13 Frightened Girls (1963)

Director: William Castle
Stars: Murray Hamilton, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Marlowe, Khigh Dhiegh, Kathy Dunn and Lynne Sue Moon

Every new William Castle discovery is a good one and there are plenty of them to make once you've seen all the regular horror titles. This one is a teen comedy of all things, set in the world of diplomatic espionage, the misleading and suggestive title notwithstanding. It came after his classic horror period, between Zotz! and his remake of The Old Dark House, and it fits pretty well with the former. For those used to the famous (or should that be 'infamous'?) theatrical Castle gimmickry, it might seem surprising to see a movie like this on his filmography, but if you take a glance at the rest of his career you'll find that he was far from a one trick pony. Sure, this is a piece of fluff, pure and simple, but like Zotz! it's a thoroughly enjoyable piece of fluff, with plenty of delicious moments of suspense, regardless of how unrealistic the framework is. After all, spies are just another excuse for twists and turns, shadows and chases, corpses and double agents.

The focal point here is Candy Hull, who lent her name to the film's working title, The Candy Web, and who is the epitome of the precocious young blonde American teenager who you just know is going to be a bundle of trouble for everyone. She's a sixteen year old student at Miss Pittford's Academy for Young Ladies, which hides away somewhere in the European countryside with a surprisingly multicultural student body, given that all the students are daughters of diplomats, very possibly one per country as if there's an enforced quota. There's no diplomacy on campus though, officially because Miss Pittford doesn't believe that such a thing leads itself to dignified behaviour in young ladies, but really because it had to be banned outright in order to allow all these varied children to even be in the same building together and thus for this plot to have even the slightest footing. Some are from the other side, you see: from behind the Iron Curtain.

And as soon as we find ourselves at Miss Pittford's we promptly leave again, because the girls all traipse off on holiday. Candy is the driver, because I'm watching the American release. To cast the girls in the film, Castle held a contest in thirteen different countries. The most obvious prize was to be in the movie, to represent their country as a teenage diplomat, which is standard stuff but Castle always went an extra step further. Winning the real contest meant that each also won a fake contest within the movie, some sort of Latin test at Miss Pittford's, the prize for that being to drive the school bus down winding roads and crash into a hillside when a spider crawls down the windscreen. It's a simple concept: just film one scene thirteen times, with a different girl each time, splice it into that country's print and hey presto, there's material tailored to that nation. The same logic applies to the trailers, each presented by their nation's contest winner.

Once we get past that though, it's all about America and Candy Hull. Her father is John Hull, the chargé d'affaires at the American embassy, but she's more interested in Wally Sanders. He's a spy, naturally, though he pretends to be a poker player, and he's known her since she was knee high to a grasshopper. More importantly she has a serious crush on him, the key reason that she decides to become a spy herself. She discovers by accident that his work has been slipping and he's in danger of losing his job, so naturally takes it upon herself to save it for him. The other reason is that she finds herself slap bang in the middle of a diplomatic incident at the Chinese embassy, while hanging out with her schoolgirl buddy Mai Ling, whose uncle Kang is presumably the chief spymaster of Red China. To prop up such an unlikely plot, I should point out that this unnamed city seems to consist of nothing but embassies and be populated by nothing but spies.

So you might assume that the sort of shenanigans that Candy stumbles onto is daily routine. You see, she and Mai Ling were merely dancing the night away to records in Uncle Kang's study, like the daughters of foreign diplomats on the other side tend to do, when they're kicked out so Kang can talk with Kaganescu, the man Wally Sanders is tasked with tracking. Aha, instant spy plot! So Candy goes back in to talk with him after the others leave, and finds him mysteriously missing with blood in the dumb waiter. She follows the trail through the kitchen to find him hung up on a hook in a food locker with a letter opener stuck into his chest, one with a US seal on it, one that she knows belongs to her father. She doesn't tell anyone, of course, but from then on begins training herself to be a spy, training that basically consists of reading Methods and Training for Modern Espionage and applying its techniques to every situation she finds herself in.

Given that this is emphatically a family film, you won't be too surprised to find that she doesn't come a cropper on her first outing and so get tortured to death by the other side. She succeeds beyond her wildest dreams, finding out everything from everybody and sending it to Wally under the code name of Kitten. She doesn't even let Wally know who she is, not only because it would only earn her a spanking from her father and an order to cease and desist, but because if Wally can't tell anyone who Kitten is, everyone will naturally assume that Wally is Kitten and so stop thinking about firing him. The adults flounder around, while Candy runs rings around them all, always blissfully free of suspicion, because hey, she's just a sixteen year old kid. To the mind of real sixteen year old kids, or to be more accurate twelve year old kids who picture themselves as sixteen, this is a delicious story, the Baker Street Irregulars extrapolated into espionage.

If I was twelve years old I'd have loved this film to death. I read voraciously and had a whole slew of books about teenagers who fought crime, from the Three Investigators to Einstein Anderson, Science Sleuth. I also had a bunch more that were effectively the same as Candy's Methods and Training for Modern Espionage but aimed specifically at children. They spoke to disguises, codes and ciphers, even how to hide secret messages at the end of a rolled up tube of toothpaste. Who cares that everyone at Miss Pittford's is a girl? That's just an excuse for characters like Ilona from Germany, who apparently falls deeply in love with a different boyfriend every day. Everything else is effectively unisex, except perhaps the dubious scene where Candy attempts to seduce an older man that she identifies as a foreign agent. It's not too dubious though as seduction is all about love and kisses not sex, because it's all written from a twelve year old's perspective.

Kathy Dunn is delightfully precocious as Candy Hull, making it all the more surprising that she never appeared in another film. Over six years she appeared in a couple of TV movies, a few TV episodes and The Sound of Music on Broadway, but then nothing. Perhaps she wasn't starstruck but her parents were. The other contest winners are capable as stereotypes if not actors, but that's all they're really called upon to do. Only a few of them even have names, the rest referred to only by the names of their countries. Beyond Candy and Mai Ling, only three get much to do. Ilona Schütze gets to look misty eyed a lot as Ilona from Germany and Gina Trikonis is suitably severe as Natasha from Russia. She had a long television career in the wardrobe department but the rest of the girls either had a few credits like Dunn or never acted again. Only two really made a career of acting: Alexandra Bastedo, Alex from England, and Judy Pace, who was Liberia.

This is hardly a film to watch for acting though, or for anything else of substance. It's capable in every department but doesn't shine in any of them, just a well made family film that offers a fair amount of entertainment if you can watch it with the right mindset, that of a twelve year old. You can tell just from his gimmicks that William Castle was a mischievous twelve year old until the day he died at 63 years of age and presumably Otis L Guernsey Jr, who came up with the story, and Robert Dillon, who wrote it, were on the same wavelength. It's consistently done, all the way to the plethora of famous childhood melodies that comprise the soundtrack. For those cringing at the concept of Castle apparently playing Walt Disney instead of Alfred Hitchcock, don't worry. This is a family film full of pixie-like daring rather than soporific niceness and there are a number of fright moments that remind us who made the film. I'll go back to it before Lassie and Flubber.

Piranha (2010)

Director: Alexandre Aja
Stars: Elisabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Jerry O'Connell, Ving Rhames, Jessica Szohr, Steven R McQueen, Dina Meyer, Christopher Lloyd and Richard Dreyfuss

While I don't tend to watch a lot of brand new movies in theatres, at least not the mainstream ones, the last week seems to have given me something of a microcosm of the year as a whole. Resident Evil: Afterlife is surely destined to be the worst film of the year and Machete is likely to be the most fun exploitation flick. Piranha may just be the most honest picture because it knows precisely what it is and never for one moment pretends to be anything else. I'd heard that this was a remake of the 1978 Joe Dante Piranha but it really isn't, as much as everyone seems to assume that remakes are all French director Alexandre Aja does nowadays. There may be a few inspirations here and there, but these two Piranha movies really owe more to Jaws than to each other. Dante's was a more direct ripoff of Spielberg's blockbuster hit but it remains the obvious comparison here too, not least because of the very deliberate opening scene.

In Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss played Matt Hooper, an Oceanographic Institute scientist who leads a drunken rendition of Show Me the Way to Go Home while he and his cohorts are waiting for the shark to come back. In Piranha, Dreyfuss plays Matt Boyd, a fisherman who drinks beer and sings Show Me the Way to Go Home while the piranha attack. OK, he isn't drunk and there's only one of him, but if killing him off in the first scene isn't an emphatic hint that writers Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger aren't interested in rehashing Jaws yet again, I don't know what is. They want to show us lots of piranha, lots of blood and lots of boobies and the usual story would just get in the way. When the monster attacks, the sheriff is supposed to do the right thing, only to be hindered by a greedy businessman or politician until the massacre happens and scientists save the day. Not here. At least Dreyfuss didn't care, as he netted $50,000 for charity before being eaten alive.

