Dangerous Encounters Of The First Kind

Dangerous Encounters Of The First Kind (Don't Play With Fire) Directed By Tsui Hark (1980)

Warning this film has real cat torture and cruelty to animals so if this offends you don't watch it! This is an early Category III that's unique from the other titles in that there's hardly any sex at all, just animal cruelty and excessive youth violence! 

   I hate when directors hurt animals to convey a message of non violence (it's a contradiction) and like Max Renn said, why do it for real, it's easier to fake it! The scene when the dog was eaten in Rene Cardona Jr.'s Cyclone, really upset me and directors who choose the animal cruelty route, I tend to lose respect for (Sergio "Monkey Javelin" Martino and Ruggero "turtle guts" Deodato spring to mind). 

   This is a different case all together, because Tsui Hark is someone I immensely respect as a film maker, "1st Kind" came out right after Were Going To Eat You, in that film, they killed a lot of chickens, but I'm not ALF and I don't eat cats, so I was disturbed. 

Hark's early work cannot be denied as a juggernaut of hong kong cinema, combining slapstick humor with lightning fast action and insane special effects! His film  Zu Warriors Of Magic Mountain (1983) would influence John Carpenter's Big Trouble In Little China and Chinese Ghost Story would poke out your eyeballs with sorcery and influence countless other copy-cats! Hark acted in Roboforce (an early, but tamer Robotrix style effort). Almost anything he produced or directed is in the Deep Red catalog and worth seeking out. It would all come crashing down with his Western effort, the Van Damme/ Dennis Rodman embarrassment Double Team!

   Although he is not the first Asian director to succumb to the dark wraith of the Hollywood system and many others were crushed in its wake, their dignity and integrity in question (in the hearts and minds of hardcore fans, at least)!   

   So what's with the Spielberg-ian title? Is this an Asian prequel to Close Encounters? is there mashed potato abuse? alien abduction, Carl Sagan? It's completely unrelated! The original title is Don't Play With Fire and was co-written by Cheuk-Hon Szeto (Righting Wrongs, Mr. Vampire). It involves punk terrorism in the ghetto and senseless scenes of animal violence that add nothing to the storyline or characters. A brief warning describes the title, a new breed of youth culture, think punks armed with pipe bombs! The urban youth terrorism angle is something fresh in my mind (after the Boston homemade crackpot shrapnel bombs were set off) and that's what makes this film sort of timeless and sickeningly effective. There are many scenes of media violence and even Looney Tunes is at fault for causing real violence and brutality. The mood is nihilistic and purely existential.

Blame Cartoons!

   The film deals with three pals who make Anarchist Cookbook style weapons and unleash them onto the public. Hark likes to steal from Goblin, but does a great job of using snippets, not entire muffled shitty sounding tracks (I'm starring right at you Bruno Mattei)! In this early effort he also uses a Jean Michel Jarre album "Oxygene" and some Lalo Schifrin "Amityville" stings.

Geekshow bullshit and music ganking are long traditions in the Chinese film world and its fun to hear what they recycle.My favorite music theft moment is Rocky 3 used in Centipede Horror! Tarantino does the same cut and paste music style now in his work.

   The three nerdy school uniformed terrorist pals set off a detonator in a movie theater while a war movie is going on. The lost reinserted film stock goes from muddy to crystal clear (rounding out this complete uncut version). According to Lisa Morton's book on "The Cinema Of Tsui Hark", Hark mentions that he felt very primal when writing the characters in this film and found Chen Chi-Lin, a Shaw Bros actress who plays Pearl to have a cat-like appearance and bizarre eyes. 

Psycho Pearl

   She works in a comic shop and after dumping ink on a co-workers head, she gets fired. Lieh Lo (Five Fingers Of Death, Black Magic), another Shaw Brothers actor plays her brother the cop. Pearl is a sadist who's hobbies include chucking cats onto barbed wire fences and pointing a loaded gun at unsuspecting neighbors heads. 

   She refers to thrill killing and sticking pins in the brains of defenseless mice as "doing funny things". This is the worst kind of next door neighbor girl to get involved with, these kids should run in terror, but they are all guilty of shedding their animosity with senseless violence and are somehow a perfect fit. 

