Apr 30
Time for another B-Masters Cabal roundtable! This time, we delve into the relatively little-explored world of counterculture exploitation– movies about hippies, bikers, beatniks, punk rockers, neo-pagans, and anybody else in youthful rebellion against whatever you’ve got… to say nothing of the squares and finger-waggers trying to put them down! We’ll be turning on, tuning in, shooting up, and rocking out all throughout the month of May.
Apr 30
Leonor (1975)
So what happens when you bring together a world-class cast and crew, and make a vampire film that has no blood… no fake fangs… no rubber masks… and a tragic love story for grown-ups?
The movie sinks without trace, that’s what.
Apr 30
If you go around the Internet to many B movie web sites, you’ll get the impression that the 1970s were a golden age for made-for-television movies. There certainly is some evidence to support this, with movies like Sole Survivor, Thursday’s Game, and Dr. Cook’s Garden. But if you actually take a closer look at all the made-for-television movies that were made in this era, you would actually see that for every classic made, there was a TV movie made that actually wasn’t very good. Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is one such movie. Yet despite all those good made-for-television movies lying on the shelf, this bomb actually managed to get a release on DVD! There’s no justice in this world.
The final two movies of Original Crew Month:
Moontrap (1989), aka “the one where Chekov gets the girl”:
And The People (1972), or “My Folks Came From Outer Space and All They Tell Me to Do is Shut Up”:
As a lead-in to the Los Angeles United Film Festival, there will be a special screening of JAWS at 9.30pm, 30th April, at the Vista Theater.
The festival itself will host the world premiere of THE SHARK IS STILL WORKING, Erik Hollander’s documentary tribute to the impact and legacy of JAWS. The doco will screen throughout the festival, but tickets are selling fast (first screenings sold out). More details here.
Fans of transgressive cinema, take note: today’s the day a small company in Europe is releasing a limited-run, Special Edition 2-disk set of Vase des Noces — better-known by its alternate English title, which is definitely Not Safe for Work (the English title illustrated here, “One Man and his Pig”, is a compromise, apparently on a reversible sleeve… though why any store that would put this movie on its shelves would feel squeamish about a naughty word in the title, I have no idea).
In addition to the feature film, the set contains interviews with the director and star, a making-of documentary, and a booklet with essays by three different critics. The mind boggles.
OK; kudos to Camera Obscura for what is clearly a labor of love; and maybe this is hypocritical for a guy who eats bacon with every meal; but I can’t really endorse a movie that kills pigs for Art.
Hat-tip to Blake Lewis for this information.
BATTLE WIZARD
Battle Wizard finds future “crazy cop” Danny Lee smack dab in the middle of his role as the go-to guy for any weird thing the Shaw Bros. threw up on screen. Hot off Goliathon and about to appear in the deliriously torrid Call Girls, this ultra-strange slice of kungfu fantasy casts Lee in a position that might take people familiar with the bulk of his work somewhat off-guard. He’s not stoic. He’s not mean. He’s not pretending to be Bruce Lee while banging Bruce Lee’s real-life mistress. He even laughs and smiles. But don’t worry — his basically likable character is still surrounded by a movie that includes a lascivious green goblin man, a legless fire-breathing kungfu master who has replaced his missing limbs with electrified robotic chicken legs, guys who shoot lasers out of their fingers, and a woman who can throw snakes at you that will burrow through your face and crawl around in your chest as they busily eat your internal organs.
As well as…
First, a screencap for my male readership:
… And then one just for Lyz:
The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973)
Whatcha think, Lyz? Hubba-hubba, eh?
Apr 22
Well, it’s been a long, long time, but I’ve finally resurrected SCIENCE IN THE REEL WORLD, my look at science and related matters in a non-science fiction context. And to make up for the silence, here’s a triple update:
THE SILVER CORD (1933) – Science versus smother love.
DIVE BOMBER (1941) – Physiology meets misogyny.
NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY (1951) – Scientists are NUTS!! Oh, sure, they save lives; but basically, they’re NUTS!!
And in house-keeping news, I’ve added some screenshots to my reviews of HALLOWEEN and HALLOWEEN II.