He's eaten because of an earthquake, which to be fair is one of the more realistic sparks for films like this. The earthquake opens up a passage between an underground lake and the regular one, Lake Victoria in this instance, though the film was shot on Lake Havasu in Arizona. What was in that underground lake, you might ask. Well, if you did after the last two paragraphs then you're a moron. Prehistoric frickin' piranha, that's what! Oodles and oodles of the things. What do they do when they get into Lake Victoria? Precisely what you think! They do it often enough to make parts of the lake run red too, while all the scantily clad young people cavort around doing what scantily clad young people do on lakes during Spring Break. Yes, of course the piranha arrive at precisely the worst time of the year. That's in the exploitation movie rule book, along with the fact that the ladies have to flash their boobs whenever the camera looks their way.

So we're set for Piranha. Aja adheres to all the rules that tie to exploitation and ignores all the ones that tie to good storytelling. Yes, we have scientists. They get eaten. Yes, the sheriff tries to get everyone out of the lake when the piranha attack. She fails and gives up in seconds. None of that matters when the Girls Gone Wild boat is there. Sorry, this has nothing to do with Girls Gone Wild as Girls Gone Wild mogul Joe Francis is eager to point out. This is all about Wild Wild Girls, who aren't anything like Girls Gone Wild at all except they do precisely the same stuff. 'I get to play Joe Francis!' said Jerry O'Connell, who actually plays Derrick Jones, before clarifying, 'Oh, wait. For legal reasons I'm supposed to say, 'I play someone loosely based on Joe Francis.'' This is just an excuse to give us Kelly Brook and porn star Riley Steele cavorting underwater in the altogether, shot through the glass bottom of the boat. 'Goddess aquatic bitches,' says Derrick.

Jones is a sleazy opportunist who can talk anyone into anything. That's presumably how he gets Jake Forester on board as a location scout and Kelly, the girl Jake would love to be his girlfriend, as someone to do tequila shots off one of the wild wild girls. Jake is a seventeen year old local, a sand rat, who never gets to see much of the 20,000 kids who show up for Spring Break because his single mother is the sheriff who is kept more than busy with those 20,000 kids, thus leaving him to babysit his little sister Laura and his little brother Zane. One look at Danni's ample bosom and he buys off the kids with his forty bucks of babysitting money and a twenty buck deception surcharge so he can make the Wild Wild Girls boat. Yep, those little kids are precocious. Yep, he doesn't care. You can write the rest of the story yourself, except perhaps for the surprising fact that the naked underwater cavorting is set to opera. Got to be one surprise, right?

There are some very recognisable names here. Sheriff Julie Forester is Elisabeth Shue, this time giving her screen son an adventure in babysitting. Shue acquits herself well though she's given almost nothing to do except show how good she is at shimmying down a rope with eager piranha snapping at her from below. She's more like Chief Brody's spare deputy than Chief Brody, as all she gets to do is sail the seismologist divers from the US Geological Survey to their doom and be ignored by everyone else. Her Deputy Fallon is Ving Rhames, who is used even less than Shue, so much so that I didn't even realise he was in the movie until it was his turn to get eaten. Eli Roth is a memorable wet T-shirt host as subtle as you might expect for a wet T-shirt host with a black DJ called Chocolate Thunder. There's even Christopher Lloyd in full on 'Great Scott!' mode as the local expert on prehistoric piranha who have been extinct for two million years.

In fact none of these capable actors are used in the slightest. They're merely more props for the filmmakers to play with, just like the awesome fish tanks that I'd steal from Christopher Lloyd's character if only I didn't believe he could go back in time and stop me from being born. The only character really given any chance to develop is Jake Forester, played by Steven R McQueen, the grandson of Steve McQueen and his first wife Neale Adams, who is currently the outsider in TV's The Vampire Diaries. He isn't bad as Jake but he's utterly overshadowed by Jerry O'Connell who steals the entire film, or at least the entirety of the film that doesn't have piranha or boobs on the screen. He may be 'the other guy' in Stand By Me but he's managed to build an interesting career nonetheless and while this is hardly the greatest film in his resume, it's a peach of a part for him and he has a riot with it. We almost sympathise anyway when he loses his penis.

The biggest success in this film, though, is not the acting and it's certainly not the script. I can't remember the last time I watched a mainstream horror movie and was impressed by the effects. Here they are consistently excellent and occasionally shine so brightly that I couldn't help but take serious note. When the inevitable massacre happens and thousands of piranha take on hundreds of partygoers in the lake, everyone seems to be set up with an effect. Corpses litter the water, some face down, and they look real. Everyone who gets out seems to have a realistic wound of some kind to show off. Some are killed in memorable ways. I loved the subtle whiplash shot in and amongst the chaos, a woman falling prey to the buckling and toppling of the Dying to Get Wet platform, whose name becomes ironically true. Another literally falls apart while being carried out of the water. One topless paraglider dips once too often and comes out bottomless.

The only real problem with the effects is that piranha are supposed to strip their food to the bone in scarily short amounts of time, something that rarely happens here. Skeletons just don't give the opportunity for the sort of awesome wounds the effects folk on this film are so good at, so these piranha treat the human race like a sort of buffet lunch, taking a chunk here and there and then moving on to someone else. To boost the victims, there's even an amazing scene where a selfish Spring Breaker tries to get away from the flotilla of killer fish in a speedboat, even though he's hemmed in by partygoers left and right. He runs them over in his quest to get away until the engine dies and they take him down. The partiers, not the piranha. The effects dominate this film, though there's also some good underwater photography, a bevy of beauties who appear to have some sort of allergic reaction to bikini tops and, most of all, a wealth of fun.

The Graves (2009)

Director: Brian Pulido
Stars: Clare Grant, Jillian Murray, Bill Moseley, Amanda Wyss, Shane Stevens, D Randall Blythe, Patti Tindall and Tony Todd

Brian Pulido's first feature, made five years after his horror short, There's Something Out There, and released to DVD as one of After Dark HorrorFest 4's 8 Films to Die For, seems to have got a raw deal from the fans. I was disheartened to see so many negative reviews on IMDb, especially as I'd already seen the film and enjoyed it. Admittedly, as it's a local Arizona movie, I was lucky enough to be at the premiere with many of the cast and crew present, so the enthusiasm and energy was running high as people got to see themselves on screen, some for the first time. A more sober viewing on DVD makes the holes far more apparent but the film still deserves better treatment, the opening five minutes excepted. While Pulido rocks, as a filmmaker and a person, this is outrageous self promotion: here's Atomic Comics, with racks of his comics, there's Halo Piercing, over yonder Brian and his lovely wife Francisca introducing Calabrese at the Sets.

Officially these scenes are there to provide background material for the leading ladies, plural as we get two for the price of one: the Graves sisters from Scottsdale, Megan and Abby, played by Clare Grant and Jillian Murray respectively. Megan is the life of the party, tough, outgoing and always up for an adventure, which is why she's heading across the country to New York City to start a new job. Abby is the skittish one who's going to be lost without her elder sister to keep the light in her life, so they're celebrating their last night together by hanging out at the sort of places nerdy horror fans dream lovely young ladies like them hang out at. Next day they head off into the Arizona desert for a final hurrah by visiting the world's largest thermometer, between Barstow and Las Vegas, but they get lost, as heroines in horror movies tend to do, and instead find themselves in the town of Unity (population 239) which boasts the Skull City Mine.

Everything here is old school, right down to the conveniently creepy names: the lead characters are the Graves, the central location is the Skull City Mine and they find out about it at Screamers Diner. Admittedly Screamers is a real place and the Skull City Mine is really the Historic Vulture Gold Mine in Wickenburg so perhaps it's inevitability, but the whole thing still plays out like a 1989 movie rather than a 2009 movie. That's refreshing in many ways but like so many 1989 movies it leaves us wanting at the end. The only modern touches are the scenes seen through Abby's video camera and the fact that it's structured in three sections, each defined by the boss who gets killed at the end of it, just like levels in a video game. Fortunately the former is used sparingly, though Adam Goldfine's handheld camerawork was better in There's Something Out There than here. The latter are self contained but don't sit too well with each other.

The first section is the best, once those gratuitous first five minutes are over, because the story unfolds nicely and there's so much happening behind it. Grant and Murray are engaging leads, believably close though believably different, and they're great on the eyes. No, I don't buy into them being beautiful nerds, but they're engaging nonetheless and Grant especially succeeds in finding that elusive level of sassiness that doesn't become frickin' annoying. She's a delightful counterpoint to the downhome feel at Screamers Diner, at least until Rev Abraham Stockton walks in with Becka Crane and the atmosphere turns sinister. Becka is another peach of a part for Patti Tindall though unfortunately not a very big one. Big is an adjective better reserved for Rev Stockton, given that he's played by 6'5" Tony Todd. All Tindall's good scenes are early on and she does wonders with them, but they're quickly over; all Todd's come much later.

