Halloween Horrors 11 - Puppet Master - Axis of Evil

I love Puppet Master as a series. They aren't all GREAT, but there are some real gems in there, and one of my favorites is RIGHT HERE in last years Halloween Horrors!  Ah, Toulon's Revenge! And I was excited to see that era being revisited, all this time later, in PUPPET MASTER - AXIS OF EVIL.  I was also thrilled to see it on Blu-Ray!! 
And then, I watched the film. Now, to call it terrible would be an overstatement. So, once we get past the plot, we can  look at the good parts, even if it is hard to focus through the rather boring sub 90 minute runtime.

Briefly, we get a rehash of the death of Andre Toulon-adding in a character that sees the nazis leaving after he commits suicide to avoid the secret of his puppets being taken.  Then...well, we learn A LOT about that character.  And he fatefully bumbles across one of the same Nazis that infiltrates his girlfriends workplace to blow it up. Oh, and there is a Femme She Chew (the scenery)  that plays the "Evil Jap" role in a distracting but nicely hammy performance. 

Oh, and puppets. A little bit.  We see our old friends, less animated than they were 20 years ago somehow. And a new NINJA puppet, though for the life of me I couldn't see how Toulon would be using that as a guide for his work.  NINJA is kinda cool, but too generic. We remember BLADE, TUNNELER, PINHEAD and LEECH WOMAN because they are unique. I love ninja, but ninja is not synonymous with unique.
Stuff happens, very little puppet action occurs and then it ends in a cliff hanger?
BAH! 

 So, that speaks for itself I'd hope. The good parts are that the film looks really nice. David DeCoteau does a nice job creating atmosphere on a limited budget and with some small sets. I mean it, there are great bits to the look of the movie.  The puppets look good, if not a bit more "real" than they did in the original.
Also, I liked the music. Charles Band. Good stuff. Always good.
And...well, all the acting isn't that bad.

The good stuff, not a ton, but it is very well made low budget filmmaking that seems utterly derailed by a really pedestrian script in the end.  There are so many things to do with these puppets, and to give them next to nothing is just unbelievable. If it was for budget, than retool the entire thing before just padding it out.  Just my two cents.

Now, the most important. The Puppets!!  They do look nice, and when they aren't moving there are some nice shots of our old pals, but they are BARELY IN THE MOVIE!!!!  Nothing even happens of a puppet nature for ages. And when you are talking an 80 minute running time, there should not be a feeling of AGES involved.  They also have lost a ton of steps, animation and movement over the years. I want to smile when I see Blade stalking, instead I was groaning at the swinging arms that make a Bruce Le film look like training video for manipulating microchips.  Nice sculpting, but the rest ain't cutting it. 

I want Charles Band to succeed. I do.  Badly. I just don't think that taking the premier franchise and doing this is the way to go.  Also, avoid the Blu-Ray disc. It doesn't look good, and you can check BLU-RAY.com for more on the specs stuff.  I also used a few of their screens here because I can't do captures from Blu just yet. 

I'm hungry for a good Halloween Horror-and I'm going to have to add another Puppet Master to the list in the next week or two, because I want to see a good one now!

Halloween Horrors 10 - The Horror Show

If there is one 80s film that really caught a gorehounds attention from looking at all the MPAA censored shots in magazines like Gorezone, it would be the James Issac / David Blyth film THE HORROR SHOW.  And when you can see it uncut, as the German unauthorized release I watched is, what you get is a supremely fun showdown of some iconic presences, effects by KNB and an embracing of the whole "Elm Street" cycle that manages to be gritter than most Freddy offerings.  Plus, Brion James vs. Lance Henrikson is just perfect. They could shoot My Dinner With Andre and cast those two in 1989 and have a hit.

