The Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)

August 25th, 2008

[DAVID] Look what I’ve got.

(NICK) Another Mill Creek Entertainment 20 movie pack, eh? “Beyond the Grave.” Why? Why do you keep buying these things?

[DAVID] Why? Why not, my friend? Twenty movies for seven bucks on sale at Shopko—think of all the monsters and murders and manliness for a measly 35 cents a movie!

(NICK) Or, looked at from a slightly different angle, you paid seven dollars to squander away approximately thirty hours of your life.

[DAVID] Not alone.

(NICK) No! You don’t expect me to sit through those crappy movies, do you?

[DAVID] What do you think I’m paying you for?

(NICK) You don’t pay me anything.

[DAVID] How much of my beer and whisky do you drink?

(NICK) I have to tranquilize myself for these cinematic torture sessions.

[DAVID] Whatever it takes. You bring some respectable scholarly credentials to the proceedings.

(NICK) Nothing could bring respectability to this detritus from the bottom dregs of pop culture.

[DAVID] See—that was good! Bloody poetic! Now, grab yourself a beer, kick back, and prepare for immersion into the first film in this collection, THE BEAST OF THE YELLOW NIGHT.

(NICK) You’ll have to turn it up. The sound transfer on these cheap-o compilations  is usually hellacious.

[DAVID]“Hellacious”—is that good or bad?

87 MINUTES LATER…

[DAVID] Written and directed by Eddie Romero. Any relation to George Romero, you suppose?

(NICK) One makes movies about zombies, the other makes movies that turn the audience into zombies.

[DAVID] Ha!

(NICK) God-awful film transfer, as to be expected. Every five minutes, the Mill Creek logo pops up in the lower-right corner. Which makes you wonder: why would anyone want to take credit for this? They’re actually worried I’ll make a pirated one-off from their shoddy one-off?

[DAVID] The “yellow night” of the title is, I guess, because the whole film takes place in “a small town in southeast Asia.” I didn’t see any nights in the film that were any color other than the usual color of night, which is, uh, the color “dark.”

(NICK) Which also makes the title of the film racist, but we weren’t on as good of terms with southeast Asia in 1971.

[DAVID] John Ashley is Philip Rogers. His lovely blonde wife Julia, played by Mary Wilcox, has no idea that he was once Joseph Langdon, a WWII soldier who went AWOL in the Filipino jungles. 

(NICK) Though he’s a tall, dark, and handsome young stud he’s actually old enough to be her grandfather. And he has a tendency to change into a demon and go on killing sprees.

[DAVID] Hey, this plot has a lot of similarities to this summer’s THE INCREDIBLE HULK.

(NICK) Yeah, it…Huh?

[DAVID] Sure, Rogers/Langdon just wants to live a normal life with his lady love, but he has this curse that periodically changes him into a rampaging beast. He takes on a new identity, but his cover is blown because he can’t control the Beast’s outbursts.

(NICK) sure, any werewolf story—

[DAVID] Aaand his transformations are triggered by anger. And check this out—in one scene  he transforms  because he’s about to get it on with his wife. The sexual arousal triggers it—just like the scene with Ed Norton and Liv Tyler!

(NICK) I interpreted it as being triggered by his wife wanting him to say he loves her. The demon in him won’t let him acknowledge love.

[DAVID] Oh. I suppose that makes sense too.

Figure 1“You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…”

(NICK) Anyway,  in this case, it’s not gamma radiation that brought on the curse, but a deal with the Devil made back in 1946 when he was starving in the jungle.

[DAVID] Isn’t it odd that Satan in this movie  looks like Buddha?

 (NICK) What can I say nice about this film? A lot, surprisingly, considering it’s a film I never wish to sit through again.

[DAVID] Okay, let’s hear it.

(NICK) The acting isn’t half bad. Ashley brings a Bill Bixby/Bruce Banner gravitas to his curse. Wilcox is believably traumatized to discover her husband has a tendency to transform into a demon—hmm, that makes for some interesting Freudian subtext. And, most impressively, the detective and police inspector are intuitive, serious, and pretty damn good at their job—which is quite shocking for this genre, where the authorities usually come across as hapless, clueless, dopes.

[DAVID] Decent acting, check. Anything else, Mr. Critic?

(NICK) Believable dialogue, especially among the law officers, considering they’re discussing the possibility of a man who may be seventy years old though he doesn’t look a day over 35 because he is inhabited by an immortal demon. For a cheapie-flick writer/director, Romero is not a bad writer.

[DAVID] And the mean things you have to say? C’mon, I know you’re just bursting to unload.

(NICK) The whole movie is slow and plodding in that ‘70s “the audience is doped up or fondling each other and not really paying attention anyway” sort of way. The camerawork is terrible, and terribly lit. in many of the night scenes it’s almost impossible to tell exactly what’s going on—which has the one benefit of masking the nearly non-existent special effects. The washed-out, grainy film transfer makes it worse. Did they find the film can moldering in someone’s basement?

[DAVID] They probably did, and thank the film gods that they saved this genre classic from rotting out of existence.

(NICK) And, look, there is only one monster in this pic, the “Beast” of the  title. You’d think with just the one monster, they could do better than slap some putty on the guy’s face, spray him green, and put him in a fright wig. I could outdo  this with a Halloween make-up kit from Spencer’s. But, David, it had boobies and it had a monster, so you’ll probably give it…

[DAVID] Five chopsticks.

(NICK) I’ll give it two.

MANNING’S STUDLY STATS:

MONSTER MENAGERIE: 1

LOVELY LADY LUMPS: 2

 

Posted in Bimbos and Beasts | No Comments »

The Funhouse (1981)

August 5th, 2008

[DAVID] Welcome to THE FUNHOUSE, kiddies. “You will scream with terror. You will beg for release, but there will be no escape. For there is no release from the funhouse.”

 

{NICK} Okay, this film is definitely not for the kiddies. Let me just interject that.

 

[DAVID] Interject away. Yes, this classic Tobe Hooper film is squarely in the early-80s slasher camp, back before “horror” films were rated PG-13 and marketed to junior-high-school girls. Though it saw the light of a darkened movie theater soon after HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, it is a cut above most films in this genre.

 

{NICK} Well, okay, yeah—though that’s not saying much. Given that it came just a few years after Hooper’s seminal THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, it can also be seen as a big letdown. Hooper never again caught the naturalistic, shocking horror of that film, but here he’s not really trying.

 

[DAVID] He’s just trying to make a good teen slasher flick, hitting all the expected bases but doing it with panache.

 

{NICK} Yeah, I’ll go with that.

 

[DAVID] Wait, what? You’re not going to be contrary throughout this review?

 

{NICK} Maybe because I didn’t have very many expectations here, I was easily impressed.

 

[DAVID] Okay then. Would you agree with me then that this movie has everything: real-life freaks of nature, a horribly deformed monster, creepy animatronics in a spooky funhouse, and even a shower scene.

 

{NICK} Yes, it does have all those things, though I wouldn’t say that constitutes “everything.”

 

[DAVID] Well I, for one, can’t think of anything else I wish this movie had. Except for maybe another shower scene.

 

{NICK} Of course. So, let’s get to the plot. Just the bare-bones summary, please. This is an ‘80s slasher flick: give our readers the basic premise, and they could write the entire script themselves. My wife fell asleep about twenty minutes in, and the next morning she was able to tell me who lived and who died.

 

[DAVID] There is something to be said for the comfort of the familiar.

 

{NICK} There is something to be said for the laziness of generic formula.

 

[DAVID] Touché, my friend, touché. Yes, it’s formula, but it’s well-executed.

 

{NICK} Again, no arguments (well, a few arguments) here.

 

[DAVID] So, two horny teenage couples decide it would be a swell idea to spend the night in the funhouse of the visiting carnival. They get on the ride near closing time, hop off the cars inside and hunker down for a night of carnality in an exotic environment.

 

{NICK} The virgin survives, of course: though she’s not chaste through a lack of trying. It’s just that the couples are interrupted by a commotion when she’s only gotten as far as unhooking her bra for Buzz, the “hunk” mechanic who is her first date. Jeez, come to think of it, the fact that she’s eager to lose her virginity to a first-time blind date suggests that, at heart, she is the sluttiest of all.

 

[DAVID] There you go. Maybe they did defy a few conventions.

 

{NICK} Nope. I don’t grant that. She is still a virgin when she must confront the killer alone, and she refused to do drugs when the other kids were passing around a doobie in the car. She’s technically “the good girl” here. Even though she lied to her parents, saying she was staying over at a friend’s, and she defied their instructions not to go to the carnival, just so she could spread her legs on the floor of a carnival ride.

 

[DAVID] Yeah, this carnival has earned something of a seedy reputation after some girls were found mutilated near the carnival grounds a year earlier.

 

{NICK} Kind of a hick version of SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, without the magic or the full set of teeth.

 

[DAVID] Thus her father’s injunction not to go to the carnival.

 

{NICK} Another character inconsistency. Her mother is so detached she seems to be on Valium, and though the father does show some concern about where they’re going, he also lets her go out after nine pm on a first date with a guy named Buzz who doesn’t even come in the house when he picks her up. Not going to happen in my house, let me tell you. She should be back by this time, not just going out—and Buzz is going to come in and introduce himself to the father. Father is then going to lay out certain expectations that go with the dating of his daughter, preferably with an ominous-looking gun posed suggestively nearby.

 

[DAVID] Come on, professor—cut your hypothetical daughter some slack. If you’ve raised her right, she’ll be smart enough to look out for herself.

 

{NICK} Were you smart enough to look out for yourself at that age?

 

[DAVID] (grins) When I was that age, I was Buzz.

 

{NICK} That’s right. I’m just trying to protect my hypothetical daughter from the likes of you.

 

[DAVID] Let’s mention one other character we meet: the good girl Amy’s younger brother. The kid’s maybe twelve, and he’s right after my own heart. His room is filled with horror movie memorabilia, a big poster of Frankenstein above his bedpost—

 

{NICK} Frankenstein’s Monster.

 

[DAVID] I stand corrected, Mr. Technicality. Boris Karloff in his iconic Frankenstein’s Monster make-up. There are weird masks and torture implements on the walls, and one of those creepy ventriloquist’s dummy’s heads, mounted on the wall with its controls still jutting from its neck, so that little brother can make it wink back at him just before he pulls a doozy of a practical joke on his sister.

 

{NICK} All warning signs to any child psychologist.

 

[DAVID] The practical joke is the aforementioned shower scene, a sort of homage to every shower scene since PSYCHO. Sis disrobes and gets in the shower while someone stalks toward the bathroom. We get a POV from the “killer” through two eye-slits as he slinks toward the shower curtain. Cut to Amy all lathering up…

 

{NICK} David, you’re drooling in your brandy.

 

[DAVID] Cheap brandy does that to me. Anyway, the curtains are yanked back and a knife plunges toward her smooth, wet belly.

 

{NICK} What would Freud make of you?

 

[DAVID] Only, the knife bends. It’s plastic—the killer is little brother, of course, and sister is royally pissed. She throws on her robe and chases him, cornering him in his bedroom closet and delivering a dire warning: she will get back at him, at a place and time where he least expects it.

 

{NICK} Now the fact that this kid is a huge horror buff, and later slips out of his window, goes to the carnival and tries to find his sister and her friends–all this suggests he will play some major role in the resolution of the plot. But the intervals of seeing him sneaking around the carnival grounds provide a few more jump-scares until he passes out from fright, a creepy carnival worker calls his parents, and he is taken home. That subplot really contributes nothing more to the movie.

 

[DAVID] Except when his parents are trying to get him to say something before driving him home, he is mum about the fact that Amy and her friends never came out of the carnival ride. We hear in voice-over his memory of Sis’s threat. So…because she threatened him, he chooses to remain silent about their whereabouts?

 

{NICK} Or he thought the monster that tried to grab him and drag him into the funhouse was part of his sister’s revenge, so he remained silent out of a sense of fair-play, or newfound fear and respect for his sister?

 

[DAVID] There, the movie did give you something to think about.

 

{NICK} Only by accident.

 

[DAVID] The first part of the movie is a slow build as the couples explore the wonders of the carnival. And this is the sort of carnival I want to go to—carnivals like this probably were pretty much a thing of the past even when this movie came out. There is the tent that features “Beautiful Girls.” Then a visit to the fortune teller—

 

{NICK} I must say I cared for the protagonists even less after their rude treatment of Madame Zena.

 

[DAVID] And a magician’s stage act that delivers a nice surprise.

 

{NICK} This was well done. It looks like the trick went wrong and the volunteer was staked through the heart, but it all turns out to be part of the act.

 

[DAVID] Actor Kevin Conway portrays all the barkers, as well as the father of the funhouse killer.

 

{NICK} Conway does do some fine acting throughout the movie, actually.

 

[DAVID] They go into a freaks-of-nature tent featuring real live animals, including a two-headed cow and the main attraction: a two-headed baby in a jar.

 

{NICK} That last one being neither alive nor real, but a fine Rick Baker creation.

 

[DAVID] That baby turns out to be significant, in the sense that it has a brother who survived, and is now all grown up…

 

{NICK} And sexually frustrated.

 

[DAVID] And homicidal. In fact, it is the son of the funhouse barker. It works on the ride dressed as Frankenstein…’s Monster.

 

{NICK} Later, when it rips off its mask, a more hideous visage is revealed beneath. An albino thing with a split face, similar to that two-headed cow seen earlier, like two faces were developing on a single cranium.

 

[DAVID] The poor mutant is just misunderstood. His alcoholic father has kept him in seclusion, not wanting his son to be made into a freak show. But while daddy’s away, the boy tends to get into trouble. Like when Madame Zena, the fortune teller, comes over to the trailer to give him a little woman’s love for a hundred-spot. Only, junior doesn’t really get his money’s worth, as he’s all done before he even gets his pants off—and thank goodness we’re spared that sight, do you think any other parts of his anatomy are split? The Madame refuses to give him his money back, and he gets a bit overly-rough with her in a fit of rage.

 

{NICK} Daddy gets back and keeps a pretty level head about it all, considering there is a corpse on his son’s mattress. He begins plotting how they’re going to cover this up, when our teen protagonists—who have witnessed the murder through a grate in the ceiling—accidentally make some noise. Not only that, but one of the boys took an opportunity while both father and mutant son were out of the room to sneak down and steal the money out of the barker’s cash box. So, Daddy realizes they have a problem on their hands—trespassing thieves who may have also witnessed his son commit murder.

 

[DAVID] And then the funhouse proper begins, with the monster hunting them down one-by-one through the mazes of the funhouse.

 

{NICK} And it is a maze. I’ve never seen a haunted house at any fair that was half this size. Turns out, this was filmed on location at a famous permanent funhouse from the ‘50s that was soon going to be demolished. It’s a great setting, but it does strain credulity as a stand-in for a traveling ride. This thing would take weeks to tear down and reassemble.

 

[DAVID] Unless you had the crew of EXTREME MAKEOVER (HOME EDITION).

 

{NICK} I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed the ride itself. It’s full of well-done, super-creepy animatronics. I’d love to go on this ride (sans serial killer). The tracks run beside all kinds of weird scenes, and the effects are several notches above a papier-mâché ghoulie popping up from a box. There is, for example, a tire-sized eyeball that opens up in the wall right next to the cars and follows as you ride past it. The scenes in the funhouse offer up some good scares. The lighting, sound, and camera work all add to the atmosphere. And we’re reminded of what Hooper and his crew accomplished with a dilapidated house in CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

 

[DAVID] A classic of cinema.

 

{NICK} I won’t argue with you there. One cannot underestimate the effectiveness of the set in that film. Think of when they go into that living room, its floor covered with chicken feathers, and draped everywhere are those nets of bones and twine. A full-scale diorama made of animal and human bones—it looks like it took the entire set crew a month to rig that all together. The effect, almost a subconscious one, is the realization that whoever lives here is obsessive-compulsive, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, and completely psychotic.

 

[DAVID] Shithouse crazy.

 

{NICK} Indeed. Back to the funhouse. It’s a great set, but one can’t really believe any of it. Too many genre conventions at work.

 

[DAVID] Elisabeth Berridge as Amy expresses terror pretty believably.

 

{NICK} She doesn’t go the typical scream-queen route of screaming her lungs out constantly. But her whimpering scream gets rather annoying, like she has a scream impediment.

 

[DAVID] That’s pretty good. She’s a scream stutterer. Kind of “Aa-a-aaa-a-a-a-a.”

 

{NICK} Well, what else can we say about this mostly-forgotten entry in Tobe Hooper’s career, one of the lost films that came between TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and POLTERGEIST?

 

[DAVID] You’ve already waxed eloquent about the funhouse itself. The killer is a horrifying monster, but also somewhat sympathetic—kind of like the Frankenstein’s Monster mask he wears. I loved it. 5 cotton candies from me.

 

{NICK} Okay, I’ll say two-and-a-half cotton candies.

 

MANNING’S STUDLY STATS

 

MONSTERS: 1 (horribly deformed mutant)

 

LOVELY LADY LUMPS: 8 (six of which have partial cover from pasties)

 

Posted in Hormones & Hatchets | No Comments »

THE SCREAMING SKULL (1958)

January 26th, 2008

[DAVID]  This is a Manning’s Manly Movies review that reaches its climax in shocking horror. Its impact is so terrifying that it may have an unforeseen effect. It may KILL you! Therefore the reviewers feel it necessary to provide free flowers to anyone who dies of fright, while reading THIS REVIEW!

 

{NICK}  What are you doing?

 

[DAVID]  A-ha! About time you pulled your head up out of your books long enough to review another movie with me, professor!

 

{NICK}  What were you doing?

 

[DAVID] I’m borrowing an idea from the producers of this week’s movie. When THE SCREAMING SKULL was screened in theaters back in the fifties, the movie opened with a voice-over narrator as a casket lid slowly opened, revealing a burial contract inside… 

 

NARRATOR:  “THE SCREAMING SKULL is a motion picture that reaches its climax in shocking horror. Its impact is so terrifying that it may have an unforeseen effect. It may kill you! Therefore the producers feel it necessary to provide free burial services to anyone who dies of fright, while seeing THE SCREAMING SKULL!”

 

[DAVID]  On our salaries, we couldn’t afford to pay for even one burial service, so I thought free flowers would be safer.

 

{NICK} Aaah, the good old days of B-movie gimmicks. It’s right out of the William Castle playbook: Castle was a producer that did stunts like installing a shocker into select seats of the movie theater, and having a “nurse” on hand in case an audience member fainted of fright.

[DAVID]  I can imagine a poor but savvy family with an ailing relative hearing about this film’s guarantee: “Grandma’s only got a few hours to live? Quick, load her in the car and get her to the theater! We won’t have to pay for her funeral!”

 

{NICK}  Does the offer still apply if you die while watching it on DVD?

 

[DAVID]  I’m sure the offer’s long since…expired.

 

{NICK}  Okay, let’s get to the movie, so I can get back to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST.

 

[DAVID]  That was a pretty good flick.

 

{NICK}  I’m reading the book.

 

[DAVID]  They made it into a book?

 

{NICK}  (Wearily shakes his head)

 

[DAVID]  Hey, I’m just joshin’ you. Ken Kesey, right? See, I’m with it, Mr. Literature. So, THE SCREAMING SKULL… YeeeeaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

 

{NICK}  Ouch.  …Why?

 

[DAVID]  That was the screaming skull. Hey, we should put a sound file in here, record that for people who open this webpage.

 

{NICK}  No no no no no. They’ve shown enough patience with us by reading this far. Let’s not torture their eyes AND ears.

 

[DAVID]  Okay, so, in THE SCREAMING SKULL we meet a couple of newlyweds, Eric and Jenni Whitlock, moving into their super creepy manor house. No furniture, no electricity, welcome to your dream home, you poor duped woman!

 

{NICK} Upping the creep factor from the outset is, this is the house of Eric’s former wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. John Hudson as Mr. Whitlock is pretty good—for this kind of film—though when I watched this with my wife, she thought he was giving off a suspicious vibe from the outset.

 

[DAVID]  You got your wife to watch this with you?

 

{NICK}  My wife endures a lot of these films with me. Oh, she loves you.

 

[DAVID]  Really? I’m flattered.

 

{NICK}  I was being sarcastic, my friend. Actually, this one wasn’t too bad. Or, as she said, “We’ve seen a lot worse.”

 

[DAVID]  It’s a cast of five, and we’re soon introduced to Eric Whitlock’s friends the Reverend and Mrs. Snow, who drop in and offer to cook dinner. Hey, on my first night home with a new bride, I don’t want the reverend and his wife crashing the party! But they’re nice folk, and I like ‘em. We also meet the estate’s gardener Mickey, a stunted, shambling man with the mind of a child—

 

{NICK}  —Played by Alex Nicol, who also directs the film, so they only had to pay four actors.

 

[DAVID]  They were obviously saving up the budget for the FX in the climactic sequence.

 

{NICK}  Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.

 

[DAVID]  Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaascreamingskull!

 

{NICK} …Do you have that out of your system?

 

[DAVID]  Almost immediately, the new Mrs. Whitlock begins experiencing strange ghostly phenomena in the house while her husband is away.

 

{NICK}  Eerie creaks and bangs, a suspiciously lurking Mickey, a disturbingly amateur self-portrait painted by the former Mrs. Whitlock—the usual haunted-house trappings, sometimes pulled off almost well enough to raise a hair or two. If I’d seen this as a kid, I probably would have been scared witless.

 

[DAVID]  Then things get really intense. Jenni wanders about the mansion to investigate bangings in the middle of the night, dressed in nothing but her nightie. Alas, this being 1958, her nightie is a full-length gown.

 

{NICK}  While you were taking note of her undergarments, I noted that Jenni is a literate woman—she’s reading “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James, giving us (could the writer possibly have intended this?) a reminder of that author’s other work, THE TURN OF THE SCREW. And the story is also an interesting choice because of its themes of loneliness and lost love.

 

[DAVID]  Okay, we’re reviewing a B-movie called THE SCREAMING SKULL for God’s sake. Don’t turn it into a book lecture. Yeeeaaa—

 

{NICK}  DON’T do it.

 

[DAVID]  Sorry. I was almost possessed by the screaming skull. She enters the room where the former wife’s portrait sits, and the doors of a wardrobe fly open to reveal: A SKULL!

 

{NICK}  She flees in terror, but shows great fortitude by returning to the room, grabbing the skull from the shelf, and tossing it out the window! You go, girl!

 

[DAVID]  The next day, Eric and the Snows search all over, but cannot find the skull. They wonder if Jenni is playing with a full deck, or if possibly Mickey is trying to scare the new Mrs. Whitlock away. Gradually, through conversations between various pairings of the four characters, many secrets are revealed.

 

{NICK}  A quick technical quibble: this was a very poor film transfer. The sound quality is atrocious—half the time when Jenni is speaking, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Where did you dig up this DVD?

 

[DAVID]  I don’t know. I found it in some bargain bin. Anyway, let’s get back to this review—American Gladiators comes on in a few minutes.

 

{NICK}  You’ve got to be kidding me.

 

[DAVID]  What can I say? I’m a Hulkamaniac.

 

{NICK}  I’m not staying to watch that.

 

[DAVID]  So, secrets are revealed, like: when she was a girl, Jenni saw both her parents drown. She’d been hospitalized for suicidal depression and hearing voices and stuff, and she was still in therapy when Eric met her, so everyone—including herself—suspects she may be coming unhinged again.

 

{NICK}  When Reverend Snow suggests to Eric that maybe his bride needs to return to New York for more therapy, Eric assures him that all she needs is love.

 

[DAVID]  Do you think the Beatles may have seen a screening of this film in Liverpool?

 

{NICK}  We also learn that Mickey and the deceased Mrs. Whitlock grew up together and were always very close. One evening they were working in the greenhouse together when Mrs. Whitlock had to return to the house for something. As she was coming down the garden path, it started to rain. The conjecture afterwards was that she slipped and fell, smashing her skull against the stone wall of the lily pond. She expired under the water in the pond. And Mr. Whitlock inherited the estate. Suspicious…

 

[DAVID]  Especially when we also learn that the new Mrs. Whitlock is loaded. So, donning our Holmes hats, we can speculate that A) Mickey, resenting Eric and his new wife, wants to scare them off, or B) Eric arranged his first wife’s “accident” and now wants to be a filthy-rich, two-time widower (and finally get some furniture for the house), or 3) the dead Mrs. Whitlock’s restless skull really is seeking revenge!

 

{NICK}  A, B, 3? You—never mind.

 

[DAVID]  We see Eric’s shady hand revealed when he suggests to his wife that it is the dead Mrs. Whitlock’s portrait that is driving her schizoid, so burning it in the garden will have a cathartic effect.

 

{NICK}  Boy, I’m glad this guy didn’t go into psychiatry.

 

[DAVID]  In the ashes of the portrait, Jenni sees THE SKULL! Eric claims not to see it, but after his wife has run off to have a nervous fit, he picks it up and hides it in the lily pond.

 

{NICK}  Enter ever-lurking Mickey, who sneaks off with the skull. What is that man-boy up to?

 

[DAVID]  You ended that question with a preposition, Mister English.

 

{NICK}  To what is that man-boy up?

 

[DAVID]  That just sounds silly.

 

{NICK}  Then it will fit right in to this review.

 

[DAVID]  It has become apparent that Eric is planning to kill off his new bride and stage it to look like a suicide, but there is one problem: when he goes to fetch his bony prop, it is gone. He gets so freaked out he dives into the pond, still in his suit and tie, and thrashes about, then chases Mickey around for a while.

 

{NICK}  Mickey keeps his cool, and when the coast is clear he tucks the skull into a breadbasket and skips off to the Snows.

 

[DAVID]  The fateful night falls. Jenni is upstairs packing to fly back to New York, unaware that her husband is out in the garden plotting her immanent demise. Imminent? Eminent?

 

{NICK}  Imminent.

 

[DAVID]  Thank you. Eric goes into the greenhouse, still looking to give Mickey a good beating and get his bone back, but a ghost pops up at the other end of the shed!

 

{NICK}  He flees in terror down the garden path. Now, the apparition that follows him—his dead bride in her wedding dress and veil—is pretty good. It is transparent, and as it floats down the path behind him we have a pretty spooky scene.

