The Wonderful World of Crap | drfreex.com

Night Train to Terror (1985)

Night Train to Terror is a very strange beast; I’ve been hearing about it most of my adult life, in one way or another. I think I first encountered it in that battered first edition of Mike Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. It’s an anthology film, and the stories contained therein are (according to who you’re reading) drawn from three, or two, or no unfinished movies. This often puzzled me, because early on in my amateur critic career, I reviewed one of the “unfinished” movies excerpted here, and it seemed pretty complete at the time.

Well, we finally have what has got to be the definitive version of Night Train to Terror, thanks to Vinegar Syndrome, who put out the most gorgeous presentations of the least defensible movies ever. And we can finally, finally figure out some of this thing’s ancestry.

We see the title train chugging on through the night, alternately as stock footage or a model. One entire car is given over to a music video. At least, that’s what it appears to be, with singers singing and dancers talking directly to the camera, all wearing clothing that was fashionable for about five minutes in 1985. Or on the set of Jem, take your pick.

In another car, God and the Devil (Ferdy Mayne and Tony Giorgio, respectively) are having a meeting. Satan is none too happy about the music video, which is something that always puzzles me when it crops up in a movie like this. Everybody knows that rock is the Devil’s music, so why do cinematic Satans always hate it? Maybe it’s because in this case, breakdancing is involved, and Satan has some standards.

It doesn’t matter, anyway, because the train is destined to wreck in ninety minutes, and all those poppers and lockers and gyraters will be dead. To pass the time, God and the Devil go over the case histories of three individuals, with the aid of the Night Porter (Earl Washington). As far as framing stories go, that’s not bad.

…because we’re going to leave the bad to the stories themselves.

The first story, “Harry”, is going to test our mettle tout d’suite. This is the only segment actually taken from an unfinished movie (although there are rumors of available copies), Scream Your Head Off. The story is so disjointed, I fear actual brain damage can result from trying to follow it, but here goes: Harry (John Phillip Law!) is a jerk who crashes his car on his wedding day, killing his bride and putting him in the care of Drs. Fargo (Sharon Ratcliff) and Brewer (Arthur Braham), who brainwash him into drugging and kidnapping women. For what purpose, we’re not sure, except for Richard Moll to paw them. Then there’s some new footage that tells us that Richard Moll’s stand-in (note the hairy arms) cuts them up and the parts are sold to medical schools. Except for the ones that get lobotomized. Or something. And I deserve a medal for even figuring that much out.

There are some versions of Night Train that put “Harry” in the third position rather than the first. Putting it first certainly makes you appreciate what comes afterward – if you continue watching. I can see a whole lot of people jerking the tape/disc out of the player before the movie can unleash anything else in their direction. Then, I also know a whole lot of other people for whom “Harry” would only be an appealing appetizer.

This is followed up by more rock, then “Gretta”, which is taken from a movie called, unsurprisingly, Gretta. Vinegar Syndrome was kind and conscientious enough to actually track this sucker down, though they could only find a one-inch video master. I’ve only had time to skim it, but it is odd. Gretta (Meredith Haze) is an adventurous young lady who gets picked up by rich douchebag George Youngmeyer (J. Martin Sellers) at a carnival. He exposes her to a better way of life, which involves starring her in porn reels. Her true love in life Glenn (Rick Barnes) sees her in one of these stag reels while visiting his old frat and knows he has to immediately seek her out.

Youngmeyer gets Glenn involved in his “Death Wish Club” (which appears to be another title under which Gretta was released), a bunch of rich idiots who have, in one way or another, barely avoided dying violently, and try to replicate that rush at their meetings. In the first, one of the members has brought a “Tanzanian Flying Beetle” whose sting means horrible, instant death. In Gretta, it’s a realistic insect. In Night Train, however, it is a fairly cheap bit of stop-motion animation. It eventually flies out a window and kills a guy necking on a park bench, and his bloody, boil-bursting demise is another addition for this anthology.

There are two more encounters with the Death Wish Club, though Gretta and Glenn want nothing to do with them; in the first, involving random electrocution. they are held at gunpoint. (Once again, the fairly gruesome fatality here was specially made for Night Train). In the second, involving a bizarre pendulum with a wrecking ball at the end, they are forcibly kidnapped. The wrecking ball takes out the perverse countess who was bankrolling the whole affair, but that’s only something you find out if you watch Gretta – in Night Train, she just dies, and the story ends, and Satan is told by the Night Porter that Gretta “went off with the nice young man, and lived happily ever after. Isn’t that nice?” A kiss-off that would probably lead you to guess that this movie was never finished.

But that is exactly what happens in Gretta. They probably could have trimmed its coda down and included it in Night Train, but there was no horror there, I guess, so it got tossed away. In a way that would piss off Old Scratch and the audience in equal measure.

Which brings us, at last to “Claire”, which is taken from the movie I had reviewed so many years ago. Originally called Cataclysm, the version I saw was titled The Nightmare Never Ends, and it honestly does have some nifty stuff in it.

It starts with an old Jewish man recognizing a young man named Olivier (being interviewed on TV) as a notorious Nazi war criminal – who has apparently not aged a day in 35 years! Oooh, there’s some devil shit involved, you can be sure of that! Cameron Mitchell is the cop who doesn’t believe the Old Man (but starts believing when the Old Man dies violently trying to shoot Olivier), Faith Clift is Dr. Claire Hansen, who is destined to go toe-to-toe with the Man-Goat, and Richard Moll – yes, again – is James Hansen, author of the international bestseller, God Is Dead. Who the Antichrist kills just to be a dick about it.

There is more of Cataclysm‘s source material in evidence here than in the other two cases, making it the strongest of the three stories, but doesn’t mean it’s any more coherent. There’s an itinerant priest roaming around telling people they’re messing with the Devil, but faster than you can say “The Omen”, he gets pulled down to hell by a stop-motion demon.

I really don’t remember any of the three stop-motion beasties that crop up here occurring in Nightmare Never Ends, and they all look like they were done by the same person who did the Tanzanian Murder Beetle in “Gretta”. Another argument that these sequences were done post-production (way post production) is their interaction with the tiny humans they terrorize isn’t done with foreground plates or any of that other fancy Harryhausen stuff. They made little puppets for the priest, and Richard Moll, and one other dude who gets stomped by a big demon. And the puppets are very cartoony – it all looks like Davey and Goliath Go to Hell.

And there’s also a woman who shows up at the climax in an operating room (Claire has to put the Antichrist’s heart in a special box, because God uses the Snow White playbook, or something), and I know she had something to do with the plot, but now she’s just some crazy chick who shows up in scrubs and blood and starts stabbing the Antichrist (she always shows up on the video box). But if you haven’t kissed any hope of linear storytelling good-bye by now, you are far more of an optimist than I.

The train crashes, via stock footage of a building burning behind a model train. And God seemingly resurrects the music video on the next train, just to piss off Satan. The end.

Now, there is not a lot of terrible acting in Night Train to Terror, except in the music video segments. This is actually a pretty good bunch of actors trapped in a series of weird, if not outright bad, movies. Scream Your Head Off was never going to be high art, but Gretta is an intriguing little oddity and Cataclysm/The Nightmare Never Ends, as I said, has some good stuff that never quite managed to jell into a solid movie. The slicing and dicing involved here did those two movies no favors.

It does, however, have a wild feeling of anarchy and desperation about it that’s kind of cool, if not ultimately satisfying. It’s the sort of thing you can inflict on your friends with a semi-clear conscience, especially if a copy of Things or Nukie is not readily available.

And there’s cheesy stop-motion. What more can you ask?

Just try to resist Vinegar Syndrome’s trailer:

November 14, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: cameron mitchell, cataclysm, gretta, night train to terror, richard moll, the nightmare never ends, vinegar syndrome . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

The October Country 2

The second phase of the current writing project is finished; now I have time to write about other stuff, at least for a day or so.

I bought the Scream Factory blu-ray of Lifeforce months ago, then allowed it to languish while I watched and did other things. I thought October would be a swell month to finally drag it out, and I’d be lying if I said seeing Gravity didn’t cause me to kick it to the top of the pile.

The default presentation in the blu is a longer, “approved” cut – I seem to recall reading this was a European version or somesuch, but I was rewarded with a lengthier opening sequence of the joint British/American research mission discovering a derelict alien space ship in the coma of Halley’s Comet. The opening now plays out like a mini horror movie in its own right, and helps the whole affair seem much more solid.

First, as gratifying as it was to see a space shuttle still being used in Gravity, it was even better seeing one with a nuclear engine being used to study a comet, because back in 1985 we still had money to spend on such frippery. (We also thought Halley was going to be the prominent presence in the sky that is presented in the movie, but oh well).

“We can’t stop here! This is Bat Country!”

You likely know the rest of the plot by now: amongst the dead giant bat occupants of the alien ship, three distinctly human bodies are found in crystal cylinders. These are removed and taken back to Earth, where it is discovered that they aren’t humans, but the creatures the vampire myths were based upon. One – Mathilda May (twenty years old at the time and gloriously nude for most of the movie) escapes, and starts unleashing a vampire plague upon the land, She is pursued by British spook Peter Firth (at the time likely best known in the States for Equus) and an even-higher-strung-than-usual Steve Railsback.

This is based on Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, which I dutifully read back in ’77 or so when it was published in paperback. I don’t remember much about it, except that the movie, ahem, doesn’t follow it too closely. I’m not even sure it could, given the ultimate climax concerning two different races of energy beings with neo-Lovecraftian names. One thing that does make the jump to celluloid is the vampires’ ability to body jump, which always pisses me off in a movie – I’ve seen it done well, once, and that was in The Hidden, where it was germane to the plot. Generally it is employed as a cost-effective way to complicate matters, and it seems so thrown in at the last minute.

There is one thing the body jumping does provide us, though, and that is a brief but important appearance by a pre-Picard Patrick Stewart (replacing John Gielgud, no less) as an unlikely victim of the body jumper, and there is one moment, when Railsback is speaking to her through the drugged Stewart, that you get the uncanny feeling that yes, there is a woman behind Stewart’s eyes; it is literally one of the best pieces of acting I have ever seen, and I have been in awe of the man ever since.