Nerd Alert!

   The extra muddy scenes with characters and subtitles add some padding and interrupt the flow of the story alittle. Pearl joins up with the terrorist nerds (think an Asian Big Bang Theory with an homemade bomb kit). Every teenager in this flick is hellbent on thrill killing and sadism and none of them are likable. She dares them to commit crimes and preys on their psychotic tendencies. Lieh Lo is out looking with a bombsquad for the perpetrators in all the wrong places (as Dawn Of The Dead Goblin songs play). In We're Going To Eat You, Hark used their music again. Psycho Pearl and her geek squad rob a bus full of tourists with a makeshift grenade.

The puppets can see you naked!

    Later on a prostitute killing Australian maniac named Bruce, hits Pearl with his car and in retaliation the punks smash up his windshield with rocks. Dangerous Encounters is filled with the worst scumbags, each more cutthroat then the next. Bruce the foreigner is a psychotic arms dealer, who after arguing with his boss, gets iced real good and turns into street garbage. The team ineptly tries to exchange the foreign money they stole from the bus all around town. The kids show up at a mime disco (Yes, I was bewildered as well)!! to make a trade with a street punks gang leader Hak, who is also a DJ. The characters go to all these incredible lengths to get this check cashed, it propels the story along, but is kind of ridiculous! 

Welcome to your nightmare

     Hak takes them to this fat greasy accountant who rips them off! Now stuck in an office building warehouse with pools of flaming gasoline, they get chased by a menacing Guitar Wolf looking gang armed with bats and knives, led by one of the mimes from the disco! Pearl's brother smacks his sister around like an Asian Burt Young and earlier barfed in her face, but saves her from certain death at the hands of the gang. The nerd's friendship starts to unravel in a hillside cemetery with rows of headstones closely packed next to each other. It's followed by an incredible gun battle between white drug runners and the punks.

Switchblade or cream pie in the face?

     According to Pete Tombs book "Mondo Macabro", the authorities banned the film for fear that it would inspire teens to copy it. This makes "1st Kind" ahead of its time certainly for 1980 and there's always a new scapegoat for parents to blame youth aggression on (Cartoons, Heavy Metal, Punk, etc….).

   I know what I'm in for usually with Asian and Italian Animal torture Geekery! (see my reviews for snake massacres like Calamity Of Snakes and Killer Snakes) It's fucked up to kill real animals in general. Whenever I do research I find some chuckleheads on the IMDB message board dreaming up bullshit about how the cat in Men Behind the Sun wasn't eaten to death by rats, it's usually the Asian films that are excused for cruelty to animals for some reason. At any rate, if you took the animal violence out, it wouldn't effect the pacing at all, if anything it's a random cruel act, that thankfully would not ever make a return in Tsui Hark's career again. Other than the animal cruelty, not as shocking as proclaimed, but still worth seeking out!  

WATCH HERE

John Morghen aka Giovanni Lombardo Radice interview (May 2013)

          John Morghen is one of the nicest and funniest guys you could ever talk to, so we did!. Theater of Guts reached out to ask him a few questions and recorded an audio interview via Skype. Hear what he has to say about his favorite films, his interview with Deep Red's John Martin, voice dubbing, House on the Edge of the Park part 2, and infamous Italian directors such as Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi. He also gives us an exclusive about the book he's writing. You'll just have to listen if you want to hear the title!!!!

THEATER OF GUTS PROUDLY PRESENTS- JOHN MORGHEN

John Morghen Tribute Trailer
Make Them Die Slowly aka Cannibal Ferox

The Church

The Church (La Chiesa, Demons 3) Directed By Michele Soavi starring Asia Argento (1989).
Review By Goat Scrote

            We’ve seen the demons slaughtering victims in a movie theater, and terrorizing an apartment complex, and even rampaging through the streets. "The Church” changes the setting to a big creepy old cathedral with a grisly secret history. It attempts to give a backstory of sorts to the demons, and connects them a little more explicitly to the demons of religious myth. It also features one of the better monster-human sex scenes that I can recall (based on the fantasy art of Boris Vallejo, ed.) It's more visually sophisticated than the other two, and even though a great deal of the plot is hard-to-follow or just plain nonsense, “The Church” is my favorite of the three.

I'm a soldier in the Stryper army

                We catch a glimpse of the origin of the building in the middle ages. A group of armored knights templars spread lime over a burial pit. They catch a young girl in the woods nearby and kill her. Next they lay down a huge stone cross, the center stone of a future cathedral, on the ground of the pit.

"CRUNCH" little girl's scare us

                Next we see the completed church in the modern day. There is some hint of reincarnation, since the girl who died in the middle ages looks just like Lotte (played by Asia Argento), the daughter of the church caretaker. A woman restoring the frescoes in the church finds ancient document hidden in the masonry. One of the preacher's in played by John Morghen. The church librarian follows clues in the document to a "stone with 7 eyes", a cap in the center of the stone cross in the floor of the deepest part of the church. There is a vast dark hole beyond the capstone. He reaches inside and scratches his hand on some kind of jagged talon or hook stuck in the stone (perhaps the talon of a dead demon, like in the second movie).

whatever you do, don't remove!

            Before long the poor guy is tearing out his own heart, turning into a goat-beast, and stalking his co-worker the restorer. She escapes his advances, and he reverts to a human form later. Hermann The Sacristan (Roberto Corbiletto), gets scratched by the librarian and starts to become possessed as well. He sees himself reflected as a bird-demon in a mirror and goes to confession to try to purge the evil from himself, but ends up freaking out, running through the church, and impaling himself with a jackhammer in the basement. The hammer strikes the cross on the floor and sets in motion a “security system”, (almost like an elaborate game of medieval mousetrap), left in place by the builders of the cathedral. Their ancient contraptions seal the place closed and reveal a stone tablet with a message explaining that the purpose of the church is to contain an old evil: The demons.

another victim of Rube Goldberg's wraith

            There are plenty of potential victims trapped inside the church, including a wedding party and a primary school tour group full of devilish children. A handful of people scratched by the caretaker when he ran through the church are now showing symptoms of illness -- perhaps even plague. Swelling, discoloration, delirium, grim hallucinations... The people trapped in the church fail to understand the gravity of their situation at first. More and more people either die or fall under the spell of the demons, and chaos erupts in the cathedral. Down in the basement the possessed conduct a freaky sex ritual, and the librarian is back in his demon-goat shape. The outcome of this can’t be good, but one of the surviving priests discovers a way to collapse the church and seal the horror inside.

I was reincarnated to hang out in Italio-disco's, not defeat demons!

          Lotte escapes through an underground passage and is the only survivor. Sometime later she returns to the scene of the collapsed church, however, and finds the access-way to the demon pit, the stone with seven eyes, exposed. As she approaches, the capstone opens by itself… the demons refuse to be contained! We can presume this means bad news for the modern world. This might even be considered a “prequel” of sorts, as a background explanation for the sudden appearance of the demon ticket-taker in the first film… but there I go thinking too hard about the Demons movies, against my own advice.

     There is also a movie called Demons 3: The Ogre which is ostensibly the third film in this series. I have never seen the movie, but it is reported to be completely unrelated to the Demons films except in title, so I decided to ignore it and consider it a trilogy. The Church has an very atmospheric soundtrack by Keith Emerson, Goblin and Philip Glass.

These new dentures work great!

Our senseless deaths will not be in vain, oh wait, never mind.

Demons 2

Demons 2 Directed By Lamberto Bava starring Coralina Cataldi (1986)

Revewed By Goat Scrote

   Well crap. It turns out that even if you turn down that free movie ticket and stay home to eat toaster pastries and watch TV, you won't be safe from the demons. This sequel is set in a high-rise apartment building, and this time the demon comes climbing out of a TV set. Apparently the demons were defeated after the events of the first movie, and the city they destroyed was walled off. Once again we have a "movie within a movie" thing going on. The people in the high rise are watching a show on TV about some idiots who sneak over the wall into the ruined city where the demon invasion happened. Things go badly for the idiots. Somehow this TV show, depicting the (fictional?) resurrection of the demons thanks to the blood of their visitors, allows a real demon to escape through the TV and start infecting people again.

did you miss us, we're back on home video!

   I've found that the best thing to do with the Demons movies is not to think too hard about them. A few of the actors from the first movie are recycled in completely different roles, including Tony the pimp (played by Bobby Rhodes) from the first movie, who is now a personal fitness trainer. I got all moist in my bikini area when I heard The Smiths and Dead Can Dance on the soundtrack!! 

I want the cake I can't have and it's driving me mad...

  Anyway, some young woman is having a birthday party, she goes to her room to sulk because she didn’t get the My Little Pony doll she asked for or something. I don’t know. All I know is that I cheered a little bit when the demons pushed their way out of TV-land to get her. She attacks the other guests and scratches them up, and by now we know how that turns out. Her blood turns out to be incredibly corrosive, and eats its way through the floor. The bubbly demon ichor burns out electrical wires and drips onto other residents and generally causes a great deal of bother and irritation. The infection spreads and the survivors try to defend themselves. There’s a yappy little demon dog and a flying bat thing and a slightly stupid-looking child demon and a weird anticlimactic happy ending involving an abandoned TV studio and a pregnant couple. The scene in the TV studio seems like it’s leading to an explanation of where the demonic TV signal was coming from but then never really goes anywhere. This was a missed opportunity for an ending that could’ve livened things up a little. The movie isn’t a total waste of time, but it adds very little to the trilogy and you can safely skip it.

It's my party who wants a snaggletoothed kiss?

Chewbacca's cousin contracted demonic Hep C

Tony the Pimp is back and ready to lay some pipe

Better Off Dead 2: where's my two dollars

I got a cavity in my rear mollar can you check it out?

WATCH HERE 

OR BUY HERE

The Reflecting Skin

(1990)

Directed by: Philip Ridley

Starring:  Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan, Jeremy Cooper

"What's Killing All The Children?" 

"The Reflecting Skin" is set in a town seemingly on another planet, paved with nothing but wheat fields and Amish looking people. It's actually supposed to take place in 1950's Idaho. There's some really eerie shots in this film, many of endless fields and massive wooden houses. The look of this movie at times is almost like the 1948 painting, "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth come to life. (This is also mentioned in another review I found after I wrote this.)

The film opens with probably it's most gory scene of a frog being creatively blown up. We meet dyed black haired Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) running away from now bloodied Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan) who's later found to possibly be a 200 year old British vampire. She's looks a lot like Emily, the blind girl in Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond". Dove's insane family has a shrine of "war hero" Cameron (Viggo Mortensen), who's currently away at the "pretty islands".  His mother can't stand the smell of gasoline, even though it's the family business. She forces Seth to drink tons of water, similar the child abuse in the novel "Sybil". 

Emily from "The Beyond"

Dolphin Blue

Seth and his friends bully each other and talk about angel's wings being torn off. Kids in the town are disappearing only later to be found dead and the few adults left are going off the deep end. There's a black car full of greasers that runs in and out of town. They appear to be without a destination, driven by a Seth Rogen look-a-like. 

There's a dialogue about the effects of war on the mind, but it's not completely defined. The film's title is derived from a photo that Cameron brought back in his wallet, along with a somewhat masculine looking nudie picture. All the uncertainty unravels the few shreds of trust within the town, causing people to accuse one another of terrible things to make sense of what's happening around them. Seth finds the corpse of a baby and is convinced that it's his dead friend whose wings were torn off because he was murdered. 

Some the shots are similar to "Paperhouse", which came out a couple of years before this movie. I saw that movie once, but I barely remember it. I bought the "Skin" VHS on clearance at Blockbuster video awhile back. I believe it's been released on DVD and also Blu-Ray, but neither really seems official, I could be wrong though. You should definitely check it out, there's not too many films like this one.

You can watch it here in the meantime. 

