The Horror!?

Deadline (2009)

2009-12-06T10:35:00.001+01:00

Screenwriter Alice (Brittany Murphy) has lived through some hard times with her ex-boyfriend Dan. During the course of their relationship Dan developed a very unhealthy amount of jealousy and finally tried to drown Alice in the bathtub, killing their unborn child in the process. She survived, but has had a major breakdown, and doesn't remember anymore what exactly happened between her and Dan, only how hard it hit her.

Now, after some time (and presumably a lot of therapy), Alice has decided it's time for her to start working again. Her new girlfriend Rebecca (Tammy Blanchard) doesn't seem all that convinced, though. Be that as it may, Alice is positive that spending a writing week alone in a Victorian mansion somewhere in the boons is just what she needs to find back to her old self again.

Once she arrives at the mansion, it doesn't even take a whole evening until the first strange things begin to happen. It is your typical ghostly stuff - strange voices, wet footsteps, a mysteriously self-filling bathtub, the shadowy figure of a woman, the works.

While she is freaking out more and more, Alice distracts herself with some camcorder tapes the ghosts have lead her to find. On them, she witnesses the deterioration of the marriage of Lucy (Thora Birch) and David (Marc Blucas) Woods. At first, the relationship seems healthy enough, but David's love passes the point of obsession and dangerous jealousy. That, just as it was in Alice's case, a baby is on the way only seems to make the problem worse.

Alice identifies herself more and more with Lucy, until she has trouble telling reality and dream apart, quickly reaching a point of crisis.

Sean McConville's Deadline is a very traditional ghost story, perhaps trying a little too hard to be also an artsy drama. You could argue that the film's ending betrays the ghost story for pure melodrama, although I think it keeps everything admirably open, never exactly defining how much of what we have seen has happened in Alice's head and how much outside of it.

McConville's directorial style is slow, moody and a little conservative. There are no flashcuts, no whooshing noises and no shaky cam to be found anywhere (even the home videos are shown as conventional film scenes), and it is the right way to direct for the story the film is telling. There's the characters and a little plot, and McConville is intelligent enough to not get between the audience and those.

Deadline concentrates much more on Alice's mental state as mirrored in Lucy (or is it the other way round?) than on being all that scary, so people only looking for scares in their horror will probably be quite disappointed by it. Instead of trying to frighten its audience, the film uses its ghosts as amplifiers of Alice's mental state, which doesn't mean that there are no disconcerting scenes to be found at all. The second half of the film has some moments that make good use of the psychological horrors of the tale to unsettle the viewer.

I was pleasantly surprised by the actors. I don't necessarily expect great work from Brittany Murphy, but her performance as the brittle woman getting more and more disturbed is really quite good. Not as surprising, but equally convincing is Thora Birch; even Marc Blucas' typically flat affect fits nicely into his role here.

For some, Deadline will probably be boring - there's no action to speak of, the spooking is very conservative and the film is interested in character and not much else. I for my part think that this is a good direction for a ghost story to go in. There should be space enough for something a little old-fashioned among the gore and the spring-loaded cats that seem to be making up much of the horror genre today.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,drama,sean mcconville,brittany murphy,thora birch,reviews

From Twitter 12-05-2009

2009-12-06T02:02:00.001+01:00

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The Stranger And The Gunfighter (1974)

2009-12-05T09:02:00.002+01:00

The thief and expert safe-cracker Dakota (Lee Van Cleef) is trying to steal the fabled riches of the Chinese-immigrant businessman Wang. To his disappointment, Wang's safe only contains four pictures of the backs of Wang's four mistresses. Worse still, the pictures' owner stumbles onto the burglary and falls down dead (I suspect four mistresses weren't such a good idea for a man of his age). Poor, semi-innocent Dakota ends up sentenced to death for murder.

A little later somewhere in China, a warlord presses Wang's nephew, the martial arts expert Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh), into his service to travel to America and get him his uncle's money. The fabled riches weren't actually Wang's own, but belonged to the warlord who used Wang as intermediate to invest money in the US. Now, the rather rude man has gotten impatient and gives Ho Chiang exactly one year to return with his money, or the fighters' father and sister will die.

