I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1971). This is a crazy hippies vs. the world movie
from the director of Stigma that was branded with an 'X' rating and had
to be drastically cut, which is too bad, this is one of the few films that
I've seen that's too short. A bunch of Satan worshipping hippies led by
the mono-named Bhaskar beat up a young woman, her senile granddad, thinking
the Nazis are invading, tries to put a stop to all this long hair nonsense
and is dosed with acid for his troubles, so while granddad is coming down
his dorky grandson gets revenge by putting rabid blood into some meat-pies
that are sold to the hippies. Of course they become rabid maniacs who infect
a bunch of hard-hats who go on the rampage. Its all ridiculous, with pointless
Umberto Lenzi-type animal killing and severely truncated violence (I haven't
seen the "uncut" version, which supposedly has all the gore, the Something
Weird version isn't uncut, nor is it letterboxed as advertised), like when
the eccentric Jadine Wong tries to pull an Alexjandro Jodorowski and light
herself on fire, if she succeeds or not, I don't know. But, even in the
butchered edition I saw, it's a heart-warming and worthwhile slab of filthy
exploitation.
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I PUKE ON YOUR GRAVE. I don't know what faggots came up with this bright
idea, but I hope they all get rectal cancer and die slowly and painfully.
Believe it or not, this is merely a retitle of Jess Franco's Ilsa the Wicked
Warden, and I didn't even bother to watch the whole thing, since I've seen
it already. For some reason some fat piece of shit is shown puking and "dying"
(let's hope) at the beginning with a photo of a guy rising from a coffin
superimposed at the bottom. What the fuck is that? Who are these assholes
who perpetrate these worthless schemes? I'm sure these ass munchers made
about ten bucks from the whole endeavor, so why bother. If you are reading
this and you where being this idiocy, go into your bathroom and kill yourself
right now!
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IGOR AND THE LUNATICS (1985). This is a worthless shit-bag movie released
by the rats at Troma who've done more to fuck up movies than George Lucas
and Steven Spielberg. I guess its supposed to be some kind of Charles Manson
movie, but don't let that fool you, its got something to do with a cult,
but Snuff was a more convincing look at murderous drug cults than this.
Its hard to believe some losers spent literally years of their lives making
this movie; then again its kind of funny to picture these mullet sporting
Quiet Riot fans blowing their futures on a piece of shit movie that sixteen
people have seen. If I heard that the cast all died tragically in an industrial
blender accident I might sleep better.
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I'LL KILL YOU, I'LL BURY YOU, I'LL SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE TOO! (1995). Why
do they make shot on video movies? Oh yeah, now they're "trendy" since dumbasses
like Lars von Trier and Mike Figgis (has anyone ever actually sat through
one of his movies?) and even worse, professional midget Knicks fan Spike
Lee are doing crap on video-it's the future, but as everyone knows, the
future invariably sucks. Hopefully Ebola will wipe out the human race before
too many SoVs are made, but then again, too many have already been made!
This is not a digital movie but is a shit-fest slasher film that makes,
say, The Last Slumber Party look like it wasn't made by a baboon by comparison.
I won't relate the plot since it was made by people too lazy to scrawl out
anything beyond the rudiments on the back of the Denny's napkin. There's
a lot of violence, and it's bloody but who gives a fuck?
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ILSA THE WICKED WARDEN (1977). A good Jess Franco movie is like a piss
stain of the Virgin Mary, one person claims to see it and pretty soon white
trash and third-world devotees come running to be healed by the magic of
holy urine. One frog or one limey claims to have seen a good Franco film
and pretty soon everyone is singing the same tune. Keep these Euro geeks
out of this country! No one has good taste anymore. I'm going to spill a
big secret: Jess Franco never directed a watchable movie. There's no art,
there's no sexual symbolism, or jazzy improvisation. Franco is on a lower
level than Larry Buchanan or Andy Milligan, since at least their films were
funny. He made a lot of women in prison films and this is one of them. Scary
Dyanne Thorne stars and abuses women, including the unphotogenic Mrs. Franco/slut
Lina Romay. Basically Franco indulges in the same cheap-jack scenes and
tricks as in every one of his other movies and it's all as exciting as an
Andy Warhol exhibition.
