Cut and Run (1984)

Original title: Inferno in diretta

After stumbling upon the aftermath of a very violent massacre committed on members of a drug smuggling gang, TV reporter Fran Hudson (Lisa Blount) and her buddy and cameraman Mark Ludman (Leonard Mann) are put on the track of a curious drug war that seems to go on all around the United States as well as (somewhere in) South America.

Clues soon lead to one Colonel Horne (Richard Lynch) who supposedly died at Jonestown, and the missing son of an executive in Fran’s TV network,  and to an unnamed part of South America, so off to (some part of) South America our heroes fly. There, they’ll have to evade the soft attentions of crazy people and the cult of native warriors who are somehow (the film never explains) under Horne’s sway. Awkward attempts at Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now quotes happen. Michael Berryman does his wild Berryman thing, so there’s quite a bit of gore, too.

Fortunately for the softer stomachs and hearts in the audience, Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run – at least in the rather gory cut I’ve watched – does not follow the trail blazed by the director’s masterpiece of making any viewer feel like shit Cannibal Apocalypse and contains very little footage of animals getting tortured to squick the viewer out. Since the film fuses Italian jungle action and elements of the cannibal movie, Deodato obviously and cleverly having deduced that cannibals alone don’t cut it anymore at this point, there is some sexual violence and quite a load of implied racism to get through, though not double the amount than in each genre alone, at least.

It also has to to be said that Deodato’s use of sexual violence here very clearly isn’t meant to turn a viewer on, but rather part of the director’s typical project (at least in this part of his career) of putting us off of humanity altogether while still doing what is expected by an exploitation movie. To my eyes, one of the things that makes Deodato’s movies from this period – which pretty much ends around this point in his filmography - rather more interesting than a lot of its genre siblings is how clearly the guy means his general hatred of Western complacity and how earnestly he tries to shock his audience out of it. Which can lead to a film like Cannibal Holocaust only few people will want to watch a second time even when they are – as I am – sympathetic to the director and his project, or one like the film at hand that’s not fun enough to really work as an exploitation movie, but not unpleasant enough to make you (well, me, at least) feel really bad.

On the exploitation and horror front, there are – if you find a version of the film not cut to hell – some rather creative gore bits to watch, as well as small parts for Karen Black, John Steiner (who really goes to pieces for his part) and other genre favourites. There’s generally enough of a good bad time that it’s a reasonably enjoyable film to watch if you’re into this sort of thing like I am (and anyone who isn’t will already have closed this tab a couple of paragraphs earlier), particularly since Deodato isn’t bad at all at pacing the film’s more extreme moments with the inevitable slow parts. I also approve of Richard Lynch doing a Marlon Brando impression for a bit, as well as the completely pointless attempts at exploiting Jonestown for additional shock value.

In short: Night School (1981)

A killer in black motorcycle garb is murdering women in Boston, depositing the heads of his victims in whatever water is closest at hand. Police lieutenant Austin's (Leonard Mann) investigation leads him to a girl school where several of the victims were students. The cop's suspicions quickly concentrate on anthropologist professor and jerk Vincent Millett (Drew Snyder), who does not seem to have student he hasn't slept with (must be the hot anthropologist sex into which we will be given unwanted insight by the movie, because it sure as hell can't be his looks).

When he's not sleeping with his students, Millett lives with his research assistant and lover Eleanor (Rachel Ward), with whom he shares a deep interest in the headhunters of Papua New Guinea. Oh, and all of the victims had something to do with Millett. Despite everything about the case being pretty damn obvious, it'll take quite a few dead bodies, and heads in sinks and toilets until it can be closed.

In 1981, the slasher movie genre wasn't quite as codified as in the years to follow, so it was still possible for a movie to (sort of) belong to it without being about a bunch of teenagers getting slaughtered in the woods or a dilapidated building. Ken Hughes's Night School differs from many other slashers by trying to incorporate elements of an actual mystery, where the killer's identity stands in question. Even red herrings make an appearance. I assume a more direct influence of the giallo than usual. This theory is compounded by the styling of the killer with its shade of Strip Nude For Your Killer, some very typical shots of spiral staircases, and the rather bizarre way the mystery is set up.

This may sound like quite an exciting combination, for what's better than a slasher that comes to the genre from a different direction, but the killer's identity is so obvious, and the whole investigative aspect so undercooked, it's difficult for me to conjure up much enthusiasm.

It doesn't help Night School how unbalanced a film it is. Tonally, it jumps from neatly done stalk and slash sequences, to bad melodramatic acting, to tasteless and overlong suspense scenes based on the question "where will they find the head this time?", to boring police procedural, to unfunny humour and back again, without ever reaching the point where these elements come together in entertaining, interesting, or dream-like ways. It's as if Hughes couldn't (or wasn't allowed to) decide what type of horror film he was trying to make and so ended up trying to make all of them at once; this seldom ends well for a movie or its audience.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,slasher,ken hughes,leonard mann,rachel ward

Three Films Make A Post: Enter a prime-evil world of future shock and alien terror.

The Unholy Four aka Ciakmull - L'uomo della vendetta (1970): Enzo Barboni's Spaghetti Western about four escaped mental patients (Leonard Mann, George Eastman, Woody Strode, Pietro Martellazana) finding out the truth about the amnesiac (Mann) among them, which obviously leads to some vengeance-ing in the end, starts out strong if loosely plotted, but peters out somewhat after half of the film is over and the actual main plot is truly starting. A film that up to that point was dominated by some beautifully photographed scenes taking place in autumnal Europe/America becomes predominantly bound to not very interesting looking sets and wants a type of highly melodramatic acting from the cast that only Evelyn Stewart actually knows how to provide.

It's thanks to Barboni's impressive tight editing rhythms and his always inventive direction that the film stays watchable and recommendable.

Island Claws (1980): This film about a giant crab and his little crab buddies fighting "eccentrics" in Florida is the only movie by director/producer/writer Hernan Cardenas, and watching it, I wasn't much surprised by that. It's not a catastrophically bad monster movie, but if the internet wouldn't tell me differently, I'd have taken it for a rather mediocre TV movie without anything in the writing or direction marking it as something other than just another movie made for no other reason than a pay check, and without much enthusiasm. The film does have one or two moments of pleasant silliness but the rest of it is just so dumb and inoffensive that I think I've already spent enough words on it.

Heavy Metal (1981): As a rule, I don't watch much Western animation, what with the form's peculiar fixation on kids and a family audience, and it's corresponding lack of exploitational values. The portmanteau film Heavy Metal (based on the US version of the French magazine) is an exception to this rule, seeing as it was made with the twelve year old boy in all of us in mind and therefore exists only to provide exploitational values. I find the quality of the animation rather rough when compared to Japanese films of the same era, but it is rough in a way that fits the film's fixation on breasts, blood and freaky humour.

Personally, I could have lived without the segment based on Richard Corben's Den, but then I do think that the Den stories are the absolute nadir of Corben's rather wonderful body of work. However, as we all know, every film like this is bound by law to contain at least one bad segment, and the rest of the segments is entertaining enough to make up for that beautifully.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,american movies,in short,spaghetti western,horror,sf,fantasy,animation,giant monsters,enzo barboni,leonard mann,woody strode,george eastman,evelyn stewart