The Rosetta shot: “Hatchet II”
You know how teenaged gorehounds sometimes make excitable lists of all the bizarre and hyperbolic ways they’d like to see people dispatched in films? There’s a reason big-budget movies aren’t made from those lists.
Adam Green’s Hatchet isn’t a great movie. It’s not even a good movie. But it does scratch, however nakedly, that old-school slasher itch; once it gets going (and, like the films it emulates, it takes way too long to get going), it offers some undemanding cheap thrills. Dumb as dirt and half as useful, Hatchet nevertheless delivers on the splattery promise it makes to its audience. That said, it doesn’t do anything else worth consideration and is ultimately kind of pointless. Hatchet is to cinema as a 7-11 microwave burrito is to food - it’ll satiate hunger by the most basic understanding of the concept, but there’s no reason to consume it unless you’re drunk or desperate, and even then you’ll probably hate yourself afterwards.
With that in mind, Hatchet II is what happens after the burrito combined with the alcohol and/or shame turn on you. In the ignominious tradition of pretty much every slasher sequel, it’s a wretched piece of regurgitated rot, the kind of film that still takes half a movie to set up its universe despite having thoroughly set it up in the first part. The only innovation, as with a good many of these types of things (i.e. the Friday the 13th series), is the escalated brutality of the money scenes, yet Hatchet II screws up even that by pushing its kills so far over the top that they become extravagantly ridiculous. The intended effect is to make the audience go, “OH COOL WOW I’VE NEVER SEEN THAT BEFORE,” but the actual effect is an alienation - Victor Crowley’s dallying with belt sanders and table saws and so on try so hard to be so unique and KOOL that they become faintly insulting, like we’re being pandered to.
Compounding the issue, Green’s puerile sense of humor gets even freer reign than it did in the first film. For instance, consider the two hunters (one of whom is an Odious Comic Relief black dude who’s all rampaging, sassy id) who get ambushed by Crowley as he wields the most enormous chainsaw in creation. The two are then simultaneously bisected from crotch to cranium, and in most slasher flicks that’d be it - the wild death is the punchline. Green can’t resist trying to plop a cherry on top of the sickness sundae, though, so we’re treated to a shot of one unfortunate party’s disembodied testicles flopping to the ground. That’s not clever, son, that’s just moronic gilding of the bloody lily.
But let’s be honest - it’s not like Green doesn’t warn you from the get-go. As you can see above, his writing/directing credit appears on screen hovering above a fresh puddle of vomit. That alone sends enough of a warning, but here’s the kicker: Guess who that is in the scene as the ashen-faced fratboy responsible for said vomit? Adam Green, of course. Essentially he’s saying before things have even started, “Yep, I puked this thing up, and you’re stuck watching it. Too late to get your money back now, sucker.” Prost to you too, buddy.
Horror Challenge entry #11: The Body Shop AKA Doctor Gore (1973, J.G. Patterson Jr.)
How bad does a film have to be to make Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films look like sensitive, thoughtful masterpieces in comparison? This damn bad.
Starts off promisingly dumb, with a mad scientist using tin foil on a body “to seal in all the radium” and a midget hunchback who needs help putting on his lab coat, but the fun doesn’t last. Patterson ladles on the grue in this offbeat “Frankenstein” gloss, yet his film is too inept and uninspired to work even in the intended titillative function. Maybe it’s because, despite the exploitative material, Patterson never seems to commit to the idea of a gut-pulling gore flick, and once his creation (a lovely, nubile young woman with the brain of a child) is complete, the film turns into some awkward combination of love story and brain-cracked sitcom about the difference between men and women. (Seriously, there’s even a musical montage with the doctor and his creation frolicking in nature and making googly eyes at one another.) All the tempura paint and white linen can’t keep this from being dispiritingly terrible, even by the standards of Florida-lensed exploitation films. Even the score, an obnoxiously insistent organ-based thing, is awful. In fact, fuck Lewis… Patterson makes William Grefe look talented by comparison. The befuddling non-ending is just icing on the cake.
Horror Challenge entry #7: After.Life (2010, Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo)
Allow me to boil this film down to its essence:
CHRISTINA RICCI: I’m not dead.
LIAM NEESON: Yes, you are.
CHRISTINA RICCI: I don’t feel dead.
LIAM NEESON: Trust me, you are.
CHRISTINA RICCI: How do you know?
LIAM NEESON: I’m a funeral director, I know corpses when I see them.
CHRISTINA RICCI: So how are we having this conversation?
LIAM NEESON: I can talk to the dead. And before you say anything, it’s not a gift.
CHRISTINA RICCI: I don’t believe you. I’m not dead.
LIAM NEESON: As a doornail, sweetie.
Repeat above annoying conversation for roughly 90 minutes. Garnish with red-on-white color scheme and awful symbolism (a bobblehead? really?). Toss in stupid twist ending that makes the whole thing pointless and intellectually suspect.
Horror Challenge entry #4: The Video Dead (1987, Robert Scott)
Holy ballsack, is this film ever terrible. That’s all I have to say about it. No, really. It’s fucking awful, I don’t understand the minor cult that’s sprung up around it and I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s move the fuck on. Okay, fine. You want proof? Here. See how long you make it before wanting to punch something in rage:
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:
Horror Challenge entry #23-#28 (plus): The tragic end
I just didn’t have the mojo this year, man. Some of that is attributable to an injury that kept me more or less bedridden for the first two weeks of the month, which meant more than one film a night was tough since I tend to nod off while watching films in bed. That doesn’t explain my flameout in the second half of the month, though. I hoping to hit at least thirty, but alas, ‘twasn’t to be. Oh well, what the hell, here’s what I got anyway.
#23: Delirium (1972, Renato Polselli as “Ralph Brown”) Before cranking out The Reincarnation of Isabel, the team of Polselli, Mickey Hargitay and Rita Calderoni came together to essay this offbeat spin on the giallo genre. Hargitay is excellently creepy as a police psychologist who is tormented by his own impulses to kill, and Polselli directs this with a nice amount of polish and skill (the opening sequence is a dazzler). Shame, though, that the narrative breaks down in the home stretch - more questions are raised than answered by the bugfuck climax. The film doesn’t end so much as it flames out.
#24: My Bloody Valentine (1981, George Mihalka) First-wave slasher benefits greatly from finally being available in its uncut form, but it benefits even more from possessing a solid and palpable sense of place and atmosphere. It’s not enough to be set in a blue-collar milieu a la the soggy remake of this - the milieu has to convince, and it’s to this film’s credit that its depiction of the spirited roughneck culture in this old mining town indeed convinces. What that does is make the downtime between killings (of which there’s a lot - Mihalka doesn’t fully cut loose on the murder front until an hour has passed) tolerable, maybe even something to be enjoyed, rather than something to plow through in impatience. Still has its share of lame material (the lost-love plot thread works no better here than in the remake), but it’s about as good as this genre gets.
#25: The Last House on the Beach (1978, Franco Prosperi) Not only is this film dead-ass boring, it seems ashamed of its own exploitative material - anything that’s even mildly spicy is either cut down into inference or stylized so heavily that the impact vanishes. Snore.
#26: Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned (2008, Brian Thomson) I’ll bet this seemed funny while it was being made, anyway. The Lloyd Kaufman cameo made me laugh at the very least.
#27: /Slither (2006, James Gunn)/ This movie is so freakin’ awesome. I love it.
#28: The Return of Count Yorga (1971, Bob Kelljan) Practically the same film as the first, and I’d accuse Kelljan of repeating himself if he wasn’t doing it as essentially a way to correct the mistakes made on his first go-around. From the opening scene, this Yorga is a far more confident, dark and creepy-cool venture than its predecessor, with Kelljan openly displaying a Eurohorror-influenced vibe that was only hinted at in Yorga the first (love that slo-mo hallway chase!). Bonus points for the well-deployed Creepy Kid, and even more bonus points for the terrifically handled final scene. Robert Quarry, as before, is awesome.
And just for posterity, here’s three stragglers I took down on Nov. 1st.
Bonus film #1: Night Train Murders (1972, Aldo Lado) It’s like Aldo took a look at Last House on the Left and thought to himself, “Not a bad idea, now how can I spin this so that it’s actually a good movie?” Takes its time with its setup (the terrorization doesn’t start in earnest until the film is half over), paces itself carefully, exercises reserve so that its big shocks hit all the harder and makes its narrative more believable… this, folks, is how it’s done. Possibly even more cynical than the Craven flick, as well, with a class-based social critique centered around the character of The Woman on the Train; all this, plus it gives us a random passenger on the train and uses him to ensnare the viewer in his own presumed voyeurism with a stroke so clever and cruel that it hurts to think about it. Is there anything this film can’t do?
Bonus film #2: Oral Fixation (2009, Jake Cashill) Starts off surprisingly well, like a script-flipped Lifetime movie with a nasty body-horror edge to it (I visibly cringed when the chipper blonde psycho dug out one of her own teeth so that she could have an excuse to see her dentist, the object of her obsession), but some time in the second act it takes a turn towards the silly and never quite recovers; the third act is nothing less than an act of self-immolation. Not as bad as the reviews would have you believe, but not essential viewing or anything.
Bonus film #3: Lucifera: Demon Lover (1972, Paolo Lombardo) It’s like they threw a Satanic-orgy movie and a soap opera broke out. Fuck this nothing of a movie.
Horror Challenge entry #17-#22: Quick words to catch up
I think Adam is gonna whup me this year, unless I go bugfuck nuts next week. I’ve gotten caught up in other things. (I only got in two — TWO! — films this past week. I suck.) Anyway, here’s some brief thoughts on films I haven’t written about yet:
#16: Thirst (1979, Rod Hardy) Takes the class metaphor implicit in Browning’s Dracula and runs all the way home with it, creating a system wherein a group of privileged bloodsuckers descended from nobility (the lead, a woman the clan is trying to coerce into their way of life, is a relative of Countess Bathory) sustain their hungers via controlled blood farming and exploitation of semi-willing donors. As both a slashing metaphor for the allure of moral compromise as a path to financial gain and as a unique, institutionally bright take on the vampire genre, it’s solid stuff. Good B-movie cast too, with Henry Silva, Robert Thompson (from Patrick) and David Hemmings among the featured players. Shame, then, that lead actress Chantal Contouri is the weak link — while she handles the dialogue scenes and any bit of business that requires her to play haughty, she’s far more awkward when attempting to express states of extreme emotional distress. Which dampens much of her character’s arc.
#17: It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To (2007, Tony Wash) No-budget spam-in-a-haunted-house flick showcases some pretty neat dimestore FX ingenuity. (Tom Savini has a cameo as an electrician, implicitly sanctifying the filmmakers’ efforts with his mere presence.) That’s about all it showcases, though: the filmmaking is rudimentary, the actors are mediocre, the characters are mostly obnoxious. Wash doesn’t do anything you can’t also find in The Evil Dead, Night of the Demons or any other film in this genre, really; you can’t fault the enthusiasm, though, and it looks like this was at least fun to make. So there’s that.
#18: The Uninvited (2009, Charles & Thomas Guard) Tries hard to maintain a semblance of fidelity to its source material… so much so that it ends up feeling like an imperfect wax simulacrum. There’s a far more interesting movie in here, one about the painful and awkward dynamic of resentment between teenagers and those they perceive as intruders into their carefully-composed familial worlds; this intriguing film, alas, is thrown over for tired shocks involving dead kids.
#19: Friday the 13th (2009, Marcus Nispel) Aren’t these things supposed to be, you know, fun? A humorless, grim version of this series was about the last thing the world needed, but fuck it — this is the 21st century, and the classic slasher has no place in the era of slickly aesthetized torture. So here he is, your ‘roided-up and angry as fuck Runnin’ Jason, as emblematic of the mean-spirited film that spawned him as Classic Jason is of his more mechanically goofy outings. Has exactly one inspired moment (Willa Ford’s death scene, a neat little symphony of cause and effect as related to aquatic breasts), and given the film surrounding it, I’m tempted to think of it as a happy accident.
#20: Count Yorga, Vampire (1970, Bob Kelljan) Robert Quarry cuts a striking figure as an ancient vampire — his seedy, weary elegance gives the impression of a man hiding something and wanting you to know that he’s hiding something, that he considers you beneath him and he’s only just holding his poisonous contempt in check. He’s a sight better than the film, really, which plays out like a cross between a superhero origin story and a J-horror discovery narrative. There’s a lot of meandering and time spent wandering around, reiterating things that should be plainly obvious… until, starting at the first meeting between Quarry’s Count Yorga and Roger Perry in the distaff Van Helsing role, turning as it does into a barbed war of words to rival anything in Inglourious Basterds, Kelljan abruptly kicks this shit into high gear. The propulsive third act forgives a lot of this film’s sins. I have it on good authority that the sequel dispenses with this film’s faults. Which makes me kinda excited.
#21: Paranormal Activity (2009 Oren Peli) If Peli had succeeded in drumming up any sympathy for the two characters here, I might be siding with this scrappy flick’s champions. But he didn’t. Rarely have I more wanted to shove myself through the screen and smack a couple of faces into sense. So fuck this undeniably effective but exasperating video wonder.
#22: Blood: The Last Vampire (2009, Chris Nahon) Remember in Kiss of the Dragon when Jet Li fought those two giant blonde guys? That was awesome. Nahon shoulda quit while he was ahead.
Horror Challenge entry #10: Mark of the Devil (1970, Michael Armstrong)
It’s probably a sign that a film is failing on any appreciable level when I find myself drumming my fingers impatiently, wondering when the fuck people are going to start getting tortured so that something might actually happen. Dreadfully dull costume drama probably qualifies as the father of the torture-porn genre, and that’s about all it has going for it - even the infamous tongue-ripping scene doesn’t pack the punch of the earlier, far faker yet somehow more effective scene in Lewis’s Blood Feast. And what’s the message in the mutilation? The Church was apparently really corrupt in the 17th & 18th centuries. Wow. Don’t stop the fuckin’ presses for that one.
Horror Challenge entry #8: The House on Sorority Row (1983, Mark Rosman)
I guess if we’re going to see remakes of every single first-wave slasher flick that achieved even slight prominence, we might as well concentrate on the ones that left lots of room for improvement. Not that I expect this year’s Sorority Row to be any better than this, but it might at least make better use of its exploitable elements. This is a fairly tame iteration of the genre, one that’s more concerned with story and character than the cheap high of gore and tits (though both of the latter show up in carefully parceled amounts). Note that I say this like that’s a bad thing, because in this case it is - the sorority sisters are almost all loathsome, bitchy and/or dumb as dirt creations who speak entirely in cliches and are portrayed by thespians of seriously limited range. (The woman playing Liz gives one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen - she can’t even enter a room convincingly.) There’s a twist in the tail that can be seen coming from miles away, but the filmmakers think it’s oh so clever; then again, the screenwriter also thought the scene involving the Dumpster and the campus cop was a good idea (it’s actually the film’s nadir). Essentially, this is a lifeless movie with unpleasant people standing in rooms talking at one another, punctuated by the occasional murder. If this was made today, the director would be careful to always use the phrase “psychological thriller” when referring to his film in the pages of his Fangoria interview.
