And now a word from our sponsor...

A metaphor for something, I'm sure...

Hey kids,

Yes, it’s true. It’s mid-August and these are films that I saw back in June. You see, what had happened was....

No, no excuses. Just changes and life and adjustments and distractions and priorities and so on. As some of you might have noticed, I’ve also gotten quite a bit gabbier over the past year, at least about certain films. Once the master of the capsule review, now it seems I can’t stop yakking once I get started. And having spilled that much virtual ink, I then feel obliged to track down a few images to break up the wordy beast. Final result? It takes longer to write a review, and consequently, I don’t have as much time to watch movies (which was half the reason why I was writing capsule reviews in the first place!). Add in the ongoing time-management issues of rehearsals and performances and other artistic endeavors (such as a certain booky wook that will soon be seeing the light of day – stay tuned) and what you get is what you see.

The happy/sad news is people keep telling me that they really enjoy reading these longer reviews with all the pretty pictures, especially since most aren’t reading them until after they see the films in question anyway. (I can relate to this, being the spoiler-shy purist ninny that I am.) So, if it’s a post-show chat we’re looking for, might as well ramble on and that’s probably the direction we’re going to continue to head. As a result, there are going to be some films that get the “star treatment” and some for whom the time-honored Fool’s Views Haikus™ are going to have to suffice. Obviously, if you want to hear more about a certain flick, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to jaw on a bit about it.

What I don’t want is this nasty ongoing habit of finding myself weeks and months behind schedule in terms of a weekly Fool’s Views report. So, we’re going to get a little more rigorous about posting in a timely fashion, and then expanding our coverage as time and enthusiasm allows. How’s that sound, true believers?

As always, feel free to leave your two cents worth – we’ll make sure you get some change back.

Enjoy!



HORROR:

Baba Yaga (aka Kiss Me Kill Me) (1973) (2nd viewing) d. Farina, Corrado (Italy)

Sassy shutterbug
Meets possessive lezzy witch
Holey floor, Batman

Earth Dies Screaming, The (1964) (1st viewing) d. Fisher, Terence (UK)

Where is everyone?
Robots, boiled brains, white eyes
Solid Brit sci-fi

Gorilla at Large (1954) (1st viewing) d. Jones, Harmon (USA)

Hot Anne, skinny Cam
Two times Lee, Ray, George B.
Star studded ape flick

Purge, The (2013) (1st viewing) d. DeMonaco, James (USA)

Fine invasion flick
Enjoyable high concept
Just don’t think too hard

This is the End (2013) (1st viewing) d. Goldberg, Evan / Rogen, Seth (USA)

Stars playing themselves
Decent laughs if sometimes strained
Worth your Redbox buck

Venom (1981) (1st viewing) d. Haggard, Piers (UK)

Poisonous snake loose
Great scenery chewing cast
Silly serpent-cam

World War Z (2013) (1st viewing) d. Forster, Marc (USA)

Megabucks zom flick
Not the book, but not half bad
Missed seeing red stuff

**CLICK HERE FOR FULL REVIEW**





KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY:

Manson Family, The (2003) (2nd viewing) d. VanBebber, Jim (USA)
In the Belly of the Beast (2001) (1st viewing) d. Chisholm, Alex (Canada)
VanBebber Family, The (2005) (1st viewing) d. Gregory, David (USA)

Helter Skelter time
One great feature, two fine docs
Worth the Blu-ray bucks

**CLICK HERE FOR FULL REVIEW**




CIVILIAN:

Gymkata (1985) (1st viewing) d. Clouse, Robert (USA)

Kurt is no badass
Which just makes it funnier
Pommel that horse, boy

Man of Steel (2013) (1st viewing) d. Snyder, Zack (USA)

Big Bam Boom Blah Blah
Huge yawntastic action scenes
Waste of money, time

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) (1st viewing) d. Abrams, J.J. (USA)

Thin spineless cartoon
Zippity doo dumb effects
Just watch Wrath of Khan



2013 Totals to date: 171 films, 160 1st time views, 91 horror, 53 cinema

AUGUST 12, 2013

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I know I still have a few missing entries when it comes to golden era slashers - Night School in particular bugs me - but I hope that X-Ray (aka Hospital Massacre, Ward 13, and even the hilarious Be My Valentine... Or ELSE) is the only one of note that I hadn't actually HEARD OF until fairly recently. It was actually only when I revisited New Year's Evil for a BadassDigest article a couple years back (not when I first watched the movie for HMAD) that I saw it advertised at the end of the film, promised as coming soon (with the "Be My Valentine..." title) the way the next James Bond movie is promised at the end of the credits on those movies. And at first I assumed the film was never made since I couldn't find one under that title, but some digging turned up the X-Ray title, and thus, here we are (thanks to Scream Factory).

Of course, if it was a great movie it would be more well known, but it's a pretty decent slasher that should satisfy fans of that era, and it's certainly better than Visiting Hours (which came along a few weeks later and made considerably more money), if we're comparing our hospital horror movies. The whodunit angle is so lazy that they shouldn't even have bothered, since they not only follow the template of making him the most normal guy our heroine encounters, but they don't even change his name! In the opening flashback scene, we see a kid give a girl a Valentine, which she scoffs at. Angry, he kills her playmate and then, I guess, spends years studying and training to become a doctor, just on the off chance that the girl would happen to come to his hospital someday for a checkup so he could finally get his revenge. Even by slasher standards this is a bit flimsy/ridiculous, but the fact that he's even got the same name (well, a very common nickname of it anyway) makes the whole idea of making it a reveal kind of a puzzle.

But otherwise, it delivers the goods. The kills aren't very inventive, but they're surprisingly bloody considering how dickish the MPAA was at that time (with the very lax Valentine's Day setting, it's impossible not to think of My Bloody Valentine*, which barely had any red splatter at all), and the body count is acceptable - 6 or 7, plus the opening flashback (which is off-screen since it's a kid, but man - the reveal of his body is a knockout). Speaking of the opener, young Barbi Benton is played by Elizabeth Hoy from Bloody Birthday (she was Debbie, the girl of the murderous trio), and the kid doing the killing is her Bloody buddy Billy Jacoby (Curtis). A shame that they couldn't have gotten the other kid to play the one who ends up dead, it would have been a wonderfully weird reunion. But they make up for it in the credits by billing him as "Young Dave" (along with "Young Susan" and "Young ___ (the killer)"), despite the fact that he died and thus never got to be "Present Day Dave".

Another thing I loved was the aggressive score by Arlon Ober, who coincidentally also did the music for Bloody Birthday (as well as The Incredible Melting Man!). It seems his primary influences were Black Christmas and Jerry Goldsmith's score for The Omen, but being a post-Friday the 13th world, I couldn't help but wonder if the odd vocals mixed within his cues were in some way making fun of Harry Manfredini, as they seem to be parodies of his "Ki-Ki, Ma-Ma" motif (one sounds like "Little Caesar" over and over). The movie may or may not deserve its obscure status, but the score definitely deserves a CD release. How about it, Death Waltz Records? Likewise, the movie has all these weird attempts at red herrings, as well as oddball patients that add a ton of strange atmosphere to the movie, like the three old ladies (I'm convinced one of them is a dude in drag, by the way) who harass Benton for no reason other than to thankfully give the movie a bit of unexpected flavor.

Of course, smoothing over just about any flaw in the film (such as the rather repetitive structure; two kills are the result of a panicked person finding the previous body and, seeking help, running into the killer, mistaking him for a friendly doctor) is Ms. Benton, who deserves any superlative meaning "pretty" one could use to compliment a human being. Maybe not the best actress in the world (this appears to be her only starring role in a feature film, though she did lots of TV), but the role doesn't require much from her beyond getting annoyed/terrified, so it's fine, and it's endlessly amusing to see her smoking in a hospital four or five times (her lighter even provides the movie with one of its better suspense scenes). Of course, in 1982 it was pretty much OK to do this, but now it's almost like her character is a rebel, rather than just dating the movie.

The movie also does a decent enough job of finding ways to keep her there. The hospital isn't contained or in some out of the way locale, and despite the Valentine's setting the staff doesn't shirk their duties (this has to be the only slasher of the era where no one goes off with their partner to fool around), so Benton spends a while just trying to find her doctor, and then the killer replaces her file with someone else's. Thus, when someone looks at her X-rays (movie name: justified!) they see something suspicious and keep her there, and then even though they were of her lungs the staff decides she has mental problems, putting her under observation and confining her to a room. Hilariously, since she was just there to pick up her test results, her boyfriend spends most of the movie sitting outside in the waiting parking lot, taking a very long nap before finally coming inside to see what the hell is up.

Shout's blu-ray/DVD combo comes with an interview with director Boaz Davidson, who admits that directing horror isn't his forte (though he likes the genre) and talks a bit about making the film, though it seems like a re-edited portion of an all purpose interview more than one specific to this film, as only a couple of the 13 minutes focus on it. Still, worth a listen, and the film Schizoid, starring Klaus Kinski, is also included. I'll get to that one soon (it's not the Pete Walker Schizoid), as it's another film that never made it to DVD and might have been lost forever if Scream Factory wasn't hellbent on devouring our wallets every month. Thanks to them, there's hope for a proper release of Cathy's Curse!

What say you?

*When I was like 15 I dreamed up a sequel to MBV that took place in a hospital. If MBV was a bigger hit and actually GOT a sequel, they could have beaten these guys to the punch!

Tweet

Schizoid (1980) d. Paulsen, David (USA)

Written/directed by Savage Weekend’s Paulsen, who later enjoyed massive success as a producer of nighttime soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and Knots Landing, Schizoid exhibits hints of being a far more interesting film than the final result. Right around the same time advice columnist Marianna Hill begins receiving anonymous cut n’ paste letters threatening her safety, members of her therapy support group begin falling victim to a mysterious scissor-wielding maniac.

Unfortunately, the affair is handled so clumsily that the various characters might as well have “Suspect” or “Victim” superimposed above their heads, along with a percentage value of the odds. Because our therapist is played by career crazyman Klaus Kinski, he immediately draws pole position as the prime suspect, followed closely by Hill’s ex-husband Craig Wasson, loopy mechanic Christopher Lloyd and Kinski’s embittered daughter Donna Wilkes, angry that dad is knocking boots with the clientele.

Considering the live-wire cast and lurid subject matter, one wishes this had been more sleazy fun. Early on, Kinski eyeballs Wilkes in the shower, hinting at incestuous desires that never rear their heads again.

There’s a mid-film sequence with Lloyd and Hill in an elevator that makes us wish the rising Taxi star had had more to do other than be an obvious red herring.

Wasson has never been one of my favorites, and he does little to curry favor here, egregiously Overacting with a capital O.

There’s a bizarre post-dance tryst between breezy stripper Flo Gerrish and Kinski that comes out of nowhere and leads to same – if he’d been sleeping with all of his female patients, it might have been a kinky little can of worms. Instead, it’s merely an excuse to flash more skin.

(Speaking of which: what therapy group members meet outside of session for topless hot tub parties?)

The killings themselves feel as perfunctory as the nudity, serving as placemarkers by which to watch the clock. Wilkes throws a few engaging snit fits toward Kinski’s liaison with Hill, but it always smacks of a heavy handed misdirect.

The second bill on Scream Factory’s Golan-Globus/Cannon double feature Blu-ray/DVD combo with the loopier, zippier, nigh-hallucinogenic freakshow X-Ray aka Hospital Massacre, Schizoid ultimately feels a bit of a slog with occasional bright moments saving it from being a total waste of time. Similar in tone is Red Shirt Pictures’ interview with Wilkes, which has a few interesting tidbits (accidentally stabbing co-star Wasson during a particularly lively shooting day, touring Europe in support of 1984’s “high school student by day, hooker by night” exploitation smash Angel) but doesn’t really offer much in the way of fresh insight into the actress or the feature.

Schizoid is available for pre-order at Shout! Factory, with a release date of August 20.

https://www.shoutfactory.com/node/217639

--Aaron Christensen, HorrorHound Magazine

X-Ray (aka Hospital Massacre) (1982) d. Davidson, Boaz (USA)

Cannon! Golan-Globus! Barbi Benton! Boaz Davidson! (Always a good sign when one finds oneself shouting the opening credits aloud.)

X-Ray, or Hospital Massacre as it was often known during its initial release, kicks off with little blonde Susan, excitedly playing with trains with her brother, spurning young admirer Harold’s ding dong ditch approach to Valentine’s romance. Payback comes instantly in the form of her sibling finding himself impaled through the neck and left hanging from the hat rack. (Okay, this little guy Harold is already terrifying on a superhuman level in in terms of lethal swiftness and strength. Give him a wide berth.)

Flash forward 19 years to the (Valentine’s) day, with Susan (Barbi Benton) grown up, lookin’ fine, brunette (?), and divorced from ex-husband Tom (Jimmy Stathis) though the two seem to have produced a perfectly lovely daughter. She is currently engaged to simpering wimp Jack (Jon Van Ness), who drives her to the local hospital to pick up her recent physical test results, required for her new job’s health insurance plan. Little does she know that someone on the staff is laying in wait, “doctoring” her charts so as to create a need for additional tests. Susan is subsequently (and unwillingly) incarcerated; at the same time, the staff is systematically and viciously whittled down.

