The Wonderful World of Crap | drfreex.com

Z: Zombies on Broadway (1945)

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I believe it was Hubrisween Host Tim Lehnerer who pointed out that if you’re doing an A-Z challenge of horror movies, you are inevitably going to end up in zombie territory (especially if you’ve sworn to never watch Zaat! again). So it’s a good thing I recently came off my ten-year moratorium against zombie movies. I guess.

There is no denying there has been an absolute glut of zombie movies over the past decade and more, and though I expected everyone to get sick and tired of them, nooooooooo, they just got more insanely popular. The recent Walking Dead season premiere broke records. We’ve had a $200 million dollar zombie flick starring Brad Pitt, for God’s sake. George Romero had no idea what the hell he was starting when he was prepping a calling card to the motion picture industry back in 1968.

But what all this misses is that there was another zombie craze, back in the 1930s and extending into the 40s. Back before zombies started munching guts. Though nowhere near as prolific as their modern cousins, zombie movies were kicked off by the 1932 White Zombie, which four years later spawned a loose sequel, Revolt of the Zombies. The high point of this cycle is undeniably Jacques Tourneurs I Walked With a Zombie, and by 1945, it was high time for the zombie to be returned to his grave with a comedy, Zombies on Broadway, three years before Abbott & Costello would similarly put paid to the Universal Monsters.

“You do know you guys aren’t funny, don’t ya?”

Zombies on Broadway introduces us to the comedy team of Wally Brown and Alan Carney, who are pretty much in the mold of Abbott and Costello, though Brown’s Jerry Miles is more sympathetic than most of Bud Abbott’s screen characters (Brown and Carney were, in fact, known as “RKO’s answer to Abbott and Costello”). The two have been hired as press agents for Ace Miller (Sheldon Leonard), a gangster who’s gone semi-legit and is opening a voodoo-themed night club called The Zombie Hut. Brown and Carney have been doing a bang-up job on the PR, but they’ve made two mistakes…

…the first was the brilliant idea to advertise that a “real zombie” would appear at the club’s opening. The second is basing their radio campaign on a broadcaster who turns out to be Ace’s bete noir, Douglas Walker (Louis Jean Heydt) a weisenheimer crusader type who delights in needling the mobster on the air. This is like asking Jon Stewart to publicize Bill O’Reilly’s new country club. And worse yet, Walker knows the washed-up prize-fighter the boys intended to pass off as a zombie.

When Walker promises to bring some professor types to vet Ace’s zombie, things get heavy for Brown and Carney, who are forced to board a ship bound for the mythical island of Saint Sebastian, to return with a real zombie or face Ace’s rather drastic consequences. You’ll recognize Saint Sebastian from the aforementioned I Walked With a Zombie. Those seem to be the same sets, too, and oh look, there’s Sir Lancelot, King of the Calypso, acting as a Greek chorus when the boys get off the ship.

That’s not the only holdover from that infinitely superior movie. I’m not talking about Bela Lugosi, who is playing Dr. Paul Renault, mad scientist who is attempting to create a zombie scientifically, I’m talking about the genuine zombie in his employ, Darby Jones, who was the eerie Carrefour in the earlier film. Here, he’s a zombie named Kalaga, and gets lots more screen time, which rather cuts down on the eerieness.

Brown and Carney also pick up a spunky knife-throwing singer (Anne Jeffries) who promises to help them find a zombie if they’ll get her off the island. She’s also going to wind up on Lugosi’s list of potential subjects, but it’s Carney who will wind up with the bulging eyeballs of the zombie, and the boys’ potential savior back in New York, until the sight of a pretty cigarette girl causes him to shake off the effects of Lugosi’s experimental serum, and hilarity supposedly ensues.

Find the funny guys in this scene. HINT: They’re all on the left.

Zombies on Broadway is reasonably well-made, and took in enough at the box office to ensure a sequel, Genius at Work, once again involving Lugosi. Sadly, Brown and Carney lack the charisma and chemistry of other comedy duos, and have thus faded into obscurity. The voodoo rituals which seemed fairly authentic in I Walked With a Zombie degenerate into a jungle hoodoo hugger-mugger more in keeping with the jungle sets from the Tarzan movies (which were used). It tries earnestly be a horror comedy in the vein of The Ghost Breakers but never manages to hit the heights of the movies it imitates. Brown and Carney simply can’t carry an extended vehicle, and when your two comedy stars are effortlessly upstaged by the then-obligatory Comical Superstitious Negro Janitor (Nick Stewart), you have a definite problem.

It would have been nice to end Hubrisween on a more positive note, but then: there was a reason I swore off zombie movies for a decade. That reason just went back further than I suspected.

Zombies on Broadway on Amazon

October 31, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: bela lugosi, hubrisween, zombies on broadway . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

X: Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1990)

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You know what? We need more movies with titles that begin with “X”.

