Alice Jacobs is Dead (2009)

Director: Alex Horwitz
Stars: John La Zar and Adrienne Barbeau

After a string of amateur or budding professional films, here comes a short with name actors, very professional denouement and a thoroughly unusual take on a commonplace story. Everyone seems to be making zombie movies these days but this shows just how far the genre can go, winning the Best Horror/Suspense Film award at the San Diego Comic-Con in the process. It's a zombie movie but it's one in which the disease that causes zombies becomes the focus instead of the ensuing brain munching. Producer Jacob Robinson described it to Fangoria magazine as 'a story of terminal illness where the terminal illness is zombieism.' Alex Horwitz, who wrote and directed, calls it 'a heartbreaking, tender, impassioned love story about aging, but aging in this case means turning into a zombie.' Surprisingly, the film that leapt into my mind as a comparison was Lovely, Still, because what rang out to me the most was the use of older lead actors in a very unusual romance.

This time out the disease is called the Z-Virus and it's been stopped in its tracks by Dr Benjamin Jacobs, working out of the St Romero Memorial Hospital in San Francisco. His work has ensured that there are no new cases any more, but there are still older ones that the Jacobs serum can't cure and the real story stems from the fact that the doctor's wife Alice is one of those cases. She's somehow immune to the serum but he's unwilling to let her die. Officially she's already dead, as Jacobs has announced to the world, but in reality she's kept alive in tight quarantine at their home, running through a sick woman's routine and deteriorating a little more each day. She showers, she vomits, she spits out blood when she brushes her teeth, she injects herself with her medicine, she watches White Zombie on TV. Dr Jacobs is a devoted husband and he works hard to find a way to save her before she finally turns into a zombie and it really becomes too late.

Horwitz wrote this short film with two actors in mind. He conceived it as a project for John LaZar, from Night of the Scarecrow, Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the joyous sword and sorcery spoof Deathstalker II. He'd met him in LA and fashioned the story around him, but then wrote the part of his screen wife for Adrienne Barbeau, not dreaming that he'd ever actually succeed in casting her. He sent her a script anyway and her agents didn't think she'd be interested either, given that she'd never appeared in a short film before and this had a really quick shoot: a mere four days, only three for her. Yet after reading it, she found herself fascinated by the part, which is rather unique in zombie movie history, and chose to go ahead. Backing up Barbeau and LaZar is Peter Cambor from NCIS: LA, completing a surprisingly high profile cast for a horror short. He plays George, the doctor's lab assistant, who is bright enough to figure out what's going on.

This really is a peach of a short, impeccably produced and beautifully executed. It runs 21 minutes, giving plenty of opportunity to flesh out the characters and establish the setting, but it knows just how long it should run and it's paced well. It even suckers us in at the beginning with what initially appears to be the old cliché of panning across the Golden Gate Bridge, but it soon reveals itself to be something new and carries on breaking fresh ground from there. It asks a lot of questions, not just about science but about humanity, and it plays with the point at which one becomes the other in both directions. When we meet her, Alice Jacobs is suffering. Her husband calls her beautiful. She calls herself an aberration. Next day she wakes up zombiefied and takes a chunk out of his shoulder. He ties and gags her to keep her safe, but still gives her a kiss before heading into the lab. This could all easily be surreal but Horwitz keeps it grounded and it's a treat to relish.

Horwitz is an experienced hand in film but not usually on his own pictures, his only previous credit as a writer/director being on a short called The J2 Project about the cloning of Jesus that starred Peter Cambor long before he found his way to television. Mostly he's been a production assistant on high profile features like Spider-Man 3 and The Bourne Ultimatum, the perfect way to learn how the industry works and a great way to make contacts too, something that helped when he set up Alice Jacobs is Dead with his own money. Wanting it to look professional, he hired professionals at a fraction of what they'd usually earn. Producer Jacob Robinson explained to Horwitz how he could get away with not paying people at all, but he wanted to do it properly and he did. 'I've produced a feature film,' said Robinson, talking about The Distance Between the Apple and the Tree, 'and both the budget and scale of Alice Jacobs were much larger than that movie.'

There's very little to find fault with, beyond the name of the hospital which is fast becoming a pet peeve of mine. With everyone and their dog making zombie movies, that name is everywhere. In a hundred years, after the zombie apocalypse when every male child is named Romero, people will look back and wonder what happened to Bobs, Jacks and Bills. To be fair, at least there's another connection here. Not only is this another cinematic child of the genre he rejuvenated, but Adrienne Barbeau worked for him on a couple of other pictures, Creepshow and Two Evil Eyes. She praised Horwitz's preparation. 'Sure, it would've been nice to get a different angle for maybe one scene or another shot,' she said, 'but we got everything we needed in that short period of time because he knew what he was doing.' It's only looking at what isn't there that flaws appear, like wondering if the final shot should have been more iconic, and if we have to look that hard then this is essential.

Colin (2008)

Director: Marc Price
Stars: Alastair Kirton, Daisy Aitkens, Kate Alderman, Tat Whalley and Leane Pammen

Remember when El Mariachi was lauded by all and sundry because Robert Rodriguez made it for a mere $7,000? Critic Joe Queenan even wrote a book about how he made his own movie for $6,998 just to outdo him. Of course El Mariachi was boosted up after the fact by a lot of post production on Columbia's dime after they bought the distribution rights. Of course Queenan's movie sucked, so badly that he has never released Twelve Steps to Death and we can only enjoy the screenplay that's available in his book about his experiences making it. Nowadays everyone seems to have access to equipment that allows them to make a movie and the only question left is how good it's going to be. Many microbudget films suck, pure and simple; many more are inherently hindered by their lack of budget, however much fun they are. Colin, which was a surprise hit at Cannes in 2009, can only dream about $7,000. British filmmaker Marc Price made it for £45. That's about $70.

There are some justifications for this nigh on insane claim, but there are numbers that are a little more believable than others and $70 for a feature length movie is on the wrong side of that line. Apparently he shot it on a Panasonic mini-DV camcorder that he already owned, and which at ten years old was an industry antique. He cast it with amateur actors who answered casting calls on Facebook and MySpace and were willing to work for free and bring their own make-up. He edited it on his home PC with a copy of Adobe Premiere from school. It looks cheap, that's for sure, most obviously with the often dim lighting and the handheld scenes of action where it's often difficult to track what's going on. $70 is so slight that it doesn't allow for a lot of batteries, let alone bus fare to get to locations. Price said that it paid for 'a crowbar and a couple of tapes', plus 'some tea and coffee as well: not the expensive stuff either, the very basic kind. Just to keep the zombies happy.'

What makes this zombie movie special is that it's effectively told from the perspective of a zombie. While it initially seems that Colin has survived a zombie attack at the beginning of the film, he's soon bitten for sure and his life (or undeath) as a zombie begins the next morning as he falls out of his window and is reintroduced to the world. He stumbles around as if he's retarded, staying alive through luck rather than judgement. We watch him learn how to move, then how to find food and how to keep it. We see him connect to a slight degree with memories of his former life, like road signs, Duplo blocks and earphones, but when his sister saves him from a couple of muggers who are more after his trainers than his existence, he fails to recognise who she is. Her looks round the corner as he shambles away are touching. There's much to admire here beyond the initial concept which suddenly seems so obvious that it's surprising George Romero hadn't already made it.

In particular the film looks good, entirely ignoring the budget and the technical limitations that it imposes. I'm talking about the composition of frame, the camera motion and the angles that the film is shot from. The folks who pointed the camera came up with all sorts of intriguing places to point it from: inside basements of houses Colin passes by, shot through grates; from the other side of doors; and at one point even from inside a TV set as Colin tries to figure out what all the static is. After his sister Linda effectively kidnaps him and takes him back to their parents' house to see if it will trigger memories and perhaps bring him out of the state he's found himself in, we watch a lot of scenes through windows. We watch him scramble at the glass as his family bicker outside about a plan of action. We watch Linda look in at him in despair as she realises nothing is going to change. We watch his mother sadly paste up newspaper to hide the pair of them inside.

The house siege is an exercise in inevitability and it runs too long, like the most demented rave of all time. A large number of zombies overwhelm a few people in a confined space and there's no way it would ever have ended any differently. Later the opposite happens: as Colin finds himself in a crowd of zombies, a large number of humans arrive aiming to take them down. There's a great shot of a stick of dynamite rolled in underneath them and the ensuing chaos is believably chaotic. While most of them launch in like it's a riot, their very calm but notably scary leader takes out the eyes of zombies with a slingshot or a hammer. It gets truly brutal when the survivors are tasked with killing those of their number that were bitten, bludgeoning them to death, because while there's an omnipresent background noise of gunshots that pervades the film like static, this death squad don't have any guns.

It's impossible not to witness the power behind this film, which gives us a sympathetic hero in the form of a zombie. Alastair Kirton's performance is a powerful one and is really less comparable to other zombie roles and more to portrayals of the mentally ill or seriously disabled. It's far easier to roam around with blood on your face and moan a lot than it is to find a way to do it with sympathy. The ending, with its flashbacks to events that took place just before the film began, is a powerful one and I don't remember a scene in a zombie movie quite that touching. By this time we're no longer focusing on the $70 budget gimmick and we're engrossed in Colin's story, the theme by Dan Weekes and the excellent sound helping no end. While the visuals certainly need work, the sound is solid throughout, not just in what we hear but in what we don't hear. The most touching scene is entirely silent. For $70, this is amazing, but it's pretty damn good whatever the budget.

Trippin' (2009)

Directrix: Devi Snively
Stars: Zed Wilson, Heathyr Clift, Ken Dusek Jr, Nicole Buehrer, Jake Perry and Lindsay Robertson

This film was an official selection at the 3rd Phoenix Fear Film Fest in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

I was privileged to talk to writer/directrix Devi Snively after a screening of Trippin' at Trash City's Fear Fest 2010 and I don't think I've ever met someone working in film who seemed more capable, professional and destined to go serious places. On the face of it, this is exactly the sort of horror movie I don't like, a horror comedy populated by young idiots who spend most of their time drunk, stoned or both, the sort of thing that Kevin Smith would make. Of all the films on the schedule at Fear Fest, this was the last one I was interested in seeing but it turned out to be the surprise of the festival, the best picture shown. It's funny as a comedy, sharp as social commentary and scary as a horror story, a success on every front. It takes the incredibly tired kids in a cabin story and turns it on its head, not least by starting out with complete stereotypes and subverting them throughout the movie. Everyone involved lives up to the levels Snively sets them too.

There are six kids this time out, three couples. Joe and Mickey are the nominal leaders, Joe being the one who books the cabin in the woods and drives them out there in his big van. He's done time for a practical joke that went too far and he throws all the ludes into the spaghetti sauce he cooks up on the first night in the cabin. His wife Mickey is a photographer who takes pictures of roadkill. 'That's revolting,' comments Giselle. 'Thank you,' says Mickey. Giselle is the straitlaced one of the bunch, the outsider in this group who's only come along to spend time with her boyfriend, Jeremy. She's so straight laced that she has bunny slippers and seems to be against everything, though she takes amyl nitrate for a heart disorder. Jeremy is stereotypically normal. That leaves Holly and Zed. Holly is the free spirit who flashes the truck behind them on the road and Zed does every drug in the book, has a guitar and a pair of bongos and laughs at the word 'angina'.

Zed is also the reason the film exists, given that it sprang out of a real life incident involving actor Zed Wilson. No, the character isn't just named that to set up a 'Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead,' line, it's actually based on the actor playing it, though he does have a real life band called Better Zed Than Dead. Devi Snively met him in a bar and noticed the horrific scar on his leg. She paid him in beer to tell his story and when he was done suggested that it would make a great movie. She was right and he plays himself, even appearing at the very beginning to introduce the story too. 'It isn't exactly what happened,' he tells us, 'but it's sorta what happened.' Of course, we have no clue as to what really happened but it doesn't matter because we get a wild ride of a story that doesn't let up and continues to shake up our expectations throughout. There's even a great trip scene in which Zed turns into a puppet, eyes appear everywhere and he stabs himself with a screwdriver.

All the actors are excellent, whether it's Ken Dusek Jr setting up yet another practical joke as Joe or Nicole Buehrer as Jizz destroying a frog with extreme vengeance after it jumps on her shoulder while she pleasures her man orally in the bathroom. Best of all may be Heathyr Clift, who seems to throw no end of acting into her role as Mickey, but inevitably Zed Wilson and Lindsay Robertson are the most obvious as Zed and Holly respectively, given that the former is a natural born scene stealer and the latter is the one who gets to show off her body. Rounding out the troupe is Jake Perry as Jeremy, who manages to be more than just the straight man to the rest. They get plenty of good material to work with, not just the characters and their dialogue but the setups too. Even on the way to the cabin, what appears to be a human corpse falls out of a flatbed truck in front of them, the same one Holly flashes. There are many more little subplots to keep it all interesting.

This is far from just a slasher movie or a kids in the woods movie or a practical joke movie, but it's hardly surprising for it to be seen that way. What struck me most, whichever of these subgenres it ends up fitting best, is the attention to detail. It's a low budget film that doesn't look it, but there's so much in the background if we pay enough attention. Each little story, like the one about Eagle Eye Johnson, a hunter who shot his wife by accident, spent ten years in jail and came back a little strange in the head, has a number of reasons to be there, generally one more than we expect. In every scene there's something going on beyond the focal point, whether it be actors carrying on in character even when the scene isn't about them or props like the copy of Home Taxidermy for Fun and Profit that I'd love to have myself. I don't know how likely an indie film like this is to break into the mainstream market but what's the competition, Transylmania? This deserves to succeed.

Long Pigs (2007)

Directors: Chris Power and Nathan Hynes
Star: Anthony Alviano

Tony Prince is a DJ on KNGY and he wants to talk about meat. He wonders why it's OK to eat cow and pig but not cat and dog, but given that the film is called Long Pigs it's pretty obvious which particular meat we'll end up talking about. This is an indie Canadian take on the groundbreaking 1992 gem Man Bites Dog, which was shot by a trio of Belgian film students in black and white and in French. While it carries this influence on its sleeve, Long Pigs stands on its own, upping the stakes by more than shooting in English and colour: instead of being a documentary about a serial killer, it's a documentary about a serial killer who's also a cannibal. Much of the approach is the same, demonstrating how easy it is for filmmakers to lose their impartiality, but it plays the journalistic integrity card a little differently. Not only is there plenty of comment about the two men making this film but more about that DJ, Tony Prince, and his motivations too.

Directors Chris Power and Nathan Hynes play themselves as filmmakers shooting a documentary about a cannibal serial killer called Anthony McAlistar, who at first glance is just a regular guy. He's a working man, a valet at a high class restaurant. He cares deeply for his mother, who is in a home suffering from Alzheimer's. He's honest, he's modest and he has an obvious passion for what he does. Yet what he does is kill people and eat them, hardly a socially acceptable hobby. He's played by Anthony Alviano, another nod to Man Bites Dog which also gave its characters the same names as the actors playing them. While Anthony is obviously a sociopath, he has a good deal of charisma and, even while talking about the most horrible things, comes across as a pleasant fellow who you wouldn't mind inviting to dinner, just as long as he didn't cook. He talks candidly about his tastes and his history, opening up his entire life for scrutiny.

As you can imagine, this becomes in turns brutal, cruel and uncomfortable. Anthony picks up a large prostitute called Lucy and takes her home, with Chris and Nathan in the back seat of the car all the while. When he murders her in front of them, mid conversation, one promptly vomits in the corner. When he strings her carcass up and slits her carotid artery, the cameraman faints. Yet even as he admits to murdering and eating a young child, Ashley Sedgwick, because he was curious about whether younger meat would be more tender, this sociopathic monster still tugs at our sympathy through pure honesty and passion. We never feel that for the filmmakers, who are already complicit in one murder and promptly descend into the depths. They shoot footage of Ashley's father, who talks about her in the present tense and thanks them for their help, but they never let on that the man who killed her is there in the room helping them with the equipment.

By the time Anthony gets the call that his mother has died, they start to show pangs of guilt, but promptly ignore them. 'Should I be taping this?' one asks. 'Could be the best part of the movie,' replies the other. A rift appears, as they want to film the funeral and the scattering of the ashes, but have to work hard to persuade Anthony that it's all for the movie. Yet again, the sociopathic cannibalistic serial killer offers up the human element and the men shooting his story appear to be the bad guys. DJ Tony Prince punctuates the story with his opinions on events of the day, but as we're continually treated to better information than him, we quickly realise how judgemental he really is up there on his soapbox. After he proudly proclaims that one victim deserved what he got, he's forced to apologise when more information comes to light. Victims are still victims, regardless who they are or what they've done. Playing with morality is dangerous territory.

And this is the point, however much this appears on the surface to be a horror movie. It's about a cannibalistic serial killer, after all, and we're treated to some gruesome footage of very realistic corpses as Anthony strings up his victims, strips them naked with scissors, slits their throats, ties their anuses and dismembers them for food. At least the second one is done with sped up film. Chris Bridges is the man behind the effects and they're impeccable. No wonder this is one of the more obscure titles in his filmography, made the same year he supervised the make up effects for George A Romero's Diary of the Dead. But the horror story falls apart at the first thought, as the concept of a cannibalistic serial killer inviting a documentary film crew to follow him around and record his crimes is absurd. The extreme subject matter merely highlights the story's real points about integrity and morality, just like Man Bites Dog and Cannibal Holocaust.

Anthony Alviano is excellent as the focal point of the film within a film. While it would have been the easiest thing in the world to ham it up, he downplays the whole part, ably highlighting that it's the normal people who are the scariest, not the ones with long hair and tattoos who thrive on indie movies like this. He gets most of the screen time and most of the lines. 'I'm not a freak or anything like that,' he tells us. On his favourite subject, he points out, 'If it was so wrong to eat it, then why would it taste so good?' The supporting cast are solid, especially Paul Fowles as Merle Sedgwick, Ashley's grieving father; Shane Harbinson as Det Ken Walby, a cop working missing persons cases; and, most of all, Roger King as DJ Tony Prince, who is good enough to do that for a living. Maybe he does, as this is his only film credit. Hynes and Power are important characters but their success is easier to recognise as the writers and directors of the film.

Perhaps their biggest success was to make the film at all, given that the pair of them were two Canadian wannabe directors with no prior experience, working with less budget than they would have liked. In fact they finished the script, written specifically for Alviano, before they set out to find the funding to make it. They didn't just have to pay the wages of their actors and cover the inevitable post production work to turn raw footage into a finished product, they started so much from scratch that they even had to buy a camera and an editing suite and they learned entirely as they went. Most of the picture was shot in 2003 but it took a few years of reshoots to get it right and it wasn't released to film festivals until 2007. It won Best Horror Picture at my debut festival but while I didn't see it then I have a feeling I bumped into one of the directors and enjoyed his enthusiasm. I look forward to the pair's next picture, which is now well overdue.

Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966)

Director: Ray Dennis Steckler
Stars: Carolyn Brandt, Vin Saxon, Titus Moede, George Caldwell, Mike Kannon and James Bowie

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

When you kick off your directorial career at 24 shooting an Arch Hall Jr musical, Wild Guitar, you're definitely on the road to cult stardom. When you name your first solo film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, you've arrived, but while that's still Ray Dennis Steckler's most famous picture, it's not his most memorable work. For me, it has to take a back seat to Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, a film so amazing that it's going to be impossible to do it justice here. Put simply, you have to see this film to understand it, because it occupies a space comfortably outside the realm of expectation. It's one of those rare movies that remain unique in the history of cinema, however long it's been since they were made, because nobody would dare to attempt to copy them and wouldn't know how anyway. It takes a special mind to make something like this. The only thing comparable is The Monster of Camp Sunshine.

More than anything else, Steckler is known for two things. Firstly, he never had enough money to make the movies he wanted, so he had to make the movies he could. Secondly, and because of this, he didn't work with scripts. He's explained in interviews that any time he started a movie with a script, the film never got finished because he could never afford to do so. Working without a script means filming whatever seems like a good idea at the time given the funding available. Next week might bring more money, in which case something else can get added. Add a fertile imagination in the editing room and, hey presto, there's a movie. The budget for Rat Pfink a Boo Boo ended up under four or five thousand dollars, and that amount didn't stretch so far as the thirty bucks needed to fix the opening credits. Thus Rat Pfink and Boo Boo lost a couple of letters and became Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, which is really just icing on the cake given what's in the film.

It's an exercise in growth. Steckler started out with two rolls of film and twenty bucks, not even enough to develop the footage, but it was a beginning and he had energy, passion and abiding confidence that he'd end up with enough to finish the movie. Like any Steckler picture, it didn't have a script, just a set of inspirations. Even the name came from a song, You is a Rat Pfink, by Ron Haydock, who had played a state trooper in Steckler's The Thrill Killers and was elevated to the lead here as both Lonnie Lord and his alter ego. Initially it was a straight crime film, taking inspiration from the obscene phone calls Steckler's wife Carolyn Brandt was getting every time he left her apartment. She plays the lead here but that's not her as the film opens, being chased by the Chain Gang through a succession of blue tinged noirish settings and eventually strangled. It's all surprisingly effective, given that Steckler was handling the cinematography himself.

Steckler isn't in the same class as Roger Corman for providing cinematic beginnings for half of the great names of Hollywood, but there are a surprising number that went on to greater things. Incredibly Strange Creatures featured cinematography by Joseph Mascelli, who wrote The Five Cs of Cinematography, still one of the key textbooks on the subject. His cameramen for that film were László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond, both future greats. Kovács shot Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and New York, New York; Szigmond won an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and was nominated for The Deer Hunter, The River and The Black Dahlia. The sound on Rat Pfink a Boo Boo was by Keith Wester, who went on to rack up no less than six Oscar nods in that department, for films like Black Rain, Armageddon and The Perfect Storm. This was his first experience in that realm. He also edited this film and provided the narration, as Dean Danger.

He introduces Lonnie Lord, who sold ten million records last year but carries his guitar around with him everywhere, because he just loves to sing and wants to be ready whenever it's called upon. He's Ron Haydock, acting under the pseudonym of Vin Saxon, and he promptly gets that opportunity, as the film stops to become a rock video, with him serenading Cee Bee Beaumont, our leading lady. She's next on the list of the Chain Gang, a trio of young thugs who pick her at random out of the phone book, then annoy her with phone calls and follow her with links of chain to jangle. I think this scene is as long as it is only because Steckler liked shots of his wife's backside walking away from the camera, because we get that for six full minutes. Any attempts at suspense are ineffectual, so all we really have is a few capably framed shots and a constant reminder of Carolyn Brandt's ass. Not that that's a bad thing but it's ten per cent of the film!

Just when we think the suspense might kick in, that night as the Chain Gang rattle Cee Bee's windows, we switch back to Lonnie Lord singing the film's theme tune while girls jiggle in leopard print bikinis and horror masks. Like most of this movie, in fact most of most of Steckler's movies, this feels like a home video, which it really is. Like many low budget filmmakers, Steckler used sets he had immediately to hand, like his house or his neighbour's house or the park just down the road. He also used his own family as much as he could, casting himself as the lead in many of his films, under the name of Cash Flagg, acting alongside his wife and daughters and whoever else was willing to get in front of the camera. At least here we get a segue from this home movie back to the plot, as Cee Bee gets another phone call and drives home frantically, only for her to be kidnapped by the waiting Chain Gang. One valid segue is good for an entire film, right?

Well we're coming up on something that is far better than any segue, one of the most legendary scenes in all of exploitation film history. We're halfway through the film by this point, the picture only running 66 minutes, and we find ourselves stuck in Cee Bee's apartment while Lonnie Lord sings a mopy song and Titus Twimbly, her mild mannered gardener, recovers from the beating the Chain Gang gave him on her lawn. It feels like the movie has stalled, because I Stand Alone doesn't compare well to up tempo songs like You is a Rat Pfink or Big Boss a-Go Go Party and Titus Moede, who plays Twimbly, looks like nobody less than a retarded Anthony Perkins in dungarees. Obviously something is needed to seriously shake the film up, and the ransom demand from the Chain Gang just isn't it. They want $50,000 in a black case before dinner. Nah, what we want is what happens next, except you won't believe it unless you've actually seen it.

'Titus,' says Lord, 'there's only one thing we can do: this is a job for You Know and Who!' Well, we have no idea what he's talking about but Titus perks up and off they go into the closet, only to emerge as the comedy hero double act of Rat Pfink and Boo Boo. If you didn't see this coming, don't despair, because neither did anyone else, including the people making the movie. Steckler had merely got bored with his story and didn't feel it was going anywhere. Adam West's Batman had been a massive hit since it began in January and Steckler was a Batman fan from way back, having sneaked out to see one of the serials at a very tender age, probably 1949's Batman and Robin. So he got Moede into his Halloween costume, complete with a jester's hat with flashing lights, he cobbled together an outfit for Haydock with a ski mask and a cape, he slapped an R and a B onto them and turned this movie on its head into something completely different.

I'm convinced I have dreams where I try to fathom just what audiences thought when they first saw this on initial release and had to deal with this scene. Talk about a blatant attempt to grab the attention of necking couples at drive ins across the country to focus their eyes on the screen instead of each other! It's emphatic and impossible to ignore. The narration goes like this: 'Rat Pfink and Boo Boo! Friends to those who have no friends! Enemies of those who make them an enemy! Champions of women and children everywhere! Rat Pfink, mysterious masked nemesis of hoodlums and rackeeteers the world over; and Boo Boo, by day a mild mannered gardener, by night the scourge of the underworld! Rat Pfink and Boo Boo! Together they blaze a four fisted campaign against the enemies of truth, justice and the American way of life!' They have only one weakness. What's that, you ask? 'Bullets. Now, let's go to fight crime!'

This scene more accurately provides the feel of being transported into the Twilight Zone than any actual episode of that show. Everything that happens from this point on is beyond surreal. They deliver the case, but it doesn't contain money, it contains copies of Variety, Screen Trade Illustrated, some DC Batman comics and an issue of Monster World, with exclusive first photos of The Munsters. I'd take it, but the Chain Gang aren't happy. They even dare to fight Rat Pfink and Boo Boo when they show up, prompting a seemingly endless chase on the Ratcycle, a motorbike with sidecar, upon which Haydock tries desperately to keep his footing during the pursuit. This isn't greenscreen, folks, they just shot at 35mph to abide by the speed limit and to help Haydock to avoid certain death through such a stunt. He often lies down when on the open road, but this isn't the usual way to build suspense. We're not fearing for Rat Pfink, we're fearing for Haydock!

Now if you felt that the six minutes of Carolyn Brandt's butt early on during this picture was an overlong scene, this chase beats it hands down. We get another six minutes on vehicles as they chase on out into Topanga Canyon, but when the Chain Gang's truck gets stuck in the mud, it all carries on by foot. While Steckler began spoofing Adam West's TV Batman, which was a spoof to begin with, this all hearkens back more to the old serial days. We even get a gorilla, one of the staples of low budget exploitation in classic Hollywood. Kogar the Gorilla was an opportunity for Bob Burns to get into a gorilla suit. He's a world renowned archivist and Hollywood prop collector whose basement museum contains such gems as the time machine from the George Pal movie and the original King Kong armature, among many others. As Kogar he also appeared in Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters and a number of fan films and homages to the golden era.

So, just in case you're keeping track, this has run through most genres already. It began as a crime picture, though a schizophrenic crime picture that wants to be on MTV. We watch Carolyn Brandt walk for six minutes, but we don't mind too much. Halfway through the film, it turns into a Batman spoof, but promptly forgets about the TV show to become a cliffhanger serial. Now we have a gorilla added to the mix like it's been a Monogram adventure comedy all along. Once we get past that, Steckler hijacks a random parade to celebrate, with Rat Pfink and Boo Boo waving to the crowds as if it was all being held in their honour. What these folks thought of a couple of nutjobs in bizarre costumes, I have no idea, but what we hear isn't real because Steckler shot on a silent Bolex and Keith Wester added all the sound in later. And we finish off as a beach movie. Yeah, a beach movie. Is there anything that Steckler didn't cram into this 66 minute trip?

So what's the draw of this picture? I don't think anyone's been able to explain it in terms other than Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. That's it. It's a home movie, a record of what Steckler and his buddies got up to over a summer. All these folks knew each other and it shows, because even the most overt nastiness is devoid of any real danger, like it's just a bunch of friends messing around. I've seen a lot of low budget films premiéred with cast and crew in attendance but I've never got that feeling myself in real life, even when watching the one movie I've been in. I spent four hours at a location one day doing extra work but was never really part of the project. Yet I feel I was part of the project when I watch this film. I feel like I'm part of the Steckler household, along with him and his wife and his friends. James Bowie, one of the Chain Gang, was his best man. Mary Jo Curtis, the first victim, was Ron Haydock's girlfriend. I was... well I wasn't but I feel like I was.

Ray Dennis Steckler never did get to turn Batman into a Broadway musical, but he did get to do unspeakable things to Bob Kane's creation with this film. Unfortunately while Steckler made a lot of movies over four decades, he didn't make any more like this, though to be honest, neither did anyone else. He did make a few other amazing B movies around the same time and anything he put out in the sixties is fascinating. When the seventies came along he ended up making strange porn movies, often under pseudonyms like Cindy Lou Sutters or Sven Christian. Many had horror themes, like The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire, The Sexorcist or The Horny Vampire, but some were as bizarre as roller skating porn flicks like Sex Rink and Plato's Retreat West. One day I'll see a Steckler movie that was made after I was born, but it's likely to be the dialogue free The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. It'll take something unique to follow this.

The Corpse Grinders (1971)

Director: Ted V Mikels
Stars: Sean Kenney, Monika Kelly, Sanford Mitchell and J Byron Foster

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

Eight years after Blood Feast, along comes The Corpse Grinders with one of the most memorably awesome titles in all of exploitation cinema. Then again, it was made by Ted V Mikels, who had a talent for such things: how can any exploitation fan resist titles like Blood Orgy of the She Devils, The Black Klansman or The Astro-Zombies? The latter film stars John Carradine and Tura Satana, took thirteen months of Mikels' life and features everything but the kitchen sink. In comparison, The Corpse Grinders has a couple of cats and a corpse grinding machine that cost $17 to make. The most experienced actor in the cast was Vincent Barbi, an Italian ex-prize fighter who played Al Capone as far back as 1955 and proceeded to rack up small roles in films from War and Peace to Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, via The Blob and even Adam West's Batman. Yet this is the film that has gone down as Mikels' most remembered in a long career of filmmaking.

While the quality of his pictures is more than open to debate, Mikels is fascinating, as a man and as a filmmaker. He's an old time exploitation maestro, someone happy to make anything that will sell in the market at the time, whether it's a spy movie, a horror movie or just a movie about a bevy of violent women. Yet he's passionate about everything he does and is obviously a fan of his own material and the people who feature in it. He's totally in control of his pictures, as writer, director, producer, editor, you name it. He usually even supplies the equipment and sets, most obviously his castle in Glendale, CA, the gates of which serve as those of the Farewell Acres cemetery here. He's also business savvy and came up with one of the most astute things ever said about the movie industry. 'The easiest thing is making the film,' he suggests. 'The toughest thing is getting the money. The second toughest is getting it back.' Fortunately he found ways.

The Corpse Grinders actually sets itself up pretty well. We watch a cat violently attack her owner as she lets it in out of the rain. Over at the Farewell Acres cemetery, complete with convenient fog machines, Caleb bickers with Cleo over a grave. He's big and burly and looks like a mountain man. She's small and completely nuts, as evidenced by the fact that she coos over a little doll just like a baby, while Caleb tries to concentrate on how much Landau owes him for meat. Landau is a partner in Lotus Cat Food, so cheap a company that the sign is a poster on the wall in the main office and the employees appear to be escapees from an insane asylum. I'm sure it won't be too much of a stretch for you to put this three piece jigsaw puzzle together, with or without the help of the rather descriptive title. Yes, Caleb sells Landau corpses for him to grind up into cat food, only for the cats that eat it to turn on their owners. This isn't rocket science.

Where the joy lies is partly in this setup which is ludicrous but also, frankly, exploitation genius, and partly in the characters. Even when unsympathetic, they're all interesting. Caleb would be a textbook backwoods hick if only he wasn't sharing the screen with a lunatic redhead; Landau is as sleazy a businessman as you might imagine runs a company with a gloriously awful pun for a slogan: 'for cats who like people'. He and his partner trust each other so much that Maltby wants to split the cash two ways on a daily basis, so we just know that ruthless Landau is going to take care of weakling Maltby soon enough. While Caleb and Cleo are wild and crazy folk, they're still outdone by the employees at Lotus. Willie is insanely nervous and inquisitive and looks like my wife's ex-husband. Tessie has a shock of red hair and hobbles around on a crutch because she only has one leg. She's also deaf and dumb so Landau talks to her in sign language.

What's more, just as we start to conjure up visions of where these joyously outre characters are going to end up, we cut to a sexy nurse and a drunken doctor. We'd assume the TV had switched over to a daytime soap opera, but Nurse Angie Robinson is feeding her Siamese with Lotus Cat Food, so after Angie and Dr Howard Glass swap tongues and commiserate over his latest failed operation, little Baby Socks naturally attacks him without provocation. If we weren't distracted by the lovely Monika Kelly, who plays Angie, we'd see this as admirable plot progression, but she's just too easy on the eye. She's also something of a mystery: IMDb lists her as being born in 1921 but there's no way she's fifty in this picture. It also suggests that she was working in real estate in Las Vegas in 2003, apparently as a spritely 82 year old. The film's press pack suggests that this was her fifth film but only 1971's Love Minus One is listed anywhere. Who is this woman?

We'll get to see more of Nurse Angie and her inebriated boyfriend Dr Glass later, to discover just what their relationship is. She flirts outrageously with him while seeming to pull away physically. I get the impression that the actors really didn't like each other. First though, we must return to Lotus Cat Food to be treated to one of the greatest examples of PG exploitation in the history of film. Landau and Maltby pick up some bodies from Caleb to put through their corpse grinding machine, but this is far from the gorefest you might expect. We don't see anything bad, except Maltby lustily eyeing the corpse, but our minds fill in every gap. The grain goes into the hopper, but the corpses go onto a conveyor belt to be run through the huge machine, bizarrely in their underwear. I don't know what's worse to end up in catfood: a human body or its underwear! The room is bathed in red and green light, and the pureed corpse is brown. It's glorious misdirection.

In fact the entire film is glorious misdirection. The title indicates graphic violence and yet there's really nothing on screen that's inappropriate. Everything we see follows the same logic as this textbook corpse grinding scene: we see things like bodies, spinning steel and puree, but only our minds provide the connection between the three because none of it is actually shown on screen. The central storyline is about food for cats not people, but there are constant connections drawn between corpses and food to keep a cannibalistic thought in our brains. Cleo pours soup for her doll while Caleb counts the proceeds of his bodysnatching business; while his assistant cackles insanely, a mortician explains that the money Landau pays him for corpses will send him back to school to become a chef; once the heroes work out what's happening, they throw out man-eating tiger analogies. Yet we see more of the corpse grinding machine in the trailer than in the film.

There's no nudity, various ladies only disrobing down to their underwear. There's no swearing at all. There's really no gore either. The worst we get is probably a cat autopsy, which sees Dr Glass picking up fake intestines off the belly of a stuffed cat to examine. Sure, there's blood dabbed around the throat of Annie, the tomcat's owner, but we don't see the creature gnawing on her jugular and we certainly don't see spouts of blood afterwards. We just see a crazy lady on a bed and a wild wino with a big beard rushing up the stairs to rescue her when she screams. It's hardly X rated stuff. In fact once he takes Annie to Dr Glass and the now sober and manly doctor does some lab work, thus actually setting up the rest of the story, we can get ready for the most adult part of the film. When Angie and Howard go to the Food Adulteration Agency, we're treated to a bizarre picture on the wall, some sort of bondage fantasy that disappears in a later shot.

It seems strange to focus on inconsistencies when the underlying structure is so sound, every scene moving the story forward another inch, but this film is full of them. The FAA hasn't heard of Lotus Cat Food, but Angie explains that it's the most expensive on the market. Landau kills off characters who know too much, only to bury them instead of feed them into his corpse grinder. There's a scene at Lotus where dismembered bodies are scattered all over the place for effect but surely they'd grind those up too. They kill people without taking their clothes off first, so why would they remove legs and arms? Best of all is when Donna, the FAA secretary, goes home. She enters her apartment through the balcony, places a can of Lotus on the kitchen counter for her Siamese to lick but forgets to open it. Yet five minutes after she strips down to her underwear to pose on the couch, I mean relax with the TV and a Budweiser, the cat attacks her anyway.

Of course I can hardly fail to mention the change in Dr Howard Glass. When we meet him, he's a surgeon who gets drunk at work because of 'hazards of the trade' and whose girlfriend doesn't seem to want to touch him, but without any background change he suddenly becomes a capable scientist able to make wild but needed intuitive leaps, a full on 70s movie star prototype: strong and capable, with a knitted sweater and a moustache. He's more than happy to follow his sexy nurse around town investigating, presumably because she's so fond of her little Baby Socks that she can't accept that it doesn't like her boyfriend. She changes too, daring and determined like many Mikels leading ladies for most of the film, only to go all screamy and girly when in real danger. Landau is sane all the way through the picture, just a particularly ruthless businessman, but when it all falls apart he goes completely wacko. There must be something in the air.

In fact there must have been something in the air back in 1971 for the screenwriters to go this wild with. Mikels wrote many of his scripts, but he bought this one, settling instead for producing, directing and editing, along with handling all the sound and music, presumably from his large stock library. One writer was Arch Hall Sr, earning his final credit after a magic decade writing and producing many bizarre gems aimed at making his son, Arch Hall Jr, into a bona fide star, including Eegah and Wild Guitar. He also co-produced The Thrill Killers with Ray Dennis Steckler. Hall's partner was Joseph Cranston, who had produced Trauma in 1962 (not the later film by Dario Argento) and co-written the original story for The Crawling Hand in 1963. Whether Hall and Cranston conjured up the wild and wonderful characters or whether Mikels did, I wished they all had more screen time and some could even have been spun off into other stories.

I'm guessing that many of them weren't designed until the actors showed up. Mikels didn't have a lot of money for this film so all the salaries were deferred, thus ensuring that the actors hired were generally the ones who were willing to work for no money. Many volunteered to be corpses though not all of them were ground. Charles 'Foxy' Fox wandered in and Mikels knew he had to be in the picture, even though he hadn't acted since The Undertaker and His Pals in 1966, that film coincidentally reissued as part of a triple bill with The Corpse Grinders and an Italian picture called The Embalmer. I'd love to see him in more films but I'd like to see Ann Noble and Drucilla Hoy even more. Noble is the joyously insane Cleo, but she only made one more picture, Sins of Rachel, though as both writer and lead actor. Drucilla Hoy, so memorable here as Tessie the deaf mute cripple, also only made one other film, 1969's Sinner's Blood.

Beyond the characters, who often either come to a gruesome demise or just wander off screen not to return, there's not too much to sustain this film. It's surprisingly capable, a solid though obviously very low budget, B movie with plenty of cheesy acting, but if it wasn't for the tone of taboo that permeates the film because of the very subject matter, it would actually be a little boring. It unfolds slowly but surely, without too much fuss or surprise. The camerawork is very traditional, hardly surprising given that Mikels had to teach first time cameraman Bill Anneman how to operate the camera during the shoot. It's surprisingly capable but hardly jazzy. The only time anything gets jazzy is when the red and green spots are hauled in or when Mikels does a sort of fast cut editing. This begins during the credits as we flash forward to things we haven't seen yet and gets strange during Cleo's death scene as it makes her look like a blow up doll.

Somehow The Corpse Grinders made a lot of money, which probably surprised all the actors who weren't really expecting to be paid. Mikels had even talked a studio rental company into letting him film there on a deferred payment, against the owner's better judgement. He's explained in a number of interviews that after the film did so well, grossing $190,000 in a single week in the greater Los Angeles area alone, he delivered a cheque to the studio owner, who pointed out that it was the first time he'd ever allowed shooting on deferment and still got paid. I wonder what audiences at the time found so engaging. It can't have been the trailer, because there's nothing gruesome in the picture that isn't also in the trailer. It certainly isn't the acting, because that's hardly outstanding, ranging from capable at very best to outrageous. Sean Kenney has moments as Dr Glass but little charisma. Only Monika Kelly really has that and she can't carry the film.

I think what makes The Corpse Grinders so special is that it has heart. It's an exploitation picture that thrives on its outrageously vile theme, men buying corpses and killing homeless guys just to make catfood, but the way it goes about telling this story is so nice. Horror movies had generally been relatively polite affairs for decades but that was changing. Gore movies had been thriving since Blood Feast and the increasing freedom given filmmakers in the early seventies allowed them to get really explicit. Yet here was a film that suggested everything but ended up mild and homely, more reminiscent of old black and white flicks than a Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefest. Nurse Angie is textbook classic Hollywood, just a little stronger than usual as Mikels loves strong women. So while I should be disappointed at how little this film delivers, I think I see it more like a fifties movie with a serious edge. It's gruesome fun, exquisite bad taste at 20 cents a pound.

Blood Feast (1963)

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Stars: Thomas Wood, Mal Arnold and Connie Mason

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

The tagline on the poster cries, 'Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror!' but unfortunately it was referencing to the quality of this 1963 shocker rather than its contents. The film's director, exploitation maestro Herschell Gordon Lewis, likened it to a Walt Whitman poem: 'It's no good,' he said, 'but it's the first,' and he's right. While Japanese films like 1960's Jigoku may technically predate it, this is the original gore movie, arguably the most influential horror film since the days of the classic Universal monster movies. Details vary depending on the reports but it was shot in around a week on a budget of less than $25,000 and became an instant hit at drive-ins across America, grossing over $4m for Lewis and his business partner, legendary exploitation producer David Friedman. Given that it's truly inept on every front, why was it so massively popular? The answer is simple: it delivered exactly what it promised, unlike anything that went before it.

In fact that's exactly why the film came about. In the early sixties, Lewis and Friedman were known for nudie cuties, movies like The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and Nature's Playmates that mixed gratuitous scenes shot in naturist camps with a modicum of plot and a dash of humour. It was a winning combination but an inevitably short lived one, so even as they shot Bell, Bare and Beautiful in Miami in early 1963 they knew that they needed to find new subject matter. Both men were canny promoters, Lewis eventually retiring to make millions as a direct marketer, so they compiled lists of what the major studios either couldn't or wouldn't do, to ensure a niche audience. Lewis saw a movie in Miami that saw each of many instances of violence ending in peaceful death, all tiny bullet holes and closed eyes. On returning to the Suez Hotel, their HQ in southern Florida, he came face to face with a statue of the Sphinx and Blood Feast was born.

The story is a simple one, as befits something made from a fifteen page script, because this was never about the story. It was about the gore, oodles of it, that began at the very beginning of the film and continued through to the very end, literally shocking the audience into reaction. While it may be hard to imagine today, in a world where the major studios churn out endless sequels to torture porn films like Saw and Hostel, in 1963 nobody had seen this sort of blood and gore on a movie screen. It debuted on a Friday night at a drive-in theatre in Peoria, IL, and both Lewis and Friedman kept away, not having a clue if they'd be successful or not. They drove to the theatre on the Saturday night, unable to resist the temptation any longer, and found themselves in a ten mile traffic jam all the way to the screen. Blood Feast made half its budget back in one week at one drive-in theatre and there were 5,000 drive-in theatres in America in those days.

Today, we have to have that background to understand why this film was so successful, because it literally has nothing going for it but the sheer guts of two men to do something that had never been done before. Even during its theatrical run it started to be banned, though that was partly publicity, Friedman even getting an injunction against his own film in Sarasota to generate yet more interest in it. Generally, local authorities had to be creative as the film simply didn't break any rules: it wasn't obscene, according to the definitions then laid down, it didn't contain foul language and the bad guy gets his comeuppance. The rules said it was fine but by the time Two Thousand Maniacs!, the thematic follow up, was released, some towns had enacted new laws that actually applied. By Color Me Blood Red in 1965, it was harder to find places to show the film, so Lewis and Friedman parted company and moved on to new genres, at least for a while.

The story follows Fuad Ramses, an Egyptian who runs an exotic catering business out of what looks like a regular grocery store. We know he's the villain because the first scene shows him killing Pat Tracey in her bathtub even before we know who he is. She looks like a Hitchcockian heroine, fitting for a bathroom murder, though the slowly beating drum that accompanies her strip isn't anything like Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings. She conveniently switches on the radio so we can hear about another murder in the park and the police ask women to stay inside. Pat just cosies up in her bubbles with a copy of Ancient Weird Religious Rites, required bathtime reading for all lovely young ladies in 1963. It looks like a bible with a fake cover and given that the film was shot mostly in the Suez Hotel, this suggests that the Gideons inadvertently provided a pivotal horror movie prop. Next thing, Fuad Ramses is outdoing Psycho with gleeful abandon.

