NEW URL FOR NECROTIC CINEMA

I am simply having too much trouble trng to maintain this blog through proxys from inside China. Google is the target right now of a lot of censoring and blocking and it takes way too long to do even a simple post. Adding pictures or media is nerve racking. I set up a new site called Necrotic Sinema at this Wordpress address:

http://necroticsinema.wordpress.com/

And yes, Wordpress is also blocked in China but I can, for now, edit and maintain a blog from inside there using proxys much easier than in Blogger. There are problems of course but they are more managable. I still love the Blogger version as I really worked with the html to give it a special look. When and if Blogger comes backI will continue the site from there again most likely. I hope that now I can get back to doing this blog with a couple posts a week as I had planned to do.

Thanks

Bill

BRUCE CAMPBELL SHINES AS ELVIS IN BUBBA HO-TEP

Director Don Coscarelli does not have many films under belt and only about half a dozen distance Bubba Ho-Tep from his 1979 horror classic Phastasm. Made in 2002 on a super small budget of only about half a million dollars and meager distribution (only 32 prints were released around the country) the film has nonetheless gone on to gain a level of cult devotion to rival Coscarelli’s Phantasm perhaps. The hard to label film succeeds on a couple levels really, not the least being that it overcame its small budget. In fact the budget was so small that while the central character in the film is an aging and decrepit Elvis Presley (played craftily by Bruce Campbell in one of his best roles ever) not one Elvis song was used in the film since licensing rights to use even one song, or film clip, would have consumed the bulk of the films money. The film also succeeds because it successfully gets outside the horror genre and is able to explore other issues such as aging in a culture that treasures youth and the abandonment of the elderly. It also explores, via Elvis’ introspective narrations, the real meaning of success and the value of family and the regrets of a man in waning years who now knows it is too late to say and do all the things he really wanted to do.


But fear not that this is some lugubrious, tear jerker or feel good movie because there is horror in the form of a soul sucking cowboy mummy (who prefers the rectum as the source of soul removal) and comedy from the team of Campbell as The King and Ossie Davis who believes he is John F. Kennedy. Also appearing in a small role is Reggie Bannister from Phantasm and Bob Ivy as the mummy. The story takes place in a quiet little nursing home in East Texas where the once King of Rock and Roll himself lies bed ridden with a crippled hip and revolting sore on his “pecker”. We are mercifully spared the actual site of said mysterious growth. Elvis spends his days in bed reflecting over his glory years and what might have been had he led his life differently and watching his friends pass away. His is known by the patronizing nursing home staff as Sabastian Haff, an Elvis impersonator. Becoming jaded and burned out with success and false friends the true Elvis switches places with the real impersonator Haff and the King spends his days pretending to be Sabastian Haff the Elvis Impersonator. Haff has an appetite for junk food and drugs to rival the King’s and is he who actually dies in 1977 and the real Elvis is left stranded after the contract he drew up with Haff is burned in a trailer parl BBQ accident and he then falls off a stage while “taking care of business” and breaks his hip.

His life seems to be seeping from him in much the manner as the infection from his manhood when he suddenly finds himself in the middle of a mystery and adventure with fellow patient Jack (Davis) who is convinced he is actually JFK and has had his skin dyed black by the CIA who also replaced parts of his missing brain matter with a back of sand. While he is outspoken on his disdain for LBJ, who feels is part of the conspiracy, all info on his affair with Marilyn Monroe is “top secret”. They soon discover the nursing home is the feeding grounds for a lesser mummy (like the brother of Tutankhanmun) lost while on a tour of the States and who is dubbed Bubba Ho-Tep by Elvis. The Mummy feeds on the weak but plentiful souls of the dying residents. The deaths would never arouse suspicion and Jack and Elvis are simply two crazy old men no one would ever believe and soon are forced to take matters into their own hands.

The mummy never dominates the film and the deaths are not gory or exploitive. The focus seems to stay on Elvis’ new found purpose for living and becoming the type of hero he played in his films in real life. The heroics are rather shallow in the big scheme of things and no one will ever even know that Jack and Elvis saved the nursing home from an evil soul sucking mummy. They both die off in the end but find some sense of redemption during their last moments. As Elvis passes in the next world, lying in the mud of a river bank in East Texas somewhere, he sees the assuring words All is Well appear in Egyptian hieroglyphics in the stars. Elvis feels his life on stage and in films was a sham and travesty and yet here in the middle of no where he gets to die a real hero with another man’s name.

