If you were to take Bryan James' Run Coyote Run, mixed it with bootleg Waldemar Daninsky, and featured the Bruno Mattei dub actors, you would get this movie. It is a werewolf movie with a sex cult in it. It's also an action movie with Mafiosi, car chases, and Caspar Gutman impersonators. This is another one of those movies where the writing committee all each liked different genres. It becomes simultaneously spooky, hilarious, and testerone-y to an extreme, even though one of those adjectives isn't exactly real. The plot is somewhat complicated, but here's what I know of it...
Marco (played by director Marco Andolfi) has his jeweled cross stolen by motorcycle bandits while he visits his cousin. Both the theft and the visit are bad because firstly, Marco wants to bang his cousin, and secondly, the cross is the only thing that stops him from transforming into a werewolf! A werewolf who is actually a nude man wearing half a Chewbacca mask. Apparently Marco's lycanthropy is linked to the BDSM sex cult seen at the beginning of the film. Yes, this movie has one of those too. There are many fights with various types of gangsters, some of which involving some badass cops who appear to have been transplanted in from another movie. Ah well. Things become more complicated when the underlings of a Senator show up to retrieve Marco, and when we find out that the werewolf god the cult worships killed Marco's witch mother by exploding her belly. Will the answer lie with "Amnesia the Fortune Teller"?
This movie is over before you know it, even though it also drags. It's full of creative ideas, and no wonder--it, like many other great movies, serves as a glimpse into a weird otherworld. Everything that comes at us in the film is nonsensical and foreign, and it slowly gains momentum as time goes on. In this world, zombie Vatican priests can lead werewolf-worshipping cults involving lots of leather and whipping. That's just how it is. Sometimes it takes a little while to get from idea to idea, but when they all line up it's remarkable just unfettered this movie is.
It is also ludicrously cheap, as evidenced by the Wookiee mask and furry cock-socks on display. I believe the movie went into the drugs that fueled the script, and also into shooting the movie on film. European film is great because even in 1987 they still resisted the VHS scourge (though many Americans did too). Thus this movie seems artsy somehow while also being incredibly sleazy and cheap. This is pretty light stuff, outside of a werewolf rape scene (obligatory, probably), and the cousin-flirting--there's no Joe D'Amato here. It feels actually pretty American, with the action sequence lunacy and with the Universal homage they do, aka the werewolf-makeup transformation sequence with the fades and whatnot. As in those movies, it goes on forever and becomes inane after awhile. It's not nearly as boring as a Daninsky film though.
Insanity is the peril of boredom. That's why so many of us become insane--because our lives are empty. Madness fills our lives in the form of great movies like this one. When we watch these movies, we believe in the impossible, even when we don't believe in what's happening on the screen. We are taken to a fantasy land where the ultimate escapism happens. It turns out at the end of the tunnel of escapism is love.
I love this movie and it reminds me of several other movies, because of course it does. Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead, William Edwards' Dracula, the Dirty Old Man, Nick Millard's .357 Magnum--these and many others come to mind. That means we're on the right path, probably. That it takes all those movies and adds even more influences to the cocktail is always truly impressive.
This was my first time seeing this movie, but I plan on watching it again sometime soon. Perhaps then I'll have more to say. I would like to apologize now for not having done a Christmas movie, but this movie has a cross in it, which Kirk Cameron would say is an empty Christmas tree. I think I may be getting that mixed up but Kirk Cameron Christmas doesn't play by anyone's rules, least of all Kirk Cameron's. As an aside, I watched God's Not Dead on Christmas. That will not be reviewed on this site because, surprise, it is not fun.
The Cross of Seven Jewels is fun. Go for that instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment