January again?

It’s been a strange trip to this post. My wife, Lisa, caught The Cough in early December. After Christmas, I caught it too. I was lucky – the worst of it for me was over in a couple of days, thanks to megadoses of vitamins, I’m sure. She didn’t improve though. We still had to get my son, Max, back to college over New Year’s, and we were both so sick that we wound up staying in the college town an extra day. As I write this, Lisa is now in the hospital with pneumonia. As I can’t do anything but leave her to the doctors and nurses, I guess I’ll just write. After all, I ponied up the cash to renew my domain and ad-free account – not using it would be stupider on my part than usual.

I travel light when taking Max to school, which bit me on the butt this time with the unexpected layover, but I had, at least, brought my Kindle Fire with me. That, combined with the LaQuinta respectably fast wi-fi allowed me to start my 100 Films, and it was all the fault of the 80s All Over podcast. Drew McWeeny and Scott Weinberg had exclaimed about Contraband, mentioned that it was on Amazon Prime, and since I’d had no idea that Lucio Fulci had made an organized crime drama…

Fabio Testi plays Luca Di Angelo, who with his brother Mickey (Enrico Maisto) runs the cigarette bootlegging racket in Naples. Someone starts trying to muscle in on their business, even to the point of murdering Mickey. Another Neapolitan gangster is suspected, but in truth it’s a vicious French drug gang led by The Marsigliese (Marcel Bozzuffi), who wants to take over Di Angelo’s smuggling operating for his heroin. Lots of people die.

There are parts of the movie that are extremely interesting; it makes the point that the economy in Naples is so depressed that practically everyone, in some way, depends on the black market. The resistance of old school criminals to drug trafficking is going to be very familiar to anyone who’s seen The Godfather, as is the sequence when The Marsigliese starts killing off all the capos – though not during a baptism, nor all at the same time. It’s all the work of one very busy – and speedy – assassin. The bloodletting in Godfather was shocking and fairly realistic, but we’re talking Fulci here. When a guy gets the back of his head blown off, we’re going to linger on it. When a woman tries to rip off The Marsigliese and he takes a blowtorch to her face, that is going to take a while. And let’s not forget a fairly graphic rape scene.

There seems to be a fair amount of involvement of actual criminals in the making of the picture, which would explain the bizarre climax where older gangsters come out of retirement with their favorite weapons to put paid to The Marsigliese and his gang. It’s not a great movie – dang, Luca is one of the stupidest heroes I’ve seen in a long time – but it is fairly entertaining and has some lovely cinematography.

I then watched Xmoor, but I need that for Hubrisween, so you’re just going to have to wait.

I followed up Xmoor with Hell House LLC, another Prime movie that had come highly recommended by my friend and fellow horror fan Rodney. It’s a found footage movie, so go ahead and get the jeers out of your system. I don’t mind them, personally. Found footage movies, that is. I hate jeers.

The setup is this: in a Halloween haunted house attraction, something goes wrong on opening night, and fifteen people die mysteriously, including four of the five people who organized it. The incident is pretty much hushed up except for the footage one attendee uploaded to YouTube. A group of filmmakers investigate, and manage to find the sole surviving member of Hell House LLC, Sarah (Ryan Jennifer Jones). After several years of seclusion, she’s finally ready to talk, and she brings with her all the video footage shot during the creation of the House.

We get introduced to the company in the course of the tapes, and they got several of these haunted houses under their belts. This is an attempt to grow the company outside New York City, and they take over an abandoned hotel in (snerk) Abaddon, NY. It does seem like an ideal locale, and it is rather interesting to watch the group brainstorm the haunted house tour, which will end up in the basement. The group’s leader, Alex (Danny Bellini) isn’t too worried about the fact that the basement comes complete with pentagrams chalked on the walls. Not operating in their home town, the group moves into the hotel and begin to work on cranking up the scary in the first floor, and installing cameras to ensure safety (and more coverage for our found footage).

Clowns. Why did it have to be clowns.

Needless to say, weird stuff starts happening. Sarah is sleepwalking. Props start moving by themselves. The local actors hired have heard, um, stories about the place. Bad stories.

This is all cut together with Sarah’s interviews, along with interviews shot by the investigating crew, and some other attendee footage for the climatic opening night. A lot of the stuff building up to that night is really creepily effective, and the fact that it all takes place in an environment that has been engineered to be scary just makes it worse. The cast is engaging and real, and there is only one instance I can point to where the found footage concept is cheated. I found the reveal on the opening night catastrophe a bit underwhelming, but the stuff leading up to it is so good I didn’t mind. And even after that reveal, the movie is going to continue screwing with you.

I’ll be the first to admit there are a lot of lackluster found footage movies out there. Hell House LLC ain’t one of them. It’s really good, folks.

Fast forward a few days. We’ll spare you the exhausting drive home. No surprise, our Friday show was cancelled, so let’s see what’s available… huh. Beyond Skyline. I hear that’s crazy.

It is, in fact, kinda crazy.

Frank Grillo is Mark, a tough police detective whose son Trent (Jonny Weston) has wound up on the wrong side of the law again. An old colleague of Mark’s (Jacob Vargas) lets him go for old time’s sake, but makes it clear this is the last time. An attempt at reconciliation between the two on the subway is interrupted by an alien invasion. Enormous motherships hover over the city, broadcasting a blue light that hypnotizes almost everyone and levitates them into waiting holds (that’s about all you need to know from the first movie). Trent gets hit by the blue light not once, but three times, with Mark, apparently one of the few immune, pulling him back each time, until finally they get pulled into the ship.

Now inside, we find that the aliens are harvesting (in a pretty grisly fashion) the brains from captured humans and plugging them into robot bodies, still hypnotized by the blue light, to create a zombie robot horde. Significantly, the more times you resisted the blue light, the more immune you become; Mark is himself rescued by a robot who’s broken the hold of the aliens and needs him to help his still-human wife give birth. One other wrinkle: the first pulse of the blue light has somehow altered the fetus in situ, engendering fast growth (the mom is only three months pregnant when she gives birth to a fully developed baby) and the child has strange powers that the aliens fear. Mark promises the transformed father to get his daughter out of the ship.

