I'm gonna drop in a few other reviews I hammered out this month.
Hell of the Living Dead (Mattei, 1980)
Many years ago (okay, not that many, I’m not that old), as I was trying to get into exploitation films and specifically Italian horror, I came across this movie. I think my first encounter was a mention in an insert included in my copy of
Dawn of the Dead, which cited a number of Italian zombie films that were produced in the aftermath of Romero’s picture, of wildly varying quality. I’m too lazy to grab that DVD at this moment, but my recollection was that this was not mentioned for its high quality. In fact, most of the subsequent mentions I saw brought this up in a “so bad it’s good sense”, which only piqued my interest more. I’m not a particularly discerning viewer and do appreciate a good bad movie, so at a certain point, I decided it would be good idea to check it out. (My memory might be playing tricks on me, but this was likely around the time I watched Zombie Holocaust, which is truly terrible but has at least one great line, a pretty good gore gag, and one memorable special effect that goes hilariously wrong.) After an interminable forty or so minutes, much of which featured stock nature footage, I decided to call it quits.
It was a defeat that haunted me for many years after. (Like Ivan Drago, I will not be defeated. Or maybe I’m more like Rocky because I lost the first time. Anyway, can’t wait for that robot-free
Rocky IV director’s cut! Poor Paulie.) Yet this past weekend, giddy off a first time viewing of
Things (which is great!), I decided I would conquer this film once and for all. Would my increased appreciation of Italian horror attune me to this one’s secret charms? Was this a lost, unfairly maligned classic? Or was my initial reaction correct and it was actually terrible and a complete waste of time.
Turns out I was right initially. This is garbage, and mostly uninteresting garbage. The movie attempts to create a sense of location through obvious use of stock footage, which also greatly pads the runtime and enhances the cheapness and cynicism of the affair. The gore is not incompetent, as there’s at least one reveal that passes for the fun kind of bad, but so much of the film drags and the violence is nowhere near as frequent as necessary to hold our interest. Many of the characters are interchangeable, with only a volatile commando (who slits a terrorist’s throat at one point, has a habit of rushing into zombies to prove his bravery and even sets one on fire) and the journalist heroine (who strips off to mingle with the natives in a scene that would be offensive in a classier movie and amusing in an endearingly ****ty one, of which this is neither) stick in our memory.
The plot, if you must know, involves a mysterious facility in a third world country where a zombie outbreak happens, which ends up spreading through the entire country and leaves it in shambles. We join with a team of commandos (who may or may not be on vacation after initially foiling a hostage situation) and a group of journalists as they mosey along the countryside, occasionally bumping into zombies but mostly leaving unscathed until the very end. There is obvious potential for social commentary with this material but this is not the film’s primary aim. For what it’s worth, Bruno Mattei may not be the most heralded of the Italian horror directors, but he was capable of making an entertaining movie.
Shocking Dark (a
Terminator rip-off that reveals itself to be an
Aliens rip-off) and
Zombie 3 both have a liveliness that’s entirely missing here. (
Zombie 3 was a collaboration with Lucio Fulci but by most accounts is much more so a Mattei joint, and plays in part like a more energetic redo of this movie’s plot.)
The one bright spot is the soundtrack, as it consists of Goblin tracks pilfered from better movies. This doesn’t exactly translate to good scoring (Goblin even used well doesn’t always translate to what most think of as good scoring), but it will remind you of other, better movies which you’d much rather be watching. I will also say that if you do watch this, it might play a bit better in the middle of summer, perhaps with the air conditioner blasting, as it might better attune you to its more atmospheric qualities. Be warned though, the heat (and hopefully your AC) will be doing all the heavy lifting.
Things (Jordan, 1989)
We see a man. A somewhat paunchy, balding man. A real schlub of a man. The man approaches a woman. A woman wearing a devil mask. Could she be the devil? Is this a metaphor? Who knows? The man wants the woman to have his baby. The woman begins to strip, while keeping the devil mask (or is it a mask?) on, which might leave more prurient-minded viewers very conflicted. (I had no such interest in this film but feel obligated to report the facts without judgment.) But wait, what’s this? It turns out she’s already made his baby? How could this be? Is she bending over to pick up the baby? Wait. Oh no! It turns out the baby is actually a hideous ant monster and it’s just bitten the schlub’s hand! Behold the horror of
Things.
But it doesn’t end there. As he’s screaming bloody murder it cuts to him lying in bed beside his wife. Phew. Turns out it was just a nightmare. But wait, turns out she’s expecting and also in terrible health? Would this be a weekend where more than anything they should definitely prioritize rest and the last weekend in which he should invite his even schlubbier brother and their slightly less schlubby friend for beers? Too late, they’re already here! And what’s this? The fact that is wife is close to death does nothing to dampen his spirits as he loudly burps and farts and sneaks a dead bug in his brother’s sandwich? Will the even ****tier looking horror movie playing on TV and the inexplicable cutaway to a hideously cheap looking yet unsettling torture scene (which doesn’t appear to have any relation to what they’re doing or the movie they’re watching) cheer them up? How about the completely unrelated news reports hosted by pornographic actress Amber Lynn (who despite very obviously reading her lines off of cue cards still comes off as leagues more professional than the entire production around her)?
Well, his mood turns to **** pretty fast as his wife dies in a bargain basement ripoff of the
Alien chestburster scene, and his brother is no help when, upon hearing the news, launches into a long-winded story he read in a science fiction magazine that bears little relation to what just happened. No matter, pretty soon their minds are taken off the death of the wife as the house is now overrun with those hideous, crappy looking ant monsters, and it’s up to these three schlubs (at least one of whom disappears for much of the runtime) to clean house through meandering scenes and entirely unconvincing gore gags. Such is the horror of
Things.
If you couldn’t tell, I kind of loved this. Like the best bad movies, it’s not just characterized by incompetence but by the way it locks onto its own idiosyncratic wavelength. This has an endearing hangout quality that makes its marginal production all the more charming, and proudly makes its heroes complete hosers, fun to watch precisely because they’re so entirely unappealing and uncharismatic. (Aside from that, it shares with other Canadian horror landmarks a sense of coziness that comes with smaller productions, evident in things like
Black Christmas and
Rock’n’Roll Nightmare, all great movies in their own way.) And as for Amber Lynn, while she was cast so they could put her on the VHS cover (so the prurient-minded viewers of 1989 must have felt even more conflicted than such viewers approaching the film today; the current DVD cover just features star Barry J. Gillis, going all in on the hoserism), we do get a pretty nice anecdote about her cameo in
52 Pick-Up.
So yeah,
Things. Check it out.
Night of the Bloody Apes (Cardona, 1969)
The movie opens with a shot of a red luchador mask on a coat rack. A female wrestler in a red catsuit goes to put it on. Pretty soon she’s in the ring and we get treated to a wrestling match. Pretty soon she’s rendered her opponent unconscious, leaving her hospitalized with a serious head injury. Naturally, she feels kind of bad about this. But that’s not all. Also in the hospital is a respected doctor whose son is terminally ill with leukemia. He proposes a radical treatment. Instead of normal, safe medical techniques that would be used in real life or in a regular movie, why not transfuse him with the blood of a superior mammal, the gorilla? Or better yet, give him a transplant of a gorilla’s heart? What could possibly go wrong? Well, nothing in fact. No complications arise from giving a man a gorilla’s heart. The wrestler magically recovers with her head fully intact. And the gorilla? Well, with the human heart, he can finally learn to love again. All’s well that ends well, as the late great William Shakespeare once wrote. End of movie.
Okay, that may not have been entirely accurate. What does happen is that the gorilla heart turns the doctor’s son into a half-man, half-gorilla monster who goes on a killing and raping spree. And the female wrestler we met at the beginning figures into the plot by virtue of her boyfriend being a cop who has to investigate these killings. If I can get one thing out of the way, and this is my biggest beef in the film, it’s that for a Mexican wrestler monster movie, the Mexican wrestler never actually wrestles with the monster. My knowledge of Mexican cinema is extremely limited, and perhaps I don’t appreciate the tradition of lucha libre on film, but it seems like a colossal missed opportunity to not deliver the goods in that respect. Even worse, that character spends most of the movie worrying about her injured opponent or about her boyfriend and their relationship (because he’s so busy catching monsters and ruining dinner plans). All other women in the movie seem to either be nurses with a handful of lines altogether or victims of the monster. This is not a great film in terms of roles for women, wrestlers or otherwise.
The other beef I have with the movie, which may not be a dealbreaker for most others, is the monster design. Simply put, the monster doesn’t look a whole lot like an ape. He looks like an ugly, Neanderthal-esque dude with a ****ty mop haircut. (Perhaps it’s because I binged on kung fu movies last month, but I am growing weary of ****ty mop haircuts.) A more overly gorilla-like monster would frankly be much cooler, and could allow the movie to draw visual parallels with the luchador mask, setting the stage for the wrestler vs monster showdown that would have happened in a better movie. Also, I must take issue with the fact that a movie called
Night of the Bloody Apes technically has only one whole ape in it (the gorilla), one and a half if we split the difference on the monster. Unbelievable.
All that being said, this is a good enough time in delivering certain cheesy pleasures. The gore, for 1969, is surprisingly gnarly if not always convincing, featuring severed heads, gouged eyeballs and stock footage of open heart surgery. When combined with the flat, TV-movie visual style, this created a dissonance that genuinely caught me off guard. The effect is similar to a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, if generally better paced but without the almost alien, trancelike effect Lewis would occasionally achieve. I learn from IMDb that is actually a remake of the director’s earlier film,
Doctor of Doom, which has a plot synopsis that leads me to believe that it delivers on the wrestler-monster showdown this film fails to produce. That one doesn’t seem all the easy to get a hold of (based on my five seconds of googling), so for those looking to get their fix of Mexican wrestler monster movies and are willing to tolerate a lack of wrestler vs. monster combat, this one should do the trick.