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So, having returned from the beleaguered Burger Island 2 (the burgers were tasty, and quite large, I must say), we settled back in as Chris Holland began the true horror of The Lapland Reindeer Festival. This is an extra on the Something Weird DVD for Terror in the Midnight Sun/Attack of the Animal People, and I have written about it before, most notably in the my last blog about T-Fest. There were a number of virgins in the room, and really, the only reason to show it is to get their reaction. So I’m not going to talk about any further, as some day you might be the virgin we are watching.

This was followed by my second pick, Mystics in Bali (1981), which was supposed to be shown last year, but was foiled by my DVD, which was Region 2-encoded. I managed to get my mitts on a Region 1 copy this year, much to the… well, I guess dismay of the crowd. Mystics is an Indonesian movie, and one of the very few out there about the penanggalen, a witch whose head detaches from her body and flies about, entrails moistly flapping about underneath, searching for blood.

I’ve written about the movie at length, in the review linked above. Like a lot of low-budget horror movies, this one is incredibly talky, but the novelty of seeing how the horror genre is handled in another culture, and the plentiful WTF moments peppered throughout, were soothing enough to get the audience through to the bizarre final fight scene, and the next movie:

Ken’s choice, The Brainiac (1962).

I enjoy Brainiac, especially the typically painful K. Gordon Murray English dub version. Ken brought the Casa Negra DVD release, which has a couple of extra scenes in it, and somehow the DVD player insisted on showing us the English subtitles anyway, which made for a good contrast with what we were hearing (Though I wish someone had proofread those subs). Anyway, as you can see in the trailer above, Baron Vitelius is sentenced to burn at the stake by the Inquisition, Mexico City branch, when he takes off on a passing comet and curses all his judges, proving that the Inquisition was pretty spot-on in its judgement.

300 years later, the Baron returns, along with the refrigerator-sized comet, and has, in the meantime, become a monster with a pulsating head who sucks people’s brains out with his tongue, and then daintily eats them later with a sherbet spoon. All the Inquisition’s descendants have (thriftily enough) all continued to live in Mexico City, so he sets about getting his revenge and gray matter goodies. It’s often effective in its horror movie moments, and wouldn’t you know it? Mexico City, like Miami in Blood Feast, only has two homicide detectives, and they’re both idiots.

The Fest was drawing to a close. It was time for the traditional closing T Rex movie, and there was a problem: apparently the scheduled closer, King Dinosaur, had been shown before, and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves. I actually had a solution: I always carry extra movies (which is how we watched Sugar Hill last year, instead of Mystics in Bali), and one of the movies I was carrying was Dinosaurus! Ken said to Max, “This will be known as the year your father saved T-Fest!” which I somehow do not think is how my son is going to refer to this year at all, but it was nice of Ken to say that.

Dinosaurus! was a childhood fave of mine. You have your typical remote island, which is somehow like a microcosm of Mexico, and some Americans trying to industrialize it, starting with building a harbor facility. Dynamite dredges up two long-buried dinosaur carcasses, a T Rex and a brontosaurus, somehow quick frozen by an incredibly cold subterranean stream. In a plot twist that delights Creationists everywhere, they also discover a frozen Neanderthal. There’s a terrific storm that night, the bodies are struck by lightning, and you know what that means…

The lightning of course takes out all the island’s power and single telephone. There’s a mail boat coming in the morning, but the island’s population is going to be dino kibble by then. The caveman character quickly becomes an audience favorite, not only through the comedy bits as he works his way through a modern house, but because this guy is a combination of caveman Einstein and MacGyver. He is constantly saving the hash of the annoying urchin Julio, not to mention the only blonde hottie on the island (see? he’s a genius!), so when he dies – heroically – the audience is bummed. That’s some quality entertainment, right there.

The T Rex mortally wounds the brontosaurus, who then stumbles off into some quicksand (as was pointed out, doubtless bellowing at T Rex as he sank, “Ha! Come eat me now, you dick!”), and there is a relatively thrilling steamshovel vs. T Rex fight. Like a lot of my favorite movies, Dinosaurus! does not aim to be life-changing or meaningful, it just wants to entertain, and does that grandly. A goodly send-off for this year’s line-up.

We were finished at 9:50, ten minutes before our supposed leaving time (and ten minutes after the local tin fascist had told us to get out), so we cleaned up, stood outside in the humidity for another 20 minutes saying our goodbyes, and then Max, the Chrises. Veronica and myself stopped for ice cream. gelato to be precise, and I discovered that yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as bacon ice cream.

T-Fest is such an educational experience.

