Tuesday, April 29, 2008

I Drink Your Blood

     LSD + Rabies + Satanic hippies + deplorable acting = I Drink Your Blood. Filmed in 1970, it earned the title of the first film to be given an X rating based on violence alone. Thankfully, it has now been released uncut on DVD, so now everyone can enjoy this piece of cinematic shit. 

     A gang of Satanic hippies is traveling around in a van (going... somewhere?). They break down in a town with a population of like 12 people. Horace Bones, the extremely eccentric leader of this gang of total acid heads that worship Satan and vow to die and kill for Him, blah, blah, blah. No one except Horace really takes this crap seriously, most of the members are a somewhat normal band of misfits who are more or less decent people who just like to trip out. 

      Anyway, a young girl accidentally sees them performing a ritual sacrifice on an unfortunately real chicken (hope they ate it afterward) she then screams and runs for her life. They catch up to her and attack her. She stumbles home and tells her Grampa about what happened who vows to get revenge on these hooligans that have moved into a run-down hotel in this almost completely vacant town, full of "yummy looking" rats to feast on (Don't ask, they look as frighteningly real as the chicken did). 

      A slightly younger version of John-Boy Walton is part of the family of the attacked girl and beats Gramps to the punch when it comes to revenge by offering the satanic hippies some meat pies that he has laced with Rabies that he got from a mad dog he had shot and killed earlier in the movie. All the hippies start to get sick and foam at the mouth. Unfortunately, It looks like they just sprayed whipped cream on their mouths, making them appear totally unscary and instead look like rejects from those "Got Milk?" commercials. 

      The extremely diminutive population of this desolate town band together and shoot all of the Satanic rabid hippies. It's a little gory here and there... a pregnant woman stabs herself in the belly, a man is beheaded, some guts spill from here and there, nothing my readers won't enjoy. All the hippies are eventually killed off in various disgusting ways. The acting is truly a spectacle, it's so bad that I absolutely must include this in the comedy section of Cultarama, I sincerely had no choice. There's a plethora of weirder-than-weird characters in this film to enjoy, no two are alike in any way. 

     I also love the movie title because despite being called I Drink Your Blood, there's actually no blood drinking in it.  The title was originally called Phobia because the film deals quite a lot with the fact that rabid animals/people are apparently terrified of water but it was changed at the last minute because they really needed a punchier title, even though it now had nothing in common with the film's storyline.  This change was made without even consulting the director, who was completely confused, as were the actors when this movie premiered and nobody could find it due to the title change!  The sequel title is even better, aptly named "I Eat Your Skin" I highly recommend both films, they're what true cult film is all about.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Queen Adreena

      After the success of Eleventeen, Daisy Chainsaw's first and only album, fueled by their punk hit “Love your money”, guitarist Crispin Gray and lead vocalist Katie Jane Garside decided to create a new band called Queen Adreena in 1999. Their first EP “Taxidermy” was released in 2000, written by the two of them. This album was to become an unusually successful hit, a classic with its awesome personality and sound, sometimes rock'n'roll, sometimes blues and melancholic. 

      The band would rotate through several bassists and drummers until they found Pete Howard in 2002 to be part of their second album “Drink Me”, a record more brutal and distinctive than the first one. Pete Howard would bring his savage strength on the drums, infusing a good rhythm and great energy to Queen Adreena. 

      With their new album "The Butcher and the Butterfly" Queen Adreena had scored its biggest hit yet, ironically it was a cover of Dolly Parton's hit song "Jolene" which sounds like an odd choice for this band, but it worked out beautifully, giving a classic country song a whole new rock/metal dimension. With this new single.  And with follow-up hits such as "Pretty Like Drugs" and "Medicine Jar" Queen Adreena began to finally achieve more mainstream success as it had done with Daisy Chainsaw. 

     Even though Queen Adreena still does a gig together now and then, lead singer Katie Jane Garside has gone on to create a multitude of other projects such as a band called Corpse Electrique and the soft and breathy band Ruby Throat, which is just soft whispers of spoken poetry with light and shallow music that's almost undetectable.  I've grown to love almost anything that Garside does because you can always count on it being fun, interesting, and completely artistic.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Terror Vision

     On the planet Pluton, a nuisance creature disposal unit vaporizes unwanted creatures and shoots them into space. Unfortunately, one of the discarded aliens has landed on Earth. More precisely, the Putterman family's new satellite dish. 

      The Putterman family is weird enough without extraterrestrial influence. Stanley and Raquel Putterman are sexual swingers and their entire house is designed to look like a porno palace. Suzy Putterman is a teenage Cyndi Lauper clone, complete with multi-colored hair and makeup that could scare a clown. Grampa Putterman is a military-obsessed peddler of lizard tail jerky that lives in a fallout shelter in the basement. 12-year-old Sherman Putterman is the only halfway normal member of the family. 

       The new satellite dish doesn't seem to be working very well, at least until the space creature is absorbed by it. Then miraculously it works, with the exception of two channels. One just shows a googly-eyed slimy alien and the other channel is a different-looking alien that seems to be pleading with humankind over something. 

      Armed with a remote the size of a small car, the Puttermans explore the wonders of satellite TV. Mom and Dad go out sex clubbing, and Suzy has a punked-out date from hell aptly named OD lined up for the night, leaving Gramps and Sherman alone for the evening. Soon lightning and tentacles come out of the TV and eat Gramps. Mom and Dad come home with another couple to have sex with, Sherman complains about a monster and Mom gets mad about him disturbing their orgy and throws him in the fallout shelter. He calls the police, but they of course don't believe him. So he calls the only person that might believe him. An Elvira wannabe named Medusa who has her own horror show on TV. She doesn't believe him either. 

      Meanwhile, the monster has eaten the entire orgy. Suzy and OD come home from their date and find the monster and think he's kinda cute. They at first treat him like a pet, then decide to exploit him on TV, so they call Medusa and see if she's interested in a real monster for her show. She scoffs at first, then says that she "might" come over. Unfortunately, the monster gets spooked when he sees the other alien on TV and eats OD's head (no big loss there). Armed with machine guns and grenades, Suzy and Sherman decided to try and kill the monster who is sitting in the indoor pool totally enjoying watching satellite TV. They throw the monstrous (pardon the pun) remote into the pool in an attempt to fry him. The other alien then comes through the TV and apologizes for the inconvenience of having unknowingly transported someone's unruly alien pet into space, specifically into their satellite dish. Suzy and Sherman tell him about how the monster has eaten their parents. The "good" alien says that their parents' DNA can be extracted from the monster upon capture, unfortunately, they'll have to live in specialized aquariums from now on. He vows to help them in any way he can. But when Medusa shows up and sees the alien with a raygun pointed at two kids, she assumes it's an attacker and smashes his space helmet, causing his head to explode from the pressure. 

      With a good alien out of the way, the monster proceeds to consume everyone that's left alive. The last scene is a half-Medusa/half-monster telling her chauffeur "C'mon C'mon C'mon, I'm in a hurry" I found it hilarious how on her show, she sounds sexy and sultry, but in real life, she talks like a Jewish harpy. 

      Everybody dies and the monster escapes. Perfect ending to a less-than-perfect movie. This film doesn't have much in the way of good acting or sharp humor but makes up for it with cheesy slapstick jokes and situations. Worth a watch, just to see all the laughable eighties cliches.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

House on Haunted Hill

     This is probably one of Vincent Price's best and most memorable performances. He plays Frederick Loren, a man with money, and a gorgeous wife, is very witty and eccentric and steals the show in every scene in which he is featured. His drop-dead (pardon the pun) wife Annabelle (played by the fabulous Carol Ohmart) is every bit as eccentric as her husband. They actually seem to have fun trying to kill each other. She once tried to poison him, and he tries to kill her with a shooting champagne cork, y'know the typical richer-than-rich husband and wife shenanigans. 

      Anyway, for the sheer fun of it, they decide to throw a haunted house party, so Frederick collects a wide variety of five or six people, a cross-section of sorts, consisting of Doctor to Typist and from Drunk to Jet Pilot. They have only one thing in common... they all need money. Apparently, again just for fun, he sweetens the deal by offering anyone who stays all night a hefty prize of $10,000. They are given the option to leave before the caretakers leave for the night, but due to the caretakers mysteriously leaving early, everyone becomes a prisoner in a house with steel bars on the windows, no electricity, no phone, and a door that locks like a vault. 

      The owner of the house is one of the party guests, a staggering drunk/tour guide named Watson Pritchard. He pretty much sets the scene by describing the murders in the house and the violent ghosts that now reside there. All deaths in the house are strange and unusual. One owner of the house was an experimenter with wines, but his bitchy wife thought it was no good, so he filled the wine vat with acid and threw her in. 

      One of the guests, an annoyingly screaming panicky mess of a woman named Nora Manning is being driven to the point of absolute hysteria by strange occurrences. She's warned by Annabelle Loren to watch her back because she's in danger, she is choked by an unknown person in the dark, and a bloody head appears in her suitcase. A side note that I always found fascinating when researching this actress is that she apparently died by gunshot, but I've never been able to find out the ultimate cause, whether it was suicide or homicide.  With the type of scream she has, my thoughts are that it was definitely a homicide.

       Due to the safety factor, all guests are given guns as party favors (an absolutely terrible idea). A few hours into the night, Annabelle Loren is found hanging by a rope over the staircase. It's at first presumed a suicide, but since there is nothing she could have climbed up on and jumped, it's deduced that it was murder. Clearly being the only one with a motive, Frederick is instantly accused, yet it doesn't truly seem to bother him much. 

      After seeing a very creepy ghostly appearance of Annabelle in Nora's window, Nora freaks, and runs. In fact, Nora does an awful lot of screaming and freaking out so when watching this movie, be prepared for a girl with a glass-shattering scream in almost every scene she's in. 

      While Annabelle is lying in state in one of the bedrooms, the Doctor walks in and starts talking to her as if she were alive. Soon Annabelle sits up and says "Get me out of this damned hanging harness". We soon learn that Doctor Trent and Annabelle Loren have been having a torrid affair and are planning to kill her husband Frederick before he kills her (after all, she is his fourth wife, all of which turned up dead of mysterious and undetermined causes). Their plot is to frighten Nora badly enough and to make her believe that Mr. Loren has it in for her. It works, and she shoots him the very next time she sees him, doing their dirty work for them. 

      Upon inspecting the scene to see if their little murder plot worked, the lights go out and Doctor Trent is tossed by somebody into the acid vat. When Annabelle hears the shot from the basement, she goes down to see how it went. Soon a skeleton emerges from the acid vat, speaking in Frederick's voice as he vows to kill her and take her with him. Scared shitless, she stumbles and falls into the wine vat herself. Sizzling sounds are quite overused in this movie by the way. Soon Frederick comes out from behind a door, revealing the skeleton to be a marionette puppet that he's controlling. He simply says to himself "Little did you two know that when you entered this game of murder, I was playing too." 

      When this movie premiered in theaters, a lighted skeleton would swoop over the audience when the skeleton in the movie is trying to kill Annabelle. Strangely, though the inside of the house has the perfect haunted house feel, the outside shots of the house reveal a very non-threatening, very modern geometric design. Oh well, the movie worked anyway. 

     Definitely one of director William Castle's better films, back in the day when he was still allowed to use gimmicks in movie theaters by using such devices as the flying skeleton.  He was eventually told that he couldn't use gimmicks like this anymore which seems like such a shame because it sounds like such fun.  Afterward, he hired Joan Crawford to be in his movies which I guess was the biggest gimmick he could have possibly come up with.  

     Since this film has now gone into the public domain, you can pretty much find it anywhere, from cheap DVD ripoffs sold at Walmart during the Halloween season to even a colorized version available on Youtube.  A true classic regardless.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Frogs

     You'll probably find this movie in the horror section of your local video store, but that doesn't mean you're gonna get any screams out of it. Made in 1972 with a very young Sam Elliot (almost unrecognizable without his handlebar mustache) and an equally young (pre-cosmetic surgery disaster) Joan Van Ark, playing her normal bitchy self. 

      The movie starts out with a very ominous feel, with young photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliot) taking pictures of the tremendous amount of toxic waste that's being dumped into the nearby swamp. Due to a boating accident where Smith's canoe is almost run over by a speedboat, Smith is taken aboard the other boat. Apologies all around for nearly killing him, the people in the speedboat invite Smith to their island mansion where their cantankerous grandfather is having a (very dull) birthday party.  

     Grandpa hates everything, especially frogs. Therefore he poisons the whole swamp, hoping to rid himself of their endless croaking. The theme of toxic waste turning frogs into killers never really happens, instead, people are bitten by poisonous snakes, eaten by crabs, etc. There's even a scorpion or two (technically a goof, because scorpions don't like aquatic environments like swamps). 

      It's strange, I never thought of frogs as being all that scary or malevolent, and certainly not being the best topic for a "horror" movie. They don't bite, they don't sting, and if you pick one up, the worst that could happen is it would pee on you. 

      Anyway, as the story goes, Grandpa's bratty kids and dingbat wife are killed off by something in the swamps (always snakes, leeches, spiders, etc, but never the frogs). Despite the death count, Grandpa is determined to have his birthday celebration anyway, even with the frogs jumping in and out of his birthday cake, which is, by the way, the only gross or disturbing scene in the film. 

      Smith, a few kids, and a blonde hottie manage to make their way out of the swamp and to the road. A lady motorist with her kid stops to give them a ride, even though Smith is carrying a huge rifle (smart move, Mom). 

      Aside from common sense blunders, there are also enough movie goofs to qualify it as an Ed Wood production. Day turns to night and back again many times in one scene as it switches from the cheap stock footage of swamp critters to the actors' reaction to the cheap stock footage of swamp critters. Many of the frogs that "jump" into the scene land on their backs, letting us know that the frogs were actually thrown into the scene. Supposedly dead bodies are clearly shown to be breathing, etc, etc. 

      In the end, Gramps is "attacked" by frogs that manage to get into the house. His death isn't shown and I suppose he has a heart attack since frogs are harmless. No scares, no chills, just lots of unintentional humor. A funny side note to this movie is that most of the 500 frogs used in the film escaped during production, I assume because they didn't want to be featured in it any more than any of the actors apparently did. It also has a great tagline, "Today the pond, tomorrow the world!!".