Lifeforce is flawed, there is no denying that, but it somehow remains entertaining despite those flaws, and with a general (almost gleeful) streak of sexual perversity running throughout, it’s also memorable. Time has been kind to it.

And then I looked sadly at my handful of Scream Factory blus beside Lifeforce and Prince of Darkness – The Howling, The Fog, Prison, From Beyond, The Vampire Lovers – movies I have already seen, some many times – and I realized that if there was any rationale behind these Movie Challenge thingies, it was to drive myself to experience new movies. So I sadly shuttled those old friends aside and reshuffled the Halloween stack to include movies I had not yet seen.

First up: Sinister.

Ethan Hawke is Elliot Oswalt, a writer of true crime books who is now in the tenth year past his hit debut novel. Desperate to get his mojo back, he moves his family into a house where a family was murdered and their youngest daughter disappeared – without telling his wife or two children about that little detail. His prevarication, when his wifes asks him if they just moved three houses away from a crime scene, a simple “No…” is amusing, and will, of course, return to bite him on the butt.

In the houses attic, Elliot finds a box of 8mm movies and a projector, and to his horror, he finds that one is a movie of the family’s murder filmed while it was happening. The others are similar massacres taking place back through the 60s, and Elliot realizes his book is now about a serial killer. Researching symbols half-seen in the footage, he also begins to realize that he is on the track of something much, much older than the 1960s and much, much worse than a serial killer.

Sinister has been described as Ramsey Campbell Lite; I can’t testify, because all my attempts at reading Campbell have failed. I should probably try again, now that I’m older and calmer, because I really liked Sinister. It has a good, linear progression as the mystery is teased out, and if there is a failing, it’s that somebody needs to teach Elliot Oswalt how to use a light switch. The first scary trek through the house takes place during a power outage, but we have later long trips through the darkened house with Ethan Hawke obliviously creeping past countless light switches and lamps. Were I in his situation, screw the electric bill, all lights go on at dusk and stay on until dawn.

Or, as my son put it, it’s brighter outside the house at night than inside.

Good cast, great direction from Scott Derrickson, previously known for The Exorcism of Emily Rose (didn’t see) and the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (which had its good points). A horror movie that starts out strong and manages to ratchet up the tension throughout. Highly recommended.

And then things went raaaaaather south on me.

I had been aware, on some level, of The Visitor for years, mostly in a mental folder labeled DON’T BOTHER. Then The Projection Booth podcast said some interesting things about it, and I relented and even put it on my Letterboxd Watch List. Then Diabolik DVD had a sale on Code Red DVDs, and one of them was The Visitor, and that is how events do conspire against me.

First, know that this movie is unaccountably star-studded: John Huston, Lance Henricksen, Franco Nero, Glenn Ford, Mel Ferrer, Shelley Winters, Sam Peckinpah!!! all of them doing their best. Hell, even the second stringers are really good, Joanne Nail putting out a vulnerable Lee Remick vibe (we’ll soon see why that is important), and Paige Connor as the Baddest of Seeds. It’s just… this movie, man. This freakin’ movie.

It starts with Jesus (Nero) telling us of the battle between the Captain (Huston) and Satan, or, more properly, SATEEN (Satan apparently has very good copyright lawyers). Sateen is broken into several parts to be reborn piecemeal, and Huston keeps hunting the pieces down. In this case, it’s Paige Connor, a girl in Atlanta (the movie does present a pretty neat time capsule of Atlanta in the late 70s). Her mom is being pressured by Lance Henriksen to marry him and have a son, who will also be Sateen, which is important to the shadowy Committee that needs more Sateen in the world (headed by Mel Ferrer).

Cosmic, man.

Paige has telekinetic powers (and a thick Southern accent that they should have just gone with, instead of trying to suppress it) which enables her to shoot her mom in the back without touching the gun. Mom, now in a wheelchair, still resists Henriksen’s wiles, so the Committee has her kidnapped and artificially inseminated. Shelley Winters comes in as a nanny who takes no guff from our little monster (Connor complains that Winters actually hit her in their confrontation scene), yet doesn’t get Carrie White-ed. Not so lucky is Glenn Ford as the cop investigating the shooting, who winds up in a bizarre Omen-inspired death scene.

That is the major problem here – The Visitor is a sci-fi inflected Omen where the Damian character wants a sibling, but then keeps following other, time-consuming paths that ultimately lead nowhere. Huston keeps cropping up with an army of shaven-headed monks, but he never really does much until the end, after an attempt to copy the climax of Close Encounters with ten bucks and some flashlights.

WHOA! I’M PEAKING, MAN! I’M PEAKING!

I suppose it was all worth it to see Peckinpah as an actor. He turns in a very real, sympathetic and gentle portrayal as Nail’s former husband, a doctor who performs an abortion when Mom realizes exactly what has been done to her. Even more surprising when you hear Peckinpah on set was, well, Peckinpah. Abusive, probably drunk. His role was cut down considerably, and it’s a credit to the filmmakers that I got no intimation of that while watching.

Maddeningly oblique as to what exactly is the endgame Connor and Huston are moving toward, even after seeing the whole thing, The Visitor… well, it must be art, because I don’t get it. It is fun to watch Huston and Peckinpah, though.

Do not take that as a recommendation.

Here witness the astoundingly inappropriate music apparently on vacation from an Italian crime drama:

October 21, 2013
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: john huston, lifeforce, Paige Connor, Patrick Stewart, Ramsey Campbell Lite, sinister, Steve Railsback, the visitor . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

The October Country Trek Begins

I love October. It’s my birthday month, temperatures finally begin to cool in the hellhole where I’ve set up shop, but above all, the macabre becomes the law of the land. Yeah, I watch a lot of horror movies, but in October, everybody watches horror movies. Unless they’re wusses. You’re not a wuss, are you?

That’s a hard sell, this year, The popular challenge is “31 Nights of Horror”, but if I’m not working evenings at Job 2 or Job 3, I’m trying to churn out 1000 words a night on a writing contract (yes, four jobs, because like all liberals, I am such a fucking moocher. Bitterness intended), and this does not leave a whole lot of time for movie watching. Yet, I manage, such is the siren call of the horror movie. I can sleep when I’m dead (or collapse from exhaustion).

It feels like I’ve been championing Prince of Darkness forever; ignored at the box office, lambasted by critics. So I, of course, love it – it’s the sort of mashing up of science and horror I really enjoy, and director John Carpenter’s choice of pseudonyms for the screenplay credit – “Martin Quatermass” – really points up his desire to do a Nigel Kneale-type picture. Although the last faux Kneale movie he was involved with, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, didn’t do so hot, either.

Supported by one of Carpenter’s creepiest soundtracks, the opening of Prince is marvelous in its precision; an elderly Catholic priest dies before his appointment with the Cardinal, and thus Donald Pleasence discovers the Brotherhood of Sleep, who have kept in the basement of their discarded church an ancient, sealed vat of green liquid which has begun agitating itself of its own accord. The problem is, the substance, locked away in the vial, is getting more active. Actually, the problem is it appears to be Satan.

So the priest reaches out to Professor Birack (Victor Wong), a quantum physicist who had engaged in a series of televised debates with him years earlier. Birack and a troop of graduate students set up shop in the church, hoping to quantify just what the liquid actually is – and that process leads to madness, death, possession, and an army of the homeless led by Alice Cooper.

This was Carpenter’s first independent production in years, and it’s nice to see him blossom again on a comparatively low budget. Some concessions are made to this lack of money, as in the cost-effective menace of homeless schizophrenics (a constant lightning rod for PC bitching). Bits of questionable science provide grist for nerd pedant complaints, but good grief, I realize faster-than-light travel is impossible, but I still watch Star Trek. Even I wince at the ancient astronauts angle, which is so outlandish that I expect to see Prince of Darkness playing regularly on what now passes for The History Channel.

Thing is, I don’t care. I love this movie, one of the last movies to actually frighten me in a theater. There is so much here that is good, I can actually forgive any shortcomings and enjoy myself. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait for the Scream Factory blu-ray, which did not disappoint. But I did wait a couple of weeks to watch it. Stupid Jobs. Stupid adult life.

There was a brief detour to watch Gravity on opening day – yes, if you still haven’t, see it and spring for the 3-D and huge screen. This one will not be the same on home video, I don’t care how orgasmic your home theater system might be. In the spirit of contrarianism, after enjoying the $80 million dollar CGI of Gravity, I partook of the $80 menace of The Devil Bat.

The Devil Bat, in my opinion, gets unjustly dismissed. Sure, it the quintessential Poverty Row production (for years, i thought the distributor’s name, PRC, stood for Poverty Row Company, not Producers Releasing Corporation), small cast, limited locations, a risible flying monster on a string. In fact you’d see the same setup many times from Poverty Row, notably with George Zucco in The Flying Serpent, not to mention the deliriously-named Devil Bat’s Daughter. But this time out, we have Bela Lugosi, not quite yet a parody of himself, and a somewhat fresh angle on the revenge motif.

Bela is Dr. Paul Carruthers, whose chemical genius has made multi-millionaires of the Heath and Morton families, who built their cosmetic company fortune on a revolutionary cold cream formula sold to them for a mere ten thousand dollars. Sadly for the families, that ten grand (an all the other money they’ve paid him for subsequent products) has gone into his experiments with “Glandular stimulation through electricity”, which means he’s been creating a bigass bat with Kenneth Strickfaden equipment. Deciding to kill off both families, Carruthers gives each a sample of a new after-shave he’s working on, and the Devil Bat uses that scent to track down its targets.

Lugosi is really good in this; he gives the character a tragic undertone. Every time a future victim leaves with their bottle of Bat Bait, no matter how they take their leave – “So long, Doc!” “See you later!” he always answers “Goodbye” in as portentous a manner as possible, and we even see a little regret in the mad genius.

