It's that time of year, a curated list of bizarro cage-free horror films casual classic horror fans may not know of, by me, Erich - and where to find them (they're all currently streaming free on Amazon Prime... for now). Sure it might be harder to get on your Fire stick or Apple TV or whatever, but if you love horror, the classic kind, ya gotta git Prime, man. While Netflix sheds almost all its older movies Amazon Prime has been, year after year, amassing a giant catalogue of weird old shit fin to make Kim's Video rise from its grave. Sure, come Halloween we'll all be watching STRANGER THINGS 2 on Netflix. But until then... am I right?
If the boxes of strange old crap look even fuller lately, it's because some rerelease outfit called 'Sprockets' has added countless lurid, cheaply made 50s-70s softcore sleaze-o-thons, usually barely an hour long, the type that probably packed onto marquees back in the days before hardcore, when underground filmmakers actually turned a profit sneaking their handheld art into smut. They all suck but in the process can help show why Joe Sarno, John Waters, and Russ Meyer are such comparative genius poets. Check a few out and wonder just how girls ever blinked with all that eyelash mascara back in the day. Then promptly exit that theater and come into mine, choose from this weird curated collection and be assured good times. To get the grindhouse effect (the 'three movies in continual rotation, open 24 hours' malaise) I suggest slotting out three of these films in advance and then starting the first one in the middle, because--if you're old enough to remember--grindhouse marquees seldom had feature 'start' times. They just played continuously, so you'd walk into the theater in pitch dark, feeling your way to a seat, and never knowing which movie was playing when you came in, until the end (which is why so many horror films of the era end with the title, i.e. "You have been watching SUSPIRIA!"). Not knowing what film you were seeing, or what was happening onscreen, allowed for a sense of anything-can-happen danger that's missing when you know what film it is, and what it's about, and what it's rated, in advance. After one film is done, start the next right away, before you can second guess yourself or read what it's about.
Then, when you finish your third movie of the night, start the first one up from the beginning, and when you get to where you 'came in,' you whisper to your asleep viewing partner (or cat): "this is where we came in" and turn the TV off and sashay away (i.e. pass out). Lo! A longstanding grindhouse tradition!
1. TORSO
(1973) Dir. Sergio Martino
**1/2 / Amazon Image - A
Looking at this now it's hard to believe just how thoroughly the commercial for Torso--which popped up a few times on local afternoon TV in 1973--scared my six-year old ass. The image of a girl crawling pathetically through the mud in the woods while a figure in a ski mask slowly approached, relentlessly, the girl's legs twisting in the undergrowth like she was grinding up against the mud in pathetic but vaguely aroused fearful abandon, hit a whole other pang of my six year-old psyche, the giddy jouissance of prepubescent sexual desire coupled to spine-chilling fear and dread, ala looking down from the top of a log flume, all capped with a freeze frame of the mask for TORSO! (looking at the spots now on youtube, though, he doesn't have a chainsaw which I distinctly remember). It was probably the dawning of my inner final girl qua feminism, though that seemed like a 'locking the barn door after the horse ran off' kind of approach to my sensitive prepubescent psyche. I should note however that Torso precedes even Halloween by five years, and once I saw it I realized it plays more like a giallo whodunnit with little suspense but lots of implied hacksaw dismembership, suspicious male suspects staring at each other staring, a gang of local Italian morons who seem like they could need someone to spit on their grave soon, beautiful coeds talking in the square and disposable Italian boys zipping around on scooters. Once it gets down to the final girl hiding in a bedroom, Torso gets pretty intense. Tina Aumont (above) is lovely, Suzy Kendall is the blonde with the sprained ankle and there's a hilarious cliff plunge flashback. The Amazon image is lovely and captures the old world Roman architecture divinely. Look at that deep burnished wood stain and deep red above, Aumont's lipstick corresponding to the wall color, her haunted heavy lidded eyes and rich auburn hair, the elephant statue trying vainly to trumpet of impending danger. The music gets schmaltzy and there's some terrible wallpaper and you have to imagine a world where no one is allowed to use their hands to defend themselves against scarf strangulation, or why someone with a huge knife would waste time strangling at all, but I digress. No chainsaws but a thin line between objectification (lots of exposed breasts, lesbian posturing, short skirts) and critique of male patterns of objectification (it must be hard being constantly stared at so openly by hordes of shameless leering men in every small town you go to - as with Monica V. in L'Aventura, Italian males all gather in the street and stare openly, hostilely, as if any minute a gang rape might break out --in the light of Harvey Weinstein, this shit's got a whole new level of repugnancy about it.
2. SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE
(1982) Dir. Amy Holden Jones
**1/2 / Amazon Image - B
If this flows better than most crap in its genre, it's because it's actually directed by a woman, Amy Holden Jones, for distribution via Corman's New World, though even by his standards, it's a mighty low budget affair: you can see the seams fraying at the edges, but its stripped-down narrative is also solidly constructed, with enough frills stripped away and enough of the 'right' parts of the Halloween boiler plate--the short period of almost real elapsed time (a single night), a stalker with no discernible motivation, the gradual self-reliance and savagery of the female survivors--that it stands out as almost a model of its type. While there's far too many fake-out jump scares in the first 2/3, and some of the acting is pretty bad, in the end there's several final girls stabbing in unison and the killer doesn't have a chance. The lurid poster offers the suggestive shots of the drill dangling between the killers legs while the film itself keeps the locker room puerility to a (relative) minimum and the murders are never sadistic or deviant-- rather the focus is on the girl's reactions and resolve, the way they tangle with not just fear but paranoia (when a neighbor drops by and starts calling their name, one of the girls hiding hypothesizes the neighbor might be 'in on it' and the blood chills thinking of future horror movies where that turns out to be the case) and the terrible cost wrought by Boy Who Cried Wolf-ish pranks, With clever framing and all three of the snickering horny boys with due haste dispatched, Slumber Party delivers all that may be expected from the title, has a real young Brinke Stevens early on, and an effective (if not quite Carpenterian) old school organ score. Considering the legions of terrible late night DTV wastes of time that followed, it's a goddamned miracle: a movie that delivers on what you expect, without an scene to waste. Like the film, the Amazon print is just about serviceable. And not all the hairdos are totally 80s awful.
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Meg Tilly is a somewhat naive high school student who has to spend the night at a spooky mausoleum as part of a girl gang initiation, little knowing a Russian psychic's newly interred corpse is fixin' to raise the surrounding dead, in this amiable spook show. Made right at the dawn of the slasher era, it compares more to Phantasm or Carpenter's The Fog than Halloween or Friday the 13th. The way it builds up from the sorority prank scares to the actual ones is pretty seamless, the dialogue is surprisingly adept, the characters thoughtful, for the most part, the PJ Soles impression of the bitchy gang leader (Robin Evans) is pretty on-point and her long dirty blonde hair's terrific but her henchwoman (Leslie Speights) has the unsightly habit of keeping a yellow toothbrush in her mouth at all times. Whose gross idea was that? Demerit!
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As the psychic's estranged daughter, Melissa Evans listens to a tape left by a psychic researcher who lays out the her later father's evil telekinetic talents. Adam West is her husband, though doesn't do much except poo-poo her own psychic flashes (the men in this film are little more than eye candy). The effects aren't the best, but they're fun and for a Halloween romp that sticks tight to the numbers, One Dark does it's job well, and doesn't leave a bad aftertaste. The sourced print is fairly washed out but in HD so probably comes right from the Blu-ray, and so is as good as we got, for now. Hey, the vibe is creepy, and Meg Tilly is awesome, a whole step above the rest of the cast. The following year she won all our teenage geek hearts by appearing in both The Big Chill and Psycho 2.
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Fulci fans come in all shapes and sizes Some love the attention to gore and gross-outs but some of us fancy folks like the discordant dream logic, the way it only makes sense if you let go of all your usual narrative expectations and just admire the framing and raucously ironic Fabio Frizzi synths. For them, us, me, we love the abstract the way Fulci plays on the rhythm of other movies as if a jazz counterpoint (in this case, that would be both the original Exorcist and the sequel). Franco and Rollin make films that flow like idylls dipped in the brush of nightmare, but Fulci does the reverse, he's the quicksand that lets you appreciate the beauty of the flowers even as a shambling corpse filled with maggots pulls your eyes out of their sockets. That's why firm supporters of his House by the Cemetery (see 'Nightmare Logic') should seek out Manhattan Baby, for the cast is largely the same and--hey--it's even less coherent! The plot involves a mysterious amulet given by a mysterious old lady to a girl visiting Egypt with her parents and brother. At night it opens up a stargate between some lost Pharaoh tomb and her and her brother's bedroom in the family's uptown Manhattan apartment. The dad meanwhile was temporarily blinded by the gem's twin that shot him with blue lasers. A psychic tossing them a note from a window lets them know the truth - the amulet is a gateway to evil, possessing children and trapping their souls within its sinister facets. Anyone who gets in the way, including the psychic, a taxidermist, and a louche family friend, all wind up either attacked by stuffed birds, real cats, or an interdimensional doorway that dumps them in Egypt and leaves lots of sand on the carpet after it closes again.
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The parents' initial skepticism soon gives way to concern and once the amulet is found - well, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real, what's a dream (the kids call it 'voyaging') and what's supposed to be happening in real time. If it doesn't bother you that when the wife sees the sand on the floor of the bedroom we can't tell if she's in Egypt looking down from a mountain or New York looking down at the carpet, then this is your movie. Mayne you 'get' Antonioni and the rise of psychedelic post-structuralism in Italian cinema or maybe you can just shrug and think, hey 'dream logic, bitches' - as long as you're open, as long as you stop trying to understand and just think, hey - the taxidermist psychic is named Adrian Mercata, a reference to ROSEMARY'S BABY (Adrian Marcata) so the weird title makes sense at last, (Pair w/ Argento's Inferno for an Italian film shot-in-NYC nightmare logic extravaganza)
3. ONE DARK NIGHT
(1982) Dir Tom McLoughlin
*** / Amazon Image - B-
Meg Tilly is a somewhat naive high school student who has to spend the night at a spooky mausoleum as part of a girl gang initiation, little knowing a Russian psychic's newly interred corpse is fixin' to raise the surrounding dead, in this amiable spook show. Made right at the dawn of the slasher era, it compares more to Phantasm or Carpenter's The Fog than Halloween or Friday the 13th. The way it builds up from the sorority prank scares to the actual ones is pretty seamless, the dialogue is surprisingly adept, the characters thoughtful, for the most part, the PJ Soles impression of the bitchy gang leader (Robin Evans) is pretty on-point and her long dirty blonde hair's terrific but her henchwoman (Leslie Speights) has the unsightly habit of keeping a yellow toothbrush in her mouth at all times. Whose gross idea was that? Demerit!
6. STAGEFRIGHT
(1987) Dir. Michele Soavi
**** / Amazon Image - A
It's a terrible shame that the great Michele Soavi made so few horror films while working with Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava in the 80s-90s, for he brought out the metatextual in-joke deadpan of their combined style to the point his work compares favorably with that of Antonioni and Godard, layering termite in-jokes so subtly maybe even he didn't know they were there. Even more of a shame is that of his three best films, Cemetery Man, The Devil's Daughter (see Shrouds of Soavi), and Stagefright, only the latter is readily available. I mention this all as it fits - in grand meta style -for this is the behind the scenes tale of a tawdry sex and violence theatrical performance, something clearly meant for off Broadway at the height of the mayor Koch 80s, when sex and sleaze and dance were all of a piece (Bob Fosse meets Abel Ferrara); it's a dark and stormy night, the show opens in a week, an insane killer broke out of the institution down the road, and hid in the back of the lead ingenue's car when she stopped by there to get a sprained ankle mended. She had to sneak out with the caretaker's key, which factors in later. But hey, they can tie in the murder of their wardrobe mistress with the show content and get a million in free publicity. The show must go on! The killer agrees ans is soon offing the cast, who make all the right moves (they stick together, stock up on the set designer's power tools for defense) but still can't compete with this kind of owl-headed madnman. Soon it's down to the cat and mouse between him (still in the owl head) and Barbra Cuspiti, who missed the main slaughter by being conked on the head on the way up to the rafter. Outside in the rain, the cops wait inside their squad car, presuming they can somehow help, but they can't even get inside. So the meta and Hitchockian elements beswirl: the only door key out begins to loom like a giant sculpture mirage, planted between the stage floor boards below the (now napping) killer's feet; weird mannequins gawk idly in the foreground stage right; we see the sax-playing Marilyn load a cassette with her solo into the bowl; the ingenue takes off giant fake bubble breasts; the killer plays his own leitmotif and works the effects (he's a former actor); the idea of being locked in all night with the killer has a goofball old school charm; the male leads follow a ogical course of self-defense; the fat guy tries to buy the killer off with a wad of cash; and you don't put it past Soavi to substitute real actresses in mannequin poses in some shots and not even call attention to it, or having someone below camera level slowly moving them side to side, too slow for the human eye to register; when Barbara Cuispi's shirt is the exact same light green as the backstage dressing room hallway, like; a big no-no in non-camouflage wardrobe that its broken rule aspect is both funny, reassuring and gently tension alleviating, maybe in ways I can't explain; Peter--the Byronic director-- toots blow but does it on the sly so we barely notice.
