Future Kick (1991)

Director: Clay Robeson
Stars: Don 'The Dragon' Wilson, Meg Foster, Christopher Penn, Eb Lottimer and Al Ruscio

I love scifi movies from the eighties and nineties that attempt to depict awesomely advanced technology without either a budget or a clue. Somehow they don't annoy me the way the fake tech in shows like CSI: Miami does. Maybe it's the difference in setting between the future and the present. When Horatio Caine's team enhance a dot into the front page of the New York Times so he can flip it over and read the sports scores on the back, it's deliberate misrepresentation. When Don 'The Dragon' Wilson plays a cyborg kickfighting machine in a future where the rich live on the moon and hold down conversations with AIs, I find it cute that the filmmakers forget to or couldn't afford to do anything about the size of the computer monitors or the crappy user interfaces on them. The futurism here is wildly inconsistent. New Los Angeles has no water but they still have newspapers. Local phone calls are expensive but organ replacement isn't.

Most importantly, virtual reality is apparently the new thing in this unidentified future year (it just says the good days on Earth were 'a long time ago'), just as it was in 1991 when Future Kick was made. Howard Morgan, rich computer programmer, is the sole designer of UltraDream, such a promising product that his company thinks they can sell 50,000 copies of it, even though it's still a buggy prototype. Maybe it'll be a toy for the rich and cost a fortune, I don't know. Anyway, he lives in opulence on the moon with a wife played by Meg Foster and all the rest of the 1%, so he doesn't generally have to deal with non-virtual reality. Unfortunately his senior publisher has him go to Earth, so that's it for him. New Los Angeles is a dark, rainy slum full of criminals, terrorists and clubs playing really unsophisticated electronic music. The cops are so busy they don't have much of a chance to do anything for anyone and are so corrupt they don't care.

There is one hope for the people. The corporations running the world did create 'biomechanical men' called Cyberons to fight the criminal element of society. That turned out to be a really bad idea for them because it didn't take too long for the Cyberons to realise that their corporate creators were the real criminals and so turned on them. In retaliation, they set the Corporate Police loose to kill all ten of them and now there's only one left: Walker, played by world kickboxing champion Don 'The Dragon' Wilson. This is a Roger Corman picture, made through his New Concorde company, and as much as I love Corman pictures generally, the presence of Don 'The Dragon' tends to indicate that it's going to be a stinker. It isn't really Wilson himself, though his acting only serves to show how good a kickboxer he is. I think it's just that he has the same problem John Travolta has: the inability to tell a good script from a bad one.

To be brutally honest, he isn't even the lead in this one, as much as his name is most prominent and the title refers specifically to him. He gets surprisingly few fight scenes, which mostly take place in the dark. They might even be the worst thing about the film, as the fight choreography is unsatisfyingly wooden with every move slow and telegraphed. There are cool and surprising death scenes, but they're mostly separate and when you realise that the best fight is against Chris Penn, you know you're in trouble. Really Wilson is only there to kick people and flesh out the futuristic background, while Jeff Pomerantz, who plays Howard Morgan, is there to set up the story by getting murdered. The lead is Meg Foster, Morgan's wife, who takes the shuttle down to Earth to investigate. To say that Nancy is out of her element in New Los Angeles is a powerful understatement, but Foster is the only member of the cast who even attempts to act.

She does a pretty good job too, especially when you know the twist that will be revealed at the end of the movie and which I won't spoil here. It's a cheap and unsatisfying gimmick but it's the key to everything that goes before. It's also adds a good deal of depth to Foster's performance, which makes it even more unfortunate that we don't get to know about it until it's over. What I can say is that she varies her acting considerably throughout. On the moon she's comfortable and alive but on Earth she's a fish out of water. Obviously traumatised by her husband's murder, in meaningless conversation she's utterly devoid of emotion, less a character and more a prop that floats through the film, but when emotions are called for, she comes alive. Her progression from professional victim to capable sidekick is not particularly credible but Foster does give it a fair attempt and that's more than anyone else in this film does. She also provides the narration.

Beyond Foster, the only reason to watch is for the pseudo-futuristic exploitation: not just fights but death scenes and pole dancing and odd little touches here and there. There's a competitive video game called LaserBlade that brings a whole new meaning to the term 'deathmatch'. There are clubs like the Trocadero 2000 House of Pleasure, which is presumably a really stupid name for a club in the future, but it does employ a lot of very limber half naked pole dancers. There's an assassin called Hynes, played by Eb Lottimer, who doesn't pass up any opportunity to go over the top, whether he's ripping people's hearts out of their chests or not. If you have a background in Corman movies, you won't be too surprised that a decent amount of these moments weren't even shot for this film: the dancers are all from Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls and the shuttle shots and other space footage are taken from Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World.

Anything to save a buck, huh? That's hardly new for Corman but it's more obvious than usual here. Behind Hynes, who's the psycho of the story, the real villain of the piece is the NewBody Corporation which doesn't get much of a chance to get established. Mostly we see one office, which is dimly lit and almost unfurnished, just a piece of space to house Dr Sado, who doesn't get to live up to his name. It's as obvious a cheap set as I think I've seen outside of microbudget cinema and it doesn't help the film. The bizarre thing is that nothing much does except reaching the end and discovering the final twist, which calls for a reevaluation of the whole picture. On a first viewing, it's a complex but unsatisfying film with little more than Foster to recommend it. It stands up better on a second run with foreknowledge of the twist at the heart of everything, but unfortunately it just isn't the sort of movie you're likely to watch twice.

3 Days Later: Jesus Christ, Zombie Lord (2008)

Director: Clay Robeson
Stars: Dave Dyson, Marcus Sams and Amber Price

Another film that really puts its essence into its title, 3 Days Later is a surprisingly spot on spoof of Jesus Christ Superstar, done with people who can really sing and mostly know how to keep a straight face when departing from the classic story of our Lord and Saviour by suggesting that after his three days in the tomb he rose as a zombie. The only surprise I felt was in realising that, in our modern zombie-soaked culture, nobody had done this before! It opens with the suggestion that it's a proof-of-concept for a feature length zombie rock opera, but if that's not a gimmick it seems to have got stuck there because its web site forwards to a YouTube channel which hasn't seen an update in almost three years. Whether they really ever wanted to expand it or not, they shouldn't. At seven minutes, it's a funny musical short that would serve as a welcome humour break to any festival set. At ninety, it would drag painfully. Even twenty would be a stretch.

Of course there's very little acting and next to no sets. It's made to appear that this preview is taken from a minimalist stage musical production with attention given to costumes and facial hair and a little choreography but not much more. Everything revolves around the songs and fortunately those are solid, especially in the brief snippets we're treated to. 'What's that smell? Tell me what's happening?' the chorus chants as they dance around the newly risen Lord of the Undead. 'I don't know how to kill him,' sings Mary Magdalene as Jesus munches on an leg. 'If you eat these folks I'll know you're no hoax,' suggests the gay 70s disco dancer. You get the picture. If you're thinking that it sounds really stupid then you shouldn't bother seeking it out at all, but if you're smiling at the idea of this, you're going to love it. The voices are capable and the musical direction is solid. It does what it aims to do with aplomb.

Bloodstained Terror (2007)

Directors: Cody Cather and Doug Gehl
Stars: Dudley Bowlin, Jane Wines, Daren Palacio, Lianna Hubbard, Jake Cather, Brandon Bond, Ryan Mahoney, Austin Logue, Matt Anderson and Doug Gehl

Unashamedly loud and cheap from moment one, Bloodstained Terror obviously knows exactly what its limitations are but it really doesn't care. It's nothing but a bunch of amateur gorehounds emulating the double bill with trailers concept done by Grindhouse, but condensed to a running time of under six and a half minutes, credits not included, and apparently without even a hint of a budget. I have to admire the sheer balls it takes to attempt something like this and submit to a film festival, but realistically they ended up with roughly what you might expect they ended up with: a fun little home video with terrible acting, bad aging effects and next to no plot, but also copious amounts of gore, backyard wrestling and offensive fun. These are probably exactly the sort of guys you want to hang out with at weekends but, to be brutally honest, if I made a film at the weekend I doubt I'd want to watch it at a film festival either.

The 'double feature' is Blood Wine and Reelestate Terror or, to be more accurate, Cody Cather's Blood Wine and Brandon Bond in Reelestate Terror, as there's more humour here than you might initially expect and these complete unknowns play up the cheesy antics of the stars pretty well. Blink and you'll miss a character named Bigot Tree. Blood Wine has an arguing couple walk in on a pair of cannibals mid-munch who promptly eat them too. Reelestate Terror has an agent show a house full of serial killers with inevitable effect, but he saves the day with his wrestling moves. In between the two is a trailer for a picture apparently called Jesus Christ Presents: You Suck at Life. Yeah, I said there's a lot of humour here. I didn't say that it's particularly deep. What would you expect from a picture with a credit thanking Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Lucio Fulci? Well that's exactly what you get here. You can't diss these guys for false advertising.

