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.
MORE BRAINS: A RETURN TO THE LIVING
DEAD (2011) D. Bill
Philputt. CAV RELEASING
From the
creative team behind the award winning four hour documentary NEVER
SLEEP AGAIN on the NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST. series comes this in depth
exploration of THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. But unlike that film
this is only a look at the first film in the series. At least as far
as the first movie itself is concerned. Once you get into the extras
they delve into the first two sequels at length (and for my money get
a little more interesting, but more on that in a moment).
So
all the expected criminal minds are present from producer Tom Fox
from the original screenwriter John Russo, the entire cast and lots
of crew people to even Suzi Q to talk about her musical contribution.
In fact the only missing contributor is obviously Dan O'Bannon
because he had recently passed away (but there is a lengthy interview
with him as a DVD extra) and oddly enough Tobe Hooper who had
originally signed on as director by left the project before shooting
began and then Dan O'Bannon signed on and totally recreated it from
the ground up. Apparently there is some animosity there.
For
me there wasn't a ton of new information, but then again, I have
followed the film for years, through the various video and dvd
incarnations AND read and re-read the CINEMAFANTASTIC article that
went into major depth about the troubled production back when the
movie was released. But for fans who haven't spent years reading
about the film there is a lot of news here. Stuff I found of interest
was finally getting to hear the controversy about the effects work
from the mouths of those involved and seeing actual pictures of F/X
man Bill Munns' aborted work. I couldn't believe how truly awful it
was, for years I read about his dismissal from the film, but couldn't
believe it could be as bad as the people involved claimed. He is
interviewed here and admits it is not his best work, but the pictures
tell the story and it is, well, embarrassing. I give the man props for
being willing to take part in this documentary and own up to what
went down.
The actors have a lot of fun stories, but oddly
enough not very many people have a lot of nice things to say about
Jewell Shepard, and she herself comes off pretty jaded about the
production. There is also some pretty insane stories about Glu
Gulager not getting along with Dan O'Bannon including him going after
him with a ball bat and a big metal can.
Not shockingly John
Russo down plays the successful nature of the film in his interviews
where it is clear he just doesn't get it, the humor or what they were
trying to do with the movie. The mind boggles at what kind of immense
piece of crap this would have ended up as if he and his buddy's would
have stayed at the helm. He talks at length about how he
would have opened the movie, which ended up in his raping and
pillaging of the 30 Anniversary of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
The extras include fairly in depth
explorations of Part 2 and Part 3. Part 2 sounds like an abortion
from the get go, from the fact that director Ken Weiderhorn who was
hired because he had done a few other horror films, said on set he
didn't like making horror. Though that entry had probably the best
actual effects of the three it is the most uneven tone wise. It is
basically a kids film, the comedy is all over the place and it seems
the the set was miserable at best. The actors all talk about how they
did not have a good experience being there. They also all talk about
how terrible the script was.
Part 3 has a lot nicer things to
be said as everyone seems to have had a much more pleasant time on
that set and agree it is more unique film. Though the film was
basically green lit from a farming out of ideas until they found one
that stuck. Everyone involved agreed that an undead love story was a
fantastic approach that took the series into a new direction.
The
interview with Dan O'Bannon is bittersweet at best now that he isn't
with us. But his enthusiasm is infectious and his final walk off line
about loving all his fans is quite beautiful. It is a sentiment that
everyone should remember about being famous.
If you are a fan
of this series there is no reason you shouldn't pick this up.
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.
DAMNED IN THE USA (1991) D. Paul Yule Made For British TV Full Screen
Fascinating and well done documentary made at the height of the moral panic fueled by the American Family Association attacking the National Endowment For The Arts in late 1989 and 1990. The artists that got their ire up were primarily Andres Serrano, the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and oddly enough rap group 2 Live Crew who ended up getting the most mileage out of the whole situation. This documentary is broken up by the on-stage comedy of Jimmy Tingle, and at first it seems like a really bad idea to have a comedian break up the proceedings to at levity to the proceedings, but it actually works well because his comedy is very topical and fairly caustic in keeping with the material at hand. His stand-up is used more as a Greek chorus to the points being made than as a cool down place to laugh.
First off, we meet Donald Wildmon, the man who started the whole ball rolling with his American Family Association, a Christian watchdog group that spends millions of hours watching TV and movies and listening to music to catalog all the indecency and offense to Christians. The idea is to put pressure on the networks, studios and advertisers to get them to back off because Christians want cleaner entertainment. Wildmon, sometime circa 1989, gets wind of Andres Serrano's controversial photograph "Piss-Christ" and wages war. He gets even more pissed off when he discovers that Serrano and many of the galleries at which his work has been shown have received grants from the National Endowment For The Arts and alerts uptight Senator Jessie Helms. Soon all hell is breaking loose on the Senate Floor as Healms and fellow conservative prick Alfonse D'Amato attack Serrano, The NEA, and pretty much art in general in an attempt to get the NEA shut down, as well as much of the "offensive" art censored.
Some of the most frightening, yet unquestionably amusing, moments in the documentary are of Helms and D'Amato freaking out when faced with the work of Serrano and most importantly the gay photographs of Robert Maplethorpe. When D'Amato throws some of the photos to the ground in anger declaring the "absolute garbage!" you can't help but to laugh at his outburst. Helms is much more savvy as he takes the nastiest of the Maplethorpe pieces and takes much time explaining how explicit, agonizing, and degrading they are, then explains how he can only hold them up for a split second because the TV cameras "will catch this obscenity".
