Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

This pleases me a great deal.
I grew up watching Ustinov's Poirot in this film and Evil Under The Sun over and over again. I loved mysteries growing up and Ustinov's Poirot, as you say, has such a humanity to him (as does Christie's Poirot, for that matter). I must have watched this movie at least a dozen times.
Yet, I have been loath to return to it as an adult, in part because I hadn't read the book and wanted to do so (I've read all the Marple short-stories and the first 8 of the Marple novels, but only 3 of the Poirot novels) but also just out of concern that this was something a 12 year-old could fall in love with but a jaded adult would find lacking and I didn't want to know.
I will now move this up.
As for poor Albert Finney, I have to tell you that I love his performance. In the end, he does show great humanity even if he portrays Poirot as a bit more standoffish and irritable than Christie wrote him. I think Lumet's MotOE is a fine film and, despite its impressive cast and sharp direction and cinematography, I think Finney carries it.
I also think Branagh's performance is surprisingly good. He doesn't look right, of course, he's too physical, but you can tell he really loves the character Christie wrote, even if he takes extreme liberties with her plots.
But I look forward to revisiting Ustinov's performance. A recent article in The New York Times gave a brief run-down of the (I think) six "major" Poirot interpreters and they had great things to say about Ustinov.

If you like movies with ridiculously stacked casts giving fun performances, you should still have a good time with this. Nostalgia definitely is playing a role in my opinion, but the cast gives it a pretty good baseline of enjoyment.


I don't mean to knock Finney (although I see I gave Lumet's Express just three stars, wonder if it caught me at the wrong moment), but I found Ustinov more fun to hang out with.



I actually just had someone else recommend the Branagh movies to me as well, so will put those on my radar. I think Branagh can be a pretty fun actor (he gives my favourite performance in any of the Harry Potter movies), and I can see his inclination for hamming it up suiting the character well.

__________________

It’s a trap!

Greta, the Mad Butcher was released in some markets as Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (and in some others as Wanda, the Wicked Warden), so it makes sense that it plays a lot like an Ilsa movie. (It does not however, play like a sequel to Barbara Loden's Wanda, making the latter alternate title a bit confusing.) The opening scenes set the tone for the junky pleasures the movie offers. Ilsa...sorry, Greta, played by Dyanne Thorne, slips into a bath while a group of female prisoners are crowded into a shower. There's a parodic amount of nudity in these few minutes, and had I any semblance of dignity as a viewer, I might have taken offense. (I don't, and shamefully nodded in appreciation.) Of course, this nudity was something of a red herring for us and the prisoners' captors, as one of the girls manages to escape, taking refuge with a kindly doctor played by director Jess Franco. (Franco is introduced with his shirt unbuttoned distressingly low, a move he's not handsome enough to pull off.)

When Ilsa...sorry, Greta, shows up to reclaim the escaped inmate, Franco holds a press conference to voice his suspicions about what the hell they're doing in her so called hospital. Franco is then approached by the sister of the inmate (their meet cute involves her holding a gun to his head) and demands to be admitted into the hospital under false pretenses so she can investigate what happened to her sister, a plan that absolutely has zero probability of going wrong in any capacity whatsoever. Among the many ways this doesn't go wrong at all include lots of sexually-charged torture by Ilsa...sorry, Greta, which are being filmed for sale to a scumbag in a loud boating blazer, being forced to go without pants (the wardrobe resembles the prison garb from Barbed Wire Dolls), and being bullied by another inmate played by the great Lina Romay. Romay does eventually help the heroine, but not before using her face for toilet paper in the movie's most baffling scene. (I suppose a bidet would be more accurate here, actually.)

Perhaps because the first two Ilsa movies were fairly flatly directed, Franco's (unofficial) entry feels a lot more dynamic. The earlier movies, especially the original, were trying to shock and disgust, and felt a little demeaning in the process. (It didn't help that the original was trying to use Nazi war crimes as the basis for cheap thrills.) Here, Franco is obviously getting off on the material, and switches out the ultraviolent tortures of the original for kinkier sequences that seem to be tickling his fancy in particular (the camera admires the participants' nude bodies even more lovingly this time around). Franco devotes special attention to the BDSM power games that colour the villain's transactional relationship with the Romay character, which features a scene where Romay is used as a pincushion. A lot of this is less graphic (in terms of violence) than it sounds, making this entry an easier watch than the others, although there are a few pretty gnarly sequences. The ending, where a cannibalistic attack is intercut with scenes of lions, tigers and leopards gnawing on their prey, has an added punch coming after the (mostly) palatably sexy material earlier in the film.

