THE FACE OF ANOTHER
[Tanin no Kao] (1967). While most people may find Hiroshi Teshigahara's
(Woman in the Dunes) films pretentious and dull, I think they're
fascinating and this is no exception. Adapted from the remarkable novel
by Kobo Abe (who wrote the screenplay) it deals with a scientist (Tatsuya
Nakadai) who is horribly scarred in an industrial accident. He goes to a
psychologist (Eiji Okada) who makes him a mask. Once an outcast, he reenters
society, trying in effect to become a new person, and going as far as seducing
his wife (Machiko Kyo). Some have said this was a critique of keeping one's
"true" face hidden, but like most of Abe's works it is a meditation on identity
and the nature of reality, like all of his protagonists the one hear tries
to run away from himself and fails. Teshigahara tells the story in the most
elliptical way imaginable, creating a beautiful, demanding film with the
usual brilliant score by Toru Takemitsu.
|
FANTASY MISSION FORCE
(1983). This is easily Jacky Chan's weirdest film, and it is certainly one
of the strangest Hong Kong action pics, but that's not surprising since
it comes from director Chu Yen-Ping, who made off the wall films like Golden
Queen Commandos and Pink Force Commandos. This movie seems to
take place in several countries and time-periods at once. A group of international
generals are kidnapped by the Japanese, so Jimmy Wang Yu puts together a
"Dirty Dozen" type group to get the generals back. Chan and Chang Ling are
thieves and Chan is a minor character until the finale, a massive, surprisingly
grim battle between our heroes and some Nazis (half of whom dress like samurais
and the other half dress like Road Warrior rejects) when almost everyone
is killed. There is also a subplot involving a haunted house, Amazon warriors
(their queen dresses like a Roman general and walks on water) music stolen
from Halloween and Ennio Morricone, a rip-off of the Raiders of the Lost
Ark drinking contest, and a musical number! Chan apparently did this film
as a favor to Wang, the 70s chop-socky star who was executive producer on
this. When Chan hit it big in the US, ASE video put out a budget version
of this and tried to sell it as a typical Chan action pic. You'll love it.
|
FASCINATION (1979).
Probably the best known of Jean Rollin's unique horror films, Jean-Marie
Lemaire plays an on-the-run thief who hides out at the chateau of Franka
Mai and Brigitte Lahaie, a pair of upper-class lesbians and blood drinkers.
Rollin's films have some major drawbacks: namely a pretentiousness that
borders on self-parody (the old cliché of the French art-film, lovers lugubriously
saying "j'aime over and over) but he is a director who, like Alexjandro
Jodorowsky that inhabits his own cinematic universe; a universe that blends
languid melodrama, gothic horror, and lurid exploitatioin. Rollin also has
a genuine pictoral sense, and a surreal temperament, embodied here by the
beautiful ex-porn star Lahaie stalking around wearing only a black cloak
and wielding a scythe. That said, his films do take some getting use to,
and even liberal-minded horror fans will be running for the exits at the
first opportunity.
|
THE FEMALE BUNCH (1969).
This typically awful Adamson film was poor Lon Chaney Jr.'s last released
film. He's bloated and can barely speak his lines, both from the ravages
of alcoholism. The non-plot seems straight out of an old nudie film, as
a group of uninhibited females spend most of their time bathing, riding
horses, tormenting a "wetback" and going into "Mexico" for slobbering sex.
Chaney plays a Lenny-ish simpleton who takes care of the horses, Russ Tamblyn
shows up long enough to get branded on the forehead and stabbed with a pitchfork.
Shot in Utah and the infamous Spahn Ranch while the Manson family was there.
|
FIEND (aka DEADLY NEIGHBOR,
1980). Another one of dollar Don Dohler's backyard efforts. Don Leifert,
a big guy with an even bigger moustache who dresses in black and looks like
a deranged televangelist (and sounds like a gay interior designer) gets
reanimated by the titular creature, the "essence of evil" which is really
just a shoddy red light. Leifer immediately strangles a woman and sucks
out her life-force and then opens a music academy! Can your heart stand
the terror? Every eight or nine minutes Leifert strangles someone and Dohler
indulges in his cheap red light effect (somebody with a magic marker drawing
on the film, I think) while his moronic next-door neighbor Richard Nelson
investigates the shady new-guy, which consists mostly of yelling at people
and looking intense. For about 91 minutes nothing happens until Nelson finds
out Leifert's terrible secret and decides to wash his face.
|
| FIGHT FOR YOUR
LIFE (1977). This movie is a bit overrated, but is still a pretty descent
slab of mean spirited exploitation. If you combined Last House on the
Left and a blacksploitation film what would you get? This movie of course.
It opens with a funky theme song and hits it's stride quickly as three
convicts escape from their transport, kill a guard, and steal a funky
pimp's pimpmobile (complete with dent in the rear end) and head out on
the lam. They kill a few people, have some laughs, and eventually end
up in a liquor store where they kill the owner (before the head con puts
a gun to a babies' head) and take a woman hostage. The cons are a motley
bunch, Chino, a Latin stud, Ling, a Chinese child-beater and arsonist,
and their boss, Jesse. Jesse (William Sanderson, from the Newhart
show) is a racist, and the home they invade is that of a black family,
so you can tell what you're in for. Jesse subjects the family of preacher
Ted Turner (!) to every racial putdown and stereotype. He forces the father
to do a minstrel dance and to shine his shoes as well as sing. But the
film doesn't leave Chino and Ling out, they get their moments to shine,
too. Chino has a Marxist ramble about eating garbage in his home country,
while Ling chases and tries to rape a white woman but ends up pushing
her off a cliff, and then beats in a white boy's head with a rock (this
scene alone qualifies this film for bad taste infamy). But, in the end,
the shat on black family gets their revenge, and shows honky motherfucker
Jesse what's up. Chino gets his balls shot off and Ling is impaled on
a shard of glass, but Jesse gets to have a lot of ultra dramatic screen
time before getting shot in the neck. It turns out Jesse hates blacks
because a) his mama ran off with a black dude, and b)he was ass raped
in prison by a black motherfucker. Our hero, Ted Turner, talks about the
meek inheriting the earth, and turning the other cheek, but when the moment
arises, he busts out the whup ass on that white boy and gives us the touching
moral of the story: Jesus is full of shit. The Bible is full of shit.