Max Jenke (James) loves his meatcleaver, and on his way to the electric chair he requests to be buried with it!  Detective Lucas McCarthy (Henrikson) put the crazy serial killer on Death Row and is haunted by the incredible carnage of the night he captured the madman.  He can't stop dreaming about the scene, and those dreams are all bent up in classic Kruegerisms as well.  But after the Death Sentence goes haywire and a bursting and popping Brion James swears vengeance against the cop amidst yelling UP THE VOLTAGE ASSHOLE!! at his executioner.  Well, Jenke has a post grave plan.

Now we go to Elm Street, but the pacing is so fast and the stars so entertaining that it outdoes most all of them!  Jenke uses electricity to Shocker his way around and become a ghost that can kill all those important to Lucas, and manages to frame him along the way.  But, will the psuedoscience guy that shows up to explain this think he is going to see the end credits??  Nah...but who cares.  What we have is a psycho turkey with a tiny Brion James head battling head to head with Lance Henrikson that acts so intense that it looks like his head is going to turn inside out--DEATHMATCH style!

While the plot is a bit shopworn, but who cares?  The characters are clearly defined and it must have been a fun day at casting to see James and Henrikson arguing who was going to play the psycho and who would play the cop. These two could have swapped and made a different, yet interesting, film as well.  The only thing I can say about the multiple directors is that I like both. Blyth was fired early on, but DEATH WARMED UP is a favorite of mine!  Isaac directed Jason X, so that gives him some massive splat-cred with me. AND the music is by Harry Manfredini!  You have to see it uncut to enjoy it fully, the German edition is very well done and it becomes obvious where the edits are made. This film was cut A TON, and without all that extra splat it would lose a few steps.  The opening sequence is gore loaded and paced incredibly well.

And..there is a European Trash Cinema connection!  Mac Ahlberg of Flossie and Justine och Juliette (????) is the cinematographer and he does a great job at pulling the most from the locations and sets.  Spooky boiler room? CHECK!  Power Plant with lots of generic stairs? CHECK!  Looking cool regardless? CHECK!

Any horror fan that loves 80s films should revisit this one!

Halloween Horrors 9 - Barn of the Naked Dead

Look look...I can watch the animals from here...

Andre (Andrew Prine) has got issues. Mommy issues. Interpersonal relationship issues.  Circus issues? Well, that last part isn't exactly right.  Instead of a circus this nutjob has set himself up in an H-Bomb testing area outside of Las Vegas in order to capture women and induct them in to his little fantasy world by sniping their car engines and chaining them up for training sessions!  Sleazy and straddling the line between exploitation and horror, Barn of the Naked Dead / Terror Circus manages to hash the two elements together to make the most of it's running time.  Because just as you wonder how another hour of Andrew Prine twisting his face around and shouting can carry this one, in comes two doofy guys to be killed by a mysterious HAND with burn marks all over it.  You know...twisted mutant monster man is a'comin!  And he sure does... Everything comes to a crashing halt when Daddy returns and turns this barn in to a Slaughter Hotel!  But hey, the three lead ladies agent and a state trooper will solve the mystery, just a bit too late.

This was exactly what I needed right now, in the midst of Halloween Horrors I've been jonesin' for some good exploitation fare, and Andrew Prine screaming and flailing around with a whip and babbling about his imaginary circus to his "mother" is rambling and goofy enough to get me in that happy state of trash film mind that will send me recharged in to the world of horror films.  PLUS, it maintains a horror atmosphere once it introduces the promise of a monster. But unlike many other exploitation films that promise something to happen, this movie delivers in spades.  The monster shows up and rampages around and, to my surprise, really gets the upper hand!  GO MONSTERS!!!  Of course, it does take any form of interest you built in the characters, ball it up and dump it into a deranged dump of nihilism.  But, that works for me, especially in a month of monster movies.

While the film is certainly almost entirely on the shoulders of Andrew Prine, who doesn't just keep it going, but hurls his scenes AT the viewer with a crazed intensity that you have to love. Most of the cast, especially Manuela Thiess as Simone, are fairly spot on-and the insane captive girls all are convincing. The "rescue" subplot is silly, but has a huge payoff that I won't spoil.  It was just...this....close!

Directed by Alan Rudolph, who would later go on to other fare, the movie isn't a stylistic triumph by any stretch. However, the final 10 minutes are great-the editing and music give it a weird atmosphere that comes out of nowhere in the best possible way.  Without the Tommy Vig music and it's warped and perverted circus music the film wouldn't work nearly as well. For a film about a pyscho circus, it sounds like a sickly band of clowns losing time constantly.  Excellent!

 There is not a lot of Naked in the Barn, but here is some!!

Click to see a larger image...check out the SEA DEVILS comic on the wall!

Halloween Horrors 8-The Devil's Men / Land of the Minotaur

Those who enter the forbidden chamber of the minotaur must die..die..die...

I had no idea that I was going to get to see the gore n' nudity edition of Land of the Minotaur, a title I've always been intrigued by, completely by accident.  Years ago I traded for the UK disc of THE DEVIL'S MEN and it sounded like a good title to watch during October.  Now, this is not a film with an excellent reputation, but I found it to be great fun, like watching a Charlton comic book picked up at a Woolworths for a dime-and it comes packed with a Brian Eno flexi disc of spooky slashsawing to boot!  Peter Cushing glowers, there are tons of sexy hotpants and tight shirts bits and you even get titles that are exhaled by a fire blowing stone minotaur!!  Bonus!

Director Kostas Karagiannis may not have a great handle on fast paced action, but he does throw us square in the middle of sinister goings on and keeps interest high for the wandering eyes by adding in some lovely nude ladies on occasion.  It really helps that we have a multicolored rainbow of cultists doing a groovy sacrifice sequence to get us started.  We know trouble is afoot, and trouble has a hepcat tailor!

After Father Roche (Donald Pleasance) warns some nice young folks not to go poking around some ruins, they do and end up on the receiving end of the Cults wrath.  Roche calls his pal, and apparent monster smasher, Milo Kaye (Kostas Karagiorgis) into action.  One of the girlfriends of the missing lads also arrives, to keep the skin quotient high!  Luan Peters looks like a Tom Sutton woman in action as the girl on the scene, one that seems to get left behind a lot actually, and shimmies and screams her way through the role with great gusto.  Of course, the cultists begin to attack and there are several chases that lead to Peters getting smacked around as a silly girl by the hero (yeesh)--but it all falls in to place as the sinister Carpathian, Baron Corofax, steps up the game and is looking for more sacrifices.  It helps that Peter Cushing plays the Baron, though for this writer I must admit that I've seen so many Neil Vokes images of Cushing that the man looks more like a moving comic character to me than the other way around.  

While it is far from perfect, there is a lot of fun landscaping to be done in this Land of the Minotaur.  The costumes are utterly cool and the night time stalking and prowling cultists are exceptionally spooky, and when the final trio of intrepid minotaur hunters are wandering the ruins and descending down the caves it has a great spooky feel.  That atmosphere is undercut a bit by the silly leads, though I take that as a positive as I couldn't help but smile and think of all the great covers and stories from Charlton Comics MONSTER HUNTERS as I watched them wander around and come face to face with fire, exploding statues, Peter Cushing and even some exploding cultists!  There are showers and slapping and a whole lot of yapping here, but hey...it's alright because I still enjoyed every minute of it.  

A nice Saturday Afternoon spooky, with some extra breasts and booty--I like this flick, and if you find it in the longer print, I'd recommend it.  It was released by Crown International with a PG rating, so I'll assume that there is a less bloody and breasterific edition out on US DVD-which is a shame.  While I wouldn't climb a Kraken to find it, I would recommend the hunt.  Fans of cool soundtracks will enjoy the Brian Eno scraping and tingling for sure, but for me...the end credits song is one of the BEST 70s vocal horror themes I've heard.  I NEED IT!

Now THAT is a trio of Monster Hunters!

