The Oracle (1985), by Roberta Finlay

Roberta and Michael Findlay were trash legends, it's fair to say. They made The Touch of Her Flesh and its two sequels, a film series in which someone is vaginally assaulted with a lobster claw. (Not in all of the movies, just one. I think.) It's hard to imagine a married couple being inspired by the goddamn Olga films, and then going on to make classics like Snuff and Shriek of the Mutilated. Michael met a grisly end, being chopped to pieces by a helicopter in 1977, but Roberta kept on making horror into the late '80s. The Oracle is the first of these later outings that I've seen, but what I saw not only impressed me cinematically, but it worked as great trash too. This movie's pretty intense.

We open with some good ol' automatic writing being down by downtown medium Mrs. Malatesta. (Huh, wonder if her husband runs a Carnival of Blood--no, not that Carnival of Blood, I mean this one.) She has a ghost-planchette which is about to summon the spirits responsible for her demise; the planchette's new owner comes along shortly. Her name is Jennifer, and she's a friendly, ordinary woman who is married to world's biggest jerk. Men, if you constantly call your wife hysterical and embarrassing except for when you want sex, you're a stupid motherfucker and you should put your testicles under a jackhammer. Anyway, once the landlord, Mr. Pappas--who has a Greek name but acts like a Mexican stereotype--hands off the planchette, then Jennifer starts running into trouble. And not just because her dumb houseguests make the hand spell out "I am horny." Jennifer makes contact with the ghost of a murdered businessman named William Graham, who helps her uncover a conspiracy of murderers involving an evil factory manager and a trans male assassin named Farkas. And of course, no one believes her, or believes that she's sane.

This movie actually works really well as a commentary on how women are treated and gaslit in our society. At almost no point in time do any of Jennifer's friends or loved ones consider that she could be, y'know, telling the truth. They don't even consider that her paranormal experiences could be based on completely ordinary phenomena! Maybe it's bad writing--trust me, the dialogue is pretty goddamn bad, even if it's frequently hilarious--but the world is set against this poor lady as it is for many women in real life. It's a pretty crude form of dealing with a real issue, but crudeness is perhaps what's needed. Sometimes a sword will do, but other times a club just hits a little better. Apply a little reason, chaps! If your ladyfriend goes crazy on you there's probably a cause, and not just a tilting of the womb or whatever.

The theme is so blatant that I'm not really gonna spend that much time on it. IT'S TIME FOR TRASH INSTEAD.

Alright, so this movie really acts like it's two movies sewn together, Godfrey Ho-style. There's the occult stuff and there's the murders with Farkas. They come together at the end but it's funny how far apart they are. And how awkwardly they're cut together. In between scenes of Jennifer's Christmas Eve party are snippets from Farkas' murders. He hires a prostitute who he kills after she finds out about his genitals. He goes to a diner with the world's bitchiest waitress and takes an angry phone call from the diner's phone. ("Oh my God! He even ate the bones!") He also pops a Happy Hanukkah balloon--Nazi fuck. Maybe there's meant to be an intentional play between the fun of the party and stark '80s New York apathy of these other scenes. It's not played up that way, though. It feels more like someone just had an accident with the editing machine.

Incidentally. With that facial structure, that voice, that weight, the AFABness and the antisemitism--my God, Farkas is actually Crazy Fat Ethel, isn't he? He found his true self in that stock footage mental hospital from the end of Criminally Insane 2! I knew the story continued! Now we just need a movie explaining the Janowski family tensions between Ethel/Farkas and his sister, Edith Mortley RN.

Then there's the supernatural stuff. Pappas ends up with the planchette at one point, but he tries to use it to figure out the next day's lottery numbers. Because that's what communing with the dead is for. He is attacked by slimy rubber kids' toys, who start drinking his blood; when he tries to cut them off with a knife he just ends up mutilating himself instead. Then there's Jennifer's visions. She sees a shitty-looking corpse on TV, a clawed boogeyman at the window, and finally the zombie of her landlord. At the end there's another bad-looking rubber corpse who we get to see in even more detail. All they could afford was rubber and slime. Frankly though, that's all you need to make a great horror film.

There's just one more thing I want to comment on. When Jennifer says she has a surprise, her husband rolls his eyes and murmurs, "Antique pistols." What?! Why would he think that's what she had? Did he think she was challenging him to a duel? Is showing off one's antique pistols a common occurrence in this couple's social circle? I don't know why this baffles me so much. I can understand this from a first draft perspective--lord knows how many jokes or bit of dialogue I've written that have made sense in the moment but have proven baffling on the return run. (That's right, you guys get my good material. Crumble in despair as you consider how dire my bad shit must be.) But this was just odd. Odd in a way that I love, naturally, but odd all the same.

If you like slime and communicating with the dead, then this is the movie for you. It actually feels like a "real" thriller at times, before someone opens their mouth and says something. Professionalism is on display. But not everywhere. It's that precise and unique dichotomy that really matters.

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Octane (2003), by Marcus Adams

Those goshdarn hifalutin' whippersnapper young people! Back in my day we didn't disrespect or disobey our parents, no sir. Almost a relief when these young folks get kidnapped by random highway-dwelling Satanic cults, dontchaknow?

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Performance (1970), by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell

200 MOVIE REVIEWS!!! We're celebrating by taking a look at my favorite movie of all time, the hyper-trippy mindbender of a crime-occult adventure known as PERFORMANCE!

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Macumba Sexual (1983), by Jess Franco

Our Pride Twentygayteen reviews come to a close with Macumba Sexual, Jess Franco's even trippier remake of his early Vampyros Lesbos.

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Orgy of the Dead (1965), by Stephen C. Apostolof and Ed Wood

Does it really need saying that it wouldn't be a proper Spookyween without Ed Wood? No one quite handled the horror genre in the way Ed did. Though he presented his scary stuff in a fashion implying he was being cynical and ironic, Wood actually threw himself into his work and believed himself to be the scribe of hair-raising nightmares--or at least, the custodian of hair-rising nightmares past. His obsession with Bela Lugosi and the Universal Horror movies led him to create films which ended up perpetuating the exaggerated campiness that folks today think all old horror films, Universal included, happened to contain. Once more this is that strange idea of horror as fun--horror as a Halloween children's game. There's virtually nothing actually scary about Orgy of the Dead--in fact it's probably not really about being scary--but it's still a fun watch if you've got both an adult mind and a remnant ribbon of that old Halloween children's spirit.

Orgy of the Dead doesn't burden itself with needy troubles like plot, but since you asked, there are a few incidents here and there. Bob and Shirley are a couple driving through an unfamiliar area. Bob is a famous writer, who is apparently out on the road in search of inspiration. "Most of my books are based off of fact or legend," he says. "That's why they sell in the top spots!" Anyway, Bob's a dumbass, so he ends up driving too fast and goes off the road, ending up in an old cemetery. It is this cemetery which is ruled by "the Emperor," played by Criswell. The Emperor orders numerous dead folk to rise from the grave and dance for him, erotically, if possible. This includes "the woman who died by fire" and "she who loved gold." Then, without warning, a woman in cat footy-pajamas comes out, with holes cut in the pajamas for her tits and booty. We follow a parade of ethnic stereotype dancers, who are commented on by a werewolf and American-accented mummy. This long string of ostensibly erotic dances continues until at long last it comes time for the two intruders to be sacrificed. But then day comes, turning the Emperor and his minions to skeletons, leaving our heroes believing it was naught but a dream.