Ahhh, warms the heart, don't it?
Race according to
Jesse: "Tar baby here says you have wheels." "Shake it, I said shake it
spade!" "Yeah, Uncle Remus!" "Now then, Aunt Jemima, how 'bout movin'
your ass to the kitchen and rustle up some soul food." "Close monkey face!"
"You got any objections to eatin' with a chink and a spic?" "Don't get
uppity bitch!" Turner: "The measure of a man is dignity." Jesse: "The
measure of a man is power, now lick my boots you fucking nigger!" "Now
get your ass up on this here stool and make like a black canary." "I don't
want anyone to amble by to check up on the coon family singers." "I'm
runnin' this show, Deputy Dawg!"
Race according to
the Turner family: "Give me a sticker for that pink pig!" "Shut up honky
or you'll bleed!" "A little boy with a banana in his pants!" "Don't move
or I'll blow your motherfuckin' balls off!" "You're not even big enough
to cut off." "White trash faggot." "Some big black boogeyman stick it
to you boy?"
Personally I love
the Turner grandma, an ugly woman in a wheelchair who says, "Black power
is where it's at!" and "The meek shall inherit the Earth, that's a load
of nonsense!" Preach it sister! I think ever third or fourth exploitation
film should have blacks getting even with whitey for all of his oppression.
ultra_caligula for one is all for equal opportunity exploitation, but
in all fairness, I did think that Jesse was more entertaining than the
Turner family. I don't think I've ever heard so much racist dialogue in
my whole life, outside the wannabe skinheads who went to ultra_caligula's
high school. Personally I tend to go for the torturers in these films
rather than the torturees. Like The Last House on the Left and
The House at the Edge of the Park, the torturers are just more
interesting people. Then again, I didn't root for anyone in I Spit
on Your Grave, which is an ugly movie even by ultra_caligula's standards,
which are pretty broad. I think Fight For Your Life 2 should be
Tom Metzger and Louis Farrakhan locked in a basement with hypodermic needles
for an hour and a half. Now that's exploitation!
|
FIST OF FURY (The Chinese
Connection, 1972). One of Bruce Lee’s better films (though that isn’t saying
much) and one of the better all-around efforts from perennial hack Lo Wei.
Lee plays a kung-fu master who returns to town when his teacher dies, he’s
convinced it was murder, and soon enough he finds out that the generic foreign
enemy of Hong Kong cinema, the Japanese, are behind the whole thing, having
poisoned his teacher. Some of the fights are amazing (Lee taking on nine
or so attackers at once, and the ending), but there’s way too much dull
plot stuff for my tastes. It seems that the weird re-titling was a cash-in
on The French Connection, despite the fact that the two films have
nothing in common, more confusing is the fact that Lee’s first film, The
Big Boss, was re-titled Fists of Fury in America, apparently because of
a screw up by the distributor. There are many official and unofficial remakes
of this, notably the awful Lo Wei directed New Fist of Fury with,
of all people, Jackie Chan in 1977, and the less anti-Japanese (but awful)
Fist of Legend with Jet Li in 1994.
|
FIST
OF LEGEND (1994). Well, I guess I'm decidedly in the minority here (me?
noooooo, never). I don't particularly care for this movie too much. In fact,
I don't particularly care for Jet Li that much either. Where others see
a martial arts whirling dervish, I see a phony wire and under cranked star,
a robotic actor with very little (if any) screen presence. Foolishly here
(despite the rumblings of countless fanboys across the globe) Li attempts
to ape, of all people, an icon the size of Bruce Lee, by remaking Lee's
excellent Fist of Fury (aka Chinese Connection in the US).
Of course, the original Lee film was full of crude, propagandistic nationalism,
the likes of which seem rather quaint and even a bit embarrassing today,
but undoubtedly struck a nerve with Lee's working class Chinese audience
in the 70s. Yet, the more I think about that movie, the less crude it seems
to me. It seems less to be about dirty Japanese beating up on poor innocent
Chinese, far from it. Think about the movie for a moment, yes, all the Japanese
are irreversibly evil and despicable, yet what about the Chinese? Outside
of Bruce Lee the Chinese are weak, cowardly and corrupt. Hardly a stirring
vision of these people in general. The vast majority of the Chinese are
beaten and bullied by the Japanese (and other foreigners) and barely grumble.
