NECROMANCER (1988)
D. Dusty Nelson
IMAGE DVD
Full Frame
Late 80's deviltry cross bred with a rape revenge movie never really gels, but is consistently entertaining in the bad film from the 80's way. Elizabeth Kaitan (her billed as Elizabeth Cayton same pronunciation) stars as Julie Johnson a college acting student with a shady past. She had an affair with her sleazy acting teacher (played by Russ Tamblyn). But she is free and clear of that now with a (supposedly) good boyfriend and a future. One night while working late a trio of assholes break into her workplace to find the evidence of her infidelity. It is never really explained why they would care though. But they catch her there and one of the guys viciously rapes her while the other two either hold her down or watch.
So Julie's best friend takes her to the local witch to get some supernatural revenge but they run out during the ceremony. Little do they know the spell is already cast and anyone who hurt Julie is going to pay. And Julie is going to get naked, a lot.
Completely chinzy in the depiction of the supernatural the movie falls back on Kaitan being nude to keep viewers attention. It is a winning idea and works well because the demon she becomes at the point of murder looks like a bowl of jell-o with teeth.In one shot you can clearly see where the demon's make up glove ends and the real arm of the actor begins.
This is the kind of movie you would have seen on USA Network's UP ALL NIGHT back in the late 80's. Cheap, cheesy, jut sleazy enough and with some crappy monsters. In other words it isn't good, but it is perfect drunken late night fodder.
Below is footage of the highlights from the movie... in Spanish. That wacky you tube!
Review © Andrew Copp
GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE aka GHOULIES 3 (1991)
D. John Carl Beuchler
LIONSGATE DVD
Full Frame
There is no denying the GHOULIES movies are some retarded shit. Each one gets dumber as the series goes on, but they are consistent in their lunacy. You get what you pay for with a GHOULIES movie. I mean how can you expect anything else when the poster art is a little GREMLINS rip-off monster climbing out of the toilet.
But I admit to a soft spot for them. I caught the first two for the first time only recently when THIS-TV played them back to back last October. I shocked myself by how much I enjoyed them. They were dumb as hell, but kinda charming. Especially in this day and age of CGI overload, little blatant puppet creatures wrecking havoc is very entertaining.
This entry has the F/X creator John Carl Buechler taking the directorial reigns and he goes all out to try and prove he is not some F/X guy with no directorial chops. We end up with ANIMAL HOUSE on a fraction of the budget with gooey never convincing monsters running amok. he jams every conceivable gag you can think of on screen and then some. Nothing is too low or stupid for this movie! It actually becomes kind of admirable by the end.
The local college is having their annual "Yank War" in which the competing fraternities try to out do each other with new and crazy pranks. One Frat brother (who is unfortunately channeling Pauley Shore) finds an old Ghoulies comic book that contains the incantations to bring the little bastards to this realm. Various people almost read it aloud until angry teacher Ragnar (Kevin McCarthy who is clearly never afraid to sink as low as the material calls for) actually does it. He sets the Ghoulies in motion, YOJIMBO style to make each frat think the other one is doing the nasty stuff they are responsible for. There's shower scenes, pillow fights, a panty raid and lots of naked women (which was missing in the previous PG-13 entries).
The Ghoulies themselves are never impressive or even very good effects. But Buechler embraces that and has them cracking jokes, talking, walking around and in a few scenes swinging giant hammers and golf clubs. It becomes really surreal, especially once he has them put clothes on, dressing like Fraternity assholes. My girl friend walked through the room while I was watching this and was taken aback by how CUTE they were. And she is right. Especially the one wearing the ball cap.
I should hate myself for enjoying this as much as I did, but I refuse to live with regrets. It is dumb as the law allows, and funny as shit. I watched the edition in the LionsGate 8 film horror pack and it looked really good to me. But don't pay the insane prices assholes who horded that DVD are asking. Now that Halloween Season is upon us it is finally showing up all over at K-Mart and Walmart stores for $5 like it was always intended.
Watch for a supporting role from Jason Scott Lee who would only a couple years later be playing Bruce Lee in DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY and would go on to many action roles. Here is a skinny, geeky Frat brother.
Review © Andrew Copp
THE COLLECTIVE VOL 4 (2012)
D. Various filmmakers
JABB PICTURES
This dvd collection of short indie films, all by different directors is a lot of fun. As with any collection it is a hit and miss bag, but the good outweighs the bad here. Each filmmaker was given an EMOTION to use as the spring board for their film. Building the narrative around it. We watched this at our INDEPENDENT SHADOW CINEMA screening so I ended up watching the films completely out of order as they appear on the DVD, so this list does not represent the actual order.
101 TAYLOR ST opened the show for us and it was a good place to start. Directed by Jabb Pictures Jason Hoover the emotion taken on here is DENIAL (arguably not an emotion as much as act but whatever). The film is designed almost like a documentary with a droning narration telling us the story of an elderly woman who turned out to be one of they most prolific serial killers of the mid west. The film is constructed of a series a very well shot tableaux of the area's landscapes. It is the most experimental film in the package and is entirely effective. It creates a deep seated mood. The emotion should have been DREAD because the movie builds plenty of it.
Next up is HAPPY HOOKER BANG BANG from filmmaker David Paul Bonnell. He follows it up later with a second installment. The two emotions he uses are DESIRE and ENVY and he blatantly names his characters after the emotions. The first segment of this hooker duo starts out well enough with two roomates arguing about work. The more worldly of the two is a hooker and her plain friend is out of work and envy's her friends ability and money. Soon she is sneaking around, pretending to be Desire and gets tied to a bed about to be raped. The short had been straight forward and serious up to this point. But then it turns into chicks with guns comedy, letting it down. Hard.
The second installment HAPPY HOOKER BANG BANG: A LOVE STORY dispenses with any resemblance of seriousness for a straight up comedy. Some of it is kind of funny (The pimp character, Desire pulling a bomb out of her snatch) but over all, even at ten minutes it becomes kind of tiresome.
Next is LUKE 1:17 directed by 14 year old Dakota Meyer and it is one of my favorites of the volume. The emotion here is HATE and it is a decidedly serious segment with no supernatural trappings. Two brothers are trying to get by in the emotional wreckage of their Father murdering their mother and ending up in jail. The film feels like the best of the DOGMA 95 movies with naturalistic performances and shooting style. The climax is more an emotional gut punch than a visceral one and that is why it works. This kid has more of a grip of the mechanics of film than most people twice, or three times his age.
CONTRITION by Jim Dougherty is one of the strongest visually. But the story is ultimately very slight. Basically a werewolf story told in flashback. A geneticist accidentally creates a wolfman who turns on her family. This one clearly had the biggest budget of any of the movies and uses it well. It just could have stood another script draft to bring it all together.
FLASH OF WIRE by David Ross is a very interesting little movie. Taking the art film approach to explore SCHADENFREUDE (The emotion of taking pleasure in the pain of others). Shot in Black and White and using Greek Mythology as a reference point the film it follows a man at the dentist explaining his dreams. Ultimately everyone in the film comes to represent Greek Gods. It is a brave approach to the genre material. Apparently part of it was actually shot in Greece too.
James Manning directs the ghost story DEATH DO US PART. Easily the weakest entry (despite a fetching lead who has no problem getting naked). A house is haunted by the couple who died there and the investigator slowly becomes sexually enamored with the place. Hence why the emotion here is LUST. The segment is just way too leisurely paced for the inconsequential pay off.
FRANKIE is Jason Hoover's shot at GRIEF and is the one that has split audiences from the reviews I have read and at our screening as well. The most viscerally violent of this volume, it is one long take, with the camera circling around the protagonists, as they are tied up, interrogated and tortured by some guys they may or may not have wronged. For the most part it is quite disturbing and unsettling, it is only let down by the improv acting that works most of the time, but falls back on just saying "fuck" over and over.
Bryan Wolford’s MYCTOPHOBIA is largely very solid, grounded by a very good performance from the lead actress Kitsie Duncan. The movie deals with a woman who has an otherwise normal life but is crippled by her fear of the dark. Her therapist tells her to try getting used to the dark a little at at a time, so when her electric goes out it seems her madness will set in. But what she is unaware of is there is a very good reason to be afraid of the dark. This segment is only marred by some so so CGI. Otherwise it is one of the strongest of the set.
Finally TRUST is explored, in the form of misguided trust in the best movie of the set EPIDEMIC by Dustin Mills. It deals with an outbreak of some sort of viral infection. But we witness it through one characters slowly becoming sick until he finally calls on the government for help.
The one consistent annoyance for me was the filmmakers over reliance to CGI effects, 90% of them not well executed. MYCTOPHOBIA is probably the only one that called for those effects, but the others would have been much better served by just doing practical effects.
Review © Andrew Copp
NINJAS (2010)
D. Dennison Ramalho
http://dennisonramalho.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/16/
Widescreen
I have wanted to see this short film by Brazilian filmmaker Dennison Ramalho for a long time. When he finally posted it to his blog I got the chance. It lives up to the long term desire to see it, as it is one of the most brutal and unsettling pieces of cinema I have seen in a while.
