The B-Masters Cabal

Comment from David Lee Ingersoll
Time: December 6, 2007, 10:46 am

Thanks again for another fascinating review. Or more accurately, thank you for an informative review of what sounds like a fascinating film.

Comment from Loki
Time: December 7, 2007, 3:40 am

I too have immensely enjoyed this series of reviews. It’s great to find out about these old or obscure non-English horror movies that Will, El Santo and others are able to unearth.

Has anyone here heard of a film called Valkoinen Peura aka The White Reindeer from 1952? Apparently it’s a Finnish vampire movie of all things, but I haven’t been able to find much else about it.

Comment from El Santo
Time: December 7, 2007, 11:13 am

“Has anyone here heard of a film called Valkoinen Peura aka The White Reindeer from 1952? Apparently it’s a Finnish vampire movie of all things, but I haven’t been able to find much else about it.”
Oh wow. Way to launch a quest there, Loki.

Comment from KeithA
Time: December 7, 2007, 11:33 am

I’m already wasting too much of my time trying to find out if there was ever a Bollywood rip-off of luchadore movies. Now I’m compelled to go searching for Finnish vampire movies, too?

And yeah — I’ve really loved these Mexican film reviews. They are perfect illustrations of why I find this usually a hobby, occasionally a profession of writing about cult films to be so much fun. Decades and thousands of films (and dollars) into it, and no matter how much you think you know, one day you will wake up and discover something entirely new.

Comment from El Santo
Time: December 7, 2007, 12:14 pm

Damn it! I found a DVD of The White Reindeer for sale, but it’s in un-subtitled Finnish. This’ll teach me to take advantage of weird opportunities when I have them, I suppose. Seven years I was dating a demi-Finn– and two of those I was living with her– and never did I make any serious effort to learn her ancestral language.

Comment from Braineater
Time: December 7, 2007, 12:53 pm

Good news, El Santo — The White Reindeer is mostly silent, from what I’ve heard.

Bad news: Finnish is probably the most wickedly difficult language in the known universe.

Comment from El Santo
Time: December 7, 2007, 3:31 pm

“Bad news: Finnish is probably the most wickedly difficult language in the known universe.”
Oh, I no. Fascinatingly so, in fact. It has NO PREPOSITIONS; the whole prepositional function is handled with declention suffixes instead, meaning that there are, like, fifteen cases. And instead of masculine and feminine (or masculine, feminine, and neuter) for grammatical genders, they have sentient and non-sentient, meaning that in sentences without a proper name as the subject, you’re completely dependent upon context clues to tell whether the person you’re hearing about is male or female. Oh– and don’t even get me started about the aglutination. Finnish makes German look like Spanish in that department. On the other hand, the language has only about three quarters as many phonemes as English (although a few of the diphthongs are simply nightmarish), and the accent is always on the first sylable of the word, no matter what. So at least there are a couple of easy things about it.

Comment from lyzard
Time: December 7, 2007, 3:35 pm

The Aurum Film Encyclop(a)edia has a lot to answer for…. While we’re discussing Valkoinen Peura, we should also mention its companion piece, Noita Palaa Elamann aka The Witch Returns To Life; its “witch” seems to be a vampire, too.

Comment from KeithA
Time: December 7, 2007, 3:39 pm

That’s no worse than Paul Naschy’s wolfman being named “Frankenstein” in the U.S. titles of some movies.

Comment from JessicaR.
Time: December 7, 2007, 5:38 pm

The agony and the ecstasy of Braineater is reading these wonderful write ups and then despairing of ever finding an affordable, subtitled copy. But it’s a perverse thrill, I like that in the age of everything, and I mean everything on dvd there are still a few that slip throught the cracks. And just when you think you’ve gotten out of frittering money away on grey market dubs someone mentions the words “Finnish Vampire Movie” and you’re right back in…

Comment from Braineater
Time: December 7, 2007, 7:46 pm

Santo — two words: “vowel harmony”. Yes, it’s a case-heavy, agglutinative, postpositional, non-Indo-European language… and on top of that, you have to make sure AS YOU SPEAK that your word endings adjust to the proper vowels, depending on how many front-vowels or back-vowels there are in the word so far. How does anybody manage to speak Finnish? Especially while drunk?

Jessica — At least this last movie I reviewed is readily available. I got my copy at a major chain store; sixteen bucks. And I don’t know about Finnish vampires, but there’s a Finnish zombie movie you can download from the studio for free. The subtitles can be found here It’s kind-of a low-low-low budget Scandanavian 28 Days Later, and it has one of my favorite “pause the action for a heartfelt emotional moment” scenes at the end. You can just imagine the zombie hordes tapping their feet and looking pointedly at their watches just off-screen.

Comment from HP
Time: December 9, 2007, 9:44 pm

Will, thanks for the link to Kuolleiden Talvi. That was a fun little film. I’d have never found that on my own. That was a fun little movie. Now I want somebody to make a zombie anthology film where each segment is filmed by a different director in a different country.

Say, I have a question for the Cabal: My friend’s four-year-old is obsessed with zombies. (”And what do zombies do, Sammy?” “They suck out your brains!” So adorable.) Does anyone know of any entertaining PG-equivalent zombie films? All I can think of is the original NoTLD, but I suspect that a four-year-old would find all that “adults trapped in a house bitching at each other” stuff really boring.

(Hmm… what about Invisible Invaders? I wonder if I could convince a little kid that it’s a zombie film.)

Comment from HP
Time: December 9, 2007, 9:46 pm

Did I mention that the Finnish film was fun? And little? I really wanted to make that point, apparently.

Comment from Blake Matthews
Time: December 10, 2007, 5:04 am

Bob Clark’s “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” was rated PG, but it was also made in the 70s, so take that as you will.

Comment from El Santo
Time: December 10, 2007, 8:23 am

Invisible Invaders might work. And if it does, you can also try out Ed Cahn’s earlier zombie flicks, The Zombies of Mora Tau and Creature with the Atom Brain. Another good, non-R-rated zombie film is Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies, one of the last to see release before George Romero came along to reset all the parameters. All are perfectly suitable for children, so far as I’m concerned. Of course, there’s no gut-munching or brain-slurping in any of those, so little Sammy might well accuse you of giving him the bait-and-switch.

Comment from lyzard
Time: December 10, 2007, 1:00 pm

Isn’t Plague Of The Zombies (in)famous for having the first fairly graphic decapitation in British film history?

Comment from El Santo
Time: December 10, 2007, 3:17 pm

Hmm… I don’t remember any decapitation, but it’s been a few years now since I saw it.

Comment from lyzard
Time: December 10, 2007, 3:46 pm

From the British Horror Films site: “….With truly scary monsters, an evil baddy and a top decapitation scene, Plague Of The Zombies works on so many levels….”

Comment from Braineater
Time: December 10, 2007, 9:57 pm

Four, eh? You know, it’s tough to figure out what’s appropriate for a four-year-old. I remember being in the horror section of a big-box store, and a woman walked by with her very small child… I don’t remember which movie it was they decided to get, but I think it was Texas Chain Saw Massacre. If it wasn’t that, it was something equally inappropriate, but the thing of it was — the little girl was thrilled. I got the impression she’d already seen it once before. On the other hand (and I hope this is much more typical), I knew a four-year-old boy who was utterly terrified by The Giant Claw. Utterly, life-alteringly terrified. So go figure.

I know nothing about kids, except for my own childhood, which seems ever-more remote. For anything involving kids and age-appropriate horror movies, I think I’d have to defer to Nathan. I’ve met his brood: if there’s one thing Nathan seems to know even better than bad movies, it’s how to raise good kids. If he says give ‘em a steady diet of Killers in the Woods sequels, hey — I’ll take his word for it.

(He won’t say that. That was exaggeration for comic effect.)

Here’s a thought, though: you could simplify and summarize some of your favorite zombie movie plots into scary little bedtime stories you can tell him. Or invent your own zombie stories. That way you can control the content — plus, the special effects in his imagination will be better than anything ever put on-screen.