Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
2LDK - Stop pushing boundaries!
Let’s look at modern films. With a few notable exceptions, cinema seems hellbent on the bizarre (and frankly WRONG) notion that more = better. From Lord of the Rings (MOAR FIGHTING PEOPLE!), to Avatar (MOAR DIMENSIONS!, MOAR MONEY), to Inception (MOAR LAYERS OF REALITY!) there is a definite trend towards the idea of giving you “more bang for your buck”. As cinema prices skyrocket, some bright spark seems to have formulated an idea:
If we throw millions of characters, a mountain of subplots and the biggest special effects ever made at the audience, all spread across roughly 3 hours, then they can’t possibly leave the cinema disappointed and wanting their money back.
Can they?
Well yes. They can. Every time I leave the cinema with a numb rear-end from 3hrs in a seat, having just watched special effects equivalent to the GDP of a small country I feel slightly hollow inside. Modern blockbusters tend to be simply too sprawling, too epic, too mammoth. They need to be cut down to size. Even Inglourious Basterds (my favourite of last year) clocked in at 3hrs or so and would’ve benefitted from being much shorter. Tarrantino had talked about having enough material to make several films; he should’ve done just that, rather than bashing them together into a film which (although wonderful) was simply too much.
So imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this:
The Duel Project was a challenge issued to Ryuhei Kitamura and Yukihiko Tsutsumi by producer Shinya Kawai during a night of drinking. The challenge was for the two directors to see who could make the best feature film with two principal actors/actresses battling in one principal location in the time span of one week.
Quote from wikipedia.
So… hardly any characters, a single location and an incredibly tight schedule? Fantastic. This is the kind of back to basics approach that cinema needs.
To date, I have only seen 2LDK, Tsutsumi’s half of the project. It clocks in at about 70 minutes. It has only two speaking characters. It’s entirely set in one flat (2LDK is a Japanese term to describe a 2 bedroom shared apartment). It’s fast, funny, witty, brutal and violent in equal measures.
The two characters are rival actresses, competing for the same role and discussing their chances. The two very different people begin to needle each other, moving from gentle jibes to cutting remarks and finally escalating to full-on fighting. It’s fantastic. There’s not a single dull moment as the tension is slowly cranked up from a relatively mundane beginning until the outbreak of violence is almost a relief.
I clearly wouldn’t want every film to follow this pattern (though I’m certainly anxious to see the other half of the Duel Project) but it is very refreshing to be shown what can be done with so little. Hollywood terms would have us believe that “low budget” meant only “crappy horror” (no bad thing!) or “over-earnest indie dirge” (which is all too often true!). 2LDK is a timely reminder that there is a lot more to a film than the MOAR IS BETTER fallacy that blockbuster cinema perpetuates.
Driller Killer (or "The Trouble With a Reputation")
Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer is a film far better known for its reputation than for its content. For those that don’t know, the film is a slasher flick from the US in 1979 and gained it’s level of notoriety in Britain in the early 1980s when it was included in the Director of Public Prosecutions list of films to be charged under obscenity laws. This list became known as the “video nasties” and would eventually prompt the creation of the UK’s Video Recording Act 1984, a piece of law that, for the first time, meant it was a legal requirement to have any video sold in the UK approved by the BBFC (the UK film regulatory office).
Driller Killer, available unrated on VHS at the time was promptly banned. It was not approved for release by the BBFC until 1999, some 15 years later.
All this excitement does, of course, make it a ‘must-watch’ for any self-respecting lover of trashy, gorey, sleazy cinema. Sadly, the film itself isn’t very good. And let’s be honest: my standards are pretty damn low!
Let’s start with some plot; Reno is a struggling artist living in New York. He does some moderately good paintings and gets the occaisonal comission but is having some difficulty making ends meet and paying the rent is becoming a pressing issue. And then blah blah blah stuff happens and he turns into a psycho with a drill. It’s hardly riveting stuff.
But we weren’t watching it for the plot were we? We were watching it for the DRILLING! The KILLING! The depraved mess that saw it banned for 15 years from shops in the UK. As might be expected, time has not treated this shock factor well; we see more and bloodier films all the time, a slope that leads Abel Ferrara’s sick and twisted video nasty looking like a film we might catch on evening television. Yeah there’re a couple of fairly powerful scenes (I’m thinking the drill in the tramps forehead…) but it’s hardly the stuff nightmares are made of and it’s hard to imagine it having a corrupting effect on anyone really - video nasties were blamed for violence in the 80s as much as violent computer games are today.
The most damning thing you can say about this film is that, far from being especially good or bad, far from being impressively depraved or tame, this is really quite middle-of-the-road. I wanted to love it, I wanted it to live up to its reputation but I came away feeling vaguely disappointed.
Stonehenge Apocalypse: What's the disaster genre about?
BOOM! BLAM! SMASH! KABOOM!
There’s something so captivating about the end of the world. Pretty much ever since someone thought “hey, who needs a plot when I have special effects?”, the apocalyptic disaster has been a mainstay of the cinema world. It’s pretty much the ultimate one-upmanship in cinematic disaster terms (speaking on a terrestrial level at least). Why blow up a car when you could blow up a house? Why blow up a house when you could blow up a whole street? Why blow up a whole street when you could… And so on and so forth until someone says: “Let’s destroy the whole damn WORLD!”. And everyone high-fives him/her for their brilliant idea and they all go down the pub to have a drink and to bask in how awesome they are.
At least that’s how I imagine the boardroom discussions that precede a disaster movie.
From H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds through to last year’s 2012, the disaster movie has a pedigree of at least 60 years. It’s risen and fallen in popularity over that time but, for a genre in which special effects play at least as large a part as characterisation, plot or any of that “traditional” stuff, as special effects improve the genre will find new heights. Or… it’ll find bigger and better explosions at the very least.
On the flip-side to this, though, is the fact that - as trashy low-content, low-brainpower movies, they fall squarely into the b-movie half of our (conceptual) cinematic Venn-diagram. As everyone know, B-movies and big-budgets do not exactly go hand in hand. This can spell awkward difficulties for the disaster movie, the very definition of a “the-more-cash-the-better(bigger)” genre.
So who will rise to the challenge and step up and create the low-budget disaster flick? Well… just about everyone in fact. There’s heaps of them. Puzzlingly, for a type of film whose continued existence is only validated by special-effects improvements, everyone seems to take a gleeful pride in churning out disaster movies with craptastic effects. Perhaps they’re confident that their obvious enthusiasm will override any technical issues. Perhaps even more surprisingly, this mostly seems to be true.
The film that sparked this post was the SyFy channel’s very own Stonehenge Apocalypse. There are certain things you expect from a SyFy original: bad acting, crap CG effects, a silly idea and 90 minutes of good, solid FUN. Stonehenge Apocalypse takes these values very much to heart and delivers each in spadefuls.
The basic plot-line is that all the world’s ancient monuments are connected by lay-lines (or something like that) and channel electro-magnetic fequencies all over the place. When Stonehenge moves and starts to vapourise people (yes!), the world begins to get worried; the British scientists want to study it, the British military want to nuke it and only the once-superstar-but-now-discredited physicist from Maine can offer an explanation. Except of course no-one listens to him because he’s waving around a device that looks like a portable tv and babbling about undiscovered ancient civilisations.
This film has quite literally everything you could ask for: Agressive ancient monuments, over-zealous military, a cult, gunfights, a lone hero who sees things clearly. And they blow stuff up too! I shan’t give away too much about which places get blown up (though would it really matter if I did?) except for the Pyramids (which I just HAD to include a picture of) and um,.. the ENTIRETY OF INDONESIA. We don’t really see Indonesia explode, but it’s passed off with a bit of a shrug; “oh yeah, Indonesia just exploded”.
So thank you SyFy channel; thank you for reminding me that actually I was wrong. THe disaster movie is not about the quality of the effects, not at all. The disaster movie is about blowing stuff up and having a lot of fun. Stonehenge Apocalypse ticked both those boxes.
A few of my favourite shots now:
THE PYRAMIDS EXPLODE! KABOOOM!
And a COmputer-Generated Plane! Wow!
Seriously, this film is brilliant. Go watch SYFY NOW! (Sky 129 in the UK)
Please remember to check out our new sister blog Cult Collage!
Poster Hunt #11 - Nightfall (and New Blog! New Blog!)
First up, here’s a Poster Hunt for July.
Here are a couple of posters for Jaques Tourneur’s Nightfall (IMDb) from 1957, starring Aldo Ray, Brian Keith and Anne Bancroft. I don’t write much about the films for these Poster Hunt posts (as I select them for artwork rather than the film - most of them I haven’t seen), so if you do want to know more about the film I’ll direct you to this comprehensive blog post at Noir of the Week.
Every day for five years? That’s quite a claim!
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Secondly, I’d like to introduce you to Chopping Mall’s edit: SHORT-LIVED, NOW DEFUNCT) new sister blog, Cult Collage. The focus of this one will be mostly pictures (although music might feature occasionally too) and it’ll pick up on interesting film and non-film related ephemera. It’s pretty difficult to describe what I intend it to be; I think a collection of interesting images sums it up best, with a leaning towards pulp-art.
Currently it only has the 11 Poster Hunt pages from this blog but it’ll be updated often (far more often than this one) with other interesting posters, leaflets and ephemera.
So head over to:
Sherlock Holmes or Have The Asylum Upped Their Game?
[Screenshots and pictures coming soon]
Nowadays, with golden age of the b-movie so far behind us, with double screenings a rarity and everyone so enthralled to the big-budget CGI of Hollywood, the b-movie has become a self-conscious postmodern creation. No longer does it just happen to be bad, trashy, sleazy or cheesy; the b-movie style is actively sought, a nostalgic re-creation of the kind of films that were once so important and are now generally obsolete.
There seems to be three different directions that the modern b-movie goes, with all of them falling somewhere within this triangle of styles/intentions. At one extreme we have the indulgent nostalgia of films like Planet Terror, Death Proof etc; these are big-budget films made by big-name stars - their link the b-movies is through being a loving recreation of the tropes and cliches of this kind of cinema - we get girls on bikes, exploding heads, senseless killing and big guns.
Another extreme is the ironically crappy film; though they might not have started out intending to be such a thing, Troma Films have become the standard-bearers of this variety of b-movie. They’re awful films. We know they’re awful, they know they’re awful, but they clearly have such fun making them and throw everything they can at making them silly fun to watch (the recurring continuity-smashing car crash has become an incredible in-joke) that we can forgive them an awful lot. They’re certainly not to everyone’s taste but you can’t doubt their love for what they do for an instant; Lloyd Kaufman’s passion and constant championing of independent craptastic cinema is astounding.
Now we come to the third point of the triangle and it’s by far the least interesting; b-movies churned out for cash. Of course, that’s what a b-movie always was, although by now it’s so far removed from creativity and any pretensions of art that it tends to be very dull. As much as Troma represented the previous point, this one belongs primarily to The Asylum (although Video Brinqueado have a fair claim to make for this title too…). Asylum films tend to me send-ups or rip-offs (depending on your point of view) of major budget Hollywood productions. From Transmorphers through Alien Versus Hunter to Sunday School Musical. Whilst some of these might sound funny, that’s exactly the point; Asylum’s creativity rarely extends beyond a humourous title. These films are cheaply made, imagination-less cash-ins, trading on selling cheap films with funny titles that no-one will enjoy. Death Racers their rip-off of the Hollywood remake of Death Race 2000 that starred the Insane Clown Posse was impossibly awful; not bad in a so-bad-it’s-good way but in a please-god-rip-out-my-eyeballs way.
Of late, however, Asylum seem to have upped their game somewhat. First came last year’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus which - as well as not actually being a direct rip-off of anything - was actually, as far as Asylum films go, pretty damn good. So much so that it generated enough internet hype to earn it a limited cinema release and the director a handful of interviews in film magazines and broadsheet newspapers. I watched it, I enjoyed it but I noted it down as a one-off fluke for the Asylum and didn’t get my hopes up for more.
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I have just finished watching Sherlock Holmes (NOT the Guy Ritchie version, but the Asylum’s) and… though I find it hard to admit, it was really quite good.
We have lesser-known but not unknown actors, a good fun story and… DINOSAURS.
The dark of Victorian London fortunately encouraged them to make a film with (slightly) less crappy CG effects than many of their previous efforts; smoky moonlit streets creating far more atmosphere than I can recall in an Asylum film before. The story is indeed completely bonkers - possibly blending elements of Conan-Doyle’s other masterpiece The Lost World - but is certainly never dull. Strange deaths and reports of prehistoric monsters are haunting London and only Holmes will be able to put together the clues to discover the answer.
It’s at it’s best when it’s being mysterious and - to tell the truth - does fall apart somewhat around the hour mark as they swap intrigue and mystery for a bombastic last half-hour but hopefully by then you’ll already have been suckered in.
I should make it very clear; I am by no means claiming that this is some masterpiece; it’s crap… but it’s not nearly as crap as you might expect and, above all, it’s entirely watchable crap. If the Asylum can churn out produce more like this, I’ll have to revise my opinion of them.
(They currently have Titanic 2 in the works! Keep an eye out for that…)