USA UP ALL NIGHT WEEK RETURNS: CHOPPING MALL

CHOPPING MALL (1986)
Directed by Jim Wynorski, starring Barbara Crampton, Kelli Maroney, Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov

By Graham Rae

Well now VHS-horror-cellar dwellers, here’s a laserblast from the dim and distant past. Towards the end of last March I somehow ended up on director Jim Wynorski’s Facebook page (maybe through Barbara Crampton’s page, cos I glance at her stuff there), and saw that this film was apparently celebrating its 30^thanniversary. I told Erok that I would watch and review it purely because I called a chapter in my soon-to-be-released novel Soundproof Future Scotland after it, and was vaguely curious to see it after first seeing it a mere three decades ago. Literally the only thing I could remember about it was somebody’s head exploding. So here we are. Isn’t life grand?

I confess, watching this film did remind me of the antediluvian times when I would go out to the local video shop in Falkirk (my Scottish home town) and get horror videos out on a Friday night and review them for Deep Red. I just went back to see when this film got a UK release. Oddly, if you go to the BBFC website, it shows that the trailer (cut by an esthetic-debilitating – GASP! – one second! THE EVIL CENSORIOUS MONSTERS!!) was rated on 09/09/1987, whereas the released-uncut film itself was rated on 30/07/1987. So celebrations of the release date over here are kind of premature anyway. Oh, the non-controversy! Check this for yourself if yer bored and have no life:

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/chopping-mall-1987

So yeah. Let’s see. Plot? Well, three prototype ‘killbots’ are placed in a suburban shopping mall to guard the place overnight. Some way-too-old ‘teens’ who work in the mall decide to have an overnight sex-n-boozefest party and lock themselves in. Like some sort of tangential-riffing, it’s-alive Frankenstein vibe, a freak thunder storm lightning bolt zaps the control room for the evil-bastard-bots and renders them armed and dangerous. They then set out to – what else – kill all the teens, and a few random overnight staff; basically anybody they see and can get their lasers and hooks into, and their tracks to run over. How does it end? How do you think?

Anyway. This is a functional, funky, fun-in-places scifi-cum-horror film, exhibiting equal parts The Terminator, Dawn of the Dead and, well, other random films that drifted through my psyche when watching it. It’s funny watching a film from that long-gone time now, having first seen it when it came out. You can contextualize it within the era it emerged from, maybe have dimlit tattered memories come silently roaring back at you out of an unquiet shallow historical VHS grave, and you can pick apart the stuff that headspinfluenced it back then. Which is odd with this film, because there are scenes in it you would swearcame from Robocop, which came out the year after Chopping Mall got its USA release. I did hear stories back at the time about a glittery-eyed, hand-rubbing Paul Verhoeven lurking around the shopping mall set, ears burning with new plot details to riff on and rip off. He was eventually ejected by film crew, his pen and pad confiscated and ceremonially burned, but he still managed to retain enough information, despite the head trauma he suffered when thrown to the pavement outside the mall, to throw a few elements from Wynorski’s lesser-known effort into his own roboprick mix.

OK, so I made all that preceding robocrock of cybercrap up for fun. Obviously. It is true there are scenes that seem familiar from Robocop, though, like the start, which presents an advertisement for the killbots (not that they’re called that – they are only meant to subdue mall malefactors, not kill them, but that would not exactly have made for an interesting film, would it? Lightly Injuring Mall just doesn’t have the same ring to it) to introduce them to us. I idly wonder if the script for Robocop was kicking around Hollywood when Wynorski made his own film, but don’t wonder too hard. It could genuinely be just a serendipitous occurrence, like when JG Ballard wrote High-Rise (the film of which came out recently) and David Cronenberg made They Came From Within the same year on different sides of the Atlantic. I truly don’t care enough to research it at all. Why don’t you do it and come back and schlock-shock and awe us all? Or (chuckling here) more likely not.

Verhoven pulling the anxiety ridden strings of ED-209

Anyhow-what-where-when-why. So what do we really have here? Well, a slasher film with robots, where the roid-rage hemoglob-spiller-droids kill wisecracking middle class white teen hemorrhoids. Especially annoying is the cockwaver jock guy who doesn’t take his chewing gum out of his mouth even when he’s kissing or having sex – I just wanted to slap it out of his jawjawjawing slobgob. The teens get killed one by one and then…they don’t. You know the drill. Have to say, a lot of the performances were pretty bad in this, though Crampton and Maroney came out of it pretty unscathed. The latter exudes a kind of wholesome cheerleaderesque goodygoodyness, so you can’t help but root for her. Plus her big, big ultra-lacquered 80s hair never seems out of place, even when she’s squirming under tarantula assault, so she gets bonus heroine-stoicism points for that.

But never one to have her spotlight stolen, or style cramped, the lovely Crampton gets naked, as usual. Have to say, I thought her character’s charbroiled death (whoops, spoiler! If you haven’t seen the fucking thing after three decades, it’s not my damned fault!) was sadistic and disturbing, the most prolonged and painful during the short (73 minutes) running time, bringing some of the pathological misogyny from horror films from this period sadly to the fore. But even this level of discussion is giving it more discredit than it’s due. It’s a cheap quickie exploitation movie, nothing more or less, and you basically expect a bit of inhuman contempt along the way. Wouldn’t have it any other way, really. 

Ultimately what this all boils down to is a cheap and cheerful full-length horror-and-scifi homage from a director who is clearly a fanboy for this sort of stuff, and of cinema in general. Right from the start director Wynorski is nodding to other movies (including an entertaining nod-and-a-wink cameo from Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov, who include a mention of their cult 1982 effort Eating Raoul), and has the balls-out temerity to include posters from his own other movies in the background as free rental advertising! This reminded me of Ray Dennis Steckler having a killer being filmed wearing a Thrill Killers jacket during The Incredibly Strange Film Show in 1988, telling Jonathan Ross that he had made that film years before and nobody had seen it, so why not advertise onscreen? Frugality, genius and insanity run rampant! Wynorski just got down to slavish pandering to his influences a half decade or so before Quentin Tarantino would come out with his own tiresome, self-reflexive, filmic recycle-fests, is all. Surprised wee mad Quentin hasn’t used Dick Miller (who is also in The Terminator, which this film clearly riffs on) in a cameo somewhere, as happens here; the Plagiarist King definitely loses esoteric cinema points for that oversight.

Free advertising couldn't hurt, don't forget to pick up some trailmix lube

Quite apart from anything else, the film is a prime nostalgia-inducing 80s time capsule, from the over-the-top Reaganite shite fashion statements-of-malintent to the Jan Hammer-alike synthsludge soundtrack to the huge ghetto blasters and wisecracking robots (“Thank you! Have a nice day!” as they put it after they kill somebody, and DAMN, do they ever sound like the ED-209 cyberfeds from Robocop as they do!) and characters. This was, after all, the era of the groanworthy cracked-pun crock, and no dialogue exchange was complete without some smartarse saying something knowing and melodramatic during lulls in the action, or before the next kinetic violence burst.

Thank fuck the 80s are long gone and half forgotten, is all I can say.

Anyhoo. Any poor deluded younger person wanting to foolishly revisit the Decade of Cocaine and Shoulder Pad Excess can do it from the safety of their own living room with Chopping Mall, and a million other straight-to-video flickershows from the same period; the VHS gold rush epoch. An especially entertaining aspect of the film is trying to guess just exactly where the killbots (how the hell did they manage to stand upright on escalators?) were ripped off from, with their red glowing eyestrip. I mean, was it Maximillian, from the weirdly disturbing 1979 Disney film the Black Hole? Was it KITT from Knight Rider? Was it the cylons from Battlestar Galactica? Was it some other undiscussed hardly-noticed scifi progenitor? Or were the red eyes an homage to Cheech and Chong? All these and other hardly-pressing questions will never be answered to your satisfaction. Answers on a postcard to the usual circular file address. Just don’t go into this expecting too much, or even too little, and you won’t be disappointed. But I guess you knew that anyway.

Talk amongst yourselves.

END

Let's all crack open the beer endorsed by all robots with the same ocular handicap 

Night Watch

NIGHT WATCH (NOCHNOI DOZOR)

2004, 114 minutes, Rated R. Starring Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Valeri Zolotukhin. 

Fox Searchlight. 4 stars.

BY GRAHAM RAE

Vampire movies. Let’s face it, if there’s a filmic subgenre that has been done to death and beyond and needs no further additions, it’s the realm of bloodsuckers, eh? I mean, look at the now-empty (ahem) veins we’ve seen it done in: silent mysterious monochrome (“Nosferatu”); lesbian softcore (“Andy Warhol’s Dracula”), blaxploitation (“Blacula”); gritty social realist psychological thriller (“Martin”), high school satire (“Once Bitten”), camp coming-of-age effort (“Fright Night”); roadkill movie (“Near Dark”); gothic melodrama (“Bram Stoker’s Dracula”); hell, even utterly bizarre (“Deafula”, the world’s first – and only - vamp flick signed for the deaf!). And I could, of course, name a thousand other variations on the immortal nightcrawler bloodgulper theme. You may think that this type of movie should have a stake driven through its flickering celluloid heart, its head cut off and garlic stuck in its mouth, but that would be before you saw “Night Watch.”

      Coming at us straight out of Russia and based on a novel by Sergei Lukyanenko, this interesting, entertaining bat-man tale broke all box office records upon its release two years ago and was the all-time #1 movie in that country for a while. The first chapter of a proposed trilogy (whose second installment came out last year), “Night Watch” presents us with an epic tale of (what else) good versus evil. In the Middle Ages these two eternally warring factions, as represented by ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ ‘Others’ (have a guess which are good and which are bad) are having a gory go at each other on a bridge until, sickened by the wholesale slaughter of his troops in battle, the Light commander calls a Truce with the Dark one. They decide that forevermore the Light Others will patrol the doings of the Dark ones, and vice versa. The Light Others control the day and also make sure that the Dark Others, who become vampires, don’t go around at night breaking the Truce and committing evil acts

      Fast-forward several hundred years to present-day Moscow. Anton, a lovestruck man whose girlfriend has left him, tries to resort to black magic conducted by a witch to get her back and kill her unborn child, which isn’t his. At the scene of this would-be supernatural crime (and the magic-assisted miscarriage scene is a pretty grim one) a group of Light Others suddenly show up and arrest the witch for violating the Truce, and ascertain that Anton is an Other. Living amongst humanity are Others of both Light and Dark persuasion, seers and witches and prophets like Anton (“Just what we need, another fucking asshole with visions of the future,” intones one of the Light Others cynically), extraordinary people, and all must choose whether to go to the Dark or Light side.

      Anton chooses the latter and becomes a sort of Other cop, tracking down vampires who are killing people without being licensed to do so, using unsuspecting normal people as bait in a kind of entrapment scenario to arrest violators. That’s right, Dark bloodsuckers are granted a license to spill hemoglobin. Why exactly they’d be granted a license to do this I have no idea, but just go with it and we’ll be fine. Our world-weary protagonist’s stings lead him into meeting a kid who may just help set off the Apocalypse and he only has a certain amount of time to save the kid before the world melts down. So he gives it his best shot. And various chaotic shit ensues.

this Big Red flavored Vape is fucking epic!

      Now. First off. The plot for this film is not all that original. It borrows heavily from the whole outdated Book of Revelations end-of-the-world scenario that deluded Christians have misread into the final chapter of the Bible, but it’s serviceably sensible. It’s a compelling enough film, and what really sets it apart from the also-rans is the fact that it is simply visually stunning. Cinematographer Sergei Trofimov’s visuals are utterly incredible, and this really was an eye-opener for me personally as to what they can do film-wise in Russia in the 21st century. I still tend to think of Russia as a grim, grey land of stagnation and decay and Red Square soldier marches and vodka-drinking denizens (though there is a fair bit of vodka guzzling in this film – they have a stereotype to live down to, after all) waiting in queues for, well, anything. “Night Watch” certainly stomped this lack-of-Russian-culture-fed preconception (though I admit to a certain morbid curiosity in seeing the 60s décor in the apartments in the film and the old phone in a nuclear power plant, etc). But they have the net in Russia! Who’da thunk it!