So yes, this movie is largely about well-proportioned ladies jiggling. Ed Wood presents us this sea of T&A using the only platform he knows--remember, the dude couldn't make a movie about trans rights without putting Bela Lugosi in the vicinity of smoky test tubes and creepy shadows. So of course this movie is "actually" about the secrets of the world of the dead, and their bizarre ceremonies under the full moon when they walk the Earth. Obviously. The thing is, I think old Eddie forgot that he was hired to write sexploitation first and horror second. For while Wood was a master of sleaze, he was primarily a master of dialogue that no one but he found intimidating. That's why we keep cutting from the naked woman on screen to a mummy who says bullshit like: "Back in my days of ancient Egypt, snakes were the stuff of nightmares!" Uh, in contrast to today's harmless snakes, which no one is afraid of?

You watch Ed Wood-penned movies for the writing. Because Lord did that man suck at dialogue. Somehow, however, he is still better at it than Harry Stephen Keeler, and, depending on the day, George Lucas. I've provided a few snippets here and there, but honestly, every single fucking line is pure fucking gold. Somehow, even the most relevant speeches collapse into untamed non sequitur. We critics sometimes complain about having too little material--and sometimes, there are those moments where we're forced to complain about having too much material. I swear to God, Wood's writing is like its own dialect of English or something. Someday we'll find an island of pudgy white guys dressed in angora sweaters, and that's all they'll speak in. Let's try to tackle the line, "She was a zombie in life...so too must she walk as a zombie in death!" What?! A zombie in life?! I mean, technically, voodoo zombies are drugged, hypnotized living people, but still, even those kinds of zombies have been referred to commonly as "the living dead" since the '30s. As far as I'm concerned, most folks in 1965 would have thought you had to die to become a zombie. No, I suspect this is some of Wood's patented social soapboxing. Wood is criticizing this lady's social behavior--she was a social zombie. At least, that's how I read it, and having now read a couple books of Wood's prose on top of seeing most of his movies, I feel I have solid insight. But it's Ed Wood. There is no fucking canon.

Criswell makes this movie lovely. Seeing him in color is a trip and a half. I don't know if he looked  this out of it in Plan 9 from Outer Space, but he's trying pretty hard to hide his age at this point. He has what I call Trump Bags--gross little white rings around his eyes where his obvious fake tan halts its orangeness. His performance varies. Sometimes he's having the time of his life, others he's clearly baffled by the syntax of what he's been asked to say, and a lot of the time he just wishes he was doing bullshit mentalism on TV again. I wonder how much the nudity he was actually present for. I can see someone with a career like his trying to stay away from that. He's joined by a woman who is not Vampira, but is made up to look like her. (No, she isn't Elvira, either.) She does a very good job, a better job than Vampira probably could have done. It is a misplaced acting extravaganza.

So much of Orgy of the Dead is dedicated to tedious and occasionally offensive stripteases that it may drive the ordinary viewer mad. I can't even argue that it's the best Ed Wood movie, as I am much more impressed with Glen or Glenda. But it is an amusing and baffling entry into the Wood corpus, and even if horror wasn't the point of emphasis, it's suitably "spooky" enough for us to celebrate with it this month.

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The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), by Ray Dennis Steckler

Before we begin this review of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, I want to say that this review will refer to the movie in question, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, by its full title on a consistent basis. Why should I dishonor the movie's writer, director, and star, Ray Dennis Steckler, by abbreviating the title when he put so much hard work into it? And indeed, he put as much work as he could muster into producing The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, another movie which I spent years hating until I was traumatized into liking it.

We open with a scene in the tent of the fortune teller Madame Estrella. She decides to come on to her--customer? boyfriend?--who rejects her in favor of alcohol. She calls him a "dahrty, feelthy peeg" and summons her enforcer, Ortega. Estrella and Ortega then disfigure him with acid and lock him in a closet. We then cut to our main plot, involving Jerry, his girlfriend, his friend(s?), and a few other nondescript individuals as their visit to Estrella's carnival results in Jerry being snared by Estrella's sexy sister Carmelita and her hypnotic dance routine. The process begins for Jerry to become a Mixed-Up Zombie--I don't know why Estrella is converting Jerry into such a thing, but maybe he turned down fucking her as well. Jerry begins a career as a murderer under Estrella's control, until he is put to a sorry end.

I have seen other Ray Dennis Steckler movies, particular The Thrill Killers, and I'd say I'm a fan of his--he's considered one of the quintessential trash directors, and while I never found as compelling as James Bryan or Nick Millard, I like popping in a Steckler when the mood strikes me. I think my issue was that I, like many, watched The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? exclusively in its MST3K format. The beaten-up toilet-paper print that appears in the MST3K version has been replaced by a cleaner edition on new releases, which still leaves the film looking like the gasoline-soaked asshole of every after-the-end movie ever, but which at points makes the film a pop-art masterpiece. That's a good thing, given how psychedelically surreal this movie is.

The process of turning an Incredibly Strange Creature into a Mixed-Up Zombie involving a lot of colored lights and turning wheels. It gets a little nauseating after a while, making it perhaps one of the most authentic psychedelic movies out there. Nausea is the name of the game as far as aesthetics go, and this movie takes that idea farther than any movie I've seen before. The carnival is seemingly located in a barren desert. The roller coasters, tents, advertisements, and employees all look fifty years too old, except for the "old hag" Estrella, who looks about thirty. We never get enough significant shots to establish that anyone is having any fun here. The opening scenes, where Ortega bursts out and manhandles Estrella's victim, are so disgusting to look at that they become genuinely terrifying. No one has any sort of fun in this movie, except for, on occasion, the audience. It is like Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty in action, but there is no point or cause for the Cruelty to lead to us to. And this bounces off the bright colors we can see in newer prints to leave the whole thing feeling like the most feverish of fever dreams.

Jerry relays to us some philosophical gibberish, which I can never remember the content of. I just remember it's depressing and nihilistic. Look at that excuse for a title card--did you really expect anything that wasn't bleak and dull? Yet, as befits Steckler, the movie is also weirdly comical, beginning with that lovably goofy title. There's a slant to this that suggests its entertaining qualities are intentional. I don't know how Steckler wanted us to react to Ortega, for example. His oft-remarked-on resemblance to Torgo is very striking, and it's amusing to imagine Ortega as Torgo's awkward cousin--someone who always somehow ends up on the far side of the table from Torgo at Thanksgiving. I always cheer when Ortega bursts through his curtain, ready to fuck shit up (even as I cringe). I wish I knew why, aside from the fact that I have become so drastically mutated by these films that a crusty chain-smoking freak with a propensity towards acid attacks named Ortega of all things is just a perfect fit for my sensibilities. Ortega, you and your cigar are why I wrote this review. He is a strange paradox, this man, a thing of mirth and nightmares alike.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? is legendarily dull as fuck, and I can confirm this. You will probably end up ditching long chunks of it, and that will make the experience more upsetting because you will understand less of the plot. To be honest, I think I understand this movie less the more I watch it. Which means I recommend it. It is another unforgettable experience in the radical deconstruction of a movie, and in extreme experimental sleaze beyond the limits of general sanity. To witness it at least once is a must. Three cheers for Madame Estrella! Five cheers for Ortega!

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New Book Out!! DEUS MEGA THERION & THE DIVINE MRS. E ARE HERE!!!

I have some exciting news! My double-sided party in paperback has been published by Odd Tales Productions! Check it out here on Lulu!

Publisher's Description: "DEUS MEGA THERION tells the tale of Jagged Skull, an '80s heavy metal band who runs afoul of a Satanic cult presided over by the sinister Edward Tamaron. Forced to play a string of concerts for the cult, the band members learn more about themselves and the world they live in. 

THE DIVINE MRS. E (Or, the Adventure of the Textual Lacuna) is the story of an actress who must solve a murder on the set of one of her films. But she is not who she seems to be, and her adventure will bring her face-to-face with fiction, femininity, and the divinity of both. 

This paperback features two excellent covers from James Bezecny, and has awesome flipbook action, meaning it can be read no matter what side is up. An Odd Tales Productions exclusive!"

An ebook version and a video trailer will be coming soon! And thank you!!

P.S. There will an extra review this week as Wednesday sees the release of James Bryan's long-lost soon-to-be-classic Jungle Trap. GET PUMPED!

The Rider of the Skulls (1965), by Alfredo Salazar

This is not a B-Western, I swear! A B-Western, as far as I know, is usually defined as being a Western made between the '20s and '50s which was not an A-feature. And, usually, the B-Western proper is bred only in the United States. The Western market changed after the 1950s to a more Italian focus, but The Rider of the Skulls is a Mexican production. And, like a lot of horror films made in Mexico over the last hundred years (to say nothing of the other movies written and directed by Alfredo Salazar), Rider of the Skulls is stunningly offbeat, being probably one of the weirdest Weird Westerns out there.

A werewolf prowls the Mexican countryside, under the control of a witch. He wears a flannel shirt, as is required by all Mexican werewolves, and his mask is pretty goddamn amazing. Eventually, one of the families subjected to the horror of the werewolf--including Don Luis and his wife, plus their son Perico and cowardly butler Cleofas--encounter the Rider of the Skulls, a masked gunfighter whose parents were killed by bandits. He patrols Mexico in search of supernatural evils to dispatch, such as the witch and the werewolf. The witch reveals to the Rider that the werewolf is Don Luis, after she shows off her abilities to summon a zombie, and the Rider is forced to kill him. (If you think it's a spoiler that I reveal that werewolf's identity, well...let's just say that if you want to hide the fact that your freshly introduced character is a werewolf, don't have their wife introduce them by saying that they recently became mysteriously ornery.) He adopts the now-orphaned Perico, as Don Luis killed his wife whilst werewolfing, and he takes on Cleofas as his comic relief sidekick.

The movie doesn't end with the death of the werewolf. In fact, we're just getting started...because now our heroic trio has to take down a vampire! This vampire has an even more amazing mask, and transforms into the fakest movie bat of all time--faker, even, than The Devil Bat. He seeks a girl named Maria to be his companion, and he nearly succeeds in turning her into another of the undead before he too is dispatched by the Rider.

But even that isn't the end of the movie, as the Rider, Perico, and Cleofas discover in the next town they ride up on is haunted by the goddamn Headless Horseman! (Little south of Tarrytown, isn't it?) And best of all, the Headless Horseman's animate severed head is represented by the most amazing mask we've seen so far. Said head turns up in the hands of a woman, whom it beseeches, "Please return me to my body." Upon having his noggin restored, however, the Horseman makes the mistake of cursing out God Himself...not even his robed skeleton minions are that dumb. And you'd better believe that the fury of the Lord comes through the blade of the Rider of the Skulls!

Anthology films are usually dangerous territory, as a lot of critics will tell you. For some reason there's a propensity for anthologies to always have that one segment that fucks up really, really badly, and as such we critical folk walk into them with trepidation. But I dunno...it seems like I've had a lot of really good luck with anthology films recently. Night Train to Terror was a glorious mess, Alien Zone was better than I expected, and my rewatch of Tales from the Quadead Zone went swimmingly. The Rider of the Skulls is definitely an anthology film, and that works tremendously to its benefit. An anthology film, I've realized, can theoretically pack more trashy goodness into its runtime by merit of having the chance to stack its craziness on top of itself. Just as you catch your breath from what came before, something new comes along and plows over you like a bullet train. This is yet another movie that I can almost review just by summarizing it.

If I had to say anything about it to give, y'know, an actual critical opinion, it would be that I really appreciate how it plays with the sort of stories it's dealing with. I can't say that I have ever seen a werewolf, for example, who transforms by first turning into a skeleton, and then being built back up into wolf form. Also, it's really nice to see a werewolf movie that remembers that there usually aren't thirty full moons in a row. The vampire meanwhile has that mask, which makes him look like a bat/human hybrid, but he also spends a lot of his screentime trying to defeat his foes by punching them. And as I mentioned before, the Headless Horseman has his two skeleton sidekicks, which is an interesting addition to the Headless Horseman story. It makes him feel more portentous, and I'm always happy to see skeletons in movies.

Probably cut from episodes of a kid's TV show, or maybe three other movies, The Rider of the Skulls is a three-headed nightmare of a Western, feeling like what would happen if the Blue Demon or El Santo started riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter. Deconstructing its own tropes, but only accidentally, the movie shows the power of low-budget Mexican horror, being one of the best examples of such that I've seen. Make it yours.

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The Face of Marble (1946), by William Beaudine

I have come to a horrifying discovery: for the last seven months, there has not been a single week gone by where I have not seen a film featuring John Carradine in some capacity. From Vampire Hookers to The Bees to Voodoo Man and Universal Horror and beyond, the one-time Grapes of Wrath star won't leave me alone, which is no surprise: the dude was in a whopping 351 fucking movies!! That I would cross his timeline not once but dozens of times in my quest to consume mid- and low-budget/quality movies of every stripe is not inconceivable, as Carradine, while appearing in high-classic movies like The Grapes of Wrath, was also an actor of the Nick Cage school in that he refused to decline work under any circumstance. One that I saw awhile back was The Face of Marble, another Monogram film, apparently the last of their 1940s horror run. My eagerness for the movie swelled when I saw it was a good ol' John Carradine mad scientist film--not as unrestrained as the unrelenting hamminess of House of Frankenstein, but an example of the man at work. Face presents Carradine in one of his more intriguing roles of a mad scientist who is not mad, or even angry.

