silly as a fish with titties!

I'm baaaaaaack, motherfuckers!



Holla atcha boy and word to yer mutha! Now that I got access to my computer again and chased the birds out of my house (a long story that I won't burden you with, other than to say that when I picked up m DVD of Sheba Baby later I found that the sonofabitch had shit on Pam Grier's face, so I should've killed 'im!), I typed up enough reviews to make ya'll long for the days when I wasn't able to get online and bother you with my stupidstuff. Heh.

Oh, yeah... and Ronnie James Dio died. That really sucks... I'm still conflicted as to whether I liked Black Sabbath better with Ozzy or with him. "Sign of the Southern Cross" still stacks up pretty well against any song Sabbath ever wrote, with any singer: both beautiful and crushingly heavy, all gelled into one perfect, atmospheric 8-minute thing.



Here's the studio version just so you can get the nuances:





Dio with Rainbow:


Dio with Dio:


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Goodbye Uncle Tom (C, 1971) aka Addio Zio Tom, Uncle Tom, White Devil Black Hell. The mondo godfathers behind Mondo Cane tried using cameras as a time machine to take a look at what the slave trade was like. It begins with scenes of modern racial unrest and an examination of white ignorance about "Uncle Toms" and black extremist reactions to it; white denial clashing with black rage. Then they go back to the Antebellum South, filming it as if it's reality and they're documentarians, interviewing characters who plead their causes and say outrageous things. Then they take the same approach to slave ships, showing truly horrific and disgusting practices perpetrated on the human "cargo." At intervals they show modern scenes for contrast. Where they found around a thousand black extras willing to re-enact these atrocities is a mystery to me. To make things even stranger (and more controversially offensive), it's full of slapstick, satirical humor. You get a disorienting mixture of bloody massacres of runaway slaves with modern costume dances, and a "professor" explaining the supposed inferiority of the non-white races, and scenes of throwing food to caged amputees is followed by Mardi Gras clowning. The original Italian cut of this runs 136 minutes, but was cut to 123 minutes for American release... where it was promptly pulled from theaters due to the incendiary, extremely-controversial nature of it. Pauline Kael even said it was an incitement to race war. Others just found it reprehensible, sick exploitation... and they may have a case, but the film does make some important social commentary and is astoundingly well-shot and edited. There’s an awful lot of nudity, bloody violence, and degrading stereotypes that will put it out of reach for many viewers, because they don’t spare the viewer (or the actors) much. The narration -- which is in a lighthearted bantering tone that’s often at odds with what you’re seeing -- is full of even more volatile material, taken from historical narratives. A seldom-seen legend of extreme cinema, definitely not for everyone (including those with short attention spans -- it is overlong and has some drawn-out stretches), and a sure-fire way to make anyone uncomfortable (but also make ‘em think).



Watch online starting here.

Bad Bunch, The (C, 1973) aka Tom, Nigger Lover, The Brothers. Director Greydon Clark stars as a white Vietnam vet who goes into Watts to deliver a letter from his black friend who was killed in 'Nam. He meets resistance from his friend's militant brother, Makimba, and his gang, who want to treat him the way racist white cops (Aldo Ray and Jock Mahoney, who had a stroke soon after filming this) have treated them. When Makimba is later beaten up by the cops, he blames Greydon for it. Greydon had nothing to do with it, though; he's preoccupied with trying to get his girlfriend to live with him, or, failing that, getting slutty Bambi Allen (who died of cancer soon after this film, supposedly due to complications from silicone that was supposed to give her bigger tits) to sleep with him. Makimba's misguided desire for revenge and reactionary racism results in several tragic events, but still leaves time for a naked pool party. There's a lot of bad hair on display in this 70's blaxploitation wannabe, and not all of it is on people's heads. The point -- that racism breeds more racism and it's all stupid -- gets lost in tedium, since this film has more padding than a beanbag chair.





Dark Water (C, 2002) aka Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara, From The Depths of Dark Water. Supremely creepy Japanese ghost story from the people who brought you the original version of The Ring. This has a few similarities, but I think it’s even scarier and more effective. Somebody else apparently thought so, too, because there was an American remake, which was decent but in all ways inferior to the original. A divorcee and her cute young daughter move into an old apartment building that has a big humidity problem; there are puddles of water in the hallways and water stains on the walls and ceiling. One on the ceiling keeps getting bigger and dripping, and the mother also keeps catching glimpses of a spooky little girl in a yellow raincoat... a girl she learns has been missing for a year or two, and who lived in the apartment above theirs. The film builds atmosphere as well as Ringu, but packs stronger shocks and an even more engaging storyline. The ghostly girl is a little reminiscent of Sadako (long black hair, unseen face, always wet) but the familiarity doesn’t distract from things, and the director takes every opportunity to capitalize on the unsettling mood he’s been carefully building, but without ever taking the cheap road to do it. This is one of the major building blocks of J-horror’s reputation, and one of the films that truly deserves that rep.



Dawn of the Mummy (C, 1981) Another George Romero rip-off, this one having the twist of using ancient Egyptian mummies to perpetrate the gory gut-munching instead of zombies (if there's any real distinction to be made between mummies and zombies other than moisture content). The basic plot is as old as the pyramids -- against all good advice given by the local crazy lady with bad teeth (named Xena), some foolish infidels open the cursed tomb of Sephriman, who was mummified and entombed with about a half-dozen of his retainers, all of whom are fated to "rise and kill, rise and kill!" if the tomb is profaned. A group of fashion models doing a shoot in the desert serve as the main course when the walking dead ones do "rise and kill," and it's pretty graphic. It takes a while to get the mayhem started as the filmmakers bide their time with tomb-robbery and goofy picture-taking in the desert (this was actually filmed in Egypt, so they have to take advantage of the location), but there's incidental gore along the way, such as a severed head they find in the sand, people with faces melted by poison gas, and a girl getting her hand burned by embalming fluid from an organ-jar. Luckily none of this is enough to phase our idiot prey, and they stick around and have the revived mummies eat their intestines, hack cleavers into their heads (the head's a bad fake but it's still better than CGI), bite chunks out of necks, cause flesh to rot (the mummy's been bound with resin that's apparently corrosive), and turn a wedding feast into a bloody riot. It takes a while to really get geared up, but it pays off with carnage eventually. The gore's not on the level of Fulci, but they try. The director used to be a surgeon in Egypt... how'd you like to be operated on by a gore hound?



Death Wish 3 (C, 1985) What a mind-bogglingly stupid and violent film? How can you not love it? I worship this thing! A bunch of criminal thugs who go out of their way to give their victims a fair chance at providing police with identifying marks (if you've a perpetrator it's really good sportsmanship to have painted signs on your face) go around doing truly heinous things. Breaking into apartments, beating up old people, raping couches, taking naps, stealing, saying bad words. And then bleeding all over everything when vigilante Charles Bronson shows up, riding a wave of evil Jimmy Page riffs into town. Charlie gets there just in time to see one of his old friends die, and he gets arrested as a suspect in the case. In the lock-up he gets in a fight with a guy who has a reverse mohawk (they don't look nearly as cool as the regular ones) and the cops let him go so he can drive the crime rate down by killing every creep in sight... which would seem to be at least 90% of the population in this city. Bronson buys a new car and an expensive camera as "bait," and makes friends with all the nice folks in town. Bronson finds footprints in his apartment (all side-by-side; apparently some bastard broke in and hopped around!) so he leaves a nail trap for 'em, and sets up giant mousetrap contraptions in other apartments (which end up with teeth stuck in 'em, to Charlie's delight). Then he orders a .44 AutoMag through the mail (sure, you could do that in the 80's, if you saved yer box tops), and when he uses it, everybody cheers. The scum come after him with machineguns, but they're terrible shots. Luckily, one of the guys in the building has a .30 caliber machinegun he brought home from the war (oh, yeah, they let you keep squad automatic weapons after the war, everybody knows that), and those will come in handy because the scumbags kill Bronson's girlfriend and blow up his friend's shop, so they all must die. They do... with the aid of a mail-order rocket launcher! Thank you, Johnson-Smith catalog! It's just one of the many prizes you can win by selling Grit! More gangs obligingly come to town so the body count can verge on the four-digit zone. Lots of idiotic noise and destruction and mayhem with not much plot to slow it down... it's sure not Bronson's smartest film, nor the classiest, but it's easily one of the most action-packed and stupidly-fun, and it delivers the goods if you're willing to suspend (or completely toss out) disbelief. More of the entertaining stuff without all the protracted sickness of part II.







