Bizarre Movie Reviewer: Titles O-S

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[Section under construction; beware the gaps, the sudden emptyness, and the feeling that you are all alone except for the eyes that constantly escape your gaze yet belong to a madman]

Open Your Eyes (Abre los Ojos)
(1997) (US/World release: 1999)

Directed by: Alejandro Amenábar (Tesis, The Others)
Starring: Eduardo Noriega (Tesis), Penélope Cruz (All the Pretty Horses, Blow, Live Flesh, Jamon Jamon, Belle époque), Fele Martinez (Tesis, Lovers of the Artic Circle), Najwa Nimri (Lovers of the Artic Circle), Chete Lera, among others.
Written by: Mateo Gil (also from Tesis) and Amenábar.
Genre: Suspense/Sci-Fi/Drama
Duration: 1 hour 57 mins.
Availability: On video. Being re-made as Vanilla Sky.

Do NOT let the poster mislead you; it is NOT a typical pseudo-artistic European romantic drama. It is actually a well made Spanish film made by the same people that made Tesis (renamed sometimes Thesis and Snuff in the US), that doesn't seem that odd at the beginning but that eventually becomes very bizarre. It is also worth noting that it got a special award at the Berlin Festival, and that it got 10 nominations for the Goya ("the Spanish Oscar"), including Best Picture and Best Director (update: now Cameron Crowe is remaking it as Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise). Here's a rather sythesized version of what it's about: Cesar (Noriega) is a guy in his twenties, who's enjoying life with all the money he inherited from his parents, and who can attract any woman he wants and get laid every night, to the extent that he is with a different woman every night, and he keeps on rejecting the advances of a nynpho named Nurio (Nimri). He's also the envy of his best friend, Pelayo (Maritnez) although Cesar doesn't quite get that. But one day we find him in an insane asylum after having murdered somebody, inexplicably using a mask while he talks to a friendly psychiatrist (Lera). And from there on he tells about the night of his birthday party, trying to remember how he got to the asylum. He tells how that night, while fleeing from Nuria, he wound up seducing the girl Pelayo was trying to impress, the attractive Sofia (Cruz), and winds up falling in love with her. But the next morning he decides to accept an invitation from Nuria, and in the way to her home they have a slight accident. Later Cesar wakes up and discovers that he has his face completely deformed, and that's there's nothing that can be done about it. Of course, his social life goes to hell immediately (what did you expect?), and the rest of his life soon follows as he loses his sanity. However, suddenly from one day to the next everything in his life goes back to happiness. That is, until later on where he loses the notion of who is who and what is reality and what is merely a dream. However one day he discovers... haha, you figure that out. Let's just say that its a strange ending, which leaves the doors open swinging in two directions, and that doesn't answer all the questions, but that fits in perfectly.

All the movie is very well made, something that surprises considering its low budget (its so low that even their barbershop appears in the beginning credits) and what the film demands at times, particularly the scenes with no traffic in Madrid and Cesar's makeup. As well, Amenábar knows well how to manage the shift in times and emotions, at the same time that he eliminates easy indicators regarding what is real and what is in dreamworld. And, except for Nuria, all the main characters become likable, including the very snobbish Cesar. You can understand perfectly the emotions and thoughts of every characters, even when the film goes into nutville, and lets say that it is helpful that the entire cast acts well. And the film never lets go of your attention, as you always want to know how it turns out, what's going on, as the suspense only increases. Unfortunately I cannot go into further details without spoiling the whole film, so I'll leave it there. But I recommend it...

Performance
(1970)
Directed by: Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammel
Starring: Mick Jagger
[REVIEW COMING SOON!]

Phantasm
(1979)

Directed and Written by: Don Coscarelli (Beastmaster)
Starring: Reggie Bannister (Wishmaster, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4), Angus Scrimm (Subspecies, Vampirella, Mindwarp), A. Michael Baldwin (Kenny and Company, Vice Girls), Bill Thornburry (The Lost Empire), among others.
Genre: Horror/Sci-fi

Killer graverobbers from outer space! Morticians from another dimension! Killer dwarves made out of shrunken human corpses! A flying sphere that drills brains out! Severed limbs that spurt yellow blood and scream in different tones of voice that transform into assassin insects! 70s haircuts! My god, the horror!

