Grave robbing was big business in the 19th century, and desperate anatomists turned to body snatchers (also known as “resurrectionists”) to keep their laboratories stocked with fresh corpses. Dominic Monaghan (better known as Charlie on “LOST”) and Larry Fessenden are resurrectionists of a sort in “I Sell The Dead,” though their grave robbing quickly takes a turn that’s funny, bizarre, and pretty damn entertaining.
Monaghan and Fessenden are, respectively, Arthur Blake and Willie Grimes. They make their living digging up dead bodies, first at the behest of Dr. Vernon Quint (Angus Scrimm), and, later, just because it pays decently. After a few years of digging up graves, they think they’ve seen it all—that is until one night when, digging up a grave at a crossroads, they find a corpse with a stake in its heart and a string of garlic around its neck. Arthur removes the stake, the vampire wakes up, and before long, the two cads are in the thick of some Victorian-era supernatural shenanigans. Zombies and other creatures are afoot and they’re a prized commodity. And luckily, Willie and Arthur are good at rounding up the undead.
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There is nothing good about airport shuttle rides. Suffused with the stink of people who’ve been stuck in the recycled atmosphere of an airplane for countless hours and full of weary travelers either freaking out because they’re late getting to the airport or getting back home, shuttles are barreling beasts of concentrated misery. And that’s if you’re lucky, which is not the case for the fun-loving 20-somethings who board a sketchy late-night transport in “Shuttle,” writer/director Edward Anderson’s debut feature.
Among the shuttle’s doomed passengers are Jules (Cameron Goodman) and Mel (Peyton List), best friends just back from a weekend vacation in Mexico. They’re joined by Matt (Dave Power) and Seth (James Snyder), a pair of hunky young dudes who were on the same flight. There’s also a milquetoast accountant named Andy (Cullen Douglas), who won’t stop talking about his wife and kid. The driver (Tony Curran) is a bit of a creep, but the shuttle’s cheap (and Jules and Seth are eager to flirt with each other), and so the four young people climb aboard. Some bad driving and a flat tire throw the trip off the rails immediately, and Jules and Matt suspect something is wrong. And boy, are things wrong! Matt loses his fingers in a tire changing mishap, the driver pulls a gun, and soon enough, everyone in the shuttle is a hostage of the crazy wheelman.
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Some couples must overcome insurmountable odds to be together, while others simply meet and fall in love. Others, though, must tame their grotesque genitalia and master their aberrant sexual desires before they can truly be together. Such is the case in “Bad Biology,” director Frank Henenlotter’s latest flick. It’s his first feature since 1992’s “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” and Henenlotter’s subjects are more or less the same as they were in the “Basket Case” films and “Frankenhooker”: mad science and abnormal freaks, tied together forever by virtue of love and mutual weirdness. Here, though, they’re turned up to 11 and fully unrestrained.
One of those freaks is Jennifer (Charlee Danielson), a girl-next-door type whose normal appearance belies her shocking sexual secret: she’s cursed (or blessed) with seven clits. Being poly-clitoric isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, though—Jennifer is in a state of near-constant arousal, and her orgasms are so explosive that her partners usually end up dead. Oh yeah—and she pops out a mutant freak baby two hours after she has sex.
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Juraj Herz, director of “The Cremator,” told now-defunct Euro-film zine Kino Eye in 2002 that, to him, the typical horror film is a “chainsaw massacre”. That’s not exactly what you’ll find in “The Cremator,” Herz’s twisted 1968 tale of a crematorium worker driven mad by his own desires and the growing threat of Nazism, though the bodies do pile up fairly high by the film’s end. Instead, Herz uses blacker-than-black humor, super surrealistic imagery and a fantastically creepy performance by lead actor Rudolf Krusinsky to create a horror flick that fearlessly plumbs the depths of deranged weirdness while spotting a utterly mad grin. Out of print and unavailable for years, “The Cremator” is back on DVD, courtesy of Dark Sky Films.
