Schlock Treatment

Schlock Treatment returns in January 2012

2011-10-25T16:38:00.003+10:00

SCHLOCK TREATMENT returns to Briz 31 in January for a brand new thirteen week, programmed and hosted by Trash Video's Andrew Leavold.

We can promise you: the Brazilian Planet Of The Apes, the Turkish Exorcist, the North Korean Godzilla, Puerto Rican Sixties sleaze, Bollywood ninjas, more Nigerian godsploitation, demented German and Taiwanese kiddie matinees, Thai flying-heads-with-guts-attached, dwarves, zombies, outrageous gore and more!

Little Boy Blue, Tiny Terrestrial (1991)

2011-06-02T16:33:00.002+10:00

Little Boy Blue, Tiny Terrestrial

Philippines 1991 colour

Director Eddie Reyes Writers Joey de Leon, Tony Y. Reyes

Cast Atong Redillas (Ato), Jay-Are Reyes (Empoy), Jen-Jen Otico (Neneng), Luz Fernandez (Lola Panchang), Joaquin Fajardo (Crocodile Danding), Joey de Leon (Professor Presto), Rene Requiestas (Stallone), Richie D’Horsie (Kuya Freddie)

We here at Schlock Treatment like to dig deep. Deeeeeep. So when Little Boy Blue suddenly appeared on the radar out of nowhere, believe me it’s an obscure one: a childish Catholic-laced E.T. ripoff from the Philippines, featuring a large blueberry that’s been molested by a Teletubby. Painful, infuriating, and at times like trying to stop a runaway bus with your teeth, it is nevertheless lovably dumb and, as far as lovably dumb Pinoy parodies go, one of the dumbest.

A squat stopper-shaped spaceship is spotted over Batangas, practically over the heads of three pre-teen cousins living in a simple nearby barrio. After their extended prayers – this is a devout Catholic family, you’ll need to remember - the kids beg their grandmother Panchang to tell stories of aliens – unbeknownst to them, at the same time the strange craft lands in the jungle. Aliens, says Panchang, descend from the heavens to punish the wicked. Just like Jesus, or, come to think of it, like Santa Claus. Back in the jungle the spaceship opens and out bounces a round rubber blue thing covered in squid suckers, and it takes refuge in the kids’ barn. The two young boys, Ato and the twitchy Empoy, are woken by strange sounds and uncover the creature scoffing the family corn. And what a creature it is: a head somewhere between a Gremlin and bloated Yoda atop a furry scrotum and Big Bird feet. And blue: all fluro blue, and emitting sounds like a mid-butchered veal (“Nyip! Nyip! Nyip!”). They argue over what to call it. “Do you remember the film ‘Extra Terrestrial?’” asks Ato. Tiny Terrestrial, they agree, or TT for short. “You’re just jealous,” they yell at their female cousin Neneng, the Drew Barrymore of this bizarre parallel universe, “that we have a TT [“titi” being Tagalog slang for penis] and you don’t.” They also settle on Little Boy Blue, and Neneng bonds with the gentle creature by pressing her finger lightly against TT’s rubber prong. It’s a touching scene in more ways than one, aiming for the emotion of Spielberg’s original but marred somewhat by TT’s high pitched bleating.

Of course you can’t have an ET clone without the meddling adult scientists, and at alien research group PAGNANASA’s headquarters, pretty young scientist Dr Delgado (and by young, I mean seventeen or eighteen) runs TT’s craft through a battery of tests. She believes the ship has emerged from inner space, not outer, and may be a relic from the lost city of Atlantis, thus proving the ranting renegade Dr Galileo’s theories correct. In Little Boy Blue there’s much discussion about Plato, and how the destruction of Atlantis is comparable to the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah. Huh? Don’t worry, it makes more sense soon… Dr Delgado’s limp-wristed boss Zarate orders her to head a team to capture the alien and perform further experiments. Her final analysis: TT is “gentle and very easy to love”. In another section of the scientific community the insane Galileo pays a goon squad headed by “Crocodile” Danding to kidnap Little Boy Blue and show the world just how sane he really is. Try to find the creature, however – TT spends much of his Earth time running around the village draped in a sheet or at the nearsighted Grandma Panchang’s house learning how Jesus is “God to all peoples”. Before you can say “Hail Mary” he’s kissing rosary beads and crossing himself, and in the film’s most uncomfortable moment, has a religious epiphany whilst comparing his own suffering to a wooden Jesus on a crucifix. You can imagine when he returns triumphantly to his home planet, like a round blue Conquistador, there are going to be conversions a-plenty.

A lame-duck Sunday School pantomime, or a Spielberg spoof that landed eight years too late? I’m having money each way. For all its inherent absurdity and ecumenical leanings, Little Boy Blue is a feeble-minded effort, a throwaway project clearly written on the hoof by the team who brought you the (ahem) superior Alyas Batman En Robin. I’d say it’s an easy bet that Joey de Leon and Tony Reyes don’t even remember flipping this cheap quickie off; at the time, writer/director Reyes and comedian Joey were the busiest creative unit in Filipino comedy, clocking in at around ten features each per year, and considered the top box office draw of 1989. Not everything they touch turned to gold, however, but they certainly give it the old Quezon City try, and for marquee value Joey phones in a cameo as PAGNANASA’s Professor Presto (he’s been peering at Venus – not the planet but his new secretary, fnyar fnyar). The usual suspects are rounded up and given their regulation two minutes of screen time: toothless and heartbroken Rene Requiestas is a barrio bum named Stallone who sees little blue monsters even before his first sip of Tanduay, and TVJ’s regular sidekick Richie D’Horsie strums a tasteful song about dying of cancer.

The film’s major flaws are its leaden pacing courtesy of director Eddie Reyes (son? Brother? Of Tony), its sledgehammer morality, and discomforting attempts at toilet humour aimed at an older demographic than its intended audience of under-tens. None of this is meant as harsh criticism, of course, and the gaping wounds are an essential part of its charm. When I use words like “unbearable”, I mean it with a father’s love for his hopelessly naïve and sugar-addicted infant. For me, I don’t know who’s more unbearable, and I love them equally and unconditionally – the child actor playing Empoy (another of the ubiquitous Reyes, this time Jay-Are), who delivers every line like he’s sleepwalking and trying to create static electricity by brushing both ears, or TT himself, the nyipping testicle betraying not a single emotion from under its rubber mat. His one discernable word – “Bye!” – comes not a moment too soon, and I for one wish Little Boy Blue so long, bon voyage, and thanks for the screaming.

Arcana (1972)

2011-05-24T18:03:00.006+10:00

Arcana

Italy 1972 colour

Director Giulio Questi Writers Giulio Questi, Franco Arcalli

Cast Lucia Bosé (Mamma), Maurizio Degli Esposti (Son), Tina Aumont (Brenda), Renato Paracchi

Giulio Questi

“The bones, the bladder..” whispers a midget into a young man’s ear, while a woman licks a doorway. Yes, I’m proud to say, it’s going to be one of those nights as we delve into the bizarre world of renegade Italian director Guilio Questi and his strangest film of all, the 1972 horror movie Arcana.

Questi is a fringe figure in Italian cinema, creating films which straddle the populist genre and elitist art divide and finding himself an outsider in both worlds. In a career since the Fifties he’s completed no more than five theatrical features, working in television and documentaries. A self-avowed anarchist, his radicalized politics is ever-present in his grimmest film, the apocalyptic spaghetti western Django Kill from 1967, and in his capitalist giallo thriller set on a chicken farm from 1968, the appropriately named Plucked!, or Death Laid An Egg. His is an uncompromising stance, and is thus: never let the audience, or a logical story for that matter, get in the way of the pursuit of one’s art.

Curiously, Arcana – on the surface his least political film - has dropped out of circulation since its 1972 premiere, and one can only wonder what a cine-literate Italian crowd weaned on Fellini’s eccentricities would have gleaned from it. The film starts off benignly enough in a Rome apartment occupied by a fortune teller. On the surface she’s a charlatan, milking good lire from her customers from carefully-staged group psychodramas – a kind of primal scream therapy, only with pissing and shitting – presided over by her freakishly insightful son Mario. He truly has inherited his mother’s divine gifts, but manifests them in more disturbing fashions. His myriad of unhealthy obsessions include dead animals or animal parts, visiting the subway tunnel his railway worker father died in, stealing photos and objects from his mother’s customers and creating elaborate charms with them, and crawling into bed with his mother or slicing her breast with a kitchen knife. A visit from a young woman engaged to an older man and worried about her future seals her fate, and in her Mario finds himself the perfect doll to stick his pin in. Figuratively speaking, of course.

The key is in the film’s title – arcane, or esoteric, or more specifically the major and minor arcana making up the deck of Tarot cards, used for divining and revealing hidden knowledge. The film, Questi states in the opening, is “not a story, but a game of cards”. Both the start and the epilogue, he continues, are not to be believed; as the film is spilt into two parts, like the Tarot itself, one might suspect that the entire narrative is a lie. “You are the player,” says Questi, suggesting everything contained herein has a hidden meaning to be decoded. “Play smartly and you’ll win.”

Arcana is as much a horror film as David Lynch’s Eraserhead. While Lynch’s brand of nightmarish surrealism has found its way into post-modern pop culture, the eternal fringe-dweller Questi’s is of a much darker, more unsettling variety. Just when your feet are back on surer footing, the flowers start to die, the cards flip themselves over, children worship eggs or stick skewers in a bread homunculus, a donkey is hoisted up a building, and you are left the Hanging Man of the Major Arcana deck, caught halfway between revelation and damnation.

Arcana’s a rough ride, at times a Freudian avalanche-of-conscious imagery, and it’s in the second half the film veers off its rails and plows into much darker territory, past Fellini and into the domain of Bunuel, a universe of sex, death, politics, decay, deformity, and the “other world” which hangs over the film like a funereal veil. If you’re not a fan of demented art cinema of the Seventies, we’ll see you next week. For those with more metaphysical tastes, we invite you into the hidden world of Arcana.

Gunmaster G9 In Surakksha (1979)

2011-05-15T22:24:00.011+10:00

Gunmaster G9 In Surakksha

India 1979 colour

Director Raveekant Nagaich Writers Rajvansh, Ramesh Pant

Cast Mithun Chakraborty (Gopi, Gunmaster G9) With Ranjeeta, Jeevan, Aruna Irani

Those of you who know me are aware of my obsession with Indian pulp movies of the Sixties and Seventies. One of my all-time favourite Bollywood films is Disco Dancer (1982), a low-rent tribute to Saturday Night Fever made five years late, by which time disco had truly died the death of a thousand cuts. But no, there was Mithun Chakraborty, in wide lapels and flares, strutting his dancefloor grooves through a Bolly mangling of “Video Killed The Radio Star”: tack heaped upon glorious tack, deliriously absurd, and one movie you must see in case you dismiss an entire subcontinent’s B grade treasures. To this day, Bengal-born Mithun is a golden idol of the cinema, now in his sixties with over 250 films under his belt, and Disco Dancer is celebrated in the same way Dirty Dancing is in Western culture minus the ironic sneer. In fact a friend of mine was trapped on a bus worming its way through the Himalayas, and the only cassette on the day long journey was the soundtrack to Disco Dancer. Doug now has “I am a disco dancer (pam-pam-paddup)” etched indelibly into the memory bank, and ever the cinematic sadist, I like to pop it on the CD player whenever he’s in the room. Yes, I too have the soundtrack; it does things to me that Patrick Swayze singing “She’s Like The Wind” can never achieve.

…which is a roundabout way of saying how much I love the rat-arse end of Bollywood cinema. Imagine my joy, therefore, to discover the Disco Dancer himself was the Bollywood James Bond in a previous incarnation. Yes, that’s Mithun Chakraborty as Gunmaster G-9 In Surakksha, or “Protection”, his first smash hit and the first of two G9 adventures. As much as I love Disco Dancer, I have a horrible feeling it’s been replaced – Gunmaster G9 is pure, unadulterated, ghee-coated 100% Bolly Gold. For starters, we have the genuine article, a disco era artefact with its ghastly fashions and insidious musical atrocities intact. No sooner are the credits over, Mithun is straight into said disco number about how irresistible he is to women. As Gopi, codename G9, his satyric wanderlust is a problem to his spy career, as he just can’t seem to keep his little Gopi in his flares. “It’ll be the reason for his death,” says the Mumbai version of M, head of the CBI, as he orders G9 to investigate a dead airline pilot and missing map to a diamond mine. And the pilot is not the only Indian male in this movie to be led astray by the gorgeous but treacherous Neelam, Bollywood’s own Pussy Galore in her red boots and vinyl hotpants.

Neelam and the silver-haired gangster Hiralal are also behind the disappearance of fellow agent Jackson (no last name), whom his family believed to be dead, as his body was delivered to their front door in a crate! Believed, that is, until Gopi pries open his coffin and finds a skeleton with some elaborate plastic surgeon performed on it. His frantic search leads him and his comic disciple Kabadi to the beautifully aloof Priya – no mere conquest this time, as Gopi falls deeply and desperately in love - and to the real brains behind the criminally awful Shiv Shakti Organization. And a suitably over-the-top Bond villain he is: perched in his underwater lair, surrounded by kung fu experts and zombie butlers, Dr Shiva is a self-proclaimed genius with one eye and metal hand who declares himself more powerful than all gods, Shiva included, and intends to destroy the world – but not before he demands our hero dance for his life in a contest with the surprisingly musical Hiralal!

The first thing you notice about this Bond-on-a-hundredth-the-budget clone is its incredible array of miniatures which put Thunderbirds to shame, setting fire to toy cars and planes and throwing them off a dirt hill. What are very real are the snakes: one found in Gopi’s dinner tray, and hundreds of them in tanks, all slithering to life during a smash-em-up kung fu battle at a water snake farm. The great leveller in that particular scene, for me, is the moment when Gopi’s opponent falls into a giant vat – only to be menaced by the same rubber shark I owned as ten year old. Dr Shiva’s lair itself is a masterpiece of modernist pap, a triumph of bullshit over budget, and quite simply the most implausible Bondian villain’s lair committed to celluloid, from its glass wall showing dangerously magnified goldfish to Shiva’s wall of clunky 70s TV sets – all six of them, the wood veneer types with the chunky channel dial. This is one underwater layer whose sinking wouldn’t raise a fart bubble in a bath tub, and believe me, this is a supreme compliment.

Gunmaster G9 has everything you want in a James Bond movie. Comedy! Romance! Musical numbers! Try spotting every intentional reference to a Bond film: the underwater lair from Spy Who Loved Me/Dr No, the poison string routine from You Only Live Twice, the funeral procession from Live And Let Die, and Goldfinger’s card game via binoculars… I’m sure I missed a few too, and please let me know what you discover. Best of all, Gunmaster G9 races along like a runaway Datsun and clocks in at just over two hours with nary a dull moment – a rarity for Mumbai’s regulation three hour masala marathons.

Gunmaster G9 will return to Schlock Treatment in the near future in Wardaat from 1981. Meanwhile, settle back, put your eye patch on and your BeeGees album on 45 as we watch our favourite Bond moments forced through the Bollywood mincing machine in Gunmaster G9 In Surakksha!

Titans Of The Ring (1973)

2011-05-02T23:09:00.010+10:00

Titans Of The Ring

Argentina 1973 colour

aka Titanes En El Ring

Director/Writer Leo Fleider

Cast Martín Karadagián, Ovidio Fuentes, Gloria Raines, Dakar

Long before WWF turned the noble sport of wrestling into an elaborate parody, Central and South American were already elevating their masked wrestlers dangerously close to sainthood. Mexico in particular named their greatest ever luchadore El Santo or The Saint, and his funeral in the early 80s (mask still firmly in place, of course) resembled the passing of Pope John Paul II. In Argentina, wrestling would evolve into a different and far less reverential form of pop culture phenomenon, one in which historical figures wrestle space creatures, and long dead mummies. With Titanes En El Ring, or Titans Of The Ring, the circus had truly came to town!

