Forty Second Street Wish Fulfillment

Day four of the September Exploitation explosion movie two 

TIMES SQUARE (1980)
D. Alan Moyle
Paramount Pictures
1.85

This rather sticky, saccharine friendship drama has a few things going for it, not the least being the time capsule of the last breath of the Duece. If nothing else the movie can be enjoyed just for the scenery of Forty Second St in its last few years of glory before the theaters and porn shops were torn down and shuttered. The film also has a terrific early eighties soundtrack including tracks from Gary Numan, The Cars, The Cure, The Pretenders, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Roxi Music, so the soundtrack is consistently awesome as well. 


The story deals with a teen girl named Nikki (Robin Johnson who is really superb) a young delinquent with apparent mental disorders. She checks into a mental health clinic to get some brain tests at the same time as a Mayoral hopefuls daughter named Pamela Pearl (Trini Alvarado). Pearl spends most of her time day dreaming and writing poetry that she sends to the local late night DJ played by Tim Curry. Seems she also has some sort of mental disorder, that causes her to have some sort of dissociative fits. Naturally the girls bond and they run away from the facility and into the City, where they find a squat and begin to live together. This is where the movie becomes some sort of teenage empowerment fantasy as the girls, not only find jobs, but slowly become folk heroes as the DJ covers their disappearance on his radio show, encouraging them to be free. Eventually Nikki discovers she has real talent as a rock singer and they end up calling themselves the “Sleezy Sisters” inspiring a mini revolution among the bored and apathetic teens of New York to be unique and not take any shit(?).

The problem being that a lot of the progress they are making is clearly being born out of Nikki’s mental illness and need for fame and someone to love her. Her activities become more and more dangerous (the girls begin a trade mark of trowing TV’s off of tenement building roofs to get people’s attention) and she may even be responsible for the drowning death of her previous friend. 


As I mentioned earlier the movie’s biggest problem is that it creates a fantasy world for these girls to live in, that deflates the drama around them. For example they easily find work in a sleazy dive bar/strip joint even though both of them are clearly about fourteen years old. The owner (played by famous prison play write Miguel Pinero) agrees to not make them strip nor makes any sexual advances on them. In fact the big city, and Forty Second St. in particular, is kind of de-sexualized. All the porn shops are shown as are hookers and trannies, but no one makes any sexual advances on these teens alone in the city streets at any time. Their fantasy of living alone in the big city is never broken at all. They never go hungry, never get robbed, never get taken advantage of, never have problems getting anywhere. Things just fall into place for them unless adults of the cops are screwing it up.

So in a way it is almost an exploitation movie of teenage girl fantasy wish fulfillment about being a rock star, being alone in the big city and making that best friend that changes your life. It is a parable about how letting teens be who they really are, and not forcing psychiatry, drugs and the parents old fuddy duddy ways can make for a better and brighter future. Director Alan Moyle would basically remake this same movie in 1990 with a superior film in PUMP UP THE VOLUME, dropping the mental illness angle, and pumping up the angst. And once again using a terrific modern music soundtrack. 

Review © Andy Copp 

Whoever cut this trailer did a great job.

He's no day Laborer!

Day four of the September Exploitation Extravaganza

MACHETE (2010)
D. Robert Rodriguiz & Ethan Maniquis
20th Century Fox/ Troublemaker Studios
1.85

This long awaited feature film version of the fake trailer that premiered in the front of PLANET TERROR has finally hit the screens. Without a doubt it has lived up to the hype and was worth waiting for. What Rodriguiz and company have done here is create a loving homage to exploitation movies of the past while grafting it all into a very relevant political satire of current events that literally takes no prisoners. The satire is about as subtle as a frying pan to the face, but in this day and age of media saturation and 24 hour sound bites making all surrounding countries feel like they are breeding terrorists like cockroaches, subtle satire can hardly get through the noise. Some might accuse the movie of being a call to arms for the treatment of Immigrants in America, illegal or otherwise, and well, they very well could be right. Maybe some people need that kind f kick to wake up.

The rather complex (one might actually say convoluted) plot deals with our hero Machete (the great Danny Trejo) (I love that we get a glance at his birth records at one point and that is actually his real name!) who is double crossed working as a Federale busting evil crime lord Torrez (Steven Seagal in his best role in years and only villain role ever). Torrez viciously murders Machete’s family, ruins his job and leaves him for dead. Cut to several years later and Machete is now working the border as a day laborer just trying to make ends meet. At the border a lady named She’ -like Che' get it?- (Michelle Rodreguiz looking like she is spending hours in the gym) is running a Taco stand that is a front for a secret network that is helping Illegals get into America and get settled, find work, and get green cards. Sartana -Just like the famous Spanish gunslinger - (Jessica Alba) plays an young FBI Agent watching everyone at this border stop trying to make that big bust that will help her career. 

Meanwhile (oh yes there is a LOT of meanwhile!) Lt. Stillman (Don Johnson) has created a redneck Militia that is building up his own border patrols who think nothing of hunting down and murdering any and everyone they catch trying to cross into the States and video taping it for sport and later use. While on one late night sporting expedition we meet Senator John McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro) who is building his re-election campaign based almost solely on the the Illegal immigration issue and his scare tactics involving the border. His speeches and campaign videos are unfortunately not that far from reality as he compares Illegal immigrants to maggots and vermin that are infecting America and need to be exterminated. 

Enter Jeff Fahey who hires Machete to kill Senator McLaughlin for a hefty sum. Citing that his border plans will destroy his business in trade. But he double crosses Machete having him shot, and his own man wound the Senator so the public see Machete trying to take the shot. So now the public has seen a Mexican trying to kill the Senator, thus pushing home the idea that the Mexicans are trying to wage a war on the Senator and thus America. 


That’s where all the fun begins. From this point on the movie is nearly non-stop action set piece after another, with the violence levels turned up to the almost absurd (well past it in some cases). For a large portion of the movie the bad guys have no idea who they are dealing with, so they just barge in where ever Machete is at, never expecting he can pick up anything with a blade and make steak tar tar out of them.  Highlights including a Hospital shakedown where Machete has improvised weapons using autopsy tools and a nurses sash, or a cork skew and cooking thermometer can be put to reckless use. But we are talking about a movie that has at least a half dozen decapitations in the first five minutes, so to keep the pace the movie has to continually up the ante and for the most part it does.

In fact if not the for over the top sense of humor this might be one of the most brutal and violent studio movies ever released and could be unrelentingly grim. Crucifixions, decapitations, gutting, evisceration, faces chopped open, multiple shootings, limps hacked off, the list goes on and on. But the sense of humor is as sharp as the blades, keeping it all from being overwhelming. Hilarious moments such as the infomercial for Tom Savini’s Hit Man service are laugh out loud funny.

But at the movie’s core there is a lot of anger couched in the satire, spoof and lots of on screen fun. When Jessica Alba’s character screams out “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!!!” it is hard not to feel a strong resonance there. One voice that is almost never heard when this whole immigration debate is riled up is that of those who are in the thick of it. Those day laborers, those who have given their lives to come to the USA in spite of all odds. There are two sides to the debate, and naturally laws in place, but when people are being taken advantage of on both sides of the border AND being made to look like disease carrying vermin or being painted to be terrorists, there is bound to be a large amount of anger and frustration among those people. That anger is very loud and clear in            MACHETE .

In that way it is the perfect exploitation film. It serves up all the exploitable elements into a heady, undeniably entertaining stew. It is action packed, violent and sexy. But, not even at the core or under the surface, but right there in your face, it is raw, angry and political about an important issue too. The greatest exploitation films of the golden era, (SWEET SWEETBACK’S BADASSS SONG springs to mind off the top of my head, or any number of the anti establishment Vietnam era films like EASY RIDER) were like this. These are the films that become lamp posts of the times they were made in. Films that end up standing the test of time, that in twenty years they still have weight. When the big budget soulless junk have faded, these little exploitation movies still have meaning because they had the balls to tackle topics relevant to their core audiences. When they do it right, they are kick ass movies on top of it.