Dr. Charles Randolph and his assistant David are hard at work at the age-old scientific dream of bringing the dead back to life. This is all without the knowledge of Randolph's notably younger wife Elaine, though she nearly discovers the nature of her husband's experiments late one night when he and David are trying to resurrect a dead sailor fished out of a storm from the water body the Randolphs ostensibly live next to. They are, incidentally, nearly successful, though the appearance of the "patient" is changed. Specifically, the color drains from his face, which becomes seemingly immobile, granting him a "face of marble." Unfortunately the resurrected man deresurrects not long after his restoration to the land of the living, which is disheartening for the simple fact that Randolph and David are always under threat of intervention from the authorities. In fact many of Randolph's colleagues eagerly tell him they will call the cops on him whenever they feel he steps too far, a fact which he accepts genially. While Randolph is kind, and his work is entirely for the betterment of humanity, he is still desperate to conclude what that one promising night offered him, so he makes the hasty decision to kill and attempt to revive Elaine's dog Brutus. The process fails again, at least at first--but after a few long moments, Brutus comes back again, not only feral but with the ability to phase through solid matter. Who must drink blood in order to sustain his existence. I haven't even mentioned how Elaine's housekeeper Maria is a voodoo priestess who puts a curse on David after he burns one of her fetishes! (And that's fetish as a "magical object"; this movie kinkshames not.) This particular subplot is the one which brings us to our climax, when the voodoo curse backfires and kills Elaine instead of David. And so Charles and David must again turn to their experiments in hopes of undoing what has been wrought...

As you might expect, this movie is a little confused about what it wants to do, though I should say it is rarely confusing. Events transpire frankly, with no illusions about what's going on but without serious elaboration on some of the zaniness. While we occasionally get typical Hollywood pseudoscience like "Electrolysis of the blood cells is occurring more rapidly than I dared hope!", this movie recognizes that it is first and foremost a fantasy horror film. Consider: it has not only voodoo, but a ghost, in the form of Brutus the Intangible Vampire Dog. It tries to appeal to the rising culture emphasis on science fiction at the time while still invoking the supernatural eeriness that dominated the horror films of years past. But no matter what genre it adopts, there are still two questions that arise from the matrix of interlocking ideas that builds The Face of Marble: what were they smoking when they came up with this shit, and how did the pitch for this film sound?

It was Monogram, so I doubt there was too much forethought, but what's intriguing about The Face of Marble is that it's not that bad of a horror movie. I doubt it will really scare anyone, but it functions rather elegantly as a character-driven mystery. It's yet another of those "what will happen next" sort of outings, and everyone puts a reasonable performance in, John Carradine especially. The horror in the movie arises less from Charles Randolph's controversial actions than the consequences that befall him for the hubris inherent in those actions; he is a good man who loses everything, making this a tragedy. And in many great tragedies, the punishment of hubris is a theme. All of the weird events that affect the Randolph house--the voodoo and the strange fate of Brutus--could be manifestations of some form of cosmic justice against Dr. Randolph's transgressions. At least that's my way of trying to tie together the various disparate elements of this story.

Plot-wise the film is still a mess, if nothing else for the above-mentioned fact that the least-fleshed-out subplot of this sea of subplots is the one responsible for the climax. You would think that the movie would reach its peak with the authorities busting in on Randolph at the peak of his success, given that everything, including Brutus' bloodthirstiness and ability to walk through walls, keeps leading the police closer and closer to the doctor's secrets. Instead, Maria, a character who has no real motivation to speak outside of vague allegiances to evil voodoo gods, is the one who thrusts the burden of perfecting the revivification process on the protagonists. If there was a bridge between ghost-Brutus and the voodoo then mayyybe I could buy that Maria's story is in any way relevant, but this film needed an antagonist, and if the mad scientists couldn't be evil and the Hays Code stopped the writers from pitting their heroes against cops, then apparently a two-dimensional voodoo witch was sufficient.

As you expect, this movie has some unfortunate racial issues which shouldn't be overlooked. Not only do we have our villain's evil arise from her foreignness and the religion she brings with her, but there's also a butler named Shadrach who is a stereotypical Cowardly Negro. He's not in this movie much and the filmmakers seem aware of the delicacy of overusing comedy (especially shitty racist comedy) in what is supposed to be a supernatural/mad science spectacle. Shadrach's relative absence from the film prevents it from becoming a Mantan Moreland slaughterhouse, but I'm still a little surprised to be seeing this type of shtick in a horror film from '46--it seems late, well beyond the nightmares of King of the Zombies and the like. But the past is always destined to let me down, it seems.

Generally, however, The Face of Marble is not a letdown. It was probably viewed as garbage when it came out, and it's definitely garbage now, but it's still a fun ride. I can only wonder what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will think when they come across their own grimy bootlegs of our era's unfettered polyheaded weirdness like Ghost Shark.

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Drums O' Voodoo (1934), by Arthur Hoerl

Let me start at the beginning.

I don't know why I became obsessed with Drums O' Voodoo (alias Louisiana alias She Devil). It surely must have cropped up in my research when I commenced this long '30s/'40s horror kick I've been on lately, but I have no idea how that's possible, given that this is one of the least-written about titles I've ever come across, which, trust me, is saying something at this point. There's my answer, I think: when I find rare movies with interesting details about them, which no one else has seen or reviewed in a generation or three, I want to track it down. The title already had me; its status as a '30s race film perpetuated things. (A desire to watch an all-black horror movie from the early days of film while tracking down a copy of Drums O' Voodoo spurred my watching of Son of Ingagi.) Slowly, I learned more and more about it, including that: 1) it was based off of a stage play by J. Augustus Smith, who also acts in the film; 2) after one week, that play was either pulled for censorship reasons or booed offstage, not sure which; 3) the director of the film was the writer of Reefer Madness; 4) this is considered to be the first all-black horror film.

That last bit, though! How am I only the--to the best of my knowledge--second critic to write about this movie on the Internet? I really can't find anything to contradict the idea that Drums O' Voodoo is the first black horror movie, even if its horror elements are relatively toned down...from what I know, if there was any predecessor, its identity is lost to history. And I say that with the knowledge that many of the movies made by black people, or even involving black people, are similarly lost to time. The best alternative to Drums being the first that I could find is this: in 1924 the black auteur Oscar Micheaux made A Son of Satan, about a man forced by a bet to spend the night in a haunted mansion, a la Ghosts of Hanley House. This however was apparently more of a crime movie, with long sequences of domestic violence and nightclub degeneracy. It may have been a remake or rerelease of a 1922 film called The Ghost of Tolson's Manor, which definitely sounds like a horror film, but about which even less is known. Both films are lost and contemporary reviews don't specify if they feature real supernatural elements. Whatever the case, I am simply glad that Drums O' Voodoo is not among the roll call of Movies Lost. Indeed, a lot of sources will even say that this movie doesn't exist anymore, but it most assuredly does! Even with some lost films, where there's a will, there's a way...especially if "way" means "unlisted VHS tape." So here we are!

Myrtle and Ebenezer want to get married, but the whole world's against them. You see, a sleazy mobster type named Tom Catt--yes, really--rolls into a small Louisiana town and opens up a juke joint which as his base of criminal operations. He quickly fixes his eye on Myrtle and intends to make into one of his girls whether she likes it or not. Meanwhile, Ebenezer's grandmother Aunt Hagar (Laura Bowman, who played Dr. Jackson in Son of Ingagi) is a voodoo priestess, who warns the couple that Myrtle's mother had a curse on her that kills the bearer when they have children; hence why her mother died bringing Myrtle into this world. This curse is hereditary and so Myrtle's marriage to Ebenezer would be her death sentence. Myrtle's uncle Amos Berry, the local minister, wants to keep his niece safe from Tom Catt, but is unable to do so because Catt has some good ol' blackmail to hang over him--years ago, Amos spent four years on a chain-gang for murder. In spite of this, Father Berry is willing to go to any distance to get Catt out of his town, and that includes joining forces with Aunt Hagar and her voodoo cult.

It is the last sentence of that synopsis which provides the most intriguing detail about the plot of Drums O' Voodoo: voodoo is presented almost entirely as a positive force. A mysterious and ancient force, with secrets that are unknown and perhaps unknowable to the generally public, but a positive one all the same. Aunt Hagar, and, it seems, her cult, are an accepted part of the community, and she's free to come and go from the church to meet with Father Berry whenever she likes. And that's the thing about it, too: this is a movie where the clergyman protagonist is in league with a voodoo sorceress! But then you think about Sugar Hill, which also portrayed voodoo in a positive light (albeit one of revenge), and it makes sense. To people who practice voodoo, and people who know people who practice voodoo, or live in places with strong relationships with voodoo like Haiti or New Orleans, voodoo is certainly the religion of evil the movies usually make it out to be. Additionally, a lot of branches of voodoo have incorporated Christian beliefs, so relationships between Christian and voodoo communities are often better where voodoo is comparatively common. Amos still condemns voodoo in some way now and again, but one major theme of the film concerns how the "White God" (as the film's narration calls Them) exists concurrently with the "Black Gods," the "jungle gods." There's even a scene where Father Berry tells Aunt Hagar something about "Jesus told us to forgive our enemies." Hagar replies: "Yeah, well, Jesus didn't know Tom Catt!" A '30s film where a voodoo practitioner gets away with sassing off Jesus Christ himself--yeah, this was worth it.

Actually, this movie has a lot going for it where it would have probably been heinous in its time, proclivity for polytheism aside. Our first introduction to Myrtle is her in the juke joint dancing to jazz in, horror of horrors, a miniskirt! Hell, it was a big deal to show off someone dancing in a miniskirt in a movie in the mid '60s, much less the mid '30s. While there's definitely a lot in the script to add credence to the "booed offstage" theory regarding the short life of the play version, this stuff, plus some other stuff I'll get to, is enough to suggest that someone set up an obscenity charge. Maybe that was a total shitstorm. I wish I knew more.

And I wish I knew more about this movie in general--about its production details, yes, but also about the plot. You see, unlike a lot of my reviews, I haven't spoiled the ending of this one, and there's a reason for that. The ending of Drums O' Voodoo may be impossible to spoil, ever, because there is clearly much footage lost, which seems to include the proper conclusion. Now maybe the producers of my VHS copy had access to a faulty print, but Turner Classic Movies says that footage was cut. And how--IMDB and TCM alike list the movie as 70 minutes, and my copy doesn't even make it to 50! While this leads to one of the most hilariously jarring conclusions of all time, the idea of this movie missing over twenty minutes of footage is disheartening to say the least. The fact that we don't know how much was lost to censorship and how much was lost to film decay is almost worse than not knowing what was on those missing frames. TCM helpfully fills in the blanks, revealing that what's missing is only an extrapolation of what we already see (it's not like there were going to be hidden zombies or anything), but still. That's why I'm especially disappointed that no one else has talked about this movie. If the missing footage is still out there, no one is looking for it, and even if it was found by accident no one would care.

I can understand why even people who have seen this wouldn't care. Drums O' Voodoo has plenty o' faults, with the biggest one being one which afflicts so many old horror movies based off of stage plays: it's essentially a filmed version of the play, with no strong use of the effects that film can offer. There are times where you will find it merciful for a shot of two characters talking to be suddenly interrupted by the dynamic change of showing one of the characters in close-up instead. And when all the characters are hugged together on the cramped "backyard" scene with its terrible, obvious matte painting background, you will suddenly feel like you're sitting in front of a stage. Adding to the tedium this induces is the fact that a lot of the movie is dedicated to a church scene. In fact, the church scene, wherein characters sing, dance, quote scripture, and accuse each other, is arguably the primary scene of the movie, just because of how much time it eats up. That's upsetting, because this scene, once the gospel music stops, draaags. I do not enjoy listening to Biblical sermons even if I find a movie's religious themes interesting. It was a mistake for the filmmakers to spend so much time watching the characters at church when they could have been developing them as people or doling out voodoo vengeance instead.

And yet there is a lot to love. There are fun performances, interesting backstories, and that voodoo cave set has some actual atmosphere to it. There are also some fun trash qualities, like the fact that the movie has a weird humorous approach to naming its characters. It's hard not to fall for a slick, sleazy crook type from the city with a groovy name like "Tom Catt," and I can't believe that the insistence on calling Amos Berry "Elder," or more specifically "Elder Berry," was an accident. It's not fully played for laughs but it kinda sets a tone in your mind. Similarly odd is a character named Brother Zero who we meet during that lengthy sermon sequence. Brother Zero may have the highest-pitched voice I've ever heard in an adult man, and I don't know if this is supposed to be funny or not. The first time he spoke, I had to take a break just to give myself time to "...what?" IMDB tells me that Brother Zero's actor, Fred Bonny, had a lengthy and successful career in vaudeville prior to this, so it probably is supposed to be comedic. Finally, there is the scene where the town lays a trap for Tom Catt and get ready to hang him, so he doesn't whisk away any more girls. Aunt Hagar stops them so that they aren't tainted with unjustly-spilled blood, but not without going on a verbal beatdown against Catt, basically saying that the townsfolk should hang him for how worthless his soul is, and how even though she saves him today, the voodoo spirits will catch up with him eventually for his crimes. She doesn't spare a breath in letting this guy know that she hates his guts. Aunt Hagar is awesome all the way through, and I am officially a Laura Bowman fan for life.

More people should know about Drums O' Voodoo, for all its drawbacks. It's not a great movie, but I am glad to have seen it. It is available from Sinister Cinema even if it's not on their website. (Don't order it from Loving the Classics, the only other source I've found to ostensibly sell it, as the Better Business Bureau and others list them as having scammed a lot of people.) It's a forgotten piece of history, and it has stuff to offer even besides having that distinction. Check it out!

Sugar Hill (1974), by Paul Maslansky

I think I've said it before, but I am grateful to my fellow critics. Obviously, I would have never seen these films if someone in the world hadn't recommended them to me, however indirectly they did so. If your main hobbies are like mine and include watching movie reviews to cover up for the pain and horror of being utterly insignificant, you'll begin to recognize cinematic trends, sub-trends, and sub-sub-trends within the big chunky genres you previously took for granted. Studying blaxploitation for example will lead one to the genre's outset as the "race pictures" made between the 1910s and the 1950s, starring all black casts and marketed to all black audiences--films that reinforced segregation but nonetheless encouraged and enabled black creators and black representation in the media. Race pictures became blaxploitation in the early '70s, arguably beginning with the mandatory Black Panthers initiation watch subject Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971. Blaxploitation has continued long since the death of '70s funk, or at least, genre films made by and starring black people have continued. Some that come to mind are Black Devil Doll from Hell, Tales from the Quadead Zone, Devil Snow, Ax 'Em, and Don't Play With Me. Because these are movies that I like they are probably not the most flattering examples of this, but I considered them all to be truly wonderful films. You can even see movies today that get theater showings which arguably carry on the blaxploitation spirit, in the form of the films of Tyler Perry, which, despite being shredded by critics, do get high audience scores and even get the dubious distinction of top billing at my workplace's Redbox.

And of course there were and are blaxploitation horror films. That is one of those sub-trends I mentioned above: in 1972, of course, we had Blacula, which heralded such films as Blackenstein, Ganja and Hess, and Abby. There had been earlier black-produced horror films, such as the ever-elusive Drums o' Voodoo from 1934, but this new vein was often crossed with the badass protagonists and dicey gang politics of the crime-oriented blaxploitation movies. This is the ground from which Sugar Hill grows, and admittedly I have not seen any of the other famous '70s Blaxploitation movies, by the simple merit of Sugar Hill ranking higher on my priority lists. The reviews always made it sound like a blast, and a blast it is. If Blacula and the others are as good as this, then I have a lot to look forward to.

The plot is pretty straightforward, especially by blaxploitation standards, save for the zombies. Black people own a club, white people wanna steal it. In this case, it's Diana "Sugar" Hill and her boyfriend Langston who own Club Voodoo, subject of intended theft by white crime lord Morgan. When Langston refuses to give in, Morgan kills him, prompting Sugar's quest for vengeance. Fortunately, the voodoo priestess Mama Maitresse can help her. Sugar makes a pact with the witch and Baron Samedi, the voodoo lord of the dead, to receive an army of turkey-killing zombies. Soon everyone in town is paying for the price for offing Sugar's man. Will Sugar manage to find her special brand of justice?

By the end of the thing you'll be hoping she does. The film casts its leads well. While the entire cast puts on a good performance, the black actors shine the brightest, especially Marki Bey as Sugar Hill, who presents a genuinely sympathetic, attractive, and badass voodoo queen, and Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi, who is one of the hammiest hams to ever beautifully ham. Those two are charming and you get attached to them. Baron Samedi in particular is a very strange and intriguing character. He is in some ways a continuation of the character of the same name from Live and Let Die, and that version of Baron Samedi was the only reason why most of us watched that movie to begin with. Sometimes he goofs off; sometimes he's menacing; sometimes he's mocking, especially when he's talking to white people. When white people think they can boss him around, he starts talking like, well...let's just say it's sort of like a banned Warner Brothers cartoon. It's kind of jarring to hear, but the movie makes it clear that all parties know that he's doing it to piss these people off. Because what are they going to do? This isn't a guy calling himself Baron Samedi--he is a legitimate voodoo loa. Weapons are not going to work on him. He calls them out on their racism, and when they try to shove him and Sugar down for that (instead of, y'know, stopping the whole being racist thing), they are killed by zombies. Baron Samedi's got a system, and the system works.

Helping you root for the heroes is the fact that the white people in this movie are bastards. Sure, sometimes they have a glimmer of respectability, but basically all of them spout the n-word whenever they get a chance, and pull all sorts of bullshit about "betters" and the like. Worst of them all is Celeste, Morgan's girlfriend, who is so racist that even he shrugs her off like a rotten corpse. She drops the n-bomb more than anyone in the film, and takes a personal jealousy in Morgan's wandering eyes when Sugar's around. Naturally, she is saved for last, and her implied fate is so dark that I laughed at it out of astonishment. But you really can't feel bad for her.

That her death is memorable is impressive, given that whenever someone dies in this movie it's pretty great. That's because the zombies in this movie are great. They have these weird silver cups over their eyes, and they also have cobwebs all over them, even though they all seem to have been buried sans coffins in earthen graves. (Are underground spiders a thing? Should we fear them?) I swear to God that the first scene of the zombies rising from their graves goes on for ten minutes. For however long it is, it's not long enough. Intercut with scenes of these zombies crawling from the earth are shots of Mama Maitresse and Sugar Hill getting really excited over the prospect of having an army of zombies, along with Baron Samedi's sweet, sweet mugging. Whenever these zombies kill someone, it's usually done in a way that resists repetition, making each individual kill scene satisfying. The quirkiness of some of these deaths, along with their roots in vengeance, reminded me in a lot of fun ways of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Which is funny because I also realized that this movie almost shares a plot with Bad Magic. I guess a lot of revenge horror films have similarities.

If you want to get a good taste of archetypical '70s exploitation, Sugar Hill is a great start. If I have somehow failed to convince you, I should say that this movie's is a Motown funk piece called "Supernatural Voodoo Woman." The movie also contains a large, large building called "the Voodoo Museum and Research Library."

P.S. Originally this review was meant for January until I had to do some schedule rearranging for the site. In the course of it I forgot that February was Black History Month. I find it to be a happy coincidence that I post this now. I'd say that a movie where a bunch of black people avenge themselves on some racist white gangsters with zombies is a good anti-racist text. 

TAIL OF THE LIZARD KING is Now Available!

This post is going to be a bit more personal than usual, but this is still a matter of relevance. You see, the wondrous folk over at Ramble House have published my trash-literature book, Tail of the Lizard King! This is my first published novel and I can hardly express my gratitude and excitement. I started work on Tail after my first intimations with the stuff that I talk about at meetings of the Book Club of Desolation, and I like to think it contains echoes of Harry Stephen Keeler and Ron Haydock. Who's Ron Haydock, you ask? Hm...I wonder who the subject of the next Book Club will be...

Tail contains two novellas, the titular story and Kaliwood. The former tells the story of Sinthia, a sex-crazed pot addict who goes on a search for truth and weed...and in doing so finds the key to revenge on the men who wronged her. Kaliwood is about Karl Denim, a repressed film director who may find the answer to his problems in an area of India where the dread dinosaur Noxosaurus is said to live. If any of that caught your eye, or even if it didn't, order your copy and get exploring! After all, entertainment is my sole goal in life, and hot damn, check out that cover! Gavin O'Keefe, the RH cover artist, is a superstar, and you should buy the book just for his efforts alone. So what are you waiting for?

Psyched by the 4D Witch (1972), by "Victor Luminera"

Okay, I'm starting to think I just like stupid shit.

What would happen if the people who made A Clockwork Blue had even more weed but even less money? If such a thing did exist, and it was a horror film as well as a softcore porn, it would be one of the best horror porn films ever. How fortunate! Our universe also contains such a movie. No, none of the same people from A Clockwork Blue were actually involved with the creation of Psyched by the 4D Witch, but that doesn't matter. "Victor Luminera" and his band of merry persons were simultaneously dumber and more brilliant than the crew of that film. After all, one of the few of their number to get a credit is named "Esoterica," and she along with many others brings us this Tale of Demonology by way of Transetheric Vision. Transetheric Vision is extremely grainy and looks like a lot of shots of masks being waved around behind a red filter. Indeed, there are many shots of floating masks being waved around behind red filters in this film. And to think that that's just the start of it.

A girl named Cindy studies sexual witchcraft in her spooky old house, which summons her Salemite ancestress, a witch named Abigail. Abigail makes a deal Cindy can't refuse--she'll teach her the secrets of magical sex and give her orgasms, while keeping her "a virgin for [her] daddy." An increasingly disturb string of sexual escapades ensues, triggered by Abigail's magic words: "Let's fantasy fuck now." What starts out as simple things like masturbation and fucking gay guys straight leads to more terrifying reaches, like lesbianism, sexual vampirism, and the ol' snake-up-the-rectum. Toothpaste-rabies ghouls dominate the second half, after Cindy is sealed away for disobeying Abigail after the "Salem witch-bitch" tries to get her to screw not just a corpse...but a female corpse! Have I mentioned that this movie is absolutely traumatized by the existence of gay people? Anyway, in the end, straight sex in the material world is what Cindy needs to break Abigail's spell, so she's off to the races fucking her best friend's German psychiatrist dad. But can anyone truly stop a witch who lives in a dimension beyond our understanding...?

I can't entirely do this movie justice, and I already expended my use of the word "psychedelic" in the review for The Witches' Mountain. Which is sad, and a grievous error on my behalf, because this movie stops at nothing to bring us a full rainbow of colors. Beyond the trippy visuals (and audio, and plot, and...), there is much on display here. Particularly, I want to point out that this movie probably has the most stereotypical and awful piece of "Chinatown" stock music ever. It comes out of nowhere and is, like many things in the movie, hilarious, but also offensive. Many things as weird and unnecessary as this occur, and these "things" are surrounded by a story that sound like a pulp written jointly by Anton LaVey and Kenneth Anger. It is miraculous.

I should also talk about the soundtrack of this movie (outside of the racist Chinese music). It's one of many '60s/'70s exploitation movies that have made to the A-List that heavily samples "A Night on Bald Mountain." Bald Mountain is played almost as much as the lyrical theme music that recurs throughout, which repeatedly warns us that the 4D witch is "born from the belly of the devil's bitch." You will hear this song so much that you will begin to love it, even though it is Stockholm Syndrome. It's great to have an ineptly written and performed song play so many times in such an ineptly written and performed movie.

Psyched by the 4D Witch is unlike The Witches' Mountain in that it condemns rather than condones intellectual analysis. It is pure fluff, it is comfort, and it is thus probably bad for you. Mountain may be psychedelia's intuitive processes laid bare, but Psyched is its mindless bubbly idiot joy. In its stupidity it really is something to gawk at rather than truly entertain. But I'm entertained by gawking, and perhaps I make true the old principle that you are what you eat. For I "eat" stupid shit like this, down to the bone. I have now seen this movie probably as many times as I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate or Don't Go in the Woods, and I have seen those movies probably about thirty times each. I feel like that makes me a bad person.

I suspect you are a good person, and so I want to do you some good. It's with that in mind that I will say that if you tend to adore exclusively "normal" movies, this one may make you puke. But I'm sure someone somewhere has said that the goal of cinema is to evoke a reaction. Puking is a reaction.

If you have to puke, puke to this movie.

The Witches' Mountain (1972), by Raul Artigot

As you may have noticed, I use the word "trippy" to refer to a lot of the movies I talk about on here. Today's movie is essentially perfect for getting deep into the head of that adjective. This movie is nothing less than a waking nightmare, a dream in the dark. It has haunted me since I was a kid, and even to this day, I don't know if I've explored all of its mysteries, and I don't know if these mysteries exist beyond my head. But let's find out, when we travel together to The Witches' Mountain.

A lot of reviews I've seen for this movie highlight this movie's intro, and for good reason. A woman, whom we later learn is named Carla, comes home to her apparent mansion somewhere deep in the Spanish countryside. She discovers weird things scattered around her house, including a wig stabbed in the lawn with a knife, and eventually a dead cat. The apparent culprit is a precocious child named Gerta. Gerta is a creepy child done right, because she is never properly explained, and because Carla seems to be in her power, spending most of this opening scene desperately trying to bargain with her. Gerta basically says that she must take Carla to an unspecified location, which makes Carla extremely uncomfortable. The scene ends with Carla seemingly killing Gerta and herself by setting a gas fire.

Except after the credits (flushed with a creepy choir singing in an incomprehensible language), Carla is alive! She wants to get back together with her photographer boyfriend Mario, but Mario (who resembles his video game name-sharer if he was a '70s era college hipster) calls up his editor to cancel his vacation so he can get away from her. His boss sends him to take pictures of a lake on top of a mysterious, virtually-uninhabited mountain, and he accepts this job. His abandonment of Carla is never explained, but maybe he knows she's wrapped up in something supernatural. On his drive to the mountain, Mario picks up a girl whom he photographs nude, the laid-back and flirtatious Delia, played by the ever-charismatic horror queen Patty Shepard. She agrees to travel with him, even when he hallucinates weird music. The ensuing journey with lead them to a Marty Feldman lookalike innkeeper, inexplicable photos, and, of course, the coven of witches that is hidden at the mountain's peak.

And the whole time, the attentive audience is creeped the fuck out. If you focus--and can survive long periods of literally nothing happening--you can get easily sucked into the setting of the mountain. The dense jungles, the winding roads. People who like road trips through the middle of nowhere like I do (having been a ghost-hunter in the American Midwest) will find themselves lost in the scenery of rustic Spain, and the quietness of the evil present in the story makes it believable. That is to say, I totally believe that there are mountains in the far reaches of continental Europe where one can find strange things just like those depicted in this film. At least, I like to believe in them.

I wholeheartedly believe that The Witches' Mountain should be viewed as an artistic classic. It's a movie that relies on clues--it never says anything outright. The ending is hard to make out because of the poor video quality, but it's tied earlier to the scenes of the barbarian-man the witches have chained up in a cave. On my third viewing I realized the witches are holding up these chains to Mario, basically saying he'll be the next to wear them. Well, in some myths involving witches, the coven is composed entirely of women, who keep a single man as a prisoner basically to breed more witches and keep the coven alive. So that's what these witches do. And it's never expressly stated, never allowed to leave the shadows. It's a movie that's incredibly relaxing, and so maybe your brain turns off and lets you miss things. But if you can get into its rhythm, it'll sing to you.

Nostalgia brought me back to this one. I first watched it back in middle school after my aunt and uncle introduced me to Mill Creek Entertainment's 50 Chilling Classics pack, which contained the 1964 zombie classic, I Eat Your Skin, which I consider to be my first trash movie. My brother and I thought it was boring and we were right. But I remembered how the boredom and slowness really did take on that bizarre dreamy feeling, with a certain '70s trippiness to it. Years later in college I wanted to get creeped out by a "bad" movie. And so when I came back to this one, I was pleasantly surprised that while it was still a rough watch due to the pacing, there was enough to pay attention to it that it gave you the impression the people behind it cared. Perhaps they didn't care enough to make it in-your-face-exciting, but they left behind something gentler. Something worthy of checking out.

