Kev's Cupboard

The Redeemer Son of Satan! (1978)

2008-12-01T21:27:00.002Z

Constantine S. Gochis' The Redeemer Son of Satan! (1978) broke from what little norm there was for the pre-Halloween (1978) slasher movies by stirring in a spot of the popular devil movies that were running neck and neck with slashers at the time in the race for the public's affections, the effect of The Exorcist (1973) still being keenly felt at the box office.

In a disjointed and often quite disorientating series on interlocking flashbacks, we meet three men and three women who are travelling to their old school for a class reunion. By the time they arrive, the janitor has been murdered and the six (who all represent one of six deadly sins - the killer, presumably, is the seventh though it isn't made clear) are soon being stalked by a psychopath who may turn out to be the devil himself. The film is bookended by scenes of a young boy emerging from a lake and heading for a nearby church (the preacher turns out to be the killer - don't worry, that doesn't really spoil anything for you) and at the climax being taken back there.

Of all of the post-Texas Chain Saw Massacre/pre-Halloween slashers, The Redeemer (also released as the thuddingly to-the-point Class Reunion Massacre) is undoubtedly one of the weirdest. It's dreamlike atmosphere, sluggish pacing and fragmented narrative often make it more of a chore than it needs to be. It also doesn't help much that if the victims are meant to be sinners (and to be honest they seem to be fairly mild sinners at best), then who is it that we're supposed to be rooting for in the film? Gochis effectively removes audience identification by suggesting - as was often the case in the more puritanical of the slashers - that the victims deserve everything they get. Indeed, The Redeemer is almost unique among slashers in that the viewer is expected to side with the killer all the way - and one can't shake the uncomfortable feeling that we're simply witnessing the religiously fuelled wish fulfilment fantasies of either the writer William Vernick or, more likely, Gochis at work. The film makes heavy weather of its Christian symbolism and frequently gets bogged down in religious diversions, particularly in the early stages which are at best ponderous, at worst simply unwatchable.

Very little is explained in Redeemer which is no bad thing. This isn't the sort of horror movie where you're spoon fed answers from frame one though a little clarification of some of the more obscure moments would have been appreciated. Like who the boy in the lake is meant to be. And there's some nonsense with a set of double thumbs that the boy seems to transfer to the preacher only to get back again at the climax.

Buried away in this intriguing mess are some nice scenes, carefully and thoughtfully shot, and Gochis manages to create a creepy atmosphere with no discernible budget to speak of. But the confused and confusing structure, uncertain tone and almost prudish moralising render it all but unwatchable. It remains of some minor interest for predating the Seven Deadly Sins based stalk-and-slash mayhem of the infinitely better Se7en (1994).
KEVIN LYONS

Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers Part 2

2008-11-17T20:42:00.005Z

The last of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV

The second disc of the BFI's excellent Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers release kicks off with some of the work of the British producer Cecil Hepworth, including one of the most famous of all British silent shorts, the action packed Rescued By Rover (1905), directed by Lewin Fitzhamon. This tale of daring canine rescue is incredibly accomplished for its day - it's a wonder that in these early days with such technically primitive equipment at hand that Hepworth and Fitzhamon even attempted including the eponymous hero hound - even today, animal actors can bring a seasoned director out in a cold chill.

Fantasy is represented in the Hepworth section by Fitzhamon's That Fatal Sneeze (1907), in which a young boy's revenge on an old man leads to disaster. The boy doses the man's clothes with sneezing powder causing a sneezing fit unlike any other - the man first wrecks his room, causes mayhem in the local town and eventually sneezes so hard that he spontaneously combusts!

The British Cricks and Martin and American Kineto Company offerings pass by with no discernable fantastic elements, bringing us neatly to the Pathé brothers. As with disc one, the fantasy centrepiece here is a lengthy, hand-coloured French fantasy, Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs (1905), clearly inspired by George Méliès' 1901 version of the same story. The Pathé's take on the story is in beautifully hand-stencilled colour (watch it and wonder for a moment at the patience, dedication and man hours needed to achieve the stunning effect seen here) and with some gorgeous and elaborate backdrops.

Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse (1906) is in a similar vein, but this one boasts some excellent optical effects and once again those painted backdrops are stunning. The interior of the tomb is particularly brilliant, allowing the brothers to dolly sideways along its entire length - no big deal in these days of computer controlled cameras and Steadicams, but imagine the technical difficulties involved here and the craftsmanship used to overcome them. The genie is also a wonderful creation, actually quite creepy when he first appears.

Both Aladin (which boasts a massive cast) and Ali Baba end with elaborate tableaux, designed specifically to show off the Pathés genius with set design and mechanical special effects. Much smaller scale is their earlier dream fantasy, Reve et realite (1901), a remake of the George Albert Smith film Let Me Dream Again (1900) included on the first disc.

The Pathé section comes to a close with Magic Bricks (1905), a relatively lightweight and straightforward trick film, just an excuse really for lots of Méliès-like illusions. It's technically very well done but rather dull by their own standards.

It's back across the Atlantic for the next section, from the Edison Manufacting Company, which kicks off with a group of Scotsmen dancing in slow motion in It's Scotch (1898), the first known advertising film. Much more interesting is The Great Train Robbery (1903), the extraordinary Edwin S. Porter film that made full use of every cinematic trick known at that time. In fact, there's little here that isn't still being used every day on film sets around the world and The Great Train Robbery could easily stand its own against any modestly budgeted action film made today. It features some hand coloured sequences, though they're not as elaborate as the later French films, and the final shot of a bandit levelling his gun at the audience and firing is justly famous.

The last film of any real interest on disc two is Porter's Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), another trick film and one well known to genre fans thanks to its inclusion in just about every book ever written on the subjects or horror and fantasy in the cinema. It's certainly a very clever film - there's an excellent, woozy representation of drunkenness achieved by superimposing panning shots - but it's rather crude compared to the more flamboyant and technically adventurous films being made by Méliès at the same time.

Overall, Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers is a wonderful release, one highly recommended to anyone interested in the earliest days of the cinema. The quality of the prints inevitably ranges from the adequate to the really rather shoddy, but after all these years, it's a miracle that any of them have survived at all. The disc comes with a commentary track but to be honest it's a bit if a disappointment - film historian Barry Salt knows his stuff but has very little to say about the films, usually relaying a short anecdote at the start if each film, then saying nothing else at all until the next short starts.

But that's a minor grumble and this excellent disc should keep your early cinema needs nicely sated. You can pick up a copy from Amazon by clicking here - it comes very highly recommended.
KEVIN LYONS

Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers Part 1

2008-11-11T21:09:00.003Z

The seventh of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV

Back in 2005, The British Film Institute released Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers, a two disc collection of some of the earliest surviving examples of film making from Europe, the States and the UK. Over the next two weeks, I'll be looking at what's on these discs that may be of interest to EOFFTV visitors - and there's certainly plenty of that!

The first thing you notice while working your way through disc one is that the word primitive only really applies to a very few titles in this collection. There's a technical proficiency in some of the more ambitious films that no doubt startle many contemporary viewers with pre-defined ideas of what silent cinema should look like.

At first, disc one seems to following some sort of chronological patterns (though that gets a bit muddled later on) so it's only right then that it kicks off with a selection of shorts from the Lumière Brothers. Most of these extremely early examples are simply shots taken of everyday events (workers leaving the Lumière factory, a baby being fed, the famous Arrivée d'un train en gare à la Ciotat/Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) which had viewers screaming in terror as the titular train pulls into the station) but there are some examples of the experimentation that oozes from every pixel of this DVD. Demolition d'un mur (1896), for example, is a simple shot of workers demolishing an old wall - but at screenings, projectionists would then reverse the film, amazing audiences when the wall appears to rebuild itself. And Le jardinière et le petit espiègle (1895) is the first known film shown to the general public to feature a fully staged fictional situation - in this case, the much copied and spoofed vignette of the naughty boy standing on a hosepipe so that the user gets sprayed in the face when he examines the nozzle to see what's wrong.

These "slice-of-life" shorts offer us a glimpse into a time as alien to us now as any futuristic thriller, a time when men all wore hats and gallantly tipped them at any passing cameraman, a time when fires were put out by brave fire-fighters aboard horse drawn (and in some cases, hand drawn!) fire engines.

The first treat for lovers of fantastic cinema comes in the shape of the inevitable Georges Méliès film, in this case a lengthy extract from Le voyage à travers l'impossible (1904). The first shock is to find it in faded but still impressive hand-tinted colour. The second is the realisation of just how technically advanced film-making had already become - this was made less than a decade after the earliest Lumière films, yet already Méliès had perfected techniques that would stay in use until the advent of the digital age. He made stunning use of sets, tinting and mechanical effects to enhance the story, a massive undertaking for its time.

With their breathtaking invention and epic scale, it's the films of Méliès that mark the real birth of cinema, the first flowering of the new art form's true potential. Even now, Le voyage à travers l'impossible is impressive and compelling viewing and there are genuinely moments here that will still have you wondering how he did that.

The rest of disc one of Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers is devoted to early British filmmakers. Birt Acres is represented by a very poor condition clip from Rough Sea at Dover (1895) and is fairly representative of the kind of work this little known British pioneer produced. Like the Lumières, he specialised in filming whatever took his fancy, making little or no attempt at creating a narrative.

More ambitious were the films of R.W. Paul, an electrician and scientific instruments maker whose body of work is represented here with a collection of shorts dating from 1898 onwards. Paul had collaborated with Acres in the design of their own camera and built the first specialist film production studio in the UK. He widely credited with being the true father of the British cinema, being not only a producer but also a distributors and ardent publicist for the fledgling art.

In one of Paul's shorts, The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901), we see one of the earliest examples of cinema starting to reference itself, as a country bumpkin visits a travelling film show and is initially amused by the images of pretty young girls, then terrified by a train arriving, not at La Ciotat, but at some unidentified British station.

The disc also includes Paul's famous The '?' Motorist (1906), an attempt to "do a Méliès", a charming "trick" film that lacks the technical polish of Méliès but is endearing all the same with its tale of a motorist and his passenger who run over a policeman, drive the side of a building and do a few circuits of the rings of Saturn before crashing back to Earth!

Next up comes another great legend of early British cinema, George Albert Smith, one of the many film makers based in Brighton on the south coast and the one who more than most embraced fantasy subjects. His genre contributions here include the rather bizarre Let Me Dream Again (1900) in which a man drinks and smokes with a woman dressed as a clown, wild revelry for the time, which turns out to be a dream - he subsequently wakes in bed with his nagging wife. It became the norm in these early days for films to be remade fairly quickly, sometimes by the same producer (they would shoot another version of the film when the original negative was lost, damaged or simply wore out) and often by rival producers looking to emulate the original film's success. On disc two of Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers, we'll find a remake of Let Me Dream Again in the shape of the Pathé brothers' Reve et realite (1901).

The best of the Smith shorts on offer here is the last film he ever made, the ambitious comedy Mary Jane's Mishap (1903). The titular character is a not terribly bright scullery maid who tries to get a fire going with paraffin with predictably tragic results. Her grave (complete with the words "rest in pieces" engraved on it!) is visited by a group of women who are startled to see Mary Jane's ghost return to life and frighten them away before doing a little dance. Mary Jane herself is played by Smith's wife.

The rest of disc one contains only one further film with fantasy material, but there's still much to enjoy with offerings from the Sheffield Photographic Company, Haggar and Sons, Bamforth and Co (including The Biter Bit (1900), one of many variations on the Lumières' Le jardinière et le petit espiègle (1895)) and the grandly named Williamson's Kinematograph Company Ltd (which includes the famous The Big Swallow (1901) in which an angry man is so upset at being filmed that he swallows the man and his camera whole!).

Had the BFI just left things with this one disc, it would still be an extraordinary achievement. But they chose to dredge up even more long unseen treasures from their vaults for a second disc. We'll be looking at the contents of that one next week as well as looking at the DVD itself.
KEVIN LYONS

La cabina (1972)

2008-11-03T22:38:00.004Z

The sixth of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

When it turned up on British television in the mid 1980s, La cabina was something of an unknown quantity. It was shown during one of BBC2's much loved (and still very much missed) Saturday night horror double bills and has since gone on to earn something of a cult following among British fans in particular.

Like all of the best short films, the story is simplicity itself. Told with virtually no dialogue, it tells the tale of a man who stops off a telephone booth on the way home from dropping his son off at school. He finds that the phone itself is out of order and that he's trapped inside the booth, unable to open the door again. Several passers-by try to help but to no avail - then the phone company's truck arrives and the man's nightmare really begins...

It's the climax that everyone who has seen the film remembers the most, particularly the genuinely unsettling final shot which I simply can't describe here in case you get the chance to see it (I shouldn't encourage this, but it's easily available as a torrent - try Googling for it). Suffice to say that it is truly terrifying and disturbing.

Quite why La cabina hasn't turned up on DVD somewhere is a major mystery - yes, the marketing of short films is difficult but someone somewhere should have the wherewithal to put together a compilation of classic horror shorts and La cabina really would be the jewel in its crown. In its native Spain, it was a huge hit but has since suffered the fate of all too many short subjects and has simply faded away into obscurity, remembered only by a handful of devotees who were lucky enough to catch it on one of it's very rare TV outings.

Writer/director Antonio Mercero works miracles with a slim narrative and the bare minimum of locations. The mounting feeling of unease and rising panic that the unnamed protagonist (well played by José Luis López Vázquez) is brilliantly conveyed and the claustrophobic interior of the telephone box itself is much more effectively used than the similar location in Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth (2002).

Mercero piles on details to make La cabina a carefully crafted and textured film that adds increasing layers of absurdity and paranoia as the protagonist's fate becomes ever more hopeless. This helps immeasurably in making the shocking final shot work so well, opening up one man's frustration, fear and torment into something much larger and far more sinister.

What's most astonishing about La cabina is the amount of detail that people who saw it all those years ago seem to be able to recall, such was the impact it had. You can guarantee that, in the UK at least, any conversation about those wonderful Saturday night double bills (you always knew that Summer was over when they ended) will inevitably turn to much excitable reminiscences of this marvellous short - the only reason that more people here didn't have it on tape was that it was actually shown as a last minute replacement filler when a televised sporting event over-ran. It genuinely is one of those truly unforgettable experiences it seems.

Of course in these days of mobile phones, the real horrors of La cabina will be lost on younger viewers for who trips to phone booths are becoming increasingly something that only happens in old movies. But surely no-one would be immune to the terror evoked by that final sequence. Do whatever it takes to track down a copy of La cabina and prepare yourself for one of the strangest and most breath-taking short films you'll ever see.
KEVIN LYONS

Screamtime (1983)

2008-10-27T20:10:00.005Z

The fifth of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Something slightly different this week in that we're looking at - technically - a feature film. In 1983, Screamtime limped out on video around the world, an incredibly grotty omnibus film set initially - and for no good reason - in New York, where layabout bums Ed (Vincent Russo) and Bruce (Michael Gordon) steal a pile of video cassettes from shop owner Kevin Smith (no, not and hightail it to a friend's apartment for an evening of illicit viewing.

What they end up watching are actually three short British films made earlier in the 1980s by Michael Armstrong and Stanley Long. The films all had limited theatrical releases in supporting slots but hanks to the vagaries of the video distribution system couldn't be released as they were so had to be re-edited into this frankly rather dull omnibus film.

The first film to be released, in January 1981, was Dreamhouse which actually appears second in this compilation. It follows the exploits of Tony (Ian Saynor) and Sue (Yvonne Nicholson), a newly married couple whose new house is apparently infested with mice. But when the bath starts filling with blood and the power refuses to work properly, it soon becomes clear that we're back in Amityville Horror territory. And who's that young boy who rides around the garden on a bike, then promptly vanishes into thin air? After much skulking about in the dark witnessing strange visions and the intervention of a dotty medium, an answer is provided in the final moments; after Sue suffers a nervous breakdown, a new family moves in and Tony is murdered by an escaped killer, events witnessed psychically in advance by Sue.

Though cliched and old hat, Dreamhouse at certainly very watchable. Director Stanley Long (working under the Americanised pseudonym Al Beresford for the compilation version) mounts one or two quite creditable, if minor, shock scenes, but it must be said that the construction is all over the place; the vignette is far too long and leisurely to do the material justice, though the ending is a genuine shock. Dreamhouse got a second theatrical release just before Screamtime was released in 1983 when it turned up supporting The Evil Dead on its initial UK release.

Chronologically, the next film to be released was That's the Way To Do It released in November 1982, sometimes known as Killer Punch. Born loser Jack Grimshaw (the excellent Robin Bailey from The Mouse on the Moon (1963) and Blind Terror (1971)) whose Punch and Judy business is failing, his wife Lena (Ann Lynn, from The Black Torment (1964)) is threatening to run off to Canada and his troubled and troublesome teenage step-son Damien (Johnathan Morris, better known to British TV viewers as sensitive Scouse poet Adrian Boswell in the inexplicably popular sitcom Bread (1986-1991)) is just being plain obnoxious and disturbing. The latter comes to a sticky end in a strange but effectively staged bit of business on a beach after he threatens to torch Jack's beloved puppets, and Lena is battered to death in her own bed. Anyone who's seen Dead of Night (1945) or possesses even a modicum of cognitive ability will have sussed that Jack has flipped out and assumed the identity of his Punch doll to do away with his appalling family.

Over-familiarity with the basic premise really prevents this first tale from ever getting airborne, though there's some sickly comic mileage to be had from scenes of a maniacal Punch doll beating a policeman to death while screeching "That's the way to do it!" However, the material is so bland and unoriginal that it ends with Jack falling to his death while pursuing the heroine across a rooftop.

But Robin Bailey gives an excellent turn as the deranged Jack and there are some genuinely surprising jolts along the way, making it the best of the three films. Armstrong's script offers absolutely nothing new but it does it with some panache and Long keeps things ticking along at a fair old pace.

Finally there was Do You Believe in Fairies?, released in February 1993 and by far and away the worst of the batch. David Van Day, former singer with pop group Dollar, stars as Gavin Martin, a down-on-his-luck motocross racer who finds employment with eccentric sisters Emma and Mildred (Dora Bryan and Jean Anderson) as a gardener/handyman. Initially, Gavin dismisses the old dears' ramblings about fairies as the result of creeping senility, but when he leads his friends on a nocturnal raid on the house to steal the women's horde of jewels, he discovers that not only do the fairies exist, but they're a rather nasty bunch to boot.

A daft idea is rather blandly brought to the screen by Long who doesn't really seem to warm to Armstrong's script this time as much as he had in the first two films. Van Day is hopeless in the lead role (his acting career was as short-lived as his music career with Do You Believe in Fairies? being his only big screen appearance) buy Bryan and Anderson are charming as the dotty old sisters whose affable senility hides a much darker secret. Its biggest liability, besides Van Day, is that the special effects just don't cut it.

A mixed bag then, but certainly all worth watching - though sadly their only official release was on the Screamtime video, now sadly unavailable. They were almost the last gasps of a once-noble art, the British horror short that vanished altogether later in the decade as patterns of cinema distribution and presentation changed forever.
KEVIN LYONS

Return to Glennascaul (1951)

2008-10-20T21:04:00.003+01:00

The fourth of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Only one film in the short film showcase this week, but it's such a gem that it needs no support. Hilton Edwards' Return to Glennascaul (1951) is a wonderfully creepy ghost story, very old fashioned perhaps, but all the better for that. This often overlooked 23 minute vignette features Orson Welles in bookend sequences as himself (it was shot while Welles was a taking a break from the gruelling filming of Othello (1952)) recounting "a story that is told in Dublin," the literally haunting tale told to him by a hitchhiker he picks up, Sean Merriman (Michael Laurence).

Merriman claims that while he was driving down the same stretch of road one night, he came across two mysterious women (Shelah Richards and Helena Hughes) looking for a lift. He dives them home to their mansion named Glennascaul, where he is invited to join them inside. Although the mansion seems idyllic, Merriman is uncomfortable, makes his excuses, and leaves. But when he returns for his forgotten cigarette case, he's in for a shock - Glennascaul is now deserted and it turns out that the women he spent time with have been dead for years...

Irish horror films are a rare commodity, making Return to Glennescaul all the more important. To modern eyes, it may seem a little stilted, too reticent for its own good, but those with a taste for the more restrained school of horror, the one that values atmosphere over gore, a creepy sense of dread over in-you-face action, will find much to enjoy in it.

For a start, it looks gorgeous, thanks to the beautiful black and white photography of Georg Fleischmann (who, curiously, doesn't seem to have done anything else) and the measured, stately direction of actor Edwards, whose only directorial credit is Glennascaul. Edwards spins some genuinely eerie moments from the thinnest of material (he also wrote the script), particularly in the mansion which seems, at first sight, to be the perfect residence but which gradually becomes more oppressive and sinister as the film progresses. The film sounds amazing too, thanks to the glorious solo harp score written and performed by Hans Gunther Stumpf.

The weakest element of the film is Edwards' script - the story is serviceable enough, nothing Earth shattering, just an unapologetically old-fashioned ghost story designed to do just the one thing - creep you out. But it's often let down by some feeble humour, particularly the ill-advised in-jokes about Welles and his work on Otheloo, which probably meant less than nothing to audiences at the time. The ending too is a bit of a damp squib, but these are minor quibbles - the overall effect is chilling enough to overlook such shortcomings.

One of the film's greatest assets of course, is the redoubtable Welles. Though his presence in the film is limited, his familiar mellifluous tones are perfect for the role of the somewhat sceptical listener. He appeared in the film as a favour to two of his fellow Othello stars, Edwards and Glennascaul's producer Micheál Mac Liammóir, founders of the famous Dublin Gate Theatre. He no doubt welcomed the respite from the rigours of Othello and certainly seems to be enjoying his chance to lighten up a little and make something that is, essentially, a lightweight but hugely entertaining piece of cinematic fluff. His presence has given the film the longevity it deserves (to be honest, it would likely have been forgotten by now had he not been involved) though it has also given it a reputation it doesn't quite deserve. To be sure, it's a wonderful film, but it's far from the great classic that it's been hailed as in some quarters.

Return to Glennascaul is currently available on Region 2 DVD as an extra on the Macbeth (1951) disc which you can pick up from Amazon (also available for rental - see below) and all the usual online sources.
KEVIN LYONS

Amazon

The films of Studio 4°C

2008-10-13T21:42:00.005+01:00

The third of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Until very recently, anime production house Studio 4°C was completely unknown to me, just one of the seemingly endless parade of animation studios churning out masses of anime each year. Thankfully, further investigation suggests that there's a lot more to this lot than meets the eye. Established in 1986, Studio 4°C -the temperature at which water is at its densest, fact fans!) was set up by Koji Morimoto (director of segments in Robot Carnival (1987), Memories (1996) and The Animatrix (2003) as well as animator on Golgo 13 (1983), Akira (1988) and Majo no takkyûbin/Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)), Eiko Tanaka (production manager on Majo no takkyûbin) and Yoshiharu Sato (key animator on several Studio Ghibli tites).

Their aim was to make anime with a more offbeat feel and to that end have employed the peculiarly Japanese style of "superflat", a postmodern approach which, to be honest, I don't really think I understand (you can find out more about it here) but which results in some of the most unusual animes I've seen in a long time.

Several of the team's short films have been gathered together in various collections and it's one of those, the bizarrely titled Sweat Punch, that we'll be looking at this week. Sweat Punch comprises four shorts, Higan, Professor Dan Petori's Blues, End of the World and Comedy.

The 8.5 minute Higan has only the slightest of storylines and relies heavily on that great staple of anime, giant fighting robots knocking the crap out of each other. There's absolutely nothing new in terms of story or themes here (you wouldn't really expect much in such a limited timespan) but the visuals are stunning. Most of the story takes place in a pitch black nocturnal forest, the action picked out in the muzzle flash of the fine collection of heavy artillery on show and the sort of room shaking explosions that you only ever see in anime. There's a genuine feeling of suspense as the two hapless robot pilots pick their way through the tress trying of find and destroy the tanks that are attacking them and there's a realism and fluidity of movement rare in all but the very best anime.

However, it is just a vignette, looking for all the world like an eight minute slice taken from a much longer film and it probably isn't the best place to start exploring the work of Studio 4°C - unless of course you're an unrepentant fan of hardcore mecha action, in which case, this one will be right up your street!

One of the first things you notice when you dive into the world of Studio 4°C is that there's no house style as such - each film looks very different to the next and the styles can range from the realistic to the stylised to the completely bizarre. End of the World looks so dissimilar to Higan that you'd never know that it was the work of the same production house.

At a rock concert, Yuko meets the strange Kazumi who claims to live in space. She offers to let her stay at her place for the night and that's when things become completely mad - Kazumi transforms Yuko's television set into a lo-tech fighting machine, disappears into a space/time portal and ends up in another dimension fighting jelly-like creatures and eventually bringing about the destruction of an entire existence...

I've watched it four times now and, blown away by it though I am, I honestly can't tell you what the hell it's all about. The ending is particularly strange, a metaphysical finale that suggests that it all may have been a dream, but then again.... well, who knows?

What makes End of the World such an enjoyable experience however is, once again, the visual style. The alternate dimension is presented through a fine gauze of television static while the "real" world is all sharp 2D animation and CGI sets. It's a strange mix, but an effective one.

The closest you may have come to the strangeness of End of the World is probably the Aeon Flux animations, with its similar mix of inexplicable events, strange creatures and youthful female assassins. But even that doesn't come close to the oddness that oozes from every pixel of End of the World.

Not well liked by all anime fans, End of the World is still worth 11 minutes of your time, if only for the surreal landscapes of the alternate dimension (where enemies of the female creator of that world are crucified beneath giant flying crosses and the landscape seems to consist of one continuous, post-apocalyptic desert.

Now as for Professor Dan Petory's Blues... Dear God, this has got to be the oddest thing I've seen in ages, and just recently I've seen some seriously strange stuff. I can guarantee that whatever your preconceptions of anime might be, this will challenge any and all of them - it begins with a mostly out of shot couple arguing about whether or not they should get married (animated in a beautiful and decidedly non-anime style) before we get to meet the eponymous Professor Dan Petory - a CGI animated hand puppet who delivers a series of mind-rottingly bonkers lectures on why UFOs fly in zig-zags and why the Earth looks blue, all interspersed with singing routines from The Soybean Sisters, a boxing bout and an astronaut drifting around in orbit...

Then we get a TV interview with UFO witnesses (conducted by a man in a pink bunny suit), a man discussing why live gigs are better than listening to recorded music then back to the Prof for some nonsense about horoscopes.

I swear to God, I'm not making any of this up! At the end, everyone exclaims "I understand!" but I'm damned if I do. I have no idea what this was supposed to be about, what point it was trying to make nor indeed why I enjoyed it so much. Completely and utterly mad whichever way you look at it, Professor Dan Petory's Blues is certainly unique.

It's also an astonishing compendium of just about every animation style you can imagine - there's pixillation, traditional 2D animation and CGI, all blended together (sometimes in the same shot) to bewildering effect. Forget trying to work out what it's all about (it probably isn't actually about anything) and just lap up the unremitting surrealism of it all.

Finally, we've got the strangely titled Comedy - and don't go expecting a barrel of laughs from this one. Instead prepare yourself for one of the most beautiful and haunting animes you'll ever see.

Set in the Black Forest, it follows a young girl and her attempts to find a mysterious swordsman who only accepts certain types of books for his services and who she hopes will help save her village from the advancing English army. The dialogue suggests that the story is set during the war between the Irish and the English, but the invading English troops look like futuristic cyborgs, giving the film a pleasing sense of dislocation.

Of the four films on offer this week, Comedy is undoubtedly the best looking. Filmed with a muted colour palette that's almost monochrome in places, making marvellous use of depth of field effects and steeping the whole thing in a soft-focus, ghostly atmosphere, it really is a marvel to behold. Characters are more angular and sparsely defined than most anime figures, the music is genuinely haunting and the storyline, though slim and perhaps too odd for many, is perfectly serviceable, if rather subservient to the images.

If this is a representative sample of what it is that Studio 4°C are up to, then I for one will be on the lookout for more of their work. Though at times they trade in anime clichés, they tend to give old ideas a neat new spin, possess a strange but likeable sense of humour and at least guarantee that you'll never be able to guess what's coming next from them. I strongly suspect we'll be back for more from Studio 4°C in weeks and months to come.
KEVIN LYONS

The films of Yuri Norstein

2008-10-06T20:20:00.004+01:00

The second of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Outside animation circles, the name Yuri Norstein sadly means very little. But this Russian- born animator has been hailed by animation experts as one of the masters of the form - in 1984, a group of leading animators hailed his 1979 masterpiece Skazka skazok/Tale of Tales (already reviewed in the main body of EOFFTV) as the greatest animated film ever made. Even with all the incredible advances in animation over the past two decades, it would be hard to topple this incredible short from its perch. Anime legend Hayao Miyazaki, currently one of the finest explonents of animation anywhere in the world, has hailed Norstein as a "great artist" (http://www.theblackmoon.com/Deadmoon/spiritedaway2.html) and has staged a Norstein exhibition at his Studio Ghibli Museum.

But Skazka skazok was just the culmination of a series of extraordinary films that saw Norstein steadily refining his art. Lisa y zayats/The Fox and the Hare (1973), Tsaplya i zhuravl/the Heron and the Crane (1974) and Yozhik v tumane/Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) form a loose sort of trilogy, each involving animals or birds in stunningly animated meditations on very human themes, particularly relationships.

In Lisa y zayats, his third film as director, relationships are fragile, treacherous and never quite settled - a fox, a rabbit and a rooster form a series of alliances with and against each other - while Tsaplya i zhuravl focuses on more intimate relationships, revolving around the attempts by a love-struck crane to propose to and deal with the rejections of the heron he wants to marry.

Tsaplya i zhuravl marked the first of Norstein's run-in with the authorities - studio bosses at Soyuzmultfilm were unhappy with the script he submitted for approval and they assigned veteran director Roman Kachanov as project supervisor to work the script into a more acceptable form. Norstein, commendably and at not inconsiderable risk, decided to just ignore Kachanov's input and shot the film as intended anyway. The studio were furious but the film turned out so well that they were unable to resist the temptation to distribute it and the film played across the USSR to great acclaim.

Both films draw heavily on Russian folklore, Lisa y zayats using traditional folk art based on ancient Russian prialkas as a source of inspiration. They also both employed a device invented by Norstein and his wife and frequent collaborator Francesca Yarbusova and cameraman Alexander Zkokovsky which allowed them to animate paper cut-outs of layers of glass, giving the films a greater depth and perspective than would otherwise have been possible.

But Norstein's masterpiece from this period - and some of us would maintain that it's even better than the much-venerated Skazka skazok, is the breath-taking Yozhik v tumane which charts the unlikely friendship between a hedgehog and a bear cub who spend each night trying to count the stars. But one evening, while on the way to the bear's house, the hedgehog gets lost in the fog trying to save a beautiful white horse. terrified and alone, the hedgehog tries to find his way out of a dark and sinister forest...

While both Lisa y zayats and Tsaplya i zhuravl had something approaching stories, Yozhik v tumane finds Norstein developing the more abstract style that would find its apogee in Skazka skazok. There's little more to the story than the brief outline above, but it's the atmosphere and mood that makes Yozhik v tumane such a profoundly moving film. And it is indeed a very moving experience - in just 11 minutes and with no human characters in sight, Norstein manages to make more weighty observations about innocence, friendship and trust.

Which is astonishing when one considers that Norstein originally intended Yozhik v tumane to be an "easy" film, what writer Sergey Kozlov called "a little fairy tale". But Norstein found more profundity in the story than was originally intended and his insistence on exploring these depths led to real creative problems. This remarkable film was made by just three people, not including his voice cast - Norstein himself, writer Kozlov and composer M. Meyerovich - and the making of Yozhik v tumane was a somewhat traumatic experience for all involved. Production company Soyuzmultfilm insisted that the trio complete the film to the same deadline that imposed on films with much larger crews and Norstein and his colleagues were unable to cope. As the deadline arrived, only a fifth of the film was actually complete. The chiefs of Soyuzmultfilm were so enraged that they sent Norstein to be reprimanded by meeting of the Communist Party. Luckily, a projectionist was suitably bribed with a bottle of vodka and the team were able to screen the work they had already completed and the committee were so impressed they agreed to let them finish the film.

And we should be eternally grateful to them for this moment of clarity and foresight - Yozhik v tumane remains one of the most amazing short films ever made and should be required viewing for anyone with even the remotest interest in animation. Happily, the film is available on DVD as part of the well nigh essential The Yuri Norstein Collection and the equally must-have collection Masters Of Russian Animation Volume 2

The short films of David Lynch

2008-09-29T20:10:00.004+01:00

The first of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Love him or loathe him, there can't be many of you who haven't seen at least one film by David Lynch. Though his feature films have always been relatively accessible - physically if not always intellectually - his short films, until recently, have remained rather less easy to see. Thanks to his own subscription-based website, you can now buy a DVD compilation of six of these shorter efforts.

Six Men Getting Sick (1967) was Lynch's very first piece of film, a very brief, 1 minute animated loop originally intended to be a "moving sculpture." Made while he was studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, it consists of 57 seconds of three heads built on a sculpture screen (actually casts of Lynch's own head) gradually metamorphosing through animation, growing heads and stomachs and climaxing in three seconds of them being explosively sick. And that's it. All to the irritating sound of a siren wailing. For reasons not entirely clear, the DVD treats us to this no less than six times but really, once is more than enough. Less a film than a to-in-the-water experiment, Six Men Getting Sick is really only of interest to die-hard Lynchians who really must see everything he's ever done - everyone else will doubtless be totally bemused by it all.

Lynch was initially discouraged by his experiments in film-making, disheartened by the costs involved compared to his other loves, sculpture and painting. But fellow student H. Barton Wasserman was so impressed by Sick Men Getting Sick that her encouraged him to create a second short, paying him $1000 to create a similar work. Lynch used some of the money to buy a used Bolex camera but his first attempt to make his new piece was a disaster - he shot for two months only to find that the camera was damaged and not a single frame of film was usable. Wasserman gave up on the project, giving Lynch free rein to do whatever he wanted with the rest of the money.

Working from a dream experienced by his wife, Peggy, Lynch made The Alphabet (1968), the first indication of what was to come. Genuinely creepy and unsettling, it has no plot to speak of but still manages to disturb in ways that many longer films could only dream of. A combination of live action and animation, it features a young girl's haunted memories of having to learn her ABCs - letters spew across the screen while a barely audible man sings and a woman vomits blood over some sheets. Quite what it has to do with the learning process is anyone's guess, but it is genuinely upsetting and scary in that unique way that Lynch's features are upsetting and scary - you feel disquiet while watching it but have no real understanding of why. It bypasses the thinking part of the brain and homes directly in on that part that triggers fear instead.

The Alphabet also marked the first display of Lynch's unique talent for sound design - from the chanting of "ABC" to the sounds of sirens wailing, wind howling and children sobbing (the baby was Lynch's newborn daughter Jennifer) the soundtrack is every bit as unnerving as the visuals they accompany. Bizarre soundtracks would later become one of the hallmarks of the David Lynch style.

At the suggestion of Bushnell Keeler, the artist step-father of his friend Toby Keeler, Lynch applied for a grant from the then-newly established American Film Institute, using The Alphabet as his calling card. He'd put together a script for a more ambitious short, one that would run for at least half an hour. The AFI awarded Lynch a grant of $5000 and he set about the making of The Grandmother (1970).

Though not quite as unsettling as The Alphabet, The Grandmother was another deeply disturbing vignette and showed that by now, that signature Lynch style was already well developed. The plot is simple - a young boy is unhappy at home with his abusive parents and looking for someone, anyone, to show him the love he's been missing, "grows" a surrogate grandmother.

Although shot on colour film stock, Lynch deliberately mutes the film's colour scheme, resulting in a strange, twilight world where colour is often only hinted at. And the soundtrack is again incredible - the parents communicate only in strange, animal like sounds and there's the usual collection of bizarre, almost-but-not-quire recognisable sounds and even the odd snatch of audio that is easily recognisable but unsettlingly out of context. The Grandmother marked Lynch's first collaboration with sound editor Alan Splet, the beginning of a relationship that would last right through to Blue Velvet in 1986. Together, the two men spent an extraordinary 63 days recording the film's many sound effects and spent so much of the budget on this project that they ran out of money. Thankfully, the AFI's Tony Vellani saw what had already been shot, he was so impressed that he agreed to finance the completion of the short. From the mouth of catastrophe came not only a finished film, but also the chance for Lynch to participate in the second year of the AFI's film-making program [eventually resulting in Eraserhead (1977)) and for Alan Splet to become head of their sound department.

The Grandmother isn't quite as unsettling as The Alphabet but it is the most ambitious and technically adept of these first three films. Featuring real - if very strange - characters that the audience can relate to and a genuinely traumatic ending, it's also the most durable of the three films, the one that's easiest to return to for repeat viewings. Indeed, all these years later and even after so many feature-length masterworks, The Grandmother remains one of Lynch's best, most fully realised, works.

All three of these early David Lynch shorts are essential viewing for anyone smitten by his skewed vision. They won't win him any new fans - indeed all they'll do is confirm all of the doubts of the unconvinced - but they will intrigue his army of devoted followers. The DVD featuring all three films, plus The Amputee (1974), The Frenchman and the Cowboy (1988) and Lumière (1996), is available from the David Lynch website either as a standalone disc or bundled with the disc for Eraserhead.
KEVIN LYONS

Robot Love Slaves (1971)

2008-09-22T14:55:00.000+01:00

This extraordinarily awful no-budget sleazy from 1971 is an anonymously shot (the print under review didn't even have a title card let alone any cast and crew credits) effort featuring mostly ugly people having lots of unerotic sex while a feeble science fiction plot (geeky scientist reanimates dead women as sex slaves) surfaces occasionally. In short, it's exactly what you'd expect from this sort of film of this vintage. In terms of explicitness it falls between soft and hardcore - it's clear that it's all being done for real but camera angles and editing conspire to obscure any potentially offending details.

Halfway through a familiar looking turns up - it's 70s porn diva Candy Samples making possibly her first appearance in a porn film and that's about as interesting and this unappealing and tedious mess gets. No-one else has been identified yet but given how bored everyone looks one gets the impression that they were just turning up, pocketing the cheque and probably not bothering with this sort of thing ever again.

And there's little else to say about this one - it's dull, it's badly made, the print put out by Something Weird Video looks like it's been kicked around the block and few times and only the synthesizer score is of even remote interest. Porn and science fiction completists will want to check it out of course but be prepared for disappointment.
KEVIN LYONS

Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon (1967)

2008-09-16T20:54:00.002+01:00

For years, British books on science fiction cinema spoke highly of this Czech import under its poetic English language title (evocative enough to have come from the pen of J.G. Ballard) The End of August at the Hotel Ozone, the writers presumably having been exposed to it during a 1973 science fiction film season at the BFI's National Film Theatre in London. And although the title kept coming back to haunt us, it remained stubbornly elusive until Facets released it on DVD in 2006 and we finally got a chance to see for ourselves if it really was a good as its reputation suggests.

The good news is that it is - though Facet does curious customers no favours with its misleading cover quote from the American Cinematheque claiming that it's "[like] a Mad Max directed by Andrei Tarkovsky." The Tarkovsky allusion is apt but this trek though the post-apocalypse wastelands is more Stalker (1979) than Road Warrior.

The fact that the film was made under the unlikely auspices of the Czechoslovakian army is signalled in the opening shots in which the Third World War is represented by a series of countdowns in various languages - the first of which, presumably the one that starts the whole mess, is English. What follows though isn't a cold and hectoring Communist tract extolling the virtues of Socialism but a far more humanist film.

Twenty or so years after the attack, an old woman leads a group of younger women who have all grown up in the wastelands on a seemingly futile trek through the ruins in search of other survivors. The feral women wile away the endless eyes in petty acts of vandalism or shocking acts of violence towards animals, almost all of which (snakes, dogs, cows) they kill as soon as they encounter them. Communicating in only the basic monosyllabic words, the women are a dismal lot and are hardly improved by their encounter with an old man, Mr Herald - possibly the last man left alive - who has taken up refuge in the ramshackle Hotel Ozone.

Beautifully shot in black and white by Jirí Macák, Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon contains some memorably haunting moments (the women watching blankly as one of their number is rescued from a crumbling church, one of the group reducing a long-abandoned love letter to tedium by her monotone recitation, the inevitable but still tragic conclusion) though its slow pace will alienate anyone drawn to the film by that Mad Max quote - action wasn't much in the mind of director Jan Schmidt who prefers instead to present a world so badly decayed that action of any kind seems almost too painful for its protagonists to contemplate.

Released in 1967, Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon takes a jaundiced view of young people that would have found favour with the more conservatively minded in the West who viewed the nascent counter-culture with a mixture of resentment, jealousy, fascination and horror. In the future depicted by Schmidt and his writer Pavel Juracek, the young have inherited a world more or less wiped clean and ready to be reborn but they can find little to do with it. The younger women aren't looking for men to help repopulate the world (they barely seem to be looking for anything at all apart from the next cheap thrill) and in the end are so consumed by violence and ennui that they resort to murder just to possess an ancient gramophone and its single 78 rpm record. Whatever future this scorched Earth might have is not to entrusted to its remaining young its seems, though the older characters - the group leader and the man in the hotel - are little better, having given up any hope of reconstruction, content instead to cling to what little remains of the past.

The most interesting aspect of Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon is its reversal of what we would normally expect from the genders - its women are brutal, quick to violence and slow to reason while the man is compassionate and cultured. The women are incapable of recognising any of the finer qualities that Mr Herald does his best to introduce them to and he eventually recognises them only as animals, devoid of anything even remotely human.

Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon is a bleak film but ultimately a rewarding one. The pace is slow but the images are mesmerising and it's full of ideas and things it wants to say. It won't sit easily with those used to hi-octane adventure in the wake of the apocalypse but those with a taste for something more contemplative will find it endlessly rewarding.
KEVIN LYONS

Find out more about Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon (1967) at the main EOFFTV site.

The Pit (1962)

2008-09-01T20:06:00.001+01:00

This week, something genuinely obscure. During the 1950s and 60s, the British Film Institute, through its Experimental Film Fund, financed a number of unusual ventures under its remit to encourage new talent. One of those films was Edward Abraham's strange and eerie take on Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit (1962).

Told with out recourse to dialogue (the only human voices are those of ominously chanting monks and the chief inquisitor pronouncing "morte!"), the film recounts the now familiar tale of a prisoner's torments in a darkened room with the titular devices of torture. He escapes the pendulum that descends inexorably towards him only find that the walls of the dreary cell in which he has been cast are glowing red hot, moving and pushing him closer to an apparently bottomless pit in the centre of the room.

For most of its brief 30 minute running time, The Pit remains commendably faithful to Poe's original (the prisoner discovers the pit by almost falling into it while blindly exploring his cell, the pendulum descends from a painting of Old Father Time) though the ending is considerably nastier. There's no last minute reprieve for Abraham's prisoner (played by Brian Peck), no French soldier to save him from his fateful fall into the pit.

Though Peck does well enough in a role that really has no meat to it whatsoever, the real stars of the show are Gregory Lawson's production design and the unsettling sound design of composer Leslie Harverson and sound men Cyril Vine and Bill Sutton. The cell is decorated with macabre images, primitive artwork of huge staring eyes, disorientating abstract patterns and menacing skeletal forms with hideous death masks and the soundtrack, all atonal instrumentation and unidentifiable electronic-sounding squawks and drones, fits this dank, revolting setting perfectly. At times it seems almost as much a torture for the audience as the constantly dripping water, descending pendulum and moving walls are for the prisoner.

Sadly, almost all of the Experimental Film Fund productions are now almost impossible to see (though a few of the animations and the early Ken Russell short Amelia and the Angel (1958) surface from time to time) and one can only hope that they match the professionalism with which Abraham assembled this, his only theatrical work as a director; he later directed On the Sixth Day (1974) for the ITV drama strand Late Night Drama and would eventually script the British horrors Dominique (1978) and The Monster Club (1980).
KEVIN LYONS

Anna to the Infinite Power (1983)

2008-08-18T19:29:00.003+01:00

"I'm not a human being, I'm an experiment!"

This is a tedious and uninvolving drama originally aimed at children yet it lacks any of the charm and energy that you'd expect from the best of children's entertainment, one which seems to have paved some of the way for the subsequent conspiracy driven backplot of The X-Files (1993-2002).

The mysterious Michaela Dupont (Donna Mitchell) moves into the house next door to the Hart family and begins taking an unhealthy interest in their obnoxious daughter, Anna (Martha Byrne, later to join the long-running soap opera As the World Turns). Indeed, she has with her a file full of photographs, all named Anna, all with the same face, but all apparently quite different individuals. She also has a strange and frightening secret about who Anna really is...

The search for Anna's roots comprises the bulk of the the film, though it's all rather laborious and hardly the stuff of which enthralling entertainment is made. Ham fisted attempts at humour misfire constantly and the turgid efforts to erect DuPont as a sultry 'villainess' are laughable, not because of any fault of Mitchell's, but because it simply doesn't work. For many of its young viewers, the film's real horror will stem from DuPont's presence - the film is a manipulative piece, trading on the insecurities and deepest fears of modern (mostly American) youth with DuPont seen - initially at least - as a sexual rival to Anna's mother; Rowan is clearly captivated by her sultry allure, and there is a subtle hint that even the father - soon driven from the family home by the truth of his 'daughter's' conception - is attracted to this new neighbour. For Anna - and many of her viewers - DuPont is the ultimate 'monster', the femme fatale that possesses the ability to tear their families apart. Sadly, this is not followed through as DuPont is eventually revealed as a sympathetic conspirator in the original cloning experiment.

Early dream sequences of Anna Zimmerman's childhood in a Nazi concentration camp seemed initially out of place and at odds with the low key, non-threatening approach adopted by the rest of the film and one suspects that they were really there just to provide a musical motif used to signify DuPont's supposed sinister nature. In view of the film's bizarre turn of events half way through, it's tempting to believe that director Robert Wiemer was attempting some sort of clumsy allegory between Nazism and modern medical practice, an allegory that was bound to go sailing over the heads of his young target audience. As it is, it's so badly handled that even most adult viewers are going to find it ill-defined and tedious.

It's always a bad sign when a film needs to have its protagonists constantly reminding one another that they're talking in cliches; while there's some truth in the adage (a cliche in itself, one suspects) that everyday speech and behaviour is full of cliches, there's really no excuse for lazy scriptwriting to result in a film as cliched as this one. The film may have made more of an impact had its youthful protagonist not been such an obnoxious and spoilt piece of work. Her temperamental, selfish outbursts do nothing but provoke revulsion in adults and couldn't possibly be seen as a positive role model for kids. As it is, Anna to the Infinite Power is a dull and unlikeable drama with not a jot of originality about it and lacking the courage to try anything bold or exciting, opting instead for a safe and ultimately uninteresting retelling of a tale already told at least once too often.
KEVIN LYONS

Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern (1973) (aka Vampire Ecstasy)

2008-08-11T22:06:00.003+01:00

By the early 70s, legendary American sexploitation specialist Joseph W. Sarno had been in the game for the better part of a decade, carving himself a niche in a market that few were prepared to take seriously. His angst-ridden scenarios, filmed in stark monochrome, grew steadily more explicit, edging slowly into the burgeoning softcore market of the late 60s but always retaining the distinctive look and feel that had made his name stand out among the sexploitation pack.

By the early 70s, following the success of Deep Throat (1972), hardcore was increasingly making the sort of softcore that Sarno traded in look obsolete and he would eventually - if reluctantly - switch to more explicit material with 1973's Sleepy Head. The following year, he was at the helm of Deep Throat Part 2 (1974), a sequel to the X-rated film which Sarno shot in an R-rated version only.

But before hardcore beckoned, Sarno hooked up with German producer Chris D. Nebe for a trilogy of harder-than-usual softcore titles. Nebe had wanted to work with Sarno since seeing Sarno's Inga (1968). Nebe had set up a distribution company on his return from school in the States in 1965 and now wanted to handle Sarno's work, overseeing the releases of titles like Naked Fog (1965) The Swap and How to Make It (1966) and the improbably titled Scarf of Mist Thigh of Satan (1967).

During this time, Sarno had decamped to Scandinavia to escape the demand back home for hardcore and it wasn't long before Nebe called on Sarno and offered him the chance to shoot a film with him in Germany. The story for what became Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern (1973) (aka The Devil's Plaything, Plaything of the Devil, Vampire Ecstasy and many others besides) started as Veil of Blood and came in part from Nebe whose uncle, the Baron Malsen, owned a 12th century castle which he felt would be the perfect location for an erotic horror film.

Until it was released on DVD by E.I. Independent in early 2006, Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern wasn't particularly widely seen and to be honest, it's not hard to see why. The simplistic plot is stretched out to an unbearable 115 minutes, most of which are spent in the company of German or Swedish actors whose were mainly cast simply because they could speak English, albeit in the most heavily accented and often incomprehensible fashion. Wild bongos pulsate from the soundtrack while nubile young things pulsate on the screen, a plot of sort emerges (something to do with cultists trying to revive their long dead vampiress leader) and Sarno throws in some unexpected and welcome oddball camera angles.

Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern is an unusual film in Sarno's oeuvre - although some of his earlier work featured bored housewives dabbling with the occult, the supernatural wasn't something that seemed to come naturally to him. But he's surprisingly willing to give it his all and there's a rancid atmosphere of decay and sleaze permeating the whole venture that again sets it apart from Sarno's contemporaries, in this case the likes of Jesus Franco and Jean Rollin. The film's main draw though is it's star, Swedish sexpot Marie Forså whose winning combination of youthful innocence and out of control ego is particularly endearing.

There's not much one can really expect from a sex film - it needs to be at least arousing and made with some sort of competence and Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern has moments that are indeed peculiarly erotic. But its ridiculous length, tedious pacing and mostly poor performances make it too much like hard work to be truly enjoyable. It's no lost horror classic that's for sure.

But it did well and Nebe, Sarno and Forså worked well enough together for Nebe to suggest a second film, the more conventional Bibi - Lustreport einer Frühreifen (aka Girl Meets Girl), eventually released in 1974 after Sarno had returned to the States and switched to hardcore. A third film, Butterflies, followed a year later.
KEVIN LYONS

Baxter (1989)

2008-08-04T19:18:00.003+01:00

One of the great tragedies of French fantastic cinema is that Jérôme Boivin isn't better known and more respected than he is. Judging by his unfairly neglected Philip K. Dick adaptation Confessions d'un Barjo (1992) and this one-of-a-kind dark fantasy, he has the sort of imagination that most practitioners of fantasy, horror and science fiction cinema can only dream of. The fact that he doesn't seem to have worked at all in the last four years and before that toiled for years in French television, his work barely visible to anyone outside his homeland, is tragic.

Based on the 1977 novel Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall, Baxter tells the highly unlikely but riveting tale of a white pit bull terrier who shares his not always palatable thoughts with the audience (a marvellous job by Maxime Leroux) as he finds himself shunted from one unsuitable owner to the next. We first meet him in the care of an old woman after being freed from a dog's home. The relationship is fractious to begin with and Baxter spends much of his time fantasising about living with the young couple next door and plotting the old dear's downfall.

Initially, it might seem like we're supposed to identify with the plight of poor Baxter but our feelings for him are tempered somewhat when he engineers the old woman's death and moves in with the couple. Any sympathy we had him dissipates completely when, driven by jealousy and disgust, he tries (but fails) to drown the couple's newborn child. Finally, he ends up at the home of a young boy who spends his time obsessing over the final days of Adolph Hitler, going so far as to build his own bunker. The fledgling Nazi and Baxter bond and all goes well until the arrival of the young boy's Eva Braun, her dog and a litter of doomed puppies...

There'll be plenty who find the bleak humour of Baxter several shades too dark for their tastes and to be sure it's a deliberately provocative and confrontational film. Baxter may be a dog but it's mind we're forced to inhabit for much of the film and it's his misanthropic, twisted but frequently very funny worldview we are forced to share. It is, in a sense, a serial killer movie in the Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) mould, one told from the point of view of the murderer, but with the twist that this time the would-be sequential slayer (he only manages to actually kill one person but he certainly plans a lot more mayhem than his meagre resources will allow him to carry out) is a canine. Curiously this makes the whole enterprising even more chilling than it might have been if told as a conventional serial killer tale.

The audacity of the plot and the perverse twists and turns of the plot may belong largely to Greenhall, but Boivin brings them to life with enough energy and invention to stamp his own personality on the proceedings. It isn't perfect (the pace is sometimes off, skipping over plot points that really needed more room to develop, and the human characters are thinly drawn) but Baxter is bursting with imagination and verve from the unsettling opening scenes in the dogs home to the final (slightly bungled it must be admitted) confrontation with the young fascist-in-waiting. The denouement, although inevitable and easily predicted, is still shocking and animal lovers should perhaps be warned that there are scenes here that are difficult to watch and even harder to justify.

Whether you subscribe to the view expressed widely elsewhere that Baxter represents the human race, desperate to be controlled and disciplined even if it results in the horrors inflicted during the Second World War will perhaps depend on your politics and even perhaps your need to justify to yourself why you're watching a film as twisted and despairing as this. It's an interesting reading though and one that Boivin and his co-writer Jacques Audiard clearly had in mind when adapting the novel.

Baxter is a complex film (you'll hate Baxter for plotting to kill an infant but you'll hate humanity more for what it does to him at the end) that won't sit comfortable with those who prefer their cinematic dogs to be Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton (Look Who's Talking Now (1993)), Samuel L. Jackson (Fluke (1995)) or Tobey Maguire (Cats & Dogs (2001)). But those made of sterner stuff would do well to track down Baxter (it's available on a US released disc from Fox Lorber) and wonder why a talent as wayward and compelling as Boisin's has been allowed to go to waste.

Raw Force (1982)

2008-07-07T21:07:00.003+01:00

Cameron Mitchell - always a sign of quality when it comes to crap movies. The man was a genuine legend, a comfortable presence in our front rooms during the late 60s as every kid's favourite cowboy uncle Buck Cannon in The High Chaparral before turning his hands to all kinds of cinematic grot in the 70s like Haunts (1977), The Swarm (1978), The Toolbox Murders (1978) and the immortal Supersonic Man (1979).

Raw Force, a delirious Philippino set kung fu zombie hybrid, came rather later and couldn't be further removed from the safe and cosy world of the Cannon ranch. as well as Mitchell - which really should be enough to sell this to any self-respecting fan of cinematic trash - Raw Force seems to play like volume one of exploitation cinema's greatest hits: the plot doesn't amount to very much but it manages to cram in hot babes held captive in bamboo cages by white slavers; sinister and not-at-all-holy monks; zombies; samurai; zombie samurai; martial arts; more zombies; kung fu zombies (this film just loves zombies); plenty of that particular brand of hopeless gore effect that just screams "early-80s-and-no-budget"; and nudity so plentiful that the word gratuitous hardly seems strong enough. Quite how the white-suited Hitler look-alike fits into all this I shall leave for you to find out for yourself.

There is a sort of plot wrapping all this lot up but honestly it isn't important. Nor comprehensible come to that. But you don't need one. It's just all the best/worst bits from exploitation's back catalogue all mashed up into a feverish piece of nonsense that really does have something for just about everyone.

It isn't really clear of writer/director Edward Murphy (who later directed Richard Hatch in Heated Vengeance (1985) and had earlier acted in Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968)) meant us to take any of this rubbish seriously. You won't, but while watching it you're never quite sure if Murphy was and that just adds to the film's oddball charm. Sometimes the cast (which also includes stalwarts like Camille Keaton, Jewel Shepard, Jillian Kesner and Vic Diaz) play it all straight as a die, while at other times they seem hard pressed to suppress an outbreak of the giggles. In fact you'll come to believe that everyone from Murphy down was just making the whole thing up as they went along.

After years of being hard to find Raw Force has now popped up, aptly enough, as part of a pairing with Tsui Hark's far better Di yu wu men (1980) (a.k.a. We Are Going to Eat You and Kung Fu Cannibals) or in at least one of those 20-films-in-varying-degress-of-watchability box sets, usually with the word Grindhouse in the title. If gratuitous gore and sex, inept plotting, terrible acting and the godlike presence of Cameron Mitchell does it for you, then tracking down a copy of Raw Force should be made a priority in your life.

We've yet to confirm this but if it's true, the mind fairly boggles at this final nugget: it has been suggested that Raw Force actually played some US cinemas on a double bill with Umberto Lenzi's legendary atrocity Cannibal ferox (1981). Just consider that possibility for a moment. Terrifying isn't it?

The Point (1971)

2008-05-05T22:38:00.002+01:00

A real oddity from the early 70s, still fondly remembered and much-loved, perhaps due in part to its Beatles connections. Based on a an album of the same name by Harry Nilsson (a long-time John Lennon associate), it's an animated made-for-TV "fable" which bears more than a passing resemblance to the feature film Yellow Submarine (1968) and, in its later incarnations, it featured a narration by Ringo Starr, warming up perhaps for his stint as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine on TV.

Beautifully animated in eye-searing psychedelic tones by a team that included prolific small screen animators Fred Wolf and Jimmy T. Murakami, The Point is a simple and idealistic but nonetheless effective plea for tolerance and understanding dressed up in dayglo colours, extraordinary design and unexpected plot twists and turns, peppered with plentiful excellent Nilsson songs along the way.

The peculiar plot charts the journey of young Oblio (voiced by Mike Lookinland, familiar to TV viewers as Bobby Brady from The Brady Bunch (1969-1974)), a child with a round head in a society where everyone else has, by law, a pointed head, who is cast out of his village at the behest of an evil Count and banished to the much-feared Pointless Forest. There he meets a string of bizarre characters (among them The Pointed Man, The Rockman and The Leafman) before coming to the conclusion that everything and everyone has a point even if at first they seem not to and returning to change the Pointed Village forever.

Nilsson never made any bones about the lysergic source for his fantasy, noting that "I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it'"[1]. And director Wolf and his team were clearly on the same wavelength and went to town with the wild, hallucinatory imagery, even outdoing the trippy weirdness of Yellow Submarine. Even if the message may seem a little too blunt and on-the-nose, there's so much to enjoy in the constantly surprising parade of psychedelic visuals that it's impossible not to find The Point endlessly fascinating.

If there's a fault to be found with The Point it is that the underlying messages - worthy though they undoubtedly are - are rather unsubtly conveyed and often seem wincingly idealistic. Like so much of the hippy inflected idealism of the time, it's hard not to agree that Nilsson has, if you will, a point, but he tends to hammer it home as though he's just discovered some extraordinary cosmic truth when in fact he's just stumbled upon the obvious thanks to a copious ingestion of acid.

That aside, The Point remains a remarkable piece of work, all the more so when one considers that it was first shown on prime-time television. It physically hurts trying to imagine anyone, least of all one of the major networks, attempting to palm off anything quite as odd as The Point in prime-time today.

When it first aired, the voice of the storytelling father was that of Dustin Hoffman but contractual problems prevented further screenings with that narration so The Point when through an extraordinary series of reworkings. Although the visual components have thankfully remained consistent, the narration has been revoiced by Alan Barzman (for further TV screenings), Alan Thicke (for a version seen on US cable TV during the 80s) and finally by Starr, whose tones grace most subsequent VHS and DVD releases.

NOTES
1. Quoted by Alan Jacobson in his review of The Point in Bright Lights Film Journal no.44 (May 2004).

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978)

2008-03-03T21:32:00.000Z

Kiss are a genuine rock and roll phenomenon, four occasionally made-up, larger-than-life rockers whose over-the-top stage shows and ludicrous stage personae have made them one of the biggest bands on the planet. At the tail-end of the 1970s, at the height of their success, the foursome succumbed to that affliction that seemed to grip many a 70s band and decided that acting was the next step on the road to world domination. How wrong they were...

The result was Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, sometimes referred to as Attack of the Phantoms, a TV movie in which the group - then comprising drummer Peter Criss (alter ego: Cat Man), lead guitarist Ace Frehley (Space Ace), bass player Gene Simmons (Demon) and rhythm guitarist/singer Paul Stanley (Starchild) - are reinvented as superheroes, taking on the evil Abner Devereaux [perennial movie villain Anthony Zerbe], an amusement park engineer dabbling in mind control, a series of life-like cyborgs and robot doppelgangers.

Kiss get involved when Devereaux creates a mechanical Gene Simmons which goes on the rampage in the park and the daft plot culminates in a fake Kiss taking to the stage and trying to incite the crowd to riot. Naturally the real Kiss - inexplicably imbued with superpowers - come to the rescue and strut their fire-breathing, blood-spitting stuff in a climactic concert.

Extraordinarily bad in almost every respect, Kiss in Phantom of the Park is an ordeal even for the most devoted of Kiss fanatic, let alone the rest of us. Kiss may have been right when they declared that God gave rock and roll to us - sadly He took his eye off the ball when this piece of televisual excrement was being prepared and failed to step in to save Mankind from that most unpleasant of terrors: the rock band vanity project. Everything about this effort is cock-eyed or just plain wrong, from the title (Kiss never actually meet any "Phantom of the Park") to the premise (Kiss as superheroes? Please...) to the special effects (special? Ha!) to very notion that Kiss could carry a film on their acting talents alone (the entire band appears to be stoned throughout and for all he contributes the proceedings Frehley may well not have turned up at all).

