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GAME OF
DEATH II (1981). Ludicrous sequel to Bruce Lee's unfinished Game of Death
(1978). "Bruce Lee" investigates the death of his friend and is killed in
the process, his brother, Tong Lung, shows up to take revenge. Obviously,
Lee had been dead for eight years by the time this came out, and he's "played"
by outtakes from his films, and presumably Tong (though some sources state
that Yuen Biao was the Lee double and doubled for Tong in the fight scenes).
Certainly no classic, this has some incredible fight scenes choreographed
by Yuen Woo-Ping, and lots of ridiculous and funny scenes; certainly the
asinine Bruce Lee subplot just adds to the campiness of the whole thing.
There's a fight with a guy in a lion suit (he's supposed to be a real lion,
of course) and a guy in a leopard skin (called "Wildman" in the credits),
cheesy sets, and lots of bad dubbing ("I'm not interested in killing, I
just want to show you how bad your kicks are."/"Huh!! You must be talkin'
about yourself!").
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THE GATES
OF HELL [Paura nella Citta dei Morti Viventi] (1980). Lucio Fulci was on
speed in 1980, and turned out a bunch of films. Most say The Beyond is the
best of the bunch, but I think this is his best film. Its atmospheric and
creepy to say the lest, with some graphic violence and enough strangeness
to at least keep you occupied in between the killings. Katherine MacColl
has a séance and sees a vision of the Dunwich parish priest committing suicide,
which causes the dead to rise and hell to open up. She apparently dies of
fright and is buried. Enter inquisitive reporter Christopher George, who
happens by in time to hear her screams and save her from being buried alive
(one of Fulci's best set-pieces). The two travel to Dunwich (next door to
H.P. Lovecraft) and find some odd goings on. Unbeknownst to them the dead
priest is showing up, making people's eyes bleed, and causing them to vomit
up their entire intestinal tract (incredible!). John Morghen/Giovanni Lombardo
Radice lives in an abandoned house and seems to know what's going on, but
the father of a girl he molested puts a power drill through his head! No
one seems to notice this. There are killings and zombies, brains are pulled
out and there are lots of cheap editing effects, as well as thousands of
maggots thrown on our dedicated cast. Nothing makes sense, why does the
priest's suicide cause all this? why is it so easy to kill the zombies?
why does everyone stand around like morons while people are being de-brained?
why didn't Argento sue Fabio Frizzi for his Dawn of the Dead rip-off
score? why do Italian directors do films in English when they clearly don't
know the language? Above all, can anyone explain the ending to me? (When
I first saw this someone had taped over part of the ending with a scene
from "The Flinstones"! It made more sense than the real ending!) Oh well,
since one of my two favorite film genres is the incoherently gory horror
film, I can excuse all of that. Bring on the chicken guts! This played in
the US uncut.
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GETTING
ANY? (Minna Yatteruka?!, 1995). A time-out for Takeshi Kitano, who leaves
behind the world of his masterpiece, Sonatine, and essentially recreates
the atmosphere of his TV work, offbeat and unpredictable, crude and witty.
The opening perfectly illustrates what Kitano is about here: a stylish man
in a stylish car picks up a stylish woman and they have stylish sex. Cut
to the decidedly unstylish and unlovely face of Dankan (the friend from
Boiling Point), this is his fantasy, and his conclusion is: “a car equals
a woman…so…I’ve gotta get a car!!” Once again we’re not in the world of
children, but the childish, and Dankan’s character here is the ultimate
Kitano man-child, a complete buffoon who only has one thing on his mind:
getting laid. The question is how to do it. There is the whole plot; from
there Dankan attempts the most asinine schemes in order to get some nookie.
His plans becomes more and more ambitious and ornate until he is finally
satisfied with just peeping on naked women in bathhouses, and for once things
work out in his favor, when he meets mad scientist Kitano, who makes him
into an invisible man, then, a giant fly man! I can’t explain too much,
since it’s a comedy and I don’t want to give away the jokes, but a good
knowledge of Japanese cinema is essential here, as Kitano references everything
from Ken Takakura (in the insane, but hilarious spoof of yakuza movies which
is the highlight) to Godzilla (the weakest part, Godzilla has been spoofed
too much for it to be that effective). Like most comedies, it mostly seems
to be improvised, and as such runs out of steam by the end, but the weird,
disjointed style of Kitano’s action cinema is perfectly suited to pure out
and out comedy too.