                                                  

Demons

DEMONS Directed By Lamberto Bava Starring Urbano Barberini (1985)

Reviewed By Goat Scrote

                If a scary guy in a creepy-looking metal mask (infamous director Michele Soavi) ever offers you a free ticket to a movie, here's what you do. You go home and cuddle up on the couch with your favorite fuzzy, feathery, or scaly domesticated critter(s) and/or your sweetie(s). Have a bag of microwave popcorn or some corn chips, watch some b-grade garbage on the internet or whatever, and have a normal, boring, apocalypse-free night. Forget you ever got that ticket. Free movie tickets are nothing more than bait for demon traps. People are suckers for free stuff. The demons know this.

Suckers!

              "Demons" primarily takes place in a movie theater, and during the first part, the action in the movie they're watching mirrors what's happening in the theater. This set-up would have really lent itself to some William-Castle-style gimmickry in theaters. You could send some people in demon masks running through the aisles at key moments to get everyone in the proper mood.

Did I do that? (In Urkle voice)

                One of the visitors is scratched by a metal demon mask that's on display in the lobby. The same thing happens to someone in the movie-within-the-movie later on, which triggers a demonic transformation both on screen and in the theater. The wound starts pulsing and swelling and I smile in fond remembrance of pre-CGI horror. Latex bladder effects rule! The big pus-blast about 22 minutes in marks the real start of the party. Yes, it's true: Acne is spawned from the depths of Hell. 

                The trapped theatergoers don't need very long to figure out something is going terribly wrong, but when they batter down the doors to escape, they find a wall of concrete has mysteriously appeared. What the...? Things just sort of happen in this movie, and there's really no payoff for thinking too hard about it. The point is that they are now sealed in. They scatter through the theater in utter panic, looking for a way out, and one by one they get gruesomely torn up. The demon plague is spread from person to person through scratches and bites, so each new victim becomes possessed by a demon.

Nevermind the Clearasil get a priest!

                Some of the theatergoers decide that the film must be making all this happen, so they break into the projection booth to put a stop to it and find computerized projectors. Once again, a warning to the modern world! This digital projector craze is a soul-corrupting ploy to put demons in our cineplexes. I'm sure there's something about this in the Bible! Stopping the movie doesn't slow down the rampage, however.

                There's a hilarious visual pun at 43:30... a quartet of "punkers" outside the theater snorting cocaine out of a Coca Cola can. Ha! Okay, I thought it was funny, but I'm easily amused. Didn’t I see that in Return of the Living Dead, or am I high? I’m way too lazy to go look it up. (it didn't happen in the film. Ed.) Also, I am craving junk food. Anyway, the punkers, now on the run from the cops, find a back door into the theater and hide inside. Meanwhile, one of the demons sneaks out and scratches up the police. Containment has been lost! The demons are free, free to spread havoc and hellish misery across the face of the world, mwahahahahaha!

                Right about here I almost feel sorry for the demons. They were having so much fun in the theater, but boy, are they in for a disappointment when they see that we have pretty much already done their job for them in the outside world. Desolation? Mutilation? Despair? Senseless mob violence? Bloody mayhem? Plague? Rivers of boiling feces? Welcome to planet Earth, ya jerks. You’ll fit right in.

Howdy Folks, I'm Murray the "bacne" demon

                There are some cool bits and pieces of imagery, like the demon transformation at 30 minutes in and the glow-eyed demons climbing backlit stairs at 1:01:00. There's a pretty nifty scene at 1:07:45 when a full-sized demon climbs its way out of the back of one of the infected like she's a living doorway to Hell. The slimy, gooey, bloody old-school special effects are definitely part of the fun, with blasts of yellow and green pus, demon puke, stretchy latex, and plenty of fake blood.

Don't worry bro, I'll take down your insurance info later!

                There's a dirt bike and a samurai sword displayed in the lobby so that later the "hero" can drive through the theater chopping up demons with an 80s metal soundtrack blasting in the background. Our hero is not a very charismatic guy, but he gets to live the dream here... until he gets scratched and then crashes the bike. Oh well.