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was made by Hanna-Barbera Productions, better known at that time for its seemingly endless production line of cheapjack kids cartoons and it resembles nothing more than a live-action version of one of the company's best known shows, Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (1969 - 1972). And it's just as predictable and vapid as that show was. Director Gordon Hessler was a very long way from his late 60s/early 70s British horrors (The Oblong Box (1969), Scream and Scream Again (1970), Cry of the Banshee (1970)) and it's clear from the lazy way he stages the token "action" scenes that his heart just wasn't in it. And who can blame him...

Extraordinarily, Kiss contribute less music to the effort than you might expect. After a sort-of promo video opening sequence, there are couple of concert sequences but the rest of the soundtrack is bog standard (ie horrid) late-70s disco wah-wah crap that would have had most Kiss fans vomiting as much blood as their heroes.

Even more extraordinarily, Kiss (sort of) got a second chance at screen stardom when they were the subject of fans' attempts to blag their way into a concert in Adam Rifkin's Detroit Rock City (1999), which wasn't terribly good but which was far and away preferable to Phantom. In the years between the two films, Gene Simmons had a go at "proper" acting, turning up in the likes of Runaway (1984), Trick or Treat (1986), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987) and Red Surf (1990). perhaps unsurprisingly, Oscar has yet to come a-calling.

Terrible, terrible terrible... If you're a Kiss fan, you'll want to watch it of course but prepare yourself for nothing but disappointment, heartache and disillusionment. You have been warned!
KEVIN LYONS

The Secret of the Loch (1934)

2008-02-04T20:48:00.000Z

The first attempt to put the fabled Loch Ness Monster on the screen is a beast almost as curious as old Nessie herself. Made at a time when reported sightings were cropping up all over the British press, Secret of the Loch no doubt benefited enormously from the famous photographs of the monster taken by respected surgeon Colonel R.K. Wilson which appeared shortly before the film was released in 1934.

What strikes the unwary viewer on their first encounter with The Secret of the Loch is that it's mostly played for comedy. Seymour Hicks mostly plays it straight (though cuts the ham extra thick for the occasion) as the obsessed and publicity shy professor determined to prove that something monstrous is lurking beneath the surface of the Loch, but just about everyone else is presented as a buffoon, drunk or half-wit. The press pack pursuing Hicks' Professor Heggie are particularly hopeless and any Scottish viewer might be forgiven for having serious issues with the way the locals - drunken superstitious rednecks almost to a man - are presented. That said, the scientific intelligentsia are equally shoddily treated in the film's funniest scene set in the British Museum (presumably) when Heggie tries and fails to present his theories to a room full of scientists madder than anything Universal was cooking up at the time.

It's no real surprise that scriptwriters Charles Bennett (later a writer for Hitchcock (The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936)) and Irwin Allen) and Billie Bristow played it for laughs as they had precious little else to work with. Hampered by a miniscule budget they were never going to be able to write scenes to match the previous year's King Kong and indeed go out of their way to delay the appearance of the monster for as long as possible. The clowning around of the cast is presumably meant to tide us over until the climactic unveiling of the beastie itself.

And when it does finally put in an appearance, the sense of anti-climax is crushing. There was no room in the budget here for stop motion animation. Not enough even for a man in a suit. Instead, we get a rather lethargic looking iguana, photographically enlarged in a terrarium which the film-makers have done nothing whatsoever to disguise - there's never any sense at all in any of the climactic scenes, supposedly set in the depths of the Loch, that we're actually underwater at all.

Today, the film is interesting not for what it does but for who did it. Director Milton Rosmer - a former actor with a filmography stretching back to the 1910s - was half way through a not-terribly-exciting career that also included the Tod Slaughter vehicle Maria Marten, of the Murder in the Red Barn (1935). His acting credits were somewhat more interesting, numbering among them titles such as The Man Without a Soul (1916), High Treason (1928), a TV version of Gaslight (1947) and The Monkey's Paw (1948). Of more interest is the credit for one David Lean as the film's editor. Lean famously earned his dues toiling away in the lowest echelons of the British film industry before becoming one of British cinema's most revered directors.

The Secret of the Loch is available on budget Region 1 DVDs and is of some interest to students of the Loch Ness legend and historians of British genre cinema alike, but anyone else might find it something a chore. The humour is more hit than miss, the monster is laughable and the performances wildly variable but it nevertheless has a naïve charm that's curiously hard to resist.
KEVIN LYONS

Find out more about The Secret of the Loch at the main EOFFTV site.

Morgiana (1972)

2008-01-14T20:52:00.000Z

Juraj Herz has become one of the great overlooked movie fantasists. 1968's Spalovac mrtvol/The Cremator (1969) is possibly his best known work outside of his native Czechoslovakia though he's created several fine genre pieces since then - among them Panna e netvor/Beauty and the Beast (1978), Deváté srdce/The Ninth Heart (1978), Upir z Feratu (1981) and the subject of this trip into Kev's Cupboard, Morgiana (1972).

Very much a borderline horror film - it's much more a Gothic in the purest sense of the word - Morgiana nevertheless plays with many of the tropes of the horror genre, from it's Hammer-like design, monstrously villainous anti-heroine, blaringly emphatic score and swooning, hallucinating apparently doomed heroine. Derived from a story by Russian writer Alexandr Grin (who apparently starved to death), Morgiana stars Iva Janzurová making the most of a twin role, playing sisters Viktoria and Klara who have both inherited homes from their recently deceased father. But the black-clad, scheming Viktoria is jealous of Klara's popularity and sets in motion a plot to kill her with a slow-acting poison. But it all backfires when much of the surrounding population - including Viktoria's beloved cat Morgiana - seem to succumb to the poison and the supplier of the drug starts blackmailing her.

The story is, frankly, overwrought nonsense but what makes Morgiana such a pleasure to watch and why it sticks in the mind for so long afterwards is Herz's outragerosu visual sense. While the soundtrack tries to pummel you into submission, the visuals are also busy trying their best to disorientate the unwary viewer - the jittery, nervous camera seems to be constantly on the prowl, even switching at times to shots from Morgiana's point of view. As Klara succumbs to the poison, her hallucinations are vividly portrayed in trippy, red-hued sequences which fit perfectly well with the film's overall air of hysteria and melodrama. Imagine Ken Russell's Gothic (1986) only done properly.

Regrettably, Morgiana comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion with Viktoria faking her own suicide but dying anyway when Morgiana intervenes (it's never really clear just how smart that cat really is) and Klara recovering from her affliction, the 'poison' having been nothing of the sort. Quite why she hallucinates so violently and what it is that's affecting the locals is never explained.

But until then, Morgiana is a highly commendale film for those who like their horror cerebral and Gothic. It boasts an excellent dual performance from Janzurová (who continues to act in Czech film andf television to this day), stunning photography from Jaroslav Kucera (who lensed several other films with Herz as well as Oldrick Lipský's Nick Carter spoof Adéla jeste nevecerela (1977)) and vivid production design from Zbynek Hloch.

Herz's original plans for the film would have resulted in something completely different to what was eventually released. In an interview with Kinoeye [1] he explained how the film was supposed to end with Klara waking up, asking for her sister and being told that she doesn't have one, the implication being that Klara has been fighting a battle between the good and bad halves of her personality. In the original novel Viktoria and Klara were the same schizophrenic person and this revelation might well have saved the film from the disappointing climax we're stuck with here.

Morgiana temporarily put paid to Herz's career. Head dramaturg Ludvík Toman complained that the film was not the romance that he had been expecting Herz to make and initially called for the film to be banned. Only when the film became a hit with the Russians two years later (the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc forces had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968) was Herz able to work again but only on television. It would be fourteen years before he made another feature film.
KEVIN LYONS

[1] http://www.kinoeye.org/02/01/kosulicova01.php

Crash che botte!/Supermen Against the Orient/The Three Fantastic Supermen in the Orient (1974)

2007-12-03T21:16:00.000Z

In 1967, Gianfranco Parolini gave the world I Fantastici tre supermen, a knockabout comedy that fused then-popular elements from the James Bond films and the crop of small screen superheroes like Batman (1966 - 1968) and The Green Hornet (1966 - 1967). It spawned a series of sequels and spin-offs, many of them directed by Bitto Albertini (aka Al Albert) who was at the helm for 1974's Crash che botte!, aka Supermen Against the Orient and The Three Fantastic Supermen in the Orient.

Designed to cash in on the mid-70s craze for kung fu movies, Crash che botte! stars Robert Malcolm (a mostly forgotten would-be leading man, here with fine 70s porno star moustache, who made only a handful of movies in the mid-70s before disappearing) as inept FBI agent Captain Robert Wallace who ducks out of his own wedding (as he did in the previous film Che fanno i nostri supermen tra le vergini della jungla?/Three Supermen in the Jungle (1970)) to take on a case in Bangkok where a number of American expatriates have mysteriously vanished. Following a series of leads (one of which is supplied by the incontinent, Richard Nixon-obsessed US ambassador to Thailand (Jacques Dufilho)) Wallace sets off in hot pursuit of the martial arts master Tang, played by Shaw Brothers legend Lo Lieh. Unlikely meetings (Wallace meets Italians Max (Antonio Cantafora) and Jerry (Sal Borgese) at a kung fu match), mistaken identities (Tang turns out to be an undercover drugs cop on the trail of the real villain of the piece, Chen Loh), appalling dialogue (Wallace rounds on one set of low-lifes with a cry of "mother grabbers!") and a set of superhero costumes that make the wearers invincible fill out he rest of the film's frenetic running time.

There's never a dull moment in Crash che botte! - lots of very silly ones, certainly, but the pace is such that there's always something daft going on to keep your attention. Albertini does a fine job of replicating the Shaw Brothers look, complete with those never-popular crash zooms and - accidentally - the stilted, faltering dubbing we've come to know and love over the decades. The obligatory martial arts scenes are surprisingly well done given that they were filmed by a Westerner (a very young Jackie Chan turns up briefly in one of them) though inevitably they're horribly compromised in the many full-screen versions of the film that are doing the rounds. The humour is less successful. Dated and often racist, it's an embarrassing collection of worn-out gags and poorly conceived slapstick scenes that really haven't stood the test of time at all well.

But the real problem with the film is that Albertini becomes so entranced by his 'exotic' locations and the high-kicking martial arts that he pretty much neglects the Fantastic Supermen. Malcolm doesn't collect the invulnerable longjohns until almost an hour into the film and then does nothing with them until the climax, which make the film much less of a fantasy film than an energetic if not-terribly-good kung fu film. But if you can make it through the terrible gags and reach the finale, you'll be rewarded by a breathless and extended action scene that mostly makes it all worthwhile.

Crash che botte! isn't essential viewing by any means but if it comes your way and you've a taste for 70s martial arts (the Shaw Brothers variety in particular) and Italian slapstick you'll have a whale of a time with it. And there can't be anyone reading this who could fail to be amused by the quite brilliant theme song by Nico Fidenco which turns up over and over in different instrumental arrangements throughout the film. Not so much sung as beaten into submission by an anonymous gruff-voiced session man, it contains such deathless couplets as "Call me Ping Pong, I'm the boss from Hong Kong" (a particularly curious lyric as there's no-one in the film named Ping Pong) and the quite wonderful "I love to destroy and dismember" and is one of the finest theme tunes any 70s movie can offer. Priceless stuff.

The Last Dinosaur (1977)

2007-12-03T20:58:00.000Z

Back in 1966, TV animation producers Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass won the rights to use King Kong in a short lived animated TV show, King Kong (1966) and subsequently took the character - along with one of the TV show’s new creations, the cheekily named Dr Who - to Japan for Kingu Kongu no gyakushû/King Kong Escapes (1967), a co-production with kaiju masters Toho. A decade later, they were back in Japan for The Last Dinosaur, a lost world adventure originally destined for theatrical release but which, in the States, ended up debuting (with cuts) on ABC as part of their Movie of the Week strand. Elsewhere, it escaped into cinemas but has since disappeared back into semi-obscurity.

An ill-looking Richard Boone - whose slurring, halting delivery suggests that he was under the influence for most of the shoot - stars as billionaire Maston Thrust (a joke name surely, though I can’t figure out how - surely they didn’t mean it to be serious) organizes an expedition to a tropical world in the shadow of an active polar volcano where the team encounter several men in rubber monster suits and a scabby look tribe of cavemen.

Kicking off with a terrible Bond inspired theme song, warbled by Nancy Wilson, The Last Dinosaur gets off to a shaky start when we’re introduced to the titular character - not, as one might expect, the Jurassic monsters that we get to see later but the chauvinistic, arrogant and deeply unlikable Thrust. It’s hard to watch Boone, so good in TV’s Have Gun - Will Travel (1957 - 1963) and as a heavy in a string of 50s and 60s movies, looking so out of sorts here. It’s hard not to laugh at his sunglasses, which never seem to sit on his face properly throughout the entire film, or chuckle at his bizarre delivery but it’s deeply sad to see the former Hec Ramsey (1972 - 1974) reduced to this.

Things get slightly more interesting when the expedition reaches the lost world via a tunneling machine that owes much to the previous year’s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core. Almost immediately, the team are set upon by dinosaurs - a pterodactyl suspended on clearly visible wires that can perform physics-defying mid-air turns; a four-legged creature obviously but effectively played by a man on all fours in a rubber suit; and the star attraction, something supposed to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex but which resembles nothing thus far discovered by paleontology.

Some cavemen turn up to make the stranded crew’s life even more complicated, but no-one’s really interested in them. The dinosaurs are the main attraction here and they’re good value for lovers of bad cinema. Being a co-production with Tsuburaya Productions, the effects are of the standard we’ve come to expect from Japanese monster movies of the 1970s, after the company’s founder, the legendary Eiji Tsuburaya, had died. Thus, you’ll either find them too irritating and cheesy to watch or will revel in their endearing fakeness and take some pleasure in the vaguely surreal imagery. Men in rubber suits rarely look good and the monsters here are ridiculous beyond words, though the optical work is frequently rather good. And fans of classic kaiju eiga will love the frequent use of Godzilla’s trademark roar whenever the dinosaur appears.

When The Last Dinosaur was first broadcast, its already shoddy technical achievements were made to look all the more slapdash by some clumsy editing, forced upon it by ABC’s Standards and Practices suits who wanted some of the dino-violence toned down. This explains why some of the scene transitions are so ungainly but doesn’t explain the disorienting jump in the middle of the film - when the explorers first encounter the cavemen, dialogue suggests that they’ve actually encountered them before (Thrust notes that they’ve got spears now) and it turns out a few seconds later that they’ve been stranded in the lost world for four months. It seems that some expository scenes were written but never even filmed, thus leaving a jarring hole in the plot.

The Last Dinosaur will appeal to lovers of dinosaur cinema and fans of kaiju eiga but will probably leave everyone else scratching their heads or frantically clamoring for the remote control’s stop button.
KEVIN LYONS

Lolita vib-zeme/Lolita Vibrator Torture (1987)

2007-11-05T21:11:00.000Z

The history of the Japanese pinku eiga has been peppered with some of the most outrageous viewing ordeals imaginable. Initially softcore sex romps made from the early 60s onwards and immensely popular for two decades, the pinku films were largely the province of the smaller studios that proliferated in the post-war years. Shot quickly and on low budgets, and usually in a little more than a week, the pinku eiga barely ran more than an hour and were made under the restrictive hand of the Japanese censors who forbade any glimpses of pubic hair.

By the early 70s, companies like Toei were dabbling with the genre but it was Nikkatsu, the oldest studio in Japan, that really claimed pinku eiga for their own, initiating what has since become known as the Roman porno series. The Nikkatsu films were a cut above the usual pinkus, boasting better production values but even they suffered with the arrival of home video and the rise of the AV (Adult Video). Moves by Eirin, the Japanese censor board, to curb the excesses of the pinku resulted in stricter controls that all but killed off the theatrical pinku by the late 1980s. Nikkatsu declared bankruptcy in 1993 but by now a new generation of ambitious young directors were using the pinku tradition for their own ends.

Among them was Hisayasu Sato who made his debut in 1985 and went on to be one of the most prolific pinku directors although, like his peers, he soon started toning down the consensual sex scenes in favour of much darker, nastier concerns. Films like the notorious Nekeddo burâdo: Megyaku (1995), known in the West as Naked Blood, favoured horror over sex earning him comparisons with David Cronenberg for his affinity for 'body horror.' He's also unusual among the current crop of pinku directors for happily alternating between gay and straight pinku - more often directors will stick to one or the other but Sato refuses to recognise any such boundaries and restrictions.

But although Sato's later films have been confrontational and unsettling - he's made films about bestiality and regularly uses guerrilla film making techniques, including sending scantily clad actresses out into the streets to interact with unsuspecting passers-by - it's his 1987 short, Lolita vib-zeme that remains one of his nastiest works.

Known in the English speaking world as Lolita Vibrator Torture it's every bit as nasty as its title suggests. Made for Shishi Pro and distributed by Nikkatsu, it pretty much abandons any pretence at being erotic in the accepted sense of the word and instead trades in sadism and humiliation. The plot is minimalist - a sexual psychopath abducts schoolgirls and rapes and tortures them to death with the aid of a dildo. Subtle this certainly isn't.

It's very long way from what most would think of as erotic but by this stage in the game, eroticism wasn't really what Sato was striving for. His detached, somewhat cold direction thankfully discourages us from getting too involved with what we're seeing but that doesn't make the film any less unsettling. The truck in which most of the action takes place, festooned with distressing photographic images of the killer's previous victims, rivals the family's hell-hole of a home in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) as the most unpleasant setting in horror films.

The fact that the actresses involved (all, we are assured, of legal age) look much younger than they really are and all wear the sailor suit uniform so associated with Japanese schoolgirls makes an already disquieting film all the more sleazy and questionable. You'll likely feel uncomfortable while watching Lolita vib-zeme rather than entertained and certainly there's little likelihood that you'll be aroused. But it undoubtedly pushes some buttons and you certainly won't come away from it felling nothing. Whether you want those buttons pressed or those feelings evoked is another matter.

Despite the presence in his extensive filmography of the likes of Nekeddo burâdo: Megyaku, Sato actually mellowed somewhat in the years since Lolita vib-zeme though still had plenty of confrontational and challenging films to come, even casting the notorious cannibal Issei Sagawa (who murdered and partially consumed Dutch student Renée Hartevelt while studying in Paris in 1981) in his 1992 film Shisenjiyou no Aria/Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture.
KEVIN LYONS

The Wednesday Play: Fable (1965)

2007-10-01T21:07:00.000+01:00

The BBC's Wednesday Play strand, which ran from 1964 to 1970, was never one to shy away from provocative and controversial topics. Among its more memorable offerings was Dennis Potter's secular retelling of the story of Christ, Son of Man (16 April 1969, directed by Gareth Davies), Neil Dunn's Up the Junction (3 November 1965, directed by Ken Loach) and most famously Loach's Cathy Come Home (16 November 1966), written by Jeremy Sandford and so unflinching unsentimental in its depiction of the plight of London's homeless that caused much public outrage.

On 20 January 1965, The Wednesday Play rattled cages again with Fable, a fascinating attempt to tackle the thorny issue of race relations by writer John Hopkins and director Christopher Morahan.

Like the almost similarly titled A Fable which followed in 1970 (based on a play by LeRoi Jones) and the much later White Man's Burden (1995), Fable imagines a future or alternative world where the balance of power between black and white has been reversed. In Hopkins' world, Britain is a mirror image of South Africa, then under the yolk of Apartheid. A brutal black regime suppresses liberal black writers like Mark Fellowes (Thomas Baptiste) and subjugates white, working class poor like married couple Len (Ronald Lacey) and Joan (Eileen Atkins) whom, at the start of the play are separated when Len is fired as Fellowes' driver and forced by government order to relocate to a "work reservation" in Scotland, leaving Eileen to rely on the kindness of friends to struggle through without their kids who have been taken away to a government-run home.

Although Len and Joan at first seem to be the play's focal characters, it's Fellowes who carries the weight of Hopkins' satirical barbs. A radical writer under house arrest, he believes that his work is still being published in an underground magazine when in truth the manuscripts are being burned by his terrified wife Francesca (Barbara Assoon). When he discovers his betrayal, he simply carries on as though nothing had happened, deluding himself that simply putting his subversive thoughts into words is enough to effect action.

Hopkins was targeting what he saw as the ineffectual attempts by South Africa's white intelligentsia to oppose the Apartheid regime. Fellowes is all talk but little action, content to intellectualize the problem and salve his conscience by maintaining the delusion that he is raising awareness while all the time those he claims to be supporting are being murdered, oppressed and dispossessed.

Hopkins was surprised at the reaction the play provoked - he spoke of receiving letters from racists who applauded him for showing what would happen if 'they' were allowed to take power - but there's no doubt that it fulfilled the remit of The Wednesday Play, which was to provide challenging and thought-provoking new drama. The BBC, as was common at the time, got the jitters and delayed the play's broadcast to avoid clashing with a potentially contentious local election in the East End of London (similar things happened to another Wednesday Play, Potter's Vote, Vote, Vote For Nigel Barton (15 December 1965) and most infamously to Peter Watkins The War Game which was initially scheduled for broadcast in 1965 but wasn't eventually screened until July 1985) - Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker was standing for the seat after losing a similar by-election in Smethick, Birmingham, an contest marred by allegations of racism.

Fable suffers all the drawbacks of 60s British television drama - some of the dialogue seems too theatrical to be really naturalistic and the shot-on-video look common to the period robs it atmosphere - but there's very much to enjoy in this exceptional production. Morahan's direction is first rate and the performances are uniformly good - it was a rare opportunity for black actors to shine and they made the most of it. Now familiar faces like Thomas Baptiste, Carmen Munroe and the ubiquitous Rudolph Walker were all given early roles here.

In today's television landscape, Fable looks like an anomaly, a compelling and provocative drama that refuses to make any concessions to its audience and boats a literate script and strong performances. But in the 60s it seemed almost commonplace - The Wednesday Play and its ilk had their faults but at least they were challenging and intelligent. One can't help but feel that something has been lost over the years.
KEVIN LYONS

The Cremators (1972)

2007-09-03T21:03:00.000+01:00

Following the 'success' (the word is used advisedly…) of the dreadful Octaman (1971), writer Harry Essex had another crack at directing (only his fourth foray behind the camera and his last) with this low budget adaptation of the short story Dune Roller. The Cremators causes some confusion as to the parentage of said story - the screen credits one Judy Ditky as the author though it's clearly based on the 1951 short story by Julian May, whose married name is the slightly different Dikty. The Judy Ditky name doesn't seem to have been used anywhere else (the original story was credited to J.C. May) and May gets no recognition anywhere in the film's credits.

Which is probably no bad thing for her. In padding the original short story (first published in the December 1951 edition of Astounding Science Fiction) out to feature length, Essex quite literally lost the plot and resorted to that great bugbear of low budget film-making, having his characters wander around aimlessly waiting for a chance to do something even vaguely interesting.

The most interesting part of the film (and please see the word 'interesting' in context here) is the opening in which a doom-laden voiceover fills in the back story - 300 years before a giant glowing meteor crashed in some mountainous region of the States where the local lake has a tidal flow (the film never quite makes its mind up where it's supposed to be set). It's into this 'lake' that the meteor crashed, witnessed only by a solitary Indian (who promptly gets fried) and… a fish. Yes, a fish. Or more accurately, a hammerhead shark. Which raises a couple of questions far more interesting than anything else in the film - what's a hammerhead shark doing in a lake? And how does the narrator know what this fish witnessed 300 years after the event?

While pondering these questions, the plot limps into action. It's now the early 70s and this apparently sentient creature is back to retrieve its offspring, small glowing rocks that the locals have been fishing out of the lake. The "Dune Roller" (one character refers to the meteor as this without explanation) lays waste to the local population while a soppy cat-loving hippy runs around in the surf and spies on the action - why we don't know, but he seems happier than the poor viewer tempted in by this tedious nonsense.

On a budget as low as this (reportedly $50,000) you don't really expect believable effects (actually the "Dune Roller" effects isn't all that bad - we've all seen worse) or even credible acting but given Essex's impressive pedigree (he worked on the screenplay for It Came From Outer Space (1953), I, The Jury (1953), which he also directed, Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and scores of others) we had the right to expect a tighter script. For the majority of its meager 74 minutes, The Cremators just plods along in the less-than-scintillating company of its scientist leading men, Essex seeming to want to mimic the 50s science fiction films he worked on two decades before but, as with Octaman, making a complete hash of it.

The Cremators doesn't even manage to rise to "so bad it's good" levels - it's just plain bad. Poorly, incompetently made and lacking even the basic rudiments of what one might call entertainment. Lovers of early 70s drive-in trash will already have picked up the Retromedia DVD release. Others, less tolerant of ineptitude and tedium, may want to look elsewhere for their home entertainment kicks. Try It Came From Outer Space, The Creature From the Black Lagoon or indeed Man Made Monster (1941), another Essex scripted genre movie - they're all so much more fun than The Cremators.

Trivia-more-fascinating-than-anything-else-in-this-film: co-star Maria De Aragon not only appeared in some much more fun R-rated smut around the time she appeared in The Cremators (Blood Mania and Wonder Women among them) but was inside the Greedo suit in Star Wars (1978).
KEVIN LYONS

Abar (1977)

2007-06-25T20:56:00.000+01:00

There have been some heinous cinematic crimes committed in the name of blaxploitation over the years (take a look at the earlier Kev's Cupboard review for Welcome Back, Brother Charles (1975) for an example) and Abar (aka Abar, the First Black Superman and In Your Face) has a rap sheet as long as your arm. But it's so unremittingly awful in just about every respect that it transcends its limited imagination and resources and becomes great fun.

The plot brings the traditional mad scientist into the ghetto for a blaxploitation spin - the scientist in question is one Dr Kincade who offends racist sensibilities by being an educated black man in an up-market, all-white apartment block. Racist taunts soon turn to acts of violence and local activist Abar steps up to the plate to defend the doctor and his family. Little do the white folk know but Kincade has developed a serum that will make anyone it's administered to invincible and he tries it out on Abar. Imbued with super powers, Abar sets out to kick whitey's ass and restore peace to the community.

You can't fault writer James Smalley and director Frank Packard's intentions here - Abar is an unusual blaxploitation film in that the hero tends to think and contemplate rather than resort to fists, snappy one-liners and guns to solve his problems. It tries, valiantly, to raise important issues and even tries to offer some half-baked solutions to the problems, but the film is so ineptly made that the clumsy editing, lousy acting and can't-believe-your-ears dialogue tend to undo any good the film may have done.

Abar desperately wants it both ways. There are some awkward martial arts fights and some badly shot gunfights but it doesn't quite have the conviction to go all the way and become a full-on ass-kicking adventure romp. It prefers to pontificate instead, which is fine, but the script simply isn't up the job and instead of meaningful insights into the plight of black America in the late 70s, we get dull platitudes and hare-brained philosophy instead.

The film's oddest moment - and there are plenty of them - is the out-of-nowhere dream sequence which moves the action out of the 70s inner-city landscape and into the Old West! Added to pad out the film's meagre running time, it's a genuinely jolting moment that just edges out the moment when Kincade tries to kill a rabbit he's given his serum to by repeatedly shooting it as the film's best and funniest moment.

Abar is certainly not subtle. The racism meted out to Kincade and Abar is so crude and obvious that it's hard to take seriously - there are even swastika wearing Nazis strutting around the estate! And not a single one of the whites presented in the film are seen in a positive light - they're all violent, racist scum with not a redeeming feature among them. This may have played well to the film's target audience but surely restricted its crossover appeal and may explain its relative obscurity today.
KEVIN LYONS

The Force on Thunder Mountain (1977)

2007-06-21T20:53:00.000+01:00

After a relatively impressive opening in which a group of 19th century prospectors are assaulted by a fall of large plastic rocks as a UFO buzzes overhead, The Force on Thunder Mountain settles down to become a frankly tedious zero budgeter that seeks - and mostly fails - to disguise the fact that it only has about ten minutes worth of plot with acres of stock footage.

With a cast of only five, one of who isn't even given a name (he's just 'the father'), limited props and costumes, over-emphatic music cues and that ever-present stock footage, this American National Enterprises release is as threadbare as they come. So threadbare in fact that no-one wanted to take credit for the script, always assuming that there was one and that they weren't just making all this up as they go along.

After a lot of wandering about (accompanied by bland folk song) getting worryingly excited by stock footage of local flora and fauna (eagles and bear cubs play a big part in The Force on Thunder Mountain), what passes for a plot is dragged screaming into the spotlight - it seems that the strange happenings that have been frightening people away from Thunder Mountain for hundreds of years have been the doing of an old alien, Om, whose ship (filched from Invaders From Mars (1953) crashed there a thousand years before. Om teaches young Rick how to use "the force" (come on, it was 1977/1978, what else was it going to be called?) as, despite the fact that he's spent a millennium frightening people away from the mountain, Om really wants to find someone he can pass his powers on to.

All unbelievable rubbish of course, clearly shot quickly with a non-professional cast and crew and foisted onto a public hungry for more science fiction after the successes of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It also had one eye on the wilderness movie market that Disney had been exploiting so well but its lack of resources plunged it to the bottom of both barrels. It's difficult to know who this was really being aimed at - there are sly druggie references (the father wishes at one point that he had some "mushrooms" and the alien Om comes equipped with a magic mushroom of his own), yet the presence of a boy, his dog and all those wildlife clips suggest that the film was always destined for matinee screenings. The fact that it disappeared without trace until video gave it a second life of sorts suggests that no-one at American National Enterprises actually knew how to market it.

Director Peter B. Good was involved in a couple of the Faces of Death sequels (he photographed the second and third instalments) but only appears to have directed one more film (Fatal Exposure (1989)) since this, his debut. On the evidence of The Force on Thunder Mountain, his decision to give up directing isn't one that should give us too much of a cause for concern.
KEVIN LYONS

Archangel Thunderbird (1998)

2007-06-18T20:50:00.000+01:00

Originally made for broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel, this bizarre short was the brainchild of British artist and film-maker Tony Luke who, in 1988, had created the comic strip Dominator, a black and white manga influenced strip that first appeared in British rock magazine Metal Hammer. In 1993, Luke transferred the strip to a genuine Japanese manga, Kodansha's Comic Afternoon, with scripts written by 2000 A.D. legend Alan Grant and the story was eventually made into a pair of animated movies, Dominator (2003) and Dominator X (2007).