You know, like Kill Bill Vol. 1, Beyond Skyline really feels like a tender valentine to me and the movies I love. Past the whole alien invasion thing, the scenes inside the ship have an undeniably horrific edge. The freed robot sabotages the ship, causing it to crash in southeast Asia, where Mark and another survivor, Audrey (Bojana Novakovic) run into a drug warlord (IKO UWAIS!!!!) who’s going to have to go to war with the aliens, too. Where Iko goes, so must Yayan Ruhian, who must have it in his contract that he must always die in the most intense fight choreography you have ever seen. Which means, that’s right, just when you thought Beyond Skyline had blended in almost all of my favorite genres, it went ahead and threw in The Raid movies, too. And on top of that, two giant things start pounding the crap out of each other.

Whatever else you may say about Beyond Skyline, it’s not boring. It feels like one of those crazy-ass action movies you chanced onto at two o’clock in the morning on Cinemax, but with actual money.

Let’s see if I can bring this in.

My pal Dave, a couple years back, was dissed by younger hipster actors for not being familiar with the films of Rene Laloux, probably while they were huffing avocados through their Vapemeister 3000s. Laloux’s primary fame on these shores comes from Fantastic Planet, an animated movie I’ve never particularly cared for. It’s pretty, but is, as Danny Bowe’s once said of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, “French as fuck.” Still, I’m down for animated movies. So I followed up Beyond Skyline with Time Masters.

I was not expecting a Moebius movie.

Now, Jean Giraud did not write the story – that’s the work of equally French writer Stefan Wul, but he did design it. Giraud was an artist who could knock you square in the eyes with his work and make you thank him profusely for the experience. Time Masters is still French as fuck.

A young boy, Piel, is marooned on the planet Perdide. His dying father radios an old comrade, Jaffar, to rescue Piel. Jaffar immediately interrupts his current journey to set out for Perdide, much to the displeasure of his passenger, a prince who is escaping some justice on his home planet. Trouble is, in the vastness of space, it will take Jaffar a month to get there.  They can communicate with the boy via a subspace radio, and have to help him survive via instruction. The Prince will try to get Piel to “accidentally” kill himself, there are guys with wings and Time Masters. It’s all French as fuck.

He’s probably smoking a Gauloise

Yes, it does feel like one of Moebius’ Metal Hurlant serials in animated form. The animation style is much more traditional than the nearly-decade previous Fantastic Planet, and often it doesn’t serve Moebius’ work as well as you’d hope. Still worth seeking out for its French-as-fuckness.

There I did it! First real blog post of the year! Four movies into The List! I’ll correct the spelling errors tomorrow! 30!

January 11, 2018
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , , , , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The War on Crapsmas

“Hey, guys! Wanna do a Crapfest?”

At the best of times, getting people together for one of these festivals of fail is an exercise akin to nailing mercury to the wall; during the holidays, it should be something ideally headed up by Ethan Hunt. Well, I must have wanted to do something impossible this month, because I had early warning of a Saturday night off, and everyone actually agreed on the date – it was like a Christmas miracle, but the wrong lesson got learned at the end.

Roll Call of the Wretched: Myself, son Max, Host David, Erik, Rick, Paul, Alan (who brought some fiendish Swedish concoction that, when heated, quadrupled in alcoholic content or something). Way too much sugary crap (provided by myself, the resident diabetic), some amazing white queso infused with pork found by Rick in the wild, and the return of Erik’s incredible burrito bowls, providing actual food that probably wouldn’t kill us.

David started out the horror with the first Spider-Man movie ever made. No, not the 1977 pilot for the TV series. In 1969 Donald F. Glut made this 11 minute short, the last of his amateur films before he went pro. As far as these things go, it’s not bad, especially for 1969, when the height of homemade special effects was scratching the film to produce lightning. Especially sterling work is provided by the Mego Spider-Man action figure. Alright, it’s a doll, but don’t tell it that. The 25 year-old Glut himself plays Spider-Man, in a suit he made himself.

I can’t get over how it looks and feels like an extra on a Something Weird DVD.

Erick kept up the Marvel vibe with Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and you either immediately know what I’m talking about, or you have avoided all comics-related entertainment since the Glut Spider-Man. This is before Nick Fury became Samuel L. Jackson in both the Ultimate comics line and MCU, so he is played by David Hasselhoff.

This failed 1998 TV pilot sidesteps a lot of problems that the comic Nick had in the 80s, mainly his WWII adventures leading the Howling Commandos (you’ll note the MCU walked away from that, whistling tunelessly, as well). This TV Fury quit SHIELD after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he had put paid to Baron Von Strucker and his Deathshead Virus. In Fury’s absence (digging for gold in the Yukon, or some damned thing that keeps him shirtless), Strucker’s children steal his frozen corpse and use it to reconstruct the Virus. How this is done, and why Strucker was frozen remain mysteries to me.

Oh, hey, an LMD – wonder if that’ll get used at some point.

Some of our pals from the comic are there – Gabe is now the Head Scientist, Val is there to slow the movie down to the proper length with recriminations of their past relationship, and Quartermain to get killed in the first five minutes. I never liked him, anyway. The David Goyer script involves stopping the Struckers from launching a missile full of Deathshead at Manhattan, and it still hurts to see a missile launcher aimed at the World Trade Center.

Hasselhoff’s not bad, but he’s also playing the Silver Age Fury, who got by simply bulling his way through everything because he was NICK FURY, and that behavior gets him poisoned thirty minutes in, giving us TWO countdowns. The TV miniatures of SHIELD craft (and the legendary Helicarrier, very obviously an aircraft carrier model perched on a jet platform) are of at least Charles Band quality. In all, it was the high point of the evening, and we led off with it. Besides frequent cries of “Oooh! You just got Hoffed!” the other continuing motif was swearing Ms. Von Strucker was in Showgirls.

After this, Dave called me into the hallway to confer. The others howled that we were plotting against them. We weren’t, but it was fun to make them think we were. He was merely asking what my choice was, and wanting to play his first. Sure, I said, why not. In the meantime, I played something I had stumbled across on the Internets, perfect, I thought, for our venue, and short enough to allow some bathroom stops and grazing.

I swear to you, I had never before heard of Naked News, but every single participant that night – including my son – had apparently found it the day after the World Wide Web opened for business.

That’s one of the things that happen as you get older, I guess. As far as that goes, I still have no idea how Snapchat works.

Anyway, we proceeded with Dave’s choice. An Andy Sidaris movie. We had been asked about Sidaris before, why we hadn’t shown any of his flicks. (There’s our audience in a nutshell) It wasn’t the Sidaris I expected, either – this one was chosen seemingly on the sheer number of Playmates involved – four. This was… Savage Beach.

