DEEP RED CATALOG LIST

Toe Tag Joe tape that William Wilson of Videojunkies alerted me to.

This is just a promo post for those not on all the social media brain tendrils bullshit circuit (aka smart people). I added practically all 507 titles of the bootleg catalog for everyone to enjoy and seek out. There are a few I couldn't figure out how to add like Endurance (which is available here), the comp tapes that only Skunkape can find, the real autopsy videos and The Devil (Hong Kong 1981). We'll be back with the usually wackiness in a few days, in the mean time check out this list!
https://letterboxd.com/goofygrapeape/list/list-of-films-in-deep-red-bootleg-catalog/

Obvious Men Behind The Sun fan.

The End of The Wicked (1999)

The End of The Wicked (1999)
Directed by: Teco Benson
Written by: Teco Benson (screenplay), Helen Ukpabio (story)
Review by: "Machine Gun" Kristin 

I discovered "End Of The Wicked" through a user made list of movies on the website, letterboxd.com. The list is titled: Atrocities, Odditites, Trash, Trippy, Religious, Tinfoil Hat, WTF, The Worst in Film & Video and boy, is it ever. haha. After sifting through over a thousand films in the list, I found some hand painted posters produced in Ghana. I recently researched these strange film posters, which are displayed and preserved in a nice space in Chicago called the Deadly Prey Gallery. There, you can look at the many different types of movie posters, all pretty much the same style, painted in oils onto hand sewn flour bags. The poster interpretations of American films (mostly action and horror) are just as strange as you may have anticipated if you're familiar with other bizarre foreign posters from countries such as Thailand or Poland. The Ghana posters are in wide, gruesome brush strokes and make some movies look way more interesting than they actually are haha. I couldn't help but be reminded of the "The Mutilator" drawing from the art classroom scene in "Ghost World".

"Oh. I thought maybe this was supposed to be your father."

The thin plotline of "End Of The Wicked" consists of a group of Nigerian shape-shifting Beelzebub worshippers with what looks like hamburger meat plastered onto their faces. Their Lord is a white face make up covered man with a hairy bloody chin and Fat Albert's voice. He commands them to retrieve enough blood to fill a lake in 24 hours, although this goal is never achieved. The dialogue is either difficult to understand through bad audio and thick accents, which ends up being really unintentionally funny. In one scene, where a group of children are being initiated into the Satanic cult, a girl is told to "blow up all electronics in your home, drink bleach, glasses and then cause fever and failure to all of the children in your home" 

 

Beelzebub's Glamour Shot

The sets look to be decorated from those terrible large shops that say "antiques", where everything is brand new, dark pink, fake period piece style chairs, and particle board entertainment systems. Bleecchhh. Or better yet, they hired the set decorator from one of those strange religious shows that sometimes pop up on broadcast TV, with the giant desks and potted ferns in the background. I'd imagine this movie is a cross between "Black Devil Doll From Hell" (which I still haven't seen yet) and "Mystics In Bali" for the absurd special effects and bizarre, super awkward perverse scenes. In "Bali", the floating head (with organs intact), eats a baby right out of the womb, whereas in "Wicked", we're assaulted with the visual of main character Chris' Satan-worshipping mother (aka Lady Destroyer) raping his wife with a giant magic penis. Fun! Even better, we're somehow treated to not one, but two scenes involving bloody crotches! Yay! I feel like I should be running down the "drive-in totals" like Joe Bob Briggs there are so many wacky things in this gawd-awful movie. In one scene (brought to life in a GIF I made below), the evil children summon a plate of inedible looking pasta on the back of some poor guy while he's trying to sleep. After they devour it with their bare hands, the man wakes up in major back pain. So gross. Later, this same man is subjected to his eyes literally popping out of his head in a dream and he wakes up blind. I'm not even 100% sure what he did that was horrible to deserve this, but he ends his life by stabbing himself to death. He definitely made somebody in this movie mad. 

"I Wanna RAWK!"

Meanwhile, our main man Chris is (unbeknownst to him) still constantly being tortured by his witch mother throughout this movie. Until he's finally transformed into a goat and his throat is slaughtered. They appear to have actually sawed a poor goat's throat to achieve this scene and it is gruesome and horrible to watch. Speaking of real life horrors, this movie was concocted by Helen Ukpabio. She appears in this film as a pastor who I guess is supposed to save everyone from evil, but that doesn't seem to happen. This film was produced by Ukpabio's company called Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries and it's basically Christian propaganda. She's a wealthy evangelist that apparently through her teachings has influenced many to abandon and sometimes actually murder their children believing that they are in fact witches in disguise. There is a documentary on the subject called Dispatches Saving Africa's Witch Children on YouTube. There's a barrage of very negative press about her career and her bizarre teachings. She was actually banned from entering Britain in 2014 and she has sued the British Humanist Association (BHA) for defamation for basically twisting her words around. BHA's reply: 

“The fact that she is threatening to launch a legal claim for half a billion pounds over an alleged distinction between being accused of exorcising "Satan" or "Vampires" tells you all you need to know about Ms Ukpabio.”

Completely crazy! 

Watch "End Of The Wicked" (in two parts, first part linked here) HERE!

Check out my website HERE!

Black Mask

Black Mask Starring Jett Li, Directed by Daniel Lee (1996). 

After compiling the list on Letterboxd.com, I noticed that we've neglected hordes of titles in the DR catalog, especially the Hong Kong action ones. I'm thinking we might even throw together a special tribute week. 

So, that's what inspired me to review this tepid, run of the mill, Matrix-y yawn-fest. This besides the abysmally disappointing Heroic Trio is the most widely viewed Hong Kong flick in the bootleg catalog and both are usually very easy to find. When this Jett Li vehicle showed up on STARZ, I figured it would fun to check out. I know I've had a more torturous time getting through a flick before (this one was even dubbed, with no white on white subs), so why did I just find it bland?

The brilliant Tsui Hark is in the producer chair but his usual action packed flicks and gory attributes that make his films so incredible are absent here. The casting of Jet Li seems as if Chow-yun Fat was busy, I mean to me, he's not very likeable in the main role. There are human time bombs called 701s, they detonate without warning. The description in the beginning goes by light speed so I had to rewind it to figure out what the deal was. I'm not the only one, either according to Lisa Morton's book "The Cinema of Tsui Hark", "Black Mask wants to both revel in the superhero mythos and deconstruct it but the script doesn't pursue either idea further enough". There's even some sexual ambiguity that they leave unexplained, Jett's character gets all frustrated at his female co worker in the library when she comes onto him.

我中國人玩笑話

The score is pretty lame and it's peppered with some wack rap beats. Jett hides out in the library and works there. As a volunteer at the library myself, I know what a bitch it us to get hired, so I'm not sure how he just slipped by without a double masters degree. I was pretty alarmed by Anthony Wong's appearance, he sports a pony tail, gold teeth and a see thru plastic outfit, plus he wears only shorts as he jumps around waving a gun. It's pretty shitty that he just disappears because he really could've brought this film to another level. There's one odd part when the hero injects a girl from the library with some roofie or something and ties her up then she plays a video game.

this grill is totally funky fresh.

The action is pretty frequent but it's all kind of done in a mainstream "Keanu Reeves in a black vinyl duster" style way. The mask that Jett wears looks incredibly stupid but is reminiscent of the Green Hornet's sidekick Kato (obviously no one is claiming to replace Bruce Lee however, although millions have tried--see Brucesploitation). There is a yucky cyberpunk vibe to this flick that just leaves a horrible taste. I wonder if The Wachowskis were fans of this film, they made Bound the same year this came out. I have to admit, even though I'm not a fan of any of their works, I did love their Hard-Boiled comic book, I still can't believe it was the same team behind that. 

if you think I'm scary, you should meet my cousin CD man from Hellraiser 3.

I don't know what people see in Jett Li, he has no acting range and there's always bits of skin hanging off his lips, I wonder how many actors audition for his role in The Expendables 2. Another thing I don't understand about the subplot is why would the main character retire from being a librarian, that's a pretty cushy job, why risk your life everyday instead? Wong's character checks out and gets replaced by this long-haired religious weirdo duster wearing goofy John Lennon glasses. Sometimes this movie comes off like a really warped episode of Red Shoe Diaries especially the music. I would say skip it and watch a really horny episode of Three's Company instead, a total snoozefest!

AVAILABLE ON STARZ.

this just looks like a new fetish in the works to me.