Shocking Cinema
You'd think that with all this time off, I'd have lots of time to watch movies. I have, but not as much as I'd like. 2009 has seen a fair amount of catching up on major 2007-8 releases that I missed in the theater ("Juno," "Iron Man," "Pineapple Express," "The Mist," "Tropic Thunder," "Hitman," "Saw V," "Shoot 'Em Up," "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," etc.), while I've ventured out to see the 3-D "My Bloody Valentine" remake, "Coraline" (twice) and even "Twilight" in second run. Since there are plenty of places to read about all of those, I'd like to tell you about a few of the low-budget international oddities I've enjoyed between them, in this post and a sequel to follow shortly. All would ostensibly be filed under "horror," although in many cases, that heading's a stretch.
"Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead" (dir. Lloyd Kaufman, 2006)
One can never rely too strictly upon release dates stamped on Troma movies. I think this one was was announced sometime in 2004 or 2005, and I'm pretty sure that although Troma president Lloyd Kaufman toted clips to conventions and other personal appearances for years, the finished film wasn't distributed until 2008. Anyway, for the uninitiated, Uncle Lloyd's signature style is juvenile gross-out, but with enough subversive thematic elements and highbrow references to evince that he makes dumb movies for smart people. Furthermore, Troma's own productions are good-natured chunk-blowers, and are generally much better than the stuff they distribute which was made by other people, a distinction which lazy critics often fail to make. I have personally been waiting quite a while for "Poultrygeist," a typically hard-to-describe Kaufman joint concerning a fast food restaurant built on a Native American burial ground which, naturally, becomes the site of a zombie/chicken creature bloodbath. It includes a number of lovably amateurish singin' and dancin' numbers in the tradition of "Cannibal! The Musical," which is one of few exceptions to the aforementioned Troma-flicks-made-by-other-people rule. Many of the characters are named after chain eateries (the heroes are named Arbie and Wendy), and the plot brings up every famous claim made against such ventures, including unhealthy food, exploitation of work force and corporate annihilation of independent competitors (the latter being one of Lloyd's pet causes). It at first seems to offer surprisingly right-wing takes on homosexuality and U.S./Arab relations, although by the final reel, these conservative attitudes are also upended in a fairly twisted manner. All of these themes are treated with levity appropriate to a film which features so many stoopid gags involving masturbation and things shoved into/spraying out of male asses. The musical numbers are all pretty fun, and everything from the nudity (both pleasant and unpleasant) to the gore (face in meat slicer, breast implants torn out, etc.) is gratuitous in the best possible manner. Most of all, it's a highly creative and original mishmash of styles, and while it's not as consistently enjoyable as Troma's last few in-house features (not counting the disappointing Frankenfilm "Tales from the Crapper"), you can see the DIY love in every handmade frame.
During Mr. Kaufman's presentation at the recent Chicago-area Fangoria Weekend of Horrors, I asked him how well "Poultrygeist" has done financially, and he understandably hedged his answer... the initial three-disc set, which my lovely lady bought me for Xmas, has already sold out, but he and his wife (who happens to be executive director of the New York State Governor's Office for Motion Picture and Television Development) sank a bunch of their own money into shooting it on 35mm, and it's been shorted on proper screenings due to all the space-hogging major "independents." So, although I already own it, I may have to attend one of the upcoming "Poultrygeist" screenings at Chicago's Music Box Theatre on April 17 and 18, if not for the live thrill of a new Troma print, then to support Lloyd and Pat Kaufman's personal investment. If you have any love for truly independent cinema, the stuff that's not studio-distributed horseshit starring slumming Hollywood people, you should consider attending as well. My only caveat is that this is the sort of movie in which a young man, in the midst of an insane zombie chicken assault, screams "I've got bitch titties!" before having his shirt ripped off to reveal eggs poking through the skin of his chest, which hatch into squawking chicks, upon which he proceeds to vomit green slime before being fed bloody meat by one of the beasts, with whom he then proceeds to make out. Yes, it's that good.
"Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu" (aka "Tokyo Gore Police," dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura, 2008)
Beyond the commercial drudgery of ghost-revenge snoozers, Japan can churn out some astounding genre enetertainment, and with a title like "Tokyo Gore Police," you might imagine you're in for a good n' bloody trashfest. Upon seeing it, you'll realize that the seemingly blunt title is fairly innocuous compared with its insane content. The directorial debut of effects wizard Nishimura stars model Eihi Shiina, the deceptively depraved lady from Takashi Miike's "Audition," as a damaged, self-mutilating officer in a dystopian near-future Tokyo. Here, the police have become a privatized paramilitary group given to extreme measures in order to deal with a dangerous new breed of crazed psycho killers. These are the so-called Engineers, whose bodies, when injured, generate outrageous weapons at the site of the wound. For instance, the first guy we see her tangle with gets his hand cut off and a chainsaw pops out, there's a woman who loses the lower half of her body, only to sprout a chomping set of crocodile jaws in its place, and one dude, upon having the top of his head removed, grows cannons from his eye sockets which fire bone fragment bullets. Our katana-weilding heroine works for a fascistic chief who wears a horned kabuto helmet outfitted with a loudspeaker mouthpiece, and she's haunted by the assassination of her straight-arrow cop father, which we see repeatedly in great head-exploding detail. On top of all this gruesome weirdness, there's a stream of morbidly funny commercial parodies advertising cutesy blade kits for fashionable young cutters and services which allow bereaved families to dispatch the killers of their loved ones with Wiimotes, as well as an ebullient police dispatcher whose inappropriately chirpy squealing seems like an homage to the orientation video girl in "Battle Royale." In a sea of underwhelming imports, "Tokyo Gore Police" is a rare satisfying Japanese gorefest. It manages to be both unsettling and fun, matter-of-fact and surreal, over-the-top and ponderous, satirical and serious. If you're looking for something different that combines the sensibilities of the Peter Jackson behind "Bad Taste" and "Braindead," the David Cronenberg responsible for "Rabid" and "Videodrome" and the Paul Verhoeven who made "Robocop" and "Starship Troopers," this is it.
"Severance" (dir. Christopher Smith, 2006)
Aside from notable exceptions like "Hellraiser" or "28 Days Later," the British horror tradition is more gothic/perverse than gory. Sure, Hammer Film Productions took the world's first steps toward graphic cinematic violence in the late 1950s, but their Frankenstein and Dracula flicks are pretty tame today, especially compared to the still-shocking stuff red-blooded Americans H.G. Lewis and Dave Friedman cooked up less than a decade later. Then the "video nasty" era kept classic extreme movies out of wide British circulation, and combined with the industry's slump in general, from being made there. Thankfully, recent years have seen this uptight trend reversing. A bloody and trenchant survival tale laced with humor, "Severance" has a bit in common with contemporaries like "Dog Soldiers" and "Shaun of the Dead," with a touch of gritty former-Eastern-Bloc terror a la "Hostel." The intriguing setup revolves around employees of a British-American defense contractor who embark on a corporate team-building retreat in remote Hungary. They're supposed to go to a luxury lodge owned by the company, but end up at a dilapidated building. Rumors that the area once housed a group of savage Russian soldiers who enjoyed their Bosnian war assignment too much are born out when they are beseiged by a group of military killers, who stalk and dispatch the desk jockeys with weapons once supplied by their own employer. The "hero" characters are generally well-drawn, especially the druggie slacker played by British celeb Danny Dyer, and their jocular interplay is nicely offset by the film's heaping helping of uncompromising violence. As such, it's engaging throughout, and provides a decent compromise for those who don't want a lightweight horror-comedy, but also don't want the overwhelmingly grim tone of what moralistic jagoffs call "torture porn" (more on that dumb term in the next post). I was impressed enough to hunt down director Smith's first movie, "Creep," a subway-bound gore flick which earned comparisons to the '70s cult classic "Death Line" (aka "Raw Meat"). It's pretty standard, and nowhere near as fun as "Severance."
"Nang Nak" (dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)
Here's a Thai ghost picture, a huge hit in its homeland that eschews the overdone J-horror style while remaining more suggestive and emotionally affecting than anything else in this round of reviews. It's got plenty of creepy moments, but having been based on a folk legend that has been filmed many other times, "Nang Nak" has a mythical quality that takes it out of the realm of pure horror cinema. At its center is the rural romance between Mak, who departs from his village to fight in a war, and Nak, the pregnant bride he leaves behind. The film's first truly powerful scene comes as Mak lies suffering from injuries, intercut lyrically with Nak struggling in a difficult childbirth. Mak eventually comes through, and he returns to find Nak at their modest hut, tending to their baby, Dang. The family's happy reunion leads to days of bliss, with Mak singing lullabies to Dang and making love to Nak, but the other villagers are spooked. As various people, including his best friend and the local monks, try to tell Mak, Nak actually died during the birth, so the wife and baby he clings to are actually ghosts. Of course, he doesn't believe them, and Nak is determined to support his illusion by terrorizing and even killing anyone who might prove otherwise, leaving one old woman's corpse to be eaten by Komodo dragons. By the time Mak comes around, the frightened villagers approach with torches to burn down his home, and Nak is is full-blown villainess mode, hurling hunks of burning wood at the mob. It takes a variety of holy men and rituals to convince the anguished spirit to move on, and the finale is absolutely heartrending. Beyond the lush, green scenery, effective score and surprisingly tasteful outbursts of violence, "Nang Nak" succeeds most because of its sensitivity to its sympathetic characters, who even as historical archetypes seem like real people rather than the detached cyphers seen in most modern Asian ghost movies. It rightly cemented the reputation of director Nonzee Nimibutr, a pillar of the Thai new wave who went on to produce the Pang brothers' "Bangkok Dangerous" (the original, not their Hollywood remake with Nicolas Cage) and "Nang Nak" screenwriter Wisit Sasanatieng's "Tears of the Black Tiger," a colorfully bizarre Thai western/melodrama.
"Nightmare Beach" (aka "Welcome to Spring Break," dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1988)
Sometimes I give up on hoping for a good horror movie, and I opt to rent something that looks completely terrible. Most of the time, this yields an umemorable or even painfully dull viewing experience. This time, I lucked out! While searching the computerized catalog at the local library for CDs by composer Claudio Simonetti, the onetime Goblin keyboardist who did a ton of session work in trashy Italian '80s cinema, I discovered a VHS called "Welcome to Spring Break." I'd seen the movie on rental shelves before, but passed it over due to the terrible box art, the unpromising "slasher terrorizes spring breakers" plot description and the unfamiliar filmmaker listed as "Harry Kirkpatrick." You see, back in the day, a lot of continentals used anglicized pseudonyms in the hopes of convincing Americans they were seeing a domestic production. For me, it has the opposite effect. I'll usually sit through any crappy-looking unknown quantity if it looks European, but have no desire to snooze through another random low-budget American slasher picture. It turns out that "Welcome to Spring Break" was originally called "Nightmare Beach" (a much better title), and it comes from renowned hack Umberto Lenzi, whose shaky resume includes some real losers ("Nightmare City," "Black Demons") but also such entertaining crapfests as "Cannibal Ferox" and "Ironmaster." For this one, imagine a cross between "Fraternity Vacation" and "Prom Night," wherein a host of large-haired '80s cheeseballs visit Florida to gyrate and jiggle while being picked off by a mysterious masked murderer, whose identity is hidden by a number of red herrings. Since the movie begins with the electrocution of a biker named Diablo and the helmeted killer electrocutes his victims (his motorcycle is even rigged with some sort of kick-ass shock device), we're supposed to think it's Diablo, but I guessed the proper culprit about 10 minutes in. Despite the lack of gore effects, the murders are pretty decent, and just about every character is hilarious, including the quarterback protagonist (who's literally tormented because he lost the Orange Bowl), the peeping Tom hotel clerk, the scowling bike gang with the logo from Lamberto Bava's "Demons" painted on their jackets and the creepy S&M cop played by genre favorite John Saxon. The girls tend to be kinda sexy in that poofy '80s sort of way, and we get to hear the soundtrack's five or so songs (including Simonetti's theme music) several times each, thus confirming how uniformly terrible they are. With its excess of extremely dated cheese, this relic is truly a hidden gem of bad cinema and has made me rethink my feelings about Umberto Lenzi... maybe I should investigate some of his gialli or poliziottesci.
