Day #28 We live and DIE at the Drive-in!!!

DRIVE-IN MASSACRE (1977)
D. Stu Segall
Chilling Classics 50 Pack
Full Frame

The IMDB lists this movie as coming out in 1977 but man it feels like it was made way earlier as this has a real H.G. Lewis vibe. People at a drive-in theater are being killed by a sword wielding madman. Usually lovers (who oddly enough almost never are getting naked and the women seem to always have just announced they are pregnant!) who make the mistake of sticking their head out of the care a little too far, and WHAM they lose their heads. Two bumbling, kinda overweight cops are put on the case (well actually they appear to be the ONLY cops that actually work in all of L.A.) and start investigating the Drive-in. They meet the quirky, perpetually pissed off manager Austin (Newten Naushaus, something tells me that is not this guy's real name!) who wont let them get a word in edgewise between his rage fueled rants. With his loud polyester suits, shiny chrome dome and neatly trimmed beard he is a crazy looking motherfucker anyway, but when he starts ranting and raving about how he never leavers the theater, how he can get out of the projection booth and has to do all the work himself, he has a gleam in his eye of a man truly bonkers. When the retarded grounds keeper named, appropriately enough, Germy (Douglas Gudbye) Austin really looses his shit.

Here he is folks. The BIGGEST ASSHOLE in all of exploitation film history!

He HATES Germy like the Nazis hate the Jews! Seems they both used to work at the owner's Carnival until he closed it down and turned it into the Drive-in. Germy is so simple he is just glad to have a job, though he misses his geek and sword swallowing days. Austin is still pissed off cause he never quite mastered the sword swallowing gags (But ya kinda wonder if he was doing some other sword swallowing behind closed doors if ya catch my meaning, and I think you do! Oh wait he don't have TIME for stuff like that! He has to do freakin EVERYTHING at this place!). Germy helps the cops peg a peeping tom in the lot who might be the killer so they dress up as a husband and wife to try to spot if he is killing folks, which leads to crazy jokes and some hapless head rolling gore.

These cops are as clueless as Germy here.

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Eventually Germy has enough of Austin and his nasty spiteful shit and corners him in the projection booth. At the same moment the rather dull cops realize that Austin "Doesn't have to stay in the projection booth all the time, he can leave during the reels!" in one of the most insightful detective moments of these bumblers lives. They rush there to see a silhouette of Austin being gored on the big screen. The ONLY time we actually see the screen I might add! This takes place at the drive-in but we never see the screen or what is playing! But when the doofus cops enter the room they discover both of those crazy cats dead and an on screen legend tells us the killer got away and is in the theater RIGHT NOW! Bwah ha ha ha!!! You gotta love those seventies open ended finales.

He wont be starring in the THROAT GAGGERS porn series any time soon.

This movie was obviously made for about twelve bucks with an eye to capitalize on the success of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE which was heating up drive-in screens all over the US. The gore is plentiful, the dialogue pitiful, and the production design non existent. Most of the direction consists of sitting the camera down and letting it roll, ala the H.G. Lewis approach.

The movie was co-written by George "Buck" Flower who was an exploitation stalwart in the 70's and he gives himself a juice role midway through as the cops think they have found their man in a warehouse. This psycho has a teenage girl hostage and is planning to cut her up with a machete.
The movie turns into a whole different film for about ten minutes, but the scene pays off with an incredible revelation and bit of dialogue that is worth waiting for.

She learned the hard way that they were playing DEEP THROAT.

This is seriously fun trash for the seventies lover in all of us.Not on any legit DVD as of right now, but tons of those multi-packs have it sourced from the long out of print Magnum VHS.



Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #27 All hail the Malformed MEN!!!

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN (1969)
D. Teruo Ishii
Synapse Ent.
2.35

This surreal, sometimes hard to penetrate, dramatic horror tale was banned for many years in Japan. One of the only films to ever get that nod on the big island. so for this movie to have finally gotten it's DVD release was a very special treat to cult film enthusiasts all over the world. I snapped up my copy from Gerry and Don at the Synapse table at Cinema Wasteland as soon as it was available and sat down that very week to watch it. But then within five minutes fell asleep and never got back to it until now. No fault of the movie mind you, I just get easily distracted sometimes and that week was one such time. But I am glad I finally got back around to it, because as I had long suspected MALFORMED MEN is a little gem.

