Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

A small New England fishing town has rather a lot of trouble: the fishing yield of the local salmon has been decreasing for years now, so much so that most of the population greets the plans of a corporation to build a cannery and start on a highly industrialized fishing operation with happiness. Only a couple of people, really mostly native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), are set against it. Johnny even might have a chance to stop the project in court, so the New England fishing rednecks under the leadership of Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow) are getting antsy enough, they start acting like the Klan. Despite being for the cannery, local boat owner Jim Hill (Doug McClure) doesn’t hold truck with these assholes, and might even become a voice of reason for the saner of the local fishermen, if he and the rest of the cast didn’t get distracted by a bunch of fish men going around killing men and raping women.

These gill men are of course the result of genetic experimentation by Evilcorp meant to increase salmon yield, a side-effect their own chief scientist Dr Drake (Ann Turkel) had warned them about (but they wouldn’t listen, and she apparently wouldn’t whistleblow). And yes, the local Salmon Festival is right around the corner, and the Mayor of AmityEvilcorp would absolutely prefer if things like a bit of murder, rape and kidnapping were kept on the down low. So it’s left to the fists (and guns) of Doug McClure and Anthony Pena to fight the fish folk eating the fisher folk.

It is rather astonishing how many Nature Strikes Back, Jaws-alike and classic monster movie clichés can be squeezed into eighty minutes of runtime, but that’s how producer Roger Corman liked it in this phase, and that’s certainly what director Barbara Peeters (with additional sleaze shot by Jimmy T. Murakami and/or James Sbardellati) delivered.

Because the film is stuffed to the gills with clichés and tropes that need little explanation, it zips along at an often incredible pace. Peeters somehow manages to keep things surprisingly coherent, with character motivations that make sense as far as they go, and a plot that may be a mix of the greatest hits of all monster movies, but also holds together through kill scenes, unpleasantness and weirdness.

Obviously, I have no problem at all with the film’s nature as a bit of a best of album with added sleaze, particularly not when it is executed with such vigour, as well as a true commitment to being a bit gory and unpleasant in the traditional exploitation style. The effects, particularly in the great, climactic attack on the Salmon Festival and the fantastic Alien rip-off moment that gets us out of the door do get rather Italian from time to time and become so imaginative, they stop being just unpleasant and instead turn surreal.

An added ace in the hole in this regard are the monster suits designed by Rob Bottin. While they were clearly realized on the cheap, there’s a sense for the strange detail on display that makes them work very well indeed. These things – all of them recognizable individuals too – look wrong in the just the right way. Mouths that are too broad, or arms that are too long suggest these creatures are something not coming out of nature as we know it, but mutants that don’t have a place in an ordered universe. Which is quite the effect to achieve with a batch of rubber suits.

Three Films Make A Post: Get a Lift

Harry and Tonto (1974): Having lost his home to city development, and not really jibing with living with his son and his family, elderly New Yorker Harry (Art Carney) and his cat Tonto (Tonto) go on a road trip through the USA, encountering old flames and new experiences, living parts of life Harry never did before. Among other things, for this Paul Mazursky comedy is stuffed full with humanity and human encounters big and small, feelings simple and complicated, treating aging and old age and the loss that comes with it with as much dignity as humour, exhibiting an openness to different ways of seeing the world that seems to be utterly alien to today’s “you’re either for us or against us” world.

Mazursky creates (or sees) an America made out of very different people believing very different things that still express a shared humanity, never making a grand gesture out of this, but treating his characters kindly, even those that might not completely deserve it.

A Man Called Sledge (1970): This is one of two movies directed by actor Vic Morrow, though producer Dino DeLaurentiis apparently robbed him of the final cut, and there may or may not be material included shot by Giorgio Gentili instead. Despite an American cast, director and US money, in feeling and tone, this is a lot like an Italian Western, starting with its treatment of the Southwestern setting, over the “sweat and dirty shirts” production design, and certainly not ending in its pretty cynical view of the world. The film also includes a pretty hefty heist movie element and ends up as a Treasure of the Sierra Madre variation.

It features James Garner in one of his grimmer performances as the titular gunman Sledge, and moves through its set pieces of dust and mud with a degree of vigour. It never quite manages to reach the allegorical heft the director – at least going by the final act – clearly wants it to have, but then, I dislike allegories anyway. In the state it is in, it’s a solid enough movie, not as well directed as the best Italian westerns (nor as crazy as these can get) but entertaining enough for what it is.

Jiu Jitsu (2020): On the plot level, this thing directed by Dimitri Logothethis is a completely bizarre attempt to mix martial arts movie traditions with a Predator rip-off, plus the dreaded amnesiac protagonist (Alain Moussi is our hero, such as he is) syndrome. And Nicolas Cage is a crazy jiu jitsu swordsman veteran (jiu jitsu in this film has little to do with the actual martial art, by the way), so you can expect a couple of scenes of Cage flipping out entertainingly, doing his best in martial arts fight scenes against people who are actually good at this sort of thing, and doing an Obi Wan (just louder). Also appearing are action and martial arts film darlings like Tony Jaa and Frank Grillo, but they only get a couple of fights in. Moussi is good in his action sequences but pretty terrible at the whole acting thing. He was probably much cheaper than those members of the cast who can do both; but then, the script is so utterly bad at stringing the decent, sometimes fun, action scenes together, even a great actor might have not gotten through the affair with dignity intact.

Three Films Make A Post: In this town a speeding ticket is a death sentence

Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City aka El silencio de la ciudad blanca (2019): This Netflix movie adaptation of a crime novel that’s apparently much better (which shouldn’t be terribly difficult to achieve) directed by Daniel Calparsoro feels like a greatest hits version of the serial killer thriller genre, and as with most greatest hits collections, there’s a lot of glitz but little substance on screen. Sure, the film does look great, but the script is a complete mess full of sub-plots that are picked up, dropped and forgotten for no apparent reason, motivations and character psychology that make little sense (and is usually neither explained nor demonstrated but just stated awkwardly). The film has the kind of overloaded stop and start pacing you often get when a book is cut down to what a screenwriter deems to be its highlights.
Otherwise, there’s only the usual overblown serial killer movie nonsense, full of grand declarations of intellectual depth that doesn’t actually exist, ridiculous murder rituals this film isn’t even clever enough to make as creepy as they should be, and taking place in a world where characters are probably even accompanied by Very Dramatic Music™ when they are on the loo.

Housewife (2017): I absolutely adored director Can Evrenol’s Baskin, but this, his second feature, is quite a step back, despite hitting some of my favourite horror and weird fic elements, namely a creepy cult, a protagonist who can’t quite understand if she’s dreaming or not, and creepy flesh masks. Evrenol seems to be trying to formally emulate the dream logic of Italian 80s horror, but for much of the film’s running time, he doesn’t hit the proper mood of a bizarre and unpleasant dream but more the randomness of actual dreams, which simply isn’t terribly interesting to watch. There are a couple or three effective scenes here to show that Baskin wasn’t an accident, but most of what we get is aimless meandering.

The film also suffers badly from the decision to have a cast of non-native English speakers speak English dialogue, adding a stilted and unnatural quality that may have been meant to add to the film’s unreal mood but in practice makes the already pretty awkward dialogue difficult to make out and puts another layer of distance between audience and characters when they badly need to feel as close to the audience as possible.


The California Kid (1974): Which leaves this post’s role of “The Good Film” to this unassuming 70s TV movie by Richard T. Heffron in which drag riding Martin Sheen takes revenge on Sheriff Vic Morrow who purposely drove his brother and others off a mountain road. It’s not a tight, Duel-style thrill ride but more interested in a  very 70s exploration of characters on the side-lines of life, while having some thoughts about the reasons why good people look away from bad acts, usually avoiding the melodrama that can come with the TV territory. Heffron’s direction is not spectacular but makes nice use of its California locations and knows how to provide space for a cast that also features a young Nick Nolte, Michelle Phillips and Stuart Margolin.

Message From Space (1978)

aka Return to Jelucia

Original title: Uchu kara messeji

Silver-faced, kabuki-inspired intergalactic villain Rockseia (Mikio Narita) and his black-clad troops have conquered Jelucia, a planet full of people who dress like space hippies (crappy robes, leaves on their heads and all), though their not non-violent but only really bad at fighting. The planet's last hope lies in sending out eight magical space walnuts to find eight heroes to rescue it. Two of the Jelucians, Esmeraldina (Etsuko Shihomi!, wearing what looks like a white silk bathrobe - and the leaves) and Urocco (Makoto Sato) are supposed to follow the leaves in a space ship that looks like a clipper and help bring the heroes in.

Turns out magical space walnuts have no taste at all when it comes to heroes, and choose a bunch of dumb space jocks (Hiroyuki Sanada, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan), a shady gambler type guy (Masazumi Okabe), a former space general played by Vic Morrow and his pet robot. Later - much too late - Hans (Sonny Chiba!), the true heir to the throne of Rockseia will join in too, but before that, it's mostly scenes of the crappy non-heroes selling Esmeraldina into sexual slavery (from which she is freed by the bad guys to be kidnapped), pouting a lot and being annoying. Well, and Vic Morrow talks a lot with his robot (turns out it was a good thing R2D2 didn't talk back).

Anyhow, after the audience has spent too much time with the film's crappy heroes, Rockseia falls in love with Earth and decides to conquer it too, so off he and his minions go by way of having Jelucia turned into a giant spaceship without any of the inhabitants having noticed. Will our intensely crappy heroes ever do anything about it?

By now, Kinji Fukasaku is actually better known for his great yakuza films and his general awesomeness than for the weird pieces of cracktastic nonsense he produced whenever he took on the job to be really commercial (for the uninitiated: you can usually recognize these films by featuring an "international" cast or being made during the 80s). If you only know Fukasaku from his more earnest-minded work, Message From Space will come as a bit of a shock, for not only is it nonsensical bordering on totally incomprehensible, it's also a film that barely seems to have been directed at all.

There's certainly little on display of Fuksasaku's usual dynamic (sometimes chaotic) visual style - much of the film seems done with a nailed-down camera, and concentrates on framing and staging everything in the least interesting way imaginable. The film's visual side is clearly not helped by sets that are the opposite of lavish. Jelucia and what we see of Earth are the sort of brown, sandy non-entities that make the rock quarries that so often tended to stand in for alien planets in SF movies look colourful and fanciful.

The script is no help at all, either: there's not much actual plot, nor dramatic tension. Nobody does much - and that slowly - until the film suddenly remembers that it's supposed to end soon after, and everything that might have been interesting had it been developed in the time that came before suddenly happens at once.

Despite these failings - and I haven't even mentioned the film's wasting of Sonny Chiba on a longer cameo and of Etsuko Shihomi on the classic princess role - there is something about it that makes Message eminently watchable, namely, its utter, ludicrous silliness that makes it a brother in spirit to the great Alfredo Brescia's Star Wars rip-offs. Kabuki traditions, truly bad space opera, moments of surprising violence and childish silliness collide in the most ridiculous ways. Space clipper ships meet horned helmets galore; an evil emperor is under the thumb of his mother, who is played by a guy (again the kabuki influence?). Tetsuro Tanba pops in for a minute as the new chairman of Earth; there are space fireflies. Earth is home to a wicked witch with her Plutonian son; Vic Morrow goes on a diplomatic mission dressed up as the camp version of an 18th century navy admiral. I'd say there's always something happening, but the film's tone (until the grand finale which by the way makes no sense at all) is so sedate it's more honest to say there's always something to look at.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,sf,kinji fukasaku,etsuko shihomi,sonny chiba,hiroyuki sanada,vic morrow,reviews

In short: The Last Shark (1981)

aka Great White

aka The Last Jaws

Original title: L'ultimo squalo

Just a few days before a surfing regatta is supposed to be held there, the little US coastal town of Port Harbor is struck by a series of shark attacks. The local experts in such things - author and hobby sharkotologist Peter BenchleyBenton (James Franciscus) and "Scottish" sea bear Ron Hamer (Vic "Yup, it says here I'm from Scotland. This is how Scottish people talk, right?" Morrow) - deem the perpetrator to be an exceptionally large Great White. Their recommendation is to postpone the regatta until the shark problem has been solved. Unfortunately, the town's mayor William Wells (Joshua Sinclair) is trying to get himself elected state governor, and as we all know, that's not a position you can achieve when you are known as level-headed and putting the greater good before your private interests in an emergency, so Wells decides to go through with regatta anyway.

We're not in Amity here (no, honestly, please don't sue us!), though, and while Wells does his best to keep the shark killings out of the news, he still does try to protect the competitors in the regatta by surrounding the area of the competition with a net no normal shark could bite through. Additionally, Wells assigns Benton, Hamer and a bunch of fishermen (surely all experts in animals they don't usually meet) as his anti-shark crack troop.

Not surprisingly, none of Wells' ideas protects anyone, and Port Harbor's beach and the surrounding seas stay an all-you-can-eat buffet. That is, until Sharkie makes the capital mistake of nibbling off the leg of Benton's daughter.

In 1981, much beloved Italian action specialist Enzo G. Castellari must have been in desperate need of some fast money. At least, that's the only explanation I have for the director signing on for a project like this late-coming rip-off of Jaws at a point in his career when he otherwise seemed unable to make a bad film. But bad The Last Shark is, there's no doubt about it. Seldom has Castellari shown himself as indifferent towards making a watchable movie as here. The pacing is sloppy and slow, half of the film's scene are copied as closely from Spielberg's film or from its lamentable sequel as possible without getting sued (which didn't help Last Shark - there was a lawsuit by Universal, and the Italian film's producers lost it), and the other half just doesn't seem to have much of a reason to exist.

Castellari tries to pep things up a bit by adding utterly random slow motion shots and a bit of dynamic editing, but for about the first hour of the film's running time, nothing to get excited about happens. It sure doesn't help the film's excitement level during that phase that the shark is either represented by an adorably bad model or through library footage that doesn't fit what is supposed to be happening on screen at all, and very often doesn't even show a Great White (see the word "white" here, Enzo?).

Fortunately for people who have already wasted an hour of their lives at this point, the film gets sillier going into its final act, and begins to show scenes poor Spielberg would not have dreamt of. The shark munches on a helicopter, the shark kidnaps a bunch of people, the shark gets blown up by an inadvertently mined corpse and happiness returns to my living room. It's not enough to rescue the film, or even in the slightest what one would hope for from Castellari, yet it stills shows the film and its director willing to entertain the audience instead of inflicting pain to it.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,enzo g. castellari,in short,vic morrow,james franciscus,horror