Once arrived in America, Ho Chiang soon realizes that Dakota didn't steal his uncle's money. It also becomes clear that uncle Wang was quite the fetishist and had the whereabouts of his treasures tattooed onto his mistresses backsides.

Since Ho is a nice guy and thinks himself in need of a traveling companion who knows the lay of the land, he frees Dakota from the gallows and offers him a little money for his help. Dakota agrees to the proposal, very un-Spaghetti-like without showing any sign of ulterior motives.

Together, the two men travel the land to stare at female asses everywhere. It's just too bad that they aren't all that good at secrecy, so they soon have to compete against an insane preacher only known as The Deacon (driving a mean mobile church) to get at the behinds.

As the film's fascination with female backsides (not that it is actually showing any of them) should demonstrate, The Stranger And The Gunfighter is not to be taken seriously. It's a film built - in the glorious Italian tradition - to cash in on the short popularity of Lo Lieh in American grindhouses as a martial arts hero (which of course blissfully ignored the fact that he more often than not played the bad guy in his Hong Kong films) and the absolute willingness Lee Van Cleef's to do any damn thing for a movie (see also Captain Apache), and it succeeds admirably as a silly piece of fluff.

Many among the surprising number of Spaghetti Western/martial arts crossover films aren't too entertaining to watch, but most of these films weren't directed by house favorite Antonio Margheriti, who always had a sure hand when it came to directing silly adventure movies. And at heart, The Stranger And The Gunfighter is a deeply silly adventure movie outfitted with the trappings of a Spaghetti Western and a little Kung Fu more than it belongs to those other two genres.

Watching the film, I found it hard to shake the feeling that everyone involved had a hell of a time - Van Cleef shooting, singing (alas) and drinking and Lo Lieh staring at female bottoms with scientific earnestness and a looking glass and kicking male asses when necessary. I imagine Margheriti giggling with glee behind his camera, as I often do when watching the man's films.

All this is obviously far from that mysterious thing experts call "good taste", but I stopped caring about that a long time ago when I decided that I'm not that bourgeois. While the bottom business and the not completely enlightened interpretation of Chinese culture (which isn't as bad as in other films I've seen, mind you) might offend some people, that will mostly be a problem for those looking to be offended.

For my tastes, the film is much too good-natured and light to deserve anything but laughter, and much too fast-paced and silly not to be entertaining.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,comedy,martial arts,lo lieh,lee van cleef,antonio margheriti,reviews,adventure

From Twitter 12-04-2009

2009-12-05T02:02:00.001+01:00

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On WTF: A Coffin For The Sheriff (1965)

2009-12-04T09:42:00.001+01:00

Sometimes, you just want a Spaghetti Western that's satisfied with just being a Spaghetti Western. At times like that, films like this one are indispensable. My review on WTF-Film will tell you why.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,anthony steffen,mario caiano,reviews,other places

From Twitter 12-03-2009

2009-12-04T02:02:00.001+01:00

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All Christmas shopping done. Looks like I win.
So, the German DVD of Johnnie To's "Sparrow" only has a German language track, no Cantonese with subtitles? What is wrong with those people?

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In short: The Final Destination (2009)

2009-12-03T09:40:00.001+01:00

A group of movie young people - Hero Guy, Hero Guy's Girlfriend, Asshole and Asshole's Girlfriend - goes to the car races. (I miss our old friends Practical Joker and Slut here, but what can you do?)

Death, being the nice being that it is, wants to spare us time with these non-entities and arranges for a crash that should leave a nice part of the racing audience dead. Alas, Hero Guy has a vision of the impending moment of joy, and leads his friends (and some future cannon fodder in form of our old friends Black Security Dude, Redneck Racist, Joe the Mechanic and Soccer Mom) to safety.

Of course, this being a Final Destination film and all, our friend Death now attempts to get rid of the lot of them in freak accidents taking place in exactly the order they should have died initially. Unfortunately, Hero Guy has unclear visions of everyone's future demise and tries to break the chain of killings to save the life of himself and his friends.