Suddenly, thrust Bruce Lee into the mix. His character is a superhuman marital
arts fighter, and, more importantly, possesses a nearly mythic fury at the
way things are. Here's a man who can devastate any opponent with his fists
and his kicks, yet he comes back to his school to find his teacher dead,
his country overrun with outsiders, and no one is lifting a finger to stop
it. It is, to me anyway, less a film about "let's beat up foreigners" than
it is a film about unstoppable rage and hatred, about an extraordinary man
who nihilistically takes on the entire world. Bruce Lee in that movie doesn't
just fight one or two men at a time, he fights entire roomfuls of
them, and beats them, not in a controlled fashion like you tend to see in
most kung-fu movies, but in a spasm of rage and venom. Lee simply goes ballistic
in the movie, from the moment he attempts to dig up his teacher's corpse
in a rainstorm, to the moment he kicks the Japanese villain roughly 30 yards,
to the moment he leaps headlong into a volley of Japanese bullets. He's
a force of nature, not a nationalistic poster-boy. Li's Chen Zhen from Fist
of Legend, however, is just that. Calm, collective, unflappable, he's everything
the evil foreigners aren't. He's the description Donald Ritchie gives of
the hero of Kurosawa's embarrassing propaganda sequel to his remarkable
Sanshiro Sugata, a tough, but kind fighter, who shows the devilish
foreigners who's best, but will kindly pat them on the head after their
thrashing, just to show that the Japanese aren't all bad. Compare Lee to
Li when they return home to find their teacher is dead, Li seems to hardly
register the event, sure, his teacher is dead, undoubtedly as a part of
some nefarious Japanese plot, but you'd never realize this to watch Li,
who looks to be sizing up a new pair of loafers by the way he carries himself.
Lee, on the other hand, goes mad with grief and rage at his teacher's death,
tearing at the earth, screaming and yelling (to the point he has to be knocked
silly to get him away). Watch the two in their final fight scenes. Again,
Li, imperturbably, barely breaks a sweat, takes a few lumps and kills the
bad Jap in the most robotic fashion imaginable. Lee on the other hand essentially
goes insane, he kicks the swordsman through a wall into a courtyard (the
man seems to vomit up a gallon of blood) all the while shrieking wildly.
He's a madman at this point and nothing at all can stop him, when he leaps
headlong into the line of Japanese riflemen, I don't think it is as some
nationalistic martyr, but the final act of a man who's rage has become all
consuming, a rage that finally burns itself out completely. Lee doesn't
just kill people by beating them, he tears them to shreds, he doesn't just
snap the Russian's neck, he crushes his throat.
For Jet Li to attempt to approach Bruce Lee in his automaton fashion is
an embarrassment. Behind Lee's on-screen fighting there is always some truth:
that's always Bruce Lee throwing a punch, for Jet Li it's a wire harness,
an under cranked camera, slick editing, or a stunt double. Li's on-screen
presence is as phony as his "martial" art, which is nothing more than gymnastics.
Of course, the passage of time has caused some basic changes to the story
line. This time, the hero has a closer relationship to the Japanese, having
studied in Japan, and having a Japanese girlfriend. The Japanese themselves
have some more depth in the update, as we see pro-peace and the more violent
nationalistic elements side by side (the Chinese too, are sometimes seen
as excessively nationalistic), and there is even a nominal Japanese hero,
played by the long-time resident Japanese villain of numerous chop socky
epics, Yasuaki Kurata, who bests Li in a fair fight and teaches him some
important lessons. I admit that it is a bit more refreshing to see non-Chinese
portrayed as something other than vulgar bullies and crude fascists bent
on genocide, but even then it has a kind of gutless, 90s era political correctness
about it. In Fist of Fury the Japanese are all cocky, little snots
bent on humiliating the Chinese at every turn, but, they are the villains
for God's sake. There are no ruminations on "good Japanese vs. bad Japanese"
the villain is a villain, so all of them are inherently bad. Fist of
Fury was a movie after all, not government policy. Historically, at
any rate, the Japanese were the bad guys, who killed and enslaved
millions of Asians? The more "sensitive" updating of Lee's original simply
makes things more confusing, sure there were Japanese who wanted peace,
but they were hardly the dominant force politically or philosophically in
Japan at the time. So Li defeats that "bad" Japanese general, is that supposed
to avert war? Bruce Lee essentially destroys himself at the end, but Jet
Li lives to fight another day, how can an android ever die?
|
555
(1988). Let's look into the supposed “future” of film making by looking
into the past. Oooooooh (that's the sound of the way back time machine,
aka my VCR)...just think of the latest unwatchable DV atrocity being shown
on IFC or whatever and realize that movies like 555 are the future
that people like George Lucas want to shove down our collective throats.
At least vanity shot-on-film honest to God 35mm or 16mm productions take
money and cojones to make, SoV work just takes a Betamax and a bunch of
gullible, stupid people who want to be in a “movie”. Well, video or not,
I get nervous whenever I see too many people with the same last name, and
this movie has at least three or four people named Koz, who should be banished
from making movies (er, videos) ever again on the strength of this pathetic,
nonsensical effort. Typically we start our journey with an awkwardly edited
scene of a couple making out being butchered by some guy seen lurking in
the shadows, and we end with the dead killer apparently having flashbacks
to previous killings, including one that had happened only 30 seconds previously!
Its that kind of movie. The cast screams “regional theater”, and act with
varying degrees of competence, ranging from little to none, the most unpleasant
being the dumpy middle-aged woman who plays a reporter that refers to herself
as a “professional newsperson” and flashes some tit to get ans interview
(something I did not need or want to see). Mostly the cops follow an old
veteran around (he was “messed up” in 'Nam) who's an obvious red herring,
complete with a knife collection. The cops go to a greasy spoon diner (where
the cook has a mullet and is played by the “composer” who's nickname is
“Hollywood”), and start discussing the gory details of the murder loudly,
followed by the cliched Dirty Harry one (complete with monobrow and sprayed
on gray hair) screaming for everybody to hear: “I'll put a bullet in his
sicko fuckin' head!” The gore scenes are okay for such an amature production,
and one or two are actually pretty good (like the decapitation that is featured
prominently on the video box), unfortunately the hilariously bad actors
ruin the effects, like a throat-slash victim who looks more like she's waiting
for a cum shot than her horrible death. The only interesting thing about
this dreary mess are the interracial couples (I think the first guy who
gets killed is black, and there's an Asian woman who looks more like she's
laughing than screaming and hides under the covers as the killer attacks
her), and the fact that the killer dresses up like some 60s reject, leading
me to conclude that there would be some sort of drug/Manson plot point,
but unfortunately the tag-team of director Wally Koz and screenwriter Roy
M. Koz decided not to explain these things to all four of their viewers.
I liked that the middle-aged reporter refers to herself as “a good lay”
and the end credits promising more exciting features from the Koz family.
|
FIVE
DEADLY VENOMS (Five Venoms, 1978). One of the more famous movies from the
end of the classic chop-socky period, it inaugurated an entire sub-genre
of movies featuring a collective group of actors known as "the Venoms".
