Five Across the Eyes (2005), by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen

The 21st Century is a weird era for trash. While it does seem like a huge amount of movies that are absolutely crazy and delightful are concentrated in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, entertainingly idiosyncratic films have endured in the smallest of markets. Movies like The Tony Blair Witch Project, Ben & Arthur, and Hip Hop Locos are usually created with the means and tools of supreme poverty, and come in two flavors: If adults make them, they tend to be on the eccentric side, perhaps to the point of egotism, as can be seen in Sam Mraovich, Tommy Wiseau, and James Nguyen. Other times, as with the forces behind Tony Blair Witch, we are subjected to the power called Kids Goofing Off. I don't know if "Kids" is the right term here, but the characters are kids even if the cast and crew probably weren't. What we have here is a story of High School Adventure--for all its thrills and all of its mindless, naive stupidity. While far from perfect, Five Across the Eyes is best described as "unique," which is surprising, given its premise.

A group of high school girls try to dodge traffic coming home from a football game by taking a shortcut. I can't remember their names, but their personalities stick out: the screamy driver whose voice realistically cracks, the polite, lighthearted super-Southern one, the bitchy one, the vague one, and the one who dies (I thought she died, but upon rewatching no one dies). While they apparently already live in a small town, the "shortcut" leads them into an even more rural part of their state (presumably Tennessee, where this was shot). Here, while asking for directions, they decide to make fun of one of the girls by pretending to drive off, and in doing so ram a nearby car. This is their trespass of hubris, because this car is driven by an ever-nameless Crazy Lady. The crazy lady will chase the girls all throughout the rest of the movie, occasionally taking advantage of car stalls, nervous breakdowns, and sweaty hands to pull them out of the car and torture them. There is no small influence from the torture porn genre here, but aside from a possible screwdriver-to-the-vag, "small" is the operative word for scale here--the inspiration is Saw, not Human Centipede. This has to be the first "torture porn on wheels" movie I've seen, and that it manages to build atmosphere without being disgusting, while also being as naive as the characters it depicts, makes it a hard beast to describe.

The movie is best broken down in chunks--there is the first handful of minutes, which is separate from the main chase. It's in this first chunk that we start to see that the characters have individual personality, which they effectively carry through for the rest of the movie. It's hard for us to like these characters at first because they are all incredibly bitchy and incapable of speaking below sane and safe Inside Voice thresholds, which they also carry through the rest of the movie. This first chunk will be a test to see if you can do this movie or not, because it is probably annoying to most persons. Still, there are plenty of blink-and-miss-it scenes in it that foreshadow the coming events, such as when we first see the crazy lady's car. Tellingly, the lady exits the car long before they hit it, and instead of going into the nearby convenience store, she stalks into the shadows some distance away from it. This already sets up the admittedly fascinating characterization of this woman. When we reach the second chunk, it does seem like she's mad at the girls for hitting her car, but changes her reasoning at some point to the girls apparently having "ruined her family"--later on, she screams about them having "killed her baby," and even later on, she says something about "old men" (?). Of course, she keeps her van stocked with corpses, so it's clear she's just a motiveless serial killer, as in too many cheap horror pieces. I'm sold by this, though, because this movie's setting is amazing. There is nothing creepier than driving out in the countryside late at night, especially in the South. I can totally buy that there are people out in the rural area even in the North who will find any weird reason to stalk people and kill them. At least, it can be fun to believe, in its own problematic way. Because the crazy lady has no motive, it only makes the imposing emptiness of the setting even creepier.

I want to zoom in on that first chunk again, and how it will test you, because it exposes one of this movie's stranger angles. A lot of the dialogue here seems scripted, because it's not how people talk outside movies, but it's delivered like it's all improv. I get the impression that if these actresses were as old as their characters when they made this, they were the Theatre Kids. Either this is improv from some really organized heads or scripted lines made to sound like improv in an attempt at realism. It sticks out, with lines like "I feel dead all over the inside." If you're someone who criticizes how people talk (which you really shouldn't), the pre-chase chunk will sort you out. Because every line is awkward, the movie becomes much more entertaining--you'll always be wondering what someone is going to say next.

Then there's the matter of how this was shot. This camera seems to be the same model I had when I was in high school, albeit with better light detection. It's fuzzy, with pixelization seen at points. This is a YouTube movie, and I don't consider that an insult. In the beginning you may be led to believe this is a found-footage film, but there isn't a found-footage frame story, nor is the camera an actual prop in-universe. The camera just bobs and weaves around, and during one of the torture scenes, when we get a close-up of a jangling toolbox, we even see the camera flip upside-down! This, along with a blurry take wherein the crazy lady shoots at the girls with her shotgun off-camera, were both left in. Remarkable is the word, literally. If you've been suckled on good movies, leaving in a gratuitously blurry shot and a random amateurish desire to spin the camera around are both worthy of remark. Whether it's a good or bad remark is up to. What matters is this is a "quasi-found footage" movie, which I've seen before but have never found quite so damn fixating. I wish I knew why it drew me in...

Did I mention that this movie also has the girls throw feces at a car, piss on their clothes, and spill and eat funerary ashes?

This movie even has bookends, which is something this review doesn't. Instead of referencing the beginning of my words, I'll choose instead to say how charmed I am by the title. The in-universe drop is that the part of the country the five girls drive across is called "the Eyes." But it's also a clumsy pun implying that somehow being tortured and killed by a hick with a shotgun is like a slap to the face. And, they make a point of showing us that "Five Across the Eyes" spelled out..."FATE"! Spooky! There's a ring to that. A stupid ring. A ring I like.

Cyberon (2000), by Bill Baggs

Fandom is a tricky concept these days. You have people who come up with new terms for describing their appreciation of a work, like headcanon and OTP, and then you have the people who hate those term-makers but will flip out when PETER VENKMAN IS A GIRL suddenly. Fanfiction is hated, but it's been around for literal millennia, such as with the Arthurian "canon" that people laud tremendously. And while it's true that fanfiction can be embarrassing, and in some cases, harmful (Fifty Shades, anyone?), I'm always curious to see where the interactions between creator and audience lead our stories and our concepts of them. I could drone on and on about Wold Newton and why you should get Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers series, and how I want to see mainstream examinations of the literary potential behind fan theories, but I want to get straight to the point: today's movie, Cyberon, shows that sometimes you can get a good story off of wanting to be something you're not.

Cyberon was the creation of BBV, also known as Bill and Ben Video, a company dedicated to fulfilling the staff's unrelenting love of Doctor Who. Over the years BBV put together works featuring elements from the Doctor Who universe, like the Sontarans and Zygons, as well as pieces that were heavily based on Doctor Who but weren't quite Who. This included The Stranger, starring Colin Baker as The Stranger and Nicola Bryant as "Ms. Brown," in what started as clear copies of the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown--this in turn was the spiritual to their audio series The Time Travelers, starring TV's Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy as "The Professor" and Ace's Sophie Aldred as...Ace. This one cut a bit too close for the BBC (especially since "Professor" was Ace's nickname for the Doctor), so it was rebranded as featuring "The Dominie" and "Alice." Like The Stranger, this eventually branched off to a point where it was clearly an original story. Though I don't want to go off on a tangent, I'm fascinated by how exactly BBV's use of Doctor Who elements was possible. Doctor Who isn't like most big-name sci-fi franchises: much of its individual parts are owned by their creators, rather than a central faceless entity craving only money (making Who like an inverse DC Comics, in a way). Therefore, use of the Krynoids, the Autons, the Rani, all that, was a matter of working with individuals for much lower licensing fees than what the BBC would offer. While they would never be able to tell stories about the Doctor, though companions Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Victoria Waterfield all made new appearances, played by their original actors, due to this unique situation.

Cyberon is pretty close to that second category of BBV productions, i.e. the not-quite Who stuff. Indeed, it's entirely absent of all canonical traces of Doctor Who, but if you know about the aliens from the show and you know that the title of the movie is also the name of the evil aliens the movie contains, then you should understand that the villains of this movie are going to be very familiar. Our hero is Dr. Lauren Anderson, a psychiatrist at a mental hospital of some kind. She meets Dr. Thomas Mortley, who is kind enough to let us know he will turn out to be morally bad by having the last name "Mortley." Lauren is frustrated with her inability to get results with patients whose afflictions are due to brain or spinal trauma, but Tom has discovered a new wonder-drug called Cyberon, which can cure literally any ailment. Cyberon is administered through a Star Trek-esque needle-less syringe, and Lauren has a good reason for her immediate distrust of it: it glows blue, and occasionally bizarre metallic faces can be seen reflected in it when it's in the syringe chamber. Of course, when these faces start appearing to the Cyberon patients, it's clear this miracle has a cost. And it's only going to get worse when those apparitions start killing the patients who resist the addictive qualities of the drug...