The titular cremator is Karl Kopfrkingl (Hruskinsky), who spends his days working a massive, palatial crematorium. He’s obsessed with affairs both earthly and spiritual. He worries about providing enough for his family—his wife, Lakme, and his children, Zina, a budding pianist, and Mili, an effeminate young boy. It’s the late 1930s, and so added to his list of worries is the spectre of Nazism, first present when Kopfrkingl encounters a portrait of Hitler at a frame shop and, later, when his old army buddy Reinke comes over for dinner. The Nazis are massing on the Czech border and Reinke, a low-level party functionary, urges Kopfrkingl to join the Reich before it’s too late.
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What is the urge that drives creators to over-explain their creations? The cinema landscape is littered with clunky sequels (“Matrix Revolutions”) and over-wrought prequels (hello, “Star Wars”!) that just try to expound too damn much on what starts as a simple, killer premise. Ambiguity doesn’t sit well in real life, but when it comes to fiction, it can be a filmmaker or writer’s best friend. “Phantasm IV” is a good example of the kind of nit-picky obsession that turns a graceful concept into a clumsy exercise.
I’ll be upfront: I haven’t seen either “Phantasm II” or “Phantasm IV.” But I have watched the first “Phantasm” plenty of times, and it’s a great flick. Weird and unsettling, with a surreal, hallucinatory atmosphere that keeps you off balance throughout. Is the Tall Man just a dream? Is Mike concocting this bizarre fantasy world to cope with the death of his brother? Or is the Tall Man really an extra-dimensional being with an army of blood-thirsty dwarves? Writer/director Don Coscarelli leaves you hanging at the end, and the movie is better for it.
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Bad acting and poor special effects aside, perhaps the one sure fire way to tell you’re watching some low-budget train-wreck of a movie is the amount of running you’re seeing on screen. Take, for instance, “100 Million BC,” one of the many ‘mockbusters’ churned out by The Asylum, those dedicated cinematic hacks committed to capitalizing on whatever happens to be in multiplexes at the moment. The last 45 minutes of “100 Million BC” features an angry t-rex running around downtown Los Angeles. The terrible lizard is chased by some military types, and you might assume that, when pursuing a dinosaur, a car, plane or other fast-moving object might be useful. Maybe even a bicycle or some roller skates. But no, the cast of “100 Million BC” is forced to run, down alleys, through tunnels, up and down the deserted streets of Los Angeles—because, after all, staging car chases, even one involving a single car and a shoddily-animated dinosaur, costs money. There’s a marathon’s worth of running in “100 Million BC,” and like the cast, you’ll probably be worn out by the end of the movie, too. It’s an exhausting sort of film, one that goes on for 45 minutes longer than it should and taxes the patience and stamina of even the most hardened trash-cinema fan.
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There’s truth in advertising and then there’s “Tokyo Gore Police.” It’s a movie so gory, violent and outrageous, so thoroughly soaked in blood and covered in thick coating of fleshy-bits and bone matter that simply putting “gore” in the title doesn’t quite cut it. In fact, the proverbial 1,000 monkeys at 1,000 typewriters could spend 1,000 years filling 1,000 thesauruses with synonyms for “gore”, “blood”, “disembowelment” and so on and still not have enough words to describe “Tokyo Gore Police.” There is so much gore in “Tokyo Gore Police” that someone floats around on a giant spewing, splattering cloud of gore. Yes, it’s that excessive—and, thankfully, it’s good, too.
In the Tokyo of the future, the police force has been privatized and the armor-clad cops have traded in “to serve and protect” for “to sever and impale” as a policing motto. But even deadlier than the cops are the “engineers,” psychotic genetically mutated killers whose bodies can morph into grotesque weapons. They’re so dangerous that a special team of cops has been created to hunt down and kill engineers. Chief among the hunters is Ruka (Eihi Shiina, best known as the piano-wire-wielding femme fatale in Takashi Miike’s “Audition”), a demure young lass with a penchant for cutting herself with a utility knife and slicing bad guys in half with her samurai sword.
