B-Movie
Halloween Bloodbath
It seems like I haven’t really had enough horror films featured on Chopping Mall lately. Which is a shame: horror films are really what this blog is all about. Even the name comes from a horror film. Perhaps there’s no better time than Halloween to catch up on some splatters, slashers and spooks. So here is Chopping Mall’s extra special Halloween Bloodbath Horror Film review! Here we go….
Aerobicide
Now this was really quite something. It’s a while since I’ve watched anything that screamed 80s any louder than this. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything more 80s. This is a film set in an aerobics class, with pumping disco music throughout, enormous haircuts, occasional moustaches and lots of lycra. This could almost be a museum piece: look at what people wore in those days!
Once you get over the disco beat, though, this is pretty standard slasher fare. The film is set in and around Rhonda’s Gymnasium. Sadly, Rhonda’s place seems to be plagued by murders. A woman is stabbed in the shower. Things go bump in the night. Etc. We get the usual crew: a slightly creepy police man who could be capable of murder; a slightly creepy strapping-handsome-gym-beefcake who could be capable of murder; some ditsy ladies who clearly aren’t capable of very much apart from aerobic and squealing; Rhonda and a creepy lecherous idiot guy who we’re clearly supposed to suspect as the murderer but patently isn’t.
It’s not really very much fun. The gore is disappointingly minimal - although the stabbing in the shower isn’t bad - the fight scenes are hilariously awful (complete with video-game-esque THWACK sounds), the acting isn’t much better and the plot is nothing if not predictable. But perhaps I’m being too hard on this one: it’s not without it’s charm. I’d imagine that after a few beers, or just put on as background noise, this wouldn’t be so bad.
Bikini Girls on Ice
I saw this listed as one of those “so bad you will not believe your eyes” titles and …oh boy… it certainly was. BGoI is clearly one of the many victims of the “good name - crap film” syndrome that plagues modern B-movies (See Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Or, rather, don’t). But how could this be? How could you go wrong with a title like Bikini Girls on Ice? What kind of idiot would you have to be to screw that up.
Sadly, screw it up they did. BGoI - which is sadly not about ice-skating women - follows a handful of women who, whilst on their (apparently very long) way to a bikini-car-wash fundraiser, break down at an abandoned garage. Blah, blah, the usual business. There is, of course, some murderous psychopath lurking in said abandoned garage who picks off the stranded visitors one by one. At first they assume that the missing people have just wandered off but, once they’ve found some body parts, they realise they’re living through a nightmare. Blah blah blah.
Seriously. This was astonishingly dull. Not only did it have absolutely no sense of tension or surprise (you absolutely knew what was going to happen ages before it did) but they completely forgot to create a convincing explanation for why the killer was killing! It’s not even like I have high standards - the eventual motive in Aerobicide is rubbish - but I do expect at least a gesture at a decent motive. That’s really what a slasher is all about: without an explanation of the killer’s motive, a slasher becomes just a string of pointless death scenes. To get away with that, you’d have to at least make those death scenes really spectacular. Sadly, these ones aren’t.
Ultimately, Bikini Girls on Ice makes 80minutes feel like a very long time and gives little by way of entertainment.
Killdozer
Aaaand finally: here’s something to really get excited about. Killdozer, also blessed with a brilliant name, manages to live up to it. I would call this a by-numbers killer-vehicle-terrorising-everyone flick, but I’m not sure there even is a by-numbers layout for this …er… niche genre.
There’s surprisingly little to say about it: conveniently cut-off from the rest of the world on an island in the middle of god-knows-where, a small team of basically unlikeable construction workers find themselves unexpectedly terrorised by one of their own bulldozers. Most of the film follows the machine picking them off one-by-one until they really begin to get it together and fight back.
It’s absolutely as silly as it sounds. What sets it apart from disappointing modern killer-object movies (like Rubber) is that they play it absolutely dead straight. There isn’t even a hint of smug, self-aware laughter here. They must have been sniggering on set but none of it carries into the film. If only more silly horror would take itself so seriously. Great fun.
Phew. All done. Let’s go and watch Beetle Juice now?
Mould
OK, so just few days ago I was wowed by the poster for Mould* and decided that I’d almost certainly have to watch it. I must admit I wasn’t actually expecting very much: once you’ve seen a number of 21st century B-movies you tend towards pessimism. Most recent films that aim for the schlocky, low-grade style of classic 70s and 80s films do so in such a self-conscious, post-Planet-Terror, we’re-so-very-hip-and-grindhouse way that they’re ultimately pretty disappointing. To my surprise, Mould* resisted all that and played it straight-faced and gorey and, as a result, was a whole lot of fun.
