The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974)

Written by: Brian Clemens, Ray Harryhausen

Directed by: Gordon Hessler

Starring: John Phillip Law, Tom Baker, Carline Munro

I seriously doubt there ever has been, and ever will be, another filmmaker as influential as Ray Harryhausen. His stop motion creations inspired not only generations of other filmmakers, but paleontologists, archaeologists, biologists, and all manner of scientists and engineers at an early age to pursue their dreams and broaden the scope of human knowledge. His work had such incredible character and made an indelible impact on the imagination of every awe-stricken child (and a good many grownups too!) who spent their weekend afternoons watching great fantasy heroes battle hydras and krakens and living statues. His career will stand forever as one of the great treasures of popular art and entertainment. There will likely never be another like him, and that's too bad. I hope that someday, out of the landscape of soulless digital animation that passes for special effects these days, another practical effects master may rise up and inspire my grandchildren or great grandchildren, but as long as Harryhausen's work is preserved and remembered, that great creative spirit will live on.

Our story opens as one of the crew members of Sinbad's ship spots a small creature flying near the mast and tries to shoot it down with an arrow. I think this is a neat touch, that the whole thing starts because of a one-in-a-million chance of the ship crossing paths with the homunculus in the middle of the open sea. Sinbad and his men weren't out looking for adventure. Hell, they were probably on the way home and ready for a little R&R, but adventure came and found them and being manly men of action, they sure aren't going to turn it down! The shot misses but the creature drops the gold medallion it was carrying onto the deck. Despite a warning from the men that it's an evil omen, Sinbad decides to keep the thing. You'd think the visions the thing gives him would be enough to make him throw the damn thing into the ocean, but his curiosity is up and when a terrible storm blows his ship to a strange land, he decides to go ashore and see if he can find out what the amulet is.

Almost immediately he runs afoul of the evil Prince Koura, the black magician to whom both the amulet and the creature carrying it belonged. Sinbad manages to escape his encounter with Koura and make his way to a nearby city, where the grand vizier has been trying to puzzle out the meaning of an amulet of his own that turns out to match the contours of Sinbad's perfectly. The vizier's king died mysteriously not long ago, although he's sure Koura had something to do with it, as well as the fireball that destroyed the king's treasury and burned the vizier's face off. By piecing their two amulets together, they discover that the whole will form a nautical chart, but even in its incomplete form there is enough information to point them in the direction of the legendary land of Lemuria.

While waiting for the tide to turn so Sinbad can get his ship out of the harbor, a local businessman offers Sinbad four hundred gold coins to take his useless layabout son on the voyage and try to make a man of him. Sinbad agrees, but not for the gold. The man's slave girl has a tattoo on her hand that matches one Sinbad saw in his visions aboard the ship, and he agrees to take the boy if he can take the girl too. They set off the next day, with Koura following close behind aboard a hired ship.

Lemuria turns out to be populated by what might be the most confused tribe of savages ever. They wear sort of African-looking face and body paint, but worship Kali, some of them wear masks that look like ceramic baby doll faces, and their witch doctor wears a head dress with the face of a Japanese-looking demon topped with some tiny human skulls and weird stringy hair that makes me think of some kind of voodoo fetish more than anything. Oh, and they're all very obviously white guys, but they have green skin and hair, which makes them look almost exactly like the Swampies from the Doctor Who serial, “The Power of Kroll”, from Tom Baker's run on the show.

Now they discover the reason Koura wants to complete the amulet set. Throughout the movie, every time he uses his black magic, he ages a little more, and he's looking pretty decrepit by the time the two parties reach Lemuria. When he brings the Swampies' statue of Kali to life in the movie's most impressive set piece, it nearly kills him, but somewhere on the island is a fountain that acts as a sort of holy vending machine. The completed amulet will guide the bearer to the fountain, and for each of the three sections a man throws into the waters, he will gain youth, a crown of untold riches, and a shield that turns the user invisible. Thing is, none of the pieces are marked as to which holy gift they grant. It's kind of like those nifty toys that come in a shell or bag that you have to put in hot water to discover which one you got. Sinbad manages to get one of the pieces away from Koura, but wouldn't you know it, it was just the lousy crown. Now Koura has the full power of his magic back, as well as the ability to turn invisible, and there's that pesky one-eyed centaur running around that he managed to gain control over.

I haven't seen this movie since I was a little kid, and it struck me while watching it again that it really doesn't differ that much from the big fantasy epics of today in terms of story. Everyone complains about how plotless the two new Titans movies were, just bouncing from action scene to action scene with just the barest story to motivate them. Well, these Sinbad flicks are exactly the same thing. The difference lies in the effects. Like I said earlier, today's digital effects might occasionally be more realistic, but they just look dull and lifeless compared to the bright, glorious Technicolor of yesteryear.

It's strange that John Phillip Law is so wooden and uncharismatic as Sinbad, and come to think of it, in a lot of his other roles as well. Listen to the commentary on the Danger:Diabolik! DVD some time. He's like the cool bachelor uncle everyone wants to have, with tons of great stories to tell about his kick ass life and he does it with such charm. You'd think someone who was so interesting in real life would have more than a handsome face and buff muscles to put in front of the camera (and speaking of putting things in front of the camera, Caroline Munro steals the show with the sweatiest cleavage in cinema history). Still, even if his line delivery is a little stiff it's more than made up for by Baker. I think it's interesting that instead of going full-on gonzo scenery chomper like most people would with a part like this, he gives Koura a very serious treatment, full of lethal intelligence and seething anger. He's not a mustache-twirling supervillain, he's just smarter than everyone else and he damn well knows it. There are better Harryhausen movies in terms of monsters (with perhaps the exception of the sword fight with the Kali statue, which is just flat out goddamned awesome), but this one wins hands down in terms of the human villain.

We've lost one of the greatest movie heroes of all time, but his influence and the happiness and excitement he gave us will never be forgotten. Thanks for all the good times, Mr. Harryhausen.

This review is part of a roundtable tribute to Ray Harryhausen.  Other entries can be found at:

3B Theater: Jason and the Argonauts 

Checkpoint Telstar: Clash of the Titans 

Night of the Hunted (1980)

Written by: Jean Rollin

Directed by: Jean Rollin

Starring: Brigitte Lahaie, Vincent Gardere, Bernard Papineau

Netflix giveth, and Netflix taketh away. After the great MGM title purge of May 1, which was inexplicably blamed on Warner Archive Instant (Who immediately and vehemently disavowed any involvement in a really snarky statement that amounted to, “We didn't take these titles back so we could put them on our service, and if you don't believe us just come look at our tiny selection!” Really guys, you want to brag that you don't have a bunch of awesome AIP movies?), a bunch of the titles were reinstated a day or two later. Netflix announced that it was simply removing some lesser-viewed titles, and it would seem that enough people watched The Minotaur in a blind panic that not only was it renewed (and you should check it out, because the monster is just...wow), but a bunch of previously unavailable 60's peplum flicks were added as well.

But just a few days later, while checking my queue again just in case (kind of like how I check that my alarm clock is set for the right time about seventy times before I can finally lay down and fall asleep at night, because I missed an important final in college due to careless alarm setting and now I have OCD), and noticed that a bunch of Jean Rollin movies were disappearing, while others are staying. All are under the Redemption Video banner, so I'm not sure what the reason is, but basically I've seen a lot of nekkid French vampires in the last week.

Rollin is a fascinating filmmaker (and insanely prolific – in 1978 alone he directed six movies!). I can't think of anyone else who has essentially made the same movie several times a year since the late sixties, with the occasional digression, but somehow managed to make each one a unique vision. Now, I understand that, for most values of criteria by which normal filmmakers are judged, Rollin's movies are terrible. While all the ones I've seen have a sort of internal logic, they bear no resemblance to a coherent narrative in the real world. The acting is typically awful, shots tend to linger on to uncomfortable lengths before and after scenes so that you get a lot of the actors just staring at the camera awkwardly, and no one but William Beaudine has so little regard for matching shots so that scenes don't take place at noon and two in the morning simultaneously. And yet, I love every one of his movies I've seen. My favorite remains my first – Living Dead Girl – but the dreamlike quality he invokes is hypnotizing. Of course, being able to shoot in majestic ruins does a great deal of the work of generating atmosphere for you, but despite the fact that Rollin never learned when to yell, “Cut!”, and couldn't tell the difference between the moon and the sun, the man could compose an image like few other filmmakers I've seen. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious art house douche bag, Rollin was a visual poet.

And so we come to tonight's movie. It's one of those digressions from the vampire mold I was talking about earlier, and it begins with another of those dreamlike images Rollin (I keep typing Rollins, which makes me picture Henry Rollins behind the camera yelling at the cast to stop staring vacantly into the distance and deliver their goddamn lines already) had such a knack for. A man named Robert is driving down a country road late at night, when a woman in a gauzy nightgown (another thing Rollin used a lot) is caught in his headlights. He picks her up, and discovers that she has no memory. She can't even remember sentences in their conversation as soon as they've been said. He takes her back to his place so she at least has a safe place to stay until he can figure out where she belongs, and this being the kind of movie it is, they have an incredibly protracted sex scene and immediately fall in love even though she can't even remember who she is.

No sooner has Robert left for work in the morning than Dr. Francis and his assistant show up and take her back to a huge apartment complex full of people with no memories. After several failed escape attempts, she manages to let Robert know where she is (she wrote down his phone number so she'd remember there was someone out there she could call for...waffles, maybe?) and he comes and confronts Dr. Francis. It turns out there was a massive radiation leak at a nuclear reactor, and the radiation absorbed by passersby caused a rapid and eventually fatal degeneration of their brain cells. To cover it up, the government rounded up all the afflicted people, stuck them in an abandoned apartment complex, and hired Dr. Francis to take care of them until he could either figure out a way to cure them or they all died. It's the 70s, what are the chances a horror flick about a government covering up an environmental incident is going to have a happy ending?

Despite this being on the longer side of my usual review length, you may have noticed that plot summary is pretty short. However, that really is all the plot there is. That's pretty typical of Rollin so far in my experience. There's enough story and dialog to get the point across, but no more, nothing fancy. The rest of the movie is composed of details of life in the tower full of slowly vegetating people, including the (sort of) famous bit where a friend of Elizabeth's, sure that Elizabeth will forget where her room is as soon as she leaves and terrified of spending the rest of her life alone with no identity, kills herself by shoving a pair of scissors into her eyes. The gore here and a couple of other scenes isn't particularly impressive, but the haunted performance of the actress really sells this scene. A little before this, the two are approached by an older woman who insists she has a daughter, but can't remember her name. They make up a story and a name for the little girl, and the old woman walks off happy, but a moment later, turns to them and says, “What did you say my little girl's name was again?” This kind of ethereal weirdness is what Rollin does best, and it works here better than some of his other movies because the actors' vapid, wooden performances actually make sense with the material.

Squirrel chopsticks bologna vase. What did you say my review blog was called again?

Panga (1991)

Written by: Sean Barton

Directed by: Sean Barton

Starring: Christopher Lee, Jenilee Harrison, Henry Cole

When is a slasher movie not a slasher movie? When the slasher is a machete-wielding gill man powered by voodoo. I'm not entirely sure why the producers thought The Curse was deserving of an in-name-only franchise of sequels, but I guess if it worked for Troll, what the hell, right? Tonight's movie was the third in the series, called Blood Sacrifice in some markets. The version Netflix used to carry on their streaming service went by its original title of Panga, however, and so that was the version I saw while rushing through my queue trying to watch as many movies as I could before a large portion of them were deleted last week. Some of the things I watched, I wish I would have ignored in favor of others, but I'm glad I saw this little oddity before it disappeared.

The scene is a sugar cane plantation in Africa, some time in the 1950s. On a trip to the nearby village one day, the sister of Elizabeth, the plantation owner's wife, prevents the sacrifice of a goat by the local shaman. In this part of the country, it is customary to sacrifice a goat when a child dies, with dire consequences involving the evil spirit of an ancient warrior who lives in the sea if the sacrifice is not carried out. As Mletch informs Elizabeth later, this particular shaman has become corrupted by his magic, and the goat was being sacrificed for a child that the shaman had killed himself. When the ritual was botched, it gave him an excuse to summon up the warrior spirit, who because of reasons takes the form of a pretty boss gill man who kills people with a type of machete called a panga, which is also the colloquial name for a South African fish called Pterogymnus laniarius, which makes the gill man thing make a little more sense.

It's odd there aren't a lot more voodoo horror movies. Voodoo can be some pretty terrifying stuff, and in the instances it's handled effectively, in The Serpent and the Rainbow for example, the results can be pretty spectacular. Unfortunately, it's little more than window dressing here. Once the gill man is summoned up, this is a paint-by-numbers slasher flick. We don't even get a good look at the creature until the last five minutes or so. Still, when we finally do see it, it's one of the better gill men to shuffle across the screen. Only the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Twinkie-loving gill man from Monster Squad are its clear superiors.

And of course we can't forget about Christopher Lee. Even when he's just making some car payments, he brings a respectability and gravitas that elevates the proceedings perhaps a little more than they necessarily deserve. He even brings a spark of believability to the tired old, “is he the bad guy or not?” red herring during the final showdown.

At the end of the day, “Christopher Lee fights a voodoo-powered gill man with a machete” is going to paint a much more interesting picture in your head than you'll actually see in the movie, but it's a fun waste of time and worth a look if you happen to run across it wherever it lands after being jettisoned from Netflix.

Southern Comfort (1981)

Written by: Michael Kane, Walter Hill, David Giler

Directed by: Walter Hill

Starring: Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, Fred Ward

Walter Hill is not a man who believes in subtext. I like that about him. I've taken enough film and writing classes that taught us to read things into a movie or book that were pretty obviously not there to find it refreshing when someone says, “No, you damn hippy, shut the hell up”. Unless the allegory is blatantly obvious, I always felt all that analysis seemed forced and really pompous. I remember, in a high school English class, my teacher told a story of a guy he knew in another school when he was young, who had to write a paper on a Kurt Vonnegut novel. The teacher of this guy's class was one of those who thought he knew everything about everything, and he didn't want papers giving the students' point of view, he just wanted what he thought was the correct answer regurgitated back to him. But this student wrote about what he felt the book was about anyway, and got a failing grade. Not one to take such pretentious bullshit sitting down, he looked up Kurt Vonnegut's address and wrote a letter to him about it. He got a prompt reply saying, “Your teacher is an idiot, and you're right”.

During the first cast read through of Southern Comfort, Walter Hill told everyone, “People are going to say this is about Viet Nam. They can say whatever they want, but I don't want to hear another word about it”. Hill was making an exciting action movie, and that was it. Soldiers are a natural thing to make action movies about. End of statement, so all you damn hippies, shut the hell up.

A unit of the Louisiana National Guard is preparing to go on weekend maneuvers in the bayou. With the exception of Corporal Hardin, a transfer from Texas new to the team, they are clearly a bunch of good ol' boys playing soldier, not taking things seriously at all, and a group of guys you wouldn't trust with a stapler, let alone a machine gun. PFC Spencer has even arranged for a group of prostitutes to meet the men at the town they are supposed to end up at when they come out the other side of the swamp.

Of course, if they got right through with no problems and ended up happy in bed with a bunch of whores, this wouldn't be a very interesting movie, would it? Another hint none of these guys are anywhere close to professional soldiers comes when, just a couple of hours' hike into the bayou, they come to an impassable body of water. So their plan was just to wander into the bayou with no maps and hope they'd be able to find their way back out again? There are a flotilla of canoes parked on their bank of the lake, though, and after some deliberation they decide to take a few of them, and leave a note explaining why half the locals' boats are missing and where they can be recovered.

They are spotted by several Cajuns, and rather than wave a friendly hello and maybe say something about the note, PFC Stuckey decides to play a joke on the Cajuns by unloading a clip full of blanks from his machine gun at them. Of course, they have no way to know that the soldiers are on exercise and using blanks. All they see is a bunch of armed men stealing their boats and firing on them, so they do what any rational person would do in this case and return fire. Except instead of Stuckey they hit Staff Sergeant Poole, leaving the bunch of dumb rednecks without a leader. Well, their second in command is a wussy little nerd named Casper, basically the Arnold Rimmer of the group, who quotes the National Guard manual constantly while watching his command slip through his fingers by the second.

They come upon a one-armed Cajun at his cabin, and take him prisoner. Casper seems to think they're going to interrogate some information out of him, despite his speaking nothing but French, but Corporal Bowden blows up his cabin. Not that the beatings they were giving him were putting him in a very helpful frame of mind. The men quickly go from undisciplined rednecks to scared, dangerous nutjobs as they become lost deeper and deeper in the bayou with seemingly no chance of finding the interstate that was to be the finish line of the exercises, and a bunch of pissed-off Cajuns with hunting dogs and an intimate knowledge of the swamp tailing their every move.

Southern Comfort has been referred to as Deliverance meets The Warriors, but I like Tim's description, The Walter Hills Have Eyes, better. The ending, though, is especially reminiscent of Deliverance, when the only two survivors of the group (most were just shot or stabbed, but PFC Cribbs gets gakked with an impressively nasty trap right out of an Italian cannibal movie) find their way to a small town and seem like they're safe at first. But the sequence in town goes on way too long and you begin to realize, if they were safe and this was it, the movie would have ended the second they got off the truck that picked them up. Then we get to see the limit of Walter Hill's patience for subtlety, as the men being stalked through town by the Cajuns is intercut with scenes of the pigs they shared a ride to down with being slaughtered (another similarity to Italian cannibal flicks, this is some pretty intense animal snuff footage I'm surprised to see in an American big-studio flick).

My favorite scene in the flick, though, has nothing to do with the violence and action. The Cajuns have whittled the soldiers down to just Spencer and Hardin, who are thoroughly lost. It's the middle of the night, and they decide rather than get even more lost, they'll just hunker down and wait til morning to start moving again. They are woken up by a thunderous sound, and they turn around to see they'd spent the night sleeping just yards away from a railroad track they could have followed to safety. The, “You have got to be fucking kidding me”, look they give each other is priceless.

There are a couple of scenes of the soldiers arguing over who is going to be the new leader that get a little repetitive, but they are far outweighed by the punchy, brutal action, and the incredible shooting locations. The movie was shot in the bayous of Louisiana. I've commented before about filmmakers showing commitment to their projects by shooting in unpleasant locations like caves, but a cave would be nothing compared to the swamp. I can't imagine a worse place to take a bunch of sensitive electronic equipment and try to shoot a movie before everyone came down with jungle rot and yellow fever. But it's a neat trick if you can pull it off, and it looks amazing here.

It's impressive that any American movie could even come close to replicating the atmosphere of an Italian jungle exploitation movie, but Hill pulls it off. The violence and gore aren't as explicit, of course, but the fact that a big studio action movie brings such a thing to mind at all is to be commended. The flick is out of print and a little hard to find, but if you don't mind having to restart it every fifteen minutes, you can watch it in chunks on YouTube like I did. One of my coworkers had been telling me about it for years, and when Tim suggested this Walter Hill tribute roundtable, it gave me the excuse I needed to get off my ass and track it down. I'm glad I did, and I highly recommend you do too.

This review is part of a roundtable paying tribute to the career of Walter Hill.  Other contributions can be found at:

Checkpoint Telstar: Hard Times 

Micro-Brewed Reviews: Hickey and Boggs 

Evil Dead (2013)

Written by: Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues

Directed by: Fede Alvarez

Starring: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci

There are few greater joys in a movie fan's life than being proven wrong. When news of an Evil Dead remake first started circulating, my reaction was the same as I'm guessing all of yours was. “HOW DARE THEY DEFILE SUCH A TIMELESS CLASSIC!?” But then teasers and stills started coming out, and each one eroded a little bit of my curmudgeonly, reactionary movie nerd fury. Early word came back very positive indeed, and although relief that something doesn't utterly suck ass can give a false impression of greatness on first viewing, disgust gave way to guarded optimism. I missed opening weekend, but several friends whose opinions and tastes are almost identical to mine and whose words I trust saw it and gave it high praise. And I'll be good and goddamned if the remake of one of the greatest, most influential horror flicks of all time doesn't do its inspiration proud. I don't think it's going to quite join the elite of horror remakes like The Thing and The Fly, but it delivers a splattery, disgusting, delirious good time and makes the old-school fans happy while updating the story and effects to sicken and horrify the damn kids with their baggy pants and their Twitters and FaceSpaces and MyBooks and you goldurn smoochers get off my property! Where's my blunderbuss full of rock salt?

But remakes are nothing new. If Evil Dead had first been made in 1915 by Thomas Edison, and had six different versions of it made between then and 1930, another in the fifties, one in the late seventies or early eighties, and then again now, no one would be all pissed off that something cherished was being defiled. We'd just go, “Oh, another Evil Dead? Cool.” And of course the big problem aside from the time lapse issue is that just about all the recent big-budget remakes of vintage horror franchises have sucked big floppy donkey dick. Thankfully, the trend is bucked in this case.

David and his girlfriend Natalie arrive at a crusty old cabin and are greeted by his childhood friends Olivia and Eric. Sitting on the rusted hulk of a very familiar-looking Oldsmobile Delta 88 in the back yard is his sister Mia. They have gathered to help her cold turkey detox from her near-lethal cocaine habit, and have promised to all stay at the cabin with her and make sure she doesn't leave until her system is flushed of all the drugs.

She soon begins complaining of a rotten meat smell coming up through the floorboards, and at first the other four assume she's having some kind of hallucination from withdrawals, but then David's dog Grandpa pulls up an old rug and uncovers a trapdoor in the floor. Given that this was supposed to be a childhood vacation spot for David and Mia, with many of the rooms still containing relics from summers past, you'd think they would have noticed a trapdoor you could damn near drive a small car down (mysterious trap doors are like catnip to kids, after all), but it's a small nit to pick and you forget about it quickly. After all, any horror fan knows this is where the good stuff starts, and once things get going you get barely a chance to breathe until the credits roll (and you should stick around until the end of them, as there are a couple of extra little treats for us die-hards).

In the basement, the source of the smell is discovered to be several dozen rotting cat carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Right away Eric assumes witchcraft, and what he assumes, we already know. Before the title sequence we got to see the cat carcasses when they were fresh, and used as part of a ritual to destroy a girl possessed by some kind of demon (how they managed to keep the blazing fire from burning the old cabin to the ground, I have no idea). On a table against the far wall sits a package wrapped in a black garbage bag and, ominously, strand after strand of barbed wire.

Inside the package, of course, is a decidedly nasty-looking book, the Naturon Demonto, bound in human skin, which Eric begins to translate (I know I always carry a small library's worth of ancient Middle Eastern dictionaries with me when I go on vacation). His deciphering and out-loud reading of a passage that sounds just enough like, “Klaatu Verata Nikto” coincides with Mia having a meltdown and stealing one of the cars to drive back to town. She promptly crashes into a swamp avoiding a vision of a ghostly girl with yellow eyes, which then causes the nearby vines to hold Mia spreadeagled while the ghost vomits up more vines which crawl into Mia's vagina.

You all know the drill from here, although you may not expect a few of the new twists along the way. I certainly didn't. Still, as one of my friends said to another when the other guy promised not to spoil it for him, “Oh, you mean a bunch of kids don't go into the woods and find the Necronomicon and get possessed and kill each other?” I won't ruin any of the new stuff, but even if you don't care for all of it, the references to previous entries come fast and thick and should be more than enough to keep you happy. Hell, they even give a reason for that ugly-ass necklace!

Alvarez does a great job juggling the tone of the movie. For most of the time, it hews pretty close to the straight horror of the original, but once the blood really starts flowing, it definitely crosses into the twisted Tex Avery/Chuck Jones-with-gore territory of Evil Dead II, and even makes a couple of detours into Army of Darkness. While that would be really jarring in most cases, it really works to the movie's advantage here, at least from the perspective of a long-time fan. If the violence had been nothing but gritty and queasy, I think the movie would have wound up being just another forgettable modern horror flick, but the sick sense of humor shows that Alvarez and company really love the Evil Dead movies and understand what makes them so special.

This is one time I will happily admit I was wrong to pass judgment without knowing what the movie would turn out like. There is a welcome place on my shelf for this delightful surprise right next to the original classic, and I really hope Fede Alvarez has more carnage waiting for us in the dark bowers of his domain.

Greta the Mad Butcher (1977)

Written by: Erwin C. Dietrich, Jesus Franco

Directed by: Jesus Franco

Starring: Dyanne Thorne, Tania Busselier, Lina Romay

Last week, the world of exploitation movies lost one of its true luminaries. Jesus “Jess” Franco (and roughly sixteen thousand pseudonyms), who was born Jesus Franco Manera in Madrid, Spain, on May 12, 1930, died on April 2. He was still cranking them out, and died before completing his current project, Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Women. Better paeans to the man have been written by more knowledgeable b-movie writers than me, so I'll keep it short and sweet by saying that Franco's contributions to the various genres he touched with his insanity are truly incomparable. Lots of directors make weird movies, and lots of directors make smut, but no one made weird smut like Franco. His love of jazz was obvious to anyone who sat through one of his infamous nightclub scenes, and many of his flicks are like cinematic jazz-fusion experiments, noodling around through various recurring themes and psychedelic set pieces until the viewer feels like someone slipped them a roofie. Franco was one of a kind, and he will be missed.

Tonight's movie is one of his less weird efforts. Well, less weird for him anyway. Any given value of normalcy is virtually meaningless in Franco's world, but at least here you can follow the plot and the dialog mostly makes sense. In the shower room of the Las Palomas women's sexual correctional facility, one of the inmates starts some fisticuffs and escapes while the guards are trying to restore order. Several of the guards pursue her through the jungle, but she kills one and escapes the others only after suffering some severe gunshot wounds. Luckily for her, she makes it to the house of Dr. Arcos, who treats her injuries. He also hears her talk in her troubled sleep about the tortures she was subjected to at Las Palomas, so he's plenty suspicious when Dr. Greta Lupino and a retinue of guards show up to reclaim their patient.

When checking up on the girl a few days later, Arcos is told she died of infection from her wounds. Arcos takes the matter to the Amnesty International, but since Las Palomas has never been found in violation on any previous inspections, and the patients there are, after all, considered mentally unstable, the authorities' hands are tied with red tape. When Arcos returns to his car, there's a woman waiting for him in the back seat with a gun. She is Abbie Phillips, the younger sister of the escaped inmate he treated, and she has what can only be referred to as a really fucking bad plan. She wants him to commit her to Las Palomas under a false name so she can snoop around and find out what happened to her sister, and after a couple of months, Arcos will come back with papers to get her out. Of course, with the authorities refusing to help, a really fucking bad plan is about all they have to go with.

Next thing you know, Abbie is being hosed down by Greta's sadistic lesbian sidekicks and shown the ropes by Juana, the alpha inmate and Greta's personal sex toy (the scene where Greta sticks acupuncture pins in Juana's chest before laying on top of her is especially cringe-inducing). Things rapidly go from bad to worse, as Abbie discovers her sister is still alive, and being held not as a sexual degenerate, but a political prisoner. You see, the only real sexual degenerates at Las Palomas are Greta and her minions. The facility is just a front for disposing of revolutionaries and enemies of Greta's boyfriend, the president of whatever South American country this is meant to be taking place in. Once Greta informs Abbie's sister what will happen to her younger sibling if she doesn't talk, she finally rats out the leader of her band of revolutionaries: Dr. Arcos!

Guess it wasn't luck that brought her to his doorstep at the beginning of the flick. And once the guards from Las Palomas are sent to gun him down, Abbie's hopes of getting out in one piece are looking pretty slim. It's just too bad Juana got a look at Greta's torture chamber earlier. She may have been a nasty piece of work, but she had no idea what was going on in the basement and she doesn't like it much. She also has a spare set of keys to the entire compound, and a bunch of psychopaths that you personally tortured is the last thing you want knocking on your office door, huh, Greta?

I don't think most pornos have this much nudity in them. Once Abbie is behind bars at Las Palomas, I don't think there are more than a few frames that don't have boobs bouncing through them. Just because there are tits, though, that doesn't mean it's titillating. I wouldn't want to meet the person who would get off on this flick. Its list of atrocities is impressively icky, making it a worthy entry in the infamous Ilsa series, even if it isn't one really (the flick was retitled Ilsa the Wicked Warden in most US releases, including the version I have, with all the mentions of the name Greta wiped from the soundtrack). Abbie is treated for her supposed sexual manias by having acid injected into her vagina; Greta and her captain of the guard sell films of their tortures on the snuff circuit (which provides this movie's closest equivalent to one of Franco's nightclub scenes, with the snuff film broker boogieing to a tune on a jukebox before purchasing the latest films), including the evening she treated some of El Presidente's more brutal soldiers to a gang rape buffet of her inmates; Juana trades Abbie some information about her sister in exchange for Abbie wiping Juana's ass after an attack of the shits...WITH HER TONGUE! And Greta's final comeuppance is a sight to see. It's a little like what happens to Rhodes in Day of the Dead, but the effects are much more primitive, and it's intercut with scenes of lions and tigers tearing apart prey animals. It starts off as just red food coloring and it looks silly, but then it just keeps going...and going...and going. And the actresses start chewing on real meat instead of sort of nibbling on Dyanne Thorne. And suddenly it's not silly, and is in fact rather harrowing and makes you feel a little queasy. In other words, it's good stuff, and I highly recommend it.

There's a lovely story on the commentary track, where Howard Maurer (who played El Presidente) and Dyanne were told by Jess that if they ever wanted a great meal, to go to a particular hotel restaurant and ask for the chef and drop Franco's name. So one night, after a day of shooting, they were out on the town quite late and decided they were hungry. They went to the restaurant, and had someone rouse the chef from bed. He was obviously not happy at all about this, until they mentioned Jess Franco. Then he was all smiles and friendliness, and made them one of the best meals they'd ever had. Howard and Dyanne married me and Malorie in Las Vegas in 2007, and it was fun talking to them about their memories of making the Ilsa movies, and about this movie and working with Franco. They said he was a pleasure to work with and a very sweet man.

Thanks for all the crazy movies. We'll miss you.

And because I never get tired of telling people about how awesome our wedding was, and what incredible people Howard and Dyanne Maurer are, here's a picture of me and Malorie and Howard and Dyanne in our Ilsa shirts, and my copy of Ilsa the Wicked Warden, which they autographed along with She-Wolf of the SS and Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks. And those boots Dyanne is wearing? They're the same ones that she wore in She-Wolf. 

Hypothermia (2012)

Written by: James Felix McKenney

Directed by: James Felix McKenney

Starring: Michael Rooker, Blanche Baker, Greg Finley

I like to go fishing. My parents and I, along with my aunt and uncle and two cousins (who were all absolutely crazy about fishing – one of my cousins worked through college at an outfitter store called Gander Mountain and when he left he owed them money) would rent a couple of cabins on White Iron Lake just north of a town called Ely on the northern border of Minnesota (for being a miniscule town that thrived on three months worth of outdoorsy tourism each year, they had a shockingly good used book store too) and spend a week fishing. I'm not an avid sportsman, and I don't own box after box of lures and rack after rack of poles. There are no taxidermied fish adorning my walls or end tables. Hell, I don't even really give a damn if I catch anything on the rare occasions I still go (of course, these days it's more about trying to make sure the kids don't throw their poles in the water casting than even bothering with one of my own). The thing I like most about fishing isn't the fish, it's just bobbing around on the water in a boat and enjoying nature.

Which is why I've never gone ice fishing. The great majority of my job is spent outdoors, and after freezing my ass off 50 hours a week the last thing I want to do is spend what little free time I have sitting on a frozen lake staring at a hole in the ice and trying to remember what it feels like to have functioning fingers.

Ray Pelletier, on the other hand, is about as gung ho an ice fisherman as you will ever meet. He likes to do things old-school, sitting on buckets with a roofless three-sided windbreak to hide behind. None of that pussy full-enclosure space heater shit for him. If your mug of coffee is still lukewarm by lunch time you're doing it wrong. And he insists on bringing his wife Helen, son David, and David's girlfriend Gina along with him to get one last week of quality time before David and Gina graduate medical school and he never sees them again. There's obviously a bit of tension in the family. Ray likes his booze perhaps a little too much. It's never stated explicitly, but it's clear there are, or at least were, some problems with Gina being Asian. There's even a current of unease between Ray and Helen, as though violence had maybe been an issue in the past and although it may not be anymore, it's still a rather imposing elephant in the room. And then you have the typical blue collar sports loving dad being just a little disappointed in his nerdy son, despite the fact that said nerdy son is going to be raking in the cash as a doctor while Ray spent his whole life working his ass off doing labor jobs just to keep his family fed and clothed.

The uneasy peace is disturbed the next day with the arrival of the Amazing Colossal Douchebag Steve Cote and his son, Stevie Junior. They roar out onto the ice in a huge pickup truck, hauling what looks to be some kind of motorcycle or ATV trailer converted into a high-tech fishing cabin, and blaring power metal on the truck's radio at top volume.

Digression time. The band playing is called Gods Of Fire. They sound a bit like Primal Fear, and apparently also did some composing work on the 2005 killer bat movie The Roost, which was also produced by James McKenney and Larry Fessenden (a name I'm always pleased to see in the credits of a movie I'm watching). Some time passes before we see Cote up close, and even longer before we discover their names and that Stevie Junior is his son. The two actors look fairly close in age, and that coupled with their behavior initially had me thinking they were a couple of stupid frat guys, who, if they were listening to metal, would be listening to some horrible As I Lay Whining or Every Time I Cry clone and not a band whose main source of inspiration would appear to be Judas Priest's Painkiller album. When we do finally meet the Cotes properly, Steve is a puffed up, swinging dick, ignorant, rich neo-conservative, who I suppose would be just about the right age to have grown up with that type of music.

Anyway, after a bit of territorial leg-lifting alpha male behavior, Ray and his family are invited back to Steve's...I hesitate to call something with a flatscreen HD TV and a full kitchen a shack, and the term, “man cave” makes me want to shoot every executive of the Spike TV channel. Fortress of Fishin' Dudes. All throughout the day, both groups have caught sight of something far bigger than any natural inhabitant of a North American lake swimming just below the ice, and indeed one of Ray's lines snagged it briefly during the two family's first meeting, but the line broke and it got away. Steve's tiny penis finds this state of affairs completely unacceptable, and has Stevie Junior carving out a huge hole in the ice with a power auger guaranteed to scare away all the fish that his roaring truck, snowmobiles, and blasting stereo may have missed. The mysterious creature has different plans, and drags Stevie Junior into the hole. They manage to pull him out of the water, but not before the thing gashed his arm wide open and apparently injected some kind of venom that occasionally causes him to see with the blurry orange vision that has accompanied all the creature's POV shots.

Soon it becomes clear that whatever has been lurking beneath the ice is a hell of a lot smarter than any fish, no matter how big, has a right to be. It's also not confined to the water...

This movie was listed under Creature Features on Netflix, so I knew it was a monster movie, but you don't expect a movie called Hypothermia to turn out to be a gill man flick. It's also a really good movie, right until the gill man shows up. All that stuff I said about the Pelletier family earlier is almost entirely implied from tones of voice, uncomfortable silences, and loaded looks during a couple of scenes at the beginning of the movie. The acting is brilliantly nuanced and is full of multi-layered meaning that is as clear as day without belaboring the point. The tension is also handled very skillfully by McKenney, building the atmosphere to a great crescendo that, unfortunately, culminates with us seeing the sorry-ass monster.

I can forgive a lot of shit for a cool monster. It's a lot harder to forgive a shitty monster for completely derailing what was, up until its arrival, a very effective horror flick. It looks like they just stuck a dude in a wet suit, got a Halloween mask of the bullshit redesigned Silurians from the 2010 series of Doctor Who, glued some extra fins and teeth on, and called it good. Every time I saw the thing, I kept hearing Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane yelling at the FX crew, “PAUL BLAISDELL BUILT THIS IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!” It seems like the McKenney knew his monster sucked too. There is a lot of effort made to keep it obscured as much as possible, but we get way too many good looks at it, and after its appearance all the tension whooshes out of the movie like a tire with a nail in it. And that ending. Not since Star Crystal has a monster flick made me want to yell, “Oh, fuck you, movie!” and punt the damn thing into the street. Except I watched it streaming on Netflix, so all I could do was give it a bad rating and push the DELETE button really hard.