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Short Film: Henri 2, Paw de Deux (USA, 2012)

May 27, 2015, 11:57 pm
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OK, you've probably seen it already, but then, as Roger Elbert once said, Henri 2, Paw de Deux is "The best internet cat video ever made."
The second of (currently) eleven Henri films, Henri 2, Paw de Deux remains our favorite encapsulation of pretentious ennui that we have yet to see. The first Henri short was made as a film project at the Seattle Film Institute by filmmaker William Braden, a former wedding videographer, who has since parlayed his series of Henri shorts into a book deal and TV commercials (for a cat food we would never feed out cat). Henri, by the way, is actually Henry, a former shelter cat and Seattle native that is by now in the twilight years.
In the same flavor as the video above, let us share with you another old chestnut that we go in the mail some years ago: Dog's Diary  vs. Cat's

DOG DIARY
8:00 am - Dog food! Oh boy! My favorite!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite!
10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! Oh boy! My favorite!
12:00 pm - Lunch! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm - Played in the yard! Oh boy! My favorite!
3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite!
5:00 pm - Milk bones! Oh boy! It's my favorite!
7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite!
8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite!
11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! Oh boy! My favorite!

CAT DIARY
Day 983.
My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet. Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. Bastards! There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of "allergies." I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage. Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow — but at the top of the stairs. I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released — and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously on their side. The bird has got to be an informant. I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe... at least for now.

Lastly, let us not forget the terrors of: Kitler!
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The Dead Undead (USA, 2010)

June 3, 2015, 3:02 am
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When watching a movie like The Dead Undead, we can't help but feel that for someone who hopes to make it as an actor, and has managed — as has The Dead Undead's lead actor Luke Goss — to already appear in relatively notable roles like that of the bad guys Prince Nuada in Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008 / trailer) and Jared Nomak in Blade II (2002 / trailer), it must be an incredible let-down to act in a movie like The Dead Undead.
Still, perhaps he should look on the bright side: at least he hasn't slid as far down the Hollywood ladder as, say, the completely forgotten but far more talented and tragic actress Helen Wood (4 June 1917 — 8 Feb 1988), who began in her career in movies such as the original version of Champagne Charlie (1936) and B-films like Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936 / full movie), Crack-Up (1936 with Peter Lorre / full film) and Almost a Gentleman (1939, with Ace the Wonder Dog) before moving up the Hollywood ladder to play Mary of Nazareth in The Pilgrimage Play (1949) and, finally, dance alongside Debbie Reynolds in Give A Girl A Break (1953, see the trailer below), only to end her life in hardcore porn as Dolly Sharp, whom we all remember as playing Linda Lovelace's best friend in Deep Throat (1972) who utters the immortal line "Do you mind if I smoke while you're eating?" (famous NSFW scene).
Helen Wood (Dolly Sharp) as Joanna,
"a pretty face",in the trailer to
Give A Girl A Break (1953):
The Dead Undead, the directorial début of two stuntmen, Matthew R. Anderson and Edward Conna, who also appear in the movie as, respectively, Viper and Doc, is low budget horror flick that looks much more like a no budget vanity production possibly made by Montanan NRA members. It's not a movie that a truly up-and-coming successful actor would want on their resume, but let's be honest, even a rent-paying job like this is still a lot better than selling your blood at the blood bank. (Anything is better than that — we know, we did it for way too long once upon a time.)
The DVD box makes some reference to a narrative about a group of teenagers caught between a raging hoard of zombie vampires and a troop of vampire commandos trying to stop the spread of a zombie infection. And, true enough, the movie opens with the arrival of a stereotypical group of twens at a deserted motel for a weekend of fun and party — but they aren't around long, serving first and foremost as a way to pad the movie's running time. And padding the movie's running time is actually what the movie is all about, if you ask us.
Directors Anderson and Conna do manage to work in one gratuitous scene of young girls in bathing suits — scandalous! — before most of the twens drop like flies, but on the whole the filmmakers seem to like guns and shooting a lot more than they do naked flesh — indeed, no babe ever even gets naked in this turkey of a movie, which on the other hand presents the assembling of guns is excessive, loving detail. (The fact that the RV the teens are driving has Montana plates, that there is no nudity in the flick, and that so much time of the movie is focused on weaponry is the reason we pegged The Dead Undead as a possible Montanan gun-lover's vanity production.)
Be what it may, however, the filmmakers do at least keep the best-looking, bustiest, and most likable babe, Summer (Cameron Goodman), as the final girl, thus revealing that they may indeed at least have some slight appreciation of female pulchritude. Summer, like a young man who shows up later, really has nothing to offer the movie as a character, but she is at least nice to look at. By the end of the movie, she not only gives up vegetarianism to help ensure the defeat of the zombie undead, but also delivers the only line in the entire movie that had everyone (5 people) at our screening rolling on the floor in unison: just when Jack (Luke Goss) is about to head off to kick zombie butt, she truly says: "Jack... wait... [*pause*]... Be careful." (OK, you had to be there, but within the context of the movie, it's a hilarious scene.)
As already mentioned, but for Summer, the other teens are out of the picture quickly, replaced by the good-guy vampire commando team that is the true focus of the movie. The commandos are played one and all but for the lead by stuntpeople — including the singular woman (Spice Williams-Crosby as the ass-kicking Gabrielle) who, in real life, seems to be addicted to cheap facelifts. Over the course of the movie, one after the other they too all fall in the war against the zombie vamps, most of whom, we learn, were, prior to their infection, peace-loving cow-blood-drinking "nightwalkers" who used to all live serenely together in a remote rural town.
Early in the movie it is established that the zombie vamps are hard to kill but not impossible: the head needs only to be completely separated from the spine. Why the filmmakers even bother to establish this fact is beyond us, however, as throughout the whole movie all that the good guys ever do is shoot wildly all over the place or swing swords that never cut anybody. The result: interminable fight scenes that truly come across as pointless — much like the movie itself.
Also, much like the miserable no-budget sci-fi flick Alien Invader (1992), which surely had a higher budget than this thing here, The Dead Undead pads its running time by telling, in flashback, the various origins of the main vamp heroes, thus enabling the addition of a short Viking interlude, a short Vietnam interlude, and a short Western interlude. (The viewer is spared only the creation of the film's lead vamp Jack, played by Luke Goss, whom, actually, we wouldn't mind seeing in a porno.) The three interludes are in general more entertaining than the movie's main narrative, if only because they're often rather funny in the amatuerity of their presentation, offer a slight variance to constant shooting and gun worship, and are generally over relatively quickly. The Dead Undead itself, however, is not, and at 89 minutes in length seems to take an eternity to finally reach its happy but open-end resolution. (Please, Allah, if you truly are good, let there never be a sequel.)
The Dead Undead is such stupid, unprofessional, and pointless movie that we considered not even bothering to write about it, but then we figured it is our duty to warn you against it. The movie isn't worth time it would take to illegally download it, much less the couple of euros our buddy spent to buy it. There are a thousand better ways to waste one's time than to watch this uninteresting and boring turd — indeed, we would venture to say that contemplating the existential meaning of the lint in your bellybutton or pulling the individual nose hairs out of your nostrils with tweezers are both more entertaining activities than watching The Dead Undead. (As would be watching Deep Throat, if you get down to it — Dolly Sharp is actually rather funny, and unlike The Dead Undead, Deep Throat at least has some redeeming qualities.
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Das Gasthaus an der Themse / The Inn on the River (Germany, 1962)

June 11, 2015, 2:09 am
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German Trailer:
(Spoilers!) The third Wallace film adaptation to be directed by director Alfred Vohrer for Rialto Films, Das Gasthaus an der Themse may have its flaws but it is not without reason that it is one of the more popular films of the series: it is both a worthy and enjoyable entry in the series — tacky, thrilling, funny, well-shot, fun.
Based on Wallace's book The India Rubber Men, from 1929, it is the second movie to use that book as its basis: Maurice Elvey's 1938 film, The Return of the Frog, also took its plot from that book, although Elvey's movie itself was made as a sequel to the 1937 film The Frog, an adaptation of Wallace's novel The Fellowship of the Frog (a novel filmed three times under various titles — including as the first Rialto Wallace movie, Der Frosch mit der Maske [1969]).
But enough history, let's get to the Rialto flick. One true pleasure of Das Gasthaus an der Themse, like so many of the Rialto adaptations, is the music: scored by Martin Bottcher, the opening song, complete with sounds of a cuckoo clock, dogs barking, and yells is undoubtedly one of the more entertaining soundtracks to come out of Germany/Europe during a generation specializing in incredibly strange (soundtrack) music. With this film, Bottcher easily holds his own alongside even the best that Peter Thomas ever had to offer. Bottcher, who still works today scoring for television from his homes in Sardinia and Lugano, is also the man behind one of Germany's most familiar and loved melodies: the theme song to the Winnetou films.
First scene, credits sequence & title track to
Das Gasthaus an der Themse:
The first scene of Das Gasthaus an der Themse (above) is wonderfully typical of an Edgar Wallace film of the 1960s. It is a dark and foggy night, and lone man paddles his boat down the river Thames. From the viewpoint of someone standing on a bridge, we see the boat glide underneath one side and then out the other, the seated man suddenly looking rather like a dressed window puppet. Flllitzzsch!! The puppet gets a harpoon in its back, the puppet is suddenly a man again who lets out a scream of pain before collapsing, the music blares, and the credits roll. A film can hardly begin any better...
A killer called the Shark is not only loose on the Thames, but when he isn't busy harpooning people, he also masterminds a series of spectacular jewel robberies. Inspector Wade (Joachim Fuchsberger) is sure that the Shark has something to do with a riverside dive named Mekka, run by the whiskey-smuggling, smoothly corrupt Nelly Oaks (Elisabeth Flickenschildt), who likes to entertain her guests by singing songs about how everything fun and nasty happens at night. (When she isn't singing to them, the noticeably interracial group likes to drink whiskey, start knife fights, and do the twist.) Is she the Shark? Or is it the sleazy Russian guest Gregor Gubanow (Klaus Kinski), who seems to spy on everyone. And how does Nelly's young and oddly uncorrupted ward Leila Smith (Brigitte Grothum of Die seltsame Gräfin [1961 / trailer] and Der rote Rausch [1962 / trailer]) fit in the picture? 
A number of implausible and unexpected plot twists later — after various double identities get sorted out, a few red herrings get smoked out, and the proper number of people have died — not only is the Shark finally revealed, the damsel in distress rescued and all crimes solved, but one of the biggest inheritances of England also gets saved at the same time.
Oh, yeah: and Joachim Fuchsberger gets the girl.
From the movie — Elisabeth Flickenschild sings
Was in der Welt passiert:
Jan Hendricks, whose career didn't die with the hilarious Flitterwochen in der Hölle (1960) and atrocious Der Insel der Amazonen (1960), makes his third appearance in a Wallace film as a partner of Nelly who eventually also gets a harpoon in his back. (Hendricks died much more slowly in real life of AIDS in 1991.) As always, Eddie Arent (as Barnaby) is there to supply both some out-of-place humor and a valuable clue, while Siegfried Schürenberg (as Sir John) pops into the picture occasionally to lend his undivided support to his man Wade. Less common to a Wallace film, however, is the unexpected revelation at the death of Gregor that Klaus Kinski was actually playing a good guy.
As with many a Wallace film, the acting in Das Gasthaus an der Themse is uneven, spanning from great to truly abysmal. Still, director Vohrer keeps the film paced nicely, and even manages to convincingly make the Hamburg harbor, standing in as London's river Themse, look like an eerie and dangerous waterfront. His occasional fantastically moody black and white cinematography as well as the excellent location shooting and set design definitely all go a long way towards making it easy to overlook the film's thespian flaws. The sound quality could be better, however. Some scenes sound as if they were recorded in a tin can, while in others the actors seem to be screaming at each other for no reason.
All in all, however, despite some small flaws Das Gasthaus an der Themse is definitely a worthy entry in the series and a good way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kids or by yourself, with or without a doob.
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Curfew (USA, 1989)

June 18, 2015, 1:37 am
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Our significant other does not like to watch the same kind of movies that we do. When watching DVDs together, a compromise is usually achieved by watching "art" like Titus (1999 / trailer) or something from France (we both love Jean-Pierre Jeunet, for example, the director of Delicatessen [1991 / trailer], City of Lost Children [1995 / trailer], Amelie [2001 / trailer], and Micmacs [2009 / trailer] — as well as the mildly disappointing A Very Long Engagement [2004 / trailer] and the black comedy that is Alien 4: Resurrection [1997 / trailer]*), but in general we end up with Hollywood mainstream products like Men in Black I (1997 / trailer), II (2002 / trailer) and III (2012 / trailer) or the type of crap often referred to as "women's films", worthless fertilizer with gag-worthy titles like What Women Want (2000) or Dirty Dancing (1987).
*We have to say, though, that even his worst films are better and more enjoyable than most mainstream flicks coming out of Hollywood.
One "women's film" night, owed to her after a few tacky selections on our part, she pulled out some obscure DVD entitled Letter to Juliet (2010). And though it sounded bad, since its cast did include Fabio Testi (What Have You Done to Solange? [1972 / trailer], Four of the Apocalypse [1975 / trailer], Dead Men Ride [1971 / trailer] and much more), the great Franco Nero (Django [1966 / trailer] and much, much, much more), the occasionally interesting Vanessa Redgrave (Blow Up [1966 / trailer], Ken Russell's The Devils [1971 / trailer] and more), and the undeniably extremely hot Amanda Seyfried* (Jennifer's Body [2009] and Lovelace [2013 / trailer]), we said "OK."
*Whose presence and beauty is only matched (at 180 degrees reverse) by the quality of her projects — if she doesn't start choosing better scripts, she's going to disappear in the same way as "superstar" Thora Birch. 
Oh — The Pain! The Excruciating Pain! For months of Sundays thereafter, the mere thought of Amanda Seyfried did the exact opposite of before and rendered us a limp noodle. Yes, Letter to Juliet was crap, it was total shit, it was almost a reason to go single again. And it was also directed by Gary Winick (31 March 1961 — 27 February 2011), the man who made the movie we want to write about tonight, 1986's "horror thriller" entitled Curfew. In fact, Curfew is his directorial début. We would perhaps make some comment about Letter to Juliet and Curfew being as different as night and day, were it not that they do have something major in common: they both suck. And not mouse dick, but elephant dick.
The basic plot of Curfew is a regurgitation of William Wyler's home invasion film The Desperate Hours (1955 / trailer), which, based on novel and subsequent play by Joseph Hayes, has been remade officially (for TV by Ted Kotcheff in 1967 and by Michael Cimino in 1990 [trailer], for example) and unofficially (including at least one Bollywood version, 36 Ghante [1974 / a song]), and revised/rewritten any number of times. In Curfew, the original three desperate escaped convicts on the run have been changed to two murderously wacko escaped redneck convict brothers out for revenge, the violence vamped up a bit, the acting and direction seriously worsened, and any and all of the positive aspects of the original jettisoned. To put it bluntly: Curfew is pure santorum.
Despite most of the violence in Curfew being of the inferred kind, the movie was once banned as a video nasty in England, a fact proudly plastered on the DVD cover. (Oddly enough, however, it never mentions that the story, being a riff of Desperate Hours, is ever-so-slightly based on actual events, as Joseph Hayes based his original novel and play on a home invasion that occurred in Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, in 1952.) Today, and despite the movie's bodycount of about 13, that Curfew was ever banned anywhere is truly hard to believe, as neither the violence nor the little sex is all that extreme, even by the standards of the end of the last century. True, Curfew does in an ineffectual and unskilled manner offer a slight foreshadowing of the torture porn genre that arose with snoozers like Hostel (2005 / trailer), but almost everything that happens, happens off-screen, and neither the blood nor the nekkid flesh are copious — so what was the fuss?
That Curfew is gonna suck is already obvious in the first five minutes, when the viewer is treated to a unbelievably poorly staged, filmed and acted cake-eating scene that proves to be the dream of dumb-shit killer brother number one, Bob Perkins (John Putch of Skeeter [1993 / trailer] and Jaws 3-D [1983 / trailer]), who then awakens in the jail cell he shares with dumb-shit killer brother number two, Ray Perkins (Wendell Wellman, seen somewhere in Klansman [1974 / trailer] and Clint Eastwood's badly dated Sudden Impact [1983 / trailer]) — a jail cell twice the size of many an apartment we've lived in. (And since when are sibling killers put in the same cell, anyway? Death row or not, they'd be kept separate.) 
From here, the flick cuts to small town USA, where the staging and acting doesn't improve any,  and we get to watch the inane evening spent by the wooden* lead "teenager" in trouble, Stephanie Davenport (a 20-year-old, square-jawed Kyle Richards of The Car [1977 / trailer], Eaten Alive [1977 / trailer] and The Watcher of the Woods [1980 / trailer]), as she wastes her time with her "friends"— With friends like that, who needs enemies? — before rushing home because of her 10 PM curfew. The now-escaped killer siblings, however, whom the viewers have had the pleasure of watching kill their way across the state on a mission of revenge against all those who had a hand in sending them to death row, beat her there. Thus the yawner night of psychological and physical torture begins. Why the killer siblings, after revealing themselves multiple times as relatively quick and single-minded about murder, should suddenly decide at the Davenports' house to use the whole night to entertain themselves with their victims is never explained and rather unconvincing.
* To degrade her performance as wooden is perhaps unfair, as almost everyone in the movie is wooden, with the possible exception of the overacting killer siblings.
The early obnoxious teens having fun and incompetent sheriff stuff set at the diner is an insult to the viewers intelligence — neither in any way realistic nor truly "funny", like most of the scenes in the first half that don't involve the killer brothers, it all comes across less as furthering the story than as simple filler. Up until the sheriff brings Stephanie back home, Curfew is a total snoozer, despite the various incompetently staged murders the Perkins Brothers commit along the way after escaping prison (how they escaped is neither shown nor in any way explained — one minute, they're in jail; the next, they're not). That Stephanie even falls into the hands of the killer siblings relies on an act that totally negates the concept of maternal love and sort of makes the viewer think that Momma Davenport (the unknown Jean Brooks*) deserves to die. (Not very helpful in making the viewer identify with the "good guys".)
*Not to mistaken with the great but forgotten Jean Brooks (23 December 1915— 25 November 1963), of The Seventh Victim (1943 / trailer), The Leopard Man (1943) and The Crime of Doctor Crespi (1934 / scene), a talented and beautiful actress whose career went nowhere and who eventually died of malnutrition and alcoholism.
The last half of the movie, the night of torture, is a little better than the first half, if only because some of the scenes do sort of make the viewer flinch now and then — the dead breasts are an expected but effective shock, for example, and one does cringe when the daughter is pulling glass out of daddy's back and during the extended scenes with momma that infer rape and torture — but everything is so poorly staged, so badly acted, so terribly written, so dreadfully put together that Curfew never really effectively does anything that is expected of a suspense or horror film, like build viewer identification with the characters or keep the audience on the edge of the seat. Really, it almost defies believability that a movie with as many deaths as Curfew could be as boring as Curfew actually is.
The most amazing aspect of this movie is that anyone involved ever went further in the film business. Curfew's tagline was "In by ten. Dead by midnight"; it should've been "In by ten. Dead by midnight. Killed by boredom." The awkward last scene, when Stephanie turns Dirty Harry, is good for a belly laugh, at least, but really: no belly laugh is worth the movie that precedes that one.
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Malevolence (USA, 2003)

June 25, 2015, 12:32 am
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(Spoilers.) Here's a flick that surprised us. The second flick on a two-movie DVD package, neither of which we knew anything about when the DVD fell into our hands, we ended up watching Malevolence years after the flick on the first side, Mustang Sally's Horror House (2006), primarily because Mustang Sally's sucked syphilic donkey dick to such a large extent that we figured this flick couldn't be much better. How wrong we were.
Not that Malevolence is a masterpiece, as it isn't: it suffers from some questionable acting, some odd and/or unbelievable behavior on the part of certain characters, and occasionally overly forced if not primitive narrative streamlining. But those are all common flaws found in many a film, including those with big budgets, which this film did not have. We're talking low budget independent horror here, and it is a sign of how good the movie truly is that Malevolence has such flaws but remains both a solid ride and also keeps the viewer interested.
Not that one expects it to do so when the flick starts: the pre-credit sequence doesn't promise much, and at the latest the slow, handheld, and over-lit "nighttime" travelling shot to the doorway of a house as loud, canned thunder peals in the background, one begins to feel that another truly bad film has been popped into the DVD player. But this intro, which comes almost across almost as an ironic (if unintentional) statement on the stereotypical tropes of horror movie opening scenes — "It was a dark and stormy night"— soon moves on to the quiet, well-framed, and at times aesthetically pleasing if almost sad landscapes of the opening credits, and they do wonders to build the viewer's hope. They reveal that the director obviously has a good eye — and, for the most part, he keeps it throughout the rest of the movie.
In its core, Malevolence is a generically simple slasher flick with crime-film embellishments, but along the way it becomes something more. Surprisingly engrossing for a crime cum horror movie, it becomes all the more noteworthy when one realizes that the low budget indie flick is also the feature film debut of its director/screenwriter Steven Mena, who has since gone on to make a prequel (Bereavement [2010 / trailer]) and is about to foist a sequel (Killer: Malevolence 3 [2015]).
The basic plot, once the stereotypical slasher intro is over, is that of a bank robbery gone wrong and the surviving robbers meeting at a predetermined, deserted house somewhere in the countryside of Pennsylvania. (Here, unlike in Dead Birds [2004], which despite its historical setting also begins with a robbery gone wrong before moving into supernatural horror, Mena actually manages to keep viewer sympathy with at least one character.) As fate would have it — and arbitrary fate plays a major role in much of what happens in this movie — a mysterious, seemingly unstoppable killer happens to be housing close by.
OK, let's bitch about the obvious: the killer never stays dead and, no matter how often he reappears, no one ever shoots or stabs or knocks him over the head with a baseball bat a second or third time, much less long enough to ensure that he really will never get up again. Are people really that stupid and lazy? Seriously: the film comes from a country where cops shoot black people for sport and citizens shoot foreigners for knocking on their doors or other foreign-looking citizens over parking-space disputes, and we're expected to believe that someone who's just barely survived hell won't/doesn't make sure a killer is dead when all it would take is two or three more seconds? (Isn't there a Zombieland[2009 / trailer] rule pertaining to this?)
And let's not forget about the momma, Samantha Harrison (Samantha Dark), who over the course of the film is kidnapped, along with her young softball-playing daughter Courtney (Courtney Bertolone) by a bank robber on the run (Richard Glover of Sightseers [2012 / trailer] and A Field in England [2013 / trailer]). Her pudgy daughter has managed to free herself from the same bonds she's tied with (gaffer tape), and is out on the run from an armed robber, and all momma does is fall asleep — not just once, but twice? Hallo? Steven Mena reveals a substantial lack of understanding for the maternal instinct here, if not a total disregard of reality. But then, more than once, as is normal for a slasher, the characters don't exactly react or act like the average Joe and, instead, suffer screenplay-convenience syndrome. (The most extreme example of which is when the good-guy robber Julian [R. Brandon Johnson of Fabled (2002 / trailer) and Little Erin Merryweather (2003 / trailer)], much like the Samuel L. Jackson character in The Long Kiss Goodnight [1996 / trailer], doesn't stay dead despite obviously being killed. Unlike the faceless killer, however, he doesn't do that more than once.)
But all the bitching aside, Malevolence does work. It intrigues, it enthrals, it scares, it thrills, and it makes your root for some and hate others — and best of all, it keeps you so involved that most of the flaws only come to mind after the movie is over. (Allah knows that there are enough professional filmmakers out there who have years of experience behind them and huge budgets at hand but can't do that.) So, even with the flaws, the film remains commendable: for all its echoes of the generic body counter, it manages to become more than just that. We can't help but feel that had Albert Camus been a low budget trash filmmaker instead of an intellectual and highly successful author, he probably would've made films like this one.
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Short Film: Violeta, la pescadora del mar negro (Spain, 2006)

June 29, 2015, 6:38 am
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We couldn't find all that much online about this little nightmare of a short film, at least not in a language we understand. The director, writer and production duo behind the film, Marc Riba& Anna Solanas, seem to be the CEOs of I+G Stop Motionin Barcelona, "an independent production company specialized in stop motion animation and puppet animation." This short is a dark, nightmarish example of their mastery.
The storyline commonly found online is "Violeta loves best fishing into the darkest depths," which is little more than a play on the film's title, which translates into something like "Violeta, the fisherwoman of the dark sea." In the end, Violeta, la pescadora del mar negro is somewhat plotless; more than anything else, it is simply an oneiric, disturbing tableaux of dank and disturbing scenes that play out consecutively and interlink, but there is no real beginning or end to the narrative. Nothing is resolved or revealed in this short: what went on before, and what will transpire afterwards is a mystery — the only thing for sure is that it wasn't, and won't be, pleasant.


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Nowhere to Hide / Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda (Korea, 1999)

July 2, 2015, 3:40 am
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Here's an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying movie that gives you the feeling you should like it more than it actually makes itself likable. Available in two versions, the original Korean version at 112 minutes and an international version at 97, we watched the latter and came away with two main feelings: one, the movie is surely better on the big screen than the small, and two, it's way too long (even when shorn of the extra 15 minutes). We also found the main actor playing Detective Woo (Park Joong-Hoon) unbearable and almost one-note, but the color, composition, cinematography, and visuals do compensate a bit for his half-assed imitation of a walking ape.
Nowhere to Hide opens with a high-contrast B&W scene that is actually emblematic of all that which is good and bad in the movie. In its cinematic seductiveness, it calls to mind the pop artiness often practiced by the Japanese director Suzuki Seijun in films like his classic Tokyo Drifter (1966 / trailer), if doped by speed, and in doing so really raises one's expectations — despite Woo's obnoxiously ridiculous swagger. Visually, most of the movie also continues to display the director's audaciousness and fine eye, but flash and dazzle alone and no story makes Jack a dull boy. And much like how even the most beautiful person in the world begins to get on one's nerve if they have no brain but like to talk, after about 15 minutes Nowhere to Hide begins to feel like a zipless fuck that is overstaying his or her welcome.
The opening scene really has nothing to do with the rest of the movie — though one could argue it presents the "character" of the lead policeman — and comes across a bit as if it were simply tacked on to stretch the running time, which makes it all the more odd that Nowhere to Hide was cut for its international release. After this stroboscopic sock 'em and shoot 'em scene, the movie moves to the main plot, but the plot is reduced to the point of inconsequentiality: bad guy introduced, bad guy chased, bad guy finally caught. It is — as the movie's final scene faintly refers, when the female lead (Choi Ji-Woo) walks past Woo and totally ignores him — an anorexic reduction of the bare bones of The Third Man (1949 / trailer) and a thousand other bad-guy-pursued films. But whereas in most films one scene follows the other and build towards a final, most of the various scenes of Nowhere to Hide seem to all stand alone with but the most gossamer of interlinkage. And as good as the scenes might be, once too often one really wishes that the obviously highly visually adroit director Myung-se Lee also had as much talent at scriptwriting and directing actors and had put a bit more time into the story and the direction of the performers instead of just constantly wowing us with his optical finesse.
After the pop-arty but pointless opening scene, the bare-bones story begins with a well-shot scene of a murder on an outside open stairwell that deserves brownie points not only for the excellence with which it is both set up and executed, but also for getting away with using the Bee Gees'Holiday without seeming stupid. (Why the "mysterious [killer] Sungmin"— an excellent Ahn Sung-Ki — should choose to involve so many minions in a job he could well have done himself does seem a bit odd, however.)
From there, we're introduced to the violent world of the Incheon police as they take a real "hands-on approach" to solving the murder, which proves to be part of drug underworld war. Some leads are followed, others are skipped over via a text board stating "so-and-so many days later" that gets shot full of bullets before the next impressively shot or dazzling scene commences. Often, like the naked child molester in the police station or the long drive to another town, the scenes are so extraneous to the story one wonders why they are even there. (To the director, we can only say: learn to kill your darlings.) Even Woo's visit to his sis, which can be at least written off as character development, seems extraneous simply for the fact that when a plot is as lean as in Nowhere to Hide— it's way leaner than that of Walter Hill's Driver (1978 / trailer), which says a lot — character development is fat. Why spend time on that when, if you are going to add padding, the story could way better use some decent inter-seaming?
When watching Nowhere to Hide on the flatscreen, and even on one of larger than average size, it quickly becomes obvious that the movie was not made for the device. It is a movie for the cinema, for the big screen, and on such a screen it is surely a visual overdose of great power, one with enough punch that its other flaws become secondary, perhaps even immaterial. But not many people have a home cinema, so the flaws — above all: uneven acting, a disjointed story, and one too many chase scenes — become noticeable and the film almost dull in its redundancies. The result, as we said: an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying movie that gives you the feeling you should like it more than it actually makes itself likable. (Try, if you might, to imagine a spicy beef burrito with dollops and dollops of spice, but no beef.)
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Frozen Scream (USA, 1975)

July 8, 2015, 2:44 am
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People with no budget and talent make something like Carnival of Souls (1962 / trailer  / full fantastic film); people with no budget and no talent make something like Frozen Scream.
The latter, a truly obscure flick of which we had never heard before, found its way into our DVD player primarily because it was on the flipside of our The Red Monks (1988 / trailer) DVD and we wanted to see both sides before we try (probably unsuccessfully) to unload the DVD to some unsuspecting sucker on eBay.
Since that night that we popped the DVD into our outdated but preferred mode of film-screening technology, we've learned a bit more about the cinematic monstrosity to which we subjected our eyes: once banned as "video nasty" in Great Britain for about the length of time it takes to pee, the resulting guilt-by-association is the movie's only true claim to fame and the only reason that it has survived its 15 seconds of infamy and is still mildly remembered today. Indeed, were more people to see this movie, it would surely gain the non-reputation it deserves and disappear, instead of hanging around like the malignant, cancerous "cult film" it supposedly is.
The again, perhaps not: as Frozen Scream is one of those movies that is so bad, so incompetent, so unbelievably what-the-fuck that it makes most Ed Wood films look professional in comparison. One is tempted to simply write it off as "what-were-they-thinking, oh-they-needed-a-tax-deduction" trash, but, in truth, although an unbelievably inept film, Frozen Scream displays an earnestness shared by all those involved that, regardless of the respective lack of talent, makes the viewer realize that the people involved in the project were probably truly serious about it. Serious or not, however, it isn't surprising that it took the movie's director, Frank Roach, another nine years before he ever made another "movie", his last, Nomad Rider (1984 / scene). (Let us pray to Allah that he makes no other.)
The true mover-and-shaker behind Frozen Scream seems to have been Renee Harmon (18 May 1927 — 26 November 2006), seen above, who co-wrote, co-produced, and starred in the movie as Dr. Lil Stanhope. Renee Harmon was a "buxom and attractive" acting and screenwriting teacher and author — buy her books Film Producing: Low Budget Films That Sell, Teaching a Young Actor: How to Train Children of All Ages for Success in Movies, TV, and Commercials, Film Directing: Killer Style and Cutting Edge Technique, How to Audition for Movies & TV, and The Beginning Filmmaker's Guide to a Successful First Film on Amazon — who, going by the movies she had a hand in, was working in a field for which she had no talent. (See the other projects she took part in, Al Adamson's  Cinderella 2000 [1977 / trailer] and William Sachs'Van Nuys Blvd. [1979 / trailer] — the two best films on her resume — and those she wrote & produced & acted in, The Executioner, Part II [1984 / a trailer of kinds / full disaster], Hell Riders [1984 / scene], Lady Street Fighter [1985], and Night of Terror aka Escape From The Insane Asylum [1986 / scene] for further proof of her noteworthy sub-psychotronic Z-talents.)
The best thing that can be said about Renee Harmon, actually, is that the accent she exhibits throughout Frozen Scream, which we assume is her real accent seeing that she was born and raised in Germany, is almost as thick as that of Uschi Dirgart. Unlike Harmon, however, Dirgart at least also usually displayed other more-appealing factors in the trash she participated in, including a natural charisma that was often still fully palpable even when she was dressed. Here in Frozen Scream, though, Harmon displays as little natural charisma as she does flesh or talent — she, like everything in the movie, is a train wreck of terribleness that is as repulsive as it is insanely and inexplicably fascinating. That so few involved ever went on to do anything else is not surprising; what is amazing, however, is that one — Wolf Muser (Caged in Paradiso [1990 / theme & final credits]) — did, and is still active today as a character actor, if rarely.
The plot, as far as we could tell, revolves around two doctors with bad accents, Dr. Lil Stanhope (Renee Harmon) and Dr. Sven Johnsson (Lee James of The Female Bunch [1971 / trailer]), who are involved in nefarious experiments to achieve immortality. When hubby Tom (Wolf Muser) dies, wife Ann (Lynne Kocol) gets back together with ex-boyfriend Kevin (Thomas McGowan of Die Hard Dracula [1998 / trailer]) to find out the truth about ... something. Some people die, other people are revived, there's a love story, a priest, indiscriminate murders, parties, dream sequences, flashbacks, and enough surreal behavior and out-of-the-blue turns in the storyline to make for one incomprehensible film. What's more, as if the movie wasn't disjointed enough, it is then made all the more incomprehensible by an occasional, subsequently-added clarifying voiceover of one character, Kevin McGuire, that clarifies nothing and only makes the movie more confusing. There are bursts of badly staged "gory" killings, most of which don't have anything to do with the plot itself — guess being immortal makes you kill-happy — and one fabulous death by dancing at a party where everyone continues dancing and partying despite a dead blonde (Sunny Bartholomew). Mix all that with crappy acting, incomprehensible montage and editing, grade-school directorial skills, and a total lack of compositional skills and you have one astonishing and muddled piece of celluloid flotsam.
Frozen Scream gives meaning to the word bizarre, if unintentionally, and is entertaining only as a sum of its various incompetencies. As such, Frozen Scream is also a rare, one-of-a-kind cinematic experience, but of the kind that can only be recommended to fans of bad films. Perhaps, in the end, it doesn't make you laugh as much as a film as bad as this one should, but it definitely does leave you open-mouthed and amazed that anything this terrible could be committed to celluloid.
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Alive (Japan, 2002)

July 15, 2015, 2:44 am
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Some movies make it really difficult to remain awake until the end, and this is one such movie. It seemed like an eternity until the final credits of this tedious flick began to roll, and the most eloquent and just statement of quality given by the group of guys that watched this thing with us was the long and particular stinky fart one let out as the final credits ran. (Amazing how fast a group lulled into total lethargy can suddenly come to life again.)
Alive is one of those kinds of films that, in order to make sense or advance the nonsensically ridiculous plot, at any given time some character stands still and pontificates in extreme detail so as to advance a story that would otherwise remain incomprehensible. ("You think you are the only one? Well, in the Northwest corner of Southern Africa, we found an albino Peruvian transgender cow with blue toenails who, after repainting them pink, led us to a stream that went west until it went east and after 130 days, 23 hours, 5 minutes and 59 seconds it ate our housemaid before revealing that if we pull our earlobes while eating peanut butter our penises will develop breasts! That's why...")
And what is the plot? Well, in what seems to be some dystopian future, some condemned man named Tenshu (Hideo Sakaki), who killed the six rapists of his girlfriend (and supposedly her as well), survives his execution and, like in an anorexic version of Let's Make A Deal, is given the choice of going through Door Number Two or sitting on the chair again. He takes the door and awakens in a big, dark, escape-proof industrial-looking room with another chair survivor, the decidedly homicidal Gondoh (Tetta Sugimoto), and they spend the rest of the movie fist fucking each other.
Naw, just kidding about the last bit, though it might've made for a more mesmerizing movie. Instead, they squabble and fight and are subjected to psychological mindgames and aural torture and then suddenly a mysterious woman with bad hair — Yurika (Ryô, also found in Casshern [2004]) — is revealed to be there as well. She is possessed by a super-powered alien lifeform called the Isomer, which transfers hosts only when the new host acts upon murderous instincts, and all three are part of a mysterious governmental experiment run by bad-hair babe's perfectly coiffured sister (Koyuki, of the original version of Pulse [2001 / trailer]) that is suddenly commandeered by a particularly amoral special forces man and his minions...

Alive is based on a popular manga comic from 1999 by the highly successful manga artist Tsutomu Takahash (who, according to Wikipedia, "is well-liked and popular due to his sense of humor and his looks"), but we have no idea how true the film is to the book. But what we do know is that this sci-fi, prison-set chamber play comes across as if a half-dozen stoned manga authors gathered together to brainstorm and put every single idea that was preceded with the phrase "Wouldn't it be cool if..." into the final script, even if the idea was only that at some point some character tosses a half-eaten chicken leg over his shoulder. (Yes, that happens.) As a result, one or two or a dozen inconsistencies and stupidities work their way into the almost somnambulist script — like the fact that the big bad special forces arrive by car & truck but, as revealed in the final scene, the whole science base is deep underground in the middle of the ocean. Or that a guy that gets impaled through the heart stays alive so as to give his gun to another guy and say "Kill me" (yes, the other guy shoots him — in the thigh, by the look of it). Or that Yurika is revealed, when un-possessed, to be soooo sensitive that a possession based on "murderous instinct" becomes a ridiculous idea. Or, or, or — snore.

Once the special forces show up, the philosophical meandering tossed aside, and Tenshu goes super, the flick does get a bit more interesting for a second or two here and there, but it nevertheless never truly becomes engrossing or suspenseful in any way. It simply drags on, and even the slow motion, CGI-enhanced Matrix (1999 / trailer)-like fight scenes — possibly intended as highlights — come across as if filmed on a low budget, without either workmanship or concern, and then cut with dull scissors. The Frankenstein-Isomer looks sorta cool, at least until he goes all doe-eyed and wimpy, and a couple of sudden deaths are good for a giggle, but for the life of us we really don't know why the Isomer never springs over to the amoral head special forces man, for he truly comes across as the person in the movie with the most homicidal intentions.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Alive is that it tries so hard to build atmosphere, and even transpires in an atmospheric setting, but in the end never truly has any. But, to give credit where credit is due: the movie's techno-laced electro-chill soundtrack is actually pretty good — too good for the movie, if you get down to it. It has aged well, unlike the movie or the movie's special effects, assuming one or the other or both were ever in any way even seen as good in the first place.

Snore, snore, snore — bore.
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Return to Horror High (USA, 1987)

July 22, 2015, 2:47 am
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Long ago, 41 years ago to be exact, the unknown director Larry N. Stouffer released Horror High (1974 / trailer), a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde Goes to High School flick that proved to be rather a success despite, going by word of mouth, being rather run of the mill.* Thirteen years later, a sequel in name only finally followed, Return to Horror High, a film that nowadays is famous primarily for being the feature-film début of some actor named George Clooney, whose appearance in the film — as Oliver, the first to die — ends after about five minutes. (Let it be said: he has more and longer hair, and he does have the same smile, but he totally lacks the innate charisma that he began to exude around the time of From Dusk Till Dawn [1996 / trailer].)
*Still, Horror High can't be all that bad, seeing that it features Austin Stoker (of the original Assault on Precinct 13 [1976 / trailer] and the William Girdler disasterpieces Abby [1974 / trailer], The Zebra Killer [1974 / trailer] and Sheba, Baby [1975 / trailer]) in his hunkadelic prime.
But as we have never seen Horror High, we've decided to review Return to Horror High on its own merits as a stand-alone movie. And, indeed, there is little of a teenage Dr. Jekyll in this movie here, which is about a film crew showing up at the high school of the first film, Crippen High, to shoot a movie based on the original murders only to — apparently — get bumped off one by one.
We have to admit that when we popped this baby into the DVD player, we were surprised to realize, the minute the bonkable Brady sister Marcia (Maureen Denise McCormick in her coked-out phase) appeared onscreen in the part of a cop — the characterization of which seems to consist of the channeling of a subconscious dominatrix that gets hornier with the more blood seen — that we had seen this flick years ago, either when it first came out or, more likely, while it was part of a double or triple feature at some second or third-run grindhouse. We can even remember: way back then, we totally hated Return to Horror High.
Well, times change. By the end of the film we knew why we had once hated Return to Horror High— it falls totally apart during the last W.T.F. five minutes — but this time around we rather found the rest of it fun. In the right state of mind, the film might still be a confusing mess by the end, but it is rather enjoyable as a horror farce and comedy filled with good dialog and mildly familiar faces including, aside from McCormick (Skatetown, U.S.A. [1979 / trailer] and Snow White: A Deadly Summer [2012 / trailer]): Vince "Dr. Ben Casey" Edwards (Space Raiders [1983], Motorama [1991 / trailer], Cellar Dweller [1988 / trailer] and The Fear [1995 / trailer]*), Andy Romano (The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini [1966 / trailer] and Welcome to Arrow Beach [1974 / trailer]), and the great character actor Alex Rocco, who just died last week (18 July 2015) and can be found somewhere in too many good films to count (including   Smokin' Aces [2006 / trailer],  Blood Mania [1970 / trailer], Stanley [1972 / trailer], Lady in White [1988 / trailer], Entity [1982 / trailer], Motorpsycho  [1965 / scene, co-starring Haji],  The St. Valentine's Day Massacre [1967 / trailer], Brute Corps [1971 / trailer], Bonnie's Kids [1973 / trailer], Detroit 9000 [1973 / trailer], Three the Hard Way [1974 / trailer, starring Jim Kelly] and Freebie and the Bean [1974 / trailer].
*We saw and reviewed the sequel to this flick, The Fear: Resurrection  (1999) — it blows feces.
But let's get to Return to Horror High itself, which, for years, has been denigrated as being one of the most confusing messes ever made. When the film opens, the cops — including Officer Tyler (McCormick) and Det. Richard Birnbaum (Edwards) — arrive on the scene in time to gather together the various body parts of all the dead. From there, Return to Horror High goes meta before the concept of meta even existed, its storyline transversing multiple temporal and narrative levels that interblend to the point that you often no longer know whether you're watching the present, the film being filmed, the "real" past that the film-in-film is based on, a dream sequence, or whatever.
Regrettably, while the non-linear structure is intriguing, the filmmakers never really master the full integration of all levels, which makes it easy to understand why so many people don't like the movie. Still, the cross-level narration does offer a few good laughs and really isn't as confusing as its reputation makes it out to be, providing you pay attention (or, Allah forbid, watch it twice). Its biggest flaw is simply the movie's impossible ending: the big (and inanely impracticable) twist involving the film crew is too stupid to even be funny, negates many of the past events, and multiplies the dozen of loose ends and impossibilities.
True, the satire of the un-killable killer works better here than in, say, Stagefright (1987), where the joke fails because it comes across as serious, but the major twist of the ending is neither effective as a joke nor plausible (if one can even talk of plausibility in a slasher film). It comes across as an insult to the viewer, or as a sign that the four credited scriptwriters (Bill Froehlich, Mark Lisson, Dana Escalante and Greg H. Sims) simply didn't know how to end the movie. Not surprisingly, an aspect of the plot itself — that the screenplay of the film-in-film is being made up and constantly changed along the way — comes across as probably mirroring the real movie shoot itself: one can't help but wonder whether the full plot of Return to Horror High was even known as the movie was being filmed.
For that, however, the four scriptwriters do put some truly funny dialog and characterization into the movie. Alex Rocco as the producer who knows he's making trash definitely shines in both regards, while McCormick's cop is a highpoint of physical characterization: both are consistent in garnering the most laughs (or at least giggles) and being the most enjoyable characters. But even the two relatively faceless heroes — Callie Cassidy / Sarah Walker / Susan (Lori Lethin of Bloody Birthday [1981 / trailer] and The Prey [1984 / trailer]) and Steve (Brendan Hughes, also seen somewhere in Sundown [1989 / trailer], The Howling IV: The Freak Show [1991 / trailer] and  To Die For [1988 / trailer]) — occasionally garner a good and intentional laugh along the way.
Likewise enjoyable, of course, is the inordinately high amount of — Holy Beanbags, Batman! — 100% natural breastage. If you look carefully, there's even some Afro-American honeymelons in the background of the girl's locker room scene, as big of a rarity in exploitation films back then as now. (Why don't the exploitation flicks of today have this enjoyable feature, regardless of the skin color? And why, when they do, must it always be plastic? And will full male frontals ever return? Rhetorical questions, one and all — but these are the kind of questions that enter in our mind during our Koran study group.)
Yes, Return to Horror High is confusing and, yes, the ending sucks, but time has been kind to the movie. It may be disjointed, but it is funny, and aside from the plethora of naked natural mambos it doesn't always skimp on the gore. Likewise, the equally eccentric soundtrack (by Stacy Widelitz) is surprisingly effective and experimental, if not also occasionally a bit too heavy on 80s synth.
In the end, Return to Horror High is way better than many a serious slasher of greater popularity and standing. We'd watch it again, at any rate, which we wouldn't say of a lot of other bodycounters we've watched and reviewed at A Wasted Life.
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Short Film: Kung Fury (Sweden, 2015)