THE WEB OF DEATH
Most of Chor Yuen’s film’s can be described as including a web of death, as they are fabulously complex, convoluted mysteries full of murder, betrayal, and secret societies. Web of Death justifies being titled Web of Death by including a literal, rather than metaphorical, web of death. It wouldn’t be difficult to interpret The Web of Death — the third in director Chor Yuen’s long cycle of films adapting contemporary popular wuxia novels — as something of a cold war parable. In it, a Martial World clan by the name of The Five Venoms Clan is in possession of a super-weapon so powerful that the clan’s leader has decreed that it should be put under wraps and hidden away for the good of the Martial World as a whole. That weapon, the Five Venom Spider, is revealed to us in the film’s opening minutes, and that’s a good thing; while definitely kind of neat in a cheeseball sort of way, the Five Venom Spider is not the kind of thing that could live up to an extended build-up. What it is, in fact, is a normal-sized tarantula that, when released from its ornate cage, glows green, emits the roar of a raging elephant, and then shoots a deadly, electrified web to the accompaniment of much billowing of smoke and flying of sparks.
In other news…
Attack of the God of Joy
Black Shampoo
Avenger X
Dolemite
She
Batwoman
Apr 16
Spring is in full bloom where I live, and looking out the window on these warm days my thoughts turn to the brighter and warmer days of summer. I have many pleasant thoughts of summers past, but there is one thing about my past summers I don’t like thinking of, and that is when I was sent to day camp. I hated day camp. My parents were pretty much saying, “We don’t want you hanging around our house”, and I hated the various low-budget sports and crafts of day camp. Plus, all those years ago I saw a day camp movie – Stuckey’s Last Stand – that was just as horrible as actually going to a day camp. Recently, I found a copy of this movie, and I sat down to watch it again. Was it as horrible as I remembered it? Well, the title of this post probably gave you a clue, but read and find out for sure.
Week 3 of Original Crew Month brings us the following matches:
James Doohan and George Takei vs. mutant cockroaches!
And William Shatner vs. a succubus, in Esperanto!
After the failure of The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, it was a decade before the next attempt to bring the Oz stories to the screen. In 1924, silent comedian Larry Semon paid a small fortune for the rights to Frank Baum’s first Oz novel – and then proceeded to toss 99% of the book aside, creating instead a nightmarish pseudo-Oz tale featuring bottom jokes, sexual harassment and vomiting farmyard animals.
That whirring noise you hear is Frank Baum spinning in his grave.
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While we’re on the subject of horrors, I’ve also tried to fix up the screenshots in my review of ZOMBIE, although I think they’re still a bit dark.
Through the latter months of 1914, L. Frank Baum and his business partners continued their battle to take the author’s stories to the cinema-going public, although sadly with little success. After failing to find distribution in America, their next production was shipped to England, cut up for kiddie films, then eventually glued back together…more or less. The company’s third release found favour with the critics but not with the public, dealing the fledgling film studio a mortal blow…
HIS MAJESTY, THE SCARECROW OF OZ (1914)
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Week two of Original Crew Month, and the review presented cover two of the classic conflicts in literature:
Man vs. Self…
…and Man vs. Rabbit:
Apr 7
With a driving funk theme and blood-dripping title graphic, Khoon Khoon’s opening credits clearly announce that the film’s director, Bollywood B movie maestro Mohammed Hussain, has changed with the times, moving on from the gee-whiz swashbuckling thrills of sixties to lurid subject matter much more in tune with the tenor of the seventies’ less restrained Indian cinema. What’s still intact, however, is Hussain’s tendency to hew very closely to Hollywood models in the crafting of his films. In the case of Khoon Khoon, Hussain’s model is Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry. While, admittedly, some of my enjoyment of Khoon Khoon arose from the novelty of it being a Bollywood adaptation of one of my favorite films, I also found it irresistibly watchable on its own terms. It is a taughtly-paced, rough-edged and deliciously trashy little thriller with all the garish accouterments I’ve come to love from 1970s Indian cinema. That it also turns that freaky, funky Bollywood funhouse mirror on an American classic is just the day-glo frosting on the cake.
In addition…
I’ve started the process of re-integrating a large number of old reviews that were retired from the site either because they were too short and, at the time, I didn’t have a Shrimp Chips category, or because at the time I lacked an easy way to import old material and still have it attributed to the correct author. So we’re kicking this “It’s alive!” project off with a couple Spaghetti Westerns…
DJANGO — Franco Nero and his coffin fulla Gatling gun. Nuff said.
DJANGO, KILL! — In which there is no Django, and the guy who is supposed to be Django-like hardly kills anyone.
