Play you like a violin.
(Part of today’s White Elephant Blogathon hosted by Paul Clark.)
Famed German actor/full-tilt psycho Klaus Kinski only directed one film in his lifetime. Ostensibly a biopic about violinist Niccolo Paganini, Kinski Paganini is really more a frenzied act of grotesque creation, a wild and senseless cascade of fevered, sexual images that bludgeon the viewer into thinking A) something profound here is being said and B) all these images relate to each other and add up to something. The validity of both claims is questionable.
So of course I dug it.
The main influence here is clearly Ken Russell in the ’70s. Imagine one of Ken Russell’s freewheeling composer biographies (say, The Music Lovers) as a rowing team. Now imagine that the boat capsized and the right half of the team was thrown overboard, unrecoverable… yet the left half carries on, rowing that boat. Kinski Paganini is akin to watching that rowing team try to soldier on: a lot of energy is being expended to go around and around in circles for some indiscernable purpose, and while the act itself seems strange and pointless, it’s also weirdly mesmerizing.
Clearly Kinski feels a kinship with Paganini. In telling the violinist’s story, he’s also telling his own (fitting, then, that this was his last film). And apparently, Klaus’s story involves him getting ass. Lots and lots of ass. Women tend to find his Paganini irresitible; in this universe, the omnipresent sound of his violin causes every woman, from scullery maid to proper lady, to wet themselves is unquenchable sexual desire. And if by some bizarre chance a lady isn’t charmed into sex frenzy by Paganini’s music or his animal charisma (which wafts off him like fog rolling off San Francisco Bay)… well, it doesn’t really matter because Paganini’s probably going to rape her anyway. He’s a misunderstood genuis artist with a God complex and a permanent hard-on.
With that last sentence, am I talking about Paganini or Kinski? And in the context of the film, does it matter?
Paganini lurches and stumbles through one setpiece after another, with little attention paid to coherence - here’s Paganini playing, here’s Paganini fucking, here’s Paganini with his son (played, of course, by Kinski’s young son), here’s Paganini defying the artistic establishment, here’s more fucking, here’s some horses fucking. But much as Paganini seems to inspire mesmeric attention from all he encounters, and much as Kinski’s career was defined by his ferociously magnetic personality, Paganini rivets the attention through sheer brass-balls lunatic energy. You simply can’t not look away, and whether this is coherent or true to the life of Paganini or just an ego-trip for Kinksi or whatever become besides the point. All those years of working alongside Werner Herzog seem to have taught Kinski something - that often times the notion of “ecstatic truth” is more important than anything else. Would that more biopics looked like this crazed concoction.
I could go on, but there’s only so much that rational analysis can do in a case like this. At some point, you’re going to have to meet the crazy head on. So I give you my hand-written unexpurgated notes on Paganini, written on the fly while watching the film. Hopefully, these can give an idea of what the act of watching Kinski Paganini is like.
Horror Challenge entry #8: Marebito (2004, Takashi Shimizu)
Is Shimizu a protege of Shinya Tsukamoto? If so, that would explain a lot about his filmmaking. Tsukamoto stars in this film that Shimizu knocked out between Grudge franchise entries, and his particular brand of vaguely meaningful incoherence is all over this tale of a freelance photographer who descends into an underground world and comes back with… something. I’d lay the blame on Shinya except that the Grudge films also traffic in vaguely meaningful incoherence, as if everything will make subconscious sense if you just throw out enough spooky signifiers and tenuous connections, so I’d say it’s more of a meeting of similar minds. But while The Grudge is pared down until there’s nothing left but ghostly imagery, Marebito has so many shards of ideas in its head that it can’t keep it all straight and ends up doing a disservice to everything it tries to do: It’s a meditation on cinema versus reality! It’s a meta-horror film about what it means to be frightened! It’s a descent-into-madness narrative! It’s a wriggling mass of references to other works, from Lovecraft to The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser to Peeping Tom to (no joke) The Little Shop of Horrors! It’s all of that AT THE SAME TIME!!!! All that, and it still adds up to zilch. I think I’m done with Shimizu, frankly.
