Jesus Christ is already among us again, which is something taken for granted in Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter; any further explanation is unnecessary, and that is going to go for the rest of the movie. You hold on, and hopefully enjoy the ride, and how much you’re going to do that will depend on your own sense of charity and willingness to share in the enthusiasm of the filmmakers.
Evil vampires Johnny Golgotha (writer Ian Driscoll) and Maxine Shreck (Murielle Verhelyi) are victimizing and decimating the lesbian population of Ottawa, and it is up to our Lord and Savior (Phil Caracas) to employ his kung fu skills to save the day. In this he will be aided by the cat-suited Mary Magnum (Maria Moulton) and eventually the famous Mexican wrestler El Santo (Jeff Moffet). That is your story, and it is stretched – sometimes a bit painfully – over 85 minutes.
Production is a familiar story – JCVH was shot on 16mm, on weekends, over the course of two years (which is probably a motivating factor for Jesus cutting his long hair and shaving early on). There’s going to be a certain amount of rough edges in an enterprise like that, making an action comedy without professional stuntmen and the like. The thing is, you can see director Lee Demarbre getting more skillful in his camera setups and editing as the movie progresses.
One of the early big fight scenes – when Jesus is attacked by a roving band of atheists (which is pretty funny, especially the endless of supply of assailants pouring out of the Atheist Jeep), looks like what it is – basically a home movie made with a bunch of enthusiastic friends. By the time we get to the final battle between our two heroes and the bad guys, Demarbre has gotten really good at tightening up this stuff, and the only thing holding him back is money. As it is, that extended fight scene would stand up well to the finale of any number of direct-to-video action flicks from the 80s made by supposed professionals.
I’m also going to tip my hat to the pretty inclusive nature of the movie. When the seemingly defeated Jesus asks Golgotha “Why lesbians?” (the evil Dr, Praetorius (Josh Grace) is grafting their skin on the bloodsuckers to provide immunity from sunlight) and the vampire replies “They’re deviants, no one will miss them,” Jesus’ answer: “There is nothing deviant about love” seems wholly in keeping with The Naz’s actual teachings. (Santo’s rejoinder, “Good one, My Lord! Truth is like garlic to them!” proves that Driscoll had the most fun writing him). After an earlier defeat, echoing the Good Samaritan, the only person who will stop to aid a bleeding Jesus on the street is a transvestite. In a final Sermon in the Mount scene, Jesus begs his followers to “pay attention to the message, not the messenger.” There’s a lot the script gets right.
There’s a lot that’s questionable, too, but hey: this is a labor of love that got finished, and then got distributed, and then got broadcast at least once I can think of. All these things are minor miracles in and of themselves. It’s worth watching at least once, but bring along that Christian charity you’ve been saving up.
One of my rules for these challenge things and lists and the like is A) I should never have seen the movies before, or B) If I have, it was twenty years ago or more. This one is kind of a special case: it was thirty years ago, and it was also the first review I ever wrote, for a zine called High Tech Terror (which eventually became European Trash Cinema). So it’s kind of special, in that horrible way usually reserved for misshapen creatures in a Berni Wrightson story. I thought it was behind me, and then it crops up just in time for a horrifying twist ending.
I’ll begin with my usual digression to Bruce Lanier Wright’s Nightwalkers, (too long out of print, c’mon publishers) where he refers to “Italian horror cinema and its idiot brother, Spanish horror cinema”. Well, there’s good and there’s bad, and there’s a whole lot of in-between, and that’s where Horror Rises from the Tomb falls.
We begin in 16th century France, where warlock Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) has a bunch of accusations about him read out by his brother or cousin, who knows, Armand (Paul Naschy), that he is a warlock, a vampire and a lycanthrope (Paul Naschy) and he and his mistress Mabille (not Paul Naschy, but Helga Line) are to executed for same. The execution takes some time, as Alaric and Mabille need that time to curse the descendants of their accusers, like Andre Roland (Victor Alazar). Alaric is beheaded, and Mabille is hung upside-down and whipped, as this is judged the best way to get a naked woman onscreen as soon as possible.
In the present day, Hugo de Marnac (Paul Naschy) poo-poos such things as seances where the head of Alaric puts in an appearance, and his friend Maurice (Victor Alcazar), who is receiving visitations from said disembodied head (because, as you recall, Maurice was cursed back in the beginning, when he was in period costume). Hugo decides to do the ultimate poo-pooing by taking Maurice and their girlfriends (Cristina Suriani and Betsabe Ruiz) to his ancestral chateau, where the body and head of Alaric are supposed to be buried separately.
As the de Marnac estate is believed by the locals to be something like a transplanted place of Transylvania, Hugo can only find a couple of local lowlifes to dig up the grounds, and they find a chest where Maurice suspiciously intuits it will be. That night, the thugs break into the shed where the chest was left until Hugo could find a blowtorch to take to the lock. They bring their own blowtorch, and find not treasure, but the head of Alaric, who immediately possesses one and compels him to kill the other, and the caretaker who discovers their burglary.
