About a third of the way through Nightshot, my son looked into my office and commented, “That looks terrifying.” My response was “Does, doesn’t it?” and the rest was…
Hm.
Nightshot purports to be an urbex video (that’s urban exploration for all us oldsters), where our host (Nathalie Couturier) leads her cameraman through an expansive, abandoned hospital while talking about the history of the horrors that took place there. It seems your typical mad doctor was doing obscene experiments involving pregnant women. At some point Nathalie cheerily announces to her cameraman (and therefore, her audience) that she herself is pregnant, so go ahead and write the rest of the movie yourself. Pretty sure Dr. Freudstein is involved.
My major issue here is that Nightshot is advertised as a one-take movie, and I have some doubts. Once again, whenever we are near something spoooooooky the camera glitches out and the audio goes wild, a major difference being these things also affect our urban explorers (and nice work on the audio effects). These are ready-made opportunities for a cut, so pull the other one. Those are still some extended takes, though, so mad props to Nathalie, who literally carries the movie. If I’m wrong, her achievement is all the more laudable.
Secondly, Nightshot did find itself a hell of a location, to be sure, but as we get deeper into the story, the Blair Witch curse sinks in and we seem to just be wandering endlessly through it. There are rooms that are tricked out for maximum creepiness and story advancement, but man I got tired of that one hall.
One of the tricked-out rooms has a Ouija board in it. Nathalie starts spinning out some bullshit about the spirit board for her audiences, and the Ouija gets so offended it flies across the room. That part I liked.
Never a good sign.
Third, as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Nathalie is suffering a miscarriage. My wife and I survived two of those, so I am not appreciative of its use as a plot device.
There is some genuine horror there at the end, but that just seems to play out the Evilspeak model of “get through the bulk of the movie so things can go nuts in the final ten minutes”. I’m not a fan. Nathalie Couturier, though – you can stay.
A group of Australian teens have a problem; they are each having the same dream about a tunnel leading to a torchlit chamber covered in aboriginal markings, where a tall figure is chanting. The figure turns, revealing it is a rotting corpse, and it forces something into their hand before they wake in fright. Upon awakening, they find a kadaicha, a crystal inscribed with, again, aboriginal markings. And whoever finds a kadaicha will die within 24 hours.
There’s a whole lot of familiar tropes in this movie, made four years after Nightmare on Elm Street, and possessing many of the markings of it and its imitators. Our main character, Gail (Zoe Carides) is the daughter of the real estate hustler who masterminded this plagued locale, and as she researches the cause of her friends’ death (and eventually her own imminent doom), she finds the development is built over, basically, an Indian graveyard.
To its credit, the movie makes it a little more than that, with an eye towards Australia’s troubled history. There was a massacre and then a counter-massacre, then a counter-counter massacre, and there are some very angry bones in that chamber. Gail finds there were many indigenous protests about the development, but dear old dad basically just bricked up the hole to the chamber and built over it.
So the neat twist is that the aboriginals weren’t threatening the development with ghostly retribution – they were trying to warn whitey not to do it, because they knew the place was cursed with a capital K.
Kadaicha – eventually re-titled Stones of Death – keeps its political outrage simmering just under the surface, a vital difference making it watchable as more than a Nightmare wannabe. Director James Bogle manages, in between the typical teen cut-ups, to craft some some nicely weird sequences – the spider POV is especially nice – and turned out an effective little thriller.
Klaus Kinski is a deviant weirdo who is a caring doctor by day and a murdering psycho rapist at night. No, that’s the character he plays, but I can see where the confusion lies.
Jack the Ripper is a Swiss/German film directed and partially written by Jess Franco. The poster proclaims “Only NOWCan It Be Shown Like THIS!“, meaning that Kinksi can now rip off all an actress’ clothes before raping and murdering them, often at the same time.
Kinksi is Dr. Dennis Orloff (yeah, Franco wrote this part), tending to his impoverished patients by day, and then being tormented by visions of his mother, who was a prostitute that also wanted him in on the trade. After these nipple-filled nightmares, there’s nothing left for him but to go out and kill. One of his victims is Franco standard Lina Romay, who lasts the longest of his victims, even getting a production number in what looks like the worst cabaret possible on the budget.
As a Franco film, it follows the template of The Awful Dr. Orloff, except without the mad science angle. No, this Orloff is just in it for vengeance against his dead mother. The police are also notably useless as in the original flick, and Inspector Worthless’s girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) strikes out on her own to find the killer, without telling the Inspector. Nudity will ensue.
Everybody in the movie is a better detective than the Inspector. There’s a blind man character that would give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. Even the itinerant fisherman played by the musically-named Howard Fux is better at the game than the Inspector.
Reportedly shot in a week, Franco has no time for his usual zoom lens fetish, so the movie feels more like an actual gothic thriller, sort of a boring Hammer flick. A lot of time is spent on the police work and supposedly risible dealings with witnesses, while we wait for Kinski to whack out again. Despite his off-screen infamy, Kinski was a very good, serious actor, and he brings the appropriate level of intensity to his role. There’s some good stuff in here, especially Kinski’s cat-and-mouse game with Romay in a foggy wood, but if you’re familiar at all with the actual Ripper case, man, are you going to be pissed…
It may not be the classic definition of a Hubrisween movie, but If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is a prime example of a conservative horror story. Of course, Stephen King has already posited that all horror stories are ultimately conservative, but this is a horror movie designed to strike fear in a certain demographic.
This is the title of a sermon delivered by Mississippi Baptist minister Estus Pirkle, and it’s all about how evil Commies will take over the US of A unless its thoughtless sex-education-class-attending masses come to Jesus. This takes the form of vignettes gleefully showing the atrocities that will take place after such a takeover, including massacres, drunken soldiers invading homes, and in a crowning moment, puncturing the eardrums of children who were attending a clandestine prayer meeting. That is punctuated by the child actor vomiting, which rumor has it was not supposed to happen.
My God, they pithed him like a frog.
Probably the worst thing to its Baptist audiences is the scene where Comrade Teacher (Wes Saunders) demonstrates to a class of inexpressive children that prayer to God will not get them candy, but Comrade Castro is happy to give them all the candy they want.
“Comrade Castro will give you all the crap Halloween candy you wish!”
The atrocity footage is brought to us courtesy of exploitation legend Ron Ormond, who had earlier brought us such worthy entertainment as Mesa of Lost Women, Please Don’t Touch Me, and Girl from Tobacco Road. Ormond crashed his single-engine plane into a field and survived, though seriously injured. This was what could be termed a come-to-Jesus moment, and from that day forth, Ormond was a Christian, eventually teaming up with Pirkle for a trilogy of films – following was The Burning Hell (which also deserves a Hubrisween slot) and The Believer’s Heaven.
Also in the mix is Judy (Judy Greer), a young lady who is attending church just to keep up appearances (we know Judy is a unbeliever because she’s dating the Sex Education teacher). Pirkle’s tale of forthcoming doom and getting covered with red paint provides Judy with her own Ron Ormond moment, and Pirkle brings her down to the altar of save her soul.
SINFUL!
Footmen was meant to be shown at prayer meetings and revivals, and this is the moment when the lights went up and people would march up to their own altars and accept Jesus. It never played actual theaters, so there are no end credits; in fact this why Pirkle never released it on video or DVD – he felt that there should always be someone at the altar after the movie’s end, waiting to receive the lost lambs for their salvation.
All good, I suppose. Pirkle is especially good in the scenes with Judy, projecting care and empathy. What gives me pause is the statistics he claims with absolute authority are true, such as the exact number of Americans the Commies intend to kill when they take over, which is a tactic used by far too many pundits and idiots in the present day.
Pirkle’s message of salvation is undercut by pronouncements like that, and by members of his non-acting flock, all things that have made it fodder for latter-day sampling and bad movie watchers. But there is a rawness to Ormond’s conservative nightmare passages that give it some power even in these Pirkle-less times.
It’s tempting to just let that be the review, but where’s the fun in that? And that’s what we’re here for, right? Fun.
About that.
I saw House by the Cemetery back when it was released on VHS. Didn’t think much of it. Years later, I would find out that transfer had the reels out of order. Ah. No wonder. Though I assigned re-watching it in its intended order a very low priority, I finally found time, and did.
About that.
I have questions.
So Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Marco) takes on his former mentor’s research. uprooting his child and wife to move to New England, to the very same house the mentor bloodily murdered his mistress and then hanged himself.
To his growing dismay, Boyle finds out the deceased had totally forsaken his original research to instead look into the history of the house’s former owner, a Dr. Freudstein, who was infamous for insane, illegal surgeries, and OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, HE’S IN THE CELLAR WE ALL KNOW HE’S IN THE CELLAR Y’ALL JUST GO TO THE CELLAR ALREADY
Ahem.
That part I can manage. That part I understand. There are three people credited with the screenplay, and even with the reels in the right order, the movie feels like three different scripts were shuffled like playing cards, and then handed to the film crew.
It is a creepy movie. I must give it that. There’s some genuinely unsettling stuff in here, and that’s not necessarily the gore scenes. There is a wonderfully eerie ghost story embedded in House by the Cemetery, but it feels like, as I said, pages from another script
What is with the rapidly vanishing blood in this movie? Why is Boyle looking for Freudstein’s tomb miles away when he already knows it’s in his living room? What the hell is up with Ann, anyway?
This movie is the Picnic at Hanging Rock of gore movies.
Sara (Lina Sundén) is a desperate woman who breaks into the Malmö Institute armed only with a knife and a set of lockpicks. She’s looking for her daughter, whom her recently-divorced husband has taken into the nondescript building. When the Chief (Jenny Lampa) mistakes her for a new hire, Sara finds that Malmo is much weirder than she thought; her job is to sweep up the sparkling dust that drops from the facility’s lights, because the dust “attracts vermin”. She also witnesses one of the other workers get covered with the dust, and the vermin – a swath of darkness – enters the worker’s body and he dies in an explosion of blood.
She enters into an uneasy alliance with the head janitor (Martin Jirhamn), who reveals that things can get even worse: the reason her cell phone was confiscated by the Chief is not because it would interfere with Malmö’s machines, but because the phones can be used to unlock the seemingly nonexistent door to Level Two. Sara has found her husband (Patrik Karlson), now significantly older, because he got lost in Level Two, where time can move… oddly. Level Two is where their daughter is now trapped.
And you do not want to go to Level Three. That’s where the Light lives.
Feed the Light is a fascinatingly low-fi tale of cosmic horror. The black-and-white presentation (except for the occasional burst of color, see the bloody demise above) is going to immediately make most cineastes think of David Lynch, and that’s an association that’s not far wrong, with demented behavior, existential dread and a trove of unanswered questions. It’s not as ultimately incomprehensible as Lynch, but it is as accomplished.
And it’s always good to find a movie that can turn a lack of a multi-million dollar budget into an asset, rather than a disadvantage.
Dracula is doing Dracula stuff so Dr. Seward stakes him in his vampire basement lair, turning the Count into a dead bat. Soon after, Frankenstein moves in, finds the bat, and revives Dracula with blood. Frankenstein seems to hope to somehow parlay his new vampire toys into his ultimate goal, a perfect being, which probably thrills the Monster to no end. After the Monster tries to kill Seward, the injured doctor is nursed back to health by gypsies. Complicating matters is the fact that Seward and Frankenstein are both idiots and didn’t check any of the other coffins in the basement so there is a rogue vampire lady running around.
The gypsy fortuneteller tells Seward that he will be the one to conquer the bad guys right after the wolfman comes to help. The wolfman is actually of little help, but Frankenstein decides fuck this noise and stakes Dracula again (this time reducing him to a skeleton, which just shows you can’t trust Seward with anything), kills the Monster with electricity (is this even possible?), and then vanishes from the movie so Seward can come in with his torchbearing gypsies to find that all the work has been done the end.
The Wolfman sees the synopsis above and wonders “Who writes this crap?”
It would be tempting to call Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein a fever dream of a movie, but in fact it feels like a movie of a fever dream experienced by a sick child after watching a Halloween marathon of classic Universal horror movies. It has that nonsensical flow – especially the inclusion of a werewolf just because. Howard Vernon’s Dracula always has the same expression, which is as unnerving as it is absurd. Count Dracula as Halloween mask.
I have spent my adult life simply waving off Jess Franco movies, and welp, here I am, trying to deal with his work in a more accepting manner. There is no denying that he knows where to put his camera and how to use stuff like camera dollies and the like. It has been put forward that the first act of the movie is largely dialogue-free and could have easily been a tribute to silent horror movies. Then Franco gets his hand on the zoom lens and all my good intentions get enraged all over again.
I’m going to try Franco again in a few letters, and maybe I’ll finally see what other critics I respect seem to see in the guy. This time, I do have to say I was never tempted to just shut it off, which is progress of a sort.
Dracula (Paul Naschy) moves into a deserted castle and immediately starts making vampires. He is aided in this by by a carriage-load of young hotties suddenly stranded by an accident and the death of their driver. Vampire stuff ensues.
Count Dracula’s Great Love is a quite unusual vampire story; although the setup above points toward a typical Hammer-style gothic tale, it quickly unwinds into novel territory. Great Love‘s central conceit is that Dracula’s immortality is not based on eternal life, but instead on a cycle of reincarnation, with the Count living and dying over and over again until a virgin falls in love with him for himself.
Also, she gotta take a knife to the neck.
One of our hotties falls for him but, alas, she is no virgin. There is another, however, who fits the bill, and that is where things start getting really weird. There is a subplot about reviving Dracula’s daughter, even to the point of kidnapping a local girl and sacrificing her to revive said daughter, but his Great Love doesn’t like that, so he abandons it. Sorry, local virgin!
Eventually, Dracula has killed all the other vampires in his employ and the virgin still won’t give in, so Dracula stakes himself to start the cycle all over again and the virgin is sorry, boo hoo hoo.
“Your coffins are right this way. ROOMS! Rooms. I meant rooms.”
Snarky recaps aside, this is held up as a high point for Naschy as an actor and Spanish horror in particular. Those are both true, and it has to be admitted, this most unusual twist on the mythology was refreshing, and certainly worthwhile.
Which reminds me, one of these days I’ve got to watch Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows before the DVD rots in its case.
So it’s 15 years since those three intrepid student filmmakers went into the woods and disappeared, but now a memory card has been found in those woods and the hectic surviving footage seems to take place in that strange deserted house in the end of that movie. Heather’s brother James (James Allen McCune) thinks he caught a glimpse of Heather in that footage, so off we go to the woods again, with James’ friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), who is making a documentary about James’ search, and two cannon fodder friends (Corbin Reid and Brandon Scott)
Perhaps you thought “Now wait a minute” about James’ hope of finding Heather after fifteen years. Hold that thought, you’re going to be needing it again.
I hope you got it laminated so it doesn’t wear out.
They meet with the couple who found the memory card (Wes Robinson and Valerie Curry), who insist on going with them. Say goodbye, everybody!
“Goodbye, everybody!”
James’ main objective is to find this mysterious house, which has eluded search parties and other investigators. It is fifteen years later, so we have new tech, like trail cameras and a drone to help.
None of these are going to help (as you surmised).
Now, I like found footage movies – when they work, I find them very involving. Director Adam Wingard works the new tech angle for all its worth, and even adds a bit to the lore by having the Witch fuck around with time as well as space. This also seems to be the year for filmmakers punching my claustrophobia in the head and taking its lunch money, the bastards. But still, Blair Witch is going to make you use that phrase “Now wait a minute” so many times that honestly, that should have been the subtitle.
Though I admit Blair Witch: Now Wait a Minute would have been a hard sell.
I’ve started this post a hundred times or more in my head. Here’s hoping that actually sitting down and typing achieves something. Making that particular set of things occur have been difficult of late.
Cast your mind back to 2020 and the week that the COVID Lockdown officially happened – now consider all the plans you’d made for that week. That is what happened to Crapfest. We had one planned, we were ready, and then this science fiction plague shut everything down, including us. A state of affairs that continued for the next three years.
Now, COVID is not over, no matter what the capitalism-fueled media would like you to believe, but if you’re careful, you can pretend it is. So we all decided to be careful, and have a Crapfest, dammit.
And there were times it was obvious it had been three years. Mistakes were made, mostly mine (having received my Medicare card in the interim, I had a good excuse). Mainly, I got the timing wrong, resulting in a shortened event. Rick had joined the Choir Celestial, so I took over his queso and dip duties. Erik wanted to make the event special, and made a chili with smoked beef brisket, and although as a lifelong Texan I had never encountered that (armadillo and rattlesnake, yes), it was, as you might guess, delicious. Also as a lifelong Texan, I was able to ignore Erik’s fretting that he had used too many jalapenos. *snorts in Texan*
SPOILER ALERT:It was the perfect amount of jalapenos.
Also in attendance: Alan and Paul. There, all the niceties have been niced.
And there I stopped typing and now it’s almost four days later. Real life can stop being so damn interesting any time now.
Dave started things off with Hangman, a 1985 safety short from the UK. In it, an Australian-inflected fellow in a budget-conscious costume suggesting an executioner (black tank top and domino mask), offers to play his namesake game using accidents from unsafe building sites instead of words with missing letters. This made sense in some producer’s mind.
So we have scenes of unsafe construction practices, usually resulting in somebody falling from a great height. We saw the money shots in these scenes in a montage at the beginning, but now we get to experience their thrilling backstories. The worksites keep getting more cartoonishly unsafe, until there is one that no sane person would enter, much less carrying large, awkward objects all by themself. The stunt work, it must be said, is actually quite good.
Oh, yeah, Crocodile No-Fundee gets clobbered at the end because he wasn’t wearing a hard hat. EAT IRONY, JACKO.
My opening shot was a section of a video I had stumbled across on the Web called Lupinranger VS Patranger VS Kyuranger. As you might suspect, this is about three Super Sentai teams (or, to use the American parlance, Power Rangers) who find themselves at odds but must team up in the face of this week’s ultimate evil (who, it must be admitted, is pretty cool-looking).
So Patrangers are cop power rangers, Lupinrangers are (misunderstood) thief power rangers, and Kyurangers are space power rangers, who have apparently been off in space for a while or some thing. English subtitles were not available, which really made it all a bit better for us. For the record, that is 19 power rangers in all, and everyone of them gets their own anime-style intro in a sequence that takes a minute and a half. Skullhead seems a bit bored when they finally get back around to him.
“Are you finished yet?”
(Okay, this is from Ryusoulger VS Lupinranger VS Patranger, but you’ll get the idea. Ryusoulgers are Dinosaur Knight power rangers and oh jesus don’t get me started)
The ensuing fight scene is actually darn good – everybody gets to show off their totally toyetic gizmos (available at a store near you), and finally kick Kaiju Skull with a SuperMegaUltraPlatinumStar Zord.
“This is some retro nostalgia stuff, right?” asked Dave. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how recent these super sentai series were, as in 2019 (that Ryusoulger clip is from 2020). If you want to dip your toe in this madness, I found The RangerWikiinvaluable in providing something more than a slippery grip on the subject.
We bid a fond farewell to the seemingly endless array of power rangers to start on feature-length exploitation, starting with Dave’s entry, the 1984 Alley Cat, supposedly chosen to secure Paul’s attendance.
Karen Mani is Billy, your typical 1984 martial artist protagonist who kicks the crap out of some thugs trying to steal her car. The lead thug (whose catchphrase is “Drive, asshole!) leads a retaliatory strike, during which Billie’s grandmother is fatally stabbed. When she discovers just how corrupt and ineffective the System turns out to be (by way of a judge throwing her in jail for being too mouthy, resulting in prison shower scenes and lesbian come-ons), well enough is enough and SHE GONE KICK THEY ASS.
As far as such low-budget actioners go, this is actually pretty good. Mani handles herself well and should have had a better career – she eventually moved into production, then seemingly left the business altogether. I’m amazed that it took three directors to deliver a vehicle combining Death Wish, Vigilante, and boobies. That probably points to some difficulties in the production – it’s surprising that it hangs together as well as it does.
My own entry was 1983’s Get Crazy, chosen because of the extremely good buzz from a recent B-Fest. Ed Begley Jr. plays a ruthless capitalist who wants to shut down Allen Garfield’s Saturn Theatre (a sort of smaller-scale Fillmore West – intentionally) so a too-tall condominium tower can be built there. When Garfield refuses to sell, a bomb is planted to go off during the New Year’s Eve concert.
Get Crazy also features Daniel Stern as the stage manager and Malcolm McDowell as rock superstar Reggie Wanker. It also has a murderer’s row of other notables in small roles, like Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov (sadly rather wasted here), Robert Picardo as a zealous fire marshal, and Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley as a couple of Reggie’s groupies (I spotted Linnea but not Michelle, which I regard as a personal failure). I can only surmise that Dick Miller was busy that week. And, oh yeah, the actual Lou Reed.
It’s an Allen Arkush film, which means plenty of cartoonish humor and an anarchic bent to the proceedings. I mean, I haven’t even gotten to Electric Larry, the mysterious cyborg drug dealer who shows up with a Star Wars briefcase full of whatever is needed at the moment (to the strains of Adrien Bellew’s “Big Electric Cat”, no less). Or the late Blue Blaze Irregular Bill Henderson tearing up the stage as King Blues, who keeps leaving the party in the green room because no matter who’s on stage, he can say, “They’re playing one of my songs!” or…
We could be here all day. Why had I never heard of this movie? Apparently some capitalists had seen The Producers and thought, “That’s a good idea, let’s apply it to a movie!” and thus didn’t care if the movie even got released, much less promoted.
That’s a fan-made trailer, incidentally. The actual trailer kind of explained why it tanked so hard.
Speaking of box office disasters when it was released and promptly vanished from sight, we came to Erik’s offering.
Look, it’s going to be impossible to try to assess Leonard Part 6 in any sort of objective way due to Producer/Writer/Star Cosby’s antics, so we are fortunate that it was already lambasted contemporaneously by everybody under the sun, mainly for its naked Coca-Cola product placement and just being not very good in general.
For our part, at least we kept the rape jokes to a minimum.
Okay, deep breath. The Leonard of the title is a retired master spy and troubleshooter who is called back into action because a supervillain named Medusa Johnson (Gail Foster) has devised a way to control animals. The opening scene featuring a murderous rainbow trout is one of the few entertaining moments in its 85 minutes.
Joe Don Baker tells Leonard he’s needed back into the fold by sending someone to kill him at his restaurant, as Joe Don Baker does. That sequence should have been a killer slapstick opening – instead it’s just sort of there, which is going to be a continuing problem throughout. Everybody is doing their job (the cinematographer is Jan de Bont, for God’s sake), but they just… can’t… seem to haul the flick out of its oppressive mediocrity. Maybe if Arkush had directed…
No! Not the Coke Freezer!
Possibly the most egregious part for us was the casting of Tom Courtenay as Leonard’s manservant and aide-de-camp Frayn, who is also in charge of delivering a rousing speech to the agent as he prepares for his mission. Alan opined in the dark, “This movie doesn’t deserve Tom Courtenay” to which I replied, “And vice-versa.”
Could have added “Neither do we,” but that certainly went without saying.
And that was that. Really going to try to have another one soon, maybe after only a couple of years this time.
Honestly. Leonard Part 6 leaves a mark. And I’ve seen Things.
About a third of the way through Nightshot, my son looked into my office and commented, “That looks terrifying.” My response was “Does, doesn’t it?” and the rest was…
My major issue here is that Nightshot is advertised as a one-take movie, and I have some doubts. Once again, whenever we are near something spoooooooky the camera glitches out and the audio goes wild, a major difference being these things also affect our urban explorers (and nice work on the audio effects). These are ready-made opportunities for a cut, so pull the other one. Those are still some extended takes, though, so mad props to Nathalie, who literally carries the movie. If I’m wrong, her achievement is all the more laudable.
Secondly, Nightshot did find itself a hell of a location, to be sure, but as we get deeper into the story, the Blair Witch curse sinks in and we seem to just be wandering endlessly through it. There are rooms that are tricked out for maximum creepiness and story advancement, but man I got tired of that one hall.
There is some genuine horror there at the end, but that just seems to play out the Evilspeak model of “get through the bulk of the movie so things can go nuts in the final ten minutes”. I’m not a fan. Nathalie Couturier, though – you can stay.
drfreex.com 