There are at least three plotlines running through Savage Beach, and while all those eventually intersect, getting to that intersection is kind of bewildering, especially when one story suddenly goes back to WWII. Two of our Playmates are charged with getting some antiserum to a remote island ahead of a storm, miss their escape window and wind up crashing on a remote island. In a more typical Sidaris movie, this would involve some skinny-dipping, but apparently we got all we were going to get in an early hot tub scene with the other two Playmates. Well, we do get a “We better get out of these wet clothes” included in the trailer below.

This island ties in to our WWII plotline because there’s still a Japanese soldier there, guarding some War Gold. The other two plotlines involve various people also looking for that gold, and one of these groups has Al Leong, so you know they’re the bad guys.

Yep, these are bad guys, all right.

As convoluted and chockablock with plot as this is, it still had to inject some filler to pad out the running time, and it’s not of the hot tub variety, either. More like the “Pre-Flight Checklist: Step 1 of 86” variety. In fact, the stranded Japanese soldier’s explanation of how we all got to this point is told twice – once in Japanese, and once in the translation. Our connoisseurs of sleazery, Paul and Erik, opined it was a lesser Sidaris offering, and as Paul is the one we looked to for what was excised from Dave’s abominably bowdlerized Showgirls, I tend to believe him.

Wait, was that Teri Weigel? <= running joke

Then it was my turn. I had offered it, and Rick enthusiastically bit at the bait, which should have made everyone else wary. 1975’s If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!

Sadly, YouTube is bereft of trailers for this movie, which is unsurprising. It’s a collection of skits dramatizing dirty jokes that were ancient during the reign of Diocletian, and possibly originated with Confucius. There were several of these skit movies during the 70s, making use of the relaxed cinema standards toward nudity. Probably the most famous of the first wave is The Groove Tube, which didn’t rely on joke books purchased in a bus station for its script. I honestly don’t remember that much about Tunnelvision. The best of them is Kentucky Fried Movie. The worst  is Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, which Dave has foisted on us several years ago. I’m not saying If You Don’t Stop It was retaliation for that, but I am saying don’t expect a Scorpio to just forget shit like that. This movie was successful enough to spawn a sequel (but then, so did Savage Beach)… Can I just Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses, and I distinctly remember seeing TV commercials for that one. The 70s, everybody!

If You Don’t Stop It takes more care to shoot its skits than Jokes, but that doesn’t make the jokes any better. They even laid down money for Uschi Digard and Pat McCormick. There are at least two Kissinger jokes and a Watergate reference. I almost expected the same howls of protest that eventually got Ms. Nymphet’s Zap-In tossed off the screen. Frankly, when I previewed it, I almost scratched it off the list, and then this scene happened:

Holy shit, it’s a musical. The Deal was Sealed. It even ends with another song, cementing my damnation with my fellows.

And pissing Dave off. He stormed into the next room, and came back with Teen Witch. There were many howls from the gathering, whining that they were being caught in the crossfire between the two of us. Wasn’t the first time, now, was it?

Yes, that’s Zelda Rubenstein from Poltergeist, whom they apparently thought could give the movie some gravitas, but nooooooo. They do get their money’s worth out of Shelly Berman, who somehow keeps his teaching job after disrobing for his class due to Louise’s voodoo. Additional weirdness is provided from the casting of Near Dark‘s Joshua Miller as the little brother and Dick Sargent as The Dad With A Thousand Weird Sweaters.

I’m not really sure who he was trying to hurt with this; it’s pretty harmless. That trailer lays out the entire movie before you; there, now you don’t have to watch it. I’m pretty sure it was the impromptu musical number in the girl’s locker room, apropos of nothing (“I Like Boys” by Elizabeth and The Weirz) that caused the connection.

The movie really reeks of Cinemax at 9:30 in the morning. And I’m grateful the trailer left in the part where Louise straight up murders a would-be date rapist. Well, probably not murder, but it did help us make it through the rest of the movie thinking she did, and might go all Carrie White on us at any moment.

Who am I kidding, I know who Dave was trying to hurt. It was Rick, because he knew the music would make his skin crawl. Speaking of which, here’s the best part of the movie:

So there I was, trying to figure out what to follow that with. I wasn’t harmed at all by Teen Witch, and thought hm, maybe we should do something halfway entertaining, but no, Dave wanted to see the movie with “The guy with the teeth!” “The what?” “THE GUY WITH THE TEETH! That you just found!” and through the Swedish alcohol fuzz I finally figured out what he meant.

This is going to require some exposition.

Over on the Twitter, I follow @DistortedKiwi, a pal from the old B-Movie Message Board Days. He uses his account to mainly post movie posters, and one day he came up with this one. Look at it. Just look at it.

Good gravy. There is no way the movie it represents is possibly 10% as awesome as that poster. The Empire Strikes Back is not as cool as that poster. If you want a soul-crushing illustration for the concept of certain disappointment, it is that poster.

I had to have it.

I was sincerely worried that we would be lost because we hadn’t seen Zodiac 1, but that wasn’t the reason we were lost.

I posted it on our e-mail chain, and the response was “This movie looks awesome” which is only to be expected, as it does. Then I explained the sad legacy of Tomas Tang and Godfrey Ho and their frankensteined ninja movies and how that heritage of horror is now carried on by Joseph Lai (and Bob Chan, which is the alias Godfrey Ho is going by these days). In short, shoot a little extra footage, insert it into a movie you bought for cheap that is no longer moving units, and TAH DAH! New movie! Make sure that new footage includes anglo actors, so you can sell it overseas! Also, maybe change the series name from “Zodiac Power” to “Zodiac America”. That’ll fool ’em for sure!

So. Here we are.

The older movie here is 1979’s The Young Dragon, which is most notable as the acting debut of James Lew, who would later turn up in… Savage Beach. Synchronicity, bitches! This is all about opium, which the bad guys in the 1988 footage want to export into Hong Kong. The square-headed snarly guy is Father Mitchell, who wanders the land monotoning homilies and destroying evil when the homilies don’t work. To my consternation, he is not named Zodiac America. Nobody in this movie is named Zodiac America, or any variation thereof. There is also no redhead, no green warrior wielding two swords, nor a monkey with a red cape. I am particularly upset by the lack of a monkey in a red cape.

Surely someone is named Zodiac in THIS movie!