To be brutally honest, it's not a bad way to spend seven minutes if you're into this sort of thing. The wrestling is surprisingly capable and the gore is agreeably plentiful. I can't believe anyone could be bored when that seven minutes includes two separate stories and a trailer, jam packed full of grindhouse blatancy. It's not unfair to point out that there are ninety minute features out there with plots just as flimsy as these. On the other hand it can't be ignored that the production quality is so low that it approaches non-existent. It's obvious that the realtor's costume is a suit jacket on top of whatever metal shirt Brandon Bond showed up in. The lighting and sound are abysmal and I'd suggest the money all went on gore effects if I didn't believe that Cody Cather, Doug Gehl and their colleagues at The Terror Studios just pooled whatever cool props they had sitting in their closets already. As deep underground as it gets, on its own terms it's genius.

Shrunken Heads (1994)

Director: Richard Elfman
Stars: Aeryk Egan, Becky Herbst, A J Damato, Bo Sharon, Darris Love, Meg Foster and Julius Harris

For Full Moon Entertainment's first theatrical release, Charles Band pulled out all the stops and went totally weird, helped to no small degree by bringing in Richard Elfman to direct. No, it isn't as far out there as Forbidden Zone, but it really thinks about trying it. After all, the hero of the film, for all intents and purposes, used to be a colonel in the Tonton Macoutes, the brutal secret police in Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier. Now Mr Sumatra is in New York, running a newspaper and comic book stand, practicing voodoo on the side. No wonder the local kids think he's scary. Blaxploitation legend Julius Harris has fun in his last film, goggling his eyes at every opportunity. If that isn't strange enough for you, Meg Foster is the butch lesbian head honcho of the criminal underworld, Big Moe. Oh, and the main characters are the reanimated shrunken heads of three children, which fly through the streets seeking revenge on the gang that killed them.

Initially it isn't this wacky. It begins like a fifties family movie, with the bad kids bullying the good kids and a love triangle linking the two sides. The good kids are Tommy Larsen, Bill Turner and Freddie Thompson and, inspired by superheroes like Superman and the Green Lantern, take an ill advised stand for the powers of truth, justice and the American way. First, they take down the bad kids, the Vipers, by filming them stripping a car bare and handing the footage to the police. Then, after Big Moe bails out her boys and has the good kids brought to her, they escape with all her number running slips. That leads to the inevitable conclusion: she has Vinny and his Vipers shoot them dead. We're under half an hour in and the heroes are no more. What's going to happen now? Well, Mr Sumatra happens. He bubbles up his big cauldron and cooks up his Haitian black magic and Tommy and his friends are back as vengeance crazed shrunken heads.

With all these elements, this story could get particularly dark and twisted, but the music refuses to let that happen. Richard Band's score has a notably light hearted edge to it, more so than his usual scores for his brother's films. Director Richard Elfman brought in his brother Danny too, to compose the film's theme. Every time the film gets gruesomely dark, such as when the shrunken heads murder a pair of bad guys trying to rape a woman in a dark alley, it's followed up with the joyous discovery that these malefactors are turned into neighbourhood conscious zombies who weed gardens and pick up trash. If we need the point hammered home that that this is far more of a fantasy than a horror movie, we never lose sight of the romance angle, between Tommy and Sally Conway, who wasn't even fifteen when he was murdered. Hey, if the tween girls can go for sparkling vampires, why can't the teen girls go for shrunken heads? It works for me.

The dialogue is also notably over the top, meaning that there's no possible way we can take any part of it the remotest bit seriously. That doesn't work too well for the kids, because it obviously isn't really them talking but what they've become, mere tools of vengeance. On the other hand, it works wonderfully for the adult leads, because they revel in the roles. Meg Foster is a bizarre but inspired casting choice for Big Moe because it's the sort of role you'd expect to see someone like Al Pacino play. She plays it surprisingly quietly, spending more attention on chomping cigars or placating Mitzi, her dizzy blonde plaything, than running her empire. That seems to be taken utterly for granted. It's easy to see just how much fun Foster was having as her eyes sparkle with every tough as nails line that she delivers, but I wish she'd had more to do. Especially given how completely unlikely her character is, she deserved more of an opportunity to build it.

Julius Harris got the screen time he needed and he dominates here. I've always felt that with his darker skin, creased face and cold dead stare, Harris looked tougher than most of his colleagues in the blaxploitation era, even when playing alongside far better known names like Ron O'Neal or Fred 'The Hammer' Williamson. He's perfect for the part of Mr Sumatra, however often writer Matthew Bright changed the tone of the picture. I've never been able to buy into him as a good guy on screen, but Mr Sumatra is so far from the regular sort of hero that he doesn't have that trouble here. Freaky, scary and magnetic all at once, he'd have been even better if this story had been played out as a serious horror film rather than a quirky romantic comedy fantasy. He's gifted with a few memorable moments. 'You can run but you can't hide,' is close to the most clichéd line in the book but he makes it his own, even more than Vernon Wells in Mad Max 2.

As a picture, this has to be a love it or hate it movie. I can imagine a lot of people not making it to the end, purely because of how wild it becomes, but I'm pretty sure that anyone who does will love it. It's almost the definition of an underground cult film. Bright grew up with the Elfmans and it shows in their films that they make a good team, but this isn't just theirs. It's obvious that they tried to make a Charles Band movie here, albeit with a good deal of their own quirkiness brought to the table, but it doesn't quite make it. There are Elfman elements and Full Moon elements but it ends up being neither, more of a bastard hybrid that stands unashamedly alone, in equal parts a fifties Disney movie, a cheesy horror flick, a mind trip comedy and a foul mouthed JD picture. Enjoy it, or Mr Sumatra will pluck out your tongues with bull cutters and roast them, and take your brains and chill them for the purposes of garnishment. You don't want that, do you?

Leviathan (1989)

Director: George P Cosmatos
Stars: Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson, Michael Carmine, Meg Foster, Lisa Eilbacher and Hector Elizondo

Given that tomorrow I'll be at DarkCon where I'll get the opportunity to meet Ernie Hudson and Meg Foster, it seemed appropriate tonight to watch the only picture they made together, a 1989 horror thriller set 16,000 feet underneath the Atlantic Ocean. It's not a great movie, hardly the peak of the few films George P Cosmatos directed. This came in between Rambo (the first one), Cobra and Tombstone and it really doesn't sit well in that company. Its good side is that a great cast mostly tries to elevate the material but the bad is that it only gets more and more derivative with each minute that passes, starting with an ill advised scene of suspense. For some reason we're supposed to thrill as a character two miles below the surface almost runs out of oxygen on his way back to base. It sounds good on paper but we have no idea who he or anyone else is at this point and so have zero emotional investment. We simply don't know enough to care.

Instead we quickly realise where the chief influences for the picture came from. The bottom of the sea in this film looks uncannily like the set of Aliens, especially with its shades of blue. The parallels with outer space continue, perhaps fairly given that it only takes a simple hurricane to apparently strand these people as far away from civilisation as if they were in space, but they're not taken in any new direction. With the crew's return to the habitat area of Mining Shack #7, we realise that we're watching Alien not Aliens and start wondering how the roles match up. Given the diverse make up of the crew, some are obvious. Ernie Hudson is Yaphet Kotto and Hector Elizondo is Harry Dean Stanton. Amanda Pays takes Veronica Cartwright's part and a relentlessly monotone Peter Weller is the geologist in charge, thus Tom Skerritt. Richard Crenna is the film's big unknown, so perhaps he'll turn out to be Sigourney Weaver. That's the real question, right?

As the story progresses, the similarities only proliferate. This is a mining expedition, just like the Nostromo. The crew locate a scuttled Russian ship called the Leviathan down at the ocean floor, rather than a derelict alien spaceship on a planetoid. It's certainly not on active duty in the Baltic where it's supposed to be. Of course they raid its safe for cool stuff, discovering that the crew's files are all marked deceased, and unwittingly bring back a monster that will grow and develop along with the running time and hunt down the crew members one by one. What would become the Weyland-Yutani company in the Alien franchise is the Tri Oceanic Mining Corporation here. The large comic relief crab looks uncannily like a facehugger and the underwater explosion plays out just like the alien egg puffball effect. The display screens are primitive, though the computer AI is sophisticated. There's even similar drool. I just wondered where Jones the cat was.

There are some minor differences, not that they add up to a heck of a lot in the grand scheme of things. My favourite is that at one point the monster bursts into a crew member's chest rather than out but the most interesting is the way it develops. In some ways it's a direct take on the creature in Alien, as expected, in others reminding more of The Thing, but there's a good deal of originality in the creature design, as much the concept behind it as the way it's constructed. That said, the creative vision of someone like H R Giger is notable only for its absence. The characters don't die in the order we expect, but that merely highlights how much more effective Dan O'Bannon's decisions were than those of scriptwriter David Webb Peoples here. This is far more conventional and predictable, the only surprise being that we don't get the strong female lead we expect. Again, that's a disappointment. The last few minutes are almost an Arnie flick.

The only real reason to watch the film is for the acting, but even there you're more likely to be disappointed than entertained. Weller is the most disappointing, but I wonder how fair that is. It's two years after RoboCop and he certainly seems to have forgotten that he was playing a human being again, but it's possible that he was deliberately evoking the deep ennui his character must have felt. The problem is that it's very hard to play bored and still keep the audience's attention. Here we wonder whether Peter Weller or his character, Steven Beck, is the most bored with the proceedings. Crenna plays Dr Glen Thompson like William Holden would, their physical similarity never seeming quite so strong as here, though facially he's more like an old Steve McQueen. The most prominent female member of the cast, Amanda Pays, is unfortunately given little to do and so she fails to achieve much more than demonstrate similar underwear to Sigourney Weaver.

Lower down the cast list, the acting is more solid because the characters are deliberately set up as character parts. Daniel Stern is suitably juvenile, Hector Elizondo suitably sharp, Ernie Hudson suitably heroic, Lisa Eilbacher suitably colourful and Michael Carmine somehow bizarrely both suitably calm and suitably hysterical, depending on the scene. That leaves Meg Foster to play up the villainy as the crew's corporate liaison on the surface. She's first shown at the other end of a videolink, so we hear her husky voice long before we see those famous blue eyes. She's smooth and bureaucratic and serves as the face to the faceless corporation, remaining infuriatingly calm as the story gets progressively frantic. In the end she starts to fit the Ian Holm role from Alien, so we wonder if she's going to turn out to be an android. The picture would have been much more entertaining if it decided to get that off the wall. Unfortunately it doesn't.

Tinted Windows (2009)

Directors: Adam DeKraker
Stars: Toby Levin and Adam Halpin

Charlie apparently didn't have a great time at the party tonight. He's tired, his friends are jerks and he's going home. When he gets to his car though he finds someone outside it, someone who desperately wants a lift. He'll even pay a thousand bucks for a ride, apparently because he likes Charlie's tinted windows. Given that I saw Tinted Windows at a horror festival, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the gimmick to this short is but it's a capable concept that's explained well by writer/director Adam DeKraker. Initially it felt stupid and overly simple, but every time I came up with a reason why it was dumb the characters promptly explained why it wasn't. By the time the credits rolled after eleven minutes of cat and mouse, I found myself admiring how ambiguous the stranger's character was. Is he really good at what he does or really bad at what he does? I could provide a decent case for either side and I like that.

There are only two actors in the film, played by Toby Levin and Adam Halpin, and while they aren't going to win Oscars any time soon they're natural actors who do credit to the material. In the same way that the story won me over against initial complaints, so did the actors. Charlie isn't particularly bright and his dialogue and demeanour reflect that, but Levin's acting helps to hammer that home: delivering occasionally repetitive lines without stage school aplomb makes him seem very real. Similarly Halpin plays the stranger well, his occasional imperfections initially noticed but then rationalised as just an imperfect role the character is playing. Again, is he really good or really bad? In fact the whole film is deceptively simple but could be read in many ways. The script may well be intended as a metaphor for unprotected gay sex, but it doesn't matter. Anyone whose interest is piqued will be able to find their own meaning in it.

Bloody Daisies (2009)

Directors: Cameron Kerr and David E White
Stars: David E White, Catarina de Castro and Cameron Kerr

Two men wait with daisies at the same fork in the road in the middle of nowhere. The thinner of the pair is the delightfully named Mitchell Lovenest, neatly but casually dressed and with an old school poet look and long hair. The larger one is Frank Winthrop, who made far less effort to look good with his Kojak T-shirt and shorts. He's early though and it's half an hour before he decides to talk to Mitchell and find out that they're waiting for the same girl, Daisy Tinkelbaum, who then appears out of nowhere and disappears back into nowhere, all without warning. She wants them to do something, but they don't know what. All they know is that there's a spade stuck into the ground in a clearing that wobbles with incentive and they have to figure out what it's for. Of course it becomes clear in the end, with a neat if not entirely unexpected twist to cap it off, but the journey becomes more interesting than the destination.

It's a patently low budget affair (the Dogme concept is cited) with occasionally dubious sound so dialogue can be hard to catch, especially from Catarina de Castro as Daisy, because when she talks she's deliberately obscured, visually and audibly, and it's often a little overdone. She's mostly a prop for the two men to banter against, and they do elevate the story with a notably playful sense of humour that keeps proceedings interesting with flashforwards, flashbacks and imaginary possibilities. The flashbacks are very reminiscent of early Guy Ritchie and the use of sound effects to highlight mood is more like a cartoon. What I found most intriguing is that apart from being thrust into the same situation, the two characters are utterly different, yet they're not just the co-stars of the film, they're the co-writers and co-directors too. What they conjure up runs too long at fourteen minutes, but otherwise is enjoyably quirky.