I'll catch you in a few days with more stabbings, bludgeonings, asphyxiations, reanimations and other morbid happenings... and here's hoping that Crack the Skye, the new Mastodon album in stores today, ends the recent spate of eagerly-awaited but disappointing major metal releases.
"Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead" (dir. Lloyd Kaufman, 2006)One can never rely too strictly upon release dates stamped on Troma movies. I think this one was was announced sometime in 2004 or 2005, and I'm pretty sure that although Troma president Lloyd Kaufman toted clips to conventions and other personal appearances for years, the finished film wasn't distributed until 2008. Anyway, for the uninitiated, Uncle Lloyd's signature style is juvenile gross-out, but with enough subversive thematic elements and highbrow references to evince that he makes dumb movies for smart people. Furthermore, Troma's own productions are good-natured chunk-blowers, and are generally much better than the stuff they distribute which was made by other people, a distinction which lazy critics often fail to make. I have personally been waiting quite a while for "Poultrygeist," a typically hard-to-describe Kaufman joint concerning a fast food restaurant built on a Native American burial ground which, naturally, becomes the site of a zombie/chicken creature bloodbath. It includes a number of lovably amateurish singin' and dancin' numbers in the tradition of "Cannibal! The Musical," which is one of few exceptions to the aforementioned Troma-flicks-made-by-other-people rule. Many of the characters are named after chain eateries (the heroes are named Arbie and Wendy), and the plot brings up every famous claim made against such ventures, including unhealthy food, exploitation of work force and corporate annihilation of independent competitors (the latter being one of Lloyd's pet causes). It at first seems to offer surprisingly right-wing takes on homosexuality and U.S./Arab relations, although by the final reel, these conservative attitudes are also upended in a fairly twisted manner. All of these themes are treated with levity appropriate to a film which features so many stoopid gags involving masturbation and things shoved into/spraying out of male asses. The musical numbers are all pretty fun, and everything from the nudity (both pleasant and unpleasant) to the gore (face in meat slicer, breast implants torn out, etc.) is gratuitous in the best possible manner. Most of all, it's a highly creative and original mishmash of styles, and while it's not as consistently enjoyable as Troma's last few in-house features (not counting the disappointing Frankenfilm "Tales from the Crapper"), you can see the DIY love in every handmade frame.
During Mr. Kaufman's presentation at the recent Chicago-area Fangoria Weekend of Horrors, I asked him how well "Poultrygeist" has done financially, and he understandably hedged his answer... the initial three-disc set, which my lovely lady bought me for Xmas, has already sold out, but he and his wife (who happens to be executive director of the New York State Governor's Office for Motion Picture and Television Development) sank a bunch of their own money into shooting it on 35mm, and it's been shorted on proper screenings due to all the space-hogging major "independents." So, although I already own it, I may have to attend one of the upcoming "Poultrygeist" screenings at Chicago's Music Box Theatre on April 17 and 18, if not for the live thrill of a new Troma print, then to support Lloyd and Pat Kaufman's personal investment. If you have any love for truly independent cinema, the stuff that's not studio-distributed horseshit starring slumming Hollywood people, you should consider attending as well. My only caveat is that this is the sort of movie in which a young man, in the midst of an insane zombie chicken assault, screams "I've got bitch titties!" before having his shirt ripped off to reveal eggs poking through the skin of his chest, which hatch into squawking chicks, upon which he proceeds to vomit green slime before being fed bloody meat by one of the beasts, with whom he then proceeds to make out. Yes, it's that good.
"Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu" (aka "Tokyo Gore Police," dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura, 2008)Beyond the commercial drudgery of ghost-revenge snoozers, Japan can churn out some astounding genre enetertainment, and with a title like "Tokyo Gore Police," you might imagine you're in for a good n' bloody trashfest. Upon seeing it, you'll realize that the seemingly blunt title is fairly innocuous compared with its insane content. The directorial debut of effects wizard Nishimura stars model Eihi Shiina, the deceptively depraved lady from Takashi Miike's "Audition," as a damaged, self-mutilating officer in a dystopian near-future Tokyo. Here, the police have become a privatized paramilitary group given to extreme measures in order to deal with a dangerous new breed of crazed psycho killers. These are the so-called Engineers, whose bodies, when injured, generate outrageous weapons at the site of the wound. For instance, the first guy we see her tangle with gets his hand cut off and a chainsaw pops out, there's a woman who loses the lower half of her body, only to sprout a chomping set of crocodile jaws in its place, and one dude, upon having the top of his head removed, grows cannons from his eye sockets which fire bone fragment bullets. Our katana-weilding heroine works for a fascistic chief who wears a horned kabuto helmet outfitted with a loudspeaker mouthpiece, and she's haunted by the assassination of her straight-arrow cop father, which we see repeatedly in great head-exploding detail. On top of all this gruesome weirdness, there's a stream of morbidly funny commercial parodies advertising cutesy blade kits for fashionable young cutters and services which allow bereaved families to dispatch the killers of their loved ones with Wiimotes, as well as an ebullient police dispatcher whose inappropriately chirpy squealing seems like an homage to the orientation video girl in "Battle Royale." In a sea of underwhelming imports, "Tokyo Gore Police" is a rare satisfying Japanese gorefest. It manages to be both unsettling and fun, matter-of-fact and surreal, over-the-top and ponderous, satirical and serious. If you're looking for something different that combines the sensibilities of the Peter Jackson behind "Bad Taste" and "Braindead," the David Cronenberg responsible for "Rabid" and "Videodrome" and the Paul Verhoeven who made "Robocop" and "Starship Troopers," this is it.
"Severance" (dir. Christopher Smith, 2006)Aside from notable exceptions like "Hellraiser" or "28 Days Later," the British horror tradition is more gothic/perverse than gory. Sure, Hammer Film Productions took the world's first steps toward graphic cinematic violence in the late 1950s, but their Frankenstein and Dracula flicks are pretty tame today, especially compared to the still-shocking stuff red-blooded Americans H.G. Lewis and Dave Friedman cooked up less than a decade later. Then the "video nasty" era kept classic extreme movies out of wide British circulation, and combined with the industry's slump in general, from being made there. Thankfully, recent years have seen this uptight trend reversing. A bloody and trenchant survival tale laced with humor, "Severance" has a bit in common with contemporaries like "Dog Soldiers" and "Shaun of the Dead," with a touch of gritty former-Eastern-Bloc terror a la "Hostel." The intriguing setup revolves around employees of a British-American defense contractor who embark on a corporate team-building retreat in remote Hungary. They're supposed to go to a luxury lodge owned by the company, but end up at a dilapidated building. Rumors that the area once housed a group of savage Russian soldiers who enjoyed their Bosnian war assignment too much are born out when they are beseiged by a group of military killers, who stalk and dispatch the desk jockeys with weapons once supplied by their own employer. The "hero" characters are generally well-drawn, especially the druggie slacker played by British celeb Danny Dyer, and their jocular interplay is nicely offset by the film's heaping helping of uncompromising violence. As such, it's engaging throughout, and provides a decent compromise for those who don't want a lightweight horror-comedy, but also don't want the overwhelmingly grim tone of what moralistic jagoffs call "torture porn" (more on that dumb term in the next post). I was impressed enough to hunt down director Smith's first movie, "Creep," a subway-bound gore flick which earned comparisons to the '70s cult classic "Death Line" (aka "Raw Meat"). It's pretty standard, and nowhere near as fun as "Severance."
"Nang Nak" (dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)Here's a Thai ghost picture, a huge hit in its homeland that eschews the overdone J-horror style while remaining more suggestive and emotionally affecting than anything else in this round of reviews. It's got plenty of creepy moments, but having been based on a folk legend that has been filmed many other times, "Nang Nak" has a mythical quality that takes it out of the realm of pure horror cinema. At its center is the rural romance between Mak, who departs from his village to fight in a war, and Nak, the pregnant bride he leaves behind. The film's first truly powerful scene comes as Mak lies suffering from injuries, intercut lyrically with Nak struggling in a difficult childbirth. Mak eventually comes through, and he returns to find Nak at their modest hut, tending to their baby, Dang. The family's happy reunion leads to days of bliss, with Mak singing lullabies to Dang and making love to Nak, but the other villagers are spooked. As various people, including his best friend and the local monks, try to tell Mak, Nak actually died during the birth, so the wife and baby he clings to are actually ghosts. Of course, he doesn't believe them, and Nak is determined to support his illusion by terrorizing and even killing anyone who might prove otherwise, leaving one old woman's corpse to be eaten by Komodo dragons. By the time Mak comes around, the frightened villagers approach with torches to burn down his home, and Nak is is full-blown villainess mode, hurling hunks of burning wood at the mob. It takes a variety of holy men and rituals to convince the anguished spirit to move on, and the finale is absolutely heartrending. Beyond the lush, green scenery, effective score and surprisingly tasteful outbursts of violence, "Nang Nak" succeeds most because of its sensitivity to its sympathetic characters, who even as historical archetypes seem like real people rather than the detached cyphers seen in most modern Asian ghost movies. It rightly cemented the reputation of director Nonzee Nimibutr, a pillar of the Thai new wave who went on to produce the Pang brothers' "Bangkok Dangerous" (the original, not their Hollywood remake with Nicolas Cage) and "Nang Nak" screenwriter Wisit Sasanatieng's "Tears of the Black Tiger," a colorfully bizarre Thai western/melodrama.
"Nightmare Beach" (aka "Welcome to Spring Break," dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1988)Sometimes I give up on hoping for a good horror movie, and I opt to rent something that looks completely terrible. Most of the time, this yields an umemorable or even painfully dull viewing experience. This time, I lucked out! While searching the computerized catalog at the local library for CDs by composer Claudio Simonetti, the onetime Goblin keyboardist who did a ton of session work in trashy Italian '80s cinema, I discovered a VHS called "Welcome to Spring Break." I'd seen the movie on rental shelves before, but passed it over due to the terrible box art, the unpromising "slasher terrorizes spring breakers" plot description and the unfamiliar filmmaker listed as "Harry Kirkpatrick." You see, back in the day, a lot of continentals used anglicized pseudonyms in the hopes of convincing Americans they were seeing a domestic production. For me, it has the opposite effect. I'll usually sit through any crappy-looking unknown quantity if it looks European, but have no desire to snooze through another random low-budget American slasher picture. It turns out that "Welcome to Spring Break" was originally called "Nightmare Beach" (a much better title), and it comes from renowned hack Umberto Lenzi, whose shaky resume includes some real losers ("Nightmare City," "Black Demons") but also such entertaining crapfests as "Cannibal Ferox" and "Ironmaster." For this one, imagine a cross between "Fraternity Vacation" and "Prom Night," wherein a host of large-haired '80s cheeseballs visit Florida to gyrate and jiggle while being picked off by a mysterious masked murderer, whose identity is hidden by a number of red herrings. Since the movie begins with the electrocution of a biker named Diablo and the helmeted killer electrocutes his victims (his motorcycle is even rigged with some sort of kick-ass shock device), we're supposed to think it's Diablo, but I guessed the proper culprit about 10 minutes in. Despite the lack of gore effects, the murders are pretty decent, and just about every character is hilarious, including the quarterback protagonist (who's literally tormented because he lost the Orange Bowl), the peeping Tom hotel clerk, the scowling bike gang with the logo from Lamberto Bava's "Demons" painted on their jackets and the creepy S&M cop played by genre favorite John Saxon. The girls tend to be kinda sexy in that poofy '80s sort of way, and we get to hear the soundtrack's five or so songs (including Simonetti's theme music) several times each, thus confirming how uniformly terrible they are. With its excess of extremely dated cheese, this relic is truly a hidden gem of bad cinema and has made me rethink my feelings about Umberto Lenzi... maybe I should investigate some of his gialli or poliziottesci.
I'll catch you in a few days with more stabbings, bludgeonings, asphyxiations, reanimations and other morbid happenings... and here's hoping that Crack the Skye, the new Mastodon album in stores today, ends the recent spate of eagerly-awaited but disappointing major metal releases.
posted by SoulReaper at 12:05 PM
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