An American Hippie in Israel (1972), by Amos Sefer

I am a little worried this review may get me in some trouble no matter how I end up wording it. Let it be known that while An American Hippie in Israel may be the supposed "worst Israeli movie ever made," as far as I can tell, its internal politics are firmly of the hippie creed. I don't know anything about the history of the hippie movement in Israel but if this movie is any sign, it existed. The hippies didn't seem to be too keen on nationalism and so this movie is, in a lot of ways, pretty apolitical to modern contexts. (Plus, the name "Israel" is never spoken--everyone just says "our country.") At the same it is also very political, as it is probably the most stereotypical hippie movie possible. You want pot and acid? Check. You want ugly people getting naked? Check. People yelling from car windows about "BEAUTIFUL FEELING"? Check. Hideous and depressing pop song that worms its way into your head till the end of time? Check. Angry young people blaming the audience for 'Nam? Check.

Actually, the most stereotypical hippie movie possible would be less entertaining than this movie, because this is also the most awkward movie ever. But let's take it easy--I'll discuss the plot first, while reaffirming those theses self-evidently. Mike is an American hippie traveling in Israel. He meets an actress named Elizabeth who basically immediately wants to bone him. She does so even after he talks about how he started killing people in Vietnam when he was 19, and how he lost count of how many people he killed. Part of this speech involves breaking the fourth wall and yelling "YOU FOOLS! STOP PUSHING BUTTONS! FOOLS, FOOLS, FOOLS!" Mike and his new lady-friend then party with some more hippies for a long time while a song we get to hear many times cautions us, "Someday we'll have to pay / For taking time to play / Just when we thought we'd seen the day / We kept the wolves at bay." Yeccchhh. It's okay, though, because two mime-faced Men in Black show up and shoot all the hippies. This leads Mike and Elizabeth, along with two others, Francoise and Komo, to go on a fateful road trip...and the movie becomes something entirely other. Friends become foes, and morals become confused.

Along the way, there are plenty of cringeworthy and hilarious moments to supplement the freakshow gawker we all have. "I'll head out of here when I get what I want: pretty girls," Mike says. Both he and Elizabeth chuckle, then look away from each other with boredom in their faces. Later, as the hippies begin to turn against one another when they strand themselves on an island lake in an acidic attempt to build a utopia, there is a five minute sequence where Komo and Mike argue. Komo speaks Hebrew, Mike speaks English. This leads to Mike chanting, "I don't get ya, man! It's like Chinese to me, man!" The dialogue was written by someone hip to the hippie lingo, but who also wanted to insert some dramatic dinner theatre moments too. Plus, they probably didn't have too much of a brain. All the same, the awkwardness and the repeat head-bludgeoning of the hippie peace creed (to the point where even I got annoyed) make the film seem incredibly earnest more than anything else. I'm not the first person to say that, I know, but it is shocking how wide-eyed and inspired the film is. It is incredibly clumsy and hamfisted, of course, but in a way that is sincerely charming.

Which makes the ending really weird. Basically, Komo and Mike kidnap the ladies all Tor Johnson style and wage war on each other. Eventually a goat comes along that I guess they all want to eat, and while fighting over the goat, they rip themselves apart. Then, the two mime-faced guys, who are probably supposed to be Death, huh?, drive off. The ending is foreshadowed in silent psychedelic slowmo scenes that imply that Mike still loves killing and that he fantasizes about murdering his comrades. In a lot of ways, I take the ending to be a pretty intense anti-hippie message. That is to say that youthful foolishness stranded them on their island, and because they were pursued by the MIBs they were always doomed to die for it. Peace and love doesn't pay the bills and it doesn't get food on the table, especially when it gets you stranded on an island surrounded by sharks. (They coulda eaten the sharks. I don't like sharks being killed but there were a lot of sharks in this lake in the middle of the desert.) It also seems to be saying that those who seem to love peace the most may be the most violent. Someday they'll have to pay for taking time to play, indeed.

This movie was made in the '70s, right on the cusp of being hit with the tsunami of punk nihilism. It's funny to see this movie be so quiet with its apparently hatred of liberal ideals (for better or worse) when just five years later, Nick Zedd released They Eat Scum, a movie where leather-clad Nazi twenty-somethings cut off people's dicks and destroy cities with nukes. Instead of songs about paying for playing, it had "YMCA." (Is there any other "YMCA" besides THE "YMCA"?) It played while the Nazi punks were being torn apart by lobster mutants. That is, assuming that this movie does have a touch of bitterness to it? Because of how genuine and innocent this movie is in its first two-thirds, I have to question my own interpretation that it is bitter in the first place. I think it's actually rather confused about itself, in truth. Maybe someday I'll learn more about the production and that will solve the mysteries. For now, I apply to this film, my theory that confusion is the response of an audience that has encountered something genuinely artistic. An American Hippie is open to many contradictory interpretations. Therefore it is inherently valuable, entertaining, and "good."

"Good" in this case simply means that I like it.

This movie can be incredibly tedious. I can't watch it as often as I do many other films on this blog, because as a general liberal I find some of the dialogue in this film emblematic of the empty nonsense that a lot of the hippies (stereotypically) believed in. In truth it represents the fact that a lot of the hippies were hypocritical, and were in large part responsible for the elections of Reagan and Thatcher. But I am dipping into hypocrisy myself, by becoming political in this entry despite my concern of taking flak for that. Suffice it to say that yes, even I think hippies are/were obnoxious, even as someone who believes that love and peace are important things. Also, a lot of scenes are obvious filler. People sitting around shouting "WONDERFUL FEELING" comes to mind. And, you do hear that song a lot and it's such an earworm. So. Feel free to skip around, but please do make sure to have one watching where you endure the whole thing. It will reward you.

It is very dumb. It is also faux-artsy in a way that is still dumb, but also charming. It sticks for the wrong reasons, and it makes me want to probe further into Israeli cinema. After all, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Manos: The Hands of Fate, and Troll 2 are, despite the frequency of their reception of the title, not the Worst Movies Ever Made. Certainly not the Worst American Movies. So I hope sincerely that An American Hippie in Israel is not the Worst Israeli Movie. Because if it's not, that means I have something to look forward to.

(Yes, that really is the title card on my copy. N American Hippie in Israel it is, then.)

The Cross of Seven Jewels (1987), by Marco Antonio Andolfi

If you were to take Bryan James' Run Coyote Run, mixed it with bootleg Waldemar Daninsky, and featured the Bruno Mattei dub actors, you would get this movie. It is a werewolf movie with a sex cult in it. It's also an action movie with Mafiosi, car chases, and Caspar Gutman impersonators. This is another one of those movies where the writing committee all each liked different genres. It becomes simultaneously spooky, hilarious, and testerone-y to an extreme, even though one of those adjectives isn't exactly real. The plot is somewhat complicated, but here's what I know of it...

Marco (played by director Marco Andolfi) has his jeweled cross stolen by motorcycle bandits while he visits his cousin. Both the theft and the visit are bad because firstly, Marco wants to bang his cousin, and secondly, the cross is the only thing that stops him from transforming into a werewolf! A werewolf who is actually a nude man wearing half a Chewbacca mask. Apparently Marco's lycanthropy is linked to the BDSM sex cult seen at the beginning of the film. Yes, this movie has one of those too. There are many fights with various types of gangsters, some of which involving some badass cops who appear to have been transplanted in from another movie. Ah well. Things become more complicated when the underlings of a Senator show up to retrieve Marco, and when we find out that the werewolf god the cult worships killed Marco's witch mother by exploding her belly. Will the answer lie with "Amnesia the Fortune Teller"?

This movie is over before you know it, even though it also drags. It's full of creative ideas, and no wonder--it, like many other great movies, serves as a glimpse into a weird otherworld. Everything that comes at us in the film is nonsensical and foreign, and it slowly gains momentum as time goes on. In this world, zombie Vatican priests can lead werewolf-worshipping cults involving lots of leather and whipping. That's just how it is. Sometimes it takes a little while to get from idea to idea, but when they all line up it's remarkable just unfettered this movie is.

It is also ludicrously cheap, as evidenced by the Wookiee mask and furry cock-socks on display. I believe the movie went into the drugs that fueled the script, and also into shooting the movie on film. European film is great because even in 1987 they still resisted the VHS scourge (though many Americans did too). Thus this movie seems artsy somehow while also being incredibly sleazy and cheap. This is pretty light stuff, outside of a werewolf rape scene (obligatory, probably), and the cousin-flirting--there's no Joe D'Amato here. It feels actually pretty American, with the action sequence lunacy and with the Universal homage they do, aka the werewolf-makeup transformation sequence with the fades and whatnot. As in those movies, it goes on forever and becomes inane after awhile. It's not nearly as boring as a Daninsky film though.

Insanity is the peril of boredom. That's why so many of us become insane--because our lives are empty. Madness fills our lives in the form of great movies like this one. When we watch these movies, we believe in the impossible, even when we don't believe in what's happening on the screen. We are taken to a fantasy land where the ultimate escapism happens. It turns out at the end of the tunnel of escapism is love.

I love this movie and it reminds me of several other movies, because of course it does. Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead, William Edwards' Dracula, the Dirty Old Man, Nick Millard's .357 Magnum--these and many others come to mind. That means we're on the right path, probably. That it takes all those movies and adds even more influences to the cocktail is always truly impressive.

This was my first time seeing this movie, but I plan on watching it again sometime soon. Perhaps then I'll have more to say. I would like to apologize now for not having done a Christmas movie, but this movie has a cross in it, which Kirk Cameron would say is an empty Christmas tree. I think I may be getting that mixed up but Kirk Cameron Christmas doesn't play by anyone's rules, least of all Kirk Cameron's. As an aside, I watched God's Not Dead on Christmas. That will not be reviewed on this site because, surprise, it is not fun.

The Cross of Seven Jewels is fun. Go for that instead.

Beasties (1991), by Steven Paul Contreras

Over the years, I've been subjected to two particular movies repeatedly over the years: Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Hobgoblins. They are staples of the University of Minnesota Morris Bad Movie Club, which I was Captain of for two years. Hobgoblins was the MST3K episode variant of course, but Hobgoblins is one of those movies that even MST3K can't save from being abominable. Killer Klowns is a legitimately good movie, but I can only watch a good movie every so often every handful of years. I hate good movies that I've overwatched. I start to see flaws in them, and unlike flaws in the sorts of movies this blog is about, those flaws are legitimate faults rather than great boons. In any case, I sometimes have wanted to see a Killer Klowns-type movie, and a Hobgoblins-type movie (that is to say, a Gremlins-type movie), that has trash-like qualities. I didn't think that two such beautiful potentials would be fused into one film. Thus the beauty of today's film is squared. I can only say now what I will inevitably say in the end: it must be seen to be understood, for it is an experienced (blah, blah). Let's get down to it, because the devil's in the details.

So this movie in which everything is wrong opens with some couples making out and fucking at a lover's lane. They are attacked by the Gremlins, Hobgoblins, Ghoulies, Beasties, and some of them are killed. We are introduced to the fact that this '90s (but shot-in-the-late-'80s) horror film has tits in it. This is proper. Also proper is the presence of kitschy houses where bored babes are menaced. The dialogue is suitably clumsy and radical alike, too, and the effects and sets are good but also noticeably shitty (delightfully so). Unlike most movies which present this much awesome awfulness up front, Beasties sustains this craziness throughout the entire film, which escapes the boredom that plagues even some of the best movies on this site. A member of the makeout gang, a nerd named Nelson, discovers that the Beasties are the spawn of a hideous telepathic alien who lives inside a bio-ship. In their quest to discover more, Nelson and friends are captured by a group of BDSM-style punks led by "Hammerhead," who has gotten mixed up in the cult of an evil alien or demon called Osiris. It becomes clear on the introduction to this that Beasties is in fact a three-headed film--it's made of Gremlins, Killer Klowns, and possibly Mad Max (though there is an equal chance of 1989's Games of Survival). It is a fucking insane film.

I don't want to spoil the fantastic ending of the movie. However, I also want to talk about how absolutely astonishing it is.

Basically it turns out that Nelson will end up working for a military corporation that uses his research to start a nuclear war. Nelson mutates into the creature on the bio-ship, and travels back in time to pass on knowledge of the future to his past self. Apparently, Osiris will be the Nelson-monster's enemy in the future. In order to change the timeline, however, future-Nelson kidnaps past-Nelson's girlfriend. But can the future really be changed?

Holy shit, I wish I knew. I so deeply wish there was a sequel to this movie, and my heart hurts over the fact that Steven Paul Contreras never made another film. Given the lack of credits for most people in this movie, it certainly comes across as a friend-group production that actually had some money behind it. That's shit I like seeing--friends hanging out, doing awesome artsy things together. Yes, I called Beasties art, but if you don't agree, you haven't been reading. And if you have been, you need to see the movie.

The best thing about this type of movie is how awkward it is. Awkwardness and amateurishness are a deadly but intoxicating combo. Voice cracks, flubbed lines, stammers, stutters--all are wonderful and show the humanity of the participants. This movie's Killer Klowns attributes arise most significantly amidst the most awkward moments, such as the bizarrely placed comedy. We literally get characters who utter, "It looks like someone had a snot festival!!" They are then Larry-Curly-Moe s-s-s-scared into running away as Benny Hill-esque music plays. This particular scene, albeit with different dialogue, happens about three times in this movie. What I'm saying is: a bunch of adults got together and decided to make a buck ripping off Gremlins. Only some of them wanted to make a comedy, and some wanted to amp up the sci-fi to Doctor Who levels of complexity. Finally, there was the faction leaning towards the literal cyberpunk genre. Somehow four or five scripts were edited down into one and set to an 80-minute film. And it was deemed okay to send to distributors.

Some people climb Everest. Some people make Beasties.

Suffice it to say that this movie is something of a testament to the power of Gremlins. There are so many Gremlins clones that it's not funny, and I've only referenced some of them throughout this review. There are a lot of similarities between Gremlins and Troll, and of course while Troll 2 would have been born without Troll (it had been in production under the name Goblins), I'm not sure it would have quite stood from the rest of the insanity of Claudio Fragasso's career if it didn't have that fake sequel nonsense attached to it. In a way, Troll 2 and Beasties are like second cousins, which I find appropriate. Troll 2 fans may not like Beasties, though, as they are from very different branches of the family tree.

But that sentence is also one of my jokes. Everyone would like Beasties. It is Gremlins unbounded, Gremlins on DMT. Watch it as a testament to creativity, a gem among gems of those movies that will do whatever with no regards to budget, profit, or relatability.

