Gamera the Invincible
Girl in Lover's Lane
Gladiators Seven
Grave of the Vampire
Guru the Mad Monk
Gamera
the Invincible (B&W, 1965) AKA
Giant Monster Gamera, Daikaijû Gamera
American fighter jets shoot down a Soviet plane carrying nuclear bombs
in the Arctic circle, and the resulting crash throws out (and nuclear-charges)
a giant prehistoric turtle! The turtle, named Gamera, would be a "friend
to all children" in later films, but in this one he's a destructive "object
of terror!" If a guy waddling around in an unwieldy turtle costume can
truly be considered terrifying. Screaming like Godzilla, he destroys one
of the best model ships that Japan could produce, and Americans in inserted
footage react to it with derision, of course, but when it's proven to
be true (and "one of the most controversial topics of our time"), they
send out the troops. A little boy who's so obsessed with turtles that
it's interfering with his schoolwork is first to discover that Gamera
has made it to population, and Gamera saves him from a fall before continuing
his path of destruction. Planes attack him but it's no good; he eats fire.
Then they try to freeze him and even turn him on his back (notoriously
the worst thing that can happen to a turtle), but he pulls his head and
legs in, spews fire from the holes, and flies away like a spaceship! Can
anything stop him... even "Plan Z"? Pretty funny, but as Japanese man-in-a-suit
monster pics go, this is one of the biggie classics, and led to lots of
sequels. -zwolf
Gamera Vs. Barugon (C, 1966)
AKA War Of The Monsters
It's a giant fake-looking turtle at war with a giant fake-looking dinosaur!
Run for your fake little lives! Barugon hatches from an "opal"
and looks like a giant spiked iguana with a rhino horn, and he can knock
down buildings with his tongue or use it to spray freezing gas. Model
airplanes and toy tanks can't stop the killer tongue, so they try toy
missiles, but a rainbow comes out of Barugon's back and destroys them..
This carnage attracts Gamera, so he comes in and gets stupid. Typical
slow-moving-but-fun-if-you're-in-the-right-mood Japanese monster flick.
-zwolf
Gator (C, 1976)
Burt Reynolds' first directing job was this sequel to White Lightning,
and most rednecks consider it a classic. Burt stars as Gator McCluskie,
a swamp rat ex-con moonshiner who's forced into helping an NYC cop crack
down on a Southern crime boss (Jerry Reed), who specializes in such things
as protection rackets, adolescent prostitution, and tax evasion. Overlong,
with only two or three good action scenes. Not really bad, but it sounds
better if you get a redneck to tell you about the time they saw it at
a drive-in when they were twelve. Also stars Lauren Hutton, Alice Ghostley,
Dub Taylor, Jack Weston, and Mike Douglas. -zwolf
Genghis Blues (C, 1999)
Accompanied by a small group of friends, filmmakers, & fellow musicians,
the blind American blues musician Paul Pena travels to Tuva (once part
of Mongolia, now an autonomous region) to visit friends & compete
in a throatsinging competition & symposium. Along the way, the viewer
is treated to some amazing scenery & examples of Tuvan throatsinging,
which really must be seen & heard to be believed, especially the children's
singing. Pena also does a pretty solid job of co-mingling the Tuvan style
he's learned with some traditional blues, creating some truly powerful
music. As an added bonus, Pena's personal thoughts on the trip are often
included in the narration, providing keen insight into the life of a blind
man. Excellent! -igor
Ghost Town (C, 1988)
A modern-day sheriff's deputy gets caught in a town full of ghosts while
searching for a missing girl in the desert. The town is frozen in eternal
limbo by a Satanic living-dead outlaw named Devlin, and the deputy must
kill Devlin (a near-impossible task) before he can rescue the girl, who
also got caught in the town. A little slow-moving but well-made and definitely
worthwhile. No nudity, but a few good gore scenes. -zwolf
Ghosts That Still Walk (C,
1977)
Okay little horror flick with some surprisingly memorable sequences. It's
nothing to write home about except for an amazing, creepy sequence where
rocks roll across a desert and attack a motor home. The plot concerns
a boy being possessed by the spirit of an evil Indian mummy that his mother
is experimenting with at home. Some slight gore and usually good effects
liven things up. I'm still wondering how the hell they did that bit with
the rocks. Not bad Gold Key production. -zwolf
Giant From The Unknown
(B&W, 1958) AKA Diablo Giant, Giant from Devil's Crag,
Giant from Diablo Point
A man researching suspended animation in animals entombed in rock and
an archaeologist looking for evidence of conquistadors in California both
make the find of their lives when they wake up a 7-foot undead Spanish
warrior, complete with armor (played by Buddy Baer, brother of "Jethro"
from The Beverly Hillbillies). He goes on a killing and girl-napping
spree and has to be stopped. One of the few films by Richard Cunha, who
made some of the best bad-movies (She Demons and Frankenstein's
Daughter), and one of the last Jack Pierce make-up jobs (famous for
early Karloff films, such as Frankenstein). Assuredly no masterpiece,
but entertaining schlock. -zwolf
The Giant Gila Monster (B&W,
1959)
Ken (Festus on Gunsmoke) Curtis produced and Ray Kellogg directed
this cheapo monster extravaganza. Some remarkably wholesome car-loving
teens living in a desert community learn that ol' 50's lesson... giant-sized
critters ain't nothin' but trouble! Kids start disappearing and cars turn
up wrecked as a giant Gila monster ('bout the size of a bus) attacks.
