Carnival of Blood (1970), by Leonard Kirtman

Let's take a step away from the Great Vorelli's unnecessarily disturbing stage shows, to focus instead on another type of entertainment: the carnival. In the '70s, Coney Island was a gruesome place, where creepy, chipped-paint mannequins laughed at you from the scummy, fingerprint-stained booths. Carnival of Blood is a bit less clean than Devil Doll, but it's also slightly more self-aware in how it portrays its women.

After opening with a song from someone who seems to be trying quite hard to sound like Joni Mitchell, we meet a pair of couples. One of them I'll talk about first simply because they are not long for this movie--or this world. They do not have a good marriage, evidently, and fight bitterly all across the carnival. Eventually, they end up in the tent of the carnival's fortune-teller, who calls Ortega on them I mean foresees something bad for them in her tarot cards. They blow her off, and they next arrive at a dart-and-balloon stall managed by Tom, a mild enough man who nevertheless is willing to give the pair a free prize to make them go away. The dude wants to go home but the girl drags him to the Tunnel of Love, where she is messily parted from her head amidst the Willy Wonka-esque voyage through the dark. Exeunt Couple #1.

Our Main Couple, then, consists of Dan and Laura. The former has made his way to the position of assistant DA, and so he proposes to his longtime girlfriend. Unfortunately, their relationship is fraught with difficulty as Dan relentlessly obsesses over catching the Coney Island killer. When Laura complains about their problems to Tom, he simply tells her that fighting of any kind is awful in a relationship. Note the tone of voice he uses when they discuss this--it will important later.

Before Laura's chat with Tom, however, a drunken sailor and a young woman he's accompanying--presumably a sex worker of some kind--stop by Tom's stand. Tom is accompanied at this locale by his sweeper, "Gimpy," who is mentally disabled and sports a made-up face that looks like it lost a fight with an octopus. (For those of you who care, this is Burt Young's first cinematic appearance.) When the sailor and his girl get too annoying, Tom once more buys them off with a prize. The two wander around the carnival for way too fucking long, a stretch of the film significantly impaired by the sailor actor behaving much more like a man OD'ing on ecstasy and meth than a drunkard. They end up at the fortune-teller's, where she once again sees something awful in the cards and tells them to go home. Instead they choose to keep on wandering pointlessly. The sailor clumsily tries to steal the girl's purse, they start to have makeup sex but then don't for some reason, and the girl is stabbed and relieved of her intestines. We then cut back to Tom, who is wondering where Gimpy went off to. Uh-oh--well, turns out that he went missing because Tom went missing. Gimpy gets upset because Tom isn't supposed to leave him alone, to the mercies of the customers. To make it up to him, Tom asks Gimpy to join him for a beer at his apartment, which is full of creepy googly-eyed teddy bears. Yet despite the eeriness of Tom's accommodations, it's evidence against Gimpy that grows here, because he ends up telling an unnerving tale of how he once had "a good dog" who "went bad, so [he] had to kill him." Gimpy repeatedly crying, "I had to kill him, Tom!" is simultaneously spine-chilling and hilarious.

All this time, our Main Couple is still investigating the park and also fighting each other. We are diverted from them once again by a rando park customer, an extremely rude and noisy middle-aged lady. As with everyone before, she goes to visit the fortune-teller, who again foresees something terrible about to happen via her tarot deck. Then she has a run-in with Tom where she's rude as a Trump supporter to him and Gimpy. Sure enough, further down the boardwalk, the screeching old harpy gets her tongue and eyes torn out, and her head crushed with a brick.

Something finally actually happens with Dan and Laura, which is that Dan decides that it's funny to don a monster mask and rush at a woman who witnessed the aftermath of a gruesome murder. It gets worse. He wants her to go back to the park right away so she can get over her trauma, so that he "doesn't have a hysterical woman on [his] back for the rest of [his] life." Then he calls her self-centered. What a fucking cock. Laura ends up going to cry on Tom's shoulder, but he's aggravated by the unrest in their relationship, and when she says she vandalized the teddy bear Dan won for her, he calls her a slut "like all the rest." No one fucks with teddy bears around Tom. Still, when she runs off, he tracks her down and apologizes. Then, when he has locked in a ride, he starts calling her Mommy, and says he has to kill her. Ohhh, dear...Tom tried to warn Gimpy when he said that his parents used to fight. Now Gimpy is dead, and Laura is about to join him.

And in the end, the villain turns out to be disfigured, too, wearing a somehow-perfect mask. What a trip. Most people cite this movie's value as residing in its vintage footage of a now forever lost Coney Island. However, I found the story and the characters to be pretty damn entertaining too. There's so much unintentional trash humor here that I love returning to this movie whenever I can. And I think it has a message too--one which subverts its surface-level misogyny. In every case save for that of the fortune-teller, misogyny is used to establish the various suspects as possible killers, which extends even to Dan. I can't imagine Dan got better after this movie, even after Laura presumably told him about Tom's backstory as per her ride with him. But ultimately, the same disgust towards women and fear of them having sex proves to be the motivation behind Tom's slayings. There's no doubt that hatred of women is on the side of evil, even though the protagonist also insists on instigating it. There's a lot of sympathy held for Laura in the film, though, and I don't think she's just a piece of meat. Note too that Tom has every reason to want to kill the men in the relationships he targets. The guy from Couple #1 is just as bitchy as his wife, the sailor is literally just babbling drunken nonsense nonstop, and Laura specifically points out that Dan started all the trouble in her relationship. But to Tom that stuff is invisible because he has double standards. A woman abused him as a child, true, but he latched onto the fact that said woman cheated on his father as his motive. It's not the deepest examination of the hypocrisy of patriarchy I've seen, but it's clear that the movie isn't just conforming to tropes either.

Honestly, though, even if you don't care about that thematic stuff, Carnival of Blood is a boatload of fun for people looking for hilariously low-quality films. The gore is some pretty sweet H.G. Lewis-type stuff, and you simply won't believe Burt Young as Gimpy. Give it a shot if you haven't already.

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Disturbia (2007), by D.J. Caruso

2007 logic: if you are an utterly disrespectful creep, you will get the girl. I had fun ripping into this one.

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Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971), by Thomas Casey

Pride continues by asking the vital question: Stanley, why won't you just get that hair cut? Featuring drag galore!