Winterbeast (1991), by Christopher Thies

There is no better time to watch this movie than during the winter. Read that sentence again and strike it from your memory, because it's wrong. There is no better time to watch this movie than anytime. Watch it constantly, because it is a tremendous flaw in space that must be observed continuously. New information pours from it constantly that makes our lives better. Winterbeast is charming, funny, atmospheric, and friendly. While also somehow managing to be rather sleazy. If movies that balance those many qualities evenly and consistently are considered to be well-made, then by George, this movie be well-made indeed. Let's get right to looking at what makes it great, but remember...flaw in space. It cannot be adequately described (much like most of the movies that crop up on this site, as you mighta noticed). But I will try.

The plot is relatively simple: two park rangers are trying to look for one of their missing team members and keep being blocked by the suspicious Mister Sheldon, who runs the last of the old Borscht Belt style vacation lodges on the mountain. (I am one of the queers who has nearly perfect gaydar, but I don't need to tell what's up with Mister Sheldon.) Meanwhile, one of the rangers is having dreams about a Native American human sacrifice idol, while is tied to the various claymation monsters wandering the woods, killing many people, including topless women. Several topless women appear in this movie but most of them are photographs. If you can't get your actresses to take their tops off, just put porn in your movie. That'll make up for it.

Anyway, yes, it turns out Sheldon is a servant of these ancient Native American demons, as demonstrated by his keeping several bodies in his house, and by the fact that his head melts. He ends up creating what is easily one of the most perfectly calculated "what the fuck" scenes" in cinematic history, which is what instantly sold the movie to me. You'll know the scene when you see it. The good guys win, of course. I'm okay with spoiling that, but I will not spoil the scene. When you see it, it will sell the movie to you too.

That murky cloud of cinema that people call "bad movies" often hold some truly great treasures. There are the movies that never tried, the movies that did try but failed, and the movies that tried and succeeded. Those that don't try are the worst, of course. The second category, the failures, are often magnificent in that they are the ones that are alienated from human experience and reality. Those are the ones that let us remember that sometimes the things we think matter really don't--things like realism and physics. The third category is sometimes not as purely entertaining as the second group, but it is still awesome to see a batch of people take on that ultimate foe of the capitalist society, pennilessness, and come out on top with a fulfilling, professional creation. Winterbeast is of the third category. It is clearly "cheap" and I think that, to a degree, that influences its obscurity. (Obviously some low-budget movies still make it to the top as "great" movies, but this blog is dedicated to greatness of a different sort. The winners have their prize by merit of winning--I want to help the losers win too.) But it's not amateurishly made, in regards to cinematography, acting, or effects. In fact, the effects really do rival those of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, and I don't need to specify which Clash. Were these effects too cheesy for 1991? I've read here and there that this movie took an incredibly long time to make, and in fact had its origin when Clash was being made. I'm always happy to see this stuff, and it looks better than a lot of the other stuff I've seen in the early '90s, that's for sure.

I don't think I'm alone when I consider this movie to sort of be in a trilogy with a couple of other movies. The first one is Equinox and the second is Evil Dead. Those two are classic horror movies that feature isolated forest settings wherein a group of average Joes have a brush with the supernatural, usually in the form of stop-motion animation. This particular style of movie always comforts me. Forests are some of the spookiest places on Earth and if you stir that in with some Harryhausenesque shenanigans, you've got a good thing going. These movies are serious but don't take themselves terribly seriously. They always preserve some degree of innocence, even as things like tree-rape and porn obsession leech into the narrative, changing with the times. They tend to remind me greatly of the monster movies of the 1950s, except unbound from the censors of their times. It really makes you think about what those movies could've looked like if the values had been different.

I guess if there's one thing this movie gives me, it's hope. If my memory serves me well and this is the movie that took, like, ten years total to shoot, I like to believe to believe that any of us unprivileged filmmakers can accomplish similar dreams if we have enough patience. As I've said in some previous entries, I'm about to give it another crack soon. But real life is upon. I have to work hours and do taxes and all that. So I must be patient if I'm to make this a reality. I must hang onto my passion. Winterbeast is a movie about passion, and because of how stupendous the final product is, it is a movie that shows the greatness of passion in turn. Do what you love. Allow yourself only your own rules, and you will do right. Just as long as you're not a dick about it.

Anyway. I don't know if my perspectives will be valuable to anyone or not. I'm at the point in my life where I want to be useful, but fear I'm not, while also wanting to do what I love. I'm scared that none of this stuff, the stuff I love, matters. Even if I know that that shouldn't matter to me. I do think these films can help people, if they're open to guts, gore, dicks, and general tastelessness. It's not about the content of the films, though. It's what they leave with you.

Winterbeast has left a lot with me. It helps me rest, knowing it's there no matter what the season.

A Clockwork Blue (1972), by Eric Jeffrey Haims

I shoulda known what I was getting into. As soon as I opened up the case for the Vinegar Syndrome DVD of Eric Jeffrey Haims' twin wonders, A Clockwork Blue and The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio, I noticed that the lefthand side of the case contained a brochure on how to activate a free trial for Skinaflix, a site which apparently contains "the finest and rarest classic erotica, in beautiful 1080p"! I'm sure someone out there will be greatly pleased by it, but unfortunately I think even the mighty Skinaflix has been reduced to naught but a mote of dust besides the other guest of the clamshell its brochure lives in. A Clockwork Blue, this little-known '70s sci-fi sex comedy, will satisfy any fan of anything for eternity, whether they like trash cinema or not. It is a shocking display of pure insanity that neither Kubrick nor Burgess could've ever hoped to keep up with.

Of course, that may send the impression that A Clockwork Blue is a ripoff of A Clockwork Orange. There are no droogs or milk bars on display here, however. Instead, there is a time-traveling Jerry Lewis clone named Homer who goes on an epic quest to avoid sex with historical figures as much as possible. Said quest specifically begins in Heaven, where we are introduced to a character who will appear often in a variety of unrelated inserts, a black man named, what else, Blacky. He spies on Homer and his misadventures using a TV made out of a watermelon. Yes, it's true, this movie is rather offensive. God gives Homer and Blacky each one wish. Homer wishes for a time-machine watch, whereas Blacky makes the mistake of wishing for a million dollars. It's hinted that Blacky wants to take revenge on Homer, as his useless wish is apparently his fault, but never pursues this revenge so I guess not.

Homer's great-great-grandson, also named Homer, is a lab assistant for a pretentious bearded professor whose actor seems unaware that he is in a comedy, and similarly unaware that his voice is often drowned by the soundtrack (no less than "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"). Homer stares at a girl's panties for what seems like eternity, but eventually he travels back to the American Revolution, finding himself having become George Washington. And that's when the madness begins...

A Clockwork Blue is always riveting, even during some of the sex scenes, which is a rare feat in a lot of movies having to do with sex. It reveals a handful of startling truths about our universe, including the fact that Heaven is full of pot-smoke, Louis XVI dated a man named Bitch, and the truth behind the Father of Our Country worded so eloquently put by Blacky: "For the intellectuals in the audience, if there are any, let it be known that the Founding Fathers frequently indulged in cuh-NAW-bis sativa." It's bizarrely historical, featuring factoids about presently-obscure figures like Madame du Barry, while also warping realism and reality in the wildest ways possible. The fact that it's not that poorly written of a film (the race humor is pretty lame, but, well, duh) and that it's a well-acted film heavily builds this effect.

The movie is a lot like The Tony Blair Witch Project, in that its random attempts to educate make it seem like a school project gone off the deep end, and in that the intoxicating substances shown on screen were really consumed by those actors. Specifically, as Betsy Ross entices "George Washington" with a fresh bowl, he says to her in wheezy stoner voice, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." When she replies, "And how do the Romans do it?" he simply shoots back, "I don't know!" And...scene. We cut back to Paul Revere screwing a girl. I assume this part was still scripted, by certain chemicals got in the way of remembering the lines. What a sight. God fucking bless America.

But in a more significant parallel to Tony Blair, Clockwork is made by no less or more than a group of friends clowning around. It wasn't intended to make a lot of money, and no money was spent on it. It becomes similar to Nosferatu in Brazil by Ivan Cardoso--a way to fill time, and doing so unprofessionally but memorably. It's something of look into the time it was made to boot, because it's very '70s. Watch it, and you'll know what I mean. You want to know what I mean, right? So watch it.

This movie has two cuts available right now, both from Vinegar Syndrome: the DVD has some (but not most) nudity cut, whereas the Blu-Ray apparently has some hardcore sequences. I reviewed this from the DVD because I owe a lot of money to some loan companies, and if I fail to pay they will remove my teeth (I assume). As such, I can only buy a couple of Blu-Rays per year or risk having to have aspic for the rest of my life.

It's a see-it-ta-believe-it sort of thing--the movie, that is, not me being forced to eat aspic. I've given some glimpses into its heart (even if I didn't tell you about the jarring dub work they do for Paris and Helen of Troy...oops). And I'll give just one more, in case you're not convinced: the words "By Odin" are spoken not once, not twice, but three times in this movie.

Ogroff (1983), by Norbert Mautier

 There is nothing I can really say about this fucking movie.

That line could be read as negative. I could be about to lunge into a critique of this film's many structural flaws. But no, that's not really what this fucking blog is at all. Of course I love this movie. I cherish this movie beyond many other movies like it, and it is a movie that is so much a part of my life that I've already exhausted words about it elsewhere. I've written about this movie semi-professionally in college, and I've shared it with literally everyone I've met. Whether they've watched it or not I don't know. It should be watched. It is a movie that is honestly shocking to behold, no matter what walk of life one comes from. To fans of "good" movies, movies like 2001 or Citizen Kane, it will be an offensive shock. To fans of "bad" movies, like Birdemic and Saving Christmas and maybe even some sprinklings of Driller Killer or Manos, it will also be an offensive shock. However, you will come to love it. The pain it brings is so self-evidently proud of the accomplishments it stems from. It is, like so many movies I love, a movie that has taken the limits of poverty and transformed them into riches and boundless constructs that sometimes rival the "good" movies of their environments. I would rather watch Mautier than Truffaut. I do have to wonder who the harder watch is, however.

Ogroff is atmospherically dark, visually ambitious, bizarrely comical, and disturbingly well-plotted. The movie opens with many seemingly unrelated scenes of Ogroff, a masked trepanned killer who lives in the French woods in a shack full of porn and axes, killing several people. He also eats them, feeds bits of the bodies to zombies in his basement (more on that later), and masturbates with an axe substituting his dick. More importantly, he engages in a duel with a chainsaw-wielding lumberjack that is as or more gripping than a middle-school fanfic of some crossover with Leatherface. (If you have a sense of humor this will be very gripping.) Chessboards, chainsaws, and children--none are safe from the axe of Ogroff, who reminiscences over how he served and was presumably disfigured in World War II. There is almost no dialogue, and even with subtitles the dialogue present is meaningless. ("Walking's good for you, you stupid bitch!") This all leads up to where he meets a lady friend...and the rest is history. Let us just say that the movie attempts to pass off the sadistic child-killing cannibal as a knight in shining armor, and partially works.

Every so often in my fiction you'll come across a reference to Ogroff. I could write forever on it, and how precious it is as an example of refined Eurotrash. Talking about be-alls and end-alls, however, is rarely interesting, which would lead me to instead talk about the fine details. But as ever, the fine details are not particularly related to one another. Blood drips out of a crushed car over a stick of Donald Duck. A woman changes oil in her car. Flies buzz while people are tied to stakes. But sometimes, truer scenes will enter--most are disturbing. Ogroff decapitates a child and feeds her mom's tongue to a dog. Other times, they will feature things like Ogroff bursting out of a woman's locked car trunk without any setup. Those times are amusing. The movie is a real slushy cocktails of a bunch of different types of stories, and it's made for so very little...

It's the archetype of a trash movie superstar. Imaginations fill the empty voids of "normal" or "workable" budgets or filming conditions. Everything is wrong, and yet the ambition replaces the wrongness with innocence. Even when Ogroff, who has probably not showered in forty years if this movie is set at the time of release, sleeps with a random woman who stumbles into his shack from the woods. I think she might be a reporter. In any case, she's fine with him being a killer and everything. She ripped a man's head off, after all. However, it's tough living the life with Ogroff. Sometimes, you'll accidentally free all the zombies he keeps trapped under his property, which he's been keeping locked away and placated using the remains of his victims. Whoops. And away Ogroff goes--in pursuit of his lady-love, wielding an axe on a motorcycle. With a helmet over his nailed-on mask, even. That's, like, seven different movies, or maybe it just feels like that. It is legendary. It is...

I can't say anything else or it will genuinely ruin it. You'll see. I haven't mentioned Howard Vernon in it. He's only in there for a little bit, and it's a good glimpse to prepare for the Howard love that will appear on this blog. You better like long shots of zombies wandering, though. Of course that was how the movie was going to end up--that disconnected craziness cannot last forever. However, those early glimpses create a great tower for the ending to sit on. We see at the end that this is a world of crazy: Evil Eyes, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and masked serial killers. It all concludes as humbly as it began. This is an every fact of life for this part of the French wilderness. That's all it is.

I suppose now I've gone and told everything. I couldn't help it--it is constantly a presence in my mind now. Perhaps it is something malevolent...I have noticed that I'll notice things almost every time I rewatch, and I've rewatched it about two dozen times. I think that's a sign that the movie changes. Let me know if this affects you, too. I've been trying to see what it wants with us.

Portents aside, Ogroff is still a thing of divinity. It is beyond our words, and thus, something-something Sapir-Whorf, I believe it is beyond our world as well. For good or for ill. Watch it.

Escape from the Insane Asylum (1986), by Felix Girard

Escape from the Insane Asylum manages to be both fantastic and mundane. It is fantastic in scope, encompassing storylines about false imprisonment, secret experiments, haunted houses, and mentally-challenged hood-wearing serial killers all at once. Yet it is, in essence, a soap opera about a woman confronting her personal problems. Both sides of the coins are engraved with stock footage from Frozen Scream, which, like this movie, stars Renee Harmon. Charm is everywhere when Renee is around. And this movie is special, because there's charm in the movie even where Renee is not present.

Her charisma must have an aura, though, because almost all of the films featuring Renee Harmon are some of my favorites, or at the very least, fond acquaintances. She seemed as the star of Frank Roach's Frozen Scream, and co-plotted with and acted for James Bryan in The Executioner Part II, Hell Riders, Lady Street Fighter, Run Coyote Run, and Jungle Trap. All of those (save the as-yet unreleased Jungle Trap) have found some place or another in my heart. Escape from the Insane Asylum, directed by Felix Girard but featuring Harmon as writer, star, and producer, is yet another jewel in the crown of the Harmon canon. It is both a good introduction and worthy twilight to her acting career. She is energetic and compelling physically, and yet her presence is dominated by oddly-enunciated German accent. She always stands out in ways both good and bad--yes, the accent is jarring, but she is a seriously talented actress, who frequently ends up appearing alongside a significantly less gifted cast. She is a legend and you should get to know her immediately.

