Category Archives: Horror

Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema, Science Fiction, Western

#81 – Demon Streets 2099

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(1985, It, 98 min) Dir Mario Andreotti. Cast John Saxon, Romeo Romero, Paula Pitt.

It’s the future – a post-apocalyptic wasteland which here means the deserts of Spain. There are demons – yes, demons – here too. You can tell which are the demons too because handily they tend to be well dressed in suits and ties where the rest of the population are togged out in rags and dirt. Oh yeah and they’re in the habit of flying everywhere on big ol’ black leathery bat wings. Once that’s out of the way in the info dump that begins the film, this is pretty much a Western. Saxon is Preacher White, a drifter who has ridden into the town of Pestilence with a pair of phaser rifles and a mission in mind. The first film from Paolo Androetti’s son Mario who displays here the same colourful eye for a shot as his father and the same way with a bucket of hot gore too, as well he should considering that he apprenticed with his father for the ten years or more preceding this – I mean the guy pretty much grew up on sets between the model of a desiccated corpse and a hamper full of maggots. Unfortunately he also shares his fathers variable quality control – this is a mostly indifferent flick that flopped massively but his next film, The House of Midnight, set up his subsequent career nice enough.

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Horror, Imaginary Mexican Cinema

#78 – Sol Diablo (Sun Devil)

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(1982, Mex, 91 min) Dir Ramon Vélez. Cast Anthony Quinn, Gabriel Jurado, Katy Fernandez.

An apartment building in the centre of Mexico City in the middle of the night. Young Jorge (Jurado) wakes and from his bedroom window is the only person to see the new tenant arrive. This is Hector (Quinn), a suave older gentleman with a suitcase full of trinkets to captivate the children and a million stories to tell to the adults but who always seems to change the subject when the conversation turns personal. He’s so charming though that nobody seems to notice and this includes Isabella, Jorge’s mother (Fernandez, in what would turn out tragically to be her last role), who seems very taken with this grey-haired gentleman. Jorge thinks that he can see through the old man’s charm and takes to spying on him, trying to find out what he’s really up to. While doing this he sees Hector standing over the dying Poe in apartment 9a, his hands pressed to the old man’s temples, and realises what’s going on – he’s stealing the life force from the other residents. “He’s a Sun Devil!” he tells his mother as she prepares to go out for the night with him, “He’s stealing the life from us all to feed the sun inside him!” Of course she thinks he objects to him because of the memory of his late father and turns on him angrily: “Jorge!” she says, “There is no such thing! How can you make something like that up?” How can Jorge convince her? Will she be the next victim? An atmospheric production with a pretty shocking conclusion.

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Horror, Imaginary Japanese Cinema

#77 – Gynaecologist

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(2008, Jap, 72 min) Dir Hiroya Hino. Cast Mitsuo Ibaraki, Yukie Inoue.

In the horror genre examples of sexism and of female empowerment rub shoulder so frequently and so vigorously it surprises me that the whole genre isn’t constantly engulfed in the resultant wildfire. There are plenty of examples of both but there are some of the former that go so far as to have no parallel among the more progressive end. This is one such film. I’m not going to go into detail as to the plot and so on as it’s beside the point – the film exists for no reason other than the examination scenes. Despite the fact that Japan’s censorship prevents any depiction of the area relevant to the film they still try their best – there is pixelling, there are POV shots from the anatomical perspective and there are shots that are so close to the matter at hand that they are abstracted into uncomfortable fields of pink. The fact that there is nothing actually graphic works in the maker’s favour though, with bloodied instruments and removed matter in conjunction with the patient’s pained face suggesting unfathomable grotesquery in the viewer’s mind. My recommendation: avoid unless you like brain damage. Postscript: the horror genre, like any other, relies on people to vote with their money and their interest and though two sequels followed this the series has now thankfully met its end.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema

#74 – Severed Tongue

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(1991, HK, 105 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Jackie Woo, Maxy Feng, Annabelle de Long.

While never in fear of achieving respectability Jackie Woo skirted the edges of the mainstream in the mid to late eighties and came within sniffing distance of a halfway decent budget and a recognisable cast. Something about this must have been antithetical for Woo as he followed his most conventional and popular film to date, Law Fist, with this, his most repellent feature. Cocky Triad Vin (Woo, as usual) has been sent by his boss to Indonesia to hash out a drugs deal but while there gets carried away with women and drink and ends up kidnapped by some kind of a jungle cult. He escapes but without both his tongue and penis – both having been graphically torn off/out – and makes his way back to Hong Kong only to be shunned by his former compatriots. Finding that he’s now somehow endowed with mystical powers (along with hallucinations of jungle men following him) he takes bloody revenge on his fellow Triads and do I mean bloody – one victim has his skin pulled off over the course of what seems like an eternity of tearing and screaming, one has his head popped like a zit, another his limbs wrenched from his body. According to the man himself in the 2006 documentary Jackie Woo: Bloody Vengeance, this film was catharsis after years of Triad interference but it didn’t seem to do his standing with them any harm – while only a moderate success at the box office it was so well received by the Triads they gave him an effective carte blanche for his next half-dozen features.

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Action/Adventure, Comedy, Horror, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema, Science Fiction

#73 – Backspace

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(1987, HK, 96 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Jackie Woo, Phillip Ko, Rosamund Kwan.

By the standards of director Jackie Woo this is an unusually restrained techno-thriller but in saying that I have to warn potential viewers that this isn’t The Net or anything like that – it’s still a Jackie Woo film which means there are two beheadings, a disembowelling and one instance of a topless lady running around on fire. Aside from that it’s a model of restraint from the guy. Jimmy (played by Woo’s favourite actor – Woo himself) has just started working at DynoTime industries which boasts a fully automated office building, from the doors to the drinking fountains. Unfortunately for him, in a big slapstick moment involving an inappropriate use for a banana, he screws up big time on his first day and has to hide from his tyrannical boss under his desk. There he falls asleep and wakes up after hours to find the building in lock down with a very vigilant computer standing guard like HAL with whirling razor-sharp blades and before he knows it he’s fighting for his life. As if that wasn’t enough a gang of punk criminals are breaking in that same night, hence the aforementioned body count. Of course the film ends with Jimmy prevailing and being garlanded with Employee of the Year but the journey there is something else. Alternating between broad comedy, hard-core violence and misty-eyed sentimentality this is a classic Hong Kong kind of film.

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Detective, Drama, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#70 – Dans le mur (In the Walls)

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(1990, Fr, 129 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Daniel Auteuil, Jean Rochefort, Emmanuelle Béart.

French thriller about famed neuroscientist Paul Mauchard (Auteuil) who has the unfortunate habit in his downtime of killing women and secreting their corpses in the space between the walls of his country house, all while his wife (Beart) and two children live there unknowing. Aging detective Fandeur (Rochefort), meanwhile, is trying to track down the missing Valerie Cassin who we have seen lured to Mauchard’s house and killed in the film’s extended opening. The two storylines play out side by side, converging and separating in nail-biting fashion as Fandeur picks up clues and finds the trail to his missing person, all the while not knowing that he’s on the trail of a serial killer. The whole thing is glacially paced and shot at the expected remove by Sacher, the camera coolly watching over the players without giving away a thing. This all means that when the expertly handled tension breaks out in the film’s latter half it will be an impossible watch for viewers without nerves of steel. An American remake has been mooted since the original was released but here’s hoping that if that comes to pass it’s not the slick, shallow interpretation that fans of the original have been dreading.

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Childrens, Horror, Imaginary Canadian Cinema, Science Fiction

#68 – Octember

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(1992, Can, 90 min) Dir Ben Roy. Cast Bobby Rusk, E. Emmett Benn, Alison Shaker.

Young Alex finds himself trapped in the missing month of Octember, a twilight month that slipped between October and November many years ago and was never found again. Octember manifests itself as an empty world – the rest of its residents having gone straight to November – though he’s not the only one there. A host of lost souls are adrift with him in this phantom month, some there so long that they have become unhinged. His initial wanderings around his depopulated neighbourhood after waking in his empty house are eerie in the extreme with whole streets rendered very Marie Celeste, the evidence of people littering yards and kitchens and driveways but nobody is there. The perfect kind of kids movie – by virtue of its small-scale made for TV production it occupies the kinds of spaces familiar to children like the house and the street and so on which is perhaps why it’s left such an impression on those, like myself, who saw it at an impressionable age.

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Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema, Science Fiction

#63 – Coffin Orbit

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(1982, It, 115 min) Dir Paolo Andreotti. Cast Kirk Douglas, Carl Weathers, Candy Brown.

It’s 1982. Star Wars busted all the blocks five years ago and then Alien did the same two years after that. The studios are tarting up the schlock in trade of the likes of White Star Films so White Star Films, in turn, have to start pumping in the cash to compete. Trouble is they’ve only got so much to go around. Easy – bet it all on one, a sure-fire winner, and with the profits you make two and with the profits from that… Next stop, success! It’s a sure-fire recipe for sure but a meal’s only as good as it’s ingredients, right? So what have we got here? Andreotti knows how to direct a film, sure, but the man’s getting old and he’s coming off Vendetta di Zombie, a film that doesn’t display the kind of common touch a blockbuster needs. Who’s starring too? Kirk Douglas? Didn’t he learn anything from Saturn 3? What about plot? An previously unnoticed object is detected in orbit around our sun and NASA send Captain Dale (Douglas) and his crew to investigate. Turns out this thing is a colossal coffin for some humongous space creature and something else is in there too. Something deadly. Okay, so Coffin Orbit is no Star Wars. Yes, it’s plot is basically Alien and no, it didn’t get the blockbuster market either, but every once in a while someone spends a ton of money on something mad like this and that should be cherished, even if it sunk White Star Films in the process. Just watch it for all the money up there on-screen behind the awful acting and you’ll be fine.

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Childrens, Comedy, Horror, Imaginary Turkish Cinema, Science Fiction

#54 – Meto in Space!

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(1974, Tur, 67 min) Dir Esen. Cast Esen, Arzu Gorgun, Melek Okay.

I have to confess from the out that the only version of this film I’ve seen is of an nth generation VHS copy – it’s colours all blobby, it’s picture all shot to hell and without subtitles – that was downloaded on the recommendation of an aficionado friend of mine who is in possession of a lot of free time and standards that are minimal. While I wasn’t disappointed in the film vis-à-vis it’s badness I can’t say that I can recommend it entirely either. Meto (Esen, also director) was apparently a children’s entertainer in Turkey in the 1970’s and this was his second film (the first, called simply Meto, is for some reason not as mental). For humour think Benny Hill but coarser and more crudely sexual – the ‘comedy’ mostly involves Meto chasing buxom and scantily clad women around a cardboard set meant to be outer space (for production values imagine Ed Wood working on the cheap). Oh and Meto also is in possession of a grotesque nose that looks like the resulting offspring between a penis and a flute. I have no idea about plot at all but every once in a while something that looks like a flashback happens and there are all these colours and spinning disks and either someone dies horribly (eaten by spiders for example) or else their clothes fly off. Are these Meto’s powers? The idea that this might be family entertainment boggles my mind. The fact that this might be entertainment for anyone boggles my mind. If you hate your eyes, ears and mind then do yourself a favour – find this now.

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Horror, Imaginary Japanese Cinema

#53 – Dark Tentacles

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(1999, Jap, 63 min) Dir Hiroya Hino. Cast Yukie Inoue.

I don’t know about you but if – all those years ago, back in more innocent times – if then someone had suggested to me the erotic potential of tentacles I would probably have smiled and nodded whilst backing away from them slowly. Of course now that the internet has opened our eyes to these things actually being things it’s harder to think of anything uncomfortable or unpalatable that hasn’t been exploited by some deranged pioneer or another, all of which is a long-winded way of saying that here is Dark Tentacles, should you want it. It’s the age-old story – an anonymous woman (let’s call her AW) is chosen by some sort of grotesque and many tentacled pan-dimensional fiend to bear its terrible spawn. Apart from a brief prologue showing AW looking in shop windows while the dread beast monologues its plan, the whole thing takes place in her apartment where said hell creature does its gross tentacle thing. It doesn’t go straight to it though – there’s 63 minutes to fill here people! No, there’s a slow and agonising preamble involving AW held down and tortured by the slippy limbs with lots of close-ups of her agonised features and vulnerable regions. It all goes downhill from there when the pixels come out… The whole thing ends with poor AW swollen with the pan-dimensional fiends offspring. It looks like it was shot on a camcorder in someone’s actual apartment which makes it worse in a couple of different ways and though the creature itself is well realised I’d probably have preferred that it hadn’t been. Easily avoidable.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms