably make more sense if you're Catholic. This film was written by three people, so it's safe to assume the storyline is convoluted. Luckily, the exposition is handled by Tom Skerritt and William Shatner, two of the finest actors of their generation.

Shatner plays Mark Preston, a man who fights the Devil. In fact, the movie begins with him going to fight the Devil, or at least the Devil's high priest, John Corbis, played with manic something-or-other by William Borgnine. I appreciated the fact that the movie began with things basically in progress instead of telling us more about Mark Preston. What do you need to know? He fights the Devil; just like his father fought the Devil and his father before him fought the Devil. In fact, his father shows up in the first few minutes to melt into a waxy goop after telling his son that he has to go fight Corbis again. He's polite enough to melt on the front porch instead of on the new rug inside.

So, Preston goes off to confront Corbis in the old Satanic church in a deserted Western ghost town. Look, I know what you're going to ask here and I have no fucking clue why they're located in a deserted Western ghost town, and after we hear their backstory (they were burned alive in New England pilgrim days) it makes even less sense that they'd be in an old wild west ghost town. But there you go- Wild West Satan Worshippers. The Devil worshipping ceremonies, incidentally, are totally legitimate- you know this because Anton LaVey, High Priest of the Church of Satan, served as a consultant on the film, surprisingly the only time he and Shatner ever worked together. (Shatner and Satan worked together for many years until they had a falling out in the 80s) LaVey also appears as a priest in a paper mache helmet that makes him look like a Satanic tit.

There's a lot of mumbo jumbo and the gist of it all is that, when the Devil gets your soul, you lose your eyes- a super creepy makeup effect by the Berman family- and look sort of waxy. Shatner's parents get the treatment and go missing and then he gets the treatment and goes missing. So, his brother (played by Skerritt) and his brother's sexy psychic wife (Joan Prather) come looking for him. The good for nothing Sheriff refuses to help (although he does drive out to the ghost town in order to inform Skerritt that the police will not actually search the ghost town; police in this area apparently being very selectively lazy), so they go themselves to wage war, enlisting the help of their teacher Dr. Richards (played by Eddie Albert, also slumming it).

There's a whole subplot with the "Devil's Rain", which is sort of like a giant Faberge egg with souls inside as well as rain- it apparently can kill Satanists, which is why they keep it in their Church, like the Wicked Witch with that bucket of water. Also, the Devil possesses Borgnine repeatedly, turning him into a goat-man. From one angle, none of this makes a lick of sense, which was a complaint audiences had at the time. From the other angle, mine, it's all awesome as hell. That angle, of course, is also drunk, so take it how you will.

Anyway, the convoluted storyline turned off viewers and the negative critical response effectively killed the career of director Fuest. Sadly, it did not kill the career of newcomer John Travolta (thanks a lot, Satan!) who has a small part. It's also a shame because the movie has a sort of nutty charm and would probably play well on a big screen to the right audience. I have no idea if it would play well with satanists though.

The Inconfessable Orgies of Emmanuelle (1982)

2011-05-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

And now for the Spanish take on the Emmanuelle films- more specifically Jess Franco’s take on them. Here the character is a more direct rip off- a diplomat’s wife whose name is spelled with two m’s, as opposed to the Italian character who has no husband and one m in her name. The main difference between the French and Spanish Emmanuelles is Franco’s Emmanuelle is horny and promiscuous but her husband does not want her to sleep around. This leads to all sorts of complications because, of course, she does sleep around and it makes him sooooo mad- but of course he forgives her.

Emmanuelle (Muriel Montossé) and Andreas (Antonio Mayans) have come to a sleepy Mediterranean town in order to rekindle their vows and are acting like lovebirds. She soon gets into trouble at a discothèque whose entertainment consists of the sleepiest stripper ever seen on film. Her act consists purely of shifting her weight back and forth from one leg to another in a sequined leisure suit. She stands around looking bored, takes her clothes off, and the drunk wife ends up on stage in a 69 with her. None of this is as interesting as it sounds in the film.

So, Emmanuelle and Andreas break up over this public sexcapade and fuck some people and then get back together. In between, she gets raped by some dudes on the beach, an unfortunate norm in these movies. A more interesting cliché is the progressive 70s ‘sexual liberation’ angle. Andreas comes to realize that monogamy doesn’t suit modern gals: “Maybe the problem is not you, but us. We’ve been brought up with outdated ideas: the couple, the family, the occasional fling. All that will disappear soon. And that will give way to new types of relationships. Maybe to total freedom in love.” Ah the 70s. Can you believe people once believed this stuff?

Anyway, the locations are gorgeous- another cliché with these movies- the lead actress is gorgeous, and the clothes are discotastic. One interesting touch is our narrator Tony, an aristocratic, decadent reactionary who rails about the new generation with their feathered hair and loose morals. He’s a parody of the Spanish aristocracy of the old regime and would make absolutely no sense in anything but a European flick. Of course I liked the promiscuity boosterism as well. And Montossé is lovely.

The problem? Jess Franco. The movie moves at a glacial pace and he has an annoying tendency to let the image go out of focus. Franco has a certain cache, probably because he did a zillion of these movies, but I’ve yet to watch one of his films that didn’t rely heavily on naked women instead of having something interesting happening in the storyline. He should have been a photographer because so many of his films come close to being still photography.

You do have to hand it to them though: the title is fantastic.

Let Me In (2010)

2011-05-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Let the Right One In was a quietly creepy Swedish vampire movie with a unique twist- the vampire in the story was a little girl and the seduced hero was a little boy and this was his very difficult first crush. What was great about the film was just how quiet and restrained it was- the small Swedish town looked like it was wrapped in a shroud of snow and I remember feeling like I was being too noisy eating popcorn in the theatre. The word for it was atmospheric.

Hollywood doesn’t generally do atmosphere, so news that the film was going to be remade for the benefit of those Americans who can’t be bothered to read subtitles and directed by the fellow who made the dreadful Cloverfield didn’t bode well. But, for the most part, this is a creepy, atmospheric vampire flick with a twist- not so unique the second time, of course. Thank god it’s not a betrayal of the source material, drawing from both the original movie and the book upon which the original film was based.

The little town is now in New Mexico, but as snow-covered and somber as Sweden. The young boy, Owen (Cody Smit-McPhee) lives with his mother in a cheap apartment complex when some strange neighbors move in next door: an older man (Richard Jenkins) and a young girl named Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) with some strange habits. She walks around in the snow barefoot and gets in loud fights with her older caretaker. On occasion, he kills people and drains their blood for her. In spite of this, Owen and Abby become fast friends and love blooms. But, will he still love her when he finds out that she’s not a girl? And what about the bullies at his school who have been making his life miserable; will they get theirs? The questions aren’t quite as open if you already saw the Swedish film, of course.

Simply put, this is a fairly strong, well-photographed genre film with some really clever set pieces and an engaging central storyline. A bit with a killer in the back seat of a car is fairly Hitchcockian and the eerie empty small town spaces reminded me of early John Carpenter, something that might have been intentional as the film is set in 1983; there are definitely some obvious visual homage to Spielberg. I also liked that they caught the same atmosphere of the Swedish film and the basic sadness of the story.

Any problems? Well, there are two: the CGI, as ever, looks fake. At some point, directors have to realize that CGI is just a cartoon, albeit a very detailed cartoon; thus, it almost always looks cartoony. The few times it was used here, it was hard not to start giggling- never good in a horror movie. The other problem is the obvious- the originality of the story is a bit diminished when you see the same story twice with different languages being spoken. But, what can you do? It’s rare enough to see a truly eerie horror film nowadays that it’s worth watching the same one twice.

The Sister-in-Law (1975)

2011-05-09T14:31:00.000-07:00

A lesson in exploitation movie marketing: To the left, we have the poster for the Crown International Picture "The Sister in Law", which bears the great ad line, "She destroyed her husband's brother- by the most immoral act imaginable!" If you saw this poster, you would think the movie was about a treacherous harlot who commits some sort of outrageous (likely sexual) sin in the movie, right?

Nope. The movie isn't at all about the sister-in-law destroying her husband's brother by any sort of immoral act. In fact, it's basically about a writer destroying his own brother by an immoral act while treating his wife, from whom he's separated, terribly. She's no harlot at all- I want my money back!

She is sexy though- Anne Saxon's performance here is enough to make you wish she'd done more movies. Her character is a wife whose husband has had some success that went to his head, resulting in him both moving in with a younger woman and getting deeply in debt with the mob. His brother, played by John Savage, returns home from time traveling the country and trying to find himself, and gets entangled in this sexual triangle by sleeping with his brother's wife and trying to seduce his girlfriend. Then the writer gets him running drugs to Canada for the mafia. It ends badly.

The Sister-in-law is a strange movie. It has some of the characteristics of an exploitation film: the characters get naked often, there's illicit sex and crime, and pretty shocking violence towards the end. But it's also a fairly straightforward character study with competent dialogue, acting, and direction by Joseph Reuben, who went on to make such great thrillers as "The Stepfather", "Dreamscape" and "Sleeping with the Enemy". It's got aspirations towards being a moral parable and everyone involved is giving it their all. It's also sort of wonky and strange in a way that actually enhances the quality of the film.

In the end, the characters are a bit unapproachable: the writer's a self-deluding prick; his wife should leave him but wants to hurt him; the hippie brother is self-destructive; and his girlfriend is a bit clueless. Now, I think that the characters are supposed to be this way- the film might well aspire to show people trapped in problems of their own making, in the style of Bergman. But it never quite jells- we don't really get to the deeper level of meaning that we do in Bergman, so we're just annoyed in the end at watching people do stupid things to destroy themselves.

Don't get me wrong: the finished product is not on the level of the European art house classics or the great American independent films of the 70s. But it's not remotely the sleazefest the poster promises. In a strange way, that's what's so great about that poster.

The Pick-Up (1975)

2011-05-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

Wow, that was not what I was expecting! If you’ve ever caught the trailer for this Crown International drive-in flick, you know that it makes the film look like a hippie sexploitation romp that ends violently. It sort of is that too; however, almost everything in the trailer comes from the first ten minutes or last ten minutes of the movie. What’s in between is a weird, semi-surrealist story about spiritual awakening and Edenic sexual bliss. There’s also a latex-faced clown in a swamp. Wow, man.

