Well, this one certainly starts off like a classic horror movie. As the opening credits roll, we hear slow piano music against a slowly building drone. Then we hear some children singing the Korean equivalent of hide and seek, we are briefly warned, and suddenly it's Korean schoolgirls, a ouija board, ritual chanting, someone having a nightmare and some awesomely dilated eyeballs. They're conjuring up some sort of a ghost, all as a joke, but apparently however much of a joke it was, it was also real. Soon elder sis is experiencing bizarre Asian horror creepiness in the kitchen.
This a very creepy little film and one in which the creepiness doesn't let up. Really when looking at each instance of shock, relief, shock, there's nothing new here at all, but it's all put together very nicely indeed and it's certainly effective. It's also hardly obvious, as we leave this group and leap forward in time to when these Sang Rim High School students are of college age. It's initially a little difficult to work out who's who, who's important and who in the present ties to who in the past. As we discover the pieces though, this becomes a powerful jigsaw.
Min Ji-won is our central character and she knows about as much about herself as we do: she has long-term amnesia. As she begins to come to terms with the concept that her memory may never return, she decides to leave to study abroad in an environment that is entirely new to her for good reason. And then her past begins to reappear: not as memories per se, but as apparently supernatural hallucinations of a little girl and through the reappearance of a childhood friend who has a photo of the schoolgirl friends.
Unfortunately this is a telling time for all of them. Kim Eun-seo is dead. Oh Yu-jung is dead too, drowned even though she was in a photographic darkroom at the time. Mi-kyung is in a psychiatric hospital, shuddering, shrieking and mortally afraid of water. And everything that Min discovers gradually adds to the understanding that while she's a good person without many friends now, back in high school she was the nouveau riche ring leader of a gang of girls and not a very nice person at all. Everything seems to tie to a young girl called Su-in, who is nowhere to be found.
Kim Ha-neul is the lead and she's very good indeed in a role that calls for two very different portrayals of the same person. In many ways it must be easier to play two different roles in the same film than two versions of the same one. It's a real juggling act but Kim is highly impressive. She's made nine films so far, of which this was the seventh. is Su-in, who is at once the least of the bunch and the most, and she makes the most of her performance. The two have a solid connection and there's a seriously twisted twist at the end to solidify it even further. The rest of the cast are decent but don't get anywhere near the screen time to compete.
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Son of Godzilla (1967)
You know, there's a part of my brain that finds a delicious irony in the fact that I can watch a film like Son of Godzilla on Turner Classic Movies. In and amongst Citizen Kane, Casablanca and The Seven Samurai is a film starring Japanese actors dubbed into English and a few guys in large rubber suits. Then again there are various meanings to the word 'classic', and this fits at least one: the quality that makes it watchable and rewatchable. I've seen this film a lot of times over a lot of years and it's still as fun as it ever was. No, it isn't great, but it's great fun.
On Sollgel Island is a scientific party working under Prof Kusumi to perform a very cool weather experiment, literally. They're going to freeze the island as part of a concept so massively important that it could transform any environment into fertile land able to grow crops. Naturally it's pretty secret and only the directors of the UN Agricultural Commission know that they're there. Yet people are starting to notice. A plane travelling nearby notices interference coming from the island and see Godzilla on his way there too. Then a reporter parachutes down because his stomach tells him there's a story down there and we should always listen to Japanese stomachs in Godzilla movies.
Of course the scientists tell him that there's nothing interesting about the island in the slightest, but it promptly turns into about the most interesting island anywhere. To start with, there are giant praying mantises wandering around the perimeter of the scientific camp and a mysterious young lady swimming in a lagoon on this supposedly uninhabited island. Then the experiment goes wrong and instead of freezing the island, Kusumi and his men set off a radioactive storm and a heatwave, making the mantises grow even larger and dig out Godzilla's baby son, previously buried safely in the rock.
Soon Godzilla shows up, just in time to kick serious mantis ass to save his clumsy baby, who doesn't have a name in the American version but is Minilla back east. Luckily by the time the cunningly named Gimantis (Camacuras in the Japanese version) takes on Riko (originally Seiko) Matsumiya, the young island lady, she's made friends with Minilla so he comes to save her. Unfortunately the clumsy creature also wakes up Spiga (Kumonga), a giant spider that's been happily sleeping under the ground all this time. This isn't Monster Island but it comes a close second. Soon the experimental team have to find a solution to their various problem while confined to a cave collapsing under the weight of battling monsters. Oh, the tension!
This is the really cute Godzilla movie. Anyone watching can see thousands of Japanese girls crying 'kawaii!' at the screen every time little baby Godzilla does something babyish, like skipping over his dad's tail or learning how to spit radioactive fire. Meanwhile the guys can all enjoy every time he falls on his ass or gets hit in the head by a rock. There really is something for everyone here, not least the touching ending, though there is a rather extreme lack of sex given that all the men have spent three months on a supposedly deserted island without a woman in sight and then they find a cute woman who's been there for seven whole years without a man, and before that an entire life with only her father for company. There really ought to be a porn version of this movie. Maybe there's an easter egg on the Japanese DVD or something. We can hope...
On Sollgel Island is a scientific party working under Prof Kusumi to perform a very cool weather experiment, literally. They're going to freeze the island as part of a concept so massively important that it could transform any environment into fertile land able to grow crops. Naturally it's pretty secret and only the directors of the UN Agricultural Commission know that they're there. Yet people are starting to notice. A plane travelling nearby notices interference coming from the island and see Godzilla on his way there too. Then a reporter parachutes down because his stomach tells him there's a story down there and we should always listen to Japanese stomachs in Godzilla movies.
Of course the scientists tell him that there's nothing interesting about the island in the slightest, but it promptly turns into about the most interesting island anywhere. To start with, there are giant praying mantises wandering around the perimeter of the scientific camp and a mysterious young lady swimming in a lagoon on this supposedly uninhabited island. Then the experiment goes wrong and instead of freezing the island, Kusumi and his men set off a radioactive storm and a heatwave, making the mantises grow even larger and dig out Godzilla's baby son, previously buried safely in the rock.
Soon Godzilla shows up, just in time to kick serious mantis ass to save his clumsy baby, who doesn't have a name in the American version but is Minilla back east. Luckily by the time the cunningly named Gimantis (Camacuras in the Japanese version) takes on Riko (originally Seiko) Matsumiya, the young island lady, she's made friends with Minilla so he comes to save her. Unfortunately the clumsy creature also wakes up Spiga (Kumonga), a giant spider that's been happily sleeping under the ground all this time. This isn't Monster Island but it comes a close second. Soon the experimental team have to find a solution to their various problem while confined to a cave collapsing under the weight of battling monsters. Oh, the tension!
This is the really cute Godzilla movie. Anyone watching can see thousands of Japanese girls crying 'kawaii!' at the screen every time little baby Godzilla does something babyish, like skipping over his dad's tail or learning how to spit radioactive fire. Meanwhile the guys can all enjoy every time he falls on his ass or gets hit in the head by a rock. There really is something for everyone here, not least the touching ending, though there is a rather extreme lack of sex given that all the men have spent three months on a supposedly deserted island without a woman in sight and then they find a cute woman who's been there for seven whole years without a man, and before that an entire life with only her father for company. There really ought to be a porn version of this movie. Maybe there's an easter egg on the Japanese DVD or something. We can hope...
Monday, 4 August 2008
Alley Cat (1984)
Director: Edward Victor
Star: Karin Mani
Something happened early on in Alley Cat that I missed because I was too busy buying pizza to be on time. Whatever it was it had to do with a bunch of moron gangbangers getting their asses kicked by a girl. In response they promptly act like real tough guys and knife her grandma. Yes, this is a revenge film, made a little late for the genre in 1984 by three guys conglomerating together under the name of Edward Victor, but it does have fun, throwing out lines like, 'You've got it too! I've got the clap!' to accompany bouncy shots of the naked clap girl leaping off the bed at the camera.
Our lead moron gangbanger is William Krug, aka Scarface, always a popular name for young idiots. His associates that aren't important enough to have cool nicknames are called things like Dave and Vernon and seem like the prototype for the hyenas in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But the cops don't really care about punks like this. They care more about girls like Billie, who gets on the right side of one cop by slamming a door in his face and on the wrong side of another by stopping a rape. She gets arrested for trespassing, carrying a concealed weapon and discharging it within the city limits. Because you know, you have to stop these people who stop crimes.
As Mr Strickland, a District Attorney who looks more like a high school senior says, 'Don't mess with girls in the park. It's not nice!' Well Billie is rather a nice person. When she kicks Scarface in the testicles and knocks him off a building, she's polite enough to scream at him something as abusive as, 'I've decided you're not a very nice person!'
But that's about all I have to say because for some reason I didn't write many notes and that's all I can remember. I suck.
Star: Karin Mani
Something happened early on in Alley Cat that I missed because I was too busy buying pizza to be on time. Whatever it was it had to do with a bunch of moron gangbangers getting their asses kicked by a girl. In response they promptly act like real tough guys and knife her grandma. Yes, this is a revenge film, made a little late for the genre in 1984 by three guys conglomerating together under the name of Edward Victor, but it does have fun, throwing out lines like, 'You've got it too! I've got the clap!' to accompany bouncy shots of the naked clap girl leaping off the bed at the camera.
Our lead moron gangbanger is William Krug, aka Scarface, always a popular name for young idiots. His associates that aren't important enough to have cool nicknames are called things like Dave and Vernon and seem like the prototype for the hyenas in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But the cops don't really care about punks like this. They care more about girls like Billie, who gets on the right side of one cop by slamming a door in his face and on the wrong side of another by stopping a rape. She gets arrested for trespassing, carrying a concealed weapon and discharging it within the city limits. Because you know, you have to stop these people who stop crimes.
As Mr Strickland, a District Attorney who looks more like a high school senior says, 'Don't mess with girls in the park. It's not nice!' Well Billie is rather a nice person. When she kicks Scarface in the testicles and knocks him off a building, she's polite enough to scream at him something as abusive as, 'I've decided you're not a very nice person!'
But that's about all I have to say because for some reason I didn't write many notes and that's all I can remember. I suck.
Sunday, 3 August 2008
Keepsake (2006)
A black and white short film that I picked up from one of the directors (I think) at the Phoenix International horror festival last year, this is quite an interesting little piece. Only eight minutes long, I was surprised to find that the DVD also contained a trailer. A trailer for an eight minute film? That seems a little excessive, but hey, needs must. It also contains a very nicely put together title sequence that impressed very much, with the credited names appearing from behind one tree as the camera pans only to disappear behind another.
Unfortunately the film proper isn't as impressive, but it's still a worthy little short that does far more than it should given its inherent limitations. It's a story about a killer who murders a young lady Dexter-style, in a house textured in cellophane. We don't see who he is during the murder, or even as he leaves the house, and nobody speaks, so the violence is just there wanting some sort of context which is denied us. Only when he returns home do we hear a TV evangelist telling us that God wants blood, thus presumably providing a motive, and a view of his face as he leans over to kiss his sleeping wife.
It's a low budget affair, that's for sure. There are only three people in the film, one of whom is asleep (two are credited: Kyle Riley and Samantha Agnew) and the only speech comes from the TV. The story is basic, as it would have to be to fit in eight minutes, and there's some experimental editing going on. Some of it works very well, some of it not quite so well, and the ending seems a little strange unless the wife is in on what hubby gets up to. How many wives wouldn't notice something like that in a place like that? Mostly though I enjoyed the opening credits and the deliberate withholding of context.
Unfortunately the film proper isn't as impressive, but it's still a worthy little short that does far more than it should given its inherent limitations. It's a story about a killer who murders a young lady Dexter-style, in a house textured in cellophane. We don't see who he is during the murder, or even as he leaves the house, and nobody speaks, so the violence is just there wanting some sort of context which is denied us. Only when he returns home do we hear a TV evangelist telling us that God wants blood, thus presumably providing a motive, and a view of his face as he leans over to kiss his sleeping wife.
It's a low budget affair, that's for sure. There are only three people in the film, one of whom is asleep (two are credited: Kyle Riley and Samantha Agnew) and the only speech comes from the TV. The story is basic, as it would have to be to fit in eight minutes, and there's some experimental editing going on. Some of it works very well, some of it not quite so well, and the ending seems a little strange unless the wife is in on what hubby gets up to. How many wives wouldn't notice something like that in a place like that? Mostly though I enjoyed the opening credits and the deliberate withholding of context.
Mabel's Wilful Way (1915)
Back in the early days of slapstick shorts, scripts often appeared on a single sheet of paper. They were less scripts and more guidelines, closer resembling something I remember doing in music class at school: writing a score by drawing lines or painting colours onto music paper to be interpreted by the musician. Here the lines or colours would be props that the cast would interpret. This one would have included keywords like fountain, merry go round, bear, ice cream, carnival slide etc, the camera would roll and everyone would improvise.
Mabel Normand is a young lady in a truly outrageous striped costume, who escapes from a boring dinner with her stuffy parents to roam around the park, getting tangle up with a couple of guys played by Fatty Arbuckle and Edgar Kennedy. They get up to the sort of antics you'd expect with the keywords mentioned above. Arbuckle gets onto the wrong side of a cop, while Kenedy gets onto the wrong side of Mabel's father. Naturally people get hit and fall down a lot.
There's nothing really new here, but it's a decent enough slapstick short, featuring a few names who made many such things. There's an interesting and surprisingly well done shot with footage run backwards, sending Fatty up the carnival slide to collect Mabel and come right back down again. There's also a scene that wouldn't have been dubious at the time but is now, with a man in blackface effectively being paid to stick his head through a hole so people can throw balls at him. It was good to see Edgar Kennedy getting more of a part than usual, as least as much screen time as Fatty Arbuckle. Al St John and Alice Davenport play supporting roles.
Mabel Normand is a young lady in a truly outrageous striped costume, who escapes from a boring dinner with her stuffy parents to roam around the park, getting tangle up with a couple of guys played by Fatty Arbuckle and Edgar Kennedy. They get up to the sort of antics you'd expect with the keywords mentioned above. Arbuckle gets onto the wrong side of a cop, while Kenedy gets onto the wrong side of Mabel's father. Naturally people get hit and fall down a lot.
There's nothing really new here, but it's a decent enough slapstick short, featuring a few names who made many such things. There's an interesting and surprisingly well done shot with footage run backwards, sending Fatty up the carnival slide to collect Mabel and come right back down again. There's also a scene that wouldn't have been dubious at the time but is now, with a man in blackface effectively being paid to stick his head through a hole so people can throw balls at him. It was good to see Edgar Kennedy getting more of a part than usual, as least as much screen time as Fatty Arbuckle. Al St John and Alice Davenport play supporting roles.
L'Avventura (1960)
One way to purge my soul after the torture of watching Satan's Storybook, surely one of the worst movies ever made, would be to watch a classic, one that I have never seen before, but which has become world renowned and often referenced. L'Avventura or The Adventure is a Michelangelo Antonioni film, which became the first part of a thematic trilogy, to be followed by La Notte and L'Eclisse. It won a special jury award at Cannes in 1960 'for a new movie language and the beauty of its images', and that's hardly surprising given how beautiful this film looks.
There are three leads: one male, two female. Anna is engaged to Sandro, but she hasn't seen him in a month and while he has missed her she's got used to being without him. To reunite, they plan a four or five day Mediterranean cruise together, and Anna takes along a friend called Claudia. How good a friend we don't know, given that Anna is temperamental and contrary and prone to doing things that she knows will have resonance. When the young ladies travel to meet Sandro, Anna tries to avoid him entirely but when he sees her, she heads upstairs and makes love to him while Claudia waits below unaware of any delay.
There are others with them too on the boat, but they only matter because they don't matter. They're associates, who flit in and out of their live as part of the same social set but are really completely peripheral. This becomes very obvious when Anna disappears. They've dropped anchor at a huge rock in the Mediterranean called Basiluzzo, because Anna chose to dive into the sea to swim, but Anna vanishes from the rock apparently without a trace. She continually tells Sandro of her need to be alone, but nobody expected her to be so literal about it.
The film is a mystery in a lot of ways. Partly it's a mystery in genre, as Sandro and Claudia try to track down what could have happened to Anna, but it's not an easy task as they aren't even given a trail to follow, merely a few bad suggestions as to leads. It's even more of a mystery to the viewers than to the characters, as we try to unravel what happened while juggling the various motives of the various people we watch. Is this an accident, a suicide, a murder? Who, what, when, where, how? In many ways these questions, the ones we ask ourselves, aren't really the important ones.
How the characters deal with Anna's disappearance is what matters here, and is far more important than than the disappearance itself. As they investigate, Sandro and Claudia fall in love themselves, which leads us to draw whole new conclusions about what may really have happened. It's also a mystery as to when it will even end; like Hitchcock's Vertigo, we have no real idea whereabouts in the film we are at any point in time. Maybe we're about to finish, maybe we're about to hit a plot twist and go off in a completely new direction for another hour. Whatever it is, it's certainly happy for us to make up our own minds and it's easy to see a whole bunch of starting points for discussions.
The film is constructed beautifully. Every scene is setup like a painting with immaculate composition, even when there are many, many people in the frame, making this one of those films that would literally lose much of itself if in a fullscreen 4:3 version. There are some magical scenes, such as the one in the bell tower or the one where Claudia waits outside a building for Sandro, only to become the target of the eyes of many men everywhere within the city square. Huge hotels resonate with crowds of people only to echo with emptiness a few hours later when everyone is asleep. What makes it most surreal is that it's crowded at night but empty when daylight appears.
There's so much emptiness here, whether it be on a remote rock in the Mediterranean, what appears to be a ghost town or just occupied space temporarily unoccupied because of the time of day. It's also there in the sparse soundtrack, the many scenes that have no dialogue and in the characters of the people we watch. One other question we come to ask ourselves is whether we should even care about these people or not, and if so which ones? It's a very clever film and I'm sure one that would grow with repeated viewings. No wonder it tends to be regarded as a masterpiece.
While it would have looked good and resonated with anyone in the cast, it's enhanced to no end by three very powerful lead performances and a number of supporting roles. Sandro is played by Gabriele Ferzetti, who I didn't recognise, though it seems that I've seen him before as Morton the railroad baron in Once Upon a Time in the West and as major supporting roles in The Night Porter and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which being the Bond with George Lazenby, I don't know too well at all. He has a long career, dating back to 1942 and he's still going strong today.
Anna is Lea Massari, who I may only recognise from Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart and given how great she is in that film and this, only two movies from her career is far too few. Best of the three to my eyes was Monica Vitti who reminds of a continental Ellen Barkin. She is awesomely deep here and carries much of the acting. She returned for the other films in Antonioni's thematically connected Incommunicability Trilogy, as it has become known to critics. These look to be what established her as an actress, and she'd go on to appear in six of Antonioni's films, along with many Italian comedies. I believe I've only seen her once, as the title character in Modesty Blaise, but even more so than Massari I need to seek out more of her work. At least I have one more on my DVR lined up as the Sundance Channel followed this one up with L'Eclisse.
There are three leads: one male, two female. Anna is engaged to Sandro, but she hasn't seen him in a month and while he has missed her she's got used to being without him. To reunite, they plan a four or five day Mediterranean cruise together, and Anna takes along a friend called Claudia. How good a friend we don't know, given that Anna is temperamental and contrary and prone to doing things that she knows will have resonance. When the young ladies travel to meet Sandro, Anna tries to avoid him entirely but when he sees her, she heads upstairs and makes love to him while Claudia waits below unaware of any delay.
There are others with them too on the boat, but they only matter because they don't matter. They're associates, who flit in and out of their live as part of the same social set but are really completely peripheral. This becomes very obvious when Anna disappears. They've dropped anchor at a huge rock in the Mediterranean called Basiluzzo, because Anna chose to dive into the sea to swim, but Anna vanishes from the rock apparently without a trace. She continually tells Sandro of her need to be alone, but nobody expected her to be so literal about it.
The film is a mystery in a lot of ways. Partly it's a mystery in genre, as Sandro and Claudia try to track down what could have happened to Anna, but it's not an easy task as they aren't even given a trail to follow, merely a few bad suggestions as to leads. It's even more of a mystery to the viewers than to the characters, as we try to unravel what happened while juggling the various motives of the various people we watch. Is this an accident, a suicide, a murder? Who, what, when, where, how? In many ways these questions, the ones we ask ourselves, aren't really the important ones.
How the characters deal with Anna's disappearance is what matters here, and is far more important than than the disappearance itself. As they investigate, Sandro and Claudia fall in love themselves, which leads us to draw whole new conclusions about what may really have happened. It's also a mystery as to when it will even end; like Hitchcock's Vertigo, we have no real idea whereabouts in the film we are at any point in time. Maybe we're about to finish, maybe we're about to hit a plot twist and go off in a completely new direction for another hour. Whatever it is, it's certainly happy for us to make up our own minds and it's easy to see a whole bunch of starting points for discussions.
The film is constructed beautifully. Every scene is setup like a painting with immaculate composition, even when there are many, many people in the frame, making this one of those films that would literally lose much of itself if in a fullscreen 4:3 version. There are some magical scenes, such as the one in the bell tower or the one where Claudia waits outside a building for Sandro, only to become the target of the eyes of many men everywhere within the city square. Huge hotels resonate with crowds of people only to echo with emptiness a few hours later when everyone is asleep. What makes it most surreal is that it's crowded at night but empty when daylight appears.
There's so much emptiness here, whether it be on a remote rock in the Mediterranean, what appears to be a ghost town or just occupied space temporarily unoccupied because of the time of day. It's also there in the sparse soundtrack, the many scenes that have no dialogue and in the characters of the people we watch. One other question we come to ask ourselves is whether we should even care about these people or not, and if so which ones? It's a very clever film and I'm sure one that would grow with repeated viewings. No wonder it tends to be regarded as a masterpiece.
While it would have looked good and resonated with anyone in the cast, it's enhanced to no end by three very powerful lead performances and a number of supporting roles. Sandro is played by Gabriele Ferzetti, who I didn't recognise, though it seems that I've seen him before as Morton the railroad baron in Once Upon a Time in the West and as major supporting roles in The Night Porter and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which being the Bond with George Lazenby, I don't know too well at all. He has a long career, dating back to 1942 and he's still going strong today.
Anna is Lea Massari, who I may only recognise from Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart and given how great she is in that film and this, only two movies from her career is far too few. Best of the three to my eyes was Monica Vitti who reminds of a continental Ellen Barkin. She is awesomely deep here and carries much of the acting. She returned for the other films in Antonioni's thematically connected Incommunicability Trilogy, as it has become known to critics. These look to be what established her as an actress, and she'd go on to appear in six of Antonioni's films, along with many Italian comedies. I believe I've only seen her once, as the title character in Modesty Blaise, but even more so than Massari I need to seek out more of her work. At least I have one more on my DVR lined up as the Sundance Channel followed this one up with L'Eclisse.
Satan's Storybook (1989)
This is a Ginger Lynn film, made in her mainstream Ginger Lynn Allen days, though I'm watching it as half of a Scarlet Fry double bill. Fry is way down the cast list in a tiny role but probably has about as much screen time as the one name anyone has ever heard of. Actually there's another name I've heard of too, one that I was highly interested in seeing on the big screen. Gary Brandner is not known as an actor in the slightest: he's really a writer, with many horror novels to his name, the most famous of which is The Howling. I was very interested to see what he looked like and how he acted. It turns out that he's not known as an actor for a good reason: he isn't that great in this, his only screen role, but sadly he's still possibly the best actor in this film.
This is an amateurish production through and through. A long, very long, text only credit sequence leads us into what becomes a framing story, with Ginger Lynn, Leslie Deutsch and Ray Robert. Deutsch plays Queen Elonite, wife to Robert's Satan, who is apparently going to be the victim in some pagan sacrifice. Lynn is a ninja (yep, a ninja, all dressed in white, and no, this isn't a Godfrey Ho movie), who takes five full minutes to explain the back story that we don't get to see. Apparently she's called Christeeth and she's really Elonite's sister. She wasn't really murdered in the cradle by Satan, that was some other sister, and she was really rescued by a priest who trained her for an entire lifetime to be able to save Elonite and piss off the Dark Lord, something she utterly fails to do.
This is an awesomely bad and very long explanation scene that feels like it was thrown in there to replace an entire film that never got made, and that's what this seems to be: a feature length story that for some reason didn't happen, so one time writer/director Michael Rider turned it into a framing story for an anthology called Satan's Storybook, the segments themselves being told to Satan to calm him down from whining about where his queen is. I'm still trying to decide whether it was a good thing that it was never finished or not. If it had been finished, at least we'd have only one story to complain about instead of three, but I have honestly seen Ginger Lynn porn movies that had better plots, better acting and a bigger budget.
Then again, if it had been finished we'd have to put up with Satan for much longer. This Satan is roughly akin to Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels, merely in one of those masks they used to advertise on the back page of Fangoria. He's a whiny little bitch who flounces about on an obvious set disguised with way too much dry ice, being pandered to by his jester. Yep, this Satan has a jester, a jester with a puppet no less, and it's the jester, played by Michael Daevid, who tells our stories. Daevid used to be a dancer and backing vocalist for Debbie Gibson, which explains why he feels the urge to leap around in between saying anything.
He tells two stories, instead of the conventional three, the first being about a serial killer called the Demon of Death. The Demon of Death is played by Steven K Arthur, who also wrote and produced, which explains how he got such a big part, though he's one of those few actors who I can look at and seriously say that I would have done a better job. Of all the many serial killers in movie history, he's apparently the one with the least background. All we know is that he's a serial killer who owns a radio and who picks his victims at random from the phonebook.
There's a great and very representative moment here: the radio newscaster tells us to hold on for a new report any second, but the new report is that there's nothing to report: no leads, no new victims. Just like the radio, this film continually tells us something's going to happen, at which point nothing does. Anyway, the Demon of Death picks Jezebell Jones as his next victim. She's apparently a 20 year old metalhead witch living with mom and dad, though she's the least convincing 20 year old I've ever seen. She survives, though mom and dad don't, and so does the Demon of Death, even though he's been repeatedly blasted by two cops.
There's something else going on here, but the way the demon voices are synthesised means that I can't understand what they're talking about, making them about as coherent as the plot. Anyway, Jezebell summons her clairvoyant grandmother in some sort of seance, who tells her how she can get her revenge. At the moment he fries in the electric chair, she can recite the very same chant she used to summon granny to make the Demon of Death burn for ever in a lake of eternal fire. Except it doesn't work but I can't tell you why because it's all incoherent, the voice and the script and everything. Did I mention this was six years later but everyone looks precisely the same?
This whole thing is awful, really awful. The acting is really bad, pull people off the street at random bad. Nobody seems to have ever appeared in anything else again, which is understandable. The dialogue is definitively awful and could be used as a textbook for a 'here's how not to write a movie' class. My favourite lines: 'I may be scum, but I'm legal scum!' and 'If I fail now I will become even more powerful!' Yeah. The sets are cheap and stunningly unbelievable. Jezebell's house has a huge white canvas hanging above the fireplace, as if the prop department didn't realise they were supposed to buy one with something painted on it. The story is incomprehensible, apparently as much so to the actors as to us, who seem so confused that there's a gap between every line spoken as if they're trying to decide if it's the right one to use.
Story number two is better, if only because Brandner's bad acting is better than everyone else's bad acting, because most of it involves only two people and because it's linear enough to at least make sense. He's a clown called Charlie, who has been hitting the sauce again, something that has plagued him for years. He can't juggle any more, let alone be ready on time, but his hands are steady enough to apply his makeup perfectly. Anyway, Charlie gets fired and hangs himself, only to come face to face with Mickey the Mort, who is basically Death to clowns, who points out how bad he was in life. The end.
While it's a better story, it's still a bad one and it's painful to watch because Charlie gets nothing except awesomely cheesy cliched lines and Mickey the Mort squeaks when he talks. Squeaking gets old after about two lines but it goes on and on here until we want to do what Charlie does to make it stop. Of course it doesn't work for him either. Oh, and then there's more framing story with Satan whining it up and Ginger Lynn getting thrown about a hundred plot twists at once, collapsing under the weight of them and giving up the ghost entirely by saying something defiant.
The third story is... oh yeah, there isn't a third story. This thing just ends. It doesn't seem to end in any way other than there isn't any more and the credits run, but it appears to just run out of time. The framing story suggests that there will be a third story, which never comes, and that it will continue itself. Queen Elonite comes back to see her Dark Lord, only to go back to the Dark Forest to catch her sister, and... well, that's it.
I've seen a lot of bad horror movies in my time, but this one takes the cake. It delivers on precisely no counts, and everything about it is painful. It would have improved no end if someone had got topless. After all this is an eighties horror movie starring a porn star in the lead, and there's absolutely no sexual element at all. There's very little gore and nothing else to appeal to the horror crowd. Nobody else would have even picked it up to watch in the first place and horror fans may even find it a little offensive to see Satan himself as a little whiny bitch. This is another film to add to the ever growing 'worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space' list.
This is an amateurish production through and through. A long, very long, text only credit sequence leads us into what becomes a framing story, with Ginger Lynn, Leslie Deutsch and Ray Robert. Deutsch plays Queen Elonite, wife to Robert's Satan, who is apparently going to be the victim in some pagan sacrifice. Lynn is a ninja (yep, a ninja, all dressed in white, and no, this isn't a Godfrey Ho movie), who takes five full minutes to explain the back story that we don't get to see. Apparently she's called Christeeth and she's really Elonite's sister. She wasn't really murdered in the cradle by Satan, that was some other sister, and she was really rescued by a priest who trained her for an entire lifetime to be able to save Elonite and piss off the Dark Lord, something she utterly fails to do.
This is an awesomely bad and very long explanation scene that feels like it was thrown in there to replace an entire film that never got made, and that's what this seems to be: a feature length story that for some reason didn't happen, so one time writer/director Michael Rider turned it into a framing story for an anthology called Satan's Storybook, the segments themselves being told to Satan to calm him down from whining about where his queen is. I'm still trying to decide whether it was a good thing that it was never finished or not. If it had been finished, at least we'd have only one story to complain about instead of three, but I have honestly seen Ginger Lynn porn movies that had better plots, better acting and a bigger budget.
Then again, if it had been finished we'd have to put up with Satan for much longer. This Satan is roughly akin to Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels, merely in one of those masks they used to advertise on the back page of Fangoria. He's a whiny little bitch who flounces about on an obvious set disguised with way too much dry ice, being pandered to by his jester. Yep, this Satan has a jester, a jester with a puppet no less, and it's the jester, played by Michael Daevid, who tells our stories. Daevid used to be a dancer and backing vocalist for Debbie Gibson, which explains why he feels the urge to leap around in between saying anything.
He tells two stories, instead of the conventional three, the first being about a serial killer called the Demon of Death. The Demon of Death is played by Steven K Arthur, who also wrote and produced, which explains how he got such a big part, though he's one of those few actors who I can look at and seriously say that I would have done a better job. Of all the many serial killers in movie history, he's apparently the one with the least background. All we know is that he's a serial killer who owns a radio and who picks his victims at random from the phonebook.