Perfect there's that chopper I ordered

                Then, with no warning, a helicopter comes crashing through the roof of the theater. This is by far my favorite moment. It makes absolutely no sense, and no explanation is ever offered. Just go with it! The two survivors use the helicopter as a weapon against their unholy enemies. And would you look at that, the chopper is also equipped with a grapnel hook gun and a winch. I’m sure if they’d kept looking they would have found a jet pack or a flamethrower, too. Anyway, hey, presto, they make it up to the roof the theater to face off with the original metal-faced ticket distributor, who is presumably the bozo responsible for this whole mess. The heroes do a reversal of the standard Italian-horror eye impalement kill, and this time it’s the bad guy getting a piece of rebar shoved through his brain. The good guys emerge victorious... only to discover that the city has already plunged into anarchy and chaos, with demons running loose all over. They're rescued by an extremely well-armed family in a jeep.

part machine part movie usher

                Now, even though we know the male lead was scratched by demon claws and we're expecting him to turn at any moment, it's the female lead who becomes a demon and has to be put down. Luckily this family seems able to take care of themselves. When the demon apocalypse arrives -- which should be any minute now, according to my sources -- we're all going to be wishing for those high-capacity assault rifle magazines, mark my words!

WATCH HERE

OR BUY ON DVD

Street Trash

Street Trash Directed By Jim Muro. Starring Bill Chepil (1987).

   Street Trash is such an overly reviewed classic that I wanted to combine all the best sources I could to give this a decent review, not just one I slopped together, cut and pasted from other writers. I respect it in the same league as other influential 80’s gore masterpieces like Re-Animator, Evil Dead and Basket Case. The way I see it, the filmakers were influenced by the gross out antics of Lloyd Kaufman and the ethics of Italian Neo-realism, am I giving them too much credit? The influences are difficult for me to ignore, there's poverty, oppression,non-professional actors and shit ton of ultraviolence. 

I Ain't No Artfag!

   My first experience with the film was through Fangoria, as soon as I saw those insanely impressionistic, punked out, revolting multicolored pictures, I was on a mission at 13 years old to find this bastard and check it out. My friend Seth and I found The Lightning Video clamshell tape at El Cheapo Video (which had a logo of a broke Charlie Chaplin on each video and the front door). I still have my dubbed copy from the early 80’s. I suffer from a VHS fetish and have a hard time upgrading, so it took me a few years before I saw the uncut version on Fandor and I recommend you chuck all inferior butchered versions and only see the unrated one. The Synapse Films one available now is the definitive version (click the link below). 

         The same David Witten, who invented the Mark of The Devil barf bags and “It’s Only A Movie” brilliant marketing campaign was now in charge of publicity at Vestron Video. He helped seal the financial deal for Roy Frumkes and Jim Muro’s bum-sploitation masterpiece. Muro later became James Cameron’s steady-cam operator and made Street Trash when he was just nineteen years old. The film’s ugly sense of humor uses comedy devices like castration, necrophilia, alcholoholism and gang rape all Troma staples of hilarity. There’s a truly bizarre moment when a man is castrated while pissing and his dick is tossed around like a hacky sack in what Chas Balun referred to as shot in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey style with extreme close-ups.

Arthur C. Clarke is spinning in his grave

   When I first saw Street Trash, I thought of it in the same vein as Class Of Nuke em High and The Toxic Avenger and was not exposed to Art house fare or independent film at all as of yet.

         Street Trash took Fangoria, Gorezone, Deep Red and the splatter film genre by force. It caused a huge impact among drooling gorehounds, who found their latest fix. Lackey, Frumkes and Muro took the independent and neo-realistic film tactics and placed them in a Troma infected wasteland.

         The basic concept of melting winos, erupting in a hail storm of multicolored sinew and organ meat because of poison booze is taken to highly entertaining lengths. These desperate souls are searching for the cheapest rotgut they can ingest for only a dollar a bottle, the infamous “Tenafly Viper” and just trying to make it through their miserable lives. A grouchy liquor store clerk finds the overly expired bottles in the cellar and unleashes the plague. He delves out the contaminated booze like death rations to the needy. The hobos are the main protagonists and are never pitied or despised (to quote Ed Wood psychic Criswell).

Wizzy is pissed or happy, can't tell.

         The locations are centered around a junkyard, a police station, mafia owned restaurant and sometimes in bombastic Vietnam. The film is legendary for some of the most appalling and beautiful surrealistic spectacles of grisly FX courtesy of Jennifer Aspinall (Toxic Avenger, SNL). As the bums choke down the blue-ish poison liquid, they immediately die and explode, becoming impressionistic new wave death graffiti. 

Coke and a full toilet, SFX secrets revealed

   Is this Reagan’s plan to spruce up the Bowery by killing derelicts while simultaneously painting the city in the process? This way an influx of art and commerce will arrive by way of human multicolored organ grenade casualties. It’s just a theory of mine that’s pretty highbrow for this flick, after all this is Street Trash, you scumfuck!

Reagan's plan to spruce up the city

         Bill Chepil is an amazing actor and not since the days of Italian Neo-Realism has there been a stellar non actor performance of “Bill” the Cop. Brilliantly and naturally executed by our next subject, today on "Frank Talk" with Crankenstein (wearing a skinned mask of James Lipton).

         Mr. Bill Chepil who after beating the shit out of a scumbag, kicks his head in a million times and shoves it into the bottom of a urinal stall and then punches his sausage fingers down his gullet and upchucks all over the poor victim’s bashed in head.

too much?

   This is the only credit for Mr. Chepil, who went back to doing what he does best, playing a bad ass cop in real life. Had he made another film, I believe he could’ve rivaled Jon Voight in tough, but sensitive charisma. But alas it was not meant to be. 

   Other favorite characters of mine are Wizzy and Bronson. Wizzy is another working class slob of a non-actor with rubbery features. He’s always giving my least favorite character Hippy Fred (Mike Lackey) shit. Fred and his brother Kevin are the lead characters you are supposed to sympathize with, but I’ve always found them detestable. Fred looks like a human version of Hippy Skippy, a Garbage Pail Kid card. His younger brother Kevin looks like a soiled lesbian version of Ralph Macchio. There’s also Pat Ryan as the Junkyard manager Frank and his Asian punk secretary Wendy (Jane Arakawa). Wendy has a soft spot for the younger brother Kevin and defends their illegal squatting to her lecherous boss. They give you these wretched characters to identify with, but I only liked the mean ones the best like Bronson and Bill The Cop. 

I'm gonna puke again!

         Vic Noto plays Bronson, he’s fucking insane as the menacing, femur bone wielding, junkyard lord and is a genuine Vietnam veteran. He’s haunted by flashbacks of bloodsucking VietCong and eradicates boredom by stabbing yuppies in their cars waiting for the traffic light to change. He carries his diaper-wearing wench Winette (Nicole Potter) around like a ratty, mentally handicapped stuffed animal. Her death later resembles “Dali’s Persistence of Memory” with a pained face attached to a dripping clock. She howls like a feral cat in heat and is jealous of any woman trotting around in the purview of Bronson’s twitchy eyeball.

Zach Galifianakis took too many steroids

   James Lorinz (later the star of Frankenhooker) plays a mouthy doorman who witnesses Mafia boss Nick Duran’s (Goodfellas and Sopranos actor Tony Darrow) puking girlfriend leave with Hippy Skippy (Mike Lackey) on her way to an uninvited gang rape. The gang rape scene is the most disgusting moment of the film, there’s not a shred of likeability to this ugly scene at all. Burt (Clarenze Jarmon), the black man wearing a gasmask has a hilarious moment in the supermarket, similar to the one with Belushi in Animal House where he stuffs lunch items and raw chicken down his pants.    

I contracted botchalism thanks to you

   The political context is subtle, but cannot be avoided, certainly the Reagan era of shutting down mental hospitals and slicing the underclass at the knees by taking away social programs and food stamps from the truly desolate and feeding it into an already over-bloated military gave the film a social political standpoint. It all ends with an inspired moment of a gargantuan CO2 cartridge flying at top speed that removes head and shoulder meat along with it. I urge you to re-watch this film because it still holds up, Fandor currently streams the completely unrated version available from Synapse and the DVD is worth buying because of the incredibly entertaining interviews and extras (with some that didn’t appear in previous DVD versions). Also available to stream via Fandor.com

check out the short version on Youtube