The very complicated story revolves around Hirosuke Hitomi (played by Teruo Yoshida) who awakens to find himself in the loony bin one morning inexplicably. But this is one strange Mental ward where all the women seem to be on drugs and naked. The guards use whips and cat o nine tails to get the all female inmates back into cells, and one angry bald man sits in a corner scowling at him as if he wants to kill him. As night falls Hirosuke is drugged and awakens to the bald man on top of him trying to do just that. But he overpowers that chump and kills him, managing to escape the mysteriously unguarded facility. Once outside he recognizes a lullaby being sang by a teenage girl as one from his dreams and talks to her. After she smacks him(!) they make friends and realize they are both orphans and remember the tune from their childhood. But before much more info beside a memory from the seashore can be revealed someone plants a knife into her and Hirosuke is blamed and on the run.



Along the way he discovers a wealthy business man named (also played by Genzaburô Komoda KomodaTeruo Yoshida) has died. Weird thing is that they are identical, right down to the weird engraved scar on the bottom of their foot. So Hirosuke pretends he is the resurrected corpse of Genzaburô Komoda and ingrains himself into his household in an attempt to solve the mystery of his blank past, as it seems it is deeply intertwined. What he discovers is that Genzaburô Komoda was a sex machine, fucking both his wife and one of the maids, so Hirosuke has his hands full. But there is also someone stalking the household and a group of mutant weirdos playing home invasion that look a lot like Japanese versions of the kid from DELIVERANCE. This is only the first half of the movie!!!


In the second half Hirosuke manages to get to the island where Genzaburô Komoda's Father has isolated himself for the entirety of his son's life. Here he discovers that this man has created a disturbing utopia filled with naked women being used as slaves, furniture and pretty much anything else. Also populating the island are hundreds of mutant and deformed people, many that seemed to be surgically grafted and created. For example women that are surgically grafted to the ass end of a horse. It turns out that Father was spurned by his beautiful wife because of his own natural deformities and went more than a little crazy. So he spirited her away to this island and held her captive for her sins. While he punished her, he got busy creating his own "master race" of "malformed men" that would eventually go devour and mate with the normal society thus seeking revenge for anyone who was ever different. He wants Hirosuke to do more adventurous surgeries since he is a surgeon and the secret of his past is of course tightly woven with this island.


This is really just scratching the surface of this deeply twisted movie. Based on the works of famed Japanese author Edogawa Rampo who is considered the greatest horror writer of Japan. Apparently this is an amalgamation of many of his stories, which explains the car crash style of the narrative which throws in everything including the kitchen sink. By the time the movie gets to the incest driven fuck it all climax, your jaw will be on the floor. But oddly enough, it is all rather tragic and surprisingly touching. For all the deformity, blood, skin and bad taste, the final couple of images and lines of dialogue illicit a lot of humanity and heart through all the chaos. There is a message about the human condition hiding in this madness, something about forgiveness, accepting people for who they are and their ability to love, not their outward appearance.



But as a cult/exploitation movie viewer it is the crazy imagery that will stun you, and this movie is chocked full of it. Lazy and jaded viewers on the IMDB called this boring. While there are slow parts of the movie, there is more than enough involving madness to pull you through the quieter scenes. The early scenes in the mental institution are quite the opening grabber (if you look ever so closely one of the woman has a close up of her breasts and a bead of milk can be seen dripping from her nipple). The flashback (and later shown as part of the narrative) of the Father crawling out of the sea side rocks towards the camera in all his madness is simply incredible. The Mother eating the crabs that have in turn ate her lover. The kidnapping psycho warden in full drag torturing a busty young lady just for fun. The lazy boat ride up river where we first see the inhabitants of the island, consisting of nude women painted silver and gold, wrapped in bandages, bolted and belted to poles, boats and sewn to animals. All of them dancing, swimming and crawling in an inhuman manner. These are all stunning moments in a film full of them. All the denizens of the island were played by Butoh dancers which enabled them to move like no other humans on the planet could. A technique that direct Teruo Ishii would use throughout his career.

Then there are the malformed men themselves, some achieved with just crusty make up, others with more explicit prosthetics, some just contortionists. Some of them just look like blobs of human flesh lying in cages, while others are elderly people with mesh covering their faces being fed by tubes. One guy in the background has elephantitis of the scrotum, but it is seen to fast that I doubt most people notice it.

It is these scenes that in fact relegated the film to the status of being banned. For many years after World War Two deformities were a touchy subject in Japanese culture thanks to the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The damage caused by those left many people, for several generations, damaged physically. It was considered extremely poor taste to show those kinds of deformities in entertainment or art after that for a long time. Even if Teruo Ishii was perhaps trying to make some commentary on that very thing with the film. The movie was banned for several decades only showing up in late night revival screenings and film festivals until this DVD.


Which is gorgeous by the way. The widescreen photography is breathtaking and looks fabulous. It always amazes me to look at genre films from other countries around the same time frame to see that many of them look lower budgeted and sometimes cheap (the Italians were doing well at this point though). But Japanese films, always look incredible. There is photography and imagery in this film that is simply impossible to dismiss. This DVD allows Asian cult cinema fans and exploitation fans in general to finally fill that gap in their education. An essential purchase.



Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #26 Bring your Daughter to the Slaughter!

SLAUGHTERHOUSE (1987)
D. Rick Roessler
LUCKY 13 ENT.
FULL SCREEN

This johnny come late to the party TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE rip off really doesn't deliver the goods. I remember reading a pretty positive review in Chas Balun's MORE GORE SCORE and kinda wanting to check it out for all these years. But ultimately outside of a couple of decent gore scenes, and one actors really weird line reading of the word "crowbar" (the dude says "Cra-BAR" emphasized just like that) I'm not so sure how much I can recommend here.

The movie is about an old coot and his semi-retarded three hundred pound son who used to run a hog slaughterhouse on their property. That is until things went mechanized and their employees went to the shiny new one in the city. Seems now that their old partners are wanting to buy the property and are offering a pretty fair deal for it. Even willing to keep them on as consultants and let them keep their house and live there. But the old man isn't having none of that new fangled city bullshit! He would never let 30% fat get into the product!
He could butcher 50 hogs by hand in the time those damn machines could do 15! (See where this is going?)

Stop you're bellyaching! Your boyfriend was messing with the pigs, so you both have to DIE!

Meanwhile his goofball son Buddy has spotted some fuckhead teens goofing around on the property tormented the hogs so he bashed their brains in with a shovel. Can't say I blame him, I mean this dude was making all kinds of noise, swinging a shovel around threatening the piggies. So fuck him! He had to die and his ho too! This just gives Pappy an idea to kill off those people who want to buy the property, so they start luring them back to Buddy can swing his ridiculously over sized clever at them or dump them in a body mulching machine. The other teens in the movie are making a scary music video and start creeping around the slaughterhouse and get caught up too.

Buddy in all his snot-faced, smelly, no hygiene glory!

There is some splashy, surprisingly effective gore, and Buddy is disgusting with permanent snot running down his face and bad hygiene. But more often than not the movie resorts to the popular 1987 cliche's of not funny one liners and teens doing really stupid things to further the plot. It was while watching this that it dawned on me while I like early seventies horror movies like SCREAM BLOODY MURDER so much. Because the gaggle of brain dead teenagers hadn't become the staple for every horror film yet. Even if it was a slasher movie, it wasn't necessary for the killer to be stalking a cookie cutter gang of obnoxious teens. That was an 80's thing and infinitely less interesting to me (and only gets worse and the nineties and two thousands pressed on).

This was obviously shot on a minuscule budget but still on film. It looks to be 16mm as the whole video revolution was just right around the corner. Technically it isn't terribly made, everything is done okay, it is lit fine, edited fine, effects are fine.It just fails to deliver anything special or that you haven't seen done elsewhere and better. Oddly enough if this had been made five years earlier it would have certainly played drive ins all over the south I am sure. The DVD is decked out with tons and tons of extras, but I must admit I did not watch them.



Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #25 Health Care is a BITCH! Then you die.

