Book Club of Desolation #23: Powers of Darkness (1900-1901), by Valdimar Asmundsson and Bram Stoker (?)

In 2014, Icelandic scholar Hans Corneel de Roos was looking over a manuscript from the turn of the 20th Century that at first seemed to merely be an Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, penned by writer Valdimar Asmundsson. However, he started to notice that the manuscript, entitled Makt Myrkranna or Powers of Darkness, made some substantial deviations from Stoker's original text, and it didn't take long to realize that the book was something new entirely, although it was based on Dracula. The resultant text was made available in English with notes by both de Roos and Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker. Makt Myrkranna is simultaneously an awesome part of horror fiction history, a superior novel to Stoker's tale, and a suggestion of a possibility I've thought about for a long time: what if there are more books like this one, which serve as alternate versions of more famous works?

The story of Powers of Darkness roughly follows that of Dracula, but it bears repeating for the sake of this review. Jonathan--or excuse me, Thomas Harker is an English real estate agent called out to Transylvania by a mysterious noble named Count Dracula, who is interested in buying property in London. Harker is warned by everyone he encounters along the way that Dracula is pure evil, but he must carry on with his job. You see, Harker is kind of an idiot--even moreso than in Stoker's novel. Dracula is an amiable enough fellow but his castle looks like no one's lived in it properly for centuries. He also gets a hungry look in his eye when he sees Harker cut himself. Pretty standard Stoker stuff so far, but Stoker never mentioned Dracula's triumphant pride in the incestuous of his family, which produces short-lived, stumpy freaks. Nor did he mention Dracula's underground chamber where he and his gorilla-man army sacrifice villagers to Satan. Nor did he mention that Dracula and said gorilla-man army are in league with a conspiracy of noblemen who want to destroy the democratic processes of England to create a world where the serfs serve the nobles again! (I guess Dracula never heard of Wall Street, then.) Will Harker be able to escape Dracula's horrifying fortress to warn his beloved Wilma, or will he be food for Dracula's vampire brides?

"But wait!" you ask. "What about Holmwood and Quincy Morris and Lucy and van Helsing? What about, y'know, the other three-quarters of the novel?" Well, that's the thing about Powers of Darkness: most of the book is Harker trying to survive his weeks in Dracula's castle. There is a second part which features most of the same events as Dracula--the arrival of van Helsing, the vampirism and staking of Lucy/Lucia, the menace hanging over Mina/Wilma, and finally the battle against Dracula and his servants in the shadow of the vampire's castle. Where the end changes is that Dracula's castle crumbles upon his death, and then the nobles who allied themselves with him commit suicide or are murdered, ending his conspiracy. As the introduction and notes posit, this part was likely meant as an outline for what Asmundsson would write later, suggesting that Powers of Darkness in its complete form (assuming that we have today isn't the complete form) would have dwarfed Dracula in length and complexity. As it stands already, Asmundsson's text succeeds at being far scarier than Dracula, perhaps because of its choice to frontload.

Asmundsson understood the Harker parts had the best potential for horror. Dracula's wild, rambling structure gives it the feeling more of an adventure novel than a Gothic piece, which is awkward because it's told, as Powers of Darkness is, through letters and diary entries. It's weird to hear the tale of a frantic carriage chase recounted post-facto in a journal. But the bulk of Powers of Darkness reads like something someone found in Dracula's castle next to Thomas Harker's emaciated corpse--you never know which entry is going to be the last. This is broken only somewhat by the fact that, again, Harker is a massive idiot, as he pointedly does not try to leave the castle until it's nearly too late, even after witnessing Satanic rituals in progress! He is remarkably tolerant of many horrifying supernatural incidents. Sometimes, though, justifying logic breaks through. After all, it's probably more than Harker feels he can't leave the castle, as it's on a high rocky pass in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wolves and God knows what else. There's also the fact that he came here to do a job, and at least at the beginning, much of his response to the ghoulish things he encountered is a very natural sort of confusion--perhaps he's imagining things, or maybe this is some local custom he as a privileged Londoner doesn't understand. Even if he trusts his instincts when he is sure the supernatural is afoot, he can't exactly return to his boss in England emptyhanded and tell him, "Sorry, the client was a Satanic vampire with a gorilla-man army which he was gonna use to tear down the government, no sale."

Now, this book would not be complete without the introduction and notes it provides. Dacre Stoker's introduction was interesting in its argument that Makt Myrkranna was based on Bram Stoker's private notes, and that Stoker and Asmundsson collaborated in the latter's penning of Powers. He brings up the fact that it was popular for Victorian authors to travel to Iceland, as they admired Iceland's astonishing poetic tradition; he also points out that several details from Powers match with unused story bits from Stoker's notes, such as the "hidden red room" where Dracula performs his evil magic, and the blind-mute woman who serves the vampire. However, I would caution against assuming that works such as these are made with the collaboration of the original author, because certain tropes are universal, and there are such things as coincidences. Respect the fanfic, I guess is what I'm saying. On my first read-through of the introduction I was disappointed that Dacre Stoker generally abstained from praising Asmundsson's individual creativity in the parts of Powers that weren't seemingly based on his great-granduncle's work, but a closer look-through on my part shows the integrity of his investigation. Similarly, I found de Roos' footnotes to be cluttery and intrusive at times, but they form a log of the challenges he ran into in translating early 20th Century Icelandic into English. When I studied linguistics I found the bond between Icelandic and English one of the most fascinating my professors discussed: modern Icelandic and Old English are extremely similar. In fact one of my professors told me that if an Anglo-Saxon time-traveler from pre-Norman England landed in today's Iceland they'd probably be able to have a reasonable conversation with someone there.

Overall, this new edition of Makt Myrkranna is an awesome look at vampire fiction history, and one of what I hope will be many discoveries of other pseudo-classics cloned from books that history remembered better. And, similarly, it's better than the original Dracula. Horror fans can't afford to miss out.

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Book Club of Desolation #21: Spiridon (1907), by Andre Laurie

And so it is that Bookvember 2017 comes to a close with another book about unusual ants. The Ant with the Human Soul was one of three ant-related texts which I knew would turn up on the site sooner or later; Spiridon is the second of them, and I'm sure that at some point in 2018 I'll be cracking open The Ants of Timothy Thummel as well. This will be part of my new initiative, which is to feature Book Clubs of Desolation every third week of the month. In the meantime, Spiridon is a fun way to close out the year--a strange ethical fable by a man famed for collaborating with Jules Verne.

Spiridon tells the story of Dr. Aristide Cordat, a young French med student who, with the aid of his Asian friend Baron Tasimoura, has brought new medical miracles to Europe. Surgeries that heal terrible illnesses in minutes, drugs that induce swift recovery--there seems to be no limit to the talent of the Cordat-Tasimoura team. We find out why Tasimoura seems to possess superhuman knowledge: he is superhuman. Specifically, he is actually Spiridon, the Emperor of a race of ants living in the ruins of an old Phoenician treasure-tower on an Italian island. After nearly ending up as one of Spiridon's vivisection victims while exploring the tower, Cordat discovered the various wonders of the ants and realized how valuable the giant ant's scientific knowledge could be. Finding that the curiosity was mutual, he helped Spiridon disguise himself as a human so he could become a student of human ways. Unfortunately, human and ant morality differs substantially, and it isn't long before Cordat and the rest of France realize that ants have no compunctions about murder.

Like the best sci-fi, Spiridon is surprisingly ahead of its time in a lot of ways. There are a lot of interesting ideas here that expose how people in the early part of the century were adapting to the still-fluid genre; for example, Spiridon's human-like size and intelligence are not customary to his species, but are instead chemically induced when the Ant Emperor ascends to the throne. The rest of the ants on his island are normal-sized, though they seem to have above-average intelligence, as they are capable of vivisecting Cordat intelligently (as intelligent as vivisection can get anyhow). There's something about the setup that recalls Plato's philosopher-king--the Ant Emperor is given his enhanced abilities so that he is better equipped to govern. It's a system of elitism but it also ensures that the governing elite is best equipped for leadership; Cordat's response to Spiridon's explanation is a wish that intelligence-enhancing drugs were given to human leaders as well, which is hard not to sympathize with.

The way in which the ants' ethics manifest, too, defies a lot of the expectations I had for a work of this time. This book is gory as hell! In fact, this may be one of the most violent books I've read in a long time. I knew I was hooked the instant Cordat woke up in the ant tower next to a goddamn eviscerated corpse--the eviscerated corpse of the brother of one of the main characters, at that! When Spiridon is kidnapped by Joel le Berquin, one of Cordat's friends who becomes jealous of him and wants his secret to success, his threats to vivisect the ant are turned on him when Spiridon escapes; Spiridon straps le Berquin to his own operating table and cuts out his organs. All of this is because Spiridon, while possessed of emotions, is ruled primarily by cold insect logic--he was threatened, so of course it makes sense to turn that same threat around on the threatener...and learn more about human anatomy, to boot! Spiridon manages to come across as a being ruled by an alien sense of ethics without being a Vulcan, which is better than a lot of Laurie's successor would do when writing characters controlled by logic rather than feeling. And indeed, logic was applied to the creation of the character, as Laurie demonstrates a knowledge of ants that helps him guide the plot. Specifically, he knows about the various chemicals used by ants to control their social order and extrapolates that into Spiridon's wonder drugs and paralyzing venom. It just makes sense for ants to be master chemists, because from a certain perspective they already are.

Now, this book does have some noticeable shortcomings. I am concerned sometimes that I talk about bigotry so often that my words have become meaningless after a time, but I honestly don't care, so let's talk about how this is another book where ant class divisions = race. There is a...sigh...charming passage where Laurie mentions that, just as there are divisions in ethics and logic between man and ant, there are also "real gaps of conscience between men of different races." Now, it's certainly undeniable that people of different races are going to be culturally different, but to call it "gaps of conscience" implies that some have better consciences than others, and that, just as the differences between Spiridon and his human compatriots are largely irreconcilable, so too are the differences between races. It read too much like the arguments white supremacists make all too often about "incompatible" cultures, wherein they automatically dismiss the idea that "gaps" between cultures can be accommodated without destroying, assimilating, or prioritizing one culture over another. And I know that's because this is a book from 1907, but the white supremacists of today are using the same lazy excuses people were back then.

The book struggles tonally, oftentimes unsure of whether this is all supposed to be fun and whimsical or dark and bleak. Characters will sometimes speak like they're in a comedy and act extremely aloof about the situation, but there are several instances of people being butchered alive, with their remains left to be found by their friends, family, and coworkers. There is also the character of Pia, whose brother Cordat finds at the beginning of the book, and who swears a vendetta against Spiridon as such. She loses her life trapping Spiridon in a burning building and her death is treated as a tragedy, but the book--spoiler alert--ends with Cordat using the ants' chemical secrets to bring Spiridon back from the dead. He completely invalidates the lives of an entire family who died horribly thanks to a creature who has killed and could kill again not only with a lack of compunction, but with a biological inability to generate compunction in the first place! Keep in mind--Pia and Cordat have romantic chemistry together! The ending admittedly reveals that Spiridon is effectively lobotomized as a result of his death and resurrection; still cognizant and intelligent for an ant, but with a broken will, and therefore unlikely to go around cutting people up again. But it's really unclear who's supposed to be the victor here. At this point our sympathy for Cordat has vanished, yet he dances away into the sunset clicking his heels over all the scientific secrets he's unlocked.

I mentioned at the beginning that Andre Laurie (born Paschal Grousset) was a collaborator of Jules Verne's. When researching Laurie I was surprised to find out that one of the Jules Verne books from my childhood, The Begum's Millions, was written almost wholesale by Laurie! In fact, it's entirely possible that The Begum's Millions' relationship to Jules Verne was simply that the more famous author's name was stamped on the front cover by the authors' mutual editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, while Laurie was in political exile. Spiridon is often described as the work wherein Laurie broke away from Jules Verne's mold, and I take that to mean that maybe this book was something of a rebellion against Verne's scientific optimism. Neither Cordat nor Spiridon give science a good name, and I feel that almost has to be intentional. Maybe Cordat is supposed to be a colossal asshole, consumed, just as Spiridon is, with his own curiosity, rather than the human consequence that can arise from experimentation. It wouldn't be an unusual statement for a book at the time to make.

Then there's the detail that Spiridon spends most of the book in a wax mask and fake gloves. I know it's fiction, but unless Cordat's colleagues were 90% blind I can't imagine them mistaking wax prosthetics in 1907 for real human flesh. These people are goddamn doctors! They should know what a person looks like!

Problems aside, however, Spiridon is by-and-large an entertaining work, managing to avoid being boring despite some rather substantial deviations from the main plot thread at times. It is snappily written for a book from the dawn of the 20th Century, and Michael Shreve's translation-adaptation with Black Coat Press has a good flow to it. In fact, there's more drive to this than the usual Jules Verne novel. I just hope Timothy Thummel doesn't try to say that the ants represent race again.

Speaking of Black Coat Press, December sees the release of my short story "The Curse of Orlac" in Tales of the Shadowmen Vol. 14: Coup de Grace, which stars and references a number of fictional characters who have been mentioned before on this site. For next year's volume I have a story planned which involves Spiridon in some capacity.

In any case: this is kinda it for 2017, then. Man, what a shitty fucking year. But at least the movies were good, and the books were mostly good, right? I hope I've helped make your life a little more bearable in these trying times. I've been watching movies this whole time to get prepped for 2018, and I'll tell you now: it's gonna to be a fucking party. But I don't want to get too ahead of myself yet. We've still got a Top Ten Movie List to do, plus we have to crown Book of the Year!

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The Butcher (1990), by Maik Ude

It was uncannily difficult to find a '90s movie for Spookyween, as I've already exhausted almost every site-appropriate horror movie from the '90s that I like. I feel that says something about the '90s. At this stage in my life I'm generally disdainful of every decade of the 20th Century but strangely it is the decade of my birth that I have the least pity for. There's no such thing as a universal statement (save for perhaps "water is wet," "Nazis are bastards," etc.), but in the '90s, comics were bad, movies were bad, music was bad, TV had some decent things going for it but also Full House existed so it too was bad. I just don't like the '90s.

The first thing is that the '90s had a...weird sense of masculinity. Don't get me wrong--the older I get, the more I realize how truly weird mainstream expressions of masculinity have been in all stages of history. But when I think the '90s, I see covers for Rob Liefeld comics and Manowar albums. I see tons of big men with big guns on army recruitment posters. I see cartoon characters kicking the crap out of anthropomorphic cartoon drug dealers. And, I think of slasher movies that exist primarily to show what the inside of a human body looks like. Now, the thing is, gore movies have existed since the early '60s--Blood Feast and The Flesh Eaters are testaments to that. But by the '90s, there were even fewer censors than ever before, even if everyone was freaking out about Satanic child abuse in kindergartens for some reason. Things got daaark, man. And that is what brings us to The Butcher. Made by the young, The Butcher is an indulgence in the same ultra-masculine obsession with slasher movie violence that motivated Maik Ude's fellow German Andreas Schnaas. Yet, this is the sort of movie Schnaas thinks he's making--and unlike Schnaas's masturbatory exercises, The Butcher manages to give us people to root for amidst all the gut-spilling.

In a pre-credits sequence, we see a man has been kidnapped and brought to a dark basement. He is awoken by a stream of piss in his face. He has been captured by the Butcher, a greasy-looking asshole dressed in leather gloves and a genuinely unsettling pillow-case mask (think Bruce without his swimming goggles). The Butcher saws his head off and remove his guts. Later, two dudes decide to go on a fishing trip and stumble across the head of what we can presume to be the victim of the opening scene. When trying to escape they are taken in by an old woman who is revealed to--I think--be the mother of the Butcher. Thus begins many days of horror for the two men as they are subjected to the Butcher's madness.

In case you can't tell, there's virtually nothing to this plot-wise--and not just because I don't speak German and this movie lacks subtitles. Despite this, by giving us two protagonists with a hobby, and taking time to detail that hobby (even if it's dull), it gives us a reason to want to follow them and the plot that moves around them. Is--is this what I've been reduced to? Celebrating the fact that a movie's characters fish? Ah well. They have fun and for some reason I like seeing them have fun. Probably 'cause I've seen this before, and because it's called The Butcher. These characters are going to end up getting seriously mutilated, so let them have their fun while it lasts. I realize it's strange to single this movie out above all others for a remark like that, but maybe there is actual credence to the idea that a slasher movie becomes more compelling when the victims are likable...

The movie did dedicate more time to plot than I remember, but make no mistake: this movie's primary concern was grotesquery. Much like West of Zanzibar, there's a heavy focus on visuals that are just meant to squick us out. It's par for the course stuff, but you better believe my 16-year-old self would've loved to put decapitations and rotting corpses as gross as the ones these kids pulled off in the movies I was making way back when. Budget is optimized, even if it shows--and the script, from what I can understand of it, is pretty tight as well. They even give us a sad old grandmother for one of the protagonists to make us feel super bad about what happen to him. Even if he does look like German Adam Sandler.

Let's talk about the Butcher himself. A simple design can go a long way: I mentioned the freaky pillow case mask (which you can always see his glinting gross rat teeth through), and the leather gloves, but there's something about a bloodsoaked leather apron that freak me out. No gimmicks here, but you know for sure that if the Butcher catches you, you are fucked. Oh, and just to be safe, he's also a cannibal. I'll take brutal efficiency when it's as appealing as this.

Even through the grossness, though, and the surprising professionalism, there are some little trashy leaks which made me smile extra hard. The opening credits are weirdly similar to those from I Am Here...Now. People refuse to mourn or even scream when their friends are violently tortured and killed in front of them. And, due to the aforementioned subtitle-less German audio, my limited German interacts with the movie in amazing ways, like when I get to pick out lines like, "Oh, scheisse! Das ist ein kidnappinghaus!"

The Butcher is probably, along with West of Zanzibar, the Spookyween movie I recommend the least. It's particularly hard to find, and aside from some chilling effects and a touch of real talent, it's not too dissimilar from other slasher movies made by teens. Still, I enjoy it quite a bit whenever I throw it on, and it would make a great double feature with Plaga Zombie--which would have been our '90s Spookyween entry if someone hadn't jumped the gun...

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The Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980), by Nathan Schiff

It did not take long for Nathan Schiff to put aside his latex weasels and give into bitterness. A lot of us are bitter when we're young--but not all of us when we're as young as Schiff, who was in high school when he started his film career. I imagine Schiff was a young outcast, a nerd of sorts, who had a lot of promises broken when he was growing up. I admire his tenacity, in case you couldn't tell--he set his nihilistic neuroses to Super 8. In doing so, he created movies which even I can't watch, movies squickier and darker than the worst of the Amazon cannibal movies. His third outing, They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore, is nigh-unwatchable, but I still want to tackle Vermillion Eyes someday. At risk of repeating myself, and overly praising, let's keep Spookyween going with something genuinely horrifying.

A young girl pulls over near the woods to go read. Her studying is interrupted by a man wearing a pillowcase and swimming goggles over his head. He grinds up her head with a lawnmower and stuffs her gory remains into a garbage bag. This man's name is Bruce, and with a metalhead-looking dude named Zed he kills people to bring bags of gore to Jack, a local lunatic. Inspector James Cameron--probably the same Inspector Cameron from Weasels Rip My Flesh--begins to stumble on their operation after he finds a half-rotten girl lazily buried on the beach...and Jack, eager to pay him off to forget all about it. He begins his own investigation, turning vigilante when he can't stand to be mocked on the police force anymore. Slowly, we learn that Jack brings what he pays for to his father, a cannibalistic leper who resembles a humanoid pickle. Formerly, this man was a member of a hidden Long Island colony of cannibalistic lepers (yes, really), but as they all went insane from their illness, he deprived his fellow lepers of food until he was the last one left. Of course, the fact that he also sired a dynasty of rape-children may account for his extra food needs as well. In any case, Jack is unable to escape the dominance of his father, and keeps on killing until a whole batch of revelations about Cameron, Bruce, and Jack spill forth, carried on a tide of gore.

In case you can't guess, The Long Island Cannibal Massacre crosses a lot of lines, sometimes a few too many times. On top of face-palements, lawnmowers to the head, and worms wriggling in rotten eye-sockets, there's also leper-rape, implied necrophilia, split personalities, and disturbing hallucinations. I wouldn't call those hallucinations disturbing if I didn't mean it. Oh, yes, it's been a great year for legitimately disturbing horror. Euridice BA 2037 and Disconnected (and real life) saw to that. But Long Island Cannibal Massacre was there long before any of 'em, getting worse and worse the deeper I got into it and the more times I watched it. You keep picking up more and more awful things, and let me tell you, there's nothing more awkward than a large party screening of the film to notice the line about how a female corpse will "still be hot for at least an hour." I tend to depress most parties I go to.

This movie is depressing--not as bad, I realize, as Schiff's #3 and #4. Sometimes the depression rings false; for example, Cameron's first line in the movie is, "I was just think about how twisted this world really is." This is pretty dumb, and what you'd expect from an ~18-year-old who wants to make a depressing movie. But then, Cameron's girlfriend says, "Everyone feels that way sometimes," and Cameron replies, "Yeah, but we still have to live with it." This reflects a theme which Schiff touches on later in the movie, and in his other works: sometimes, the things that make us happy are just distractions from the things that make us want to die. Frequently, Schiff uses this perspective as a platform to lambast optimists and other "unrealistic" thinkers. There's no reason for this decision on his behalf because there's no reason in anything. And hey, I've grappled with mental illness long enough to know that sometimes hopelessness does seem justifiable. That he frames this perspective in a movie featuring extreme violence makes it all very messy.

It's not the sort of mess that everyone will like, but as you've probably observed, especially this year--I like movies that drag me down sometimes. I was considering doing Last House on Dead End Street for one of the '70s movies for Spookyween, but then I remembered I was doing this and realized I shouldn't be cruel. Either to you guys or myself. We'll save Last House for another cold, rainy day. It is interesting to rewatch that earlier film, however, and then watch this. In sleaziness and gruesomeness they're neck-and-neck. Movies like Bloodsucking Freaks and Don't Look in the Basement have been condemned by prudes and censors infamously for their content, but it's lesser-known flicks like Cannibal Massacre that make me shudder.

That first line of Cameron's, by the way, gains something as this whole plot unfolds. I've never been to Long Island, but it's unbelievable to me that its wilds could not only hide several dozen sadistic murders involving lots of loud screaming, but no less than five flesh-eating lepers as well. Similarly, I can't comprehend why it's never occurred to Jack--even considering the horrible childhood he must have had--to bring his father and his friends to a fucking hospital! They could have done something for these men, even in the early 1980s, that didn't involve them living out in the barren cold eating raw corpses.

One last thing: it's interesting to that this movie came out in the same year as The Empire Strikes Back, and it features a final duel between father and son that is surprisingly similar to that from Star Wars. There's a scene where Jack gets his dad in the shoulder with a chainsaw that sparked off my memory of a moment in the lightsaber duel where Luke swats Darth Vader on the shoulder. It's probably just a coincidence but I didn't want to let it go unnoticed. This is real film history, people!