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GLEN OR
GLENDA (1953). To say this is an incredible film that seems to be a poverty
row version of Blood of a Poet but far better is an understatement.
This is a masterpiece! No one made films like Ed Wood and he never made
another film like this: it's a personal piece of filmmaking literally decades
ahead of its time. Glen (Ed Wood, of course) can't decide weather to tell
his fiancée (Dolores Fuller, also in The Mesa of Lost Women, what
a year!) that he's a transvestite. Bela Lugosi as "Scientist" sits in a
cut-rate "lab" and rants about "puppy dog tails and big fat snails" a "green
dragon" who eats little boys and, famously, "pull the string!" There are
shots of people walking down the street, cars on freeways, buffalo, and
Wood taking long looks into shop windows. There's an amazing, long nightmare
sequence with women lounging around set to jazz and folk music, a Dali-like
room, hands and laughing accusatory faces and the final triumphant emergence
of Glenda. One of the best films ever made! Viva Ed Wood!
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GOD OF
GAMBLERS’ RETURN (1994). I remember seeing a preview for this movie, it
showed Chow Yun-Fat getting out of a limo in slow-motion. That’s it, nothing
else. I guess Chow was identifiable enough in this role that no other information
was needed. This is the fourth God of Gamblers movie, with Chow returning
to the role after #3, which starred Steven Chow. The God of Gamblers has
retired and is living the quiet life when the Devil of Gamblers (Wu Xing-Guo)
comes calling, murdering his pregnant wife (a particular bit of poor taste
from director Wong Jing), so Chow and his brother (the other Tony
Leung) head across Mainland China to Taiwan for a showdown along with a
bumbling crook, a mainland cop, and (of course, this is Wong Jing!) a little
brat kid. As stated before, this is a Wong Jing movie, and is his typical
mishmash of genres and conventions, like ridiculous over-the-top gunfights,
and some seriously borderline comedy. It is entertaining, I’ll give it that,
though probably best seen in a theater where everyone will laugh at its
excesses, Chow is quite smooth, and Chingmy Yau is sexy as usual playing
her stock femme fatale character.
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GODZILLA
VS. KING GHIDORAH [Gojira Tai Kingu Gidora] (1991). The incredibly convoluted
plot of this hugely exciting neo-Godzilla movie has some bizarrely contrarian
and paranoid political overtones, but that doesn't detract from its raison
d'être. We find out that during WWII a giant dinosaur helped a unit
of Japanese soldiers from being annihilated by the Americans. This same
dino became Godzilla after an A-Bomb test. Some people from the future-Japanese
speaking white guys and a Japanese woman-come to Japan circa 1992 with a
plan to rid the world of Godzilla once and for all: travel back in time
and kill the dinosaur, which they do, but they leave some cute winged creatures
behind, and they are mutated by radiation and become the three headed Ghidorah
(from the old big G movies), which the future dudes control. You see, in
the 23rd century Japan is the most powerful nation on Earth, and these guys
(UN?) want every country to have equal power, so they get rid of "good"
Godzilla, and use Ghidorah to destroy Japan and keep it from world domination
(Tojo, anyone?). But, the government uses a nuclear sub to mutate the dino-now
at the bottom of the sea-into Godzilla. It works, and Big G kicks Ghidorah's
butt after the Japanese future chick switches sides and breaks the mind-lock
on Ghidorah. Unfortunately the new G is bigger and angrier, and he goes
on the warpath, so the Japanese future woman has to go to the future again
and revive Ghidorah to fight G, leading to a totally exhilarating finale.
Whew! You've got some remarkable optimism from the waning days of bubble
capitalism, paranoia about outside interference in Japan's affairs, but
also anti-nuke and military bits-as the military creates Godzilla to protect
Japan, but he ends up wreaking half of it. Wow! What a goofy allegory, but
what a great movie! The effects are incredible, as is Akira Ifukube's music.
Even the dubbing is fun with lines like: "you hateful men are full of deceit!"
and "take that, you dinosaur!" But above all, the appearance of the mechanized
Ghidorah is brilliant. A must see!
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GONIN (1995).
This may be the first surreal/gay action film ever made, and it is an unusual
departure for Ishii, a former manga illustrator who broke into the film
business by writing pink scripts for Nikkatsu studio, and eventually started
directing his own films, stylishly misogynistic horror movies. This too
is a dazzling and stylish effort. Koichi Sato plays a famous nightclub owner
heavily in debt to the Yakuza. Tired of being bullied and humiliated by
the thuggish gangsters he gets together with four other equally desperate
men (the title literally translates as "Five People"), a flashy gay gigolo
with a violent streak (Masahiro Motoki), a corrupt ex-cop (Ishii regular
Jimpachi Nezu), a crazy laid-off business man (Naoto Takenaka, from Shall
We Dance?), and a bleach blonde weirdo with a Thai girlfriend (Kippei
Shiina, the girlfriend, as usual for an Ishii story is named Nami and is
played by Megumi Tokoyama), to rob the local Yakuza gang. The five succeed
brazenly (the robbery is hardly a Melville-esq. essay in criminal brilliance),
but the boss gets the two best yakuza hitmen to track the robbers down.
Beat Takeshi and Kazuya Kimura play the hitmen/gay lovers, and this was
Takeshi's first film after his near-fatal scooter accident, and he takes
full advantage of his infirmary to play the one-eyed assassin as a frightening
sadist. Perhaps remembering the charge that action films are blatantly homoerotic,
Ishii makes three of his characters gay, and one closeted (who comes out
at the last possible moment); twisting his premise even further, he makes
the most obviously bourgeois character, the businessman, a completely insane
homicidal maniac. Unlike most recent Japanese action films, Ishii forgoes
the Hong Kong approach, and instead settles on a gloriously filmed, frequently
gaudy, sometimes slow and pointless character-based movie. The action scenes,
when they come, are memorable, and many of Ishii's usual touches are there
(love that rain) and the poetic (?) ending is excellent. This played American
art houses and Ishii followed his success with a sequel, the incredibly
violent Gonin 2 with five women verses the yakuza.
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GONZA THE
SPEARMAN (1985). Director Masahiro Shinoda returns with another adaptation
of the perennially popular Chikamatsu Monzaemon. It is another tragic tale
set during the corrupt Tokugawa Shogunate, local lords must keep a residence
not only in their home province, but in the capital of Edo as well, while
one particular lord (Takashi Tsumura) is gone the ambitious young samurai
Gonza (Hiromi Go) is undone by the usual treachery and circumstance. He
is engaged to be married, but is offered marriage to the daughter of the
lord by the lord’s beautiful wife (Misako Tanaka) and cannot refuse. Unfortunately
for Gonza, the lord’s wife has been carrying on an affair with a crafty
samurai (Shohei Hino), and when he finds the two innocently together he
accuses the pair of adultery. The lord returns, and though he’s a kindly
man, he’s honor-bound to hunt down and kill the pair. Here the samurai must
master the tea ceremony rather than the art of killing and seem to be superfluous
members of society, upholding a pointless martial social order that can
only lead to tragedy, and in the end, when Gonza fights off his killers
with a wooden sword, Shinoda makes a potent symbol out of his inevitable
destruction.
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GORE GORE
GIRLS (1972). A sadistic killer is stalking nubile young strippers and killing
them in all sorts of nasty ways, a young reporter and a debonair (poor man's
debonair, anyway) private eye are on the case. Is it the jilted lover? The
Vietnam vet? The leader of the local feminist group? None of the above?
Standard H.G. Lewis horror/gore/comedy outing complete with bad acting,
bad camerawork, bad writing, bad direction, almost endless padding (strippers
and, worse, Henny Youngman!), and of course gory killings. There is a certain
demented charm to the whole thing as well as a completely inexplicable ending.
The violence is not at all meant to be taken seriously, as when the killer
bashes in a stripper's ass and adds seasoning. Lewis' last film.
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LA GRANDE
BOUFFE (1973). Overindulgent movie about overindulgence offers up four European
superstars (Marcello Mastroianni, Phillipe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, and Michel
Piccoli) as typical bourgeois professionals who retire to a villa with the
intention of eating themselves to death, which they do. Along the way they
meet up with a schoolteacher who proves to be an even greater glutton than
they are. I suppose director Marco Ferreri is spoofing middle-class self-indulgence
and the need for instant gratification, but he makes his point, then makes
it, and makes it, and makes it until the movie becomes quite tiresome. Granted,
Piccoli farting to death, and a shit-exploding toilet are memorable.