MACHETE gets it right on all counts. 

Review © Andy Copp

A Cinematic Thalidomide Baby

Day three of the Exploitation September challenge...

TEENAGE NURSES (1974)
D. Doug Collins (Constantine Zuba)/ Shaun Costello
Video X Pix
16mm Full Frame

This is among the weirdest movies I have ever seen, not only in the XXX field but in any genre. Thankfully SHAUN COSTELLO forwarded me an article he had written that gave me some history into the making of this monstrosity which shines a lot of light on the mind set that created it. But make no mistake there are no other movies quite like TEENAGE NURSES, it is a genre unto itself. And truly rewarding viewing for those who like to travel to the out most edges of cinematic weirdness.

The completely wrong-headed plot deals with the Bethesda Veterans Hospital during the waning years of the Vietnam war and the logical concerns of the craptastic entertainment for the suffering maimed soldiers there. A suitably insane Dr. Stein has brought in a group of horny Nurses to satisfy the needs of said patients. But he is also not happy about the USO shows that have been put on in the past so he has brought in a number of, well, frankly insane vaudeville styled acts for the pleasure of the suffering.

So between the bouts of up close and personal fucking we get jugglers, unicyclists, a snake charmer dressed in vinyl, a singing woman comedian, a lounge singer/ tap dancer and a ventriloquist comedian with a black dummy.  All of this book ended with a crack reporter in Groucho Marx glasses (played by Costello himself) giving us the rundown on the story, and screwing up his lines.  If you pay close attention you can spot HARRY REAMS, FRED LINCOLN and JAMIE GILLIS in blink and you miss them supporting roles. 

"Shaun Costello Himself as Groucho Marx"

Ultimately a through line plot finally emerges in the last reel about a soldier who has lost his leg in battle who feels he will not ever be whole again and one of the nurses tends to his sexual needs irregardless of his amputee status. Once again this character is played by Costello himself and the nurse is played by Laura Cannon who was in Shaun Costello’s classic FORCED ENTRY.  This last act sex scene is what makes the whole movie worthwhile as it actually manages to be quite touching, tender even amidst all the insane and moral chaos around it. While the movie at large is clearly a farce, designed to at once frustrate, or even thumb its nose at the audience to a degree (or maybe it is just a product drugs of the time period) this final scenes becomes even more effective because of it. Of course once the poor soldier is released and hit by a car it sort of negates the beauty of the scene preceding it...

"If the Republicans only knew this was part of the new Health Care Bill..."

The history of this involves director Doug Collins putting this together as a XXX comedy with lofty ambitions to involve musical numbers and the vaudeville bits. Naturally it did not sell. Years later after some legal trouble the movie was sold to Shaun Costello who shot more sex footage, the wrap around stuff and added some other things to make it more coherent and commercially viable to the adult crowd and unleashed it to the rain coat crowds. It only recently resurfaced on this dvd. 

 "Costello as the Amputee Soldier and Laura Cannon as Nurse Scarlett who tends to his needs in 

a surprisingly effective and tender scene."

Shaun Costello calls it his cinematic Thalidomide Baby. That about fits the bill as it is as twisted a porn film as you could imagine. It really doesn’t function as a porn film should as the sex scenes are edited and interrupted by the comedy and vaudeville acts. But the comedy doesn’t quite succeed because it is interrupted by the sloppy sex and blow job  close ups. The whole thing has a weird laugh track even though it is about Vietnam Veterans being hospitalized during the war giving it a bit of the same kind of feel the incest scene during NATURAL BORN KILLERS had (but twenty years earlier). But, and this is important, the movie is NEVER boring. there is always something weird and wacky going on. And the climactic sex scene is shot with a lot of care, and even some distance which shows that they were thinking about it at least a little bit. With the acting in that scene really selling it as well.

TEENAGE NURSES (which was originally called AN AMERICAN IN BETHESDA) is a bizarre curiosity item well worth checking out. The Video X Pix dvd looks about what you would expect for this kind of fly by night grab a stray print and dump it to dvd deal. Maybe one day a more impressive dvd will surface. 

Review © Andy Copp

This kind of animation haunts only my bowels...

Day two of the Exploitation Film Extravaganza presents...

THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO (2009)

D. Rob Zombie

Anchor Bay/ Starz

1.77 Anamorphic

This long in production animated exploitation in joked laden extravaganza owes as much to Scooby-Do as it does to the horror and exploitation that director Rob Zombie grew up with. It unfortunately is not nearly as intelligent as the average episode of said kid’s show. The idea here is not unlike Zombie’s first feature film HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES where he just threw all his influences into the cinematic blender and hoped it would all blend into some sort of entertaining cocktail. But unlike CORPSES which entertains almost on sheer passion and love of the genre, this just becomes annoying rather quickly, not matter how many genre references are made or cartoon titties are bounced into the camera.

"Bride of Frankenstein gets a little lip to lip action from the Creature From The Black Lagoon"

What little plot there is deals with the hero El Superbeasto a Wrestling movie celebrity who moonlights as a superhero and his bodacious busty blond sister Suzi X who is the real hero of the family. Together they fight monsters, zombies and what ever the hell else happens to be sliming around. Suzi is currently trying to dig up the severed head of Adolph Hitler from the zombie army while Beasto is trying to find the stripper kidnapped by Dr. Satan who intends to use her to become some super-demon who can rule the world. Stuffed into this whole mess is every conceivable in-joke, racial stereotype, sex gag, big tit gag, boner joke, and classic monster reference you can choke down. All with pretty terrible sub Trey Parker-esque songs the tell you what is happening on screen.

"Cartoon fetishism at it's very best?"

The design of the movie is very lovely with great animation; why the movie took so damn long to produce. The backgrounds and character design are always interesting to  look at and whenever a female character takes off her top suddenly the animation seems to get a little bit better spending more time on the bouncing breasts or undulating ass. But the writing is from the loins of an eleven year old, aimed directly at that level all the way around. I’m sure Rob Zombie feels he is living it up in the same vein as someone such as Ralph Bakshi, but there is nothing in this movie that holds a candle to even the worst of Bakshi’s work. Bakshi pushed boundaries and had something of interest to say. This is just the out of control libido and fascinations of an obsessed fan boy splashed out in colorful animation.

"It is okay to masturbate to cartoons. The Japanese do it all the time!"

That is not to say it isn’t amusing now and again. Occasionally there is a funny moment such as the cat-fight that climaxes the movie and the song explaining how it is okay to masturbate to cartoons because the Japanese do it all the time. Or the big giant monster chase/ destruction scene set to “yackety Sax “from Benny Hill complete with ladies getting their dresses ripped off. But when Zombie starts trotting out his own characters from his own movies for cameo’s the small favors the movie has already gained feel really slight indeed.

"In jokes are fine, but when Zombie starts throwing in his own characters, the jokes wear out their welcome."

I’m sure this is one big labor of love for Rob Zombie and he thinks it is a riot. But as a cohesive movie this really doesn’t work. To call it a mess is being kind.



Review © Andrew Copp

No actual Hitchiking going on.

A Month of Exploitation Film

I am going to attempt to do the old 30 films in 30 days thing again. This time 30 Exploitation films in the month of September. I'm getting a jump early with tonight's movie.

The rules are simple. I have to have never seen the movie before and it has to fit within the "Exploitation" genre. Now that is kind of wide and could possibly include blaxploitation, artploitation, sexploitation, or even porno. So I have a pretty easy palette to work with here. One thing is for sure there can be no horror, as that is being held for next month's challenge.

SCHOOLGIRL HITCHHIKERS (1972)

D. Jean Rollin

Grindhouse Experience Box Set Vol. 1

Pan and Scan

This light weight nudie, S+M yarn has very little substance to it. Just some pretty girls caught in a villa with some bad guys and a over a abundance of skin on display. The film looks to have been shot on less than a shoe string with all the action taking place inside the mansion or on the grounds with very minimal set ups or camera moves. Everything is kept very light and fun, with no real sense of danger or menace throughout the proceedings, with just a tiny hint of S+M to pepper to edges.