It's a fun enough movie, though far from director Chang Cheh's best. The
goofy, sometimes incomprehensible plot deals with a dying kung-fu master
sending off his last student (the bumpkinish Chiang Sheng) to find his "star"
pupils, the venoms. Each fighter has a fantastic kung-fu style based on
a poisonous animal: the centipede (Lu Feng), the snake (Wei Pai), the scorpion
(Sun Chien), the lizard (Kuo Chui/Kwok Tsui), and the toad (Lo Meng). The
teacher is worried that his pupils have fallen into evil, since their clan,
the Venoms, has been up to various nefarious activities (I think, I was
a little confused). Chiang is to find another ex-Venom, a rich man, and
try to convince him to give away his wealth in order to bring the five Venoms
out of hiding. It turns out the five Venoms are already onto the old man,
and are attempting to track him down to get at his money, centipede and
snake, and lizard and toad joining forces separately (the scorpion remains
hidden). Centipede and snake find the old man and kill him (they lack the
gentle touch it seems), but scorpion finds the map to the old man's treasure.
Unfortunately, there's one witness to the massacre, and he identifies centipede
as the killer, and toad (helping lizard, who is a policeman) manages to
subdue centipede. But, as it turns out, snake has bribed the judge, and
toad ends up being charged with the murder, and after some extensive torture
is executed for the crime, while centipede is let off. Got that? Ok there's
more. Now lizard joins up with the master's last student to go after centipede
and snake, which brings out scorpion, who was playing everyone against each
other in an attempt to get the treasure all for himself, which leads to
a final confrontation between the Venoms. Like I said, this plot is more
than a handful, and part of the amusement that comes from the movie is just
trying to keep track of all the characters and little side plots that go
on (even the dubbers mess things up at one point, calling centipede "number
five" rather than "number one"). There isn't really that much fighting in
the movie, and what there is isn't really all that mind-blowing, but I suppose
that the thrust of the movie is more the bizarre plot and esoteric fighting
styles rather than on all out action. Maybe not as great as its reputation,
but its still a fairly solid Chang Cheh kung-fu thriller.
|
FLESH
EATING MOTHERS. (1989) I had the distinct pleasure of seeing this
film on what was undoubtedly its impromptu debut on the old USA Network.
Things were more “liberal” then, and USA had no qualms about
showing a movie full of bloody scenes like this one, my main complaint against
the film would be that it is so goddamn awful. I’d say the
chances that the makers of this garbage tried to get Troma to distribute
this but were turned down are pretty good. It has the standard Troma elements:
cheap production values, gore effects of varying degrees of competence,
acting of uniformly no competence, and that trademark bad 80s horror:
humor. As filmmakers decided that being scary wasn’t cutting the mustard
anymore they turned to being sleazy, when that didn’t work they tried
to be funny, and, well, anybody who’s seen a Troma movie can tell
you how well that little experiment went over. What could’ve been
a good scary, even terrifying premise, is instead a limpid and amateurish
exercise in poor taste and poorer production values. The plot mixes Romero
inspired diseased-zombie/maniacs with some truly misguided morality; a number
of women in a small town are overcome by the compulsion to eat human flesh,
they logically turn to their own children, then the townspeople, the women,
it turns out, are infected with a sexually transmitted virus passed to them
by the local lothario. The kicker is that the virus only infects women who
have had children; obviously we are dealing with some sort of moron majority
fable here. The children who manage to avoid being eaten react to their
mothers’ cannibalism calmly enough; if this was a satire I would buy
it, but their placidity has more to do rather with the horrendous nature
of the acting, which ranges from barely spirited to lethargic in the extreme.
The scenes of violence are in spirit with the rest of the goings-on here,
lots of rubber limbs are gnawed at by the cast members (who are progressively
more and more bizarrely made-up as the film advances) while tubs of blood
are splattered about. The mothers bicker among themselves (this passes for
“comic relief”) while their children try to come up with a plan
of action and are saved by the efforts of a freakishly small pathologist
and his giantess of a colleague. In the ending copied from any number of
Italian zombie films the women are seemingly cured (and let off the hook,
it seems murdering and eating people isn’t a crime to get to excited
about), but quickly return to their cannibal ways as a breathless radio
commentator describes increasing instances of cannibalism around the country.