BIRTHDAY CAKE VODKA, BLECCHHH WHY DOES THIS EXIST?

      This movie certainly rivals anything the West can do visually, and contained so many neat, original touches it really made it a joy to watch; for example, the subtitles. They were done in a really cool fashion I personally never would have even thought about. People obscure them when they walk into them, they’re printed in MUCH BIGGER LETTERS when people are shouting in odd places on the screen, they are done in red and dissolve into cloudy water-dissolved puffs of blood when the vampires are calling on somebody…it’s a really, really neat thing, something I had never seen done before, and instead of being annoyed at static subtitles I actually found myself enjoying looking at them and the way they were presented. One thing I confess to finding funny was the fact that the subtitles were very Americanized – weird to see a 12-year-old Russki kid saying stuff like “My bad” like an American. But that’s obviously because “Night Watch” has been picked up for release in America. Indeed, Fox are apparently going to make an Americanized version of the film. It’ll probably star some bullethead musclebound homunculus like Vin Diesel and lose all its rustic olde-worlde charm that way, but hey, what can I say? It certainly won’t be any better looking than the original anyway.

SHHHH! Let me gently subdue you into a coma with my beef jerky breath

      There are so many other cool wee things I could talk about in this film. There’s a scene with a villain playing a videogame that prefigures, literally and figuratively, an end scene. Anton has a flashlight that…ah, see for yourself. There’s some gorgeous monochrome animation about a woman who is cursed and after that her gaze kills. Things camera-shake and fade in and out in trippy acid visuals and blow up and there’s a humorous scene where a kid is watching “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and learning vampire-killing techniques from it (not as bad or cutesy as it sounds). The Light Others can shapeshift and turn into tigers or bears or whatnot. But you’ll really have to see it yourself to see what I mean. They mess around with the vampire mythology in interesting enough ways that you don’t simply feel you’re watching a retread of some other crap fangflasher flickershow. See this film. You definitely won’t regret it. You’ll learn visually about contemporary Russia and see vodka downed and a woman changing from an owl into a human. What the hell more do you want or need, a written invitation? Get on it. And I’ll see you in line for the sequels. Guaranteed.

     

END

Dead Snow

DEAD SNOW (DOD SNO) (2009, Un-rated, 91 minutes, Euforia Film.

BY GRAHAM RAE

Two events in recent human history have basically divested the human race of any dearly-held illusions about itself: the invention of the internet, where you can see all insane human potential spread out in a vast mad anything-goes market…and the Holocaust. The latter pogrom, the single most vile and evil event ever perversely perpetrated by the human (disg)race on itself, has produced some hollow caustic experimentation-and-extermination exploitation movies: sick, tasteless stuff like “Love Camp 7,” “SS Experiment Camp” and “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.” Cos after all, nothing screams entertainment like the loons who carried out the horrifying and race-despairing systematic wiping out of six million Jews and gypsies and homosexuals, eh?

I guess this human baked alaska is a bit too much!

You’d think that the whole Third Reichsploitation field had been done to death – and beyond. Which is where “Dead Snow,” the new (at the time of writing the review – Graham) Norwegian Nazi zombie movie, comes in. It’s a fresh and new twist on the whole Herrenrasse film genre, right? Wrong. There have been at least four other Nazi zombie movies made to date (there may be more, but I can’t be bothered searching Google for them): “Shock Waves,” “Zombie Lake,” “Oasis of the Zombies” (a Jess Franco anti-classic I actually own on a 50-public-domain-horror-film DVD and put off a third of the way through after my central nervous system started to collapse) and ‘Night of the Zombies’ (not to be confused with the excellent trash Bruno Mattei “Dawn of the Dead” rip-off movie). The question here is, does it bring anything new to this undeniably stupid subgenre, and do it well?

Not really.

First off: “Dead Snow”. What does that title mean? Nothing. It’s stupid to me, and pretty much as decorticated as the rest of the part-satire part-homage film. To a bad metal soundtrack, a bunch of University of Oslo students (one of whom, a medical student, is - hyuck hyuck – allergic to the sight of blood) snow-scooter to remote area of the Norwegian mountains to party in your archetypal cut-off-from-the-world cabin, indulging in some tiresome ‘post-modern’ Kevin Williamson-alike dialogue about horror movies that have had characters who go into areas with no cell phone reception as they do. Once they arrive at the cabin, they start partying when a strange old man lurches out of the snowblown night. “This’ll be the old guy to warn them they’re doomed to a horrible death, to explain the plot,” I said to my friend Elwyn, visiting me from Scotland…and I was right. Every self-respecting cheapshit splatter movie in the 80s had them.

you think this is bad, try sitting through Zombie Lake again!

Transpires that the area they are in, Oksfjord, was occupied by the Nazis during WWII (Norway, like most of Europe, was genuinely occupied, and this is apparently big in the Norwegian recent history psyche) and a group of ubermensch were chased off by the townspeople into the mountains and were presumed dead. Or not. Obviously, or there would be no movie. So the old man buggers off and gets slaughtered, illogically hanging around overnight in a tent in an area he knew to be haunted, and the film really kicks off. The kids find a treasure trove of gold stolen by the Nazis, which causes them to rise from their frigid mountainside tombs to search for their ill-gotten gains, in a move straight out of John Carpenter’s “The Fog.” Pretty soon “Dead Snow” turns into pretty much every ‘keep the undead outside and us inside’ film you’ve ever seen…and soon grows pretty tiresome indeed.

Damn it! I just can't decide what I want at Der Wienerschnitzel!

Now. I will say this. I’m getting tired of seeing old splatter movies from the 80s or so regurgitated, simply because this limited palette of sometimes-entertaining trash was the stuff the director grew up on. The minute I saw a fat ugly guy in this effort wearing a tee-shirt of Pete Jackson’s splatter comedy classic “Braindead” (U.S. title “Dead Alive”) a few minutes into the film I knew exactly what I was going to be getting; hell, even one of the posters is a direct rip from Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie.” There’s a ridiculous scene involving that horror nerd too. He’s in an outhouse taking a dump and a drunk beautiful girl comes out and fucks him (coming while he’s going, in other words), which I couldn’t caustically help thinking was sort of a splatter freak’s wet dream come true – as well as being completely ludicrous and implausible.

I suppose if you’re going to rip off (sorry, I mean ‘pay homage to a la “Shaun of the Dead”) splatter zombie movies, you could do far worse than early Sam Raimi and Pete Jackson films, whose undead lore this film is bloody drowned in. But, to me at least, that’s the whole problem. If I want to see early Raimi and Jackson films, I’ll watch the “Evil Dead” films or “Braindead” again, cos they’re great…and not just some halfass spinterpretation of them by somebody else. I love Romero zombie movies but didn’t much rate “Shaun” for pretty much the same reason: seen it all before, and far better done. Just the filmmakers recreating their youth and putting themselves in their favorite splatter movies. Which may be fun and fine and fair enough on one level, but even though we now live in an era where popular culture has swallowed its own tail and the directors who grew up on it are just shitting out the stuff they grew up on (often because they seem to have had no real lives growing up outside of watching movies)…is trying for originality, even a vague semblance of it, a completely lost cause?

You tell me.

Looking back over this review, I see it’s been somewhat jaded and negative. “Dead Snow” is certainly not a badly made film. It’s certainly of a higher production quality than some of its source inspirational material, and some of the scenes work pretty well. There’s a really creepy scene where a knocked-out woman wakes up to find herself being disemboweled by devouring zombies as the screen wobbles and fades and reddens as she dies. Wirkola can definitely direct a film, and could be a fine director if he just got some better material to work with that isn’t an irritating slavish imitation of other people’s seminal sanguinary spillage-work. There is plenty of blood and guts and chaos here for rabid splatter fanatics, so they’ll definitely get their money’s worth. Other people I know whose opinion I normally agree with and respect watched it and liked it (eh Baron?) so that basically just proves the subjectivity and ultimately pointlessness of reviewing movies.

I think I’ve said enough.

Next move’s yours.

Pointless? I'm so depressed.

Day Of The Dead (2008)

DAY OF THE DEAD (2008)

DIRECTED BY STEVE MINER

Review By Graham Rae

Well, there are some ‘remakes’ (or ‘re-imaginings,’ as Hollywood likes to euphemistically put it these days, when recycling worthless old 80's splatter and slasher flicks; a prevalent trend there in recent years) that should simply never see the light of, well, day, and this waste of digital video is one of them. This one (the original ‘Day’ is one of my favorite films) instantly joins the ranks of the world’s worst zombie movies like ‘Hell of The Living Dead’ and ‘Zombi 3’ and ‘Oasis of The Zombies’ and ‘Zombies Lake’ and ‘Violent Shit’. And that is no mean feat.

We should have known. In 2004, Hollywood ‘remade’ the 1978 satiric zombie classic ‘Dawn of The Dead,’ the movie credited with single handedly inventing the splatter subgenre, and big bucks rolled in. The reason they could do this is because original director George A Romero’s business partner Richard Rubinstein owns the rights to the ‘Dead’ films and wants to rake in as much cash for them as possible, against Romero’s wishes.

ROOBENSTIEN BUB NO LIKE, CHEAP FUCKK! 

How much he must have got for this worthless garbage is debatable, because it’s low-budget, low-rent shite from Steve Miner, the hack who brought us quality fare like a couple of the ‘Friday The 13th’ movies. The plot here? There isn’t one. Good acting? There is none whatsoever. Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames are in it (the latter only in a few small crap scenes before being bumped off), but they must have needed rent money and I can hardly believe they’re in this. Good makeup FX? None whatsoever; the zombie makeup is terrible. Gore? Very little, and the head-shot CGI-generated zombies look like they come straight out of a videogame. The social and philosophical subtexts of the original? Are you fucking kidding me?

being ball gagged and gang raped in a basement by gimps was less humiliating!

Discussing this film any further is a total waste of time and effort and energy, and to think more about it would be to put more thought than the clowns who made it put into it. I sat watching this nothing-like-the-original movie in utter disbelief, wondering about things like why the zombies could suddenly stick to ceilings and scuttle along them like Spider-Man, why…ah, tearing this to shreds is like shooting fish in a barrel. The only reason I am writing this brief review is to direct you back towards the nihilistic, humanity-escape-velocity-fantasy of the amazing original, available in a great edition from Anchor Bay DVD. Apart from that, well, forget it. I genuinely can hardly remember a thing about this straight-to-DVD lobotomy already, and I only watched it last night.

Thank fuck for having a short memory.

WATCH THE ORIGINAL DAY OF THE DEAD INSTEAD AVAILABLE FROM SHOUT FACTORY

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD RECKONING PART 1 BY GRAHAM RAE

This piece originally appeared on Film Threat's site, but they've since gone belly up like a bloated rat in a bucket of vile cheese whiz. Mr. Rae has graciously offered this article about his visit to the set of Land of the Dead, a film I enjoyed when I first caught it in an empty theater in Berkeley by myself in the middle of the day. This article will be split up in two parts and I'll give it the Guts wacky picture treatment per usual, I hope you enjoy it and thanks again Graham! 

THE DEAD WALK!

Dateline: Friday, 12/03/2004. Dead of night of the living dead in BCE Place. I am riding an escalator up from the lower level of this huge, gaudy building in the financial district of Toronto, Canada back to the ground floor, where the fourth George A Romero “Dead” movie “Land of The Dead” is filming this evening. In full horrifying zombie makeup, I have just been to the toilets, where I tried not to wash too much of the fake blood off my hands and was grinningly told I looked like shit by some random guy using the urinal next to me. As the film crew comes into view on the horizon I feel oddly as if I am in the surreal middle of some sort of wish-fulfillment dream over two decades in the making. I am going to shoot my first crowd scene and am nervous as hell. As I approach the milling zombie extra swarm I reflect for the millionth time on the long, strange journey that has led me from Scotland to the Great White North and my fast-approaching flesheater stardom and it still doesn’t seem any clearer or more believable…