I think the thing that makes Cyberon so fascinating is its status as a sort of chimera--and I know just got myself in trouble for using that word. It really is a freak, a hybrid, and a beautiful one. (And if you got past "chimera," the Doctor Who fans present will hate me for saying "hybrid"...) It definitely tries to be its own movie, but it's still trapped in its presumed origin as a Doctor Who-linked Cyberman film. And even then, it has difficulty determining which type of movie its own movie is. These qualities work both against it and in its favor. First, let's talk about the Doctor Who elements. It turns out that the Cyberon drug somehow connects humans to another dimension where the Cyberon race lives. While they have some changes, saying that the Cyberons don't look almost identical to the Cybermen is like saying that Donald Trump is a good person--it's just wrong. The voices are the last tip-off. Whether the Cyberons are Cybermen or not, the premise behind them is kind of cool. Having them exist outside our dimension gives them a real menace, especially if you allow yourself to ignore that it's impossible to believe that the drug and these mysterious apparitions aren't related. In a way this story sort of precedes the New Who episode "Army of Ghosts," which also had Cybermen appear as specters before being revealed as other-dimensional and breaking through into our world to wreak havoc. I think, though, that episode ultimately did the premise better, because the insertion of the Cyberon drug into the story is pretty clunky. The drug has both physical and mental effects--healing all ailments while inducing a pleasurable psychedelic state--so it's unclear if the contact with the Cyberons is purely psychic or if the user's bodies are somehow integrated with their dimension as well. When he succumbs to addiction (because the drug apparently causes heroin-level cravings), Tom gains a metal hand, implying he's either becoming a Cyberon or the host of one. What's odd is that it seems unclear if Tom invented Cyberon by himself or if the Cyberons somehow gave him to the formula to it. There's a reason why the drug plot was inserted, though, and there's a reason why it's so clunky.

I do want to say that while I call this site my "A-List" because it is for reviews of movies that I consider to be "A-class." The creme de la creme, as it were. Cyberon is not A-class--it would probably be on my B-List at worst (with its fellow BBV movie Downtime), but it's more like to join its sibling The AirZone Solution on my C-List. By no means does that mean it's a bad movie--it's just not one of my classics. Cyberon shares many qualities with The AirZone Solution, honestly, though sadly this is a BBV production entirely without Doctor Who actors, whereas AirZone had four whole Doctors in it in its own way. No, AirZone and Cyberon both have a problem with their messages being all kinds of heavyhanded. AirZone's obsession was with pollution, which is a good thing to cover, but its subtlety leaned to the Birdemic side of things. Cyberon has two messages, one bigger than the other. The small one is about the horrors of modern technology. I was interested in this at first because Lauren is portrayed as being incredibly technophobic--she rages at a pub quiz video game and calls it rigged, and she criticizes electronic music for not being real sound, man. I thought this was going to be tied to the fact that the villains of the movie have a mechanical appearance, but the Cyberons don't really seem mechanical outside of having the word "cyber" in their name. So there's some wasted potential there.

The bigger message is that Drugs Are Bad. Really, extremely Bad. It's not made a secret that Cyberon sort of stands for medical marijuana--you have the well-intentioned hippie activist in the form of Tom, who believes his medicine will save the world but is nonetheless is addicted to it; and you have the level-headed, old-fashioned doctor in the form of Lauren, who believes that there is a way to get through medical tragedies but it can't involve shortcuts. In the end, it is Lauren who lives and Tom who perishes, and the film nearly ends on a shot of a "JUST SAY NO" poster or some equivalent. The AirZone Solution's heavy-handedness lives on as well in the fact that in the beginning we see that Tom has--choke--financial gain to be made from Cyberon, and he has a little bit of the Corporate Pig feel about him. Actually, if Cyberon is a movie about greedy people turning the helpless into Cybermen for fun and profit, AirZone Solution is a movie about greedy people turning the helpless into Sea Devils for fun and profit. Both movies even have ghosts in them...!

