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Short Film: Fétiche Mascotte / The Mascot (France, 1933)

August 28, 2015, 1:58 am
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After the meta-post-mod CGI extravaganza of last month's Short Film of the Month, Kung Fury, here's some (real) Old School: a pioneering masterpiece written and directed by the sadly underappreciated Władysław Starewicz aka Ladislas Starevich aka Vladislav Starevich aka Владисла́в Алекса́ндрович Старе́вич (8 August 1882 – 26 February 1965).
Despite the short's simplistic plot (a toy dog seeks to fulfil a child's request), The Mascot, with its numerous ape-shit situations and characters that include a horny monkey, a lady of easy virtue, a decapitated clown, the devil and a knife-wielding thief, is definitely not for kiddies. (Though we also wouldn't be surprised were someone at Pixar to one day admit that the short was the original inspiration to Toy Story [1995 / trailer].)
In regards to this roughly 26-minute-long flick, which we stumbled upon rather accidentally and then went on to read about, Terry Gilliam pretty much hits the mail on the head in every way — though he is wrong about the short being the director's last film; Starewicz made many more after The Mascot, including another fours shorts featuring the stuffed dog of this one — in The Guardian article in which he lists "The 10 Best Animated Films of All Time": "[... Ladislas Starevich's] work is absolutely breathtaking, surreal, inventive and extraordinary, encompassing everything that Jan Svankmajer, Walerian Borowczyk and the Quay Brothers would do subsequently. This is his last film, after The Tale of the Fox from 1930 (full film, while it lasts); it is all right there in this cosmic animation soup. It is important, before you journey through all these mind-bending worlds, to remember that it was all done years ago, by someone most of us have forgotten about now. This is where it all began."
Over at mubi, they offer a valid interpretation of the short: "The protagonist, a puppy, wanders into the Bosch-like landscape inhabited by the relics of a hedonistic society in decay. In its quest to capture an elusive orange, (Starewicz's symbol of virtue) the hapless puppy must contend with an environment that is unrelentingly bleak and threatening." Still, all's well that ends well...

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R.I.P.: Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven, Part I (1970-1977)

September 1, 2015, 8:00 am
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2 August 1939 – 30 August 2015

What follows is a look at some the projects he was involved in — actually and/or presumably. TV series are ignored.



The Art of Marriage
(1970, writ & dir. Sean S. Cunningham)
We took a look at this film in R.I.P.: Harry Reems – Part II (1969-1972). Few sources link Wes Craven's name to this movie, but in The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, the author Jason S. Martinko claims that this white-coater was made by both Cunningham and Craven. According to the dead film critic Vincent Canby: "The host-narrator (Howard J. Brubaker) of The Art of Marriage, a sort of filmed sanesex manual that employs two pairs of live actors to demonstrate the various positions for coitus, refers at one point in his lecture, which he presents as if he were sight-reading from the Congressional Record, to 'the pioneering work done by Masters and Johnson, to whom we owe all indebtedness'." A description that conforms to that of Cunningham in the book Filmmakers on the Fringe, where he says it's the type of film in which "You know, a guy comes out in a white coat and says 'In the interests of better marital harmony we'd like to show you these sleazy people with dirty feet rolling around in bed,' then you cut to the sex."



Together
(1971, writ. & dir. Sean S. Cunningham)
Aka Sensual Paradise. The second known film by Sean S. Cunningham — like his first above, a white-coater — is Wes Craven's first known film credit (as associate producer), though there were surely other earlier pseudonymous credits in the porn. Together stars Marilyn Briggs, otherwise known as "Marilyn Chambers" (22 April 1952 – 11 April 11 2009), of Behind the Green Door (1972) and Rabid (1977 / trailer). 
 
In The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, the author Jason S. Martinko writes: "This fake white-coater can hardly even be considered softcore, and mostly consists of scenes of naked people at a commune discussing what they like about sex. It is significant because [...] revenue generated from this movie allowed Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham to make The Last House on the Left. [...] Original music is performed by Emmanuel Vardi (as Manny Vardi)." One wonders how Vardi (21 April 1915 – 29 January 2011), "one of the great viola players of the 20th century", got involved in a soft-core porn project.
 Not from the movie —
Emanuel Vardi, "You Can Call Me Manny":



You Got to Walk It Like You Talk It 
or You'll Lose that Beat(1971, writ. & dir. Peter Locke) 
Possibly a lost film. Richard Pryor appears in it as a wino. More than one website out there — including for example Film Reference— lists Wes Craven as the co-editor of this movie, the first of three directed by Peter Locke that Craven was involved in. We took a look at the movie in 2012 in R.I.P.: Zalmon King; it was King's first lead role in a feature film.
The plot, according to TV Guide: "King is an idealistic young man who is seeking the meaning of life among the inanities and absurdities of New York. In Central Park he is set upon by a fat black woman and he watches incredulously as a young man exposes his behind to an old woman shouting obscenities at him. After many such ridiculous adventures, he finally marries an understanding girl, becomes a father, gets a job, and, seemingly in a jiffy, he loses the job, his wife leaves him with the baby, and he is back in Central Park still seeking the 'meaning' of it all. A mishmash of intent and execution and too annoyingly clumsy to watch."
The soundtrack of You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose that Beat is some of the earliest released music by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, otherwise known as Steely Dan.
 Dog Eat Dog Eat Dog—
From the soundtrack of
You Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose that Beat:

 


Deep Throat
(1972, writ. & dir. Gerard Damiano) 
We looked at this film in R.I.P.: Harry Reems – Part II (1969-1972). To quote Rolling Stone: "While he struggled to find financing, Craven often paid the bills by working on pornography sets, either uncredited or under pseudonyms, including Deep Throat [...]." That explains why he appears as one of the talking heads in the documentary Inside Deep Throat (2005).
 Trailer to
Inside Deep Throat (2005):

 


Last House on the Left
(1972 writ. & dir. Wes Craven)

Trailer:
Wes Craven's "official" directorial début, we took a look at the movie in R.I.P. David Hess, where we wrote: "Hess made his film début in this classic grindhouse production, the film that jump-started the careers of its producer, Shawn S. Cunningham, and début director, Wes Craven. Inspired by the 1960 Ingmar Bergman film The Virgin Spring (in turn based on the 13th century Swedish ballad Töres döttrar i Wänge ("Töre's Daughters in Vänge"), Last House on the Left is a primitive and uneven but unforgettable piece of exploitation [...]. The film, which was banned in Australia for over 34 years, incurs strong reactions: one of the film's stars, Fred J. Lincoln, who went on to a long-lasting career directing and acting in porn (doing such fine films as Enema Obedience 2 [1994], The Enema Bandit [1994], The Enema Bandit Returns [1995] and Abducted by the Enema Bandit [1997]), has even gone on record as considering the film to be the worst movie he ever took part in. The plot: Two teenage girls on the way to a rock concert want to buy some pot and cross paths with a quartet of psychopaths who torture and kill them; a twist of fate brings the killers to the house of one of the girls, and when the parents figure out what has happened, they take merciless revenge. Hess stands out as Krug Stillo, the group's leader, in an amoral performance only matched by that of his costar Jeramie Rain (later and now former wife of Richard Dreyfuss) as Sadie, the killer bitch of the group. The clip embedded below [...] features the original version of Wait for the Rain, one of the many songs David Hess provided for the film's soundtrack."
David Hess singsWait for the Rain:



 It Happened in Hollywood
(1973, writ & dir. Peter Locke)

We took a look at this flick in R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part III (1973-74). The second of three films directed by Locke, who like Craven went on to a decent career in Hollywood. In The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, Jason S. Martinko writes: "This is the story of a sweet young girl named Felicity Split (Melissa Hall) who quits her job with the telephone company in hopes of becoming a famous sex-film star. She makes it big, and even sleeps her way to an Academy Award. Dozens of people appear in the cast, there's plenty of music, singing and comedic dialog. Not to mention lots of erotic hardcore action. It was produced by Screw magazine's Jim Buckley, and according to Al Goldstein, this is the first adult film he ever performed in, receiving oral sex. Goldstein remembers having great difficulty performing in front of the camera, and seldom being offered to perform in sex scenes afterwards. He also remembers that Wes Craven had more to do with the production of this film than he cares to admit, often down-playing his involvement in the early days of the adult film business. Wes Craven supposedly worked as the assistant director and editor of the film." 
Craven also appears briefly as the "King's Litter Bearer"; the King is played by Peter Locke.
 Radio report on
It Happened in Hollywood:
 


The Fireworks Woman
(1975, dir. "Abe Snake", aka Wes Craven)
 
"What Happens When a Brother and Sister Break the Ultimate Taboo?"

Aka Angela Is the Fireworks Woman and Angela, The Fireworks Woman. Despite the success of Last House on the Left, Craven still had trouble finding mainstream work — thus he occasionally continued his porn activities with films like this one, which he supposedly co-wrote with Hørst Badörties, and in which he has a small non-sex part (see the photo below).
 
Over at Rupert Pupkin Speaks, they say: "More than just an oddity, Angela the Fireworks Woman is quite a powerful work and the original VCA tape is quite a collectable."Rame.net is of the opinion that "If the late seventies was a golden era when it looked like porn and mainstream films were converging, (Sex World [1978] for instance is v. reminiscent of sci-fi films of the time), the early seventies heralded a period of experimentation as filmmakers tried different genres (and filmed an awful lot of orgies) and slowly found their feet. Fireworks Woman is very much a product of this time: part love story, part edgy drama, part surreal nonsense, it remains a difficult film to classify."
Orgy Scene:
The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, has the plot: "Eric Edwards plays Peter, a man who is deeply in love with his sister Angela (Jennifer Jordan). They are both virgins, and one day after fooling around on the beach like children, Angela initiates a tender sex scene. Peter feels extremely guilty afterwards and violently rejects Angela and leaves home. He returns years later, having been ordained a Catholic priest, and begins working at the local cathedral. Angela has never loved anyone else and tries to change the mind of her religious brother. Peter sends her to work for a wealthy parishioner, not knowing that the woman's sadistic boyfriend (Jamie Gillis) is into S/M and urination, and intent on brutalizing Angela into becoming a woman. Angela escapes and flees on a sailboat, but has nothing but a bottle of whiskey to eat or drink. Drunk, she falls overboard and is rescued by a horny couple who get her in on a threesome. Later, Angela is noticed by two local fishermen, and one of them rapes her in an icehouse, in a graphic scene beside a pile of dead fish. All the while, Peter continues to reject Angela, although he fantasizes about her regularly. In the final scene, Angela decides to have one last orgy. This scene is rumored to contain a live fish fellatio sequence and a dog performing cunnilingus in some prints. [...] Original music is performed by Jacques Urbont. It was distributed theatrically in the USA by Dog Eat Dog Films Inc. in 1975." Martinko also credits Sean Cunningham as co-producer, but the imdb says that honor belongs to Peter Locke (as "Carmen Rodriguez").
In turn, Movies Made Me says: "Porn movies today are about one thing. The Fireworks Woman is about many things, not the least of which is Craven's fascinating and complicated perspective on organized religion and mysticism. I think it's a real shame that no one has paid serious attention to the film as part of the director's oeuvre — and I hope to turn the tide a bit with an article that's been published in the latest issue (#33) of Fangoria's GoreZone magazine.  You can order [...] a digital version HERE."



Kitty Can't Help It
(1975, dir. Peter Locke)
Aka California Drive-In Girls, Drive In and The Carhops; the last known directorial effort of Peter Locke. Wes Craven was the editor of this grindhouse comedy, a relatively generic if entertaining jiggler — among the bongos seen, those of the great Uschi Digard, the "Lady in Hotel Room".
Movies About Girls has long, detailed review of the movie, which we've emasculated to the following: "Here's what important to know about The Carhops. It's not about carhops. The carhopping is over with two minutes into the film. So then, what is it about? Hard to say. Rape, mostly. [...] Carhops has an excellent poster and an excellent title, which not only got it made, but is apparently still convincing saps like yours cruelly to watch it. [...] Porn and gore, apparently, is something Locke can do with panache. R-rated sex comedies, on the other hand, are just not his forte. Bland, creepy, and depressingly unfunny, with less nudity than you'd like and more threats of rape than you could possibly need, Carhops is useful only to Uschi completists and groupie enthusiasts keen on seeing Pam Des Barres strum an acoustic guitar. I didn't exactly feel cheated, but I'm pretty numb at this point. You'd probably be pretty disappointed."
Car chase from the film:

 


Thunder Buns
(1976, dir. Thomas Marker)
Director "Thomas Marker" never made another movie — at least not under that name. Pulsing Cinema uploaded the clip below onto YouTube, crediting it to this film. We have our doubts, for as far as we can tell, Thunder Buns is a compilation film edited together from diverse other movies — including porn films we've found elsewhere as having Wes Craven's participation. Be we like the poster and the clip, so here it is. And yes, that is Wes Craven playing the photographer giving instructions to the possibly true twins and now mostly forgotten porn actresses from the Golden Age, the "Famous Lesbian Twins" Brooke and Taylor Young (active 1976-1978, photo below from some film of theirs).
In regard to the long-retired supposed siblings, the Tumblr The 50 Greatest Porn Stars, which lists them together as #42, writes:  "Brooke and Taylor Young symbolize that languid period of seventies porn where a lot of previously (?) taboo things were first tried out on camera, including — yes — twincest. These two girls starred in a few hardcore flicks in the mid to late seventies bearing brilliant titles such as Thunderbuns, Sweet Cakes and the somewhat-eponymous Teenage Twins, all shot in 1976. The latter flick even took a venture into occult realms, with one of the twins masturbating with a bible…"
 "Show us a little tit..." 



Sweet Cakes
(1976, dir. Howard Ziehm [as Hans Johnson])
In The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, the author Jason S. Martinko claims that Wes Craven has a non-sex role in this movie which, like Thunder Buns above, features the "Famous Lesbian Twins" Brooke and Taylor Young.
The plot, according to Mr. Martinko: "Sweet Cakes is a very well done sequel to Honey Pie [1975, also directed by Ziehm] consisting of four vignettes. The story involves a female reporter (Jennifer Welles) interviewing a famous photographer (Eric Edwards) and the sex scenes are shown in flashbacks. Notable moments include a BDSM sequence with Hustler magazine cover-girl Linda Wong and a stunning incest scene with identical sisters Brooke and Taylor Young."The album cover below is the soundtrack release to Teenage Twins.
Howard Ziehm, of course, is famous for having made the first full-length straight porn movie with a plot, Mona The Virgin Nymph (1970) and the classic soft-core comedy, Flesh Gordon (1974).
 Trailer to
Flesh Gordon:

 


Hot Cookies
(1977, dir. Howard Ziehm [as Albert Wilder])
In The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, the author Jason S. Martinko claims that Wes Craven has a non-sex role in this movie and offers the following plot: "In a spoof of Rod Sterling's Night Gallery, Serena plays a mysterious enchantress who makes erotic paintings come to life. Scenes include a slumming rich bitch (Abigail Clayton), Victorian lesbians, a Rocky parody and Joey Silvera as a painter with a Scandinavian model (Anne Magle)." 
But as Dries Vermeulen points out atVideo Tramp, Ziehm "made a name for himself as the King of the so-called 'loop-carrier'," so if Craven is there it is probably in a scene taken from another movie... still, we like the poster, so we're listing the film here anyways.
Abigail Clayton, by the way, is one of the many women that die in the slasher "classic", Maniac (1980).
 Trailer to
Maniac (1980):

 


The Hills Have Eyes
(1977, writ & dir Wes Craven)
Personally, although we still find this movie a fun film to watch, we also think time has not been kind to The Hills Have Eyes — the blood-thirsty killers are so damn clean, and the young son looks and acts like a twink on loan from some 70s gay porn movie — nevertheless, when this movie (produced by Peter Locke) came out, it made waves and Craven's reputation as a horror director was cast in stone. Inspired by the classic Sawney Bean legend, the action was logically enough moved from 15th century Scotland to 20th century USA. Originally smacked with an X-rating, Craven re-cut to an R; regrettably, the cut material seems to have been lost, other than for an alternative ending.
 
TV Guide offers the following plot synopsis: "The Hills Have Eyes opens as the Carters, an ostensibly typical middle-class suburban family, drive through the desert in their mobile home headed for California. Trouble starts when the vehicle's axle breaks and the travelers are left stranded in the desert, miles from help. Unfortunately, they've accidentally trespassed on the domain of another family, a brutal, almost atavistic, clan of cannibals who live on the desert mesas. Soon the rival families collide with the twisted desert clan attacking the 'all-American' suburban clan to loot, kill the men, rape the women, and eat the tasty-looking baby. Though not particularly bloody, The Hills Have Eyes is an extremely intense and disturbing film. As is the case with Sam Peckinpah's classic, Straw Dogs (1971 / trailer), it becomes oddly and distressingly exhilarating to watch the nice family become increasingly savage in their efforts to survive. Not for the squeamish, this low-budget potboiler is one of the prime examples of what was so fascinating about American horror films in the 1970s. It can be profitably read as the kind of thematically rich meditation on the dark side of the American family that could only be done in the exploitation horror genre."
 Trailer:


Part II will follow next month
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The Wickeds (USA, 2005)

September 7, 2015, 12:40 am
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Aka The Flesh of the Living Dead. Supposedly filmed on a budget of $50,000 — so we can only ask: where did the money go?
Many a year ago, way back in 2008, we reviewed a typically low budget Tiffany Shepis flick entitled Corpses(2004) and within our typically verbose review we complained that "Corpses sort of feels like a group of actors and their neighbors got together one weekend, smoked a lot of pot and then suddenly decided to make a horror film just for the hell of it." Today, were we to see that movie again, we would surely be much more forgiving, for not only do we now have a greater appreciation of Tiffany Shepis, but we have also seen a lot more movies that make Corpses look like a masterpiece. Some of those much-worse movies, admittedly, by the dint of their innate shittiness, are far more entertaining than Corpses, but most are not.
The Wickeds is one of the latter, a perfect example of a total waste of time, a movie that truly and completely looks and "feels like a group of actors and their neighbors got together one weekend, smoked a lot of pot and then suddenly decided to make a horror film". It is an indefensible and painful bore that no one should be subjected to while alive, but would function well as a form of torture somewhere on some level of Dante's inferno. Hard to believe that either the scriptwriter (David Zagorski) or director (John Poague) ever went on to do another film, but they have... and what we know for sure is that we won't be seeking out any of their subsequent projects: a film like this one cannot be forgiven. The Wickeds isone of the worst films we've seen this year, if not years, and not in a good bad way in any way at all.
The basic plot is an ancient chestnut: twens out for a party break into a deserted house next to a cemetery when suddenly the dead start to rise and the idiots die one by one. In The Wickeds, the seven one-note victims-to-be are augmented by two graverobbers who, when they steal a magic amulet, cause the dead to rise. Sounds like a straightforward plot, but hardly: added to the brew of angry zombies and meta-references* in the dialogue is a weird and non-jelling combination of vampires, ghosts, possession, and inane scenes and segments that, in the bright sun of the day, never tie together into even the loosest of knots and — far worse — never scare and never entertain. (The characters themselves also seem to have problems with the plot development: when the dumb sex-hungry woman [Kelly Sue Roth] comes screeching into the room and tells everyone about what just happened upstairs, for example, virtually nothing that she says corresponds to what the viewer just saw happen.)
*Examples meta-references in the movie: "I see lots of dead people"; "What would Bruce Campbell do?" and "They're coming to get you, Barbara"— the last of which has been used so often by now that it should be made illegal for film characters to say it.
Of course, it is perhaps to be expected that a movie in which the "star power" is supplied by an over-the-hill, overweight porn actor — the ubiquitous Ron Jeremy as one of the graverobbers — won't exactly be a masterpiece. On the other hand, even if Jeremy's fame isn't due to his acting abilities, he actually is sometimes an effective actor in his non-porn films (see, for example, the otherwise overly lauded flick, TheBoondock Saints [1999 / trailer]). Likewise, even if the budget really was only (an obviously wasted) $50,000, there is also a such thing as a good low budget horror movie (see, for example, the film that this movie refers to once too often in word and visuals, Night of the Living Dead [1968 / trailer], or one it doesn't, A Carnival of Souls [1962]).
But the fact this straight-to-video (possible) tax deduction is so shitty is not just the fault of the fifth-rate acting of Jeremy or the faceless twens, who are not given anything to work with as characters. It's the fault of the disjointed script, the terrible editing, the chaotic direction, the dull pacing, the predictability (despite the presence of everything and the kitchen sink) of the plot development, the silliness of some of the events — in other words, the general total lack of concern and talent evidenced by everything in regards to the scriptwriting and direction. Were this a film school project — and to say that The Wickeds looks like one does disservice to film school projects around the world — only the most liberal of graders would have given it a D minus.
The Wickeds does have one special distinction that we find notable: it contains the longest, most boring and incompetently filmed non-sexy sex scene we have ever had the displeasure of being subjected to — and we've seen a lot of them. Prior to the shit hitting the fan, two characters make-out and dry hump un-erotically for what seems like forever in a scene so sloppily edited that their positions change indiscriminately and clothes reappear and disappear from one cut to the next — and the scene never even pays off with as much as a decent breast shot, despite the fact that the girl does take off her top at one point. (When she comes running downstairs in terror a little later, however, she obviously takes the time to put her bra back on.) A second thing that we also noticed, perhaps only due to the fact that we put the bacon on our table by working with the English language, is that while in the movie itself the characters do at one point speak (grammatically correct) of "the wicked", the title itself is the grammatically incorrect "The Wickeds"— but then, it is a sign of how boring the flick is that anyone (even us) should even notice that.
A movie to be avoided — and should you already have the DVD but haven't yet seen it, do yourself a favor and give The Wickeds to someone you hate.
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Trailers of Promise – Films We Haven't Seen: Honeymoon of Terror (USA, 1961)

September 16, 2015, 4:35 am
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 "Oh Frank, I don’t think I should get pregnant right away."
Marion (Dwan Marlow)


Written & Directed by Pete Perry, a.k.a. Ecstasy on Lovers Island — not to be confused with Irwin Meyer's Honeymoon of Horror (1964 / trailer), which doesn't look so bad itself. Honeymoon of Terror was made in the days when couples split the pajamas: the man got the pants, the woman the shirt.
Plot description from TCM: "Marion (Dwan Marlow) and Frank (Doug Leith) are disappointed with Las Vegas and its nightclubs on the first night of their honeymoon and decide to spend the rest of their vacation on Thunder Island. Upon arriving on the island the following day, Frank has to return to the mainland to pick up fuel for the portable stove. Marion remains behind to enjoy the swimming and sunbathing. Although a stranger attacks her, she is able to escape the would-be rapist, who has a club foot. In town, Frank hears tales of a logger known as the 'Ridge Runner' (Anton von Stralen), who went mad, raped two women, killed a third, and has not been seen for 8 years. Frank hears some hunters tell of finding tracks on Thunder Island that might belong to the lumberjack, and he rushes back to the island, arriving to find Marion in the fiend's grasp..."

Bleeding Skullsays: "Baffled by the snapshot appeal of quaint monster-nudies? Don't start here. However, if selected early 1960s works from Barry Mahon, Dale Berry, and yes, Peter Perry, already light up your nights, Honeymoon of Terrorwon't disappoint. It's more horror, much less nudie, and all ignorant fun."

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Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen (Germany/Great Britain, 1961)

September 22, 2015, 10:10 pm
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(Spoilers.) Based on the original Edgar Wallace novel The Daffodil Mystery, producer Horst Wendlandt made this film as a joint production with the British production firm Omnia in London. As a result, aside from the extraordinary amount of exterior scenes for a Wallace film (which usually tend to be studio-bound), two versions of the movie were filmed simultaneously, one in English and the other in German. Although both versions utilised the same crew and most of the same secondary and background actors, the lead roles were filled by different "stars", depending on the language. In the English-language version, entitled The Devil's Daffodil, William Lucas (of Vampire Cop [1990 / trailer], The Shadow of the Cat [1961 / full film] and Tower of Evil [1972 / trailer]) starred as Jack Tarling instead of Joachim Fuchsburger, Penelope Horner was Anne Rider instead of Sabine Sesselman and, unbelievably enough, Klaus Kinski was replaced by Colin Jeavons as Peter Keene. In truth, however, no matter which version of the movie one sees,* Akos Ràthonyi's unbelievably lifeless direction remains the same. Thus, of course, the final cinematic experience also remains the same: Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen is a dull sleeping pill, a snoozer that in no way requires re-evaluation, rediscovery, or even your attention when nothing else is on the tube.
*We watched the German version.
Not that it had to be so. The convoluted script, generally attributed to Basil Dawson and Trygve Larsen (real name: Egon Eis), had a lot of potential and features — amongst other aspects — a sleazy club, drug smuggling, addicted showgirls, a nameless killer, a mysterious Chinese man (an always fun to watch Christopher Lee, practicing for his future starring role in the Fu Manchu movies), a duplicitous Scotland Yard detective, a torture scene, and a bevy of dead babes (and other victims). That the final cinematic result is such a drag can indeed only be blamed on the director, who obviously had no interest at all in the project. That Ràthonyi had some 25 years experience as a director — he began making films in his native land of Hungry in 1936 — is not anywhere evident in plodding and dull direction found in Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen.*
*While it is probably impossible to ever find out if his earlier, Hungarian projects were any better, he did make an entertainingly pleasant if not overly innocent and extremely dated vampire film in 1964 entitled Der Fluch der grünen Augen, a.k.a. Cave of the Living Dead or Night of the Vampires (full film). Ràthonyi died five years later in 1969, a year after ending his unspectacular career with the ultra-trashy and unfunny "sex comedy"Zieh dich aus, Puppe (opening 8 minutes). which translates literally into "Get Undressed, Doll."
The German titleDas Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen, if literally translated into English, would be "The Secret of the Yellow Daffodils." To talk of any mystery or secret about yellow daffodils is a bit aside from the point, however, for the "secret" is revealed within the first few minutes of the film, when Jack Tarling (Joachim Fuchsburger), the security officer of Global Airways reveals how hollowed out plastic daffodils are being used to smuggle drugs into England. Tarling is convinced that the drug are somehow tied to a series of murders in which the female victims are always found with daffodils, but Scotland Yard seems convinced that the dead girls are all victims of a sex murderer. Tarling barely escapes a bomb attack that destroys the intercepted shipment (and kills a few cops), but with the help of his inscrutable Chinese assistant Ling Chu (Christopher Lee) he traces the shipment back to the China Export & Import firm, run by Raymond Lyne (Albert Lieven). Interestingly enough, Lyne also owns the infamous Cosmos Club, where many of the dead girls had worked. Lyne, however, cannot be held accountable for anything and firm co-worker who originally placed the order is soon fished out of the Themes. Bad girl Gloria (Ingrid van Bergen, who in real life served 5 years for manslaughter after shooting her 12-years-younger lover Klaus Knaths in a fit of jealousy on February 3rd, 1977) gets to do a truly entertaining "bawdy" stage number, heroine Anne Rider (Sabine Sesselmann) is continually sexually harassed by her boss Lyne, Ling Chu eventually tortures the answer to everything from bar manager Jan Putek (Peter Illing), a lot of people die, and Peter Keene (Klaus Kinski) wanders around a lot before he finally flips his wig and kidnaps Anne, intent on killing her in a cemetery...
All this happens to an exceptionally competent and jazzy score by the unjustly unknown and forgotten Keith Papworth. Sound good, doesn't it? Well, as said before, thanks to the director, it ain't.
Not from the Movie —
Keith Papworth - Hard Hitter:
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Misc. Film Fun: Three Dance Scenes

September 27, 2015, 1:00 pm
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Another Thin Man 
(1939, dir. W.S. Van Dyke)
Trailer. The third of the six Thin Man movies, which were based on the writings of Dashiell Hammett and star William Powell and Myrna Loy as the eternally tipsy sleuthing couple, Nick and Nora Charles. This time around, the Hammett story used was The Farewell Murder.
Here, in the midst of their investigations, Nick finds himself at the West Indies Club enjoying his companions more than the dance performance of René y Estela (otherwise known in real life as René y Estela la Hermana de Arsenio Rodríguez). Stella does all the work, but the dance is smooth.



Hellzapoppin'
(1941, dir. H.C. Potter)
A Faux Trailer. According to imdb, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin cited this movie as the main inspiration for the style of their comedy show, Laugh-In (1967) — completely believable, if you've ever seen either the long-gone TV series or this underrated and mostly forgotten movie.
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings explains the film: "Any movie this wild is bound to slip over into fantastic cinema territory a few times before it's all through [...]. Try to imagine Busby Berkeley, Spike Jones and Tex Avery all pooling their talents to put together a live-action movie, and you might have an idea of the mayhem in store. Once again, there are so many gags that the bad ones don’t count [...]"
There are also some pretty wild dance scenes, like this one here — which, though the music is very much of its time, seems extremely contemporary in its physicalness. Breakdance Swing, anyone?  



Cien muchachas
(1957, dir. Jaime Salvador, writ. Fernando Méndez)
Director Jaime Salvador (4 Nov 1901 — 18 Oct 1976) went on to do the John Carradine cheapies La señora Muerte (1969 / full, subtitled film) and Pacto diabólico (1969 / scene), not to mention the yet-to-be-rediscovered slice of Mexican psychotronica, The Terrible Giant of the Snow (1963 / scene). Scriptwriter Fernando Méndez (20 July 1908 — 17 Oct 1966) went on to direct a number of notable Mexican horror films: The Vampire (1957 / trailer) and its sequel The Vampire's Coffin (1958 / trailer), The Black Pit of Dr. M (1959 / Trailer from Hell), Ladrón de cadáveres (1957 / full film while it lasts) and The Cry of Death (1959 / trailer).
Cien muchachas is obviously not a horror movie, but we know absolutely nothing about it. Nevertheless, we love this dance scene featuring — we think — Alfonso Arau and Sergio Corona. We also love the music, too. But then, we're major fans of mambo... and cumbia, for that matter. And of the tango, bolero and vallenato, too, actually, though our true love remians milango...

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Short Film: A Short Vision (1956)

September 30, 2015, 5:10 am
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Written & directed by Joan Foldes and Peter Foldes; narrated by James McKechnie.
To quote the BFI National Archive: "A Short Vision became one of the most influential British animated films ever made when it was screened on US television as part of the popular Ed Sullivan Show [on May 27, 1956]. Although children were advised to leave the room while it played, it still caused outrage and alarm with its graphic representation of the horrors of nuclear war. [...] That said, there is no explicit reference to atomic warfare in A Short Vision. The narration is calculatedly allegorical, even quasi-Biblical, talking about a mysterious 'it' appearing in the sky, terrifying animals but ignored by most humans. Not that this makes any difference, as 'their leaders and wise men', though aware of the situation, are powerless to do anything about it — since every living creature, regardless of species or age, is subsequently annihilated. The sequences of human faces disintegrating into skulls, their eyeballs popping and flesh peeling back from muscle and bone, are what gave the film its primary notoriety, as did its utter extinguishing of any hope at the end (the final images show a moth flitting around a dying flame)."
Over at the blogspot Conelrad Adjacent, they tell this urban-legend-sounding tale relating to this short's television premiere in the US, when Ed Sullivan "threw more than just a curveball: he broadcast an animated short film about the end of the world that still reverberates within the memories of an untold number of baby boomers": "[...] I met a man from Canada who had shoulder-length dark hair, but in the center of his head was a small spot where his hair grew out a silvery white color. I asked him about it, and he told me that he was a medically-documented case of a person whose hair had turned white from fright. As a child, he had seen A Short Vision while alone in a house, and he experienced extreme panic and terror for some time, and one result was that his hair began to grow out white from that one spot on his head." [Michael Mode, "Sense of Panic," March 22, 2009, www.conelrad.com, "A Short Vision Legacy Project"]
In any event, we aren't a baby boomer so we never saw the short, but when we stumbled upon A Short Vision while wasting our time on YouTube, we knew that one day we had to make it our Short Film of the Month.  And here it is.
Hungarian-born  Peter Foldes (1924 — 29 March 1977), by the way, went on to make a number of other shorts of varying interest, including Hunger (1974), our Short Film of the Month for March 2014.
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El Dia De La Bestia / The Day of the Beast (Spain, 1995)

October 7, 2015, 1:44 am
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Chirashi Movie Poster from Shock Cinema 
OK, you might not know it — particularly if you're from the US — but many countries in the world have their own version of the Oscars. Canada, for example, has the world famous (?) Genie Awards. In Germany, they have the Deutscher Filmpreis (often simply called the Lola Awards, not after the song by the Kinks but because the awards statue is modelled after "Lola", the character Marlene Dietrich plays in The Blue Angel [1930 / German trailer]); the French have the César Award; the English, the British Academy Film Award, or BAFTA; the Italians, the oft-maligned David di Donatello Award; and the Spaniards, the Goya. Of interest to us here is the last — but first, a question: Do you remember who won the Oscar for Best Director in 1995? No? Well: Robert Zemeckis for Forrest Gump (1994) — a film that also had a jillion of other Oscar nominations, and walked away with six.
Over in Spain, on the other hand, they obviously weren't interested in any boxes of chocolates. Being the good Catholics that they are, they had the devil on their mind — and nominated this flick here, the sophomore feature film of director Álex de la Iglesia, for 14 Goyas. It went on to win six, including Best Director. Somehow, we find it hard to believe that any film that includes extended scenes featuring full frontals of a relatively old, ugly, naked, pot-bellied, and uncircumcised man will ever get nominated for any Oscar at all — but, Hey! People tick differently in "Old Europe". Luckily.
The Spaniard Álex de la Iglesia, unlike the comparably unique Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, is still not really a household name in the English-speaking world, but then, unlike Guillermo, Álex has remained primarily active in his homeland. (And his only two "English-language" films to date, The Oxford Murders [2008 / trailer] and Predita Durango [1996 / trailer], while interesting, are also his among his weakest.) But as one knows, life is not fair — were it so, Álex de la Iglesia and his numerous over-the-top black comedies would enjoy a far greater international fan base than they seemingly do. We've been a fan ever since his first feature film release, the gory sci-fi grotesque Aktion Mutante (1993 / Spanish trailer). The Day of the Beast is likewise a grotesque, if in horror trappings this time around, and while it might not be quite as tasteless or gory as Aktion Mutante, it is much more tightly directed and just as entertainingly in-your-face and enthralling — providing you have a taste for extreme violence, puerile humor, blood, gore, hyperbolic acting, lots of sacrilege, and a total lack of subtlety.
The basic plot revolves around the klutzy, inept priest, Father Angel (Alex Angulo, 12 April 1953 — 20 July 2014, of Bosque de sombras [2006 / Spanish trailer], Pan's Labyrinth [2006 / trailer], Imago mortis [2009 / Spanish trailer] and Pos eso [2014 / Spanish trailer]). A bumbling but dedicated religious scholar, he has broken the code of "The Book of Revelations" and now knows when the anti-Christ will be born — before dawn on December 25 — but not where (other than, it would seem, the city: Madrid). He sees it as his duty to destroy the anti-Christ, and to find out exactly where the demon will be born, he decides to go to Madrid, become evil and sell his soul to the devil, thus entering the inner-circle of those in the know. Along the way, he first finds the assistance of a particularly brain-dead record-store clerk and heavy metal fan Shorty Dee (Santiago Segura of Beyond Re-Animator [2003 / trailer], Killer Barbys [1996 / Spanish trailer], the dud Una de Zombis [2003 / Spanish trailer], La mujer más fea del mundo [1999 / trailer I / trailer II], Airbag [1997 / trailer] and Asesino en serio [2002 / Spanish trailer]) and, after the incompetent but oddly compatible devil hunters kidnap and drop acid with him, the self-satisfied and successful TV psychic Professor Cavan (Armando de Razza) as well. And in their pursuit of the devil and his child, whether as a one-some, two-some or three-some, they leave an outrageous, burning trail of directly or indirectly caused mayhem behind them.
Has nothing to do with El Dia De La Bestia—
The Killer Barbys sing Candy:
For all the frantic activity and action, Álex de la Iglesia manages to keep his film in control. He wastes little and also trims the fat; where he tosses in an aside, its scurrility only serves to underscore the movie's irreverent attitude, and many of the twisted asides — be it Father Angel putting cigarettes out on the souls of his feet or right-wingers setting the homeless on fire — also reveal themselves subsequently as being integral to the plot or character. The three main actors excel in their farcical roles, fully convincing in their three extremes, and are well-supported by a variety of secondary characters, the most-notable being a mother from hell (Terele Pavez, of de la Iglesia's Witching & Bitching [2013 / red band Spanish trailer] and La Comunidad [2000 / Spanish trailer]), who meets a blackly hilarious end, and a big-breasted caricature of a peroxide blonde (Maria Grazia Cucinotta of The Rite [2011 / trailer], Death of the Virgin [2009 / trailer], Tulpa [2012 / trailer], the Oscar-winning women's film The  Postman [1994 / trailer], Transgression [2011 / trailer] and  The Museum of Wonders [2010 / trailer]) who, regrettably, never gets naked. (A sight, unlike the other nudity of the film, which would have been far more pleasurable and far less queasily and uneasily funny — but even an extremist like Álex de la Iglesia, for all his obvious desire to shock, knows the difference between nudity that instigates discomfort and uneasy laughs and nudity that would have been only exploitive — and while he is out to shock, he isn't out to exploit.)
El Dia De La Bestia is a twisted black comedy of both farcical and uncomfortable violence that has a layer of social critique that is, of course, missed by non-Spaniards, but fans of extreme humor and irreverent violence will probably enjoy the movie anyway. Others, particularly those with a low threshold for realistic violence, might often find themselves offended by some of the more extreme, blackly humorous scenes. (Indeed, frequently the heroes almost become difficult to root for.) If there is one aspect of the movie we ourselves did not like, it was the odd insertion, during the final climactic scenes, that the whole anti-Christ aspect might be simple madness on Father Angel's part. Sure, we see Satan take shape, and yes, it is obvious that Angel sees it too — but do the others? For while the opening scene of the movie, in which Father Angel's initial compatriot in arms (a fellow priest) meets a hilarious demise, seems to indicate the battle is real, and while Satan does appear to the three heroes while they are on acid, it makes no sense that the devil, as one of the murdering group of right-wing fascists ridding Madrid of the undesirable and homeless, would, during the climactic scene at Madrid's Puerto de Europa —
Oh, wait: that would be a total spoiler and give away too much of the movie.
Let's just say, if you're the type of person who finds the concept of a movie featuring the Three Wise Men dying as collateral damage in a shopping mall shootout — one of many scenes of mayhem these three Satan-chasing stooges incite — can't be that bad, then El Dia De La Bestia is probably for you. (Of course, you do also get treated to some less-than-inviting uncircumcised chorizo more than once...) Give the flick a go — and then pick up some of de la Iglesia's other projects: it's time the man gained a wider audience.
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R.I.P.: Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven, Part II (1978-1986)

October 14, 2015, 3:54 am
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2 August 1939 — 30 August 2015


What follows is Part II of a look at some the projects he was involved in — actually and/or presumably. TV series are ignored.

Go here for Part I (1970-77).



Stranger in Our House
(1978, dir. Wes Craven)
Aka Summer of Fear, Stranger in Our Houseis based on the teen novel Summer of Fear by Lois Duncan, who also wrote the novel behind I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997 / trailer).
Wes Craven's first television movie, like all his TV movies, is generally not viewed fondly by those who have seen it — as is the case at Classic Horror, which couldn't stop thinking of cabbage while watching the movie and says "Summer of Fear[...] is one of those times when even the master fails". (The master failed often, actually.)
 
The plot, according to Cult Reviews: "When Julia Trent's (Lee Purcell, also seen somewhere in The Witching[1972]) parents are killed in an accident, she comes to live with her aunt Leslie Bryant (Carol Lawrence) and uncle Tom (Jeremy Slate). At first daughter Rachel (Linda Blair of Hell Night[1981]) accepts Julia as a new friend while her older brother Peter (Jeff East) lusts after Julia and her younger brother Bobby (James Jarnigan) doesn't seem to notice. When Rachel's horse hates Julia and Julia steals Rachel's boyfriend Mike Gallagher (Jeff McCracken) and her best friend Carolyn Baker (Fran Drescher), Rachel starts to suspect that her cousin is more than just a bitch…."
The Bloody Pit of Horroris of the opinion that "At the time, director Wes Craven was best known for the gritty, violent shockers [...], so this milder made-for-TV effort marked both a change of pace for him as well as a (more-or-less) successful step toward mainstream acceptance. On the other hand, actress Linda Blair [...] was just ending her reign as teen queen of the controversial tele-movie. Prior to this, she'd played a teenage alcoholic, a kidnapped illiterate teen, a sickly teen awaiting a kidney transplant aboard a doomed aircraft, a institutionalized juvenile delinquent who gets pinned down and raped with a broom handle and other roles that make what goes down in this horror flick look a little tame by comparison. So I'd say this one probably helped Craven's career but really didn't do a whole lot for Blair's. Either way, within the limitations of the TV movie, it's really not a bad little effort."
Stranger in Our House was subsequently released theatrically in Europe under the title of its source novel, Summer of Fear, which it then retained for its video release.
8 Minutes of
 Summer of Fear:




The Evolution of Snuff
(1978, dir. Andrzej Kostenko)
Aka Confessions of a Blue Movie Star and Snuff; not to be confused with Michael Findlay's (1938 – 16 May 1977) legendary exploiter from 1976 (trailer) that started the whole scandal and legend, Snuff— "A film that could only be made in South America, where life is CHEAP!"
The imdblists Craven as the cinematographer of this mockumentary, but they have it wrong: his only link to this flick is the inclusion of previously unseen outtakes — presented as a "real" snuff scene — from Craven's masterful horror debut, The Last House on the Left (1972).
Scenes from
The Last House on the Left
presented as real snuff scenes:
BFIexplains the movie's supposed agenda: "[The movie] sets out to prove that the work of sex film actors constitutes irresponsible exploitation of human beings, taking the real life example of Claudia Fielers, a young actress who committed suicide in Munich." In all truth, the film bathes too deeply in the subject it supposedly frowns upon and also often comes across so ridiculous and ironic that it is obvious that filmmakers were less interested in an agenda than making a disguised exploitation movie. And as such, the movie, as J4HIrightly says, is "recommended for exploitation and sexploitation lovers alike." 
More from
The Evolution of Snuff:
Claudia Fielers (21 May 1946 – 20 February 1975), the young actress and suicide by poison featured in Snuff who seems to have killed herself following an argument with the director Robert Furch, had bit parts in a variety of fun German sleaze, including numerous Schoolgirl Report films, Erwin C. Dietrich's Die Mädchenhändler/ White Slavers(1972),Dietrich'sShe-Devils of the S.S.(1973), and Joseph W. Sarno'sDer Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern / The Devil's Plaything(1973 / scene).
A Trailer to
She-Devils of the S.S.:




Deadly Blessings
(1981, writ & dir. Wes Craven)
Set in Pennsylvania, shot in Texas. We saw this movie back when it first came out and could never understand why it got as panned as it did, as we found it really entertaining — the only thing that sucked about it was the final scene of the incubus bursting up through the floorboards, a totally retarded and out-of-place final shock of the kind so de rigueur of the era. The young Sharon Stone — despite her famous spider-eating scene in what is basically both her first credited role and role of any importance — hardly made an impression on us, and had someone said "She'll be big one day" to us, we would have laughed at them. (In theory, one could say that Craven discovered Stone, much like he did Johnny Depp three years later.)
For that, we totally loved the lead actress, Maren Jenson, who is 100% total babe-a-luscious; regrettably, she left the film business soon after due to illness. Another plus to the movie is the typically over-the-top, scenery-chewing Ernest Borgnine as the leader of the Hittite community in which the film is set; the Hittites of the film, who "make the Amish look like swingers", naturally don't exist in real life but are modeled after the real-life Amish and Hutterite.
Time has been kind to the movie, and nowadays it even enjoys some popularity as one of Craven's better films. Final Girl, however, is of a mixed mind, saying many things but most importantly: "It's kind of a seven-layer dip of a movie: all these different flavors competing with each other but trying to work together, turning into a big mess that sits in your stomach like a gelatinous lump of regret. Mind you, the regret comes later; while you're eating it, your eyes focus on some distant, imaginary point and you find yourself saying a little too loudly, 'I don't know what's happening to me and I'm not sure if I entirely like it, but I might and so I'll just keep going.' Yes, in this way Deadly Blessing is exactly like a seven-layer dip. [...] But then...the last ten minutes. I'm not going to give away anything here, because...the last ten minutes of this film should not be given away. Let me just say that it's jaw-dropping. It is women punching, shooting, flying around due to punches and/or gunshots, and making crazy faces. It is a big pile of total what-the-fuckery, and it completely redeems all that came before. And just when you think it is over, it is not. And then your jaw — still dropped! — will say 'fuck this' and throw itself out your window. It's amazing." (Stacey obviously likes the ending we so hate.)
Cult Movies has a more literal plot description of the film they call "a bizarre, creepily effective tale": "The story takes place in a farming community and centers on a young woman named Martha (Maren Hensen), who has married a member of the Hittites (Jeff East), a cult sect who live nearby and are run by the unflappable Patriarchal figure of Isaiah Schmidt (Borgnine). Isaiah has turned his back on his son due to his belief that Martha is an Incubus in legion with the Devil. When Martha's husband is mysteriously killed one night by his own tractor, her two female friends come to stay with her and console her over her loss. [...] When the two ladies arrive at Martha's house, things start going from bad to worse, with locals being killed off by an unknown assailant and Isaiah insisting that Martha is responsible for the death of one of the Hittites. Meanwhile some of the other locals are hiding secrets of their own. Deadly Blessing is a consistently intriguing horror mystery which showcases director Wes Craven's skills to fine effect [...]".
Trailer:



Kent State
(1981, dir. James Goldstone)
Who knows the what, when, where, why, or how of this TV movie, but Wes Craven was one of the producers. "A dramatization of the incident at the Kent State campus in 1970, where Ohio National Guardsmen shot four students and wounded nine others, trying to control a student protest." [BFI]
Director Goldstone (8 June 1931 – 5 November 1999) was the man behind the second pilot of the original Star Trek series (1966-69), Where No Man Has Gone Before, which was then later broadcast as the third episode (22 Sept. 1966), when the first pilot, The Cage (1965), failed to impress NBC.
Trailer:



(1982, writ & dir. Wes Craven)
Click the title above to go to our typically verbose review of the movie, which we found flawed but rather enjoyable. Seven years later, bad guy Dr. Anton Arcane (Louis Jourdan) and Swampy (Dick Durock) returned for the far more trashy The Return of Swamp Thing (trailer), directed by Jim Wynorski.

Trailer:



The Hills Have Eyes, Part II
(1984, writ. & dir. Wes Craven)
This "sequel" is one of the greatest cinematic atrocities ever committed on film, and can hardly be called a movie: it is a totally non-redeemable example of a total lack of respect not only for the viewing public but people in general. We watched it and got so angry, so furious, that we promptly threw the VHS away and consciously decided to not review it and, instead, to believe it doesn't exist. (Something you can't do in a career review.) The Hills Have Eyes, Part IIisn't even fun as a bad movie — although, in all truth, we did have a good and hearty laugh when the dog had its own flashback to the original The Hills Have Eyes. It is claimed that Craven made the film because he was in need of money, something that the movie truly reflects. We've also heard-tell that he later claimed to regret having made it, something we also find believable — no one could be proud of being involved in a smegma-dripping micro-penis like this one.
Ninja Dixon, which calls the flick "one of the dumbest sequels produced" and says "it's like director/writer Craven just didn't give a shit [about] what was going on", nevertheless confesses to enjoying it. He points out the best things about the movie: "Everything in this movie is SO stupid. It's hard to even imagine how stupid it is if you haven't seen it. From the legendary 'dog-having-a-flashback'-scene to one of the female characters suddenly taking an outdoor shower because 'she can't miss a chance like this', and this is in the middle of the night when something fishy obviously is happening around them, her friends disappearing etc. I also need to mention that the final girl is blind, but actually walks around and escapes the family over and over again like she actually can see very, very good!"
The plot? Some survivors of the first film go back the location of the first film with some other new fodder to ride dirt bikes and run into the surviving cannibals of the first film (and a few new ones) and everyone has a lot of flashbacks and some people die. Avoid this one like you would Donald Trump's unwashed anus.
Trailer:




A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984, writ & dir. Wes Craven)

"Whatever you do... don't fall asleep."

Odd how the cookie crumbles: the same year that Craven makes and releases The Hills Have Eyes Part II, one of the worst films ever made, he also makes and releases one of the true classics of modern horror, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Inspired by news reports about "Asian Death Syndrome", basically a form of Brugada Syndrome, Craven came up with one of the iconic characters of horror, Freddy, and created this masterpiece.
 
Trailer:
Aside from creating a bona fide classic, Craven could actually claim to be the one to have discovered Johnny Depp, who made his screen debut in the movie. (Truth be told, Craven could probably also claim to having made Robert Englund's career, too, for although he had been around for a long time, he only became a name after this movie.) Although it has little to do with the movie, we must admit here that after it came out, we occasionally dreamt of a three-way with Depp and the true star of the movie, Heather Langenkamp — believe us, it was never a nightmare.
A further inspiration to the movie —
Gary Wright's 1976 hit, Dream Weaver*:
* Recognize the synth riff that opens the song?
Wikipedia offers a concise plot description of this "instant success": "Set in the fictional Midwestern town of Springwood, Ohio, the plot revolves around several teenagers who are stalked and killed in their dreams (and thus killed in reality) by Freddy Krueger. The teenagers are unaware of the cause of this strange phenomenon, but their parents hold a dark secret from long ago." The great script and effective direction is ably supported by a game cast that includes the great John Saxon and Ronny Blakely as two of the parents keeping the dark secret.
A Nightmare on Elm Street remains a film, like such classics as Frankenstein (1931 / trailer) or The Haunting (1963 / trailer) or Night of the Living Dead(1968 / trailer), that is required viewing of anyone that claims to be a horror movie fan.
Full film — Mahakaal (1993),
the Bollywood version of Nightmare:



Invitation to Hell
(1984, dir. Wes Craven)
Craven's second TV film, written by Richard Rothstein, whose other films of note include Death Valley (1982 / trailer), Human Experiments (1979 / trailer), the western Shoot the Sun Down(1978 / trailer), the underappreciated TV movie Bates Motel (1987 / trailer) and the flawed but entertaining Universal Soldier (1992 / trailer) — and, damn! Did van Damme ever have a muscular bubble butt in that last flick!
Though nominated for a lesser Emmy ("Outstanding Art Direction"), few people who have seen Invitation to Hell have anything nice to say about it. In the opinion of Cult Reviews, for example, "Wes should be ashamed of himself [for having made this movie]." Here at A Wasted Life, however, we personally we find the movie wonderfully stupid and entertainingly cheesy.
Cover version of the theme to
Invitation to Hell:
Camp Blood, one of the few who has anything nice to say about the TV movie, knows the facts: "This [...] has absolutely everything from white-hot tract houses to evil children to laser-shooting space suits to computers to demonic possession to late-seventies corporate angst to Susan Lucci in chandelier earrings as the devil incarnate, who happens to work at a country club. A surprisingly lucid and well-constructed parable about selling out to, well — just about anything (greed, lust, corporate America), Invitation to Hell is surprisingly well-told for a story that is so aggressively weird and composed of such disparate genre elements (horror, sci-fi, family drama, corporate thriller, satire). Craven's hand is certainly visible at the helm; as with his later work, the fantastic is planted so firmly in a banal suburban setting that it's both shocking and surprisingly fitting (much like A Nightmare on Elm Street). Lucci is absolutely riotous as alpha-bitch Jessica Jones; the fact that the devil would take the form of a slutty membership director at a barren country club is simply brilliant in its inanity, and she plays the part so straight it's impossible to tell if she was in on the joke or not. Building a very effective story on a simple Stepford-like premise of 'belonging', the film culminates in a special effects extravaganza of monumentally trashy proportions (much of which involves Lucci's makeup)."
Susan Lucci's
Invitation to Hell:
The plot, when reduced to its skimpiest form: "Matt Winslow (Robert Urich, 19 December 1946 — 16 April 2002, of Killdozer[1974 / trailer]), wife (Joanna Cassidy of The Night Child(1975 / trailer)and Blade Runner [1982 / trailer]) and family move to a town named Steaming Springs to start a new life, where the devil temps the worldly at the local country club. Luckily, Matt has a spacesuit."


(1985, dir. Wes Craven)
We saw this one, and we were not amused. Click the title above to read our typically verbose review from 2007, which ends with the following statement: "A truly awful film with no redeeming features, Chiller won't do much more than leave you pissed-off for having wasted your time. Indeed, seldom is there a movie that improves with the inclusion of commercials, but Chiller stands out as one such production."
Maynard's Horror Movie Diaryhas the basic plot and a similar opinion: "Chiller is a weird and underwhelming made-for-TV thriller about a cryogenetically frozen body that comes back to life as soulless and callous killer. The basic storyline is pretty intriguing and the first 20 minutes are eerie and chilling, especially the opening sequence, but due to Wes Craven's extremely poor direction and the lengthy script of J.D. Feigelson, the movie lacks tension and thrills, and is loaded with tedious and tiresome scenes, including one of the lamest climaxes in Craven's filmography."
J.D. Feigelson, as "Jake Fowler", also scripted the cheapo, regional horror trash classic Horror High (1974), a far more entertaining movie than Chiller.
Trailer to
Horror High (1974):



(1985, dir. Jack Sholder)
Craven actually had little to do with this movie, other than having created the title character and the core concept of dying in your dreams, the latter of which saw many liberties taken during the course of the movie. It was a hit, but was generally reviled at the time of its release. We ourselves saw in a grindhouse on Broadway in downtown LA, and we weren't thrilled, but over the years we've developed a fondness for it — as one can tell by our 2009 review of the movie. (Click the title above to go the review.)
Craven was actually approached to do Part II but he turned it down due to a variety of reasons, so the project went to Jack Sholder, who three years earlier had made the still underappreciated horror, Alone in the Dark (1982 / trailer), which, in all truth, is a better movie than this one.
Trailer to
 Freddy's Revenge:



Deadly Friend
(1986, dir. Wes Craven)
Based on the science fiction novel Friendby Diana Henstell, the screenplay was written by Bruce Joel Rubin, who went on to write one of the worst films of all time, Ghost (1990), which we forgive him for since he followed it up with that great mindfuck of a film, Jacob's Ladder (1990 / trailer).
Trailer:
We admit to watching about a half hour of Deadly Friend on VHS one evening — and popping it out of the player for something better (don't remember what it was we watched instead, but it was better). One of Craven's more problematic productions — literally: the studio more or less forced him to make a film he didn't want to make from a film that he had made like he had wanted to make. Deadly Friend, made while Craven was in the midst of his I-don't-want-to-be-just-a-horror-movie-director phase, was intended by the director to be more of a sci-fi relationship dramatic thriller along the lines of John Carpenter's dull Starman (1984 / trailer), but, damn it! The movie studio wanted a "Craven movie", with blood and gore and horror, and that is what they made sure they got. The movie's ending is particularly hated, but as Bruce Joel Rubin has famously said, "That robot coming out of girl's head belongs solely to Mark Canton, and you don't tell the [then] president of Warner Bros. that his idea stinks!"
Needless to say, the flick flopped and is not considered one of Craven's successful projects — but They Shoot Actors, Don't Theyis not one of the nay-sayers, and considers the movie "one of the more enjoyable Wes Craven movies", saying that some of the reasons the film is good are because "BB the robot talks like a retarded Jawa, Kristie Swanson wears blue eye shadow around her eyes to show that she's resurrected, and it has a wonderfully ridiculous ending."
The film's best death scene:
The plot as supplied by Richard Scheib at theScience Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review: "Teen genius Paul Conway (Matthew Labyorteaux) and his divorced mother (Anne Twomey) move into a new neighborhood so that Paul can teach computer science at the local polytechnic while also studying for his medical degree. Paul befriends and falls for Samantha Pringle (Kristy Swanson of Highway to Hell[1992] and The Phantom[1996]), the girl next door. He is upset when Dee-Dee, the beloved robot he has built, is blasted to pieces with a shotgun by crazy old neighbour Elvira Parker (Anne Ramsey, 1 September 1929 — 11 August 1988) during a Halloween prank. When Samantha's father (Richard Marcusof Tremors[1990]) catches her and Paul kissing, he brutally beats Samantha, sending her falling down a set of stairs and leaving her in a coma. After the medics turn the life support machines off, Paul comes up with a crazy idea to save Samantha by stealing her body, implanting Dee-Dee's computer chip in her brain and using it to restore her to life."
Spoiler —
How the movie ends:


Part III will follow next month.
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Trailers of Promise – Films We Haven't Seen: The Giant Claw (1957)

October 21, 2015, 1:15 am
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"The Giant Claw is every bit as unrepentantly bizarre as any Japanese or Korean creature film, and in exactly the same characteristic way. It is, so far as I’ve seen, the only true American kaiju."
1000 Misspent Hours

AKA The Mark of the Claw. A classic "bad film" high on our list of films to see — and as it easy to get online, we plan to see it soon. Director Fred F. Frears's short career — he died at the age of 44 (7 July 1913-30 November 1957) — was spent entirely at Columbia, where he was a regular collaborator with the legendary producer Sam Katzman (7 July 1901-4 August 1973), the man behind many a trash classic and not-so-classic, as well as one or two real classics, such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956 / trailer), which Frears also directed and featured special effects by the great Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen was originally intended to do the effects for The Great Claw, also, but was replaced by some cheap model makers in Mexico City who supplied the legendary marionette that makes the movie what it is.
The story of The Giant Claw (1957), written by Samuel Newman (Invisible Invaders [1959 / trailer]) and Paul Gangelin (The Mad Ghoul [1943 / full movie] and The Boogie Man Will Get You [1942 / full movie]), is as follows: "Engineer Mitch McAfee (Jeff Morrow) is conducting a test flight of radar equipment for the Air Force in Alaska when he reports that his plane has been passed by something as big as a flying battleship. This is disbelieved back at base but he persists with his claim. Soon after, he is proven right as air traffic is attacked amid further reports of a giant flying bird. The Air Force attempts to shoot the bird down but it proves impervious to any type of attack. Scientists then realise that it is an alien creature made of antimatter, which is causing it to be invisible to radar and capable of projecting a shield to protect itself from any attack." (From: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review)
 
The Great Mara Corday
The babe of the film, "Sally Caldwell", is played by the exotically beautiful cult actress Mara Corday (born Marilyn Joan Watts on 3 January 1930), the Playmate of the October 1958 issue of Playboy (34-24-35, D cup) and an extremely popular cheesecake model of her day. Her most famous movie is undoubtedly 1955's Tarantula (trailer), and she can also be found in the not quite as entertaining "bad movie"The Black Scorpion (1957 / trailer).
 Watch, gape at, and enjoy the trailer to
The Giant Claw:

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City of Rott (Pennsylvania, 2006)

October 27, 2015, 1:14 am
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If one is to believe the imdb, this relatively plotless animated zombie gore flick was made on an estimated budget of $5,550, to which we can only conjecture that the cash was split between the computer program used for the animation and a lot of coffee, 'cause it sure doesn't look like it was spent on much else. And, indeed, a look at the cast and credits of City of Rott reveals some dude named Frank Sudol as the writer and director and producer and editor and composer and all voices — truly a one-man effort. As such, for the first time in our life we finally understood what all those dumb-ass teachers meant when they would say "Well, I'll give you an A for effort, but...."
City of Rott is one of those movies that seems to divide its limited audience. We saw it as part of a small group of four, and two liked it and two hated it. We belong to the latter duo, though we tried hard to belong to the former — but the fact of the matter is that at 77 minutes in length, City of Rott is way, way, way, way  tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long for its slim plot, primitive technique, and hammered-in thematic message. We weren't just relieved when the flick ended, we were downright happy.
In the filmic world of Sudol's City of Rott, mankind has fallen victim to worms from outer space that invade our bodies and change us into unthinking undead with an unquenchable appetite for innards and flesh. But as is made obvious by the posters and banners and billboards and other advertisements seen in the background throughout the movie, City of Rott is, somewhere at its core, a criticism of conformism and the one-of-the-herd mentality of modern man in contemporary society wrapped in a slim storyline about and anchored by the elderly man Fred Figiero and his walker. Fred, one of the few remaining living people in the city of Rott, is in search of a new pair of loafers, and as he wanders through the city in search of new shoes he crosses paths with a limited amount of other survivors — none who survive all that long — and hordes of hungry zombies, most of which he bloodily obliterates with his talkative walker.
Fred is very much a nutcase, and he holds lively discussions and arguments at various times with his walker, one of his shoes, and himself, but for the most part he is also an effective zombie killer lost in a world with no future: it is basically simply a matter of time before he, like everyone else, either falls victim to the zombies or the worms — and conforms. (Sudol takes his criticism of mankind's lack of individuality a step further by adding the aspect that in the end, even the individual is part of the masses: Fred's craziness — or his individuality — is caused by a second kind of parasitic alien worm, one that simply makes you crazy, so in the end he is basically one of the masses as well. It would seem the Sudol views true individuality as impossible — a point of view we wouldn't argue against.)
But the "intellectual" theme aside, City of Rott is a flawed movie. It's animation style, though a far cry from the cut-paper simplicity of, say, South Park— a series (1997-present) and film (1999 / trailer) that City of Rott easily calls to mind — is executed with far less aplomb or skill than even the earliest episodes of that never-ending series. Sudol's primitivist style is indeed obviously intentionally "artless", and is also perhaps the best thing about the movie, but nevertheless the animation technique often slides too far into simply being badly executed: figures flicker or walk backwards, the backgrounds sometimes go out of focus for a few seconds, occasional objects float out of place across the screen (the latter might be intentional, on occasion). A little more polish wouldn't have hurt.
Likewise, the movie is simply too long for its slim story. Sudol pads the movie with excessive and not particularly funny dialogue and never-ending scenes of carnage, and both eventually become predictable and boring. Particularly the long scenes of Fred killing zombies become yawners, despite all the animated gore: more than once the viewer feels like a fifth wheel on a car, like a person watching over the shoulder of a gamer playing a one-person game in which the gamer has the fun of destroying thousands of zombies while the viewer has nothing to do but watch and twiddle their thumbs. Boring!
Lastly, the other characters and overall narrative of City of Rott are pretty much all over the place and never really connect. In regards to the secondary and tertiary human survivors, the result is that with the possible exception of the underused sexy nurse, none truly seem integrated into the story and most come across as added padding — as does the entire final act of the movie after Fred wanders out to a farm. City of Rott would have been better-served with either a better scriptwriter or as a short film.
Oh, yeah: while the music doesn't exactly suck donkey dick, it does now and then at least lick baby donkey dick.
So, final verdict: were it not the only animated feature-length zombie we know of, we would simply dismiss it as hardly imperative viewing. As it is, City of Rott is probably of above normal interest for zombie-film completionists — and thus, in the end, as flawed as it is, we give it an A for effort....
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Short Film: Don't Hug Me I'm Scared (2011)

October 29, 2015, 10:34 am
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Sesame Street from Hell. This is the first of a series of short created by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. It and the others in the series seem to have been rather popular on-line — regular memes, so to say — but like normal we missed the fuss and only recently stumbled upon this and their other fabulous shorts.
To simply steal from Wikipedia: "Each episode is made to appear like a typical children's television program, consisting of singing and talking puppets similar to those of Sesame Street, but eventually takes a dark turn, usually involving gore. The videos parody children's television shows by ironically juxtaposing puppetry and musical numbers against psychedelic content and disturbing imagery."
Dunno how many episodes have been made to date, but this is the first one made and the first one we ever saw, so we want to share it with you.
Now let's all agree to never be creative again.
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Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (Japan, 1995)

November 4, 2015, 1:03 am
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(Spoilers.) Another obscure movie (for Westerners) found in our DVD pile of "unknown movies", a mound of Sisyphean proportions accrued over the years that never seems to shrink no matter how many times we blindly pull out a DVD to watch. 
Trailer:
Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, like the name of the director, Shimako Satō, was totally unknown to us. And after having seen the movie and having researched the flick's background a bit, we just couldn't help but think of that highly (if sadly) entertaining Tumblr blog, Shit People Say to Women Directors, 'cause, like, women directors are a rare thing... and what do you know, but "Shimako" seems to be a women's name in Japan and the flick was made by one of the "weaker sex". Not that anything about the film would've indicated the sex of the director — which is why we thought of the previously mentioned blog. And as our meandering mind tends to wander, thinking of the above Tumblr made us think in turn of that disgusting paean to intellectual retardation, the Tumblr Women Against Feminism. What does all that have to do with Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness? Hello! Turn on that light bulb in your head and connect the dots yourself for a change.
But till then, let's get back to Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, the first of a franchise totaling with six movies that also includes Eko Eko Azarak II: Birth of the Wizard (1996 / trailer), Eko Eko Azarak III: Misa The Dark Angel (1998 / trailer), Eko Eko Azarak IV: Awakening (2001), and Eko Eko Azarak: R-page (2006) and Eko Eko Azarak: B-page (2006 / trailer to both), as well as a TV series.(The last two movies could well be edited versions of the Japanese television series, going by the look of the trailers.) It would seem that Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, and its lead character, are obscure only outside of the Land of the Rising Sun; there, the franchise has its roots in a super-popular manga originally serialized in the teen magazine Weekly Shonen Champion from 1974 to 1979 and is far from unknown. How true the film is to the original we do not know, so that aspect is immaterial to our view of Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness.
At its core, Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is basically a teen bodycounter (with a bodycount of around 15), the minor difference is that the final girl and heroine of the flick, Misa Kuroi (Kimika Yoshino) is a witch. She transfers to a school which, we learn, is the location where Lucifer is to be summoned by a group of unknown Satanists and, rather ineffectually, she tries to stop both the event and save the lives of a variety of her classmates doomed to die as their deaths are a key to the summoning. Kept after school one evening to retake a maths exam, much like in the absolutely dreadful Danish bodycounter Final Hour, also from 1995, the students are suddenly unable to leave the building and start dropping like flies. Unlike Final Hour, however, as cheesy as Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is, it is also relatively well made, highly atmospheric, occasionally even scary, is populated by at least some characters that gain viewer sympathy and, at least until the final scene, remains both an interesting and effective movie. It's a shame about the last ten minutes, though.
Personally, we were rather happy to finally see an Asian horror flick that didn't fixate on ghosts with long hair and not only included some nice gore (as well as some cheesy computer-generated stuff) but also had a couple of totally gratuitous and exploitive lesbian scenes. (Less happily, in this regard, is that lesbianism is presented as either a reflection of a person's corruption or, if you are not corrupt, then as an act that requires punishment. Also in this regard, the old chestnut about "if you have sex you die" is less applicable, because many [probable] virgins die in the movie.) The first death of the flick, of an unknown women fleeing in terror through the streets of an unnamed town who meets her death by way of steel girder, is a highlight and is really never again equaled throughout the entire movie, though the lesbian student nailed to the table and the death by overflowing toilet are almost as memorable, each in their own way.
We would be hard-pressed, however, to call this the movie "Japan's response to Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (as is done on the DVD cover) because, well, not only was Buffy consistently campy, but Buffy was also usually effective at what she was doing. Unlike in Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, which is far more cheesy than campy, and in which Misa is not at all effective: she not only fails to save anyone, but is herself killed and Lucifer is also summoned — upon which the movie suddenly becomes an unsatisfying headscratcher as, going by the fate of the summoner (and confirmed by Misa's inability to save anyone), there was no reason for the good witch to even bother showing up at the school in the first place. And how the fuck does she manage to suddenly return from the dead?
In the end, we would say that Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is more about the journey than the destination. Shot on a low budget in two weeks, it is better directed and made than many flicks of its ilk and this, combined with a relatively low-fat story and linear narrative, makes it an enjoyable B-film experience up until the final ten minutes, after which the movie falls totally apart and deflates like a pin-pricked blow-up sex doll.
On the whole, when compared to the last dead teenage film we saw featuring kids trapped in a school — the previously mentioned example of dripping santorum, Final Hour — Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is a frigging masterpiece. But taken on its own, it is ultimately a disappointment, and is thus recommended only with reservation. (Nevertheless, we do plan to someday watch another Eko Eko DVD, Eko Eko Azarak III: The Awakening [2001], which currently still languishes in our Sisyphean pile of DVDs.)
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R.I.P.: Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven, Part III (1987-93)

November 11, 2015, 12:32 am
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2 Aug. 1939 — 30 Aug. 2015

What follows is a look at some the projects he was involved in — actually and/or presumably. TV series are ignored. 

Go here for Part I (1970-77)
Go here for Part II (1978-86)


Nightmare on Elm Street III:
The Dream Warriors
(1987, dir. Chuck Russell)


"Sleep. Those little slices of Death. How I loathe them."
Edgar Allen Poe 

Craven returned to the franchise for the first time, taking on the role of executive producer and sharing the story/script credit with Bruce Wagner, who went on to write the screenplay to Paul Bartel's Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) — not one of Bartel's better films. Craven, it is claimed, was still not thrilled about the idea of a money-making franchise and thus wrote a script that saw Freddy laid to rest — a concept totally undermined by the movie's last scene (not to mention all subsequent sequels). The direction was done by an at the time unknown named Chuck Russell, making his directorial début after a variety of production and assistant directorial jobs that included, among others, Chatterbox (1977 / trailer), The Great American Girl Robbery (1979 / trailer), andHell Night(1981). After Freddy 3, Russell went on to do a couple of decent films, including The Blob(1988) and The Mask (1994 / trailer). Of the unknowns given their first role ever in this film, Patricia Arquette has become perhaps the biggest name, but the true babe of the flick was and still is Jennifer Rubin (of Screamers[1995]).
Trailer:

We saw the movie when it came out and enjoyed it much more than we had its predecessor, though the inexplicable reappearance of the (going by the first film) dead Nancy Thompson(Heather Langenkamp) did bother us. Even today, the old-school effects as well as the concepts behind some of dream kills are still decent and pretty amazing — it took years for us to get over the images of the puppet suicide and hungry junkie mouths. The downside of the movie is that it is the first one to move into the "Funny Freddy the Anti-Hero" mold, even as it also presents just how horrible a person Freddy was while alive: anyone out there ever think about the implications of the little girl on a tricycle in the opening dream of Kristen (Arquette) who, in the basement with Kristen, says "This is where he takes us"?
Odd to think that someone who literally gets his rocks of by killing children could ever become such a popular anti-hero...
The basic plot, as explained at Scopophilia: "The last of the Elm Street children find themselves plagued by the same terrible nightmares and are now put into an institution where a grown-up Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) works as a dream therapist. It is found that Kristen (Patricia Arquette) has the ability to invite other people into her dreams, so the entire group goes into her nightmare and takes on Freddy (Robert Englund) as a team."
For more on the good and bad of Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Dream Warriors, we suggest a look at Final Girl, who's one of the few that seems to remember that before Freddy got into killing teens in their dreams, he had a thing for prepubescent children. 
Music video to the theme song, Dream Warriors,
by Dokken,
a bunch of guys who use more hair spray
than all their mothers combined:



A Nightmare on Elm Street 4:
The Dream Master
(1988, dir. Renny Harlin)
 

"When deep sleep falleth on men, fear came apon me.
 And trembling which made all my bones to shake"
Job IV, 13-14

Trailer: 
Wes Craven bailed for Part IV of the by-now solidly footed franchise based on his creation The Dream Master was the highest-grossing of the entire series until 2003's Freddy vs. Jason (which we still haven't gotten to the end of). The directorial duties were given to a young, unknown Finnish director,Renny Harlin, probably on the basis of his prior credit, the horror film Prison (1987). 
Harlin's American directorial debut,
Prison: 
Harlin, as many know, is an adroit director whose career is heavy with entertaining trash — Deep Blue Sea (1999 / trailer), Mindhunters(2004) and The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013 / trailer), anyone? — and who helped destroy Geena Davis's career with the enjoyably daffy Cutthroat Island (1995 / trailer) and the inanely fun Long Kiss Goodnight(1996 / trailer).
The movie's plot? Freddy gets resurrected when a dog named Jason pisses on his grave. He then takes up where he left off by killing the survivors of Nightmare III before moving on to a new batch of old-looking teenagers. Patricia Arquette's part, Kristin, was recast with Tuesday Knight, who also sang the song played over the opening credits; the closing credits featured a pop rap song by the now mostly forgotten and always apolitical Fat Boys. 
The Fat Boys — 
Are You Ready for Freddy? 
Despite the fact that film was a hit, few people say they like it. Indeed, we ourselves enjoyed it more for some of the tricks (the time loop is great) and over-the-top effects than the story, as by then the series was more cheese and corn than true horror. (Enjoyable trash, so to say, but not good horror.)
  
At-A-Glance Reviewshits the nail on the head in their review of the movie: "Continuing with the natural devolution that hampers many populist film series, this outing gives the star of the show, Freddy Krueger [Robert Englund, the headlining credit for the first time in the series], an abundance of wisecracks and corny one-liners. In the tradition of slasher movie sequels, there are more bodies and the deaths are more elaborate. Elaborate beyond all rational boundaries. What motive could a supernatural murderer like Freddy possibly have for constructing all these complicated dreams and dressing up as characters in it? [...] He begins his reign of terror again, this time moving beyond Elm Street. [...] When one of the kids is burned alive in her bed, we are never shown the real world consequences of that. What about the kid who drowns in a waterbed? Isn't anyone the least bit curious how all these teenagers keep dying? But no, this movie is too lazy to get into such details. It focuses on one character long enough for him to be knocked off, then moves on to the next. Sorry, but 'by the numbers' serial killer flicks not only don't work, they're exploitative abominations. There's absolutely no reason for this piece of tripe to exist at all."


The Serpent and the Rainbow
(1988, dir Wes Craven)
 
Despite the fact that the author of the eponymous book upon which this movie is based, Wade Davis, actually also worked on the movie as a technical advisor, he later described Wes Craven's voodoo horror flick as "one of the worst Hollywood movies in history". In our humble opinion, however, Wade's statement says less about the movie than it does about how many Hollywood movies Wade has seen. But we also have to admit that although we caughtThe Serpent and the Rainbow on the big screenwhen it first came out and remember rather liking it, today the only thing we truly remember is that Cathy Tyson, the romantic interest of the movie, is one hot tamale. 
Soundtrack to 
The Serpent and the Rainbow: 
366 Weird Movies, which doesn't find the film weird despite "some fantastic scenes", is of the opinion that"Serpent is an above-average horror outing, although it's ultimately a mild disappointment because the black magic premise has so much unrealized potential. The voodoo milieu the civilized doctor encounters in Haiti is memorable and spooky; the setting is also unique in that it mixes witchcraft with politics by having the main villain be both a powerful warlock and an officer of Haitian dictator 'Baby Doc' Duvalier's secret police. In the end, unfortunately, Craven can't figure out how to keep the momentum rolling into a proper climax to an interesting premise. We end up with a formula horror finale where Zakes Mokae's brilliantly sadistic Dargent Peytraud transforms into a poor man's Freddy Kruger. The eye-rolling climax comes complete with false deaths, catch phrases, an ironic comeuppance, and other silliness."
TV Guide, which sees the film as "a sloppy but ambitious mix of pop anthropology, political observation, and good old-fashioned Val Lewtonesque horror [... that] succeeds more often than it fails", has the plot: "Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) is a young scientist hired by an American pharmaceutical company to go to Haiti and uncover the secrets of zombification. Recent studies have proven the existence of actual zombies, and scientists suspect a drug or potion (the discovery of which could mean a fortune to drug manufacturers looking for a new anesthetic) is involved in the process. Dennis's trip, however, happens to coincide with the collapse of the Duvalier government, and he finds himself tossed into the resulting violent social upheaval. In Haiti Dennis teams up with beautiful local psychiatrist Marielle (Cathy Tyson), who introduces him to the mysterious world of voodoo. The deeper he probes, however, the greater the opposition from voodoo priests, who attempt to invade his mind and transform him into a zombie." 
Trailer: 


A Nightmare on Elm Street 5:
Dream Child
(1989, dir. Stephen Hopkins)
Wes Craven was not there anywhere for "Freddy 5", the lowest-grossing instalment of the franchise, but of course Craven's creation was. We saw it when it came out — and can't remember anything about it at all, not even whether we found any of the fodder hot or not. 
Foster on Filmssays: "Yup, he came back after he was absolutely and unequivocally dead … again. It's hard to get too involved in these plots to destroy Freddy since they are all different, and they all work only until the next sequel. This time, Alice (Lisa Wilcox), the dream master from the last sequel, having mysteriously lost her dream combat skills, finds herself pregnant by her quickly deceased boyfriend (Danny Hassel) and popping in and out of dream worlds. The dreams looks good, particularly the M.C. Escher room of stairs. Even in the dreams, Freddy is a bore, speaking only unmemorable one-liners. Outside the dreams, we get Alice telling everyone about Freddy and everyone saying she's nuts. This isn't exciting the first time so you can imagine how riveting it is the tenth time."
Director Stephen Hopkins went on to do the fun Predator II (1990 / trailer), Lost in Space(1998) and the intensely annoying The Reaping (2007 / trailer). 
Trailer: 


Shocker
(1989, writ & dir. Wes Craven)


"On October 2, at 6:45 AM mass murderer Horace Pinker was put to death. Now, he's really mad."

Another one of Craven's less successful and less known films, Shocker suffers in that the filmmaker's intentions are obvious: cut out of the Freddy franchise by New World Pictures, Craven tried to come up with a new horror figure with which to get his piece of the rent-paying pie — regrettably, he modeled his character, story, and movie after the lesser sequels instead of the truly scary first Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Freddy-lite — aka "Horace Pinker"— didn't work, and neither did the movie. A mild success, the concept of a franchise was (luckily) quickly dropped. At the recommendation of a horror-loving friend, we saw it once on DVD — stoned and drunk and in the perfect condition for a teen horror trash — and we hated it. So do most other people, it seems (other than our friend, but he's a cop in Amsterdam so his taste would logically be different than most people).
Trailer: 
The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Reviewhas the plot: "High school quarterback Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) is knocked out after running into the goal post during a game. While unconscious, Jonathan has a vision in which he sees his mother and sister murdered by a serial killer. He comes around and moments later and receives a phone call from his police lieutenant father (Michael Murphy of Count Yorga, Vampire [1970 / trailer], Phase IV [1974 / trailer] and Strange Behavior [1981 / trailer]), informing him that his mother and sister have been butchered just as he saw in his vision. Jonathan is able to use his psychic link to lead the police to the killer, TV repairman Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi). Pinker is sent to the electric chair but this only serves to transform him into a being of electricity. Jonathan realizes that Pinker is able to pass through electrical appliances and possess people. Jumping between host bodies, Pinker comes after Jonathan seeking revenge."
The SFHFR also says that "[...] Shockeris a film that embodies all the worst excesses of Wes Craven. Once again, Craven is stuck in dream/reality territory and this time only getting sillier by degrees. He never for a moment seems able to settle onto a single idea, whipping the film off on a trail of concepts left over from Elm Street, the recent body-hopping hit The Hidden (1987 / trailer), and the old B-movie Man-Made Monster (1941) about an electrically charged killer staggering up from the electric chair." 
Trailer to Man-Made Monster (1941) —
a much better film than Shocker: 


Night Visions
(1990, writ & dir Wes Craven)
Well, if you can't get a film franchise of the ground, how about a television series? Wes Craven returned to the boob tube and produced, directed and co-wrote (with Thomas Baum) this lesser project, a TV movie that plays out like the pilot it was.
In the book Wes Craven: The Art of Horror, author John Kenneth Muir explains the plot: "Psychologist Sally Powers (Loryn Locklin) has the ability to see into the minds of psychotic killers, and joins with a Los Angeles police officer (James Remar) to catch the serial murderer known as the 'Spread Eagle Killer'. As a relationship develops between the two partners, Powers is forced to confront not only her dark abilities but haunting elements of her own past as well." 
Adding to the complications is the fact that the shrink has multiple personalities. Night Visions did not get picked up as a series and has pretty much fallen off the face of the earth, though it did get a VHS release in Europe and can now be found on-line.
Loryn Locklin went on to do the sub-standard Stuart Gordeon movie, Fortress (1992 / trailer); James Remar was already and still is one of our favorite character actors and can be found in many a film good and bad, including the maligned kiddy film, The Phantom(1996).