Usually these attacks consist of a claw stepping on the camera lens. It's
up to our hero - an always-helpful, clean-living, safety-conscious, absolutely-piss-poor-horrible-folk-song
singing mechanic named Chase - to put a stop to the behemoth's rampages,
while simultaneously helping the sheriff, his crippled little sister,
his French girlfriend, drunk disc-jockeys, and his car club. The Gila
monster never manages to look any bigger than average (in fact, it looks
like a rather small Gila monster), but it still manages to cause a train
wreck and several car accidents. Apparently something in the water supply
works as a growth hormone on lizards. Or something. Who knows? And if
you can't guess how they snuff the big bastard within the first fifteen
minutes of the movie, you just flat out don't understand foreshadowing,
ya poor dense puppy. Goofy but fun old 50's flick, paired on a double-feature
DVD (a cheap one, too) with The Killer Shrews - the DVD quality's
not great, but it's not bad, really, especially when you're getting two
movies on one very low-priced disc. -zwolf
The Girl and the Geek
(B&W, 1964) AKA Passion in the Sun
Sleazy little nudie movie about a crazed circus geek who escapes from
a low-rent carnival and runs around, while every once in a while some
chunky 60's girl strips to take a shower or something. An overworked sheriff
and deputy try to catch the geek, recover a kidnaped girl, and anything
else their radio tells them to do. Not a lot happens, but it's pretty
funny watching naked girls walk backwards to avoid showing any pubic hair,
and the film (which looks like a home movie) was obviously shot silent...
and the overdubbing is bad and hilarious. A guy and a kidnapped girl fight
in the backseat of a convertible for what seems like a hundred miles.
Finally she escapes and is chased through the backwoods by the kidnapper,
with the cops also in pursuit. Every once in a while we cut to some desperately-talentless
strippers. While escaping, the girl stops to swim and take naps... naked,
o' course. Then she meets up with the escaped geek. He looks a little
like Sid Vicious, she looks a little like Nancy Spungeon, it was inevitable.
They end up back at the carnival, where he chases her around and she tape-loop
screams every time she sees him, and it's all very goofy. Basically it's
an excuse to show nudity, with a shred of plot thrown in just for the
hell of it. Included for free as an extra on the Godmonster of Indian
Flats DVD. -zwolf
Girl in
Lover's Lane (B&W, 1959)
A couple of hoods knock out a young runaway named Danny and try to rob
him. He wakes up on a freight train with another young fella named Bix
who's drifting around because his old man used to get drunk and beat him
up. Danny agrees to pay for everything if Bix will show him how to handle
himself on the road. They stop in a small town and Bix makes a date with
a waitress. Before he can keep the date, though, he and Danny get in some
conflict with a gang of hoods who want to take their money. They fight
their way out and Bix has to make another date, and soon the girl is stuck
on him and he's getting stuck on her, which scares him. So he's planning
to leave town, but he learns that the girl's being stalked by a rapist
creep (a young Jack Elam) so he has second thoughts about leaving her
unprotected. But then Elam kills her and Bix gets the blame... Low-budget
blend of juvenile delinquent drama and film noir is no masterpiece, but
it's a fast-moving solid little B-film that delivers what it's supposed
to. Elam makes an especially oily sleazeball. -zwolf
Girl, Interrupted (C, 1999)
With that awful haircut it looks more like Little Boy Interrupted,
but it plays more like Sylvia Plath Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.
One of my least-favorite actresses, Winona Ryder, plays a '60's girl named
Suzanna who may just be a pretentious wanna-be writer flake, or may be
crazy. When she o.d.'s on vodka and aspirin they put her in a psychiatric
hospital with a lot of other girls. And into this comes Angelina Jolie,
another actress I'm not fond of, who is really angry and sociopathic.