July 28, 2015, 5:35 am
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The plot description as found on the  Kung Furyhomepage: "Miami Police Department detective and martial artist Kung Fury time travels from the 1980s to World War II to kill Adolf Hitler, a.k.a. 'Kung Führer', and revenge his friend's death at the hands of the Nazi leader. An error in the time machine sends him further back to the Viking Age."
Written, directed and starring David Sandberg. OK, so you've probably heard of this flick before — who cares? When we caught this trashy and hilarious homage to crappy 80s action flicks, we peed our britches in laughter. Good enough reason for us to choose this 30-minute masterpiece of intentional ridiculousness as our Short Film of the Month for July.
Kung Fury was crowdfunded through Kickstarter, and since its release has been such a success that a feature-length version is now in the works (or at least in the talks). Watch it and laugh — and then watch the music video to David Hasselhoff's song for the flick, True Survivor, below.
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Misc. Film Fun: Friday the 13th

August 3, 2015, 1:07 am
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Thanks to Stacie Ponder's eternally entertaining blog Final Girl, we were exposed to this fun little sampling remix of a kill in Danny Steinmann's Friday the 13th, Part V: A New Beginning(1985 / trailer). And while those seen here (Miguel A. Núñez Jr. ["Demon"], of Shadowzone [1990], and Jere Fields ["Anita"]) are not the first Afro Americans  to die in the original franchise — that honor belongs to two relatively faceless Afro Americans motorcyclists in Friday the 13th Part III (1982 / trailer) —  they do possibly have the honor of enjoying one of the series' least-ennobling locations to die, an outhouse.* (We haven't seen the original film yet, but we doubt it is a highpoint of equality in film. For further ignobilities, take a look at the website Black Horror Movies.)
* Wanna see white folks die in outhouses? Women — we will reserve from quoting John Lennon and Yoko Ono at this point — meet their ends in or close to them in both Reeker(2005) and Dead Snow (2009). 


Speaking of locations of death, or to be more exact, slasher deaths in general, the monologue to the first trailer that hit the little scene for MTV's new TV series Scream(2015 / later trailer) featured a statement that we find applicable to all slasher movies:  "Sure the reason you watch ... is because you fell in love with the characters, but maybe deep down you know the reason ... is to watch them die." With that basic fact in mind, let us share with you a roughly 20-minute collection of almost all of Jason's kills* in all the Friday the 13th films of the original franchise plus one: the maker of the clip skipped a lot of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993 / trailer) 'cause "the film was dumb" but, oddly enough, includes the death of the recent reboot (2009 / trailer), which was truly a shitty, boring flick.

* The astute will notice that only one of the deaths of the first film (1980 / trailer) is included, but then, the astute will also remember that Jason didn't have any kills in that movie — even the last scene, after all, though included here as the opening kill, proved (later, and theoretically) to be a dream sequence.
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Romasanta (Spain, 2004)

August 10, 2015, 1:07 am
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Released as "Werewolf Hunter" in the U.S., this movie is the second feature-film project of the Spaniard Paco Plaza, who went on to create the original [Rec] franchise with Jaume Balagueró, a director whose work does not normally enamor us, and with whom Plaza co-directed the excellent first installment of the franchise in 2007 (trailer), the crappy sequel [Rec]2 (2009 / trailer), and the pointless but fun [Rec]3: Genesis (2013 / trailer). He seems to have bailed for Balagueró's flogging of a dead horse, [Rec]4: Apocalypse (2014 / trailer).
In our childhood, we were big fans of those wonderfully lush if illogical period Gothic euro-horrors of the 60s full of beautiful damsels in distress who, struggling hard not to become the next dead nightgown, would (usually) survive all their trials and tribulations to see the light of day and, at the end of the film, ride off with some dull man of romantic interest. Romasanta is very much lush in color and costumes and set design and setting, not to mention often illogical, but — unlike, say, Julian Sands' other turn in costume horror that we've seen, Argento's Phantom of the Opera (1998 / trailer)*— it is nevertheless mostly successful and wonderfully entertaining for fans of costume or period horror. It also has a somewhat surprising if period-inappropriate feminist stance in that the final girl takes an exceedingly active role in the resolution of the events — far beyond that which would've in any way been possible during the period the movie is set. (She also doesn't ride off with her romantic interest, either.)
*We saw that Sands disaster, with its equally miscast Asia Argento, and hated it sooooo much we didn't even bother reviewing it.
 
Romasanta is inspired by a true story, the same one behind the earlier and far more grimy and obscure Spanish horror flick, El bosque del lobo / The Ancines Woods (1970 / Spanish trailer). In real life, "the Werewolf of Allariz"— Manuel Blanco Romasanta (18 Nov. 1809 — 14 Dec. 1863), who is considered Spain's first known serial killer — was a travelling salesman that killed an indeterminate amount of people (he admitted 13 killings, but was only charged for nine) and made soap from their body fat. His defense was that he suffered from lycanthropy, and while he was eventually granted a reprieve from the death sentence by Queen Isabella II, it is believed that he died in prison.
Unlike in real life, where the bearded, dark and short killer of yesteryear was known to be between 1.37m [4'6"] and 1.49m [4'11"] in height), in Romasanta the travelling salesman is the blonde Julian Sands, who comes across as taller than his mere 1.80m [5'9"]. That said, if the film succeeds it is not due to his participation, for as an actor he remains for the most part as ineffectual and weak as ever, or at least he is whenever is isn't homicidal: whenever he goes sinister or wacko, he's truly threatening and effective, but whenever he goes nice guy or passive, his demeanor and voice becomes boneless and almost annoying. Even if this is surely a conscious thespian decision meant to convey the second side of the man, when he's boneless he is so inexpressive that instead of conveying any sort of personality — wimpy or split — he conveys an inability to act.
Though the movie does have flashes of the visceral — there is a brief shot of what's left of a dead deaf girl's eyes that is particularly shocking, one of many instances in which director Plaza displays a notable and more reality-bound disdain of the Speilbergian rule of not killing children — on the whole the director takes a rather subdued and atmospheric approach. In fact, Plaza often sacrifices logic and reality to the lusciousness of the production and visuals, and the excessive length of time certain scenes last also results in an uneven rhythm. (Indeed, as beautiful as the Spanish landscape might be in the movie, and as delicious as the final girl might be, some of the horse riding scenes are simply interminable.)
That the movie might suffer this tendency of beautiful visuals trumping logic is already foreshadowed in its opening segment in which Manuel Romasanta (Sands), riding through the countryside in his coach, takes on a severely injured fieldworker (but not his two companions) to transport the man to the nearest village. Not only does day go into night without a village in sight during the long ride, but the interior of the covered wagon is suddenly awash with the light of countless candles lit most definitely not by the fatally injured man. The fieldworker, oblivious to the passage of time, dictates his final words for his beloved wife to Manuel, whom we quickly learn in quick succession, is both a man of no morals and a violent killer — but whether or not he is truly a werewolf or simply a man with a severe personality disorder is long left open to question. (We know for sure at the latest during a slimy scene in which a wolf changes back into a man, but it is hard to say whether the film might not have been better had this question never been answered. And, indeed, the whole transformation might just be in the man's head.)
Manuel leaves a long trail of dead women and children behind him (we don't see all the murders) before finally deciding on Bárbara (Elsa Pataky of The Art of Dying [2000 / Spanish trailer], Beyond Re-Animator [2003 / trailer] and Snakes on a Plane [2006 / trailer]), a capable and beautiful woman who can obviously throw a whole farm alone on her own. She might be willing to steal her sister's man — which involves the obligatory nude and actually rather erotic scene — but definitely wants, uh, justice (?) when she learns that while she is no longer alone on the farm, she is now alone in the world. But could it be that her love is stronger than her desire for revenge?
Elsa Pataky is truly effective in the movie. Yes, she is beautiful, but her effectiveness and affectiveness — shall we say presence? — goes beyond her basic babeness. Whether terrified, beset by doubt, overcome by lust, or simply determined, she conveys her state of mind and emotions far more believably than Sands, and definitely walks all over the tertiary character Antonio (John Sharian of The Machinist [2004 / trailer] and, supposedly, Lost in Space [1998 / trailer]), who, despite being US-born, displays all the conviction and believability of a badly dubbed foreign actor. (In this way, actually, he is oddly appropriate to the Euro-gothic film.)
On the whole, Romansanta is a truly uneven but, ultimately, satisfying ride. Beautiful images like flaming bonfires in front of the farmhouse or Bárbara's unplanned escape in a burning coach defy common sense but look fabulous; others, like any time someone gets on a horse or starts talking mumbo-jumbo science, are way too long. Nevertheless, the film remains intriguing, and there are enough shocks and horrific scenes — few of which can be labeled gratuitous — that anticipation and suspense is forever present. True, one gets the feeling that the filmmakers didn't really know how to end the movie, but when one keeps in mind that the true end of Manuel Romansanta is no longer known for certain (all records have been lost), the ending at least works with popular legend.
If you're a fan of wonderfully lush if illogical euro-horror films, this one's for you. And if you're not, well, in all likelihood Romansanta is the kind of horror film you can at least watch with your "woman's film"-loving other half. It truly deserves to be better known than it is.
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Trailers of Promise – Films We Haven't Seen: Aroused (1966)

August 14, 2015, 12:48 am
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Written & Directed by Anton Holden.
"Arousedreminds us that the grindhouse, the slaughterhouse, and the nuthouse were occasionally so close together as to be the same squalidly satisfying place." (DVD Verdict)
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Short Film: Love & Theft (Germany, 2010)

March 30, 2015, 2:27 am
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"And I'm still carrying the gift you gave,
It's a part of me now, it's been cherished and saved,
It'll be with me unto the grave
And then unto eternity."
(Bob Dylan)

OK, were the music from an actual band, we would be tempted to simply dismiss this hypnotic short as an exceptionally unique music video (not that a music video can't also be a short film with narrative — see this one here by Die Fanta 4). More than anything, however, Love & Theft is a mesmerizing exercise of merging animation with rhythm. (The great music is from Heiko Maile.) 
Love & Theft was written and directed and animated by Andreas Hykade, the twisted mind behind the equally rhythmic and odd animated Freudian cowboy short Ring of Fire (2000), our Short Film of the Month for March 2011. Among the many metamorphosing faces down in a style that promptly brings to mind Jim Woodring's Frank: Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Spider-man, Adolf H., Droopy Dog, and KoKo the Clown, to name but a few. We don't see much content or story in this surreal short, but for that we want to watch it again and again and again.
Like that? The check out these other Short Films of the Month: Muzorama(Dec 2011) and Kunstbar(Sept 2011). Or Cyriak's cows & cows & cows(2010) or Baaa!(2011), neither of which we would want to watch on acid.
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The Red Monks / I Frati Rossi (Italy, 1988)

April 3, 2015, 4:24 am
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(Spoilers) Also known, in Germany, as Sexorgien der roten Mönche, which literally translates into the truly inviting title, Sex Orgies of the Red Monks— and a misleading title, as there is nary an orgy anywhere in the movie.
One rumor has it that Lucio Fulci was given the flick's "Presents" credit because he was pulled from The Red Monks as director and replaced by the flick's screenwriter, Gianni Martucci. Another rumor has it that Fulci had absolutely nothing to do with the movie and even went to court, unsuccessfully, to get his name removed from the film. What is not rumor is that with this movie, Gianni Martucci seems to have capped his less-than-spectacular career as screenwriter cum director with a less-than-spectacular piece of sub-standard Italo-trash. We would hazard to guess that had Fulci actually directed the movie, it surely would've been far better than it is now, but even he probably wouldn't have been able to save this wanna-be Gothic horror film that screams "Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!" just as loudly as it screams "Incompetent scriptwriter"!
Which isn't to say that somewhere within the diffuse, confused and scattershot period movie — it is set mostly in the 1930s — there aren't the gossamer threads of an interesting narrative that could've (perhaps) made a good horror movie, Gothic or not. But for that to happen, far more care must be shown to the simplest of movie-making aspects — beginning with a story that makes sense.
The plot is almost tritely (and thus enjoyably) Gothic: a young woman of no special means marries a rich man and moves into his castle, where suddenly he begins to act strange, people die, she experiences unexplainable events, and doom seems to loom as she runs around at night in her long white nightgown. But the plot, if you get down to it, is a farce that neither remains true to itself nor the viewer, and cheats on levels that reveal either a deep disrespect for the audience, a total indifference in general, or a total lack of screenwriting skills.
One can't really talk about The Red Monkswithout giving away the big plot twist, but the plot twist itself is one of many things that help ruin the movie, as it makes the opening interlude impossible, ridiculous, stupid — simply for the reason that the ending of the movie would mean that the opening interlude would be impossible, as by the end of the movie, all the chance of heirs no longer exists. But then, the opening interlude also feels totally tacked on, as if it were added simply to pad the running time, plot of the real movie be damned.
And what happens during the opening interlude? After a meeting a violin-playing woman (who obviously stumbled in from another movie and never shows up again later) in the gardens of the estate he has just inherited, a man wanders through the dilapidated house only to spy a naked women strolling through the ruins; following her through the house and deep into the cellars, when he finally catches up with her, he hardly has time to say "Hello, nice tits" before she beheads him. And then, to the subtitle "50 years earlier", the real movie begins — and ends with the death of the last line in the family, thus making the heir of the opening film impossible. (And that is the smallest of the obvious flaws of the story.)
The production values of The Red Monks resembles those of a mid-budget TV movie, one with lots of tits but an overly streamlined narrative (the male and female leads meet and marry within minutes, for example). Care is taken for beautiful period cars, locations, and half-way decent outfits, but saved on special effects and gore. The acting is all over the place: the two lead females — penniless painter and eventual wife Ramona Curtis (Lara Wendel of Killing Birds[1987 / trailer] and Tenebre [1982 / trailer]) and MILF housekeeper Pricilla (Malisa Longo of Elsa Fräulein SS aka Captive Women4 aka Fräuline Kitty [1977 / trailer], A Cat in the Brain [1990 / trailer] and the trash classic War of the Robots [1978 / full movie]) — do rather well, but the lead male  — rich landowner Robert Garlini (Gerardo Amato of Caligula[1979 / trailer] and Notturno con grida [1981 / title track]) — and the tertiary characters of importance, like the French housemaid Lucille (Mary Maxwell) and the period-pimp-looking dude, are thespian disasters.
Likewise, the use of the same actor (Claudio Pacifico of the recent turkey, Dead of the Nite [2013 / trailer]) to play a living historian and then a royalty of centuries past is also more than jarring, as the two don't have anything in common — or do they? And what's with that cheesy-looking spider that pops up twice but has nothing to do with anything — or does it? Lastly, there is an aspect of the plot that pops up twice that is simply repugnant by modern standards: rape is the way to a woman's heart. Did people really still believe that in 1988? (OK, maybe in Italy; in the US, however, by 1988 rape may still have been the woman's fault, but no one really believed anymore that it was the way to her heart.)
That aside, all the female nudity of the movie, courtesy Lara Wendel and Malisa Longo, remains the most interesting aspect of the entire movie. (Indeed, we're startled to realize that delicious Lara Wendel of this flick is the same oddly unappealing and frumpy Lara Wendel of Ghosthouse[1988], a film she made the same year as The Red Monks.) However, what should be actually be the most interesting aspect — that those you think are "good", are actually "bad", while those you think are "bad", are actually "good"— is handled so incompetently that it also becomes the movie's most annoyingly grating aspect. The switch-a-roo is so jarringly out of place, so unbelievable on all levels, that it becomes less a twist than simply stupid.
The Red Monks: nice cars, nice butts and breasts, nice scenery, but incompetently made, dull, uninteresting, and ultimately a both unsatisfying and annoying cinematic experience. There are better bad films out there to waste your time on. The Red Monks is a true rarity — it's a film that makes you wish you were at work.
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Zombie Apocalypse (2011, USA)

April 9, 2015, 10:06 am
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Another movie — like Rise of the Zombies (2012) and Zombie Massacre(2013) — that, much like drawing straws, we simply pulled from the some multiple dozens of zombie flicks in the "Zombie Movies" folder on our pal's computer. And as we found out later, Zombie Apocalypse is even directed by the same man (Nick Lyon) who later made Rise of the Zombies(2012), which is also a TV film from The Asylum but, in all truth, is a lot worse than this sloppily diapered baby here.
In Zombie Apocalypse, for all its flaws, the post-apocalyptic world is presented a lot more effectively and with greater care — indeed, we only saw one scene in which cars were still being driven in the background despite the facts that: 1) EMP (electromagnetic pulse) bombs had been dropped at the start of the movie, and 2) zombies don't drive. The script is a bit less cookie-cutter in nature than in Rise and, aside from the basic group-of-survivors-looking-for-a-safe-haven premise common of most zombie flicks, its only truly obvious pilferings are its samurai-wielding babe of minority background (delectable Lesley-Ann Brandt as Cassie, seen below not from the movie), its guilt-ridden leader (Gary Weeks as Mack),* and its arrow-shooters — one and all taken from The Walking Dead.
 
*Luckily, however, the movie doesn't spend too much time on the leader's sense of guilt for all those who have died while under way.
Zombie Apocalypse is a bit low on the known names phoning in a rent-paying performance, the only truly familiar face (to us  and/or at the time of its filming) being Ving Rhames doing his typically stoic man's man, named Henry, whose favorite weapon for dealing with zombies is a sledge hammer. For that, it is one of the rare Asylum films to have a face that has gone on to do bigger things: Ramona, the whiny blonde that you hope will die but who never does, is played by Taryn Manning, seen below not from the movie, who has gained some recognition in the US at least for her stints on Hawaii 5-0 and Orange Is the New Black. In any event, the acting in the movie can't be really be criticized: everyone does well enough, and since an inordinate amount of time is spent on character development, you sort of get to like a couple of them.
Ramona (Manning) is one of the first characters to be introduced in Zombie Apocalypse, one of three friends that at the outbreak of the virus took refuge in a mountain cabin and, weeks later, are forced to return to the ruins of civilization in search for food. Of course, being as stupid as they are hungry, they make way too much noise trying to get at a few candy bars and are attacked by zombies, which means the early departure of the non-character Kevin (Gerald Webb, who is supposedly seen somewhere in Camel Spiders [2012]). Luckily Henry, Mack, Romona and Julien (Johnny Pacar) show up to save Romona and the dude with hipster bad hair (Eddie Steeples as "Billy"), and the rest of the film is spent following the rag-tag group of survivors as they make their way to the coast of San Pedro in the hope of catching a legendary ferry to the legendary island of survivors, Catalina Island. (How the ferry should work after all the EMPs at the start of the film is never broached in the movie.)
Even before the housing-market meltdown a few years ago, Los Angeles had more than enough deserted housing projects perfect for a movie like this: the abandoned and overgrown housing estates work well representing a world gone dead. (For comparison of such abandoned projects, now to earlier days, take a gander at the old non-zombie exploiter, Suburbia[1984 / trailer].) In general — and unlike Lyon's follow-up Rise of the Zombies — Zombie Apocalypse exploits its urban locations well, whether a strip mall or downtown Los Angeles, and this does a lot to make the movie work. It's a shame the script just wasn't a bit tighter, and the abundant CGI a little better. There's a scene involving a machine gun, for example, that totally forgets that the gun was left blocks behind the good guys trapped in the house, and the whole bit in the deserted high-school "safe haven" defies normal intelligence — really: you know it's a zombie apocalypse, but you wander around a body-strewn "safe haven" yelling "Hello? Anyone alive here?" until the hoards of un-dead come running? Makes you wonder how any of them got as far as they did in the first place. Also, we can't help but notice the scriptwriters' fascination with certain bodily functions: first, the need to pee is used for some character and friendship building between the ladies, and another character later meets his end basically because he's obsessed with finally being able to sit down on a toilet (in this case, a Johnny-on-the-Spot). Did a German write the script?
Zombie Apocalypse does briefly touch upon three things seldom seen in other zombie movies, all new concepts of varying viability for future inclusion in the zombie cannon. The most interesting one is that the zombies are getting more intelligent as time goes on, to the point of setting traps or running at the sight of guns.* (The development of intelligence, however, is uneven, so if the zombies run from guns in one scene, they don't in the next.)
*OK, one finds this in Romero's later movies as well, but I can't remember if they go as far as to set traps. 
Of less viability is the concept that the zombie virus can spring over onto animals. It is not without reason that, in 28 Days Later (2002 / trailer), the concept of the virus affecting animals was quickly dropped after the opening scene with the chimpanzee: there are too many animals in the world. Shit, even if the legendary number of one rat to every person is a myth, think about how many animals there are to every person — we'd have the chance of a snowball in hell, even if only mammals were susceptible to the virus. (Thus, as far as we are concerned, it is an idea best dropped now.) In any event, the latter "new" aspect is the basis of the big final scene and required  Hemingwayesque sacrifice of a character, a scene marred by crappy CGI.
The last new aspect is one also seen and mentioned in Silent Night, Zombie Night(2009): not all zombies are created equal — in ZA, there are the normal shambling dead and "runners". As there is a direct reference to this difference in ZA, unlike inNick Lyon's follow-up zombie flick, Rise of the Zombies— in which all zombies are obviously likewise not created equal — the zombies of varying speeds don't come across as a directorial oversight. As a result, the mixing of the classic shambler with the modern speedster doesn't jar all that much.
We enjoyed director's Lyon's later Rise of the Zombies for what it was: a laughably crappy movie. Zombie Apocalypse, however, is a bit less easy to simply dismiss as crappy. It may not really be a good movie — it has way too many flaws to be anything more than second rate — but is also not really a laughably terrible movie: for all the balls it drops, it also catches too many to simply be dismissed as a lost cause or hilarious example of bad filmmaking. As a TV movie, it really isn't all that terrible, and it is actually better than the way too many disappointing episodes of its inspiration, The Walking Dead. (As a DVD release, however, Zombie Apocalypse arguably also lacks the added requirements of gratuitous nudity, but then, most films do nowadays.)
Zombie Apocalypse is, perhaps, simply what it is: generic, low budget zombie movie, nothing spectacularly good or bad, but OK for a zombie fix if one is needed. A flick for zombie completists, in other words, and not horror movie fans.
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R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part XV – Other People's Films & Addendum

April 17, 2015, 2:12 am
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12 January 1928 — 26 March 2014

 "When I was a kid, my Daddy told me, 'There's a buyer for everything.'
And I lived to find out that he was right." 
Harry H. Novak

Harry H. Novak, alongside David F Friedman (24 Dec 1923 — 14 Feb 2011) one of the great (s)exploitation kings of the last half of the 20th century, died 26 March 2014 at the age of 86.
Over a bit more than the past year, in a total of 14 blog entries (roughly one a month), we have taken a relatively detailed and rambling if undoubtedly incomplete career review of the projects Harry H. Novak foisted upon the American public. It is definitely not a complete list, and definitely not infallible, it was merely culled from sources reliable and unreliable that we found online; we also in no way suggest that the given release dates are the correct ones, they are merely the first ones we found.
What follows here are films by other people that are connected to Harry Novak, if ever so slightly, and films that we have since discovered to have possibly been fingered by the great sleazemonger.If you know any we missed, feel free to send the title — if we get enough, we might do an Addendum II.


Go here for Part I
Go here for Part II: 1956-64
Go here for Part III: 1965-66
Go here for Part IV: 1967
Go here for Part V: 1968
Go here for Part VI: 1969
Go here for Part VII: 1970
Go here for Part VIII: 1971
Go here for Part IX: 1972
Go here for Part X: 1973
Go here for Part XI: 1974-75
Go here for Part XII: 1976-77
Go here for Part XIII: 1978-79 
Go here for Part XIV: 1980-86 



Other People's Films: 

Serial Mom
(1994, writ. & dir. by the great John Waters)
Trailer to
Serial Mom:
Why John Waters should choose this movie of all his movies to give "Special Thanks" to Harry Novak in the credits is beyond us, but we are sure he has seen many a Novak movie in his younger, formative days — indeed, Waters' early masterpieces share a stylistic similarity to some of Novak's sleazy low budget sexploiters.
Serial Mom is lesser Waters, but as always even lesser Waters is truly enjoyable Waters. Kids in Mind, which views the movie as conveying the message that "picture-perfect suburbs hide dark secrets", also points out that the movie includes "several brief but obvious flashes of a pornographic movie* showing nude, abnormally large breasts [Doris Wishman's Deadly Weapons (1974 / trailer below), featuring Harry Reems], and a number of skin magazines with varying degrees of female nudity. There is one very noisy and rambunctious sex scene between a married couple (they are shown under covers). There is also a very long masturbation scene (also under covers)."
* Why do so many people not realize that just because a movie has nekkid people or simulated sex scenes, it is not a porn movie?
Trailer to
Deadly Weapons:

Deadly Weapons (1974) trailervon filmow
The plot, according to the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review: "Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) leads a life as the perfect housewife, married to her dentist husband Eugene (Sam Waterston) and with two teenage children Chip (Matthew Lillard) and Misty (Ricky Lake). However, she also kills the neighbours who complain to the police about her obscene phone calls and steal her parking spot at the mall, the math teacher who condemns Chip for liking horror movies, and Misty's date for standing her up. She is arrested whereupon she is nicknamed 'Serial Mom' by the media. At the trial, Beverly determines to conduct her own defence by exposing the dirty secrets and hypocrisies of the witnesses brought to condemn her."
Much like Cecil B. (2000 / trailer) was the last good film from Melanie Griffith before she got totally, completely, over-the-top addicted to plastic surgery, and Pecker (1998 / trailer) was the last good film Edward Furlong made before he went off the deep end,*  Serial Mom is the last good film that Kathleen Turner made before her thyroid went wacko.
*Pecker was also the last good movie Christina Ricci made before she went Hollywood anorexic, but since we find her hot both with curves and pencil thin, we forgive her.



 Schlock!
The Secret History of American Movies
(2001, writ. & dir. Ray Greene)
Harry Novak appears as a talking head in this documentary. The description of the film found everywhere online (and now here, too) is written by Mark Denning, who wrote: "Pauline Kael once wrote that since movies were so rarely great art, if one weren't interested in great trash, there wasn't much reason to pay attention to them, and one could reasonably argue that few periods brought us more top-quality cinematic trash than the 1950s and '60s. With drive-ins and grindhouses across the United States making room for low-budget exploitation films of all stripes (such as horror, science fiction, teen exploitation, biker films, beach pictures, nudies, and much more) as the major studios were focusing their attention on big-budget blockbusters and television, this was a boom time for inspired trash, and Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies takes a look at the low-budget wonders of the 1950s and '60s, as well as the men and women who made them and the social and psychological subtexts lurking behind many of these movies. Schlock! includes interviews with Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, David F. Friedman, Doris Wishman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dick Miller, Vampira, and more."
The busty babe on the poster is of course Pat Barrington, and the image itself taken from the poster to one of her "best" movies, The Agony of Love (1965 / trailer), which we looked at in Part III of this career review.
We couldn't find a trailer to Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies online so, instead, we present the trailer to the directorial debut of John Landis, also entitled Schlock (1973), but which has no connection to Novak.
Trailer to
John Landis's Schlock:
 


Until the Night
(2004, writ & dir. Gregory Hatanaka)

Trailer to
Until the Night:
Who knows why or how it came to be, but supposedly Harry Novak appears as a reporter somewhere in the background of this movie about relationships falling apart. Until the Night is the unknown directorial début of the equally unknown producer Gregory Hatanaka, which he followed two years later with the much more interesting flick Mad Cowgirl (2006 / trailer below). Of note about Until the Night: it stars everyone's favorite zombie-killing redneck Daryl (Norman Reedus) as Robert.
Trailer to
Mad Cowgirl:
Over at imdb, williampark77 of Los Angeles, who "couldn't wait until this night ended", complains that Until the Night is "a boring wreck of a film, and a terrible waste of the talents of some usually excellent actors. [...] Poorly shot on digital video, with a nearly nonexistent plot, lousy script, poor directorial choices that include jumpy editing and an annoying, extremely repetitious performance by Norman Reedus, who seems to be more interested in chewing his nails or smoking a cigarette than croaking another line of bad dialogue. More embarrassing is a very strange and unnecessary cameo by Sean Young, who really is going to the bottom of the barrel for a paycheck. [...] I saw this film at a special screening in Hollywood, and most of the cast and crew were in the audience and it received quite a tepid response [...]. I would advise you to avoid this movie, but it's so bad, I don't think anyone will put it out."
An opinion not shared by Film Threat, where someone gushes: "You have to excuse me if I sound a bit breathless, but I’ve just been gut-punched by a new film. The production in question is Gregory Hatanaka's Until the Night and this is one of the most mature, devastating and challenging films to come along. [...] Until the Night is such a work of professional triumph emotional maturity that it makes nearly every current drama in release pale in comparison. This is what independent filmmaking should be all about — taking chances and succeeding with gusto. What a damn fine movie!"
Trailer to
another Unknown Film featuring Norman Reedus
(and Debbie Harry, Adrian Brody, Elina Löwensohn & Issac Hayes)
truly worth rediscovery —
Six Ways to Sunday (1997):
 
 

Slink
(2013, dir. Jared Masters)

Trailer to
Slink:
Aka Virgin Leathers. Jared Masters, the founder of Frolic Pictures, is a "self-taught Beethoven" who "was expelled his freshman year of high school for streaking" and now makes independent sleaze horror flicks. That he might give "Special Thanks" to Harry Novak in the credits of one of his numerous flicks is hardly surprising, as Novak's movies are surely a stylistic and contentual influence of this Young Turk.
Slink won the award for the 'Best Scream Indie Horror' at the 2013 EOTM Awards. The plot, as taken from the Frolic Films website: "After the unexplained death of their Uncle Arlo, Kayla Nunez (Danika Galindo) and her sister (Jacqueline Larsen) venture to his home in the rural town of Wickenhaven. They plan to claim their share of his estate, but their trip takes a drastic turn after discovering that their uncle's house is occupied by a mysterious relative, Aunt May (Julia Faye West), who may be harboring deadly secrets. Complicating matters is the deranged, lust-filled tanning salon owner, Dale (Art Roberts), and his exotic wife, Joan (Dawna Lee Heising), whose business in designer handbags is the backbone to the entire town's economy, and possibly the darkest fashion controversy the world will ever know."
Slink stars younger gals who look like wanna-be porn starlets, older gals who look like former porn starlets and/or plastic surgery addicts (in this regard, "Joan", photo below, stands out in particular) and a variety of ugly men. The acting of Slink is postmodern bad, the sets cheap and the tale over the top — just our cup of tea, in other words.
But not that of Culture Crypt, which hates the flick, saying: "Unquestionably, the single greatest drawback to reviewing low budget independent horror movies is that the job requires sitting through the entirety of something like Slink. [...] Gather up some friends and family with nothing better to do and use them to populate a cast and crew, no experience required. That is the starting point for Slink. From there, the filmmaking philosophy is simply to set each scene in a corner of a room haphazardly dressed to resemble something else and let the camera roll on whatever happens. [...] Any way it is sliced, Slink is a mess on all fronts. Performances are painfully embarrassing for everyone involved. Sets look like they were constructed for a high-school stage play. The music is out of place and thoroughly obnoxious. And the ending is one of the worst ever seen. [...]"
The only complaint at Ain't It Cool News, however, is that the movie ends "as if the camera ran out of film". They go on to rave that "[...] though this one feels like it might have been done on the cheap, the idea behind it is strong and for the most part, Slink, though somewhat predictable, plays out pretty masterfully. [...] Basically this is one of those Motel Hell (1980 / trailer below) type films where a down-home business makes its business off of the flesh of young women, but instead of Farmer Vincent's fritters, the youthful flesh is made into fashionable handbags, the likes of which Paris, Brittany, and Christina tote to the fashionable affairs [...]. Slink is a pretty tight little thriller with some nice twists along the way in terms of script. The film goes to some dark places [...]. I have to give the film credit for having a very corroded moral core and going to those dank places most horror films are afraid to go. The effects are pretty great and the directing itself does a really good job of maintaining its black tone throughout. [...] Though the evil tanning salon wenches are overly botoxed and siliconed, it fits the tone of the lifestyle the film is lampooning. This is a film about looks over everything else; a comment on the shallow lifestyle we live in, so the gratuitous nudity and NIP/TUCK (2003-10) wet dream actresses serve more of a purpose than just window dressing."
Trailer to the classic black comedy
Motel Hell:
 



Addendum — Are they or Aren't They?
Though, famously, all Novak releases at Something Weird got cut and discontinued for some unknown reason, on a thread about Novak & Something Weird over at AV Maniacs, it says: "A couple of the Harry Novak releases that weren't on the deletion list are still available on the website" and then lists eight films, five of which (Acapulco Uncensored [1968], Cry for Cindy [1976], For Love and Money [1967], The Golden Box [1970] and The Muthers [1968]) we could collaborate elsewhere as Novak productions and thus looked at in earlier segments of this career review. Three titles, however, we couldn't get any collaborating evidence for, so we chose to ignore them, perhaps incorrectly. For the benefit of the doubt, we'll look at the three films here. 



Mr. Peter's Pets
(1963, dir. Dick Crane)

"This story must be told.
Otherwise you would never know about it,
because it could never happen."
(Opening narration)

Supposedly aka Petey's Sweeties. As mentioned, we have our doubts to what extent Novak was involved in this movie, which seems to be the only known directorial credit of "Dick Crane", who, according to imdb, five years earlier produced (and appeared in) Ronald V. Ashcroft's Girl with an Itch (1958 / trailer below). (Ashcroft, as some of you might know, produced and directed the masterpiece The Astounding She-Monster [1957 / trailer].)
Trailer to
Girl with an Itch:
More than one source, however, including Something Weird, a site we find more reliable than imdb, says that Dick Crane is actually the productive Peter Perry Jr., who was truly known to use the name "Dick Crane" and "Dick C. Crane" as a pseudonym — he acts under that name, for example, in what could be his best movie, Honeymoon of Terror [1961 / trailer].)
The Japanese poster above comes from Pulp International, which also gives the skinny on the film: "[...] A pet shop owner (Al Hopson) orders a potion from a catalog, sending a dollar to India for Maharaja Poon Ja's Animal Ambrosia, a Hindu elixir that ensures long life and happiness for one's pets. But before he administers the elixir to his animals he decides, 'Only if it is good enough for me is it good enough for my little friends', and tastes it himself. It goes down accompanied by a bolt of lightning and a peal of thunder — sort of like when you do a Jäger shot. But instead of merely making him act like an animal he’s literally turned into one. Specifically, a turtle. Each time he takes the elixir he turns into a different animal, almost any type he wishes, from kittens to pythons. [...] He immediately uses his power to gain proximity to unsuspecting women so he can watch them take bubble baths, play guitar nude, and so forth. It's just as silly as it sounds. [...]"
Perhaps Novak truly had something to do with this movie at one point or another, but it was produced by sleazemonger Dan Sonney (23 Jan 1915 — 3 Mar 2002), David Friedman's partner at Entertainment Ventures Incorporated, who once co-owned the mummified body of Elmer McCurdy— it was bought by Dan Sonney's father, "policeman-turned-showman" Louis Sonney, in 1922 and belonged to the family business. Louis Sonney is often claimed an uncredited co-producer of the great Dwain Esper's classic road show exploiter, Maniac (1934). In Eric Schaefer's great book Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! : A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, Dan Sonney says that Esper's Maniac "cost about $7,500" to make, while Esper's earlier lesser classic, Narcotic (1933 / full movie) was supposedly completed for $8,900. Likewise, in Christine Quigley's book Modern Mummies: The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century, Dan Sonney states that "My dad was pretty good friends with Dwain Esper and loaned Elmer to him for about six months for Narcotic. [The mummy was displayed as a dead junkie.] Even after my dad died and news came out that Elmer had been found, Esper still claimed that he owned it."
Clips from Mr. Peter's Pets appear in the Sonney/Friedman documentary Mau Mau Sex Sex (2001)... 
Trailer to
Mau Mau Sex Sex (2001):
 


Her Odd Tastes
(1969, dir. Donald A. Davis [as Don Davis])


"A Bizarre and Intimate Journey for Adventurous Adults"

Writen by Jerry Wilder, who, like so many of the credited writers that worked with Don Davis, never seems to have taken part in another film, thus giving credence to the concept that that name, too, is merely one of Davis's many pseudonyms. As for Davis, we already took a look at the Ed Wood protégé and great anti-filmmaker Don Davis (7 June 1932 — 23 Sept 1982) in Parts IV, V and XII of Novak's career review when we looked at his movies, respectively, For Love and Money (1967), For Single Swingers Only (1968 / film at a NSFW website), Acapulco Uncensored (1968 / full movie), The Muthers (1968) and The Golden Box (1970). Of them, the last three, like this movie here and the next one that follows, all featured the acting and pendulous talents of Marsha Jordon, who is often praised as the "Queen of Softcore"— a title we ourselves would be more likely to give the legendary Uschi Dirgard, shown below on the cover of Men's magazine.
That aside, we would agree that Marsha had pendulous talents, as the clip below — not from any film we know of — amply demonstrates.
Not from Her Odd Tastes & NSFW—
A Naked, Buxom Marsha Jordon Lolling Around:
Over at TCM, they swipe their plot description uncredited and word for word from The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion: "Christine Hunter's search for pleasure leads her to retrace the path of Charles Odman in the film Odd Tastes, q. v. In her travels, she encounters a group of devil worshippers and participates in their rituals. Her first stopover, Hong Kong, introduces her to some 'experimentation' with erotic drugs. Moving on, she accepts the invitation of a desert sheik and experiences some of the delights of harem life. In Africa, Christine meets a youth whose unfortunate sexual experiences lead Christine into an extraordinary situation. ..." 
Few people who have seen the movie seem to have to have found it worth reviewing, a rare exception being that aficionado of filth from NYC, lor, who regular leaves his insights at imdb. Calling the movie a "wonderful vehicle for Marsha Jordan, tailored to her strong suits", he goes on to give a blow-by-blow description that reveals an affinity to the film: "Her Odd Tastes is a quite successful movie made by her frequent director Don Davis. [...] Film opens with a bang, with Jordan as Christine Hunter and a gal pal Lisa (luscious Capri) having a sensual lesbian scene — the battle of the blondes & busts. After implied cunnilingus (with Capri delivering a screaming orgasm worthy of a Joe Sarno actress), Jordan writes in her journal the revelation that this was incest — the duo are sisters! She's left town and started a new life as a cordless vibrator saleslady, door to door. (This sounds comical, but the film is played straight.) She visits the house of Charles Odman [...], and when he tries to rape her at knife-point she accidentally stabs him to death in self-defense. Jordan delivers full-frontal-nudity as she runs away, clad only in a loose bathrobe, getting a lift from good Samaritan John Franklin (Michael Perrotta, an effective character actor). He turns out to be a publisher, and volunteers to remove any incriminating evidence from the scene of the crime. He returns with Odman's journal, requesting that she continue the dead man's lifelong research concerning the ultimate in pain & pleasure. Jordan chooses to emphasize the pleasure aspect, but this is an obvious foreshadowing that pain will ensue in due course. She embarks on a globe-hopping journey to retrace Odman's steps, courtesy of some obvious stock footage, all of Jordan's scenes being shot on cheap, generic studio sets. [...]"
The final sex scene, which involves an electric chair — "a sinister recliner that belches smoke, sparks, and electric shocks"— is said to be a real scorcher...
Her Odd Tastes appears to be the sequel to an apparently lost Don Davis movie entitled Odd Tastes made the year earlier in 1968, which has a similar plot but has the wanna-be killer that Christine (Marsha Jordon) accidently kills in Her Odd Tastes, Charles Odman ("Joe Bonaparte"), as the main character exploring the nooks and crannies of sexual deviance. Going by the plot description of Odd Tastes found in The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures, the two film even overlap plotwise: "Becoming increasingly perverted, he (Odman) ultimately falls victim to his own devices: he is destroyed in a sadistic 'experiment' with a personal vibrator saleswoman."
Capri is also found in the sleazy and underappreciated Lee Frost roughie The Animal (1968), a movie "based on facts taken from authenticated newspaper files"; the great opening sequence can be seen below.
Opening Sequence to
R.L. Frost's The Animal (1968):




Marsha, The Erotic Housewife
(1970, Donald A. Davis [as Don Davis])

Trailer to
Marsha, The Erotic Housewife:

Marsha the Erotic Housewife (1970)von bmoviebabe
The second to last movie that Marsha Jordan was to make with Davis; the last, The Golden Box, was released a month after this one. By now, Marsha was a big enough name among soft-core fans that the movie — "one of the biggest adult love stories ever produced" and filmed in "THROBBING COLOR"— was literally named after her. (The last name of her character, however, was different: "Bannister".)
One Sheet Index has the original pressbook description: "Starring the incomparable Marsha Jordan and a cast of seasoned professionals, the dialogue sparkles with the humor and mannerisms of today's young marrieds. Marsha, The Erotic Housewife, the story of a beautiful young bride who learns of her husband's (Edward Blessington) lengthy affair with another woman. Her first desire is for revenge thru meaningless affairs with any man she can find. With the help of her lifelong friend, she ultimately realizes that this path can only lead to disaster; what she really wants is to save her marriage and family. The plot to return the erring husband to the fold is witty, practical, successful and surprising. [...]"
Elliot James of Score magazine, that great fan of mammoth mummeries, says "Marsha The Erotic Housewife is an easy-going domestic comedy with a slight soap opera touch, photographed in a straightforward style. Don Davis made this for the couples crowd then beginning to check out pre-hardcore adult films. Of course, he didn't neglect the raincoaters who get to examine Marsha's mammazonian birthday suit at various points."
Over at imdb, one such raincoater, JohnSolomonAuthor of Canada, shares the following commentary with the world: "Marsha as a person is perky, pretty, and very likeable. Personally I don't find women with super-size breasts all that attractive though. However, there is one absolutely GREAT erotic scene in this film. Marsha walks in on a married couple who are making out in the kitchen. The man's wife takes off all her clothes and sits naked on the kitchen counter. She is very beautiful and the scene is highly erotic."
Marsha Jordan's Last Movie —
Swinger's Massacre aka Inside Amy (1975):


Other "Maybes":

Hedonistic Pleasures
(1969, writ & dir. Ed DePriest)
Did Harry Novak have anything to do with this movie by the ever-elusive Ed DePriest? Who knows for sure — but: on the Something Weird release of the "Harry Novak Double Feature — Special Edition", featuring two known films fingered by Harry (William Rotsler's The Agony of Love [1966] and The Girl with Hungry Eyes [1967]), as an extra they present an excerpt from this movie here, Hedonistic Pleasures. Logic would say that if Harry presented it, he probably had the right to, so he must have been involved somehow, somewhere.
TCMhas a plot: "Made possible by highly sophisticated miniature cameras, this exposé of Hollywood's sexual underground deals with prostitution, sex techniques, oral sex, and group sexual encounters. Living in Hollywood there is a whole subculture of perverts, who with jaded sexual appetites, seek increasingly outrageous and bizarre means of satisfaction." Above, from the movie — though possibly swiped from another — is a blonde Pat Barrington shaking her plastic orbs for some hippies in a park.
The breast-fixated Divine Exploitation has some additional comments to the movie, "Hedonistic Pleasures is an extremely bizarre mock documentary on the wild sex life in Hollywood. You get hookers and hippies and acid trips and...well, you get the idea. Directed by Ed DePriest, this is only 55 minutes and he tries to pack in as much female flesh as possible. The weird part is the boobies.The first girl has missile-shaped ones with the entire end of the titty being nipple. The next girl is a lopsided A cup, more like an A- cup. They finally gave us a nice looking pair and her ass was scary. It was a no-win kind of thing. The scene with the hippies smoking grass and swimming seems familiar like it was in another mondo flick, but I can't place it. The scene with the couple tripping on acid had this cool projector that made it look like these bizarre shapes were erupting from her mouth. That was cool."
No trailer to be found anywhere. 