Actually, that fight is pretty great, because it shows that leprosy makes you unkillable. Seriously, bullets will not stop you. But perhaps Jack Sr. is normal for his universe, as Inspector Cameron survives acid to the face, losing an eye, and numerous bullet and stab wounds. This dude gets up after being shot in the head. But then, Trotsky managed to keep fighting someone after taking an ice axe to the skull, and there's the whole urban legend about the death of Rasputin.

In the '80s horror at last stood naked and unbound. The '70s sanded away whatever remained of the regulations that trapped movies in the cheesiness of Valley of the Zombies and its ilk, and after this there was nothing that couldn't be shown. Still, with one exception, we won't be returning to the Grunge Train again this Spookyween. Instead, an old friend from a different time will be visiting us before our departure from the '80s...

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I Drink Your Blood (1970), by David Durston

Doing a more intensive Spookyween this year has allowed me to obtain a particularly gleeful sense of history when it comes to tone in movies. The '20s produced films of shocking brutality, and the '30s continued that tradition, albeit in a milder sense. By the '40s, the horror genre had been thoroughly gelded, and the '50s produced virtually no horror films at all. I can't succinctly explain what was happening in the '60s, but the '70s saw the cultural upheaval of the hippie movement give agonized birth to the fervent pessimism of the punk era. Didn't take long for a horror movie to pick up an X rating for violence, did it?

I Drink Your Blood tells the tale of Horace Bones and his Family of Sados, who are not at all based on the Manson Family, no sir. They hold a Satanic ritual which is spied on by a local girl from the nearby small town of Valley Hills. This girl, Sylvia, is dating Andy, a member of the Sados, but this status does not spare her from the rape she suffers as punishment when she's caught. When Sylvia's grandpa Doc goes to settle affairs with the Family, he's beaten up and dosed with psychedelics, which causes him to have hallucinations of zombies or skeletons or something. Finally it is Sylvia's ten-year-old brother Pete who takes revenge. Their family runs a bakery, with the aid of Mildred Nash, girlfriend of the foreman of a local construction site--the same construction site, incidentally, which has led to most of Valley Hills becoming abandoned. While the hippies are having a rat barbecue at one of the abandoned buildings scattered throughout the area, Pete finds and kills a rabid dog, and injects its blood into the meat pies his bakery ends up serving to the hippies. Uh-oh. Soon all of the Sados are rabid, and once the promiscuous girl in their group gets to the construction crew, the bakery fam are the only folks in the area who aren't infected. Not everyone's going to get out of this one in one piece.

I'm not drawn into this movie simply because it's the natural double feature with I Eat Your Skin. It is a good movie of its own merits, even if I've recently discovered some differences between the "full" version of the movie and the version I've been watching these last ten years. The 75-minute version I was accustomed to is pretty gristly to begin with, featuring hands lopped off, pregnant hari-kiri, and a ton of real animal violence. The full 88-minute cut that I watched for this review contained not only an additional rape scene (and a truly nasty one at that), but also threw on a downer ending for good measure. What this all means is that I Drink Your Blood pushes more limits that a lot of the other movies that would follow through its native decade, managing to still freak me out after all these years.

Even ignoring its central focus on rabies-induced violence, there are tons of little nods here and there to ramp up the controversy. The Sados do a lot of drugs, naturally, which admittedly for a '70s movie isn't played for horror as hysterically as it could have been. But two moments stood out to me: there's a scene where the Sados end up knocking out Shelly, the guy they all pick on (presumably the father of the Friday the 13th Part III character). They cut his feet open and suspend from the ceiling, swinging him back and forth as a gristly pendulum. The blood from his feet splashes on the Sados, and one of them, Su-Lin, seems to get turned on it. Then, there's the fact that the promiscuous chick, the same who brings doom to the town in what I'm sure was at least a Freudian insertion of misogyny into the script, is also implicitly a pedophile--we see she's totally willing to try to seduce a ten-year-old in order to stop him from looking into what they're doing to his grandpa.

And yet despite their awfulness, I still somewhat enjoy the Sados as characters. The movie understands that it is they and not the townsfolk who are our leads, and therefore it fleshes them out with strangeness as best as it can. It starts on a good foot by having someone be named "Horace Bones" (though the name of his actor, Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, is almost as good). It helps that Bones acts like an ersatz hippie version of every villain Ricardo Montalban ever played. There's also the fact that the black man in the group is named "Rommel Yates," which a better critic than I could spend days unpacking. Then there's Su-Lin, the group's Asian representation, who dresses like a stereotypical "Dragon Lady" and commits suicide by burning herself like a Buddhist monk (this movie presents race weirdly, at the very least). Each of these characters, save perhaps for Shelly, who is largely there to be tormented and killed, all get faces of their own, in spite of their numbers, making them resemble the New Primitives of Rats: Night of Terror in that sense. And it really is tough to say how much we're supposed to like them. On one hand, they don't seem to take themselves overly seriously, and are largely just hyper-exaggerated caricatures of "wild youth"--Andy even comes right out and says most of it is for show and ego. Somehow they would seem a lot more menacing, at least initially, if they actually believed in Horace's stories of being the son of Satan. But you realize they're actually a lot worse. Cultists do what they do because they believe they're serving a higher cause, a greater authority; even Manson believed he had the God-given quest to provoke a race war. But Horace Bones and his crew have no such illusions. They're doing this just because they can, and because they want to. One gets the impression now and again that there is some philosophical motivation behind their actions--Su-Lin, for example, seems to honestly believe that blood and pain should be viewed by society as positive because they are signs one is still living--but the Family's primary direction in life is chaos and nothing but. This doesn't differ overly from other hippiesploitation flicks from before and after, but by incorporating decidedly more disturbing aspects into its evil hippie characters, I Drink Your Blood makes this sort of recklessness actually unsettling.

I do wonder, though, why they didn't get rabies from the rats they were cooking. It can't be healthy to take a bite out of a wild rat, especially if you don't bother cleaning it first in any way.

I also have to wonder why (trying to wrap things up now) our ostensible heroine, Mildred, is dating the dude that she is. He constantly talks over her, treats her like an idiot, and presumes he's always right. Ah well--he gets what's his in the end. I feel like maybe his bad-character-ness is a set-up for this final cruel twist, making it not so cruel after all.

I Drink Your Blood managed to shock me thoroughly, and I return to it on an annual basis. Stacking beautiful trashiness with sleazy gravitas, it serves effectively as a source of laughs and chills alike. And despite its gruesome content, it does make a good double feature with the comparatively tamer I Eat Your Skin. So draw up your chair, get yourself a meat pie, and dig in.

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West of Zanzibar (1928), by Tod Browning

...huh. It's not every week I get to start out with sepia.

But this isn't a usual week, is it? Oh no. This is the start of SPOOKYWEEN '17. This month, we'll be examining no less than twelve horror films taking us from the 1920s to the 2010s to celebrate the Halloween spirit. Kicking things off is a return to Tod Browning and Lon Chaney with the unbelievably brutal 1928 feature, West of Zanzibar--a silent horror film matched only by the uncanny strangeness of The Unknown. West of Zanzibar does its best to break every single taboo in the book, and given its early release date that makes it remarkable, though one finds that the film's age has also given it some truly reprehensible qualities.

Phroso (Lon Chaney) is a magician at a carnival, because this is a Tod Browning movie; he has a beautiful young wife named Anna, whom he loves more than anything. However, Anna's attentions stray and she takes a lover--said lover, a man named Crane, wants to take her out to his ivory plantation in Tanzania, but she realizes who she really loves and doesn't really want to go along. While arguing with Crane, Phroso gets knocked over a railing and breaks his back, and is unable to stop the two from leaving.

Time passes, Phroso discovers that Anna has returned to the city, but she's come here to die. She abandons her daughter, doubtlessly sired by Crane in Phroso's mind, inside a church. Phroso takes her and over the course of several years he commences his lengthy revenge scheme against the ivory-trader. First of all, he uses his stage magic to take over a Tanzanian tribe, and begins directing that tribe, with both authority and performer's tricks (including a fake voodoo monster), to break up Crane's ivory trade. (At this point the ex-performer has taken on the name of rather appropriate named of "Dead-Legs.") As this happens, one of Phroso's minions is busy raising Maizie, Anna's daughter, in her shabby seaside bar/drug house/brothel. Maizie has long desired to escape this place, with its boggy marshes of cheap income and illicit substances, but fortunately, a man has arrived who claims to know who Maizie's father is. We already know that this man is another of Dead-Legs' minions. He takes her out to Phroso's village of horrors, where it is revealed that her happy fate was all a lie, a cover for the world of drugs, drinking, starvation, and rape that Phroso has been setting up all this time. Sure, the former magician's doctor henchman takes pity on her...but this is only the beginning. At last it comes time to capture Crane, and reveal to him the truth; he then intends to kill Crane, which will in turn force the natives to enact their traditional ritual of burning a dead man's family members to join him in the afterlife. Except...well. Crane isn't Maizie's father. Anna never went away with him. She hated him for crippling her husband, so why would she? So who's Maizie's real father, I wonder...?

Yes, West of Zanzibar is very effective. It takes an oddly progressive approach towards using intensified sleaze as a source of horror, predating movies like Bloodsucking Freaks and the H.G. Lewis canon by decades. Sometimes you can get scary out of slimy. We humans don't like our rules broken--we don't like seeing young women left to dry out after being forced on a months-long drinking binge, for instance. We don't like seeing something that was once love turn to hate, and we are terrified of so much of our relationships with our children. All over and throughout, the movie breaks taboos, showing us nary a clean house or tidy city street. Its characters, from their faces down to the clothes they wear, are bitter and gruesome. Tod Browning drives home the fact that grotesquery is the name of the game by showing montages of enormous spiders rising from the waters or tangled in their webs, alongside worms, grubs, and lizards writhing in river mud. It's unpleasant.

But unpleasant is just the first layer. There's one more taboo that Browning decides to break, and that's the race taboo. The exploitation of black people for horror value in movies starts at the beginning of the history of movies and carries on into the present. This is some of the worst racism I've ever seen in a movie. The Africans depicted in the movie embody the most despicable "jungle native" stereotypes white people have ever come up with; they dance wildly, speak broken English, run screaming from "evil spirits," rape white women, and engage in meaninglessly violent religious rituals. For all the likable qualities of this movie, the movie should absolutely be condemned for its attempts to exploit racial fears of its era in an attempt to ramp up its horror elements. Period.

There are still reasons, of course, as to why I reviewed this movie--even besides the fact that there are almost no other '20s horror films appropriate for the site that I like enough. We get to see some glimpses of 1920s carny life, including a strange comedy fire-eating act where a man started smoking both ends of his cigarette, then eats it, decides he likes the taste, and starts gobbling down lit matches. I dunno, the other carnies seem to think it's hilarious. Phroso's act, what little we see of it, is pretty neat as well. But of course, that's because the man playing Phroso is a genius.

Lon Chaney Sr. gives one of his best performances here. He manages to perfectly capture a magician's theatricality in the same rhythm as his petty, mirthful cruelty, and he's more than capable of convincingly turning that cruelty into flat-out barbarism. The Phroso we meet at the beginning is a handsome, well-groomed man dressed in a tux; by the film's end he's wearing greasy rags, shaved himself bald, and worn his face down to an angry snarl. His former soft-spokenness is replaced with the tongue of a cynical dock pickpocket. My favorite part of watching silent films is lip-reading the performances. If you do it with Chaney, I swear you can hear him talk. Chaney's costar, Lionel Barrymore, has seen his performance heavily criticized in the wake of the Internet, but I thought he did fine here as an asshole with basically no redeeming qualities. Browning would get a chance to direct Barrymore in a more complex role in The Devil-Doll, which I'm sure I'll talk about on here at some point.

I also do have to give credit to Edward Rolf Boensnes, who made the soundtrack to the version I saw on Web Archive, available here. The music is catchy and fits the movie's tone of mind-warping horror. If you're going to watch this movie, I definitely recommend the version with Boensnes' music on it.

West of Zanzibar is a tough movie to praise because of how thorough its bigotry is. It's not something we can dismiss easily, either--I can't just tell you to skip past the racist bits and watch the good Lon Chaney parts instead. What should be done is that we should talk about this movie, and learn from it what our society once did wrong and what it's still doing wrong. That this still happens is the scariest Halloween horror of them all! Well, rest assured. Things for the rest of this month are going to be notably less controversial.

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Criminally Insane (1975), by Nick Millard

I don't think I've reviewed a Nick Millard film on the site so far, which is surprising. Many years ago, he was one of the most important directors in my life. I had a chance to interview him, and my excitement was incalculable when the Slasher // Video released Cemetery Sisters, the last remaining unreleased Millard film from 1987. Nick Millard got his start in the exploitation circuit's softcore porn courts, and in 1975 shifted focus to a series of grimy, unforgettable horror films, producing movies like Death Nurse, Satan's Black Wedding, and Doctor Bloodbath. The film that kicked everything off in '75 was of course Criminally Insane. Criminally Insane remains the best of Millard's films, but given that I love all of them, that's saying something. Like the best trash films, this one's surprisingly complicated, so let's get started!

Ethel Janowski has just been released from the mental hospital and is living with her grandmother in her apartment. Ethel is worthy of the film's alternate title of Crazy Fat Ethel, for she is indeed both crazy and fat. The doctors are hesitant to release her from care and urge her grandmother to get Ethel to lose weight. When Mrs. Janowski does just that, Ethel decides to fight for her to right to Nilla Wafers, and stabs the old lady to death. Thus commences the main conflict of the film: Ethel has to keep getting food while hiding her murders, which increase rapidly in number as she kills everyone who comes to investigate the disappearances of people who she's previously murdered. Complicated things is the arrival of her prostitute sister Rosalee and Rosalee's repugnant boyfriend John. Of course, it doesn't help that the bodies of all her victims, stored in her grandma's bedroom, are starting to stink...

Criminally Insane is yet another film which benefits from having a straightforward premise. By embracing the grime of the era in which he made the movie, Millard takes the film in a lot of different sleazy directions. This is one of those Crapsack World films where no one is likable--at least not entirely. John is an abusive, lying, short-tempered, coke-sniffing pimp. Rosalee mocks Ethel for her weight, takes advantage of her hospitality, and belittles their offscreen mother for taking up with "a little brown man." Even Ethel herself, arguably the film's protagonist, is an antisemite. But we also sympathize with Rosalee, who is beaten by John and other men, and Ethel often seems child-like and innocent when she isn't in a violent rage. Could it be that the characters of this low-budget slasher film are complicated? Indeed, it's because of the characters that I come back to this movie again and again. They are interesting to observe, and the way circumstances pile up around and spring on them is always enjoyable.

It's one of those movies, too, where I always notice new things every time I watch. One of my friends helped me realize that this movie has necrophilia in it. Spoilers follow: when Ethel kills John and Rosalee, she speaks to their bodies: "I could hear you sometimes, you know. I knew what you did with John, Rosalee." Dissolve cut to the next morning, where Ethel is laughing in bed...next to John's corpse. I assure you, such implications are not beyond Mr. Millard. To finally realize what's going on here adds another layer to the film. To love a movie only to see more of it is a unique and incredible feeling. And there is much to love to begin with.

Criminally Insane is a very professionally made movie, and the technical errors can largely be attributed to equipment faults rather than personnel errors. With its impressive use of fades, dissolves, zooms, and cuts, the movie is startlingly kinetic, which is something that is somewhat lacking in Millard's later films, which are often shot more like stage plays. I don't want to say that Millard got lazy or anything--he was still following his passion, but had less time and money on his hands. The stiffness of the later Millard films makes them amazing in another way, one which is in some cases more challenging to understand. I'll get to that when I get around to movies like Death Nurse; suffice it to say for now that Criminally Insane shows a sharp eye for direction and a genuine talent for film.

Also, the movie has a lot of blood in it. Not as much as an H.G. Lewis movie, but it is still the trademark Lewis Bright Red Paint. There's something about Bright Red Paint being used for blood which has almost a mythic quality to it. It is a piece-part of Americana as it is a piece-part of the American tradition of the Bad Movie. It is a symbol of laziness, and yet it also packs a Pop Art brightness to it which harkens back to the Adam West days of yore. The world seems like it was so much brighter then...there was a dancing logic in the long shots of mannequins dressed in garbage bags getting their arms cut off, or fat people dancing through cemeteries in feather boas.

The past also sucked dick. I should say that, too. Criminally Insane, like a lot of the '70s trash I like, is an experiment in Problematic Fave Theatre.

But if you want to see the history of exploitation cinema in action, and visit the cornerstone of its creator's astonishing career, Criminally Insane is a good stop to make. I encourage you, as always, to seek out its mysteries for yourself.

Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), by H.G. Lewis

We lost Herschell Gordon Lewis earlier this year, and in the wake of Bookvember and Spookyween I promised a look back at four films made by the Godfather of Gore. In 1963, Lewis' Blood Feast cracked open a new sort of filmmaking--gore-trash was born, and things would never be the same. Blood Feast was only the beginning, and it served as the opening part of what would become Lewis' "Blood Trilogy," consisting of Blood Feast, Two Thousands Maniacs!, and 1965's Color Me Blood Red and it's that second film we'll be looking at today. (We probably won't be looking at Color Me Blood Red because I think Lewis lost some steam on that one.) And before we start, I want to clarify something: when I started planning this month, realizing that Two Thousand Maniacs was a given (as it is on my A-List), I wasn't anticipating a Trump victory. In the wake of this election, a movie about a town full of right-wing Southerners trapping and killing Northerners to avenge the Confederate loss of the Civil War will be...interesting, to say the least. So break out yer finest moonshine, and pluck a song on the banjo. We're goin' down under the Mason-Dixon line.

We open with a song sung by none other than Lewis itself, recounting the defeat of the major Confederate generals during the Civil War, done in the style of a stereotypical "hick" ballad--like many things in Lewis' horror movies this is played for laughs. As this song plays we see a group of yokels move signs and tree branches to divert a pair of cars into the town of Pleasant Valley. The entire town comes out to greet these Northerners, proclaiming that they are holding their centennial celebration and they've been looking for outsiders to make into their guests of honor. Despite the oddness of such a proposal--and despite the fact that they've been invited to stay two whole days--the travelers agree to such "Southern hospitality." Almost immediately the audience is shown that there is something sinister about this town, aside from the fact that it is literally plastered with Confederate flags. And the characters only notice this when it is far too late: for the name of the game here, essentially, fucked up carnival games, like a "horse race" that turns out to be drawing-and-quartering, or going down a hill in a barrel...lined with nails! That's to say nothing of the "emergency surgery" they get ready for a woman who "accidentally" loses her thumb...or the cannibalism. Yes, this is all to make up for an incident a hundred years ago where the Union Army decided not only to butcher the Confederate forces they were facing, but the inhabitants of Pleasant Valley as well. Of course, there is a twist ending which reveals that these new folk in Pleasant Valley may not quite be the original victims' descendants.

Two Thousand Maniacs! is a movie that thrives on being high concept. A town of vengeful Southerners kill Northerners in wacky and gruesome ways, behind the guise of Southern kindness. That is your one-sentence premise; nuance is not what Lewis aims for, and I think that shows in that I can't tell you the name of a single character from this movie (though the movie certainly establishes its characters, even in a thin way--there are familiar faces). But what makes high concept, single-sentence stories interesting to talk about is that we get to fill in the nuance ourselves, in contrast to the didactic style of the complicated, experimental works which I will equally defend. Like I said, a movie like this is gonna say some weird things in the wake of a Trump victory. So let's get into my reaction.

When I first saw Two Thousand Maniacs, I found it as amusing and wonderful as the other Lewis movies I saw. I will not hide from the fact that now, today (I write this back on November 10th), Two Thousand Maniacs is actually pretty chilling if you are a minority concerned about the future, as I am. Never mind the fact that my new copy of the movie doesn't have the psychedelic Technicolor of the first print I saw, which highlighted that the blood was the too-bright red paint that Lewis employed to save money. Never mind the lack of realism concerning the violence, or how the characters handle it. What has happened in America in 2016 is a result of a lack of understanding of the dynamics of power and privilege, and that lack of understanding was carried by rural, non-college whites. For better or worse, the murderous Confederates in this film are part of the liberal narrative of who we should be afraid of, and even if I recognize that neither the liberal or conservative ways of things are absolutely correct, it's scary, having grown up with the liberal side of things, to be faced with the prospect of bands of regression-worshiping idiots (for remember, stupid people are scary 'cause they're immune to logic) who use their majority to torture and murder people. Of course, I'm of the mind that it's more complicated than both Lewis and the modern media let on: the people who support Trump, along with the people who supported the Confederacy, were victimized by Republicans (or Democrats, in the 1860s) who wanted to make them into their pawns, and shaped the media and education systems to this end. The xenophobia and intolerance shared by both Trump supporters and the slave-owning South are inherently unnatural, and culture can be changed to help people understand the intersectional function of power in our society--but I majorly digress. I am viscerally scared of the events of Two Thousand Maniacs if I understand that things are more complicated than my feelings let on.

Moving away from my own feelings, we have the movie itself. There's an interesting distinction I noticed. While 1964 was definitely in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, being fifty years closer to the Civil War has made a lot of difference. Even a lot of whites these days get on edge in the presence of the Stars and Bars, and yet the protagonists of Maniacs never seem to worry about being Yankees in a town that has spent millions of dollars on flag orders. Again, they are white--think of how different the movie would be if there was a single person of color in the cast--but we so readily assign that flag status as a symbol of hate today.

And that leads me to my next point: even beyond that detail, the protagonists are pretty naive. While I get that people might be more generally trusting, even outside the flag issue, in 1964, it takes a little bit of stupidity for someone to choose to derail their trip for two days to participate in a small town festival. The male lead of the story is even supposed to be headed for a teachers' conference, and his car has already broken at this point--only through hitchhiking with the female lead did he make it this far. And it's interesting to focus in on the fact that Lewis chose his male lead to be a teacher, of all things. He's played by the same guy who played the manly police detective in Blood Feast, so maybe his masculine charms are supposed to represent a self-assurance that things will turn out okay, but it's hard to write off the fact that the movie ends with our teacher friend telling the female lead that the best thing to do about discovering this patch of murderous, past-obsessed hatred...is to forget about it. What's that? The white middle-class educator wants to ignore a crime committed by his fellow whites? One which, because this is the Confederate South we're talking about here, is inevitably and irrevocably tied up in racism? Shocking.

I don't know if this style of filmmaking is what's needed for what's ahead in politics--and yes, that's a serious question I asked myself. I say that because I helped publish a book called The Fires of '16: Reign of Emperor Tromble. It was published before the election, and it's one of those things where it takes an offensive group and wallows in their awfulness, out of anger, out of a complete inability to digest their worldview. I'm sure it was written with good intentions, but wallowing is stagnation. It doesn't help anyone, because it doesn't move forward. Two Thousand Maniacs wasn't intended at all, probably, to be a progressive film in any way, but I'll interpret it with that lens, because even if the Godfather were still alive today, I will claim Death of the Author. (And I celebrate it for his intended goal for it, a gory, silly horror movie.) Were it not for the fact that it implicitly calls out its Northern characters alongside its reactionary ones, Two Thousands Maniacs would be simply a slate for the anger its creator had over the crimes of the South, both in the past and the present, representing only how disgusting and low humanity can sink. (And the ending very directly says that this way of life is literally dead.) By adding in a degree of care to his plotting, Lewis has asked us to look at the bigger picture, and to understand where us "do-gooders" fall into the scheme of things when it comes to violence and hatred.

TWO New Exciting Releases from Odd Tales of Wonder!!

ODD TALES OF WONDER #2 IS HERE!!!

Odd Tales of Wonder is another project I manage besides the A-List, and I've talked about Issue One on the site before. Issue Two is just as awesome, featuring stories about cannibals, spaceships, and pterodactyls! You really don't want to miss out. Get it in print and on Kindle, and receive three wonderful stories from returning contributors Jonathan Huisman, Rogaard Montieff, and Zachary Rouse, along with two excellent tales from newcomers Patrick Huisman and Katherine Avalon, plus a piece of my own. Check it out!

And that's not all. Odd Tales Productions is pleased to announce that we are performing an experiment in book publishing. Katherine Avalon's short story "Suicide Cult in the World of Cannibals" is featured in Odd Tales #2, but Avalon has also written a screenplay, entitled The Fires of '16: Reign of Emperor Tromble, which serves as the basis for our test. And it's a weird, weird book--to quote the Amazon description...

In this screenplay, Katherine Avalon combines the tastes and stylings of exploitation filmmaking with political parody to weave a story you won't forget...and will hopefully never have to experience! A good read for fans of the Bruno Matteis and John Waterses of this world. Billionaire Woodrew Tromble commences his quest to become the greatest man on Earth...and all humanity pays the price for his terrifying success. Avalon asks the question of how dictators are made while also probing deep into the psychedelic and sleazy underbelly of the human mind!

If you can read between the lines of the name Woodrew Tromble you will see the relevance this book carries today. Check it out HERE on Amazon in Print and on Kindle!

(Hey, you know what I just realized? Books and movies are expensive! But you can help me review stuff by buying stuff and funding my endless online purchases. And as always I do take requests. No shame here...)

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.

Zombi 3 (1988), by Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei

This is a convergence of divine proportions! Bruno Mattei and the Zombi series. Yes, while Hell of the Living Dead has sometimes been called Zombi 8, this is Bruno's crack at an official entry. But joining the convergence is gore mastermind Lucio Fulci, who made Zombi 2, among countless other movies generally perceived as "better" that Bruno's. And while he may have only directed a few of the scenes in this movie, his presence means Zombi 3 now has prestige. Ironically, Zombi 3 is even clumsier than Hell of the Living Dead, meaning that it has virtually no prestige at all. The sloppiness of Zombi 3, however, is its ultimate charm. So lazy of a film is it that it gains a charisma is that is distinctly Mattei's.

Somewhere on an island a group of scientists are researching something called "Death One," apparently part of a bringing-the-dead-back-to-life experiment. Of course, this works too well and when there is a fault at the laboratory people start turning into zombies. And, a group of soldiers is brought in to clean them up, with great death and horror abounding. Sound familiar? Zombi 3 essentially is a remake of Hell of the Living Dead, but it is almost a caricature of that earlier effort--as remakes have a tendency to be. As always we must turn to the Events to highlight why this movie is so charming. It is full of these little Happenings that make the movie unravel itself quickly. Case in point: the zombie infection returns after the soldiers kill all the zombies, because they bury most of the zombies in a mass grave, but insist on burning the original infectee...for...some reason. The ashes infect some birds and the birds infect the humans. General Morton, the military asshole responsible, says the idea of ashes falling back to Earth is "pure science fiction." There's also the scene where the soldiers find the original zombie, and conveniently there is a clothesline in front of his face so they can jerk it back and reveal that--gasp--he is now a zombie. Except this clothesline only has one or two thin rags of fabric on it, directly in the center, as if they couldn't afford enough clothing to make the clothesline look like anything that's not just a prop for this shocking reveal.

That's not even getting into the severed zombie head that comes to life and flies out of a refrigerator to bite someone.

The dialogue, being written by Claudio Fragasso, is of course excellent. There's a DJ named Blue Heart who acts like a stereotypical '70s black man--in the late '80s! Says a Marine of Blue Heart: "Man, I love this Blue Heart music when I'm coked up! It's makin' me horny!" You will become a Blue Heart fan by the time the movie's over, if anything because he keeps interrupting the film to give pro-eco messages. I feel like this was supposed to be related to the plot, but the zombies aren't caused by pollution, they're caused by a virus. Except halfway through the movie, they mention a "radioactive cloud"...I dunno. In any case, the revelation of this cloud is also marked by the best line delivery in the film: "There are reports...of...murder!...and...and people are eating each other!" Admittedly, though, the true star of this film is the head scientist, whose dub actor must have had a real rough time. The actor apparently insisted on putting lengthy pauses between each of his words, in order to take time to milk the giant invisible cow. Which means that every few syllables the dub actor had to stop, wait for the guy he was dubbing to stop chewing scenery, and then continue. He works well with what he's got, giving the guy a frantic and frustrated voice.

Weirdly enough, the movie ends with an extremely dramatic sequence where one of the Marines misses the escape helicopter, and fights off dozens of zombies, only to be mistaken for one of the ghouls and shot down. Of course, because there is absolutely no character development in this movie, there is no emotion in this--only the imitation thereof. Everything in this, from the action, to the dialogue, to the editing, is only an imitation of what real movies do. We have a chance to watch an unreal movie. Bathe in its blandness.

Indeed, blandness, in the most fascinating sense, is the focus here. If you are expecting anything new at all to the zombie concept--except for maybe flying severed heads--don't cross these premises. The zombies are slow and stagger around, and while some of them talk or use weapons, they're largely there to snack en masse on the designated dead characters, or to be blown to pieces by guns and explosions. Zombi 3 flirts nervously with the action genre, instead trying mostly to be a sci-fi thriller or horror film. There are some odd action-hero moments at the end that, to my mind, come from a different movie. Maybe it was that the characters were saying something defined, rather than flat and hilarious. God, and Bruno, alone possess the answers.

Zombi 3 suffers somewhat if you haven't familiarized yourself with Hell of the Living Dead. At least, I assume so. If you do watch these movies with this one first, let me know how it goes. The good news is...both are wonderful.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980), by Bruno Mattei

Every few months I am inevitably called back to the directing work of Bruno Mattei and the writing work of Claudio Fragasso. This usually means I rewatch SS Girls for the billionth time. Last week I dove into Caligula Reincarnated as Nero, which was amusing but off-putting in the same way Women's Prison Massacre was, minus that last valuable sliver of entertainment. It was a depressing experience. I guess that just shows that sometimes you gotta stick with the classics.

Hell of the Living Dead is a classic. I've heard a few different folks say that it may well be the most incompetently made zombie film of all time. That is almost certainly true, though movies like Night of Horror still exist. It steals many scenes, ideas, and musical scores from movies like Dawn of the Dead, so originality is not its forte, but all the same, Hell sustains itself itself on not merely being a zombie movie. In my mind it succeeds at being a zombie flick, with an occasional dose of impressive atmosphere. But it's also an adventure film, an action film, a tribalsploitation film, and it has a dose of...real animal violence, to boot. Anyway, it's an exploitation film through and through, with all those elements churning in its greasy, grubby mix.

A lab is working on something called "Operation Sweet Death," which actually turns out to have an interesting dark secret behind it in the ending. What matters for now is that Sweet Death is a gas that turns people into zombies. This is released accidentally by two scientists who talk about whether they are tit men or ass men. The exchange in which they bring this up shows that every line in this movie is going to be solid gold. Next we see a group of Marines break into a building that is under the control of some ecoterrorists who want to expose Sweet Death. As one of them dies, he whispers: "You're all doomed to a horrible death. Doomed...to be eaten up. You will be killed...and then eaten. Eaten by men who were once your brothers..." That's how I talk, in Real Life. Anyway. The Marines then go on a long journey wherein they gain and lose numbers to the zombies, eventually stumbling across a village where an unbearably interminable stretch of exploitation stock footage rolls by, including a long scene of a crocodile being butchered* and an elderly nude woman eating maggots out of the eye socket of a corpse. Let me tell you, jumping from the rollicking comedy of Fragasso's dialogue to a fucking Mondo film is jarring. The end will shock you, or at the very least, make you kinda sad.

The dialogue here is key. There are a lot of weird one-liners in this movie. Namely, the Marines joke about necrophilia and quip lines like:

"Maybe there'll be chicks in grass skirts."
"Maybe there'll be some without grass skirts."

Genius. Fans of Troll 2 will feel right at home.

Let's see. What else do I love about this movie...?

-A zombie priest shows up who is played by Victor "Marty Feldman" Israel from The Witches' Mountain
-"Maybe they're just drunk or drugged. Or they're a leper colony. I don't think they intend to harm anyone." The man who says this, the news photographer, looks like Mario the news photographer from The Witches' Mountain.
-Zantoro. The "crazy" Marine. Watch the movie just for him. There is no explanation. Also, his name is Zantoro.
-Bruno Mattei has no idea how to dub black people. This is a pattern that continues into this film's remake, Zombi 3.
-This movie was remade as Zombi 3.
-This movie was also released as Zombi 8 even though it was made eight years prior to Zombi 3.
-There is a zombie lady who is full of cats.
-The soundtrack is stolen from Goblin's soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead due to a contract loophole for Dawn regarding Italian film law at the time. Perhaps, just as Women's Prison Massacre gave Claudio Fragasso's connection to Laura Gemser for the fashion sense that went into Troll 2, this movie's cribbing of Goblin led to his decision for what race his "Trolls" belonged to.
-The soundtrack is also stolen ex libris Joe d'Amato.

That's...basically it. This is probably the best Mattei movie to start with. If you can stomach this, SS Girls and Zombi 3 will open up to you. Gee, I wonder what the next movie I'll talk about will be...

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* My personal copy of the film doesn't contain this scene. The first time I saw the movie, when it did contain this scene, it was admittedly a bootleg on YouTube. I think it's safe to say that whoever uploaded the now-missing YouTube version edited this footage in from another source. Ick. In any case I've left this reference in as a warning to those who may stumble across the same bootleg. It's best to just get it from a legitimate source.

Horror Safari (1982), by Alan Birkinshaw

I was introduced to this movie under the title of Invaders of the Lost Gold. I have no idea why the marketers of this movie felt like they had to rip off Harrison Ford to succeed, but this movie being a Raiders bootleg is just icing on the cake. This is movie is a veritable trash hall of fame--nearly everyone in it has been in something magnificent. Edmund Purdom from Pieces! Laura Gemser from Women's Prison Massacre! Woody Strode from The Outing! Plus it's directed by Alan Birkinshaw, the creator of Killer's Moon, one of the most entertainingly sleazy Clockwork Orange ripoffs of all time (never thought I'd say that). And it is the final film of Harold Sakata, who as we all know played the villainous Big Buddha from 1966's Dimension Five--oh, and he was also a villain in some forgettable piece of trivia called Goldfinger. It has good vibes from all corners of cinema, and while it is slow at times it stands up to the legacies it basks in.

At the end of World War II some Japanese soldiers hid some caskets of gold in the Philippines. Naturally, once the '80s roll around, there are some people who want to get that gold, including Edmund Purdom, but also Stuart Whitman, from basically every TV show ever, who Joe Don Bakers his way through the movie in a spectacular way. Joined by the other stars they travel into the snake-infested jungles, which, by the way, also house a tribe of Amazon cannibals. Okay, they're not near the Amazon, but c'mon. Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals had been out for five years before this, and it would be all too easy to channel that once Laura Gemser signed on. That means this movie is a war movie, a jungle survival movie, a crime thriller, a seedy romance, and an Amazon cannibal flick. Therefore it will be occasionally snooty and largely tedious. Fortunately, it is a movie where if you zone out, you will benefit from zoning back in. Typically you will see some stuff that is hilarious even with context, like people pouring beer on their eyes, or prolonged closeups of what may be the filthiest ship captain in existence. (Not even Jell-O wrestlers get that dirty.) The dialogue, too, sometimes reaches Bruno Mattei levels of inanity. You will never forget Edmund Purdom's whopper unleashed during a shady business deal with a Japanese man: "Now let's skip this Oriental tea party, and get down to some hard drinking!" Edmund Purdom then shoots that man in the chest.

You may wonder how far this movie goes into its various genres. Let me tell you, the soap opera stuff, the thriller stuff, and the adventure stuff all goes over well. However, as far as cannibal flicks go, there is a tremendous amount of buildup followed by a baffling letdown. It is actually pretty funny how tiny a role they end up playing past the movie's first half. Rest assured, however, this movie may well contain some real animal violence. Wait, that's a horrible thing. Jesus. Anyway, a snake may get shot in this movie and it is some awful shit, but then again it appears to be the same snake stock footage from Manos: The Hands of Fate, which originated with Disney. Meaning it probably was not shot. Still, in these movies it would be par for the course, and the deeper I dig into the darkest reaches of Internet exploitation records and IMDB's lowest rated pages, the more terrified I am of seeing that sort of cruelty when I find a dearth of content warnings (having walked blind into horse cock and live amputation surgery without warning). This has a 2.4, making it one of the worst movies of 1982, even beating out the disturbingly similar Oasis of the Zombies, which shares an equally schlocky treasure hunt plot and is generally hated even by the most tolerant of Jess Franco fans. Except for me.

Moving to the movie's story, the grittiness of this movie is perhaps best compared to the unforgiving conditions of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It reaches absurd levels of cruelty, with snake poisonings, crocodile devourings, and cannibal spearings, and there's no shortage of paranoid arguments. I think someone cheats on someone's wife at some point. This is complimented by the devastated film, covered in stripes and flaws that would give Leonard Kirtman or Nathan Schiff a heart attack. That makes it cozy for people like us. Sure, there are tons of shots that are irritatingly dark, but once gets used to those things in this business. Among other production details that the filmmakers lavished upon us, with us getting little say in the matter, is the "Oriental" music that plays throughout most of the thing. Luckily it is very similar to the unbelievable themes of a similar type used horrifically in Psyched by the 4D Witch. This is the most stereotypical music I can think of, which may be forgiven in that it was apparently shot in Hong Kong. But it's initial release was in Turkey...see why I love the trash cosmos? All of this needlessly convoluted shit clearly has a story behind it. That history makes it seem like it was a battle to get this out--that the people behind it stuck with it, to gain whatever profit they could, just so they could do it all over again with something equally cheap. Trash's vicious cycle.

Speaking of the people behind it, one of the writers was Dick Randall, the producer of such films as Pieces (as well as Pod People, also made by Juan Piquer Simon), Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert (starring Laura Gemser, who else), and Death Dimension (another Harold Sakata villain vehicle). That explains the unholy allegiance forged here that really does improve the film if you are familiar with some of the old friends of trash divers. However, each of these actors have fame for a reason, and so they are capable of delivering an entertaining enough piece for people who haven't met them yet. If you have a strong stomach, use this as a launch point into their careers. Don't expect a masterpiece but if you have the right expectations, it will do good things for you.