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Tuesday, November 11, 2008The Mummies of Guanajuato Release Year: 1972Country: Mexico Starring: Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, Santo, Elsa Cardenas, Juan Gallardo, Jorge Pinguino, Manuel Leal, Julio Cesar, Carlos Suarez, Patricia Ferrer Writers: Rogelio Agrasanchez, Rafael Garcia Travesi Director: Frederico Curiel Cinematographer: Enrique Wallace Music: Gustavo Cesar Carrion Producer: Rogelio Agrasanchez Also known as: Las Momias de Guanajuato; Santo vs. Las Momias One need only glance over the many titles in the lucha movie genre to see that there is a long history of enmity between Mexican wrestlers and mummies. This goes all the way back to 1964, when Elizabeth Campbell and Lorena Velazquez threw down against a pop-eyed, reconstituted Aztec warrior in their sophomore effort as The Wrestling Women, Las Luchadoras contra la Momia, and continued throughout the rest of the sixties, during which Santo, the most celebrated movie luchadore of them all, would come up against shambling bandage jockeys in films like Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters and La Venganza de la Momia. But the conflict didn't really kick into high gear until 1972, when the success of a little film called The Mummies of Guanajuato (aka Las Momias de Guanajuato) guaranteed that, for the next several years, Mexican movie screens would seldom see respite from the spectacle of colorfully-garbed, masked Mexican grapplers working their moves on a seemingly endless series of inexplicably muscular mummified adversaries. The Mummies of Guanajuato was the brainchild of Mexican independent producer, distributor and writer Rogelio Agrasanchez. Now, Agrasanchez is a figure whom I have decidedly conflicting feelings toward. His wrestling films are generally emblematic of the type of haste and neglect that plagued the lucha genre during the 1970s, marked by sloppy storytelling rife with plot holes and continuity errors, lackadaisical pacing, hunger-strike production values, extremely hit-or-miss technical execution, and a patience-testing reliance on padding -- often in the form of footage lifted from other films, as well as poorly integrated musical numbers, beauty pageants, and anything else they could squeeze in -- that definitely gives the impression of films that were made on the fly with very little prior story consideration or planning. Of course, Agrasanchez was not the only Lucha filmmaker of the period who was guilty of these sins, and it should be kept in mind that this was a time during which, first of all, audience interest in the genre was waning and, second of all, government financial support for commercial Mexican films, which had been plentiful during the sixties, was at a temporary ebb due to a shift in priorities toward funding more "respectable" fare. As a result, the profitability of such films dictated a need for thrift and speed that Agrasanchez alone can't be held personally accountable for.     Still, the fact is that lucha libre films were never big budget items, and what one sees occurring over the lifespan of the genre, from the dawn of the sixties to the end of the seventies, is not so much a reduction in the amount of money spent as a reduction in the amount of care put into insuring that the films were actually coherent or watchable. While an early film like Santo contra las Mujeres Vampiro seems to be the work of accomplished craftsmen determined to deliver an engaging and atmospheric example of B movie entertainment to the fullest extent that their modest means would allow, many of Agrasanchez's films seem to demonstrate a concern primarily with attaining acceptable feature-length by any means necessary while delivering the minimum number of bankable elements at the most minimal expenditure of time and resources possible. While, again, these faults were not those of Rogelio Agrasanchez alone, that is not to say that he didn't, in many other ways, put his own personal stamp upon his work in the field. And, to give the man his due, I would here like to list those contributions to Mexican wrestling cinema that are indeed uniquely Agrasanchez's own. These are elements that you can not only count on from pretty much any one of his lucha films, but that also mark those film as being distinctly his. The first of these would have to be… ...Midgets. Sure, there were midgets in lucha movies before Rogelio Agrasanchez came upon the scene -- most notably Waldo, the hunchback in Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters. Furthermore, The Mummies of Guanajuato, by Agrasanchez's standards, is fairly conservative in it use of little people, limiting itself to only one in the cast. But, generally, Agransanchez's thinking seemed to be that, if you were going to have one midget, you might as well have a whole posse of them. It seemed he felt that there was something intrinsically much more thrilling about having a burly masked wrestler fighting several midgets as opposed to just one normal-sized man. The result saw the employment of a troupe of wee folk that I like to call The Agrasanchez Midgets in film after film. They wore matching superhero costumes with big "M"s emblazoned on their chests in The Champions of Justice, little moonman suits in Superzan el Invencible, rat-person costumes fashioned from fuzzy footy pajamas in The Champions of Justice Return, and appeared as fanged mini-vampires in the Mil Mascaras effort The Vampires of Coyoacan, which is probably one of the producer's most enjoyable films.     Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this, of course, and, upon first encounter, you can't beat the sheer entertainment value of watching a big, musclebound lug like Mil Mascaras or Tinieblas trying to pretend that he's being taken down by a gang of clamoring homunculi. In cases where the featured wrestlers are in less than peak physical condition, I can even see the utility of such mismatched pairings. But over time it comes to seem like evidence of an absurdly obstinate aversion to opportunity when a film has athletes such as these at its disposal and dedicates most of their screen time to pitting them against opponents a sixth their size. The result is that, impressively and against the odds, these pictures often manage within ninety minutes to drain something as awesome sounding as masked-wrestler-midget-fighting of much of its novelty and entertainment value. Another hallmark of Agrasanchez's films is a reliance on musical accompaniment that is inappropriate to the point of approaching ironic commentary. In the case of The Mummies of Guanajuato, this is perpetrated by frequent lucha movie scorer Gustavo Cesar Carrion in the form of sedately jaunty organ riffs that bring to mind nothing more than heavily medicated mental patients on furlough traversing endless dazed circles around an ice skating rink. Still, Guanajuato is far from the worst offender in this regard. The soundtrack to The Champions of Justice is much more typical, seemingly comprised of the producer just letting a sub-par West Coast Jazz album side play out over all of the action, with the result that every bit of screen business -- be it Mil Mascaras hurling a midget or Blue Demon staring blankly at a cue card -- carries the same negligible dramatic weight.     The Champions of Justice also represents another one of the trends that ran through Agrasanchez's lucha work, and that was his tendency to stuff his films full of as many masked wrestlers as they could possibly hold. Of course, that he would do so is not all that surprising, given that Champions -- which featured a total of six luchadores, including heavy-hitters Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras -- was one of his early successes in the genre. Audiences had seen wrestlers paired onscreen before in the several films that teamed Santo and Blue Demon, but it was Agrasanchez who made the use of small armies comprised of three or more fighters his own. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact it's a great idea. It's just that the half-heartedness of Agrasanchez and his crew's execution so frequently resulted in these films being so much less than the sum of their parts and, as such, fragrant of wasted opportunity. I realize that a lot of people reserve a fond place in their hearts for The Champions of Justice, but I can't help thinking that they do so as a result of being in love more with what the film promises than with what it actually delivers. The dependence of Agrasanchez on multiple wrestlers to make up his casts lead the producer to even invent new wrestlers of his own, which brings me to the last of the cinematic offenses he committed that I will comment upon here: Superzan. Superzan was a bodybuilder by the name of Alfonse Mora who Agrasanchez styled as a masked wrestler/superhero (the name was meant to suggest a combination of Superman and Tarzan) to both star in his own series of films and fill-out the bill in some of the producer's multi-wrestler extravaganzas -- such as the aforementioned Vampires of Coyoacan and the final entry in the Champions of Justice trilogy. Aside from a black hole-like lack of charisma, Superzan's biggest liability was probably his costume. While, by this time, other wrestling heroes were affecting a more casual look, wearing their street clothes, or at least a more basic wrestling ensemble, with their masks, Superzan in the field always wore a complete, head-to-toe superhero outfit complete with cape, sparkly skin-tight body suit and boots. When paired with a comparatively less flamboyant wrestler, this made him look kind of like the kid who insists on wearing his costume to the grocery store the day after Halloween. On top of this, it didn't help matters that the film meant to launch Superzan into stardom, Superzan el Invencible, is among the most lackluster and incomprehensible in Agrasanchez's body of work, so leaden with pointless filler that it stubbornly defies even the most masochistic viewer's efforts to view it to its conclusion.     Now that I've spent several paragraphs ardently running Rogelio Agrasanchez's contributions to lucha cinema into the ground, let me shift gears a bit and focus on another, quite different aspect of his career in film. This occurred later in his life, when he began to take interest in the preservation of Mexican commercial cinema's history, an interest which involved him acquiring and preserving, not only many original negatives of classic films, but also countless posters, lobby cards and other examples of Mexican film-related ephemera. In the 1980s, his son, Rogelio Jr., also began to take an interest in this project, and is today the owner and curator of the Agrasanchez Film Archive in Harlingen, Texas, home to thousands of movies and pieces of memorabilia from throughout the long and varied history of Mexican film. Apropos of the diversity of its contents, the archive boasts an ethos that is refreshingly egalitarian, catering to the standard scholarly interests while at the same time reflecting an attitude that The Braniac is every bit as worthy of study as Los Olvidados. Now, to give you some idea of just how high my esteem is for efforts such as those of the Agrasanchez family, let me just say the following: Here at Teleport City, there is not a single day that passes -- not one single day -- in which we are not tortured -- tortured! -- by the fact that we will probably never be able to see the Filipino monster vs. superhero mash-up Batman Fights Dracula or the similarly tantalizing-sounding Turkish effort Killink vs. Frankenstein -- this largely due to the low premium those films' respective countries of origin placed on the preservation of their national popular cinema. On the other hand, we do not take lightly the fact that, when it comes to Mexican cinema, if we hear about a film such as, say, the science fiction/western/musical La Nave de los Monstruos, or the Sixties spy spoof Cazadores de Espias, in which a masked luchadore can be seen fighting a robot while a scantily clad Maura Monti go-go dances ringside, we can rest assured in the knowledge that sooner or later we'll probably be able to scare up a copy. Of course, I realize that this is not due to the efforts of the Agrasanchez family alone, but those efforts are emblematic of both an abiding respect for their nation's cinematic history and a forward-thinking understanding of the need for preservation of the type that makes the lives of basement-dwelling world cinema obsessives like ourselves less of the recipe for serial disappointment and despair than it otherwise might be. In fact, so deep is my appreciation for Rogelio Agrasanchez in this regard that every negative word I cast in the direction of his efforts as a filmmaker is like a dagger plunged into my own side, making the preface of this review something akin to my own little private circle of Hell.     The primary reason that The Mummies of Guanajuato had the success that it did is because it marked the first time that the three biggest stars of lucha libre -- and of lucha cinema, for that matter -- had appeared onscreen together, those three stars being Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras. I've devoted a lot of words to the careers of both Santo and Blue Demon in my reviews of Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters and Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis, but, for those not well versed in the particulars of Mexican wrestling movies, Mil Mascaras will probably need some introduction. Like Santo and Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras (the name means "Thousand Masks") had enjoyed success in his own series of films prior to making The Mummies of Guanajuato, though, beyond that, he was separated from his costumed co-stars by some marked differences in terms of both his personal style and his career path. Mil, who was born Aaron Rodriguez in 1942, began his screen career in 1966 under the guidance of low budget independent film producer Luis Enrique Vergara. Vergara had produced popular lucha film series for both Santo and Blue Demon, but, by the time of signing Mil, had found himself without a star as a result of Santo moving on to greener paychecks and Blue suffering a debilitating injury that would keep him off the boards for a matter of months. Now, one major difference at this point between Mil and those other two stars at the dawn of their respective movie-making careers, aside from the fact that he was considerably younger, is that, unlike Santo and Blue, who began their film careers later in life and thus made films that capitalized upon the stardom that they had already achieved in the ring, Mil at the time of his screen debut was a relatively unknown up-and-comer, a fact which made Vergara casting him something of a gamble on the producer's part. As a result, Mil Mascaras was unique among lucha cinema's top stars in that his public persona had in part been established as a result of him appearing in these films, rather than the other way around. Of course, he would later go on to prove himself in the ring and, in that regard, achieve international fame that would in some ways even surpass Santo's, but that does not change the fact that, unlike his peers, he was, to some extent, a movie star first and a wrestler second, which may explain some of those differences in style that I referred to earlier.     For one thing, Mil was a dedicated bodybuilder, and had a lean, chiseled physique that was a marked contrast to the stockier builds seen on many of the wrestling stars of the day. This not only made him stand out, but also fit in nicely with the superheroic persona that Vergara had crafted for him. (Mil Mascaras, his scrupulously titled debut film, even fitted him with a Captain America-like origin story, in which, left orphaned as an infant during the war, he is raised by a team of scientists to be an invincible super soldier.) Beyond that, Mil brought a rockstar-like flamboyance to his style of dress that seemed exceptionally peacock-like even within the context of the colorful world of lucha libre. This may have been the result of his chosen gimmick, which was to wear numerous masks as opposed to one distinctive one, and which might have lead him to feel the need to visually distinguish himself by other means. Still, despite the name, the number of different masks he wore numbered far less than a thousand, and was generally limited to several highly identifiable models -- my favorite being a toothy green dragon number that looks like it could have been designed by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. The reason for Mil's signature sartorial style was more likely that he was just a big, glammy ham. And God bless him for it, because his clothes alone exponentially increase the entertainment value of any movie in which he appears. In The Mummies of Guanajuato, for instance, he spends much of his screen time wearing a pair of leopard print hotpants on top of a pair of gold lame wrestling tights, topped off with a red velvet vest with gold trim worn over a bare chest. As pimp-tastic as that may sound, it is only a distant second in splendor to the outfit he wore in the loose Mummies of Guanajuato sequel, The Mummies of San Angel, which consisted of a silver, billowy-sleeved pirate shirt paired with a vest that had his face -- in starburst, of course -- emblazoned on the back. The Mummies of Guanajuato was originally intended to be a starring vehicle for Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras alone, but doubts on Agrasanchez's part that their names would carry the necessary box office clout lead him to make the eleventh hour addition of Santo to the cast just for good measure. Mil Mascaras reacted to the resulting dimunition of his role with pragmatic stoicism, but for Blue Demon this was just another insult in a long history of rivalry with el Enmascarado de Plata, and would reportedly remain a thorn in his side for the rest of his life. To Blue's point, Agrasanchez and company were certainly less than sensitive to their top billed stars' feelings in the ham-handed manner in which they inserted Santo into the action, essentially using him as a deus ex machina who shows up at the end to save the day with relatively little effort after Blue and Mil have proven ineffective for much of the previous running time. While Santo was basically credited as a special guest star, with Blue and Mil's names above the title, the true nature of his participation can be gleaned from the title that the movie was given upon its release in Spain later the same year: Santo vs. las Momias.     Now to fully understand and enjoy The Mummies of Guanajuato, one has to appreciate that the "mummies" of its title are not the kind of mummies that viewers of English language horror films are normally accustomed to, as, rather than being ancient mummies that are man-made in origin, they are naturally occurring mummies of much more recent vintage. The real Mummies of Guanajuato were corpses -- many of them casualties of a cholera epidemic that swept the city in 1933 -- that were disinterred from a cemetery in the Mexican city of Guanajuato between the years of 1896 and 1958 -- said disinterment being the result of a law that required loved ones to pay an annual grave tax in order to keep their dearly departed safely ensconced underground. Inevitably, some of those loved ones were unable or unavailable to make payment of that tax, and so up from the crypt old Aunt Paola and Uncle Gustavo came. Once those bodies were brought back into the cold light of day, it was found that many of them had undergone a natural process of mummification, the result, it has been conjectured, of soil and atmospheric conditions unique to the area. As novel as that is in itself, the thing that ended up making the real-life Mummies of Guanajuato the stuff of legend, as well as a popular tourist attraction, is the fact that many of their faces were contorted in what appeared to be horrified screams. While this has been explained away by some dull scientific types as a natural result of the skin constricting in the course of mummification, the creepier and, thus, much preferable explanation is that these particular mummies had been cholera victims who had been hastily buried before they were completely and verifiably dead. So, as fascinating as we might like to pretend that the phenomenon of naturally occurring mummification is to us, it is, understandably, this tantalizing, spook show aspect of the mummies that has kept the coins of paying customers pouring into the till of the museum in Guanajuato where they are lovingly displayed.     The movie The Mummies of Guanajuato indoctrinates us into its idiosyncratically meandering and lackadaisical way with storytelling in its very opening moments, treating us to a startlingly ponderous sequence in which the camera appears to be following a tour bus in real time through the entire length of the city. Finally the bus comes to a stop at the Mummies of Guanajuato museum, at which point its party disembarks, lead by a miniature tour guide going by the name of Penguin (Jorge Pinguino, here the only little person in the cast, but otherwise a key member of the Agrasanchez Midgets in most of the other movies in which they appeared). Soon thereafter we are given a view of the actual Mummies of Guanajuato, which are every bit as creepy as advertised. After a few introductory words, Penguin then leads the group into another room where a group of "special" mummies are housed. These seven mummies, he explains, are, for reasons unknown, markedly less decomposed than the others, and he's not kidding. The muscle tone on these things is amazing. This, of course, is because they are portrayed by a group of professional wrestlers who have been mummied-up with tattered clothing and hash-faced zombie make-up. At the center of this group of special mummies is a towering figure with a droopy-eyed make-up job that looks very similar to Gary Conway's in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. This, Penguin tells the assembled vacationers, is a former wrestler called Satan, and he is portrayed by Manuel Leal, who we last saw as the goateed Frankenstein's monster in Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters, and who would also gain fame both in the ring and in a number of Agrasanchez's multi-starrer lucha movies as the masked wrestler Tinieblas. Satan, Penguin continues, lost his championship title to an identically named and masked ancestor of Santo a hundred years previous and, at that time, having allegedly made a pact with the devil, swore to return from the dead a hundred years hence to seek vengeance upon el Enmascerado de Plata's descendants and supporters. In response to this, one of the tourists innocently asks on which day Satan's curse would come due. Why, "exactly today", replies Penguin after a bit of mental calculation. Then, having neatly set up the entire plot of The Mummies of Guanajuato, he promptly moves on without a word of explanation as to the identities of the other six preternaturally burly mummies on display.     The notion of the mantle of Santo being a legacy handed down from generation to generation is not unique to The Mummies of Guanajuato, and was in fact a plot element in a number of earlier Santo movies. Films like 1965's Baron Brakola and 1969's El Mundo de los Muertos even presented a Colonial era version of Santo called the Caballero Enmascarado de Plata. This character was usually simply portrayed by Santo wearing a frilly collar along with his mask, and required the wrestler to engage in some fancy rapier work in addition to his usual moves, though on occasion another actor was brought in for the role. The device was generally used just as it is in The Mummies of Guanajuato: to justify the supernatural appearance of some vengeance-seeking foe of one of Santo's ancestors in the present day, a situation whose frequent re-occurrence throughout the series gives the clear impression that Santo's forebears were not very good at settling their own scores in their own time. It probably goes without saying that, soon after Penguin drops the bomb about Satan's very imminent, if fabled, return -- and once the museum has been cleared of visitors -- the diminutive guide catches a glimpse of the hulking cadaver starting to shudder back to life. In response, he faints and lapses into druggy, fish-eye-lens-shot visions of the wrestler-mummies pawing at him hungrily, at which point the movie's action shifts to the nearby Santa Fe Inn. Here is where best friends Lina (played by 70s lucha movie fixture Elsa Cardenaz) and Alicia (Patricia Ferrer) earn their daily bread, the former as a lounge singer and the latter as a cigarette girl. Lina is Mil Mascaras' girlfriend, though, because she appears to live in Guanajuato and Mil Mascaras seems to only come through town when his fight schedule requires, I'm not sure whether she's his girlfriend girlfriend, or just, you know , his girlfriend in Guanajuato. (Oh, snap, upon a repeat pass I caught a bit I missed in which she threatens to return Mil's engagement ring, which pretty much settles that question. Sorry Lina.)     Anyway, because we have just had several uninterrupted minutes of fairly solid plot development, it is now time for us to watch a musical number performed by an unidentified woman who plays absolutely no part in the rest of the film, despite the fact that we have just been introduced to a major character who is a singer. Once this is over, Penguin stumbles into the lounge in an agitated state, at which point we learn that, while we have been watching the lady sing, the plot of The Mummies of Guanajuato has moved on without us. Penguin tells us and the girls that, upon reviving from his faint, he found the body of Satan missing, and, upon follow-up, the three of them find footprints leading away from the pedestal on which it had stood. Fortunately, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras are in town, and so the girls race with Penguin in tow to the arena where they are appearing, which affords the opportunity for a lengthy wrestling sequence in which Mil and Blue fight a tag team match against a couple of identically bearded goons. After the match, Lina, Alicia and Penguin, having made their way back to our stars' dressing room, find Blue and Mil in a much less heroic mood than they might have hoped for. It seems that both have had their memories wiped of all those encounters with vampires, werewolves, space aliens and mummies that have marked their cinematic careers up to this point, causing them to scoff at Penguin's story and instead offer all kinds of pragmatic-sounding explanations for why the mummy might be missing. This is something that happens in lucha movies from time to time, especially in those starring Santo: a sort of periodic slate-cleaning that I appreciate for the simple reason that it prevents anyone from ever being able to make reference to a Santo "universe" or "canon", which would in turn necessitate that I kill them or scream the word "no" into their ears so loudly and protractedly that they forget their own names. In any case, Blue Demon will ultimately pay for his arrogance, as later that night, when he is leaving the deserted arena, the reanimated Satan comes up and clobbers him from behind. Satan then stands ringside and has a mummy flashback to his fateful match with Santo's ancestor all those years ago, providing another opportunity for a long wrestling sequence, during which no attempt to convey period is made whatsoever. Afterward, and perhaps with the intention of working his way up gradually to fighting within his own weight class, he kills the elderly caretaker at the arena and then an old drunk guy whom he encounters on the street outside. Later, the Guanajuato police will speculate that the manner of death of these two victims -- i.e., ass kicking -- suggests that a professional wrestler might be the culprit.     Now, armed with clear evidence of sinister supernatural doings afoot, Blue, Mil and the girls hit the streets -- Blue in his Alpha Romeo, and the rest in Mil's awesome green dune buggy -- to do some mummy hunting. They are not so successful in this respect, but they do come across some kind of street fare where some people in Colonial era garb are performing some kind of folk tune on traditional instruments, which enables us to take a much needed breather from what has been yet another several minutes of uninterrupted plot development. Afterward, to pick up the slack, Penguin does his part to move things along by thoughtfully phoning Blue to let him know that he is being murdered by Satan at that very moment. The group rush to Penguin's apartment, only to find that Satan has had yet one more success in his campaign to practice his wrestling skills upon only the most impossibly over-matched opponents. And it is at this point, in the aftermath of Penguin's murder, that Blue Demon makes a couple of decisions that seriously put into question his leadership skills. First of all, he determines that the group shouldn't report Penguin's death to the authorities, for the reason that "they'd think it was us", despite the fact that -- even though, by doing so, he is predicting a plot development that is still a ways off from actually happening -- there has been little reason established at this point why they would. Second of all, he fatefully rejects Mil Mascaras' suggestion that they get Santo involved, protesting that that would be exactly what the damn mummy wants. Of course, this is only a bad decision in light of how everything turns out, as it provides Blue with a mouthful of words that he will ultimately have to eat. Finally, as they make their way out of Penguin's apartment, the gang is confronted by Satan and the other six wrestler-mummies, whose resurrection is as yet and will remain unexplained. After a bit of grappling, Blue Demon declares the Mummies indestructible and orders a retreat, setting the tone for all of Mil and Blue's further encounters with the mummies over the remaining course of the movie.     One of the positive aspects of The Mummies of Guanajuato is that it is one of those infrequent lucha pictures that actually tries to provide its luchadore heroes with some back-story and character development. This is done, not only by providing Mil Mascaras with a love interest, but also by introducing a subplot involving Blue Demon having a young adopted son, Julio, who comes to stay with him while he's in Guanajuato. What's most surprising about this particular tack is how effective it is. Blue actually manages to convey some genuine warmth and affection in those scenes he shares with the kid, and watching him wrestle playfully with Julio and pretend to be incapacitated by his fledgling attempt at a face-lock is both enjoyable and affecting. It just confirms all of those warm and fuzzy feelings I've always had for Blue -- forever and undeservedly the earnest and striving second banana -- and makes it all the more sad when the whole picture ends up getting jerked out from under him. Compounding The Mummies of Guanajuato's insult to Blue is the fact that it includes undoubtedly the most humiliating enactment of the time-tested "Evil Blue Demon" gimmick in his filmography. As I've mentioned in my other reviews, it became typical in those films starring both Santo and Blue Demon for an evil version of Blue Demon to be introduced -- either by way of Blue being somehow brainwashed or possessed, or via the introduction of a malevolent double -- so that fans could see Santo and Blue -- who were rivals in the ring, but allies on screen -- fight one another while still preserving their status as cinematic BFFs. Somehow this trope eventually achieved a life beyond its initial utility and began to turn up in even those films in which Blue didn't have to fight Santo, as if audiences just grew to expect it. In the case of The Mummies of Guanajuato, the trick is simply accomplished by having the evil mummy Satan sneak up and clobber Blue from behind, then steal both his mask and the clothes off his back and give them to one of his hench-mummies to carry out the impersonation. That hench-mummy then dresses up as Blue and goes out and kills some people, leading the police to suspect Blue in earnest. Soon the TV is broadcasting reports that Blue Demon is wanted and "on the run", despite the fact that he's still just hanging out with Mil at Lina and Alicia's place like he was before all this happened. As I suggested earlier, The Mummies of Guanajuato then plays out as a series of encounters between Mil and Blue and the mummies, during which the mummies manage to do considerable damage and Mil and Blue's efforts prove to have little effect whatsoever. Finally, someone behind the scenes decides that a suitable amount of running time has been achieved, and that it is time for a hastily contrived, entirely coincidence-dependent ending to be fashioned in order to wrap things up. To that end, Santo and his manager (played by his actual manager and frequent screen sidekick Carlos Suarez), while driving home from a match, just happen to decide to stop for the night in Guanajuato, pulling into the town square just as the mummies are attacking a group of townspeople. After a brief scuffle, Santo, echoing Blue's earlier sentiments, declares the mummies "undefeatable' and retreats, but soon returns to the fray, soon after to be joined in the fight by Mil and Blue. Things are looking grim for a moment, until Santo, in a moment of sudden inspiration, asks Mil to go fetch some flamethrower pistols that are sitting on the seat of his car. Mil dutifully complies, and when he gets to Santo's car -- what do you know? -- there the pistols are, right on the seat where Carlos Suarez had been sitting only moments before. Mil returns and distributes the pistols to Santo and Blue, after which the three of them open fire, quickly reducing all of the previously indestructible mummies to piles of smoking ash like so many spent Black Snakes. Everyone laughs, and Lina turns to Blue Demon and says, "You would have saved a lot of trouble if you had called Santo on time." Ouch.     In terms of box office success, The Mummies of Guanajuato was a sort of last hurrah for the once lucrative lucha genre, enjoying a run in Mexico City that, at nine weeks, was longer than that of any Santo movie previous or since. As a result, a slew of sequels was spawned in its wake, none of which were able to duplicate its impact, mainly due to the fact that they were unable to feature the same assemblage of talent (Superzan was even in one of them). The popularity of the film even had consequences for the actual Mummies of Guanajuato, as the museum where they were housed saw a considerable rise in attendance as a result of the free publicity. That the film's impact was so profound is all the more impressive when you consider what an aimless, lazily-constructed mess The Mummies of Guanajuato is. You'd have to be kind of humorless, however, to also not find it to be a good bit of fun, and it is that, combined with the thrill of seeing its three heavy hitting stars sharing the screen for the first time, that I imagine accounted for its broad appeal. In fact, it is by virtue of its very shortcomings that The Mummies of Guanajuato provides a perfect example of the lucha genre's beauty and magic. It is a film that -- without the presence of Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras and Santo -- would be completely unwatchable, but that, somehow, by its inclusion of three grown men who conduct all of their affairs from behind constricting and colorfully ornamented full head masks, attains an added dimension that renders it irresistibly compelling. You could perhaps call it "surrealism" or "absurdity", but I think that, for me, the real key to these movie's allure is that, once you make the leap required to accept these improbable figures as your heroes, you have crossed a frontier in the suspension of disbelief that leaves you liberated in a state of unbounded, childlike credulity. Truly, to accept the notion that a masked wrestler in leopard print hotpants and gold lame tights is the world's best hope against a bunch of murderous mummies that all look like Hulk Hogan wearing a rubber fright mask from Walgreen's brings with it a joy of surrender paralleled by few other experiences on Earth. The Mummies of Guanajuato is helped in this regard by the fact that, in classic lucha movie tradition -- and despite the very obvious fact that no one behind the scenes was taking things very seriously at all -- everyone in front of the camera plays it completely straight throughout. At no time are you in doubt that any of our protagonists see these wrestlers in crappy zombie make-up as being anything but the gravest threat that the Earth has ever confronted. For all the fun that could be had at the expense of Blue, Santo and Mil's acting abilities, that's a pretty impressive feat, because I doubt that I, in their shoes, could have done a comparable job of keeping a straight face.     In the final analysis, then, The Mummies of Guanajuato, while by no means a great film, is nonetheless an important one in the history of lucha cinema, not to mention one that's a stupid good time if you know what you're getting into. For myself, the film generates enough goodwill by virtue of its sheer goofiness that I'm willing to overlook most of its many flaws in the interest of just going along and enjoying the ride. Most of its flaws, that is, except one: and that would be the disrespect shown toward my man Blue Demon. It just pains me to think that Blue went into this project thinking that it would be a star vehicle, only to have it turn into something of a prolonged joke at his expense. And the thought that, as a result, he began each of his remaining days by mumbling bitterly into his Cornflakes about Santo and his stupid flamethrower pistols -- while admittedly funny, though in a totally rueful way -- brings me no joy at all. The man clearly deserved better. Still, I take heart in the fact that Blue Demon's film career was far from over at this point, with a number of its high points still ahead. I also take solace in those few moments in The Mummies of Guanajuato when the film, taking a break from making him the butt of its jokes, actually manages to place Blue Demon in a suitably iconic context. Such is the movie's final sequence, in which he, Santo and Mil ride smiling off into the sunset -- Blue and Santo in their respective sports cars, and Mil in his dune buggy. At that moment, all of those perhaps less than spectacular exploits that we've witnessed on the parts of our heroes over the past ninety minutes are wiped away, and we see them only as their most perfect selves: three titans of lucha cinema heading off toward the vast unknown, heartily embracing the promise of greater dangers and grander adventures ahead. It's such an inspiring image that, even though we know that said promise will ultimately be realized by way of cheesy and unconvincing monster make-up and charity haunted house-level special effects -- not to mention padded to within an inch of its life with lengthy wrestling matches and unwanted musical numbers -- we cannot help but want to follow along. Labels: Action: Luchadores, B-Masters Roundtable, Country: Mexico, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Horror: Mummies, Stars: Blue Demon, Stars: Mil Mascaras, Stars: Santo, Year: 1972 posted by Todd at 11:00 AM | 6 Comments Wednesday, September 03, 2008Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani Release Year: 2002Country: India Starring: Manisha Koirala, Sunny Deol, Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty, Arman Kohli, Raj Babbar, Aftab Shivdasani, Rajat Bedi, Sharad S. Kapoor, Ali Khan, Shahbaaz Khan, Johnny Lever, Sonu Nigam, Nikita, Aditya Pancholi, Rambha, Payal, Amrish Puri, Kiran Rathod, Mohini Sharma, Siddharth, Upasna Singh, Arshad Warsi Writers: Naveena Bhandari, Raj Kumar Kohli, Rajendra Singh "Atish", K.K. Singh Director: Raj Kumar Kohli Cinematographers: Damodar Naidu, Thomas A. Xavier Music: Anand Raj Anand, Anand Chitragupth, Milind Chitragupth, Sandeep Chowta Producer: Raj Kumar Kohli That some of Bollywood's worst sins have been committed in the name of nepotism is a fact which anyone who has borne witness to Karisma Kapoor's early career can sadly attest to. For the Hindi film industry's directors, stars and producers, dynasty building seems to be a top order of business, right alongside the practice of their chosen craft. For a fearsome reminder of this, one need look no further than director Raj Kumar Kohli's 2002 film Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani, as terrible a monument to a father's love for his son as has ever been erected. Kohli made his initial mark on Bollywood with a pair of supernaturally-themed blockbusters during the seventies. The first of these was 1976's Nagin, just one in a long line of Bollywood movies concerning the dark escapades of snake spirits who are capable of taking human form. Reena Roy starred as a female snake whose lover is mistakenly killed by a group of hunters. Vowing revenge, she sets about eliminating the hunters one by one by seducing them under a variety of human guises before killing them. Under Kohli's guidance, the film came to exemplify two prominent strains in 1970s Bollywood cinema, both of which the director seemed to have taken very closely to heart. One is the trend for "multi-starrers", which was in full force at the time (and which, in America, resulted in the type of films whose posters featured pictures of the stars lined up in little boxes along the bottom). To this end, Kohli packed Nagin's cast with an impressive assortment of name brand talent, including -- in addition to Roy -- Feroz Khan, Sunil Dutt, Jeetendra and Rekha. In addition to that, Nagin seemed to take 1970s Bollywood's tendency toward fanciful design and blinding displays of color to a retina-rending extreme, adopting the look of a lurid cinematic comic book, complete with dreamily artificial-looking sets cast in florescent primary hues and woozily melding pastels.     