The twangy guitar laden soundtrack by Brian Tyler suits the film perfectly as Elvis monologues in his life weary and yet funny as hell reflections. And to reiterate what most people have said Campbell is great as Elvis. His performance is comical but not insulting or demeaning. At times he is genuinely touching as Elvis wonders about how he could have been a better husband and father. The films never gets maudlin or morose and yet it never inane either. Campbell simply never insults the memory of Elvis at any time, even when the King is examining his bump and finding the will power to use the bathroom instead of his bedpan. It is a rare type of a film really and it too bad Coscarelli did not delve into this type of thing more, or maybe just do more period. The story is based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale and for a while there were rumors of a follow up film but for now all that seems to be no go. And really there is no need. This film is fine just as it is and if a sequel or prequel were ever released I may just pass on it as it might spoil this curious and fun little film.

BETTER OFF TO FORGET THE FORGOTTEN ONES

Lately I have not been in a good mood when it comes to the net and blogging and I fear that that sour disposition is going to make my review of this really horrible movie all the more bitter. I have been dealing with hackers, bandwidth issues and host server crashes over at the Uranium Café and if all that is not enough Blogger is blocked in China and all my work here must be done on a gruelingly slow hit and miss process through a proxy. I have gotten way behind on my updates here because I hate dealing with the proxy issues but since my hosted site is in limbo all the time I decided I need to do something to keep the flame burning. For now there will be less graphics and almost no embedded media here at Necrotic Cinema. Publishing those things is really slow and unpredictable through proxies but I will do my best.

I think I have learned something way too late in life. What valuable lesson is that Uranium Willy?There are essentially two kinds of movies. Those movies that are great or pretty good movies and crappy movies that compare themselves to great or pretty good movies on the DVD covers in order to hook someone in to forking over some cold cash renting or buying the damned things. For example you have great war films like Apocalypse Now or Platoon. So when you pick up a film you have never heard of with a bunch of no name actors and on the DVD cover it says “In the tradition of Platoon and Apocalypse Now…” you can bet the film will steal scenes and ideas from those films but will in no way be in the same league. Of course when this desperate marketing ruse happens within the horror genre the result can be about the worst thing imaginable, and such is the case with 2009’s The Forgotten Ones, also known as The Tribe, which is made in the horror traditions of The Descent and Predator. Or so it states on the DVD cover. My despondent mood makes it a struggle to even want to give any sort of reasonable synopsis of this mess and yet I feel I have an obligation to do so. A mission of sorts, to warn my fellow horror movie enthusiasts to either avoid this one or go into it with the proper frame of mind: that you are gong to see a bad movie and make the most of it and have a little fun. My expectations were way too high going in, making the plummet all the more devastating later.

I will be brief here in my sketch of the film. A group of mismatched people head out on a luxury yacht for some relaxation. None of them seem to like one another and this seems to be the case with most modern horror films (or films in general) and I have to wonder what compelled half a dozen people with nothing in common with each other except mutual disdain to decide to travel across the Caribbean together and think they will enjoy life is beyond my limited reasoning ability. A storm hits and the boat snags a rock and sinks but they all survive and are washed up on the beach of a mysterious island in the French Antilles. On the first night one of the group, Peter (Justin Baldoni), is dragged off of the beach during the night by something. There is blood all over the place but later we find he received basically a bad but hardly massive blood squirting wound to his leg. His disappearance is a formula vehicle to create tension and conflict in the group, but none of it works. The acting and script is so bad that all the arguing about whether or not to search for him is annoying at best. Of course they search for him and while in the jungle become prey for the monsters of the title, which are indeed hybrids of the blind cave dwellers of The Descent and the tree top stalking super hunter from Predator. The difference is these monsters are simply nothing special at all. They are low budget obvious men in suit monsters that never excited me at all.

A deserted anthropologist camp is found and we are treated to corny flashbacks that are a useless attempt to explain the creatures. The long deserted camp hardly looks overgrown by jungle foliage. It rather seems to have to have been abandoned a year in the past at the most. The capture scenes are lame and we are to believe these things can design elaborate traps that snare the human’s by the foot and pull them high up into the trees. Lets just skip everything and get to the end. The closing action involves lead actress Jewel Staite (as Liz) in a cave with the blind beasts stalking her. The monsters seem more blind at times than others and seem to have no hieghtened sense of sound or hearing as they sniff her from inches away. Her final escape is one of the most drawn out and painful endings I have ever seen, where she just sits on the beach reflecting on who knows what for way too long. Look, I could go on more but I think you may get the idea. I could describe some of the other characters in more detail but I do not see why I should do that. This movie does not deserve my time and energy in the state of mind I am in. Before going I will give two reasons I came to literally loathe this film by the time it was all over.

One was the “making of” special feature with director Jorge Ihle and cast and crew talking about the film. They really took this thing seriously and at one point some one makes a comment about there being some stuff in the movie that has never been seen before on film. That is a paraphrase. But my reaction is amazement at the lunacy of the remark. This film is nothing but unoriginal ideas and production. They go on raving in the special feature about the monster make up and show the performers perfecting their monster gestures and grimaces. Jeesh. These things are not that great. Okay, better than The Creature from Boggy Creek, I’ll say that, but nothing special at all. And last I will give you a special reason I hate this film, and it may sound strange but I think this affected me more than the bad acting and bad dialog and bad lighting and camera angles. Some times in a film a certain scene comes along, nay, intrudes rudely and vulgarly upon my psyche, from which there is no return for me. After such a scene the film is lost and the closer to the beginning of the film such a scene happens the worse the experience for me since I either stop watching the film (as is often the case) or I continue on, as I did in this one.

What scene could I be talking about? What could so adversely affect a jaded horror movie watcher who has seen tons of cheap exploitation and graphic gore films without flinching? Well not long after the group has been on the beach Liz leaves her asshole boyfriend Peter to be alone and relieve herself. To tinkle. She goes off to a quiet stop and begins to pee and this in itself is no big deal though the scene is really pointless. However the real problem is that as she is peeing we are treated to the cheap sound of her farting. Yes. Farting. Farting as she pees! Was this added later as a joke? What does this add to anything? How does this help develop the character of the only semi-decent person in the film? Do we even need to witness her pissing in the first place since nothing else in the scene happens much less listen to her make a weird fart noise as she does it. It is a stupid and cheap shot and that is about the level this movie maintains from beginning to end. A total waste of time.

CANINE CYBORG ON THE THE HUNT IN BRIAN YUZNA'S ROTTWEILER

Brian Yuzna began producing and making films under his own production company in Spain, where he permanently resides, called The Fantastic Factory in about 2000 and since then the work of this usually entertaining horror/gore director has been getting weaker and weaker. Yuzna began as producer for some of friend and associate Stuart Gordon’s best work, including Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dolls. He entered the directing arena with 1989’s Society and did some pretty good films after that including Bride of Re-Animator and Return of the Living Dead III. They were all well edited, shot and acted and contained some humor and wit to them. His newer works lack the humor and craft that made his American made films so watchable overall and he seems to trying to create Euro-sleaze now.

Rottweiler is not a well done movie but is still watchable over all in the sense that enough happens to keep you amused, and some parts enter the classic bad movie realm, such as shocked chickens being killed by the film’s antagonist, a cyborg Rottweiler. Of course a true bad film is one that has lasted a decade or two and retains some sort of lasting allegiance by a fan base. I do not know if this film is old enough or campy enough to really be a “good” bad movie, but none the less I recommend it over lets say watching Pretty Woman again or committing suicide.

The plot is pretty simple and sometimes vanishes altogether. Dante (William Miller) is an American in a Spanish prison. He is being held for playing a game called infiltration with his girlfriend Ula and both are subjected to abuse by evil prison warden Kufard, played by European horror institution Paul Naschy. A distraction is created in the camp when a prisoner is stung by a scorpion and in classic chain gang fashion Dante and a “negro man” high tail it. The film almost seems like it could become a sci-fi version of 1958’s The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier chained together in Jim Crow deep south, but that is not to be as the black man is chewed to bits by the Rottweiler and allows Dante to escape. After that the movie really gets hard to understand in some ways, because nothing much ever happens. After Dante is recaptured by a guard he kills the guard and escapes again and the dog chases him and proceeds to maime and kill everything in its path but Dante. There seems to be little reason why the dog cannot kill him and yet over and over Dante eludes becoming Alpo. In one instance he even has to run naked from the dog, who drops Dante’s weapon the water, leaving him without pants or gun. But the dog never catches up with him and he is caught later by a lonely Catholic woman who forces Dante to have sex with her. She, however, is killed by the dog (along with one of her chickens in a totally weird scene) and Dante (with clothes finally) flees with her young daughter. There is the eventual final confrontation between Dante and Kufard and the dog who crawls out of a fire and looks like he could have been Arnold’s pet in The Terminator. The film is loaded with flashbacks and they do not resolve anything at the end.

Make no mistake, this is not a good movie by a film maker who could do better, but it is not without moments and if you like to watch something just to laugh or be pissed off by how ludicrous it is then this is for you. It never gets so totally absurd or boring that it cannot be watched, and there is enough well shot gore and nudity to keep your eye lids from drooping permanently.