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THE INSIDER (1999). Michael Mann is maybe the best director in America
right now, yet each of his movies seem so recent and up-to-date it's hard
to believe that he's been making films since the early eighties. This is
radically different from his previous film, Heat, in it's muck-racking
portrayal of both the tobacco industry and the news "industry", blowing
the lid off such passé and bullshit concepts as "journalistic integrity
and ethics". Al Pacino (who seems to be at his best in Mann films, even
if he was a bit over-the-top in Heat) plays a producer for 60
Minutes who comes across laid-off tobacco research executive Jeffrey
Wigand (Russel Crowe) who is setting on some major bombshells as far as
the giants of the tobacco industry are concerned. Wigand is leery about
talking to Pacino, but as his former bosses at Brown & Williamson begin
to bully and intimidate him Wigand decides he doesn't like to be pushed
around and talks to 60 Minutes and that paragon of integrity, Mike
Wallace (Christopher Plummer, who's such a fantastic actor, yet is hardly
ever used). Wigand gets into all kinds of trouble, and his life beings to
fall apart, but it is then that the film shifts into it's second part, an
expose of the new face of corporate journalism, as CBS execs and lawyers
try to quash the story, as it's revelations may bring a multi-billion dollar
lawsuit against CBS, which in turn might harm the pending sale of CBS to
Westinghouse, and therefore harm the pocket books of some CBS suits. Pacino,
is outraged, and is shocked to find Wallace going along with it (60 Minutes
producer Don Hewlitt is seen as having completely sold out his journalistic
badge of honor long ago). From then on it seems like Jean-Pierre Melville
is directing things, as Pacino tries every avenue to get the story on air.
The collusion between big business and journalists would seem like prime
material for an ambitious filmmaker, and Mann is the right man for the job,
and his film closely resembles a lefty-60s Euro film bashing right-wing
politicians and their relationships with gangsters and terrorists. But,
Mann's film isn't just some sort of left-wing attack, since few people would
accuse 60 Minutes or Mike Wallace of overt conservatism, none-the-less,
Mann effectively shows those very people and organizations as being completely
compromised and corrupted by money, as well as the hypocrisy of the news
media, hiding behind redundant concepts and oxymorons all the while lining
their pockets with kick-backs as ruthlessly as any Clinton-era politician.
No wonder Wallace and 60 Minutes didn't like the movie (Wallace especially,
who's portrayed as something of an opportunist and a fuddy duddy). In a
decade of bland, mindless propaganda and silly shoot-em-ups, Mann finally
gives the 90s its best political film: as ferocious as it is edifying.
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INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS (1972). Hilarious piece of hack-work that
was made on a porn budget with some of the gayest actors this side of the
Bravo channel. Its actually about modern-day Druids who are trying to revive
the Druid queen and its coordinated by the Druid king who's more of a queen
than the queen. The hero is a creepy dork, and his father is so gay he screams
"interior designer" and "butt plugs". The Druids are great: they run around
in overalls and some wear black KKK hoods. The leader of the Druid tobacco
farmers limps around and kills a dog, though when you see the dog's "corpse"
it looks like a furry blanket with jam on it. The acting is even more theatrical
than any Andy Milligan film, and if he had made this it would have been
the gayest film in history.
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THE INVISIBLE DEAD (aka ORLOFF AND THE INVISIBLE MAN, 1972). You slobbering
Franco heads are probably sporting wood seeing that "Orloff" title, but
alas, no, bozo Franco didn't have anything to do with this, and its actually
a lot worse than any of Franco's putrid hackwork: it comes courtesy of frog
hack Pierre Chevalier, a stock director for Eurocine, which must be one
step below snuff porn. The long suffering (now resting comfortably in eternal
slumber) Howard Vernon invents an invisible "man" and a seriously boring
dunderhead (Fernand Sancho, whoever the hell that is) comes to the rescue.
The supposed highlight is when the invisible man rapes a woman, and at least
Franco would have some spazzo zooms into her crotch, but Chevalier is too
much of an "artiste" to indulge in such sleaze so it's a hilarious simulated
rape scene. You get to see the invisible man and he turns out to be some
kind of half-dog and the dubbed-in sound he makes is atrocious; even better
is when the invisible man is attacked by dogs. There are lines like: "the
invisible man has set the place on fire" and "I hope the invisible man never
comes back!" If there's any justice in the world Pierre Chevalier is drinking
paint varnish in a Paris gutter.
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IRREVERSIBLE (2002). Gaspar Noë’s
first film, I Stand Alone was an interesting variant on Taxi
Driver, with a middle-aged man providing running commentary to his
gradual descent into depravity and pointless violence. Of course, Noë
showed himself to be a showman straight from the William Castle vein, what
with the onscreen countdown urging patrons to leave the theater in thirty
seconds or less before the film’s climatic gory conclusion. Yet, beyond
this adolescent urge to use schlocky gimmicks and extreme violence to get
his points across, Noë, at least, has enough fortitude to confront
hot topics of a contemporary nature without perching himself high above
the audience and castigating them for their prejudices. Noë’s
hero explodes with rage towards foreign immigrants, homosexuals, women,
and for that matter, nearly everyone. Most male members of the audience
undoubtedly feel some sort of charge, however submerged, when they hear
paragraphs taken from their own internal monologues. Such things are no
longer kosher to be spoken of publicly, but when the film’s protagonist
rages against a seemingly retarded immigrant, calling him a “faggot”
until being thrown out of the bar he’s determined to get drunk in
it must bring up a man’s own memories of impotence against swaggering
youths, uncomprehending foreigners and so on. The Archie Bunker syndrome
is to claim such feelings belong only to cretins and “middle-class”
blowhards, when in fact they are held by most men most of the time. Noë’s
accomplishment then was to bring them up to the surface. Unfortunately,
by the end, Noë falls for the same Archie Bunker syndrome, turning
his hero from a Dostoevskian Underground Man to an incestuous pedophile
that sleeps with his daughter. Noë has his cake and eats it too, pushing
the buttons of men everywhere, but ultimately washing his hands of the mess
and crawling up to his perch comfortably above the resentments and concerns
of average mortals. With Irreversible Noë mines the territory of I
Stand Alone, even bringing in that film’s protagonist for the film’s
“philosophical” prologue. This time rather than being a fat,
unattractive middle-aged failure, the heroes are younger, better looking,
and better off. Rather than having to deal with the advances of old women,
the heroes playfully argue over the Italian beauty Monica Bellucci. Yet
there is the same Noë impotence as displayed in his previous work,
rather than failures in life causing the violent resentment, it is an actual
crime, in this case a particularly savage rape and beating. The gimmick
is there as well, in the already well-tread (in Memento at any
rate) device of telling one’s story backwards. From the opening credits
that are the actual closing credits, most of the names being backwards and
unreadable (save the principals involved) the film opens with two men entering
a hellish gay club called The Rectum in search of a man called “The
Tapeworm.” They find him, or at least whom they believe to be him
and obliterate his skull with a fire extinguisher. Obviously this is Noë’s
challenge to the audience, one can almost hear him cackling behind the camera,
“let’s see who can take this!”, most films end with the
theater-clearing violence (think of Takashi Miike’s Audition for example),
this one opens with it. From then on the scenes, told in reverse order,
are around ten or twelve minutes in length. They also have a unifying theme
of being almost unbearably dull. While revenge films can be supremely entertaining,
and, in a perverse way, exhilarating (who has never dreamed of getting back
at those who have wronged them?), they can also be frightfully dull. In
fact, the opening explosion of violence simply dilutes the impact of the
rest of the film. Rather than a gradual descent into hell (epitomized by
The Rectum), or even a crawl out of hell, the film is mostly a meandering
dead end. The camera swoops and churns and spins out of control, and finally
calms down, but not before the viewer has become tired of the effect. The
same goes for the structure, the scenes are overlong and devoid of any content,
half the film is spent following star Vincent Cassel around while he asks
everyone in earshot if they know where “The Tapeworm” is, or,
where the club Rectum is. It gets quite tiring. The explosions of bigotry
(against a Vietnamese cabbie) and anti-homosexuality (a transvestite, the
denizens of the Rectum) essentially serve as a girder to the rest of the
film, it is Noë’s conception of what a real manly sort would
do, yet it isn’t hard to realize that Noë doesn’t take
this seriously, he is typically Frenchifying the action, showing “real”
men while laughing at them. When a street tough tells Cassel that “Revenge
is a serious business, no pussies allowed” it is less of a moment
that will get the men in the audience riled up than mostly Noë’s
rolling of the eyes and sighing, “men, what fools, but look how I’ve
shocked everyone.” By the time the film reaches the rape scene there
really isn’t much left. While most reviewers express shock and indignation
at the scene, this reviewer was mostly yawning and checking his watch to
see how much longer the film would go on. Ten minutes of watching an actor
simulating sodomizing Bellucci is dull by any standard, in fact, the scene
goes on so long it becomes slightly farcical, Noë’s determination
to shock his audience by any means has undermined itself; it shows without
a doubt the very fine line between violence and comedy. But this is the
problem with the film’s structure, rather than building upon the rape
so that the final atrocity would be cathartic for the viewers as well as
the characters; the reverse chronology simply makes each scene a pale imitation
of the one before it. Bellucci’s character was introduced only in
the previous scene, how can there be any dramatic connection between her
and the audience (Bellucci’s rather placid acting doesn’t help
matters). As the film lurched into the more ironic “beginning”
in which Bellucci, Cassel, and Bellucci’s former lover Albert Dupontel
playfully spar with each other verbally, Cassel and Bellucci loll about
in bed, Bellucci reads a book, etc. there is no real sense that the viewer
has been given a glimpse into the future and can only feel pity for the
victims of the rape and assault, rather the viewer has been hit in the face
so many times over the course of the film that this relatively light conclusion
is not a respite from the violence at all, rather, it is a reinforcement
that we are in the hands of a rather smug and ruthless director. Noë
is less interested in making the point that rape is a crime that in some
ways ruins the woman and man, in as much as the woman is sexually ruined,
and the man’s masculinity has been destroyed, he couldn’t protect
his woman; had the film been interested in this aspect, and been less interested
in gimmicks and shock-for-shock’s-sake, the conclusion would have
been, essentially, an attempt by the man to regain his masculinity by avenging
his woman’s honor. Instead Noë goes the easy route, avoids the
moral and social questions, and dives ahead with his silly plot devices
and swooping camera. Noë hasn’t gotten into the head of the male
like he did with I Stand Alone, rather he has let his minor success go to
his head, having found his formula he sticks with it, and that formula is
as banal as can be imagined. Throwing gore, explicit sex (in a distasteful,
throwaway manner) and a scene of extended rape will draw the ire of feminists,
bring the artistic freedom fascists out of their caves, and causes audiences
to go to fewer and fewer French films for the simple reason that they have
nothing left but pure sensation. Noë is our own Richard Strauss, whether
or not he is capable of a Rosenkavalier waits to be seen, but it
seems doubtful.
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IRMA VEP (1996). Before
she was stolen from the world by frog Chinaman wannabe Olivier Assayas Maggie
Cheung starred in this terrible frog travesty for him. Maggie plays Maggie
and comes to Paris to act in a remake of the silent serial Les Vampires
for a has-been New Wave director (Jean-Pierre Leaud, isn't this idiot dead
yet?). The movie has a lot of Hollywood bashing. Oooh, tough target Olivier,
take those brave pot shots against the Hollywood shit juggernaut, then again,
I don't see France putting out anything that's even marginally better then
the garbage that comes out of America, unless you count hilarious art-sleaze
like Romance (go Rocco Siffredi go!) and this month's fag-with-AIDS-crime-spree-on-the-run
epic. The only descent thing Assayas does is put Maggie in a latex Catwoman
outfit for half the movie. Maggie isn't the shapeliest woman in the world,
and in fact she looks like a 12-year old (Gary Glitter ignore this!) but
who am I to complain? Then again to see that you have to wade through three
tons of French "comedy" (the "satiric" scene in which an interviewer who's
completely ignorant of Maggie's films but rambles about the greatness of
Arnold Schwartzenegger actually makes unintentionally good points about
French art cinema: since its raison d'être is to put out pretentious
garbage nobody wants to see). Now Maggie spends most of her time doing French
films and Hong Kong movies that don't ever seem to be released in the US.
:(
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ISLAND OF FIRE [Huo
Shao Dao] (1991) Seriously odd Hong Kong director Chu Yen-Ping (see Fantasy
Mission Force) teamed with has-been chop-socky star Jimmy Wang Yu
for a series of films that are notable for the fact that they plagiarize
almost as much as Quentin Tarentino (who's been seen at Hollywood video
stores furiously gathering material for his next film). This one is a star-studded
prison movie that tosses every cliché imaginable at you, but, like Chu's
other films, it's actually pretty good. Jackie Chan gets top billing, but,
basically puts in a glorified cameo appearance. Most of the film features
the other Tony Leung (Leung Ka-Fay, from The Lover) as a cop who goes undercover
in prison to find out how a supposedly executed prisoner killed his teacher.
He finds out that the warden has been using death-row inmates to carry out
political assassinations and other nefarious deeds (this is stolen from
Hideshi Gosha's Death Shadows). A lot of the film deals with Sammo
Hung as a father who escapes to see his son and says things like "son of
the bitch". The ending is, typical for Chu's films with Yu, a downbeat one,
in which our heroes take on an entire army and are wiped out in the process.
I could have used more action, but this one is good enough, and maybe you
could invent some sort of "spot the prison movie cliché" drinking game.
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