R.I.P. Herschell Gordon Lewis

We lost a great mind yesterday and the world is a sorrier place without him. He was the director and writer of Blood Feast and its novelization, and with Lucio Fulci he had the title of the "Godfather of Gore." In honor of his influence on trash horror I will get around to reviewing some of his movies come December. The reason for that is that October is going to be Spookyween, a month-long event where I review some of my absolute top-tier horror films across four decades: unfortunately, my schedule will not allow me to ditch my presently-planned '60s review for Lewis' film Two Thousand Maniacs, but that would be first on the schedule for December reviews. November, meanwhile, will be Bookvember, where I take on four particular excellent books. Rest assured, the Two Thousand Maniacs novelization will be something I talk about, perhaps then but perhaps also in December.

I am shit at tributes, but I encourage you to track down some of this man's movies. They speak for him better than I ever could. Trash as we know it wouldn't have been around today were it not for Herschell Gordon Lewis. Rest in peace, H.G. And thank you. 

Book Club of Desolation #8: Kuru; or, the Zombies (1990s?/2011), by Yaubus Redford

We live in a magic world. Do you ever think about it? Do you ever think that every day on the streets we brush by hundreds of people, and consequently, hundreds of stories, each of which break into their own kudzu threads thousands of times over? Statistically, you have met a serial killer, a costumed vigilante, a practicing witch, and perhaps even, if you are lucky, a writer. Perhaps that writer was Yaubus Redford.

I don't know anything about Yaubus Redford, and it's doubtful I ever will. He passed away in a plane crash in 2011, and I ended up editing his last notes and photographs (getting access to them in a trip to Britain over the summer) into a self-published book called Devil Skull Takes London. Earlier this year, Amos Berkley published a book that is probably the only complete omnibus of Redford's surviving work, again through self-publishing means, called Much Ado About Kuru. I recommend checking out both if you want a serious examination of a mysterious, improbable man--he was involved with the occult, and seemed dedicated to the art of writing to a point that is a little alarming at times. That is his life; however, if you want to see what his heart looked like, look no further than Kuru; or, the Zombies. By merit of its own experiment, Kuru should destroy some of the magic of the world. But because it was attempted, I like to think it added to it.

Here's where I'd ordinarily jump into a plot synopsis, but the issue is that Kuru is written in a...particular style. That is to say that Kuru is written almost like some of the famous bad fanfictions of modern myth, but with some intriguing subversions. It's worth noting that by the end of this no character has the same name as they did at the beginning, because names slowly drift into other names throughout the story as Redford seemingly forgets what he called everyone. Similarly, the spelling mistakes are a sincere issue, to the point where it's easy for the reader to have no fucking clue about what is going on. For example, if we did not have the contextual assumption that the words "how ounlicky" are supposed to read as "how unlucky," that we would not be able to assume that the rest of the sentence, "vrey kunkukiing inded," is supposed to read as "very unlucky indeed." And yet, there was something else at work here--a cerebral sublayer. If you read Berkley's book, you'll find that Redford almost certainly knew what he was doing. And that's why this book is an important find.

Chuck Landauze is a reporter for the Daily Magnet, in a city just referred to as "The City." He is in love with his boss's secretary Amanda and good friends with Potato the Janitor. The editor of the Magnet, Edward T. Shturngart, receives a scoop that a scientist named Dr. Ghibourkei (!) is conducting newsworthy experiments on Death Island. The team's journey to Death Island is cut short by several tangents, including Shturngart's heart attack and the revelation that Potato has leprosy. Slowly it is revealed that the love our hero chuck has for Amanda is obsessive and violent, though he never harms her in the course of the book. Dr. Ghibourkei is an amicable man at first, revealing that his invention is a healing ray that can cure all injuries and diseases (!!). But the reporters (and secretary, and janitor) quickly learn that the ray actually turns people into zombies, and that Ghibourkei has a zombie horde all ready to go. The story from here is a struggle to survive in the face of zombies, infighting, and the ghosts of all the U.S. Presidents.

...(!!!)