The film starts with two female friends sitting in a field together by the road, when they’re picked up by a kid named Chuck (Alan Long) who is delivering a mobile home to Tallahassee. The more sombre and spiritually-inclined of the two, Maureen (Gini Eastwood) is apprehensive about going with the boy because he’s an Aries and Aries is in a period of turbulence. Her friend Carol (Jill Senter) just wants to smoke pot and screw. The recent DVD box claims incorrectly that the movie was made in 1980, but movies like this were not made after 1976.

Maureen’s apprehensions die down after Chuck plays some Bach and Carol has a ball on the ride, doing a sort of interpretive sexy dance for a pickup full of young boys. Sure enough though, the weather starts getting rough and the road takes a detour; soon the mobile home is stuck in the mud of the Everglades.

This is where the film switches gears as Chuck and Carol return to a state of nature and Maureen regresses into memories of her childhood. Soon, the soundtrack is overpowered by trippy outer space sounds and Maureen is visited by Pithia, priestess of Apollo, receives a sacred dagger, and rolls around nude on a white stone altar in the middle of the swamp, while Carol and Chuck run around naked in the swamp. Did I mention this movie’s weird? If you saw it in the theatres during its original run, you were high.

Making the film even more mysterious, both Senter and Eastwood are gorgeous and neither ever did another film. The focus for the next hour is on two stories: Carol and Chuck’s burgeoning love and sexual liberation, and Maureen’s psychological breakthroughs. Maureen was molested by a Priest (they were into girls back then) and has frequent flashbacks to the incident. She is also visited by a two-faced politician who may or may not be the Devil (at one point, he voices support for abortion legalization, but she is ‘against all forms of killing’!) and an evil, latex-masked clown (in the middle of the swamp). While she’s the less-interesting of the two girls, clearly the story is focused on her inner life, something that makes sense with the twist-ending.

Meanwhile, Carol’s mother never understood her free and open sexuality and Chuck is just learning to be free” and “live in the here and now”, which requires him to hunt a wild boar with a bow and arrow- as with some other exploitation films, this one needlessly shows the animal being killed. The girls are freaked out by the killing, but the three roast the pig and Maureen finally burns a hole in her hand with a coal from the fire, so Chuck decides to seduce her. The two leave the bus and screw on the altar with the clown, politician, priest, and priestess watching. Incidentally, if you made this movie, you were also high.

Still, you have to admire the narrative daring of this movie. Combining Fellini and the drive-in aesthetic and going to all sorts of weird places, The Pick-Up takes more chances than most exploitation movies.

Rogue (2007)

2011-05-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

The trick with doing a movie about a killer crocodile, alligator, shark or octopus is just to make sure the thing doesn’t look fake. There are a ton of these movies and, particularly with the croc/gator films, the monster usually looks like fifty dollars worth of latex being operated as a puppet off-screen. The Si-fi Channel has, in recent years, proven that computer generated aquatic monsters can look even faker than latex, which is probably vindication for those puppeteers. Finally, for the record, the best of these movies ever, in my opinion, is Alligator, with Robert Forrester and a gator that emerged from the sewers to eat a kid in a swimming pool, among other great things. That was a combination of a real gator on a miniature set and a latex gator that didn’t look real either, but fuck the movie was so nutty that you didn’t care. Ah the 80s.

Anyway, in Rogue the croc is effective because the filmmakers keep it off screen through much of the movie. It’s the Jaws trick- all you have to show is the fin for most of the film and the shark at the very end and you can scare the crap out of people. In the last ten minutes or so, there’s a CGI crocodile that looks a wee bit goofy (seriously, you can’t escape CG looking goofy unless you have Industrial Light and Magic money), but by that point, you don’t care because the rest of the film has been so effective.

Rogue was made by the same Aussies who made Wolf Creek, a slasher film set in the Australian outback that basically pulled the “Psycho switch”- the storyline shifted radically after about half an hour- in addition to being much crueler than expected. I remember actually being shocked when the character we’ve come to expect will fight for survival in the movie is killed early and brutally, throwing the whole film off-balance. The ending of Wolf Creek was a bit of a disappointment, but at least they were willing to fuck with the audience.

This is another Aussie horror story- apparently, crocodiles really are this big and mean in Australia and the filmmakers explain in the making-of documentary that they’re just adopting true stories of croc attacks. In this case, the story is about a river tour boat that pisses off a very big crocodile and gets wrecked on a small island with the tide coming in, and they have to figure out how to get off the island.

Rogue is more a popcorn movie than Wolf Creek (which was not-at-all a popcorn movie), and the thrills are fairly effective without the story getting as rough as that film. They’ve definitely taken notes from Spielberg about how to utilize animals and kids and make minor characters believable and likeable before menacing them with the monster. Like early Spielberg, you could also see this one playing well at a drive-in. As for gore, it’s a bit tame, although a few people get chomped up good, and overall the thrills are effective. So, score one for the Aussies.

Frozen (2010)

2011-05-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

Basically an extended riff on “what would happen if you got stuck on a chair lift at a ski resort? and they closed for the week? and then there were wolves below? huh?”, Frozen is pretty scary for a movie about three people sitting in a chair for a few days. It’s also educational- I learned quite a bit about frostbite, wolf packs, and ski lifts- particularly that they all can suck.

Adam Green previously made the film Hatchet, a movie that suffered from what we can call the "Quentin Tarantino Law": if a filmmaker has seen all of the same exploitation movies you have, your enjoyment of their own movie will diminish in direct proportion to the number of times they reference them. Hatchet was less a slasher movie than a mix tape of cool things from actual slasher movies and considerably less enjoyable than it was intended to be.

So it’s a relief to see Green crank out an effective movie that is actually somewhat original. The three characters are young college kids (they’re always college kids, aren’t they?) who are on a ski trip together. Dan (Kevin Zegers) has a girlfriend Emma (Parker O'Neil) and a pal (Shawn Ashmore) who is clearly feeling like a third wheel and acts like a bit of a douchebag as a result. I’m not sure that filmmakers realize how often sarcastic characters start seeming like dicks- maybe it’s something with college kids today actually being dicks, but I don’t think so. I suspect the point is to build tension between the characters and then get them stuck on a ski lift. But, we’re not exactly talking an Ingmar Bergman level of characterization here.

Actually, the ski lift is the most developed character in the film. The lift is way off the ground, so jumping is a bad idea, very cold which leads to some really gruesome skin irritations, and fairly rickety. I was truly glad that the filmmakers realized it would be much more effective to film a real ski lift and not a lift in front of a green screen- this added a layer of realism to the proceedings. You can really tell they’re way up there. And there was a nice attention to details. Did you know that the wires holding those things are razor-sharp so it’s difficult to swing across them hand over hand? Apparently this is true. Did you know that frostbite itches, but you can’t scratch it without removing your skin? The film is educational!

Green has since made another Hatchet film that was booted from theatres because it was too much of a niche movie and the economics of the multiplexes are brutal. It’s a shame, but I’d much rather see him do more movies like Frozen and someone figure out a way to put the multiplexes out of business.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1977)

2011-05-04T08:32:00.000-07:00

I first heard of this 1977 Samuel Z. Arkoff presented slasher flick by way of a newspaper ad from that year, which I found preserved in the trunk of a junked car in the woods. The painting of a bag-masked killer looking down on a town at night piqued my interest: what was this movie and why hadn't I heard of it before? I made it my mission to track down a copy, fully aware that it might turn out to be terrible. Finally, I got my hands on a VHS edition at London, Ontario's Shock Stock Convention. And you know what? It 'aint half bad.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown is a police procedural about a slasher who terrorized a Texarkana town in 1946. The film does a good job of contextualizing its story in the time and place and detailing how the killer's reign of terror drove residents to the gun shops and locksmiths. The police deputy Norman Ramsey (played by Andrew Prine) leads the operation with help from Captain J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson), the "most famous ranger in the history of Texas". Ultimately, however, it's an unsolved crime, which means we never find out who did it or why and he could still be out there!

The film suffers a bit from a problem common to most crime docudramas: we find out what the characters did to solve the crime, but almost nothing about who they were. Johnson in particular is great as always, but he doesn't have much to do aside from riding around in cars chasing people. Since this is a 70s drive-in flick, there is a superfluous car chase scene with a car flying through the air and landing in a lake. There is also unfunny comic relief provided by the rookie cop 'Sparkplug'. Oh, that Sparkplug!

Nevertheless, the scenes with the killer are effective. I liked that the teen boy killed in the opening scene was named "Sammy Fuller" in reference to one of the great B-movie directors. Also, the killer's tendency to tie up women and bite them all over if pretty creepy. There's a particularly unique scene in which he kills a woman via knife-rigged slide trombone. And horror fans who have ever watched Gilligan's Island and asked themselves, "Who would you rather see stalked: Ginger or Mary Ann?" can see Dawn Wells (Mary Ann) flee in terror during a home invasion scene. Finally, the fact that the killer is never caught is frustrating and unnerving, and probably true-to-life.

Somebody should give The Town that Dreaded Sundown a better DVD release. It's not a lost classic; but it is an example of solid, never showy filmmaking of a kind that we seldom see anymore.

Resurrection County (2008)

2011-05-04T06:05:00.000-07:00

Ah, rednecks- they've been the staple of many horror films ever since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre forced us all to consider how terrifying it might be to share dinner with them. In this direct-to-DVD survival flick we're firmly in the backwoods of Creepy County, where the radio only plays fire and brimstone preachers with molasses-thick accents and the general stores sell chewing tobacco right next to the sleeveless flannel shirts.

Into this stere-o-typeecal hick town come traipsing some strangers from the city, which is problematic because characters in these towns typically hate strangers from the city nearly as much as they hate sleeves. The strangers from the city are two couples out for some touristy fun racing off-road vehicles, camping, and tresspassing on hillbilly land. The deeper into the backwoods they go, the more the characters look like illustrations from a 1920s argument for eugenics. The movie does a good job of making the backwoods seem menacing and the characters are sort of engaging, even though they should be wearing signs from the beginning reading, "I will fight for my survival" and "I will be killed by the hicks first".

And wouldn't you know it? The off-roaders ride right onto trailer trash land. There's a melee, a ruckus if you will, and one of the hicks winds up dead bringing a whole mess o' trouble down on our heroes. If none of this sounds very original to you, you're right. Just like in Texas Chainsaw, the hicks in town all know each other and work together. And they're led by a menacing preacher straight out of Night of the Hunter. The only thing missing is the child-like, pregnant hillbilly girl whose baby is clearly a product of incest. Maybe in the sequel. As Iwas watching the movie, I kept thinking that the only two groups you can make fun of with relative impunity are rednecks and Italian Americans. You would have problems if this film was about kids running afoul of inner city blacks, although that was the plot of nearly every Charles Bronson film in the 80s.

Also, I'm sort of old school; I can't look at anything on digital video without thinking of cable access. Resurrection County doesn't escape any of these problems, but it does have a certain je ne sais what the fuck that is enjoyable. The acting is serviceable with Robert Miano's Parson character being a standout. And it gets some mileage out of the Wolf Creek tactic of being meaner than expected. So, it's worth a two dollar rental. Just don't believe the crap on the box about it being "horrifying".

If a Tree Falls (2010)

2011-05-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

It’s funny that so many low budget horror filmmakers are now trying to imitate the 70s grindhouse flicks, because so many of those vintage grindhouse epics were themselves imitations of bigger budget Hollywood movies of their time. At some point, I imagine Hollywood will be shooting faux-faux digital video grindhouse epics in homage to this time period. Every cultural item will eventually be a subject of nostalgia.

Of course, I’m also a fan of those old grindhouse movies, so I imagine I’m the target audience for these homage films. When a Tree Falls is an example, taking one of those old chestnuts, in this case “this group of young people went camping in the woods and ran into some backwoods psychos”, playing it straight, and using various effects to make the digital video look like scratched and faded old film stock. There are also some visual and music cues that recall the films of that era as well as a generally high level of brutality in line with the subgenre.

The young people in question are a brother and sister (played by Ryan Barrett and Jennifer De Lucia) and their two friends (played by Breanne TeBoekhorst and Daniel Zuccala). They’re going out into the wilds of Canada for a weekend trip. The acting is decent for a no-budget movie and there are some interesting subplots indicating the filmmakers’ intention to draw us into the characters before placing them in peril, which is nice. Unfortunately, one of the characters, Will (Zuccala), is a stock horny douche bag of the sort that are becoming common in these movies. Does every group of friends now have one friend who’s a dick weed? Is it a generational thing? None of my friends were dicks. Of course, that probably means I was the dick!

Anyway, the backwoods mutants are much more interesting. The filmmakers had the inspired idea to give them no dialogue until a pivotal scene, so they’re silent and all wearing nylons over their faces and behave like small and violent children; it’s a creepy touch. I guess Ils sort of did the same thing, but there was a lot less interaction between the pshycho kids and the victims in that movie. These psycho kids are a lot weirder. I liked the unnerving bit in which they stroked the characters' faces like they were pets. There’s also a fair amount of mystery and tension in the film, as opposed to reaching immediately for heaping buckets of gore. The film does bring the viscera eventually but the buildup leads us to the payoff as opposed to so many no-budget horror films that are all payoff.

The creators have been self-distributing their movie and it’s worth a viewing; it definitely shows potential. Their intention seems to be to set up a series of films about the nylon-masked killers, but it would be more interesting to see them do something totally different instead. For me, the most enjoyable old exploitation movies were the ones that pulled something out of left field instead of paying homage to the old chestnuts.

Mayhem (1986)

2011-04-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

A direct-to-video crime saga that suffers from being fairly competently made: if there had been an incompetent writer, director, or actor involved, it could have become a minor cult classic. As it is, the film is a bit amateurish and very low budget- everything shot on video looks low budget anyway- and good for some sleazy thrills, but nothing terribly memorable.

Dino (Raymond Martino) and Ziggy (Robert Gallo) are two hitmen in Los Angeles, both with lady problems. Dino’s girlfriend Rachel (Wendy MacDonald) left him for another man and he’s still obsessed with her; Ziggy’s girlfriend Misty (Pamela Dixon) and one-woman escort service has been taken hostage by kidnapping pimps. In order to straighten all of this out, they’re going to have to shoot a lot of people. There’s also a lot of detective work, via montage, in which they scour the city, instead of just looking in the building into which she was dragged. Luckily, lots of people get shot up real good, and the squib effects are pretty effective. There’s also some decent nudity, ridiculously slimy hoodlums, and an incredibly sleazy scene in which an evildoer who’s been running a pre-school pedophile ring is shot in the vagina with a shotgun!

Both Gallo and Martino are decent actors for this sort of thing and the dialogue is always on this side of silly, aside from a reoccurring subplot in which one hitman wants to move to Alaska (movie hitmen and strippers always want to be doing something else with their lives). There is the common problem with very low budget films in which the camera doesn’t move or even cut between shots as often as it could. There are also some story problems. The character of Dino is supposed to be a jealous, macho and haunted male, akin to Jake LaMotta; but instead comes off as an insufferable misogynist and constant whiner, so we’re sort of rooting for him to get killed off. There’s also a third-act twist for him that pushes past credible, and a twist-ending that makes even less sense. Really, it’s just hard to watch two characters when one is boring and the other is insufferable. The two female characters are sort of non-entities. Finally, it’s still unclear why there was so much detective work involved in finding a girl who was dragged into a building in front of our hero’s eyes.

But, let’s be honest: given that the thing was probably made for three dollars and some change, there are so many other things that could have easily gone wrong.

Laure (1975)

2011-03-15T20:24:00.000-07:00

This is a movie that was not just made in the 70s, it was made by the 70s. The 70s should have a production credit of some sort, or one of those notices like they have on PBS- "This movie was made possible by the 70s". Everyone in the film seems stoned at all times, dresses in very comfortable-looking leisure clothes and swaps sexual partners. I'd like to live there.

Set around a research university in Manilla, the film stars the lovely Annie Belle as Laure, the free-spirited daughter of the University Director who meets the similarly free-spirited Nicola (played by Al Cliver who is in half the Italian movies I watch). We know she's free-spirited because while she's operating the slide projector during a professor's lecture a hippie girl under the podium licks her pussy. Luckily, Nicola is also free spirited and would like nothing better than to watch her have sex with lots of men, which works out fine for her. They're clearly an ideal match.

For most of the movie, there is little in the way of plot. Nicola is making a documentary about love and they sort of wander around having sex with various people and speaking pretentiously about open sexuality. Much of the dialogue is along the lines of:

Him: You want everything and think everything is possible.

Her: And you what is your dream?

Him: I should like to see you doing impossible things.

(And delivering impossible dialogue!)

The open-marriage lifestyle was, of course, detailed in the Emmanuelle films, and Emmanuelle Arsan apparently wanted to take a more active role in the filming of one of her books than she was with those films- she's a supporting actress here and actually has a few sex scenes, including a very silly one with girl-girl and flower sex. Her involvement sort of explains the otherwise inexplicable American title "Forever Emmanuelle" since nobody in the film is named Emmanuelle. I'm still confused about who directed this movie- different sources say Arsan, her husband, or herself under another name. Apparently, the production fell apart and everyone disowned the film.

This is a shame because the movie's got some advantages over the real Emmanuelle- for one thing, the main character is much more in charge of her situation and less of a borderline victim than the character in the French Emmanuelle- in this, she's more akin to Laura Gemser's Italian character. Also, Laure is a prettier movie to look at- the locations are more lush and the direction more adept. Finally, Annie Belle is a truly lovely actress, probably moreso than Sylvia Kristel.

Whatever else you want to say about it, Laure is a strikingly beautiful movie. The Philippine locations are well-photographed, the visuals are evocative, and there's a dreamy/druggy vibe to it all that makes this a pleasant movie to watch- given the era it was made, it's likely that plenty of audience members watched it while stoned and that would certainly suit the film.

The drawbacks? The characters are very one-dimensional, really just there to express the writer's ideas about non-monogamy. The plot is a bit silly- a story in which the characters go searching for a tribe who is "reborn" annually is interesting but only shows up in the last 20 minutes. A story in which Laure screws a transvestite in a helicopter while her boyfriend films and nobody flies the thing is pretty silly. Finally, there's not a great deal of chemistry between Cliver and Bell, which is strange considering they were an item during the filming.

But, I think a movie like Laure should be watched in the spirit it was intended- so, get really stoned and be enchanted by the beautiful tropical locales and naked people, and maybe the psuedo-philosophical dialogue will sound deep, man.

The Salute of the Jugger (1989)

2011-03-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

I first heard about this movie when it was released in the US as The Blood of Heroes. Rick Sullivan's classic zine the Gore Gazette recommended the flick, noting, "although the flick is yet another in an endless spate of post-apocalyptic sci-fi bludgeonthons, it is packed with enough explicit violence, senseless carnage and ample nudity to enable gorehounds to forget they've been down this road a zillion times before." That road is the one Mel Gibson took in The Road Warrior, in which the apocalpyse has come and left everyone in the desert and Australian.

After the wars, everyone lives like bedouins in a desert landscape. The only heroes in this world are athletes known as "juggers" who play a game in which everyone puts on makeshift armor and beat the crap out of each other with chains and clubs- the winner is whoever can stick a dog skull on a stake! It does look like fun though and in recent years real world jugger leagues have sprung up in Germany, the US, and Australia. One assumes they don't use dog skulls.

Rutger Hauer is Sallow, the head badass of his jugger team who apparently once played in the League many years ago. Joan Chen plays Kidda, a cute young scrapper on her way up in the sport who wants to make the team and is willing to bite a dude's ear off to win a match. Vincent D'Onofrio is Young Gar, the more experienced player who befriends her and beds her before Hauer. Sullivan was exaggerating about the nudity being "ample", although we do briefly see Chen's juggers. D'Onofrio had just gotten off of Full Metal Jacket- he's really in a world of shit here. (Not a comment on the quality of the movie)

The League is where the really good players go and our heroes want to make the League. This requires going to one of the Nice Cities underground and challenging the legitimate juggers to a match. Salo has some sort of dark secret in his past- the upper crust lords want him to be blinded in the match- all of which is going to come to a head in the climactic match. And, of course, there will be a climactic match and there's no points for guessing who wins.

Okay, so none of this is particularly original stuff, but it's easy to see why the film has attracted a little cult following. Clearly, a lot of care went into creating this world. For example, the costumes are really well designed- there's a common desert nomad look to them, mostly in browns and blues, that looks like they were put together by a professional instead of just having the extras show up to the set in old clothes like they usually do with these post-apocalyptic movies. Also, there are some really good make-up f/x by Michael Westmore and Bob McCarron- everyone pretty much looks like they've been dragged behind a mule face down. The action is well-choreographed and bloody and the movie moves at a good pace. The direction, by David Peoples who also wrote the film, is assured and engaging. Finally, the acting is solid and the dialogue is never corny, not always the case in action movies; admittedly, "I never hurt a soul for any reason but to put a dog skull on a stake" is pretty memorable.

So, if you like post-apocalyptic action movies from the 80s, this is a must-see.

Endgame (1983)

2011-03-08T06:28:00.000-08:00

An Italian action film (a.k.a. by the great "Bronx Lotta Finale") set in the distant future year of 2005, after a nuclear blast has wiped out the cities and left people either burned, mutated, or made up like 80s new age band members- a fate worse than death. I’ve never entirely understood why, in the 80s action movie dystopian future, people are starving and desperate but have lots of face paint. Anyway, the main form of entertainment is “Endgame” a televised game show in which three hunters try to track and kill a player designated as prey. It’s hard not to wonder if Stephen King saw Endgame before writing The Running Man- then again, “what if there was a game show where they hunted people?” isn’t exactly blazingly original.

Alas, the game show plot doesn’t last very long. Mark Shannon (Al Cliver, yet again) is the prey in the game. Meanwhile, black trench coat and gas mask wearing storm troopers called the Security Services (SS- get it?) are on a secret military mission to exterminate the mutants and a strange woman (played, of course, by Laura Gemser) repeatedly tries to enlist the hero’s help. And, about a half-hour in, he’s won the game and the story switches to his mission to protect the mutants on their way out of the city. Shannon assembles a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude: martial artist, guy who catches knives, fat guy with a battleax, etc.

The government wants the mutants- really psychics- dead because they pose a threat of some sort in a society that has no order anyway. And our heroes want to help the mutants in order to get a lot of gold in a society where there’s nothing much to buy. Anyway, the government agents drop out of the story after the first half hour anyway, only to show up at the last ten minutes, and our heroes are inexplicably fighting blind monks and guys on dirt bikes until then. There’s lots of scenes shot in quarries and abandoned buildings. There’s a battle with hundreds of monks in black cloaks getting gunned down that gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. There are souped-up battle cars. And there are Laura Gemser’s nipples for a few seconds. Basically, it’s a movie for 12 year old boys awaiting its Saturday matinee.

Bonnie's Kids (1973)

2011-02-23T17:19:00.000-08:00

A nasty little noir gem from the golden days of the drive-in, Bonnie's Kids follows the genre formula of detailing the machinations of slippery, manipulative operators as they double-cross one another. Almost nobody in this movie is even slightly reputable. It's lots of fun.

We start off in a crappy small town, where the two daughters of Bonnie (long dead- Mom's name's an attempt to cash in on Bonnie and Clyde), are living with their stepdad; Charlie's a mean old man who can hardly stand how his sexy stepdaughter Myra (Robin Mattson) cock teases the boys in their dead-end town. He tries to rape the girl to teach her a lesson, but her sister Elly (Tiffany Bolling) shoots him dead with a shotgun in the unbelievably sleazy first ten minutes of the movie. They then steal his pickup truck and head for El Paso. Briefly, it looks like it will be a tale of personal growth and liberation. No such luck.

Here, the girls hook up with their Uncle Ben, a rich businessman of some sort, and his spoiled trophy wife, moving into their ranch. The movie here splits into two stories when Elly is sent by her uncle to pick up a package with his employee Larry (Steve Sandor). The package turns out to be $300 thousand, so you can imagine what they decide to do about it and, before long, they're on the run with Uncle Ben's two goons out to kill them. Mayhem ensues on that end. Many people have suggested that the two goons in Bonnie's Kids could have been the model for John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's characters in Pulp Fiction. Since Quentin Tarantino's got very few ideas of his own, it's entirely possible, but hard to say for sure. Neither of them has a "Bad Motherfucker" wallet.

Meanwhile back on the ranch, Myra is getting hit on relentlessly by her Aunt, who's clearly a lesbian. She's playing the Aunt and screwing the stable boy instead, although her real interset seems to be stealing whatever she can get from the mansion. We soon realize that she's a heartless tramp, her sister is about the same, and their Uncle is a criminal thug. Along the way, there are plenty of sleazy touches, like when one of the goons goes to kill a woman in a cheap motel but takes the time to spy on her in the shower first. There's also bloodshed, nudity, and good old fashioned nasty behavior. Recommended.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

2011-02-21T16:29:00.000-08:00

A throwback to 50s sci-fi movies with a good amount of 70s nudity, Invasion of the Bee Girls is more fun than it has any right to be. Our story begins in a hilariously crappy fleabag motor lodge where a government researcher is found dead in his room of heart failure do to "extreme exhaustion"- meanwhile, the guy in the next room heard strange humming that he attributed to the television set. Soon, the government has their best man on the case. Admittedly, a middle aged, heavy set man having a massive heart attack isn't exactly a big mystery, so it's not entirely clear why they've put a man on the case; but, okay, plot mechanics ahoy! Anyway, he interviews the dead man's former mistress at length and romance starts

Cut to two pasty, naked motorcyclists making rolling love in the long grass before he drops dead and she walks off making buzzing noises. And in the local frat house, two kids trying to get it on discover a dead frat brother. Clearly, they're not that dedicated to the frat lifestyle since this stops them. Soon, there are enough deaths for the police to warn the public about men dying during sexual intercourse and call for abstinence, leading an angry old fart to call it the stupidest damn thing he's ever seen and insist that he's going to continue, "screwing my old lady and anyone else for that matter!" The local hardhats are pretty convinced it's them damn eggheads in that scientific research center screwin' around with sumpthin or other.

Well, duh. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford of The Big Bird Cage), a sexy entomologist at the institute, who frequently dresses in labcoats without anything under them and huge Gloria Steinem sunglasses, is merging women with bees, a process that involves having women in lab coats with nothing under them strip the patient naked, cover her with a white goop, stick her in a cell full of bees, and then removing the goop and making out with her. And then they all massage their own bare breasts because why not? This is pretty much a 13-year old boy's version of science.

So, the bee girls are killing horny guys by screwing them, with one exception- one of the researchers winds up dead- run over by a car instead of screwed to death. He was homosexual, a fact exposed after our hero discovers his very 70s gay sex pad. Apparently, lava lights mean homosexuality, something I'd always suspected. The Army tries cordoning off the town, but ultimately for the killing spree to end, men have to stop being susceptible to sexy women who want to screw them. In other words, they're doomed.

It's unlikely they were taking any of this nonsense too seriously, but happily the movie plays it straight. It's also about as sleazy as it sounds with nudity a plenty.

Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

2011-01-11T09:21:00.001-08:00

It's noteworthy how many of the classic monster movies have a thwarted love theme- King Kong, the Mummy, Frankenstein (in the sequel), Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon- they all had trouble getting the girl due to their relative monstrousness. Many writers have argued that the subtext to these films, in which a hideous creature carries away an unwilling female, is rape and the fear of adult sexuality in general. Luckily for us, Roger Corman doesn't do subtext, so from him we get Humanoids from the Deep, an updated version of the old creature on the beach flicks in which the ugly creatures are here to kill the men and rape the women.

You can see how this could be pretty offensive, and you know, it sort of is. However, the fact that the creatures are guys in rubber fishman suits with large rubber brains sort of mitigates against the offensiveness. To put it bluntly, a man raping a woman is pretty shocking (and something I've complained about with some of the other exploitation films I've talked about here) but a rubber fishman with a huge brain raping a woman is a bit more silly than offensive.

The fishmen are actually genetic mutants created by a corporate cannery that has injected the salmon in a small fishing town with chemicals in order to make them breed faster. There's local intrigue because the fishermen want the company in town with their fancy genetically-modified salmon, while the local Indian tribe wants them to stay away from the traditional lands, and doesn't trust the company in general, what with their crazy chemicals. These are all B-movie characters, so you have the classic conflict- Indians love the land and rednecks love beating up Indians. Well, of course, the Indians are right here because those genetically-modified fish are just raping and killing up a storm.

Our hero is Jim Hill (played by B-Movie stalwart Doug McClure, who you might remember from such films as...) who thinks there's something behind the recent string of dog-killings. His wife, Carol (Cindy Weintraub) agrees and gets some screen time as the damsel in distress, but is entirely too hot not to have screen time as the damsel in the shower. The local loudmouth bigot is Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow, a TV stalwart who was killed a few years later on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie), who starts a brawl at the annual Salmon Festival with the Indian hero, Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), who is pretty much like every movie Indian in that he has a deep relationship with the earth and gets beat up by rednecks. There's also a corrupt mayor and a hot lady scientist who created the fishmen with her crazy chemicals.

And, of course, there are also a good number of horny teenagers coming to the beach to have sex, but ultimately getting fish-fucked or fish-massacred, including a young man who actually seduces a sexy girl via ventriloquist dummy, a likely first in cinema, or reality. Finally, there's a victimized girl in the hospital impregnated with a fishbaby.

The chum hits the fan at the yearly Salmon Festival when the Humanoids decide to go a rampaging and even Miss Salmon gets her top ripped off. The massacre scenes are remarkably bloody and the Humanoid suits, by Rob Bottin, are fairly awesome. The film also works because it's outrageous without ever veering into intentional satire. Also, by this point, Roger Corman pretty much knew what his audience wanted: monsters, tits and gore.

Trailer:

Extra: Believe it or not, punk singer Jello Biafra wrote a song about Humanoids from the Deep:

Black Swan (2010)

2011-01-09T17:52:00.001-08:00

An expressionist horror film currently in wide release, Black Swan deserves recognition for dealing with such heady subjects as the duality of human nature, the fragmentation of personality by mental illness, the projection by stage parents onto their children, and the uniquely impossible demands placed on women in modern society. Conceptually audacious, and drawing on such varied sources as All About Eve, Suspiria, Repulsion, and, of course, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the film suffers from too many baroque flourishes and brushes with the garish. Also, its highly visual style, reminiscent of Hitchcock’s idea of “pure cinema”, might be taken as “operatic” in how it deals with these themes, or maybe just superficial. As with nearly all of Darren Aronofsky’s films so far, there does seem to be something missing in the storyline- a hole that gets papered over with stylistic daring.