I've driven myself nuts trying to find out anything else about this film, including which mountain exactly it was shot on. I would love to visit the locales from this movie, especially the barebones inn run by the deaf not-Feldman (actually European creep-star Victor Israel, of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Hell of the Living Dead) or Delia's spooky old house. After all, it is a film about the dark secrets of the countryside, and so location is everything. I did manage to find an interview with director Artigot, wherein he talks about his movies facing censorship in Spain. Horror films that were deemed contrary to the religious goals of the Franco regime--and since we're talking trash, I should specify Francisco Franco, rather Jess--were heavily cut, especially if they involved themes like witchcraft. Artigot apparently also faced sabotage against his picture alongside these cuts, which removed some presumably-now-lost scenes involving nudity intended for more progressive foreign audiences. Discovering this stuff gave me a new look into the European horror scene in a way that didn't involve the Argento/Franco/Fulci/Mattei/Fragasso/D'Amato/Lenzi web of unification that you tend to find everywhere if you can bother to do enough research. As crazy as some of these movies got, they were also bound to rules that washed away those of lesser stamina. Raul Artigot, and The Witches' Mountain, held on, if anything because of a bootleg that formed the U.S. release.

Because a lot of my love of the movie comes from this external stuff, it is indeed a hard movie to enjoy. These meta-details don't help the film stand any stronger, and I would totally understand anyone falling asleep during it. If you show patience, though, the weird will leak out, and it will be good.

One last thing, in regards to the quality of the video, which is universal in every release I've seen: it is pretty bad. Consequently, I am super curious about the apparent HD print shown off in this YouTube video. If anyone out there has any information on this print, please let me know! Especially if it's linked to an updated release! In the meantime, watch what version you can find. The darkness works to good effect with the eeriness--even if you have to squint now and then.

P.S. Cihangir Gaffari, who plays Mario, also appeared in what appears to be a sexploitation Western called Seytan kan kusturacak, which translators tell me comes out to mean Satan Will Vomit Blood! This movie was made in 1972, just a year before its director, T. Fikret Ucak, made the world-famous 3 dev adam, aka Turkish Spider-Man vs. Santo and Captain America. I can only assume that Satan Will Vomit Blood is amazing and that I must find it immediately. (Ucak made another Western called Azrailin bes atlisi, which translates to, hell yes, The Five Horsemen of the Grim Reaper. And bless the lords of awesome names, this one's on YouTube!)

The Tony Blair Witch Project (2000), by Michael A. Martinez

Since 2009, I've made about a dozen horror movies of various lengths (about thirty minutes to an hour). Some of them are easy for me to appreciate--others are rather embarrassing. Some are neither, or a fusion of both. Apparently there are some bootlegs of them floating around, and I've even found a few reviews, for movies both nostalgic and cringe-worthy. Right now I'm working on something kind of serious (as serious as I get anyway), which will hopefully avoid the blush-worthy category and be legitimately entertaining. I raise this point so that I can talk about my fourth movie, which I called Bigfoot Resurrection. Unlike my past three movies, this one involved quite a few levels of collaboration with people who weren't my immediate family members. I turned to my friends, and together with three people plus my brother and my dad, we made our Sasquatch epic. It was one of those fusion movies, both glorious and shitty. There are a lot of "gags" in it, and some weird tangents. The acting is mercurial. There was no script, except for the fact that we knew he had to have a scene where Bigfoot disembowels me and hangs me with my own intestines.

I can say, despite my mixed thoughts about it, that Bigfoot Resurrection has higher production values that The Tony Blair Witch Project. And, at face value, the latter film is much more meta than the former. And that is why the latter film is so cool to me.

The Tony Blair Witch Project is infamous by way of its placement on the IMDB Bottom 100. I don't entirely know how it ended up there, as I have never located any sort of release for the film. No home video, no theaters, no filmfests. I don't even know how I have my copy--it's an .avi file that just happens to be on my computer, and has been on it for years. CREEPYPASTERS TAKE NOTE. I sincerely doubt that so many people have seen the movie. All the same, I hope a lot of people have seen it. And I hope someone knows something about the production. If you do, please talk to me about it. How was this made, and what happened after?

So basically, Tony Blair and a bunch of other British personages, including film critic Alexander Walker, go to West Virginia in search of the titular Tony Blair Witch. They are played by a bunch of West Virginians wearing masks made of printed-out JPEGs of the faces of these people. The noble Prime Minister also pisses off a bunch of mall employees who may be either awkward friends or terrified/enraged strangers. In any case it is striking, in a slightly squirmy way. They also make fun of Americans basically all the time, calling them faggots 'n' whatnot. This goes on for quite awhile--it is, in fact, most of the movie. In the woods, they stumble across an abandoned town, which they smash the windows of. This also makes up a sizable chunk of the film. However, the magic truly begins when they are set upon by a gang of hicks. Suddenly, a whirlwind of amazing images and noises arise! Dicks are cut off! People vomit lime Jell-O! Slow-mo appears for some reason! As does the soundtrack from Nightmare City! And finally, in a tearful confession to the camera mirroring that of the main girl from Blair Witch, Tony Blair declares the resurrection of the monarchy and the re-implementation of droit du seigneur. Throughout the entire thing the characters insert factoids about 1980s British culture, as if this was made for a class. A class where the teacher was fine with property damage, underage drinking, castration, and Umberto Lenzi references.

That would be the WORLD'S KOOLEST TEACHER.

I mentioned that this movie is meta. Well, at multiple points in the movie, several potential outtakes are shown in the movie. Outtakes that show the actors making fun of their "characters," while speaking in American accents. These scenes are part of the story, and as such, these characters are actually bizarre American hipsters who mock both their own culture and that of Britain. They also have a psychotic dedication to their satire, implying something of a nihilistic outlook on life and death. It doesn't matter that your friends are getting killed by hillbillies in the woods. It's for art, bruh. That makes them even more over the top than a lot of other found footage entities, including the relatively dumb Blair Witch kids and the disgusting assholes of another movie this film rips off, Cannibal Holocaust. Which brings me to my next point...

Obnoxious or not, it is kind of neat that a bunch of high school seniors decided that the movies they needed to rip off included, yes, the then-super relevant Blair Witch Project, but also Cannibal Holocaust and not one but TWO Lenzi films, Nightmare City and Cannibal Ferox. (I'm guessing that's where the dick-cutting is from, though it's not like Holocaust is unlikely to have schlong-slicing in some cut of it or another.) It's sort of a last hurrah to a kind of exploitation movies from decades past. The early 21st Century was a transition period in horror spoofs. The Scary Movie franchise marched on and on into increasingly lazy and cheap things like A Haunted House 2. I know some people who liked that stuff at the start of the '00s, but rarely have I met anyone who will support a lot of the stuff that makes it to theaters these days. Perhaps their source material is flagging too and that's the problem, though nostalgia does paint one's glasses rose, as my mother's cousin's late brother-in-law Herbert used to say. I don't have much of an opinion on the found footage craze (it's kind of an easy target), but in the density of it, Tony Blair Witch is more relevant than ever. It is a found footage spoof not only of the granddaddy of the 21st Century found footage piece, but of at least one of the great-granddaddies of the genre in general. One that, by the merit of its own ambition, is actually rather funny and charming.

Yes, it will probably take a couple views to enjoy this movie. Teenage boys are still annoying even here. But there is muted creativity and great fun all around, even without intestine-gallows. I watch it every British election season. (That's a lie. But I have started watching it a couple times a year. Which is more than I can say of a lot of my own movies.)