ROBOTRIX: THE REBOOT

ROBOTRIX (Nu ji xie ren) Directed by Jamie Luk, Starring Aoyama Chikako (1991).

When I wrote the review for this robotic jiggle-fest, I saw it on a scrambled looking dupe even back in 2012 (when things were saner in the U.S). Now an entirely new experience can be had once you’ve seen this brilliant flick in HD from Amazon Prime streaming, there’s just no contest! I mean, all credit goes to Chas Balun for introducing this Cat 3 favorite to the bootleg consuming gorehound public, but you haven’t lived until you’ve seen this film in high tech. Only a few years ago that wasn’t a possibility though, so I’m re-reviewing this (for the book if it ever comes out) and with a new perspective. All credit goes to Asian Crush and Fortune Star for this pristine restoration. There is one main difference however between this version and the uncut one. During one scene, a Terminator-esque character fucks a couple of girls to death and we see both his dick and their pubes but it's excised from this version (but if you really must see it, it's on various porn sites and of course Youtube in pure Cat 3 form).

Now that's what I call donkey punchin'.

Is it offensive, I would say mildly at best. Let me explain, for the Cat 3 rating/sub-genre, where I’ve witnessed retarded kids forced to make lattes for their special ed teacher (THE RAPE AFTER). I’ve watched in horror as Anthony Wong, the main offender of ghastly violence dismembers an entire family then serves them up in a Chinese Restaurant as a comedic device. So, no it wasn’t as shocking as the other films mentioned. If you are conservative and uptight about luscious female boobs then venture back to the dark ages where you belong and skip this one. The Russ Meyer elements belong to the knock out attractiveness (or ginormous boobies) of Golden Harvest staple Amy Yip and other assorted sexy babes.

This is goofy looking actor Jamie Luk Kim-Ming’s finest moment as a director, but he’s still acting and his last credit for Sword Master is as recent as 2016. He’s worked alongside many of the famed Cat 3 stars like Anthony Wong.

Johnny Cage in Facial-talicized The Mortal Kombat porn parody.

The busty and beautiful Aoyama Chikako gets to play the Peter Weller role as cop who’s recently died and returned from the operating table ready to fight. When Larry David mentions how he’d be more of a Christian had Jesus been a woman, he probably was thinking of Chikako’s resurrection.

standard bargain priced Oakland Chinatown gynecology.

So how did we get in this predicament anyhow? How else, a stupid Saudi Prince was to blame! Well, he looks more Italian to me, but at any rate the adorable Policewoman Linda Lam is his babysitter at a sex hotel. He tries to lure her into his scuzzy pool orgy, then knock out fumes put everyone asleep! Next, she gets a cap popped into her chest cavity and quickly dies—or does she? Detective Chou (David Wu Dai-Wai) pines for her after she dies, they got a special “thanng” going on if you catch my drift. Never mind that foreshadowing of a romantic encounter to wreak its sappiness later on, because we’re now at a kick ass robot convention! The Saudi Prince’s father “The Sheik” is a big robot investor, where we see a mural of a Heavy Metal magazine looking babe touching hands with God. A more recent reference for how this droid looks would be the Gazorpazorp sex robot from Rick and Morty. There’s a Leni Riefenstahl-esque supermen and women showcase of pleasure bots available for purchase, they lower them down on strings. The recent documentary “My Sex Robot” on Netflix comes to mind, if you see the road rash looking corpses they’re carting out for prostitution in that one, you realize this portion of futuristic fantasy will most likely never reach fruition, at least not for light years to come.

At the con, there’s a dude that looks like Sons of Anarchy, VH1 commentator Donal Logue but it’s never been actually confirmed. There’s also a David Arquette looking guy as well, I feel like this is Imdb up to its bullshit again.

Psychotic and suicidal droid dealer Ryuichi Yamamoto (Lam Chung), who I know from such classics as TOUCH AND GO and HER VENGEANCE is up to no good again. He uses a monitor that reminded me of the racist scene in BACK TO THE FUTURE 2, where the Asian guy was yelling “MCFRRYYY YOU’RE FIRED”, at Michael J. Fox in old age makeup. That scene is straight up offensive!

I'm even more offended that this shit hasn't come out yet!

Anyway, the evil automaton creator figures out a way to reincarnate your soul into a metal machine and live on CHAPPIE style! If you missed that cross breeding of SHORT CIRCUIT and ROBOCOP, with just a hint of skin crawling music c/o of Die Antwoord go do it, I’ll wait right here.

Oh sure, everybody loved dumb ass Suicide Squad but nobody got the subtle nuances of this?

Are you back? Ok, let’s press on. Yamamoto, has kidnapped the horny Prince seen in the opening in a pool surrounded by babes. He then black mails our cast of characters into fighting back with their own robot in the form of the recently deceased Linda Lam (Chikako), but they gotta book because that bitch won’t stay fresh forever!

This film gets even more zany if you can believe that and apparently, most of the females are already robots and I’m not sure how that makes them surgery experts but they get cracking on the procedure. I love how once she wakes up confused like the “Bride of Frankenstein”, they all coerce her into the new mission by saying, you need to follow these new orders and you’re still under a contract, what the fuck?

Down at a bar called “Joey Bananas”, the new evil Terminator-esque heavy is punching holes through random barflies and bribing hookers. All kinds of Asian “Brooklyn Nine Nine” style wackiness ensues, where one guy named Tony (or Puppy in some versions, played by Kwai Chung), who has one of the best Billy Ray Cyrus style mullets, puts on a costume so he can have sex with Amy Yip. Can you blame him, I mean come on! Another thing about robot-reincarnation that’s odd is that you are really good at consuming alcohol in a drinking contest. 

my favorite Smiths song is Handsome Devil.

They pad the ending with a car chase but it never really gets that dull or slows down, it’s a consistently fun time. If you’re a male or a lesbian with the maturity level of a 14-year-old, you’ll dig this one, all others are encouraged to watch a Ken Burns doc or something more your speed.

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A Zed & Two Noughts

A Zed & Two Noughts Directed By Peter Greenaway, starring Frances Barber (1985).

Reviewed By Kris Gilpin

After Peter Greenaway's first major film (The Draughtsman's Contract, shot on 16mm), his second feature was 1985's 35mm A Zed & Two Noughts (aka ZOO), a fittingly morbid rumination on death and decay.

It begins with the deaths of two women in a car crash, wives of zoologists (though I never saw any guests visiting the zoo throughout the film) who then become obsessed with the deaths and death in general ("I can't stand the thought of her rotting away!" "The wives of two zoologists die in a car driven by a woman named Buick, after being attacked by a swan on Swan's Way?!"). They later shoot time-lapse films of dead fish, dogs, crocodiles, swans (a swan caused the deadly car crash), etc. rotting away, while also watching old documentary footage on the origins of life.

OK, Now according to Little Black Sambo, if you run fast enough, I should have some delicious butter for my pancakes

This film features Greenaway's frank use of full male and female nudity (as with his The Baby of Macon, Prospero's Books, etc. Over 30 years later, Hollytrite still doesn't have the maturity to make films like this!), including the sexy Frances Barber as Venus de Milo, who's kind of like the zoo's resident hooker (?). There are also running references to symmetry: the brothers are twins named Deuce, played by real-life twin actors, the two late wives, pairs of amputated legs, twin newborns.

Alright now just poop toward the middle so I can tie them in a knot

Using very few close-ups, Greenaway's beauty photography (his D.P. is Sacha [Greenaway's 8 1/2 Women, The Pillow Book, and Drowning by Numbers] Vierny) utilizes lots of colorful tracking shots. And P.G.'s straight ahead focal point, head-on shots and busy frames always reminded me of Kubrick's camera-image style, though Peter G. offers long takes of smart, humorous, "exaggeratedly realistic" dialogue here, too.

And the lighting in ZOO (a Zed & 2 Naughts--get it? ;-) they based on the painting style of Vermeer. Together they came up with 26 different ways of lighting their scenes, using moonlight, candles, flashing light bulbs, car headlights, starlight, etc.

The beauty music is by Greenaway regular Michael Nyman, whose catchy keyboard-based, repetitious, almost meditative musical themes remind me of my beloved early Philip Glass pieces. Nyman also worked with the director on other films, including the great Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. A separate song which also reoccurs in the film is the kid's classic, "The Teddy Bear's Picnic." (!)

ZOO was narrated by David Attenborough (ha), who would later go on to narrate tons of popular British TV series. It is a slow-paced but always fascinating, offbeat film and well worth seeing, as is all of Peter Greenaway's best work...

I beat off to that decomposing animal footage and then used it to clone dinosaurs!

ROCKTOBER BLOOD

Rocktober Blood Directed by Beverley Sebastian, Starring Tray Loren (1984).

Reviewed by Michael Hauss

This movie really hit home for me! The thoughts that music can influence the decisions you make in your everyday life was something that I could relate to, because it had happened to me! When I was a card carrying member of the West Side Mullets, a group of the most ferocious tough guys in mullets, you’d ever want to meet, I became addicted to playing the cryptic, satanic music of that spawned goddess of Satan, Cher. I found that when I played her songs backwards,  I could hear faint chants of Satan saying “Buy Ovaltine!” Well of course after hearing this I immersed myself in the sub-culture that surrounded the great Cher, spiraling downwards with my addiction to Ovaltine, until I read in the World News that she had married Batboy and knew then and there that she could never love me! I, like most other young people in the 80’s also have a story about how their dog told them to kill, but that’s another story for another time.

Any who! This 1984 film is a decent enough little flick about a messed up Rock N Roll singer named Billy Eye (Tray Loren), who goes on a killing spree, killing twenty-five people and almost killing Lynn Starling (Donna Scroggins), the girl he was shagging and had written the song “Rainbow Eyes” for. A year after Billy’s execution, the band has reformed and goes under the name Head Mistress and is now being fronted by Lynn. At the reformation party Lynn is stalked by Billy Eye, but, how could it be Billy? He had been executed the year before for the string of murders he committed against “Rock N Rollers.” But it is Billy (or is it?), unfortunately no one believes Lynn, thinking her crazy. Chris who is the producer and the new shagging partner of Lynn, sends her to the cabin by the lake to get away from the crazy atmosphere surrounding the groups restart. While at the lake with Donna (Renee Hubbard) and Honey (Cana Cockrell), they do aerobics to release some tension and Billy appears and kills Donna and harasses Lynn, right after she gets out of a long bath scene (where she displays one of the most impressive tan lines ever), until the worried Chris shows up and is stabbed by Lynn, who thought he was Billy.

Guinness book you've got your record for whitest ass of all time

The show must go on, as they say! But, not before Lynn and Honey go and dig up the grave of Billy. Chris shows up to aid the girls after they had done all the digging and when they open the casket they discover the skeletal body of Billy. Thus proving to Lynn that Billy is dead and maybe, just maybe she is just imaging Billy’s alive! The night of their first show, a plot twist is revealed and kind of ruins the movie. But, the last few songs like “Killer on the Loose,” and “I’m Back” both performed by Billy in an ape mask, and Lynn performing the song written for her by Billy “Rainbow Eyes, are effective songs and worth the view alone. The ending is a What-the-Fuck moment and may have been left opened ended for a possible sequel, which never happened.

I SHOULD'VE HAD A V-8

I had fun with the flick which I viewed on YouTube after having this recommended to me by the owner of this blog, Erok Hellhammer. The version of this film I viewed on YouTube was very dark most of the view, and had a few continuity issues and the whitest ass ever seen on the lead singer of any band. But, it was fun and in my hyper active mind it had to have something to hold my attention or I’m fast forwarding like a fucking lunatic throughout the flick. The lead characters although shallow,  are for the most part fleshed out including the producer Chris, who is British and helps open-up the grave of Billy, wearing his leather pants, talk about cool. The Billy character, who may or may not be dead? Or maybe he has a twin brother who framed him for the murders? I won't tell so you have to watch this Rock N Roll Nightmare to find out the truth.

Eddie from Iron Maiden's cousin Reggie

The Lynn character as portrayed by Donna Scoggins, is not a hapless victim and is resourceful, a bit vapid at times, but besides the glow in the dark ass, is attractive and capable in the part. This is Scoggins only film appearance, and that is a shame as she had some acting and scream-queen skills. According to IMBd Nigel Benjamin, who played Chris, was the lead singer of Mott The Hoople from 1975-1976, and was also the singing voice for Billy in the film. The movie is directed by Beverly Sebastain, who does a decent, but uninspired job on the film, she has a few other directing credits including that swamp-ass film Gator Bait starring the late great Claudia Jennings.

So, dudes and dudettes pull on them leather pants, tease that wig, slap on some mascara, and wait for the part where Billy while harassing the aerobic suit wearing Lynn at the cabin with phone calls, says…. wait for it…. When the frantic Lynn says, "What do you want?” Billy replies back “Blood! I want your hot steaming pussy blood all over my face!” Laughing maniacally all along. Then after that glorious moment, just remember one thing, you Rockers out there, they don’t write em’ like that line anymore! Hold on, my dog is telling me something...

Hey MIKE, LETS GET WASTED!