The Rosetta shot: “Deported Women of the SS Special Section”
Yeah, more boobs. It always gets worse before it gets better, etc.
Seriously, though, look at that shot. What do you see? Breasts, naked flesh, a large phallic nightstick. You know what you don’t see in that shot? Swastikas. Uniforms. Nazi paraphernalia. Things like that. You’d think that, if I am to capture a film that openly traffics in Nazi symbols, I’d have to include an actual Nazi somewhere in the shot. The fact that I don’t should tell you something very important about the particularly rancid chunk of sputum horked up by writer/director Rino Di Silvestro, and here it is:
Deported Women of the SS Special Section is dismal, an absolute failure on every artistic level right down to that awkward mouthful of a title. Most importantly, though, it is not a Nazisploitation flick. Not really, anyway - I mean, it’s got the costumes and the German accents and everything. But it plays out like a standard Women-in-Prison film. I get the feeling it was intended to be one, but Di Silvestri got a great deal on Nazi uniforms halfway through writing the script.
I suppose this gets into what we expect (or should expect) from this nasty-ass genre. The way I see it, there’s two options when making a Nazisploitation film, and the more I think about them, the more I consider the genre to be thoroughly unworkable. The first is damn the torpedoes and barrel full speed ahead into the uncomfortable area beyond the pale. If you do this, you are clearly a terrible person who does not need to be holding a camera. The second is what we have here - palette-swap a WIP flick and dot it with little soupcons of outre ugliness. Either way, you’re not going to end up with something that most human beings would consider palatable just by virtue of your subject matter. But you, the theoretical filmmaker, know that going in - you’re using one of the 20th century’s darkest moments as fodder for base titillation. So if you make a point to set your exploitation film in a Nazi camp, then proceed to use that solely as window dressing, you’re a huckster and a charlatan indulging in the lowest form of carnival barkering. Deported Women uses the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust as a simple financial hook and nothing more. This strikes me as far more obscene than a sick, horrible atrocity exhibition would.
That then calls me to answer whether I would really want to see the kind of film that the former tactic I delineated would create. To which I can only say: Of course I don’t. Di Silvestri’s shockingly tame, incoherent constructed sad-sack shitheap may not have offended me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I need to be offended. I don’t need a film to throw Mengele-style medical experimentation, gas chamber massacres and shit like that alongside lesbian revelry and big ’70s bush, thanks all the same. This is why I think the genre in and of itself is an untenable proposition - the audience gets slimed if the premise delivers on its horrid promise, but they get cheated if it doesn’t. Best to simply leave it alone, let it gather dust in the bin of bad ideas. (That said, Eloy De La Iglesia’s In a Glass Cage is a fine film, probably the best film you could make in said genre. But Eloy’s aim was art, not commerce.)
(Also: Despite my misgivings, I still want to see Love Camp 7, which invented the genre. Why? Because Lee fucking Frost directed it, that’s why. You make a film like The Pick-Up and I’ll pay attention to whatever you do.)
An Elephant in the East.
When it comes to the notorious White Elephant Exchange Blogathon, I have been quite mean these past two years. To be fair, I got blind-sided by Bio-Dome in the inaugural edition, so I had some fury that needed venting. But still - there’s really no excuse for the two nuclear stinkbombs I tossed into the pot. People shouldn’t even know of the existence of King Kung Fu and Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, let alone find themselves forced to endure the likes of them. This year, I decided to go with something that, love or hate, is an odd and singular work, and I’m very anxious to see how the lucky recipient responds to it.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say with this needlessly long opening is that I was a nicer guy this year, and I guess you get what you give because fortune smiled upon me this time around. How else to explain my receiving the ridiculous, wonderful ball of ’80s-style goofiness that is…..
GYMKATA!!!
Gymkata! Oh, Gymkata! It’s so much goddamn fun to say Gymkata! Seriously, between that title and that poster, how could I not be excited for this? It’s awesome before I’ve ever popped in the DVD.
