The world of exploitation film ripped open and laid raw for you to experience. From 70's grindhouse to current underground, it is all here. So ripe you can practically smell it.
EXCISION (2012) D. RICHARD BATES JR. ANCHOR BAY 1.85 This comedic, drama, horror film really misses the mark on most counts. It isn't that it is poorly made, far from it, it is the uneven tone that blows the whole thing.
The movie stars Amber Lynn-Mccord as a disheveled and clearly disturbed teen age girl. She lives a rich fantasy life in which she is beautiful, sexual and enjoys bloodlust. In real life she wants to be a surgeon, but her personality disorder is clearly getting in the way of high school. Her mom (in a VERY good performance by Traci Lords) is an overbearing bitch. But it is made clear she became that way from the lack of affection of her own mother. She also has a fatally ill little sister and an emotionally absent Dad.
I also have a long standing theory that any trailer that uses NINE INCH NAILS music is automatically better. Often NIN's Music is used in trailers to an effect that ends up making the movies look MUCH better than they actually are. 300, TERMINATOR SALVATION, THE AVENGERS (though that turned out pretty alright) and now EXCISION can be added to that list...
THE HANGING WOMAN (1971) aka TERROR OF THE LIVING DEAD aka RETURN OF THE ZOMBIES aka ORGY OF THE DEAD D. Jose Louis Merino TROMA DVD FULL FRAME
I have a special love for Paul Naschy and his films. In 2007 when the BCI releases came out I introduced his work to a very dear friend of mine that I unfortunately do not get to see often. The two of us came to love watching Naschy's movies together and over the years since it has become something we do together. Life has it's way of making things difficult and time has not allowed us to watch more of his movies since we looked at HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN near the beginning of this year. As part of my Halloween Horror Challenge I decided to look at THE HANGING WOMAN, released by Troma. I really wish my friend had been here for it.
THE HANGING WOMAN is clearly not one of Naschy's better vehicles. In fact he is only in it sporadically playing IGOR the local gravedigger with a penchant for kissing up the sleeping bosoms of maidens and touching up the corpse of his dead girl. The real plot deals with Serge (Stelvio Rosi) a count who has come to a sleepy town to claim the mansion left behind by his dead Uncle. He finds a house full of insanity with Uncle's former partner and his daughter conducting electric experiments on dead tissue in hopes of resurrection. Also living there is his Uncle's mistress who wants only to sell the mansion and get her mega-bucks. Serge fucks his way through the female cast while trying to figure out what is going on. Along the way the Doctor's daughter is found hanging in the graveyard, but she clearly did not die by her own hand. Eventually all roads lead to the fact his Uncle is still walking around killing.
The movie has a leaden pace that only livens up during the psychedelically shot sex scenes, and the few and far between gore scenes. The climax with the living dead is thankfully very effective with some incredible make up. Naschy is in the climactic scenes the most, so fans of the man have to wait to see him in action. The TROMA DVD is the most complete version of the movie possible, but it still looks like shit. While it is clearly cut together from several prints but not much remastering seems to have been done. Thankfully they went buck wild with the extras with a commentary, a bunch of interesting featurettes, trailers and a great spot on dubbing in Spain by Art Ettinger and Mike Maggot.
CRAZY LOVE aka LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL (1987) D. Dominique Deruderre MONDO MACABRO DVD 1.77
This Belgian produced film started life as a short film called "A FOGGY DAY" based on Charles Bukowski's short story "THE COPULATING MERMAID OF VENICE, CA" which the filmmakers made with money from the Belgian film commission. They were so happy with the results (even though they pulled a fast one on the film commission who thought they were getting a much more mild story) that they made the short into a feature film. To do so they took the main character and drafted out two more very "Bukowski" styled stories based on imagery from other stories and even bits of his life. What they ended up with is a film that the very hard to deal with writer, considered the best adaption of his work.
The film deals with one Harry Voss whom we meet at three distinct moments of his life. First at age twelve at the movies where he has fallen in love with a beautiful screen princess. His world view of love, romance and even sexuality is formed on this storybook notions. But the next 24 hours all of that will be torn down as he spends time with an older, hornier, neighbor boy who takes it upon himself to teach Harry to ropes of sexual misadventure. Firstly explaining to him what "fucking" is, then setting their sights on several girls and women throughout the town for the both of them to try to conquer. Naturally, it never really goes well and is all very confusing to young Harry, ending with him seeing a lot more of his new friend that he wants to see, and much more of human sexuality than he needed to know about.
We meet him again seven years later on the day of his high school graduation and he has grown into a depressive young man. The song 60's hit song "Love Hurts" plays on the radio as the camera pans over to reveal his older face which is covered with hideous acne. Pus ridden, pimples so bad that he looks like a monster right out of a 50's sci-fi movie. He gets on a bus and adults try not to star eat him, but little children have no compunctions about leering right at his face. He doesn't go to his graduation out shame, but his best friend convinces him to go to the final dance to attempt to profess his love to the pretty girl in class he has written a poem for. Naturally that doesn't go well either. But his best friend being the sort that he is arranges for the class floozy to put out for the both of them in a car in the parking lot, but she has not seen his scarred face either.
We meet both of these boys again another seven years later and they are worse for the wear. Harry Voss is now a raging alcoholic. His acne is gone, but clearly so is much of his sanity. His best friend is just back from several stints in prison and they are together again after many years. They start a fight in the local bar so they can steal a bottle of gin and hit the streets together. They see a bagged up corpse being hauled out of the hospital, and put a challenge to each other for some mischief, stealing the body and taking it home. But when Harry unzips the body bag and discovers it is the remains of a very beautiful woman, everything changes for him. Suddenly the last chance for any kind of love is lying in front of him...
CRAZY LOVE starts of kind of mirthful, even innocent and ends pitch black as we see how a lifetime of rejection, disappointment and hollowness has driven this man to complete nothingness. Watching this man who believed in the power of love as child, to have it destroyed as his life goes on until there is nothing left but the cold booze bottle and a colder beautiful corpse woman is truly devastating. The final scene, without spoiling what it is, is both redemptive, haunting and profoundly sad.
This is one of the most bitter of all coming of age stories I may have ever seen. Yet it holds a lot of truth in how the lives of some people just never stop derailing. A bittersweet tragedy and horror story of love.
WARNING: Even for the material normally discussed and contained on this blog, the following pictures and video may be objectionable and disturbing. The following contains images of real death and embalming, so proceed with caution.
Orozco The Embalmer (2001) D. Tsurisaki KiyotakaCinema ObscuraS.O.V.
Widely considered to be one of the must brutal and in your face of the mondo-documentaries that has floated around the underground in recent years, OROZCO THE EMBALMER has gathered a reputation that's proceeded it. Mostly by gorehound death fetishists that don't understand, nor care enough to look beyond the guts being spilled on screen to see the spiritual, political or just plain human context they may be watching. All they want to see is bodies being ripped open and blood splashed all over the place. This movie delivers that in a matter of fact manner that puts films like FACES OF DEATH or even the turgid and offensive FACES OF GORE series to shame. But at the same time there is an exploration of a real person here, who does a very real job, in a very real place, that very much resembles hell on Earth.
Orozco is an embalmer in one of the poorest, most crime ridden grottoes in Columbia. It is not uncommon here to see someone gunned down in the street, or for cars to run someone over and reduce them to paste in some sort of drug fueled vendetta. A life of crime is basically the only way to survive in this place and people die all the time.
Even the stray dogs have to take time to get plastered up to heal after street warfare in Columbia.
Hell, even the stray dog's are not safe. Orozco's business is booming due to this. But at the same time, he understands that the people he serves are poor and suffering, so he charges less than the city hospitals for an embalming and he makes his services affordable to the people he lives and works among. He also hires as assistants people from the neighborhood, including a local mentally handicapped man and that man's son who he has basically almost adopted as his own and is training.
Orozco finishes dressing a dead child for a funeral, while the parent waits patiently in the wings.
But don't let all this selflessness fool you - Orozco is one grumpy son of a bitch. The daily grind of cutting people open for little pay obviously gets to him. He is an old man now, the lines of a life that has battered the shit out of him are etched on his face. He barely seems to blink, and his mouth is always down turned in a frown. He applies his trade in a swift and aggressive manner, cutting into the bodies he is working on as someone would expect a butcher to attack a side of beef. Chunking his knives into the flesh hard and fast, tearing into abdominal cavities to release bloated gases, pockets of settled blood, and sack after sack of gorged internal organs that are simply in his way. He is not performing an autopsy, his job is to relieve the body of the artifacts that are going to start decaying soon that will prevent the body from being in a funeral service. He might even go as far as to apply make up if he deems it necessary for that particular person, though he has pretty strong opinions on that matter, expressing about one corpse "why paint this person up like a clown now, when that never looked like that when they were alive?" The brain is always removed and replaced with newspaper because that rots away the quickest and will smell immediately. It is all a daily grind for him: body after body, old men, women, and occasionally little babies or children. Sometimes he will notice things the hospitals or morgues have missed, such as an elderly corpse on his table he clearly notices had been abused while alive, but the cause of death does not indicate such. But he steps away from saying anything, claiming that to do so would only start trouble. Orozco was in the military when he was much younger but refuses to talk about it, as well as his time in the police. He clearly saw things that were quite awful, illegal things, murderous things. Things in which to spend his days among the dead is not terribly different.
A typical way someone ends the day in Columbia now and again.
The documentary crew visit one of the local hospital morgues to watch how they do their embalming, which is no more high tech than Orozco. In fact, in some ways it is just as savage. They take more time in the clean up, with more make up and prep for the funeral, but the actual cutting up and discarding of parts it is no different. Still, the embalmer has no problem talking shit about Orozco and his team. In a weird and out of place bit, the documentary director begins to talk off camera to the embalmer about the corpse and how it has a "really pretty hairy pussy" which kinda comes out of nowhere. Once that is said, though, it does sort of make you notice that a lot of the camera work has included crotch shots of the corpses which seemed a bit unnecessary. And very, very weird.
Which leads me to the movie's biggest detriment, the direction. The movie has a truly fascinating subject with Orozco, and the actual town in Columbia, but the direction itself is beyond sloppy, with many long, useless montages of life in the street (all set to the same droning, repetitive music) that just pad out the movie. There is one long aside of a drug addict allowing the camera to follow him to a corner in an alley to smoke crack, that has nothing to do with the movie at all. Then there is that weird sort of leering sexual asides the movie takes form time to time, the worse being the bit at the hospital morgue, where the camera seems to linger on a corpses genitals or breasts just a bit too long, which seems really fucked up.
The brain is removed to prevent stink of decay during any services the family may ask upon.
When I mentioned this on a message board someone mentioned that this film started life as an episode of the DEATH FILES series in Japan which is just a Mondo Death footage series (and one of the most brutal and outrageous). That series is just footage of dead people, usually at accidents in third world countries (of which there is plenty of here) or murder sites (once again plenty of that here). One of the most famous of that series was an off shoot called DEATH WOMEN which is just that, random footage of the corpses of women at accidents, murder scenes, morgues etc. Seems this director cut his teeth working on those series, and then make some short "art" films called JUNK FILMS which were basically more of the same. Orozco was originally intended to be more of this until he got a hold of such a fascinating subject and it become something entirely new. And that saves it. The focus on Orozco himself gives it all context and form, as well a lot of social dynamic as he explains how these people live and die.
Certainly well worth watching if you can stomach it. But be warned it IS as rough as you've heard.
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