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THE KILLER INSIDE ME Directed by Michael Winterbottom            The second adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel of the same name (the first being Burt Kennedy’s 1976 film starring Stacy Keach), this new version retains the mid-century air of Thompson’s tale of small-town violence, but ratchets up that violence to a truly shocking level. Only in parts, however; it’s not all one big blow-up…             The Killer Inside Me starts off on a deceptively low-key tone as Central City, Oklahoma deputy Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) takes a slow drive down country roads to a pay a visit to local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba). The lady lets him in, and as she washes up he examines the small pearl-handled automatic that she’s left lying around. Lou gets right to the point, and when faced with the option of leaving town before sundown or being run in for prostitution Joyce responds with alley cat anger. Pitching a fit she begins slapping Lou, cursing at him and knocking the hat from his head until he throws her down on the bed and belt-whips her bare ass. (No doubt some viewers out there will be replaying this scene a time or two.) This turns into a hot roll in the hay, and the Lakeland woman’s place quickly becomes a regular stop on Lou’s patrol.             Love seems to blossom, in between bouts of anal sex, and pretty soon Joyce is trying to entice Lou into blowing town with her. Money might be an issue, thinks Lou, but Joyce has an angle for that. It seems Elmer Conway, son of Conway Construction magnate Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), is pretty sweet on Joyce, and she figures she could sucker him for a sizeable stake towards a new life. Thinking it over, Lou figures this might be a perfect opportunity to settle an old score or two of his own at the same time.             Despite Joyce’s attentions Lou’s thoughts are growing mean, and he admits this, demonstrating by grinding his lit cigar into the outstretched palm of a wino begging for a handout. The bum is surprised and pained, but somehow not intimidated: “You better watch it with that stuff, Buddy,” he warns as he drifts away from the deputy.             Lou has been asked to take a late meeting with shifty labor union representative Joe Rothman (Elias Koteas), a meeting which concerns Lou’s foster brother Mike. It seems that back when the brothers were still boys there was some trouble involving Mike and a young girl, and Mike had to leave town for a bit. When he came back he was killed in an accident while on the job for Conway Construction. And Joe seems to have reason to believe that Chester Conway was at fault for that. Perhaps deliberately at fault for that.             Lou blows this off, but it adds to his weighty train of thought. As he ponders things, Lou flashes back to a scene from childhood that indicates maybe it wasn’t Mike after all who caused that trouble so long ago… To unwind Lou goes home, puts on some opera music and pulls out a big book. His lady Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson) comes downstairs and surprises him, Lou not having expected her to sneak out of her parents’ house and pay him a visit that evening. She manages to lure him up to bed, but in return Lou has to submit to a bit of hen-pecking and the promise of more later for the way he’s been acting these past couple weeks.             Lou and Joyce continue their games, but he can’t get Chester Conway out of his mind. When he meets with Conway another day the businessman makes it clear that, for the sake of his son Elmer and the reputation of the family, he expects Lou to take a $10,000 payoff out to Joyce, “bust her around a bit,” and run her out of the county. Apparently there’s a bit of blackmail involved; for the sake of his own reputation, Lou maintains that Elmer himself should deliver the money as per that Lakeland woman’s demands.             That night Lou heads out, pulling off the side of the road and giving himself a flat tire. He hoofs it cross-country to Joyce’s place, arriving with an hour or so to spare before Elmer is supposed to show up with the cash. This gives the couple a chance for some quality sack time before she leaves town, and their pillow talk indicates that the plan is for Lou to meet up with her and the money in two weeks’ time.             As they get dressed Lou tells Joyce that it was Chester Conway who had his brother killed. Joyce is suddenly worried that Lou might do something to Elmer and get himself caught. But Lou thinks not, and tells her, “They won’t catch me, baby. They won’t even suspect me for it, really. They’ll just think he got tanked, like he usually is, and then you two got to fighting, and you both got killed.” “Well that doesn’t make any sense,” says Joyce. “How am I supposed to be dead?”             Lou has been slipping on some black leather gloves during this talk, and now he goes up and gives Joyce a pat on the face with one of them. And then another, and another. Then he lines up good and gives her a solid couple of shots to the nose. Joyce looks surprised. “Lou…” He takes the wind out of her with a hard one to the belly, and a mean uppercut sends her crashing into the wall. As she sinks to the floor Lou approaches and punches her in the face over and over again. (This is actually hard to watch – the sound effects are brutal.) “I love you,” he pants, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow. “I love you,” she moans, just before he knocks her out. “I love you,” he repeats. “Goodbye.” You can hear her neck break as he finishes up with her. Then he kicks her in the tit to make sure she’s gone. Joyce doesn’t move.             Elmer drives up as Lou is finishing wiping his face with Joyce’s dressing gown, and Lou lets him go inside and get a good look at what’s left of her before he shoots Elmer square in the forehead with Joyce’s pistol. He pumps a few more into the body, then places the gun in her hand.             “I’m real sorry, sweetheart,” Lou says as he strides through the fields on the way back to his car. But then it’s straight back to the plan, changing the tire and backing out into the road just as Chester himself is driving by. It’s late, over an hour past the drop-off time, and old Chester is wondering just where in hell that son of his is. He orders Lou to follow him to Joyce’s place, and when Lou gets inside Chester is already on the phone. He’s calling an ambulance for Joyce – she’s still alive, and he wants her to survive so she can pay proper.             Lou is under a cloud of suspicion. Not only does his fiancée Amy suspect that he was screwing that whore all along, but since the death of Conway’s son an out-of-town district attorney, Howard Hendricks (Simon Baker), has come around, and he’s got some mighty unpleasant ideas. When Chester decides to have Joyce flown to Fort Worth for proper medical attention, Lou and Sheriff Bob Maples go with them. And Lou is firmly under Conway’s thumb the entire time.             Joyce is scheduled to have an operation the day they land, and it’s hoped that she will be able to give a statement that very night. Lou is sitting around Chester’s suite, drinking, smoking and pondering, when Sheriff Bob walks in. “She’s dead, Lou. She never came out of the ether.” “Well, that’s that,” Lou practically sighs.             When Lou returns home he’s visited by Rothman, who sees the deputy as having a motive for the two killings. What with Lou’s grudge against Chester Conway and all. Rothman’s not asking for anything just yet, but his brief visit does provide a shadow of impending threat.             When Rothman leaves, Lou pulls out his father’s old bible and sits down with it. When he opens the good book he finds a set of old black and white photographs depicting a young girl, naked, with her hands tied behind her back. Welts clearly stand out on her naked ass. Lou flashes back again to a similar scenario with the same girl, doing just like his daddy did.             This disturbing reverie is disturbed further by a phone call from the station: Johnnie Pappas, a young rebel whom Lou has taken under his wing as a friend, and who he’s helped out of trouble before, has been arrested for passing one of the marked $20 bills from Conway’s payoff. A bill Lou passed to the kid as a tip, after receiving a wad of cash from Elmer for his trouble. Before the real trouble happened. Johnnie’s in the county jail, being held for murder, and he wants to talk to Lou.             Lou talks to him all right. Because, as Johnnie says, Lou is his friend. “I killed them. I killed both of them,” Lou tells the lad conspiratorially. “Bet you had a real good reason, Lou.” “There’s a reason.” “I bet they had it comin’.” “No,” says Lou. “Nobody has it comin’ to them. That’s why nobody can see it comin’.”             Lou leaves the prison, looking pleased with himself. “Give you any trouble Lou?” asks one of the screws. “Not at all,” Lou replies. Lou goes home and fucks Amy, still fantasizing about Joyce. He’s rousted from bed in the middle of the night by a call from Hendricks: Johnnie Pappas has hanged himself in his cell.             “After Johnnie’s death, somethin’ changed. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on, but I got the feeling that people were looking at me in a different way.”             When Lou goes to pay his respects to Johnnie’s father Max at his diner, he gets what might be considered the cold shoulder. As he sits by the side of the road outside Joyce’s empty house, Rothman slips into the car and starts in with the not-so-subtle needling. Rothman suspects Lou might have been out here more than once before. And despite Lou’s assertion that Johnnie hanged himself out of guilt or fear over the killings, Rothman finds it odd that Chester Conway is the one paying for the remodeling of Max’s diner. And that Johnnie was buried on sacred church ground, meaning that his death wasn’t considered a suicide.             And one more thing: one of Rothman’s carpenters had his wheels stolen on the night of the murders, right around the same time as the killings took place. Another member of the Joiner’s Union happened to buy two of those wheels right after that. From Johnnie Pappas. “You feelin’ the chill, Lou?” Rothman is of the opinion that it might be a good idea if Lou left town.             It looks like Lou is going to do just that. He asks Amy to elope with him, and she likes the idea. In the meantime however Lou gets another drop-in visitor. That bum he lit into with the cigar has come calling, and it seems he happened to be camping out on the night of the murders, when he saw Lou cut across the prairie to that little yellow house where those people were killed. He wants $5,000. Lou says he’ll have it for him in two weeks.             Lou continues to see Amy, keeps whipping her ass and imagining she’s Joyce. Despite everything, “For the first time in I don’t remember when, my mind was really free.” It seems Lou’s got everything figured out.             A couple of weeks go by, and Amy arrives at Lou’s place in her traveling dress, packing a pair of bags. She’s surprised that Lou doesn’t seem to be ready yet, but she loves him and she tells him so. Lou spits in her face and punches her in the stomach. And then again. He leaves Amy gasping on the floor, moving his shoe out of the way when her trembling hand reaches out for him. Lou rips open her blouse and throws her dress up over her face, then sits down to watch as her urine trickles across the floor.             That shifty old stew bum shows up for his payoff, and before Lou goes to answer the door he gives Amy a couple of bone-crunching kicks. Lou gives the man a handful of cash, and the blackmailer follows him through the house for the rest of it. He freaks right out when he sees Amy’s body lying on the kitchen floor. Lou has already picked up a carving knife. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he says to the drifter. “I was gonna marry that poor little girl.”             The bum rushes out, and Lou is right after him. But he slips in Amy’s urine and falls on his ass as the bum gets out of the house. As the man runs down the street calling for help Lou gives chase, crying, “Murderer! He killed Amy Stanton! Murderer!” When the bum crosses the path of another deputy, the officer shoots him three times. Lou runs up and makes a display of grief by beating on the bum’s dead body.             Just a little while later Lou wakes up in the morning to find Deputy Jeff Plummer sitting out on the porch. He comes bringing the sad news that Bob Maples shot hisself last night. “And I reckon I know just how he felt,” Plummer adds. Hendricks joins them, and he’s chomping at the bit now. Lou planted the money he stole from Elmer Conway on the drifter, Hendricks thinks, and tried to frame him for the rape and murder of Amy Stanton. Lou killed Elmer Conway because of his grudge against Chester, and he killed Joyce Lakeland to keep her quiet. He hanged Johnnie Pappas to shut him up about the $20. Hendricks has even made the connection between the bruises on the bodies of Amy and Joyce.             But Lou is cool as hell, and like Hendricks says, he has an answer for everything. Everything except for the letter found in Amy’s purse, a letter she was planning to give to Lou later, which says that she knows he’s in trouble but she still really does love him. Hendricks outright accuses Lou of the murders, even blaming him for Bob Maples’ suicide. Lou stays frosty and points the gentlemen to the door. Plummer pulls his gun and politely asks if Lou is sure that he wouldn’t rather come with them. He sure did like old Bob, Jeff did. And that little Miss Amy.             They try to chill Lou out by keeping him in a cell, the same one that Johnnie died in, but like he says, he doesn’t mind, it just gives him time to think. Lou doesn’t even mind it when they transfer him to the asylum. He’s left alone there for awhile, and pretty soon he starts to crack. He knows they have some kind of evidence that he hasn’t completely concealed, and he’s not sure what it is. He starts seeing things.             One day a commotion in the hospital halls heralds the arrival of a lawyer, Mr. Walker (a tobacco-chewing Bill Pullman), who takes Lou out for a drive and a talk. Lou does talk, and as Walker pulls up into Lou’s driveway he asks if Mr. Ford would like him to come inside with him. Lou declines. “I got an idea that…it won’t be long now.”             And it ain’t. As events steamroll towards a head there’s more than one surprise coming, even for Lou. It all comes down to a wild and psychotically romantic climax, one that perfectly encapsulates the entire film.             The slow pace and easygoing manner of the characters gives the film a simmering quality, boiling up into moments of brutality that you can’t always see coming. There’s an undeniably misogynistic tone throughout, but the emphasis isn’t particularly on the hatred of women, the violence instead exemplifying Ford’s absolute embodiment of the qualities of a complete sociopath. And his utter nihilism.             I’m not a big fan of Casey Affleck, his boyish face and whispery, almost cowed delivery being immediately off-putting, but here he plays the most sick, fucked-up son-of-a-bitch imaginable, and he really pulls it off. He is the gentleman lawman, gone completely psychotic. And Alba may not have much range, but she always looks good. Well, except for when she’s getting the shit knocked out of her. Then again, some people probably like that.             Cool country/western rock ‘n roll soundtrack, too.             Now go read the book.             Bonus features include brief “Making of” segments with Affleck, Alba and Hudson. * * * *

THE KILLER SNAKES Directed by Runme Shaw Man, who woulda thought that a mid-budget HK flick about some geek’s friendship with snakes would turn out to be such a perv-fest? Well, maybe anyone who watched the B&W pre-credits footage, wherein a young boy, upon hearing his momma begging for a whipping in the bedroom, begins to pet his snake, literally . . . Fast-forward to gruesome color footage in which a live cobra is having its gallbladder removed, to be served with wine as a virility drink to some flashy cat and his love-you-long-time girl. The wounded animal crawls next door, into the shantytown shack of our main guy Zhihong. A bullied and emotionally challenged delivery boy, Zhihong has plastered his hovel with bondage photos and titty pictures and appears to masturbate into milk bottles, but he is able to patch up the snake and is soon treating it like a new best friend (“You seem to understand me . . . I’m not like them.”). Zhihong even gives his serpentine buddy a name, Xiaobiao, and soon the snake is bringing other injured reptiles to Zhihong’s shack for treatment (“I’ve found another friend!”). Soon Zhihong’s menagerie has grown considerably, as has the helpless rage he feels as he continues to fail every social test to which he is put. Often receiving a beating for his ignorance and incompetence, Zhihong just as often throws a fit of retarded rage out of frustration at his own impotence. When he thinks his would-be girlfriend Xiujuan stands him up for a date at the movies, when in fact she’s been distracted by her dying father, his anger reaches new heights. Trashing Xiujuan’s vending stand isn’t enough to assuage his grief, and as his masturbatory fantasies have been becoming increasingly more sadistic even the coils of his scaly friends aren’t enough to soothe him tonight. In an effort at release Zhihong goes looking for Jinyan the whore, even though she was responsible for having him beaten and robbed earlier. After a hasty and inadequate attempt at sex Zhihong is scolded out the door, but is followed shortly thereafter by Jinyan and her henchmen who think he may have even more money. As Zhihong is being brutally beaten (yet again) and searched in the alley, Xiabiao comes to his defense and viciously bites the now-terrified muggers to death (“Bite him dead!”). Jinyan has only fainted however, and Zhihong finds himself captivated by her unconscious body . . . When she wakes up some time later, naked, bound, and gagged in Zhihong’s shack, Jinyan finds him licking away at her, an object of his fantasies come to life. After sucking and pinching Jinyan a bit more Zhihong proceeds to let his snake buddies play with her too, and there is a disturbing shot of one of them disappearing between Jinyan’s legs. Oddly she begins moaning in ecstasy before beginning to writh in horror, and as Zhihong flashes back to watching his pop flog and screw his mom he excitedly urges the snakes to finish her off (“Bite her! Bite her!”). But, after stashing Jinyan’s carcass, Zhihong is still not satisfied. “I want more snakes – more!” Breaking through the brick wall between his hovel and Mr. Zhou’s snake salon Zhihong uses a series of boards to unlatch the snake cages, then leaves the boards in place to serve as ladders for the reptiles. At Xiaobiao’s urging the reptiles crawl out of captivity and into Zhihong’s friendly clutches. Unfortunately Mr. Zhou has heard some of the ruckus this involved, and when he sees what is transpiring he rushes over to beat on Zhihong. There is a brief but frenzied battle as Zhou becomes unnerved at the sight of the dead hooker, but before long the snakes are helping Zhihong fight back, launching themselves at Zhou in strike after poisonous strike. Zhihong loads both bodies into a laundry basket and hauls them over to Zhou’s shop (losing Zhou once along the way), where he drapes the owner in his own merchandise and leaves the hooker for the police to puzzle over. Xiujuan meanwhile has had to sell herself out as a dancing girl. Her good friend Fangfang has also arranged to sell Xiujuan’s virginity to Baochun, a sleazy old cat with an eye for young whores. When Zhihong spies him taking a drunken Xiujuan away for consummation he chases Fangfang down and gives her the Jinyan treatment. Stripped and bound, when Fangfang won’t tell Zhihong where Xiujuan has been taken he sics a pair of small komodo dragons on her to loosen her tongue. Upon hearing that Xiujuan has been taken to a Love Motel in Kowloon Tong Zhihong begins cutting Fangfang’s bonds, but when this gets a little too touchy-feely for her she bites his hand and gets slapped in the face for her resistance. This sends Fangfang into a writhing heat, and moaning “Hit me! Hit me!” she tears off Zhihong’s shirt and goes after him in a fit of lust. Zhihong takes her down to the floor, but finishes so quickly that even he is dissatisfied and allows the lizards to finish her off. At the Love Motel in Kowloon Tong, Xiujuan is about to be deflowered. Baochun strips the drunken girl naked and takes her, an act which she actually seems to enjoy, but during round two, after he pops a pill, pulls on a dragon-headed French tickler, and does her in the butt, Xiujuan passes right out. His work there finished Baochun takes off, leaving Xiujuan’s naked body lying on the bed for Zhihong to find. As he hugs the unconscious girl to him Zhihong imagines her life becoming one of hardened, happy whoredom, and can only come to one conclusion – “I think you’d be better off dead.” Pulling out his ever-handy snake Zhihong lets Xiaobiao bite the girl, and as he watches her die vows to exact revenge upon those who led her to this sorry end. Instead of hanging himself straightaway, Zhihong loads up his reptiles and carts them over to a sleeping Baochun’s apartment. A literal wave of serpents is unleashed upon the man who stole Xiujuan’s cherry, crawling up the stairs towards his bedroom with evil intent. When something awakens Baochun he throws back the covers to find himself lying in a sea of snakes, and tumbles out of bed only to be bitten in the face and neck time and time again. Even throwing himself through an ornamental window doesn’t help him escape, as the snakes slither after him down to the lower level of his home. In a last stand Baochun pulls an ornamental sword from the wall and, as the cobras launch themselves at hiim, cuts the snakes in two and sends the halves squirming to the ground. Baochun soon joins them, the overdose of venom he has received causing him to collapse, vomiting and purple-faced. At this point Zhihong steps in to deliver the killing blow, releasing a giant boa constrictor upon Baochun as he blames the man for Xiujuan’s death. Not long after this, police officials pay a call to Zhihong’s shanty. They want a word with the little weasel, but suspecting the worst Zhihong hides his scaly friends and himself away and watches as the officers search through his tiny rathole. The heat is on now, Zhihong realizes, and he knows he must save his good friends the snakes. In much the same way that he saved Xiujuan; by taking all of the animals out to a vacant lot, piling them into a stack of Sunkist Lemon cartons, dousing them with kerosine, and applying a match. Zhihong watches his good friends twist and coil in the flames, then returns home and goes to bed. That night the sound of breaking crockery disturbs Zhihong’s sleep. Upon investigating he is surprised to see Xiaobiao, badly blistered but still alive. Thinking the snake has returned out of friendship Zhihong reaches out for his little buddy, only to receive another surprise – “Xiaobiao you bit me!” As Zhihong reels back to avoid another strike he falls to the floor, which is now crawling with angry undead reptiles. When he struggles to his feet he is covered from head to toe with the angry biting creatures, and his screams fade out the film. Creepy, perverted, violent, and tragic – all of the perfect ingredients for a Hong Kong special. Fine cinematography captures Zhihong’s lurid, twisted, red-hued fantasies, the squalid over-crowded conditions of urban Hong Kong, and simple indoor sets all equally well. The violent beating and snakebite scene in the alley, littered with refuse and splashed with neon lighting from the surrounding establishments, is particularly colorful and gritty. The sweaty, atmospherically lighted bondage scenes ain’t too bad either. And like numerous other films in the HK arena, The Killer Snakes takes care to delve into the background and psychological damage experienced by the deranged main character, giving more body to the story rather than concentrating solely upon the fetishistic aspects of sex, death, and reptiles. And bondage, lots of bondage. While I can’t tell whether the snakes and lizards returning for revenge in the finale are supposed to be zombie animals or have just escaped the worst of the flames, either way it’s a fitting end to a most unusual film. I understand there’s another HK flick in a similar vein, about killer centipedes . . . gotta find that one! * * *

