Spectre

If you think this pilot would get grounded on American TV of ’77, home of Three’s Company and Charlie’s Angels, you’ve just earned your cynic wings. Even Gene Roddenberry as producer couldn’t get Spectre made into a show, and the pilot is rare. I happened to catch a version that was taped off of TV in ’96, hosted by Robert Englund and a mummy he keeps cuddling with (for reasons you understand late in the film).

But the fact is I did see it, and loved it. Because of these TV Tuesdays, I’ve discovered the ultra cool Culp and am now actively seeking his work. He’s in wonderful form here as a psychologist and genius named William Sebastian who travels the world with his more skeptical business partner Ham Hamilton (Young). In the case they’re investigating in this story, they must help an English lady (Ann Bell) find out what the hell is going on with her two strange, secretive brothers (John Hurt and James Villiers) when their aristocratic home abruptly turns to a swingers’ paradise and she begins to fear for her life. But are any of the siblings what they appear to be? For that matter, is Sebastian? He certainly knows a bit of magic, and may even have been a demon-worshipper at one time. And speaking of magic, what kind of spell did his housekeeper, played by Roddenberry’s wife Majel Barrett, work on Ham?

Culp and Young battle a succubus, trick a demon, fend off seductive and possibly murderous prostitutes, and even succumb to a bit of black magic, although temporarily. The only thing this movie has in common with most of its TV brethren is its happy-ish ending. And in liking that, I’m USA all the way.

I LOVE Japanese cinema.  It is so happy making that I cannot get enough.  And when I find things like Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies, which is a zombie comedy/horror love story, I love it even more.

Stacy starts with a scene of a teenage babysitter lying dead on the side of the road being poked at by the group of boys she’s been sitting for.  Along comes the boy’s mother who seems wholly unconcerned that her kids are hanging out on the edge of a highway with no babysitter in sight.  But wait!  What should happen next?  The babysitter comes back to life and eats the children!  YES!  And that leads us to the “Worst Mom Screaming in Horror” action ever.  Trust me.  She looks like her dog just ate her favorite shoes more than a zombie just ate her tiny children.  Then we cut to a girl standing in the street holding a wind chime and giggling like mad (oh, Japan.  No one makes me fear women’s laughter more than you.)

So why’s our girl so damn happy?  Because she’s experiencing Near Death Happiness.  See what happens is, first, girls between the ages of 15 and 17 get uber happy.  Then they die.  Then they reanimate and come back to life.  Oh and there’s Butterfly Twinkle Powder. (I don’t get that one either….)  This is a worldwide phenomenon and as such, the world population has been cut almost in half.  What’s the solution?  A mad scientist searching for answers (*note to self: get a cane so you can go around smashing things like said scientist*) and “Romero Repeat Kill Troops”.  Yes, you read that right.  Not only do you have to kill the zombie girls (who are nicknamed “Stacys” by the way), but you have to repeat kill them by cutting them up into 165 pieces.  Why?  Because that is the magical number, that’s why.  The only people allowed to kill/repeat kill Stacys are their immediate family or the Romero Repeat Kill Troops which is why you can run right out and get your “Bruce Campbell’s Right Hand 2!” chainsaw complete in fun colours from the spring line being sold by a girl in a bunny suit!  YAY!

But what happens if your teenager dies and the Romero Repeat Kill Troops are busy and you just don’t feel like going through the hassle of a repeat kill yourself?  Well, we’ve got the “Drew Illegal Repeat Kill” gang on standby just in case.  The “Drew” gang consists of three teenage girls who are illegally repeat killing to earn money to pay a hot celeb guy to repeat kill them when they die.  And they love Drew Barrymore.  Seriously folks, this is pure cinematic genius here!!

So yeah, Stacys and repeat kill troops and a couple of guys in love…..a really excellent puppet show……a lady shrimp with huge knockers puppet…..too much porno music in the background….and a heck of a lot of gore (in that really really cheesy fake gore way!) make this a delectable slice of J-horror heaven.  And there’s even a deep message to it all:  1) EVERYBODY is terrified of teenage girls and 2) EVERYBODY wants to be loved, even zombies.

Enjoy!

Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) is serving a life sentence in some crappily-constructed jail for being a mad scientist of the Frankenstein sort. He’s busy doing chalk drawings for the edification of his neighbor Daniel (J. Carrol Naish) the hunchback when, right as he promises to rebuild Humpy when they get out of jail, lightning strikes and knocks down the walls. Neato!

So the two criminals escape and go on a tri-city tour of revenge to get back at the guys who put Karloff in jail, along the way using John Carradine as Dracula in a ten-minute cameo to kill one guy.  They stop by Frankenstein’s house in the village of Frankenstein to get some notes on how to reanimate and set the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) and one very ripe and weakened Monster (Glenn Strange) free from their prison in the Fortress of Solitude. Oh, and they also pick up a gypsy girl called Ilonka (Elena Verdugo) for perpetual sad sack Igor/Daniel and Chaney to have a love triangle with. Karloff kidnaps up two more guys who have wronged him in the town where his own lab is located so he can play musical brains with them, the Monster, and Chaney, but Chaney’s nocturnal activities as the Wolf Man indirectly get everyone killed. Talk about hairy palms!

I had a lot of fun with House of Frankenstein. I think of it as sort of a horror version of Cannonball Run 2, in that they get the group of Universal monsters back together for a road trip. We get a stop motion werewolf transformation, a vampire skeleton turning into a vampire complete with a good look at the circulatory system during the process, horse chases, folk dancing, villagers with torches, a good old lab cleaning montage, the mellifluous voice of Karloff, and the always likable yet emo Chaney Wolf Man. My only real disappointment was that when Ilonka was killed, Daniel’s brain didn’t go into her body for some gender-bending fun. Although, to someone who cares about the quality of their horror movies, this is probably a lesser entry into the Universal monster canon, at least it makes me want to watch the more popular movies of the sub-genre that I’ve been putting off.

I think Wild Zero is a vehicle for an actual rock band called Guitar Wolf, a Japanese punk band who look like American 50s greasers. They’re like the Ramones, except not ugly. I can only think of two other such rock band vehicles: Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park and Dark Floors. I’d rank this in between the two, since Dark Floors scared the shit out me and Kiss…Park is crap.

Anyway, the band has a dispute with a ridiculous-looking club owner that results in a Mexican standoff, until a doofus named Ace accidentally provides a distraction that allows the band to win the argument. The lead singer gives Ace a whistle to call for help and they become blood brothers. Different and previously unconnected people fight zombies caused by either an alien invasion, or meteorites, the next day. It takes 20 minutes to see a zombie, but only 20 more until someone figures out that you shoot them in the head. Ace meets the love of his life, then discovers she is a he. Which is fine, but the movie makes a point out of it so I’m including it in my synopsis. Guitar Wolf in spirit form tells him not to be an asshole because love is love. One character happens to be an arms dealer. Eventually everyone meets up for a zombiethon.

It’s a cute, sweet love story with decent, head-exploding gore and zombies, right? More of a “look at the ridiculousness of this set piece” than “I’m laughing until I pee” comedy, and pretty much a ready-made, out of the box cult classic.  None of the actors appear to have had that silly operation where they sew their eyelids open, which is a plus, but I don’t listen to punk unless I’m being real nice to a punk fan I just started dating (and I’m married now and don’t have to be nice) so that’s a minus. I enjoyed the mid-movie argument about who had seen a zombie movie when they were trying to figure out what to do. The women were all attractive in a non-plastic way. I mean, you can’t complain about me not getting the movie if I admit that I don’t get it, unless there’s nothing to get. I would say that this is the least Japanese Japanese movie I’ve ever seen, but can you really separate the country and culture from the movie? Oh, well. It’s safe to say that if you like zombie comedies, you’ll like this.

I don’t fucking know, y’all. I mean, here I am, I’ve lived my whole life in the American south, but I’m as liberal as you can possibly be about anything an American can be liberal about, but due to economics and laziness (but not a total lack of first-world privilege) most of my multicultural experiences come from people who have traveled here from other places and from movies. All that is to say, I am not worldly enough to put Wild Zero in context, but I’m not insensitive enough to dismiss it entirely. I know enough not to bite the hand that feeds me, especially when that hand is slinging electrified guitar picks that can kill a horde of zombies.

Frankenstein’s Daughter is a 50s drive-in monster movie. The best you can do with a flick like this is enjoy the 50s music, clothes, hair, and acting, and make fun of the script. I’m usually at a loss when it comes to writing about 50s horror, but I do enjoy watching it, if for no other reason than to enjoy a rousing version of the MST3K home game.

The producer obviously said, “I want a Frankenstein monster, and I don’t care about anything that leads up to it.” The synopsis therefore doesn’t matter, but I’ll give it to you anyway.

A really stupid old scientist and his equally brilliant niece Trudy live with the uncle’s assistant, Mr. Frank, and the assistant’s assistant who is posing as the gardener. Frank is actually Mr. Frankenstein, the grandson of the original mad scientist. The title refers to the monster Frank makes out of Trudy’s bitchy cockteasing frenemy Susie, even though the monster is obviously played by a man. But there are two monsters, because for no good reason I can determine, Frank keeps dosing Trudy with some kind of Jekyll/Hyde drug that makes her turn really ugly and run around outside in her bathing suit scaring people.

Some of the common Frankenstein tropes are here, although the brilliantly tragic subtext of the original story is completely missing. This Frankenstein has the usual belief that his entire family is made up of geniuses who need to be vindicated, but there’s no other reason for wanting to create life, and he’s not at all a sympathetic character. In fact, no one is. And without the subtext, all you have is some asshole who woke up one morning and decided to sew a bunch of different dead people’s body parts together and shock them back to life.

So if you like Frankenstein movies, 50s movies, or movies with a lame song and dance number that pops up in the middle of the film, you’re in luck. Everyone else can either sit back and enjoy the nostalgia, wait for the annoying friend character to get pushed into the pool, mock the movie mercilessly, or some combination of the three.

Back to the movie. This particular naked lady demon has killed two priests in two years in the same church in New Orleans. Now, Father Michael (Ben Cross) has been assigned to the church to fight the demon because he has on his resume the experience of falling from a great height without being injured, having been thrown out a hotel window by one of the lesser T-Birds from Grease 2. The demon tempts people with the sin they most desire, then kills them in the act of committing that sin. In my case this would probably be signing a three-year lease on a Cadillac, but for these priests it’s touching naked ladies.

This would probably be most enjoyable schlock if the dialogue wasn’t even worse than what comes out of the “script” of an Italian horror movie.  This dialogue is stinky. Ben Cross can’t save this crap with the help of Hal Holbrook as the archbishop and Ned Beatty as a homicide cop, never mind a club owner played by the guy from Death Bed who gets the skin flayed off of his hands. I mean, this dialogue makes Dardano Sacchetti look like Tennessee Williams.

But I’m a sucker for supernatural horror, and I can’t totally hate a movie that has discount dry ice in the sanctuary, hallucinations, nightmares, bleeding eyeballs, midgets in monster suits, a nightclub full of devil worshippers, a really disgusting instance of reverse communion, a nod to 1977′s The Sentinel fully vigorous enough to give you whiplash, and a long-distance phone call from hell! And this was in 1988, when long distance meant you were gonna be hurting when that bill came! At least they didn’t call collect.

What does this mean for our 8-pack rankings? I have to put this one above Class of 1999, even though it’s probably a worse movie if you look at it objectively, because I have such a bias towards demonic horror. And with that we come to the end of our journey through the 8-pack. The rankings, from bottom to top: Ghoulies 3, Class of 1999, The Unholy, Slaughter High, Waxwork, 976-EVIL 2, Chopping Mall, and C.H.U.D. 2. This weekend, I’ll be off to WalMart to pick up another horror pack to fill up some more Thursdays.

Before I go, has anyone ever wondered why there’s never been a big budget, four-star horror movie filmed in New Orleans? I might be missing a movie due to my Swiss cheese memory, but all I can think of is The Beyond, which, although I love it, is one whose flaws you have to overlook. I know some people make a case for Angel Heart, and if you try to tell me Interview With the Vampire is great I’ll just order you off of my lawn, but New Orleans is possibly the creepiest place in America, and it deserves an Exorcist/Rosemary’s Baby quality film.  Someone get to work on a screenplay to fill this need.

This tale of a suspicious teenager, adopted into a family of such creatures who are part of the titular Society, was supposedly a big hit in Europe. In the U.S. it’s more of a little-known cult movie. This is probably because the film is the most graphic indictment of capitalism ever to grace the screen, and Europe is known for having a generally more socialist bent. And because in the U.S., if you’re not rich, chances are you believe you have the chance to become rich.

There’s a huge temptation, possibly of the sour grapes variety, to view all those with money as some sort of evil creatures who want to figuratively consume the poor, and that is certainly one reading of the film. I’d go further and say that the film is almost too kind, and that the evil glee the Society shows is born of a fantasy among the poor that the type of decadent rich people the film portrays actually consider the poor at all. Then, of course, if you’re a conservative, you could say that Society stands for the leftists who would prefer for everyone’s resources to be sacrificed for the good of all rather than focusing on the individual. It’s whatever you prefer, really.

More likely, in my opinion, there are some nice rich people who worked hard and deserve their good fortune, and some mean ones who are buttheads. Or shapeshifters.

Or you might say this is an interesting, campy, satirical body horror cult classic. Now I’m going to drink a Coke and continue to hope that I don’t actually throw up.

Has this ever happened to you? You’re watching a TV movie and thinking to yourself, “This would be great if it only had more Australians struggling to do American accents!” Well, then you should see Meteorites!

Meteorites! has classic plots colliding like falling space rocks into the Earth: every disaster movie cliche you can imagine rockets unstoppably towards a former cop who can’t get over the death of his partner and a greedy mayor who doesn’t want to warn the townsfolk of the meteorites! because there’s a festival going on. As a bonus, the festival is a UFO festival. There’s also a sleazy tabloid reporter, a home invasion, teen romance, a beauty pageant, a hermit with a heart of gold, and a person who gets killed by one of the meteorites! leaving only a pair of smoking shoes behind. And if all that isn’t enough for you, Luke Duke himself, Tom Wopat, is on the scene. I loved this movie! It’s fast-paced, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. You could even say that, at least with me, it was a big hit.