The Hi-Riders (C, 1978) Automotive assholes are on the rampage in this Greydon Clark drive-in 70's scuzzflick. A gang of drag-racing hot-rodders and bikers meet a beachy blonde couple with a hot Pontiac, who become hang-arounds with the gang after getting in a conflict with a Hi-Rider who looks a little like a fat Jon Voight (who wasn't fat -- or a bugshit crazy lunatic - at that point in his career). Once they join up nothing really happens for a while other than a lot of filler where they all have orgies (which aren't really sexual so much as just pouring beer on each other, and themselves), or hanging out in Neville Brand's bar, being obnoxious while he (with uncharacteristic patience) tries to make them behave. Then there's more fun-in-the-sun filler with cars, and goofing around to obscure 70's rock (well, obscure other than David Essex's minimalist classic "Rock On," which makes a brief appearance) Then they decide "let's have a story in our movie!" and a drag race ends in a fiery crash that kills all participants, including a local kid. The kid's rich father wants revenge and offers 50 grand for the destruction of the gang... an offer so good that the town rednecks (and crooked cop Ralph Meeker, who really seems to enjoy roles where he gets to be an asshole) can't refuse it. Most of the Hi-Riders are massacred at a gas station, and the rest try to get revenge even while they're being hunted down. There are a lot of good, dangerous-looking car stunts (one of which resulted in a death) and you get the feeling that Tarantino may have been trying to copy some of this in Death Proof. Nothing fancy story-wise, but delivers what you'd expect.







Murphy's Law (C, 1986) One of those Cannon Group Charles Bronson vehicles that you have to be in the mood for. Bronson is Jack Murphy, a cop whose main law is "don't fuck with Jack Murphy." But my oh my how he does get fucked with; his car's stolen by a girl who promptly crashes it into a building and then kicks him in the balls. Then he gets threatening phone calls from a woman who promises to put him through hell before killing him. At work he gets in fights because the other cops wise off to him because he's such an alcoholic slob. Plus, the mob wants revenge on him for a hood he killed. Then he gets framed for the murder of his stripper ex-wife and he ends up handcuffed to the oldest-looking 14-year-old girl (the actress was 22) in the world, who constantly yells strings of creative-but-lame insults, most of which seem to be about boogers, brains, or breath, with the occasional sperm tossed in just to spoil the alliteration. So, it looks like the real Murphy's Law overrides the "don't fuck with Jack Murphy" deal. Luckily he's pretty tough despite all his other shortcomings, so he manages to cowboy his way through the rest of this standardly-dimwitted action flick. If it wasn't for Bronson's screen presence, this would probably have never been heard from again. You gotta feel for ol' Chuck, though, being stuck with a sidekick like he's got here. Boy do they have chemistry. Like ammonia and bleach. Not really dull, at least, with Bronson getting to blast plenty of bad guys at the end.



Pilot X (B&W, 1936) aka Death in the Air, The Mysterious Bombardier, Death in the Sky. A guy in a black biplane with an X on its wings is shooting down commercial airliners. The authorities believe it’s probably a WWWI ace gone psycho-schizo and trying to add to his wartime body count. In an attempt to trap him, they gather the top six air vets who fit the killer’s profile and recruit them to hunt Pilot X. They’re all from different countries so they argue about whose country had the best pilots. They all look suspicious, but Pilot X is thought to have a split personality, so that could be misleading. On their first day in the air, Pilot X guns one of them down. Each time they go up, more are shot down; I guess that’s one way to eliminate suspects. They keep you guessing by having people sneak off a lot and one guy throws a really unhinged screaming fit you’ll have to see to believe. Decent pulp-magazine-plot mystery livened up by pretty good dogfight footage (albeit too brief, and the filmmakers don’t do a very good job at helping the viewer keep track of who’s shooting at whom). It’s pretty creaky but worth checking out if you’re a fan of biplane combat. Good climactic battle, and although Lona Andre is a pretty bad actress, she makes nice eye-candy with her kitten-face.

Scorpio (C, 1973) aka The Scorpio File Tough-to-follow spy film by Michael Winner. Burt Lancaster is Cross, a top CIA agent who's suspected of going over to the other side. To get him, the agency blackmails French assassin Scorpio (Alain Delon) by planting heroin on him. Scorpio is kind of an apprentice of Cross's, but agrees to track him down and kill him if they'll give him Cross's job once he's out of the way. Why he'd want it, I don't know, since he's getting to witness the way they treat their agents. Cross tries to work out a deal with a Russian agent, but finds that he's got nowhere to go, and has no option other than to keep running. Anyone who gets between Cross and Scorpio end up getting violently eliminated. My problem was trying to keep track of who all those people were and what they were doing, and why they needed killing, and I failed to do that. In a movie that expects you to fill in a lot of the blanks, that's not a good thing, but I still wasn't bored; what was lost in tension was made up for by tough action scenes and good style. Gritty espionage thriller that will likely require a few viewings before everything falls into place, but that won't be painful. The trailer is especially good.

Trailer here (worth watchin')

She-Gods of Shark Reef (C, 1958) aka Shark Reef. Cheap lil' Roger Corman adventure flick that's saved from being typical only by the fact that it's in color (although versions you'll see nowdays are just barely in color, since the prints are fading out). A couple of brothers on the run from the law get shipwrecked on a reef and nearly eaten by sharks before they're rescued by some Amazon pearl divers who live on a nearby island. The guys aren't wanted there, but there won't be a boat to take them away for ten days. Chris is the blond brother (and therefore the good one). The dark-haired one is Lee, who's he's wanted for murder, and he quickly gets himself in trouble on the island by stealing a cache of pearls. Chris, meanwhile, cozies up to a cute native girl, but that's taboo, so he gets in trouble, too. The girl's going to be sacrificed to the sharks that swim around an underwater stone idol, but Chris saves her, which leads to - guess what? -- more trouble. Nothing astounding, but moves quickly enough, especially since it's only 63 minutes long.

Watch the whole thing here.

Serpent's Egg, The - (C, 1977) Bizarre, dark film from Ingmar Bergman, set in 1920's Berlin, where anti-Semitism was ramping up as the Nazi party struggled to seize power. Jewish trapeze artist David Carradine finds his brother has shot himself, and he stays drunk every night in little cafes where they do creepy, decadent cabaret shows. Unemployment is rampant and the black market for dollars is through the roof, since German money is nearly worthless. Jews are blamed for everything, and Carradine is harassed by authorities and forced to identify corpses in the morgue. It becomes hard for him to find places to live, and he tries to stay with his brother's widow (Liv Ullmann), who is suffering guilt about her husband's suicide. The whole atmosphere of the city is dreary and toxic with fear of political clashes, and money becomes so worthless they exchange it by weight, but there's nothing to buy anyway. The terror and misery drives everyone insane and surreal moments accumulate (such as people butchering a horse in the street in the middle of the night), and people around Carradine turn up dead; he even decapitates a guy himself, using an elevator! Even with desperation setting in, Carradine resists accepting help from a smarmy German he knew as a child, who liked to cut open live cats for fun. Eventually he learns that the German still has an evilly inquisitive mind, but his experiments involve humans now, and he may be a subject. This film is regarded as a misfire from Berman, mostly due to the odd casting of the limited-talent Carradine (who's not really that bad, but who does revert to his Kwai Chang Caine speech pattern whenever he has to play meek), but I was pretty impressed with it and found it more compelling than some of Begman's other work. Bergman uses a lot of horror film elements (the trailer certainly sells it like one) and masterfully builds an atmosphere of oppression and dread that becomes weirder and more claustrophobic as it goes. I wonder if some critics were put off just from the depressing morbidity of the whole thing; not that Bergman's ever been a sunshine-and-light kind of guy, but this is pretty doomy even for him. One interesting trick: since Carradine's character can't speak German, none of the German is subtitled, leaving us in the same confused position (unless, of course, you're fluent). Nightmarish, strong stuff that deserves re-evaluation.

This has a creepy trailer:

Vacancy (C, 2007) A bickering couple (Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson) who've drifted apart since the accidental death of their child have car trouble on a backroad off the interstate in the middle of the night. With little other choice, they check into a run-down, nearly-abandoned motel, even though the manager is a weirdo, slightly more creepy than goofy. Their room is filthy and the TV doesn't pick up any stations, but there's a VCR and some dirty old videotapes, so they try watching some, only to discover snuff films of previous guests getting attacked by creeps in a room that looks a helluva lot like the one they're staying in. Then they find the hidden cameras... Creepy horror that sets up a very weird vibe and then turns up the intensity until you're really not sure if they're going to make it out alive or not. I was a bit hesitant to give this one a shot because it sounded like it'd be another Hostel -style torture-porn thing, and I've gotten really bored with those. This one's very different, though; it doesn't take the lazy approach, even to the point of having very little gore or graphic violence. It manages to be more effective by suggesting things and keeping the menace realistic, concentrating on winding up the tension instead of using splatter as a crutch. Pretty scary stuff with good instincts for when to underplay things, and when to become overbearing.



Wanda The Sadistic Hypnotist (C, 1969) aka The Sadistic Hypnotist, Wanda the Hypnotist. A guy wanders into a grindhouse to watch a nudist-camp flick. The camera pans over a bunch of unattractive women sitting around reading magazines while a narrator tries to convince us it's exciting. Then a movie starring "Miss Dikey Dikeman" starts up, and it's about two girls taking a guy home after a budget-saving offscreen car crash. Dikey, or Wanda, is 6' 2" and wears evil eye makeup, and she can't act worth a weaselfart but tries enthusiastically anyway. She does some of the most unconvincing-looking whipping ever (when she really starts flailing it looks like go-go dancing) and makes the guy walk around the swimming pool in his underwear -- he complaints like it's torture and Wanda's girlfriend worries that they're going too far! The guy's just walking, for Christsakes... you're probably tortured as badly going to your mailbox and back. Then a bunch of girls drop by and skinnydip while Wanda grins and twirls her whip. An Avon lady visits and Wanda hypnotizes her into go-go dancing. Another girl becomes a karate expert, and a lesbian becomes a man-crazed nymphomaniac who goes after their captive (even though he protests, "But, lady, I'm a Republican!"). Then a sex-maniac rapist escapes from a nearby funny farm and invades the party after getting into Wanda's secret stash of LSD. He ties everybody up, lets the captive guy loose, and they all have a body-painting orgy. O' course, Wanda eventually prevails. Even the guy in the grindhouse seems to be made restless by this typical nudie-flick tedium, but if you stick around there's a twist ending. Despite promises of kinkiness, this is as tame and vanilla as you'll find, and delivers nothing but some wacky 60's atmosphere.

War Hunt (B&W, 1962) Robert Redford's film debut is an intense Korean war film about the line between heroism and psychopathia. Redford arrives in Korea and finds it a pretty crazy place, but craziest of all is John Saxon, who likes to sneak across enemy lines at night and kill the enemy with a knife. It soon becomes evident to Redford that Saxon's not just a dedicated soldier, but a psychopath, and Redford may become one of his victims, because he's been friendly with a young Korean boy that Saxon's adopted. And when the war ends, that's bad news for Saxon, since he's gotten hooked on killing. So he sneaks out as usual, putting the cease fire at risk. Strong tension level and some magnificent black and white photography make this a standout war film, and proof that John Saxon does have talent that's too often squandered on junkier films. For instance, he was also a psychotic soldier in Cannibal Apocalypse, and compare the quality of that to this sometime.