There's also a certain political charge to the proceedings, as the villain's torture hospital is clearly an extension of the repressive regime that runs the unnamed country in which the movie is set, in which Franco's (the character) pleas for transparency seem laughably futile. The movie also deserves some points for a not entirely politically correct but still sympathetic portrayal of a trans character, who happens to get the best line in the movie. (When another inmate softly sings "Frere Jacques", she complains: "Piss off, you blonde bitch! And you can take your brother, jack him off and shove him up your singing ass!") Of course, much of the entertainment is provided by two very fun performance from Thorne and Romay, who get to be domineering and bullying in different ways, Thorne authoritarian and arch, Romay down and dirty. (Despite her character having a Spanish name in the version I watched, Thorne still does her Teutonic accent, although I suppose there's real life precedent for Nazis fleeing to Spanish-speaking countries in an attempt to escape justice. Thorne also trades her usual peaked cap and blonde hair for a beret and wavier red hair this time around, while Romay sports a super cute pixie cut.) But this also works because Franco seems to rightfully regard authoritarian repression as bad (a low bar, sure, but his film has more conviction than the other Ilsa movies) and gives us an actual protagonist to root for, and because his direction is pretty sturdy by the standards of the genre, even if it's less fluid and hallucinatory than I usually like from him. Come for the sexy shower scenes, stay for the surprisingly committed narrative.

*Adolphe Caesar voice*


She's back, and up to her old tricks!

I did see this under the title Ilsa, The Wicked Warden.
Many, many moons ago.

Was she actually called Ilsa in the version you watched? Here there's a line where she calls herself Greta, I assume it would have been changed in the other versions.

If you decide to watch Devil Story because of how cool the monster looks on the poster , I regret to inform you that you've been grossly misled. While the monster in the movie does wear the same Nazi uniform (something which is never explained in the movie, for the record), his general appearance is less like the wild-eyed decaying zombie suggested by the poster and more like beloved actor Peter Boyle, star of such classics as Taxi Driver, Young Frankenstein and Joe. (I guess Boyle did play an undead character in Young Frankenstein, but his appearance there was more dignified.) Just an ugly, unappealing sonofabitch with a complexion that can be charitably described as scrotal, who spends the entire movie making Chewbacca-esque growls, spewing blood from his puckered lips and doing an ungainly shuffle.

Luckily the movie compensates with the introduction of a mummy, in proper bandaged form (although his outfit looks suspiciously like a bodysuit with a bandage print; this is a low budget production and I assume they had to cut corners somewhere). The mummy is even revealed to have a cute nose when some of his bandages are torn off his face, and he has a girlfriend who steps out of a sarcophagus with intimidating helmet hair. If you're one to take your romantic advice from horror movies, you might be inspired to find someone who looks at you the way these characters look at each other: the mummy, drooling blue liquid, and his girlfriend, returning his gaze with a blank, affectless stare.

As for the plot...oh dear. Peter Boyle kills a few people in the middle of the woods in a series of extremely limp gore scenes, and then the heroine and her plus one stop in the middle of the road for the movie's first real freakout. Angry, jittery synths fill the soundtrack, lightning strikes in broad daylight, and we keep cutting away to a cat until it leaps on the heroine's face. Or maybe it doesn't. (Is the cat real? We will never know.) Anyway, they stop by a manor during a storm and decide to spend the night, and are regaled by one of the inhabitants by a story about a shipwreck containing cargo from Egypt. For some reason in the middle of the night that same character runs outside with a shotgun and tries to kill a horse. The heroine decides to follow and ends up running into not just Peter Boyle, but the mummy and his lady friend as well. (The man is presumably a member of the French equivalent of the NRA, as when the heroine asks her to use his rifle, he angrily corrects her: "It's a shotgun, lady!")