The Ghastly Ones (1968), by Andy Milligan

LGBT PRIDE IS HERE!!! Get your gay on with Andy Milligan and his island of murder!

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The Zodiac Killer (1971), by Tom Hanson

Most of us at this point are familiar with the story of the Zodiac Killer. In the late '60s through the early '70s, an as-yet-unidentified murderer killed at least five people in the San Francisco area, leaving behind mysterious ciphers which remain as unsolved as the case they belong to. Many theories have emerged citing a number of suspects, and similarly quite a few films have been made on the subject of the murders. Like the theories, some of these movies are sound, while others are not. The 1971 film The Zodiac Killer, made by Tom Hanson as part of a harebrained, probably-bogus scheme to catch the Killer in the theater it showed at, is decidedly not one of the sound Zodiac case adaptations, being instead a fascinating portrait of ugly people thrown into a classic exploitation backdrop.

The film is a relatively disconnected series of vignettes. We first follow the Zodiac Killer without knowing who he is, and two suspects emerge for us to consider: the meek, rabbit-keeping vegan mailman Jerry, and the violently misogynistic, drug-addicted, alimony-dodging Grover. The police begin to close in on Grover, seeing as he's the more readily obvious suspect, but he's shot down after trying to kidnap his daughter with a Ultimate Weapon, a handsaw. Jerry is the actual Zodiac, believing that his victims will become his slaves in the afterlife (which the Zodiac Killer claimed to believe), after Atlantis rises from the ocean (which is horseshit concocted by the director). He keeps on killing and, as in real life, he is never caught.

Tom Hanson here takes the Ed Wood route of exploitation and tries to make a movie that teaches us something. At first, the movie is rather cynical--it flat-out calls the audience stupid for not being more paranoid about serial killers, for not suspecting the un-suspicious. This is a rather uncomfortable view to take, especially in an age where kids are now being told that their shy classmates are potential school shooters in the making just because they're quiet. Jerry being the killer fits in with this mentality; he is the very "guy next door" that he warns us about at the beginning. Grover's arc exists to demonstrate that sometimes the most vulgar and openly-violent and Trump-esque of us are just bad people, and despite their loudness and brashness they shouldn't be the only ones we look at when it comes to looking for murderers. Of course, that sort of seems to normalize people like Grover, but the subversion, I think, goes deeper than that.

Grover is violently misogynistic, true, but grotesque sexism is a running theme of the whole movie--almost as if Hanson wanted to demonstrate, at least subliminally, that the Zodiac Killer could not exist without a confining culture that encourages men to be violent. Jerry is not as sexist as Grover, but only barely. He shares a conversation with his hideous pimple of a neighbor Doc, who opines that "once women are over 20, they're no good...Chinese have a term for it, it's called the Year of the Dog. [That's...not what that is, but 'kay.] Or as I like to call it, the Birth of the Bitch!" Following this Doc adds, "if you get any leftovers, though, send 'em my way...remember, I like 'em plump 'n' juicy...and DUMB!" Jerry is generally on Doc's side during this, and the rest of the movie will show him throw sexist remarks out of his own volition. Jerry and many other characters also sling around the word f*ggot, and Jerry himself takes deep offense at being called such. This latter incident takes place in a bar scene where we get glimpses of various relationship dynamics, nearly all of them portrayed negatively. Bad sexual dynamics, negative gender roles, and institutionalized homophobia are all major parts of the world that makes the Zodiac Killer who he is.

Actually, this movie in some ways is all about subversions. After Jerry is shown to us as the Killer, we see him first share some hotdogs with some beachgoers, where he doesn't kill them--then he goes to a park full of vulnerable children, where he doesn't kill anyone. But then we get the biggest and most infamous murder scene of the whole movie, where he first claims to be a crook escaping from a prison in Montana, and that he just needs to steal his victims' keys and money to get to Mexico. But after he ties them up, he chuckles casually, "I'm gonna have to stab you people." This sort of sadistic joking-around follows as he plays games with the police. He takes genuine pleasure in shutting down the power of those who can stop him. At the end, this is played with, where it's briefly put forth that maybe if the police didn't need to get so many fuckin' permits and warrants and whatnot they'd just be able to arrest/kill all those dirty crooks all the time like we want. It's uncomfortable (because time shows that cops perform worse and commit more crimes without those regulations), but it's presented alongside the suggestion (put forth, admittedly, by the Zodiac himself) that the Killer may in fact be a sane person, which means there are other reasons for his killings aside from simple "mental illness." While it is the Zodiac Killer himself putting forth this view, it also obviously stands in for the sentiments of the filmmakers, so this is a point they're interested in exploring. It's interesting. It's almost like unscientific views of mental health and biased explanations/solutions for crime are excuses for the violence of the patriarchy or something. 

Of course, this movie is also ridiculous. Grover is absolutely disgusting inside and out, which becomes kind of comedic after a while. ("Suspect proceeded to urinate in customers' drinks, proclaiming...'The Fountain of Youth lives'?") The Zodiac Killer wears a Paul McCartney wig and a beaglepuss. The police consult a psychic, Mr. Koslow, who has some Mysterious Foreigners in his apartment for no reason. It's a weird movie, and I may have understated that, despite the fact that this is a fictionalization of a series of murders that was released while those murders were still happening. To say nothing of the fact that for all the hard facts about the case Hanson gets right, there are plenty he just makes the fuck up.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's not an easy watch, for quite a few reasons, but every time I pop it into I'm completely engrossed in its world for 87 minutes. Like, I will actually forget about outside reality when I throw it on. That's another way it's weird. Watch it.

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The Primal Essence: The Mudman's Top Ten New Views of 2017

2017 saw a lot of growth for the A-List! I found a comfortable schedule wherein I could squeeze in three reviews a week, and I intend to hang onto that schedule for as long as I can. I opened a Patreon, which has been an exciting experience so far. I posted a bad movie sci-fi novella. I was able to find nine weird books to talk about--not as many as I'd hoped, but that's what next year is for. It was a marvelous time and I can't tell you how glad I was to have this site to go back to whenever the real world came down too hard on me. The fact that so many of you kept showing up week after week made it all the better. I may curate its entries, but it's really you guys who build my A-List...you're all on my A-List of People. You are the finest souls I know.

The movies on this list are the cream of the crop. They tore my heart from my chest and shook up my soul. I hope you track them down if you haven't already because they will reshape your life for the better. Well, actually, it's for the worse. But in a good way. Capiche?

FROM BEST TO BESTEST:

#10 - I AM HERE...NOW, by Neil Breen

It is only out of a stubborn respect for the later entries of this list that Mr. Breen ended up at the number ten spot...otherwise this one would be much higher. I Am Here...Now was the best possible introduction to Breen I could(n't)'ve hoped for. I've seen some pretty bizarre Ancient Alien stories over the years, but this one takes the cake--Breen is a sign that Weird Film is far from dead, even as the Intentional Bad Movies try to take their cut from the legacy spawned by the people whom Breen now succeeds. May self-awareness never touch you, Neil, ol' buddy. I'm so glad I have the rest of your filmography to discover.

#9 - THE PHANTOM COWBOY, by Robert J. Horner / SMOKING GUNS, by Alan James

A dirty stinkin' tie! I knew I had to have one B-Western on here and no matter how much boiling down I did I couldn't pick one of these over the other. Smoking Guns is definitely the "better" movie, but the sheer shittiness of The Phantom Cowboy makes it feel truly alien. I'm starting to doubt I'll find Westerns weirder than these two, but if these are the best there are I'm in good company. I've definitely raised a lot of eyebrows in my time talking about the movies I watch with the people I know in Real Life. They've never been raised higher than when I tried to describe these two.

#8 - DRUMS O' VOODOO, by Arthur Hoerl

'Cause the drums make me happy...drums make me happy...my feelings on the so-called "race pictures" have shifted somewhat since I wrote this review due to some things I've learned about them (i.e. creative control was not in the hands of the actual black performers as much as I thought), but there's no taking away the talent from Drums O' Voodoo's cast. Aunt Hagar is still one of my favorite movie characters of all time, and to my dying day I won't forget the time she fucking sassed off Jesus. At this point, I feel I've seen every voodoo movies there is, but there's something deeply special about this one. I'm (ideally) getting a new copy soon, which may be from a different print...I may have to write something up if it turns out the lost footage is in this version.

#7 - JUNGLE TRAP, by James Bryan

I don't like getting hyped for movies because it's so easy for those sorts of hopes to get dashed. But not when James Bryan and Renee Harmon are at the helm. My heart nearly exploded when I learned this was a thing and it was a tough sweat waiting for it to come out. But it was worth it. Farewell to a pair of great careers...you guys made my life, one last time. Oh, how I wish you still had one left in you.

#6 - SWEET TRASH, by John Hayes

Now we're slipping into the New Weird. For me, that is. I spent so much of my life thinking I'd seen all the greats, but then this year came along and I started to see some trippy fucking shit. Sweet Trash is apparently not overly beloved even among trashsters, which is saddening. This movie dips into territory both grim and hilarious, often without warning, in the best of ways. As far as boggy-surreal nightmares go, this one just barely beat out Disconnected and Euridice BA 2037, which would make a great triple feature with this.

#5 - NIGHTMARE ALLEY, by Edmund Goulding

Gotta have at least one legitimately good movie on here. I guess this Ty Power guy is hot stuff, huh? Well, even if I had known that at the time, I would've been swept off my feet by this movie. A clammy, greasy, disconcerting expose of circus life, this one fits in perfectly with some of my other favorites from this year like The Unknown and The Amazing Mr. X, but this one is the best of all of them. I've been watching a lot of Hollywood dramas from the '40s now in the wake of sitting down for this three times in a row. I hope they won't make me sick.

#4 - BLOODY WEDNESDAY, by Mark G. Gilhuis

When I was writing the list I kept putting this on here for some reason. I'd take it off, asking myself, "Wha...really?" Then I would rewatch it and remember everything. For a while I would just quote that goddamn teddy bear, voice and everything, and sometimes people would hear me and worry about my health. Simultaneously the most depressing and hilarious movie about mental illness I've seen, Bloody Wednesday is so unsure of what the heck it's supposed to be that it becomes a psychedelic trance. I've found for myself a new classic of the slasher (?) genre, which isn't an easy feat these days.

#3 - INFRASEXUM, by Carlos Tobalina

Yes, I like this one more than Flesh and Bullets, because I'm a sucker. It's almost unbelievable to me that this was Tobalina's debut. This is a ballsy film to make under any circumstances, and yet porn is a weird thing, and thus he built a whole career out of this. I wasn't expecting to get a Pseudo-Philosophical Voiceover-Journal Inner-Quest Movie that also had a disembowelment scene, but at this point, I should know better. Art and trash go well together and this is a great example of how they pulled that off in the late '60s.

#2 - GRETTA, by John Carr

No explanation. It's not even based off the book--it just exists. It's like 35 movies got stuck in a blender and the director drank the result, and the camera implanted in his brain recorded everything he saw afterward. Or, alternatively, it was originally an 8-hour mega-epic like von Stroheim's Greed and they cut out too many reels. Why should we care about this occasionally-creepy romance when there are killer beetles...and vice versa? Better yet, it has a "sequel." If you count movies that recut other movies to make them even more confusing as "sequels," that is.

#1 - THE TELEPHONE BOOK, by Nelson Lyon

The best. The Holy Grail. This is why I got into reviewing movies. I laughed, I screamed. I could go on forever but The Telephone Book is really good, okay? Every new scene brought fresh surprises that I could never have expected--which is really what cinematic media is meant to be about. For a movie about sex, it felt like sex...it kept building, and building, and building, and then there was that ending and there was such joy. A vulgar, mind-boggling cartoon brought to life, I'll never see anything like it again; but then, I was lucky enough to see it in the first place. 

AND THE BOOK OF THE YEAR IS... *DRUMROLL PLEASE*
...
...
...

THE UNHOLY THREE, by Tod Robbins

Man, I sure read a lot of bullshit this year. How could the Book of the Year be anything but this when the competition was Space Jason and voodoo sharks? The Unholy Three is a weirdly kinetic pulp pseudo-masterpiece, whose presence on this list means I can live with myself for not including The Unknown. Lon Chaney is a powerful figure even when he's not directly involved; and besides all that Tod Robbins is an accomplished enough writer to keep me hooked. Next year I'm gonna grab a copy of Robbins' "Spurs" to take a look back at the origin of Freaks, and this book will get a mention, as I've said, when I get to touching on Todd Browning's The Devil-Doll. Robbins also wrote a book called Mysterious Mr. Martin, which looks like a delight. More to follow!

