It’s still August, and my review is up. Hey, you wait to the last minute and then spend an entire weekend watching a piece of crap like Starcrash. (Believe me, the photo above makes it look a LOT more enjoyable than it really is.)

So what’s Starcrash like?  See that guy in the roundtable banner above?  Yeah, that’s what pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 72 hours.  You’d think there’d be more entertainment value in blue-skinned aliens, starship battles, space amazons, space cavemen, robots, Caroline Munro in a variety of bikinis, David Hasselhoff…

OK, maybe not David Hasselhoff.

There should be no trouble guessing ahead of time which review is my roundtable entry; it’s the one you’ve heard of.

The Black Torment (1964), in which Brits rip off Italians ripping off Brits whose cultural ancestors pretended to be Italians…

Deep Red (1975), in which I am a contrary bastard…

The Ghost of Rashmon Hall (1947), in which we discover that some fool actually made a movie of a Bulwer-Lytton story…

A Place of One’s Own (1945), in which James Mason is awesome, and everything else sadly isn’t…

and…

The Rocking Horse Winner (1949), in which we see a whole new side of D. H. Lawrence.

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE

Luckily, I was only minoring in film studies, so I am still able to wring considerable joy and entertainment out of even the most insipid crap — or out of the most pretentious experiments (except for that one video where it’s just a shot of a stereo speaker with some guy talking about misunderstood communications as the speaker is slowly buried with sand, until what he’s saying can’t be understood at all — I get it; a noble message — did it need to take so long to deliver?). Finally I got to sit down and watch Werner Herzog films, all the old epics I missed, silent films I’d always wanted to see. I even learned to love Godard and the French New Wave. But a man only has so many hours in the day, especially when he has to devote a substantial amount of his time to solving murder mysteries in exotic locales while wearing a tuxedo and armed with nothing but a flashlight and boundless wit. So there still remain substantial gaps in my resume, even within the genres in which I consider or am consider by others to be something of an authority. And in some cases, the films I have not seen in those particular genres aren’t just major films; they are the films. The cornerstone. The one everyone should see and from which all intelligent discourse flows.

Case in point: I love Mario Bava movies. I love giallo. And while making a claim for any film as “the first giallo” will only degenerate into an unresolvable debate akin to naming the first punk rock band, a lot of people tend to agree that it’s Mario Bava’sBlood and Black Lace — which I’ve never seen.

SANTO VS. THE INVASION OF THE MARTIANS

The leader of the Martians, Argos insists that from now on they all speak Spanish because the country they are going to invade on the planet Earth is Mexico. Why Mexico? Maybe they like Corona? Before landing, the Martian’s announce their intentions by interrupting television broadcasts around the world. Initially everybody thinks their television is on the fritz but slowly the Martians come into view. The leader announces that they are from Mars (naturally). Then states:‘Instead of using your scientific advancements to better humanity, you Earthlings use them for your own destruction. When you wage war with conventional weapons you are the only victims of your ambition and selfishness. But with the discovery of nuclear energy and your mad experiments with the atomic bomb, you are on the verge of destroying the entire planetary system.’

The Martians want all the governments on the planet to accept total disarmament; eliminate all borders and adopt a unified language. Next they want a global government established, which does not discriminate based on colour or creed, and finally and most importantly, Earth has to give up war forever. If these terms are not agreed to, the Martian will annihilate everybody on the planet.

Earthlings, being as cynical and self centred as we are, dismiss the transmission as a comedy skit.

Charles Roxburgh and Matt Farley, the driving forces behind Freaky Farley (2007), return with Monsters, Marriage and Murder in Manchvegas (2009), a similar tale of quirky goings-on in an off-kilter New Hampshire town. Say what you will about these guys, but they’re obviously making the movies they like to make. Does that mean that they’re movies that you necessarily want to see? Gotta read the review to find out, I’m afraid.

Sumpah Pocong di Sekolah (2008)

I’ve criticized Indonesia’s Maxima Pictures for putting out horror flicks that are a bit noisy and immature. With what seems like stunning self-awareness, Maxima actually produced a movie that turns its worst habits into assets: it’s set in a boys’ boarding school, where noise and immaturity are only to be expected.

Then they did something that stunned me even more: they switched gears in the middle, and made it a halfway-decent horror film.

This third (and for now, last) of my reviews of Maxima’s output shows once again what they could do, if they’d only set their sights a little higher than junk like Tiren.

Todd clocks in first with Teleport City’s trio of contributions to this month’s Roundtable, and in doing so, finally fulfills his final requirement for being a full-fledged B-Master:

ZOMBIE LAKE

My viewing of Zombie Lake was one of those events that lead you to question everything in your life that has lead up to it. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it was a “where did I go wrong” moment, because many of the choices that brought me to it couldn’t in themselves be considered mistakes. Nonetheless, when you get to the point where you see watching Zombie Lake as some kind of solemn obligation, it’s a circumstance that bares some investigation. And I would be lying if I didn’t admit that, amidst all the questioning of how and why, I also found myself asking if there was not some way that all of this could have been avoided.

To some extent, when it comes to Zombie Lake, I am a victim of my own conscientiousness. Had the current B-Masters roundtable topic, which asks the participants to reveal embarrassing gaps in their film-watching resumes, come up a couple of years ago, I would have had no shortage of movies to choose from. However, once I went from merely watching movies to writing about them on the internet, I felt duty bound to do a bit of caulking in that area — with the “caulk” that I am referring to being those films that I had yet to see that I felt I probably should, which I guess would then make the “caulking gun” that I would use for such purpose either my DVD player or computer drive, or whatever. It’s probably not a very good metaphor for me to have reached for, seeing as I’m not very handy with around-the-house sort of things.

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MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

Embarrassing in a “YOU haven’t reviewed Zombie Lake!?” kind of way, anyhow. I did have a second “real” embarrassment picked out, but after Jurassic Park turned into such a marathon, I thought I’d take things a little easier this time.

Still…mad science, goofy dialogue, giant killer spider… Yeah, I should have seen this one. So – mea culpa.

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Mati Suri (2009)

That’s Rizal Mantovani; and the “golden hits” are any number of other famous horror films that have been “orchestrated” into… ummm… oh, hell. This pun isn’t worth the effort. Let me start again.

After a suicide attempt, a young woman named Abel finds herself faced with some very mysterious events. Is she being haunted? Is somone trying to scare her to death? Or are the two or three or four possible twists in the narrative all in her mind, a result of her traumatic mati suri (apparent death)?

Yes, this is a Maxima Pictures production, but relax: this time it’s only the heroine that’s potentially brain-damaged… not the script. You’ve seen it all before, no doubt; but if you’re like me, you’ll have a lot of fun seeing it all again.

Tiren: Mati Kemaren

From Indonesia’s Maxima Pictures comes a lopsided mix of horror and bad comedy. This movie is so ill-proportioned that the entire last 20 minutes have nothing at all to do with the plot. In fact, the whole mess wouldn’t even be worth mentioning — if it weren’t for the necrophilia, which raises the tone of the flick for a few brief moments.

The spaghetti western Navajo Joe is an unusual entry in this genre. It isn’t because the lead actor is American – there were plenty of spaghetti westerns made with American actors. What’s unusual about it is that it’s one of the few spaghetti westerns that has a Native American character in it. That fact was enough to intrigue me enough to watch it, as well as the fact that Burt Reynolds has called this movie the worst of his career. Worse than the movies he’s made with Albert Pyun and Uwe Boll? Read the review and find out.

That’s right, George Lucas’ first feature film, an expansion of an experiment short from his film school days, has never before graced my eyes.  That’s okay; it’s with a seasoned bearing that I can look at the output of the 24-year-old Lucas and harrumph at all the thinly-veiled adolescence present in THX 1138 (1970).

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JURASSIC PARK (1993)

Yes, it’s true: until now, I had never seen Jurassic Park. Somehow, the combination of later-career Spielberg with later-career Crichton was always a bit too much for me. Then, too, I was afraid that the film’s science might provoke me into one of my Dull Thudding Rants.

Yes. Well.

However, on the bright side…the dinosaurs are frickin’ awesome.
 
 

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