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“The Strangers” is a tease of a horror movie. It’s a solid 75 minutes of frightful foreplay, with shifting shadows and menacing noises working in concert to craft pure, unadulterated suspense. There are moments when “The Strangers” is absolutely, unbearably terrifying, and first-time director Brian Bertino ratchets up the scares so effectively that, for a moment, it seems as though things can’t get any more terrifying. And then…they don’t. The movie ends, the credits roll, and all the viewer is left with is a case of cinematic blue balls.
Of course, it’s a hell of a build-up, and Bertino should get a lot of credit for establishing and maintaining an awesomely high level of suspense throughout the movie’s first two acts. Bertino keeps things sparse, which helps. Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) are spending the night at James’ family’s secluded vacation home. They’re having major relationship issues—he proposed, she declined—and things are already tense when a mysterious girl starts pounding on the door at 4 a.m. She wants to know if Tamara is home; she’s not, but James and Kristen are, and it’s not long before the girl and two friends slip on some scary masks and start raising hell.
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Central America in the 1980s was a complicated place, a Cold War hotspot with Marxist revolutionary groups dueling with dictatorial regimes, counter-revolutionary forces squaring off against newly installed Communist governments, and the U.S. government trying to play both sides against each other. You needed a scorecard just to keep track of who’s a Contra and who’s part of the Sandinistas, and the dirty tricks the American government were up to in Central America were enough to bring down some prominent members of the Regan administration (but apparently not bad enough to keep them from getting jobs in the current administration). Strange, complex days indeed, which makes it a good thing we’ve got a film like “Toy Soldiers,” which not only simplifies the political intricacies of 1980s Central America but also serves as a cautionary tale for wayward rich kids thinking of organizing their own amateur hostage-rescue commando team.
Like most vacation-gone-wrong movies, “Toy Soldiers” starts out with a vacation going right. Rich girl Amy (Terri Garber) and a bunch of friends are cruising along the Central American coastline in a yacht piloted by a dude named Sarge (Jason Miller, better known as Father Damien in “The Exorcist). A Vietnam vet, Sarge grudgingly chapperones the kids (including a young Tim Robbins!), and though they’re all super-rich, they’re nice enough. That is until they stick Sarge in a lifeboat and steal the yacht for an afternoon of fun. The kids play guitar, drink beer, hold a wet t-shirt contest and generally act dumb, though the fun comes to an end when one of them trips and cracks his head open. Thinking that traipsing through the Central American jungle is the quickest route to medical attention, Amy and three pals take their injured friend ashore. Within minutes, they’re captured by some sort of military group, thrown into a makeshift jail and groped and tortured by the grungy revolutionaries (or are they counter-revolutionaries? Ah, who cares.) Meanwhile, Sarge is always about 15 minutes behind the rest of the story, first using a boat and then running at a light jog to find the kids.
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One of the early cinematic abominations to pour forth from the filthy minds at Troma Films, “Mother’s Day” is a lot like most exploitation epics of the era—nasty, brutish and with a dash of slapstick comedy thrown in to make all the rape and murder a little more palatable. Director Charles Kaufman (brother of Lloyd, Troma’s head honcho) claims “Mother’s Day” is a satire, but what, exactly, it’s satirizing is cloudy at best. Despite the goofy humor and liberal use of faux hillbilly teeth, “Mother’s Day” is a decent exploitation flick, one that’s made all the creepier by the twisted matriarchal angle.
The matriarch in question, played by Rose Ross (actually, actress Beatrice Pons, using a pseudonym), lives in the backwoods of New Jersey with her two grown boys, Ike and Addley (played by Holden McGuire and Billy Ray McQuade, both of whom—you guessed it—used a pseudonym). They live in a rickety old house littered with trash, broken toys, muscle magazines and graffiti (typical example: “Ike + Addley + Mom”)—sort of like the house in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” if it were filled with retarded man-children instead of cannibals. It’s a normal household, except for the times when mom lures unsuspecting city folk into the woods and allows her sons to mutilate and violate foolish city slickers to their hearts’ content.
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