For his next big hit, 1979's Jaani Dushman, Kohli followed much the same pattern, stuffing the cast with as many big names as it could take -- Sunil Dutt, Shatrughan Sinha, Rekha, Reena Roy, Sanjeev Kumar and Neetu Singh among them -- and adopting a similarly narcotic palette. This time, the film focused on a werewolf-like creature who murders brides on their wedding day. While not quite as much fun as Nagin, Jaani Dushman was not without its moments of effectively creepy atmospherics, and boasted the added attraction of featuring a young Amrish Puri as its monster. The hits kept coming for Kohli throughout the eighties, but the dawn of the following decade would see the director take on a project that, in retrospect, seems to have sent his career careening irreparably off the rails. That project started with 1992's Virodhi, and had as its goal the elevation to stardom of actor Arman Kohli, who also happened to be Raj Kumar Kohli's son. Virodhi, unfortunately, was an utter failure -- both in terms of box office receipts and as a vehicle for Arman -- and two successive attempts at the same prize, 1993's Auland Ke Dushman and 1997's Qahar, didn't fare any better. Kohli, however, remained committed to furthering his son's career -- to the extent of limiting his directing output exclusively to films starring Arman -- and, by 2002, seemed to have come to the conclusion that the key to success lay in forging an association between his son's name and those beloved hits that had cemented his reputation as a director. To this end, the story of Nagin was updated, but then, in a curious touch, fitted with the title of Kohli's other big seventies hit. The result, Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani (translation: "Beloved Enemy: A Strange Tale"), turned out to be not only a resounding box office dud, but also a film that would come to be widely considered one of the worst ever produced by Bollywood.     I recently found myself trying to defend Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani against this particular judgment, arguing that, while the film was indeed searingly bad, it was also very entertaining, a fact which I felt should place it above other Bollywood films that were comparably bad but also boring. On second thought, though, I had to reconsider that opinion, because the truth is that there is not one element of Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani that is not misjudged -- a pretty impressive feat that makes an extreme distinction like "worst ever" well earned. This is not the only thing that makes the movie special, however. For one, it accomplishes the seemingly impossible by achieving a sort of surplus of deficit -- by which I mean that it abounds with so much evidence of poverty of imagination on the part of its makers that its very unoriginality comes to take on a kind of uniqueness, and its insubstantiality a kind of heft. Kohli's approach to making JD:EAK seems to have been to simply make the same movie he would have made back in the seventies -- complete with cartoon color scheme and outrageously phony-looking, stage-bound sets -- and then update it for a young audience by awkwardly grafting onto it elements taken of a piece from every major Hollywood action blockbuster of the last ten years, regardless of how those elements did or didn't fit in with the story that he was trying to tell. What saves the film is how Kohli so often spectacularly stumbles in duplicating those elements. After all, if executed competently, Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani would have ended up being just one of many bloated, special effects-driven blockbusters with a cast of blandly attractive but ultimately unlikeable young stars. As is, it works as a brilliant parody, lampooning all of those Hollywood excesses that it seeks to carbon copy with an effectiveness far beyond that of any of the Scary Movie-type films currently being turned out by the American studios (or, for that matter, Tropic Thunder). In fact, I firmly believe that, if every producer in Hollywood were forced to watch Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani, many would be shamed away from ever using any of the tropes that it so clunkily borrows again.     Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani boldly puts its worst foot forward with an opening scene containing computer effects of astonishing ineptitude. To be fair, not all of the film's effects will be as bad as what you'll see here -- and at times they even approach mediocrity -- but it's so difficult to wash the taste of these particular effects out of your mouth that those later scenes that rise above the bar they set end up coming across as the exceptions rather than the rule. The scene takes place after the wedding of Rajesh (Rajat Bedi), one of the many depressingly interchangeable young people that make up the film's cast of characters, and we join Rajesh in the honeymoon suite just as he is about to lift the veil from his bride's lovely face. Only hers is not a lovely face at all, it turns out, but rather a giant skeleton head animated with all the precision and detail you'd expect to find in a handheld video game from the eighties. As Rajesh recoils in horror, his bride morphs completely into a cartoon skeleton so lacking in any illusion of physical depth that it could have been lifted from an episode of South Park and proceeds to beat him up, all the while cackling crazily like a drunken old prospector. Interestingly, those in charge of rendering the skeleton appear to have felt that the idea of a skeleton that was actually, you know, skeletal beating up the beefy Rajat Bedi placed too much of a tax on credibility, and so made the ill-advised decision to provide that skeleton with something akin to muscle mass. The resulting creature is nothing if not otherworldly, boasting exaggerated, Popeye-like bulges in the bones of its legs and upper arms. Then again, it could just be that no one involved knew how to draw a skeleton. After sending Rajesh's broken body flying out the window of his suite and crashing -- much to the consternation of his gathered friends -- onto the floor of the ballroom where his reception is still in progress, the terrifying, one dimensional cartoon skeleton makes its way jerkily to the shadowy ruin of an old fortress. Here it assumes the spectral form of Divya, a young woman played by the talented Manisha Koirala (here doing penance for god knows what karmic infraction). Divya was not always a spook with the ability to turn into a bulked-up cartoon skeleton, however, and a flashback handily appears to show us how she came to be in such a state. It seems that, not all that long ago, she was just a normal college student with a large assortment of depressingly interchangeable yet uncommonly scrubbed and blandly attractive looking friends. Two of those friends, however -- specifically the aforementioned Rajesh and another fellow named Madan (Siddharth) -- were also rapists, it turns out. And, as we see, they almost succeeded at raping Divya in her aspirational poster-laden dorm room, but for the fist-y intervention of Divya's beau, Karan, who is played by Sunny Deol.     Now, like the earlier Raj Kumar Kohli hits that it's modeled on, JD:EAK is a movie in the old multistarrer tradition and, as such, boasts a large cast that features some of the most big-ish Bollywood stars of its day, not the least of whom is Sunny Deol. No stranger to the benefits of nepotism himself, Sunny is the son of Dharmendra, one of the industry's biggest stars of the sixties and seventies. Like his dad, Sunny got a lot of mileage out of puffing out his chest, pointing a finger, and booming out defiant proclamations at people before punching them -- and his brief introduction here -- before summarily jetting off to London for some business that, we're told, will take him several months -- clues us in right away that, whatever the conflict in JD:EAK is going to be, its resolution is going to involve Sunny Deol coming back to town to shout and punch it into submission. Before jetting off, though, Sunny/Karan takes Divya's would-be rapists to the dean of the school, Joseph (Raj Babbar), who tells the now penitent young men that, before he can decide on a course of action, they must ask Divya for forgiveness. Divya's large assortment of depressingly interchangeable friends prove to be a big help in this matter, as they unanimously and as a group browbeat her into accepting Rajesh and Madan's apology, saying, among other things, that to do otherwise would make people think that she is "too proud of her beauty". After all, says her friend Atul (Akshay Kumar -- and I believe it's pronounced "A Tool"), the two are healthy young men and she's a hottie, so what could she expect them to do other than get rapey with her? It's all pretty heart warming, really. Little would anyone suspect that Divya's well-meaning and not-at-all-worthy-of-being-systematically-murdered-by-a-malevolent-otherworldly-force friends were advising her to make what would turn out to be a pretty bad decision.     But before that startling revelation, Divya awakes one evening to the sound of an eerie call that summons her to a Banyan tree in a park that lies just outside her dorm. A CGI explosion heralds the arrival of a poorly animated cobra that morphs into Raj Kumar Kohli's son Arman in the role of Kapil, a centuries old snake spirit. Kapil tells Divya that she, too, was once a cobra -- his cobra girlfriend, in fact -- and that they are destined to be together once more. To quell any of Divya's doubts, Kapil transports her back in time, where we see the two of them in happier days, dancing against a rapidly shifting backdrop of flat-looking computer generated fantasy vistas. The end effect is kind of like those tourist videos you used to be able to get where it looked like you were sitting on a flying carpet. This aforementioned scene, along with providing yet another example of JD:EAK's woefully behind-the-curve computer effects capabilities, puts in stark relief yet another of the film's glaring shortcomings. And it's not Anan Raj Anand's songs, either -- which are merely generic and forgettable -- but rather Ganesh Acharya's choreography, which is truly awful. This is even more apparent in the film's many party scenes, where the hypnotic repetition of head shaking and methodical shuffling from foot to foot on the part of the young cast comes across like a kind of hoochified Hokey Pokey. Whether this is in part due to the dancing abilities of the cast is another issue. But I think it's telling that, even in the case of Manisha Koirala, who has shown herself to be an able dancer in other films, you feel like you can actually see the actors counting in their heads while performing these numbers. Divya and Kapil end their happy dance by stomping up and down on top of a cave which happens to contain Amrish Puri as a dirt-encrusted old shaman type. Amrish is royally pissed at being woken from his long meditation, and places a curse on the two snake people that causes olden-times Divya to die pretty much immediately. Kapil begs the sage to reverse the spell, but the old guy tells him that it's too late for that. However, Amrish is moved enough by Kapil's anguish to append his curse with a provision that will allow Divya to be reincarnated as a human many years hence. All Kapil must do is live inside that Banyan tree for however many centuries it will take for that to happen, at which time he will be freed to reunite with her. The plus side is that, when released, he will be invincible to all but those with divine powers.     Back in the 21st century, Divya, her snake memories restored, takes all of this in stride for the most part and quickly gets back to the routine of college life -- which, of course, means parties. Unfortunately, the predatory Rajesh seizes the opportunity of a party thrown by Atul at the old ruined fortress to lay a trap for Divya, impersonating his other friends in the course of doing so. At his direction, Divya unwittingly shows up for the party an hour early, only to find just Rajesh and Madan waiting for her. This time the men's rape attempt is successful, and it's just about as nasty as Bollywood standards would allow -- not graphic, but still shocking in its brutality, and leaving no doubt as to exactly what's going on. In keeping with the film's Jurassic sexual politics, Divya -- who, in the wake of Rajesh and Madan's failed rape attempt, was given no choice but to forgive her attackers -- is now given no choice but to commit suicide, and so impales herself on a convenient tree branch. The rest of the distressingly indistinguishable crew then shows up and, though someone makes noise about calling an ambulance, quickly find themselves content to bicker with the rapidly dying Divya over who exactly was responsible for her getting into this predicament. Finally, the centuries-old snake spirit Kapil happens to casually stroll by just in time for his long awaited lady love to die in his arms. And it is at this point that something strange and wonderful happens to Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani -- something that will leave those who found the movie's first hour incomprehensible pining for the relative coherence that it provided. Because nothing that will happen in the film from this point on will make one lick of sense. In time honored fashion, Kapil throws his arms out and cries in anguish to the heavens, at which point lots of CGI lightning thunders down upon him, and the brief, Egyptian-style garb that he is wearing morphs into a sculpted, form-fitting, head-to-toe leather ensemble very closely based on that worn my Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. Then, with the aid of more CGI, his mouth opens unnaturally wide and he emits forth a raging sandstorm, just like the mummy in The Mummy. Finally, with all of Divya's other former friends apparently blown out the door, Kapil -- in a manner somewhat more appropriate for a centuries-old snake spirit -- turns into a snake and bites Madan to death.     With their first act of revenge out of the way, Kapil and the now spectral Divya hold a powwow, during which Kapil informs Divya that it should be he who carries out the lion's share of payback against that amorphous mass of humanity that is her circle of friends. This is because Divya, being just a spook, can only act by possessing the bodies of others, while Kapil, being invincible and able to transform into anything he wishes to, is limited only by the imaginations of the filmmakers -- which, as we'll see, are actually pretty limited. Nonetheless, he sets about the task of picking off Divya's crew with enthusiasm. Of course, each must die in reverse order of his or her star power, and so it is Victor, played by Sharad S. Kapoor, who is next to go. The sequence in which Kapil chases down and kills Victor turns out to be yet another dizzying mosaic of clumsy visual quotes from 1990s action movies, starting with a fight in the woods during which Kapil's sudden and inexplicable transformation into some kind of killer robot/mummy/virtual reality guy is completed by the sudden accompaniment of Robocop-like electronic buzzing and whirring sounds effects. Much wire-assisted flying and kicking follows, which manages to vividly evoke memories of particular scenes in The Matrix while at the same time falling drastically short of them in terms of execution. Finally, Kapil chases after Victor's car while mimicking the stiff-limbed high-speed gait of Terminator 2's T-1000, eventually somehow producing a motorcycle from his lower torso to complete the pursuit on wheels. Victor's end comes at the conclusion of a stunningly phony, digitally-assisted motorcycle jump by Kapil that plants the front tire squarely on his victim's collarbone. Now having assumed the form of Victor, Kapil goes about his next order of business, which is to -- as if in response to popular request on the part of the audience -- eliminate the gang's resident comic relief guy, Abdul (Arshad Warsi). This is accomplished by Kapil throwing Abdul into a swimming pool and then summoning the awesome force of computer-generated lighting bolts to electrocute him. This scene is gratifying on many levels, but is most memorable for how, Abdul, despite having zillions of volts of electricity pulsing through his body, is somehow still able to deliver a moving farewell speech to his friends gathered poolside before giving up the ghost. Sadly, this does not leave us viewers in the clear, because the filmmakers, seeing a comic relief vacuum left in Abdul's absence, decide to fill the gap with the subsequent introduction into the cast of migraine-conjuring Bollywood yuk-meister Johnny Lever.     Eventually the gang gets the notion that they must somehow defend themselves against Kapil, and so turn to Joseph, the school's dean. Joseph -- though probably not considerably older than most of the 30-something "students" in his charge -- is something of an all-purpose adult in JD:EAK, serving not only as dean, but also science teacher and, as we'll see in a later scene, boxing referee. Providentially, he also happens to be some kind of master of the supernatural arts, which leads to one of the film's most indelible set pieces. Convinced that the gang are innocent of the crimes for which Kapil and Divya are punishing them, Joseph sets about conjuring forth the spirit of Divya so that they may plead their case to her. When Divya makes her appearance, it is for all intents and purposes in the person of the miniature, holographically-projected Princess Leia from the beginning of the first Star Wars movie. While initially awed by this otherworldly phenomenon made manifest before them, the kids are quick to devolve into bickering with the intransigent mini-Divya as if they were so many Real World contestants arguing over the allotment of refrigerator space. That is until Akshay Kumar, having had enough of Divya's ectoplasmic lip, empties a handgun into her spectral visage. Take that, stupid apparition. So now, naturally, it's time for Atul/Akshay to feel the bitter sting of Kapil's pixilated sword of vengeance. This takes place during a sequence that is obviously intended to be JD:EAK's version of an action tour de force, featuring motorcycles, speedboats, massive explosions, jet skis, and Kapil running across water like some black leather-clad, Michael Bay version of Jesus. Plagiarism-wise, the scene is a mash-up of equal parts T2 and The Matrix, with Kapil going from dodging rounds in bullet time to simply letting those rounds pass through him to leave chrome-dripping, perfectly round holes in his body which rapidly seal themselves. This peaks with a replay of the bit from T2 where an explosion reduces the T-1000 to puddles of liquid metal, from which he reassembles himself into silvery humanoid form -- although, in this case, the result is so sad looking that you kind of wish that you could just give the movie a hug.     Now, a lot of other stuff happens in Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani. It is, after all, a long movie, and brim-full of visual wonders and momentous events, most of which involve shudderingly terrible CGI effects emulating scenes from bloated Hollywood blockbusters of the nineties. I'm sure, once this review has been posted, I'll hear from some of you who have seen the movie, asking why I failed to mention some favorite scene. For instance, you might ask, "What about Sunil Shetty's interminable green screen fall down the face of a not-all-that-tall building, complete with gratuitous air swimming and Mr. Bill facial expressions?" Or: "What about the big explosion where the devices used to catapult the cars into the air are clearly visible?" Or: "What about the scene where Divya possesses Akshay Kumar's girlfriend and tries to kill him by making him dance off a cliff during an upbeat musical number?" Or... Oh my God, shut up! Shut up! Shut up! The fact is that, as much enjoyment as I got out of this movie, to take the time to describe all of those events in detail would be giving it far much more time than it deserves. Besides, if you are, like me, the type of idiot who would watch a movie like this, you're already sold. (I know: "Sniff... You had me at the Popeye-armed, ColecoVision skeleton, you big lug.") Let's just suffice it to say that eventually the character Vivek, played by Sonu Nigam, calls his big brother in London and tells him of his fear that he'll be the next in line on Kapil's hit list. Vivek's big brother, I should mention, is Sunny Deol -- or, excuse me: "Karan", as portrayed by the actor Sunny Deol -- so you know where this is going. Sunny Deol really loses his shit big time at this news and starts shouting and pointing at everything, then slams the phone down and hops on the next plane back to India. Soon Sunny and Kapil are in a foundry beating the stink out of one another in exactly the manner decreed by the mere fact of Sunny Deol's presence in Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani. Finally, just when you think that he's about to bite it, Dean Joseph says an incantation that fills Sunny Deol with magic, enabling him to fatally impale Kapil on a girder, even though earlier scenes have demonstrated that Kapil is made of liquid metal exactly like the T-1000 in T2. In a last, conciliatory nod to that film to which JD:EAK owes so much, Kapil is thrown into a vat of white hot something-or-other and sinks Arnold-like into nothingness -- at which point we fade to Divya and Kapil, now reunited, dancing happily in a garish and shoddily computer animated version of an idyllic afterlife.     An interesting and/or perhaps sad thing about Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani is that, in casting his son as basically the locus for a lot of bad CGI effects, Raj Kumar Kohli wasn't exactly providing him with the best showcase for whatever acting talents or star quality he might have possessed. The only way that I can think that this might have seemed like a good idea would be if Kohli was actually trying to convince people that his son could really do the things he was shown doing in the film. (I can hear the producer now: "Get Arman Kohli. He can turn into a motorcycle!") As is, those scenes in which Arman is required to do anything beyond glare robotically and assume stylized Matrix poses -- mainly those in the first hour of the film in which he is required to interact with Manisha Koirala and do some tortured emoting -- don't leave much of an impression. The sense you do get is not so much of a bad actor, but simply of one not obviously possessed of those ingredients necessary to Bollywood superstardom. Whether this finally dawned upon Kohli pere is unclear, but the fact remains that he has not returned to the directing game since helming JD:EAK over six years ago. Of course, it is just as likely that he has simply opted for retirement, seeing as he is now in his late seventies. It also could be that he has faced difficulties in obtaining funding to make another film. After all, despite all of its flaws, JD:EAK was clearly a very expensive film to make, and no doubt left in its wake a good number of investors who were not eager to make the same mistake again. This last fact makes it hard not to wince a little bit as your laughing at Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani's excesses. There's a stink of naked desperation to all of its overkill Clearly, people had a lot riding on this movie, and at some juncture it was decided that the best way to recoup was to create a product that was not only spectacular in itself, but also derivative on a spectacular scale. As such, the pursuit of unoriginality in JD:EAK is striking in its aggressiveness, evidencing an unyielding determination on the part of its makers to make sure that absolutely nothing contained within it would be untested or challenging to expectations. It is by virtue of this that the movie ultimately serves to reveal with tragicomic accuracy the mindset behind the blockbusters that it seeks to duplicate, as if it were some kind of hideously mocking picture of Dorian Gray to be locked away in Hollywood's attic.     The shame here -- or at least one of the many shames -- is that, with films like Nagin and the original Jaani Dushman, Raj Kumar Kohli demonstrated a genuinely quirky sensibility, while at the same time proving that he could draw in a popular audience. Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani, on the other hand, demonstrates the culmination of a gradual grinding down of that sensibility. All in all, it's a pretty sad portrait of compromise. But if one were looking for some kind of redemptive tidbit within it, it might be found in the fact that Kohli was apparently motivated by a love of family, rather than any desire for mere material gain, in making it. Love really is a bitch, isn't it? Labels: Bollywood, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Stars: Amrish Puri, Stars: Manisha Koirala, Year: 2002 posted by Todd at 1:54 PM | 15 Comments Saturday, May 10, 2008The Seventh Curse Release Year: 1986Country: Hong Kong Starring: Siu-Hou Chin, Maggie Cheung, Dick Wei, Sau-Lai Tsui, Chow Yun Fat, Elvis Tsui, Ken Boyle, Yuen Chor. Writer: Daniel Ullman Director: Lam Ngai Kai Cinematographer: Chiu-Lam Ko Music: Gam Wing Shing Producer: Raymond Chow, Leonard Ho, Jing Wong Original Title: Yuan Zhen-Xia yu Wei Si-Li Alternate Title: Dr. Yuen and Wisely Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Suit work! It's the two words that all young aspiring actors dread, but hey, when the rent is due and the cupboard's bare, a person's gotta do, what a person's gotta do, right? But where do you draw the line? Is appearing at your local metropolitan shopping centre as a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger acceptable? How about a cartoon character at a Hollywood theme park? Sure it's all show business, but walking around all day with a giant fibreglass cat's head on your shoulders can hardly be called acting. But I guess nobody can see the actor's face -- they get paid for the gig -- and they can keep auditioning for the big role that one day will make them a star. Then there's maybe the one or two actors who enjoy the anonymity of suit work. They enjoy being a part of the creative process, giving a performance, and at the end of the day, going home to their family without the pressures of celebrity. At this stage I feel an urge to talk about Barney The Dinosaur, but I will refrain at this stage.
But suit work doesn't belong solely to the world of children's entertainment. Where would we be without David Prowse, Peter Mayhew and Anthony Daniels all kitted out in the Star Wars movies? ...hang on, maybe they are kids films too! How about the guys who played aliens in Alien and Predator? And who can forget King Kong and Godzilla. Finally, where would Hong Kong cinema be without the guy who played the Ancient Ancestor in The Seventh Curse? Oh, you're not too familiar with that one...allow me to elaborate. Welcome to weird eighties Hong Kong horror. Pardon my French, ladies and gentlemen, but The Seventh Curse is one fucked up movie. Oh man, this film is all over the place, but at the same time, it is an incredibly enjoyable movie experience, one that I couldn't take my eyes off. I had no idea where the story was going and what was going to happen next. By the 22 minute mark, when the first of the many truly 'What the fffff...' moments occur, this film has you totally within it's long, spidery, and sometimes slimy grasp. The film opens at an elaborate cocktail party, with famous novelist, Mr. Yi being asked where he gets all the ideas for his fantastical stories. He says at parties like this. He says a good story starts with a good wine, and then begins to tell the story of Dr Yuan and Dr Wei -- both of whom happen to be at the party. The film then jumps to a siege situation. Police have surrounded a building, which houses six armed bandits and a group of hostages. One of these bandits is a sharpshooter and he shoots the negotiating police officer with the megaphone. This results in all police officers opening up on the building with a variety of weapons. In the firefight, the police accidentally shoot one of the hostages. The bullet doesn't kill him, but he has a heart attack. The bandits call for a cease fire, and ask that a doctor be sent in. The police call for the courageous Dr. Yuan (Siu-Hou Chin). The police ask Yuan, once inside, to plant a smoke bomb for them, so they can storm the building and save the day. Yuan agrees, and to assist him, a policewoman is to accompany him, posing as a nurse. Nosey reporter Tsai Hung (Maggie Chung), sees an opportunity for a scoop, and clocks the policewoman on the head with a brick and then assumes her nurses apparel and follows Dr. Yuan into the building. Of course Tsai Hung's meddling causes complication, but ultimately the smoke bomb goes off -- the police storm the building and kick the shit out of the bad guys. For his part Yuan is a hero, and now Tsai Hung wants to do a story on him. He is not interested and heads home. At home he has two surprises in store for him. The first is that there is a naked woman in his bathroom. And second, and not quite so welcome is a mysterious, black clad kung-fu guy named Heh Lung (Dick Wei). Heh Lung kicks Yuan's ass all around his home, destroying glass tables, bookshelfs, statues...everything and anything. But despite Heh Lung's aggressive and destructive demeanour, he is actually a friend and there to help Yuan. He says that Yuan has a 'blood spell' upon him, and will relapse soon. Yuan must go to Thailand. And he mentions that the girl has a 'ghost spell' on her. What girl? Yuan, at this stage, doesn't seem to comprehend what his ass-kicking friend is saying -- and we viewers are equally in the dark at this stage. Before leaving, Heh Lung also warns Yuan about having sex. This will only bring on the relapse of the 'blood curse' quicker.
After Heh Lung has left, Yuan ignores all warnings and engages in a bit of 'rumpy-pumpy' with his beautiful house guest. During their sexual encounter, strange things begin to happen to Yuan's leg. It is almost as if something is alive beneath the skin. Then all the veins begin to bulge, and then finally one of the veins erupts. Alarmed, Yuan seeks the advice of his rather comfortably dressed colleague Dr. Wei (Chow Yun Fan). Wei asks about the 'blood curse', and Yuan relates a story from one year ago... Yuan was part of a medical expedition to North Thailand, where they were searching for herbs that would benefit in the treatment of AIDS. The leader of the expedition, Professor (Ken Boyle) warms all members that they shouldn't wander off too far from the camp, because in a nearby camp is the Yunnan Maio Tribe. The Yunnan Maio are a worm tribe that specialises in witchcraft. So what does Yuan do? He wanders off from the camp. And at a rockpool, sees a beautiful tribeswoman, Ba Chu (Sau-Lai Tsui) swimming all but naked. Well the dialogue call her Ba Chu, but the subtitles call her 'Betsy'. Yuan is instantly smitten. He goes back to his camp and gathers a few friends, and they foolishly decide to pay a visit to the worm tribe's village. Every year, the worm tribe's ancient ancestor is awoken from his slumber, and is offered two people as a sacrifice. Overseeing the ritual is the Shaman, Aquala (Elvis Tsui). Aquala wants Ba Chu to be his mistress. When she refuses, he arranges for her to be one of the sacrificial victims. As Ba Chu is the daughter of the previous leader of the Yunnan Maio people, one tribesman speaks out against Aquala. However, the tribesman's act of dissent is short lived, as Aquala has a blood ghost hiding beneath his cloak. The blood ghost is a vicious worm muppet with sharp teeth. The muppet, er...blood ghost flies through the air onto the tribesman, and begins to chew on the guy's face and neck. Then the little blighter burrows into the guy's body and bursts out of the tribesman's chest. The scene is obviously inspired by Alien. Having successfully mutilated the objector, the blood ghost returns to Aquala and tucks itself, once again, behind his cape. After this spectacle, the rest of the Yunnan Maio people have no objections to Ba Chu's sacrifice. Yuan and the other men from the medical research team have been watching the ritual, and are a little shocked. Yuan decides to rescue Ba Chu, and he sends his colleagues back to camp to get weapons. Ba Chu and the other victim have been taken inside an underground temple. Before them, is a giant stone tomb. Aquala pours some blood on the lid of the tomb and then leaves the chamber. The stone lid flies off, and from a screen of smoke emerges the Ancient Ancestor. And I've got to admit, that Ancient Ancestor look exactly like you'd expect him to. He's a skeleton...albeit, a skeleton with glowing eyes. He rattles his way out of his crypt and makes his way towards Ba Chu. Just as it looks light it is curtains for Ba Chu, Yuan steps into the fray and engages in a kung-fu showdown with the ancient bag of bones. Yuan doesn't exactly win the fight, but somehow he manages to hold his own and free Ba Chu. Then both of them flee. Yuan drags Ba Chu back to the medical research expedition campsite, chased by legions of Yunnan Maio warriors. The tribesmen make short work of the medicos, leaving only the Professor and Yuan alive (and Ba Chu of course -- she is one of their own). The Professor and Yuan are dragged back to the temple, and are brought before Aquala, who plans amusing deaths for both men...amusing if you are a sick, twisted Shaman type, which Aquala is. For us normal people, it's all kinda icky. Firstly Aquala pours something on the Professors head. It acts instantly, and in seconds the Professor is screaming and ripping off his face, and if that isn't enough, then he rips open his stomach and a whole lot of worms wriggle out. I hope you're not reading this over dinner! Mmmm Mmmm.
Then Aquala turns his attention to Yuan. First he walks over to the body of a dead tribesman, burrows in and pulls something out -- I am not sure what it is -- but it can't be good. The Shaman then returns to Yuan and forces the objects down his throat. Immediately, the evil magic begins to work. Yuan begins to convulse and then blood blisters erupt all of his body. Aquala then leaves Yuan to die. This is the second time, that Aquala has just left people to die, without watching and checking to make sure. He is a lazy villain. As Yuan is left alone with no guards to watch him, he manages to escape, all the while; the giant blood blisters continue to burst. He makes his way to the rockpool where he first encountered Ba Chu and collapses. Ba Chu finds him. To revive him, she disrobes, produces a knife and cuts out a section of her left breast and feeds it to Yuan. Yuan passes out...and this is the end of the flashback sequence. We are back in Dr, Wei's office. Dr Wei tells Yuan what we already know -- he has a blood curse. As they sit in the office, Yuan experiences another rupture; his second. Wei tells him that he will suffer one blood curse a day, until the seventh day, when the curse will explode in his heart and he will die. As Yuan has already used up two days, he has five days to save himself. He immediately makes plans to go to Thailand and meet Heh Lung. It's now that Tsai Hung enters the room. She is Dr. Wei's cousin. Ever the persistent journalist, she is still after an interview with Yuan, and now insists upon going with Yuan to Thailand. Naturally both Yuan and Wei advise against it. But, you know, she's a reporter and heads along anyway. Now in Thailand the story rapidly moves along. I won't outline it all, or there will be no surprises left for those who choose to see this film, but needless to say Yuan soon teams up with Heh Lung and they start working out a way to cure Yuan's Blood Curse, and Ba Chu's Ghost Curse. And, luckily for them, there is a way. In a sacred temple, hidden in the eyes of a giant stone Buddha are two eggs filled with magic grain. Here the story moves into Indiana Jones territory, and as our two intrepid heroes start to climb the Bhudda, lot's of sharp pointing objects pop out. Not only do they have to contend with the booby traps, but also protecting the Buddha and the magic eggs is a team of butt-kicking monks. After a fast and furious battle on the statue, Yuan and Heh Lung retrieve the eggs. Yuan gobbles down the grain inside one, just in time as his seventh blood curse in about to erupt. So now Yuan is good. But you're probably wondering where the girls are during all this? Well they have got themselves captured by Aquala and now need rescuing. Aquala, the FIEND, has Tsai Hung and Ba Chu tied up, ready to be sacrificed to Ancient Ancestor. But in the nick of time, Yuan and Heh Lung arrive on the scene. Heh Lung knocks Aquala back onto the lid of Ancient Ancestor's tomb. Suddenly Ancient Ancestor's arm reaches out, grabs Aquala and drags him into the tomb, and no doubt carries out some nasty medical experiments on his body. Tsai Hung and Ba Chu are freed and the four of them make a run for it before Ancient Ancestor can climb out of the crypt once again. Strangely, and I never really got this, the large concrete tomb structure chases them. I mean it kinda drives down one of the passageways after them. Our four mortals are chased into a giant chamber, and the stone coffin races in after them. It crashes into a wall, the stone lid flies off and out creaks the skeletal form of Ancient Ancestor. But then strange things begin happening to Ancient Ancestor's bony structure. He starts to swell and mutate into another creature. This slimy full-bodied creature looks remarkably similar to the beasties in Alien, but I am sure no intentional plagiarism was meant -- just like the chest bursting scene earlier on -- it's just a lucky coincidence! At that moment, reinforcements sent by Dr. Wei arrive. They bring semi-automatic weapons and plenty of people for Ancient Ancestor to kill. This new incarnation of Ancient Ancestor is a lot more dexterous than the kung-fu skeleton. This bad boy can fly and has pointy claws to grab, slash and mutilate the disposable underlings in the chamber. Which he does, very effectively. I ask you, is there anything more threatening in filmdom than a 'man in a monster suit'? Yep! A 'man in a monster suit on wires'! This motherfucker just won't stand still and be killed like any normal monster. No, he has to jump and fly about the chamber. He's not one to give our heroes a sporting chance.
Now I don't want to give everything away, but of course this film has a slam bang ending which features the slimy rubber Ancient Ancestor, the killer muppet, and Chow Yun Fat. Yep, Dr. Wei finally does something. One of the running jokes throughout the movie, is that Dr. Wei never gets involved in the action. He continually says 'you go ahead, I'll join you later!' Well this is 'later', and Dr. Wei turns up carrying a bloody great rocket launcher. Here I have outlined large portions of the plot for you, but words cannot do the visuals justice. This is one film that has to be seen to be believed -- whether it be kung-fu skeletons, flying killer muppets, or the 'man in a monster suit on wires' -- this film has some crazy scenes. As you may have ascertained from the plot description, this film features quite a bit of gore. Those of you who have read any of my other reviews will know that I'm a squeamish kind of guy. But in this film, everything is so stylised and jaw-droppingly out there, I didn't feel put-off by the more bloody aspects of this film. There is a truly weird psychosexual undercurrent to The Seventh Curse, which cannot be ignored. If you think about it too much, you may find it a tad unsettling...then again, it may excite you and add to your viewing experience. In no particular order, here are some of the twisted sexual imagery that The Seventh Curse showcases. Firstly, when we first witness Yuan's blood curse, as I mentioned earlier, it arrives mid coitus. It manifests itself with Yuan's veins in his legs bulging, and ends with an orgasmic eruption over his partners face. It may be a mild horror moment, but it owes more to John Stagliano than John Carpenter. The next strange sequence involves Ba Chu's revival of Yuan, after the Shaman initially infects him with the blood curse. Ba Chu revives him by cutting out a section of her breast and feeding it to Yuan. I suppose in a clumsy symbolic way, a breast gives life by providing nutrition for babies, so eating a piece of a life giving breast, will er,...give life. But I don't think this film works on that level. I get the feeling, that the film-makers asked the question 'What will freak out the audience the most?' Then we come to Aquala, The Shaman of the Worm Tribe. The fact that they are a 'worm tribe' should tell you something? When we first meet Aquala he kills a tribesman by releasing the Blood Ghost upon him. They may calls this creature a Blood Ghost (well in the subtitles anyway), but the mini-beast looks like a cross between a penis and a tadpole. Aquala fires off this creature to do his killing for him. It almost a symbol of his extreme male potency -- all this from a character who has a squeaky effeminate voice. I could go on, but I don't really know what all this means. I am not a psychologist or a sex therapist, but it's all kinda creepy. It probably just means I have a diseased mind, but then again, I didn't make a film about a flying 'dick with teeth'. Well I have dragged this review into the gutter for long enough. It's time to climb out into the light and talk about the stunts. Those of you who have seen the film know what I am going to say, don't you! There's this scene where Yuan and Heh Lung drive their four-wheel-drive into the Worm Tribe Village. As the vehicle crashes through the huts and clotheslines, all the tribe members go scurrying for their lives. Unfortunately one of the 'scurryees' did not scurry quite quickly enough and is collected quite solidly by the four-wheel-drive. I don't know what the aftermath of this stunt was, but it can't be good.
If you'll pardon my very clumsy analogy, The Seventh Curse is a bit like the blood curse in the movie. Once you have seen this film, it slowly infects your whole body, and while your veins don't explode, there is a certain amount of 'verbal' eruption. I have told so many people about this film since I have seen it. I just want to infect everyone with it's dynamic exuberance. And I hope by reading this review, that some of that 'infection' has rubbed off on you. If you haven't seen The Seventh Curse, track down a copy, switch on your lava lamp, pull up your candy coloured beanbag, pour yourself a decent measure of Scotch (you're gonna need it) and prepare to be thoroughly entertained! Before signing off on this review, it's best that I go back to 'suit work' and 'men in monster suits', where we started. In a film like The Seventh Curse, you cannot hire any hack actor to jump into the monster suit, especially with the wire-work and stunts featured in the film. You need someone tall, strong and acrobatic. And you need them to be acrobatic while wearing a giant rubber suit. Whoever the guy is in The Seventh Curse, my hat comes off to him. He is a master of his profession. Sure he could have eked out a living playing a jolly green dinosaur at a local shopping centre, but instead chose to push the boundaries of suit work. His spinning, twisting, aerial display sets a standard that other men in monster suits can only help to emulate.  Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1986 posted by David at 6:26 PM | 3 Comments Thursday, May 08, 2008The Maze Release Year: 1953Country: United States Starring: Richard Carlson, Veronica Hurst, Katherine Emery, Michael Pate, John Dodsworth, Hillary Brooke, Stanley Fraser, Lillian Bond, Owen McGiveney, Robin Hughes. Writer: Daniel Ullman Director: William Cameron Menzies Cinematographer: Harry Neumann and William Menzies Music: Marlin Skiles Producer: Richard Heermance, Walter Mirisch Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us There are a lot of times when I don't remember a movie (sometimes mere hours after watching it), but I remember a particular scene or vague theme from the movie. This has come up several times before. For instance, before I rewatched it, all I could remember about Treasure of the Four Crowns was the scene where fireballs on ridiculously visible wires were flying around. With Sword and the Sorcerer, even though I watched that movie about seven billion times when I was ten years old, all I could remember was "guy falls into room of naked women" and "guy makes witch's chest explode, then catches her heart." Although there were many times when I remembered both the scene and the title of the movie in which it appeared, there are many other times when I have no recollection at all of the film's title. It is in these instances that the Internet has proven to finally be worth all the trouble. Thousands and thousands of years of social and technological evolution finally lead to the moment when I can look up "screaming banshee on moors" and find out in which movie it appears. That movie was, of course, Darby O'Gill and the Little People. I thought it was Cry of the Banshee, but when I rewatched that film, I found that it contained no screaming banshee on the moors, or any banshee of any type for that matter. Luckily, the internet was there for me. And it was there for me again, very recently, when I was trying to remember the title of a movie about which all I could recall was, "frog man in center of hedge maze." Actually, I remembered one other scene, which was of a woman looking out a dusty window and seeing some creepy guy in a cape dashing across the moonlit lawn, but it turns out that was a bizarre combination of a bit from The Maze combined with a bit from, I've been told, Munsters Go Home.
This time, the movie was The Maze, and when I finally tracked it down (because even if something isn't in print, the internet also helps you find old copies), I discovered two ways in which my memory was faulty. First, of course, was the fact that I couldn't remember the title of the movie I'd seen. Second, it turns out I'd never seen the movie. Yet still the concept "frog man in center of hedge maze" haunted me. It turns out that, when I was a little kid, my mother used to tell me the plot of this movie as a spooky bedtime story. Granted, stories about murderous frog men lurking in the center of a hedge maze may seem like a strange bedtime story, but I was a strange kid, and anyway, children's bedtime stories used to be all full of cannibalism and witches and trolls who steal the fingernails of naughty little boys and girls who don't eat their stinky boiled kale. In comparison to the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales, regaling me with the adventures of a man-frog in a hedge maze is small potatoes. But it did result in me spending most of my life thinking I'd seen the movie -- which, as I explained, I discovered to be untrue once I actually did watch it. It also fueled, or so my theory goes, by continuing obsession with hedge mazes, especially hedge mazes that are occupied by weird magical creatures and monsters. Preferably sexy, naked nymphs and such, because if I have to be murdered by a charming but malicious magical being, I'd much rather it be a sexy flying girl with pointy ears and no clothes than a lurching man-frog in a threadbare suit or a shirtless guy with goat legs and a fondness for Zamfir records. While I was disappointed in the subjectivity of my memory -- what other grand adventures are merely lies I told myself so many times that even I started to believe them -- I was happy to have this movie on hand to watch for the first time, even if the big reveal of the ghoulish dark family secret was already known to me. In fact, knowing the shock ending ahead of time is probably or th better. If you went into this film with some degree of anticipation, after all, the big reveal would be something of a letdown, to say the least. Conversely, if you go into a movie knowing little about it other than "frog man in center of hedge maze," it's much easier to be pleasantly surprised by the bulk of the film and pleasantly amused by the shoddiness of the nightmarish man in a monster suit waiting for you at the center of the labyrinth.
The Maze is a film tailor-made to appeal to me. It has a gloomy castle, gratuitous fog, a hedge maze, a cute woman in a bullet bra, creepy butlers, secret passages, and a "jolly good, old chap" kind of guy who smokes a pipe and enjoys motoring through the countryside whilst wearing his Harris tweed. And, of course, it's got the man-frog. It's black and white, and since it's the sort of movie that is unlikely to ever be lovingly restored -- that exhaustive process being restricted to classic works of art like Caligula and Zombie Lake -- it remains available primarily in grainy, murky bootleg copies. Now, I've never been a quality freak, especially for old films. For newer ones, yeah sure. I want them looking the way they're supposed to, at the correct aspect ration, in the correct language, with all the scenes intact. But for a lot of old films, I kind of like seeing them all grainy and beat up, with the dust specks and the random missing frames and that greatest of old film friends, the stray piece of hair. Not that I would turn down a proper copy of The Maze, or of any old film, but having a pristine and remastered version doesn't mean that I'll be willing to get rid of my crappy old copy. What I would like to see is a copy of The Maze that restores the film to its full 3D glory, even though from what I can judge, the 3D would be pretty lackluster, unless you are really excited by gratuitous "bat flies at the camera" 3D effects. Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson) is about to married to his lovely fiancee, Kitty (Veronica Hurst), and to celebrate they are frolicking in some sun-kissed paradise with, for some reason, Kitty's dry-witted aunt Edith (Katherine Emery). Fun in the sun is interrupted when Gerald gets an urgent telegram from his uncle. It turns out that Gerald has a family castle in the highlands of Scotland, and all sorts of weird things happen in it. As a boy, Gerald remembers being locked in his room at night whenever he and his family visited the castle, and that there was a massive hedge maze into which no one was ever allowed. He departs to tend to whatever emergency his uncle has been contacted about, but Kitty and Edith become increasingly worried when they receive no word from him. When a letter does arrive, it only distresses them more. Gerald calls off the wedding, breaks his engagement to Kitty, and forbids them from ever visiting or contacting him again. Kitty is understandably perplexed, and rather than merely accept Gerald bizarre, out of the blue proclamation, she and Edith pack up and head for Scotland to see what's up at the ominously named Craven Castle. Gerald is, needless to say, distressed by their sudden arrival, just as they are distressed by the fact that his hair has turned white and he seems to have aged considerably. He is adamant that they must leave immediately, but Kitty keeps devising excuses to stick around until she has figured out what the heck is going on and why Gerald has suddenly become so hostile and elusive. Clues begin to prevent themselves later that very night, when they hear Gerald and his two servants dragging something out of the off-limits guard tower and into the maze. Kitty discovers a secret passage in her room that leads to a long-forgotten room with a window (most of the windows in the castle have long since been bricked up) and observes the men hauling something into the maze. On the second night, Edith fakes out Gerald and leaves her room before it is locked for the night. While exploring the castle, she stumbles across...some hideous thing...that scurries from her view an disappears into the shadows before she can get a proper look at it. This tears it for Gerald, who insists that they get lost. Kitty counters by arranging to have a group of their friends show up, hoping that familiar faces and friendship will snap Gerald out of his funk and force him to come clean about the mysterious shenanigans. Her scheme almost works. Gerald even smiles at some point. But then it all goes horribly wrong. Everything comes to a head that night, and the horrible truth is revealed.
The Maze depends heavily on atmosphere. For the bulk of the movie, very little actually happens. Small tidbits are thrown the viewer's way to keep them interested -- a fleeting glimpse of a glistening creature, a weird webbed footprint, the frequent foreboding stares of the butlers -- but if this sort of movie isn't your thing, it's going to bore you pretty quickly. Lucky for me, this sort of movie is my thing, and I found the whole thing engrossing. Richard Carlson, who already had a long list of credits, including at least one other Scotland-based horror tale (an episode of Lights Out entitled "The Devil in Glencairn"), does a wonderful job of transforming Gerald from happy-go-lucky regular guy to world-weary crank, and he does so in a manner that makes you both sympathetic (you know he bears some horrible family secret) and irritated (why won't he just trust someone?). But then, I guess I've never had a giant frog for a great great great great uncle, so who am I to judge? I do, however, have an uncle who refuses to put his teeth in, and I don't think it's an entirely dissimilar circumstance. Veronica Hurst, aside from being gorgeous, also does fairly well with a character who stays within the realistic bounds of femininity at the time (oh for the days women investigated unspeakable horrors whilst dressed in a shimmering cocktail dress and heels) but also emerges as strong-willed and determined in her unwillingness to simply let Gerald be a spooky jerk. That said, she may be one of the worst amateur sleuths in the history of amateur sleuthing. Although she constantly foils Gerald's plans to send her and Edith away, nothing ever really comes of the time she buys herself. Edith, for that matter, is set up as sort of the stolid voice of reason, but her sneaking about never bears much fruit, either. It gets to be frustrating at points, and even though both women are fairly well portrayed for the time, one can't help but with there was a bit more of the modern in them, thus allowing Kitty to grab Gerald by his tweed lapels and knock some sense into him. I mean, he has a dark spooky family secret, but it's not that dark or spooky. Kitty sort of stand sup to him by defying his orders to skedaddle, but it would have been nice to see her actually confront the guy and not let him glower and frown his way out of it. The supporting cast,lead by Katherine Emery as Edith and Michael Pate as William the butler, is also excellent. With the exception of Veronica Hurst, who was only in her very early twenties at the time, The Maze is yet another in a long line of classic examples of how a film can be lent an added air of gravity and importance by filling the cast with actual adults rather than teenagers. These are all experienced players, and they handle the film with dedication, so much so that when the final reveal of the creature proves to be somewhat comical both by today's standards as well as, I would assume, the standards of the time, it hardly matters. They sell it regardless, and after the initial guffaw at the sight of this man-frog, The Maze makes it really easy to get over creature design short-comings. It helps that the creature is only on screen for a brief moment, but what helps more is that the entire cast sells the tragedy of the situation.
There is also some attempt to justify scientifically the appearance of the creature, who it turns out, is a horribly deformed member of the MacTeam family. Kitty discovers Gerald reading a book about human deformation, and Gerald explains that the human fetus goes through many stages of evolution before obtaining its final form, including one that is amphibian in nature. As with most horror film science, the end result is somewhat dubious but wholly believable within the confines of the film's reality. Once again, this is the product of a cast that is committed to selling the plot of the film, even at its most outlandish moments. Complimenting and, usually, overpowering the cast is the cinematography, production design, and director. William Cameron Menzies isn't exactly a well-known name among modern horror fans, but he directed a number of early horror efforts, including 1931's The Spider and 1932's Chandu the Magician, both films that drew heavily upon the world of magic and illusionists, as well as 1936's Things to Come (based on the predictions of H.G. Wells) and 1940's The Thief of Baghdad. However, what's probably more important to the success of The Maze is his long career and vast experience as a production designer and art director. In this role, Menzies is perhaps better known. His experience in this field reaches as far back as 1918 and includes a whole slew of famous films such as the 1924 version of The Thief of Bagdhad, Pride of the Yankees, and in 1939, a little something called Gone with the Wind. A couple Oscars and a few other assorted awards later, he found himself directing The Maze, as well as serving as the film's art and production designer. These multiple roles make it possible to say that the movie is, every step of the way, the director's vision. It also means that the guy responsible for the burning of Atlanta sequence is also the guy responsible for the man-frog in this film. Menzies was no stranger to horror of science fiction, having previously directed the sci-fi cult classic Invaders from Mars. Although the direction itself in The Maze is best characterized as "blandly competent," the unassuming nature of the direction allows the mood to take center stage. And that's a wise decision, since it's the film's strongest character and was obviously the aspect in which Menzies was more interested. We barely get a glimpse of Craven Castle (obviously because of budgetary concerns -- this is a low budget film, after all), but when we do, it is all twisted brambles and gnarled trees. When Kitty and Edith first arrive, the moors are awash in fog. Everything inside the castle is shadows and gloom. Even when sets aren't draped in moroseness and cobwebs, it feels like they are. When the atmosphere takes front stage, the film is very effective. When it relies on the script, it is decidedly less so. And even within Menzies' otherwise acceptable if pedestrian directing style, there are a number of curious decisions. Most noticeable is the bizarre set-up during narration sequences featuring Katherine Emery, which are framed so that she is visible from the chin up at the very bottom of the screen, with the rest of the frame filled with nondescript ceiling and room. If I had to guess, I would say this was not an artistic decision, but was rather the product of a camera being improperly positioned and there not being enough time, money, or interest in reshooting these sequences. Still, these are minor gaffes in comparison to the film's biggest misstep, which is promising a horrible monster terrifying beyond all belief and then delivering...well, you know by now.
Augie Lohman was the special effects supervisor, so one has to assume that blame for the appearance of The Maze's signature monster should be pinned on him -- though Menzies ultimately made the decision to go with the creation. Judging by his long list of credits, which includes special effects for everything from John Huston's Moby Dick to Barbarella, one has to assume that Lohman was good at what he did. But The Maze represents his first real foray into the realm of the fantastic, having previously worked on adventure and crime films. I don't know if it was his relative inexperience (hard to believe since three years later he was working magic in Moby Dick), or a function of time and money that resulted in the final product. To some degree, he was hamstrung by the story. The Maze was based on a novel by Maurice Sandoz, so the nature of the beast as already set. I would imagine that even the most adept effects man in the early 1950s would have a hard time when saddled with the assignment "make me a man-frog!" Modern effects technology could probably dream up something more effective, but then, modern scripting would probably ditch the idea of a frog entirely and go with something more legitimately terrifying, like a boll weevil or a marmoset. So maybe Lohman was just faced with an impossible task and did the best he could. Which, in all honesty, was pretty bad. If you didn't know ahead of time that the monster was going to be a colossal let-down, then that first reveal, when Kitty stumbled upon the creature while wandering desperately through the maze, would pretty much undo all the hard work the atmosphere of dread put into the rest of the film. To make matters worse, rather than walking upright like a man, the frog creature is down on all fours -- which might have worked it the suit was designed to better mimic a four-legged creature. Instead, it's designed in the same way that the Anguilas costume from the Godzilla movies was designed, meaning that the hind legs are bent because the guy in the suit is just crawling around. And as if that wasn't enough, it seems like even the makers of The Maze couldn't justify trying to pass off a frog's "ribbit" as a terrifying noise and so instead rely on...elephant noises? Huh. How about that? The end effect is singularly laughable. On the scale of scary animals, frogs have to be at the bottom of the list. I mean, maybe even lower than giant killer bunnies. Sure, some people think frogs are "icky," and like me, many of you know from first-hand knowledge that if you catch one, they are going to defend themselves by peeing on your hand, but other than that, the number of people genuinely terrified by frogs must be very small and limited to a few women who had bad experiences as girls with naughty little country boys dropping frogs down the back of their dress (not that I ever did that to anyone), and members of various Amazonian tribes who have to deal with those frogs that are the size of a fingernail but will cause you to die an agonizing and certain death by poison if you touch them. Oh, and maybe Spider-Man, who I think once tackled a dastardly frog guy. Even the Australians, who have come as close to anyone to doing actual real world combat against giant frogs, consider them a nuisance more than a nightmare of hell that will cause a woman to hold her left hand up in front of her face while biting the knuckles on her right. I mean, sure. If I was out at night, wandering through the hedge maze of a spooky Scottish castle, and I stumbled upon a gigantic frog, I'm sure I'd be taken aback, perhaps even a little startled. But once the initial shock wears off, and provided he doesn't shoot a gigantic sticky tongue out at me, I think I'd recover fairly quickly and go into "I say, that's a tremendously large frog you have there, old chap" mode -- which is a mode I go into with disturbing frequency. It should be noted, however, that the above statement is only suitable for instances in which you encounter an actual giant frog in a hedge maze or a haunted cove. Saying "I say, that's a tremendously large frog you have there, old chap" whilst in a gym locker room or standing at the urinals lends the phrase an entirely different and perhaps controversial air.
In the end, though, the monster is played more for tragedy than terror, so if you know in advance that the build-up is let down by what's being built up to, you can relax and enjoy the rest of the movie, have you chuckle at the sight of the monster when it finally shows up, then move on with very little harm done. There have certainly been sillier looking monsters (Giant Claw, I'm looking in your direction), but few that are surrounded by as much somber atmosphere and seriousness. I have a tremendous affinity for this film, even though I think when my mom told it to me as a bedtime story, she changed things up a bit. Because I'm pretty sure in my version of the movie, the man-frog lived in the center of the maze (in actuality, he lives in the locked guard tower and is carried tot he maze at night so he can swim in the pond in its center) and the dragging and scraping sounds were made by the servants dragging some poor chump out to the maze to be eaten alive (the reality in the movie being that the monster never actually kills anyone, though one maid dies of fright upon seeing it). But still, after setting the record straight in my own mind, I still think The Maze is an enjoyable, if somewhat silly, film that boasts some tremendous mood and a hearty chuckle. The script does tend to run in place for too long -- Kitty diligently investigates the situation but never makes any real progress -- but I have a pretty high tolerance for films comprised mostly of well-dressed people sitting in comfortable chairs, sipping scotch and pondering things. I didn't find The Maze to be boring even when it was biding its time, and I think the build-up is quite nice even if the pay-off is more side-splitting than horrifying. Screenwriter Daniel Ullman, who worked mostly in television but also wrote the screenplay for Mysterious Island (where his script is once again upstaged by production design and special effects), redeems himself int he film's final moments, which actually succeed in making you feel sorry for our doomed man-frog beastie, but the bulk of The Maze, be warned, is people sitting in chairs discussing things that should be resolved much quicker than they are. So I reckon if you are looking for a great monster and cracking good dialog, you're probably better off elsewhere. But I found a lot to like in The Maze, even if my mom's version of the movie was better, and I would gladly wander through it again...even knowing what's waiting in the center for me.  Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1953 posted by Keith at 4:16 PM | 0 Comments Monday, April 07, 2008Hausu Release Year: 1977Country: Japan Starring: Kimiko Ikegami, Yoko Minamida, Kumiko Ohba, Saho Sasazawa, Haruko Wanibuchi, Eriko Tanaka, Miki Jinbo, Masayo Miyako, Mitsutoshi Ishigami Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi Writers: Chiho Katsura, Nobuhiko Obayashi Cinematographer: Yoshitaka Sakamoto Music: Asei Kobayashi, Micky Yoshino Producer: Nobuhiko Obayashi Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us I once read a review on some site that contained the statement "Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is not for everyone", which is my favorite line ever from an online review of a cult movie. Not only is it admirable for being refreshingly direct, but also for how it so clearly provides the guidance that we depend on from such reviews. It makes you truly grateful that the internet exists, especially if you're one of those people who might otherwise have considered purchasing Slaughtered Vomit Dolls as a Mothers Day gift. In the spirit of those words, then, I would like to begin this review by stating that Hausu, the 1977 debut feature from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, is not for everyone. However, if you are one of those people whom Hausu is for (or for whom Hausu is?), I think that you will find it not only fascinating, but addictive. I myself have seen it five times now, and it's a testament to its uniqueness that each time I watch it I find myself surprised anew at just how strange it is. It's as if it contains too much that's beyond the normal frame of reference for the brain to adequately retain it all. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it is one of the most unique horror films that I have ever seen. Obayashi came to Hausu from a background in television advertising, and, in making it, he not only employs all of the tricks of that trade, but also turns many of them on their head. This is a film in which no fraction of any one frame escapes being stylized to within an inch of its life. In addition to working with a woozy pallet of saturated and uniformly unnatural colors (not to mention a chaotic sound design), Obayashi uses every special effect technique available at the time, in concert with a large repertoire of "naive" optical effects not typically seen since the early talkies, to create layers of visual and aural signals that constantly bombard the viewer at every level. While this can at times come off like a first-time director simply showing off, the film is far from an empty exercise in style. Hausu is simply energized by too much passion (and perhaps rage) for there not to be a vision--and heart--behind its madness.     Obayashi, at least in his early directing years, seemed to be drawn to fantastic stories that centered on school-aged protagonists, especially those that played on themes of teenage angst (his other films include Exchange Students, The Little Girl Who Conquered Time and the manga adaptation Drifting Classroom), and Hausu is no exception, following the fate of a close knit group of seven teenaged schoolgirls. Of these seven, only the ethereally beautiful Oshare (Kimiko Ikegami) is provided with any kind of back-story--or character, for that matter. The remaining six are simply an assortment of types, each paired down to a descriptive nickname and one corresponding signature behavior: Mack (for "stomach") overeats; Fanta (Kumiko Ohba) is prone to romantic daydreams; Melody (Eriko Tanaka) plays piano; Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo) practices Kung Fu and has her own action theme music, etc. Collectively these girls inhabit a world straight out of a seventies Saturday morning cereal commercial, one in which people rise to greet the day with arms outstretched to the sun as cartoon rainbows play across the horizon to the strains of treacly soft rock. As Obayashi presents it, you wouldn't be at all surprised if one of those freaky psychedelic football mascots from Syd and Marty Kroft's PuffnStuff or Lidsville were to bound into frame at any moment. Oshare's life outside of the group, however, is presented a little differently, though in no less cavity-promoting terms. Hers is a world of movie-fuelled romanticism with the kitsch level pushed to belligerent extremes (think Douglas Sirk on eleven): Beyond the balcony of her father's high-rise flat, a permanent artificial sunset stretches across the sky like a glorious, lurid bruise, and, as we watch Oshare, all of the camera's means of idealizing dewy young womanhood--gauzy soft focus, halo lighting, fan-blown hair captured in dreamy slow motion--are amped to the level of the grotesque. Taken together, the world that's presented in the first section of Hausu is one in which a malignant, over-ripe greeting card sentimentality has poisoned the very atmosphere. And, given that, it should come as no surprise that rottenness lurks just around the corner--or, at least, just a short train ride away.     Things start to turn when Oshare, heartbroken over the prospect of her widowed father marrying a creepily serene younger woman named Ryoko (Haruko Wanibuchi), reaches out to her beloved dead mother's sister, an aunt (Yoko Minamida) whom she hasn't seen for many years. That aunt has remained in the family home, alone, honoring a decades old promise to wait for the man to whom she was engaged, even though, as we have seen, he was long ago killed in the war that took him away in the first place. (In keeping with the psychotically chipper tone of Hausu's first act, the flashback of the aunt's tragic story is played out as a silent era film while, on the soundtrack, the girls coo inanely over how cute and quaint it all looks.) The aunt in return invites Oshare and her friends to come stay at the remote family house for the holiday. Quickly after the group of girls arrives at the house it becomes apparent that, not just something, but everything isn't right. The aunt, they eventually learn, has long ago died and become a ghost whose vengeful spirit has infected the very house itself. Furthermore, in order to maintain itself, the house must literally devour any virgin girl who steps within it. It is at this point that Hausu resoundingly turns against its first half, and the opening scenes' creepy yet chaste fetishizing of the young girls gives way to an explosive sexuality so uncontainable that it literally permeates and animates the physical environment that they inhabit. It is also at this point that Hausu takes on the structure of a conventional modern horror film, with the girls being picked off one by one by a variety of gory means. But the nature of those means, given that it's the house itself that is implementing them--combined with the delirious, candy colored nightmare of their presentation--makes those sequences anything but conventional. The scene in which we watch Melody getting eaten, and then digested, by a grand piano is probably the most memorable, but there are a number of others that equal it in terms of their combined horror and absurdity. Obayashi here performs a neat (and, to my mind, never repeated) trick by drawing on the queasy, hallucinatory imagery of Italian horror directors like Argento, while replacing their languid, dreamy pacing with the sugar rush velocity of a particularly demented Saturday morning cartoon. The result is as intoxicating as it is overwhelming.     Hausu, perhaps surprisingly, dates very well. Despite its surface appearance, it manages to escape itself being 1970s kitsch by presciently recognizing that kitsch for what it was in its own time. From that vantage point, it can treat those treacly feel good excesses, not with nostalgic affection or condescending dismissal, but as a telling symptom of something malignant underneath. It may just be wishful thinking, but I like to believe that it's no coincidence that Hausu came out in the year commonly associated with the birth of punk--that, though not apparent on the surface, hidden within it is a mischievous punk sensibility. After all, what better symbol of everything that punk rose up against than the smiley face? If Obayashi did not officially count himself among punk's practitioners, he at least attacked that symbol and everything it stood for with a bile and passion equal to theirs. Hausu also benefits greatly by comparison to contemporary Japanese horror movies, which typically suffer from their makers' grim determination to make every moment pregnant with ominousness and foreboding--with the end result being films that are pretty much uniformly tedious and annoying. In contrast, Hausu, a film that is rich with humor and a subversive sense of play, not only delivers a number of effective scares, but also manages to be profoundly disturbing as a whole. At a time when it is becoming distressingly apparent that the Japanese have forgotten how to make horror movies that are actually scary, it might just be that their film industry could take a lesson from Hausu. Perhaps they could learn from it that their taking the horror genre too seriously could be the very thing that is leeching it of all of its horror, and that it's time to bring a sense of fun and mischief back into the process. The American film industry, on the other hand, should continue in their benevolent ignorance of Hausu, because no one wants to see a remake of it starring cast members of Gossip Girl.     So, if you think that Hausu is for you, that's the good news. The bad news is that, though long a soft and grainy staple of the grey market, Hausu is, as of this writing, only legitimately available as a German PAL region DVD without English subtitles. That shouldn't be too much of a deterrent, however, because its simple story and emphasis on visuals make it a perfect example of the type of film that's easy to enjoy without understanding the spoken language. Still, given the ready availability of so many old Japanese genre titles on the market, it's somewhat astonishing that no one has seen fit to give a film as ripe for cult appreciation as Hausu a proper American release. Mind you, it's no Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, but it still deserves to be seen. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Studio: Toho, Year: 1977 posted by Todd at 1:03 PM | 4 Comments Monday, March 05, 2007Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1985, United States/some Eastern European country. Starring Christopher Lee, Annie McEnroe, Reb Brown, Marsha Hunt, Sybil Danning, Judd Omen. Directed by Phillipe Mora. Written by Gary Brandner and Robert Sarno. Buy it from Amazon
 . There are those among us who, in a moment of moral weakness, find themselves unwilling or unable to turn away from a grisly situation. As to the psychological motivations behind this tendency, they are legion and vary from person to person. Perhaps it is a desire to affirm that someone is worse off than you, that even though your rent is overdue and your daughter is hopped up on the goofballs, at least you're not a corpse being yanked out of some twisted, smoldering wreckage along the interstate. Perhaps, instead, it is little more than a reflex reaction symptomatic of the seemingly insatiable human hunger for spectacle, however grim it may be. Perhaps, in some, it is a genuine perversity, a wicked satisfaction gleaned from witnessing the suffering of others. And finally, it may be that some of us look out of guilt -- that we are torn between not making a gawking spectacle of suffering and ignoring suffering. Whatever the case may be, the urge is there, commonplace, and hardly solely the purview of the misanthropic. It manifests itself in a variety of forms, everything from slowing down to stare at a traffic accident to gathering on the street corner to gawk at a crime scene to greedily devouring the sensationalist news about the sordid downfall of a celebrity. Or, in my own peculiar case, it manifests itself in a complete inability to not watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf every single time I run across it on television.
I have no reasonable explanation for my addiction. At least heroin makes you feel good for a little while. I garner no pleasure from my addiction to Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. There is no benefit to me in staying up until three in the morning yet again just because Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf happens to be on. And yet there I am, never the less, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf on the television, a tumbler of bourbon in my hand to help dull the pain, and a deep-seated loathing of myself gnawing away at my very soul as I catch myself tapping my foot in time with that horrid pseudo new wave band that appears in the opening scene. But as much as my hate myself in the morning, as much as my addiction may cripple me socially and bankrupt me morally, I can still go to bed at night with a single dab of salve to soothe my troubled conscience: at least I wasn't in the movie, which is more than venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee can say.
In 1981, up and coming horror film luminary Joe Dante (who would give the world one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time in 1984, and had already given the world Piranha) teamed up with writers Terence Winkless and John Sayles (of all people!) to direct The Howling, an updated werewolf tale released at roughly the same time as John Landis' An American Werewolf in London. It was a good year to be a werewolf (better than the year in which Van Helsing was released, anyway), because both films were greeted with enthusiasm by fans and praise from a number of hot shot critics. Sequels were in order, but while Landis' film had to wait roughly sixteen years to get its first godawful sequel, Dante's own werewolf film wasted no time. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, also known as Stirba: Werewolf Bitch, was released in 1985 and quickly went down in history (and flames) as one of the worst goddamned movies anyone had ever seen. I'm not really one to argue -- almost nothing about this film resembles anything remotely close to competence. The script by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner (who's never written anything but Howling scripts) is dreadful. Direction by Phillipe Mora is passable, but there's a reason he didn't go on from here to direct movies that weren't Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills. The acting is almost uniformly awful, anchored as it is by none other than our good friend Reb Brown, last seen on Teleport City back when we reviewed Yor, The Hunter from the Future, and an embarrassed venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who must have been thinking that all those Dracula roles he bitched about his whole career were looking pretty good now that he had appear in movies like this or the one where he fights Chuck Norris. Oh, there's also Sybil Danning as the alternate title titular werewolf queen (or bitch), Stirba. And some chick named Annie McEnroe who was in Warlords of the 21st Century.
And yet, as undeniably bad as it all is, there I am, every time it's on television. And what makes it worse is that I own the DVD! I own the goddamn DVD, and still I watch it whenever it's on television. Let this be a lesson to anyone who ever takes my advice on anything; if you ever find yourself faced with a difficult decision and ask yourself, "What would Keith from Teleport City do?" then your immediate next thought should be, "Who cares? That guy watches Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf all the time." Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is one of those early movies, alongside classics such as Beastmaster and Revenge of the Ninja that I got to see thanks to a friend with cable television (I couldn't just have him tape them for me though, because while he had a newfangled VHS machine, my family went Betamax). But even nostalgia can't excuse my adoration of this truly unwatchable film. Things start out OK. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee shows up to harass Ben (Reb Brown), who is supposed to be the brother of one of the chicks who turned into a werewolf in the first movie. Ben and and his girlfriend Jenny Templeton (Annie McEnroe) don't take too kindly to this nine-foot-tall guy lurking around the cemetery during the sister's funeral, constantly walking up to them and, in gravest tone imaginable, delivering the line, "Your sister is a werewolf," over and over. When, during the next full moon, the sister does spring forth from her tomb and make with the lycanthropy, they are more disposed toward believing venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, whose character is named Stefan Crosscoe (oh good grief -- did a spooky high schooler come up with that name? At least it wasn't Chris I. Fixtion or something).
Somehow through a series of events I don't care about, they all end up going to Transylvania together, because it is the heart of werewolf power. But they don't do that before venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee gets to go to the punky club and put on a pair of those plastic wrap-around new wave sunglasses. If any scene justifies watching this movie, this is it. But when, "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses" is the high point of your movie, you know you're in trouble. Actually, pretty much everyone agrees that if there is a high point in this movie, it's "werewolf orgy," but we haven't gotten to that part yet, and honestly, it's not as good as " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses." When "werewolf orgy" isn't as good as "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses," you're in ever deeper trouble than you were when it was just " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses."
So next we're in one of those secret warehouse clubs where the usual assortment of movie punks/new wavers/dominatrixes/neon freaks are hanging out listening to a crummy band called Babel -- and by "crummy," I mean, yes, I did search around for mp3s. I couldn't help myself. While the band goes through their wolfy song about howling (what a coincidence!), a hot chick named Mariana picks up a couple of typical goofball movie punks who I'm sure had names like Razor and Chainlink and Puke. She shows them her boobs (quite nice of her), then turns into...I guess it's a werewolf. It looks more like one of those monkey men from 2001 though. Anyway, she gets all hairy and toothy and rips them apart. When The Rolling Stones wrote the song "Brown Sugar," it was about Marsha Hunt, the actress who plays Mariana. I bet they didn't envision her turning into a hairy monkey-woman werewolf, but then, maybe they did. I mean, it is the Stones, after all. Whatever, she's still dead sexy, had a huge 'fro in the 1970s, and we all saw her die in Dracula A.D. 1972, though I doubt she and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee looked upon Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf as a grade-A reunion. It turns out that Stirba, the queen bitch of the werewolves, lives in a castle in Transylvania, which in this movie is a country rather than a region or town, and the seat of werewolfery (which I prefer over lycanthropy) rather than the seat of vampirism -- but whatever, man. Any chance to needle venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee about the Dracula movies is worth taking. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, Ben, and Jenny must unite to destroy Stirba and her werewolf legion, which includes Brown Sugar and Mickey the escaped con who hung out with Pee Wee Herman. That actor's name is Judd Omen. Seriously, man, if they had named one of the characters Judd Omen I would have complained about that, but then it turns out there's really a guy named Judd Omen. I hope he hung out at some point with Thurl Ravenscroft. When Stirba and her minions aren't messing around with punker dudes at new wave clubs in Los Angeles, they're busy having werewolf orgies where they all grow lots of hair but don't quite turn into werewolves, then writhe about on the big ornate bed in Stirba's antechamber. It's sort of like watching a bunch of hirsute hippies makin' out, except with more growling.
While this is going on, our trio of half-assed vampire killers, err, werewolf hunters, show up and, in one of the movie's most nonsensical scenes, stumble upon a car wreck out in the middle of nowhere. While all the colorful, toothless local peasants vanish into thin air, Jenny, Ben, and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are attacked by werewolves. In broad daylight. And after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee battles the murderous locals, he sort of just randomly wanders off and says, "We'll meet back in the village." But aren't they all going to the village right now? Why the hell does venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee wander off at random, except to go weep quietly behind a nearby tree? Sure enough, as soon as he's gone, one of the dead daylight werewolf things springs back to life to menace our remaining heroes for a little while. When we finally get to the town, it's one of those typical bad Eastern European movie towns where everyone is a medieval peasant clad in a colorful array of rags and potato sacks and ill-fitting wool suits, and they all spend every waking hour cackling insanely and making "crazy eyes." We spend a lot of time watching people wander around the town square or chase midgets in disturbing Punchinello masks. I'd say it's pointless, but this movie pretty much lost any point it might have had right after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee took off those sunglasses. So basically, after some random town nonsense, some lame werewolf ambushes, and that werewolf orgy seemingly playing on loop, we discover that Stirba and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are brother and sister (oh SNAP Stefan Crisco or whatever your name is -- your sister is a werewolf, too!), and it is his destiny to put an end to her reign of terror, which seems to consist largely of killing jerks at new wave clubs and inconveniencing the local fall festival or whatever it was that was going on in that town. Eastern European towns are always having some sort of festival in the town square, complete with medieval era puppet shows instead of discotheques and David Hasselhoff concerts like actual Eastern Europeans like. No matter what year it is, they're always watching medieval puppet shows, and no matter what time of year it is, they're having a festival. It's sort of how any film that has a chase scene through a Chinatown will run into a lion dance or dragon parade or something, no matter what time of year it is, like they have those things every day in Chinatown.
Oh folks, it's just terrible. And when I sit down and try to write about this film, it becomes even more evident just how bad it really is. And when the true depths to which this film plummets become thusly crystal clear, my fondness for it is only amplified. In fact, right now, I'm sitting here, writing this, and thinking to myself, "Man, this movie really is horrible. I wish I was watching it right now." This week, I will have the choice to either go out and get a lapdance from a cute Cuban chick or stay home and watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, and right now I can't decide!!! I guess we should go step by step, and start with the acting. I don't think I really need to even comment on Reb Brown. I'm pretty sure the big lug might not even know he ever had a film career. He goes through pretty much every film with the same dazed look of confusion on his face, and he doesn't stretch his acting chops here. Man, I wish someone had put him, Sam Jones, and Miles O'Keefe in the same movie. That would have been a classic. And as for Annie McEnroe -- really, do you even care? She looks like Jamie Lee Curtis' little sister, and neither she nor Reb serve any real purpose than to spout lines like, "What's going on?" and "Stefan!" Similarly, Brown Sugar and Mickey from Pee Wee's Big Adventure are mostly there to wear a leather catsuit (what self-respecting canine would wear a catsuit???) and a jaunty circus knife-thrower gypsy outfit respectively. Sybil Danning is in the film primarily to preside over her werewolf court, then rip her bodice open. Oh, and she wears possibly one of the worst outfits ever made -- the pointy-hipped baggy leather catsuit covered in angular mirrors. What in the the hell???
Sybil Danning has never really done it for me. From all I hear, she's a spectacularly friendly and charming person, and I would love to hang out with her for hours on end and listen to ridiculous stories about the making of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf or Panther Squad. But I'd like to do that with David F. Freidman, too, and I certainly don't think of him as a sex symbol. But as a sex object to fawn over, I think I was turned off by her frizzy blonde 80s hair. No matter how nice the boobs and legs may be -- and on Sybil, they are both spectacular -- frizzy blonde 80s hair will kill it for me. I'm sure Sybil Danning stayed up crying late into the night because some twelve-year-old kid thought to himself, "No, I would rather jerk off to Marsha Hunt." But still, the makers of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf must have known that Sybil's boobs were a much bigger potential attraction than her flashy animated laser beam showdown with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, because her bodice-ripping scene (or whatever you call a leather halter top plastered with giant mirrors) is repeated over and over in the movie -- twice during the end credits alone. I guess they paid her for a boob flash, and this was their way of getting their money's worth out of that couple of seconds of upper nudity. And if it seems like I'm base and degrading because I'm talking about Sybil's boobs instead of her acting in this movie -- trust me. I am doing her a favor. And then there's venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who intones every single line with -- well, honestly, it's pretty much the same acting job he always does. No more, but no less, even though the material isn't just below him -- it's also below Reb Brown. "Material not worthy of Reb Brown" is really something, but venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee still gives it the ol' college try and treats every single line, no matter how ludicrous, as if it was the single most important line of dialogue ever uttered. That said, venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's acting style is not well-suited to making this movie more tolerable, and here in lies the big difference between him and fellow venerated horror film icon Vincent Price. Price would have had a field day with this movie. Lee is way too solemn, which is my polite "I respect venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee" way of saying he's boring. In the right role, his booming voice and towering presence is extremely effective. But it's pretty much the only trick he has. He lacks the versatility of Price, or even of fellow Hammer horror alumnus and venerated horror film icon Peter Cushing.
Not to say that it isn't amusing to watch venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee go about the role of Stefan with the same approach, method, and gravitas as he did that of Sauruman in The Lord of the Rings. And I will always appreciate that whenever I watch one of those pompous interviews where Lee drones on and on about literary tradition and the craft of acting, or about the tragedy of being typecast as Dracula, I can always let out some of the hot air by remembering fondly his time spent getting kicked in the face by Chuck Norris or shooting glowing beams at Sybil Danning, who is wearing a suit of leather and mirrors. Lee's acting actually works well with the movie's overall tone. Where Joe Dante's original was fused with his usual tongue-in-cheek humor, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf plays it completely straight. As far as Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is concerned, this is nothing short of the greatest story ever told, and it goes about the whole nutty affair with a seriousness and complete lack of humor generally only found in adaptations of the various books of the Bible (of which, this might be one, as the whole film opens with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee solemnly reading from a giant leather-bound tome while he and that skeleton from the old House on Haunted Hill float around in space).
As goofy as the acting may be, the sets and special effects are even worse. The Howling was famous for its revolutionary (within the world of special effects, anyway) werewolf transformation scenes, which may have been overshadowed by the same in An American Werewolf in London but remain impressive never the less. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf achieves its transformation scenes by showing Sybil Danning making "growly face," then cutting to someone else making growly face, then cutting back to Sybil, only this time they've pasted some mangy hair to her chest. There's almost no effort put into making any of these werewolves look like werewolves. They mostly look like humans with some fake hair pasted to them. The town/country/region of Transylvania is realized via a painting of some hills and a castle, then one street carnival set. An annoying guy does get his eyes gouged out, but other than that, we're in pretty shoddy special effects territory this time out. And the werewolf lore is almost as jumbled and hodge-podge as Underworld, which may or may not be a worse film than Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. It's really a toss-up. Silver bullets, it turns out, are not what kills werewolves. No, you have to use titanium bullets. Isn't titanium an alloy? I'm no metallurgist, but isn't it not a naturally occurring material? How can a werewolf's fatal weakness be something that didn't even exist prior to whenever the hell some guy mixed some stuff together and said, "Hey! Titanium!" But no fear, because if the grubby peasants of yore had no titanium bullets with which to dispatch the werewolves, they could always use the trusty old wooden stakes. I guess a wooden stake will kill pretty much anything in Transylvania. Oh yeah -- garlic wards off all evil, too. And there's apparently a full moon every night. As bad as all this may be, at least the werewolves just go out and see crappy bands that only have two songs in their entire set, then they go have hairball orgies. I'll take that any day over yet another scene of Larry Talbot looking dejected and moaning about his terrible curse.
As bad as Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is, it's also strangely compelling. Lots of people try to make films this flaky and weird on purpose, and it never works. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is one of those rare occurrences where a tremendous lack of care, talent, and sanity combined to make a completely warped and absolutely awful movie that never the less has immense entertainment value, provided werewolf orgies and midgets getting thrown out of windows are what you consider entertaining (and why wouldn't you?). Mora pads out his film with inexplicable cut-aways to puppets, people in masks, fake werewolf heads, owls, some complex grim reaper clockwork scene, and whatever the hell else he found lying around the place. It gives the film a completely bonkers sense of surrealism, though I will bet good money it was less an artistic decision and more an "I really don't give a crap" decision. Whatever the case, the end result is an off-kilter weirdness I find endearing. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf isn't the worst movie ever made, but it's pretty bad. Still, I really enjoy it. I know I try to cover for the fact by pretending that it is in some way painful for me to watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, but that's not true. I lied. I experience no pain. Partially, this is because I died inside a long time ago. But also it's because I just like Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf despite its being a truly odious example of filmmaking. And I like that as bad and as goofy as it is, this isn't the worst movie in Sybil Danning's filmography. Hell, it's not even the worst movie in venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's filmography. And yes -- as much as I have insulted the film, as much as I have poked fun at it and told you how awful it is, rest assured the next time I'm flipping through my DirecTV programming guide and see that Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is on, I will be on that channel, bourbon in hand, giddy with the anticipation of seeing werewolf orgies, mirror-plate jodhpurs, and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee in plastic wrap-around new wave sunglasses. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Horror: Werewolves, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Reb Brown, Stars: Sybil Danning, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 3:56 PM | 11 Comments Monday, February 05, 2007Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1989, Japan. Starring Yasunori Matsumoto, Koichi Yamadera, Yoko Asagami, Daisuke Gori, Tomohiro Nishimura, Maya Okamoto, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Yumi Takada, Norio Wakamoto. Directed by Hideki Takayama. Written by Sho Aikawa.
I was having a hard time starting this review, and I'm not sure why. I don't mean that I was caught in some moral dilemma, wondering if I should dare discuss such a filthy, irredeemable piece of trash -- I think we all know how such a moral dilemma would hash out if I'm involved. I guess it was just a case of writer's block, or exhaustion. Or maybe it was the fact that there were just so many things to say, so many approaches that could be taken in discussing the source material, that I was overwhelmed. Perhaps even spoiled for choice. And under a bit of pressure. An epic as vast and sprawling and serious as this demands an appropriately grave and serious demeanor. Would I do the subject justice? Would my review be deserving of such a monumental work of art? In the end, I simply had to accept that sometimes words don't come easy, even to a rambling windbag like me, but like the titular character of the Overfiend, while words may not come easily, they must come never the less. Which brings me to the disagreeable preface that must be applied to a review of a film of this nature. As regular readers know, I pride myself in ardently defending the standards and decency of the community. Luckily, since the community to which I refer is the Internet, which means pretty much anything short of Hitler jerking off on Jesus while the Savior makes sweet love to a little boy can be considered decent and acceptable. Still, even with the community standards of the Internet thus established, I feel like I should warn some of our less seasoned and no doubt happier readers that the movie about which we're going to talk today is a work of questionable morality and ill repute.
At this point in my career, I don't think any recreated act on film or video could manage to shock or offend me. Amuse, perhaps. Disappoint, sure. But when you've been at this for as long as I have, the disconnect between make-believe and reality becomes crystal clear, and once you've managed that, there's not much point in getting offended by goofy make-believe sleaze. But I understand that not all of you share this particular immunity toward offense, for a variety of valid personal reasons, so allow me to warn you now: Legend of the Overfiend is utter and absolute filth. Unless, like me, what was human in you died a long time ago, you will find this series inexcusably tasteless, offensive, and perhaps even upsetting. In a couple weeks, I'll be reviewing the ridiculously fun and enjoyable Bollywood caper Shaan, and I suggest that if you have heart or soul left in your being, you simply rejoin us then and give this whole horrible Legend of the Overfiend thing a miss. On the other hand, if you find cartoon tentacle porn more absurd than upsetting, and if you want to slog through a film that is indeed filthy and wretched, but also one of the single most important titles in the history of anime in the United States, then steel yourself, make sure your boss isn't working (I'm writing this at work -- I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be reading it there), and prepare to submerge yourself in a series that is impressive both for how callously offensive and perverse it strives to be while also striving to be colossally epic and vast in scale -- sort of like the Old Testament.
When, during the summer of 2006, Teleport City decided to dig about in the waters of anime from the 1980s, we mentioned on more than one occasion that the eighties were probably the most glorious decade of unfettered excess and decadence in the anime world. The giant robots and melancholy space pirates of the 1970s gave way to hot chicks in battle armor, exploding heads, and the now infamous birth of tentacle porn, among other things. While today's anime market may be choked with cheap hentai titles full of tentacle rape and nurses pooping on each other, it's neither as shocking nor as notable today as it was in the eighties, for two main reasons. First, the eighties did it first, and just about everything that happens today is derivative of the sleazy pioneers of the 1980s. Modern sleazeball anime may have plumbed further into the depths of human perversions and replaced magical demon bodily fluids with actual human bodily fluids, but given how mainstreamed porn and sexual deviance has become (and God bless it!), even the most shockingly sick and twisted modern hentai lacks the punch of its forefathers, if for no other reason than we've seen it all before. I don't know what it says about me or society that a title like Cool Devices can come out, and my reaction is a decadent sigh of boredom and, "Oh, ho hum. He's peeing on his sister." Second, modern hentai (for you people who don't take time to acquaint yourself with esoteric terms, "hentai" is what people call porn anime so they don't have to call it porn anime) exists largely and almost exclusively within the confines of the porn ghetto. There is very little, if any, cross-over between hentai and the more mainstream world of shrieking blonde ninjas in orange jumpsuits telling me to "believe it!" Of course, I speak only of official production anime; if one needs to find the crossover between porn and mainstream anime, one need only turn to our dear old friend, the Internet, which will allow you to access a whole world of fanfic in which the characters of Naruto lick each others buttholes while fending off an endless attack of bad grammar and spelling mistakes. But that's fanfic, and it's a ghetto all its own. Only Dragonball filk is lower.
There was plenty of underground hentai in the 80s, of course, but there were also several titles which crossed the line (in more ways than one) and either flirted with or achieved legitimate mainstream crossover success. Here in the United States, when anime broke in the latter half of the Reagan era, it was defined primarily by three titles, though only two are ever really acknowledged as having reigned supreme, while the third is filed away as sort of this guilty curiosity that no one really saw, but don't let that sort of anime history revisionism fool you. There were three king hell titles: Akira was the obvious top of the heap, followed by the OVA Bubblegum Crisis, which dominated the home video market for reasons I still cannot fathom to this day. I guess it was all we had at the time, and it was better than watching MD Geist. The third title comes to us courtesy of one of the creators of the classic anime series Yamato, aka Starblazers in the United States, and even though Akira is named time and again as the defining moment in 80s anime and one of the landmark accomplishments in the history of anime as a whole, it was the bastard son of a writer-director-producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki -- The Nish, as he has become known lately -- that really defined anime in the mainstream press. In between creating Starblazers, delighting generations with Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight, and shooting cannons off on his private yacht, Nishizaki found time to serve as producer for a new series which, unlike all his previous ideas, wasn't just a rehash of Yamato. Following the lead of Lovecraft-inspired horror that flirted with graphic sex presented to us in Wicked City, Nishizaki decided that the one thing wrong with that movie was that it only featured some sex thrown in with its violence, and never had the guts to show full-on penetration of a woman by a gigantic demon penis.
And so, as the 90s came to a close and the window for getting a high-profile work of such decadence and depravity was closing, Nishizaki collected together a crew that included director Hideki Takayama (still brand new to the game in 1989, but he's since gone on to direct all sorts of screwed-up demon rape porn, and for some reason, Sakura Wars) and writer Sho Aikawa (who was fresh off the popular title Vampire Princess Miyu and would go on to write for Fullmetal Alchemist), and together, they made a little OVA series called Urotsukidoji, more popularly known as Legend of the Overfiend. This is a pretty dubious assembly of talent, and one sort of has to stretch the meaning of the word talent to really fit them all in. After all, Nishizaki hadn't really come up with anything memorable since Starblazers, and he seemed to be batshit insane in addition. Sho Aikawa -- who I'd like to think is the same Sho Aikawa who would go on to acting fame in Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive trilogy, but I'm pretty sure it isn't -- may have achieved some degree of respectability with Vampire Princess Miyu, but that was flirtation with respectability, at best, and you have to do much better work if you want to make people forget about you also having written Dog Soldier and Angel Cop. And director Hideki Takayama? Other than becoming the go-to guy for Overfiend sequels and rip-offs, he doesn't have much to offer. But the fact remains that while they may not have been impressive names, they were still names, and they had some legitimate work under the belt. And The Nish, crazy or not, still had Yamato era clout that helped make his own private exploration of ridiculously grotesque and pornographic extremes more of a high profile release than the average piece of hentai naughtiness.
But whatever respectability the Overfiend saga -- and porn aside, it is a saga, complete with a vast and ambitious personal mythology and epic scope -- may have squeezed out in Japan is nothing compared to what happened to the thing when it hit the United States. It became a cult phenom that, for a brief time, very nearly rivaled the status of Akira, albeit with a decidedly different tone in those who talked about it. I remember seeing it for the first time in 1990, when a friend who was heavy into trading VHS tapes to get obscure horror films, ended up with a copy on a tape where it shared space with some Japanese porn movie about a woman pursued by a garbage bag containing her murdered husband, and an underground video of some chick performing "hanadensha," or "pussy arts," such as blowing up balloons, shooting a dart gun, smoking a cigarette, and, umm, filling herself up with squirming, live eels. Yeah, I really don't have any excuse whatsoever, other than it was pretty late, and we sure did laugh a lot. It was just the first episode of Overfiend, fuzzy and with no translation, so all we really knew was that there was a spectacle on the screen the likes of which we'd never really seen, not even in Wicked City. And we weren't the only ones. Bootleg copies of this "ridiculously screwed up thing from Japan" were circulating like wild fire throughout the cult film underworld, and while many looked on with awe-inspired disgust, that doesn't change the fact that many looked on, always corrupted by a friend waving a VHS tape and saying, "Dude, you have got to see this!" So many saw it, in fact, that the Overfiend eventually crept into mainstream consciousness and became the poster boy for how hideous and corrupt anime was. Not just porn anime, but all anime. It didn't matter if it was the gender bending shenanigans of Ranma 1/2, the turgid teen romance of Kigamure Orange Road, or the epic science fiction of Akira. Overfiend, as far as the local newscaster was concerned, embodied them all, and all anime looked like and was as perverse as Urotsukidoji. If only. I might have finished Kigamure Orange Road if that had been the case.
Of course, it's not like anime was totally innocent of the charges. The 80s were, as we've said, pretty packed to the gills with messed up stuff. If anything, The Overfiend was simply the trends of the 1980s taken to their most logical extreme, or as logical as Nishizaki was ever capable of being, and exploding in the final year of that decade with all the gruesome force of the Overfiend's orgasm blowing some chick's head off in a messy splash of blood, brains, and semen. It was the last gasp of the twisted, free-for-all of the 1980s. After that, anime settled down, and the porn settled to the bottom of the barrel. In time, when old timers would go back and talk about the seminal movies of the 1980s, they would neglect to mention the most "seminal" of them all. If Urotuskidoji was mentioned, it was usually as an offhanded aside, or a sneering condemnation of how this tasteless abomination ruined anime and made everyone thing anime fans were all a bunch of murderous pervs. Rarely will they mention that, for better or for worse, damn near everyone who watched anime in those days saw it. Rarely will they mention that it was, again for better or for worse, a defining title of the era, and that among other dubious claims to fame, it was the first anime feature (when the OVA episodes were edited together to create a feature film) to be released in both dubbed and subtitled format not just to U.S. home video -- but to U.S. movie theaters as well.
The Overfiend gets no respect, and frankly, it doesn't deserve much. The animation is sometimes hit or miss, occasionally nicely realized, and in some cases bordering on great; the story is scatter-brained; and yes, it's packed full of misogynistic violence toward women, underaged sex (though the warning at the front of the film swears the high school characters are all over the age of nineteen), and rape that culminates in exploding heads. It's just not very good. But it does have its moments, and good or not, it played a huge role in defining the formative years of anime, and deserves, if nothing else, to be recognized for its contributions (be there good or ill) and its rightful place in the history of anime. So it was that I decided that, while I wasn't going to champion the series (I save my Nishizaki championing for Odin), I would at least try to put it in it's proper context, and I would do so with the help, should they chose to offer it, of the great and mighty torchbearers of celebrating "old school" anime, the Anime World Order podcast. Of course, they're a podcast, and I'm a written review website, so I don't know exactly how this collaboration will work out, but that's all part of the fun.
Of course, as soon as Gerald from the AWO took me up on the offer, I had to figure out exactly how I was going to deal with such a notorious and admittedly irredeemable piece of filth. The Overfiend, I mean, not Gerald. In my younger years, I would have simply indulged in it with reckless abandon, celebrating the filth and the fury with slimy screencaps and interminable gusto. I am older now, and not so prone to adolescent fits of petty offensiveness, but I'm also still not offended by things that are saucy or stupid, or in the case of Urotsukidoji, both saucy and stupid. And in the end, Urotsukidoji is definitely stupider than it is offensive. In fact, I find the whole thing so absurd, so totally ludicrous as to be inoffensive, because seriously, man, how can anyone take this crap seriously? There are much scarier things in the world and much scarier things in the world of anime, and they are called moe and harem shows, but we'll come to those later. So in deference to my more sensitive readers who do not share my callous disregard for what you humans call morality, I'll do my best to exercise some degree of restraint, which may be an odd thing to do in the case of Urotsukidoji -- but only just barely, because while I may claim that the purpose of this review is to put this much maligned piece of trash in its rightful place in the pantheon of anime, my real motivation is simply to have a good laugh, which ultimately, is about all you should get from something as completely goofy as the Overfiend.
Our story begins with narration courtesy of a guy who seems to be competing with Tomisaburo Wakiyama as Ogami Ito for the deepest voice in the world. He lays out the basics for us -- demon world and human world, one intruding on the other -- the usual. And there's a chosen one who will rise up and cleanse the world and unite us all while demons with six breasts do it doggy style to clue parents in to the fact that they shouldn't have rented this movie for their kids, even though the kids themselves are no doubt appreciative. Right away Nishizaki clues us in to the fact that there's not going to be much in the way of originality on display in this story. We then meet the nominal hero of our story, a goofy peeping tom named Nagumo, who alternates his days between peeking in the girls' locker room and being licked on the cheek by the number one ace hero of the basketball court during some weird Japanese high school sport in which basketball games are accompanied by a girls' gymnastics routine. Watching everything from up in the rafters is Amano, the new kid at school who no one seems to notice has catlike whiskers. Amano is searching for the titular Overfiend, the super-being foretold by prophecy to be the savior of the world. Amano is pretty convinced that it's that cheek-licking basketball guy, but Amano's sexy sister Megumi is convinced that it's someone else, possibly nerdy perv Nagumo. Either way, once again we see that ancient beings relying on a "chosen one" is always a stupid idea, because the chosen one is always some kind of a chump. Here we get a face-licking basketball star or a masturbating nerd. Nice going, prophecy of old. When next we meet the brave and noble Nagumo, he is slinking into the school to peep on Ameki, the sweet girl next door on whom he has a crush, and one of the female teachers. When it turns out that the teacher intends to sex up the young student, Nagumo assumes his standard position of peeking in. But when it's further revealed that the teacher is, in fact, a hideous demonic monster that is going to rape Akemi via a twitching tangle of giant tentacle penises that spurt glowing neon goo, well, Nagumo still just sort of squats there peeping through the crack in the doorway. It's not until Amano shows up that the sexual assault is halted thanks to some good ol' magical intervention that results in exploding heads.
The good thing about Legend of the Overfiend is that it doesn't try to trick you into thinking it's something it's not. If you are going to be offended and disgusted by the movie, it makes sure you know that from the very first few minutes. That way, at least you haven't wasted your time. Pretty much everything that will jam pack the rest of the series running time is put up front for your consideration in this opening scene, so you can't say Nishizaki didn't warn you. Personally, as I said before, the whole scenario is so utterly silly and juvenile and presented in such an over-the-top manner that it's really hard for me to feel offended in any way. I would have loved to have been sitting in on The Nish and his crew when they were writing the story for this absurd exercise in the extreme. Although the story itself is presented in a serious fashion, I can't imagine anyone taking it the least bit seriously when they were writing it. But then again, Nishizaki is batshit insane, so who knows? Whatever sexual and psychological hang-ups he and the society in which he lived might have had are certainly laid bare in The Overfiend. There is an obvious fear and lack of understanding in regards to women. Lesbians are all secretly drooling demons who have hidden their giant penises behind a veneer of femininity. And even as they paint a terrified phobia of homosexuality, they fetishize the penis to a degree that would even make Tom of Finland blush. If you are the type to analyze such things, it's worth noting that The Nish made his millions working on the Yamato series. The original battleship Yamato was a massive World War II ship that was supposed to be the pride and joy of the Japanese people and a symbol of their might. Its construction bankrupted the Japanese military, and during it's first major combat operation, it was sunk by American airplanes. Still, however, the Yamato is held up by many -- mostly men -- as a great symbol of pride despite it being a catastrophic failure. More than a few people have said that the Yamato was nothing more than the "big dick" syndrome. Theirs was the biggest and that made them the baddest. Never mind that the thing turned out to be impotent.
So decades later, Nishizaki resurrects the myth of Yamato's grandeur by creating a cartoon series in which the original ship is recovered from its watery grave and turned into a spaceship that will save humanity. If The Nish had his history straight, then there would have been tremendous fanfare and pomp as the space battle cruiser Yamato was launched. Then it would have been shot down by aliens a few minutes later. But that would have been a pretty lame television series, and since Yamato is one of my favorites, I'm glad Nishizaki didn't go that route. And ultimately, I reckon championing the old Yamato battleship is no different than any other country championing their lost causes. Anyway, after Yamato, Nishizaki made a show about a submarine that's turned into a spaceship -- completely different from the Yamato series, right? Anyway, you may notice that Nishizaki -- who also happens to be a gun and cannon nut, as well as sporting a fondness for speed boats and big yachts -- seems to have a preoccupation with things that are long and cylindrical in shape. And then comes The Overfiend...I've never seen Nishizaki naked, and likely never will, so I can't say what he's compensating for. However, it's pretty obvious that the man has built an entire career around his obsession with his own penis. Overfiend is just the most overt example.
Anyway, having established that this movie is going to be an affront to all that is decent and tasteful in the world, Overfiend then goes on to lay out the rest of its plot, which has got to be one of the most complex and sprawling mythologies ever grafted on to cheap animation and porn. Nishizaki may be obsessed with dicks, he may fear and/or hate women, he may be ripping off Wicked City, but no one can say that the man didn't have vision or put work into the back story of his infamous masterpiece of the grotesque. Spread over the first few episodes of Legend of the Overfiend, we get a story that spans thousands of years and involves everything from depraved captains of industry to Nazi madmen, to peeping tom high school students. As Amano and Megumi continue to try and ferret out the Overfiend -- or Chojin -- other forces from the demon realm seek to do the same. This includes such demon assassin hits as messing with that basketball guy during his orgy, offering up a giant possessed demon penis that will make the school's resident nerd ultra-potent and powerful if he chops off his own useless little member and replaces it, and finally sending a wizardy uber-being out to kill Amano. Just when you think Overfiend can't possibly get any sillier, it finds a way.
Eventually, Nagumo realizes his destiny, but to the horror of Megumi and Amano, it's not the destiny they expected -- and for all that is ridiculous about Overfiend, the final revelation that basically, the people who believed in the prophecy just got it all wrong, is a pretty nice writing touch. The series ends on a cliffhanger of sorts -- with Amano shedding his human disguise and attempting to take on the Overfiend himself while vowing to survive the carnage that comes from the inevitable destruction of the world. Unfortunately, the series is never fully resolved. The final two episodes of the OVA end up being post-apocalyptic side stories that don't really go anywhere, and subsequent sequel series' were equally pointless. Eventually, the final Urotsukidoji series was just a remake of the first series. If you've seen Odin and suffered through its non-ending, then you might pick up that this is sort of a thing for Nishizaki. Unfortunately, Overfiend does not end by randomly cutting to a Loudness music video.
Not all the blame (or credit -- whatever) for Urotsukidoji can be laid at the feet of Nishizaki. Urotsukidoji was actually created by manga artist Toshio Maeda in 1986. Maeda was working as a porn manga artist and had gotten bored, he says, with drawing the same mundane crap over and over. He decided that what erotic manga needed was a dash of grotesque fantasy. Blending his erotic manga with a Lovecraft-esque sense of the horrific, Maeda more or less invented the tentacle porn genre -- yes, it's a genre now -- with tentacles and nightmarish abstractions of the penis standing in for actual sexual organs as a way to skirt Japanese censorship laws. When Nishizaki seized upon Urotsukidoji as the source for his next masterpiece of anime, Maeda's position as the father of sick and twisted cartoon porn was cemented. Maeda went on to create several more of the more infamous high-profile hentai titles of the early 1990s, including the terrible Adventure Kid, Demon Beast Invasion, and La Blue Girl. Maeda is infinitely proud of his legacy and has reportedly even said that he wants "Tentacle Master" inscribed on his tombstone. Urotsukidoji remain his defining "masterpiece."
You know, Urotsukidoji is an absolute mess. Although the high concept is interesting and intricate, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And it's still largely just a pornographic rip-off of Wicked City with a bit of Akira thrown in (the scene in which the Overfiend comes full into power and decides to destroy the world is very reminiscent of the finale of Akira). It draws from the same Lovecraftian/H.R. Giger vision of horror as Wicked City. The characters are ridiculous -- after being raped in every orifice by a teacher who turns into a slobbering monster, Akemi shows up for school the next day and is basically no more freaked out than, "Boy, that sure was weird." Nagumo is completely impossible to like as a character. I guess the story is ultimately about Amano and, to a lesser degree, Megumi, which is OK since Amano is the only halfways decently developed character in the whole thing. The animation is often incredibly cheap, with limited motion in most scenes. Effort seems to have been put into the big battles and the demon rape, but that's about it. But for someone as awful as me, there's a perverse enjoyment to be extracted from the nonsense. For one, I admire the ambition of the story. Most of the tentacle porn that would follow in the footsteps of Urotsukidoji was incredibly weak -- basically, they would say, "There's a demon world, and they rape humans and some people fight them," and leave it at that, knowing that the ultimate goal of their little film is to get some lonely perv off, and he's probably not even going to listen to the plot. That wasn't good enough for Nishizaki. The man had created an expansive universe for Yamato, and even for Odin, and he saw no reason that Urotsukidoji shouldn't enjoy the same epic mythology. Never mind that it was an endless parade of filthy porn and callous rape; he was still going to weave a monstrously complex tapestry to serve as the backdrop Also, as cheap as the animation is in most scenes, one does have to admire the imagination that went into the monster design. There are, after all, a lot of monsters in Urotsukidoji, and no two of them look alike. From hulking wolfman-like monsters to grotesque toadmen that dress like Humphrey Bogart, the sheer number of drooling ghouls the art team dreamed up is fascinating. Of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the giant screaming (sometimes literally) cock, but still, points for wickedly sick imagination.
Finally, there's the finale. Although it leaves almost all of the plot threads dangling and is a weak resolution to the story as a whole, the scenes of mass destruction and carnage as the fury of the Chojin and the whole demon world is unleashed on earth are pretty impressive. They obviously cut costs on the rest of the series so they could deliver on the finale, and at least in that respect, Urotsukidoji doesn't disappoint. But it's still pretty foul. I wouldn't really recommend it, although I was just as enthusiastic in the old days about convincing unsuspecting friends that they should watch it. But there is something grotesquely fascinating about the whole artistic abomination. The incredible insanity and over-the-top spectacle of it all trumps the nasty misogynistic edge and juvenile penis-obsession and really transforms Urotsukidoji into a sleazy carnival sideshow. You hate yourself for looking, but you can't turn away. It's that car wreck everyone slows down to gawk at. As wretched as it may be, it has a strangely hypnotic power that can draw even decent people into its world of laughing demons and spurting bodily fluids.
It might be worth watching just so you can see the cast list for the English dub. Apparently, whoever worked on it was a little embarrassed, so the English cast list includes names like Chris Courage, Rebel Joy, Rosie Palmer, and my two personal favorites, Lucy Morales and Jurgen Offen. I would assume that the use of such names is perfectly in tune with Nishizaki's high school locker room level of discourse. The dubbing was done primarily for the theatrical cut of the film, which combined the first few OVA episodes into one film and cut out all the scenes of actual penetration. The Japanese cast (most of whom elected to have their names left out of the credits) actually includes a lot of experienced actors, including a lot of people The Nish roped in off the Yamato series and other Leiji Masumoto works. Tomohiro Nishimura, who voices Amano, even worked on My Neighbor Totoro! It's sort of reminds me of all the respectable actors who showed up in Caligula. If you are interested in the history and evolution of anime, you can't help but pay attention to it. The dang thing played in American movie theaters, for criminey's sake! Newspaper and TV reporters held it up as the sole defining example of "anime," resulting in crusades to have anime banned and all anime fans branded as slobbering perverts, while at the same time, apologists tied themselves in knots trying to write pieces that deconstructed and analyzed the film and trumpeted its artistic merits (it's a cautionary tale about teenage pregnancy or a cautionary tale against blind faith, depending on who's writing the analysis). It was an absolute fiasco, and if nothing else, I always enjoy a good fiasco. As alarmist and shocked as the reaction in the U.S. was, it was even more sensational in England. In the U.K., things were a little more serious. Urotsukidoji practically destroyed the anime market in England, which was only just coming off the high of its infamous Video Nasties years. It took a long time before anime fandom in the U.K. could rebuild itself. Like its titular character, Urotsukidoji destroyed the world so it could rebuild a new and better one in its place. But the fact that it gutted the industry and made anime so incredibly difficult to obtain for many people might be the main reason, far more so than the actual pervy content of the series, so many people harbor a lingering distaste for this anime atrocity. For me, personally, it didn't make much of a difference. I didn't suffer any of the "anime is all porn and anime fans are all perverts" stigma because, frankly, no one at my high school even know what anime was or was in any position to even hear about Overfiend or anime. everyone in Buckner, Kentucky, was too committed to the new Bocephus album at the time. So I have a much better sense of humor about this series than many other people who did get branded as freaks on account of it may have -- even if they were Miyazaki fans and had never seen Overfiend. I mean, hell, as far as anyone I knew was concerned, if you were watching cartoons, period, you were just a nerd.
At the end of the day, Urotsukidoji is all those things and more -- and less. It is filth. It is irredeemable. It does have artistic merit. It lacks artistic merit. It is shameless and offensive. It is ridiculous and harmless. It was the logical illogical extreme and the culmination of the increasingly outrageous nature of anime in the 1980s. You should avoid it like the plague. You should absolutely see it. There's really no way to make sense of the controversy and jungle of opinions surrounding the series. At the end of the day, you really just have to see for yourself. Me, I think it's mildly entertaining in spots and ultimately harmless. In fact, as outrageous as the porn aspects of Urotsukidoji may be, when held up against certain aspects of the modern anime landscape, it seems to be little more than goofy doodling -- quaint, almost, perhaps even innocent. And that's because everything is presents is so preposterous that it can't be taken seriously or really looked at as a corrupting agent. No one is going to go out and mimic the Chojin, after all. Compare that to something like the modern moe or harem show -- things that may not feature a giant demon raping a woman and making her body explode with his semen, but instead paint a world where an unlikable loser with no redeeming qualities never the less finds himself in control of a group of slavishly devoted women who worship him like a god. Or moe, in which female characters are so overly precious and innocent and doe-eyed and pre-pubescent that the whole thing reeks of child pornography. These types of shows are far more insidious and perverse than the flashy, over-the-top idiocy of Urotsukidoji. They often appeal to a segment of the population that really does relate in some way to the lead male character and really does let the portrayal of women and little girls affect their opinions of the real world. I don't see Urotsukidoji operating in quite the same fashion. So yeah. Whatever man. Urotsukidoji is the tawdry piece of pornographic trash you've heard it is; it's also not all that fiendish or corrupting. It's just silly. But it is a major milestone in the history of anime, so if you are the type who needs or wants to understand the evolution of anime, then you pretty much have to deal with Urotsukidoji. It's really not as painful as you think it might be. I mean, I wouldn't watch it with my parents or invite a date over to watch it, but come on: it's so loopy, so genuinely cracked in the head, and so unabashedly over-the-top, and so epic and ambitious that it really stops being offensive porn and starts being nothing more than a laughable freak show. And it does try to be something more than cheap porn. It tries to be really lavish, complex porn. earlier, I made a passing reference to Caligula. Overfiend is definitely the Caligula of anime -- fitting, even, since both films were funded with Penthouse money. They both contain about the same degree of perversion an twisted grotesquery (I'm pretty sure that's not a word -- but it is now!). Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Sexploitation, Year: 1989 posted by Keith at 2:16 AM | 8 Comments Wednesday, September 20, 2006The Snake People
American cinematic portrayals of voodoo, and of anything even related to African or Afro-Caribbean culture, might historically have tended to be reprehensible, but it's hard not to at least enjoy a movie which begins with a cackling dwarf. As the opening scenes unfold, the dwarf (played by ostensible Mexican mainstay Santanon) alternately cackles in riotously evil ecstasy and moans in what seems to be some kind of jealous covetousness. As is the nature of mute, cackling dwarves, his motives tend to be kind of inscrutable.
His actions aren't a whole lot clearer. The film technically begins by talking about the outrageous rites and rituals of primitive peoples, using voodoo as a blanket term for all primitive religion. Especially, the narrator mentions that many people have turned pretty girls into zombies so that they could have beautiful, exotic slaves. Now... look, I realize that there are a wide, wide variety of fetishes out there. But honestly, how many people dig the idea of getting it on with the walking dead? And of those, how many would actually have the resources to make it happen? And after that, they can either choose to live in whatever village they had to travel to forever, or... well, what? It's not like no one will notice the pallid walking corpse boarding the plane with you. And it's not like that corpse is going to get a Visa or a passport, either. The narrator goes on to tell us: "There are many existing opinions about the living death. The truth is that many strange and horrible stories are told, like the one that happened in Korbai to Captain Pierre Labesch." I find those lines fascinating, in part because neither sentence seems quite to link up with the other. It's kind of like in Deathstalker II when the eponymous hero quips, "I don't mind a woman getting a good beating when she deserves one, but that doesn't look like much of a contest"... leaving us to wonder what deserved beatings and credible contests have in common. But hey, I overthink things, and that's one flaw which the narrator of The Snake People staunchly lacks. Scanning a printed world map as the narration closes, the camera zeroes in on islands that someone doodled into the eastern Pacific ocean--and then it's dwarf time. The dwarf is marching along in some kind of grotto, accompanied by some skinny white guy whom I at first mistook to be Pierre Labesch. I should mention that the dwarf, who is actually listed as the character "dwarf," is wearing sunglasses, a weird pimp-like suit, and just going sacrifice-happy on some chickens in this grotto. They stop in front of a mound of dirt that's oddly coffinlike in dimension, and then start digging out what transpires to be... a coffin. After pumping some sacrificed chickens around in the air, and responding to queries from his companion with cackles and groans, dwarf gets the corpse in the coffin to rise up. She looks beautiful for someone whose face is covered in blue "I'm a zombie" powder... We're then brought back into the daylight to find Pierre Labesch and Anabella Vandenberg riding into town. Pierre, it eventually turns out, is coming in to lay the firm hand of the law down on these lax primitive peasants and their black magic, while Anabella is coming to save the world through the miracles of prohibition, stating that "Modern science has shown that alcohol is responsible for 99.2% of all the world's sins." Obviously, they will both succeed wonderfully in their endeavors, because what 1970s patron of cheap horror films would tolerate the depicted failure of militarism and prohibition? Hm. Later, we're introduced to Anabella's uncle, Carl van Mulder, who's played by Boris Karloff in one of his last roles--this was one of his three final films, each made with the same writer/director duo in different configurations, of which The Snake People seems to have been the high point. Take that as you will. Anyway, the film continues on with its plot, but unless you're interested for scholarly reasons as I am, there's really no reason to bother with it. Plots are, in effect, the connections that make sense of otherwise random images; the constellation to the stars of events. The sheer attempt to make any sense out of this movie is only an insult to the viewer's intelligence, even if the viewer is a drunken and mentally debilitated chimp. So, there'll be no more about the plot in this review. Imagewise, there are some scenes of voodooists dancing to music which I guess is meant to be voodoo music, though the central players are always white in films like these. The scenes include several involving the aforementioned dwarf, who tends to either be shaking headless chickens at things or whipping attractive female zombies in some kind of ceremony that's weird even for fake voodoo; we're also introduced to Kalea (played by Tongolele), who is apparently the lead dancer for the ceremonies, and can also make things combust by staring hard at them. Finally, there's the "head priest" named Damballah who, in keeping with a longstanding tradition involving Occidental cinema and representations of voodoo, ends up being a white guy behind a black mask (and I don't mean that figuratively). I could also mention that this film's telling us that "Baron Samedi, god of death" is the head god of voodoo, and that Damballah is "his servant" is about as accurate of real voodoo, or vodou, or vodoun (the latter two being more politically correct thanks to films like the snake people), as telling us that Zeus was Hades' bitch, or that Satan booted God out of Hell and turned renegade demons into angels. Said from the mouths of unbelievers, I guess it's not blasphemy or heresy per se, but it's pretty ignorant. Baron Samedi (or Simitye, which translates to "Baron Cemetery," I gather), is indeed important in voodoo, as far as my limited understanding extends, but Damballah is regarded as a creator spirit of sorts, and is hugely important--in fact, Damballah is the "serpent in the rainbow" in Wade Davis's book and Wes Craven's regrettable drivel that was 'based off' of it. So Damballah isn't, as far as I know, anyone's underling, much less some white guy living on the fictional island of Konai. Boris Karloff at least turns in a sincere, if poorly-scripted, performance in one of his final trips out, though even his presence in the film has little impact. This film, like most dealing with voodoo, pulls the viewer in two directions. On one hand, it's ignorant, insensitive, ethnocentric, and ridiculous; on the other, it's full of dancing, a crazy dwarf, sacrifices, zombies, "cannibal women," and is generally ridiculous. And at the end of the day, enlightening is all well and good, but a bacchanal of absurdity and zombies tends to be the trump card. It's not a film to respect, but The Snake People is a film well worth watching. Labels: Horror: Just Plain Weird posted by Ryan at 10:53 AM | 2 Comments Saturday, April 22, 2006Wicked City
1987, Japan. Drected by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Written by Kisei Choo, Hideyuki Kikuchi. Purchase from Amazon.com.
A thrilling part of Animeighties Month! I keep sitting down to write my review of Wicked City, and I keep petering out after a page of rambling incoherence, as opposed to what I normally do, which is peter out after about six pages of random incoherence then post it and call it an update. I don't know why I'm so stymied on this review. Perhaps I've just not been in the proper mindset for writing a review of anything (my book reviews of The Intelligencer, Count Zero, and Doctor No are similarly derailed), what with the sun being out, an adventure trip to Dominica booked, and my kayaking hand itching to get a start on developing the season's calluses. My thoughts are definitely going north and south, which is why I couldn't cut the bottle in half. Although that last oblique reference has given me an idea for a new movie: Jack Knifed: The Adventures of Jack Bauer and Jack Burton. Well, I think I've managed to marshal my thoughts into a loose confederation of like-minded individuals assembled in a disjointed but somewhat recognizable formation, so I thought I'd give it another go, especially since April is winding down and I've only posted two reviews for Animeighties Month -- you should have seen the overly ambitious list I originally made. But let me offer a word of warning as relates to the coming review, as a courtesy to the number of new readers who have been ensnared by Teleport city's jungle booby trap of placing some old anime titles in the usual fray. For the past several months, the reviews here have been relatively focused -- and I say relative in terms of how they relate to some of our previous reviews. You may think to yourself, "You call that Golgo 13 review focused?" And my reply would be, first, "I know what you are thinking, for I have the power to peer into the minds of men." Having thusly chilled you with powers I acquired in 1984 as a direct result of lying about my Dungeons & Dragons character's sudden blossoming of psyonics, I would then explain to you, either vocally or through the sheer force of mental will at my disposal, that yes, all things considered, the Golgo 13 review was indeed focused, for although it covered a large swath of ground with it's billowing parachute of truth, the vast majority of it was related, in some surprisingly direct way, to the background information needed for a proper and deep understanding of a movie where the hero is implored by a woman to pull her trigger, lovingly and softly.
I say this now as a warning that the past several months of reviews that busy themselves primarily with reviewing a movie may have lulled you into a false sense of security. Many of you may not have been around for the halcyon days of having to read five pages of my biography before getting to the first comment regarding the actual subject of the review. If you were looking for lean, mean, informative film writing, Teleport City really wasn't the place to be. My philosophy when I started this site, and yea even long before the Web, was to write about film in a way that related the watching of such movies to a life in general, to place them in the context of daily existence, rather than treat them as external components to be commented upon without any reflection as to the role they have played in my life. I thought this for two reasons: first, because fans of bad films are often met with a chorus of predictable, "Get a life!" taunting, and I wanted to show off the fact that not only do I have a life, and not only does being a fan of these films, not preclude you from a life, but the life I have lead may actually be a hell of a lot more fun and interesting than that of the person trotting out that hoary old cliche of an insult. And most of the b-movie fans I've met over the years have boasted similarly satisfying lives. Adventures have been mounted, relationships have been built, sweeping romance and epic action all manage to coexist with watching and writing about goofy films no one else would devote a paragraph to. Secondly, and more importantly, a lot of the films I write positive reviews of are positive solely because of the circumstances that led up to seeing them, or under which I saw them. Understanding why I would write a glowing review of something like Treasure of the Four Crowns or Sword and the Sorcerer requires understanding how I saw those movies, what it was like at the time, what experiences became intertwined and associated with the movie. My approach has never been to review films as a science, with a clinical approach. My approach has always been to put them in their proper personal and social context, to explain how the movie might have become a part of my life, and how everything else that was happening to me at the time may have influenced my opinion of a particular film. The resulting reviews may seem wildly unfocused. They may seem to wander off on tangents, lose their way as they meander through the muck of my memory and nostalgia, but I've never felt that the information, the silly asides and biographies and recollections, were at all throw-away diversions. They were, within the confines of my potentially crackpot way of writing about movies, vital threads of a greater tapestry in which the film itself is only one of the images formed. Having thusly warned new readers and old ones who may have forgotten, let me further explain that I issue this warning because my review of Wicked City is going to be prefaced by a story that has very little to do with actually assessing the artistic or entertainment merit of the film itself, but nevertheless reflects something that plays an important role in influencing my overall reaction to the movie. Like all my stories, it involves adventure and romance. If you just want to skip ahead to a history of tentacle porn and a review of the movie, use this handy link to fast forward through time and space. And with that... My chest was heaving, and I was doing the best I could to suck in as much of the balmy, flower-scented spring air as I could. Blades of grass probed lightly at my back, and I felt the soft warmth of a hand on my stomach, which at the time had not yet embarked on the long and shockingly successful quest to bulge and hang down over the top of my pants that it enjoys these days. It was 1993, her name was Elisa, and we'd just finished whiling away a perfect north Florida spring day by shooting basketball. She was a hell of a gal, too beautiful to associate with the weak-chinned likes of me. Dark, curly hair; healthy, tan skin; fun, easy-going, athletic, with the slightest vestigial traces of a Puerto Rican accent. She lived in an apartment that shared a parking lot with the duplex I lived in with my friend Rob, and after a couple months of seeing each other from time to time, we graduated from friendly nods of acknowledgement to an actual exchange of words and a few drinks here and there. I was just at the early stages of toying with the idea of emerging from a straight edge punk rock cocoon, so I was a bit on the timid side when it came to imbibing (I would learn some years later, when I decided to embrace the culture of wine and spirits wholeheartedly, that Scotch-Irish blood apparently bestows upon you near godlike powers of tolerance and recuperation, regardless of how little you'd been drinking the past decade). Dating in Gainesville is tricky, because there were (and still are, from what I could tell during my last visit) so very few places you can take a girl that rank very far above Denny's or El Toro. Lisa was the first non-punk girlfriend I'd had in a long time, and I was going to have to come up with a different game plan if I wanted the relationship to continue. Punk rockers often suffer from an unhealthy, "I shall show her my world!" mentality, as if we inhabit a vast underworld full of mystical danger and darkness when, in fact, the average punk rocker's world consists of sitting on the couch, hanging out in a parking lot, or going to see really horrible bands that you pretend to like so you can make proclamations about "supporting the scene," because you're not old enough or wise enough (and some never are) to realize that some scenes and artistic endeavors really blow and aren't worth supporting. This is especially true of any scene that is comprised of four or five guys with beards, Dickies jackets, and fake trucker hats playing loud amelodic indie rock. Lucky for me that Elisa was some crazy kind of dream girl and was incredibly easy-going when it came to going along with idiotic schemes, and when it comes to idiotic schemes, I'm a Viking. So despite the lack of world-class places to which a sophisticated young gentleman could take a beautiful young lady for an evening of cocktails and witty conversation, there were still plenty of places a slobbish, lazy punk rocker still clinging to the "I ain't gonna wear no suit and dance for The Man" that people should outgrow a couple months after leaving high school could take a charming young lady who, for reasons one can't possibly comprehend, had decided to take a shine to the aforementioned asshole. So we'd go out for Coronas and all you can eat crawdads by the bucket, or we'd stay in with a bottle of wine and a movie. Or we'd go shoot hoops or kick the soccer ball around, take walks through nearby nature preserves, or we'd just sit in the floor at my place and listen to records, because punk rock guys always seem to have this sick need to make girls listen to godawful pieces of crap that the guy thinks is utter genius. "Yes, you are a smart and cultured woman possessed of a striking beauty that leaves a man breathless. Come! Come sit on my ratty bedroom carpet while I play Boredoms records for you."
Actually, in this regard, I took the sage advice of my friend Jon, and rather than trotting out Zeni Geva and Sun Ra, stuck primarily to The Cocteau Twins. I was, at the time, also a member of the University of Florida Film Council, and we were in the midst of the first annual (of two, I believe) Asian Film Festival, a program I'd put together primarily because I wanted to see Once Upon a Time in China, Chinese Ghost Story, and Bullet in the Head on the big screen, and this was the only way it was ever going to happen. We also peppered it with a smattering of Japanese cartoons and a few respectable films like Black Rain and Tokyo Story so people who wanted to sit and feel smart about themselves four a couple hours could do that. That day spent shooting hoops happen to fall on the final day of the event. I'd skipped out on Ozu in favor of sunshine and a sparkling smile, but the day was growing short and we were at a loss for what to do with the evening. "Well," I said as we lay there together on the grass, staring up at the tops of palm trees and listening to the slow rumble of traffic along 13th Street, "It's the last night of film festival. It'd be nice to end it on a better note than last night." "Last night" would have been our big showing of John Woo's Hong Kong swansong, Hardboiled. We were among the very first theaters in America to screen the film, though you wouldn't know it based on the amount of stars and prestige it brought our way (none). But people drove from as far away as Miami and Atlanta when they heard we were showing the movie, uncut and subtitled. All of the Hong Kong films played to packed houses, but none possessed the buzz that surrounded Hardboiled. This was right in the middle of people started to go batty for Hong Kong action films thanks to things like The Killer showing up on Cinemax. And the screening was a massive success, with a packed house howling and cheering right up until the projector went to switch to the final reel of the film -- the sprawling hospital shoot-out -- and we were suddenly watching the first reel of Aliens. Someone had screwed up big time before they sent us the film, but what could we do? We had a theater of angry patrons, and because UF runs their box office separate from the theater itself, the box office people had already packed up and went home, so there could be no cash refunds. All we could offer were vouchers for free screenings, which didn't do much to placate the people who drove six hours. Elisa stretched languorously next to me. "That sounds good," she said. "What's playing tonight?" I went over the schedule in my head. Immediately I regretted making the suggestion. We should have just gone for burritos at El Toro. "Umm," I hesitated, "A Japanese anime film." Her eye slit up slightly. She was a real sport at watching bad movies -- we'd even gone to see one of those screenings of Mystery Science Theater together at her suggestion (I'd never even seen the show up until that point, as Cox Cable did not offer Comedy Central) -- and it wasn't that long ago that we'd watched Akira, which had delighted her to no end. "Which one?" she asked enthusiastically. "Umm, it's called Wicked City. It's uh..." Honestly, I hadn't seen Wicked City at that point, which was the main reason I'd even booked it. It was originally meant to fill an 8 PM timeslot, with the midnight movie finale being another showing of Hardboiled, but with Hardboiled on the ropes, we replayed Zu Warriors and then slid Wicked City into the midnight movie slot, where it would be right at home. About all I knew of the film was what I'd seen in the previews. "Well, I know there's some monsters, some guys in tuxedos fly, and, well, a woman turns into a spider." I also knew that her vagina became a giant slobbering toothy maw, but I didn't know if it would be worse to bring that up now or wait until it actually showed up on screen. Thing is, I was really looking forward to all that madness, because I'd heard nothing but good things about the movie. Sure, it was a tad perverse, but beautifully animated and incredibly well-written. OK, I figured, maybe it'd be a decent movie for the two of us. I mean, it wasn't going to be Overfiend, which I'd seen unsubtitled a couple years earlier when the tape started making the rounds among cult film traders.
I don't have the world's most sterling track record when it comes to date movies. It's not that I don't know how to pick a decent date movie, one that both I and my prospective lady companion can enjoy. It's just that I tend to stumble by accident into remarkably bad choices knowing full well how bad they are. Midway through trying to impress a dame a mere couple months before, I'd invited her over for a romantic evening of dinner and a movie, only to have an assembly of friends show up demanding they be allowed to watch Black Devil Doll from Hell. As I had the town's only copy and the only working VCR (I'd bought it the day before at Wal-Mart, with the intention of using it for my romantic movie night, then packing it back up and returning it a day later -- such is college life) among my friends, my romantic evening became an enthusiastic and drunken screening of Black Devil Doll from Hell. Other date movies have included Alien 4, Cliffhanger (only because it was 50 cent Tuesday, meaning that you paid 50 cents, not that 50 Cent was in attendance, at the second run theater and my power had been shut off), and I Like to Hurt People. So it was that I took a girl out on a date to see Wicked City. She showed up in a jaw-droppingly nice dress and those embroidered cloth Chinese slippers. I was a fucking moron punk rocker, so I think I wore olive drab cargo pants cut off at the knees and an XL-sized Ramones shirt -- XL even though I was 5'7" and weighed 110 pounds. What the hell was this girl thinking? She took the film pretty well. Laughed at the spider-vagina, winced a bit when the demon tentacles started slithering into the chick character's mouth, but all in all, she seemed to enjoy the movie, though she freely admitted it wasn't something she was likely to rush out to see again. Wicked City wasn't what caused our relationship to peter out. It was me, as is often the case. I was still addicted to pretending like being punk rock was some kind of insane revolutionary lifestyle that she would never understand, and I was better off dating some gaunt, lazy chick in a Black Flag t-shirt and possessed of no real interest in anything other than studded leather bracelets and sitting on the couch. Needless to say given that lengthy intro I wrote, the circumstances under which I saw Wicked City go a long way to shaping my opinion about the film. Although the night we saw it was wonderful, and we were in at the apex of our youthful romance, Wicked City still represents badly blown opportunities, missed chances, and a commitment to awful decision making. My God, that gal was something. And I was an ass who started blowing her off basically because she wouldn't listen to Minor Threat. Wicked City is a painful reminder of how big an idiot I can be. When I watch it, I get a little misty-eyed and start thinking about the past. I raise my gin and tonic to the stars and say, well, I don't say anything. Granted, it's a funny movie to turn one toward bittersweet reflection, because it's full of bad-ass dudes with guns blowing the crap out of demons that are prone to probing the nethers of a woman with their slime-dripping tentacles, usually against said woman's will. But then, I took a date to see it, so what the hell (if you used the link above to skip to this point and are wondering what I'm talking about, don't you wish you'd read the whole thing now)? Given the sheer number of absurdly pointless and idiotic things people are allowed to study for their doctoral thesis, I'm sure someone somewhere has sold some desperate-to-be-hep professor in a tweed jacket and bow tie on the notion that it is academically valuable to become a doctor in the history of Japanese tentacle porn. I did not have the foresight to try and pass this off as a thesis, since like all punk rockers I was trying to pass off writing about punk rock as a thesis-worthy topic. So I am not the world's foremost authority on the social and artistic history of tentacle porn. I shall endeavor to do my best to cover the basics. WWII: America drops two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bunta Sugawara survives and begins his long journey through the criminal underworld in post-war Hiroshima. A slew of restrictions are put on Japanese cinema to make sure nothing come sup that'll get the Japanese all riled up and becoming a handful for MacArthur. Korean War: we figure at this point that the Japanese are basically pretty cool. But many of the restrictions put in place remain. Most famous among them: a ban on showing, in film or still photo or illustration, human genitalia, sexual penetration, or pubic hair. During the seventies, Japanese filmmakers are forced to become increasingly clever in the way they go about depicting erotic acts of wanton carnality, giving rise to a country with more strategically placed candles and potted plants than anywhere else in the world. Porno films are still made, but the pubic region is blurred by unsightly optical mosaics or fogging. This ban on pubic hair remains intact clear through the nineties. But enterprising smut makers and a population generally sick of strategically placed candles and intrusive mosaics succeed in punching through reform that allows for on-camera pubic hair, though the actual penis and vagina are still illegal. This ban seems increasingly pointless and more about stubbornness with the advent of the "thin mosaic" technique, but we're straying off topic here. Looking for a way they could legally depict the dirty, disgusting act of sex and the vile, evil, naughty portions of the human anatomy, Japanese manga and anime artists came up with a brilliant idea. Exactly who first thought it up I don't know, but the thought was that these guys could freely draw penis-shaped tentacles attached to a variety of horrific creatures and get away with it since, technically, they weren't drawing a penis. It was just a penis-shaped tentacle. Plus, this way, you could violate a woman in multiple orifices, providing fun for the whole family. My assumption was that this first showed up in manga somewhere, but as I'm lacking my Doctorate in Tentacle Porn, I don't know. I'm sure someone does though. The most famous appearance of tentacle porn in anime was in the infamous Urotsuki Doji or Legend of the Overfiend, but Wicked City might very well have been the first tentacle film out of the gate -- though you can't really call it porn, and you certainly can't put it in the same class as slimy, hilarious filth like Overfiend.
In fact, like many "firsts," Wicked City is really only tangentially related, at best, to the world of tentacle porn that exploded in a luminescent white glob after the release of Urotsuki Doji. There is a tentacle rape in Wicked City, but it's not presented hardcore. There is additional nudity and sexuality in the movie as well, but once again nothing on the level of porn, and really no different from what was in Golgo 13, except that it involves demons and thus lends itself to a more twisted and surreal artistic sensibility. Considering what gets produced these days, Wicked City is relatively tame -- relative, remember, to films in which multi-tentacled demons slather naked women with otherworldly goo. These days, of course, artists get away pretty frequently with drawing full-on penetration and genitalia. Even Overfiend got away with it in 1989, and since then plenty of other anime titles have skirted the No-Dingalings Law, as it was officially known in the Japanese parliament. Yet there are still tons of cheap, crude tentacle porn releases every year. This would be primarily because it turns out some people prefer watching slimy demon tentacles rather than human parts poking around in bodily openings. I'm really not in the game of making moral calls on stuff like this, so we'll just leave it at, "some people preferred the penis stand-in over the actual penis." You could really understand Wicked City pretty well without understanding this roughly sketched history of tentacle porn (I didn't even get into animism and the role of the octopus in ancient Japanese art, because that's for whoever is writing their thesis about this crap), but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway because it would be good for a larf. So now, when you are trying to impress the doe-eyed Gothic Lolitas hanging out at Otakon, you can do it by saying, "Actually, tentacle rape can trace its roots back to the early days of Shintoism and the belief that certain animals were types of gods. Plus, the octopus, you know. Have you ever looked at one of those things?" If they ask you where you got all your sick information (they will ask you this as a delaying tactic so they can get to their mace, and rightfully so), you can puff up your chest like a rutting pigeon and proudly proclaim that it was "from the same guy who told to watch a Filipino midget spy film, then ditched a beautiful and charming woman because she didn't want to listen to Youth of Today." I compared the horrible, perverting, youth-corrupting filth present in Wicked City with the filth in Golgo 13, and if you're going to compare this movie to anything, it compares well to Golgo 13 even though on the surface the two seem pretty dissimilar. Both look to a combination of 40s film noir, 70s grindhouse sleaze, and 80s Miami Vice color schemes to achieve a look that is unique and new yet instantly familiar. Wicked City doesn't look exactly like Golgo 13, but one can definitely see parallels in their approach to artwork -- basically, they develop a different style from the same source material. Likewise, Wicked City continues the tendency of 80s anime to look to past American pulp writing as another source of inspiration. If Odin is a throwback to the writing of AE van Vogt, and Golgo 13 is a throwback to the gritty crime writing of Chandler, Hammet, and the 60s espionage potboilers that followed Ian Fleming's James Bond template, Wicked City can trace its roots back to the pulp writing of H.P. Lovecraft (yes, he wrote serial pulps) and the Lovecraft-inspired horror-pulp of R.E. Howard (best known for creating the character Conan the Barbarian). Howard and Lovecraft were regular correspondents with one another -- friends as much as two insane pulp writers can be friends with each other. Lovecraft's ever-expanding Cthulu mythos was a major influence on Howard, who wrote stories that dabbled in Lovecraft's universe, but with more of the gung-ho brawn that identifies Howard's writing. Howard's own endearing contribution to the world of horror pulp is the grim wandering Puritan Solomon Kane, who walks the earth forever in combat with ghosts, pirates, cannibals, ancient civilizations, living corpses, and other ghoulish delights. However, while Howard's sensibilities may have informed some of the more macho elements present in Wicked City (as well as his cruder but more enthusiastic style of writing), it's obvious that this and most of the subsequent demon-oriented anime titles (both hentai and not) are heavily influenced by a combination of Japanese folklore and grotesque H.P. Lovecraft imagery. The plot of the film is, like most anime plots, pretty simple once you strip away the orbiting insanity, much like the plot to any fantastical pulp story: there exist two worlds, our own and a shadowy world of demons. While all humans look basically the same, however, the demons get to have a billion different appearances, which doesn't seem fair. Anyway, for centuries or so, the two worlds have managed to coexist, but lately, a passel of rabble rousers from the demon world have decided to start wreaking havoc in our world. It's up to the mysterious Black Guard -- a security force comprised of members from both worlds, but mostly, it seems, ours -- to keep a lid on the situation until a horny old negotiator from the demon realm can broker a ceasefire. Assigned to protect negotiator Giuseppe Maiyart (irritatingly enough, I can't find any accurate listings for the Japanese voice acting cast) are Black Guard members Taki, from the human world, and Makie, from the demon world. Taki is a grim-faced young man with a no-nonsense approach to his supernatural job (not unlike the sort of blue collar, daily grind" approach to fantastic events that you find in Hellboy). Makie is the beautiful (as always) otherworldly woman with razor-sharp retractable fingernails (shades of William Gibson's Neuromancer perhaps?). They wrok well together, but trouble arises when Guiseppe's impish nature combines with Taki falling in love with Makie, affording the rogue demons a chance to take her hostage in exchange for getting Taki to abandon his post guarding the diminutive negotiator (who is sort of like Yoda, but if Yoda wore track suits and jacked off a lot -- which maybe he does. Unfortunately, the Star Wars movies never explore that). Wicked City was famous for a clever script, engaging artwork, and some truly phantasmagorical and imaginative set pieces. It was infamous for some of these same set pieces. As mentioned, for instance, this is the first instance of which I know of the now ubiquitous tentacle rape, though again, it's not a hardcore scene and is pretty mild (as mild as demon rape can be, I suppose) on the grand scale of the perversions anime offers the daring and/or sadly horny viewer. The film opens with it's most famous/infamous scene: Taki meeting a hot broad in a bar, then taking her home for a little lovin', then having her turn into a giant spider beast thing with the head and torso of a woman, but with long stocking-clad spider legs and a roaring, drooling fanged mouth where the vagina usually goes. Far from being sexually explicit, this scene is more grotesquely imaginative and crazy than it is offensive. It certainly sets the mood for what's to come and serves as an easy warning beacon. If you get freaked out by this, it ain't getting any more kid-friendly later in the movie. The body horror sequence is lightened somewhat when, shortly thereafter, Taki's superior says that maybe this experience will teach him to be "a littlre sexually cautious next time." Other notorious sequences involve Giuseppe running off to get a little action from a hooker, only to fall prey to a demon woman whose whole body becomes a malleable putty and Taki being swallowed whole by a cooing demon woman's fanged vagina while trying to rescue Makie. So yeah, it's all pretty twisted, and if you want a fine example of the gory excesses Japanese anime was willing to explore during the 1980s, you need look no further than Wicked City. It's full of ghoulish beasts, dripping tentacles, spraying blood, and spilling guts. But like much of the best anime to come from that decade of gleeful abandon, what sets Wicked City above the seething sea of horror anime is the fact that, coexisting with the repulsive Lovecraftian nightmares and grindhouse exploitation is a movie that is thoughtfully crafted and beautifully animated. Wicked City plays out as a parable of Japanese society in the 1980s. Recovery from the war was complete. Rather than being a limping wounded man, Japan suddenly found itself a world power once again, but this time without the need of a imperialist military. But with such rapid success comes confusion. Japan's image of itself as a well-ordered and well-behaved society was challenged at every turn by the simple realities of life. Some humans can act as cogs in a well-oiled, polite, bowing machine. But in a society like Japan, for every cog there is going to be a square peg that throws a kink into the works. The more repressive your culture, in other words, the more outrageous and extreme the counter-culture. Which is why Japan gave birth to loony youth fashion cultures, noise music, and Kinji Fukasaku yakuza films. Beneath that well-ordered veneer, Japan was as much a boiling cauldron of lust and perversion as any other country, with the possible exception of Germany. Wicked City is rife with images of archetypal Japanese salarymen -- Taki and the rest of the Guard where the requisite black suit, black tie ensemble of the salaryman, despite their incredible mission -- and women being ripped asunder by animal desires and passions they've sought endlessly to master and suppress. The demons are the wretched excess that so many Japanese (and other nationalities, for that matter) citizens are torn between denying and embracing. Giving oneself over entirely to them results in, you know, being devoured by toothy vaginas. Denying them entirely results in a similarly nasty fate. Survival, it would seem, involves a merging of these two polar opposite tendencies -- which we see in the relationship that emerges between Taki and Makie. This sort of intellectual underpinning of the often horrific action on screen is what keeps Wicked City a source of constant debate among people who still remember anime from the 80s. When we screened it as part of the Asian Film Festival, it was both lauded and condemned. It certainly created a host of varied and often conflicting opinions, even among types of people usually united by a common goal. Had the movie been simple smut of the caliber seen in most tentacle porn since then, it wouldn't spark this sort of debate. Well, given the fact that people will debate pretty much anything, I guess it might have. Point is, Wicked City has a lot more going for it than just the grisly imagery. The Tokyo of Wicked City is realized in a way that augments the thematic currents of the story. It's a fairly recognizable world, and it just so happens that incredibly bizarre things happen. Once again, as I've mentioned in plenty of other reviews (if only I could remember which ones), Wicked City succeeds in being creepy by taking the mundane and familiar and tweaking it in a way that keeps it comforting and familiar but also unsettling alien and inexplicable. It's hardboiled detective noir filtered through the askew vision of a director like David Cronenberg. You know something just ain't quite right, even before spider-women start scurrying down the facades of otherwise dull and unimpressive high rise apartment complexes. Like many films, animated and otherwise, it seems to use Blade Runner as its art design starting point, but rather than aping Blade Runner, it takes the foundation concept -- a future that is equal parts gee whiz sci-fi and nourish antiquity -- and puts its own spin on it. There's never any real doubt that Wicked City is set in the near future, but there's not much on display to actually say it's the future. It's simply the way the film is colored and the tone it sets that places it in the world of scifi-noir.