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THE GRIM
REAPER (aka Anthropophagus/Anthropophagus: The Beast, 1983) I'll call this
one a missed opportunity. I don't want to completely dismiss a movie before
I get to see the whole thing. Everybody and their grandma now offers the
complete version of this Joe D'Amato gut-fest, but with the prospect of
a recession looming and the fact that ultra_caligula's finances are that
of most Americans (i.e. non-existent) I'm a bit tight with my money now
and days. Dark days it is indeed when a man can't afford to see a movie
that features baby eating and self-cannibalism. I saw the Monterey Home
Video which was cut to ribbons. I've said this elsewhere, but I've never
understood why gore movies like this are cut up so badly. It's like cutting
the sex out of porno; the only reason these movies exist is to show scenes
of extreme violence, so why spoil it by giving it an "R" rating that doesn't
really mean shit anyway? I guess I'll never understand the mentality of
distributors, but it's obvious they don't really give a damn about their
base audience. At any rate, this is a Joe D'Amato (as previously stated,
just in case you forgot) and so that means it's pretty bad, but at least
Joe knew to give the audience what it wanted, and this film contains scenes
that have become legendary: D'Amato mainstay George Eastman (aka Luigi Montefiori!,
who looks like Will Farrell from Saturday Night Live) tearing a baby out
of a woman's stomach and chowing down on it, and gobbling up his own intestines
at the "stirring" conclusion. The plot is your basic slasher set up: a group
of tourists come to a small Greek island (nice location) and find everyone's
gone, save a mystery woman and a babbling blind girl. Eventually our heroes
are beset by a giant cannibal played by Eastman, and, if I understand the
flashback correctly, he was lost at sea in a raft with his son and wife,
he tried to eat his son but accidentally killed his wife, went crazy, and
became a giant throat ripping cannibal. Okay…I guess it's alright to eat
your kids but not your wife? Blame me for counting on moral complexity from
the man who directed House of Anal Perversions. Like most
of Joe's horror movies, the extreme tastelessness of the gore distracts
from the tedium of the rest of the film (Joe was always at his best in either
a) porno, or b) gore/softcore/hardcore/sex movies). While I didn't get to
see self gut munching or baby snack, you do get to see a blind girl get
her throat torn out (at least she doesn't see the atrocious make-up on Eastman).
This is probably the worst film I've seen featuring Tisa Farrow (who was
always in better, or at least more interesting movies than her prestigious
sis).
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THE GRUESOME
TWOSOME (1967). After a couple of years off doing gore films, H.G. Lewis
returned with this black comedy about a mother and her retarded son who
run a wig shop, and get their "100% Human Hair" from less than willing donors.
An obnoxious psuedo sleuth solves the case. Pretty idiotic, even by Lewis'
broad standards, it features a deranged janitor (well, not really, I've
just always wanted to say "deranged janitor") burying bones, action packed
footage of a beach party and a stock car race, talking wigs, and a bad parody
of an art movie (shown at a drive-in). When you think you're an hour into
it, you're really just fifteen minutes in. Prospective ad: "See! Buxom college
co-eds scalped, decapitated and disemboweled! See! Buxom college co-eds
dance and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken! See! A woman talk to a stuffed cat!
See! A really bad movie! In Blood Color!"
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GUINEA
PIG: THE DEVIL’S EXPERIMENT [Akumano Jikken] (1985). Based on the
premise that you can fool some of the people all of the time, gutter producer
Satoru Ogura put together two episodes of what he planned to be a long running
series of videos geared towards the most jaded tastes of the Japanese video
underground. Controversy around the first two episodes forced the series
into another, less horrific direction, but none-the-less, Ogura had struck
a nerve with his fake snuff films that were “recreations” of
made-up snuff films. While Flower of Flesh and Blood gained notoriety
stateside and in Europe due to the controversy of a drugged-up Charlie Sheen
believing the film to be real (followed by outraged stories on Hard
Copy informing us that, yes, the film was a fake, but by God, there
has to be a real snuff film out there somewhere!). Odd, because this would
be the more conventional “snuff” film formula, one woman, a
single location, a mostly immobile camera (instead of the elaborate shots
seen in Flower), masked men, and so on. Purporting to be a recreation
of a snuff film that had fallen into police hands, and determined to be
an experiment carried out by either a deranged doctor, or evil corporation
to find out the physical and psychological breaking point of a human being,
there is no plot to this unpleasant entry in the series. Four men take a
woman to a cottage in the woods and torture her to death using various methods,
culminating with her eye being torn out with a needle. There is virtually
no dialogue, and the woman reacts to her predicament with zombie-like acceptance,
like Flower, it is disturbing not only for its skillful execution
(this was apparently directed by Hideshi Hino, who also made Flower)
but for the underlying notion that this film was made for the sort of people
who might very well be willing to sit through a real snuff film, and that
one’s own watching of the film might very well include oneself in
that dubious company as well by default.