This a real brain fryer of a movie, where minutes stretch seemingly stretch into hours, a fuzzy synth sizzles on the soundtrack, plot points bear little relation to each other, and narrative coherence melts along with your brain if you try to think about any of it too hard. (Crack an egg open and get a nice breakfast going.) The scene where the man tries to kill the horse is a perfect example. The man is stranded in the middle of the screen, firing in all directions. The horse gallops from one side of the screen to another, as if nowhere near the man. The man is cloaked in the dead of night, the horse is framed against the dawn sky. These two appear to be nowhere near each other, not even in the same time of day, and possibly not in the same reality, an accidental surrealism arising from the ragged visual continuity.

This must have been especially maddening to see in the VHS era, with different sequences playing like your VCR malfunctioned and started to loop over the same few minutes and skip the odd moment, like a showdown between Peter Boyle and the horse that has him repeatedly knocked back by the horse's kick (despite it clearly making no contact) and scream in pain endlessly with a chunk of skull dangling off his bloodied forehead. The horse raises its legs. Boyle falls back and shrieks. Flesh and bone dangle in close-up. Rinse. Repeat. It goes without saying that none of this is remotely scary, although the movie achieve a certain goofy rhythm. Setting it in the French countryside also gives it a pretty distinct texture, albeit one not conducive to building dread. (American forests seem like a natural environment for mad slashers, French forests make you want to go on a weekend getaway to a chateau.) There's also a touch of class with the use of some Bach on the soundtrack, likely because it''s in the public domain.

So is this any good? I don't know, but there are worse ways to kill seventy five minutes.

This poster is true to the letter, but not spirit, of the story.

I was going to give this 3 stars, but realized I gave A Night to Dismember the same rating, and that's a better movie than this.

I actually don't remember. There was a big Ilsa thing among my friends back in the late 80s. We loved getting our hands on shit we weren't supposed to.

I feel bad that I don't keep up with this thread. Especially while Crumbs is on the injured reserve list. And then I see Isla, and remember my experience of seeing She-Wolf of the SS in the theater, and my response now as it was then when the credits came up and I realized what I was about to watch, "No... Why?" Followed by the ending assessment, "I have no idea who this is movie is for."

Like Bob Chinn, another director whose films were referenced in Boogie Nights, Jamie Gillis was apparently not a fan of how his work was portrayed. If I can play armchair psychologist for a second, their qualms seem to be more about context then accuracy. Segments from Chinn’s Johnny Wadd films are meticulously recreated, a fact that Chinn concedes, but he takes issue with the implications about his competence. In the movie, the Burt Reynolds character (a stand-in for Chinn whose appearance was modeled after Gerard Damiano) observes the limp fight scenes he’s put together and gleams with pride, impressed by the results. In a Rialto Report interview, Chinn grumbles that he knew the fight scenes were poor as there wasn’t enough money for a stunt coordinator. When the same Reynolds character takes to roving around at night trying to pick up bystanders so he can film them ****ing his star in the back of the limo, it’s seen as a awkward, desperate attempt by a more traditional filmmaker to adapt to the video age. In contrast, with On the Prowl, the model for that sequence, Gillis was trying to pierce through the artifice of porn and introduce some spontaneity into the genre. One can quibble with how much of an artistic ambition this really is (and it’s one that apparently led Gillis to some vile places I don’t care to explore), but it is an artistic ambition nonetheless, so I can understand why he was upset with his portrayal. The Burt Reynolds character was arguably selling out to eke out a buck, Gillis was doing it for higher- (or lower-, depending on how you’ve oriented yourself) minded reasons.

You could argue that Boogie Nights at least evokes the warm hangout vibes of Chinn’s work outside of the scenes where his movies are directly referenced (for all the haughtier influences that have been attributed to Anderson, I wonder if he didn’t learn a little something from how Chinn handled his ensemble casts), but in its truncated form, the video sequence doesn’t really capture the experience of watching On the Prowl. While it’s cited as a landmark in the gonzo porn genre, it feels far removed from the “wham bam thank you ma'am” ethos that most associate with the form. Gillis rarely cuts to the chase, and instead focuses pathologically on the dead air that would realistically arise from trying to execute the premise. The participants struggle to maintain erections and fumble about awkwardly in the cramped interior of the limousine. One key image has star Renee Morgan riding one of the men who’s been picked up while the camera pans enough so you can see his friend’s disappointed reaction from being unable to get hard and participate. Another has three men surround a mostly nude Morgan to the point that all you can see are the back of their shirts, a visual that likely wasn’t doing it for anybody watching. We even have to wait around while Gillis gets an espresso. Is this making you horny?