The artwork is gritty and expertly executed, boasting the warmth and intricacy of hand-drawn art rather than the polish and perfection of more modern computer-assisted drawing. It relies heavily on the blue and red palette, a nod perhaps to the playful yet sinister way in which Italian directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento played with lighting and used it not to reflect reality, but rather to convey a certain mood. Similarly, many of the shots in Wicked City seem to be nods to the old EC Comics horror anthologies, which were probably as much an influence on the tone and style of the film as the old pulp stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The red and blue shaded "shocking scene of unspeakable terror" was a trademark of the EC titles, and Wicked City knows when to pull out homages to those equally pulpy old comic books. If the plot of Wicked City is nothing overly impressive -- cops guard the witness under siege, basically -- the way in which the film executes the typical set-up is nothing short of staggering in its creativity. The pace is languid without being slow, and the many plot twists stem organically and logically from the story rather than being disjointed zingers thrown in with no reason other than to shock and titilate. Even the film's notorious sexual content is at home and justified by the storytelling. Wicked City is awash with set pieces that manage to be repulsive, beautiful, shocking, and melancholy -- often all at the same time. Often, you can't believe the crazy stuff that's going on, but it totally sucks you in, and it's pulled off so spectacularly in the artwork that you find yourself emotionally involved even when the characters are thinly sketched. It's an atrocity show from which you can't extract yourself. It's also action-packed and rarely lets up long enough to become dull. There's scarcely a pause as the film skips from one eye-popping set-up to the next. The end result is more a series of individual action pieces than it is a full film, but the narrative is just enough to pull the whole thing together into a cohesive and comprehensible feature film that continues to be interesting almost two decades after its initial release. Add to that the fact that the story takes itself completely seriously -- even with the addition of a horny lump-handed old dude in a Sopranos track suit. As with all the best pulp, Wicked City creates a completely outrageous situation and then handles it with such earnest, solemn-faced seriousness that you are willing to buy into the illutsion no matter how crazy it becomes. Of course, it's hard to sit through a film like Wicked City and not think about the attitude it expresses toward women. OK, maybe it's not that hard, but as a reviewer, I try to do my best to cover as many elements of a story as I can, even if I don't find them especially compelling. It's not debatable that many people see the film as rather strongly anti-female. After all, their sexual organs are often seen as slobbering beasts that can swallow a man whole and destroy him. People often make the mistake of thinking that what a film depicts is an accurate reflection of the attitudes of the film maker, which fails to take into account the fact that someone may be making a statement in reaction to something rather then in opposition of it (not to mention that maybe they were just using their imaginations). Whether director Yoshiaki Kawajiri and writers Kisei Choo and Hideyuki Kikuchi have deep-rooted issues to work out with women I can't say. The way I've always read Wicked City isn't that it's an expression of the creator's fears and hang-ups, but rather an indictment of a society (not just Japanese) that both outlaws and fetishizes female sexuality. Society is endless teasing people when it comes to sexuality, hinting at it, selling it, then telling you you're dirty or evil for wanting it. Look at the porn movie industry -- the world's biggest multi-billion dollar industry that no one has ever seen anything from, or so each individual would have you believe. That sort of twisted entice-and-deny mentality is common everywhere, and ultimately, it creates a destructive mindset that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the desire for that same unknown through acts of violence. In the case of Wicked City, Taki and the other Black Guard are typical men raise din a repressive society. It's no wonder that female genitalia so often manifest themselves as menacing and otherworldly. But I'll be honest. Although I took plenty of film studies classes that dwell on sexuality and sexual politics in films, it really doesn't interest me. So I'll mention what I think, but it’s not the reason I go to the movies, and it's not the over-arching issue that defines my opinion of Wicked City. I like Wicked City because it's an action-packed pulp horror comic come to life, infused with acid trip imagery that rattles the brain. It's sick, daring, and in my opinion, brilliantly written. The artwork is gorgeous even when it's horrific. It certainly doesn't ever deserve to be thrown onto the hentai rubbish heap, or even blamed for the proliferation of cheaper, sleazier versions of itself that came from knock-off artists who were probably more inspired by Overfiend than by Wicked City anyway. Yoshiaki Kawajiri began his directing career in 1984 with the feature film Lensman, which was one of the very first anime titles to incorporate CGI into the preceding without it being as noticeably and hilariously pathetic as the CGI helicopters from Golgo 13. Wicked City was his second feature, and he would go on to direct another demon invasion themed movie, Demon City Shinjiku, which is similar to Wicked City in some ways, but very different in others. It lacks the sex and extreme gore, but also lacks the expert creation of dark mood and atmosphere, playing out more like a straight action film than piece of horror pulp. Wicked City made huge waves in America, at least amongst cult film and anime fans, when it made the rounds in the usual format (ie, a dubbed version from Streamline, using the usual Streamline crew of English language voice actors and being of about the same quality as their dub of Golgo 13). Demon City less so, but Kawajiri scored another huge cult fave in 1993 with Ninja Scroll, which retains some of Wicked City's affection for grotesqueries and a Grand Guignol style of film making. Similar, but with more Gothic lace and such, is his recent resurrection of another icon of 80s anime, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Kawajiri had nothing to do with the original Vampire Hunter D, but it obviously shares a lot of common ground with Wicked City as it indulges in a mind-blowing parade of freakish monsters, so it's not all that odd that Kawajiri would find himself directing a follow-up. Additional success with X and with pieces of The Animatrix insure that Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of animated filmmaking. Wow, that last sentence sounds like it came from his resume cover letter. Let me rewrite it: Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of people being ripped in half by demons and having their guts spill out all over the ground. Writer Kisei Choo had considerably less of a career, as Wicked City is the only credit I could turn up for him. It wouldn't surprise me to one day learn that Kisei Choo is just a pseudonym for some other, more established writer who was afraid of what being involved with a project like Wicked City might do to his career -- as if such things ever seem to have that detrimental an impact. You can write the goriest, nastiest piece of perverted crap Japan has ever seen (and that's saying something), then turn around and write for Hamtaro if you want. That's just the way things seem to happen. Story developer Hideyuki Kikiuchi had better luck. Aside from being a writer for the original Vampire Hunter D as well as Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Demon City Shinjiku, and A Wind Named Amnesia. But he's not a screenwriter. Most of his work is in story outlines or novel writing.
There was a live-action adaption produced in 1992 by Tsui Hark, who likely did more of the directing than credited director Tai Kit Mak. I haven't seen the film since 1995 or so, so I'm not going to pretend like I'm in a position to write a proper review comparing it to the animated source material. It was less saucy, with only a hint of nudity, and focused on the relationship between two male members of the Black Guard: Taki (the always somnabulistic Leon Lai) and his half-demon partner Ken (Jacky Cheung, who gets to turn into a fanged demn and chew scenery the way he so loves to do). Joey Wong Tsu-hsien (Chinese Ghost Story, and that City Hunter movie starring Jackie Chan) was in the mix as well. About all I remember was the film employed a pastel blue and pink color palette similar but softer to the anime's red and blue, the Black Guard combatted demons using psychic powers that can only be invoked by pointing at your own forehead, and the finale was Taki and Ken riding around atop 747 commercial airliners and giving speeches as they tried to destroy and/or save one another. Or maybe it was Roy Cheung who was riding around on top of a 747. Look, at least two guys were riding around atop 747, and that was pretty cool. The movie itself was, as best as I can remember, pleasing to me without being really blow-away impressive. Now I feel like watching it again. Producer/stealth director Tsui Hark, aside from being the father of modern Hong Kong special effects, was also the man behind hooking up with a Japanese production and art crew to make the first really big budget Chinese animated feature, A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation, which I highly recommend. Before that, Chinese animation was all Bruce Lee and Chinese Gods, which I also highly recommend. All in all, I really like Wicked City, and feel that it's not all that shameful to admit such a thing. It's a screwed up movie, but not nearly so much as the hype might lead you believe, and certainly nowhere near the sort of trash Overfiend is. Yes, Overfiend looms like a many-tentacled penis demon over all the 80s. That's why it keeps coming up. Plus, it's pretty funny to keep bringing it up, at least to me. I don't really recommend you do what I did and bring a date to see Wicked City, but I still think it's a high water mark (but not the highest) of the seamy 80s anime that invaded America, and well worth checking out once you've steeled yourself against the more tasteless images the film is going to throw at you. Wicked City is really adult-oriented anime done right. Heck, it's not even as gratuitous as Golgo 13. And anyway, like I always say: don't you have something better to do than be offended by twenty-year-old Japanese cartoons? That's like still being offended by The Canterbury Tales. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1987 posted by Keith at 6:11 PM | 2 Comments Monday, March 27, 2006Nigahen: Nagina II
1989, India. Starring Sridevi, Aroona Irani, Jagdeep, Pran, Sunny Deol, Anupam Kher, Gulshan Grover, Anjana Mumtaz. Directed by Harmesh Malhotra.
One of the many things that really steams my monkeys is when a movie's summary sounds like a tremendous amount of fun, but the actual experience of watching it is more akin to having someone hammer nails into your sternum. In other words -- it's an interesting story, but you really wouldn't want to experience it yourself. You know, like some time you've sat down with a friend and the friend says, "Last week I watched a movie where a roller skating chimp in a rhinestone g-string swings around a cricket bat and has to save the world from nuclear annihilation." And you, being a wise and tasteful viewer, immediately think to yourself, "Ahh, this does indeed sound like a grand ol' time at the movies!" But then your friend sighs and says, "Actually, it was pretty boring. You're better off not watching it." So you go home for the night, but secretly you are thinking to yourself, "I don't know. That monkey has a cricket bat and a g-string. I bet it's all right." So, against the advice of your friend, you watch the movie anyway, and it turns out that, yep, it's pretty much a soul-crushing bore. And you're angry not so much because you wasted time watching the movie as you are angry that someone could make a movie with a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat and have the execution come out so horribly boring. And not only that, but then this means that the idea for a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat has been wasted on a rotten movie, and now someone with the potential for making a good movie about a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat can't make that movie, because the idea has already been used up. Nigahen is such a movie. If I say to you, "Sonny Deol fights snake spirits who shoot laser beams out of their eyes while some priest in a fake Rollie Fingers moustache rolls around a lot during wind and lightning storms," then you're going to think, "Sounds pretty good to me. And there will be musical numbers!" And I was with you, right up to the point where I started watching the movie and realized that, in reality, it was going to be a slightly tougher row to hoe than I first thought. But let's begin with Sonny Deol rather than the movie itself. Since one of my goals for 2006 is to increase the Bollywood representation on Teleport City, it's was pretty much a given that we'd be getting to Sonny Deol pretty quickly, though I didn't expect it to be in a film like this. I assumed it would be one of the movies where he's cracking Pakistani skulls and blowing stuff up. Yet somehow the supernatural drama Nigahen came up in the queue before Maa Tujhe Salaam, Indian, Border, or any of the other roughly eighteen thousand films he made in a three-year span where he plays a heroic and patriotic Indian officer fighting evil, moustache-twirling Pakistani terrorists -- though, to be fair, Nigahen does include a moustache or two well worth twirling. Sonny Deol is sort of the Sylvester Stallone of India. Like other muscular action heroes, he doesn't have a tough name (Sonny, Sylvester, Arnold). He's good-looking in a rough and tumble sort of way -- more of a likeable lug than an actual sex symbol. He's a bad-ass, but he's also a nice guy, willing to punch you in the face or dance with you through the Alps. Like Stallone, he went through a period where he was pretty respectable (his Rocky/Nighthawks phase), but then started appearing in more and more ludicrous flag-waving actioners (his Rambo phase). All in all, however, Sonny Deol is pretty much a Bollywood institution -- not on the level of Amitabh, but still a pretty big and enduring part of the scene. So, with Sonny's place in Bollywood summarized, let's move on to Nigahen, which is a sequel to the film Nagina, which I have not seen since no one seems to offer it for rent, and the one or two places I looked for it to purchase, should I want to apply my dollars in such a way (and I don't know that I would), listed it as out of stock. But I think I can get the gist of thinks, thanks in no small part to the convenient visual summary of the film provided during the credits of this sequel. The basics seem to be that we have some snake spirits, they protect some people, a wizard with a handlebar moustache wants a magic gem. There may be more to it than that, but that's enough to get you to the point you need to be to grasp the sequel, which seems to be more or less the same thing, except the two leads from the previous film are killed off, presumably in between movies, but you needn't let that bother you since the same actress (the lovely Sridevi) will be appearing as the daughter of the character she played in the first film. We meet her first as a child being adopted by her grandfather, or possibly uncle. We then skip eighteen years ahead, as the now-grown Neelam returns to her ancestral home to witness the fact that the progress of time for the other characters has been realized by having them wear really shoddy silver wigs. What she doesn't know about the house and her family history is that her mother could transform into a snake, and two more snakes (her deceased parents?) show up from time to time to watch over her and communicate to her by shooting animated blue beams that cause the film to freeze almost as if someone was simply drawing on a still photo. This highlights one of the most peculiar and impressive feats of this film, which is to take a film made in 1989 and make it look like a film from 1979. Neelam also isn't privy to the fact that her next door neighbor is a shrieking, screaming, sweating ranting, raving holy man lunatic named Garaknath (Anupam Kher). He's got the twirling-worthy moustache here, in case you are keeping track of that sort of thing. Garaknath has a tendency to sit cross-legged on the floor until wild bolts of lightning and gusts of wind blow him over, at which time he will inevitably spring to his feet, wave his trident around, and scream, "Bhairavnath!" over and over, which happens to be the name of his mentor, killed in the first film by the heroic couple who were off-handedly disposed of between the end credits of that film and beginning of this one. Garaknath is so committed to stealing the sacred gem his guru sought in the first film that he has sworn to eat nary a morsel until it is in his hands and he can use it to become all-powerful, whatever that may mean. For a guy who hasn't eaten in a decade or more, Garaknath is looking pretty good, and by good, I mean he has mangy hair and sweats profusely, which the camera lovingly captures in a series of close-ups that would make Sergio Leone proud. That's pretty much the plot in a nutshell: crazy holy man tries to steal sacred gem, and noble girl guided by snakes foils him. You might be thinking to yourself, "Hey, I thought Sunny Deol was in this." He does show up eventually to fall in love with Neelam, and it turns out he is a snake boy who was raised by the villainous Garaknath, who among other things, kept him in a basket for fourteen years. Who knew living in a basket for fourteen years makes you come out looking like Sonny Deol? Deol's character is pretty much a buffoon here, and Sonny has the open-mouthed, slack-jawed look of befuddlement down pat. Other than that, he doesn't have much reason to be other than to hang around and occasionally drive a tractor. So if you think that sweaty moustachio'd madmen trying to steal magical gems from snake girls sounds like the makings of a good movie, you're right. And if you further suspect that the final results aren't nearly as much fun as they sound -- well, frankly, given how the whole intro was about that very phenomenon (which I call the "Something Weird phenomenon," in honor of the many titles released by Something Weird that sound cool but end up being godawful boring), it's not that impressive if you guess it applies to Nigahen. A lot of this movie is just flat out uninteresting, which is pretty remarkable given the number of snakes shooting magic beams out of their eyes we have on display here. There's a lot of comic relief from a guy whose shtick seems to be based entirely on an "Oh my goodness, my wife is so fat!" routine that wouldn't have even gotten a chuckle out of a Depression era vaudeville crowd. Maybe if he'd also dressed in drag and been swatted with brooms -- at least then he could have been a hit with fans of Hong Kong variety shows. But there's way too much of that in between supernatural snake action. The editing only makes matters worse. And I say editing only under the good faith that they actually hired an editor, because any evidence of his craft is barely detectable in the film. When Neelam is hypnotized by the snakes, who then lead her on a slow somnambulistic stroll out of the house, across the lawn, and into the temple ruins where the sacred gem is hidden in a pretty obvious spot, we get to watch pretty much the whole stroll. It just goes on and on, until finally some lightning and wind kicks up to blow Garaknash over, so we cut to him rolling on the floor, then leaping up to yell, "Bhairavnath!" And you better get used to him doing that, too, because he's pretty much the best part of the whole movie. With Sonny not being allowed to jump cars through office buildings or shoot grenade launchers, the bulk of the film's entertainment value comes form Garaknash chewing scenery with a voracious William Shatner-esque glee. Garaknesh is obviously an over-the-top comic book style villain, and actor Anupam Kher seems to operate under the assumption that the only way to play him is by going way over over-the-top. And if you think he might maybe look somewhat familiar, even though you haven't seen too many Bollywood films, then perhaps you're remembering him as the stern but loving father from Bend it Like Beckham, a movie that slightly annoys me because, seriously, no love for Parminder Nagra? Keira Knightley had to go and pull a Harrison Ford by stealing all the fame that should have been more evenly distributed. And Parminder? Hey, I have nothing against Keira (well, I have King Arthur against her), but Parminder Nagra is much hotter. Uh, where was I? Oh yeah, Anupam Kher and his handlebar moustache, enduring through the ages. He was also in Ziddi some years later, also with Sonny Deol, where I think Sonny does get to drive a car through the front of an office building, or something like that. It was one of the first Bollywood action films I saw, and I can't remember a whole lot about it except that, well, it was kind of silly. And he was in Bride and Prejudice, so I guess there's a law saying that if you are trying to make a Bollywood/Hollywood crossover -- but not actually Bollywood/Hollywood -- then you should hire Anupam Kher. I know I would. The other half of the film belongs to Sridevi, who spends most of the film walking around looking beautiful before she finally gets her snake powers and delivers a musical supernatural finale that actually does live up to the promise on which the rest of the film fails to deliver. Sridevi has been (and continues) acting in the Hindi film industry since getting her start as a child actor in 1967. Since then, she's made over 250 movies and was one of the biggest stars in Bollywood. She doesn't have an impressive moustache like Anupam Kher, but that's usually not what you're looking for in a Bollywood leading lady. She does have eyes to die for and is a decent actress. Together, she and Kher will pretty much make you forget poor Sonny Deol is even in this movie. As I said, the finale of the movie, in which Garaknesh and Neelam battle one another through the use of song and dance and, weirdly enough, a magical mongoose made of bread, delivers everything you want it to. Too bad you had to sit through two hours of rather plodding production before that. To make matters worse, at least for us non-Hindi speakers, the subtitles stop about a third of the way into the film, and come back in the final third but out of phase with the action on the screen, so that the subtitles are appearing two or three lines after the dialogue they're supposed to be translating. A pretty disappointing movie considering the premise I hear the first film was much better. Snake spirit movies are nothing out of the ordinary for Indian films, or for many other south Asian industries. Sometimes, it seems the Thai film industry is comprised of 70 percent snake spirit movies, twenty percent romantic comedies, and ten percent movies where guys smash each other with war chariots and big mallets. Even Hong Kong has more than it's share of snake spirit movies, so with so many to chose from, there's no real reason to settle for something as disappointing as Nigahen. It's obvious that producer/director Harmesh Malhotra found himself with a surprise hit on his hands with the film Nagina and slapped this together with a minimum of effort and care in order to cash in on the success of the first film. It's a slapdash production right up until the end, which is worth skipping forward to if you happen to have the movie lying around, or if it is delivered to you one night by two snakes with mysterious intelligence. If such an event happens to you, be sure to throw your arms unto the heavens and scream, "Bhairavnath!" over and over for minutes on end. It'll be slightly more entertaining than sitting through Nigahen. Labels: Bollywood, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Netflix Diary, Year: 1989 posted by Keith at 5:10 PM | 2 Comments Monday, September 20, 2004Scream and Scream Again
1970, United States/England. Starring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alfred Marks, Christopher Matthews, Judy Huxtable, Yutte Stensgaard, Marshall Jones. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
What the hell? It's rare these days that I have that reaction to a film. By this point, I really have seen just about everything, and the one thing that keeps that from being a depressing revelation is that sometimes something will pop up to remind that I haven't seen anything. This movie was apparently based on a book called The Disoriented Man, and while watching it, that was definitely an apt description of me. Scream and Scream Again seems for much of its running time to be three completely different movies. By the end, of course, things will be tied together, but not in a way that necessarily makes much sense. The end result is not unlike watching one of those Thomas Tang/Godfrey Ho ninja movies where they'd buy bits and pieced of a couple old Hong Kong films, splice them together with some scenes from some unfinished Italian action film, then stick in a series of newly shot scenes featuring white guys in red and yellow ninja outfits with headbands that say "Ninja!" on them and call the whole hideous Frankenstein's monster a movie. If I lean a little heavily on plot summary for this review, please forgive me. I do try and avoid that these days, but sometimes you just have to tell people what's happening. Film number one in Scream and Scream Again begins during the opening credits, as a jogger sprints about London without a care in the world until he keels over and wakes up in some weird hospital room where a silent nurse in six pounds of make-up keeps insisting that he keep that spittle vacuum hooked to his lip. When she leaves, he struggles to sit up, throws back the covers, and realizes with horror that one of his legs is gone. Truth be told, it's a comical but unsettling and effective way to kick off the film, which goes from there straight into the second film, in which the most British cop in the world, Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks), harrumphs and mumbles like a character actor turned to eleven as he investigates a series of grisly murders in which young women are found to be completely drained of blood, though there's no pool of blood at the scene. No sooner have we been introduced to this plot thread than we pick up a third plot, in which agents of some make-believe Eastern Bloc (do I have to tell the kids what that means?) nation obviously modeled after East Germany, sit around in a room discussing vague plans until one of them whips out the touch of death and kills his leader. Eventually this requires Peter Cushing to come into the room and smoke a cigarette before he, too, has the touch of death put on him. Now I'm going to probably get some of the series of events out of order as I forget at what point the film switches to one of its three plots, but it really doesn't matter all that much. Meanwhile, Bellaver goes to interview the former employer of one of the serial killer's victims, and that turns out to be esteemed research scientist, Dr. Browning (Vincent Price). Then another girl gets killed. While that guy in Fake Germany is using his weird Vulcan Nerve Pinch to make Peter Cushing drip blood from his mouth, the cops set up a sting operation using an assortment of pretty female police detectives scattered around London's swinging clubs in hopes that one of them will be picked up by whoever is doing the vampiric killing. Sure enough it works. But wait, I think maybe before that, the guy from the beginning of the movie woke up and found that his other leg had been removed as well. The police find their vampire killer and engage in one of the longest chase scenes ever committed to a cheap nonsensical horror thriller. That the vampire killer is a young mop top in a frilly lavender Medieval Faire shirt make sit all the more fun. He leads the cops on a car chase, then a foot chase, then a climbing chase before finally falling down, getting handcuffed, ripping off his own hand, and starting the whole thing over again. Eventually he ends up in Vincent Price's barn, where he escapes the cops by jumping into a giant vat of acid hidden beneath the floor. But no, no, no! There's so, so much more! That Fake German guy with the touch of death seems to be taking over the country in the easiest coup ever staged, since various people in his way on the path to glory just get invited into the room with him, where he kills them with his magic fingers. After that, no one seems to raise any questions as to why the leaders of the country keep dying when they go into a room alone with him. Eventually, Christopher Lee shows up to talk about this guy. Wait, no. Let me give them names. The touch of death guy is Konratz, the most Commie fake Russian-German name they could come up with. He's played by Marshall Jones, who would also show up as a priest to help Vincent Price torture Pagans in Cry of the Banshee before finally having acid thrown into his face by Herbert Lom in Murders in the Rue Morgue. Really, you know one of the things I like about both Hammer and AIP films is that after a while, it's all one big family and everyone becomes a familiar face. Christopher Lee plays Fremont, an agent in the service of the British secret police. While we're getting know them, that one guy wakes up and finds that now his arms are missing. The hell? And that nurse still insists that he keep the spittle vacuum firmly attached to his lip. This is the guy you're going to feel most like while watching Scream and Scream Again. This is also a good movie for those who appreciate hot naked women in really baggy, ill-fitting bald caps. How can this movie possibly pull together its three plots and five or six genres? Well, how about by revealing that the vampire killer is a superman who has been constructed in Vincent Price's lab using various body parts collected from unlucky joggers is experiments funded by that weird Fake Germany country so that they can take over England and then the world with their race of supermen, that is unless secret agent Christopher Lee can stop them. Unless he, too, is a synthetic being. Or something. Man, don't look at me. And if you are wondering why that one guy can make Peter Cushing spit up blood or why the guy in the purple poet shirt drinks blood or why the movie spent so much time on two people trying to escape Fake Germany (one of whom is Yutte Stensgaarde, who we'll see much, much more of in Hammer's Lust for a Vampire) when they have no connection whatsoever to any of the other plots, well then you're just going to have to be happy with the fact that Scream and Scream Again managed to tie together as much as it did. To give the film some final sense of having come full circle, just about everyone in the cast who is alive by the final scene ends up in that pit of acid into which the vampire killer jumped. Adding to the overall sense of chaos is the fact that there is no central character. With three horror heavy hitters in the line-up, you'd think at least one of them would be a main character. But Cushing is killed off in one scene, and Price and Lee have about an equal amount of time in their separate plots. Konratz isn't really a main character, nor is Inspector Bellaver. I guess the closest thing we have to central characters are the young Dr. Sorel (Christopher Matthews, who would go on to battle Christopher Lee the following year in Hammer's Scars of Dracula) and his policewoman girlfriend. Sorel is the man who shows up at the end so Vincent Price can give his mad scientist speech (and it's a good one) as several of the disparate plots are loosely tied together, or more accurately, brought together in that sort of tangle that happens to the cord of your headphones when you take them out of your bag. So while you can't say it doesn't make sense, since by film's end it has drawn together in a wildly convoluted fashion, you can at least say it doesn't make very good sense. If the plots aren't enough to make your head spin, then take into account that it's all set to a jazzy lounge score with occasional bouts of acid rock. That means nothing about this movie is menacing, and even what I assume were supposed to be suspenseful or heavy scenes come across as light 'n' breezy. At it's best, Scream and Scream Again feels like something taking place in the Avengers universe, where a combination swingin' 60s meets espionage meets horror meets sci-fi meets Frankenstein meets police thriller meets political caper would be right at home. The sheer weirdness of this movie makes it enjoyable, though there are a number of things that could tick off the ill-prepared viewer. Chief among these annoyances is that they took three screen legends and once again keeps them separated. Cushing appears with neither Lee nor Price. As they would in The Oblong Box, Lee and Price have one scene together, again with minimal dialogue and only lasting a minute or so. But if you've ever wanted to watch Christopher Lee stare at Vincent Price in "hypno-eyes" fashion, then this is the moment for which you've been salivating. Lee has next to nothing to do and wouldn't make an impression if he weren't Christopher Lee. Peter Cushing gets to smoke a cigarette and talk about how important public relations are to a military dictatorship. Only Vincent Price gets a chance to strut his stuff during the aforementioned mad scientist speech. The rest of the cast performs in suitably hammy fashion. Inspector Bellaver in particular is in serious jeopardy of crossing into Monty Python's Mr. Gumby territory as he Cockney's his way through a variety of lines about san'wiches and 'oigh tinsel steel. Given the utter absurdity of just about everythign that happens, Gordon Hessler's direction is shockingly dull. He doesn't do anything wrong. He just does everything so...competently. And competent is fine most of the time, but subject matter this ludicrous demands something more daring and innovative in the direction department. But then, maybe it's Hessler's matter-of-fact workman's job of directing that makes the film seem even more unsettled, like some weird old man telling you the foulest, most twisted story imaginable but in a very sane and calm and rational sounding voice. Scriptwriter Christopher Wicking split his time between AIP and Hammer, and his work on both sides of the Atlantic was equally bizarre and uneven. In a way, he seems to have been the perfect match for Hessler, and the duo worked together on Scream and Scream Again as well as the previous three AIP gothics we've reviewed: The Oblong Box, Cry of the Banshee, and Murders in the Rue MOrgue. His Hammer credits include the exceptional Blood from the Mummy's Tomb and the film that is alternately known as "the film that destroyed Hammer" and "the film that showed us full frontal Nastassja Kinski nudity," To the Devil...A Daughter. If you're not worried about a film making very little sense until the very end, and even then just barely, then Scream and Scream Again is a pretty enjoyable romp. It's absolutely cracked in the head. As long as you're not bothered by huge chunks of film that have nothing to do with anything else or big blaring questions that remain unanswered or the fact that the police catch a vampire killer then leave him unattended so they can all go stand around the captain as he calls in a report, then Scream and Scream Again will have you giggling with confused and bewildered glee. It doesn't matter if you have high, low, or no expectations for this film. It will manage to confound them all. Labels: Horror: Just Plain Weird, Netflix Diary, Stars: Peter Cushing, Stars: Vincent Price, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 11:44 PM | 0 Comments Friday, April 02, 2004Jigoku
1960, Japan. Starring Shigeru Amachi, Hiroshi Hayashi, Fumiko Miyata, Torahiko Nakamura, Yoichi Numata, Jun Otomo, Kimie Tokudaiji, Akiko Yamashita. Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa.