There are two hopping vampires (not the crowd depicted in the poster) that the head 1988 bad guy (who apparently bought the hopping vampire franchise from an Asian version of Vic Diaz earlier) uses against Father Squarehead, but ho ho, the cross works just as well as yellow prayer scrolls! (Also, these were the most acrobatic hopping vampires I have seen, but it is far too late to demand any sort of quality or consistency from Evil Destroyer)

The fighting is actually pretty good in both movies, though the 1979 stuff is a bit hamstrung by being cropped for 4:3 video release. I appreciate the fact that they actually tried to cut together a dialogue scene between 1979 Bad Guy and 1988 Bad Guy, even though the two men are not in the same room, decade, or possibly even continent. Doesn’t make me resent the lack of a monkey in a cape any less, though. Even the Clown Ninjas couldn’t do that.

Evil was not the only thing destroyed – the audience was as well. Rick was intensely curious about the R-rated cut of Gums I carry around with me, and and after his constant cries of “You’re only doing this so Freeman can’t show Gums!” he finally got his wish. Speed past five minutes of man-dong aimed at the screen, and Rick was moaning that he had made a terrible mistake. Gums is the porn parody of Jaws, in case you hadn’t polluted your mind with such impure things, about a renegade mermaid sucking the life out of swimming men via the appropriate organ. The sad thing is the snowflakes in attendance demanded the movie get pulled before it truly got weird. Way before Brother Theodore showed up as the Quint character. Wusses.

We must speak again of that movie some day.

That was it, they groaned. No, we do not care about the Rider of the Skulls and his battle against a $1.25 werewolf. We’re leaving now. You fiends.

Ha. See you next year, suckers!

 

December 27, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

December Already

There is an odd perceptual trick that as you get older, time goes by faster. This phenomenon likely has its roots in the crush of past experience pressing up against the present moment, with a constant increase in supposedly adult matters burning away your time. I suppose the current administration was the solution for that, as there were instances when time ground to a maddening crawl, like a perpetual few seconds just before the impact of a car crash. Hurricane Harvey was only three months ago; it feels more like a year.

Life definitely feels like a circus act where you’re pressed up against a board and some idiot with a blindfold keeps throwing knives at you. December’s always hectic, and I doubt it’s going to calm down until the year is nearly over. Maybe not even then.

I think you’re getting at least one more post out of me this year. In the meantime – since I have a few minutes to catch my breath – here’s the few movies I’ve had the chance to watch:

The Limehouse Golem is based on a Peter Ackroyd novel, and delights in moving the timeline back and forth as Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy) is a sacrificial detective set up by Scotland Yard to investigate the Limehouse Golem murders, a series of bloody mutilations that predate and outdo Jack the Ripper for sheer ghoulishness. His investigations run counter to the murder trial of music hall star Lizzy Cree (Olivia Cooke), whose poisoned husband seems a very likely suspect for the Golem.

The world of the English music hall wasn’t something I was expecting to be immersed in when I started the movie, and that was a pleasant surprise. Douglas Booth, as music hall superstar Dan Leno, is a continuing thread through the story as it unfolds, enabling the unique story structure. I’ve not read Ackroyd’s novel, but that structure feels uniquely literary, and director Juan Carlos Medina pulls it off well. While I can’t hand it an enthusiastic recommendation, I can still say it’s definitely worth a look. If you’ve not had your fill of Edwardian murder mysteries, you can certainly do far worse.

I finally watched Atomic Blonde, and I’m sort of glad I didn’t get over my animosity toward theaters to see it. It’s a pretty good retro spy movie, taking place just before and during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Charlize Theron is Lorraine Broughton, an asskicking troubleshooter for MI5 tasked with finding a wristwatch containing microfilm with the names and records of every agent on both sides of the Cold War, including a double agent known only as Satchel. She meets up with the local handler, Percival (James McAvoy), who has gone native in a big way. She spends most of the movie getting the crap kicked out of her, but you should see the other guy(s). What’s left of them, anyway.

Let’s be frank, Charlize Theron just plain owns me, and has for years. She is incredible as the agent James Bond would rightly be afraid of – except incredible doesn’t really cover it, she is credible in the role. Great supporting cast, too – John Goodman, Sofia Boutella, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan. Incredible soundtrack. Great editing. Pretty much what you would expect from David Leitch, who was one of the directors of the original John Wick.

My only real complaint is that the movie feels over-extended at nearly two hours, giving me far too much time to figure out the true identity of Satchel. Minor complaint. Some directors would have stretched it out to two and a half hours.

That same day I saw Takashi Miike’s Blade of the Immortal, so I must have been in the mood for a fight. If you dug on the 45 minute long battle scene that ended 13 Assassins, good news! This is basically a movie-length version of that! In the very first segment, Manji (Takiya Kimura) informs a mob of about a hundred lowlife bounty hunters – who just slaughtered a girl for fun – that he is going to kill each and every one of them. And does. As he lays dying from his wounds, he is infected by bloodworms, which will heal any wound, even rejoining severed limbs to his body.

As Blade is based on a long-running manga series, I don’t know if there is ever a good reason given why a mysterious old woman gives Manji this curse/blessing – it still hurts when he gets injured, and the healing is far from instantaneous. He just can’t die from his wounds. He eventually takes up the cause of young Rin (Hana Sugasaki), whose family was killed by a group of rogue martial artists who want to take over the Imperial Guard (a ploy familiar to fans of “rule the world of martial arts” movies). The story gets somewhat involved from there, with plots, counterplots, a bloodworm poison that significantly slows down Manji’s healing, many colorful opponents, and my second two exhausted, bloody combatants still taking each other on fight scene in one day.

Overall, I liked it, but I wanted to love it. Miike’s samurai flicks are really good, though – see it and make your own decisions.

I watched two more movies, but I promised the review for one to Daily Grindhouse, so you’re going to have to be satisfied by closing things out with S&M Hunter.

I’m always downloading movie trailer collections and watching them at my leisure; one group was some movies available from PinkEiga, which specializes in Japanese “Pink” movies – so called because they involve nudity. That’s a subject that has a Wikipedia page all to itself, so I’ll direct you there for the broader picture. Pun definitely not intended, by the way. S&M Hunter caught my eye with its outrageous stylization and definite kinkiness (it’s right there in the title, after all), so I sought it out.