Chris Nilsen's husband Alex, a doctor at ye humble mental hospital, has married her for her money, and when she starts sniffing this out (along with the fact that he likes fucking a blonde named Inez) he has her institutionalized in his hospital. She eventually gets out under unclear circumstances (first she's told she isn't getting out! Then...her daughter picks her up?), but there's another person taken off the patient list--a serial killer with a psychic mom. But there's more--a group of repetitive teenagers who decide to stay a night at the old MacFarlane place, which is supposedly haunted. And then there are ghosts in the movie. The ending tries to explain it all with hypnotism and SCIENCE. And that's exactly the perfect endcap for a piece like this.

We know from listening to the dialogue and seeing the complexity of the different plots that the makers of Escape cared. But why does it feel like they didn't? The scattered weirdness occasionally comes across as laziness--the recycled footage from Frozen Scream, for instance. Depending on the account, Scream was made either five or eleven years prior to Escape. It was also shot on film, whereas Escape is a video production, so, yeah, a little out of place. Adding to the idea that these inserts are filler is the fact that there is almost no way to reconcile them with the plot arcs of Escape. Scream is about people being turned into frozen zombies in order to find the secret of immortality, and the frozen zombie part at the very least is communicated in the inserts. Assuming the lifted scenes are meant to be flashbacks, that means that at some point, Chris created these zombies (?), which may be why she's wealthy. But she mentions a "board of directors," which doesn't sound like something one would associate with a zombie lab. And I don't know if there's much profit in creating immortal emotionless serial killers.

Plus, scenes end perplexingly in this film. Chris talks to one of the evil doctors in a therapy session about how she's having all sorts of hallucinations. However, she doesn't want to talk about them. The doctor's response to being simply told, "I don't wanna talk about it"? "Alright!" he then looks down, bored, and picks up a cocktail. He sips it for awhile. FADE TO BLACK.

In fact, at least half the scenes end like that. Harmon doesn't seem to be aware of how to do scenes transitions. That's okay. Many of the plots that go on in this film are, if not disturbing in content, disturbingly shot and acted. The movie is goofy enough to avoid being dark. Awful acting, bizarre dialogue ("You're not crazy, you're just psychic!" *Both characters cheerily laugh*), and sheer incompatibility of the plots help stand in the way of being overwhelmed by the creepy shots and occasionally deep introspections made by the characters.

So in essence--if you want a movie that has so-bad-it's-good qualities alongside so-good-it's-good traits, with some sexy German accents to boot, this is your flick. It's a thriller, it's a slasher, it's a soap opera and a mess. If you've seen Renee Harmon before, find some gentle comfort in her familiar presence. If this is your first time, get ready for a long road. A long, pleasant road, with lots of daffodils growing alongside it, with the added fact that you bought a lot of your favorite candy at the last gas station and you're eating it while driving. Track it down.

Manhattan Baby (1982), by Lucio Fulci

Surprisingly, Manhattan Baby is not a ripoff of Rosemary's Baby. Even though Fulci demonstrated his fanboyishness for Rosemary by having a character actually be called "Mary Woodhouse" in City of the Living Dead, he resists lifting wholesale from the Polanski classic. Well, except for a character named Adrian Marcato, like the father of the Satanist from Rosemary. No, Manhattan Baby is simply a good ol' Exorcist ripoff. There's an archaeologist dad in Egypt who excavates a temple dedicated to Alzubador, an obscure god of evil. Slowly, his children seem to fall into the clutches of an evil power, with his daughter ending up like Regan and his son like Damien. In fact, I think they visit the park from The Omen where Patrick Troughton dies. All of this is told slowly, but tastefully. And then, there is a great ending.

Manhattan Baby's charm lies in its trivia. Fulci takes an Argento-like turn with this one, playing with space and cities. He fills the movie with groovy color, and all throughout, there are weird tangents that create a dreamy atmosphere that makes the audience question the reality of the film, much in the same way the characters do. The kids in this one are significantly less annoying than Bob from House by the Cemetery, even though Tommy, the archaeologist's son, is played by the kid who played Bob. Their odd, inexperienced performances suppress the realism, and the Godzilla vs. King Kong-level dubs add to this. It is a fantasy movie presented at least semi-soberly. I can dig that.

I get the impression this movie isn't edited in order. There's a scene that threw me the first time I watched this--the family mom is a reporter for TIME-LIFE, and she asks her irritating prankster friend to come over to their apartment to try to open a locked door for her. He succeeds but is consumed by blue light. When the mom goes to the room, the floor is covered with sand. That character is basically never mentioned again. But I noticed on my second watch, I saw that ten minutes later, we cut to the foot of the Sphinx, and the friend is dead at its feet of exposure. That is the last time we see him. Why did Fulci wait that long to add him back in? I honestly forgot that he disappeared, because more vignettes got in the way.

Similarly, when they introduce Marcato, the father asks, "Are you Mr. Marcato?" Marcato looks up and says, "You didn't come here to discuss names." Then, it cuts to something else. That's basically the entirety of their conversation. It returns to the scene quickly, but at the same time, there wasn't any reason to abandon the scene to begin with.

The only real big-leaguers I've seen of Fulci's are Zombi 2 and House by the Cemetery. I have not seen The Beyond or City of the Living Dead, but in my mind the two movies I have seen do still grant some good insight into his work. And I like it when the man goes crazy--he's good at putting on a show. The ending of this has a showman's touch, and that includes a little comedy. (Someone dies and there's kind of a "wah-wah-wahhhhh" sax cue. I don't know if that was intentional or not.) I'm not going to reveal the ending. It is available on YouTube. I really do recommend the entire movie, though. It can be hard on people unaccustomed to '80s Eurotrash, but honestly, to me, it's more entertaining than The Exorcist (I think most Exorcist ripoffs are better than The Exorcist).

I think it'd be best to watch a better known Fulci movie before going for this one. This was my first experience with the Godfather of Gore, and it was good, albeit perplexing. It was enough, though, to worm into my head, and ever since, it's been a match made in Heaven.

Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), by Mike Kuchar

I love this kind of movie.

This movie is actually, in proper terms, a conglomerate of two particular types of movies I love. On one hand is highbrow psychedelic stuff from the late '60s/early '70s like Performance and...well. Performance. (If there are other movies out there like Performance please tell me.) Its more well-defined counterpart is the lowbrow psychedelia from that era. Psyched by the 4D Witch and The Love Captive are the epitomes of this end of the spectrum. Performance has Jorge Luis Borges and Mick Jagger. Psyched by the 4D Witch and The Love Captive have homophobia and vampires, respectively. Sometimes there are crossovers between these types of movies, and something magical happens. Genuine artistic soundness reigns alongside exploitative sleaze. This produces movies like Stick It In Your Ear aka Vortex--in my mind, an actually artistic movie made within the confines of a very special brand of exploitation that thrived in this age of philosophy and drugs both good and bad. Overall, the exploitation of the '60s and '70s has a feel to them that is just so entirely unique. It floats and clings to movies like I Drink Your Blood and An American Hippie in Israel. When that baseline grime mutates and grows strong with sometimes pointless musings about life, you've got yourself a giant among giants.

Sins of the Fleshapoids is thematically interesting, genuinely and subtly funny, and aesthetically pleasing. It also has robots that make Three Stooges faces while ripping girls' dresses off, Ancient Greek-style porn portraits on the wallpaper, and an excellently depressing story of infidelity. All jam-packed into a nice forty-three minutes, too. It is one of those fusion films. Deep, but also garbage.

Any longer than forty-three minutes, however, would would have been too much. Sins of the Fleshapoids is pretentious and somewhat forgettable due to the abruptness of its scenes. But it comes together, and does a good job of balancing several different plots. All the stories takes place a million years in the future, when humans are too lazy to do anything for themselves. There's the story of the two robots or "fleshapoids" who gain independence when they fall in love with each other--they also want to kill all humans. It's all very similar to the '20s play Rossum's Universal Robots, which invented the word robot. Like the fleshapoids, the robots from R.U.R. were more like clones than mechanical beings, though the fleshapoids are both (cyborgs?). In plot two, there's the cute lady who has a football player lover, who wants to get at her jewels in more ways than one. Her husband finds out and she learns that her lover just wants her mineral jewels. Stab stab, that's over--but nothing can stop the fleshapoid revolution! What is the future of the new ruling species of the Earth?

From the crayon-scrawled title cards of the opening credits to the shocking twist ending (which will make fans of Godfrey Ho's Ninja Terminator laugh), Sins is a monstrous and beautiful hybrid. Was it intended to be artsy? Was it meant to be a parody? It succeeds at both, though I don't know what it's a parody of. Perhaps itself. Whatever it is. (The more likely answer is Lang's Metropolis.)

Everything in this film works to its advantage. The griminess is complimented by the film quality, which appears to be Super 8. It gives a haunting red or pink glow to everything, making it something like a glimpse into a '60s pajama party. This light also grants the film that artistic element. I'm a sucker for weird lighting. As long as I can see what's fucking happening, a movie will always be better if the lighting is just a touch bizarre.

I could go on--this review is basically just mindless rambling. But so too is the movie. It is chaos, but it's controlled chaos. The kind of chaos unleashed by a master. That being said, I don't know if I'm going to seek out other films by Kuchar. I feel like it would burst the bubble a little bit, or scratch a little uniqueness off of this. I dunno. I mean, I am upset that Psyched's Victor Luminera never shot again, nor did Captive's Larry Crane.

Maybe the goldmine lies ahead. And even if it doesn't, I've taken some good nuggets out of Fleshapoids. Take that line how you will.

Now we just need to track down Attack of the Hideopoid, and thus shall the greatest double feature be born unto the world.

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.)