August 26, 2010
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

SO a number of years ago I helped start a small film fest, more of an informal get-together, really, called T-Fest. Yes, the parody element, from “B-Fest“, is obvious, and it was held in Texas, but the T actually stands for “Tyrannosaurus”, the rationale being that we always close with a dinosaur flick. It grew out of my desire to have such a get-together with my fellow B-Masters in the Summer, especially once it became obvious that the New Orleans Worst Film Festival wasn’t coming back. It rapidly outgrew my dream of a few guys in my living room to a venue of its own at a local hotel, then another founding member, Sandy Peterson, realized he had access to a venue for free, and that was it: we moved to Dallas.

Plano, to be precise. At the SMU Guildhall, where Sandy teaches game design. There were a few problems this year: the Guildhall is undergoing renovation, and a new security regime was throwing around its weight, demanding we leave the premises by 10PM, whereas in previous years there was no problem in us staying until midnight or beyond. Well, never mind; we improvised, and all that. Lost a movie or two, but endeavored to persevere and all that rot.

Having missed the memo that we were starting at 10AM rather than 10:30, we missed the first few minutes of Gorilla At Large, a pretty well-produced 1954 thriller about some murders at a carnival that seem to be the work of the resident gorilla (back in the days when finding yourself in a room with a gorilla was a death warrant). But there’s also a gorilla suit floating around, too, so maybe somebody wearing the suit is committing the murders. And all the characters are too stupid to see the difference between the suit and the real gorilla ( alright, the better gorilla suit, but you know what I mean).

And what a cast! Raymond Burr, Lee J. Cobb, Cameron Mitchell, a young and exceptionally hot Anne Bancroft, and Lee Marvin playing a cop with a really bad Irish accent.

Somewhere in its production, the decision was made to turn it into a 3-D movie, though the moments when the 3-D process would have been worthwhile were few and far between (sound familiar?) The movie was good training wheels: an excellent way to start the fest.

Next up, you poor devils, was one of my picks: The Invisible Ray (1936) starring Boris Karloff (though here still billed as simply KARLOFF) and Bela Lugosi. If, in their previous team-up, 1935’s The Raven, Lugosi warped time and space with his over-acting, this is certainly Karloff’s turn. His maniacally focused scientist tracks down a meteor in Africa containing Radium X, an incredibly potent source of radioactive energy. He simply plugs it into a ray gun he brought for the purpose and melts a nearby boulder, convincing his superstitious native bearers to stay or get melted (and probably at a generous discount). Radium X is so powerful, though, that it poisons him, causing him to glow in the dark and to kill anything with the merest touch.

Lugosi, as the French (ha!) scientist running the expedition, devises a chemical that restores Karloff to normalcy, but has to be administered periodically, like insulin, or he will turn all incandescent and killy again. It is, of course, only a matter of time before the scientist, resentful to start with, is driven mad by the Radium X and starts leaving day-glo handprints on people’s throats.

Although Karloff really lets the ham rampage through the movie, it never reaches the heights of “Dude, dial it down” that Lugosi reached in The Raven. Lugosi plays a rare sympathetic role here, and he is really, really good, quite solid; it makes you wish he had been giving more opportunities to play straight roles, but that’s where his accent really worked against him.

Next up: because Sandy was dismayed that Ken Begg, the master of Jabootu, had never seen any H.G. Lewis movies: Blood Feast (1963). Chris Holland glances sidewise at me and says, “67 minutes. We can do this.” But 67 minutes in the Lewiusverse is 3 and a half hours in the real world, and it was slow going. Though playing “Yakity Sax” during the final chase scene really did help.

That trailer supposedly ran two minutes, 24 seconds, but it felt like 10 minutes, didn’t it? Consider this: apparently, the night before, Sandy had shown Ken The Wizard of Gore, causing Ken to comment how restrained and coherent Feast was by comparison. Fancy that.

After this was the traditional Sandy quiz, this time concerning in which movie various zombies appeared. I got 22 out of 30, which was pretty good, but not exceptional enough to win the prize, a paperback novel bought off eBay for for the lordly sum of one cent.

And then it was time for the lunch break, at 3:00 in the afternoon. One unfortunate burger stand, Burger Island #2, was ill prepared for 40+ movie nerds walking in their front door, at what would normally be a slow time in the afternoon. But credit where credit is due: while the single guy there was taking my order, he was on the phone, and additional folks were there within ten minutes. We were served and eating within a reasonable amount of time, given the circumstances.

I will leave you there, with myself and Chris playing catch-up with Ken at the loud Burger Island 2 (and my bored son wishing he had his laptop so he could be blowing the heads off total strangers in whichever deathmatch has his attention this week), and tell you that this will be continued tomorrow. Which will bring the Lapland Reindeer Ritual, and the hideous penanggalan, you poor bastards.

August 25, 2010
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments