Three Films Make A Post: He's not a serial killer. He's much worse.

Troublesome Night 8 aka 陰陽路八之棺材仔 (2001): This eighth entry into the venerable series of Hong Kong horror comedy anthologies surprises by not being an anthology movie. Instead, director Edmond Yuen Chi-Keung chooses to draw out a single story that might have made a strong segment for an anthology into a full length movie that starts slow, continues slower and suddenly becomes downright entertaining in its last half hour (the bit you’d actually find in the anthology movie). It’s not terrible, but it’s also not exactly an exciting piece of cinema, not helped by Yuen’s bland and characterless direction.

Dust Devil (1992): Every few years, I try again to watch Richard Stanley’s much loved horror magnum opus, a film I always should have been all over, given my tastes in horror. Every few years, I don’t get on with it. Or rather, I didn’t, for suddenly, this year, the film opened up to me, and suddenly its complicated mix of private and not so private mythology, its surrealist commentary on colonialism and its human consequences, and its intense visual style came together in a singular way; eccentricities I found annoying the last four or three times suddenly make total sense.

That abuse and the kinds of violence certain men inflict upon women have been more on my mind lately than I’d like to might have played into my finally connecting with this one, as well, for this is also a film about an abused woman stumbling into a man (well, sort of) even more toxic than the last until she will eventually become so hollowed out, his personality will be able to just slip into her.

Succubus (2024): Succubus is no Dust Devil, but I do appreciate how much R.J. Daniel Hanna’s film wants to be like one of the films of the classic exploitation era: sleazy (or as sleazy as you can get in 2024), a bit absurd, but also absolutely interested in talking about some of the issues of the day in the sort of crudely metaphorical manner that makes my heart go out to any movie using it. It also features Ron Perlman playing one Dr. Orion Zephyr, adding a little joy to anyone’s day.

I also appreciate the film’s willingness to just go there and attempt the budget size version of the visionary artistry it can never afford the proper effects work for.

The script, on the other hand, could have used a little more time, perhaps a clean up of the pretty draggy middle of the film, as well as more focus on the core of what it clearly wants to communicate about relationships in the age of swiping wherever.

In short: Gor (1987)

Wimpy college lecturer Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) finds his weird ideas about the existence of a “counter-Earth” you can visit with the help of a ring he inherited from his father proven very right indeed when he is sucked into the sword and sorcery without sorcery world of Gor.

Freshly arrived, he just barely escapes the clutches of the men henching for evil priest king Sarm (Oliver Reed) and runs into the local good guys. Sarm is on a bit of a rampage through various villages, slaughtering and enslaving their populations and stealing their “home stones”. Sarm’s rural enemies have hoped for a dimension traveller to arrive, apparently, but Tarl isn’t manly enough to pass muster, so has to go through a training montage.

To motivate him into helping out against Sarm, his new buddies – big-haired and big-breasted love interest Talena (Rebecca Ferratti) and characters I dub old guy and grumpy young guy – explain that their home stone is Tarl’s only way to get back home. Why everyone else is so fixated on some red plastic stones, the film never gets around to tell. So off our heroes go through deserts and more desert, visit a barbarian camp and wander through some caves in what appears to be the local equivalent of a quest, just without the adventure.

This is Fritz Kiersch’s Cannon version of the first of John Norman’s Counter-Earth novels. The books start as basically readable Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches but becomes increasingly misogynistic and unpleasant, espousing some pretty notorious nonsense about women’s supposed wish to be dominated, enslaved and violated; the film on its part doesn’t care about any of that stuff, and really just wants to be an Italian Conan rip-off. Alas, it doesn’t manage to achieve this modest goal.

Even the worst Italian sword and sorcery (or in this case sword and planet/scientific romance) movies try to keep their audience awake by throwing regular action scenes and cardboard and latex monsters at their audience. Gor’s action is as unambitious as it is infrequent, with the usual barely dressed guys and gals slowly going through motions Kiersch is either unwilling or unable to make look interesting. Apart from Tarl’s dimension hopping, there’s no fantastic or science fictional element here at all, missing out on quite a bit of what makes Sword and Sorcery or the best stuff by Burroughs (I can’t speak for Norman’s books, for I don’t have the stomach to delve deeper than the first two books there, and my reading of those has been a couple of decades ago) so fun – creatures, magic, and weird science as the base for fun and games.

It would be one thing if Gor had anything else to show its audience, but there’s really little happening here of any interest. Kiersch’s disinterested and unergetic direction doesn’t improve anything.

The most interesting thing about the film is how it manages to get such a bored villain performance out of Oliver Reed. For some reason, Reed mostly mumbles and angrily whispers his lines, with pauses that suggest he has to drag every single line slowly out of the script; from time to time, he laughs pointlessly. Oh, well.

Three Films Make A Post: FILMED WITH THE NAKED FURY OF FACT!

Warning: this trilogy of crap movies isn’t for the faint of heart!

Dracula 3000 (2004): Not to come over as excessively negative, but this German/South African co-production directed (in a rather generous interpretation of the term) by one Darrell Roodt must be one of the most joylessly bad films ever made. At the very least, it’s one of the most joylessly bad films I have seen in a long career of trying to find the entertainment value in things of generally dubious quality. There’s a theoretically okay enough cheapo cast including Casper van Dien, Tiny Lister and at least two minutes of Udo Kier, but the combination of Roodt’s clueless yet boring direction, the industrial building this was shot in nobody even tried to dress up as space ship interiors, and a script that includes lines like “I wanna watch my anaconda spit all over your snow white ass” and deems them funny come together to produce the perfect piece of shit.

To be avoided at all cost.

L’immortel aka 22 Bullets (2010): I’m more often than not criticizing the films that Luc Besson’s Europacorp crap out for their blatant stupidity but at least, they don’t have pretensions of artistic class and do their best to entertain their audience, quite unlike this particular Europacorp film. Richard Berry’s L’immortel plays out as a painful attempt at cramming as many gangster movie clichés into nearly two hours of running time as possible, filming them in an overbearing way that’s so pseudo-artistic it becomes tackier than anything Olivier Megaton has ever done, and hoping the audience hasn’t seen the dozens of better movies using these clichés to much better effect. Poor Jean Reno does his best as our honourable hero gangster boss (he’s against drugs, saves prostitutes etc) but not even he can save this particular film.

Repo Men (2010): And yet, the Berry film is still more watchable than Miguel Sapochnik’s dystopian SF action comedy monstrosity that takes a perfectly serviceable anti-capitalist idea and turns it into a series of scenes that are by turns unfunny, puzzling in their use for the film, would-be transgressive, or painfully generic. As is the custom for films like it, it also features way too many scenes where it winks into the camera while clapping itself on the shoulder for how clever and subversive it is, never actually finding the time to be clever or subversive.

As an action film, it also suffers more than a little from the fact its hero is the kind of asshole who has no problems with murdering people for money until his head is on the table, and never demonstrates anything even vaguely resembling a change of heart. Which is of course unavoidable in a film whose characters never resemble actual human beings, either.

In short: The Stay Awake (1988)

Somewhere in “Europe”. A group of Catholic school girls and their teacher are locked into their school for a stay awake – a night of movies, potato chip munching and aerobics, apparently.

Alas, for reasons the film never bothers to disclose, the demonic spirit of obviously Gacey inspired dead American serial killer William John Brown (Lindsay Reardon), calling himself the Angel of Darkness whenever an opportunity arises, has chosen this night and school for his Angel of Darkness-y business, namely murder, and some sort of plan possibly concerning the conception of the anti-christ and suggested rape via tentacle tongue. Though I might be misreading Brown’s plan or position in the hierarchy of evil. What I’m sure of is that the girls’ teacher will turn out to be rather more spunky than the undead serial killer might have imagined.

John Bernard’s The Stay Awake belongs to the small number of South African horror movies, and shares with the handful of other genre entries I’ve seen from the country a really confusing script (also by Bernard), a low budget, and an interesting concept of pacing. The script is vague when it probably should be precise (see: what’s the supernatural menace up to, and why does he do it in “Europe”, and to these girls?), rambles in a way that suggests a first draft, uses zero characterisation and can’t even make use of the film’s more interesting ideas in a vaguely effective manner.

On the other hand, when you’re used to wading through the less savoury or just obscure little by-ways of horror cinema, little things like a terrible script and a film that moves like molasses won’t stop you from finding something to appreciate about an epic like The Stay Awake. Consequently, while I found myself rather bored for most of the running time, I also somewhat admired the film’s from time to time semi-effective lighting and the standard disembodied monster camera as given to us by Saint Raimi; and while it certainly added to the general tedium, the incredible length of some of these sequences that suggest a monster not hurling towards some evil deed so much as one that has gotten lost in the school’s hallways is more than just a bit hilarious, now that I think about it.


The demon suit our killer sometimes wears is pretty funny too, as is the tongue tentacle and the general awkward way most of the horror sequences are staged, full of characters that tend to position themselves in the frame in often completely absurd ways so that Bernard can get his shocks in. There’s also rampant Catholicism, cheesy teen dialogue, an excellently primitive synth score, rubbery gore and quite a bit of general nonsense trying to break up the general tedium. If that starts to sound as if I (sort of) recommend The Stay Awake, you’re probably the kind of viewer who might get something out of it.

From a House on Willow Street (2016)

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Hazel (Sharni Vinson), and her friends and partners Ade (Steven John Ward), Mark (Zino Ventura) and James (Gustav Gerdener), all semi-tough people with a troubled past, decide to go for a big score.

