Sunday, May 29, 2016

Holy Sword (1982)/Death Warrior (1984), by Çetin Inanç and Cüneyt Arkin


...these are honestly the only two Turkish movies I need to review on this site.

Almost everyone now has heard of the insanity of Turkish cinema, and of that percentage of the thus-blessed population, most of them have heard of it primarily through Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars, or 3 dev adam, aka Captain America and Santo vs. Spider-Man. I love the former, and have gotten a kick or two out of the latter. Usually people point out that a lot of Turkish movies--at least, a lot of the ones that we Americans have actually heard of--are new, weirder takes on Western films, though one will notice that the most famous of these films, Turkish Star Wars, doesn't resemble Star Wars at all, plot-wise. Today's movies--if they can be describes as movies, in the sense of being plural and actual movies--are original stories, though if they did come close to ripping anything off, it would be the filmography of Godfrey Ho. A man whose filmography looks like this. Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said I was leaving movies like last week's behind...Holy Sword and Death Warrior are probably the most exciting, unfettered, kinetic, bizarre movies I have ever seen. Because of their weirdness, energy, and Cüneyt Arkin star power--he's Turkish Han Solo and basically the greatest action star of all time--they are quintessential Turkish films for people who dig this sort of thing.

First, some clarification. I've decided to do a "double feature" on these movies because...they're kind of the same movie. As far as I know, both of them aired on TV two years apart, and Arkin didn't serve as co-director on Holy Sword. I encountered these movies via Death Warrior, and when I finally tracked down Holy Sword I was surprised to find a lot of familiar scenes. In fact, the same scenes, just in a different order. I feel as if there may be a few scenes that appear in one movie or not the other but there's nothing in my memory denying that those "scenes" were actually footage from the shared scenes that was cut depending on the version of the movie. But rest assured--Death Warrior is not a remake or repackaging of Holy Sword. It is a bona fide sequel, and I know this because at one point a character explains, "Two years ago in Germany was ninja terror," referencing the movie's previous (ostensible) setting in Berlin. And as if a movie's sequel being composed entirely of remixed footage from the first movie was not enough, there is the trifling matter of the subtitles that adorned my bootleg. God bless Google Translate. I'm sure I'll say more later.

Regardless of which movie you're watching, the plot is the same--an evil Ninja Master is leading his army of supernatural warriors against the world, in the name of controlling everything! And these ninjas are already a force to be reckoned with. Not only do they have an army of zombies, and the ability to breathe underwater and live without food, but they have mastery of alchemy. Who could possibly stop these immortal zombie-controlling gold-creating monsters? It turns out that Inspector Murat, aka Cüneyt Arkin, is on the case. Murat has two things on his side: he is the world's greatest martial arts master, and he is incapable of being surprised or flummoxed by anything. But don't think that means he lacks energy--Arkin action-mugs to every shot and is still charismatic as fuck outside of the fight scenes. Most of these movies are comprised of fight scenes. Are you surprised? If you are, watch Ninja Terminator and reinvent your definition of cinema. Even in the movies' downtime people are having their faces ripped off by mummies or being strangled by garden plants. There is a shockingly generic romance that occurs between Murat and Füsun Uçar, who was also Arkin's girlfriend in Turkish Star Wars. And consequently, there is no boredom here, not for a second. These are movies that threatens to repel its audience through sheer noise rather than a lack of anything interesting--shield your mind well and float downstream, or you will die of an adrenaline overdose.

If you can find this, hope it's the same as my copy, because you don't want to miss the now oft-mentioned subtitles. The Ninja Master instructs his evil pupils in the ways of archery: "Five arrow not enough. But matchstick" Lack of period included. Or how about the endlessly quotable "Zombies coming underground"? And it's hard to not cry laughing over putting "Help." over a woman whose scream sounds roughly akin to "AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH." That the audio people also at least doubled the sounds of people screaming or fighting (so as to make them as loud as possible, you see) makes whatever script these movies had into an audiovisual waking nightmare.

Like many of the Turkish films that have filtered down to us mere mortals, the technical aspects are the final icing on the cake. The shots are all dynamic but not sophisticated--they were shot in a matter of days if not hours for an audience of similar patience. Characters teleport at random, and some shots last for mere fractions of seconds before they cut to something else, usually someone fighting or being killed. The sound and video were probably faded to the garish whining (gorgeous) shit we see today when they first aired. They could also only afford one stock effect for people punching each other, which appears to be comprised of a wet flour sack being hit by a stick while someone grunts off-camera. This sound effect never gets old even people are being punched a million times a second, and it is occasionally intercut with the sword duels (!!!) which also only one "clang" sound effect ad hilarium. These sound effects play even when the punches or slashes clearly miss by several feet.

Bless those in my life who showed me a plethora of good movies in my youth, so that the awesomeness of these ones could break me in my adulthood. Every time I watch them, they leave me at a loss for air, and my head spins. Human lungs can't keep up with speed like this.

I'm not kidding, folks. I know I sort of take on the role of a "character" in these reviews, but if that character exists, I break them to let you know that these movies are indispensable. If I found out I missed them in mortal life after my death, I would feel cheated. I would be depressed for the rest of eternity. Do not do that too yourself--you are too good. This is nonstop ninja action, and it is probably the absolute best at what it does. Though as always, I dare somehow to prove me wrong.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

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?

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Ghosts of Hanley House (1968), by Louise Sherrill



For now, this is our last voyage into that weirdly simple pocket of trash, that cadre of movies that manage to be stupendously entertaining while also being so stereotypical that it's hard to place why they're so fun to watch. Ghosts of Hanley House achieves the astounding feat of being even less original than The Screaming Skull, and when you find it lacks the flesh-searing camp of Dungeon of Harrow, you're left to conclude that it compels its audience through something other. There is a genuine atmospheric mystery to Ghosts, achieved through sincere in-context creepiness, but also in the jaw-dropping editing and frank, uncanny slice-of-life acting. Dare ye cross the haunted threshold and enter Hanley House?

The plot is cut clean out of the earliest and laziest issues of Tales from the Crypt or House of Mystery. A group of people in a small town bet each other their cars if they can spend a night in the infamous haunted Hanley House. Then, they proceed to spend the night in the infamous haunted Hanley House. Along the way, we see some spooky occurrences, like a disappearing black widow spider, and some not so spooky occurrences, like doors opening slowly. Of course it turns out someone in the group has a special significance to the brutal murders of the Hanley Family, though I don't seem to recall IMDB's reference to decapitations of the party members ever happening. So it goes.

One tremendous tipoff that we're dealing with a movie that may well be The Screaming Skull for masochists is that the title, theme, and setting aren't particularly exotic. Hanley isn't exactly a Gothic surname, and Hanley House itself looks like it was ordered out of a Sears catalog. These houses are supposed to look like death itself, built on cursed land two hundred years ago. This is almost certainly a product of the fact that this movie is a weekend-with-friends production. The best kind of production! The house is probably the director's, and outside of a bar where the bet is struck, and a forest, there are no other sets. Suburbia in action. It has sort of a hillbilly feel to it, too--the protagonists are shockingly dumb at times, and much excitement and attention is lavished upon six-packs of beer. By dumb, I mean to say that this is said (verbatim), after the proposal of a theory that the ghosts are actually human intruders in the house: "If there is someone in the house, they probably don't intend to harm anybody." Ah, the '60s. Everything was so safe back then that even people spending the night at an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere had nothing to fear from the people who went that far out of their way to stalk them.

Speaking of the '60s, I want to put it in perspective how weird it is that a movie like this exists so far out. 1968 was the release date for Night of the Living Dead. These Old Dark House movies were gone decades before that, and yet for reasons unknown Ghosts of Hanley House insists on inserting itself into the timeline. Now, obviously, the successor to the Old Dark House movie was probably some of Jess Franco's Gothic Eurotrash, as well as a lot of the Hammer Horror canon. But in the wake of George Romero they had gore, and in the wake of fiends like the Findlays they had sexuality too. Most importantly, they had seriousness. Ghosts of Hanley House is not as slapsticky as, say, Sh! The Octopus, but I think the beer stuff was supposed to be funny. Sh! was a parody of Old Dark House films, and so I assume the parody equivalent in Hanley House's era was Hillbillys in a Haunted House. So perhaps it wasn't alone in being behind the times.

Devils hide in the details here. This is one of the worst edited movies I've ever seen, which is saying something. If you've seen Manos, there's a chance you remember that scene with the makeout couple in the car, where the camera runs about ten seconds too long before the actress delivers her line. That is a lot of shots in this movie--five seconds, line, five seconds, cut. Also every character gets the shot to themselves every time they deliver a line, which is a nice trick if you have some scheduling issues with your actors. Except they also have shots together in the same scenes, meaning that the director essentially had no idea what she was doing. That works to our benefit because it is endlessly charming--if anything because at times these closeups are devoid of any sort of flattery to their subjects.

Again, the dialogue is...c'mon, in '68, some of it had to be deliberate. "What does it want?" "It wants...Dick!" Yes, Dick is a character (of course there's a Dick in this movie), but that matters not. Plus, a little Southern Christian magic: "In the name of the LAWD!" Excellent. How about the scene in which the gang is completely unconcerned that one of their friends is outed as a mass murderer? When I called the acting in this movie uncanny, I wasn't kidding. Sometimes the cast breaks free and does their job well--other times, they are clearly struggling. I can't help but point fingers at the script, but the pointing of fingers implies blame, which implies judgment. I am in no position to judge this movie. The choices it made were its own, and I respect that. That's standing up for your rights as a filmmaker, that's what I say. And so on and so forth.

As far as the paranormal activity goes, it's so forgettable that I only remember clocks chiming, doors opening, and some weirdly ADR'd ghost voices. Yet there is a seance that proves itself to be the worst seance this side of The Wild World of Batwoman, a trait which it shares with every seance scene in every movie ever made, including Batwoman. Oddly enough, the conclusion of this film is depressingly similar to the central "conflict" of another movie I hate as much as Batwoman, 1981's Night of Horror. In case you couldn't guess, Ghosts of Hanley House is better than those two movies collectively. I don't know if that's a compliment or not.

In any case, compliment Ghosts of Hanley House. It is tight, creepy, and confusing all at the same time. Mundane it may be, but it's an experience that will haunt you forever.

Next up...something a bit more pulse-pounding!

Monday, May 16, 2016

The Dungeon of Harrow (1962), by Pat Boyette


This is one of the other minimalist horror movies I mentioned when I was talking about The Screaming Skull. It's not a horror film that will challenge you or open up new trends or concepts. It's actually very much in the same league as The Witches' Mountain, except this movie is significantly less mysterious. I think it captures the essence of what we, or at least I, get nostalgic over when we think of the Halloween of our childhoods. Halloween is harmless fun, never truly scary--but if it's good, it's not cynical enough to not try to be scary. The Dungeon of Harrow, I think, is the sort of horror movie that would have had me giggling in my seat if I'd watched it as a kid on Halloween. That is the source of its perfection.

Aaron Fallon is an upper-middle-class gentlemen on an ocean voyage. When his ship runs aground on an island, he and the Captain are the only survivors. We learn quickly that the island is the property of a maddened, murderous nobleman, who has hallucinations of a photo-negative Satan and constantly murmurs "Yes...yes...the wine...it was the wine." He is called the Count de Sade, because of course he is. Fallon and the Captain earn the ire of the Count when the latter believes the Captain to be a pirate. However, he tolerates Fallon's presence, even though Fallon is one of those poor beggars without a proper title of peerage. Slowly, Fallon learns the truth of the intensity of the Count's cruelty, as he abuses his maids Ann and Cassandra as well as butler Mantis. He hides the Captain's survival to Fallon so that he can continue torturing him. At the root of all this is the fact that the Count's dead wife really isn't dead--she's an insane leper, chained up in the castle dungeons. The same dungeons that the Count traps Fallon in...

Dungeon of Harrow is very much an "old world" horror movie. More melodramatic and theatrical than cinematic, it focuses on satisfying a series of Victorian horror beats and establishing the twisted psyches of its characters. It's claustrophobic, constantly--it's jarring to see the openness of the island after having spent most of the movie in cramped ship cabins or stifling stone chambers. All of the old stuff is here: the spooky castle, the torture dungeons. Leprosy. Aristocrats whose "good breeding" and decadence have unhinged them. The Devil. Creepy islands. And of course, camp. Lots and lots of excellent 1960s camp.

Not camp for the point of humor, of course--camp for the point of ACTING. The ACTING in this movie is some of the best I've seen, and I primarily intend to spotlight the Count here. He's tan and plays the same sort of gay that Louis XVI had going for him in A Clockwork Blue. You know the kind. He actually calls someone a "blithering idiot," in addition to getting to say things like, "I'm afraid that the town of Bath is losing its social significance these days." But camp is not all he has to offer. Yes, as hard as it may be to believe, there are round characters in this movie. The Count is undeniably evil, but at the same time, he has some redeeming traits. His hatred of pirates is due to the fact that it was a pirate attack that caused Ann the maid to become mute. This implies that he is protective of her--even though he spends most of his time in the movie torturing her. Plus, it's easy to read his evil as essentially being misguided grief over his isolation and his wife's disfigurement.

Despite the movie's unrelenting seriousness, the camp does make things more fun than anything else. If it had been produced in any other decade, and had maybe a bit more money behind it, it would have been a much darker movie. (After all, the Countess de Sade's madness causes her to believe every night is her wedding night, and that every man is her husband. And so you can imagine what sort of horror they're aiming for when she has Fallon in her clutches...) But because it hits the most stereotypical of horror tropes, and insists on doing so every chance it gets, it's a look back into the past. A lot of trash films are reminiscent of pulps--this one calls back to Gothic novels. I don't know the mechanisms behind the appreciation of this wizened media, but for me, this stuff sings. There's a bizarre comfort in it, even if I prefer focusing on the possibilities of the future than what is already history. But then, you can't watch the movies of the future, can you?At least--not yet!

Anyway. Visually, tonally, thematically, and structurally, The Dungeon of Harrow is a minimalist Halloween masterwork. It's another one that's available on YouTube, too!

I'd like to close by mentioning that director Pat Boyette made another movie in the same year as Dungeon. Obsessees of lost media like myself will be familiar with The Weird Ones, a sexploitation/monster flick which appears to star the greatest creature effects in history. The Weird Ones was supposedly lost in a garage fire some years ago, but we're all holding out for the chance that one of the film's distributors, or maybe a member of the cast or crew, still has a private print tucked away somewhere. Please, if you have any leads--don't hesitate to get in touch with me!

Monday, May 9, 2016

The Screaming Skull (1958), by Alex Nicol



If I was full of myself (I have a little space for something else still), I would say that this movie is "archetypical." However, a lot of people have ruined words like that, and so I am left instead with the word "generic." But that sounds caustic, when in truth I have an obviously favorable opinion of the movie. The Screaming Skull, along with The Ghosts of Hanley House and (maybe) The Dungeon of Harrow, is one of the most general horror movies I've seen. Even The House on Haunted Hill played with everything a little bit, because Vincent Price was in it. If you took an issue of House of Mystery or House of Secrets from the '50s and picked any one of their ghost stories, it would be this movie. Not hip enough to be Gothic, not gory enough to be a gross-out. Just creepy, with the bare bones of bare bones. I imagine there was indeed a time when skeletons were the epitome of horror. The idea of being confronted by anything skeletonoid was once the equivalent of waking up to see the inside-out baboon from The Fly riding on the back of Freddy Krueger wearing a trucker hat that says "Make America Great Again" on it. Skulls, being a product of skeletons, would thus conceivably be equally mindwarpingly awful, if not worse. The Screaming Skull becomes an examination into an era in horror movies that is almost impossible to imagine today. I am legitimately baffled by the market for this film. Was this considered to be edgy back in the day, or was it mildly spooky pablum (pinned by censorship) made for the "sensitive, sophisticated" horror audience? Or did it pass by entirely unnoticed by everyone? Mildness of yore always raises questions for me. Maybe this movie can help me answer some.