This cult horror movie, as much as it sounds like an Ed Wood film, is, without a doubt, one of the best horror films ever made (placed somewhere in the Top 30, anyway). Director Don Coscarelli, after making two small films that were relative hits overseas, made this low budget creepy flick that became his springboard for near fame. The result is cheesy at a few times, odd all along, and completely nightmarish. The story flows along like this: Mike is a kid who lives with his 20-something brother Jody in a small town in the middle of nowhere, with his parents are recently deceased, and his brother wondering if he should send him to live with some relatives. One day he follows his brother (whom he dearly loves) to the funeral of a friend killed mysteriously a night before, and notices that the mortician carries the casket by himself as if it didn't weigh a thing. This attracts his interest, and he starts trying to figure out more about the mortician, a creepy character they just refer to as the Tall Man (Scrimm), and explores the Morningside Cemetary. Slowly Mike and Jody find out that there is more than expected when they discover that the strange being is stealing the fresh corpses and making them into evil dwarve servants, that he bleeds embalming fluid, and that he's a presence that's been around for over a century. Together with the help of their ex-hippie ice cream vendor/ folk singer friend, Reggie (Bannister) they try to stop him. Of course, the more they snoop around the mausoleum (and I haven't even mentioned a third of the surprises that they find dwelling down there!), the more the Tall Man and his army of growling dwarves (and other surprises) start attacking them. What ensues is an exhibition of haunting images out of this world, and a very screwed up ending where you don't know what happened exactly yet wind up with one last chill...

One of the factors to the effect of the film is the great score, this creepy little tune by the recently deceased Fredric Myrow (Soylent Green; no pun intended, and may he rest in peace) that rivals those of Halloween, The Fog, Suspiria, and Nightmare on Elm Street in the fight for most chilling horror theme. Then there's the dark look provided by the low lighting and the cheap film. And Angus Scrimm is dead on horrifying as the enigmatic Tall Man (recent inductee into the horror hall of fame, by the way), with his deep voice and ghoulish look (the latter ripped off in the Poltergeist sequels), not to mention the nasty grin. Coscarelli directs this in a dreamy (better said nightmarish) tone, following a non-linear pattern at times, and with enough gory touches (there's both red and yellow blood!). The most infamous scene here involves a high speed flying metallic sphere that comes out of nowhere in the mausoleum and starts chasing Mike, only to wind up literally hooking itself into the forehead of a character, taking out a small drill, inserting it between the eyes of the character, and drilling out the character's brain, flushing out the remains through a high pressured bloody stream that runs out from a hole in its back.

Then again, there's some pretty bad acting by a couple of supporting actresses, who have the stupidest characters possible ("I'll open the door and check what is going on!"), not to mention some bad lines here and there, and some cheesy scenes (one very bizarre one involving a fortune teller and a pain inducing box that is too similar to the one in Dune). But none of this undermines the dark fantasy effect given by the film, as Coscarrelli explores the childhood fears of being left alone and the common fear of cemetaries. A movie really worth checking out for horror fans...

More money! More action! More killer spheres! A chainsaw duel! Psychics! More multi-colored blood! Kinky sex! New lead actor! Changed atmosphere! New decade! Wider release!

Of course, the critics hated this film. This included the regular horror reviewers, although this came along in 1988, one of horror's finest years, when critics had to review a new horror film every week for the last 3 years and were pretty much tired of the whole deal (nearly 250 horror films were released that year between video and the big screen, 5 times the amount nowadays), as they wanted to finish writing their thesis on Fanny and Alexander or whatever, and slammed many films that are now considered forgotten gems. Gee, what a surprise... Anyway, although this is inferior to the original, it is still a pretty damn good kick ass action horror film, and worth a view, particularly if you enjoyed the previous one.

One change you will notice immediately if the nightmarish unclear tone of the first film dissappears. This is not to say, however, that this plays completely straight. The Tall Man is as puzzling as ever, the story is filled with unexplainable fantasy elements, some parts feel dreamlike, and very little is answered.
[REVIEW IN PROGRESS]

Pi
(1998)

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream)
Starring: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Jakob the Liar, Scarface, 1492), Pamela Hart (Next Stop Wonderland), Stephen Pearlman (in his last film; was in Quiz Show, Green Card, The Iceman Cometh, The First Wives Club, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, and many flicks where he played the obvious jew or the rabbi), Ajay Naidu (Office Space, subUrbia), among others.
Writen by: Aronofsky, Gullette, and Eric Watson (who produced this)

Your average Saturday morning story in black and white about a mathematician escaping from corporations and fanatical Jewish priests, who winds up so insane that he puts a drill into his head, among other things.

Picture a combination between Taxi Driver, Jacob's Ladder, and one of those films about a paranoid guy whose fears are coming to reality as part of a major conspiracy, with a slight touch of Eraserhead, and you've got something close to this hit Sundance film. Oh, wait, I forgot the final, crucial ingredient, over which all of this floats: the extremely exciting, adventurous, and tittilating subject of... math. Yes, sorry for the let down, but you read that right. So, while you have acid flashbacks to the times when you had to take trigonometry, geometry, or (most useless and forgettable of all) calculus, let me go on to describing the plot.

Our hero and subject of portrait of dementia is a brilliant mathematician named Maximillian Cohen. He's a very eccentric character, who seems to suffer several mental problems, including an obsesive-compulsive personality, an obsesive-compulsive disorder, paranoia, migraine, and perhaps is beginning schizophrenia. He constantly tapes his comments while trying to view everything in the world in manner of rules, laws, and numbers. It is through these personal notes that we get to know some important things about his mindframe. The first is his hypothesis: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature. Another thing that we get to know is that when he was a kid, his mother told him not to stare at the sun, so he decided to stare at the sun, and ever since then he's been getting strange headaches. His only human contact is his mentor, Prof. Sol Robeson (Margolis), who doesn't share Max's view regarding order, but rather has faith in chaos. Anyway, he believes that the stock market can also be predicted by a mathematical constant, and he's determined to find it. For that purpose he has built in an unorthodox supercomputer, which unfortunately breaks down a lot, to his extreme annoyance. Of course, while Max gets closer to this number, his paranoia and his hallucinations grow. Problem is, the film takes a strange twist and some of those bizarre characters that Max keeps running into every day actually ARE after him, for their own purposes. One group is, as predicted, a Wall Street firm. But another is a stranger one that involves a kabal that believes that he may hold the key to finding something beyond that, something veeery powerful. So as Max is escaping both groups and getting even closer to the number, he also starts... mutating, or going completely insane...

Well! That was simple, wasn't it! However, I have let out the style of Aronofsky, who, aside from filming it in pretentious (yet useful) black and white, let's you feel and see all that Max sees, including the migrains and the hallucinations, through complex camera work, editing, and the contortions by Gullette (in an amazing performance - unless he's like that in real life), not to mention an actually well employed electronica soundtrack... Also admirable is the great technical execution. This flick was done for about $60 000 that Aronofsky got by selling shares to his friends and family, while family members cast as minor characters, and many people take several different technical roles to pull this one off (heck, the actor co-authored the story and built the website to promote the film!). Some of you may be turned off by how bizarre this becomes and how repelling the characters are, but the ones out there with better taste will enjoy the oddities and be hooked by the suspenseful story and good pacing. Aronofsky proves that even math can become suspenseful and involving. Maybe he should consider a career in launching certain boring politicians (or maybe for the best of us perhaps not)... Definitely a director to keep an eye on.

I don't know what is more odd: this movie, or the people who made this movie and actually convinced themselves that this was even remotely true. For those fortunate enough not have seen this movie, it's an "educational" video (read: scare propaganda) about marihuana, where the low-addictive, relaxing substance is treated like a combination of heroin, crack, LSD, and an anti-Parkinson's drug. It's a highly addictive substance which converts people into raving homicidal maniacs, who do things like laugh unstopably in a fiendish manner, play the piano way too fast, become sexually adventurous (the women kiss men they just met! The horror!), drive over people while driving, become impulsive, cannot control their emotions, and can somehow shoot quite well. And of course, those who smoke it have to be locked up, because they are plain evil, and uncurable. On a technical level, it isn't an Ed Wood film, but it comes close at times. But the content more than makes up for its high ranking in the "worst films of all time" list.

