Cupcake: A Zombie Lesbian Musical (2010)

Director: Rebecca Thomson
Stars: Anna Kidd, Rose Mastroianni, Helen Edwards and Pip Tyrrell

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

While the news reporter tells us about the inevitable corpses rising from the grave, Agnes just carries on baking. She looks like a nice old white haired granny who wouldn't hurt a fly, but she can take care of the vast undead hordes fine, with a pitchfork no less, all while chatting away with Mauva, her similarly elderly neighbour. They don't have a problem with the living dead, just the lesbians living next door. And here we break into song for, as the title suggests, this is a musical, but not just any musical. These songs are the sort of songs that could only be more glorious if you put the soundtrack on an iPod and they popped up on shuffle in the car while you're giving the vicar a lift. These old ladies remain all sweetness and light as they sing Zombies and Lesbians with its chorus of 'we'd rather have zombies than lezzos next door.' Rebecca Thomson wrote the lyrics to music by Heath Brown, who also scored El Monstro del Mar! and Dish Communication.

The lezzos being sung about are Cupcake and Dayna and they're a happy couple who sing songs themselves, joyous numbers with lyrics like 'no penis will ever come between us'. Unfortunately things go south just as they're about to get down and dirty and, given that the next song is called My Girlfriend Ate My Pussy - Literally!, it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot of guesswork to realise quite how. To say this is original is something of an understatement, even in a world where every other short genre film seems to be a musical with some sort of classic horror monster in it. There is a Repo! The Genetic Opera vibe, especially as Dayna tries to turn into Alexa Vega at one point, but there's not much else to reference. How many times have you seen a zombie slain with a vibrator shaped like a corn cob? The most surprising thing is that it doesn't seem to do a lot of good, but that just means he can carry on regardless for the rest of the short which is even better.

The dialogue is just as joyous as the song lyrics, the last one being a drag queen zombie number called Zombie Pride with its rousing theme of 'we're zombie, lezzo and proud'. It's spread liberally around the cast so everyone gets a shot. 'Come and eat me, baby,' invites Dayna from behind a blindfold, not realising that it might be taken literally. That may have been a punchline in half the slasher movies the eighties churned out but I can't recall ever seeing a picture actually delivering the goods before. 'One down and one to go,' says Agnes, when the number of living local lezzos is halved. 'Let's a have a barbecue to celebrate.' Once Dayna is zombiefied too, she's as happy as a bearded clam. 'I don't like zombies at all,' she says, 'but at least they've cleaned up the street.' I wish I'd been on that street while they filmed. If there's anything better than watching a musical about zombie lesbians, it's surely filming a musical about zombie lesbians. It must have been a riot.

Beep (2010)

Director: Nicholas Militello
Stars: Matthew O'Brien, Ty Hoodekoff and Nicholas Militello

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

An unnamed traveller arrives in town by plane and finds his way to a hotel. He ought to know what's to come given that he's played by Matthew O'Brien, who also wrote the script, but it seems to end up as a surprise anyway. His plane was late, his girlfriend talks to him on the phone and he has to be up again in three hours. Yet he's woken up by the beep of a smoke detector reporting on its lack of battery charge and when he follows the sound to investigate, we discover that he's never seen an episode of Dexter in his life. Trying to flesh out a full story in a mere six minutes is a challenging task, especially when you add in both opening and closing credits, but O'Brien does a fair job and director Nicholas Militello, who keeps the juiciest part for himself, brings it neatly to the screen. As you might expect for a six minute short, this is a one trick pony, but it's a decent trick, though we do wonder about the logistics of the whole affair.

Ashes (2010)

Director: Elias Matar
Star: Brian Krause

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

A young Spanish boy called Jesus touches a stranded jellyfish on a beach and ends up in hospital. Fortunately when he's dropped anonymously inside the door, Dr Andrew Stanton is right there to take a look. He appears to be a pretty good doctor: he's played by Brian Krause from Charmed and he's dedicated enough to his work that he doesn't get home until long after his wife and daughter have gone to sleep. Even then his mind won't let him join them so he just grabs a coffee and goes back to work. He might as well sleep at the hospital too. It isn't just patients though; he's working on a cure for AIDS and apparently doing pretty well at it, enough so that a seemingly very able and very realistic colleague mentions a Nobel Prize in his future. His mistake is to grant young Jesus a fighting chance. 'It's not your fault,' he tells this minor, whose family has not yet been identified, as he injects him with an experimental AIDS vaccine to boost his immune system.

We know something is wrong when Jesus goes into almost immediate shock. We know something is really wrong when he bites Dr Stanton, hard enough to break the skin through his lab coat. Never mind that there's a limited supply of vaccine that's earmarked for Steven Dupree, his sole test subject, so he has to start skipping treatments, there's just no way this isn't going to come back to bite him later, pun well and truly intended. It fades into the background for a little while first though, so we can watch some normal stuff, like Andrew and Nicole Stanton dealing with a marriage that isn't being nurtured. Even their daughter Islay asks him if her mother is a trophy wife as he rarely spends time at home and they never talk about the same things. She's a sharp cookie but there are plenty of sharp cookies around Dr Stanton. None of them help though, as Jesus dies that night and he simultaneously starts seeing things. Here's where it all begins.

As a story this is a slow burner. There's a great deal of attention given to setup and background, much of which seems to have nothing to do with anything, but it gradually starts to focus. We realise that it's all tightening in like a spiral until Stanton is about to be forced into making a real bitch of a choice: die or infect yourself with AIDS. AIDS would be the cure. It's such a peach that I expected it to be the spark to the story by Edward E Romer and director Elias Matar but it's promptly ignored, which is rather surprising and the only reason I point it out. In fact compared to this choice, all the little subplots about corrupt hospital officialdom and conspiracy theories about AIDS really don't amount to anything. What matters is that this is a zombie movie that ignores the brain munching and concentrates on the origin story, building slowly but surely with brutal honesty and a willingness to make tough decisions of the sort that zombie movies never make.

It's refreshing to see a zombie movie that ends with the apocalypse and doesn't rely on special effects, the closest we get to that here being sharp editing and a tendency to play with the focus. Mostly it's told through story and good acting. Brian Krause is decent as the driven doctor but his sidekicks are even better: Julia Parker as his long suffering nurse, Hana, and Kadeem Hardison as his long suffering lab assistant, Matthew. I can't really complain about a script that manages to mention both Cthulhu and the Darwin Awards, not to mention a 'post apocalyptic erector set', but as good as some of it was, there was also some wasted opportunity. For most of the second half of the picture I was loving how much of it was right, but when it finished I still had questions, less about why they did it that way and more about why they didn't elaborate on some of the more twisted parts. I know that the choice they didn't follow through on is what will stick with me most.

Recollection (2010)

Director: Federico D'Alessandro
Stars: Chadd Stoops, Gina Scoles and Robbie Daymond

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

Waking up with bloody head wounds is never a good thing, but when you find yourself in a freshly dug grave with no recollection of who you are or how you got there, you know you're in trouble. Our John Doe isn't in a field in the middle of nowhere, he's in some sort of back yard surrounded by hints of danger: a bloody table here, a man with an axe over there, a collection of freaky doll parts and children's books inside the first door he finds. There's a woman there too, tied up and with her eyes removed. There are sounds of babies and cool old time Decca blues playing on a turntable. It's a sad state of affairs when the cost of licensing music has forced filmmakers to look far back in time to music that ends far more enjoyable anyway. Can our John Doe make it out alive and in one piece? Can he save the various people chained up in various stages of torture? What haven't we seen yet? Writers Christopher Ryan Yeazel and Federico D'Alessandro keep us guessing.

Chadd Stoops has a Mel Gibson thing going for him as the John Doe who serves as our focus but he moves more like Jonathan Pryce. Gina Scoles finds herself playing a character who has to spend the entire film with her eyes carved out. Robbie Daymond is a sinister shadow. For a while it seems like there's much more here than these mostly silent actors can cram into the slight fifteen minute running time. We can't help but think of the clock ticking and wonder how they're going to wrap it up, but as the suspense builds and we despair for any believable resolution, the filmmakers nail us with a peach of a finish. It's a gruesome film, but unlike most gruesome horror shorts, it aims more for suspense than gore effects and the fact that it ends up with both is a bonus, D'Alessandro's direction and Daniel Ainsworth's cinematography solid partners. D'Alessandro has a string of major Hollywood movies under his belt as a storyboard artist but this is a promising debut for him as an indie filmmaker.

Everything's Eventual (2009)

Director: J P Scott
Stars: Michael Flores, Joe Jones, Cavin Gray Schneider and Shane Dean

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

Everything's Eventual is a 'dollar baby', an intriguing concept that I hadn't heard about before. It seems that Stephen King allows student filmmakers to adapt his short stories for the screen for a single dollar. They can't be released commercially and King retains the rights, but it gives amateur filmmakers serious material to work with. I'm not surprised that they're leaping at this proposition. Arizona director J P Scott spent $45,000 making this, his debut feature, and only $1 was to obtain the permission to use the story. The sound isn't perfect and some scenes are a little dark, but it's capably done and it's a great way to start out. Frank Darabont started out with a dollar baby called The Woman in the Room in 1983. Seven years later he was working in TV, four more and he made what is currently the top film on the IMDb Top 250, The Shawshank Redemption. Through loyalty or something like it, he stayed with King for The Green Mile and The Mist. Dollar babies seem to work.

This one is about Dinky Earnshaw, a young man with special powers. We see him as a ten year old drawing symbols on a window and making flies die. Later it's drawing symbols outside a yard with a big dog in it and eventually drawing symbols in a letter to a bully called Skipper, a colleague at work who beats him up. Quite what happens to the dog and Skipper we don't know to begin with, but it can't be good. It's enough to bring him to the attention of Mr Sharpton, who rings him up out of the blue with a job offer. Sharpton works for a company called TransCorp and describes himself as King Arthur collecting knights. He calls Dinky a trans, someone with special powers, a knight he needs because their goal is to get rid of all the Skippers in the world. He knows he's hired when he heads up to the sky in a private jet, sipping champagne and preparing to join the mile high club. He's very hired. As he repeats to us as he explains his story, he has it pretty good.

It's a strange life, exercising his very particular power to cause people to kill themselves by e-mail using special TransCorp software without anything being up front and personal. Everything is at a distance here, not just his ability but his fringe benefits too. He gets a free house in Columbia City, a free car, free everything. Anything he writes on Dinky's day board is waiting for him when he gets home, from an apple pie to an Henri Rousseau painting. As long as he ends the week broke everything carries on. The turning point of the film is when it ceases to be at a distance, when the work he so blindly does for all that free stuff comes home to him. When he opens his eyes to see just what he's doing, the questions begin. One of Columbia City's own has committed suicide: Dr Andrew Neff, a scientist at the forefront of AIDS research, hardly one of the Skippers of the world. With the questions comes the danger, and we wonder about what other powers are out there.

I haven't read King's story, but this is apparently a pretty close adaptation of the title piece from his Everything's Eventual collection. It's an intriguing little critter but, except for the unashamed teaser of an opening, it unfolds chronologically and inevitably which highlights that, somewhat surprisingly, the source material is the low point. Scott does a good job with what he has, letting the plot unfold naturally without ever feeling forced and certainly making us feel like he had a lot more than $45,000 behind him. His actors are capable, Michael Flores and Joe Jones reminding of Wil Wheaton and Liam Neeson respectively as Dinky and his boss. A couple of actors from Deadfall Trail are notable, Cavin Gray and Shane Dean, but they get small parts with little to do. Dean, who plays Skipper, is always fun to watch, and he's acted for a wide range of local filmmakers, many of whom are graduates of the film program at Arizona State University.

Scott is the latest welcome addition to that list, having reenrolled when that program began, and only time can tell whether he can live up to the obvious Frank Darabont career path comparison. That's a heck of a trail he blazed and one that surely can't be easy to follow but the concept of the dollar baby seems to give small time filmmakers a real chance to attempt it and become big time filmmakers. If only there was a way to see the things outside of screenings at film festivals. There's a solid argument to build that circulating material like this is precisely what the internet is for, but I haven't gone searching yet, for The Woman in the Room or others. Interestingly, the Everything's Eventual website suggests that this dollar baby almost became the first to break on a wider basis, as Stephen King apparently liked the movie and tried to help it gain a theatrical release. In the end that fell through, but it does suggest possibilities for the future.

Devil Monster (1946)

Director: S Edwin Graham
Stars: Barry Norton and Blanche Mehaffy

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.

Nowadays we have it lucky: there are so many avenues we can follow to see classic movies that we're spoiled for choice. Back in 1946, most people only had the option of going to their local theatre to see whatever happened to be showing and the only choice they had was between the different movie houses in their town. Many would have seen Devil Monster, often on a double bill with The White Gorilla, and wondered why it seemed familiar, only to shrug it off. After all, every popular success launched a hundred cheap imitators and many classic era films were remakes to begin with, even famous ones like The Maltese Falcon. Those who paid attention though may have realised that Devil Monster didn't just seem familiar, it was really something they had seen before. You see, not one single moment within this entire film is original. Everything was patched together from stock footage and older movies that the 'filmmakers' had bought the rights to.

The details are so convoluted that nobody seems able to confirm exactly which piece fits where, but the source movies expose a host of business practices commonplace in the classic era that may seem bizarre today. In the early days of sound films were often shot simultaneously in more than one language, usually with different cast and crew. The 1931 Dracula was really two films, for example: Béla Lugosi in Tod Browning's iconic English version and George Melford's Spanish version with Carlos Villarías as the Count. The latter was shot at night on the same sets with the same costumes, but it runs 29 minutes longer and benefits from the crew watching and learning from the Browning dailies. Alfredo Carlos Birabén, the bilingual Argentinian actor better known as Barry Norton, who played Juan Harker in Melford's Drácula, is the star here, his footage taken from The Sea Fiend and El diablo del Mar, the English and Spanish versions of the same film.