We open with a William Castle-esque intro offering a free funeral to those who die of fright during the movie. Our story concerns Jenni and Eric, a married couple who move into Eric's old house. Eric used to live there with his first wife, Marion, before she split skull in a rainstorm. Jenni has had a rocky history, mental health-wise, which of course means that a lot of people are going to tell her she's hallucinating, when a mysterious skull keeps cropping up around the house. Is Marion's ghost out for revenge? What about Mickey, the mentally handicapped groundskeeper? Is Jenni losing her mind? And what's that about Jenni having great wealth, wealth which will go to her creepy husband if anything awful happened to her...? Just when the mystery is explained, the rules are thrown out (in the film's own way) and it becomes a purebred supernatural thriller.

The Screaming Skull never exceeds the simplest of models. This is an entirely low-effort movie, and for that it is spectacular. The half-assed-ness of the blatant Castle rip-off shows AIP's lack of interest in creating what audiences at the time were into (and, for the most part, a lot of them were into Castle's gimmicks if the box office says anything). They similarly weren't interested in coming up with anything more original than the ol' killer-marries-unstable-rich-ladies-to-steal-their-fortunes-with-fake-madness-charges setup. I'm not sure if that was cutting edge at this time, but it makes sense that this movie was based on a short story written in 1906 (uncredited). I really feel like that formula is a Victorian thing, probably older--as old as the concept of murdering/committing people for inheritance, maybe. What makes The Screaming Skull worth watching, then?

Even if you're not fascinated by blandness, as I am, it is a creepy affair. While the old dark house of the piece is relatively featureless--it doesn't hold dark secrets, like a hidden acid pit, for example--it casts shadows well, and while the characters are bland, seeing them wander through the eerie darkness is, well, eerie. The subdued nature of everything works in its favor, much like The Witches' Mountain. I suppose it helps to say that the spookiness of this wormed its way into my nostalgia registers, as it was one that came on one of the many public domain box sets I picked up. If you can abandon your sensibilities and think of skulls as somehow being scary, it's worth the goosebumps you get.

But I think the main attraction of it is its weird lack of...features. There are no twists to it, no elaborations on what is essentially a formula. That a movie is capable of doing that touches something primal in the human brain. It stands out, uncannily. It invites analysis, though its so simple that it evades study. Or something.

I dunno. This movie hits my sweet spot, and it's guaranteed to strike those of at least several others. There has to be a reason why this movie keeps perpetuating--it shows up everywhere! It's probably as common a release as The Killer Shrews or Atom Age Vampire, or even House on Haunted Hill itself. Perhaps it's seen by some as a classic. I haven't bothered to research the audience for this movie, only the movie itself. It's nice for a flick like this to have some mysteries unsolved.

It's a movie that will bring you closer to a sense of a corpus of trash. Somehow this movie has the power to make the people who watch it feel more complete.

Monday, May 2, 2016

Horror from a Mudman's Jukebox: The Human Horn (1980s?)

Hello, everyone! I hope you're having a nice day. Since I didn't get a chance to watch a movie this week, I've decided instead to introduce you to what could be called trash music. I don't think I'm super serious about introducing a concept like that, but let's face it--there is some amazingly awful music out there. Today I decided to feature The Human Horn, a compilation album featuring the titular Human Horn, Shooby Taylor:


Shooby considered himself to be a scat musician whose scatting was meant to imitate jazz instruments. The result is more than a little traumatizing.

Eighty minutes of glory. You're fucking welcome.

Shooby himself. (Image Source: YouTube)