The story starts with two teenage girls camping in the woods named Monica and Jackie. Jackie has the worst wig in cinematic history. They discover this big empty mansion and decide to crash there for the night. We quickly learn their friendship has extended to a bit more as we watch them bed down for the night in each others arms. But soon Monica is up and around and discovers that there is a low rent gangster spending the night there as well, named Fred. Fred is a dead ringer for Tom Savini, if Savini was five foot one and had a handle bar mustache. For reasons beyond my comprehension Monica beds down Midget Savini and Jackie joins the fun too.

"Monica contemplates the ramifications of sexing up Midget Savini,"

The next morning the girls are on their way and Midget Savini’s boss, a curvasious, jack booted and slightly cross-eyed babe shows up wanting her package of jewels. Seems that they are missing so they find the girls thinking they must have stolen them. Soon they are stripping down poor Jackie and tormenting her with fire place tongs and cutting her horrendous hairdo. She looks about ten times better. Monica seduces a henchman and gets away to enlist the help of a dimwit Private eye and his cartoon outfit wearing side kick to try and get her girlfriend back. A craptastic shoot out ensues as well as a topless cat-fight. Lots of cat and mousing about who has the gun, and Midget Savini beds down the rest of the female cast (except his boss who watches and gets turned on) until Jean Rollin himself shows up to answer all the questions.

"The Private Eye's side kick cannot wait to get out of this silly outfit."

I honestly didn’t even notice who directed this during the opening credits, and they looked to be pseudonyms anyway. But about two thirds of the way through I found myself thinking this felt an awful lot like a Rollin movie. With the two teen female leads, the action taking place in an isolate villa, the lone sexual S+M torture scene, the softcore lesbian sex... Even some of the shots and set ups felt familiar. Then suddenly the man himself comes walking into the movie and I was like well that seems to settle that! After checking around online (the IMDB lists this in their adult database though it really is just barely a softcore movie) my suspicions were confirmed.

 

"Quite possibly the most misleading DVD cover art ever. There is no hitchhiking in the movie, and certainly no girls who look like this!

Without a doubt this is lower tier Rollin, even among his sex films. But at the end of the day it is diverting enough, the girls are pretty and have natural breasts, the dubbing is silly and it is all in all just a wisp of a thing that is nice enough to take your mind off of reality for a while. The print in the Grindhouse Experience Box Set actually looks better than the rest of the movies in that set. Which means it looks like crap, is cut, missing frames, scratched, etc. But still has strong color and is surprisingly watchable and has a stronger bit rate than the others in the set, so it doesn’t break up every few minutes while playing.

Review © Andy Copp

Since I cannot find a clip of Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, here is a clip from Rollin's Masterpiece FASCINATION.

Taming the Horses

THE HORSEMAN (2009)
D. STEVEN KASTRISSIOS
KASTLE FILMS
1.78 (HD)

Incredible debut feature film from Australia has a few bits of implausibility, but more than makes up for any tiny shortcomings with strong performances, taut direction, and pounding tension. Idiot viewers are going to pounce on this and call it torture porn because their cinematic vocabulary doesn't extend beyond whatever catch phrase they have read on the latest gossip website. But what we really have here, is a solid, old-fashioned revenge thriller. The kind of film the British excelled at making in the 70's often with actors like Michael Caine or even here in the states with our homeboy Charles Bronson as he got a bit older. This is lean, mean, violent as all hell, and one of the most impressive indie films to roll out in many a moon.

Peter Marshall plays Christian, a middle aged man that in the first scene we meet him, is beating the living shit out of another man with a crowbar in some out of the way flat. It seems he is a termite exterminator, or at least used that ruse to get into this place to get this guy alone. He gets some minor information out of the guy: That he has several video tapes that Christian wants, and that he knows several other guys fucked his daughter. Apparently this is on those tapes. From the stacks of other tapes all over the joint it is clear he is some sort of pornographer. After breaking the man's legs Christian sprays him, and the whole place, down with gasoline and sets it ablaze with the guy still alive inside. He goes outside, strips down, cleans up and drives off as it burns.