The other side, thankfully, get their say, too, starting with Serrano who just seems confused by all the fuss. He mentions that he was raised Catholic and that it is his own business to use the iconography of his own faith to explore in his artwork. The documentary shows some of his other work that actually would be more offensive had the people trying to be outraged taken the time to look at what it actually was. But they missed the photos of come shots flying across the room in the hurry to attack the statue of Jesus being defiled.
A huge portion of the documentary surrounds the incident in Cincinnati, Ohio when the Contemporary Arts Center was temporarily shut down and its director arrested for displaying the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. Seven of his photographs were seized as obscene, including pictures of Maplethorpe himself with a bullwhip up his ass, two men engaging in water-sports, and the most controversial of the photos, two involving children with nudity. Not explicit sexuality or activity, just nudity.
Lastly, we explore the case of rap group 2 Live Crew and their album "As Nasty As They Wanna Be," which was declared obscene in several parts of Florida in 1990, resulting in several record store owners jailed for selling it. Eventually the groups lead singer and business owner Luther Campbell was arrested for obscenity for performing the material and lewd conduct on stage. A national free speech firestorm brewed, with 2 Live Crew becoming synonymous with freedom of expression. The irony here being that their music was pretty bad. Had this whole incident not happened they would have been a novelty act that had a small fan base and would've never made it big in the rap world. Musically they are nothing special and their raps are incredibly weak, even for the lightweight late eighties. They didn't create a song worth listening to until their rebuttal to the system that crucified them with the tune "Banned in the USA," but even then they lifted almost the entire musical accompaniment from Bruce Springsteen.
As I write this, President Obama has earmarked fifty million dollars toward the National Endowment for the Arts as part of his stimulus plan for the country. A good portion of that is supposed to help art programs in schools, after-school art programs, neighborhood arts programs ect., but thanks to the likes of FOX NEWS, the media is being told the money is being used by the NEA for "smut projects" and filthy "pornographic art" of which they found a whooping TWO examples: A playhouse in San Francisco running an off-color sex parody play, and a 501 C-3 funded movie theater that has played, god forbid, the movie THUNDERCRACK as a midnight show! FOX NEWS even played clips of THUNDERCRACK while the bubble-headed bimbo, robotic newscaster cried out "THIS IS WHAT YOUR TAX DOLLARS ARE GOING TO!!!"
I fucking WISH my tax dollars were going to something like that. In fact, I wish specifically my tax dollars were going to a restoration of THUNDERCRACK so it can finally get a dvd release. I'd be thrilled about that and I know a LOT Of other people who would be too.
And interview with Robert Mapplethorpe (NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!)
Sexual Freedom In Denmark (1970) *** - This new DVD from After Hours Cinema finally releases one of the most famous of the 'white coat' porn documentaries from the era right before porn became legal. In the moment in time when this was made a filmmaker had to justify the sex on screen by surrounding it with social and scientific wraparounds to make it seem redeeming to the public. The term 'white coat' is from the fact that usually a faux scientist or doctor in a white coat appears on screen rattling off factoids to support the sex. This film doesn't have a doctor. Instead we get an intrepid reporter on assignment in Denmark circa 1969 when all pornography was legalized. All pornography. He goes about asking people how they feel about the proliferation of pornography and most seem to think it is a good thing. He goes on to ask a teen age girl about her sexual practices, her opinions on birth control and finally porn. Her answers show a positive, well adjusted attitude to all things sexual. He then visits the set of a porno film with a gaggle of giggling females. he breifly talks to the director, weilding a microphone that looks more like a giant food mixer. he finally gets to talk to the naked girls about there relationships, how old they where when they started having sex, if they make a living with the work and if they think that pornography is okay. Once again the attitude is pretty positive. A different narrator gives us factoids claiming that since the ban on porn was lifted sexual crime has lowered by 25% in Denmark. He also says that most of the sales of sexual materials now go to the tourist trade. Cut to a woman in a sex shop putting away a penis enlarger and gigantic fake vagina. The rest of the movie movie is mainly dealing with other forms of sexuality such as nudism or strip joints. I.E. excuses to show big tit gals shaking their stuff. There is a bit on hippie body painting that has some gorgeous busty girls that will knock your socks off. Then about two thirds of the way through it flies full throttle into mondo film territory as it focuses on the body, reproduction and disease. A close up of a syphilis ridden penis is sure to sober you up fast. A run down of the male and female anotomy/physiology includes so many micro close ups of both sets of genitals that it becomes almost like surgery. Though the gal doing her Kegal exercises is pretty fascinating to watch. Then the last ten minutes become the only real pornographic content in the movie was it becomes an 'marriage manual' on different positions that a couple can have sex in. this segment isn't really erotic, But it IS really informative. Especially the information about having sex while pregnant. Oh yeah there is some startling footage of births, including a breech birth, that could be a bit much for wimps and expectant moms. The last image is beautifully enough, Uschi Digart and her fabulous bosoms. Though this functioned as pornography upon its release in 1970, iti s really much more of a Mondo/Documentary style sideways look at sex with a very little titilation thrown in. It sits nicely along side something like Mondo Cane more so than say Deep Throat. the new DVD looks great, with the print being extrordinarly clean and blemish free. After Hours finally did what fans have been asking by putting an original aspect ration 1.33 edition on disc #1 and the reformatted 1.78 edition on disc 2. So you get a choice instead of cropping like in some instances. There is a second feature from the same director, John Lamb, called Sexual Liberty Now which mainly focuses on the government's investigation into pornography. but I need to watch it still. A really nice disc of an interesting time capsule. First time seeing this.
There used to be a trailer for this on You Tube, but SURPRISE it is gone now.