Expressionist drama frequently depicts a central character’s spritual suffering as they go through a series of painful events quite often modeled on the stations of the cross. Our martyr here is Nina, played by Natalie Portman, a self-sacrificing ballerina whose perfectionism facilitates neurosis, bulimia, scratching her skin bloody, and finally breaking with reality. Ultimately, her stations of suffering will lead her, we are aware, to either transcendence of selfhood through dance, a mental breakdown, or death; and probably all three. It becomes clear fairly early in the film that her grasp on reality is weakening, partly because we suspect that her new friend/rival Lily, played by Mila Kunis, is just a projection of the darker aspects of her personality, particularly the sexual, and partly because Arronofsky introduces classic images of the uncanny early on, such as Nina passing herself on a sidewalk. A later scene, with Winona Ryder stabbing herself, is fully in line with the logic of nightmares. And at times, Aronofsky’s visual sense, for as refreshingly risk-taking as it is, verges on symbolism for dummies. Having Nina dressed in white as often as Lily is clad in black is a bit like hammering us over the head, not to mention a borderline-goofy late scene in the film in which a character literally transforms into a swan.

Similarly, Barbara Hershey’s overbearing stage mother is a great portrayal of a one-note character. Aronofsky uses the character partly to convey the short careers of professional ballerinas, but he also uses Winona Ryder’s character Beth to do the same and her portrayal is much more interesting anyway. As in The Wrestler, the director is fascinated with performers who pour their lives into professions that are inherently limited by the aging of the human body, itself a subject of The Fountain. Here, as well, he takes great interest in showing the daily rituals that his characters engage in; asRequiem for a Dream was nearly a primer on shooting heroin, this film is a good guide to preparing ballet shoes for dance.Expressionism also deals frequently with the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie and especially Father authority figures. Vincent Cassel, as the director of the dance company who sleeps with all his lead dancers, does a great job portraying the emotionally-distant father that dominates Nina’s psyche. He triggers a sexual awakening that makes her perfectionist character more relatable (Nina is, frankly, a bit of a prig) and is likely tied to her mental breakdown. Frankly, I think Cassel could read the phone book and make it compelling, but he’s especially good playing an asshole.

The one real problem I have with the film, and it’s a problem I have with nearly all of Aronofsky’s films (the exception being the perfect Requiem for a Dream) is that it’s not clear to me if Aronofsky is dealing with profound themes or just beckoning towards those themes without really engaging in them. A particularly over the top scene in which Portman masturbates alone in her room before recoiling in terror at a hallucination of her mother in the corner conveys the role her mother plays in the character’s psyche, but is also a little obvious. A later scene with Hershey painting image after image of her daughter verges on camp. It’s easy to imagine the film becoming a staple of drag queens and midnight showings.

But I suppose Aronofsky gets extra credit because so few general release American movies deal in any way with adult psychology anymore. The kiddie matinee so dominates the multiplexes now that we could be overestimating the handful of films that are made for adult viewers and all released in this month every year as Oscar-bait. It’s not to say that Black Swan isn’t a really good movie. But, if Arronofsky had a bit more faith in his material and his viewers, it could have been great.

Horror Safari (1982)

2011-01-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

A low-budget Indiana Jones knock-off from Italy that works much better than it has any right to, Horror Safari (A.K.A. Invaders of the Lost Gold [a title that's even funnier than Horror Safari- how in the hell does one invade gold, especially if it's lost?]) begins with a Japanese platoon during WWII stealing a chest of gold and hiding it in the jungles of Japanese-occupied Philippines. In the process, the natives pick off most of the platoon via decent gore f/x. I also like the costumes in this sequence. I mean, sure the film is cheap. Hell, if you took all the movies I watched last year and added up their budgets, you still couldn't finance Avatar! But this one works because it looks a lot like one of those B-movies Hollywood used to make in the 40s- in other words, the very movies that Raiders of the Lost Ark was ripping off, this Raiders rip-off evokes- it's the cycle of cinematic life!

Anyway, three Japanese soliders survive the massacre and they swear to return someday. 36 years later, Rex Larson (Edmund Purdom), a rich bastard, shows up asking the survivors about the gold. He kills one of the ex-soldiers in a shootout and the next commits hari-kari. Luckily, the third, Mr. Tobashi, is willing to go along on the rich bastard's planned expedition to retrieve the gold. Along for the ride are Larson's partner, Mr. Jefferson (David DeMartin), Jefferson's daughter Janice (Glynis Barber), Tobachi's wife Maria (played by Laura Gemser, naturally) and the American adventurer Mark Forrest (Stuart Whitman), who has a drinking problem, did jail time, and has a dark secret in his past involving the rich bastard, but is the best there is at leading these expeditions. Whitman's character, incidentally, is introduced during a bar brawl that seems to suggest that American sailors are astoundingly racist and go to the worst titty bars in Japan.

Off they go into the jungle and Forrest hits it off with Janice, which is a bit disappointing for Maria, his ex-lover who wants to start things up again. The strangeness of Laura Gemser not having a sex scene in the film does not tear a hole in the time-space continuum, thankfully, and probably because she does have a nude scene. Her nude scene, incidentally is very brief, and her part in the film is minor; but you'll notice how central it is to the film's advertising! It's also sort of weird because she goes skinny dipping and then cries out in pain for no apparent reason and we're to understand that her character has been killed. I'm really just amazed that the film was never entitled "Emanuelle Goes on a Horror Safari".

As you might have guessed, characters are gradually picked off one-by-one in creative ways that eschew continuity or plot coherence, and at the end we find out who was doing it. This shouldn't be much of a surprise- after all, it is a horror safari. But, you might be surprised to find that the film doesn't become a cannibal epic. It's still got some decent gore, a few thrills, and some brief nudity. Other reviewers have complained that it's not very exciting. But I liked the throwback aspects of it and found it more competant than most of the films I've seen lately. Maybe I do need to stop watching so much crap though.

Sister Emanuelle (1977)

2011-01-02T19:16:00.000-08:00

A nun?! It's pretty hard to see how they were going to sell this movie as part of the "Black Emanuelle" series, since it's difficult to figure out how Laura Gemser's character transitioned from being a slutty photojournalist to a nun. Apparently, however, this is not an "official" Black Emanuelle film (which, themselves, aren't official Emmanuelle films), but a knockoff, according to Mondo Esoterica. Glad I've got that straight. It probably also goes without saying that this is not a religious film.

Nevertheless, Sister Emanuelle is actually a very entertaining movie, thanks to the incorporation of some much-needed (intentional) humor. The story concerns Monica, played by the lovely Monica Zanchi (who made out with Gemser in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals in front of a waterfall and behind a smoking monkey), a trampy young girl whose rich father and equally trampy new young wife have her put in a convent, but not before new mom French kisses her goodbye in front of the nuns!

Gemser plays "Sister Emanulle" (or 'Sister Manuelle' occasionally) who spends the first bit of the film transporting the girl to a secluded convent via motorboat through the canals of Venice and a train, where the young harlot slips off to blow the conductor before getting nude and coming on to the Sister in their cabin. This provokes the following, awesome, exchange: Gemser: "You're a lost soul!" Zanchi: "That's alright by me as long as I have a body." This is my kind of girl.

There is also a great scene in which Monica recounts to the nuns the tearful story of being assaulted by three young strangers at the beach in the voice-over, while the flashback actually shows her seducing them. Zanchi does a great job playing a young girl whose motivation consists of being basically impressed with her body and the trouble she can cause with it. It's obviously a one-note role (and film), but everyone has fun with it, and it's nice that the character's lie is the closest we come to sexual assault in the film (a problem in the Black Emanuelle series). Anyway, off they go to the convent, where Monica immediately takes off and Sister Emanuelle has to chase her down and subdue her. She struggles with the girl and wrestles her into sexy submission but catches hell for wearing the wrong panties under her habit! Apparently, the Mother Superior is a bitch on wheels and forces the nun to wear woolen undies, which is clearly difficult for her.

Intrigue increases after Monica gets roomed with Annie (Vinja Locatelli), a square girl who thinks she's in line for sainthood! Nevertheless, Monica repeatedly comes on to her probably causing some issues with sainthood, but soon discovering that Miss Goody-two-shoes is okay with having her pussy eaten. Sister Manuelle, meanwhile, seems to be getting sick of this nun shit as well, as indicated by her wearing increasingly sexy underwear. If the plot thickened any more it would be concrete.

But thicken it does! Into the picture comes an escaped convict, played by the versatile Gabriele Tinti, who is in most of the Laura Gemser films. Monica first discovers him and hides/conspires with the convict in order to bonk him repeatedly in soft focus. She also implicates Emanulle by introducing her to the thug while threatening he'll massacre the students if she tells anyone else. Eventually, Gemser and Tinti have sex, pretty much a given in the films they did together. Sister Manuelle also punishes Monica by tying her up and having sex with Tinti in front of her, something that would totally happen. She then tries to burn the girl's bush with a torch!

Thankfully, it was all just a dream. This is good because, otherwise, the storyline might seem a bit silly.

The Demon (1979)

2011-01-02T15:00:00.000-08:00

Someone, or some thing, is running amok in South Africa killing people. Okay, actually, it's someone- a man, not a demon at all, making the title a bit disappointing. In the opening, he kidnaps a young teenage girl and ties up her mother. He soon after kills a fellow who picks him up while hitchiking before babbling about how his mother thinks he's gay for his love of acting- shutting the guy up probably qualifies as a mercy killing.

Meanwhile, the family hires Cameron Mitchell, playing "just a man with ESP" to find the killer. When he gets to her room, he hears the sound of screaming angels, something that happens to me in the bedrooms of teenaged girls as well, and which clearly means something important. He soon realizes that what they're dealing with is "less than a man. But also more than a man. Much more." So a woman?

Turns out the killer is also stalking a young teacher and her visiting American friend who like to hang around the house and meditate. The young friend is dating a rich fellow who has won her heart by taking her out for lobster thermidor and wine. But the teacher friend doesn't seem compelled to inform her roomate that there's someone making scary phone calls and so forth because, really why would you?

Anyway, the story follows Mitchell who eventually figures out the kidnapped girl is dead, and never really tells us who the killer is or why he's killing. We do see frequent shots of waves breaking against rocks, which are either symbolic or padding. At the end, we finally see the killer unmasked, but unfortunately have no idea who he is, making the mask unnecessary. To be honest, not a lot of what's happening here is ever explained, which is probably why you can so often find this movie in 99 cent DVD editions.

Velluto Nero (1976)

2011-01-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

The missing link between the Italian art house cinema and exploitation genres, Velluto Nero (black velvet) brings together a cast straight out of a million gore/sexploitation movies (including Laura Gemser, Gabriele Tinti, Annie Bell, and Al Cliver) for a film written and directed by Academy Award winner and longtime Fellini scripter Brunello Rondi. The result is a story that plays like 8 & 1/2 with more nudity. Not terribly surprising that enterprising distributors marketed it as another Laura Gemser classic "Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle", in spite of the fact that none of the characters is named Emanuelle.

There is not much of a plot to speak of, although by now you might be expecting that to be the case. Personally, I'm not much of a plot man anyway; any hack can recycle plot mechanics and most of them do; besides, life doesn't usually have character arcs and beginnings, middles, and ends. Here, there are some interesting events that happen, beautifully filmed Egyptian landscapes and very colorful characters, just like in the Fellini movies. Here too, the storyline is loose and vague. The only difference is there's more sex and violence here. Not like that's a bad thing.

The characters are mostly European ex-pats in Egypt. Crista, played by "Susan Scott" (Nieves Navarro), owns a fancy villa on the Nile and screws around with her Arab servant, played by Tarik Ali. Al Cliver (Zombie) plays a mystical guru figure who spouts esoteric mumbo-jumbo while cott blows him, culminating in one of the best reaction shots in cinema: Scott staring very meaningfully towards the sunset as fake jizz drips down her face. Ziggy Zanger, who sadly only did three movies, plays Crista's bratty young daughter who gets off on teasing her poor Arab servant by showing him her pussy and teaching him to say, "this is not for me"! Even better is the scene in which she screws two gentlemen in the sand next to Egyptian ruins while drinking whiskey from the bottle. (In other words, she's my kind of girl!) Feodor Chialapin is a rich pedophile who hilariously retired to Egypt from Hollywood. Annie Bell is Crista's other daughter Pina, who has sex with Gemser, and is, in some versions, called "Laure" in order to capitalize off her title role in another Emmanuelle rip-off written by the real Emmanuelle Arsan. Finally we have the hilariously dysfunctional couple of Carlo and Laura, a hotheaded and abusive photographer and his model, who he gets off on posing next to roadkill and dung! They're played by real-life couple Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti; his dubbing is from the ridiculous "Whatsamattayou?!" school of Italian characterizations, while she eventually is liberated from the creep by screwing a girl and sacrificing a goat!

I think that pretty much covers the highlights of the film too. The characters bicker, screw, wander around, and try to achieve some sort of enlightenment, all the while unwittingly exploiting the locals and getting nowhere. There's a weighty feeling of European decadence and the fact that the story goes in circles without getting very far seems to be the point- so do the characters. Some might dislike that aspect of the film, but I was okay with it.

The Pink Angels (1971)

2010-12-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

I guess you could call this the greatest gay biker movie ever made, if there were any others to compare it to. Actually, no, if there were others, they'd probably be better than this one!

The Pink Angels is, I suspect, a "comedy" about a biker gang made up of six gay men, and that's the punchline right there- they're a bunch of "bananas" who look like bikers! Wh-wh-what?! And they cross-dress!! They're heading down the California coast to a cotillion ball and the locals will never know what hit them when they realize that these bikers are actually... gay bikers!! YOWZA!

The movie sort of ambles through one contrived set up to another with the punchline nearly always being that, get this! They're gay bikers! Most of the actors play mildly embarassing swishy, fey "homo" types; but the film is also really on the side of the gay bikers, who are contrasted with the square "establishment" types, and the portrayals are much more lighthearted than meanspirited. One of the gags here is that the military/square/cops hate long-haired hippie "queers"- but, in this case, they really are gay! So, given that the target audience for the film was stoned teenagers at the drive-in, it's possible that maybe some of them became more tolerant of homosexual cross-dressers after watching the film.

Of course, the problem with this type of late 60s/early 70s movie is that it looks like it was shot by people who were stoned too- there is a lot of bombastic folk-rock about America and its social ills and scenes that go nowhere, and an orgy scene in which the cameraman nearly sticks the lens up some actor's noses, and a really stereotypical military type who appears periodically, and lots of scenes that play too long and slow- so very characteristic of the era.

And then there's an ending that is suddenly very serious and tragic- in the last two minutes of the film! The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Movies reviewer admits that he had no idea how to handle it, and I'm sort of in the same boat. Is it supposed to be funny or freak us the fuck out? Unlike Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Movies, I'm going to reveal the ending, so you know if you want to watch the movie, after the trailer, (SPOILER ALERT)

Spoiler: The bikers all get lynched and murdered. The end.

It seriously comes out of nowhere, especially given the lighthearted tone of the entire rest of the movie, and reminds me a lot of "Avere Ventanni" an Italian sex romp about two girls having wacky misadventures, until they're raped and murdered in the last five minutes. That one, in fact, struck me as social reactionary bullshit- we can show all the female nudity and sex that you came to see so long as the girls get punished in the end for their behavior.

In this movie? I don't know. I think The Pink Angels is actually pretty subversive because it asks its early 70s audience to relate to heroes who are openly gay and then mourn their deaths. There's a closing montage that reminds us of their adventures and, I actually might dare to say, that we're forced to question all the fun we've had snickering at the "faggots" throughout the film, since this was what got them murdered. I prefer this interpretation to thinking the movie is showing the characters "getting what's coming to them" for their transgressions.

At least, I hope I'm right.

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)

2010-12-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

Probably the most ill-concieved movie genre mashup of all time, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals combines the sexploitation eroticism of the "Black Emanuelle" films with the graphic gut-munching of the Italian cannibal films. If that mix seems somehow wrong to you, let me just say two words: Joe D'Amato.

Okay, now: "what are the Italian cannibal films?" you ask. They're a subgenre of Italian horror movies in which clueless westerners travel into the Amazon jungle and eventually get eaten by cannibals for their transgressions. I suspect they started making these movies in response to the cannibalism scenes in earlier zombie films. "You know who else eats people? Cannibals!" The best of them is probably Cannibal Holocaust, which really isn't that good. I'm not sure the worst. Maybe we'll plow through those later- this is the last of the (official) Laura Gemser Emanuelle films to plow through. So let's get to it.

My favorite part of this movie is the title card: "This is a true story as reported by Jennifer O'Sullivan". I'm guessing this is actually a crapola story as reported by Liar O'Bullshitter.

The story begins with Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) doing an undercover investigation of a New York City mental institution when, suddenly, a patient attacks and bites a chunk out of a nurse's breast in the 'Farnacy' (The sign was clearly made by the Italian crew). The staff ties up the patient and have no luck getting her to talk. Thinking quickly though Emanuelle tries masturbating the girl, but has no luck.

Cut to her editor's office, where Emanuelle explains the girl's malicious tit-munching by telling us that the nurse "was well-known for her homosexual inclination. She's the one who started abusing the poor girl"- a bit judgmental considering Emanuelle has just fingered "the poor girl". Anyway, turns out the tit-biter has a tattoo on her linked to an Amazon tribe that was thought to be extinct. How did she get into a NYC loony-bin? No idea.

But, this allows Emanulle to meet up with an anthropologist played by Gemser's husband and frequent co-star Gabrielle Tinti. He shows her some 8mm films of African cannibals killing and eating people and then they have sex because of course they do. Afterwards, she informs him that "I'm a free woman and I behave as such".

Besides, she's got another lover, Peter, who she then has a surprisingly hot sex scene with alongside the Hudson River. This is followed by an equally good sex scene with the anthropologist, which has an unforgettably schmaltzy love song with lyrics like, "my arms feel so tired when I make love to you" and "I am so happy... like a clown". Indeed.

Emanuelle, the professor and a team of researchers heads into the Amazon jungle to solve this whole cannibal mystery. They bring along some associates, including a nun and teenage girl, who live outside the jungle and are up for more sexy hijinx (no, not the nun). For instance, Emanuelle frolics with a nude Monica Zanchi in the water near a waterfall while a monkey smokes cigarettes in the foreground. (Writing a sentence like that reminds me why I watch these movies) The group soon runs into a hunter, played by Donald O'Brien (Dr. Buther M.D. himself) and his wife Maggie, played by Susan Scott, (who's in a few other Emanuelle movies). The hunter is really searching for a wrecked plane full of diamonds, while his wife is searching for dudes to fuck her on the side; she's a lot luckier.

The hunter tells them that the priest who they were going to visit in the jungle has been killed, along with his nuns, which doesn't really seem to bother anyone terribly. After about an hour of sex and chatter, the cannibals finally show up and start picking off characters. The nun gets eaten. The gore effects are fairly realistic here, but scenes of cannibalism tend to suffer from the fact that the dinner is already dead, so there's no tension. Anyway, the hunter and his wife find the plane and the diamonds and find they still love each other, but she gets snatched by the cannibals and his plan to save her fails spectacularly.

Finally, Emanuelle saves the teenage girl with a brilliant plan that involves being naked in the water and being naked on land. She, the girl, and Tinti survive to tell the tale. Even though Emanuelle has enough material for a great article, she finds herself strangely moved by watching her friends massacred in front of her.

Of all the Gemser Emanuelle films, this is the one most seen by horror movie fans. It's also one of the worst because it makes very little sense and the blend of hot sex and revolting gore doesn't work well at all. The sex is actually hotter than in most of the other Emanuelle films and the gore is pretty convincing; but the film has to really shift gears to get from the sex to the violence. D'Amato's direction is pretty lousy here anyway, but the real problem is that, again, he's unable to stick to making one movie and goes off in all sorts of bad directions. But, at least, nobody gets raped this time.

Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1978)

2010-11-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

You'd never guess from the title, but this one's a much lighter Emanuelle film than many of the others and Joe D'Amato keeps his penchant for sexual violence mostly at bay, while ramping up the bizarro quotient. So it's one of the more entertaining films in the series, even though it's not exactly original.

Maybe I should characterize the scenarios with some sort of charting system. Story 1- Location: Nairobi. Sex: 1. Emanuelle's friend Susan and her mechanic, Susan and Emanuelle, Male/Female (2), and the two women and a man. I think that covers it. I'd only note that Emanuelle's stewardess friend in Nairobi is played by the lovely Ely Galleani, who played the newly-liberated American tourist in Emanuelle in Bangkok, and is here playing basically a character from Black Emanuelle. Ah, recycling.

There's more recycling when Emanuelle returns to New York to meet with her editor- some scenes are taken right from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (more about that mess later) and redubbed with new dialogue! You can see how they were able to crank out so many of these movies at once. You can also tell that D'Amato was running out of ideas at this point.

Anyway, the main storyline has Emanuelle investigating a white slavery ring in which girls are auctioned off for sex; she goes undercover as a slave, even though this isn't "white slavery" since Gemser was Indonesian and, as we all know, this makes her "black" to the Italians. She ends up in a sort of brothel- also stolen from Emanuelle in America- same sets and scenes in fact, but more entertaining because some of the girls are 70s butch lesbians and the madam's assistant is a transvestite who Emanuelle has sex with. In general, there is also a lot more softcore sex in this one and no scene with anyone jerking off a horse. I think any movie is good if there's no scene of horse-wanking.

Also the tone is sillier this time. This is largely unintentional I suspect. We're meant to be shocked when one of the girls, Midget, is killed off-screen, although everyone wandering around asking, "Where did Midget go?" gets a bit silly. Also, Emanuelle wanders around the house taking secret pictures of everyone having sex, and you have to wonder at some point in this series if she really is an investigative photojournalist or just a pervert.

Finally, Emanuelle decides to leave before she loses her life, enlisting the help of the transvestite Stephen, who fights a gang of thugs in a bowling alley to help her escape. It doesn't work, but hey, really, a transvestite fighting a bunch of dudes in a bowling alley is why you watch grindhouse films in the first place.Sadly, D'Amato just can't leave out the mandatory rape scene; after their long fight, the group of thugs gang-rapes Emanuelle- this is the one sexual violence scene he stuck in here. Then the thugs drug Emanuelle, tie her up, and arrange for her to be lobotomized by their personal doctor. Is all hope lost?

Of course not- the resident nurse is a lesbian (an occupational hazard of being a nurse in these movies) and thus just has to untie Emanuelle in order to have sex with her. Foiled again! Our heroine escapes and hitches a ride aboard a fishing boat to Los Angeles, giving her a chance to have sex with a bunch of fishermen and the film a chance to include another plot twist that makes absolutely no sense.

Part of the appeal of D'Amato, in fact, is that a lot of what happens in his movies makes no friggin' sense. Actually, that's probably true of grindhouse movies in general. There's also a lot of sex, of course, which helps. Where he falters is when the 'outrageous' and 'shocking' content he includes is usually just misogynist. Really, none of the Emanuelle films needs to have a rape scene, and it's hard not to think that they're included so frequently as a sort of defensive position to reassure the members of the audience who're uncomfortable with a sexually-liberated woman. But, here's the thing- the rest of the movie is pretty silly and harmless, and Laura Gemser is beautiful, so we overlook all that.

Emanuelle Around the World (1977)

2010-11-23T22:48:00.000-08:00

God, what is wrong with Joe D'Amato? His taste for shocking violence totally upends the Emanuelle films because it goes against their frivolous tone. But he keeps doing it.

This time, as the film begins, Emanuelle (Gemser) is having casual sex with a moving guy in his truck. She's in San Franciso, where she stays long enough to meet a UN diplomat (Ivan Rassimov) and state her philosophy of life and sex: "I'm free. Men and women are equal. It's society that obligates us to be different." So far, so good.

Then it's off to India, where Emanuelle meets a tantric guru who teaches westerners how to have karmic sex and take their money. He's played by George Eastman in lots of makeup and the punchline is that Emanuelle fucks him and thinks he's mediocre in bed. This story is entertaining and the camera work is surprisingly good- stop watching the movie at this point because the rest is terrible.

In the second story, Emanuelle heads to Rome to investigate a sex slavery ring and the focus shifts to violence against women. Yes- in a sex romp. Do you know what's not sexy at all? Watching a man with a hideously burned face anally rape a sex slave. So Joe includes that. This story is quickly resolved- the girls call the cops and share a laugh together about being raped. Then the Rome story ends with Emanuelle introducing a young man to sex while spying on his stepmother and her maid, which is a nice scene, although it doesn't really clean the palate of that anal rape scene.

Emanuelle has a comrade in arms (Karin Schubert) in her crusade- the film was also titled, "Emanuelle Versus Violence Against Women"- and it might sound like feminist subversion. It isn't. Joe D'Amato is titilating the audience with multiple scenes of rape and degradation for its own sake, while ruining the light tone of the series. This film really appeals to those misogynists who were offended by the character's independence in the rest of the series and wanted to see her "get what was coming to her". It's no surprise that another alternate title was "The Degradation of Emanuelle".

Okay, now it's off to Hong Kong to further investigate/be victimized by sex slavers, and we have a scene in which a snake is inserted in a woman's vagina while another is raped by a dog. Jesus friggin' Christ! None of this makes sense in the context of a sex romp! But, they call the cops and laugh about it all, so no harm done.

Then, it's off to Tehran, for more of this bullshit about investigating a sex slavery ring that serves shieks and diplomats. The Emir, however, is nice enough that Emanuelle can convince him of the exploitation involved in his harem and they call the cops and laugh about it all so no harm done. Also, Schubert and Gemser have sex with each other and the Emir in order to keep down high oil prices!

Finally, it's off to New York City where- I'm not making this up- a large group of powerful American Senators and their wives force Miss Ohio to pay off a gambling debt by dancing naked for homeless men who then shock everyone by raping and beating her. So, the girls call the cops- but not before Emanuelle is forced to blow a dirty bum at gunpoint. But all's well that ends well. (Except for Miss Ohio who is left near death). The movie ends with Emanuelle sailing off on a yacht with Rassimov.

Yeesh! The Emanuelle series always had this weird blend of 70s liberated working woman feminism and sex romp hijynx. They're all kind of loopy. But D'Amato's misogynist degradation of women and graphic violence in this one are so completely at odds with the character and the series that you wonder if he really wanted to get even with the fans or just women in general.

Emanuelle in Bangkok (1976)

2010-11-20T15:17:00.000-08:00

New theory: the lack of any dramatic tension isn't just a glitch in the Emanuelle films- it's their message. The storyline is Emanuelle, an independent woman exploring the world and sexuality freely and breezily; and the point is to watch her wriggle out of the romantic complications that the directors throw at her. She escapes all plot points. The sensibility of the films comes from a 70s dream of freedom that feels sadly archaic now.

This time, Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is in Bangkok, arriving by boat with her Italian archaeologist lover Roberto. He wants her to settle down, but she has to be free. You know the drill. She's here to photograph the royal family, but still has time to fool around with a massage girl, the prince and maybe a bellhop- it's unclear. Then, Roberto and Emmanuelle meet up with some square American tourists who represent bourgeois Babbit norms, which she soon liberates them from. In a nutty development, the two couples go see a Bangkok stripper squirt golf balls out of her pussy and are inspired to smoke pot with the prince and massage girl and have group sex. Emanuelle ends up screwing the American and Italian men and retires for nude massage with the Prince. So far, the tone has been dreamy and pleasant and erotic, and little has happened plot-wise. The running time is half over.

Director Joe D'Amato has a taste for shock value that is jarring. A scene with a mongoose killing a snake on film, and one in which Emanuelle gets gang raped by some hippie dudes, but enjoys herself and wins their respect, are pretty offensive, and the rape scene also makes absolutely zero sense- who are these dudes? No clue, but they tell her she's in danger in Bangkok because someone believes she's out to sabotage the royal family, so she leaves. Only D'Amato could deliver a plot point in the sickest way imaginable.

Emanuelle next heads to Casablanca where Roberto is on a dig with his new fiance Janet. Along the way, she hooks up with the American wife, who is now sexually liberated and on her way to Katmandu without her husband. Emanuelle teaches her more about sexual freedom by screwing her on the plane. Then, in Casablanca, she meets Roberto's jealous fiancee and liberates her by taking her to have sex with a group of Arabs, so they split up too. While in Casablanca, she beds at the American consul's home, where his insecure teenage daughter Debbie soon takes to Emanuelle and learns to love herself from her new friend, who delivers the inspiring message, "It's time for you to learn to be a lot more self-confident. You have to believe in whatever it is you're doing." They also fool around in the bathtub.

Emanuelle becomes a mentor to Debbie, telling her that "I learned a long time ago to protect my freedom, to make my own decisions, and live my life the way I want to live it." Debbie watches Emanuelle and Roberto have sex, so he loses his temper and storms out, leaving Emanuelle and Debbie to finally have sex. Complications arise in the last fifteen minutes of the movie- our heroine starts falling in love with the young girl. Luckily, Emanuelle gets assigned to a shoot in Paris about ten minutes later and the two women part with a loving gaze into each other's eyes. Roll credits!

So, to sum up, there's almost no real plot, many of the events make no sense, and the overall theme blends a lot of sex and nudity with a message of personal freedom and self-esteem. Par for the course then.

Black Emanuelle (1975)

2010-11-18T19:40:00.000-08:00

I know- this isn't supposed to be Rufus's House of Sex, is it? Well, no, but honestly, who worries about what I post here? Kung-fu movies and racing car movies aren't exactly horrorific either. I like to think that the world of exploitation filmmaking is my dirty oyster.

So, Black Emanuelle: the first Italian Emmanuelle knock-off. Laura Gemser, who appeared in a bit part in the second official film in the French Emmanuelle series, here plays Emanuelle with one m, a globetrotting, sexually-liberated journalist in the 70s. A few things about this: 1. She's actually listed as Emanuelle and not Laura Gemser in the credits, "Emanuelle in 'Black Emanuelle', which amused me, 2. Laura Gemser is actually Indonesian, which I guess seemed black to the Italians, 3. She's often called 'the black Emanuelle' in these movies, which I guess is a bit like Blackula, but not black. Much of the movie stresses her feelings about being black, which I think is supposed to say, "Hey, we're not ripping off the French Emmanuelle here- she was white! Totally different movie!" (We should make a new blaxploitation film. Maybe "Clash of the Black Titans".)

Anyway, the begins with Emanuelle on a plane. Alex Cox has called planes the train-entering-a-tunnel of the Emmanuelle movies. The French Emmanuelle was screwed on a plane in the first film in a scene that is referenced constantly. Here, the black Indonesian Emanuelle sees a couple fooling around on her plane to Nairobi while a 70s soft rock song plays on the soundtrack. She's a photographer coming to Africa for her magazine: this is the plot of all the Italian films. You can pretty much see the whole Laura Gemser series as one really long movie about a photojournalist traveling the world and fucking a lot of people.

In Nairobi, she meets up with Ann, an English journalist, and Gianni, her Italian husband, and rooms with them. The first night, they introduce Emanuelle to the European expat community at a party in which everyone screws around with partners other than their spouse and jumps into the pool. The next day, they stop by the gas station Ann can screw her mechanic, go out dancing in the evening, and Emanuelle screws around with the Italian husband. Gianni and Emanuelle eventually have sex. Later, Emanuelle goes on a safari with the wife and has sex with her. Then she fantasizes about having sex with a tribal chief. Oh, you get the idea. Bored yet?

The Emanuelle movies are basically travelogues with sex. The problem is a travelogue can get boring fairly quickly, and so can a sex film- both of these are activities that are more fun to do than watch in a movie. After a while, the movies are a bit like watching someone's slides from their vacation while they tell you, "We had sex here.... she blew me in this hotel..." They lag mostly in the long spaces with no dramatic tension, which is hard to establish when your main character has no sexual inhibitions to overcome. Emanuelle never really changes- she just wants to have sex. It's hard to blame her, but it's also hard to be enganged in the storyline because you can imagine fairly easily how the story will turn out: the beautiful horny woman with no sexual inhibitions will probably get laid.

Black Emanuelle tries to create dramatic tension and, indeed, it picks up a bit after Emanuelle begins her affairs with the husband and wife- she's falling in love with him, but he's a bit of a player and rebukes her as a tramp, so she screws another man to make him jealous as well as his ex-lover Gloria for the hell of it. (At this point, there is a scene with some servants screwing that is stolen directly from the French Emmanuelle- I'm ashamed to know that.) But what will she do? Commit herself to Gianni and stay in Nairobi? Leave him and remain free? Probably you can guess.

Clearly, however, Emanuelle doesn't just want sex without emotion. In fact, she tells the Italian stallion her thoughts on love, "Emanuelle doesn't need drugs to be sacrificed to love. Love isn't just an explosion of the senses. Emotion counts too." So true. Rufus agrees, but he needs drugs to finish this movie.

The whole gang goes on another safari and there's a sex scene with Emanuelle and Gianni by a waterfall- also swiped from the French movie. But Emanuelle needs to be free and she takes off, only to be gangbanged by a cricket team on a train, in an uncomfortable scene that reportedly made Gemser uncomfortable as well. What exactly is this scene trying to say anyway? The dialogue suggests that she's sexually insatiable and cannot be with just one man when there are cricket teams available, which is certainly legitimate. But then why is she asleep for most of the gangbang?

Meanwhile, Gianni has run off to find Emanuelle, ending his marriage. She turns him down in a dramatic speech delivered directly to the camera like a scene from Annie Hall: "Something always happens. Believe me... It wouldn't work... Love is not enough Gionni. Maybe it's my work, my appearance, my skin. Or maybe it's just fate. But I must be free... That's what it's like to be a woman. Or, at least, a woman like me."

Okay, I know I sound crazy here, but this is what I find totally fascinating about these movies. The series is obsessed with female sexual freedom. I mean, sure, they're stupid sexploitation movies, and definitely they can fit in a lot more sex if she's not in a monogamous relationship; but how many sex films today have anything to do with a woman's right to find sexual happiness however she chooses? Actually, how many films today are about that?

Emanuelle in America (1977)

2010-11-13T13:58:00.000-08:00

How to explain the Emanuelle films? Okay, well, the first, "Emmanuelle" was a French movie, based on a popular French book about a diplomat's wife in an open marriage and her sexual awakening. It was one of the first softcore X movies and was fairly well-made, and it made a shit-ton of money. The French made a bunch of official sequels. And the Italians figured they could capitalize off that success with another series about a sexually-liberated woman named "Emanuelle", with one M, almost always played by the lovely Indonesian actress Laura Gemser. I'm currently working on a script about a boxer named Roquie.

Emanuelle in America is one of the most popular of the American knock-offs and one of the best films director Joe D'Amato ever made; this, however, is setting the bar pretty close to the floor. Here, Emanuelle (Gemser) is a photographer in New York in the 70s, which we can tell by the Marlborro Man billboards and the great leisure suit she wears, both of which had become historical artifacts by 1982. She's actually a photojournalist in most of these movies. Emanuelle photographs naked women and lives with a pop artist and is generally a sexually-liberated women- sexual liberation also being an artifact of the 70s. The music is somewhere in the space rock-glam-disco continuum, so the soundtrack is pretty awesome.

In general, I do find something appealing about the attitude these movies have about sex- that it's a fun, zesty enterprise, and not very serious or a means of control over another person. I like that Emanuelle does what she wants and the stories never really condemn her for her freedom. Note that her boyfriend never questions her love for him, in spite of the fact that she sleeps with everyone. Compare this to any recent skin flicks and the female degradation they all seem to feature, and then tell me that social mores are improving! However, it's seldom totally clearcut female empowerment in this series- they always seem to include one rape or degradation scene in the Emanuelle film as a sort of nod towards the patriarchy. But, and this is a big but- Emanuelle always pulls through and overcomes the misogynists. Here, her escape seems a bit callous and blithe and, frankly, I think they should have left out the "snuff movie" subplot altogether, since it makes no sense. But, we'll get to that in a second. Another general point- a lot of what happens in Emanuelle movies makes no sense- they're pretty loopy.

The film is episodic. In the first story, a psycho kidnaps Emanuelle at gunpoint and tells her he's going to kill her for moral reasons, since she photographs naked women. They park and she blows him, which changes his attitude about sex entirely. Next, for 'research', Emanuelle infiltrates a mafiosi's harem in which each girl was born under a different astrological sign. She gets the dirt on him and takes part in an underwater nude girl lesbo session scored to space rock- I'm fairly certain this was the scene filmed expressly for the stoned people in the audience. While in the harem, she has sex with a few men and a woman. Also, in order to fulfill the requirement that every Emanuelle film has to have one scene that makes you somwhat uncomfortable, in this one a girl jerks off a horse named Pedro. This scene made the film somewhat notorious. No word as to how horses felt about the scene.

Moving right along, Emanuelle goes to Venice and visits a Duke and Dutchess, helping their marriage with a threesome. She thanks them pointedly for showing her that she doesn't want to be married, which is pretty bitchy of her and surprisingly judgmental considering that they really seem to love each other, and she has lots of casual sex with everyone she meets. What a snob. Anyway, after she insults them, the couple takes Emanuelle to an aristocratic orgy and she takes pictures for "research" and screws some guy. At this point, I was wondering why the film wasn't called Emanuelle in America and Italy.

Returning home, Emanuelle visits a cathouse for women, also for "research". It's very lucky for Emanuelle that the magazine pays her to do investigative research that involves getting laid a lot. She's caught spying in the female brothel but escapes by a clever stratigem involving lesbian sex. Whew!

The story gets more serious as Emanuelle investigates a snuff film that is being swapped by the rich and powerful. The snuff scenes are of interest to horror/exploitation fans because they're startlingly horrifying and realistic for a sex romp. The investigation brings her to Washington DC, where she meets a Senator from the establishment, man, who wants another war to set the younger generation right and then tries to pork her, shows her another snuff film, gives her LSD, and takes her to see the Central American right-wing rebel snuff film makers. At this point, the film seems like it will turn into a serious crusade against a powerful conspiracy story.

However, her editor buckles under pressure from the man not to publish the story and Emanuelle quits in anger, which inexplicably makes her feel like "the happiest girl in the world", a pretty unique response for someone who just recently witnessed war atrocities and has now given up completely on exposing American involvement in those crimes, or saving their victims, or getting any sort of justice. Basically, she sells out completely. So Emanuelle is now the happiest accomplice to war crimes in the world- in celebration, she goes to an African tribal village with her boyfriend, who sells her to the chief and there's a wedding celebration.

At this point, I started thinking that maybe the younger generation really does need to be sent to war.

Fritt Vilt (Cold Prey)- 2006

2010-11-13T13:07:00.000-08:00

Did you know that Norway has the world's lowest homicide rate? This could help explain the box office success of the Norweigan slasher film "Fritt Vilt" (Cold Prey)- maybe they find slashing strange and exotic. Conversely, the exotic snowy location might pique one's interest in this otherwise pretty generic slasher flick.

Admittedly, calling a slasher movie "generic" is like pointing out that there are a lot of horses in a western- the slash'n'hack genre is well known for its interchangeable plots and storylines. At one point in the slasher movie documentary Going to Pieces, a slasher producer talks about watching Halloween with a stop watch in order to know exactly where to place the shocks in his own film! Scream, of course, commented openly on the formula, and post-Scream slashers tend to subvert it in fairly trivial ways- Fritt Vilt has the virginal girl die first instead of surviving. But the genre has yet to attempt the sort of post-modern deconstructions that the western, superhero, and noir genres have pulled off.

So, this one is about a group of young people on vacation in the wilderness, like every slasher flick; but this is Norway, so they're snowboarding and they all have names like Jorg and Blorgen. There are some romantic subplots- these movies were always a bit like teen soap operas that end in bloodshed- and an accident and they wind up stranded in an abandoned ski lodge. Something mysterious happened there in the 70s, although if you try, you can guess it- and now there's a killer on the loose, picking them off Blorgen by Jorgen.

Fritt Vilt is certainly well-made, and the murders and mood are very effective. You can see why Norweigan teens ate it up- there have already been two sequels released there, while it's only recently arrived in North America on DVD- but it's not like Cold Prey takes the slasher genre anywhere new... well, aside from Norway.