RECORD REVIEW: ISLANDROCKS-COVERING HORRORS FROM THE PAST

Skunkape and I have been a fan of Islandrocks aka Mr. Thomas Nylom for a long time going back to when Youtube was thee place to find undiscovered talent. It was still a trash heap of ungodly, moronic celebs, oozing with narcissism, however this one man stood out from the shit and self-diluted trash. 

I'm drowning in an overflowing toilet of self appreciation

Nylom was the first guy I can think of who took Italian Horror themes, Nintendo core, Actionsploitation and covered them brilliantly before it all became another run of the mill internet trend and he did it with total dedication and gusto. Going to Youtube to find music is annoying and the fans demanded we have these awesome tracks on a portable system to blast in our cars! It’s about time, right? So what do we have in store for this full length first effort by Islandrocks? Well, it begins with a genius re-working of Claudio Simonetti’s Demons theme, which I liked even more than the cEvin Key remix. That tracks takes Hall of the mountain king and discos the fuck outta it!

pass the dust, I'm so Studio 54.

The guitar tones and piano have never sounded better on these Fulci themes, if you are a fan of Italian horror you might start drooling over how glorious they sound. Slurp, ahem—I know I was!

He really hit the nail on the head!

Carpenter/ Howarth eat your hearts out because Island "rocks" your movie themes as well in the most face melting style possible! There's even some originals on there, one inspired by The Dead Next Door. Nylom has a way of making horror themes sound like you’ve never heard them before done in all kinds of original and crazy styles. What are you waiting for? Go out of your way to get a copy! 

BUY HERE

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SUBSCRIBE TO HIS CHANNEL

Guinea Pig (1985)

Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment (1985, dir. Satoru Ogura)

This "Guinea Pig" series reboot is a great idea!

Review by Goat Scrote

     Yes, this is the first one in the series that got Chas Balun in all that hot water with the FBI! 

     Although there are several repulsive scenes, “Guinea Pig” doesn’t even come close to living up to its reputation as an extreme shock classic. The entire thing is only 43 minutes long and there is no story to spend time on, yet it’s halfway through before actual blood flows. Since this movie seems to have no purpose for existing other than to showcase blood and guts, that means there is a whole lot of purposeless violent filler occupying screen time. With no context for the violence it just seems like a meaningless exercise in misogynistic torture fantasy. If that sounds like your thing, you may dig it. My personal reaction to "Guinea Pig" was boredom and distaste (not a good combination), except during the brutal finale which features artfully disturbing imagery and an outstandingly horrifying gore effect which is a must-watch for gorehounds and practical SFX nerds.

     Three men torture a woman, and she dies. There it is, the complete plot, in every detail. The abusers are anonymous and the victim never says anything. No one in the film is individualized or made into an actual character. There’s no explanation except that the project is claimed to be a series of experiments exploring the limits of suffering. Each “experiment” opens with a title card hinting at what kind of punishment they will inflict this time. This film is genuinely nothing but torture porn (and I use the term without malice), although they actually leave a lot of the worst of it out of view even during the gruesome and explicit final scene. They sacrifice quantity of gore for quality, which is usually the right trade-off.

     The movie presents itself as something which was obtained illicitly and redistributed, in a “Blair Witch” style marketing maneuver. Most of the time the perpetrators faces aren’t shown, which further lends to the feeling that we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing. I suspect it was these facts combined with the plotless pseudo-porno presentation which confused certain drug-addled celebrities into mistaking “Guinea Pig” for a real snuff film.

Part 2: Flower of Flesh and blood was the tape that freaked Charlie Sheen out enough to alert the FBI. Here's what Dennis Daniel said about the embarrassing event after he lent out the tape. Well, when I finished with it, I sent it to my pal Chris Gore at FILM THREAT. He ended up lending it to a friend who watched it with Charlie Sheen, of all people!  Sheen thought the shit was REAL!!! He contacted a friend of his in the FBI and before you know it, I got a call from an FBI Agent saying that it was a federal offense to send snuff films through the mail! We’re talking 20 years in prison!!!!  I had remembered that Chas told me there was a tape called THE MAKING OF GUINEA PIG, so the FBI said I had to give him the contact info for the person who sent me the tape and they needed to send that “MAKING OF” tape as well. So, I had to call Chas and tell him all this. Needless to say, he was not pleased. I actually called him on his birthday and he was having a fucking grand old time till I called him with the info. Remember, Chas was a California hippie dude of epic proportions…the fact that I gave “the man” info about him was not too cool…but I had no choice. He was my only hope to prove it was fake. It all worked out in the end but it really sucked at the time.