While many horror films can be described as moralistic, they have the morality
of a fairy-tale, don’t wander too far from the well-trod path or you’ll
be eaten by the witch and so on (or its science-fiction variant, “he
shouldn’t have tampered in God’s domain”); this film,
on the other hand, engages in such a distasteful, hysterical morality that
even this reviewer had a hard time stomaching it. The film’s obvious
lesson is that a mother whom betrays her marriage vows is harming her children
to the extent that she might as well be eating them. While it hardly takes
a scientist of the obvious to agree that adultery is, like a form of bear-baiting,
harmful to everyone involved, to base such a reactionary, hypocritical (for
the most part the fathers are never present, except to brutalize and/or
ignore their wives) stance around what is essentially a mindless gore film
is more disgusting than any of the on-screen violence. Co-producer, editor,
photographer Harry Eisenstein (presumably no relation to Serge) went on
to (among other things) the anti-abortion horror film The Sucking.
|
FLESH
FEAST (1970). I don't know what Veronica Lake did in her life, but here
she is, in the second lowest level of ex-movie star hell (behind appearing
in a hard-core porno I think). Lake was one of the most glamorous movie
stars of the 30s and 40s, but apparently went off the deep end and disappeared
from the public eye completely, which begs the question, what the hell compelled
her to come out of retirement to appear in this completely ridiculous bottom-of-the-barrel
exploitation movie? Lake stars as a plastic surgeon living in luxurious
Miami Beach who conducts experiments using maggots as an anti-aging
agent. Yes, maggots. Now exactly how this process works remains a mystery,
as director/co-writer/co-producer (with Lake herself) Brad F. Grinter seemingly
lacked either the imagination or the stamina to come up with a working explanation
as to how maggots can possibly halt the aging process. At any rate, a news
reporter is tracking the shady activities of a guy who comes to Miami from
South America and is knifed for his trouble, leading his boss to "personally"
take on the story, which consists of sending his secretary out on various
missions. Meanwhile Lake needs fresh corpses for some reason, and one of
her nurse underlings complies by stealing one from the local hospital. Why
I don't know, as I was really very confused by this whole dreary mess of
a movie. The maggots are always accompianied by weird lights ("the colors
of the spectrum") and the "special effects" are the worst. Despite the fact
that the movie only runs around 70 minutes, everything is sort of leisurly
crammed in here and there. Some swarthy South Americans show up with "Max
Bauer" who's face is flaky and white for some reason, after being worked
on by the doctor's magic maggots he promptly strangles an assistant. Chris
Martel (of Scream Baby Scream non-fame) is in love with the assistant
and promptly knifes him. He's named Juan (or is it Jose, I forget) and I
guess is supposed to be from South America, but still ends up just sounding
like a freaky beatnik man. Judging from this movie's rep, you probably know
by now that the mysterous "leader" who is continually mentioned turns out
to be none other than Adolf Hitler himself, who is then promptly eaten by
Lake's maggots. Much like Bauer, Hitler seems to have a problem with chaffing,
as his skin resembles a bowl of Quaker Oats, but he has the cute little
moustache, so we know its Hitler and not Hilter. It turns
out the whole thing is a plot by Lake to get revenge for her mother, who
was subjected to similar maggot experiments in the death camps. Now, you
might think that a movie with a forgotten has-been actress, plastic surgery,
no production values, maggots, and Adolf Hitler would be a load of fun,
right? Well, not really. This genuinely is a crappy little movie, dull,
badly paced and pretty blandly executed, for whatever reason, this is just
missing that certain element that sets a piece of shit apart from a mere
piece of junk. Of special mention is the "DVD" release from Beverly Wilshire
Filmworks and Telefilms International that must rank as the single
shittiest DVD I've come across yet. Don't expect an Anchor Bay type
release, no this seems to have been taken from a bad second or third generation
dub and simply transferred to DVD (probably with a Mac or PC no doubt) the
menu is atrocious and the picture sucks. A real pathetic effort, but I only
paid $8 for it, so I'm not too offended (though the DVD release of Andy
Milligan's Guru, the Mad Monk was only $10 and taken directly from
a 35mm print). Michael Weldon points out in the Psychotronic Video Guide
that John Ascroft, when governor of Missouri, tried to get this banned as
a part of an anti-slasher film bill! On top of being a fascist police-stater,
he's also a dumb ass. God bless America!!!!
|
UN FLIC (aka DIRTY
MONEY, 1972). Jean Pierre Melville's last and most bizarre film features
Alain Delon as an emotionless cop who in the course of investigating a robbery
finds that his friend (Richard Crenna speaking French!) took part in it.
Unlike the more intricate Le Circle Rouge this is more of a sketch, going
over Melville's usual themes without elaborating or even really exploring
them. It could be the ultimate Melville film then, since everything is extremely
ambiguous and ill defined, but one gets the sense that Melville's heart
really wasn't in it. The center-piece of the film is a lengthy train-robbery
done with Melville's usual genius for criminal detail, unfortunately he
uses an embarrassing obvious model train and helicopter which makes the
scene more closely resemble Larry Buchanan than Jean-Pierre Melville
|
FLOWER OF FLESH AND
BLOOD, THE [Za Ginippigu 2: Chiniku no Hana] (1986). One of the most notorious
underground films of the 90s (though it dates back to the mid-80s), Flower
of Flesh and Blood was a continuation of gutter producer Satoru Ogura’s
planned series of “extreme” video releases that would appeal
to the sensibilities of the most outré video fans. The films
were shot cheaply on video, had no serious plots and a maximum of gory violence.
The series effectively ended with the first two films before moving onto
more mundane situations, but Ogura made his mark with this and the first
episode (Guinea Pig/Devil’s Experiment, 1985/86)
along with writer/director Hideshi Hino. Both films were essentially forged
“recreations” of alleged snuff films that had wound up in police
custody. The first was an “experiment”, the second was the recreation
of an 8mm snuff film sent to manga author Hino by a deranged fan. Of course,
these explanations were bogus, but succeeded in lending a certain distasteful
legitimacy to otherwise dubious productions. After an opening note describing
the “origins” of the production, the video shows a man stalk,
then kidnap a woman; he takes her to his isolated home and ties her to a
bed, drugs her, then proceeds to dismember her, pausing to address the camera
with poetic declarations of his methods and intentions. The killer’s
efforts finally result in the woman’s demise, and he throws back a
curtain to show the skeletal parts of his other victims, she wasn’t
the first, and the freeze-frame of an anonymous woman shown walking down
the street suggests she won’t be the last. Basically a gore version
of a porno loop, albeit slightly more ambitious, Hino’s film is rather
disturbing in both style and meaning. Hino certainly manages a degree of
dread and unease, the shaky hand-held camera that literally chases the doomed
woman through a play ground, the blood-splattered home the woman wakes up
in, the grotesque montage of body parts preserved by the killer, and so
on, and the film definitely lacks the joke laden approach of the average
80s horror film, Hino is dead serious in his execution (though in some aspects,
the cheap samurai costume the killer wears, his gleefully gruesome eyeball
sucking ritual and so on are a bit silly), and one gets a sense that the
makers genuinely want the viewer to believe that the film is real. But,
this is missing the film’s reason for existence, which is to show
graphic bloodletting in as realistic a way as possible. The woman’s
hands are carved off, her arm is removed, as are her legs, and finally she
is disemboweled, and is convincingly shot, though one may or may not miss
the rather rubbery flesh, and, in one case, a servo-arm clearly visible
in a cut-off hand. It is impossible to rate such a film accurately, as generally
only people predisposed to seeing such scenes of violence would even know
of its existence in the first place, as it is unlikely that any video store
would stock such a film, at the very least without some warning as to its
content. The uninitiated will be thankful for its violence, the wary will
turn it off after ten minutes, and any reports to the police will be thoroughly
investigated before being dismissed.
|
FLYING SEX MAN [Maza
Gusu ka Shoutta…] (19??). Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I don't think I've
ever seen anything so amateurish in my entire life. Home movies have more
finesse than this. 8mm porn loops are more stylish. I don't know when this
thing was made, but it's safe to say it was before the advent of digital
technology or even the existence of competent video makers. A guy (Sachio
Kijoi) prays to Buddha (or "Budha" in the subtitles) to be like superman
and viola! he becomes the not-so-super Flying Sex Man. The "effect" for
the flying portions of the "movie" is so incredibly cheap and shoddy you
may begin to wonder about your eyesight, or at the very least why the hell
you're watching something with a lower budget than a fourth-grade diorama.
Flying Sex Man shows up at Tsuyako Hime's apartment, ties her up, does various
perverted acts to her (hot wax, gynecological exam, vaginal enema) then
screws her. The End. You can see crewmember's arms and shadows, and hear
the cameraman walk around. There are previews for more ugly-looking Japanese
pornos that seem to have been made for the US market (no optical censoring).
It was "directed" by Yoshi Watatai, and I really wonder what he's doing
right now. Unbe-fucking-livable.
|
FRANKENSTEIN
'80 (1972). It was shot in 1972, but it takes place in 1980. THE FUTURE.
In the FUTURE people dress like its 1972. You see, the 70s have never ended,
and, doctor Frankenstein decides to end them by building a man out of spare
parts he finds behind a 7/11 and…oh, wait, ok, wrong movie. Stuff happens
here, IN THE FUTURE. The doctor builds a monster called "mosaic" who looks
like Tor Johnson and spends much of his free time harvesting organs from
Chinese slave laborers and raping shapely prostitutes. Every twenty minutes
or so organs are removed from dummies. IN THE FUTURE. An intrepid reporter
with Art Garfunkle hair investigates IN THE FUTURE. A lot of exciting things
happen IN THE FUTURE, most of all the end of the movie! Starring Ohn Richardson,
Ato Romano, O Papas, Ila Parker and of course, 8 Fiz.
|
FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND
(1983). This is a classic to beat them all. It's probably the most desperate
B-movie in history, and it comes as no surprise that it was directed by
Ed Wood's illegitimate half-brother Jerry Warren. This may as well have
been made in 1960, since it shares nothing in common with other films from
the early 80s (which is too bad). A group of balloonists (I guess Warren
heard that stupid Burt Bacharach song about flying away in "my beautiful
balloon") are blown off-course and land on an uncharted desert island. This
A-Team of morons, led by the confused-looking Robert Clark (who resembles
a retirement community gigolo) explore the island and find a bunch of leopard
skin bikini clad women who turn out to be aliens (logical enough, but where
the hell did the leopards come from?). Soon enough they start hanging out
with the wrong crowd and kick it with a bunch of pirates who work for >gasp<
the 200 year old assistant to the original Baron Frankenstein and his freaky
white haired wife. Frankenstein is dead, but still controls the island through
PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. This consists, in a theremin eerie sort of way, of a
superimposed image of John Carridine showing up and yelling mysterious dialogue
("seekers of the Golden Thread, the power ye seek shall be yours! The power!
The power! The power!") and sometimes, when people speak of the outside
world their arm is paralyzed by some mystery machine (huh?). Despite the
fact that the 200 year old guy and his wife are seeking the "essence" of
life they seem to spend most of their time trying to keep the old fart alive
by injecting him with the blood of Cameron Mitchell, a salty old sea captain.
Cameron Mitchell was in a lot of bad movies, but he always gave his all,
and he actually tries to impart his pathetic role with some dignity, quoting
poetry and rambling about his lost daughter. Now, I don't have the foggiest
idea what the hell this movie was about, but I seriously enjoyed the nefarious
"guards" of the Frankenstein crew: a bunch of guys in black stocking caps
and goofy porn star aviator shades who lumber around like mongoloids and
do their master's bidding. At one point one of the balloonists has a karate
fight with one and loses! Maybe Warren was a Dadaist, or a disciple of Alexandro
Jodorowski, and this is an update of The Holy Mountain, or
a really confusing version of Dune. There are scenes that will blow
your mind, baby, as when a Filipino guard injects a mannequin in the eye,
or when some other guards, using a cheap plastic red devil trident turn
another guard into a monster with goofy-ass boogaloo fangs. At the end the
Frankenstein monster shows up, and he's just as asinine as you'd figure
he'd be. Any movie that features a climatic fight between bikini clad aliens
and retard bad guys, a Frankenstein who's only powers rest in his ability
to turn over furniture, a one-eyed pirate that laughs uproariously at every
opportunity (this guy is fucking excellent!) a reserve Frankenstein brain,
and a "is it a dream or reality" ending absolutely must be a masterpiece.
Rest in piece Jerry Warren, you magnificent son of a bitch!
|
FRISK (1996). Low-keyed
and low budget film of Dennis Cooper's ultra-disturbing novel. Michael Gunther
plays a man whose bizarre sexual fantasies spiral out into a world where
fantasy and reality start to merge. He writes his fantasies out to an ex-lover
and his brother. Perhaps Cooper's narrative is too fractured to transfer
to film, but director/writer/editor Todd Veron's adaptation is not particularly
inventive. It would be difficult to bring the strange, digressive scenes
and gruesome violence to screen, and Veron's film is too slow and unfocused
to really be compelling. Plus, the grotesque conclusion, which takes place
in Holland, is unwisely placed in San Francisco, and the sadistic Germans
are replaced by a serial killing couple (Parker Posey and James Lyons who
make wisecracks). The Playschool camera scenes are just too much.
|
FROM
HELL (2001). I guess you can call this a perfectly serviceable (if a bit
daffy) telling of the Jack the Ripper mythos until the embarrassing ending
that pretty much sums up the cretinish tendencies in contemporary filmmaking
nicely thank you. Johnny Depp plays a walking collection of the fashionable
vices of the late 19th century: opium and absinthe, beyond that he has within
him another fad of the late 19th century: spiritualism. Depp has "visions"
of crime. He also has that great fashion of late 20th and early 21st century
cinema: a traumatic past experience that has pushed him into his destructive
behavior. We first glimpse him being riled from an opium stupor by his trusty
right hand man Robbie Coltraine (getting fatter by the film I think). He's
called to investigate the especially brutal killing of a whore, found carved
up on a Whitechappel street. Of course, Depp, being the hero of the movie,
is thoroughly modern in his investigatory technique, and immediately senses
that "this is no ordinary crime". We're given a few red herrings in the
early going, namely a sadistic gang of thugs who're demanding payment from
a group of lowly prostitutes, "or else". This little sub-plot is followed
for a while until it becomes clear to the filmmakers that yes, the audience
possesses enough intelligence to figure out that these are not the killers,
and it is dropped unceremoniously. This is problem number one with this
whole thing, contempt for the audience (hardly something very novel, since
roughly nine out of ten films now deign to treat their audiences like especially
stupid children). Beyond that everything here will be extremely familiar
to anybody who's ever read a magazine article or a book about the various
Ripper theories that have been bandied about over the years: the Royal Family,
Freemasons, a crazy doctor, conspiracy theories, crazed syphilitic princes,
etc etc. To its credit the film at least tries to tie the theories into
something plausible. Namely that syphilitic Prince Edward liked to cruise
for whores and ended up marrying one. On top of this he gave her a child,
which would be the rightful heir to the throne. Obviously this would cause
some difficulties for the Royal Family, so the whole thing is "taken care
of". By who? By a crazed Masonic doctor (Ian Holm) who's eyes get all black
and scary when he's about to kill. Since, as Mr. Burns' germs informed us,
Freemasons run the country, the whole thing is an airtight conspiracy that
even Oliver Stone would admire. But, since this is a movie, the case is
rather easily cracked by the clairvoyant hophead detective with a dead wife/baby
in his past. Oh, but what about the love story? you ask. Well we've got
that too of course, as Depp falls in love with Mary Kelly herself, Heather
Graham, an actress of admirable transparency. Now this is where it gets
sticky, folks. Depp is the Hero, Graham is the Hero's Love Interest. The
Hero's Love Interest is allowed to die, but only in a Hollywood sanctioned
good way to die. Car crash, plane crash, explosion, etc. It isn't sanctioned
by the governing body that the Hero's Love Interest can die at the hands
of a crazed serial killer, not only that, but be mutilated beyond recognition.
So how do we solve the problem, good people? Have her run off to Ireland
and have a minor character killed off in her place. Yes, it's a happy ending
for the most part. A happy ending in a film about Jack the Ripper.
Is it possible to really conceive of a more heartless, pandering conclusion?
First Hollywood gives us an upbeat Holocaust movie, now this. There is absolutely
nothing, it seems that Hollywood cannot totally whitewash for the viewing
public; a public which Hollywood views with barely concealed contempt obviously.
It's really very clear that not one person could handle a movie with a downbeat
ending, right? So rather than deal with the fact that this is a movie based
on actual events, and actual murders, and a real woman named Mary Kelly
was skinned and gutted by a killer who was never caught, instead of bothering
to respect the actual lives and suffering of people we are given a paltry
little fairy tale so we can sleep well at night. The other whores were just
that, whores, disposable people, but well, our Mary Kelly is a young, vibrant
attractive woman and therefore mustn't be destroyed by anything. It is in
this that the real inhumanity and cruel heartlessness of modern Hollywood
filmmaking comes out. The total lack of passion, of interest in humanity
is so clear in a movie like this. The idea that even ugly people are somehow
still human is lost on our dear Hollywood establishment. Of course now and
again a few scraps on the table are given to a minority here and there,
or a fat-ass here and there, or a plain performer now and again, but the
real underlying message here, if any, is that to be an actually human being,
not some airbrushed, phony, plastic little Barbie doll, is to somehow be
worthless. Saucy Jack can hack and slash and dismember the ugly, fat, toothless
whores that populate the largely digitized London of 1888, but for the love
of God, he mustn't be allowed to murder the just as good as digital American
Actress with Accent. No, better play it safe and put her on a plane to Ireland.