Halloween Horrors 7 - Witch Story

I'm a sucker for late era Italian horror films, and Alessandro Capone's STREGHE - WITCH STORY is a fun last gasp of gore and mayhem.  To give it an extra OOOMPFH I finally managed to check it out in full widescreen thanks to the Japanese VHS version, which gave this little film a nifty shine that it might not have had on full frame crappy vhs from 20 years ago. 

A tired and well worn plot doesn't hold this film back from being fun. After a flashback to a witch being burned alive by a small Florida town (??)-we quickly realize that the evil woman's daughter is not just watching for a laugh. No, she is going to be trapped in time as her hells bells loving momma goes poof.  Years later, in the films late 80s present, a bunch of college kids go to the house to renovate it, almost exactly like the earlier watch of Sorority House Massacre 2!  They kibitz. They have sex. They have one dude that sings very poorly... and then they die!!  But the witch is clever and takes three of the most attractive of the ladies and converts them to her cause. So, you have carnage being dealt not just by the wicked ghost, but by the hands of the kids themselves.
Glass breaking and axe slinging ensue.  Also add in a priest that knows what is going on and may be able to stop things and you have a well tested plot.  But we don't watch these for plots many times...

Witch Story plays like a much more carefully shot Filmirage production from around the same time and feels a whole lot like Killing Birds minus the birds, yet with more killing.  The cast is really flat, and after the opening sequence the whole thing flatlines excitement wise for a bit. But don't let that stop you!  After all this time I've come to except that I embrace these time filling scenes and have found the zen of enjoying them. Witch Story doesn't equal Demons (what does), but also avoids being utterly generic by employing the girls to do the dirty work, giving each scene it's own dynamic.  Also, I have a thing for shattering glass and people KIYIIIIIIIIIING through it to deliver a scare (kind of the Ninja Condors 13 effect for horror films)-and this has several scenes.

Alessandro Capone is no Lucio Fulci (or Joe D'Amato), but Witch Story shines in it's full scope presentation of spooky lighting and outrageous action when the time comes.  It looks really cool and features a scene that has a witch possessed girl THROW a guy through an upstairs wall that leads to him crashing in to a swimming pool.  It looks awesome.  And then she pops up behind him WITH A CHAINSAW!!! Yes, Italian Horror, no matter the vintage, always finds something to offer me.  Also notable is that Filmirage and Mattei score maven Carlo Maria Cordio does the score and it is as great mish mash of early 90s Filmirage "wwwwwhhheeeeerrrrryaaar" sounds and rhythms.  I have to admit to buying the Killing Birds score, and this one would be equally welcome.

Violent, in scope and drenched in Italian style splatter sauce when it wants to be, this is the tale of some cutouts that get chopped up.  Essential for those that have it all when it comes to EuroSplat!

Halloween Horrors 6 - Sorority House Massacre 2

The cinema of Jim Wynorski is, for me, like wearing a lambskin condom.  Sure, it gets the job done, but while you are watching all the jiggling breasts and pounding away at the cinematic moments of your life you wonder if it will protect you from that dreaded itch--boredom in this case.  Well, I'm glad to report a 100% efficacy award to this particular gem, Sorority House Massacre 2. 
Plot?  Well, we have a group of well built ladies showering and dressing in lingerie while playing with a Ouija board.  We have a house that a bunch of murders took place in. A shifty neighbor that MAY have been involved in the previous films slaughter. A pair of cops. A strip club scene. And off screen murders (by and large) that don't waste our time with poor prosthetics, leaving that to some of the showering lasses. 
I loved it.

 Funny story.  I had a Mario Bava box set in my hand (#2 to be exact) and was settled on Baron Blood as my film (which will be posted on shortly), but for some reason it just felt right to grab my unwatched old SHM 1/2 double feature disc and pop it in. I have seen the first film, but never caught this one.  It's fast paced, actually funny and has a cool soundtrack and some editing that generates actual tension and a real "huh, I wonder whodunit...oh...booooobs....nice!" atmosphere that many other of it's ilk fall flat on a silicone injected ass trying to put together.  My favorite bit has to do with the POV of a woman being stalked in the shower while paying too much (or just enough for me) attention to the undercarriage of her breasts turning out to be ANOTHER woman waiting to shower in the icy water.  As all women in sorority house massacres do, they strip down and compare assets. 
I loved it.