KNOWING Directed by Alex Proyas             Now this is a two-hour shit-stabbing if I ever sat through one: hours of an aging Nicolas Cage running around trying to save the world and managing to look more and more like a balding wrinkled nutsack as he does so. The trailers gave Knowing a definite apocalyptic flair, and the film does have that in spades; unfortunately there are only three of these scenes in the entire movie. Are they worth it? You be the judge.             Oh yeah, by the way, I’m gonna spoil the shit out of the ending. On purpose. You’ll know why. If you’d rather not be cheated, just ignore the film and this review altogether. M’kay?             It begins back in 1959, where a spooky little girl named Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) has come up with the winning entry for the dedication ceremony of William Dawes Elementary School. It’s a time capsule, and the idea is that all of the kids in the class will each draw a picture for the children of the future to share when the capsule is opened years from now. But instead of drawing rocket ships Lucinda covers a sheet of paper, front and back, with a continuous string of apparently random numbers. Maybe it’s all of that time she spends staring directly into the sun, but then again it could be that she’s being guided by the whispering voices she hears. So intent upon her project is she in fact that her teacher Ms. Taylor actually has to tear the page away from her so that it can be sealed for burial. A little while later Lucinda is found in a closet, scratching numbers into the door with her fingernails…             Flash forward 50 years (Really? Are you sure you don’t want to make a mini-series out of this?), and uber-drunk John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) is playing single father to bratty, precocious, half-deaf, vegetarian twerp Caleb (Chandler Canterbury). And teaching dispiriting classes on astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When the time capsule is opened to celebrate “50 Years of Education” and the envelopes containing the mid-century students’ artwork are passed out to the class of today, Caleb receives Lucinda’s envelope and the accompanying character string. And it’s at about this same time that whispering strangers start to show up and shadow the boy.             That night, through the brilliance of a drunken accident, John starts dicking around with the number string on Lucinda’s legacy. And in no time at all he discovers that many of the figures represent dates and casualty counts related to infamous accidents and disasters: 9/11/01/2996, for a glaring example. Other numbers remain unexplained, but what troubles John the most is that some of the dates haven’t yet passed. In fact, one falls on tomorrow’s date, with the numbers predicting that 81 people will die.             John stays up all night channel surfing, looking for the news report of the scheduled disaster. With no results. It isn’t until he’s stuck in traffic, in the rain, on the way to pick up his kid that catastrophe strikes. And when it does it hits right in front of him; just as his GPS clues him in to the fact that the mystery numbers stand for latitude and longitude, a jetliner comes hurtling out of the sky, striking an electrical tower and scraping a wing across the crowded freeway before crashing and burning in a nearby field.             John goes running straight into the flaming debris to help, but he is simply overwhelmed by the sight of so many passengers burning alive. In fact, as he watches one group of survivors fleeing the wreckage of the main cabin, they are suddenly engulfed in an enormous fireball of an explosion. Emergency crews arrive and push John aside, where he can only stand in shock, staring at the flames and burning bodies all around him.             Afterwards John is a little more than a little bit shaken up. Not only because he watched multiple people burn to death, but because he’s sure that it was no coincidence that he happened to be right there when the accident took place. He’s convinced that the numbers are a warning meant for him – and there are still two disasters yet to take place. (Well, three if you count the widespread release of this film.)             John continues to delve into the origin of the sheet of code, more intent than ever on preventing the upcoming disasters. Although Lucinda Embry died years ago a newspaper obituary provides her married name, and John soon begins to stalk her daughter Diana (Rose Byrne) and Diana’s daughter Abby (Lara Robinson). And, in the hope that Diana can shed some additional light on the situation, John takes Caleb along with him to the aquarium for a contrived meeting with Diana and Abby. But upon speaking with him Diana quickly decides that she doesn’t want anything to do with some crackpot theorist who reeks of single malt digging into her family history, and the meeting ends abruptly. So, John goes home and gets his gun.             Dumping Caleb at his sister Grace’s place, John plots the coordinates of the next anticipated tragedy and heads into Manhattan. Going down into a subway station he chases a suspicious-looking character onto one of the trains, but by the time he realizes that the guy is just a shoplifter the doors have shut and the train starts to move. Just as another train heading toward them at speed is shunted onto the same track due to an electrical malfunction. The oncoming train hits at force, leaping the track and literally tearing through the subway platform, grinding a host of commuters to jelly as it does so. John is unharmed, but just as predicted many others are not.             Now be forewarned; the end of the world may be nigh, but the film is only half over. You’re going to have to sit through almost an hour of talky bullshit before Armageddon arrives. So you may want to get up and get a drink now.             Later that evening when John brings Caleb home he finds Diana and Abby camping out on his front porch. When the kids go inside Diana tells him that the last date on the sheet, 10/19/09, is a date her mother often spoke of: it’s the day Diana’s supposed to die.             John drives them all out to Lucinda’s home, left largely untouched since she committed suicide by overdose when Diana was nine. Leaving the sleeping children in the car to be approached by the whispering people, John and Diana enter the house and begin to poke around. In doing so John comes across a bedframe that explains the curious backwards ‘E’s at the end of the number string: scratched into the underside of the wood are the words “Everyone Else,” repeated over and over again. And the date for that final event is tomorrow’s.             Summoned by the sound of the car horn the parents rush back outside, where John pulls his handgun and chases the whispering people off into the woods. Cornering one of them John demands to know what they want, whereupon the man turns around and opens his mouth, emitting a burst of light that leaves John stunned and helpless. Once he recovers and takes them all back home, Diana admits that the whispering fellows have been following she and Abby for some time.             In the morning John visits a colleague at the observatory and, based upon something that Abby said before, begins looking at the projected activity of solar super-flares. And it looks like one is scheduled to occur later that day; one that would completely destroy the earth’s ozone layer.             Diana tells John about a little-known cave system where they might be safe, and it sounds like a good idea to him. But upon finding Caleb in a trance, desperately scrawling out his own series of numbers, John decides to make a pit stop at Dawes Elementary. Breaking into the building he miraculously manages to find the door that Lucinda was clawing at 50 years ago, and tearing it from its hinges he hauls it back home. As an increasingly frantic Diana protests John begins scraping away a recent layer of paint, explaining that Lucinda must have added another set of coordinates after she was prevented from completing her list. John is now looking for that final portion of the code, but as he works away Diana loads the kids into her car and hits the road. By the time John uncovers the numbers and plugs the coordinates into his cell phone application, he realizes that he’s all alone.             On the way to the caves Diana stops at a gas station and catches an emergency broadcast on the mini-mart’s television. Warning of the increasing severity of solar activity, the transmission instructs citizens to stock up on supplies and find underground shelter. While she’s inside Caleb sneaks out to call Dad, and when Diana finds him she takes the phone and is told by John that the new numbers reflect the location of Lucinda’s mobile home; that’s where they need to go. Diana is insistent upon the caves, despite John’s warning that the radiation will penetrate a mile underground, and as they argue back and forth the whispering people show up and drive away with the children.             Diana steals another car and gives chase, only to be broadsided by a lumber truck when she runs a red light. John shows up at the gas station just as widespread panic is setting in, and getting some information from the attendant he goes after Diana. He finds her in the back of an ambulance at the crash site, given up on as unresponsive by the EMTs.             Somehow following the trail of shiny black pebbles that have been popping up throughout the film, John manages to track the whispering people to an isolated woodland location. He finds them, along with the kids who tell him that everything is all right; it was the whispering people who originally sent the code to Lucinda half a century ago with the goal of saving the children. And now the children must leave the planet with them in order to start over and save the human race. All of this as a gigantic spacecraft appears and drifts down to earth and the whispering people metamorphose into angelic extraterrestrial beings and carry the children away into the heavens, followed by an array of innumerable identical ships.             Of course the adults can’t go, so John is left to sizzle on the baking planet. There’s the requisite bit of weepy family reunion horseshit before this happens of course, and by now the audience is truly primed for an epic disaster. And, after a lot of fancy CGI work and more scenes of civil unrest, and some unnecessary Christian nonsense about this not really being the end, the end of the world does arrive in the form of a massive firestorm that sweeps the Earth, turning people and buildings into cinders in seconds. There’s some additional religious allegory about a new Eden, and thank fuck that’s all over.             And are you fucking kidding me? If I would have paid to see this I think I would have shat directly in my seat. For fucksake, that’s even worse than the ending in Poltergeist II when Grandma’s angel comes out to save the family from the H.R. Giger preacherman monster. Lousy alien intervention ending, with the hokey Christian symbolism smeared all over it like shit on a wafer.             Three scenes of awesome and horrible tragedy, loaded with calamitous special effects and literally thousands of deaths, each rather horrible in its own way. But scattered throughout interminable chatty candy-ass nonsense that ends, again (can’t make this point enough), with some religious Close Encounters / Sphere Rapture garbage? What the hell kind of Disney-fried chickenshit is that? Sure, there are some pretty strong “Disaster Sequences (and) Disturbing Images” for a PG-13 flick, but the majority of this falls under the heading of substandard storytelling. (Way to exploit 9/11 though, dicks.) Because what’s more horrific than CGI victimization but needless talkiness, made ultimately more needless by the contrived special interest ending.             Plus it’s one of those films structured around some fuckin’ little brat you’d rather see fed to the rats in New Delhi than watch bouncing around onscreen, so you can expect some big time disappointment here. Like Eddie Furlong in Terminator 2; who the fuck tells the Terminator NOT to kill people?! Shit!             It’s been as long since Proyas has made a good movie as it has since Cage has starred in one; let’s just say this is no winning combination of The Crow and Wild at Heart. And nowhere near as funny as Vampire’s Kiss.             Special features include an audio commentary by director Proyas, and “Knowing All: The Making of a Futuristic Thriller,” which at 12 minutes long was 12 minutes longer than I had to spare. There’s also “Visions of the Apocalypse” in which a number of ‘experts’ give their opinion on apocalyptic thought – skipped that one too.             One point for the disasters. I’d give it another for the end of the world, but that’s just too much. * www.knowing-themovie.com