A man comes to “The Pleasure Dungeon” and chooses to whip a submissive dressed (briefly) as a nun until she faints. The Dungeon Master states “You are not a true sadist. I can see it in your eyes.” (Never mind that both men are wearing sunglasses) It turns out that new customer has a massive hate on for women because he’s gay and his lover has been kidnapped by a high school girl gang and is being used as their sex slave. Enter the dungeon’s superhero, S&M Hunter, dressed as a priest with a skull eyepatch, who agrees to rescue the boy. His super power is an amazing – and like all super powers, essentially impossible – mastery of rope tricks and the fact that every woman he is up against gets pleasure from the act of being tied up.

S&M Hunter would be classified in the realm of “Pinkie Violence”, I guess, but the whole setup is so silly and over the top that it comes off as a lighter parody of that genre. S&M Hunter has his own spaghetti western theme song. The Hunter’s archenemy feels it necessary to dress up in a gestapo uniform, complete with Nazi flag. The Dungeon Master has all the good lines. It’s only an hour long.

I was considering this for a Crapfest entry. But. It still remains a sex film, and that’s a level of tawdry I’m not willing to subject the fest to – titillation is fine, but S&M Hunter, while not explicit, still crosses that line. It is a pretty subversive entry in that genre, though, as the only truly loving, normal relationship is the homosexual one. Here, have a censored version of the trailer that sent me on this odd sidetrip:

Things only get busier from here on out. Hope to see you betwixt Christmas and New Years, if some moron doesn’t get us all killed. Happy Holidays, everybody, as possible.

 

December 7, 2017
Categories: Mindless Blather, Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Z: The Zodiac Killer (1971)

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After four weeks of dwelling on the fantastic, I suppose it’s only fitting to wind down with something bordering on the all-too-real. I’m lying, of course, there is no really good reason to return to the hellscape of real life, but we’re at the letter Z, there’s no way I’m watching Zaat again (maybe next year), so here we are.

You don’t have to be a David Fincher fan to know about the Zodiac murders of the late 60s, but that’s probably a better excuse than being a true crime freak (or, like me, a constituent of Ted Cruz). I’m going to have to cop to the sick fascination angle (well, that and trying to vote him out of office). The Zodiac murders and the Manson family were impossible to avoid on the news at the time, and they were that decade’s proof that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. Robert Graysmith’s book in 1986 allowed me to get a fuller picture of the case, and would also come in pretty handy when watching not only Fincher’s 2007 flick, but also Tom Hanson’s more contemporaneous 1971 movie.

Grover and his toupee. “Don’t touch the hair!”

We’ve got some zero-budget recreations of the first two Zodiac killings intercut with the lives of two suspects: Jerry (Hal Reed) a put-upon postal worker, and Grover (Bob Jones) a divorced truck driver who likes to put on a toupee and cruise the local bars in the guise of a successful businessman. Grover’s got a temper on him, and is under a lot of stress, so you can be sure he isn’t the Zodiac. In fact the movie gets rid of him via suicide by cop at about the 40 minute mark and yep, Jerry – who raises bunnies in his basement – he’s the Zodiac.

SPOILER: NOT THE ZODIAC

(I was frankly disappointed it wasn’t 50s kid show host Doodles Weaver)

The point at which this is discovered is one of the better scenes, beginning with a tight shot of his mouth during a whispered phone call to the police to let them know they got the wrong guy, gradually pulling back as he gets more agitated, hangs up and launches into an amazing unhinged speech that’s pretty much taken from Zodiac’s letters to the press. After this the movie becomes a series of vignettes of Jerry being a likable, helpful guy alternating with more of the Zodiac murders. Eventually they run out of confirmed Zodiac kills and start improvising. We find out Jerry’s father is in a mental hospital and is quite violent, make of that what you will.

Jerry and his friends.

The final scene is Jerry walking down the street, as his voiceover reminds you he still hasn’t been caught, and there are lots more like him. Maybe you pass them when you walk down the street. Maybe they’re sitting behind you at this theater. See you around. Mwoo-ha-ha.

Tom Hanson’s lack of a budget is apparent in almost every frame, but that doesn’t stop him from getting the occasional fantastic shot. The matter-of-factness of the simple approach this lack of money requires actually causes some of the murders to be quite disturbing, and a whole lot can be accomplished with enthusiasm and a knife with a collapsible blade. It plays like a low budget regional horror movie because that’s exactly what it is. After a certain point it starts to feel like a dry run for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Yet the most intriguing part of the movie isn’t even on the screen: The movie’s premiere had a contest sponsored by Kawasaki. A motorcycle would be awarded to the best answer to “I believe the Zodiac kills because…”Hanson had handwriting experts poring over the entry cards, looking for a match to Zodiac’s letters. I have no idea if Hanson even cleared this with the cops, who were getting hammered by the public at the time. There’s a reason Dirty Harry was a monster hit; Scorpio was a thinly-veiled substitute for Zodiac, and Harry Callahan was everybody else.

Whether or not you want to check out The Zodiac Killer is going to depend on your tolerance for/interest in extremely low-budget filmmaking and attendant acting shortcomings, a historical context that is gobsmacking, or needing to see something that is basically Toxic Masculinity: The Movie. Cuz holy jeezum, those guys – all of them – are real jerks.

Buy The Zodiac Killer on Amazon

October 31, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

X: X-Cross (2007)

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Last Hubrisween I ran out of Xtro movies and had to resort to the Blank Scrabble Tile rule and substitute a movie with a number for X (The 7th Victim, if you’re too lazy to search). Then, while casting my nets wider for this year’s movies, I came upon this entry from Japan. How fortuitous!

Shiyori (Nao Matsushita) and Aiko (Ami Suzuki) are headed to a remote hot springs spa to get away from it all. Shiyori is trying to get over a bad breakup with her first love, Asimiya (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi). The two girls couldn’t be more dissimilar, typified by their cell phones: Shiyori’s is plain and unadorned, Aiko’s is blinged out to the max and probably weighs five pounds from the excess decoration.

I use this distinction as we will find cell phones are central to the story.

Ashikari village is at the top of a mountain; the cabins for the patrons are quite nice, but the villagers all seem to be various forms of twisted and vaguely sinister. Some friction grows between the two girls – the free-wheeling Aiko with her many lovers versus Shiyori’s mourning for her sole, unfaithful boyfriend. The two separate, and as you might suppose, this is where the trouble truly begins (particularly since Aiko calls someone on that sparkly phone to report that everything is “going as scheduled”).