The author buried somewhere among the hordes of the undead

ZOMBIES MAN, THEY CREEP ME OUT

1981. I am 11 years old in Falkirk, Scotland (directly between Glasgow and Edinburgh, if you’re interested and need a geographical reference point). Video recorders have not been out for too long (you have to pay to join places to rent tapes) and are still a novelty. My primary school friends and myself are horror film fans and, this being the golden age of the so-called UK ‘video nasties,’ the shops are full of bloody horror videos to sate our morbid-wee-shite preteen gorehound appetites. Whenever one of us sees a new sick flick we breathlessly report the next day to the rest about this sick crazy weird really gory mad film ye shoulday seen it this vampire guy zombie cannibal ninja creature gets ripped tae bits shot in the heid falls off a building heid chopped off smashed tae fuck attacked by an alien cut in half stabbed slashed sliced diced melted mutilated mauled and so on and so forth, excitedly describing the latest entry into our own private atrocity exhibition gallery to our awestruck friends. Our parents are fairly liberal (or just plain crazy) and let us watch pretty much what we want, and we are having a great time seeing the craziest goriest sleaziest vilest vicious violent videos we can. One day my pal-at-that-time Derek McLaren tells me about this great-sounding undead effort called “Zombie Flesheaters” (a Lucio Fulci film know as “Zombie” in the USA) and this amazingly cool bit where a woman’s eye gets impaled on a piece of wood. It sounds magic and I decide that this new classic, which becomes mythical among my group of peers, is the film I am going to get out the next time I go to the video shop.

Or when there's no more room in hell or too long a line at Dennys

So my father and I trail up to a shop in Falkirk whose name I can’t even remember now (but I can still recall the interior in vivid, lurid detail) and we go to the horror section to get the film. I can’t see the box and, being a shy 11-year-old kid, get my dad to go up to the counter and ask for it. It isn’t in, but the guy behind the counter lifts up the box for another film, “Zombies: Dawn of The Dead” and says they’ve got that one in, would that do instead? I have never heard of this film, and don’t really want to see it, I want to see “Zombie Flesheaters,” dammit, cos after all that’s what I went to the shop for, but I was too shy to say I don’t want this poor substitute for Derek’s great film and nod my head mutely. And so we take this film on Intervision Video by some guy named George A. Romero home and, in disappointment, I put it in the video recorder…

…and blow my young fucking mind.

Misleading Fulci-esque UK Intervision artwork 

This unexpected filmic discovery, about a group of people who hole up in a shopping mall to get away from zombies taking over the earth, is absolutely great too. It’s really, really sick and gory, with loads of folk getting shot in the heid and a zombie getting the top of its heid chopped off by a helicopter blade and zombies getting run over by trucks and a screwdriver getting stuck into a guy’s ear, and I can’t wait to tell the boys about this one. I watch and re-watch the film, taking it round to my auntie Mima’s (another great place to see horror films) in an adjacent street to show my uncle Gary, who stays round there at weekends, and he thinks it’s great too. The film really makes an immediate impact, and even after I have told my friends about it and they have seen it and we have dissected every death and smart (British word for ‘cool’) bit in it, I re-rent it at irregular intervals and it never grows tiresome to watch and, over time, becomes my all-time favorite film.

REWIND AGAIN!

(Brief digression: it was only this year that I realized (upon careful reflection) the reason “Zombies: Dawn of The Dead” made such an impact on me was because when I saw it in 1981 I had only recently returned to Scotland the year before from South Africa, where I had spent the ages of five to ten (my first five years being spent in Scotland) living with my parents and brother. There was a shopping mall called Eastgate just outside Johannesburg that we used to visit at weekends sometimes and the shopping mall in the film (complete with first-generation videogame machines like Boot Hill) reminded me of Eastgate and the times I had spent there. But I never thought of that at the time, at least not consciously (funny the way the mind works, eh?). I just thought it was a bloody great film, and I still do.)

(Second digression: a few years ago at the Edinburgh International Film Festival the documentary “American Movie,” about wannabe-director Mark Borchardt’s attempts to make low-budget horror films in Wisconsin, was screened. I recognized the guy’s horror film fan mindset immediately and could relate to his intense Romero zombie fandom. I had to interview director Chris Smith and producer Sarah Price after I saw it. I put it to them that Borchardt had obviously named his daughter Dawn after “Dawn of The Dead.” Smith looked at me in amazed bemusement for a few moments, then said “You know, you’re the first person who ever got that.” Make of that what you will, but “Dead” fans recognize their own…)

Anyway. Let’s fast-forward this old, chewed story-videotape (sorry if the picture jumps or is poor quality in places) a few years. I find out piecemeal bits and pieces from reading horror magazine Fangoria (which I read when I was young, though I haven’t looked at an issue in over 15 years) about “Dawn of The Dead” (as I now know it is known in the US) and become a huge George A Romero fan. When I am 17 I am on a Youth Training Scheme and, with my meager ‘wage’ of 27 pounds (roughly $40) per week I go through on the train to Edinburgh and delight in finding hard-to-find years-old Romero tapes like “Night of The Living Dead” and the classic “Martin”. Purchasing the soundtracks for “Dawn” and “Day” I also buy a copy of ‘The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh,’ which is a book about all of Romero’s movies. I really, really want to buy the (I think it was) $100 signed hardback version of the tome, but that proves to be beyond my limited financial capacities at that time. Over the next year or two, pissed off that “Dawn of The Dead” and “Day of The Dead” (which I love and see ten times at the pictures in Falkirk when it comes out in the UK, even opening the back door of the cinema so my 15-year-old brother Tony and his pal Mikey Martin can sneak in and see the film) that are cut in Britain I send off to the US for them from FantaCo in New York, and get the copies converted from British PAL to American NTSC myself: no way, no fucking WAY am I going to watch cut versions of classic films like these.

 

R.I.P. Scala Cinema

When I am 18 in August 1988, I attend a horror film festival, Shock Around The Clock 2, in London, at the now-sadly-defunct classic arthouse-cum-grindhouse Scala Cinema. I see some films like “Nekromantik” there and do the first US review of it for Deep Red, a now-defunct legendary splatter movie fanzine whose editor, Chas Balun, I have started corresponding with after reading about him in Fangoria and asking him if I could be a ‘foreign correspondent’ (with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of what this might entail – ahhh blissful youthful ignorance and naivety – or how I might do it from my bedroom in my parents’ house in Bainsford in Falkirk with just a typewriter and no contacts in the film industry) for the zine and getting the go-ahead. The next year at Shock 3 a young man of 18 comes up to me and asks if I am Graham Rae. Ready for a fight, I reply that I am. He tells me his name is Justin Stanley (another Romero zombie movie freak), he has read my stuff in Deep Red, he likes it and asks me if I would like to help organize a horror film festival like the one we are currently at. I tell him yeah and give him Chas Balun’s phone number and tell him to say I sent him when he calls. By the tail end of 1989 Justin has put together a festival called Splatterfest 90, scheduled for February of 1990, and we go across to the USA (my first visit) to meet some of the guests in Hollywood.

Graham and Monika M. from Nekromantik 2.

Before we go to LA, though, we stop off at a snowblown Pittsburgh where we initially are going to be zombies in the limp remake of “Night of The Living Dead”, but it is rescheduled and a meeting we are going to have with Tom Savini pulls through. But we don’t care, because we visit the consumerist Mecca where “Dawn of The Dead” was filmed, Monroeville Mall. We wander round this familiar-yet-not site excitedly, taking endless photos and playing the comedic ‘Gonk’ music from the end of the film on a ghetto blaster I am carrying (which we are told to turn off by mall security), marveling at how much – or little – some of the place has changed since the film was made there over a decade before.

Turn down that Ghetto Blaster and no pie fighting either!

We then head off to Hollywood to meet Chas Balun and Scott Spiegel (director of a supermarket slasher film we want to show at the festival, “Intruder”) and, through Spiegel, who co-wrote “Evil Dead 2” with Sam Raimi, we get drunk with the Spidey director at his Silverlake abode one day as we play a Donald Trump board game (which was, as you might imagine, an incredible experience for a shy, bookish 20-year-old “Evil Dead” fan from a small boring Scottish town).

In more pleasant days before Spiderman 3 was unleashed upon the earth

Spiegel (a cool guy and a man to whom I owe some AMAZING memories – thanks Scott) also drove us over (listening on the ghetto blaster to Screeching Weasel’s classic second album Boogada Boogada Boogada, which had just come out at that time and a band of whom I was a huge fan; funnily enough, it has a song called ‘Zombie’ which references “Dawn” in it) in his open-top stick-shift European sports car to meet the super-amiable Greg Nicotero (of the venerable KNB EFX group), another guest at the Splatterfest, who had done FX on “Intruder.” Greg took us round the KNB studio, showing us super-cool FX props from films like “Tales From The Darkside” and the then unknown “Dances With Wolves” (think lots of fake dead buffaloes!), amongst others. Tickled pink that Justin and we knew his dialogue from “Day of The Dead” (in which he played the doomed soldier Johnson: “We used to talk to Washington all the time, they could hear us then!”), Greg gave Justin a WGON-TV sticker from the helicopter in “Dawn” and me a pen-marked script from the set of “Monkeyshines” by Romero. When Greg and Scott are in London for the Splatterfest two months after that, staying in a flat in Tooting, we also hang out. This is all pertinent, by the way, because it just basically illustrates how much Romero’s work has meant to me over the years. And it all leads full-circle, don’t you worry…

DEAD RECKONING BECKONING

Anyway. Years roll by, life’s trials and tribulations test and educate me. I start to write for the long-dead print incarnation of this very website (cosmic fact: Chris Gore was a zombie extra in the selfsame “Night” remake Justin and I were going to be zombies in), or more specifically the Film Threat Video Guide, an offshoot of the magazine. Through that mag in 1992 I meet Dave Williams, my brother-of-another-mother American twin (similar mindsets, music and literature tastes, etc), and we keep in contact over the years. As a writer/editor Dave moves from FTVG to American Cinematographer to Cinefantastique (which he left a few months ago to continue his own work) and, when he does so, he moves me with him, on the proviso that I can cut it in writing articles for these publications. I prove myself to him again and again, and his generous patronage (I owe you so much Dave – thanks for being one of the best for so long and putting up with me all these years) is the reason why I end up writing about stuff like Scottish art cinema (Lynne Ramsay and “Ratcatcher”) or Jim VanBebber (about the cinematography on his Pantera video for ‘Revolution Is My Name’) for AC. One of the world’s top film magazines, it’s a technical trade journal and I don’t come from a technical background…but hey, with enough balls and wordwork know-how even a monkey can follow writer’s guidelines and come up trumps, right?

Right.

Over on the Romero front, I stop following his work closely after “The Dark Half” but am still interested to hear about what he’s getting up to upon occasion. Or, more specifically, I’m interested to hear about the oft-raised-but-never-fully-verified rumors about an impending new “Dead” film “Twilight of The Dead,” which will be the end to the series that the original “Day of The Dead,” whose budget was lopped in half (and whose original script is excellent), was supposed to be. My idle “Day”-dreams of being a zombie in a Romero film (which assumed some sort of talismanic significance in my mind for a few years) fade quietly as I get older and move into new arenas of interest, leaving behind my horror fandom in my early 20s, although not my love of “Dawn” as my favorite film. By now I’m older and more educated as to Romero’s subversive social and societal subtexts in his “Dead” films and can see the nod-and-a-wink depth to them. But underneath it is all is just the sheer pleasure of seeing a world order I despise collapse and seeing an intelligently realized version of, as the director himself puts it in one clip of him I see, the vision of a new society devouring the old. The film is just a great remedy for any dazed days when I’m feeling hopeless or helpless or misanthropic at the state of the world, and the idea of a planet seemingly full of morons being wiped out and a new world disorder establishing itself is an extremely appealing one. 