Sisters in Leather
(1969, dir. Zoltan G. Spencer)

Did Harry Novak have anything to do with this movie by Zoltan G. Spencer (aka Spence Criley)? Who knows for sure — but: on the Something Weird release of the "Harry Novak Double Feature — Special Edition", featuring two known films fingered by Harry (William Rotsler's The Agony of Love [1966] and The Girl with Hungry Eyes [1967]), as an extra they present an excerpt from this movie here, Hedonistic Pleasures. Logic would say that if Harry presented it, he probably had the right to, so he must have been involved somehow, somewhere.
Heavily edited Trailer to
Zoltan G. Spencer's most famous film,
Terror at Orgy Castle (1972):
Women in Prison Films uses frankfob2@yahoo.com'suncredited paragraph (taken from imdb) to explain the plot: "A spouse (Dick Osmun) is blackmailed by 3 lesbo riders once they identify him having sex with different female (Karen Thomas) in a convertible car. They then take the man's spouse (Kathy Williams) out for a picnic and some naked bike driving. The man discovers some male motorcyclists and collectively they try to save his girlfriend from getting a lesbo biker."
The movie features way more nudity than any twenty exploiters from the 21st century combined, as you can see by all the shots found at Score the Film's Movie Blog, which rhetorically asks (and answers) the question: "Will I watch it again? Nope."
The great blog Movies About Girls— which points out that "Zoltan G. Spencer disappeared at the dawn of the 70s. No one's seen him for 40 years. I suspect lesbian bikers were involved."—  gets to the nitty-gritty: "A shamelessly skuzzy anti-epic from the height of the grindhouse era, Sisters in Leather is, on one hand, a bit of cheat: despite the title and the tagline ('No man or woman is safe from these love-hungry hellcats!'), this is not really a biker chick movie at all, and only one of the girls actually wears leather. On the other hand, it is relentlessly grimy, and the nudity is pretty wall-to-wall, so let's call it even. As long as you don't mind threadbare production values, fuzzy black and white photography, wooden acting, wobbly overdubbing, and low-rent fake jazz — or even better, if you love all that stuff — there's plenty to like about this kooky sexploitation romp."
Dangerous Dykes!
A Scene from Sister in Leather:




Two That Got Away (1979) 
The above is a copy of a Valiant International advert that Novak took out in the Feb 19, 1979 issue of Boxoffice. Of the films mentioned, we've looked into all but two in the course of this career review. Try as we might, however, we cannot find any movies titled Three's Not Company (starring John Holmes) or Miss Banana Split, not even as an "AKA". We assume the productions never happened, or they were given new titles prior to release and never carried the moniker given in the advert. Anyone know any different?
That said, the presumed Novak-fingered movie Sissy's Hot Summer (1979), looked at in Part VII, is a take-off of the sitcom Three's Company (1977-1984) and also features John Holmes, so our guess is that movie was originally entitled Three's Not Company. Anyone know for sure?



Special Mention — Proven Not to Be Novak:

Leather Persuasion
(1980, dir. "C.B. Remington")

OK, in all truth, this movie here is also one that got away — in that we pretty much have totally confirmed that Harry Novak never had anything to do with the only known films entitled Leather Persuasion.
An online bio of Harry Novak found everywhere online states: "Boxoffice International Pictures was forced to shut down in 1978. Harry subsequently launched Valiant International Pictures in the late 70's; this particular outfit distributed such X-rated porno fare as Sissy's Hot Summer, Sweet Surrender, and Leather Persuasion." Both Sissy's Hot Summer (1979) and Sweet Surrender (1980) we were able to find and, to a limited point, offer evidence of Novak's fingers. With Leather Persuasion, however, the only evidence we've found indicates Novak didn't finger this baby.
Despite the obvious marketability of the title, it seems to grace only two existing movies, and the only one that is certifiably X-rated is the gay porn film above from 2001 directed by "Dean Dickson"— Get it? Hah! Hah! Hah! (Not!) — featuring the inferiority-complex-inducing meats of angel-eyed Michael Brandon (below) and Erik Evans (standing above; who knows who the other leatherman is). It is a film we can surely rule out as involving Novak in any way, as he was seemingly adverse to "serious" gay fare.
The second Leather Persuasion we found, an earlier film made in 1980, is a straight movie, "X-rated", but not porn; the image way above (from Vidbase) is the VHS cover used for the Centurian Leather release. This obscure 1980 movie was directed by "C.B. Remington", and the plot, according to Ravishment University, is: "Kim, Joannie & Connie are three lovely girls on a summer outing. They are tricked and trapped into spending the night at a house of seemingly comfortable lodgings. They are drugged and forced into slavery with lots of bondage and discipline by Tamara, a Dominatrix extreme."
Alone the fact that the movie features the great David F. Friedman in the cast indicates that the movie is not a Novak flick.... something confirmed when we contacted L.J. Dopp, who the website CD Baby says "was art director for exploitation producer David F. Friedman's pioneer home video company, TVX, and directed his first commercial movie, Leather Persuasion, in 1980 — a film of inordinate restraint featuring Friedman as a detective."
L.J. Dopp was kind enough to tell us about his "50 minutes long, well-shot (and lit) in 16mm" movie: "[...] I read in a European book on the sexploitation masters that Harry Novak also made a film titled Leather Persuasion in 1980, and figured that guy had my film mixed-up with Harry's, as [...] he had nothing to do with my film — nor does my film contain any actual violence or sex. Yes, I used the name 'C.B. Remington' as director, and 'Siegfried Lohengrin' as composer. [...] That is the correct plot listed by Ravishment Univ. Two of the three victims had just been in Roger Corman's Humanoids from the Deep (1980 / trailer), and the third (Marci Drake) was the first victim in The Toolbox Murders (1978 / trailer). She gave me such a hard time on Leather Persuasion that when I discovered her murder in that splatter film — by Cameron Mitchell with a claw hammer — I rewound the tape and watched it a couple of more times. David F. Friedman, my boss at TVX (adult video), kindly appeared as a detective in Leather Persuasion's final scene, but it was an odd duck having no hardcore or simulated sex scenes, no actual S&M, but lots of female nudity and bondage. The producers made their money back and then some by selling videos for $89 retail through their many bondage mags. Film cost $12,000 and they put up ten; I never got paid."
 Marci Drake in The Toolbox Murders:
OK, now it's official: despite what is written all over the web, Harry Novak had nothing to do with Leather Persuasion. As for "C.B. Remington", L.J. Dopp went on to become "an award-winning commercial artist who specializes in fantasy, horror and sci-fi projects as well as movie work." His last directorial project is the cult-worthy Crustacean (2010), the trailer of which you find below.
Trailer to
L.J. Dopp's Crustacean:




Addendum — Other Novak Firms & Films:
Through the wonder that is called the Internet, we were able to uncover that Harry Novak and his wife Carmen Novak had more film-related businesses than just the commonly known and reported firms Boxoffice International and Valiant International Pictures. At various times, the building at 4774 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029, — owned by the Harry Novak TR Trust — housed a variety of other firms headed by one or the other Novak, or both, or that can be linked (if only faintly) to Harry Novak.
Kathay International Productions, for example, which has since been dissolved but, in 1970, applied for the copyright to the Novak-presented Wilbur and the Baby Factory (1970, see Part VII). Or All-World Pictures, Ltd., which, in 1975, had Cynthia's Sister (1972, see Part IX), The Sinful Dwarf (1973, see Part X) and The Manicurist* all seized when they attempted to bring the movies into London "on the grounds that the said goods are indecent or obscene [...]". (The French website Encyclo Ciné also lists All-World Pictures as a co-producer of Teenage Bride [1975, see Part XI]). Or CNH Video, which the imdb claims distributed the VHS's of the Novak projects Booby Trap (1970, see Part VII), Machismo: 40 Graves for 40 Guns (1971, see Part VIII) and A Scream in the Streets (1973, see Part X).
* Regrettably, we weren't able to find any movie known as The Manicurist, though it seems to have been screened in a double feature with The Black Godfather (1974 / trailer) or Dr. Masher (1969) at some locations in 1975.
The CNH Video cover to
A Scream in the Street, re-titled Scream Street:
Also at 4774 Melrose Avenue: Channel X Video, Inc, with its president Carmen Novak, and Global Pictures, Inc., with its now-deceased President Harry Novak. Yep, the Harry Novak juggled a lot of firms aside from those commonly known. Novak's Global Pictures, which, as far as we can tell, didn't do anything after about 1972, should not be confused with Yoram Globus's Global Pictures, which as of the 1990s has kept the world flooded in action trash from Cannon Films.

A search of the Copyright Office reveals that Channel X Video, Inc., applied for copyrights to a number of known Novak films that we already looked at — Fandango aka Mona's Place (1970 / see Part VII), Street of a 1000 Pleasures (1972 / see Part IX), Bust Out (Convicts Woman) (1973 / see Part X), Black Bunch (1973 / see Part X), and Black Alley Cats (1973 / see Part X) — as well as some we haven't. So let's take a look at the known films that Novak, or Channel X Video, fingered... or at least tried to gain some copyright control of — the next five films. 



Female Factory
(1971, writ & dir. Lee Frost)
Aka Surftide Female Factory, but under all titles this Lee Frost sexploitation movie is considered lost. But then again, maybe not. We can't help but notice that the American poster above lists some of the same stars as on the poster for the 1973 German release of ...und ewig knarren die Betten shown below.
But: ...und ewig knarren die Betten is actually the belated release of a 1962 Lee Frost movie entitled nothing less than Surftide 77 (1962) — a movie that features none of the names on the two posters above.
Odder still, however, on-line sources list H. Duane Weaver as the co-scriptwriter of both the 1962 and 1971 movie, although the only other films we could find listing his name on the credits all come from 1961/62 (they would be: the classic low-budgeter Night Tide [1961 / trailer], as associate producer; the Arch Hall Jr. vehicle Eegah (1962 / trailer), as production manager; and Rider on a Dead Horse [1962 / scene], as production supervisor). Strangely enough, both Female Factory and Surftide 77 also share the same cameraman, Andrew Janczak, whose limited output includes the psychotronic classics The Creeping Terror (1964 / full film), as director of photography, and his underappreciated sole directorial effort, Terror in the Jungle (1968 / scene).
A Trailer to
The Creeping Trailer (1964):
So dare we suggest that Female Factory and Surftide 77 are actually one and the same movie, at most possibly re-cut? The evidence is there...
We discovered an on-line review of ...und ewig knarren die Betten at the German blog splattertrash, and they flatly state that the German version is not only an edit of 1962's Surftide 77 with new material but also give Surftide Female Factory as an aka title for the older film. The plot they offer is as follows: "The P.I. Bernhard Bingbang (Thomas Newman) is hired by the aged Agatha [and Townsend] Bungworthy (Bob Cresse [in a duel role]) to find the sole heir to the family fortune. The only clue: the young lady has a mole in the shape of a butterfly on her breast — so Bingbang really needs to take a close look at all the ladies that come in question."
Among the women he gets a close look at are the scrumptious Althea Currier and the early Playboy Playmates Arline Hunter* (August 1954) and — sigh — Virginia Gordon (January 1959, seen above).
Virginia Gordon Show Her Boobs in
Surftide 77:

Virginia Gordon Surftide 77von explorerwinfield
* "Much of Hunter's fame was built upon her resemblance to Marilyn Monroe; indeed, her Playboy pose was obviously inspired by Monroe's notorious 1949 nude photo session. The similarity in look between Hunter and Monroe also came into play when a nude Hunter starred in a film short called Apple Knockers and Coke. For many years there have been those who have seen the film and have mistaken Hunter for Monroe."



Dr. Carstair's 1869 Love-Root Elixir
(1972, dir. Henning Schellerup [as Hans Christian])

NSFW Trailer to
Dr. Carstair's 1869 Love-Root Elixir: 

Trailer till
Aka Sticky Fingers and a variety of foreign-language names. Scripted by Joseph Dury, who also co-wrote Henning Schellerup's Novak-distributed The Black Alley Cats (1973, see Part X) and Schellerup's later forgotten porn noir Night Pleasures (1976). Among Schellerup's less interesting projects is the TV version of The Time Machine (1978), which we looked at in our R.I.P. Career Review of the character actor R.G. Armstrong.
Dr. Carstair's 1869 Love-Root Elixir is a hardcore flick complete with stiff dicks, penetration and money shots, or at least the movie also exists in a hardcore version. We weren't too lucky in finding a plot anywhere online, though Erotica Films does offer "A couple of thugs rob gold from the peaceful miners, then they steal their women. This leads to fighting, making up, a threesome in a brothel."
Vintage XXX adds an additional detail, taken from the Alpha Blue DVD release backside description: "Bandits steal gold and women from innocent townsfolk. Contains what is probably the sexiest scene of a girl peeing into a cowboy hat ever filmed!"
DVD Drive-In adds that the movie features the "favorites Marsha Jordan and Kathy Hilton. It is, by all accounts, lost, and the trailer has stock music from Novak's corn-porn pictures!" (Lost, the film is not.)
Over at imdb, the inexhaustible Lor of New York City calls the flick a "well-made porn Western [that] deserves a wider audience". He continues to explain [*spoilers*]: "Dr. Carstair's is a surprisingly good example of that rare bird, XXX Western saga. [...] The movie looks good, has decent location photography, and even the period dress rings true. It's simple-minded in script, but no dumber than any of dozens of Charles Starrett B-Westerns of the '40s and '50s cranked out by Columbia. Looking a bit like both Val Avery and William Conrad, William Guhl (of Kiss of the Tarantula [1976 / trailer] and Grave of the Vampire [1972 / trailer]) is effective in the title role, as a 19th-century huckster traveling the West with his plain-Jane but sexy daughter Jenny (an unidentified actress) selling a tonic for $1 a bottle which seemingly has aphrodisiac qualities. He formerly had a gold mine in a small town he returns to, but evil Garett (Tony Vorno, who looks a lot like soft porn star Gary Kent) has stolen his supposedly tapped-out mine. [Vorno, by the way, directed and wrote one film, the infamous rape flick, Victims (1982), and can be found in Garden of the Dead (1972 / full movie).] [...] At least in the Alpha Blue Archives version, this film is an unusual example of a successful spice-up splice job, wherein fully XXX insert shots logically extend the sex scenes into what 1972 audiences really wanted to see. [...] One drawback however is that for fellatio footage the performer doubling for each actress does not look like the original performer. The sex scenes are remarkably effective in their hybrid form and probably improve rather than tarnish the original film. [...] Homework assignment is to identify the actress who played Jenny, a talented enough trouper who is key to this film's success."



Keys
(1973, writ. & dir. George Bowden)
Though credited to "George Tilghman" (director) and "D. Taylor" (writer), this obscure and possibly lost comedy was written and directed by George Bowden, whose early involvement in the Los Angeles exploitation film scene and BA in journalism eventually led to the security of a lifelong job at LA City College (he' since retired, professor emeritus).
Among the projects he participated in: He played "David the Intern" in Ted V. Mikels'The Corpse Grinders (1971 / trailer); he was the still photographer for Black Starlet (1974); he wrote the original concept and story to Hollywood High (1976 / a trailer), but not the screenplay; and, as far as we know his only other directorial project was the documentary short Swimsuits Optional (1983), "an intelligent look at the conflict over nudity at beaches" and "a must for those who enjoy good documentaries".
Bowden's own plot description of Keys, given at imdb: "A key to a train station locker containing a fortune in cash is missing and a young couple must join a special 'club' to find it. This spoof of swingers in the 1970s is a race against time featuring colorful characters and scenery."
Keys stared the cult actress Barbara Mills, among other regulars of the LA exploitation scene of the late 60s & early 70s.



Little Girls Blue
(1978, dir. "Joanna Williams")
Aka Mama Don't Preach. Director "Joanna Williams", whose limited output consists of about five hardcore films, is known to have used the pseudonyms Wray Hamilton and Jennifer Ray; some on-line sources claim she is the former soft-core actress "Ann Myers", otherwise known as Anne Perry aka Anne Meyers (of House on Bare Mountain [1962 / full movie] and Swamp Girl [1971 / trailer]), who in turn became the porn director Anne Perry-Rhine, known for Sweet Savage (1979 / full NSFW film) and Star Babe (1977 / full NSFW film). Other sources swear she is actually is the former soft-core actress Maria Lease, of Lee Frosts The Scavengers (1969 / opening credits) and Love Camp 7 (1969 / trailer), and Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971 / trailer below).
Anyone know for sure? We tend towards Maria Lease...
Trailer to
Dracula vs. Frankenstein:
Little Girls Blue did well enough to warrant a sequel, five years later in 1983, also directed by "Joanna Williams", entitled  Little Girls Blue Part 2. Both Part I and II were written by Williams and "William Dancer", the latter of whom is better known as Daniel Cady, the under-appreciated exploitation producer of many a fun trash film beginning with Help Wanted Female (1968 / 8 minutes) and ending with Dolly Dearest (1991 / trailer below); he foisted many a John Hayes movie and Henning Schellerup movie (including Dr. Carstair's) onto the breathless public.
Daniel Cady, by the way, is married to former soft-core starlet (see above) Maria Lease, the director of Dolly Dearest (1991).
Trailer to
Dolly Dearest:

In a rare review of a porn movie, The Video Vacuum explains Little Girls Blue: "The sex-starved students at the Townsend School for Girls fantasize about getting it on with their teachers. The faculty, as it turns out, has similar aspirations. Some of the students actually manage to seduce and bed their teachers while others sneak out of school in the middle of the night to meet their boyfriends in a barn for sex. [...] Little Girls Blue is a classic erotic XXX flick that harkens back to a time when adult films were more than just a series of unending sex scenes and money shots. It boasts an impressive production design and a good use of location. Williams directs the fantasy scenes in a dreamlike manner (there is lots of slow motion) and the results are quite steamy. She puts more heart into what could've been just another horny schoolgirl movie and handles the sex scenes rather well. [...] Folks, they just don't make 'em like this anymore." (Considering the sex objects of the film — schoolgirls — the topic is so P.I. it ain't surprising.) 



Butter Me Up!
(1984, dir. Charles Webb [as Charles De Santos])
 

"Shot Live On Video Tape!"

Aka Last Tango in Sausalito. Not a classic of the Golden Age. The tagline, as found at imdb: "Sexy blonde housewives experiment with hard cocks and dildos up their perfect pink asspipes!"
The DVD back cover embellishes the non-plot: "Through a series of flashbacks, a beautiful wife recalls her introduction to anal sex. Adventures include scenes with her young and wild girlfriends and a series of group encounters that are sure to please the lusty viewer!" Hard to believe that the same director made The Seven Seductions (see Part XIV) only three years earlier. Starring: Nina Hartley, Lili Marlene and Rocky Balboa.

The End?
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Route 666 (USA, 2002)

August 18, 2015, 5:44 am
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(Spoilers.) OK, we'll admit it: the only reason why watched Route 666 is because many, many years ago, when we were but a young spud — so long before this flick was even made — we sort of found Lou Diamond Phillips hunkadelic. So when we stumbled upon this obscure flick, which also heralds the eternally eccentric Lori Petty (of Tank Girl [1995]) as co-star, we figured it might be worthwhile to catch a gander of the kind of flick two interesting thespians make when their respective careers have landed firmly in a slump.*
*Although, in truth, even if their projects might not be as notable as the ones that initially brought them fame — La Bamba (1987 / trailer) and A League of Their Own (1992 / trailer), respectively — as both have remained in steady employment since they first entered the biz, and neither has suffered an unending nadir like that of someone like, say, Richard Grieco (Webs [2003 / scene in Spanish] and Raiders of the Damned [2005 / trailer]), perhaps it is unjust to say their careers were ever truly in a slump. 
Contrary to what one might think, considering how tainted the number 666 is in the Western world, there have been and are a variety of Route 666s in the US. (There is even a Route 13 out there, but we'll skip that tangent.) The Route 666 of this movie, however, is clearly derived from what is now Route 491 (it was renamed in 2003), a north-south US highway that originally started at a turnoff on Route 66 in Gallup, NM, and enjoyed the nickname of "Devil's Highway" due to its numeration and the supposed (former) high fatality rate of certain segments. In the movie, however, Route 666 is an old, condemned highway running more-or-less parallel to Route 66 that the characters end up taking as an out-of-the-way shortcut to California.
And why do they need the shortcut? Well, though a horror film, Route 666 also utilizes the tropes of the traditional action film: the basic plot involves a group of government agents that capture a government witness on the run, Fred "Rabbit" Smith (Steven Williams), and to get him to court on time and alive — there are hitmen at work — they take the forgotten by-way, whereupon the flick goes horror and they are confronted not only by the killer ghosts of four murdered chain-gang convicts, but kill-happy police officers led by the one who killed the convicts in the first place (character actor L.Q. Jones of The Brotherhood of Satan [1971 / trailer] and The Beast Within [1982 / trailer]) as Sheriff Bob Conaway).
If you get down to it, it is easy to understand why director/screenwriter William Wesley (born Jose Rolando Rodriguez) hasn't been the most active of filmmakers. He seems to be a one trick pony, and his trick isn't all that memorable. Route 666, his second and at the moment still last project, made 13 years after his first, Scarecrows (1998 / trailer), is basically a rehash of his first film in a new setting. (In Scarecrows, you have criminals caught in a graveyard surrounded by killer scarecrows, while in Route 666 you have 7 marshals & a smart-mouthed criminal trapped on a road haunted by killer convicts.) Unluckily, it is also in no way better.
Route 666 begins pleasantly enough, once you get through the oddly annoying and overly long credits sequence, in that the great Dick Miller (of The Terror [1963] and much, much more) appears for all of 5 minutes in the opening bar scene. He quickly disappears, and the movie goes downhill real quickly. The badly staged and shot shootout that soon follows is truly indicative of all that is to come: half-assed, nonsensical, and sort of dull. Aside from the fact that the whole scene is so typical of the typical movie shootouts in which hundreds of bullets fly as people run for cover and never get hit, the viewer is actually subjected to Agent La Roca [Phillips] suffering augural visions of the ghostly convicts — despite being miles from Route 666. (He gets a lot of visions along the way because — Well, wouldn't you just know it! — his long-lost daddy is one of the four undead.) And then the agents hit the road without a map and only an old tourist guide at hand for directions, which is how they end up on Route 666. (We can't help but wonder what kind of guidebook bothers to tell where condemned highways lead.)
To point out what's good in Route 666: Fred "Rabbit" Smith (Steven Williams of The Fear Chamber [2009 / trailer]) has a lot of good lines, including one meta-reference to The X-Files (1993-2002), whence most people know him; the acting is more than adequate, occasionally even good; aside from the opening shootout, the blood and violence ain't Miller Lite; the drive-in theater set is sort of groovy; and... and... and... OK, guess that was it.
In turn, if we were to point out every flaw of the flick, we'd have a novelette-length review here, so we'll keep to the main ones: Lori Petty is totally wasted and sometimes even looks lost; every time the chain gang attacks or violence hits, the cinematographer develops epilepsy and the camera jumps all over the place like a spastic sitting on a vibrator — not good; the editing gets a little confusing now and then, especially around the time the overweight shaman (Gary Farmer of Dead Man [1995 / trailer]) shows up; at one point in the movie, La Roca drinks peyote tea and basically stands up and walks away ready for action; La Roca actually says "Father" to one of the killer ghosts, who in turn becomes the deus ex machina that saves the butt of the final good guys; and — ah, shit: basically the whole story is all over the place, predictable but for one kill, doesn't hold any water at all, and falls apart by the end. Worse, it has no atmosphere — not even a sun-burnt one — and isn't even scary.
Over at imdb, William Wesley is quoted at saying "I like my horror real scary and I like to lose a lot of sleep when I see a horror film. It's a really hard thing to accomplish." The fact of the matter is, he didn't accomplish it in Route 666, which, in the end, is truly one of those films that justly deserve their obscurity. Totally unessential viewing, Route 666 makes it easy to understand why William Wesley has so few directorial projects to his name.
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House of Ghosts / Pisaj (Thailand, 2004)

August 24, 2015, 1:39 am
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The original Thai title, Pisaj, which translates into "Ghost", is perhaps the more fitting title, for though there is more than one ghost in the movie and in the house, House of Ghosts concentrates for the most part on a singular ghost, that of a former hired girl prone (both when alive and dead) to sadistically mistreat a young boy named Arm.
The movie, which seems to be the directorial and screenplay début of Chookiat Sakveerakul is both atmospheric and at times effective, but in the end it is more interesting for its setting in and reflection of contemporary Thai working class culture than it is as a solid slice of horror. But face it, sometimes it's simply fun to watch a film, no matter how flawed, in which the prelude to a scary scene is the directive "Clean up my Buddha room" and not "Take this up to the attic / down to the basement."
One of the strongest visual shots is the film's opening, where we see the daily activities of what seems to be a successful Thai print shop: in the distance, at the shop's entrance, we eventually see a slight figure of a female with a suitcase appear at the door, and long does she stand there before she finally enters. The lonely, timid figure turns out to be Oui (Pumwaree Yodkamol, also found in Ong Bak [2003 / trailer]), a young woman who looks more like a young teenager than a young adult, and who, alone in the world after experiencing the double shooting of both her parents, has turned up at the doorstep of the print shop run by her aloof and severe Aunt Bua (Ammara Assawanon, also seen somewhere in The Ghost of Mae Nak [2005 / German trailer]). Aunt Bua takes Oui in, perhaps less due to familial love or responsibility than the need for someone to care for her grandson, Arm (Alexander Rendell), a young boy who, to put it simply, sees dead people...
For the most part, House of Ghosts pursues a subtle path, raising the tension primarily through bangs in the dark, reflections in glass, Arm's obvious fear of the night (or aversion to specific foods), the mystery of the deserted top floor and the disappearance of the previous woman who took care of Arm, the tales of the print-house workers who seem almost amazed that Oui is still there every morning, or Aunt Bua's distant attitude, piercing eyes, and supplementary position as a medium. This subtle approach is occasionally pushed to the side for a bloody hallucination or two (which Oui suffers as a result of the death of her parents), and then jettisoned at the end, to mixed results, when the director and narrative descends into a confusion of killer apparitions and a crazed, seemingly unstoppable Aunt Bua out for blood, before the movie almost peters out with a somewhat open-ended, overly rational final scene that leaves the future corporal fate of the three survivors rather unresolved.
House of Ghosts intrigues through its foreignness and characters, and does manage to build a certain sense of dread and unavoidable fate, but the script reveals a slight lack of clear direction and not only tosses in a bit too much but also fails is in its inability to tie all the loose strings together. Who are all the ghosts and why are they there? And where do they all go to when the shit hits the fan? In the end — at least until an unexpected revelation in the final scene — it appears that the only ghost truly out for blood is that of the sadistic former house girl. (Perhaps the second strongest scene in the movie is when she appears in Arm's hiding place under the sink and begins crawling towards the terrified young boy.) The whole bit about Oui's hallucinations is also a bit out of place, for since the viewers never truly doubt that the ghosts are real, the hallucinations come across as unneeded; likewise, while Oui's hallucinations might be good for a nasty scene or two, they also confuse — at one point, one hallucination even briefly leaves the viewer unsure whether or not Oui might not actually be dead and not know it, much like the daughter in season one of American Horror Story [2011 / trailer]).
It also seriously annoys when the character of Mai (Theeranai Suwanhom of Headshot [2011 / trailer] and Happy Inn [2005 / trailer]), the deus ex machina of the grand finale, has absolutely no problem getting into the house (after it's made more than clear that it is locked up and Oui & Arm are trapped in it), but subsequently cannot get out. At least Aunt Bua's sudden conversion from a distant and unfriendly old woman into a blood-thirsty wacko with almost Terminator-like unstoppableness is slightly foreshadowed — the question "Where are the Buddhas?" actually does portend a lot — and is then revealed to have precedence, but why she should even return home in the first place is one of many natural questions that never get answered.
More interesting than good, House of Ghosts has atmosphere and a decidedly leisurely pace until the havoc explodes at the end — and then the mayhem ends almost as quickly as it begins, with the movie tapering off with a final that is particularly prosaic and open (what happens to everybody thereafter?). We recommend it with reservations.
Director/scriptwriter Chookiat Sakveerakul, by the way, went on to do the screenplay to the far more consistent if ridiculous [and entertaining] action flick Chocolate (2008 / trailer).
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