All in all, one of the best "so bad it's hilarious" films ever, and a great party movie. You've got to see it.

Bizarreness level: 7 shots out of 10.
Rating: 1 out of 10 (so awful it crosses the mark and goes around and is good!)

A movie about a young couple that moves into a new apartment that is falling apart, located in a bad neighborhood filled with annoying characters, but has a refrigerator that produces hallucinations, seduces the husband, and kills many cast members. You see, it is possesed by an evil spirit, which changes the inside of the refrigerator from time to time into an odd out-of-focus mass that devours people, and then sends the souls of those it kills to hell. A dancing Bolivian handyman who tries to seduce the wife helps save the day. The showdown features several objects chopping off people's body parts. Odd direction at times is effective, eerie, atmospheric, and oddly comical, and other times ridiculously bad. A movie so strange that it makes Aunt Jemima seem evil.

Bizarreness level: 7 shots out of 10.
Rating: 7 out of 10 (on some "it's so bad and ridiculous that I enjoyed it" level)

One of the best martial arts movies ever, and probably the goriest. Fans of The Daily Show will recognize it as the film from where the clip that Craig Kilborn used before "5 Questions" came from, the one of the large Asian man smashing the head of another, by just clapping his hands. Basically, the story is about a tough fighter who practices chi-kung (even though chi-kung is a non-violent physical art), who was a peaceful man, until some bad guys tried to apparently rape his girlfriend (that's not clear), which made her run off a roof (why she does that is not clear either, but we get to see it) and die. So he killed those guys and lands in prison, with bullets inside his body and all. The problem is, he's in the most violent prison ever, which is run by a corrupt warden, who employs super-powerful fighters to keep the prison under control. The top 3 are the aforementioned large, strong, fat guy, as well as some guy who can sort of fly (played by an actress), and some guy who throws around some wires. Ricky, our hero, winds up standing up for innocent prisoners who are abused and killed in the prison, and fights these guys with his amazing abilities. What results is just plain carnage. A lot of VERY graphic violence throughout, with exploding bodies galore, as well as hacked off limbs, and split organs. In one of the best scenes, Ricky gets a tendon ripped out of his arm, so he just re-inserts it, and keeps on fighting. And wait until you see the monster that the warden is (literally). And the effects, while not lousy by any means, look quite obviously fake.

Bizarreness rating: 8 shots out of 10.
Rating: 9 out of 10 (really would be a 2 out of 10 if taken seriously - but if you manage to take it seriously, there's something quite wrong with you).

Directed by: Clive Barker (author of many best-selling horror novels, director of Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions, author of the story Candyman is based on, which he produced)
Genre: Horror, experimental
Duration: 20, 34 mins respectively.
Availability: On sale on DVD. Available to rent at the less mainstream video stores.

Cliver Barker's two student shorts, available on the same tape. Salome is the visual version of Barker's college play of the Biblical tale of King Herod, John the Baptist, and Salomé. Basically, a girl dances around for a long while in the darkness while putting on different faces, in some beautiful shots, while some other faces pop up from time to time. The added music helps a lot to establish a mood, because otherwise one would fall asleep after 15 minutes of the same thing. Doug Bradley (Pinhead from the Hellraiser series of movies) plays King Herod, but blink and you'll miss him.

The Forbidden is some sort of precursor to Hellraiser, based on Faust, more specifically, the part where Faust gets skinned by some angels. It is shot in negative contrast, and is more interesting, as some bearded guy (Peter Atkins, the guy who wrote Hellbound: Hellraiser II and the awful Hellraiser III, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Wishmaster, and Fist of the North Star; just the guy you'd like to see skinned) does somethingrather. He assembles some tiles that form a puzzle of a formation, based on a blueprint that he has. He then dances naked in circles for several minutes (and yes, certain thing flops around in front of the camera all that while, which is a sure way to tell that the director is gay) for some unexplained reason. Then he encounters an odd-looking being. Finally he lies down and a group of odd-looking beings shave off all his body hair, and then proceed to shave off his skin (with a lot of delicacy, but no anesthetic). Then the guy gets up, skinless, and seems to be happy. The end. It does get too slow, but if you fastforward through it when you can't take it any more, you'll get an interesting and moody piece.
By the way, The Forbidden has nothing to do with Barker's story of the same title, from which Candyman was adapted.

