Plane Crazy Porky
Japan’s anime master Hayoa Miyazaki loves airplanes, especially vintage aircraft. He showed this inclination in his earlier features Laputa and Kiki’s Delivery Service, but her he let’s his obsession take center stage. Continue reading
Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film as writer/director finds him in familiar territory – that is, familiar territory for fans of psychotronic film. A glorious homage to all the exploitation flicks that have inspired him throughout his life, Kill Bill is a relatively straightforward revenge story, told in a typically Tarantino un-straightforward manner, incorporating styles and tributes from as many psychotronic favorites as QT can squeeze in. Continue reading
Drive-In Discs, Vol. 1
Continued from previous post…
The second feature, The Screaming Skull, is a ’50s horror update of Gaslight. It has it’s suspenseful moments, but also quite a few silly ones, but moves along quickly enough that you may not notice the extreme low budget. The entire film was shot on one location, and there are only five actors in the cast – and director Alex Nicol steps in to play the mentally challenged gardener himself. John Hudson plays the all-too-obvious Bluebeard, with Peggy Webber (The Space Children) running around in a nightgown as the frightened bride. The print includes the “Fright Insurance” prologue, guaranteeing free burial to any viewer who dies of fright, which is usually trimmed from TV copies. Continue reading
It’s a shame that most kids born today will never know the joy of a visit to a drive-in theater. During the Baby Boom years of the 1950s and ’60s, there was an “ozoner” in every community, but skyrocketing real estate values have drastically decreased their number over the last few decades. There may be more drive-ins today than there were ten years ago, mostly built in Southwestern states, but for many, the drive-in theater is only a memory from our pop culture past. Continue reading
The plot of the film is pretty much wrapped up in DreamWorks’ “General… slave… gladiator…” taglines, and can roughly be divided into these three acts. In the first, we’re introduced to Roman General Maximus (Russell Crowe), a Spanish outsider who has never seen Rome, but nevertheless has risen to be a favorite of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) through his personal virtues and many years of loyal service expanding the empire. Continue reading
Continued from the Wasp Woman post…
In the second movie, Giant Gila Monster, the dour narrator barely draws a breath after describing “the enormity of the West… bleak and desolate” than some typical necking ‘50s teens get their car swatted off the road and are devoured by the title beastie. The local hot roddin’ teens at Spook’s pop stand, including hero Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan) and his French exchange student girlfriend Lisa (Lisa Simone), wonder at the pair’s disappearance, as does Sheriff Jeff (former serial stuntman Fred Graham). The budget barely provides production values beyond that of the typical educational short of the period, and some of the acting is at the same level, but the script is full of a lot of details that help bring the story to life. Monster pictures rarely pay much attention to the victims, but here the characters take the time to speculate on what may have become of the missing kids.
Our teenage hero is fleshed out as well, a flawed but good hearted kid who supports his widowed mother and crippled sister by working in a garage – and takes a correspondence course in engineering. Chase has enough problems that he doesn’t himself take seriously his dreams of becoming a Christian rock star. Then one day he rescues a drunk driver who turns out to be local rock radio deejay “Steamroller” Smith (Ken Knox), and ends up getting discovered. Meanwhile, more cars are found wrecked, and their drivers not found at all. Then a fuel truck, and even a passenger train are smashed by the big lizard. The Sheriff suspects the truth, but no one knows for sure until the monster crashes the big sock hop.
Comic relief is provided by Shug Fisher as Harris, a no-account drunk. Cartoon fans remember Fisher as the voice of the mouse’s musical Uncle Pecos in the Tom & Jerry cartoons.
One nitpick with the Drive-In Discs – Ray Kellogg’s Giant Gila Monster was originally released at the bottom of a twin bill with Kellogg’s The Killer Shrews. It would have been nice if Elite had been able to pair up the original double features on their discs. Sinister Cinema has done as much on their excellent Drive-In Double Feature tapes.
Another problem is the transfers. While the “widescreen” presentation seems to provide more picture on the sides for Wasp Woman, quite a bit of the top and bottom of Giant Gila Monster is masked off. Elite is using the same worn prints from National Film Museum that have been used for numerous other DVD releases of these titles, and though Elite’s versions are a lot brighter and cleaner, they still fall short of the company’s usual standards – especially considering that they’re charging at least twice as much as similar double feature DVDs from Madacy, K-Tel, and others.
However, Elite comes through when it comes to intermission clips, which are beautifully preserved and plentiful. The disc also includes a Betty Boop and a Popeye cartoon, both windowboxed a bit too much but looking sharp. Viewers are advised to make a trip to the snack bar when the dull “America the Beautiful” photo montage begins.
Knows its chops
Fans of neither the Friday the 13th nor Nightmare on Elm Street series will not be converted by this long-awaited crossover, but it delivers the bloody “goods” for the Fangorian faithful.
Effectively forgotten by his home town of Springwood via a complete cover-up involving the institutionalization of all witnesses – and dosing the remaining population with “Hypnocil” – dream demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) seethes in some unnamed netherworld, unable to continue his reign of terror. He revives immortal man-monster Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger, who had a bit part in Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan) and sends him to Elm Street to covertly slaughter a few teens and bring back bad memories. But Jason refuses to slow down once Freddy’s name starts being bandied about once again, mowing down youngsters at a rural rave in an orgy of blood and fire. When Jason begins poaching Freddy’s targets, this dispute over turf leads to an inevitable and satisfyingly gruesome showdown.
F Vs. J is at its bloody best whenever its monsters are on screen – with cackling Englund not above addressing the camera and massive Kirzinger managing some pathos from behind his spattered hockey mask. This comic-book inspired thriller from Hong Kong director Ronny Yu (Bride of Chucky, Bride with White Hair) loses energy whenever it concentrates on the dumb teen protagonists, with a script that faithfully wallows in ridiculous clichés so thick that they sometimes border on Scary Movie territory. Buxom Monica Keena is stuck with the poorly written virgin heroine role, accompanied by pop star Kelly Rowland as her cosmetics-obsessed pal, as well as Katharine Isabelle (of the Ginger Snaps werewolf series), who provides some of the required drinking, smoking and nudity. Following the slasher movie formula, the “sinful” teens are prime targets, but the film gives a solid wink in the direction of drug culture. The kids are protected by downing the fictional (and illegal) drug Hypnocil (introduced in Nightmare on Elm Street 3), and a few funny bits contributed by a Jason Mewes clone named Freeburg (Kyle Labine, a veteran of Halloween: Resurrection). In one of many f/x highlights, Freeburg has an encounter with Freddy transformed into a hookah-smoking caterpillar.
But this monster rally overcomes the relentless stupidity of the teen character’s dialogue when the focus shifts back to its killer stars, who eventually hack their way towards each other for an extremely violent confrontation at Camp Crystal Lake (which happens to be within driving distance of Springwood). (The lakeside climax may echo the fate of Keena’s Dawson’s Creek character.) It’s one of those movies you forgive for its own stupidity because it joyfully gives its target audience the kicks they demand – the last few entries in both series seemed hesitant about their horrors, pulling back from hard shocks. Here, Krueger is the snarling devil that springs from the shadows once again, and Voorhees is the unstoppable death-dealer lopping off heads right and left. When they come at each other, the blood flies in earnest, which is just as it should be.
EI Independent Cinema has released their third Donald F. Glut feature under their Seduction Cinema banner. Glut was a legend among monster fans long before making his first feature (Dinosaur Valley Girls), having made his mark as a writer, musician, and one of the better known makers of amateur monster movies. The Mummy’s Kiss (the onscreen title) isn’t Glut’s best picture (Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula has a more engaging story and characters), but it’s obvious that he’s learned a great deal about smoothing out the rough edges of low budget filmmaking, and his films stand far above the quality of other Seduction Cinema titles. Continue reading
Dawn of the Dead DVD
Zombies in HD
The back package copy on Anchor Bay’s new edition of Dawn of the Dead
describes the new commentrak recorded for it “startling”, but what’s truly startling is their new High Definition transfer of the film itself. I’ve seen George A. Romero’s sequel to his surprise hit Night of the Living Dead many times, and in many different forms – with a raucous crowd in a grungy downtown theater in 1978, on HBO’s cropped tape and laserdisc editions, a revelatory viewing of a bootlegged copy of the longer European version, the restored Elite/Anchor Bay widescreen laserdisc of this 142-minute version, and finally ABE’s DVD editions of both versions in the late 1990s. This first edition of the 21st century surpasses them all in clarity of image and sound, amazingly sharp via their Divimax HD transfer method. The picture is so clear and the colors so vivid that it seems that it must be an improvement on the original negative. Continue reading →