Yet Gillis holds on such shots for an extended amount of time, because the one person they probably do anything for is Gillis himself. You can hear him mutter under his breath, offering direction, encouragement and appreciation (and presumably nursing the chub under his sweatpants offscreen). Gillis’ bleary video images and loose construction offer not just a sense of immediacy, but a conflation between director and viewer. There’s a certain nocturnal atmosphere here that brings to mind movies like Blue Velvet and Something Wild, where night isn’t just a couple of hours when the sun goes down, but a sexually charged state of mind. But where in those movies you identify with their (admittedly kinky) protagonists who are along for the ride, this one puts you in the villain’s seat. Gillis, and by extension you the viewer, are Frank Booth, dominating the situation.

And despite Gillis’ seemingly amiable demeanour, there’s a certain mean spirited quality to his gaze, particularly in how he pokes fun at Morgan’s attempts to maintain a semblance of glamour, her gloves, wiping of her lipstick and patting of her hair all laughably futile in the face of the tawdry mise en scene. As someone who likes porno movies that feel like actual movies and like their characters, I should despise this in concept, yet I don’t know if it can be singlehandedly blamed for the devolution of the genre. (As I said, this isn’t nearly as business minded as what followed, the genre had been moving to lower budgets and more vignette-ish plot structures over the ‘80s, and those were predated by loop carriers made fast and cheap.) What I can say is that when it comes to deconstruction of the genre from within, I prefer the wry, quirky humour and structural playfulness of Rinse Dream, and the warmth of something like Little Showoffs, which ends by essentially pulling back the curtain in loving tribute to all who work on these movies, in front of and behind the camera.

All that being said, this is a fascinating document and well worth a watch for anyone interested in the genre. For a movie obsessively committed to capturing and evoking boredom, I was never bored.

Joey and Gary are best buds and super cool dudes. Unfortunately, some ******** decide it would be cool to stage a coup against Gary's family, leaving Gary for dead and causing Joey to flee. While Joey flees, he ends up stumbling into the underworld and ends up making a deal with the devil. Joey has access to nine demons and gets magic kung fu demon powers, but in exchange he has to keep feeding them blood. Joey agrees and returns to the mortal plane to save Gary and seek his revenge, but like many Faustian bargains, ends up having to do a lot of bad shit to feed the demons. Will Joey become evil for good? Or will he cast off the demons and resume being the good person he once was? I dunno, watch the movie.

This is a late period Chang Cheh film and has the same narrative style as other films he made during that period. Which is to say that characters don't have a lot of interiority and will frequently spout exposition just to keep the plot going. We get enough to establish the reason for the underlying conflict and then proceed to the fight scenes as quickly as possible. When I first encountered his work, while I didn't consider it a weakness per se (I appreciated the narrative efficiency), I also conceded that it was likely just a byproduct of making movies primarily concerned with delivering action sequences. But as I encountered more and more of his earlier films, this approach came into focus as a deliberate narrative choice. Earlier movies like Vengeance and The Boxer from Shantung were deeply felt portrayals of fraternal loyalty, wringing real emotion out of the violence that ensued (and were a precursor to the heroic bloodshed movies of John Woo and the like). In contrast, movies like Five Deadly Venoms and Crippled Avengers deliberately flatten the characterizations and abstract the emotions at play. The effect is like a story told through a tapestry, or by reciting a folktale.

Crippled Avengers has another quality that's very much present here, with their unusually oriented morality. It opens with a character deeply wronged, only for him to be and wrong other characters by maiming them in various ways. Through those scenes the first character is revealed to be the villain while the others are revealed to be the heroes, but it didn't always seem that way in a given moment. (This dynamic also features in Two Champions of Shaolin, where the "villains" only want to kill the hero because he needlessly castrates and kills one of them during a friendly exhibition.) In this movie Joey is supposedly the hero, but his murder of relative innocents brings that into doubt, and the villains' allies who try to stop Joey aren't entirely wrong in doing so. The tapestry looks a little different depending on the angle you're viewing it from.