So that's 2017! See you next year! I loved all the time we spend together and I can't wait to start again soon. In the meantime, you can check out the $1 tier on my Patreon to hear some of my Movie Thoughts. Otherwise...keeping dreaming, true believers!

Hip Hop Locos (2001), by Lorenzo Munoz Jr.

Everyone I know of who has seen Hip Hop Locos hates it bitterly and deeply. That is because most people in this world--ostensibly--are sane. Spookyween, however, is not a holiday for sanity! It is a holiday of raw, unfettered chaos. The chaos present in Hip Hop Locos is of such an idiosyncratic brand that I can't help but love this movie through and through. It may have little appeal to those of you possessed of "taste" or "standards," but that's almost the point. I can hardly explain, but here I go.

Unodoz and J10 are two rappers appalled by the lack of Mexican rappers in the hip hop industry. (This movie makes no distinction between rap and hip hop, which I am told is not super accurate--but there is enough Venn diagram overlap where this may not be naivety on the filmmakers' behalf.) Thus they concoct the brilliant scheme of killing musicians and cocaine dealers to steal their music equipment, their cocaine, or both, and using the money they get from selling that, they'll buy recording time at a studio (?). The formula for the entire film: murder scenes cut by lengthy driving sequences or shots of the two rappers in dark rooms, in both cases repeating the plot premise of killing people for drugs/equipment so as to fund their rap career ad nauseum. Near the end, we get a hilarious sequence where they are unable to locate the house of their intended victim, and when they do get to said house, the man isn't home, so they just leave and never mention him again. The ending is inconclusive. Apparently they just keep killing people and all their wishes are granted.

Because there are only three kinds of scenes in this movie--talking in rooms, talking in cars, or killing people--this movie tries to make the mundane interesting by applying "cool" video effects. Shots will bounce around or become inverted at random. It's basically just a Rally of the Sony Filters. The insistence on raising the contrast of the already-muddy shots just emphasizes the largeness of our heroes' pores. It also disguises something that it took two viewings to confirm; these rappers spend most of their time wearing their beanies over their eyes, for reasons I can't divine. Plus, there's an insistence on dropping the pitch of peoples' voices, but not for any particular reason. Sometimes the pitch shift seems to have been added to emphasize a "scary" pre-murder moment, but this is done so infrequently and with such a lack of style that it's impossible to tell.

It's also impossible to tell if this movie believes that the true rapper lifestyle is as presented or if it makes fun of people dumb enough to believe such. Most of the dialogue is the movie is hopelessly inundated with exclamations of "homes," "esse," "eh," and "y'know what I'm sayin'?" And this is where the movie achieves the glory I see in it. The second murder scene involves a coke dealer being garrotted from behind. Whoever isn't doing the strangling keeps chanting, "Choke him, homes! Choke that mothafucker, homes! Choke him! Choke him, eh! Choke him, homes! Choke him, homes!" This scene lasts for almost exactly two and a half minutes. What's depressing about this is that this is actually the most accurate scene of strangulation I've seen in a while? Some last way too long, some are way too short. I can believe that the average adult has about two and half minutes of air in him. But the chanting really makes it go on for eternity and a day.

Regarding SFX/related material. One of the victims gets himself one of those rubber sticker blood spatters you put up on windows on Halloween leaking out of his body. There is no other gore. And despite this being a movie about rap and hip hop, there are about three (hilariously awful) raps, and everything else seems to be MIDIs from a '90s point-and-click horror game. This movie couldn't even get weed. In a lot of the scenes the actors are very clearly not smoking what's in their mouths (they don't exhale smoke), but when we get close-ups of blunt-rolling, well--look, I've been to college, and I know the difference between cannabis sativa and fucking chopped lettuce. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.

If you're a fan of such classics as Five Across the Eyes and The Tony Blair Witch Project, Hip Hop Locos is a treasure trove, a pot of gold at the end of your personal rainbow. It will probably take you slightly closer to eternal damnation, but hey, what's Halloween without that? The horror is, for now, on YouTube. Tread into its den...if'n you dare!

P.S./Fun Fact: When I was younger I thought this movie was a snuff film. I realize now that was a little dumb of me, but who knows...?

Spookyween is almost over, but Bookvember is almost here. Get the party early with Patreon...and like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!

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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A Night to Dismember (1983), by Doris Wishman

I have called Carlos Tobalina "The Man," but Doris Wishman puts even him to shame. She was a director like no other, a pioneer not merely for being a woman in the mid 20th Century who ended up with the sort of career usually only obtainable and usually only wanted by men, but for being also something of an underground artist. She threw flourish and flair into 42nd Street sleaze with a style suggesting even she herself was unsure of what she was accomplishing with such. This attention to color and romance and drama was always contrasted with a hilarious feeling of slack laziness and rushed cheapness. And of course, Wishman was always as viciously exploitative as her male counterparts, if not moreso. While Wishman usually made sexploitation flicks intended to show off big boobs (or sometimes, to mix things up a bit, absurdly big boobs), A Night to Dismember was her attempt to cash in on the slasher movie craze rising from the hot freshness of Friday the 13th and, from a little earlier, Halloween. The result was doubtlessly bizarre to begin with, but then something very unusual happened. Someone tried to destroy the movie's print, and nearly succeeded--and this did not deter Wishman. She slowly reconstructed the film from what remained, using dubs and "clever" editing to hide the holes. Or, so she claimed: there's really only one bit of solid evidence that I know of to substantiate this. But just remember, even if this didn't happen, every frame of this movie definitely feels like it did. Remember that well!