KONGA Directed by John Lemont Crikey but this is a ripping good yarn. You never really have too many giant killer monkey movies, you know. Especially ones filmed through the miracle of “SPECTAMATION!”                 A plane flies over some trees and bursts into flame, and famous English botanist Dr. Charles Decker (Michael Gough) is missing and presumed dead in the course of a research expedition to Uganda. But the mighty Doctor returns a year later, and at an airport news conference tells the tale of being taken in and sheltered by the Bogandas, natives “distantly related to the Bantu tribe.” Accompanying Dr. Decker out of the jungle is Konga, the loyal young chimpanzee Decker credits with leading him out of the jungle and into the tribal village. Not a very threatening little beast for such dramatic title music . . . yet. Finding that the experience has allowed him to make unprecedented advances in the field of ethnobotanical research, Dr. Decker is in remarkably good spirits for someone who hasn’t seen a piece of toast or toilet paper in an entire year. Of his newfound discoveries, Dr. Decker says, “It made me think of the crash as a lucky accident.” Well, except for his pilot, who failed to bail out in time and was burned to death in the crash. But no matter, science marches on. Dr. Decker’s study of the region’s rare indigenous carnivorous plant life has yielded some rather startling scientific fruit: “I’m on the verge of a revolutionary link between what grows in the earth and animal life . . . But at this time I’d rather not say anything more about it.” In no time at all Decker is back at his estate, sucking down brandy in the company of Margaret (Margo Johns), his “secretary, assistant, housekeeper, confidante, and most of all, my good friend.” (Psst . . . they have an illegitimate relationship . . .) In the presence of such a good friend Decker allows his more megalomaniacal side to show, practically evangelizing as he boasts that, “Through Konga not only will I dominate a corner of the earth, but blaze a new trail through science. That little chimp will become the first link in modern evolution between plant and animal life.” (Maybe he really did miss that toast and toilet paper after all  . . .) Decker starts in on his new mad science project right away, ripping the carefully cultivated flowers out of his greenhouse to make room for the rare carnivorous plants he’s brought back from the jungle. Plants introduced to him by a “jungle witch doctor” as having “human properties.” The next morning Decker goes on some more about the miraculous properties of the plants, as well as the witch doctor’s occult knowledge and the control he held over his village. While using parts of these plants to mix up a special serum Decker accidentally allows some of it to boil over onto the floor, and when his housecat Tavis begins lapping up some of the mess Decker pulls out that most essential of scientific implements, a revolver, and shoots the tomcat dead on the spot. When the horrified Margaret protests, Decker savagely upbraids her, making the determined point that he will not have “the biggest experiment of my life menaced by a cat . . . even those few drops could have made Tavis swell up to huge proportions!” Decker drops a towel over the bloody mess of his pet, planning to bury him in the garden later that night. Before long Decker’s greenhouse is in full bloom again, the carnivorous plants thriving in their new environment. Twitching away with eerie Triffid-like life, the gigantic pitcher plants, Venus Flytraps, and more are fed chunks of raw meat. Taking a few clippings Decker cooks up a new batch of serum and injects Konga with it, standing back to watch as the screen flickers and rolls and the little chimp triples in size. Success! Back in his classroom at Essex College, Dr. Decker shows his botany class some National Geographic footage of the Bogandas he shot in the jungle. (“Incidentally, it was a stroke of luck I could rescue my camera and part of my equipment when I bailed out . . .”) When class is dismissed Decker takes busty blonde apple-polisher Sandra (Claire Gordon) aside. “I can’t get over how you’ve grown,” he says, leering at her cleavage. “But in you it’s more than that . . . there’s a maturity about you now Sandra. And how pretty you’ve grown.” Sandra laps these compliments right up, speaking of how excited she is to be working with Dr. Decker and how he has inspired her in her studies. Of course, “I would like to guide you in your development,” Decker says. And, of course, “There will be extra-curricular experiments . . .” Soon afterwards Dr. Decker has a meeting with Essex College Dean Foster, regarding his public remarks about evolutionary links between plant life and human beings. Dean Foster will brook no controversial material being taught at his institution, and suggests Decker take a sabbatical until he has fully recovered from his jungle exertions. But being the brilliantly unstable genius that he is Decker doesn’t take kindly to any questioning of his theories or methods, and an argument breaks out wherein an ultimatum is delivered by Dean Foster: “So long as I am Dean of this College you shall do as I say!” With these fateful words dramatic orchestral music flares, and Dr. Decker storms out. Konga is still coming along nicely, and in fact the mutated little chimp is even serving tea now. Decker, still fuming over his encounter with the dean, isn’t as impressed by this advancement as he might be, and in a burst of paranoid determination he shoots up his monkey friend with the latest batch of serum. This latest mixture has horrendous consequences, as Konga changes again, this time growing into a . . . a . . . a man in a gorilla suit! Decker sets to work hypnotizing the big beast, instilling in Konga the will to follow his orders explicitly. “After all, we know each other much better than the world suspects.” (What the hell does that imply? I think I hear native drums beating to the tune of “Jungle Love.”) It is revenge and not tea that Konga will be serving up now, as Decker’s first test of the monkey’s new strength and obedience will be the paying of a visit to Dean Foster . . . Police are baffled as they contemplate who could possibly have torn off Foster’s head (unfortunately this is no Night of the Bloody Apes, so we don’t actually witness Foster’s decapitation), and can only conclude that this is the random act of, “A powerful, cunning, ruthless animal that somehow is at large.” Margaret knows better however, and confronts her Doctor Decker the very next morning. “You killed Dean Foster!” And in order to ensure her silence, despite Decker’s absurd rationalizations (“You know I had to sooner or later. I would have been forced to kill someone through Konga, just to prove I was right, just to make my experiment a success.”) and everything else, Margaret wants their relationship legitimized. “I want you to marry me!” Decker agrees, with all of the warmth and emotion he showed during his last conversation with Konga. At an evening party held at the Decker home, the good Doctor happens to have a discussion with one Professor Tagore, who as it turns out has not only been pursuing a course of research parallel to that of Decker’s but is on the verge of publishing his results. Tagore dodges Decker’s desperately weasel-like attempt at a scientific partnership, but nevertheless invites Decker to his home later that night for further discourse. And of course Decker doesn’t arrive alone; as Konga tears up the Professor and his laboratory, Decker collects Tagore’s notes and makes away with his dead rival’s work. A day or so later Decker takes his class on, “A field trip to study mosses and ferns. It’s not a picnic, though I don’t object to your enjoying it.” Decker starts enjoying it right away, squiring Sandra away from her boyfriend Bob to sit up in the cab of the truck with him. Separated from the rest of the students in the back, Decker puts on the moves. “I’ve looked forward to this trip very much. You know Sandra, I don’t always think of you as a student, a pupil. That’s really why I’ve been so full of . . . anticipation. We’ll have all day. Perhaps we can carve out a little time . . . I mean, just for ourselves.” This special attention is something Bob highly resents, and when he himself manages to carve out a little time with Sandra he tells her so. Lurking nearby, Dr. Decker listens in. Not much later, just before the truck returns the class to the university, Bob carves out a little time with Dr. Decker, knocking him to the ground and nearly strangling him when Decker refuses to heed Bob’s childish demands that he leave Sandra alone. Relizing his mistake Bob recants and apologizes, something Decker grudgingly seems to accept. For now . . . That evening as Bob sets out on his scooter for a study date with Sandra, he’s waylaid by Konga with fatal results. Waiting nearby with the truck is Decker, who provides a quick and easy getaway for his simian minion. At the breakfast table the next morning Margaret is terribly upset by this latest development. As she rails against another useless death and Decker’s hypocrisy, he cooly cuts her off and goes on to rationalize the murder. “Margaret, if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s hysterics. Especially in the morning . . . A great scientific experiment is being conducted by me.” Despite his murderously self-serving justifications however, Margaret still won’t leave him. Instead she is concerned for his, and their, safety. Upon hearing her small voice of reason Decker realizes that it might be time to cut things short there in England, and decides to destroy his experiment and move his laboratory out of range of the police investigation. Far out of range, in fact; all the way to Africa. But first there are appearances to be kept up, and this means attending his student’s funeral. And, apparently, inviting the murdered boy’s girlfriend over for dinner afterwards, the better to console the poor dear. As Margaret clears away the teacups Decker takes Sandra out to the greenhouse to brag about his blossoms. But, “Don’t get too close my dear! There’s danger in that hungry plant! It thrives on meat . . .” Says Margaret, “It’s strange, and very frightening!” More strange and frightening however are Decker’s intentions, as he takes the young girl by the hand and, in a rather oily way, offers her the position of his assistant. “Poor Margaret” is no longer of any use to him, you see, and besides, “I need a young, fresh mind like yours. Besides, I require more than just a laboratory assistant. Sondra, I need you. To work with me. To be with me!” And with that Decker pounces all over her young, fresh, um, mind. (Guess the Venus Flytrap isn’t the only thing in the greenhouse hungry for meat . . .) Margaret, justifiably suspicious of Decker’s sudden interest in the girl whose boyfriend Decker has just had killed, has been listening to all of this, and she knows exactly what it means. She’s bushmeat! Konga’s going Gargantua on her ass unless she nips this situation in the bud, which she quickly does by paying a visit to the big monkey and hypnotizing him the same way Decker did. Commanding the great ape to heed her every word, Margaret shoots him up with some more of the good stuff saying, “After this Konga it will be easier for you to obey me. It will bring you more power, greater strength, and you shall use it all as I have instructed. Go, Konga!” Go Konga indeed, as through the miracle of SPECTAMATION Konga blows up to a height of twelve feet tall. Developing an attitude to match, Konga thrashes the lab before, in a nightmare of scale, he reaches down and grabs the shrieking Margaret (or at least the red-headed doll meant to represent her). Margaret’s doll is thrown into the flaming wreckage the laboratory has become as Konga continues to grow, breaking through the lab’s ceiling and soon dwarfing, and demolishing, the entire building. Decker meanwhile has been promising Sandra “a glory greater than any woman has ever known” between his assaults, but his intense creepiness, enhanced by the humidity of the greenhouse and the mashing of his leathery face against hers, has the girl rather unnerved. When Konga’s gigantic monkey puss looms through the greenhouse ceiling she flips out completely, accidentally straying into range of the giant Venus Flytrap which promptly chomps down on her arm. Sandra screams hysterically as her arm dissolves in the plant’s spiny foaming maw, while at the same time the giant ape reaches down a gigantic paw and snares Dr. Decker. Decker cries out for help as Konga carries him into town, horrifying the tiny citizens as he strides about, pretty much just waiting for the military to move in and finish him off. (“There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets!”) Puny mortals flee in terror as Konga stomps toward Big Ben, and by the time armed forces arrive the gorilla is now something like twenty stories tall. Ignoring Decker’s Fly-like pleas of “Help me!” as well as the close proximity of the crowd, now lined up along the street as if awaiting a parade, the army begins firing anti-aircraft guns and bazookas at the mighty Konga. Tracers lash the night while Konga just stands there roaring like the big dumb ape that he is, until finally hurling the Doctor’s doll at his military oppressors. Eventually Konga succumbs, falling to the ground as dramatic music plays and Big Ben’s tower peals out its twelve strokes. At his death Konga changes, werewolf-like, back into his original tiny form to lie helpless beside his creator in death. The End. How about that, huh? Nothing truly startling and unusual here, but a giant monkey’s a giant monkey and you’ve gotta take those where you can get ‘em. The casting is all more than adequate, the actors giving appropriately emphatic performances for the period, and delivering some ridiculously excellent lines along the way (“There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets!”). In short, it’s a good time. Enough said. * * *

LAST EXIT Directed by David Bourke             Didn’t have too much advance information on this Danish indie thriller – even the box cover wasn’t giving anything away. Last Exit; ghost story? Tragic romance? Drug drama-slash-road trip? Some sort of a Last Exit to Copenhagen? Only one way to find out…             Married couple Nigel (Morten Vogelvis) and Maria (Jette Philipsen) have a distant and most uncomplimentary relationship. He’s a borderline alcoholic porn fan and she’s a closet junkie, and between their separate habits they rarely see one another, let alone spend any ‘quality time’ together.             Which seems to suit Nigel just fine. Chronically unemployed and still hiding out from the aftershocks of a failed drug deal in another city, Nigel appears content to drink his beer and watch his lesbian porn long after his wife has gone to bed. But when his seedy one-eyed friend Tobias tips him off about a job possibility offering “very good money,” Nigel is intrigued. Tobias’ description of the work is a little shady but it would mean cash money under the table, something a man in Nigel’s position finds hard to refuse.             Agreeing to the as-yet-unspecified job, Nigel is brought before an enigmatic kingpin-like character known only as “The President” (Peter Otteson, who is, appropriately, most often shown seated against the backdrop of a suicidally violent action painting). And, not without some rather sinister undertones, Nigel is given his first assignment, one that sounds like a cakewalk. All he has to do is stow fifty unmarked boxes in his apartment for two weeks, in exchange for which he receives 10,000 kroner on the spot. In addition to this sizeable advance he’s also plied with a date with The President’s pet, Tanya (Gry Bay, who also performs a pair of the film’s songs), an exotic dancer who is, to say the least, exceedingly friendly. Friendly enough in fact to easily bat aside Nigel’s feeble protests of marital fidelity and convince him to go back to her place for vodka and sex.             And with that Nigel’s life appears to improve. His cash windfall not only ensures that Tanya will want to keep him around but may also help buy his way out of trouble with the underworld faction back home. A faction that has threatened the life of the wife and child he ran away from when his big deal went sour. There’s even money to spare for weed, which fuels both a spacey conversation with overly verbose drug dealer Jimmy (Nicholas Sherry) and a psychedelic video-splashed session of wild tantric sex with the enthusiastic Tanya.             Everything’s gravy until the boxes Nigel was holding are retrieved by The President’s men, and it’s discovered that instead of the specialty videos they were supposed to contain they’re loaded with blank cassettes. Oddly The President doesn’t hold this against Nigel, and even gives him another similar assignment right away. A proffered kidnapping gig however proves too much for Nigel, and the aura of menace that’s been escalating since meeting The President causes our boy to lose it. Drunk and high he ends up raping Tanya, but it’s not the rape she minds so much as the fact that Nigel tries to leave her afterward. Considerably upset Tanya brains him with a can of beans and when Nigel comes to, awakened by a cell phone call from his wife, he finds Tanya slumped down in the kitchen with her wrists slit. Maria, meanwhile, is urgently trying to summon Nigel home in order to share some news with him. What she plans to tell him when he arrives is that she’s pregnant, and she hopes this will be enough to restart, or at least repair, their increasingly damaged marriage. But while she cleans the house, throws out her dope and makes herself up for her husband, Nigel wanders the streets in a daze, getting progressively more fucked up on guilt, grass and booze. By the time he gets home he is in no condition for family planning, and when he hears the news it hits him hard enough to send him reeling toward his very own Last Exit. And there’s still a sizeable portion of the film left to go, but to detail Nigel’s descent would inevitably prove to be something of a spoiler. Suffice it to say that things go wrong, very wrong.             Last Exit possesses a very music-rich soundtrack (comprised largely of pieces by Fabio Testa and Jacob Moth), loaded with modern techno tunes and sweet Euro-pop that nicely match the frenetically dreamy motion of camera and characters as they swing through darkened neon-scrawled environments at an oddly-angled pace conveying the impression of drug-induced delirium. The “foreign” atmosphere and imagery evoked by the Danish streets and settings adds a good deal of exotic local color to the picture, which when combined with the lurid pink/orange/yellow color scheme makes for a film that borders on the hallucinogenic. But not in a happy hippie way at all, as Nigel’s last days can attest.             The film also contains some brutal, if not overly explicit, violence, as well as at least one borderline Blue Velvet moment (the scene in which Tanya table-dances for Nigel while an unfortunate member of the President’s henchmen has his eye carved out in the adjoining room, all to the tune of “Nice Work If You Can Get It”). And I, for one, appreciate a film wherein one of the recurring motifs is a great big can of pork & beans. But despite containing all of the requisite underworld characters and plot elements, there’s still something missing from Last Exit. Drugs, crime, desperation, cheap sex, lies, torture, murder, despair; all of the staples necessary for an international neo-noir cult classic are here, but are combined and presented in a considerably more blunt and simple fashion than, say, Killing Zoe or Man Bites Dog. Perhaps too simple in fact, as the limited number of characters, settings and scenarios don’t manage to satisfactorily round out the film’s feature-length running time. As a result this fatalistic crime drama is less gripping than it is mildly interesting. Or perhaps what’s lacking is empathy, for as a protagonist Nigel doesn’t possess a single redeeming quality. For all of his faults and criminal misdeeds, he is a being completely devoid of personality and interest. Even when his wasted life goes as horribly wrong as possible it’s still hard to care what happens to him one way or the other. His wife’s selfish self-destructive behavior makes her as unsympathetic a character as her husband, and even when she does make the token effort to turn things around upon the discovery of her pregnancy it is, literally, too little too late. Side characters such as Tanya and The President, while intriguing, are never developed beyond the one-dimensional stereotypes they appear to be. Also at fault is the ever-more-prevalent trend in independent cinema of underlighting scenes. The picture contains far too many darkened and dimly lighted shots, resulting in some portions of the story playing out in utter blackness. And as is not unusual not only does this diminish the viewing experience, but it also obscures crucial moments of action. Perhaps in this case the darkness is supposed to reflect the characters’ lives (fitting in with the previous drug reference, along with the plot and cinematography this trait does somewhat convey the impression of a very bad trip), but that’s a stretch and if it is intentional the filmmakers definitely need to come up with another gimmick. But with all of that being said, Last Exit is probably worth a watch by those in need of a bleak and low-lived drama. Maybe not worth owning, or even worth standing in line for, but a fair bet as a portion of the program during an evening of home entertainment.             The screener DVD is presented in English without subtitle options or a chapter selection feature, and the lone bonus of the film’s trailer. (I’m guessing the retail release will be more versatile and comprehensive.) (Thanks to Exploitation Retrospect – www.dantenet.com ) * * Last Exit Productions – www.lastexitproductions.dk – Borghaven 6, 1, SAL, Valby 2500 Copenhagen, Denmark

LAWLESS Directed by John Hillcoat             Despite the legendary subject of Prohibition-era moonshiners and loads of brutality (castration, tar & feathers, throat-cutting, multiple GSWs and the like), somehow there just ain’t a whole lot to this picture. The bootlegging Bondurants demonstrate their endurance through ruthless colorlessness, except for the most objectionable name in show business, Shia LaBeouf, who just fucks up and cries a lot. Guy Pearce as Charles Rakes, Special Deputy from Chicago, seems perpetually pissed at losing his way to BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and even Gary Oldman slips through his scenes as a gangster looking like he’s in a hurry to be someplace else. Trying to think of some redeeming excuse to sit through nearly two hours of this (aside from the novel ‘shock value’ of testes in a jar of ‘shine), but can only come up with reasons not to. Two words: Shia LaBeouf. * http://lawless-film.com/

LETHAL FORCE Directed by Alvin Ecarma                         Okay, this one I had to watch twice; not because it was all that fucking amazing, but because certain elements make it kind of hard to follow the first time around. Here we go:             We begin with some anonymous schlub getting his ass kicked; said ass-kicker continues to ply his trade until he reaches a protected witness and her police escort. He wastes the escort and, before taking out the lady witness, introduces himself as Savitch (Cash Flagg, Jr.), a yellow-shirted cat who’s “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”             Nine months later Detective Jack Carter (Frank Prather) comes home to find his family gone and a couple of hardasses trying to blackmail him into luring his ex-partner Savitch into the hands of crippled crimelord Mal Lock. When negotiations break down Jack shoots one intruder, but gets his ass handed to him by a bowtie-wearing martial artist. The unconscious Carter is taken to Mal’s mansion where his wife Linda and son Patrick are being held hostage, awakening just in time to see his wife executed as an indication of just how serious Mal is.             Thoroughly convinced, Jack arranges for a meet with Savitch. And, after some questionably longing looks into each others’ eyes, Savitch agrees to take the contract on an anonymous victim. At their next meeting Savitch allows Jack and a group of Big Bertha’s hitmen to drive him out to a deserted housing development, and while Bertha’s crew is easily disposed of suddenly crazy bowtie guy drops in and he and Savitch go kung-fu fighting throughout the house and across an abandoned schoolyard.             After polishing off Mr. Bowtie Savitch and Jack head over to Bertha’s Big Top to catch a little go-go action and bust Bertha’s chops; unfortunately for Savitch this is also where Jack delivers him into the hands of his enemies. Or tries to anyway, as Savitch fights his way through a throng of angry strippers and escapes. (After a prolonged series of chase and fight sequences, that is.) In fact, after taking out wave after wave of Mal’s goons dressed in masks and black suits Savitch gets the drop on Carter, but after another montage of deep soulful gazes, enhanced by homoerotic buddies-in-battle flashbacks, Savitch simply walks away. So Jack hits him with his car, rams him into a retaining wall, breaks his knees, and sends him over the railing for a six-story drop to the bricks. Savitch just gets up and walks away. Albeit a little unsteadily, he makes his way to a nearby church where he has just enough time for an imaginary conversation with Jesus (“Would you like a cookie?”) before Mal and his cohorts come to collect him and haul him back to the mansion. All of a sudden Mal’s Amazonian ladyfriend Rita takes the opportunity to pull Jack aside and let him in on the fact that she’s an undercover cop, working to bust Savitch in revenge for killing her husband during the prologue. The two of them head over to Mal’s estate, where Jack watches Mal exact his revenge upon Savitch. Earlier we saw the reason for Mal’s perpetual bad mood: disguised as a mailbox, Savitch made a botched assassination attempt on Mal’s life, putting him in a wheelchair instead of killing him as he’d been paid to do. Mal now takes great pleasure in watching his goons beat Savitch stupid with baseball bats, stab him through the hands with bayonets, and perform trepanation with a power drill (actually a pretty decent bit of FX). Rita goes inside to take out some of the goonies, but in the process gets popped herself and taken out to witness Savitch’s torture, as well as his miraculous (read: unbelievable) revival and slaughter of a whole squadron of Mal’s men. In the ensuing mayhem Jack swipes the key to his son’s prison cell and goes to rescue the boy while Rita and Savitch have their final showdown. No less than three additional bloody face-offs ensue, each escalating the gore and foolishness quotients. But even as the last body drops it’s not over:           “To Be Continued in Lethal Force Part 2: Savitch Strikes Back!” I don’t want to spoil anything here, but that’s going to be kind of hard to do…             Lethal Force does have a better variety of locations than your average indie actioneer, and a plethora of over-the-top fight scenes to boot. Said fight scenes however, despite some decent choreography, are still a little stiff in places; after the multi-angle green screen high-wire action of the big budget flicks the low budget really shows. Even the not-so-fancy HK flicks do it better, and the jazzy faux Matrix soundtrack during the punch-outs really doesn’t help. Speaking of the soundtrack, the dubbing is for shit, and a lot of the lines match. Such as, “Just another symptom of life in this supersonic age.”               It’s hard to tell how seriously the filmmakers took this project; the blurbs on the DVD box play it up as a “satire/homage” but also call it a “wonderful” “cult classic in the making.” I wasn’t entirely thrilled; the story really does have too many characters in it, adding to the needless complexity, and despite the fact that it is literally action-packed, as mentioned before this just doesn’t seem to be enough. It’s mad, bad, and dangerous to your quality viewing time.             Special features include director’s commentary, director’s shorts (My Dog Has a Cyst, Me! [2K3 Re-Mix] and A Conversation, all directed by “Sir” Alvin Ecarma and none of which do much more than fill space on the bonus menu), production photos, an Action Figure Gallery (no kidding!), an art gallery, and trailers for other gore-soaked Unearthed Films. There’s even an entire Bootleg Bonus DVD of “material that was left out by accident or design”; no, I’m not watching that. (Thanks to Exploitation Retrospect – www.dantenet.com ) * * Unearthed Films – www.unearthedfilms.com

LIVE EVIL Directed by Jay Woelfel             For full review see www.horrorreview.com. * * www.liveevilthemovie.com

THE LOVE STATUE LSD EXPERIENCE Directed by David E. Durston             I’ve quoted them before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again, but in the words of the mighty Rupture, “I’m Havin’ a Fucken’ Flashback!” All the way from 1965 comes a B&W acid flick (and one of the first LSD movies) that actually displays a modicum of class: get yer red wine and sugar cubes out and prepare for The Love Statue.             (Spoiler Alert: As it really isn’t very difficult at all to figure out who the killer is, particularly with the limited number of characters introduced, we’re going to travel through to the very lysergic end here. So, feel free to quit reading at any time and go back to counting microdots on your own…)             A mournful showtune plays along with the credits as the visual theme is established through shots of sculptures, candles and skulls. Painter Tyler Westin (Peter Ratray) and his dancer girlfriend Lisa (Ondine Lise, aka Broadway musical performer Beati Seay) are lounging on a studio cot sharing post-coital cigarettes and talking hipster trash. Bliss quickly turns to rancor as Lisa puts on her clothes so that she can go to work and take them off again, talking down to her artist beau in increasingly low terms as she does so. And she knows she can get away with it too, seeing as how she’s paying his rent and doling out pocket money. His impotent threats only yield additional insults: “You’re not really much of anything Tyler. You’re nothing but a big beautiful bowl of mush, baby. And without me, you’re just one step away from the parade of pimps!” When he slaps her she laughs in his face, but when he hits her again she breaks a wine bottle over his head, ending the argument with his unconsciousness.             “Baby, don’t you know, you’re a loser every time,” is the first thing he hears upon regaining consciousness and finding Lisa tending the cut on his noggin. More lowdown bohemian drama ensues as the lady leaves for her dancing gig, complete with thrown money and a screaming fit from the rooftop.             Tyler is just getting dressed when his fruity subnormal-looking sculptor buddy Stanley Jacobs (Harvey Goldenberg) shows up toting a bucket of clay and looking for a place to crash. Tyler lets him in, then leaves Stan to his own devices as he hustles off to The Bitter End Café to suck up to his cash cow sex kitten. There he meets up with a couple of his boho buddies, Josh and Nick, who introduce Ty to chanteuse Mashiko (“Introducing Hisako ‘Choko’ Tsukuba”). They all just want to help their buddy Tyler get over his troubles, and of course the hip new way to do that is with LSD. “It’s the newest thing in dreams,” Mashiko tells him. “Instant psychoanalysis, baby,” one of the fellows adds. But Ty ain’t having any: “I like my nightmares just the way they are,” he says, opting for whiskey over acid. Nonetheless Mashiko gives him her card, telling him that if he changes his mind he can call her any time.             Soon Lisa takes her turn on the stage, but after a few sexy gyrations she’s interrupted by Tyler, now well into his cups. When she literally kicks the drunken lout off of her stage (“You make such a lovely bathmat!” she says, using him as a stepping stone down from the platform) the audience’s mocking laughter sends him stumbling out into the street. Falling down drunk on his way home, Tyler narrowly avoids getting shanghaied by some street hustler and moved in on by some stew bum before he can shut his door and try to continue drinking in peace. No, it’s definitely not a good night for our boy Ty.             The torments continue when Lisa drops in briefly, only to leave again in a shroud of derisive laughter, and in desperation Tyler picks himself up and heads over to Mashiko’s. There is some kind of funky happening going on there, with hipsters tripping balls left and right, and amid a lisping stream of metaphysical chatter the singer fixes Ty an LSD cocktail. Ty’s leery of her claim that, “It produces strange mental transformations… It sometimes change the personality,” and a passing acid eater’s testimonial “One man’s kicks is another man’s psychosis” doesn’t inspire much confidence in our young voyager. But his fears are apparently allayed by Mashiko’s promise that, “You are young, strong; it will not harm you. It will only free you.” Down the hatch…             Three days later Tyler still hasn’t returned to the studio. As Lisa frets and Stan attempts to soothe her nerves, Tyler pulls himself from the tangle of crashed-out acid heads and staggers outside. His vision bleary and kaleidoscopic, Tyler trips through a city made foreign and nightmarish by the dose still coursing through his brain until he can take it no longer and screams himself out of it.             When he pulls himself together Tyler finds himself back in the studio, alone. Well, almost: there’s an odd dreamlike sequence in which he has an erotic interaction with Stan’s living sculpture of Lady Godiva, which has been completed in Ty’s absence. When Tyler comes out of his haze the first thing he gets is another round of Lisa’s bitching. “It’s over, Lisa,” he tells her, even when she relents and tries to play nice. Weepy drama unfolds as each party loudly justifies their meager existence, but Tyler’s doors of perception have been well and truly opened and he walks out of the studio a new man with a new mindset.             As a carefree Tyler feeds the ducks in Central Park, Lisa shifts into savage cunt mode and begins slashing his canvases to shreds. She’s pretty much destroyed the entire studio, Stanley’s Godiva included, when a presence seen only as a shadow enters the flat and, without hesitation or introduction, stabs her to death.             Tyler returns to the studio as happy as a clam, toting a sackful of groceries and Chianti. His mood darkens considerably when he sees the damage wrought by Lisa’s wrath, but when he finds Lisa’s body, sprawled out on the floor like a broken doll with glassy eyes, things go from bad to worse. Confronted with this all-too-real horror after days of drug-induced hallucination, Tyler does the only thing he can: he runs away.             In a subway station Tyler spots Stanley’s Lady Godiva model (Nancy Norman, aka skin mag model Gigi Darlene) and follows her onto the Express to Manhattan. He can’t quite place her face however, and his awkward attempts to make conversation turn into a chase out into the cold New York night. He finally catches up to her, and as they recognize each other he tells her that he really needs to talk to Stan; all of Stan’s material has been cleared out of the studio, only one of Lady Godiva’s hands being left behind as evidence that he was ever there at all.             The Lady consents to have a cup of coffee with him, and in the conversation that follows she strongly suggests that old Stanley isn’t just the “harmless nut” he seems to be. After hearing Ty’s story the Lady agrees to help him, and the two split up and try to find the errant sculptor. Tyler tries a local watering hole with no luck, but in the process learns that Lisa’s body has been found and that he, of course, is the prime suspect in her murder.             The Lady, meanwhile, receives a surprise phonecall from Stanley. He’d really like to see her, he says, and she agrees to meet him at the Park in an hour. As she sets out to find Tyler and give him the update she is shadowed by Stanley, who’s starting to look more like the pederast’s version of Peter Sellers than ever. Together Tyler and the Lady head to the designated bridge in Central Park, with Tyler hiding underneath while Lady remains up top. But Stanley is already there, and he quickly grabs the girl. An NY standoff takes place, during which Stan admits that he went “crazy” when he saw his busted-up masterpiece. “Damn Lisa! She was no good Ty, she deserved to be killed!” But he did make sure to tell the cops all about Ty and Lisa’s volatile relationship, apparently sealing his friend’s doom. As the only other person who knew Stanley was using Ty’s studio is Lady, Stan pulls a knife on her and drags her away across the park, warning Tyler against following them.             Stanley bundles Lady into his car and drives away as snow begins to fall, leaving Tyler to run blindly through the winter streets of the city. Fortuitously his buddy Nick pulls up on a motorbike and pledges his allegiance to Ty’s cause. “I always knew he was a little batty,” Nick says of Stan. “Josh got to him the other night, gave him some LSD. He went completely crazy, went out of his mind! That probably explains what happened!” Not only that, but Nick also remembers a place Stan told him he used to visit, a dam out on Highway 4. Without further hesitation the lads crowd onto the bike and roar off in that direction.             The dam is indeed where Stanley has taken his Lady, and he seems to be just waiting for Tyler to show up. The moment he does Stan ditches the girl and takes off on foot, and a picturesque footchase around the snowy stone architecture takes place. This ends abruptly when Stan, who had been way out in front, suddenly and unwisely decides to climb over the railing at the very top of the dam. With a shrill scream his body is seen plummeting over the side, leaving Ty and the Lady to run off into the wintry distance together.             Director Durston admits in his interview (see below) that he was influenced by European cinema, particularly the films of Fellini and Antonioni, and this is most evident in the eroticism and morbidity of the early scenes. The black and white presentation enhances this effect, and at the same time does a fine job of carrying this unpredictable ambiance into the gritty lofts and dives of New York City.             The feeling of Sixties’ Greenwich Village drug culture is vividly brought to life as bums, artists, queers, dopers, dancers and beatniks all flow through a series of studios, bars, cityscapes and crash pads. Against this vibrant setting (which comes across quite well even in black and white) there is an emotional street theater realism to the acting which makes for a coarse and enjoyable experience.             It is an intentionally artsy film, what with the emphasis on, well, art and all, but much of this (aside from Stanley’s oozing about his own “genius”) isn’t nearly as pretentious or off-putting as it could have been. Instead, the trappings of artistry serve to enhance the film in a colorful and intriguing way (“Paintings by Sobossek”). Groovy soundtrack by Dottie Stallworth, too.             Of course no LSD Experience would be complete without a bevy of trippy extras: audio commentary with writer/director Durston and film historian Michael Bowen; a pair of alternate scenes (“Tyler & Lisa Break-Up” and “Tyler Phone Call”); interviews with Durston (“Behind the Love Statue,” in which the director, now in his eighties, talks about being approached by some Harvard grads to do a non-union LSD flick, and subsequently getting interested enough to get dosed himself. [Dig the story about thinking he’s a gum machine in the subway!] Durton also discusses his actors and various aspects of filming, looking back fondly on the experience as a whole.) and Peter Ratray (“A Trip with Peter Ratray,” who talks about coming to NY as a teenager and scoring the role of Tyler, and having a damn good time in the process. [Including an anecdote about “this kid Bob Dylan” who was playing at The Bitter End at the time.] As did Durston, Ratray talks about the filmmaking experience and his co-stars, with no shortage of colorful side stories.); and a Secret Key Trailer Vault that includes promos for questionable gems such as All the Sins of Sodom, Grindhouse Double Feature Punk Rock / Pleasure Palace, Daddy Darling and the like.             But the real crackerjack prize here is the pair of LSD “scare films” from the Sixties. 1967’s LSD-25, written, produced and directed by Dr. David W. Parker, “Under the auspices of the San Mateo Union High School District,” begins with some goateed cat buying acid on the street. “The cost: a few dollars. And his mind,” the Rod Serling-style narration tells us. Mr. Hipster’s vision blurs, the narration takes the point of view of LSD-25 itself (who now sounds suspiciously like Timothy Leary), and sinister Sixties sounds play out as various hippies talk about how easy it is to get the stuff and various ‘squares’ bemoan the wicked nature of the drug. But LSD-25 just wants to set the record straight: “It is, as they say, time for the facts. High time.” High time indeed. The chemical compound of LSD is laid out, with an emphasis on the drug’s potency and variety made clear. Unclear is how it works exactly, but there is no doubt that it does work. “Altogether I’m one of the most perplexingly powerful drugs conceivable,” our acid host boasts. The hazard of the very lack of control over this controlled substance is made clear, but that’s not stopping the kids from taking it. “Drop a cap of me, man, and drop out. But watch it, because the trip can be a trap, too: you never know where a ticket with me will take you.” Now the film shifts into bad trip mode, with acid casualties sobbing and freaking out (cue vintage monster movie soundtrack). Watch out for the flashback! (Or “after-flash.”) “It’s not fun at all…not even the coroner knows how to tell whether or not I was part of this scene.” (This against a staged shot of a bloody car accident.) More bum trips follow, all the way to the morgue. “I’m so depressed,” moans LSD-25, “Depressed because I’m so badly misused and abused by those who know so little about me.” It’s not all bad, but, “I am never the sort of thing that one takes lightly, or for kicks. Because, you see, I can kick back.” Acid has an ego, apparently, and boy can it prattle on. Damn, all this needs is a creepy little cartoon capsule dancing around and fucking with its users. Bottom line: Acid is scary! Too bad for Mr. Hepcat from the beginning though: “…He may be terrified by what he sees. But that’s his problem. Not mine.” Gee, thanks LSD-25!             Your Amazing Mind starts with an odd George Washington analogy, used to demonstrate the advancement of ideas and invention over time: “The human mind is the world’s single greatest resource.” This muddles around for some time, and then, uh-oh, here come the school kids, and you can feel the heavy hand of the righteousness of suburban utopia coming down: “Only with clear thinking in an unclouded and undistorted brain can life be better and more rewarding.” Of course there are enemies of the Reich: “It may seem unbelievable, but there are some people who disturb and twist their minds on purpose.” (Say it ain’t so, doc!) It’s those damn dirty drug users again, and in no time we’re being treated to shots of ambulances and emergency ward entrances, as well as a lecture on the importance of ‘doctor’s orders.’ Various types of drugs begin to swim across the screen, overlaid with colorful brain pattern animation in an ironically trippy presentation that defines controlled substances and their effects. (“Strangely, some people get kicks from them.” You don’t say…) More scare tactic imagery follows (“Any drug, wrongly used, can change the way your mind works, and keep you from thinking clearly. They can make you very sick. They can even kill you.”), and pretty soon some kid’s keeling over from an overdose of airplane glue and a pothead is sailing his car over an embankment. And then, finally, our old friend LSD. (“It brings on the symptoms of insanity.”) Well, what about LSD? Just ask J. Thomas Ungerleider, M.D., of the UCLA Medical Center: “LSD has no proven use in medicine. Repeated use of LSD may permanently alter the brain’s function. In fact many people, after using LSD, have had to be placed in mental institutions because they’ve become mentally ill.” (Lather, rinse, repeat.) “LSD also changes the cell structure of certain cells within the body, probably permanently, and thus may affect your unborn children.” (BOO!) And don’t forget, “Any trip is a bad trip when your amazing mind isn’t thinking clearly.” Habit forming drugs are also touched upon before the school kids are trotted out again to regurgitate the lessons with which they’ve been indoctrinated: “I think that all trips are bad trips because they bend your mind, and who wants to bend their mind?” “If I had to take pills to be part of a gang, I wouldn’t want to be in that gang. I’d have more fun without the pills.” I’m not sure what sort of a lesson that last one is, but you pay attention, young man. And on and on and on and on, so be the evils of drugs, amen. Especially LSD.             Quite a lot of material on one disc here, coming in a full color slipcase and including a collectible booklet of liner notes. Tune in, why dontcha? (Thanks to Exploitation Retrospect – www.dantenet.com) * * * * Secret Key Motion Pictures – www.RetroSeductionCinema.com

LUSTFUL ADDICTION Directed by Nick Philips (1969) and Misty Mundae (2002) Another entry in Seduction’s short line of double features pairing a “grindhouse classic” with a modern reworking of the same sleazy tale. In Nick Philips’ original B&W version of Lustful Addiction, bored bedsitter Jean wanders around her SoCal flat, distractedly peering out of windows, lighting and stubbing out cigarettes, and generally looking vaguely uncomfortable. Is she a housewife upset that hubby will come home to find the roast overdone and the rye gone? No, she’s a junky! (“A user of ‘stuff,’ or more commonly known, ‘drugs.’”) When her beat-looking dealer “Penn the Peddler” shows up Jean goes through a striptease routine for him, but Penn soon gets bored with this and goes off for a dose of, “The dark feeling of sleep that will surround him when he plunges the silver needle deep into his soul, into his blood, to caress his twisted soul with the darkness of . . . ‘stuff.’” Setting up in the kitchen Penn prepares a massive spoonful of “the juice of Hecate” (in such a hurry to get away from Jean that he neglects to either cook or filter his ‘stuff’), and, as Harry Angel might say, “shoots himself to Palookaville.” Now it’s Jean’s turn, and she shoots up a needle full of Penn’s leftovers. When the pusher nods off Jean goes trolling for cock somewhere else, finding a piece called Tad at a nearby coffee shop. (“He’s nice, really nice.”) They pass an idyllic day frolicking about as young-lovers-to-be, and then they get right down to doin’ it. Totally naked Jean is one dusky sexy beauty, her pale dark-haired form being one so stacked and statuesque that it almost makes up for the lousy softcore love scene that follows (one every bit as long and labored as the metaphors of our apparently dope-addled narrator). Meanwhile Penn the Peddler has come out of it, stolen Jean’s record player, and bailed out. Jean wakes up too, and immediately craving she calls her dealer and arranges a meet at some strip joint. Tad insists upon accompanying her, and as they await Penn they take in a horrendously bad, horrendously long strip show. (Some broad in a plastic raincoat looking high and self-conscious as she awkwardly lurches about the stage, pulling off her lingerie and waving her unshaven muff at the audience.) To everyone’s enormous relief Penn finally shows with the ‘stuff,’ and Jean makes a hurried buy and gets the hell out of there. Back at Tad’s place the lure of dope and sex proves too much for our young man, and he is seduced by Jean into sampling some of her devil’s brew. The sitar cranks up with the witchy narration as Tad is given a shot and . . . bums right out, becoming sick to his stomach. In his condition Tad is no fun for the dope-hungry sex kitten, and besides she could use a little more dope; unable to contact Penn Jean heads out to find a hooker friend she knows will be holding. Hooker Friend is only too happy to share some of her shit with Jean, for a price of course, and in this case that price is the satisfaction of her “perverse lesbian hunger.” Despite having just worked a full shift, if you know what I mean, Hooker Friend takes it out in trade with Jean, and as the voiceover grows more decadent and the bad coffee shop jam kicks it up a notch on the soundtrack the two ladies go at it in a feigned display of lesbian sexual blackmail. This takes a long time, but is at least moderately fun to watch for the lovely Jean, her hair in wild disarray as she writhes about the bedsheets wearing nothing but her beads. Hooker Friend ain’t too bad to look at either, in a sexy, sleazy, slutty kind of way. For dessert Jean gets her fix, and in her excitement she overdoes it and ODs right there in Hooker Friend’s kitchen. (Plant that flower child!) Hooker Friend is properly aghast, and desperate for someone to come clean up this mess she find’s Tad’s number in Jean’s bag and calls him to come over and pick up his dead girlfriend. Instead Tad goes for his gun, and clumsily chases down and kills the evil pusher. (“Run and die, devil! Run and die!”) After the deed is done he stands over Penn’s body in woe, lamenting the wicked way of the world. “He has known love once, with a young girl,” the narrator tells us. “A pretty girl. But now time has expired.” Cut to shot of parking meter bearing the same message. Heavy, man. Heavy. (The end. No cast, no credits, no nothin’.) The dialogue in Lustful Addiction consists solely of a lispy female voiceover (similar to that utilized in Philips’ Pleasures of a Woman), one that packs every stereotypical love & dope generation reference possible into its stilted narration. But at least in this film the females are considerably more attractive (even if they don’t do fondue). Another bemusing if not dramatic effect repeated throughout are the multiple scenes of monkeys, shot in negative, cut in from time to time. (Gee, what unsubtle symbolism could that have?) When inserted between nude scenes the effect is kind of cool, even if a little morally heavy-handed. While eminently more watchable than any number of other softcore shelf-fillers, with Lustful Addiction it still never ceases to amaze me how little people do with such a large number of resources. Here you got naked junkies, gunplay, strip shows, lesbianism, theft, blackmail, drug dealing, the works (even monkeys, for fucksake!), and it all just goes to pad out some good-looking woman’s low-key nude scenes. Ah well, on to the next feature:   The 2002 remake of Lustful Addiction is helmed (and “concieved”(sic)) by its star, noted softcore strumpet Misty Mundae herself. In this version pierced-faced Ruby LaRocca plays the part of, um, Ruby, looking considerably more dope-sick than her Sixties counterpart as she does so. Smoking and snorting loads of ‘stuff’ during the opening credits, just like Jean Ruby is waiting for her man. When her “creepy sister-fucker” of a dealer, O-Rock (?), shows up Ruby lays down with a line from the Scratch Acid classic “She Said” and lets him have it. Her body, that is. As O-Rock mauls her unenthusiastic form Ruby contemplates the ironic junkie’s Catch-22 of her situation, relating that through the pills that she gets from the dealer she’ll be able to forget what she has to do to get them . . . Bad softcore sex follows. So bad, in fact, that O-Rock falls asleep right in the middle of it. Ruby don’t mind though, because going through O-Rock’s pants she finds a baggie of Tylenol she calls Ecstasy, and taking six of those she goes outside to play. Dimwitted druggie mind-chatter accompanies her romp through the park and a chance meeting with Opal (Mundae), and continues as the two girls wander away together to get high and make out. (There is what I assume is supposed to be a long sequence of playful seduction leading up to their getting it on, but the awkward action and dialogue make all of this foreplay seem awkward and juvenile. Picture junior high school whores on drugs trying to show what sexy grown-up free spirits they are as they vamp and tease one another while playing hooky.) O-Rock meanwhile has awakened to find his stash missing, and he leaves a vicious note behind for Ruby as he makes his exit. When Ruby comes back from the park with Opal in tow O-Rock’s death threat doesn’t faze her in the least, as she comes to find that her new playmate is packing a considerable supply of ‘stuff’ herself. And without further ado the girls change into lingerie, sample each others’ stashes, and get down to fooling around. Sort of. I guess if you were high these scenes might seem pretty hot, but extended softcore scenes of nouveau-hippie punks on dope playing around with each other gets old in a hurry. More and more shit is snorted, more and more pills are popped, and a great show of playing decadent is made (‘Oh, let’s get high and dance around together in our g-strings and high heels!’). And man does it go on for what seems like forever. Ruby’s bad forced phone-sex voiceover doesn’t help either, simply recalling the slightly more amusing bad narration heard in Pleasures of a Woman. Much fast forwarding later the girls finally take off their g-strings to simulate closer contact, but it’s all still pretty pointless. Finally, oh no, all the dope is done. (Shades of The Salton Sea’s “WE’RE OUT OF GAK!!!”) “It’s over now,” moans the narrator. But it’s not yet, as there’s still some moping around to be done before Opal goes off in search of more stuff, promising to come back right away, while Ruby sketches out into the anxiety of withdrawal. Eventually Ruby becomes so sick and desperate that she calls up another lesbian stripper, Daphne (Darian Caine), and proceeds to trade snatch for stash. (“I get you off, and you get me off.”) Having got what she came for Daphne leaves, and with her duty done Ruby quickly snorts up all of her reward. When Opal returns with her score Ruby samples some of that as well, and combined with the previous orgy’s-worth of overdoing it this extra pinch puts Ruby right over the top. Mimicking Uma’s Pulp Fiction overdose Ruby keels over and dies right in front of her new friend, who in turn can do nothing but moan and squirm around in shock. Soon however a very pissed-off O-Rock shows up to settle Opal’s nerves by force-feeding her a bottle of pills. It appears that he’s contemplating fucking her, but in the end he just takes her money and dope instead. The end. And I think all of that pretty well speaks for itself. This DVD set comes with a selection of extras I have yet to sit through, including the “Lustful Documentary” and various theatrical trailers. There’s also a separate audio CD containing Tim Tomorrow’s soundtrack to Lustful Addiction, joined by The Pink Delicates’ score from Roxanna (another Seduction Cinema double feature release in the same vein as Lustful Addiction and Pleasures of a Woman). And there are actually a couple of pretty groovy little numbers here (“Lustful Addiction Theme,” “Red, Hot, & Rollin”, “Fix”), bass-heavy period pieces with a little bit of soul, a little bit of funk, and a whole lot of bump & grind, along with some good ol’ fashioned druggie music (“Roxanna Theme,” “Falling”) and just plain cool instrumentals (“Alone,” “My End”). (And I’d swear Speedball Baby stole more than a little bit from tracks like (“Big Sky”). Most of which is not at all out of place in a softcore sleaze-o-rama. (The more folky acoustic and harmonica-laden pieces could have been comfortably passed over, though, and the “bonus” versions of soundtrack pieces with added vocals aren’t nearly as nice as the purely instrumental ones. And what the hell is with the cowpoke song (“The Coming Days of Winter”)?) A couple of points for the original version, a generous one for the second, but a couple bonus points for the surprisingly listenable CD, all equaling out to a big . . . 3 stars. * * * Seduction Cinema - www.SeductionCinema.com

MALABIMBA Directed by Andrea Bianchi            A foreign Exorcist mimic – that goes the extra mile with hardcore porn.             It all begins, as it so often does, with a séance. Conducting the ritual is Daniela (looking something like a Brazilian tranny victim of alleyway plastic surgery), a medium whose handiwork has the expected ill results: a somewhat demonic voice is channeled (“It’s negative presence!”), speaking out against the swinish hypocrisy of the assembled bluebloods and forcing lascivious displays from some of the guests before traveling, poltergeist-cam style, on a twisting mission straight into the bedchamber of Sister Sofia (Maria Angela Giordano). Forcing the nun to masturbate lewdly for a few moments the negative presence is repelled by the sign of the cross, and in a fury the unclean spirit leaps to inhabit the next best victim, sweet young sexpot Bimba (Katell Laennec).             And thus, with the sinister barking of a mechanical toy and a wicked glint in her eye, Bimba becomes the Devil’s plaything. She calls her grandmother a whore at dinner, grabs the serving boy’s cock, spits at a nun, and generally acts the possessed brat. This behavior brings the family together to discuss Bimba’s development, as well as provide a bit of background on the clan and their setting. Assembled at modernized medieval Castle Karoly, the family is ostensibly present to spend time with and look after rich castle owner Adolfo, paralyzed some time ago by a stroke. But Adolfo’s condition lends to some small amount of scheming on the hands of his vertical relatives: his mother Countess Karoly wants her second-eldest son Andrea, widower to Bimba’s mother Lucrezia, to marry Adolfo’s wife Nais in order to keep the castle and Adolfo’s fortune within the family. But Andrea wants nothing to do with a faithless whore like Nais, instead leaving her to the desperate attentions of his younger brother Giorgio.             And as Bimba’s acting-out continues to confound her family, Nais proves to be somewhat possessed herself – by a case of the hot pants. Approaching Andrea in his bedroom late one night Nais does her very best to seduce him, but even offering herself to Andrea in her best lingerie doesn’t persuade him to “have some relax.” Nais storms out understandably offended, and has her sexual frustration worked out of her ass by little Giorgio.             Bimba has been watching Nais’ display the entire time, and when she’s caught peeping by Sister Sofia she runs screaming to her room. There she masturbates with a teddy bear in a scene sure to send the filmmakers all straight to hell, and in a final fit Bimba gouges out the bear’s crotch with a butcher knife and pushes a candle into the opening. The next morning the family finds this trophy downstairs in the main hall for all to see.             This new outrage causes the Karoly family some small consternation, and theories on the girl’s emotional state run wild. (“Bimba is only having a retarded puberty that’s causing her some sexual morbidity.”) When her father tries to have a little talk with the girl she sticks her tongue in his mouth and pulls at his cock. Shocked, Andrea can only run away, and that night at a dinner party Bimba comes down to call everyone pigs and expose her bush to the banquet guests. (“Bimba, cover up yourself!”) Consultation with a doctor proves to be no help at all, as with a dismissive wave of pop psychology the quack essentially tells Andrea not to worry about it, once his daughter starts getting laid she’ll settle down.             That night a thunderstorm again enflames Bimba’s burgeoning passion, and after masturbating feverishly she creeps about the castle and spies upon her father as he finally succumbs to Nais’ temptations. Aroused even further by their unabashed sexuality Bimba sneaks into the chamber of paralytic Uncle Adolfo and, after performing a truly arousing striptease, proceeds to go down on him. Bimba’s blowjob is one that would raise the dead, but in Adolfo’s case it instead gives him another stroke, this time a fatal one.             With rich old Adolfo out of the way there are some heated words between family members regarding his estate, and Bimba’s nymphomaniacal disruptions are forgotten. That is until Sister Sofia interrupts to request that she be allowed special supervision over the troubled girl; the Sister was the one who discovered Bimba naked in Adolfo’s bed after his ‘accident,’ and is convinced she can help save the girl’s soul. This even as Bimba is upstairs masturbating with another one of her toys and making love to her reflection in a mirror. Sister Sofia breaks in on this Janus coupling and, attempting to sooth the girl’s sobbing pleas for help, stays with her until she falls asleep. When Sofia awakens she goes in search of her young charge, only to find Bimba peeking in on her father’s lovemaking yet again. After convincing the Sister to watch with her for a moment Bimba leads her back to her bedroom and begins working some of the wiles of seduction she learned from watching Nais. As she works a hand between Sofia’s legs it looks like Bimba is well on her way to getting the Sister to perform an unnatural act, but with a burst of conscience Sister Sofia comes to her nunly senses and bolts back to her own room. Bimba won’t be so easily evaded however and, nude, she stalks after Sofia and corners her in her bedroom. Speaking in a familiar demonic tone Bimba chastises the Sister, accusing her of awful sins before offering her a single chance to save the girl: offer her soul in exchange for Bimba’s. Sister Sofia of course can’t allow the girl’s soul to remain in jeopardy, and passively agrees to allow the demon to have its way with her. Forcing the quivering nun to undress Bimba throws her onto the bed and goes down on her, then kisses Sofia passionately before the demon forces itself inside of her, moving out of the girl to possess the greater prize, a true bride of Christ. In the morning Bimba is found to have returned to her former self, much to her father’s relief. Sofia however still has a demon to wrestle, and she does so in the classic way.             Bimba being the girl’s name and ‘mala’ meaning bad, the title of this film is essentially “Bad Bimba” – a standout in the field of bad porn titles. But perhaps one of the film’s alternate titles puts it better: Malicious Whore. (Why any parents would want to name their daughter ‘whore’ is never explained.) A word about the sex here – while the film can be considered hardcore in that it features a number of scenes of full penetration, there are no ‘money shots’ to be found here. This places the intentions of the filmmakers in an ambiguous position; is this a sex film or a horror film? Which came first, and which was added to spice up what would otherwise have been a truly tepid genre offering? No matter, the combination of the two succeeds through sheer perversity. Or fails, depending on your point of view, but if you happen to appreciate a little X-rated demon possession now and again, Malabimba just might be for you.             Katell is a little smoker for sure, with a wide seductive face, rich sensual lips, and a sweet little body that any man, and a number of women, would love to possess. And while there is something of a fragmentary subplot running around in the film about the fact that Bimba might be possessed by the spirit of her dead mother Lucrezia (hence the séance and start of all the trouble), there is no explanation given as to what made Lucrezia a vicious and vindictive old slut who was desperately hungry for the souls of innocent girls. Again, perhaps the title Malicious Whore says it best.            This DVD presents Malabimba in widescreen NTSC/Region Free format, in the original Italian with English subtitles. No special features to speak of, unless you consider the film’s remarkable perversion. * * * $24.95 from Luminous Film & Video Wurks – www.lfvw.com – P.O. Box 289, Hampton Bays, NY, 11946

LE MARI DE LA COIFFEUSE (THE HAIRDRESSER'S HUSBAND) Directed by Patrice LeConte             So according to Roger Ebert, this was one of 1990’s ten best films. I don’t know, it looks like a smelly French chick flick to me, but we’ll see where this “uncommon erotic classic” takes us.             We open with some French kid practicing his belly dancing by the seashore. Yes, that’s correct. The Arabian music continues through the credits, after which we find an older gentleman reminiscing as he cuts his own hair. He’s thinking about the beach at Luc-sur-Mer, and the woolen bathing suits his mother knitted for him and his brother. Complete with hanging pom-poms, “like cherries.” “I was always sore between the legs,” he remembers, due to the fact that the wool never dried. But on the other hand it taught him to always take care of his balls (this as his younger self plays croquet on the sand).             Back in the city, the 12-year-old lad, Antoine, loves going to the barber’s. Not because of a haircut fetish, but because he had short hot pants for the owner of the shop, red-headed Rubenesque Mme. Scheaffer; her “pronounced body odor” drove him wild every time. And on a hot day in June of 1947, through her open blouse he caught sight of her “heavy but ideally rounded breasts,” something which sends him into a trance state of puppy lust. At dinner that night, when his father asks him what he wants to do in life, Antoine says, “I want to marry a hairdresser.” And is promptly slapped in the face. Antoine’s resolve, however, remains unbroken.             Cut to the elder Antoine (Jean Rochefort), who sits in a barbershop enchanted by the “slightly sad but gracious” Mathilde (Anna Galiena). He had met her some time ago after she had taken over the shop from the previous owner, Isidore Agopian, which she then ran all by herself. At first she put him off for a haircut, saying that she was waiting on another appointment. Antoine lingered in the area and over the next half-hour saw that there really was no ‘other customer.’ “But what disturbed me most,” he remembers, “Was that once again, after years of searching, I was in love with a hairdresser.”             But Antoine’s first hairdresser crush ended badly; Mme. Scheaffer committed suicide, with a “massive dose of barbiturates.” Antoine reached her shop just far enough ahead of the police to stare at the crevasse between her plump thighs before the cops broke down her door. Recalling this incident as he gets his hair cut, the elder Antoine suddenly says to Mathilde, “Will you marry me?” “35 francs,” is her response, for the haircut.             Three weeks later Antoine again visits Mathilde’s shop. Busy with another customer, she acts like she doesn’t recognize her suitor. After his haircut, as he pays Mathilde tells him, “I don’t know what got into you. You were probably making fun of me. But if you weren’t teasing,” she continues, “Then I appreciate your proposal.” And just like that she consents to marry him. And Antoine is as happy as a little boy.             “When told I was marrying a hairdresser, my father died of a heart attack. Out of loyalty, my mother refused to meet Mathilde or to visit the shop.” On top of the fact that Mathilde has no family, the wedding party is a small one. Held at the shop and accompanied by Antoine’s perennial Arabian dance music, in attendance are only Antoine’s brother, his wife, and Mr. Agopian. (As well as a drop-in customer who wanted his beard shaved because, “They say it makes me look sad.” “Too bad,” he says, looking in the mirror after Mathilde stops in the middle of the party and cleans him up for free). Antoine plans to live a simple, blissful, insulated life with Mathilde, and she, the quiet solitary type herself, seems most agreeable. They spend a short honeymoon at Luc-sur-Mer, then return to life on their “stationary luxury liner.”             One day Antoine is having his hair trimmed when a nervous-looking man hurries into the shop and frantically requests a haircut. A regal-looking woman enters the shop after him and, after sitting down for a moment, rises, spins his chair around and slaps him loudly across the face. The man, Julien Gora, introduces his wife Germaine and himself, and the scene is over as soon as it started as Germaine bids them goodbye and leaves the shop. The newlyweds are asked for their opinion of the woman, and Mathilde thinks that Germaine is “very nice,” while Antoine declares her “magnificent.” Julien agrees, asserting that she is at her loveliest when she is angry. Shortly afterward the couple locks up for the day and begin to get intimate right there behind the counter. Mathilde asks Antoine to promise her one thing, that being that when he no longer loves her he will not pretend that he does.             On another day a mother hauls her struggling brat in for a much needed haircut. The child screams and pitches a fit, hiding under the chair and doing everything he can to avoid his fate. As his mother bemoans her situation (“He’s not even ours. We adopted him. Big mistake!”), Antoine puts on the belly dancing music and begins to dance like a fool, somehow charming the kid into sitting still for his haircut. All the while Antoine thinks about how fine it is not to have any children of their own. Or friends, for that matter. “What could they add to our lives?”             When mother and child leave Antoine puts on another record and coerces Mathilde to dance with him. She does, and as he spins dreams of the future she begs him to hold her tightly, fearful that the day may come when he’ll no longer want to dance with her. He reassures her, but there is a foreboding flash-forward where we see Antoine, alone, staring at nothing in silent sadness.             Another time Mathilde is tending to the poet Mr. Doneker. As she listens to his poems, and as he tells her that they fade away and die, like flowers do, Antoine is overcome. Even with the apparently blind client in the chair Antoine moves to stand next to Mathilde, massaging her breasts and sliding down her panties. He moves his hands up between her legs, working on her even while she works on Mr. Doneker.             Antoine recalls that in ten years they only had one fight. Bored and listless, Mathilde asked him one day if he’d like a haircut. As he sat in the chair, during the small talk that ensued Antoine made a disparaging remark about a favorite actor of Mathilde’s. She became “annoyed and silent,” but finished the haircut. “That was our only fight.”             That night neither one of them can sleep. Mathilde comes down from the apartment upstairs and finds Antoine smoking a cigarette, something he hadn’t done before. She joins him and asks for a cigarette. They sit together, smoking, and when he apologizes she says not at all, it was she who got ‘carried away over nothing.’ She would like a drink, though. They don’t keep booze, but what they do have, Antoine tells her, is Eau de Cologne. “Want to poison us?” Mathilde laughs. “Let’s try it,” Antoine says. Putting on one of his records and mixing several bottles into one, Antoine dances about, shaking the mixture like a cocktail. He pours them each a glass, and…”Not bad,” Mathilde admits.             In the morning they lie on the floor together, surrounded by the mess of the night before. “We drank a lot. Weird things,” Antoine’s narration tells us. “We made love standing before a mirror.” There was talk about all of the cocks in all of the women in all of the world at that moment, with Mathilde being the happiest. He remembers her saying that she would never leave him – “‘Til death do us part.” And when he opens his eyes, he sees a little boy peeking in the front window.             Later they visit Mr. Agopian in the old folks’ home. He’s a bit sour, and after a brief chat he hustles them out, the way he sees the families of other residents leave almost as soon as they’ve arrived. “Stay happy,” he tells them as they depart.             Back at the shop Mathilde cuts the hair of a man who perpetually argues with his friend. Today they are bickering over the subject of death, and when asked for his opinion Antoine says, “Death is yellow and smells of vanilla.” He cannot wait for the patrons to leave, and as they do Mathilde remarks that her client seems to stoop more and more every day. “Every day he gets older,” Antoine tells her. “Life’s disgusting,” Mathilde says. Shortly thereafter a thunderstorm begins. The lights go out and they make love.             Afterward Mathilde rushes out into the rain, saying she’s picking up some yogurt for that evening. But instead she goes to the walkway by the shore and throws herself into the ocean. “My love,” her voiceover says, “I’m going before you do. I’m going before your desire dies. Then we’d be left with tenderness alone. And I know that wouldn’t be enough.” As her sheet-covered body is examined by emergency personnel her voice continues, saying in part, “I go with the memory of the best years of my life. The ones you gave me. I kiss you slowly until I die…I loved only you. I’m going so you’ll never forget me. Mathilde.”             As her corpse is carried away we see Antoine, standing in the rain, reading her suicide note.             Afterward Antoine sits alone in the shop, doing the crossword. Some scruffy fellow comes in and sits down, and Antoine offers him a shampoo. Putting on his music again Antoine begins to do his dance, and his customer gets up to join him, even giving him a few pointers. Abruptly Antoine shuts off the music and sits down. “The hairdresser will be back,” he tells the man.             That’s right, I spoiled the ending. And I’d do it again. Hell, you could see it coming all the way from 1947, but you had to endure all manner of foreign bullshit before it finally arrived. I mean, you’ve got to be fucking kidding; a whole movie about a fucking relationship in a fucking barber shop? What kind of frog-gigging one-trick stage play ratshit is this?             I’m sure the message is something about appreciating the time you have with your partner, blah blah blah, but why make the entire audience sick and old with your sordidly sentimental view of romance while you’re at it? Wouldn’t you know it, the real moral of the story turns out to be that the sweet and beautiful woman’s form of love proves to be the most hurtful and selfish imaginable. Bravo, Frenchy.             This tale of an aging Frenchman, interspersed with childhood flashbacks of a young Frenchboy, is simply maudlin. It really makes the 81-minute running time seem so much longer and more painful than it actually is that it literally took me all fucking day to get through this thing. And as glorious as Mathilde seemed I was practically praying for her death before the film was even halfway through, just to get the wretched thing over with.              Speaking of dragging things out there are, of course, several bonus features. These consist of a theatrical trailer and two featurettes, “LeConte on LeConte Part One,” with the director, and “The Hairdresser’s Recollections,” with star Anna Galiena. And if you think I’m gonna sit still for either one of those then you can go and suck a dog’s dick.             Now, thanks to this shitpot of love, I can no longer stand Arabian music. Which before I thought was pretty keen. Even the concept of belly dancing is no longer appealing to me, and who doesn’t like a good belly dance now and again? Nice going, twench.             In French, with English subtitles.             Oh, yeah, just one more thing: Fuck you, Roger Ebert.   (Thanks to Exploitation Retrospect – www.dantenet.com) O Severin – www.severin-films.com

MIRRORS Directed by Alexandre Aja             Watching Queefer Sutherland usually makes my skin crawl. I mean, all the way back to Lost Boys. Hell, I might even actually watch 24 if anyone but he were playing Jack Bauer. But the advertisements for Mirrors looked even creepier than its star, so I figured it was worth a look. And for the most part it is.             The film begins on an ominous note of familiarity as a lone individual runs panicked through the sickly green-tinted halls and platforms of a New York subway station. The fact that he appears to be a security guard himself makes his situation even more desperate. Blockading himself in a locker room the man seems secure for the moment, until all of the locker doors slowly creak open, a mirror in each reflecting his terrified visage. Turning to the large mirror over the sinks the guard makes a feeble attempt at begging for mercy from an unknown entity, even as the mirror begins to fracture and his own image suddenly becomes savagely hostile.             Roll opening credits, then cut to a clock radio sounding an eight o’clock alarm. Ben Carson (Queefer) gets up, takes a shower, then grinds a pill up into a glass and swills it down with tap water. Ben, it turns out, is a former detective with the New York Police Department, currently on suspension after having shot and killed another officer in an undercover SNAFU a year ago. Separated from his wife Amy (Paula Patton), who retained custody of their children Michael and Daisy, Ben’s been fighting alcoholism for some time. He’s now unemployed and living with his sister Angela (Amy Smart).             On top of three months’ sobriety however, things start to look up when Ben finds a job as a night watchman and begins working as a security guard at the old Mayflower department store. Destroyed by fire five years ago, left dark and stained by smoke damage, the immense store resembles a decayed mansion more than a shopping center. The fact that the old building used to house St. Matthew’s hospital doesn’t make it any less ghostly. When Ben relieves daytime guard Lorenzo Sapelli (John Shrapnel) on his first shift, as Sapelli shows him around Ben comments upon how clean all of the mirrors are in the midst of the wreckage. Sapelli tells him that this was the work of Gary Lewis, the guard whom Ben is replacing. “He was completely obsessed with these damn mirrors. Spent the entire night cleaning them.”             Later Ben drops by the old homestead to celebrate his son’s birthday, and for his efforts is given some amount of shit by Amy for coming around unannounced. Even as Ben makes the point that he’s trying to change, the reunion does not go well.             Back at the department store the next night, Ben makes his rounds. The sinister old ruin, still filled with charred mannequins, definitely fits the description of a haunted place. That haunted feeling gels as Ben notices a fresh handprint on one of the mirrors; as he tries in vain to rub it off, he notices that there are prints covering the entire surface of the floor-to-ceiling looking glass.             During the following night the atmosphere of the Mayflower grows increasingly spooky. The handprint mirror fractures under Ben’s touch, just before he’s suddenly overcome by hideous hallucinations of burning. When he recovers Ben finds Gary Lewis’ wallet on the floor of the department store, and it doesn’t take him long to match the name to the one Sapelli gave him or the locker that still holds Gary’s belongings. Searching through the wallet for clues, folded up among the bills Ben finds a sheet of notepaper with a single word on it: ESSEKER.             Anguished screams draw Ben deeper into the Mayflower, and his frantic search for their source reveals a chilling disparity; the images in the glass appear to reflect another more painful reality, one that seems to have captured the anguish of those who perished in the great fire.             Meanwhile, back at home, Michael is already experiencing some unwanted intrusion from behind the mirrors.             The following day Ben receives a package from Gary Lewis. The box is filled with clippings on the Mayflower fire, and when Ben goes to the job site to talk to Sapelli about it the old man tells him that Gary’s body has just been found in the subway station. Straightaway Ben goes to see Amy on the job at the police morgue and asks to see Gary’s corpse. It’s no surprise that the body is that of the guard we saw in the beginning, and when Ben demands to see Gary’s file he notices a discrepancy in one of the crime scene photos: the mirror image just doesn’t match the scene. Ben tries to explain all of this to Amy, but she is skeptical in the face of his claims about the evil mirrors. “What medication are you taking to stop drinking?” she asks him. Ben hands over the prescription bottle. “That’s a strong drug. It has a lot of serious side effects.”             Meanwhile, at her apartment Angie is preparing for a bath. Gracing us with some ass and side boob she climbs into the tub, watched with quiet hostility by her reflection in the mirror. When the reflection takes action Angie is forced to mimic its movements, and sadly she comes to a very gruesome end. So gruesome in fact that even Ben’s buddy Larry (Jason Flemyng) is startled when he is called in to investigate the crime scene. When Ben arrives and pushes his way through the assembled police officers, he is so overwhelmed that he vomits into the sink.             Brushing off even Amy’s pleas to come stay with her and the kids, not wanting them to fall under the lethal spell of the glass, Ben heads to the Mayflower and tries to destroy the mirrors. But they are impervious even to gunfire, as the spider webs of shattered glass shrink in upon themselves and the bullet holes are sealed over. When Ben desperately asks the mirrors what it is that they want from him, a nail-thin name carves itself into the glass: ESSEKER.             Ben asks Larry to run down the name for him, but to no avail. In the news clippings he received there are multiple references to Mayflower head of security Terrence Berry, who admitted to setting the Mayflower blaze but claimed that ‘the mirrors’ were the ones who killed his wife and three children. Berry is now deceased, but Ben visits the hospital where he resided until his death. There he is shown a videotape of Berry, seriously disfigured by burn tissue, explaining that the mirrors killed his family because he couldn’t find ESSEKER. Ben makes a connection, and rushes over to Amy’s house.             There he removes every mirror he can carry, and is in the process of painting over the immovable fixtures when Amy arrives home. The children are already frightened, and Amy is concerned for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is Ben’s front lawn target practice on one of the mirrors in a failed attempt to demonstrate their unearthly nature.             Embarrassed and shaken up Ben takes off to search for additional clues, only to narrowly avoid an accident when his car’s rearview mirror acts up. Exploring the flooded basement of the Mayflower, Ben follows the old hospital signs to a walled-off portion of the underground labyrinth. Breaking through the water-damaged brick he comes across a chamber of reflecting glass, in the middle of which sits a solitary chair. Fitted with arm and leg restraints.             After a spooky encounter in the glass room Ben again contacts Larry, this time to try and find medical records from the hospital. As the institution has been closed for over 50 years this may prove a daunting task, but Ben is convinced that ESSEKER is the key to the mystery of the horrors in which he is involved. And he may be right: Larry manages to find a file on one Anna Esseker, age 12. But it’s not because of any relation to the Mayflower that Larry was able to find her file, it’s because of an unsolved case dating back to October 6, 1952. On that date all of the psychiatric patients of St. Matthew’s apparently died in a murder-suicide slaughter that resulted in the hospital’s closure.             As Ben reviews Anna’s file he learns that she was a violent schizophrenic, but also finds an inconsistency that indicates she may have been released from the hospital only days before the massacre. When Ben holds a picture of Anna up to a mirror, the glass literally cracks with wicked anticipation.             At Amy’s house, meanwhile, she finds Michael talking to a mirror in his bedroom. When she calls him away his reflection remains in the glass, staring at her. Amy calls Ben, and the two frantically cover all of the reflecting surfaces in the home; mirrors are painted over, and newspapers are hung over the windows.             With his family temporarily ‘safe,’ Ben drives off to see what he can find out about Anna Esseker in the hope that he can prevent any further deaths.             There is still a full half-hour of running time left, but it all goes toward building an escalating series of shocking and unnatural scenes as the riddle of the mirrors becomes increasingly dangerous and time becomes increasingly short. There are a number of very effective twists and a shocking moment or two, all very much worth watching.             The special effects, by Gregory Nicotero and Howard Berger, are for the most part incredibly effective. The unrated version really showcases the gore, concentrating on a few spectacular demises rather than providing a watered-down finger-painting of blood, guts and victims. Aside from the gruesome burn makeup the viewer is treated to such visuals as a face being slowly pulled apart, a throat sliced clean through the windpipe, and the like.             Among the optical effects there are some impressive blizzards of broken glass, and even the kaleidoscopic opening credits trigger a sense of vertigo as mirror images of the cityscape tumble together from all angles. There are a couple of scenes utilizing that Francis Bacon / Joel-Peter Witkin blurry head effect that’s been over-used since Jacob’s Ladder, but that can be lived with. And as mentioned before, the very setting of the Mayflower itself is particularly conducive to the chilling nature of the story.             The ending may be a little heavy on the action hero/video game stylization, one that doesn’t entirely mesh with the atmosphere of suspense and investigation that preceded it. But as a violent multi-staged conclusion it is definitely not without its excitement. And the creature Ben ends up confronting is kind of spectacular in its own right as a fevered example of sick horror.             And then there’s the secondary Twilight Zone-style ending that wraps it all up… (Which, together with the preceding climax, makes for a much better finale than the sappy, candy-ass, douchebag new age alternative ending found as an option on the DVD.)             All in all a most welcome surprise, even if the film is another take-off of the Asian vengeful spirit horror movie. (With a touch of The Haunting of Hill House here as well.) Mirrors is genuinely unsettling in parts, and with a keen storyline matching solid pacing, acting and effects this is definitely one of Hollywood’s better horror remakes. (After remaking Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Alexandre Aja here reworks Sung-ho Kim’s Korean thriller Geoul Sokeuro, AKA Into the Mirror.) Check it out. * * *

MURDER SET PIECES Directed by Nick Palumbo See www.horrorreview.com for full review. * * * * Fright Flix Productions – www.frightflix.com

MY BLOODY VALENTINE (2009) Directed by Patrick Lussier             Yet another in a long series of slasher remakes, My Bloody Valentine was actually the last film I saw in a theater. The experience was so underwhelming that I haven’t been back since, not even for the addictive popcorn butter. Not necessarily because of the film itself however; I was barely able to concentrate on the movie. Between the drunken local brillo-bags whispering throughout the entire film down front, and the doped-out fairy alternately screaming and cackling hysterically somewhere behind, the ambiance was a little distracting. And having to wade through the bums washing their hair in the restroom sinks after getting out of the shit-filled stall didn’t add much to the experience or the appetite. Oh yeah, and then there’s the fact that the lousy theater showed this 3D film in 2D only. Fucking AMC. I’m no fancy lad, but if I’m paying for goods and services, including ridiculously overpriced food and drink, how about a little actual service? I know it’s too much to ask underage minimum-wage slaves to provide this, or other customers to exert any sense of decency or courtesy, but for fucksake, man! Anyway, once this came out on DVD I promptly rented it to watch it at home, where I could clog my own toilet, wash my own hair, and get loaded and chortle like a dick as I saw fit.              The film opens with a montage of newspaper articles accompanied by voiceover reporting of the Valentine’s Day collapse at the Hanniger Mine. The owner’s kid, Tom Hanniger, apparently failed to properly bleed the gas lines, which led to an explosion and subsequent cave-in. The lone survivor of the disaster, Harry Warden, allegedly murdered the other miners trapped underground with him in order to preserve his own air supply.             One year later, Warden remains in a coma at Harmony Memorial Hospital. That is until a vivid dream of the explosive collapse snaps him awake and the killing begins again. By the time Sheriff Burke (Tom Atkins) arrives on the scene the hospital is littered with bodies and body parts. Including a human heart left in a box of chocolates along with a bloody holiday greeting. Harry himself is nowhere to be found.             At the Hanniger Mine that night the useless local punks are having a party, ironically attended by Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles) and his girlfriend Sarah (Jaime King). The party is crashed by a psycho in a gas mask and mining coveralls, and bodies rapidly begin to pile up: one kid gets his eyeball driven out of his skull, another has his face split with a pickaxe, and a girl has her head severed at mouth level with a shovel in a nice and grisly half-decap Day of the Dead-style scene.             Our protagonist Tom is left alone in the mine with the killer when Sarah is driven away from the scene by Axel (Kerr Smith), the boyfriend of her girlfriend Irene (Betsy Rue). The killer closes in on Tom, and it looks like curtains for him until Sheriff Burke shows up and blasts the killer, now largely recognized as Harry Warden, several times with his service revolver. As Tom lies on the ground in shock, covered in blood, Harry retreats into the crumbling mine.             Ten years later the town is still talking about the Valentine’s Day massacre that claimed 22 lives. Axel Palmer is now the county sheriff, married to Sarah, and cheating on her with adorable borderline jailbait Megan (Megan Boone), a co-worker of Sarah’s who now happens to be pregnant. Tom has been away for years, but he now returns to Harmony to sell the family mine after his father’s death. Upon being informed by his father’s unforgiving friend Ben (Kevin Tighe) that the signing of the paperwork has been postponed, Tom checks into the local Thunderbird Motel.             Still plagued by his brush with death, Tom pops some pills as he listens to the truck driver and the tramp getting it on in the next room. Their night ends badly; when Irene, Axel’s ex-girlfriend, catches fuck buddy Frank secretly taping their screwing she grabs a pistol from her purse and chases after him, naked, to confront him in the parking lot. Where he gets a pickaxe through the top of his skull. The gas-masked killer, dressed in mining attire, chases Irene back into the motel for a little cat-and-mouse, but the game is interrupted by the Motel’s diminutive proprietor (who resembles a miniature Adrienne Barbeau). She gets the axe as well in a violent puppeteering scene before the killer returns his attentions to Irene.             As police investigate the scene, taking multiple photographs of Irene, naked and butchered in heart-shaped tub with her own heart torn out, Tom pays a visit to Sarah at her parents’ grocery store. The reunion doesn’t go so well, but Sarah is evidently moved nonetheless. That evening Sheriff Palmer receives Irene’s heart in a Valentine’s candy box, further fueling local rumors that Harry Warden has come back. After all, rumor has it that his body was never found…             That same evening Tom’s appearance at a local bar nearly causes a riot. The townsfolk still blame him for the murders, even after all this time, and he’s fresh out of friends in this part of the world. His old rival Axel even thinks he might be involved in the most recent murders, seeing as how Tom shows up on the Motel room porno tape as he passes by the window of the passed-away lovers.             The following day Tom has another chat with Sarah, getting a little more of a lecture than he bargained for. Properly chastised he goes out to the mine to talk to Ben, descending into the tunnels by railcar. From out of nowhere Tom is assaulted by the pickaxe-wielding madman, who knocks him around before locking him into an equipment cage. The miner stares at Tom for a moment, giving off some heavy Darth Vader breath, then moves on down the tunnel. Where Tom’s unpleasant escort in the mine, Red, who just happened to be on the hostile side of the confrontation at the bar, is on the line trying to get in touch with Ben. When the killer comes after him Red puts up a good fight, but he gets it in the skull in the end. As Tom watches helplessly the unknown miner hacks into the body over and over again, disappearing just before a party of other miners arrives.             While getting stitched up at the hospital Tom tells Ben it was Harry Warden who killed Red. Sarah happens to be doing some charity work at the hospital, and when she stops by and starts asking questions Tom tells her that he went to the mine to tell Ben he was no longer interested in selling the property. Axel has been monitoring all of these conversations, and he pops out now to have an out-of-line confrontation with Tom about Sarah. Then, to dispel local rumors, Axel tells a tale of vigilante justice; about how their fathers, and Ben, took it upon themselves to kill Harry Warden. “And Sheriff Burke covered it up.”             A search party is formed, and the group from the hospital, along with Burke and a deputy, head out into the woods looking for Harry’s grave. They find the spot, but the shallow hole is empty. Ben and Burke both swear that Harry was dead when they buried him, but it looks like putting the legend to rest isn’t going to be so easy after all.             Axel takes Tom back to the police station, where Tom goads the sheriff into another fight over Sarah. After Axel punches him out he wants to lock him up, but as the other miners confirmed that Tom was trapped in the cage when they arrived on the scene of Red’s murder it looks like he’s off the hook.             That night at home Ben sits watch against the possible return of Harry Warden. Having nodded off over his shotgun and bottle of whiskey, something awakens the old miner and he unsteadily gets up to investigate. When he returns, laughing at himself for “aiming at shadows,” the killer materializes and does him in. (Another one right through the eye.) The following day Ben’s eviscerated body, minus the heart, is found lying on Harry’s grave.             With panic mounting throughout the small mining town, Sarah and Megan hurry to lock up the store that evening. (Pork rinds on the rack – take two drinks!) It’s a spooky after-hours scene as the lights suddenly go out and the girls realize they’re not alone. Lots of screaming and running around follows, with the ladies eventually locking themselves in the store’s rear office. In hysterics as the killer begins chopping through the door after them they try the rear window, but in the process Megan is abruptly dragged away into the darkness. Hitting the store alarm Sarah bolts out the front door, running into Axel right outside as she does so. Together they go looking for Megan, and find her cut up in the alley behind the store. Her heart lies in the candy box between her legs, and the very words she wrote on Axel’s Valentine’s Day card are written in blood on the wall behind her.             Meanwhile the killer shows up at the Palmer household and dispatches the nanny, Rosa. The officer stationed outside in her patrol car is startled when Burke shows up, waving a pistol and urgently telling her that the killer is inside the house right now. As Burke guards the porch the officer goes inside, where she finds the Palmers’ son Noah unharmed and Rosa’s sizzling corpse tumbling in the dryer. Just as she cries out for Burke the killer appears on the porch and catches him under the jaw with his pick. As the point protrudes from the retired sheriff’s mouth his assailant gives the pickaxe a strong pull, sending Burke’s jaw hurtling toward the screen.             Sarah, now at the hospital, gets a cell phone call from Tom. Tearfully she tries to tell him that Harry Warden is back, but Tom disagrees; he needs her to trust him, and he has something important to show her. When Axel shows up at the hospital ten minutes later, he’s less than pleased to hear that his wife has checked out and left with “That nice Tom Hannigan.” At about the same time Axel gets a call from his deputy, telling him that the report he requested on Tom has come in. And he’s really going to want to hear what it says.             And now the film starts to melt down. Over the next 25 minutes or so it moves from a gory slasher into a sloppy head game of back-and-forth whodunnitism. Characters literally chase around blaming each other for everything before the film finally reaches a conclusion. Which, with its High Tension-style ‘surprise’ ending, makes the entire film seem like a con. The finale just doesn’t sit right; the whole machismo contest running throughout the film ends in a weak psychological showdown that simply doesn’t satisfy. Plus, by this point there’s only one more killing in the film, which makes all of the drama hardly worth the effort.             The film is faithful to the genre in many respects, as there are multiple butchered female bodies and the requisite bit of T&A. And of course the shrieking attempts to escape the madman’s rampage. While the special effects, especially the puppeteering, are generally very good, they are kind of spotty; you can actually see the molding seam on the plastic pickaxe in places, and the CGI blood is pretty evident during Burke’s murder.             After endless credits there are a number of special features, including a look at the film’s FX (“Sex, Blood & Screams”), a barely alternate ending, gag reel, deleted and extended scenes, etc.             In short, none too stellar. * Lionsgate

MYSTICS IN BALI Directed by H. Tjut Djalil             This early Eighties ‘classic’ is a fine Halloween movie, what with all of the cackling witchery, grotesque visages and gruesomely cheesy effects. It may not be as good as the Encounter of the Spooky Kind films, but it’s definitely aiming for the same vein.             (Oh yeah, Spoiler Alert!)             Mystics in Bali starts out on a swell note as dancers in Indonesian demon costumes cavort behind a credits list that plays out like the lineup of some Indian voodoo hip-hop troupe. After a barrage of colorful names we find “American” author Catherine (Ilona Agathe Bastian; actually a German broad – check out those furry armpits!) trying to convince her Balinese boyfriend Myhendra to help her accomplish some research in the area of black magic. Specifically Leyak black magic, “The most terrifying magic there is!” Cathy wants to learn the way of Leyak through its practice, ‘just the way she learned voodoo in Africa,’ and she persuades Hendra to introduce her to the most infamous practitioner in the region. And, after a bit of kissy-face in an above-ground cemetery, Hendra leads her into the jungle on a dark and stormy night to meet the Queen of the Leyak.             A disfigured old witch with Freddy Krueger fingernails and a voice like Yoda on estrogen, the sorceress’ appearance is preceded by her high-pitched trademark cackle (not unlike the witches of Western cinema; play this loud enough and you won’t need any other soundtrack come Samhain). With much laughter and theatrics the Queen agrees to take Catherine on as her “disciple,” and after instructing her to return again tomorrow night she reaches out her clawed hand to shake on the deal. Cathy grips the outstretched limb, only to have the offered hand come off in her own; when she drops the hand in fright it crawls away and quickly scampers off after its owner.             The following night the Queen of Leyak gleefully greets the initiates again, but this time she remains hidden in the thick jungle foliage. She asks Cathy to hold her payment of jewels out in the palm of her hand, and when the girl does so a long spiny red tongue emerges from the bushes and eagerly laps them up. “Now I need blood. I’m very thirsty!” From the laundry basket they’ve brought along, Cathy and Hendra remove five bottles of blood, each of which the tongue drains in turn. “Mmm, good, delicious – this is good blood!” (Cackle!)             For the first lesson Catherine is ordered to take off her skirt. With some hesitation she does so, and the tongue, crackling with wicked energy, again reaches out. This time it scratches some mantras of Leyak in the form of a dancing demon on the girl’s quivering thigh (“I need to write the magic spell in a secret place!”). As Catherine replaces her skirt the tongue extends to her a “cloth of black magic words” that she is to carry with her when she returns the following night, at which time she is also instructed to wear traditional tribal undergarments. (Hey, wait a minute, are these Leyaks or Mormons?)             On her way to her lesson the next evening, alone, Catherine stumbles into a grave – complete with papier-mache skeleton, white mice and haunted house ‘Woo-oo-oo-ooo!’ effects trigger. As the sound effects continue (cue owl; cue wolf…) Cathy makes her way to the site where the ever-hysterical Queen awaits. An awkward (read: goofy) dance-off/laugh-off takes place, and the following day, as Catherine meets up with Hendra, she tells him of how she and the Leyak Master were transformed into pigs (via a crude and unsightly air bladder process). Catherine will soon be a Leyak master herself, she proclaims.             Myhendra takes this troubling news to his Uncle, hoping that there exists a spell strong enough to counter the evil power of the Leyak. Of course there is, asserts Uncle: otherwise the world would have been completely taken over by now. The secret, Uncle tells his concerned nephew as they wander through some beautifully ornate Balinese temples, is in the occult mantras of holy words. Some of which are imparted to Hendra on the spot, along with a powerful little kris dagger.             Later, back at the hotel, Cathy tells Hendra of the telepathic power she’s received as a result of her continued lessons. When Hendra hears Cathy’s story of being transformed into a ball of fire and destroying another one, he tells her that the flaming ball could be her soul, and that by extinguishing the other fireball she may have actually killed someone. “(Gasp!) Hendra, this is turning into the most horrible nightmare!” Suddenly Cathy starts to feel very unwell; refusing Hendra’s offer to fetch a doctor she tells him that she’s to return to the graveyard tonight where her ailment will be cured by the Leyak.             But instead of curing Catherine the laughing old witch puts her into a trance – and in seconds Cathy’s head unexpectedly detaches itself from her body and lifts into the air, dragging behind it the girl’s internal organs. Heart, lungs, intestines, all dance in the air below the flying head as the witch sends it sailing up into the night sky. “Catherine, I gave you invaluable lessons in the black arts,” the Queen says to the floating horror. “And now it’s time for you to pay. I’m your mistress and you have to obey my orders at all times. And now, I will have to borrow your head for a short time. And then I will obtain total power!”             Elsewhere a pair of men sit outside a house in which a midwife is helping a pregnant mother give birth. As they talk with concern about the procedure, the flying head comes soaring in through a window, striking the midwife and knocking her right through a wall. Approaching the terrified mother-to-be the fanged apparition settles down between her legs and literally sucks the baby right out of her. When the men hesitatingly enter the room the head sails right past them, leaving a dead woman in its wake.             Returning to the graveyard, the head and organs are reunited with Catherine’s body to the Queen’s crows of success. Telling Cathy that she is now cured of her illness, the Queen also promises to retain the girl as her disciple if she so desires. But, “If you’d like to stop – perhaps later!” Catherine thanks the evil old woman for everything, but she thinks she’s learned enough lessons for one lifetime. As the apprentice takes her leave, behind her the Queen vows that she’ll never let her get away.             And sure enough, the following night finds Cathy once again facing the Queen. But the old witch isn’t looking so old anymore: at their last meeting she appeared considerably less hideous than before, but now she’s practically glowing with youth and vitality. In a trance-like state the two women dance around in a circle until they both fall to the ground, whereupon their faces begin to bulge with scales and their tongues become forked. Another gooey metamorphosis takes place, this time turning the women into snakes. Together the serpents creep across the jungle floor until they come across a burrow, into which they both descend. A little lesbian snakewitch action perhaps? No, not quite…             Catherine wakes up in bed with a kiss from Myhendra. And immediately throws him off as she starts to gag. Rushing to the bathroom Cathy pukes up a green mess of slime, corn…and live mice. When Hendra asks her what’s wrong, Cathy doesn’t know: “All I can recall is that I saw the Leyak Queen, and we laughed a lot together, and then we went to this strange place where I saw plenty of delicious looking delicacies, and I ate a lot of the things that were on the table…”             A short time later Cathy moves into a private house to work on her book about Leyak magic. And in no time at all she begins to suffer additional discomfort – just before her head tears itself away from her body and, guts dangling in the wind, flies out of a window. This last part is observed by the same Balinese girl who’s been creeping around and peeping at Catherine throughout the film; a curious look spreads across her face, and somewhere in the darkness a woman screams.             Catherine wakes up in her bed with a sore throat and blood on her mouth. “It must have been a dream,” she says to herself. “Perhaps I was just thinking too much about my book. But my mouth, the blood – I guess, I bit my lip!”             The native girl, Maya, goes to speak with Uncle, who in turn meets with a council of the elders. “According to the information we’ve got, it seems that this thing was a flying head!” In the conference that follows it comes out that another newborn babe has been slain. Many wise words are spoken, with the end result being that the Leyak sorceress needs only to consume one more life before her power is complete. And it goes without saying that she needs to be stopped before this can happen.             Shortly thereafter the Queen surprises Cathy in her bedroom. Her bill of blood needs to be paid tonight, and, “I just need to borrow your head for a moment!” After which, of course, Catherine will be released from her spiritual bondage. And the Queen will stay young forever. Without further ado Catherine’s head lifts off into the night, but this time it is spotted by the villagers. Without hesitation the natives immediately chase after the flying head with flaming torches, as if some kind of angry piñata party was taking place. But the head just smiles and bares its fangs before disappearing over the treetops.             Meanwhile Uncle has found Catherine’s headless body, left unattended at the house. Pulling three skewers from his sash he sticks these upright into the neck, and is about to leave when he’s surprised by Myhendra. Who is somewhat perturbed by the sight of his headless girlfriend. “I must admit,” he says nonchalantly to his Uncle, “I never thought this thing would go as far as this.” Just as Uncle is telling Hendra that it’s too late to save Catherine and that the black magic must be stopped, the head comes flying back into the house. Unable to reattach itself with the wooden spikes in place, the head manages to remove one skewer with its teeth but is frustrated in its attempts to pull out the others. With an angry hiss the thing flies off again, out of sight.             Come daylight and Catherine’s body is placed in the cemetery, on the ground in the traditional open-air cage. Uncle convinces Hendra to stand guard with him over the grave, the plan being that they will meditate for three nights in a row in order to prevent the head from rejoining the body. That night they begin their vigil, accompanied by three acolytes. Sure enough the flying head shows up, frightening the assistants and sending them running away into the dark. The Queen is not far behind; she and Uncle have apparently tangled before, with Uncle having emerged victorious, and the bad blood boils over in a moderately unimpressive test of skills. During the battle Catherine’s head returns to her body, and the girl turns on Hendra; when Uncle is distracted by that confrontation the Queen rushes him, stabbing him in the throat with all ten of her talons.             As Hendra charges at the Queen with his magic dagger, Maya comes running into the fray, heading him off and striking the Queen with a tree branch. The girl is promptly put down, and with her dying breath she tells Hendra that she still loves him, despite the fact that he left her for another woman.             Now both of the witches, the Queen and Catherine the possessed, descend upon Hendra, and it looks like his hash is settled. But just then, riding in on a bolt of lightning from out of nowhere, it’s Uncle’s brother, “Eteoka, the greatest one of all!” (Hooray! I mean, Hokey!) The Queen is frightened away by this unexpected visitation, but as she hobbles on down the road with Catherine in tow Eteoka stops her with a burning ring of fire and a wee avalanche. In defense the Queen messily shape-shifts into a giant sow, but Oka deflates her form by stabbing her in the tit with his kris. Instantly she changes into a masked figure dressed in ceremonial robes and sends glowing green claws of evil energy after Eteoka. He returns fire with a serpentine bolt of his own, and after being momentarily stunned the combatants rise to face each other again. But it is the rising sun that determines the outcome, putting the wicked witch down for good. She melts away in the cheapest possible way, and as she dissipates so does her unfortunate disciple Catherine. The End.               In spite of the sensationalism of the story concept, it must be said that Mystics of Bali isn’t really all that spectacular. Weird, yes, but the film suffers from all of the standard detriments: the effects, acting, fight choreography, and humor fall far below the standards of the HK school of sorcery. Still, it is one of those flicks that’s been around for so long, and mentioned in so many sources, that you really kind of owe it to yourself to check it out. Perhaps not exactly top-notch, but as mentioned above it is an excellent background video for Halloween parties.             Extras include a trailer and the essays “Mystics in Bali & the Indonesian Exploitation Movie” by Pete Tombs and “How to Become a Leyak!” (“DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!”), both of which are as informative as they are difficult to read. Also provided is a filmography of prolific director H. Tjut Djalil as well as an intriguing promo compilation, “More from Mondo Macabro.” * * Mondo Macabro – www.mondomacabrodvd.com

THE NAKED GAMES             I badly wanted to enjoy this, despite the fact that it really looked like a cheesy rip-off of the Girls Gone Wild franchise somehow mixed up with Jackass. (HOSTED BY WEE-MAN shouts the box.) After all, the premise ought to be good enough for anyone, what with the promise of fun, games and nekkidness. What more could one want? Well, a whole lot more, as it turns out.             At the sprawling playground of “Olympdick Field,” four ‘international’ teams of dizzy young women in various states of undress compete in ten ridiculous events that seem designed solely for the amusement of drunken frat boys. As an apparently drunken Wee Man and his equally drunk-on-stupidity bimbo bunny co-host Shauna deliver lamely scripted commentary (unnecessarily assisted by a smarmy play-by-play interviewer), our cadre of clueless broads engage in such spectacles as the Bigfoot Dildo Race (this one was actually pretty funny), the Tramp-Oline (pseudo-softcore sorority lesbianism for its own sake), the Banana Bull, Pool Volleyball, Whipped Cream (like the Tramp-Oline, but with whipped cream), the Wall Climb, Whipped Cream-Ups, Shower Time (more pseudo-softcore), Big Gloves Boxing and Hot Tub Action (like Shower Time, another playfully tame Sapphic music video).             This is all preparatory to “The Main Event,” which is the following day – and on a following DVD. What we’re left with are a motley assortment of “Special Features” such as meeting the teams, which is a fucking endless introduction to the girls supposedly representing Japan, Russia, France and the U.S. (although all appear equally anglicized and stereotyped), Topless Basketball, Stripper Practice (which these ladies will need after their folks see the video and stop payments on the dorm room), posing with a motorcycle (?!) and outtakes (but aren’t they all?).             If you were a high school kid watching this while smoking some very bad pot, or if you were paid off by the producers with beer and sandwiches to bear witness to the event itself, then The Naked Games might present some small appeal. To all others however it serves no purpose whatsoever, just being an assortment of gag games designed with little more purpose than to make the boobies bounce. Even this isn’t always a treat, as some of these naked or half-naked barely-legals have conspicuous beer bellies and the asses to match. And all of that softcore lesbian playtime meant to be so titillating never does quite manage to develop into anything more than a lethargic tease which, to those of us with genitals, is fucking unpardonable. Oh yeah, and then there’s the soundtrack, the painfully bad Warped Tour-quality tuneage. Even Wee Man gets the short end of the stick here, given a very wee role indeed, akin to that of the carny midget used to draw marks into the depressing burlesque tent at the back of the fairgrounds. In a word, disappointing. (Thanks to Exploitation Retrospect – www.dantenet.com) * Maximum Xposure – www.maximumxposure.net

