by ·Comments Off on Horrors of Malformed Men (1969, Teruo Ishii)

Wild 1920’s-set mad-scientist movie. The title and concept are more fun than the experience of watching it. I fell asleep with my finger on the screenshot key and had to delete ten thousand files the next day.

Can’t say you weren’t warned, I’m superdeformed (dig it):

Young doctor (lead actor from the also-nutty Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell) escapes from an asylum, seeking a half-remembered island, and finds a doomed circus girl who also half-remembers it. He makes his way to the shore right as his doppelganger dies, so he pretends to be that guy, saying “actually I’m still alive,” then hangs out with his weird family and sleeps with his sister.

Chair goals:

He makes it out to the family island and finds his madman web-handed dad who deforms people, and hopes to one day deform everyone… one at a time I guess, since he doesn’t have a Magneto-scale operation here. Dad reveals various hidden identities and plots and backstories – such as when he locked his wife in a cave, and she fed on the crabs that fed on her dead lover – then a cop who’d been posing as a family servant explains some more.

Dad is a disability-rights advocate:

But it’s true he has issues:

After all this, the young doctor’s sister-lover reaches the correct conclusion: “We will embrace atop the fireworks mortar. We will scatter magnificently across the great sky.”

by ·Comments Off on Rumours (2024, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)

A different sort of thing for Maddin, his most restrained feature. More Bunuelian perhaps, tricking viewers with a political arthouse drama with Cate Blanchett then gradually accumulating unnatural quirks until the giant brain in the woods is only a distraction from whether sentient pedo-hunting AI has Lawnmower-Manned all communications in an apparently depopulated Germany. Seven world leaders were in a gazebo hard at work crafting the most bland and vague statement they could, when they found themselves cut off from outside contact. Each one gets their standout moment, but Canada (the most emotional and least respected) steps up during the crisis, triumphantly editing and reading their final statement aloud to the masturbating bog people.

Germany is the Australian Blanchett, Canada is Roy Dupuis (I think he’s the woodsman who yells “strong men!” in Forbidden Room, which also features a giant brain). UK is late Shyamalan fave Nikki Amuka-Bird, USA is the inexplicably British gent Charles Dance (who I just saw in The First Omen). Then there’s Italy (I got nothing on Rolando Ravello), France (Denis Ménochet, the violent PTSD guy in Beau Is Afraid), and Japan (Takehiro Hira of the new Shogun). They come across two suicidal European Union workers: Zlatko Buric of Triangle of Sadness, and Alicia Vikander, subject of the best joke in the movie (they think the brain’s influence has got her speaking in ancient lost languages, but it turns out to just be Swedish).

by ·Comments Off on Lake Michigan Monster (2018, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews)

Very grateful that people are putting in excessive amounts of effort to make extremely silly movies. I laughed every time the soundtrack plays “what do you do with a drunken sailor,” and after watching Guy Maddin movies and reading Cinema Scope for 20 years, my brain’s pleasure sensors light up from this Canadian-adjacent content.

I guess Ryland pretends to be rich and assembles a team to find the monster, and I guess it kills team member Sean “Nessy” Shaughnessy during their third mission. There’s not much more I can tell you, since the Mets were getting trounced in game 3 of the NLCS and I was unevenly splitting my attention between these two things and drinking pumpkin beer.

by ·Comments Off on Alice, Sweet Alice (1976, Alfred Sole)

Alice is a creepy kid who loves masks and torments her popular little sister Brooke Shields. After Brooke is murdered in church and her mom’s shitty sister is repeatedly stabbed in her legs and hands, Alice is brought in for questioning. The parents take her home against psych recommendations, and more people get stabbed, but the masked raincoat killer has been the family’s psycho-catholic housekeeper (a Spike Lee regular)… all along? It’s confusing since Alice wears the same getup, but given the movie’s half-giallo half-Don’t Look Now influence, it’s probably meant to be confusing.

Unlike Tucker & Dale we got real filmmakers in charge, though you wouldn’t know it from checking their other credits – Sole made porn and did production design for the Wishmaster and Donnie Darko sequels, the producers and DPs made nothing, and the editor cut The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. But for a brief moment in the mid-70s they made a beautiful slasher film in which the vibes are so far off.

by ·Comments Off on Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010, Eli Craig)

Not the most excellently made movie, but it gets pretty far on a great concept, good writing and charming leads. Due to a misunderstanding, eight vacationing college kids believe two yokels are killers, while our guys (Alan Tudyk and Escape Room‘s Tyler Labine, both of whom need to be in more movies) think the incompetent kids are a suicide cult since they accidentally kill themselves whenever they encounter something pointy. Cerie from 30 Rock is the only one who understands them, while the alpha “Chad” (murderous goth of Final Destination 3) is their biggest threat.

Our heroes:

Okay the policeman’s death was a little bit their fault:

Cerie attempts peace talks:

The goth ain’t having it:

by ·Comments Off on The Wolf Man (1941, George Waggner)

Watched in solidarity with WOLFtober. To their writeup I’ll add that I enjoyed the fact that werewolves can be killed with a silver bullet… or by hitting them with a stick. It’s also good when Lon Jr. comes home to dad Claude Rains’s castle at the beginning, dad’s got a new lens for his telescope and Lon’s like “I happen to dabble in telescope repair.”

Waggner had acted in The Iron Horse. Writer Curt Siodmak is best known as being Robert’s idiot brother, and due to remakes he’s got credits on a Benicio Del Toro movie and on next year’s version made by the Invisible Man Remake guy. Love interest Evelyn Ankers showed up in Frankenstein & Dracula & Invisible Man movies over the next three years, and police chief Ralph Bellamy went on to be the antichrist’s doctor.

by ·Comments Off on Netherworld (1992, David Schmoeller)

Zombie conspiracy movie with lots of birds and boobs, from the director of O.G. Puppet Master, this videotape was very popular with some teens I could mention who were stuck at their great aunt’s house. The wannabe-Phantasm flying stone hand never looked extremely cool, and holds up even worse in HD, but the birdies have never looked better. The stone hand facehugs a would-be rapist using its barbwire grapples and maybe transforms the guy into a bird, and we’re off.

These red-crested cardinals and a cockatoo get carted into the background of every room/scene:

Verbose young man Corey arrives at his late dad’s estate and meets the staff, including lawyer Robert Burr (a doctor in Return to Salem’s Lot), Anjanette Comer who runs the place (she starred in The Baby with Arletty from Messiah of Evil), and her hot young horsegirl daughter who is constantly hitting on Corey (naming her “Diane Palmer” was probably supposed to spark some connections I didn’t catch at the time). The horsegirl says to stay away from the feather-eared bird people at the brothel next door, but her mom is one of them. Corey got a note from his late dad saying someone named Dolores can help resurrect him, and guess where Dolores hangs out.

The director appears onscreen, at left, as if to say “don’t take any of this too seriously”:

Corey keeps acting confident as he blunders around, way over his head, risking his ass to save the father he never met. He gets it on with his dad’s girlfriend while guest star Edgar Winter blows a sax solo. Anjanette maybe tries to kill him, but gets blinded by Dolores. The alliances are confusing… and the meaning of the stone hand… lotta good birds though. Zombie Dad gets almost-resurrected, intending to inhabit his son’s body, but Corey fights back at the last minute and dad turns into a zombie muppet eclectus.

by ·Comments Off on All You Need Is Death (2023, Paul Duane)

Of course I’d watch the movie where Irish music enthusiasts unleash ancient ghosts by stealth-taping forbidden songs. They’re Alex and Anna, and are bad at the stealth part, bad at knowing the details of what they’re after, and can’t interpret the songs, so they enlist help from folk music expert Agnes, who beats them to the song-knower’s house, steals the song, and steals Alex.

Song-knower:

The song-knower’s puppeteer son Breezeblock Concannon (!) comes home to find his mom has been murdered by ghosts, so he revenge-kidnaps Anna, and they track down the others by breaking into the library to see who’s checking out ancient Irish dictionaries. By now Alex is possessed by the viral song, emaciated and only wants to fuck, while Agnes works on the song and takes care of him. When Anna arrives she isn’t happy about any of this and starts stabbing people, but the Reborn Combination AlexAgnes eats her and then goes on its way.

“A digital cinema package by Paul Duane,” who codirected the great Natan. Since then he’s made The Dead Zoo and Best Before Death, the guy has got a thing for death. The drunken song-knower mum is the only character who is cool – it figures she was in The Northman – and Agnes played Ashley Laurence’s mom in Warlock 3.

by ·Comments Off on House of Usher (1960, Roger Corman)

“That almost looks like an image from a Roger Corman Edgar Allen Poe movie” says the Messiah of Evil audio commentary the first time the lead girl gets to the beach. “Don’t mind if I do,” said I. This was the first of the Price/Poe movies, made the year after A Bucket of Blood, and the color is really nice but they didn’t have their groove down yet, it feels draggy and drawn-out.

Visitor Phil makes a poor first impression, throwing a fit over being asked to remove his shoes indoors, then insists he’s the fiancee of sickly Lenore and is taking her away with him. Her brother Vincent disagrees (a delicate shut-in, this must be the performance the Burton cartoon was based on). Vincent goes on to explain that all his ancestors were evil and so is the house itself, and anyway, whoops, Lenore just died. But the butler slips and mentions catalepsy, so Phil goes barging through the family catacombs trying to rescue his beloved. She’s either driven insane from being buried alive or just wants revenge on her gothy depressive brother, and they go up in flames together.

Ever since Tales of Terror I’m collecting shots of Price being throttled in front of fire:

Phil was Mark Damon, who went on to exec-produce Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, and Lenore would guest-star on TV’s Batman. The butler is Harry Ellerbe of The Haunted Palace, which also has Elisha Cook Jr., so could’ve been an equally smart double-feature with Messiah of Evil.

Phil, having a foggy dream that used up the movie’s entire dry ice budget: