Eagle's Claw and the Butterfly
Palm (C, 1982)
It's Chinese patriots vs. invading Mongols in this kung fu retitle (from what
I don't know), which is marred by a bad transfer on DVD - too dark and poor
speed correction leaves "trails" behind movements - it hurts your eyes. The
Butterfly Clan have destroyed Shaolin and the Wu Tang and it's up to a lone
avenger from the Yun to avenge them all. The Butterfly fighters tend to wear
ninja-like masks and use shields with spiked blades, and they're led by a
princess with magical powers, who can drug people and control them by playing
a flute, and she also works with Lo Lieh. She takes control of four knights
who came to discuss their problems. Meanwhile, a bratty girl teams up with
a fighter and a drug salesman and they meet the Butterfly Clan in a big climactic
showdown. Despite the interesting title this is pretty average stuff, even
though it does give Lo Lieh a chance to repeat a "glowing palm" scene like
in his classic Five Fingers of Death. -zwolf
Eagle's Killer (C, 1979) AKA Bai cu shi fu kou cu tou
Hwang Jang Lee is a killer for hire, taking out his targets with a vicious
eagle claw style (and, of course, some incredible kicks). Meanwhile, a young
kung fu student (John Cheung, from Snake in the Monkey's Shadow) isn't
having much luck learning from a shiftless teacher who's not good for much
except Cantonese comedy. Disgruntled, he gets into some Drunken Master-inspired
battles with a fat student and leaves the school. On his own he has to fight
off some inept bandits before meeting Hwang and asking to become his student.
Hwang's a hardcore killer, not a teacher, but decides to humor the guy so
he can sell him into slavery. This results in him nearly getting raped! He
gets some help from a drifter and learns well, getting plenty of excuses to
practice what he's learned, but then Hwang is hired to kill him, and you know
that means trouble. If this were a video game I'd have to say it was built
on the "Drunken Master engine," but it's got a style of its own, with
interesting directorial elements (such as intercutting shots of Hwang kicking
a skeleton apart during fight scenes). And while the comedy is rambunctious,
it doesn't get in the way of the story or the great fight scenes. Funky music
score, too. Highly entertaining, and recommended. -zwolf
Eaten Alive! (C, 1980) AKA Doomed to Die, Eaten
Alive by the Cannibals, Emerald Jungle, Mangiani Vivi, Mangiati
vivi dai cannibali Italian cannibal sleaze with a young lady from Alabama
(which means the dubbed voices are worse than usual, since they're trying
an accent) going to New Guinea to look for her sister, who's joined a Jonestown-ripoff
cult led by a demonic-looking creep named Jonas (Ivan Rassimov, who was the
demon in The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, which proves he's
demonic-looking!). She and the Vietnam deserter she hires as a guide get chased
by cannibals and then caught by the cult, which drugs them and - as is apparently
required in every such film since Bo Derek's awful Tarzan flick - paints nude
girls gold. Escaping the cult is impossible because if they don't kill you,
the jungle cannibals will (aided by some footage lifted from Slave of the
Cannibal God and Jungle Holocaust, all accompanied by music from
Make Them Die Slowly). Plus real animals are butchered or fight each other.
After a while you get a really nasty cannibal picnic, with ears and breasts
and limbs being sliced off of living people and eaten raw. Gore and nudity
and cliched plot situations abound. The fact that the crazy suicide cult uses
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as their theme song should make it up to
the people of Alabama for the bad dubbed accents. Directed by the notorious
Umberto Lenzi. -zwolf
Eerie Midnight
Horror Show (C, 1974) AKA The Sexorcist, Tormented,
Enter the Devil, Devil Obsession, L' Ossessa
A young female art student finds big trouble in a 15th century
carving of one of the thieves who was crucified with Christ, which was found
in a deconsecrated church that had been the site of a lot of evil orgies.
She takes the statue for study, but it's possessed by an evil spirit that's
got centuries of pent-up lust to work off. Or maybe she's just obsessed and
suffering from hallucinations involving the carving; she's got sexual hang-ups,
anyway, since she saw her mother cheating on her dad. Soon her parents find
her acting crazy, masturbating and trying to seduce her father. She has visions
of black masses, with the living statue (played by the truly demonic-looking
Ivan Rasimov) presiding over grey-skinned women and gleefully crucifying our
heroine, who develops stigmata from it. The crackpot family doctor prescribes
a weekend in the country, but they soon find that isn't going to cure what's
wrong with her, and finally an exorcist is called in and they get her to a
nunnery, where she becomes hysterical, escapes, and runs around behaving like
a complete asshole! It's supposedly based on a true story but looks more like
another in the long line of Italian Exorcist imitations, but it does
boast some weird atmosphere and scary moments, achieved with more style than
some others in the subgenre even though it does show slightly more restraint
than, say, The Tempter. Retitled to try to capitalize on The Rocky
Horror Picture Show, for some reason. The video box even features giant
red lips. Luckily, it's absolutely nothing like that film. -zwolf
The Eiger Sanction
(C, 1975)
Clint Eastwood is a paid assassin working for a secret government agency headed
by a cold-blooded albino called The Dragon. Clint only wants to retire from
the biz and work his cover job - college art professor - but Dragon makes
him an offer he can't refuse: terminating some killers who snuffed one of
his friends. He knows that one of the assassins will be in a mountain-climbing
competition on the Eiger Mountain, and that's where Clint will have to kill
him. First Clint trains on rock formations in the desert, under the guidance
of George Kennedy, then climbs the actual mountain (Clint did his own stunts,
which were dangerous - a crew member was killed during filming). I put off
seeing this for years, thinking it would suck for some reason, and it's not
Clint's best but I'm glad I finally gave it a shot because it's a whole lot
better than I thought it'd be, and Clint's in his prime and was easily able
to carry the film (which he also directed). -zwolf
8 MM (C, 1999)
Nicholas Cage is a small-time private detective hired by the widow of a millionaire
when she finds a snuff film among her late husband's personal effects. She
hopes that Cage can prove the film is just a sick-minded fake and that the
girl wasn't actually tortured and murdered. But, with the help of a wise guy
adult bookstore clerk who knows the porn industry like the palm of his hand
(snicker), he finds that the film was real, and the sickos who made it wouldn't
mind making another, with him as the star, and possibly even throwing his
wife and kid in as a short subject. Another dark and disturbing film from
the writer of Se7en. -zwolf
El Condor (C, 1970)
Lighthearted western starring Lee Van Cleef and Jim Brown as a pair of bandits
leading an army of Apaches to a Mexican fort in hopes of stealing the gold
buried beneath it. They have to overcome a couple of tight situations and
defeat a whole Mexican army to get it. Okay western with lots of comedy relief
- just don't expect a spaghetti-type dealie and you'll be okay. Also stars
Marriana Hill, Patrick O'Neil, Iron Eyes Cody. -zwolf
The Embalmer
(B&W, 1966) AKA Monster of Venice, Il Monstro di Venezia
A maniac with scuba gear swims the canals of Venice, snatching girls and drowning
them, then taking their corpses to his underground laboratory, secreted in
the depths of an ancient flooded monastery. There he puts on a hooded monk's
robe and a skull mask and embalms the girls with a secret formula so he can
dress them in togas and stand them up in little cubicles to form a "temple
of beauty." Some rather incompetent cops try to catch him, which won't be
easy since they spend most of their time arguing about whether murders are
even being committed or not. They tour the city a lot and watch a weird nightclub
act where an Elvis lookalike comes out of a coffin and wails a really terrible
not-at-all-Elvisy song that they didn't bother to translate ("Love Them From
The Embalmer," I reckon). Meanwhile, the killer keeps on killing
and making pretentious speeches to his collection of dead girls. A professor
who figures out that the killer must be operating out of the monastery ends
up in not-Elvis's coffin. Will the bumbling cops manage to trip over a solution
despite themselves? That's the only hope! Some pretty creepy scenes (face
it - a skull-faced monk wandering through damp, dark, abandoned hallways is
kinda spooky) but the silliness of the horribly-dubbed dialogue does compromise
things a lot. -zwolf
Emmanuelle
in America (C, 1976) AKA Brutal Nights
Laura Gemser returns as the astoundingly laid-back (she seduces a lunatic
who wants to kill her for promoting sex and then doesn't even report him to
the cops) libertine who's a photographer of nude models who doubles in investigative
journalism. She wiles her way into a crime boss's zodiac-based harem (irony
of ironies, she's a Virgo) to secretly photograph illegal activities... and
to have sex with anything that moves. After finishing this assignment, there's
an interminable period of time where she goes to high-society parties (and
has sex with anything that moves) and then discovers a conspiracy involving
snuff films. A really infamous movie that doesn't quite live up to the hype
despite the fact that it does include the rumored footage of a woman masturbating
a horse, a few hardcore segments (which don't involve Gemser), and some very
realistic nastiness in the faked snuff films (breasts cut off and cheeks torn
back via chains in the mouth and other such sickness). It's not as disturbing
as it could have been, though, given the playful approach that Gemser brings
to it all, and the usual tedium that pervades all softcore. Still, for sleaze
fans and Joe D'Amato freaks, it's an event. -zwolf
The Entity (C, 1981)
Lovely Barbara Hershey is a single mom of three who finds herself assaulted
in her own home within the first ten minutes of this scary movie supposedly
based on actual events. In actuality, the novel & screenplay are by Frank
DeFelitta. Carla (Hershey) is repeatedly attacked & raped in her home
by... someone or something she can't see. She's not even safe in her car,
where this invisible thing shows her what a crappy driver he is. Her shrink,
Ron Silver, thinks that it's all in her head... even the physical evidence
can be 'splained away as self-induced or psychosomatic, like stigmata. Will
she go crazy? Will her kids & her boyfriend believe her? Can she convince
anyone to help her before it's too late? Hey, it's Hollywood! So, of course,
she's able to enlist the aid of some (extremely well-funded) parapsychologists
(eventually to be known as Ghostbusters), who attempt to help her against
this entity. Director Sidney J. Furie crafts a strong, suspenseful film, augmented
immeasurably by the Charles Bernstein score. Special effects are kinda silly
looking now, but not terrible, & at the time, invisible hands kneading
Barbara Hershey's breasts was an innovative new trick. -igor
Equals Against
Devils (C, 1970's?)
The opening theme music for this Hong Kong film was so good they stole it
for the movie Rocky! Or possibly the other way 'round. This is kind
of like The Hustler but without Paul Newman and fist fights breaking
out now and then. A pool shark plays against a fat gangster who's backed up
by a gang of bumbling cross-eyed guys in sleeveless Levi jackets. Lots of
gum get thrown around and their pool hall is plastered with vintage movie
posters from spaghetti Westerns, Blaxploitation flicks, and The Black Hole.
The bad guys wear bad guy hats and the good guys wear goofy visors. A pro
called Black Sinner trains our hero, Alan, to become an ultimate pool shark,
because his nemesis, White Cloud, chopped off one of his hands. Once Alan's
training is complete, he's the best pool player in Hong Kong and his friends
all think they'll be rich (it sounds like the girl was planning to buy a "mink
house"!) but Alan has to go away to play a match with White Cloud... but White
Cloud doesn't want to play him ("Our boss will never play someone who's an
idiot!"), but they put up enough money, so there's a tournament, which is
full of bikini'ed girls in bunny ears, and it's broadcast on the radio! Pool
on the radio, how exciting. Alan wins, but White Cloud's a poor loser so he
hires a cockeyed hit man named Chicken to kill him ("Have a kiss before you
go to Hell!") Amazingly, Alan survives two shots to the chest like it's nothing.
Then he gets beaten in a match by a girl in a bikini... even though she holds
her cue backward half the time... but that's okay because he retires to the
bathroom and takes "the world's record in shitting." Black Sinner gets a bionic
hand, and then they engage in a weird contest where they do stupid human tricks
with billiards. There's a gunfight (with a bullet-through-the-peephole scene
that predates Argento's Opera) and an exploding car and a party getting
shot up before the outlandish ending. Pretty funny dialogue and it has Chen
Sing in it... but he never gets to fight. Marketed as a kung fu movie but
it's really a crime drama, but whatever it is, it's definitely worth watching
just for the craziness. "You are scum!" -zwolf
Equinox (C-1967-71) AKA The
Beast
A student film that was good enough to get a theatrical release once some
new scenes were added. Since it was made over a span of years, you can see
the actors age from scene to scene. It was made for $8,000 and the special
effects are impressive despite the budgetary limitations. It starts off in
the middle of things - a guy sees his girlfriend killed by something in the
woods, then he runs out and gets hit by a driverless car. A year later he's
catatonic in an asylum, constantly staring at a cross he has on a necklace.
A reporter (who looks like Al Bundy) tries to uncover what happened. The film
goes into a flashback from the year before, when the guy who ended up in the
asylum goes out with three other friends to look for their missing geology
professor up in the mountains. They find a cave with some weird laughter coming
from it and strange tracks leading in. They light torches and enter the cave
to find an extremely creepy, crazy old man who gives them an ancient book
full of demonic sigils. Their professor, now gone mad, jumps out of the woods
and runs away with the book, then falls down and dies... and soon disappears.
A weird park ranger named Asmodeus tries to rape one of the girls until her
cross necklace sends him running. The students find some notes the professor
wrote, explaining that he experimented with some spells from the book and
raised some demons, which are apparently still on the loose. They find a zone
where things disappear, and then a stop-motion monster that looks kind of
like Mighty Joe Young after the orphanage fire. Then one of the girls gets
possessed, and Asmodeus tries to tempt on e of the guys. Then, in a truly
astounding special effect, a giant that looks like a zombie Fred Flintstone
shows up. Other creatures include an octopus-like thing that destroys a house
and a winged demon. The acting is awful, but as far as the rest goes I don't
think anyone could have done a better job with the money involved. In a lot
of ways this plays like an early incarnation of The Evil Dead. Some
of it is actually pretty creepy, and it's all definitely weird. They don't
make 'em like this anymore.... -zwolf
Escape from
Death Row (C, 1973) AKA Mean Frank and Crazy Tony, Homme
aux nerfs d'acier,, Interpol in allarme, Suo nome faceva tremare,Dio, sei
proprio un padreterno!
Lee Van Cleef is a hard-ass mobster named Frank who gets himself thrown in
jail as the ultimate alibi for when one of his enemies is bumped off. But
jail cramps his style, especially when someone on the outside kills his brother
and he wants revenge. So, with the help of a knockaround goofball from New
Jersey named Tony, he starts working on an escape plan. Once he breaks out,
Tony starts helping him with his vengeance plotting. Because they keep stealing
and destroying cars and a gasoline transport truck, the path of vengeance
involves a whole lot of destruction (much of it cartoonish and comic, such
as sidecars detaching from motorcycles and cops driving a car that's been
split in half). Some nice directorial touches and engaging characters (and
a memorable but overused music score) make this fast-moving Italian crime
drama stand out. Available dirt-cheap on the "Crime Wave" 10-movie DVD set,
in a sharp transfer of a print that looks like it was dragged behind the truck
in the big chase scene (the scratches only add to the sleazy atmosphere).
Worth seeking out if you're into Italian crime flicks. -zwolf
Evil Brain
From Outer Space (B&W, 1964) AKA Super Giant 7, 8, & 9
An evil brain is sent to Earth to start a nuclear war that could poison the
whole galaxy, so the Emerald Planet (populated by weird beings who move their
arms up and down a lot) dispatch Starman, the blandest and most awkward hero
ever, to stop it. The brain lives in a suitcase which gets lost in a stream.
Masked agents under the brain's control try to kill all who interfere with
its plans, but Starman battles them with his fighting skill... which mainly
involves pushing or touching people who obligingly fall over as if clobbered.
Soon the brain summons monsters and all kinds of disasters are happening.
A model train falls off its track, for instance. The brain's invasion force
(who have pictures of bats on their chests so you'll know they're EVIL!) are
ready to attack, and a lizard thing with an eye in its belly is also sent
in, for backup. Starman and it gently battle each other. Then alien agents
throw toothpicks at Starman, but even that doesn't thwart our hero. There's
also a white-haired chicken-nosed witch who appears out of nowhere and smirks
at everybody and gives them the creeps. There's also an evil germ... or possibly
an evil Jello swirl dessert. Can Starman save Earth? And... should he? Crazy
Japanese sci-fi superhero goofiness. -zwolf
Evil Dead Trap (C, 1988)
AKA Evil Dead's Trap, Shiryo no wana
Japanese horror that tries to imitate Dario Argento's style (and music - a
lot of it sounds almost exactly like Suspiria's theme) even to
the point of having maggots fall into a girl's hair, plus there are breaks
that look like Sam Raimi's crazier camerawork. And the gore is Fulci-like.
So it all looks pretty impressive. Too bad the story's an uninvolving mess
that put me to sleep in the first half hour the first dozen times I tried
to watch it. A late show hostess gets a snuff film in the mail, and she and
her reporter crew go to an abandoned military base where it was apparently
filmed to try to determine if it was real or not. There they become stalked
by a killer in a raincoat, and weird, nonsensical stuff happens, bringing
about a cumulative effect of irritation. It has some good points, but overall
it's style over substance... and even the style starts to seem rinky-dink
and unmotivated after a while. The director commentary on the DVD (which is
limited to a few scattered comments) confirmed my suspicions that the guy
didn't really know what he was doing with a lot of this. For instance, at
one point silver stuff starts falling all around, even though there's no explanation
for it - the director just thought it "looked pretty." Looking pretty is fine,
but have a reason. Pretty great gore effects, though. -zwolf
Executive Decision (C, 1996) AKA Critical Decision
I hate titles like that - "Executive Decision." "Just Cause." "In
The Line of Fire." They sound so "Tom Clancy" in their stodginess and uncreative
lack of imagination, and you'd expect them to appeal to the unimaginative
and easily-excited. Yet, boring titles (like the ones I mentioned) often conceal
good movies, and this qualifies. Some pre-9-11 terrorists hijack a plane,
demanding the release of a terrorist leader. But they have no intentions of
letting the hostages go; the plane contains a huge nerve-gas bomb that they
want to detonate over Washington. It's big enough to take out half the eastern
seaboard. So, a commando team including Kurt Russell and Stephen Seagal (don't
worry, he gets killed before he can even do anything - you have to cherish
this movie for that if nothing else!) secretly board the plane and have to
defuse the bomb and kill the terrorists, but - as in most A-list-formula action
flicks - everything that can go wrong does, and they have to solve every stumbling
block with just seconds to spare. This gets ridiculous and it's a familiar
pattern to these flicks, but it's still handled well (especially by a first-time
director in Stuart Baird) and is entertaining, with an emphasis on tech-stuff
and planning instead of violence. -zwolf
Exorcist III: Legion (C, 1990)
William Peter Blatty got to direct his own sequel to The Exorcist,
based on his book, Legion, and he does a good job, but the film didn't
do very well at the box office, probably because it's not what people were
expecting. This time a demon-infested serial killer - The Gemini Killer (based
on the Zodiac) - is given a new lease on life by demons, who house him in
the body of Damien Karras (the guy who went out the window and down the steps
in the original). George C. Scott is a Jewish detective who thinks God is
cruel... and finds plenty of evidence of that as the bizarre killings mount,
culminating in a tacked-on exorcism scene. A very cerebral script confused
some people, and add-on exorcism scenes for box-office appeal didn't help,
but it's a clever film that gets better with multiple viewings. It helps if
you go into it expecting more of a Silence Of The Lambs type of film
instead of an Exorcist thing. Some pretty intense bits, and this was
a favorite film of Jeffrey Dahmer's - he was watching this with his last victim
right before the guy escaped. Intelligent script makes some good soundbite
material if you've got a band or something. -zwolf
Eyeball (C, 1978) AKA The Eye,
The Secret Killer, The Devil's Eye, Wide-eyed in the Dark,
Gatto Rossi in un Labirinto do Vetro
The opening credits of this Umberto (Make Them Die Slowly) Lenzi giallo
film are impressively spookshow-like. Unfortunately, it's downhill from there...
A girl is stabbed to death by someone wearing red gloves, who cuts out one
of her eyes. Soon afterward a tourist girl is stabbed and loses an eye in
a funhouse. Another is killed and left to be eaten by pigs. The people on
a tour bus become both suspects and victims. One guy thinks his wife is doing
the killings - it seems likely, since she's in town and since he found her
after the first killing with a knife in one hand and an eye in the other.
Meanwhile, the killing continues - someone in a red raincoat kills another
tourist. A witness said the killer looked like a red cat. He (or she) tries
to kill another girl, but the attack is so awkward that she gets away by falling
in a swimming pool. Meanwhile, the suspicions are running rampant. Not too
scary, but the red-raincoated killer is pretty freaky looking, and the motive
behind the mutilations is pretty twisted. It's not bad in the last five minutes
or so, but the rest is kind of tedious, and the gore is really pretty weak
- the missing eyes are, basically, black eyeshadow on an eyelid. Not the fountains
of splatter you'd expect from a sicko like Lenzi. -zwolf