Shiyori finds a phone in the closet of their cabin and answers a call from the brother of the phone’s previous owner, whose fate we saw in the film’s opening. The brother (Nozomu Iwao) fills us in on the necessary backstory. Ashikari has a dark history, a logging village that in olden times went to the hideous extreme of chopping off their wives’ left leg to keep them from running away while they were at work; this mania soon extended to any traveling women unlucky enough to wander into the area. Ashikari is now home to a full-blown cult that lures in women with the hot springs, cuts off their leg, then worships their mummified remains as goddesses. They also cut the tendons in their own left legs, which makes running after the escaping Shiyori a bit ungainly.

So this sounds rather like an Asian version of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and it might have turned out that way, but there are various twists with the modern technology of cell phones that add layers of paranoia and doubt to what might have been a simple chase movie. Also, Aoki is having problems of her own: the jilted girlfriend of one of her former lovers, Reika (Ayuko Iwane), dressed like a goth Lolita from hell, has tracked her there and is determined to murder her with scissors, which adds an entirely different kind of weirdness and tension to the story.

The director is Kenta Fukusaku, and that last name should be familiar to you: his father was Kinji Fukusaku, a towering presence in Japanese cinema, from The Yakuza Papers movies to The Green Slime to Tora! Tora! Tora! to Battle Royale. Kenta wrote the screenplay to that one, and took over the directoral reins on the sequel when his father passed away (the sequel is, shall we say, not loved). His career since has been rather speckled; X-Cross was preceded by a Sukeban Deka movie and followed by a string of movies that hover around the 6.5 stars rating on IMDb, when they have a rating at all. He hasn’t had his breakout hit on these shores yet, and that’s a pity, because I really enjoyed X-Cross.

Though it doesn’t reach true Christopher Nolan levels, Fukusaku does mess with the timeline to show us what is happening in the parallel stories of our two stars, literally rewinding the footage to show us where we are, event-wise, even providing a couple of laughs along the way. The best part for me is when odd details in one girl’s sequence are explained in the other girl’s flashback, so I guess I should have invoked Tarantino rather than Nolan.

Generally I liked X-Cross not because it transcends its genre – it doesn’t – but because just when I think I have it figured it makes me say things like, “Holy shit, where did that crazy Reika get a five-foot pair of scissors?”

Buy X-Cross on Amazon

 

October 29, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

W: Wither (2012)

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Wither was mentioned to me when it first came out as “a Swedish Evil Dead” to which my response was yeah, okay, cool as it was entered in the Infinite Watchlist until I had need/time/desire to track it down and watch it.  And I have to say that I wasn’t expecting that description to be quite so literal.

High hopes at the beginning, as we find a hunter searching through a rainstorm for someone named Lisa. He finds her – apparently his daughter – but someone is chewing on her. He shoots that someone in the head, and they get back up anyway.

Credits.

We are now going to go into setup mode for the next twenty minutes, as we meet our seven young cannon fodder characters as they prepare for a weekend at a remote cabin: four women, three men (Lisa Henni, Amanda Renberg, Jessica Blomkvist, Anna Henriksson, Patrik Almkvist, Patrick Saxe, and Max Walmo). The father of our male lead, Aldi (Almkvist), who owns some property in those woods, found this cabin, seemingly abandoned, for his son’s outing.

Seven characters might seem a lot for a horror movie, but then, since it’s a horror movie, we can be pretty sure that most of them won’t be around for the end credits. Especially since they seem to keep making the requisite dubious choices that make such movies possible. The first being Marie (Blomkvist), boosted into the locked cabin (to supposedly surprise Aldi at the front door) deciding to, instead, investigate the mysterious cellar she finds dug under the cabin.

This is Dubious Choice Prime that makes the rest of the movie possible, you see.

Instead of finding a recording raising ancient Sumerian demons, there is some kind of legendary race that lives underground, and gazing into their eyes allows them to swallow your soul, you see, and it’s not ten minutes later that Marie goes all white-eyed and bitey. The hunter from the opening (Ralf Beck) drops by to give us the backstory, and to advise that they burn Marie (like he did his wife and daughter, who had also found that basement). And oh, yeah, anybody who gets bitten or has possessed blood slopped on them will get infected, too. So right away we are able to go, okay, you and you, and that list will get expanded thanks to further dubious choices.

The FX are practical, gory and frequent. Marie’s goopy transformation doesn’t even wait for the half-hour mark, and after that the movie is pretty much non-stop – the only problem is that what is happening is so damned familiar. It manages to etch out a bit of identity by having the cat-and-mouse between the possessed and still-human take place in a two-story house, but otherwise, this really is Evil Dead without the very real weirdness Raimi and party brought to the proceedings.

Writer/directors Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund (who also double as camera, sound, and FX men) know their genre chops well, and Wither is a well-made movie on all those fronts. The actors all get a chance to be scary (and speaking as an actor, we love that shit). If I had never seen Evil Dead, I would have really gotten into this movie – but I have, and therefore all I can say is, good job everybody! But I do really wish you’d brought just a little something else to distinguish yourselves from your inspiration.

Buy Wither on Amazon

October 28, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

U: The Unknown (2000)

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So while casting about for movies off my usual beaten path this year, I came across the Swedish flick Det Okānda, or as it is known in English-speaking countries, The Unknown. Somehow I’d never heard of it, despite it being nominated for Grand Prize at Sitges and the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy, and actually winning at Luxembourg’s Film Festival.

There may be some reasons for that. Let’s look at the film itself, first.

Five young biologists (Jacob Ericksson, Marcus Palm, Ann-Sofie Rase, Ingar Sigvardsdotter, and Tomas Tivemark) are sent by their University, at the behest of the Environmental Protection Agency, to survey the site of a huge forest fire. In three weeks, they will catalog the damage and any remaining wildlife. Being who we are and what time of year it is, we will presume that things will not go as planned.

What is assumed to be a burned animal is found on the first day – problem is, none of our gang can figure out what animal it might be. After drinking entirely too much that evening, they decide to to dissect it, and still get no answers – though two people, in the flash of a camera, see something black dart further back into the carcass. They finally put the thing into a cooler and go to sleep.

In the morning, Ingar finds her menstrual flow has gotten frighteningly bad. We’re talking emergency room bad. She manages to shrug it off, but that mysterious animal carcass is now missing. “A fox or a wolverine got it.” The site where they found the carcass is anomalously hot, even for the site of a forest fire. Ingar’s condition worsens during the  day. She begins to get hysterical – “Something’s inside me!” and she may be right. She vanishes into the woods. Some trees have fallen across the only road out. The car stops working. Everything goes to hell and paranoia is the order of the day as Jacob suspects there is some sort of horrid infection in play, and it may already be too late for Tomas, Ingar’s boyfriend. Maybe for them all.