I keep doing alphabetical movie challenges, and let me tell you, such titles are thin on the ground. Earlier this year I did Xtro, and I didn’t care for it. Yet now, here I am, watching Xtro 2. Gavin is also doing Xtro 2, because, like I said, slim pickin’s. Cronenberg should have just lopped off that useless initial e in eXistenz, because it would have made life a lot easier on me.

I’m …going to have to talk about Xtro 2 eventually, aren’t I.

Fine.

So there’s this massive underground scientific complex where they are attempting to project three scientists into a parallel dimension. This seems to have some value to the Department of Defense, who are threatening to shut the whole thing down, “especially in light of what happened in Texas.” What happened in Texas was a guy made the trip to the parallel dimension, came back, and blew up the complex. So our high-strung project head Dr. Summerfield (Paul Koslo) is under a great deal of pressure.

The three scientists make the jump, the weak video signal coming back from the other side shows some sort of spherical construct in the distance. Then they lose contact completely. A rescue team of four professional badasses prepares to go in after them, while the other head of the project, Dr. Julie (Tara Buckman, who you just know is the heroine because she has Linda Hamilton hair) insists on bringing in the guy who blew up the Texas complex – her former lover, Shepherd (Jan-Michael Vincent).

About the time Shepherd arrives and the pissing match between him and Summerfield begins, one of the missing scientists, Marshall (Tracy Westerholm) wanders back into the “transference vector” and is brought back. While the rescue team preps, Shepherd tries to kill the comatose Marshall in the clinic and is put under arrest. Everyone except the audience is surprised when a creature bursts out of Marshall’s chest and slithers into the air ducts.

This has the effect of setting off the complex’s biohazard alarm. Most of the personnel leave in an orderly manner through the elevator system to the surface. Remaining are the rescue team, Shepherd, Summerfield, Dr. Julie, and some other ~~cannon fodder~~ technicians who will attempt to track down and kill the alien invader before the biohazard protocols flush the base with radioactive gas.

I guess we’ll ignore the fact that all this could have been avoided if Shepherd hadn’t clammed up after blowing up Texas. “Would you have believed me?” doesn’t cut it when some preparation would have been much better than none.

A lot of people told me not to bother with Xtro 2. These people do not do movie challenges. But here is the thing: it’s not bad. It’s well made, the actors are all good. it’s got fairly high production values (except for one especially glaring thing we’ll talk about in a bit). Its major problem: you’ve seen all this before.

I had my problems with Xtro, and I’ve been over those. But it has to be admitted that Xtro was creative in many spots, even unique. Director Harry Bromley Davenport reportedly kept the title rights to Xtro but not the story rights, and so was obligated to go the unconnected sequel route. Xtro 2 winds up being a complete reversal from its predecessor: Xtro wasn’t too well-made, but it had creative energy; Xtro 2 is well made but lifts the templates from several other successful movies, most noticably Alien, Aliens and, of course, The Andromeda Strain.

Don’t want to take my word for it? Hey, look, the leader of the rescue team has a steadicam gun:

At least they didn’t go so far as to have a fiery Latina on the team.

And then we have our monster, the whole reason we’re watching this. It’s necessary in these low-budget affairs to keep the monster hidden away for most of your running time, saving the full reveal for the end. So we see a lot of monster feet and monster hands, and a monster tail, and a toothy maw, and it all looks so terribly familiar when you can see it:

Let’s turn on the lights and get a better look.

That is the Xenomorph crossed with the goddam Rancor, so you can add Return of the Jedi to the list of movies being ripped off.

And that is really the worst thing I can say about Xtro 2: it took four writers to come up with this, and I strongly suspect each writer was assigned a different movie to imitate. And this is the result.

Xtro 2 on Amazon

October 29, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, jan-michael vincent, xtro 2 . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

W: We’re Going to Eat You (1980)

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Looking back over the rocky wasteland of Hubrisween, I’m pretty happy that the Asian horror movie has been well represented – Korean, Japanese, Indonesian (twice) and… oops. No Hong Kong horror.

And I really wish we had a better example to show you, but… this is the letter W.

Way back when, in the early 90s, when we just beginning to wake up to the cool stuff that was then happening in Hong Kong cinema, I bought a lot of sketchy, blurry things called VHS tapes through the mail. What had propelled me down this path was The Incredibly Strange Film Show, which devoted half an episode to Tsui Hark (the other half, as I recall, was Stuart Gordon). One movie that was high on my list was Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain, and the other was We’re Going to Eat You. I didn’t care too much for the latter, so it was high time to check it out again, with a better quality picture and improved subtitles.

I suppose the movie lets you know where you’re going to stand from the very beginning, which opens with a piss joke. Two travelers have just come to this island and are looking for the town, and one of them has to keep stopping to pee. The one who can hold his water gets killed by a masked gang of knife-wielders, and if you resented the other one for having such a lame running joke, that’s okay, because the masked guys strap him down to a table and bisect his middle with a cross-cut saw. He was probably going to die from dehydration, anyway.

You see, this town is populated by insane cannibals (yes, this is one of the many movies that also carries the title Kung Fu Cannibals), and the cannibals are ruled by the despotic Chief of Police (Eddy Ko). The masked men are his supposed police force, who trap unwary travelers and butcher them for the “cafeteria”. The Chief puts aside way more meat for himself and his men than is fair, and the other cannibals are grumbling about it.

Enter the dapper Secret Agent 999 (Norman Chu), who is hunting the fugitive bandit Rolex (Melvin Wong). Rolex, we’re pretty sure, is the Chief’s right hand man, the one who is actually competent. Rolex’s identity is confirmed when he lets 999 in on the village’s cannibalistic secret – Rolex refuses to become a cannibal himself, and he knows the Chief will never let him leave the village alive. The trouble is, 999 is a bit of a dim bulb himself, and doesn’t realize that the guys who keep trying to kill him are the Chief’s men. Ergo, Rolex, being a bandit and all, must be lying. Complicating matters even more is a traveling thief (Hon Kwok Choi) who also tries to report the violent gustatory inclinations of the villagers… to the Chief.

You’re going to run into two problems with We’re Going to Eat You. The first is the story, which gets off to a terrific start and then has absolutely no idea what to do with itself. After 999 introduces himself to the Chief, and the Chief tells him that Rolex has been sighted hanging around the town’s slaughterhouse, 999 walks there, gathering quite a crowd as he goes. Before he enters, the village applauds him, which he accepts with a bow. Then he steps into the deathtrap, and there is a tremendous fight. 999 escapes – barely – but that is where the meandering starts, as does the viewer’s irritation.

The other problem is going to be cultural. This is a horror comedy, and comedy changes across cultures. I’m still not sure what to make of the seven-foot tall lovesick drag queen character. I think it is actually supposed to be a tremendously ugly woman (and the guy is playing his role to the hilt), but… well, uncomfortable is the operative word, here.

There are likable bits here and there. The fights – early work by Corey Yuen – are frequent and quite creative. There’s a fair amount of blood, but you kind of wish Stuart Gordon had wandered over from the other half of the The Incredibly Strange Film Show to deliver some pointers on the effective use of gore.

Director Tsui Hark’s output has been fairly uneven; when he’s on, his movies are amazing. When he’s not, though, you start to wonder who sneaked into the director’s chair while you weren’t looking (then again – what director can’t you say that about?). While We’re Going to Eat You doesn’t quite ever get so bad you’re tempted to turn it off, its inability to tell its own story – or even decide which character that story belongs to – with any confidence is both irritating and off-putting. This early in his career, though – this is only his second movie, after The Butterfly Murders – it’s more forgivable.

Here, have the original trailer with some purloined Goblin:

We’re Going to Eat You on Amazon

October 28, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

S: Shanks (1974)

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Shanks is an odd, odd movie.

This is the first – and I’m thinking only – starring film role for the famous French mime Marcel Marceau. It seems quaint these days to consider a mime a respected artist, but I had the pleasure of seeing Marceau on one of his American tours, and I can tell you, the reputation was completely justified and wholly earned. Marceau plays the title character, Malcolm Shanks, a deaf-mute puppeteer much beloved in his small town. Marceau also plays Mr. Walker, an elderly, eccentric scientist who owns the gothic mansion up on the hill.

Walker, impressed by Shanks’ skill with marionettes, hires him to help with his experiments, much to the delight of Shanks’ worthless sister and husband, the town drunk (Tsilla Chelton and Philippe Clay, respectively), who seize Malcolm’s pay each week.

Walker is working on… something. He begins with Shanks manipulating a pickled toad to jump, using electrodes. They progress to a dead rooster, using some manner of wireless devices stuck in the nervous system. They’ve just started to map out where the electrodes go in a human’s nervous system, when the aged Walker dies.

His home life having become unlivable, Shanks moves to the mansion and continues his friend’s work, using Walker as the subject. Marceau’s mime talents come to the fore here, as Shanks learns to manipulate Walker’s body like a marionette, the stiffened joints cracking and popping in protest, . This sequence is, as the poster promises, “deliciously grotesque”.

Soon enough, the drunken lout of a brother-in-law shows up to demand money from Walker’s corpse, then manages to kill himself by falling down some stairs when Shanks attacks him with the zombie rooster. Then the sister, seeing the reanimated drunk nearly hit by a car, runs out in the road and gets creamed herself… well, Shanks soon has a bizarre troupe of zombie marionettes.

The movie is at its strongest in these sequences, full of whimsical, if extremely dark, humor. Celia, a girl on the cusp of womanhood (Cindy Eilbacher, who would eventually wind up in Slumber Party Massacre II), who dearly loves Shanks, is at first horrified, then amused by these dark antics, finally having her birthday party with Shanks in the gothic mansion, attended by zombie servants.

Which is when the motorcycle gang barges in.

To say that Shanks is uneven in tone is about the biggest truth and the strongest criticism you can unload on it; as the story had progressed, silent movie-style intertitles have popped up occasionally, and for the motorcycle gang it reads, “The Outside World of Evil”. Shanks is overpowered, Celia is raped and killed (offscreen, this is a PG movie), and Walker will dig himself out of the grave to wreak revenge on the thugs.

With our required zombie murders – and Shanks’ final hand-to-hand with Celia’s killer – out of the way, the movie finally returns to its morbidly fascinating tone, with Shanks sadly revivifying Celia’s corpse and having a final dance with her. And then we cut back to Shanks’ puppet show for the town children, Celia looking on with admiration, as this was all apparently happening in Shanks’ mind, the end.

I had honestly hoped (having wanted to see this since 74, but it vanished after dismal box office) that this was some undiscovered gem, but alas, that withdrawal from the public eye is largely deserved. Marceau is wonderful – it’s a sheer joy just to watch the man walk through the frame – but its uneveness sadly detracts from the good. The concept is unique and interesting, but soon finds itself with nowhere to go. The sudden appearance of the motorcycle gang seems a desperate intervention to make the movie marketable as a horror flick.

This is nowhere more obvious than the it-was-all-just-a-dream ending, which also seems tacked on. Here is the thing, though: this is William Castle’s last film as a director, and Castle always made what I refer to as kid-friendly horror movies. House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, even the twisted The Tingler were all squarely aimed at the Saturday matinée demographic, and even later, afternoon TV and Creature Features. Castle likely felt that the sappier, happy ending wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.

Shanks would have been improved immeasurably if its running time possessed the confidence of its own macabre premise. There are sections of it where you can almost feel a young Tim Burton in the audience, filing away stuff for later use. As a document of Marceau’s talents away from pantomime make-up, it’s quite valuable. But as a horror movie – or even a coherent whole – it is sadly lacking.

A distinct lack of trailers on the Olive Films blu-ray and the Internet. Here’s a clip, though, that gives you some idea of the beautiful quality of the blu, and a sample of the macabre whimsy we could have used more of:

Shanks on Amazon

October 24, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, marcel marceau, shanks, william castle . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

R: Return of the Blind Dead (1973)

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What, we’re back to Spanish horror already?

This is, to no one’s surprise, Amando de Ossorio’s sequel to his 1972 Tombs of the Blind Dead, which is a really good horror movie. It introduced an alternate version of the Knights Templar (whose actual story makes for a good read) who were executed for practicing black magic and birds plucked out their corpses’ eyes. In this alternate alternate version, the Templars are still drinking virgin blood, but this time it’s the villagers, not the Church (with a capital “Ch”) who get fed up, burn out the knights’ eyes and then set them (or at least some dummies dressed like them) on fire. The one Templar allowed to have lines swears they’ll be back.

Sooo, 500 years later, the very same village is having a party to celebrate the legend of the death of the Templars, and an “American” named Jack Marlowe (Tony Kendall) is there to provide the fireworks. He got the gig through an old girlfriend (Esperanza Ray) who is now the secretary/mistress of the corrupt mayor (Fernando Sancho). The relationships get stupidly complex, but never mind that, there’s zombies.

The semi-deformed caretaker of the ruins where the Templars got torched, Murdo (Jose Canelejas) kidnaps a girl and sacrifices her the night of the festival, but we’re not really sure if it’s her blood or the Templars deciding they’d better make good on that “coming back” business. In any case, the Templars are back, and they’re a creepy bunch, because they actually look dead. They get on their zombie horses and ride for the village, stopping at the occasional house or railroad station to murder the occupants.

Intriguingly, the Mayor and his goons have advance warning of the Templar’s approach, yet do nothing about it, resulting in a wholesale slaughter in the town square. After Marlowe and the Mayor’s suddenly civic-minded goons manage to clear a way for the surviving townfolk to run away, they barricade themselves in a church to hopefully survive the night. At that point, we’re into fairly traditional zombie siege territory, with the occupants splitting into factions and the Mayor getting several people killed just so he can escape.

There are two minor scenes of the Mayor calling the less-than-useful Governor for help which I think are supposed to be comedic but just slow everything down. Apparently the legend of the Templars is very well-known, because Useful information About Undead Knights is dropped at important points. “They’re supposed to be attracted to sound!” “They’re afraid of fire!” “They’re supposed to go back to their graves at dawn!” But in this version of the Templar story, they haven’t been seen for 500 years… where is this information coming from?

Tombs of the Blind Dead ended with one hell of a devastating bloodbath and the dreadful promise of carnage to come. Return has a more upbeat ending, which feels like a cheat, somehow. Overall, it’s not quite as good as its predecessor, but it definitely has its moments, and whatever else, you have to admire its efficiency: the Templars rise from their graves at the 16 minute mark, and then we’re off to the races. That, my friends, is some significant bang for your horror buck.

The Blind Dead on Amazon

October 23, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: amando de ossorio, blind dead, hubrisween, return of the blind dead, templars . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

Q: The Queen of Black Magic (1983)

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Well, well, Indonesian horror, here we are again.

Back on the other end of the alphabet we visited Dangerous Seductress, a 1995 effort to break into the lucrative Western horror market. We’re going back a decade and more for a more homegrown horror, starring Indonesia’s answer to Barbara Steele, the lovely Suzzanna, who was a genuine star in her country from the early 70s up through the 90s.

The movie starts with a wedding, the village head man’s daughter marrying a man named Mohar, with much ceremony. Judging by the muttering in the crowd, Mohar is not a very well-regarded fellow. Somebody else agrees with that opinion, because there are signs of black magic afoot: maggots in the wedding feast, and the bride starts hallucinating monsters.

Suzzanna

A “witch doctor” (hey, blame the dub, not me) is called in, and whoever the villain is bounces the guy up and down like a superball. He lives long enough to reveal “The demon comes from the West!” and Mohar, being a scumbag, deduces that it must be Murni (Suzzanna), the girl he seduced and then left for his current sugar momma.

Mohar whips the village into a mob (even when the head man appeals to their reason) and they descend upon the innocent Murni, burn her house, and throw her into a ravine, which is apparently how you deal with witches in Indonesia. Fortunately for her, she is caught by an old man, who nurses her back to health, then tells her that she needs to learn black magic to get her revenge on the villagers.

Now reasonable people would be asking who this old man might be, who conveniently knows so much about black magic, but as we will see, we are dealing with A Village Full of Idiots (my suggested alternate title), so Suzzanna agrees, and begins her training, which involves nude trampoline jumping, for some reason (I shouldn’t complain, it’s a truly lovely shot)

Soon, Murni is appearing to her would-be assassins, and assassining them right back in a number of interesting ways, including flesh-eating bees and animated scarves that double as nooses. During these days, a city feller wanders through the town, and stops at the village mosque to pray, only to find it abandoned and falling apart. In fact, whenever he mentions prayer, a part of the building tries to fall on him, because our old pal, the Suspicious Old Man, is muttering over his paraphernalia. The holy man defiantly sets up his prayer mat in the mosque and prays despite the falling debris, resulting in the Old Man getting punched by a holy mule miles away.

The new Holy Guy observes what has become a normal night for the village: Mohar and his minions marching out into the night to find Murni (like I said, Village Full of Idiots), and opines that really, all the village needs to do is start praying again. Well, the mob of idiots does find Murni, and she disperses them easily with a big offscreen fan, and lays a curse on Mohar, who, in the best scene in the movie, literally pulls his own head off.

It turns out that I had been waiting all my life to see that in a movie.

After Mohar’s head goes all penanggalan on us, flying around and biting people, the Holy Man crops up to stop it. and everybody agrees it would be a good idea to rebuild the mosque and start praying again. Murni is reluctant to continue killing, now that she’s had her revenge on Mohar, much to the Old Man’s disgust. It gets worse when there’s a meet cute between the Holy Man and Murni, and she decides to move to the big city and marry him. Which the Old Man just can’t have.

Queen of Black Magic isn’t going to win any points for originality, but it has some impressively weird and gory death scenes, and I have to say, after years and years of Western horror movies where the villains sneer at ineffectual religion, it’s quite novel to see a movie where simple prayer actually packs a (literal) punch. Entertaining and worth the watch, If you can get past constantly groaning, “You idiots!”

I’m feeling nice tonight. Here, have a Best Of:

The Queen of Black Magic on Amazon

October 22, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, indonesia, queen of black magic, suzzanna . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

P: The People Who Own the Dark (1976/80)

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Incidentally, Sean S. Cunningham claims he knows nothing about this movie,

Whenever I bring up the subject of The People Who Own the Dark (which is an uncommon occurrence, I grant you), I am generally greeted by blank looks. Admittedly, this shouldn’t surprise me, though I am narcissistic enough to believe that my movie experience is everyone else’s. But my knowledge of this movie is due only to a couple of 15 second movie spots on local TV, and a later admonition to “not bother.” The lack of it in any home entertainment format seemed to bear that out, but as we know, often to my detriment, I have to find out for myself.

Code Red DVD is one of those boutique labels that champions some of the most obscure titles, and God bless them for it. They’ve allowed me to see some absolute garbage, but they’ve also allowed me to see some real gems. And their disc of People Who Own the Dark (with typical dark humor, proclaimed on the box to be a “Brand new telecine from an abused, scratched and beat-up 35mm print that went vinegar!”) manages to edge it’s way into the latter category. (The transfer, incidentally, is all those things, but it is also frequently gorgeous; the disc also has a full-frame 1-inch video transfer, if you need to know what’s missing from that 35mm print)

In an indeterminate area of Europe (oh, okay, it’s Spain) a group of high level statesmen, businessmen and rich doctors gather at a remote villa for what proves to be a weekend of debauchery with some lovely women who are, ahem, in it for the money. There is an opening ceremony name-checking the Marquis de Sade, held in an underground wine cellar, and just when we think we’re going to be treated to a low-budget Salo (hopefully lighter on the coprophagy), there is an earthquake that interrupts the salaciousness.

Returning to the mansion upstairs, our group finds out that every living thing above ground is now totally blind. The guy who is going to turn out to be our protagonist, Fulton (Alberto de Mendoza) figures out that there has been a nuclear war, and they have just days before the radiation comes. This is bad science at its baddest, but let’s just roll with it.

The men head into town to ~~steal~~ get supplies for their wine cellar/fall out shelter and the boytoy host of the debaucheries (Tomas Pico) first stabs the blind shopkeeper they’re ripping off, then freaks out and shoots some of the now-blind villagers before he is himself killed by one of the outraged doctors. The others return to the villa, and prepare to hunker down until the fallout passes. Their efforts are interrupted by a mob of vengeful blind people.

What this is, obviously, is another version of Night of the Living Dead, except with blind people instead of zombies. The advantage to that is we are able to skip right over the “they’re learning to use tools!” phase right into cars being used as battering rams to get into the villa. The major disadvantage is the rather problematic conversion of blind people into bloodthirsty monsters.

But as a zombie siege picture, it works; all the necessary notes are hit, and hit well. Though what can be considered another flaw is the adherence to the Night of the Living Dead model, right up to the downbeat ending.

The double year credit in the title of this post is due to the fact that (Surprise! Surprise!) this is actually a Spanish movie, Ultimo deseo. That would likely come as no surprise if I had told you the designated asshole (who is so mean that when he shoots skeet, he uses real pigeons) is Paul Naschy, and the mistress of the villa is the lovely Maria Perschy. Also, the director is Leon Klimovsky, who you’ll recognize from a ton of Naschy werewolf movies.

The original cut is 12 minutes longer than the English version; I suspect I’ll never know what’s in those 12 minutes, and given what I’ve seen, it probably doesn’t much matter. There are some character stories that aren’t fully exploited in this version, but there’s not a whole lot here to make me want to seek those moments out. It’s not a terrible movie by any means, but neither is it a great movie. It’s entertaining enough during its runtime, but alas! Does not cry out for a second viewing.

The People Who Own the Dark on Amazon

October 21, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, leon klimovsky, paul naschy, the people who own the dark . Author: drfreex . Comments: Comments Off on P: The People Who Own the Dark (1976/80)

O: Orgy of the Dead (1965)

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In any of these movie marathons, too much of a good thing can get poisonous. Eventually you just have to watch something you know is terrible, just so you can have a larf and reflect how good you have it at other times.

No one had let Ed Wood Jr. near a director’s chair since The Sinister Urge in 1960. I still haven’t seen that, I now realize, but I have seen Night of the Ghouls, which languished at the lab for years because Eddie couldn’t afford the fees, and the sad truth is, the man had learned enough by that time that Night has few of the lunatic newbie mistakes that riddle his earlier pics, so much so that Wood had, at that time, progressed from manic risibility to mere mediocrity. Surely there is a German word that describes the sadness that causes me.

Night of the Ghouls does have some of the flavorful Ed Wood dialogue, though, and since Orgy of the Dead is an Ed Wood script from an Ed Wood novel, it proudly possesses some, as well. Producer Stephen Apostolof, making his directorial debut, was a little too smart to let Eddie near the big chair, but he did employ him as a production assistant. Too bad those smarts didn’t extend to the casting, because there are few things worse than bad actors trying to do Ed Wood dialogue. Then, God bless ’em, that is why I am here.

Orgy of the Dead is a nudie-cutie, a subgenre more or less created by Russ Meyer. Most of them are simply loose frameworks to connect burlesque striptease numbers (see also Kiss Me Quick, one of the more watchable examples of the breed, if only for its oddness). This means I am going to have problems finding photos to illustrate this review that do not violate WordPress community standards. (I can still talk about body parts, because nobody reads anymore)

Your norms (and chief bad actors) here are Bob and Shirley (William Bates and Pat Barrington). Bob is a successful horror writer who is looking for an old abandoned graveyard at midnight for inspiration, and dragged his girlfriend along just because. One car wreck later (the squealing brake sounds start a couple of cuts before the actual incident) they regain consciousness and find themselves unwilling spectators to the court of the Emperor of the Night (Criswell), who is judging the dead, or at least the dead who are female and have a propensity for losing their clothing. While dancing.

There are roughly ten dances on the card tonight, with the slightest of story elements to justify them. The sudden lack of clothing never is explained, but I guess we can credit Apostolof for using the near endless cutaways to Criswell and his attendant (Fawn Silver, as either the Black Ghoul, Princess of the Night, or Ghoulita, depending on whether you believe the IMDb, the script, or the video box) to excise the strip part of the striptease, and just go to the near-nudity.

There is an Indian dance, then a quote-unquote “Skeleton Dance”, during which our, ahem, heroes, from their hiding place, say things like “I can’t imagine anything dead is playing that music” and “Nothing alive looks like that,” because Bob is an idiot.

After a Goldfinger-inspired dance where a woman who “loved gold above all else” gets dipped in gold (her picture is under the credits and much of the publicity material), Bob and Shirley get captured by the Emperor’s goons, a not half-bad werewolf and a really terrible mummy. (And yes, the boredom has set in to such a point that I did not realize that Shirley was also the dancer for the Gold Girl number).

Tied to two conveniently-placed obelisks (while Shirley yells, “Fiends! Fiends!”), Bob and Shirley are forced to watch the rest of the evening’s festivities, and I know how they feel.

First Ghoulita informs us “To love the cat is to be the cat.” Now, I have loved and lived with several cat lovers, and the uniform never included assless leopard-print pajamas with a boob window. I feel so deprived. And we are going to ignore Criswell’s “A pussycat is born to be whipped.”

I shudder to inform you that we are now only four dances into our set. There is a “slave dance” (featuring my favorite Criswell line, “Torture! Torture! It pleasures me!”) which is followed by Bob telling Shirley, who is just standing there, “Panic won’t do us any good!” Then we have a Mexican dance, then a Hawaiian dance (which honestly seems to last an hour), then a comedy sketch with the mummy and wolfman which is every bit as painful as you think it is, and then there is a bride “who murdered her groom on her wedding day, and now she dances with his skeleton.” (“We rented this skeleton prop for the day, and dammit, we’re going to use it!”) Or at least she does until the go-go music starts, and then she starts gyrating her upper torso so her breasts flail about in all directions. This was the same act as the blonde Sex Bomb in Kiss Me Quick, and just looks uncomfortable, if not downright painful. Still, I suppose this is a fetish for someone out there…

Scream, Gingerla, Scream!

Shirley gets to show us she has the worst movie scream ever, and we still have to get through the zombie dance and the streetwalker dance and…

No, I’m not going to tell you how it ends. Suffer as I did.

Orgy is competently shot, if not acted. Some of the ladies have pretty good dance moves, some do not. They’re all attractive, but seem to fall within the same body type. Your main enemy while watching Orgy of the Dead is going to be boredom, pure and simple, unless you are vitally interested in burlesque and third-rate Martin Denny imitations. This has to be the fifth or sixth time I have watched it, and unfortunately, Orgy of the Dead does not improve with age – but my facility with the fast forward button certainly did.

Oh, the hell with community standards, have a NSFW trailer:

Orgy of the Dead on Amazon

October 20, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: criswell, ed wood, hubrisween, orgy of the dead . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

L: The Living Skeleton (1968)

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Nestled firmly in-between its better-known siblings in the Eclipse Collection When Horror Came to Shinchoku, The Living Skeleton at first seems a fairly typical ghost story. It begins with enough blood and thunder: the crew of a freighter shackled together at the ankles, threatened by a gang of machine-gun wielding thugs. The sole woman on board begs for the life of her new husband, the ship’s doctor. They are all gunned down in cold blood.

Switch to three years later. Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka), who we will find is the identical twin of the woman in the first scene, lives at a Catholic church under the care of Father Akashi (Masumi Okada), and is dating a young man, Mochizuki (Yasunori Irakawa). All seems well, until Saeko and Mochizuki go scuba diving and are confronted by a horde of anatomically risible skeletons, all chained together at the legs.

Mochizuki jokes later that they were seeing things, but that night a storm rolls in, and on the horizon: a seemingly derelict freighter, blowing its foghorn. Saeko is irresistibly drawn to it, and nearly drowns boating to it. It is the Dragon King, the freighter from the first scene, thought lost at sea. She finds the ship’s log, which tells of suspicious people aboard, and a secret cargo of gold bullion. Then she sees her sister and faints.

Saeko vanishes from the church, much to the Father and Mochizuki’s dismay. Meantime, the members of the gang that slaughtered the crew is either enjoying the fruits of their crime or the dregs of their wasting same; they start seeing that chick they know they killed three years ago, and they start dying one by one.

So it’s pretty obvious that Saeko has been possessed by the spirit of her dead sister – they always seemed to have a psychic bond, she tells the Father – and she’s avenging herself, right?

Not so fast.

It looks like The Living Skeleton is going to give us that tooth-grinding device, the rational explanation that explains away all the supernatural happenings, which it does, but the rational explanation is ten times weirder than a vengeful ghost seeking retribution. The last half hour is so berserk, one mind-croggling revelation stacked upon another, that I’m not even going to try to relate it here. It’s so insane it has to be seen, and I’m not handing out any spoilers.

The Living Skeleton pretty much makes sure it stands apart from its brethren at Shochiku Studios by being shot in black and white, increasingly uncommon in 1968, so much so that it is definitely an artistic choice. There are at least two user reviews on the IMDb pointing to this as “the obvious inspiration for The Fog”, to which I have to ask – which version of The Fog did they see? Or which version of The Living Skeleton? Both have ghost ships and avenging spirits, but this like saying Citizen Kane is the inspiration for Cool Runnings because both feature sleds. Come on.

Living Skeleton also led me to ponder if bats actually would nest in derelict freighters. I suppose they could, but then it was made obvious that these are ghoooOOOooost bats, so, you know, educational.

I like when movies can surprise the living hell out of me. That doesn’t happen near often enough.

When Horror Came to Shochiku on Amazon

October 17, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, the living skeleton, when horror came to shochiku . Author: drfreex . Comments: Comments Off on L: The Living Skeleton (1968)

K: Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

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This was a movie I had seen as a child, way back when; I remember it played on NBC in a Prime Time slot, re-titled Kiss of Evil, and I recall being rather confused about the whole thing. Turns out I was seeing a version that had been massively tampered with, and I direct you to this IMDb page for the details. I eventually figured out the true title was Kiss of the Vampire, have now finally watched it again, and was relieved to find out it made a little more sense.

One of the scenes heavily cut for sensitive American viewers is the opening, a funeral in your typical Hammer turn-of-the-century cemetery. One cloaked fellow watches from a distance, and the village gossips whisper that “he’s been drinking again.” This fellow walks to the graveside as the service concludes, takes the shovel and proceeds to smash the shovel down into the coffin. Whatever is in that coffin screams, and impossibly, blood gushes out. The frightened villagers run away, crossing themselves.

After the credits, we are introduced to our – well, not heroes, but our main characters, Gerald and Marianne (Edward de Souza and Jennifer Daniel), who are traipsing about in their motorcar, on their honeymoon. Marianne is a terrible map reader, and they are lost and eventually run out of petrol. This is observed by a telescope in a nearby dilapidated château. They have the car towed to a nearby, nearly deserted hotel, where they find themselves the only other tenant besides the alcoholic Professor Zimmer (Clifford Evans), whom we all recognize as Mr. Shovel Chucker from earlier.

George and Marianne are invited to dinner by the owner of the aforementioned château, Dr. Ravna; they find the interior of the mansion to be quite lovely, and Ravna and his two children very handsome and genial. Of course, given the pre-credit sequence and the title of the movie, we are pretty damned sure they’re vampires, and as the movie progresses, we find they are vampires with a penchant for very elaborate and rococo plots.

Delivery of the rather exotic petrol will take several days and the Ravnas invite George and Marianne to a lavish masked ball. Make no mistake, the entire purpose of this ball is to get George drunk, and then drug him, while Ravna puts the bite on Marianne. When George awakens, he is told there is no such person as Marianne, and that he is a miserable drunken sot and should leave forever.

Even the innkeepers are telling him he came to the hotel alone, but Professor Zimmer is having none of that, and gives George the index card version of what is going on; Ravna is the head of a cult of vampires – all the other attendees of the ball are members of that cult. The vampire Zimmer skewered with the shovel was his own daughter, and he has been laboring over his ancient texts to find a magic spell that will “turn evil against evil”.

A whole lot of Kiss of the Vampire seems like a bunch of 60s Hammer films were put in a blender. The same setup would be utilized for Dracula: Prince of Darkness three years later (also written by Anthony Hinds) and Zimmer must cauterize a vampire bite, much like Peter Cushing in Brides of Dracula. The major elements that set this one apart from the others is the treatment of the vampires as a religious cult, right down to the flowing white robes, and that spell woven by Professor Zimmer, which culminates in an attack on the château by a flock of the finest rubber bats available from the local Woolworth’s.

It’s that final attack that impressed me as a kid; it’s unusual enough to make a lasting impression in a childhood spent watching monster movies. Sadly, the movie proper doesn’t live up to the extraordinary scenes bookending it. The actors are a solid lot, but lacking the convincing gravitas of either Cushing or Lee. Once all the subterfuge is put aside, and Zimmer and George go on the offensive, the story becomes much more involving – but by that time, it’s almost over. A diverting enough movie, but definitely not one of the brighter jewels in the Hammer crown.

(The only trailer I could find on YouTube is so dark as to be worthless. Here instead, is a speed-ramped version of the closing sequence set to Chimo Bayo’s 1992 “Bombas”. The Internet. Go figure.)

Kiss of the Vampire on Amazon

October 16, 2014
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hammer, hubrisween, kiss of the vampire . Author: drfreex . Comments: Comments Off on K: Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

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