Greetings once again, boils and ghouls, and welcome to the final regular installment of Reviews You’ll Never Use. I regret to announce that the column will be ending as a recurring piece, though may reappear now and again in the future.
Our topic tonight is a film that I followed with some interest through its development, The Boy. Often with horror films, writers and/or directors will have a short film, a treatment, or sometimes even a fully finished movie (though usually badly in need of editing), but cannot get distribution. It’s a fairly common phenomenon that affects most low-budget filmmakers when they’re just getting started. Such was the case with director Craig William Macneill. The Boy was only his second full-length feature as a director, and I recall reading some years ago about how he was trying to drum up financing to turn his short, Henley, into a full-fledged movie. The concept he outlined was to do a trilogy, following the life of a serial killer through early childhood, into young adulthood, and then as an older man. I thought it was an interesting idea, and looked forward to the first installment. Certainly the whole, “what makes a serial killer tick” shtick has been done before – even Rob Zombie took his reboot of Halloween in that direction (though for my money, nothing has yet topped the excellent Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). However, it had never been done over the course of three films (unless you count the trials and tribble-ations of Anakin Skywalker). Eventually, the movie saw the light of day due in large part to Chiller Films, which is part of that horror-dedicated cable channel I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
A boy and his deer. Would have been creepier if it didn’t remind me of that scene in Freddy Got Fingered. At least the antlers come in handy later.
Truth be told, that was a few years back, and I’d kind of forgotten about the whole thing until recently when I saw it for sale on the cheap at Movie Trading Company. So I brought that bastard home & popped it in the ye olde Blu-Ray player. And an hour and forty-five minutes later, I awoke with a start as something finally fucking happened at the end of the movie.
So let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: the director, bless his heart, had more brains and artistic chutzpah than your average trash low-budget horror filmmaker and didn’t want to do another throw-away slasher. Okay, cool, I get it, more power to you. But I think he goes a bit off the rails in trying just so damned hard to make you take this film seriously, and to not lurch into being a stereotypical horror film. Camera angles are static, the background sounds are exaggerated for effect (with no background music through the entirety, except what characters play on their stereo), and there are just too many cock-tease moments before the final payoff.
We open in 1989, at a crappy roadside motel run by David Morse, and his troubled son, Jared Breeze. The motel is clearly dying, and Morse has taken counsel of despair and despondency. He does pay his son a quarter per carcass to keep roadkill scraped up off the highway, I suppose to make the place less creepy-seeming to passersby. Breeze is stultified by this life, never interacting with other children except when the increasingly scarce guests happen to have their own crotch-fruit. His father, though going through the motions, seems to have checked out of having any sort of vitality, and his mother ran off years ago with one of the guests.
Rainn Wilson and Jared Breeze, shooting the breeze. Yeah, I went there. This movie is that fucking boring.
Eventually, curiosity gets the best of him, and instead of simply waiting for the highway to provide his income, he decides in true capitalist fashion to go out and make shit happen. So he seeds the middle of the road with potato chips & chicken feed, to draw animals that will then be hit by cars. This plan goes slightly awry when Rainn Wilson (I always hated that fucking first name) hits a deer and totals his car, causing him to have to stay at the motel. The titular Boy grows close to Rainn over a number of days, though the reluctant guest gives plenty of clues to us in the audience that he may not be a wholesome person. Another couple with a little boy stop in, and Breeze disables their car so that they’ll stay an extra day (and almost drowns their son while playing in the swimming pool). Our little protagonist (antagonist?) displays unusual behaviors, such as stealing Rainn’s dead wife’s ashes and looming over the guests in their beds at night.
By the end of the film, he’s managed to coerce Rainn into chasing him through a junkyard where he laid a tarp over a deep pit, trapping a severely wounded Rainn presumably for forced boy-on-man sex at a later date. He also cops a feel off a drunk girl at a prom party that has rented out a few of the motel rooms. The boys at the party kick his ass pretty bad, and his drunk father only yells at him for having disturbed the guests. So Breeze takes things into his own hands, waits until everyone is passed out asleep, and burns the fucking motel to the ground while everyone screams inside.
Fucking FINALLY something happens. The kid takes the antlers his dad sawed off the carcass, wires them to his head, and kills a bunch of people by burning them alive. He was inspired by heated political rhetoric.
I don’t want to bash this movie. It was ambitious, to do a slow-burn think piece as your first big horror film, and that takes both guts and some level of thinking above and beyond what most hacks in this field are capable of. So I applaud Mr. Macneill for that. I would much rather someone make this attempt and not quite succeed than give in to the siren song of doing Friday the 13th Part Eleventy. The problem is, up until the end, the entire fucking thing is nothing but an hour and thirty minutes of atmosphere and set-up, and by the time you finally get to the payoff, it’s too damned late. Nobody cares anymore. Shit fucking fire, I’d fallen asleep in my (admittedly very comfortable) Lay-Z-Boy. The vanishingly few non-superhero films that are being made anymore should find their strength in being the opposite of Fortress Mouse and its motto of “There Is No Such Thing As Too Many Overwrought CGI Battles”. These movies should take their time with pace, and rely on solid performances and writing to build engagement with the characters and situations. And this film does that. Both Morse and little Jared turn in quite good renditions of their bleak characters, never going into absurd “look how awful our lives are” hyperbole. But it does it too fucking much. At this point, I realize I’m starting to sound like a crank, but it really is like Goldilocks stealing the porridge from those fucking pedobears. Just because some things are too much one way, and you quite rightly realize that a correction is in order, doesn’t mean that you necessarily go a full 100 mph in the exact opposite direction until you hit a wall. It’s okay to go partway. Just the tip. It won’t make you gay, and you never have to tell anyone else about it if you don’t want to.
Anyway, I think Macneill has promise. My criticisms are harsher because I perceive the film to have so much more potential than what was realized. There’s honestly a really good movie lurking in their editing room somewhere, and that’s nothing to sneeze at considering what most young auteur horror directors crank out. This one just doesn’t quite rise to the occasion.
I typically read a lot of other reviews online to try and help focus my own sense of how I view the films I write about, and also to make sure my criticisms aren’t solidly addressed by some aspect that I might have just plain missed. I found one that seems to echo my thoughts entirely, only better written.
Weighing in at 105 minutes, “The Boy” traps itself in a corner by giving its sights, sounds, and story so much room to breathe that the suspense ratchet cannot retain its tightness. The movie has more time than it needs to get where it wants to go, giving excess duration free reign to defuse dread with unfulfilled setups and unnecessary asides.
Preach it. I award this film two Pretty Marines and one Cat out of three possible of the former, and two possible of the latter.
Hello my macabre menagerie of malcontents, and welcome once again to the only thing on the internet better than Asian spit-roast porn, Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, we’ll review…the sequel to the movie we took a look at last week *sad trombone sound*.
Actually it was a stroke of fortune; the reason I dusted off Class of 1999 last week was because I saw it on El Rey Network as I was channel surfing one evening, and it turns out they started playing the sequel, as well. So I taped it (yes, I’m old enough I still refer to all program capture off of a television as “taping”, even though it’s done on the dvr) and gave it a whirl. And let me say: worth it. I mean, not really, but in the sense of, it was every bit as dumb as I thought it would be, and so in that perverse sense, did not disappoint.
Released in some territories as “Class of 2001”, which I think goes with the theme of “Class of 1984” and “Class of 1999” a little better. But like everything else having to do with this movie, they took the stupid way out.
First, let me say some lovely words about El Rey Network. I’m not being paid to do this, but this and Chiller (the horror channel; I used to have two horror channels, but the superior Fearnet was bought out and ceased operations, to my never ending regret) are my go-to channels when turning on the television. Ostensibly started by Robert Rodriguez to try and cater to the young Hispanic market, instead it is simply a reflection of Robert Rodriguez’s (and my own) taste in film. Which is to say, grindhouse, kung-fu, big dumb action, and z-grade horror. Seriously, look at the site I linked and scroll down just a bit to where it says, “El Rey Is…” and see the categories. I watch that channel like 5-6 hours per week, and that’s a lot for me as outside of live sports, I’m not a big TV guy. What the fuck any of this has to do with young Hispanics I’ll never know, because I’m 90% certain from the many that I am acquainted with and friends with both professionally and personally (I live in Texas) that most of them aren’t into this shit. Robert Rodriguez is into this shit, and apparently nobody has the stones to tell him he isn’t representative of the young Hispanic zeitgeist in this country. I was zeroed in over the Memorial Day break because they ran a three day marathon of old The Incredible Hulk episodes. Over Christmas, they had Kaiju Christmas, and just ran Godzilla movies on loop for like three or four days. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH WEED THIS CAUSES ME TO BURN THROUGH? I DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CHAIR EXCEPT TO STUMBLE TO THE DOOR TO GET DELIVERY FOR LIKE 48 STRAIGHT HOURS. I LOVE THIS NETWORK!!! They do have some sort of Lucha show, which I suppose is Hispanic-y, but that’s about it.
But I digress. Four years after the world-record smashing success of Class of 1999, some sharp marble decided it would be a good idea to do a sequel. Most of the top names in Hollywood were attached to direct at some point or another, but the studio was very choosy, and told Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, et al to take a fuckin’ hike. I heard Spielberg even offered to pay them to be allowed to direct this film, but was given Saving Private Ryan as a consolation prize when he couldn’t get this one. What’s that Cameron? You already did a successful killbot movie, and want in on this action? FUCK you, I’ll kill your family. There is no one smarter than studio execs, and they knew that there was only man who could bring this puppy to life. And that man was career stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos. You will undoubtedly remember him as the deft hand behind six episodes of Team Knight Rider from 1997-98 which, if taken collectively and combined with this movie, constitute 2/3rds of his lifetime directorial experience. And so was born Class of 1999 II: The Substitute.
Eyeliner, lipstick, and purple hair spray? Once again, upper middle class white America, *this is not what a gang member looks like*
So now that they had their director, they needed a star. And nobody on the whole wide Earth was a bigger star in 1994 than Sasha Mitchell. He played the dumb older kid on Step By Step. The handsome leading man needed a sexy lady to play against, so in steps Caitlin Dulany, from no fuckin’ thing. She makes up for lack of pedigree by showing her tittays in a romping sex scene with none other than…Nick Cassavetes! That’s right, the much less famous son of the great John Cassavetes steps in to give Caitlin the ol’ D, and otherwise kind of play an on-again off-again douchebag. I shouldn’t make fun of him too much, though – he directed his own mother Gena Rowlands in The Notebook, so that’s legitimately kind of a big deal. Good for him. More than I’ve done with my life. I bet he got to fuck Rachel McAdams. I’d fuck Rachel McAdams. If I was a director, I’d be one of those sleazy old-timey ones you always hear about who makes the actresses “audition” their sucky-fucky skills. Hey, it’s a condition of employment, no physical coercion, and thus fully libertarian, so, you know…blow.
Anyway, the film is very loosely tied to the events of the previous one by the exposition of Department of Educational Defense agent G. D. Ash, played by some dude named named Rick Hill. I almost didn’t even check the link to his name while doing my prelim work for this article, but I’m glad I did, because hole-ee fucking shit, lookee lookee what I found. That bitch is goin’ on the list hard. That shit makes The Beastmaster look like big-budget Oscar bait. I literally have a hard-on in anticipation of the lovely, melty pure Velveeta that is that movie. Soon *strokes penis back to sleep*, soon my pet (for this one time only, “strokes penis back to sleep” is not a masturbation metaphor…or is it?). A hilarious part of the exposition and occasional flash-backs is that they only show the killbot played by the unfortunately named Patrick Kilpatrick. I get not showing Pam Grier, because she’s a “name” and the money to use her image might have been too much for this no-budget schlock-fest. But why not show any of the old English professor killbot, played by John Ryan? The only fucking thing that guy’s ever done of note was be the lead in It’s Alive, which is admittedly a pretty good thing to have done. That’s a badass movie, and I may review it at some point in the future here. You can’t go wrong with Larry Cohen directing, I’ll just leave it at that. If you check that link, ignore the “Known For” bullshit and just look at the directorial work. If you’re into this kind of stuff, at least three or four of those will jump out at you as classics.
I…I…I just can’t. It’s too easy. Feel free to caption this one yourselves in the comments.
Moving on, turns out there was one killbot left in a bunker after the whole operation went south, and it broke out and has posed as a substitute teacher going up and down the west coast murdering delinquent students. He winds up in a small California town, where a teacher (Dulany) is set to testify against one of her own former students, whom she saw fatally shoot another student. There’s a lot of tension as gangs in the school are trying to intimidate the teacher into recanting her statements and not testifying. Even the school leadership wants her to back down, because they can’t handle the heat. Here’s where Nick Cassavetes shows up and in one scene seems like a complete tool telling her how to run her life, and a few scenes later will seem to be all supportive. I don’t know if it was a ham-fisted way to try and display depth to the character or what, but it’s poorly written. He’s also some kind of military enthusiast who keeps a military “museum” consisting of a trailer full of memorabilia on his paintball range, which includes an underground bunker full of surplus MREs, weapons, detonators…you know, the usual. We never find out if he’s a militia guy or anything, but I suppose it was nice to show him as being a pretty normal dude for the most part who just happens to have an extreme interest in survivalism and military paraphernalia, instead of being the wild-eyed gun nut prepper of so many other films. He goes Rambo on one of the gang members at one point, but is strongly provoked into doing so, so I don’t think that counts.
Long story short (too late!), killbot Sasha does things like take inspiration from poems, look in on Caitlin as she’s undressing, and also look in her window while she’s fucking Nick Cassavetes. This is where we get to see her tits. Also, check out her bed – if this movie wasn’t made in 1994, I’d have sworn it was 1984, because her bed frame has functional neon lighting all over it. He alternatively saves Caitlin, and seems to be ready to kill her because she’s getting too close to him. Their whole relationship is very confusingly depicted.
I love this bed! So 80s sextastic! I’d do coke and fuck in this bed like a fucking champ. I’d fuck in this bed like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and listen to Flock of Seagulls while I PIIHB. Put the Disco Peacock from Suspiria on the nightstand, and it’s like my dream bedroom.
The day of the big JROTC paintball game arrives, and the nefarious gang-members are angling to arrange an “accident” to kill the stool pigeon teacher. Natch, Sasha shows up and kills everybody, including setting trip wires that somehow throw spiked metal ninja balls at people which Cassavetes describes as an, “old Navy Seal trick”. Uh-huh.
Eventually we find out that Sasha isn’t a killbot – he’s the demented son of Stacy Keach from the previous film, who is looking to take over his old man’s student-killing ways. He just acts like a robot because he’s apparently just fucking crazy. He wore a bullet-proof suit that looks like some Evel Knievel spandex because it’s future armor from the fantastic year of 1999. After taking several armor-piercing slugs point-blank and bleeding out, he still functions without any noticeable decline in ability, though eventually gets trapped in the bunker and blown sky high. It’s never explained how he found the damn bunker, or why he suddenly went off the reservation and started slaughtering innocent students along with the troublemakers. We end with Caitlin on the phone describing how she’s taking on a class of troublesome remedial students, because after all she’s been through, now she’s a badass I guess. A badass whose tits we got to see, as they were bouncing up and down while she was riding Nick Cassavetes like he was the horse son of a more famous horse, on her neon-bedecked bed.
The most hardcore paintball session evah.
Look, I ain’t gonna sugar coat it – this one’s bad. The performances from Caitlin and Nick are passable given what they had to work with, and kudos to them for giving it the old college try, but Sasha is trying to pull a Terminator stoic thing while still making corny one-liners (“Class is dismissed” after tossing a hand-grenade into a car full of kids). Even if atrocious writing wasn’t his fault, he comes across as wooden, but not in the way I believe the director had in mind. More like Anakin from The Phantom Menace, and less like a killbot. There are no fewer than two shots of two different explosions happening behind him while he dramatically faces the camera without flinching. I mean, one is bad enough, but two? And the whole, “He wasn’t a robot the entire time!” thing doesn’t work, because 1) the robots in the first movie already made dumb puns and displayed maniacal emotions, so taking an interest in poetry and peeping don’t seem like that far of a stretch even though it’s supposed to clue us in that he isn’t what he seems, and 2) he stands there without flinching while being shot many, many times. Even in bullet-resistant armor, the force of the impacts would still throw you backwards. I mean, he takes a full magazine from an Uzi at point-blank range and doesn’t even blink or push back an inch. I don’t give a shit how much you think you’re a robot, that’s fucking stupid. Oh, and don’t forget being treated to sharp exchanges such as this:
Caitlin: Go to hell.
Sasha: You first.
Nick, standing behind Caitlin: You first.
This is merely the first of two identical scenes you get treated to, that are in no way, shape, or form cliched.
That’s right, a surprise rescue from the kinda-hero just parrots back the antagonist’s words before shooting him. I hope they paid the scriptwriter in party tacos, because that’s all this drivel is worth.
Or Sasha’s mantra that without discipline, there can be no order, and without order, there is anarchy. This is used to justify his mass killing, by the way. If you aren’t willing to meet out the death penalty for truancy, you support unfettered chaos in the streets.
So ultimately I can’t recommend this movie. Hell, it still hasn’t even had a Region 1 dvd release – that should tell you something. Fucking Killdozer has a Region 1 dvd release. I mean goddamn dude, this is just sorry all around.
I have to give Class of 1999 II: The Substitute, a paltry 2 1/2 Corgi Butts out of 7. It would have been two flat, except for getting to see Caitlin’s tittay’s bouncing all over the place, which will automatically add extra credit to any film. This is the first time during the run of this column that I feel I’ve actually suffered for my art, and that means ultimately, for you, my legions of adoring readers. Never say Gojira doesn’t love ya.
Welcome once again fellow aficionados of the absurd to another round of your favorite thing on the Information Superhighway, REVIEWS YOU’LL NEVER USE! This week, we’ll do something a bit unusual, and review a sequel to a film instead of the original. Why? Because this movie came in one of those four-movie $10 DVD multipacks when I bought it several years ago, and I had no idea it was a freaking sequel until I was doing my preliminary research for this column, so fuck me I guess.
To be fair, it’s only a sequel in the loosest sense of the word. The film is Class of 1999, by veteran action director Mark L. Lester. Middle name starts with an L, huh, and last name is Lester. I never liked that. I don’t like alliteration in names, or even using the same beginning letter. I don’t know why, it just rubs me the wrong way. I dislike it just like I dislike it when people have two first names, like Clippers roundball player Chris Paul. Chris Paul? FUCK…YOU, get a last name! Be Chris Paulson, or something like that. Anything, just don’t have two first names! I hate it SO MUCH! I hate you for not changing your name, I hate your parents for having that name, just fucking die!
Stacy Keach, menacingly eating a banana. The crudely stereotyped gay jokes write themselves.
Anyway enough about my hang-ups. Mark Lester directed such endearing childhood memories as Firestarter and Commando. Lately, however, his IMDB reads like the resume of a director only someone like me could love. Dragons of Camelot? Poseidon Rex? Dragon Wasps (the cover art is of a giant wasp breathing fire)? Sand Sharks? Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon? Game of Swords? Holy shit man, I’ve hit the junk cinema jackpot. Oddly, he’s credited as a producer for all of these things on his IMDB page, but if you actually go to the links for the movies themselves, he’s the director. I wonder what that’s all about. Whatever’s wrong, I’m sure it’s the fault of a progressive.
Our three killbots. For some reason one of the military robots was designed to look like an old professor, complete with smoking a pipe. FFS.
Moving on, apparently in 1982 he directed a film called Class of 1984. I’ll not link it, in case I run across it and review it someday. By not linking directly from here, I have thereby prevented any of you from being able to access any information about this film on the World Wide Web on your own initiative. But the gist of it seems to be another one of those, “The kids aren’t alright” movies about an inner-city high school overrun by gangs, new teacher comes in and has to get shit done, yada yada yada.
In 1990, still not satisfied that society wasn’t spiraling downward into an inevitable collapse, he trotted the idea back out and directed Class of 1999. Only now instead of an inner-city decay theme, he decided to make it an action movie about street gangs vs. killbots. It was the right, nay, only move. No shit, this movie stars Pam Grier, Stacy Keach, and Malcolm McDowell as The Principal! Well, they all have supporting roles, but significant screen time, even if the titular stars are the teenage gang-bangers (not people in gangs, but rather, people who regularly engage in gang-bangs).
The film was produced by Vestron Pictures & released by Vestron Video, and had only a very limited theatrical release, but really, check out those links. I thought it sounded familiar, and I immediately saw why. Scroll down a bit and take a look at the gems this company produced back in the day. Great low-budget awesome crap like Street Trash (which I wouldn’t have seen without the recommendation of one of the original H&R schismatics, who unfortunately left prior to the website launch) and Chopping Mall, all the way up to Princess Bride and Dirty Dancing! I had completely forgotten about these guys, but reading through this company’s history brings back a lot of fond memories. Do check out both, as the films for the two branches of the company don’t entirely overlap.
So our film opens with some lazy exposition detailing how by 1999, gangs had taken over the city cores of most major American urban centers and turned them into “free-fire zones” where cops were scared to enter (HA, if only! -ed). In response to the crisis not of apparently ceding sovereignty to gangs but of the fact that the damned gangs aren’t going to school, the gubbmint creates the Department of Education Defense. They’re like hyper-militarized truancy…divisions. One would think that it would be a better use of resources to regain control of the cities first and then run the schools like normal, rather than simply run military ops in no-man’s land for the sole purpose of getting kids to and from schools over which no adults exercise any control, but what would I know, I’m not the visionary director of Dragon Wasps.
This is what upper-class white people thought gangs looked like. Shit, maybe in Seattle, it *is* what gangs look like.