This movie also bears some similarities with The Weird Man, which Chang directed the previous year, in how it tries to force supernatural elements into his insular, artificial style with awkward results. That movie felt at times like a transmission from Chang's subconscious, with scenes where the hero possesses the villain's wife to surprise him in the bedroom, possesses a priest to sexually harass the villain's wife and female acquaintances, and possesses the wife and her sister to surprise the villain with a threesome-turned-kung-fu-fight. (One wonders how Chang's marriage was doing at the time.) This one isn't as psychosexually tinged, but it does feature its share of awkward, amusing visuals. The demons are represented by a set of skulls that Joey wears around his neck that transform into eight children and one adult woman, which means we get plenty of scenes of little kids jumping on people to drink their blood and the same effects shot of blood on a prop skull numerous times throughout the movie. (And before you ask, it never gets old.) Added supernatural flavour is provided through garish multicoloured lighting, likely through the use of a spinning disco ball. The cheapness gives it a schlocky charm, nicely complemented by an awful English dub responsible for giving the heroes traditional Chinese names like Joey and Gary and providing such emotionally resonant dialogue as:

And:

And because this is a Chang Cheh film, it goes without saying that the fight scenes are creatively executed and frequently stunning. Earlier scenes seem to blend the action into the mise en scene, only to puncture the effect when switching to handheld (an effect he'd employ in his earlier movies but this time with the added benefit of Steadicam-like fluidity) while later scenes feature such highlights as fighting while waterskiing and fighting across a network of bamboo rods (and trying not to fall off in the process). And when the cast features some of our friends from the Venom Mob, the fight choreography certainly delivers the goods.

I've mentioned before that I have a weakness for the distinct texture of first wave slashers. Movies that evoke the feeling of being truly lost in the woods and whose minimal budgets offer a sense of grit difficult to capture in more expensive productions. The raison d'etre of slashers (the slashing; also, the T&A) are almost beside the point when it comes to why I enjoy these movies. (Not entirely beside the point though. Folks, I'm only human.) Which is to say that while I don't think The Prey is a very good movie, I probably enjoyed it more than most, even if I perfectly understand the less than stellar reception in my internet circle. This is a movie that tries to coast by almost entirely on those elements and skimps on everything else.

The plot is the same as in many of these movies. Many years ago a forest fire destroyed a community of Romani living in the woods. A group of campers go on a trip to those same woods. Something starts to kill them off. Enough for an eighty minute movie, right? What if I told you that with the exception of the opening scene, there isn't any killing for over thirty minutes into this eighty minute movie, and when the slashing does happen, it's not especially gruesome? What if I also told you that not only do the campers have no personalities, the movie also can't be bothered to feign interest in them, frequently cutting away to odd nature footage at every opportunity? What if even told you that there's barely any nudity?

Now, apparently there's a longer cut featuring a flashback scene with porn actors John Leslie, Arcadia Lake and Eric Edwards that does deliver on the rumpy pumpy (in the words of the late, great Roger Ebert). One of the reasons I bothered to watch this was because I saw their names listed in the credits on IMDb and was interested to see how they'd fare in a horror movie. (I've mentioned before that I have a certain fondness for classic porn actors, at least the ones that can act.) Alas, that scene was not in the cut I watched, leading to some disappointment when the end credits rolled. (I assume there was no end credits stinger where Nick Fury recruits the three of them into the Avengers.) The one character with any personality is a park ranger played by Jackson Bostwick. He has a scene where he recreates a country music album cover by playing his banjo with a can of Coors on the table next to him, another where he pets a cute little deer, and another where he's so enraged by the death of the campers (whom he had just met for like five seconds) that he contemplates shooting a vulture with his tranquilizer gun in revenge. These provide a large percentage of the movie's highlights.