Davidson is probably better known as a producer and writer than director (this and The Last American Virgin, both from 1982, probably rank as his two best known efforts), and his prolific output in all arenas has been scattershot to say the least. In the accompanying Red Shirt Pictures featurette on Scream Factory’s recent Blu-ray release, “Bad Medicine,” the Israeli-born filmmaker explains that he inherited the big chair after the original director stepped (or was pushed) down just prior to shooting.

Not having any experience and only limited interest in the horror genre, it’s enjoyable to see the array of playful misdirection that Davidson and screenwriter Marc Behm enjoy with the established slasher tropes (young Susan with huge a knife...with which to cut her Valentine’s cake, red stuff dripping suspiciously on Benton’s white shoes...courtesy of her fellow elevator passenger’s hamburger, the leering hospital janitor...leering like a red herring champ). For someone relatively unversed in the horror genre, Boaz knows football, er, slashers. Ahem, little joke for the ’80s kids out there.

The body count is generous, and while we don’t see much in the way of onscreen slicing and dicing, there’s no shortage of squirting and splashing onto our surgically masked maniac. There’s not much to the mystery as to who the killer is – heck, he doesn’t even bother to change his name! The real questions are logistical in nature: What the hell kind of hospital is this? What the hell could have been written on her records to justify such behavior by the hospital staff?

Is there anyone in this facility that isn’t a total creeper? Who are the loopy ancient patients that give Benton such a hard time? Isn’t one of them a guy in a wig and drag?

Who knew that an acid bath would turn a guy’s face into a kindergarten craft project?

Where did the cake box come from?

Or the butcher knife...

or the hatchet...or...?

However, viewed in a certain mindset, these peculiarities are unexpected assets rather than drawbacks. Hospital Massacre isn’t as completely loopy as some Italian or Spanish outings, but it’s not far off when we see Benton screaming her head off through hallways filled with fog, stumbling into traction wards packed with gyrating patients, or indulging in some spirited improvisational protestations. (“Stupid nurse! This hospital is crazy! I’m not having a seizure! What is wrong with you? Let me go! I saw a murder! Stupid nurse!”)

But the best piece of nonsense comes in the form of Benton’s completely unnecessary disrobing to have her blood pressure taken – not so much in that she takes her clothes off (this was Hugh Hefner’s former girlfriend, after all), but how the “teasing before pleasing” sequence is handled.

After having been extensively toyed with – being shown Benton’s silhouette behind a dressing screen, her naked back from behind and her feminine wiles framed out below the collar bone – just when we start to think we’re not going to get any action at all, Davidson’s cameraman takes it upon himself to dolly around so that we can get a nice long look. It’s a truly awesome moment.

Almost as awesome as the subsequent high-def reveal that John Warner Williams (as no-nonsense Doc Saxon) has shaved his hairy knuckles for the healing hands’ close-ups.

Composer Arlon Ober rips off Jerry Goldsmith’s Omen score every chance he gets, playing ominous dark choral riffs a la “Ave Satana” every time someone gets offed, and the moody cinematography comes courtesy Nicholas von Sternberg, son of famed director Josef von Sternberg.

Though Davidson claims the shoot was done inside a real abandoned hospital (or at least a few floors of it, to his memory), it looks for all the world like someone’s apartment complex, from the outside façade and its giant generic black HOSPITAL sign to the hallways that shout out “urban blight.” Speaking of hospitals, this is about the least realistic depiction of a medical facility since Halloween II. Minimal staff, random rooms filled with random equipment, crazy patients, slipshod Hippocratic standards, and so on.

Benton is undeniably pleasant to look at and the overreaching wackiness throughout keeps viewers enjoyably off balance. Hats off to Scream Factory for bringing this long forgotten patient back from the dead, on a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack paired with the lesser Klaus Kinski psycho vehicle Schizoid, both being early '80s Cannon/Golan-Globus offerings.

Available for pre-order now for an August 20 release.

https://www.shoutfactory.com/node/217639

--Aaron Christensen, HorrorHound Magazine

AUGUST 9, 2013

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

Spielberg recently made some comments about tiered pricing for movies; he predicts someday that an Iron Man sequel would cost 25 dollars whereas something like his Lincoln would cost only 7. It's a scary scenario (more for the former; Iron Man movies are fine, but what if it's as bad as Wolverine Origins?), and if he's right, it will leave movies like Jug Face in a worse position that they're already in - horror's hot as hell right now, but it's going the same VOD first, thankless and minimal arthouse theatrical release later route as so many of its peers. It's already getting harder for these movies to get much attention without the benefit of a big marketing campaign or wide theatrical release - what about five years from now?

But, if he's right about the pricing, it'd be cool to see a movie like this playing at 1/3 the cost of the other films, which would hopefully inspire folks to check it out. There isn't much to it; it's one of those movies that I couldn't even give too much of a plot description without feeling like I was spoiling too much, so there is definitely some merit to the idea that maybe an audience, now used to films running over 2 hrs, should pay less to see this minimal, barely 80 minute movie. Especially when you consider that stuffing a lot of exposition down our throats is not part of the deal. Our characters routinely sacrifice members of their community to "The Pit", with the idea being that it will also heal them when necessary, and, like Children of the Corn and its sequels, their silly-sounding deity turns out to be real, but the key difference is we don't get much information (or even a real look) at it.

However, the gore and violence is kept to a minimum as far as the pit is concerned - the real meat of the movie stems from the many tragic effects of our protagonist's attempt to save her skin. Early on, she gets pregnant with someone she most certainly shouldn't have even been getting to first base with, and at the same time, finds out she is next to be sacrificed to the pit. So she hides the evidence of both, leading to a chain of events that sees many people killed for no reason - some by the hands of other townsfolk (which is to say backwoods hillbillies, led by Larry Fessenden), others by the pit, angry that it did not get its intended sacrifice. There are some weird ghostly beings and unexplained visions that flesh out the extent of the pit's power without ever really coming down hard on its origins (or how the hillbillies figured out what it wanted), enough to put this into the horror category - but mostly it feels like a hill person version of Fargo or even The Crucible, with one selfish act spiraling into unimaginable tragedy.

And no one is more tragic than Dewai, played by Sean Bridgers (the Will Ferrell-y guy from The Woman, nearly unrecognizable here with thick glasses and a fantastic beard). He's the potter who makes the titular Jug Faces, which when revealed will tell the town who needs to be sacrificed, and gets roped into helping "heroine" Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter, another The Woman alum) cover up her misdeeds and ends up getting the brunt of the punishment. While most of the focus is on Ada, Dewai was the most sympathetic character by far, and Bridgers is fantastic, playing many scenes with just a few sad, lovelorn looks to convey his state of mind. Hopefully at the end of the year, when folks are doing their "Best of horror" lists, his performance is remembered.

Like I said though, there isn't much to the movie, in turn leaving me without much to say. There are a couple of minor characters that seem to exist just to pad things out to that 80 minutes, and what seems like 5 different scenes of Ada hiding her jug face. And Sean Young's character just baffled me, hating her daughter for no reason right from the start, making it a shrug of a moment when she actually has a reason to treat her the same way she's been treating her throughout the movie (Fessenden turning on her after being the loving on was much more effective). Maybe they figured Young would be yelling and angry all the time anyway so why bother trying to get her to play someone a bit warmer?

I DO want to talk about the opening title sequence, represented with what can best be described the "motion comic" version of a child's chalk/crayon drawings. It runs just under three minutes and pretty much acts as a prequel, telling what I assume is the story of the first jug face sacrifice, though I'm not sure if what is happening actually comes across unless you've seen the (much clearer) movie that follows it - perhaps it could have been used at the END of the movie? But either way, it's a gorgeous, creative sequence; the type I wish I saw more often, and even if you don't realize it at the time, is also pretty much the only background info on the pit that the movie offers (which means that if you're watching at home and you fast forward the "credits", you'll be left with even less information.

In short, Jug Face is one of the more unusual genre films of the year, and should satisfy fans of the people involved (Lucky McKee is an exec producer), as they have a knack for these sort of "hard-sell", more dramatic horror films. 2013 has been a blessedly "original" one for the most part - very few remakes and sequels are popping up, while original properties like The Conjuring, The Purge, and You're Next (I assume) clean up at the box office, which can only help films like this get a little bit of exposure (as opposed to a time like in 2006, where you were either a remake/sequel or you were nothing). As long as people can get on board with the wacky plot, they should be satisfied with this little gem.

What say you?

Tweet