The former gang-leader of the Blackhearts gang, “Cody” (because badass gang leaders are always named that), is let out of prison to resume school in his free-fire zone of Seattle as part of a pilot program. The Blackhearts, by the way, all have this dumbass little tattoo of a black heart on their cheeks to show their affiliation. It doesn’t make me afraid of them, it just makes me want to help them sign up for HIV screening. Cody acts like he wants to lay low to not violate his parole, but bizarrely insists on driving home through the turf of the Blackheart’s rivals, the Razorheads (this is what middle-aged white people actually thought gangs were named). A firefight ensues, and he makes it home only to find his friends, younger brother, and mother all living in decrepitude and addicted to drugs.
Going to school, he meets the new principal’s goody two shoes daughter, Christie. They bond over his bad-boy image and not wanting to be in a gang anymore. We’re introduced to evil corporate CEO Stacy Keach’s trio of new teachers, two of which are people you’ve never heard of, and one of which is Pam Grier. They’re androids programmed to teach, and to be able to physically handle the violent students.
Well of course since Stacy Keach is the head of a profit-making kkkorporation, it turns out he’s evil and only in it for the money, without caring about killing kids, because hey, what’s a few (dozen) dead kids when there’s a buck to be made? THAT’S HOW CAPITALISM WORKS. You see, the three android teachers are actually reprogrammed military robots, and this whole setup is a test run to see how they’ll work in urban combat environments. Unfortunately when Malcolm McDowell finally gets wise, he gets his throat punctured for his troubles.
Robo-view camera angle. Notice there is a selection for unspecified, “Karate Moves”. That’s Grade A schlock for you, right there.
So the androids first discreetly kill a few troublesome kids, then for some reason flip their shit and decide to spark a war between the Razorheads and Blackhearts. While this war of many people firing automatic and semi-automatic weapons at each other from like 10 meters apart with nobody hitting anything rages, the androids sneak behind the lines and go on a murder-spree. There is one rather delightful scene of a kid being pulled backwards through a small hole in the wall, snapping the kid’s torso in half. Afterward, they kidnap Christie and take her to the school, trying to lure the competing gangs into a trap to restart their earlier battle. The gangs figure out what’s up, heroically join forces to defeat the androids, and after a bloodbath battle in the school, literally only Cody & Christie remain alive at the end. At one point, Cody also hilariously accurately hurls a fire axe across a classroom. Seriously, like 50 kids are killed over the course of this movie – it’s like Total Recall only with teenagers.
The effects are workable for being a low-budget grindjob. At the end, when the androids are showing more of their robot parts, it isn’t too hysterical. Also you get to see a fake Pam Grier titty after her chest rips open. There is a gratuitous enough amount of violence to satisfy most people watching this who went into it with eyes open for what they were getting. Unfortunately the writing and directing are where this falls short (the director of Commando not being particularly adept? Gasp!). It suffers from something all of the movies of this particular subgenre suffer from, in a wildly unrealistic depiction of gangs, how gang members interact with each other, what gangs are named, what symbolism they use, etc. It’s more like what worried parents imagined in their heads when the first Hot Topic opened in their lily-white suburban mall and they saw their kids with a Dead Kennedys CD, which, as you probably know, bears precisely zero resemblance to actual gang members and activities. Movies pull shit like that all the time though. What bothers me more is that the robots really go off the reservation, and begin making stupid, witty remarks. At one point, one of them with a drill-hand (which seems much less useful on the battlefield than the other robots’ flamethrower hand and rocket-launcher hand) is drilling into a kid’s head, and he says, “I love to mold young minds!” while grinning manically. They’re robots, dude. They don’t get a boner for killing and make puns. The stupid killbots even slaughter their own support staff. During an earlier chase scene when the robots are driving after Christie & Cody after the teenagers broke into the robot’s shared apartment looking for clues, as they’re flying off a dock into the ocean, one of them says he hates getting wet. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but I really think the whole Terminator approach to killbots is preferable to the hokey-jokey variety you see here.
Pam Grier finally shedding her limiting human outer shell to reveal the foxy killbot beneath. Notice the look of rapturous joy on her face? I don’t think Mark L. Lester knows what robots are.
Also the guy who plays Cody sounds oddly like Corey Feldman. It was bugging me the whole time.
So to sum up, if you’re not looking for much except a mildly amusing way to kill 90 minutes, it certainly isn’t that bad. Christ knows I’ve seen a lot worse. But don’t let the somewhat interesting premise trick you into thinking you’re getting anything particularly great here, some overlooked low-budget gem. Those movies exist, but this isn’t one of them. It’s one rung above a made-for-TV SyFy Channel Saturday Night Special, which is apparently what Mark L. Lester is churning out these days. The real waste is seeing three good-to-great actors slumming it here.
And oh yes, lest I forget: there is a third film in this series. But that’s a tale for another time.
Greetings once again, my fellow luxuriants of the ludicrous, to another edition of Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, let’s dip our toes into another great and underappreciated genre of film, Hong Kong wuxia (kung fu) films of the 70s & 80s. Today we’ll be taking a look at 天龍八部, or as you round-eyed devils have dubbed it, The Battle Wizard.
Magic thigh-bone gun of ultimate devastation!
I must profess to having a soft place in my heart for old trashy kung fu movies. Those of you my age or a bit older probably remember these as being staples on late-night cable, when they were just trying to fill air space. The silly dubbing, ham-fisted acting, convoluted story lines, and most importantly, the high-flying martial arts action are ambrosia for the aficionado of trash cinema.
And brother, The Battle Wizard delivers on all these fronts. It’s a Shaw Bros. production, which may not mean anything to you, until I tell you that if you ever saw a fucked up cheesy Technicolor kung fu movie on tv at 2 a.m., it was probably from this production company. This particular film is based on a serialized novel whose title variously translates as Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils or Eight Books of the Heavenly Dragon. The novel deals in archetypes based on Buddhist cosmology, so it’s all a bit complicated to explain in a blog post.
Pew pew!
The film opens with a guy getting caught in bed with his mistress, by her husband. Rookie mistake. Of course they immediately fight, but it turns out the philanderer has mastered the ancient martial art technique of shooting lasers out of your finger. He shoots the husband in the knees, and then as he tries to flee, injured, he gets shot again by the finger laser, which results in both of his legs falling off below the knee. Somehow the husband disappears over the roof, running away on his stubs. Back inside, the philanderer’s wife reveals to his side-piece that he’s actually a prince and could never marry gutter trash like her. Take THAT, bitch!
Reptile laughing uproariously. Seriously, if you watch these movies, the bad guys are *constantly* laughing their assess off for no reason. It’s really weird.
Twenty years later, we cut to an underground cave. The cuckold has built extendable iron bird-legs for himself that can destroy rocks, because of course he has. He’s hanging out with a half-human reptile-man of some sort, whose provenance is never explained. Through the magic of exposition, we learn that Prince Philanderer is now king, and has a boy. Killing the son should be just the revenge Iron Bird Legs is looking for, so he dispatches Reptile to the surface world to enact his revenge labor for him.
On the other side of the street, Gutter Trash’s daughter by Prince Philanderer is all grown up, and has mastered the ancient martial arts technique of firing lasers out of the end of an oversized novelty thigh bone. Her mother sends her out into the world to enact her revenge labor, on Prince Philanderer’s wife. She also tells Bone Shooter to always veil her face, because all men are worthless scum. See, SJWs aren’t new, they even existed in China 1,000 years ago.
MEANWHILE, AT THE HALL OF JUSTICE, sonny-boy is moping about because his old man, now King Philanderer, is trying to make him study kung fu. All the boy wants to do is read old Chinese sages and be a scholar-philosopher. After fighting with his parents over it (who claim that no one can govern unless they can also kick ass), he sullenly runs away to prove that you don’t have to be Chuck Norris to make it in the world.
Ambush by Iron Bird Legs, who it turns out 2/3 of the way through the film can also breath fire!
Here’s where shit really starts to get weird. Deep breath: he meets a woman who can mind-control snakes and kicks his ass because she knows kung fu. They’re captured by bandits, but Snake Woman uses her powers to help Pacifist Son escape. She sends him to find a particular woman that can rescue her. Pacifist Son asks several wanderers in the forest, and eventually learns that the chick is a hated witch. Heart in throat he approaches her hideout to beg for help for Snake Woman. Turns out, the witch is Bone Shooter. What a twist! So Bone Shooter shows up, kills the bandits, frees Snake Woman (who promptly fucks right off until near the end of the film), and has to allow Pacifist Son to see her face because he sucked poison out of her wound sustained during the fight with the bandits. They’re then ambushed by Reptile, but survive because it turns out a giant red snake lives in the river and because it ate nothing but ginseng and deer antlers it’s whole life, it somehow grants magic super martial arts powers to anybody who drinks it’s blood (I swear that is the exact explanation given in the film). So in desperation Pacifist Son bites the snake and drinks it’s blood, sending Reptile scurrying back to tell Iron Bird Legs about this intriguing development. Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter go back to the palace because they want to get married, but find out they’re half-siblings through King Philanderer. Iron Bird Legs springs an ambush and captures Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter, throwing them into a pit (after an awkwardly weird scene of Reptile stripping and fondling the woman) where they have to fight a super-strong man in a cheap gorilla costume. Pacifist Son uses his snake invincibility to eat a magic poisonous frog that Snake Woman had given him earlier; this somehow makes him go Super Saiyan, and he defeats the magic carnivorous gorilla and escapes from the pit. There’s a final show-down with Bone Shooter, Snake Woman, Reptile, Pacifist Son, and Iron Bird Legs, where everybody shoots a shit-ton of lasers out of their hands at each other. Eventually the good guys kill all the bad guys, the end.
Seriously, lasers everywhere.
This is an amusing diversion for a variety of reasons. The effects are, of course, garish and silly by today’s standards, but I profess a certain fondness for the earnestness of the efforts of people burdened by a lack of both money, and skill. The plot is simply marvelous. Everyone trying to get revenge on everyone else, magical beings all over the place, the most crowded fucking forest I’ve ever seen in my life. The most interesting aspect to me, though, is the explicit turning of the usual trope of the weakling Chinese valuing faggoty scholarship in the classics over the vigorous manly martial valor that we value in the West. In this movie, the protagonist explicitly tries to be the very model of a perfect Confucian ruler, and is ridiculed for it, and basically gives up on it like 15 minutes into the film when he first agrees to let Snake Woman try and teach him kung fu.
Carnivorous gorilla of doom. I hope Iron Bird Legs takes revenge on a lot of people, because that seems to be the only way the ape gets fed.
If you’re already partial to this kind of film, you’ll love it. It’s got everything you could ever want from a 1970s low-budget Hong Kong import, including a hilarious scene of a horse falling to it’s death over a cliff. If you don’t already like this kind of film, it has nothing for you that would make you change your mind. I rate this film 3.5 Glowing Hands out of 7. Props to anybody who can name the movie this image is from without looking it up.
Greetings one and all, and welcome to an unusual installment of Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, I shall recount to you, my reluctant audience, my adventures, foibles, and heroic deeds during this past weekend’s Texas Frightmare Weekend. This will follow a slightly different format, with all wordy word words up front and then all the photos at the end. I tried sprinkling them throughout but thought it looked too cluttered. Also, some quirk of the site makes it very difficult to line photos up next to each other when captioned, so they’re just all in a vertical line, which also looks weird. Sorry.
My favorite weekend of the year. Now I have to bide my time until October, when shit gets real for me again.
This was TFW’s 12th year, and the convention continues to grow. They’re going to have to change locations again soon, methinks. The Hyatt Regency DFW’s entire bottom floor is a convention center, but on Saturday especially, it’s just wall to wall, to the point it’s barely fun and you can’t move. The logo doesn’t lie, however: this is the southwest’s premier horror convention. People come from all over; in Ted Raimi’s panel, he asked who was from out of state, and fully half the room raised their hands. I spent time standing in various lines with a lovely couple from Montreal, a man who claimed to hail from San Francisco and yet quizzically was not a gayhomofag, and some boisterous fellows from Monterrey, Mexico.
The wife and I always stay at the hotel from Friday through Sunday, as there is simply too much to see and do for a single day, and it’s much more conducive to drunkenness to be able to just go up to our room, rather than get an Uber back and forth to our house, about half an hour away. Friday night we dedicate to signature hunting and finish that task on Sunday because the lines during Saturday are just unbearable. Also, if you’re reading this, Hyatt, your $15 breakfast buffet is barely passable as food, and a lot of places don’t charge for that shit, particularly when it is of such low quality. Literally, the only good thing is that the bacon is made thick and soggy, just the way I like it. I am not a fan of crisp bacon, and if you are, I hate you, because people like you make restaurants think it is not only acceptable, bur desirable, to make crispy bacon. Seriously dude, fuck you.
There are always lots of guests, lots of interesting vendors selling interesting things, lots of costumes, panels, and film screenings. There’s a theme party on Friday night, a VIP party for people who pay more on Saturday, and a free Saturday night option of karaoke. I’ll let you peruse the guest list yourself rather than listing them all here, but this year we had quite a good haul of signatures and bought a few fun items. We attended the Friday night theme party (the theme was an Antarctic research post from The Thing), but Saturday I’m afraid we were simply too drunk to participate in any of the other festivities. The Friday night party was crowded but boring, so we broke open the glowstick necklaces laying about and made an art project on the tablecloth. We really only went because the decor and props were done by our friends at Dark Hour haunted house, and it would have been shitty of us not to show up to support people we hang out with. Seriously, we have season passes to this haunt, and had our 10th wedding anniversary there last month.
Saturday we managed to sit through a midnight screening of Karate Kill, with director Kurando Mitsutake in attendance to field questions afterward. I pointed out to him that the Texas flag was upside down the two times it appeared in his movie, which I’m proud of myself for having caught, it being 2 in the morning and my being drunk. Somebody asked him the budget of the film, and he said he wasn’t supposed to say prior to US distribution, but fuck it, he’d had too much whiskey, and he spilled the beans. Don’t worry, Kurando, I won’t tell. The film was a welcome re-introduction to actress Asami’s titties, which I had seen in previous films. She was in attendance at a TFW a couple of years back, and we got her signature. She was dressed conservatively in traditional Japanese female clothing. I wanted to tell her it was no use since most of us had seen her have fake sex on screen, and seen her boobies, but I suppose it made her feel better. Seriously, check out the movies she’s been in. Read that list and revel in its awesomeness. I have a couple of those movies and may review them in future.
One of the commenters, it may have been Suthen, mentioned The Legend of Boggy Creek once before. Well they had a screening of a 2016 sequel, Boggy Creek Monster, but unfortunately it had an early (8 pm) start time, and I was still getting blasted at the bar. But just know that it’s out there, waiting for you to see it : )
I only caught three panels this year: first was The Thing, which featured Keith David, Wilford Brimley, the guy who played Windows, and the cinematographer. Turns out Brimley is a hilarious dirty old codger with a lot of crusty old man stories, which is awesome. I also got his signature this year, and you’ll never guess the photo. The dude actually had an 8×10 of an old Quaker Oates advert featuring him. I couldn’t believe he’d be that cool. So of course that’s the one I got signed.
The second panel was Suspiria. This was the big one. Dario Argento doesn’t make it to stateside cons very often, and often cancels appearances. We had him, Stefania Casini, Udo Kier, Barbara Magnolfi, and, one of the founding members of Goblin, Claudio Simonetti. Dario’s limited English made it difficult for him to articulate complex thoughts, and Barbara and Claudio had to step in to translate for him increasingly as the panel wore on. The most interesting audience question, to me, was a person who asked the great director what he thought of the current generation of Italian horror directors. Argento responded that there was no current generation; just a bunch of retards mindlessly mimicking the giallo masters (specifically himself, Bava, and Fulci). Claudio chimed in his agreement with that assessment. They all thought Italian cinema had one glorious moment in the sun, and then decided it would retire as champion and never do anything innovative ever again.
Also, it turns out that while my full name is a common enough one to Italians, my nickname is a purely English diminutive. The first two Eye-ties I had sign things stumbled over it, and they spelled it out in block lettering, before adding my wife’s name in more natural-looking handwriting. It looks like we just crudely added my name onto all the photos after the fact. So for the last two pasta-eaters, I just gave them the Italian version of my name.
They were all hilariously stereotypically Italian. Overly expressive, waving their arms about as their spoke, everything was Brava! this, and Grazie! that, with several of them telling us in the audience that they loved us and each other a thousand times over the course of the panel, and while speaking with them while getting autographs. I did get the guy from Goblin to sign one of their LPs, which is better than a photo I think.
The last panel I went to was Ted Raimi’s. He didn’t have a moderator for some reason, so spent the whole time engaging the audience, running about, and is one of those guys who is always, “on.” When I asked my question, he asked me what was on my shirt. Of course, it was a Warhammer reference, so I had to explain to him in one sentence about the Skaven. I had two other people in the audience whoop in support of the Great Horned Rat. The audience respectfully (mostly) stuck to questions about him and his career, rather than only asking about Bruce Campbell and Ted’s famous brother.
We also secured Keith David’s signature, Amanda Bearse (she was there for the Fright Night panel), Ric Flair (why was here there? Who knows. But he did write, “Woooo!” under his name when he signed the photo, so I’m happy), and Michael Berryman. Mr. Berryman, as you may not know, has had to overcome tremendous physical obstacles in his life to become a successful actor, and he gathered all of us in line around his table to tell us stories of perseverance and positivity. He invited anyone who has a positive image, video, or story to post it on his Facebook page, so I’m relaying the good word to all of you.
We also got Chris Sarandon this year, of course as Prince Humperdink. He’s a humble guy if you talk to him. Or at least he says humble things. He claimed to not know whether any of his characters will stand the test of time. I think Humperdink is already pretty well there. He’s also much smaller in person than you’d think from seeing him in Princess Bride or Fright Night.
We also picked up Dee Wallace, who has been in so many classic films (E.T., The Howling, Critters, Cujo, et al) that she was kind enough to have a photo montage of them all, to keep me from having to chose. Rounding out the list was Ken Page, voice of Oogie Boogie in Nightmare Before Christmas.
There were a few others that are repeat guests, so we had snagged their signatures in previous years. Udo Kier, Meg Foster, Malcolm McDowell, and Tom Savini all fell into that bucket.
A lot of the cast from Bates Motel was there and had huge lines, but I don’t watch that show so who gives a shit.
Oh and last but not least, Misfits guitarist Doyle was there, looking menacing and still with a great devillock. Except he probably wouldn’t want me to associate him with the Misfits, because I heard from several others that I spoke to while waiting in different lines that he just talked trash about the band, about how it was entirely his talent that drove them, Danzig is lucky that Doyle made his career, etc. Seemed kind of bitter. Oh well. Looks like the kind of guy Warty would like.
Ultimately it was a sad drive back to the casa on Sunday, as this, our big weekend of the year had come and gone. I love the experience, and my wife gamely tags along. There’s a wonderful buzz in the air, and you’re surrounded by people who dress like you, think like you, act like you, who understand every one of your obscure references, and who are just as passionate about the Dark as you are. The whole thing is a shrine dedicated to group worship of Death, in His manifestation on film. I get to spend a whole three days walking around with people who have fake intestines spilling out, fake eyes hanging by plastic nerves, t-shirts with catchy pictures and slogans, neon hair styled every which way, tattoos like you wouldn’t believe. Not to mention the occasional sluttily dressed hot chick, to compete with the fatties that seem to make up half of the female contingent of horror fandom. This is our fourth year, and we’re already looking forward to the next go-round.
Alright, some words about the photos. A lot of the guests charge extra for a photo op with the signature. I don’t care about any of you that much, so sadly many of the people I got to meet, I don’t have photos of. At first, I tried creep-shotting them, but my complete lack of skill with phone cameras, combined with the crowds, soon showed me the folly of this approach. So there aren’t as many pics of celebrities (or in some cases, “celebrities”), as I would have liked. This leads me to my next point: most of the photos are of very poor quality. What you see below probably doubles the number of photos I’ve ever taken in my life. I have never had any desire to visually document anything for any reason except insurance purposes, and so never take pictures, and have no facility with this. I don’t even have a picture of my wife. Why would I? I know what she looks like, and it’s not anybody else’s goddamn business. Nothing grinds my gears more than people who have photos of their own family. It tells me that either, 1) you frequently forget what they look like, or worse 2) you think I give a damn what they look like. Protip: I don’t. Anyway, I’ve never taken pictures at any previous TFW, and only did this year to have content for the site, so they’re terrible. The only time that sucked is when William Sadler looked genuinely deflated that we didn’t want a photo with him after getting his signature a few years back. If I mentioned meeting a guest up above, but don’t have a photo of them below, it’s because they upcharged for it. The only creep shot I kept was of Argento since I promised that one. You can see from how bad it is why I deleted the other attempts. Most all of these were taken late Friday night or Sunday afternoon. I had a lot more from Saturday, but the crowds were just too thick and the pics were all even worse than the ones you see below. You’ll also notice I stand somewhat awkwardly – I have some chronic lower back pain from a pretty bad motorcycle accident a few years back, so I have to stand pretty ram-rod straight if I’m going to be on my feet all day to mitigate it. Just thought I’d address it before somebody else brings it up because I agree, it looks weird. Anyway, you have been warned.
Our art project at the Friday night party. Several of our friends noticed this and stopped by our table to take part. The staff kept giving us the stink-eye, but hey, you work in the service industry, so fuck you.
Some kind of Alien Freddy family, who the fuck knows.
One of the many fantastic shirts available for sale. I thought about buying this and having Brimley sign it, but couldn’t resist the Quaker Oats poster instead.
People dressed like the ice necromancers from Game of Thrones. Actually I think the littler one is one of those green people who grew the tree up Max von Sydow’s ass.
This is my good friend’s daughter, who also works at Dark Hour haunted house. The character is from something called Five Nights at Freddy’s, which is bizarrely *not* a Nightmare on Elm Street property. The robot hand is actually battery powered and articulates. This was on Saturday, but thankfully since I was assisting I was able to get the shot before general admission opened, after which she was swarmed the rest of the day.
One of the set pieces created by Dark Hour haunted house for The Thing theme party on Friday night. You can’t tell in this shot, but it glows from within and pulsates. It’s the kennel dog-monster thing. They also had the head spider thing, of course, but I wasn’t able to get a good shot of it.
Yes, they set up a tattoo area, so you can immortalize your weekend with a flash tattoo. The dude is from LA, which he advertises prominently on his banner. I guess that makes it trendier somehow. Fuck people who live in SoCal.
The Suspiria panel. From left to right: douchebag moderator; Barbara Magnolfi, Stefania Casini; Udo Kier, Dario Argento, and Claudio Simonetti.
Great t-shirt. If you don’t know what A Serbian Film is, kiss your wife and children while you still have your innocence and watch it. Or just read the summary and see why it’s awesome to have a shirt that says this.
My buddy Alex belting out Country Roads on the accordion wearing his normal flayed human face mask and utilikilt. He is the owner/operator of Reindeer Manor haunted house, which is quite good. His lovely wife is also possibly the best dessert baker I’ve ever met.
My wife really wanted the crocheted nosferatu because it’s unique. I thought he looked lonely, so bought him a plush Godzilla to play with. The day we got home our fucking mastiff chewed up the vampire’s head. He is currently out with some old woman for repairs.
Great Americana melting pot moment. You can’t see the mom as she’s off-camera to the right, but she was in full Muslim woman-be-gone hidey dress, but with a grin plastered on her face as her kids took pictures with all the various monsters and seemed to be having a great time. Good feelz all around. Welcome to the States, young horror fans.
MacReady and dog-monster wife at The Thing theme party on Friday night.
This guy makes weird shit out of bones. This is a Little Shop of Horrors homage that cost like $1,100. The mouth is a big turtle shell.
Great horror themed kids shirts for sale. Spawn of the Dead, I Don’t OBEY My Parents, Escape from School, and The Monster Squad Founding Member. We bought a few for the nephews.
Myself and mystery woman with Stefania Casini.
Myself and that damned mystery woman who kept following me around with Barbara Magnolfi.
Myself and mystery woman with Keith David. She’s wearing a t-shirt that’s a reference from Monster Squad, I’m wearing probably my favorite shirt: Skeletor trying to drink wine from the bottle but it’s just pouring through his bottom jaw and running down his chest. I think this may be the only other shot here from Saturday.
Myself and mystery woman with Claudio Simonetti. We got him to sign a limited numbered Goblin LP, which now I have to buy a record frame for.
Myself and mystery woman with Dee Wallace. She was a real sweetheart; besides Meg Foster, probably the single nicest lady I’ve met at this con. Look at her IMDB link up above, she’s been in a lot of great horror films, and I was excited to get to meet her.
It’s hard to tell in this shot, but this guy dressed like Groot has an axe in his back for some reason. He did awesomely only speak through a voice box built into the helmet that just said, “I am Groot”. Kids loved it.
Another great t-shirt for sale that I bought for my buddy who couldn’t make it this year.
If this is the cover to your movie, if this is the box art and that is the name of your films, I will buy them, no questions asked. It’s like heaven for a person like me; there are tables and tables covered in this kind of shit.
I doubt the efficacy of these gas masks.
Dude and chick dressed like at the beginning of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
This was just laying on a table as a centerpiece in the middle of one of the rooms, as decoration. Because this is the kind of thing that counts as decoration at Texas Frightmare Weekend, which is why I love it so.
Creep-shot of Dario Argento. He’s signing an endless array of rare large posters brought by the people directly in front of me in line, a nice couple from Montreal. The dude put me to *shame* in obscure low-budget horror knowledge, and that ain’t easy to do.
Cinco de Skeletor. Plus it was a black dude, which is super weird, because 1) there’s like a dozen black dudes at this convention, total, and 2) they sure as fuck don’t dress up.
Chick dressed as Chucky. Child’s Play and Fright Night director Tom Holland was in attendance, but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to meet him/get signature.
Part of what I love about conventions. You find the weirdest shit. This one guy had a whole series of little painted Chinese porcelain figurines, that just came in orange boxes that said “Myths and Legends Series” and labeled, “God of Luck”, or “God of Prosperity”, etc. No other info. He said a customer traded them to him at his physical shop, which he accepted because he thought to sell them at DragonCon, but no such luck. So we picked up the God of Luck and put him on our shrine to Guan Di once we got back to the house. Just a nutty little piece of the universe.
Prom Night Carrie.
Beetlejuice when he has the spikes sticking out of him. I’d hate to try and navigate a crowded con with… protrusions like that.
Greetings once again my scandalous sojourners into scintillating cinema, and welcome to the final installment of our three-part exploration of perhaps my single favorite genre of film, giallo. Forgive me if this is a bit short; I slammed my right index finger in the car door like an idiot on Sunday, and even though it’s been a few days as of Wednesday evening, typing and using a mouse still hurts like eight bitches in a bitch boat.
The movie poster for today’s treat.
In part one, we took a broad overview of the genre itself. Last week, I provided a brief survey of three of the largest names associated with these films. Finally today, we will briefly look into giallo’s influence on cinema outside of Italy.
If you recall, giallo’s heyday was from the mid-60s to the late-70s. The films continue to appear even to this day, but their production tapered off severely by the end of the disco decade. The more astute of you may have noticed this coinciding with the rise of “slasher” films in the United States, and the eventual full-blown emergence of the splatter genre in the 80s. Mainstays of those genres, such as a mysterious killer, graphic on-screen violence, young people being killed in alarming numbers, antagonist POV shots, gratuitous use of nudity, and total ambivalence to acting quality all spring directly from the success of giallo. As I previously wrote, John Carpenter has repeatedly credited the influence of giallo on his own work, Halloween. Sadly, some of the artistic flair seems to have been lost in the translation; in my opinion, films like Friday the 13th are straw giallos, copying the form but without the unique substance.
Anyway, so much for the meta-analysis. Please note that you can’t spell analysis without “anal.” Also note that I can attest that a middle-management cubicle schmuck in his Kohl’s polo and Penny’s khakis driving his fucking grey Camry to work every day in a bizarre effort to be the most cookie-cutter office monkey who ever lived doesn’t seem to find it amusing when you say that, after he asks you to analyze something.
Famous self-cannibalizing ending scene.It’s kind of hard to tell, but that’s the “fetus” he’s eating. I thought about showing a shot of him ripping it out, but I’m too classy.
Today’s effort will focus on a weird little piece from Joe D’Amato called Buio Omega in Italy, Buried Alive in the initial US release, and eventually now Beyond the Darkness. You may remember that I initially said I was going to focus this third review on one of the seemingly endless and decreasingly topic-related Zombi sequels. The movie I had in mind was Anthropophagus (or, Zombi 7), also by D’Amato. But as I was standing there looking at the dvd, I decided Beyond the Darkness would fit better, as it serves as a sort of bridge between the latter stages of the giallo run, and what we would call slasher films. Besides, Anthropophagus is really only worth it for two scenes: one in which the killer pulls a pregnant woman’s fetus out of her and eats it on camera (the effect done using a skinned rabbit covered in corn syrup), and the very end when he’s gutted by the Final Girl and he begins scooping up his own intestines and stuffing them in his mouth in a final cannibalistic orgy. There, I just saved you 90 minutes. Anecdote: I found this one at a Movie Trading Company in a part of the city with a heavy black population. The clerk was black. The dvd cover had a picture of that ending self-consumption scene. The guy looks at me and says, I shit you not, “Man who da fuck wanna watch a movie like this?!” I gave him a Cheshire Cat grin and didn’t say a word.
Anyway, Beyond the Darkness is still super fucked up, but has more super fucked up scenes than Anthropophagus. D’Amato dabbled both in horror and porn, so it was inevitable we’d get a movie like this. Our young lead Kieran Canter loses his fiancée to a voodoo curse by his weird-looking housekeeper Franca Stoppi who wants the guy all to herself (I’d link to both of their IMDBs, but neither of them has really done anything you’d care about). In fact, she breast feeds him in his sorrow after the funeral. Except he’s really into taxidermy as a hobby, see, and it turns out he’s also a complete fucking loon. So once the fiancée dies, he digs her up (this scene shows the coffin having been buried, oh, I’d say about six inches deep), takes her back to his palatial villa, stuffs her, and puts her in his bed.
Creepy-looking housekeeper. She’s making sloppy joes.Just what the doctor ordered after a hard day of burying the chick you wanted to marry.
While returning from the graveyard, he has a flat tire, and a hitchhiker helps herself into his van. He takes her back to his place, and after she freaks the fuck out seeing him taxidermy-ing this much better looking chick, he kills her (after bizarrely taking time to rip her fingernails out with pliers). The housekeeper helps hack her fat ass up (and we get to see her giant titties flopping out hither and yon), and they turn her into sludge in a bathtub full of acid. Amusingly, the acid in Italy also comes wrapped in those wicker baskets like you see around bottles of table wine. It looks exactly the same, only huge, and with a warning label on it. After feeling bad about this, the housekeeper gives him a handjob to lift his spirits.
Seriously, the acid looks just like this, only in a much larger bottle with a generic warning label on it. I really sincerely hope that’s how they sold acid in Italy in the 70s.
Next, he’s out jogging, when he comes across a comely lass who has sprained her ankle. He takes her back to his place, and in exchange for wrapping her limb in a bandage, she basically jumps into bed with him, no dialogue needed. Upon seeing the stuffed corpse she freaks the fuck out (stop me if you’ve heard this), and Kieran rips out her throat with his teeth, and then swallows the chunk. Enter housekeeper, to burn the body in their giant pizza oven.
Eventually the funeral director starts snooping around, because he saw Kieran inject the fiancée’s corpse with something just before the funeral. Franca and he have a falling out, eyes are ripped out, twin sisters appear, and all hell breaks loose. There’s an interesting jump-scare ending that I don’t want to spoil, so we’ll leave it at this.
Now, this comes close to rising above being a gore-fest, but just falls short. Kieran’s character is alternately devastated and weepy, only to become enraged and murderous, and there is a definite feeling of his being trapped in a childhood twisted by the early death of his parents. But this thematic avenue is never really explored. Franca’s character has no such interesting promise, and is just a freaking weirdo. Her family appears at one point, and they also are shown to be…eccentric, would be the politest way to put it. Also quite interesting, is the fact that there is no real protagonist. The good funeral director (whose entire subplot is worthless except to set up the final shot) and the twin sister both appear too briefly to be said to have a meaningful role in the conflict. It’s actually just two antagonists doing crazy shit to other people and eventually, to each other.
Order up: one dead jogger.
Really though you’re watching this for the gore factor. There are great scenes, particularly two well known ones: the taxidermy and the acid bath. The sequence where Kieran stuffs his former love’s corpse is drawn out, using buckets upon buckets of animal guts, as we see him emptying her out. Upon removing her heart, he holds it up to kiss…then takes a bite out of it. The hacking up of fatty and turning her into slurry is also quite graphic and memorable. There’s an amusing transition from Franca dumping the liquid remains in a hole in the yard, to her very messily eating beef stew that will stick in your mind. Also the soundtrack is once again by Goblin, so that’s good.
What’s left of fatty after her acid bath. Serves her right for jumping in his car after he drove past her a few moments earlier. Also serves her right for being a fucking fatty.
Really though, even though this is widely considered to be D’Amato’s best work (he also pulls double-duty as cinematographer, under his real name of Aristide Massacessi), it doesn’t do a lot more for you than show the potential he had, and make you sick. I haven’t seen any of his porn work (though I can’t help but wonder what Anal Paprika is like), but I suppose great directorial skills are less important in that genre. Suspiria is giallo at it’s finest (as evidenced by the number of commenters who chimed in with how much they also enjoyed that film) – this is giallo at it’s most base.
Sorry this is a bit short and to the point, but like I said, my finger really fucking hurts, and I’ve got a big convention coming up this weekend, so that’s just perfect. Ultimately I give this film 6 pictures of my brindle mastiff out of 11.
I tried to get him to wear a hat, to make the photo “amusing,” but no dice. And my corgi wouldn’t even sit still for any photo at all. Also, I saw UCS’s review of Dawn of War III too late to chime in on it, but the next time any one of you motherfuckers does anything Warhammer related without getting ahold of me so I can impress everyone in the comments with how much I know about Warhammer, I will destroy you all in my wrath. I have Warhammer tattoos FFS!!!
Greetings once again, my fellow travelers in the transgressive, to another installment of Reviews You’ll (Probably) Never Use.
Last week as you’ll recall, we explored a little of the background of the wonderful Italian crime and horror genre called giallo. This week, before getting to our feature review, we’ll explore three of the main personalities which shaped and defined the giallo over the years.
Barbara Steele in the original, and still best, “Black Sunday”
Undoubtedly the father of giallo, and indeed of Italian horror in general, is Mario Bava. Born in 1914, Bava got his first taste of directing in 1956 when, as cinematographer for I Vampiri, he was asked to finish the film when the hired director walked out on the project. He later went on to direct the gothic horror masterpiece Black Sunday(not the one about the football game, this one is better) and began directing what are widely considered to be the first true giallo films in the early 60s. Bava’s start as a cinematographer and special effects man provided the early shape of the genre as being primarily concerned with the immediate visual impact on screen and the relegation of other aspects to subsidiary status. His son also made films, but aside from a promising turn with Demons, has utterly failed to live up to his old man.
Next, we have the great Lucio Fulci. His film Zombi 2 was the subject of last week’s review (not linked here because linking to my own posts seems weirdly like masturbating), and if you watched or read that, you know his game. While his wonderful Don’t Torture A Duckling showcased a fine directorial ability, in general, he became known as the king of Italian gore. Despite getting his start in comedies, eventually his films were watched with a grim fascination by folks eager to see just how much brutal violence someone could get away with putting on screen. Seriously, if you have a problem with a slow close-up shot of an open eyeball having a straight razor dragged across it, don’t watch The New York Ripper. But really you should to you know, not be a pussy. His Gates of Hell trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery) are all good to excellent and worth watching for any serious fan of horror. The Beyond is probably my personal favorite Italian horror film from this era.
Finally, we come to the director of tonight’s film, one Dario Argento. He managed to have both a prolific and influential directorial career and to produce a pretty decent-looking daughter. He will be appearing at Texas Frightmare Weekend, and I will share a photo of the gentleman after I obtain my signature and regale him with stories of how much I love his movie because fuck knows he hasn’t heard that a thousand times from rando overweight white bald misanthropes. He started off as a screenwriter for Sergio Leone on spaghetti westerns but came into his own when he moved to giallo. In fact, his nearly flawless masterpiece, Deep Red, is considered by many critics to be the supreme expression of the giallo form. No less a personage than John Carpenter has frequently cited its influence on him when making American slasher innovator, Halloween. He’s fallen off recently (seriously, I bought his Dracula starring Rutger Hauer sight unseen, and returned it, it was that fucking bad), but man, when the guy was in his prime, he could make a fucking great movie experience. One thing I’ve always thought a bit off, however, was his willingness to direct his own daughter in nude scenes. How does that go? “OK sweetie, that was a good take, but now I want to see your titties a little bit more to the left, and rub that nipple a bit more sensuously. Yes, that’s the way…rub it slowly for daddy.” I mean, I know they’re Italian, and so their mores are going to be less “the corporation bought us lunch today so we can meet a deadline” and more “fuck it, let’s hit this bottle and sportfuck until the sun comes up,” but shit man, there are limits.
WHY DO OUR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS HAVE TO BE SO DAMN BRIGHT?
Anyway, that brings us to our feature tonight, Argento’s Suspiria. The film was inspired by Suspiria de Profundis, a series of short essays by English author Thomas De Quincey. Argento thought to make three films out of the three Sorrows recounted in the essay: “Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears,” “Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs,” and “Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.” Argento would indeed go on to complete his plan with Inferno in 1980 and The Mother of Tears finally in 2007, but let’s not digress onto those paths and ruin future reviews.
The film follows American dance student Jessica Harper as she attends a prestigious academy in Freiburg, only to discover that it’s a front for witches, just like all Arthur Murray Dance Studios in real life. Suspiria is pretty much the only famous thing Harper did, though she apparently was in Minority Report in a role I don’t recall just from reading the name.
She’s feeling a little blue.
Jessica’s introduction to the academy is seeing a student flee from it while ranting during a storm. The fleeing student is then murdered in most satisfying fashion. She goes to her friend’s apartment, and a random hairy-armed intruder stabs her so damn many times in the sternum that her heart is exposed, then we get a nice close-up shot of the knife being stabbed directly into the beating heart. Then she’s hung from the skylight, the shattered debris of which falls and buries itself in her aforementioned friend’s skull. It’s easily the best opening to any movie ever made, and if you disagree, you can fuck right off with your incorrect opinions which can be disproved mathematically.
Seriously, how can you not love a movie that ostensibly takes place almost entirely at night, but is still so full of glorious colors?
So Jessica meets the various eccentrics who staff and study at the academy. Creepy things happen, people die, and she starts to get suspicious. There’s a great scene where the blind pianist’s guide dog is possessed and rips out his owner’s throat, and tears chunks of meat out of him until a couple of polizei come running over to chase him away. Her friend Stefania Casini tries to run away from an unseen murderous fiend with a straight razor, only to fall into a storage room filled entirely with razor wire. WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK? It’s giallo, it doesn’t matter or need any explanation! But seriously as she’s struggling with the razor wire and getting cut up she gets her throat slit with the straight razor. Very tragic.
Oh shit, I jumped into a room full of razor wire! I hope that guy with the straight razor who was chasing me doesn’t take advantage of this situation and come slit my throat!
Eventually, Jessica discovers that the academy was founded by an old evil witch, and after parsing out the meaning of the opening runaway’s rant is able to find the secret passage where the academy staff congregate to perform black magic. The main baddy animates poor Stefania’s corpse, crucified on a coffin and now with needles in its eyes for some reason, to attack Jessica, but our brave Final Girl is able to see through the witch’s glamour and kill her, which causes the other witches to apparently suffer cranial bleeding and migraine headaches while the whole house tears itself apart.
Honestly, the plot isn’t as convoluted as some critics make it out to be. You do have to pay attention and give the usual allowance for a giallo film’s somewhat blasé attachment to narrative flow, but that just comes with the territory. The real sparkle of this film is in the visual realm. The entire thing is shot in imbibition Technicolor, which was seen in films such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind but was no longer widely used at the time. It produces a more vibrant, vivid color palette, almost to the point of garishness, though of course, that’s only a good thing in certain circumstances, of which this happens to be one. There is heavy emphasis on strong primary colors as the background in many scenes – the academy walls are deep blue and red velvet, and in a scene where sheets are set up as a screen so the ladies can sleep without a horde of maggots falling on them through the ceiling (watch the damn movie), as soon as the lights are out a nightmarish red backlight pulses through everything. Even in a bedroom, at night, there will be what looks like bright green or blue spotlights shining onto the actor’s faces. The damn skylight the initial victim is hung from is an enormous mosaic of bright colors. The entire thing is like a kaleidoscope given form and is really quite remarkable, and I can’t recommend it enough. Lord only knows how great it would be to watch it blazed (note to self: what am I doing this weekend?). Maybe the best part is what I have lovingly dubbed the Disco Peacock in the main witch’s bedroom. I desperately want one of these, and it also would be suitable for extended viewing while blazed.
I wasn’t kidding. I present to you: Disco Peacock.I also wasn’t kidding about the camp-out sheets having glowing red backlight. And nobody comments on this or thinks it sinister in any way.
Again, though, this is very much in the realm of art for the sake of art, so don’t go expecting some kind of Tarantino-esque dialog or Oscar-nominated stories of black folks overcoming oppression. It’s all enhanced with a great soundtrack by Goblin, long-time collaborators with Argento, and mentioned in my previous post. It’s less accessible to a standard horror audience than Zombi 2, but is ultimately superior. I award Suspiria 13 Sexy Witches out of 15.
Greetings fellow marvelers of the menacing and macabre, and welcome to another installment of what is indisputably at least the eighth best weekly recurring article on this site. For the next several weeks, we shall be exploring your humble wordslinger’s favorite single genre of horror, giallo.
I will preface the reviews with a brief history of the genre itself, the horror directors most well known within it, and its larger impact on American cinema.
First, lettuce define our terms. Giallo is greasy wop-talk for “yellow,” like the color of my wife’s skin, and refers to a particular style of Italian-produced murder mystery film which often includes elements of horror fiction (such as slasher violence and eroticism). The genre developed in the mid-to-late 1960s peaked in popularity during the 1970s, and subsequently declined over the next few decades. This description is copied entirely off of the beginning of the Wikipedia article, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, says I.
Is that a zombie riding a shark? MAYBE. Read on!