Bloodfist II
(1990, dir. Andy Blumenthal)

OK, why not? According to imdb and others, Wes Craven is credited as "advisor" on this Roger Corman-produced Don "The Dragon" Wilson movie directed by a one-shot wonder never heard of again. (Perhaps Craven's advice was to leave the industry?)
The Bloodfist franchise, begun the year previously with Bloodfist Fighter (1989 / trailer), lasted nine movies (to date), the last being the TV movie Bloodfist 2050 (2005 / trailer), the only one in which Don "The Dragon" Wilson didn't appear. (As of yet, the only Don "The Dragon" Wilson we've seen, Sort Target(2006), we sort of enjoyed — read the review to find out why.)
The plot? Bloodfist II is basically a cheap remake of the far superior Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon (1973 / trailer), which costarred the great John Saxon & once hunkadelic, now dead Jim Kelly. Retro Junk explains it as thus: "This time, Wilson is up against a diabolical Fu Manchu type named Mr. Su (Joe Mari Avellana). Our hero and five other kickboxing experts are kidnapped by Su and forced to do battle against the villain's steroid-crazed henchmen. It's up to Wilson to straighten things out."
Johnny LeRue's Crane Shot, a blogspot we trust, says: "Readers of Blackbelt and The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu magazines should get a real (ahem) kick out of Bloodfist II, which offers a lot of fighting. A lot of fighting. I doubt more than five or six minutes ever pass without Wilson or one of his friends getting into a battle with somebody, usually using their bare hands and feet, but sometimes grabbing a handy knife, staff, spear or sword. Since much of the cast, including 'The Dragon' [...], are actual martial-arts champions, the frequent fight scenes have an air of authenticity about them that help ground the comic-book plot in some sort of reality. Not that you should take Bloodfist II seriously [...]."
Trailer to
Bloodfist II:
 


Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
(1991, writ. & dir Rachel Talalay)
Trailer to
Freddy's Dead— The Final Nightmare:
AKA A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: Freddy's Dead. Once again, Wes was not part of the project — but, damn it! He created the original character! We never bothered to see The Final Nightmare, but it was intended as the last of the franchise — which might explain the number of guest appearances, including that of Johnny Depp (in a commercial) — but proved too successful for the powers that be to stop flogging the dead horse. Director Rachel Talalay, not surprisingly the only female director to do a Nightmare film, went on to direct one film that we have both seen and reviewed: Tank Girl (1995).
 
Iggy Pop sings
the Golden Raspberry-nominated song
Why Was I Born (Freddy's Dead)
from Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare: 
Wikipedia has the plot: "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare follows the exploits of 'John Doe' (Shon Greenblatt), an amnesiac teenager from Springwood, who was sent out to find Freddy's daughter Maggie (Lisa Zane), whom he needs to leave Springwood. Freddy's goal is to create new 'Elm Streets', and begin a new killing spree after having killed all of the children in Springwood. Maggie, utilizing new dream techniques, uncovers Krueger's past, which include: being taunted by schoolmates for being the 'son of 100 maniacs', being cruel to animals, beaten by his stepfather (Alice Cooper, of The Prince of Darkness [1986]), the murder of his own wife when she discovers he has been killing children, and the moment when the Dream Demons arrive in his boiler room to make him the offer of eternal life. Eventually, Maggie pulls Freddy out of the dream world, and uses a pipe bomb to blow him up."
 A better song,
from a different movie: 


People under the Stairs 
(1991, writ. & dir. Wes Craven) 


"In every neighborhood there is one house that adults whisper about and children cross the street to avoid…"

Oddly enough, even today The People Under the Stairs remains one of Craven's most underrated movies... possibly because, although it was a commercial success, it came at a time when the horror genre was in a creative slump and, to further remove it from the lily white masses found in the movie duplexes of the American malls, the movie was both surprisingly Afro-American and critical of the prevailing value systems of capitalist USA. (And also inverts the typical home-invasion horror chestnut by making the minority invaders the likable good guys and the lily white moneyed homeowners the bad guys.)
 Trailer: 
Tell the truth, we went and saw it not because it was from Wes Craven, but because of the gimmicky casting of Everett McGill (of Silver Bullet [1985 / trailer]) and Wendy Robie (of Devil in the Flesh [1998 / trailer] and Horror in the Attic [2001 / trailer]) as the nutcase siblings, "Daddy" and "Mommy", who own the house in which the kids live under the stairs — at the time, they played one of the weirder couplets amongst a cast of weird in the original Twin Peaks (1990-91 / trailer). That their campy but effective physical embodiment of the hypocrisy, obscene greed and amorally corrupt self-centeredness of the white Reagan-era American capitalist (indeed, big business then as now) is excellent was just one of the various pleasant surprises the movie held for us. And unlike all of his feature films after The Hills Have Eyes (1977),* though some humor is there, there ain't a touch of the by-now tiresome supernatural in this bizarre slice of urban horror.
*We are intentionally ignoring the non-movie known as The Hills Have Eyes II (1985).
Much like the other top-notch throwback to the Blaxploitation days released that year, New Jack City (1991 / trailer), The People under the Stairs makes it clear that the man ain't gonna be of any help, and if Black America wants justice, they gotta take it in their own hands. (Where are the Black Panthers when you need them?)
Over at Rove, Karl Williams explains the plot of this great, "surrealistic horror-comedy, which was inspired by a true story of parents keeping their children locked in a basement for years. Fool (Brandon Adams), an African-American teen, breaks into the home of the wealthy landlords who evicted his family from a ghetto tenement. A fortune in gold coins is rumored to exist inside, but Fool discovers that the mansion is a chamber of horrors presided over by a pair of incestuous, serial killer siblings (McGill and Robie). The twisted couple has also tried to raise a succession of kidnapped boys. Each botched effort is handled the same way — the victim's eyes, ears and tongues are removed, and he's sent to live in the sealed-off basement, where a colony of similarly deformed 'brothers' resides. Fool is able to avoid the evil lovers as he moves through the house's maze of hidden passageways. He discovers that the occupants have a daughter, Alice (A.J. Langer of Grey Knight [1993 / trailer] and Albert Pyun's cheesy Arcade [1993 / trailer]), who has survived their abuse, so he rescues her and they attempt to free the 'people under the stairs'."


Laurel Canyon 
(1993, dir. unknwon) 
The one that go away. Listed everywhere as having Wes Craven as the executive producer, listed on Robert Kurtzman's CV as one of his special-effects projects for 1993, and supposedly with Elaine Hendrix in it, nothing can be found anywhere regarding what it's about. Romy and Michele's High School Reunion mentions that it was a pilot for NBC, while in an interview at filmzine, composer J. Peter Robinson says"Laurel Canyon on the other hand, was a pilot the Wes and I did that never made it to the light of day. Pity, because I thought it was very good." In any event, it isn't listed on Craven's own website, so who knows if it ever flickered across any screen anywhere...


Body Bags
(1993, dirs. John Carpenter & Tobe Hooper)
The success of HBO's Tales of the Crypt (1989—96) gave Showtime the impetus to try for a horror series of their own, and they came up with Body Bags. Three episodes were filmed — two, The Gas Station and Hair, were directed by John Carpenter, and one The Eye, by everyone's favorite punching bag, Tobe Hooper — but the series never happened. Instead, the three shorts were strung together with framing segments (directed and staring John Carpenter) for video release. We rented it way back in the mid-1990s, undoubtedly the cut version, and remember not being overwhelmed. Wes Craven is one of the numerous cult names popping up in the credits: he plays the "pasty-faced man" who appears briefly in the full-length version of The Gas Station. (Other names of note to appear throughout the three episodes include the great Charles Napier [1936-2011] and equally great George Buck Flower, as well as Roger Corman, John Agar, Twiggy, Sam Raimi, Tom Arnold, David Warner, Luke Skywalker, David Naughton Sheena Easton and a non-blonde Deborah Harry.)
Trailer: 
Wikipedia's concise plot description tells you almost everything you need to know about the movie: "The first story, The Gas Station, features Robert Carradine as a serial killer [... terrorizing a gas station attendant (Alex Datcher) on her first night at work]. Hair follows Stacy Keach as he receives a botched hair transplant that infests him with an alien parasite. Eye is another transplant story, this time featuring Mark Hamill as a baseball player who loses an eye in a car accident and receives a transplant, only to be taken over by the personality of the eye's previous owner, a murderous misogynist."

Part IV will follow next month.
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Wishmaster IV: The Prophecy Fulfilled (Canada, 2002)

November 22, 2015, 3:08 am
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Roughly a year ago, we caught the firstWishmaster (1997), which we found mildly entertaining: "as a horror film it offers little new or innovative, but it is a fun and at times almost campy film that goes well with, well, a six-pack, chips and a joint (which is actually what we consumed it with)." That we have now watched Wishmaster IV: The Prophecy Fulfilled has less to do with the fact that the first movie mildly entertained us than that we found a working copy of the DVD on the street — and despite the fact that we should know better, we never say no to a free DVD.
And, indeed: there was a reason that whoever dropped the DVD didn't find it worth bending over to pick it back up again: this Canadian-made, direct-to-video tax deduction licks leprous caribou cunt.
Trailer:
The fourth and the last of the series, it was filmed back-to-back with part three, Wishmaster III: Beyond the Gates of Hell(2002 / trailer), and going by this instalment, we feel safe to say that the two combined served well to nail the coffin lid of the franchise shut. As was to be expected, in truth, seeing that both the two direct-to-video sleeping pills were directed by some guy named Chris Angel, a man with a porno-star name who, in 1999, also directed one of the worst horror films we ever had the displeasure of seeing, The Fear: Resurrection, another direct-to-video tax deduction that licks leprous caribou cunt.
The plot of Wishmaster IV, like all the films of the series, revolves around an evil djinn (John Novak of Darkman III: Die Darkman Die [1996 / trailer] and the public domain horror flick Eternal Evil [1985 / full movie]) who, once accidentally released by a blonde, must get his latest victim — in this case here, Lisa (Tara Spencer-Nairn of Final Draft [2007 / trailer]) — to make three wishes so as to be able to release his evil fellow folk onto our world. In between, he grants the wishes made in passing by those whose paths he crosses, usually killing them as he does. Unlike in the earlier films, however, this time around the lady in peril actually makes three wishes — but for some odd reason, he doesn't grant the final wish — "I wish I could love you for who you are"— and, instead, spends his time pondering the meaning of love and trying to make Lisa love him for who he is. Snore. In-between, he makes a few unspectacular kills — indeed, the body count and special effects of this installment are sub-standard for even a direct-to-video piece of shit.
As is known to anyone who has seen any of the franchise installments, the only way to vanquish the djinn is to make a wish that somehow destroys him or brings his downfall — but Lisa's final wish is not such a wish, as the djinn could basically snap his fingers, change the wiring in her brain, make her head-over-heels in love with him, free his fellow djinn, and spawn dozens of half-breeds, thus ruining the purity of the white man's bloodline. (Before you go shitten' yer britches, that was a joke, okay?) In any event, his procrastination is stupid, and endemic of the stupidity of the entire movie, which sorely lacks much of the campiness that helped make the first installment mildly enjoyable. The sudden appearance of a protective angel (Victor Webster of Embrace the Vampire [2014 / trailer]), who is both murderous and ineffectual, pads the time and adds to the body count, but does little to make the movie any more entertaining or logical.
But then, none of the kills are particularly interesting and at least one seems oddly inconsistent: a lawyer (John Benjamin Martin), for example, makes no wish but nevertheless kills himself at the djinn's influence simply because Lisa wishes a court settlement would be reached? Excuse us for failing to see how the court settlement required his death — and, also, if the djinn is so powerful that he can influence others, why can't he simply make Lisa make three wishes? Indeed, he seems to have the power to invade her wet dreams— pictured below — so why can't he bend her will? And, really, perhaps we're being a bit pedantic here, but we do tend to see a difference between a wish ("I wish I could love you for who you are") and a statement of desire ("I'd trade my soul to be a pimple on her ass") — the film pretty much misses the chance of a good laugh with the latter by leaving the result to the viewer's imagination.
Is there anything good about the movie? Well, some of the actors are appealing. Lisa is rather attractive, and the movie's opening does include an extended sex scene which has her bare a lot — a scene that once again proves (especially by way of comparison with the later scene in the strip club) that all natural is way better than all plastic.
All natural:
Likewise, Lisa's true love Sam (Jason Thompson of Circle [2010 / trailer]), may be a bitter asshole for most of the movie, but he is good-looking and while we never get a full frontal, we get a lot of his smooth skin in the sex scene with Lisa. And, indeed, the pre-credit love scene is surprisingly well done and sexy, doing wonders to reflect the happiness the loving young couple enjoys (prior to the appearance of the words "Three years later"). Sure, even a fixer-upper like the house they bought probably cost more than they would have, and, yes, they do screw in a bed found in the attic that, in all likelihood, considering the condition of the house that they don't yet actually live in, would logically be filthy and full of bugs, but hell: the scene does show a level of romantic joie de vivre that indicates the director might be better at women's films or soft-core porn than he obviously is at horror. Indeed, so much of this flick revolves around relationships, lust and love, and sex and desire that one could easily imagine that it was originally meant as a Zalman King project.
But Wishmaster IV, in theory, is a horror film. In theory. Not in theory, however, but in fact: as a horror film, Wishmaster IV is a tedious lick-a-thon that bores until it ends with a whimper. Yes, it has tits — but who watches cheap-shit movies for mammaries, now-a-days? That's what the internet is for.
All plastic:
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Misc. Film Fun: Live Long enough to Find the Right One (France, 2006)

November 26, 2015, 1:24 am
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Remember the Rubettes? Not by name, probably, but they were an assembled British pop band that, while a one-hit wonder in the US, were more successful in Europe. Their biggest international hit is without a doubt Sugar Baby Love (1974), but perhaps more notable is that they were one of the few pop groups in the 70s who had the balls to do a "serious" song about a gay figure, Under One Roof (1976) — it was not a hit in the US. (Interestingly enough, another "serious" song of the same year, Rod Stewart's The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II), was.)
The bubblegum pop song Sugar Baby Love, in any event, has popped up in a number of advertisements and TV shows and movies, including P. J. Hogan's super-popular Muriel's Wedding (1994 / trailer), which is more entertaining than the trailer lets you surmise,  and Neil Jordan's less-popular Breakfast on Pluto  (2005 / trailer), which is still on our To See list.And the song is used in full in this great French, computer-animated AIDS-prevention commercial from 2006, which won a Silver Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival that same year. It tells a great story of surviving the ups and downs of life and living long enough to find the right one. It also uses some pretty nifty cinematic transitions and visual concepts that show more creativity than many a movie we've watched. And, lastly, it has a happy ending. It may be a commercial, but it is very much a cinematic experience. Enjoy.

The straight equivalent to this ad, by the way, using the The Vibrators'"punk" classic Baby Baby [1977], can be seen here. It is not as visually fun, is annoyingly Phyllis Schlafly in attitude, somewhat racist,* and oddly annoying and less enjoyable than the queer ad. It basically can be labelled FAIL. (Remember, all you vaginas out there: if you can't get a man and that house in the suburbs, your only option is to jump off a bridge. And while we're at it: face it, if you don't one day have kids, you are not a complete woman.)
* Though, actually, when remembering our wild years long ago as a teen in Washington, DC, when we slept with anything that moved, the "racist" interlude — sorry, fellow white guys — is true. (We confess to having played both Cowboys & Indians and with dolls well into our post-college years.)
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Short Film: The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (USA,1916)

November 30, 2015, 1:58 am
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So here we have a truly odd fish of a public-domain film. (We couldn't resist saying that.)
In the simplest of terms, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is a silent two-reeler comedy, a burlesque, one of many in general as well as one of the very few that the great silent (and later talkie) film star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (23 May 1883–12 Dec 1939) ever made. Also of note: the list of names involved aside from Fairbanks — script, Tod Browning (The Unknown [1927], Dracula [1931 / trailer], Freaks [1932 / trailer], Mark of the Vampire [1935 / trailer], The Devil Doll [1936 / trailer], and more more more); subtitles, Anita Loos (The Women [1939 / trailer]); direction, John Emerson and the fired Christy Cabanne* (The Mummy's Hand [1940 / trailer] & Scared to Death [1947 / trailer]); co-star Bessie Love (who began headlining films like The Lost World (1925 / full film) and ended as a character actress in movies like  the original Children of the Damned [1964 / trailer] and José Ramón Larraz's classic Vampyres [1974 / trailer]) — is exceptional to say the least.
And of note among the names of the background bit-players:  the beautiful but long-forgotten Alma Rubens  (19 Feb 1897 – 21 Jan 1931), whose career, ironically enough, collapsed due to her drug problems. Ironically, we say, because this pre-code comedy is all about drugs, and it's definitely not anti-drug either.
And what is The Mystery of the Leaping Fish about? Let's let the Worldwide Celluloid Massacre explain the film: "A short slapstick spoof on Sherlock Holmes from 1916 made into a cult item by its heavy use of drugs. Coke Ennyday (Fairbanks) is a detective who literally sets his clock by his drugs and carries syringes with him in order to function. He also eats opium paste right out of a can and disables assailants with drugs. He investigates the mystery of a man literally rolling in money to find out his secret and befriends a fish-blower: a woman (Love) who blows air into inflatable fish for people on the beach."
The short is, of course, normally silent; we know nothing about the music added to the background of the version found on YouTube below. 

*Christy Cabanne: a forgotten and unknown name now, but notable for being, along with Sam Newfield (The Monster Maker [1944]) and William Beaudine, one of the most prolific directors in the history of American films.
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Black Killer (Italy, 1971)

December 4, 2015, 2:56 am
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Opening Credits to
the French release:
(Spoilers.) One might assume that we came to this movie by way of everyone's favorite child molester, the cult legend Klaus Kinski, but that is not exactly 100% correct. The actor that initially drew us to this sub-standard, obviously low-budget spaghetti western is the forgotten Norwegian actor Fred Robsahm, who died this year on March 26, 2015, at the age of 71.
Robsahm, after what initially seemed to be a promising start of a pan-European film career with his lead in the once much-lauded but now mostly forgotten movie Flashback [1969 / scene], was ancient and forgotten history by the time Even G. Benestad got around, in 2007, to doing his documentary, Natural Born Star [trailer]), on the washed-up and HIV-positive actor. It was a photo of the young, handsome Robsahm that brought us to Black Killer, and Kinski, of course, was an added attraction, but what really made us look for the film was the presence of the beautiful Marina Malfatti — of, among others, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971 / Italian trailer), The Lady in Red Kills Seven Times (1972 / trailer), Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972 / trailer), All the Colors of the Dark (1972 / trailer) and Red Stained Lawn (1973 / Italian trailer) — at her prime (she was 32 when the film came out). And while she — as Sarah, the attractive Indian squaw with a plastic surgeon's nose, perfect aim, and way too much brown pancake make-up — is indeed one of the more enjoyably ridiculous aspects of a movie full of ridiculous aspects, neither her presence nor even her naked ass help save Black Killer from, well, being what it is: a mess.
One knows not where to begin with listing what is wrong with this movie because, well, just about everything is: Black Killer is so badly acted and badly shot and incoherently edited and poorly paced that the cheap-looking sets and even cheaper-looking costumes almost manage to slip by unnoticed. What doesn't slip by unnoticed, however, is that the movie drags once too often, and occasionally even verges on being boring — and that despite a plethora of laughs that it instigates (never intentionally).
One of only two movies the Italian actor Carlo Croccolo (born 9 April 1927) ever directed — credited as "Lucky Moore" he made the undoubtedly equally inept spaghetti western One Gun, A Hundred Graves (trailer) that very same year, with some of the same actors and, possibly, with the same threadbare sets — Black Killer displays a notable lack of directorial talent, if not laziness and disinterest. In regards to style, despite the genre, Croccolo seems to be channeling the work of Jess Franco and not, say, Sergio Leone or Sergio Corbucci. The result is bizarre, to say the least, and perhaps because he seems more to mimic the look and feel of Franco on a truly bad day than Franco on a good day, the odd cuts and pans, bad blocking, excessive and pointless use of zooms, and total lack of visual competency do have an oddly entertaining appeal, if only because the final culminating result is so funny. But funny or not, Croccolo's filmic "style" also makes the movie hard to follow on occasion, despite the fact that the plot is relatively linear, if full of meandering tangents.
Despite the focus on Kinski as the headlined star, Kinski's character, James Webb — one assumes he must be the "Black Killer" of the title, but who knows for sure — is more of a major supporting character than anything else; Fred Robsahm's Burt Collins is actually the central character around which most of the action transpires. Kinski's Webb, in any event, rides into town one day with a horse loaded with books; claiming to be a lawyer, he spends most of the time wandering around town with big books in his hands or watching from windows or explaining the law to the town's judge, Wilson (Dante Maggio). The rest of the time, he busies himself with pulling strings behind the scenes, hiding guns in his hollowed-out books, or shooting bad guys with his books. (No matter how many bad guys involved in a shootout, none ever think of shooting the guy wandering around in the background with books in his hand.) Whether or not Webb is a good guy or bad guy, or what his intentions are, is left unclear for most of the movie, and his propensity for "loaded books" is less logical than simply another (truly ridiculous) nod to the quirky affections of so many spaghetti western heroes following the release of Corbucci's Django (1966).
Burt Collins's intentions, on the other hand, are clear: initially he returns home simply to visit his brother Peter (Jerry Ross of Karzan, Master of the Jungle [1972 / trailer]), but when quick-draw Burt cheats at cards and ends up killing a few of the bad guys, he not only becomes Sheriff but more or less causes a lot of people to die before he finally kills all the manly O'Hara Brothers, all of whom have a truly atrocious fashion sense.
That, at least, is what we were able to distill from the extremely disjointed movie which transpired on our screen.
Kinski does OK as an actor, relying as so often simply on his presence and not on any display of true acting ability. Robsahm, well, there's a reason his career went nowhere; he smiles a lot and is sort of handsome despite the grime, but he is hardly convincing. Most of the other actors — particularly Dante Maggio as the judge, Calogero Caruana  (of Mandinga [1976 / trailer]) as Miguel O'Hara, Enzo Pulcrano as Pedro O'Hara, and to an extent even Croccolo himself as the Deputy Sheriff — seem to think that they are acting in a silent movie, and thus arch and bulge their eyes or exhibit over-exaggerated body language more typical of an early D.W Griffith or Charlie Chaplin movie than a modern western. The female characters are all of the laughable kind, and totally superfluous. Consuelo (Tiziana Dini) seriously exists for no other reason than to be or get nude, and she is or gets nude in almost all her scenes — in fact, at one point, during an exchange with bad guy Ramon O'Hara (Antonio Cantafora, of Juan Piquer Simón's Supersonic Man [1979 / trailer]), she starts out naked, gets dressed, and then gets undressed again. (She dies with her clothes on.) The sexy Indian Sarah (Marina Malfatti) doesn't expose as much skin, but she looks more like a European in a politically incorrect costume on the way to a Halloween party than a Native American, and her presence is far more enjoyable for the laughs she gets than for being convincing. She shoots a mean bow, though.
Some credit should be given to the music by Daniele Patucchi, which sounds so much like a soundtrack to a spaghetti western that it occasionally verges on becoming a parody of spaghetti western music. Often, hints of incidental themes from more famous movies (Once Upon a Time in the West [1968 / trailer], for example) or western songs (Ghost Riders in the Sky, for example) echo weakly in the background. Still, if the rape scene is in any way uncomfortable, it is due only to the disquieting carpet of sound that he puts behind it, so he obviously put some though into what he was composing. (Patucchi, who that same year did the music to David Friedman's The Terrible Swift Sword of Siegfried [1972 / trailer] and Mario Mancini's Frankenstein '80 [1972 / German trailer], went on to do the music to Il sesso della strega / The Sex of the Witch [1973 / scene], Umberto Lenzi's Mondo cannibale [1972 / German trailer], and two José Ramón Larraz movies, La muerte incierta [1973 / 5 minutes] and Estigma [1980 / excerpt]).
One thing for sure, when talking about the obscure and forgotten movie Black Killer, we aren't talking about some long-underappreciated masterpiece — unless, that is, you want to talk about masterpieces of crap. And even then, as laughable and as bad as Black Killer is, it has one too many dry spell and thus simply drags too much to be a truly enjoyable piece of craptastic cinema. Black Killer borders the edge of psychotronic enjoyability, often wetting its toes if not its ankles in the waters of the surreally stupid, but for all its teasing, for all the come-hither-and-enjoy-my-inability allure it exudes, Black Killer just never truly goes overboard to being truly enjoyable, fabulously fun flotsam, despite being unmitigated flotsam. 
Recommended with major reservations, if at all, to fans of bad movies; fans of westerns, spaghetti or otherwise, might want to avoid Black Killer.
Theme to
Black Killer:
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Short Film: The Living Want Me Dead (USA, 2010)

December 8, 2015, 12:24 am
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'Tis the season to be jolly.... and to spend money you don't have. But how to earn the money? Give blood? Pass bad checks? Getting a "real" job is definitely out of the question — so: How about signing onto a medical experiment? Our hapless hero (Adam Conger) does the latter — and learns: never trust the government. They weren't testing Axe Deodorant — see: The Lynx Affect— that's for sure. Instead of suddenly being followed by bevies of babes, any person — or cat or dog, for that matter — that crosses his path goes projectile-puking berserk and is out for blood. Looking for a safe place to lay low, he heads off to a friend's place...
The X-mas short has won a bevy of awards, and it's easy to see why. Funny and bloody, it is better written, acted, and made than many a bigger-budgeted production.
As for the writer / director / producer Bill Palmer, Fangoriaknows more:"Bill Palmer lives out an unending, mildly amusing horror film in LA as a camera operator on sleazy reality shows. When his pockets get fat, he burns the money producing short film scripts he scribbles in notebooks while waiting for D-listers to shamble out of their trailers. His last three shorts screened at bunches of festivals and won some awards and stuff. He recently served as 2nd Unit Director on Henry Saine's upcoming post-apocalyptic actioner, Bounty Killer (2013 / trailer), featuring rapper Eve, actress Beverly D'Angelo, and philanthropist Gary Busey. He hopes to direct a feature of his own by the next lunar eclipse."
Enjoy Bill Palmer's The Living Want Me Dead, our season-appropriate Short Film of the Month for December 2015. 
The Living Want Me Dead from Bill Palmer on Vimeo.
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R.I.P.: Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven, Part IV (1994-1999)

December 15, 2015, 1:25 am
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2 August 1939 - 30 August 2015

What follows is a look at some the projects he was involved in — actually and/or presumably. Most TV series are ignored.


Go here for Part I (1970-77)
Go here for Part II (1978-86)
Go here for Part III (1987-93)


Freddy's New Nightmare
(1994, writ & dir. Wes Craven)
Hey! Wes Craven finally returns to Elm Street in this, the seventh Nightmare film, an  über-meta meta take on the franchise that has Heather Langenkamp (the original Nancy) playing Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund playing Robert Englund (and Freddy, of course, tho Freddy is credited as playing Freddy in the credits), and Wes playing Wes. That Wes was at hand might explain why Freddy is less funny and more sadistic than in virtually every entry since the first film. The basic idea of Freddy crossing over into the real world — as in: not a fictional real world, but the real world — had already been suggested by Craven for Dream Warriors (1987; see Part III), the third film of the series, but had been turned down by the studio, New Line Cinema.
Despite the general positive critical reception, New Nightmare ended up being the lowest grossing entry of the franchise. Not surprising when you see the trailer.  
Trailer:
To simply use the plot outline given at imdb by "Will": "In 1984, horror director Wes Craven created A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was acclaimed as one of the scariest movies ever made and made unknowns like Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, and Heather Langenkamp huge stars. Ten years later, Heather is living happily with her husband, Chase (David Newsom of Black Circle Boys [1997 / trailer]), and her son, Dylan (Miko Hughes of Spawn[1997] and Remains of the Walking Dead [2011 / trailer]). But her life has now been turned upside down because she is being stalked by a person who sounds like Nightmare villain Freddy Krueger. Chase has just been killed in a car accident after he accidentally fell asleep behind the wheel. Dylan refuses to sleep any more, and New Line Cinema has just offered her a part in 'the ultimate Nightmare'. But some other strange things have been happening, including earthquakes and Craven being tight-lipped about the script. The ultimate truth is that Freddy Krueger is actually an ancient demon breaking out into our world, but in order to do that, he must go through Heather. [...]."


The Fear
(1995, dir. Vincent Robert)
Trailer:
The Fear  is, to date, Vincent Robert's directorial début and only movie he's ever directed. We haven't seen The Fear, though we did see and review its remake — excuse us, sequel — The Fear:Resurrection(1999), which totally sucks donkey dick. We would hazard to guess, going by the remake — excuse us, sequel — that The Fear sucks, too, and is only noteworthy for [to quote Video Graveyard] Wes Craven's "pretty pointless cameo" as Dr. Arnold. And, maybe, for featuring former hotness Ann Turkel (of Humanoids of the Deep [1980 / trailer] and Deep Space [1988 / trailer], the latter with the great Charles Napier) and being the last movie of Vince Edwards (9 July 1928—11 March 1996), ofSpaceRaiders(1983), Return to Hollywood High(1987), and somewhere in The Killing (1956).
Trailer to a much better film —
The Killing (1956):
Popcorn Pictures has the plot: "A group of university friends go to a remote cabin for therapy where each person is supposed to 'talk' to Morty, a wooden mannequin in order to overcome their fears. Shortly after the group has divulged their fears, someone starts killing off people one-by-one and Morty starts to appear in unusual places."
Feoamnate, like virtually everyone who has seen the movie, didn't like it and says The Fear "is a 5-pound-capacity bag filled with 20 pounds of shit. Stuffed to overflowing with confused subplots and riddled through with plot holes, The Fear is a movie drowning in its inability to tell a good story. That's too bad because this concept of a wooden mannequin that may or may not be alive is a good one (and reminiscent of Pin [1988 / trailer]). Piss-poor editing in the form of people's words being chopped before they complete them; buildups to nude scenes that were obviously filmed but then cut out, and jump cuts from day to night leave The Fear as nothing more than broken pieces on the floor. There is too much going on in The Fear that has nothing to do with the story. There are also too many distracting side scenes that take you completely out of the movie. [...] It does star horror writer/director Wes Craven, however. He was probably doing a favor for a fan. He's known to have a soft heart for young filmmakers."
Feoamnate, by the way, has a very entertaining, relevant and valid page entitled The Unfair Racial Cliché Alert, which The Fear also earns. 


Vampire in Brooklyn
(1995, dir. Wes Craven)
Trailer:
The mind boggles: Wes Craven directs an Eddie Murphy movie. Probably seemed like a good idea at the time — and, indeed, the trailer looks good. We saw the film in the cinema. And we didn't laugh. We've made a point to forget everything about the movie which, basically, as a rehash of an earlier Murphy film, simply involves Murphy's main character, Maximillian, Coming to America (1988) in search of a wife — just now he's a Caribbean vampire instead of some dorky African prince. In addition to playing the vamp, co-scriptwriter / producer Murphy also plays an alcoholic preacher and a foul-mouthed Italian gangster.
The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review has the plot, more or less: "A ship crashes in Brooklyn harbour with all its crew dead. The vampire Maximilian (Murphy) emerges, having travelled from the Bermuda Triangle in search of a woman to help him continue the vampire species. He believes he finds her in police detective Rita Veder (Angela Bassett) as she comes to investigate the bodies on the ship. Maximilian then sets about trying to romantically woo Rita."
Typical of the response the movie generates is what good ol'Roger Ebert said about the movie: "At one point early in Vampire in Brooklyn, the vampire's victim says, 'Don't be pulling that old Blacula shit on me.' If only he had been! Blacula (1972), actually one of the better movies from the blaxploitation period, was miles better than this disorganized mess. Eddie Murphy, whose career is seriously in need of reviving, should have thought twice before entrusting it to an amateur-night screenplay stapled together from a story by himself and his brothers."
Trailer to
Blacula (1972):
Angela Bassett's stunt double for the movie, Sonja Davis, died in an accident on the set, a price the film is not worth: She was performing a 45-foot backwards jump/fall and miscalculated the landing — her body hit the airbag, but her head hit cement. Angela Bassett went on to do better horror movies, like Critters 4 (1992 / trailer) and Supernova (2000 / trailer).


The Outpost
(1995, dir. Joe Gayton)

Trailer:
Aka Mind Ripper. We saw this movie, which was originally written as another sequel to The Hills Have Eyes (1977, see Part I) but retooled prior to filming. Wes Craven produced his son's début as scriptwriter. We saw the DVD — click the linked title above to read our full review — and were not amused, saying among other things, "Indeed, it is one of those films you never want to pop in your DVD player, for life is much too short to be wasted on a piece of shit like Mind Ripper.")
The Spinning Image  has the plot to a movie its star, Lance Henrickson, describes as "One of those films that pays your alimony": "A former scientist (Henrickson) decides to take his repulsive teenage children up into the mountains en-route to a camping holiday to visit his old workplace. It's a lab, housed in an abandoned nuclear bunker, from which he resigned a while back for ethical reasons, and they've now begged him to come back and look at what they've done: turned a half-dead guy they found out in the desert (Dan Blom) into an indestructible WWF wrestler whose tongue now looks like a dog's cock sticking out of a horse's twat. By the time they arrive, he's gone on the rampage, killing off the scientists now trapped inside The Outpost…"
Over at YouTube, Good Bad Flicks tells you all the reasons you should or shouldn't watch the movie.
Good Bad Flicks'Mind Ripper Movie Review:


Scream
(1996, dir. Wes Craven)
Well, if Wes ever had trouble paying the rent, he surely didn't after this movie. Finally, 12 years after A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven hits the jackpot with a new horror franchise, one that remains in his hands through three sequels and a TV series. What started out as a nod to Psycho (1960 / trailer) and a fresh idea — having the biggest-named star (Drew Barrymore) die first in the opening scene — has since become an overused trope in its own right.
Drew nude, not from the movie:
The script, written by Kevin Williamson, was supposedly inspired by the true story of the Gainesville Ripper; Williamson went on to pen two of the three sequels as well as the highly entertaining flicks I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997 / trailer) and The Faculty (1998 / trailer), as well as the less entertaining flicks Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999 / trailer), which he also directed, and Wes Craven's Cursed (2005). If you watch Scream — and, indeed, it is an entertaining meta-take on the teen slasher genre — keep your eyes open for a guest appearance of the director himself wearing a red-and-green shirt as the school's janitor, Freddy. As Scream went through a lot of recuts to get its initial R-rating, it is now also available in a "Director's Cut", supposedly with everything reinserted. We saw the non-director's cut way back when it first came out and rather enjoyed it, despite Neve Campbell's somewhat wet-rag performance as the final girl Sidney Prescott and Rose McGowan's terrible bleached hair.
TV Guide has the plot: "Small-town virgin Sidney Prescott (Campbell) is being stalked by a psycho-killer who's already slaughtered two of her classmates and also may have murdered her mom, exactly one year earlier. Is it the video store geek (Jamie Kennedy)? Sidney's hunky and too-good-to-be-true boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich)? Her dad (Lawrence Hecht), who's supposedly away on business but can't be located? Class weirdo Stuart (Matthew Lillard), who's dating Sidney's perky best friend (McGowan)? The high-strung, teen-hating school principal (Henry Winkler)? The janitor in the Freddy Krueger sweater? In-jokes — some quite clever — abound, everything from Halloween (1978 / trailer) to TV's Millennium (1996-99) comes in for a tongue-in-cheek drubbing, and the requisite scenes of various girls being stalked by a killer in a dime-store Halloween costume are extremely well staged. The 'but this isn't a movie, it's real life,' dialogue wears a bit thin and the ending steps over the line into preposterousness, but compared with most of what passes for scary movies these days, this is golden: it's not stupid, it's not wussy and it pulls off a couple of pretty nasty jolts."
Trailer:


Shadow Zone: The Undead Express
(1996, dir. Stephen Williams)
We've always wondered: do Black Canadians call themselves Canadians, Afro Canadians or Afro Americans? In any event, the same year that Wes Craven released Scream, he took the time to make a guest appearance in a small role in this obscure Canadian movie directed by one of the above — not that the last really matters, as Shadow Zone: The Undead Express is less political than the average Ernest R. Dickerson or F. Gary Gary flick and is pretty lily white through and through.
For those not in the know (we weren't, before today), Shadow Zone was the franchise title to a series of 13 supernatural young adult novels popular in the 1990s written by several different authors under the pseudonym "J.R. Black". Two of the series were eventually filmed in the Great White North as TV movies by Stephen Williams: this one here, the 5th novel of the series, and the 11th novel, My Teacher Ate My Homework (1997 / trailer).
Over at All Movie,  Cavett Binion has supplied the following synopsis: "A horror semi-parody targeted at the young adult market [...], this made-for-TV vampire tale stars Chauncey Leopardi as Zach, a teenage rebel with a flair for telling ghost stories, who stumbles on an underground cabal of vampires when he takes a fateful ride on a New York subway. The vampire's leader, Valentine (Ron Silver [2 July 1946 — 15 March 2009], of the lame Canadian horror movie The Wisher  [2002]), proposes a deal to young Zach, offering him safe passage to the world above, thus enabling the trapped vampire — who can only mingle with humanity through the willing assistance of an innocent youth — to reach the surface as well. Our young hero balks at this idea and escapes to the surface with a wild story for his skeptical pals, who shun him until one of their number is kidnapped by the undead subway dwellers in exchange for Zach's cooperation. Though atmospherically photographed, this low-budget production is a bit too corny to provide either laughs or chills, and it suffers further from lethargic pacing."
Women in Prison Films points out that the movie "features abandoned subway stations, a snowy graveyard, a black hippie vampire, and exploding and melting vampires."
Trailer:


(1997, dir. Robert Kurtzman)
Wes Craven presents — we have out doubts how much Craven had anything to do with this movie, but once again he's headlining as "Wes Craven Presents The Wishmaster". Though a movie everyone seems to hate, we saw it and rather enjoyed it — click on the linked title above to read our typically verbose review of the movie.
Wishmaster went on to spawn three sequels, all direct-to-DVD, none of which were presented by Wes Craven. We've only saw the last, Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled (2002 / trailer), and we hated it.
365HorrorMovie.Com, which calls the movie "one of my biggest guilty pleasures", has the plot: "'Forget Barbara Eden. Forget Robin Williams. To the people of ancient Arabia, the Djinn was neither cute not funny. It was something else entirely. It was the face of fear itself.' Yes, genies are neither big-breasted women living with an astronaut nor hairy animated comedians. They are out to turn the human race into their personal slaves. Lucky for us humans the Djinn (or genie) must first grant three wishes to the one who awakens them. Meet Alex (Tammy Lauren). She's a tomboyish cutie pie who appraises gems for an auction house. After the unfortunate demise of Ted Raimi (Army of Darkness [1992], wishes he had his brother's money), Alex is asked to appraise an opal found in the rubble of the statue that kills poor Ted. The stone awakens the ancient evil. In other more eloquent words said by the Wishmaster himself, 'The shit has hit the fan.'"
Trailer:


Scream 2
(1997, dir. Wes Craven)
Oddly enough, though we like Scream, we never saw this sequel, which was released less than a year after its predecessor.
Urban Cinefile has the plot: "Continuing where the original Scream left off, the survivors of a serial killer's spree are now in a small college town. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) hope their previous problems are behind them, but then another killing spree begins. Deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette) arrives in town to protect Sidney. Likewise, TV reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), who wrote a book on the original murders that's been turned into a movie itself, also shows up to cover the breaking story. Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), the man Sidney initially accused of killing her mother, arrives too, and wants Sidney to do a TV interview with him. While some people, including roommate Hallie (Elise Neal) and boyfriend Derek (Jerry O'Connell), try to comfort Sidney, others, such as Randy the film buff, and local reporter Debbie Salt (Laurie Metcalf) try to figure out who the killer is and whether they're creating a sequel to the original murders. Soon everyone becomes a suspect, but as the body count rises Sidney and Gale do what they can to prevent themselves from becoming the killer's next victims."
Trailer:
Some people, like Classic Horror, like the movie: "Scream 2 is one of those rare sequels [...]. The script in this film is as sharp as, if not sharper, than the first film, and Craven still has a great skill at building fright and suspense. While its predecessor thoroughly interrogates the clichés and tropes of modern slasher films, Scream 2 brings this same wit to the exploration of sequels. It also looks, briefly, into the debate over film's influence on real life. While it tends towards a convoluted plot, Scream 2 is nevertheless a worthy successor to its groundbreaking original."
Other, like Foster on Film, didn't see the movie as worth more than a paragraph, a six-sentence paragraph at that, which ends with the following judgment: "There was enough material [in Scream 2] for an excellent 15-minute short. Unfortunately, they dragged it out into a feature."


Wes Craven's Carnival of Souls
(1998, dir. Adam Grossman)
 

"And Wes Craven, I think, should be hung by his thumbs at Hollywood and Vine for movie fans to stone, because he's so devastated the intent of the original."
Candace Hilligoss (star of the original Carnival of Souls)

Wes Craven's Carnival of Souls is a remake of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962) — a fact that leads to only one logical question: Was it really needed?
Trailer:
TV Guide mentions that "Though Wes Craven's name appears in the title of this dismal, sort-of remake of the classic 1962 chiller, he actually contributed nothing to the screenplay and had no hand in directing. [...] The idea for a new Carnival of Souls originated with actress Candace Hilligoss, who played the haunted girl suspended somewhere between life and death in the first film. In 1989 she asked Harvey whether he'd be interested in making a sequel and, she says, he replied 'If you want the headache, you pursue it.' Hilligoss wrote a script and began trying to drum up interest in it. But the project eventually wound up in the hands of director Adam Grossman, who co-wrote a new script with original Carnival of Souls screenwriter John Clifford; Hilligoss was cut out of the project entirely. [...] Hilligoss, disgusted with the way things had worked out, refused to appear in a cameo role, but Sidney Berger (who played her memorably lecherous neighbor in the first film) appeared in a small role as a policeman."
In any event, the hope that Craven's name in the title might drag in a few lost souls proved in vain: the movie was a flop and to date director Adam Grossman, normally a musician, hasn't — Surprise! — directed another movie.

 "Their remake says in the opening credits, 'A Film by Adam Grossman.' I don't know who he is, but the audience should now know that if they ever see 'A Film by Adam Grossman' on any movie, it should be a cue to run for the nearest exit!"
Candace Hilligoss (star of the original Carnival of Souls)

We did not bother renting the DVD to Wes Craven's Carnival of Souls, and for a long time even sight unseen we would've simply said you shouldn't either. But over the years we've become less militant in our distaste of remakes, especially if they don't follow the original plot all that much and, instead, use the basic idea to create a new story — which this film supposedly does. (An example of a movie that doesn't would be Jan de Bont's lousy version of The Haunting [1999 / trailer], which only ups the shocks and blood, tweaks a few characters lightly, and loses all the tension and beauty.) Still, we are sure that the original Carnival of Souls— a masterpiece of low budget, subtle horror — is better than this remake.
A poster to the original movie:
The plot? The AV Club explains it: "Bobbie Phillips stars as the owner of a dockside bar not too far from an old carnival site. On the anniversary of her mother's murder, she finds herself haunted by the figure of the clown, played by the not-too-scary Larry Miller, who is responsible for her mother's death and her own molestation as a child. That the otherworldly Miller harasses the adult Phillips Freddie Krueger-style, accompanied by what appear to be monsters left over from Jacob's Ladder (1990 / trailer) [...] lends the whole thing a creepy, exploitative feel that would probably be excusable if the movie were any good. But it's not: It's just another straight-to-video horror film that appears to have had any bit of ambition squeezed out of it and replaced with cheaper-than-usual cheap thrills. Seek out the original if you haven't seen it; it's a great film that doesn't depend on a clown-make-up-clad Miller abusing a small child for its chills."
Full Movie —
the original Carnival of Souls:


Don't Look Down
(1998, dir. Larry Shaw)
Craven was one of a variety of producers on this TV movie by television director Larry Shaw that originally aired on 29 October 1998 on ABC, but the only producer added to the title — more proof that "Wes Craven Presents" is a sure label of sub-standard entertainment.
Many a DVD cover has the great blurb "Genuinely Nail Biting", credited either to Variety or to DVD Verdict— the sentences that followed that statement in the original review (at DVD Verdict at least) are the important ones, however: "Not scary. Not thrilling. Not suspenseful. Nail-biting… why not? You might as well be productive while this movie is playing, and fingernail maintenance is as good as anything. Whatever you do, don't look down… you might find some belly button lint that needs your attention. [...] I've seen after-school specials that were scarier than this. If you want a real scare, open that pizza box in the back of the fridge. Whatever you do, don't look down."
At-A-Glance Film Reviews says "The story is entertaining enough, but it's bogged down with an overuse of dreamlike sequences and spooky off-screen whispering."Vegan Voorhees, in turn, is of the opinion that "a not-entirely predictable exposition from the killer and the fact that the black woman lives are the only distinguishing features in this boring crack at a potentially interesting premise."
The plot? Over at imdb, Kyle explains it: "Carla's sister (Tara Spencer-Nairn of Wishmaster 4 [2002]) accidentally falls off a cliff when the railing becomes loose while Carla's boyfriend (Billy Burke of Dead & Breakfast [2004]) takes photos. Carla (Megan Ward) has a hard time getting over her death and keeps having visions of her sister yelling at her for not saving her. It seems that every time she gets next to a edge of a high area, she gets terrified. She then starts to take a class with other Acrophobiacs [sic]. Then the people in the group start getting killed one by one. She starts to suspect that someone wants her never to get over her fear and that the loose railing was meant for her."
By the way: many, many years ago, Gregory Goodell, the scriptwriter of Don't Look Down, made his directorial and scriptwriting debut with the sadly overlooked and forgotten entry into women in prison films, Human Experiments (1979). A way better movie that this piece of generic TV flotsam.
Trailer to
Human Experiments (1979):


Hollyweird
(1998, dir. Jefery Levy)
Not to be confused with the never-released documentary film directed by Penelope Spheeris on the making of the Charles Band movie, Blood Dolls (1999 / trailer). This Hollyweird was a pilot episode for a television series for Fox that never happened. Once again, of all the half dozen producers — including Shaun Cassidy (!), the show's official creator — only Wes Craven is deemed worthy of presenting the TV pilot.
TV.com has the plot: "The show followed the adventures of three aspiring filmmakers, Trey (Bodhi Elfman of Shrunken Heads [1994 / trailer]), Charlie (Fab Filippo of Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil [1992 / trailer]) and Caril Ann (Melissa George of Dark City [1998] and Turistas [2006]), after they arrive in Hollywood from the Midwest. [...] The hour-long drama promised to show the dark side of the entertainment industry."
The photo above of the three stars of the pilot was taken from Melissa George's website, which also mentions that the three main characters "take their love for the macabre and use it to solve crimes plaguing Los Angeles. The twist being that [they] ... film their investigations as well as hunt for the bad guy."
Full Pilot:
Some years previously, director Jefery Levy scripted (but didn't direct) the entertaining cheapy Ghoulies (1984 / trailer) and the sort of fun "what were they thinking?" comedy Rockula (1990 / trailer).


Music of the Heart
(1999, dir. Wes Craven)

Going by this film, one could easily surmise that Wes Craven undoubtedly always felt, well, pigeonholed as a "horror director" and had a secret yen to do a "real" movie. The success of Scream (1996) and Scream II (1997) seems to have given him the clout to finally make his first non-horror feature film. We confess to having seen it, out of curiosity, and have to admit that when it comes to making generic Hollywood feel-good product, Wes Craven could deliver corn as well as the best of them. As Mr Cranky says, "If feel-good were a drug, this film would be a heroin overdose."
Inspired by the documentary Small Wonders (1995), Music of the Heart is a dramatization of the true story of Roberta Guaspari, the woman who co-founded the Opus 118 Harlem School of Music. (True or not, it is a perfect example of the white-savior narrative cinematic trope — where would dem poor black folks be without dem good white folks?) Originally and oddly enough a Madonna vehicle, when she bailed the great Meryl Streep took over the lead role, for which she was yet again nominated for an Oscar (but lost to the far more deserving Hilary Swank for Boys Don't Cry [1999 / trailer]). Thanks to Streep, however, and the disgustingly crappy "original song"Music of My Heart— written by Diane Warren and sung by Gloria Estefan and *NSYNC— this movie became Craven's first and only film to ever be nominated for Oscars.
As fitting to the movie, let us go to Christian Answers for more info onMusic of My Heart, which they describe as "a satisfying 'feel-good' movie that has very little that would be offensive to Christian audiences": "[...] Roberta Guaspari has recently moved herself and her two sons in with her mother (Cloris Leachman of Kiss Me Deadly [1955 / trailer] and Young Frankenstein [1974 / trailer]), after her marriage fails. Roberta (Meryl Streep) takes her limited teaching experience and pitches a violin class to a sceptical principal (Angela Bassett). After proving how well she's taught her young sons the instrument, Roberta is given a chance. It is slow going at first, as Roberta has to deal with inattentive students, and disapproving parents and fellow teachers. One African-American parent snaps that her son has better things to do than learn 'dead white men's music', even though her son lights up while he's taking his music lessons. The violin program grows so much in popularity that kids have to enter a lottery to get a chance to get into it. When the program is cut due to the insensitive school system, Roberta fights back."

 Part V will follow next month.
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