Hell. Our rock and roll albums teach us that Hell is one big party town, but Jack Chick comic tracts would have us believe otherwise. Hell can take the shape of many different places. In one movie, it is an oppressively hot tropical village where b-grade made-for-television movie actors sweat profusely. In other movies, legions of the damned march pointlessly to and fro while a killer red robot stands on a mountain. My personal hell, of course, involves frequent broadcasts of Brat Pack movies and a stereo that only plays adult contemporary hits and that "Our God is an Awesome God" song. Some people don't even believe in Hell, and I guess I'd have to be among them since I'm not an overly religious fellow. But still, Hell is fun to talk about. It's a lot more interesting than Heaven, even to Christians. Fire and brimstone sermons are a dime a dozen, and each one goes into graphic detail regarding the eternal sufferings one endures in Hell. When Dante wrote his epic Divine Comedy, he spent about five pages on Purgatory, a couple pages on Heaven, and about a million pages on Hell. Everyone wants to describe Hell, but no one seems all that into Heaven. About the best we get is people wear a lot of robes, and maybe it's foggy. Other than that, who knows? The problem with Heaven is that it's a place where everything is basically going alright. While that may not be a bad way to live, it doesn't make for very dramatic literature. This is why film makers, much like Renaissance poets, tend to dwell on Hell while dashing off Heaven scenes with little imagination or consideration. But Hell - now there's a place worth writing about. It's miserable, fiery, evil, and full of sin. Actually, I don't know if it's full of sin or just full of sinners. Seems like if you were a big time sinner in life, then Hell would be a place where you don't get to do any more sinnin'. I know I like me a good sin every now and then, and I'd be pretty annoyed if every time I tried to commit a sin, the Devil popped up to make me stop. Likewise, Heaven is a place where, if you didn't sin in your life, you get to sin like mad for all eternity. I don't know. This theory is probably why I'm not a preacherman. Christians don't have a monopoly on Hell, of course, and lots of other religions serve up their own particular brand of post-mortem eternal suffering. One of the most wild and creative visions of Hell comes from Japan, and more specifically from the gloriously twisted imagination of famed horror director Nobuo Nakagawa. Nakagawa, one of the most respected names in the history of classic Japanese horror cinema, became an instant favorite of mine after I saw his stunning samurai ghost film Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, a film that combined the more traditional slow build-up with some truly shocking gore scenes the likes of which were unheard of in 1959. A year later, he completely outdid himself with the film Jigoku, also known as Sinners of Hell. People generally credit HG Lewis' outrageous 1963 film Blood Feast as the first splatter or gore film, a claim that betrays a lack of knowledge regarding horror and shock cinema on a global scale. Nakagawa not only beat Lewis to the punch, but he did it with a movie that is both far bloodier and far better than Lewis' ridiculously cheap but enjoyable romp. Jigoku is splatter that also manages to maintain a high production value, outrageous imagination, and a truly warped surrealism that sets it far apart from the legions of splatter films from all over the world that would follow in its wake. Part of the reason the film probably isn't as widely known as Lewis' film, apart from it being Japanese, is that while it delivers the grue, it's all reserved until the final third of the film. Up until that point, the movie is fairly slow in its pace, allowing time for the development of characters, the explanation of situations, and other aspects of basic storytelling that the kids these days seem not to have the patience for. We begin things with a credit sequence that is positively James Bond in nature, or at least Seijun Suzuki. Scantily clad, curvatious femmes in weird shadows and blue light populate the sequence, which then leads into a montage of hellish images that will be revisited during the film's finale. Having thus shocked the viewer right out of the gate, Nakagawa continues with the story proper. A college professor is giving the typical movie professor lecture on concepts of hell, the kind of lecture that never actually takes place in real classrooms. One of the students, Shiro (Shigeru Amachi, who also played the wicked samurai lead in Tokaido Yatsuya Kaidan), is especially interested for a couple different reasons. First, he's about to marry the professor's daughter, but more influentially, he and a shady acquaintance named Tamura were recently involved in a hit and run murder. As a result, damnation, sin, and guilt have been weighing pretty heavily on Shiro's mind. He and Tamura had been out for a drive that night when a drunken petty criminal stumbled out in front of their car. Though it was clearly not their fault and the police would probably write the matter off entirely as an accident, Tamura - who had been at the wheel - convinces Shiro not to report the incident since no one saw it. Though he is uncomfortable with such a course of action, Shiro is eventually persuaded by the darker, somewhat mysterious Tamura. Shiro begins to question why he even hangs out with this thoroughly creepy individual. "Who is this guy Tamura?" Shiro thinks to himself. "I know I don't like him." I guess everyone has one of those people in their lives who you really just absolutely do not like, and yet you always seem thrown together with them regardless of how much you strive to avoid them. The big hole in Tamura's plot is that the crime did not go unwitnessed. The gangster's aging mother actually saw the whole thing, but rather than go to the police and settle for a court battle that will probably not end too horribly for Shiro and Tamura, she gives the license number to the recently widowed wife of the gangster, a fiery woman who immediately vows to hunt down the men who killed her man and extract horrible revenge on them. As if having the sexy but murderous widow of a gangster your creepy acquaintance killed after you isn't enough of a hassle, Shiro is soon involved in another car accident, this one resulting in the death of his fiancee, the professor's daughter. Spurned by her relatives and obviously not getting a passing grade in the professor's theology class, Shiro seeks solace in the embrace of a young hussy named Yoko, who we immediately recognized as the vengeful widow. Before she can stick an ice pick in the back of his skull, however, he gets word that his mother is dying and so decides to pack up and leave town, his destination being to visit his ailing mother out in the countryside. Upon reaching the Tenjoen Senior Citizens Facility where his mother lies dying, things hardly improve for the troubled young man. His mom, of course, is at death's door. His father is an unrepentant asshole who ignores his dying wife in the next room in favor of getting it on with a young harlot from the city. He also runs into the friendly and proper young Sachiko, who happens to look like his recently deceased fiancée. Oh, and there's the insane artist who spends all day working on paintings of Hell, a corrupt cop, a criminally negligent doctor, a seedy reporter, and a couple other rakehells and ne'r-do'wells. Put it all together and you have one hell of those "gathering of lost souls" type things. Suffice it to say that this motley gang of sweaty sinners is hardly the pick-me-up Shiro was needing. Shiro is at least happy hanging out with his dead fiancee's doppleganger, but the determined advances of his father's mistress are unwelcome. Equally unwelcome is Tamura, who shows up to taunt everyone and expose their secret shameful pasts. Slightly more welcome is the old professor, who is ready to reconcile his differences with Shiro, at least until Tamura starts talking about how the old man was a jackass during World War II and stole his wounded buddy's canteen, then left said buddy to die. It's really one of those parties that involves too much alcohol and "truth or dare." Not one to have a moment of good luck, Shiro's life is further complicated when both Yoko shows up. She reveals her background then attempts to shoot Shiro. A struggle on a bridge results in Yoko accidentally plunging to her death. Maybe Shiro should just stay home. When Tamura shows up to taunt Shiro and generally act like an asshole, the two get into a fight and Tamura falls off the bridge, too! All this is witnessed by Yoko's crazy old mother-in-law, who also witnessed the hit and run and apparently spends entire weeks hiding in the bushes around various towns hoping to catch a glimpse of some knavery. During a party to celebrate the center's tenth anniversary, everyone gets drunk and belligerent and generally behaves like those old guys you see trying to punch each other out in Japanese parliamentary meetings. When the dad's young harlot puts the moves on an exhausted Shiro, the father catches them and tries to kill her. The only reason she doesn't succeed is because she falls down the stairs while running away and breaks her neck. Lesson learned: don't be friends with Shiro. His dad immediately conspires to cover it up, and they both head back to the main hall where people are passed out, fooling around, or generally behaving like the scum of the earth. Not one to stay dead for long, a pale and deathly looking Tamura shows up to hurl barbs and taunts yet again, and as the clock strikes nine, Shiro finally loses it and tries to choke Tamura to death, his actions slightly hampered by the fact that while trying to choke Tamura to death, he himself is being choked to death by Yoko's crazy mother-in-law. About that time, the clock freezes, and the fiery pits of hell open up to consume the various lost souls bickering with one another in the living room! That will kill a party even faster than breaking a lamp or getting caught staring at the hostess' cleavage. Shiro finds himself on the misty, barren banks of the river of death, and it is here that the movie kicks its eerie surrealism into high gear. I'd be slightly surprised if future surreal horror auteurs like Lucio Fulci didn't see this movie. There are parts of the landscape of Hell that look very much like the hellish landscapes from The Beyond. The king of hell shows up to bellow about damnation. On the banks of the river, he is met by his inescapable load, Tamura, who tells him they are destined to burn in hell together. Not one to accept the word of a psychopath who recently returned from the dead only to quickly return back to being dead, Shiro wanders off through the various levels of hell just like the protagonist in Dante's Inferno (as opposed to Dario's Inferno). He first encounters his recently departed fiancée, who is spending her time in hell stacking rocks along the riverbank. Her sin: dying before her parents, which seems like a pretty lame thing to get sent to hell for, though not as lame as being damned for driving a Volkswagon backwards into the bay, if you know what I mean (and I bet at least three of you do). She informs Shiro that she was seconds away from joyfully telling him she was pregnant, but got sidetracked by the whole being killed in a car wreck thing. As if Shiro didn't have enough to deal with, he now understands that their baby, too, is condemned to Hell. This is pretty harsh, really. Next thing you know, people are being dangled upside down with spikes jammed through their blood-gushing necks. They are being forced to drink from a river filled with pus and bile and other tasty treats (pus and bile custard is only slightly more disgusting than your average British fare, though). Others are forced to simply run around in a big confused circle forever, sort of like being stuck in a never-ending Limp Bizkit concert. One may provides the film's most shocking and gruesome atrocity as his skin is ripped away, leaving a bloody skeleton covered with pulsating, dripping organs. As Shiro searches desperately for his child, he is still tormented by Shiro, who is revealed to be a demon and eventually tortured just to shut him the hell up. Shiro finally finds his child on a giant flaming wheel of life and struggles in vain to rescue the child and possibly achieve some sort of salvation from the horrors of hell. Needless to say, he appears to fail miserably. What Nakagawa accomplishes in the final thirty minutes of this film is truly mind-blowing. His sets are not lavish, but instead make ingenious use of smoke, multi-colored lighting, superimposition, fire, and animation to create an otherworldly and terrifying nightmare landscape. It's the sort of thing Fulci spent his entire life trying to achieve (and did, to some degree, in The Beyond): an overwhelmingly eerie, alien world that feels like you've stepped right into a Salvador Dali painting. Cinematically, it seems to forecast the out-of-control artistic style of maverick film makers like Seijun Suzuki, who would apply similar color-saturated hallucinations to his yakuza films. As grisly as the effects to come are, they are overshadowed by the sheer wild imagination put into the set pieces they inhabit. Simply put, the gore is good. The scene of the man being flayed alive, lying there screaming as his organs pulsate and spew blood, is really something else. I can only imagine how audiences must have reacted in 1960, because it's still a very successful and bloody effect, far more shocking than anything HG Lewis would attempt a few years later with his better known but far worse Blood Feast. Part of what makes the splatter content of Jigoku so powerful is that the movie itself is a very well crafted work of art. While some of the editing during the final journey through Hell is confusing, the movie as a whole is technically sound, not to mention full of great writing, pacing, and acting. Lewis' splatterfest is, of course, amazingly bad in all departments (though not at all unfun to watch). Pioneering though it was, Jigoku was not necessarily alone in its move toward a more shocking, more surreal, or just plain bloodier presentation. While it was blowing the minds of unsuspecting patrons in Japan, the West was getting assaulted by Alfred Hitchcock's ground-breaking Psycho, which while not sharing the same artistic style as Nakagawa's film, certainly shares the same desire to shock, amuse, confuse, and break new ground in what was a very tired and overly safe genre. Though not nearly as well known today, even in Japan, Jigoku is every bit as much responsible for throwing open the doors to a new type of horror as was Hitchcock's film. From the seeds planted by these films came glorious monstrosities like Blood Feast and the various Hammer horror films that continued to push the envelope of gore and sexuality throughout the 1960s. Jigoku snares and disarms you with its very slow-paced, conventional first hour, leaving you completely unprepared for the moment when the clock stops and everyone is plunged into the depths of the underworld. Nakagawa once again proves himself a master of the classic horror film while, at the same time, defiantly showing that he is not bound by the conventions and can move the genre into bold new territory. It is a cautionary tale about the wages of sin and indulgence, yet it communicates its message without seeming preachy and its gore without seeming exploitive. Jigoku is a classic of the horror genre, and self-respecting fan with interest in horror beyond the director's cut of Valentine, featuring 15% more Denise Richards boob shots, owes it to themselves to track this horrible beauty of a film down. It's been released subtitled in English on region 2 DVD in Japan, which will cost you a pretty penny, of course. Hopefully, someone will one day take notice of this unjustly forgotten classic and give it a release elsewhere for less than ¥4800. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1960 posted by Keith at 4:07 PM | 1 Comments Monday, April 15, 2002Phenomena
1985, Italy. Starring Jennifer Connelly, Daria Nicolodi, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Patrick Bauchau, Donald Pleasence, Fiore Argento, Federica Mastroianni, Fiorenza Tessari, Mario Donatone, Francesca Ottaviani, Michele Soavi, Franco Trevisi. Directed by Dario Argento.
Phenomena is often regarded as something of a turning point in the career of Italian thriller director Dario Argento. Unfortunately for him, the direction it is most often cited as turning is down. After Phenomena, the influential director had one more good film in him - the mean-spirited and sadistic Opera -- and then it was all downhill from there. In many ways, Argento's career seemed to reflect that of another highly creative, important director: Tsui Hark. Both men revolutionized film making in their respective countries and inspired (and continue to inspire) countless other writers and directors. Both men brought a highly stylized vision to the screen. And both men have spent the better half of the last decade trying to live up to their own reputations. Like Hark, at least when Argento fails he fails in a spectacular and interesting fashion. Trauma and Stendahl Syndrome are both wildly uneven works, but each film has moments of brilliance and macabre beauty where you can see the Argento of old shining through. Even if those films are disappointing, they're still worth taking a look at. Dario's Phantom of the Opera is such a deliriously bad mess that it becomes entertaining for all the wrong reasons. As for his more recent Sleepless, I will reserve judgment until such time as I have seen the film. It could be nothing more than a tired rehash of Deep Red, or it could be for Argento what Time and Tide was for Tsui Hark - proof that he still has it in him, even if it hasn't been tapped too much recently. Phenomena gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons, but much of it is lingering hostility based not on Phenomena itself, but on its drastically truncated American release, which was retitled Creepers. The negative reaction to that little experiment continues to color people's perception of Phenomena, and those opinions are sometimes perpetuated by critics (and fans) too lazy to revisit the original, uncut film and instead rely on past critics who bashed Creepers. They lazily figure it's more or less the same movie, so the same criticisms will apply. In some cases, that might be true, but it's hardly in the spirit of giving Phenomena a fair shake as a stand-alone work. Certainly the film is not immune to criticism, nor is everyone who reacts negatively to the film merely mimicking those who came before them. There are plenty of things that can be legitimately dissected even in the uncut version of Phenomena, especially if the viewer is not predisposed toward understanding - or at least excusing and tolerating - some of the peculiarities of Italian horror films in general and Dario Argento in particular. Like most people in the United States, my initial exposure to Phenomena was through Creepers, which was one of a dozen or so foreign titles stocked in the local video store I frequented with horror film cohorts Dave and Rob back in the day. The place was surprisingly well stocked for a mom and pop video store in tiny LaGrange, Kentucky circa 1987, but mom and pop shops always seem more open to weird movies, or at least more ignorant of how offensive the contents might prove. As rabid horror fans with a very limited menu from which to chose, we devoured every title we could get our hand son no matter how abysmal it may have been. Zero Boys? Okay, why not? The Hills Have Eyes II? Yeah, that works. Even at a relatively young age, though, we learned to treasure films from Italy. They were special. They offered a little something extra that was lacking in many of the contemporary films from America, most of which were simply operating on the Friday the 13th model. Sure, we had late-night monster movies on television, but even I can only watch Brice of Frankenstein so many times before I start thinking about maybe watching something else. The Italian films had a certain exotic appeal, a curious flash, style, and willingness to push the boundaries even in a genre of film where the boundaries were often pretty liberal. Okay, so mostly it was the gore and sex. What do you want? We were fourteen, fifteen years old and not exactly the most sophisticated viewers in the world. Hell, we couldn't afford to be sophisticated or picky about what we watched, because there just wasn't that much around. Even if we'd had the intellectual development needed to be discerning viewers, you can't do much when all you have to chose from is Screamers and Ghoulies. Compared to those, event he most idiotic Italian films were godsends, if for no other reason than they took things to such extremes and did it with gusto. No one is going to call Demons a work of art, but at least it tried to entertain you and did something a little different than the usual "killer in the woods" routine. When we found and watched a copy of Suspiria for the first time in high school, it was a definite banner moment for me and my taste in films. I'd never seen anything quite like it; never even knew that a horror film could be so sumptuous, surreal, and otherworldly. Parts of it didn't make any sense to me, but I was willing to roll with the hallucination simply because it was such a wild, unique trip. At the time, I'd never heard of pioneering directors like Mario Bava so the wild use of color was still all new to me, and it was my first brush with Dario Argento. Creepers would be my second. As a youngun, I thought Creepers was all right. It wasn't the masterpiece I expected after seeing Suspiria, but it wasn't bad, especially since we watched it on the same night we watched Screamers -- the movie that promises people turned inside out and then delivers naught but tedium and yawns. It also didn't hurt that I had a wicked crush on Jennifer Connelly (and I say "had" as if I still don't have it). I didn't see what was so special about it, and the film was indeed a bit of a mess. Of course, I didn't know how badly it had been edited at the time. Creepers jettisons over twenty minutes of material, shearing down the running time from 110 minutes to an anemic 82. Some of the gore was trimmed, as it always seems to be, and a lot of plot and character interaction. Even in its uncut form, there's no denying that Argento's film was not entirely logical. Missing almost half an hour, it becomes well nigh incomprehensible. Certain aspects of the plot, including the rather crucial revelation about the killer, are altered as well by the edits. For me, it was pretty much an "in one ear and out the other" affair as we moved on to the more visceral and less ambitious Zombie. Years later and more familiar with the back catalog of Argento and other Italian genre directors, I decided it would be worth my time to track down an uncut copy of Phenomena and refamiliarize myself with the film, or do the proverbial "getting to know it again for the first time." This was in the days before companies like Anchor Bay it possible to just waltz on down to any store and pick up a widescreen, uncut copy of such a film. I had to engage in fairly complex video trading gymnastics with a guy who kept insisting on telling me about all the Japanese rape porn he could send me. Man, I don't want to watch that crap! I just want to see something normal, like Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasance, and a razor-wielding chimp. After finally convincing this less than savory fellow that I didn't need any rape movies, I managed to complete the trade and get myself a really horrid looking God-knows-what-generation dupe of the uncut film. I was in college at this time, and though I was expanding my horizons, I was still pretty naive about a lot of particulars and not well-versed enough in Italian horror films to keep my opinion completely uncolored by the flood of negative commentary regarding the film. Once again, I watched it and dismissed it. It was kind of goofy. In parts, the plot was outlandish to the point of absurdity. It just didn't strike me as a very good movie, and I was comfortable agreeing with those who counted the movie as the beginning of the end for Dario Argento. Once again, years passed. Things changed. Phenomena was released on DVD, and all of a sudden I really wanted to see it again. Why? I mean, I didn't like the movie, right? So why had it become so captivating? Why did pieces of it stick so firmly in my mind and work so diligently on my desires? I suspected that my conscience had missed something in the movie that my sub-conscience had picked up and filed away for such a time as I was ready to understand it. So it was late one night that I sat down for my third look at Phenomena -- the look that would answer all my questions about the film. It was on this third viewing that I realized I'd fallen in love with the movie. Phenomena finds Argento straddling two worlds, with one foot firmly planted in the more-or-less logical giallo films like Deep Red and the other kicking around in the free-form phantasmagoria of supernatural fantasies like Suspiria. There is a logic to the film, but it becomes warped as Argento revels in the Italian horror film's philosophy that a horror film should be approached less like waking life and more like a nightmare. It is this philosophy that confounds so many people since it allows the director to meander in and out of sense without distinguishing between the two. It also affords fans of the films a rather sturdy aegis, as damn near any stupid idea can be defended with the simple statement, "You don't get it. It isn't supposed to make sense." Well, sometimes even things that aren't supposed to make sense can still stink, but that's neither here nor there. A young and somewhat awkward Jennifer Connelly stars as Jennifer Corvino, the daughter of an American movie star who has shipped his daughter off to a boarding school in Zurich. In a rotten bit of parenting, the father has neglected to research the area, lest he would have discovered that a serial killer has been stalking the countryside and preying on girls his daughter's age, including it seems at least one student at the school. I know parents can't be perfect, but sending your daughter to a school besieged by a serial killer just seems to be a bad idea. Oh well, you know how those movie stars can be. What really sets Jennifer apart from the other students is her curious ability to communicate, and in some cases even summon and control, insects. I'm guessing that the average bug rarely has anything interesting on its pinpoint-sized mind. You know, just stuff about "I gotta lift this leaf" or "Mmm, pollen," but even if the conversation is lacking, being able to control the bugs is a pretty good power to have, unless you're the kind of person who gets creeped out by bugs. In that case, you're probably not going to appreciate beetles dropping by all the time and asking if they can roll some dung for you or something. I've always thought horror films about bugs were a bit of a cheat. I mean, it's easy to creep people out with bugs because people are already afraid of them. You don't have to work very hard to make someone think a bug is icky. If a giant cockroach eats someone, the fact that it is eating someone is a distant second on the shock-o-meter than the simple fact that it's a big cockroach. However weird Phenomena and Creepers may have been, I was always happy that Argento never took the cheap way out. The bugs are around, and sure he trots out the maggots, but for the most part their application in the film is fairly subdued, and the fact that they more or less play the role of heroes rather than villains makes Phenomena unique among all "bug attack" movies. Jennifer's quirks don't end with insect telekinesis, however. She's also a somnambulist, prone to taking long and dangerous walks in her sleep. One such walk sees her witness a murder, then even more horrifying, get picked up by a couple of sleazy German guys in a sports car. When she does not share their love of Kraftwerk, they dump her down a hill where she finally wakes up and meets kindly wheelchair-bound entomologist Professor John McGregor, played with class by horror film mainstay Donald Pleasance. McGregor is accompanied by an ultra-intelligent chimp who helps him around. By this point, the chimp isn't even going to phase you. As more girls begin to disappear, McGregor and Jennifer hatch a wild scheme in which she will team up with a Great Sarcophagus Fly (they only feed on dead bodies) to track down the killer. Complicating matters is the fact that Jennifer's sleepwalking and general weirdness has put her at odds with the rest of the school, who constantly mock her while the head mistress demands the poor girl be subjected to a variety of pointless brain scans and medical tests. If hyper-intelligent chimps, detective flies, mind-melding with a maggot, sleepwalking, decapitations, and blasts of heavy metal at completely inappropriate moments don't mark this film as a bizarre one, that's because you've yet to get to the final act. That's where things really go off the deep end. For me, at least, there is something spellbinding about Phenomena. Argento's stylistic approach to the direction keeps the film fascinating to look at from beginning to end. His use of color, so prominent in Suspiria and Inferno, is more subdued here but no less effective. Cinematographer Romano Albani paints a simply sumptuous and terrifying picture with every movie of the camera. Fans of Lucio Fulci (and yep, I am one) like to celebrate the director's ability to paint an eerie cinematic picture, but Alabni (who also worked for Argento on the astoundingly beautiful Inferno) really sets the bar high with this one. The use of simple effects really give the film its power. The opening sequence in which a young girl (Dario's daughter, Fiore - the first but not last time I can think of where he menaces one of his daughters on screen) is left behind by a tour bus and wanders through the windswept, lush green hills until finally coming to the home of the killer, is an incredible sequence that draws a great deal of atmosphere and creepiness from the simplest of things. Like one of those old fairy tales that turns deadly sinister and macabre, the viewer knows that these idyllic grassy hills are a lie. Even though we've not been introduced to the plot yet, we know there is a killer hiding somewhere amongst the windswept beauty. Another of Phenomena's best moments comes when Jennifer finally has enough of the taunting of her classmates, who are making fun of her after they find a letter in which she discusses her ability to control insects. Although she goes through the initial head-clutching histrionics, Argento wisely pulls back from the cliché "angry school girl psychic attack" a la Carrie. Instead, Jennifer backs away calmly. She smiles, and suddenly a simple white light illuminates her face as a supernatural wind blows back her hair and she says simply, politely, "I love you. I love you all." The other students are confounded by her bizarre reaction to their torture, not to mention the fact that there's wind blowing through the inside of the school all of a sudden, but their confusion soon turns to shock and terrified comprehension as they realize that she's not talking to them. She's talking to the thousands upon thousands of flies that she summons. In a great cloud, they swarm around and envelope the school. But she never sends them to attack. They're only present as a show of her power while Goblin's masterful, haunting theme highlights the supernatural insect shenanigans. Description can't really communicate the bizarre beauty and power of the scene. Characters in Italian horror films are often flat and single-dimensional - if they're even that thick. Certainly Argento's film is populated by the stock characters we'd expect. There's the gruff cop, the creepy demanding head mistress, and an assembly of no-name schoolgirls who are only there to stick out their tongues and taunt our heroine. At the same time, however, the development of Jennifer and McGregor is engaging. Jennifer Connelly was an acting novice at the time, and a good many of her lines are delivered with a degree of flat awkwardness. Luckily, her character is so strange that the delivery doesn't really detract. In fact, it enhances the weirdness. Had she had more experience, she might have gone over the top and been less interesting. As is, she is reserved, aloof, and exactly as one would need to be for such a character. At the same time, the young actress has an undeniable charm and charisma that draws you in. In many ways, her off-kilter performance mirrors the off-kilter appeal of the film itself. Pleasance is, of course, a master of the genre, and he is as good here as he's ever been. The conversations between he and Jennifer are good, and weirdly enough, the interaction between he and his chimp are just as touching. One of the mot heart-wrenching scenes comes when McGregor becomes the inevitable target of the killer and his chimpanzee sidekick, locked outside but witness to the danger McGregor is in, howls desperately as it struggles to break into the house and come to the rescue. It's a completely ludicrous scene that is, within the supernatural universe of Phenomena, oddly tear-jerking. The chimp puts in a heck of a performance. Rounding out the main cast is Argento regular Daria Nicolodi as the only understanding face in the whole school. As the film enters it's final act, she gets to chew some major scenery and deliver one of the film's darkly humorous moments when Jennifer's guardian from American runs to her rescue, gun in hand. Of course, it wouldn't be an Argento film without some brutal special effects and scenes of vioelnce. He certainly doesn't let us down. From the opening murder to the disgusting pit of corpses to the final razor attack on the killer, and even for the blade piercing the neck and protruding from the mouth (an effect he liked so much he used again to even nastier effect in Opera), Argento and special effects supervisor Sergio Stivaletti (Demons, Dellamorte Dellamore) don't let us down. Where as goremeister Lucio Fulci often delivered violence and grue so over-the-top as to be cartoonish, Argento restrains the onslaught just enough to keep things shocking and unnerving. The bugs are a curious aspect of the movie. Like I said, for once they aren't there just to provide the gross-out factor or menace teenagers in hot rods. Other than a few maggots, the bugs aren't really that gross. Just flies, for the most part, and a bee here or there. They are not products of the atomic age, nor is Jennifer's ability to communicate with and control them explained away as some mutation from radiation. In fact, it's not explained at all other than a bit where McGregor reflects on the rather common occurrence of "ESP" -- or at least the ability to communicate without visual or audio aids -- among insects. Although their involvement in the plot is almost tangential, they do a play a key role in the film's completely off-its-rocker finale, in which Jennifer discovers the true identity of the killer(s), falls into a pit of gooey corpse muck, is menaced by the killer on a boat, and finally summons the insects to protect her, this time allowing them to do more than just make a show of it. It's rare in film that the bugs get to save the day, even rarer when the day has to be saved again, but this time by a vengeful razor-wielding chimp. Even with the various hints dropped in this review regarding the nature of the finale, it's still a serious mind warp. As gorgeous as the film is, it is not without its flaws. Chief among them are the many contrivances thrown at us to propel things along. It's convenient, for instance, that the girl with the psychic link to bugs rolls down a hill and wanders in her sleep to the home of a determined entomologist who has a grudge against the local serial killer. It's also convenient that the chimpanzee, while searching for sustenance in a public park, finds a brand new straight razor just lying in the garbage can. Character stupidity often contributes to some exasperation with the movie as well. In the most obvious scene, Jennifer is trapped in the killer's home and struggles desperately to fish a telephone out of an adjoining room. Rather than just crawling through the opening at the top of the door, she hangs there and tries to snag the phone with some sort of curtain rod. Who would do that? Just grab the dang phone! And then there's the heavy metal. From time to time, it almost works, but at other times it has absolutely no connection to anything going on in the movie. Why would an ambulance crew be blasting Motorhead as they cart away a murder victim? Add to that the lack of any real police presence and a "killer's identity" bait-and-switch not unlike the one in DeepRed, and there's certainly enough targets in Phenomena to keep critics of the movie busy. But none of that really matters to me, because the film takes on a logic all its own. I know that may sound like a weak defense of the film, and I'll grant you that seeing Phenomena as a great movie relies heavily on your ability to suspend not just your disbelief, but your rational sense of logic as well. I mean, we are dealing with a movie in whic a girl can commune with bugs, and a vicious, deformed little kid plays a prominent role in the finale. If you go into a plot like that expecting rationality, then you're lost before you begin. I think movies like Suspiria are more successful among people because it plays one side of the field It's a supernatural fantasy, so we willingly accept that our expectations for the real world do not apply. Phenomena, on the other hand, complicates matters by being equal parts supernatural fantasy and concrete whodunit. The mix is what keeps a lot of people uneasy about the film. Just as you settle into it being a murder mystery, Jennifer Connelly starts forming psychic links with maggots and summoning great clouds of angry flies to do her bidding. From its inauspicious role as one of my least favorite Dario Argento films, Phenomena has emerged as one of my very favorites, right alongside Suspiria and even inching out Deep Red and Inferno. It asks certain concessions be made on the part of the viewer, but if you are willing to make those, it's truly one of the most mesmerizing, fantastic films around. When I finished watching it for the third time, I was awestruck and more than a bit embarrassed by my previous dismissal of the film and failure to grasp what I was seeing. Every scene is constructed perfectly to pull you in and keep you feeling uneasy. As trite as this may sound, Phenomena exceeds the expectations of what a movie is and becomes a deliriously gorgeous work of art. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Horror: Giallo, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 11:16 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, September 20, 2001Uzumaki
2000, Japan. Starring Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Ren Osugi, Hinako Saeki, Masami Horiuchi, Taro Suwa, Eun-Kyung Shin, Sadao Abe. Directed by Higuchinsky. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
I love fairy tales. Not the happily-ever-after Disney stuff that makes you feel good about yourself. Not the safe and sanitized nonsense that has come to represent the fairy tale in our more recent history. No, I'm talking the black stuff. dark and twisted, meant more to terrify children into sleepless nights than to lull them into a soothing night's slumber. Tales where the kids don't outsmart the witch, where they do end up in the oven, and no one lives happily ever after. Given our increasingly crass and cynical society, I would seem, at first, that this sort of twisted tale would be popular, but as they often require some degree of imagination and appreciation of both the subtle and the fantastic, most people would simply rather watch shit blow up or get the classic Disney ending. When someone does attempt to carry that sense of the macabre over into a modern day fairy tale, it can happen with mixed results. At their best, they come out looking like Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb or City of Lost Children. More often than not, however, they just come out looking Troll. In our recent review of the classic Japanese horror film Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, we talked about how, despite being a world away, Japanese horror draws on very similar, almost universal, elements of horror to lay on the scare. In a similar vein, there creepy fairy tale elements that exist above and beyond culture and geography and become part of globally understood and shared heritage. While in college, I was reading a book simply called Japanese Tales, that was a collection of bizarre Japanese fairy tales, and it struck me that, despite the fact that many of these existed as oral legends at a time long before Japan was in regular contact with the nations of the West, the stories were very similar in tone. Everyone understands a witch luring innocent youths into the woods, or monsters who take the form of humans. My favorite was about a woman who struggled much of her life with a tape worm. She managed to survive the parasite and eventually give birth to a young son who grew up to become a tremendously powerful general and leader of men. Great were his deeds, and he soon ruled the land. A neighboring warlord invited the great warrior to his court one day for a celebration of their new alliance. At the feast, the neighboring warlord offered up bushels of walnuts (or was it chestnuts?) for all to eat -- it was, after all, the commerce crop that kept his province prosperous. The great warrior, however, refused to eat the walnuts. When the host warlord grew angry and felt insulted, the great warrior threw off his helmet and exclaimed "I can't digest nuts! I'm my mother's tapeworm!" He then promptly turned into a tapeworm and slithered off. The best part of the whole weird story, however, was the final line, which went something like "Back in his homeland, his family was devastated and his province plunged into chaos. Everyone else agreed it had all been a good laugh." I bring this up because I feel the Japanese surrealist horror film Uzumaki draws heavily upon the tradition of the creepy fairy tale. There is something fantastic and mesmerizing about it all, and something unsettling and distressing lurking just under the surface. I forgot where I read it, perhaps in an interview with Clive Barker, but someone said that the most effective way of creating a sense of dread is to take something familiar and slowly transform it into something alien and threatening. The best example I can think of is the closet monster. How many times have you opened your closet to get something out? Your shoes, perhaps, or an elf you've been holding prisoner? If you have a closet, chances are you open it at least once a day, maybe more. It's a familiar place. But let it get dark out, let it be pitch black and three in the morning when you wearily gaze over from the comfort of your bed and realize the closet door is open. Suddenly it's not so familiar. It's a gaping black maw, noticeably dark even in the dead of night. Suddenly what was once familiar to you begins to take on a sense of dread. What if something comes out of there? A monster, or a killer, or that damn elf? And what's that shadow? I think it's just my shirt thrown over the vacuum cleaner, but it sure looks like an ax wielding homicidal maniac. I once spent an entire night scared witless as a youth, covers tight around my neck as I stared in horror at what was most definitely the shadow of Weird Harold from Fat Albert come to kill me. Okay, so maybe not everyone gets freaked out in the middle of the night by shadows that bear a vague resemblance to Weird Harold, but you get my meaning. Nothing makes a person panic quite like suddenly finding yourself in a strange situation when you thought you had everything under control. Uzumaki is set in a sleepy working class town somewhere in the Japanese countryside. There's nothing particularly weird about the place. Hell, even though it's in Japan it's not that much different than a small blue-collar town in America. It's downright idyllic, right up until the opening narration that tells us of the unspeakable nightmares the town contains. Director Higuchinsky has nothing on his resume before this film, but he proves right out of the gate that he is a master of subversion, taking a beautiful small town and immediately making you anxious about it. We then meet cute high school student Kirie, our narrator. She's a pretty average schoolgirl -- a few friends, a few enemies, a nerdy goofball who keeps trying to make her fall in love with him by employing such tactics as jumping out and trying to scare her at every possible opportunity. Her dad is an accomplished pottery artisan, and her boyfriend is a moody teen who will one day join an emo band. The two of them are hassled by a Barney Fife-esque local cop who has nothing better to do than bluster at teens who ride two to a single bike. En route to meet her beau, Shuichi, she spots his father crouching in an alley. Attempts to get his attention fail, as he is intently videotaping a snail slithering up the wall. Already things are weird. Shuichi is acting weird as well, though not so weird as to be taping hours worth of snail shenanigans in extreme close-up. But he seems afraid, and he talks of running away, fleeing the town, which he feels has a rotten core. Kirie is confused but also a bit excited by the idea of dropping everything and running off with her childhood sweetheart. At this point, the film is shaping up to be just another schoolgirl horror film, the sort of watered down, one step above Goosebumps stuff that has been big business in Japan for the last couple years. You know, whenever anyone has the brains to make a movie for adolescent girls, it's always a huge hit (remember Titanic), and yet people only seem to remember to do it like once every ten years or so. You'd think by now they'd understand that the girls are bored shitless and want a little something thrown their direction. Don't be fooled. Uzumaki is just getting started. Kirie learns that Shuichi's father has become obsessed with spiral designs, surrounding himself with them, dedicating his life to staring at them and ranting about it all when he isn't bust videotaping the spiral design on snail shells. His madness has reached the point where it is starting to tear the household apart, and Shuichi suspects there is a force behind it all that threatens the whole town. At school, in the meantime, things aren't much more normal. When Kirie isn't being accosted in the bathroom by the leader of the resident girl gang, who sings the praises of being the center of attention, of being the focus of the spiral, she's sitting in a science class attended by a kid who only shows up to school on rainy days and is covered by a thick, dripping goo. Why they let him only come into school on rainy days is less puzzling then why they would let a kid covered in gallons of effluvia just take his seat. Hell, we didn't even tolerate the kid who always had the gooey, unnaturally green ball of mucous clinging to the very edge of his nostril. I know if I had showed up for chemistry glass all dripping with goo, there would have been a good chance they would have made me hit the showers, or at least that emergency eye wash fountain for the kids too clumsy to not get iodine in their eyes. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though, as Shuichi's father is eventually overcome by his mania and commits suicide -- by cramming himself into a washing machine and twisting his body into a taffy-like spiral. This upsets Shuichi's mother, and the matter is made worse during the funeral when the clouds from the crematorium spiral up into a massive, misty whirlpool that also has a tendency to form a likeness of the deceased's anguished face. Shuichi's mother breaks down, and soon she too is obsessed with spirals, but with their elimination rather than their collection. She begins by slicing off her own fingertips, and then after a later midnight visit from a friendly neighborhood centipede, realizes there is a part of her inner ear that is also a spiral. The jagged shard of a broken vase can dig that out, though. As Shuichi helplessly watches his parents self-destruct, Kirie begins to notice her father too is becoming a nutcase, and the girl gang leader at school has started styling her hair into massive swirls. A local Poindexter teams up with Kirie and Shuichi to crack the sinister mystery, but of course, just as he makes a huge discovery, he's killed in a grisly car wreck. If the overall freakish atmosphere of the movie thus far hasn't convinced you this is something more than schoolgirl horror, the graphic gore might bring you around. While we're not talking Dawn of the Dead here, the movie refuses to pull punches with the gore, and when someone dies, they die horribly. The bizarre events in the town eventually attract the attention of the outside media, and a news van arrives to do a "can you believe this shit" type of story that is made even meatier by the fact that the gooey kid and his friendly neighborhood tormentor have just gone and transformed into giant half-slug half-human creatures and spend the day squirming up and down the side of the high school. The film crew meets with an equally unsavory fate as they attempt to leave town, resulting in some decapitation and a cute, perky newscaster left with her eyeballs dangling by the optic nerves. Kirie and Shuichi want desperate to either fight against or escape from the growing hurricane of spiral-related madness, but they don't even know what to fight against or where to start. There is no creepy old wizard living at the edge of town, or secret government lab, or anything at all to give them the first clue as to what the hell is happening. As she struggles desperately to make some sense of the chaos, Kirie's life is completely shattered when Shuichi himself begins to exhibit rather strange spiral qualities. The end is a disturbing jolt to the system, to say the least. At first, it will leave you sort of pissed off and thinking "what the hell?" kind of like Blair Witch Project. Unlike the end of that film, however, which gets stupider as time goes by, the final burst of gory insanity in Uzumaki grows increasingly unnerving the more it sits in your mind. Ultimately, the film ends with the same close-up and snippet of narration with which it began, turning the film itself into one giant spiral. It's a feeling not unlike the one you might get from a particularly good episode of Twin Peaks, like the one where they finally reveal Laura Palmer's murderer. It will confound and anger some, while others will simply sit back and think, "Holy cow!" to themselves as they realize the disturbing power of what they've just seen. First and foremost, Uzumaki is a visual film, but unlike a lot of current films that rely on slick visuals as nothing more than eye candy, the surreal atmosphere of Uzumaki is a central tool with which to weave the tale. It's not just thrown on for the hell of it. There is an actual purpose, and Higuchinsky knows how to use the visual aspect of the film with the deftness of a scalpel-wielding surgeon, and I don't mean Dr. Giggles. Every shot, every set, every quirky pice of music, is perfectly exploited to create a sense of lurking dread. Like a seedy circus sideshow or run-down midway, Uzumaki is undeniably gorgeous and frighteningly grotesque and disorienting. It is, as I discussed earlier, a disorienting warping of the familiar, mundane world into something threatening and dangerous. For his first time out as a director, Higuchinsky is astoundingly successful. WHile Lucio Fulci always talked about creating the feel of a surreal nightmare in his films, he was only ever able to accomplish it in tiny bits and pieces. A moment here, a moment there, then back to the tedium of watching Ian McCulloch intone, "But that's crazy!" Higuchinsky manages to capture that same nightmarish mood, but he sustains it throughout the whole movie and never exhibits any of the slapdash qualities that undermined Fulci's own attempts at such a mood. Some of the scenes don't even strike you as bizarre until they are over and you're going, "Wait, what the hell?" In a casual, offhand manner, the film will just randomly throw in background characters who are walking in reverse, or in a particular eerie scene that doesn't even hit you as eerie at first, Kirie and her friend are walking down a hallway having a typical schoolgirl conversation while, on either side of the hallway, students stand at attention, still as statues, gazing off into nothing. There is never any acknowledgment of these things, making them even more intriguing, sort of like that weird hippie you can catch sitting in the background of various episodes of The Young Ones. I didn't even notice him until years later, but now that I know that he's sometimes there, squatting in the corner, it's equally amusing and disturbing. Watch the very first episode, Demolition, and you'll see him during a scene around the television set. It's kinda creepy. As far as the plot goes, it is simple but effective. The movie is based on a series of horror comics by writer Ito Junji, a proclaimed H.P. Lovecraft fan, and the influence of Lovecraft is obvious. Like his inspiration, Ito's stories are difficult to translate onto film. They are simply too far out there. This problem has plagued countless would-be screenwriters and directors who took on the unenviable task of turning brilliant H.P. Lovecraft stories into incredibly lame movies. Consider that a number of Lovecraft's stories revolve around creatures who are so intensely terrifying that merely glancing at one is enough to drive someone mad. If you make a movie about such a beast, you either have to show it -- which will inevitably be a big disappointment -- or not not show it -- which would also be a big disappointment. Lovecraft created a fear that simply could not be lifted off the page or out of your own mind. Likewise, Ito's stories often defied easy adaptation. Despite the difficult source material, this is a damn effective film that manages to communicate an intangible yet overwhelming horror without ever having to show it. Lovecraft would have been proud, I think. Sure there are kids who turn into creepy slugs, people with weird eyes and hair that spirals up forty feet and continuously swirls around. Sure heads are crushed, people are gutted, and bodies rot before horrified onlookers, but these are all symptoms of what is happening. In the hands of a lesser storyteller or director, the fact that the film never reveals the nature of the seemingly supernatural madness would be a big let-down, but scriptwriter Nitta Takao, armed with Ito Junji's story and Higuchinsky's inspired direction, uses the ambiguity to augment the film's nightmarish tone. It's truly a stunning feat to have pulled off. The movie also never tips us off as to what actually happens to our heroine, Kirie. When last we see her, she is in what is, at best, a dire situation, but the closing repetition of the opening narration would imply that she somehow cheated fate. If so, how? We never know, and while that would be a weakness in some films, it's the reverse here, like never finding out why the birds were attacking people in The Birds. Is it possible that Kirie, who was teased about never being the center of attention, was somehow the focal point of the spiral madness? Was she the eye of the hurricane? Or was she simply insane, dreaming up this whole bizarre scenario in her head? The film is constructed in such a way than any explanation would fail to be as effective as no explanation, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of chill and glorious discomfort. Higuchinsky also uses music brilliantly. The soundtrack is a combination of sappy toy piano sounding "young kids in love" music and off-kilter horror/carnival music. It works further to subvert the feel of the film when you have this quaint and innocent scene of a young girl clinging to the boy she's loved her whole life while dippy lovey dovey music plays in the background as they ride the bike in slow motion. It's sweet tot he point of being goofy, but it becomes heart-breaking in a way since you know any second the creepy carnival music is going to start up and no one is going to be very happy. The cast is up to the task of fleshing out this bizarre world. Hatsune Eriko is great and sympathetic as Kirie, while Fhi Fan as Shuichi is moody, dreary, and detached. At first it almost seems like it's bad acting, but then you start to think about how many of these self-absorbed mopey guys you knew in high school, and you suddenly realize the kid has nailed it. Unlike the mopey kids in high school, at least this guy lives in a town that is cursed with a madness involving lots of spirals and bloody deaths. Everyone else is basically there to die horribly and go insane, and they all do it well. The effects are great as well. Actually, the effects are somewhat archaic looking in spots, but once again the director makes it work marvelously for him, turning what should be a drawback into another strength. Competently done but somewhat awkward computer effects serve to embellish an increasingly alien and surreal landscape. The gore effects are bang on, grisly and realistic, and the make-up effects to create the slug people is also great. Unlike those twits who made the updated version of The Haunting, Higuchinsky knows better than to make a movie where there are effects for effect's sake, and they are the central point to the movie being made. Higuchinsky wants to creep you out, and he is smart enough to know that special effects are just one of many means to that end and not the end themselves. Just like the stylish direction, the special effects are not there just as eye candy. They have a job to do, and they execute it wonderfully. Uzumaki is a surprising film, and that makes me happy. Like a fairy tale of old, it seizes you from the outset and pulls you deeper and deeper into a world that is too weird to look at but too enticing to turn away from. Even during the quiet moments and build-up scenes, there is enough tension and uneasiness to keep the movie sailing along. When the end hits, it hits hard, and I guarantee the whole thing will stick in your mind a long time after you've finished watching. Of course, my guarantee means nothing. It's not like I'm going to give you an oven mitt if you find yourself dissatisfied. I only have two oven mitts, and I need them both because one is always dirty. The most refreshing thing about this movie is that it's not quite like anything else I've ever seen. While you can place in the company or H.P. Lovecraft and Twin Peaks, it's still quite different in many ways. It's a movie that knows how to lull you into a sense of security, then spring untold amounts of indescribably freakiness 'pon you. I love a movie that keeps me guessing and thinking, and Uzumaki delivers on a cerebral level, at least for a dolt like me. Still, I'm a realist, and I know this is the kind of movie that will just piss some people off. It's not that it's overly arty -- those movies even piss me off. It's just weird. Really weird. Weird people will dig it, but if your idea of clever horror was Scream or your idea of a well-constructed story was, well, Scream, then this sort of movie version of a Salvador Dali painting probably ain't gonna make you happy. That's not a judgment, just an expression of opinion. If everyone liked everything I like, I'd get pretty annoyed. Uzumaki is a film for people who like to be fucked with, who like to be unnerved, who like to get depressed and disturbed by a film out of nowhere, days or weeks after they've seen it. You're sitting there, thinking happy thoughts, and all of a sudden you start thinking about the gruesome "slide show of death" that helps close the movie, and all of a sudden you just feel creeped out. It's the sort of movie that will be appreciated by people who also appreciate sinister carnival midways and those ringmasters who speak of black things and always seem to have midget henchmen dressed as Aladdin walking behind them playing the accordion. It's a movie for people who just simply delight in the torment of sheer weirdness and surrealistic horror. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 2:07 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, May 20, 2001Eternal Evil of Asia
1995, Hong Kong. Starring Ellen Chan Ah Lun. Directed by Man Kei Chin. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
Over these many years of watching crazy films from all over the world, I've amassed a sizeable group I can only refer to as "Only in Hong Kong." When that country feels like it, they can pump out some of the most bizarre movies you'll ever see. I mean, no other country but Hong Kong would give you Young Taoism Fighter or a whole subgenre of films in which guys wearing ratty gorilla suits leap about and do kungfu. When they want to, Hong Kong can baffle you like no other former British territory. In the years leading up to the reunification of Hong Kong with the mainland, the quality of films deteriorated severely. The Hong Kong new wave really hit it's peak in the early 1990s, and John Woo's insanely action-packed shoot-em-up Hard Boiled was sort of the orgasm for the whole movement. After that, the good movies were few and far between. Hong Kong retreated into a dismal era of slapped-together no-budget crap, lame romantic comedies, and weird, often brutal softcore action/horror/porn. I've been a fan of Hong Kong films ever since seeing my first kungfu film way back when in the 1970s. And no matter how embarrassing and abysmal the films may have become, I felt I owed it to the industry that had given me so much joy over the years to see if there was anything worth digging up. So let's see. I can't stand romantic comedies. Whether they star Anita Yuen or Meg Ryan makes no difference to me. I just don't like them. Maybe you do, and that's cool. They are there for you, and you don't have to worry about me snaking that last copy of You've Got Mail you were hoping to get. So I can chose between no-budget slapped together crap or sleazy softcore sex and gore. Okay, I'm cool with both of those types of film. So let's see what the no-budget crap is all about. Apparently, it's all about Donnie Yen undercranking his fight scenes to where he looks like one of those old newsreels of Babe Ruth. Man, this shit reeks in ways that aren't even funny. It's just awful. It's Richard Kern awful. Who would have thought guns and kungfu could be so insanely, mind numbingly boring? Well, that leaves me with sleazy softcore sex and gore. Ahh, it's like an old glove that always fits. I can always count on sleaze to delight me and make the neighbors wonder what the hell it is I'm watching. Are those naked three-headed green midgets with five dicks that I saw on his television screen? You're goddamned right, they are! Luckily, communism hasn't quelled Hong Kong's tastelessness, and while every other genre may have become worthless, the boys and girls in what was once called "the biggest Chinatown in the world" have latched on to horror, gore, and sleaze as the only defense against the increasing popularity of foreign films and the defection of most of the big name talent to Hollywood. It's not a new strategy. When the bottom fell out of the market for Shaw Brothers films in the late 1970s, Runrun was quick to churn out a fistful of cheap exploitation films featuring ample amounts of naked female flesh and spurting blood, thus keeping his company afloat a while longer. Some things just never go out of style. Most of the new school of Hong Kong exploitation, or Cat III films as they are known (because the Cat III rating is Hong Kong's equivalent of either an R, and X, or an NC-17, depending on the film) seem to revolve around vengeful spirits and a visit to Thailand, probably because spirits are easy to make (they look like people, but with green lighting) and Thailand is a cool looking country. Eternal Evil of Asia is indeed about vengeful spirits and a trip to Thailand, but it's so much more than that. Of the gallons of cheap Cat III sex and gore films to come out of Hong Kong in the past five years, few are weirder than Eternal Evil of Asia, and absolutely none have a lead woman as fabulously sexy as Ellen Chan. The movie centers around a nice enough fellow whose buddies seem to be dying, while he himself can't seem to get it up even when Ellen Chan, who plays his girlfriend, does a sexy striptease for him. Most people have the opposite problem, so we immediately know he's either gay or has drawn the ire of a vengeful wizard from Thailand. Well, as fate would have it, it's the wizard thing. That's bad news, because if you are gay, you have plenty of options. If you are on the shitlist of a vengeful wizard from Thailand, well you're pretty much screwed, aren't you? Ellen thinks he's been cheating on her, and in order to save his relationship with her (believe me, you'd go to any lengths to save a relationship with Ellen Chan), he recounts to her the entire sordid story of his trip to Thailand with his buddies. They'd gone seeking hookers, although our hero is too smitten with Ellen to even think of fooling around with hos. After doing such "funny" (by callous Hong Kong standards) things as going to an AIDS bar, where all the hookers are HIV positive, they end up getting chased by some local thugs and lost in the jungle. Luckily, a reclusive, buff wizard helps them out. When one of the guys insults the wizard by calling him a dickhead, the wizard gets an impish grin and turns the guy's head into a giant penis. Yep. Needless to say, the film only gets more highbrow from here. You know, if Woody Allen used the same joke, it would be bold and witty. When they do it here, it's just considered trashy. Well, I can't stand Woody Allen, so there. Then, all of a sudden, a wizard war breaks out as the buff wizard is attacked by some sexy witch her buddy. They derive magic power from flying and spinning through the air while gettin' it on. Sure. Why not. It beats having to prance around to lame disco music like American magicians have to do. Our hero and his buddies help out the buff wizard, while the guy with a dickhead strokes his own neck vigorously. The wizard is grateful. He turns the dickhead back to normal and introduces everyone to his cute sister, who instantly takes a shine to our hero. He resists her advances, though, so she cooks up a magic love potion. Unfortunately, everyone but him gets dosed with it, and they all have a wild orgy with the girl. When she realizes what has happened, she freaks out and, in an attempt to keep her from going nuts, the buddies accidentally kill her. That done, they decide the vacation is over and return to Hong Kong, where they each start dying in strange ways. One guy keeps showing up as a walking corpse impaled on a flickering fluorescent lighting tube. The wizard, seeking revenge for the death of his sister, has gone insane and is out for blood. He also takes time out to astrally project himself into the bathroom to watch Ellen Chan shower. Now that's a pretty good wizard power. Ellen, on the other hand, seeks the advice of a local sorceress and ends up in a showdown with the wizard's apparition, in which she gives a blow job to an invisible man. You'd never think that just watching a woman waggle her tongue and pretend to give an insane Thai wizard a blow job would be so sexy. Or then again, maybe you would. I think Ellen Chan could scratch her ass and make people weak in the knees. But the fun has only just begun, as all sorts of magical mid-air sexual acrobatics ensue. This movie is every bit as high in tastefulness as your average cannibal film or Satanic lesbian nun flick. It's guaranteed to offend most people, but since the readers of this website generally aren't most people, I have no reservations about recommending it whole-heartedly. After all, offensiveness is one of our banner awards to any film. It's completely twisted, unrepentingly tasteless, and of course, immensely enjoyable. Like most Hong Kong horror films, it veers wildly between sex, gore, and slapstick comedy, but unlike most of them, manages to pull off the schizophrenia while only seeming like somewhat of a mess. Of all the Cat III horror sleaze I've seen, and I'd be an obvious liar if I didn't say I'd seen ... well, more than my fair share ... Eternal Evil of Asia remains my favorite. It's the wildest, the weirdest, the only one with a giant penis-headed man, and perhaps above all that, it's the one that has Ellen Chan Ah Lun. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Sexploitation, Year: 1995 posted by Keith at 12:24 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, March 03, 2001Uncle Sam
1996, United States. Starring: Jason Adelman, Isaac Hayes, Laura Alcalde, Raquel Alessi, Abby Ball, Stan Barrett, Timothy Bottoms, Mark Chadwick, Richard Cumming, Chris Durand, Matthew Flint, Robert Forster, David 'Shark' Fralick, Tim Grimm, Bo Hopkins, Taylor Jones, Desirae Klein, Jason Lustig, Tom McFadden, Zachary McLemon, Leslie Neale, Christopher Ogden, Morgan Paull, Frank Pesce, P.J. Soles, Anne Tremko, Joseph Vitare. Directed by William Lustig.
After finishing this movie (a feat in itself), I realized I'd been way to hard on Jack Frost. That movie is actually pretty good when compared to Uncle Sam. Somewhere, a group of people were sitting around, probably smoking pot, and one of them said, "You know what would be really scary? A dude dressed as Uncle Sam going around killing people." Thus the movie was born. Obviously, the writers of the film had some issues with those Uncle Sam guys on stilts -- and frankly, that's one thing I agree with them on. What's up with that? Did Uncle Sam walk around during the Revolutionary War on giant stilts, waving and going "Hey there, you limey bastards!" Uncle Sam stilt guys are only slightly less disturbing than clowns and David Bowie. I really don't know where to begin with this one. It's major downfall is that it isn't a tongue-in-cheek comedy. At least Jack Frost knew better than to take itself seriously. This movie actually comes at you with all sorts of rather heavy-handed preaching (not to mention heavy-handed pacing) about America, freedom of speech, and making war sound like a glorious adventure. It seems like someone had an actual message to deliver. Too bad this was their envelope. You might wonder why I keep bringing up Jack Frost. Other than just getting a kick out of mentioning Jack Frost as much as possible, and apart from the fact that I rented them both at the same time and watched them back to back (I dare any of you to try and do the same), there are actual other similarities. Both come from A-Pix pictures, which I think might just be Full Moon Productions in disguise. Damnit, a movie like this does not get made without Charles Band being involved!!! Both boxes feature almost identical "holograms of terror." Both suck. But at least Jack Frost was funky enough to be somewhat enjoyable. Uncle Sam has a real cast, or at least people who, in a better film, might comprise a real cast. B-movie veteran PJ Soles is in it for a few, and my man Isaac Hayes stars as a war vet minus one leg. Haye's presence in the film created the only real tension. We desperately wanted him to live and were on the edge of our seats wondering if Isaac would beat the odds and make it to the end. This isn't even a function of the "black man must always die" thing horror films get tagged with; it's more a function of my expectation that any big name star costs too much to employ for the entire film, so they are killed off first. Dispatch with Roddy McDowell and leave us with 80 minutes of Clu Gulager. Luckily for the makers of Uncle Sam, Isaac had lost most of his money to the IRS and other tools of The Man. It was before he was mining South Park gold, so I guess he worked pretty cheap to pay the bills. So what we have here is a movie where some asshole gets killed by "friendly fire" during the Gulf War. They finally find his body and ship it back to his hometown, where his wife and sister commiserate about what an abusive sumbitch he was. His sisters creepy son, however, idolizes his dead uncle and spends a lot of time trying to open the coffin. This goes on for about 40 minutes. Yes, nearly half the film is spent in the living room. Occasionally Isaac Hayes limps in to give a speech about the horrors of war. The boy, who is like a frail, sickly version of Henry Thomas from ET, has bad "1970s kid" hair even though this movie was made in 1996. I thought he was freaky, but things got even worse when they introduced his doughy, blind friend. More on that later. Meanwhile, Jody is busy being all clammy and creepy and arguing with his teacher about military service. Wait a second. Where the hell do these people live. In the movie, the Fourth of July is in just a couple days, and they're still in school? Jeez, that sucks. I guess this really is a horror movie. Eventually, the corpse gets it's lazy ass around to rising from the grave, or at least from the coffin. It took him 40 minutes to do that, and he didn't even have to claw his way up out of the ground. What a bum. Anyway, the best I can come up with is that he rises from the grave because ... well, fuck it. Point is, he's dead and decayed and ready to kick some commie ass. First he goes after some flag burning neo-nazi teens. No wait, first he goes after an Uncle Sam guy on stilts. This guy uses his position as the town's official "Uncle Sam Guy on stilts" to look into women's windows while they are undressing. Somehow, I think there less conspicuous ways to peep than on stilts while wearing a shiny red, white, and blue outfit. Even dull people tend to notice things like that. Anyway, Sam offs Sam and takes his costume. Why? Because this movie is called Uncle Sam. And the zombie's name is Sam, and he's the kid's uncle. You see where I am going with this? After the peeping tom and the teenagers, Sam shows up at the 4th of July parade, where he offs a draft-dodging teacher, a crooked lawyer, a greedy politician, some pot smoking teen, and another Nazi youth kid who was bullying people in a potato sack race. Yes, the "Potato Sack Bully" is right up there with the "Sled-Ridin' Gang" from Jack Frost. These vicious gangs must be stopped! And luckily, a serial killin' snowman and a zombie dressed up like Uncle Sam are ready for the job. Most of the murders take place off camera because they can't afford to stage any special effects. Later on, Sam kills a cop who was dating his wife. Creepy hero, Jody, learns about Sam's true nature as an abuser, rapist, and incestuous child molester. This pasty blind kid shows up (he was maimed in a bizarre fireworks accident) and all of a sudden has a psychic ability to sense where Sam is. At first it seemed like Sam and the doughboy were pals. But I guess they aren't as he and the creepy kid seek the aid of Isaac Hayes, who steals a Revolutionary War cannon to use against Sam. This movie takes itself way too seriously. I mean, the guy is dressed like Uncle Sam. But everything is buried under mountains of rhetoric about the horrors of war, the corruption of America, and other such lofty things. It's a message best not delivered by a murderous zombie dressed as Uncle Sam. But even worse than that is the fact that most of this movie consists of people sitting around. I'm a patient man, but sometimes, enough is enough. Isaac Hayes does what he can. Too bad he didn't write the score. The creepy kid, Jody, is pretty flat, but he's no worse than any other kid. Still, he's pretty far up on my Ichirometer (Ichiro being the little kid from Godzilla's Revenge and the living embodiment of everything an annoying little kid should be). The doughy boy is even creepier. And why was he so wise all of a sudden? This movie really sucks. It's not even much fun. I would definitely rather watch Jack Frost. Hell, I'd rather watch any of the Leprechaun movies than ever suffer through Uncle Sam again. But perhaps this movie will make you question blind patriotism, hero worship, and the corruption of America. It made me question what the hell I'd been thinking when I picked it up at the video store. Labels: Horror: Just Plain Weird, Horror: Slashers, Year: 1996 posted by Keith at 1:54 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, March 01, 2001Jack Frost
1996, United States. Starring Scott MacDonald, Christopher Allport, Stephen Mendel, F. William Parker, Eileen Seeley, Rob LaBelle, Zack Eginton, Jack Lindine, Kelly Jean Peters, Marsha Clark, Chip Heller, Brian Leckner, Darren Campbell, Shannon Elizabeth Fabal, Paul Keith. Directed by Michael Cooney. Buy it from Amazon.
 Why oh why do I do the horrible things I do? Not long after watching this film, I posted a lament on alt.horror, bemoaning the sacrifices people like myself make for your benefit. You don't know the pain; you can't understand the suffering. You don't know what it's like to sit and scrutinize all four Leprechaun films. I wanted to share my pain with you, the web surfer. That's why I write these reviews; that's why I do this website. It's not because I love you or want to be loved by you. It's because I cannot control my urge to watch the most atrocious, painful films ever made, and deep down I want to inflict that same pain on you. Jack Frost is not the most painful movie experience of my life. On the scale of pain, Jack Frost clocks in at about the same level as, oh, let's say a spinal tap. I would imagine this Jack Frost is actually a lot less painful than the more recent mainstream Jack Frost, in which Michael Keaton rips off this movie and the lame-ass movie Fluke. Fluke was this annoying heartfelt Christmas film about a father who is killed in a car wreck one snowy night and resurrected as his son's dog. Jack Frost starring Michael Keaton was the same exact thing, only he got put in a snowman's body. I take no small degree of delight in thinking that somewhere out there, people are picking up this Jack Frost and thinking it is the Michael Keaton Jack Frost. With any luck, these people are parents who will also go, "Oh look at this cute muppet movie!' and also rent Meet the Feebles. So Jack Frost. What we have here is a movie that thought it was clever and witty. That thought, not surprisingly, was wrong. The movie begins with a "chilling Christmas story," voiced over the credits. An adult pretends to be a child by talking in a stupid squeaky voice and mispronouncing things. Like when she squeals "Pweeeeze!" Her uncle or some crazy-ass old fart tells her a story about Jack Frost, the serial killer who slaughtered 38 people before finally getting caught. And oh my -- on this very night, he is being executed. Cut to the "Executional Transfer Vehicle." Now I may not be well versed in the America prison system, but I could have sworn that they usually kept the death row prisoners in a prison with a death row. And I know that when transporting a convicted mass murderer, they would probably have more than one old guard with him. I mean, Hannibal Lector -- they strapped his ass to a dolly and put that funny mask on him. Jack Frost, America's deadliest serial killer of all time, is handcuffed and stuck in the back of an ice cream truck with a retired member of the Mayberry police force. As if this situation wasn't volatile enough, the "death row inmate delivery truck" isn't the only delivery truck out on this stormy night. No, the "Genetic Engineering Delivery Truck" is also out. Call me crazy, but you'd think they would, I don't know, postpone both the transfer of America's deadliest killer and a truckload of unstable genetic engineering crap until after the big blizzard. I guess that's why I'm not a prison warden or a genetic engineer, though. I just can't make the tough calls. In a shocking twist, these two trucks collide. I can see the scene now: "You got genetic mutation juice in my serial killer!" "You got serial killer in my genetic mutation juice." Yes, two great tastes that resulted in Jack Frost. The genetic stuff makes Jack combine with the snow around him. He comes out looking like a styrofoam snowman. I don't know if this is what the engineers had in mind, that they could bond people with snow. It seems like a pretty strange avenue for research. But then, someone did spend millions of dollars on a study to see why women in abusive relationships are more depressed and likely to commit suicide than women in stable and loving relationships. Science knows no bounds. It doesn't take long for Jack Frost to waddle his snowy ass into the town where he got caught and start zinging us with those wacky murder one-liners we all know and love. Only, this time, it's a snowman. There's something intensely not scary about a snowman. I mean, sure, maybe if this was the Kalahari Desert and I was a bushman, and a snowman came running at me, that would probably be pretty shocking. But as it stands, a snowman is a hard thing for me to be terrified beyond belief by. Of course, the snowman can't just waffle people to death with his broom. He has to engage in the horror film tradition of "wacky death." The first murder occurs when a group of sled bullies -- yes they are a gang of tough young punks who bully others on the sled hills -- make fun of the snowman. Out of nowhere, the snowman has arms and knocks one of the bullies in front of a fast approaching sled. This sled, which looked like standard K-Mart issue, apparently had rockets on the back and samurai sword blades on the bottom, because it cleanly severs the bully's head. Having grown up in Kentucky, I did my fair share of sledding, and I've been hit by my fair share of sleds. Never once was I decapitated, no matter how well waxed the sled blades were. They were still blunt, flat pieces of metal. There's so many things wrong with this whole scene. I mean, for one, there's the menacing snowman thing, but we're beyond that by now. So we have sled bullies. Really? A gang of guys who like to sled down hills and don't let no other punk stand in their way. Seriously, do these gangs exist? Having lived in Florida and now in New York, I thought I'd heard of every type of gang. Latin Killers. Born to Kill. Vicious gangs of sled riders are a new one on me. And then there's the fact that this giant snowman leaps to life and attacks a kid, and only one kid seems to notice. And where the heck did those arms come from? In all fairness, I must mention that the snowman leaping to life isn't actually shown. You see, that would require a special effect. Instead, it's just some jumpy editing, we see the big snowy arm, and that's about it. In fact, through almost the whole movie, Jack Frost does nothing but sit there. I mean, they didn't even fork over the cash for a decent puppet mouth so it would look more like he was talking. "Wacky killing" is soon joined by the other horror film staple, the post-murder one-liner. This trend in horror began with Freddy but was actually honed by Arnold Swartzenegger in the action genre. The action genre gave birth to it, as the earliest examples I can find of the post-kill one-liner are in James Bond films. Since then, America has been unable to produce a script without having the hero or villain hurl a sly one-liner after he's killed someone. My favorite will always be, "Let off some steam, Bennet!" from the Swartzenegger film, Commando. At best they are a mild but amusing annoyance. At worst, they don't even have very much to do with the killing. Guess which end of the spectrum the quips in Jack Frost come from! In one scene, Jack tries to posses someone by melting himself down to water (he has that power) and going inside them. When it doesn't work too well, Jack spews himself out the guy's mouth then proclaims, "Don't eat the yellow snow!" It's good advice and all, but what does it have to do with that whole scene? Anyway, Jack's murderous rampage continues. He puts an ax down some guy's throat, and then he turns an old lady into a Christmas ornament of bloody horror. The big pay-off comes when the snowman gets to have sex with a regular human woman. Yes indeed. He takes that carrot nose of his and, well, you figure it out. It's pretty sick and tasteless. I mean, it is a snowman having sex, so there's some entertainment value there. But raping a teenager with a carrot nose a snowman has affixed to his lower abdominal region is, well ... you know, for some reason, if Joe D'Amato had come up with this, it would have been fine. Anyway, the snowman has sex. Go figure that shit out. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The local sheriff is on the case, and he is frustrated by those uptight city slicker FBI agents who look down on small town folk. This is the source of much hilarity. And Jack Frost can shoot icicles. In the end, they discover the only way to defeat the killer snowman is with anti-freeze. Get it? Because he is frozen. See? This has been an epic review, but a film this mind-bendingly bad deserves this much space. I mean, this movie got made. Those of you in film class take note. Your professor will tell you how hard it is to sell a script. Don't listen to him. Just send your script to A-Pix and Full Moon Productions. You can even just send them the gist of it written out on a napkin. They will make your movie. I've actually had worse experiences than Jack Frost, but that doesn't mean I want to repeat it. Despite the hilarious sounding premise and that snowman sex scene, the movie is mostly just badly acted, boring filler. Nothing is very funny and the suspense and terror are actually in the negative range. Not that it was ever supposed to be. My lament about how a snowman is not scary was not a fact lost on the makers of this film. They obviously had tongue in cheek (read the end credits very carefully -- they're the best part of the film, and not just because it means the film is over). It just didn't work out very well. Instead of "clever," it's more like a script written by three college-age horror fans who had too much to drink. And that's probably exactly what it was. And yet, and I can't prevent myself from suggesting that you at least consider watching this film. It's awful, but god damnit, a snowman kills people and has sex. That's got to be worth something. Labels: Horror: Just Plain Weird, Horror: Slashers, Year: 1996 posted by Keith at 1:59 PM | 0 Comments |
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