Inspecting the second most expensive thing in the movie.

The first thing that is going to be assumed is that The Unknown was inspired by The Blair Witch Project, released the year before. I don’t think that’s actually the case, but the feel is definitely similar – similar enough that it’s even name-checked on the poster above. Though not a found footage film, the entire movie is shot handheld. The characters all use the actors’ first names. Some, but certainly not all, of the dialog feels improvised. And the budget is super low – apparently around $200,000 in US dollars.

That handheld camerawork helps cover that up immeasurably, like the fact that they could only afford the one bizarre carcass (of which we never get a truly good look). There is one particularly unsettling scene where Marcus stumbles upon some hideous Lovecraftian creature and all we can see are a couple of visceral tendrils twitching in the brush while the actors react.

I find the paranoid bickering as the movie progresses as tiresome as I did in Blair Witch, but as the saying goes, talk is cheap – action costs money. The Unknown is probably about 15 minutes too long, but it is a very good piece of extremely low-budget filmmaking, a good example of what some ingenuity and a lot of talent can pull off without access to megabucks.

It’s also another reason why I won’t go camping.

 

October 26, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

T: Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

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Okay, back to my comfort zone for tonight, with a Hammer film. Now, you could argue that I was just there a couple of letters ago, with Quatermass and the Pit, but I would have to answer that was not really a Hammer flick because Michael Ripper wasn’t in it.

There’s also a little bit of resonance here because a year ago, I reviewed Trog for the letter T. It was the first time I’d seen it since 1970, when I saw it on a double bill with a theater full of sugar-blitzed fellow teeny-boppers who would scream at the slightest onscreen provocation. The second movie on that double bill? Taste the Blood of Dracula. Also unseen by me in the intervening (choke) 47 years. I remembered some of it, but not all.

For one thing, I forgot Roy Kinnear is in it – then again, in 1970, I had not the foggiest idea who he was. I don’t think I even saw Help! until ’72 or so. Anyway, Kinnear is a traveling salesman named Weller, who has the unfortunate luck of showing a snowglobe he got in Karlsburg to some superstitious fellow travelers in a coach. He gets bounced out of the coach and wanders lost in the woods until he happens on the end of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Christopher Lee impaled on the cross. He watches the dead Count resolve to dust – even his blood – and thriftily picks it up for later.

After the credits we are introduced to disagreeable toff William Hargood (Geoffrey Keen) who we know we’re going to like because he calls his daughter a harlot before leaving to spend his Sunday evening as he does every month, doing charity work. His coach picks up his compatriots, Paxton (Peter Sallis) and Secker (John Carson), Since this is a Hammer film, we already know that all toffs are actually perverts and hypocrites, and sure enough, that soup kitchen is a front for a lavish bordello.

The three men have formed a circle dedicated to experiencing the extremes of pleasures, and evenings of snake-charming doxies and champagne laced with laudanum are losing their allure. The possibility of finding something beyond that is provided by the dissolute Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates in a stunning purple ruffled shirt), disowned by his family for practicing black magic in the family chapel.

Courtley convinces the men to buy Dracula’s effects – cape, clasp, ring and powdered blood – from Weller to perform a rite in the disgraced chapel to “extend their experiences…  to infinity.” A few drops of Courtley’s blood results in goblets filled with bubbling plasma. Only Courtley has the cojones to actually drink it, and the results are apparently far more painful than he expected. The three toffs, panicking, beat him to death and flee. A few hours later, though, Christopher Lee reincarnates in Bates’ body, and he’s really pissed off that the toffs killed his servant.

Also, someone is shining a light in his eyes.

Lee’s dislike of the character is pretty legendary by this time, and it’s telling that Dracula doesn’t even show up until halfway through the movie, and then is only a fleeting presence through much of it (Warner wouldn’t distribute it in America without Lee’s marquee value). The Count gets his vengeance on the three killers through their children – Hargood’s put-upon daughter Alice (Linda Hayden), Paxton’s daughter Lucy (Isla Blair), and Secker’s son Jeremy (Martin Jarvis). They do most of the dirty work until the final showdown with Paxton’s son, Paul (Anthony Higgins), who is – economical story! – Alice’s true love (and whom the hateful Hargood despised).

Couching this entry in the Hammer Dracula franchise as a revenge drama does add a bit of distinguishing flavor, even if the whole enterprise feels like the back-up story in a comic book. The actual mechanics of vampirism get a bit confused (One bites turns Lucy into a vampire, but a second, really serious bite from the Count kills her permanently). Still no Peter Cushing, but the world-traveling Secker is presented as having some knowledge of the darker corners of existence, with a handy library to match.

Lee as ever is the most magnetic presence in the room, and is actually allowed to be charming for brief flashes. Director Peter Sasdy was always more in tune with the more perverse elements of the Hammer oeuvre, and is certainly the right choice for this venture – I’m quite surprised at how much skin is on display in the bordello scenes. It’s likely I saw a trimmed version in 1970 to play with the GP-rated Trog. I also have to say that after three ass-kicking and unusual methods to off the Count in Lee’s three previous outings, the method employed in Taste seems rather mundane (and cash-strapped).

“Cor Blimey! A corpus!”

Oh, and Michael Ripper? He’s the clueless cop investigating the murders. But you expected that, didn’t you?

Buy Taste the Blood of Dracula on Amazon

 

 

October 25, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

S: The Screen at Kamchanod (2007)

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Throwing out a wider net for this Hubrisween, reaching out past my usual comfort zones of American and British horror, I found some lovely gems and, predictably, some mediocrity. At least I have to say in the case of the latter they were at least trying, and with The Screen at Kamchanod, succeeding enough that I wish the filmmakers had the resources to reach just a little further.

Then again, we have to realize my opinion can be regarded as more than a little suspect. I’m a fat white nerd in Texas sitting in judgement of a movie made in Thailand.

But let’s talk about that movie for a while.

First, as is mandatory, we are assured that this is based on a true story. Twenty years before, in the forest of Kamchanod, an outdoor cinema company was hired to screen a movie. At first, there was no one at the screening but the projectionists. Then, a group of figures suddenly appeared, staring at the screen. The movie ended, and these figures vanished into thin air, leaving behind a couple of very frightened projectionists.