NEO NAZI, PORNO PHOTOGRAHER PYSCHO KILLER IN: MURDER SET PIECES

I was duped into this one by the so called rave reviews plastered on the DVD jacket, one comparing some of Palumbo’s shots “of visual brilliance” to “the best works of Dario Argento.” Well, that’s a load of crap. While I am not a big fan of Argento’s narrative style I do respect his technical ability with camera shots and movement. To say that even one frame of this movie comes anywhere near Argento’s best work is a blatant lie. I perused a few reviews before doing mine to maybe gain some sort of relevant insight in to the movie that I may be lacking and decided I was wasting my time. I am fully qualified to dismiss this movie as a load of garbage. Not because of the murders and gore and so called sickenly repulsive violence (which I did not find it to have but rather found the violence comic bookish in the way a Herschell Gordon Lewis film is) but because it is simply a poorly written, poorly acted and poorly directed movie.

The basic story is about some Nazi guy who takes porno pictures of women around Las Vegas but has a tendency to practice zero self-control and murders most of them as well as most other people he encounters. He seems to get away all this with utter impunity. He drives around and picks up hookers and kills them, kills his porno models, his girl friend and some woman who may be his German ex-wife or current wife, we never know, a little girl who is a schoolmate friend of his girlfriend's sister, a fortune teller who won't tell him what the cards say and a disgruntled porno book store clerk played by Candyman Tony Todd and it goes on and on into sheer absurdity. He is never questioned by the police or rouses any suspicion except in his girlfriend’s little sister played by Jade Risser but no one will believe her because SHE'S A KID!

The whole move feels like it was shot in the 70’s. Some great movies came out of the 70’s, but some shlocky ones did too. This one patterned itself on those substandard 70's movies that are sort of fun now in a bad movie way. But this movie is not trying to be a bad movie and we do not need the 70's done over except in parody. The music score is weird too, with some really poor heavy metal stuff that was probably done by friends of the director. The rest of the movie score sounds like typical incidental music from a 70’s exploitation film, which is what this feels like. I like exploitation films from the 70’s, they are campy and fun. This film is not either. Look, the murders here are not that shocking or brutal or original. There is one scene where the guy lunges out at Jade from a hole in the closet and is suppose to scare you, I guess, but it was so ridiculous I replayed the scene like six times for a laugh. I am tired of DVDs that advertise themselves as the “sickest movie of all-time” and then deliver Z-Movie entertainment at best. Sure, there is a ton of off color blood everywhere, again the type that looks like the too red goop used by Herschell Gordon Lewis, but so what. I like blood and gore and that is basically what I buy a DVD like this for, but to just pour blood all over the walls and on top of some moonlighting porn star because the film maker cannot do anything to get the story across simply gets boring after a few scenes and that is what this movie was, boring.

I cannot believe the reviews that seem to see something more to this movie than poor film making. The victims never seem scared and all look like porn actresses, which is what I read Palumbo hired for this film. Original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen has a small role as a Nazi gun dealer. Sven Garrett, who plays the photographer killer, is not really too bad in some ways as a serial killing, misogynist Nazi, but it is simply too unbelievable and poorly made to get anything but a weak nod from me. And it only gets that because Tony Todd was great as the burned out porno clerk and Gunner Hansen made an okay suburban Nazi.

KANE AS A SEXUALLY FRUSTRATED PSYCHO KILLER IN: SEE NO EVIL

This movie is directed by ex-porn auteur Gregory Dark who is best known in polite society as the genius behind the New Wave Hookers series. It stars as the imposing protagonist Glenn Jacobs (a.k.a. Kane) of WWF fame. The direction is not bad but it is simply annoying in a way. It looks like a heavy metal video, the type you see late at night on Headbanger’s Ball. That style of camera work is okay for a five minute Morbid Angel video but can really become distracting in a 90 minuteish movie. It has all those shaky faces things like in David Lynch's Lost Highway and sometimes the camera will come in from three or four angles and the sound will develop in to a swooshing crescendo to simply show something like a fly on an ashtray. I begin to think the fly or whatever is central to the plot or is telegraphing an approaching scene but it is all simply technical excess.