The Cell (2000), in which we discover that Dennis Quaid is infinitely preferable to Jennifer Lopez…
Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), in which no money whatsoever was apparently spent on anything…
The Ordeal (2004), in which Belgian rednecks are every bit as psychotic as the more familar American variety…
Succubus: Hell Bent (2006), which manages to live up to its first syllable, if nothing else…
and…
The Terror of Tiny Town (1938), in which an all-midget cast fails to make a terrible late-30′s Western any more entertaining.
When you can all drag your eyes away from Night Of The Creeps, here are a few more DVD releases in the pipeline:
On 5th May, MVD Visual will be unleashing upon us a 2-disc, Director’s Cut edition of the film that that very director once called “The Giant Spider Disaster“. The set will include a director’s commentary and an interview with Bill Rebane.
Lots of Euro-Horror news! On April 28th, Dark Sky Films will be releasing The She-Beast, Michael Reeves’ first film, starring Barbara Steele and Ian Ogilvy. In more Babs-related news, Severin have at long last named a street date for their release of Nightmare Castle: May 19th.
Meanwhile, Mya Communications will be releasing Jorge Grau’s The Legend Of Blood Castle aka The Female Butcher, another version of the Erzsebet Bathory legend, also on May 19th. On 30th June, Mya will also be releasing the original cut of Sergio Martino’s 
Island Of The Fishmen (surgically altered in the US to become Screamers), and Horrible aka Absurd, the sort-of sequel to the infamous Anthropophagus that re-teams Joe D’Amato and Aristide Massacessi. On July 28th, Blue Underground will be re-releasing two former Anchor Bay releases, Sergio Martino’s Torso aka The Bodies Bear Traces Of Carnal Violence, and The 10th Victim, directed by Elio Petri and starring Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni.
Proving that some people never learn, Sony Pictures will be releasing the fourth entry in the Anaconda franchise, Anacondas: Trail Of Blood, on 2nd June. Tragically, this time around there’s no sign of The Hoff. The same day will also see the release of Fox’s Silent Venom, directed by Fred Olen Ray. Taking a tip from 1974′s Fer-De-Lance, this film gives us snakes on a submarine, and stars Luke Perry and Krista Allen. Genius Products [sic.] will be releasing Sea Beast on 30th June. Featuring mutated angler fish and Corin Nemec (in that order), this ought to be hugely cool, but sadly seems to be just more of your typical SciFi – sorry, SyFy - crap. I include the DVD cover here so that you can all marvel at its stunning lack of originality.
Heartfelt jumping-up-and-down thanks to reader Blake Matthew, who tipped us off to the good news at ShockTilYouDrop.com that the Greatest Movie Ever Made is finally getting a DVD release:
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is finally getting around to a special edition DVD of Night of the Creeps. Go ahead, read that sentence again. It’s true.
Red Shirt Pictures’ Michael Felsher – who has produced a good deal of terrific genre discs – is spearheading the special features. Here’s what he had to tell Dead Pit Radio: “It is coming out officially for the first time ever. Fred Dekker is already working on it, It’s going to be the director’s cut with the original ending. We’re going to go balls to the wall with the special features on it…I talked to Sony today its official, we’re going ahead and its coming out in October! It’s officially In production…and moving forward, its coming!”
If there were someone to take my money, I would already have this preordered.
By hiring Al Adamson to assemble them all!
BLACK SAMURAI
Jim Kelly, of course stars as Robert Sand, the black samurai — though when we first meet him, he’s indulging in Kelly’s other physical culture passion: tennis. The samurai is contracted to hunt down a criminal mastermind known as Janicot — The Warlock – who uses a voodoo cult as his army. Sand is uninterested in interrupting his vacation to chase after some goofy wizard, until he learns that Janicot has kidnapped Toki, the grand-daughter of Sand’s samurai master. Which means that before too long, Sand is up to his…well, basically his waist…in bullwhip-wielding midget hitmen and dudes dressed up as leopards. Not knowing beforehand what one was in for, a person can’t help but get a little excited about the prospect of Jim Kelly starring as the Black Samurai. If only someone besides Al Adamson had made this movie! But Al Adamson did make the movie, so we have to deal with what we have. And what we have is a wildly uneven, completely bizarre, generally sloppy adaptation of The Warlock, and had I not read The Warlock, I wouldn’t have known that so much of this movie’s ultra-bizarre nonsense is present in the source material. The devil worship and voodoo, the sex cult, the killer midgets — everything but the attack vulture, which was Al Adamson’s primary contribution to the proceedings, and one I assume must have made Marc Olden slap himself on the forhead for not having thought of it when he was writing the book.