The third associated source film is The Great Manta, but it's not clear precisely what this was. It starred 'Barry Norton and a Big Native Cast' and was advertised as early as June 1935, so it may be the real film shot alongside El diablo del Mar, which saw its Mexican release in December of that year. Perhaps The Sea Fiend, a closer translation of the Spanish title, was merely the name given the film when released in the UK in 1938. It was routine for B movies to be released under different titles in other countries or even other states, and the retitled films often had different running times too in order to cater to the varied rules of local censor boards. Another suggestion is that Russ Vincent and George Moscow bought the rights to The Sea Fiend and renamed it The Great Manta, though the years don't quite add up. However these are related though, the rights to all three apparently ended up with E M Landres and Louis Weiss in 1945 for $500.

Devil Monster is the result, a patchwork quilt composed of scenes from all three versions of the source story, along with a slew of stock footage from nature documentaries and perhaps even a few scenes from other pictures too, like 1930's Hell Harbor. Without seeing the source material to make a comparison, it's hard to tell, but it would hardly seem unlikely given the unholy hodge podge it ended up as. There are no less than five credited writers, only one of whom was new to this release. He's Tom Hubbard and he wrote the narration that overlays the stock footage, in a vague attempt to keep a consistency between entirely unrelated material. The original director, S Edwin Graham, keeps his credit, but after it comes another that reads, 'Supervised by Adrian Weiss'. Adrian was the son of Louis Weiss, so he was presumably tasked with turning the footage his father had co-purchased into some sort of financial return.

It's a seafaring story, as you might imagine, but this time the sea isn't the standard tough and unforgiving mistress, it's just a doddle. We know this because Robert Jackson, our narrator and hero, has never been to sea, even though he's the son of a captain who has spent his entire life in the fishing village of San Pietro. Quite what he does there we don't know but it doesn't require sea legs, yet when needs must he proves himself able to leap onboard ship and feel at home in minutes. Obviously there's no learning curve needed to sail the South Seas, good for Jackson as he's fed up of being cockblocked by his girlfriend, especially while she's eating bananas. Louise is still in love with a man who's missing, presumed dead: Jose Francisco, first mate of the Miami, which was lost in the South Seas six years earlier. Jackson describes him as 'a lifelong friend of the family', but only his mother and his sweetheart still care about him. Not Jackson, you'll note.

Obviously he has an ego, one that is stroked immediately because the first nine words, outside his opening narration, are his name. 'Robert!' cries Jose's mother as she runs down to the docks, where our non-sailor is naturally hanging out in a sailor's cap talking about tuna runs, to show him a newspaper clipping about a pair of bodies discovered on a beach in the Galapagos Islands. When Louise turns down his proposal of marriage yet again, he decides to sneak onto his dad's fishing boat when he leaves for his next tuna run, so that he can persuade him to change course and search every inch of the South Seas for Jose's body, thus allowing him to finally get laid. No grizzled sea captain could resist such eloquence as, 'You've got to help me! C'mon dad, don't be a grouch!' Right? Well, given that actor Jack Barty had died four years before this film's release, he wasn't in too much of a position to say no. So off we go, to the strange land of stock footage.

It really is a strange land because Adrian Weiss trawled through many documentaries to collate his footage and there's not a lot of consistency to what he found. First there's three and a half minutes of sealions and elephant seals, which might not seem much but that's a third of the film thus far. 'I hung on the rail for what seemed like hours,' narrates Jackson and we know what he means. At least the next section, supposedly featuring the natives of a friendly island, is mostly made up of topless women, surely explaining why this film gained even the slightest success. It's a wildly multicultural island, comprised not only of the expected Hawaiians but white women and even Australian aborigines too. The common factor is that they're all topless, even when one of them joins a native boy to put on an underwater floor show in shark infested water. Naturally the shark never shares the screen with the natives he threatens because he's from different footage.

Some of the footage is mildly interesting, like natives running up palm trees as if gravity can be ignored, but none of it has anything to do with the story, and we were hardly given much story to begin with. When Capt Jackson and Tiny the cook show back up to spy the wreck of the Miami through their telescope, it's the first time we've seen a single member of the cast for 13 minutes and 48 seconds and we're only 21 minutes into the film, a full third of its running time. The time spent with cast on the screen thus far only just edges out the time we've spent watching a battle between an octopus and a moray eel in a fish tank. It's supposed to be a lagoon but the octopus spends most of its time attached to the glass so we don't buy it for a moment. When a school of fish show up so Jackson can suggest they deliberately overcome the octopus by sheer numbers just to rescue their buddy, the moray, we wonder if we've found ourselves in a Disney movie.

You might think that we let out a collective sigh of relief when Jackson announces, 'Continuing the search for Jose...' but no, because a moray eel fighting an octopus is a lot cooler than what we're about to get stuck with. You see, the native chief on the island the Miami grounded itself on is one of those embarrassing artefacts of classic Hollywood. It isn't just that this South Sea Islander is played by a man born in Norfolk, Virginia and who probably only left it to seek fame in Hollywood, it's that actor Bill Lemuels somehow felt that the part called for a bad Béla Lugosi accent, only to prove so bad at it that he comes across more like Mal Arnold trying to channel Béla Lugosi in Blood Feast, only wearing curlers and a Hawaiian skirt. It's one of those surreal moments that's so unarguably wrong that we wonder who the starlet slept with to get the part, only to get confused when we remember that this starlet is a 45 year old man.

If anything, Lemuels and his Transylvanian interpretations of dialogue like, 'What brrrrings you to the island, captain?' simply make the rest of the cast look like Oscar nominees in comparison. The crew is apparently made up of three men: Jackson, his father and Tiny the cook, all of whom would seem lacking in any company other than Lemuels'. Barry Norton plays Jackson roughly like William Haines would have played Marlon Brando in a biopic centred around filming The Wild One. Jack Barty is so wooden as his father that one of those natives may have tried climbing him to find coconuts. Terry Grey, whose five credits at IMDb are all for variants of this film, is the best of the three but that really isn't saying much. He was one of the writers too, though he neglected to explain why his character is named Tiny. He isn't a midget so it's not literal. He's not that tall either so it's not ironic. Maybe it's a self deferential reference to the size of his penis.

There is one word here that's sheer genius, though hardly in the way the writers intended. When the Jacksons ask about the manta ray that's painted onto the wall of the chief's hut he explains that it's one of a pair of deadly killers that have plagued the island for centuries, the only objects of fear the natives have, but it was caught by the sole survivor of the wreck on the beach. 'Is it him?' Capt Jackson asks his son in a huddle, after he looks out the window at this magnificent fisherman. For the duration of one word, Norton provides a masterclass performance. 'Yeah,' he replies with so much resignation that we can fully believe that in that moment this character has just had his world turned upside down; lost all chance of getting any from his girlfriend, who now won't be his girlfriend for much longer; and been rooked between the eyes with guilt for not coming to look for his friend before now. Unfortunately one word is all he gets. That's all, folks.

Now Jose is having a ball on the island. Here he's the master fisherman of all time who is to be the next chief of the island and who spends his days making wild passionate love to Maya, the current chief's daughter. 'I'm one of them now,' he tells Jackson and you can't blame him. You'd think it would be easy for them to figure out a win/win situation here, where Jose could stay on his exotic island but Robert could take back something to prove to Louise that he was dead and so move on, but no, they go for the lose/lose situation instead. They get the entire island drunk and kidnap Jose. He'll thank them in the morning, they think, and amazingly he does! It's only when Tiny lets slip about Robert and Louise that he gets pissed and decides to haul them off to the waters of the devil monster on the pretext of showing them great tuna grounds. Maybe five writers is the point at which any film loses all valid character motivation.

The only saving grace is that Jack Del Rio, who plays Jose Francisco, is a notably better actor than those he's tasked with acting opposite, especially Lemuels, who only gets more ridiculous as he gets drunk and decides that being a Transylvanian South Sea Islander isn't enough and he really needs a pork pie hat. Don't get me wrong, Del Rio is no great star, especially as he goes insane in the silent style for a couple of scenes, but during the finalé he demonstrates a dynamic edge, showing up Norton who doesn't show any hint that he was a talented ballroom dancer. Del Rio's career was short, with credits in only four of his seventeen films; and this was his only role of substance, even though he doesn't show up until halfway through. He's probably best known for his brief marriage to Peggy Lee in the sixties, as her fourth and final husband, but explorers of Cinematic Hell will always remember him dominating the second half of Devil Monster.

This title is appropriate but rather unfortunate, given that manta rays are about as ineffectual as any villain Nature has given to the world of film. They may be huge creatures, reaching up to 25 feet across, but unlike their stingray cousins, they're dangerous only to plankton. Apparently the people who wrote seafaring horror stories in the thirties didn't know that evolution had stripped them of teeth and stingers as they became filter feeders, so conjured up outlandish plots out of their size and their nickname alone. Now we can only howl in laughter as this gentle vegetarian of the deep is painted as a centuries old sea monster capable of ripping off human arms at the slightest provocation. The Sea Bat, a 1930 film featuring Charles Bickford and Boris Karloff, had the same problem, but at least offers something to posterity beyond a textbook example of how not to construct a new film out of old material.

It's hard to imagine how Adrian Weiss could have done a worse job. Obviously he was limited by the production quality of his source material and he was unable to replace bizarre shots like the frequent alternation between too long with too close, but he had total control over what material to pick and choose and how to patch it all together into something new. Giving us five minutes of melodrama then diverting us into fifteen minutes worth of sealions, naked breasts and octopus war is indefensible. Then again it's hard to find any continuity. Jackson constantly talks as if he's a fisherman of experience but this is his first time afloat. The crew only appear on the way back, suggesting that they've been in cryogenic storage until Jose was found. Certainly they're OK with swanning around the South Seas looking for someone they've all forgotten about but once he takes the helm to steer them to tuna it takes about an hour for them to suggest mutiny.

Most of all, there's the fact that this appears to be a horror movie. It's called Devil Monster, for pity's sakes. The poster depicts a vast manta ray about to devour an unwary sailor, above words that read, 'mammoth killer of the sea'. What would you expect going in? There's nothing there to suggest that this is really just a melodrama about a man who searches for the corpse of a family friend just so he can get laid. False advertising just doesn't come close. It even claims 'an all-star cast' though only one member of that cast could remotely lay claim to ever having been a star, albeit in foreign language versions of Hollywood films. The leading lady had retired eight years before this portmanteau picture was released. The leading man hadn't just fallen to the level of being uncredited in films like Casablanca, he'd fallen to the level of being uncredited in films as bad as Zombies on Broadway. By those guidelines, I'm a superstar.

Double Agent 73 (1974)

Director: Doris Wishman
Star: Chesty Morgan

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.

Chesty Morgan was a freak of nature, like so many of the actors who populate Cinematic Hell, a very popular one who made a lot of money out of a particular physical quirk that Mother Nature chose to gift her with: a 73FF bust. This makes her look rather unlike anyone you've ever seen, because anything of similar stature is probably the result of implant surgery and porn stars with giant balloons in their chests don't look remotely like Chesty Morgan. When constrained by an ambitious bra her assets provide a truly daunting cleavage, but when freed from captivity the laws of gravity ensure that they reach almost to her waist. Given that they're the entire point of this movie (as well as a companion piece called Deadly Weapons), we get to see a lot of them, in every meaning of the word. The excuse here is that she's a spy with a camera implanted into her left breast so she effectively has to get topless to partake in the plot.

She looks very strange throughout this movie, but less because of her mammoth mammaries and more because 1974 was obviously a notable nadir in the worlds of fashion and home decor. The clothes Morgan wears are scary beyond belief to anyone fortunate enough not to have lived through this era as an adult. It's hard to imagine anyone wearing them without wanting to take them off, though given the subject material perhaps that's the point. She's obstructed by more frills and ruffles than can comfortably be imagined and wears a platinum blonde wig throughout. She wears elephant bell bottoms, platform boots and blouses which don't even attempt to hug her figure, thus making her appear deformed: from behind she seems normal in size but from the front or sides she looks like she has a midget stuffed up her dress. She's heavier here than in her days as a 73-32-36 stripper but she isn't fat. It's the clothes that make her scary.

She was in her late thirties when legendary sexploitation filmmaker Doris Wishman cast her in two movies but she'd already had an interesting life, plagued by ill fortune that began when she was born Lillian Wajc to a well to do Jewish family in Warsaw in 1937, hardly the safest start to a young girl's life. She escaped the ghetto to a Israeli kibbutz but neither of her parents made it: her mother was hauled away in a boxcar and her father was shot during a Jewish uprising. In her twenties she married Joseph Wilczkowski, an American who co-owned a couple of Brooklyn meat markets and gave her two children. He was killed with two of his employees in an armed robbery dubbed 'the icebox murders', leaving her forced to overcome her thick accent to provide for her children. Later her daughter and second husband would be killed in unrelated traffic accidents, the latter sandwiched between two parked cars, but by then she was a stripper of legend.

With such a fascinating history to bring to film, it's sad that she got a trio of parts that cared only about her six foot rack. Wishman starred her in two films, shot simultaneously: Deadly Weapons saw her revenge the death of her boyfriend by smothering mobsters to death with her cleavage; and Double Agent 73 saw her left boob used for espionage. Wishman planned a sequel to this film but, fed up with Morgan's prima donna attitude and constant lateness, chose to kill off her character at the outset of The Immoral Three in the form of another actress. She was then cast by Federico Fellini, of all people, in Casanova, playing 'a woman with big boobs', to use her own description, but the scene in which Donald Sutherland chases her round a table was cut. Thus the cinematic legacy of a notable burlesque performer is limited to a Something Weird double bill and a deleted scene only viewable in an Italian documentary. So it goes.

On stage Chesty Morgan was old school: she never appeared nude and she relied as much on the tease as the strip. Yet the moment we see her in Double Agent 73, she's freeing her assets from captivity almost frantically. She spends the opening credits topless, lifting her left breast to take photos of things we don't see with an implanted camera we don't know exists yet. Wishman has been frequently described as 'the female Ed Wood', to a large degree because they shared an inability to comprehend plot consistency, so this shouldn't be surprising, but she wrote both this film and Deadly Weapons with her niece, Judy Kushner, so perhaps that ran in the family. As the film gets going it's difficult to work out just what we're watching. Doris Wishman was known for her sexploitation and the poster invited us to 'see Chesty Morgan expose the 'Big Two'', as she did during the opening credits, but then the film begins and seems to be utterly different.

We're gifted with a barrage of shots, each of them short and quickly edited into something else, some to introduce characters but often with no apparent reason. We see a number of shots of a man's shoes, for instance, but while the camera begins to pan up to show us who he is, it stops before it reaches waist height. We've already seen him anyway so the attempt is pointless. At one point he apparently walks into the camera, crotch first, and we can't tell if it's this is a clever segue or just ineptitude on the part of either the actor or cameraman. Certainly he's an inept character. He sneaks into a house where obvious hoods are playing cards to look for a microfilm by shuffling around everything he can find. As he tries to sneak back out, they catch him and Mr Toplar, the villain of the piece, orders him dead. He does escape briefly, but the bad guys drive their car at him so he flounders around in front of it and gets left for dead at the roadside.

He still has a line of dialogue to come, because the crooks are apparently as inept as he is so forget to actually kill him. After we watch a tree for a while to pass time, a stranger discovers him and asks, Who did this?' His reply is the key plot point of the entire film, if you care about the story. He mutters, 'Toplar, scar,' then points to his eye and dies, thus telling us that Toplar can be identified by a scar on his ear. Remember what I said about the lack of plot consistency in Doris Wishman movies? This is what I was talking about. My personal favourite example comes up next. As if we'd just watched a reel of a different movie, we switch to a naturist camp where a traditional game of volleyball is in progress. We're watching from an angle though, so the folks on our side of the net are naked as jaybirds while those facing us are all clad in shorts. Frankly, I find the attempt to avoid full frontal nudity in a film about Chesty Morgan's 73" breasts hilarious.

If you'd wondered where those twin stars had vanished to, by the way, they're about to show up. Morgan's character, Jane Tennay aka Agent 73, is lounging around nearby, though why she isn't naked in a nudist colony in a sexploitation movie I have no clue. She looks like nothing less than a cheap whore in red shorts and platform boots; huge sunglasses and earrings; and a black bra that has no tie but hangs down somewhat like a hammock. Her wardrobe in this film may be scarier than that of any other character in any other movie. Just wait till we get to the couple of square miles of pink fabric covered in white polka dots that she wears at one point. Anyway, she promptly gets called back to New York, making us wonder why this naturist camp is even in the script and how the most talented member of the crew seems to be the girl who dubbed Chesty Morgan's lines because she had such a thick accent that even Wishman couldn't understand it.

The next scene suggests that beyond entirely discarding the voice of her star, Wishman would have liked to have discarded her entirely too. In her unauthorised biography she calls Morgan a monster and she's said in interviews that she was the most difficult and only uncooperative actor she ever worked with over a long career in film. It's a surreal scene, set in the office of Bill, Jane's boss, as he explains the dangerous assignment he's about to send her on. It's painfully obvious that Morgan doesn't want to be there and it's far from clear whether all the snippets we see of her during the scene were shot for it. She looks vaguely drugged and she sighs often. She smiles uncomfortably at one point. She's out of focus much of the time and most of her lines are given while she isn't on screen. The underlying suggestion is that Wishman would have sent her home if only her boobs could have stayed behind to provide the gimmick she needed.

To prepare for a caper named Highlight One, Agent 73 is sent into surgery to have a camera implanted into her left breast. Sure, she's tasked with photographing all important documents on her mission as well as everyone she eliminates, so she needs a camera, but I'm still completely in the dark as to how this implant can meet the need. How many photos can this camera take and how can they be retrieved? Tennay never changes the film, not that that would appear to be a viable option. Where's the lens? If it's where the implant went in, then how does pointing at the ceiling take a picture of something in front of her? She does seem to have an astounding aim for a camera that she can't even see. How does it get past the barrier of skin? The photos we see in the end have better picture quality than this film. This insane plot device serves only to highlight the twin stars of the film and bring a whole new meaning to the term 'flash photography'.

Puns were certainly on the minds of the filmmakers, given that Tennay quickly proves able to identify an enemy agent, while hindered by a hospital gown of flowing turqouise frills, strangle her to death with a telephone cord and test out her new implant, apparently only to prove that 'Toplar's agents are everywhere'. Get it? Topless agents are everywhere? That this may be the single greatest intellectual achievement of this film amply highlights just how godawful it is. If only some of the attention given to puns was dedicated to plot consistency it might be better but after being proven as lethally efficient as any spy with a license to kill, Tennay is promptly shown up as a complete wuss, as she has extreme difficulty removing the band aids that cover the neat implant scar. This scene is painful to watch, proving that it's the little things that hurt the most, though that's a strange way to describe a scene starring a 73" bust.

She doesn't get any recovery time because a note is quickly shoved under the door to send her after her first target, Toplar's right hand man, Mark Chiaro. Her seduction technique is to sit next to him and look disgusted, but somehow that's enough to get her into his hotel room, which has its own office. Unfortunately he discovers her there taking photos with her breasts so she tries to knock him out with them in slow motion. The car chase that follows isn't in slow motion though Chiaro does manage to find time to light, smoke and discard a cigarette as he leaves the hotel! Logic throws its hands up in despair but perhaps not before the fashion police, given that Tennay is wearing checkered flares, white platform boots and a black fur coat. It all ends when she apparently parks in front of him so he can force her at gunpoint into his car, drive somewhere else and order her to get out so he can shoot her. She blows him up with her lipstick first.

While this surreal chase scene might not suggest it, there is an element of suspense to this film. Bill told Jane that she has to be back in his office by 10.00pm on March 11th. This is extremely imperative, he tells her, merely neglecting to let us know what date it is now so we have no way to gauge how long she has. This inept reading of the rules of suspense is enhanced by a shower scene. Yes, that sort of shower scene. A woman enters the plot entirely so that she can strip off and be stabbed to death in the shower by Dmitri, a hitman in a white turtleneck who looks like he should be in a Danish porn movie. He's good, good enough to be able to wipe his knife over her body and cover her in blood without leaving a single wound, and keep his white turtleneck pristine in the process. What sort of hitman wears a white turtleneck? At least we know that Jill Harris is only in the film because she's willing to get naked and murdered in quick succession.

I could run through these scenes one by one and highlight just how definitively awful they are, without exception, but that's a joy you should be able to discover for yourself. Just make sure you watch it more than once because the first time through is going to be painful, as Wishman bludgeons you to death, not only with Morgan's deadly weapons but with so much quintessential badness that it's hard to know what to look at. When Agent 73 turns the tables on the returning hitman, for instance, are we supposed to be looking at the horrendous pink chairs, the prominent bong that she uses as a weapon, the hallucinogenic pans over her breasts, her innovative choice of murder technique, the fact that she strips topless to pour a drink in her own apartment or just her perpetually pissed off expression? Only through multiple viewings can you really pick up on all the elements worthy of attention to the intrepid explorer through Cinematic Hell.

Perhaps you're still stunned by the fact that Toplar has a henchman called Igor who refers to him as Mr T. That provides no end of amusement. 'Mr T wants some dame rubbed out!' And we were led to believe he was a good Christian gentleman under all that jewellery. 'Mr T wants action and he wants it fast!' In a sexploitation flick, that doesn't bear thinking about. 'Mr T is awful mad.' So nothing new there. Maybe your eyes are stuck on the strange techniques the cinematographers, Yuri Haviv and Wishman's regular cameraman, C Davis Smith, bring to bear. There are so many bizarre shots here. One with Igor provides a great example. We get a long shot of him talking on the phone. Then we zoom in for a closeup. All good. Then we look at his arms for a few seconds. Why, we have no idea. No scene seems free of an unexplained camera movement, a zoom or a pan that always goes somewhere that has nothing to do with the price of fish in Denmark.

What stood out for me more than the zeppelins that Morgan carries around with her was how a sexploitation film written by a woman, directed by a woman and starring a woman could be sexist. From one angle, Agent 73 is a proto-feminist because she goes utterly against the norm for spy movies. Bond films may be great fun but nobody could claim that they aren't sexist, but here the spy is a woman with a wide range of lethal techniques to bring to bear. Morgan only had one in Deadly Weapons: using her ample cleavage to smother her enemies to death. This time out, she drowns them with ice cubes, explodes them with lipstick, kills them with earrings that act as throwing stars. Only one death actually involves her breasts, coated with poison to be licked off by someone who doesn't recognise that these 73" monsters don't belong to his wife. Yet even with such an emphatic leading lady, there are points of embarrassing sexism here.

For a start there's a love story that comes out of nowhere, when Bill suddenly decides that Agent 73 needs a protector. Atlantis Seven doesn't even turn up until almost halfway through the film but one date is enough for him to fall head over heels in love with his charge. He doesn't want to fall in love with her, he thinks at us while we watch night footage of traffic, but there's something about her. I wonder what that could be, especially as he declares his devotion while feeling her up. Even with Atlantis Seven in place, Bill worries when she disappears, enough to call him about it, but this is apparently a new meaning of the word that I was hitherto unaware of because he knows precisely where she's going next. It could be argued that all this exposes the weaknesses of the men rather than our intrepid heroine but I don't buy it. It feels like certain attitudes were so entrenched that even feminist filmmakers didn't think of leaving them out of their stories.

Certainly Wishman is far from your usual sexploitation filmmaker. Exploitation was always about getting the most buck for your bang and filmmakers that succeeded at it by definition tended to be at least a little sleazy and were often outright crooks. Yet Doris Wishman, certainly the most prominent female filmmaker working in the exploitation genres, if not the only one, seems to be a polite, restrained young lady who didn't lose those attributes as she grew older and got used to what she was putting on screen. When she began in 1960 with the nudie cutie, Hideout in the Sun, she was embarrassed to watch what she filmed. In later interviews, she cringes or rolls her eyes at mentions of truly outlandish stories like The Amazing Transplant or Let Me Die a Woman, films that sought out new gimmicks in possessed penises and real transgender patients. Above even Nude on the Moon though, her biggest gimmick, in size and earnings, was Chesty Morgan.

Recycled Parts (2007)

Directors: Erick Vega, Bradley Young and Larry Sands
Stars: Girstin Bergquist, David Dartt, Brandon Brendel, Michael Dias, Lisa Gail, Joe Duffy and Larry Sands

We get a naked girl even before we get a title: that has to count for something, right? It really needs to count for something because this doesn't promise to be a very good movie, cool title notwithstanding. There isn't much of a story and what there is gets diluted by three directors and four writers, never a good sign. It's cheesy as all get out but after surviving the first twenty minutes or so I came to the conclusion that it's meant to be and it merely takes that long to get what the filmmakers were trying to do. No, it isn't a good film but there's a really fun one trying to get out, one that would play like something Herschell Gordon Lewis would have made, had he started out twenty years later than he did. It's capable stuff, though that may be stretching the definition of the word a little. Obviously low budget and made by people who had to juggle many roles at once, I've seen a lot worse in every department but I've seen a lot better too.

There are three acts to this play. The first is about a minute long and is actually quite fun. We're in downtown Los Angeles with some fun graffiti, but the TV reporter is there because of the 33 people who have gone missing in the last year, or at least the one that anyone cares about. Most were just transients but Larissa Ann Tate was an advertising executive from Tulsa, thus news. 'What could have happened?' the reporter asks, only to be instantly and violently answered. It's a good enough start, but then we shift over to five idiot kids in a car arguing themselves into getting lost on the way to a cool party. I hate horror movies about five idiot kids hurling insults at each other and I hated this one for a while because that's precisely what we get. There's Rick the driver, the boyfriend of Miranda in the passenger seat. Her brother Alex is in the back, along with Heather and William, who can't stop necking to contribute anything to the film. They all suck.

Now given that I was sent this movie to review, I had to do my due diligence and actually review it. If there's anything I hate more than horror movies about five idiot kids hurling insults at each other, it's people who review things that they haven't seen. That and Horatio Caine. So I sat back and stuck with the movie. During one heated insult session, Rick runs over a woman, a pregnant woman at that, one who's very close to giving birth. None of these morons ring for help and Rick doesn't even want to get out of the car because he might get into trouble, but eventually they persuade him and so discover that the woman is still alive. Enter stage right one strange doctor, one who is never gifted with a name, who persuades them that the best thing to do is to move her inside his house so he can treat her. These are idiots, remember, so they do what he says. They don't ring 911. They move the trauma victim. The house doesn't even look like a house.

Outside, Rick wants to leave to save his own ass. He's a complete sleazeball, of course, but this is a horror movie called Recycled Parts and so we can only presume he's inadvertently stumbled onto the first good decision in his life. Naturally he doesn't listen to his own advice because he's a moron and the flags continue to go up. Everything about this doctor is suspicious, even before Einstein, his apparently retarded assistant, arrives. Now, other than being about five idiot kids hurling insults at each other, the big downside to the film thus far is that it's often pretty dark and so we have trouble seeing exactly where these kids are and what's happening. However, given that it's the height of summer and they stumble into a room with Christmas lights and a huge Christmas tree that has driver's licenses in place of ornaments, it's the only way this could stay even remotely believable, not that it does but at least I can see how they tried.

It was about twenty minutes in that I got it, around the time we learn some stuff from a flashback to Christmas Day in 1977. The people making this movie hate horror movies about five idiot kids hurling insults at each other too. That's why they wrote this one, which is effectively all about murdering those idiot kids in delightfully horrible ways. The doctor is the hero of the piece, not the villain! He and Einstein may begin poorly but they grow, trying to be memorable eighties horror movie icons and succeeding to a large degree. The eventual lack of iconic stature lies in how they're defined rather than how they're played because the characters are better than the filmmakers can make them with the talent they have to bring to the proceedings. David Dartt and Joe Duffy, who play the mad doctor and his retarded assistant respectively, could have had a franchise, had they been in a Wes Craven picture in the eighties instead of this one in 2007.

And this is where the film starts to work. It isn't about great acting or great cinematography, it's not even about a great story. It's about a couple of colourful freaks mangling those five idiot kids and us relishing in it. My favourite moment was when Alex, who has had his legs cut off with a rotary saw, tries to escape and Einstein chases him down. He's not there to stop him. He's there to hold up his legs and cry, 'I'm a helper! I'm a helper! You'll need these!' Watch it on this front and you might just enjoy yourself. This is the sort of film where Alex keeps miraculously staying alive just so they can kill him again. It's the sort of film where they have only one sound effect, though to be fair it's a good one. It's the sort of film where the doctor is supposed to be an organ harvester but he's about as believable as Fuad Ramses as an exotic caterer. Really he's just a cool mad doctor. No wonder there's a drinking game surrounding this movie. It would help.

The Busy Body (1967)

Director: William Castle
Stars: Sid Caesar, Robert Ryan, Anne Baxter, Kay Medford, Jan Murray, Richard Pryor, Arlene Golonka and Charles McGraw

The William Castle movies I keep finding continue to surprise, but not always in good ways. This one is another comedy, appearing after a string of five of his sixties horror movies, but I use the word lightly because this can't raise laughs on the level of 13 Frightened Girls, let alone Zotz! It plays out like a TV movie, so much so that it's surprising when it really sinks in that there are no commercial breaks. The cast are TV actors, with a few classic movie stars added in to boost the credits. The TV names are mostly at the beginning of their careers, in the case of Richard Pryor actually debuting on film, but the movie folks are close to the end of theirs. The sets are TV sets, complete with walls that move when characters climb out of windows, which happens a lot. Most of all, the tone is a TV tone, mildly risqué in the way that only New York Jewish comedians writing for network TV could be. It kept my attention but it did precisely nothing else. It was just there.

The story is the usual one of an average Joe caught up in wild circumstances. Here that's George Norton, who is notable because he has class. Given that he's the guy who brings the boss lunch and he's played by Sid Caesar, you can imagine how much class that really amounts to, but the boss thinks he's great and the boss is a really important boss. Officially this unnamed company sells wax fruit but really it's The Mob and Charley Barker runs it in the able form of Robert Ryan, slumming it in between The Professionals and The Dirty Dozen. Perhaps because the hoods who sit on the board wouldn't know class if it slapped them in the face, Barker is fond of George who brings him mustard on the side, dresses in sharkskin suits and opens the door for him. So this everyday schmuck gets a seat on the board too, making his scarily stereotypical Jewish mother proud. She rings him in the boardroom to congratulate him and to check his underwear.

Yes, that's the level of humour we're at here. Barker's entreatment to his men to improve their appearance is a great example: 'You guys have got to learn class or I'll kick your teeth in!' Sid Caesar is the constant but he doesn't try in the slightest to elevate the material, however much class he's supposed to have. George is that bizarre combination of inept comic hero who does everything wrong, capable comic hero who escapes every awkward situation only to find himself in another one, and somehow endearing enough ladies' man for widows to throw themselves at him. One even explains it to him: 'You have that kind of adorable lost look that women adore.' He needs it, given that he screws up immediately. When board member Archie Brody blows himself up in a barbecue accident, George selects the man's blue suit for him to be buried in. Unfortunately, unbenownst to him, it contains a million bucks in cash sewn into the seams.

What follows is a set of madcap adventures in which George tries to recover the money before Charley Barker gets upset to the degree that mob bosses tend to get at the drop of a hat. We've all seen Joe Pesci, right? Well, Robert Ryan is more than capable of matching that, or at least the 1967 network TV equivalent, but he restrains himself and lets George look for the money. The story comes from a novel by Donald E Westlake, who was far better represented on film by the next take on his work, John Boorman's Point Blank, but it was adapted by Ben Starr, a TV writer who would make his name with Diff'rent Strokes, Silver Spoons and The Facts of Life. Westlake could be as funny as he could be serious and there are good moments that come from a mix of the two, as Caesar plays the whole thing straight, but those good moments aren't too plentiful. More come from the plot twists but they go overboard to make the story needlessly convoluted.

In the end what we stay watching for are actors we recognise put into wacky situations and they don't tend to pan out too well, even though most of them were comedians before they were ever actors. Richard Pryor's debut performance on film is as a cop at a cop's funeral in which George finds himself stuck among the pallbearers. Officer Muldoon was crushed to death in a stampede at a movie premiere. 'We're sure going to miss Muldoon,' Pryor says, and his career could only go uphill from there. I should mention that by 'actors we recognise', I mean 'actors that American TV audiences recognise' because I don't know many of them but my wife could name them all. Jan Murray gets to stand behind curtains a lot in purple suede shoes. Ben Blue faints whenever he's nervous, which is pretty much all the time, including four instances in a single scene. Arlene Golonka gets to put on a boom boom dance for George. All these are American TV regulars.

Dom DeLuise gets the best of the supporting roles as Kurt Brock, a hairdresser turned assistant mortician who gets fired the day before his boss is murdered. In a film where the entire storyline revolves around a missing corpse, it's DeLuise who gets perhaps the only real William Castle moment, as Brock gets upset at George's questions in his apartment and threatens him with a knife to prompt him to leave. He returns just as quickly because he can't believe he ran from a hairdresser, only to find Brock with a cleaver in his back. While The Busy Body is capably shot from beginning to end, there's nothing that stands out at all except perhaps a few moments of this scene. I'd have expected William Castle to have fun with all the corpses, but if anything they're the worst thing in the movie. They crop up a lot but they're obviously store mannequins that nobody seems able to recognise as such. Women talk to them. Men take them for rides.

Perhaps being forced to act alongside mannequins without ever letting on does something to an actor's integrity, especially in a comedy. Something must explain why the acting is as capable but insignificant as the camerawork. There are some major names here. Robert Ryan was always solid and the late sixties were good to him. Anne Baxter may have truly believed she only gave one great performance, in The Razor's Edge, as she's been quoted as saying, but better odds say she was just being modest. She overplays Margo Foster Kane with abandon, throwing herself into the role so much that we can't believe a single word she says but, like George, we have to keep on listening, despite her lies continually being exposed. Kay Medford, Oscar nominated for Funny Girl, was always known as a scene stealer and by the time she played George's mum she had perfected it. At the funeral of Archie Brody, she asks his wife if she'll ever barbecue again.

All these actors were closing in on the end of their careers. Robert Ryan, who had the most films left in him, is already looking old. He was a late starter, not making his first picture until he was 31 years of age, but that was in 1940. He'd be dead in six years. Anne Baxter still looks lovely, especially given that she was close to retirement. She was only 44, but she didn't make another movie for four years and only had four more to go. Kay Medford had five more but her greatest role hadn't arrived yet: Funny Girl was the next film she made after this. Yet the youngsters they play alongside were all just starting out. This was Richard Pryor's first film, Dom DeLuise's fourth and even Sid Caesar's fourth, though it came no less than 21 years after the first. He just wasn't known as a film actor, his comedy style somehow not translating well to the big screen, though to be fair he being given roles better than Jerry Lewis knockoffs like this may have helped.

One scene in particular may really demonstrate whether this film is for you or not. George is at the funeral home when he's caught with a murdered mortician. He tries to escape but everyone else there seems to be a cop, given that Officer Muldoon's funeral has just finished, so he hides inside a coffin, about the only place guaranteed to not have a cop in it. Well, in this film it has a cop in it. Wacky hijinx ensue. If the thought of that scene makes you split your sides, you'll get a kick out of The Busy Body and the more attention you pay the more you'll enjoy, but if it sounds awful to you, this film will be awful to you. Maybe it's best described as a stand up sketch acted out by veteran comedians. Maybe it's an hour and a half sitcom without a laughtrack but with some decent sitcom dialogue. 'Archie's gone!' cries George to his widow, who replies, 'Isn't that why we buried him?' It could easily be seen as a pilot for a bad TV show that never happened.

Holocaust Holocaust (2008)

Director: Sofian Khan
Stars: Kitty Cole, Kris Eivers, Suzi Lorraine, Noshir Dalal, Bill Weeden, Randall Heller, Manuel Fihman and Theodore Bouloukos

Cannibal Holocaust spawned a hundred Italian movies called Cannibal Something but director Sofian Khan went the other way. He went for Something Holocaust instead but to emphasise how much of a holocaust it was he called it Holocaust Holocaust. Subtle, huh? Perhaps realising how well that would go down with the Jewish audience, he later gave it a new, less outrageous title: Destined to Be Ingested, which was previously the tagline for the picture. Yeah, not much less outrageous, huh? Surprisingly that's also as inaccurate a title as it is a descriptive one because not a single one of the main characters is eaten. Sure, it has plenty of cannibals and zombies, but it turns out to be more of a character driven jungle romance unfolding in a foreign language with subtitles, very possibly an imaginary one. Both its biggest success and its biggest failure is in not having the faintest clue what it wants to be. Every ten minutes it becomes something else.

To emphasise how subtle the white folk are, we're quickly treated to the lead actresses returning to their boat from a snorkelling trip. Anna wears a see through bikini and Sandy has one that reveals through design rather than fabric. They're both lovely young ladies but their choice of men is truly scary as their partners are unappealing in the extreme. Anna's Tom is a jackass and Sandy's Chester is a jackass with a belly that puts mine to shame. There may be a shark in the water but do sharks really attack whales? Anyway, this quartet are heading for a South Pacific holiday resort but the captain is as lost as you might expect a fat Mexican captain called Macho to get. He pulls in at what appears to be a desert island, only to head for the horizon when he sees his fares murdered by cannibals on the beach. That's a shame as actor Manuel Fihman is the most fun part of the scenes on the boat and he could have been fun on the island too.

Anna is Kitty Cole, debuting in film after a bit part in a TV movie in 2002. She plays the central part, co-wrote the script and designed the costumes too, so along with director and co-writer Sofian Khan, this is emphatically her film. She's a capable actress but a subdued one, perhaps appropriately given the part she plays, that of a long suffering woman who has more patience than sense. There are real possibilities to her role, unlike that of Tom, who is doomed to failure from moment one, and she grows as a character throughout. Her past is explained through a dream sequence that Tom has on the island, bizarre in that it unfolds entirely in black and white except for what's on the TV, which is shown in colour. It would seem that she's a lottery winner, so perhaps financed this trip, but the night of her win is the night Tom gets into a drunken car crash and proposes to her over the phone while needing her to bail him out of jail.

We don't know if they get married or not but the film begins four years later when he's sobered up and apparently turned his life around. Unfortunately he's just as annoying. He's depressing even when trying to be optimistic and he's not too optimistic given that he gets news by satellite phone that the stock market has crashed and they've lost everything. He gives his girl nothing but orders and trouble. 'Eat your sandwich,' he tells her. 'Pick up your bag.' I wanted to slap him constantly because she doesn't seem capable of doing it and really should have done. He does exhibit the odd bit of charm on occasion, like when he sits on the pitiful attempt at a raft that he builds and bursts out laughing because it promptly sinks. Unfortunately he then turns back into a jackass and that's it for charm. I cheered when he was discovered by Kohi the cannibal, who shoots a blow dart into him and lets him sink into the sea.

As bad as Tom is, he's more attractive than Chester, who must be insanely rich because there's no way otherwise that he could ever land anyone as young and gorgeous as Sandy. She just has to be a trophy wife or paid companion, so has little substance, even though she's played by the lovely Suzi Lorraine, a busy latter day B movie queen who has racked up almost fifty credits to her name in less than a decade. She's as thoroughly pleasing to the eye as Chester isn't, given that Theodore Bouloukos seems to be attempting to look as unattractive as is humanly possible. He's grossly fat but spends most of his time in a pair of swimming trunks and a terrible wig that he has to hold on with a headband. He's addicted to cocaine, he snores, he hurls racist abuse at the captain and it's impossible to come up with a single redeeming characteristic except that it doesn't take too long for him to get speared in the gut and sacrificed to a cannibal god.

Unfortunately it wasn't soon enough. I don't want to judge Theodore Bouloukos or Kris Eivers on their performances here, as they play Chester and Tom respectively to perfection, but I was very happy to see both characters quickly disappear from the story. Unfortunately with Chester went Sandy, who I was hoping would become a worthy character once her sugar daddy was disposed of. As much as I enjoyed watching Suzi Lorraine, she was given precisely nothing to do here, perhaps explaining just how she's been able to rack up so many credits so quickly. All these characters being disposed of so quickly merely highlights how important Anna is to the story and she promptly hooks up with the cannibal who killed Tom. Fortunately he's well worth watching, actor Noshir Dalal playing Kohi like a performance art piece, leaping over the scenic rocks of the British Virgin Islands like a dancer. He's the best thing that's happened to Anna in years.

He's also the best thing that's happened to this film since Suzi Lorraine climbed out of the water onto the boat, an elegantly painted savage who soon turns out to be the son of the local chief. In fact this is where the film truly betrays its schizophrenia. It's as if Cole and Khan wrote separate scripts and then vainly attempted to combine them into one. On the masculine side it's a violent story of cannibals and zombies and death, but on the feminine side it's the stuff of pulp romance novels, with a misunderstood woman shipwrecked on a desert island and rescued by a heathen hunk who she can civilise with her love after learning his language and not teaching him a word of her own. Sure enough, six months later she's pregnant and when Kohi takes her back to his village, his father is pissed. Fortunately he quickly dies of some horrible disease so Kohi can succeed to the position of chief and enforce his own style of leadership. Convenient, huh?

I find it strange that this male horror fan finds himself drawn to the feminine side of this film more than the masculine one, but it's only when Anna and Kohi get together that we're treated to something of substance to watch. The debauchery of the early scenes is as gratuitous as it's pointless. There's just no need for any of it, especially as none of it is explicit. All the best bits are the ones that didn't happen, because Suzi Lorraine doesn't get naked and the shark doesn't get Chester. The first bits of fun are when we arrive in the romance portion of the film. Kohi tries to court Anna with a flower, eating it when she runs away. When she realises his good intentions and introduces herself, we discover that Anna is the native word for 'chin' and he bursts out laughing. He thinks she looks like a fallen goddess, even though he has to paralyse her with a blowdart to make her pay attention. At least there's a point here.

These scenes benefit from two other key factors beyond the acting of Cole and Dalal. One is the fact that they unfold in a foreign language with subtitles, serving as a clear delineation between the world that Anna has left and the one that she's found herself in and posing questions about happiness and civilisation, though hardly in depth. The other is the British Virgin Islands, which demonstrate a wild variety of contours and textures to be picked up on by the cinematography. The rocks seem to have been thrown around by behemoths in an attempt to build avant garde cave systems. Noshir Dalal has fun leaping around it all and the cameraman has fun trying to keep up with him. Unfortunately it's not destined to last as more generic nothingness is on the way. Sure, cannibals fight zombies, but we just don't care. This film doesn't work as a horror movie, it only works as a romance and how many romances are called Destined to Be Ingested?