     It begins with a woman handcuffed to a chair and several men dressed in black beating her. They rub salt in her eyes. They club her with a bag full of coins while one dude chills in the background casually enjoying a soda. Some time later, they throw her on the ground and kick her while verbally abusing her. Next they torture her with pliers pinching and twisting her skin. The most absurd torture arrives when they spin her around a whole lot on an office chair. After way too much time lingering on that, they force Jack Daniels down her gullet, and spin her around some more until she pukes.

     The second most absurd "experiment" is when they torture her with headphones roped to her head, playing something which sounds like a perfectly ordinary Merzbow recording. This goes on until she is a drooling wreck. Around 22 minutes into the runtime it starts to get gory as they pull out her fingernails. She is tied up and asleep when they start pouring boiling oil on her arm with a cringe-inducing sizzling sound. That’s one seriously fucked up alarm clock.

     Next up is the maggot torture. They pour maggots on the burns and sprinkle a few on her face just for the hell of it. She seems to be unconscious through it all. Maggots are pretty fucking gross, and the thought of them eating the dead flesh on her arm is unsettling. The entire maggot scene is about getting under our skin with psychological creepy crawlies.

     For their next amazing trick, the torturers throw raw meat and real animal guts on the woman. The guys, mostly off-camera, giggle and breath heavily like masturbating morons. She is unconscious, and the gut-throwing goes on and on for what feels like a really long time. Finally she wakes up and screams. Again, it’s pretty gross to have guts all over you, but mainly I am bored at this point in the movie. If you've cooked chicken or turkey in your kitchen, you've handled things just as gross as this. Like the maggots, it's something a quick shower can take care of..

     Things get drastic near the end. They move on to surgical incisions and smashing her hand with a sledgehammer. It does look pretty realistic. For the finale, they chain her head down and shove a long needled into her eye socket sideways. The eye socket floods with blood and the eye is skewered until it pops right out. Fulci and Bunuel would probably approve. It closes with what appears to be her corpse, dangling inside a net in the woods.

     After it was over I felt all the emotional involvement of having watched a practical f/x demo reel. It was very hard for me to connect with this movie, since I couldn't see any purpose beyond serial-killer stroke material or showing off their gore effects prowess. I would've liked it better as a five-minute short, and I don't think anything significant would be lost that way. I know that they were doing their very best to present something deeply disturbing, but other than a handful of short sequences, I had to fight to avoid letting my attention wander.

Recommendation: Only watch the ending, unless you are a huge fan of torture porn and fake snuff.

Dragons Forever (1988)

DRAGONS FOREVER (1988, dir. Sammo Ma-Bo Hung, Corey Yuen.)

Review by Goat Scrote

     I was excited to see a Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung/Biao Yuen collaboration on the list of Deep Red movies. My expectations may have been set a little high by the mind-blasting awesomeness of some of their other work. The action in this one felt a little too familiar, like a retread of bits and pieces of fights we've seen in their other films. It’s still very exciting action, but it feels like they didn’t challenge themselves to do something new and interesting despite the spectacular talents involved.

Go on, try. I dare you.

  
    “Dragons Forever” has all of the fights you could hope for. Some of them felt like they were only there to pad the time, or their setup was contrived, but the important thing is that they were fun to watch. There’s plenty of Jackie Chan's trademark humor and prop-based action, but no big set-piece “wow” stunts that popped out at me. Sammo Hung’s fight choreography is superb of course, but the editing in a handful of the action scenes was a little choppy, rapidly cutting in a way that made it harder to tell what was going on. The stunt work, as you'd expect, is utterly phenomenal.

