Sunday, October 28, 2007

Deranged

     This is a creepy little flick about a disturbed little guy named Ezra Cobb. This was the first and most accurate telling of the Ed Gein story. A story that would go on to inspire many other popular movies like Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

      Ezra Cobb (Ed Gein) is a hopeless mama's boy who caters to his mother's every need, but when she dies Ezra just can't control his grieving and soon falls into insanity. Unable to cope with the separation from his mother, he decides that it's high time he went and got her from that nasty old cemetery and brought her home. Unfortunately, Mama Cobb doesn't look so great (being dead for almost a year can do that to you). Ezra becomes a regular at the cemetery, collecting body parts from other corpses to help restore his mother. 

      Eventually, he starts bringing whole corpses home to keep Mom company. He also has become quite a ghoulish artist, hanging faces on the wall and keeping the skin of his victims to make a woman suit that he often wears while dancing in the moonlight (Ed also had gender issues). He also made bowls from human skulls, lamps made with a spinal column, and lampshades made from skin. 

      He eventually turns his interests toward live women (I guess he got tired of the smell) and when a few of the women from town start to go missing, nobody even thinks of Ezra Cobb, who is by all accounts considered a nice guy. The police soon link him to one of the disappearances and when they come to his house to check things out, they find a woman in his barn... decapitated, gutted, and hung upside down like a deer. It turns out that sweet and gentle Ezra has been a very naughty boy. 

      Even though this movie is very gross and disturbing, it doesn't even compare to the real events that occurred in Plainfield Wisconsin at the hands of the real Ezra Cobb, the infamous necrophile Ed Gein.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

     This particular art film has an incredible idea that is executed brilliantly. It's in Japanese (hopefully with subtitles) and is very cleverly filmed and edited. This movie jumps around in time and the plot isn't exactly shown in order. There's a lot of fast-forward video and stop-motion animation using what looks like several different types of mediums (people, wires, clay, and lots and lots of tin foil). 

      The basic story (as best I can make out) revolves around two men. One is a clean-cut business man and the other is a professional runner. The runner has inserted a rusty pipe into his leg, a reason is not given. The runner screams in pain and runs into the street where he is hit by a car driven by the businessman, who with his girlfriend dump their automotive victim into a nearby ditch and proceed to make love while the dying runner lies in the ditch watching them. 

      Businessman begins to have real troubles though when a transistor-looking zit appears on his face due to a small cut from a clean new razor. When touched, it pops and gets worse. He then begins to rapidly change. He develops a metal rash that starts spreading over his entire body and he becomes strangely magnetic. 

      Meanwhile, the runner is morphing into a supernatural being bent on destroying Mr. Businessman. The story slowly becomes a strange game of good vs. evil. Clean metal is good and rusty metal is evil. Eventually, since neither one of them can manage to win against the other, they decide to unite and turn the entire world into metal, then rust it all just for the fun of it. A truly fascinating movie to watch...on drugs.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats!!!!

     This is a very strange little art film that was made but never theatrically released. It floated from one dusty shelf to another for about thirty years until it was finally dusted off and released on low-budget DVD. Apparently, during those thirty years, only a handful of people got to see it, but that was enough to generate a buzz about its existence and a copy was finally located and released. 

      The story is simple yet effective. Various people happen upon an old house with a mysterious basement room containing a large four-poster bed and an odd painting hung on the wall. Anything edible that comes in contact with the bed, gets eaten, leaving chicken bones and empty wine bottles amongst the sheets. As people go to lie on this bed, they also begin to disappear. The actual digestion of whatever the bed happens to eat is shown in a hilarious way by using a glass tank where whatever is eaten is dissolved in yellow liquid, with hilarious side-splitting sound effects (it sounds like crunching on raw carrots). 

      Slowly we learn that the artist of the painting on the wall is actually still stuck behind the painting, watching helplessly as the bed chomps down on anything and everything. A guy gets his hands eaten off when he sticks them under the sheets, leaving him with skeletal hands, but for some reason is perfectly calm with no pain and has an "oh well" kind of attitude. A treasure of a movie, that successfully rides the fence between horror and comedy. A must-see for any cult fan.

     I give this film the honor of being the ultimate example of a cult film because it really was only through word of mouth that after 30 years it was able to be released. Director George Barry saw my post about Death Bed and wrote to me, saying he liked my review. I asked if I could send him a few 8x10s to autograph, and the man seriously sent me four autographed photos and a personal letter. Completely awesome guy!

Plan 9 from Outer Space

     Plan 9 from Outer Space is ironically considered to be Ed Wood's most well-known movie and greatest cinematic achievement, while at the same time, it has outright won the award for the worst movie ever made and Ed Wood was then declared the worst director of all time. Which made his films more famous now than they ever were when he was alive due to the new category of "so bad that it's good" type of movies.  And in an almost cruel twist of fate, Ed's story spawned an award-winning star-studded movie about his life directed by one of the greatest directors of all time, Tim Burton, with Ed being played by one of the greatest actors of all time, Johnny Depp.  I'm not sure whether Ed would have appreciated that amount of irony.

     Filmed with more goofs than one can count, it never ceases to make me laugh out loud. In addition to the cardboard tombstones that occasionally tip over and the rapid continuity errors that result from the scene changing back and forth between day and night like 6 times in a two-minute span. 

    Obvious goofs or not, Eddie wasn't really interested in the "small details", only the big picture. This thinking led him to make some pretty bad flicks.  For each new movie he made, that he was sure was going to be a massive hit, Eddie would gather up all of his friends and set out to make a really bad movie instead of a really good one, much less an actual hit. 

      Plan 9 is about an alien plot to take over the world by reanimating the recently dead. They succeed somewhat, by raising only three "zombies" total. These consist of an old man, who's half played posthumously by Bela Lugosi using some of Ed's old home movies and half played by Ed's chiropractor who kept his face hidden with a Dracula cape so that no one would notice that they were two different people. The man's wife, played by the recently unemployed TV movie horror host Vampira, who was so embarrassed to be in one of Ed's films that she only agreed to play the part as long as she didn't have to speak a single line, hoping that no one would notice her in the movie.  Spoiler alert, people noticed.  And a 500 lb cop, played by Tor Johnson, the gentle giant wrestler turned B-movie actor. 

      Cheap sets, wooden dialogue, flying saucers that look mysteriously like paper plates painted silver (which wobble uncontrollably throughout the entire movie), and the most stock footage that Ed could get his hands on (and boy, did Ed sure love his precious stock footage). All this amounted to an amazing cinematic experience (well, at least in Ed Woods's mind).  For the rest of us, we were left wondering how someone could make a movie that was so incredibly bad...on purpose!

Friday, October 26, 2007

Frankenhooker

     This twisted tale of sluts and bolts begins when Jeffery Franken's girlfriend Elizabeth gets accidentally shredded by a runaway lawnmower. Left with only a few pieces of his dismembered fiance', Jeffery tries to figure out how to put her back together again. Since there is so very little left of his beloved, he decides that he needs some fresh parts to make her whole again, and since he considers himself to be a bio-electro-genius, he's convinced that he's just the man to do it. 

     To find new parts, Jeffrey takes to the streets of New York looking for prostitutes, his rationale being that these are ladies who are more than willing to sell their parts (yeah, but not to be cut off and sewn together with other dead hookers!). 

     Anyway, since all these prostitutes care about is crack, he sets out to make a lethal form of super crack to kill the prostitute who has the best "parts". Unfortunately, they discover his bag full of super crack that's intended only for the "winner" and they gleefully have a party with it, but an unexpected side effect of smoking this super crack is that it causes all the hookers to explode into bits and pieces. Now that Jeffrey has all the parts he could possibly want, he bags them all up, takes them home, and sets out to restore Elizabeth. He patches her up with random prostitute parts, loads her onto a table, and raises the table to the sky to attract lightning, completely "Frankenstyle". 

      The experiment is a success, Elizabeth is alive, and the only hitch (aside from looking like a patchwork corpse quilt) is that she now thinks she's a hooker too. Which makes sense since she's now about 89% prostitute. Jeffrey tries to track his girlfriend down in different seedy motels that she now frequents, all the while Elizabeth is literally shocking her customers to death left and right because she's been brought to life using electricity. There's also a very pissed-off pimp named Zorro that is currently tracking her down since most of her is considered his property. This is a hilarious movie with loads of enjoyable quirks. Oh yeah, and almost everything in this movie is purple, I'm not sure why.

The Gruesome Twosome

     This film by Herschell Gordon Lewis (of the famed Blood Trilogy movies) is by far one of his weirdest films. And that's really something considering the kind of movies he made. You see, H.G. Lewis mostly made disgusting gore movies, the first of their kind actually. Nobody seemed to notice the extremely bad acting, the bad sound, the bad sets, the bad continuity, etc. All we cared about was that it was a new and ironically fun, albeit completely gross genre of movies. 

      In this particular farce, there is a sweet but extremely odd old lady who constantly talks to a stuffed cat named Napoleon and runs a little wig shop near a college campus. She also has a room for rent that mysteriously stays vacant even though several young ladies come to the wig shop to inquire about it.  Coincidentally, the girls that come to rent the room are never heard from again, but their stylish hairdos are being seen worn by the coolest chicks on campus. 

      It seems the old lady also has a mentally challenged grandson named Rodney (a grown man who thinks he's a six-year-old child) who actually does the scalping for her. Half comedy and half gore. Not horror, just gore. There's a difference. Horror makes you scared and gore usually just makes you gag and then laugh about it. Anyway, it certainly made me laugh, and that's the important thing. 

      This movie also has the strangest intro of any movie I think I've ever seen in my life, and I've seen a heck of a lot of strange movies, man. It's two styrofoam heads discussing the mysterious events that have been taking place around the campus, a scene that has to be seen to be believed!  Truth is, the only reason that this incredibly weird intro exists is because the film was considered too short on running time and needed a few more minutes added to it to make it full feature length.  Definitely one of my all-time favorites!

Eraserhead

     Eraserhead is definitely one of the best-known cult films in cinematic history. This was the first full-length feature film by the king of "hard to figure out" movies, David Lynch. This movie has way more symbolism than most people can handle and the true plot has been widely discussed for years due to the fact that Mr. Lynch refuses to talk much about it and has decided to take its true meaning to his grave. He just calmly states that even he doesn't remember what it's truly about. 

      Henry lives an extraordinarily dismal life and there's pure desolation everywhere he looks. He gets a message one day from a recent ex-girlfriend that she and Henry now have a baby. Henry is forced to wed Mary by her parents. Oh yeah, there's a really big hitch to it. The baby is badly deformed and looks more like an overgrown sperm cell completely wrapped in bandages up to its head. Gee, no apparent symbolism there. Anyway, the girlfriend splits and dumps Henry with the baby who then becomes very sick. 

      As Henry nurses this sick sperm cell, he has visions of a weird woman in a radiator who sings about how in Heaven, everything is "just fine" and (symbolically depicted) his head is now being used to make pencil erasers. Yeah.

     Personally, my take on it... (silence please) I think Henry has a brain tumor, losing his memory, and is dying. The desolation, holes in the roof, the title (duh), and a woman with bloated cheeks singing about how great Heaven is. Go figure. A very dark and moody movie that can be endlessly speculated about. 

     A great bit of trivia about this film is that it took David Lynch forever to finish it, either he had time constraints, was running low on funds, etc. So it was filmed over quite a long time.  There's actually a scene where Henry walks through a door and an entire year has passed when he comes out on the other side.  Quite unfortunate for the actor playing Henry who had to keep the strange hairdo he sports in the film for that long of a time, just for a movie.  Now, that's a serious dedication to your craft. A true cult classic.

Chastity

     This is the only movie that Cher ever made that she absolutely didn't want anyone to see. Unfortunately for her (but fortunately for us) Sonny owned the rights to the movie, not Cher. So when Sonny died, his heirs decided to make some money by releasing it on DVD. But before the DVD release, this was one heck of a hard movie to find, due to the fact that Cher physically set out to destroy all copies of it because she was so completely embarrassed by it. And it's hard to imagine Cher being embarrassed by anything.

      Cher plays Chastity, a wild child runaway who hitchhikes her way across America. With absolutely no direction at all.  She floats around, from finding a nice guy who can accept her obnoxiousness to having a lesbian affair with the madam of a brothel in Mexico, then back to the nice guy who is evidently the only person who can tolerate her for very long. 

      Chastity very boringly narrates her adventures in a very unnecessary way, she flips out here and there for no reason... and goes to church, just to check it out and see what happens there. I guess she didn't like it because, after a short while, she loses her shit, steals a car and is Mexico bound.  The view of her flying down the highway in a convertible with all 12 feet of black hair trailing behind her is a really cool sight to see.

     Much like the Beatles and the Who, Sonny and Cher figured they could make a movie too. But a very square duo attempting to make an edgy film does not a classic make. It failed miserably and cost them their dignity... and all their furniture. Cher also got pregnant during the making of this movie, hence their first child's name. It has a very clever tagline... Chastity, she's not just a girl, she's an experience.  Yeah, a very bad one.

     To be totally honest, I really liked this film.  I think Cher's acting, though obviously that of a newcomer, isn't really all that bad.  Anyone who can conjure up enough emotion to be able to cry on film without the use of onions or Visine is someone who really has a future in acting, which obviously she did, having eventually won an Oscar for Moonstruck.  I think the reason she hated this movie so much is because it wasn't exactly the movie she thought she was gonna make.  Chastity was supposed to be doing all sorts of salacious things, but Sonny was the writer and just couldn't handle seeing his wife play out these events so he kept changing the script on her.  By the time filming wrapped, Cher discovered that she had made a completely different movie than she had thought she was making.  I would love to have a look at the original script, I bet it was way better than what it ultimately became.

Pink Flamingos

     From John Waters, the Titan of Trash comes Pink Flamingos. The story of the notorious Divine, the filthiest person alive and proud of it. Because of her criminal lifestyle, Divine has been forced to go underground, adopt the alias of Babs Johnson, and live in a trailer deep in the woods 

      Connie and Raymond Marble are "two jealous perverts" who loathe Divine and are hell-bent on destroying her reputation and stealing her title as the filthiest people alive. The Marbles run an illegal baby ring where female hitchhikers are thrown in a dungeon, and impregnated by their butler. The babies are then sold to lesbian couples who obviously can't legally adopt. They also fuel money to a gang of heroin pushers in the local elementary school. 

      All of this combined cannot top the notorious beauty Divine, who along with her traveling companion Miss Cotton, her mentally ill mother Miss Edie, and her delinquent son Crackers overthrow the Marbles and reclaim their position as the filthiest people alive. 

      Stay tuned for when the movie comes to a close because Divine has a little something extra filthy to show us. Not only is she the filthiest person alive, but she is also the filthiest actress alive. She proves this by feasting on some freshly squeezed dogshit (ugh, and it's...real). An ending that could make anyone gag.  A movie made solely to see how much shock value could be compiled into one film, a disgustingly fun ride!


Reefer Madness

     This movie was actually a propaganda film made with the most honest of intentions by trying to discourage people from the supposed evils of marijuana, but instead, it ended up entertaining pot smokers rather than preventing them. The acting is deplorable, to say the least. 

      Originally titled "Tell Your Children!", it is presented as part documentary and part movie to explain the absolute horrors of the "demon weed". According to the narrator, it's compared to and considered worse than Morphine, Cocaine, and Heroin combined into one. 

     The movie has an extremely improbable plot consisting mainly of very dim people who peddle pot to teenagers, resulting in them committing horrible crimes, including murder, and an inevitable descent into sheer and utter Madness!! Originally in black and white, it has recently been colorized by Off Color Films, who cleverly made the pot smoke being blown by the characters come out in multiple colors.  A movie with a sincere intention that was completely turned around and went the other way, being cherished by potheads worldwide!  Thankfully it can now be found on YouTube!

Forbidden Zone

     Forbidden Zone is the hilarious brainchild of Danny Elfman, starring Danny himself as Satan (no leap of imagination there). Danny Elfman's early career with The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo conveniently provided the soundtrack for the movie, and what a soundtrack it is!!! Being that it's a comedic musical drenched with Yiddish humor just makes it that much more hilarious. 

      Frenchy (a foreign exchange student, maybe?) is sucked down a hole in her families basement and ends up in the Sixth Dimension ruled by the evil Queen Doris and her perverted staff of dancing frogs and the weirder-than-weird performers known only as the Kipper Kids (one of whom is actually married to Bette Midler). 

      Luckily for Frenchy, King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (Herve Villachaiz, "de plane, de plane!") has fallen for the young French girl, much to the Queen's dismay. Frenchy and the Queen duke it out for the coveted position of least hated among the inhabitants of the Sixth Dimension. 

      With its cheap sets and incredible overacting, this black-and-white yet still somehow colorful movie is a great find for any cult classics fan.

Liquid Sky

     Liquid Sky is without a doubt the most colorful movie I've ever seen. Besides being shot in what I like to call "psychedeliscope", it also cashed in on the whole luridly multicolored non-gender-specific early 1980s. 

      Margaret is a fashion model and lives in a penthouse in Manhattan. She also lives with Adrian, her heroin-pushing lesbian girlfriend. One day, an alien spacecraft the size of a dinner plate lands on their penthouse roof searching for heroin but instead finds something better. That something is a chemical reaction in the brain produced during orgasm that is similar in chemical composition to heroin. Unfortunately, it kills its victims when it shoots out of their heads in the form of glass-like arrows when they reach orgasm. 

      This alien has chosen Margaret as its tool to obtain this chemical.  I guess one would naturally expect a sexy fashion model would have many orgasms, even though she never does because she's either being raped or somehow having sex that she's absolutely not into. 

     Since everyone she has sex with keeps dying, she decides to have sex with her biggest fashion rival Jimmy, who seems oddly feminine (even for the eighties). This is probably because actress Anne Carlisle plays the roles of both Margaret and Jimmy. 

      This film is so bizarrely colored that one must assume that it was only meant to be watched on some really strong LSD, I know I did. From the unbelievable makeup (even for the eighties) to the rainbow vision that results from seeing things from the aliens' perspective. 

      Take more color than most televisions can handle and an electronic soundtrack that could literally drive someone insane and you get one of the most notorious movies of the whole cult film phenomenon. In fact, the director Slava Tsukerman was reportedly exiled from Russia for making weird movies.  I don't doubt that this could very well be true.

Nekromantik

     Wow, what can one say about Nekromantik? Being a cult movie master, I thought I had seen it all... I was so DEAD wrong. Nekromantik is a story about a little German guy with an unpronounceable name who has a job as part of a cleanup crew for grisly car accidents. 

      One day he happens upon a very very rotted corpse in a ditch and brings a piece of his job home to his necrophiliac girlfriend as a "gift". They proceed to have repeated intercourse with it until the little German guy gets fired from his job and his girlfriend decides that he can no longer provide her with fresh (or not-so-fresh) playthings, so she runs off with their "new friend". 

     Unable to cope with his girlfriend's betrayal, he seeks to satisfy his carnal pleasures among impatient but creative prostitutes, only to find that he cannot achieve any pleasure at all... at least with anything alive. For a cheap foreign horror film, the acting is actually not that bad, and for those who crave shock value, this is definitely the movie for you.  I actually found this movie to be oddly very artistic and had a surprisingly cool original soundtrack.  It isn't for everyone, but what is?  I personally loved it.