Plus I still think zombies are really, really cool…

OK So how do we send one of those ROTLD missiles over to Zack Snyder so he never remakes Dawn 

DEAD SET ON A DEAD SET VISIT

In 2004 the much-debated, tedious, braindead “Dawn” ‘remake’ (or re-imagining or whatever the fuck you want to call it, which rips off the original “Day” script) comes out and I phone up BBC Radio Scotland and DEMAND to review it and do so, dismissing it and pointing people back towards the original, which has finally been released uncut on DVD in the last couple of years in the UK (having been snipped of six minutes on its initial video release). Stupid as it may be, the regurgitation remake has one good effect: its success, along with that of the “Resident Evil” films, convinces Universal Studios that they could make a mint if they put Romero back in the undead director’s chair to make another long-overdue installment of his own decades-spanning zombie flesheater holocaust saga. And thus the forever-rumblings about a fourth “Dead’ film start anew, only this time with real weight and it’s-finally-gonna-happen substance.

I tell Dave Williams that, if Cinefantastique are going to do a story on the film, I want to be the one who visits the set when it shoots. He agrees (earning a place in my good book until the end of time) and gives me the gig. I am fortuitously on holiday in Chicago (a short hop to Toronto, where “Land of The Dead” is filming) during December 2004, the omens are good…and I can hardly believe my luck as I jump on a plane to Canada on 12/01 and the culmination to a story that started over two decades before with an unsuspecting 11-year-old’s chance discovery of a horror classic in a long-gone Falkirk video shop. I get an added wee bonus on the plane. Actor Paul Dooley, who played Claude Elsinore in the 1983 Canuck cult classic “Strange Brew” (which just so happens to be one of my all-time fave films) is on the plane, and I tell him the film is great and shake his hand before settling down for the undead adventure to come.

After a journey of a little over an hour I am in Toronto and get a limousine (all the while marveling at the whole thing) from the airport to the four-star Marriott Bloor hotel I am being put up in by the generous-cos-they-can-afford-it Universal Studios. Starving, I head down to the dining room after checking in. With my $100 (Canadian) per diem I get myself the most expensive $35 coupla-inches-thick steak (best I ever ate in my life) in the place, just because I can, and toast myself with a $12 glass of red wine. This is the life indeed; things just don’t get any better than this…

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 COMING UP SOON . . .

Mardi Gras Massacre

MARDI GRAS MASSACRE
Directed by Jack Weis. Starring nobody who wants to admit to being in it. (1978)

Review By Graham Rae

Mardi Gras Massacre. Zipadee doodah. Does the world really want or need another review of a shitty 38-year-old splatter film that nobody cares about anymore? What’s that you say? Yes? Because that’s what this site is about, reviews of films in Chas Balun’s video trade catalog? Okay, well, here you go then:

Weird guy who wants an “evil” woman picks up various hookers in bars (one of whom “could probably take first prize in any evil contest”), takes them home, and sacrifices them some Aztec deity by cutting their hearts out, whilst a horrible disco-cum-weird-crap soundtrack farts inappropriately across the scenes. Two stupid cops try to catch him. One falls in love with a hooker. Bad acting abounds. Some more stuff happens. The copsuckers chase the sacrificial murderer. He jumps into a police car and drives straight into a river for no reason. But there is no body in the car, which is the set up for a thankfully nonexistent sequel. The End.

Bloodfeast 2: Egyptian Fiesta

What’s that you say? I should have given you a spoiler alert? Why? Here’s one: the whole fucking film is spoiled, there’s your alert! The only people who care about this film are horror nerd completists who want to say they have seen every film with the word ‘massacre’ in the title. But you know what’s far worse than it just being a terrible piece of pathologically misogynistic hamfisted garbage? This film is a killer of hope, a slayer of artistic fantasies, a weary charnel house of young cinematic dreams. 

Fuad Ramses would not approve

Consider if you will: The director, fumbling with his girlfriend’s bra in a drive-in somewhere in 1963 as Blood Feast oozes, burps, gurgles and splatters across the appalled screen. One eye on HG Lewis’s timeless anti-classic, the other on the pert young breasts slowly coming into damn-this-fucking-bra view, he thinks one day I too will make my own worthless piece of celluloid excrement, to rival or even surpass this one, throwing body parts around and cutting out hearts and – OWWW! His future filmmaker reveries are cut cruelly short by his girlfriend slapping his face for twisting her nipple too hard, and she jumps out of the car and storms off, slamming the door hard and cursing him as she does. But he never, ever forgets, and 15 long years later his own cataract-clouded vision is dumped on a bored, sniggering, bloodthirsty, unforgiving audience. He briefly forgets the people he frightened with his films along the way, and those disowned terrible early Super 8 porno loops of his involving…well, you’ll know what was in them, the court case was quite famous. All this is not what he expected or wanted, and he dies in a shooting gallery a few years later of a Drano overdose, cursing the deceptively easy art of filmmaking with his last sad halitosis breath just before the other junkies pick his pocket and scram before the police get there.

Jack Weis loves the nightlife and likes to boogie 

The makeup FX guy, inspired beyond belief by the Utterly Godlike Genius of his hero Tom Savini’s seminal work on Dawn of the Dead, and his porno mustache. He eagerly constantly practices his sleight-of-hand makeup wares and tears on unwary friends and family, causing his parents and siblings to mutter darkly about his mental health and having him institutionalized. But nothing and nobody can stop a man possessed by the will to disgust people with his FX on the silver-cum-blood-splattered screen! He will not be stopped! He lops off cheap plastic limbs, pours endless gallons of sticky, chunky Karo syrup blood, and rigs up exploding condoms to poorly mimic gunshots until he thinks his heart will burst with pride at his subpar work. Finally…it all comes to fruition! His big chance! A horror film! He gets to do the same cheapjack effect over and over again, cutting open a pathetically fake, waxy torso and pulling the heart from it! He laughs heartily at all those he alienated and who thought he would end up a serial killer along the way, including his friends and family, and goes home to his skanky lonely apartment to drink cheap wine and eat from a can, wishing he had money to pay the electricity bill so he could have warmed up the contents before eating.

Not bad for a dime store outlet special effect

filmed in Technicolor diarrhea brown and beige

The set designer. As a child, he would sit and ooh and ahh and coo and handclap when watching things on the big screen like the vivid primary colors in the Elizabeth Taylor production of Cleopatra, the decorative, dazzling mauves and emeralds and cobalt blues sending a coded arousing message his nascent (homo)sexuality would not quite able to figure out yet. But as those gorgeous neon-hued colors dripped and drizzled across his lap, staining his popcorn and his young future set designer dreams, he instantly knew in which direction he wanted to aim his life – if not yet which direction to aim his cock. And so he studied all the greats on video and at the cinema, pausing videotapes, comparing color charts and wallpapers, reading American Cinematographer, taking notes, performing anachronistic feng shui calisthenics behind his fevered everything-is-art eyes, redesigning the natural world constantly until it fit his precious and precocious aesthetic vision. The first couple of high school plays he did were awful except for his extravagant-rainbow-motif work, which was applauded by his hush-hush young lover in the high school newspaper, the hunky dreamboat Rusty, but at least he started to get his visual message out there. Until, through a combination of happenstance and good luck, he finally chanced upon his maiden cinematic experience. Mardi Gras Massacre, huh, okay, geez, whatever. Cheap gig, obviously. “OK kid, make us up a sacrificial chamber, this cuckoo asshole has to murder some women on a table. Hang some big crimson curtains with – hey waitaminute, make everything crimson, I like it, shit, crimson like blood, real high concept shit, yeah, everything crimson, the cheap sacrificial table, the Aztec altar, alla that shit. Just let your imagination go wild. Long as it’s cheap and crimson. Go to it, kid!” And so our poor set designer does as he is told, simmering once-unstoppable aesthetic dreams cruelly crushed by the weight of cheap splatter movie set design reality. After he finishes he cannot bear to watch the end product and takes to the streets, selling himself as a rent boy until he finds a sugar daddy to take him away from it all and to help him blank out his nightly-nightmare-retraced experiences on the splatter set that wake him up in the early hours before dawn and that only valium and absinthe and crying will obliterate.

Care for a nice cold Steel Reserve 

The actress. Skinny kid in school, arty, kind of kooky. Always into theater and dance, kind of a nerd, bit weird, intense, into Sylvia Plath, misunderstood, but along with it, you know, dreams far beyond her small town horizons. Truly believing that the magic of the tarantella she could easily astound her peer group and dance class with would propel her to the heights of stardom. She would hit Broadway – okay, maybe off-Broadway for five minutes, just to give her time to dazzle and be discovered, don’t want to too be too unrealistic – like a whirling spinning prancing jumping trotting comet, a kinesthetic (got that word from some poetry book whose title couldn’t remember, and often used it to show her superior intellect) vision of untouchable purity, a trip beyond all current available dance processes. Shrugging off the cooling loins and tears of smitten young male and female lovers she strode boldly into the New Orleans night, long bus journey and sore ass a necessary evil.

Art or Arse, you be the judge

She was ready to strut her stuff, the roar of the crowd and the smell of the greasepaint ringing in her ears and nose, her get-outta-my-way searing upward trajectory nothing but a natural phenomenon given the weight and heft of her easily-wielded anybody-can-see talent. Couple of small dancing gigs here and there, the odd lapdance poleslide embarrassingly endured, smacking sticky prying fingers on small stages in intimate rooms from drunk patrons in the front row, the show must go on, ignore these assholes, when I am dancing like Nijinsky and Nureyev across that not-too-far Broadway stage I will laugh last and long at these salad days memories. But somehow and somewhere it never went quite right for her, as it doesn’t for a thwarted great many, and she grew despondent, weary, towel-throwing-in. Until…on the horizon…a dim maybe-redemptive…chance! A film! Director looking to prove himself, horror flick, kind of cynical, sleazy, “OK girl, you get naked and do your dance moves round this brown – HEY MOTHERFUCKER, I SAID I WANTED CRIMSON! – this sacrificial table, altar, whatever. I know you got the moves, you can do a pas de deux like a motherfucker, and I know you’re supple, you were like a goddam gymnast in bed last night. Show this crazy murderer asshole, girl, show him the beauty he is murdering, dance naked, show him the evil error of his ways before he ties you down and cuts your heart out! Don’t be sad, stop crying, this is your big chance, this will play in Peoria! Stop crying! OK, lights, camera…ACTION!” And so she sniffles and raises her chin high and rises above her sordid surroundings and circumstances and dances and kicks her legs high overhead, elegant swan-like movements coming through loud and clear on the grimy recording 16mm celluloid, the camera comprehensively documenting her descent into an inferno of no uncertain ending. After filming she disappears into the night, maybe back to the black hole of her small town home, maybe into the cold dark hiding places that proliferate in any big conspiratorial city, nobody on the production quite knows or cares, and she is not at the premiere or any screening ever. She is forever a mystery, a question mark, a dream unfulfilled.

This should be just enough for gas money and a cheap lunch

Well, I could go on, but I think you catch my drift. Doesn’t anybody else ever watch these films and think damn, I wonder what happened to this dancer woman, or this stupid bartender guy, did they really think they were going to be famous in a stupid fucking flickershow like this? Watching certain movies, you can’t quite believe that grown men and women wasted precious days of their lives making them, and this is most certainly one of those chinstroker hmmm-I-wonder-inspiring epics. You wonder if the people in it went onto anything else, or if they just gave up any nascent dreams of stardom and went back to the silent midnight valley of nothing of life far away from cheap sets and never-lived-down filmic embarrassment.

Russ Meyer's gumshoe brother Hortense

Well, I occasionally wonder. But not very hard. I guess it might be easy enough to find out what some of them did after, as the net is a wonderful tool for facilitating pointless research into worthless subjects, but really I don’t care and, let’s face it, neither do you. And neither did the people making this film when they made it, either, so we should just return the favor and let this guitar-picks-of-the-future (historically, old film prints were melted down to be made into guitar picks) garbage slide back into the Stygian, talent-free depths it slimed up from. But sometimes…spare a thought. For the crushed dreamers. For the abused thespians. For the bruised-brain directors. For the now-colorblind set designers. For the turned-accountant dancers. For the ex-FX guy now working in a hardware store. After all, there but for the (dis)grace of Mardi Gras Massacre go you and I…

END

I just moved in with Red Fox and another portly fellow named Cal

This roll of singles made it all worth while