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

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