Bad Magic (1998), by Mark and Jon Polonia

I cannot say that it's right for me to go into a description of why this movie makes me Super Happy, and not just regular Happy. It is made by the Polonia Brothers, who are Trash Kings of the Universe Forever. Describing their legacy is something better saved for their most infamous effort, 1987's Splatter Farm, which is also one of my favorites. This one isn't as good as Splatter Farm in my mind, because it's not as grotesque and shocking as that film. All the same, it is grotesque and shocking as far as production quality, special effects, acting, editing, and relevance/semblance to real life go. Plus, I remembered it because I needed a double feature with my rewatch of Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. Bad Magic is Witchdoctor of the Living Dead made by Americans. It has the same frenetic jerkiness. The same emphasis on black magic as told through an anarchic dismissal of the idea of magic having rules. The same impossibly shitty acting. It's a blast of a nuclear variety--so let's begin our descent into a black pit called Hell.

Renny seeks to avenge his brother Amos, who was killed during a gang war. Rather than doing, say, anything but learning the secrets of black magic for revenge, his first course of action involves learning the secrets of black magic for revenge. He reads an account which creates flashbacks to the 1993 Polonia film Hellspawn. He eventually goes to "the West Indies" in search of a magician named Tobanga. Bizarrely, and perhaps upsettingly, Tobanga is a white guy. Tobanga enjoys laughter and hitting people in the face with snakes. He teaches Renny of Bluh-key-bluh-kay, the Spirit of Revenge, and gives him four magic tools with which he may destroy the Red Claws, the gang of fat nerdy guys who killed his brother. But of course, there is a price that Renny must pay when his quest for revenge ends...a quest that involves prostitutes in fake wigs, demons with Texas drawls, and toilet-paper mummies. In the end, we cannot forget what is probably the most important lesson of the film: that advertising for Les Miserables looked exactly the same in 1998 as it does in 2016.

This is a bullet-point movie--the fine details of it are best summarized and described as a string of bullet points. There are things that "happen," most or all of them hilarious. Here are some of them:

•  First of all I want to say that the guy who plays Renny is the worst actor of all time. The absolute worst. He is constantly bored and/or stoned, moreso even than Ted from Crypt of Dark Secrets. He is bored by drinking a god's blood and by being attacked by snakes, and he completely destroys a very workable script. He does a killer evil laugh, though, which gives us the impression that even if revenge didn't play a part, Renny would kill people anyway, for fun. Which is, of course, inconsistent with the ending. I am deeply saddened that this actor, Vincent Simmons, has no other credits to his name--a name that should be praised.  
• Renny tries to bribe Tobanga to train him when the latter initially refuses to do so. The two bills he throws at him are clearly ones. I like to think that in the universe of this movie Renny did really try to bribe Tobanga for two dollars, and this isn't supposed to be some representational theatre thing.
• This movie probably has the same soundtrack as High Kicks. Prepare for a '90s-gasm, which is like an orgasm but with mullets. Except unlike High Kicks, it also has shitty '90s video graphixxx, which doubles the awesome.  
• There is some unfortunately real animal violence (a snake eating a mouse). Luckily, there is enough hilarity involving snakes that you will still love snakes after the movie.  
• Learning the black arts involves passing boxes back and forth between your hands and picking up bottles off of desks, says this film. This is sacrosanct fact in the school of evil wizards.  
• In Hell the demons will grab your mullet, and they will tug on it as they whip you! It's all you deserve for growing the fucking thing. That's probably why you went to Hell to begin with.
• For some reason Renny uses a lot of paired nouns in his expositions voiceovers, specifically ones refer to Bad Shit. "Violence and bloodshed," "bloodshed and death," "corruption and wickedness." It forms its own weird meter that quickly becomes funny, in both senses of that word.

That's it, really. It is a short film, which perhaps pushes me into the Hyper Happy regions--if you take out the credits it's about a minute over an hour. That shortness probably points to one of the things that makes Bad Magic great: its poverty. I sincerely suspect Renny's two-dollar bribe was the sum of what they used to make this, and because there was no money involved there was also no reason not to take risks and go bananas. And take those banana-gone risks the filmmakers did, unleashing a demon unto the world like the characters they chronicled. The only pitfall here is some slight boredom and padding--that is what drags it below Splatter Farm for me, though Splatter Farm certainly slows down sometimes.

The Polonias will undoubtedly return. Sometime soon we'll see Splatter Farm and perhaps another old gem, Night Crawlers. But don't make me choose between them! The Polonia films are all precious. If these movies were taken from me by someone, I, too, would commit Renny's sins, and spectral revenge would be upon the thieves for the awful thing they did.

High Kicks (1993), by Ruta K. Aras

I have encountered a generation of movies--usually action movies, but it varies--that have managed to contain the very living essence of the '90s, which was a bizarre era for those of us who set out to make movies with no money. A lot of these low-budget productions washed up on the shores of our elementary schools. Some of them distantly haunt my memory, all nameless and indistinguishable from one another; nothing else but old ghosts now. They always featured the immortal VHS hiss, wooden acting, curious accents, and questionable slang. It turns out there were some movies that had all of that, down to the letter, in movies made for adults as well, and High Kicks is one of them. It is a martial arts film. It is also a rape revenge film. But because it's filtered down through classic shot-on-shitteo blandness, it comes across as jarring and flat at the same time. That contrast has always intrigued me for some reason. Maybe I just like being embarrassed by how stupid the decade I grew up in was.

High Kicks starts off on what is probably the weirdest possible note for a rape revenge film: with super-sexualized shots of ladies working out. I feel like maybe this was supposed to set up some sort of guilt in the audience, possibly offense and confusion as well. This workout takes place as a gym called High Kicks!, run by Sandy, mistress of aerobics. When her handyman ditches out on her she takes on a new one, a sailor named Sam, who is secretly a karate master. A group of street thugs, led by a chubby white dude named TC, break into the gym and assault Sandy. Sam helps her recover from the trauma, and he offers her to teach her karate, with the aid of his buddies/practice combatants Jonas (from Germany!) and Maurice (from "OUTAH SPAAAAACE!!!"). Every line of dialogue throughout is unnatural but charmingly Hamill-esque ("I'm kinduva free spirit, actually!" Sam says), and the hair on most of the characters is pretty awful. It's simultaneously dark and whimsical, uplifted by Casio cues and community theater earnestness even after people have been gang-raped. It jumps from unflinching and realistic images of trauma to a weird love triangle between Sandy, Sam, and one of Sandy's students, Tracy, which plays out in the most soap opera-y of fashions. And all throughout, those training montages and synth demos never let us forget what decade it is. High Kicks is vengeance and justice...for the '90s!

The scope of the film never gets too sizable for its trousers, as the saying goes. That is to say, it is a movie that you can believe would happen in real life. There is a five-man criminal organization who is the subject of sweet revenge by Sandy and her three karate buddies, broken down into several ass-kicking sessions. Then, there is the Tracy-Sandy-Sam love triangle, which is endearingly the fault of Sam's bad social skills. Actually, Sam is a pretty great character for this sort of movie--not only is he as awkward as he is good at martial arts, but he, too, is a rape victim. He and Sandy are on equal terms, because one is never above the other in terms of martial arts skills, or at least so. Can I go so far as to call it a feminist movie? It does fail the Bechdel test pretty hard, at least as far as I noticed, but unlike a lot of low-budget action movies, it doesn't glory in or exploit its rape scenes...er, even though those rape scenes become the primary motivation for its lead character. I may be thinking too hard about this--you know the rule of never devoting more time than the director did. 

This movie isn't going to change how your brain works. It is simply entertaining. But entertainment, at least in my opinion, can truly be an end in itself--humans thrive on it. And High Kicks will entertain every time you come back. That means it's a reliable resting place for one to go to when the "real world" gets too intense. You just need something of a strong stomach, a little tastelessness, and a forewarning of the potentially triggering material. (The whole thing's nudity-free--there is nothing explicit in Sandy's assault, though it may still be troubling.) But it is rewarding, and not merely because the acting really does remind you of Birdemic.

This movie is better than Birdemic. For one thing it's only 80 minutes, and also, things constantly happen in it, instead of there being blank seas of hopeless nothing. The special effects are better, too, because there are none. A better comparison movie would be 1987's Killer Workout. That film plus this one would be a great double-feature, providing a slasher take on the world of aerobicizing. (A world lost to time, full of dark and mysterious secrets.) I'm sure Killer Workout will end up on this site at some point or another.

Seriously, though: do not watch High Kicks if you have a dislike of the '90s in any way. It will literally kill you.

Book Club of Desolation #1: The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (1934), by Harry Stephen Keeler

I'm very excited to introduce a new column here on Adam Mudman's A-List. I've long wondered if there was ever a literary parallel to the trash cinema that I've dedicated so much of my life to, and only recently have I started to construct a picture of such a thing. This picture was always there, waiting to be dug up, and it's here where I have to say that the new column, of which today's post is the first, is based in large part on the shoulders of previous giants. I would like to start my thanks with one aimed at Ramble House for collecting various and sundry bits of crazy lit back into light--reprinting the works of Ron Haydock and Jim Harmon, Richard E. Goddard and Harry Stephen Keeler, who all disturbed and distorted the function of the novel and the English language. In regards to Keeler, I would like to thank the Harry Stephen Keeler Society for their work on documenting the life of today's writer (who of course I'll get to in a bit), and thus bettering the world in any number of ways. And finally, I would like to give a shoutout to OR Books for their release of Blood Spatters Quickly, a collection of the short stories of Ed Wood. (That Ed Wood. Of course.) I'm sure I have met and will yet meet many other people who will lead me to the sort of wonderful convention-defying literature akin to that which we explore today. Now, the Book Club of Desolation is in session, and in its moldy room in the old haunted library, the weirdest of the weird will be perused. And brought into the sunlight.

The gorgeous McSweeney's hardcover edition.

It would be easy for me to dedicate this entire column to Harry Stephen Keeler. He is truly one of the most baffling and inspirational authors of the early/mid 20th Century, and whether you like him or not, reading his work will forever transform one's knowledge of the limitations of the mystery genre, much in the same way that works like House of Leaves transforms the way one views a book. His motifs, in their own way, have become legendary--absurd plot twists (like revealing the killer's identity to be a character we've never heard of before on the last page), bizarre dialects (which usually have to be read aloud to be comprehensible in any way), and obsessive recurring MacGuffins (circus freaks, skulls) are just a few of the things that motivate the bizarre legacy he thankfully left for us in his prolific lifespan. I have only just begun what I hope to be a long relationship with Keeler, and I have started such a bond with the most recommended first book of his, 1934's The Riddle of the Traveling Skull. If even half of his material is like this, I will suddenly have an entire library worth of material for both this column and my life.

So with that briefest of intros, we reach our first conundrum--explaining the plot of Riddle is next to impossible, because it depends on impossibility to function. All the same, I'll do my best to talk about it, while also preserving the tradition of not revealing its frustrating and hilarious conclusion.

I should say beforehand, however: Keeler was a pulp writer in the '30s, and that means his racial sensibilities are not up to modern par by any stretch of the word--it is one of the most significant issues of his work. There is some debate over whether or not Keeler was genuinely racist or parodying racism. It's hard to figure out, especially in Riddle, and so let me just say that most readers will tense up any time a person of color shows up (Keeler always had a fascination with the Chinese in particular). I like the idea that Keeler was a progressive, and the shocking racism of his work is, in fact, attempt to be a parody. A parody that is no less heavy-handed than anything else in his corpus.

Clay Calthorpe is a businessman returning to his native Chicago from a trip in England, where he is pursued by a, ahem, mysterious Chinaman. Calthorpe realizes that the Asian has been following him from the train--this unsettling realization is swiftly topped when he finds out that his work bag has been switched with someone else's. And the holder of the swapped bag was using it to transport a trepanned skull, containing a green bullet and shredded fragments of a poem! Calthorpe, though shaken by the discovery, goes to visit his friend John Barr, the inventor of Barr-Bag, a model of work bag that seriously gets, like, two chapters dedicated to it in descriptions. Barr has to get throat surgery, and Keeler then spends a lot of time lingering on the use of cocaine in surgery, perhaps trying to tell us something. Calthorpe then visits his fiancee, and the revelation of the skull causes his future father-in-law, the head of a wealthy candy company, to faint, and then call off the marriage. The businessman thus has a personal stake in solving the mystery--his marriage depends on it! The subplots that spin out of this concept are endless. It involves a trail leading to "O. Ming Lee, the Spider-Woman," a circus freak with six arms and four legs (!), as well as lectures about trepanation, and the sinister machinations of Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel (!!!), called Suing Sophie due to her compulsion for suing men over breach of promise by faking that they failed to marry her after proposal. As I said, the ending does not merely suck at making sense, but it is literally physically impossible.

