Thursday, November 29, 2012

Naked Killer



 The Naked Killer Directed By Clarence Fok Yiu-leung (1992) Starring Simon Yam
      This film is blatantly ripping off Basic Instinct and La Femme Nikita and the whole thing looks great, but doesn't add up to much! I've been waiting so long to see it (between the long wait on Netflix and it taking forever to show up on Youtube)!
The beginning looks like an Asian Red Shoe Diaries. The sequel Raped By An Angel (was alot more extreme) it even had an "AIDS Clown", I saw that before the original. The subtitles come at you fast and furious I had to stop this a few times to process what I was watching! Everything looks like a hyper stylized Pepsi commercial. The attractive women are all prone to extreme genital violence (one guy loses a ball, another is shot in the dick and another is stabbed in the balls)!

       Simon Yam former Dr. Lamb plays Mr. Tinam, a traumatized cop whose brother was killed and works for a lunkhead boss who keeps telling him to shave and get a haircut (like that will improve his psyche)? He drinks milk with a straw and vomits when anyone points a gun at him, he's trying to solve the case. Kitty flirts severely with Tinam in a short red skintight number and threatens to have sex on his car, but doesn't. Later her father catches his wife cheating, flips out and accidentally stabs himself with scissors while falling down the stairs. She tracks down the cheater (his name is Bee) at his corporate office and in the process shoots him, his henchmen and all innocent bystanders at work (the bodies literally pile up)! She fires rounds like Chow Yun Fat in an early John Woo flick. She teams up with Sister Cindy who in a parking garage becomes a one woman wrecking machine, bouncing from car to car while both guns fire repeatedly. She kicks in windshields and dives off the outside of the parking garage Bruce Willis style while tied to a firehose. Sister Cindy is a professional killer and recruits Kitty into her underworld first by scrubbing off her fingertips in her sleep and putting her through rigorous training (she keeps a rapist in her basement and forces Kitty to kill him).
      Later Kitty assumes another identity(with a large Orange hat) and has fun torturing her boyfriend Mr. Tinam. He becomes obsessed with her because she can cure his impotence. Miss Kitty threatens their relationship and says "Only losers fall in love with heartless men". There is one scene of nudity in a blood drenched pool, it's definitely watchable, but not mandatory. There is a poison lipstick Kung Fu lesbian fight to watch out for. This is all pretty tame considering The Hong Kong king of sleaze (Jing Wong) is on board!
WATCH HERE

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

The Johnsons


The Johnsons Directed by Rolf Van Der Berg. (1992)
It starts off with the volcanic looking inside view of a c-section birth, seven mutated brothers are delivered. The sleep deprived doctor puts on a magic ring and stops off at the side of the road, then goes into a pond and smears his face with yellow excrement. He yells incantations at the moon as a sinister bubble baby (or Xangadix) rises from a pool of flames. A female journalist's daughter Emalee Lucas is having blood drenched nightmares about seven bald mutant children as they paint fetus' on the walls. She has yet to get her period (I'm only referencing this because they keep bringing it up and there's a stupid dance number where she drops a tampon into a glass of water).
     Later on Professor Keller a leading expert on demonology sees a film strip with clay masked natives. The same natives visit the daughter again in a dream and gang rape her. Keller is told by a detective that the mutant children from the beginning are psychopaths that went on a murder spree and have to be stopped, they are all now 21. Chas Balun really oversold this Dutch train wreck, which had three people writing it (one being Street Trash director Roy Frumkes) and it doesn't really add up to anything all that cohesive. Skunkape kept warning me not to bother, but I had to check it out for myself. The seven brothers end up in a Super Max style prison, they attack a prison guard and refuse to speak thier only form of communication is to paint those pesky fetus's on the wall in human blood. Read about the behind the scenes randomness on The Temple Of Shock blog
it doesn't seem like it was supposed to be this confusing! 

      It's kind of a shame because there are some decent camera shots and gore scenes (but they are wasted on this clunky mess)!
      There's is tons of padding (Ha! get it Pad?) and the mother and daughter go camping almost like in a Maxi pad commercial! The seven brothers are related to Emalee and plan on having an incest baby with her that will destroy the world! The head chopping,bath fighting,electric knife wielding mayhem doesn't start till the last forty minutes and you don't really need to sit through all the b-movie chatter, just fast forward up to that point. Luckily the brothers show up one by one and can easily be dispatched by a teenage girl (did they really need to be in a maximum security prison then)? The evil baby is more pathetic then a soggy cabbage patch doll and The Manitou would pummel it in a fight! 


WATCH THIS JUNK HERE

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Men Behind The Sun 731



 Men Behind The Sun (Man Behind The Sun 731, Hei tai yang 731) Directed by Mou Tun-Fei. Starring Gang Wang (1988).  
   T.F. Mou is one of the most reviled, notorious and unknown alumni of The Shaw Brothers circuit. In Men Behind The Sun he utilized all the cruel Mondo tricks, only this time it was done as a political statement! Yes, Jacopetti/ Prosperi's Africa Addio was apparently an Anti-Colonialism statement, but is so scorchingly inaccurate that it's almost a travesty and a parody of itself! In Men Behind the Sun, real children are exploited and abused for this defiant artistic statement, it's definitely the Cannibal Holocaust of the 80's.
Squadron 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare experiment orchestrated by heartless bastard General Shiro Ishi during WWII. Chinese and Russian captives including hundreds of children were rounded up and experimented on in horrid ways (live eviscerations,vivsected without anesthesia and frozen to death, read about it all here) The worst part of all was that all the data was sold to General MacArthur and the U.S for biological weapons. The Japanese soldiers consider Chinese to be subhuman and exterminate them in unforgivable ways with sanctions from Imperial soldiers.
      In my mind two wrongs never equal a right and for Mou to decide to rally against the Gov. and be pissed off is one thing! However he used real corpses (because apparently there's no special effects department in Hong Kong, Yeah Right)!!!!! He waited around to collect a child corpse for one of the most upsetting, gut wrenching scenes of an innocent mute child undergoing wide awake heart surgery while Japanese Surgeon's gleefully operate! This film is hard to watch more than once or for me to justify for that matter (and there were more sequels to come, so this was a big hit)! 
      The cryptic line in the beginning "Friendship is Friendship and History is History" was inspired by the Japanese government caving in and granting Mou permission to make his film and maybe a jab at us for letting this Holocaust occur and profiting from the research! The Japanese government took extreme measures to erase this point in history and Mou used the actual location of the 731 death factory. The People's Liberation Army was involved in the production and even lended weapons. The film teeters on the edge of accountability. It's excruciatingly offensive to exploit this point in history in order to make a valid statement and it fucks up all credibility!
      During the famous frostbite scene, a girl in encased in an icicle prison for a few days then brought inside to have her arms submerged in boiling water. The same methods to subject real people to an exploitive recreation of the Chinese Holocaust were used on the Republic of Haiti for Farewell Uncle Tom and both films are fascinating and at the same time beneath contempt! There's a scene where a real cat is bitten to death by a million rats (according to IMDB,the cat survived, but I highly doubt that since the director has no conscience and used real dead bodies to achieve his demented vision).The genuine rats got firebombed, which is Ok by me. I could only image what the set must have smelled like with all the rotting bodies lying around. Here's what Chas Balun said in Deep Red Alert from Fall 1991:A sadistic barbaric,quasi-atrocity film about secret experiments carried out on Chinese prisoners by a desperate Japanese army, almost made me renounce my recently-aquired Oriental fetish right away. I chipped a tooth the first time I saw the frostbite victim stripped of her flesh after plunging her frozen arms in a vat of hot water.
     So for those brave souls who want to make this journey, Check it out Sickos! This film ruined Mou's credability and I'm still confused why Ruggerro Deodato  was able to continue to make films (which got worse and worse).

Don't pull those hands up!

A very strange cameo for Kerri Kenney!!! (of Reno 911)


WATCH HERE
FURTHER VIEWING (History Channel Doc. on 731)

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Werewolf Woman

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 Werewolf Woman(La Lupa Mannara, The Legend of the Wolf Woman, She-Wolf, Terror of the She Wolf and Naked Werewolf Woman) directed by Rino De Silvestro. Starring Annik Borrel. 1976 
      According to IMDB this is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite surprise films to freak people out at the Cinema Drafthouse. I had seen parts of this movie on Reel Wild Cinema or maybe it was on those video comps that Something Weird put out, not sure! It’s super dumb! 
      A naked blonde (Annik Borrel) who had before this acted in one of my favorite dopey blaxploits, Truck Turner! She plays the werewolf woman and in the opening gyrates around a circle of fire. In her werewolf form she has ugly hairy cone shaped boobs! Over dubbed villagers with torches show up and she plunges an axe into one pilgrim’s head as it spits out copious amounts of ketchup! This movie is like a pressure test (can you make it all the way through? I failed many scenes were just too stupid and I had to fast forward). Skunkape used to prank people in the same Tarantino way but with a Ron Jeremey porn instead called Fatliners! That smut would shock the beejeesus out of anything with a pulse! As for Werewolf Woman the overdubbing is extra loud and sometimes incomprehensible! There’s some priceless dialogue and Lancelot Link style dubbing. Her doctor prescribes plenty of sunshine for her nightmares and sexual phobia! There’s tons of full bush (werewolf and regular). The werewolf lady definitely has old man phobia not sexual because she’s super horny for everyone else besides her husband! She has the shittiest, most untrustworthiest Dr. who should diagnose her a horny werewolf and be done with it! There are a lot of dull sex scenes to fall asleep to. There’s maybe two shots of a full moon and one of her transforming into a wolf, so something else is going on besides regular lycanthropy. There’s a scene where a Robert Loggia look-a-like tries to rape her and she bites his face! Later three bikers break in and rape her but end up stabbing each other by accident! It all ends with the werewolf girl having a cookout that’s interrupted by police dogs with a Dragnet Style narration tacked on. Yet another lame Video Nasty that scared uptight Brits in the 80’s that nowadays comes off very tame and dull.

Friday, November 23, 2012

Frightmare


 Frightmare (Cover Up) Directed by Peter Walker. Starring Sheila Keith (1974).
       Having just watched House Of Whipchord, this is the best Peter Walker film I’ve seen so far. In 50’s London at an amusement park, unfortunate victim Barry Nichol’s face is eaten off by fortune telling cannibals. For this crime against humanity, Ed & Dorothy Yates are sentenced to a mental ward. Now in the present setting down at The Toby Jug some bikers get into a fight, they stomp a poor innocent bartender for refusing to serve 15 year old Tart Debbie. Jackie and Debbie are the sibling offspring of the Yates parents. Jackie, the older sister brings her mother animal brains to tide over her cannibal cravings that have yet to subside. They now live in a stone cottage farm that’s bathed in black and red shadows. Her eerie mother visits Jackie in a nightmare with a ghostly face and red eye sockets (that’s the artwork on the cover). Jackie always has to cover up for her parents human meat addiction and wants to lead a normal life. The mother gets stir crazy being sentenced to the farm (those red lights must be acting like the Kenny Rogers sign in that Seinfeld episode, switching their rods and cones all around)! Debbie the troubled tart has been kept away from her parents and later reconnects with them in a disturbing way. The mother tricks her victims into her lair with psychic readings (I’m guessing that was her method before too).
         She uses a drill on one victim and yells “There’s no Future” like Johnny Rotten as she stabs another girl with a flaming hot poker. To justify the killings to her husband, who is her corpse burying bitch, is that no one will miss them! I would say if you want to check out any Peter Walker films see this one first (it’s the least dry British) and very entertaining! 
WATCH HERE (you need a Creepster account)

I card all those under 30 and look where it got me!