But before those features were made, Luke formed Renga Media in 1995 with Grant and Japanese anime designer Yasushi Nirasawa to make Archangel Thunderbird, a mind-bending, eyeball-searing blend of live-action and stop-motion animation. The mad plot mixes and matches influences as broad as British horror movies, anime and Luke's own comic books - scientist Dr Churchill discovers that the pre-Christian demons of mythology are all too real and threatening to over-run the world. Led by the alien demon Baal, the creatures descend on the defenceless planet and start enslaving Mankind. But Churchill, who has gone into hiding after the world's governments dismissed his theories, has assembled a fighting force of scientists and soldiers code-named Doomshield who go into battle with the demons armed with an ancient magical mechanoid known as the Archangel Thunderbird.

Equal parts Gerry Anderson, Japanese monster movies and giant-robot-anime, Archangel Thunderbird (named after the Amon Düül II track perhaps?) is virtually impossible to sum up in mere words - it's a fascinating film that will keep you glued to the screen for the hole of its meagre running time, despite the fact that you can never quite shake off the feeling that it's really not all that good. The animation is amateurish, the pace is so frenetic that it's impossible to figure out what the hell's going on and the acting (from a cast that includes Hellraiser's Pinhead, Doug Bradley, and 90s low-budget British regular Eileen Daly) is pretty shakey at best. Yet despite that, it's still a huge amount of fun that makes a virtue of its cheapness, and one certainly can't fault its energy and imagination.

And certainly there were plenty of people who fell for is threadbare charms - the first screening of the short on the UK version of the Sci-Fi Channel attracted record viewing figures for the station. That didn't help the pilot go to series, which is perhaps a good thing - its surreal charms would have been considerably diluted over time (they almost outstay their welcome as it is) and leaving Archangel Thunderbird as a scrappy, compelling and frequently quite mad curio has ensured it a very minor cult following. A DVD release is extremely unlikely so it's lucky that Luke and the rest of the Renga Media team have put it up for download (in four more manageable chunks) on their website - head over to Renga Media's website and experience the madness for yourself.
KEVIN LYONS

The Killing Edge (1986)

2007-06-11T20:47:00.000+01:00

Lindsay Shonteff may not have been the greatest cinematic talent that Britain ever produced, but he managed his fair share of entertaining B-movies in a variety of genres. Night After Night After Night (1969) is a wild and daft slasher long before the term was coined, Clegg (1969) is a mostly incompetent but endearing cop thriller and Big Zapper (1973) is a film I'll defend to my dying breath while happily admitting that it's appalling in most departments - but so much fun nonetheless.

But by the mid 80s, with the British film industry all but decimated, the low-budget likes of Shonteff were finding it tougher to generate the funding required to make an even half-way decent film. The Killing Edge is by almost any standards unwatchable - filmed on atmosphere dodging video, burdened with a dreadful synthesizer soundtrack (which uses every one of those hideous mid-80s electro-pop clichés) and looking for all the world like it was being made up as it went along, it's real ordeal and helps put the rest of Shonteff's oeuvre into perspective.

Bill French stars as one of the survivors of a nuclear attack on Britain who spends much of the first half of the film trudging endlessly around in the snow talking to a teddy bear (!) and searching for his missing wife and son. He eventually finds them after a couple of dull encounters with other survivors only for them to be gunned down by Terminators, brutal paramilitaries who now seem to be running the country. Bloody - if rather dull - vengeance ensues.

This is a peculiar nuclear war that our man and his motley crew of acquaintances have survived. There's absolutely no visible evidence to suggest what's happened (buildings are still standing and although a couple of characters have radiation sickness near the beginning of the film, no-one is horrible scarred or otherwise physically affected by the holocaust) and we're left with a few snatches of dialogue to fill in the not altogether important fact that we're actually watching a post-apocalypse movie. One assumes that little time has past since the attack (the hero's son seems no older when he finds him than he does in the endless flashbacks) yet there's no evidence for this either.

One would be really hard pressed to think of a way to make a film more boring than The Killing Edge. Like its brooding but charisma-free hero, it lumbers around aimlessly, never quite sure of what it's trying to say or do. As noted earlier it looks very much like great chunks of it were just made up as they went along the concept of continuity (within shots let alone between them) seems to have occurred to no-one. The acting is terrible, the script muddled and ill-conceived and Shonteff's direction is leaden and unimaginative.

The only surprise that The Killing Edge has to offer is the unexpected appearance (and almost immediate disappearance) of Matthew Waterhouse as a knife-wielding survivor. Waterhouse had last been seen as the slapable Doctor Who companion Adric who met a timely (some would say overdue) end trying to save prehistoric Earth from Cybermen. Here he just lurks in a tunnel, menaces the hero with a knife then disappears from plot. Presumably Shonteff believed that Waterhouse's time in the TARDIS was still sufficiently recent for him to be a bit of name recognition. Which probably tells you all you need to know about the film's ambitions.

The Killing Edge was one of a very tiny blip of post-apocalypse movies shot with minimal budgets in the UK during the 80s - others included Michael J. Murphy's Death Run (1987), Alan Briggs' Ghetto Wars and Steven Lisberger's rather more up-market Slipstream (1989). None of them were particularly any good but The Killing Edge is the absolute pits.

Incidentally, many sources list The Killing Edge as a 1984 film - the end credits however offer a copyright date of 1986.
KEVIN LYONS

This Is Not a Test (1962)

2007-06-04T20:44:00.000+01:00

Made at the height of Cold War paranoia, this is a decidedly under-resourced entry into the America-under-attack cycle but one not without its threadbare charms. The set-up is the very model of economy - a bored deputy is ordered to set up a road block on a remote mountain road and is soon joined by a disparate group of travellers, including an old man and his grand-daughter, two couples, a truck driver and his hitch-hiker who soon turns out to be an escaped killer. But things get worse when a voice on the deputy's radio informs the horrified group that the USA is under attack, that an air strike is imminent and that "this is not a test." The rest of the film, all shot in a couple of look-alike locations and in what feels like real time, charts the attempts by the group to deal with the impending end of the world.

This Is Not a Test is quite unlike the rest of the nuclear scare movies of the 60s. It's set in one location, has only a handful of characters and plays for all the world like a stage play that somehow got itself filmed. It's let down by mostly poor performances, none worse than the deputy, an almost touchingly naïve failure to grasp the real threats posed by nuclear weapons (hiding in a truck would be no help at all!) and the studio setting is painfully obvious when Gramps' shadow falls right across the painted sky! But for all that, it's so unusual that it keeps you hooked and director Fredric Gadette does a fine job keeping you on the edge of your seat as you remain as in the dark as the characters you're watching - has war really broken out or will it all turn out to be a horrible misunderstanding?

Refreshingly for a film of its subject and vintage, there's a notable lack of finger-pointing in This Is Not a Test - the 'enemy' is never named (we assume it's the Russians but no-one ever says as such). Indeed if there's any moralising at all it's aimed at the motley collection of 'ordinary' Americans - particularly the authority figures - who find themselves plunged into a nightmare of uncertainty - none of them are particularly likeable, especially the ruthless cop, initially set up as the audience identification figure whose bullish behaviour becomes increasingly alienating and paranoid until he loses us altogether when he coldly kills a dog to help preserve air in the group's makeshift shelter.

From the wreckage of the rickety production values emerges a surprisingly intelligent and thoughtful look at a subject that was genuinely terrifying at the time - This Is Not a Test was released in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis when global annihilation looked almost a certainty. It's limited resources give it a claustrophobic and progressively unsettling paranoia that other nuke scare movies strived for but rarely achieved.

This Is Not a Test seems to have been the only film made by Fredric Gadette, whose writing skills are clearly more impressive than his directing abilities but who could have been a talent to watch out for. On the evidence of This Is Not a Test, he had a keen ear for dialogue and wasn't afraid to take a new and different approach to an already well-worn theme. Serious, sharp and witty, This Is Not a Test mostly transcends its limited assets to present a disturbingly credible portrait of society in disarray when faced with the unthinkable. Miracle Mile (1988) did pretty much the same thing with a better budget, much better actors and with a far more expansive storyline, but This Is Not a Test was there first and remains of interest - not just as a 60s curio but as a genuine attempt to try something different, grown up and devoid of the inevitable exploitation elements that marred many similar efforts.

Well worth a look if you can get past those terrible performances.
KEVIN LYONS

I sopravvissuti della citta morta/Ark of the Sun God (1984)

2007-05-31T20:38:00.000+01:00

Antonio Margheriti's ridiculous but fun rip off of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) at least offers plenty of cheap thrills and a smattering of unintentional laughs, which is more than can be said of most such enterprises. David Warbeck (who sleepwalked his way through many an Italian exploitation item of the late 70s and early 80s, including Lucio Fulci's L'aldila (1980) and Il gatto nero (1981) and Marheriti's earlier L'ultimo cacciatore (1980)) stars as the improbably named Rick Spear, a virtuoso safe cracker, arriving in Turkey to help steal the fabled Ark of Gilgamesh the Sun God. Ranged against him are a bunch of power crazed Arabs who believe that possession of the Ark will aid their bid for world domination.

And so the scene is set for an action packed romp of epic proportions that is frequently sabotaged by the miniscule budget and appalling acting and just as often rescued by Margheriti's canny eye for a good visual. Of course it's just a cut price Raiders clone, but it does what it does with a good deal of panache and tongue in cheek self mockery that makes it all the more endearing. Somewhat less endearing is the implicit racism - also a criticism of the Indiana Jones films - inherent in this kind of thing, erecting the Arabs as, once again, a potential threat to the Eurocentric worldview.

David Warbeck could often seem bland and uninterested in his Italian films but here he seems to be having a lot of fun and he always seemed better served by Margheriti than he was by Fulci. John Steiner is his usual reliable self in the unlikely role of a British aristocrat, as is the obligatory Alan Collins/Luciano Pigozzi (is there a single Italian exploitation film he didn't appear in?) turning in a fun performance as a drunk, and the rest of the instantly forgettable cast of nobodies does what it can with a script that all too obviously was being made up as production went along.

I sopravvissuti della citta morta (a curious and misleading title that suggests zombie action that it notably fails to deliver) is a shameless knock-off of a much better film, but is undeniably great fun - the wild desert car chase between American super-cars is the action highlight.

Quite why I sopravvissuti della citta morta isn't more highly regarded than it is, is a mystery - perhaps Italian exploitation fandom runs only as far as horror and science fiction (genres that Margheriti was certainly no stranger to) and not to silly action romps. It's far from a great film, but as lightweight fantasy action romps go it's a damn sight more entertaining than most. Probably a good idea to have the remote control at hand though to hit the mute button when the almost obligatory awful song rears its ugly head.
KEVIN LYONS

UFO Target Earth (1974)

2007-05-28T20:30:00.000+01:00

A real oddity this one - made for peanuts (reputedly $70,000), it's an ambitious attempt to translate the mid-70s passion for ufology to the big screen but writer/director Michael DeGaetano lacks the resources, imagination or ability to carry off his lofty ambitions. A few years later, Steven Spielberg would come along and show him how it should be done with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978). By contrast, UFO Target Earth is dull and DeGaetano goes to quite extraordinary lengths to show off the research he's done, risking boring his audience to death with characters that rabbit endlessly without ever really saying anything at all.

There are admittedly some clever ideas at work here but they're swamped beneath wooden acting, endless yakking and a horrible, intrusive synthesizer score. The meandering plot follows a university communications researcher, Alan Grimes (Nick Plakias, who seems to possess no more than two facial expressions) on his quest to find a UFO that apparently crashed into a lake many years ago. He wanders about with a small group of colleagues and believers, mostly filmed from behind to cut down on all that awkward synchronised sound nonsense before they encounter a very cut-price 2001-esque light show and some aliens that are able to get their ship airborne again thanks to the power of one of the character's imagination.

Botched continuity, an incomprehensible script, lousy special effects… The list of reasons to never, ever be tempted to approach UFO Target Earth is a long one. There are plenty of films in EOFFTV that demonstrate admirably just how well a low budget can be utilised by a skilled director so the fact that UFO Target Earth was made for such a piffling sum is hardly an excuse for it being so agonizingly dull. For a film that makes such a great play of imagination and the power it has, there's precious little of it on show here - the lengthy "trip" sequence that climaxes the film not only tries to recreate 2001's Stargate sequence visually (Alan ages as he's exposed to the alien presence, just like Bowman) but tries to quote it musically too - just to hammer home the point, as the UFO takes off (represented by a series of abstract computer generated shapes) we're treated to a few bars of Khachaturian's Spartacus. Because obviously all classy science fiction films need a touch of classical music, right?

DeGaetano seems to think that having his characters repeat bad dialogue culled from a beginners guide to popular science is enough to give UFO Target Earth some gravitas. It isn't. All it does is slow down already turgid narrative while actors who quite clearly have no idea what they're talking about unconvincingly recite the script with no conviction whatsoever.

Stunningly awful and one for only the most devoted of UFO movie fans. Amazingly, DeGaetano managed to get the funding together to make at least three more films, the basketball comedy Scoring (1979) and two horror films, The Haunted (1979) and Bloodbath in Psycho Town (1989).
KEVIN LYONS

Idaho Transfer (1973)

2007-05-24T20:26:00.000+01:00

Back in the early 70s, Peter Fonda's acting career was at its still going strong - he'd appeared in a number of popular counter-culture low-budgeters in the 60s, culminating in the runaway success of Easy Rider (1969), and had started the new decade with such interesting ventures as Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971), Robert Wise's Two People (1973) and John Hough's Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974). But his fledgling career as a director was proving less commercially viable. His 1971 western The Hired Hand enjoys something of a cult following now but was a flop at the time and his 1973 follow-up, the science fiction piece Idaho Transfer, fared even worse - a limited release in 1973 was witnessed by virtually no-one and an attempt to re-issue the film at the 1975 Filmex science fiction festival in Los Angeles was a disaster.

Which is a shame as, although it is a deeply flawed effort, Idaho Transfer has much to commend it. Often unfocussed and occasionally incoherent, it still exerts a quite, subtle fascination that makes it more than worth the effort it takes to track it down. It never really escapes the fact that it was made in an idealistic 1973 but what now seems like naivety was, back then, something else entirely. In many ways it's ahead of its time, an earnest attempt to address the impact that Mankind is having on its environment.

The plot takes its own good time in revealing itself but centres around Karen Braden (Kelly Bohanan), one of a group of young scientists in Idaho who have been chosen to take part in a radical social and physical experiment - they're being sent 56 years into the future to bypass an impending but never explained ecological disaster that wipes out the human race. The plan is that the devastated world of the future will be re-populated by these young, intelligent idealists who should, in theory, make a rather better job of this time round. But of course, things are never really that simple.

The first thing you notice about Idaho Transfer, even through the appalling video transfers that seem to all that's left of the film, is that it really makes exceptional use of its ultra-low budget. The time travel sequences are the very soul of simplicity but are remarkably evocative and the blasted landscapes of Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, representing the ruined future landscape, are hauntingly photographed.

But the script - by Thomas Matthiesen - is infuriatingly unfocussed, drifting as aimlessly from one character to the next as they tend to do when they get to the future. Characters appear then disappear from the narrative only to unexpectedly turn up again later and the experience can be somewhat disorientating. It doesn't help much that the acting is uniformly dour, making the characters so dull and unappealing that we can't be bothered much to keep track of who they all are.

That and the hippy sentiments left over from Fonda's acid-scarred 60s experiences prevent Idaho Transfer from really standing out from the crowd today and it's not at all surprising that it's largely vanished into obscurity. But as noted earlier, there's something very definitely worthwhile at work here - the fine, minimalist score from Bruce Langehorne is a plus and the evocative settings (the time machine is just a small machine in a sterile white room) and photography make it always very watchable. The sense of being trapped in a bleak, unpalatable future is also well conveyed and the bizarre final scenes are simultaneously hilarious and horrible.

Idaho Transfer turns up in pretty shoddy condition in any number of those multi-title, cheapo DVD releases and as such is unlikely to be getting a shiny, extras-enhanced upgrade any time soon. And to be fair, unless you're a die-hard fan of 70s SF in general or cautionary post-apocalyptic tales in particular, your life won't be any the worse for never seeing it. But those with a taste for 70s marginalia and those who like their screen science fiction slow, quite and thoughtful will be ultimately for sitting through a few too many yak-sessions and more flower power propaganda than one should really be subjected to at a single sitting. Flawed but in the right frame of mind, quite fascinating.
KEVIN LYONS

Gonks Go Beat (1965)

2007-05-21T20:22:00.000+01:00

It's 1965. The Beatles are taking the world by storm and London is about to start swinging. So what else would you expect from the British film industry than a science fiction comedy musical about an alien visitor, Wilco Roger (Carry On stalwart Kenneth Connor) who visits Earth to bring peace between the warring teen tribes of Beat Land and Ballad Isle. As the annual battle of the bands approaches, Wilco takes a young boy and girl from opposite sides of the musical divide and hopes to secure peace through the power of love.

Directed by Robert Hartford-Davis (director of great British horror like The Black Torment (1964), Corruption (1968), Incense For the Damned (1970) and The Fiend (1972)), Gonks Go Beat is wild and energetic if not particularly any good. The simplistic plot - derived from Romeo and Juliet - probably wasn't that appealing even in the far more innocent times of 1965. But plot wasn't the draw here - what attracted audiences then and remains the film's most alluring attraction now is the roster of mid-60s Brit-pop bands who turn up for extended cameos and performances. Almost forgotten names like The Graham Bond Organisation rub shoulders with the totally obscure (The Long and the Short, The Trolls) and long-careered stars like Lulu and even rock legend Ginger Baker (from Cream, where he played alongside Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce, the latter seen here in The Graham Bond Organisation) can be glimpsed in the film's most spectacular sequence, a 9-drummer jam session. In truth, most of the music is pretty wretched and not really indicative of the rich vein of pop and rock that was being created in the UK at the time.

The cast, which also features instantly recognisable soon-to-be film and TV comedy regulars like Frank Thornton (Are You Being Served? (1972 - 1985)), Terry Scott (several Carry Ons and much later Terry and June (1979 - 1987)), do what they can with the incredibly lightweight material but are mostly pretty poor and Hartford-Davis looks to have phoned in his direction. It's something of an anomaly in his filmography, coming as it does after the excellent and provocative The Yellow Teddybears (1963) and just before the full throttle mayhem of Corruption. Nothing else in his oeuvre is quite as silly and throwaway as Gonks Go Beat which may explain why it doesn't feel like much of his other work.

One assumes that Hartford-Davis and co-writers Jimmy Watson and Peter Newbrook (later director of The Asphyx (1973)) were trying to make some sort of comment on the then-current war being raged between Mods and Rockers, a youth conflict that had already led to large-scale brawling in the streets of coastal towns like Margate, Broadstairs and, most infamously, Brighton on several Bank Holidays in 1964. If that's the case, it doesn't really work as the antagonism between the residents of Ballad Isle and Beat Land is tame by comparison to the full on bloodshed on the beaches of the South Coast the year before.

But Gonks Go Beat is genuinely hard to dislike. Its naiveté, charm and sheer silliness will help completists of 60s British cinema sit through it at least once, though that will probably be more than enough for most. The love-and-peace message is hammered home relentlessly, the dancing is wild and, to modern eyes, hilarious, the costumes are camper than a row of tents and a bunch of gonk puppets put in an appearance just to add to the bonkers proto-psychedelic stylings. And yet that's precisely why we love it so much - it's horribly dated, it was probably hopelessly naïve even at the time and it's as mad as they come. And that's just the way we like it.

Against all the odds, as this review was published, a Region 2 DVD release for this most improbable of films was in the offing. The world has, indeed, gone mad…
KEVIN LYONS

Seksmisja/Sex Mission (1984)

2007-05-17T20:20:00.000+01:00

The lurid titles (which unfortunately makes it sound like cheap porn) conceals a sharp, witty, PC-baiting satire that will likely have feminists up in arms. Two men are placed in suspended animation as part of a government experiment expecting to wake up three years later - instead they wake up fifty years into the future into a society ruled by women where men are a distant and much feared memory.

And so the stage is set for much ribald slapstick as the forces of twentieth century male chauvinism meet a terrified feminist utopia head on. And there isn't a sexist joke left untold as youthful writer-director Juliusz Machulski (at the time the youngest ever Polish film director) gleefully sets out to make some telling political comments amid the welter of dubious gags. For some, those comments will be drowned out by the sound of furious tut-tutting as Machulski brazenly equates feminism with totalitarianism.

But Machulski doesn't seem to be setting out on a one-man crusade to discredit the feminist movement with Seksmisja - far from it in fact. He certainly doesn't seem to approve of the often boorish behaviour of his two male protagonists and instead makes the valid point that a society too dominated by one gender is one that will inevitably lead to repression and decay. Although Machulski denied it, it's clear that Communism was the real target here and that feminism just got in the way, a useful scapegoat for distracting suspicious eyes from what's really going on: when the two men are asked to sign "confessions" to the effect that they were "born male against their will" it's difficult not to be minded of some of the more excessive show trials and attempts to rewrite history that blighted the late twentieth century histories of Eastern European nations. Ones suspects that George Orwell would have liked Seksmisja.

Other dark periods of Europe's history are recalled when the men find themselves pawns in a power struggle between a cadre of archaeologists and a powerful order of geneticists - the archaeologists are happy to leave the men as they are in order to study them; the geneticists are relentlessly determined to "naturalise" them.

But while Sekmisja has some very serious points to make, it is above else hysterically funny. For those used to the more sober, even dour, films from Poland that seem to be the only ones we ever see in the west will find Sekmisja a real revelation. Some of the subtleties of the humour have no doubt been lost but there's still plenty here to enjoy. Yes, it can be silly, but there's nothing terribly wrong with that is there? In fact, without some of the low brow humour one suspects that the Polish authorities might have been more suspicious of the films - remarkably, they only insisted on one being removed (one of the reanimated men suggests that the pair travel east as there's bound to some form of civilization in that direction).

The more politically sensitive might balk at some of Sekmisja's laddish excesses but try not to read too much into it (Machulski clearly disapproves of such behaviour too) and you'll be rewarded with an inventive, cleverly, sometimes even witty science fiction romp that will effectively dismantle any preconceived notions you might have about Polish cinema.
KEVIN LYONS

Invasion From Inner Earth (1974)

2007-05-14T20:17:00.000+01:00

You certainly can't fault Bill Rebane's ambition. Throughout his career, he struggled against meagre resources, ludicrous budgets and even common sense to churn out a series of no-budget 70s genre movies which somehow still manage to turn up on cable TV and DVD even when more interesting films of the period still struggle to get a decent release. You'll know him best for the hysterical The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) but he also gave us cheapskate monster-from-the-lake movie Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake (1975), an Andromeda Strain (1971) knock-off, The Alpha Incident (1978), a Bigfoot movie, The Capture of Bigfoot (1979) and the quite terrible The Demons of Ludlow (1983). But before all of them, he made Invasion From Inner Earth (1974), aka They, which features some of the concerns of his later films, notably alien invasions and biological weapons.

Which makes Invasion From Inner Space sound so much more interesting than it really is. In fact it's a tedious plod through some very well-worn ideas, one which struggles constantly with the lack of budget. As noted at the outset, ambition was always one of Rebane's strong suits and here he tries to do an alien invasion story when he could barely pay for the catering for his miniscule cast and crew. The invading extra-terrestrials - who seem to be causing chaos in a city in the opening shots though it's hard to tell as this footage seems to have wandered in from another film - menace a group of hunters in the frozen wilds of somewhere (it's never really established where we are but it's remote, woody and under several feet of snow) by manifesting as a red light! These non-corporeal invaders unleash their secret weapon - cheap smoke bombs that are really a terrible chemical agent that is laying waste to the world's population.

For what seems an eternity, nothing actually happens in Invasion From Inner Space. It's the antithesis of the action movie (the inaction movie?). Which isn't in itself a criticism - there are some very fine films where nothing appears to actually be happening for great stretches of time (Andrei Tarkovsky films spring to mind, as indeed does 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)) but because they were made by directors of talent, taste and intellect, they hold our attentions even when the "action" is reduced to a snail's pace. Rebane isn't capable of any of that and instead we're left with some of the least interesting people ever captured on film sitting in a cabin or stamping about in the snow. They occasionally listen to "eerie" (or so Rebane would wish) voices on the radio, watch some very strange television broadcasts and talk about UFOs. And they do this for over an hour… According to the cast's token scientist (we know he's the scientist because he has long-ish hair, glasses and a beard) it all has something to do with Martians who have been hiding in the centre of the Earth for millennia and have now decided that they want to take over the entire planet. Or something.

Eventually we get to the finale and here Rebane makes an attempt to emulate the metaphysical climax of 2001 in one of the most ham-fisted allegorical twists you'll ever see. The last two survivors, one male, one female (they have names but you're not interested enough in them to care) mysteriously transform via the miracle of clumsy jump-cutting into children and this new Adam and Eve set off into the sunset to, presumably, re-populate the world devastated by the aliens.

While all this is going on, the soundtrack assails us with a dire selection of cues that range from someone's first experiments with an analogue synthesiser to what sounds uncannily like a synthesised version of Ennio Morricone's theme for Il buono, il brutoo e il cattivo/The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) with a few notes changed around.

It would be churlish to talk about the quality of the acting in a film as cash- and talent-strapped as Invasion From Inner Earth, so let's just say that most of this sorry lot never ventured far from Bill Rebane or bit parts on TV in what was left of the careers - if indeed they had one; most of them simply seem to have vanished without a trace.

Invasion From Inner Earth is available on a number of PD DVDs at the time of writing (in varying degrees of completeness and watchability) and should be avoided by all but the most hardy of explorers in the outer reaches of cinematic trash. Sure, it's odd and chances are you won't see or hear anything else that's quite like it. But that really isn't enough to warrant you actually going to the trouble of seeing it. Oh yes, there's a very funny scene of someone dancing to wild jazz on the radio about 50 or so minutes in but I'm betting you won't make it far without wanting to pluck your own eyes out.
KEVIN LYONS

El refugio del miedo (1974)

2007-05-07T20:14:00.000+01:00

A rare attempt at a post-apocalypse story from Spain - and on the evidence of this one, it's not hard to see why they didn't make many more. Talkative, pretentious and achingly slow, it's a film so dull that when it was released on UK video (under the inexplicable title Survivors of the Last Race - what last race?) it had to be dressed up in a sleeve that made it look like an Italian Mad Max (1979) clone, complete with muscle-bound, bald-headed warriors and big guns.

Which couldn't actually be any further from the truth if it tried - this is no action packed run-around, but a sombre, would-be serious study of what happens when a disparate group of people are cooped up a fall-out shelter to wait out the after-effects of a nuclear war. Married couples Carol (Patty Shepard) and Arthur (Pedro Maria Sanchez) and Robert (Craig Hill ) and Margie (Teresa Gimpera) are joined by Robert and Margie's son Chris (Fernando Hilbeck) in a stylishly appointed bunker where they talk, argue, talk, do nothing, talk, play pool and talk. And boy do they talk. Endlessly spouting dull, pompous claptrap as the meagre plot unfolds around them. Which would be fine if what they had to say was interesting, but it isn't, nor is it particularly well written.

It all ends badly of course as director José Ullóa and his co-writer Miguel Sanz hammer home their potentially interesting but tediously rendered point about how social barriers collapse under pressure and how inter-personal relations can fracture when individuals are forced to live together in a pressure-cooker environment. There's sex, suicide, hare-brained trips to the irradiated surface, jealousy and ridiculous dialogue aplenty before the fade out and none of it is anywhere near as interesting as it should be. Except, perhaps, for the bizarre moment when Carol, having been admonished for swaning around the bunker in her underwear, turns up for dinner dressed in a bright yellow anti-radiation suit, which is certainly an arresting moment if one that's utterly nonsensical and totally laughable.

José Ullóa - best known for nothing else at all - directs as ploddingly as he writes, content all too often to just leave his camera sitting there waiting for his bored looking cast to wander in and monotone their lines. Director of photography Antonio Millan seems equally uninvolved and the film - even allowing for the fact that the UK videotape was clearly very cheaply produced - looks awful. Little is made of the claustrophobic confines of the shelter and the hopelessness of the situation that the characters find themselves in is sublimated in favour of soap opera clichés. The cast is the most interesting part of the film, a fine collection of Spanish exploitation regulars who have all done far more interesting work than this.

At its core, there's a good idea at work in El refugio del miedo but Ullóa's ham-fisted direction and the inevitable loss of a certain something when the dialogue was translated renders the whole enterprise all but unwatchable. Even hardcore fans of the post-apocalypse movie - and I'd certainly count myself among their ranks - will be extremely hard-pressed to find anything of worth in this dreary effort.
KEVIN LYONS

The Omegans (1968)

2007-05-01T20:10:00.000+01:00

While Billy Wilder was carving himself a place in cinema history with a string of much loved and critically lauded comedies (Some Like It Hot (1969), The Apartment (1960), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)) and memorable dramas (Sunset Blvd. (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951), Stalag 17 (1953)), his older brother W. Lee was faring less well in the lower echelons of the Hollywod hierarchy. Famously dismissed by Billie as "a dull son of a bitch" - no, they didn't get on at all - W. (short for William) had begun his working career as the owner of Wm. Wilder Co., Inc. Original Handbags, creator of purses in New York, before heading west in 1945 to try his hand at film-making. His career never reached the stratospheric heights attained by Billie, instead settling into a comfortable, profitable but uultimately forgettable groove creating such masterpieces as Phantom From Space (1953), Killers From Space (1954), The Snow Creature (1954), Manfish (1956) and this, his final feature.

The Omegans is a slightly misleading title, perhaps suggesting an epic tale of the Biblical last days armies of the Antichrist as foretold by Saint Germain of Paris but in truth a rather dull trek up the jungle and some mucking about with a radioactive river. Today, the film is of interest solely as an early vehicle for Ingrid Pitt - who's mostly incomprehensible throughout - two years before she made her Hammer debut in The Vampire Lovers (1970). In The Omegans, she plays an unfaithful wife who cheats on her artist husband Valdemar (and let's be fair here, actor Lucien Pan was no looker so you can't really blame her) and gets her comeuppance when the cuckolded spouse lures her and her lover (Keith Larssen) to a radioactive river which causes them to age rapidly.

Curiously, and the only other reason why The Omegans provides even the most meagre crumb of interest, the film is a sort-of reverse dry run for Pitt's subsequent appearance in Hammer's Countess Dracula (1971) - in the Hammer film, Pitt plays a woman who bathes in virgin's blood in order to stay young; here she plays a woman who bathes in radioactive water and ages. It's a curious link and a tenuous one, but The Omegans is so tedious that one tends to clutch at any straw it offers.

Shot in the Philippines, Wilder makes little effective use of the jungle setting, content to simply allow his small cast to wander about talking endlessly until they reach the river and the real meat of the story begins. But by then it's too little too late and by the time we see Pitt in her not-very-convincing ageing make up, the will to live has long since been lost.

The Omegans proved to be Wilder's last film and there's a sort of encouragement to be had in the thought that, right to the very end, he still hadn't improved any as a director. It's a leaden and tedious as any of his other films and even the prospect of seeing Ingrid Pitt in her pre-Hammer days does little to make this rubbish palatable. Stick with her Hammer films instead: they may not all have been terribly good - yes Countess Dracula, we are looking at you - but at least they were well made and technically proficient, qualities that Wilder could seemingly never have recognised.
KEVIN LYONS

Chosen Survivors (1974)

2007-04-16T20:03:00.000+01:00

When we first get into the films we all love so much here at EOFFTV, we invariably gain our first knowledge of the genres' rich histories through the plethora of magazines and books that have appeared over the decades devoted to exposing the past and digging up titles that we would otherwise never had heard of. When I was first developing my obsession with science fiction cinema in particular, one title kept cropping up in these books, a title that resolutely failed to surface again during the video boom of the 1980s and which shows little sign of re-emerging again in the digital age.

Chosen Survivors always sounded fascinating - a group of survivors of a nuclear war are spirited away to a top secret underground installation where they are expected to wait for the radiation levels to subside and get on with the task of repopulating the Earth. But things go horribly wrong when they find that they've been sealed in with a swarm of very hungry vampire bats.

It was a title which seemed to turn up over and over again in these books and magazines, which always made it sound exciting and scary in equal measure. Having only recently (as of Spring 2007) managed to find a copy, expectations were understandably high - but how does this apparently 'lost' films (currently available only as a bootleg on the 'collector's circuit') stand up to scrutiny. [1]

Sadly, not as well as one might have hoped. The premise is indeed fantastic and the opening half hour or so is very impressive - the chosen survivors of the title are rounded up by the military, drugged and deposited in their sterile, hi-tech (by 1974 standards) new world where a pre-recorded video message advises them of what's going on (a massive "thermo-nuclear war" has broken out and even as they recover from the drugging, the world they knew is being obliterated above them). We never get to see any of the survivors in their lives before the attack and - with the exception of brief bookend sequences - the film takes place entirely within the confines of the steel walled subterranean 'prison', giving the film a nice claustrophobic edge.

But things soon start to turn sour when the cast - mostly made up of TV regulars - get into their stride. Without exception, the performances in Chosen Survivors are poor, some much worse than others, and even usually dependable types like Bradford Dillman and Jackie Cooper resort to overacting, shouting and yelling "Goddammit" at each other at every opportunity. They all seem to be taking it terribly seriously and their earnest over-emoting gets a little draining after a while and their characters are so thinly drawn by scriptwriters H.B. Cross and Joe Reb Moffly that once the bat attacks begin, we don't care all that much about their fates.

The fact that most of the cast consists of small screen regulars and that the direction was put in the hands of Sutton Roley, the vast bulk of whose work was also for television, gives the impression that Chosen Survivors was also intended for the small screen, though in fact it was always meant to be a theatrical project. Roley's direction ranges from the impressive (in the opening scenes) to the run-of-the-mill (the rest of the film) and whatever visual impact the film has is due more to the noteworthy set designs of José Rodríguez Granada.

Chosen Survivors has something of a reputation for being gory, a reputation it really doesn't deserve. The bat attacks are well staged - using real bats, no crappy CGI nonsense here - but the after-effects are less than convincingly done. Sutton never really manages to convey just how relentless the bats are nor does he manage to adequately illustrate the mayhem they are supposed to be causing. As a consequence, we never get a real sense of the danger that the characters are in.

A mid-story twist (the whole thing is a sham, a government-sponsored experiment to see how people would cope being cooped up underground if a real war ever did break out) revives flagging interest a little, but it's to little avail. The attempts by the remaining survivors to fight their way out of the complex, their only escape route cut off when the power supply is damaged, manage to wring a little suspense from a well-worn scenario, but the escape-from-an-underground-facility thing was done so much better in Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain (1971).

Rarely seen since it's initial release, Chosen Survivors is sadly no lost classic. It has some good moments, mainly in its opening stages, and the production design is first rate, but the performances let it down and it runs out of steam depressingly quickly. In the surprisingly small world of killer bat movies, Chosen Survivors is at least better than Nightwing (1979) or Bats (1999) but that's really not saying all that much is it?
KEVIN LYONS

[1] Since this review was first written, Chosen Survivors has been released commercially on DVD.

Diversions (1976)

2007-04-02T19:55:00.000+01:00

When thoughts turn to British sex films of the 1970s, and admittedly that's not something that happens all that often, the image conjured up is usually that a rather embarrassed affair with defiantly un-erotic sex and often starring the likes of Mary Millington or Robin Askwith. All too often played for laughs, the British sex films of the 70s were generally a staid and almost apologetic lot that seemed almost mortified that they were engaging in such terribly un-British acts.

One of the leading lights of the genre was Derek Ford, a prolific writer and frequent director of all flavours of exploitation, from softcore titillation (The Wife Swappers (1970), The Sexplorer (1975), What's Up Nurse! (1977)) to low-rent but frequently interesting horror (A Study In Terror (1965), Corruption (1968), Venom (1971), Scream… and Die! (1973)). In 1976, British devotees of cinematic tat were enjoying Ford's Sex Express, an anthology film featuring home-grown sex star Heather Deeley in a series of sexual couplings linked by a framing story in which she daydreams while on a train journey.

What few viewers realised at that time was that the 50 minute film Sex Express was actually extracted from a far more confrontational 87 minute film called Diversions which, unusually for a British sex film of the time, featured several hardcore shots and two sequences that didn't so push at the boundaries of what was deemed acceptable in British cinema at the time but dismantle those barriers and ride roughshod over them.

The longer version - intended only for overseas consumption - features five stories as opposed to the four seen in Sex Express. Both films begin the same way - Imogen (Deeley) boards a train, handcuffed to another woman, apparently being escorted to prison for crimes of violence. En route, she wiles away the time by fantasising about her fellow passengers, beginning with a curious encounter with a young man who seems intent on eroticising the humble apple. After some tedious poetry readings, we get a lengthy but poorly lit coupling in a barn.

Diversions veers straight into horror territory with the next sequence. Imogen constructs a fantasy around a black-clad passenger reading a copy of Vampirella comic in which she has sex with perennial British superstud Timothy Blackstone (once a bit part in the Doctor Who story Genesis of the Daleks (1975) but soon dropping his pants on cue in a variety of British sex romps, notably a series of hardcore loops for John Lindsay) and stabs him to death at the moment of climax while suffering flashbacks to a brutal war-time gang rape. In an increasingly delirious turn of events, Imogen writhes around on the coach, smearing herself with her dead partner's blood, caressing her naked crotch with the blade, castrates the dead man and proceeds to fellate his severed member.

Even all these years later it's a shocking moment, not just for what it shows but also for its unexpectedness - Diversions was released the same year that Askwith was gurning his way through the wholly innocuous Confessions of a Driving Instructor, Barry Evans was having similarly automotive romps in Adventures of a Taxi Driver and Askwith was on hand again for the bizarre Queen Kong. Had this scene survived intact, British audiences would have been completely unprepared for this brutal and out-of-left-field plot development.

The vignette continues with Imogen setting out to seduce and presumably kill another victim that picks up while driving her sports car around central London - but the tables are turned when the new pick-up turns out to be a vampire!

The third tale is a bog-standard sex film scenario in which Deeley plays a respectable suburban woman whose phone number gets muddled up with that of a call-girl and whose displeasure at getting pervy phone-calls is tempered somewhat by the arrival at her door of a hunky American looking for some action. Industry standard coupling ensues and frankly it's rather dull. It goes on forever and is rather tediously shot.

British viewers of Sex Express were denied the fourth segment in its entirety. For reasons that the script never really elaborates upon, Imogen visualises the ticket inspector as a gun-totin' Nazi officer and indulges in a lurid fantasy about being humiliated and abused by the man and two of his cronies. Not only is the whole Nazi-sex-fantasy thing far too outré for British tastes (look what happened to Sergio Garrone's Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur/SS Experiment Camp (1976) and similar titles a few years later during the 'video nasties' panic) but also contains some of the most graphic sex scenes.

The last episode is also fantasy. Imogen buys an antique camera which seems to be haunted by a Tod Slaughter-look-alike Victorian photographer. Deeley is joined in these scenes by Gilly Sykes (another regular in anonymous and frequently untitled loops) who attempts to fellate the lascivious shutterbug even though the actor playing him seems to be having a problem getting his equipment to work properly.

A final 'twist' reveals that Imogen isn't the prisoner, as we'd been led to believe, but instead is the guard and the other woman (played by Jacqui Rigby, who also appears in the Nazi sequence) is the violent offender.

Had it been made in the USA or Europe, Diversions would have been just another mid-70s porn film - not as hardcore as was the norm in those days and not particularly well made and most likely it would have been forgotten by now. The fact that it has any kind of reputation at all is largely due to the fact that it was the product of a society that was still sexually very repressed, despite the "Swinging London" reputation that the capital city enjoyed in the late 60s and early 70s. British films from 1976 just aren't supposed to be as filthy as this - Robin Askwith's arse bobbing up and down and Mary Millington romping around in a suspender belt was about as far as we were supposed to go. The existence of something like Diversions is a genuine shock.

Diversions is a seriously odd film - the lengthy dialogue-free passages and disconcerting switches from knockabout comedy to unsettling scenes of humiliation, from bloodsoaked violence to hardcore sex, give it a peculiar, almost dreamlike feel and the sex scenes are disappointingly inconsistent. Some are well shot, others give the impression that Ford had lost interest and just left his camera running in the hope of catching some footage he might be able to salvage later.

British 70s smut barons had been using hardcore inserts for his films for a few years before Diversions but they were largely reduced to fleeting close ups shot anonymously as the main cast certainly wouldn't have indulged in such practices. In Diversions, Ford clearly shows his cast engaging in the real thing and here he's helped enourmously by the lovely Heather Deeley who at least gives the impression that she's enthusiastic about what's going on. Deeley appeared in a couple of other British sex films that had hardcore footage added later (Girls Come First (1975) and It's Getting Harder All the Time (1975)) though it's still not clear if she's actually in any of the hardcore footage. Given her enthusiasm here, it would seem likely.

Deeley was soon being tipped as the next big thing in British porn. Her natural good looks, apparent lack of any inhibitions and willingness to engage in all manner of hardcore shenanigans setting her up as possibly the natural successor to Mary Millington. Tragically, it all went horribly wrong - she fell in with an off-screen lover who helped lead her into cocaine addiction and she became too unreliable for producers to trust. She dropped out of the film game after Hardcore (1977) and was last seen working at a peep club in London's Soho. After that, she simply vanished and hasn't been seen or heard since.

Her career in British porn was short-lived - she only appeared in seven other films, and one of those is disputed - The Session (1974) may not have been completed, joining another of films, Pink Orgasm on the shelf, never to see the light of day.

Diversions is by no means a great film - it's not even a great porn film - nor should it really be anywhere near the top of your "must-see" list (if it is, you're bound to be disappointed). But it is interesting as a sort of oddball cultural curio and should prove (and you just knew this gag was coming…) to be an entertaining diversion for lovers of 70s British obscurities.

The Nazi sequence appears to have also been available separately as a loop, under the title Nazi Sexperiments, though when it was released and to which territories remains unclear.
KEVIN LYONS

Wavelength (1967)

2007-03-20T19:51:00.000Z

For a film in which almost nothing happens for 45 minutes save for a very slow zoom across a rather dull and ordinary room and a few moments of human drama (everything from the delivery of a cupboard to what seems to be a murder), Michael Snow's seminal experimental piece Wavelength (1967) is an extraordinary film. Starting with a wide shot of the unexceptional room and ending on a visual pun that's best left for you to discover for yourself, it's a frequently fascinating, sometimes tedious, and always utterly unique piece of film.

Snow is a Canadian film maker whose body of work has come to be hailed as the amongst the most important in the history of experimental and avant garde cinema. He's also an accomplished jazz musician and has worked as a sculptor, photographer, writer and even holographer over the years. But even with a hugely impressive body of work to his name, it's Wavelength that remains his most discussed and widely seen work.

The first half of the film consists of the zoom - actually a series of small jerks forwards and certainly not one continuous take as is often erroneously reported - accompanied only by a "found" soundtrack of traffic noise coming through the windows towards which the camera initially seems to be moving. Over time, delivery men appear introducing some muted and almost indecipherable dialogue and later two women seem to use the room to take a coffee break and listen to a distorted version of The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever on a radio. In the second half, the ambient soundtrack is replaced by a steadily rising sine wave tone that starts at a comfortable enough low register rumble and eventually becomes an ear-splitting screech as the long, slow zoom eventually comes to an end.

Along the way, the image distorts, switching to negative, almost disappearing altogether as various filters are applied and towards the end becoming double exposed in a psychedelic kaleidoscope that helps to distract from the fact that for the better part of the running time, nothing much is actually happening.

Wavelength is unique among films of any genre (and it qualifies for a place in EOFFTV by virtue of its trippy visuals and the hallucinogenic sensory overload of the climax) in that it can invoke many different emotions in its audience in such a short space of time - as the camera slowly zooms in towards its final image, you'll experience everything from boredom to awe, frustration to a peculiar feeling of suspense generated by the unsettling rising tones of the sine wave, from outrage to utter confusion. But therein lies the film's strengths and the reason why it still exerts an odd fascination after all these years - each individual viewer will get something completely different from the film, but it would be impossible to not to have felt something by the time it's all over.

Wavelength completely revolutionised - and ultimately energised - the avant garde film scene in the late 1960s and has remained influential even in the mainstream ever since it was first shown - the climactic shots of films like Michelangel Antonioni's Professione: reporter/The Passenger (1975), the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink (1991) and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) all suggest that their respective directors had seen and been influenced by Snow's film.

Snow continued to work extensively in avant garde cinema and in 1971 made another experimental classic in the shape of La région centrale. In 2003, at the age of 74, Snow revisited Wavelength when he released WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time), a 15 minute retooling of the original.

Wavelength will split any audience that sits through it between those who are bored and offended by it and those who embrace its strangeness. Either way, you won't leave a screening unmoved in one way or another - and there are still precious few films that can claim the ability to do that.
KEVIN LYONS

War Time (1987)

2007-03-05T19:47:00.000Z

Alongside BBV, the other big player in small Who spin-offs in the period between TV incarnations was Reeltime Pictures. Predating BBV by several years - it was set up in 1984 - Reeltime was the brainchild of Keith Barnfather and made its name with a line of interviews with many of the key players from the original series - from both in front of and behind the camera - under the series title Myth Makers.

In 1987, the company released the first commercially available Doctor Who spin-off in the shape of War Time and the only one that the BBC authorised while the original show was still on the air. Produced and directed by Barnfather from a script by Andy Lane and Helen Stirling, War Time returned to the screens one of the supporting characters from the Jon Pertwee era - UNIT soldier Sergeant (now Warrant Officer) John Benton, played as he was in the 70s by John Levene.

The plot follows Benton as he returns to his childhood home and finds himself literally haunted by the ghosts of his past. Meanwhile, terrorists have attacked a military transport of radioactive material and the haunted Benton is the only one left to stop them.

Running less than 40 minutes, War Time moves along at a fair clip, never becoming dull while never really being totally satisfying either. Levene is good as the tormented Benton and Michael "Davros" Wisher is on hand again but inevitably the production values tend to let it down. And Barnfather's direction is a little too busy for its own good, perhaps betraying some insecurity which is perhaps understandable.

All that said, although it's a less ambitious production than The AirZone Solution?, War Time is still a remarkably assured piece is due some credit for being the first independent production to legitimately make use of the BBC's characters. At its best it's surprising effective thanks to a well crafted script and generally strong performances.

Reeltime went on to craft an increasingly interesting series of Who related dramas, including Mindgame (1998) (featuring Sontarans and Draconians), the self explanatory Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans (1995), Downtime (1995) (which featured the yeti and positioned itself as a sequel to two Patrick Troughton stories, The Web of Fear and The Abominable Snowman) and Daemos Rising (2004) which features characters from the Pertwee story The Daemons.

In 1997, Barnfather revisited War Time, adding a new voice over by Nicholas Courtney, in character as Benton's superior, the much-loved Brigadier Lethridge-Stewart.
KEVIN LYONS

The AirZone Solution? (1993)

2007-03-05T19:42:00.000Z

During those dark years when Doctor Who was off our screens, many fans sought whatever comfort they could find from whatever source they could find. Chief among these was Bill and Ben Video (cunningly abbreviated to BBV and sometimes erroneously known as Bill Baggs Video), a company set up in 1991 by Bill Baggs and his wife Helen "Ben" Baggs. A lifelong Doctor Who fan and organiser of the Hampshire division of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, Baggs started out making audio adventures inspired by the series in the early 80s before joining the BBC and eventually creating BBV to produce and distribute fan films again inspired by Doctor Who.

One of the main draws of the BBV videos is that Baggs was able to hire former companions, guest stars and even Doctors themselves to appear in his increasingly ambitious series of spin-offs. In time, he was actually able to use characters from the show (Liz Shaw in the P.R.O.B.E. series) and much loved monsters (Autons) in the videos.

1993's The AirZone Solution? was made during BBV's production of their first series of tapes, all involving the adventures of The Stranger (Colin Baker) and his sidekick Miss Brown (Nicola Bryant). It went one further than the Stranger series (Summoned by Shadows (1991), More Than a Messiah (1992), In Memory Alone (1993), The Terror Game (1994), Breach of the Peace (1994) and Eye of the Beholder (1995)) by casting Bryant again and not one, but four former Doctors: Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. BBV also added a former villain to the pot in the shape of Michael Wisher, the original Davros.

Written by Nicholas Briggs (later the voices of the Daleks and Cybermen in the resurrected series), it's an ecological thriller set in a near future where the environment is about to collapse completely. A desperate British government calls in the mysterious AirZone Corporation to help rectify the situation, but all is not as it seems. When journalist Al Dunbatr (Davison) is killed while investigating what AirZone is up to, TV weatherman Arnold Davies (Baker) teams up with his girlfriend (Bryant) and environmental activist Anthony Stanwick (McCoy) to expose AirZone's schemes - unable to clear up the pollution, they're planning to alter Mankind's genetic make-up to enable them to survive.

It's an ambitious, far-reaching story for a company as cash-strapped as BBV but by some small miracle, Baggs manages to pull it off. The shot-on-video look gives it an unavoidably cheap look but the quality of the performances and the writing go some way to making up for this - though the sound quality is pretty poor.

The cast are all great value, though sadly Pertwee is given little to do but lurk around the fringes of the narrative wearing a rather fetching hat (he was added to the production late in the day after he heard about it via McCoy and asked to be included). Bryant and Baker are something of a revelation, here playing a couple with more warmth and chemistry than they ever managed as The Doctor and Peri in Doctor Who, and they both give far more convincing performances too. McCoy is great as the eccentric and moody Stanwick, but it's Davison who's the real revelation here as a foul-mouthed journo who won't let even death keep him from a good story in a role as far from his vulnerable Doctor as one can imagine.

It's customary at this point in any review of an older production concerning itself with ecological matters to trot out the usual guff about how it was ahead of its time, visionary, forward thinking and so on. But in truth, ecological concerns have been a staple of science fiction for decades and The AirZone Solution? was merely responding to very real fears about the state of the environment that were rife in the early 90s and have escalated ever since. But to his credit, Briggs treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves and the cast respond by turning in strong performances that resist any temptations to give in to parody or self-awareness - the expected overkill of Who in-jokes fails to materialise, for example.

Despite the cheap look, The AirZone Solution? remains the best of the BBV productions, a very well-written and acted thriller that manages to cram an awful lot into its meagre running time. It was no replacement for Doctor Who - it was made when the BBC failed dismally to commemorate the show's 30th anniversary - but it provides an hour or so of solid entertainment with a host of familiar Who faces giving unfamiliar performances. The film has been released on DVD (with a host of extras) and is available from BBV themselves.
KEVIN LYONS

Diamond Ninja Mission (1986)

2007-02-19T19:24:00.000Z

Way back in November 2005, I promised that Kev's Cupboard would eventually vomit forth more of the insane work of Godfrey Ho. Having put it off as long as possible, the time has come to bite the bullet and plunge once again into the often incomprehensible world of one of Hong Kong's most nefarious low budget directors.

If he's known at all, Ho is infamous for his series of Ninja films cobbled together in the early 1980s. And cobbled together is definitely the right term here - Ho's approach to film making at the time was simply to take an old Hong Kong or Taiwanese film, often a horror movie, that hadn't been seen for a awhile (if at all) and splice in newly shot footage usually featuring American actor Richard Harrison and men in brightly coloured jumpsuits wearing headbands with the word 'ninja' emblazoned upon them.

These cut and shunt jobs numbered in the dozens and have gained a certain amount of notoriety - and even a cult following - among fans in the west. Mostly pieced together by Ho himself (and often under a bewildering array of pseudonyms), the films were released via his own IFD Films, with its distinctive logo image (ripping off the Columbia torch woman) and unlicensed use of a few bars from John Williams' score for Star Wars (1978).

Diamond Ninja Mission is but one of the many ninja films that Ho put together and is barely distinguishable from any of the others - and as such is probably fairly representative of the entire sorry collection. Harrison is on hand again (he later claimed to have only made one film for Ho and that the footage was endlessly recycled, but there's so much footage that he must have made more than just a single film), mooching about in Hong Kong, occasionally donning ninja gear and eye-liner (this footage really does turn up over and over again) to engage in the usual bewildering nonsense, all the while intercut with footage from an as yet unidentified Hong Kong horror film.

One of the strangest things about these films remains the fact that no-one has yet identified any of the old films that Ho used to make these 'new' productions. He covered his tracks extremely well and it's extremely unlikely that any of the source films were ever seen in their original form in any non-Asian market. This one is mildly interesting in that it looks uncannily like the Ju-on/Grudge films but even that mild diversion isn't enough to make this atrocity worth watching.

All of Ho's hallmarks are present and correct - the rubbish costumes, oddball plot (it has something to do with a wizard ninja trying to scare a family out of their home so he can get his hands on some sort of magic object), dreadful fight scenes and a preoccupation with electronic music that he pinches wholesale from artists who would be mortified to find their work in such tawdry crap. This time around it's Tangerine Dream whose albums Le Parc and Thief are plundered.

The films of Godfrey Ho are, by any standards, appalling, yet they exert a strange fascination. It's almost impossible to walk past a film fair table or DVD bargain bin, spot a Godfrey Ho ninja film, and walk away without buying it. They're ghastly in every respect yet also strangely compelling in their own twisted way. Diamond Ninja Force is just like all of them - impossible to understand yet equally impossible to tear yourself away from once you start watching.

Bizarrely, Ho, a man who barely made an original film in his entire career, is now teaching digital film-making courses at the Hong Kong Film Academy. God knows what he's telling his students - but maybe in a few years time, a new Godfrey Ho will emerge armed only with a catalogue of forgotten or unfinished B-movies, some footage of an unsuspecting Westerner and an editing machine. I'm sure the world is waiting with bated breath…
KEVIN LYONS

The Wounded (2003)

2007-02-06T19:22:00.000Z

There have been some very bad films reviewed on EOFFTV over the years, but this surely takes the prize for the worst so far. The Wounded begins as a deadly dull prison drama with aspirations to being social commentary before eventually mutating into a low-grade slasher as the protagonists (a racially mixed bunch of ever-bickering young thugs on an outing from some kind of remand centre) and a few innocent passers-by fall foul of a murderous death cult.

It begins with a scene which appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the film and, even by the time the end credits rolled around, I was still none the wiser as to why it was in the film at all. A fat hoodlum trying to raid a convenience store and paying the ultimate price for his misdeeds is never mentioned again in the body of the film and the vignette looks to have been grafted on simply to get the film up to the required running time.

The first hour of the film itself is the most astonishing ordeal - lots of montages of macho young men doing press ups, arguing with each other, occasionally talking straight to camera as though this were some sort of documentary and engaging in some truly terrible fight scenes.

Or at least that's what I think is going on. The Wounded is technically so inept that the sound simply fades away in the middle of conversations and, although it was shot in 2002, it looks for all the world like it was made in the early 70s on a 16mm camera that had seen better days. Director John Azpilicueta films everything in claustrophobic close up (presumably to disguise the fact that he's using a limited number of sets and locations) and the concept of framing is clearly alien to him. Focus is often an issue, the camera is almost always shaking and the editing makes an already cramped and suffocating series of images even less comprehensible.

Azpilicueta is trying to put some sort of half-assed message across here, something to do with how teamwork can cement bonds between even the most antagonistic individuals, but given that the characters he's created are either completely anonymous (half of them don't even seem to have names) or utterly loathsome, it's hard to give a damn one way of the other. To broaden the plot a little, Azpilicueta later introduces several other characters, including a trio of lost campers and a gang of Mexicans intent on springing one of the prisoners, but as they're just here as fodder for the black-hooded cultists, they barely register before they're killed, mostly off screen.

The final stages of The Wounded are a jumble of barely comprehensible set pieces as the surviving members of the three warring camps (they've all suffered early losses) run around fighting it out in the woods. By now, no-one really cares about any of them (if they'd ever cared at all), which is just as well as you can't really tell who's who anyway.

The teamwork message is pummelled home repeatedly until The Wounded… just stops. After nearly an hour and a half (it feels longer) of tedious sermonising, ham-fisted camerawork and useless direction, the film simply grinds to a halt with the surviving inmates and their warden in the woods with no way home. The only attempt at closure is a voice over explaining what happened to them all - laughably, some of these hard-assed thugs saw the error of their ways and became restaurateurs, computer engineers and even film directors! Did Azpilicueta run out of money or something? Or just, like the rest of us, lose the will to live?

The Wounded simply beggars belief - you couldn't make a film this bad even if you actually set out to do so. It stinks on every level imaginable and is one of the toughest viewing experiences I've ever endured. Nothing about it works the way that it should - there are two sex scenes included which must rate as among the least erotic and most ridiculous ever filmed, the first involving two very ugly people indeed and in the second, the man doesn't even bother to take his trousers off! - yet it never quite becomes so bad it's actually enjoyable. Those who, like me, simply have to see it all will endure it and no doubt regret the waste of 85 valuable minutes of their lives - the rest of you might be well advised to steer as clear as possible from The Wounded.
KEVIN LYONS

Lot In Sodom (1933)

2007-01-29T19:06:00.000Z

This wild and surreal short dates from 1933, the same year as The Invisible Man, King Kong, Mystery of the Wax Museum and The Vampire Bat but looks nothing at all like any of them - or indeed like any other film made that year. A rare example of American filmmakers taking on the European arthouse directors at their own game, it's a surreal, bewitching take on the biblical story of Lot that mixes homoeroticism with avant garde techniques and dazzling camerawork to make one of the strangest but most compelling films of its era. On the face of it, homoerotic imagery and biblical fervour make for strange bedfellows, but somehow this works.

What makes it really watchable though is the extraordinary back of cinematic tricks that directors James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber employ in telling a story which, at the time, was probably better known than it is today. Which was probably just as well as if you don't know your Bible - and I'm afraid I only really know what I've seen in Biblical epics over the years; Sunday School seems a very long time ago now - you'll probably have a hard time working out what's going on. The story is told in the most obtuse manner imaginable and it's probably for the best to just not bother and simply soak up the extraordinary atmosphere.

And what an incredible atmosphere it is - to use a rather hackneyed phrase, this really did "push the envelope", using so many then-cutting edge effects and tricks that even today the film looks rather out of time - were it not for the often battered state of some of the surviving prints, you'd swear this was made a good thirty years later than it actually was.

At the time, the film was well received and even made it to the 1934 5th Annual National Board of Review Best American Films list, making one wonder if American critics of the 1930s were more open-minded that we'd expect them to have been or simply that they missed the (to our modern eyes) very blatant gay subtext. Maybe they were just blinded by the film's excellent use of expressionist technique and disorientating effects to actually notice.

Perverse, erotic and at times oddly disturbing, Lot in Sodom is a fascinating reminder that sex did indeed exist before the 1960s. Five years earlier, Watson and Webber had made an equally strange, poetic and haunting version of The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) which, if you like Lot in Sodom, you'll love too. Sadly, Watson and Webber only made these two films together and have never really enjoyed the reputation that they deserve because of it. But anyone with an interest in the more extreme end of 30s American filmmakers should note the names and do whatever it takes to track down these two forgotten masterpieces.
KEVIN LYONS

Welcome Home, Brother Charles (1975)

2007-01-22T19:04:00.000Z

There were some very odd things done in the name of Blaxploitation cinema in the 1970s but surely nothing quite as outrageously weird as this. Available on DVD in censored form as Soul Vengeance and directed by Jamaa Fanaka, later director of the Penitentiary series, Welcome Home Brother Charles is seriously strange.

Trading on the long discredited urban myth about the size of black men's penises (and bear in mind throughout that this was written and directed by an African American film-maker), it tells the bonkers tale of Charles, a small time drugs dealer whose penis is mutilated by the cop who arrests him but which later takes on magical powers, growing to extraordinary lengths and allowing Charles to use it strangle to death the men who've crossed him. There's also some nonsense about him using his mighty tool to hypnotise suburban white housewives (complete with strange siren noise) into having sex with him…

Extraordinary is really not to the word for this. Made as a student project, it's a virtually incoherent mess with a drearily earnest first hour (one suspects that this was the footage that Fanaka shot while studying at UCLA) that trots out every cliché known to Blaxploitation. But get past that and we're into a whole other realm (not necessarily a better one) and you'll find yourself watching a film that delivers something you've never seen before - and thankfully may never see again. It beggars belief that a black film-maker would come up with a film which so blatantly plays into that most pernicious of racist stereotypes, the well-endowed black man out to seduce and "corrupt" white women, yet here it is. Is it meant to be a parody? One can only hope so, though the film is poorly made that it's really never clear what Fanaka's intentions were.

It's almost churlish to criticise the atrocious acting, clumsy camerawork and tedious plot, but let's do it anyway. In fact the only thing that makes Welcome Back, Brother Charles at all endurable (apart from the one, ten second scene at the end where Charles actually puts his (ahem…) weapon to good use) is a rather fine soundtrack of rare funk tracks. But that might not be enough of a reason to tempt most people to sit through one of the most boring and, ultimately, offensive Blaxploitation films of them all. Still, it's not every day you see a film about a man strangling his rivals to death with his penis is it?
KEVIN LYONS

Quincy's Quest (1979)

2006-12-18T19:01:00.000Z

There's an argument that one should never go back to fond TV memories, that for the most part they should stay just that, memories, and not be exhumed many years after the fact to be subjected to the scrutiny of an older and invariably more cynical sensibility. As at the time of writing (December 2006), there are a good many EOFFTV capsule reviews that need to be modified having caught up with shows and specials that seemed like the greatest thing ever when first seen but which, decades later, haven't weathered the ravages of time at all well.

And certainly Quincy's Quest should have stayed as a warm and cosy teenage memory and not given a second chance - as what seemed rather charming in 1979 is starting to look a bit tiresome a quarter of a century later. Shown only once on British television, at Christmas 1979, this is vehicle for British rock and roll legend Tommy Steele whose currency was still accepted by British television executives in those immediate post-punk years but whose small screen star waned somewhat in the aftermath of Quincy's Quest. In fact it was his final television or film acting role to date after a career that had seen him transformed from manufactured pop star (hard though it is to believe now, he was seen by legendary impresario Larry Parnes as a likely rival to Elvis Presley) to likeable film star in the likes of Tommy the Toreador (1959), Half a Sixpence (1967) and Finian's Rainbow (1968). Since Quincy's Quest, Steele has pursued his writing career and developed a love for sculpture as well as continuing to work on the stage, particularly in the hugely successful Scrooge: The Musical which he toured in 2003 before taking it to the London Palladium over Christmas 2005.

In Quincy's Quest (based on a book written by Steele himself), Steele stars as the eponymous hero, a defective toy doll who embarks on a quest from the reject department in the basement of a department store to find Santa Claus in his grotto at the top of the building, hoping that he'll be able to save the rest of the rejected toys who are due to be thrown into an incinerator at 9:00 the next morning, Christmas Eve. Along the way, he sings lots of songs, joins the army, falls in love and does battle with an evil witch and her army of killer toy robots.

Steele's constant grinning can get very irksome very quickly and the songs outstay their welcome even before the first one has run its course, but there's still much to enjoy in this amiable fantasy. The production values are extraordinary for a British television production of this vintage - the props, sets, costumes and effects are still impressive and the film looks amazing, particularly in the surreal sequence wherein Quincy sings and dances with a menageries of stuffed toys.

But though the film looks fantastic, it's overlong and the songs are at best uninspired and forgettable, and at worst annoying and intrusive. Steele's performance will win him no new fans but his army of loyal followers love his turn here, which is no different to the cheeky, grinning naïf that he's played in just about every screen appearance. Mel Martin is winning as his doll girlfriend Rebecca and there's a part lower down the cast list for a very young Patsy Kensit.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Quincy's Quest now is the odd, and rather simplistic and naïve, strand of political comment that runs through what seems on the surface to just be a musical fantasy about living toys. The rejected toys (represented initially by a powerless trades unionist jack-in-the-box) are shown to be antagonistic and envious of the 'higher class' perfect toys on the higher floors who in turn are dismissive and rude to the less-than-perfect Quincy. Later, our hero makes a stand against the futility of a war game, demanding to know why the middle-class officers are safe on a hill overlooking the battle and not down in the thick of it with the plebs. It's all very unsubtle stuff but remarkable for appearing at all in a lightweight Christmas extravaganza like this.

Since it was broadcast on 20 December 1979, Quincy's Quest has become almost impossible to track down. It has never been repeated and given its age, a belated commercial release on video and DVD is looking slimmer with every passing year. Luckily for those of us determined to wreck our television memories, it can been found on pirate DVD and occasionally as a download if you really want to match it against your own memories. Perhaps you won't be as disappointed, but chances are you may well find that Quincy's Quest doesn't live up to your memories either - it's fun, visually spectacular and, particularly if watched over the Christmas period, can leave you with a mildly fuzzy glow. But it's also dated (inevitably), overlong and eventually it just become tiresome. Perhaps it should have stayed where it belongs, as a nice memory.
KEVIN LYONS

Fatal Games (1984)

2006-12-11T18:55:00.000Z

By the mid-1980s, the wave of slashers initiated by the likes of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) had long since run its course and it was left to Wes Craven to give the genre one last twitch of invention with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) before he simultaneously resurrected and spoofed it in Scream (1996). Michael Elliot wasn't as talented as Craven so when he tried, in the same year as Craven first visited Elm Street, to send the ailing genre up, no-one really cared all that much. Particularly as the result, Fatal Games, was neither scary nor funny enough for anyone to bother noticing it.

Elliot - who seems to have done nothing else before or since Fatal Games - filched the basic plot from another worthless slasher, Herb Freed's Graduation Day (1981), making it the second sports theme slasher in three years. Which is about as interesting as this gets I'm afraid. It's all strictly by-the-numbers as a group of big-haired, sex-crazed young people - all part of a high school sports team - are stalked and skewered by a javelin wielding maniac.

Shot as The Killing Touch, but given a title change when someone realised how crap the original was, Fatal Games plays itself mostly for juvenile laughs. The revelation of the true identity of the killer is hilarious, the soundtrack (from perennial low-budget tunesmith Shuki Levy) is the most painfully offensive collection of dead-end rock tracks and grumbling synth farts ever recorded and the cast could be out-acted by even the least talented porn performer. In short, it's a disaster and it's no surprise whatsoever that Elliot never worked again.

His directing "technique" is certainly very odd - important events are filmed in long-shot, the camera barely moves at all, even during the action scenes and the lighting (courtesy of cinematographer Alfred Taylor, who started his career with Monstrosity in 1964 and ended it with Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988)) is dismal. The only thing that Fatal Games has going for it is the copious amounts of nudity, one of the pre-requisites for this sort of thing and about the only one that Elliot delivers on. Even if it does result in laughable moments like the male members of the cast taking showers in their shorts and a lengthy sequence in which a naked woman runs screaming through the sports academy where the bulk of the action takes place.

The only time he actually catches us by surprise and shows that somewhere in there there's a modicum of talent, is in the first killing which is really rather well done and is at least a bit of surprise. Most of the killings are fairly gory, as was par for the course by this stage of the slasher's development (the Dutch video, retitled Olympic Nightmare was for a long time the only way to see the film completely uncut) but the gore is too hamfisted and amateurish to be truly effective.

Perhaps one other point of interest in Fatal Games is the cast - newcomer Marcelyn Ann Williams is really Spice Williams, later one of Hollywood's hardest working stuntwomen (The Lost Boys (1987), Natural Born Killers (1994), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Mission: Impossible III (2006) are among her many credits); Nicholas Love, brother of Suzanna Love, star of all those Ulli Lommel films, is along for the ride; Linnea Quigley has a small role as an athlete; and Brinke Stevens turns up in an uncredited, blink-and-you'll-miss-her part as one of the (many) girls who get naked and spend an awful long time in the shower.

The worst slasher ever made? Maybe not - Don't Go in the Woods... Alone (1982) takes some beating in that department, but it's certainly swilling about at the very bottom of the slasher barrel. Completists will want to see it of course (and in the UK, it can apparently be picked up on DVD in those £1 shops that are proliferating across the nation's cities - and you'll still be overcharged) but it'll be hard going even for the most die-hard of slasher fans.
KEVIN LYONS

Monster of Camp Sunshine (1964)

2006-12-04T17:30:00.000Z

Kev's Cupboard isn't, as some seem to think, a catalogue of obscure or rare or hard-to-find titles (though some of them are undoubtedly all of those things and more). Instead, it's a celebration of the cinematically odd, the offbeat and the downright peculiar. All of which leads me to say that this week's little gem, Ferenc Leroget's Monster of Camp Sunshine; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nature (1964) - which marks Kev's Cupboard's half century - is still available to buy from Something Weird (pick up the DVD if you want a unique package of awfulness, teamed as it is with Barry Mahon's The Beast That Killed Women (1965)) but is certainly worthy of its place in Kev's Cupboard for just being flat out weird.

This astounding piece of old tat apparently never got a theatrical release - indeed a print was never even struck from the negative - and it's not hard to see why. Mixing torturously prolonged stripping scenes (did anyone ever really get turned on by this sort of thing?), a non-synchronised soundtrack (a lot of dialogue is delivered by actors with their backs to the camera and dialogue delivered outdoors has an echoey ambience suggesting it was recorded in someone's garden shed) and mis-matched stock footage, The Monster of Camp Sunshine is a dizzying experience.

It relates the sorry tale of Hugo, a dim-witted gardener at a New York nudist colony who gets infected by a chemical thrown into the River Hudson by a mad scientist and who eventually mutates into a ravening, axe-wielding lunatic. He runs amok in the camp before being dispatched by military forces who arrive aboard waves of stock footage for the delirious climax.

Director Ferenc Leroget (no-one as yet seems to know who he or any of his colleagues really were - he doesn't seem to have made another film but the name is almost certainly a pseudonym) at least has a sense of humour, playfully switching styles in mid-scene to incorporate elements from silent movies (inter-titles are inexplicably plentiful), psycho-horrors (Hugo's expert gurning and flailing axe work), eco-horror (the rat attack on Martha is hilarious) and even war films (represented by that astonishing montage of footage filched from other films).

But the subtleties of film-making really mattered to Leroget and his producer Gene Kearney (who later scripted Night of the Lepus (1972), several episodes of Night Gallery and three for Kojak (1973 - 1978). All they were interested in were getting as many naked breasts on screen as possible, always careful to have a towel on hand to discreetly cover up anything that would get the film into trouble. Sadly, this need to fill the screen with frankly unattractive women disrobing overrides all other considerations and there's way too much larking about in the woods, slowly stripping off in bedrooms and prancing around on New York City rooftops, all to the accompaniment of that maddening soundtrack, a relentlessly chirpy and up tempo work that starts to grate by the end of the fourth bar…

Hailed by many as something of an important find when Something Weird unearthed it after many years of obscurity, Monster of Camp Sunshine is really just another nudie with little to offer contemporary audiences weaned on softcore direct-to-video flicks and hardcore porn epics. Even at a meager 74 minutes it's in danger of outstaying its welcome, though the opening titles - featuring some surprisingly Terry Gilliam-like cut-out animation some five years before he made it a trademark of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969 - 1974) - is fun and Hugo's hammy performance is a riot. But it never quite becomes boring (it gets very close) - there's always something insane and ridiculous going on, though once you've seen it once the chances are you'll be happy to never see it again.
KEVIN LYONS

Virgin Beasts (1991)

2006-11-28T17:24:00.000Z

A genuine what-the-bloody-hell-was-that viewing experience, Toby Zoates' extraordinarily odd Virgin Beasts (1991) is an Australian film so perverse and off-kilter that it was virtually unseen for decades (it popped up in the 1990s on the British cable TV station Bravo) before Troma gave it a belated release in 2005.

Despite what you may have read elsewhere, Virgin Beasts dates from 1991 and incorporates a prologue consisting of an early Toby Zoates short, The Thief of Sydney (1984) which uses the same surreal mix of live action, animation and rotoscoping to tell the musical story of a young man's dreams of winning a sound surfing competition in a post-apocalyptic Sydney. The short works better than Virgin Beasts - which is barely feature length - despite the crudity of the animation, its psychedelic stylings being far more memorable than the juvenile nonsense that follows.

The primitive animation and use of rotoscoping to capture the oddball dancing of the sound surfers is memorable and effective, even if the plot is completely bewildering, though Zoates knew full well that it was going to confuse the hell out of most of us - at one point a mutant creature quips to the camera "I don't know what's going on either."

Virgin Beasts itself has a plot of sorts but, like The Thief of Sydney, it's constantly struggling to poke its head above the barrage of strangeness that Zoates launches on his audience - it all has something to do with the wealthy Sir Blow who desperately needs a heart transplant and has his surgeons steal a new organ for him from another patient. The unwilling donor then sets off on a strange odyssey with one of his nurses that takes them to Heaven (where an insane Jesus tortures his followers) and Hell and beyond. Elsewhere, Blow's boss, Dr Turd who now rules over what one presumes to be the same post-apocalyptic Australia seen in The Thief of Sydney, is out to rid the beaches of a gang of surfers…

While The Thief of Sydney was able to get away with its nonsensical plot by virtue of its meagre length, when stretched out to a little more than an hour, the irrational and possibly drug-fuelled ramblings of Virgin Beasts simply becomes irritating.

Even the most devote lover of the camp, the outré and the deliberately obscure will find this unholy cross between The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), any Ralph Bakshi film you care to name, late 60s underground comics and Troma-style juvenilia hard to swallow. Amateurish in the extreme, it bumbles along from one badly done musical number to the next with bad actors struggling for screen time alongside crude animation, all under the leadership of a producer/writer/director who doesn't seem to have a clue what he was trying to do. The story meanders about with odd non-sequiturs edited into the jumbled narrative for no discernibly good reason.

Quite frankly it's a mess, and not even an entertaining one. The songs are (mostly) terrible, the symbolism obvious and the production values rock bottom. The result is a film that clearly wanted to be an underground cult classic but just childish and next to impossible to sit through.

Zoates, a professional artist and cartoonist, is one of Australian cinema's best-kept secrets and on the evidence of Virgin Beasts it's possibly best if he stays that way. He's been making films since at least the late 1970s - the earliest directing credit I've traced so far in for something called The Victim in 1979. If his other work is as short as The Thief of Sydney they might be worth tracking down - but let's just hope that he didn't make too many more of these longer farragoes…
KEVIN LYONS

Masters of Venus (1962)

2006-11-20T17:16:00.000Z

For 30 years, the Children's Film Foundation (CFF) was a Saturday morning institution for three generations of budding film fans. Formed in 1951, the CFF was part of a long tradition, dating back to at least the late 1920s, of Saturday matinees for children and had a fore-runner in the shape of the Children's Film Department (later Children's Entertainment Films), a special unit created by J. Arthur Rank in the mid 1940s. Rank wanted to replace the back catalogue of Hollywood westerns and serials that comprised the programme for most of the Saturday matinees (held in church halls and youth clubs as much as cinemas) with home-grown films with a strong moral message.

Meanwhile, in 1946, the County Councils Association (the body representing local government throughout the UK) had become increasingly concerned about the British Board of Film Censor's perceived close links with the film industry and called for a new, independent censorship body to replace it. In response, the Home Office, the Ministry of Education and the Scottish Office set up a committee, headed by Professor K.C. Wheare, to take a closer look at the state of British film censorship.

On its publication in 1950s, the Wheare Report not only recommended the establishment of a new ratings system to replace the three ratings already in use (U, A and the rarely awarded H 'for horrific') with a new system that would see the introduction of the X certificate (which has a very different meaning to the American X certificate) but also took a special interest in the Saturday morning matinees. Wheare was unhappy with the amount of violent Hollywood material being shown at the screenings and called for more films like those being made by Rank.

But Rank had found the burden of creating these more wholesome kids films on his own too much to bear and had closed his Children's Entertainment Films just before the report was published. To meet the demands of the ever-growing Saturday morning matinee audiences and to address the issues raised by Wheare, the British film industry created the Children's Film Foundation, a unique organisation that was funded by money from the British Film Production Fund (also known as the Eady Levy) and it released its first film, The Stolen Plans, directed by James Hill, in 1953. The films released through the CFF were made for set fees by independent producers who were able to take advantage of reduced rates on studio space and lab facilities as well as special agreements with the film-making unions.

As well as making feature-length (or at least B-feature length) one-offs, the CFF's producers also contributed serials, among them Five on Treasure Island (1957), Danny the Dragon (1967) and this week's offering from Kev's Cupboard, the eight part Masters of Venus (1962). As you'd expect from a company that wanted to restore the morals of a nation's youth, Masters of Venus is a simplistic romp full of terribly nice middle-class people (one early criticism of the CFF was that the provincial attitudes and accents of the earlier films failed to provide much for working class kids to identify with) and packed to the rafters with lots of running around, plenty of narrow escapes and a bit of low key fisticuffs. Masters of Venus may be many things, but dull it certainly isn't.

The serial follows the adventures of siblings Pat and Jim Ballantyne who find themselves launched into space aboard their father's rocket when Venusian agents try to sabotage the first manned flight to their home planet. The children, along with a pair of jolly nice grown up astronauts make it to Venus where they find a race descended from the survivors of Atlantis.

Despite well-intentioned attempts to deliver basic science lectures (particularly in the opening episode), the science in Masters of Venus is all over the place and the many science fiction ideas and tropes (robots, alien descendants of Atlantis, super-hypnotism) were already old-hat by the time H.B Stewart's story was adapted by Mary Cathcart-Borer and Michael Barnes. But the action never flags, there's always something pretty exciting going on and for undemanding audiences of the early 60s (whose only real contact with screen science fiction would have been Doctor Who which started a year after Masters of Venus, though the serial remained in circulation well into the rest of the decade) it probably seemed like the most exciting thing ever.

Today, as a rather more cynical adult, Masters of Venus still exerts a peculiar charm - its naiveté is genuinely appealing and the rather mannered performances have their own special fascination, as do the inevitably terrible special effects which suggest that effects technology hadn't advanced one iota since the days of the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s.

One of the most interesting aspects of the CFF films today is the opportunity to spot faces we now know from other things in very early roles (in Calamity the Cow (1967), Phil Collins, of Genesis and multi-million selling solo career fame turns up as one of the kids): here, Robin Stewart, who plays the impeccably posh Jim, will be known to Brit horror fans for his turns in The Haunted House of Horror (1969) and Hammer's Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) (in which he plays Leyland Van Helsing), though Amanda Coxell (erroneously credited under her real name Mandy Harper in some sources) did nothing of any note within the genre.

The adult cast of Masters of Venus include the likes of Robin Hunter (later in Modesty Blaise (1966) and Vampire Circus (1972)), Arnold Diamond (from TV's The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and 1984 (1954) and lots of 60s Brit horrors) and Ferdy Mayne (whose career in genre movies has been impressive to say the least) and an early turn from Zienia Merton, later Sandra Benes in Space: 1999 (1975 - 1977).

Masters of Venus is hardly must-see viewing (2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) it most certainly isn't) but for those of us of a certain age who remember the Saturday morning matinee's with a curious mixture of nostalgia and fear (they could be scary places - all those kids hopped up on sugary sweets and without parental control were a fearsome force to be reckoned with…) will love every action-packed, impeccably well-spoken minute of it. Now if only someone could dig up Danny the Dragon (about a talking dragon from space - they really don't make 'em like they used to)…
KEVIN LYONS

Kyofu densetsu: Kaiki! Furankenshutain/Monster of Frankenstein (1981)

2006-11-13T17:13:00.000Z

Last week we looked at the frankly quite horrible Toei anime adaptation of Marvel Comic's Tomb of Dracula, Yamo no Toei kyuketsuki Dracula (1980). This week, we've got the companion piece, the equally obscure adaptation of Marvel's less well remembered Monster of Frankenstein comic.

There's not really a lot between the two made-for-TV specials - Monster of Frankenstein is just as poorly animated (most of the time the camera is just panning over static panels), badly dubbed and sluggishly paced as Tomb of Dracula, though it does have a rather fetching looking monster to its name. As with a lot of anime, the design work is first rate, but the annoying kids, immobile "animation" and lack of atmosphere kill the production stone dead.

How much of this is due to the editorial interference of Harmony Gold, the company who imported the show into the West is hard to tell - they can't be held responsible for the dreadful animation but the dub track does the film no favours at all. Like Tomb of Dracula, Harmony Gold removed the opening titles leaving the film with no official English language title, though it was widely advertised as either Monster of Frankenstein or Frankenstein Legend of Terror.

Despite the fact that there's a surprising amount of gore being splashed about, Monster of Frankenstein manages to be terribly boring - people sit about talking endlessly while the monster lurks around offscreen for most of the show. When he does turn up again, it looks like the anime version is going to start going down the Universal path when he encounters a blind man and his young daughter in the woods, but instead it goes off on a very unexpected angle - the monster lays waste to just about every half-way likeable character it encounters and at the climax, after losing her mother, boyfriend and the monster she's inexplicably come to befriend, our young heroine watches helpless as her father blows his own brains out!

Which all makes Monster of Frankenstein sound a lot more exciting and a lot more fun than it really is. The climax is a bit of whirlwind of mad action but it takes a lot of patience and dedication to get there and frankly you've all got better things to do than waste your time on this. Die-hard fans of Frankenstein will want to see it of course, but really, you'll be a lot better off sticking with Messrs Clive, Karloff, Cushing and Lee.
KEVIN LYONS

Yami no Toei Kyuketsuki Dracula/Tomb of Dracula (1980)

2006-11-06T17:09:00.000Z

A late addition to the already over-crowded Kev's Cupboard (picked up only a day before this review was written), Tomb of Dracula has an almost mythical status in some quarters - there are those who still refuse to believe that it exists at all and, given the relative scarcity of this one-off television special, that's hardly surprising.

Made in 1980 and shown just once on TV Asahi, Tomb of Dracula was the product of a strange and ill-fated relationship between US comics giant Marvel Comics and the Japanese production company Toei Animation. Toei negotiated the rights to several Marvel characters in the mid-1970s, but all they managed to come up with was a peculiar live-action take on Spider Man (Toei no Supaida-Man) in 1978. But in 1980, they dragged out a treatment for a filmed version of Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's (both names miscredited as Mary Wolfman and Jean Colan) Tomb of Dracula comic and made the cheap looking Yami no Toei Kyuketsuki Dracula.

The special was subsequently picked up by Harmony Gold (the same company who imported the anime series Chojiku yosai Macross (1982), Kiko soseiki Mosupeada (1983) and Chojiku kidan Southern Cross (1984), re-editing them into the hugely successful Robotech (1985) series) and given the appalling dub that's typical of all of their imported work. The result was truly horrible, a real let-down for fans of the comic, but to be fair to Harmony Gold they were hardly working with the best material here. The animation is the very definition of limited, the character designs for the supporting cast are uninspiring, the pacing is all over the place and the voices almost completely inappropriate.

The show has some extraordinary ideas as to what Dracula is all about - in one jaw-dropping scene, a now mortal Dracula (he's been 'punished' this way by Satan himself) seeks to satiate his cravings by eating burgers, still wearing his full vampire garb! It's a genuine laugh-out-loud moment, but is just one of many in a film that really could have been so much better. The comic could sometimes be florid, over-the-top and cheesy but was, in its earliest issues, an indisputably creepy and atmospheric work - actually this was even more true of the black-and-white UK reprints in the weekly Dracula Lives! title; everything always seems creepier in black and white.

Clumsily plotted (it throws in far too many of the sub-plots from the comic for a 90 minute movie to bear), badly animated and just plain unscary, this is a quite terrible adaptation of a much loved comic, though of course if you're a fan of Wolfman and Colan's work, you'll want to track down a copy anyway.

When I first added Tomb of Dracula to EOFFTV several years ago, I got many emails claiming that I was making it all up, that the special simply didn't exist. In both the UK and the States, it was given brief and now hard-to-find video releases but there still existed the feeling that somehow, this couldn't possible be for real. But recently, collectors markets have been turning up bootlegged DVD copies and the awful truth is beginning to dawn - that there really is a quite horrible anime version of Tomb of Dracula out there.

What's even more extraordinary is that a second TV special was made, based on another Marvel horror comic, The Monster of Frankenstein (1983). And we'll be looking at that abomination next week…
KEVIN LYONS

The Perv Parlour (1995)

2006-10-31T17:05:00.000Z

Made smack in the middle of that wasteland decade for the British horror film, The Perv Parlour is an insane but relentlessly puerile effort from Josh Collins and Alex Chandon that seeks to disguise its juvenile attempts to be outrageous behind a mind warping and frankly incoherent narrative. The eponymous Perv Parlour is a time travelling brothel from another dimension that sets down temporarily in an alternative, steampunk Victorian London where it is visited by royal gynecologist Professor Rumphole Pump. As demonic forces gather to invade and subjugate our reality, it's down to Pump and his dim-witted sidekick Watty to save the day - but can they resist the temptations placed in their way?

Do we really care? Certainly by the time this incompetent and ridiculous 16mm fan-made offering is over we're close to giving up the will to live. It definitely has lots of ambition, though the deliberate camp, smirking, juvenile attitude towards sex and all-too-obvious attempts to shock (reminiscent of early John Waters) are simply to affected to be effective - their production company is luridly named Red Hot Bazoomas for God's sake so you can't say we weren't warned… Using Barbie and Ken dolls to stage startling hardcore porn scenes (thus disarming censors) may have some amusement value once, but their repeated appearances throughout the film eventually become tiresome.

The incoherence of the narrative is wearing too - the flashy, psychedelic technique is undoubtedly impressive given the paucity of resources at hand, but certainly can't make up for the fact that the film simply goes nowhere and has nothing to say. It's just a tired, childish, knockabout farce by people who'd OD-ed on pop culture and were determined to regurgitate those influences on an unsuspecting public. Had this been a short, we'd have had a winner here, but stretched to feature length it just becomes unbearable, a plotless, meandering work of self-indulgence.

The Perv Parlour stemmed from the club scene that co-creator Josh Collins was active in during the early 90s. He was instrumental in the establishment and success of the Gorilla Go Go, a London rock club where the clientèle were encouraged to dress up as gorillas, and which eventually mutated into the Frat Shack, a similar venture. It was under the auspices of the Frat Shack that The Perv Parlour was born and the soundtrack was supplied by many of the 60s-style psych-bands that were regulars at the club, among them Vibrasonic, Armitage Shanks and The Diabolics. The score is the only thing about The Perv Parlour that's in any way enjoyable, a fun compilation of authentic 60s fuzz frenzy that would have made a very fine soundtrack album.

Curiously, the contemporary reviews for The Perv Parlour were largely positive ("everything excessive, loud, cheap, ugly and lurid is exploited to the full to create a disconcerting sensory overload, with plenty of mutant sixties rock 'n' roll" - Flesh and Blood; "Collins' demented movies hark back to the first films of John Waters, eschewing art and commerce in favour of fun and shock value" - Celluloid Jukebox) thus encouraging more of the same in the somewhat better - though not by much - Pervirella (1997). Collins and Chandon directed this semi-sequel together before Collins returned to the club scene and Chandon went on to direct Cradle of Fear (2001).
KEVIN LYONS

Ultra Flesh (1980)

2006-10-23T17:01:00.000+01:00

Given that Kev's Cupboard is supposed to be a catalogue of the strange and the unusual in the EOFFTV video collection, it's surprising that it's taken quite so long to one of the porn/fantasy hybrids that litter the collection. There's an unexpectedly large crossover between the world of adult movies and the fantastic - every major fantasy/horror/ science fiction hit is parodied in one way or another and there are even plenty of original films that mix hardcore romping with fantastique themes.

One such is Ultra Flesh, made at the tail end of the 1970s, just before the business of sex on screen moved away from film and embraced the burgeoning home video market. As such, Ultra Flesh would have been one of the last wave of porn films to have debuted in a specialist sex cinema rather than in the privacy of ones own home.

The Ultra Flesh of the title is a nubile alien, played by peroxide bombshell Seka, who is sent to Earth by a council of extra terrestrials (actually men in silly masks) to counter the effects of ruthless South American dictator Sugarman (porn legend Jamie Gillis) who has rendered the world's male population impotent.

No, don't be cruel, porn films really aren't about plots. Yes, Ultra Flesh is silly but it knows it's silly and emerges as a rather good hearted romp in which everyone overacts wildly (even more so than normal) and seems to be having a high old time even in the non-sex scenes. Highbrow it certainly isn't, but it's a fun knockabout with everyone entering into the silly spirit of things and hamming it as best they can.

Porn films made before the advent of video tended to be - or at least seemed to be - a lot more inventive and off-the-wall than they would later become. In the 80s and beyond the sex became everything and the stories either disappeared altogether or just became tired rehashes of everything that had gone before. Which is, one supposes, at least honest - I can't believe that there would be many people who watch porn films for the stories, no matter how much they might protest otherwise. In the 70s we saw some really strange films that mixed the sex with outré plots. And Ultra Flesh certainly has plenty of bizarreness to go round - dwarf sex, Ultra Flesh firing lasers from a part of a woman's body that no man ever wants to see lasers coming from, Jamie Gillis in a ridiculous moustache and the daftest chase ever filmed in which the participants pursue each other in prams and on bicycles.

The cast is made up of a host of late 70s/early 80s porn dependables - Seka had a career numbering over 100 films from 1978 to 1993 (including Dracula Sucks (1979)) while red-headed Lisa DeLeeuw would probably have made a lot more than the 100+ that she appeared in had she not been one of the adult industry's first AIDS casualties in 1993. Among the other women appearing in Ultra Flesh are porn favourites Angel Cash, Serena, Candida Royale (now a director) and Andrea Parducci, better known to devotees as Little Oral Annie, while the male performers number such luminaries as John Leslie, Mike Ranger and an uncredited Ron Jeremy.

So it's funny, it's got a mad plot and a great cast. But is it actually erotic? That, of course, is a matter of terribly subjective opinion, but I for one would find it difficult to believe that anyone would find Ultra Flesh that much of a turn on. The murky photography and rather disinterested style of director Svetlana makes sex scenes seem rather languid and unenthusiastic, as if everyone's just going through the motions and waiting to get paid. To be honest, Ultra Flesh is a lot more enjoyable as a silly, low budget science fiction comedy than it is a sex film.

Hardcore sex and science fiction were mixed to much better effect the following year by Gerard Damiano in The Satisfiers of Alpha Blue (1981) - it's not as funny or as strange as Ultra Flesh but it's a lot more erotic and really that's all you can ask for with this kind of film surely?
KEVIN LYONS

Shan gou 1999 (1999)

2006-10-17T16:58:00.000+01:00

Just to prove that rubbish stalk and slash clones aren't exclusively the province of creatively impoverished European and American film-makers, Bowie Lau's Shan gou 1999/1999 The Deadly Camp attempts to give the tired Friday the 13th formula an Asian spin (it's also, allegedly, a remake of Yu Wan-kong's The Beast (1980) but as I haven't seen that I'm not in a position to confirm or deny the claim).

Anyone who's seen more than a couple of 80s slasher movies will find nothing here that will cause any great surprise - a group of dense teens head for a remote island for a party (which seems to consist of them setting up tents and splashing about in the surf - nothing if not naïve and rather chaste these Chinese teens…), meet some sex-obsessed smugglers led by Anthony Wong (or maybe they're condom salesmen - it's not entirely clear…) and fall prey to a hulking maniac and his mentally retarded son.

Despite the killer father's propensity for using a chainsaw, Shan gou 1999 is disappointingly anaemic and, like many a Chinese horror film, the violence and mayhem are in thin supply and the silly slapstick comedy plentiful. That said, the version under review here, released on DVD by Widesight, shows some evidence of having been cut to obtain its IIb rating from the Hong Kong censors. Some of the edits are clumsy and jolting and there's been talk that some of the sexual humour was cut from the theatrical release - is it possible that the violence was also downgraded?

Commendably, there's no real explanation given as to who the father and son are, nor why they're on this supposedly deserted island. Sadly, rather than make them seem more mysterious and frightening, it just serves in this instance to make them seem like little more than generic stereotypes. Lau tries to go for a few disturbing moments involving the treatment of the disturbed son (Wong's attempts to teach him how to have sex with his wife is both hilarious and rather unsettling) but as we don't care one jot about him or about any of the other characters it's all for naught - most of the characters are so thinly drawn that they're names are simply descriptive of their behaviour, ie: Boar, Pervert, Nuts, Soldier, Professor and so on.

One of the very few pleasures to be derived from Shan gou 1999 - and it's one that wears very thin very quickly - is the fact that the odd subtitles were clearly transliterated by someone whose grasp of the English language is shaky at best. The subtitles, which are non-removable on the Widesight disc, are horribly literal and often fly by so fast that it's impossible to read them. Don't worry about missing any though - the dialogue is so lame that you won't be missing anything important.

Anyone whose love of slasher movies is so all encompassing that you simply have to see them all might gain some small amount of enjoyment of Shan gou 1999, but the rest of us will find our thumb hovering itchily above the fast forward button or struggling to stay conscious.
KEVIN LYONS

Top Line (1988)

2006-10-09T16:53:00.000+01:00

You'd think that a film combining Romancing the Stone (1984) with The Terminator (1984) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) would at least be interesting, if not exciting. But somehow Nello Rosatti takes all these elements, stirs in a few South American dwelling Nazis and Franco Nero as a potless, down at heel treasure hunter and still makes it dull. Rosatti is one of the less lauded Italian directors, chiefly because what little of his oeuvre has been seen is rubbish.

Top Line - also known as Alien Terminator - gets off to a lumbering start as we follow Franco's alcoholic treasure hunter Ted Angelo as he gets involved in a not-at-all-interesting mystery involving sunken treasure that leads, via George Kennedy's ex-Nazi, to a mysterious cave where aliens and their cyborg are waiting for him. Honestly, a plot as bonkers as this and they still manage to screw it up…

Technically the film is wretched - it looks awful, the soundtrack is undistinguished and the effects are laughable. The cyborg itself is just rubbish and the make up effect deployed to achieve the illusion of his face having been partly burnt off is disgracefully bad - so bad that it takes Nero's character several minutes of seeing him it with his face burnt off before he exclaims "My god…he's a robot!"

One of the least favourite things in a film here at EOFFTV Towers is people running around in a jungle - and Top Line unfortunately has plenty of that. People drive around on dusty roads talking rubbish, lurk in the undergrowth doing not much of anything, and run about mindlessly, stumbling through the same sort of identikit foliage that made most of those early 80s cannibal movies so geographically faceless. Top Line does seem to have been filmed in some South American locations (it's set in Colombia though there's no guarantee that it was shot there) and features plenty of "hey gringo" type dubbing, and it's just as tedious as most other jungle treks.

You can usually rely on Franco Nero to enliven even the most tawdry rubbish but he seems as disinterested in Top Line as the rest of us and sleepwalks his way through the film, though strangely he seems to be doing it wearing eye shadow. No-one else in the film mentions this, and quite why he looks as heavy lidded as he does remains a mystery. The rest of the cast isn't much better either - William Berger is onboard but disappears after the opening scenes, while George Kennedy is the least threatening Nazi the screen has ever known - even when he's forcing a barefoot Nero to flee through a cactus field his insane cackling robs the scene of the tensions and menace that Rosatti was no doubt aiming for.

Elsewhere, Deborah Barrymore is really Deborah Moore, daughter of former James Bond Roger Moore, and has inherited her father's acting "talents" but none of the effortless charm that makes us forgive his limitations. And Swedish former Miss World (and former Bond girl) Mary Stavin is as wooden here as she has been in everything else she's ever appeared in. Normally such a fine collection of over- and under-acting would be guaranteed to liven things up a bit but here you're too busy wondering where the plot went to really care about anything else.

You've got to give Top Line 10 out of 10 for cheek… there's enough material here for half a dozen movies, all of it filched from other, better films, though predictably none of the plot strands are really developed. It seriously looks for all the world like it started out as one thing - a Raiders of the Lost Ark/Romancing the Stone clone - then turned into something else when the producers decided to jump on another bandwagon instead. The only real point of interest today is how much it foreshadows The X Files (1993 - 2002). Like Chris Carter's show, it features a global conspiracy to hush up an alien invasion though needless to say it's not a patch on the later show.

The masochistic among us, who will watch anything Italian if it has even a whiff of the genre about it, will struggle through Top Line with gritted teeth and survive to tell the tale - afer all, we've been on a diet of Aristide Massaccesi/Joe D'Amato, Bruno Mattei and Umberto Lenzi for many years and are hardened watchers of irredeemable trash. Anyone else would be best advised to not fall for the marketing hype surrounding Top Line (the "alien terminator" turns up very late in the day and, as has already been established, is rubbish) and leave this one where it belongs - gathering dust on the bottom shelf of a long forgotten video store, or taking up room in Kev's Cupboard.
KEVIN LYONS

Cherez ternii k zvezdam (1981)

2006-10-02T16:47:00.000+01:00

Now this one really is an oddity - originally released in its native Russia in a cut that ran 148 minutes, imported to the States by notorious cut-and-slash producer Sandy Frank who gutted it the same way he'd gutted so many Japanese genre movies (including the Gamera series) and released in a bewildering 90 minute cut under the title Humanoid Woman, featuring a horrendous dub and new music and sound effects, the film was apparently lost in its original form and reconstructed in a 123 minute version by the original director's son in 2001.

There are reviews scattered around the web by Russian commentators who suggest that Richard Viktorov's sprawling epic, written by noted Russian science fiction author Kir Bulychov, is something of a lost gem, at least to those of us in the West who have had to make do with Frank's poorly translated version. Inevitably, the shoddy quality of the Frank version has soured the film's reputation but given that it's all we've got to go on - a Russian-language only DVD is available but the lack of linguistic skills at EOFFTV Towers rules that one out - we'll have to try to pick out the qualities that have some Russian fans so passionate in their defence. No easy task, particularly after Cherez ternii k zvezdam turned up as an object of derision in an episode of Mystery Science Fiction Theater 3000.

At face value, the bowdlerised U.S. version is certainly appalling - the storyline is disjointed, the political allegory diluted to the point of being non-existent (the dying planet Dessa is meant to be the old USSR), the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio is horribly compromised by a full-screen transfer and the performances made crude and amateurish by the awful dub. When the action relocates the alien planet itself, any sense of narrative coherence breaks down altogether and the editing is so choppy as to be positively distracting.

Yet there are hints at what the film's apologists are getting at - the photography is often excellent and the low budget effects shots have a strangely hypnotic quality to them. The climax veers of into the sort of metaphysical musings that Stanley Kubrick essayed so well in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but, needless to say, it's completely bewildering in this version. But enough of the poetic, lyrical qualities of Viktorov's original have survived the transition to the West to hint that, yes indeed, there might be something worth watching here.

That said, there are also moments of strangeness and downright horribleness that can't be blamed on Sandy Frank - the rubbish comedy relief robots (one which wanders about with a teapot on its head while vacuuming up via its in-built hoover), the oddball aliens with the silliest beards you'll ever see (they're just single bits of fluff on the left side of their mouths) and an off-putting lead performance from former model Elena Metelkina as the humanoid woman of the title (not a robot or android as reported elsewhere, but a clone, the only survivor of a ship full of clones discovered abandoned and derelict at the beginning of the film). Metelkina, who vaguely resembles Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox, is rigid and expressionless, which is almost certainly the effect that Viktorov was aiming for but, coupled with the poor dubbing, it simply comes across as irritating.

Curiously, despite the fact that it goes to some length to distance itself from the Soviet-era politics and allegory that allegedly informed Viktorov's original version, the Sandy Frank cut does little to disguise the film's Russian roots. Characters are still referred to by their Russian names, for example. Quite why Frank didn't go the whole hog and anglicise the names is anyone's guess.

One of the most fascinating things about Cherez ternii k zvezdam is the way that misinformation seems to have accrued around it over the years. Already noted is the tendency by many Western commentators to claim that alien heroine Niya is a robot instead of a clone, though Metelkina's performance may have something to do with that. Elsewhere, you'll find the film referred to as Czechoslovakian film whereas it's definitely Soviet. And there are few references in English to the fact that, although it was shown as one complete film, Cherez ternii k zvezdam was in fact presented in two parts, Niya - Iskusstvennyi Chelovek (Niya - a test tube human) and Angely Kosmosa (Guardian angels of space).

The restored version, assembled by Viktorov's son Nikolai, boasts a completely news score and a handful of newly shot special effects sequences, making at least three versions of the same film. Whether Viktorov's original version will ever resurface - or even whether or not it still exists - remains to be seen, but I for one would welcome the chance to see it in a sensitive translation, in its original aspect ratio and without the clumsy edits inflicted upon the Sandy Frank version.
KEVIN LYONS

Have a Nice Weekend (1974)

2006-09-25T16:44:00.000+01:00

Although clearly the most influential of the 70s slasher movies, Halloween (1978) was by no means the first and prior to Carpenter's classic there were numerous psycho-on-the-loose-armed-with-a-knife movies that failed to impress. Made the same year as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), itself an important milestone in the development of the slasher movies, Michael Walters' long-forgotten Have a Nice Weekend is one of the many that fell by the wayside.

Set on a remote island, it details the messy events of one weekend during which Chris, recently returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam and suffering the obligatory flashbacks, invites his family and friends to the familial summer home where they are slaughtered by an unseen assailant.

Or at least that's what it should have been - by the fade out only three members of the fairly sizeable cast have been murdered, all of them killed in the most anaemic manner, which probably goes some way to explaining why Have a Nice Weekend is so relatively unknown. Add to that dull and unappealing characters, dreadful acting and stilted dialogue and it seems unlikely that Have a Nice Weekend will be getting the rediscovery treatment any time soon.

The script, written by Walters, John Byrum and Marsha Sheiness, goes to great and often ludicrous lengths to keep the audience guessing as to who the killer might be, giving just about everyone some sort of psychological kink - patriarch Paul fondles a knife inexplicably given to his wife by his daughter's college friend as a present, cooing over its appearance and distractedly wondering where his hunting knife went to; Chris is a total psycho, given to torching his own clothes and smashing radios when they report from Vietnam; neighbours Donald and Joan Crab are a bickering couple, he in particular acting in the most laughably 'sinister' way you can imagine; and one hilariously contrived moment involving a cut-throat razor.

Technically, the film is a disaster - no-one seemed to notice the hair caught in the camera gate during some shots (the audience can't miss it though), the lighting is flat, the music (especially the mock classical stuff) is terrible and Walter's direction is so ham-fisted that he seems to have given up after this one and never directed again. He makes no good use of his locations (indeed we rarely get the feeling that we're actually on an island after the initial boat journey) and although one might just be able to use the excuse that the drab clothing, sets and lighting are meant to reflect the autumnal setting, it actually just makes the film look lacklustre and dowdy.

The script is so muddled that when the end finally comes into sight and you think that maybe it's all over, we get a "The End" caption, immediately followed by "An Epilogue", a ridiculous further few minutes in which a psychiatrist tries to explain to one of the survivors what has happened and why the killer behaved the way they did. Yeah, like we care…

Have a Nice Weekend was once available in the UK on video from Fright-Nite-Films but doesn't seem to be available any more and may not have been released very widely elsewhere. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to show up any time soon and certainly don't lose any sleep over not seeing it - you're really not missing anything at all.
KEVIN LYONS

Cataclysm (1980)

2006-09-18T15:30:00.000+01:00

One of three films that were butchered to make up the anthology film Night Train to Terror (1985) (the others being Death Wish Club (1983) and footage from the unfinished Scream Your Head Off), Cataclysm is no more interesting in its full, unexpurgated version than it is in it's bowdlerised form.

Also known as Satan's Supper and The Nightmare Never Ends (how very apt…), Cataclysm is a torturous affair with Faith Clift and Richard Moll turning in appalling performances as a troubled married couple - he's an author, his latest offering being the unequivocally confrontational God Is Dead, she's a devout Catholic plagued by horrible nightmares. The plot stumbles along through flashbacks to Nazis atrocities, the murder of a stage hypnotist and a Jewish Nazi-hunter, a painful disco scene (love those traffic lights pressed into services as a light show!) and the various not-at-all interesting shenanigans of pretty-boy Satanist Olivier (Robert Bristol). Somewhere in all of this is Cameron Mitchell - the only real reason for sitting through this garbage - as a bemused cop trying, like the audience, to make sense of it all.

The only real surprise that Cataclysm has to offer is that it's scripted by Philip Yordan, who bagged an Oscar for his script for Broken Lance (1954) and was also responsible for the likes of the Charlton-Heston-vs-killer-ants movie The Naked Jungle (1954), Byron Haskin's Conquest of Space (1955) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) among many others (his credit for The Day of the Triffids (1962) was a front for the black-listed Bernard Gordon). Those Oscar winning days must have seemed a very long way off when he wrote this…

Yordan strives for something a bit more interesting than the usual Satanist movie, with some debates on the existence or otherwise of God and some complex meditations on the nature of faith, but he's scuppered at every turn by the direction (astonishingly there were three men responsible for this - Phillip Marshak (of hardcore porn vampire variant Dracula Sucks (1979)), Tom McGowan and Greg Tallas - and not one of them came up with an interesting shot), the production values and above all the acting. It's all very muddled and disjointed (was the script rewritten or was footage just hacked out to get it down to manageable length?) with things happening for no real reason and with no adequate explanation.

Richard Moll is terrible as the controversial writer (he's done a lot better than this, before and since), veteran actor Marc Lawrence is clearly doing it to pay the rent and Faith Clift (from Pánico en el Transiberiano/ orror Express (1973)) is just excruciating. The striking Robert Bristol looks creepy but is so wooden that he only managed two other films, including the UFO conspiracy thriller Hanger 18 (1980). Cameron Mitchell just wanders about doing his thing and his many fans will find some crumb of comfort in his presence, and will derive much pleasure from his hopeless disco dancing.

Usually in a low budget effort like this, you can count on some splashy gore to alleviate the pain of the terrible script and acting, but Cataclysm is a real oddity in this area. Throughout the film, Marshak, McGowan and Tallas go out of their way not to show any gore at all, clumsily cutting away at the last minute before you get to see anything. But then, when we get to the climax, they go berserk, staging an astonishing bloodbath, complete with genuine surgery stock footage, all incongruously scored to the strains of Mars from Holst's The Planets.

Given just how much is going on in Cataclysm, it's amazing how dull it all is - you've got demonic native Americans, bad disco music, enforced open heart surgery, a monster in the closet, demons galore and the obligatory twist ending, yet it all adds up to a tedious and uninvolving viewing experience.

After years in deserving limbo, Cataclysm has finally dragged itself out onto DVD and seems to have picked up a bit of a following. Fans of low budget Satanist movies will probably find something here to enjoy, as will Cameron Mitchell admirers, but it's hard to recommend it to anyone else when there are so many better films of a similar vintage, budget and inclination more worthy of your time and money. OK for a watch once to say you've seen it experience, but make sure it isn't anywhere too near the top of your must-see list.
KEVIN LYONS

Spawn of the Slithis (1977)

2006-09-11T15:24:00.000+01:00

If you're anything like me you'll have an inexplicable soft spot for low budget trash like Spawn of the Slithis (1977). You know you're damaging your eyesight straining to make out what the hell's going on in the rubbish video transfer (the British release on Media looks like the whole film was shot in a very bad day-for-night process) and risking your sanity by trying to get your head round the twaddle that passes for scientific explanations (when a scientist - you can tell he's a scientist, he wears glasses and has a beard - is asked why the creature is called Slithis he snaps "for the same reason your parents named you Jeff!" And incidentally, "Jeff" is a woman…) but you just don't care.

Get past the impenetrable transfer and you still have the pacing issues to contend with. In the early stages, Slithis slaughters are few and far between but scenes of people sitting around talking about it are plentiful. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the dialogue had been scintillating and the performances captivating. They're neither, sadly, and for the first half hour, Spawn of the Slithis rumbles along propelled by dreadful music, some hopeless comic relief and the leaden investigations of unlikely hero, Wayne Connors (Alan Blanchard, from the little-seen Close Encounters knock-off Foes (1977)), a high school journalism teacher.

Spawn of the Slithis never really deviates from the tried and trusted monster movie formula - something that looks like the content of a blocked toilet that's grown legs emerges from a canal in Venice, California and goes on the rampage (albeit rather slowly), starting with killing some stray dogs before tracking down some really bad actors and gorily disposing of them too. As well as failed journo Connors, the Slithis (radioactive mud, apparently - shades of X the Unknown (1956)) is being stalked by the local police headed by Lt Prentis (an astonishingly bad performance from Hy Pyke, who had already appeared as the bus driver in the extraordinary Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1975) and would later turn up as the bartender Taffey Lewis in Blade Runner (1982)). Slithis goes beserk, everyone stands around looking concerned and finally Slithis is disposed of by resourceful heroes. Nothing you haven't seen a dozen times before then.

Those of us with a taste for the ridiculous, the incompetent and the jaw-droppingly awful will always be drawn to the likes of Spawn of the Slithis. Their very incompetence demands that they be seen at least once and there's nothing more we like than to be able to claim legitimately to have sat through it without fast-forwarding, falling asleep or drifting into a coma. But Slithis really does push you to the very edges of your endurance - at first its turgid pacing is actually quite amusing as writer/director Stephen Traxler seems to believe that his characters are both interesting and plausible and so spends an inordinate amount of time with them. But even that rudimentary and twisted charm wears thin very quickly.

Still, there are a few quirks that help to alleviate the tedium. Traxler has a fondness for weird transition effects - almost every scene ends with a wipe, an iris effect or, in one out-of-nowhere moment, a spinning cut - and it's clear that Traxler was aiming for, though missing, the feel of an old serial with the use of these devices. Then too there's the fun non-acting and the hilarious overacting, though in real terms Spawn of the Slithis has only one thing going for it - its locations. If you can see them through the murk, the various Venice locales give it a somewhat unusual look, replacing the over-used New York or Los Angeles settings with something slightly more offbeat. Such a shame that we can't get to see them properly then…

When it was first released to cinemas (yes, this really did get a theatrical release - amazing isn't it?), Spawn of the Slithis came with a free "Slithis Survival Kit", a give-away promotional item that has assumed almost mythical proportions for some of us. I've never seen one and to be honest know nothing about what might appear in it, but I've always coveted one and doubt that my life will ever be complete until I lay hands on one. Then I'll no doubt spend what's left of my life regretting ever having paid good money for it…

Would I recommend Spawn of the Slithis? In all honestly, no. In fact in most cases, I'd recommend fleeing for the hills if anyone ever suggests putting it on at one of your film nights with your friends. But the person who suggested showing it will understand when I say that for some of us, those who just have to put ourselves through anything and everything even remotely related to the genre, Spawn of the Slithis is absolutely unmissable. Dull, ridiculous, atrociously made and liable to cause prolonged mental and physocal illness if watched too often (ie, more than once a decade), it's still utterly irresistible in its cheesiness. We'll revel in the fake accents (look out for a very unconvincing Jamaican), the stodgy exposition, the tatty monster suit and enjoy checking off the clichés as we spot them. And of course we'll exalt the wonderful Hy Pyke for his manic, eye-popping performance. People like us are a lost cause, but give us a film like Spawn of the Slithis, and we're happy lost causes.
KEVIN LYONS

Wonderwall (1968)

2006-08-21T15:04:00.000+01:00

The late 60s. London was swinging (though the rest of the UK was just sort of carrying on pretty much as it had done) and in the King's Road and other trendy hangouts, the hair was long, the fashions wild and the hallucinogenics plentiful. It was a fruitful time for British popular culture as writers, artists, musicians and film makers, fuelled by whatever intoxicant came to hand and revelling in the new-found sexual, social and artistic freedoms that were being afforded to them, flocked to the capital and made things happen. Many of those things are now best left forgotten (some of the artistic endeavours that atrocities from this hotbed of acid charged creativity are astonishingly awful four decades later) while some have stood the test of time rather well.

And then there are those undertakings like Wonderwall (1968), remembered for all sorts of reasons that are largely nothing to do with the film itself. It was the inspiration (for the title at least) for the 1995 Oasis hit of the same name, though it's likely that many of those who made the single such a hit had even ever heard of the film. Today, a few die-hards cling to its memory thanks to the involvement of then Beatle George Harrison who penned the frankly bizarre soundtrack.

Completely mad in that way that only films made by hot-headed young things in 1968 can ever be, Wonderwall is a genuine curiosity, though whether it's actually any good or not is another matter. It begins gently enough, with an eccentric scientist (Jack McGowran, hot off the John Lennon starring How I Won the War (1967) and Polanski's Dance of the Vampires/The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)) leaving work for the weekend. It starts to go a bit weird when he finds that he can spy on his sexy new neighbour, a young model named Penny (Jane Birkin, who spends a lot of the time semi-clad listening to dreadful Indian music) through a hole in the wall dividing their apartments. Then it just loses its grip altogether as the scientist becomes increasingly obsessed with Penny and her hippy friends who hold stoned parties and indulge in all manner of far-out diversions.

The fact that we only ever refer to Swinging London and never Swinging Bradford or Swinging Bournemouth is indicative of how London-centric the 60s cultural revolution was in the UK. And there's some sort of strange critique of that going on here as writer G. Cain (actually G. Cabrera Infante who, three years later, would write Richard C. Sarafian's excellent Vanishing Point under the pseudonym Guillermo Cain and here working from a story by regular Polanski collaborator Gérard Brach) positions his dreary, old-fashioned scientist hero as the lustful onlooker, constantly desiring the swinging lifestyle that he can see clearly enough but which remains tantalisingly just out of reach. But equally, just one year on from the Summer of Love, there's a sense of a growing disillusionment with the lifestyle it gave birth to - as the film goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Penny is far from happy in her seemingly carefree life and in the end it's the intervention of the far-from-hip scientist who saves her from herself.

But this is to give the film more credit than it really deserves. It's an interesting curio for those interested in the psychedelic milieu of 1968 London (though, to its credit, it doesn't indulge in those oh-so-tired clichéd shots of the city at the time that seem to turn up in so many of its contemporaries) but the rather dodgy plot (it boils down to an old man peeping on a sexy young girl) will alienate more people than it will intrigue. It was clearly never meant to stand the test of time, being unabashedly a product of the time (look out for the Superman character with an L and a D to complement the S on his costume) and was probably looking dated six months after virtually no-one bothered turning up for its theatrical run.

It's hard to talk about the performances as they tend to get swamped amid the tricksy camerawork and psychedelic visuals, but fans of Jane Birkin won't be disappointed, and Wonderwall marked the third appearance in psychedelic cinema of 1968 for Rolling Stones entourage member Anita Pallenberg (the others being Barbarella (1968) and Candy (1968)). The real stars are probably the Dutch designers known collectively as The Fool, who appear in the party scenes but also designed the sets for Penny's fashionable pad.

If Wonderwall is remembered at all these days (it's available on DVD but hardly seems to get a mention even among the most voracious consumers of late 60s novelties) it's because of the involvement of George Harrison. It was held for years that Wonderwall marked the first solo work from one of The Beatles, though in fact Paul McCartney had contributed to the soundtrack of Roy Boulting's The Family Way two years earlier. To be charitable, Harrison's score is probably best appreciated by the most uncritical of Beatles fans - the psychedelic rock stuff is fine, the jokier tunes forgettable, but the Indian ragas are almost unlistenable. Add to this some harsh musique concrete and the film's soundscapes are really hard going.

Director Joe Massot, who would later co-direct the frustrating Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same (1976) (frustrating in that while some of it is clearly manna from heaven for Zeppelin fans, it's so hideously self-indulgent that it simply handed ammunition on a silver platter to those who would, a year or so later, dismiss the band as no longer relevant), re-issued Wonderwall in a restored version in 1998, complete with a song, In the First Place, that had been missing from the original release.

Whether you like Wonderwall or not will depend on your tolerance for indulgent trippy visuals, psychedelic soundscapes and off-their-time cultural references. To be honest, you probably need to be on something (or maybe you just needed to have been there at the time) to really appreciate any point that Wonderwall might be trying to make but one gets the impression that it didn't actually have a thought in its pretty little head, content instead to just be weird and overcome any criticism by dismissing those making it as being too out of touch to appreciate it. This is one ageing hippy, however, who remains wholly unconvinced.
KEVIN LYONS

The Norliss Tapes (1973)

2006-08-14T14:57:00.000+01:00

Back in the early 1970s, producer / director Dan Curtis was in the middle of a run of small screen horrors, carving himself a niche on American TV as a genre specialist. Supernatural soap Dark Shadows (1966 - 1971) had been a huge success and by the end of 1973 Curtis had adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1968)), Bram Stoker (Bram Stoker's Dracula (1973)), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein (1973)) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973)) under his belt, along with a clutch of original titles (the Dark Shadows movies, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971), Shadow of Fear (1973) and The Invasion of Carol Enders (1973)).

But what Curtis really seemed to want to do was make a TV show which pitted a journalist against the supernatural. He wanted it so much, in fact, that he tried it four times in five years. As early as 1969, he scripted the forgotten TV pilot Dead of Night: A Darkness at Blaisedon, which pitted a pair of investigators (played by Kerwin Matthews and Cal Bellini) against the supernatural - establishing a format that would be echoed almost a quarter of a century later in The X Files (1993 - 2002). The pilot failed to go to series and has now vanished into the mists of time.

More successful were The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973) which Curtis produced for ABC, and which introduced the TV world to investigate reporter Carl Kolchak who would eventually get his own short-lived but hugely influential series Kolchak: The Night Stalker in 1974. But, hedging his bets, Curtis prepared a third pilot film for rivals NBC which utilised the same journalist-vs-the-supernatural format - The Norliss Tapes.

Over the years, The Norliss Tapes has lapsed into semi-obscurity, overshadowed by Kolchak's cult following and increased media attention (Chris Carter, creator of The X Files never cited Norliss as an influence though was happy to own up to being inspired by Kolchak). Which is a crying shame as, in many ways, The Norliss Tapes is better than either of the two Kolchak movies. In fact it remains one of the best made-for-TV movies of the 1970s of any genre.

The format is simple - David Norliss has disappeared while preparing a book on the supernatural and his worried publisher discovers a series of cassette tapes detailing, in this first instance, his encounter with a blue-faced zombie/vampire brought back to life by voodoo and now possessed by a demon. The story is told in flashback and ends with the publisher starting on another tape, listening to a story that has sadly remained untold.

It has some of the flaws of 70s TV movies - some of the acting is less than convincing and the meagre budget occasionally peers through the glossy veneer that Curtis gives it - but its strengths are considerable. Curtis, always referred to as producer, was also an excellent director and he gives Norliss a creepy, uneasy atmosphere that still works today. Filmed in a damp, rainy Northern California, the film looks very different to most of its bathed-in-sunlight contemporaries and Curtis makes excellent use of both the inclement weather and the unusual locations.

The script is an unusual mix of the supernatural, hard-boiled detective fiction and the more familiar police procedural, with the cops replaced by a journalist and the killer under investigation being dead and blue-faced. It was the first script by William Nolan who, as William F. Nolan, co-wrote (with George Clayton Johnson) the highly-recommended 1967 novel on which Logan's Run (1976) was based (the book is way better than the film…)

The success of any venture of this kind rests on the strength of its leading actor and in this instance, Curtis made the inspired decision to cast Roy Thinnes as laconic reporter David Norliss. Thinnes was already a genre regular, with memorable appearances in Gerry Anderson's Doppelgänger/Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969) and another under-rated TV movie, Black Noon (1971) and of course he spent most of 1967 and 1968 fleeing from aliens as David Vincent in Larry Cohen's The Invaders. Here, Thinnes is perfect as the world-weary hack suddenly confronted with the seemingly impossible and finding his life changed forever by the experience.

He's ably supported by Angie Dickinson, giving a great turn as the mystified widow haunted by a husband who just won't stay dead, and a whole host of actors familiar from 60s and 70s TV whose faces you recognise instantly but whose names you rarely knew - Claude Akins, Michele Carey, Bryan O'Byrne, Ed Gilbert. There's also space for Hurd Hatfield (Dorian Gray in 1945's The Picture of Dorian Gray) and Vonetta McGee (from Blacula (1972)).

The other key element in any undertaking of this kind of course is the quality of the monster. And although The Norliss Tapes' budget didn't stretch to much more than a bit of blue face make-up and a dodgy teeth appliance, the demon/vampire/zombie is a highly effective presence. His sudden, jolting appearances come as a genuine shock and the ferocity of his attacks is unnerving.

The Norliss Tapes boasts a satisfyingly complicated mystery, an intriguing format, cut-above-the-usual performances and an unusual, dreary but highly effective ambience and the fact that languished for so long in relative obscurity (it hasn't been seen ion UK television for donkey's years but still shows up late at night in US re-runs) is sad. Thankfully, after years in the wilderness, The Norliss Tapes is about to be given a new lease of life as it makes its belated debut on DVD thanks to Anchor Bay in October.

Fans of 70s TV horror will need no recommendation from me to buy this release - anyone who still clings to the view that all 70s made-for-TV movies are flat, unatmospheric junk (and there is a certain amount of evidence to support that hypothesis) might do well to give The Norliss Tapes a try - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
KEVIN LYONS

Fire Maidens From Outer Space (1956)

2006-08-07T14:50:00.000+01:00

When most people think of British science fiction, it's not often with much fondness. Though there are some fantastic examples (Hammer's Quatermass trilogy, Invasion (1966), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) - and let's not forget that 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is British) there are, sadly, far too many like Fire Maidens From Outer Space.

Even by low budget 50s standards, this is pretty appalling. Poor scripting and terrible acting are just two of the lesser crimes against humanity that this piece of old tat could be accused of. The opening 5 minutes seem to consist of nothing much more than stock footage of a plane in flight, stock footage of a plane landing and (presumably custom made) footage of a car tootling around the Home counties.

Things don't get much better when the plot is revealed - British scientists, led by the terribly posh Dr Higgins (Sydney Tafler), have initiated Plan 13, an ambitious scheme to send men to the 13th moon of Jupiter which, they believe, may support life. A dashing young American scientist, Dr Luther Blair (Anthony Dexter) is flown in to lend a hand. After what feels like an eternity spent in the company of bad actors mouthing incomprehensible dialogue, the 'action' finally gets under way. Arriving on the 13th moon aboard stock footage of a V2 missile, the hardy crew of explorers most of them boasting upper lips so stiff they risk battering themselves to death whenever they speak the crew are hailed by the local inhabitants who incapacitate their ship then guide them to a predestined landing point. Although to the casual observer it may seem that they have in fact landed in Epping Forest, a bit of manly running about and rescuing of damsels in distress reveals that they are in fact on the what's left of Atlantis and that, until they arrived, there was only a single male inhabitant and a rather silly looking monster to keep a whole planet full of sultry Fire Maidens company.

And here's where Fire Maidens reveals its true colours - it's just another male sexual fantasy made celluloid as the explorers romp around with the nubile inhabitants of the 13th moon much as the explorers of Queen of Outer Space (1958) and Star Maidens (1976) would do so later and which innumerable casts of pulp genre fiction (and the film Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)) had already done so many times before them. This leads to the expected casual sexism rife in films of this vintage: "I wonder if the beings on Jupiter's satellite will look anything like her?" leers one of the scientists as his lovely assistant sashays past. Later, we get the scantily clad (for their time) space lovelies doing a little dance to the strains of Prokofiev's Prince Igor from the Polovtsian Dances while one of them falls for the dubious charms of the expedition leader. They stop short of the classic "tell me more about this thing you call kissing" but you wouldn't be at all surprised if you did hear it.

Technical credits are shoddy in the extreme - the soundtrack is barely audible at times and the camerawork is so static it leaves many of the actors standing around for ages looking embarrassed while waiting for someone else to finish their business - it's not unlike watching a play from the third row of the theatre. There's barely enough plot to fill out its already meager running time so director Cy Roth is forced to resort to copious filler material. He's also forced into some pretty shameless product placement, proving that the practice is nothing new - alongside some blatant pluggery for now defunct airline TWA in the opening shots, the astronauts' "Longines space watches" get an explicit brand name check and the company's logo appears prominently on every clock face seen in the film, and there's a drinks machine with "drink Coca Cola" in large letters along its flank.

And yet for all this, there's something undeniably loveable about Fire Maidens From Outer Space. It has the same optimistic, held-together-by-spit-and-sticky-tape amateurism as Ed Wood's immortal Plan Nine From Outer Space (1956). There's something vaguely surreal about the way things happen for no reason (where did those rocks come from that are thrown at the crew after they touch down? And why are so many long stretches where no-one speaks or does anything, just look meaningfully at each other waiting for the camera to stop rolling?) and the graceless way that Roth attempts to spin out the running time by repeating footage endlessly.

But the most entertaining aspect of the film is its unique Britishness - it exudes a mend-and-make-do attitude and a defiantly low-tech approach to space travel that now seems rather quaint and charming. One of the ground control scientists wears a bow tie while on duty, they keep in contact with the ship by telephone and the rocket is controlled by good old fashioned pulling of levers. None of that radio, computers and technology malarkey for these boys...

Fire Maidens From Outer Space isn't any better or worse than any number of no-budget American films of a similar flavour that were flooding the drive-ins at the time. It is completely hopeless in every respect (the effects are shoddy, the settings unconvincing, the acting strictly amateur hour and 'scientific' dialogue is some of the least convincing ever written) and it has all the hallmarks of an extended home movie, shot by Roth and a few of his mates over the course of a couple of weekends. But it's so awful that it just about nudges into so-bad-it's-good territory and those with a taste for the wretched, the over-ambitious and the unspeakably silly will probably find something to enjoy here.

NOTE: Posters exists (see above) with the title Fire Maidens of Outer Space though the print under review here, recorded from British television some time in the 1980s, bears the Fire Maidens From Outer Space title. And look out for the strange opening credit: all characters in space are fictitious.
KEVIN LYONS

I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain (1998)

2006-07-31T14:46:00.000+01:00

Now here's a British horror film that certainly deserves a much better reputation than it currently has, particularly in the States where it doesn't seem to as well liked among zombie fans as it is in its homeland. Made on a truly pathetic budget, it announced writer/director Andrew Parkinson as one of the most innovative and compelling horror directors to emerge from Britain in years.

The story is simple but powerfully effective - PhD student Mark is attacked in the woods one day by a dying woman and slowly transforms into a flesh-eating zombie. Unable to control his cannibalistic urges, wracked with guilt and slowly deteriorating both physically and mentally he chronicles his new existence in a series of tape recordings and journal entries.

As zombie films go, this is so atypical of the genre that it has alienated many viewers. The only films that are even remotely comparable is Jean Rollin's excellent, La morte vivante/The Living Dead Girl (1982), which also featured a zombie protagonist who knew what she was becoming and was powerless to stop it, and Romero's Martin (1977). All three films put their undead characters through the ultimate existential nightmare but I, Zombie, though technically the least polished of the three, is certainly the more affecting.

Perhaps forced as much by the lack of a budget than by artistic inclination to adopt a quasi-documentary approach, Parkinson effectively conveys the horror of the transformation that Mark is undergoing rather well and the result is a film that is genuinely as sad and affecting as it is gory and repellent.

The pace is deliberately slow and in truth the first 30 minutes or so do tend to drag their heels a little, though undeniably it adds to the creeping sense of unease and with a film that takes a more personal, introspective approach to a sub-genre not generally noted - Romero aside - for its subtleties, it was essential that we saw something of Mark before and immediately after his attack.

The biggest problem with I, Zombie is the generally stiff performances. It would be unfair to single out a particular turn, but the acting is uniformly amateurish (no surprise as the cast was indeed largely composed of amateurs) though one could suggest, if it doesn't sound too much like clutching at straws, that the awkwardness adds to the almost documentary like feel. On a more positive note, I, Zombie boasts a fabulous score from Parkinson himself, melancholy and contemplative, exactly what the film needed.

I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain is not your typical gut-crunching zombie epic. It's scary but in a different way than the Romero films or their better imitators - the terror of Parkinson's film is an existential one and is therefore even more unsettling. The horror of pain, loss of identity and isolation are what are being explored here and Parkinson does it so well - it's a bleak and despairing exploration and one that won't be to all tastes.

For those looking for something different in their zombie films, something more small scale and intimate than the apocalyptic visions of Romero's Dead series, would do well to seek this out. You won't feel particularly good or uplifted after watching it, but then again you weren't meant to - dark, depressing and painfully true, this is the best and most inventive zombie movie in years, one of those from-out-of-nowhere gems that make sifting through all the junk so worthwhile and comes very highly recommended.

Note: Despite what you may read elsewhere, I, Zombie is not a Fangoria production (it's an independent production released on DVD in the States through Fangoria - they had nothing to do with its production at all) and the subtitle is The Chronicles of Pain and not A Chronicle of Pain as is too often reported elsewhere.
KEVIN LYONS

Satan's Mistress (1982)

2006-07-24T14:38:00.000+01:00

Back in the early 80s, director James Polakof (director of such never-heard-of-them titles as Slashed Dreams (1975) (about campers being stalked by rapists), He Is My Brother (1976) (about a leper colony) and the wonderfully titles Love and the Midnight Auto Supply (1977) (about… well, who knows and frankly, who cares?)) decided that what the world really needed was a quickie knock-off of Sidney J. Furie's The Entity (1981). But it seems that the world wasn't ready for another ghosts-and-sex drama just yet and the film floundered about with no-one watching it until it briefly resurfaced again when Octopussy (1983) came out - Kabir Bedi, who played Gobinda opposite Roger Moore's James Bond, also appears in Satan's Mistress as the haunting presence. And I'll bet he was just delighted to see this turn up again just as 007 came a-calling.

It begins well enough, with an atmospheric opening sequence featuring a mysterious figure chasing lonely heroine Lisa (Natalie Wood, sister of Natalie and who, as luck would have it, has a passing resemblance to The Entity's Barbara Hershey from some angles) along a beach in slow motion. But minutes later, Polakof wheels on his comedy black cat with red glowing eyes and synthesized meows for the first of far too many appearances and then makes matter worse by having a caption try to convince us that what we're about to see is all based on real events. Furie did the same thing with The Entity so of course it had to turn up here too. What little credibility the film has left is utterly destroyed when the special effects kick in - the arrival of the ghostly force that haunts Lisa is represented by the worst animated purple blob in the whole history of animated purple blobs…

To its credit, Satan's Mistress does have an interesting thesis - that loneliness and sexual frustration are links to the world of the supernatural, but it tends to lay it on with a trowel. Subtlety is a word missing from Polakof's vocabulary it would seem and his decision to introduce a quasi-paedophilic subtext as the ghost (who never speaks - Bedi must have just turned up for a couple of days and hung around the set looking moody) takes a shine to Lisa's schoolgirl daughter Michelle is equally clumsily handled. Even the sex scenes, which should at least have been fun, are repetitive, a bit coy and completely ruined both by Wood's apparent boredom and by the hideous score.

Roger Kellaway had already scored the likes of The Mafu Cage (1978), The Dark (1979), Silent Scream (1980) and Jaws of Satan (1981) and had written both the end title song for TV's All in the Family (1971 - 1979) and even scored the Barbara Streisand/Kris Kristofferson Oscar winner A Star Is Born in 1976. Here he simply resorts to some random electronic noises, rhythmless piano pounding, tedious synth drones and clattering drums. And a right old racket it is too…

But it fits in with the other equally shoddy technical aspects of the film - the photography is horribly dark (a scene in a basement is so dim you can't actually see what's going on, but it seems to have something to do with a suit or armour) and Polakof's direction is the very definition of pedestrian. The script is nothing special either: "You're not you any more," Michelle tells Lisa at one point, and therein lies the problem. We never see her any other way than the moody, neurotic drag that whines her way through the film looking like she's about to fall apart at any second, so we can never really sympathise with her plight.

And as for the plot… Halfway through, things start to get really weird (and not in a good way) when a ghostly girl turns up accompanied by pulsating eye to warn off the ghost and act spooky around Michelle. By the time John Carradine turns up as a priest, you'll probably have given up on it and to be honest, even if you have stayed this far even he isn't worth the effort.

Satan's Mistress is lurking out there under many different titles - Satan's Mistress is silly (Satan doesn't even get a mention let along a look in) and Dark Eyes or Demon Rage are hardly any better. To be honest, its working title, Fury of the Succubus is the one that represents it best.

I know that are many of you out there who, like me, just can't help themselves and want to see it all, no matter how bad it is. But trust me, there's much better quality rubbish out there than this dreary nonsense. It's a cliché, but it's so true that there are some films that are so bad that they're perversely enjoyable. This certainly isn't one of them. Best avoided unless there's absolutely nothing else left on the shelf and you haven't got any paint to watch dry.

EOFFTV - watching the crap so you don't have to.
KEVIN LYONS

Night of the Lepus (1972)

2006-07-17T14:04:00.000+01:00

Back in 1971, Daniel Mann's Willard kicked off a whole cycle of nature-on-the-rampage movies that saw dogs, cats, frogs, sharks, bees, snakes and various other fauna making mincemeat of B-list actors across the States. None of them were quite as silly as the mutant killer sheep in Fredric Hobbs' Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), but William F. Claxton's Night of the Lepus gives it a very good run for its money.
This is the notorious giant rabbit movie with Stuart Whitman, a stalwart of low budget 70s nonsense, and it's not quite as engaging as its reputation might suggest. Admittedly, the sight of the rampaging bunnies is hilarious but there's an awful lot of tedious padding to wade through to get to the laughs.

There's a certain morbid curiosity in watching Whitman and slumming co-star Janet Leigh heading a cast of long-past-their-prime names like veteran Western regular Rory Calhoun and Star Trek's DeForest Kelley, clearly finding it hard to escape his "Bones" McCoy character and stooping to tat like this. You have to hand it to them, all four of the leading hands are enthusiastic if not entirely convincing and commendably manage to keep a straight face throughout the whole sorry affair.

A certain amount of credit should be given to producer A.C. Lyles, presumably the man who first read Australian writer Russell Bradon's novel Year of the Angry Rabbit and thought that his tale of killer bunnies was just crying out for the big screen treatment. It takes a particular kind of genius to see the potential in such a crazy, outrageous idea and genius of another order to actually think that audiences would fall for it. Most of the 70s cycle of killer animal movies, even the truly bad ones, made a kind of sense as they chose creatures most likely to provoke some sort of revulsion or fear in their audience - spiders (The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)), rats (Willard and Ben (1972)), sharks (Jaws (1975)) and snakes (Sssssss (1973)) are all genuinely scary creatures for at least part of the audience. But rabbits? Little fluffy bunnies??! What were they thinking? To call Night of the Lepus odd - one of the criteria for inclusion in Kev's Cupboard - is to seriously understate the case.

Night of the Lepus might - only might, mind you - have worked if they'd somehow managed of pull off the effects. If they'd been convincing and scary enough, we might have forgiven the film it's idiocy. But the site of optically enlarged rabbits hopping about in slow motion, occasionally intercut with gory scenes of fake teeth and jaws gnawing on hapless victims is more laughable than terrifying. Still, the sight of an extra in a rabbit suit attacking a cow (no, really, it's true…) is worth the DVD rental alone.

But for all these faults, Night of the Lepus still comes highly recommended for many reasons: the wonderful cast, giving it all they've got on a project that not one of them deserves to be in; the po-faced seriousness with which everyone took the film; the feeling that you're actually watching a 50s giant monster movie that sat on the shelf for two decades before getting dusted off and foisted onto an unsuspecting public; and the fact that this came from one of Hollywood's most respected studios - yes indeed, producer Lyles actually managed to get MGM on board to release Night of the Lepus, making it one the strangest and silliest films the company ever released.

Night of the Lepus has clearly made an impact on those who have seen it over the years. There are few genre fans who don't at least know about it and film makers like Oliver Stone and the Wachowski Brothers liked it enough to use footage from it in their own films (Natural Born Killers (1994) and The Matrix (1999) respectively). A bare bones Region 1 release is now available for those of you wanting to find out what the fuss is all about. Come on, you know you want to - check your DVD collection and look at that killer-bunnies-on-the-rampage shaped hole up there that's just begging to be filled…
KEVIN LYONS

L'ultimo squalo/The Last Shark/Great White (1981)

2006-07-10T13:58:00.000+01:00

Those of us who have been following Italian exploitation cinema for more years than we care to remember have become so used to the blatant copy-cating that the industry has always relied on (or did, when the Italians still had a viable exploitation industry) that it has, over the years, become almost invisible. After a while, you just accept that the next Italian horror film you see will most likely be a copy of an American hit or a copy of a previous copy of an American hit. Sometimes, they were just content to copy from themselves, a practice which gave us much-loved genres like the peblum, the spaghetti western and the giallo. And that's always been part of their wayward charm, the way they take established ideas and put their own unique and often twisted spin on them.

But when you see something as brazenly derivative as Enzo G. Castellari's L'ultimo squalo, it can still take your breath away. It certainly rattled the cages of the suits at Universal who were so outraged at its barefaced and wholesale lifting of the plot from Jaws (1975) that they promptly slapped an injunction on distributors Film Ventures International, forbidding them from releasing the film on North American soil. They didn't do it straight away though and the film saw a very limited release under the title Great White though to this day it remains unavailable legally on home video in the States.

L'ultimo squalo wasn't the first time that the Italians had a go at ripping off Jaws - we'd already had such aquatic variants as Tentacoli/Tentacles (1977), Lucio Fulci's shark-vs-zombie moment in Zombi 2 (1979), Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981) and Castellari's own Il cacciatore di squali (1979) and there was still the likes of Lamberto Bava's crazy Shark rosso nell'oceano (1984) and Joe D'Amato's Squali (1989) still to come. But none of them were as blatantly, unashamedly derivative as Castellari's film.

Given that the film simply copies Jaws almost scene-for-scene, with a moment or two from Jaws 2 (1978) thrown in for good measure, there's little point in recounting the plot in any great details - once you've seen Spielberg and Szwarc's films you've pretty well got the whole picture. Great White shark attacks a popular coastal resort, smashes up a pier, kills a few people, drags a helicopter into the sea… and so on. Scriptwriter Marc Princi simply takes the best bits from both films, changes the character names and away he goes.

Castellari is a much better director than this, or indeed most of his horror and science fiction offerings, would suggest - his 70s polizieschi (another great Italian genre spawned by a hit Hollywood movie, in this case The French Connection (1971)) were a cut above the usual, La polizia incrimina la legge assolve/High Crime (1973), Il cittadino si ribella/The Anonymous Avenger and Il grande racket/The Big Racket (1976) being among the best of their kind. But he never warmed to horror and science fiction as much as he did to his violent cop thrillers or spaghetti westerns, another genre he made great contributions to (Keoma/Django Rides Again (1976) in particular is excellent). L'ultimo squalo is fairly representative of his genre work, which mostly consisted of him cranking out cheap, quickly made knock-offs of the Mad Max movies - I nuovi barbari/The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland (1982), 1990: I guerrieri del Bronx/1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and Fuga dal Bronx/Bronx Warriors 2 (1983).

So, it's a shameless rip-off, a blatant attempt to ride on the not inconsiderable coat-tails of one of the best Hollywood movies on the 1970s. But does that necessarily make it a bad film? True to form, Castellari at least takes enough care to ensure that L'ultimo squalo looks good - his films are usually among the slicker, better produced of Italian 70s exploitation movies and this one is certainly no different. He's let down only by some impenetrably murky underwater photography and some hopelessly mis-matching shark stock footage.

The acting is mostly awful, and imported Americans James Franciscus (in a sort of combined Roy Scheider/Richard Dreyfuss role) and Vic Morrow (channelling the spirit of Robert Shaw) are simply coasting along waiting for pay day. But despite a couple of moments when it opts to saunter when it should be breaking into a jog, L'ultimo sqaulo is never dull - silly, yes, shamelessly unoriginal there's no doubt, but never dull. The plastic growling shark that pops up from time to time is worth the price of admission alone and characteristic of the sense of fun that this kind of make-do-and-mend film making can offer.

Crack open a few cans, sit back and take pleasure from laughing at Morrow's hopeless accent, let your mind boggle at the sheer audacity of those unashamed Jaws moments, squirm in pain when the cheesy 70s disco songs crop up and cheer on that wonderfully fake shark, one so loveably inept that the much maligned Bruce from Jaws will never look so tacky again. Universal will hate me for this, but if you've a taste for low budget Italian tat, do whatever it takes to track this one down - just don't watch Jaws to remind yourself how marvellous it is just before watching this. The overwhelming sense of déjà vu could be bad for your mental health…
KEVIN LYONS

The Black Panther (1977)

2006-07-03T13:53:00.000+01:00

Making any film based on a true life crime is a difficult tightrope for any filmmakers to walk - do it too soon and with insufficient sensitivity and the public will stay away in droves, leaving the filmmakers at the mercy of the gutter press. Do it too late and most potential viewers will be unaware of the social and political contexts which gave birth to the crime in the first place.

Ian Merrick's The Black Panther was always going to be onto a loser - it's subject, the psychopathic post-office robber, kidnapper and would-be extortionist Donald Neilson, was undeniably a cruel and brutal man but his pop-culture rating is much lower than someone like Charles Manson, Ted Bundy or fellow Brit and near namesake Dennis Nilsen. As such it was unlikely that he would be remembered for long after the media outcry over his crimes had died down and Merrick and scriptwriter Michael Armstrong, of The Haunted House of Horror (1969) and Hexen bis auf Blut gequält (1970), were forced to make their commendably thoughtful and entirely unsensational film account almost as soon as Neilson had been caught and tried. For many, it was simply too soon - the union body representing sub-postmasters in the UK called for a boycott of the film, outraged at it's too-early depiction of a still very sensitive subject. As such, the film vanished into obscurity as memories of Neilson and his crimes faded, turning up a couple of times on British video in the early 80s, getting at least one screening on obscure and now long-defunct cable channel HVC and remaining next to impossible to see ever since.

Which is a shame as the film in not only a restrained and sensitive handing of a particularly nasty series of crimes but also a powerful and largely non-judgemental insight into the mind of a psychopath, anticipating the similar approach adopted by John McNaughton in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). Armstrong insisted that he would only take the writing gig if they made the film this way and the result is a brooding portrait of an essentially powerless and inadequate man living out sad and extremely dangerous power fantasies. In the hands of Donald Sumpter, a much under-valued actor giving an excellent performance here, Neilson comes across as an obsessive but oddly ordinary man, a nobody that fades into the masses he feels alienated from, a cold and dispassionate man who leads a mundane life enlivened only by the iron grip in which he holds his much-suffering wife and daughter.

Although Merrick and Armstrong play down any psychological or socio-political explanations for Neilson, he comes across in the film as a man struggling with his own frustrations and his inability to deal with the routine realities of every day life. His crimes begin not out of any sense of bloodlust or a need for thrills, but simply as a way to keep food on the family table. He clearly found it impossible to readjust to civilian life after a spell of national service in the army and some of the film's most quietly chilling moments come when Merrick focuses on Neilson's attempts to impose military rigour and order on a chaotic world.

The Black Panther is commendably faithful to the real life events, which culminated in the abduction and murder of 16 year old heiress Lesley Whittle - a security guard, Gerald Smith, who was shot by Neilson before the Whittle kidnapping subsequently died from the injuries he received. Armstrong's script remains staunchly committed to the facts of the case, lending the film an almost documentary feel.

In the mid-70s, Donald Neilson was the great British bogeyman, and the tabloid press had a field day with his activities - he was dubbed The Black Panther because of the black face mask he wore during his raids - and there are those, especially Lesley Whittle's brother, who blamed the increasingly scaremongering coverage of the events for her death. That same press attacked the film version of events as tasteless exploitation in as craven a display of hypocrisy as you'd find anywhere.

The Black Panther is a genuinely unsettling film - Sumpter's blank-faced portrayal of the Neilson is startling when he suddenly erupts into uncontrollable rage and the scenes of Whittle and her captor in the drainage shaft she died in are horribly claustrophobic. Merrick's cool, detached direction gives the film a suitably menacing air and the fact that it has now become so obscure and hard to find is a tragedy. With the distance of time, the names Donald Neilson, Lesley Whittle and The Black Panther have come to mean next to nothing for the general public in Britain and probably never meant all that much abroad so, sadly, the chances of a revival for this excellent film seem very slim indeed.
KEVIN LYONS

Animals (1999)

2006-06-26T13:50:00.000+01:00

In 1999, director Bob Cook (director of such all-time greats as Rock-A-Die Baby (1988) and Lycanthrope (1999) - no don't worry, we hadn't heard of them either…) decided that what the world really needed was a crappy Last House on the Left (1972) clone. So that's exactly what he gave us, a cheap, torturously dull knock-off that stands as one of the great endurance tests for exploitation fans.

Things get off to a dreadful start with a way over-long intro with Cook himself as a newsreader telling us about the gruesome shootout that allows the band of sadistic thugs to get loose and go on the rampage. This nonsense goes on forever, with Cook sticking his finger in his ear and monotoning his lines such that we by the time he finally gets offscreen, we actually don't care any more. Eventually, the opening credits roll and we think that's the last of him, that the film will actually get started now - but no. Just when you think he's finally gone, he turns up again and starts talking to us again!

All writers have one Golden Rule drummed into them all the time - the much quoted rule of "show don't tell", though Cook and his co-writers Tawny Kaye and Mel Roberts don't seem to think that this applies to them. The film would have got off to a much pacier start if they'd managed to raise that little extra finance needed to effectively stage the gun battle that the newreader goes to such extraordinary lengths to tell us so much about. It's a very poor start, yet amazingly, it's just going to get worse…

Technically, the film is a mess - it looks to have been shot on a camcorder, the sound is frequently muffled, the script is laughable and as for the performances… I know you shouldn't expect much from no-budget efforts like this, but really the acting in Animals is so stilted it's almost painful. As one who never understood the appeal of Linnea Quigley, her presence in the film was hardly likely to make Animals any more bearable but she gives the best performance in the film - which should give you some idea just how bad the rest of the cast are.

Things get really hilarious when Cook starts to get pretentious - when the killers' strike, he experiments with bizarre solarizing and black and white effects, and even clumsily splices in stock footage of crocodiles, vultures and sundry other wild life in a manner that recalls Ed Wood's similar tactics in Glen or Glenda? (1953). Laughing at Cook's ineptitude is the only relief from the tedium of Animals, but it's a very cheap and ultimately unsatisfying relief.

Cook hopes to make up for the film's deficiencies with lots of gratuitous nudity, but it's not enough to distract from the horrible performances, lousy camera work, embarrassing dialogue and quite possibly the tackiest Vietnam flashback you'll ever see - all red tinted stock footage and terrible video editing trickery.

If you've been dropping into Kev's Cupboard on a regular basis, chances are that, like me, you'll happily watch anything, and will even approach the least appealing looking junk in the hope that one day you'll uncover that long forgotten gem or never-heard-of nugget. So of course you'll probably want to give Animals a go, just to see if it's really as bad as I say it is, and because you, like me, simply have to see it all. A laudable ambition, but do yourself a favour - put this one at the very bottom of your "must-see-before-I-die" list and get on with watching something better instead. Trust me, you'll thank me for it one day…
KEVIN LYONS

2+5: Missione hydra/Star Pilot (1966)

2006-06-20T13:45:00.000+01:00

Back in the 1960s, a full decade before George Lucas got in on the act, the Italians were cranking out space operas at an impressive rate. Most of them were terrible, though some of the Antonio Margheriti offerings are worth a look and Mario Bava's Terrore nello spazio/Planet of the Vampires (1965) is of course terrific. Pietro Francisi's curiously titled effort, issued in the States as Star Pilot, is one of the less notable entries in the genre but has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments of silliness that should appeal to all connoisseurs of the cinematically odd.

The film plays a bit like the Japanese space operas that were being made at the time - an illusion fostered by the use of footage from Kaiju daisenso (1965) and Yusei Gorasu (1962) that were spliced in to some English language prints - with its odd pacing, plastic-looking models and ludicrous shiny alien outfits. There are even some Eastern secret agents on hand ("We are not Chinese - we are Oriental!"), as though Francisi was acknowledging the debt his film owed to the Toho SF movies. If only it was as much fun to watch…

If you do decide to track down a copy of 2+5: Missione Hydra after reading this (and go on, admit it, you know you want to!) save yourself the bother of trying to work out what's going on. The plot probably never made much sense to begin with but the fact that US distributors Monarch allegedly removed some footage when they belated released the film in the wake of Star Wars (1977) may account for just how incoherent the English dubbed version actually is. The opening half hour consists of lots of people wandering around caves, taking travelogue helicopter rides over Rome (look, it's the Coliseum!) and turning in some of the worst performances you'll ever see - Leontine May is particularly guilty in this department, seemingly determined to steal every scene that she's in with her wild over-emoting, oddball posturing and outrageous costumes.

Other faces in the cast that may be more familiar to fans of Italian fantasy cinema include peblum veterans Kirk Morris (Maciste all'inferno (1962), Sansone contro i pirati (1963), Il conquistatore di Atlantide (1965)), Gordon Mitchell (Maciste nella terra dei ciclopi (1961), Il gigante di Metropolis (1961), Sinbad contro i sette saraceni (1964) and literally dozens of low budget Italian genre movies) and Leonora Ruffo (La vendetta di Ercole (1960), Maciste contro il vampiro (1961), Ercole al centro della terra (1961)).

But when it finally gets going, 2+5: Missione Hydra becomes hilariously entertaining - look out for the tatty tribe of ape men who menacingly wave sticks at our heroes; if they aren't funny enough for you, try the universe's two fattest and least convincing humanoid robots; and there isn't a living soul who could fail to be unmoved by the amazing space walk sequences, realised by actors filmed in slow motion as they bounce up and down on an off-camera trampoline. And just wait till you get to the ending (struggle through the rest of the film if you can, it's definitely worth it), as clumsy a twist ending as you'll ever witness. You genuinely won't see it coming as it comes out of nowhere and appears to have just been tacked on at the last minute as a way of bringing the proceedings to a speedy resolution.

Fans of kitsch 60s space opera should lap up 2+5: Missione Hydra (what does the title mean? Damned if I know…), despite the turgid opening scenes. Anyone expecting the slick extravagance of the Star Wars series will be sorely disappointed (imagine being eight years old in 1977, seeing Star Wars for the first time, then queuing up to watch this - you'd be mentally scarred for life) but anyone with a healthy sense of the ridiculous will love every single, stupid second of it.
KEVIN LYONS

Des Morts (1981)

2006-06-12T13:42:00.000+01:00

As "horror" films go, this is as borderline as it gets. Buts its subject matter is the sort of thing that attracts the more hardcore genre fan, so here it is, in all its grim, macabre glory. Often wrongly labelled a "mondo" movie, Des morts is of a different order altogether, far removed from the opportunistic shock-fests that followed in the wake of Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti's Mondo Cane (1962). Here, directors Jean-Paul Ferbus, Dominique Garny and Thierry Zéno embark on a morbid, almost obsessive examination of death and the rituals that surround it.

A bundle of laughs this certainly isn't. Even the rather mangled, bleary, Nth degree dupe hauled from the bowels of Kev's Cupboard retains its occasionally mesmeric, frequently tedious, and sometimes shocking qualities as the directors tour the world looking for peculiar and sometimes unfathomable funerary rites.
The first hurdle for many will be the killing of oxen in the opening Thai (or is Nepalese? - my tape copy is conveniently mangled when the explanatory caption appears) funeral rites. Filmed in a detached, matter-of-fact, coldly clinical fashion, the ritual killing and mutilation of the animals sets the tone for some of what is still to come. Having winced your way through this unpleasant footage, it isn't long before we're in the States watching - with the same icy detachment - a pair of undertakers preparing a body, complete with graphic, stomach-troubling detail of the accompanying autopsy.

After a while, all this clinical morbidity inevitably becomes tiresome and by the end we're almost inured to the film's big themes. It's often heavy going, sometimes even dull, as it hammers home some rather trite observations about how different cultures treat death and its immediate aftermath. The most telling juxtaposition is between the lavish, respectful Thai (or Nepalese) ceremony at the beginning and the more clinical and even callous American ceremony that follows - the directors cut between the Thai (or… OK, you get it by now) villagers engaged in their complex and rather bizarre ceremony and a funeral cortege driver playing loud disco music on his hearse radio as he ferries the deceased to the chapel.

What's perhaps most unsettling about Des morts is that, while watching it, after decades of increasingly sophisticated gore movies, one can't escape the feeling that we've all "seen worse." Such is the detachment of the directors that it becomes difficult to engage with the very real pain and suffering on display before us. While that detachment is commendable in some respects, its distancing effect renders much of the point of Des morts obsolete.

The makers even lose their way somewhat when they bring on sufferers of muscular dystrophy and the victim of a stabbing - the latter included, one suspects, merely for the shock value of the surgical footage - all of who are far from dead and therefore out of place in a documentary of this kind.

Horror fans will naturally be drawn to Des morts by its reputation - here in the UK, it was much sought after in the late 80s, as was co-director Thierry Zéno's earlier sensibilities-rattler, Vase de noces (1974), charmingly retitled The Pig Fucking Movie in English speaking territories. They may, however, be disappointed by what they get - a worthy but frankly rather dull documentary that delivers the "goods" but takes an awful long time to get there. Anthropology students will find it a fascinating and invaluable insight into attitudes towards death, but the rest of us will find it mildly diverting at best. One to be watched once out of curiosity, then never bothered with again.
KEVIN LYONS