The A-List site will sometimes feature C-List material because the C sometimes stands for "curio." A lot of movies I like to make note of just because they are unique, even if they aren't really entertaining or worth watching. They are "hidden gems" as it were. And, despite the disappointments they bring, I've learned recently that I like learning firsthand about these freakish things. Cyberon is a fascinating example of when fan ambition is allowed to grow, but decides not to get far enough away to be its own thing. It happens to the best of us. There is nothing that is not derivative, and it's all about the sell. Cyberon was slow and repetitive enough to not quite sell me--but I'll keep it as a curiosity, and you should too. If you're a Doctor Who fan you can't've seen worse (read: Dimensions in Time), and if you're not that means there's no tiresome continuity here, so you can call it a beta for Sci-Fi Original Movies and get some joy out.

Ninja the Protector (1986), by Godfrey Ho

Oh my God, our first Godfrey Ho movie! There's no time do an intro now! Just understand that Godfrey Ho is that guy who made over 130 utterly cheap, utterly crazy ninja movies throughout the later end of the 20th Century. This is one of the ones he did with sword 'n' sandal superstar Richard Harrison, who appeared in many Ho movies as "Ninja Master Gordon." As ever, Godfrey Ho promises us NONSTOP NINJA ACTION, and as ever, he delivers on it. Ninja the Protector's started without us, let's go!

A gangster named Bruce runs several different crime operations, including a counterfeiting ring, and Gordon and his white-dude operatives face him down. They are confused by the track-suit dressed men who engage them in challenges of martial arts, but learn from one of them that they are "Ninjas." "What's a Ninja?" they ask Gordon. "Ha, ha, ha. Just a fairy tale," he replies. Meanwhile, in Plot B, a salesman works his way up the company, fucking his boss on the beach and failing to protect her from getting raped. This movie incidentally contains what is probably the most tasteless jump cut I've ever seen, wherein we cut from a rape scene to an office where two men are talking with Gordon in front of a poster showing a bound and gagged woman that says "It could happen to you." Full apologies: it's a little disturbing. Just lose yourself in Plot A, with its irreversibly silly ninja battles--after all, that's what people come to a Godfrey Ho movie for, right?

Now that we've caught our breath a little, I can do some 'splaining: this Plot A and Plot B stuff is a reference to the fact that most of Ho's movies, even ones as short as the 67-minute-long Ninja the Protector, are usually made of two older movies that Ho acquired that he sewed together using dubbing. Usually the characters in the two movies would establish the connection by calling each other on the phone, possibly even though a phone that looks like Garfield the Cat. It's a technique that inspired my linking of the two novellas in my book Tail of the Lizard King. In this case, Plot A is made up of footage with Harrison and Ho's other white actors, while Plot B, connected as always by a phone call, is an old Asian film, in this case a drama or rape-revenge thriller of some kind, with the crooks in B being stated to be the goons of the ninjas.

All throughout we encounter other Godfrey Ho tropes, including groups of criminals all independently unleashing a chorus of "Heh, heh, heh, heh"'s. Godfrey Ho makes being a criminal look fun! Plus, the dubs will make you pine for the fjords of Godzilla vs. Megalon. I have unfortunately become desensitized, but if you are alien to the world of Ho, you will be reborn in a new image. Cheapness is the name of the game here, and it permeates deep.

Ninja the Protector is not without flaws. Like almost all of Ho's films, even the action gets tiresome at some point. There are no characters to really latch onto, though I suppose the Plot B romance is okay and sad and the banter between Gordon and the other Plot A commandos about whether or not ninjas exist is pretty hilarious, though perhaps not for the reasons intended. These are moments incidental to the characters, however. Ho has a talent for animating cardboard, but he can't make it flesh. Usually the only emotion that his characters make us feel is testosterone during the fight scenes, which do drag on. This lack of depth makes the rape scenes, of which there appear to be two, even more tasteless than before, because of the lack of effort that could be afforded to it. But if you need to fill an hour, and maybe want to open yourself up to a new world in that time, check it out. Let the excitement power you through the day. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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