by ·Comments Off on It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987, Larry Cohen)

Very first character is an asshole cab driver, the second is a cop who mutters to the camera how many weeks he’s been on the force (six), movie seems off to a bad start then they’re both immediately killed by a newborn mutant baby, yay.

Where did my friend go?

The plot is: the dad of a mutant baby has a viral moment in a courtroom, the gov’t decides to exile the dangerous babies to an island instead of exterminating them, a few years later the dad with nothing left to lose joins a scientific(?) expedition to the island (“surely they’ve developed a language of their own”) where everyone else is killed and he helps the mutants escape to the mainland then he and his ex run off with the only surviving baby.

Karen burns her ex’s tell-all book:

But the movie is less about plot than it is about letting dad Michael Moriarty go hogwild. Between his early courtroom antics, his late no-fucks-given mode, and his ability to psychically communicate with mutant babies, it’s his show. She’s not in it much but it’s funny to watch a Karen Black movie the day after not seeing her in The Devil’s Rejects. Cohen throws in new ridiculous plot points (sympathetic Cubans smuggle Moriarty to Florida, the last adult mutant lives just long enough to hurl ten cops off a rooftop). Easily the best of the Alive trilogy, all those times I wanted to rent this video in the late 80s, I was right.

Moriarty freaks out Maniac Cop star Laurene Landon:

by ·Comments Off on Junk Head (2017, Takahide Hori)

I can’t believe another sci-fi stop-motion feature exists with the same plot as Mad God – Phil Tippett must’ve been so steamed when he saw this. Both movies’ worlds are packed with lore and backstory, which they mostly don’t bother us with, as we follow a little guy who descends into lovingly-detailed hellish depths on some doomed mission. This guy’s human body has been mangled so he’s been robocopped into a doll head and roboticized. Early in his trip he’s ripped apart by worms and takes a mission-endangering head knock, then is re-roboticized into a science lab servant, and fails (but with great effort) to complete a quest to retrieve some mushrooms. The little guy kills a monster and rescues one of his mole-man friends – he does not save humanity or return to the surface, but a sequel is due next year.

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 Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009, Shinya Tsukamoto)

“Dad, I’m worried about you. You need to get back into biotech research.” Gotta give it up to Shinya for making the same exact cyberpunk movie for the fifth time. Diminishing returns, but once again a guy finds himself hulking out, turning into a machine.

Desaturated greys and browns except for a few popping colors. It’s in English; the dialogue and the plot being spelled out more explicitly are both weaknesses. When the action comes it’s prolonged and incoherent. The soundtrack is more pounding than ever. The clean HD photography clashes with the jittery underground lo-fi intentions. I did not hate it.

Hulking-guy’s son is run over by Shinya. He learns he was born from an android replica of his dead mom… he gets blasted by a hitman, also shoots himself in the head and lives… tetsuos a few city blocks. I wrote “I think Shinya wanted to be a suicide cult leader,” but I don’t know if I meant the director himself or the character he’s playing.

by ·Comments Off on Inu-oh (2021, Masaaki Yuasa)

Cursed Mutant kids meet up and share a musical connection. Tomona was blinded by the magic sword that killed his father, and Inu-Oh was born a mutant due to a deal his serial killer father made with a magic mask. Stories of mutants and curses are usually good, and Yuasa’s animation is playful and unusual, especially when visualizing how blind Tomona “sees” the world through sounds. But then after a half hour it abruptly becomes a hard rock musical… returning to sum up the kids’ stories at the end, but too late. And while some directors will shoot the plot scenes normally then make the style come alive during musical numbers, Yuasa does the opposite. The whole hour of rock & roll theatrics is full of repeated shots and movements and angles, third-rate early-MTV stuff.

by ·Comments Off on It’s Alive 2 (1978, Larry Cohen)

It’s just not SHOCKtober until we watch a crappy sequel, and this one was pretty crappy. The original was no great masterpiece, but Cohen made God Told Me To in between, so I hoped he’d upped his game. I showed Katy a scene where the boom mic played a supporting role, but she was busy noticing that we’ve got the same couch as the 70’s couple. My favorite bit was a pigeon flying around the house, overdubbed with bat sounds.

Motherhood not working out as planned:

The one great idea here is that the isolated incident from part one turns into a national conspiracy (Cohen loves a good conspiracy), dad John Ryan from that movie returning to covertly assist couples with new or expecting mutant killer babies. Arizona dad Frederic Forrest (a Coppola fave) is a real prick – why did anyone put up with guys in the 70’s? New mom Kathleen Lloyd and underground mutant baby-hunting org head John Marley had shared the screen the year before in The Car (he’s the sheriff, she’s the girl whose entire house got run over). The movie tries to build suspense for a full hour so it won’t have to do anything else, then one-by-one POV-camera killings begin. I don’t get why the vigilante “volunteers” tent and gas a house their leader is still inside. In postscript, Forrest becomes either the new underground mutant-baby-hunter or the new underground mutant-baby-rescuer, it’s not clear which, but it’s not important since he’s been replaced by some more likable actors in It’s Alive 3. Nice to see Eddie Constantine here, though.

Mutant Baby is wearing his 3D glasses wrong:

by ·Comments Off on Two by Shinya Tsukamoto

The Phantom of Regular Size (1986)

Industrial-sounding mayhem, and did I hear a Psychic TV song? Nervous guy is attacked by a Freddy Krueger type in the subway, transforms into a scrap-metal mutant-man who kills his girlfriend with his giant spinning drill cock. A psychically linked rival appears, they face off and travel in stop-motion like The Wizard of Speed and Time. Looks wonderfully cheap and frantic, even the titles are scrawled Brakhage-style in rapid partial title cards.

–
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988)

Guy goes to a workshop, cuts his leg open and shoves a metal rod in, but only seems to realize the horror of this after it becomes infected, then he runs down the street until hit by a car. Our new guy, who turns out to have been the driver in that last scene, finds metal in his cheek while shaving, woman next to him on the train station touches metal thing on the floor and it becomes her hand, she chases him down and they battle… he defeats her but his feet turn into rocket shoes.

Between Maniac and Tsukamoto, subway restrooms are gonna be a theme this month. This is also my second movie in a row where the male lead is butt-raped, but this time it’s by a Doctor Octopus lady in a possible dream sequence. It’s a semi-remake of the short, but in this version the girlfriend does stab him a bunch of times with a kitchen knife and burn him with a hot pan before he drills her while unconscious. Tetsuo’s off the hook, if not the filmmaker.

See Also: Haze

Girlfriend (who helped dump the guy from beginning in the woods) is dead in the tub until the metal guy outside infects the house through its pipes and she attacks again, then transmogrifies into him, and they go speed-and-timing through the streets.

I’m sure the director had a good idea of what was happening in the last ten minutes, two metal-encrusted mutants in an extreme stop-motion battle, but I didn’t. Most of the movie is very watchable, which is only surprising since I’ve seen this before on VHS, and remember it bring a spastic, plotless, ear-piercing nightmare. In either event I wouldn’t have pinned this filmmaker to direct a prestige remake of Fires on the Plain, looking forward to that one.

by ·Comments Off on Color Out of Space (2019, Richard Stanley)

Lavinia is introduced by the lake, doing a wiccan ritual to cure her mom of cancer and get herself out of this town, when a wandering hydrologist interrupts – it’s convenient that a hydrologist is on-site exactly when an alien color-force lands via meteor and gets into the locals via the well water. Lavinia’s cancerous mom is Joely Richardson (of a movie-royalty family, previously of Drowning by Numbers and the Ken Russell Lady Chatterley), her dad is Nic Cage (toned down from Mandy, and better), doing his damnedest to inform America that alpacas are the animal of the future (they are!).

Lavinia and little brother Jack-Jack:

Cage vs. The Color (Purple):

Soon the mutations begin. Mom reabsorbs Jack, stoner brother Benny and his buddy Tommy Chong see otherworldy visions, the alpacas fuse into a many-headed blob, and Cage takes care of business with a shotgun. I think Lavinia helps bring about the apocalypse! Stanley is beloved for some 1990’s cult films… good music by the composer from Hereditary… shot by a music video vet (Grinderman’s “Heathen Child”). The first major Lovecraft feature since Beyond Re-Animator and Dagon in the early 2000’s (RIP Stuart Gordon).

Hydrologist, Benny, Tommy:

Hi, mom:

by ·Comments Off on Annihilation (2018, Alex Garland)

Ex-soldier returns for a secret mission with a small group of new teammates who get picked off one-by-one… sounds like the usual, but it’s got some neat twists that make it play more like a prequel to Under the Skin. Natalie Portman is a scientist (unsubtly reading the Henrietta Lacks book in flashback) who volunteers to go into the “shimmer,” an alien-comet-infected zone of lifeform transformation and combination, searching for whatever has freaked-out and half-killed her soldier husband Oscar Isaac.

“Very few of us commit suicide, but we all self-destruct” – musings on life and death and states in between, as they pass beautifully mutated flora and flee from horrific bear-creatures that imitate human screams. The second half of the film has the trailer music, themes played on a sampling keyboard programmed with the Inception Sound, but the first half is surprisingly full of acoustic guitar, as the team struggles to make a plan when some want to turn back and their sense of time and direction is disoriented. The white girl with the weakest distinguishing characteristics (Tuva Novotny) dies first, fortunately. Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin) gets paranoid and ties up the others before her face is ripped off by a screaming bear. A very young-looking Tessa Thompson gives herself up to the transformative space and becomes a tree. Team leader Jennifer Jason Leigh and Portman carry on, and Portman discovers a shimmery humanoid that learns how to imitate her before the real Portman dies from a fire grenade, same as her late husband, and the Alien Portman joins the Alien Husband outside the zone.