Dark Waters

Dark Waters (Temnye vody) Directed Mariano Baino, starring Louise Salter (1993).

I decided to pick this Lovecraftian Nunsploit shot in the Ukraine from the catalog. No, it’s not the Japanese Dark Water by Ringu director Hideo Nakata, which was remade with Jennifer Connolly. In fact, I actually liked this one more. The Baino film, which is his debut, starts off on a blasphemous note as a priest is drowned and then impaled by a cross, while a nun is mysteriously pushed over a sea side cliff. I'm stoked to see what heavy metal wackiness will erupt forth next like the spirit of Nyarlathotep. No that’s not a typo because this one takes place in the briny terrain of an Innsmouth-like cult, minus the inbreeding and the fishy lips. This is all deliberate and Mariano was very much influenced by Lovecraft. He was also a big fan of Graham Masterton, the genius behind one of my all time favorite schlocky Indian backne midget demons The Manitou!   

A cracked Flavor Flav style Pazuzu-ish medallion is placed in a keep sake box by the nuns,

left there for some predictable foreshadowing later.

What time is it? Time to drop a shit ton of LSD

The last mainstream disparagement toward those punishment craving nuns I can think of was the “Shame” dungeon sister featured on the Game of Thrones religious cult.
The score is very Boswell sounding, which works out pretty good.

Down in the depths of a cave there’s flaming crosses and flagellant nuns, (meaning cloistered bippies whipping themselves for sexual kicks not those with bad gas)!

I'd be cautious around that open flame during pork and beans night at the convent

Louise Salter, a British actress all decked out in sexy red leather is eager to reach the island of the eyeless creepy nuns, she's there to lower the boom and cut their funding after the death of her father, who was a big supporter of their satanic shenanigans. Little does she know they have some wicked plans for her and it gets worse, considering there's devious connections between her parents and these horrid bitches.

This film is extremely wet and European, it's always raining and the characters all speak in a gruff Eastern block-ish dialect, the kind that warms the frigid cockles of the alt-right Putin lovin suck ups. One loony aboard the vessel feasts of entrails and looks as if he sorely regretted taking the 20$ for this shitty bit part acting gig!

In the catalog, Chas mentions the shopping cart Sam Raimi “shakey cam” and the atmospheric set design, I think this director is pretty talented and besides DW, he’s only put out short films.

These eerie nuns seem to never catch any ZZZZ's, they stay up all night with torches walking around from dusk till dawn. Some of them act like the blind dead, wearing robes and lunging forward to strangling the shit outta anyone within reach. Elizabeth has one tripped out freaky nightmare showing a crucified nun with a withered face and candy corn teeth who levitates forward behind two cackling bug eyed kids.

OK kids smile for school picture day!

It must be a bitch to charter a boat, (Fuck that shit, I would've fashioned a Gillian's Island one out of bamboo to escape this claustrophobic dump)! That aspect sort of reminded me of The Wickerman.

It gets worse after it turns out this little pirozhki has family connections to these island hags and her chickens all come home to roost or something, I was slightly confused there's an "unbearable lightness of being" amount of metaphorical subtext. I guess I shouldn’t keep bringing up Russian references, (that last one was Czech by the way), because this director only filmed in that location because it was the financier’s idea--Mariano is Italian. He mentions this in an interview with comingsoon.net.

FLOYYYDDDD!!!

Nuns still have no fun like the Mercyful Fate tune goes and what's worse they are pyromaniacs!

Definitely stick around for the bat shit crazy ending where the main character’s mutant naked twin makes an appearance and the Pazuzu puzzle piece grants her the fortitude to yank out nun guts and chew them up like snausages! I think I need intense therapy now! Even though this one is like a Catholic Innsmouth with a Sentinel (1977) type element, it’s more original, super weird and worth seeking out. There's a new special edition DVD with commentary and a featurette which seems cool, because I heard that they apparently filmed near radiation infected landscapes and the flaming crosses almost demolished the set. Worth a shot, check it out!

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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

The Final Sanction

    -Reviewed By Skunkape-

Directed by David A Prior (1990)

                                                       

This review comes at a time more relevant than ever, really, I’m not just Putin you on! Russia is invading Ukraine and the United States is faced with tough decisions. We don’t want to go to war with Mother Russia so we issue sanctions that will hurt their economy and hopefully get them back under control. The Final Sanction does not deal with a sanction that will effect Russia’s economics, it's about kicking Soviet ass! The Cold war ended in 1985 but this film was released by AIP in 1990 and was directed by David A Prior. It stars his brother Ted Prior, best known for his infamous role in the film Deadly Prey as the shirtless jorts (jean shorts) wearing Danton.

Meet the Hero, Sgt. Tom Botanical Gardens

Ted Prior much like in Deadly Prey plays a soldier, who is the best of the best. His name is Sgt. Tom Botanic (just remember only his friends call him Thomas) and he’s been framed for a crime he didn’t commit. He was court marshaled and sent to prison for killing Americans within his own platoon. He gets pardoned for his crime by the president and taken out of jail for his cooperation in a top secret military operation. This is one of the most far fetched premises for a film ever, so bear with me. USA and Russia have agreed to put their best two fighters up against each other in a match to the death so they can settle their country’s differences. So who will take on Botanic? None other than Rob "The Face" Z’Dar, who you know from countless crap fests (classics) like Samurai Cop, Soultaker, and Hellhole . Z’Dar does his best Russian accent as Sgt. Sergi Schvackov, while he trains under Maj. Galashkin played by William Smith. William Smith is becoming one of my favorite character actors (he’s everywhere) especially after recently seeing him take on Fred "The Hammer" Williamson in Boss Nigger, try to kill Gary Busey in Eye of the Tiger and worship Satan in the super low budget gem GETEVEN, by John De Hart.

He destroyed my Matryoshka dolls!

 Comrade Z'Dar has to pass the most sophisticated and technological advanced training, including a machine that tries to destroy his sanity and force him to blow his brains out through a series of nightmarish illusions. He’s the only man to ever survive that device set to level 10.

"A Blockhead Orange"

If you want someone to blow their brains out, you need David Hess.

Botanic is forced to go under surgery against his will, a tracking device is inserted into his body and a chip that lets one of the officers communicate directly into his brain. He’s not too happy about this. The officer that’s assigned to communicate with him is Lt. Tavlin, ( Renée Cline) a female, at first they don’t get along very well, he calls her Dragon Lady and when he gets to nasty she has the ability to shock him, ouch! The problems keep piling up, his rival Lt. Willy Gross is in charge of briefing him on the mission and giving him tactical advice. Lt. Willy is a real dick wad! Before Botanic heads out into the field, he convinces the Lieutenant to let him pick out his own weapons of choice which includes a roll of quarters. What the hell is he going to use those for? (you’re on pins and needles now aren’t ya?) As Willy leaves, Botanic asks him "How does it feel to always come in second?" and then motions a kissing gesture at him, oh that Botanic.

"How'd they get a chip in my brain by cutting into my side?"

Big Willy (is that a young Tarantino?)

The battle begins, the two men are dispatched into a designated fighting ground. One of Sergi’s specialties is throwing little shovels and he's the first to strike cutting Botanic’s arm. Sergi somehow manages to jam radar and disappear, from a tree he corners Botanic, could this be the end? Hell no, Botanic then sets off a trip wire causing an explosive that forces Sergi to flee the scene and he lives to fight another day. Lt. Tavlin acts as his eyes and ears and once the Dragon Lady bit gets old, they begin to form a bond. So Tommy Botanic has a sensitive side after all. If someone could only let him know that Tavlin may be good from far, but far from good.

What other "skills" does this Botanic have?

If I get out of this alive, I'm going to need a bag for her head!

A nosey senator is pressing the general in charge, Gen. Royston (David Fawcett) for information about this mission but it’s so hush hush that he gets nothing. When the senator starts putting the pieces of the puzzle together (mostly with the help of his secretary), the dirty military asshole rigs a bomb to the good senator’s car, but unfortunately he sends his secretary out to run an errand and with the turn of the key she’s blown to bits.