[Yes, the film is actually called ‘Mold’ but the word looks silly without a ‘u’ in the middle. Sorry America. You might be right about ‘color’ but oyu’re wrong about ‘mold’]
The plot is about as complex as you’d expect from a low-budget film about mould. A group of basically good but apparently conscience-free scientists (oh scientists, why are you always evil?) have been funded to create a new form of super-evil life-destroying hyper-contagious mould. Y’know, so America can remain a superpower or something. And kill people. It’s pretty vague, but let’s be honest, who cares? The important point is that this mould is in their lab and it is very, very bad for you.
And it’s demonstration day. So as well as 4 scientists (Old scientist, lady scientist, two young scientists who both fancy the pants off lady scientist) we have a coke-snorting congressman, his effeminate aide, a cigar-toting army general and his dumb, macho soldier aide. So now we have cowards, scientists, bullies and a woman. All locked in together in a building with some mould. AND GUESS WHAT!? Despite all the precautions taken, the mould contaminates one of them and, from that point on, the worry of containment and contamination takes over the film.
Budget-wise, of course, this is very efficient. Most of the action takes place in one room, with a few shots set in the neighbouring corridors. This, thankfully, means they were able to save all the rest of their cash to spend on splattering green goo and blood across… well… everything. Mould is one of those that you can imagine was an awful lot of fun to make and the enthusiasm carries across onto the screen. I don’t want to spoil the surprise(s) but we have splattering heads, exploding internal organs, facial bleeding. And then later, some guns.
There really isn’t very much more to tell: Mould is an awful lot of fun. It does perhaps start a little slowly but the slow-moving first half hour is definitely worth it for the oozing, gooey, mouldy pay-off that follows. This is modern low budget trash made with old-fashioned enthusiasm. Highly recommended.
**Available right now at www.moldthemovie.com **
Island of the Fishmen aka L'isola degli uomini pesce
Well, it’s been a while since I wrote (or watched, for that matter) anything as gloriously silly as Island of the Fishmen. Whilst I have seen it before, it was only once and somewhat over a year ago, so I thought this re-imagining of Dr Moreau’s isalnd was ripe for another watch. And what a (ahem) treat it is!
It opens as you might expect a tense serious monster film to: the sea is still, several injured men look silently at the camera and a gull screeches overhead. Something has gone very wrong here, but we just don’t know what! Maybe this will be, despite the name, a slow-building tense affair, all hinted-at flashes and unsettling curiosities….. OH WAIT, NO! MONSTERS HAVE ARRIVED!
The boat rocks, the men shout and scream, despite clearly being in a studio rather than the ocean they are plunged into the sea! We see flashes of fishy monster hands and eyes… and all this in the first five minutes.
The greatest thing about this film is that, unlike many of its ilk, it never really slows down. All too often, I’ve watched dull films with snappy titles, fun beginnings and then a tedious 45 minute crawl towards a decent finale, the kind of film that makes 90 minutes seem like a very long time indeed. Thankfully, Island… is not one of these. The pace does dip and wobble but the sense of threat and excitement never really leaves. Even within the first half hour or so most of the first characters meet grisly fates (more fishmen!) , presumably-poisonous snakes have threatened the others and native islanders have attacked and captured our heroes. Through all this carnage walks the impressive mustachioed badguy, Rackham (Richard Johnson), sneering and snarling his lines at his captive would-be wife and our shipwrecked hero.
From here on in it just gets sillier. We learn about the rediscovery of Atlantis, the origin of the savage clawed fishmen and the dastardly Rackham’s true plans. It’s chaotically silly stuff that makes little sense to anyone but it romps on through with gleeful abandon. And it is great fun.
I don’t want to give too much of the fabulous plot away but I couldn’t help but mention the volcano shots… Every now and then the camera cuts to some very impressively shot footage of erupting volcanoes - obviously lifted from a nature documentary - which, when contrasted with the unspeakably silly Fishmen costumes, makes them look even more ridiculous than they otherwise would have done.
N.B. This was re-cut and re-released in the US as Screamers. I’m not really sure in what ways that version was different, as I watched the Italian print, but I do know that Roger Corman re-shot the intro to add more gore… The poster for Screamers bears almost no relation to what happens in the Island of the Fishmen!
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!
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.
********
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…)