The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1970), by Leon Klimovsky

Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. And that's what leads me to both do this review today and to condemn its subject. I felt an obligation to review this movie a week after reviewing the book that was supposed to be this film's novelization. And following that obligation has kept me off this blog's main focus, which is focusing on my favorite ("A-List") trash movies. The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, the fifth of Spanish actor Paul Naschy's movies starring werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, is not one of my favorites, even if I did like a few moments of it. Overall, however, I want to rip it apart, because I don't get to do that enough up here, though I have reason to be fair as well.

Waldemar Daninsky is resurrected by a coroner who refuses to believe his assistant's tale of werewolves. After both men and a nameless woman are butchered by the werewolf Daninsky, we cut to our two protagonists, students named Elvira and Genevieve, who are looking for Countess Wandessa de Nadasdy. They never say why they want to find her, but they are soon led to the castle of the revived Daninsky. Sound familiar? Mercifully, the similarities to Leo Guild's book run out here. The two ladies are briefly assaulted by Waldemar's crazy lesbian sister, before discovering the Countess's tomb. One of the girls accidentally cuts herself and spills blood on the corpse, a la Black Sunday, bringing the vampire back to life, briefly as a mummified dried-out ghoul like the Templars from The Blind Dead (which this movie predates). From there, we lose steam as characters walk around and talk about details we already know about vampires, werewolves, and Waldemar Daninsky. Namely that he is a werewolf who can only be saved by true love. Daninsky's...neighbor? chauffeur? tries to kidnap one of the girls, who has become the werewolf's lover and thus the key to his salvation, but this nameless creeper-man is killed in one of the few werewolf scenes in this werewolf movie. I'm saying the word "werewolf" a lot, and so let me just say that the werewolf does indeed vs. the vampire woman. We can't see a single frame of it because this is a '70s horror movie and the concept of lighting something is foreign and impossible. There is an interesting enough final shot of Elvira and her original boyfriend walking away from the corpses of the monsters.

One issue that about the Daninsky series that I've read and heard fairly often is that Paul Naschy never let his world grow. Sure, he did some fun twists, like the one where Daninsky has a run-in with Dr. Jekyll and becomes a werewolf/Mr. Hyde fusion. But usually, he's still endlessly trying to mine the nuggets of Universal Horror's veins, copying rather than pastiching, deconstructing, or reimagining. I'm a brat spoiled on postmodernism, of course, but in this case I justify myself with the assertion that the Universal films are old now. Very, very old. Before you say that I do not understand these movies because I didn't grow up with them...I did. I remember being entertained by the sequels to The Mummy, being bored by the Larry Talbot movies, and hating Frankenstein. My opinion might change if I watched them again, but they are slow, slow movies. Certainly, the ideas would have seemed dramatic and novel in previous decades, but Seinfeld Syndrome has taken full effect. What I'm saying is: the Daninsky films are boring because his source material is boring. While Naschy is a skilled actor, and can construct some solid (albeit thin) plots, he moves around cardboard imitations of better movies that were never that cracked-up to begin with.

Naschy homages Black Sunday in this movie. Black Sunday is very Universal-y, but with better (and more numerous) creeps and much more charismatic actors--a lovely fusion between the B&W age of Universal and the updated European grossness of Hammer. Why didn't he draw on more movies like that? I know he apes the Hammer movies at some point but I doubt he ever drew on something legitimately awesome and unique like The Devil Rides Out or The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. He also really did inspire Amando de Ossorio's evil Templar movies. He could've had Tombs of the Blind Dead but for some reason he always settled for Night of the Seagulls.

It's easy to attack Naschy's movies, and I'm far from the first person to do it. They simply haven't aged well, and because they choose to thrill with familiar childhood symbols relevant to a Universal-loving audience, they provide some lockout for people expecting scares instead of nostalgia. At the same time, the man deserves to be respected as a national icon for Spain and a hero to many, and in any case, he passed away in 2009, so I feel some extra guilt in going after him. Instead, let's talk about how the movie succeeds. Me being me, I had to watch the movie from a trash perspective, and the first half delivers both laughs and sincere intrigue. Boris Karloff's toe-curling charm and Bela Lugosi's inherent goofiness are absent, but the dub actors thankfully make up for it by furthering the demonstration that the English dub community up until the late '90s must have been worked to exhaustion week after week. When Genevieve explains the story of Countess Wandessa, she speaks with the diction and enthusiasm of a Midwestern housewife sharing recipes, even though Wandessa bathed in the blood of virgins, worshiped Satan, and attended "the Sabbath" (yeah, 'cause Satanism is the only faith to practice something called that). The dub actors also pronounce "Waldemar" (which I assumed was said as "Vahl-de-mahr") as "Waldo-mur." This works to Naschy's advantage, because it is hilarious. Elvira's encounter with the apparently-nameless creepy driver is also fun just because it slowly gets more intense until we realize this guy is not only fucked up, but probably a fated victim of the werewolf. Hell, there's even some offensive shit, even besides Waldomur's sister apparently being a lesbian as a result of her mental illness--the first time Genevieve and Elvira suspect that Daninsky is keeping a secret person hidden in the castle is because "only a woman could have set such a lovely table!" The other woman replies: "But when we ate at that table, he only served cold cuts. That's a man's dinner!"

It may be weird for me to say this here, but I liked how this movie was set in contemporary times. Yep, there's a reference from one of the coroners to the Apollo landings. It gives the movie an added dimension to consider that the isolated, backwards provinces that the movie takes place in is part of the world of 1970--it shows that the Old World is still hidden out there, and yes, it has monsters in it. Clearly Elvira and Genevieve weren't letting themselves get caught up in some good ol' Second Wave Feminism back in their home country. They probably vote Republican.

Finally, Naschy's fanboyishness comes to the fore with the pacing of the first half, which serves the film well. So desperate is he to getting around to the werewolf adventures that many sequences that would ordinarily be stretched out seem to have been cut, making it all refreshingly quick. The girls seemed to find Daninsky's castle pretty easily, and the exhuming/resurrection of Wandessa mercifully happens shortly thereafter. This doesn't escape the fact that the last forty minutes of the movie are a wandering, disjointed mess, with barely anything visible on camera and even less actually happening. If the Daninsky movies were twenty or thirty minutes long, I think they'd be masterpieces. But Paul Naschy had to go the full nine yards, for reasons best left to him.

No fault to you if you're untroubled by that. I will not knock a movie that was not made for me. All the same, it would have been nice to expect something a little unfamiliar--something closer to the roving wilderness I like to focus on with this site. That having been said...much more enjoyable than Arthur fucking Scarm.

Book Club of Desolation #7: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1972), by "Arthur M. Scarm"

(New rule: never trust a piece of writing which opens with a paragraph in parentheses.)

Where the fuck did this come from? I'm glad I now know. This book captivated me for several years before I finally broke down and grabbed a copy from Ramble House (the generous blokes who also published my book, Tail of the Lizard King). Experiencing the work for myself, combined with new developments online (for me), reveals that The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was likely the product of Leo Guild, creator of such musty tomes as The Girl Who Loved Black and Black Bait and Black Streets of Oakland (to say nothing of Street of Hoes). Which, surprise, are racist and sleazy beyond any other '70s pulp I've seen. From what I know, that's a common discovery, even for people with more experience in '70s pulps than me. Brrr. Well, I don't know if the name is "Arthur Scarm" or "Arthur Scram"--apparently in the 1972 edition, probably-Guild is credited with both names. Speaking of 1972: that was two years after the release of the fifth of the endlessly tedious "Waldemar Daninsky" werewolf movies by Spanish director, actor, and super-fan Paul Naschy, originally called Walpurgis Night, but released in the U.S. as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman. This book was intended as an adaptation of the film to build hype in an American audience. Unfortunately, Leo Guild was brought into the project, and he apparently decided to make this thing his own. And at the time there was no creative vision as hideous as his.

And I will say this: the legends are true. Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman is easily one of the most atrocious things ever published. This is perhaps the farthest I have ever gone in terms of a book and its sheer badness--prose-wise, it's so simplistic that it's almost a children's book, except full of misogyny, rape, and murder. The plot is everywhere, bouncing around through ten different story points in fifteen pages. And there are more tangents than in Tristram Shandy. I can only summarize the plot in a string of scenes, because there is not a shred of seriousness applied to having this be anything but a bunch of random events.

A werewolf is brought into a morgue. He is named Waldo, which is sorta like Waldemar Daninsky. The idiot coroner removes the silver bullet that killed him, and he comes back to life to kill the coroner and rape his assistant. Because Leo Guild wrote this and he was a fucking asshole, the assistant falls in love with him, as do two students named Genevieve and Elvira (sure, whatever), whom he also beats and rapes. We learn in detail that werewolves have enormous "wangs," and that burning werewolf pubes smell like perfume, which I swear to God is a thing I was forced to read. Genevieve and Elvira were previously searching for a vampire woman named Countess Wandessa "Wanda" de Nadasdy. I would say that's probably a joke on "Danasdy," but this was the name of an actual character from the movie (as were Genevieve and Elvira, I should say). Waldo and the girls finance their long quest using pirate gold that they find in what is total not a contrived sequence, and on this trip, Waldo fucks and murders the girls while trying to destroy Countess Wanda--because werewolves and vampires naturally hate each other, y'see. Harmless nonsense like Waldo using black magic to shrink a woman's breasts is intercut with scenes of Waldo whacking a woman against a wall until the room is splattered with the gory chunks of her body. This is probably the first book I've read which is written by a serial killer. This is followed by Waldo and Wanda forming an on-again/off-again romance culminating in their desire to become movie stars, despite the fact that Wanda has literally never heard the word "acting" before. In the end the two are forced to kill each other, as fate demands, in a scene where lesbianism throws Waldo into a berserk rage which is somehow not his fault.

Actually, if you did want to do a "Too Long; Didn't Read" synopsis of this book, it would be this: Waldo the Werewolf is an abusive, sadistic monster who at no point demonstrates any sort of legitimate affection for anyone around him besides himself, and yet somehow manages to get exactly what he wants with zero consequences, for 130 pages. In this universe, werewolves are boss, and I am not going far at all in saying that men are boss too. The most competent woman in the entire book is, of course, Countess Wanda, but she inevitably falls in love with Waldo and from there on out is a complete airhead. I don't even know why people are compelled to fall in love with Waldo (or do anything besides try to kill him, for that matter), because, well, look at that cover. It probably does a better job of making Waldo look like a werewolf than the actual story does: in the book, Waldo only turns into a werewolf one night out of the year, and every other time, he's just an ordinary dude with a weird garter-belt of fur around his torso, which I unfortunately imagined as the fluffy cock-sock from The Cross of Seven Jewels. Every werewolf apparently has this, in addition to having hollow eye-teeth and an inability to ejaculate.

The book is all about Waldo, and that is a large reason why this book is so repugnant. But this is the A-List; by now, you should know that I have a fascination with the repugnant. The overwhelming amount of violence in this book, both general and sexual, forced me to draw comparisons to Hogg or American Psycho, where the general premise is the same: an evil person, who has virtually no directly-explained motivation, tortures a bunch of usually-faceless, nameless, helpless victims. Now I would like to say that I enjoyed Hogg and American Psycho very much, even if they're not books I can get back to on a regular basis. (Hogg especially.) That's why I was charmed when Waldo kept pulling the thing where he tells someone that he's going to kill them horribly, and because that's not something people usually say in the open to people they just met they assume it was just a joke, until it is too late. But here's the primary issue: the two books I referenced above were well-written. Hogg constructs an atmosphere of its own by having simplistic prose--a product of the narrator being an uneducated child--and it sustains that atmosphere by never repeating its limited vocabulary, never getting stuck in patterns, except when it means to. American Psycho is a nightmarish labyrinth of yuppie faux-eloquence and brand names that keeps topping itself until we simply can't believe it anymore.

The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, then, is horribly written, and that means that we can't enjoy or endure Waldo in the same way we do Hogg or Patrick Bateman. I will only quote one passage, justifying it as the sole quotation by saying that 1) this is on the very first page; 2) there is no first person narrator behind the first handful of pages; and 3) the entire book is like this. Behold:

Perhaps I should first tell you what a werewolf is like. It was never adequately been described even by a werewolf's bride. [sic]

The most frightening characteristic of a werewolf is that he is completely unreliable. That is made obvious by a toothy smile that flashes on and off like a traffic light with no substance other than evil behind it. It is entirely possible that while you are lulled in passivity, by the werewolf's pleasant smile, he is planning to perform major surgery on you without benefit of doctor or even anesthetic. And the instruments he will probably use will be teeth and nails. 

...hurts, don't it? I think I can rest my case.

Curiosity is what drew me to this book, but don't make my mistake, unless you're interested in seeing every literary convention be as thoroughly mutilated as the characters sadly trapped within its pages. This is a bad one, even for the time and market, and despite my lack of patience for the Waldemar Daninsky series, I would still be willing to check out Walpurgis Night to see if the two are even somewhat similar. If you took out the rape and misogyny, a werewolf movie with the consistency of a Goosebumps book would probably be pretty entertaining. But even the most sluggish and uninspired Daninsky film would be preferable to this.

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Image Source: Ramble House

Terminator II (1989), by Bruno Mattei

Where would we be without Bruno?

I think I've talked before about how my life hasn't exactly been...normal, as far as movies go. I hate self-exceptionalism and all who believe in it, but ever since my aunt and uncle showed me I Eat Your Skin at the tender age of ten, I have had an issue with prioritizing "good" movies over trash flicks. Off the top of my head, some of the classic movies I have not seen are: The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, Saturday Night Fever, GoldenEye, Mean Girls, Breakfast at Tiffany's, American Psycho, Superman III, and last but not least, Aliens. It's worth pointing out that I have seen Terminator and Terminator 2. And now, I have also seen Terminator II. Except Terminator II is not Italian trashmaster Bruno Mattei's attempt at sequelizing James Cameron's robot-action tour-de-force, though Cameron is certainly present here. No, today it is Cameron's Aliens that falls under the auspices of Bruno Mattei and Claudio "Troll 2" Fragasso. At some point in my life, I know I will become a non-loser and watch Aliens, but because of my experiences today, I will have the inverse view of most folks: to me, Aliens will be the pale shadow of Terminator II, the one I saw first. And I think there's a little validity in my point. After all, James Cameron is no Mattei, nor is he any Fragasso--he is too anchored, too straightforward. Let's let the maestro work.

In the not-too-distant future, at a point where Venice has sunk into the sea, a group of Marines is sent into an underground tunnel network/genetics lab. They are joined by one of the mercenaries employed by the owner of the lab, the astonishingly-named Tubular Corporation. Shortly after learning that something with that name exists in this universe, we find out these Marines are called "Megaforce"! After many wonderful lines of dialogue, they learn that the lab was wiped out by a not-Xenomorph created by Tubular to spread some sort of genetic virus that rewrites an organism like computer code. This is also confusingly tied to pollution, a theme that also appears in Rats: Night of Terror ("You mangy beasts! That's how the water gets...POLLUTED!") and Zombi 3. Of course, the Tubular mercenary is revealed to secretly be an evil android, which I know happens in at least one of the Alien movies. And, naturally, once he is revealed to be an android, he starts doing an Ahnold impression, right down to ripping part of his face off a la the eye-removal scene in the first Terminator. There is a happy ending to this one, for both not-Ripley, and the obligatory child-played-by-a-30-year-old.

The typical Mattei/Fragasso nuttiness is all present here. Even outside of casting moms as ten-year-olds, and all of the flimsy rip-offs of other films, and the presumably-stolen soundtrack, there is wave after wave of beautiful scripting that ties it all together. "Alright, you bunch of pussies," says Koster, one of the three women in this film. "I'm back, and I'm kicking ass!" This is the first thing she ever says to us in the movie, so we don't know what she's "back" from. Terminator II's script also echoes Hell of the Living Dead with a scene where people are dying/screaming for help, and everyone around them just sits around and stares at them grimly as they die. In fact, it's even worse than when it happens in Hell, because at least in that movie, the bystanders at least seemed concerned for the people being horribly killed by monsters. I may have mentioned how Zombi 3 seems to be a "lazy" movie--people move, talk, and live slowly, and don't really seem to enjoy putting effort into doing things like "keeping themselves and their friends alive." Perhaps it shows that Bruno himself was slowing down as he aged. Who knows? Who cares? It's entertaining!

I considered writing a big long paragraph about how the second half of it is dull. Guess what, the second half of every Mattei film is dull. It is an unfortunate truth. This is one is duller than the others, probably because it's a pretty chromatically dark film. And because I'm not above cheap shots, I suppose I can say that you'll like this movie if you're a fan of Man of Steel. Zing-o!

As a side-note/conclusion: this is the second bootleg Alien sequel I've seen. I have also watched the obnoxiously boring Alien 2: On Earth, a movie that's apparently received some acclaim recently, enough for it to get a snazzy Blu-Ray release. My copy is a bootleg pulling together two separate bootlegs to ensure the entire thing is in English. I'll probably only be able to get an HD version of Terminator II when all our brains are resurrected in a supercomputer in the future. That's okay. I'll take slime over substance any day, when Bruno is at the helm.

All Women Are Bad (1969), by Larry Crane

I've got no luck when it comes to titles. You see, I try to be a little tasteful with the admission of my interest in sleazy trash, but sometimes, some titles are going to present some unfortunate sensibilities when I try to spread the word about Adam Mudman's A-List and the Stuff I Talk About Here. I was able to find an alt-title for the pretty-jarring Ape Rape, but here, there's no wiggle room. I guess people are going to think that I find all women to be bad or something. Well, because this is a site where I talk about the trash movies I found the most entertaining, you can imagine that there must be something of value in a movie called All Women Are Bad. Fortunately, All Women is the creation of Larry "The Love Captive" Crane. The Love Captive (also 1969) was an adventure in the love lives of vampires, werewolves, and egg-shaped dime-museum owners that depicted a surreal, nostalgic version of New York City and its bizarre underbelly. And, like most of the sexploitation flicks of the '60s, it was laden with sexism. And make no mistake, All Women Are Bad is a hateful film--much more so than The Love Captive. It is a twisted product of its time, while still reflecting sentiments we have today. Yet there is so much going on that we can detach ourselves a little bit, and let these awkward biases add to a building sense of tense oddity.

John Steele is a salesman who is happy with his wife. He narrates the entire movie, and he's probably the same narrator that The Love Captive had. Of course, because this is a sexploitation movie, the happiness of his marriage is artificial, and belief in it, sophomoric. He comes home, and as circumstances would have it she is fucking another dude. This leads "poor" John on a quest to escape the memories of his unfaithful spouse, and we slowly learn the probable reasons behind her desire to cheat. John finds sex wherever he goes, which slowly erodes whatever little fragile sanity he already had. He turns out to be not only a misogynist, but a racist, kink-shaming misogynist. He accuses China of bringing over bad cars and bad hookers, and he reacts with horror upon seeing feather- and foot-fetishes, which he claims are the creations of women to enslave men. He shows even greater horror over those two kinks than he does over necrophilia. Of course, his unlikable nature maybe means that he's supposed to be the antagonist of the film. I mean, his name is "John Steele" for Chrissakes. I would hardly sympathize with someone with that name. And yet even as he disintegrates John can't resist a good pun: I think he says "Maybe he'll tickle her fancy" three times in the feather-fetish scene. And of course, like its successor A Clockwork Blue, All Women Are Bad ends with a gag reel that summarizes the entire movie.

The movie succeeds by having great intentional and unintentional achievements. For instance, there is a scene where John suddenly finds himself surrounded by pot smoking hippies. One of them, the leader (described as a "guru"), has an eyepatch. As they succumb to a drug-fueled orgy, the music that plays is the same library cue that runs over the tenser sequences in Nathan Schiff's teeth-grinding Long Island Cannibal Massacre. I should give the movie credit--in 1969, depictions of pot smoking may well have still been the equivalent of showing someone injecting PCP into their eyeballs today, but when I hear this music I think about masked serial killers crushing skulls with hammers in creepy Super 8 tight shots, rather than a bunch of teenagers getting high with a pirate. It creates a humor that I really do hope was on purpose. Even if it wasn't, those accidental moments shine anyway. There's a scene where the actors freeze in place for several seconds, and in the background you can see the shadow of director Crane waving his hand to cut. That was left in.

Anyone who's set out to make a movie for the first time, whether seriously or just for fun, knows what poverty can do. There are some people who are creatively as well as financially bankrupt, who create tedious garbage that nonetheless manages to accumulate some exposure (here's lookin' at you, Birdemic). But other times, ambition meets limitations head-on, and miracles happen. All Women Are Bad is largely made out of stock footage and stock music, crudely sewn together with nonsensical and repetitive dubs. There was no script here. Right at the beginning of the film, John desires some R&R out in the woods, claiming civilization is too cloying for him. He's pretty emphatic that it is indeed the presence of the civilized world that's causing his woes. Once he arrives in nature he immediately feels like he needs to track something down for him to relax completely. After five minutes of running through the woods, babbling such lines as, "If I climbed any higher I would reach the very heavens!", he comes across a factory, "belching pollution into the golden sunlight," which he takes as a sign that his relaxation is contingent on...going back to the city.

Over five minutes is spent on this pointless circular loop. I think I forgot to mention that the movie runs a whole 61 minutes in total.

Which means it's not even a full afternoon. Larry Crane will dance into your life and be gone before you know it. As far as I know, all of his films save for this one and Love Captive are lost, which is a damn shame. Presumably, however, it also spares us the pain of having to dig through the clunkers of his career, as we must for fellow '60s sleaze superstars Barry Mahon and Doris Wishman. Still. The man made a musical called Sugar Daddy...and that one is confirmed destroyed. These tears could fill a river. Don't cry like me--join John and his awful morals and you'll have a gorgeous non-story unlike any other.

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.