A good bonus are the interviews at the end, which explain a lot of what Barker & co were trying to do and how they did it. Heck, I hate to admit it, but that bonus is more interesting than the shorts themselves. Oh well...

Bizarreness level: 9 shots out of 10.
Ratings: 5 out of 10 (Salome), 6 out of 10 (The Forbidden)

Directed and Written by: Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Out of Sight, Monster in a Box, Sex,Lies and Video Tape)
Starring: Steven Soderbergh, Steven Soderbergh, David Jensen (Species, The Newton Boys, Halloween 4), Betsy Brantley (Deep Impact, I Come in Peace, The Princess Bride), among others.

If you've actually read any of the ads for this film or paid enough attention to its video box, then you will figure out that this is a comedy that does not make much sense, and that the plot will be secondary to everything else presented. Meanwhile, you will also spot several humorous lines lying around there. This is a pretty accurate description of the film. About four stories are wound somewhat together, two of them with a main character played by the same actor (who happens to be Soderbergh), with other actors taking several roles as well, two of them that look like Soderbergh, to add to the confusion. One involves a dentist with sexual dysfunctions and problems with his marriage and his junkie brother; another about a philandering serviceman (aparently an exterminator of some sort, played by Jensen) who is hired to be in a sort of Cops show where he does things like rip off the tags of mattresses in stores; and the other two about a popular yet controversial motivational speaker/philosopher, with one of the stories centered on a guy working for him in a company where a mole has been discovered (yet none of the office workers really grasp what a mole is). All of this is interceded by hilarious TV reports reminiscent (or ripped off?) from The Kentucky Fried Movie, and pointless quotes jumping onto the screen, as well as satires of requirements for films nowadays (e.g. "No fish were harmed during the production of this film").

Actually, to describe the plot (or whatever you want to call it) is pointless. The film is about listening to hilarious lines or great alterations in the script. Yes, this IS a parody, if you are wondering. So watch out for characters saying the wrong lines, or a character being called by everyone as "Attractive Woman #2", or people speaking a dialogue that deliberately makes no sense whatsoever, or just one character's voice suddenly for no reason being badly dubbed into different foreign languages (with no cues from other people's responses to figure out what he is saying), and, of course, a guy running around naked from the waist down. It is a wonderfully twisted film.

The problem is that, as hilarious as it is, it does get tiring from time to time, as some jokes are carried on too long or sometimes do not work well. But when it is working, it is a laugh riot, with several memorable lines. This is inspired work by Soderbergh. An enjoyable time, particularly while drinking.

Schramm
Directed, Written, and Edited by: Jörg Buttgereit (Nekromantik, Der Todesking)

The only movie where you can see a fat guy hammer nails through his, uhm, "male appendage", in graphic close-up. Did I mention he's a serial killer and owns a blow up doll (which we get to see him using)?

The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (a.k.a. Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, The Seven Brothers and their One Sister Meet Dracula).
(1974)

Directed by: Roy Ward Barker (Asylum, Quartermass and the Pit, The Vault of Horror, Dr. Jeckyl and Sister Hyde, And Now the Screaming Starts!, The Vampire Lovers, The Monster Club, and a lot of British TV)
Starring: Peter Cushing, David Chiang (kung fu star), Robin Stewart (Horror House, Bless this House), Julie Ege (Craze, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, lesser Hammer films), Szu Shih, Chan Shen, James Ma, Fong Lah Ann, Chia Yung Lu, Wong Han Chan, Chen Tien Loong, Liu Hoy Ling, John Forbes-Robertson.
Written by: Don Houghton (Dracula A.D. 1972, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Shatter)

The ultimate B-movie (or one of the best candidates for that title): kung fu, zombies, Dracula, naked Oriental women, gore, re-used footage, possessed women, AND Peter Cushing! If you can't enjoy that, get the fuck out of my website right now. This movie sounds like an urban legend, but it actually exists. Hammer Studios, near their end (in fact, in their last year before moving exclusively into television), made a movie with Run-Run Shaw, one half of the Shaw Bros., the studio responsible for such classics as Crippled Heroes, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, super-gore film Revenge of the Zombies, and Amazons Against Superman (a.k.a. Three Stooges vs Wonder Women), not to mention a few movies Bruce Lee did after he died, and most movies that have "Shaolin" in their title. Hammer somehow had Peter Cushing available, shortly before he went on to do his most famous movie ever - some sci-fi movie about wizard ninjas and cowboys rescuing a princess from some british people and the body builder from A Clockwork Orange (Cushing's co-star in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell), aided by whiny robots in a galaxy far, far away. Lucky for us, Cushing is fair game, playing Van Helsing as well as he always did. Heck, he should have received an Oscar just for not breaking into laughter each time several kung fu warriors battled zombie-vampire warriors. Hey, at least he wasn't suckered into an Abbot & Costello movie!

Anyway, the film starts off with some zombie/vampires dressed in old Oriental warrior costumes chasing after Oriental women, whom they rip the clothes off and start sucking their blood. Then we get something about a Chinese member of ZZ Top (or he looks like one, anyway) finding Dracula's tomb, reviving him, and getting possessed by him. Unfortunately (or fortunately, according to your view on this movie) Christopher Lee doesn't play the old Count (he was busy singing in The Wicker Man), who is instead played briefly by John Forbes-Robertson (briefly seen in Vampire Lovers and Vault of Horror - one wonders if his contract read: "you will only appear for two minutes in any movie you make for Hammer"). The oriental Dracula goes on to revive the 7 Golden Vampires and their army of armor-clad zombies, and we get to see the intro scene again. Cut to Peter Cushing, who's giving a lecture on vampires in a Chinese college. All the students walk out on him, except for a young David Chiang, who tells him that Dracula is alive and well and living in London - oh wait, wrong 1974 Hammer movie written by Don Houghton. No, he tells him that Dracula is alive and in the form of a Chinese guy who has taken over a village and revived some vampires. He says that he and his 7 brothers (one of which is a sister) are going to go kick the vampires' asses, and ask Van Helsing to join them. Van Helsing goes with his son Leyland (Stewart) and a blonde rich pseudo-intellectual bimbo (former Miss Norway and Penthouse pet Julie Ege), the latter who finances the expedition. Soon their plane crashes in Africa, and they have to learn not to remove the yellow tapes from the foreheads of the vampires and to drink one drop of water a day - no, wait! That was The Gods Must Be Crazy 3! Okay, I promise: that's the last mix-up in this review... while I'm sober (which you shouldn't be while watching either flick). No, the trio just joins the brothers and heads off into deep China.

The rest of the flick is pretty much non-stop action, with the brothers (each armed with his own weapon) chopping vampires into bloody bits, while the younger Van Helsing just shoves them away from the bimbo, and Cushing remains in the background. Some of the cast members die. Eventually, Cushing gets his own battle with Dracula, and... THE END! Woo! Not much drama went into this one! Oh, but don't worry: it's 83 minutes of fun (or less if you get the censored version).

I don't think I have to write about the movie's merits. In case you are wondering, for the most part, this movie does not have the production values of, say, Terence Fisher's Phantom of the Opera. It was the cinematographer's first film (although he was the camera operator in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Superman, A Passage to India, and the 1979 Dracula, as well as Flash Gordon and Superman IV: The Quest for the Worst Screenplay), and he does a mostly decent job, at most. He didn't work alone, as he had the company of B-movie regular John Wilson, who did a few Hammer and Tyburn films with Freddie Francis, as well as junk like MST3K'd The Deadly Bees. Costumes, make-up, and production design where by the Oriental crew. Editing was by the reliable Chris Barnes (Dracula: Prince of Darkness, The Horror of Frankenstein, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Plague of the Zombies), but the film has been re-edited many times by second and third hands, sometimes to the point of near senselessness. Supposedly the version under this title is 74 minutes long, but the one I watched was 83 (with this title). The result at times looks like one of Hammer's finest, and at other times like a Lamberto Bava movie... which makes the thing a whole lot more fun.

Included in the version I saw was a trailer for the movie, which went under the title The Seven Brothers and Their One Sister Meet Dracula. I guess no one could get straight exactly how many brothers there were (at least as many as the Wayans), or what was the grammatically correct and PC way to say the title of the movie.