It's the waitress at Screamers who sends them to the Skull City Mine, irresistible not just because it's a gold mine but because it's both abandoned and haunted and because it has a cheesy loop broadcast over the PA which is joyously kitsch. The place is creepy in a safe, preserved kind of way, closer to The Goonies than to what Rob Zombie might do with it. It's run by Mama, with her wild hair and yellow teeth, and there's a real live working blacksmith called Jonah Lee Atwood who does demonstrations every hour. We saw before the credits what he does in between times but the Graves girls don't until they see him out of a window hacking to death 'one of the cute guys from the diner' (read: one of the producers). Shane Stevens may not be the greatest actor in the world but he doesn't need to be and he does everything required of him. 'I don't take no pleasure in this and that's the honest truth,' says Jonah. That's why he doesn't last too long.

The death itself brings a freaky rush of sound effects and Megan turns the body over to show us hollowed out eyes and greyed skin. More follow, as we discover why the Ronalds Brothers are more renowned as producers than actors. Strange things are afoot at the Skull City Mine and they soon get stranger still, as Bill Moseley replaces Stevens for the second section. Moseley is the other big name in this film, an ever memorable screen nutjob. He's a riot as Jonah's brother Caleb, better known as Cookie, bringing his own pig snout along for fun. It takes a special actor to play a role like this, with no inherent depth but every opportunity to turn into a memorable characterisation. Most actors would screw it up, but Moseley steals the film. He lets the Graves girls run, then traipses along after them, singing Baby Please Don't Go and snorting at them. As much fun as Clare Grant has been thus far, she fades in comparison. He knows it too.

Part of the problem may be that Brian Pulido is so good at writing female characters that grow over time and through experience to find the strength that they didn't know they had. Here that means Abby, because he crafts her way out from her sister's shadow well. What he's less good at is keeping us interested in female characters that were strong to begin with, and Megan, the focus early on, gradually fades in interest from here on out. The rest of the problem is that there is absolutely nobody to follow Moseley, not even Tony Todd. I didn't like him here as much as I've liked him elsewhere, not just in Candyman but other, very different films like The Man from Earth. He bounces around like a fundamentalist preacher should, while Randy Blythe, the lead singer of Lamb of God, is merely annoying as his deacon, like a goth version of Iggy Pop. These scenes are too empty though as if all the momentum was lost after the great nose biting scene.

There's much to enjoy here, far more than you'd expect reading those IMDb reviews. There's a real joie de vivre in the first section that continues into the second and fans of old school horror aren't going to be disappointed. The characters and settings are memorable and the portrayals range from decent to joyous. Moseley is great fun to watch, with a host of great lines that often feel improvised and fresh. It's as the second section winds down and the third takes over that the film starts to fall apart at the seams. Blythe is annoying, Tindall is wasted, the Graves girls don't get much to do and everything starts to become predictable and convenient. Yet while the explanations may not really satisfy, there are still plenty of interesting shots to pay attention to. Perhaps it's just easier to remember the downward slope than to remember how high it began and how it still doesn't really descend to the depths that so many lesser horror films do.

There's Something Out There (2004)

Director: Brian Pulido
Stars: Patty Tindall, Scott Jordan, Phil Blackmon, Jonesey Jones and Zack Miller

While he co-founded the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival with Chris LaMont and he remains a key figure in the thriving Arizona film scene to this day, Brian Pulido has surprisingly few film credits, instead forging a highly successful career in his chosen medium of comic books. Conveniently ignoring Lady Death, the mangled 2004 animated movie starring his most popular character, he has only two films to his name as a writer/producer/director and this short horror film was the first. Having now seen how good it is, I'm surprised that it took so long for him to follow it up with another one, especially given the obvious enthusiasm that climbs out of his commentary to attack us. There's nothing new in There's Something Out There, as the generic title suggests, except perhaps the choice of monster, but it's a capable collection of influences brought together with panache by a talented cast and crew. It's a joyous little shocker.

The monster is a garden gnome, named Boris by the filmmakers, who is a little overzealous at keeping Penny and Brad's garden safe. Really it's his garden, but they're too busy not getting on with each other to notice beady little doll eyes and signs of intent. In fact, as the director's cut shows, and I so love that there's a director's cut for a 16 minute short, Boris is just another thing for them to disagree on. Brad is determined to have his way and Penny acquiesces for the sake of peace, obviously something that happens a lot in this household, but what they have no way of knowing is that Pulido is a demonic pixie hell bent on reclaiming the annoying gnome from the Priceline commercials and turning it to the dark side. Soon this Siberian garden gnome that Brad picked up at a swap meet is going to go on a rampage of destruction with his tiny trowel of death and, of course, that's precisely the way we like it. Go, Boris!

Technically this is an accomplished little film that would serve well as a textbook for how to build a horror short. First it's all about sound cues and red herrings, those tiny moments of relief from tension that filmmakers just love setting us up for and shocking us with. Then, as we conclude that we're on a slow ride of suspense, Pulido kicks it into high gear and we find ourselves thrown into a neatly gory slasher movie. The phrasing is note perfect, bursts of action followed by pauses for breath, then more bursts of action, all underpinned by a quality soundtrack and some great lighting. The camera movements are very capable, even successfully switching to gnome cam without ever giving me motion sickness. Even though it's obvious who the monster is, it's kept mostly out of sight, the demonic cackling of Jonesey Jones keeping us well aware of its presence, as we focus instead on Patti Tindall, the only actor with experience in the film.

This was her first horror movie, though she'd go on to make plenty more, such as The Graves for Pulido, Machined with David Hayes and two movies for Sean Tretta, including my favourite of her performances thus far in Death of a Ghost Hunter. The rest of the cast are able but not remotely up to the admirable depth of her characterisation, so it's hardly surprising that none had acted before and none would again. The acting requirements sit squarely on her shoulders and she demonstrates how able a scream queen she can be, though Pulido's penchant for strong female characters means that she was always going to do a lot more than scream, however many cuts and bruises she ends up with. I found it hilarious that, while the film was shot at Pulido's home and much of the screaming took place in the wee hours, none of the neighbours complained. They probably didn't want to become characters in a Lady Death story as a writer's revenge.

Given that the entire film is constructed from all the best bits from the history of horror movies, there are influences to be found everywhere. A shameless pun highlights the most obvious, Night of the Living Dead, which anyone who's ever attended a panel with Pulido on it knows is his favourite film, but there are others too. What's in the basket, Brian? There's a sequel for you. For me it ended up playing out like Sam Raimi had hijacked The Shining from Stanley Kubrick by having his steadicam operator bite his knees off, fired Jack Nicholson and hired Warwick Davis in his place, then replaced Shelley Duvall with Sigourney Weaver. Obviously budgetary concerns meant that the Overlook Hotel had to become a Phoenix town home but if you still have tough chicks and maniacal midgets, how can you go wrong? Pulido has cited El Mariachi as his trigger for making movies. Now I'm picturing a remake of Machete with Boris as the lead. I need help.

Blood Freak (1972)

Director: Steve Hawkes & Brad Grinter
Star: Steve Hawkes

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.

It's hard to imagine a film like Blood Freak existing and it's even harder to imagine what possible motivations the filmmakers had to make such a thing. It's not just that it's so far out there that it becomes truly surreal, which it is; it's that it seems to be an anomaly in the careers of everyone involved. I can only assume that it carried the message that its financiers wanted to be carried, but once their money supply had run out and they abandoned the film, it fell to Brad Grinter and Steve Hawkes to finish it on their own. How much they obscured the original message I have no idea, whether deliberately or accidentally, but it's certainly an unholy mishmash of a number of genres, tones and styles and apparently Hawkes, when asked about the film later in life, called it 'a sad chapter in my life.' So what is it? Well, it's a pro-Christian, anti-pot, biker movie about a man who turns into a bloodthirsty freak with the head of a turkey. You know, the usual.

Grinter seems to be the focal point. He wrote, produced and directed the film, all in collaboration with Hawkes. Most of the cast are students from his film class who had never acted in anything professional before and would never do so again. His son, Randy Grinter, took a part and also took charge of the sound department. Now, all this may suggest that Grinter is exactly the sort of authority figure who might make a Christian propaganda movie, a sort of updated version of Reefer Madness, made thirty years on, but that doesn't seem to be the case. His main focus in life was naturism, to which cause most of his films are dedicated. He acted in William Kerwin's Sweet Bird of Aquarius, in the all together; directed Never the Twain, which merges possession by Mark Twain with the Miss Nude World Pageant; and produced, directed and starred in Barely Proper, a film about a pretty schoolteacher brought up on charges of immorality for being a nudist.

While naturism was the driving force in his life, he did make other movies, appearing in Barry Mahon films as varied as Musical Mutiny, which revolved around the rock band Iron Butterfly, and The Love Pirate, a sexploitation flick in which he appeared as Capt Fu. It's as a director that he's most remembered though, chiefly for Blood Freak and Flesh Feast, a movie shot in 1967 but not released until 1970 that marks Veronica Lake's final appearance on film. Grinter turned the star of Sullivan's Travels, I Married a Witch and The Blue Dahlia into a deranged doctor trying to restore youth using flesh eating maggots. He didn't have a long career, almost entirely centred around the year of 1970, but it's a bizarre one. If it's even possible, his collaborator on this film had even more of a bizarre career. That's Steve Hawkes, who wrote, produced and directed with Grinter, and also starred in the lead role of Herschell. He's still in the news today.

Usually known as Steve Sipek, Hawkes is best known for playing the lead in a couple of Spanish language Tarzan movies in the early seventies, even though he's Croatian. Playing Tarzan was a dream come true for Hawkes, who had survived a tough childhood through an identification with Johnny Weissmuller, but on the second Tarzan picture a set fire left him with burns that covered 90% of his body. He spent six months recuperating in hospital while the production moved to Colombia. He was rescued from the fire by a lion called Samson, who he promptly adopted and, while he did make a few further films, including this one, he devoted the rest of his life to caring for great cats in his wildlife sanctuary home in Florida. He's spent the last forty years living with lions, tigers and panthers, making headlines only once in 2004 when his tiger Bobo escaped into the neighbourhood. I like the sign on his electronic gate that reads, 'Trespassers will be eaten.'

So these are the folks who made Blood Freak and if you can fathom how these two backgrounds generated this picture then you're a better man than I am. We begin with Grinter himself, in one of a number of scenes that presumably exist to pad out the running time to eighty minutes once the money supply had dried up. Periodically he appears on screen to chain smoke and read to us from notes on his desk. His utter lack of charisma may help him to fade into the background at naturist colonies but as an on screen narrator he's terrible. Every time he appeared I wished for him to turn into the Amazing Criswell but he steadfastly refused to do so. To begin with he just talks about catalysts, which is what Angel is about to become to Herschell. Angel breaks down on the Florida turnpike and Herschell is a Vietnam veteran and biker who helps her get moving again. In thanks, she takes him back to her place, but she isn't the sort of character you think.

While she initially appears to be the standard catalyst to begin a porn movie, Angel is a devout Christian who is tolerant beyond anyone I've ever met. She offers Herschell hospitality out of the goodness of her heart, but she's also offered the same to her sister Ann, who is heavily into the drug scene, along with a whole collection of her swinger buddies who sit around doing drugs all day and trying to pick up on anyone who walks into the house. 'You know your body is a temple for the Holy Spirit,' she tells your sister. 'You shouldn't defile it.' Herschell appears to fit well with Angel. It literally takes ninety seconds for one of the girls to pick up on him and his muscles, but he lectures her on her lack of morality. 'I just don't go for a girl that acts like a tramp,' he tells her, 'even if she's very beautiful.' The responses are predictable. Angel's a drag and Herschell's a dumb bastard, but they're our heroes anyway in what appears to be a Christian home video.

They're a fascinating pair of leads. Steve Hawkes, who is so massively important to this film that he apparently needs 'Starring Steve Hawkes' credits both before and after the film's title, looks like a cross between Hugh Jackman and Alvin Stardust, complete with jacket and large Elvis quiff, but he sounds more like Tommy Wiseau. He doesn't hide his burns, which are visible the moment he sheds his jacket, and he's acutely polite. He's exactly who you'd want to take home to grandma. Heather Hughes is far more attractive as Angel, not only because of her perpetually bare legs, than Dana Cullivan is as her sleazy sister Ann, but after her initial warning to Herschell about her sister, every word she says is tied to the Bible. Whether it's odd lines like, 'I believe therefore I speak' and 'Praise the Lord!' or whole discussions about the commandments, she just doesn't quit. No wonder she's driving Ann crazy, not that she wasn't halfway there already.

And so our plot begins, or at least the plot we think we're about to watch unfold. One of the joys of this film is that every time we think we know what we're watching, it promptly changes into something completely different. Thus far, it seems to be a positive story all about Herschell. He does a good deed for a damsel in distress and gets somewhere to stay in return. He joins her at an impromptu bible session and that lands him a job at the Midway Turkey Farm and Hatchery. Yet just as he finds his life on the right track, he promptly derails it just because Ann calls him a coward. Sure, she throws every temptation his way but he refuses all of them because he's a character with plenty of inner strength. He's also obviously immune to the clouds of drugs that must surely float around the place but one dare later and this good guy instantly morphs into a drug addict boffing his host's sister. Talk about gratitude!

Ah, a morality play, you might think, three acts of Herschell's rise, fall and rise. Nah, we're about to turn into a mad scientist story. One solid day of throwing turkeys around and he starts his real job as a guinea pig in food experiments. The health and safety folks require proof of the quality of the meat before it can be distributed, but for some reason that eludes me they'll be satisfied by having the drug addicted new guy eat it and just tell them there are no ill effects. Either that or Herschell is a moron, which is very possible. He has plenty of ill effects too but how many are due to the turkey and how many to the drugs that Ann has got him hooked on is entirely open to question. The only differences between his seizures before and after eating a turkey come down to the way in which he shakes. Before, he just shimmies subtly like he wants to be a motion blur but after, he contorts like an epileptic Elvis. This scene is ripe for a YouTube mashup.

Now, you might wonder why this film is called Blood Freak and I'm still trying to figure that out myself. Most obviously it's because when Herschell goes home to Ann, we see that he's become a monster with the head of a turkey that lusts after human blood; not just any blood either: it has to be drug infused blood, so he's soon out searching the town for druggies, hanging them upside down, slitting their throats and drinking down their contamination. What's most amazing here is that Ann doesn't seem to mind. There's a truly surreal scene where she tries to come to terms with his new appearance. Sure, she faints when she sees him, but it takes a whole thirty seconds to progress to the point where she calmly wonders aloud about what kind of life they'll lead when they get married and what their future children would look like. This is one of those magic moments of 1970s cinema that make you wonder what drugs your parents were on.

A more subtle reason for the title surely has to tie to Angel and her strong beliefs in Jesus. When she left the film after a mere fifteen minutes, everything was looking good for Herschell, but a full half hour has gone by without her, even though much of that was spent in her own house. Everything has gone to Hell in a handbasket without her, suggesting pretty strongly that she's the way, the truth and the light, but what sort of good Samaritan would invite a stranger into her house, then leave him alone with a bunch of hippies and drug dealers while she swans off to do her own thing somewhere else? The only time the word 'freak' is used in the script is amazingly not to describe the man who's morphed into a murderous half-man half-turkey monster but to describe the adherence that Angel has to the scriptures. Is the title really suggesting that she's the blood freak, because her devotion to the Holy Blood was the catalyst for events to follow?

Who knows? There are some major twists to come, though you won't believe those either. It's hard to fathom anything in this film that anyone could believe, but these twists get seriously harder to buy into as the picture progresses, and it all inexorably comes back for me to that original question: what is this film trying to tell us? Is it all a Christian fable that explains that if you don't keep the Bible thumper in your life close, you're going to quickly lapse into depression, panic, addiction, hallucination and strange mutation into a weird turkey headed monster? Did the filmmakers (or the financiers) seriously believe that any filmgoer who turned out to see a movie called Blood Freak with a lead character deliberately named for the Godfather of Gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis, would watch this and be persuaded to bring Jesus Christ into their lives? It's hardly the most subtle attempt in the book, gore entirely aside.

Perhaps it's a straight anti-drug film, suggesting that you can not only get hooked on your first experience with even the most minor drugs but also cured by your first bad trip? The revelations at the end of the film render that approach completely meaningless but then continuity is not a strong factor in this story. Such a message would also be rendered utterly unbelievable by the sight of Grinter throwing all this moral high ground at us while literally choking on cigarettes. We never see him without one, at any point in the film, and his last monologue is ended, quite possibly prematurely, by a coughing fit, through which he continues to smoke with dedication. I doubt this is deliberate irony on behalf of a filmmaker bitter at the financiers leaving his film high and dry. If these scenes were padding, as is likely, they were probably shot on odd ends of film and couldn't be redone, just as the conveniences that litter the plot couldn't be ironed out.

It could all even be a vague attempt to offer social commentary on the American presence in Vietnam, given some of what we're made privy to at the end. If so, it's so weak that it doesn't even approach half baked. I've watched this film a few times now and while I'm still fascinated by what drove such an incredibly strange picture to be made, I honestly don't expect any of it to ever be fully explained. Grinter died in 1993, his last film almost two decades behind him, with the exception of doing unit coordination on Masterblaster, a 1987 film written, produced and partly directed by his son Randy. Hawkes retired from the industry in 1975 and is happy taking care of his big cats in Florida. If any of the cast had future ambitions on the screen, they either came to naught or were jettisoned after their experiences on this production. Blood Freak is likely to simply abide, a left handed treasure for film fans who are willing to be utterly amazed.

Machete (2010)

Directors: Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis
Stars: Danny Trejo, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Daryl Sabara, Shea Whigham, Don Johnson, Jessica Alba and Robert De Niro

If Resident Evil: Afterlife was the worst movie I've seen in months, then Machete was the best. No, that's not fair, because 'best' implies qualities that you don't find in movies like this, which carry no delusions whatsoever of being great cinema. The Seventh Seal this ain't. Let's just say that Machete surpasses its origins as a rather popular fake movie trailer in Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's 1997 homage to the exploitation flicks they adore, to become the most consistently enjoyable and outrageously entertaining film of the year. Just take a look at that amazing cast! Most are Robert Rodriguez regulars but there are surprising additions too. Steven Seagal's debut as a villain after a couple of decades as a hero shows why he should have been a villain all along, Don Johnson is so unrecognisable he warrants an 'introducing' credit and Robert De Niro has a comedic field day as a racist and opportunist US senator.

Best of all, there's Danny Trejo at the top of the bill. How long have we waited for that sight, cool indie short films like Cowboy Dreams excluded? When I was watching Steven Seagal movies in the nineties, I was wishing they were Danny Trejo movies. Yet every time he managed to get screen time it seemed that directors were hell bent on using it to kill him off, often in the first few scenes and even when they were made by his second cousin, Robert Rodriguez. I'd honestly given up hope of seeing him as a lead, given that he was 63 years old when he made the fake Machete trailer and 66 by the time it became a real film. He's no spring chicken and he doesn't look like one, but he still moves better at 66 than I do at 39, which perhaps explains why he gets to get jiggy with Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez and Lindsay Lohan in the same movie, carve half the cast up with a machete and leap out of a window using a assassin's intestine as a rope.

As you might imagine, there are many words that might describe Machete but 'subtle' sure ain't one of 'em. While it raises many topical points about Hispanic immigration into the US, it does so through comedy rather than real social comment, even though it's played straight. Most often described as Mexploitation, this is roughly akin to an Hispanic take on blaxploitation but could be better seen as a modern day spaghetti western set on the Tex Mex border, character names like Django and Sartana helping to underline that connection. Trejo may not bring a heck of a lot of nuance to Machete, but then Franco Nero or Richard Roundtree didn't to Django or Shaft either. He certainly sets out on the right foot to add himself to the annals of iconic exploitation anti-heroes as a tough Mexican federale, literally driving into a building to rescue a kidnapped girl who he finds buck naked. 'What's this long hard thing?' she asks? 'My machete,' he replies.

Yes, that's how serious this is intended to be, even when Machete discovers that his boss is in Steven Seagal's pocket and so the kidnapped girl, who isn't quite what she seems and has a cunningly concealed phone, is shot dead and he's left in the building while Mexican drug lord Torrez burns the place down with flamethrowers. Naturally our hero escapes, surfacing three years later in Texas as an illegal immigrant looking for work as a day labourer, perhaps the first homeless exploitation hero since Rowdy Roddy Piper as Nada in They Live. However it only takes a couple of minutes to realise that the subtlety of that film is replaced by the sheerest blatancy here as the Mexicans are all good guys (except for the big bad drug lord villain of the piece) and the Americans are all bad guys (except for those Americans who are really Mexicans deep down inside and just need a little time to remember that fact).

Let me introduce you to the characters so you can see for yourself. Robert De Niro is Sen John McLaughlin (not the guitarist from the Mahavishnu Orchestra), who campaigns for re-election on an extreme anti-immigration platform far beyond anything his near namesake, Arizona Sen John McCain, has ever come up with. McCain may be for tough border controls but McLaughlin wants an electrified border fence to keep the parasites and terrorists out, his words. He describes himself as 'a hardliner against wetbacks' and he isn't above going beyond mere rhetoric either, happily shooting an unarmed illegal dead at the border, ensuring that the event is captured on film so he can circulate the footage to his most generous backers. Yet he's the one inconsistent character in the film, because he's a sneaky opportunist willing to do anything to get what he wants, while everyone else believes in what they're doing and why, whether good guys or bad.

His aide is Michael Booth, a peach of a role for Jeff Fahey, who has to kowtow to both McLaughlin and Torrez, who provides a good deal of the campaign's money. Yes, the racist senator is funded by Mexican drug money, which is all explained in terms that may be consistent but would make a conspiracy theorist blush. Booth is more akin to Torrez in his ruthlessness, lusting after his own daughter and setting up a hit on his own candidate to further his odds. Both Booth and Torrez are slime to Von Jackson, a border vigilante who gave McLaughlin his camera opportunity. He's hardly a nice guy (when he shoots a pregnant woman, he highlights that 'if it's born here, it's a citizen'), but he does what he does out of patriotism rather than evil intent, a cool as ice villain hiding behind his sunglasses like a combination of CSI: Miami's Horatio Caine and Boss Godfrey, 'the man with no eyes' from Cool Hand Luke. Don Johnson is surprisingly good as Jackson.

On the other side of things is a network unimaginatively called the Network, which helps illegal immigrants to find work and get hospital treatment from hot twin nurses in short uniforms. And here was I, doing it all legally. I never got that when I went through the system! Who do I sue? Michelle Rodriguez plays Luz, who runs the Network out of a roach coach, all high principles and common decency. In this border town, every illegal immigrant is a hard worker denied an opportunity by the Man but given one by the Network and they all turn out fine. All the crime is run by American businessmen funded by Mexican drug money. Luz has principles, as does Agent Sartana, an ICE agent in the lovely form of Jessica Alba, who apparently spends most of her time watching Luz but not actually seeing anything go down. Sartana is an idealist who believes in the system, that the law is just and everyone gets a fair deal. She gets a wake up call here!

Where everything ties together is when Booth hires Machete to hit Sen McLaughlin, thinking he's just another illegal immigrant he can use as a patsy. Of course it's a setup but it's also a huge mistake and the film is an action porn explosion from that starting point. From then on we get thrown everything that made exploitation cinema great: sex, violence and quotable dialogue. There's so much of the latter that Rodriguez could make a dozen effective trailers without ever reusing dialogue. 'We didn't cross the border,' cries Sartana. 'The border crossed us!' Luz points out: 'The system doesn't work. It's broken. So we made our own.' Machete keeps his lines short and sweet. 'Machete don't text,' may be my favourite. Also, as befits an obvious attempt to codify the Mexploitation genre, nobody eats anything but Mexican food, even the racists, and every colourful description is a Mexican food reference, the whole enchilada.

The sex is plentiful but shown through gratuitous nudity rather than lengthy sex scenes. Just as I'm happy to see Trejo in the lead, I'm also happy I don't have to see him get down and dirty with the ladies. His most blaxploitation inspired scene is when he visits Booth's house. After he takes down the bodyguards, he finds Booth's daughter April and his wife June naked in the pool getting ready to shoot a internet video. Naturally he joins them before he kidnaps them though the Isaac Hayes soundtrack you hear is only playing in your head. Lindsey Lohan effectively plays herself as April, a neat send up of her own image, but while she does spend most of her part naked that doesn't mean you're going to get to see too much. She'll need to work hard to outdo her scenes late on in this movie. If there's a complaint on the sex side, it's that we could do with more of Jessica Alba but then that would apply if this was a ninety minute movie of her in the shower.

Mostly there's violence, as Trejo finally gets to live up to the name of his character. He's played a lot of characters in a lot of Rodriguez films and almost all of them are named after weapons. He was Machete in the Spy Kids trilogy as well as this film and the trailer in Grindhouse, Razor Charlie in the From Dusk Till Dawn movies, Navajas in Desperado and Cuchillo in Predators. If you don't know what navajas and cuchillos are, just do a Google Image search and you'll get to see something like the inside of Machete's jacket in this movie. There's as much machete work as you might imagine, ending with a twin machete versus twin samurai sword duel with Steven Seagal, but there's much more than that. Machete works the props in this movie, from cleavers to nailguns, meat thermometers to garden shears, even memorable work with a weedwhacker. He gets progressively beaten up as time goes by but continues on like the Energizer Bunny.