     If you’re a fan of any of the main actors you will probably find plenty of enjoyment here. It entertained me thoroughly, although there are a lot of other movies in the same vein I would rather re-watch. It’s a better-than-usual Hong Kong action/comedy/romance flick, it just doesn’t rise to the level of invention and excitement which Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan deliver in some of their other projects.

Ta-daaaa!

     The plot contains a heavy romance story element, which might make it a decent date-night action movie. The characters are mostly quite flat and underdeveloped, however, and only the innate charisma of the main characters carried the romantic side of the movie. There are two interconnected romance plots, one each for Sammo and Jackie. I don’t really like romance movies and there was a lot more of that element here than in your typical HK actioner. The romances drive the character arcs of the two male leads and has a direct impact on the shifting alliances in the movie, so I can’t hate on it too much.

Stop! In the name of love... and my invincible kung fu.

     The romantic storylines arise from the other driving force of the story, the legal battle against narcotics manufacturer Boss Hua. He is operating under the guise of a legitimate chemical factory, which is poisoning waters downstream and affecting a fishery. This eventually grows into open violent conflict between the three heroes and the forces of corporate and criminal evil. The various subplots directly intertwine and affect each other, so the romance elements really are essential to the plot.

     The movie opens with a meeting in which Boss Hua Hsien-Wu (Wah Yuen), a mobster, screws over a business associate and shoots him in cold blood. Hua’s lackeys don’t even flinch, but damn, somebody is going to have to get a new sofa now, and that sofa really pulled the room together.

Asian Grouch0 Marx enjoys a post-homicide smoke.

     Defense lawyer Mr. Jackie Lung (Jackie Chan) and his assistant Mary (Crystal Kwok) have lunch. Some men show up, smack Mary for opening her mouth, and abduct her. Mr. Lung fights his way through the thugs to rescue her. As a reward, she slaps him and accuses him of working with the bad guys, so he slaps her back. I didn’t quite get the purpose of this entire scene, as I didn’t ever catch on to how the assistant figured into the overall plot or who these thugs were working for.

     Mr. Lung flirts with a whole series of woman while walking down the halls with his assistant, to establish what a ladies man he is. In court, Mr. Lung proves to be kind of a sleazy defense lawyer, defending a rapist and getting him loose on a technicality. Then he defies that first impression when the defendant thanks him, and Jackie delivers a brutal uppercut. He is apparently conflicted about the work he does. The judge just overlooks this little infraction. If I am to believe this movie, the Hong Kong legal system runs in a very counter-intuitive fashion. It’s a lot like the feeling I get watching an episode of “Law & Order”. I am skeptical about whether the scriptwriters have any practical understanding of what they're writing about.

Whoa, this aquarium is a tube, dude, and it's blowing my mind!

     Miss Yip (Deannie Yip) tries to negotiate with cigar chain-smoker Boss Hua. She wants his factory shut down because it is poisoning local waters and ruining her fishery business. He doesn’t want production shut down because he is making obscene amounts of money. Jackie Lung represents Hua Chemical Company against the fishery, and Hua wants his staff to use every underhanded trick in the book to find dirt on Miss Yip and the fishery. Miss Wen (Pauline Yeung), beautiful cousin of Miss Yip, consults with the lawyers about the ecological testing she has done. Jackie relentlessly and inappropriately flirts with her and she stonewalls him.

     Elsewhere, Luke Wong Fei-hung (Sammo Hung) is dealing firearms out of his duffel bag in an abandoned warehouse. When his clients can’t afford the guns, they attack him to try to take the merchandise and he gives them a solid beat-down. Luke gets a phone call from Jackie on his huge 1988 cellular phone, and the two meet up.

I've had a very emotional day. Now I'm gonna shove your
machete up your ass. Sideways. Deep.

     Some time later, eccentric  burglar Timothy Tung Tak-Biao (Biao Yuen) returns to his unusual home and discovers someone is up to something sinister inside. He acrobatically ascends the roof and climbs in through the skylight. There is a fight in the dark, before Timothy realizes he has been attacking his friend Jackie. Jackie came by to ask Timothy to use his electronics and cat-burglar skills to plant a listening device in the apartment of Miss Yip.

     Luke/Sammo moves to a new neighborhood and meets his nice lady neighbor, who is (not by coincidence) Miss Yip. It’s obvious he’s here to spy on her when he breaks out wacky listening devices. He spots Timothy climbing around the building, trying to plant the bug in Miss Yip’s apartment, and he doesn't know that they're both working for Jackie. The burglar gets caught (after stupidly planting the electronic bug in a watery vase) and gets into a fight with Luke. Afterwards, Miss Yip sees Luke as more of a hero.

Go, go, Gadget creep-o-matic!

     Things get complicated with Timothy when he shows up in the middle of a date between Jackie and Miss Wen the ecologist. Then Luke shows up too, but he is supposed to be undercover and has to hide in the apartment while Miss Wen is there. Luke stumbles across the burglar Timothy, who is also there to talk to Jackie, and the two have a fight while Jackie tries to prevent his date from investigating the loud noises. He rushes her out of the apartment and breaks up the fight, then tries to mend the conflict since the two criminals are both helping him.

     Jackie meets with Boss Hua at a club. A rival gang shows up and attacks with cleavers, fighting with Hua’s men. Jackie and his two friends are caught in the middle and forced to help fend the attackers off. Hua’s criminal enemies start specifically targeting Jackie now, because he is both a ruthless lawyer and a skilled fighter. 

"If do right, no can defense." - Mr. Miyagi

    Jackie and Miss Wen go on a date on a yacht, when assassins on ski-doos or whatever they’re called attack the boat. Jackie gets into one of his signature acrobatic, prop-heavy fights against a legion of foes and sends one of them flying overboard. Then the last assassin jumps in the water willingly, since he doesn’t want to face the fury of Jackie! This puts an end to another date with Miss Wen.

     Sammo flirts with his neighbor Miss Yip relentlessly. She turns him down, he’s too pushy. Even so, Miss Yip ends up showing up to the place he said he’d wait for her, a restaurant, and he chases her shouting his devotion through a megaphone. Somehow this works and she ends up going on a dinner date with him when she should be getting a restraining order. (Shades of John Hughes here.)

And you stink like sweaty ass-crack.

     There are lots of cutesy scenes showing the couples each bonding on their own. The two couples are genuinely falling in love. An assassin attacks all four of them while they are together. The assassin gets caught and turns out to be their crazy friend Timothy. He then spills the beans about the two other men dating the women to help win the case. The women  storm away, quite understandably, and don’t give them a chance to explain what their real feelings are.

     A three-way free-for-all develops between the friends, each of them mad at the other two for the turn things have taken. This ends with the trio getting arrested and released shortly afterward.

Sammo Hung's brief, controversial bondage porn career.

     Luke blocks a road to get the women to stop so he can declare his devotion to Miss Yip. She hits him with a wrench and then feels bad and wipes away the blood. He convinces her that he is no longer in it to win the case, or for money, but for love.

     In the factory, the two buddies Luke and Timothy sneak in to take pictures to prove the place is a drug factory. They discover secret doors and Luke slips inside one to get to the “real” factory where the narcotics are made and where the pollutants are dumped straight into the water. The workers notice him taking pictures and he has to fight a room full of thugs to get away with his photographic evidence. Since he is a righteous badass he beats the lackeys, but then a non-asian guy (martial arts champ Benny Urquidez) shows up and beats Luke badly. He is tied up and injected with narcotics to knock him unconscious. Timothy is still free, and escapes to get help.

I would put a joke here but I'm afraid Benny Urquidez
would rip out my still-beating heart.

     In court, the hearing begins. Jackie is there defending Boss Hua, putting him at odds with Miss Yip and Miss Wen. Jackie cross examines his main squeeze Wen and asks her under oath if she loves him. Improbably, the judge compels her to answer. She says yes and this gives Jackie an excuse to recuse himself from the case because of the conflict of interest, freeing him from his allegiance to Hua.

     Timothy, Jackie and Wen sneak into the factory again and end up in a confrontation with Hua’s men. This leads to lots of acrobatic fighting on walkways and rapid-fire stunt work. They find their drugged friend Luke and Timothy fights a horde to rescue him. The head enforcer played by Benny Urquidez is the last foe to face off with Timothy, and takes him down with one kick.

The inventor of the used-panty vending machine.

     Jackie keeps fighting the endless minion supply elsewhere, trying to get at Boss Hua. He chases Hua and they fight, then Benny shows up and takes over. Jackie and the Benny have an epic boss fight, while Boss Hua occasionally darts in to deliver a kick or a cigar burn before flitting back out of reach. This fight is much more entertaining because of his antics.

     Given the creators involved I expected some insane set-piece battles, especially here at the climax. Although they definitely use the multileveled terrain of the drug factory the climactic confrontation is more of a straightforward kung fu fight with some comic relief.

I just fucking LOVE being EVIL so god-damned MUCH!

     Hua spots Miss Wen and attacks her, but Luke leaps to the rescue and injects Hua with a fully-loaded syringe of the drugs. Boss Hua is tossed into the toxic waste tank while overdosing. Jackie takes down Benny the badass shortly afterward. The good guys get their girls, all three of the friends survive without going to jail, and the bad guys get their just desserts. Hooray!

RECOMMENDED!

Ooooh crap. Isn't this how the Joker got his start?

Flap your arms really fast and you can fly, just like Jackie Chan!

Yum, semen flavored!
(Oh shit, I am gonna get murdered for real now.)

Taste my bacon-flavored shoe of justice!

Gross, you never kung-fu fight with dogshit on your shoe!

So it's true... Sammo IS hung!

Hey Jackie, remember that time you saved my life
and to say thanks I slapped you really hard? Good times!

USA UP ALL NIGHT WEEK: Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama (1988)

Dir. David DeCoteau

Reviewed By Goat Scrote

     The pastel opening titles and upbeat synth-rock let you know that you are entering a time vortex back to the 1980s, when fashions were awesomely bitchin’ and everything was just a little more radically tubular than it is now. “Sorority Babes” starts off as a formulaic 80’s teen sex comedy which takes a left turn into a goofy C-grade horror story. It’s an extremely stupid but fun film with quite generous helpings of T&A. The version I saw on the USA Network must have been cut to hell in order for it to be aired on TV. There’s no significant gore, but plenty of full nudity.

     One of the more notable things about the movie is that it is packed to the brim with female icons of B-horror. The tough biker chick with a heart of gold is played by legend Linnea Quigley.  Scream queen Michelle Bauer is Lisa, a sorority pledge undergoing initiation. Taffy, the other pledge, is played by model, actress, and marine biologist - I kid you not - Brinke Stevens. I have tremendous respect for anyone with a range of accomplishments like hers!

Freud would have something to say about this.

    Trashmeister David DeCoteau has directed everything from gay porn to sappy children’s films in his prolific career, but one of his staples is cheesy horror with plenty of skin on display. In other films he has made an admirable attempt to be an equal-opportunity purveyor of sleaze by getting attractive members of both sexes to take off their clothes. In “Sorority Babes” it’s almost entirely the female body on display, but they are rather fetching bodies. I suspect this has something to do with the lasting appeal of this flick!

     The movie opens on three dorky college boys hanging around looking for something to do. Jimmie (Hal Havins) and Keith (John Stuart Wildman) hatch a scheme to spy on the Tri-Delta sorority initiation. They drag along their friend Calvin (Andras Jones). Calvin is watching DeCoteau’s movie "Creepozoids" (1987) during this scene.

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

     At the “Felta Delta” house, queen bee Babs (Robin Stille) and her minions Frankie (Carla Baron) and Rhonda (Kathi O’Brecht) haze their sorority pledges. The two girls, Lisa and Taffy (Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens), are stripped to their undies and paddled over the back of a couch. Next they are sprayed all over with whipped cream, to the great delight of the boys watching from outside.

     The three stooges decide to sneak into the house to spy on the pledges showering off the mess. They get to see plenty of boobs and bush before they get caught. The creatively sadistic ringleader, Babs, has them over a barrel. Either they do what she says or she calls the cops and reports the three peeping-tom housebreakers.

Bowling Dicks, coming soon to CBS

     The pledges are forced to team up with the pervs to break into the bowling alley at the local mall. They must steal a trophy to prove they were there. What the pledges don’t know is that Babs’ father owns the mall, so she plans to watch the hijinks from the mall security control room and mess with the pledges. The mall security cameras have excellent audio pickups so she can listen, too. Whatever.

     While breaking in, Babs and her minions accidentally lock the mall janitor in a room without noticing. The foul-mouthed janitor is played by the ubiquitous George “Buck” Flower, under the name C.D. LaFleur. This is the same alias he adopted when he appeared in the first two “Ilsa” films. I can see Flowers distancing himself from the degenerate “Ilsa” series, but come on Buck, “Sorority Babes” was just a slightly naughty teen sex comedy with an evil muppet. Anyway, I think the janitor should have been the hero who saves the day and ends up with Linnea Quigley, because I have a soft spot for ol’ Buck and his grizzled charm.

You look like...

Linnea Quigley?!?

PREPARE YOUR FACE
FOR  MY SMOOCHIES!

     Inside the bowling alley the five intrepid burglars encounter someone else breaking into the cash register, the spandex-clad Spider (Linnea Quigley). There is some badly written, badly delivered ‘catty’ dialogue between the pledges and Spider. Calvin tries awkwardly hitting on Spider and she shuts him down repeatedly.

     The kids grab the biggest trophy but on their way out, it gets broken and releases light and mist. The trophy was prison to the wisecracking, wish-granting demon Uncle Impie (Michael Sonye, using the alias Dukey Flyswatter for some reason). He has a deep voice which sounds like a cross between a game-show host and a pimp, and is the furthest possible thing from scary. (Crank the ed. here. Dukey Flyswatter was in "Hollwood Chainsaw Hookers" (1988) and was one of the titular villains in "Surf Nazis Must Die" (1987). He also had a band called Haunted Garage.)

Move over Cat's Eye troll, here comes Uncle Impie!

     Impie offers everyone a single wish. Spider and Calvin warn the others about possible consequences and their general mistrust of Uncle Impie, but the others decide to make their simple-minded dreams come true. Jimmie wishes for gold and a bunch of gold ingots appear. Taffy wishes to be prom queen and gets an instant Cinderella makeover. Keith wishes to bone Lisa, and they depart for a locker room to have a little privacy.

     The Imp forces Babs into the game by turning her minions into his minions. Frankie changes into the Bride of Frankenstein, while Rhonda develops a severe case of slimy green monster-face. When Babs tries to flee the mall she is zapped by a magical barrier and knocked unconscious.

Don't be so negative, Rhonda.

     Around now the wishes start turning bad. The gold is painted wood and the prom dress is rags. Then Monsterface and the Bride suddenly attack. Jimmie gets his face worked over in a ball cleaner, then he gets decapitated and Monsterface goes bowling with his head.

     Spider and Calvin barricade themselves in a storage room but are found by Monsterface. Luckily, some careless employee has left a handgun and a couple of bullets laying around. What the fuck…? Spider shoots Monsterface, which only stops her temporarily.

Bitch, don't test me. I will swallow your soul.

     Prom Queen Taffy is terrorized by the Bride. When Taffy takes a club to her crazed pursuer it just slows down the magic-fueled monster. Taffy ends up getting caught between both evil minions, who have a “Taffy pull”… har har, get it? She is pulled in two off-camera while being used as the rope in their tug-of-war.

     Keith and Lisa are still making out, but she is being way too aggressive and he is having second thoughts about the ethics of mind-controlling another person into having sex with him. Keith leaves her there so he can have a moment to think, only to get his face deep-fried in the kitchen by Monsterface.

Extreme ambush makeover!

     Babs is hiding behind the lanes in the bowling alley when she is cornered by the Imp. He explains that his purpose is to torment human beings. Monsterface shows up for a tussle, and ends up falling down on one of the lanes, where she is bowled to death by Spider! How the hell do you score that?

     The janitor eventually escapes the closet. He meets up with the other survivors and fills in the backstory. The imp was summoned decades before to help a guy who was a wiz at black magic but not so hot when it came to his bowling scores. When Impie started killing people, it was trapped inside the bowling trophy. Sure, good enough explanation for me.

No! Wire! Hangers!

Nothing a little foundation

and some blush can't fix.

   












     Babs the Dominatrix finds Lisa alone, in her lingerie, and she pulls out a whip and a giant black paddle. She kills Lisa with the paddle off-screen. Spider is elsewhere making Molotov cocktails when Babs attacks her. They get into a major cat-fight before the evil dominatrix gets Molotoved. The janitor is stabbed to death in his hideout by the Bride. Then the evil minion chases Spider and Calvin with an axe, but is herself decapitated. The Bride's head strikes the door of the mall and Impie's magic cancels itself out, giving them an exit. Spider sends Calvin to get his car, but Monsterface is in the back seat, still kicking after all. They crash and the car flips. 

     Meanwhile Spider sneaks up and catches the imp in a tobacco tin, ending his brief reign of terror. Total body count: 8. They leave the tin with the imp in it sitting on the sidewalk in front of the bowling alley, which seems pretty fucking irresponsible. Maybe they were hoping for a sequel. Calvin crawls out of the wreck more or less unhurt and rides away with Spider on the back of her bike. She is taking him back to her place to have wild steamy sticky pity sex. Talk about a happy ending for Calvin!

I'm SO sure.

Horror heroine uses yonic weapon to deal with the
domineering masculinity of the villain, symbolically
enfolding him in her womb and taking away his power,
proving this is actually a highly intellectual feminist film.

Argento's "Three Mothers" Trilogy

“Suspiria” (1977), “Inferno” (1980), “Mother of Tears” (2007)

by Goat Scrote

>-----[o]===~~~-----~~~~~=====><=====~~~~~-----~~~===[o]-----<

In director Dario Argento’s trilogy of horror films, the Three Mothers of Sorrow are powerful malefic witches who are greedy for wealth and power. They live in special homes designed for them many years ago by an alchemist, who didn’t realize their wicked natures until too late. Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, lives in a dance academy in Freiburg, Germany. Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, lives in an apartment building in New York City. Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, lives in a mansion in Rome.

     The witches secretly rule the world from these hiding places but they are actually portrayed as quite petty and self-destructive. This begs the question, why haven't the witches used their long lives to amass material wealth and mundane political influence, instead of just going on occasional killing sprees?

  Argento’s film “Tenebre” (1982) is unrelated to the series despite the title. “Inferno” is the film which deals with Mater Tenebrarum. Exploitation director Luigi Cozzi made an unofficial sequel to the series in 1989 which has carried a number of titles, including “The Black Cat” and “Demons 6: De Profundis”. I’ve discussed it already elsewhere because it is also a fake sequel to the “Demons” series.

     If you're interested in where Argento got his inspiration for these movies, be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the article for a brief discussion of the book "Suspiria de Profundis".

<}-----{]---------------<:==========:+++++O+++++:==========:>---------------[}-----{>

Suspiria *****

     This horror film is legendary for very good reasons. The story is flawed but everything else more than makes up for it. It’s not hyperbole to call it fine art.

SIGHT *****

     One of the most visually stunning movies ever made. The composition and camera work are beautiful and inventive. The use of lush primary colors and geometric motifs makes for an incredible viewing experience. The movie has a look all its own which has been imitated many times but never duplicated (not even by Argento).

SOUND *****

     Also one of the great film soundtracks, composed by Claudio Simonetti and Goblin. The way sound and music are used in this movie is just as important as the visuals. The sound design has an otherworldy and menacing quality which builds unease throughout.

SCARES *****

     A tense nightmarish feeling, like a fever dream, pervades the whole movie. The death scenes, although there are only a few, are unpredictable and intense. They don’t always make sense — dreams are like that — but that doesn’t stop them from being scary.

STORY **

     The plot is murky and at best adequate, although one could argue that this actually contributes to the dreamlike quality of the film. The story is set primarily at a prestigious dance academy full of sinister characters in the Black Forest of Germany. Horrible events are underway and the school is at the center. A hidden coven of witches lashes out at anyone who threatens their veil of secrecy, leading to a string of bizarre "accidents" and murders around the city. The coven is led by the evil Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs.

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Inferno ***

     What sets “Inferno” apart from other Italian horror flicks is its visual flair. It’s not a very scary nor a particularly absorbing movie, unfortunately, but it's almost as gorgeous as its predecessor.

SIGHT *****

     “Inferno” is beautiful. Visually, it's a worthy successor to “Suspiria”. Striking colors, geometric patterns, and beautiful shot compositions create individual frames which could stand as artworks in their own right. It’s worth seeing it in the best quality you can manage because it’s all about the visuals.

SOUND ***

     The score is written by Keith Emerson. There are times when his music fits seamlessly, and other times it seems to go in its own direction and belong in an “Omen” film or a 70’s TV show. The clashing music sabotages several of the scary scenes in the latter half. Some of the characters are musicology students which offers a logical way to bring some effectively-used classical music into the soundtrack. The sound design lacks the nightmarish intensity which helped propel the first movie. Hard to rate because it is so all-over-the-place sound-wise.

SCARES ***

     It has a few very creepy scenes. The tense early scene of a woman swimming in a fancy apartment submerged underwater is particularly haunting and surreal. The few great moments like this are spaced too far apart. The scares are sometimes undermined by unintentional comedy, such as an attack by ill-tempered house cats, or a guy screaming “Rats are eating me!” as he dies. The disappointing special effects at the end seem to belong in a campy 60’s era Vincent Price film.

STORY **

     The backstory of the Three Mothers is further fleshed out and continues to make hardly any sense. The two surviving witches both commit some murders in this film. The focus is on Mater Tenebrarum as she tries to preserve her New York hiding place. For all her supposed magical power she mostly uses knives to kill people. The unsatisfying ending hinges on the inability of the mighty witch to cope with a mundane household accident.

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The Mother of Tears ***

     “Mother” tries for an epic high-fantasy scope, with many characters demonstrating magical knowledge and abilities. The attempt to top the previous two movies hinges pretty much entirely on upping the gore, body count, and sexual perversity. Argento discards the more restrained and stylized approach which made the other two films stand out. "Mother of Tears" falls far short of the grand climax to the series which it was meant to be.

SIGHT ***

     It just looks like a pretty ordinary modern horror movie sprinkled with some truly awful CGI. The palette is mostly earth tones, with lots of black. Stylistically it is jarringly different from (and inferior to) the look and design of the first two movies.

SOUND ***

     Professional and competent, with some good work by Claudio Simonetti. Nothing too out of the ordinary here either, though. It just sounds like a typical scary movie. The loud nonstop shrill laughter of most of the witches sounds too much like a stereotypical caricature of witches cackling in a corny old cartoon. This makes it hard to keep a straight face during many moments which ought to have been full of tension.

SCARES **

     This movie is a little bit boring despite waves of gross-out gore and violence that sweep across the screen. It has the bloodiest and most sadistic kills of the series. That's super, but it doesn't make up for the lack of any real suspense or chills.

STORY **

     Mater Lachrymarum retrieves an artifact which greatly amplifies her power. She summons lesser witches from all over the world to join her, and the entire city of Rome descends into madness under their evil influence. The plot is the most coherent of the three (which isn't saying much), but unlike the first two it’s mostly a chase movie. The way they show the people of the city slowly turning into homicidal maniacs in the background of the main action is a nice touch. Mater Lachrymarum's defeat is a bit of an anticlimax, unfortunately.

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Argento's Source Material

      The characters of the Three Mothers of Sorrow originate from “Suspiria de Profundis” (“sighs from the depths”), a book of “prose poems” or imaginative essays written by Thomas de Quincey (favorite subject: drugs). It was first published in partial form in 1845 and remains very incomplete. Charles Baudelaire translated parts of the work into French and quoted it in his 1860 “Les paradis artificiels". (Translation “Artificial Paradises”. Topic: drugs.)

     The specific piece of de Quincey’s work which inspired Argento’s series of films is called “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow”. The Mothers were inspired by mythological triads such as the Fates and the Furies. For de Quincey, they were personifications of the trials and burdens which had shaped his life. Levana was a Roman goddess related to childbirth and is a fourth, distinct figure in the essay. It's quite a good piece of writing, considered a literary masterpiece in fact, and it’s only a handful of pages long. You could read it. It’s worth the time.