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GUNHED
(1989). Expensive giant robot spectacular has a childish plot, but some
impressive effects. In THE FUTURE, a supercomputer declares war on humanity
(ie The Terminator) so humanity sends an elite battalion of heavily
armored troops and robots called Gunhed to destroy the computer and its
forces. The battalion is annihilated in the process, and thirteen years
later a shipful of computer-chip pirates (headed up by Japanese oddball
Micky Curtis, a Japanese guy who for some reason took on a Western name
and is best known as a silky pop star) come to the deserted island, and
the proverbial hell is unleashed. Most everyone is killed except a lowly
mechanic (Masahiro Takashima) and a Texas Ranger (American actress Brenda
Bakke) who rebuild a Gunhed robot and make stuff blow up. Like the neo-Godzilla
films, the effects here are actually a lot more interesting and impressive
than their American counterparts, which have had all the life sucked out
of them, these at least give you the feeling of human creation and interaction.
Typical of the ”big robot” genre, but is easy to find in a poorly dubbed
English version.
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GURU,
THE MAD MONK (1971). Andy Milligan shockingly uncovers the Catholic church's
deep dark secret! That's right, at this very moment flaming Catholic priests
are in Manhattan pretending to be in Renaissance Eastern Europe! The horror!
Milligan was decades before his time, making this muck-raking expose of
the evils of the Catholic church, as fey Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) dabbles
in all sorts of nefarious activities with the help of (obviously) his pet
hunchback Igor and his lumpy middle-aged vampire/werewolf (I guess) mistress
Olga (Jaqueline Webb). Right off the bat Guru intervenes to save the life
of pretty Nadja (the very interesting looking Judith Israel who I think
I have a crush on now), who's been condemned to death for killing her infant.
Island dweller "Carl" (Paul Lieber) is in love with her, so Guru performs
Romeo and Juliet duty and administers a potion to Nadja that makes
her appear dead. Guru of course, wants Carl to do something in return that
involves selling the bodies of executed prisoners to a local medical school.
Carl also makes a deal with Olga to allow her to "drain" the bodies of blood.
Olga cheerfully explains to us that she has an "ingenious" method of draining
blood which, it turns out, involves putting dime-store Halloween fangs in
her mouth and licking the blood off of chopping blocks. Nice, very nice.
Yes, as you may have guessed, Guru is an evil priest, yet despite obviously
batting for the pink team actually tries to rape Nadja. Hand it to Flanagan,
the man knows how to…no actually he doesn't. This being an Andy Milligan
film you know what to expect: talk and more talk. Then there's more talk,
and when you're tired of the talk there are some hilarious gore "effects"
to distract you, like the typical Milligan violence against mannequin parts,
and sticks being violently plunged into ping pong balls symbolically representing
eyes. The acting ranges from thespian to Milligan, which is to say from
poseur bottom-feeders of the New York art scene to hustlers Milligan picked
up in various bathhouses. Mostly Lieber and Webb are pretty bad with the
rest of the cast performing, well, performing let's just say. The costumes
all look like they're straight from a particularly shoddy Renaissance faire,
while the pope hat that Guru wears looks more like butcher paper with a
cross scrawled on it. I particularly liked the very 70s hairstyles on Israel
and Lieber, as well as the fact that the church looks decidedly un-middle
ages/Renaissance-y. But to be honest I didn't think this movie was half
bad actually, I mean, let's face it, Milligan's movies are pretty awful
for the most part, but the oddball personalities and bitchy dialogue that
populate them are just too damn interesting for me, at least, to ignore.
Plus there is the longest scene of Flanagan talking to his good and bad
personalities in a mirror, and plenty of prancing gay shit that I wouldn't
wish on my worst enemy. I loved the DVD from Retromedia, which seems
to have come directly from a 35mm print, its very colorful and scratchy,
and unlike most budget DVD releases (this was only $10) is of the highest
quality (which is to say it doesn't come from an out-of-print 1981 video
tape). Also includes a semi-interesting interview with the guy who did the
stills on Milligan's last movies. I have read, I must say, that this runs
62 minutes, while the DVD runs 55, I'm hardly complaining, a little less
Milligan is probably for the best, but if you're a crazed completest this
might be an edited version, I don't know.
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