The Kent family has lived in the small town of Woodmire Lake for 70 years. However, one October night in 1986 (I'll get to that, don't worry), the Kents were all killed in some manner. (The movie says all its death happen in one night, and that's bullshit, but again, I'll get to it.) Phineas Kent and his two beautiful daughters were slaughtered, and Broderick Kent killed himself after slaying his wife for insurance money. That left Adam Kent, his wife, and their three children, Billy, Mary, and Vicky. Vicky for all intents and purposes is our protagonist--five years prior, she was sent to a mental hospital for killing two boys. However, she's since reformed and recover, and she spends the movie with everyone around her, including and especially her family, fully expecting her to crumble back into homicidal insanity. Billy and Mary in particular want to keep all their parents' affections for themselves (despite looking old enough to have at least one grad degree), and as such forge an increasingly ludicrous string of stunts to frame Vicky and/or drive her nuts, including dressing up like a waterbound zombie and later some kind of green-skinned old man. Of course, there are also some killings going on which make it look mighty probable Billy and Mary won't need to frame their sister for murder. Detective Tim O'Malley is on the case, but will he figure things out before it's too late?

Most if not all of the plot of this movie is told via voiceover. This is because all the stuff that would normally forward the plot was destroyed in a fire...again, ostensibly. The possibility remains that all of the madness that dances across A Night to Dismember's 68 minutes was made on purpose, but even Wishman was too embarrassed to move forward without proper apologia in place. Listening to this voiceover shows a shakiness that has rarely been paralleled in other movies I've seen. Even if there wasn't a warbling delivery to it I'd still be agog at editing that leaves us with the line, "The Kents lived in Woodmire Lake for 70 years. Then, all of the Kents were dead." "Manic" is the word I wrote down to describe it, and I can't think of anything better. There are so many cuts in this film there's a special Death named after them. The tone, speed, and diction of a character's line will change at random, and there's beloved celebration of the old Coleman Francis trick of keeping everyone's mouth out of frame. Once we reach the axe murders all hell breaks loose, and the swiftness and repetition of the cuts nears artfulness. The "bong" sound that sometimes announces the appearance of Chesty Morgan's tits in Deadly Weapons makes a shocking reappearance, to the point of insanity. And there are "chase" scenes made of the same two or three shots looped endlessly.

As I said in my review for Frozen Scream, I'm positive that Thomas McGowan, who plays Kevin McGuire in that film, also plays Tim O'Malley, who is mysteriously uncredited both on IMDB and in A Night to Dismember's end credits themselves. O'Malley supplies the bizarre opening voiceover which summarizes the deaths of both Phineas and Broderick Kent's families in four minutes, as though this film was a sequel to movies about those murders. Then, he dates Vicky's killing of the neighborhood boys to "August of 1981," but also "five years ago." Remember this movie was released in 1983. Either the actor flubbed his line, the editing made him flub his line, or Wishman meant for this movie to be set in the future. Similarly, it's worth commenting on the fact that O'Malley insists the events of this all take place in one day, which I assume is meant to explain why Adam Kent never learns about the massacre of his family. But I'm sure we go through at least one day/night cycle. All of this just contributes to the sheer strangeness that this movie is ridden with.

Now, regarding the chance that there was another version of this movie: I believe it, and I think the trailer proves it. The trailer is a trip in itself, and it fortunately features a spooky narrator who tells us the story of the movie he's advertising. Except in this version, Mary Kent has no siblings, and is apparently assaulted in some form by a disfigured stranger--this encounter leaves her with psychic powers (!), which she uses to slaughter her family. Then, years later, Vicky Manuel moves into the former Kent home, where she begins having psychic visions of the murders. If you've been reading this review in any capacity you can tell that that is a totally different movie. Add in the fact that this trailer features a ton of footage completely unseen in the finished cut and I think the tales are true. This would explain one shot I've noticed in the final movie where one of Vicky's relatives is running towards a car saying, through dub, "Hurry up, dear, it's going to rain!" The shot is slowed down to make it seem less frantic but it's clearly a shot of people running in panic; the person speaking is looking over her shoulder and screaming. They just dubbed right over and hoped no one would notice. I would love to see the original version of this film (I do have to wonder why Wishman didn't make use of the "lost" footage present in the absolutely-extant trailer), but I'm also infinitely pleased with what we ended up with.

A Night to Dismember is one of my favorite movies of all time and I will say no more of it, due to my deathless hopes that more people will see and find fondness for it. I don't want to compare films to Troll 2, The Room, or, God forbid, Birdemic, but if you need a new great bad movie, this is it. It is nothing short of a miracle in filmmaking, which we can all learn from. Here's to Doris.

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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 Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993), by Sarah Jacobson

At long last, the I Was a Teenage [X] series is complete. We've come a long way from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and we've suffered long through the nuances of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, but at long last the wait is over. Now we can finally--

I can't do it. This movie deserves better than a lame joke like that. It's just that this movie puts me in such a good mood. Which is odd, given that it's about murder. But it explores murder in a way that a lot of people can relate to, which is something I never thought I'd say. I Was a Teenage Serial Killer is Third Wave feminism pioneer Sarah Jacobson's 25-minute video essay on the history of violence against women, both "passive" and aggressive. It's a fantasy exercise in homicide and thus we can't take it overly seriously--but if you're a woman, at least one of its brief scenes will remind you of some peril in your life. It is a movie which very much panders to its audience, but the question raised then is: why is it still so compelling?

Mary comes home to spend time with her brother. She's just been with their mom, stopping by their dad's funeral. "Too bad about that accident," Mary's brother says, but she replies, "Yeah, but at least Mom got a big insurance settlement out of it." Hmm...that's odd. Are you really that surprised when moments later, Bro starts garbling poison, courtesy of sister Mary? Dude probably would've been fine if he hadn't started giving her a racism-laden talk about how she needs to settle down with a man, or she'll end up homeless and pregnant. Then, a guy on the street comments on her ass, and she shoves him into traffic; and she is forced to strangle her boyfriend to death when it is revealed he faked putting on the condom. As in Ogroff, our narrative is suddenly broken by romance, when Mary meets a man who also enjoys killing men--specifically straight white men. They enjoy brief domestic bliss, but then he decides to threaten a woman, too, and then the deal's off. We eventually learn that Mary is the way she is because she was molested by her father, tying back to the film's beginning. She is seemingly thwarted, but in the end, she vows to tell her stories, and that act will make her valid even in a society that strips her of her validation.

Y'know, this story is sort of like Robin Hood, but with murder instead of robbery. This is about someone who slaughters the "rich" in the name of the "poor"--Mary refuses to kill people who aren't privileged, apparently refusing to kill men of color or queer men, despite the fact that both can be misogynistic. This is a joke I make only hesitantly--because it's ground already fatally overtrodden--but this is the sort of thing that modern day Tumblr users could identify with. It really is interesting to see a reflection of "Internet feminism" in a movie that's almost twenty-five years old...this really does feel like the sort of movie my friends and I would make if we were feeling particularly bitchy about men on a summer afternoon. I don't know how I feel about the impression I'm left with, however, that Third Wave feminism has gone on relatively unchanged in all those years. Has it been sufficient for us, I wonder, or will our future be tasked with making a fourth wave? I'm just glad that we were concerned with queer issues in the early '90s. This movie doesn't namedrop trans people, so that's one change at least between and now. Trans rights as a thing seem so comparatively new--especially when you're trans.

Speaking, then, as someone with the double whammy of being trans and female, I can tell you now why there's this anger in the air, that's been lurking for at least twenty-five years...once, I would have thought it unnecessary to share my beliefs on the world, but my experiences with the privileged have taught me otherwise. I believe, in essence, that we have never fully left the Dark Ages--and that's a statement I make often, however pompous and windbaggy it makes me sound. It's true. Having spent the first chunk of my life identifying as a white straight cis man, followed by a second chunk as I am today, I've felt the difference firsthand. I know that nostalgia tints all, but even in my worst moments, the world seemed a sunnier place than how I see it today. For women, for queer people, for people of color, there is a second world, and it is prioritized second. And it is subject to frequent violent incursion from the world that exiled its inhabitants to its surface. Sometimes, that violence gets to be too much. Some people do kill. Others--like Sarah Jacobson--make movies. They change the shape of that beautiful crystalline world, the third continuum: fiction. And in doing so, they change both worlds, both privileged and oppressed. Encoding your scream in fiction is always a way to get it heard.

Reflecting on that anger: the last scene of this movie, I think, is one of the best, because it shows one of the most insidious ways that men commit social violence against women. An irritatingly-voiced douchebag plops himself down next to Mary as she tries to console herself after murdering her boyfriend. He refuses to leave her alone, and then he decides to make it all about himself, telling a rambling, incredibly tedious story about he and his loser friends hitchhiking down to this city. Nothing that this man indicates that he's halfway as interesting as he thinks he is. When she does open up to him and tells him about her father, he says that she was probably molested because she's so beautiful..."he just couldn't resist." I have heard people tell molestation victims this in real life. It would have been cathartic to see her kill him, but her proclamation that she'll conquer her trauma by telling her stories to people is more satisfying than murder would have been.

Now, like I said, this is a movie which definitely panders. It seemingly cements one of those age-old arguments that liberalism's ideology is only effective if you're already a liberal. Here, children think murder is cool, there are no police authorities, and people don't try to stand up or move when they're thrown in front of a moving truck. Plus, if you're a sexist pig, you probably will hate a movie which shows a woman killing you for your sexism. Yet this movie, I'm sure, is the very story which Mary vows to tell at the end of it, save perhaps for all the death (maybe Sarah Jacobson killed a buncha dudes, I dunno). It is catharsis; self-serving, as catharsis usually is, but no less necessary. And, possibly, no less genuine.

Most of us feminists wouldn't actually kill men. Feminism's about dismantling patriarchy's effects on men, too. But movies like this--an affirmation of the validity of outrage--are satisfying despite their faults, and they will keep on being so, until the problem is finally over. I love low-budget feminist exploitation movies, and I will keep seeking them out till the day I die. And I'll keep fighting for my sisters until the day I die, too. Movies like this help remind me of the complexity of our struggle and the long roads we all have ahead of us.

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Book Club of Desolation #17: Jason X: Death Moon (2005), by Alex S. Johnson

I've been trying to finish this book for over five years. I still didn't finish it in time for this review.

But even though I did not read every single page of it, I think I get the general gist of things in Jason X: Death Moon. I heard of this long, long ago on TV Tropes, which listed it on its So Bad It's Horrible / Literature page. It is almost certainly the worst of the Jason X tie-in novels, which I can't imagine being stellar to begin with. It is also one of the most self-assuredly delirious novels I've read, and for perspective, my current reading is Tristram Shandy. I guess I have my limits--there is such a thing as excessive absurdity. While I can give Jason X: Death Moon points for trying something I've always dreamed of doing, I do have to condemn the book for being an overall waste of time, a Jodorowsky film in prose--an eager start, followed by a thoroughly pretentious and obnoxious string of disappointments.

Let's start with the plot. Jason Voorhees is still a superhuman cyborg in the mid 25th Century, as seen in the "classic" film Jason X. A bunch of scientists who may worship him/be sexually fascinated by him (?) resurrect him and send him to the Moon (?) just in time for a bunch of horny, drug-crazed teenagers to arrive in time for their summer at Moon Camp Americana, whose awful, awful name is written out way too many times. Then, Jason kills a bunch of them, before being defeated (?).

That's it.

I am told by other reviews that the conclusion features Jason being sent back in time to fight his past self, or something similar to that, but having skimmed the last few pages as much as my brain will allow doesn't indicate that, plus, there are other books in this series that are still set in the future. The plot details are unimportant, and the author makes it clear that we don't have to pay attention to them because we meet a new set of characters every few pages. The novel was seemingly written in blocks, usually following one vague "plot" motion before jumping into a chunk of rambling nonsense, then jumping into our next "plot" bit, which has almost nothing to do with what we've already seen. This patches up any sort of leaving-behind I'd surely ordinarily experience as a result of not having seen Jason X. This is a standalone work!

Now, I need to clarify my reference to "rambling nonsense," because that is essentially what this book is all about. I could turn to literally any page in this and pull out a quote which defines the entire thing. Here, I'll demonstrate:

At first he thought it was a routine hard-drive swipe--an archaic, lo-fi term the Tribes still used to refer to cerebellar cleaning. That was when they took your brain, dumped its contents into the core of an artificial person; blew your brains out out in some dark alley. That's what happened sometimes if you lurked on Cityofdiss.com, as JJ was doing. Fucking head cleaners will pay for this, thought JJ, a little edge of anger pushing his usual poise to the edge of chaos. But JJ held it steady. If they wanted a firefight, he would give 'em a firefight. The mother of all flame wars.

Note that almost none of this is explained. The setting of this book is some sort of cyberpunk anarchist dystopia, where Internet technology can not only manipulate reality to some extent, but there are no regulations on the power of such, and everyone lives a sort of pseudo-illegal libertine existence in a desperate desire to end boredom. Like if everyone in Neuromancer was a Tessier-Ashpool and Earth was basically Gallifrey from Doctor Who in terms of technological achievement. I don't really know how much this clinches with the world we see in Jason X, but most of that film is set on a spaceship bound for an Earth colony, so anything's possible.

The point around which I gave up involved a tangent several dozen pages long about, I think, a mad scientist trying to use advanced video manipulation to make Bride of Frankenstein into Elsa Lanchester porn. I considered quoting from this part, too, but it's not worth it.

Much of this book tries very much to cash in on the things that make Cool Hipster Books Cool and Hipstery. To be more specific, it tries to be controversial. Egregious cursing, sex, porn, drugs, gore, and video games are set hand-in-hand with Hemingway and philosophically-reworked Marx Brothers quotes, plus a plethora of flowery adjectives that even the Romantics would have turned from in disgust. It is the last thing you'd expect to see in a book based on a movie where Jason Voorhees kills people on a future spaceship. But for that, I sort of low-key love this book? Sure, it may not function in terms of a conventional novel, but one thing I've always wanted to do is write a tie-in novel that completely fucks with the thing it ties in with. A surreal, postmodern Star Wars novel; a Dune novel that has a secret code in it; a Warcraft novel that's incomprehensible unless you've read the complete works of Jane Austen. I think that writing a bizarro Friday the 13th novel shows I'm not alone in having that impulse. I wonder if Alex Johnson laughed the whole time writing this. If he wasn't laughing I get the impression it was because his mouth was being used for bong hits instead. (I joke. It looks like Mr. Johnson has found a reasonably successful career as a bizarro writer, and I'm actually thinking of grabbing a couple of his other titles, if anything for the sake of the Book Club of Desolation. After all, it would be entirely against my ethics to ignore a book called Doom Hippies.)

While I didn't necessarily enjoy reading Jason X: Death Moon, I'm glad it exists for its status as an artifact. And, before I read it, I could not make this shit up. Now I can, in fact, make this shit up. Reader beware!

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Frozen Scream (1981), by Frank Roach

Renee Harmon returns again! I'm not reviewing her films in a very good order--really, I should have given her time to shine in Lady Street Fighter first. But Escape from the Insane Asylum was not a terrible place to start, and Frozen Scream is an excellent way to continue. After all, Escape from the Insane Asylum used stock footage from Frozen Scream! There are a surprising amount of things that use stock footage from Frozen Scream, as bits of it show up in Bryan's Run Coyote Run as well. Add in the fact that Frozen Scream shares that awesome soundtrack with Don't Go in the Woods and you begin to see the amazing James Bryan-Renee Harmon-Frank Roach web that extends through the '80s. Frozen Scream is yet another Trash Cornerstone, a film without which a proper definition of These Sorts of Movies is not possible. This one's been long overdue, so let's take a look!

We open with Renee Harmon, German accent thicker than ever, narrating over footage of the ocean, which we'll return to several times: "Ever since the creation of man, man has dreamed of immortality. But his pursuit of eternal life is always devoured by death itself." Yeah, that's usually a true statement. Following this we go to the home of Tom Girard, who appears to be under duress as he calls his wife Ann. It turns out his stress has reason; there are black-hooded men trying to break into his house. Eventually they catch him and inject him with something, and next we know Ann is the hospital, having broken down over Tom's mysterious death. The doctors say it was a heart attack but Ann knows better, and with the aid of her cop ex-boyfriend Kevin she intends to get to the bottom of things. She and Tom used to be part of a study led by Renee Harmon, a study concerned with turning its participants into immortals. It seems it all began with mind-expansion experiments involving meditation, but eventually led up to surgeries that turned the participants into the dark-robed creatures we saw at the beginning. It seems immortality comes at a price, and Ann and Kevin will soon learn how cold and lonely Hell is.

Frozen Scream is over before you know it, and its relatively bare-bones plot had continued to elude a lot of the people I've shown the movie to. The movie approaches the plot strangely, placing events out of order and being too vague in some places. It's never made entirely clear how the scientific processes used to make the zombies overlap with the immortality group's philosophical musings about "love and immortality." It appears very dream-like, but it's not clear if this is deliberate. It's surreal in the same way that Don't Go in the Woods is, but I know that that movie's quirks were intentional. Frank Roach and James Bryan are very similar filmmakers--I know from Roach's other effort, Nomad Riders, which I always confuse with Bryan's lesser Hell Riders, also featuring Harmon. I wouldn't be too surprised if there was some tongue-in-cheekness to Frozen Scream's creation, much as there was with Don't Go in the Woods. It seems like there's a method to the madness.

Of course, it may also be simple cheapness. This movie is edited like if it runs over 85 minutes, everyone involved with it will die. That leads to scenes like Kevin giving one of his oddly-omnipresent voiceovers during a surreal sequence where Renee Harmon slits her wrists and drinks her own blood. It comes across as goofy, and forced, as if we're supposed to know that Kevin's interruptions are basically for the purpose of throwing in tawdry exposition. The movie can't decide if Kevin or Ann is the protagonist...we have more of a stake in Ann than Kevin, but Kevin gets the voiceovers and the ending. It's an uncanny mix, but a captivating one. As a side-note: I'm absolutely positive, from analyzing these voiceovers countless times over the years, that Kevin's actor, Thomas McGowan, is the uncredited man who played Detective Tim O'Malley in Doris Wishman's A Night to Dismember--another movie I need to get to soon.

If nothing else, Frozen Scream is a fun revivification of the sci-fi zombie movies of the past. It reminds me of a more mature and more risk-taking Teenage Zombies, but with boobs and bizarre dream sequences. If you haven't seen Frozen Scream, it really is one of those Bucket List films. Make your cinematic experience a bit more complete and give it a shot.

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Ax 'Em (1992), by Michael Mfume

Y'know, it's been awhile since I've reviewed a movie which has...floored me. Sure, there was Glen or Glenda, but that was a long while ago. I need some flesh back on my bones! Some blood back in my veins! I need something overwhelming, something which leaves me struggling for comprehension and comprehensibility. Oh, yes, I know what I want. I know what I need. Yes, it's time...time for AX 'EM!!