 

[DAVID]  He runs and wails like a little girl that is, um, about to get supernatural vengeance wreaked on her by the wife she killed. I mangled that one, didn’t I?

 

{NICK}  He heads for the safety(?) of the family mansion of the woman he murdered.

 

[DAVID]  Maybe he’s hoping it’s strictly an outdoor ghost. The ghost proves something as prosaic as a solid door is no match for ectoplasm and follows him inside.

 

{NICK}  But when he throws a chair at it—now obviously a mannequin prop—the chair knocks it over and its arms fly off! Cheesy goodness.

 

[DAVID] He heads for the stairs, but the skull is sitting on a stair about midway up waiting for him, its empty sockets full of grim judgment!

 

{NICK}  The skull, obviously pushed over by a stick, comes bumping down the stairs, and he runs back outside like a little girl running from a skull.

 

[DAVID]  Out in the yard, the specter of a giant skull flies through the air screaming at him. Skull after skull appears, herding him to—you guessed it—the lily pond!

 

{NICK}  The skull chomps down on his neck, and he splashes into the pool. His “struggles” with the skull clamped to his neck is worthy of Ed Wood.

 

[DAVID]  He dies in the pond, his just desserts. The Snows arrive with Mickey in time to assure Jenni that she is not mad; she merely made the mistake of marrying a cold-blooded murderer who was haunted by the ghost of his dead wife. Duly comforted, she leaves the mansion arm-in-arm with the Reverend and his wife. I knew I liked ‘em.

 

{NICK}  Like my wife said, I’ve seen worse.

 

[DAVID]  Okay, Studly Stats.

 

MONSTER MENAGERIE: One. (A series of skulls and a full-bodied apparition, all incarnations of the ghost of the dead wife)

 

LOVELY LADY LUMPS: Zero. (Jenni’s diaphanous gown may have been risqué for 1958, but it doesn’t register on the Studly Radar)

 

[DAVID]  While it doesn’t really fit into our rating categories, I’ve got to give props to the roadster with gull-wing doors Eric Whitlock drives around in. That car must’ve cost more than the whole budget of this movie!

 

RATING:

 

{NICK}  Two skulls and a mandible. That’s two-and-a-half out of five.

 

[DAVID]  Five skulls and a scream. YeeeeeeeeeeaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!

 

Posted in Bones & Broads | 1 Comment »

One Million Years B.C. (1966)

September 4th, 2007

Summary: Raquel Welch’s Cleavage versus Prehistoric Monsters: Whichever way this bout goes, the viewer wins!

(David): Okay, so I know that it’s hokey science from the get-go to throw cavemen in with dinosaurs. Technically, our closest point-of-view ancestors at this stage would be small rodents—with no cleavage to speak of—who scurried into holes when the thunderous feet of the thunder lizards came thundering. Unless, that is, you’re one of those creationists who think the dinosaurs were wiped out in The Flood. Then, God help you, you shouldn’t be watching a movie with this much cleavage anyway. [Manning tangent alert] Of course, that theory raises some questions about Noah’s selectivity. Was it all the animals, or did he get to pick? Sure, I can understand space constraints posed by brontosauruses (brontasauri?); the elephants were already pushing it. But, hey, there were dinosaurs the size of chickens. Maybe they did get on, and food shortages after forty days on the high seas sealed their fate—they may have tasted like chicken, too.

(Nick): And, back to the movie…

(David): Whether you buy any of that or not, the whole kooky idea of man and dinosaur cohabitating is a great scenario for thrills! Look at all the scientific hoops Crichton and Spielberg jumped through so we could plausibly entertain the idea while enjoying what we really paid our money to see: lawyers getting bit in half by tyrannosauruses (tyrannosauri?). Make it genetic engineering, make it lost worlds (a la King Kong), make it cavemen inexplicably out-of-place by about four million years on the evolutionary timeline—just so’s we can see a guy get chewed up by Mr. Rex!

But that’s not the only thing going for this movie. It has two other things going for it. Those would be located front and center of Ms. Welch’s ribcage. I’m talking, of course, about Welch’s jelly jars.

(Nick): Couldn’t resist, could you?

(David): No, I couldn’t. And boy, can they act! They really chew up the scenery whenever they’re on-camera, playing a constant game of peek-a-boo with the attentive male audience. It demonstrates just how clever our cave-dwelling ancestors were that they could engineer a Wonder Bra out of giant-sloth hide. This mode of dress must have proven too confining, however, because later primitive cultures in such climes just dropped the upper-body wear altogether. Still, one wishes the makers of this movie had been more accurate on this one point—but then it wouldn’t have been a PG-rated movie. I want Paul Verhoeven (that stickler for documentary-like faithfulness to his subject matter) to do a remake starring Jessica Alba. But there are a lot of things I want that I’ll never get. Like Jessica Alba.

(Nick): While your eyes get that glazed-over look entertaining that fantasy, David, I’d like to note that the screenplay is credited to Michael Carreras from an original screenplay by Mickell Novak, George Baker, and Joseph Frickert. Since there’s not a single word of dialogue in this movie, I wonder how four screenwriters were possibly needed. Certainly none of them were scientific advisors, since there’s not a thought given to animal biology, or ecosystems, or geology, or geography, or anthropology. The thought process seems more like: it’d be cool to have a volcano here, so there can be a big eruption, and it’d be cool to have this giant sea turtle here, because Harryhausen has a model he can animate, and it’d be cool to have a giant spider here, because we have some good tarantula stock footage.

(David): I’m sorry, what were you saying about Jessica?

(Nick): So, the movie begins—

(David): Oh, yeah, the movie begins with a voice-over narrator explaining, “This is a story of long, long ago, when the world was just beginning.” Then we get some stock footage of swirling clouds and volcanoes erupting. And now that we know Raquel Welch was there at the beginning, we can understand why evolution was so fruitful and multiplied.

We meet a mean, hairy caveman named Akhoba, the leader of the Rock Tribe. He has two sons, Sutana and Tumak, and they chase a giant boar into a pit trap, but then the two sons get into a fight over who deserves the credit, and Akhoba sides with Sutana—my guess is because he sees Tumak as the bigger challenge to his authority—and runs Tumak off. Close attentiveness is required of the viewer here, because they only grunt and squeal at each other, and there are no subtitles.

(Nick): Actually, I was reading the latest issue of Weird Tales during this scene, and I still followed it.

(David): Nick, I’ll tell you later what I think about a critic reading while watching a movie he is reviewing.

(Nick): Okay, I wasn’t really reading it; I was just skimming the letters page to see if anyone mentioned my name.

(David): What would you normally say at this point?

(Nick): Right, right. And back to the movie…

(David): So our hero wanders across the desert without food or water, occasionally seeing passing fauna—a brontosaurus, a giant tarantula, a giant iguana…

(Nick): This movie was filmed in one of the most barren locations on Earth, which really makes you wonder how it could support giant herbivores—like that brontosaurus that walks by. Then there’s the dump-truck-sized tarantula eating a Buick-sized cricket—okay, so we know what the tarantula eats, but what about the cricket?

(David): You’re being Nick-picky again. Back to the plot.

(Nick): Such as it is…

(David): At one point he finds a promising cave, complete with running water. But, turns out it’s already occupied, and he’s run off by Hairy Ape-Man. Finally, stumbling beneath the pounding sun, he comes to the ocean. And there he sees: supermodels frolicking in the surf! They’re spear-fishing octopuses (octopi?). And this is obviously a more advanced race than the Rock People because they have wavy Farah Fawcett hairdos, waxed eyebrows, and they wear make-up—lipstick, blush, eye-shadow. And they have bikini waxes. They even shave their armpits, so these are not progenitors of the French.

(Nick): And they’re all blonde.

(David): Yeah, this is the blonde tribe, whereas the Rock Tribe is all dark and swarthy. Suddenly—Giant Sea Turtle! One babe blows on a conch shell to summon all the Aryan men. The girls start tossing rocks at it, probably thinking, “Man, this would make a lot of turtle soup.”

(Nick): Who knew the tribes at this stage of evolution were separated by hair color? I was surprised that there were even white folks around. Since we all come from African ancestors about fifty thousand years ago, this was almost as surprising as the presence of dinosaurs.

(David): The tribe runs off the sea turtle, and Raquel finds Tumak passed out on the beach. He revives just long enough to get a load of Raquel and immediately evolves to homo erectus. (Sorry, you know I couldn’t resist.)

(Nick): I’ll give you that one.

(David): So then we cut back to Rock Tribe hunting a goat. The other son—what was his name again, Ugbu or something?—gets a private moment with Dad and decides it’s the opportune time to off the old man. He pushes the hairy soon-to-be-ex-chieftain off a cliff, probably thinking, “Drop dead, Dad! Now I get the heavy fur Mantle of Leadership, even though it’s a hundred degrees out. And now I get to sleep with Mom and further inbreed our hairy-ass tribe.”

Meanwhile, Tumak awakens to see that instead of fighting over bones, the Shell Tribe engage in arts and crafts in their spare time: cave-wall-painting, sewing, basket-weaving, that sort of thing.

(Nick): Blondes had more fun a millions years ago, too, it seems!

(David): And Tumak’s thinking, “Prissy Europeans.” Meanwhile, over in Rock country, their bull dance is interrupted by the return of ex-Chief-Daddy, who is one bad-ass old coot, because after a fall from a cliff he still manages to drag his ass back, albeit blind in one eye and with bumps all over his face—he may have landed on a sand-wasps’ nest, I guess.

Back to Shell country, where the blondes are teaching Tumak the art of spear-making and spear-chucking. And agriculture. And language (still unintelligible to us). All the while Raquel has a glint in her eye, like she’s thinking of teaching him that there are other positions than doggy style. They go spear-fishing—their first date, I suppose—and she spears one for him, and he shows his lack of sophistication by asking if he can have chips with his fish. No, he doesn’t, but he does fall in the water when he tries to spear one, and for the first time he hears the derisive, soul-scarring sound of laughter. But this scene is getting overly sentimental, thinks the cruel god Harryhausen, who decides, “I’ll send a tyrannosaurus in here to eat somebody.” And the laughter turns to screams!

A girl is caught up an apple tree—Tumak to the rescue! Right about now he discovers, hey, having a sharp thing on the end of the stick is really handy when a tyrannosaurus wants to eat you. This scene features two high points of the film: Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects, and the fact that when Raquel runs, her loincloth flops up, really showing off her cheeks. If you don’t appreciate either of these things, my friend, you are not a male homo sapien, and you may as well just turn the movie off now, because it doesn’t get any better than this.

T-Rex munches another Norwegian caveman, but this gives Tumak his opening to make Rex-kabob—tastes like chicken, and good with fried apples!

(Nick): For Harryhausen fans, it is pretty impressive how seamless this scene is.

(David): Tumak wants to keep the spear he used to finish off T. Rex—sort of like the quarterback keeping a Superbowl football. But Raquel’s jealous boyfriend wants it back. Raquel convinces Tumak to give it up, and Tumak learns another lesson—you can’t take other people’s spears, even if you did save their life with it. The lesson doesn’t stick, though, because right after the burial of the fallen Swedes, Tumak rummages through the guy’s stuff to steal his spear. This results in a knockdown, drag-out fight, which gets Tumak banished—“We don’t want troublemakers of his kind moving into the neighborhood—it’ll bring down property values when the seaside resorts come in.” That’s how I interpreted their gibberish, anyway—which the filmmakers leave you leeway to do.

So, it’s back off trudging across the wasteland, but Raquel decides to follow him, in a gesture of love transcending races—uh, hair colors. Tumak heads for Rock country, trying to ignore the bikini-clad vixen tailing him.

They come back to the cave Tumak tried to rent at the beginning of the film, and immediately go looking for the realtor—who turns out, of course, to be Hairy Ape-Man—and there’s a whole tribe of them! Tumak and Raquel climb up a giant tree growing inside the cave—apparently the only trees in these parts grow indoors.

Night falls, and Raquel uses sign language to convey, “I want to teach you the Scandinavian art of lovemaking right here in this tree.” Tumak signs back, “That might wake the monkey-boys, and when we’re doing the beast with two backs, I don’t want to worry about a monkey on my back. So, no doing.”

(Nick): He signed Shakespeare?

(David): Huh? Anyway, morning comes, and they climb up out of a hole in the cave because it’s always better to travel by day in the desert, especially when you’re pale-skinned. And, for some reason I don’t remember, Raquel sheds a tear. Tumak reacts like this is yet another marvel he has never seen, so apparently the Rock People have not yet evolved tear ducts.

This tender moment does not last long, fortunately, because once again the god Harryhausen unleashes his wrath on sentimentality, this time in the form of a triceratops munching on some sagebrush. Veggiesaurus or not, it is royally pissed to see two primates edging in on his turf—probably because there’s so little turf to go around in this desert. But it doesn’t get long to express its displeasure before a T Rex shows up to demonstrate that giant carnivores have no problem staying nourished around here.

Once again, the film reaches its one-two-punch zenith: battling Harryhausen models interspersed with Raquel flashing her butt cheeks as she scrambles into a hole. But a cave-in separates poor Tumak from his mate-to-be. He’s stuck outside with the dueling behemoths. The triceratops wins this grudge match and heads off, leaving Tumak to slink away, calling for his Loana. Did I mention that’s Raquel’s character’s name?

(Nick): No, but it doesn’t really matter.

(David): Alas, Tumak’s brother finds her first! She starts blowing on her conch shell, and Tumak shows up in time to square off with his old gang. He spears his brother, but Raquel keeps him from finishing him off, so he learns the concept of mercy. Can’t we all just get along? It’s like Westside Story in animal hides! Tumak’s old mate is happy to see him, and returns his prized warthog tusk. He wants to kill half-blind, crippled old dad, but his mother dissuades him—almost like Oedipus in animal hides!

Then Tumak’s old flame goes after the blonde bimbo Tumak brought home with him. Okay, I have to say it; it’s obligatory: Cat Fight! Raquel wins, but when offered a rock to bash the jealous ex’s brains in, she refuses. Tumak restores peace, and the women will just have to get along—they still practiced polygamy back then, anyway.

So, Raquel, our guest of European descent, pretends to be impressed by the animal-skull décor. The next day she begins classes, and she’s like Wendy among the Lost Boys. We have a mother-figure to teach us! Yay!

But brother doesn’t like all this new-fangled learning and splits off with some of the other tribesmen who will go on to evolve into rednecks.

(Nick): But not much. They won’t evolve much—get it?

(David): In their continuing education, Raquel takes them all down to a lake and introduces them to the pleasures of bathing. Hey, look, this dirt comes off! Kind of a disappointing scene, really—skinny-dipping without the skinny. The god of Harryhausen thinks so too and sends down a bird of judgment, a pteranadon that swoops up Raquel and flies off to feed a tasty blonde to her chicks. But before she can deliver the chick to the chicks, a pteranadon-sized pterodactyl attacks Ms. Pteranadon in mid-air, and Tumak watches helplessly as they fight with Raquel clutched in their claws. She’s dropped into the ocean—thank goodness that happened to be there, although it seemed much further away earlier in the movie when Tumak nearly expired crossing the wasteland to reach it. Tumak crosses the wasteland a third time, arriving just in time to see the pteranadon chicks chowing down on—something. Assuming the worst, he turns, dejected, to cross the desert a fourth time, thinking, there goes my chance at a multi-hair-colored harem. Meanwhile, his absence gives brother a chance to return and reassert his dominance over Rock Tribe.

But Tu-wana or whatever her name is—Raquel—survives the fall and returns to her people.

(Nick): Hair-color harmony is restored.

(David): Raquel convinces her people to send out a diplomatic party to bring her back to Tumak, as their coupling will bring the two tribes together and perhaps pave the way for redheads. But Chief Brother is in no mood for peaceful relations with Shell People. A royal rumble ensues, and in the melee brother snatches Raquel. The sibling rivalry grudge match is on, but just when Tumak is about to bash his brother’s brains out with a rock, the volcano that has been ominously spewing in the background throughout the movie gets its cue from the god Harryhausen to do its thing. Fissures open up, the Rock People get crushed by pieces of their namesake, along with Shell People whose last thoughts must be, “We picked a bad time to visit.”

A few escape, but not Giant Iguana. He falls into a fissure, and we are reminded that at this time there were no ASPCA reps on set to monitor the treatment of animals.

And so the remnants of the two tribes, led by Tumak and Tu-wana, wander off into a post-volcanic-eruption landscape, which looks pretty much the same as before except that now it is strangely tinted with an orange cel over the camera lens.

(Nick): Um, were the dinosaurs wiped out?

(David): I don’t know. The cosmic narrator does not return to offer any parting thoughts. The end. Any parting thoughts from you, Nick, before we do the tallies?

(Nick): It’s a funny thing about stop-motion animation: it just never worked for some people, even when it reached its state-of-the-art. The herky-jerky motions are too artificial to some eyes, and no matter how well the models may be blue-screened in with human actors, to some people they never look like more than what they are: twelve-inch-tall puppets being moved by hand a frame at a time. Now, the goofiest dinosaur effect ever, which was in several low-budget movies of this period, shows up here with Mr. Iguana. You take an iguana or a monitor lizard, glue some horn- or fin prosthetics on it, and blue-screen it in to make it look twenty feet long. Why they threw this one in when they had the master of stop-motion is inexplicable—unless time constraints meant he could not provide another scene. Stop-motion is a notoriously slow process, a single brief scene taking months to execute. But Harryhausen’s remarkable skill is plenty on display here, as are Raquel’s assets. Ouch! That was a Manning line. You’re having a bad influence on me, Dave. But I do agree with you that this movie is fast-paced—whenever it threatens to bog down, a Harryhausen creation shows up to chomp on a few cavemen. Yes, the whole portrayal of the stone-age world is ludicrous, but it’s kinda fun.

(David): Okay, time for Studly Stats.

Lovely Lady Lumps: 0. (They’re always covered, just. No nipple slippage in the Hays Code version of the stone age. Damn you, Hays Code!)

Monster Menagerie: 10 (giant iguana; brontosaurus; giant tarantula eating giant cricket—I didn’t count the cricket; giant sea turtle; ape-men; tyrannosaur; tyrannosaur with horn; triceratops; pteranadon and babies; pterodactyl)

Manly Rating

(Nick): A guarded recommendation if you’re a Harryhausen fan, or if you want to see Raquel Welch’s first “acting” role, which made her familiar on pin-ups in teenaged boys’ rooms across the globe. Overall, though, it doesn’t hold up well. 2.5 fur thongs.

(David): 5 fur thongs!

Posted in Dinosaurs & D Cups | No Comments »

At the Earth’s Core (1976)

May 30th, 2007

[DAVID]  You realize it’s been nearly four months since our last movie review?

 

{NICK}  It took me that long to recover from Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie.

 

[DAVID]  Well, now we’ve got a bi-weekly schedule worked out, and I’m holding Mr. Professor here to it.

 

{NICK} I just wish you’d let me pick some of the movies.

 

[DAVID]  No, we’re not doing Citizen Kane.

 

{NICK}  Right. No boobs or monsters in that one.

 

[DAVID]  You should be interested in this week’s pick: At the Earth’s Core, the 1976 movie made in England, directed by Kevin Connor.  It’s based on a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was one of your favorite authors growing up, wasn’t he?

 

{NICK} I read ERB ravenously, up until my mid-teens. I remember seeing this movie in the theatre—I must’ve been about five—with my Nan and Granddad. Granddad introduced me to ERB. The Warlord of Mars I took down from his bookshelf when I was in the third grade. I read the first few lines of that book, and I was swept away and hooked on fantasy and sci-fi for ever more.

 

[DAVID]  A film adaptation of A Princess of Mars is in pre-production, you know.

 

{NICK}  I’m sure of one thing: the special effects won’t be men in rubber suits.

 

[DAVID]  The effects in At the Earth’s Core are somewhat dated.

 

{NICK}  They were dated when the film came out in 1976. The fx in the 1933 King Kong were superior to this.

 

[DAVID]  But it wasn’t torture.

 

{NICK}  It’s goofy. But there are two categories of bad film: so bad it’s good (in other words, fun to watch), and so bad it’s painful. Garbage Pail Kids falls in the latter category; if the people responsible for it were being flogged in a public square, you’d want to go and throw rocks at them. But At the Earth’s Core is sometimes entertaining, in a spectacularly cheesy way.

 

[DAVID]  The adventure commences right off the bat. We are spared lots of scenes of expository blabber. David Innes, played by that inestimable B-movie star Doug McClure, is copiloting the first test-run of the Iron Mole, a “High-Calibration Drilling Machine” designed by Dr. Abner Perry.

 

{NICK}  Achieved by unimpressive miniature and matte-work.

[DAVID]  Perry, played by the venerable Peter Cushing, has gotten his calibrations wrong, because the Mole doesn’t punch a hole through to the other side of the Welsh hills. It starts burrowing straight down into the Earth’s mantle.

 

{NICK}  I like the Victorian-style interior of the Mole, with its green-shaded wall lamps and dials and controls reminiscent of the old Time Machine.

 

[DAVID]  David and the Doctor both pass out from the rising heat. But when they come to, they are shivering with cold and the instrument panel is frosted with ice. They hit an underground body of water, the temperature stabilizes, then they punch through another rocky crust and the Mole shuts down. Since the front view portals are offline, they throw open the hatch. They’re not in the UK anymore.

 

{NICK}  They’re on a studio set lushly decorated with strange plastic flora.

 

[DAVID]  They are, in fact, in Pellucidar, the world in the Earth’s hollow core—a popular trope with Victorian-era fantasy writers. The other night I heard a fellow on the Coast 2 Coast with George Norrie radio program talking about an expedition he was arranging to the North Pole to prove that the Earth is hollow and teeming with strange life, so the idea hasn’t completely died out.

 

{NICK}  It’s all bunk, of course. But can you imagine if they really did find a way into a hollow Earth, and came back with strange descendants of prehistoric life?

 

[DAVID]  If there is a world beneath our feet, it probably doesn’t look like this. Unless it was decorated by the guys who did the covers of psychedelic albums, or early 70s pulp sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks. And the soundtrack is all done on a Moog synthesizer.

 

{NICK}  This place gives a literal meaning to the term “Neon Jungle,” all the oranges and violets and purples, with a hot pink sky.

 

[DAVID]  “But where on Earth can we be?” David asks. Doctor Perry, observing his compass, replies, “We are not on Earth. From my observations, dear friend, I can positively state that we are under it. At the Earth’s core.” The Doc then goes gaga over “Mesozoic moss—I’ve only seen it before in fossilized form.” And to dispel any doubt, a giant monster suddenly emerges from the jungle, making straight for them.

 

{NICK}  Big Bird! That’s what my Nan called it. It’s a guy in a rubber suit, reptilian body, parrot head, shrieking as it lumbers along. “Doc, I don’t think you want to get too close to that,” David says to the insatiably curious Doctor Perry. Doc climbs up into a tree and waves his umbrella at a terribly integrated blue screen of the monster. Again, a similar scene done forty-three years before in King Kong was pulled off better than this. Were we really this far ahead of the British in the movie-magic department?

 

[DAVID]  David throws some rocks at the creature to draw it away from its treed prey, then runs off—straight into a pool of quicksand. Things look bad! The monster is rumbling toward him, when just in the nick of time—

 

{NICK}  —spears whistle through the air, bouncing harmlessly off the rubber suit. But apparently this is enough to deter the monster. Man, the suits in this movie are several steps below the monsters in Godzilla flicks from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Were the British really that far behind Japanese movie magic? Why didn’t they get Harryhausen or somebody to do some decent stop-motion?!

 

[DAVID]  Yes, it would take an upstart New Zealander, two decades later, to finally surpass us in the movie-magic department. But back to this movie: a rope is thrown to David, and he and Doc are taken prisoner by Mongoloid monkey-men.

 

{NICK}  They look like the offspring of Huns and Klingons. The synthesizer-created gibberish the ape-men converse in is very annoying. But at least they speak a different language, which of course you’d expect from a race separated by hundreds of thousands of years from their surface-primate relatives. This criticism will make sense in a minute.

 

[DAVID] Our protags are chained to a line of other human prisoners, a chain gang of primitives who look like extras from a Hollywood Biblical epic. David—lucky dog—gets chained to Dia, played by Caroline Munro, a hottie in an outfit that is constantly crying out for a Wardrobe Malfunction.

 

{NICK}  David and the Doc immediately begin conversing with the natives in perfect English. Huh? In his books, ERB skims over language barriers by having his characters master new languages in the space of days—often when they are, as in this case, helpfully incarcerated with some natives. But he never would’ve gotten away with having a foreign culture conveniently speaking English. This is, of course, never explained.

 

[DAVID]  I couldn’t help but notice that Dia’s cleavage is well-oiled throughout the movie. But this isn’t a criticism.

 

{NICK}  Anyway. In a rare bit of exposition (one thing the director does a good job of avoiding is long pauses in the action to make sense of what is going on), we learn that the ape-men are Sagoths who serve the Mahars, bird-like flying reptiles with telepathic powers. The humans are the subservient race, captured by Sagoth raiding parties and sent as slaves to the Mahar city to toil in the lava pits.

 

[DAVID]  “A sub-human species, yet the master race. Isn’t that always the case?” Doc observes. “Yes, brawn before brains,” David concurs.

 

{NICK}  An odd bit of dialogue coming from two white European males of the early twentieth century. Perhaps a PC attempt by the screenwriter to offset some of the white-superiority attitudes that may be detected in ERB’s work. Then again, that’s a lot of thought to attribute to a writer who doesn’t bother with explaining why the Pellucidarians speak English.

 

[DAVID]  “Who’s that fellow up there who keeps looking at me?” David asks Dia, indicating a shady-looking character a few paces back on the chain gang. She says, in an impressive character synopsis, “He’s Hoojah, the Sly One. Do not trust him.”

 

{NICK}  And they’re off, marched toward the Mahar city with the Sagoths always whipping and pushing them while emitting their irritating electronic burps.

 

[DAVID]  At one point there’s an altercation: Hoojah is giving Dia some unwanted attention, and David clocks him. Dia waits expectantly for David to say or do something else, then gets all huffy and gives David the cold shoulder. “Your act of chivalry didn’t seem very popular, David,” the Doctor notes.

 

{NICK}  A mystery of cultural misunderstanding. How intriguing!

 

[DAVID]  More intriguing is when the march is interrupted by a giant bipedal warthog who snatches one of the slaves off the chain and starts snacking. Everyone takes cover as a second Warthoglin charges the first and the two throw down, goring each other with their tusks over the tasty treat.

 

{NICK}  The “tasty treat” in question may be the worst effect in this whole movie—and that’s saying something. It looks bad even for a mannequin, a cheap segmented doll with one leg that twitches mechanically while the warthog chomps on it. But I must admit I loved this rumble of the gargantuan warthogs when I was a kid. I still like them—they don’t look real, but they’d make great Halloween costumes.

 

[DAVID]  The victorious Warthoglin stomps off with his meal, and the march continues—minus Dia. David asks the old chief with the crazy beard where she went. “Dia’s gone. Stolen by Hoojah.” He also clears up the cold-shoulder question: “You insulted Dia. When a man in Pellucidar fights with a man for a woman, she belongs to he who wins. You should’ve claimed her or freed her. By ignoring her, you brought shame on her. Now she cannot be had by any man.” Darn the bad luck. If that wasn’t bad enough, crazy-Moses informs David of Jubal the Ugly One, who wants Dia as a mate. Oh, and he adds, “There is something you should know, my friend. Dia is a princess, daughter of kings. She is proud. She will never forgive you.”

 

{NICK}  David’s course of action is now clear. Rescue Dia from Hoojah. Then save her from Jubal the Ugly One. Then apologize profusely for his cultural faux paus. Oh, and along the way defeat the Sagoths and overthrow the Mahars. All in a day’s work for Doug McClure.

 

[DAVID]  Now we come to the Mahar city, which looks like a model of a Mayan ziggurat against a matte-painted backdrop.

 

{NICK}  They are brought into a labyrinthine cavern system under the city, to a passage blocked by a curtain of falling molten lava. The Sagoths are able to turn this on and off, using it as a fiery portcullis.

 

[DAVID]  Doc gushes about the wonder of the sight—“a curtain of fire!”

 

{NICK}  The quirky enthusiasm Cushing brings to the role is infectious, almost. But the scale of it really isn’t that impressive. And when he’s gushing about extinct life forms that are men in rubber suits, it’s unintentionally campy.

 

[DAVID]  For a guy his age—and Cushing looks pretty old, thin, and frail—he radiates jovial spunk, capering around like the Scarecrow. Now we are introduced to Pellucidar’s oppressive masters, the Mahar. Perched on cliffs around an arena, their leathery wings folded, they are lords of all they survey. And when their eyes turn milky green and they blink, they send out telepathic mind-control powers.

 

{NICK}  More guys in rubber bird suits. And I’m thinking, the puppets in The Dark Crystal are more convincingly life-like than these things. Far more. And the Skeksis had personalities.

 

[DAVID]  Doc exclaims that they are specimens of “rhamphorhynchus, of the middle Jurassic period.” But, he adds in amazed glee, “the remains we’ve found have never indicated they attained a size any bigger than an ordinary crow.”

 

{NICK}  Whereas these are about the size of a man in a rubber suit. So the Mahar are highly-evolved pterosaurs. These things, by the way, look nothing like rhamphorhynchoidea. They look like parrot piñatas, with a green ruff around their necks just like the one Kermit the Frog has. Their motion is quite limited and clumsy, their beaks are not able to close, and the only facial movement they can achieve is blinking eyelids.

 

[DAVID]  Our protags are put to work in the underground lava pits. In the ensuing days, David’s main job seems to be making bricks, while Doc (for reasons unexplained) gets his own room in a sort of Mahar library doing scribe work. A Sagoth pulls down stone tablets engraved with cuneiform script, which Doc copies with a stylus onto a clay tablet.

{NICK}  Somehow, he is fully proficient in reading this foreign script, and learns a great deal about the Mahar during this time. Like the fact they are telepathic—a concept that must be hard to convey in cuneiform.

 

[DAVID]  One day David decides he’s had enough when a Sagoth begins beating on another slave. He grabs the Sagoth’s hatchet, puts monkey-boy down and escapes into the caves.

 

{NICK}  He wanders around lost for a while, marking arrows with chalk on the walls should he need to find his way back, until he finally sees the hot-pink light of the Pellucidar sun (the movie never explains where the internal light source comes from, but in the books ERB provided a mini-sun at the very center of the Earth).

 

[DAVID]  He emerges to discover a campfire. He’s about to steal a spear someone has left unattended, when he is tackled by a dark-skinned man with a curly mop of hair. They punch and wrestle for a while—neither of these men would be contenders in the UFC—until their hand-to-hand sends them rolling into a diabolical cave.

 

{NICK}  Diabolical because it is host to three relatives of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. The giant plants have big hairy mouths with red lips, and their throats glow with pulsing red light—it’s a disco inside there!

 

[DAVID]  One Pellucidaran Man-Trap grabs the Pellucidarian with one of its many octopus-like tentacles and starts dragging him towards it orifice, but David uses the hatchet to cut the tentacle and free the fellow.

 

{NICK}  They clamber out of the cave and sit catching their breath. Then, somewhat unconvincingly, they begin to laugh.

 

[DAVID]  With the shared laughter, their friendship is cemented.

 

{NICK}  And—this is unintentionally hilarious—David introduces himself the way you would to a foreigner, saying “David” and patting himself on the chest. The other guy introduces himself as Ra and the two proceed to converse in plain English. The fact that the Pellucidarians speak modern English is taken completely for granted, so why the pretense of “David, me David” pat pat pat “You?” point point?

 

[DAVID]  David shares his plan for starting an uprising, which Ra tries to dissuade him from. To this end, he takes David back into the cave and they sneak in to where they have hidden vantage of the Mahar arena. They witness a feeding. Four slave women are brought in, and David gets a brief scare when one of the women looks like Dia from behind. But she turns around and, no, its just an extra wearing Caroline Munro’s costume. Whew! The king Mahar, rather than being green like the others, is the shade of dog poop after it’s sat in the sun for a long time. It puts one of the girls under its mind control and silently calls her out. She compliantly walks forward and bows. Then one of the Mahar leaps off its perch—

 

{NICK}  Well, sort of tumbles off the cliff and is buoyed up by its fly-wires. The nearly-invisible wires swing it across the arena in the most clumsy flying spectacle I’ve ever witnessed on film. Then we cut to a shot of the Mahars’ legs grasping the woman by the shoulders and carrying her off. The remaining three women scream as the other Mahar make their ungraceful descents.

 

[DAVID]  We don’t actually see any of the feeding, only David and Ra’s disgusted reaction to it. David is so outraged that he picks up a stone to throw at the Mahar—good thinking, you big man-twit. Ra grabs his arm to keep him from getting them both killed, but David loses his balance and falls down into the bottom of the Mahars’ lair!

 

{NICK}  Oh no oh no.

 

[DAVID]  Fortunately the Mahar, bellies sated, are now napping. The only way out is through a tiny crawlspace right behind one of the Mahars’ legs.

 

{NICK}  This is supposed to be a suspenseful moment as David wriggles past, trying not to wake the Mahar. But it only gives us ample time to laugh at how goofy the Mahar looks. The rubber feet with their stubby, rigid claws obviously could not grasp anything, much less lift a woman. If, during a moment that’s supposed to be full of tension, you’re thinking, “Just push the silly thing over,” that’s not good.

 

[DAVID]  David rejoins Ra, but as they’re heading out, they’re captured by Sagoths.

 

{NICK}  Wasn’t it a dumb place for Ra to set up camp in the first place, right outside the Mahar caves? Kinda like a fox taking a nap outside the hound kennel.

 

[DAVID]  They’re brought back to the underground arena, and now they’re the main event. Ra is chained to a pole in the center of the ring, and David is given a spear. All the slaves are on hand to witness the event. Doc, ever the optimist, waves at David from the crowd. At least their captors provide periodic entertainment, a brief respite from their labors.

 

{NICK}  Likely it’s to teach a lesson about what happens to people who try to escape. Because suddenly there’s a low rumble from a cave, a portcullis is raised, and out trundles HIPPOSAUR!

 

[DAVID]  Rubber suit, of course, but via the wonders of blue screen it’s made to look the size of a Chevy Suburban.

 

{NICK}  They also have a full-scale model of the creature’s head, which they inter-cut for some awkward footage as David ineffectively pokes at its snout. The jaws of the full-scale puppet are pretty rigid, and so it just looks like it keeps nudging David. Doug McClure would have to crawl into that mouth for the creature to actually bite him.

 

[DAVID]  Ra helpfully yells to “Go for the ear!,” apparently the beast’s one weak spot. Eventually David does manage to poke it in the ear.

 

{NICK}  It stands still a bit, grunting in pain from the ear piercing—

 

[DAVID]  Ha!

 

{NICK}  —then keels over on its side, its legs jutting out in that funny way they do when it’s a guy in a rubber suit.

[DAVID]  The Mahar, apparently because of their telepathic connection to their pet beastie, croak in synthesizer-modulated pain, then one flies down to do what Hipposaur could not.

 

{NICK}  oh no oh no

 

[DAVID]  Fortunately, Ra breaks his chains at just this moment, and uses the chain to garrote piñata-bird. “Freedom!” he yells, and a full-scale uprising is on. David, Ra, and most of the other slaves escape.

 

{NICK}  When David emerges from the cave, he conveniently comes upon Hoojah holding a spear to Dia’s belly.

 

[DAVID]  “There is a shortage of perfect bellies in Pellucidar. ‘Twould be a pity to damage yours.”

 

{NICK}  He doesn’t say that. And before you ask, yes, I recognize what you’re paraphrasing.

 

[DAVID]  As if Hoojah weren’t threat enough (well, really he isn’t), a burst of flame suddenly laps at the Sly One and the woman who has refused to make Pellucibabies with him.

 

{NICK}  It’s a fire-breathing dinosaur! Who knew? And since this one is belching fire from a cliff far below them, the fx team didn’t even bother with a rubber suit or a full-scale puppet. It looks just like some of the dinosaur toys I had when I was a kid.

 

[DAVID]  Kinda cute, really. Made me reminisce of the days when I’d hop in the bathtub and just such a plastic toy would rise from the bubbly depths to chomp on a GI Joe.

Suddenly the creature is struck with an arrow! And a second, and a third. Who’s turning it into a pin cushion? None other than Doc, who’s found time to make a bow and arrows.

 

{NICK}  Dragontoadithicus tumbles from the cliff to the valley below and…..EXPLODES! That’s right it explodes on impact in a ball of flame.

 

[DAVID]  Yes, you erupted into peals of laughter, I recall.

 

{NICK}  I’d never seen a self-detonating dinosaur before.

 

[DAVID]  In the ‘70s everything exploded, even parked cars that weren’t running.

 

{NICK}  Hoojah sneaks off, and David is finally able to confront Dia about the strong feelings he developed for her during the couple hours they were chained to each other.

 

[DAVID]  She accepts that he didn’t know any better about not claiming her, but morosely declares that it’s no use; Jubal the Ugly One will kill him.

 

{NICK}  So they head off to find the Ugly One to get this over with.

 

[DAVID]  Cut to the Ugly One emerging from the psychedelic foliage and bellowing. Man, is he ugly. He’s a big, portly brute, with half his face covered in dried oatmeal.

 

{NICK}  He and David get it on. Neither of them would be UFC contenders, but the Ugly One, though slow, does have some weight on David and tosses him around like a rag doll.

 

[DAVID]  But David leverages his superior speed and intelligence (never thought I’d use those words to describe a Doug McClure character) and trips Jubal up. The Ugly One lands in a copse of large pink mushrooms, which begin shrieking and emitting a pink cloud of gas. When the Ugly One clambers out of this mind-altering roll in the ‘shrooms, David skewers him with a spear. Then he claims Dia as his own.

 

{NICK}  Dia, coming from a primitive patriarchal society, doesn’t mind this. In fact, she’s positively jubilant she won’t have to snuggle up to the Ugly One.

 

[DAVID]  Yeah, McClure is no Sean Connery, but he is not the Ugly One.

 

{NICK}  Tribes come together to lay down plans for the revolution to overthrow oppressive reptilian species.

 

[DAVID]  Doc has learned the key to destroying the Mahars—they incubate their eggs in fire, and he knows where the incubation nest is.

 

{NICK}  I’m unclear on how pterosaur eggs could be incubated in molten lava, but the movie’s not big on scientific explanations.

 

[DAVID]  It’s the ‘70s. They could safely assume many of the people watching this would be on drugs.

 

{NICK}  Let’s wrap this up. They defeat the Sagoths and wipe out the Mahars. Ra dies, but not before destroying the incubation pit. The whole Mahar-city miniature blows up. The Iron Mole is repaired and it’s tally ho! Call us again the next time you forget homo sapiens are the dominant species and need some help keeping your lizards in line.

 

[DAVID]  Don’t forget the poignant moment on the launch platform, when Dia changes her mind about accompanying her mate to the surface. “But I want to show you the wonders of my world!” David pleads. No, she explains, Pellucidar is her home. She would not fit in up there in big-sky country. She may have also gotten wind of bangers and mash and all that other crap the British eat. I only hope that, after all David had to do to win her, he at least got some consummation.

 

{NICK}  No comment.

 

[DAVID]  In a deliberately funny final scene, we see two American policemen standing guard at the White House gate. Suddenly the tip of the Iron Mole’s nose-drill punctures the lawn, and it slowly rises in front of the White House. The two policemen turn, see it, and run away.

 

{NICK}  They did get a little off course, didn’t they?

 

[DAVID]  Okay, Studly Stats time. Lovely Lady Lumps: 0. Monster Menagerie: 8 (BigBirdatrodon, the Sagoths, Warthoglins, the Mahar, man-eating plants, Hipposaur, Dragontoadithicus, and the jaws of a beast that breaks through a portcullis and eats Hoojah during the climactic destruction of Mahar City)

 

RATING

 

{NICK}  I loved this movie when my age was a single digit. Judging it now, I give it 2.5 stars. That rating is inflated by nostalgia and the downright hokiness that’s good for unintended laughs.

 

[DAVID]  A world of psychedelic wonder beneath our feet, populated by bizarre new evolutionary branches of flora and fauna and monsters galore. Fierce competition with Sly Ones and Ugly Ones for a Hot One. Violent overthrow of bird-brains and their primate lackeys. How could I not give this movie…5 stars!    

 

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The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

January 29th, 2007

When garbage gets green-lighted…

 

PRE-SCREENING:
 

(NICK) I can’t believe we’re about to subject ourselves to this punishment.

 

(DAVID) C’mon, buddy—freaky monster babies—what could go wrong?

 

(NICK) You know what really rubbed it in? At the beginning of the DVD there’s one of those quick-cut montages of some classic MGM movies—Rocky, Silence of the Lambs, Some Like it Hot, Thelma & Louise, Fargo, Braveheart, The Great Escape…And we’re about to watch The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. How does a film like this get greenlighted???

 

ROLL FILM:
 

 (NICK, hitting pause) Okay, the opening credits tell us that Atlantic Entertainment Group—damn them!—presents a Topps Chewing Gum production. That’s, I think, all you need to know. A maker of brittle, sugary strips of chewing gum should not produce movies. Stick to gum!

 

 (DAVID) Nick, you’re prejudging. Take it off pause, sit back, and try to enjoy.

 

(NICK) You got any hard liquor? Nothing, I fear, will help this movie—but liquor could act as an anesthetic.

 

(DAVID) Naysayer! Hit Play! There’s some Bud in the fridge.

 

(NICK) I said hard liquor. I’ll need whisky to endure this so-called “family film.”

 

(DAVID) The opening credits present the actors on bubble gum cards. See, that’s clever!

 

(NICK) I don’t recognize any of these actors. So, I’m assuming the budget went into special effects. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

 

(DAVID) Now they’re introducing the kids—without the actors’ names! Where’s the Hollywood Midgets’ Union when you need them?

 

(NICK) Valerie Vomit. Windy Winston. Foul Phil. So they decided just to go with the toilet-bowl humor cards. Great.

 

(DAVID) Now there’s a spaceship approaching Earth.

 

(NICK) So, what gives? Are these kids aliens?

 

(DAVID) How clever, the ship’s shaped like a garbage pail. Wait, here come more cards: Nat Nerd. Ali Gator. Greaser Greg. Messy Tessie. You know, I had most of these cards back in grade school. Collectors’ items now.

 

POST-SCREENING:
 

(NICK) I’m glad I no longer have my Garbage Pail Kids from grade school. Because I’d burn them.

 

(DAVID) Those are collectors’ items now.

 

(NICK) No thanks to this vomitous waste of celluloid.

 

(DAVID) We should note, for readers who are unfamiliar with the cards that inspired this work of cinema, that they feature “kids” who look like Cabbage Patch Dolls, except even more pudgy and malformed, and usually leaking unpleasant substances from various orifices. You can pretty much guess what sort of bodily projections each character specializes in by their names. Windy Winston. Valerie Vomit…

 

(NICK) Ad nauseum. And the character development in this stinking waste of trash didn’t really stretch beyond that. This crap of a movie is ill-conceived, ill-cast, deplorably directed—I’d add horribly written, but I don’t want to denigrate the art of writing by describing this movie as having been “written.” If you could go inside the heads of the people who created this, you wouldn’t find thoughts; you’d find giant tumors.

 

(DAVID) Wow. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about plot…

 

(NICK) Plot?! This movie seemed plotted by three different people, then the producers just tossed them together without incorporating them into a coherent whole.

 

(DAVID) Okay, enough of the generalities. Let’s get down to brass tacks. (Whatever the hell that means.) Our protagonist is the wussiest kid I’ve seen in a lead role ever. He’s being bullied in a park by a gang of…yuppies? A couple guys and their groupie dolls, they look like rejects from Flock of Seagulls and the Go-Gos. All that was bad about 80s fashion is on display here. Mullets, big hair…

 

(NICK) Triceratops hair!

 

(DAVID) Right, because of the big crest concretized by hair gel? I get you. The Bangles groupies are rolling the wuss for lunch money or something.

 

(NICK) Here’s one of a constant stream of jarring inanities: the kid’s supposed to be fifteen, but he looks about twelve. The bullies are, I guess, supposed to be in their teens but are obviously in their twenties. It looks like a group of adults picking on a junior high boy for lunch money; i.e. it looks silly. Do they think he’ll have enough change for them to go buy the new Depeche Mode LP?

 

(DAVID) The wuss works after school for an antique shop owner, who also happens to be a wizard! Does the wuss also live there? Maybe I missed something, but I can’t recall this kid ever going home or mentioning parents.

 

(NICK) Maybe the script-“writer” didn’t know either. The level of thought in writing this did not rise much above: “What words can come after ‘and’? Let’s see…‘a’, ‘the’, ‘some,’ ‘more’—Oh, I like ‘more.’ What words can come after ‘more’?”

 

(DAVID) The wuss is cleaning up and bumps into a particular garbage pail, which sits rather prominently in the room, its rim encrusted with green ooze. Mr. Wizard freaks out and says he must never touch that pail because it would be like opening Pandora’s Box—“Think of this as Pandora’s Pail.” So, apparently all the world’s woes are embodied in farting, vomiting, snotty-nosed Cabbage Patch Dolls. Open the pail, kid! It’s what we paid our money to see!

 

(NICK) This creates about half-a-dozen plot holes, but it seems pointless to talk about plot holes in a movie this devoid of plot. Can you have holes in a void?

 

(DAVID) That sounds like one of them Zen kois.

 

(NICK) You mean koans. A koi is a Japanese fish. Are these kids aliens? Are they mischievous sprites or goblins? Manzini seems to have some history with them, but events later in the movie seem to indicate they arrived very recently. Why am I wasting my breath asking?

 

(DAVID) Now a girl named Tangerine comes in, a hot little number despite her goofy fashion tastes, and the wuss starts trying to make time with her. But she won’t give him the time of day; she’s the girlfriend of the shady character who earlier took his money and tossed him in a puddle. Who, right on cue, struts into the shop and declares, “The boy needs to be taught a lesson. It’s a matter of principle.”

 

(NICK) So he’s jealous of an adolescent? Does his girlfriend have a past record of statutory rape?

 

(DAVID) Tangerine raises that point when she protests, “He must be twelve years old.” The wuss whines, “I’m fourteen—almost fifteen!”

 

(NICK) A most lamely-choreographed fight scene ensues, which results in the pail being knocked over of course. The yuppie thugs, since they have nothing better to do than pick on a minor, drag him outside, lift a manhole cover and drag him down into the sewer where they tie him up.

 

(DAVID) There are pipes clearly labeled “Men’s room,” “City Zoo,” “Toxic Waste,” “Prime Time TV.”

 

(NICK) The only satire in the whole movie shows up in the set design.

 

(DAVID) They unscrew a valve, releasing a jet of sewage onto the wuss. The wuss gets soiled a lot in this picture. Then they leave, having performed their matter of principle.

 

(NICK) Now we meet the dwarfs in unsettling puppet masks. They rescue the boy and bring him back to Manzini’s.

 

(DAVID) In a frankly disturbing scene, the wuss takes a bath in an old claw-foot tub in the basement, and when he gets out of the tub all the kids are standing around ogling him. Manzini hands him a towel (is the kid incapable of taking a bath in private?). “Ooh, he’s got nice legs,” Valerie Vomit sighs.

 

(NICK) A lot of banter ensues about how the kids will have to be locked back up. The boy—do you remember his name, David? I’ve forgotten.

 

(DAVID) The wuss.

 

(NICK) Whatever.

 

(DAVID) The scrawny bleach-blond wizard’s boy.

 

(NICK) Our boy hero speaks up for freedom, but it doesn’t matter anyway because Manzini doesn’t know the spell to put them back in the pail. Which doesn’t make sense because he must’ve done so at least once—oh, never mind. I’m prolonging the pain of reliving this film by raising all the plot inconsistencies.

 

(DAVID) While they’re all playing Gettin’ to Know You, Ali Gator pops open a box full of eyeballs, fingers, and toes. This guy’s always hungry, and digits are his favorite snack.

 

(NICK) So is Ali Gator homicidal? Whose body parts are these? Manzini and his sidekick react with disgust, but not moral indignation—no question is ever raised as to where Ali harvested these bloody pieces of human anatomy.

 

(DAVID) Of course not; it’s a family film.

 

(NICK) Right. If your family came from test tubes and were raised by mongoloids.

 

(DAVID) The GPK start going on night raids, ostensibly to look for their missing kin. Apparently there are other GPK who came to Earth in other pails, from somewhere (that’s never really discussed). Mostly, though, they just have weenie roasts, play games, and steal whatever they want. When Greaser Greg is about to go into a diner, one of the other creeps points out they don’t have any money. To which Greg responds by whipping out a switchblade and saying, “We’ll carve out an IOU.”

 

(NICK) They also find the time to make an outfit for the boy, which looks like something Prince would’ve worn in the 80s.

 

(DAVID) The wuss drops by Tangerine’s apartment to drool a little more over fruit that is way out of his league. The piece of fruit in question is obviously not too thrilled about the visit from her pint-sized stalker…until she sees the outfit. Now she’s the one drooling, because Tangerine is an aspiring fashion designer who makes her own clothes and then sells them out of boxes outside sleazy dance clubs to whining New Wave bitches.

 

(NICK) She now demands that he supply him with ten more such outfits by Friday, intimating that if he does, maybe she’ll take a second look at him.

 

(DAVID) And, thoughtfully enough, she warns him to watch out for her boyfriend. As if he needed a reminder: Oh yeah, that New Wave Neanderthal who likes to shower me in poop.

 

(NICK) Later, Tangerine takes the boy with her to sell her wares at the club. They leave her apartment during the day, next thing they’re driving at night. Is this dance club in another state?!

 

(DAVID) After some pissing and moaning about being turned into sweatshop labor, the GPK agree to churn out the duds. Who would’ve ever guessed the GPK were skilled seamstresses? But first they must sneak out and break into a building labeled “Non Union Sweat Shop” to pilfer some extra sewing machines.

 

(NICK) Aw, those clever satirists over in set design…

 

(DAVID) While doing this, they break out in—what the f***?—a musical number!

 

(NICK) A song as grating as any sung by Barney: “We can do anything / by working with each other.” Yeah. Like breaking and entering. And theft.

 

(DAVID) We haven’t really mentioned it, but throughout the movie Nat Nerd keeps pissing his pants, and Windy Winston passes gas incessantly, and Messy Tessie is always rubbing snot on stuff. It’s not really worth mentioning every time.

 

(NICK) No.

 

(DAVID) When Nat Nerd says, “Look at me. Old Faithful” and pisses his pants for the third time in ten minutes, the other GPKs groan and Valerie (who has yet to vomit) says “Grow up!” Nat replies in his nerdy voice, “I thought it was funny.”

 

(NICK) The makers of this aberration should’ve taken Valerie’s advice. It wasn’t funny the first time.

 

(DAVID) I’m starting to lose track of the order in which these scenes occurred, because they don’t really have any discernable chronological significance, but at some point the GPK steal some ATVs and drive off to “The Toughest Bar in the World.”  Ali Gator goes in looking for somebody’s toes to eat. This guy has a real toe fetish. He bites the toe of a biker wearing sandals (odd footwear for a biker) and find himself immediately surrounded by bikers with switchblades.

 

(NICK) I was hoping they were about to make alligator skin boots, but Windy Winston comes to the rescue, knocking people out with his gaseous explosions.

 

(DAVID) One biker is so impressed with this display of fart-fu he declares, “This kid’s got courage. Hey, he’s with me!” And they all make friends. Having a lethal fart apparently earns great respect with some crowds.

 

(NICK) Dave, are we getting paid for this? Oh, yeah: No.

 

(DAVID) The GPK carry on their shenanigans. They mess with sewer pipes, resulting in a guy getting shot off a toilet on a geyser of water. Also, a couple’s snuggling gets interrupted when the Jacuzzi they’re simmering in starts filling with waste water.

 

(NICK) Pandora’s pail, indeed.

 

(DAVID) Tangerine lands a fashion show, where she is going to present the GPKs creations as her own work. She just wants to get out of wherever it is they live, you know, and this is her ticket to France or something. The GPK want to attend the show, but Tangerine learns of their existence and locks them in the basement. Smart. Those freaks probably wouldn’t go over well with the snooty types. She blabs to her clod boyfriend, and he and his crew kidnap the GPK and turn them over to the State Home for the Ugly.

 

(NICK) In another intermittent subplot, Manzini has been out looking for the missing GPK. He tracks them to the State Home just in time to discover his own brood of GPK have become new inmates of that hallowed institution.

(DAVID) A word about the State Home for the Ugly. Guys with big nets, like dogcatchers, routinely sweep the city for ugly people to lock up. Apparently the ultimate fate of residents of the State Home for the Ugly is to be crushed in a garbage compactor. This movie’s getting weird.

 

(NICK) Some kind of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing going on here?

 

(DAVID) Inside the State Home people are kept in barred cells that are labeled for various crimes. The GPK are in a cell labeled “Too Gross.” There’s a clown in a cell labeled “Too Silly.” Others are christened “Too Skinny,” “Too Bald,” “Too Weird.” And they’ve got Santa Claus in there, labeled “Too Fat.”

 

(NICK) “Too Jolly” would’ve been funnier. But maybe the suffix “-ier” is inappropriate here, because that would imply that something in this movie was funny. I can’t stand much more of this—my mind is already starting to repress memories of this movie—so let’s start summarizing.

 

(DAVID) Enlisting the aid of the bikers from the bar, Manzini and the wuss bust the GPK out of the State Home. In a brief aside that is never alluded to again, Manzini explains that he was too late to save the missing GPKs, who were presumably killed in a trash compactor.

 

(NICK) No one sheds any tears at this state-sponsored murder, nor is there any guilt or remorse on the part of our human protagonists that by keeping the GPK sewing down in the basement, they were kept from finding the other GPK in time to save them from this crushing fate.

 

(DAVID) Alas, no Nasty Nick will be appearing in this movie.

 

(NICK) Saved on the costume budget.

 

(DAVID) The GPK show up at the fashion show just in time to turn it into a chaotic disaster.

 

(NICK) I’m wasting breath pointing this out, but yet another missed opportunity at humor here: it may have been amusing to have the GPK come onto the catwalk wearing their designs, with the ensuing reactions of the audience at the hideousness of the models. But no, they just waddle through the crowd pissing and farting and, oh, Valerie Vomit finally gets a chance to show off her talent.

 

(DAVID) And the wuss gets his chance to punch out the bully.

 

(NICK) Who has to practically lie back on the floor and let the kid crawl on him and throw punches. A scrawny twelve-year-old getting the best of an athletic adult male. Not the least believable thing that’s happened in this movie.

 

(DAVID) In a touching “moral of the story” moment, later that night Tangerine shows up on the street outside the antique shop to express her penitence to the wuss and make amends. The wuss gives her a wisdom-beyond-his-years look and refuses her come-on, saying, “I no longer find you pretty.”

 

(NICK) What irony. And everyone lives happily ever after.

 

(DAVID) Studly Stats time. Monster Menagerie: 1 (Garbage Pail Kids, i.e. mutant midgets of varying degrees of repulsiveness.) Ali Gator seems like he could qualify as a different species from the rest—being reptilian rather than mammalian—but he, too, is a Garbage Pail Kid. Are they aliens? A breed of mischievous goblins? We really don’t know.

 

(NICK) Nor does Topps Chewing Gum, the director, the screenwriter, or anyone involved in this excretion.

 

(DAVID) Lovely lady lumps: 0. Your rating, Nick?

 

(NICK) I am annoyed and despondent and have lost some of my faith in the human race. This movie never came within a mile of a laugh. I’d say that the mute, one-dimensional, one-joke trading cards were ten times funnier than this movie—except that would make no sense because, as we all remember from math class, ten times nothing is still nothing. I considered giving it one garbage pail, which I will need to get sick in, but no. Zero garbage pails. Zilch. Nada.

 

(DAVID) In sixty years everyone involved in this film will probably be dead.

 

(NICK) Thus the Earth purges herself.

 

(DAVID) This movie reaffirmed for me that even if you have the face of an alligator and have a taste for human toes, you are still a worthwhile being. I give it…three garbage pails.

 

(NICK) Wait—you’re not giving it five? This is unprecedented, David—you give every movie a rating of five!

 

(DAVID) Well, not every movie. I do have to keep up my credibility.

 
(NICK) No comment.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Conquest (1983)

January 10th, 2007

(NICK) What happens when an Italian moviemaker originally inspired by George Romero to make oregano-flavored zombie films gets drunk and stays up all night watching Conan the Barbarian, Clash of the Titans, Quest for Fire, and Beastmaster?

(DAVID) He gets inspired to make Masterfully Barbaric Clashes of the Beastly Questing Fire-Titans. Otherwise known as La Conquista, or Conquest. Except without James Earl Jones, Harryhausen stop-motion, or ferrets. Still, even with those shortcomings, he creates a masterpiece.

(NICK) ….

(DAVID) Perhaps the magnum opus of the Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci. Isn’t that right, Nick?

(NICK) Well, um…I didn’t fall asleep.

(DAVID) That’s a start.

(NICK) It’s one of those films, there’s always something to look at. Even with the low budget and the technical limitations, the special effects are, well, bizarre, sometimes bordering on surreal.

(DAVID) Conquest is to American sword-and-sorcery what A Fistful of Dollars is to American westerns. Spaghetti S&S.

(NICK) Except that A Fistful of Dollars is a classic, whereas if you hadn’t gotten me slightly inebriated I never would’ve watched this film.

(DAVID) Now, now, don’t give away trade secrets. Let’s talk about the movie, not the reviewers’ pre-screening routine.

(NICK) Okay, you start, while I go grab a hair of the dog.

(DAVID) The opening scene looks inspired by Clash of the Titans. A beach, some people dressed in Greek-looking garb. Some kind of ceremony is about to transpire.

(NICK) When you use the words “inspired by” in this review, David, can the reader mentally substitute “ripped-off of?”

(DAVID) Anyway, back to the opening expository scene. The ceremony turns out to be a sending-off. The leader of these people is sending his son Ilias out into the world so he can grow in experience and achieve manhood, or at least avoid getting killed. Father explains to son that during his time abroad he will gain wisdom, preparing him to come back and rule his people.

(NICK) Right, although one has to listen pretty closely to decipher that, because the sound editor thought it clever to put reverb on the old man’s speech, making it almost unintelligible. Don’t worry if you miss some of it, though—you’ll hear the pertinent parts of the speech again later, snippets of flashback in Ilias’s mind. And his memories aren’t in reverb.

(DAVID) Another interesting effect here is that throughout this scene all the people on the beach are transparent, making them appear like ghosts—conveying the impression that this is an event that happened in the past.

(NICK) Just in case the fact that they’re dressed like ancient Greeks didn’t make that clear?

(DAVID) Hey, you’ve gotta give Fulci credit for taking experimental risks.

(NICK) Yes, he does do that—even when they’re sometimes incomprehensible.

(DAVID) You’re pretty full of the six-syllable professor words today.

(NICK) Yeah, they’re probably wasted on a Fulci film. But, back to the movie…

(DAVID) After his pep talk, father—who looks a bit like Charlton Heston as Zeus—reaches out his arm and a bow comes flying through the air into his outstretched hand. He explains something about how when a legendary hero of the people ran out of arrows, the sun god empowered this bow to shoot magical sun arrows. With bow in hand—and arrows cleverly held in boot-quivers—he gets into a little skiff and rows off.

(NICK) Around one’s ankles doesn’t seem a good place to carry arrows—you know how often they would snag?

(DAVID) We then shift to another part of the world, where the people are still in the Stone Age. Poor, dirty goat-shepherds huddle together on a plain, watching their snake goddess, Ocron, do her daily ritual up on a slab of rock, pretending to call up the sun. And from this point through the rest of the film, we have a more-or-less steady stream of Lovely Lady Lumps. Snake goddess is wearing nothing but a steel thong and a mask. As long as you can’t see her face, she obviously doesn’t care what else you see. And—Lord have mercy on me but I’m just a man—she has one inspiring body. If I was the sun, I’d rise for her.

(NICK) Good grief, David, I knew we wouldn’t get two pages into this review before the double entendres started rolling.

(DAVID) Yep, I’m definitely seeing double at this point.

(NICK) Back to the movie…

(DAVID) Right. We’ve barely begun appreciating how righteous Ocron’s body is when we find out how evil and warped the mind behind the mask is. She sends her henchmen down among the goat-people to demand a human sacrifice. Some of her henchmen are men, and some are wolf-men.

(NICK) The human guys look like extras off the set of Road Warriors. The wolf-men have an uncanny resemblance to Chewbacca.

(DAVID) This leads into a scene that reminds us Fulci is better-known as the Italian godfather of gore cinema. Conquest may be billed as a fantasy, but Fulci is a horror director at heart, and we’ll be getting lots of it, starting with a wolf-man bashing in the head of the leader of the goat tribe. This is head bashing Fulci-style, so the skull cracks open and we see his brains.

(NICK) Please, David, no migraine jokes.

(DAVID) I’m not that obvious, thank you. So, after ex-goat-people-chieftain discovers that, while the brain has no nerve endings, it is never healthy to expose it to open air, the baddies pick out a comely young lass to be their virgin sacrifice. Or, actually, to be their doggie chew toy. Showing that men—even half-canine men—are so predictable, they pick out one of the two girls in the tribe who is running around inexplicably naked except for a little thong. The rest of the goat tribe are covered head-to-foot in hides, you see.

(NICK) Maybe they picked out one of the naked ones because she was already peeled. Ha!

(DAVID) Not bad. I can see I’m having an influence on you.

(NICK) Oh no. If I were Catholic, I’d be going to confession.

(DAVID) Two wolf-men each take a leg, drag her onto a rock, and literally pull her apart like a wishbone. Lingering camera shot on her belly as her skin rips open and her intestines spill out.

(NICK) I feel like I’m going to have to shower my brain after this movie is over.

(DAVID) You know I don’t condone brainwashing. Ba-dum! “You’re a naughty boy, Saucy Fulci!” It’s all harmless fun. No real virgins were harmed in the making of this film. Anyway, they cut off her head and cart it back to Ocron’s secret lair, then split it open on a platter for her. Appears they have a primitive drug lab going on, and brains are the key ingredient. They pound it into a powder, then take turns shooting it through a straw into each other’s nostrils, which apparently brings on a crazy high. After Snakey gets her shot of brain-cocaine, she lays out on a bed and starts having, well, like an orgasm. And she has a big snake crawling between her legs during this, so it looks like she’s getting off with a snake. All I can say is…Wow.

(NICK) Words fail me.

(DAVID) Then she has a vision. It’s Ilisia, strolling boldly into her lair, pulling back his bow, and shooting a magical blue arrow right into her naked chest. So, Snake Witch is on high alert. End of scene. Which brings us to…a cave-girl cooking up a fish by a river. Snakey’s henchmen are crouching in the bushes spying on her—quite an ambush for one little girl. But they’re just spectators, as a big snake comes slithering across the ground toward the oblivious girl.

(NICK) A word here about location and shooting. Like all the Italian spaghetti westerns, this film is shot mostly in desert country, bare except for some grass and sagebrush. But there always seems to be a mist. On the rare occasion there’s not mist in a scene, Fulci shoots through a filtered lens to give it a misty feel. It may be a smart choice—about all they can do to cover for the limitations of their location. New Zealand this is not. And you don’t want your ancient-world fantasy to remind everybody of Clint Eastwood riding across a sun-bleached desert chewing on a cheroot.

(DAVID) The girl is covered in dried gray mud. I can only imagine what she smells like.

(NICK) She looks like an extra from the set of Quest for Fire.

(DAVID) Suddenly—an arrow. Thwang! Snake-ka-bob. Our hero Ilias to the rescue, but mud-girl runs off. And Ilias steals my line: he actually says, “That’s gratitude for you.” See, this movie has a sense of humor. But remember that band of thugs voyeuristically gawking from the bushes? Ilias quickly discovers how useless a bow is in melee combat. Now it’s Ilias needs rescuing, and right on cue we have—

(NICK) Fabio! “I can’t believe it’s not butter” Fabio, featured on about five hundred romance novel covers—

(DAVID) It’s not Fabio. It’s top-billed hunk Jorge Rivero!

(NICK) He looks like him. Buff, shirtless, long blonde hair waving in the wind, he is Mace, our low-budget Italian barbarian Fabio.

(DAVID) He makes short work of the motley crew, rescuing Ilias.

(NICK) This scene is just so surreal, because it looks like Fabio tossing around a bunch of stunted Chewbaccas.

(DAVID) Introductions follow. Mace explains the red tattoo on his forehead, which looks like a capital R that fell drunk on its back. “See this—this means every man is an enemy.” Naturally, Ilias wonders why, then, Mace chose to save his skinny Greek ass. “I didn’t save you,” Mace says, picking up the bow, “I saved this. If you show me how to use this, I’ll take you with me—wherever our feet carry us.” For some reason this seems to Ilias like the best offer he’s had all day, so off they go.

(NICK) Turns out your basic stringed weapon is a never-before-seen technological advancement in this here backwater. Mace, however, may not be the best choice with whom to share weapons of ranged destruction, because in the next scene we see him use an innocent passerby for target practice.

(DAVID) After Mace sticks the old man—proving he’s a quick learn with the whole archery business—they take the dead pig the guy had slung over his shoulders.

(NICK) Mace doesn’t seem too burdened by such pesky things as ethics or moral laws.

(DAVID) But when Ilias and Mace are roasting the pig, Mace does reveal he’s a primitive ancestor of PETA. He waxes philosophic: “Man meets man, you never know who will die. Animal meets man, animal dies. I’m on the animal’s side.”

(NICK) Ilias points out the logical fallacy of Mace’s mouth being full of pork: “Isn’t this an animal you’re eating?” Without missing a beat, Mace counters, “I didn’t kill it.”

(DAVID) Brilliant! There’s obviously more to this barbarian than meets the eye. He’s not just a muscle-bound meathead; he can rationalize and equivocate with the best of them.

(NICK) These scenes of Mace and Ilias bonding are interspersed, by the way, with more scenes of Ocron in her lair.

(DAVID) And this is just fine by me, since her garb (or lack thereof) does not change throughout the film. The costume department really cut corners when it came to the female cast in this movie. And her thugs who survived their run-in with Mace have come back to report the remarkable weapon carried by the stranger from a strange land, so now she has a heads-up that the fellow she saw cold-smoking her in her vision has come to town.

(NICK) Meanwhile Mace decides to introduce Ilias to his lady-friends. “Here’s a story / of an unwashed lady / who was brining up three very muddy girls!”

(DAVID) How much hair of the dog have you had?

(NICK) Not enough.

(DAVID) Ilias asks Mace who these gals are. Mace, at his enigmatically stoic best, says, “Just people.” Seeing that Mace brightens a tad when the eldest woman comes out to greet them, Ilias asks, “Is she your woman?” Mace, foreshadowing the Free Love 60’s by several thousand years, says, “She is every time I pass by. You can have her too if you like. Or her younger sister.”

(NICK) Younger sister turns out to be the girl Ilias rescued at the river. She looked like a little girl in that scene, but now that we see her running around topless, I’m thinking I maybe underestimated her age.

(DAVID) She’s definitely past puberty, and there’s nothing little about those…You know, Nick, even I’m not going to go there this time. I’m just gonna assume she’s eighteen, although I don’t really trust those Italian filmmakers. I’d really hate to think I was ogling a minor.

(NICK) She and Ilias start exchanging come-hither looks.

(DAVID) And in the middle of the night, she wakes him up and leads him off into their own private room in the cave. I guess she’s capable of showing gratitude after all.

(NICK) She is covered head-to-foot with that caked-on white mud. If I were Ilias, I would’ve suggested she maybe shower first.

(DAVID) Alas and alack, they don’t get the chance to get down and dirty, because some of Ocron’s thugs pop up and kill her and take Ilias prisoner. Meanwhile, mom and the two young ‘uns are getting slaughtered. Mace tries to fight back, but he’s outnumbered and knocked unconscious. When he awakes, he doesn’t really waste much time mourning over the womenfolk, but his puppy-dog whimper “Ilias” makes you wonder if maybe he is discovering feelings he’s kept deep in the closet.

(NICK) C’mon, David. Every instance of phileo—platonic friendship love—between two men is not a case of homosexual tendencies.

(DAVID) Yeah, I remember your spiel about there being nothing fruity between them two hobbits.

(NICK) And back to the movie…

(DAVID) Mace goes on the warpath, ambushing Ocron’s crew and rescuing Ilias. His weapon of choice, by the way, is this thong full of rocks or something. I never did quite figure it out, but he can throw it and club you with it.

(NICK) With weapons like that, a bow’s gotta seem pretty damn impressive. These people have barely entered the Stone Age.

(DAVID) When we return Ocron’s lair, we see the price of failure demonstrated on one of her wookies. He’s stretched out on a heated altar being burned alive.

(NICK) “This movie brought to you by Fulci” reminder: we get lingering close-ups of his flesh melting, fat grease bubbling up through his fur.

(DAVID) You can almost smell the burnt dog hair.

(NICK) That’s when Ocron calls up the big gun, some kind of demon called Zora. She promises to give herself to him and fulfill his every desire if he’ll take out that meddlesome Perseus-wannabe Ilias.

(DAVID) And apparently satanic demi-gods have needs too, because he accepts. Back to our protags, who are now ambushed by…bushes?

(NICK) I’m a bit lost on the logistics of this scene, but I think what happens is a couple bushes start firing thousands of porcupine quills at them.

(DAVID) Yeah, something like that. One hits Ilias, but they manage to duck the rest. Ilias is now set on vengeance, explaining to Mace that they have an obligation to avenge the women and end Ocron’s reign of terror. This is a novel concept to Mace, who has a live-and-let-live attitude toward Ocron: “She leaves me alone, and I leave her alone.” Apparently slaying his f***buddy does not violate this arrangement.

(NICK) Ilias is the first friend he’s ever had, though, so he agrees at least to take him as far as the mountains where the witch lives. They retrieve Ilias’s little skiff—how far did he actually travel in this tub to reach the land of the lost? It doesn’t even have a sail!—and proceed downriver.

(DAVID) A complication develops, however, because that quill has poisoned Ilias, who begins breaking out in pustules.

(NICK) “This feature brought to you by Fulci” reminder: these pustules are really nasty. Fulci lingers in close-up on them erupting all over his face—throbbing boils that pop and spew forth pus.

(DAVID) Mace informs him that he has maybe a day to live, but he knows where a healing plant grows in some marshland, where Mace immediately starts rowing for. They reach the marsh, Mace leaves Ilias in the skiff to keep popping out with monster acne and promises to be back with the healing herb by morning.

(NICK) A really good set-piece here. Mace walks through a foggy marshland surrounded by gnarled trees, and the branches of the trees cradle desiccated corpses that seem to be webbed up. I was actually expecting a giant spider to appear…

(DAVID) No Shelob though. What we get instead is: zombies! Remember Fulci is most famous for his zombie films, and the walking corpses that emerge from the swamp to beset Mace are first-rate. We see Mace struggling with them, then we leave him to his fate, returning to Ilias that morning. Not only is he still covered with erupting pustules, but he is now crawling with ants. Ugh.

(NICK) Mace suddenly appears, but he raises a weapon to strike a killing blow! Only to be saved by—

(DAVID) Mace! Yes, we have two Maces, who now get into a knock-down, drag-out fight. Twin brothers? No—when one Mace finally succumbs, he transforms into (drum roll please) Zora! Then he promptly disappears.

(NICK) Real Mace has brought the herbs, and he nurses his friend back to health. Feeling better, Ilias decides—probably wisely—that he’s not cut out for this frontier, and will be heading home now, thank you. He’s had enough of the Peace Corp.

(DAVID) Classic line: Ilias tries to persuade Mace to leave with him, saying, “Come with me—we have long-haired people who work in the fields. You’d like it there.”

(NICK) Mace—probably wisely—declines. Ilias offers the bow to him, but Mace also declines that, saying, “No. This weapon is still too dangerous for this land.”

(DAVID) Obviously, under Ilias’s influence, Mace is starting to develop a conscience. Ilias is to Mace what the black obelisk was to the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, helping him on his evolutionary path toward time-shares and the Mall of America.

(NICK) Ilias sails off—well, rows off—into the horizon, and Mace heads back to…wherever he has to head back to. Mace doesn’t seem to have a homestead per se.

(DAVID) But, striding through a rocky pass that looks exactly like the one where R2D2 was ambushed by jawas, he is ambushed by rock people.

(NICK) The rock people look pretty cool, at least until they emerge from the rocks. Their faces are surreal, and they blend into the rocks quite impressively.

(DAVID) Meanwhile, father’s words come back to Ilias as he’s rowing away, and he decides he doesn’t want to come home a failure, so he turns around and heads back. Just in time to see his friend has been tied to a crucifix on a rocky ledge by the rock people, who are trying to get him to divulge the whereabouts of Ilias.

(NICK) They sound just like the Daleks when they talk!

(DAVID) I forgot to mention that Ilias ran out of arrows when Mace rescued him from Ocron’s people, so now he must call upon the power of his sun god and draw his string in faith. A blue bolt forms on the string, and when he launches it, it splits into multiple blue bolts that diverge and fly unerringly to where the various rock people are hiding! Wow, this isn’t just a bow; it’s a guided missile launcher.

(NICK) Before he decimates the rock tribe, though, one pushes Mace off the cliff, and—tied to the crucifix—he plunges into the sea.

(DAVID) That’s not the end of him, though. Underwater cam! a school of dolphins swim by, chew through his bonds, and nudge him to the surface.

(NICK) Ilias is walking dejected along the beach, when he spots Fabio lying in the surf!

(DAVID) Our protags are reunited, and no sooner is Mace conscious than he learns the madness has again overtaken his effete friend, who has again decided to go kick some snake-goddess tail.

(NICK) The pair head inland toward the witch’s mountain. That night they’re both sleeping—a mistake even a novice D&D party would not make, leaving no one on guard.

(DAVID) A fissure opens in the ground and a hairy blue thing emerges with glowing purple eyes and claws, dragging Ilias down into the subterranean darkness.

(NICK) Mace leaps down in pursuit, and is beset by a couple of these beasties that look like they stepped out of a velvet black-light poster. This scene is actually quite impressive, though maybe that was augmented by being tipsy at two in the morning. And I think it’s impressiveness is largely accidental, but it’s just so trippy. I think these beasts were actually the wolf-man costumes reused. But with the blue light on them, and the glowing purple eyes, they look like really weird creatures. The way this scene is lit, you can just make out Mace and the monsters, but everything else is pitch black. These things take flying leaps over his head, which is obviously wire work. But because of the lighting, the effect of these bodies flying through the darkness takes on a very surreal, nightmarish quality. Pretty visually disturbing—I think Fulci unwittingly stumbled into David Lynch territory here.

(DAVID) Mace manages to fight them off, and then runs through the black caves until he comes upon…

[MAJOR SPOILER ALERT]

(NICK) If you’re actually planning on watching this movie, David is about to give away a major plot twist. You’ve been warned.

(DAVID) …Ilias’s headless body strung from the ceiling. Whoa! Wasn’t he our main POV character from the very beginning? Who would’ve seen this coming?

(NICK) I certainly didn’t. Movie over? Snake goddess won?

(DAVID) No, and no. Because the special bond of friendship Mace developed with Ilias has given him something worth fighting for. But first things first. He prepares a funeral pyre and lights his friend’s corpse.

(NICK) “This feature brought to you by Fulci” reminder: the camera lingers for what seems like minutes on Ilias’s burning body, as we watch the flesh melting off in stages, until all that is left is a skeleton and smoldering ashes.

(DAVID) In a scene reminiscent of Obi-Wan post-death chatting up Luke, the voice of Ilias informs Mace, “Kronos’ power through the bow will now pass on to you.” Not that it did him much good. Ilias’s voice then instructs Mace to consecrate himself by rubbing Ilias’s ashes on himself, so Mace reaches right into his chest cavity, hauls some ashes out and does that whole Catholic Lent thing.

(NICK) Wouldn’t that chest cavity be like three hundred degrees?

(DAVID) Meanwhile, Ilias’s head is delivered to Ocron. And you’ll recall she and her man-puppies get high on brains. But when she sets her adversary’s head down on her altar, his eyes open! She gets really pissed at this, scolding Zora that he managed only to kill his body, not his soul.

(NICK) Which means, I guess, that A) they won’t be able to get high off his brains and B) he’s still a threat—although without a body, it’ll be pretty hard for him to draw a bowstring.

(DAVID) Segue to Mace showing up outside the cave. He puts his hand out, karate-chop style, just like Ilias’s father did at the beginning of the movie, and the bow comes flying into his hand. Then he draws it back and lets loose with the blue bolt. It passes right through the cave walls, striking and breaking Ocron’s mask. Which reveals—she’s one ugly b****.

(NICK) There’s a good reason she never took off that mask.

(DAVID) Then Mace miraculously appears in the cave with her, apparently endowed with the ability to pass through walls like Kitty Pryde now. Another bolt to the chest—“There is a shortage of perfect breasts in the world. It would be a shame to damage yours…” He didn’t say that, the line just came to mind.

(NICK) Princess Bride.

(DAVID) Good call. Mace wanders off into the desert, having been redeemed. As soon as farming is invented in his country, I bet he becomes a vegetarian.

(NICK) Quite prominently when the credits begin to roll: “Any reference to persons or events is purely coincidental.” Ya think?

(DAVID) Tally! Monster types: 6 (Snake goddess—although this may be one of the only times a character shows up in both the Monster and Lovely Lady Lumps categories, wolf-men, the supernatural being known as Zora, zombies, rock people, blue-light-special monsters) Lovely Lady Lumps: 8 (one pair of which is on display for nearly half the film)

RATING

(NICK) I’m giving this a split rating. There are some standout scenes—the ghoul-infested bog, the rock people, the bizarre flying-purple-people-eaters. Some humor with how un-PC the Mace character is. If you like this sort of thing—low budget, gory sword and sorcery—it’s 2.5 arrows. For the rest of the world, 2 arrows.

(DAVID) 5 arrows, baby!

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