And now that I have dealt with the plot, I have to return again to the style. I have done my best to apply rationality to the synopsis, but there are several threads I have to leave out in order to make this book look even somewhat respectable. Plus, I don't want to spoil too much of the events of it. The same style that causes Redford to cover page after page with nothing but the letter R, or with increasingly disturbed descriptions of potato sacks, is invariably tied to the plot and how it is structured. That is to say that the book is designed to be offensively opposite to what a reader expects from a book, in terms of regard for literary tropes in the plot and stylistic norms in the text itself. It is, I think, an attempt to make a tropeless work, by smudging and broad-stroking the tropes we know until they are absolutely meaningless. But maybe I'm reaching.

Like I said, I do think Redford was trying for something here. Consider the following:

He was sad. She was sad. It was sad.

He was crying. She was crying. It was crying.

Kind of an analysis of English grammar if you think about it. We can use a general, neutral pronoun to refer to implicit circumstances ("it" meaning the sad situation in this case) which can't be used in parallel structures (the situation cannot cry). This sort of broken parallel structure is right at home in a book that also contains bits like "HELP HIM HE IS CHOCKING!!!!!!!!" Refuge in Audacity may be relevant here--Redford attacks tropes and grammar by completely wrecking all of them.

Or maybe I'm just a pedantic asshole.

Pretentiousness aside, it is hard not to enjoy a book where a zombie has had his arms--arms, not hands--replaced with Desert Eagles.

That's magic, I think--or, I guess. I wish I could have bumped into Redford on the street. If someone's been a featured writer on this site, it's likely I'd want to meet them face-to-face.

But to have met them through their work: that's just as good, if not better.

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Image Source: Lulu

Torture Dungeon (1970), by Andy Milligan

Back to basics.

Torture Dungeon is, like many of Andy Milligan's movies, best described as a "stew of images." I have now seen a good handful of his horror films (The Ghastly Ones, Seeds of Sin, Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Man With Two Heads, Blood, and possibly Guru the Mad Monk), and can confirm that there are patterns and shared themes between them. Ennui, depression, desperation, rage--incest--hatred of the mentally or physically deformed. The susceptibility of the average person to mental illness. And, of course, England-set period pieces heavily inspired by the Gothic tradition. Better scribes than I have written of Andy Milligan's personal history, and so I will briefly say that he grew up a product of abuse and hatred. Jimmy McDonough's The Ghastly One tells the full tale. Each of Milligan's films contains a bizarre melodrama that shows people at the end of several ropes, so hateful that any of them could be responsible for the gory fates of their fellows. Oftentimes a bunch of characters, usually an inbred, degenerate rich family far enough back in the English past so as to have Long Island accents, locked in a house with a murderer. Sure enough, Torture Dungeon grows along similar lines, but it is probably the sleaziest iteration of the formula I've seen yet. Milligan jumps into some deep shit here, and it's a tough sit. There's no reason for me to choose it as the first Milligan flick for the site, but it's what I've done anyway. Down, down, we must go...

In medieval England a bunch of gaudy-dressed inbred aristocrats plot to seize control of the poor kingdom. Their plan involves gutting people with pitchforks and marrying a girl to the mentally handicapped member of the family. There is a long, long "seduction" sequence whereby this girl is meant to conceive the heir of said member, and while it's ableist as fuck, it still sets off more than a few fine points of my rape trigger. This leads quickly into a long scene where two characters recant their backstories to each other, which both involve rape and eating garbage. Jesus. Despite Milligan's own homosexuality, the movies indulge in a fair share of homophobia, though it does contain the ever-infamous howler: "I'm not homosexual, I'm not bisexual, I'm not asexual. I'm trisexual. Yes...I will TRY anything for pleasure!" Anyway, you'll lose track of the characters pretty hurriedly, and there's a "you're secretly a princess" twist that's lamer than the lousiest of penny dreadfuls. Mercifully, your attention will have been held this whole way, just to see how much sleazier it can get.

If you were to trim out scenes that were clearly Andy Milligan indulging himself and his personal troubles, this movie would only be as long as Guru the Mad Monk, which clocks in at 55 minutes on my copy. But despite slight bloating, there's enough gruesomeness to satisfy anyone, and perhaps even overwhelm 'em a little. The Ghastly Ones and Seeds of Sin suddenly seem mild, and indeed, it seems as if age slowly Andy down a bit, as Bloodthirsty Butchers and Blood weren't nearly this...unfettered. Simply put, Torture Dungeon is a passionate movie. It has camp elements due to people insisting on overacting the fuck out of literally everything but camp in a Gothic setting can be kind of grotesque sometimes. Especially since it's clear that the Gothic lit Milligan was aiming for was less The Mysteries of Udolpho and more The Monk. The Monk is a novel from the early 19th Century written by a teenager that contains incest rape on top of a pile of corpses. Jesus.

Andy Milligan had, as they say, no chill. None at all. His actors and scripts and settings always spit pure bile, pure revulsion, at each other, and at life itself. It's difficult to talk about him in calm and level-headed terms, not helped by the fact that I admire his work as much as is okay to. Milligan was probably one of the people I channeled when I wrote Tail of the Lizard King, which you would probably like if you enjoyed The Ghastly Ones or any of Milligan's other comparatively tame films. (Hey, Ben Arzate of Cultured Vultures called Tail a "goofy and fun read", so it can't be that bad, right?)

Don't go into Torture Dungeon expecting either comfort or a torture dungeon--though there is a lengthy scene where one of the ladies who appears in all of Milligan's movies runs through a cave full of bloody men in chains shrieking about "revenge!" Does that count? As before, there's no rhyme or reason to a lot of this--it's just images and rage-venting for the grand Mr. Milligan. There is some comedy in store if you've seen enough mid-century exploitation movies, as once again, the stock music that's on every Something Weird release ever reappears. And hey, have you seen Lost Skeleton of Cadavra? The music from that is in this, too. Usually, whenever I hear these music cues in a movie, I get happy, because they usually appear in movies I love. Torture Dungeon is tough to love, but it's won my heart all the same. It's a good square-one restarter for the trash lover, fast-forward-needed scenes and all.

Troll 2 (1990), by Claudio Fragasso

It's good that we finally get to see a larger scope of the world set up in the first movie of the Troll series. While Troll hardly left the small San Francisco apartment building that Harry Potter and family lived in, save to explore the home dimension of the titular Troll, Torok, we now get to see what the other members of Torok's race are doing, out in Utah. It seems that Torok was hardly the only evil Troll--the Trolls of Troll 2 are nothing if not even more evil than Torok, subjecting their victims to forcible transformation by way of their stomachs. Sure, Torok turned people into plants against their will, but at least he just had the plants take over their apartment and turn them that way. These Trolls make you eat their gross food, and then you undergo transformation--apparently a rather painful process. Trust me, I have a digestive disorder, and there's nothing worse than intestinal torment. Torok is now seemingly the least evil of these Trolls. I would be concerned about this series gaining spectacle creep in the evil of its villains, but the third and fourth entries in the series were breather episodes. Joe D'Amato, who produced Troll 2, took his first crack at making a Troll 3 with Quest for the Mighty Sword, which focused largely on his recurring character of Prince Ator, dwelling only briefly on Trolls like Grindel, who were presumably the ancestors of the Trolls from the last two films. Troll 3 aka The Crawlers was even softer on continuity, just showing a bunch of killer trees that were probably animated by the plant-magic of Torok and the Nilbog Trolls from this film. Sure, they talk about "radiation" in The Crawlers, but they wouldn't market it as Troll 3 if the story from the first two films didn't have some influence on it.

There are no other jokes that one can make about Troll 2.

Bad movies have had a curious history. You look at them at the very dawn of cinema and you find that "poorly made" was often considered synonymous with "offensive." Not offensive in the sense of having one's intellect offended, by a lack of effort or whatever, but offensive in the way that movies like The Birth of a Nation offend us today. (The 1915 Birth of a Nation, fucking duh.) One of the first famous "worst movies ever" was No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which, surprisingly, is more boring than anything else. Yes, there is an implied rape scene, which would be pretty intense for 1948. Yes, the American accents in the mouths of British actors are awful. But people hated this largely-tedious film just because it was poorly made. As time went on, people began to grow softer on these movies, only taking their awfulness seriously if they did something actually offensive on top of being a pile of shit (like Myra Breckinridge making fun of rape). I would argue that sometimes this offensiveness comes be derived from resource abuse, like any number of movies that have devoured many millions of dollars and still turned out awful (like Pluto Nash). The '50s and especially the '60s mark when we began to cuddle up to films made by the likes of William Castle and Roger Corman that were fun even if they weren't expressions of the arts, maybe because it was okay for the medium to open a little bit--the studio environment had changed, in any case. Postmodernism also started building around that time, and that's clearly informed the modern sensibility of enjoying these films ironically. Postmodernism's virtue of self-awareness allowed us to begin constructing a bad movie "canon" of sorts, which is basically this Wikipedia page. These are the Bad Movies, separate usually from the Trash Movies, which are typically lower-key affairs.

The Bad Movies are usually hard to talk about because everyone has already said everything about them. I can't even write a bogus intro like the one I started this review with, because inevitably someone will twist that around to assume the joke was that I was "trolling" you. The joke of that intro, in any case, is predicated on knowing that the Troll movies have nothing to do with one another. And now I've allowed myself to be trapped in the old "explaining the joke" bit, as a consequence. It's Troll 2: group of white people, the Waits family, go on a house swap with a family in the rural town of Nilbog. Young Joshua Waits has visions of his dead Grandpa Seth, who warns him that Nilbog is the Kingdom of the Goblins, an evil race of beings who trick people into consuming food that turns them into plants, which the goblins then eat, since they are vegetarian as well as man-eaters. Grandpa Seth is absolutely correct about this backwater berg--the weird, creepy inhabitants of Nilbog, with their weird, creepy birthmarks and weird, creepy vegetarianism, swiftly act weird and creepy to the Waits clan, as well as a group of young men who have also traveled to Nilbog because one of them, Elliot, is dating Waits daughter Holly. The goblins are led by Credence Leonore Gielgud, the queen of overacting, whose first scene has that "Oh my Gooooood" thing that the Internet is obsessed with. In the end, it takes the power of family, and meat, to defeat the goblins...or is it?!?

It has been quite a few years since I've heard tell of any sort of follow-up to this movie. That's probably for the best. Within the events of that relatively short synopsis, we have the oddities and madness that have now become famous: the "oh my Goooood" scene. The corn-cob scene. The scene where Joshua pisses on his family's food, and, presumably, his family. The dialogue, every word of it, and how it is delivered, up to and including, "You can't piss on hospitality." Troll 2 is one of those movies that I have watched or been forced to watch innumerable times--it's almost certainly in my Top Five Most Watched. I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate about thirty times, Don't Go in the Woods around twenty-five, and Troll 2 in the same ballpark. None of those movies are ones I ever get sick of. My forced repeat viewings of Sharknado and Birdemic don't share that fondness. There's a certain spark of something that motivates those other three movies more than those two outliers. I assume that this spark is called "effort."

What matters about the number of times that I've seen Troll 2 is that I still notice new stuff about it all the time. And what's more, I've rewatched it after finally seeing the limits of Claudio Fragasso's astonishing scripting, a la Women's Prison Massacre, SS Girls, Hell of the Living Dead, and Zombi 3. In my most recent viewing, where I got to have the best Troll 2 experience of all--showing it to someone who's never heard of it before--I noticed that Dad Waits dismisses Elliot's relationship with his daughter on the grounds that Elliot is a "good-fer-nuthing." Much later in the film, Grandpa Seth condemns Dad Waits, because even in death he's still angry a "good-fer-nuthing" married his daughter. That adds a little extra depth to the dynamic of the family, because it suggests that Elliot and Holly may have a future together against the odds, just like Holly's parents. The young couple are a little charming as characters, although they're also poorly-acted. But lines like the ones they share with each other, shows that even sans Bruno Mattei, Fragasso has still got it. "If my dad knew you were here, he'd cut off your LIIITLE nuts and eat them!" That's gold, right there.

Troll 2, like The Room, is the Valley of the Dolls of our generation. Having now also seen Valley of the Dolls, I can sense that familiar vibe. I dunno--there really is just something in all of us that likes watching an art medium get mutilated. Sometimes in the most boring way possible. Zing! Take that, Valley of the Dolls, and also you, Birdemic. Troll 2 is comfortable and cozy, and what's more, it feels like a single unified thing. You can drink in all the details and have an excellent time in the process without having to wait for this scene or that scene or hoping that someone grabs a coat-hanger again. (That's a Birdemic reference, not a Valley of the Dolls one, ass.) It's a bright, colorful film, and it's well-directed. There are some impressive or at least amusing effects, and the scenes are imaginative. Hell, the premise is wonderfully imaginative. Directors: use your wives' ideas. Especially if she hates vegetarians.

I don't even know how to end this review. If you've never seen Troll 2, see it, in the same way that you would see The Shining or Suspiria or whatever for the first time. Kiss up on it a little, and vice versa.