There's a reason Lewis is known as 'the Godfather of Gore' and this is it. One stab and Pat Tracey is missing an eye, gloriously red Eastmancolor blood pooling on her face and bloody body parts skewered on her killer's knife like a kebab. Some hacking and slashing later and her severed leg goes slowly into his sack, the bloody stump sticking out of the water to be lovingly lingered on by the voyeuristic camera. Only three years earlier the censors were getting upset at Hitchcock for what they believed were knife wounds and nudity in the shower scene of Psycho. Here Lewis was showing everything Hitch couldn't and wouldn't even before the credits that saw the words of the title dripped onto the screen with blood. No wonder Lewis and Friedman had nurses distributing vomit bags in theatre lobbies. No wonder Blood Feast became the oldest film on the list of so called video nasties compiled in the UK by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Pat Tracey's murder turns out to be the seventh in two weeks. 'I don't know what to make of it,' says the inept police captain. 'We're just working with a homicidal maniac,' says inept Det Pete Thornton, who seems somehow surprised that the media are interested in such a thing. They're not the sharpest tools in the shed but that's why we have a full hour of gore time to go. If they could actually detect, this story would have ended before it began. Ramses is no master criminal and clues are continually dangled in vain in front of Det Thornton's eyes, but he's busy falling for the lead female character, Suzette Fremont. This romantic subplot isn't remotely believable as he was a decade older and she was about to be a Playboy Playmate of the Month, but it was real as actors William Kerwin and Connie Mason were married a year later. She promptly retired to be a wife and mother, giving him two children and they remained married until his death in 1989.

Her character is a student of Egyptian culture, even though she's as dumb as a post, so when her mother wants 'something unusual', 'something totally different' to be served as a surprise at her birthday party, she goes to Fuad Ramses Exotic Catering. This scene is a real gem for Z grade movie nuts and I could just see Ed Wood mouthing the lines in awe. 'Have you ever had an Egyptian feast?' Ramses asks slowly as actor Mal Arnold leans for effect and Lewis struggles to keep him in frame. 'It has not been served in five thousand years!' He's trying to be Bela Lugosi, from the staring eyes to the exotic accent which Lewis plays up even more in interviews, but he sounds more like Adrian Paul. He walks with a shuffling limp and he hypnotises Mrs Fremont into submission even though she's sold from moment one anyway. For an exotic caterer he's a pretty good grocer, so maybe he just wants to guarantee a use for all the limbs he's been collecting.

The rest of the film is just as camp but not quite as fun, though I can't resist Ramses shuffling off downstairs to demean himself before the gilt store mannequin dressed up in jewels that he's set up in effigy. She's his 'divine and wondrous woman of the pale light', 'his lady of the dark moon'. She's the goddess Ishtar, who was really a Babylonian deity rather than an Egyptian one, thus rendering the entire script meaningless in a single touch. The story, thought up by Lewis and Friedman, was scripted by Lewis's second wife Allison, credited as A Louise Downe but better known as Bunny, the star of a number of his and other nudie cuties. As plot was hardly the most important factor in those nudie cuties, it's not surprising to find so many inconsistencies here, so many bad motivations and so much that seems destined for an exploitation trailer. Criticising on aesthetic grounds is insane but we can relish in how definitive this is as 'so bad it's good'.

It isn't just one plot hole, everything seems to be wrong, right down to the most remembered scene in the film. This is the tongue scene, where Ramses rips out the tongue of an unwitting victim with his bare hands. It's delightfully gross, but he holds the thing up for us to see and it's huge! In reality it was a lamb's tongue, far too big to even fit into a woman's mouth folded in half, let alone alongside all the strawberry jam that substituted for blood. My favourite insanity is Ancient Weird Religious Rites, the book that links all these Miami cuties together. Det Thornton knows it's a clue. The father of Marcy Franklin, scalped on the beach for her brain, tells him that she was on a book club list run by Fuad Ramses. The killer takes a different body part from each victim. Yet even after conveniently attending a lecture with Suzette all about the blood feast of Ishtar that explains absolutely everything, he just can't figure out the book's significance.

Nobody seems able to figure out anything, even reality, and that includes the scriptwriter. Every scene seems to contain another leap of logic, so that they stack up to unwieldy levels. The local police force is so overwhelmed by these murders that Det Thornton is a 24 hour cop, but he has time to attend this lecture on Egyptian cults. Oh, and he's the boyfriend of Suzette Fremont, the intended recipient of the blood feast, who wants him to be her date to the party. But she has to ring her mom to come get her afterwards because it's late. Except it's daytime outside and her boyfriend wants to take her home via a smooching spot overlooking the beach. That's where he hears the radio tell that the latest murder victim survived her attack, because the cops wouldn't call in the lead detective for something like that, right? He gets back to the station so the chief can begin an explanation with the words, 'Well, that's it, the whole story.'

Just as the characters seem confused by the entire film being a vaguely linked collection of plot conveniences, none of which make any sense whatsoever, so the actors follow suit. I use the term 'actors' loosely here because some of them are truly stunning in their ineptitude. Worst is Gene Courtier in his only film appearance as Tony, the frustrated boyfriend of the beach victim, Marcy Franklin, who won't put out even though they've been going steady for a year. Just when she might be willing, she gets scalped to death and he falls to pieces. 'She wanted to leave,' he sobs to the cops. 'It's all my fault.' He's so emotional he makes Tommy Wiseau seem like Marlon Brando as he hysterically repeats, 'I can't remember!' Yet the rest of the cast aren't much better, perhaps as many of them were nudie cutie regulars who simply didn't go home when Bell, Bare and Beautiful wrapped so they could begin shooting Blood Feast a single day later.

William Kerwin was the most experienced, with credits dating back to River Goddesses in 1951, but that was just a nature excursion for five models, hardly high art. He racked up bit parts until Lewis gave him a lead role in 1961's Living Venus and they became regular collaborators, Kerwin appearing in everything he made, and even issuing all the warnings on the trailers. He's more like a cheap car salesman but he's by far the best actor in the film. Connie Mason, his future wife, is as great an actress as you might expect a Playmate of the Month to be. She was better in Two Thousand Maniacs! but even there Lewis had to remove about two thirds of her dialogue as she was never able to remember her lines. 'I often felt if one took the key out of Connie's back,' he told John Waters in an interview, 'she'd simply stand in place.' She's like a living Barbie doll but she's only there to look like a victim and at that she's capable because her limbs move.

Mal Arnold is a memorable Fuad Ramses, with artificially greyed hair and thick eyebrows. He's no worse a ham than any of the many horror icons who he channelled for the part and his loping run was paid tribute by Peter Jackson, who channelled it himself as the alien Robert in Bad Taste. In fact Arnold is surprisingly good, given that this was only his second picture, bookended by simple roles as a nudist in nudie cuties. After five films in four years for Lewis or Kerwin, he only came back for one more, 1990's Vampire Cop. Al Golden plays Dr Flanders, the expert on Ishtar and the blood feast, as sensationally as the headlines of the Daily Chronicle we see early in the film that read, 'Teenage Girl Found Slaughtered! Legs Cut Off!' He never acted again. Scott Hall, the police captain, would only return to the screen for Color Me Blood Red; Lyn Bolton, a daffy Mrs Fremont, only for a late nudie cutie from the Kerwins, 1970's Sweet Bird of Aquarius.

But nobody watched Blood Feast for the acting, they watched it for the gore, which is as graphic as you could imagine without ever being realistic. Even the victim who doesn't die at the scene lies in her hospital bed with blood seeping through the bandages that cover her head. Suzette's friend Trudy Sanders is whipped raw so Ramses can collect the blood dripping from her back in a cup. This takes place in his basement, which by this time looks like an abattoir, with corpses and bits of corpses left everywhere. Most of them aren't even recognisable as anything except slabs of meat because Ramses is apparently rather wasteful of his ingredients and rather sloppy at cleaning anything up. We get an illustrative flashback sequence during Dr Flanders's lecture, where a toga clad girl has her heart carved out to be held glistening above her bloody flesh by a high priest, even though the wound is just a mass of gore without a single cut to the skin.

The gore travels well down the years, not in the sense that it's well done because it isn't, but in the sense that it's gloriously exploitative and has precisely the same effect today as it did when the film was first released. Viewers nowadays will surely hate this movie, make no mistake about that, but if you can keep them in front of the screen they'll cringe and shudder and bury their faces in their arms just like they were teenagers at a drive-in in 1963. Unlike most drive-in films, this was one that people watched. Sure, it was mostly in disbelief at what they were seeing but they watched anyway, because it was new and groundbreaking and they couldn't get enough, however ineptly it was all done. Their kids grew up with the extremes of the 1970s and today's audiences can find worse things on the internet without even trying, so today it's hard to see past the ineptitude. Those who can are probably filmmakers who owe Blood Feast big time.

The Tournament (2009)

Director: Scott Mann
Stars: Robert Carlyle, Kelly Hu, Ian Somerhalder, Liam Cunningham and Ving Rhames

I discovered The Tournament while reading up on parkour after watching Luc Besson's District B13 and its sequel. It's a British film that seemed to have been done very American style like a video game. I recognised a number of the actors and, to be honest, I recognised the story too given that it's far from original, but it was always going to be worth picking up on Netflix. I wasn't expecting it to be intelligent, but was it going to be fun? That was the question I was looking to have answered, though of course with Kelly Hu in the cast it has to be at least a little fun. 'Every seven years in an ordinary town an extraordinary event takes place,' we're told. 'You won't know it, you won't see it, but it happens.' What is it? Well, it's the tournament, of course. Didn't you pay attention to the stupidly generic title? The tournament is the old last man standing concept, which has been done to death, no pun intended, but it adds a few new quirks beyond the usual.

One is that it takes place in public, the deaths explained away as acts of terrorism, car crashes or natural disasters. The other is that it takes place in the least romantic cities in the world, like Middlesbrough, a deliberate comment on the proliferation of CCTV cameras in the UK. OK, that's not a heck of a lot of social commentary but it is a little at least and that's more than usual for a film like this. It doesn't hold much pretense to value though, because it knows that at heart it's all about a bunch of people killing a bunch of other people in incredibly violent ways. This game only has one rule, kill or die, and if you're the last man (or woman) standing then you collect a neat ten million bucks. We come in at the of the last tournament, seven years earlier, in Shirao, Brazil, where the gore is plentiful and the dialogue is awful. 'Are you out of bullets?' some moron asks Joshua Harlow. 'Well, have some of mine!' he cries, letting rip with his machine gun.

Harlow is the good guy, in as much as any professional killer is the good guy. He has a code of honour at least, lighting a cigarette for the last opponent left alive before shooting him in the head. Then again we know he's going to win in Brazil because he's played by Ving Rhames and you don't kill Ving Rhames in the first five minutes of your movie, not if you want him to be the big draw in the Middlesbrough tournament, as both an actor and a character. He returns not for the prize but for revenge, given that his wife was murdered four months earlier by one of this year's players. Of course they don't tell us which one to begin with, but we don't really care that much. What matters is that he has a death wish and that's about the only way in which Joshua's insanely cool slow motion entrances could remotely make sense. It's a really slight excuse and it isn't anywhere near enough and that makes Joshua one of the least of the characters.

We spend more time watching Lai Lai Zhen, an assassin for the triads played by Kelly Hu, from the time she arrives in Middlesbrough to the end of the tournament. She's sent to the Ivy House Hotel, where she finds a briefcase, containing a gun and a small cup of liquid with a note reading 9pm. That's when she takes it and shortly afterwards is when the organisers of the tournament implant a tracking device. The contestants each get an electronic gizmo to track their prey, you see, so ensuring plenty of action, and the tracker doubles as a explosive in case the time limit runs out. If 24 hours expires with more than one contestant left alive, all the trackers explode. There are thirty contestants and they're as varied as their reasons for turning up. Powers, the man running the show, introduces us and the assembled high stakes gamblers to a few of the choice favourites before they start slaughtering each other wholesale.

Anton Bogart is a French parkour expert, appropriately portrayed by Sébastien Foucan, who co-founded the Yamakasi group with David Belle from District B13 and others. Scott Adkins plays a former member of the Russian special forces called Yuri Petrov. Ian Somerhalder is the wildest of the bunch, a Texan who is completely off his rocker, thus providing plenty of entertainment for those watching. How crazy? The first time we meet him he shoots a dog in the head and yawns. He cuts off the trigger fingers of his victims with a cigar cutter for his trophy cabinet. He's a loon. The most unexpected contestant is one who never signed up for the tournament to begin with, a profane and alcoholic priest called Father MacAvoy. Played by Robert Carlyle as a pitiful wreck of a man who has lost his faith, he joins by accident when he swallows Bogart's tracker with a cup of coffee, after the Frenchman extracted it and dumped it into a café percolator.

It's a decent setup as setups go, varied and busy, though notably less fascinating than Battle Royale, the freaky Japanese film that ran through a very similar plot in 2000 with a class of high school students as the contestants. Like Battle Royale, the large number of players means that there's plenty of opportunity for gruesome death and the filmmakers don't skimp, even though the budget was as tight as £3.6m or just over $5.5m. First blood goes to Lai Lai Zhen in a brutal one on one with Steve Tomko, but we soon escalate. Father MacAvoy is oblivious to the first few attempts on his life but, after begging for hope at his altar from the Blessed Virgin Mary, while surreptitiously dipping into a bottle of spirits, he can't ignore the explosive battle between Zhen and Petrov that wipes out most of his church. He was pitiful when we met him, puking onto a bartender's feet, and he remains pitiful throughout. Zhen should have killed him to shut him up.

There's much attention spent on the choreography, not just the fight moves but the logistics in which they take place. This is a dumb action movie, make no mistake, but a lot of thought was put into how each of the action scenes is set up and how they unfold. It's never boring and it's not always predictable. There are points where it gets a little out there, like the concept that the lunatic Texan would stop off at a strip club during the tournament, that eight other killers would soon follow and turn it into a bloodbath, and that the cops steadfastly fail to investigate. I was much more impressed with Foucan's parkour moves, not just his rooftop antics but a great chase scene in which he free runs after Zhen and MacAvoy, who are reversing down an alley in a police car. The grand finalé is a peach too, a high speed motorway duel between a chemical tanker and the 192 bus to Easingwold. I loved the speed camera taking a snap of a car speeding in midair.

What I didn't love were the missed opportunities. There's no attempt to provide background to any of the characters, which ought to have been fascinating. The only real motivation ties to the reasons Joshua Harlow is even there and it's a pretty basic motivation that Ving Rhames takes to truly scary degrees of overacting. The few hints at Zhen's background are mangled attempts at introducing morality. For a tournament that unfolds in public, there's surprisingly little attempt to engage the actual people of the town. Sure, they're not supposed to know it's going on but most of it just isn't avoidable. Beyond Father MacAvoy, the best use of a civilian is the service station attendant who looks a little like William Petersen and his reactions are funny mostly because they're almost non-reactions. There are passengers on the bus when it sets off on its high speed chase but none of them are used, even as props. It's a fun ride but not an essential one.

The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)

Director: Nathan Hertz
Stars: John Agar, Joyce Meadows and Robert Fuller

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

Beyond sporting a title as outrageously inviting as The Brain from Planet Arous, surely a gift to any pornographic spoofer, this film opens with what appears to be Tinkerbell dancing around the Mesa of Lost Women. No wonder director Nathan Juran insisted on having his credit changed to Nathan Hertz, though Hertz is his middle name rather than a description of the reaction his own brain had to the finished picture. It can't be good when the director is embarrassed of a feature he made, even one that kicks off with an explosion and has make up by Jack Pierce, Universal's monster maker. We soon see why: we're about to be subjected to John Agar, who married Shirley Temple and debuted opposite John Wayne and Henry Fonda in John Ford's Fort Apache, but went consistently downhill from there. This is a bad film and yet it's only partway down the ski slope of quality that ended with him in Larry Buchanan movies like Zontar: The Thing from Venus.

He's Steve March and he's saddled with opening dialogue that nobody could really do anything with. 'I don't understand it,' he says. 'It doesn't make any sense.' He sounds like he's trying not to trip over his tongue, even when it isn't attempting words like 'nucleometer'. He's a nuclear scientist, you see, though any credibility he and his Geiger counter might have is unfortunately soon lost. The intermittent blasts of gamma radiation he's trying to figure out are coming from the base of a mountain, or perhaps inside the mountain itself. It's not just its name, it's the way Steve tells his friend and colleague Dan Murphy. 'Something going on over at Mystery Mountain,' he suggests and if anyone watching today doesn't immediately get a strong visual of Scooby Doo and the gang, I'll buy them a five foot tall sandwich. 'Got to be spooks,' replies Dan. Don't they realise it's always the janitor who'd have got away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky kids?

Mystery Mountain is the most godforsaken spot on the desert, Steve tells us. By the way, I should reiterate that Steve is John Agar's character, just in case you'd forgotten. Apparently the people who made this film were in fear of you forgetting his name because everyone keeps calling him Steve, over and over. If we had to take a shot of something every time someone mentions the name Steve, we'd be soused before we ever got to Ro-Man's cave from Robot Monster. Yes, this film was shot in Bronson Canyon, like an amazing number of others, so Mystery Mountain turns out to be the most recognisable heap of rock in California that doesn't have a Hollywood sign on it. Everyone who's seen a B movie knows Bronson Canyon, but here we're supposed to believe that nobody goes there. 'Hasn't seen a human being since 1900, when the prospectors gave it up,' Dan tells Steve's fiancée, Sally Fallon, who's only in the picture to make everyone lunch.