This was directed by Edwin Brown, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Summer (who is also credited as producer), both of whom have a background in making hardcore porn films. I can't directly comment on how their overall style (I haven't seen any of the other films they've directed, although I did enjoy China Girl, the porno spy thriller with Annette Haven that they produced), but like Gerard Damiano's Legacy of Satan, another horror movie by a porno director, this exhibits the same struggle in filling up runtime without explicit sex to punctuate the story. (Both, at least in the versions I watched, have minimal sexual content, which seems baffling given their backgrounds.) This movie does it with the aforementioned nature shots, but I found the results surprisingly evocative. Unlike other movies that use nature inserts, the footage here is incorporated pretty nicely into the overall visual style. (The other major visual flourish is the use of POV shots, a genre requisite.) And as shot by the great Joao Fernandes, the movie looks quite handsome and has some nice forest atmosphere. I wish there was more in the way of actual thrills or dread, but the movie is not totally unpleasant to sit through if you like the genre for the same reasons as I do.

As an actual documentary this is pretty useless, but as a piece of the John Holmes mythos, it's pretty entertaining. We've all seen documentaries that are lazy hagiographies (I thought back to an A&E profile of Steven Seagal that ended on an upbeat note about his environmental views and left out everything else about his offscreen life), but this is an enthusiastic one, and pretty fascinating for the way it seems to feed off the artificial image Holmes projects himself through his movies, even more so when you contrast it with what we know about his offscreen life. (It's not too surprising that Holmes comes across as more charismatic than he does in some of his movies that I've seen.) If there's a point this is trying to make, it's that, despite Holmes' momentary claims to the contrary, Johnny Wadd and John Holmes are essentially the same, even if the details differ.

This is especially enjoyable if you've seen Boogie Nights, as it contains a number of moments (some repurposed from other Holmes movies) that were lovingly recreated in the Anderson film, including a very funny action-packed montage that makes The Jade Pussycat look a lot more exciting than it is. But there are times when the movie's use of clips approaches a tone poem quality, like Koyaanisqatsi with penetration. Of his co-stars, Seka is featured most prominently, and is interviewed while wearing an amazing outfit consisting of a yellow bodysuit and a sparkly, scaly jacket with gold shoulderpads.

And this is an endless source of great quotes from Holmes and others, some of which I'll leave here:

"John Holmes? Uh...he's a boxer, isn't he?"

"Everything in life is an act."

"It is difficult to give head to John. It's like trying to suck a telephone pole."

"John Holmes has come like God."

"A happy gardener is one with dirty fingernails, and a happy cook is a fat cook. I never get tired of what I do because I'm a sex fiend. I really enjoy...I'm very lusty."

"I quit wearing shorts after that. I was going through twenty, thirty pairs a month."

"Bigger than a breadstick, smaller than a compact car. I never measured."

"We've helped quite a number of people."

"There's no way he can use all of it. It would be coming out somebody's ear."

"I do enjoy freelance sexuality."

"I think the general public can look forward to seeing Seka and John Holmes on late night TV."

"Can I sum up John Holmes in thirty words or less? Yes. This."

*holds hands two feet apart*

"And it's wonderful. And what he's carrying up here. Because John has a lot more brain than people think, and they don't give him the credit that he deserves."

"No, I never paid attention to his acting ability."

"If a woman respects what you do, what you represent, how you speak, how you carry yourself. You don't have to be overly macho. You don't have to be overly complementary. Gain her respect. Treating her as an equal. Don't ******** her. Treat her as a human being. Treat her as you would treat yourself. As soon as you have that respect from her, she'll treat you with the same respect that you show. Then, you **** the shit out of her."

And of course, this legendary exchange:

Holmes: "He allows me to block my own sex scenes. It's a good rapport."

Interviewer: "Do most people allow you to..."

Holmes: "No, I think there's only two or three directors I can do that with."

Interviewer: "So why do you do that, Bob?"

Chinn: "Allow him to block his own sex scenes?"

Interviewer: "Yeah."

Chinn: "Well...I don't allow you to block your own sex scenes."

Holmes: "See, I don't tell him how to edit, and he doesn't tell me how to ****."

What kind of crowd did you get at the theatre? In theory I'd like to see it in that setting, but I'm also worried that the subject matter might attract certain...undesirable elements.

As I said elsewhere, it would make a lovely Nature Film were it not interrupted by occasional, ya know, actual action. Of a sort.

We need an edit where all the POV shots are revealed to belong to the woodland creatures.