Three laughs: Tokyo Gore Police

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart. 

★ or ★★★★★

 

Three Laughs Case File #43:
Tokyo Gore Police (Tōkyō Zankoku Keisatsu, Japan 2008)
Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura

We live at stressful times right now, so a way to make things feel a bit easier is to take some flights of fancy. Like, say, this Japanese film about a privaticed police that leads to major bloodbaths.... Wait, but it's more or less a parody of anime stylings and over-the-top violence in Japanese flicks in a way that's more reminiscent of Braindead with it's firehosing of actors with blood.

In future Tokyo, law-enforcement is left for companies and private entrepreneurs. One of the latter is Ruka (Eihi Shiina), a super-skilled katana-wielder, who's also after the persons who killed her policeman father. At the same time, odd body manipulations and mutations are all the rage in the underground. Someone is using these body-melt technologies to sprout biological weapons to kill cop company workers, though, so Ruka is off to find the culprit.

I came of age at the time where most of the coolness and edge of Asian action movies had started to wear off. But there were still some last gleamings in parodies such as this, which I first saw at my beloved Night Visions film festival. This, along with stylistically similar OTT gore films Meatball Machine and Machine Girl, were one of the starting points of independent studio Sushi Typhoon, with which Nishimura and fellow director Noboru Iguchi made a string of bad taste gore flicks, with diminishing returns. You can't keep up if even before starting the business you've already gone to 11. Still, they managed to fund some of Sion Sono's films as well before closing doors so it was all for art in the end. 

But at this point it was still odd and novel, inventive even, to do a sort of cross between RoboCop, Akira and Tetsuo. The film has its tongue firmly in cheek and offers plenty of surprises and cool practical effects so it has still stayed surprisingly fresh today. 

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The film begins with a lengthy action scene where Ruka faces off against a guy wielding a chainsaw on a chain. After this we get a pretty straightforward nod to Starship Troopers with a propaganda commercial showing the strength of privatized police forces, who execute a guy tagged to be a murderer of 15 childern on a rooftom by repeatedly shooting him like he's Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. A later commercial features a family using a Wii-like katana controller in order to perform remote executions as a kind of party game.

2. It takes a while to see just how gleefully perverted the movie is, but the auction scene is pretty hard to top in this regard. A cheerful crowd of punks and vampires is presented with a number of female dancers, each with a more bizarre mutilation. The snail-girl with her eyeballs in tubes is already pretty weird and disgusting but what takes the cake is the breathing half-woman-half-chair that squirts a lengthy pee to the faces of the ecstatic audience.

3. The main bad guy has a massive shotgun dick he uses to blast out police officers. That's it. That's the laugh. 

Z is for Zombies

Happy Halloween! It used to be a tradition at this blog to each year take a look at a particular movie monster and talk about movies where they appeared. I never got to do the Zombie one, partly because everyone knows which ones are the good ones. George Romero's Dead Trilogy, Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and the like. I would've liked to do top 10 more obscure zombie pictures, but never had the time to do enough research. But now I can talk about Italian zombies!

Most of the best Italian zombie movies use the walking dead pretty sparingly, as in Lucio Fulci's The Beyond. But that's not to say Romero's Dawn of the Dead wasn't really popular, and a major influence that showed how to do effective thrills on limited resources. Italians never really bothered with the light social commentary (we have Demons movies for that), they just liked the zombies as a cheap way of showing blood and gore. So, let's take a look.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2, 1979)
Director: Lucio Fulci

The grandaddy and best pure zombie flick Italians managed to do was marketed as a straight-up sequel to Dawn of the Dead (also known as Zombi). Fulci had the idea of doing a horror movie set on a remote island even before the premier of DotD, but relented in adding New York scenes in the beginning and end that can be seen of tying to Romero's film. One thing to note is that Italian films seem to have a better tie to the origins of zombie mythology in the voodoo culture... but use it mostly just to have insensitive depiction of natives and their savage ways. Zombi 2 is not the worst in this regard, it came later with movies that cashed in both the Cannibal movie craze and zombies, such as Zombi Apocalypse (a.k.a. Dr Butcher, M.D.)

Fulci's film is a rollicking good adventure, starring an adventure seeker named Peter West (Ian McCulloch) and a spunky reporter Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow), who embark on a dangerous mission after investigating a mysterious boat in New York's harbor. Fulci had an excellent eye for set-pieces and planty of them linger on in your memory forever after seeing them, even if they are only tangentially related to the plot. The best among them are an incredible fight between and underwater zombie and (a real) shark, and a woman's eye being slowly pulled towards a sharp wood splinter (eat your heart out, Un chien Andalus).

 

While the zombies in Romero's movie were just cartoonish actors facepainted blue, here they are actually very creepy looking, wormy and worn-down corpses. I think the scene of the dead rising from their gravces is exceptionally creepy, with Fabio Frizzi's incredible score creating the necessary chills. Fulci's best skills are as a visualist, and this film started something of a golden age on his filmography (which we will take a closer look at soon enough).

★★★★

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 3, 1988)
Dirs. Lucio Fulci, Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

A lot of unrelated films were sold as "Zombi 3" during the 1980's, but by the end of the decade, the aged Fulci was also lured to do an actual sequel. But the collaboration with the screenwriter Claudio Fragasso didn't work out that well. Due to creative differences, Fulci was let go and Fragasso finished the film with his regular collaborator, Bruno Mattei. Fulci later called the movie as made by "a bunch of idiots".

I think Fragasso was trying to do a more ambitious version of his previous movie, Zombie Creeping Flesh (more on which below) and he needed Fulci's visual eye to achieve this. The end result is actually pretty okay entertainment, even if it's pretty easy to spot the visually nice and athmospheric scenes as being done by Fulci, and the cheaper shots by the Mattei/Fragasso team. Tonally they can't even keep up with what the zombies can do, whether they can run, wield machetes or even speak... at... a.. very.. slow... rate...

A deadly virus gets loose from a research center and the military is employed to stop the spreading throughout Pacific Islands. There's also a group of rich dorks on a holiday that are on the way of the zombies. There's a lot of characters to follow, but never mind, most of them are zombie food anyway. There are some very memorable scenes, as one sees a zombie head fly out of a refrigerator and another a zombie baby burst out of its mother's belly, like a scene from Alien. The entire film is hosted by a radio DJ, who, in the end, is revealed to be a zombie himself. SURPRISE?

There are two other movies that are usually told to be official Zombie Sequels, After Death (1989) and Killing Birds (1988). Both are cheap, cheesy and not terribly exciting in any way, though the first one has a voodoo cult and ninja-looking masked zombies, and the latter some zombie birds attacking people in the vein of Hitchcock (although so does Zombie 3). So that's enough of them at this point.

★★★
 

Zombie Creeping Flesh  a.k.a. Hell of the Living Dead (Virus, 1980)
Dirs. Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

 

This cheapo Virus movie presents something Mattei always excelled at; marrying two very unrelated movies. As a deadly zombie virus takes over a military research center, most of the movie follows a group of soldiers of fortune travelling around Papua New Guinea. The film used mondo movie footage from Akira Ide's movie called L'isola dei canibali, and stole the score from Dawn of the Dead and Buio Omega. It's so shameless one has to give the edge out to it when compared to the more sleek Zombi 3.

But for a film made on such a shoe string budget, it had some ambitious gore scenes such as tearing out a woman's tongue and then grabbing the brain through the mouth with eyes bulging out. Also rare for a Mattei film, the plot moves along surprisingly briskly and keeps surprising the viewer. Of course, most of it is driven by the characters acting like total jerks or making the dumbest decisions the entire time. 

 One has to love Fragasso's ear for dialogue:
"Up your ass. Lt. Mike London, Shit Creek. The year is now."

★★★ 1/2

Burial Ground (Le notti del terrore, 1981)
Dir. Andrea Bianchi

For my money, however, the silliest of Italian cash-grab zombie pictures is this one, which tries to match Fulci's zombies in their creepiness, but just ends up having worm-faced mummy guys crawl out of flower beds and slowly stumble to grab the nearest overacter screaming their lungs out. Burial Ground is something of a morality take, as a swinger's weekend of debauchery in a secluded mansion takes a violent turn.

There's some very fucked up things going on in the family, particularly with the 12-year-old Michael (Peter Bark) who doesn't want to die a virgin so he tries to achieve his long-time dream and nail his own mother before the zombies get to him. It's one of the Italian films that uses the legendary Etruscan people as a source of ancient terrors, but neglects to include much of actual Etruscan culture to go with it. Nevertheless, we get a healthy amount of zombie monks, too.

It's a great film to watch during boozy nights with friends, as the actors themselves seem to be quite relaxed as well. I love how when cast member become zombies, they seem to be quite happy with the development.

★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs: Night Killer

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart. 

★ or ★★★★★

 

Three laughs case file #42:
Night Killer (Non aprite quella porta 3, 1990)
Director: Claudio Fragasso (as Clyde Anderson)

Ol' shlockmeister Fragasso is best remembered as the director of Troll 2, as well as having been the co-director of plenty of films by another trash master, Bruno Mattei (such as Rats: Nights of Terror). Whereas Mattei was content on doing cheapo ripoff films for the lowest common denominator, Fragasso seems to have quite a high opinion of himself. Case in point is this 1990 horror movie, which the director himself has compared to the works of Fellini.

Well, to my knowledge Fellini never did shlock that featured a killer that looks like the offspring of Freddy Krueger and the Toxic Avenger.  Fragasso would have wanted to make a psychological movie about trauma with parallel universes and dream-like logic, but the studio demanded him to have a more basic slasher plot. But it seems a compromise was reached, since these two sides seem to battle it out throughout the movie. Insult to injury, Mattei, who Fragasso kept saying stole his credits from their previous collaborations, was hired to add gore scenes to the movie. So the tables surely have turned.

In Italy, the film was sold as Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, even though it has even less to do with the franchise than Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 did. In actuality, the film features gruesome murders at Virginia Beach where young women are stalked and killed by a rubber-faced fiend, seemingly with his bare claws. The killer has a grander plan for one of his victims, Melanie Beck (Tara Buckam), who has repressed memories of previously encountering the killer.

CONTENT WARNING: The movie depicts sexual violence.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The scene in the beginning with dancers practicing a dumb disco-dancing routine seems almost like a parody of later-era Argento with Opera or his production Stage Fright. The director's beration doesn't make any sense and the dramatic camera movements showing a really dumb Halloween-costume wearing fiend watching in the balcony just add to the bizarreness.

2. In-movie, it seems to fluctuate whether that mask and glove is just cheap plastic or the real thing. For instance, the killer can easily stick his claws through a girl. The most bizarre kill scene comes, however, when he makes a plaster cast for another lady, then proceeds to sex up his own simulacrum.

3. There's maybe some idea of females fighting against the pervy nature of the men around them in the movie. For instance, our lead has a scene where she lures a cat-caller to the toilet, then at gunpoint makes him strip and flushes his clothes. As the guy asks on how to get them back, we get an amazing line:

"Just reach in and fish them out. It shouldn't be anything new to AN ASSHOLE FULL OF SHIT AS YOURSELF!"

I have to mention the film's final moments as they have so many revealing twists that it's hard to keep up. Mostly because none of them make any sense. Anyway, the killer is shot to pieces by the police. But later on, in Christmastime, our lead's daughter gets a mysterious present. It turns out to be the killer's mask and once she puts it on, she wovs revenge. So, the mask was magical, too? Was this a prequel to The Mask (1994)? Either way, the film is SSSSSSSmoking!

Three laughs: Dead Heat

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.   

 ★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs case file #41:
Dead Heat (USA, 1988)
Director: Mark Goldblatt

How about a reanimator / buddy cop action parody made by Shane Black... 's brother? Well, ok, Terry Black isn't quite as droll a writer of the quips, or creator of ingenious action setpieces, but he has plenty of the same essence that takes you a long way. And it has a GREAT concept for a flick from the golden age of VHS. So, even though Dead Heat isn't quite as good a horror-comedy as you would want it to be, there's still plenty to enjoy, from truly weird effects work to major plot twists the kind you won't see in your run-off-the-mill action movie.

It features one of the final screen roles of Vincent Price, Keye Luke from Gremlins, and although the main pair isn't the most recognizable or generally even likable, they grow on you and the viewer wants to see the knuckleheads, if not succeed, at least uncover some weird shit. And to do a lot of wonton damage around town, and giving total disregard for human lives they may wreck. They may insult their corpses on the way out, as well.

Detectoves Mortis and Bigelow (Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo) run across bank robbers, and general nuisances of stiffs that can't seem to stay dead. There's a bigger plot going on as Dante Laboraties have some bigger plans than to simply resurrect the dead. And you can't keep our heroes down, since the same techniques that bring their adversaries to life also work on them...

At the very least for this time, it's a film that allows the phrase "the only good cop is a dead one" some consideration from the both sides.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The film opens with a scene of a crew of jewel store robbers on a heist. When our heroes arrive, they do the normal cop routine of starting fire before asking too many questions. But they soon realize the robbers actuallu can't die from simple gunshots. To get rid of them, one  has to be exploded, one run over with a car.

Cut to the key element of every cop action film: a pissed-off police captain yelling at the renegades for destroying everything around them. But at least they get results, man.

2. I like a sudden appearance of a gnarly monster man, especially as there's been a long while of exposition and getting to show the machinery that is used to bring people back to life. That's why it's a great joy as an obese biker zombie comes walking across an aisle to wrestle our heroes. It also gives the pleasure of seeing Treat Williams being knocked into an asphyxiation chamber and killed (he gets better).

3. One of the greatest special effects scenes comes from a scene best described as Big Trouble in Little China meets The Thing. In a Chinese butcher's shop some electric shenanigans bring meat to life. It means honking duck heads, wrestling with a pig carcass and getting an alien-like slab of meat to the face. As a coup de grace, there's a headless bull torso out to get our heroes. Best believe they make quips out of all of these!

"Zombie duck heads. What a concept."

G is For Gothic Giallo

The golden age of giallo didn't last more than a few years from the late 60's to early 70's. But it was just the latest fad in Italian horror movies. Before all that we had gothic horror movies, as established by Mario Bava. That one used stark visuals on haunted castles, torture chambers and classical melodrama. They cashed in on the popularity of Hammer Horror films in the UK and  Roger Corman's Poe films in America at the same time. Besides Bava, there were plenty of other talented directors working on the subgenre as well. Let's take a look at a few.

Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra, 1960)
Director: Giorgio Ferroni

Ferroni is someone that's a bit controversial in some circles due to his actions in WWII, but you can't say he wasn't a talented and effective filmmaker. This film is set in the Netherlands and in the similar art circles that Corman also sometimes depicted. A young art student travels to a Flemish village to see a windmill filled with stone sculptures of legendary women. He finds a mysterious woman and falls for her hard, but doesn't realize she harbors a horrible secret.

The ominous setting, with the gloomy Holland winter and ominous sound design from the mill's gearwork make the film's athmosphere of foreboding dread quite unique. Color photography wasn't that common this early, so that makes Ferroni's movie shine out compared to his contemporaries. It also emphasizes the meet of artistry and mad science also on display in the story.

 The major downside is the third act that gives a rather ludicrous explanation to all the murder and mayhem. The plot's romanticism also rings a bit hollow. Similar plot points were common in many contemporary movies, so it's a bit disappointing Ferroni couldn't top them in this one too.

★★★★

The Horrible Dr Hichock (L'orrible segreto del Dr. Hichcock, 1962)
Dir. Riccardo Freda

The Italian horror cinema owes a major debt to Hitchcock, of course, but still it's a bit much to use a misspelling of his name in a movie title or a major film villain. The titular doctor, played by Robert Flemyng, takes a new, young wife (Barbara Steele) to live with him in his vast old castle. Taking on the story of Bluebeard, the wife goes on to find out what happened to her predecessor and the doctor's deadly secrets.

 

This is another movie that takes a turn in the third act, but this time to be more outlandish and hysterical. It's a trick Italian horror movies tend to do perticularly well. Particularly as we've endured the uptight and very British manners of Flemyng for the first hour or so. This film was very taboo-breaking for its time since it's plot heavily circles around necrophilia. This started a sort of trend in Italian movies to try to up one another. Still, at this point everything was done mostly in good taste and avoiding explicit scenes of sex and violence.

Steele was one of the great leading women of the period, and she did admirable work here, too. The sets are lavish, gloomy and dark, as they should be, but otherwise this film seems to suffer a bit of lack of suspense being built until the final reveals.

★★★

The Whip and the Body (La frusta e il corpo, 1963)
Dir. Mario Bava

Our old buddy Bava again, with one of his filmograhy's most dark-toned movies. The movie is all dark moors, stormy seafronts, damp cellars and unlit torture chambers. Christopher Lee had a few days to shoot his role for the film, but he was put in good use. After all, in Hammer's Dracula films he usually didn't show up for too long.

He plays a cruel and ruthless nobleman that likes to whip girls. The puritans around him don't much care for him, so he soon winds up dead. Or does he? Something unexplained, perhaps a ghost, begins to haunt the mansion. At the same time his would-be bride (Delilah Lavi) seems to start to desperately pine for him and perhaps develop a relationship with the ghost. The increased scares and bodies beginning to pile up cause and investigation on the matter.

Bava was a filmmaker that used minimal elements to maximum effect, and this is a clear textbook study of that work. His use of minimal light in particular makes his film a lot more eye-popping than any of his contemporaries managed. Then again, his use of sound and music isn't quite as good, and his disregard for reasonable plot development may be a bit long-winded to follow. The name implies for more S&M but it's actually left mostly to our imagination.

★★★ 1/2

Castle of Blood (Danza Macabra, 1964)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Corbucci

 A true Italian answer to Corman's Poe films, it also features a connecting opening scene that features the author himself. A rival author bets that he can spend the night at a haunted castle. While there, he enconters various lost souls and is forced to live out the ways they have perished within the castle's history. In the end, the ghosts demand a blood sacrifice themselves.

Margheriti's step to the scene also meant for the genre to take a step more to psychedelia.The film was shot in black and white, but makes the most out of strong contrasts with candle-lit scenes and visible cobwebs in almost every frame. The film's castle is built so as to have a mystery or a secret attached to each room, corridor or nook. 

Legendary western director Corbucci worked as the co-director, yet was not credited for it. Barbara Steele is on top form in here as well, playing a sad remnant of a love lost. It's as melodramatic as they come and the finale takes on for a bit too long, but still, it's one of the brightest spots of the genre.

★★★ 1/2

The Long Hair of Death (I lunghi capelli della morte, 1965)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti

A true historical epic, this one takes place in the 15th century, witch a lover scorned threatening to burn his would-be wife on the stake for witchcraft. Death follows the entire family, until one of the daughters is old enough and the situation is apt to get revenge on the lord. A nice idea is to have everything revolve around the same castle through time, but I guess it's for the cost-effectiveness to limiting sets.

Another Barbara Steele classic that sees her do a dual role. The story and music repeat one another a bit too much with the witch-hunt, paranoia and hauntings going on. The cast of actors is particularly good here, as they manage to find a nice balance between hysteric melodrama and small nuances.   

The morality tale on display here is very Catholic indeed, utilizing the iconygraphy of the Church and basically be about a post-generational vendetta. I think Michele Soavi was very influenced by this.

★★★

The Possessed (La donna del lago, 1966)
Dir. Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini

Shedding light on how the development from gotchicness to giallos came about, we have this slow-moving arthouse movie, shot in black and white. At this point, it feels a bit odd to have this kind of cinematography used in modern setting, though it does help to make the film's athmosphere.

The film is a murder mystery where Peter Baldwin's Bernard arrives for a seaside holiday in order to be able to write. Even as he had spent time therein before, he notices most of the locals give him the cold sholder and act weird. He finds out that Tilde, the chambermaid he had been in love with, had killed herself during the year. But is there something more to the case?

The film depicts the gloom and depression present in neo-realism, with surreal images of leavless trees and the cold embrace of the lake in question. The film doesn't have too strong a pull though, and it's mostly due to the uncharismatic lead turn by Baldwin. Nevertheless, it is a sense of styling that proves you don't need ghosts or spooky castles in order to have some good old-fashioned gothic dread.

★★★

Three laughs: Birdemic - Shock and Terror

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.  

★ or ★★★★★

 
Three Laughs Case File #40:
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (USA, 2010)
Director: James Nguyen

If you've noticed, I like to do a little something special every time this column reaches even tens. So, it was about time to get the other movie that gives The Room a run for its money for sheer ineptitude. The fun of Birdemic is that its director James Nguyen obviously had lofty standards. It's the sort of self-serious film that takes a major issue (in this case, global warming) and trying to hammer the audience in the head with it in the guise of an easy to watch thriller movie.

The movie has obvious reference points, the main one being Hitchcock's The Birds, which is given a shout-out several times. Nguyen goes so far as to bill Tippi Hedren third in the end credits for using a clip of her performance in Julie and Jack. It should be obvious, but Birdemic doesn't get anyone to change their minds about global warming, but the way it sets out to achieve this task makes for a bizarre and beffling journey.

Rod (Alan Bagh) is a software salesman, living his daily life albeit ominous news of melting glaciers, heat waves and forest fires. Rod meets his old flame Nathalie (Whitney Moore) and they begin dating. But one day, everything changes and angry eagles start attacking and killing people. It's up to our (pretty useless) heroes to get to the bottom of what's causing the birds to attack, save children and bring balance back to nature.

 Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. After the seemingly endless opening credits where the short main theme loops about three times, we get our first proper scene and it gives us a very good idea on what to expect. The sound mixing is terrible, making every line jump terribly and making it feel like you're watching a skipping record. About everything that's possible to be wrong about a quick scene of a man walking to a restaurant and being seated, is worng. The actors are hokey, the editing giving the scene odd emphasis and everything in general feeling awkward and weird. These kinds of bad movies are very good at revealing how odd our daily interactions may be, and as an entertainment it's something you don't get to see every day.

2. The dating scenes between Rod and Nathalie seem to go on and on, but there are occasional bright parts, like the one where they attend a R&B gig at a bar. The song "Hanging out with my Family" has hilariously bad lyrics, and it's cut to Rod and Nathalie doing the most hilariously awkward, white bread dancing. The next scene is the sex scene, so at least it worked for them.

3. The most famous terrible thing about the movie has got to be the special effects. The first scene of the birds attacking illustrates their hilarious ineptitude best. Shrieking GIF-animated birds fly up and about, with explosion GIFs added over the city (maybe the eagles are carrying TNT and kamikaze striking?). The high-pitched whine the birds keep making is also totally hilarious. Like everything else in the movie, it just keeps going, and going, and going...

D is for Demons! Demons!

Last month I missed out on doing any posts about Italian genre cinema, but October gives us the perfect time to catch up. And unholy monsters from hell gives us a perfectly seasonal adversaries to base a blog post on. In the late 80's, demons started to get the spotlight zombies used to have with a couple of fresh-faced directors.

Demons (Démoni, 1985)
Director: Lamberto Bava

The son of Mario Bava, Lamberto, started out as a assistant director in his father's films, but got to start his own directing career from the late 1970's onward. In the early 80's he was a ward of Dario Argento, who produced and co-wrote this 4th-wall-breaking movie to him. The artist also known as John Old Jr. considers this to be his best movie and probably is not wrong there.

Shot in Berlin, a group of different people have won a ticket to a film premiere in a brand new movie theatre. The showing is to be a horror movie that has effects never before seen on the big screen. The event soon turns to a nightmare as it turns out the group is trapped inside the theatre and blood-hungry demons start slaughtering them one by one. 

The film can't be said to be entirely serious. It has a sense of irony of having one of the cinema-goers be a blind man. Also the main theme from the soundtrack is probably the craziest composition Goblin's Claudio Simonetti ever did. But the film has a good eye for set pieces, a decent budget that paid for a lot of really expensive effects and a willingness to forget about certain details, such as the plot, in order to get going. The younger Bava never could quite match his old man's style, but still he was gifted as a creator of suspense and putting unique visions on screen. Not to mention gore, that comes bountifully. It was not actually a preference of Bava himself, so I expect Argento had his fingers in the game.

If there's a downside to this coked-up fever dream it's that Demons basically work too much like zombies, in that they can turn people into one of their own kind. That's why the apocalyptic ending seems way too familiar from plenty of zombie movies, Italian or otherwise, that show the disease spread to the entire world. But that was the 1980's when people had a common fear of an illness bringing about the end of the world.

★★★★

Demons 2 (Dèmoni 2... l'incubo ritorna, 1986)
Dir. Lamberto Bava

Like the Die Hard films, it seemed the Demons movies also were going to be set on bigger and bigger settings. This one sees an entire high-rise become a battlefield when Demons attack! This time they won't step out of the movie screen, but come from your TV sets standing in the most sacred places of your own homes.

The film has a new set of stock characters with their flimsy character arcs, or just colorful deaths. It feels the script is even more haphazard than the first one as a lot of set-up is just forgotten along the way. It's not bad, but it all just feels so uninspired. Almost all good ideas of the movie were already done in the first one.

There's still some points of interest in this. Fans of architecture in Italian films may get a kick on how the film moves between different apartments. It's critiques of modern living and entertainment are also somewhat similar to the mayhem seen in Gremlins 2 four years later, but it doesn't really go far enough into these to reach the same dizzying heights.
 

★★ 

The Church (La chiesa, 1989)
Dir. Michele Soavi

 Along the way, Argento had a falling out with Bava, opting rather to work with his own second unit director, Michele Soavi. The man also called last great giallo director had debuted with Stage Fright.  Reportedly, Soavi thought the Demons films to be "pizza shlock" and wanted to make a more sophisticated horror movie rather than a continuation. Still, his second film was sold to some audiences as Demons 3, as well as his next movie The Sect as Demons 4.

The Church is interesting in just how Catholic it is. Past bloodletting done in the name of the Church comes to haunt modern librarians and priests trying to work in a building built on the blood of innocents. In Italy in particular, it seems a lot of the most bitter agnostic attacks against the power of religion came from horror movies, which is probably why they were seen so subversive back in the day.

 
Soavi digs a hole for himself by having a too good, brutal and savage prologue set in the Crusades. The opening scene reads like something out of the catalogue of Paul Verhoeven, another critic of the violence done by institutions. But after the opening, the film lulls in athmosphere a bit too long. The Church itself with its dark corridors and ominous statues is a very nice environment, but after enough camera drives and crash zooms where scarcely nothing happens makes the audience groan for the movie to roll along. At this point Soavi wasn't that skillful in building up tensions, part of the reason being that his characters are always so paper-thin as to be boring to follow.

The film's music is an odd cocktail of Goblin, Keith Emerson and some Philip Glass compositions that seem to be taken straight out of Koyaanisqatsi. It's a good measuring stick on how Soavi has problems establishing a clear thoroughline for the film. Visually, though, it's very striking with magnificent effects work by Sergio Stivaletti. The gore and creature scenes in particular are nasty and memorable, so the film has plenty to offer for fans of Soavi's style, even if the film as a whole somewhat creaks at the seams.

★★★
 

Cemetary Man (DellaMorte DellAmore, 1994)
Dir. Michele Soavi

Since we are covering double D's, I have to throw in also Soavi's probably most popular and unique movie. Loosely based on the fumetti comic Dylan Dog, Dellamorte Dellamore is a kind of unique little gem in the horror comedy genre, a sort of match between the general skewed worldview and sense of humor of Danger: Diabolik and the hysterical antics of Evil Dead 2.

Rupert Everett plays a lonely but cynical cemetary groundskeeper Francesco Dellamorte who has a surprising amount tof work on his hands. The cemetary turns the dead back to life after three days so he has to make sure the zombies stay underground. But the lovelorn young man can't help to fall for either widows or corpses of  young women, which is harder to combine with his line of work.

The film has a autumny visuals where it's all shades of brown and grey, down to earth, which contrasts nicely the cartoony aspects of the story and performances on screen. The film has a episodic nature, where it does resemble the comic books it is adapting. Likewise in the amount of sex and violence on screen, although to contemporaries like Braindead, the film seems downright tame.

Not only about the duality of love and death, the film also depicts the longing to escape a small town and its repetitive cycles. Dellamorte goes through the same loops every night, but refuses to learn or to move on. His mute partner Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) fares better, and genuinely falls in love, albeit to a severed head. The movie, as outrageous a premise as it has and dry humor, is actually in favor of enjoying life and seeing as much of it as one can.

★★★★

Night Visions: The New Ab-normal

 
Things are different this year around, which meant for the regular spring edition of Night Visions film festival getting cancelled. But at least here in Finland things got a little better, so there was an opportunity to have a festival in August. Things are changing also in the way I'm writing a festival report after a long while.

Butt Boy (USA, 2019)
Director: Tyler Cormack

 
This is a movie about an obsession, addiction and the willingness to wreck lives to achieve it. It's also a serial-killer movie about a dude, who (SPOILER) sucks people and objects inside his cavernous butthole. As far as crazy premises go, this one takes itself as seriously as it physically can.

As a whole, this film moves quite slowly. It has some perks, like watching the slowly ravelling cat-and-mouse game between Tyler Cornack's perp and Tyler Rice's cop on the edge. When the actual reveal comes, it changes the film's dynamic entirely, making the last quarter or so a real blast of butt-jokes. It is not quite as crazy as I had hope it would be, but I got some good chuckles and the melancholic feel of the movie really got to me.

★★★

Luz: The Flower of Evil (Columbia, 2019)
Dir. Juan Diego Escobar Alzate

This latest word in folk horror sees a reclusive cult live off the land. The cult leader El Señor (Conrado Osorio) keeps multiple wives and declares his youngest child to be the next Messiah. The other children, three daughters, find an object of the outside world and have different reactions, from wanting to escape to undying loyalty and laboring hard for the cult. The film doesn't really manage to give a good athmosphere or raise the stakes as one would wish from a horror film. Visually, it's clearly a fan product of the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky. But the actors are quite good in their roles, and one manages to sit through the film woith relative ease, even if it doesn't ever really deliver as good as one would want.

★★ 1/2

Tezuka's Barbara (Japan, 2019)
Dir. Macoto Tezuka

 
The pinku film seems to follow pretty clearly the godfather of manga Osamu Tezuka's comics. It is a story of a regular guy becoming increasingly obsessed by a homeless girl he meets on the streets of Tokyo. Like most pinkus I've seen, this one is quite slow with very few and not very graphic sex scenes. The ideas and obsessions around sex are more important than the act itself. There are a few scenes of note here that remind of Tezuka's odd sense of humour and richness of his imagination. But as a whole, the film is quite stilted, not utilizing what film can bring to the table as opposed to manga. So, this one felt quite dull in the end.

★★

Klovn The Final (Denmark, 2020)
Dir. Mikkel Norgaard

 
After the bit disappointing Klovn Forever, it's fun to see the third part in a trilogy somewhat return to its roots. At this point, Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen's rowdy comedies know what audiences are expecting, and both tease them with it but in the end, also deliver. It's not quite as graphic as the two previous ones, but altogether it might be ruder. It's crazy funny, at least.

The movie opened in Denmark just before the Corona crisis, so it's weird to see it tackle self-isolation for a length of its time. However, since an embarrassing mishap has cost them their trip in Iceland, Frank and Casper have to hide out in a vacant house next door to Frank's family. One small lie leads to bigger and bigger ones, and the strain to Frank's marriage in particular is stretched to a breaking point. Casper works as a ruthless id, caring little about anything else besides getting laid and getting the two into bigger and bigger troubles.

Not all of the film's gags quite land, and they are eager to set up some scenes that they oddly drop off at the blink of an eye. But when a good joke is laid out, waiting and then suddenly given an unexpected punchline, one can't help but to fall over laughing. I laughed, I cried, I hurled.

★★★★

Rabid (Canada, 2019)
Dir. The Soska Sisters

 
Even if 1977's Rabid isn't the most popular film in David Cronenberg's filmography, it is still risky to even attempt to redo one of the corner stones of the body horror movement. The Soska Sisters realize this, and while the end result is definitely going to split viewers, I do think they managed to update the ideas to a modern setting quite well. Maybe this should be a Re:Make blog post later on?

The new version downplays sexuality and the inner shame caused by it, as seen in regular horror movie tropes. The idea this time around is more like a feminist satire showing a woman being punished by outside forces for showing initiative in general. Timid fashion designer Rose (Laura Vanderwoort) isn't getting the recognition she deserves until she has an accident and an experimental skin operation to fix it. Too bad it also makes her a Patient Zero in a vampiric disease that starts to wreack havock.

 

It's kind of a wonder how ahead the curve the Soskas were last year. The vampire disease and the reactions of it, ranging from trying to shrug it off and continuing as if nothing is happening to outright maliciousness of trying to benefit from people dying, seems like satire from the reactions to COVID-19. There's even a barb at the police violence against poor people that have the disease. The Soskas make plenty of changes to the original, with a lot of emphasis on a sisterly relationship, and a thoroughly bonkers final reveal to match. All the bitterness surrounding the depiction fashion industry don't quite work, but the film bursts with ideas enough that one can give or take a few clunkers as something entirely else is just around the corner.

★★★★

The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (Akinjeon, South Korea, 2019)
Dir. Lee Won-tae

 
Supposedly this south korean crime actioner is based on actual events of a mob boss testifying in court against a serial killer. It does deliver some grisly violence, surprising twists and well-rounded characters. The actors are wonderful, especially Ma Dong-seok as the burly kingpin who has to revalue his pendant for violence and need for revenge as an even more ruthless murderer (Kim Sung-kyu) tries to kill him. There are only shades of grey here, as the cop (Kim Mu-yeol) himself is a corrupt gambler and a drunk, happily spending his spare time in mob-owned casinos. The film is well-done entertainment, but has a bit of an abrupt ending, like you would expect from a TV series, and it doesn't really feel to have a central idea strong enough to really elevate it into a classic. 

★★★

Dolls (USA/Italy 1987)
Dir. Stuart Gordon

 

Night Visions also paid tribute to the late horror master Stuart Gordon with a screening of his classic horror-comedy. Dolls may not be quite among the very best of Gordon's filmography, but as is usual for the director's oveure, it is better than you would think. And it's generally thought to be the best of producer Charles Band's various killer toy movies that also include the Demonic Toys and Puppet Master franchises.

For the hardcore horror buff, the film might be a bit childish, though. It's central character is a little girl (Carrie Lorraine) and all the adult characters are overplayed caricatures, like you would find in a Roald Dahl book. They also meet similar grisly ends in a magic mansion filled with creepy dolls, or getting turned into dolls themselves. There are a couple of rowdy punk girls, evil yuppie stepparents, a weird elderly couple, and a plump but well-meaning dweeb (Stephen Lee). 

While the plot isn't anything terribly extraordinary, nor scary, the film is kept reasonably short and gives a few good one-liners to chuckle now and again. The puppet effects are kind of crude, but kept in a way that makes them mysterious enough. That was some of the magic of Gordon's filmmaking, he always knew how to stretch his budgets to suit the storytelling he aimed for.

★★★