Unfortunately nobody checked the script for consistency because it turns out that everyone and their dog hangs out at Mystery Mountain. Even Steve finds Ro-Man's cave because he notices a stack of rocks that wasn't there last winter. How would he know? To recognise heaps of rocks in the middle of a desert he must spend half his life at Mystery Mountain, taking pictures of heaps of rocks. Steve and Dan wander into this new cave to take a look around. Steve has a flashlight and a hairdryer. Dan has a flashlight and a Geiger counter. And a rifle. He'll need that when they notice a strange radioactive light. 'We don't want any trouble but we're armed in case you are,' warns Steve as the pair promptly trap themselves down one of the passages. No, the light isn't Ro-Man's bubble machine, it's a huge transparent floating brain with languorous eyes, so they shoot it. Then they drop their guns and fall to the ground in pain while the brain looks at them.

Given that Steve is an utterly generic all American man masquerading as a nuclear scientist, the brain gets to be both the film's character and comic relief by descending into Steve's body. Yes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers had been made the year before and scriptwriter Ray Buffum was paying attention, but he went to uninentional comic lengths with his version. The brain turns out to be Gor, not just an extra-terrestrial but also a criminal, a terrorist and a lecherous lunatic. Why a disembodied alien intelligence lusts after a human female the moment it acquires testicles, I have no clue, but once Steve's body gets back to Sally's house, he slaps a kiss on her like she's never experienced before. A few more of those and he starts ripping off her clothes. We'd be in for a rape scene if this wasn't 1957 and Sally's dog didn't interrupt. If this was Japanese, it would be called Alien Brain Rape Complex and we'd have cute Gor action figures to play with.

Fortunately Sally is played by Canadian actress Joyce Meadows, because she combines Lauren Bacall's set jaw with Elizabeth Montgomery's pixie nose and so can appear at once rather happy with the new vigorous Steve but indignant when she feels he's gone too far. Unfortunately Steve is still played by John Agar so we're not surprised when he bends over with stomach cramps and pretends it's a toothache. He storms indoors because he's been home for five minutes but hasn't got any, and Gor promptly emerges from his body for no apparent reason other than to explain his character motivation, because you know, disembodied intelligences can pout and gloat just like any James Bond supervillain. He wants Steve because he's a nuclear scientist and so can go to the places Gor wants to go and do the things Gor wants to do. But enough of that. Who cares about global domination when you can hold a man powerless while you lech after his girl?

'I chose your body very carefully,' he tells Steve, even though we remember a choice of precisely two guys in a cave, adding, 'even before I knew about Sally, a very exciting female.' Gor sounds like Cleveland in Family Guy, as played by Patrick MacNee, but with words more suited to Glenn Quagmire. I waited for a 'giggety giggety' but it never came. 'Why?' he leches. 'She appeals to me.' He calls Steve 'savage' like it's the Arous equivalent of 'boy' and relishes tormenting him. 'It is you who were touching her!' he reminds him. 'She'll do very nicely!' Now, while Gor is wasting time like a twelve year old bully, Sally and her father have decided to do something about the situation. They head out to Mystery Mountain, quickly finding Ro-Man's cave because even Sally knows this godforsaken place that hasn't seen a human being since 1900. 'I've been out here with Steve before and I know that cave wasn't here,' she tells her dad. Vol wasn't there either.

Vol is another brain, who looks precisely like Gor, probably because it's exactly the same footage but the Fallons don't feel afraid when he materialises, even though they've just discovered the radiation scarred corpse of Dan Murphy in the cave. 'Do not be afraid. I am a friend.' says Vol. He's a mild mannered cop who's chased Gor all the way to Earth to bring him to extra-terrestrial justice, but apparently chose to do so by hanging around in the middle of the desert until the Fallons showed up. He's so in tune with human nature that he expects them to keep quiet about the Earth becoming a battleground for two disembodied alien intelligences. Of course nobody would tell anyone that they talked with a floating brain. Nobody would invite Geraldo Rivera to film the thing when it arrives as promised back at their house the next night. Nobody would let The Weekly World News know about it possessing Sally's dog, George. Nah, Vol's a nice guy.

Gor isn't nice in the slightest. 'I will enjoy being you tonight,' Gor tells Steve, because he can't resist leaving his body just to gloat at him all the time. 'She gives me a very strange, very new elation,' he raves about Sally because such is the mindset of one of the greatest intellects in a world where intelligence is all. Never mind the fact that he can blow up planes with his magic eyes, which are suitably freaky through Agar wearing contact lenses lined with metal foil. Ouch. Never mind Gor's ability to travel to other planets and possessing bodies, let's concentrate on how much he can lech after the Earth women and laugh at their boyfriends. What is this? Wish fulfilment fantasies of ten year old boys? Next he'll be promising untold power for collaboration. Yep, that's next on Gor's checklist. 'Through me you shall have powers such as no man has even seen before in the history of your planet,' he promises, 'the power of pure intellect.'

Vol has already explained that Gor is insane for power and sure enough, he soon demonstrates how he's going to get it. Steve finagles his way into some atomic tests at Indian Springs and sets off a nuclear blast without using any of the bombs they have on site. He just pops in his metal foil contacts and looks out of the window. They shoot him when he gets overtly megalomaniacal but he just carries on regardless, decreeing that he wants representatives there in person that evening from each of the major countries. Anyone who doesn't show up will forfeit their capital city, he tells them, and so everyone naturally gets there in time. There's some serious trust here, because this sort of thing didn't work in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Klaatu didn't escalate the way Gor does. It works here because we're already in the last fifteen minutes and we need to find out his demands and then work out how Vol is going to save the day.

The demands are utterly outrageous. I've always wondered about the demands of supervillains because there has to be a line across which nobody will cross. A million dollars? Sure. A billion dollars? Maybe. It's only money, right? Sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads? I could even believe something that wild over what we get in this picture! Gor wants everything. All the world's supplies of uranium and plutonium. All the factories and industrial facilities. The railroads and shipping. The workers too to build the most powerful invasion force ever gathered anywhere in the universe. He even wants the UN Building. He wants to build interplanetary rockets so that he can invade Arous and become the master of the universe. He's He-Man! Somehow he forgot to ask for Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Bettie Page or maybe the Playboy Mansion, given how lecherous he's supposed to be in human form, but time is short in a 70 minute picture.

We do at least get some megalomaniacal laughter, which is long overdue, but John Agar really isn't one of the great megalomaniacs of the screen and his laughter is pretty pathetic. Gor's is a little better because his laugh doesn't belong to Agar, it belongs to Dale Tate. Tate was one of the producers on the film but he also provided the voices of both Gor and Vol as well as briefly playing a professor who carries his name. Agar is far better pretending he's Orson Welles in The Third Man, because he's pretty good at that. At one point the local sheriff arrives with news that he's discovered Dan Murphy's body in Ro-Man's cave, even though it hasn't seen a human being since 1900, and Gor, in Steve's body, just plays with him, exuding that self-satisfied confidence that Welles was so iconically good at. In fact these are the best scenes Agar gets, except maybe an odd shot where he stands up behind a huge jar so he looks like a circus freak.

For some reason The Brain from Planet Arous has become a popular reference point, probably because of the finalé which pops out of nowhere with astonishing convenience to combine a whole movie's worth of bad all in one blistering scene. Steve's flailing axework on Gor's fissure of Rolando even got sampled into the opening credits of Malcolm in the Middle. It even throws in an outrageously sexist last line just so the few women in the audience can look daggers at their boyfriends. Perhaps the only actual positive note to the ending is that it's so jarring that the rest of the film almost vanishes from our memory in shock and with it all the gaping plot holes that we've been wondering about all along. My favourite was how nobody has any problem with the whole extra-terrestrial concept. No, the downed plane with its strange metal couldn't be secret Russian technology two years after the signing of the Warsaw Pact. Nah, alien brains, of course.

Maybe its initial success came through a coincidence almost as large as the one that generates the film's finalé. The Brain from Planet Arous, with its distinctly good guy and bad guy brains and villainous demands for infrastructure to build interplanetary rockets, was released to cinemas on 1st October, 1957. Three days later, the Russians launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite that would go on to orbit the planet 1,440 times. To Americans this was a punch to the gut and to the sort of Americans who were thriving on pulp scifi movies it must have seemed like the end of the world, unavoidable proof of Russian dominance at the worst possible time. In his horror memoir, Danse Macabre, Stephen King revealed that he was in a movie theater watching Earth vs the Flying Saucers when the manager stopped the film to announce that Sputnik 1 was in orbit. Given that that film was a year old, he could easily have been watching this instead.

Today, there's no context unless we look for it. We could enthuse about the very idea of a cop chasing a crook, who both just happen to be disembodied alien brains, but it's no action piece. Gor is more of a pulp supervillain than a crook and Vol really doesn't do anything. He doesn't even get to make George do tricks. We could comment on yet another awful film in John Agar's outrageously bad filmography, but however bad it gets it's a few layers of quality over anything he made for Larry Buchanan. Beyond Agar, nobody is really worthy of mention, as they aren't given any opportunity either to shine or to earn undying ridicule. They're just the other guys in the movie. The real stars are the brains, but they're just visual effects all the way through to that overly convenient finale where Gor bounces around Steve's lab as if he's a brain balloon on a brain stem string and Vol just disappears. It's hardly the sort of iconic memory it really needs.