Without getting too into the weeds on the subject, the genre covers a fairly broad range of films, from pulp murder mysteries to straight supernatural horror. There are some common elements. First, there is almost always a psychological element to the films, some insanity provoked by trauma in one of the main characters. There is always killing, and it is always very violent and very much center screen – this is not a genre of happy fluffy bunnies. There is very (and I do mean very) little focus on the cohesiveness of plot or dialogue throughout the film. Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t the purposeful insanity of, say, House, or the purely so-over-the-top-it’s-weird-ness of Zardoz. More of a…benign indifference to strict logical flow. There is, essentially, just enough of a storyline to ensure that one event leads to another, and that’s about it. There is a great focus on cinematography, on capturing interesting or provocative or just plain unusual shots. The soundtracks are usually awesome, as in, done as if the keyboardist from an early 80s synthpop or electro funk band was on some mellow acid and just decided to score some movies in his spare time. There’s even a band, called Goblin, most well known for their movie soundtracks. I could go on and on, but this gives you the gist of it. Seriously though, if any of you guys want to just meet somewhere and listen to me wax philosophic about this genre and all the movies that I love in it for six hours while drinking beer, I am always up for that.
One of the many different posters for this film. Collect them all!
We begin our exploration with one of the seminal works of the great Lucio Fulci (more on him next week), Zombi 2. Or as it was known in America, Zombie.
Italian copyright law (pre-EU) was a funny thing. Any movie could be marketed as a sequel to any other movie, without having any direct relationship. We of the superior Anglo-Saxon lineage understand that George Romero’s masterwork Dawn of the Dead was a direct sequel to his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. As the science of phrenology teaches us, Italians aren’t nearly as intelligent as we are, and so were ignorant of this fact. Personally, I blame all the out-race breeding. Dawn of the Dead was released in most European markets titled Zombi, and the audiences thought it was simply a stand-alone. Ever one to try and turn a quick buck on the cheap, the Italian movie industry decided to cash in, and Zombi 2 was green-lit. The title Zombie is for the American release since over here, it is not a sequel.
As a brief aside, this started a bizarre and, for the collector, irritating trend of any movie involving supernatural cannibalism to be labeled as a Zombi sequel in Europe. So there are a shit-load of movies that all have multiple titles, but if you’re hunting them down, they might be known as one thing, or might be known as Zombi 3, 4, 5, etc., depending on which production company is doing the release at any given time, and varying according to release region. In two weeks I’ll review one such, chosen to show just how far afield this trend can go. Though not one of the chief offenders of appropriating the Zombi moniker, Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (I Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead) is one of the worst, having been released with over 15 different titles. My personal favorite of the titles for that film, and the title on my copy is Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.
Anyway, I won’t go into a great deal of background on director Fulci, because I’ll cover him some in next week’s installment of giallo background since he is an important figure in the genre. Suffice to say the man has some kind of obsession with eyes. I own six of his films, and I’m fairly certain I remember seeing eyeballs punctured or mutilated up close on camera in every one of them.
That started with Zombie. After a brief opening scene in a hospital where a doctor shoots somebody wrapped in a sheet in the head, we cut to an abandoned boat drifting into New York City. Officers variously described as either Harbor Patrol or the Coast Guard find somebody dead inside, and a zombie, which bites one of the cops in the throat (they look like harbor patrol to me, though one of them makes a crack about getting a big bonus for bringing this ship in, so maybe they’re some kind of salvage crew mercenary harbor patrol cops?), killing him. His partner blasts the zombie back into the sea, and his dead partner is taken to the city morgue.
One of the “zombies” promised by the title of the film.
The daughter (Tisa Farrow) of the man whose boat was found adrift teams up with a reporter (Ian McCulloch) investigating the ghost ship, and they trace its route back into the Caribbean. There’s a hilarious scene where the cab driver on the island they fly to tells them there aren’t many boats about to be hired, and then we see them walk along a dock which is literally cluttered with civilian boats. There they meet Al Cliver (who was born Pierluigi Conti – cultural appropriation!) and Auretta Gay, who are just about to set out on vacation on their yacht and agree to take our investigators with them to try and find a sinister island that the natives are rumored to avoid.
Here’s where this movie gets fucking awesome. Auretta strips down to just a thong bottom and goes scuba diving. She encounters a tiger shark, which is attacked by an underwater zombie that keeps trying to bite it. This scene is pure cinematic gold. There was a diver, done up in water-resistant zombie makeup, and he actually fights a tiger shark they doped up so that it wouldn’t be too aggressive. When you see the guy biting on the shark, he’s actually doing that. Man, they just don’t do movies like that anymore, and it’s a goddamn shame.
So awesome it deserved another look.
While fending off the shark before the zombie showed up, the boat was damaged, and so the protagonists fire off some flares. On the island, doctor’s assistant Lucas sees the flare and asks if it’s the Devil. Yes, Lucas, the fucking Devil is firing off bog-standard emergency flares from just off shore. This is why a white guy is in charge of your island.
The foursome are rescued by Doctor Richard Johnson, who was also in one of the great all-time classic horror films, The Haunting. I’ll review it someday – it’s really superlative. A complete sense of dread built up with almost no effects whatsoever. Also, it lent the opening sample to a great White Zombie song.
Once ashore, we learn that Richard Johnson was friends with Tisa’s old man, and they were researching why the dead are increasingly returning to life on the island. The film never makes a definitive statement, but voodoo is mentioned several times, so I guess we’re going with “magic” in this one. He agrees to help the stranded newcomers but first asks them to check on his wife up the road while he tends to more zombie research right quick.
Of course, the fucking gardener was left in charge of security at the house, and he blew it. You already know the wife’s dead, because of a fantastic scene earlier in the film where she’s showering (yay, more titties!) and a zombie breaks into the house and kills her. Here you have another one of the great moments in horror history: for the first time in a major release, you get an agonizingly slow, up close, center camera shot of a big splinter of wood jamming right into and bursting her eyeball, no cutaways or wide angles to lessen the impact. I remember seeing a brief interview with Tom Savini for Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments where he recalls watching that scene building, and wondering if Fulci had the guts to do what even he hadn’t dared in Dawn of the Dead (for the tragically ignorant amongst you, Savini did the effects for that film).
See that spike on the right edge of the frame, just below the zombie’s wrist? It’s about three seconds from going straight into that eyeball.Don’t worry though, she has bigger problems to worry about than her missing eye. She gets eaten.
Fleeing in terror from the scene at the house, our protagonists are making their way back to the hospital when they stop to catch their breath. For some reason Tisa and Ian start making out when it turns out they’re in a Spanish conquistador cemetery, and the remarkably still meaty former Spaniards begin to reanimate.
Fight fight fight people die, eventually, we have a last stand at the hospital, and I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who decides to see it. But New York City at least gets overrun, so I’ll leave it at that. Serves all the progressives who live there right! If it wasn’t for major cities, there’d be no national democratic party! Down with urban dwellers! REEEEEGION WAAAAAR!!!
Look, everything I write about these movies is going to be biased because I love them all so very, very much. I could seriously sit down and watch this shit all day. The barely-there storylines, the garish, brutal on-screen killings with bright red pulsing blood, the horrifically rotting zombies dropping piles of worms out of their eyes, I even love how you can’t tell what language the fucking things are shot in (pro-tip: most of the time they’re shot without the dialogue being recorded at all, and dubs are put over it in post-production for each country that it’s going to be released in. Hell, in Zombie, half the cast were English speakers who had no Italian, and the other half were the reverse. This is because they were always filmed with an eye towards international release since none of the European nations were large enough to guarantee good gross receipts by only catering to their own native audiences). So don’t take my word for it, because I’m going to tell you to watch every one of these.
I picked this one first because I think it’s a good way for those of you unfamiliar with the glory of low-budget 1970s Italian splatter-horror to segue into the genre with a fairly familiar motif. Everybody knows zombie movies and has seen at least a few, so the transition from American “don’t show anything too graphic and try to make sense” movies won’t seem so jarring. The bottom line is, if you like horror, you will like this movie, I guarantee it. If you don’t like horror, then what the fuck are you doing reading this anyway? Fuck you too, buddy, and just get on with posting all your endless goddamn “hurr durr let’s all give HuffPo more advertising money by hate-sharing their posts” OT links in the comments below. Always remember how much Zardoz loves you all, my children.
I rate Zombi 2/Zombie six decayed heads out of seven.
Greetings Boils and Ghouls, and whatever other gender you may be currently identifying as. For the next three weeks, I’ll be reviewing films from that wonderful splendiforous genre, my personal favorite, giallo. I’ll be doing this due to the presence of several well-known giallo guests at Texas Frightmare Weekend, coming up May 5th-7th. I’ll choose three different films from three of the genre masters. And don’t worry, my beloved readers, you’ll get a full report of Texas Frightmare after it’s finished and I’ve recovered from my biggest drinking & spending weekend of the year.
But since most of you probably either haven’t heard of that genre or don’t care for it because you are philistines with no taste, who drink knock-off Colt 45 in paper cups drawn out of a large plastic bag being sold by that elderly Mexican fellow pushing it around in the little cart, I won’t subject you to four straight weeks of the best 1970s Italy had to offer. This week we’ll go with a popcorn goofy horror film, one of my favorites from my woefully mundane childhood, Monster Squad. Or more correctly,The Monster Squad. But seriously nobody calls it that in casual conversation, and if you do, you’ll stand out as being that guy.
The movie poster. Pretty much does what it says on the tin.
Monster Squad is a 1987 creature feature with a set-up so ludicrous you can’t help but love it. Dracula is trying to take over the world, and to do so, gets the old band back together. Only our impetuous band of child heroes can stop him.
Monster Squad was directed by Fred Dekker, a man who writes much more than he directs. His few other directing efforts are…hit and miss. You have RoboCop 3 (boo, hiss!), but also Night of the Creeps (huzzah!). More interestingly, the film was written by Shane Black. Now if that name doesn’t ring a bell to you, see if this does: “Billy. Billy! The other day, I was going down on my girlfriend. I said to her, “Jeez, you got a big pussy. Jeez, you got a big pussy.”
That’s right, Monster Squad was written by fucking Hawkins.
Seriously though, check out his IMDB. In addition to being Hawkins, he’s written Lethal Weapon, Iron Man 3, and is directing the upcoming The Predator film. Nuts, huh?
Aside from that, Monster Squad is peopled largely with actors that you may probably kinda sorta recognize, but probably not (depending, of course, on how big a film fan you are). Mary Ellen Trainor (RIP), mostly known from the Lethal Weapon series. Leonardo Cimino, who plays the weird little bald guy with an accent in every movie which called for that role (also RIP). Jason Hervey, who played asshole older brother Wayne on The Wonder Years. Tom Noonan, from all sorts of things like Last Action Hero, and decent little Satanic Panic throwback horror film The House of the Devil. The IMDB photo for the main protagonist, Andre Gower, kind of has a rapey murder vibe going on. Finally, Drac himself is played by Duncan Regehr, whom our friends from north of the border will recognize as also being Canadian. He was in several episodes of DS9 as a Bajoran dude getting to occupy Major Kira’s wormhole and was also the ghost-but-really-it’s-an-alien-who-likes-fucking-Dr. Crusher-and-lives-in-a-candle-for-some-reason on that one episode of Next Generation where they go to Planet Scotland. You know exactly the episode I’m talking about, you fucking nerds.
ANYhoo, our story opens 100 years ago, with Dr. Van Helsing botching an attempt at killing Duncan’s Dracula – Dracan…Duncula? I like Duncula, let’s go with that.
Cut to present. Duncula has set up shop in Red Stick, Louisiana, and has recruited The Mummy (who escapes from the local museum), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (whom I could totally see living in Louisiana), some poor schmuck who has been turned into a werewolf, and even managed to rob Frankenstein’s Monster from an airplane carrying it God-knows-where. Does Red Stick even have a museum that would be fancy enough to host an actual mummy as part of an exhibition? I dunno. Suthenboy, what of it? You’re the closest one I know to that area.
The Jackson Five, as re-imagined by…well, me, I suppose.
Turns out, Mary Ellen Trainor just so happens to buy Van Helsing’s diary at a fucking garage sale (not making that up) and gives it to Rapey McMurderface as a gift. See, he’s really into monsters and has an after school club where they go up in a treehouse and talk about monsters. The only problem is, the diary’s in German.
So off we go to Leonardo Cimino, playing a Holocaust survivor, who translates it for them. Turns out there’s an amulet that balances good and evil in the world, and once every hundred years, you can bust that shit up and then evil will rule the world. So this is Duncula’s plan in a nutshell.
Our plucky protagonists manage to defeat the monsters one at a time (the mummy never does a goddamn thing except shuffle around and then get destroyed) and even recruit Frankenstein’s Monster onto the Good Team. Finally, we’re left with only Dracula, who, in a pretty badass scene that somewhat presages what you see at the end of Rogue One, purposefully strides through the middle of town casually massacring the entire police force as they run up to him one at a time.
Of course, in the end, a hole is opened to Limbo by having a virgin read some words (that’s how Limbo works, right?), and the mean monsters are sucked into Purgatory forever. Frankenstein’s Monster is also banished, punished for looking weird regardless of the morality of his behavior. Just like in real life. Being an 80s movie, there is, of course, a bitchin’ training montage, and a contrived rap song for the final credits.
Look, the movie has tremendous heart. And the monster effects, particularly the Gillman, are honestly quite good (thanks to the wizardry of Stan Winston). I also personally have always preferred the half-man, half-wolf bipedal werewolves to the “he just turns into a big wolf” variety. And there are some background scenes that still warm my nerdy child heart (one of the characters wears RoboTech pajamas. I wish I had RoboTech pajamas as an adult!). It’s genuinely great for kids, or even for adults just looking for a cotton candy movie on an otherwise boring Saturday night. But ultimately, there are just too many plot holes that you can drive a bulldozer through. How the hell do all these monsters manage to converge in Red Stick? Actual non-monstrous humans have a hard enough time converging there. Why the hell does the US Army show up at the end entirely in response to a letter written to them in crayon by a little kid? Why does Duncula have so much fucking dynamite on him at all times? He casually tosses dynamite at people that he just pulls out of a pocket on his tux at least twice – I don’t remember that as being a known method of attack, and I’ve read a lot of vampire lore.
I have no clue who this guy is wearing the shirt, but he’s pretty fucking awesome, I can tell you that.
Still, it’s impossible not to like this movie down on some level, in the cockles of your heart. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be anything more than it is. The film didn’t do well when it was released but became a “cult classic,” and when the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin held a screening featuring many of the cast & the director in 2006, it sold out with lines around the block. So if you’ve got an hour and a half to kill and want a little old-style Universal Monster action updated to mid-80s standards, give it a shot. You’ve really got nothing to lose except time, which if you’re a frequent guest of this site we all know you have plenty of, and you may find yourself smiling here and there.
Two quick anecdotes: first, there’s a scene where one of the characters (a fat kid who died of pneumonia in real life in 1997; I can’t help but feel it would be more tragic if he wasn’t so goddamn fat) remarks to Leonardo Cimino that he knows an awful lot about monsters. Cimino says that he supposes he does and closes the door to his house, where we see a concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm. As a kid, I had no idea what that was and thought it was Dracula’s phone number. Why else would he be saying he knew a lot about monsters, with the camera then focusing on those numbers with menacing music playing?
The Mummy, right when he realizes he’s about to be vanquished after accomplishing exactly Jack and Shit towards Dracula’s goal.
Also, Rapey McMurderface wears a shirt through the first portion of the film that’s just a red t-shirt with yellow screen-printed letters that say, “Stephen King Rules”. My wife loved that shirt so much she found it at Texas Frightmare Weekend three years ago and wears it around all the time. I think maybe only two people have gotten the reference in all that time, though lots of people just think it’s a pro-Stephen King t-shirt and comment on how much they enjoy that author. I love my wife. I love having sex with my wife. I think I’m going to go have sex with my wife right now while you’re reading this. Think about it.
I rate Monster Squad 15 Weather Penises out of 27.
Greetings once again, fellow intrepid interlocutors of the insidious and the incredible, it is I, your humble author, once again delving into his personal DVD archive to bring you only the finest is bizarro horror filmmaking.
This week we take a look at the largely forgotten 1972 made-for-tv movie, Gargoyles. I’m afraid I don’t have much to regale you with in terms of production information; such is lost in the sands of time. And in the sands of New Mexico, where this beauty was filmed on a single camera in 18 days.
Opening title card. It’s always promising when they go with “day-glo slime” font.
No dear readers, this film is remembered for one reason, and one reason only: the exemplary practical gargoyle effects, made for zero dollars and whipped up over only a few days time. Now when I say, “exemplary,” understand that I’m grading on a curve here. Obviously, they don’t touch what is seen in much larger budget films. The costume designer was a fellow named Tom Dawson, who also did the wardrobe and costume effects for Blazing Saddles and Arnold Schwarzenegger crap-fest End of Days. It is interesting, however, to note that one of two people tasked with creating and applying the gargoyle makeup is Stan Winston, in his first credited special effects role. If after perusing that link you find yourself still unimpressed with the fine work of Mr. Winston, then you can go right to hell – my reviews are not for the likes of you.
Our story begins with a voice over explaining that gargoyles are actually the earthly spawn of Satan himself and that they arise every 600 years to try and take over the planet. However, it appears humans whip dat azz pretty badly every time because the creatures are now on the verge of extinction. However, it does result in many of the world’s myths about monsters.
Cut to anthropologist Cornel Wilde (who, fun fact, was blacklisted during the HUAC era) taking a drive through the desert, with daughter Jennifer Salt in tow (Salt would later touch again on the world of the macabre as a producer for sometimes-great-sometimes-dumb FX staple American Horror Story). Interestingly, throughout the film, Jennifer always seems to wear her shirts tied up to show off her stomach, which is, I suppose, something of a welcome diversion. Coming across a barely-functional roadside tourist trap run by lovable old Uncle Willie, the drunken coot ushers them out back to show them his prized possession: a gargoyle skeleton hung up in his shed out back. Willie proceeds to tell the anthropologist (the character has a name, but does it really matter?) about how the Injuns in the area used to have a lot of stories about these and….you know what, it’s just the usual hokum spun out in crappy horror movies. I’m so damned sick of people acting like/assuming that a bunch of freaking dudes dancing around smoking peyote have some kind of magical powers or great insight into the universe that I lack because I wear pants. Fuck that noise.
Bernie Casey is a Critical Monster Studies Professor
Anyway, the titular monsters attack, killing Uncle Willie and driving Generic Anthropologist and Hot Daughter to seek refuge at a nearby roach motel run by horny drunk Grayson Hall (best known for her long-running stint as Dr. Julia Hoffman on the original Dark Shadows). Having escaped with the gargoyle skull from Willie’s shed and with audio recordings of the attack, our protagonists try to make sense of all the shenanigans and goings on. They are attacked again by two of the creatures trying to retrieve the skull, and once they have it, they flee across the road only for one of them to be hilariously run over by a semi. It comes out of nowhere and is really quite funny, because normally when you see the creatures running or attacking, they director uses a kind of weird slow-mo, so it cuts straight from that, to a damn truck coming out of nowhere and smacking one of them.
“I don’t remember you from the faculty meetings at UCLA…”
Running to the police station to report the latest attack, Hot Daughter pleads with the cops to believe her, and to release several dirt bikers they caught at the scene of Uncle Willie’s earlier that day (the lead biker being played by Scott Glenn, who is one of those guys whose name you don’t know but you’ll recognize him when you read through his IMDB). On her way back, she’s kidnapped by King Gargoyle…Bernie Casey?! I think that’d be racist today. You may know him from his work in Revenge of the Nerds or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but because I’m me, I’ll always remember him from Suzanne Somers and Stacey Keach eco-horror film, Ants. Yes, I have that on DVD as well. Anyway, the actually pretty awesome looking head gargoyle takes Hot Daughter back to their cave, where he explains that 1) they’ve only been woke for a few weeks, 2) he’s taught himself pretty good English in that time, and 3) he likes to have chicks read stories about 15th century rapes out of scholarly books to him. We also see the gargoyle hatchery, where eggs literally half the size of the adults hatch the creatures, and we learn that the ones with wings (such as Casey and his female gargoyle consort) are “breeders”.
A close-up of the really quite good monster makeup used in this film
Generic Anthropologist convinces the cops and the local dirt bikers to help search for Hot Daughter, and the group is eventually assaulted by the gargoyles. The humans manage to kill a lot of them with shotguns and pistols, which really makes one wonder how the whole, “We’re going to exterminate humanity” thing is going to work out for the monsters. Scott Glenn goes in to throw gas around and burns the hatchery, and upon seeing him beset with gargoyles, Generic Anthropologist declares him dead and flees (he did the same to Uncle Willie earlier – seriously, the guy will decide you’re a lost cause within seconds of you running into any adverse circumstance). The supposedly thousands of eggs burn up from the two gas cans splashed around one room, and Bernie Casey, along with his consort, try to fly away with Hot Daughter to, I guess, rape the shit out of her, since it’s pretty clearly established that the monsters only produce offspring with each other. However, Generic Anthropologist makes a Quick Decision and uses a handy rock to bust the consort gargoyle’s wing, forcing Bernie Casey to abandon Hot Daughter so that he can fly away with his basic bitch. And…that’s it. They get away, they end.
Bernie Casey: Critical Monster Studies Professor’s breeder counterpart. She actually gets jealous of Hot Daughter and helps Generic Anthropologist to escape at one point, dooming her entire race because she can’t control her womanish cattiness.
The movie basically sucks, but really, if you have the 74 minutes to spare, it is honestly remarkable how good they do with the gargoyle costumes given what you know must have been incredible time and budgetary constraints. So kudos for that. Director Bill Norton went on to acclaim *coughbullshitcough* as the director of such masterpieces as More American Graffiti, and Hercules and the Amazon Women. If any of you have seen either of these, sound off in the comments.
Actually please don’t, nobody gives a shit.
On a parting note, apparently it’s not safe to trust the TCM website’s user-generated movie ratings, because holy hell, check this out. The lowest one is 4.31 out of 5.
Personally, I award Gargoyles 10 Pubic Hair Cartoons out of a possible 30. Keep track of the percentages here; 10 isn’t very good.