The plot is simple: teenagers in a type of reform school are sent to renovate an entirely dilapidated old hotel that harbors in the secret passages the 6’8” religiously motivated psycho killer played convincingly by Kane. So then, guess what, he begins killing off the teenagers one at a time in brutal fashion and since most of them are unlikable you really do not care who gets it and how. The movie is pretty bleak and some of the deaths seem to take away from there being a possible good hero winning against the evil psycho element to the story. The cop character who lost a hand to Kane years before and so has a grudge is killed off way too soon and senselessly I felt. There are survivors at the end, but they are a pimpish thug and two bitchy teenage girls. It is really pointless anymore to try and understand these endings, since the thing called the movie leading up to the ending is usually more inexplicable.

What is important here ultimately is the quality of the deaths and a couple of them are pretty good as Kane hooks people with chains and drags them then crushes their skulls with his bare hands and removes their eyeballs and saves them in mason jars. There is one rather unique death scene where one of the more likeable female delinquents falls through the roof of a glass atrium and dangles from a rope upside down and is devoured by street dogs. Kane is totally sexually frustrated because his puritanical mother never let him watch any of Gregory Dark’s earlier movies when he was boy locked up in a cage in the backyard.

Nothing will surprise fans of the splatter genre and if you like this style of in your face edgy photography (I do not in large doses) you will enjoy the ride. It is well made and the acting is okay, but I only give a mild recommendation because of the jittery, overblown camera work that could have been fantastic if it was just a little toned down.

JEEPERS CREEPERS ONE AND TWO

Most everything I have read about these movies really pans them without mercy but I do not think these Jeepers Creepers movies are that bad. They are not fantastic either but I really do not know what people expect from this sort of genre. The acting is not bad, the editing and cinematography are pretty good and while there are no surprises you get basically what you expect to get. The first time I watched it was with a couple good friends in Seattle and one guy just wold not let up on the movie. Every ten seconds he was ragging it. Hey, the guy - good friend and lay authority on Japanese cinema- watched every episode of Pokemon okay, so his opinion was suspect in this case.

The plot is about some sort of creature billed as “The Creeper“ who returns to our world every twenty three years for twenty days to feed on human body parts. He is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people over the decades. He keeps the bodies stored under an old church where he has developed a past time of turning the corpses into preserved works of art. They are stuck to the ceiling and wall like some sort of Satanic Sistine Chapel. He is selective about who he gets his parts from and is able to detect by smell the right type of fear. He traumatizes two teenagers (Gina Philips and Justin Long) in his serial killer truck until selecting one of them for a helping of eye balls. The creature wrecks havoc in a rural and desolate community and is all but unstoppable.

There are some problems of course and some parts are a little more than corny. The show down on the country road with Gina Philips running him over after he does flips over the car cold have been done better. And then he assaults the police station where the cops are hapless before him. It just is not scary to have a creature lose in a police station. It is more like an action movie (Terminator) here than a horror movie. And the two genres can mix of course, but I did not like the brew this time, but enjoyed the rest of the movie. The Creeper (Jonathan Breck) is interesting and enough about him is left unexplained to keep some mystery. The movie ends begging for a sequel and one is delivered. Maybe my taste is really bad, but I enjoyed it and recommend it completely. BEATINU baby.

I liked the sequel here more than the original in this case. Usually I do not like horror movie sequels much, with a few exceptions of course. It takes up right where the last one left off and the Creeper is running out of time to collect and digest body parts as the action takes place on day twenty three of his most recent hunting spree. Most of the story takes place in and around a school bus packed with high school students returning from a homecoming football game. The mood is tenser than in the first movie where the kids soon realize the Creeper is selecting who he will kill and eat and who he will not. All the adults on the bus are killed right off and disorganization and pandemonium ensues as it always does when teenagers are being stalked by a supernatural serial killer.

There is also a subplot of a father seeking revenge on the Creeper for abducting his son in a corn field. He creates a sort of harpoon gun out of a hydraulic fence post puncher and he takes on the Creeper over and over and the movie ends with the makings of a sequel dangling before us but I have not heard anything about it yet.

The killings and action again take place in some vast and desolate rural area of what looks like Kansas or Nebraska. I read that IT is Michigan but I could not be sure by checking the license plates in the scenes. The acting is good and there is tension between the characters as they try to help each other and yet stay alive themselves as the relentless Creeper stalks them one by one. But the kids and the vindictive father all fight back and give the creature a worthy fight in this fine sequel.

NOTE: I just found out that Jeepers Creepers III has been made but as of yet I have not seen it on the shelves here in Kunming China. DVDs here have been known to appear before the movie has even been released back in the States if they can get a hold of a screening copy. I do not think it has been released in the theaters yet back in the States and from I have read I might go straight to DVD. I will research it more after another can of Coke.

Jeepers Creepers I & II get: