Category: Reviews

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The Nude Vampire

Nude Vampire.jpg

You think you’d know what you are getting when watching a movie called The Nude Vampire, but Jean Rollin is a man who subverts expectations. The Nude Vampire isn’t about vampires and the vampire isn’t nude. It is, however, one of the better movies Mr. Rollin has directed.

The opening sequence of The Nude Vampire is visually striking, with no dialogue for the first ten minutes. A man in a hood draws blood from a topless woman, also hooded, in a lab brimming with test tubes full of brightly colored dyes. Cut to a woman fleeing three men wearing bizarre animal masks. She runs into a man – our hero Pierre – who tries to protect her. The masked men shoot the woman and take her body to a tenement. Pierre follows the murderers back, eventually gaining entrance to a private party where the guests kill themselves so that the selfsame woman can drink their blood. Which means *gasp* she’s a vampire. Or is she?

Pierre’s dad Georges is an evil industrialist. Think Obadiah Stane of Iron Man or Mr. Lodge of Archie comics. He has a female sidekick, Solange, who does his dirty work and he keeps a pair of female twins as pets/sex slaves. At one point the twins dress Pierre – who’s supposed to be our hero – but whatever.

Pierre soon uncovers his father’s plot. The woman his dad’s keeping locked up is immortal, and he’s trying to uncover the secret of her immortality. The purpose of the suicide club is to provide the woman with blood, because they think she’s a vampire. After Pierre crashes the party Georges and his flunkies move to a chateau in the country. This turns out to be a big mistake.

The second half of The Nude Vampire isn’t as good as the first, mostly because the answers aren’t as interesting as the questions. The plot is quite complex, and this movie does stand up as a decent 1970’s science fiction movie, even if the special effects aren’t great in places.

I believe I stated in an earlier review that Jean Rollin movies don’t have plots. Many of them do. The first Jean Rollin movie I saw was Requiem for the Vampire, which starts with a big chase scene and ends in a vampire den with not much plot in between, but that movie is the exception rather than the rule. If you like Eurotrash and/or Jean Rollin movies, The Nude Vampire is a must-see.

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Temple Wood: A Quest for Freedom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVJ0KIn_ZJY

 The first time I watched Temple Wood: A Quest for Freedom I figured I was missing something. So I watched it a second time. Now I’m thinking this movie’s mode of linear storytelling is a trap and Temple Wood isn’t supposed to make sense. For example: the Quest for Freedom part of the title means nothing in the context of the movie.

When Professor Martenson disappears his (graduate) student Martin decides to investigate, contaminating a crime scene and finding a book in the professor’s study about Temple Wood. Despite it being the 21st century, Professor Martenson writes using a dip pen. Martin himself uses a Walkman instead of an iPod. Could this be a clue?

For reasons I don’t understand Martin decides to visit Temple Wood. He treks to the town of Kilmartin, which is, as his landlady points out, an unfortunate name for him. Martin’s rented attic room is bright yellow and full of kids’ books and toys. Some of the movie’s imagery suggests that Martin himself is a child. There are also weird sexual images; the most disturbing sequence in this movie is sexual.

Martin enters Temple Wood, a stone circle covered in rocks. Was the site decommissioned by the ancients – or are they trying to imprison something? Beats me! Martin visits Temple Wood a second time that night in his dreams and sees a group of cultists performing a ceremony. He runs away from the cultists in a goofy-looking scene and then meets the Sunflower Man. I’m not sure if the Sunflower Man is supposed to be scary, funny, stupid, or all of the above. The Sunflower Man is surreal, which I like. The Sunflower Man is part of a dream, and dreams aren’t supposed to make sense.

The plot moves on, but it doesn’t really matter. In the end what we have is a hodgepodge of bizarre imagery: the Sunflower Man, a yellow room, a pair of shoes with the laces tied together and Martin waving his weenie around and yelling. It’s possible Martin is crazy. He sees people appear and disappear. He doesn’t interact with anyone but his landlady, whom he sees as a mommy/lover figure. Martin resembles a Lovecraftian hero in his total isolation. He wears a single set of clothes, carries around a copy of the Necronomicon and is a social outcast.

Temple Wood is short, about an hour long. I couldn’t figure it out, but I’m not sure that’s a valid critique. The movie may be satire, or perhaps it has a deeper meaning I’m missing. Maybe I should watch it a third time…

Definitely worth a viewing, but watch at your own risk!

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Pyega, aka The Haunted House Project

Question: what kind of horror movie do you make if you have no money? Answer: found-footage! Filmed on a budget of $300,00 (according to IMDB), the South Korean horror movie Pyega (aka The Haunted House Project) is yet another entry in the found-footage file bin. This is a case where I’d suggest viewing the trailer; if you do, there’s no reason to watch this movie.

Pyega does get a few things right. The haunted house/factory is falling apart and looks like a genuine health hazard. I like grit in my movies, so that’s good. The ghost story isn’t bad, either: a man opens a cookie factory, has an affair with his secretary, kills his secretary and dumps her body in a big puddle. Soon afterwards, her vengeful spirit slaughters him and his family.

With the help of a film crew, a paranormal club investigates! Let me say that I love the idea of a paranormal club; if my high school had a paranormal club back in the day I would have joined in a minute. The cast is your usual mix of nobodies, which befits cannon fodder. One of the female cast members falls or is pushed into the big puddle, which must have been fun for her.

Unfortunately, since the filmmakers don’t have any money for special effects nothing happens, and we’re reduced to sitting around waiting for the ghost to kill them. The makers of The Blair Witch Project solved that problem by arguing over the map, but Pyega drags. If you want to see all the jump-scares watch the trailer. We do catch a glimpse of the ghost contorting her body into impossible angles, so apparently this evil spirit does yoga!

I am not sure why I watched Pyega. Sometimes I’m just in the mood for a bad movie, and Pyega scratched that itch. And how.

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Psychomania

The thing is, you can’t hesitate. If you don’t want to die you can’t have eternal life. That’s the premise of Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers, an English horror movie that isn’t a horror movie at all. Yes, the name of the motorcycle gang is The Living Dead; yes, the members of that gang come back from the dead; no, it’s not a horror movie. More on that later.

Tom is the leader of a motorcycle gang called The Living Dead. Even though he’s all grown up now, Tom wears leather pants and a weird helmet and drives around with his motorcycle gang terrorizing the squares. He’s an overgrown child, the kind of kid who pulls the wings off flies. His mother is rich, which is why he’s not in jail.

But Tom wants more from life. His mom made a deal with a toad that gave her eternal life, and Tom wants in. Discovering that the way to immortality is to die, he drives off a bridge. The funeral is awesome. Tom’s biker pals prop him up on his motorcycle, which they put in the grave and then bury. Because it’s the early 70’s, one of the bikers sings a groovy folk song.

Tom doesn’t stay buried long. Back from the dead and endowed with supernatural powers,  he’s a bigger asshole than ever. It’s not long before Tom’s buddies all want in on the fun. Indeed, the best part of Psychomania is watching the creative ways they off themselves. Pretty soon The Living Dead live up to their name. The only party pooper is Tom’s girlfriend Abby. Instead of doing something cool like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute or throwing herself into traffic, she takes a bunch of pills and doesn’t die. Wimp.

Psychomania isn’t a horror movie; it’s a black comedy. Why do I say that? Well, that’s what I say when a movie is funny instead of scary or gory or upsetting. Psychomania is full of funny scenes, but my personal favorite is a reborn Tom revving up his motorcycle and driving it right out of his grave. Psychomania is an early 70’s film that with a bit of editing could be an episode of The Avengers. John Steed and Emma Peel would make short work of these bozos.

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House of the Devil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtXtSGRV0xc

A summary of House of the Devil: nothing happens for the first seventy minutes, and then holy shit. The plot riffs off the Satanic Panic of the early 80’s, involving a babysitter, a total eclipse of the moon and a ceremony to Say-Tan. This is a movie meant to throw you off your game. For instance: the halfway scare is important in horror films, the point halfway through the movie when you can count on something fucked-up happening. The halfway scare in House of the Devil happens fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. It’s just one of the things that’s off about this movie, and I mean off in a good way.

College-student Samantha (Sam) wants to move into her own apartment. She doesn’t get along with her roommate, who is a slob and maybe even a sex-addict. Sam finds the perfect apartment but needs cash for the first month’s rent. Luckily, she finds a Babysitter Wanted flyer hanging on a billboard. On the phone the guy seems weird, but Sam needs the money.

Sam’s friend Megan drives her to a house in the middle of nowhere, where the creepy Mr. Ulman reveals there is no child for her to sit. He wants Sam to watch his wife’s elderly mother and offers her four hundred dollars to do it. Mr. Ulman is the family member who interacts with Sam because he’s the best at imitating a normal human being, and he’s not too good at it. Megan thinks her friend is nuts, and tells her so, but Sam needs the money. I mean, she’s stuck in a house in the boondocks without a car, and the people pretending to own the house are probably related to the Manson Family. What could possibly go wrong?

Supposedly inspired by the horror films of the early 80’s, House of the Devil has more of a 70’s vibe. Sam looks like a combo of Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith on Charlie’s Angels. Despite wearing mom jeans for the whole movie, Sam is very attractive. She’s also…I don’t know what you’d call it. Naïve? She’s not stupid. Sam catches the house’s bad vibes right away. As the movie goes on the sense of wrongness grows, and pretty soon she’s peeking around corners armed with a butcher knife.

House of the Devil will either scare or bore the crap out of you. Nothing happens for long periods of time, and this movie foregoes the usual practice of having nameless somethings lurking out of the corner of your eyes. The third act of this movie pays off, big-time, but it all depends on whether you think the ride is worth the wait.

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House by the Cemetery

Young Bob utters the best line of House by the Cemetery when he goes into the basement in search of his babysitter, Anne. A few scenes earlier Bob saw Anne’s severed head rolling down the steps. As he walks down the stairs Bob says (paraphrasing) – “Anne. Are you dead? Mommy says you’re not dead.”

I’ve seen enough horror cinema to know that House by the Cemetery, directed by Lucio Fulci, is an influential movie. It’s an important entry in the Monster in the Basement subgenre and contains an element of sadism that was way ahead of its time. This is not torture porn, but it’s close, and nowadays you can see about a hundred horror movies like this: threadbare plot, cutout characters, sadistic killer and lots and lots of blood.

House by the Cemetery opens with a guy and girl, post sexy-time. Instead of treating his date to a nice motel, maybe with mirrors on the ceiling, the dude takes her to a disgusting, grungy basement. He dies and she gets a knife through the back of the head. Cut to Dr. Norman Boyle, his wife Lucy and their son Bob, who are off to the same house in New England.

We meet another little kid, a girl named Mae who doesn’t want Bob to go into the house. Bob sees Mae’s face in a picture, peeking out of the window of the house they’re about to move into. The house the Boyles are renting – which is a piece of shit – was owned by Dr. Freudstein, a half-assed mad scientist who performed medical experiments on people in the basement.

You couldn’t pay me to spend the night in that place, but the Boyles are made of sterner stuff. The results are predictable. Norm and Lucy hear children crying in the middle of the night, even though their son is fast asleep. There’s an honest-to-God tomb in the hallway hidden under a carpet. A bat attacks Doc Norman and he stabs it about three hundred times before it dies. Bats don’t act that way unless they have rabies, so anyone sane would leave the house, post-haste. The Boyles stay. Of course they stay. They’re begging to be killed, and the thing lurking in the basement is more than happy to oblige.

I’m sorry to say that House by the Cemetery wasn’t to my tastes. It has lots of gore, but the script is a mess and the characters are dumb even by horror movie standards. This could be a translation issue. House by the Cemetery is an Italian movie, and maybe the dub isn’t too good. Still, if you want to see the flick that helped inspired the latest hack ’em up streaming on Netflix, check out House by the Cemetery.

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Ravenous

This trailer contains spoilers. Watch at your own risk!

The tagline for Ravenous reads ‘You Are Who You Eat.’ Yes, this is a film about cannibalism, but since it’s set in California in the 1840’s this is also American history and  thus educational. Unlike most of the movies I watch, Ravenous features a cast many people would recognize. The trailer is full of spoilers, so I’d skip it.

Captain Boyd (Guy Pearce) is awarded for bravery during the Mexican-American War; he faked being dead and ended up taking the enemy HQ. The experience left him with blood in his mouth, literally. His disgusted superiors transfer him to a fort in California, near the Sierra Rockies. Led by Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones), they’re a ragtag bunch.

The plot kicks into gear when a half-dead Scotsman named Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) stumbles into the fort and tells a hair-raising story about his wagon party being stuck in a cave in the mountains for the winter. They ate the oxen, and then they ate the horses, and then they ate their shoes and then they started to eat each other. Colqhoun ran away before their guide could eat him.

A rescue party is mounted, which leads to a gruesome discovery. Five skeletons are found in the cave, and there were only six people in the party. The rescue mission ends in another massacre, but Boyd manages to escape. His leg is broken, so he eats part of one of his dead comrades to heal himself; in Ravenous, eating human flesh grants you superhuman powers. Maybe it has to do with the Wendigo, or maybe it’s Christians eating the body of Christ every Sunday, or maybe it’s Manifest Destiny. Whatever. An unpleasant surprise awaits Boyd upon his return to the fort, and he’s faced with a choice: death, or a full belly.

The villain is the most interesting character of Ravenous. Part of that is because Boyd isn’t the action-hero type. He spends most of this movie scared shitless. His fellow soldiers think he’s a coward, but by the end of Ravenous Boyd’s weakness becomes his strength, one of this film’s many interesting twists.

Finally: I’d be doing people a disservice if I didn’t mention Robert Carlyle’s hat. Carlyle wears a great black hat that he ditches halfway through the movie. I don’t know what type of hat it is, but it’s a damn shame it went out of style, and I want one.

Ravenous is the funniest film about cannibalism you’ll ever watch, but it doesn’t skimp on the gore. Guy Pearce plays it straight; Robert Carlyle doesn’t. Good writing, good acting, good cast, an off-beat soundtrack – this is the full package. Still, if you aren’t sure whether you’d like a movie about cannibalism, I might err on the side of caution.

 

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Vampyres

No naked people appear in the trailer for Vampyres, which is a miracle. This movie is British Eurotrash, although at this point it’s an open question whether Britain is even part of Europe. Vampyres‘ influences are obvious, but it’s way too explicit to be a Hammer production and doesn’t have the visual panache of a Jean Rollin extravaganza.

Vampyres is very ‘No Sex Please We’re British.’ Despite featuring lots of softcore sex, this movie is strangely ambivalent about its subject matter, orgies, bare breasts, lesbians and blood. There’s a scene where Fran and Miriam are drinking wine with that night’s victim, and the orgy is about to commence, and the girls kiss and the guy looks away. You signed up for the orgy, dude, what’s your hang-up?

Vampyres has plot elements but no real plot. Fran and Miriam pick up hitchhikers, kill them and drink their blood. Sometimes they have sex with them. Afterwards, they stage a car accident, carefully placing the bodies of their nude victims in their cars, because people in that part of England all drive naked.

In the opening scene a guy or girl wearing a weird hat (we only see the shadow) kills Fran and Miriam during sexy-time. See what I mean about the ambivalence? The hat is one of the many bizarre touches in Vampyres. We cut to Murray, a beefy middle-aged Englishman checking into a hotel. The elderly manager thinks he recognizes him, and Murray slaps that shit down fast.

The plot kicks into gear when Fran and Miriam bring Murray home to their abandoned castle. Murray does his best to live up to his billing as the male beefcake, saying things like – ‘see here. I find you extremely attractive’ – in a stern voice. You know, the kind of talk that drives a woman wild. Murray may be an older dude, but he gives it his all during the sex scenes. Yes, seeing the liver spots on his back during sexy-time sort of kills the moment, but perhaps the filmmakers determined Murray’s age demographic to be Vampyres’ target audience.

Murray wakes up in the morning with a nasty cut on his arm. During the course of the film, our hero gets weaker and weaker. That could be because he hasn’t eaten in days, or the hours having sex with a woman half his age, or maybe it’s the fact that Fran and Miriam are treating him like a human Slurpee. In one scene the lusty gals use Murray as a prop during their own lovemaking.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I watched Vampyres, but technically this is a horror movie. There are a few interesting elements. The girls kill with a knife instead of with their fangs. I’m not even sure they have fangs, although there is a good biting scene. The ecstatic frenzy in which Fran and Miriam kill and feed is the most interesting thing about this movie.

Anyway, no more hokey recommended or not recommended announcements. Vampyres is a bad movie. If you want to watch it for its historical significance or are in Murray’s age demographic, it’s available on Shudder!

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We Are Still Here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvdZjLXkK-U

 We Are Still Here is a sneaky movie, starting with brooding shots of the desolate New England landscape that scream arthouse horror and ending with the bloodiest gore sequences this side of Lucio Fulci. This movie has been in my Netflix Queue for months, mostly because it stars Barbara Crampton. Full disclosure: Ms. Crampton is my favorite Scream Queen, which made me predisposed to like this movie. I still remember seeing her in Re-Animator and From Beyond, way back in the 1980’s.

Anne and Paul are a middle-aged couple whose college-age son just died in an accident. For reasons I can’t fathom they move to a house in the middle of Nowhere, New England. To escape the memories, I guess? They’re visited by a pair of locals who seem shocked they’ve been in the house for two weeks and are still alive. The locals tell them a story about the first-ever people to live in the house, a family of morticians accused of selling the bodies. According to local legend, the townspeople drove them off. Hint: take a look at the movie’s title.

Anne believes her son’s ghost has followed them because she senses a presence in the house. She’s right, sort of. There are several presences in the house, and they aren’t friendly. When the electrician comes to fix the boiler he’s attacked by one of the ghosts living in the basement. Soot black with chalk white eyes, these ghosts are literally burning up.

Anne invites a second couple, Jacob and May, to visit. May is a self-proclaimed psychic who might be able to contact the entities in the house. May’s son and his girlfriend arrive when the couples are out enjoying a wild night in town (i.e., eating at the local equivalent of Applebee’s). They get frisky on the couch, which stirs up the cinder ghosts.

It is at this point that We Are Still Here goes gonzo. The wild car ride, cold-blooded murder and disastrous séance culminating in Jacob eating a sock are only the beginning. When the locals join the party the blood and brains really start to fly, including a great scene with a knife and a sickle. Yet the movie’s center holds. The end credits are a must because they fill in a few plot holes.

I liked We Are Still Here as much as It Follows, probably the most critically acclaimed horror movie of 2015. The acting and effects are good. This is a simple story, well-told, which is why it succeeds so well.

Recommended!

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Sadako vs. Kayako

(Warning: don’t watch the trailer if you plan on seeing this movie)

Sadako vs. Kayako is a Japanese horror movie available on Shudder, a streaming service that specializes in horror cinema. Shudder costs $4.99 per month to subscribe, and if you are a horror fan it’s a good deal. However, I would think twice about subscribing for this movie.

The idea of Sadako vs. Kayako is simple: have the evil spirits of the Ring and Grudge franchises battle it out. I followed the plot without seeing either Ringu or Ju-On: The Grudge, but the Kayako story confused me because at first I didn’t realize there were two spirits in the house.

A few words about the ghouls in question. When you watch a cursed videotape Sadako will appear and kill you two days later. Kayako and Kid Ghost live in a deserted house, and you will die if you step foot inside. Thus, Sadako and Kayako are based on similar memes – if you do X you will die – which turns out to be important.

The plot: college students Natsumi and Yuri buy a used VCR to transfer old video footage to DVD format. There’s already a tape in the VCR. Natsumi watches it while Yuri is texting. Afterwards, Natsumi gets the obligatory call from Sadako on her cell phone. Through a chain of events too complicated to go into, the girls meet Spiritual Medium Kyozo, who seems to be the rock star of mediums.

The Kayako story is much less complex and feels shoehorned into the plot. Four schoolboys enter Kayako’s house and none return in one of the movie’s better sequences. Suzuka, another student, enters the murder house despite repeated warnings. Maybe she’s suicidal? Who knows? There are a lot of characters in Sadako vs. Kayako, and most of them do stupid things. Spiritual Medium Kyozo’s master plan makes no sense. Someone even transfers the Sadako video to DVD and then uploads it to the Internet. Why? Yeah, that’s a good question.

And then there’s the title. Anyone who’s seen one of the many Godzilla sequels knows what Sadako vs. Kayako means. The monsters battle it out! Unfortunately, the fight scenes are dull and the movie isn’t scary. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that Sadako vs. Kayako might be a comedy.

Recommended for series completists only. I am not sure if fans of either The Grudge or Ring franchises will like this movie.