I could not believe the amount of plot that Keeler squeezed into the novel. I have mentioned my own complicated plots before (peers' adjective, I swear), but I could never dream of getting in as many sub-stories, coincidences, and unlikely twists as HSK did. On top of this, his prose is dreadful. By which I mean, of course, beautiful. He insists--and here I create a self-demonstrating example!--on using an over-plethora of em-dashes--creating a sequence of increasingly Wagnerian tangents and sub-tangents--using the most egregious and overripe of the prose of purplish hue. He actually really is like Lovecraft, minus the supernatural stuff, and with more fun than ol' H.P. ever had. (He even has a Mysterious Occult Book like the Necronomicon--a tome of Chinese wisdom called The Way Out.) Naturally, he is indigestible, but fortunately, plot points are repeated over and over again, to the point where you can tell what's going on, without straining yourself.

The thing is, Keeler didn't have all of this craziness appear at random. There was an almost philosophical dimension to why he did his plots the way he did. He had a famous theory about plot working called webwork theory, wherein a plot could be sketched into a complex web of connections--each intersection point between the plotlines was a coincidence in the story that bound these seemingly scattered stories into a single (ostensibly) cohesive whole. (The link goes to the theory as posited by the man himself, which admittedly is extremely hard to read, because prose--Wikipedia is a better alternative but please read that link all the same.) When I read about Keeler's webwork theory, I found a weird kinship, as a lot of my own fiction has had a tendency (hear my confession!) to cobble together multiple storylines that are bound by a central idea of significance, and with the ending being the primary pre-planned point of the story. Reading one of his novels helped me understand the process on a deeper level, and already, I have incorporated a KEELERIAN PLOT PENTAGRAM into a story of mine, as an experiment in FUN. (That is to say I drew a pentagram and came up with a subplot for each intersection, and expanded from there.)

The thing is, Riddle seems to put a meta-statement on webwork theory into the character's reflections on life. Several times, Clay talks about how life is just a big web of coincidences that come together in shocking ways. There is a sort of divinity to this, and to me, Keeler is revealing little bit of his soul to us here. He is one of those "God moves in mysterious ways" people. Except in his universe, God is a fucking disorganized mess with no subtlety whatsoever. Keeler thus gets himself a chance to mock life by making it senseless while also being a series of orderly conspiracies by nature itself. Social, historical, or economic forces are not the ways of the secret world here--instead, everyone is the subject of a masterminded universal joke.

Of course, it's also possible that he was just over the top because the pulp standards of his era commanded him to. Those were weird times! I plan on featuring a relatively mainstream pulp on this column at some point, a 1937 piece called The Octopus, which is genuinely fitting for the site. But you can't help but sense that Keeler was different. He was more aware of his surroundings than his peers. And he mocked the hell of out of everything, all the while having the time of his life. He experimented in a time where survival was based on writing quickly, which meant formulas--these experiments are evident in webwork theory, an attempt to render writing scientific. When Keeler did resort to formulas, they were bizarre enough to satisfy every time, as they mostly involved his own internal mythos of recurring symbols.

As I said, most Keeler fans will recommend this as a first. That's because it will hook you for life--I can and will testify to that. I can't wait to look deeper. Sometime soon, I plan to check out one of the last books Keeler did before his 1967 death. He never chilled, and these last works seem to be exponential leagues ahead of the madness of Riddle.

There is one last thing that I think summarizes my experience with this book...

Near the end of this book, there is a tag that the publisher customarily put in all their mysteries, where the reader is told: "Stop! At this point--all the characters and clues have been presented to make it possible for you to determine the true identity of the blackmailer." When I read this I literally shouted "Bullshit!" and slammed the book down on the table.