While I take the first Final Destination to be as fun as teen-oriented horror gets, its sequels have been steadily getting worse. This one is the fourth film in the franchise (and it is a franchise aka money-making machine only now, not a series of films telling a story) and has about the level of quality even the Friday the 13th films only sank to with their eighth film, Jason Takes Manhattan.

In other words, it is utter shite made by people who don't care about making anything watchable.

The acting in here is as bad as it gets in a non-backyard film. The "actors" (and I use the word loosely) are visibly struggling with their lines and/or are declining to emote at all.

Of course, as bad as the dialogue is, it would be hard for even a decent or better actor to make something out of it.

And just don't get me started on the absence of a plot or a dramatic arch or really, anything that resembles actually screenwriting.

I can't even go and praise the film's creative death scenes, because Death seems to have worn out his brains in the first three films and has become an utter bore, leaving any sense of humor and suspense(you know, the things which made the deaths in the first film so much fun) behind. Everything is just there to give the film a reason to show off its only selling point: 3D effects I couldn't care less about. It might come as a surprise to the makers of this thing, but eyes and pointy objects jumping at the camera do not a movie make. In fact, they don't even make for a carnival ride.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,in short,utter shite

From Twitter 12-02-2009

2009-12-03T02:02:00.001+01:00

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Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot! (1967)

2009-12-02T10:19:00.001+01:00

A guy nobody ever calls Django (Tomas Milian), takes part in the attack on a gold transport. Afterwards, his partners realize that not-Django and his Mexican friends aren't part of their beloved Aryan Brotherhood and so decide to keep all the gold in their own evil white hands.

Turns out that it wasn't a good idea to sloppily shoot their old partners and let them rot in a self-made grave in the desert, because not-Django claws himself out of the grave to be rescued by two very Italian looking Indians. These Indians are really nice guys. If The Artist Never Known As Django tells them what awaits after death, they'll be his obedient servants. To prove their enthusiasm, they have already made him bullets from the gold that really shouldn't be lying around there, seeing that not giving him and his friends any gold was the point of killing them.

While our hero recuperates, the bandits arrive in a nameless desert town I like to call Bucket O'Doom, while the Indians call it just The Unhappy Place.

Too bad the bandits didn't have these subtle hints to guide them, and so fall victim to the gold-greedy lynchmob that makes up the population of Bucket O'Doom.

When TANKAD arrives, he just barely has the opportunity to kill the bandit leader quite dead. For no reason I could fathom, and despite the obvious bloodthirsty madness of everyone around him, he decides to stay in town for a while afterwards.

Very soon, the place's various factions kill and betray each other to get the gold. Somehow, everyone still finds time to kidnap and torture Mister Passive, who really seems quite thankful for the attention.

Wow, did you know that people are mean and greedy? If not, If You Live, Shoot will tell you as often as anyone could wish for. It's just too bad that freeform misanthropy is the only thing of interest the film has going for it. While director Giulio Questi (perhaps best known for his brilliantly titled bizarre giallo Death Laid An Egg) has a certain sense for arresting images, I'm less than enamored of what he decides to use it on. There's really just this much you can do with basic misanthropy until it becomes not deep and profound as the film takes itself to be, but monotonous and a little ridiculous. I already understood that people ain't no good after the first thirty minutes of film, giving me 90 minutes more of the stuff is mostly just numbing and more than a little boring.

It's interesting to compare this to Sergio Corbucci's also incredibly dark and pessimistic The Great Silence, a film that works much better than Questi's thanks to Corbucci's interest in people as actual people and not just as robots that commit the atrocities we see to make a point about the director's philosophy. Which of course doesn't make the things happening in The Great Silence that much more pleasant, but the film is as interested in the (social and psychological) reasons for cruelty as in the cruelty itself, something that would go right over Questi's head, it seems.

If You Kill, Shoot mostly wallows in its own unpleasantness and earnestness, never realizing that it has long passed the point where it will be able to affect its audience emotionally.

It really doesn't help that Milian's character is a complete cipher without a past or much humanity himself - he's just there to be a stand-in for the film's viewer's, never more than superficially trying to influence anything that happens.

Even as a shock picture the film falls rather flat for me. At no point does Questi bother to show his characters as actual people with thoughts, hopes and idiosyncrasies, making it impossible to get any emotional reaction for their bloody demises from me. They are just very flat pictures on celluloid, after all, never meant for anything else than dying with a lot of red paint thrown over them, never giving me a reason to care about them (they aren't even archetypes, much less people, after all).

To put it in a different way, Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot! just lacks soul.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,giulio questi,tomas milian,reviews

From Twitter 12-01-2009

2009-12-02T02:02:00.001+01:00

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In short: Ninjutsu Gozen-jiai (1957)

2009-12-01T09:47:00.001+01:00

aka Torawakamaru the Hoga Ninja

Being a magical ninja ain't easy. If you are Ishikawa Goemon (Nakajiro Tomita) of the (in this film) rather evil Iga clan, you might be able to ride clouds, teleport, jump really high, make yourself invisible and cut down trees via telekinesis, but your annoying son Goroichi (Motoharu Ueki) has missed every lesson in Being Evil School and your henchwomen like Sagiri (Hiroko Sakuramachi) are so fragile in their evilness that having one good deed inflicted upon them will turn them into do-gooders themselves.

Not that the rather good ninja of the Hoga clan (also known as the Koga clan) have it easy. First and foremost, there aren't exactly a lot of them left, and their youngest and brightest Torawakamaru (Sentaro Fushimi) might be able to do all those sexy things Goemon can plus turn into a big toad, but he also has the laughter of an especially ill-mannered goat. And, you know, who wants to turn into a big toad?

When the Iga decide to throw their lot in with Tokugawa, the Hoga obviously side with the Tokugawa's main enemy, the Toyotomi. The groups are fighting about the plans for new-fangled castle fortifications the Toyotomi are planning to build and use all the silly tricks a good ninja knows.

But not even the kidnapping of the adorable/annoying little Toyotomi daughter Nene is enough to end the difficulties. In the end, only a ninja duel between Torawakamaru and the Iga boss of bosses Momochi Sandayu (Ryunosuke Tsukitaga) can decide who will build a fortification and who will be (quite literally) cooked.

The short programmer Ninjutsu Gozen-jiai was conjured up in the same spirit of silliness that would later produce the best Japanese film of all times, The Magic Serpent. Obviously made for children, and containing the important moral lessons that evilness is not genetic, and that fire-breathing snakes look much cooler than big frogs, the film's naive charms are large enough to make it an excellent Sunday morning choice of film for people receptive to its charms, namely me.

There is probably not all that much technical merit to the film (although its director Tadashi Sawashima manages to smuggle in a very beautifully shot swordfight in the rain right at the start of the movie), but it runs along nicely, from time to time stopping for the nauseating children and some painful humor.

Fortunately, there is always some new magical ninja silliness waiting around the next corner - not as much of it as in, say, Taiwanese productions of the next two decades, yet enough to satisfy me.

The final duel (in the clouds, with people changing into various ugly animal suits) is especially satisfying and reminds of the best animal themed Halloween party that never happened in historical Japan.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,in short,tadashi sawashima,ninjas,fantasy

From Twitter 11-30-2009

2009-12-01T02:02:00.001+01:00

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Music Monday: One Of These Days Edition

2009-11-30T10:32:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,neil young,the band,joni mitchell

From Twitter 11-29-2009

2009-11-30T02:02:00.001+01:00

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El Castillo De Las Momias De Guanajuato (1973)

2009-11-29T11:40:00.001+01:00

Dr. Tanner (director Tito Novaro), another of the dozens of dastardly mad scientists who plague Mexico, is dying of an incurable illness. The only way to save himself is to acquire a large amount of blood taken from people under duress. But how does a man get at this nectar, when he lives and works in a cellar lab and has only three midgets and one slightly larger skinny guy as henchmen? First, he needs to kidnap another scientist and his son (Alex Agrasanchez again), for no good reason I could make out other than to raise the interest of some luchadores.

Then, he plays his mean magic organ while his henchmidgets sacrifice two cocks in a graveyard to raise a group of undead minions (who really aren't the mummies of Guanajuato, whatever the film's title may promise). Easily controlled with a dog whistle, these walking dead are exactly the help Tanner needs, because they might be so slow even my Grandma could outrun them, but have the useful ability to induce instant loss of consciousness in women. Let the mass kidnappings begin!

The not very dynamic trio of the life-draining void named Superzan, the shirtless wonder Blue Angel, and Tinieblas (the mentally less developed person's Mil Mascaras) had already taken some kind of interest in the disappearance of the Professor, but were too distracted by their new girlfriends Lita (Maria Salome) and Nora (Zulma Faiad) and the need to get beaten up in the ring to do much about it. But when they stumble onto one of the mummy kidnappings (and lose one of the girlfriends to the mummy fainting magic), the ancient enmity between luchador and mummy kicks in, and they really try to find out what is going on.

As always, Agrasanchez Productions don't make it easy for anyone to like their films. As if the cast of two c-list luchadors and the unbearable Superzan wasn't bad enough, half of Castillo is just dreadfully boring and possibly even slower than the two Superzan solo outings. It is of course the fault of scenes upon scenes of filler, padding and padding to pad out the filler. Friends of lucha cinema will of course know that this is one of the Agrasanchez trademarks, but three plot-irrelevant wrestling scenes, one musical number (that was at least filmed in the presence of the wrestlers, which would be kind of a plus if not for the fact that it is also especially painful) and much driving, walking and more driving are still hard to take. It doesn't help that our protagonists are not doing anything important for more than half of the film, and really can't make up for it through charisma. Perhaps potential female viewers will at least like the Blue Angel beefcake?

Confusingly enough, the other half of the film is quite awesome and creative in the thoughtless yet effective way I have learned to love.

There are earnest scenes of wrestlers doing research in musty old tomes (always a favorite) and interviewing priests, the absolutely hilarious grand mummy resurrection scene (complete with the shaking of dead cock into the camera), a score that always drifts off into freeform freak-out mode as if played by a talentless Sonic Youth with acoustic guitars and way too tired to try anything fancy, the patented mummy single file, a very campy torture scene and the unforgettable sight of Superzan biting through a young boy's ties - all things which make my heart rejoice and put a spring into a mummy's steps.

I also couldn't help but wonder about the film's sexual politics. What is up with the three wrestlers apparently sharing two women? Is Blue Angel a secret member of the Village People, as his perpetual state of shirtlessness suggests?

I'd love to say something about Tito Novaro's direction this time around, but except for an unhealthy love for the colour red and some groovy camera movements in the resurrection scene, he's just doing point and shoot here. Well, at least he's not making the shoddiest mummy make-up of the series up to this point too obvious and keeps the things we are supposed to see in frame. I'd love to treat things like this as prerequisite for any film, but I'm not that naive anymore.

So, how do you call a film half brilliant, silly entertainment and half snoozefest (apart from "an Agrasanchez Production")? A typical 70s lucha movie? Probably. In that case, El Castillo De Las Momias De Guanajuato is an archetypal 70s lucha movie.

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,lucha,horror,reviews,tito novaro,superzan,tinieblas,blue angel,zulma faiad

From Twitter 11-28-2009

2009-11-29T02:02:00.001+01:00

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In short: Fu-Rai (2005)

2009-11-28T09:48:00.001+01:00

aka White Panic

(This time, I will not be able to avoid spoilers for the film's ending. Be warned!)

Four young people - three men and a woman - awaken naked in an empty white room full of something that looks suspiciously like flour. They all remember that they were assaulted in their respective apartments and kidnapped, but have a hard time imagining why they have been brought to this strange place.