The movie begins with a preacher giving his sermon in typical over the top fashion. The entire congregation disperses leaving one very religious man. He witnesses as the Jesus stature comes to life and steps down off the cross. Fully nude and his stomach rotten and falling open. This man named Jailton is about to have his faith tested.
Jailton is a cop, but not a particularly good one. During a chase of a drug pusher he gets confused and shoots a kid instead. His partner helps him plant a gun so it looks like he did nothing wrong. But Jailton is a moral man is is haunted by this killing. Seeing the ghost of the kid in his water tank, in his house etc.
Finally his supervision shows up and informs Jailton they had switched the body and no one can trace anything back. He explains this is what cops do. Take care of each other. They ask him out on a night run that will help "clear his name" but when the cops all put on masks and claim they are "Ninjas" he know s something bad is about to go down. Several corpses and a lot of spilled blood he will be proven right.
This scant movie (only 25 min, actually 21 minus credits) packs a lot of mean-spirited power into the short running time. There is some violence in the last few minutes that will leave you agape and slack jawed at how miserable it is.
Ultimately the movie is about corruption. Corruption of the church, of the police force etc. It is like it is saying if those institutions are like Ninjas how do we stand a chance as regular people.
Review © Andrew Copp
STRAIGHT INTO DARKNESS (2004)
D. Jeff Burr
FULL FRAME
This horrors of way style film from director Jeff Burr is a pretty impressive accomplishment. Though an intimate and small character driven film the logistics of the movie spread out all over with lots of big set pieces, cast and production design. It is far from a small movie.
The film opens in 1945 with two soldiers being taken to the prison camp for desertion. Losey (Ryan Francis) is a quiet and demure man, with hard morals about peace. The other man Demming (Scott Macdonald) is loud, cruel and the direct opposite. Through a twist of fate they both of them end up free of the MP's and go on a cross country trek to escape. The eventually land at a small villa with an elderly man (David Warner) his wife and many small children they have trained to be killers. A Nazi tank battalion corners them all and a huge fight takes up the last quarter of the film.
The film is certainly reminiscent of Burr's final segment in the anthology film FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM (aka THE OFFSPRING) in which during the Civil War a troupe of children survived by being vicious killers and cannibals. Here Burr has taken the horror elements of the story down a few notches and replaced it with the fallout ofwar. His style has also changed as the movie is (to its detriment) filled with flashy montages and dream sequences that make the movie feel slower than it is.
Still if is an impressive film and the children are all superb in their roles. It is a nice change of pace from a director who was becoming all to well known for the PUPPETMASTER sequels.
Review © Andrew Copp
BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2012)
D. Panos Cosmatos
Magnet Releasing
2.35
This experimental, sci-fi, horror is a visual triumph but on a plot level it is completely confounding. Which I think is all part of the design of the piece. But that makes it damn hard to get through at times.
The film opens with a commercial for the ABORIA INSTITUTE for happiness and wellness. The commercial has Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers) talking directly to the camera about the new and exciting techniques the place has to offer. It sounds like a new age getaway camp for those needing to run from theirs problems. But when we enter the actual institute it is something else entirely. A freakishly red lit nightmare hospital that seems to only have one patient, the teenaged Elena (Eva Allen). Dr. Nyle is clearly obsessed with Elena and her so called "recovery" constantly lording over her and tormenting her psyche with questions about her dead mother. Dr. Nyles is unhappy at home, distanced from his wife Rosemary, so the work seems to be all he has.
As the movie goes on we discover the institute has a lot more going on, such as what appears to be android sentinels guarding secret rooms, and experimentation that reveals that Elena is a telepath, able to explode people when pushed. The movie takes a hard left turn (from already being way left of center) when we see a flashback of the doctor and the creator of the institute Dr. Aboria in some sort of personal destruction/recreation ritual. This is when we realize Dr. Nyles is all together very different from what we thought. Much more dangerous and deadly and probably not even human.
The movie is all about style with locations bathed in red light, faced bathed in blue or yellow. Everyone moves at half speed, sometimes even slower and the music is pulsing and repetitive like old techno or house music. It all adds up to a beautiful to look at film that works like a trance in action. I bet seeing this on the big screen was quite an experience. But watching it on TV only served to make me nod out a few times over.
BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW is worth watching due to the sheer uniqueness of it, but it isn't going to convince you to visit it a second time, even if it probably takes the second viewing to comprehend all of it.
Review © Andrew Copp
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.
If I was going to recommend a Naschy film this would not be at the top of the list. But it quenches the Naschy thirst somewhat.
Review © Andrew Copp