SAW VI (2009)
D. Kevin Greutert
LIONS GATE
1.85

I'm willing to go to bat for the SAW films. While I thought Pt 5 was terrible, and Pt 4 not much better, I've still defended the SAW movies pretty widely and will continue to do so. Horror fans in our age group LOVE to shit on them, then turn around and fall over themselves about how great the original Friday the 13th and Halloween sequels were. What it really is, is a generational thing. We give our old school loves a pass, even though they are dumb as dirt, but shit on the new favorites almost out of a sheer act of rebellion.

My thing is that the SAW series, for all it's faults, and there are a lot of them, are still among the most creative and interesting continuing horror franchise going today. All people see is the gore and "torture" but fail to notice that the series has an ongoing "philosophy" about taking responsibility for your own actions. Each entry (well the first three and this new one) are all about characters that have to realize, through coming close to death, that they need to take responsibility for something in their lives. Sometimes it is addiction, sometimes it is an all encompassing need for vengeance, sometimes it is how one's selfish actions hurt others.

The games have begun. This reminded me of the breathing treatments I have seen so many people have in the hospital recently.

The torture and pain are almost biblical penance for their crimes against the fellow man. Jigsaw is not even a serial killer, but a very creative anti-hero who shows far more compassion than any of the other characters in the films. The movies themselves work more like episodic TV than sequels like the old slasher films we grew up with, as each entry divulges more details, more character development and more plot twists. Casual viewers and more importantly, those who just like to stand on the outside and throw stones, claim that all there is to the series are set pieces of people being tortured. But when the SAW series is at its best (part 3 and this one in my opinion) there is a helluva a lot more meat to chew on.

What would you cut off to give that important pound of flesh?

SAW VI opens with two new people in a trap. One obese man in one cage and a thin woman in another. Via pre-taped video they are told that they are to fill a scale between the caged 9via large plastic tubes) with their own flesh within 60 seconds of the giant metal bolts attached to their heads will detonate and be pounded into their skulls. Seems they worked for a large corporation that gave loans out to poor people that in turn had interest rates that made the loans impossible to pay back. Thus took everything from these people. Now these two are being made to judge themselves for what they have done to others. Naturally the fat man goes for his meaty love handles and carves them off, but the woman realizes her limbs have more weight value...

The movie proper begins with Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandalor with his lips permanently pursed in his only thought configuration) working his way out of the glass cage he encased himself in at the end of Pt V when he killed Special Agent Strahm in the compacting room (his squished corpse makes a special appearance). Hoffman is setting about finishing his work his has taken up since Jigsaw died. this time targeting the head of a Health Insurance company that specializes in fucking over their policy holders. Seems that this company (like pretty much ALL health insurance companies) has a staff trained to find loopholes and pre-existing conditions so they don't have to help or pay out when they are needed most. This head of the company even has a mathematical equation he has specially developed that ways human life value against the bottom line. The bottom line wins every time. Seems Jigsaw's Widow's methadone clinic was partially funded by this joker at one point, AND Jigsaw had this company as insurance when he found out he originally had cancer and wanted to get an experimental treatment.

Say what you want about the movies, but the SAW films have some of the best poster art going today.

They promptly dropped him all together when they found out he was going to attempt treatment that might actually cure him. So before he died he laid out plans that put this company and the employees that have destroyed the lives of so many people over the years directly into the cross hairs of his life or death manias. Leaving Detective Hoffman and his wife to carry them out.

The Health Insurance Company has left Jigsaw in worse shape than the last five sequels combined.

Many of the questions that have been unanswered in the previous entries are answered this time. What was in the big box Jigsaw left to his wife? What was that letter Amanda read in part 3? How about the significance of the audio cassette in part 4? Lots of minute details from throughout the series find their way back into the plot fold this time out making this entry a very rewarding and satisfying experience. Unlike part 5 which just felt like you were spinning your wheels for ninety minutes, this one makes you feel like you've stuck it out for six movies for a reason. Not just to rehash the same crap movie after movie, but to actually see a story arch through from part two to part six. Like a mini-series on cable or something.

The series does have its detriments though. For one the acting has never been a strong suit. Tobin Bell as Jigsaw is terrific, has been from day one and has manged to really infuse the character with a sense of loss and tragedy. He is the real center of the series and they made a great casting choice with him. Shawnee Smith as Amanda was smart casting as well, she does a good job as the formerly heroin addicted assistant that struggles with her allegiances. She is only in pt VI a couple of scenes but it is nice to have her back. Betsy Russell former tits and laughs 80's actress from such classics as TOMBOY and AVENGING ANGEL made her first appearance in pt IV and looks terrific, especially for a woman her age, but her acting is just as still today as it was back then.

Betsey Russell may not be ANGEL anymore, but she still looks fine.

She's not terrible, but she isn't great either. Probably doesn't hurt she's married to one of the series' regular directors. Then there is Costas Mandalor... Another heart throb from a couple of decades ago. Remember the teenie bopper gangster pic MOBSTERS? Of course you don't, I only do because I worked at a theater and projected the damn thing. It was him, Christian Slater, and a couple of other nineties era dorks. Well, that was the height of Mandalor's ability I think. I've felt he was miscast here from the beginning. He's like watching a plank of wood.

I've also had issues with the directorial style and editing of the series too. That hyper stylized flash cutting that they use, especially in the torture/kill scenes. As the series has progressed it has become less and less prominent, but it has always gotten on my nerves. For me it takes me right out of the moment. Perhaps that is the reason they do it, because the actual violence often being portrayed would be unbearable if they concentrated on it with out that hyper stylized, distancing effect. All I know is it distracts me and reminds me I'm watching a movie. Its weird cause there have been what, four different directors and all of them have been forced to do it for continuity.

But with all that said, this entry is easily the best one since pt III if not THE best one to date. The whole story attacking the insurance companies is completely relevant and makes a bold and hearty statement about the faceless nature of corporate killing in the name of the bottom line. I'm sure the last thing die hard Liberals want on their side is the new SAW movie, but here it is anyway! I would say it is actually making a more humanist statement actually. Plus as a series capper this entry brings all the previous elements together and wraps them up neatly and nicely. There is an open ending, but not so much that they couldn't stop here and be done with it. All the questions are answered at this point. There is no need to go on now, except studio greed really. Plus for the gorehounds who just LOVE this stuff, it is still fairly intense in spreading around the red stuff. There is less interpersonal "torture" this time as the games scenarios are more aimed at making the characters make choices about other people's lives (hence the health care debate). There is an incredibly intense scene involving a carousel of people and a loaded shotgun that is probably among the best of the series. It isn't so gory, but the intensity of it is outstanding.


A lot of people have probably given up on the SAW series. Just as many people wont give it a chance because it is cool to do so. To those people, just remember when we were kids, the adults wouldn't watch a Freddy movie or Friday the 13th movie for the very same reasons.



Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #24 Dolls having Doll Babies

SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
D. Don Mancini
ROGUE STUDIOS
1.85

CHILD'S PLAY series creator Don Mancini finally takes the director's chair for this extremely mixed, and probably last, entry to the series. While the series has always leaned towards the comedic, with BRIDE OF CHUCKY, it took a big step on a funny bone. In that movie under the direction of Ronny Yu it worked really well. He played the absurdity of the whole thing against the rather nasty edge of the horror and had a lot of fun with it. He actually brought what was a dead series back to life. Here Mancini seems much more interested in making a comedy than a horror movie and manages to put the nails back into the coffin. The movie is not a total misfire, but as a horror movie it doesn't work. As a comedy with some underlying social agenda, there is some interesting things going on.

Those evil dolls are back in action, but are too busy being wacky to be scary anymore.

The movie opens with an attack on the average middle class family from the point of view of what seems to be a doll. We are to assume it is Chucky, but since we are seeing it through the eyes of the attacker we are not sure. This scene has the only real effective scary/horror moments of the movie as this family is viciously slaughtered. The mother is killed in the shower, the dad knocked over the railing (the camera riding him all the way down as he hits the floor, which was really impressive) and then as the doll is about to kill the little girl, BAM! We realize this is all a dream. Turns out that is is the dream of the child of Chucky and Tiffany from the last film. A rather bizarre looking little redheaded puppet that is now part of a sideshow act. He thinks he Japanese because he has "made in Japan" branded on his wrist. He also thinks his name is Shithead because the ventriloquist calls him that. Cut to Tiffany and Chucky stalking Santa Claus in a snowy field and killing him, but that turns out to be fake too as it is part of a movie being made about the murders from the previous films and the dolls are actually animatronics (with effects man Tony Gardener playing himself). Jennifer Tilly shows up, also playing herself, as she is really the star of this movie. Shithead sees a news report about the movie on TV and makes his way to the set and uses a magic charm to put the souls of the real Tiffany and Chuck into the dolls for the movie and Viola, they are a family again. They are freaked out to realize they have a son. Even more freaked out to realize he has a sexual identity crisis because he doesn't know if he is a boy or a girl (he has no genitalia cause he is a doll) and pisses his pants every time he sees someone killed. Meanwhile Jennifer Tilly realizes her career is on the skids and wants to get into the new movie being made by rapper Redman (also playing himself) about the birth of Christ. So she sets up to sleep with him to get the part of Mary Magdalene. The dolls become obsessed with putting their souls into the bodies of Jennifer Tilly and Redman and impregnating her so she can have a baby they can put the kid's soul into as well. John Waters is on board as a sleazy tabloid journalist who has all the good lines.

Chucky has the right idea here. Really who can blame him?

What the movie is really about is how the Seed Of Chucky is sexually confused and has to deal with overbearing parents who keep trying to tell him what his sexual orientation is. All the while never sticking up to their own convictions. They keep saying they are going to stop killing and doing their evil deeds but continue, but try to hide it. Until it all finally comes to a head and Junior snaps, becoming a drag queen homicidal maniac like his folks. thrusting home that negative stereotypes start with the parents. There is also a lot of really broad comedy about Hollywood and the lack of ideas and depth of corrosion that goes on to get films made. But that whole thing is really sort of falling on deaf ears, because when you are trying to make a commentary on how ridiculous it is to have a rapper directing a movie about Jesus, yet you cast a real rapper in your horror film who is NOT an actor, the irony is lost on YOU, not the audience.

They're good buddies now, but he can't help if his eyes wander a bit.

Then there is the whole thing about Jennifer Tilly's career being in the shithouse because she is too old etc. There is some funny stuff about how she lost roles to other high profile actresses because they fucked the directors, but then the joke is played real thin real quickly. More than once there are "fat jokes" about her when in fact she has probably the most incredible body I've seen in a mainstream film in the last ten years. I'm not sure if those jokes are supposed to be ironic, self depreciating, or what. I mean the whole movie is her being stuffed into tighter and tighter dresses that her chest is practically exploding out of, and I didn't see anywhere on her that I could ever possibly consider fat. Maybe that is the point. It is pretty clear to me the selling point is that she looked pretty damn hot in every single outfit. So I dunno, seems a little strange to me.

Does this woman look fat to you? Me either..

The biggest problem is that the movie is just not scary. There is no attempt to even try to make it a horror movie anymore. BRIDE OF CHUCKY at least remembered it was a horror movie. Here that is gone and replaced with all laughs. the gore has been ramped up, but that is taken to Monty Pythonesque levels of goofiness, as to not be taken seriously at all. So as a comedy with some things to say, it has moments. As eye candy for Jennifer Tilly it succeeds without mercy. As a horror movie it is a resounding failure. As a franchise killer it is a ten on the meter.



Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #23 This boy does NOT love Mandy Lane

The Halloween Horror Challenge continues. We took this in the same day as PONTYPOOL. Quite the polar opposite...



ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (2006)
D. Jonathan Levine
Weinstein Company
2.35

This movie has been sitting on the shelf at the Weinstein Company for almost three years now. It has been released all over the rest of the world without problems, so it isn't a content issue or music rights or some bullshit like that. No one seems to really know why it is just sitting there. Except that the Weinsteins are notorious for picking up films and just squatting on them. But after seeing this one, I can't say it is a huge loss to the movie going community.

There is nothing wrong with a slasher movie that is clever. But there is something seriously wrong with a slasher movie that the filmmakers THINK is clever but it is anything but. I can give this one credit for not trying to be one of those post SCREAM bullshit jobs where everyone quotes other movies, and tries to let the audience in on the joke pretending everyone involved is better than the genre. At least it isn't trying to do that. But that is a small favor in the lager cache of things. Slasher movies have never been the smartest genre, but now that they try to appeal to the same teen crowd that watch the kind of shit that is on teen TV, they have sunk to depths of low that scrape the bottom in ways we have never thought possible. This movie is prime example of that.

Mandy Lane in all her pouty glory. All the boys want her you know!

The movie revolves strictly around the character of Mandy Lane played by (who to me looks like a poor mans Amber HeardScarlett Johanson minus the boobs). The gimmick here is that Mandy Lane is perfect in every single way. All the boys want to fuck her so bad that they are in solidarity about it and work together to create plans to do it. All the teen girls are so in awe of her that they are all her friends and follow her everywhere she goes. But she is no HEATHERS style conceited snob. No way! She is an angelic, perfect, virgin, shot with soft filters, and slow motion, that is too good for this Earth. And that is ALL her characteristics. All we learn about her as a character is that her parents died in a car crash when she was little and she was raised by her Aunt. That's it. Her angelic beauty is supposed to fill in for her lack of any kind of character insight, which would be fine, if there was a twist in the tail that was so important later on. But anyway, because of her perfection everyone thinks she is the bees knees and do crazy things to be near her, even though she doesn't do anything much at all in response. She has a best friend, who is the class outcast. All the other boys in school beat him up and try to drown him at the local parties (you know homicidal horseplay). So in retaliation he talks to biggest dousche of them all into jumping off the roof to impress Mandy in the movie's most impressive scene. No one likes this emo kid after that though. Well except me, cause I thought it was pretty cool.

Don't get excited kids, this doesn't go where it totally should go!

So six months later all the cool kids decide to go to the Jewish kid's local farm to drink and get high and hopefully fuck the shit out of Mandy Lane. Her buddy is now the school pariah, even she is not talking to him. So he is not invited. They all go up there and three montages of all the kids smoking pot later (I am not kidding) they are off and running wild with someone killing them. Here is the dumb thing though. After two of them are killed, the film totally reveals that the killer is the best friend character (who is also such a dork, that it is really hard to believe he could over power a couple of the other guys). So any sense of mystery is out the window. More time is spent with the drunken shenanigans, the girls bitching and making fun of each other and talking about fucking. There is one boob shot but it is very brief. By the climax of the movie it is clear the filmmakers were trying to make a movie about how this teenager has become some sort of spree killer ala Charles Starkweater or something. But by approaching the first half like a BEVERLY HILLS 90210 episode mixed with a slasher movie it just doesn't work. To do a movie exploring how someone becomes a spree killer, you need to try to include some depth of character. This has NONE. Hell even UWE BOLL'S HEART OF AMERICA managed to get that right. And everyone hates that guy (actually I don't, but most everyone else does). Then they trot out the twists, not one but TWO. Each one negating everything you have seen up to the point before it. So they are not clever, in fact the twists are ANTI-CLEVER. They actually kind of make your head hurt as they go on, sort of like you ate a whole bunch of pop rocks at once and maybe a few of them got stuck in your sinus cavity or something. You can feel your brain cells just popping away...POP...POP...POP.

An example of that beautiful cinematography I was talking about.

Which is weird because this thing is beautifully shot. The cinematography is gorgeous. It was shot in Texas and they picked plenty of beautiful landscapes to use and framed it all wonderfully. Some of the shots would make beautiful still photographs. Just on a visual level the movie is well directed and always nice to look at, though the editing is really weird. There are side wipes used often, sort of like an old TV show, which are really out of place. Then when the kill scenes happen it is like Rob Zombie took over editing. The rest of the movie is edited one specific way, then the kill scenes are edited like music videos, with flash cuts, hyper fast editing, shock freeze frames etc. It is over stylization just for the sake of it and is simply just stupid.

But this is a movie that doesn't even have the guts to fulfill the sleaze that it pertains to want to dip into. For a movie that is about how all the characters want to fuck someone, it is about as chaste as it can get. The characters talk a big game, one character gets an off screen hand-job and blow job. As I mentioned earlier one blond bimbo shows her boobs all too quickly. But that is it. There is a moment where Mandy and the other blond look like they are going to make out, it is even set up as the other girl gives Mandy a pill to loosen her up. But then the filmmakers chicken out completely and have the boys interrupt them. This is that kind of movie. Where it is perfectly okay to show a girl get a shotgun rammed down her throat because she just gave a guy a blow job moments before, but wont show two girls kiss. But boy it will try to look edgy and sexy by talking a lot of crap about sex. It will even show -gasp- girls in their bras showing off their navel rings!!! Oh no! How naughty! One girl even trims her pubic hair, but we don't really see that either.

Some movies are shelved for a reason.



Reviews © Andy Copp

Day #22 When a Zombie movie doesn't have Zombies

The Halloween Horror challenge continues with one of the best horror movies in a long time. Naturally most people haven't seen it.



PONTYPOOL (2009)
D. Bruce McDonald
IFC
1.85

Canadian indie filmmaker Bruce McDonald returns with a weird little outing where he does the unthinkable: he's made a zombie movie that basically has no zombies. He's taken Romero's concept that Zombie films are basically political discourse and pushed that all the way to the breaking point. A lot of horror fans will hate this movie. Many more will argue it is not a horror film at all. And those people may be right to a degree. I mean, it deals with a zombie take over, a zombie plague, and the survivors holed up in one small place trying to figure the whole mess out - it's a classic zombie movie set up. But what McDonald has done is so far out in left field that it has to be taken on its own terms. Based on a play by Tony Burgess (who also wrote the script), this is essentially a three character chamber piece that explores the use of language in society. It takes the old William Burroughs quote "language is a virus" and spins it into a whole new level.


PONTYPOOL deals with a shock jock radio host named Grant Mazzy (played by the always welcome Stephen McHattie) who's recently been shipped from the big city to the small town of Pontypool. The movie never says exactly why, but you get the feeling his rebellious nature and off the cuff, on-air rantings have gotten him in trouble in the past. His producer Sydnie Blair (Lisa Houle) takes a negative rub to him right away, but also respects his ability to engage the listeners. Their ultra cute engineer Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) is a town hero because she was in Afghanistan for several tours. They are a mismatched group trying to do a morning show together. It's clear that Laurel Ann has a little bit of a crush on Grant (or maybe she's a bit star struck) and that Sydnie is having a lot of trouble reigning him in. Then suddenly their eye in the sky reporter (who is not really in the sky at all, but roving around in a car) sees a riot going on outside a local doctor's office. A mob of around a hundred is attacking the place, with people being trampled and beaten to death. The station goes live with it and the reports from eye witnesses keep pouring in, with some witnesses making no sense, just repeating themselves over and over.


They get a transmission that breaks into their signal in French, which they translate, that tells them with no terms of endearment to speak only in French and to NOT translate the message. But, of course, it's too late. With each successive call they get, and each report from the "eye in the sky," it becomes clear that there's a zombie plague going on, that people are being attacked and torn apart and possibly eaten. The radio station becomes the hub of information as they try to stay on the air, to keep people calm and informed, and to do what they can to keep information flowing freely. Eventually, the doctor that originally was being attacked makes his way to them and explains to a degree what's going on: the virus is being carried through sound; words. specifically. Certain words, when cognitively understood, are triggering off this reaction in people. So anyone could be saying these words at this point, and anyone listening to them could be infected because of it. So now the problem is internal, because the few people inside the station could be infected too.


There are no flashes or cuts to the outside world in this movie. All of it is inferred through the use of sound and phone calls, pretty much how a play would be done since its confined to a few select sets. There are only a few zombies in the last fifteen minutes as they begin to find their way into the station or other people become infected, and actually the tension completely builds from what we do NOT see in the movie. In a lot of ways this is the antithesis of what cinema is, because it's all about what is NOT on screen at any given moment. In that way it should NOT work at all. But it does. It works extremely well, because ultimately the movie's not about zombies at all, but about language and the barriers we bring with it - the dangers that language and the misuse of it can cause. About how words that are said can be understood or misunderstood to the point that entire huge catastrophic events can occur because of it. And ultimately about how we can take hurtful, degrading and deadly meanings and with effort change them to save ourselves if we try hard enough. The movie is a metaphor on how language is life, or the locomotive that drives it, connecting all the other boxcars together.



Reviews © Andy Copp