I don't know who Stacia Zhivago is, but she should have made a lot more films for Jim Wynorski!  The cast is very solid here, and even the most wooden performances are less stiff than the wood in my pajama pants, so we'll call that a push.  You can see an effects guys hand squirting the ketchup bottle for a completely off kilter angle for a death scene, but again, that is part of the charm here.  The girls wear soap bubbles and fake blood with equal grace and the final 15 minutes is really well done.  Never boring. Always titallating.  I'm down with this Sorority House.  Special notice should be given to another Wynorski film that I really like called HARD TO DIE.  I was having heavy deja vu watching this movie, because if you reskin flick this horror entry into an action movie it is almost identical!
THAT is awesome.

Dear Mr. Jim Wynorski, I'm sorry I compared your career to a condom...it is done with the utmost respect. I'm actually more a fan of your work than I am condoms.  By far.  Thank you so much.

Halloween Horrors 5 - Cross Of Seven Jewels

I love werewolf movies, and Cross Of Seven Jewels, which appears to be the kamikazze Eurotrash Cinema mission of producer, director and star Marco Antonio Andolfi , is indeed a werewolf film. Now, I could tell you it was great, but I'd be better served to tell you that I really love it. I've paid more attention to Cross Of Seven Jewels than I have in The Exorcist and all the Nightmare On Elm Street sequels combined in the last five years.
A sort of boneheaded charm keeps the film going during it's tedious stretches as the one man hit squad on good taste Andolfi charges headlong in to not only wasting Annie Belle, Gordon Mitchell and Giorgio Ardisson in small roles, but managing to give the Japanese fits as they try to hide his dangling wolf dong!! 

Mario is a rather luckless fellow who arrives in Milan thinking he has the hottest cousin in the world-but it turns out that his hopes are dashed quickly as he gets robbed right away, and the titles cross is stolen off his neck. The problem is that the cross controls his lycanthropic curse!  Oh shit!!!  Well, for some reason this cross criss crosses the entire underworld of the city and Mario just keeps following the trail to retrieve it.  But hey, I'd rather it stayed lost, because he transforms in to the crummiest 1/3 werewolf, 2/3 moderately semi-fit nude Italian guy that swings his sausage and claws all over the screen. Chasing, slashing and S L O W L Y transforming every night. 

Dammit! His "cousin" is just a plant as well.  But you would think there was an upside, and there is for the viewer. Mario has weirdly cut and animated flashback/flashforward/flashsideways moments that feature what appears to be a gummi bear that feel on the set of a Naschy film and picked up a little bit of residual hair, yet none of the talent of the make up people it was near.  Yeah, the bearwolf with the spinning psychotropic whirlygig effect ROCKS me. I love it. Not in a "I'm a gumball machine and I can crack jokes" way at all. I love it because it is the very reason Andolfi made the movie. He didn't make it well, but he made it exactly as he wanted to.  Oh, and he kicks a bunch of ass and gets laid and the movie ends. 

This is real trash cinema friends, the pacing is really off in spots and you'll wonder when things will get rolling...and then Gordon Mitchell starts glowering at YOU and the gummi beast arrives and the naked werewolf guy stands awkwardly like a rushed Mike Ploog panel inked by nobody whose name we would know to finish a job and Annie Belle's nipples pound at her sweater.  It may be ragged around the edges, but this is the type of film I'll hold on to as tightly as the disintegrating T-Shirt I wore when my son was born.  Andolfi really likes Naschy movies and shows that everyone really can't make one, but trying gets you a lot of points on my Werewolf Dong-O-Meter and he sure puts forth everything he has. 

We can pick at it...but don't be a "Damned little fat head!" and miss it!