Since this is a Cube-alike, they immediately start to bitch at each other for no good reason at all. From time to time, their discussions are broken by the lights turning blue, gas being pumped into the room and guys in white hazmat suits forcing them to swallow a mysterious fluid.

After some time, at least three of the young people form a reluctant coalition and try to find out why they have been kidnapped and how to get away. Turns out that they all share a feeling of guilt for one parent.

With this pooled information strengthening their resolve, they manage to escape from the room, only to spend the rest of the movie crawling through air-ducts and running through corridors and stairways, all the while evading a handful of exceedingly silly death traps like the Mousetrap of Being Stuck and the Foot-Cutting Wire.

It's no wonder these traps are so silly. They have after all been invented by the same scriptwriter responsible for the film's twist ending, such as it is. You see, our protagonists' feelings of guilt notwithstanding, those feelings aren't the reason they have been kidnapped, rather, they have been chosen because nobody will miss them when they end up as food in the giant microwave oven of an evil corporation trying to solve the problem of overpopulation while making tasty treats.

Fu-Rai is an ultra-cheap imitation of Cube, but one which, unlike the films it copies, is stupid enough to commit to a reason for the things happening to its characters. The cooking angle is of course patently absurd, the earnest and dramatic way the film treats it making the ridiculousness just worse.

This is not the film's only problem. Its production design tries hard to let the cheap and shoddy look minimalist and stylish, but seems to give up after the first twenty minutes or so, and just goes for the usual airduct/corridor/warehouse stuff.

With a running time of 68 minutes, Fu-Rai is also at least half an hour too long, like a classical Twilight Zone episode artificially bloated by flashbacks and people screeching at each other.

While all this does not for a good movie make, I can't help but appreciate that director Shugo Fujii is at least trying to make an earnest and interesting little film, something that puts it automatically above too much of the direct to DVD market in Japan or elsewhere, which is full of films made by people who just don't give a shit about movies or their audience.

With a bit more cleverness, a slightly better sense of pacing and little less (or much more, of course) silliness, this could have been a neat little movie. As it stands, Fu-Rai is just not interesting enough to overlook its flaws. It is also a case where I find myself having a hard time laughing about a film's unintentional humor. It would be a bit like laughing about a one-legged man's troubles with stairs.

Technorati-Tags: in short,japanese movies,sf

From Twitter 11-27-2009

2009-11-28T02:01:00.001+01:00

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On WTF: Hantu Jeruk Purut (2006)

2009-11-27T09:28:00.001+01:00

The Indonesian part of the Asian horror boom is often ignored by Western horror fandom, undeservedly so, as not original but fun films like Hantu Jeruk Purut prove. There's long-haired ghost women and headless priests, oh my!

Technorati-Tags: indonesian movies,koya pagayo,horror,reviews,angie virgin

From Twitter 11-26-2009

2009-11-27T02:01:00.001+01:00

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In short: Mikadroid (1991)

2009-11-26T10:12:00.002+01:00

To the surprise of no one, Japan was trying to build a cyborg soldier during World War II. Just when the war is lost, the Japanese government decides to close down the project. They needn't have bothered, because the building in which the project is based is destroyed in an air raid. Before that, the lead scientist manages to help two not completely converted soldiers escape, while the real prototype in its full early Iron Man glory is buried under the rubble.

45 years later, a building with a parking garage and an underground disco has been built on the site. One day, Iron Man awakens and kills a few people. Fortunately, his old soldier colleagues haven't aged a bit in the intervening years and are coming to kill him.

A young electrician (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, yes the director) and an office drone (Yoriko Douguchi, who still has a career in Japanese genre film and has also played in a few Kurosawa films) will be very thankful for their help.

Mikadroid sounds more interesting than it actually is. Apart from the intriguing Kiyoshi Kurosawa connection and a handful of neat visual ideas, there's unfortunately not much about the film.

There isn't happening enough for 73 minutes of film, the plot would barely be enough for 45, and while the cyborg soldier's design is nice and truly looks like I'd imagine a cyborg made in pulp '45 would, the two directors (Satoo Haraguchi & Tomoo Haraguchi, the latter mostly a special effects guy with a few films like the dreadful Kibakichi as a director) never manage to do much with him. The film does not manage to build the necessary feeling of menace and is also much too slow to ever build up enough momentum to become exciting.

The script is nothing to write home about either. It never bothers to explain why cyborg soldier is going on a killing spree, leaving what is happening too abstract to have emotional impact. The film's tendency for undeserved pathos does not help its case - there is too much baseless melodrama here, too many moments when we the viewer is told to feel something the film doesn't bother to make her feel.

Still, I am not completely down on Mikadroid. Most of its problems are obviously based on a lack of experience and a lack of funds, and I am willing to live with them to a degree when a film at least tries to be professional.

There are also a few slightly surreal sequences making up for some of the film's flaws. Seeing Kurosawa act alongside Douguchi is quite a neat thing to watch, too.

So while I can't really recommend it, Mikadroid has its intriguing aspects.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,kiyoshi kurosawa,yoriko douguchi,sf,action,in short

From Twitter 11-25-2009

2009-11-26T02:02:00.001+01:00

RT @pollinatewildly: RT @FakeAPStylebook The rules for numbers below ten do not apply to 6. He is not a number, he is a free man.
Huh, I found "Jennifer's Body" to be a lot better than the critical consensus says it is. At least funnier.
New blog post: From Twitter 11-24-2009: New blog post: From Twitter 11-23-2009: New blog post: From Twitter 11-22-2... http://bit.ly/5ElQsT
New blog post: Slaughter High (1986): It's April Fools' Day somewhere in the trenches of the American high school. ... http://bit.ly/9016i0
Just completed Dragon Age. An utterly lovely experience.
[Two favorite old school RPG tastes united] RT @YSDC: Mongoose to publish WildFire's 'Cthulhu Chronicles' for Traveller. http://is.gd/53E8c

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Slaughter High (1986)

2009-11-25T09:32:00.001+01:00

It's April Fools' Day somewhere in the trenches of the American high school. A group of jocks lead by a certain Skip (Carmine Iannacone - watch out for his dramatic mugging in the second half of the film) and Carol (Caroline Munro, at age 36 wee bit old to be in high school, yet even with her 80s hair still too classy for the film, even though she doesn't seem to be trying very hard) play a series of especially cruel jokes on the local nerd Marty (Simon Scuddamore).

Despite their best efforts, the funny people don't manage to electrocute or drown their victim, but have no fear, Marty himself is stupid enough to take a (of course spiked) joint from some members of the group and will have a terrible disfiguring acid accident which also lands him in a padded cell.

Years later, Carol is an upcoming, coke-snorting actress, but still has time to visit her class reunion. It's a rather strange reunion at that - only the members of her old clique seem to have been invited and the school is more or less deserted.

A complete lack of guilty consciences and utter stupidity are the reasons why our group of victims still decides to have a party, but what do you know! Someone in a high school jacket wearing a fool's mask and hat is slaughtering them one by one in creative ways, and there's no way out of the school anymore. Will Carol be the world's first mean-spirited, coke-snorting Final Girl? Or will our friend Skippy rise to the occasion? More importantly, do you want them to?

Slaughter High came late in the first slasher movie cycle, but I can't say it had learned any important lessons from its million of predecessors, or rather, not one of the three(!) directors deemed it necessary to do any directing as we usually know it. Why this shoddy, derivative mess needed three directors at all is anybody's guess. I'm just going to blame the cocaine. Or perhaps someone somewhere thought that the combined efforts of three talentless hacks would somehow reach the level of the work of one barely mediocre craftsman. Turns out they don't.

While it, like all slashers whose only ambitions lie in being loose collections of murders, isn't in any way scary or exciting (please put words like "mood" right out of your vocabulary when it comes to films like it), the film at least succeeds as a cheesy collection of silly bits and stupid pieces. There are many joyful (or painful) moments you can only get in a shoddy production from the tail end of the slasher boom like this, be it the outrageous hideousness of the killer's victims or some of the sillier kills. At least the sex-electrocution (while talking dirty) has to be seen to be believed.

There is also the ending to mention, or rather the way in which it effortlessly manages to go from killing off the (theoretical) Final Girl to a stupid Twilight Zone pastiche to a "it was all a dream" cop out to a supposed shock ending in the space of five minutes. It's aweinspiring in its insipid and annoying way.

Apart from Caroline Munro as the only professional actor on screen, the producers also managed to rope Harry Manfredini in to do the music. In revenge, he composed them a bizarre mix of his usual synthie stuff, some idiosyncratic strings, cock rock and an annoying "humorous" jingle theme thing I will probably never get out of my head again.

So, if you are looking for quality in your movies, you should probably make a wide berth around Slaughter High. If your mind is instead set on witnessing more of the special brand of cheese that only grew (much like especially big-haired fungus) in the 80s, you will feel right at home with it.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,slasher,caroline munro,reviews

From Twitter 11-24-2009

2009-11-25T02:03:00.001+01:00

New blog post: From Twitter 11-23-2009: New blog post: From Twitter 11-22-2009: Thank you Hantu Jeruk Purut for bei... http://bit.ly/5Mmlfu
New blog post: In short: The Shackle (2000): Screenwriter Yuchool spends most of his time writing lurid screenplays... http://bit.ly/5aYsxv
Internet gone for a few hours again. Can't recommend 1&1 to you Germans.
So, what is supposed to be so bad about Squeenix doing the CGI scenes for Deus Ex 3 & Thief 4. They're good at that, you whining gits!
Unless you are against cinematics on principle
Ah, comments threads suggest it's a racist bias against all things Asian & fear of androgynous people at work here. God how I hate "gamer".

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In short: The Shackle (2000)

2009-11-24T09:59:00.001+01:00

Screenwriter Yuchool spends most of his time writing lurid screenplays his producer doesn't want to touch because they are supposed to be too artsy. Not that he needs the job - the death of his parents some time ago has left him with quite a bit of money.

The rather disturbed man seems to have spent a part of it on his hobby room in the basement. There, he has space for alone time with his beloved mannequins and the women he first kidnaps, shackles and then rapes and kills every Sunday.

On weeknights, he plays the voyeur, watching his neighbour Sulchee and her husband making love. Sulchee is an important part of the creep's fantasy life in her role as is only great and secret love.

While Sulchee is friendly but obviously not at all interested in him as a lover in real life, her visiting sister Dalchee is (like some other women he completely ignores) just all over him. That's unfortunate for her and leads her to an early death when she says the wrong things about her sister to him.

After that killing, it won't take long until the psychopath feels the need to finally get close to his "beloved".

Myeong-hwa Jo's Saseul tries very hard to follow in the footsteps of the less pleasant parts of the Japanese pinku genre or some of the roman porn films of Yasuharu Hasebe, but somehow gets stuck at an awkward place just a bit too far from being truly disturbing and too close to being complicit with its protagonist.

There might be a very unpleasant streak of identification with the deranged main character running through the film, but at the same time this streak never gets strong enough to make one squirm while watching it.

This may sound like a good thing, but I don't think it really is. Trying to get the viewer to identify with the psycho, to feel queasy about sharing the position of the voyeur with him while being disgusted by his violence would be the trick that's needed here to get this jaded exploitation fan to feel more about the film than a combination of slight exasperation and boredom. Intellectually, I should have felt bad about sharing Yunchool's experiences, but instead just co-ogled the naked women, watched his mugging and felt slightly embarrassed.

There's something lacking in this film (and it's not the lack of empathy) I find difficult to put into words, I must admit. I suspect The Shackle just needed a few more scenes which tried to achieve some sort of twisted poetry, or violence that felt either more real or more artificial, something, anything to drag it out of the mire of slightly artsy, slightly unpleasant sexploitation into the weird, the wild or the dangerous.

I'm looking for a something committed to a little more than just breasts and chains in my exploitation. Alas The Shackle never really dared to deliver more.

Technorati-Tags: south korean movies,exploitation,in short