My verdict: a must see. Run to your Blockbuster store and slap the manager silly until he promises to put this movie on the shelf the next day (or the cops come). Tell him that you will bring your 6 brothers along - and your one sister...

Bizarreness level: 7 shots out of 10
Rating: 7 out of 10 (not on any serious level)

A lot of people (mostly film students) got the wrong idea when they watched The Blair Witch Project; namely, that "Hey, I
could have done this". That film, improvised, cheap, and all, had a better concept and execution than 99% of student films, and
was actually effective. A lot claim they could have done it, but, trust me, few could have (if you don't trust me, watch their
student shorts - just take along a barf bag). However, THIS film is one that just about anyone could have made. In fact, it
looks like a bunch of drunken frat boys did it on their weekend off. Not surprisingly, director Putnam physically looked like he just left a frat two years ago or so when he screened this at the 2000 SXSW festival. What we have here is a parody of blaxploitation films, mixed in with parodies of oriental B-movies, zombie flicks, super agent flicks, and well known films that adorn any campus dorm room with their posters (Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now). The ploy is that a recently released mental patient thinks he is John Shaft, after watching too many exploitation films. To make things worse, he is puny and white. Not only that, but he doesn't get the name right and calls himself John Shat. Now, in good hands, this could have been the next Austin Powers.

Unfortunately, it is not like the Mike Myers film nor any of the better Zucker brothers flicks. It's more in the line of several of
the Fox Family Channel National Lampoon films of recent. The reason is that Putnam did not have enough good material for a
full film, and he did not know how to even make use of what little he had. There is some good material, however. John Shat's institution is called "The Herve Villachieze School of Podiatry and Mental Institute". He says "mothafucka" every other word. He teams up with the sister of Japan's toughest cop, whom is dressed like her deceased brother to avenge him, only that all of her lines are out of sync. They wind up by accident in a male strip club. One of the bad guys, who is extremely gay, recruits a series of deadly killers which includes Gary Coleman (whom actually makes a cameo). Clumsy, slow zombies are after Shat. The henchmen of the bad guys and the heroes are all aware of the predictable stupid movies cliches such as that the bad guy explains an incredibly complex plan that makes little sense to the hero before killing him, and leaves his henchman to finish him off, which the hero will kill because he freed himself. A 70s soundtrack plays. Shat questions his sexuality. The easy way that heroes are able to transport themselves throughout the city without having any cars is also spoofed. And the type of film and editing involved is the same used in most cheap 70s flicks. Sounds good, right? Here's the problem: it's all STOOOOOOOOOOOOOPID. One joke works, but the ten next make you groan (it's still a better rate than anything released by Disney, though). None of the actors play their roles even semi-seriously as those in good spoofs do, but instead overact and clown around, pretty much as if they had hired a bunch of 5 year-olds in the leads. And some jokes are used waaaaay beyond their potential.

On the fair side, it does get entertaining from time to time, and some jokes do have you laughing out loud. However, please
note that the guys who were seated next to me, who were the first in line and were standing there for over an hour, were the
first to walkout of the theatre (then again, they had a large popcorn and a pitcher of beer that they left unpaid for). And they
were not alone. A lot of people who stood in long, boring lines just left during the movie. When the director asked at the end if
anyone had any comments or questions, the only thing some guy said was "I'm drunk!". I doubt anyone left the theatre without thinking about how they could have done the film better.

To remind us how entertaining blaxploitation films get between the cheesy "drama" parts, a series of clips and trailers of varied
blaxploitation flicks showed before this movie, since this was screened at the Alamo Drafthouse and they do cool things like that (plus serve beer and actual food). However, this achieved an effect contrary to what may have been intended.
You know something is wrong when a parody is only 1/10 as entertaining as the films it is lampooning.

Directed by: Lance Mungia
Starring: Jeffrey Falcon (Lethal Contact)
Written by: Mungia and Falcon
Genre: Comedy/Parody/Action/Sci-fi/Western/Fantasy
Duration: 1 hr. 31 mins.
Availability: Oddly enough, this hit DVD before video, and is now available in most mainstream video stores in the US, but only in non-mainstream video rentals. Don't ask me why...

What do you get when you cross a Mad Max rip off with El Mariachi, a fucked up Hong Kong action flick, El Topo, Kolya, and a Terry Gilliam flick? Yep, you got it! Howard's End! Nope, close, but no banana. The result is actually this cool flick that played a couple of weeks in the college/indie theatres (all 130 of them) in Fall 1998, in the wake of mostly crappy movies that surface in that bizarre transition period that happens in films between the summer blockbusters, the Thanksgiving kids films and turkeys, and the award-searching Winter flicks, known as puberty (not to be confused with the toilet training phase, which happens between January and March of every year, when the only things that show up in the cinemas is pure and absolute crap that was leftover), when your best bet actually is to go to those small theatres to watch the least pretentious and more entertaining indie flicks of the year. And hey, this was no dissappointment...

The story? Well, in the 50s the Russians blew up the US, leaving only a cool city named Lost Vegas, where (who else?) Elvis is king. However, several years later, the King is dead. So now throughout the nuclear desert a bunch of musicians/warriors are duking it out while trying to make it to Lost Vegas and crown themselves as the new king. Enter a pissed off, ass-kicking swordsman and rock n' roll musician with a classic electric guitar who looks like Buddy Holly named... Buddy. This guy is not only the best fighter in the wasteland but also the best guitarist, something that pisses off a lot of people. However, Buddy, with his Snake Plisken-like attitude, cares less about the mutants, the punks, the cannibals, the killer weathermen, the bowlers who look like wrestlers and act like the Clockwork Orange gang, the rivaling swordsmen, the Russian army, the hellish creatures of the desert, and everything else that lies in his path to Lost Vegas. However, the above do not feel the same way, particularly his self-declared nemesis, Death himself. Death is a heavy metal guitarrist that looks like Slash from G N' R and has the voice of Darth Vader, who with his gang/band of archers that look like Black Crowes rejects roams the wasteland killing other guitar players, collecting their picks and putting them in a collar around his neck (just like Dolph Lundgreen would put noses around his neck in Universal Soldier), while searching for Buddy. Buddy meanwhile does amazing flips and kicks while slashing everyone who dares touch his guitar. However, things change when a little orphan who only yells "AAAA!" starts chasing Buddy, despite Buddy's attempts to get rid of him. Throughout the course of the adventure Buddy starts to develop a brotherly love/annoy relationship with the kid, eventually saving him from the perils of the desert, while the kid (always only shouting) tries to help him in whichever way possible. Average plotline, right?

This flick is hilarious, in its own demented way. Mungia does a great job subtly (and not so subtly sometimes) spoofing many things from The Wizard of Oz, to the above mentioned flicks, to Rambo: First Blood Part II, to Leave it to Beaver (just wait till you meet the Cleavers, the friendly all-American cannibal family), to post-apocalyptic C-grade trash like 2020: Texas Gladiators, as well as itself. Heck, Buddy takes on the entire Russian army, and is able to wildly dodge all the arrows of the Death gang! Mungia works every camera angle and character to near perfection for more than one good laugh, taking the film only semi-seriously while creating a cool fantasy world, where every loony character is more entertaining than the next. Falcon also fits the title role perfectly (although so could have several other straight-to-video martial arts flick "actors"), and everyone seems to know what they are doing. On a downside, some things do get tiresome towards the end, but not enough to mention them. All in alll, an enjoyable flick for a couple of beers on a Saturday night.

Sick, Troma-like movie, about a bunch of bums who live in a junkyard and try to survive the violent bullies, and a new liquor called Viper, which causes people to melt entirely after they drink it. One of the bullies is a traumatized 'Nam vet who looks like he wandered out of Apocalypse Now, and is stabbing everyone in sight. Beyond that, there is no plot. You will see odd sex, a bum getting his penis ripped off and then trying to take it back from two bullies that are playing catch with it, a lot of people melting into fashionable colors, a decapitation, a cop capturing a mobster, beating him up until blood is oozing all over his head, then sticking his bloody head in a urinal, and throwing up on it, a bum exploding in slow motion, a necrophiliac, and other stuff. Of course, it's a cult classic. Good? No. Entertaining? Yes, if you are sick and drunk. Worth watching? Here's a test: if you just read the description of the contents of the film and are smiling, then you will enjoy it. Otherwise, just get it as a Mother's Day present.