Soavi buries gems all over; a reel-to-reel tape of the Wagnerian musical score blasted (by the killer) at inopportune times makes Peter's determined vengeance seem like a Roman opera; a broken bottle of stage blood crashes to the ground right when a guy gets drilled through the door, so the two red run together. We don't just see the cops oblivious in the rain but Soavi plays with trying to get us to care or be scared for them as they delve merrily into cop cliche. Wry shit like that just piles up and though plenty tense and scary, the laughs are earned, the acting sublimely exaggerated (except for Cuspiti, who zombies out for the last 1/4, which is preferable anyway as it's suspenseful enough without hammy histrionics), and the layers of meta so interwoven that even after death the killer might manage one last smile at the camera. Amazon image, in full rich HD has such lush rich Italian blue-red palette color it's to swoon for, to the point most of the other films on this list are unbearable by contrast afterwards. (full)
***/ Amazon Image - B
Fulci fans come in all shapes and sizes Some love the attention to gore and gross-outs but some of us fancy folks like the discordant dream logic, the way it only makes sense if you let go of all your usual narrative expectations and just admire the framing and raucously ironic Fabio Frizzi synths. For them, us, me, we love the abstract the way Fulci plays on the rhythm of other movies as if a jazz counterpoint (in this case, that would be both the original Exorcist and the sequel). Franco and Rollin make films that flow like idylls dipped in the brush of nightmare, but Fulci does the reverse, he's the quicksand that lets you appreciate the beauty of the flowers even as a shambling corpse filled with maggots pulls your eyes out of their sockets. That's why firm supporters of his House by the Cemetery (see 'Nightmare Logic') should seek out Manhattan Baby, for the cast is largely the same and--hey--it's even less coherent! The plot involves a mysterious amulet given by a mysterious old lady to a girl visiting Egypt with her parents and brother. At night it opens up a stargate between some lost Pharaoh tomb and her and her brother's bedroom in the family's uptown Manhattan apartment. The dad meanwhile was temporarily blinded by the gem's twin that shot him with blue lasers. A psychic tossing them a note from a window lets them know the truth - the amulet is a gateway to evil, possessing children and trapping their souls within its sinister facets. Anyone who gets in the way, including the psychic, a taxidermist, and a louche family friend, all wind up either attacked by stuffed birds, real cats, or an interdimensional doorway that dumps them in Egypt and leaves lots of sand on the carpet after it closes again.
The parents' initial skepticism soon gives way to concern and once the amulet is found - well, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real, what's a dream (the kids call it 'voyaging') and what's supposed to be happening in real time. If it doesn't bother you that when the wife sees the sand on the floor of the bedroom we can't tell if she's in Egypt looking down from a mountain or New York looking down at the carpet, then this is your movie. Mayne you 'get' Antonioni and the rise of psychedelic post-structuralism in Italian cinema or maybe you can just shrug and think, hey 'dream logic, bitches' - as long as you're open, as long as you stop trying to understand and just think, hey - the taxidermist psychic is named Adrian Mercata, a reference to ROSEMARY'S BABY (Adrian Marcata) so the weird title makes sense at last, (Pair w/ Argento's Inferno for an Italian film shot-in-NYC nightmare logic extravaganza)
(2013) Dir. John V. Knowles
**1/2 / Amazon Image - A
This low budget attempt at a candy-colored smart girl Scream meets Heathers / Mean Girls divided by The Faculty horror comedy suggests any suspiciously well-preserved woman who drifts into your small upscale Amerixan town advocating celibacy and 'promise rings' at the local mostly all-girls school may in fact be the ever-young Countess Elizabeth Bathory, organizing groups of girls to drop by her place and become 'part' of her beauty treatment. Under the alias, 'Liz Batho,' Louise Griffiths has a field day, gorgeous, poised, effortlessly seducing students, parents, and audience alike with her mix of cool British/European poise and seductive coded-lesbian allure and cheerful disregard for the screaming victims. The stars are two smart intimate best buddies, Alison Scaglioti and Francesca Raisa, one of whom has her eyes on a college journalism scholarship so is always pitching to "HuffPo" and the other draws flowers on her face to co-opt her acne and is--well--ready to date in one pool or another. All the 'Hiltons' (this schools' version of Heathers) are planning to lose their virginity in one fell swoop before prom, and they better hurry. But what can Scaglioti and Raisa do to keep their blood to themselves? And is this the story 'HuffPo' finally accepts?
7. CHOPPING MALL
(1986) Dir. Jim Wynorski
**1/2 / Amazon Image - A
8. TERRORVISION
(1986) Dir. Ted Nicolau
*** / Amazon Image - A
Good natured mid-80s MTV/New Wave/mall culture/punk horror/sci-fi comedy in the vein of EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY, NIGHT OF THE COMET, REPO MAN, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and BUCKAROO BANZAI, this Charles Band joint is the story of an ugly but hilarious blob-crab-style alien materializing via the newly installed satellite TV of a looney upscale Malibu family, helmed by mom Mary Woronov and dad Gerritt Graham (they're swingers), Diane Franklin is their Cyndi Lauper-ish teen daughter; Chad Allen a tow-head young gun nut under the tutelage of his crackpot survivalist war vet grandfather (Bert Remsen) who lives in the adjacent bomb shelter. TV horror hostess Madame Medusa (Jennifer Richards) shows up expecting a party, as do a swinger couple (Alejandro Rey and Randi Brooks [above]. Jonathan Gries is the daughter's metalhead boyfriend ("too rude!"). They're all on the same page, sitcom-from-Hell overacting-wise, a style that perfectly matches its loud 80s colors and bizarro decor (it's all filmed on indoor sets with psychedelic skies outside the windows). The huge ugly space monster is grotesque but there's also a 'good' alien dispatched to retrieve him trying to convince the family he's talking to them directly through the screen rather than just helmning some old monster movie.
This all might be unpleasant on the eyes were you to see it on a faded, streaky VHS, but with the Prime HD image the vibrant lighting makes the colors sing and it's a total rush perfect for Halloween. Underneath the gross-outs and decadence lurks a loving spirit that triangulates its genial signal somewhere between 60s John Waters, 80s Tim Burton, and 50s Roger Corman. Too rude! Or rather, just rude enough. (Full)
(2016) Dir. Anna Biller
***1/2 / Amazon Image - B+
Anna Biller's fond ode to the early-70s (women's lib-inspired) 'suburban housewife joins witch coven' American cinematic subgenre (and its Eurosleaze erotic black widow variation) is ripe with a pagan Thoth Tarot Deck-inspired color palette and a sense of real danger, diligently spinnereted to Jacques Demy fairy tale romance with a 'Satan's School for Gifted Youngsters' annual solstice pageant primitivism that keeps it from being either too campy or realistic. Comfortably ensconced in the middle ground between power of suggestion paranoia (as in Polanski) and fantasy, we can't really tell for sure where real magic, power of suggestion, and delusional madness divide within the psyche of our beautiful but clearly cracked lead/narrator, which is how it should be if you want your movie to resonate with uncanny frisson, as this does. As the vintage Morricone patches the disparate pastiche elements into a coherent whole, Biller ointments up her broomstick and flies herself up ahead to act as point guard for this whole new flock of new filmmakers, I've written lovingly about, who use the 60s-70s 'Euro-artsleaze' genre as a palette from which to paint uncanny new vistas, and in some cases--such as Billers'--bringing in a whole other level of filmmaking cohesion. Any separation between art /experimental, film, narrative, genre, retro-pastiche, present and past --all gone in the capable hands of this quintuple threat. Even the terrible hyper-mannered acting is so uncanny it resonates in the mind long after viewing is done. (full)
(PS, if you dare, pair w/ Blood Orgy of the She-Devils)
(1971) Dir. Harry Kümel
*** 1/2 / Amazon Image - A-
If the Countess Bathory themes from Chastity Bites still got you fidgeting under the collar then you may want to cool down with this slice of elegant perversion, a real benchmark favorite with the ivory-handled lesbian contingent of feminist horror film school lovers, perhaps the most sophisticated and poetic of the deluge of lesbian vampire movies that flooded screens in 1971, easily the best acted thanks to a first-rate Dietrich-esque performance from Delphine Seyrig. This takes themes from the Fanu's Carmilla source text (a bewitching woman seduces young innocent away from her straight lover, or father, or something), with Last Year at Marienbad enigma-xotica (see: Last Year at Marien... something something) with latter Dietrich Fassbinder drag and off-season old world Belgian hotel class belying real forceful menace. The story follows a naive young beauty (Danielle Ouimet) on her European honeymoon with Stefan (John Karlen) who even an American tourist could probably tell is a gay hustler on walkabout. Bathory (Seyrig) and her young full-lipped consort (Andrea Rau) spot the lovers (no one else is at the hotel) and before you can say 'the doorman who remembers her from before the war is beginning to be suspicious that she's never aged,' the countess is luring Stefan into orgiastic discussions of sadistic cruelty in order to drive his bewildered bride to her arms. The enigmatic ending and celebratory murder are both pretty cool and the whole thing has a washed-in-the-tide kind of ambience that does what Marienbad was trying to do with way more charm, old world ennui-soaked sophisticated menage-a-whatever decadence and dry wit. Seyrig imbues her role with such heavy-duty old world menacing charm she could scare Bela Lugosi. There's no escaping her, like death itself and when she wears that spangly disco ball Ziggy Stardust sheathe gown you're powerless to escape her teutonic glam rock gravitas.
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ASIDE: Standing tall with Dracula's Daughter and Xena in the annals of beloved lesbian fantasy texts, there's an interesting gay-sploitation moment or two in Daughters of Darkness when Stefan calls his gay sugar daddy, who we see wearing garish make-up while lounging by his indoor pool. Though freakishly presented, we identify with his heartbreak when he learns Stefan is married, the way he tries to keep a stoic face even over the phone, and we're left to imagine the fight between them that led to current state of events, all while the bride playfully unwittingly tries to get at the phone thinking he's trying to talk to his mom and making plans to come visit at the family estate. When you consider the way gay directors could express their own lifestyle only under the promise that they, in a sense, camp it up and mince around, make a freak show out of it, one gets at a terrible truth in the core of the post-vs.-pre-Stonewall struggle: the gay lifestyle can be shown in high camp provided it undercuts with tragic self-loathing. At the same time we're encouraged to fall under Countess's sway and to see Stefan's sense of what's right (the man gives the orders and instigates the sex - the wife submits) as a bullying child's feeble attempt to counter the subtler sapphic machinations of the Countess and her invigorating 'sickness'. Hot stuff, served cold as Belgian fog. Kümel made Malpertius the same year.
11. DAY OF THE ANIMALS
(1977) Dir. William Girdler
**1/2 / Amazon Image - B-
From a different time, when 70s America was at the height of its post-Jaws eco-horror and ensemble cast disaster movie fever, this has a big camping tour group who find themselves adrift in the High Sierras when the hole in the ozone layer causes all animals to go insane and start attacking humans, sometimes in teams. Everything from hordes of mice to carloads of snakes show up and the big climax involves the survivors taking shelter against a pack of wild dogs. Leslie Nielsen is the guy who snaps his animal brain and tries to rape a young girl, rants about Melville's god, makes some old Bronx character actress cry with the realization she shouldn't have followed him when the gang split up, and fights a grizzly, all bare-chested like a white-haired Putin. Director Girdler has no gift for momentum or suspense, but he feels his way along in real time, in real mountain mannish boy's life nature, with semi-real actors (including an adult but very small male stuntman posing trying to pass as a child -- a very grotesque effect) and real animals--especially vultures, hawks, a cougar, a crazy dog pack, and a tarantula--the scene where the hawks and vultures maul the bitchy girl is terrifying because those birds are real, and they're right there in the shot, and her unease is palpable. The amazing near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. (Full)
12. MESA OF LOST WOMEN
(1953) Dir. Ron Ormond
**** / Amazon Image - C
(see: "So Close to Heaven")
I'm mighty glad that Prime has so many of my favorite late night spider woman films, the ones that get me through everything from panic attacks to the DTs to boredom to not being able to choose anything else to watch and too lazy to rummage. A PD title for decades, quality's always been poor on the Mesa but thats part of its dog-eared charm. I used to have this on a 6-hour tape with Mesa of Lost Women (which I think uses the same giant spider puppet) and Spider Baby,bro, how cool is that? Can you see me now, watching that tape over and over, pounding cheap whiskey under the relentless rain on the flat roof of our Seattle bungalow circa 1990, while my lovely soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend galavanted around with garlic-eating hippie freak contingents, ushered along by some smitten open mike guy who laughed like startled mare? Dude, I know! Great films for it. The whiskey's long gone, so is the girl, so is Seattle (down the rearview mirror hatch), but that 6-hour spider girl tape, well, I still keep 'er around, in case. All the other tapes are long gone but that that one's still on the shelf- just because, because spider women on a mesa. Just knowing they're there, is what's important. Out there, up on that mesa, playing the climax of Freaks with the whole mesa as the underneath of the Emerald City circus wagon? And crazy what's his name, packing a gun and hijacking a flight out of there after shooting a cantina dancer. And that music, that clanging cacophony of piano mashes and flamenco guitar. Ooh ooh! Can I see it again... right now?
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Al Zimbalist's 'finest' hour is a moody trash heap that manages to create a strangely poetic vibe thanks to the cool beatnik coffee house improv dance troupe vibe of the cat women aliens (who live in a telepathic all-female clique on the moon) and a beguilingly low-key score by the then-just-starting out Elmer Bernstein. The moon seems very groovy indeed - but the astronaut's ship is bolted together sides of sheet metal, sort of halfway between a quonset hut and a trash can, but hey, the cots and hammocks all look relaxing. NASA doesn't yet seem to exist, so one of the astronauts throws in plugs for various products when he gets some radio time, hoping they send him a couple of bucks. He wants hard to make you aware his character only cares about money, baby. Sonny Tufts is the dimwit leader who's dating Marie Windsor, instead of Victor Jory, the seether of the group, who's too busy fuming like a little bitch cuz the cat women stole their space suits to have fun (he packs a 45 automatic, just in case). The young human radio operator and the young innocent Lambda fall in love (she wants to go to America and have, what you call it, 'a Coke.') And there's a giant spider. No, TWO giant spiders. The kind of film that, once seen, must be immediately forgotten, and/or followed up with Mesa of Lost Women, Spider Baby and/or Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! I had them all on a 6-hour tape compiled from video rentals from a nearby Kim-ish record store near my chosen Seattle state store and watched it over and over in an amniotic blissful bourbon fog (more) all through 1989-90. I still can't move on, mentally, from that (feel like I just talked about that, 'hiccup') and now, thanks to Prime, I don't have to. As for you, your mileage may vary but you'll still find this Moon trip with plenty of goose left, whatever that means, baby. Whatever that means... (I mention it as they've uploaded a really nice print of this film to the Prime site, it looks better than e'er I've seen it. Don't miss it - whatever the damage).
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A huge star in HK and Mainland China, Stephen Chow is mostly unknown in the west, partly because he's not Jackie Chan or Jet Li and his satire skewers a pop culture partially different than ours but if you've seen any Asian horror movies in the last 25 years -- Ringu, Ju-On, Pulse, Dark Water, Suicide Club, Tale of Two Sisters, Audition, A Chinese Ghost Story, etc. or classics beloved of Hong Kong, like The Evil Dead and The Professional, you should get at least 80% of the jokes, and they fly by so fast it won't matter about the others. Chow stars as a crazy ghost hunter Leo, called to a towering HK apartment complex to exorcise the vengeful spirit of a squabbling couple's recently deceased mother. Their cute neighbor (Karen Mok) finds Chow's ghost chaser--with his long black coat, sunglasses and mysterious Chow Yun Fatty ways--intriguing. Soon she's showing up where he lives (a lunatic asylum) and following him around. He lets her carry his houseplant (its stamen acts as a spirit diving rod) and faces off against an evil mom spirit living in the TV who can possess anyone at any time (and the subsequent husband and wife die and become evil ghosts too) and trains her and the guards in ghost detection via a hilarious sequence of tests to remove their fear, as in lit dynamite hot potato. He does hilarious things like performing CPR with a hammer and catching ghosts with saran wrap and a bullhorn.
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The overall impression is fairly grimy but the laughs are served with a genuine relentless chill in ways Sam Raimi or Stuart Gordon would approve. It's raucous, witty and moves so fast you're afraid to laugh lest you miss something. It's also relentlessly intense, especially the prolonged climax where the spirits keep possessing random members of the party, including even Leo himself, and coming at them with a chainsaw even while they're flying with paper hats. (In Cantonese w/ burnt-in English subtitles)
(1953) Dir. Al Zimbalist
**** / Amazon Image - A
Al Zimbalist's 'finest' hour is a moody trash heap that manages to create a strangely poetic vibe thanks to the cool beatnik coffee house improv dance troupe vibe of the cat women aliens (who live in a telepathic all-female clique on the moon) and a beguilingly low-key score by the then-just-starting out Elmer Bernstein. The moon seems very groovy indeed - but the astronaut's ship is bolted together sides of sheet metal, sort of halfway between a quonset hut and a trash can, but hey, the cots and hammocks all look relaxing. NASA doesn't yet seem to exist, so one of the astronauts throws in plugs for various products when he gets some radio time, hoping they send him a couple of bucks. He wants hard to make you aware his character only cares about money, baby. Sonny Tufts is the dimwit leader who's dating Marie Windsor, instead of Victor Jory, the seether of the group, who's too busy fuming like a little bitch cuz the cat women stole their space suits to have fun (he packs a 45 automatic, just in case). The young human radio operator and the young innocent Lambda fall in love (she wants to go to America and have, what you call it, 'a Coke.') And there's a giant spider. No, TWO giant spiders. The kind of film that, once seen, must be immediately forgotten, and/or followed up with Mesa of Lost Women, Spider Baby and/or Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! I had them all on a 6-hour tape compiled from video rentals from a nearby Kim-ish record store near my chosen Seattle state store and watched it over and over in an amniotic blissful bourbon fog (more) all through 1989-90. I still can't move on, mentally, from that (feel like I just talked about that, 'hiccup') and now, thanks to Prime, I don't have to. As for you, your mileage may vary but you'll still find this Moon trip with plenty of goose left, whatever that means, baby. Whatever that means... (I mention it as they've uploaded a really nice print of this film to the Prime site, it looks better than e'er I've seen it. Don't miss it - whatever the damage).
14. OUT OF THE DARK
"Wui wan yeh" (1995)
Dir. Stephen Chow
*** / Amazon Image - A
The overall impression is fairly grimy but the laughs are served with a genuine relentless chill in ways Sam Raimi or Stuart Gordon would approve. It's raucous, witty and moves so fast you're afraid to laugh lest you miss something. It's also relentlessly intense, especially the prolonged climax where the spirits keep possessing random members of the party, including even Leo himself, and coming at them with a chainsaw even while they're flying with paper hats. (In Cantonese w/ burnt-in English subtitles)
15. THE SUPER INFRA-MAN
(1977) Dir. Shan Hua
**** / Amazon Image - A++
Another thing for sure, even as a five year-old I would have found the whip-snapping world-conquering Princess Dragon Mom super sexy. The idea of having the super villain be female, with 'Mom' in her name, with a sexy right hand woman with eyeball hands that shoot lasers, and an army of guys in skull motorcycle helmets is genius. It's Mozart. And the crazy fighting is insane, a mix of high wire kung fu chops meets Batman x early James Bond x Sid and Marty Kroft art design. If I was a kid seeing this at a theater matinee, I would have grown up far differently. It's not too late.
RECOMMENDED on PRIME