Gymkata, if you didn’t know, was the ill-advised attempt to turn gold-medal-winning gymnast Kurt Thomas into a fists-of-fury action-movie star. It was also part of the long karmic bitchslap administered to Robert Clouse in retaliation for his part in bringing the debacle that is Game of Death to fruition. Seriously, look at the guy’s resume. He makes one of the greatest martial-arts films ever in 1973 with Enter the Dragon and makes an enjoyable followup with Black Belt Jones. Even Golden Needles and The Pack have people who are willing to go to the mat for them. But post-Game, yeesh: A couple of telemovies for Disney, an unloved entry in Jackie Chan’s first attempt to break into the American market (The Big Brawl), a film with dachshunds dressed up as giant rats (Deadly Eyes), not one but two Cynthia Rothrock vehicles (the China O’Brien films)… and this inexplicable thing. It is an enormous, unbroken string of bad laughs, an entirely straight-faced rendition of an entirely ridiculous concept. To watch Gymkata is, among other things, to wonder if anyone involved in the production understood what a silly, silly film they were making.
But who the fuck am I to complain about a bad laugh? I much prefer misguided sincerity to the easy snark of the cult readymade - if you’re going to expend the resources to make a movie, it makes zero sense to waste all that on something to which you feel superior. So Gymkata takes itself very seriously even though it has (among other things) a scene where the hero finds a convenient pommel horse in the middle of a Asian mountain town populated entirely by psychotics, and I’m okay with that. Even as a retarded work of art, it still stands its ground as a era-specific cultural object.
Gymkata could only have been made in the Reagan ’80s - it’s a relic of the waning days of the Cold War, the days when a Star Wars military defense system sounded viable and thus would be a fine thing around which to construct your doofy action movie. Turns out the tiny East Asian nation of Parmistan (which, I assume, is bordered by Provolonistan and Asiagistan) is the perfect location to set up a ground base for such a defense system. Putting such a construction up would bring invaluable aid to whichever nation was allowed to build it there… but of course such a proposition is not as easy as it sounds. For 900 years, Parmistan has challenged all entering outsiders with “The Game,” a deathsport that’s a cross between The Most Dangerous Game and an Army training obstacle course. No outsider has won in all that time, which makes me wonder if even Genghis Khan got his ass whipped by the then-native Parmistanians or if he just intrinsically knew to leave those crazy bastards alone. Kurt Thomas, though, is determined to win for flag and family and all that patriotic jazz. (Also, his dad having disappeared in Parmistan while playing The Game probably added a motivational boost.) He’ll have to compete against his fellow players (a parade of ethnic stereotypes including a Hispanic guy, a Chinese guy and a big burly cheating-bastard Russian sumbitch) as well as the Parmistanian forces, comprised mostly of a couple low-rent ninjas and angry angry Richard Norton.
Just describing the basic concept of the film makes it sound shithouse-rat crazy. It’s to my great pleasure, then, that Gymkata lives up to that - The Game itself is properly daffy (the long sequence in the town of crazies is an indescribable highlight, not just of the film but of all Bad Cinema), but the film shows its willingness to jump the rails of logic and competence from the start. Because this is the ’80s, the film waits about four minutes to set up its premise and then kicks into a training montage, in order to explain how Thomas goes from Olympic hero to mad-kung-fu-skillz wizard. Thomas is taught how to fight, how to pay attention to his surroundings and generally how to be an ultimate-warrior type, and he also falls for the exiled princess of Parmistan who’s there for, I dunno, emotional support or something. (I kid: She’s there because she’s the only person who can get Thomas into the country, for obvious reasons. Interesting to note how the film sets her up as a sneaky ass-kicking bitch who can handle her own business only to conveniently forget that the minute the story shifts overseas.) One thing becomes very clear very quickly - Thomas is a fluid, agile gymnast, but he’s no martial artist. The grace he demonstrates on the parallel bars evaporates when he’s asked to kick people in the face; his attempts at karate are stiff and awkward, like he never quite got the choreography right because he was afraid to muss his mullet. Not that I blame him - his hair, so carefully maintained and precisely feathered, damn near deserves a supporting credit. Check it out:
You may think I’m being unnecessarily cruel and snarky. And maybe I am. But we live in a modern age, and instead of resorting to words to describe the Thomas-fight-scene problem to you, which is akin to using finger-paint to describe the taste of a Bordeaux, I can show you. To wit:
You see now, right? Thomas is a lot of things - an incredible athlete, a beacon of physical fitness, a potential second-place finisher at a Richard Dean Anderson lookalike contest, hopefully a good sport - but he is not a martial artist. Never was and likely could never be without a lot more intensive practice which wouldn’t have fit into the production schedule. You wonder how something like this basic conceptual failure could have happened. Why base a large-scale, high-budget kung-fu movie around a guy who cannot perform kung fu, cannot even reasonably fake kung-fu?
I ask this even though the answer is beautiful, obvious and very telling about its time: Kurt Thomas is in this kung-fu movie because he was a champion gymnast, a gold medalist in a number of international competitions. What’s more, he was denied a chance to go to the 1980 Olympics and win another gold medal on the home turf of those dirty rat-bastard Commies. He was, for a time, a national icon, a recognizable face… a god-damned hero. And why the hell wouldn’t you cast an athletic hero in a film that allows him to do a good many athletic things in the name of ass-kicking whilst simultaneously offering him a chance to symbolically enact the Commie beatdown he never got to do in real life? Easy peasy lemon motherfuckin’ squeezy. Gymkata may be dumb as dirt, may be a terrible action film, but it’s a true and sincere effort. A hero on the mat becomes a hero of flying fists for God and country, and America emerges victorious over the Eastern forces. USA! USA! USA! USA!
******************
Post-script: I couldn’t work this into the review proper, but I can sum up exactly how dumb this movie is in the space of one minute. This, I think, is an even more succinct explanation of this film’s wacky appeal than the above fight scene:
Feed her!
My review of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) went up over the week at In Review Online. I’m not a fan.
A riddle so strong.
So I’m an occasional patron of a nearby gentleman’s club. (Why? I like titties. Don’t judge me.) Most of the songs played in this place are what you’d expect - pop, hip-hop, hair metal, anything with a good groove to it. Saturday evening, though… there was a song that, shall we say, stuck out. Far be it from me to impugn on a girl’s choice of dance music, and granted the song has a pretty heavy cock-rock vibe to it. But still… a song wherein the lead singer talks about his own funeral, off an album written entirely about the heroin addiction that eventually killed him? Doesn’t scream lap dance to me.
If you don’t know already what song I’m talking about… well, here:
Could have been worse, I guess. Could have been “Down in a Hole.”
Still, though, I await the day when they hire a girl hip enough to dance to this:
From the Shelf: Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)
Acquired: Through the generosity of a certain Ms. Jenny Sekwa. Who is awesome.
Seen before?: Spun this disc once before, back in June of 2002.
I wish more big-ticket Hollywood films would bathe so luxuriously in their own lack of repute. Alan’s Parker’s bombastic, ridiculous voodoo thriller openly flaunts its lack of taste and morals, and the results could have been plug-ugly if they weren’t so nastily entertaining. I think the key is that everyone in front of and behind the camera understands the material and plays it at the level it needs/deserves rather than the level they wish it could be (sometimes, a potboiler is just a potboiler and that’s okay). There’s no great significance, no message being sent… just 110 minutes of a fantastic Mickey Rourke slowly and epically losing his shit. That, for me, is frankly enough.
But there’s also De Niro. It’s amusing, after a long decade of increasingly bored-and-boring work from Robert De Niro, to look back at this and remember a time when he seemed to enjoy his job. Playing the quietly sinister, ridiculously-monikered Louis Cyphre, he appears to be having a grand old time portraying evil as genially as possible. Note his portrayal here, then compare it to his bud Al Pacino in the same role in The Devil’s Advocate for a lesson in contrast and situational effectiveness - Pacino can go way, way over the top because his film is relying on him to be the catalyst for the crazy places it eventually goes, while De Niro mantains a sense of balance and calm because the film he’s in is thoroughly unhinged from frame one and someone’s got to keep it from launching into outer space.