It isn't just Trejo either, because everyone gets to cause violent devastation in this movie. Where else can you go to see a man killed by one of those pimped out Mexican lowriders that bounce up and down like some sort of mad alligator head? Cheech Marin gets to demonstrate how well he can wield twin shotguns and he's a priest. Tom Savini is a hitman who's so sure about himself that he even has a commercial and a customised phone number: 1-800-HITMAN. Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis, who co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed, really pull out the stops to ensure that this is as Mexploitation as it gets. They throw everything but the kitchen sink into this movie and that's only because that's an English expression. Everything is Hispanic, though naturally a very stylised Hispanic. There's even an ice cream cart in the final battle demonstrating that like blaxploitation movies, this would be racist if made by someone not of the appropriate ethnicity.

Trejo is great but while he's top billed as the title character, he doesn't get any more screen time than the rest of the ensemble cast who share it so evenly that it often seems like their minutes were divided mathematically. Everyone has a riot with their roles, including De Niro who took the part of McLaughlin after Chris Cooper turned it down because the script was 'the most absurd thing I've ever read.' Marin may be the most memorable and Rodriguez the most fleshed out but Seagal is the most surprising. He relishes his villainy and is gifted with an amazing death scene that everyone has been waiting for since 1988. He finally puts his whisper to good use too, to hide his lack of a Mexican accent, and while he plays a Mexican drug lord he reminded me of nobody less than Han from Enter the Dragon, so I kept looking for his metal hand. Maybe that'll be in the sequel, because there must be one, even if those announced at the end are jokes.

Rodriguez has been planning Machete since Desperado in 1995 and he won't let go of such a beloved character lightly. The idea came up when he first met Danny Trejo, thinking that 'this guy should be like the Mexican Jean-Claude Van Damme or Charles Bronson, putting out a movie every year and his name should be Machete.' He would come in when the authorities couldn't take care of business, for whatever reason, and get the job done for what would be a bargain price in the States but a fortune in Mexico. The end of the film plays up his status as a mythical figure, a great pulp anti-hero in an era when we need more such creatures. The only problem is that it's so well fitted to Trejo that we'll probably only end up with whatever can be slotted in amongst all Rodriguez's other myriad projects. Trejo is 66 so can only play the action hero for so much longer. I just hope he gets as much opportunity as is humanly possible.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

Director: Paul W S Anderson
Stars: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts, Spencer Locke, Boris Kodjoe and Wentworth Miller

Resident Evil: Afterlife may be the worst film I've seen in months. Given that I spend a good deal of my time deliberately watching the worst films of all time for my Cinematic Hell series, I'll let that sink in for a moment. Yes, this deserves mention in the same breath as Robot Monster, The Wild World of Batwoman and The Brain from Planet Arous. Beginning a review of a film currently in theatres with such provocation, I should add some caveats. Firstly, I have no background with any of the Resident Evil games which sparked this movie series. I'm aware of them but I haven't played them and so I have no vested interest in any of the characters or events. Secondly, I have no hate for writer/director Paul W S Anderson. While I don't see either as great cinema, I enjoyed both Alien vs Predator and Death Race. Lastly, I haven't seen the third Resident Evil movie, but I mildly enjoyed the first and was mightily underwhelmed by the second. This is the fourth.

So I came to this fresh, without high expectations and without any real background. That was a bad call, as there is much that references the third movie and more that references the games here, but never with explanation. As an example, halfway through the film, as most of the key players have met up at a prison in Los Angeles, a huge behemoth of a character turns up, twelve feet tall and dragging a half axe, half meat tenderiser of comparative size behind him. Who is he? Good question. He enters the story without a name, background or purpose, walks through a horde of zombies without being attacked, breaks into the prison and attacks the lead characters. He's pretty tough, as you can imagine, but they take him down. We know no more than we did when he arrived but now he's departed. Only reading up on the film afterwards tells me that he's the Axeman, the movie version of a character in the games called the Executioner.

This sort of thing happens a lot in Resident Evil: Afterlife, because 'explanation' is apparently a bad word in this post apocalyptic world. The film feels like a collection of setpiece moments with only the slightest story to link them together, and while I'm thoroughly aware that that's hardly a new concept in Hollywood, I don't remember seeing it so blatantly adhered to as this before. I'll be courteous, though, and assume that there's a story here and attempt to review it accordingly, so please bear with me. Those who know something about the franchise may be able to explain away some of the gaps but what I've heard from such people suggests that that's more optimism on my part. The overwhelming feeling I took away from this film was horrendously bad writing, as everything seemed to fit one of two categories: disappointing events that happened out of the blue and disappointing events that were all the more disappointing for being telegraphed.

The first scene promises much, at least visually if not for the story. An unknown girl stands on a pedestrian crossing in the rain apparently waiting for the credits to finish unfolding around her. Something is going to happen but there's no clue as to what. Perhaps she's escaped from one of the research facilities so prevalent in these films and one of the salarymen walking towards her with an umbrella plans to recapture her, given that the Umbrella Corporation is the bad guy in the Resident Evil series. She turns out to be a zombie, perhaps the first in Tokyo, because that's where we are as the camera zooms out so far that we end up looking at the Earth from space, before we're zoomed back in to the very same crossing, now part of an apocalyptic wasteland. This whole scene is a great example of what can be done right with the cinematic toolkit that's available to the modern action filmmaker, but it all goes horribly wrong from there.

Underneath Tokyo is an Umbrella Corporation research facility, which our heroine Alice attacks blatantly and with no apparent concern that there's only one of her and a vast number of heavily armed guards to take on. What we soon find is that this is because there isn't only one of her, as the third movie presumably has a subplot about cloning Alice as much as is humanly possible. I have no idea what it is because it isn't explained here but it does provide plenty of opportunity for her to attempt every move in The Matrix five times in five minutes. It's even possible that this is the point of the cloning subplot because once we've been introduced to it, it goes away again. All the Alices promptly perish in the assault as Wesker, the evil genius who runs the Umbrella Corporation, escapes in a cool helicopter and blows the entire place up. He comes across as the coolest guy in the world to a twelve year old wannabe supervillain. He's embarrasingly awful.

And I have to wonder here. It would seem that we're in a film set after the zombie apocalypse, in a world where society and currency are long gone and the heroes are surprised to find a couple of thousand people still alive, but the villain of the piece runs a global multinational corporation. He keeps his employees loyal by shooting them in the head when they disagree with him and blowing up gazillion dollar underground facilities because someone got past security. Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't help but wonder why this company still exists when there's nobody left to sell anything to; why its people stay loyal to a professional asshole when they could just steal some high tech weaponry and go on a rampage of fun in the ashes of the world; and why Wesker carries on creating mutations with no possible benefit for anyone. He already runs the world, right? He has the only power structure left and half the survivors cater to his every whim.

It's as if the entire rationale is that he's a villain so he needs to do villainous deeds and we have an hour and a half to find out just how villainous they can be. So here goes. Let's see if we can find a plot in and amongst the conveniences and holes. Wesker escapes but hey, the real Alice had already sneaked onto his helicopter. She can't kill him without letting him know she's there so he strips her of all her superpowers and they fight long enough to fly into a hillside. Though she's now human again she walks away from certain death and decides to fly around the country in a plane with unlimited fuel filming herself for a reality TV show. After six months she finally decides that it might be an idea to just go to Arcadia, because a repeating radio signal has been inviting all survivors there all along. It's apparently in Alaska but she only finds a graveyard of planes and Claire Redfield, who she personally sent there way back in the last movie.

Claire doesn't have memory or free will because she's been taken over by a cool spider device attached to her chest, but she still survived for months in the Arctic wilderness. Alice kicks her ass, ties her up and removes the spider, but her memory only comes back gradually. They fly down the western seaboard and finally see survivors advertising their presence from the roof of a prison in LA, a prison entirely surrounded by a horde of the living dead. Personally, I'd have gone to LAX and come back with a helicopter to ferry them all out but Alice decides to land her frickin' plane on the frickin' roof instead, thus marooning her and Claire in the sea of zombies. Bad things happen, more bad things happen and eventually they discover Wesker, miraculously alive and ensuring that yet more bad things continue to happen. Oh, and I should add that Chris Redfield, Claire's brother, is in the prison. Did I mention there are plot conveniences here?

There are good things too, trust me. I counted two of them. One is that we get a scene full of zombie lemmings. What may be the entire human race is on the prison roof but needs to get off it because it's about to be flooded with zombies, the arrival of the Axeman serving at least to let them into the building. So everyone but Alice gets into the lift so she can blow up the cables and drop them a couple of dozen storeys hard and fast into water that conveniently cushions their fall so softly that nobody even loses their footing. Alice then grabs a cable and leaps off the roof to land in a neat forward roll on the ground outside, a couple of dozen storeys down. Realism is not dead, huh? Well, while all this idiocy is going on, zombie lemmings fall to their doom. That's cool, at least. The other cool thing is an escape attempt by plane, which involves falling off the roof and pulling up just in time to cut a bloody swathe through the massed zombie horde.

Is that really it? Is there nothing else worth watching here? Well, yep, that's it. Sorry. My stepson, who is a long time fan of the Resident Evil series, both games and movies, hated the film too. I think that says plenty. He sees it as merely an opportunity for Paul W S Anderson, who wrote all four films and directed two of them, to show that his wife can still look hot when kicking ass. To be brutally honest, Mrs Paul W S Anderson, aka Milla Jovovich, the star of this entire series, didn't look too great to me here. As usually gorgeous as you might expect Russian supermodels to be, she seemed tired here and older than her 35 years. She's outshone by the lovely Ali Larter, who reprises her role as Claire Redfield from the third movie. The acting is capable throughout but never anything special, only Shawn Roberts standing out as worthy of note as Wesker, though not in a good way. I'd bet money that the video game character was better acted in pixels.

Also in the film are people like Kim Coates, Boris Kodjoe and Wentworth Miller. Coates is suitably sleazy as Bennett, a Hollywood producer who unfortunately looks like Ron Jeremy on a bad day. A talented actor, worth far more than he's given to work with here, he seems to have a habit of picking the wrong movies to appear in, including Waterworld, Pearl Harbor and Battlefield Earth. I hope he gets paid well at least, because his part is badly written even for this film and this film doesn't set its sights too high at the best of moments. I felt somehow dirtied for having watched the movie, as if my unabashed cynicism at how low Hollywood has fallen was suddenly revealed to be far too optimistic, but how much worse must he feel for having been in it? I hope he never gets to see the picture. At least it's clear where the fault lies: squarely in the hands of Anderson, who is already planning a fifth movie. I don't care how good the company, I refuse to see it.

Corsair (1931)

Director: Roland West
Stars: Chester Morris and Alison Loyd

Corsair was the last film directed by Roland West, a groundbreaking early American filmmaker who was on a serious roll after The Bat Whispers, one of my favourite precodes, even when not shown in its full 70mm glory. The star, as in all three of West's sound films, was Chester Morris, one of the sadly forgotten stars of the early years of sound. Playing opposite him is the tragic Thelma Todd, the big question mark over West's head. Their relationship was a volatile one from the moment they met on a yachting trip to Catalina Island in 1930. They became not just lovers but business partners, running Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café with West's estranged wife, Jewel Carmen. In 1935, Todd was found dead in her car of carbon monoxide poisoning. The car was inside Carmen's garage. We're not ever likely to know now what really went down but the LAPD thought accidental death, a Grand Jury called it suicide and notable evidence said murder.

After this, West never directed again and that's a real shame. It's even possible that this is the last of his films left for me to discover, as most are now lost, so here's to hoping someone has a hidden gem in their attic. Chester Morris is John Hawks, a college football player, American not Association or rugby, and apparently a good one. He won't be playing for long though, not just because he's caked with more make up than he has face but because he's about to fall into the clutches of the luscious but infuriating Alison Corning, or Miss Wall Street Corning as she's introduced to him. Daddy is Stephen Corning of Corning & Co, a Wall Street brokerage firm, and she organises Hawks into a position with the family business, one which he hates with a passion. He's an honourable man and that's not too compatible with Wall Street ethics so when he's fired after a year he tells her, 'I'll never be a sneaking white collar margin clerk again.'

What he takes away from his year at Corning & Co is the knowledge that it doesn't matter how you get your money, it's how much you have at the end of the day. So he sets out to outdo them at their own game through the power of piracy, but with something of a conscience. He chooses to fleece blind only one target, a high profile crook by the name of Big John, and he chooses to sell to only one buyer, Corning. He has a clever modus operandi too, one that apparently keeps him effectively legal: he hijacks stolen goods and sells them on outside of territorial waters, so the risk is with the former owner and the buyer. Surely there's a flaw in that logic but for 1931 it seems to work pretty well and Hawks's Corsair consistently outwits Big John's Queseda. Naturally Big John isn't stupid enough to let it go on indefinitely but that's where the suspense kicks in, as much as we get in a leisurely 75 minute run that only occasionally switches into high gear.

There are some great shots here, as you'd expect from Roland West. One in particular zooms in on Big John's West Indies Warehouses, fades through the wall and dollies down a long corridor of crates like Raiders of the Lost Ark. There's plenty of shadowplay, as anyone who's seen The Bat Whispers would expect, and there are quite a few interesting camera angles. Less impressive technically is the lip synch work which is far from flawless, but dubbing the dialogue in later does at least mean that we hear the whole thing. The lines may not match the lip movements too closely but it's all clear as a bell, especially when compared to most of Hollywood's output from 1931, even when shot on a set. A good part of this film takes place at sea and without the aid of rear projection. I wonder if one of the boats used was West's own Joyita, which had a fascinating history, becoming known at one point as the 'Mary Celeste of the South Pacific'.

The acting is variable. Morris gets to pout a little too often as Hawks and he doesn't get enough opportunity to be the man of action he was so good at being. At least he gets a forceful finalé, however outrageously sexist it happens to be. Alison Corning does deserve that scene, at least, after a whole film spent playing with everyone she possibly can. Todd, under the pseudonym of Alison Loyd, is a self satisfied little devil as Corning, annoying as all get out but subversively delightful nonetheless. In comparison her fiancée Richard Bentinck is only annoying, though to be fair, William Austin did his job right. The ever reliable Frank McHugh gets very little to do, but as he's drunk for most of the film he's welcome wallpaper. Fred Kohler is a shipbound version of W C Fields as Big John, which doesn't help his tough guy routine. Surprisingly the best acting is done by Ned Sparks and Mayo Methot as a worthy couple of accomplices for Hawks.

Roland West deserved a better final movie than this one and he deserved a better run in the era of sound films. He only left us three of those, this one being much better than 1929's Alibi but not a patch on 1930's The Bat Whispers, three very different films with very different lead roles for Chester Morris. After this one Morris went on to a declining but still fascinating career in film while West retired to concentrate on Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café. After her death in 1935, he went into seclusion and the event overshadowed his legacy for decades. He never returned to the film industry, leaving this his last hurrah. With only fourteen films as a director, the last ten of which he also wrote and five of which he produced, he was hardly prolific. A majority of these are lost films so sadly we're left with only a fraction of those few, but it's obvious to anyone who sees these pictures that he was a huge talent with a visionary eye who was ahead of his time.

Track of the Moon Beast (1976)

Director: Dick Ashe
Stars: Chase Cordell, Donna Leigh Drake, Gregorio Sala and Patrick Wright

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.

Track of the Moon Beast is one of those unfortunate films that are doomed to be remembered for the wrong reasons, not that there are any good reasons to remember it. Unlike many of the films I've reviewed for Cinematic Hell, it's not 'so bad it's good', it's so bad it's just bad. Shot in 1972 but not released until a distribution deal could be reached in 1976, that perhaps explains why Dick Ashe never made another film. He'd moved up from assistant director positions on a couple of other films to helm this solo, but then... nothing. His work is no worse than what you'd see on any random TV movie in the seventies, just as the cast easily fit that bill too. None of them seem quite right but they're not really awful. In almost every way this film is just forgettable, but it has a way of striking a nerve for people as something more. In particular, Kevin Murphy, a writer for MST3K, explained that the character of Johnny Longbow was one of the best they'd encountered.

He's John Salinas, a professor of anthropology, but his closest friends call him Johnny Longbow, a tribal name given that he's Native American. The actor playing the part is Gregorio Sala, who has done precisely nothing else and about whom nothing much seems to be known. In comparison, Chase Cordell, the film's star, made three other films and a few TV episodes here and there, but never again as the star; and Donna Leigh Drake, who plays the leading lady, is a court reporter and country singer: as Donna Leigh Scott, she's half of Sugar Magnolia. She did return to film a decade later for bit parts in two movies, Prime Risk and The Return of the Living Dead. They're not exactly names but they did other things on screen. Yet Sala, who has more charisma than both put together, was never heard from again. Go figure. At least he's famous, courtesy of MST3K, who love him right down to the way he lists off the ingredients in his famous soup.

I think what makes Johnny Longbow special, beyond the easy way in which Joel and the bots can turn his name into something sexually suggestive (hey, it's even translated in the film itself as 'warrior's bow that reaches long to its mark' so Murphy and his fellow writers had it easy), is that he's so cheerful all the time. He's even cheerful when being solemn, like when he gets to the end of that ingredients list. 'Onions...' he says, as if there's nothing in the world he'd like to do less than finish that sentence. He's cheerful when we meet him, leaping out from behind a rock in the desert, after playing a dumb practical joke on his former student, Paul Carlson. He's cheerful when this film finally lives up to its title and turns into a monster movie. He has to fight to not be cheerful when he saves the day at the end of the film, but it's just inherent. So perhaps it's Gregorio Sala's cheerfulness that has led to this picture failing to find deserved oblivion.

The story is mostly a run of the mill monster movie. Carlson is a minerologist, having switched from anthropology while a graduate (as cheerfully explained by Longbow), and the practical joke serves as an introduction to Kathy Nolan. She's supposed to be a New York photographer but she seems much more like a brain dead bimbo who believes that scaring someone she's never met is a perfectly valid use for a tribal mask borrowed from a reservation museum. Naturally they hit it off immediately, as he's stripped to the waist in the desert heat and she's wearing dyed blonde hair and short shorts. She also has trouble meeting his eyes, focusing instead on his bare chest in a strange role reversal. That's usually the man's problem when confronted by a notable rack but I wouldn't chalk the switch up to clever writing or acting. Drake is as stiff as the rocks around her and writers Bill Finger and Charles Sinclair apparently got worse since The Green Slime.

Anyway, Paul and Kathy head up 10,678 feet (he counted, apparently) into the mountains to see a meteor shower dance over Albuquerque. You see, an asteroid has crashed into the Moon, but even though it added a substantial new crater in an explosion that was 'beyond the end of the Richter scale,' it's supposedly no threat to the Earth at all. It'll just generate some pretty lights, that's all, nothing to worry about, but if you believe that, you've never seen a monster movie. There is one twist here, though, because the meteor doesn't bring the monster with it, it brings only the spark of the monster. You see, one fragment decides to fly at a ninety degree angle to all the other fragments and strike Paul right in the head. Let me repeat that just in case it didn't sink in. Paul Carlson is hit in the head with a meteorite. There's blood on his head and he has moon shrapnel in his brain but he just shrugs it off. ''Tis but a scratch,' you might imagine.

It's my duty to point out that these are but two of the blatant plot inconsistencies to be found in this scene. Besides the angle the meteorite takes and besides the fact that our hero survives a blow to the skull with apparently no ill effects, this moon rock is cold to the touch so they can just pick it up to take with them, leaving behind a radioactive handkerchief. Kathy, who, you'll remember, is a professional photographer, also doesn't bother to take pictures of any of this. Even though she's in New Mexico to document the religious customs of the local tribes, she's naturally already booked to take pictures of NASA moon rocks the next day. Paul takes her to his place (well his mum's place) to show her Ty, his pet monitor lizard (it's short for Tyrannosaurus). And of course the token Native American in the film is an expert on tribal mythology. It's good to see plot building but it's rarely so blatant as this. Every part of this story is badly telegraphed.

Now, I realise that monster movies aren't usually well regarded for their well defined characters but there's a particular lacking in character motivation here. Worst is Kathy Nolan, because she serves absolutely no purpose to the plot and is obviously there because she looks good in a pair of short shorts. She's a damsel in someone else's distress. The distress is all Paul Carlson's but he doesn't seem to care in the slightest. He shrugs off getting hit in the head by a meteorite. He collapses the next day when Kathy takes a photo of him but he shrugs that off too, even when his vision is affected. He doesn't go to a doctor, he takes Kathy and Johnny to see some Keith Carradine wannabe singing California Lady while he tries not to collapse. This is the only song Frank Larrabee has ever played in a film so we get to hear the rest of it even though our heroes head home so that Paul can show his manly chest and Johnny Longbow can wax philosophical.

Johnny says Paul has been a loner for a long time. Kathy has already pointed out that she thinks he's lonely. So naturally in his hour of need, they leave him alone to feel terrible, look at Ty and the Moon and clutch the moon rock. There's nothing to be worried about there, right? It's not as if he's about to turn into a giant lizard monster out of Native American myth and murder a drunk while his wife refuses to let him in. That never happens, right? They obviously haven't watched enough monster movies. What I didn't expect was that when confronted with a bloody murder, the cops call in an anthropologist who suddenly decides that his field is in medicine. Yep, Johnny Longbow is on the case. Why not Budd Keeler, his student who can do birdcalls? Why not Kathy Nolan given that she changes her focus every time we need her to be something different? Maybe they just needed someone cheerful to look at the humungous lizard footprint.

These cops certainly don't want to follow the standard monster movie textbook. The rules say that the heroes should be able to work out the impossible within the film's running time but the authorities should never believe them until they actually see the monster. Even when confronted with a blatant footprint outside Sid Harris's house and a bloody slash carved into the wall above it, they're not supposed to come to the conclusion that the perp is a seven foot walking lizard. Maybe one might quietly believe it through some personal phobia, but he'll keep quiet for fear of being laughed off the force. Here the chief calls in an anthropologist to explain it to him. Where can we find a seven foot walking lizard, he asks, as if they want a description for a sketch artist. I wonder what would happen if someone saw this movie, decided to kill their wife and proceeded to explain to the New Mexico cops that it was really a baby tyrannosaurus. He'd be fine, right?

Maybe we're supposed to be distracted from such idiocy by Kathy Nolan, who is kind enough to wear a different sexy outfit every time she's on screen. They're all designed to show off her legs to the maximum, whether they be short shorts, short skirts, see through woollen things or just hot pink ensembles that don't cover much. I have to admit that she's pretty good eye candy but I still didn't miss lines like, 'Harris was killed by some kind of thing that was nearly seven feet tall, had hands with claws on the fingers and walked on feet like I've never seen before.' That's a line from the police chief, who obviously hasn't seen Creature from the Black Lagoon. So now that we know who the monster is, where it came from and what it can do, all we need to know is how he will be taken down in the end, and, sure enough, that's the next scene. We head out into the desert so Johnny Longbow can demonstrate his aptitude for archery with self made equipment.

Now, it may seem that I've just outlined the entire film, complete with detailed spoilers, but no: we're only thirty minutes into an eighty minute picture, so we've really only just begun. Whether there's anything to come that we haven't already seen is open for discussion, but if you can't write the rest yourself then you really haven't been paying attention. It really isn't the what that makes this film noteworthy, it's the how, or perhaps the why, because it's hard to imagine why anyone would write anything so mindnumbingly unoriginal. Charles Sinclair and Bill Finger are the folks responsible for the screenplay, seemingly a partnership as they share most of the same credits. You may be able to gauge their imagination given that The Green Slime, their previous film in 1968, was about a substance from an asteroid that turns people into monsters. Sound familiar? Finger's claim to fame is that he convinced Bob Kane to change Birdman into Batman.

I'd like to say that at least this double act provided a consistent storyline, but while it does move inexorably towards its inevitable conclusion, it gets more and more painful as time goes by. Our manly hero gets to go to hospital and be introduced to polka dot pyjamas, Kathy seems to give up on any attempt at a facial expression and it's left to Johnny Longbow to explain to us exactly what we're watching. At least we can enjoy watching Gregorio Sala strut his stuff, though you might call it a strange form of enjoyment to watch a man struggle with gloriously inept dialogue and plot progression. Somehow he remains stunningly sincere even when talking utter gibberish: he's part William Shatner, part Adam West, part scary sociopath given that he never gives up on the cheerfulness. What a shame Sala never acted again! It would have been fascinating to see him take the lead in a TV series like Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I'd pay to have seen that.

Somehow he resonates with emotional energy even though he doesn't have a clue what body language is. For Sala it's all in the intensity, and that's joyous to watch in a number of the later scenes. He shows the police chief outlandish slides of a four hundred year old deerhide, telling a story about a 'demon lizard monster' who apparently raped the natives, if the coloured pencil drawings by schoolkids are anything to go by. 'I know what you're thinking,' he tells the chief. At the NASA exhibit he holds up Paul's moon rock to another so one can zap the other one. 'I wish I was kidding Mac,' he says. 'I'm not! Now there is an answer and I think I know what it is and it makes me sick to think about it!' It's all gloriously out of control dialogue, that fits the rest of the film because nobody really talks like the people talk in this picture. The lesser actors get their tongues twisted over their lines all the time because they obviously can't believe them either.

The film would have succeeded much more if most of them hadn't shown up to be filmed, thus elevating Sala's role in proceedings. As pleasing to the eye as Leigh Drake is, it didn't take long for me to wish that she hadn't shown up either. Her role could easily have been consolidated into Sala's without much trouble at all, merely without the hot pink number, of course. There really wasn't much there to begin with except short shorts and a couple of screams and Drake didn't add anything to that at all. In fact her lack of expression only served to lessen the character and ensure that all we saw were the legs while the reasoning part of our brains switched off. Beyond the psychedelia at the end, Sala is all that the film really has because we're never shown any of the reptilian kung fu (snake style, I presume) that would have saved it just a little. Maybe we can find Sala and dig him out of retirement to make a sequel. That's the in thing nowadays, right?