As is the tradition of the times, our hero is a wisecracking reporter – Dave O’Brien, the “Faster! Faster!” dope fiend of Reefer Madness. He’s actually a solid leading man, small wonder he eventually became Captain Midnight. This was also apparently a time of unparalleled cooperation between the Police and the Press, as O’Brien walks into the Police Chief’s office and offers his investigative skills to the poor, bemused bureaucrat. Thank God for the fourth estate!

The Devil Bat itself is fairly ridiculous, especially since they keep cutting in the head of a fruit bat in close-ups – I guess because of the pointy ears, but come on, it’s a fruit bat! They have one of the cutest faces in the bat world!

I watched this on the new Kino-Lorber blu-ray, and the commentary track by Richard Harland Smith is first-rate, presenting a ton of information in a brisk 68 minute span.

So… How busy am I? That’s only two of nine movies I’ve watched lately… and I don’t have time right now to even name the rest. Best to just get these up and write up the others as I have time …IF EVER. See you when I can.

Or, as Bela would say, “Good bye… Dr. Freex.”

October 13, 2013
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: bela lugosi, Devil Bat, halloween, John Carpenter, Prince of Darkness . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)

I just reviewed my schedule for next week, and it is one of those weeks that is going to attempt to kill me. Days and evenings are spoken for, except for Wednesday, when I shuffled one commitment to another day to give myself an actual day off. The other day off is tomorrow, Sunday, but my son has been begging me to take him to see Riddick. I will do so, even though the last time he begged me to take him to see a movie, it was Priest.

No, I still haven’t managed to hit a theater to see the movies I actually want to see, The Conjuring and You’re Next. Such is adult life.

So if I’m gonna do this, I better do this now.

Last November, Criterion’s Eclipse label, which issues bargain (for Criterion, anyway) box sets concentrating on a single filmmaker or era, issued When Horror Came to Shochiku. It gathers together the four films made when the struggling Japanese studio, seeing others make plentiful coin on horror movies and daikaiju monster romps, decided to get in on the action. Shochiku’s mainstay prior to this had been melodrama, and those extreme emotions bled into their genre offerings.

I’ve already written about their daikaiju, The X From Outer Space, on another site (and back when I was a different person). What I really wanted to see was a movie mentioned in Famous Monsters of Filmland oh so long ago, and which I had never managed to see: Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell, which has to be one of the greatest low-rent titles EVER.

Goke has a reputation as a gaudy, almost psychedelic movie, and the opening scenes certainly bear that out, as a jet airliner flies through red clouds “like a sea of blood”. Birds keep smashing themselves into bloody pulp against the plane; one passenger says they’re committing suicide, trying to get away from something. Then a flying saucer appears and the plane crashes on a mountainous plateau.

Oh, yeah, there is also an assassin on board and a guy carrying a bomb. This flight is so unlucky I kept expecting Karen Black to crop up as a stewardess.

The luck continues to get worse as the assassin, attempting to escape, runs afoul of the saucer and gets his head split open so alien goo can run in and drive his body around. This also makes him a vampire, for some reason, and the only source of blood is the survivors in the plane.

The circumstances cause the trademark Shochiku high emotions to get pegged to 11 and stay there. Each of the passengers is certifiably insane, though each in a different way. The politician who turns from bully into a sniveling coward at the slightest provocation, the arms dealer who whored out his wife to the politician for a lucrative contract, the scientist who forms an unlikely alliance with the politician just so he can see a vampire in action. As in X From Outer Space, there is a gaijin white woman gumming up the works. In X, it was Dr. Lisa, who brought back the spores to Earth that developed into a giant chicken with deelyboppers. Here it’s Mrs. Neal, who was flying to a military base to claim her husband’s remains, recently killed in Vietnam. This causes many red-tinted images of war horrors to flash by when required.

Eventually, the arms dealer’s wife gets possessed by the saucer (though without getting her head split open) and she informs our plucky band of whiners and shouters that this is indeed the forefront of an alien invasion, and the plan is to exterminate mankind. Then she turns into a rotting corpse.

One thing you cannot accuse Goke of is being boring; the story rarely lets up, and if the histrionics of the characters venture often into the realm of the cartoonish – well, hell, you’re watching a movie where goop turns a nattily-dressed assassin into a vampire. You were expecting subtlety and realism?

The FX are uniformly good (past the model of the airplane crashing, which is still pretty dang good for 1968). The crumbling of a couple of walking corpses once the goop is finished with them makes me wonder if Ken Russell might have seen this at one point and filed the effect away for Altered States. The downbeat ending is so 1968, I probably could have accurately guessed the production year plus or minus.

WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU?!?!

Now, the fact that I never saw the half-decayed face that was ballyhooed in that long-ago issue of Famous Monsters is a little annoying, but par for the course for exploitation films, really. Goke was a fun little distraction, a lean horror movie with a unique monster, a collection of horrible people one didn’t mind watching pay the price for their bad decisions, and an oddly endearing bit of social conscience.

September 7, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: criterion, eclipse, goke, japanese, when horror came to shochiku . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Labor Day Weekend & The Getting Back of Grooves

I know I’m not the only person who thought August sucked. Reports have poured in from all over the globe that yes, the August of 2013 was particularly brutal in all sorts of ways. Yours truly was seeking to get his mojo back, and not having a whole bunch of success. Let’s see how that shakes out:

The small matter of diabetes. Generally this was pretty favorable, as I settle into my new official lifestyle. The last week I was working on a solid seven days of healthy sugar levels when bam! my levels Saturday night shot up to 207. The cause? Apparently the stress of performing in my weekly show – that was the only change in my daily routine. For someone who has been acting most of his adult life, this is a daunting development. Frustrated, I had a cheeseburger after the show. The next morning, my fasting sugars were normal.

Wacky. I prefer to take this as a lesson in the magic of cheeseburgers, nature’s perfect food.

One thing I did manage when I wasn’t ruminating on the heat attempting to kill me and everything around me, was to develop a plan for re-organizing my home office. Yes, because I don’t have enough things to occupy my Copious Free Time. This is actually connected to one of the other problems of August, the Not-Watching of Movies.

Oh, I still did, as these infrequent ramblings prove. Just not to the excess or with the zeal of previous months. That most notorious of self-imposed regimens, The List, may not be completed this year. Things change. I change.

“I hate you, Tom Cruise! HATE YOU!!!”

I’ve done two movie-watching challenges this year, and those have done a number on me. I don’t necessarily regret either, but the cost extracted is problematic. I enjoy watching movies, and injecting a definite discipline into that watching kills some of the joy. Probably one of the reasons I never pursued a career as an actual film critic: I want that joy to stay. I’ve seen too many give in to a gradual souring until all they can do is point out negatives; I respect people who continue their love affair with the movies on a regular basis, and keep their writing fresh and accessible.

So. Just because I haven’t been watching movies on a regular basis doesn’t mean I stopped acquiring them, either. I now have quite a few movies I am genuinely excited about watching.

Which is why I want to re-organize my office.

My office pretty much arranged itself organically. When we moved into this house twelve years ago, most of the bookshelves found their way into my office, and they got filled. Then filled again. Then the overstock started hitting the floor. Then I added a reading chair. My computer desk has not moved from its corner, where I can look out the window and, if necessary, see who may be approaching the house – the paranoia of my youth has not completely vanished. There is an increasingly narrow path from the door to my desk.

So current plans involve clearing out the piles of electronics and cabling and power sources that have landed in this room over the years. Clearing out the table that holds a TV/DVD player that hasn’t worked in ten years. My laserdisc player, which surprisingly, still does. Cataloging and boxing up stacks of books and either clearing a space in an equally chaotic garage to store them, or actually investing in a storage room (not ideal). Unpacking the boxes of DVDs that sit in the center of the room, determining which of them I am never going to watch and getting rid of them, and putting the rest in theoretically cleared bookshelves.

Then: Reorienting the former TV table and the reading chair to face each other. Buying a TV manufactured in this century and (ideally) a region-free Blu-Ray player. Maybe a sound bar, probably not. I still have the Roku that was on the downstairs TV, but I mothballed when we got a Smart TV.

When I bought that TV and its companion Blu-ray, I thought I was being exceptionally sly by making sure the first thing seen on it was Dancing With The Stars, thereby convincing my skeptical wife that it was, indeed, a necessary purchase. In the style of classical tragedy, however, this rebounded on me by ensuring all subsequent broadcasts of Dancing With The Stars had to be watched in HD, and I swear to you that fucking show is on four nights a week.

“And we have PEGGED Freeman’s Hate Meter!”

So. I of course rarely buy DVDs anymore, because drool drool Blu-ray slobber giggle. And ergo, I need my own little island of Blu-ray viewing so I can watch these fabulous movies I’ve been stockpiling, at will.

The real problem with this dream is the amount of work it’s going to take, in a schedule that includes my part-time job, the other part-time job, the other other part-time job, and the two ongoing writing projects, not to mention any housework, cooking, or parental duties. I estimate two months before I’m even ready to price TVs (I’m lying, I’m already doing that) and start reaping the benefits of this madness.

But like i said, in the meantime, I managed to watch some movies.

Sometimes your interests in obscure movie subgenres lead you down a darkened alley with whispered promises and then punches you, takes your lunch money and runs away. Actually, that’s a pretty fair description of what happens most of the time. That is certainly the case with Vixens of Kung Fu. It’s a somewhat legendary grindhouse feature, primarily legendary because for years, it was damn near impossible to see. It’s a hardcore sex film with kung fu elements, although the martial arts elements here make David Carradine look like Jet Li possessed by the spirit of Bruce Lee.

Bree Anthony is walking through some autumn woods and gets accosted by three porn actors (One of whom is supposedly Jamie Gillis, though I didn’t recognize him). She runs away, but get shot in the back. The three lowlifes then proceed to rape her semi-conscious form while the music changes to bluegrass. About a half-hour later, under the tender lesbian ministrations of a female kung fu master (C.J. Laing), we are told that she was shot with “the gun of anesthesia”, which explained the lack of bullet holes and other trauma, I suppose.

So there are some ladies who are Laing’s students, who practice some questionable martial arts and meditation that causes smoke to issue from their lady parts. A lanky yellow-clad caucasian monk ventures into their territory, gets waylaid, is declared an unsatisfactory lover and tossed out. He begs another female master – currently disguised as a cook in a Chinese restaurant – to teach him “Golden Dragon Raising Head Kung Fu”. Which involves training and masturbating in the woods. There is another showdown, with the Monk and Anthony acrobatically schtupping each other into unconsciousness. Yeah, forget the rapists, I guess they were too expensive to bring back for a vengeance scene.

The Vinegar Syndrome DVD is unbelievably gorgeous – the autumn foliage really pops. Porn, however, is always boring, and there wasn’t anything Vinegar Syndrome could do about that. Vixens has its wild moments that raise it slightly above the norm, but there’s not enough of it to make it interesting enough for a recommendation.

Hey, remember Jack Reacher? Remember how a lot of people were pissed off that Tom Cruise was playing the main character? Man, that seems like it was so long ago. Long enough that the Blu-ray is cheap, so I bought it, primarily because I was intrigued by the idea of Werner Herzog playing the bad guy.

I haven’t read any of the books – and was, in fact, unaware of the character at all – so I didn’t have a dog in the Tom Cruise hunt. What I did find was a pretty serviceable, if fairly unoriginal, crime investigation movie that morphs into an action flick as our heroes get closer to the truth.

The plot concerns a sniping incident involving the death of five people, apparently the work of a crazed loner trained in Iraq. His only statement under interrogation is “Get Jack Reacher”. Reacher is a former Military policeman who caught the culprit in a similar incident in country – but there are several inconsistencies with the current shooting that stick in his craw. Behind the machinations, of course, is Herzog as a man known only as “The Zeck” – who once gnawed the frostbitten fingers off his own hand in Siberia to prevent gangrene.

Herzog is muted and incredibly creepy as the criminal mastermind. I thought Cruise was fine as Reacher, though, as I said, I have no prior knowledge of the character to color my judgement. The supporting cast is terrific, there are a couple of good fight scenes. Overall, though, you can wait to see this on Netflix.

Over the past year or so, I’ve watched two movies about Idi Amin. One, Amin: The Rise and Fall, was a somewhat sensationalized docudrama. The second, The Last King of Scotland, was pure fiction with enough basis in fact to make it solid. So somehow I find myself watching Barbet Schroeder’s General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, which is undeniably the real thing.

Amin granted Schroeder a number of interviews and staged several adoring rallies for the camera. He also gathered together 150 French citizens living in Uganda and threatened to kill them if Schroeder didn’t cut three minutes from the movie. Schroeder, of course, did so, and at this point the “Self Portrait” portion of the title came into being, as Schroeder felt it was now totally under Amin’s control. After the dictator’s deposing, the cuts were restored, and that is the version Criterion rightfully issued.

The cut portions mainly concerned public executions, and a few snippets from a dispassionate narrator mentioning the staged appearances, or pointing out people who would later be found mysteriously dead or vanish altogether. These quite undercut the persona Amin presents otherwise, an affable man of the people, always ready with a joke or a laugh – downright charming, most times. It’s surprising Amin didn’t want one entire section cut, when he is conferencing with a very critical group of senior physicians, and Schroeder zooms in his face – unhappy, brooding, eyes darting back and forth as if seeking escape – as in that moment he actually looks capable of ordering the death of almost 300,000 of his countrymen. Then he turns on the charm and gets the doctors laughing.

Schroeder ends the movie with that same close-up, and with a bit of narration that Amin did insist be cut; that cut remains, and the moment plays out in powerful silence.

Labor Day I journeyed into town with pal Dave to see an animated movie that he – and a couple of my other friends – did voice talent for a couple of years ago: Last Flight of the Champion. This was apparently the culmination of two brothers’ lifelong dream, and by golly they even managed to get a (very) limited theatrical release. There were about seven of us in attendance, and we owned that theater.

The plot isn’t new; galactic despot is taking over planets (I guess because he can), and a painfully earnest young turtle guy finds a buried spaceship left over from the last round of galactic despot fighting, the Champion. Yes, turtle – this is a sci-fi universe populated by animal toons alongside humans. The turtle puts together a crew of similarly painfully earnest misfits and flies off to take on Darth Meanie and his armada.

I went into this movie with great misgivings, mainly thinking that there were movies I really wanted to see but couldn’t carve out the time, like The Conjuring or You’re Next, but here I was walking into a theater to see something that had been described as having computer animation on the level of a local TV commercial.

Well, it wasn’t that bad. Pixar has nothing to worry about, but there were some very nice sequences. The characters aren’t very detailed (and there are way too many of them), and for some reason the animators, when the script says “Let’s hurry!” still has everyone cycle through the same walk animation they’ve been using the whole time. The script is pretty good, though there are some clunky parts, and the story shows some drastic cutting – but my friends did good work, there’s some cleverness in the background details, and overall, it didn’t suck. In fact, it was downright painless.

So that’s The Last Flight of the Champion. You got kids who like science fiction, it’s a safe bet.

“Rated PG for some rude humor.” Huh. That means a monkey flings poo. Offscreen. People only talk about it. I don’t get the MPAA.

September 5, 2013
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: barbet schroeder, diabetes, general idi amin dada, jack reacher, last flight of the champion, tom cruise, vinegar syndrome, vixens of kung fu, werner herzog . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Extended Blurt

Sorry, everyone, but I am definitely still alive. A little more battered and beat up, but alive. This has to have been one of the most grueling Augusts ever, and I’m not just talking about the Texas heat. The frickin’ month isn’t over yet, but I do sense a light at the end of the tunnel. And then I take a moment to laugh at myself and my superstitious belief that bullshit will confine itself to an arbitrary chronological construct.

Let’s see, I think I told you I was working on two writing projects, one of which is actually paying me money at the moment, so that takes up a fair amount of my time. When I do get a couple of moments to rub together, I briefly contemplate whether to blog or watch a movie.

Hm. Blog entries take four hours or so. Let’s watch a movie instead!

Then the guilt sets in, and then I’m asked for another thousand words explaining what we’re doing in this project. Could we have that this evening, that would be good? And before you know it, another week has whizzed by.

My project’s not on the hotseat this week (so far). Football season started today, which means my wife is monopolizing the TV. So. Let’s reminisce.

Criterion recently released Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and if there was ever a movie that deserved such treatment, boy, this is it. Rebounding from his studio manhandling with Mimic, del Toro’s third feature is a masterpiece of mature storytelling, ironically using children as his protagonists. If you’ve not yet seen it – and you should – it takes place in a boy’s orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, and its new arrival’s encounter with the ghost of a boy who supposedly ran away but was actually killed, his body hidden away in a forbidden part of the compound.

There is always a strong undercurrent of melancholy running through del Toro’s best work, and this is the movie where it solidifies and informs all characters and events. Though the orphanage is secluded, far away from the War, its reality is never far away, not the least because an unexploded bomb in the courtyard that serves as a constant reminder. The ghost is at once eerie and heartbreaking, and del Toro’s slow unfolding of what actually happened to him is gripping.

This can remind one of Pan’s Labyrinth quite a bit (and an eventual Criterion release of that seems a foregone conclusion), but that movie got a pretty wide release. I’m happy Devil’s Backbone is now out on the market again, for those who missed it the first time around.

Then there was a looooong period – almost two weeks! – where I didn’t get to watch anything. And what do I use to break the drought but the movie that almost killed Howard Hawks’ career, Land of the Pharaohs, which Warner Archive recently put back out.

Historical Spectacle films were all the rage in the 50s, so its only natural that Hawks should make one; this one takes place during the reign of Khufu (Jack Hawkins), who is obsessed with dying with all the toys and taking them with him. In his conquests, he has pillaged many tombs, and he seeks to build a pyramid that will more adequately guard his treasure vault. Since he came close to losing his last campaign because of some cleverly engineered booby traps, he blackmails their creator (James Robertson Justice) to design his pyramid, with the freedom of his captive people as a reward. All this is made much more complicated by the arrival of a scheming woman (Joan Collins, barely 22 years old!) who becomes Khufu’s second wife, and who is plotting to get all that treasure for herself.

Land of the Pharaohs was a commercial flop, which prompted Hawks to take several years off to travel Europe, until he returned and made Rio Bravo. The reasons for Land‘s failure are not readily apparent. Its plot is no more ridiculous and turgid than any other Spectacle film(even with a writing credit for William Faulkner), and in fact it has some clever twists and nice court intrigue. The money is all there on the screen, and Hawks deals with his crowd scenes beautifully. The triumphant return of Khufu and his army at the beginning, and the scenes of hundreds of men building the pyramid are breathtaking, and must have been moreso on the big screen.

It’s not like the movie came late in the cycle; The Ten Commandments opened the next year, and it did gangbusters at the box office. It could be pointed out that Land has no Biblical material, and therefore didn’t have that built-in draw. It’s probably more telling, however, that Hawks has no big-name stars to drape his story around. Hawkins was a credible performer whose career went back to 1930, Justice has undeniable presence and likewise had a healthy career, but neither man had any marquee value. This is Joan Collins’ tenth credited role, but her fame was definitely ahead of her. Unusually, there are very few instances of what one could call “Hawks Scenes” in evidence, character scenes with rat-a-tat dialogue. Maybe it was felt those would be too modern in tone.

I caught the end of Land of the Pharaohs some twenty years ago on late night TV, and it stuck with me long enough to get the disc when Warner offered it. While not a hidden gem, it is an entertaining movie. I don’t know what 1955 was thinking.

Then one evening I was all alone in the house, There was a thunderstorm threatening outside (but never arriving). So it was obviously time to watch the new Evil Dead.

First, let me say I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t love it, either. I really appreciate the set-up: That our characters are at the secluded cabin to help one of them go cold turkey off drugs. That’s a breath of fresh air right there, and perfect for the early stages of Things Going Wrong, when no one believes her that bad things are in the offing.

I must admit that yes, once things get going, they are suitably intense and unpleasant, but this is also definitely an Evil Dead for the Saw generation – almost all the horror is based on acts of self-mutilation. There are a number of things that peg the “oh-come-on” meter (like the most incredibly sharp electric carving knife in the history of the world), but I also appreciated the shout-outs to the original movie. Also, star Jane Levy is a definite keeper. She does all the heavy lifting, and then some; she goes for the gusto. Decent horror movie, but I can see why it’s been so divisive to the fandom.

This was about the mid-point of August. One of my stories at the Day Job bungled into an ongoing feud between two offices and I was really sick of the continuous bullshit engendered in what has come to be known as “The Neverending Story”; so I took a day off and went to my pal Dave’s to watch movies far from the madding crowd.

Grabbers is a fun flick from Ireland that, once more, I would not have known existed had it not been for Internet movie critic Scott Weinberg. The main story itself is not so original: a meteorite brings with it a bunch of hungry tentacled monsters that start mistaking the populace of a coastal island for a buffet table. Now, I really love monster movies that take place in an isolated locale: Island of Terror, Tremors, Monolith Monsters, and now I can add Grabbers to that list.

Here’s what makes this one unique: alcohol is toxic to the monsters, so everybody on the island has to get really drunk really fast. And still have to deal with bloodsucking alien octopodes. As Dave points out, as bad as the aliens in Signs had it, being allergic to water and then invading a planet that was three-quarters covered by the stuff, these beasties have it even worse because they can’t stand booze and they landed in Ireland. We will also quickly note that Dave is quite proud of his Irish heritage and kept nodding throughout, going, oh yeah, that’s right. Old Irish drunks will feck ya right oop.

Best of all, unlike Attack the Block, I didn’t have to turn on the subtitles to understand anybody.

Dave had a disc from Netflix he’d been sitting on a while: Superbad. He had gotten it so he could finally understand all the inside jokes on Reddit. However, “There’s no way in hell I’m watching this alone,” so in it went.

I think it is safe to say that I am not the target audience for Superbad; on top of that, I’m not even sure who the target audience actually is. Then, I watch a hell of a lot of movies that fit that descriptor, so what the hell. I will say that I enjoyed the McLovin, arc, where an uber-weedy little nerd with a fake ID finds himself riding with a pair of unconventional cops (one played by co-writer Seth Rogen), and I found the movie’s final scene in a mall unexpectedly bittersweet. But the rest of the time, I was reading comics on my iPad.

We finished up with Europa Report, a science-fiction movie that had been getting good word, and found it deserves every bit of it. It’s the story of a manned flight to Jupiter’s moon, Europa; there is a power surge several months into the trip that fries the communication array, cutting off all contact with Earth, and the crew decides to go ahead with the mission anyway. There are more problems, even a fatality, along the way, but once they land, they find the initial reports were correct, there is a significant amount of liquid water with unusual heat sources under the moon’s ice. What’s more, there may be something moving under there.

Europa Report is in the found footage format, and before you start moaning and groaning, it ain’t Apollo whateveritwas. Most of the footage is from the ships internal cameras, and, really, it all makes quite a lot of sense. The science is fabulously hard, probably the best we’ve had in a space movie in some time. There’s a bunch of familiar faces here, too, like Sharlto Copley, Michael Nyqvist, Embeth Davditz and Daniel Wu. Very good, serious movie. I also haven’t seen a space movie with this much heart since Moon. Highly recommended.

We’re in the home stretch now, hold on. Last week I managed to get in one movie, and it was The Four, Gordon Chan and Janet Chun’s movie version of Wen Ruian’s novel The Four Detective Guards, and supposedly the first of a trilogy. This is basically X-Men in a wuxia setting, which is interesting because what attracted me to wuxia in the first place was that it presented the best expression of super-powered people in action until recently.

Somebody is counterfeiting coins and causing a panic, and an elite police unit known as Department 6 finds there is another police force also investigating, called The Divine Constabulary, under orders of the Emperor himself. Led by the ever-reliable Anthony Wong, it’s this group that has the super powers, with names like Iron Hands, Coldblood and Life Snatcher. Our Professor X character (not Wong, surprisingly) is a young lady called Emotionless, confined to a wheelchair, but a powerful telepath and telekinetic.

The story gets off to a rocky start but soon finds its feet. At about the halfway point we got zombies, and the last twenty minutes or so has the big action scenes the viewer has been desperately wanting for most of the movie. It’s a fine finish, certainly good enough for me to look forward to the next installment.

Looking at my clock – yep, it’s been four hours, more or less. Now for another hour for pictures and YouTube clips, another hour of rewrites, and then I can finally face tomorrow unafraid.

Oh, yeah, fat chance of that.

August 26, 2013
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: europa report, evil dead, grabbers, guillermo del toro, howard hawks, land of the pharaohs, superbad, the devil's backbone, the four . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

A Report from Busyland

You know what? It actually does chafe my lazy ass when I don’t weigh in here for a while. Really, it does. Though that amounts to the posterior of a rat when I don’t have the time to do a halfway decent job of it; I suppose if I didn’t care about things like spelling and general grammar it would be a lot easier. Speaking of spelling and grammar:

Most of my free time is taken up by being paid to slam words together. I’m currently working on three separate projects, of which only one is a sure thing, but that sure thing is paying me actual money. Money is good, I like money. I’m fairly certain that not stressing over getting the bills paid has put an extra month or two on the back end of my lifespan.

SAY HELLO TO MY LEETLE FRIENDS!

Money also helps in the other current fun struggle of my life, my recent diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes. That is not going as swimmingly as I would like, but pfft! What does? It doesn’t take a pack of scientists to point out to you that Eating Right is expensive, which makes no goddamn sense to me, but that only means that it fits in well with the rest of the world at large. I started with unregulated sugars near the three hundred mark, and now generally clock in under 200. I need to exercise more, but A) gyms are also expensive, and B) we are currently experiencing one King Hell heat wave, which renders the outdoor exercise idea kinda risky. Twenty years ago, I would get up at 4am to get in five miles before the sun came up and tried to obliterate the city. I was also twenty years younger then.

Besides trying to coax creativity out of a brain trapped in a system with changing blood chemistry, I find that the other thing cutting into my movie-watching time is the twice-daily blood test. Most of my movie-watching got done in the evening, after dinner. I now have to wait 30 minutes after din-din to do the evening stick, and I haven’t gotten good enough at it to perform the ritual in my easy chair. I need a desk or table to hold everything at the ready, glucometer, lancet, alcohol pad. Doing otherwise really tempts the Blood Gods and I wind up wasting a test strip, which even bought at a discount cost 25 cents a pop. What I’ve gotten really good at is cursing, though many would opine I already had a fair mastery of that art.

As I’m writing prose, I’m also reading more. I’m pleased to announce that so far, Richard Kadrey’s Kill City Blues may be his best yet. But I feel that I’m stealing time away even for that.

Enough. I watched some stuff.

Ever since Fitzcarraldo, I had wanted to see Les Blank’s documentary on its making, Burden of Dreams, which, unlike a lot of Blank’s work, is fortunately available on a Criterion disc. Given Herzog’s penchant for absolute, even dangerous realism – that is damn well a real boat being hauled up that incline – it is no surprise that the actual filming was a massive clusterfuck on the level of Apocalypse Now.

But the surprising thing is – and Herzog acknowledges this in the supplementary material – is that Blank produces a documentary that is not so much a retelling of the filmmaking process, but of the life around the process, how it affects and possibly even changes people. The film junkie in me is kind of disappointed, but Herzog admires and respects the result, so I probably should, too.

My son & I went to see Pacific Rim, and we had a whole lot of fun. I am bemused that a whole generation of kids are going to know the word kaiju and have no idea who Godzilla is, or worse, think he’s a giant iguana. Maybe next year’s movie will change that.

Yes, I know a lot of people diss Pacific Rim. I don’t care. Haven’t you figured that out yet?

And speaking of not caring: it was about that time that Sharknado hit. It certainly lit up Twitter, though that didn’t seem to convert into ratings numbers; nevertheless, it was rebroadcast the next week, got a theatrical booking, and the sequel is on the way.

I don’t have cable (too expensive for something I wouldn’t use). This did not stop people from chiding me over my lack of opinion and bloviating about Sharknado. They were disappointed in me. Where was my bad movie moxie? When was I going to watch it? Huh? Huh?

Well, since I am apparently some sort of dancing monkey, I found a way to see it. The movie achieves Maximum Stupid in the first three minutes and spends the rest of the movie trying to match it. It comes close many times. This really is the sort of thing I would have gone on and on about for 2000 words back in the day, but you know what? There are lots of people already doing that for Sharknado. I see despairing posts from other critics about how they’re tired of spectacle, how Man of Steel‘s fight scenes put them to sleep, waaaaah. That’s how I am with stupidity. Especially willful stupidity. Make no mistake, that’s what this is; once they had that title, they ran with it. I appreciate that. However…

I had Wild Strawberries and The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp waiting on me upstairs, but there I was, succumbing to peer pressure and watching Sharknado. This dancing monkey didn’t even get some coins in his tin cup.

So after spending most of its running time wondering where the title character was and saying things like, “Wow, you can firebomb a tornado out of existence from a helicopter?”, I shot the world the finger and watched Onibaba.

Onibaba had been on my radar for a long, time, since my teen years when it cropped up in a book about horror movies. So it finally got scooped up in one of those Barnes & Noble Criterion sales.

Based on a Buddhist fable, it’s the tale of two Japanese women in the (I think) period of constant civil war preceding the Tokugawa era. They are a mother and her daughter-in-law; the son went off to war and while they wait for him to come back and work the farm, they make ends meet by waylaying defeated samurai seeking to hide in the sea of reeds surrounding their hut. The samurai’s bodies are tossed down a deep hole and their armor and weapons traded to the local black marketeer for grain.

The son’s friend returns with news of the son’s death, and so begins the unraveling of the relationship between the two women. The friend makes a play for the recently widowed daughter-in-law, and she returns his interest. Mom is worried that she’ll be left to fend for herself, and is also dealing with not a small amount of sexual frustration herself.

While the two young’uns are out dallying, Mom has to take out a samurai wearing a demon mask all by herself, and gets an idea. Once she takes the mask off his corpse – revealing a hideously disfigured face – she uses the mask to scare the daughter away from her nighttime visits to her stud. Since I found this in a book of horror movies, we can be pretty sure that this is going to backfire in some terrible manner.

Onibaba is definite slow-burn material; director Kaneto Shindo (who passed away only last year, and was also responsible for Kuroneko, another Criterion offering) serves up great vistas of tall reeds swaying in the wind like a vertical ocean, its turbulence obscuring and drowning his characters. It’s astounding how erotically charged the relationships become, how the daughter blossoms under the interloper’s attentions. This is another movie that, although made in 1964, when even Roger Corman was making color movies, could not have been produced in any medium but black and white. The characters, though far from smart, are drawn with such craft that their survivalist cunning was more than a tonic for Sharknado.

August 10, 2013
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: burden of dreams, diabetes, les blank, onibaba, sharknado, werner herzog, writing . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

The Return of the Crap of July

If you’ve been around me any length of time, you know that every July my Day Job tries to kill me. We cover the City’s Independence Day Festivities; the July 4th Concert, itself, is not so bad – it’s in an air-conditioned auditorium. Ah, but July 3rd, and the Parade – which takes place at 7pm, necessitating setting up equipment and running cable in the heat of a Texas Summer afternoon – that can be perilous. Because of my advanced age, I get reduced duty, but I feel every one of my infirmities at the end of day, and several days afterwards.

So I always celebrate my survival by watching terrible movies at a Crapfest.

I arrived on time, which meant I was practically the last one there. This was to be one of our most well-attended Crapfests, making seating tricky. I, however, had purchased a camp chair earlier in the day for the lordly sum of seven dollars, so I was set.

Host Dave started off with a vintage VHS of the classic days of Night Flight, including an episode of Dynaman, which thrilled me to no end. I followed up with some files culled from Everything is Terrible, with the biggest hit on everyone’s psyche being provided by Philip Michael Thomas’ music video. Hell, Don Johnson did it, why not?

Once again, I found myself leading off the movies. I had spent a goodly amount of time second-guessing myself here; this was soon after the passing of Hong Kong movie legend Lau Kar-leung and I wanted to show one of his movies. I had narrowed it down to Heroes of the East, my personal favorite, and Legendary Weapons of China. Legendary Weapons is more of a traditional kung fu movie, and ends with a king-hell fight between Lau and his younger brother, who were both accomplished martial artists. Heroes of the East gets my vote for best martial arts movie EVAR, but the first 40 minutes or so is character-developing comedy (punctuated by some minor fights), which could be the kiss of death for a rowdy bunch of Crapfestistas.

She’s baaaaack…

The deciding vote in my head was influenced by one thing: Dave had dug up a copy of Witch With Flying Head, a Taiwanese horror movie I had long wanted to see. Taiwanese movies are visually similar to Hong Kong movies, so I tossed out the Lau movies and went with Lady Terminator, which I wrote about recently, doncha know. I knew the mob would appreciate it. It has boobies.

The main subjects during the viewing were: this was not as good a movie as Terminator (“You’re complaining about the quality of a movie at Crapfest?” asks Dave), and the fact that my seven dollar chair folded under me, trapping me in a cheap steel talon of death. Yeah, thanks for helping me out of that, guys. I look forward to standing by while you sink in quicksand some day. Alan very kindly surrendered his seat to me, and Dave wheeled out his office chair for Alan.

Lady Terminator also brought the terms “Vagina snake” and “Wang shot” into our vocabularies, for better or worse.

Next up was another Alan discovery, The Humanoid, which was fortuitous, because I had recently stopped hating Alan for Road to Revenge. The Humanoid is another Italian science-fiction movie produced after the success of Star Wars, but what it has over the venerable Starcrash is that the filmmakers got to actually see the movie they were ripping off before making their version. The Humanoid often has the look down, from Death Star corridor look-a-likes to a villain with a black helmet modeled on Samurai and gladiator armor. This advanced civilization, like Star Wars’ has also advanced beyond the need for things like bras. Just like Starcrash, though,when we finally get a space dogfight, all the models still zoom around in a straight line.

Oh, the plot? Uh… Dark Helmet wants to do bad stuff. He is aided by Barbara Bach as Space Countess Bathory and her pet Mad Scientist, Poor Arthur Kennedy. Poor Arthur Kennedy has some sort of hate-on against Corinne Clery, because she gave him a bad review on Space Yelp or something, and once he uses some nook-you-ler popcorn mixed with an atomic missile to turn Richard Kiel into a “humanoid” with super strength and invulnerability (and give him a shave, to boot), he sends the monster to kill Clery, but she’s the tutor of The Golden Child who uses Zen mysticism to bring the Humanoid back to himself and also there are two albino space elves who crop up to save the Golden Child when necessary.

In other words, I had no damned idea what was going on.

I haven’t even mentioned the robot dog, which is a real 1979 robot – in other words, limited mobility and utility. Most of the time was spent with Dave and I convincing the others that Corinne Clery was O in The Story of O and the darkness punctuated by men desperately using their smartphones to access Google Image Search, and then, once more, cursing that we were not watching another movie.

I don’t usually feel this nice, but here’s Humanoid cut down to ten minutes, almost half of which is the opening credits. Prepare to have your heart broken, as were the hearts of many Crapfest attendees, by the credit, “Music by Ennio Morricone”. Take what comfort you can in the fact that the spoken language is Italian, which means you have to concentrate on the pretty pictures:

Now finally we had Witch With Flying Head, and it turned out my choice of Lady Terminator had given Dave a reverse case of the nerves, because technically the monster in Witch With Flying Head is a penanggalan, an Indonesian monster which is a woman’s head severed from her body, flying around with its guts dangling beneath, as detailed in Mystics in Bali, a movie shown at an earlier Crapfest. Dave was worried about two Indonesian flicks on the same bill – an inverse version of my earlier worries – but this movie was Taiwanese, as earlier stated.

Back in the 90s I watched an awful lot of Chinese laserdiscs with my pal Parker, and a lot of them had the same flaws as this copy: taken from a widescreen master with the telecine set to the absolute middle of the screen, causing the subtitles to drool off the edges of the screen. VHS tracking fuzz at the bottom of the screen, often obscuring the already-blurry subtitles. Those subtitles were often created on the fly, a bi-lingual translator dictating to a typist for whom English was a second language, resulting in very fractured results (which form my most cherished memories of those days). Then the operator shifting the image down to obscure the fuzz, and obliterating the subtitles. No image control on the print, meaning that nighttime scenes – and in a horror movie, there are a LOT of nighttime scenes – that would have alright with a projector bulb behind it, were pitch black.

In other words, welcome to how we had to watch obscure cult movies at the turn of the century, you spoiled brats. Let me tell you about the time I watched Jigoku without subtitles.

Oh God, now you want a plot, don’t you? Okay. So this nice lady gets cursed by a wandering sorcerer who wants to marry her (this actually happens quite a bit in HK horror movies) so that she becomes “the flying evil” – a penanggalan – at night, until she accedes to the wedding. She and her two ladies-in-waiting escape to the country, where she can’t hurt anyone while she’s the Flying Evil – yet she does, anyway, because, you know, movie. A wandering wise man manages to lessen the curse (and number of snakes in her body) so that she will only become the Flying Evil on the 15th of each month, and leaves her friends a spirit box that will trap the Flying Evil on those nights. Until he learns some better mojo and can come back to cure her completely.

But then a Snake Monster sets up shop in the vicinity, seducing men in the night and killing them. Our cursed lady uses the spirit box to trap the Snake Monster, and winds up falling in love with and marrying the man she saved. The women always make hubby leave on the 15th of each month – eventually, taking their child with him – and so it goes. Until the Snake Monster escapes, the original sorcerer shows up, still hot for marriage, and everything comes down to a low-budget monster magic showdown at the end.

Now, I can say I’ve seen it, but I really wish Mondo Macabro or someone would put out a decent print so I can say that I’ve seen it. There is a full-length (and likely illegal) version on YouTube that is un-subtitled, but at least you can see everything. I was pleased to discover that the penanggalan is actually pretty well done.

How do you wrap up an evening like that? There is only one way, prompted by the uncommon attendance of David (Not Dave), and that was Can’t Stop The Music.

Can’t Stop The Music, as if you didn’t know, is the fictionalized story of how The Village People got together in the glory days of the late 70s. I had never gotten more than five minutes into it, because those first five minutes feature Steve Guttenberg, in short shorts, on roller skates. Past that, though, the movie’s a pretty harmless affair, a combination of old showbiz movie cliches and lets-put-on-a-show tropes. Mark kept entoning that shortly after this movie, Valerie Perrine turned into the Sea Hag or something, causing one to think that Perrine had burned Mark’s village to the ground when he was a child.

The other memorable thing is the acting debut of Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner. Jenner seems to feel that as long as his face is moving, he is acting, and he acts a lot. This leads to many scenes where Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner try to out-mug each other. There is also a scene, just prior to the “YMCA” production number, where Jenner’s costume manages to out-gay The Village People, which is sort of amazing. After the “YMCA” number, every man in the room had turned gay, except for David, who had become supergay. Such is the power of cinema.

Here, you can be gay, too:

So I crossed off a couple of wanna-sees that evening, which is all I ask of a Crapfest. Well, food and folks, of course, but there are few things we enjoy so much as being able to say, “My God, that was really horrible.”

July 21, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: can't stop the music, crapfest, lady terminator, the humanoid, village people, witch with flying head . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

After Ebert: More Movies

If there is one thing I have learned about doing movie-watching challenges – these crop up on the Letterboxd social site – it’s that a month of watching a movie a night and then writing it up causes my mental gears to start smoking alarmingly as the month comes to an end, and I wind up taking a break. This one was lengthier than the last, I admit. I was engaging my brain in other activities, like reading (Warren Ellis’s Gun Machine) and giving Facebook casual gaming another go. The gaming was numbing, the reading wasn’t: perfect combo.

But I did still watch the occasional movie. “Occasional” has ballooned to an unwieldy number, so it’s time to start cleaning out that bin.

The Shootist was on The List, and it seemed a good cornerstone to merge the quality of the Ebert Great Movies with the stream of movies I usually watch: good quality intersecting with pop culture. The Shootist came out in 1976, the year I entered college, when movie watching took a back seat to education and mere survival. I recall I had a shot at seeing it at the student cinema for 50 cents or a dollar, but I probably had rehearsal that night. Such is the life of a theater arts major. So I went for decades without seeing it.

The Shootist features John Wayne as J.B. Books, an aging gunslinger who moseys into town at the cusp of the 20th century, visiting an old doctor friend to get a second opinion, and the news isn’t good. Books has advanced prostate cancer (apparently distressingly common among men who rode horses all day long), and is given less than a month to live. Books checks into a nearby boarding house and sets to preparing to die, knowing that a man of his notoriety will not be allowed an anonymous death. He grows close to the widow running the boarding house (Lauren Bacall) and her troublesome son (Ron Howard). He finally elects to not die a prolonged, painful death, but sets to cleaning out some accounts with a final, arranged four-way gunfight.

Based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel of the same name, The Shootist was nearly not as awesome a movie as it eventually became. During pre-production, it was generally felt that John Wayne was the logical choice to star, but was too ill to actually make the movie. He had been cancer-free since 1969 – at the cost of a lung and several ribs – but his 70th birthday was staring him in the face, and time takes its toll, no matter the spirit of the man. George C. Scott was preparing to play the role, and he would have been predictably amazing, but when the Duke caught wind of the project – well, everything just fell in line. I love Scott, but Wayne brings with him the weight of an entire career, as we see flashbacks of a younger Wayne in older movies. The degree to which this movie is enriched by that true fictional past cannot be underestimated.

Wayne’s casting had the effect of attracting a phenomenal cast – we’ve already mentioned Lauren Bacall, but also Jimmy Stewart, Richard Boone, and Hugh O’Brian, who reportedly offered to do the movie for free just so he could be in it. This high caliber of personnel also extends to the other side of the camera, including absolutely the best director for the project, Don Siegel. Siegel was never a terribly flashy director but he was always a rock solid, engaging storyteller, the perfect choice for a character-driven Western.

So yeah, I liked it. Kind of surprised it wasn’t on Ebert’s list; it’s rare to see such a perfect coda to an actor’s career. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to writing it up.

I watched Star Trek Into Darkness, as required by Nerd Law. I was entertained while it was running, but had some burning questions afterward. That link takes you to those questions on another site, sort of the ultimate spoiler space.

Earlier in the year, I had taken in Mark Cousins’ multi-part Story of Film on Netflix, and one of the movies that was excerpted, which I had heard only vague things about and was immediately inspired to put on the watchlist was Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Ark follows a strangely timelost narrator (our subjective camera) and a disagreeable French diplomat from the 19th century, as they wander about the Russian State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and meet historical figures like Catherine the Great and Czar Nicholas (and Alexandra and a young Anastasia) as well as some contemporary Russians. Even the constantly bitching Frenchman is an historic figure, the Marquis de Custine. There are some astonishing setpieces and astounding costumes on display.

What makes the entire thing remarkable is that it is shot as one take – 96 minutes long! – as the Steadicam glides through its various vignettes. That is a feat which required months of rehearsal, but sadly only pays off occasionally. Much of the time it seems like a taped museum tour (but what a museum!), though the final half-hour, recreating a grand ball just before the Bolshevik revolution, is simply incredible, especially when the camera leaves with the richly costumed partygoers and goes down a massive staircase, finding itself confronted by hundreds of people in perfect period costume. It is jaw-dropping, and well worth the effort to see.

Pretty sure Tillman Buttner, the DP who was operating the Steadicam, and his poor boom operator were exhausted afterwards. Especially since I recall reading they did two takes.

One weekend I went to pal Dave’s because he had not yet seen Django Unchained and that needed to be remedied. But we also caught up on Wreck-It Ralph – yes, it was a sublime, bizarre double feature – and I loved it unreservedly. I’m not sure I would have loved it as much if I hadn’t been able to identify all the Roger Rabbit-style video game cameos, but that becomes a minor cavil when you consider the well-constructed story, full of heart and great characters. Disney has learned well from Pixar, and Wreck-It Ralph is the result.

I went back to The List for the next weekend and Around the World in 80 Days, not the Disney-fied 2004 Jackie Chan vehicle but the 1956 David Niven/Cantinflas road show monster. It’s a movie of parts rather than a whole, which rather echoes Jules Verne’s adventure novel, which was also episodic as hell. In case you don’t have a rudimentary education: David Niven is Phileas Fogg, a wealthy punctilious Englishman who makes a wager at his gentlemen’s club that he can, as the Daily Telegraph claims, travel around the world in a mere 80 days. He sets out on this the same day with his new valet, Passpartout (Cantinfas) and a carpet bag full of money. Adventure ensues.

Around the World was largely conceived as a delivery vehicle for producer Michael Todd’s Todd-AO Vision, a process that delivered Cinerama-width spectacle while using only one camera (the previous year’s Oklahoma! was the process’ debut). The movie is rife with splendid sunsets and some instances of things-rushing-at-the-camera that bring to mind the roller coaster in This Is Cinerama, and some grand landscapes… though spoilsport literalists will point out that most of the movie was shot on backlots, not on location around the world, as the producer would prefer us to think.

This is the movie that coined the term “cameo role”, and there are a ton of them, especially once the movie hits San Francisco, the center of a cluster of them: Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, Red Skelton, Frank Sinatra, John Carradine and Buster Keaton in the space of ten minutes. But Todd’s real coup was Cantinflas, at the time the wealthiest, most beloved actor in Mexico. Known as the Mexican Chaplin, the comedian had never made an English language movie, his success was such that he probably didn’t feel the need – yet somehow Todd prevailed upon him.

Watching Around The World unfold, you start suspecting how Todd managed it; though Fogg is supposedly the hero, all the movie’s action devolves onto Passpartout. There is an entire segment in Spain that does not occur in the novel, involving Passpartout in a bullfight. That is strictly there for Cantinflas, who had no small amount of bullfighting experience himself. Passpartout is the agent for change throughout the movie, while Niven is generally playing whist or dallying with young Shirley MacLaine, oddly cast as an Indian princess. Cantinflas did finally attempt another English language movie in 1960, Pepe, which sadly flopped at the box office, despite having almost as many star cameos as Around the World.

I’ll just mention that the scene between Cantinflas and Red Skelton in San Francisco was obviously cut short, which is a shame. Two great comic talents playing off each other, and it could have gone on much longer.

Around the World in 80 Days is interesting primarily as a relic of that bygone practice, the Road Show Engagement. Its value as entertainment is going to depend on the level of your yearning for such fare, gently satiric (S.J. Perelman gets a screenwriting credit), with adventure scenes that are rarely as pulse-pounding as they seem to wish to be.

Though I was left with a yearning to see The Great Race again… Hm.

Okay, one more, and we will be halfway done.

Lady Terminator has been in my possession for ages, and I finally put it on The List to force the issue of seeing it. This is an Indonesian movie by H. Tjut Djalil, the director of Mystics in Bali, perhaps the finest penanggalan movie ever made. That was in 81, by 1989 Djalil had a larger budget, better equipment, and the ability to show naked breasts. These are all ingredients for a grindhouse hit.

As with Mystics, Djalil capitalizes on an Indonesian legend, the South Sea Queen, who lives in a palace at the bottom of the ocean and keeps killing her male consorts during sex. Finally, one heroic fellow satisfies her, but literally pulls a snake out of her lady zone, which she screeches is her “inner essence”. The snake turns into a dagger, and when our curiously anglo fellow declares he will not give it back, and her murdering days are over, the Queen proclaims she will avenge herself on his great-granddaughter, and vanishes in a puff of smoke.

In the present day, a beautiful anthropologist gets too nosey while scuba diving and gets possessed by the Queen, turning her into an unkillable leather-clad aerobics instructor with a taste for automatic weapons and, yes, killing guys during sex, apparently by biting off guys’ junk with her hoohah. (The lady is serious about her kegels).

Lady Terminator is serious about its title, reproducing two and a half scenes from The Terminator, even that eyeball surgery scene, although it makes little to no sense. LT is determined to kill the granddaughter, a rising pop star, and she has no time-traveling soldier to protect her, so she has to make do with the only Caucasian cop on the Indonesian police force. I’m reduced to bullet points here to detail the awesomeness:

Indonesian security guards carry Uzi pistols.
We establish early on that bullets have literally no effect on LT, yet the cops will continue to use them for the next hour or so.
Due to this, by the end of the movie, our Caucasian is apparently the only cop left alive in the entire country.
If you’re the Caucasian’s Rambo-esque American pals, called in to help on short notice, you can bring all sorts of ordnance into the country, no problem.
Yes, the granddaughter has the dagger, and could have saved hundreds of lives by just stabbing the bitch, but then we wouldn’t have a movie.

Indonesian movies have a very high fun content. There is just a whole lot of determination to simply entertain, and if the action gets repetitious, it makes the completely over-the-top climax even more welcome. This is eventually going to make it as a Crapfest entry, and I don’t know what higher accolade I can give it.

June 28, 2013
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: aleksandr sukarov, around the world in 80 days, cantinflas, david niven, don siegel, john wayne, jules verne, lady terminator, michael todd, russian ark, the shootist . Author: drfreex . Comments: 5 Comments

A Break for Crap

Trying to prove that we didn’t actually need to sully a holiday with this month’s Crapfest was perhaps ill-considered. The Sunday before Memorial Day weekend, but not the holiday weekend itself? Well, perhaps it was best to not to mess with anyone’s plans for a three-day weekend. I did not necessarily feel that way Monday morning, though, when I appeared to be suffering from a lack of sleep and some sort of snack hangover.