(Outdoor movies are a going thing in Thailand; also the Kamchanod forest is on a small island cut off by waterways, and is the scene of many famous Thai ghost stories)

The young Dr. Yut (Achita Pramoj Na Ayudhya) is fascinated by this story, and along with the journalists Ji (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul) and Pun (Pimonwan Honnthongkum) is avidly researching it with an eye toward recreating the event, proving or disproving it. Dragged along

Don’t do it, Ji.

for the ride are Yut’s girlfriend Aon (Pakkaramai Potranan) and dissolute street kid Roj (Namo Tongkumnerd). Roj is the errand boy for the document restoration specialist Yut employs, and the doctor keeps him around mainly because the kid knows how to pick locks, which is handy when you’re doing Scooby-Doo ghost investigations (Shaggy does look like he’s picked a lock or two in his time).

Of the two original projectionists, one is a basket case in a hospital ward, an amulet to ward off ghosts bandaged in his eternally clutched fist. He can answer no questions, but gets violent if you try to remove the amulet. The investigation leads to an abandoned cinema where both men worked, which is also where the other projectionist died – reportedly killed by ghosts when he tried to burn the film that was shown at Kamchanod. Yut actually finds the film (which mysteriously resisted burning) and has the brilliant idea that they should watch it immediately.

This is a bad idea. But you knew that, right?

This is one of the most effective scenes in Screen, as our five investigators sit in an empty auditorium, watching the film as things begin to make themselves known in the darkness around them. Watching this in a theater was probably an unnerving experience. William Castle would have had a field day with it.

Everybody wakes up the next day with no real memory of how they left the theater, and things literally start to go to hell from there. Ghostly figures begin appearing to each, and they just get freakier as they approach the anniversary of the screening. Aon makes the observation that they are seeing fewer and fewer real people and more and more ghosts, and indeed, every time we see them travelling, the roads are absolutely empty.

The onslaught of the paranormal brings out the darkness in each of their characters, and this is just one of the ways Screen screws with the viewer: our sympathies are built on foundations of sand, and we eventually discover terrible things about them. Clues that puzzled at the very beginning bear awful fruit, and Yut’s obsession with recreating the screening, at the same site on the same day with the same film, will prove to be destructive indeed.

Specifically, this book.

The Screen at Kamchanod tells its story creatively, and its main drawback is that if you have seen any Asian movie about hauntings, you’ve seen most of the shocks unveiled here in one way or another. That doesn’t make them any less unsettling in presentation, and there are times the movie is visually stunning; this is the point at which my cultural shortcomings come into play. How much of this was fresh to the Thai audience, and how much played like the proverbial spring-loaded cat in American horror movies? The effect to me is that the movie plays like a supernatural mystery at both ends while the middle is interrupted by an anthology of spooky stories like the ones I devoured as a kid. And that’s okay. I loved those books.

Here’s a trailer with poor subtitles:

October 24, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

P: Panic Beats (1983)

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No, no, no, I just TOLD you it wasn’t THAT Alaric de Marnac!

Well, here it is. The third of four Paul Naschy movies I managed to schedule this year. The last two, in case you’re joining us late, were Exorcismo and The Valdemar Legacy/La Herencia Valdemar. It was my intent to spread my nets wider for movies this year, and this was the unintended result, aided by the fact that I hadn’t watched many of his movies, I’m sure.

Anyway, let’s just get this out of the way: SPOILER ALERTS FOR A 35 YEAR-OLD MOVIE. I’ll try not to give everything away, but then, up to a point, Panic Beats is pretty predictable. (Also, if you’re a Mondo Macabro fan, their disc-opening promo has already shown you most of the money shots)

We start with that Paul Naschy standard, an opening scene with murder and a naked woman. She’s running bloody through some woods, pursued by a mounted man in a full suit of armor. This is the infamous Alaric de Marnac, last seen in Horror Rises From the Tomb, tracking down and killing his unfaithful wife. Okay, so it’s not really that Alaric de Marnac, but it’s still Paul Naschy.

Yep, that’s Paris, all right.

After credits, cut to present day Paris, where Paul Marnac (still Naschy) is told he has to take his rich wife Genevieve (Julia Saly) away from the hectic life of a Paris socialite, or her heart condition will kill her. Marnac will take her to his remote ancestral home to recuperate, along the way running into bandits (so we’re still having Horror Rises From the Tomb flashbacks), the fright of which nearly kills Genevieve on the spot.

At the house she meets Mabile (Lola Gaos), the housekeeper who has been there forever, and her young thug niece Julie (Frances Ondivela), whom Mabile is trying to reform. Mabile is the receptacle of all the folklore associated with the Marnac family, especially the guy who opened the movie and whose sardonic portrait graces the wall: Good old Alaric, who in this version was not beheaded, but did turn to Satanism and got burned down with his castle. This house was built on its ashes. Supposedly Alaric comes back every hundred years or so to clean house again. This tale gives Julie nightmares because we really needed something interesting to happen at this point.

Slight digression: I’m still not sure if it was wise or not for the movie to name-check Rebecca.

Genevieve slowly regains her strength over the next month. Julie rather sadistically tells her the story of Alaric, and then things go downhill again. Nightmares, snakes and figures in armor appearing mysteriously in the night. Dinner plates covered with blood and eyeballs. Stuff like that.

Now, it’s going to be obvious to anyone that it’s all a plot to literally scare Genevieve to death. The only question is who, and since there are only two possible suspects, the mystery is not all that engaging. Remember the fright shows with a similar intent in The Tingler? Those were studied models of speed and efficiency compared to the ones in Panic Beats. It is tempting to brand it Milk That Scene: The Movie. I did a lot of time-remaining checking.

Then Genevieve’s heart finally cashes in, the mystery, such as it is, is solved… and there’s still a half hour of movie?!?

At this point Panic Beats  actually managed to engage my interests, as plots and counter-plots emerge, more people have to be killed, and a mysterious figure from Julie’s past emerges, though we’re not allowed to see his face. It does get complicated to a point where we’re not really sure what is real and what is not, and that is generally a type of movie I enjoy.

I was once told that you had to endure the first hour and fifteen minutes of Evilspeak, the Clint Howard shower scenes and puppy killing, just to get to the cool ending. I guess the same criteria holds for Panic Beats, except that first hour wasn’t all that terrible. The best part is Lola Gaos as the housekeeper, really. She can really turn on the scary when she needs to.

Hm. I see Amazon has one DVD available for seventy bucks. Here… Happy Hubrisween!

 

October 21, 2017
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

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