And what a batshit piece of work this is - there’s blood and murders and voodoo and Satanism nightmares and killer gumbo and a set of goofy superimposed yellow eyeballs and tons of sweaty, sweaty atmosphere. There’s also the infamous sex scene between Rourke and Lisa Bonet, which might be the most deranged scene of its ilk this side of Shadowboxer (except Alan Parker seems to know how off-the-wall his film is as opposed to Lee Daniels). Terrific closing credit sequence, too. I don’t think it’s as creepy as I remember it being, if only because the relentless hyperbole renders it less a horror movie and more an elaborate black joke. But it’s entertaining as all fuck.
Up next: The triumphant return of a moral man…
From the Shelf: Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Acquired: This past February from criterion.com.
Seen before?: Once - Spetember 20th, 2007, from a copy of the Criterion disc that I checked out from the library.
Even though I covered most of the salient stuff the first time around for this Godard doozy, I still managed to underestimate it. A second viewing didn’t uncover anything new or unexpected; instead, it merely reinforced what I already knew the film to be. What did change was my opinion of the effectiveness. What once was an unusual and interesting transitional work now, to me, seems like the pinnacle of Godard’s achievements. This is more than a mere stopgap or artistic evolution - this seems to me the perfect synthesis of everything Godard had done up to that point and everything he was going to do in the ensuing years. The shiny coat of genre paint makes the philosophizing go down much easier than in a lot of his subsequent works, and the dry and stilted tone of much of the dialogue makes sense in the context of the film’s mechanical and sterilized logic-only world.
Plus, Eddie Constantine is fabulously rumpled and hard-boiled, Anna Karina is alluring as ever (and gets the film’s swooning penultimate image), Godard’s puckish sense of humor has rarely been this delightful and the action sequences are terrifically staged. Seriously, check that first sequence where Lemmy is attacked in his hotel room - using basic camera setups and creative blocking, Godard crafts an fight scene that plays with notions of limited perspective and chaotic movement without sacrificing spatial coherence, unlike all those who utilize the shaky-cam “realism” that has come into vogue these past few years. Basically, he makes Paul Greengrass look like a stooge thirty years before the fact.
And that sense of humor - loopy and dry, intellectualized without seeming overthought. The “Insert Token” gag still kills. (It might be my favorite moment in any Godard film ever,) Alphaville has the probing, ruminative intelligence, involved revolutionary rhetoric and pretension out the ying-yang that would come to define its director’s metier (even more than it already had), yet it never forgets one key thing: entertainment value makes the medicine go down. I always wondered if I would see a Godard film that I could point to and go, “Yeah, that’s a masterpiece.” Turns out I already had - I just needed to recognize it. (Makes me wonder how many other of Jean-Luc’s works will improve the second time around.)
Up next: A whale’s vagina!
From the Shelf: Akira (1988, Katsuhiro Otomo)
Acquired: Likely late in 2001, somewhere in New York City (I’m thinking the Virgin Megastore in Times Square - R.I.P.)
Seen before?: Three times prior - once from the English-dubbed VHS (Streamline dub), once from the subtitled VHS and once during its English-dubbed 2001 theatrical rerelease (Pioneer dub). Never from this DVD.
Is there anything left to say about this film? I’ve seen it four times now, and while I feel I have a pretty good grasp on the plot now, at least, I doubt there’s anything I can say about this that hasn’t been said already. It’d be like trying to find a new angle on Citizen Kane or something. It’s a terrific film, a masterpiece and I haven’t a thing to say about it. Because you already know it all. As you can see from the viewing rundown, my own personal history with this film is likely more interesting than any commentary I can offer. Best bit of personal trivia: I was carded at the ticket counter when seeing the rerelease. Because of that, for a number of years I could claim that the only two films I’d ever been carded for were animated, the other film being South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. This was eventually broken, much to my chagrin, by the idiotic John Singleton movie Four Brothers… but think about that. From 1999 to 2005, Akira and South Park were it. In that timespan, I caught theatrical screenings of Baise-Moi, Catherine Breillat’s Romance, 9 Songs, Audition, Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV, Requiem for a Dream, and George Bataille’s Story of the Eye… but nope, it was the cartoons that were going to corrupt my soul if I wasn’t 18.
So whatever, we’ll move on. No harm, no foul. The well can’t always be filled with life, now can it?
Up next: What’s a nice girl like you doing on a (k)night like this?
D2D entry #71-#85: Cleaning house
From the communal to the personal…
It’s been a very long while since I’ve updated the status on the Dusk to Dawn Project - I’ve still been watching these films, I just haven’t been writing about them. This year, though, I’m gonna kind of back-burner this in favor of another thing that I’ll talk about in the next day or two. So it’s high time I squared away these forgotten entries. Won’t be much here, just a couple of lines on each flick. So… let’s do this.
#71: Korean Connection (1972, Lee Doo-yong; featured in Dusk to Dawn #1) Chintzy, low-grade Korean-made chopsocky. Follows a pattern familiar to anyone who’s seen more than, say, two of these, as a down-and-out high-kicker hiding inside the bottle gets a chance to redeem his shamed honor via violence; notable mainly for possibly the worst dubbing any single film has ever received (sound effects get forgotten and shit like that).
#72: The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973, Luigi Batzella; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2 and Dusk to Dawn #4) Muddled like many of these Gothic Eurohorror things are, but lacks that crucial spark of inspiration that buoys the genre’s worthier examples. So it just seems silly and vaguely dull. Batzella would acquit himself much better a year later with Nude for Satan.
#73: Shogun Assassin (1980, Kenji Misumi & Robert Houston; featured in 42nd Street #2) The Citizen Kane of clip jobs - Houston manages to take the near-three hours that comprise the first and second Lone Wolf and Cub films and distill them into a workable eighty-minute feature that follows a coherent plot and serves up a shit-ton of hyperactive action without sacrificing either the elegiac tone of the source or Misumi’s considerable visual artistry. Shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is, but it appears to have been made with a modicum of respect, which makes all the difference. Bonus: Now I know where the sampled dialogue in the Cage song “Agent Orange” comes from!
#74: The Force Beyond (1978, William Sachs; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2) What a heap of happy horseshit. Pseudo-documentary supernatural nonsense is somewhat amusing in its brazen attempt to unite all manner of unexplained phenomena under the umbrella of alien activity, but that amusement only goes so far before this becomes tiresome. People didn’t actually believe this nonsense, did they?
#75: Hell’s Chosen Few (1968, David L. Hewitt; featured in Dusk to Dawn #1) I used to hate the biker genre, but it’s starting to grow on me. This two-bit entry has a lot of issues (acting’s weak and the cliche-ridden script does no one any favors) but also has in its favor an authentically scuzzy vibe - for better or worse, it feels like something made by people who know a thing or two about the subculture and feel a kinship with it. It’s mangy and threadbare, but I think I like it anyway.
#76: Mother Goose a Go Go (1966, Jack H. Harris; featured in Dusk to Dawn #5 and Dusk to Dawn #7) Agonizingly unfunny attempt at making a “hip,” “with-it” sex comedy about a fella whose attempts at consummating his marriage are constantly thwarted by his bizarre reaction to fairy tales. Features precious little sex or nudity (the prurient will have to settle for swimsuit cheesecake and a visibly embarrassed Tommy Kirk as the man with the dong problem), and features even less in the way of humor that isn’t labored, strained, overbaked, ham-fisted, etc..
#77: Cockfighter (1974, Monte Hellman; featured in Dusk to Dawn #8) One of Warren Oates’s best performances (and that’s saying quite a lot) is the linchpin of this offbeat character study. Warren’s a professional trainer of fighting cocks who’s takena vow of silence until he wins a big tournament, for reasons which become clear as the film unfolds, and while most actors would use that as a license to mug it up, Oates underplays as much as he can while still getting his point across. Instead of gesticulating wildly, he opts for a serene economy of movement and allows his expressive eyes to do most of the heavy lifting. It’s a terrific turn by a reliably terrific actor. The animal violence is very real and unfortunate, but it’s also an integral part of the milieu, and Hellman to his credit doesn’t celebrate or sensationalize it.
#78: Teenage Mother (1967, Jerry Gross; featured in 42nd Street #1) Hilariously cruddy and misguided, like someone shoved a ‘50’s-JD flick into the Brundlefly machine with a live-birth square-up reel. Despite the scenes of attempted rape and premarital sexing, this feels weirdly innocent given the time frame of its crafting (I can’t recall any nudity), which makes the eventual dive into a graphic anatomy lesson feel all the ickier. And hey - there’s Fred Willard! What’s he doing here?
#79: Teenage Graffiti (1977, Christopher G. Casler; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2) Snore.
#80: Enter the Ninja (1981, Menahem Golan; featured in 42nd Street #3) Completely retarded but also cheesy in all the right ways, right on down to Franco Nero and His Amazing Porno Mustache. Nero’s maybe the only Italian B-actor who seems not just believable but inevitable as a ninja, and his rough-and-tumble charisma goes a long way towards keeping this thing teetering on the positive side of the entertainment scale. Also, there’s ninjas. Ninja action all over the damn place. It’s a juvenile sort of fun, but then I never claimed maturity as a string point.
#81: Tom Thumb (1957, Rene Cardona; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2) Given the nutty inspiration that flows through Cardona’s wrestling movies, it’s kind of startling how stodgy this kiddie flick is. It’s threadbare, but not in an amusing way - just in a cheap way. Fairly dull, really, which is just a shame.
#82: The Big Bad Wolf (1957, Peter Podehl; featured in Dusk to Dawn #6) This screwy thing, on the other hand… I don’t know what to make of it. Clearly a lot of thought and time has gone into its look, and all that effort resulted in the single most hideous excuses for costumes and set design that I think I’ve ever seen. The costumes worn by the actors in the goat suits in particular, with their enormous heads and empty sunken eyes, are indescribably creepy. Is it appropriate for kids? Content-wise, sure - it’s no worse than any other Grimm Brothers tale. But I imagine the horrifying eyesores wandering through the tattered forest landscape could cause a raft of nightmares.
#83: Savage Sisters (1974, Eddie Romero; featured in Dusk to Dawn #1, Dusk to Dawn #10 and 42nd Street #2) See how many times this film pops up in these compilations? That’s because, aside from a surprising lack of nudity, this is the quintessential ’70s grindhouse flick. It’s a Filipino women-in-prison/jungle-action movie; as such, it features women in prison, guns, explosions, double crosses, women using sex as a weapon, Banana Republic politics, smart-ass one-liners, an ethnically diverse crew of ass-kicking ladies (including Cheri “Ginger” Caffero!), elaborate methods of murder and Sid Haig as a heavy with a ludicrous accent. It’s shameless and sleazy and in its own way kind of perfect.
#84: The Cavern (1964, Edgar G. Ulmer; featured in Dusk to Dawn #9) Ulmer’s last feature, this tough and claustrophobic WWII-set obscurity about a group of soldiers trapped in a cavern after an avalanche first seems like it’ll be another allegory about Getting Along, but that’s not Ulmer’s bag at all. He has no big fish to fry - he just wants to spin a solid yarn, and that he does in fine style. Features early, accomplished work from both John Saxon and Larry Hagman and maybe the greatest title card ever written. Somebody please resurrect this sharp little piece of pulp so it can find the audience it deserves.
#85: Magic Christmas Tree (1964, Richard C. Parish; featured in 42nd Street #5) A little snot-nosed brat encounters a witch who gives him a magic ring. This magic ring, when used properly, can summon forth a magic talking Christmas tree that grants wished. So, naturally, the selfish kid decides to abduct Santa Claus. It’s even wackier than it sounds, with public-access-level production values, random bursts of weirdness (a giant shows up at the end, just because) and the world’s worst child actor. After seeing the trailer, I was expecting something hysterically awful, and I was decidedly not disappointed - this thing’s golden. I think I found my new favorite Christmas movie.