But I really need my bimonthly Crapfest. Need it badly. Especially this month, consumed by the end of the school year and the Roger Ebert Great Movies Challenge. Like finding that incredibly rare rude Disneyworld employee, Crapfest was a welcome oasis amongst all that oppressive quality.

When I arrived, host Dave was running Varan the Unbelievable off his hard drive, because he’s a tech-head who does things like that. (I may work in video, but that doesn’t mean I like to run cable through walls. Dave does, and my hat is off to him for doing it well) As more people arrived, the conversation grew lively, and Dave’s media player dutifully moved on to the next digital file, the original Earth vs The Spider. How lively was the conversation? It was twenty minutes before we realized the soundtrack was in Spanish. Aieee! Aranya grosso no bueno!

This was taken as a clue that we should start the festivities, and for some reason it usually falls to me to choose the first movie. Maybe it is because I generally try to be a nice guy and come up with something at least entertaining (Things was an exception). Maybe because Dave feels that, therefore, his choice in the second slot will seem even more horrible by comparison. Or it will give him a chance to determine how badly he needs to hurt me in return.

But I had discovered a couple of fests ago, that one of our newbs, Erik, was fairly knowledgeable in the ways of le cinema bad, yet had never seen Starcrash. Neither had the other FNG, Mark. This is what we refer to in the trade as a moral imperative, and so we old-timers settled in for a re-watch.

I feel I have to explain Starcrash, even though, if you are reading this blog, chances are it’s unnecessary. Starcrash is an Italian attempt to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, at a time when Star Wars had not yet opened in Europe. So all Luigi Cozzi had to go on was photos, possibly some imported trailers. It’s pretty obvious that lacking the thing he was imitating, he had to fall back on Euro science fiction movies like Barbarella, Antonio Margheriti’s Gamma I flicks, and, for some reason, Jason and the Argonauts. The cast is Caroline Munro, Marjoe Gortner, Joe Spinell, David Hasselhoff and Christopher Plummer. And a police robot who talks like a Southern sheriff. If you have not yet seen it, all this should have convinced you to rush right out and find it now.

Erik was gobsmacked. “This is horrible,” he said, amazed. I think he may be a bit unaware of the depths we regularlysubject ourselves to at Crapfest – one day he will realize what a sweet, sweet gift we gave to him that day.

It was time to cook up dinner, and I filled the time with a couple of episodes of Ultraman (this would be the 1966 series). I showed the episode with the pearl-eating monster because A) Science Patrol token girl Akiko is really upset that the monster is eating all those lovely pearls; B) Science Patrol gets rid of the monster by literally shoving a rocket up its ass and blasting it into space; C) meaning Ultraman is unneeded, but he shows up anyway. We needed a second episode, and chose “The Rambunctious One from Space” at random, hoping it would be some manner of space biker, not realizing that such weirdness wouldn’t be showing up until the sentai shows started rolling out in the late 70s. No, it’s just another giant monster, or what they refer to in Japan as “Tuesday”.

Dave had been inferring for some time that I wasn’t drunk enough to watch his selection yet. Not that this was ominous, or anything.

Well, yes, yes it was. Because he had decided to show Nukie.

Nukie is an E.T. rip-off made 6 or 7 years after the fact and (deservedly) more obscure than Mac and Me. Apparently of South African origin (with lots of German names, to boot), it didn’t even hit VHS in the US until 1993. I remained blissfully unaware of it until Stomp Tokyo’s 2000 review, and I spent the intervening years not exactly avoiding it, but not seeking it out either. I’m sure that in my inevitable war crimes trial, the day I spent helping the visiting Chris Holland paw through boxes of VHS tapes at my then-favorite used movie store for copies of Nukie that he could inflict on innocent people will be entered in evidence.

So. There is a sort of cartoon comet zooming all over Earth while we hear the voices of two aliens, Nukie and Neeko, argue about how they shouldn’t be doing this. Something goes wrong and Nukie crash lands in Africa, while Neeko touches down in America, where he is promptly captured by the Space Foundation and routinely tortured by scientists. Nukie befriends a couple of outcast native children, and in general tries to find out where this “America” person who is holding Neeko can be found – by asking animals.

Nukie and Neeko have a psychic link, which means that whenever Nukie is finally about to get to sleep, Neeko will get poked and start screaming “NUUUUUUKIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” in his head, and that also we in the audience will likewise scream “NUUUUUUKIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” when bored, which was often. Before they can take off to space again, they have to be together, you see. Never mind that we see Nukie turn into a cartoon comet and loop around the Moon once.

Then, in the village where all sorts of skullduggery is afoot, none of it particularly coherent, a chimpanzee wearing a shirt starts talking. This is enough to make us stop screaming “NUUUUUUKIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” and discuss whether the humans onscreen could hear the chimp or not; in the following scene, Nukie is talking to other primates (the aliens can speak any language once they hear enough of it), but the whole subject of talking monkeys was introduced before this sequence… Then Neeko helps the Space Foundation computer achieve sentience. Well, it actually already sentient, since it can hypnotize aliens and humans – somehow – and laugh like a mad scientist. Neeko just helps it become a better person.

Your star power in Nukie is limited to Glynis Johns as a nun in the Village of Problems (looks like things went to hell for the Banks family after Mary Poppins left, if Mrs. Banks joined a nunnery and is working in Africa), and Steve Railsback as the least effective field agent for a Space Foundation ever – although it has to be admitted that he flies Neeko to Nukie in his helicopter – apparently overnight, from America to Africa! – so the two can get the hell off this mudball and we can put this whole dismal exercise behind us.

The best part of the whole ordeal was Rick fervently making his case that if Dave had chosen Nukie, he had no moral high ground to claim in his steadfast resistance to Rick’s dream entry, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. I think he may have had a point, there.

No, wait – the best part was where Dave, as we entered the subjective fifth hour of Nukie, began to moan in his chair, “What have I done?” like Col. Nicholson in Bridge on the River Crap.

High ground or no, Dave put on The Yesterday Machine to “give people a chance to go to the bathroom”. Fifteen minutes later, no one had gone to the bathroom and the damned thing was still playing. Unwilling to sit through a 35-minute explanation of how time travel works again, I held a straw poll of the contents of my Crapfest Bag of Tricks and the clear winner was a return to the original fare of the first Crapfests, a New World drive-in programmer by the name of Candy Stripe Nurses.

There are three stories at play in Candy Stripe Nurses as our nubile young not-really nurses try to change the world via nude scenes. More than ever, you can sense Roger Corman with one of those accountant visors and a stop watch nudging the director and murmuring, “I can’t help but notice there hasn’t been any nudity for 7 minutes.” Not fooling – in one of those instances, where there was no way to stop the plot for naked flesh, it was provided by streakers at a basketball game. Not as ideally salacious as you’d want, a bit heavy on the socially-conscious story elements… but at least it wasn’t Nukie. And as is the case with these movies, when you’re not waiting for the next nude scene, you’re waiting to see where Dick Miller will crop up.

Let’s take a moment to thank Joe Dante for cutting together this completely NSFW trailer:

(By the way, whichever of you guys tried to correct me on the director of Candy Stripe Nurses – you were right, it was Allan Holeb. I just got hung up on seeing Barbara Peeters’ name as Second Unit Director. I was wrong.)

There was some sort of problem with Erik’s portable hard drive, so while Dave took it to the back room to diagnose, he ominously said to me, “Figure out what’s next.” I didn’t do the straw poll again. I simply opened the vintage Warner Brothers snapper case and inserted Exorcist II: The Heretic. Enough of this weak-ass stuff. People had been demanding The Heretic for some time.

Mark was a bit apprehensive, unsure if this was truly riff material. Pshaw, said I, and ho boy, was I right. I’m pretty sure there was some exposition going on, but it was drowned out by multiple, simultaneous bad Richard Burton impersonations, which continued for the next two hours. Drunk jokes were the standard fare, but I was astounded and delighted by the variation and lack of repetition. I am especially fond of the section where we switched to using booze as a motivator. “Okay, Mr. Burton, for this scene we’ve put a bottle of scotch on top of this mountain, and… OH GOD ROLL THE CAMERAS! ROLL THEM NOW!!!”

In case you’ve never had the pleasure: Burton is Father Lamont, another exorcist who is having a crisis of faith, yet is sent by the Church to investigate the death of Father Merrin in the first movie. He meets up with the now teenaged Regan, and things sort of fall apart from there. The original audience started laughing the movie out of the theaters with the first sequence involving The Synchronizer, a device that “syncs people up” using biofeedback, a strobe light, and a deep pulsing note. It allows people to share a hypnotic trance and experience each other’s dreams, or something. That sequence is actually pretty effective, if you can get past the dubious science.

Anyway, the best part, past the Richard Burton jokes, is the Ennio Morricone score, which I still have on the original vinyl. Enjoy Ennio rocking out on the trailer:

Actually, the best part was realizing that I was watching the original ending on this disc; Warner tried several different endings to deflect audience derision when the movie opened, and when I saw it, it was the ending where Burton died battling the demon Pazuzu. Offscreen, of course, no need to actually bring him back to shoot new footage. It was shoddy work, and though the original ending is rather ridiculous, it is obviously part of the same movie I just spent two hours scratching my head through.

By then it was midnight, and we had jobs to get to in the morning. We woke Alan up and sent him home. (“Why couldn’t I have nodded off during Nukie? Why?!?”) We also swore undying vengeance against Dave. Which will make the next Crapfest all the more… interesting.

Here’s my Letterboxd profile just prior to this Crapfest:

And here it is after, Can you spot the difference?:

Never mind, it’s back to this, now:

May 24, 2013
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: candy stripe nurses, crapfest, exorcist ii: the heretic, nukie, richard burton, starcrash, ultraman . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

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