Shrove Tuesday (2009)

Director: Lee Andrew Matthews
Stars: Jayde Newman, Mark Newman, Gina Newman, Jeffrey Prewer, Alison Cochran, Poppy Matthews and Peter Dean

A long short film, Shrove Tuesday is fascinating viewing but it's also wildly inconsistent. Less a horror movie and more a fairy tale in the vein of the Brothers Grimm, it opens like a Punch and Judy show in rhyme. Its plot is as simple as a colourful warning for children to be careful when walking through the woods. There isn't much more than that as far as the story goes: Pancake Marion is a mythical boogeyman with a brief moment of sympathy that's promptly ignored: a child burned alive by villagers for being evil. She emerged to bite off their heads and become a myth, kept away only by an enchanted flower. If you pick that flower in Marionwood, you'll be promptly killed, like the drunken yokel who opens up the live action part of the film. To avoid horrible death, simply don't pick flowers. Naturally that's what people do in this film, but that's about it. We don't need to know anything more. Cue the fire and blood and gore and mayhem.

So the story is cute but hardly essential. What makes the film interesting is the visual style that it employs, which is highly unusual. A good part of it is rapid fire editing, common enough today as distraction, but there's a huge amount of effects too, as a real mixed media thing. A lot of CGI sits alongside modelwork and traditional animation. Much of it is live action, but with surprisingly few lines for anyone and even there it's often played out like a comic book, with a succession of freeze frames frozen in turn, often at stark anglesm and then zoomed into. This is only the most obvious, but the angles and effects are all reminiscent of print based design too. Much of the point seems to be to aim for mood rather than story and it succeeds best in some neatly framed cinematic images with great lighting, poetically shot in the Jean Rollin style. So there's much to watch and enjoy, with the mindset and feel of a Tiger Lillies song.

Unfortunately it's not consistent. Some of it is gorgeous, moody and effective, but some of it is also obviously and painfully cheap. I'm still not sure whether that's deliberate or not but it does cause us to wonder. Even the few characters are inconsistent. The one we see most of is a young girl obviously set up to be Little Purple Riding Hood, literally skipping through the forest to take something to her grandmother, setting us up for an admittedly gruesome fairy tale for kids. Yet before this we've got past the yokel at the beginning, who is rude and crude, even when talking drunkenly to Mr Worm and Mistress Bunny Rabbit. It's hard to picture the intended audience. Even the mayhem varies between highly stylised violence that wouldn't be out of place in that Punch and Judy style opening and outrageous gore that totally wouldn't. For a film that seems to revel in being everything at once, it's something to enjoy a few times but still be confused by.

Devil Dynamite (1987)

Director: Godfrey Ho
Stars: Mack Stuart, Walter Bond, Richard Phillips, Ted Wald, Eddie Leo and Mark Coston

A year before Robo Vampire, one of the most awesomely bad movies ever filmed, Hong Kong mashup maestro Godfrey Ho was at it again with Devil Dynamite. It has everything you could possibly want from a Godfrey Ho movie and more, if you're into that sort of thing. Most people aren't but Ho has become a surprising cult figure in film, perhaps because of the sheer blatancy he exhibited in patching his pictures together. He made over a hundred movies, but a pretty large percentage of the footage came from other Asian movies that he'd possibly bought the rights to, many of which hadn't been finished or released. Into this footage he'd splice newly shot scenes that only rarely pretended to have anything to do with the story at hand. In many ways they're just videos for ninja fetishists, people who believe that anything would be better if only it had a couple of colour coded ninjas. I'm not one of them but I'm building similar fetishes.

Needless to say, it's completely awful, but if you've seen Godfrey Ho movies before and you're stlil reading this then you're not going to care. This one is also courteous enough to get down to awesomeness even while the opening credits roll. A Taoist priest shows how awesome he is by juggling fire and leaping through a kata, but the token westerner with a beard, Ronald by name, renders him ineffective with a mere voodoo doll. The priest can't complain because Ronald is his boss for whom he's managing four hopping vampires or jiangshi. He's a particularly cut rate sort of boss for this sort of scenario but we should never forget that this is a Godfrey Ho movie. He's white and he has a beard, which is more than enough to make him a villain. I could have had a great career as a villain in Godfrey Ho movies. My beard is bigger, for a start, and I could easily manage scenes as complex as chuckling and asking henchmen to bring in new victims.

Meanwhile, outside are ninjas, leaping around in the dark. What sort of Godfrey Ho movie could it be without ninjas? Their job is to eliminate Steven Cox who, inconveniently for them, has just been released after ten years in prison, so they don't find him there. They slice up some of his fellow prisoners just because, but get promptly wiped out by the hopping vampires. It's all a test, you see. 'Vampires are undoubtedly the ultimate in efficient fighting killers,' explains the Taoist priest. 'No-one's able to stop them,' he adds, as he stops them with the traditional talisman to the forehead. Jiangshi fans can't complain about a lack of action here, and it continues with an attack on a restaurant, apparently to interrupt a couple of diners who want to explain to us who Steven Cox is. Unfortunately for the hopping vampires, one is a kung fu master called Tony and the other is Alex, who can instantly turn into a spaceman in a silver suit. I didn't see that coming.

I'd wondered about the Chinese RoboCop in Robo Vampire and I wondered here how a Chinese guy with an English accent can suddenly transform into a refugee from an Intel clean room. No explanation is offered and nobody seems to find it remotely unusual. Why would anyone ask? Well, as I discovered last night as Oriental Cinema's Damon Foster celebrated 30 years of metal heroes with a few key episodes of Space Sheriff Gavan, that this was an entire genre. This was a Japanese TV show that featured a lead character who could don a battle suit in a thousandth of a second through the aid of bizarrely explained technology and fight evil, and it inspired countless followers. RoboCop had a western storyline but was obviously inspired by the metal heroes from Japan and Godfrey Ho simply ripped off the ripoff. Asian audiences in 1987 couldn't avoid metal heroes so needed no explanation for why Alex can transform at will into Shadow Warrior.

Eventually we find out what the point of all this is. Steven Cox is a solid hero, a gambling king with a hidden treasure who knows kung fu and can dodge daggers thrown in the dark. However a decade ago he was betrayed by his lover, Madame Mary, the local queen of the underworld, who runs all the gambling in town and surely can't have been legal ten years earlier. Now she's trying to marry a cop called Louis who doesn't ever seem to work. Somewhere within this story is the gold, but I still haven't figured out how even after two viewings. Madame Mary knows where it is but doesn't go to get it, even though she put Cox away for a decade. What's more, he seems somehow surprised when she decides to do something about it. It almost seems that putting him in prison and sending hopping vampires to kill him is OK, but going after his gold after ten years of ignoring it is beyond the pale. Maybe it's just the inscrutable oriental mind at work.

More likely, it's just Godfrey Ho not paying too much attention to what he patched together. Like that's a surprise. Certainly this feels like it's all from two completely different movies, which of course it was. Brian Thomas, author of VideoHound's Dragon: Asian Action & Cult Flicks suggests that the half with Madame Mary, Louis and Steven Cox may be taken from Stunning Gambling, a 1982 Taiwanese picture. If it is, then it may even be the second time Godfrey Ho reused footage from that film, as in the year it came out he apparently edited it into Ninja, the Violent Sorceror as well. The other half of the picture, featuring all the other characters and all the supernatural elements, may or may not be entirely new but it's hard to tell. It makes so little sense that there may be multiple sources here too. Only Steven Cox makes it to both sides, but rarely and in dark scenes where I can't be convinced he's even played by the same actor.

Needless to say, logic takes a back seat so far in the back that it's out of sight. Of course I'm not going to expect logic in a Godfrey Ho picture, but some scenes come completely out of nowhere. About half an hour in there's a truly bizarre scene where zombie ninjas attack a children's party with a ghost girl and a fake hopping vampire kid. Enter Shadow Warrior from the ether, exit any semblance of sanity. In its place is the sort of disconcerting 'What did I just see?' moment where we wonder if someone changed the laws of physics and didn't feel it was worthy of mention. It's not often I have to rewind a movie to watch a scene again to confirm to my brain that I saw what I thought I saw, but this was definitely one of those. I couldn't even figure out exactly why some of what happens happens. Sure, I now understand the metal hero thing, but there seems to be a conspicuous Michael Jackson influence too. This metal hero moonwalks. Was I dreaming?

Of course, this is what draws a certain type of audience to Godfrey Ho movies to begin with, so we'd be disappointed if he didn't deliver. Devil Dynamite is short on sense but long on awesome. It's mostly free from the fatal flaw of many of his films, namely talky scenes inducing boredom. Instead it keeps up a steady supply of hopping vampires, ninjas, kung fu and blissfully surreal Taoist sorcery. I've long been a sucker for jiangshi, but the sparkling acupuncture conjurations the priest performs here to aid their recovery from battle led me to believe that every movie should contain a scene of Taoist sorcery. I guess it took me this long to realise that it's what Gone with the Wind was really lacking! I think I could watch a Nicolas Cage movie without crying if only there was Taoist sorcery to distract me! If only Michael Bay could learn from Godfrey Ho! The Ed Wood of Asia was never coherent but he instrinsically understood insane awesomeness.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)

Director: Eli Craig
Stars: Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden and Jesse Moss

For about five minutes, Tucker and Dale vs Evil is the clichéd and stereotyped nonsense I had a sneaking feeling it was going to be, from the little I knew about it beforehand. Tucker and Dale are creepy rednecks passed on an Appalachian country road by a bunch of college kids. You won't be surprised to find that the girls are gorgeous, the guys are assholes and they're all about beer, sex, dope and bad fireside ghost stories. Ally is the lead hot blonde chick. Chad is the lead asshole. You've seen this a hundred times before, down to every little detail. It's only the names that ever change, right? Well, what changes here is that the rednecks are the heroes. It's outside Last Chance Gas that Dale is shown to be a sympathetic lead. It's when he builds his confidence up to approach the girls and smile and laugh with a scythe in his hand that it gets funny. By the time they're pulled over by a deputy with Dale's head in Tucker's lap, it becomes priceless.

And it stays that way for most of the picture. I laughed my way through this on the big screen and I enjoyed it just as much at home second time around. Partly it's because it's your standard slasher movie turned entirely on its head. Partly it's the way proceedings, including all the gory death scenes you expect, are set up through an inventive set of misunderstandings. Partly it's just because the roles are refreshingly reversed. The rednecks, usually the characters to fear or fight in pictures like this, are the sympathetic heroes. The college kids, far from being either the sympathetic victims or the focus of the story, are mere idiots who deserve everything they get, especially when they pay attention to Chad, the ostensible leader of the pack whose dream must be to get voted onto the island in Lord of the Flies. Those of us who realise that the real serial killers are forgettable normal people see how utterly everyday he is, right down to his inhaler.

This whole concept works wonderfully, brought gloriously to life by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine, who are magnetic and engaging in the title roles. I've been a fan of Tudyk for a while now, most obviously from Whedonverse shows like Firefly and Dollhouse but also as far back as A Knight's Tale. I only know Labine from the TV show Reaper, which I gave up on quickly even though he and Ray Wise were superb in that show. Had the humour in it been more like the humour here, I'd probably have loved it. I'm somehow surprised to find that that was far from the first thing Labine has done but he'd apparently been acting on screen for sixteen years before that. He's much older than he looks. He certainly shows his experience here, making a great double act with Tudyk. Their timing is impeccable, whether they're merely lying in the dirt or running with chainsaws, and especially in the tender moments when they're even more hilarious than ever.

They dominate proceedings here, to the degree that almost everyone else in the picture fades into the background as much as the trees. Only Allison is truly noticeable, in the stylish form of Katrina Bowden, currently going strong on TV's 30 Rock. You could call her the love interest, but only if you read the film as the routine slasher it isn't. She manages to endow her role with much more than just her looks, which are certainly pleasing to the eye. She's also the film's MacGuffin, as her apparent kidnap by Tucker and Dale, who merely saved her from drowning, is what drives the story forward for all the other characters. She could have done exactly the same thing with a fraction of the screen time and as much as I enjoyed looking at her every time she appeared on screen, I wonder if the film might have gained an edgier tone if she didn't do it as often, even as far as only appearing at the beginning and the end.

That leaves Jesse Moss, another surprisingly experienced young actor, to guide us into the more traditional side of the story as Chad, the psycho college kid. Maybe three quarters of the way in, we find that a few hints dropped early on aren't merely flavour because they coalesce into a plot that's recognisable as a traditional slasher story. Unfortunately this just isn't as much fun as the main approach the film takes. Thus far we've loved the twisted logic of the story, the slasher flick turned on its head. We realise that it makes just as much sense, if not more sense, than most of the cheesy slasher movies we've seen and it pushes us into wondering if we should view them in the future with the different perspective of this film in mind. What if what we see isn't reality but really perceived reality, seen through the eyes of supposed victims? Jason Voorhees was always a little sympathetic. How much perspective shift would we need for Freddy Krueger to join him?

So after changing our perspectives so agreeably, it feels disappointing when the writers, Morgan Jurgenson and Eli Craig, seem to back it up a little and try to change them back again, at least somewhat. It does give them the opportunity to wrap up the story but it felt to me like the easy way out and everything achieved up until that point deserved a better finalé. The large stack of conveniences needed to set up and finish off this side of the story comes far too quickly, mostly in a single overblown scene that's reminiscent of a Scooby Doo ending and it feels unworthy. I'm not sure what a good finalé would have been, given that the necessary build up to a deeper, more crafted finish would surely eat into the character and humour of the main thrust of the film, which is its greatest success, but I can't help but feel that it isn't what we're given. Fortunately it isn't difficult to shrug off after perhaps 80 minutes of the funniest gore movie since Brain Dead.