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Pray For Death



Pray For Death Directed By Gordon Hessler. Starring Sho Kosugi. (1985).
    Sho Kosugi is the best actor for this type of genre and the quintessential ninja of the 80's! He can totally act his way out of a paper back,he speaks pretty hilarious broken english and he always acts along side his real children and has a super hot blonde girlfriend. He's like an Asian Charles Bronson (Sho is the 4th or 5th banana in the Cannon Films star roster)! If you see only two ninja films this and Ninja III: The Domination are the ones to choose, but like potato chips you can't just eat (or watch) one. All the stereotypical racist thugs, corrupt cops and unhelpful neighbors are present. Sho Kosugi moves his family to the mean streets of L.A. in an attempt to start his restaurant (which I imagine as a Chinese Pizza parlor, that's destined to fail)! He swore he'd never raise the ninja sword or chuck the Chinese stars ever again, but the most viciously calloused and vile super criminal "LimeHouse" Willie (James Booth) convinces him to don his ninja costume and slay some criminal butt!
    This movie pulls no punches! an old man is set on fire as bad guys cackle hysterically! In one of the most genius tricks to sneak into a hospital, Limehouse decides to slice his wrist to get medical attention so that he can inject Sho's wife with poison. His two "real" sons (Kane & Shane) take down a bunch of punks on mongoose bikes. Sho Kosugi was the king of all 80's ninja movies and the main inspiration for all the goofy ninja lore on the internet and beyond. His first role was to painfully watch Franco Nero in "Enter The Ninja" (or White Ninja) clown around with Christopher George and pretend to be a ninja. Nero wears a white mask over his face and cannot conceal his giant frankfurter mustache! After that came Revenge Of The Ninja which Pray For Death is basically remade, but that doesn't make it less worth your time, both are incredibly entertaining! There's a wicked chainsaw battle toward the end in the final showdown and gratuitous violence to satisfy people with the bad sense to enjoy these Cannon films. Director Hessler made a couple of 70's flicks with Vincent Price (Cry Of The Banshee, Scream and Scream Again) and most famously Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park! and James Booth (who acted in Neil Diamond's Jazz Singer before this) plays Limehouse Willie and wrote this fucker. Hessler in a must read interview with Shock Cinema talks about all the strange details (midgets,tanks, Cher and Dr. Pepper!)
WATCH HERE

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Re-Animator

 

 Re-Animator Directed by Stuart Gordon. Starring Jeffery Combs. (1985).   
       The first Re-Animator has a strange effect on most of the population that see it! It’s so well crafted, it’s a combination of spatter, wacky comedy and dramatic elements. It inspired Chas Balun to write his own magazine and publish books that inspired me to tribute him! There’s something so likeable and infectious about Re-Animators campy style and boldness to do crazy shit like have a room full of the ugliest naked zombies imaginable tearing people apart, Dean Halsey head butting a served head (played by David Gale) or that neon green serum being injected frivolously into every orifice imaginable. As a youngster (who has yet to grow up) I fondly remember seeing the most gruesome gore makeup effects in the pages of Fangoria. I first saw it on WDZL(channel 39) the first year I moved to Florida from Long Island, NY at age 11. 
       When I first moved there in one week they played this along with the first Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th. Nothing was cut out in the version I first saw, which clocks in at 86 minutes.  The R rated version is longer and has more scenes of Dr. Hill (David Gale) practicing his hypnotism on Meg played by the beautiful Barbara Crampton, who most horror nerds have had a crush on to one time or another. Kids today have it so easy! they never even see the TV versions (of VideoDrome, Repo Man and other castrated shit of that ilk) all this craziness went on during the uber conservative Reagan era, they get to see the whole enchilada and are often jaded by it! I should talk though, I’m afraid to watch any of the sequels and have put the first film on a pedestal. There are a lot of Re-Animator sequels, all I’ve successfully avoided and even a musical on the way (which might be good). If Stuart Gordon were to be measured by two films, he couldn’t make more of an impressive impact then Re-Animator and From Beyond, two flawless classics in my opinion and Dolls is pretty good too!
      The basic premise is that Herbert West (played by the overly dramatic Jeffery Combs) has to leave Switzerland after an eye bulging accident involving his mentor Hans Gruber occurs (this entire name would later be hijacked for Die Hard). He moves in with Dan Cain and Meg Halsey and immediately conducts secret experiments on their cat Rufus. He also makes an enemy with Dr. Hill (David Gale) who has a cool high powered laser drill that can burn a hole into a brain as he dunks in an extra long Q-Tip (this seems to me a cooler trick then his hypnotism, but what do I know)? My favorite character in recent years have gone from Herbert West to Dean Halsey, I like how stodgy he is in the beginning and then after being crushed by a steel door, having his fingers bitten off and then thrown violently against a wall (by Arnold Schwarzenegger's real stunt double) he dies. After being given the serum, he turns into a googly eyed lunatic with blood constantly dripping out of his mouth. With him out of the picture and thrown into an asylum, West and Cain are able to experiment on as many corpses as they want! Each dead body must be timed out perfectly with freshness and serum injection and there is alot of dangerous trial and error. The creepiest kinkfest that happens at the end with Dr. Hill attempting undead oral copulation is still by far the weirdest any mainstream unrated film ever got! I’ve seen Re-Animator at least 20 times and like Evil Dead it seems as fresh as when it first debuted in the glory days of explicit horror. This film made H.P. Lovecraft famous and I’m glad they took liberties with the storyline and made it more insane then the original story! Lovecraft is a genius writer in his own right but no film adaptations have been as entertaining. Revisit it right now over at Netflix!

Dean Halsey unhinged

Dr. Hill's zombie army

 CHECK OUT this highly entertaining take on Chas Balun and Fangoria that uses the Video Drome banner that I used for my blog! Right Here

Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Killing Kind



The Killing Kind(Are You A Good Boy?) Directed by Curtis Harrington starring John Savage (1973)
I’ve always found John Savage, the actor who plays Terry Lambert to have a hidden level of psychotic tension before I saw him play a killer. Some of my favorites roles are The Onion Field where he plays a mentally shattered cop who witnesses Ted Danson getting shot in the face and it turns him into a kleptomaniac. In Inside Moves which is set in San Francisco, he plays a pathetic suicidal vet who can barely keep together different awkward relationships and contain his jealous rage against what little others surrounding him have. Sometimes I get him confused with John Heard who seems to be doing an impression of him in Cutters Way with Jeff Bridges. 

     This role may have been a springboard for later creepy roles, because he is incredibly effective as a reluctant gang rape participant. The Killing Kind opens with this rape flashback that continues to drive him to assault women. All his problems stem from his domineering mother and the forced gang rape. A pre-Laverne & Shirley Cindy Williams plays one of his victims who gets drowned in a bathtub. Ruth Roman (from The Baby) dies a hilarious death as Savage forces her to drink all night until she can’t move. The director Curtis Harrington has made a few turkeys in his time like Ruby (which I’ve attempted to watch 3 times and failed), Games and The Killer Bees. This drive in staple was often pared with the Arch Hall Junior opus The Sadist. As Harrington, I did really like Devil Dog: Hound of Hell and The Killing Kind has that sleazy 70’s tv movie feel sort of in the same vein as The Toolbox Murders (but less graphic). Dark Sky has since released a restored version on DVD but you can also watch it on Youtube. Check it out!

WATCH HERE

Friday, November 16, 2012

Baby Blood


 Baby Blood Directed By Alain Robak. Starring Emmanuelle Escourrou (1990)
      It starts off with volcano footage as a forbidding menace waits to be born. As mankind was spawned in Africa, this creature excluded it self from that genesis. Baby Blood uses this premise, that an evil child awaits to emerge from the womb of its chosen mother, a busty  gapped toothed French carny named Yanka. 
      The circus animals act hostile around her and she escapes town after a tiger explodes in a drippy gooey red mess. She has no self respect and sleeps around with who ever can move her onto the next town. I almost forgot one other thing, the unborn child speaks in a demonic voice that only she can hear! It sounds like a french version of the goblins in the tv movie version of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. One night while she sleeps a snake defiles gapped tooth Yanka (this seems to be an Eden reference, since the genesis of mankind is what lead us to all this trouble). The baby commands her to kill and she tries suicide a few times with it screaming at her not to! She acts as a vessel for the unborn child's blood lust, it even says feed me like in Little Shop Of Horrors!
      Months fly by during each fade out and eventually she ends up working as a waitress in a greasy spoon. For some inside jokey reason there is a poster for Baby Blood 2 on the wall (hold up Robak, we're not finished with this one yet)! 
The baby controls her mind like Aylmer from Brain Damage. Unlike that film the baby doesn't give her an awesome drug injection in return, only constant bitching and it craves blood all the time. Why she doesn't abort it right away is a head scratcher and there's no preachy conservative right to life message either! 
This film is a mixture of Baxter (The Nazi French dog) and Hellraiser. Eventually she's reduced to stabbing random strangers and even has sex with a former circus clown. Gapped tooth Yanka has a great body and never seems to be showing any evidence of carrying a baby (could it be all in her mind)?
The baby gets pissed when she smokes as she threatens to stab it. There's a very creative scissor cam shot that flows in and out of the clown's butchered stomach!
There's some hilarious French punks and even a fake Rik Mayall looking character. The version on Youtube goes in and out of French & English, but you only miss a fraction of dialogue. Yanka starts killing without the babies instructions and its hard to feel sympathy for her. She robs a mobile blood bank with a toy gun and slurps down a plasma bag. There's a bizarre air canister used as a weapon to blow someone to bits. An Alien like tentacle attack on a fat bus driver's face. The baby needs to find the sea and be born there, it is an ancient species. Baby Blood is very underrated and hardly mentioned, I don't think of the French as cornering the gore market but I really need to check out more films from that scene.

Gapped Tooth Yanka

Baby can shed it's skin

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Dr. Butcher M.D.



Dr. Butcher M.D. (Zombie Holocaust, Zombi 3) Directed By Marino Girolami. Starring Ian McCulloch. (1979).
      Dr. Butcher M.D. or Zombie Holocaust is one of the most tasteless, wretched dirty zombie island cannibal flicks that tries every second to plagiarize Fulci's Zombie! Then again there's no fake Peter West (Ian Mccullough) or Lucas (Alejandro "Dakar" Barrera), the genuine actors from Zombie are back for more mayhem and that handy dandy paycheck!
     No one can blame the director for blatantly ripping off every exploitation genre (Cannibals, Emmanuelle, Zombies), because the original actors are involved! Directed by Frank Martin (ahem... I mean Marino Girolami) with the same maggot infested, thing maker type special effects seen in Gates Of Hell and Burial Ground, I mean what's not to like about Dr. Butcher?  I found plenty to be appalled by and skived out by, mainly the plot line is so flat and lifeless, people just are going through the motions, but the cheap zombie effects are pretty great looking! The cannibalizing heart thief that plunges to his death through twenty glass windows and then snaps his arms off is incredibly hilarious! 

      Skunkape recently went to see this at a NY theater thinking that the Nico Fidenco score would be replaced by the Atari on LSD Casio sounds from the original cut would be presented VHS tape style (with the Roy Frumkes footage intact) that was sadly not the case! It's very hard to find the original cut of Dr. Butcher now for some reason, maybe its in the same landfill as the E.T. Atari game!
       This film was cleverly promoted by way of the awesome Butcher Mobile which drove all over Time Square (check out the Gore Gazette picture). Back in the heyday of exploitation films people took to the streets to get the message out that this oddity (how awful and disgusting it was) should be seen! I admire that conviction and I even used to wear the Mutilation Graphics Dr. Butcher t-shirt!   


      Dakar plays the offensively named Molotto! He is one of the most uncredited actors in Italian film history (he must have self esteem issues)! He's worked with Fellini, D'Amato, Deodato and was a former wrestler (according to IMDB). Why doesn't he want credit?
There's some kind of Kito cannibal conspiracy involving the infamous mad surgeon played by Donal O'Brien, who I remember fondly as the guy who after cracking open a poor blond girl's head with a bonesaw, snips off her vocal chords. He says "The Patient is annoying me!" I mean this is one classy fellow! Alexandra Delli Colli ends up naked and spread eagle on a wheel in some kind of ritual. The cannibals apparently made a deal with the zombies, they eat while the zombies hang back and look ugly. They get the job done by mesmerizing the onlookers with their hideous faces while the humans steaming entrails are pulled out by the savages and their eyeballs are plucked out and feasted on. The film itself is pretty weak and is best watched while on an empty stomach, however distressing it is, it's still very entertaining and unintentionally funny. The original title is just an insipid excuse to use the "buzzword" holocaust, Jeez Thanks alot Hitler!

WATCH HERE

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Eaten Alive By The Cannibals



Doomed To Die (Eaten Alive By The Cannibals, Manga Vivi) Directed By Umberto Lenzi. Starring Robert Kerman (1980).
                Janet Agren (City Of The Living Dead, Hands Of Steel) has the sharpest cheekbones in the business as she walks around in vintage 80’s Time Square.All cannibal films are required to have prime footage of sleazy Times Square marquees (Zappa’s Baby Snakes?!) and genuine lurking sordid characters in the background.You can almost taste the rubbery steak from Tads or smell the filthy peepshows and gross hot tubs (like the ones at Plato’s Retreat)! Then right from that point they draw us further into the subterranean jungles to contrast from our world: the concrete jungle to the third world, the real Amazon. Robert Kerman and Janet Agren’s constant bickering relationship is almost like "African Queen". They are there to bring down a Jim Jones type cult leader, Jonas Melvyn played by Ivan Rassimov who is more menacing in this one then he was with blonde hair playing the victim in Man From Deep River. He is hypnotizing women, painting them gold and using cobra venom soaked dildos on their poor genitals! It's all part of his plans for world religious domination. Mimi Lay has made a career out of playing cannibal bait and later on starred as a hooker in Element Of Crime by Lars Von Trier.Good thing she’s plays a minor role, otherwise they’d have a bitch of a time trying to match her death scenes from Jungle Holocaust and Man From Deep River!
Eaten Alive By The Cannibals is like a mixtape of the best cannibal attacks stolen from other films (Man From Deep River,Mountain  Of The Cannibal God and Jungle Holocaust). Lenzi has no shame whatsoever but to be fair, he did direct Man From Deep River, so he has the right to rip himself off! Had I not seen this first before the stolen films, I would have been very pissed off!
Like every cannibal film you get a lot of half naked Foreign dudes in white paint wearing bargain basement crepe hair frightwigs devouring whatever cheap gizzards and steak-um meat they can find. There’s recycled animal slaughter too, like the famous cartoon leaves over the monkey tied to the javelin travesty from Mountain Of The Cannibal God. Check out the great interview with Sergio Martino where he denies forcing a snake to eat a live monkey (found on Mountain not The Eaten Alive DVD)!
                Robert Kerman hates this genre but still shows up at conventions (denouncing Deodato, saying the man has no soul!) but he acted in this right after Cannibal Holocaust. I think he is prouder of his porn career then his Cannibal career! He comes off like a fake David Hess and is pretty likeable. Many of the actors get to pretend like they are shooting or looking at something while footage from another film is spliced in. I found it very entertaining and like most exploitation horror fans I could re-watch this movie stolen or original, it’s pretty much the same storyline, bad dubbing and jungle setting you find in every other Jungle adventure cannibal film so there you go!  

Ivan Rassimov as The Cult Leader

Richard Kuklinski hit by a cannibal dart

Let's Get Physical!

Yummy Steak-Ums!


WATCH HERE

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Dinosaur Island



Dinosaur Island (1994) Effects by John Carl Buechler.
      If your boat is floated by scantily clad cavewomen who fight in the dirt, then I have got a movie for you. If you are a pasty, nerdy, older, or slightly chubby hetero male in the armed forces, and you have always wanted to be set up as a "living god" on some primitive island paradise, then this will be great fantasy-fulfillment material. If you also get a hard-on for low-budget dinosaur effects, then boy (or girl) have you hit the jackpot here.
     I’m not really sure how I ended up watching this Fred Olen Ray/Jim Wynorski co-production. The writing is terrible. The acting is silly. The leather bras are scanty and frequently absent. This movie was made for one reason, and that reason is cavegirl boobs. The dinosaur and monster special effects are fun but that’s all that kept me watching.
    Military guys crash on island fill of prehistoric babes, must kill dinosaurs to impress babes. After I figured out what this movie was about (cavegirl boobs, in case you’ve already forgotten), I fast-forwarded to all of the monster scenes and had a laugh, and then moved on. This is a stinker with no gore and a few "Carnosaur"-quality dinosaur movie effects, buuuut if you like scantily clad women and softcore sex (no judgments!!) then you may not need fast forward. Much.
     If I had a choice between watching this again, or watching Ringo Starr in "Caveman", I'd have to go with "Caveman", You've been warned.
Thanks Goat Scrote, There's no way I'd be able to sit through this USA "Up All Night" schlock fest, you are a hero in my book-Ed.

Watch On Netflix

Monday, November 12, 2012

Mr. Vampire




Mr. Vampire Directed By Ricky Lau. Starring Lam Ching-Ying. 1985
            I saw the English translated one first along time ago (at least 7 years) and I remember the dialogue being more outlandish in an Umberto Lenzi type way. This is the original Mandarin version. The only way to keep a Chinese vampire out of commission is it to hang a sacred scroll over his hat. Actually there are many ways to defeat a Jing Shi (or Hopping Vampire) read about the folklore here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Shi
 This is the greatest hopping chinese vampire film ever made and there are over 5 sequels. There are tons of Chan-esque marial arts comedy fighting. Mainly because this was produced by Sammo Hung! It's less of a horror movie then an all out comedy with the undead.The unibrowed actor that plays master Kau is Lam Ching-Ying he’s in a lot of the sequels and other kick magic related monster battles, defusing the unholy with flying light up swords and chicken blood.
            The bowl cut shrimp (whose name is MAN played by Ricky Hui) and his master are so retarded that they don't know how to fix up a cup of coffee (there's the caste system at work)! They slurp each one individually (black coffee, milk then sugar). There's a lot of wacky misunderstandings going on like a Chinese Threes company with vampires! They don't have time to figure it out coffee, they are too busy battling the undead.  
            Something sinister is going down at the Dragon Fly Plot, pissed off ghosts seek revenge like the ones in Poltergeist. Incense is used a lot and sacred rituals (like the catholic ones in Hammer Films). The fire, chicken blood ritual is pretty bad ass! An attractive ghost hitches a ride on a bike, she took a shine to one of the main characters after he took care of her grave at the Dragon Fly Plot.
The piece of yellow paper with Chinese characters on it is magic and when shrimp bowl haircut (Man) swallows it he can control and humiliate a high society character. The light up grid on the wooden coffin holding the vampire in check isn't enough to keep him locked in. They place the unibrowed master in jail without a trial because he has long nails and is a suspect in the murder of the uncle character. Raw sticky rice, chicken blood and yellow paper are the garlic, holy water and crosses of Mr. Vampire! Also if you hold your breath a vampire cannot see you, these are helpful tips if you ever find yourself in an Asian vampire invasion! There's flying, crotch biting and well choreographed fighting. There's a wire contraption that fries vampires that reminds me of the tennis ball inter-dimensional hijinks in Poltergeist! A snake’s gall bladder is mushed into a mortar and pestle to prevent a vampire bite (see Calamity of Snakes & Killer Snakes for more reptile remedies). A cheap rice salesman almost kills the vampire busting team by mixing in inferior rice! I saw this before Chinese Ghost Story and Close Encounters of The Spooky Kind, so this was my first entry into pretty female ghosts seeking mortal men to fall in love with. They are pretty on the outside, but mean one-eyed headless bitches on the inside!
            Mr. Vampire is more of a Sammo Hung haunted comedy then perverted Jing Wong/ Shaw Brothers and It should be appropriate for kids, but what do I know?






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