Full Eclipse (1993)

Max Dire (Mario Van Peebles) doesn’t just possess a quintessential US action hero name, he’s also a cop who likes to use two automatics at once while doing the traditional action movie hero lunge that usually ends in a belly flop. Even more typical, Max’s partner is too old for this shit, and reads his wedding vows to his partner in his first scene, before suggesting they wait for backup while confronted with a hostage situation. Obviously, partner guy gets himself shot when Max decides not to wait for backup, causing some choice screaming of “noooooooooooo” from our hero, as well as slow motion shoot-diving.

In a pretty funny subversion of genre expectations, the partner survives. He does end up in a coma, though. However, while Max is off annoying his and his wife’s obviously long-suffering marriage guidance counsellor by being a bit of a twat, some mysterious mystery man mysteriously sneaks into partner dude’s hospital room and injects him with some mysterious fluids. Before you can say “mysterious, sir!”, Max’s partner is better than ever, getting back to duty in what looks like about a day (after having been shot in the chest four times). There’s something not quite right with him anymore, though. Whenever he is own screen, there are growly noises on the soundtrack; he is rude to donut sellers; and when it comes to law enforcement, he acquires a style even his action movie cop partner Max finds too much, correctly describing him as “Dirty Harry on crack”. But no matter, for a couple of scenes later, partner dude walks into a bar full of cops to commit suicide in full view of his loving partner. Oh well, movie over.

But wait, there’s much, much more, for Max is soon contacted by police psychologist Adam Garou (Bruce Payne), clearly the king of subtlety. Apart from his day job, Garou turns out to be the head of a secret police kill squad who “keeps the streets clean” by murdering arms and drug dealers, theirs wives and probably their baristas too. Garou’s “pack” does this not in the old-fashioned manner of just brutally gunning their victims down while holding self-justifying speeches. Instead, they shoot up a mysterious fluid, turn into the kind of people who kill with fang and claw, and clearly have a lot of fun doing it. Garou really, really wants Max on his team, but our hero is made of somewhat sterner stuff and declines. Why, he even tries (if not terribly hard) to sic his boss on the pack, which of course leads nowhere.

Perhaps an offer he can’t refuse of extramarital doggy style sex from Garou’s pack member Casey (Patsy Kensit) will convince Max to join?

Before Game of Thrones was even a twinkle in the eye of George R.R. Martin, when the three little letters “HBO” more often than not suggested softcore porn thrillers, this happened. As the plot of the first fifty minutes or so suggests, “this” means a wonderfully insane pairing of every US action movie cliché ever with a bizarre werewolf tale directed by good old Anthony Hickox who clearly enjoys working on a TV horror movie that looks as if it had a better budget than most contemporary direct-to-DVD action films, and suffers from none of the restrictions of network TV when it comes to sex, violence, and Van Peebles.

If you’re going into this thing looking for depth, clever ideas, and what we call “good writing”, you should probably avoid this at all costs, even though the film’s use of the old “walking dead partner” is at least a bit clever. This one’s all about explosions, slow motion, dubious sexiness, Mario Van Peebles in ripped outfits, and hilarious werewolfery, packing as much awesome nonsense into a bit more than ninety minutes as possible. Judged on that ambition, Full Eclipse is a huge success, full of details that are stupid fun at its most bizarre. For example, what’s the mystery fluid that makes werewolves? Garou’s brain fluid, of course!

Also on board for your delectation are crap werewolf make-up - later on heightened to a werewolf costume that looks more like a bear costume - clear attempts at getting at some of that Wolverine fandom, a master plan that makes no sense whatsoever, gratuitous nudity, hilarious (or was that “steamy”?) sex, and one batshit insane thing a minute. All this is directed by Hickox with verve, style and as much cheese as he could pack in, which, given Hickox particular set of talents as a director, is a lot.


The only thing about Full Eclipse I did not find enjoyable is a rape scene that’s just too unpleasant to belong in a film quite this silly.

In short: Re-Kill (2015)

It’s a few years after the first (fast) zombie virus outbreak. Large parts of the world’s population have been killed, but the survivors – at least the US ones, which are the only ones we’ll meet - are pretending things did not fundamentally change, so there’s still TV, TV ads (though for things like an anti-zombie-virus medication that doesn’t actually work, and sex because there’s a certain repopulation pressure), and reality shows. The reality show we are watching is called Re-Kill and follows the misadventures of a squad, ahem, division of the Re-Kill military organization created to kill the not exactly tiny remnants of the Re-Ans (which is this film’s zombie moniker).

Journalists Jimmy and Bobby are the lucky bastards accompanying R-Division 8 (among whose members are Daniella Alonso, Roger R. Cross, Scott Adkins and Bruce Payne). After encountering a truck shipping Re-Ans through the United States, the group is tasked with following the truck’s trail to something called Project Judas in the walled-off ruins of Old New York. The mission doesn’t go very well.

If you’re like me and you’re suffering from a bit of zombie fatigue (and don’t even like The Walking Dead outside of its Telltale Games incarnation), a POV military horror film with zombies which predominantly takes place in corridors and empty industrial buildings does not sound too enticing. So I think it says something for Valeri Milev’s Re-Kill when I tell you I actually think it’s a pretty neat little low budget horror/action movie that doesn’t re-invent the zombie genre but does put quite a bit of effort into its worldbuilding, even if most of it comes in form of – rather funny – fake ads for post-zombie-apocalypse products that break up the bloody, camera-shaking violence. These ads not only do some nice satirical work on contemporary TV culture, they also represent the state the film’s world is in, the story the characters try to tell each other to be able to sleep at night, but also provide useful exposition, and all in a simple yet flexible format. It’s the sort of cleverness and humour you’d have found in a New World production from its golden age, and like in the best of the films of that particular era, they enhance a simple yet effective genre tale with a bit of cleverness.

Said genre tale is certainly on the pulpy side, not very complex, but told with gusto and a lot of blood and guts, providing quite a bit of fun for this jaded viewer. Milev makes the most out of the budget he has to work with, never letting his characters stop so much their mostly grey and brown surroundings become boring, setting up some nasty little set-pieces, all the while taking a look at a world full of people who’d really like to pretend everything’s going to go back to normal some day soon, but just can’t anymore. The cast of TV and character actors does the expectedly good job, leaving the increasingly shaking camera as the only thing I found potentially annoying about Re-Kill. Though thematically and logically, the camera shakes do belong into the footage we see, so the film gets a pass there too.

So it seems there’s still life in the rotting corpse of the zombie genre.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,action,valeri milev,daniella alonso,roger r. cross,scott adkins,bruce payne

Howling VI: The Freaks (1991)

British drifter Ian (Brendan Hughes) comes to a dying town in the US South-West (with a big emphasis on South). Despite the handful of people populating the place that hasn’t been driven away yet by droughts and desperation being rather eccentric, Ian stays on for a while. For room and board, Ian helps the local preacher Dewey (Jered Barclay) and his traditionally pretty young daughter Elizabeth (Michele Matheson) renovate their church, a place that needs every bit of help it can get. After a while, even the rude local sheriff (Gary Carlos Cervantes) comes around to Ian, and of course love is blossoming between Ian and Elizabeth.

Things are bound to get somewhat more complicated when the travelling carnival of one R.B. Harker (Bruce Payne) arrives. With carnies played by Antonio Fargas and Deep Roy in sinister weirdo mode, it comes as no surprise that there’s something just not right about that carnival. If one were bound to do some research, one might even learn there’s a trail of disappearances and deaths following it or a carnival quite like it. And wouldn’t you know it, Ian’s stay in town hasn’t exactly been accidental: he has been waiting for the carnival to arrive, for the young man is a werewolf, and he has plans against Harker. However, Harker, it turns out, might just have plans of his own.

For two movies, the Howling series got downright interesting again, films number five and six being very much their own thing without any relevant connections to films numbers one and two (we don’t talk about number three around here), or the attempted reboot with four. Clearly, as long as there are werewolves in the movies, it’s good enough to be called a Howling movie, so we follow a badly acted yet fun goth-ing of the manor house mystery with a Southern Gothic that also nods to Ray Bradbury (especially Something Wicked this Way Comes, of course), the Incredible Hulk, and every strange things you ever heard about the US South as a place of the grotesque.

Even though it is a bit of a scrappy movie (clearly on account of its budget), director Hope Perello shows a surprising amount of control over a film that just shouldn’t work at all, given the peculiar rhythm of its plot, the not exactly easily believable nature of its characters, and a core moral about the lack of connection between inner and outer monstrosity. Yet Perello does some fine work creating the appropriate heated and strange mood that might not convince anyone of the reality of her film’s world but convinces one quite wonderfully of the irreality of it. Which is my preferred movie mode anyhow.

While the plot has its awkward moments (like the scene where Ian oversleeps rather stupidly on a full moon night, something a surprising amount of werewolf media thinks to be plausible), these moments emphasise the film’s mood and the idea you’ve stepped into a place that is both less and more than real just all the more. There is a lot going on under the film’s surface too, an argument about the nature of evil that isn’t quite as simple as it at first seems to be, with the film putting its money on evil being a choice, as well as a force inside oneself one has to fight (or if you’re like Harker, cultivate) again and again, no matter if you’re a priest, a wolfman style werewolf, or a guy with a bad skin condition looking for a place where people treat him right. Some of the conclusions the film comes to are actually a pleasant surprise, with it coming down heavily on the side of hope and redemption instead of eternal damnation.

And as if being a dream-like morality play done well weren’t enough to endear The Freaks to me, Perello also didn’t skip on the all-important monster content, presenting some cheap yet fun murders absolutely in tone with the rest of her film, and even ending the proceedings on an old-fashioned monster mash you probably didn’t see coming. The monster make-up is in keeping with the film’s mood too, and makes an interesting attempt at using a very classic monster model but making it individual. It also looks just a bit silly, but then, there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

It’s a shame the Howling films didn’t continue in this vein, but then, we’ll always have The Rebirth and The Freaks.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,horror,hope perello,brendan hughes,michele matheson,bruce payne,antonio fargas,deep roy