OUTTAKE REEL Directed by Jeffry Chaffin and Scott Feinblatt See www.horrorreview.com for full review. * * www.outtakereel.com / www.backyardfilmspresents.com / www.dervishpictures.com

THE PINKY VIOLENCE COLLECTION            Now this looks to be great fucking box set. Four feature Toei Company films from the Seventies (“Presented for the first time anywhere”) complete with plenty of extras, a CD of songs by “Pinky Violence icon” Reiko Ike and a special edition booklet, Toei’s Bad Girl Cinema, written by Chris D. specifically for the set. Granted, Panik House only sent along two of the DVDs for review, but based on these two alone this limited-edition box set looks to be well worth the $99.95 price tag.   CRIMINAL WOMAN: KILLING MELODY Directed by Atsushi Mihori             You can tell right away this one is gonna be good – it opens inside a Japanese titty bar, and within seconds a woman with a great big knife comes charging out to attack a group of presumed gangsters.             Bussed to prison as the sorrowful Criminal Woman theme plays and the credits roll, Maki (Reiko Ike) finds herself in a cell full of other criminal women. Their various stories begin to come out, shown in flashback: one reckless hottie got nabbed stealing a police motorcycle; Yukie is a pickpocket; Natsuko a ruthless whore; and Masayo (Miki Sugimoto) is a yakuza moll (who gets picked up for starting a knife fight in a den of gamblers, topless, her tattoos and bare breasts flashing). When Maki ignores her cellmates’ inquiries as to her reckless past she’s put to the test: holding a length of rope between their teeth she and Masayo duel it out with glass daggers. This test of honor degenerates into an all-out catfight, and while Maki takes a beating she earns respect by refusing to quit. In fact, amazed by her opponent’s perseverance despite the thrashing she’s received, Masayo quits the match, yielding the victory to Maki.             At last Maki tells her new friends her story. After forcing her father to work as a drug dealer for them, the Oba Industries clan of the yakuza killed him when they found out he had become an addict himself. Not only that, but they gang-raped Maki for his failure as well. And with this tragic tale Maki wins the hearts of her fellow convicts for good.             So much so that when, years later, Maki is released from prison she finds her former cellmates waiting for her outside the prison walls. She gives them the cold shoulder at first, but before long the girls are sharing ice cream and beers and making plans for the future. Maki in particular has something in mind – to crush the boss of the Oba clan completely, then kill him as he did her father. Her friends are all onboard with this idea, and in no time at all Charlie Chan’s angels are hatching an elaborate plot for revenge.             Maki quickly builds a nest egg by hooking, and with this money purchases a sizeable cache of weapons – automatic rifles, pistols, even hand grenades. Getting to know their enemy, the girls put it together that the Oba clan beat out the long-standing Hamayasu clan in a fierce gang war, but due to the intervention of a councilman stopped just short of slaughtering the Hamayasu entirely and instead allowed them to eke out a living as petty dock contractors. The Oba, meanwhile, grew rich and prosperous in the underground markets of drugs and money-lending. The best way to go about things, scheme the girls, is to fire up that bad blood and allow the rival factions to kill each other off before moving in for the final blow.             To this end the vixens pinpoint and assassinate one of the Oba druglords and have Yukie play the hapless witness to the ‘yakuza murder.’ Believing Hamayasu’s “Mad-Dog” son Tetsu to be the culprit, the Oba pay him and his father a visit. But when they are unkindly received by the sake-swilling Tetsu the Oba vow to finish the Hamayasu clan for good. Which is when our gang of criminal women show up at Tetsu’s hangout with an inviting crate of firearms…             Meanwhile the virtuous assemblyman Tanno, who brokered the truce between clans long before, steps in to prevent further bloodshed. It seems that an untimely gang war could jeopardize the imminent plans corporate giant Toto Industries has for developing the dock region, and if the Hamayasu hold off on further hostilities they’ll reap the rewards of rich contracts in the future. This is inconvenient to say the least, and as the ladies plot the death of Tanno Masayo pays them an unexpected visit. She was not among the well-wishers at Maki’s release, instead going back to her yakuza boyfriend Ogata at the end of her sentence, and she’s come to warn Maki away from any plans that might put her man’s life in danger.             Unmoved by Masayo’s veiled threats, Maki goes ahead with her plot and uses a sniper rifle to take out assemblyman Tanno. This does not sit well with Oba, who sends his goons down to the docks in full force to dynamite Hamayasu headquarters and gun down all remaining henchmen. During the fray Tetsu sees his father murdered in the midst of valiant battle, but is dragged away by his followers before he too is killed.             Maki and the girls carefully pick off another couple of Tetsu’s men, and on a roll Maki picks up one of Oba’s top dogs, Hayami, coming out of a drunken orgy. But something tips him off, and instead of allowing himself to be seduced he sticks a gun in her breast and the next thing we know she’s tied up nearly naked at Oba HQ. Maki takes a brutal beating but refuses to talk, even when her captors try to intimidate her by using a chainsaw to lop the breasts and head off of a mannequin.             At this point Masayo steps in to help, saying that only another woman can make a woman truly feel pain. Putting a cigarette out on one of Maki’s nipples, an act that puts off even the hardest of the gangsters, Masayo uses the distraction to pass the captive a straight razor. When Hayami comes down alone some time later to ‘get a good taste of her’ Maki slashes his face and holds the blade to the startled gangster’s throat until he tells her where Oba’s big 300-million yen drug deal is going down. Satisfied that she has everything he knows, Maki slits his throat.             As the exchange is made late at night on the wharf, Maki’s girls spring into action by hurling Molotov cocktails and a hail of bullets at the gangsters, using the chaos they’ve caused to make away with the drugs. Convinced Tetsu is behind this latest outrage Oba begins planning another slaughter, but is interrupted by a surprise visit from Maki. Claiming to have sold his drugs to Tetsu she offers Oba a chance to get them both by giving away their hideout – for a fee of 30-million yen.             Oba’s men storm the abandoned ship Maki has told them serves as Tetsu’s hiding place, only to be ambushed by Tetsu and his grenade-hurling henchmen. A violent shootout ensues, with many casualties taken on both sides, but in the end Oba discovers that Tetsu doesn’t have the drugs – he doesn’t even know anything about them.             And that’s when Maki pushes the final confrontation with Oba. But even then the story isn’t over; in gangster sagas there’s always another score to settle, and it always involves some element of poetic justice…             This one has everything a classic pulp film requires: babes behind bars, drunken brawling, dope, guns and fucking, angry topless women, brutal murders, knife fights, tattooed ladies, explosions, catfights…and, as if one was really needed it after all of that, an actual plot. I can’t tell you how much fun this film was to watch; if you are lucky enough to find it, load up beforehand on sake and Japanese snacks and be sure to make a party out of it. The film also stars Chiyoko Kazama, Masami Soda, Shinzo Hotta, Seiya Sato, Keiichi Kitagawa and Johnny Sako’s Yumiko Katayama. Special Features include original theatrical trailer, audio commentary, poster & still galleries, production notes on the Pinky Violence tradition and Criminal Woman’s place therein, and biographies of the director and stars. * * * *   DELINQUENT GIRL BOSS: WORTHLESS TO CONFESS Directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi             A group of female students at Akagi Reformatory is gathered for a screening of Hokkaido’s Great Outdoors, but instead find themselves cheering for screen idol Ken Taka Kura in Abashiri Prison. The principal quickly catches on that this is not the educational film he was expecting and cancels the screening, nearly inciting a riot among the girl’s school inmates.  To cool off the girls strip down and hit the baths, where we’re first introduced to the bad attitude of rose-tattooed Midori Muraki (Yumiko Katayama).             Upon her release a year later “sassy bitch” Rika (Reiko Oshida) pays a visit to Muraki Automotive in Shinjuki just as “old man” Muraki is being shaken down by gangsters for the debts racked up by his daughter and her worthless boyfriend Hamada. Rika had met Mr. Muraki at the reformatory when he had tried to visit his daughter and been rejected, and Rika remained touched by his devotion in light of Midori’s apparent callousness. The kindly old man warns Rika away from the corrupt town but still offers her a job and a spare room to help her get on her feet.             Rika goes to see her old school chum Midori, now working as a go-go dancer, but Midori wants nothing to do with her or her father. Rika does meet up with a real friend from Akagi, Yuki, who is now working for her family’s ramen shop and who demonstrates her overexcitement at seeing her long-lost friend by sliding a hand into Rika’s jumper (providing a tantalizing hint at what life inside the reformatory was really like). Yuki’s mother serves up a reunion dinner for her daughter and her young school friends, including Choko and Senmitsu from the Ginza Girls Cabaret who advise against looking up another pal, Mari, for reasons best left unspoken.             Rika visits Mari (Yukie Kagawa) anyway, and finds her friend working as a nude junkie-looking ‘model’ at a public ‘art studio.’ She lives with and cares for an ailing former yakuza boyfriend, Arai, and despite the poor circumstances the three of them manage to have a celebratory meal together. It even turns out that Arai’s younger brother is truck driver Ryuji, who’s had the hots for Rika ever since she and Mr. Muraki’s dimwitted assistant Makao ran into him a day or so before.             Meanwhile Hamada’s losing streak continues, he racking up gambling debts and beatings at a record pace. Mari has built up some debt herself in caring for her boyfriend, and by leaving them unpaid has made a bad name for herself around town. But seeing as how she’s their “street sis,” Rika encourages the girls to band together and help her out. Before long the group of them manages to wrangle Mari a job at the Cabaret performing as “Miss Akagi.”             Some time later Ryuji pulls Rika out of an alley fight with members of the local yakuza faction the Ohya Family. As she’d been holding her own Rika is somewhat less than grateful, but Ryuji ends up so thrilling her on a near-death freeway ride that she has to ask him to pull over, her tough-girl façade having finally cracked.             Coming home Rika is none too surprised to find Midori ransacking her father’s office. An emotionally charged scene follows, ending only when Mr. Muraki himself steps in. Midori runs away, and in the aftermath Muraki explains that she is the accidental child of a liaison with a geisha, and once Midori found out about this she started striking out against the world.             Mari’s new job opens up a window for her and Arai, with the new income providing the possibility of a real hospital for him. However, as there must always be, there is a hitch; Mari has recently discovered that she’s pregnant. Arai urges her to keep the baby, “this time,” swearing that he’ll raise the money for a new family somehow.             Meanwhile Muraki gets shaken down by the Ohyas yet again, who this time are joined by Hamada. Midori’s boyfriend shamefully blackmails Muraki with the threat of what might happen to his daughter if the old man doesn’t pay off her boyfriend’s gambling debts. Muraki gives them his last yen, but with his property being held as collateral Rika and Makao fear that he may lose that as well. Paying a visit to the Ohya-owned club where Midori dances, Rika asks a favor from Mr. Ohya himself; return the money and she’ll do anything. Of course the scar-faced gangster’s first request is, “Strip naked right here,” which Rika begins to do; but overhearing the party Midori bursts in and offers herself in Rika’s place.             Both women are immediately taken hostage, and Ohya telephones Muraki to say that they will only be spared in exchange for the deed to his land. Muraki arrives at Ohya HQ, but instead of the broken down old man everybody expected he instead arrives as Tetsu the Razor – the very man who put the scar on Ohya’s face during a gang war twenty years ago. His appearance so cows Ohya that he apologizes and lets the girls go. But not without some bad feelings; when Arai shows up to tell his former boss that he’s leaving Shin-town for the fresh air of the country and a brand new start, Ohya charges him with one last job: Kill Muraki in exchange for the 300,000 yen they’ve just taken from the old man.             At a fish stew and sake shop that night Rika, Midori and Muraki share drinks, potatoes and family bonding. Midori is properly shamed by the fact that her father, who she has treated so badly for so many years, has come to her rescue, and he in turn is simply grateful to be back in her good graces. All seems well with them and with the world, and Muraki is so happy to have his daughter’s affection once again that he stays behind when they leave to have another victory round. Drunkenly stumbling home later he provides a perfect target for Arai, yet unbeknownst to the gangster his Ohya cohorts have an assassination of their own scheduled as well. As Arai charges Muraki they’re both run down by a pair of Ohya mob vehicles; good man that he is Muraki even pushes his assailant out of the way of the first truck, but the second gets them both.             Now completely alone in the world the five women forge a bond of revenge and, after a brief prayer for forgiveness, set off to wipe out the Ohya Clan. Storming yakuza headquarters the girls tear off their trenchcoats to reveal tight little go-go outfits – and short swords. They have at the astounded mobsters in a terrific and bloody battle that’s the highlight of the picture – and the outcome of which you’ll have to witness on your own.             Not as thrilling and gloriously sleazy as Criminal Woman, Delinquent Girl Boss is still a great story with no shortage of violent action. And, need I say it, the two of them make a perfect double-feature. Special features include trailer, commentary, poster & still galleries, production notes and brief bios on the director and stars. * * *             Re-mastered in crisp and colorful 16x9 widescreen, the Pinky Violence Collection is presented in original Japanese language with easy-to-read English subtitles. Highly recommended. (Thanks to Exploitation Retrospect – www.dantenet.com) Panik House Entertainment – www.panikhouse.com

PLAY-MATE OF THE APES Directed by John Bacchus Now normally I’m all for monkey movies. And the idea of a monkey movie porno? Hell, bring it on! But no sooner had the credits for Play-Mate of the Apes begun to roll than I noticed that this was the brainchild of John Bacchus, the genius behind the sorry-ass softcore ripoff The Erotic Witch Project. Which meant that this nudie parody was sure to be another quick & derivative excuse to get girls naked in ridiculously goofy situations. Not a terrible pretense in itself, but when executed in such a silly and inexplicit way these things often come off as overly-long bawdy comedy sketches. Especially when this one opens up with a scene starring one of the most hideous sun demons to ever sully the tarnished silver screen . . . Artificially baked to an oompaloompa orange, implanted with grotesquely oversized udders bearing wide blue veins and lumpy distended nipples (poking out on either side of a sizable cyst, yet), and sporting a collection of stretch marks and a veritable pock mark of a groin, this starlet tops her horrific ensemble with a hawk-nosed acne-pitted face surrounded with bleached-blond hair extensions and grafted with a big pair of chewed-bubblegum lips. And she’s not even one of the apes! She is apparently supposed to be sexy though, as said creature begins getting it on (in a non-explicit way, mind you) with some heliophobic Russian broad, another member of her all-female astronaut crew. See, these two space strumpets, plus Misty Mundae and a couple others, are all currently rocketing through the universe (for some reason never made quite clear), and they need some juicy ways to pass the time. Their little joyride literally comes crashing to a halt however when freakazoid and pinko chick get so caught up in their nipple-pinching frenzy that they deploy their landing capsule early. Crash landing in a part of the final frontier that looks remarkably like a temperate part of California, the women are immediately captured by the “apes” of the planet. (Or maybe just a bunch of really stoned guys making bad jokes and wearing cheap monkey masks, gloves, and an odd assortment of trendy clothing . . .) In either case the girls are all dressed up in leopardskin bikinis and caged up with indigenous savage Darian Caine (as Uvula, a name apparantly meant as a misappropriation of “vulva”) for another display of lesbian fakery. And then made to dance – the difference between humans and apes in this world apparently hinges upon the ability to dance, and failure to equal the apesuits’ lame stylings clearly indicates inferiority. Oh yeah, they rap, too . . . Eventually Mundae and Caine escape, aided by the kindly “Dr. Cornholius” (haw!) and some big pink gay ape (“Dr. Queerus”). There follows a shamefully bad reenactment of Heston’s “God damn you all!” speech in front of a cut-out on a dirtbike track, the girls meet up with a tribe of leopardskin & bluejean-wearing humans and rebel against the apes in a corny choreographed fasion, and then look out, the “messiah,” or missing link, arrives in a cardboard disco-ball to lead another fucked-up rap that turns into a half-baked lesbian orgy. Suddenly the space broads’ ship is repaired (“It’s amazing what a little bit of gum and snot can do”), good-byes are said, and Mundae returns to earth to find it populated by . . . toy duck people? What the shit?! Besides a shitty cup of coffee, a bad hamburger, or biological warfare, few things aggravate the soul as much as lousy softcore wannabe-sleaze. Watching two chicks laughably pretend to go down on each other while bargain-basement keyboards muddle away in the background really can’t be anybody’s idea of a good time. Can it? And if it is, such a sucker truly deserves to become a Play-Mate of the Apes. Misty Mundae’s a cutie for sure, but how many times in ninety minutes can you just watch her take off her top? Aside from girls stripping down and acting like they’re on some form of animal tranquilizer, you’ve got a pile of lame jokes, cheesy music, embarassing rap & dance numbers, lousy costumes, and ultra-cheap scenery (the “controls” of the spaceship consist of a white PVC pipe; points for tiki collector geeks though: see if you can identify the mugs the apes are drinking from when the girls make their escape). Oh yeah, and some really, really bad acting. I suppose it could all be taken in good humor, but porno and “all in good fun” rarely go hand-in-hand. For an adult film called Play-Mate of the Apes the least you could expect would be a bunch of guys in monkey masks gang-banging some broad and maybe making a few bad banana split jokes. There’s probably a market for that kind of thing, right? But the way this thing went it’s just a sad and painfully long hemorrhoid-inducer that, frankly, sucks hiary matted monkey ass. One point for tits and monkeys, and that’s it. * Seduction Cinema - www.SeductionCinema.com

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