It seems that Christian's daughter was found dead by the side of the road from a Heroin overdose. Her body showed a load of other drugs in her, as well as semen showing she had sex right before death. Someone called in her location, so someone was with her and dumped her off to die. That same week he receives an anonymous videotape of her doing a gangbang porn movie where she is clearly stoned out of her mind during the whole thing. Christian sets out to find those involved and try to put his daughter's memory to rest.

On the face it is a simple set up, but it has a lot of subtleties that make it more complex. Christian takes to cutting himself the minute he watches the tape. At first not even understanding why he does it. Each time he finally gets to one of the people involved and has them at his mercy, often torturing them screaming for them to tell him more information, they all tell him the same thing; That she was there of her own free will. That no one made her shoot the movie, that no one forced her and that she was getting paid. He can never accept it of course and it goes from bad to worse every time. Naturally it was not as easy as that, but there is that fundamental truth that she was making the porn film of her own free will.

On the surface the movie is unfortunately more than a little anti-pornography, if you want to read it that way. But it seems to me that it is just a device to propel the story, more than a commentary on the industry itself. The characters are not exactly industry insiders, but a bunch of nasty criminal wanabees, and they could just as easily have been drug dealers, gamblers, dog fighters, or any other nefarious underground industry. As the film progresses any sort of commentary it might be making is left behind as the thriller aspects move to the forefront with more vigorous violence, beatings, murders and vengeance being the order of the day.

In fact as the film moves into the third act, it becomes much more of an aggressive exploitation revenge thriller, where as the first two thirds were a bit more of a cerebral, though no less violent, film. The last third moves the film to an isolated location with the REALLY bad guys, and lets loose with the extreme violence the movie had been keeping in its hip pocket up until then. Some audiences will probably tune out at this point as it gets pretty grim and unbearably violent. It also goes a bit too far over the top with Christian changing from an everyman type victim/hero to an unstoppable killing machine who is able to fight off a room full of guys with his bare hands. A few too many times credibility gets stretched just to keep it moving along. Never broken, but stretched.

But thankfully the velocity of the thing is so ferocious that these kinds of things are not there long enough to be focused on. I actually saw a commentary on IMDB where someone said the movie was too slow... I can't get my head around what they would consider a fast moving movie then as this thing moves along at a breakneck pace, never really letting you catch your breath. Maybe they were commenting on the small character moments, the very things that make the movie so powerful, such as a small subplot where Christian picks up a runaway hitchhiker who in some ways replaces his daughter on his journey. They have some heartfelt conversations along they way, that make what he is doing feel all the more bloodthirsty. Or maybe the moment when he finally brings himself to dump his daughter's ashes into a river, thus letting her memory go? Or maybe a tiny little moment like right before he snaps for the first time and he is talking to the distributor of the porn film, whom he has discovered was there during the shooting and he quietly asks him "did she smell good?" It is these small, quiet moments, which are actually pretty few, that make the rest of the movie "hurt" so much.

Far from perfect, but still really solid and impressive and well worth seeing. Recommended!



Review © Andy Copp

Tinto Brass will have make you HOWL

THE HOWL (L'URLO) (1969)
D. TINTO BRASS
CULT EPICS
1.78

Most cult film fans know Tinto Brass either as the embittered director of CALIGULA (1978) or as the director of many an elegant softcore sex flick enamored with the female ass. His very early experimental, political assault films have been all but impossible to see up until very recently. Thanks to the fine folks at CULT EPICS we can finally have a look at these essential missing links in this passionate Italian filmmaker's filmography. But be forewarned THE HOWL (and the companion piece ATTRACTION - to be reviewed at another time-) are quite unlike his other films in any way shape or form.

From the very opening moments it is completely obvious we are not in the same playing field as the films we have come to expect from Mr. Brass, or any other movies from the Italian film industry of the late sixties in fact. There are some parallels to French agitprop cinema such as MR. FREEDOM and much of the American underground cinema that was flourishing at the time, but even at that, there is a distinct and assaultive flavor that rises from the first few frames of THE HOWL.

The movie begins with a young, beautiful woman named ANITA (Tina Aumont) quickly and desperately cleaning herself off in the shadows telling herself over and over "It's a trap. It's a trap" intercut with a young man explaining to the police that he is there to pick her up. Apparently she is some sort of young revolutionary who has been arrested and he is there to bail her out. Their scene is shot/edited in insanely fast cuts, and through horrendous distorting lenses that are often used for peepholes or looking glasses. Some shots shift from B/W to color. She explains to the young man who the police stripped her and "caressed her" with phallic objects while we are intercut with the flashback of the police strip searching her and raping her with a nightstick. This prompts the man to propose to the Anita. He squirrels through his datebook,riffling off days that are filled with work dates, and other bits of trivia until arriving at Sunday where there are a few hours they can actually marry.

They are at a makeshift alter in front of a delapitated building, Anita in Mime make up the wedding ceremony in progress. Anita becomes distracted, frightened and then runs away leaving her new husband to be at the Alter. She hops on a bus that is being pursued by a dozen or so police officers screaming for violence and blood. On the bus she meets a man named Coso (Gigi Prioetti) who explains to her how he is destruction incarnate, a killer, wiseman, saint sinner, etc. etc. He fucks her in the back of the bus then everyone on the bus goes crazy and destroys it before the bumbling police can. Together Anita and Coso will go on a journey into a phantasmagorical landscape of nightmares, political charges, sexual exploration, power struggles and emotional destruction. They will visit a brothel where every single sexual fetish and desire will be metted out from orgies, animal killing, to necrophilia to a family of self appointed saints who are actually cannibals.

The most nightmarish segment occurs in the mid section of the film when they come across a small section of town that is overrun by soldiers who are ruthlessly executing bystanders for no reason at all, while being following by a man dressed in a barrel and an American flag hat. The soldiers eventually corner Anita in an abandoned building while Coso is held up in conversation with a "left wing radical" talking about literally nothing. She is emerges from the building stripped and bloodied, clearly having been gang raped. During all the savagery of the preceding scenes is intercut with actual atrocity footage of WWII and the Korean War. .

After leaving this town they follow the broadcast rantings of a dictator to a military operation to find a literally wind up midget broadcasting the rantings of Stalin and Hitler with footage of the liberation of various prison camps being screened behind him. He falls and dies so Anita and Coso take up the broadcast, screaming for revolution instead.

After this point the movie sort of loses steam though with the duo sort of just wandering about from light hearted situation to situation none of which that have the emotional or visceral weight or impact of the earlier scenes. They dress as religion icons and steal a boat that they quickly crash. They get picked up and put on shore and end up in an insane asylum which they quickly ascend to leading, but Coso gets bored and they leave. They end up at a commune that resembles a hippie village with big boobed women wandered about free woshipping the sun and nature. etc. etc. etc.

Finally Anita finds herself being lured back to her wedding alter and Mime make up with her to be husband. Was this all a flight of fancy as she is about to be married? A commentary on the futility of love in the face of revolution and the breakdown of society?

What THE HOWL is, is about twenty five years before it's time as it predates the punk movement and MTV with the rapid fire editing, insane costumes and overt stylization that would become the norm in the age of rock videos. The films of Alexandro Jodorwosky and Derek Jarman would all come to use such material with a few years, and the French New Wave was toying with some of the ideas but not with the same viciousness that Tinto Brass shows here. The flirtation with near hardcore sexuality and pornography is also something that would not come into vogue until several years later.

While not always a successful film, THE HOWL is always a fascinating and original one. The CULT EPICS DVD looks as nice as a totally lost film can be expected too, with lots of film damage here and there and an occasional bit of washed out image. But the very experimental nature of the film itself kind of renders that kind of complaint almost moot as it seems to fit the fabric of the piece itself just fine. There is a commentary which I have not had a chance to listen to as of yet.

Review © Andy Copp