Ax 'Em is generally regarded as one of the worst movies ever released on home video, and it is admittedly tough to contend with as far as sheer production values. I have seen few movies, in all those which I've seen, with poorer visuals, cinematography, and sound mixing. And it is tough to watch a singular movie which features extensive scenes of people telling jokes, bickering, and urinating, especially if it also contains those aforementioned technical failings. But there is something charming about Ax 'Em--there has to be, as I returned (eagerly) after an abortive and hate-filled first viewing. Ax 'Em is, as they say, like a fine pair of shoes. It will be angular and cramped at first, but you eventually find that it will carry you well over the marshy terrain of the Scottish highlands, should you ever be presented with a situation wherein that would be a good thing. That is to say it's pretty awesome.

The movie's sole authentic DVD release (which only happened nine years after the movie was made), drops us immediately, sans menu, into the movie's opening title cards, which explain that years ago a man went berserk and killed his family and himself. We will see this incident much, much later in the film in a pretty hilarious dramatization. Anyway, one of the kids, Harry, was "not ever found," and we meet someone whom we can presume to be Harry as an adult. The kid has made some of himself, namely by becoming a booger-faced machete-wielding zombie. (He's never explicitly referred to as a zombie, but most reviews I've seen seem to think he's one, to explain not only the booger-face but his immortality. C'mon, he could just be a leper afflicted with the Curse of Thorn!) Harry kills an old man, and we swiftly learn that said old man's grandson and his college friends plan on going down to visit the old man and spend some time at his house to relax in the woods. Another flashback tells us that some of these kids were childhood friends of Harry's, and that he, being "mentally Ill" blamed them for the murders. Why he didn't kill them then and there when confronting them about it, and why they apparently never passed this incident on to the authorities, must remain a mystery.

Anyway, shortly after arriving, the kids hardly notice the old man's conspicuous absence as they drink beer, play Game Boy, and cheat on their partners with each other. Much of this is filler and, aside from some non-linear flashbacks edited in to tell us the backstory in a surprisingly patient way, we don't really get to the horror aspects of the film until about 40 minutes in (of 70). From there it's just a matter of Harry hunting down the impressively large cast and killing all but three or four them. That's it! Director Mfume--known to his friends as "Mfumay" by the way--thanks his grandma, and the credits roll.

Most of what makes Ax 'Em memorable is the now-oft-aforementioned fact that it looks and sounds like shit. The acting is solid--I can tell that at least a few of the cast have gotten some kind of acting training, and everyone has enough energy that even those without talent still have something to bring to the table. The music, while usually ripped from public domain sources, is bearable, albeit weirdly placed. Ax 'Em is genuinely a shoddily put-together film: most of the dialogue can only be picked out with repeat viewings, which will make the plot borderline incomprehensible. Not only that, but it is pretty hard to see what's going on. But unlike a lot of films with these problems, Ax 'Em gains strength from them, becoming something of an experience in visual poetry, with some lines or images snapping out suddenly from a void of random nonsense. Lines like "You better lay off my beer, you big six-foot-nine motherfucker!" Images like one of the characters bobbing his glasses up and down.

Okay, I have to open that last one up. This scene has haunted me since I first saw this film, nearly ten years ago. There's a scene where three of the characters are bickering and two of them break off to leave the third, a dude with glasses, behind. At this point the killer catches up with him, and music starts playing that sounds like it belongs at a funeral. The bespectacled guy screams and we get a close-up shot of him wiggling his glasses up and down, before jumping to a shot of his dead body. I have never been able to determine why they decided to have this guy bob his glasses up and down. I assume it's supposed to be like Laurel and Hardy's hats jumping off their heads, or someone's monocle popping out--a slapsticky representation of the surprise of confronting something scary. Then why the fuck are they playing funeral music? These murders can't be simultaneous whacky and tragic!

Unless you want to get a dark humor effect, which is what they totally ended up with. This scene is hilarious: not merely because of the contrasting tone, but because I'm still not entirely sure that they were going for slapstick. Maybe the actor just felt like hyperactively adjusting his glasses, which I'm told is common behavior in those about to be killed by zombies.

I hope you can tell I'm in a good mood. This movie has brought me to it. Everything is wrong. Everything is awful. The title is awful. Only one person is killed with an ax; everyone else dies by machete, gunfire, or rotary telephone. Also, the film was originally called The Weekend It Lives, which adds to the notion that Harry is a zombie (hence "It") while also being more grammatically and contextually confusing. I cannot, for the life of me, determine why this was released, much less made, but I want more of it and any film distributor who wouldn't release this film is naught but a craven coward. I've praised the decision to make and release these films in the past, but for someone outside of the director's friend group to release this shows not only insanity but courage. It was a risk to try to find an audience for this film, but a risk well-played, because they found me. Except York Entertainment, which is responsible for the Ax 'Em DVD, no longer exists. Sorry, York--I should've gotten into the game before it was too late. Now the world will never again enjoy your releases of such films as An American Vampire Story or Laserhawk.




To wrap things up, then: sometimes I can't help but wonder if we trash-lovers are really just creeps who like watching people's home videos. Hell, I've bought tapes that really have been just people's home movies before, from the antique shops and garage sales who choose to sell such things, but I do so for a very specific: I watch these movies with the hope that they will turn out to be horror films. (And hey, if I find a snuff film or two in the mix, I get to be part of Internet history! Because that's what one should value in such a case.) This is simply because I'm sure movies like Ax 'Em, Psyched by the 4D Witch, and The Tony Blair Witch Project began their lives as home movies before plot suddenly intervened. A shitty excuse for a plot usually, but something in there that separates it from what would otherwise merely be clips of families seeing what the new camera can do. These films are separate from movies like Bad Magic or Weasels Rip My Flesh, which are made with the quality of home videos, but clearly had scripts of some kind. This is a weird sort of candidness crossed with the provision of genre tropes in a way that's uniquely magical; movie, but not movie. Home video, but not home video. These movies are trapped in a bizarre sort of quantum lock that returns to the old trash adage, that movies which reveal the hearts of their creator at their embarrassing worst are worth treasuring. To be honest, I don't know if Ax 'Em really says anything about Michael Mfume, but it said something for him. There was a reason why this movie was made--it surely couldn't have been for money. I guess I don't really care about that purpose. Everyone who made it looks like they had a great time, and I'm grateful they decided to let us in on that.