Its founding father, part-Armenian wrestler Martin Karadagian had spent over twenty years on the professional circuit as a rudo or heel, unleashing his dirty bag of tricks onto his much bigger and faster opponents, and was remembered as much for his tall tales as for his wrestling prowess, which even he would admit wasn’t spectacular. But he was a showman, and the self-aggrandizing jibber-jabber was all part of the show. By the early 50s, wrestling in South America was bigger than ever thanks to TV’s all-present eye, but as a small-screen fad had worn out its welcome by 1962. It needed a facelift, and one of Karadagian’s publicized stunts led to Channel 9 in Buenos Aires offering him a TV contract. Wrestling was cheap to produce, and in theory was easy to capture the public’s imagination. Thus, Titanes En El Ring was born.

As the show grew, so did the stable of eccentric characters cooked up by Karadagian. By 1964, Titanes… no longer resembled wrestling, but rather epic cartoonish battles of good-vs-evil, and no more silly than La Momia who debuted in 1965, a deaf-mute monster wrestling in full bandages, and whose limited trademark moves included a washboard backhand to the opponent’s skull. The kids loved it, purists despised what had become of their beloved sport, and by the early Seventies Titanes En El Ring had became the most-watched TV show in Argentina, now on Channel 13 on Friday nights, and squeezing 2000 fans into its tiny studio. Critics loved it too, praising the revamped show for its “originality, vitality, and innovation, condensing surrealism – primitive yet genuine - into its wildest state.”

It is fitting, then, that Titanes En El Ring made its big-screen debut in 1973, and that its main protagonists are two children, Miguelito and Carolina. Naturally they’re the show’s biggest fans, and sit in the audience in rapture while Karadagian parades his cavalcade of wrestling oddities, each with their own theme tune: literary figures Don Quixote (in full armour!) and Sancho Panza, the topical Hippie Hair and Hippie Jimmie, and Cucumber The Clown, whose grease paint and baggy pants compound the circus atmosphere. An alien in a helmet and bright yellow outfit would periodically emerge from a space ship lowered into the ring in a flurry of smoke. Then of course there’s La Momia – friend to all children! – going slap-happy on Karadagian the Armenian, whose ringside persona by now slips effortlessly between good guy, villain and carnival barker.

Miguelito constantly brags about knowing the Titans in an effort to impress his young girlfriend. To save face, his father convinces Karadagian to let the kids hang out at their training session. “Why are there good and bad Titans?” they later ask their new friend over sodas. The wise Armenian describes his show as a microcosm of the world – the universal struggle between light and shadow – and not just grown men in silly costumes throwing shit around and beating each other into meat. By mid-movie we’re treated to a rock and roll number and very little plot to speak of; luckily Carolina’s father is kidnapped by goons, and the Titans rally to the rescue. And that’s it. As a movie it’s candyfloss, all sugar and asbestos and little substance, and screw you for wanting anything more. The crowd shots of adoring young kids’ faces – that’s your demographic right there, the young, and the young and cheerfully dumb at heart.

As for the Titans, their peak in popularity in the early 70s translated to a long and painful decline until the show was cancelled in 1988. Karadagian lost a leg to diabetes several years before but would still hobble around the outside of the ring pulling pranks on both tecnicos and rudos. One time he threw his cane away, and announced dramatically to the audience, “I am alive! I don’t need the cane because the ring and the fans keep me standing.” His words proved to be prophetic, and he passed away three years after the show’s end, a thin and frail little man living in a convent infirmary, and a far cry from the king Titan we witness tonight. Prepare yourself for a unique peek into Argentinian pop culture circa 1973, with Titanes En El Ring, or Titans Of The Ring.

26th December 2010: Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1972)

2010-12-23T14:24:00.006+10:00

Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny

USA 1970/1972 colour

Directors Barry Mahon, R. Winer

Cast Jay Clark (Santa Claus), Shay Garner (Thumbelina), Pat Morrell (Mrs Mole), Bob O'Connell (Mr Digger)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the entrance to Hell, and it’s an amusement park in Florida. And it’s here we’re spending Boxing Day – and the end of the current season of Schlock Treatment – in the torturous sands of Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1972). You’d assume, in this season of giving, that we’ve saved the best of Schlock for last, right? Well, our film tonight is not so much a movie as a kind of wretched wrapping paper around a not-so-wretched short. In fact, Santa’s mulligan stew of school play, tacky home movie footage and amusement park advert, could be a new genre: the panto-mercial, of which its single entry Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny is clearly its outstanding example. To rub salt into our bleeding eyes, it displays a common trait amongst the kiddie matinee films, and that’s naked contempt for its audience, whom the filmmakers believe will watch any old horseshit, so long as there’s a candy cane parked in the top. [sound of crickets…]

But hey kids, it’s Santa Claus! Wait…oh no! He’s stranded in the sand dunes of Florida and his sleigh is stuck without his reindeer. The kids from the neighbourhood heed his distress call, and empty what seems like the entire menagerie of a petting zoo to help pull the sleigh. There’s a cow, and a frightened sheep, a guy in a gorilla suit – this is all filmed, by the way, in excruciating detail – and even a donkey, but Santa’s clearly no Baby Jesus. Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn just happen to be floating down the Mississippi River (cue “Old Man River” on kazoos), and offer their angry raccoon from the safety of some bushes. From what we can gather from his litany of clichés, Santa’s frustrated with his lot, but the world’s children need their toys, greedy little selfish bastards that they are . Never give up, Santa tells the wilting kids, have faith and BELIEVE. And, since Santa’s footage is almost an hour short of feature length, here’s a story to hammer the point home…

And so we arrive at our film-within-a-film, which comes with an interesting legacy. How did the director of A Good Time With A Bad Girl (1967) come to make kiddie horrors? Barry Mahon is one interesting cat. An American World War 2 fighter pilot shot down over Europe, his POW experience later inspired the Steve McQueen movie The Great Escape, but it’s his adventures in Filmland that most interest us here at Schlock HQ. By sheer twist of fate Mahon became Errol Flynn’s manager and directed his rancid swansong Assault Of The Cubal Rebel Girls (1959) which, along with the ill-fated Flynn vehicle William Tell, scuttled any chance at a serious career in Hollywood A-films. Instead, White Slavery (late 50s), a movie he shot in Tangiers while he and Flynn were laying low, sealed his fate, and he began a series of nudie cutie films, some with Playboy bunnies sourced by glamour photographer Bunny (“I shot Bettie Page”) Yeager. As the Sixties progressed, the benign nudie antics of Pagan Island (1960) and Girls On Tiger Reef (1965) gave way to notorious “roughies” like The Beast That Killed Women (1965) and The Sex Killer (1967), and then POOF! Like a third-rate magic act the pornographer disappeared, and Mahon the Kiddie Matinee King took his place: six shortish films in rapid succession around 1969 and 1970, and mostly shot at a doomed Florida amusement park called Pirate’s World, a place remembered more for its rowdy concerts by The Doors and Iron Butterfly than any of the buccaneer-themed rides.

Thumbelina (1970) was Mahon’s cardboard rendition of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, a burnt-out fluro nightmare lit sparingly with dayglo splashes by a filmmaker who clearly didn’t have a clue what the word “psychedelic” meant. Its two inch heroine suffers all manner of ignomies – sleeping in a walnut, kidnapped by frogs, pimped by a widowed mole and railroaded into marrying her octogenarian neighbour – and all with customary good cheer and boundless optimism. Indeed, every human-sized creature, or man-sized anthropomorphic puppet with flapping yapping mouths, wants a piece of Thumbelina, or to at least feast on her innocence. That is, until a thawed out bird gives her a glimpse of freedom AND true happiness, prompting yet another ghastly unmusical musical number. It’s like the rock opera Hair before it hit puberty and was still high-pitched and hairless. Sure, Thumbelina is a step up in production values from the Santa footage, but when you’ve hit rock bottom, you’ve nowhere else to go. What ever you do, don’t drift off to sleep and let its hideous tune about “twelve pennies” soak into your brain-sponge.

As Thumbelina draws to its depressing conclusion, it’s back to The Suck, and a sand-bound Santa still cursing his existential funk via a stream-of-consciousness gibberish issuing forth from his sweat-stained beard. I have absolutely no doubt there won’t be one single viewer left sitting by the end of the film, so I can safely give away the ending – Santa’s sleigh is saved by the Ice Cream Bunny, a pathetic seven foot threadbare creature even Jimmy Stewart in a percodin haze couldn’t have conjured. I can only assume it was the park’s mascot, as it drives the kids for a victory lap in a vintage fire engine past its numerous rides and attractions. It can perform only two functions, driving and winking like a dead, rotting, reanimated and fur-covered Marilyn Monroe. I swear, if anything screams Christmas more than the Ice Cream Bunny, I’ll happily choke on a homeless man’s sick, with the film’s “Jingle Bells” for kazoo playing as my funeral dirge. Happy Christmas everybody, and see you sometime in 2011 for the next season on Schlock Treatment as we leave you with the 1972 Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny.

The Ice Cream Bunny winks out in Morse Code "Happy Christmas, Schlockateers!"

19th December 2010: War Of The Zombies (1964)

2010-12-23T14:11:00.002+10:00

War Of The Zombies

Italy 1964 colour

aka Rome Against Rome, Roma Contro Roma, Night Star: Goddess Of Elektra

Director Giuseppe Vari Writers Ferruccio de Martino, Massimo de Rita, Piero Pierotti, Marcello Sartarelli

Cast John Drew Barrymore (Aderbad), Susy Andersen (Tullia), Ettore Manni (Gaius), Ida Galli (Rhama), Mino Doro (Lutetius), Ivano Staccioli (Sirion), Philippe Hersent (Azer)

“Unconquerable warriors of the damned!” screams the US poster for War Of The Zombies. “SEE the undead cross swords with the living! SEE the goddess of the night whose gaze mummifies men!” Sounds to me like the premise for one of the most incredible horror films ever. Imagine then your reaction when the film unspools and it’s YET ANOTHER ITALIAN SWORD AND SANDAL MOVIE! As if American theatre screens and televisions weren’t inundated enough in the early to mid Sixties with peplum-themed product, the films’ distributors – in War Of The Zombies’ instance, American International Pictures – were forced, as the peplum cycle was grinding towards its demise, to primp up or flat-out lie about their content.

Luckily War Of The Zombies from 1964 is not just another Sons of Hercules muscle-fest, but an ambitious fantasy-horror ranking comfortably near Mario Bava’s Hercules In The Haunted World and Riccardo Freda’s The Witches Curse. In War Of The Zombies, however, there’s no Hercules, Samson or Ursus as the beefcake-flavoured focal point. Instead the film’s hero is Roman centurion Gaius, sent without his troops to the troubled Salmacia province to investigate Rome’s missing tribute. In the opening sequence Roman troops carrying treasure from Salmacia back to Rome are butchered by barbarians, stripped of their armour and their bodies stolen by deformed scavengers. It appears the entire province, including its weak Roman pretern Letitius and his double-crossing snake of a wife Tullia, is under the spell of a devilish cult dedicated to the Moon Goddess and “daughter of Isis”, whose Oath of Blood is performed under the blazing high beam of its enormous stone bust’s single Third Eye. Through Letitius’ slave girl Rhama, held in a trance by the cult’s high priest Aderbad, Gaius learns of its plan to revive the spirits of the dead Roman soldiers and lead them into an ultimate showdown against their own living comrades.

Sounds incredible, and to a certain extent it is. This IS a peplum, let’s not forget, and as such there are dry patches of wooden dialogue and stiff-as-corpses emoting to suffer. Once we wade through the regulation courtships and betrayals, however, we’re presented with the payoff: a magnificent low-rent but surprisingly effective battle between the living and the dead, smothered with superimposed colour swirls of saturated reds and blues (Mario Bava’s favourite palette for supernatural effects). Rather than rotting corpses, the Moon Goddess’ army is presented as ghostly figures, their otherworldliness underscored by slow motion cameras and an eerie echo-laden soundtrack. Just as impressive is the over-the-top performance of their leader, high priest Aderbad, played by John Drew Barrymore (son of John Barrymore, father of Drew Barrymore) in one of his numerous Italian film appearances between numerous cocktails in the early Sixties. Quasi-psychedelic, and several notches above your ordinary Italian sword and sandal, is the zombie-themed peplum chiller Rome Against Rome, or War Of The Zombies.

12th December 2010: Revenge Of The Zombies (1943) & Valley Of The Zombies (1946)

2010-12-23T13:55:00.011+10:00

Revenge Of The Zombies

USA 1943 b&w

Director “Steve Sekely”/Istvan Szekely Writers Edmond Kelso, Van Norcross

Cast John Carradine (Dr Max Heinrich Von Altermann), Gale Storm (Jennifer Rand), Robert Lowery (Larry Adams), Bob Steele (Sheriff), Mantan Moreland (Jeff), Veda Ann Borg (Lila), Mauritz Hugo (Scott Warrington, Lila’s brother), Sybil Lewis (Rosella), Madame Sul-Te-Wan (Mammy Beulah)

I’m sure many of our viewers are familiar with the old Universal terrors of the Thirties and Forties, the domain of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine and many other classic Hollywood boogeymen. Those old guys didn’t just survive on big studio meals, however, and were just as busy in the lower strata of the film business, the much more threadbare B programmers of rattier studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram. Dismissed by many as mere el-cheapo crowd pleasers, I find the B pictures enjoyably cheap and formulaic, relatively fat-free quickies with a charm all of their own.

Monogram Pictures’ Revenge Of The Zombies begins deeeep in the fog-shrouded Louisiana swamps, to the call of the zombies (“Ar-Wooooooooooooooooooooo!”). Dead bodies are rising from their coffins and crawling around the estate of the insane scientist Dr Max Von Altermann (a low-key but still menacing John Carradine). His wife’s brother has learnt of her sudden and inexplicable “heart attack”, and he and his police buddy arrive to investigate, only to discover Von Altermann’s experiments are in creating an army of unstoppable, unkillable undead ubermentsch for his Nazi overlords. You can even hear him train them in his basement – “Ein, schwei…” – and yet his ultimate enemy may be the steel will of his own dead wife…

Intended as a sequel to the 1941 King Of The Zombies, Revenge… is more of a revamp utilizing some of the cast, and its adherence to elements already poached from Bela Lugosi’s White Zombie from 1933. Returning is Mantan Moreland, comedian from all-black vaudeville known as the Chitlin’ Circuit; as in King Of The Zombies and his long-running stint as Charlie Chan’s chauffeur, Moreland essays his driver role as the bug-eyed, superstitious and terrified comic relief, and like his contemporary Step’n’Fetchit, a wholly un-PC example of pre-Civil Rights Hollywood. Conversely the film’s most interesting character is Von Altermann’s old African-American servant Mammy Beulah, played by Madame Sul-Te-Wah (also from King…), a D.W. Griffiths stalwart from such early epics as Intolerance (1916) and that grand ol’ ole to the KKK, Birth Of A Nation (1915). Unlike the “lordy lord” antics of the exasperating Moreland, there’s depth and a quiet dignity in Madame Sul-Te-Wah, not easy to maintain amidst the chorus of massas and sho ‘nuffs. The anti-Nazi propaganda may seem forced, but Revenge Of The Dead was after all released in the opening phases of America’s involvement in World War 2, and is infinitely more subtle than Hungarian-born director Istvan Szekely’s other film from the period, Hitler’s Women (also 1943).

Valley Of The Zombies

USA 1946 b&w

Director Philip Ford Writers Dorrel McGowan, Stuart McGown

Cast Robert Livingstone (Dr Terry Evans), Lorna Gray (Nurse Susan Drake), Ian Keith (Ormond Murks), Thomas Jackson (Detective Blair)

Both King and Revenge Of The Zombies must have made enough cashola for rival company Republic Pictures to release the exploitatively-titled Valley Of The Zombies in 1946. The film certainly wastes no time in plunging straight into the guts of the story: a tall figure in a top hat and cloak breaks into a doctor’s office at the hospital’s morgue and demands a supply of his rare blood type, only to reveal himself as Ormond Murks, the insane criminal mind the doctor had committed several years before for claiming to have found the secret of eternal life. Murks was later pronounced dead and interred in his family crypt, but has since existed somewhere between the living and the dead by stealing packaged supplies of his precious life fluid…until now, he decides, that fresher really IS better. Thus begins a string of murders throughout the city, all strangled, drained of blood and then meticulously embalmed. Chief suspects are the morgue’s resident couple Dr Terry Evans and Nurse Susan Drake, a wise-cracking pair of amateur sleuths equally at home prowling around mausoleums at midnight or napping on the morgue’s slab. Naturally they’re two steps ahead of the bumbling Irish-American cops, which means the ditzy Nurse Susan is a sitting target for Murks’ dastardly plans.

If ever there was a film screaming out for a name actor to carry it, it’s Valley Of The Zombies. The role of Murks would have usually been reserved for Boris Karloff; instead we’re given Ian Keith, a salted plum of a stage actor who was once in the running for Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Here he’s more Tod Slaughter than Lugosi, an adequate by-the-numbers villain who sadly only ever hints at the evocative Valley in the title, its voodoo rituals and Devil’s potions the source of his secrets. Thus we’re treated to one zombie-like scientist, and one hypnotized broad who acts like the living dead. Thanks, Republic, you suckered us alright. Still, Valley Of The Zombies is brisk, ghoulish fun, in the tradition of many B detective serials of the era, and a throwback to a pre-George Romera era when the word “zombie” had an air of mystery about it.

Sunday 5th December 2010: Return Of The Evil Dead (1973)

2010-12-23T13:40:00.003+10:00

Return Of The Evil Dead

Spain 1973 colour

aka El Ataque De Los Meurtos Sin Ojos/“Attack Of The Eyeless Dead”, Return Of The Blind Dead, Revenge Of The Evil Dead

Director/Writer Amando de Ossorio

Cast “Tony Kendall”/Luciano Stella (Jack Marlowe), Fernando Sancho (Mayor Duncan), “Esther”/Esperenza Roy (Vivian), “Frank Blake”/Franco Brana (Dacosta)

Just as George Romero changed the face of zombie cinema with his groundbreaking Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Spanish director Amando de Ossorio gave them a distinctly European neo-gothic makeover in a series of four films from 1971 to 1975. Known as the Blind Dead Quartet, the films feature the reanimated skeletal remains of the Knights Templar, keepers of the secrets of eternal life and now unstoppable killing machines on undead horses and clad in their Templar garb. Their skull features blazing empty eye sockets require them to find their victims entirely by sound...the trick is to not scream their lungs out at their ghastly appearance!

Tonight's film Return Of The Evil Dead is the second in the Quartet, following on the bony heels of Tombs Of The Blind Dead (1971), while completely reinventing its Templar back story, as the whimsical de Ossorio did with each entry. This time the blood-drinking, human sacrificing Templars are holed up in an Abbey in the Spanish town of Berzanzo, their eyes burnt out by angry villagers and set on fire – but not before a curse falls upon their descendants. Five hundred years later and the townsfolk of Berzanzo are happily celebrating the anniversary of scouring the Templar devils from the face of the Earth. Night falls, dry ice oozes from the ruined Abbey, and skeletal hands covered in rotting cowls slowly emerge from their tombs...

Back in Berzanzo, it's certainly no Fourth of July Picnic. The town's corrupt Mayor is busy ordering his goons to beat up Jack Marlowe, the American fireworks technician and ex-lover of local sexpot Vivian, whom the Mayor and at least one of his goons have their greasy eyes on. As the Templar's mummified army reaches the town square and hacks its way through the festivities, the core survivors seek sanctuary in a church, and then turn on each other one by one. It's like Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) – the tight confines bringing out the characters' latent jealousy, greed, selfishness and inhumanity – if zombies were clutching at the side of the raft. Particularly repellent is the Mayor, who thinks nothing of using his constituents as Templar bait. Vindication is the Templars, and the world finds itself a few assholes fewer.

As a film, Return Of The Evil Dead is much more suspenseful than a skeleton army in sackcloth should engender. The very appearance of the undead Templars and their modus operandi (blind but not deaf, my sweet pointed coccyx!) require a very serious leap of faith on the part of its audience, and yet, with those iconic soiled hoods and grinning skulls, they can't help but disturb. De Ossorio recycles many of the first Blind Dead's aural and visual tricks, such as the jarring slow-motion shots of the Templars on zombie horseback reinforcing their otherworldliness, and the soundtrack dripping with low moans and pitch-shifted bells. The set pieces are nothing short of fantastic: the village square massacre, the fate of hunchbacked cripple Murdo, and in an obvious nod to another Hitchcock film The Birds (1963), the young girl's heartstopping walk through the zombie sentinels (ALWAYS remember that in the case of an undead Armageddon, children are the weakest link). There are moments of intentional humour – the scenes with the governor and his saucy maid are nicely handled – but overall the tone is grim to the point of apocalyptic, and like other Spanish horrors of the early Seventies, equal parts gothic atmosphere and modern gore-soaked shock tactics.

“You have to be quiet!” yells one character, and I hope you do the same. Sit very still, and don't utter a sound until the end of Return Of The Evil Dead.

28th November 2010: The Lady Of The Black Moons (1971)

2010-12-23T13:28:00.005+10:00

The Lady Of The Black Moons

Egypt/Lebanon 1971 colour

aka Sayedat Al Akmar Al Sawdaa, La Dame Aux Lunes Noires

Director/Writer Samir A. Khouri

Cast Nahed Yousri (Aida), Hussein Fahmy (Omar), Adel Adham (Sami Bey)

Poster for Nahed Yousri's Queen Of Love (1971)

Six months ago we screened our first ever Egyptian cult movie on Schlock Treatment called The Kuwait Connection from 1973. Those who saw it will have to admit it was baffling attempt to stitch together the horror, sexploitation, art film and political thriller into one strange mutant monster. It was one of two films which book-ended Egypt's brief flirtation with erotic cinema, a two year period of relaxed censorship restrictions between 1971 and 1973 during which Egyptian filmmakers made the country's most scandalous and salacious movies. The Lady Of The Black Moons was the first, filmed in Lebanon and directed by The Kuwait Connection's Samir A. Khouri, and featuring gorgeous and talented (not to mention adventurous) actress and superstar of Egyptian cinema, Nahed Yousri, as its lead.

Hussein Fahmy today

It's one of those films that throws you in the deep end of a pool after midnight, turns off the lights and watches your death throes while sipping a warm martini. The opening fractured montage eventually pieces together a disconcerting tableaux of a bored, well-to-do housewife in feathered mask bedding strangers in a house of ill-repute during a full moon; the woman, the film reveals in excruciatingly slow flashback, is Aida, married to successful, cold and cruel businessman Sami Bey, but tortured by memories of her lost love, their chauffeur Omar. Unable to embrace a man after her stepfather raped her at age ten, it takes a drunken Omar to open her rosebud; regardless, she chooses wealth and position over desire, and despite her valiant efforts to keep the affair alive, Omar ultimately rejects her, sending her into a downward spiral of depression and self-destruction. Her illicit attempts to recreate her beloved Omar out of strangers always end in castration – symbolically, the film suggests, despite the metaphor being hammered home several times with disturbing realism.

Nahed Yousri

The Lady Of The Black Moons is mostly early Seventies melodrama peppered with tease, violence, sexy smoking, ape-hair chests and the kind of flaming arch-pretentiousness that filmmakers managed to hold in reserve until the start of the Seventies. Symbolism abounds in its ragged, overt imagery and faux-poetry-as-dialogue, and even if at times our director isn't being deliberately oblique, it's tempting to look for meaning, however cracked, where no meaning can possibly exist. In key scenes the stench of pretension is impossible to miss: Sami's father, a wily trickster with a grotesquely over-developed sense of irony, gives Sami and Aida a distorted mirror as a wedding present. “Ugliness,” he reasons, “is but the mirror of the soul” - this nugget of wisdom coming from the chap who plays happy tunes under blown-up polaroids of the Hiroshima and Nagisaki blasts. Then there's the portrait mounted above Aida's bed of a white horse flanked by two brown horses; Aida later rides a white horse down the beach in her underwear, is met by Omar, and are filmed making sweet filthy love through the shimmering heat of three fish (that's THREE fish, remember) poaching over a fire. The horse, I'm certain, represents Aida's freshly unbridled sexuality, but what about the fish? Are THEY symbolic, and could they possibly be cyphers in an Islamic reinvention of the crucifixion triptych? Is it ALL, for that matter, just a load of symbolics? Has Meaning finally skewered itself in a bizarre piscine version of hari-kiri and now stares us down through parboiled eyes?

Adel Adham in action

I, for one, get high on misguided art cinema, particularly if the “art” is nothing more than tarted-up sleaze. One one level it's the work of a filmmaker in a repressive regime given permission by authorities to test the limits of control – and he certainly does, although his The Kuwait Connection from 1973 helped slam the window of opportunity shut again. On another level, it's a morality play from the Muslim world in which wickedness is ultimately punished (“I'm a slut dirty!” Aida's subtitle proclaims) but not after the privileged audience cops one steaming eyeful of said wickedness after the other. On final scrutiny, The Lady Of The Black Moons is like many of its European contemporaries, a simple soap opera gussied up with tits and art; to his credit, Khouri indulges in the same highbrow pulp as prolific Spanish cinemaniac Jess Franco, with only a whiff of Franco's customary surrealism and deranged psychedelic visuals that go full-tilt in Khouri's next film The Kuwait Connection. It's imaginatively photographed, sadly nowhere near as sleazy, violent or weird as its follow-up, and at times threatens to collapse under the weight of such turgid lines as Omar's when driving past a cemetery: “Can they keep loving each other after death?” Not only that, you have to admit that Nahed Yousri makes a fantastic slut dirty. Time to cover the windows with cardboard and take out the lightbulbs with hammers as we visit The Lady Of The Black Moons.

21st November 2010: 666 The End Is At Hand 2 (2007)

2010-12-23T13:16:00.007+10:00

666: The End Is At Hand 2

Nigeria 2007 colour

Director Ugo Ugbor Writer BobEmmanuel Anosika

Cast Emeka Ani, Pastor Kenneth Okonkwo (Pastor Chucks), Clems Ohameze (Pastor Ken), Fred Arico

Greetings, Schlock Fiends, as we take you kicking and screaming back to Nigeria for a second dose of Nigerian or “Nollywood” Godsploitation. Last Christmas we showed you 666: The End Is At Hand, a delirious take on The Omen series by foaming-at-the-mouth evangelists; in the sequel, we're pleased to tell you that the midget Antichrist from 666... is alive, well, still under four foot tall, and drinking, smoking Guinness and whoring his way across Lagos.

Did I say midget Antichrist? You'll remember the Son of Satan from the first film, an angry little “kid” in a David Beckham jersey who spends much of his screen time glowering under a polystyrene horn with CGI eyes. It turns out the junior Antichrist is played by Musa Ibrahim, popularly known as Ibro, a popular midget actor in his early twenties who shot to fame several years ago in a film called Baby Police. While nowhere near the giddying heights of fame reserved for Nollywood midget celebrities Aki and Paw-Paw, this feisty Gary Coleman-in-training has all the hallmarks of a bona fide superstar. Seriously, this little guy has chops: within fifteen minutes he has already garrotted a priest, and at the thirty minute mark he's just sprayed “666” on some comely wench's forehead and is lying back on the bed literally with The Horn. Praise Ibro!

You'll also remember Pastor Lazarus from the first film, the preacher trawling through the poorest parts of Lagos preaching de Word of God. In the sequel, he passes the torch to New Preacher On The Block, Pastor Chucks, played by the franchise's producer Pastor Kenneth Okonkwo, who clearly felt the series needed some Ken Power. Pastor Chucks thus spends much screen time on endless sermonizin' (read: pointless padding) at the expense of some much-needed religious weirdness. Trust me, however, the Weird is still with with us... Satan, that rolly-polly Louis Armstrong, remains in his gymnasium surrounded by his she-demons, dragging down one soul at a time to increase his kingdom – ONE AT A TIME. Once again, the actor playing Satan is given free rein on his dialogue, which here is less than inspired, and reduced to an emphatic “I am Lucifer. I AM LUCIFER! ..... ahahahahahahahaha!!!!”

At the half-way point the Antichrist upgrades to an adult's body, and the series bids adieu to Ibro while wishing him all the success in his proposed Hollywood career. Antichrist Mark 2 takes on the guise of Pastor Ken, referred to by his congregation as “our Lord”. Part of his ecumenical duties is to dress like a pimp, and to impregnate bored rich housewives (“Praise be to Jesus!”), his Demon Seed thus ensuring a part 3 and 4 - or more accurately, The Signs Of End Time 1 and 2. Are we really that sadistic to play two more of these Nollywood Godsploiters? See you at Easter time, sinners!

If this all looks and feels like a home movie or student film, do not be deceived: Nigeria is one of the largest film industries in the world, generating billions from its staggering output of 1000 to 2000 features per year, mostly shot on digital cameras and edited on home computers. Nollywood has its own pantheon of stars, its own international distribution networks, and its own mutant genres (of which the “juju” or religious horror film is just one), all of which operate as if Hollywood doesn't even exist; in Africa they pirate their own movies, and snub the cultural hegemony of Angelina Jolie and company. It's a brazen revolutionary stance, a “DIY Or Die” to the Western Monolith of Media Mediocrity, which Schlock Treatment salutes. I assure you it will take a while to adjust your filmic sensibilities to the Nigerian aesthetic – the accent for one, the shouting of improvised lines, the primitive video production, the computer-generated effects and soundtracks – but like evangelical Christianity, once hooked you're snared forever. We hope you see the Nollywood Light with 666: The End Is At Hand 2.

14th November 2010: Magic Of The Universe (1986)

2010-12-23T09:05:00.009+10:00

Magic Of The Universe

Philippines 1986 colour

aka Salamangkero: The Magician, Monster Of The Universe

Director Tata Esteban Writers Tata Esteban, Grace Hill Serrano

Cast Michael De Mesa (Lolo Omar/Professor Jamir), Tanya Gomez (Lovina), Tom Tom (Bojok), Sunshine (Freza), Armida Siguion-Reyna (Mikula)

What is known of Filipino director Tata Esteban (real name Steve Regala) has been coloured by his own much-publicised personal narrative, carefully constructed following his conversion to revivalist Christianity as an almost cartoon-like fall from Grace and subsequent redemption and salvation. A “hardcore womanizer, flesh trader and shabu addict”, he is described on a Christian ministry's website, “promiscuous since he was 13, and constantly wallowing in money as he traded and bedded women, and showed off their wares in his hit nightclubs and movies...” A stroke, several heart attacks and his two year-old son asking for a hit of daddy's Shibu, reportedly turned his life around in 2000, before a final heart attack in 2003 claimed Esteban for good; friends and colleagues remember him prior to his conversion as a talented if troubled artist whose personal demons no doubt got the better of him.

It's tempting to draw parallels between Esteban's turbulent private life and his skewed filmic fantasies. Starting with the demented sex-horror Alapaap (aka Clouds) in 1984, his work tended toward the erotic, and is most notorious for the samurai sword-in-vagina sequence from Hubo Sa Dilim (aka Naked In The Dark, 1985). In context, Esteban's startling filmography makes his 'kids' fantasy Magic Of The Universe that little bit disconcerting.

Esteban cast two of the leads from Alapaap, Michael de Mesa (son of Rosemarie Gil, brother of Cherie Gil) and bold star Tania Gomez, as Jamir the Magician and his wife Lovina. The film opens at a circus with Jamir's vanishing act going horribly wrong – their daughter Freza (Sunshine) has truly disappeared without trace. The couple venture deep into the jungle with their tubby child assistant Bojak (played by Tom-Tom – and no-one properly explains where HIS parents have vanished to) to consult a shaman. He proceeds to carve up one of his monkey companions with a machete, and invites the party to scoff fresh steaming brains out of the convenient monkey-skull desert bowl for divine inspiration. The child, it appears, has slipped into another more magical realm, and Lovina soon vanishes too, leaving Jamir and Bojak wondering what to do with their ever-diminishing family act.

Jamir is visited by the spectre of his great grandfather Lolo Omar (also played under a landslide of latex by Michael de Mesa). He tells Jamir of the family's mystical lineage, and how Omar's black-hearted acolyte Mikula - the Root of All Evil - is holding the Magical Realm hostage. The audience's descent is sudden, plunged head-first into a universe resembling a Duran Duran filmclip by Russell Mulcahy (but in fact co-designed by Magic's AD and future auteur Brillante Mendoza), populated with slobbering pig-people, monkey-men and dwarves in white-face, and presided over by the demented Mikula, she with the domed skull pulsing so wildly it threatens to send her headdress into orbit. “I am an animal, it's true,” Mikula declares to her court's menagerie, “but I RULE!”

It's a strange amalgam of influences at work in Magic Of The Universe. From Hollywood comes the sinister, otherworldly nightmares of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, with more than a nod to the title of He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe. Closer to home is the reinvigorated horror and fantasy industry courtesy of Peque Gallage and Lore Reyes (Shake Rattle And Roll, Once Upon A Time), following on from such successful fantasy franchises as Carlo J. Caparas' Ang Panday series (1980-1983), Ramon Revilla's anting-anting films, the Seventies revival of Darna and company, and if one follows the trail far enough back, to the original Darna (1950) and Djesebel (1953).

There are serious pacing issues, not to mention large fissures in the film's internal logic which prevent it from straying too far from the mundane. Its 1986 Metro Manila Film Festival slot, and the economic imperatives that come with such a responsibility, also tend to dampen Esteban's darker impulses, which are naturally given full rein in his more adult features. There's also a regulation stream of superfluous name stars who serve little more than marquee value: Dick Israel as forest dweller Arbutus with his stone wife Madera (Odette Khan), Liza Lorena as Kleriga, Mikula's wildly painted nemesis, and Gina Alajar as Siddha, the grail keeper of the Regalia, a wand designed to defeat Mikula and thus restore the balance of Goodness and Justice in the Magical Realm.

The film has moments of intentional absurdity: Mikula's court suddenly drops everything for an Oingo Boingo-styled musical number, the singer in snake dreads gargling San Miguel beer for vocals, and guitars made from human bones. For the most part, however, it's a grim affair, and far too grim to be considered 'light entertainment'; poor eight-year old Sunshine looks genuinely terrified for her entire performance, and I'm certain she's not that intuitive an actress. Severed heads are boiled for Mikula to absorb their strength – and let's not forget brains slurped out of monkey skulls! Then there's the goofy muppet Gondo, a jibbering flap-eared vision from my own personal Hell draped around a black and white TV, which I assume is both his torso and narrative function. For a tittering gargoyle it's given a fair amount of screen time, and presumably Esteban didn't want to waste a single inch of his Satanic-inspired rubber creation.

7th November 2010: Child Bride (1938)

2010-12-23T08:38:00.005+10:00

Child Bride

USA 1938 b&w

aka Child Bride Of The Ozarks, Dust To Dust

Director/Writer Harry Revier

Cast Shirley Mills (Jennie), Bob Bollinger (Freddie), Warner Richmond (Jake Bolby), Diana Durrell (Miss Carol), “Don Barrett”/Angelo Rossitto (Angelo)

Tonight we have finally uncovered a film so inherently evil, even WE had to censor it: from a world which believes that ten year old fruit are ripe for the plucking comes the 1938 Child Bride.

“We aim neither to ridicule nor defend their way of living.” So begins one of the most hateful examples of hicksploitation from 1938, posing as a plea to outlaw child marriage amongst hillbillies - the po' White Trash huddled in mountain communities far away from civilization's disapproving gaze. Popular culture had just discovered these modern primitives with their own customs, a black economy founded on moonshine – yep, these people are dirt poor, with an emphasis on the dirt, and according to Child Bride's litany of cliches, a simple-minded goat milkin', wife beatin', infant lovin' folk emitting a stink worse than the charred, piled-up remains of Lil' Abner, Ma and Pa Kettle and the Beverly Hillbillies combined. At least those folk were cheerfully innocent rubes that even the most unimaginative city drones could feel superior to; no, Child Bride's cast of miscreants are truly ugly people living in a squalid hellhole that God, in His infinite wisdom, has chosen to forsake.

One of Child Bride's opening scenes shows a pig wallowing in the mud – shades of the shitstorm to come for ten year old Jenny and her family. Her pa Ira works at an illegal moonshine still with the mean and covetous Jake, a snake with one eye on the till, and the other roaming eye for Ira's daughter. Then there's Angelo the Dwarf (played by the ubiquitous Little Guy Angelo Rossetti), and a simpleton named Happy, a magnificent figure in Gilligan hat and joke-store teeth. They bunk together, work the still, are a kind of mutant Greek Chorus, and are about the most sympathetic characters we're going to subjected to.

On the other side of the mountain is the school presided over by Miss Carol, a local lass who'd managed to escape to the Big City for some educatin', but still believes in “my people, my blood”, and is filled with missionary zeal to reform the critters from trading in their poor clapped-out wives in their thirties for a much younger model. Understandably the menfolk don't take too kindly to her meddlin' and putting ideas in the young un's heads, and anticipate a whole mess o' trouble; the womenfolk, all haggard former child brides themselves, are too set in their ways, or browbeaten to even raise an eyebrow in protest. Jake heads up a lynch mob to dispense some good ol' fashioned Mountin' Law, and argue whether to tar and feather the pesky teacher, or boil her in oil. Happy and Dwarfy save her in the proverbial nick, but not before the stage is set for a ghastly tale to unfold of Biblical proportions.

So where does this leave young Jenny? Naked, for one thing, and swimming with her German Shepherd under the watchful gaze of her would-be beau Freddy and a peeping Jake. It's at this point the film steps way over the point of acceptability under any circumstances, and was the film was usually sheared of ten minutes' footage by like-minded authorities. If you ever wondered where we at Schlock Treatment draw the line, it's RIGHT HERE. As a result you'll only see a black screen, and please don't let your imaginations fill in the blanks. It's also a black flag for poor Jenny's doomed family, and without spoiling the ending, let's just say, “Do you take this girl-child...” are some of the most sinister words I've ever heard uttered by a man of the cloth.

Child Bride is just one example of a peculiar kind of exploitation film from the Thirties and Forties: like the VD scare films and drug horrors of Reefer Madness and co, it's leering, spiteful pseudo-propaganda wallowing in the exact kind of filth it purports to condemn. Sometimes I suspect that we, the Schlock Treatment audience, are just like the pig in Child Bride's opening sequence, wallowing in filth – but then I remember that we are, in fact, that child-like innocent in the Gilligan's hat. See y'all later, y'all after the 1938 Child Bride.

31st October 2010: Horror Express (1972)

2010-12-22T23:18:00.004+10:00

Horror Express

Spain/UK 1972 colour

aka Panic In The Trans-Siberian Train, Pánico En El Transiberiano

Director “Gene”/Eugenio Martín Writers Arnaud d'Usseau, Julian “Halevy”/Zimet

Cast Christopher Lee (Prof. Sir Alexander Saxton), Peter Cushing (Dr Wells), Alberto de Mendoza (Father Pujardov), Silvia Tortosa (Countess Irina Petrovski), Telly Savalas (Captain Kazan), Helga Liné (Natasha)

Tonight's film takes me all the way back to 1979, when I was a nine year old kid living in Bahrain. Betamax had arrived in the Middle East, and suddenly all of the films I was previously denied access to were there, on seventh or eight generation dupes, distributed though the network of pirate video stores I would later call the Betamax Grapevine. Horror was the vine's forbidden fruit, and I started to gorge myself: slashers, Italian gore movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then Hammer films, and those of Britain's horror superstars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. No matter what dire projects they lent their marquee value to, Lee and Cushing would always give their roles a certain class and gravitas, and in the midst of the filmic chaos a dignified retreat. It was early in this voyage of discovery that I stumbled upon the two playing turn-of-the-century scientists battling a brain-sucking Neanderthal on the Trans-Siberian Express. The film was called Horror Express from 1972, and I went bananas over it.

It's always a terrifying moment going back to those defining moments in your childhood, only to discover you were so far off the mark. Not so with Horror Express. I hadn't seen the film in thirty years, yet I remembered it almost scene by scene. It's every bit as bizarre as I recalled, and just as classy. Christopher Lee is note-perfect as a humourless fossil expert Alexander Saxton jealously guarding his latest acquisition in Arctic Siberia – the intact body of a primitive man encased in ice. It arouses much interest, not least from a nosy fellow scientist Dr Wells played by Peter Cushing, with whom he reluctantly ends up sharing a carriage on the Trans-Siberian Express back to Europe. A thief at Shanghai's station, then a baggage attendant, quickly discover the body is no longer frozen – and whose glowing eye sucks out their memories, leaving the victims' eyes white and ringed with blood, and their brains smooth as an egg. Agh, those eyes! They've haunted me since childhood, and no matter how often the brain-suckling scenes are repeated, they still unnerve me.

It's an alien intelligence in the body of the caveman, or possibly something much darker. The first person to notice the stink of true Evil is a Rasputin-like monk with more than a passing resemblance to the late great Paul Naschy, little more than a trained monkey in the employ of a Polish Count and his flirtatious wife, who spends much of the film's running time throwing herself at the disinterested Lee right under her husband's nose. The wide-eyed mystic believes the creature in the trunk is Satan himself walking amongst mankind, and readily abandons his faith to learn the creature's power and drink greedily from its endless well of knowledge. “Science is immoral”, the Countess reasons with the amoral Darwinist Lee, and it's this clash of Godless science and faith, superstition, and the age-old belief that knowledge is inherently evil – the apple in the Garden of Eden, the hidden eleventh branch on the Kabbalah's ten branch Tree of Life, the yawning Abyss representing the absence of God and thus Satan himself - that gives a counterweight to the rest of the film's jibber-jabber and brain sucking.

The real revelation of Horror Express is Kojak's Telly Savalas as the cossack officer, and quite possibly steals the show screaming “Peasants!” at the passengers and gargling vodka like listerine. For a cheaper, less polished version of Hammer's more distinguished productions, the period detail is extraordinary, particularly in the Shanghai station sequences, and as expected Lee and Cushing's presence balance the film's spiralling lunacy, the strain almost palpable as they soldier through the polyphonous babble of pseudo-science and peer through microscopes at line drawings of pterodactyls. And as if it couldn't get any stranger comes an ending so out of left field, and such pure Grand Guignol, it firmly cements the film as one of my favourite horror films of all time.

Sometimes it's good to revisit an old friend, especially on those special times of the year. From all of us at Schlock Treatment, Happy Halloween everyone, happy All Saints Day tomorrow, and have a ghoulish Day Of The Dead on Tuesday, as we take you for a night journey on the Horror Express.

24th October 2010: Puss 'n Boots (1961)

2010-12-22T22:58:00.006+10:00

Puss 'n Boots

Mexico 1961 colour

aka El Gato Con Botas

Directors Roberto Rodríguez, [uncredited] Manuel San Fernando Writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero

Cast El Enano Santanon (El Gato), Antonio Raxel (El Rey Serio), Humberto Dupeyrón (Juanito), Edmundo Benitez (El Gallo)

There are a number of rules for a children's film to succeed as a miserable failure, and thus reaching the hallowed “schlock” status. For one, the movie must patently stink as entertainment for its (by now alienated) primary audience. Secondly, it must disturb and unnerve – not in an obvious manner, but in a creepy, not-good-touch fashion. And thirdly, it must be shoddily dubbed, thereby hammering home its “unworldliness”. Musical numbers, unable to match the mouth movements with musical syncopation, subsequently crash and burn, and are reduced in minutes to smouldering ash. The agony! The ecstacy! And remember, kids, don't ever take ecstacy if you're feeling depressed or not in the care of an irresponsible adult.

Once these three simple rules are in place, it's a joy to uncover an entire industry of psychedelic pseudo-kiddie horrorshows which sticks desperately to the rules like a drowning fat kid to his donut. It ain't a life raft, Tubs, and Puss 'n Boots from 1961 is clearly not for twinkywinks. Originally titled El Gato Con Botas, it's just one of a series of Mexican fairy tales from the early Sixties produced and directed by Roberto Rodriguez, and then reworked for an American audience by the dubbing factory of Florida-based K. Gordon Murray. His successes repackaging Mexican wrestling and/or horror pictures was matched by his Saturday Matinee circuit; Murray's fabled double bills of weirdly-reworded German and Mexican programmers were augmented with live appearances of “your favourite characters brought to life” - men in animal costumes representing Stinky the Skunk and the Big Bad Wolf. Plush memories, I'm sure, buried by an entire generation of post-Baby Boomers only now coming to terms with the deep psychological scars.

Puss 'n Boots is set in a magical kingdom under the spell of a terrible ogre, the genetic result of Genghis Khan being raped by Vikings, who has bled the Royal Treasury dry and now demands the hand of the King's daughter for his oafish son. The Kingdom, it has been foretold, can only be saved by one who is pure of heart: into the forest prances Randy the Sheep Herder (thank you K. Gordon Murray for showing such restraint), and into the hidden sugar-cave of kindly old Mother Time. She hands Randy a miniature hat and boots, which fit his pet cat like a charm. Before you can say “aye chihuahua”, the puss is transformed into El Gato, a midget in a cat costume (and if you dig below the furline you'll find the hunchbacked dwarf from our previous film Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters!), an amphetamine howl on legs whose demented stream-of-consciousness babble is punctuated with a stabbing series of “mrow's” and “meowmeowmeow's”. The Prints (as in “Paw Prints”) and the Pauper team up with a talking chicken who claims to be of royal lineage – both Cat and Chicken become locked in a battle to see who has the most grating voice, and I suspect it's the same one! - and together they set out to save the kingdom AND the chastity of Princess Jane with cunning, lies, a pure (if somewhat deceitful) heart, and a full load of catnip.

“The mercy and charity of God is infinite,” says Mother Time, echoing the film's Catholic overtones and Inquisition-like intensity. For us, however, Puss 'n Boots offers no mercy, and is proof that God has left the cinema, leaving us perpetual five year olds trapped in an existential filmic Hell. For one we're subjected to one of the most excruciating musical scores in the K. Gordon Murray catalogue, a caterwaul of cat's claws on blackboards (“Who dares raise his voice in song?” asks the King, and no-one's willing to own up!). Then there's the scene of the Chicken pleading to the court not to be eaten, echoing the undercurrent of sadism in both Puss In Boots the fairy tale, and Puss 'n Boots the Mexican torture show. There are dwarves dressed as clowns, fat kids in puffy pants, and El Gato attempting to seduce a real-life pussy... “This pretending is grotesque”, the King so accurately puts it, and the sum effect is like having an injection – it stings like a motherfucker and the sight of steel penetrating the skin chills us to the soul, but we can't look away. Watching Puss 'n Boots from one set of credits to the other is like a whole series of injections that have perforated the skin all the way around your arm so you can tear it off like a postage stamp. Now take that arm and beat yourself to death with it.

Feeling better? Thought you might. Or, just record tonight's movie and watch it twice. Please enjoy the 1961 Puss 'n Boots.

17th October 2010: The Mexican Batwoman (1967)

2010-12-22T22:44:00.006+10:00

Batwoman

Mexico 1967 colour

aka La Mujer Murciélago

Director René Cardona [Sr] Writer Alfredo Salazar

Cast Maura Monti (Batwoman), Roberto Cañedo (Dr Eric Williams), Héctor Godoy (Mario Robles), David Silva (No. 1/José)

Here's a fascinating and practically seamless experiment in film genre, splicing Sixties Batmania to the Masked Mexican film. An infinitely more glamorous character than Santo, Batwoman stars Maura Monti, the tall gorgeous actress of Italian descent who featured in a phenomenal thirty five films in her four year film career before she disappeared. Usually playing in tandem with other actresses, or second-billed to wrestling superstars Santo and Blue Demon, her chance to strut her costumed stuff came in 1967 with the lead role in La Mujer Murcielago, or the Mexican Batwoman.

The body of yet another drowned wrestler is discovered by fisherman off Acapulco, hot on the heels of a number of similar murders in Hong Kong and Macao. Autopsies reveal that in each case the juice of the wrestlers' pineal gland has been drained. Police bring in secret agent Mario Robles to solve the mystery; he in turn calls in his own secret weapon Gloria, the beautiful, rich, crime-fighting female wrestler and caped crusader La Mujer Murcielago, or as we would call her in the English speaking world: Batwoman. Her anonymity allows numerous costume changes under her omnipresent Bat Mask, from wrestling sweats to braces, and the ever-popular Bat-Bikini, as she stalks her prey with bat-like stealth. Hot on her radar: famed Neurosurgeon (Clue Number One!) Dr Williams has just sailed his boat the Reptilicus (Number Two!) from Hong Kong and Macao (THREE!) with his collection of fishtanks (...anyone still counting?).

Williams' attempts at creating a hybrid Fish-Man, it seems, have been thwarted by the lack of perfect human specimens, which the Mexican wrestling circuit is only too happy to supply in spades. What starts off as a curious experiment involving a fish tank, an Action Man doll and a goldfish (true story), evolves into an aquatic fetus in a plastic bottle, placed on the ocean floor and radiated into a life-size Gill Man the mad doctor calls Pisces (though in Spanish the word rhymes with 'feces'). “My vengeance will be terrible,” yells Dr Williams, “TERRIBLE!” as he plots the beginning of his unstoppable army of amphibious fin-soldiers controlling the High Seas – Peeces would need to be mated, of course, with an Gill Woman, and guess whose heaving Bat-Cleavage he has his scientific gaze squarely on...

Competently directed by one of the Granddaddies of Mexican Pulp, Rene Cardona Sr avoids, to his credit, the usual Batmania cliches of Penguins, Riddlers, and cartoon henchmen in striped sweaters, and plays his goofy-looking Creature From The Black Lagoon riff relatively straight-faced. Cardona gets more than his pesos' worth out of the underwater footage, and let's not forget the masked wresting sequences. In any other costumed superhero film these would seem extraneous - here they are a positive boon, though Mara Monti's stocky wrestling double is so glaringly obvious, even the blind guy in the audience can tell she's packed on more than a few excess pounds between shots.

So here we have Batwoman going eye-to-fish-eye with a creature sporting the body of a goldfish, the super-grip of a GI Joe, and the pineal juice of a Swedish wrestler, in La Mujer Murcielago, or the Mexican Batwoman.

AND BECAUSE THERE CAN NEVER BE ENOUGH BATWOMAN POSTERS....

10th October 2010: The Curse Of The Crying WOman (1963)

2010-12-22T22:25:00.004+10:00

The Curse Of The Crying Woman

Mexico 1963 b&w

aka La Maldición De La Llorona

Director Rafael Baledón Writers Rafael Baledón, Fernando Galiana

Cast Rosita Arenas (Amelia), Abel Salazar (Jaime), Rita Macedo (Selma), Carlos López Moctezuma (Juan)

Tonight we revisit the world of Mexican Gothic, a glorious period in Mexico's horror cinema from the late Fifties to early Sixties, after which the intrusion of colour cheapened its brooding black and white aesthetic. Mexico's was an idiosyncratic take on the vintage Universal horrors and the ghoulish terrors of Britain's Hammer films and their European partners-in-crime. One of the truly memorable moments from this brief window in time is the image of La Llorona or the Crying Woman, obsidian eyes blazing and smile like a fatal slash across her cruel white features, holding onto three rabid and almost skeletal hounds straining at their leashes, while her crippled servant Juan dispatches an entire carriage of innocents to their demise. It's the critical point at which Mexican folklore collides with full-tilt Horror, and that moment, along with The Curse Of The Crying Woman's many other iconic snapshots, is breathtaking.

La Llorona the Crying Woman is an old Mexican tale of a peasant woman who gives birth to a rich man's child, only to be spurned for a more acceptable new bride. The woman then kills the baby and commits suicide, leaving her wailing ghost to roam the countryside looking for her lost child. The much-told story is often associated with that of Dona Marina, an Aztec princess who bears the child of Hernan Cortez; the scars of class-bound shame are thus stitched to the deeper wounds of the Spanish invasion and colonization. In other versions, La Llorona is a supernatural predator, a witch who had possibly died during childbirth, and thus feasts on the misery of dying infants.

It's tale often filmed, either as a traditional ghost story, or by exploiting the brand name in a tenuously-linked narrative. In The Curse Of The Crying Woman, the figure of La Llorona is no longer looking for her own child, and is instead an otherworldly superwitch, possessing the souls of her descendants. The spirit is still wailing and quite supernatural to the point of vampiric – her possessed relatives avoid daylight hours, won't cast a reflection, salivate at the sight of blood, and perform the old Bela Lugosi trick of walking straight through cobwebs.

Fate and enduring evil are just two themes at work in The Curse Of The Crying Woman. The young and beautiful Amelia brings her new husband Jaime to meet her long-estranged aunt Selma in her isolated mansion deep in the woods. She discovers Selma looks exactly as she did fifteen years before, is now widowed – or so SHE says – and draped in black, and is deep in research into the Black Arts. So deep, in fact, that she keeps the desiccated corpse of Dona Marina herself, their long-distant relative, stretched on her Aztec torturer's wheel with a long spear through her accursed heart. The malevolent presence Dona Marina is everywhere, from the skulls and black orbs staring out of mirrors, to the wailing of an unseen presence filling the empty hallways. It's no coincidence that Amelia has reunited with her bloodline, as legend has it that Dona Marina makes her triumphant return that midnight. Fatalism descends upon Amelia like a black shroud as she awaits the family curse to unfold; not so Jaime, who has clearly heard of what happens to male members of the Marina clan, and is determined to break the cycle of damnation and death.

Abel Salazar as Jaime is always a welcome face in Mexican horrors, and takes on the producer's reins as he did in The Vampire and The Brainiac. As Aunt Selma, Rita Macedo is perfect at containing her inherent evil and thirst for power behind her beautifully benign mask. The house itself takes on a menacing role, a secluded mausoleum straight out of Poe's Fall Of The House Of Usher, and its ultimate demise is nothing short of spectacular; even the studio-bound forest takes on the ever-present threat of death, as in another snapshot moment of Amelia surrounded by hundreds of eyes staring accusingly from the branches.

All the elements are in place – bloodsucking beauties, bats in the bell tower, the Thing in the attic, and those black, black eyes – for a bona fide masterpiece of Mexican horror. I hope you are suitably unnerved by The Curse Of The Crying Woman.

3rd October 2010: Santo And Blue Demon vs The Monsters (1969)

2010-12-22T22:07:00.006+10:00

Santo And Blue Demon vs The Monsters

Mexico 1969 colour

aka Santo y Blue Demon Contra Los Monstruos

Director Gilberto Martínez Solares Writers Rafael García Travesi, Jesús Sotomayor Martínez

Cast Santo El Enmascarado de Plata (himself), Blue Demon (himself), Jorge Rado (Otto Halder), Carlos Ancira (Bruno Halder)

Santo And Blue Demon vs The Monsters is just one of the many successful pairings of masked wrestling superstar Santo and his rival (in the ring at least) Blue Demon. From the late Sixties until Santo's death in the early Eighties, the two seemed almost inseparable, fighting everyone and everyTHING from Dracula, Dr Frankenstein, the mummies of Guanajuarto, fishmen from Atlantis, aliens, Nazis... and in this outing, practically the entire back catalogue of Universal's horror series from the Thirties and Forties. Did someone say “copyright infringement”? Apparently you just stick on a goatee and no-one will notice...

After the necessary tag-team introduction, the film proper begins with the “funeral” of the presumably mad scientist Dr Halder. It's more of an exhumation, as his coffin is hauled back to his castle by a mourning squad of zombie criminals, under the direction of a hunchbacked dwarf in a bowler hat with bald head and bad teeth (luckily for him, the dwarf Waldo has retained his sense of humour). Halder's request for his body not to be mutilated pays off, and he is brought back to life by his own machine in the castle's laboratory by gleeful lever-jockey Waldo. The vinegar-filled Halder has plans to revenge his brother and niece Gloria, for reasons lost to the sands of Time, AND to seek vengeance against his sworn enemy Santo, who just happens to be dating the niece. Halder initially kidnaps Blue Demon and clones him as a robotic assassin to use against Santo, with expected results. Undaunted, he then resurrects a small army of horror icons Halder picked up in his travels through Transylvania: the Vampire, the Mummy, the Wolfman, and The Cyclops, a scaly one eyed amphibian from Sotomayor Pictures' own 1960 picture Ship Of Monsters. Add a pair of vampirized chiquitas and the menagerie is almost complete; oh, and keep your lychees peeled during the laboratory scenes for an unidentified “observer”, also a leftover from Ship Of Monsters, who looks like an angry tiki mug with a brain sombrero.

And so Halder's Chamber of Horrors is unleashed upon the countryside, several times recycling the same introductory footage. The Vampire is less Bela Lugosi and more German Robles as “El Vampiro”, in a pale imitation of Mexico's own horror icon from late Fifties. Frankenstein is more ludicrous than ever thanks to his Fu Manchu facial hair, and as for the Wolfman – well, let's just say the miserably inadequate day-for-night footage makes both El Vampiro and the Wolfman's full-moon antics completely redundant.

If this Santo film looks slightly more cheap and tacky than his usual offerings, send a letter of complaint to Sotomayor Pictures. Both Santo and Blue Demon were on loan to the rival company for a number of films, and so ditched their usual creative team of craftsmen for Gilberto Martinez-Solares, who also directed them in Santo And Blue Demon In The Land Of The Dead. Now, Martinez-Solares was no slouch at directing, but even he must have had a Percodan slipped into his Corona. Did he notice in the restaurant scene, for instance, that the musical number is taking place on a stage FOUR TIMES the size of the entire restaurant? Even the wrestling scenes – obligatory set-pieces in Santo films, and pretty much their raison d'etre – are strangely over-lit and under-attended.

Yes, it's a sloppy production, and one can sense a growing desperation on the producer's part to keep its audience entertained by topping previous outings. The film purports to be a sequel and constantly refers to a previous episode, and yet there IS original; the effect is like being thrown into the deep end of a swamp and wondering “who ARE these creatures, and why do they want to kill me?” The thought is then replaced with a screaming case of deja-vu. Santo and Blue Demon complement each other well, even if Blue Demon spends most of the film trying to tear his friend's head off; but their partnership was becoming increasingly part of a cookie-cutter formula of multiple wrestlers battling pre-branded “monstruos”. The trade-off is quantity over quality, and Santo And Blue Demon vs The Monsters is almost bursting its stitches with ideas, both good and awful.

On the plus side it's punchier than Santo's ring buddies, zips along at an unnatural pace, and for a film aimed at twelve year olds of all ages, surprisingly bloody – there are some graphic shots of a young man's face being crushed under Frankenstein's giant boot, and the vampire girls are dispatched with a steady flow of the red, red vino. The switch to colour in the late Sixties wasn't all wine and rosaries, however, and in the faces of Walder's zombies you can see where the green paint finishes.

Keen-eyed Schlock watchers please note: Frankenstein is played by stuntman Manuel Leal, later in wrestling tights as Tinieblas, and our lovable hunchbacked dwarf, one of the busiest Little Guys in Mexican cinema named Santanon, is the guy in the plushy suit in Puss In Boots (1961) in three weeks' time. Til then: hola hola rock y rolla, Santo y Blue Demon Contra Los Monstruos!

26th September 2010: Psychomania (1973)

2010-12-22T21:51:00.004+10:00

Psychomania

UK 1973 colour

aka The Death Wheelers, Psychlo-Maniacs

Director Don Sharp Writers Julian Zimet, Arnaud d'Usseau

Cast Nicky Henson (Tom Latham), Mary (Abby Holman), Ann Michelle (Jane Pettibone), Roy Holder (Bertram), Robert Hardy (Chief Inspector Hesseltine), Beryl Reid (Mrs Latham), George Sanders (Shadwell)

There's an apocryphal tale of British actor and self-proclaimed Professional Cad George Sanders completing the shoot on his final film and, having witnessed just how low his career had sunk, committing suicide afterwards. Reportedly in poor health, Sanders checked into a hotel in Spain and downed a lethal dose of sleeping pills. His three-sentence suicide note began with “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.”

The film in question is the British zombie biker flick Psychomania, released after Sanders' death in 1972. Now, I'd certainly hate to spoil a great story; after a long and distinguished run in Hollywood, Sanders' career was indeed on somewhat of a downhill slide, and his last few films were hardly earth-shattering. But Psychomania is, in my humble opinion, a superb swansong, and Sanders should be hung for suggesting it, even apocryphally. Combining the JD thrills of British pulp novels like Skinhead, Terrace Terrors and Angel On My Mind, and the early Seventies' pop culture obsession with Dennis Wheatley and Alistair Crowley, it stars Nicky Henson, perfectly cast as the smug, cocky anti-hero Tom. He's the leader of a British biker gang called appropriately enough The Living Dead, well-versed in the Black Arts thanks to the creepy relationship with his spiritualist mother (Beryl Reid) and her mysterious and somewhat ageless butler Shadwell (the aforementioned Sanders), and obsessed with the idea of “crossing over” and returning from the Other Side, a feat attempted by his late father with dire results.

All you have to do, it seems, is believe you're coming back, click your biker boots three times, and bingo! Tom's fresh corpse is buried by his faithful gang near their regular meeting spot, a druidic circle of rocks named the Seven Witches, seated on his bike in full Living Dead regalia; at the witching hour, Tom drives out of the grave at full throttle, stops at the local pub for a quick one, then phones his Mumsy to tell her he's back in one piece. Splendid! He's back alright, and like the angry kid in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, he's obviously seen some unmentionable horrors. And, without the fear of death hanging over him he's utterly fearless, not to mention heartless, ruthless, and cold as the grave. He then invites the rest of the gang to join him: as regular hooligans the Living Dead are strictly second-rate, knocking over traffic cones and bags of groceries for childish kicks, and they're terribly English - you'd never see a Hell's Angel in America stop their bike and comb their hair - but once they've all “crossed over” there seems to be no end to their reign of terror.

There's so much more to recommend about Psychomania than its surface eccentricity. True, the film is more preposterous than genuinely chilling, and at times played for as much gallows humour as can be wrung from the material by one of the strangest casts assembled for a British B film; veteran British actor Robert Hardy plays a Police Inspector investigating the pile of bodies left in the Living Dead's wake, and joins Reid and Sanders in trying to keep a professional mask amidst the bare-faced absurdity. The music has dated gloriously along with the rest of the film: from fuzzed-out bogus psychedelia to the funeral's Satanic hippy dirge, a wondrous pile of muddle-headed plop that equates death with freedom from Squaresville. Thankfully Australian-born director Don Sharp, himself no stranger to ludicrous genre scenarios (The Face Of Fu Manchu and Curse Of The Fly [both 1965] to name just two), keeps the action taut and the visuals intriguing, from the opening shots of riders in skull-like helmets gliding through a mist-shrouded field, to an weirdly effective frog motif which, in occult circles, represents life and rebirth.

Is this the only British zombie biker film you're likely to witness? Sadly the answer is yes, and it's a doozy. So let's warm up the engine, spit the dirt from our mouths, then surge forward at full throttle into the 1972 Psychomania.

19th September 2010: Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (1936)

2010-09-23T16:12:00.005+10:00

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

UK 1936 b&w

aka The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

Director George King Writer Frederick Hayward

Cast Tod Slaughter (Sweeney Todd), Stella Rho (Mrs Lovatt), Johnny Singer (Tobias Rag), Eve Lister (Johanna Oakley)

Tonight we visit Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. For those one or two of you expecting the recent version, I'm sorry to say there's no Johnny Depp and THANKFULLY no Helena Bonham Carter, no Tim Burton visuals, and not one single musical number. Instead we give you Tod Slaughter's 1936 adaptation - BLOOD and THUNDER, madness, greed, murder and a hint of cannibalism.

It's the second Tod Slaughter film we've brought you on Schlock Treatment, and for the forgotten anti-hero of British pre-war horrors, it's one of his most fondly remembered. An ageing East End impresario and renowned stage villain specializing in lurid Victorian-era melodramas, Tod Slaughter (real name Norman Slaughter) made the transition from theatre to film in 1935 with his most iconic stage performance in Murder In The Red Barn. The problem with film, of course, is that it's forever, and so Slaughter's stage rendition became old quickly. So Slaughter raided his somewhat limited box of tricks, and as a follow-up filmed his equally rousing performance as the slash-happy London barber for Sweeney Todd in 1936. An unmitigated drunkard and attention whore, Slaughter would prop himself against the bar during intervals and continue to give his theatre audience the evil eye. Now that's dedication to your craft!