There's a great and very representative moment here: the radio newscaster tells us to hold on for a new report any second, but the new report is that there's nothing to report: no leads, no new victims. Just like the radio, this film continually tells us something's going to happen, at which point nothing does. Anyway, the Demon of Death picks Jezebell Jones as his next victim. She's apparently a 20 year old metalhead witch living with mom and dad, though she's the least convincing 20 year old I've ever seen. She survives, though mom and dad don't, and so does the Demon of Death, even though he's been repeatedly blasted by two cops.
There's something else going on here, but the way the demon voices are synthesised means that I can't understand what they're talking about, making them about as coherent as the plot. Anyway, Jezebell summons her clairvoyant grandmother in some sort of seance, who tells her how she can get her revenge. At the moment he fries in the electric chair, she can recite the very same chant she used to summon granny to make the Demon of Death burn for ever in a lake of eternal fire. Except it doesn't work but I can't tell you why because it's all incoherent, the voice and the script and everything. Did I mention this was six years later but everyone looks precisely the same?
This whole thing is awful, really awful. The acting is really bad, pull people off the street at random bad. Nobody seems to have ever appeared in anything else again, which is understandable. The dialogue is definitively awful and could be used as a textbook for a 'here's how not to write a movie' class. My favourite lines: 'I may be scum, but I'm legal scum!' and 'If I fail now I will become even more powerful!' Yeah. The sets are cheap and stunningly unbelievable. Jezebell's house has a huge white canvas hanging above the fireplace, as if the prop department didn't realise they were supposed to buy one with something painted on it. The story is incomprehensible, apparently as much so to the actors as to us, who seem so confused that there's a gap between every line spoken as if they're trying to decide if it's the right one to use.
Story number two is better, if only because Brandner's bad acting is better than everyone else's bad acting, because most of it involves only two people and because it's linear enough to at least make sense. He's a clown called Charlie, who has been hitting the sauce again, something that has plagued him for years. He can't juggle any more, let alone be ready on time, but his hands are steady enough to apply his makeup perfectly. Anyway, Charlie gets fired and hangs himself, only to come face to face with Mickey the Mort, who is basically Death to clowns, who points out how bad he was in life. The end.
While it's a better story, it's still a bad one and it's painful to watch because Charlie gets nothing except awesomely cheesy cliched lines and Mickey the Mort squeaks when he talks. Squeaking gets old after about two lines but it goes on and on here until we want to do what Charlie does to make it stop. Of course it doesn't work for him either. Oh, and then there's more framing story with Satan whining it up and Ginger Lynn getting thrown about a hundred plot twists at once, collapsing under the weight of them and giving up the ghost entirely by saying something defiant.
The third story is... oh yeah, there isn't a third story. This thing just ends. It doesn't seem to end in any way other than there isn't any more and the credits run, but it appears to just run out of time. The framing story suggests that there will be a third story, which never comes, and that it will continue itself. Queen Elonite comes back to see her Dark Lord, only to go back to the Dark Forest to catch her sister, and... well, that's it.
I've seen a lot of bad horror movies in my time, but this one takes the cake. It delivers on precisely no counts, and everything about it is painful. It would have improved no end if someone had got topless. After all this is an eighties horror movie starring a porn star in the lead, and there's absolutely no sexual element at all. There's very little gore and nothing else to appeal to the horror crowd. Nobody else would have even picked it up to watch in the first place and horror fans may even find it a little offensive to see Satan himself as a little whiny bitch. This is another film to add to the ever growing 'worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space' list.
Saturday, 2 August 2008
Scarlet Fry's Horrorama (1990)
Scarlet Fry tells us that he loves death and death loves him. I say 'he', because Scarlet Fry is not the video vixen I was expecting, he's a ghoul in a hat and deliberately bad clown makeup. I wouldn't have recognised him for the guy in a Vampira shirt who was hawking the DVDs, if indeed that was him. Here he looks more like Martin Jacques from the Tiger Lillies done up in blood makeup. Scarlet is our host to a set of six shorts, and by the general standard of shorts, these are so short that they're really Daisy Dukes. Call them micro-shorts or vignettes, or call them what they really are: settings for the crew to have fun with gore effects. That's really what this Horrorama is all about.
In the Sack is probably the best, because it actually has a plot: a beginning, a middle and an end, along with a couple of twists that are nicely executed, if you'll pardon the pun. No, it's not subtle and no, it's not well acted, but it's fun and it's a great opener. Rebecca is getting ready for her hot date with 'what's his name again', who turns out to be a loser called Josh. She's trying to be Linnea Quigley and she could be the video vixen that Scarlet Fry isn't: hosting anthologies like this would seem to be very much up her alley.
Manwich is a great example of a vignette designed around a single line of dialogue: 'A sandwich ain't a sandwich unless it's a manwich'. Someone probably heard it spoken, made an association and ten minutes later Manwich was filmed. I'm sure you can make the same association: fat guy, packed lunch, friend, chainsaw. Salt With That, Dear has even less to play with. It has a foul mouthed fat bitch of a wife (we're on a role reversal here) complaining about the food her mild mannered hubby is cooking her, so he takes her out, and I don't mean to McDonald's. The language seems to be the point here: it's wild and inventive, reminding me of the Rude Kid cartoons in the Viz comic.
Kiss Me Kiss Me New Wave Zombie is the inventive title of part four, and it's the most inventive thing about it. A lady in a scary wig weeps at her boyfriend's grave, only to have her intestines chomped by a zombie with new wave lapel pins and a limp. It's Blood Feast with that inconvenient 80 minutes of plot cut out. A Day in the Park is the longest segment but probably the most pointless. A couple are having a picnic: he wants to get married but she just finds him repulsive. Luckily for him he finds a gun in the trashcan and she only has a pencil and you can see where this one ends up. Like the Manwich vignette, this probably grew out of a single line.
The last segment is RIP: Rest in Peace which would seem to be a highly misleading title. A large and loud punk girl with a dangerous snore sleeps with a bottle of whisky, while her inept boyfriend fails miserably to chop wood in the yard. I thought it was the neighbour but apparently it's her boyfriend, even though he's gay and dweeby and she's a large and loud punk girl. He promises to leave Bruce, but she either doesn't believe him or doesn't care, so uses the axe to make him an ex.
The funniest bit comes at the end when the public picket Scarlet Fry, which is a really cool touch. 'Make Love Not Gore!' There's definitely a sense of humour at play here but it isn't the point, the gore effects are the point. Gore effects are fine but they do need something to back them up and only In the Sack really delivers that. To provide a film based entirely around gore effects, Hideshi Hino made Flowers of Flesh and Blood, one of the most twisted and sickening films ever released. Scarlet Fry only made this.
In the Sack is probably the best, because it actually has a plot: a beginning, a middle and an end, along with a couple of twists that are nicely executed, if you'll pardon the pun. No, it's not subtle and no, it's not well acted, but it's fun and it's a great opener. Rebecca is getting ready for her hot date with 'what's his name again', who turns out to be a loser called Josh. She's trying to be Linnea Quigley and she could be the video vixen that Scarlet Fry isn't: hosting anthologies like this would seem to be very much up her alley.
Manwich is a great example of a vignette designed around a single line of dialogue: 'A sandwich ain't a sandwich unless it's a manwich'. Someone probably heard it spoken, made an association and ten minutes later Manwich was filmed. I'm sure you can make the same association: fat guy, packed lunch, friend, chainsaw. Salt With That, Dear has even less to play with. It has a foul mouthed fat bitch of a wife (we're on a role reversal here) complaining about the food her mild mannered hubby is cooking her, so he takes her out, and I don't mean to McDonald's. The language seems to be the point here: it's wild and inventive, reminding me of the Rude Kid cartoons in the Viz comic.
Kiss Me Kiss Me New Wave Zombie is the inventive title of part four, and it's the most inventive thing about it. A lady in a scary wig weeps at her boyfriend's grave, only to have her intestines chomped by a zombie with new wave lapel pins and a limp. It's Blood Feast with that inconvenient 80 minutes of plot cut out. A Day in the Park is the longest segment but probably the most pointless. A couple are having a picnic: he wants to get married but she just finds him repulsive. Luckily for him he finds a gun in the trashcan and she only has a pencil and you can see where this one ends up. Like the Manwich vignette, this probably grew out of a single line.
The last segment is RIP: Rest in Peace which would seem to be a highly misleading title. A large and loud punk girl with a dangerous snore sleeps with a bottle of whisky, while her inept boyfriend fails miserably to chop wood in the yard. I thought it was the neighbour but apparently it's her boyfriend, even though he's gay and dweeby and she's a large and loud punk girl. He promises to leave Bruce, but she either doesn't believe him or doesn't care, so uses the axe to make him an ex.
The funniest bit comes at the end when the public picket Scarlet Fry, which is a really cool touch. 'Make Love Not Gore!' There's definitely a sense of humour at play here but it isn't the point, the gore effects are the point. Gore effects are fine but they do need something to back them up and only In the Sack really delivers that. To provide a film based entirely around gore effects, Hideshi Hino made Flowers of Flesh and Blood, one of the most twisted and sickening films ever released. Scarlet Fry only made this.
One Take Only (2001)
I was very impressed by both The Eye, the original Hong Kong version, and the unrelated film that went by the title The Eye 2. They were directed by the Pang brothers, Oxide and Danny, who had a few other films to their credit by that time, this being one made while they were living in Thailand. The original title is Som and Bank: Bangkok for Sale, which makes a lot more sense than One Take Only and highlights the two lead characters. Both live on the darker side of Thai culture, but not too far.
Som is a prostitute who still hangs out with her girlfriends; Bank is a small scale drug runner who dreams of being a tough guy. They live only two floors apart in the same housing complex and occupy much the same space: early on we see them crossing paths all the time without actually talking to each other. They finally meet and fall in love, though naturally Som doesn't let on what she does for a living.
The film is highly stylised, especially in the action sequences, often edited in time with the music which is generally Prodigy style techno: lots of jerky repetitions like the editor of the film was scratching a record. It's effective but it doesn't feel anywhere near as groundbreaking as it feels like Pang was expecting it to be. In fact on occasion it's a more than a little annoying. The firefight is impressive though: confusing but deliberately and effectively so, just as the actual incident would have been to the characters.
The leads are both very good indeed, though as this is probably my fourth or fifth Thai film ever I don't recognise either of them. Som is Wanatchada Siwapornchai, and I was surprised to see that this is her only film. There's a lot of depth in what she brings to the part: she's believable in the various different facets of the role. She's a more complex character than Bank, who is a small fish in a big pond, always one step from being a long way out of his depth. He's played by Pawarith Monkolpisit, and he's very believable in convincing us that most of the decisions he's made in his life were bad ones.
Monkolpisit has only made one other movie according to IMDb, but it seems that IMDb is not as reliable when it comes to eastern actors. It would seem that Pawarith Monkolpisit and Pawalit Mongkolpisit are the same person, so there are other titles to look out for. It's the believability of these performances that makes the film worthwhile, because otherwise it isn't a patch on what the Pang brothers would do later on. In essence it's a very simple story jazzed up by editing and enrichened by the leads, and while there's much that's promising there's not much that really delivers.
Som is a prostitute who still hangs out with her girlfriends; Bank is a small scale drug runner who dreams of being a tough guy. They live only two floors apart in the same housing complex and occupy much the same space: early on we see them crossing paths all the time without actually talking to each other. They finally meet and fall in love, though naturally Som doesn't let on what she does for a living.
The film is highly stylised, especially in the action sequences, often edited in time with the music which is generally Prodigy style techno: lots of jerky repetitions like the editor of the film was scratching a record. It's effective but it doesn't feel anywhere near as groundbreaking as it feels like Pang was expecting it to be. In fact on occasion it's a more than a little annoying. The firefight is impressive though: confusing but deliberately and effectively so, just as the actual incident would have been to the characters.
The leads are both very good indeed, though as this is probably my fourth or fifth Thai film ever I don't recognise either of them. Som is Wanatchada Siwapornchai, and I was surprised to see that this is her only film. There's a lot of depth in what she brings to the part: she's believable in the various different facets of the role. She's a more complex character than Bank, who is a small fish in a big pond, always one step from being a long way out of his depth. He's played by Pawarith Monkolpisit, and he's very believable in convincing us that most of the decisions he's made in his life were bad ones.
Monkolpisit has only made one other movie according to IMDb, but it seems that IMDb is not as reliable when it comes to eastern actors. It would seem that Pawarith Monkolpisit and Pawalit Mongkolpisit are the same person, so there are other titles to look out for. It's the believability of these performances that makes the film worthwhile, because otherwise it isn't a patch on what the Pang brothers would do later on. In essence it's a very simple story jazzed up by editing and enrichened by the leads, and while there's much that's promising there's not much that really delivers.
Friday, 1 August 2008
Leap Year (1921)
Piper Hall is where we find Jeremiah Piper, irascible and struck by plenty of ailments. He decides he's going to close up the house and head off to the hot springs to recover, sending his heir and nephew Stanley off somewhere where he can't cause any trouble, given that he falls in love with every girl he meets. Given Jeremiah's nurse's reaction to this, they return the favour, even though he's the size you'd expect Fatty Arbuckle to be and a chronic stutterer to boot. Then again he's heir to millions.
So off goes Stanley to Catalina Island where he gets himself into all sorts of trouble, because he has no clue how to tell anyone anything clearer. Trying to help out a young lady called Molly Morris, who is having an argument with her boyfriend on a golf course, she thinks he's proposing marriage. So he runs away and tries to find a way out of it by talking with Loris Keene, the lady companion of a married friend whose wife is about to arrive. She takes it the wrong way and thinks he's proposing to her. So off swims Stanley out to sea to get away from both of them, only to run into a boat where Irene Rutherford, thinks he swam over on purpose to propose to her.
You know this can't progress happily, as Fatty tries to avoid being married to three women at once and being arrested for 'trigamy'. Naturally every attempt to get rid of any of them backfires and makes the catastrophe even more certain. At least Arbuckle gets to show off his admirable and ever surprising talent for physical acrobatics in trying to persuade them each that he's afflicted with fits. At least it ends happily and a remake title would likely be Four Weddings and a Trip to the Asylum. Yes, it's contrived. No, we don't care.
However it all ended even more unhappily than you could imagine. This film was never released theatrically, given that in real life Arbuckle was embroiled in a scandal that would wreck his career. A young actress called Virginia Rappe died three days after a party with Arbuckle and a couple of other industry names at a San Francisco Hotel. Rappe died of peritonitis caused by a ruptured badder, probably because she wasn't hospitalised for two days, given that the hotel doctor thought she was merely drunk. However Rappe's companion at the time accused Arbuckle of rape, which through the actions of newspapers and prosecutors with agendas of their own, worked its way through three trials and became rape, sodomy with a coke bottle and manslaughter.
Arbuckle was acquitted each time but his career was over. It's easy to see what his critics and accusers would have made of this film, even though Fatty wasn't trying to acquire most of these lady friends. The scandal makes this a fascinating film, but it wouldn't have been a bad one without it. I'm still not an Arbuckle fan, but both he and his films improved over time, to my eyes. He's always better when he gets the opportunity to leap around because with the exception of Sammo Hung, he's probably the best example of someone who is amazingly agile without ever giving the impression that they could possibly be amazingly agile.
Backing him both as a screen uncle and in the amazingly agile stakes is Lucien Littlefield, and Clarence Geldart, Allen Dunell and John McKinnon back them up. The girls all impress: Mary Thurman as the nurse, Gertrude Short as Molly, Harriet Hammond as Loris and Maude Wayne as Irene. Thurman is trying to look like Louise Brooks; Short would be trying to be Una Merkel in sappy mode, if only Una Merkel had been around at this point in time to copy; and Hammond and Wayne both look familiar, though they shouldn't. I've seen Wayne a few times in bit parts in silent movies and Hammond not all.
So off goes Stanley to Catalina Island where he gets himself into all sorts of trouble, because he has no clue how to tell anyone anything clearer. Trying to help out a young lady called Molly Morris, who is having an argument with her boyfriend on a golf course, she thinks he's proposing marriage. So he runs away and tries to find a way out of it by talking with Loris Keene, the lady companion of a married friend whose wife is about to arrive. She takes it the wrong way and thinks he's proposing to her. So off swims Stanley out to sea to get away from both of them, only to run into a boat where Irene Rutherford, thinks he swam over on purpose to propose to her.
You know this can't progress happily, as Fatty tries to avoid being married to three women at once and being arrested for 'trigamy'. Naturally every attempt to get rid of any of them backfires and makes the catastrophe even more certain. At least Arbuckle gets to show off his admirable and ever surprising talent for physical acrobatics in trying to persuade them each that he's afflicted with fits. At least it ends happily and a remake title would likely be Four Weddings and a Trip to the Asylum. Yes, it's contrived. No, we don't care.
However it all ended even more unhappily than you could imagine. This film was never released theatrically, given that in real life Arbuckle was embroiled in a scandal that would wreck his career. A young actress called Virginia Rappe died three days after a party with Arbuckle and a couple of other industry names at a San Francisco Hotel. Rappe died of peritonitis caused by a ruptured badder, probably because she wasn't hospitalised for two days, given that the hotel doctor thought she was merely drunk. However Rappe's companion at the time accused Arbuckle of rape, which through the actions of newspapers and prosecutors with agendas of their own, worked its way through three trials and became rape, sodomy with a coke bottle and manslaughter.
Arbuckle was acquitted each time but his career was over. It's easy to see what his critics and accusers would have made of this film, even though Fatty wasn't trying to acquire most of these lady friends. The scandal makes this a fascinating film, but it wouldn't have been a bad one without it. I'm still not an Arbuckle fan, but both he and his films improved over time, to my eyes. He's always better when he gets the opportunity to leap around because with the exception of Sammo Hung, he's probably the best example of someone who is amazingly agile without ever giving the impression that they could possibly be amazingly agile.
Backing him both as a screen uncle and in the amazingly agile stakes is Lucien Littlefield, and Clarence Geldart, Allen Dunell and John McKinnon back them up. The girls all impress: Mary Thurman as the nurse, Gertrude Short as Molly, Harriet Hammond as Loris and Maude Wayne as Irene. Thurman is trying to look like Louise Brooks; Short would be trying to be Una Merkel in sappy mode, if only Una Merkel had been around at this point in time to copy; and Hammond and Wayne both look familiar, though they shouldn't. I've seen Wayne a few times in bit parts in silent movies and Hammond not all.
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