Terror (1978)

JULY 4, 2010

GENRE: REVENGE (?), SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Had I realized Norman J. Warren was the director of Terror, I would have watched it sooner, having been smitten with his work after Alien Prey and Inseminoid. And while it’s not as genuinely good as Prey or batshit crazy as Inseminoid, Terror is still another win for the man, and further cements my belief that the Gorehouse Greats set is the best DVD purchase I’ve made in years (it also has Warren’s pretty good Satan’s Slave and the awesome Blood Of Dracula’s Castle).

This one’s sort of like a British Suspiria, with a bunch of crazy murder scenes and not a lot of coherency. In fact, I even rewatched a good chunk of the movie due to not taking notes when I watched it the first time (this review is posting 4 days later), and I still hadn’t the slightest clue as to why the spirit was killing these folks. It’s introduced as a curse on a particular family, but either I am misreading their genealogy or the ghost simply got bored with that and started killing folks at random.

But who cares? You get a cop being run over multiple times, an Exorcist-esque tumble out a window that results in an impaling, a beheading or two, and a final kill in which our last remaining character of note (the would be “final girl”) is impaled after being flung across a room. Then the movie just ends without any sort of final reveal or explanation. In fact the last reel of the film doesn’t have any dialogue at all, if memory serves.

As with most of Warren’s films, the pace could be improved, particularly in the first big kill scene, which goes on for about ten minutes. In a climax it would be OK, but as this is a horror movie and she’s a thankless character going off into the woods by herself - we know she’s dead. No need to drag it out (especially in a film this baffling - this is time that could be spent explaining what the fuck is going on). There are also a number of endless scenes involving the filming of a sex comedy (the main character is a producer), which just pad/waste time, especially as there is surprisingly little nudity in the film.

On the plus side, it seems to be intentionally funny at times, which is unique to this film out of the four from Warren I have seen. I particularly liked early on when a guy gets blown off, so he says “What should I do, kill myself?” and everyone in earshot says “Yes”, but not in unison, which makes it funnier. And even though they kill the pace, the snafus when trying to film the movie are pretty amusing, like the guy who doesn’t understand that his line is supposed to be a double entendre.

There was also a bit of irony in one scene, when an actress bemoans that she should be trying out for MGM movies. Movie nerds of course know that MGM is currently falling apart at the seams, delaying The Hobbit (which cost them Guillermo Del Toro) and putting the next Bond film on hold indefinitely (costing them Sam Mendes and possibly Daniel Craig). It also means that the release of such films as Cabin In The Woods and the Red Dawn remake may be a long way off, similar to when Orion went bankrupt and managed to dump films into theaters 2-3 years after their initial release dates. But the comment in Terror reminded me that at one time, MGM was sort of THE big studio, the one the others were afraid of. A shame, really. I blame Windtalkers.

Back on point, I think if you like Argento’s stuff you might enjoy this British take on his style, even if it’s closer to ripoff than homage (he even brings out the crazy primary colors during the kill scenes). And it continues my appreciation of Warren, who apparently made all of his career choices based on what was successful the year before, but yet brought something unique to each one (in this case, the intentional humor). By the end of HMAD I hope I can say I’ve seen all of his films. And the ones they’re ripping off.

What say you?

P.S. The transfer on the Gorehouse Greats set is anamorphic and looks pretty good for something that cost me like 70 cents. Mill Creek has come a long way from the universally awful looking Chilling Classics set!

PLEASE, GO ON...

Blood Mania (1970)

FEBRUARY 17, 2010

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

For the 3rd time this week, my horror movie choice is rather horror-lite, even though unlike the others, it’s the only one with “HORROR” as its only genre on its IMDb page, right next to its tagline that promises “A night of unspeakable terror!”. And the title is Blood Mania for Christ’s sake! But the horror stuff takes up MAYBE two minutes of the movie, which is otherwise a talky melodrama about an unbalanced woman fighting her sister over an inheritance AND the affections of a douchebag doctor.

Luckily, it’s kind of entertaining in its own trashy low-key way. Pretty much everyone in the movie (except the sister) is despicable, and director Robert Vincent O'Neill seemingly enforced every letter of their “YES-nudity” clauses. Maria De Aragon in particular spends half of the movie in some state of undress, though there are also hilariously odd moments where she is OVER-dressed sprinkled throughout, such as when she removes a white blouse to reveal... a sweater underneath? What the hell?

I also love the movie’s opening credits, especially in hindsight as they have nearly zero relation to the movie. It’s basically a bunch of crazy filters and a guy chasing a woman around in what appears to be backstage during a theatrical production of the comic book transition scenes in Creepshow. Cool animation to reveal the title too. A few such more “freakout” scenes are inserted at random throughout the film, and damned if I don’t suspect they were added in late in the editing process when the filmmakers realized that they didn’t make the horror movie they likely promised to. Or they realized their smutty melodrama was kind of dull and needed something to spice it up, regardless of whether or not it fit. Either way, it adds to the film’s odd charm.

And Alex Rocco shows up! He plays the lawyer who reads the will that finally sets the plot in motion at the 50 minute mark, and is also pretty much the only person in the film who doesn’t have a sex scene (thankfully). The scene is a delight as well, as the girl has a full blown meltdown after finding out that she will only get 250 bucks a week for allowance while her sister gets the bulk of the dough. But she carries on while sitting in a chair (and it pretty much all occurs in one unmoving camera shot), which lends the scene an odd quality as you never really see anyone else’s reactions to her outburst.

And I loved that I could SEE the movie. While I’m no longer as impressed with the Gorehouse Greats’ abundance of anamorphic transfers, Blood Mania actually seems to be remastered as well, or at least taken from a high quality source. When there’s a close or medium shot on someone, you can see detail in their face! It’s the best transfer I have ever seen on a Mill Creek release, which is all the more impressive when you consider it’s a 40 year old obscuro.

That tagline, however, is total bullshit. Even if you buy the film’s minimal “terror” as truly being “unspeakable”, it takes place over several weeks, not one night. And on that note, tomorrow’s movie better be full blown horror, goddammit! Friday will probably be Shutter Island, which I know is also more of a thriller (but they are marketing it as a ghost movie and pushing it to the horror sites); I don’t want to let things get TOO loose around here.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Nightmare In Wax (1969)

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

GENRE: HERO KILLER (?), REVENGE
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

You can’t go wrong with Cameron Mitchell... is a phrase that no sane person would ever think to utter. He managed to find his way into some pretty good movies every now and then (Haunts), and anyone involved with Raw Force is set for life in my book, but the bulk of his movies are more like Nightmare In Wax, which is “groovy” 1969 ripoff of House Of Wax/Mystery Of The Wax Museum, albeit without the actual wax people.

See, the victims are once again propped up in a wax museum, but the twist here is that they aren’t regular folks made up to look like famous people, but rather the actual famous people (everyone in the movie is a Hollywood type. And they’re not wax, or even dead - they’re victims of this serum that leaves them unable to move, or under Mitchell’s control, or something. The horrid audio on Mill Creek’s release (which, once again, is surprisingly given an anamorphic transfer) made several lines of dialogue hard to make out, and this is a very talky movie.

Either way, that’s not even the biggest problem with the movie. The “investigation” is. Apparently, the dumbest motherfuckers in the world were assigned to solve the case of the missing actors, and it takes them the entire movie to figure out that maybe, just maybe, the weird, one-eyed and burnt guy who acts like Cameron Mitchell, and has “wax” figures of all of the missing people on display in his weird museum, might have something to do with it. Devoting a hefty amount of the movie’s running time to two guys trying to “solve” a mystery that doesn’t even exist is not the most economical use of film stock. It would be like watching a couple of private investigators trying to figure out who cooked Michael Douglas’ bunny in Fatal Attraction.

But it’s not a total loss. Mitchell is hamming it up as always, and unlike those other movies I mentioned, he’s front and center for the bulk of it, which is a good thing. There’s also a guy who simultaneously reminded me of Anthony Perkins, Harry Dean Stanton, and Elisha Cook Jr, so there’s something. And there are even a few sort of creepy moments, like when one of his robot/faux wax people begins saying what sounds like “Hello, Maurice.” over and over. I also loved the chase scene in which Mitchell terrifies this girl for like 5 straight minutes, and when he finally catches up to her, he kisses her passionately, which she is charmed by. Ladies, if a disfigured guy chased you around a creepy wax museum for a while, and then shoves his tongue down your throat, would you be turned on by it? Even if it was Cameron Mitchell? Note - he then stabs her.

I was also curiously reminded on several occasions of certain films from the Sci-Fi Channel era of MST3k: The Projected Man, The Girl With Gold Boots, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (mostly for the dance numbers in the latter two cases). In fact, I’m surprised that the film never made it on the show - it’s the perfect fodder for them - obscure, public domain, and with some inherent entertainment value (some episodes are nigh on unwatchable due to the films in question being so dull and lifeless - see Season 10’s episode of the German Hamlet for an example). And since they always trimmed their movies down to 80 minutes, it might have actually IMPROVED the film, because at 96 minutes it is far too long. Bring the show back, BBI!

One final note - this comes from the same team who gave us last week’s Blood Of Dracula’s Castle, which I was quite amused by, thus possibly making me more excited for this movie than I had any right to be. But regardless - if you are a connoisseur of their work, please let me know which others I might enjoy, using this and Dracula’s Castle as a guide.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Blood Of Dracula's Castle (1969)

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

GENRE: VAMPIRE
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

I’m sick of straight up Dracula adaptations, but I’m all for more movies like Blood Of Dracula’s Castle, in which Dracula is a character in an otherwise completely different story (the story of Manos: The Hands Of Fate in this case). No Van Helsing, no eternal love... he’s just a guy who hangs out in his castle with his wife, has John Carradine bring him (real) Blood-y Mary’s, and entertains the local serial killer, a guy named Johnny who may or may not be a werewolf.

Apparently, in some TV versions of the film, Johnny’s werewolf-ism is made a little more clear, though whether these scenes were the intention of director Al Adamson or if they were inserted to pad the running time (or make more sense out of the plot - a novel approach!) by producers I do not know, nor do I really care. The completely vague nature of his character is what made this movie such an oddball delight.

But Johnny isn’t the only laughably puzzling part of this movie, not by any means. We have a man who decides to wait until he is at the top of a rotating sky-tower ride at the carnival before reading the certified letter letting him know that his uncle died and left him his castle (he then casually tosses the letter into the wind). The same man later claims that the sounds of a woman screaming were likely “an electric toothbrush that short circuited” (what the?). Johnny begins a scene with the curious punchline of this “joke” - “and then there was a character, he used to hold out his hand. And he’d ask me what was in it. And I’d say “an elephant.” And then he’d say - “what color?”. And despite several lines placing the castle in the middle of Arizona, there’s a scene later in the film where the heroes and Johnny go to the ocean. Oh, and again, the movie as a whole is sort of like Manos (deformed henchman, a cult with fuzzy objectives, etc), so that’s always good for a laugh.

There are also TWO characters with black and white striped shirts, which I guess must have been the style back then. It doesn’t help that Johnny is one of them, and he has a very similar physical appearance to the hero (whose wife is the one wearing the other shirt), so that coupled with the late hour of watching the film, I started getting confused as to who I was looking at sometimes. The lousy transfer didn’t help - while it was given an anamorphic transfer (thank you!), it was not remastered in any meaningful way, and also had some of the worst scratching I’ve ever seen on a DVD:

The movie’s in jail!

But again, the thing I dug about the movie was that it was just so loose with both the Dracula mythology and its own over-stuffed storyline. Johnny has no concern about the fact that his friends are vampires, and there’s a wonderfully nonchalant conversation about how they hated having to bite into necks and that the new way is so much better. And the hero’s wife practically has a monologue about how she can’t wait to swim in the moat around the castle (again - what the?). I don’t think the vampires ever actually kill anyone in the movie (though Johnny makes up for it by killing a bunch of people at random - including a hitchhiker in a surprisingly gory scene - before he actually gets to the castle and thus joins the story proper), as their butler (Carradine) and the aforementioned Torgo-lite guy do the bulk of the dirty work, which again, ties into the film’s surprising laid back nature. And it ends with a guy falling to his death while on fire, so automatic win.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Prime Evil (1988)

JANUARY 30, 2010

GENRE: CULT, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Some folks on Twitter tried warning me away from watching Prime Evil, and I should have listened to them. It’s got a few fun scenes here and there, but it’s overall a mindless bore of a film, and for the life of me I cannot understand why director Roberta Findlay or the screenwriters thought anyone would be interested in this particular non-story.

I know there are more to see, and I’m sure I’m wrong, but I’ll say it anyway - this has to be the boringest Devil movie ever made. It’s about this cult looking to please Satan, but Satan isn’t really in the movie. We see this little puppet at the very end that I guess is supposed to be the Dark Lord, but he just sits there doing nothing until he gets stabbed. And he’s never in a shot with anyone or anything else, so I can’t tell how big he’s supposed to do. It’s no End of Days is what I’m saying.

Don't sell your soul to this... thing.

And the cult is half-assed too, their leader needs a virgin sacrifice, but all the guy will get is 13 years of immortality. Only 13 years? He doesn’t look that old (he DOES look like a hybrid of Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham though), so why he’d go through all this trouble just to get 13 years of immortality is a bit puzzling. Unless he’s like a skydiver or something, where he is often in life-threatening situations. Then I can see him wanting a little insurance.

There’s also a plot thread (the closest the film has to an interesting one) about a nun renouncing her vows (woo, she can fuck!) in order to infiltrate the cult so she can help the cops bring it down. She even has a backstory about being abused by Satanists or something. But after all of this is set up, she more or less disappears for the entire movie, as we focus on the next intended virginal sacrifice, who is the estranged granddaughter of the cult guy. She too has a backstory - her father made money by letting guys take nude photos of her when she was a child. And thus now she is understandably frigid (hence the still-virgin status), but all this serves is to pad the movie out to feature length by including a bunch of scenes where her boyfriend gets blue balls and her whorish, junk food obsessed best friend mocks her for not giving it up.

And there’s also a few (not very good) cops on the trail, and a guy who looks like Fink from Meatballs who runs around the city killing women, though, as is often the case with this movie, I’m not sure what he was trying to accomplish. I thought maybe he was looking for virgins, but since one of his victims is a crackhead hooker, either I’m way off or he is. But either way, the movie has way too many characters (none of whom are particularly interesting or likable) and not enough action, which is even more of an issue when you consider that Findlay comes from the porn world. A healthy dose of sleaze would have improved matters greatly, but whether Findlay was trying to show she could do serious work, or they couldn’t afford to film anything interesting, either way it’s a shockingly dull movie.

But a grown man does refer to another as “Fart breath”, so there’s something. And I think Brian Yuzna and co. took a page from the film when they made Silent Night Deadly Night 4, as they feel very similar at times (yes, I finally get to use the phrase “Not as good as Silent Night Deadly Night 4”!). I also liked the balls on the writers to set up a sequel - Cravengham gets away, shouting “You win, this time!” and then sets up shop in another big city (the movie is supposed to be set in Boston I think, due to the “New England” title at the beginning, but it’s clearly New York). But it’s been 22 years, so I think we can all stop holding our breath for Prime Evil II. Shit, Millennium Films wouldn’t even want to remake this fucking thing.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Satan's Slave (1976)

JANUARY 26, 2010

GENRE: CULT
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

When I was back in Massachusetts for Christmas, I picked up a new set from Mill Creek called "Gorehouse Greats", which was 12 films for 5 bucks (as opposed to the usual 50 films for 20 bucks). I was attracted to it mainly because the films all seemed to be from the 60s and 70s (unlike the primarily 30s/40s junk on the Horror Classics and Tales of Terror sets), which would make it more like the Chilling Classics, a set I have long since exhausted for HMAD purposes. So imagine my delight when I cracked the set open, put in Satan's Slave, and was treated to a pretty good anamorphic transfer! Most of the transfers on their previous sets weren't even worth the average 40 cent price per movie, so this was a very welcome surprise.

Another surprise - the movie was pretty good! I was happy to see that it was directed by Norman J. Warren, who was responsible for Alien Prey, which is one of the best "I never would have seen this if I wasn't doing HMAD" movies I've seen in quite some time. Slave isn't quite as successful, but it's still a fairly engaging, atmospheric British chiller with whopping doses of nudity.

Seriously, in the first 10 minutes we are treated to not one, not two, but THREE pairs of breasts. Shit, I've seen pornos that didn't even offer that much skin variety in their opening moments. Now, I'm not exactly a "WOOO!!! BOOBS!!" type of guy, but I AM a "WOOO! THIS MOVIE HAS NO SHAME!" type of guy, so it set the tone nicely, and I actually began to wonder if I should save my first viewing of the film for the New Beverly, where I could, well, yell "WOOO!! BOOBS!!" along with several dozen other drunks, instead of watching it by myself at work (luckily, my office-mate was gone for the day. Would have been a lot of minimizing going on).

Unfortunately, the plot has to get in the way, so after that the movie calms down some, and spreads out its "visuals" a bit more evenly. Ten minutes of talk, and then another nude scene. Another few minutes of talk, and then a guy plummets to his death (and the dummy they use was apparently made out of cake, so what should be a "oh man, so fake!" turned into a "Mmmm, I think I want to eat that guy's arm."). Other highlights include a woman being (seemingly willingly) penetrated by a wooden cross during a cult ritual, cousins going at it without anyone else (including his dad/her uncle) being concerned, someone impaled on a door 4 years before Friday the 13th came along, and a downer ending. And more nudity here and there, of course.

I was also impressed with the quality of the FX. Apart from cake man, most of them still hold up favorably to the prosthetics work of today. An eye gouging during the climax is mighty impressive, and the assorted other gags (such as a pretty graphic "branding with hot iron" flashback scene) are pretty good as well. It's weird, I was trying to think of FX work that equaled it for the US, and all of the movies that came to mind are from 1980 or later. I think the UK deserves more credit for ushering in the splatter craze.

The only downside to the movie, apart from some occasional draggy parts (again, the inadvertent result of having such a delightfully "action packed" opening - maybe this movie inspired Legion) is that it reminded me of The House of Usher update from a couple years back. Like that film, a lot of Slave is just a girl in a mansion, trying to figure out why her house-mates are so creepy while also falling in love with one. Both films have a lot of scenes where someone should be questioning their situation instead of making doe-eyes at their male relative, and the structure is nearly identical. I wouldn't be surprised if Usher's creators had seen this film and drew some influence from it, though if that is indeed the case, they should have swiped less of the structure and more of the cross-fucking. Of course, either way, the similarities are no fault of Slave's, but rather just another reason why I should watch movies in order, even if they seemingly have no relation. I could have enjoyed Slave even more had I not been occasionally distracted by memories of watching that piece of crap.

At any rate, for a movie that cost me about 50 cents, the transfer and the film itself were quite the bargain. One other movie as good as this on the set and it will be the best DVD investment I've made in years (since 2006, when I picked up the Chilling Classics set, in fact). All hail Mill Creek!

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...