Their plan is to kidnap Katherine (Carlyn Burchell) from her family home and trade her back for a bunch of diamonds. Alas, as brilliant as that plan is (you might want to imagine a degree of sarcasm in my voice here), things go very wrong indeed. Acquiring the young woman isn’t really the problem, though she already looks as if she had been kidnapped before our protagonists got their hands on her, but once she’s in their hands, (and repeat after me:) curious things begin to happen. The kidnappers first encounter very loud, jump scary and icky looking ghost versions of their personal dead. Quickly, things devolve into demonic possession and other rather more high-grade supernatural shenanigans.

The first half hour of Alastair Orr’s South African low budget horror film is a bit tough going: the semi-hard boiled dialogue sounds off, the acting’s not terrible yet oddly stilted, and the loud jump scare zombie ghosts look awesome but feel as annoying as jump scares in films that exclusively trade (or in this case seem to trade) in jump scares tend to do.

Persevering with the film might turn out to be a rather good idea, though, at least for those among my readers who share my liking for gory Italian horror and other things wonderful yet probably rather silly. Orr’s film really does share quite a few genes with the louder half of Italian horror: the script is earnest about a lot of decidedly silly things and isn’t afraid to do really awkward stuff. How awkward? How about letting two of the kidnappers go back to their victim’s home because they can’t reach anyone by phone to, one assumes, deliver the ransom note in person, mostly so they can find a bunch of corpses (some of whom they expertly identify not just as priests but as exorcists) and a couple of very convenient expository video tapes that show scenes even more improbable to have been filmed than what we see in most POV horror films, among it the misadventures of two really inept exorcists. Thing is, that’s about the point when the film just might slime itself into the horror fan’s heart with the deeply earnest treatment of very specifically silly possession nonsense, the increasing amount of pretty damn fun special and make-up effects and the general increase of cheap yet creatively awesome horror set pieces that leave the realm of the jump scare as quickly behind as that of logic.


Among the wonderful, gruesome, and silly things one can encounter are the best demon tongues outside of anime tentacle porn, more demonic floating (and not just in that stupid corner at some bedroom ceiling most possession films are so fixated on) than you can shake a stick at, a fight between the burning ghost of a Mum and two demonically possessed (let’s just say Mums beat demons in a fight pretty badly), and choice demonic gloating. The film also attempts some gestures towards thematic resonance and that depth stuff we all have heard about from time to time but doesn’t really manage to get anywhere with it because it is desperately underwritten and generally awkward. However, since its main interest is in some moments of wonderful illogic and in putting Italian style possessed against criminals, that’s only a problem if you as a viewer want it to be one. I, at least, found myself charmed, gripped and delighted by the film’s tone, the effects, and Orr’s good eye for staging a gruesome and over the top scene for little money.

Momentum (2015)

Alex Farraday (Olga Kurylenko) is helping out her former boyfriend with a little bank robbery on demand. It’s the sort of affair where one dresses in what we in the business call space ninja suits. Despite Alex being really good at penetration (yes, that’s what the film will later tell us, and not with a joking face on), things don’t go too well: one of the other bank robbers loses control so much she rather shoots him than let him kill an innocent. To add insult to injury she loses her mask during the altercation.

Afterwards, when our heroine is trying to relax a little before she can flee the country with her own little sack full of diamonds, things go from bad to worse. Turns out, the evil US senator (Morgan Freeman with a screen time of at least three minutes) who hired them wasn’t actually interested in diamonds or money so much as in a little USB drive that contains information he’d really rather not see going public. He’s also little interested in having loose ends, so he sends out evil Mr. Washington (James Purefoy overacting rip-roaringly and assuming an accent that might supposed to be German or Afrikaans or Dutch or Elvish) and his multi-racial, gender-progressive gang of henchpeople to cut them off.

Boyfriend doesn’t survive the night, but Alex – no surprise with her action movie protagonist name – makes Washington’s business very, very difficult. Turns out she isn’t just good at getting into places but has superior ass-kicking powers as well as a penchant for improbable plans that somehow work against all sanity and logic.

Basically, Stephen S. Campanelli’s Momentum already had me at least half way at Olga Kurylenko and James Purefoy, both the sort of somewhat luckless actors who’ll appear in just about anything and always put their game faces on – no matter if they are in a mid-level action movie like this one or a mid-brow costume drama. As a viewer of much crap, I appreciate actors who do get their hands dirty to make my life that much more enjoyable.

In Momentum’s particular case, Purefoy goes the well-worn route of portraying his bad guy exaltedly insane to the border of high silliness I generally hope for from the big bad in my silly action movies, while Kurylenko once again demonstrates she makes for a pretty fun action heroine and can act other emotional states than angry and determined your typical male action movie star will have his troubles with (I love my Jean-Claudes, and Dolphs and so on, but you gotta be realistic). Fortunately, the film uses that ability rather sparingly and doesn’t fall into the horrid mistake of making an action movie with a female lead “more relatable” by having her cry a lot, because girls are supposed to be like that.

In fact, and to my delight, Momentum doesn’t play up Kurylenko’s gender at all but just – correctly – assumes it’s normal for a female character to go through the same action movie hero tropes and plot beats a male character would have to. Why, the film even gets away with a bit of child protecting business without drawing on the typical and often very annoying mythical “motherly feelings” supposedly slumbering in all of them thar wimmin.

When it comes to the action, Campanelli – and very rightly so – bets on variety, including the by now traditional cat and mouse game in a hotel, car chases, wild shoot-outs and some rather fine close combat, as well as scenes in classic thriller and suspense tradition (though louder) with a tiny bit of the conspiracy thriller for added flavour. Campanelli’s direction thankfully eschews the flash cut and whoosh zoom aesthetic that has ruined many a US action film over the last two decades or so. The action is fast, it’s professionally staged and generally exciting (if not breath-taking), and thanks to Campanelli’s efforts, you can actually see much of the stunt work. The man’s no Isaac Florentine, obviously, but he clearly knows what he’s doing, and does it in an enjoyable way.

I should probably comment on the plot and the characters, but as it goes with this sort of film, looking for a logical narrative and deep characterisation seems to me to be rather beside the point. Let’s just say the action scenes are connected via vaguely sensible (if you don’t stop and think about them) developments, Kurylenko’s character moments are well enough placed, and the ending’s a curious attempt at either being ambiguous or attempting to hawk a sequel that won’t come (because people rather preferred the showy and offensively stupid John Wick with that wooden puppet in the lead to a decent film, I suppose). That’s enough for me, particularly in a film that does its work of letting people die in creative ways and furniture explode as well as Momentum does.

Headhunter (1988)

A series of deaths among the local Nigerian community awaken the mild degree of interest deaths among the poor and the black tend to awaken in Miami’s police force. Racist idiot Captain Ted Calvin (Steve Kanaly) sends out what must be his least favourite couple of detectives to solve a series of murders you’d usually build a task force for. The lucky ones are Katherine Hall (Kay Lenz) and her peculiar partner Pete Giullani (Wayne Crawford). Pete’s suffering from marriage trouble: seems as if his wife (June Chadwick) has found her lesbian self after what we can only assume to be a decade or more of horror and is throwing him out on his ass, and if you ask me why that’s going to be important for the course of the film, I surely don’t know. But then, I didn’t write the script.

But, let’s get back to the murders – as the film does from time to time too. These aren’t your run of the mill killings but rather bizarre beheadings after which the head of the victim goes missing. Because they sure as hell wouldn’t find anything out on their own, Nigerian-American shaman/lawyer Samuel Juru (Sam Williams) provides a bit of exposition and informs our heroes they are looking for some sort of demon that drove the Miami Nigerians from Nigeria. Which they of course don’t believe.

But no matter, for the demon finds himself threatened and challenged by the two worst cops in town kinda-sorta being on his case doing nothing of consequence, and starts to haunt them with hallucinations and attacks instead of letting them get on with drinking in bars, walking around town muttering nonsense, and not doing anything that could solve even the case of little Timmy’s vanished ball.

Seriously, I got nothing here. I have no idea what Francis Schaeffer’s film is supposed to be, what it’s supposed to do, or what the people involved think its plot is. About half of the film belongs to the peculiar genre of the mumbling, rambling cop film, consequently spending its time on showing our police heroes (yeah, that’s sarcasm right here) being shlubby, mumbly, and totally ineffective, investing a lot of time into Pete’s personality crisis without it having any pay-off or much connection to the supernatural plot beyond his wife and her lover becoming victims at the end. Mostly, that part of the film takes places in bars, cars, and other places where characters can mumble some nonsense at each other, and honestly, I have no idea why the film showing half of this stuff.

I have even less of an idea about the supernatural plot. There’s a demon, who might have a cult, and might do something or other even worse than beheading people we never learn anything much about, I suppose. He’s mostly an invisible wind for large parts of the film (at least those parts that are indeed concerned with him), and turns into a rubbery suit for the big tiny chainsaw against monster finale, but otherwise, I have no idea what his game is, why he feels threatened by two characters who couldn’t find their own asses, or why I should care.

If all this sounds rather vague and disconnected, welcome to Headhunter, a film that spends most of its time not actually doing anything except for being somewhat peculiar and pointless, and certainly never deigns to attempt stuff like entertaining its audience, telling a story, building up a mood beyond “huh?”, or anything you might connect with, you know, a film, and which, alas, just isn’t weird in an interesting enough way to keep one awake watching it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,south african movies,in short,horror,francis schaeffer,kay lenz,wayne crawford,sam williams

The Mangler (1995)

Warning: there may be one or two last act spoilers hidden away in the text, because some things are just too good not to mention them. Plus, it’s Halloween.

Horrible things are happening in the early industrial age looking industrial laundry of evil old capitalist Bill Gartley (Robert Englund in peculiar age make-up giving a performance permanently fluctuating between the ridiculous and the ridiculously inspired): gothic looking mangler number 6 is mutilating and killing off members of the female workforce in accidents that don’t look so much like accidents but rather as if the machine had an evil mind of its own. In a normal place, the mangler would be shut down right quick, but Gartley’s the most powerful man in town, and he only cackles evilly about death and mutilation, so on the mangler mangles.

Only police officer John Hunton (Ted Levine as a bitter, shouty, sweaty and irascible hull of a man with a peculiar haircut) cares. His investigation, involving the help of his “theoretical parapsychologist” neighbour and buddy Mark (Daniel Matmor), quickly leads to the assumption the mangler is indeed possessed by a demon. Finding that out and doing something about it are quite different things, particularly as our heroes take quite some time to make the connection between demons, pacts, powerful evil old men, and sacrifices of the virginal kind.

Like all films Tobe Hooper ever made not called Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this (sort of) adaptation of a Stephen King short story is not well loved; like some of these films, it can be a worthwhile viewing if approached from the right angle.

The sympathetic viewer will need to bring along a patience for the weird, a love for the artificial, and a tolerance for the blindingly obvious yet circumspectly told when it comes to plotting. In other words, this is Hooper’s early 80s Italian-style horror movie, with all the silliness, the gooey blood and the just plain inexplicable stuff this suggests. Of course, in my house, being an early 80s Italian-style horror movie is a good thing, and Hooper is rather good at the whole business too. I, at least, can only appreciate a film with two perfectly silly looking and rather unnecessary cases of old age make-up (well, it’s not difficult to imagine Englund’s there because of his horror idol value), a main monster that is somewhat hindered in being all that threatening by virtue of not being able to frigging move, yet that still finds victims willing to step really close even after corpse number three or so, a script that contains grand ideas like pretending Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” is some kind of magical handbook, and so on and so forth. And let’s not forget the utterly crazy finale when the mangler turns into some sort of organic mecha thing - a fire-breathing organic mecha thing to be more precise.

Hooper presents the glorious mess in a tone of hysterical artificiality that – apart from the Italian angle – mostly reminds me of his own Eaten Alive and Spontaneous Combustion, films that also share the off-beat – and again rather on the hysterical side – approach to performances, not exactly logical plotting and a political subtext so blunt you can scratch the sub right away (doesn’t mean Hooper’s wrong, though). There’s a lot of dry ice fog pretending to be steam so that people have a reason to sweat a lot, harsh blue and red light coming from places where blue and red light have no business coming from, production design right out of the industrial gothic handbook, and camera angles that eschew any idea of realism for the full-time grotesque.

The same goes for the bloody stuff: like in comparable Italian movies, believability or the facts of human anatomy or physics belong to areas Hooper seems to have no regard for or interest in, so people get mangled in pretty damn strange ways completely in tune with the visual language and all around bizarre tone of the rest of the film.

Following the fashion, the haircuts, the cars and the way people talk in the film, it is also impossible to pinpoint when exactly The Mangler is supposed to take place; or rather, it is clear it’s not supposed to take place at a precise point in time at all but in a grotesque nightmare space born out of the corrupting influences of power and money, a place and time that combines 40s movie accents, Italian gore, industrial gothic and random elements of the year the film was actually produced in with wild abandon. It’s not so much a place as a state of mind turned visual. Again, the political subtext about the way capitalism turns everything into ruined shadows of its own seems pretty clear to me.

But, my imaginary reader will ask (what ever did I do before I made you up?), is The Mangler entertaining? Well, to me it is, but I can see how somebody could get bored or annoyed by it easily. It is, after all artificial, grotesque, more than just a bit silly, and most problematic at all, it seems to be the kind of horror film that’s not actually putting much (or any) work into being frightening, or creepy, or suspenseful, using all its energy for the grotesque mood, to bring a bit of weirdness on screen, and to talk politics, so if you go in expecting to be frightened, or shocked, you’ll probably hate it with a passion, and you won’t be wrong about it.

Me, on the other hand, love to wallow in a film that’s all weirdness and grotesqueness all the time, and if the price for that is a horror not very effective at horrifying me, I’m more than willing to pay it, even on Halloween.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,australian movies,south african movies,reviews,other places,horror,tobe hooper,robert englund,ted levine

In short: Alien Outpost (2014)

aka Outpost 37

It’s 2033. Ten years after humanity – uniting under the banner of something called the “United Space Defence Force” or USDF – has driven back an alien invasion despite those aliens pretty clearly being technologically far advanced, nobody on the planet seems to care much about the fact there are still aliens, called “Heavies”, left behind continuing the war, so the USDF is undermanned and underfunded.

The film follows the obligatory documentary film crew accompanying a handful of soldiers to Outpost 37 in Iran. There, the war is still very active, and now it looks as if the locals weren’t any longer willing to tolerate the once welcome USDF’s presence any longer – at least going by the regularity with which they attack the outpost.

Or there just might be something else – something much worse – going on.

I wish I would like visual effects specialist Jabbar Raisani’s feature debut more than I actually did, for its basic set-up of using the military doc formula, POV horror edition, in combination with the alien invasion scenario is a good one. Unfortunately, the fake military documentary part is neither very interesting nor very surprising, with every character a cliché you’ve seen in dozens (if not hundreds) of war movies and little actual depth put into it. Personally, I’m also not a fan of the completely uncritical way the film looks at the military but then, that’s not atypical for the documentary style it’s imitating either, so it’s at least authentic.

The SF part is even more problematic because so very little about it seems thought through at all. I at least find a future taking place some years after an alien invasion where humanity actually doesn’t care about a continued aggressive alien presence on their planet anymore pretty implausible, a word that also fits a world where technology doesn’t seem to have progressed much during eighteen years, particularly not eighteen years that must have left us with quite a bit of superior alien technology to learn from. And hey, as luck will have it those aliens are even humanoid to a silly degree, so a lot of their technological concepts would probably be pretty manageable to understand. These things, and quite a few other details that are equally badly conceived, leave the film’s basic plot standing on a very shaky world building foundation.

And that plot isn’t very interesting either – apart from the fake military doc thing, it’s alien invasion by numbers with the biggish surprise for the characters being obvious to an even just mildly genre-savvy audience early on, and little else to distract one. Well, the military action aspect of the film is decent, as are the effects but both elements aren’t so spectacular they could ever make up for the undercooked rest of the film.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,south african movies,in short,sf,war,jabbar raisani

Northmen – A Viking Saga (2014)

A small band of Viking outcasts surrounding young Asbjorn (Tom Hopper) were outlawed by King Harald because they “have opinions Harald doesn’t like”, or so Asbjorn tells us. Seeing as they begin the film crashing their boat against the coast of Scotland while they were actually trying to reach Lindisfarne for a bit of rape and pillaging, one might think of somewhat different reasons, but oh well.

Be that as it may, after that tiny mishap Asbjorn and his men – dude with bow, old guy, guy who doesn’t like Asbjorn very much but will come around in the end, etc (all acted well enough for what they are) – do stumble upon a group of Scottish soldiers whom they proceed to kill, acquiring a Scottish noble daughter named Inghean (Charlie Murphy) in the process. Inghean, the men think, just might be what will buy them places in the closest Viking settlement. Alas, Inghean isn’t just any noble daughter but actually the daughter of the King of Scotland himself, so soon there’s half an army on our protagonists’ tracks. Worse, they won’t even be able to trade Inghean in for their safety, because while the king “only” wants his daughter killed if necessary, his favourite mercenaries leading the hunt, Bjorn (James Norton) and Hjorr (Ed Skrein), think it’s much better politics to slaughter her in any case.

Well, at least a friendly Christian warrior monk (Ryan Kwanten, who isn’t as atrociously miscast as you might expect) is around to help the Vikings out a little while they and the increasingly friendly Inghean are looking for a way to leave Scotland.

Now, as I might have mentioned a dozen times or so before, pseudo-historical pulp action movies have an easy time with me, so it probably won’t be much of a surprise that I found myself enjoying Claudio Fäh’s German, Swiss, South African co-production with a bunch of English language actors quite a bit, despite the film’s obvious flaws.

Among these flaws are: you know which colour scheme and you can – if you want – just mentally insert my usual rant about colour films who don’t actually want to take on the visual responsibility of colour but are too chickenshit to actually be black and white here; a script I’m pretty certain if seen filmed a dozen times or so before with slightly different character names and ethnicities; characters who generally aren’t terribly well individuated beyond their names and hair styles; various wasted opportunities to add any kind of thematic weight to the film (and there’s quite a bit of weight pulp adventure can carry, if the people writing it just want it); and the fact that these Vikings and Scottish clanspeople don’t actually act according to the things we know about their cultures.

Fortunately, some of these flaws are problems that I am not exactly happy to encounter yet which still are not too problematic for the enjoyment of the film at hand – apart from the non-colour scheme that wastes quite a few clearly impressive landscape shots for no reason at all. While I naturally prefer the thematically enriched kind of pulp adventure more, there’s nothing really wrong with the more basic version presented here, where every man speaks in gruff grunts that suggest bad hormone problems or damaged vocal chords, at least when he’s not fighting, a situation that can only involve him loudly shouting “Yaaaaaaargh” while showing off his perfect, perfect, teeth, and where there’s clearly nothing at all going on in the characters’ heads. At the very least, director Fäh knows how to film these things clearly and sometimes even moodily (of course – again! – except for that darn lack of colours), and does a fine enough job pacing the series of chases and skirmishes that make up most of the film’s running time. Sure, he’s no Neil Marshall but there’s no shame in that.

While this still sounds like I’m damning the film with faint praise, I honestly quite enjoyed Northmen, its focus on being the simple pulp action piece it wants to be, the grace that comes to a film without pretensions and without the need to apologize for not having pretensions via irony or by being offensively bad (like, say, much less fun Viking movie Hammer of the Gods).

Technorati-Markierungen: swiss movies,german movies,south african movies,reviews,action,adventure,pulp,claudio fäh,tom hopper,ryan kwanten,charlie murphy

Kite (2014)

In a near future South Africa dominated by gangs and a corrupt police force after some sort of economic collapse. A young woman named Sawa (India Eisley) hunts a mysterious slaver and trafficker in kids only known as The Emir, the man responsible for the murder of her policeman father. To keep her trauma at bay, Sawa is taking the drug Amp that not only makes the psychological pain go away but also erases parts of her memory and increases her combat reflexes, though I’m not sure her killing machine style really needs much improvement. Her only friend is Karl (Samuel L. Jackson), her father’s former partner who keeps her in weapons, drugs and information and tries to erase as many of her traces as he can, which gets increasingly more difficult the closer she gets to the Emir and the higher her body count becomes.

Of course, taking a drug that destroys one’s memory isn’t necessarily a good thing to do because you just might lose your personality, or the actual reason for doing the things that you do, with it, and consequently, Sawa might have forgotten some rather important facts. Like how she is connected to the young guy (Callan McAulifee) who seems to be following her, helping her out (or at least trying to) and who says they know each other well.

What we have with Ralph Ziman’s Kite is a US/Mexican/South African co-production of the adaptation of a Japanese anime I haven’t seen but which is supposedly much, much smuttier. The whole international she-bang was filmed in South Africa, giving the film more of the feel of one of Luc Besson’s more obscure productions than of your typical US SF/action movie.

In fact, on an aesthetic level, Kite doesn’t so much remind me of its own anime roots as of a live action version of a francophone comic crossed with the 2010s interpretation of an old Duran Duran video clip. Which, if you ask me, is a good thing, and certainly an aesthetic that gives the film an individual feel, particularly in connection with the use it makes of its South African locations (only the most ugly and run-down, of course, because this is a post-economical apocalypse movie and not a tourist video) and minor role actors. It’s an interesting mix to say the least, and while Kite’s plot isn’t anything I haven’t seen a dozen times before (including the idea that vengeance probably-maybe doesn’t solve everything or makes you whole again), the rather more lived in world it takes place in gives it a bit of originality – at least inside the genre borders of post-economical collapse SF action. Which yes, is a thing now.

The film’s action is pretty great too, with a variety of increasingly tense and bloody fights that actually manage to sell the not exactly threateningly built Eisley as a frightening killing machine through clever choreography, fast-but-not-too-fast editing, and Eisley’s surprising ability to go from controlled childlike to fierce through poise and facial expressions. Sure, she probably couldn’t take most of the guys she makes mincemeat out of here in real life but she sure has the eyes of somebody who could, and that’s what counts in movies. On the other hand, the film also doesn’t make the mistake of never letting her lose a fight; as all good action heroes, one of her qualities is not that she’s never going down but the way she gets up again.

The plot, as I said, isn’t very original, but the film is well enough paced and doesn’t just go from one action sequence to the next. At the very least, Kite possesses an actual story, as well as characters that make sense in their comic book-y way, and while it isn’t exploring questions of trauma, memory and identity deeply, it’s not a thoughtless movie either. In particular when it comes to a style of worldbuilding that suggests more than it explains about its specific post-collapse world but which does intimate things that feel to belong together and form the place in which these characters attempt to survive.

And that’s really the part that makes Kite work for me the most, the feeling that its crazy, a little sad, and a little silly plot takes place in a world appropriate to it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,mexican movies,reviews,sf,action,ralph ziman,india eisley,samuel l. jackson,callan mcauliffe

In short: Hellgate (1990)

William A. Levey's sort of horror, kind of comedy movie about the repercussions the murder of a woman by a motorcycle gang has thirty years later, about a guy whose face got nibbled on by a possessed turtle shooting lasers out of a crystal, a ghostly hitch hiker, and about ghost love, recommends itself through a lot of things that'll make it practically unwatchable for a lot of people but that are exactly the sort of things bound to endear a movie to people like me and mine.

So there are all manner of charming types of bad acting, going from the zoned-out, inflectionless whispering of our leading ghost lady (Abigail Wolcott), to the more rarefied "I'm just pretending to be a normal guy, you know, even though I am so very very pretty" shtick of Ron Palillo, to whatever it is some of the other actors think they're actually doing.

To make matters worse/even more beautiful, the film's second half consists of our heroes wandering through an amusement park ghost town ghost town and encountering people with really bad ghost make-up dressed up like amusement park ghost town actors. There's a warning against the dire consequences of getting shit-faced and watching dead can can dancers while visiting a ghost town, naked breasts, and many a scene of people telling each other in-jokes nobody else, particularly the audience, will find funny, and which I can only assume are improvised, because nobody could script something this unfunny, right? Right? It's all pretty fantastic in an utterly wrong-headed way, and that's before I mentioned the bad decapitation, aging through bad hair-dye, and the film's frightening attempts at sexy times.

I don't know what director Levey or scriptwriter Michael O'Rourke were thinking with any plot or directorial decision they take in Hellgate (except for the "breasts sell" part, which is pretty self-evident, yet also completely untrue in a case like this where no amount of nudity could distract anyone watching from realizing that this is all they ever dreamed of/just horrible crap). Frankly, I don't want to know, for a film as peculiar (in the same way a parallel dimension full of cannibals is peculiar) as Hellgate is should stay a mystery, or, as the film would phrase it "Get away from my boyfriend, zombie bitch!". There really isn't anything I could add to that.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,south african movies,in short,horror,wtf,william a. levey,ron palillo

Three Films Make A Post: A Terrifying Case of SKULL-DUGGERY!

Don't Look Up (2009): Fruit Chan remakes Hideo Nakata's fine early ghost story for the English language market, but replaces subtlety with loud noises and annoying dumbness and Nakata's interesting characters with a director who is seeing dead people in badly acted epileptic fits and the usual clichés that come with that sort of role. Instead of not explaining a lot, Chan churns out some crap about a "gypsy curse" that is supposed to give the film a whiff of the Gothic, but only achieves to bring it further down the road of films nobody needs to see.

It's an embarrassing film from a director who really should know and can do better. A fantastic demonstration how not to make a film about ghosts.

 

Rat Sakti Calon Arang (1985): Despite being blessed with Suzzanna (in an improbable double role as evil black magic queen and her kind-hearted daughter) and Barry Prima in the leads, this Indonesian film isn't really the insane mix of horror, martial arts and fantasy I had expected, but rather a more earnest-minded adaptation of an actual legend, which puts it right outside my area of expertise (and my areas of vaguely knowledgeable dilettantism, too). It's a fine time, though, and - earnest-minded or not - does have moments like the utterly bizarre scene in which Suzzanna fights one of her enemies by power-urinating on him that bridge all cultural barriers for your low-brow needs.

 

BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007): Leave it to Uwe Boll to make a movie with a vampire lord Billy the Kid as its big bad that is utterly tedious and boring. I would admire Boll's gift for inciting even the better of his actors to dreadful performances, or his utter inability to learn how to point a camera into the right direction without having it make the wavering motions of a sick donkey, or his talent for finding scriptwriters whose lack of craftsmanship is equal to his own, but then I have seen too many of his movies to feel anything but disgust for him.

There aren't many directors able to make their crap films feel like deliberate insults to anyone stupid enough to lay his or her money down for them. Boll is their master.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,south african movies,indonesian movies,suzzanna,barry prima,fantasy,horror,sadistic crap,uwe boll,sisworo gautama putra,in short

The Horror!? 86: The Demon (1979)

A very slow and delibaretly working killer kidnaps the daughter of a burgeois family. Though he kills again and has obviously no intention of hiding his victims, the girl's body is never found. Her parents, desperate for any kind of closure, seek out the help of soldier-turned-clairvoyant Bill Carson (Cameron Mitchell, as always badly in need of his drinking money).

Since all his sniffing on pieces of clothes doesn't lead to any helpful visions, the movie merrily jumps to a pair of young women (sisters? cousins? - I am not completely sure and will certainly not watch parts of this again to find out), whose boring love lifes and all-around annoyingness will accompany us for the rest of the movie. There is hope, though, because our friend, the very slow killer stalks the two women, albeit even more slowly. From time to time we look in on him anyway, and see him standing, standing or standing and washing his mask (that seems to be able to teleport onto and off of his skull at will).

At this point I had high hopes to at least see the clairvoyant guy again, but no chance. Carson is finally able to tell where the killer lives. He even seems to have an especially good day concerning visions - he also prophecises that the father will not survive his short moment of Charles Bronson vigilantism against the Slow One.

All of this comes true, but of course The Demon still finds the time to show us the sisters of boredom again and again and again.

Actually, it shows us the two that often and extensive that there isn't much time to wrap the film up, so Cameron Mitchell is disposed of in one of the stupidest twists imaginable and the killer can finally strike.

Oh, there are South African horror films? I hesitate to call this a horror film, I even hesitate to call it a film.

It's an absolutely dire attempt to make a slasher movie (at least I suspect it is meant to be one), one of those films that don't get anything right except a nearly mystical aura of utter cluelessness and boredom.

At least I know what to do the next time I can't sleep.

 

Technorati-Tags: horror,cameron mitchell,reviews,slasher,south african movies