---

Image Source: Amazon

Hack-o-Lantern (1988), by Jag Mundhra

The worst part of reviewing these movies is describing them.

As I've said many times before, the goal of the A-List is to spread awareness of trash movies with the hopes that people will check 'em out and, ideally, reconstruct their notions of "good" and "bad" movies. Because these movies subvert and play with all of the cinematic conventions we've grown comfortable on (being sheltered since childhood in a Plato's Cave of exclusively good movies...usually), putting them in precisely-defined terms is the most important part of "selling" their value. (More a spiritual and emotional value than a capitalist one, to be sure.) While it is easy for me to simply proclaim the greatness of these films, that method is not effective. And there's always an unsteady balance between revealing the fun and spoiling it. But what complicates the issue further is that there is always an indescribable aura of good in them. An intrinsic sweet substance that flows richly from them, that touch the heart and destabilize the mind. Maybe it's masochistic guilt, or sadistic schadenfreude against the poor souls who tore their chests open to the world and fell so hard. Or soared so high.

Today's movie, fortunately, is one that presents that magic, invisible "trash feeling," while also being easily comparable to "bad movies" that people have a high chance of having already seen. I've heard people compare it to Troll 2. Both are distinctly products of the late '80s/early '90s. Both had foreign directors directing American casts (Indian and Italian, respectively). Both are fucking incredible. Good news, at this point in history statistically you probably either have seen Troll 2 or know someone who can show it to you! That will lead easily in Hack-o-Lantern. Following Hack-o-Lantern may have to be James Bryan's Don't Go in the Woods, or maybe Furious. The goal is to get you to like Manos: The Hands of Fate, and then send you down into Ax 'Em, and finally Hip Hop Locos. It's nearly impossible to get any sort of enjoyment out of what waits on deeper levels, like After Last Season, Where the Dead Go to Die, and Alien Beasts. Love is not applicable to them. They are not even movies. They are Creatures.

This movie gets off to a great start--we have a relatively innocent setup where a young boy named Tommy meets with his grandfather, who is very sweet, if overdramatic and possessed of a voice that sounds like Beetlejuice after six packs of Red Apple cigarettes. Of course, he is a Satanist, who teaches Tommy that blood tastes good and drinking it makes you healthy. Also, he kills Tommy's father by burning him alive. But this is just the beginning. If you think that this movie holds back its weird twists and somehow becomes normal after this intro, you are dead wrong. It's revealed that Tommy's grandpa is incredibly open about being a Satanist, and apparently happily revealed to his daughter that he killed her husband. He even keeps one of his bones on a necklace, which he shows off to her while groping her. It is a scene that is gross by default, true, but the whiplash pacing, poorly-chosen soundtrack, absurd line delivery, and unsettling stylistic changes (rustic thriller to Hammer Horror to POV '80s slasher depending on the scene) make nothing in the film come across as truly fucked-up. It's laughs all the way through, even with some occasional slow bits. Where will Tommy's dark destiny lead him? To heavy metal? To a cool-looking demon mask and burying people alive? Or even to the horrid depths of branding someone's buttcheek with a pentagram...?!

This is one of those films where you can let it play in the background, and 90% of the time when you turn back to it, something crazy is going on. Ass-branding aside, this movie is full of nonsense. The grandpa's mouth is always of both scenery and an ever-worsening Southern accent. People have sex in a graveyard on top of one of the graves. And even dedicated fans of soap operas will be shocked and intrigued by how many times people have the same repetitive conversations about relationships. In all of this, there is perpetually a sense that everyone involved had great fun and they wanted you to have great fun as well.

The issue is, they had to get it to feature length, and thus there are a lot of shots that are just plain uninteresting. Some of them are too dark to see, and others are visually dull next to vibrant shots lit by mood lighting (such as at the Halloween party, which, like everything else in the movie, is full of EIGHTIES). So again, feel free to zone out--just expect to be dragged back in rather hurriedly when the dull shit is over!

I'm always impressed by how this movie, via having the garnishes of poor acting and all the other stuff I mentioned, manages to thrive despite being incredibly generic for an occult thriller. The scenes of Satanic rituals--and indeed, Satan himself is the evil here, because it's not like he's overdone or anything--consist of people in black robes dancing around candlelit pentagrams and drinking from chalices. That's it. It is the original, generic, archetypical "Black Mass" scene. Even the movie's tenuous link to heavy metal had been beaten to death by the '80s by the time this movie came out. Do not come here looking for an original story. The presentation of the story is what matters, because they did indeed manage to fumble literally everything. Everything except showing off lots of boobs.

That combination--failure and simplicity--make Hack-o-Lantern simultaneously charming and spooky. It's great on Halloween, as if you couldn't tell. While it will not frighten you, it may potentially give you goosebumps, which if you're like me will give your life more meaning. I live for spooky shit. I die for spooky shit. And I like laughing at this nonsense.

And sharing it with you, of course.

Hack-o-Lantern is a syzygy, a fusion of two opposites. It is both entirely relatable and entirely alien. It's something that you can jump on no matter what of stage of life you're in, as well as a gateway to something greater. Hack-o-Lantern doles out perspective, and through perspective, we have understanding. And understanding leads to a better world.

ENGH-SkreeeoOOoonk: A Retrospective on the Godzilla Series, Part 2 (The Heisei Era)

 
Welcome back to the A-List Retrospective on the Godzilla franchise! In case you missed it, Part 1 can be found here. Today we've got the Heisei series, which ran from 1984 with The Return of Godzilla and ended in 1995 with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. It is the second and as-yet final continuous Godzilla series. From when the franchise returned to Toho control after the hiatus of Ț͉͓̮̱̤̏̊ͅh̸e̟̹̤͈͉̹̯̾̓ͯ ͚̟͙̗͎T̶̥̜͇̙̱̱ŕ͕̯͖ͫ̄̈́̀̉ī̡̜͙̹̼̥̅̏̋S̛̪͔t̼̯̖̬̿̒̀ͤ̎ͫ̄͜a̰̬͂̽̄r̢̓͐́̄̓͒ͨ ̒̔̾ͮ͡F̻̲̩̏ͥͅí̗͈̜͍̈́̾ͫͯļ̫͍͈̺̘̤̄̎̀̎ͅm̠̬̞͕̌̈̿̀̔, each film formed its own unique continuity. There were shoutouts to other movies, of course, and Final Wars seemed to incorporate all canon, with a special focus on the Showa series. The Heisei series for that reason alone is just as much of a romp as the Showa series, in ways both good and bad. It is a fun story to follow. Despite some weak segments, it has a nostalgic quality to it that makes me look forward to the pair of proposed continuous-canon series supposedly on the horizon via Toho and Legendary. But because its entries are fewer in number, it can end up being a hard thing to love. Yet, what can one expect out of Godzilla...? Let's answer that question--and learn it's not all so bleak!

Warning: As is the case for most of the posts on this site, there will be spoilers ahead.

Bloodstream (1985), by Michael J. Murphy

Not long after Shogun Assassin, here I am with another revenge movie. It's a much stranger revenge movie that its Eastern counterpart. It's made by the guy who made The Hereafter, which was kind of fun, but overly long. He then made Death Run, proving he was much more versatile--and badass--than he first appeared. Bloodstream was never officially released, though there have been bootlegs of it going around for some time, and I'm sure there's some company or another out there who will take your money for a DVD-R. There may be some movies that show up on here that are of a similar nature, in that they have not been formally released (see The Tony Blair Witch Project)--including some that were never entirely finished (such as Voodoo Swamp). Bloodstream's de facto underground status makes it an enthralling phenomenon to begin with, but the fact that it is also a great movie makes it two times the awesome.

Bloodstream stars Alistair, a filmmaker who makes a horror flick also called Bloodstream. His producer, William King, is a colossal dick. He tells Alistair his movie sucks and that he should just "get a proper job." He says "proper" because this film is British. If customers at work told me to get a "proper" job instead of a "real" job, I'd be somewhat charmed rather than offended and sad. It turns out, though, that King is pulling a hoax--he tells Alistair that he won't distribute the film but does anyway after ostensibly firing him. With the aid of King's secretary Nikki, Alistair dons a skeleton costume and sets King and his closest friends and family into line so they can be killed. The deaths are suitably awful, including chainsaw decapitation and a knife rammed down someone's throat. Because Alistair is a filmmaker this movie is about snuff films. Alistair slowly becomes obsessed with making his snuff film into great art...because as it turns out, those horror movies really are bad for you...