Mind your own business senator nosey.

After more fighting, Botanic claims victory when he leads Sergi into an exploding building, This is where the quarters come into action, they were placed into the shape of a smiley face to mock Sergi right before he blows up. "Yippee ki-yay" becomes "have a nice day, motherfucker." However being the super indestructible soldier that Sergi was trained to be, he manages to miraculously escape with only one side of his face barbecued.

The quarters of death!

Like a burnt marshmallow!

When both fighters finally come face to face ( face to face with Z’Dar, talk about intimidating), they throw down their weapons in true macho fashion, so they can fight like men. David A.Prior should have directed an unauthorized sequel to "Face Off", Imagine if Z’Dar’s face was transplanted on John Travolta's head!!! It’s not likely Travolta would participate, so maybe the perfect choice for a cheapie like that would be Joe Estevez anyway!

Face/Off 2: More Facier than ever!

Botanic does his one, two, three, -punch- you’re out routine, but Sergi replies, “I don’t like baseball”. Since that didn’t work, Botanic gives him a swift kick to the balls and before Sergi passes out from the pain he delivers one last super punch to Botanic’s face. Both men drop to the floor, when they wake up, something strange occurs, they awake with a new found respect for each other. Do they fall in love and skip into the sunset? Bring peace to America and Russia? Or, do they realize they’re part of some bullshit conspiracy and team up to bring vengeance upon their senior officers' Royston and Galashkin that put them in this fucked up situation? Hmmmmm.

While your fighting, care to order some Timelife books?

The Last Sanction is guilty of stealing from many mainstream action films. There are traces of Rambo, Escape From New York, Rocky IV and Die Hard. It has stock footage and lots of Atari style graphics representing America and Russia’s latest technology. There is never a dull moment in the film, constant crappy lines of dialogue and badly shot action scenes give actionsploitaion fans something to snicker about every five minutes. Z’Dar fans will marvel at his performance as the Russia Sgt. Schvackov. To fans of the actionsploitation genre, I can’t recommend this enough.

Good Times

8/10 On the CULT-O-METER

On YOUTUBE but for how long? Watch here

Tribute Trailer 
from Trailers that Smell!

 

Come And See

Come And See (Idi i smotri, Kill Hitler) Directed by Elem Klimov. Starring Aleksey Kravchenko (1985).

   Immediately, I knew what to expect from reading different reviews online about this film, it's devastating, horrific and gets under you're skin long after you've viewed it. We here at TOG like to goof on shit all time, so as deranged as it may seem, there are fleeting moments of humor in this misery soaked Soviet perspective on the Holocaust. 
   Any movie strange enough to open with an angry kid talking in a goofy voice, not unlike Herve Villachaiz/ Froggy from the Little Rascals is off to a good start, this child is one of two young boys playing war games in the dirt amidst real bombs in Nazi occupied Russia in 1943. The film is supposed to make Schindler's List look restrained, that's a bold statement, but I didn't let it hinder my appreciation for the stark realism. I don't believe you should bother to make a Holocaust film, if you're not going to go for the throat, because if it's too soft, it comes off even more offensive and Come and See delivers in the abysmally gloomy department!

   This is a rare film that intrigued me and I hoped that it would be as captivating as I found The Tin Drum, it's completely different though. It's not even on the radar of highly regarded film snob best of lists (at least not by my inclination),why have I just become aware of it? Most of the reviews claim how harrowing and nightmarish this film is and it most certainly is. I almost wish I was totally unaware about what's to come, because I'd rather be shocked by it than desensitized. Make no mistake, this film is still a rough experience! 

a brief moment of rest on a dead cow

   Florian Gaishun (the brilliant young actor Aleksey Kravchenko) is unknowingly drafted,(or hurled onto a cart with an eye wound from a turkey peck), at first he seems excited to carry a gun, this is because there's no one to fight yet.

   The boy is ecstatic to help out and march into the death realms of the Nazi war machine, joining the Soviet resistance.

  The army mentions how Hitler's weapon is fear, which reminded me of my humanities teacher, someone I deeply respect, who said; "The Nazi's believed in Hell and used it as a model to bring it to Earth, had they not been influenced by The Catholic Church, they wouldn't have this to draw from". The title "Come And See" is from a Bible Passage in Revelations about the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse.  

   Florian leaves the camps and finds a crazy girl named Glasha, (Olga Mironova, who stopped acting after this). She is found weeping in the forest, his crying causes her to laugh and vice versa. Their awkward, abrasive first encounter is upended by bombs dropping from planes.

The bombers constantly circle through-out the film 

   He brings his new girlfriend back to his family, little does Flora know that they were murdered (their rotting bodies are seen lined up against the back of the cabin). The couple sit in the empty cottage and eat rancid soup as flies buzz around their ears. 

   Suddenly Florian runs screaming into the wilderness and they trudge through a thick like molasses mud pit in agony, the boy keeps claiming that his family is there in the bottom of the swamp. This is an irrational response to try and unplug his brain from the harsh reality surrounding him. The freezing mud looks authentic and their anguish seems genuine. 

   Those displaced from the village fashion a grisly carcass like sculpture that resembles Hitler and they take out their rage out on it. 

Achtung, my freakin ears!

   Flora quickly shuts down and becomes introverted, a relative decides to chastise him as his final death rattle and makes matters worse. This causes him to blame himself for his families death and the man with cooked blistered skin, croaks out a few harsh words, confirming his fears.

   The death planes resonate with an eerily pleasant sound and seem to constantly be in flight.    
   Every single review spoke about the bleakness and humorlessness, I disagree, there's some moments of levity among the funeral procession grimness (it's very brief, but it's there), it's usually crushed out, right after a shred of happiness occurs. Flora giggles as a runaway cow moves along a barren field and then dies from a hail of bullets (which apparently were real)! Nothing can sustain the scorched wasteland and as he callously plunges a knife into the cattle carcass, his sanity starts to chip away.  

   According to IMDB, they hypnotized the boy so he wouldn't become traumatized by the "real" horrors, but of course it didn't work! Come on Klimov, don't rob the kid of stark realism, were the kids in Men Behind The Sun spared of any real torment, definitely not, what would Eisenstein think?

   The Nazis shove all the helpless women and children into a an overcrowd barn, watch the innocent squirm then firebomb it. They cackle like immature babies as they watch them burn to death.    

   Florian's face starts to crack into a leathery, wrinkled one, out of terror as children are dragged around by their hair and murdered, his disturbing reaction is haunting and he looks petrified. His trance-like appearance was supposedly achieved by hypnotism (but Kravchenko claims it never worked, which is testament to his superior acting skills).

I hope they don't market my face as a gimmicky mask

He looks toward the sky and feels a sense of calmness from the death plane buzzing, which eclipse the wretched sound of screams. The Nazis show their weakness by posing pictures with a gun to a frightened boy's head as their trophy of conquest. 

  

Nazi's are like Paris Hilton with their use of pet accessories

    I can only describe this film as "Ratcatcher goes to the Belarus", they both have similar protagonists living in filth, enduring miserable conditions and meeting a grisly finally. They are both devastating films with children as the victims to their caustic environment. James, the boy in Ratcatcher had a better existence, compared to Florian, who walks around in a constant state of fear, his soul and humanity quickly evaporating (he'd be more at peace dead).

   They would make a nice double feature together, I could see Howard Scott and the giggly outside right now, handing out Up-Chuck-Cups!

   They could hand out Florian fright masks like in Cut Throats 9, I say bring back the William Castle style hokum to the stodgy arthouse!
   Klimov never directed a film after this one, when asked why, he said that he had accomplished everything in this one film, fair enough! This is a brutal uncompromising, gut punch that doesn't sit well with you later on and why should it, its a very effective anti-war film that deserves high praise. 

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