Now, fellow monster kids, you are going to realize that this is the Universal B-flick (and TV staple for years) The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958), right down to the necklace with an ancient symbol that is the warlock’s weakness. What Paul Naschy realized is that the setup needed more gore (Alaric and Mabille like to eat human hearts), more kills, and much more nudity. Mabille, for instance, once she is resurrected, likes to wear a sheer black nightie, and nothing else, much of the time. Oh, yes, Naschy also realized the plot needed zombies for no good reason, except for addition to the running time.
I should mention that Hugo takes the opportunity to rekindle his childhood romance with the caretaker’s daughter, Elvira (Emma Cohen), who is quite endearing and makes for a (spoiler spoiler spoiler) splendid Final Girl (end spoiler. Movie’s 40 years old, dude).
Apparently, beside gussying up another movie’s plot and injecting frequent nudity, Naschy also shot the entire movie in and around his country house, which makes makes this movie the sort of thrifty enterprise Roger Corman would give a standing ovation. It’s a pleasurable enough way to spend 90 minutes, and can serve as a decent intro to Spanish horror cinema.
You probably know that Universal is currently trying to gin up a Marvel-style “shared universe” for all their stock monsters; what’s annoying is that they’re pretending this is something new, when anybody who’s seen any of the 40s Universal monster movies know this was already the case. (Also annoying is that the studio will almost certainly try to make them all moody anti-heroes, but that is a rant for another time)
Ghost follows directly after 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, starring Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in his last outing as the Monster. The villagers, as usual, are pissed off and certain that Frankenstein is the cause of all their problems, even though there hasn’t been a Frankenstein in the castle for years. They decide to blow up the castle, mainly because Ygor (Bela Lugosi) managed to survive getting shot in the last movie. The Burgomeister goes, “Fine, fine.” All the explosions manage to do is free the apparently immortal Monster (now Lon Chaney Jr.) from the sulfur pit he fell into back in 1939.
Ygor takes his “friend” to the brother of Frankenstein (a less-intriguing title than Ghost of Frankenstein, to be sure) Ludwig Frankenstein (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), who runs a “Hospital for Diseased Minds”. Along the way the Monster manages to kill a couple of villagers who get in the way of the creature’s attempt to retrieve the ball of a little girl who is totally unfrightened of her “giant”. Ludwig eventually brings the Monster into his hospital with the intention of destroying it, but the appearance of the ghost of his father (title fulfillment – 100%! Though sadly it’s not Colin Clive, who had died five years previous), pointing out that all Ludwig need do is replace the Monster’s defective brain, convinces him to join the family business.
Ludwig’s plan runs aground when Ygor prevails upon his assistant, Bohmer (Lionel Atwill) to transplant his brain into the indestructible creature, with predictably dire results. Those results would even carry into the next movie in the series, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which would feature Lugosi as the Monster. Sensible because Chaney lip-synching Lugosi’s lines after the transplant isn’t entirely successful, and, of course, Chaney had to play the Wolf Man. But that is yet another rant for yet another time.
Ghost bends itself into some interesting shapes to get all its story elements in (the means by which the villagers are made to storm yet another edifice of Frankenstein is especially suspect), but overall it’s an enjoyable way to spend 67 minutes. And that cast! Besides Hardwicke, Chaney and Lugosi, Evelyn Ankers is Elsa Frankenstein, Ralph Bellamy is the local prosecutor (and Elsa’s boyfriend). Atwill had been the one-armed Inspector Krogh in Son, and just so you don’t start deluding yourself that in-joke casting is a modern thing, Dwight Frye, the original hunchback assistant in Frankenstein, in on hand as two different villagers. You have to drill down into what Will McKinley calls “old movie weirdo”-dom to recognizeI Love A Mystery‘s Barton Yarborough as the doomed Dr. Kettering. And whatever else, Ygor is pretty much the last of Lugosi’s classic roles, and it deserves some respect.
Ghost isn’t really any sort of a major linchpin in the continuing mythology of Universal Monsters, but it should be watched just for that amazing cast. And especially just for Lugosi.
If you remember last year, while reviewing The Quatermass Xperiment, I referred to it as a “ground zero movie”, the direct ancestor of movies like this one. A mere two years later, once more a guy goes into space and comes back changed, and people die and popcorn gets bought.
Dan Prescott (Bill Edwards) is your stereotypical go-for-broke hot dog hardcore test pilot in the Navy. How much of a hardcore is he? In the plentiful stock footage, he is always represented by Chuck Yeager, that’s how hardcore he is.
Dan keeps pushing his rocket planes to go farther and farther, much to the chagrin of his more strait-laced brother Chuck (the ever-reliable Marshall Thompson). Dan, in fact, pushes his new plane past radio contact, 250 miles into space itself (title fulfillment: 100%!), encounters a weird cloud of meteor dust, and crashes back to Earth. Chuck and his crew find a strangely changed rocket plane: the dust has coated the entire vehicle, including the interior, with a hard, armor-like coating.
It’s not too long before the murders start happening. Starting with cattle on the ranch where the rocket crashed, to a nurse at a blood bank, then a truck driver. Whatever it is that’s killing people and drinking blood, it can drive a car.
Whatever it is, of course, is Dan, also coated with the meteor dust, causing his hands to become bludgeons coated with the equivalent of diamond dust. His body has somehow adapted to live in space, and he is suffocating in Earth’s thick atmosphere. He’s been lashing out in survival mode, trying to get to his trusted mentor, Dr. Von Essen (Carl Jaffe) at the base, and the high altitude simulation chamber where he can breathe and deliver necessary exposition.
Man, talk about needing a spoiler alert on a lobby card
First Man Into Space, like the previous year’s Fiend Without a Face (also starring Thompson) is a fairly intelligent sci-fi monster movie produced by Richard Gordon, who was trying to establish a British movie company much like AIP in America. The original script, Satellite of Blood by Wyott Ordung, was in fact offered to AIP and turned down. Probably the most remarkable thing about the movie is that it is set in New Mexico, but was, in fact, filmed in Hampstead Heath, England, which explains some of the uncharacteristically wet exterior shots.
First Man Into Space is almost always going to wind up compared to the thematically similar Quatermass Xperiment, and suffer in that comparison. We perversely see too much and yet not enough of the monster – that actually is Edwards in that suit, and he could only wear it safely a few minutes at a time. There is precious little mystery and no pathos until the very end – there is just a bulletproof monsta on the loose. Eek! The development of the story feels a bit extended – the movie opens with another test flight that Dan pushes too far and crashes even before the flight that transforms him. But once that flight occurs, the movie steps forward at a steady pace, and was a fine waste of an afternoon in my youth. It doesn’t have the more bizarre aspects of Gordon’s other sci-fi flicks, like the aforementioned Fiend or The Atomic Submarine, but it has its own monster movie charms.
After an impressive (low-budget) opening sequence of trains, planes and automobiles crashing because their drivers are apparently dead at the wheel, we meet Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) driving about the English countryside, which is littered with corpses. After appropriating a shortwave radio from an empty shop, he sets up in a small inn. Two more survivors, Taggart (Dennis Price) and Peggy (Virginia Field) show up, then a couple assumed dead but just drunk, Edgar and Violet (Thorley Walters and Vanda Goodsell).
Jeff theorizes that there’s been some sort of gas attack – he’s a test pilot who was on a high-altitude flight with oxygen assist, Peggy was in a hospital in an oxygen tent, Edgar and Violet were at an office party and sleeping it off in a sealed bio lab. The question of who would have done such a thing is answered – kind of – when two robots walk through the village, seemingly unconcerned about the survivors. Until Violet, assuming they’re Air Force personnel, interrupts their stroll and we find out the robots can kill with a touch.
Publicity photo? Or community theater production of The Mousetrap?
Two more people show up, Mel and Lorna (David Spenser and Anna Palk), a young couple trying to get to Liverpool so Lorna can have her baby. Taggart bitches about the burden of adding a pregnant woman to their group, but Nolan answers “They may have just become the most important people on the planet.”
That’s your setup, and there really isn’t much more to it. There is a lot of theorizing and planning, until it’s revealed that the robots can resurrect any dead bodies they wish as shambling slave units. This induces our survivors to abandon their cozy little inn and start on their planned exodus, only to have the birth of Lorna’s baby bring everything to a halt. Nolan finally figures out that the strange transmission that’s on all frequencies is somehow guiding the robots, and he and Mel have to track down the local radio station that’s being used for transmission, and blow it up (just in the nick of time, of course).
The photo you always saw in Famous Monsters and thought, “Wow, this movie looks cool!”
The Earth Dies Screaming runs a typical b-picture 62 minutes, but still has trouble filling that time. Almost all the fantastic elements – the walking, white-eyed corpses, the robots suddenly deciding to do something about the survivors – are in the last quarter of the movie. A more even distribution of these elements would have resulted in at least a halfway decent Outer Limits episode.
A lot of that is typical of low-budget filmmaking. Talk is cheap, action costs money. There are a lot of unanswered questions in The Earth Dies Screaming – not the least of which is who is still manning the power generation plants of Britain – and some of those points actually do improve the movie, giving the viewer’s brain something to fasten on. Who are the invaders? Are the robots merely the troops, or are these aliens truly a race of robots? Who the hell is Taggart, how did he survive (“That’s not important.”), and why is he so good with a gun and picking locks? (I think he’s James Bond gone feral, but that’s just me)
Director Terence Fisher is one of my favorites in the Brit horror field; besides numerous iconic Hammer films, he’s also responsible for underappreciated indies like Island of Terror and Island of the Burning Damned. It’s largely due to his talent that this over-talkative under-active movie has any hope of keeping our interest at all; a mostly painless way to waste an hour, and not much more.
Ah, yes. Another of those movies I knew I was going to have to deal with some day. That list used to include Salo and The Last House on the Left, and it’s shrinking by the year.
You know, back in the 80s, when I was trying to get a movie made, I called myself a gorehound and like a lot of others, read Fangoria and Deep Red, and this movie was one of the Big Dogs, the ne plus ultra of nastiness. Speaking of Deep Red magazine, its editor, the late Chas Balun was one of Holocaust‘s most ardent American supporters; to him we owe the term “Italian Gut Muncher”. The box for the Grindhouse Releasing Ultimate Platinum Super Collector’s Restored Version proclaims it to be THE ONE THAT GOES ALL THE WAY!!!