It's easy for me to compare this film to Skullduggery, a movie which I'm sure I'll feature on here at some point. Because Bloodstream does something that Skullduggery also does. Throughout the latter film, there are additional stories that parallel the course of the main plot. There is a D&D game which plays a role in the main character's killings, and a weird medieval prologue, as well as a poorly-made stage play, that toy around with what's going on as the main character does what he does. In Bloodstream, Alistair forms an obsession with horror movies, and indeed, at least half of this movie is comprised of scenes where Alistair smokes cigarettes and watches an endlessly entertaining string of fake monster movies. They don't explain initially that these movies aren't one film, and they don't explain that these movies are not Bloodstream. I assumed that Bloodstream was the slasher movie they show at the beginning, so I was confused when suddenly scenes from a mummy movie started cropping up. Sometimes there are reflections of the main plot with Alistair in the movies Alistair watches, just as Skullduggery's D&D game nods to what we're supposed to be primarily invested. But there's another mirroring in Bloodstream, and that of course is the title. This is a horror movie about a horror movie, and both movies have the same name. It's telling that the maker of the fictional Bloodstream demonstrates a severe hatred for the film distribution industry--and ironic, then, that the movie didn't make it to release in real life. Sad, too, that it never got that message out, or that the world got to see how marvelous the movie is.

A lot of the awesomeness of this movie comes from the fictional movies it shows off. There's a mummy movie, a werewolf movie (though it looks more like a were-skunk), and some sort of medieval torture thing where an evil court jester has a strip of rubber taped to his face. If each of these movies was a full movie within Bloodstream, I'd still watch it, even if it meant it was twenty-something hours long. So much care went into these interruptions, and it is probable that they were meant as padding. Maybe their briefness facilitates my enjoyment of them. It's hard to say. They fit well--I never felt like the dichotomy between clips and skull-masked slayings was unbalanced.

Then there's the premise. In our universe, two adults would not sit down and decide that the answer to being massively ripped off resided in dressing up as a skeleton and killing people. But here, it seems to be kind of a normal thing. Remember that Nikki is not insane, and she comes up with a lot of what Alistair ends up doing. I was under the impression that she had been the one to propose bone-man justice. And that's wonderful. In terms of realism, it's almost like a superhero movie, if superhero movies tended to feature the protagonist creating mountains of corpses.

Bloodstream is one of those slashers that fully satisfies my love of slashers. And I mean full satisfaction--like inhaling really, really good chocolate, or letting oneself sip straight from a two-liter of root beer. I am a sucker for unprofessional movies about masked killers, and the A-List--the actual list that fuels this site, that is--has tons of them. Long Island Cannibal Massacre, Nigel the Psychopath, and Ogroff have a sort of mystique that only a wide variety of bladed weapons and face coverings can supply. Maybe it's the comic fan in me, and I really do have a fetish for garish costumes. Who knows. I want you to watch it and get back to me, so I can see if I'm just a weirdo.

Maniac (1934), by Dwain Esper

Exploitation, as the impression of a genre, has always existed. Even before cinema became one of the big pillars of modern media, there was Weird Shit tucked away in the depths of history. Guillaume Apollinaire, regarded as a great hero of Western poetry, wrote 1907's Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, a porn novel where the hero's type as far as women go involves lots and lots of thick hair, all over their bodies, like werewolves. While hailed by some now as great art, there's also Marquis de Sade's 18th Century gross-out 120 Days of Sodom, a book which is madcap in its disgusting and traumatizing rebellion against literary and social conventions. I could go on and on, but I'm full of myself enough as is and so citing all of these references makes me look like a tool. Today we're talking about Maniac, a movie that was basically a '60s exploitation movie thirty years before the '60s. It joins Reefer Madness and Sh! The Octopus as Depression-era schlock that mercifully survived. I live for this stuff--this confirmation that there's always been this magic to the world. Today's film can be a great demonstration to friends if you need to defend your faith in the history of trash--should you have it!

Don Maxwell is a former impersonator who works for Doctor Meirschultz, a Santa Claus-looking motherfucker who apparently saved Maxwell from the law. Meirschultz is obsessed with, what else, bringing the dead back to life. When Maxwell bungles his attempts to fulfill his life dreams, the doc orders Maxwell to kill himself so that he can be the subject of the resurrection. It stands to reason that Maxwell kills his mentor and begins impersonating him, which drives him off the deep end. This leads to shenanigans, like injecting "super adrenaline" into a crazy guy, which makes him start spitting William Shatner slam poetry and kidnapping women. Then, someone eats cat eyeballs. Honestly, this movie is just shenanigans, or more truthfully, shenanigans and misanthropy. I was gonna say sexism, but then I remembered that men get the short end of the stick too. The wife of Shatner-guy reveals that she hated her husband and is happy that he's now an insane woman-grabbing zombie, and agrees to help Maxwell kill more people. An apparent sorority we meet is populated by boneheads who are given fake dubs to make them seem even dumber. But the male leads include a scientist who experiments on corpses, a serial killer, and a man who breeds hundreds of cats to take their skins. In the end, the cat of the eaten eye exposes a corpse walled up in Maxwell's basement, and it's off to cardboard-bars prison he goes.

Filled with random introductions of characters and subplot, Maniac is actually really exciting. It's a movie where the entire gimmick involves topping what we've already seen with something even more improbable. Most improbable of all is the possibility of sincerity behind the title cards, which give outdated medical advice concerning various manifestations of mental illness. These attempts at being intelligent as facades--as educational as the historical exposition in A Clockwork Blue. What's on display here are some forbidden boobs and an attempt to discomfort, an odyssey into the Real World of mental illness in the same way that Reefer Madness is a voyage through the Real World of marijuana. It is a farce, and I love my farces.

Furthering the notion of its duplicitous nature, it plays with dialogue in some fun ways. Meirschultz mocks Maxwell, using pronunciation that shoves all adjacent scenery into his mouth: "Youu, an AC-TOR?!? Once a HAM, always a HAM." He backs this up by foreshadowing Maxwell's destiny by saying, "Study under me, and someday, you too will be a great man." Yet these little meta jabs opposes the production value: this is all framed under the watchful power of home video-vision. Odd cuts, cramped sets, and obvious cue card abuse, along with unlikely statements ("Mr. Buckley is positively mad! He thinks he's the Orangutan Murderer from Poe's Rue Morgue!") make it both a fascinating and jarring movie to watch. There's a sense of real dread in how simple it is. There is barely any music and the acting is, as I've alluded to before, pretty barebones. But it is ambitious, and there are moments of cleverness and genuine originality. It is not a movie that plays by the rules, possibly because it couldn't afford to it. Glory to it for that, I say, because if it can pull off all of these elements I'm rambling about, that's an accomplishment. It shows heart on behalf of the creator. A desire to produce something that is at least entertaining, if not cathartic or good.

I should mention that it does end up imitating a number of classic horror stories. The stuff with the walled-up body and the cat doubles up with the Rue Morgue allusion to create a double Poe combo. At the end, Maxwell also talks about how Meirschultz's eyes made him do it, like "The Tell-Tale Heart." Plus, the orangutan-man's wife deciding to help Maxwell with his work made me think of Mrs. Lovett from the Sweeney Todd story. But it's not an adaptation--it's an echo. It's like a modernization of those stories, with borrowings from Frankenstein. I suppose it's no great feat for this film to be a product of a time when scientists raising the dead was a popular trope--though in my mind, this movie does it better than the Whale Frankenstein. (I'm sorry, but I always found the Boris Karloff films to be tedious...I much prefer Al Adamson or even Jess Franco if I have to.) I guess whether or not you like the echoes in Maniac, though, depends on whether you like references in general. If you think a movie should stand on its own without a literary legacy behind it, you may be opposed to it. Fortunately, it does stand strong on its own legs, and so even if you've never read Poe before, or you think he's overdone, this movie will move you in some way. Poe made and knew good tropes, and this movie inherits them even without prior information.

All in all, a cheap and creepy wonder. There's no reason not to give it at least one watch--it's in the public domain and on YouTube, and it won't steal even an hour of your day (fifty minutes!). It's madness within, madness without. Living proof that we humans have always had a knack for breaking out of our own heads.