It's not hard for Jolie to be convincing because she actually is crazy
- ever seen her interviewed? She's a fuckin' looneytoon. So, watching
a crazy person play a crazy person is kinda like watching NASCAR in fast-forward.
Jolie completely steals the movie. As part of her Rhonda P. McMurphy act,
Jolie helps the girls sneak into the basement to go bowling, lets them
read their secret files, encourages them not to take their medication,
and plays with a cat puppet. Then they try to take Jolie away, so she
and Ryder escape and pay a visit to a girl who got released... but obviously
didn't get better. Ryder ends up back in the mental home. Without Jolie's
influence she starts getting better and arranges to be released, but then
Jolie comes back... Not a great film - it's a little too pretentious and
stagey - but it is a good one, and stays interesting. It pretends to make
some feminist statement (note all the stuff they watch on TV) but it doesn't
work well on that level. It's best viewed as What If They Remade
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest As A Chick Movie. Whoopi
Goldberg's excellent performance as a doctor brings everything up a notch,
and there's some creative editing in the flashbacks. -zwolf
Gladiators
Seven (C, )
No, it's not a sequel and there were no six previous Gladiators
films; it's just another Italian muscleman flick. Darius, son of a Spartan
ephor, is ashamed to have been captured alive by Romans and forced to
fight in the gladiator arena, so he's kept his background a secret from
them. He's a powerful fighter, though, and becomes popular enough with
the crowds to win his freedom, so he returns to Sparta and finds that
a lot of corruption has been going on in his absence, and his father's
been murdered. The guy who did it (so he could become the new ephor) isn't
pleased to see the vengeance-seeking Darius back in town, and has Darius
framed for the murder of his girlfriend's father. Darius escapes and rounds
up some old gladiator buddies whom he'd helped escape, and he brings them
back to clean house and set things right. They're a colorful and multi-talented
bunch (a brawling drunk, a strongman, a master archer, a guy who uses
an axe, and a guy who's been recaptured and is still gladiat-ing), just
to keep things interesting. This still has the typical stilted stiffness
that most of these Ancient-Rome epics tend to have, but the plot moves
well enough and the action is better than usual. The Magnificent Seven-inspired
plot was also done in Seven Magnificent Gladiators. The cheap Brentwood
DVD (on a box set with three other gladiator movies) is letterboxed and
decent quality for the price. -zwolf
God of Killers (C,
1981) AKA Woo yuet dik goo si, Story of Woo Viet, Woot
Yuet's Story
Warning: the cheap DVD of this is bad: not only is it struck
from a dropout-filled fourth-generation videotape, but the letterboxing
isn't wide enough and it cuts off the sides and bottoms of the subtitles...
which often don't show up against the background anyway. If you speak
Chinese this is no problem, but for me I kinda had to piece together what
was going on. Seems like a young Chow Yun Fat is a refugee from war in
Vietnam who comes to Hong Kong to meet his pretty pen-pal. But apparently
he was a witness to an assassination and had to kill a special agent,
so he's on the run and people are trying to kill him. Trying to travel
to Chinatown, a guy tries to kill Chow but ends up being Chow's hostage.
Then some criminals take him in and give him a job. He watches a grief-stricken
drag queen sing and goes to a nightclub full of midgets. He becomes a
big hit man, but his boss is too ruthless and may be plotting to betray
him. Or at least that's what I think is going on - it's hard
to say for sure, given the state of the subtitles. Rather slow crime drama
might be okay if it was in a clearer format, but even then it's no John
Woo-type film, with pedestrian action scenes, and not a whole lot of 'em,
either. Still, it's always interesting to watch Chow, and there's a pretty
sicko scene with a toothbrush getting rammed through a guy's face (the
only gore). Could be passable if given a better DVD, instead of this bootleg
thing. -zwolf
God Told Me To (C,
1976) AKA Demon
A rash of senseless killings springs up in New York City - snipers, stabbers,
even cop Andy Kaufman pulling his gun and firing into the crowd during
the St. Patrick's Day parade. In each case the happy little psychos explain
that "God told me to." A police inspector investigates the phenomenon
and finds out that a woman was impregnated by aliens and her half-breed
son (Richard Lynch with long hair and a robe and effects that make him
glow) is hiding in the utility tunnels of New York, using his powers.
Lynch wants to "convert" the cop, but the cop finds some strange things
about his own background as well. Typically strange, somehow aloof but
interesting Larry Cohen film with an intriguing exploration of how someone
with extra powers raised in a religion-crazed human society would probably
end up assuming that they were God, and a pretty accurate metaphor for
religion as interpreted psychosis, where people make gods out of anything
because no one really knows who or what god would be... even though so
many people seem certain. In fact, given the number of abortion-clinic
bombings, child-drownings, terrorist attacks, and numerous other religious
crimes we see every day, this shouldn't have been as controversial as
it was. The title was changed to Demon partially because people
kept getting the real title wrong and because some television stations
were scared to run the ads, since the fundies freak out about everything.
God told them to protest movies! -zwolf
Good Against Evil
(C, 1977)
A fashion designer named Jessica who's "always had a guardian angel watching
over her" has her car bumped into by a suave guy named Andy (Dack Rambo!
Remember Dack Rambo?) who starts doing what used to be considered romancing
but now seems more like stalking. It works, though, and they start dating.
Meanwhile they're being watched by people from a Satanic organization,
because apparently Jessica is destined to be the mother of the Antichrist.
They want to kill Andy to get rid of him, the way they got rid of every
other guy she ever dated. Andy and Jessica want to get married but the
priest realizes she's been "touched by Astaroth" when the church darkens
and chills when she enters it. Head Satanist Richard Lynch gets displeased
with his followers for allowing things to slip and has one of them attacked
by cats before taking Jessica away and erasing her memories of Andy. Andy
tries tracking her down through a possessed little girl who's being exorcised
(or maybe she just has a Magic Fingers bed and a short in her lamps -
it's pretty low-budget for an exorcism scene). This is another great old-school
made for TV horror movie, but it has a stupid open ending. Maybe they
intended it as a series pilot? It's hard to understand such a thing, considering
that it was scripted by Hammer god Jimmy Sangster. Besides the anticlimax,
it's good. Opening scenes in a shadowy hospital are especially creepy.
-zwolf
Goose Boxer (C, 1978)
AKA Leung saan gwaai chiu
Slapstick kung fu about a goofy guy who raises geese and sells them, up
until some guys wreck his cooked-goose stand. A con man hires him to teach
some fake kung fu, and a white-haired crane-style master starts training
him against his will, mainly by tying him up in fighting positions until
he's too stiff to get out of them, throwing eggs at him, or committing
various other tortures. Finally he trains himself in "goose fist" (it's
goofy-lookin' but effective) and some strange techniques he picks
up from a book called "The 108 Techniques," which turns out to not be
a kung fu text at all, but a sex manual! Some of the humor is funny and
some is just low-brow (a shitting midget, for instance... now, I ask you,
how sophisticated is a shitting midget?! It's not funny! Stop laughing!),
but the fight scenes showcase some top-notch talent. -zwolf
The Gospel According to Philip
K. Dick (C, 2000)
Clearly a labor of love, this documentary is, for the most part, well-made
& entertaining. Most of the footage is of interviews with friends
& associates of the late author, most notably fellow author &
eccentric Robert Anton Wilson. Audio recordings of Dick from Paul Williams'
Rolling Stone interview are a worthy addition, though these segments
suffer from tedious & cheap-looking computer animation. A minor gripe
about an interesting documentary. Dick was an intriguing character, with
genius-level intellect & the symptoms of dementia often associated
with such intellect, & this good film could've been great if it had
delved deeper into his life, & if less time onscreen had been wasted
by slow-moving, repetitive animation. -igor
Gone In Sixty Seconds (C, 1974)
An inner-city car theft ring steals cars, changes the serial numbers,
and re-sells them. They even steal Lyle Waggoner's car at one point (Lyle
isn't in the film, but they have a picture of him - that's almost as good).
There's a car chase in which a tow-truck pulling a car evades cops, but
things are only so-so until the last forty minutes, where the main thief
gets double-crossed by his boss and evades a whole squadron of police
cars in a high-speed chase through five cities, while driving a yellow
Mach I Mustang named Eleanor. In this top-notch chase, 93 cars (costing
over $250,000) were demolished. It's kind of painful to watch, because
they're mainly beautiful early-70's muscle cars. They were plentiful back
then. Writer/producer/director/star H. B. Halicki is a former stuntman,
and that explains a lot. Lots of great car crashes, weird hairstyles,
and bad music. A drive-in hit that has acquired a small cult following.
A must for fans of metal damage. The Junkman was a similar follow-up.
Remade in 2000. -zwolf
The Grapes of Death (C, 1978) AKA Les Raisins de la Mort,
Pesticide, The Raisins of Death
Probably Jean Rollin's most straightforward horror film, this is a French
take on Night of the Living Dead. Pesticides in a vineyard cause
people to break out in horrible fast-spreading rashes and make them homicidal.
A girl escapes from a farmworker on a train and goes to a house were people
have been drinking contaminated wine. Running to a nearby village she's
faced with more pus-faces. A blind girl leads her to another village where
everybody's been massacred, but they rise again and commit a whole night
of nightmarish craziness, until a couple of guys who didn't drink wine
pull our girl out of it and escape to the vineyard... which is the wrong
place to go. It's not on a Fulci level but there's still a lot of well-done
gore, from the simple - rotting, pus-oozing faces and gunshots - to the
more extreme, like a graphic decapitation-by-hatchet that takes a good
bit of chopping, to a pretty convincing scene where someone's pinned to
a table by a pitchfork. Not Rollin's most stylish (although it's nowhere
near the hackwork of his Zombie Lake, either), but one of his fastest-moving,
and a good addition to the zombies-on-the-loose genre. -zwolf
Grass (C, 2000)
Narrated by Woody Harrelson, this is a pretty enjoyable film focusing
on U.S. governmental policy toward marijuana throughout the 20th century.
It naturally leans heavily on the side of the potheads, but a lot of the
evidence is there to support legalization, regardless of the stoner you
first heard it from. Anyway, a lot of stock footage is used, with overdubbed
voices that are reminiscent of, well, a bunch of stoners trying to emulate
MST3K, funny at times, but usually just annoying. There is also
a good representation of excellent old footage from medical experiments
with marijuana, alongside the requisite clips from Reefer Madness
& its ilk. The documentary breaks the war on cannabis up by era, including
some great film & newsreel clips from each, as well as cultural references
for each era. Interestingly, I learned some neat stuff from this film,
such as: Jimmy Carter originally ran in support of decriminalizing reefer,
but was forced to take a hardline stance against drugs due to an addiction
scandal within his own Cabinet. Or, the commission appointed by Nixon
to study the effects of marijuana returned a finding of no noticeable
harm & suggested legalization, which pissed the old codger off so
badly that he ignored it completely! A funny movie that I would recommend
on a double bill with other unusual documentary works like Roger &
Me or The Eyes of Tammy Faye. -igor
Grave of
the Vampire (C, 1972) AKA Seed of Terror
A young couple has the misfortune to choose a romantic spot in a graveyard
where a withered spider-covered vampire is reviving. He brutally kills
the guy and drains him, then drags the girl into his grave and rapes her.
He hides from the sunrise in a woman's sub-basement, then kills her when
she comes down. The girl who was raped gets pregnant, and the doctor says
the baby's dead-but-growing and is a parasite that should be aborted,
but she thinks it's her late boyfriend's baby and insists on having it.
She does, and soon figures out that it drinks blood, so she draws her
blood with a syringe and feeds it to him with a baby bottle, and it grows
up to be biker movie icon William Smith, who hates his vampire father
for what he did to his mother, and sets out to track him down. The vampire's
teaching night courses at colleges, and that's where William finds him,
still killing and draining women. William enrolls in his class to play
a game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile a woman is after the vampire, trying
to get him to make her a vampire bride, but he wants another woman who
resembles his first wife, and who briefly becomes possessed by her spirit
at a seance. Then the vampire starts trying to kill off everyone in the
house until he and William face off. Very low-budget, but atmospheric
and delivers the goods. -zwolf
The Great Guy (B&W, 1936) AKA Pluck of the
Irish
Who'd've thought that working for the Bureau of Weights and Measures would
be such a dangerous and violent job? James Cagney at his tough-little-fella
best is a Bureau officer who's incorruptible in his quest to make sure
that the American consumer gets what they pay for, whether it be a gallon
of gas or a pound of chicken. He turns down bribes, gets roughed up, and
endures the scorn of the girl he loves (even though she wears hats he
hates), all because he won't turn a blind eye to corruption in his own
department. The same thing happened to Serpico, remember? Decent
plotting and some snappy dialogue make this one better than you'd think.
One guy got his nose broken making a fight scene: Cagney swung at him
during a party scene and he jerked his head back... right into another
actor's nose. -zwolf
Great Silence (C, 1968) AKA
Il Grande silenzio, The Big Silence
This snowbound spaghetti Western from director Sergio Corbucci has the
(obscure) reputation of being possibly the best of the genre, but, while
it's definitely very good, I don't think it comes anywhere close to any
of Sergio Leone's stuff (that would be impossible) or is even Corbucci's
best (I like Django a lot better). It's just a little too cinematically
sloppy to reach those levels, and the cast doesn't particularly grab me,
but it's still a great and uniquely-nihilistic western. Jean-Louis Trintignant
is a broomhandle-Mauser-packing gunfighter named Silence. He can't speak
because his throat was cut by some bounty hunters who didn't quite get
the job done, and now he goes around picking fights with them so they'll
draw first and he'll be justified in killing them, or shooting their thumbs
off so they can't handle guns anymore. Klaus Kinski is Loco, probably
the most vicious and unscrupulous bounty hunter of them all. And in some
snowy mountain, in a dispute over some refugees, the two face off. Due
to Corbucci's fetish for mutilating his heroes, things aren't going to
go smoothly. The ending was so downbeat that Corbucci was forced to shoot
another, happier one (included on the DVD as an extra), but it was apparently
never used. Essential viewing for spaghetti Western fanatics, with a strangely-intense
Ennio Morricone score - it sounds nothing like the ones he did for Leone.
The mountains, snow, and presence of a broomhandle Mauser (and even a
guy with a hurt throat) may indicate that this had some influence on Clint
Eastwood's Joe Kidd. -zwolf
The Green Berets (C, 1968)
Call me un-American if you must, but I'm no John Wayne fan. I like some
of his movies, but not him in particular. And he directed and stars in
this notoriously bad Vietnam war epic. Wayne's staunch Republicanism soaks
through and turns this whole thing into jingoistic propaganda... it gets
hard to take at times. Sgt. Barry Sadler's unlikely hit, "Ballad
of the Green Berets," opens this up. David Jansen is a liberal reporter
who doesn't think America should be in 'Nam, and he's quickly shown that
it's to stop communist domination of the world! (See, there was this bad
thing called communism back then. Everyone was scared of it and vigilant
against it. Then it just disappeared! Well, mostly...) They all go to
a remote camp in VC territory where bad comedy relief (backed with bad
comedy-relief music, so we'll know it's supposed to be funny) abounds.
Some of it is provided by Ham Chuck the numbah one orphan boy - "Ha
ha, you funny!" Nearly ninety minutes into this thing we get the
first action, which includes an obvious model helicopter on fire. Other
than that, the fight is decent and goes on for a while. The VC take over
the camp, but with air support the good guys promptly take it back...
and have to start all over! Noooo! The movie's been too long already!
One dead hero gets a toilet named after him. Kinda makes you wanna enlist,
don't it? To close the movie out, they go after a VC general. Then flags
are waved, and John Wayne consoles the poor orphan Ham Chuck (who Wayne
calls "Ham Chunk" - scary when the director doesn't remember
the character names, ain't it?) as the sun sinks beautifully over the
sea... which is east of DaNang. Uh-huh. Much of this was filmed in Alabama,
which I guess was close enough to being a war zone back in '68... The
Green Berets are a great bunch of soldiers and they definitely deserve
a tribute, but this sluggish and cliche'-ridden film - though sincere
- just ain't it. It tries, but it doesn't move. And, oddly enough, the
co-director, Ray Kellogg, was also responsible for the trash classics
The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews! -zwolf
The Grim Reaper (C, 1980) AKA
Anthropophagus
Splatter movies with the gore cut out... god, that's depressing. But that's
about the only way you'll see this movie, unless you have some really
good underground connections, because the versions released on VHS and
DVD are the heavily-scissored American version. Having never seen the
Euro cut, I don't know what I'm missing. And that sucks. Anyway, several
tourists, including Mia Farrow's sister Tia (from Zombie), go to
an island where a crazed cannibal psychopath is on the loose. He got shipwrecked
and had to eat his wife and child to survive, which left him a bit...
traumatized. His face is also a scarred-up mess from too much sunburn,
even though he's still pale... he looks kind of like a zombie with a mustache
and bad hair (what's left of it) - actually pretty damned scary lookin'.
His sister hangs herself just as the tourists find her - probably a wise
move, considering the stalk 'n' slash nightmare to come. One guy explores
some catacombs and finds his pregnant wife stored there, still alive.
But not for long. In a moment of astounding bad taste, the psycho stabs
the guy and performs a simultaneous murder/abortion by jamming his hand
up the pregnant woman. Yeee-ouch! Then he sets out for the remaining women,
stalking them through a large villa, always just a few feet behind. Definitely
ain't art, but the monster is brutally scary and some of the scenes are
pretty intense. It's junk, but it's not bad junk. But it could be great
junk if they just put the damn gore back in... Directed by Joe D'ammato,
who usually does porn films. -zwolf
Guinea Pig : The Devil's Experiment (C, 1988) AKA Za ginipiggu:
Akuma no jikken
This film (or video, really - it's shot on videotape, and poorly) has
only its notorious reputation to recommend it, because while it's definitely
sick, it's also very boring, unless maybe you're a real pervert. All Guinea
Pig is, is a faked snuff film, with no plot whatsoever. It's Japanese
and for the most part isn't much of anything that one of their game shows
isn't. Three scumbags take a kidnapped girl (assuming she's kidnapped
- at times she seems like she signed up for it because she never makes
any effort to fight back) out to a garage somewhere and submit her to
stages of torture. First they slap her dozens of times, then kick her
around, then pinch and twist her skin with pliers, then they spin her
around in a chair while force-feeding her whiskey until she pukes and
passes out. Then they strap earphones to her head and play loud noises
until she's catatonic. Then they pull out one of her fingernails, then
pour boiling oil on her, throw worms and maggots all over her, then throw
animal guts all over her, slice her hand with a scalpel (which is pretty
damn real looking, filmed very close up) and then smash it with a sledgehammer
(very fake looking), and finally shove a long needle through the side
of her head into her eye, in extreme close-up and lingering detail. The
gore effects are unsettling - they appear to have used gelatin-based prosthetics
instead of latex, so it stands up even in close-up. But you can still
tell they're fake (check the eyelashes, for instance)... and that's a
good thing, because you wouldn't want this to be real. Charlie Sheen saw
it and thought it was legit and reported it to the cops (or that may have
been one of the sequels, Flowers of Flesh and Blood - reports vary).
The people who made it initially marketed it as a tape that had been sent
to the police but found its way into the underground, and that's pretty
sick. Overall, it's very unpleasant (although I'm sure she knew what she
was signing up for, the girl had to have been suffering, getting spun
around and having worms and stuff all over her - even a sadist wouldn't
have much fun watching it, and there's no sexual aspect to anything),
and it's about 40 mintues long. Trust me on this - it's not even worth
it to say you've seen it. The subsequent films had plots and even though
they're nothing special (at least not the one I've seen), you're not bored.
This one's dull as dirt and will make you feel blah for even watching
such junk being faked. Spare yourself. -zwolf
Guinea Pig 2 : Android of Notre
Dame (C, 1989) AKA Za ginipiggu 2: Notorudamu no andoroido
The second in the notorious Japanese gore series is a vast improvement
on the first, because this one has a plot (which is partially stolen from
The Brain That Wouldn't Die). But that doesn't mean it's good...
A dwarf is working on Frankenstein-like experiments to try to cure his
dying sister. A sleazy criminal finds out what he's doing and sends him
a girl's corpse to work on, then tries to blackmail him and ends up decapitated,
with his head brought back to life and wired to a computer. After much
suffering (having his ears scissored off, etc.) his partner comes after
him, and the dwarf kills her, too, and transplants her heart into his
sister... with unhappy results. It's very cheap - shot on video - and
runs about 50 minutes, so you're not really getting your money's worth.
The gore effects are sick and extreme, but not unnervingly so - they tend
toward the ridiculous. But at least this one has a story...-zwolf
Guinea Pig: He Never Dies
(C, 1992) AKA He Never Dies, Za ginipiggu 8: Senritsu! Shinanai
otoko
Departure for the infamous Guinea Pig series in the form of a disgustingly
gory comedy this time. A bored, dissatisfied, nobody office worker
gets depressed because nobody even realizes he's been skipping work, so
he slits his wrist. But he doesn't bleed much (even when he starts picking
at it - this will make you queasy because the effects are too
good) and doesn't feel much pain, so he figures out he's immortal! He
jams a pen through his arm, cuts his hand off, slits his throat, and just
becomes more bummed out that he can't die. So he decides to have fun with
it by throwing his entrails at a friend as a prank. The guy deserved it;
he showed up at the house in an Elvis mask. Runs about 40 minutes and
is very disgusting, stupid, and actually pretty entertaining if you can
stomach it. The end credits, running backwards so the guy's un-mutilating
himself, are pretty funny, as is the "look at the mess you made of your
apartment!" reaction of the immortal guy's love-interest. -zwolf
Guinea Pig: Mermaid In A Manhole
(C, 1991) AKA Za ginipiggu 4: Manhoru no naka no ningyo
The only film (or tape, really, since they're all shot on video) in the
infamous Japanese Guinea Pig series that could really bear any cinematic
analysis. It's a strangely poetic (yet intensely disgusting) fable of
a sad, rather unbalanced painter who has started going into the sewer
since his wife left him, because he thinks that's where everything he's
lost has gone. It's full of things from his past, including dead pets
which he still loves. One day he finds a mermaid, who he remembers from
his childhood. She's really pretty so he wants to paint her, but she starts
developing bloody, pus-filled tumors on her belly, so he moves her from
the sewer to a bathtub in his studio. He tries desperately to cure her
but the septic rot spreads unchecked, and under her direction he starts
slitting open her tumors and painting her portrait using the various colors
of pus that drain from them. He's horrified and becoming more insane the
whole time. And none of it does any good; she gets worse and starts puking
up worms, and worms start bursting from her tumors, pus sprays all over,
and her intestines fall out. Finally he has to give up and dismember her.
This could be viewed as a parable about how dwelling on decaying memories
can drive one to madness and failure, that the past is unreachable and
trying to layer it over the present is sure to end in disaster... or -probably
more aptly - it could be passed off as just another sickening exercise
in the art of gross-out. In any case, only extreme gorehounds should show
up for this revolting, nearly-plotness nightmare. Runs less than an hour.
-zwolf
Gummo (C, 1997)
The directorial debut of Harmony Korine, the writer responsible for
Kids, Gummo is a fucked up movie, no doubt about it. It
comes across like a documentary, much like, but far more disturbing than,
Richard Linklater's Slacker. Solomon & Tummler live in the
depressed shithole of Xenia, Ohio, & spend their days killing cats,
selling 'em to the local grocer for cash & glue, & visiting a
local perv who lets 'em screw his retarded daughter for money while he
peeps & pinches his nipples... Yes, that certainly is a lot of crazy
stuff, but don't worry! There's still over an hour left in the film &
a parade of people & their stories onscreen to come. Most of the film's
principles are unknowns, but you should recognize Kids star Chloe
Sevigny & Max Perlich from the excellent Homicide: Life on the
Streets. Not for everyone, but definitely worth the attempt, if only
to see Solomon eating while bathing in what can only be the water from
Neil's bathtub episode of The Young Ones! -igor
Guncrazy (C,
1992)
Drew Barrymore is a small-town skank who spends most of her time fucking
local losers at the town dump and her step-dad (Joe Dellasandro) at home.
As part of a class assignment, she gets a penpal - a young convict named
Howard Hickcock, who's looking for a girl who's as into guns as he is.
Grasping at any available straw and desperate for someone to like her,
she learns to shoot and also helps Howard get a job so he can be paroled.
Howard turns out to be a basically decent guy, 'cept he's impotent. They
get married anyway, and soon fate sends the dysfunctional duo onto a reluctant
killing spree. Pseudo-remake of a 1949 classic. It's not bad. But it's
strange, considering that ultra-flakey Drew Barrymore made this, then
later refused to do Charlie's Angels if they used any guns in it. Try'n
make sense out of Drew, I dare ya... -zwolf
The Guns At Batasi (B&W, 1964)
Dull British drama about a bunch of stiff Brits who must halt a bunch
of African troops who have decided to mutiny. My guess is they got tired
of being taught how to salute by the numbers and hearing about the damn
queen and just staged an uprising to alleviate boredom. They shoulda tried
harder, for my sake. Some woman from Parliament tries to stop the British
troops from shooting it up with the African troops. There's a little bland
action near the end. Good acting and good production might make this worth
watching for the easily excited. -zwolf
Guru the
Mad Monk (C, 1970) AKA Garu the Mad Monk
Another Andy Milligan assault on all standards of moviemaking. Following
his rule of making period pieces so they could be re-released over and
over without becoming dated, this is set during the days of the Inquisition...
but never looks like anything but the Summer of Love, what with the big-flower
curtains in the background, the hairstyles, the corduroy pants, etc. A
young man with Brady hair (as in Brady Bunch, not as in cornrows)
makes a deal with the church to free a girl he loves from the Inquisition,
via faking her death. The church wants bodies to sell for medical training,
and a vampiric woman who sells potions needs a lot of human blood for
"experiments," so he makes a deal. Meanwhile, the church is torturing
people via some of the worst gore effects ever - hands are gently chopped
off, sticks gouge out eyes (hilarious), a beheading, and a crucifixion,
all mostly presided over by chubby Father Guru in his ridiculous headgear
that looks like something a toddler would train to go poopie in. Guru
is not only mean and crazy, but he's a split personality... and his personalities
hate each other! He has a hunchbacked simpleton as a henchman, but the
hunchback is good-natured and brings Guru's prisoners horsemeat and clean
rags to sleep on. Overall, though, the movie is a drawn-out bore, with
only minimal gore that's few and far between (and badly done anyway),
mixed with a lot of interminable talking scenes, which, since it's an
Andy Milligan product, one has to strain to hear, anyway. The good thing
is, it runs a little under an hour. The bad thing is, the full miniseries
of The Stand seems shorter than this... Suitable for students of
talentless, budgetless film only. See the trailer instead - I promise
you that it contains every second of good part, and you won't miss a thing.
-zwolf
