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.
Death Line a.k.a. Raw Meat
This poster bears stunningly little resemblence to the film. How puzzling.
For a long while, the disused stations of the London Underground have interested me; despite being closed, many years out of service, they’re still…. there. They sit, lurking under city streets, completely forgotten by the people who walk past their once-entrances or sit on trains that rush past their once-platforms. Some of them can still be seen from trains, some of them were converted to war-time bunkers and still have propaganda posters on the walls, some them house plague-ridden cannibals, tucked well away from the city’s lights.
Ok, so the very last bit may not be strictly true, but it’s the central premise of this film.
Hopping cautiously from the train
You can smoke on the tube! Right from the start you know this film is pretty old
Death Line is a horror-thriller with some pretty funny bits, some pretty creepy bits and one bit that’ll definitely make you jump. It’s not an excellent story, admittedly, but suspend your disbelief for a second and follow me down the rabbit hole escalator and into Russell Square station…
JUst along from Russell Square is an abandoned half-finished station, called Museum. Whilst there was really a British Museum station once-upon-a-time (closed 1933), the extra uncompleted line underneath and the cave-in that trapped workers in the tunnel are fictitious. According to the film, the working men and women trapped by this cave-in were simply left to rot after the contracting company went bankrupt. What they hadn’t counted on was that the trapped workers didn’t die; oh no, they lived on underground, drinking the water that trickled through the rocks and eating human flesh. Fast forward a couple of generations and we have an inbred, grunting cannibal stalking the tubes, picking off lone visitors to Russell Square late at night.
It’s an odd film. The Inspector (Donald Pleasence) and his Sergent are comic characters, all stout British swearing and drinking, whilst the underground man is genuinely pretty creepy. Both are pretty good but they just don’t feel like the same film. It’s noticeable that, by the time they finally actually investigate the tubes, Donald Pleasence seems to be playing a very different character.
“Yes, we’d better investigate. But first, some tea!”
The speed with which it cuts from laughs above ground to moody scenes underground doesn’t really help the horror factor, it just makes it seem boring. One very long shot that pans over all sorts of rotting and savaged flesh, accompanied by only the sound of dripping water is almost atmospheric and powerful but… in contrast to the scene before it, it just becomes a bit dull. Which is a shame, as overall it’s mostly pretty good.
Overall, the funny bits are funny, the creepy bits are creepy and the music is brilliant throughout. Only the odd editing makes it seem a little slow. What is perhaps its best feature though, is that we actually feel sorry for the cannibal. This is no crazed beast, the poor guy was born and raised in the dark and only kills to survive. That the film doesn’t take the easy route and just make him as disgusting is possible is pretty impressive.
Oh, and the bar scene is amazing.
There’s even time for a Christopher Lee cameo
Help The Video Dead find it's way onto DVD!
A worthwhile project if ever there was one.
Copied wholesale from the myspace page:
On July 21st, 2009, I was browsing around and decided to check and see if one of my all time favorite cult films was scheduled for a DVD release this year as I had noticed a lot of catalog titles from various studios were being released on DVD for the first time this year. To my surprise, the film was indeed listed and was slated to be released on October 27, 2009!
Unfortunately the release was not a legitimate release by the studio that owned the film and when it was brought to the attention of MGM - the studio that does rightfully own the film - the release was ceased from said company.
Shortly after that released was canceled, I contacted MGM about releasing the title legitimately and they said it could be a possibility providing they find it is a cult film, that will of course sell on store shelves and would be a welcome addition to any cult film collector’s shelve.
Thus began the campaign to get THE VIDEO DEAD released on DVD, in it’s original widescreen form, and out to the public.
Instead of starting an online petition, which sometimes can go either way, I decided setting up a page dedicated solely to getting the film out on DVD would be an easier and more efficient way for me and others to relay information in one place to show to MGM and say; “Yes, the market for this film is there, yes it will sell, yes it is a cult film…yes we know how bad it is - but we still love it!”
So tell your friends, post your comments, send your messages, post links, pictures, whatever you think will help - let’s get this cult classic released on DVD finally the way it deserves to be released!
**If you do not have a MySpace and want to help, please email; FoxDrop@4icc.com and request to get THE VIDEO DEAD on DVD! MGM and FOX DO pay attention to these emails and do keep track of them! However, if you DO have a MySpace, all you have to do is add this page as a friend and that’s it! MGM and Fox are monitoring the amount of friends this page has and the more people who are here, the more they see the potential to release the film on DVD! Comments and bulletins are appreciated but not necessary!**
Trailer below:
Poster Hunt #2 - Frauleins In Uniform
Poster Hunt was going to be an exploration of the most incredible movie-posters. The sublime, the ridiculous and the wonderfully crass.
Following on from the last though, which scored higher in the crass stakes than I could have hoped for before I found it, I am sticking with the (deservedly) much maligned Nazisploitation genre…
Here, without further ado, is the poster for your new favourite film…
-1.JPG)
Wow.
Described on IMDb as “In the last days of WW2, women are volunteering from all over Germany to serve in the front lines by having sex with the brave Nazi soldiers…”
The Nights of Terror (Le Notti del Terrore)
Another day, another Spaghetti Zombie flick. Fresh from the prime years of Italia’s Zombie cycle comes Andrea Bianchi’s Nights of Terror.
This film has been called a lot of things. Good isn’t usually one of them. IMDb reviews run from a verdict of “unintentionally hilarious” to “unbearably awful” and, whilst there’s definitely elements of the latter, I must side with the former.
Like so many of the others (and indeed, most of the films I cover here…) it gets off to a bad start on paper.
- Andrea Bianchi cut his teeth very much on the porn side of exploitation films: his previous titles to this included Confessions of a Frustrated Housewife, Strip Nude for Your Killer and The Erotic Dreams of a Lady.
- The film has almost no plot
- The scenes are pretty much split equally between the central characters fumbling with each other and the central characters being hunted by zombies.
Of course, you could very well argue that some of those may be positives….
^^ There is literally nothing that gives away that this film was made in 1980.^^
The ‘plot’ can be pretty easily dismissed as: luxury-loving loved-up couples spend some time at a castle/mansion house. Zombies rise from their graves. Zombies kill central characters. The end.
The characters are similarly bland; in the film’s defence, things to move at a good enough pace that we are hardly given time to consider how little depth Bianchi gives his protagonists but…. on the flipside: whenever any one of them dies, there’s a fairly large temptation to shrug your shoulders and mutter, “oh well”. It’s not as if we really ever care about any of them. The women especially (as might be expected from a 1980 Italian exploitation horror) are completely characterless. Of the prominent women, one is zombified fairly early, the other encounters her slaughtered son and hardly utters another word whilst the third…. She is so enormously irritating in the typical ‘all-a-woman-can-do-when-confronted-by-something-scary-is-scream’ manner that, when she stumbles into a (rather oddly placed) bear-trap, I was vaguely pleased. Sadly, all it means is that she screamed and squawked for the rest of the film, albeit now with added limping.
Frustratingly boring characters aside, the zombification is quite fun. The make-up is somewhat heavier than normal (in the vein of the Spanish conquistadores of Fulci’s Zombi 2) but they are pleasingly grotty with maggots and all. The gore is a little thin on the ground perhaps, but the bits we do get are fairly satisfying. And THAT breast-feeding moment needs no more elaboration…
Perhaps I’m being too harsh. After all, for all the lack of plot, the flat characters, the atrocious dubbing, the obviously budget-limited set, this film moves along at a keen pace and is a lot of fun. Maybe not one to treasure, watch again, or even remember but… if you’re after a fun film to watch, in which stupid people get killed by the undead, this might just fit your requirements.
Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata)
Ok. First off we’ll do a quick Zombie-Survival, multiple-choice quiz question:
You are on the run from vicious, fast, flesh-eating, blood-drinking ghouls. And your escape-vehicle is running out of petrol. When you stumble upon a deserted looking petrol station, do you…
a)Fill your van at the pump, taking advantage of how there appears to be no-one around, and continue fleeing, or…
b)Pop in, have a rummage through the (presumably deceased) owner’s clothes and make yourself a cup of coffee, whilst dicussing how man’s greed has triggered this crisis. Upon discovering one of the zombies in the back garden, rather than running away, you attack it, alerting others to your presence, allowing them to find your car which you then firebomb, before escaping on foot with only a flask of brandy.
If you anwered a) you might stand a chance of survival. If you anwered b) you’ll die like the suckers in this film.
Oh look, there’s some glamourous dancers. What’ll happen to them, I wonder….?
Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City is both wonderful and awful, serious and silly. The characters are numerous and killed off so fast that we can’t really care very much about them; when the military lieutenant is forced to shoot his zombified wife through the head, we’re vaguely aware that this seems a shame, but it’s hardly a tragedy as none of the characters have enough time to create any depth or link with the watcher.
You can’t fault it on body count though. The monsters of the film might not be strictly zombies - they are victims of radiation who haven’t died and move incredibly fast (think 28days…) and wield weapons - but they certainly cause havoc, feed on blood and pass on their contamination to those that they injure. And the injure an awful lot of people!
The planned air-strike is somewhat derailed by the discovery of an entire airbase of dead pilots and the notquitezombies munch away at doctors, nurses, patients, soldiers, dancers and relatives with ample enthusiasm.
Plot-wise, this is little more than a vehicle for graphic violence and, although this sounds like a criticism, at least it’s fairly open in its lowly ambitions. Refreshingly unpretentious! So if we can’t rate a film on its plot, what can we use to evaluate it?
Why, the nature of the killings of course! Zombie movies are generally an excuse to be inventive and/or outrageous in terms of death scenes and this is fairly competent in this regard. Highlights include beating a vicar’s brains out on the altar, a harpoon through the chest and a scene with a rollercoaster that I won’t spoil…
Whch leads us to Zombie-Survival, multiple-choice quiz question number 2:
If, when fleeing a zombie-outbreak, you encounter an abandoned fairground do you…
a)wander in, or..
b)stay the hell away.
I’ll let you figure the answer to that one yourself…