Slaughter as demon barber Sweeney Todd prowls around London's dockside looking for custom for his Fleet Street shavery. He's suitably sleazy and greasy to the point of redefining the term “obsequious”, and on the scrounge for lost souls with a few quid in their pockets ripe for the taking. “I loooove my work!” he oozes, and his fetish for bared throats is clear, as is his predilection for easy pickings. Once in Todd's flippable barber chair, the hapless victim is quickly dispatched to the cellar, where the body is stripped of cash and jewels and Todd's partner in crime, neighbouring pie maker Mrs Lovett, finds a way of dealing with the unwanted bodies. Theirs is an uneasy alliance in greed and one can only assume unrequited lust, at least on the part of poor jealous Mrs Lovett; once Todd slaps his varnished eyeballs on Joanna, daughter of a shipping magnate he's planning on fleecing, his tidy arrangement starts to fall apart at the seams. Enter a suspicious orphan apprentice and Mark, Joanna's betrothed, and it's clear that Sweeney will be, in his words, “soon polished orff”.

The stagebound film version of Sweeney Todd deviates very little from the play that had done the rounds of Victorian stalls since in the mid Nineteenth Century, and that includes Slaughter in the title role. It's clear Slaughter is relishing every moment playing his beloved Sweeney with his broad grins and grimaces, sinister brow-arching, cackling and sideways glances to the camera standing in for his audience, all gloriously intact. It's a wonder he didn't trade in the theatre schtick for a film career sooner, as he possesses all the trappings of a silent movie villain minus the top hat and twirly mustache. It was indeed a limited box of tricks, and was ultimately Slaughter's downfall once he's exhausted his stage repertoire; his post-war career was patchy to non-existent, and he died penniless and forgotten in 1956.

Thankfully film IS forever – not every film of course, but Slaughter's back catalogue is still with us and ripe for the plucking. Here's to you, you sozzled limelight hog, as you tread the boards once more in Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. And now Inspector – arrest that woman for being deliciously filling! Take that man away for making a dishonest crust!

12th September 2010: They Came From Outer Space (1966)

2010-09-23T15:33:00.006+10:00

They Came From Beyond Space

UK 1966 colour

Director Freddie Francis Writer Milton Subotsky

Cast Robert (Dr Curtis Temple), Jennifer Jayne (Lee Mason), Zia Mohyeddin (Farge), Bernard Kay (Richard Arden), Michael Gough (Master of the Moon)

A flying V formation of meteors crash lands in Cornwall, prompting American scientist Dr Temple to send his assistant-girlfriend and her team to investigate. They excitedly poke the still-warm rocks when ZAP! Alien intelligences invade their thoughts – as possessed scientists their customary British reserve becomes even more starched - - and before you can crowbar your glazed eyes shut into what could be described as a blink, they're borrowing a million of our Earth pounds, taking over entire estates, abandoning morning teas to build rockets to the moon, and unleashing a dash-awful disease of Biblical proportions dubbed the Crimson Plague. I say, how unsporting! Thanks to a convenient silver plate in his head, our intrepid American scientist hero believes he's able to save the planet from the non-sentient rotters – it's all smoke and mirrors, however, for the alien Grand Poobah's REAL motives.

At a time when Hammer was the by-word for British horror, a rival company was carving out its own niche in the British genre field. Amicus Productions, a partnership between Americans Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, started with youth- culture B films in the Fifties before hitting gold with the atmospheric, gothic-drenched Horror Hotel/(aka City Of The Dead, 1960). Amicus followed in 1965 with an even more striking horror anthology called Dr Terror's House Of Horrors, made by one of Hammer's most prolific cinematographer-turned-directors Freddie Francis, and starring the two stand-out icons of British horror, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. From the mid Sixties until its demise in 1974, the company's biggest successes would alternate between gothic horrors and Dr Terror-styled anthologies, and despite the borrowed talent and reflected glory, distinguished its product from Hammer's by Subotsky's wit and comparatively subtle touch.

Along with titles like Torture Garden (1967) and Tales From The Crypt (1972) came the inevitable science fiction films, a minor cycle for Amicus no doubt inspired by Hammer's groundbreaking Quatermass series. Subotsky's two big screen adaptations of the Dr Who series in the mid Sixties rolled into two further low-budget alien invasion features for their 1966 schedule – The Terrornauts, and a reworking of US pulp novel The Gods Hate Kansas, retitled as the generic and less inspiring They Came From Beyond Space. With Freddie Francis once more in the director's chair, it's a threadbare patchwork of borrowed ideas – Invasion Of The Body Snatchers the most obvious – held together with American actor Robert Hutton as the Professor Quatermass stand-in Dr Curtis Temple.

And hereby lies the film's major weakness. To illustrate it in more topical terms: They Came From Beyond Space is like Christchurch, a city built upon a major fault line, which is American import Robert Hutton. At his first appearance, the cracks begin to show. By the end, over 80% of the city is without water and due for demolition. It made business sense to cast an American actor in a British B-film to broaden its audience appeal Stateside, but seriously, what appeal IS there? Hutton is neither an action hero, svelte intellectual nor romantic lead, and is more of a body stocking filled with suet swung at the heads of his supporting cast. The moment a local dolly bird (or is she a Cornish gaming hen?) chats Hutton up with the offer of a cup of tea - “with sugar” (arches eyebrow) – the film is propelled even further into the realms of the unbelievable.

It's other major fault can only be described as being “too British” - unremarkable, indistinguishable, with cardboard sets left over from the Dr Who features and a narrative that demands a minimum of cheapskate effects, and an conclusion featuring venerable British actor Michael Gough that, despite the grimly apocalyptic build-up, is depressingly jovial. On the plus side............. the jazz score is snazzy, and I like the girls' hair. Should this forgotten example of British science fiction have been left forgotten? Like Michael Gough as the all-seeing, all-knowing Man in the Moon, you be the judge, as we decant They Came From Beyond Space.

5th September 2010: The Satanic Rites Of Dracula (1973)

2010-09-06T12:34:00.003+10:00

The Satanic Rites Of Dracula

UK 1973 colour

aka Count Dracula And His Vampire Bride, Dracula Is Dead... And Well And Living In London

Director Alan Gibson Writer Don Houghton

Cast Christopher Lee (Count Dracula), Peter Cushing (Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing), Michael Coles (Inspector Murray), William Franklyn (Torrence), Freddie Jones (Professor Julian Keeley), Joanna Lumley (Jessica Van Helsing)

Tonight is the first in a four week season of British genre chillers, starting with Christopher Lee sucking his way through the Swinging Seventies in The Satanic Rites Of Dracula.

The name Hammer Films is virtually synonymous with British horror: a production house dating back to the Thirties who changed the face of horror cinema in the late Fifties with a pair of gory, colour-soaked reworkings of Frankenstein and Dracula. They were stylish and straight-faced, unlike the gleefully dumb horror pictures of the American drive-ins, with equal amounts of ghoulishness and restraint. The next Golden Age of Gothic Horror was about to begin, and Hammer led the pack for the next fifteen years, its Frankenstein series starring Peter Cushing as the Baron, and its Dracula films starring Christopher Lee with an occasional visit by Cushing as Van Helsing, book-ending its tenure.

Cushing and Lee WERE British horror until Hammer's gradual decline in the mid Seventies, and Christopher Lee was easily the most recognizable Dracula of his generation. Still, Hammer were forced to swing with the times, and dragged the Count kicking and screaming into the Seventies with an ill-advised Carnaby Street makeover. The result, Dracula AD 1972 (1972), brought Dracula to hipsters grooving on the occult, the Psychedelic Generation and the Permissive Society, but was neither hip nor horrific, and even the venerable presence of both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as the descendant of Dracula's arch-nemesis Professor Van Helsing could save it.

It seems bizarre that Hammer would give director Alan Gibson and writer Don Houghton a second shot at a contemporary Dracula sequel, and yet here it is: The Satanic Rites Of Dracula, set two years later, opens with an undercover agent infiltrating an updated version of the Hellfire Club. With his dying breaths he tells his aghast superiors tales of occult rituals and human sacrifice in the presence of government officials, the military and the country's top biochemist. Is it just harmless kicks for jaded power junkies, they ask Professor Van Helsing? Is it the Red Chinese, or something much darker? The trail of Hellfire leads Van Helsing to reclusive industrialist DD Denham, his multi-story mausoleum build on the final resting place of Dracula two years earlier, and to reveal his true identity and his diabolical Final Solution.

The Satanic Rites Of Dracula would be the swan song in Hammer's fifteen-year series, and some would call it a sad coda for a once-great franchise. I for one find it a fascinating latter-day Hammer horror, a melding of familiar gothic motifs with a conspiracy thriller, its cold modernism captured in unnerving wide lenses and overcast with a real apocalyptic menace and Christopher Lee's shadow of timeless evil. Its flaws are many and glaring: there are simply too many protagonists vying for screen time, some welcome – the lovely Joanna Lumley as Van Helsing's granddaughter Jessica has perhaps the film's finest moment amongst a basement of amorous female vampires – some less welcome, and some, like the commanding presence of Christopher Lee in the title role, criminally underused.

In the same year British horror was under attack on multiple fronts – from the European sex-and-blood shockers to the spiraling gore of American drive-ins, to Warners releasing The Exorcist, the most expensive B film ever – the comparatively anaemic Satanic Rites... could never compete, lacking many of the essential Bs: blood, breasts, and budget. Let's hope the colder, infinitely more evil 21st Century will be kinder to it. Time to go into the basement and unleash the vampire brides for The Satanic Rites Of Dracula.

29th August 2010: Alyas Batman En Robin (1991)

2010-09-06T12:09:00.004+10:00

Alyas Batman En Robin

Philippines 1991 colour

aka Batman En Robin, Alias Batman And Robin

Director Tony Y. Reyes Writers Joey de Leon, Tony Y. Reyes

Cast Joey de Leon (Batman/Bruce), Keempee de Leon (Kevin/Robin), Rene Requiestas (Jocson/Joker), Dawn Zulueta, Vina Morales (Vina), Panchito [Alba] (Tiyo Paenguin)

Philippines cinema has had a long and fruitful relationship with its komic industry dating back to the Forties, as well as a tenuous grasp on the concept of international copyright law. Much of Western culture was adopted and adapted, and put through the process of “Pinoyization”: out of the other end of the cultural sausage machine came a product that was faintly recognizable, but very much Filipino in flavour.

At times producers didn't even bother slapping a new label on a familiar product. The Sixties, it seemed, was open season on Americana: not only Batman, but James Bond, the Phantom, Tarzan – the list is endless. Copyright holders required a court case to be mounted in the offenders' country of origin – a costly and often pointless process, particularly if the offending territory is as far away as the Philippines. And so the relentless plundering of Batman iconography continued, including the intriguing titles Batman Fights Dracula (1967) and Batwoman And Robin Meet The Queen Of The Vampires (1972). But enough was enough, and when Batman En Robin premiered in Manila cinemas in 1991, DC Comics sent a cease-and-desist letter (or so the story goes). The film was withdrawn from theatres, only to reappear on VHS months later with “Alyas” before the film's title, but with all of the infringing material – the name Batman, for starters, along with the symbol, the Batmobile, the Bat Cave ad nauseum – thankfully intact. There's parody, and the degree of license bestowed upon its comedic form, and then there's outright theft. I think you'll quickly note which side of the legal fence this unrepentant sack of arse is proud to sit.

Kevin (Keempee de Leon) is a teenage dreamer obsessed with comics and especially Batman and Robin, lives with his older brother (Joey de Leon) in their parents' old house, is a champion swimmer at his local high school, and object of every young girl's affections. His jealous rival is schoolmate Jocson (Rene Requiestas), a would-be Casanova with full moustache and no front teeth and possibly the oldest schoolboy in the Philippines. He hates both Kevin AND Robin with a passion, and favours the darker charms of Batman's rival The Joker instead. As fate would have it, Jocson's Tiyo (“Uncle”) Paeng (Panchito) invites him to join his new criminal organization, a fearsome bunch based on Batman's rivals: Uncle Paeng crowns himself the Paenguin, complete with top hat and umbrella, while Jocson dons the pancake makeup and spikes his hair into antennae to create the most ludicrous, almost Dali-esque caricature of the Joker in Comicdom.

With assistance from a slinky Cat Woman and her gang of masked she-kittens, Tiyo Paenguin and the Joker embark on a crime spree the likes of which “Gotham City” (or is it “Anila”, as a newspaper headline suggests?) has never seen. At the Smith and Wesson Dollar Exchange, the super-baddies point their guns at the cashiers – and then break into song and dance routine, whilst the girls behind the counter wave their upstretched arms in unison. And the musical numbers don't stop there. Kevin talks his older brother into donning the superhero costumes and teaming up as the Caped Crusader and Wonder Boy in order to banish Paenguin and Joker, and by association, Evil from the world of the Right and Just. Over the top of a montage showing the two brothers getting into superhero shape and building their own Batmobile, musical copyright is once again flushed down the toilet to the tune of the Beach Boys' “Surfin' Safari”:

Do you still remember from your comic book?

All the series of the Dynamic Two

The Caped Crusader and the Wonder Boy

Kalaban nila ang mga goons (They fight all the goons)

Holy smoke, Batman and Robin

Oh my God! Batman and Robin

Praise the Lord Batman and Robin

Shoot na shoot Batman and Robin

Let’s do Bruce Wayne now and Dick Grayson now

They are all a part of me…

For all its surface weirdness and eccentricities to a Western audience, it must be remembered that Alyas Batman En Robin was considered a major release in the Philippines: produced by the largest studio at the time, Regal Films, and starring three of the most popular comedians ever. Joey de Leon's Batman is just one of hundreds of his comedic creations from a career dating back to the Seventies as popular TV comic, game show host, DJ, singer, and member of the phenomenally popular team of Tito, Vic and Joey (affectionally known as “TVJ”). Along with brothers Tito and Vic Sotto, TVJ graduated from TV sensations in Seventies sitcom Iskul Bukol to prolific films stars throughout the Eighties. Aside from the odd reunion the trio went their separate ways in '88, and it was Joey who had the earliest hits with goofy parodies like Starzan (1989) and The Long Ranger And Tonton (1989), often with Batman's Tony Reyes in the director's chair. Alyas Batman... is even cheeky enough to reference Joey's most beloved screen character:

Batman: No, no, I don't really like Batman.

Kevin: What do you like?

Batman: I'd like to be Starzan!

Kevin: What? Starzan? And turn it into shit?

Joey is still one of the most prolific presences on Philippines TV in four separate shows for GMA-7 – testament to any popular comedian's staying power, and their public's loyalty and adoration. The same can be said for Panchito Alba (“Uncle” Paenguin), the gruff, exasperated sidekick of Dolphy, the Philippines' King of Comedy, in movies and on stage together since the early Fifties, and a top-shelf comic in his own right. Rene Requiestas (Jocson/The Joker) found fame much later in his life as Joey de Leon's comic foil in many of solo outings, with his trademark missing front teeth and malleable moustache. Sadly, both comedians passed away soon after Batman – the 36 year-old Rene of tuberculosis in 1993, the much older Panchito following complications from a stroke in 1995, aged 70.

As with much of the Philippines' populist fare, Batman's faults are many and glaring. It adopts a regulation Bollywood-style “masala” approach: throw in some comedy, some romance, some by-the-book goon action (and let's not forget the musical numbers!), and pad out the film's unnecessarily long running time with protracted and pointless exposition, in the belief the audience's ceaseless fascination with their favourite film personalities will carry the movie just nicely. Even the goon punch-ups – a chance to emulate the “Biff! Bang! Pow!” moments of the Sixties TV show – are flat and uncooked, with not even the hint of a camera tilt on the horizon. It's lazy, perfunctory filmmaking at best, which trades on accumulated goodwill and over-familiarity which in the West would merely breed contempt. Luckily for Alyas Batman En Robin the film is, at times, as funny as it is bizarre, and the humour – never an easy thing to translate between cultures - is in turns silly, self-aware, puerile, grotesquely unfunny, ribald and downright scatological. Take for example Paenguin and Joker's escape from their prison cell, under a toilet and into the sewer below...

Paenguin: In a toilet bowl? That's why you're a shit, smell like shit, because you're always close to shit!

Joker: I thought you wanted to escape?

Paenguin: How? Are you going to put me in and flush me?

Then there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it studio in-joke – Batman points to the Regal Films emblem on Kevin's Robin costume and says, “Wait, what's this? This is a Viva film [Regal's main rival]. Why is it on Regal? “I bought it already,” replies Kevin.

On the romance front there's young Kevin and his puppy-lovestruck classmate Vina (pop star/actress Vina Morales), who halt the film long enough for a duet in English which sounds like Celine Dion dropping her breakfast. Batman himself goes weak in the tights for ace reporter Angelique Legarda (Dawn Zulueta) and at one point even addresses the camera in a Wayne's World moment (come to think of it, Joey does look like an older, doughier Mike Myers) and asks the audience, “What if I do a dream sequence?” Cut to a fantasy poolside sequence in which Batman saves Angelic from a gang of goons but loses his mask, and tries to maintain his secret identity by wearing her bikini on his face. What can I tell you? I'm a sucker for lowbrow silliness. In a word: Comedy...Gold...

Despite the best efforts of Uncle and nephew, the true family values of goodness and justice prevail, and the storyline stresses that Batman is nothing without Robin, and vice versa. The film ends with the Batman clan, a reformed Paenguin and Joker, and a cast reunion on the front lawn outside the Batcave. There's even a few surprise additions: Angelique in a Wonder Woman costume (hubba hubba!), Superman, and even a go-go dancing dwarf Spiderman! Cue a second stolen tune, this time “At The Hop”, while the Joker points out his new-found humility in Taglish (a mangle of Tagalog and key English phrases):

Kung kayo ay isang salbahe (If you’re bad) and you are very naughty

You dirty rat. You’re very dirty rat!

Pwede pa kayo mag bago at hindi pa nahuhuli ang lahat (You can still change while it’s not too late)

Let us sing kumpare (friend) that the world means love and not the rot

Let us good na brod (Let's be a good brother),

Let us not be bad

That’s better

Let’s be good na part (Let’s be part of good), let’s be afraid of God

Ahh... Let's believe in love!

It's equal parts comedy heaven and hell, and I sure know which part Rene Requiestas is in right now, tittering away in whiteface, after witnessing the DC Comics car crash courtesy of Manila traffic, Alyas Batman En Robin.

22nd August 2010: Special Silencers (1979)

2010-09-06T11:58:00.005+10:00

Special Silencers

Indonesia 1979 colour

Director Arizal Writers Deddy Armand, Djair

Cast Barry Prima (Hendra), Eva Arnaz (Julia), W.D. Mochtar (Gumilar), Dicky Zulkarnaen (Gundar)

Tonight we ask the question, “Have you ever seen a tree grow out of a human torso before?” If the answer is no, then I'm happy to say tonight is your lucky night, as we unspool the Indonesia ultra-weirdness of Special Silencers.

Indonesia's peak export period for its genre films was from the early Eighties to around 1992, grinding out cheap direct-to-video exotica for a world market already saturated with kung fu and jungle-bound action films – but with the added ingredients of bizarre fantasy and horror, genuine tropical locales, and always with ridiculous death-defying stunts and action sequences. For me, Indo cheapies are always a pleasure and never a guilty one, and part of the pleasure is watching their incongruities and extreme thrills kicking a film's weirdness level to the next building. Special Silencers stars Indonesia's B King Barry Prima, a staple in Indo-horror, fantasy and action cinema, and his would-be Jackie Chan hair helmet and fight moves define the landscape of one of the wildest, if little-seen cycles in Asian cult filmdom. Call it Indo-nausea or Satay Splatter, or whatever sticker you want to put on it, I GUARANTEE you will not have seen anything like it before.

By 1979, Prima was already comfortable in his blow-dry coiffure and denim suit to call himself Indonesia's Number One Action Star. Here he plays young buck Hendra heading for his classmate Dayat's village, meets a pretty girl along the way just happens to be Dayat's sister Julia (action star and Prima's ex-wife Eva Arnaz), and attempts to woo her from his motorbike. Smooth. Unbeknownst to both of them, Dayat's uncle and mayor of the village has been usurped by a black magician who has his evil eye on the mayor's chair, using a secret weapon, a vial of little red pills – those “special silencers” hinted at in the title – to take over the village. Once ingested by the hapless victim, fully grown trees shoot out of their stomach. I repeat: TREES, complete with branches and complex root systems, BURST from their victims' stomach. Hendra uses his considerable martial arts skills to help Dayat and Julia defeat the arch-villain, his army of thugs, and his “black commandos” - a squadron of hungry rats (alright, they're mice coloured with textas).

Special Silencers is a typical South East Asian genre film, a cheerfully simple-minded tale of revenge and retribution, with its inherent rough-as-guts production values and atrocious dubbing. Don't forget, it's an Asian film from the Seventies, so there's kung fu. A LOT of kung fu. What sets Special Silencers and its Indo ilk apart from most B-fare are its jaw-dropping money shots. Try for instance Julia's torture sequence where she's forced to smell someone's gym shoes. Just kill her, you fiend! Or the villain trying in vain to ram his severed leg back onto the stump... Then there are the film's money shots, those pesky little red pills doing their assigned task, which surely must rank amongst the most absurd moments ever in film horror AND horticulture. Indo-nausea indeed! I hope you enjoy the 1979 Special Silencers.

15th August 2010: The Telugu Superman (1980)

2010-08-24T15:45:00.003+10:00

The Telugu Superman

India 1980 colour

aka Superman

Director/Writer Madhusudan Rao V.

Cast Rama Nandamuri Taraka Rao (Raja/Superman), Jayapradha (Jaya), Kaikala Satyanarayana (Dharma Rao), Jayamalini (Miss Lee)

Tonight we continue to tear through Asia country by country, and now to India for the Telugu Superman, while singing “Hoooray for Tollywood!”

That's TOLLYwood, the Telugu-language cinema of Andhra Pradesh, just one of many regional cinemas running parallel to the dominant Hindi language film industry centred on Mumbai. By definition Bollywood is loud, colourful, melodramatic, broad, and takes many of its cues from the West; Tollywood, from what I've seen so far, is just as loud and colourful, even MORE loopy and pulp-driven, and prone to what is politely called in the film business “cultural appropriation”. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Tollywood cranked out hundreds upon hundreds of mythological fantasies, spy films and “curry westerns” - all musicals, mind you – and in Superman (1980), they manage to happily mash up their three favourite genres AND leave room to plunder the costumed superhero film as well, barely twelve months after Christopher Reeve's man-in-tights blockbuster. Which, in theory at least, makes the Telugu Superman the best of all possible worlds, and potentially the greatest movie of all time.

The film opens with a young child named Raja witnessing his father gunned down by three mysterious gunslingers. It's just before the family was due to attend a festival at the Temple of Hanuman the Hindu monkey-faced god, and so Raja prays at base of the statue, singing book reviews and throwing petals at Hanuman's feet. In a final desperate attempt for the Ape-God's attention, he stabs himself in the stomach and splashes blood all over the statue. A towering Hanuman suddenly materializes, picks up the tiny prostrate body and breathes life back into him. Boy Raja is now filled with divine powers, and in the tradition of all good westerns, and quite a number of bad ones too, swears revenge of the three cowboys who shot his pa.

He grows up into a strapping “young” man complete with familiar-looking blue suit - that's “H” for Hanuman! - and this own theme song: “Superman.... (la la la la la), Superman... (la la la la la la)....”. Between flying gigs and stopping runaway buses he finds time every now and then to woo the film's own Margot Kidder, the delectable Jaya (Jayapradha), daughter of his mine's co-owner Mr Bangaram, in a series of rancid show-stoppers. But this is a Curry Western Revenge film, let us not forget, so back to the bloodied trail of vengeance.

One cartoon baddy controls a herd of remotely-operated Attack Elephants; another owns a midget assassin who hides stands in small cupboards. If that scene reminds you a little of Hervé Villechaize as Christopher Lee's dwarf butler in The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), you'll be amused to note that Superman also cribs an entire scene from the 1974 Bond film, in which our hero turns a bullet-maker's own gun on his crotch. The third and final villain is Dharma Rao, also known simply and modestly as The King, a wily paythan in charge of a Casino in “Hong Kong” (although I suspect the budget didn't stretch to airfares past Singapore or Malaysia) and – horror of horrors – the father of Raja's sister Laxmi's betrothed. It's not exactly a shotgun marriage the bride's mother has planned, but it's interesting to note that the idea of losing one's chastity while unmarried in Superman is tantamount to suicide AND matricide, and is a stark reminder we're culturally speaking a loooooong way from Hollywood Boulevard, Toto.

Raja (to Hong Kong hotel clerk): Do you speak Telugu?

Clerk: Yes. It's part of the service.

The adult Raja is played with relish by popular Tollywood heartthrob Rama Nandamuri Taraka Rao, or NTR, born in 1923 and a superstar in Telugu films since 1949. Which makes him – well, you can do the math. The fact that he's older than the actress playing his mother doesn't seem to phase anyone; peering at his convex torso and fading matinee-idol looks through the mountains of makeup, there's a slightly creepy, almost waxen quality about him – reminiscent of Liberace's brightly painted corpse. Whether he's defeating twenty blackbelts in an obligatory kung fu sequence without bending a single steel strand of his breeze-proof bouffant, untangling the loins of the King's bewitching, wing-helmeted supernatural temptress Miss Lee, or crushing his adversaries to a pulp under costumed booties, NTR certainly makes a meal of it. A three-course meal, that is, with every food item varnished a deep brown, and subsidized with a Sizzlers' over 55s discount card.

So how does the theory work out? Superman is certainly one of the most brazen ripoffs of the Man of Steel, and by tying in his powers to the pantheon of Hindu mythology, one of the strangest. At just over two hours your staying power will be sorely tested, but that's all part of going deep into previously unexplored territory, filmically speaking. Time to discover the joy of Telugu mythological western superheroics in 1980's Superman (la la la la la la).

8th August 2010: Eyes Of The Condor (1984?)

2010-08-13T12:34:00.004+10:00

Eyes Of The Condor

Thailand 1984? colour

aka Eye Of The Condor

Director “Chalong Pakdeevichit”/Chalong Pakdivijit

Cast “Soraphong Chatri”/Sorapong Chatree, Douglas Dull, Krung Srivilai, Joe Samenchai

Most Filipino B-film exports would never have made it past Manila Customs if it weren't for the efforts of Davian International Ltd, a distribution and later production company formed by Hong Kong-born David Hung and his Philippines partner Vivian Andico (hence the “Dav-“ and “-ian” the company name) in 1986. Like Bobby A. Suarez before him, Hung had already muddied his boots in the low-budget distribution trenches as one of Joseph Lai's General Managers for Intercontinental Film Distribution Ltd, and was keen to source saleable action films for his fledgling company, primarily from his own back yard. Davian purchased the international rights to Tagalog-language films, recut them from their customary two hour running times to a more serviceable 90 minutes, and supervised the dubbing into English, more often than not in Quezon City. Hung would then set up a booth at Cannes and the American Film Market and peddle his wares directly to overseas distributors. In this way, even the most generic Tagalog action film for other local producers – such as the Dante Varona vehicle Commander Lawin (1981) and The Day They Robbed America (1985) - could be given a Davian makeover and raffled off to one of their less discerning customers.

Davian also procured a pair of Thai action films, the Sorapong Chatree-starrer Cobra Thunderbolt (dir. Tanong Srichua, 1984) and Eyes Of The Condor, presumably from the same period, although Davian's version bears a 1987 copyright in its closing credit. And kudos to their impeccable taste, I should add: it's an ambitious and utterly charming crime-caper featuring a jewel thief, two cops, a bald Indian, two Caucasian baddies and a squadron of dwarves, all looking for the legendary Eye of the Condor, a precious diamond (the eighth largest in the world, we're constantly reminded, and the most beautiful). The gem disappears from its owner's exhibition on his yacht in the opening sequence: pandemonium breaks out as suave shyster Kenny Hemmings swims with the Eye to a waiting speedboat and his dwarf driver takes off, allowing Kenny to escape via the hang-glider conveniently located in the boat, thus living up to his moniker The Sky Robber! His slimy American boss tries to double-cross Kenny and his stubby sidekick, but they escape once again with the diamond, and hide out with the cherubic sidekick's miniature mates and their normal-sized sister Nancy, an odd household in which Nancy plays Snow White to their Five Dwarves. That is, if Snow White was Asian. And related to the Seven Dwarves. And if there were five... They're more like hyperactive children, running around "Uncle" Kenny's ankles and causing mayhem and structural damage while he suavely woos the suitably impressed Nancy.

A pair of cops are assigned to the case of the missing Eye. the glamorous yet humorless Lieutenant Phyllis (no-one's sure if it's her first or last name) and the more laissez-faire Captain Ben Daniel, and they manage to snare Kenny, only to befriend him (awww!) use him as bait to flush out the REAL Mr Big of the Syndicate, a silver-haired slimeball who looks and sounds like a Greek shipping magnate. The diamond goes missing several more times - once at an ice factory, once in an iced coffee, and once in one of the Five Dwarves' stomach - and the film becomes an endless cat-and-mouse game winding up on the Greek Tycoon's island lair, in a protracted, gloriously over-the-top action finale worthy of a Bobby A. Suarez film. It's here our director "Chalong" (S.T.A.B. [1976]) pulls out every trick from his Boys' Own Book of Action Theatrics. There's an invading army on jet skis, a commando squad of Indian Thuggees looking for their temple's sacred stone, and another hang-glider causing explosions galore. There are stunts on top of other stunts, and that's on top of the rest of the film's kung fu, tuk-tuk chase, mid-air knife fight, and the cheapest, ugliest furniture and sets, unfashionable EVEN for the Eighties.

Eyes Of The Condor sounds like the rest of Davian's pickups, courtesy of their Quezon City dubbing team. It's not just your regular kung fu voiceovers; Davian's team use a plethora of silly and inappropriate voices, squeaks, panting and squarks, not least the penguin sounds uttered by the five munchkins. Luckily the film plays the dwarves' antics for cheap yucks, an essential ingredient in these Thai masala movies. Whether on the receiving end of a Three Stooges-style ladder gag or trotting out the old "one dwarf on the other's shoulders under a long coat pretending to be a tall person" routine, these little guys emote their hearts out and provide an added element to what's already a preposterous crime caper. I'm not sure if it's an absurdist element or the film's missing heart, but it lifts Eyes Of The Condor far above most of South East Asia's relatively one-dimensional action movies into a completely new realm. And that's a tall order (f'nar, f'nar!).

Wolf Devil Woman (1982)

2010-08-07T14:40:00.005+10:00

Wolf Devil Woman

Taiwan 1982 colour

aka Wolfen Ninja

Director/Writer "Pearl Cheung"/Chang Ling

Cast Pearl Cheung, Hsing Nan Ho, Chung Hu, Ge Pai

Taiwan was and still is a sizeable market for Hong Kong's cinematic output. In turn, Taiwan's own genre film industry provided cost-effective B-fodder for Hong Kong distributors to dub into Cantonese or (badly!) into English, repackage and on-sell to domestic and international markets. As a result, you'd think most Taiwanese films were from Hong Kong, if a little rougher round the gills, strangely familiar and yet with a hint of something not quite right. Then there are Taiwanese genre films – and Wolf Devil Woman is only one example – which appear out of a bizarre alternate universe, are let off the leash and are currently howling and tearing off into the distance. Be prepared.

There was a noticeable shift in Hong Kong films in the early 80s from the more traditional kung fu cinema to more fantasy and horror-based stories. Tsui Hark's Zu Warriors From Magic Mountain (1983) for instance eschewed straight combat for high-flying wirework, supernatural elements , and some jaw-dropping leaps in internal logic. Other Asian film markets followed Hong Kong's lead, and Taiwan's skewed attempt from director and lead actress Pearl Cheung aka Chang Ling, could be one of the craziest of them all.

Wolf Devil Woman, also known as Wolfen Ninja, plunges straight into a crucifixion scene in some psychedelic Chamber of Horrors. It's presided over by a black magician who calls himself “The Devil”, a strange cartoon-voiced villain in gold lame and a KKK Grand Wizard's peak, and who has the ability to freeze his victims and keeps an army of zombies inert using voodoo dolls skewered with gold needles. Steel Sparrow, one of The Devil's minions, escapes the Ken Russell vision of hell with his wife and baby daughter into a snow-filled Purgatory; cornered by the Devil's satanic ninjas, the couple drench their daughter in their own blood and bury everyone alive in an avalanche. The baby girl is dug up by a pack of wolves and adopted by White Wolf, nurturing her into a bouncing young lady (the enthusiastic Pearl Cheung who's clearly having even more fun than her audience). She's a wild card alright, with a predilection for wearing a child's stuffed dog toy on her head and tearing live rabbits apart with her bare hands.

Into the White Wolf's domain comes young buck Rudolph and his yokel Sancho Panza named Rudy, searching for a thousand year old Ginseng flower to restore his family's court from the Devil's freezing spells. Rudolph clasps eyes on Wolf Girl and it's love at first sight, and before too long he becomes a Professor Higgins to Wolf Girl's Eliza Doolittle when he should be clamping a muzzle on her out-of-control yapping (“It's not true!” she howls when she discovers White Wolf has been skewered on a tree. “It's not tarooooooooooo!”). When Rudolph is tempted across to the Dark Side, Wolf Girl (renamed “Snow Hibiscus” by zen poet Rudolph Higgins) grabs her wolf-claw nunchukkas and leaves her snow world, swinging from tree to tree like a lupine Tarzana, to redeem both Rudolph and her parents' deaths, to rediscover her humanity AND divine nature, and to note that satanic ninjas can be torn apart as easily as rabbits.

Halloween masks, hopping zombies, rubber spiders: Wolf Devil Woman, along with its two in-name-only sequels, is a garish sugar overload of Taiwanese weirdness, played as much for cheap yukks as for the over-the-top shocks, and its pointless wirework and crude Eighties effects, all in glorious analogue 2-D! In order to watch these with optimum results, you'll need to construct a pair of 2-D glasses with clear cellophane over the left eye, and clear cellophane over the right. Now, take a bag of sugar...Oh no! Too much sugar! WOLF DEVIL WOMAN!!!

Sunday 25th July 2010: The Dybbuk!

2010-07-06T16:33:00.004+10:00

The Dybbuk

Poland 1937 b&w

aka Der Dibuk

Director Michal Waszynski Writer S.A. Kacyzna

Cast Abraham Morewski (Rabbi Ezeriel ben Hodos), Ajzyk Samberg (Meszulach - the messenger), Mojzesz Lipman (Sender Brynicer ben Henie), Lili Liliana (Lea - Sender's daughter)

We've screened some obscure films in our time, but never a Jewish horror film. Tonight we right that terrible wrong by unearthing a 1937 version of The Exorcist, filmed in Poland and entirely in Yiddish. Intrigued? Then let me introduce you to The Dybbuk.

The film was an adaptation of an extremely popular Yiddish play first performed in 1914, and based on the Hassidic Jewish folk tales of Eastern Europe. One such age-old legend – and if you've seen the start of the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, you'll know what I'm talking about – is that of the Dybbuk, a malevolent earth-bound spirit that possesses a living person, or the body of the recently deceased. The exteriors was shot in 1937 in a picturesque and primarily Jewish village in Poland called Kazimierz, untouched by time and insulated from the swelling tide of anti-Semetism – there's even an actual cemetary, which the film puts to good use - and the filmed version varies very little from the original text. Two old friends promise that their future children, if boy and girl, will marry each other. Years later, one of the fathers inadvertently betroths his daughter to a wealthier suitor and yet the offspring, as fate would have it, meet and fall in love. The boy Chanan makes a pact with demonic forces to allow him to marry Lea, but he dies in tragic circumstances under the watchful gaze of otherworldly figure The Messenger, and Chanan's restless spirit demands that the bride and groom be united, even in death.

The Dybbuk works on many levels – as a faithful rendition of 19th Century shtetl life, as a surviving fragment of a pre-war Yiddish film culture, and as a stark, atmospheric and at times disturbing supernatural tale, echoing the European Expressionist horrors of the Teens and Twenties. There's a further layer that one must never forget and that's the film's own tragic history. The tiny village of Kazimierz in eastern Poland was officially declared “free of Jews” in 1942; actor Ajzyk Samberg was destined to die in a concentration camp in 1943, along with many of the film's extras, and cantor Chazzan Gershon Sirota would never make it outside the Warsaw Ghetto. Lest the film appear completely cursed, the story of The Dybbuk's two romantic leads, Leon Liebgold and Lili Liliana, had a much happier ending after they escaped Poland for America and later married. In the actual film, however, they're doomed, and after an elaborate and quite harrowing Jewish exorcism sequence, the ending is both poetic and devastating.

I realize it's not our usual Schlock Treatment fare, and at two hours some of you will find it slightly lethargic, but please stick with it – I swear you have never seen anything like the 1937 Yiddish horror film The Dybbuk.

Sunday 18th July 2010: Early Silents triple!

2010-07-06T16:26:00.003+10:00

Alice In Wonderland

USA 1915 b&w

Director/Writer W.W. Young

Cast Viola Savoy (Alice), Herbert Rice (White Rabbit), Elmo Lincoln

The Sealed Room

USA 1909 b&w

Director D.W. Griffith Writer Frank E. Woods

Cast Arthur V. Johnson (The Count), Marion Leonard (The Countess), Henry B. Walthall (The Minstrel), Mary Pickford (Lady-In-Waiting)

The Student Of Prague

Germany 1913 b&w

aka Der Student von Prag

Directors Stellan Rye, Paul Wegener Writer Hanns Heinz Ewers

Cast Paul Wegener (Balduin), John Gottowt (Scapinelli), Grete Berger (Komtesse Margit), Lyda Salmonova (Lyduschka)

Tonight we screen three very early and, in their own ways, pioneering examples of fantasy and horror filmmaking from the first half of the Silent Era – the 1915 Alice In Wonderland, The Sealed Room from 1909, and the 1913 The Student Of Prague.

Though certainly not the first filmed version, from 1915 comes the first faithful adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, a brave attempt to recreate Lewis Carroll's tale using elaborate costumes and production values. Young Viola Savoy, who at 15 was already a veteran of over a hundred stage productions, plays Alice in a role which over the next decade would identify her in the public's eye. Forty minutes survive of its original hour long running time – which means two reels have slipped into the ether, one sadly containing the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, giving Alice's narrative a more surreal, dislocated quality. What has remained intact is quite remarkable. Alice's journey through the Looking Glass has a strange dreamlike feel throughout – the Cheshire Cat appears and reappears in a startling series of in-camera jump cuts, and the Lobster Dance has to be seen to be believed!

D.W. Griffith is considered one of the seminal filmmakers of the Silent Era. Before his groundbreaking features such as Birth Of A Nation and Intolerance, he made a series of short films he labeled Biographs, essentially brief filmed experiments in film language and craftsmanship. The Sealed Room from 1909 is a ten-minute horror melodrama “suggested” by Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask Of Amontillado, and features a ghastly tale of revenge upon a king's faithless concubine and her strumming minstrel lover. The most primitive of the three films tonight, it nonetheless shows a cinematic alchemist tinkering with a gothic horror formula with interesting results.

And so to the last film - from 1913 comes The Student Of Prague, a German production from before the classic Expressionist period of The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari and the like, and considered lost until ten years ago. It's a Faustian tale of a poor and listless university student Balduin who is in love with a Countess. Penniless and with few prospects, he makes a deal with a sorceror for an endless bag of gold. The sorceror, an impish fellow who may be Beelzebub himself, chooses the student's mirror reflection, thus sealing Balduin's tragic fate. The split-screen effects are remakable, as is the backdrop of old Prague and the performances from Paul Wegener (star of the later Der Golem films) as Balduin, and Nosferatu himself, the creepy rat-faced John Gottowt, as the sorceror Scapinelli. As with Alice In Wonderland and The Sealed Room, there's a timeless magical quality to the film that their comparatively simple film techniques can't erase, and proves that with limited resources and a little imagination, not to mention an adventurous spirit, you can turn lead into gold.

Sunday 11th July 2010: The Face At The Window (1939)

2010-07-06T16:14:00.004+10:00

The Face At The Window

UK 1939 b&w

Director George King Writers A.R. Rawlinson, Ronald Fayre

Cast Tod Slaughter (Chevalier Lucio del Gardo), Marjorie Taylor (Cecile de Brisson), John Warwick (Lucien Cortier), Aubrey Mallalieu (Monsieur de Brisson)

Since British-born Boris Karloff was working almost exclusively in Hollywood, Tod Slaughter is Britain's first home-grown horror superstar, an unmitigated ham in the grand tradition of Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Like Lugosi, whose stage portrayal of Dracula sealed his fate in the talkies as screen villain supreme, Slaughter followed a similar path. Born Norman Carter Slaughter in 1885, he was an East End stage actor renowned for his revivals of Victorian “blood-and-thunder” melodramas – pantomimes of pure evil designed for a less discriminating theatre crowd, but which were still popular amongst bourgois thrill-seekers. From 1934 Slaughter starred in a series of low-budget films based on his most popular performances, almost always cast as the villain. He's equally memorable in the title role in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street from 1936, and as the lunatic homicidal financier in The Face At The Window (1939), made just before the start of World War 2, at which point Britain banned the production of ghoulish-themed films (on account of the horror-show on their own front doorstep).

The Face In The Window opens in Paris, 1880. A series of dastardly murders is attributed to a wolf-like creature called “Le Loup” (or “The Wolf”), whose crimes are preceded by its blood-curdling howl and slobbering, fanged and bristling visage at the victim's window. Parisian banker Monsieur de Brisson asks for help from his well-to-do friend and bank customer Chevalier del Gardo (Tod Slaughter) after a well-timed heist, in order to assist his failing credibility. Del Gardo, with his wolfish charms and fake grin framing his incisors, is more interested in getting his claws into de Brisson's pretty daughter Cecile, who only as eyes for the lowly bank clerk Lucien. With the help of some cartoon vagabonds from the seediest saloon in the East End, del Gardo frames the wretched clerk as “The Wolf”, and Lucien is forced to flee from the police while attempting to clear his name, with the help of a mad professor who uses electricity to reanimate the last actions of The Wolf's victims.

The Face At The Window is, as predicted, pure Victorian melodrama – a penny dreadful made flesh by some of the most uncured hams who ever trod the East End's stageboards, a seething mass of double takes, rolling eyes, theatrical whispers and stick-on facial hair, and presided over by an unmitigated cad of the Vincent Price variety. Its charms are threadbare, as are its production values, although there are some fantastic expressionist lighting effects courtesy of a cut-rate version of Fritz Lang. But if you feel like slumming it in an East End theatre tonight for some vintage cheap thrills, then leg's go down the Frog and Toad and Up the Apples and Pears, and peer back back at The Face In The Window.

Sunday 4th July 2010: Dwain Esper triple!

2010-07-06T12:44:00.006+10:00

How To Undress In Front Of Your Husband

USA 1937 b&w

aka How To Undress

Director/Writer Dwain Esper

Cast Elaine Barrie Barrymore (herself), Trixie Friganza (Trixie), Hal Richardson (Peeping Tom), Albert Van Antwerp (Narrator)

Sinister Menace

USA 1930 b&w

aka Sinister Harvest

“Presenter”/Writer Dwain Esper

Narcotic

USA 1933 b&w

aka Narcotic Racket

Directors Dwain Esper, [uncredited] Vival Sodar't Writers A.J. Karnopp, Hildegarde Stadie

Cast Harry Cording (Dr. William G. Davis), Joan Dix (Mrs. Davies), Patricia Farley (Mae), Jean Lacey (Lena)

Tonight we revisit an old friend of Schlock Treatment's, the carnival huckster Dwain Esper, whose sleazy roadshow anti-classics – Marijuana The Weed With Roots In Hell, Maniac, The Strange Love Life Of Adolph Hitler, to name a few - were the filmic equivalent of Snake Oil. Esper's films, both as director and distributor, were of the salacious kind, lurid exposes on the darker impulses of his prim yet prurient audiences masquerading as morality plays. Vice, madness, addiction and damnation were all four-walled across Depression-era America by Esper's one-man caravan, and he made a tidy profit throughout the Thirties and into the Forties as an independent filmmaker SO independent, he could be described as outstanding in a field of one.

Tonight's feature is augmented with two of Esper's shorter subjects. How To Undress In Front Of Your Husband from 1937 is a bizarre creature, a burlesque short of pure vaudevillian cheesecake cloaked as a manual for “relief of marital boredom”. In true exploitation style, Esper secured the services of silent star John Barrymore's then-wife Elaine Barry, a scandal on legs who was only too happy to expose said legs (and the rest!) while cashing in on her fifteen minutes of infamy. Esper cuts from Barrie's masterful disrobing – the artistry! The aesthetics! The SUSPENSE! - with the lumbering boudoir ritual of stage comedienne Trixie Friganza, whose elephantine gracelessness prompts our Peeping Tom narrator to heap scorn upon scorn into lines such as “Life is a bowl of cherries for Trixie, and she's the pits!” Leering, snide and hateful, it's nevertheless a thrill-ride for stocking sniffers and foot fetishists of all ages.

The second short takes the word “hateful” to another plateau. An early example of a Mondo Cane-style shockumentary, Sinister Menace from 1930, purports to be Egyptian government footage of the narcotics trade, with a new foaming-at-the-mouth tirade on the evils of drugs that's 100 percent pure vintage Esper. Tales abound of hash smuggled into Egypt on the backs of camels, and of evil pushers lacing their dope with crushed human skulls. These are NOT actors, the film reminds us, “just fellow human beings”, and thus starts the camera's journey along the trail of human wreckage captured, no doubt, by an Egyptian Esper clone. Haggard, haunted faces in hideous closeup, shaking and crawling with flies, are reminiscent of images from Nazi propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew, and as America's War on Drugs was just starting to warm up in the early Thirties, Esper's own propaganda is a similarly cruel and inhuman piece that would warm the cockles of Joseph Goebels' ice-cold heart.

And so to our feature tonight, which proves once and for all that Dwain Esper was the Ed Wood Jr of his generation of roadshow pioneers, and that Narcotic from 1933 is the Glen Or Glenda of the Drugsploitation genre. A bold claim, I hear one or two of you declare, but just wait for Narcotic to unfold. On the surface it's the confessions of one Dr William G. Davis, promising doctor with his own Free Clinic, loving wife, and a caring friend in his former classmate Mr Wu (played with squinted reverence by Caucasian actor and Esper's assistant on Maniac, J. Stuart Blackton Jr!). Wu introduces Davis in garbled Confucian to one of Chinatown's many opium dens and to the pipe's dangerous charms, but warns him that any defect in character will allow the drug to take hold. Before the smoke clears Davis has his own home opium den, is selling tiger fat on street corners as the miracle ointment Wang Fang, and cavorting with socialites and underwear-clad showgirls in a recreation of a dope party which eclipses any scene from Reefer Madness. Davis produces a veritable all-you-can-ingest pharmacopia, from “C” to “H”, snorting AND main-lining (says one girl, “It takes a needle for me to get a bang!”) and some jazz cigarettes for an extra ding or ping or pop, or whatever Harlem lingo was hip that season.

Sadly for Davis he's just one of a million addicts, claims Esper, in the US at the time, and discovers only too late the old adage “you can take it out of the body, but not out of the mind”. For Davis there is only one way out, he writes in a letter addressed to Dwain in the opening credits, a self-reflexive moment very much like Ed Wood's own confessional Glen Or Glenda, and from a filmmaker whose career has more than a passing resemblance to that of Davis' snake oil salesman. And, like Glen Or Glenda, Narcotic is an eccentric patchwork of a film, stitched together from silent car chases, footage of circus freaks, the birth of a baby and rattlesnakes in the wild, and probably the same shots of lightning bolts that Ed Baby used as punctuation. It's an astounding work by one of the Thirties most idiosyncratic filmmakers, and only goes to prove that those Thirties roadshow pioneers were exploitation alchemists – adding a tincture of sin here, a pinch of derriere there – posing as Victorian-era moralists. Dwain Esper, you're not fooling anybody, as we reveal the horrors of Z-grade Drugsploitation in the 1933 Narcotic.