I look forward to a new and Better passion play by Hollywood in which Jesus
has a minor throwaway character nailed up in his place and runs off to open
a successful boutique in Rome with his life partner and quirky best friend.
Thank you Hollywood for more bullshit than anyone will ever need in this
lifetime.
|
FUDOH: THE NEW GENERATIONS
[Gokudo Sengokushi: Fudoh] (1996). In some ways it's too bad that the only
way a Japanese film can get attention now and days is if it just copies
the formulas laid down by filmmakers in other countries. The Japanese film
industry has always copied other people, but it always filtered them through
it's own unique perspective. Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress may resemble
a John Ford film superficially, but it is undoubtedly an Akira Kurosawa
film, and Japanese at that. Maybe everybody's cinema is diluted and homogenized,
but I'd take a slow and stark Ken Takakura old-school Yakuza film, or one
of Kitano's masterpieces any day over this pumped-up, outrageous, but derivative
and dull Hong Kong copy. It's based on a manga and deals with Ricky Fudoh,
a handsome teen who as a child witnessed his Yakuza-boss father butcher
his brother and proudly display his severed head to other Yakuza bosses.
Ricky grows up with an understandably insane hatred of his father, and builds
an army of child assassins to do his bidding and kill off other Yakuza bosses
before he takes on his father. The opening is as slow and intricate as any
other Yakuza film, save a spastic shoot-out in which a pair of assassins
kill a man in a bathroom (one of them is played by veteran actor/singer
Mickey Curtis!). But, things change drastically when a pair of cute kids
gun down a Yakuza boss, and another one is served coffee that causes his
veins to burst, causing the car he's in to overflow with gallons of blood.
Basically most of the film has one killing after another, and most are pretty
imaginative, and some are just gross (i.e. the girl who shoots darts from
her vagina, and tries to kill a giant biker by firing one while she's menstruating).
While I appreciate sleaziness and gore as much as anybody, something about
this film annoyed me. Maybe it just thought it was too cool, as if director
Takashi Miike figured that he had a cult film on his hands and just let
it go at that; but the worst part for me was the fact that our "hero" Ricky
just turns out to be a pretty-boy pussy who hides behind his little army,
and when push comes to shove, and he has to fight someone on his own, he
gets the shit kicked out of him, and has to be saved by his buddies (who
hide in the shadows). Maybe Miike was trying to be unexpected by making
his hero a wuss, but it just made the film annoying, especially at the conclusion,
when Ricky faces off against his sadistic father, and Miike falls back on
a ridiculously unimaginative convention to save Ricky's sorry ass. I'd prefer
to see Ken Takakura marching off by himself to take on the rival gang than
see Ricky Fudoh hide behind twelve-year-old kids and teenage girls. On top
of that, the most interesting characters, Ricky's father, a food obsessed
Yakuza assassin, a ruthless Yakuza boss, are hardly developed or killed
off, and the dullest characters, Ricky, the giant biker/wrestler freak,
are in nearly every scene. Just a wasted opportunity, I guess. There are
some sequels that are even worse since they don't have any violence in them.
|
THE FUGITIVE SAMURAI
(1983). Anybody expecting action on the level of the original film series
of Kozure Okami will be sorely disappointed, as this is the much
more watered down TV series version (hugely popular though) of the comic/movie
version. Kinnosuke Yorozuya plays Itto Ogami this time out, and this pretty
much follows the plots of the early episodes of the original film series,
and is probably the re-edited and re-titled version of From North to
South, West to East, the first film that was distilled from the TV series
(which ran for 4 years). The dubbing is awful, the sword duels are second-rate
and the whole thing is pretty dreary.
|
FULL CONTACT (1992).
Ringo Lam was, and continues to be, one of the best directors in Hong Kong.
Even though he is mostly unknown in the West (despite helming two Jean Claude
van Damme turds, Maximum Risk and the woeful Replicant) he
is truly one of the classiest action directors in the world, never once
bowing down to the Wooist style that dominated Hong Kong for so many years,
preferring his own brand of low-key, character driven filmmaking. This is
one of his best films, a sleazy, unpredictable, violent ride through the
sleazy side of HK criminal life. Chow Yun-Fat (in one of his better roles)
plays Jeff, a bouncer in a seedy Thai night-club who agrees to help pull
off an arms robbery to help out a buddy in trouble (Anthony Wong). In Hong
Kong, Chow and crew hook up with another gang lead by outrageously gay thug
Simon Yam, who’s character has a crush on Chow. During the heist Chow is
betrayed and left for dead, of course he survives (minus a couple of fingers)
and returns years later to get revenge. Of course, Woo’s films were always
centered on honorable crooks and their dealing with the modern world, Lam
seems to reject the notion of honorable crooks entirely, he has a dark,
cynical view of criminals and the world they inhabit, crooks double-cross
each other, often with little reason, and friendships are as fragile as
anything else. On top of that Lam tends to keep his actors under control
(though he lets Yam go pretty far over-the-top), allowing them to have a
more naturalistic repartee than usual in the world of histrionic Hong Kong
film performances. Of course it was a big flop in Hong Kong but is highly
recommended.
|
| |
Cheap Reseller Hosting 