Yet… I had never seen it. My interest was minimal. I don’t much care for jungle movies, or movies that simply serve as a catalog of atrocities. I had watched some tape – maybe it was one of those short-lived video magazines – that was a compendium of scenes from various flicks, and it had all the money shots from Cannibal Ferox under its American video name, Make Them Die Slowly, and that was enough for me, for years. But in those years, I was assured that there was more substance than that going on in Holocaust, and when Grindhouse Releasing did their thing, I figured this was going to be my shot at seeing it under the best conditions possible.
I suckered frequent movie-watching partner Rick into sharing the burden with me. That was easy, because Rick has a long-standing grudge against The Gates of Hell. Rick can be a bit gullible when it comes to movie ballyhoo, and when he was told that Gates was banned in 92 countries because it was the ultimate experience in gut-wrenching terror, he was at the theater opening day, money in hand, guts ready to be wrenched. I like Gates more than Rick did, shall we say. For instance, I do not rant and rave for an hour about it when the subject comes up. So I said to Rick, “I have a movie that was actually banned in three countries I can verify. It says it goes all the way.” And he was in.
Unfortunately for me, Rick scoffed at Grindhouse’s generous offer of an “Animal Cruelty-Free Version”, saying, “We’re going all the way!” I guessed if Grindhouse put this much trouble into restoring it, I should at least watch the whole thing. Yyyyyyyyyyyeah, no. I could have easily done without that part of it.
If you live on some planet where this sort of thing hasn’t reached you yet: A documentary crew of four young people (Carl Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen and Luca Barbereschi) set out into the Amazonia (a region we are constantly reminded is called “The Green Inferno”), seeking to make a movie about people still “living in the stone age”. After they’ve been missing for two months, Professor Monroe (Robert Kerman), an anthropologist, goes into the Green Inferno to search for them.
This part of the movie is pretty standard jungle adventure. The indigenous tribes are especially wary about white men, and Monroe realizes that the four missing people are the cause. He eventually tracks them to a remote tribe called The Tree People, where he finds the bones and smashed equipment of the four; slowly gaining the Tree People’s respect (with a tape recorder, and by joining in on the ritual eating of enemy guts), he is given the fifteen cans of film the group had shot.
Back in New York City (really, they never miss an opportunity to drop in a landmark), the network who backed the four’s other documentaries wants to show the returned footage. Munroe is against it. This second part of Holocaust involves the restoration of the recovered film, and Monroe interviewing people who knew the crew. The most cogent thing learned is that the leader of the group, Alan (Yorke) was “a real son of a bitch” according to even his father and his employers. Monroe is shown their previous movie, Last Road to Hell, which looks like execution footage lifted from Africa Addio. He is told that the footage is faked. That’s what Alan did – he incited or he faked. (Note: that shit wasn’t faked).
The last third of the movie is Monroe realizing these executive idiots haven’t watched all the footage, and insisting they do. And here is where the money shots start afresh. The fifth member of the party, the guide, is bitten by a snake, and the venom is so potent that that a quick amputation of the leg doesn’t help. The four decide to continue on, anyway.
(There are what we call Idiot Plots, which depend on the stupidity of the characters to advance. These guys take the cake. They take a whole bakery full of cakes.)
They shoot a member of the first tribe they encounter in the leg, so he’ll be slow enough for them to follow to his village. Then, awing the villagers with their boomsticks, they round them up and torch the huts. Then Alan and Faye (Ciardi) make love in front of the cowed villagers. Going further, they find an errant woman from the Tree People and gang rape her. (They are also mean idiots) . This means eventually they are going to run into a large group of Tree People – too many to shoot – and find themselves rather messily on the menu – and that on camera, to boot. Alan’s the last to go, and I guess hoping that the God of Whiteness will protect him and his film, he keeps rolling.
I’m not going to go into detail on the deaths here, except that they are very well faked – director Ruggero Deodato was actually accused of murder because he somehow managed to convince the four actors to disappear for a year to lend the story credence. There are other man-on-man horrors, but the animals are going to hit you the worst, because those deaths are real and graphic. There are two (very) small saving graces; one is that everything is on the menu in the Amazonia, and after the scenes were shot, the animals were given to the natives to eat, for which they were grateful. That’s a coatamundi, a turtle (that scene is infamously heinous), a snake, a couple of monkeys, a pig. They also list a spider, but that one looked fake, and nobody eats spiders. The other silver lining to clutch at is that the filmmakers now say they regret those scenes, and specifically asked Grindhouse Releasing to excise them. They did, via the branching capabilities of the technology – the Animal Cruelty-Free version runs a good six minutes shorter.
This isn’t even Deodato’s first cannibal movie – he and Umberto Lenzi kept trying to one-up each other on the gore-meter (“The Gore Score”, as Chas Balun would say). The thing is, in that contest, I give Deodato the clear edge. He apprenticed under Roberto Rosselini and Sergio Corbucci. As Eli Roth points out, from Rosselini he gets the power of low-key neo-realism, from Corbucci the canny use of violence to make a political point. Our documentary crew are walking examples of white privilege who push it too far, and pay the price rather nastily.
So does Cannibal Holocaust go “All The Way”? Yeah, it does. Yet somehow Deodato’s framework and execution keeps it from feeling like totally sleazy exploitation. It’s definitely exploitation, but you feel like a point is trying to be made, somewhere in there, amidst all the screaming, rape and gore.
Way back when, when I was writing about The Blair Witch Project, I was asked why I hadn’t included Cannibal Holocaust in my brief history of found footage movies. Well, it was, um… mainly because I hadn’t seen it. But this really is the first one, right down to the “based on a true story” hook. That’s a coin that has been counterfeited so many times as to make any use of it suspect, but legend (ha!) has it that there was a similar party lost to cannibal tribes, there was footage, an Italian network was going to show it, but decided not to and ordered the footage destroyed. The footage still leaked, though, and a projectionist was fined for stealing it – this is mentioned in the text at the end.
Aaaah, who knows. Now I’ve seen it. I don’t have to shuffle my feet shamefully at movie nerd meetings anymore when the subject comes up. Here’s the NSFW trailer:
Let’s get the Hong Kong horror for this year out of the way early, shall we?
The Boxer’s Omen starts with a boxing match, sure enough, an MMA style bout between a Chinese boxer and a Thai, played by Bolo Yeung. Predictably, Bolo cheats, breaking the neck of his opponent with a cheap attack. This leads his brother Chan (Philip Ko) on the road to vengeance, but first he has to be rescued from a gang of thugs (who I guess were also Thai?) by a ghostly Abbot, who then proceeds to haunt Chan until he goes to Thailand to challenge Bolo to another bout. This trip also, nearly by accident, takes Chan to the Abbot’s temple, where he finds out that he is involved in a much weirder movie than he originally thought.
Evil Wizards have the BEST decor.
The Abbot, you see, is now deceased after a battle with a black magician. This battle includes massive exploding sores, driving a magic dagger through the heart of an evil bat puppet, the skeleton of that bat puppet trying to walk out of the temple, and the black magician creating some fuzzy spider puppets so he can crawl up the ceiling of the monk’s bedroom and drop the spiders on him, so they can drive poisonous needles into his eyes, killing him.
Not my favorite cookie jar.
Whew. Is that weird enough for you? How about the fact that Thai magicians keep pots of disgusting things around to eat and then spit up, creating nasty potions? And they have the most amazing decor for their warehouses full of nauseating things in jars?
If not, trust me, this movie gets weirder.
Chan and the monk were brothers in a previous life, it seems, and now their fates are linked; once the Abbot’s body decomposes, Chan will die. So Chan becomes a monk and trains up for a battle with the black magician, all in the space of three months (cuz he still needs to make it back to HK to fight Bolo).
The battle is a tough (and weird) one, full of bat puppets, animated crocodile skulls, and the black magician ultimately pulling his own head off to attack Chan, Penanggalan-style. It looks bad for Chan until the sun comes up, so burn, black magician, burn!
Ai-yaaaaah!
Well, that’s taken care of, so Chan goes back to HK and immediately breaks monk protocol by sleeping with his girlfriend. Meantime, the black magician’s disciples are doing all sorts of disgusting things, like sewing up his corpse in a crocodile carcass and chewing each other’s spit-up to resurrect him as a super-naked woman with metal nails, which also resurrects the golden needle curse just in time to rob Chan of his eyesight during his match.
Chan doubles down on his screwing up by lying about his falling off the sex wagon, robbing himself of his monkish powers and necessitating a trip to Kathmandu to find the holy ashes of his Abbot brother from yet another former life. This leads to one of the most delirious, demented magical fights ever put on screen, and it’s almost all practical effects. The final assault by the three disciples is now very high on my list of “Oh-What-The-Living-Hell?” moments in cinema.
The Boxer’s Omen was a response by Shaw Brothers to a bunch of smaller studios eating into their market share with tales of extreme horror. It’s best to leave your gag reflex at home while watching this, and don’t even think about absently enjoying a snack while watching. I’m still amused by the prospect of Thailand being the Transylvania of HK movies, but this movie’s dependence on evil wizards running everything through their salivary glands prior to use is going to be a bridge too far for some viewers. The movie’s also about ten minutes too long, but it’s a really crowded hour and forty minutes, and there’s not that much fat that could be trimmed.
But if you have a room full of people that need to be freaked out, boy, do I have a movie for you. Or parts of one, anyway.
Here, have some weirdness, including the fact that whenever the black magician appears, he always plays the audio for the last five seconds of Phantasm.
You should check out cesardg13’s movie posters on Deviant Art.
Juan López Moctezuma is an interesting side-trip in the world of genre filmmaking. A compatriot of Alejandro Jodorowsky in his Mexico City days, he was a producer on Fando y Lys as well as El Topo. Moctezuma is most widely known for three movies made in the 70s – The Mansion of Madness (73) which is loosely based on Poe’s “The Method of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Feather” and was indeed re-titled Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon in the US,’cuz them Poe movies always made serious coin (though audiences expecting gothic horror were not prepared for what is actually pretty dark farce); 1975’s Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary which we’ll be visiting eventually; and this remarkably straightforward, though still weird, occult thriller.
The teenaged, recently orphaned Justine (Susana Kamini) is remanded to the care of the sisters at a convent, where she meets the similarly orphaned Alucarda (Tina Romero), who you know is going to be trouble because she’s the only one who dresses in black. We also know she’s going to be trouble because immediately after her birth, her mother (also played by Romero) was claimed by something dark and scary before the opening titles.
Oh no! It’s Satan!
The friendship between the two girls deepens quickly to a nearly sexual intensity. One day while capering in the woods, they run into a sinister hunchbacked gypsy (Claudio Brook) who offers them enlightenment, even as one of the other gypsies reads Justine’s palm and blanches. Soon after, Justine falls ill and the hunchback appears in the girl’s chamber, making their clothes vanish and signing their souls over to Satan, as one does.
The girls start doing disruptive things like hailing Satan during classes, and things continue to deteriorate until Justine is hanging nude from a St. Andrew’s Cross, being stabbed to find her Witch’s Mark while being exorcised. This scene is interrupted by the local Dr. Oszek (also Claudio Brook), who has no time for such superstitious rubbish. He’s too late to save Justine’s life, but he carries the sobbing Alucarda away to his home, where his blind daughter Daniela (Lili Garza) will keep her company.
A brief pause for my favorite detail – the learned doctor keeps a book in his library entitled Satan so he can sneer at it whenever he pleases.
Oszek returns to the convent to find it in a panic – the nun tending to Justine’s body has mysteriously burned to death and Justine’s body is missing. Soon after Oszek is lead to the chapel by screams, because Father Lázaro (David Silva) is hacking off the head of the dead nun, returned to demonic life. This where the horror movie really kicks into high gear, as Oszek realizes that his book learning is useless against the forces of darkness, and what’s more, he’s put his daughter in mortal danger, because both she and Alucarda have vanished.
The first order of business is to find all these missing girls, of course, and Sister Angélica (Tina French) leads them to the ruins where Alucarda’s mom had her opening scene and the girls liked to hang out and get hallucinations. Angélica also lends another forgetful sister her crucifix, which means when she discovers the naked Justine in a coffin filled with bubbling blood, she’s pretty much doomed.
This leads to a major confrontation in the convent, where all Alucarda has to do is say the name of a devil and somebody else bursts into flames. It all looks pretty bad for anybody not named Alucarda, until the girl’s humanity kicks in when she sees Daniela, who was nice to her, injured by all her wild devil-calling and destruction. The end.
Alucarda has a reputation for being a bit of an undiscovered gem, and that holds true, by and large.There is some wild imagery left over from His Jodo days – the convent’s chapel looks like it grew organically out of the walls of a deep cave grotto, and the nuns’ habits are the farthest you can find from the traditional black-and-white – they’re dressed in odd white fabric with a red wash that is not uniform, making the sisters look like they’re dressed in bloody bandages. Quite striking, and in my experience, unique. This being the Internet, someone will let me know if I’m wrong.
It’s definitely a 70s, movie, though, which means some time spent before you get to the truly weird stuff, though quite a bit of nudity livens up the wait. Should you seek it out? Well, Guillermo del Toro is an admirer of Moctezuma and his films, so let how you feel about one director’s work be your guide as to how you’ll feel about another.
In a dramatic departure for covers, this is actually pretty close to what happens in the movie
Next month, in our annual Hubrisween marathon, I’ll be revisiting the very first movie I ever reviewed. In my usual demented brain-damaged crab fashion, I will now re-visit the second movie I ever reviewed, which is Slugs, a 1988 horror movie directed by Spanish director Juan Piquer Simón, whose biggest hit stateside was probably 1982’s Pieces (“It’s Exactly What You Think It Is”).
I didn’t care for Slugs back in ’88 or ’89, whenever it was. My entire review consisted of a list of each and every horror movie cliche which you will encounter during its runtime, up to and including, “Hey (Hero), if anything happens to me, take care of my wife.” The only one I couldn’t complain about was the alcoholic hermit saying, “Whut’s thet dawg a-barkin’ at?” and that’s only because the dog doesn’t bark, it just refuses to go into the abandoned house infested with killer slugs.
Killer. Slugs.
You two are so frickin’ doomed, I didn’t even look up your character names.
And that’s not one of the reasons I hated the movie (it is right there in the title, after all); I have watched movies about giant mollusks, murderous tires, bloodthirsty pianos and meteorological events made of man-eating fish; I am not going to balk at a movie about killer slugs, even if as a predator, they only slightly more mobile than the monster in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It was the rote nature of the thriller that grated on me.
So here I am, 27 years later, and Arrow Video has put Slugs out on blu-ray. A number of my friends are very excited about this. I’m talking about being as excited as me hearing a pristine 35mm print of Chimes at Midnight had been found. So here is another chance for an older, wiser version of myself to give a movie another chance.
BAD SLUG! BAD! BAD!
As you know (or could have surmised by my above rambling), this movie is about a small town being invaded by a horde of large, carnivorous black slugs (in the most famous shot, we find that the slugs have a toothy maw) traveling through the sewer system, having been spawned by some toxic waste dump in the town’s past. Their mucus is toxic, and can paralyze their victims. Also, as we find out in a particularly Cronenbergian sequence, if your alcoholic wife cuts one up in a salad and you eat it, blood flukes will proliferate in your body and make your head explode. Oops!
Pretty impressive in 1080p.
So it’s up to a heroic Health Inspector (Michael Garfield) a doesn’t-want-to-be-a-hero sanitation engineer (Philip MacHale) and a dubbed high school biology teacher (Santiago Alvarez) to combat the menace. There is a lot of time spent trying to get the local bureaucrats to do something about the bloody bodies piling up, but they can’t close the beaches on the 4th of July jeopardize a sweet business deal already in trouble because the guy negotiating it had his head explode at a ritzy restaurant. So our heroes come up with a formula that makes the slugs explode instead (I guess they were immune to salt), and dump it in the slugs’ breeding ground, which also blows up half the damn town, and serves them right.
The problems with the movie are largely structural: it never really allows itself to build any momentum to its final scene. Two men in hazmat suits blundering around a sewer system with outdated maps, trying not to get eaten should be claustrophobic and terrifying. Instead we’re told to be afraid of motionless rubber slugs and flowing water and I’m constantly checking to see how much time is left. There are times I admit I’m distracted by wondering how slugs can pull people off boats or drag dead bodies along the ground…
“We hate each other a lot, right?” “Right.”
As to the much-reviled cliches: They’re there, but I’ve mellowed about them. These are what Simón thought would make for a commercially successful movie (along with some unrepentant 1980s gore), and apparently, he was right. The special effects are quite good; the exteriors were all shot in New York, while the interiors and almost all the effects were filmed in Madrid, Simón’s home turf. This means there is an awful lot of dubbing in evidence, some of it lamentable, but really that’s part of the charm for its fans.
Those fans are going to be ecstatic about this blu-ray, too. Arrow Video are the guys who brought us a flawless Blood and Black Lace and the quality on Slugs is equally breathtaking. A 1080p presentation from the original film elements, and those elements must have been blessed by the Pope because they are amazing and show not the slightest wear.
Arrow also has their usual bonanza of supplements, but the best for my money is an audio commentary track with Shaun Hutson, who wrote the original novel. Hutson is refreshingly level-headed and entertaining about what became of this, his first book; he speaks disarmingly about his first viewing at a film festival, and the differences between the two (mainly, his book takes place in London, not small town America). The conversation, having 92 minutes to breathe, ranges over horror movies in general and Hutson’s hatred for Stephanie Meyers in specific: “You ruined vampires!”
I like Shaun Hutson.
This is an amazing time to be a genre fan with an HDTV. Are there movies I wished Arrow Video had concentrated on other than Slugs? Of course I do. But I still have to admit this is a wonderful package, beautifully presented, and I commend Arrow for taking such care with a long-neglected stepchild of the horror movie world.
There is sort of sad nostalgia about my relationship with the drive-in theaters of the 70s, especially when it was married to my recent acquisition of a driver’s license. This was the beginning of personal freedom, my friends and I piling into the family station wagon and heading out to the Skyway Twin on the weeknight where an entire carload could get in for one low price. This is where I saw Texas Chainsaw and Torso on a double bill, but it was also where we were sure to see those other magical R-rated movies with titles like Student Teachers and Night Call Nurses. I should say especially sure, because these were important to my budding, frustrated and often confused sexuality.
I was reasonably confident I had seen The Swinging Cheerleaders at some point during this, when my life was full of possibilities and my own innate superiority.
Did you know these sonsabitches were still being made? I did not!
When I found out that Arrow Video was prepping a 2K restoration and blu-ray, I knew I would have to try and re-capture that brief window of time – although this time I would be doing it without hollow sound blaring from a metal speaker hanging on the driver’s side window, without the humidity of a hot Texas night, and without the smell of a burning coil of Pic® Mosquito Repellent. All of these are highly overrated.
It turned out I actually hadn’t seen The Swinging Cheerleaders. I probably would have remembered it better if I had, because director Jack Hill delivers an actual movie.
Mesa University is having a great football year, thanks to star quarterback Buck (Ron Hajak). The cheerleader squad, though, is down one girl, and who should show up to try-outs but Kate (Jo Johnston), who wants into the squad to research her term paper on “Female exploitation in contemporary society”, which her boyfriend The Campus Radical Ron (Ian Sander) also wants to run in his underground newspaper. Kate is going to find out that Buck is, under his swaggering front, actually a nice guy, and Ron, under his progressive front, is a sniveling weasel. That’s not much to hang a movie on, so the Coach (Jack Denton), Dean Putnam (George Wallace) and math instructor Professor Thorpe (Jason Sommers) are rigging the games to make a fortune in gambling, which makes a much better exposé for Kate, since she’s also found out even cheerleaders can be worthwhile people.
Well, except for Mary Ann (Colleen Camp), the leader of the squad who hates Kate, because Buck is her boyfriend. Oh, and also she’s the daughter of Dean Putnam. And we haven’t yet mentioned Lisa (Roseanne Katon), our token black cheerleader, who is dating the very-married Prof. Thorpe. And then there’s Andrea (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith), who is dating running back Ross (Ric Carrott), but can’t bring herself to lose her virginity to him. She’s advised by Kate and Lisa to do it with a stranger, and she winds up settling on Ron, who invites some friends over for a gang bang, which leads to Ross beating the crap out of him, and Ron’s subsequent reprisal against cheerleaders in general and Kate in specific.
The Other Cheapest Special Effect: 70s wallpaper.
Now, you are thinking, this is an exceptional amount of plot for a T&A drive-in flick and you are absolutely correct. In the third act, the trio of faculty gamblers decide Mesa have to lose the big game to State to really clean up, and the uncooperative Buck has to be kidnapped – at this point all those subplots go away in favor of low-budget slapstick action. There is a certain amount of grousing online about this movie, and that is at its core: there’s some nudity from our three main cheerleaders (sorry, Colleen Camp fans, villains don’t get nude scenes), and a whole lot of interpersonal relationships. Like I said, Hill delivered an actual movie, not an excuse for my teenaged self to ogle nekkid women. My middle-aged self is reasonably okay with this.
That cravat deserves its own credit.
What I tend to be more interested in this Internet age (where it is ridiculously easy to see nekkid women) is the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, and watching The Swinging Cheerleaders allows you see a man who was a master at artful efficiency at work. Arrow Video has Jack Hill on the commentary track, and it is a beautiful thing to hear him talk about directing. He points out which scenes were achieved by simply dressing up a corner of the soundstage (it’s quite a few, including one where they didn’t even bother to throw up some flats), why pacing is so important to a movie, his history with the crew and actors. The Swinging Cheerleaders was shot in twelve days, which is extraordinary – even AIP generally went to eighteen. The sharpness of the new transfer allows you to note that the teams’ practice uniforms are turned inside-out to obscure a real team’s logo, and follow background props as they magically move from location to location. That was a really popular brand of hot plate in 1974, it seems.
Where’d you go, Jo?
Our heroes and heroines are all young and personable – it’s surprising to note that this is Jo Johnston’s sole credit. Colleen Camp is still acting (last seen in Aquarius), Roseanne Katon went on to become a Playmate of the Month and was acting up through the 80s. Rainbeaux Smith, so winning and vulnerable as Andrea, we lost to heroin and hepatitis. The bad guys – all adults, and outsiders to the intended audience, are cartoonish at best, but in the Nixon years, that is what we urgently desired: bad guys that could easily be defeated by good clean Americans.
I mean, look at that. That is GORGEOUS.
There’s also a new interview with Jack Hill in the extras, 83 years old and sharp as a tack. I sincerely hope he’s writing his memoirs. The Swinging Cheerleaders was made after his back-to-back successes with Coffy and Foxy Brown; this was his shot at avoiding being typecast as The Blaxploitation Director. He hasn’t made a movie since 1983’s Sorceress – from which he removed his name. And that is a shame. Hill could have made it as a director of “A” movies easily, though I suspect he didn’t want to give up the creative freedom small-budgeted fare allowed him. The Swinging Cheerleaders isn’t his best movie, but it’s a solid one. The blu-ray is deserved, if only to hear a legend talk about his craft.
The most amazing thing for me about that Arrow Disc (past the Hill commentary)? As ever, the cover art is reversible, so you can have the movie poster on front, which is my usual preference. This time, though, that cover art by Graham Humphreys is so good, I’m leaving it as is.
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Jesus Christ is already among us again, which is something taken for granted in Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter; any further explanation is unnecessary, and that is going to go for the rest of the movie. You hold on, and hopefully enjoy the ride, and how much you’re going to do that will depend on your own sense of charity and willingness to share in the enthusiasm of the filmmakers.
One of the early big fight scenes – when Jesus is attacked by a roving band of atheists (which is pretty funny, especially the endless of supply of assailants pouring out of the Atheist Jeep), looks like what it is – basically a home movie made with a bunch of enthusiastic friends. By the time we get to the final battle between our two heroes and the bad guys, Demarbre has gotten really good at tightening up this stuff, and the only thing holding him back is money. As it is, that extended fight scene would stand up well to the finale of any number of direct-to-video action flicks from the 80s made by supposed professionals.
I’m also going to tip my hat to the pretty inclusive nature of the movie. When the seemingly defeated Jesus asks Golgotha “Why lesbians?” (the evil Dr, Praetorius (Josh Grace) is grafting their skin on the bloodsuckers to provide immunity from sunlight) and the vampire replies “They’re deviants, no one will miss them,” Jesus’ answer: “There is nothing deviant about love” seems wholly in keeping with The Naz’s actual teachings. (Santo’s rejoinder, “Good one, My Lord! Truth is like garlic to them!” proves that Driscoll had the most fun writing him). After an earlier defeat, echoing the Good Samaritan, the only person who will stop to aid a bleeding Jesus on the street is a transvestite. In a final Sermon in the Mount scene, Jesus begs his followers to “pay attention to the message, not the messenger.” There’s a lot the script gets right.
